{"id":1,"title":"Barrel - Part 1","image_title":"Barrel - Part 1","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/barrel_cropped_(1).jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1:_Barrel_-_Part_1","transcript":"[A boy sits in a barrel which is floating in an ocean.] Boy: i wonder where i'll float next?\n[A smaller frame with a zoom out of the boy in the barrel seen from afar. The barrel drifts into the distance. Nothing else can be seen.]\n","explanation":"The comic shows a young boy floating in a barrel in an ocean that doesn't have a visible end. It comments on the unlikely optimism and perhaps na\u00efvet\u00e9 people sometimes display. The boy is completely lost and seems hopelessly alone, without any plan or control of the situation. Yet, rather than afraid or worried, he is instead quietly curious: \"I wonder where I'll float next?\"  Although not necessarily the situation in this comic, this is a behavior people often exhibit when there is nothing they can do about a problematic situation for a long time; they may have given up hope or developed a cavalier attitude as a coping mechanism.\nThe title text expands on the philosophical content, with the boy representing the average human being: wandering through life with no real plan, quietly optimistic, always opportunistic and clueless as to what the future may hold.\nThe isolation of the boy may also represent the way in which we often feel lost through life, never knowing quite where we are, believing that there is no one to whom to turn. This comic could also reflect on Randall's feelings towards creating xkcd in the first place; unsure of what direction the web comic would turn towards, but hopeful that it would eventually become the popular web comic that we know today.\nThis is the first in a six-part series of comics whose parts were randomly published during the first several dozen strips. The series features a character that is not consistent with what would quickly become the xkcd stick figure style. The character is in a barrel.\nIn 1110: Click and Drag there is a reference to this comic at 1 North, 48 East .\nAfter Randall released the full The Boy and his Barrel story on xkcd, it has been clear that the original Ferret story should also be included as part of the barrel series.\nThe full series can be found here . They are listed below in the order Randall chose for the short story above:\n[A boy sits in a barrel which is floating in an ocean.] Boy: i wonder where i'll float next?\n[A smaller frame with a zoom out of the boy in the barrel seen from afar. The barrel drifts into the distance. Nothing else can be seen.]\n"}
{"id":2,"title":"Petit Trees (sketch)","image_title":"Petit Trees (sketch)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tree_cropped_(1).jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2:_Petit_Trees_(sketch)","transcript":"[Two trees are growing on opposite sides of a sphere.]\n","explanation":"This comic does not present a particular point; it is just a picture drawn by Randall .\nThe Little Prince (in French Le Petit Prince) is a novella written by Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry in 1943, about the titular Little Prince, who lives on an asteroid and visits other inhabited asteroids and eventually the Earth. The book is filled with drawings of the asteroid, the prince, and the travels they make. It is noted how, on occasion, baobab trees can begin to grow on these asteroids, and should they not be immediately uprooted, the growth of their roots would tear the asteroid apart. In this drawing, the roots are encircling the sphere, rather than piercing it, as Le Petit Prince describes.\nThe Little Prince has later been referenced both in 618: Asteroid and in 1350: Lorenz at the end of the space trip branch. It was also referenced to in the What If article Leap Seconds .\n[Two trees are growing on opposite sides of a sphere.]\n"}
{"id":3,"title":"Island (sketch)","image_title":"Island (sketch)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/3","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/island_color.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/3:_Island_(sketch)","transcript":"[A color sketch of an island.]\n","explanation":"This comic does not present a particular point; it is just a picture drawn by Randall .\nThe title text may be a play on the classical \"Hello, world!\" program, traditionally a first program when learning a new programming language.\n[A color sketch of an island.]\n"}
{"id":4,"title":"Landscape (sketch)","image_title":"Landscape (sketch)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/4","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/landscape_cropped_(1).jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/4:_Landscape_(sketch)","transcript":"[A sketch of a landscape with sun on the horizon.] [There is text from the checkered paper at the top:] From Page No.__\n","explanation":"This comic does not present a particular point; it is just a picture drawn by Randall.\nThere is a joke in the title text that a river, made of water, is flowing through the ocean, which is also made of water.\nIt is also worth noting that the sketch, when flipped vertically, maintains the appearance of having the sea on the bottom and sky on top, although the setting sun is on the wrong part of the horizon.\nSimilar to works of M. C. Escher , this picture takes visual components of a typical scene and combines then in ways that appear to work well on a small scale, but would never combine that way in real life and do not make sense in the larger context of the image.  The clouds are casting shadows on the sky.\n[A sketch of a landscape with sun on the horizon.] [There is text from the checkered paper at the top:] From Page No.__\n"}
{"id":5,"title":"Blown apart","image_title":"Blown apart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/5","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blownapart_color.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/5:_Blown_apart","transcript":"[A black number 70 sees a red package. This small panel is partly overlaid on the next larger panel, which is shifted down.] 70 70: hey, a package!\n[The package explodes in a cloud of brown smoke. This panel is both behind the first in the top left corner, and below the last panel, which has been laid on top of that corner.] BOOM\n[There are a red 7, a green 5, and a blue 2 lying near a scorched mark on the floor.] 7 5 2\n","explanation":"This comic is a mathematical and technical joke involving prime numbers and primary colors.\nIn the comic, an anthropomorphic black-colored number 70 sees a package, but it turns out to be a letter bomb that explodes when opened.  The result is pieces of the number scattered about.  The specific pieces are a red-colored 7 , a green-colored 5 , and a blue-colored 2 .\nThe title text explains the logic for splitting 70 into 7, 5, and 2; as with many of the earlier comics, the title text explains the joke rather than adding to it. 7*5*2 is a prime factorization of the number 70. Prime numbers are numbers that cannot be divided by any number other than itself and 1. Factors of a number are numbers that can be multiplied together to produce that number (i.e. 2\u00d75\u00d77 = 70). 70 has other factors, including 1, 10, 14, 35, and 70, but 2, 5, and 7 are the only factors that are prime. All other factors of 70 can be formed by choosing zero, two, or three of the prime factors and multiplying them together.\nAn implication of this comic is that prime numbers would be immune to explosions, as they are already their smallest parts.\nAlthough not explicitly called out, the colors of the numbers also seem to have been blown apart.  Red, green, and blue are the primary colors in the additive color model.  These colors mixed in pairs produce cyan, magenta, and yellow, which are primary colors in the subtractive color model.  The removal of all additive primary colors, or conversely, the combination of all subtractive primary colors, produces black, which is the color of the original 70 (according to the official transcript , although it looks dark blue in the drawing).  The comic is somewhat misleading in that red, green, and blue do not compose black in either color model, but the difference between the two models is not widely understood (most still view the additive primaries as red, yellow, and blue).\n[A black number 70 sees a red package. This small panel is partly overlaid on the next larger panel, which is shifted down.] 70 70: hey, a package!\n[The package explodes in a cloud of brown smoke. This panel is both behind the first in the top left corner, and below the last panel, which has been laid on top of that corner.] BOOM\n[There are a red 7, a green 5, and a blue 2 lying near a scorched mark on the floor.] 7 5 2\n"}
{"id":6,"title":"Irony","image_title":"Irony","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/6","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/irony_color.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/6:_Irony","transcript":"[A panel only with text. The last text is written below a line in all capital letters.] When self-reference, irony, and meta-humor go too far A CAUTIONARY TALE\n[Cueball talks to to his Cueball-like friend.] Cueball: This statement wouldn't be funny if not for irony!\n[Cueball laughs at his own joke in front of his friend.] Cueball: ha ha Friend: ha ha, I guess.\n[Again a panel only with text.] 20,000 years later...\n[A desolate brown badlands landscape with an imposing red sun in the dark blue sky.]\n","explanation":"It must be part of the human condition that causes us to think that odd statements are sometimes more humorous than those supposed to be funny. Cueball makes a true statement, that his statement is not very funny. However, because he invoked irony and thus makes it self-referential, the sentence is now funny! The other guy (also a Cueball-like character), producing a fake laugh, is probably not so sure that it is actually funny.\nNow going meta: In 20,000 years, there might be no more humans on earth to find the irony funny anymore. How ironic ! Alternatively, the barren landscape would have occurred regardless of whether someone made the joke, so ironically, the cautionary tale is completely meaningless, although still funny.\nThis is the first xkcd comic showing stick figure people, which eventually becomes a defining characteristic of the future comic series. It is thus also the first comic with Cueball (and the first with Multiple Cueballs ). Note however, that it was actually not the first comic Randall released using either of the above mentioned features, see the trivia below.\nThe \"too much perspective\" line comes from the visit of Sp\u0131n\u0308al Tap to the grave of Elvis Presley . In addition, the perspective theme also invokes the Total Perspective Vortex in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . This is located on the desolate planet Frogstar B, possibly looking not unlike the final image in the comic.\nSelf-references was already used again in 33: Self-reference , and again and again , but never more famously than in 688: Self-Description .\n[A panel only with text. The last text is written below a line in all capital letters.] When self-reference, irony, and meta-humor go too far A CAUTIONARY TALE\n[Cueball talks to to his Cueball-like friend.] Cueball: This statement wouldn't be funny if not for irony!\n[Cueball laughs at his own joke in front of his friend.] Cueball: ha ha Friend: ha ha, I guess.\n[Again a panel only with text.] 20,000 years later...\n[A desolate brown badlands landscape with an imposing red sun in the dark blue sky.]\n"}
{"id":7,"title":"Girl sleeping (Sketch -- 11th grade Spanish class)","image_title":"Girl sleeping (Sketch -- 11th grade Spanish class)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/7","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/girl_sleeping_noline_(1).jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/7:_Girl_sleeping_(Sketch_--_11th_grade_Spanish_class)","transcript":"[Girl sleeping on her side, facing away from view.]\n","explanation":"This comic does not present a particular point; it is just a picture drawn by Randall. It is just what the title says - a sketch of a girl sleeping drawn during a Spanish class.\nAccording to the title text, she is also on the floor.\n[Girl sleeping on her side, facing away from view.]\n"}
{"id":8,"title":"Red spiders","image_title":"Red spiders","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/8","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/red_spiders_small.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/8:_Red_spiders","transcript":"[Many six-legged red spiders standing on and hanging from cuboids. The cuboids hang in the air with no visible means of support. Some of the spiders have made a bridge out of themselves.]\n","explanation":"The early comics often feature a style different to what would become the signature xkcd stick-figure style. This comic is the first in an arc of comics, spaced out over 3 years (so far), in which Red Spiders are seen attacking humans. Its objective is not to be funny, philosophical, or scientifically interesting; it just tells a story, in a Questionable Content -esque way.\nInterestingly, the red spiders actually more closely resemble opiliones, the order of arachnids that includes the Daddy Longlegs, and which are actually more closely related to mites than to spiders. Of course, the number of legs is incorrect.\nThe full series of Red Spiders comics:\n[Many six-legged red spiders standing on and hanging from cuboids. The cuboids hang in the air with no visible means of support. Some of the spiders have made a bridge out of themselves.]\n"}
{"id":9,"title":"Serenity is coming out tomorrow","image_title":"Serenity is coming out tomorrow","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/9","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/firefly.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/9:_Serenity_is_coming_out_tomorrow","transcript":"[Several stick figures stand side by side in a lineup. A forlorn male in a coat, a male with combed hair, a male with spiky hair and arms outstretched enthusiastically, a female with long hair and cornrows, a shorter female with stringy hair falling over her face, an enthusiastic female with arms raised in celebration with shorter hair, a male with short hair and a goatee and hands on hips, a female with curly hair wearing a dress, and a stern-looking man with flyaway hair.]\n","explanation":"This comic is about the release of the movie Serenity , which was the followup to Joss Whedon 's TV show, Firefly , which was cancelled by Fox after only one season. Plus, three episodes were not shown on Fox but debuted on Sci Fi Channel in the UK. The show was followed by a devoted number of fans who were outraged by the cancellation of the show. High DVD sales and strong fan support allowed the follow up film Serenity to be created, which tied up many of the loose ends that Firefly left open, such as the cause of River 's abilities and the origins of the Reavers .\nThe image shows the main characters of Firefly. From left to right:\nThis is the first xkcd with adorned stick figures (e.g. hair, coats, etc.) to represent distinct characters, which later becomes a standard motif of the comic.\nNathan Fillion , Summer Glau , and Jewel Staite , the actors who play Mal, River, and Kaylee respectively, show up later in Randall's series The Race .\n[Several stick figures stand side by side in a lineup. A forlorn male in a coat, a male with combed hair, a male with spiky hair and arms outstretched enthusiastically, a female with long hair and cornrows, a shorter female with stringy hair falling over her face, an enthusiastic female with arms raised in celebration with shorter hair, a male with short hair and a goatee and hands on hips, a female with curly hair wearing a dress, and a stern-looking man with flyaway hair.]\n"}
{"id":10,"title":"Pi Equals","image_title":"Pi Equals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/10","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pi.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/10:_Pi_Equals","transcript":"[A huge \u03c0 to the left, then a large equal-to sign, and then five rows of text.] \u03c0 = 3.14159265 3589793help imtrappedin auniversefac tory7108914...","explanation":"There are two possible references here. One is from the book Contact by Carl Sagan, where the existence of God was shown in the last chapter to be encoded in the digits of pi . The other is an old joke of a fortune cookie with a fortune that reads, \"Help! I'm trapped in a fortune cookie factory!\" Similar jokes are often repeated for any mass-manufactured personalized item, often implying that the worker who made the item is working in a sweatshop somewhere or is literally trapped inside a factory and calling for help via the items they produce. This joke is also referenced in 327: Exploits of a Mom 's title text, where Mrs. Roberts daughter 's name is \"Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.\"\nThe most literal interpretation of the joke would be that some being who helped to create the universe in a \"universe factory\" snuck a message into the digits of pi (a number that has an endlessly long decimal that never repeats) asking for help to get out. Mathematical concepts being manufactured in a factory is the main mental image here. One can't help but wonder if the primordial beings who labored on the universe to produce things like the gravitational constant and pi have a labor union. Judging by the fact that they're calling for help, it seems they don't.\nSince pi never ends and does not follow any sort of known pattern, if each number pair were assigned a letter from the alphabet, or if it was converted to base-26 (or preferably ASCII or some other form of text encoding, if you desire capitalization and punctuation), the entire works of Shakespeare, as well as any other expressible piece of information, including the message in this comic, could presumably be found (it is not really known that pi really has this property , but the absence of this property would in itself be an extraordinary coincidence); although the probability of finding any given string of numbers within a calculable range of digits of pi diminishes rapidly as the string length increases .\nIn the novel Contact by Carl Sagan , he includes a \"Signature of God\" (There was a link here, but the page no longer exists). In brief, the signature consists of a very long string of 1s and 0s far out (after some 10^20 seemingly random numbers) in the base-11 expansion of pi that when arranged in a square of a specific size yields a clear drawing of a circle with a diameter of several hundred digits.  The existence of this pattern was hinted to the protagonist by a member of an advanced alien civilization as being encoded in physics by an even more advanced civilization with the ability to create universes.\nInterestingly enough, this could also work for pictures: if you assign a set of nine numbers to equal an RGB hexadecimal color value, eventually you will find the Mona Lisa.\nIn the title text, Randall notes that this became one of his most famous comics (at the time it was re-released on the new xkcd site on the 1st of January 2006.) He also notes that it was one of his first drawings for the site (it was the 11th posted originally). See trivia below.\n[A huge \u03c0 to the left, then a large equal-to sign, and then five rows of text.] \u03c0 = 3.14159265 3589793help imtrappedin auniversefac tory7108914..."}
{"id":11,"title":"Barrel - Part 2","image_title":"Barrel - Part 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/11","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/barrel_mommies.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/11:_Barrel_-_Part_2","transcript":"[A boy sits in a barrel which is floating in an ocean.] Boy: none of the places i floated had mommies.\n","explanation":"Like in the previous comic in the Barrel series, the boy is floating in the ocean in a barrel. The previous comic made a point about the uncertainty of life; here, the boy's lament at not finding a mother is pure sentimentality, as accentuated by the title text.\nAccording to Freud, the first stage of psycho-sexual development is the Oral Stage, which relates to a baby's relationship with its mother.  The realization that 'mommy' cannot be found is the first point at which a person learns to stop trusting the world and realizes that the world is not always comforting and safe.\nThis is the second in a six-part series of comics whose parts were randomly published during the first several dozen strips. The series features a character that is not consistent with what would quickly become the xkcd stick figure style. The character is in a barrel.\nAfter Randall released the full The Boy and his Barrel story on xkcd, it has been clear that the original Ferret story should also be included as part of the barrel series.\nThe full series can be found here . But below they are listed in the order Randall has put them in his collection linked to above:\n[A boy sits in a barrel which is floating in an ocean.] Boy: none of the places i floated had mommies.\n"}
{"id":12,"title":"Poisson","image_title":"Poisson","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/12","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/poisson.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/12:_Poisson","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Black Hat. Cueball has his mouth wide open and has both of his arms up.] Cueball: I'm a poisson distribution!\n[Same scene, except Cueball has only one arm up.] Cueball: Still a Poisson distribution! Black Hat: what the hell, man. Why do you keep saying that?\n[Cueball's face is gone, and he is not holding any arms up.] Cueball: Because I'm totally a poisson distribution. Black Hat: I'm less than zero.\n[Cueball is gone. Black Hat is now whistling.]\n","explanation":"Cueball expresses himself as a Poisson distribution .\nA Poisson distribution is a distribution that shows the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time or space. The X axis typically represents the \"number of events\" while the Y axis is a decimal representing the probability (i.e. 0.5 for 50% probability) a given number of events will occur in that fixed interval of time or space. It is commonly represented by a bar graph or a scatter graph (sometimes with a line connection to show a trend, even though there is no actual value for non-integers).\nWhat's important to note for this comic is that this distribution only has data points on non-negative integers and is not continuous through decimal numbers or (as the image text tells us) negative numbers because events can't occur 0.3 of a time, or \u22122 times.\nAfter implying that the concept of a person being a mathematical distribution is irrational, Black Hat suggests he is \"less than zero\". Since the Poisson distribution doesn't exist or has no value at negative values, Cueball either leaves or disappears magically.\nHence, the punchline is the same as the title text: Cueball doesn't exist to Black Hat anymore, because he has a value less than zero. Another one of the early comics where Randall explains the joke in the title text.\nAlso, because a Poisson point process is memoryless, the figure claiming to be the distribution may simply be repeating the fact as a reference to this.\n[Cueball is talking to Black Hat. Cueball has his mouth wide open and has both of his arms up.] Cueball: I'm a poisson distribution!\n[Same scene, except Cueball has only one arm up.] Cueball: Still a Poisson distribution! Black Hat: what the hell, man. Why do you keep saying that?\n[Cueball's face is gone, and he is not holding any arms up.] Cueball: Because I'm totally a poisson distribution. Black Hat: I'm less than zero.\n[Cueball is gone. Black Hat is now whistling.]\n"}
{"id":13,"title":"Canyon","image_title":"Canyon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/13","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/canyon_small.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/13:_Canyon","transcript":"[Two guys, both Cueball-like, are standing at a cliff's edge.] Friend: What time is it?\n[Cueball looks at his watch in silence.]\n[Cueball looks up.] Cueball: Now.\n[The full scene is shown: the two men (barely visible) are standing at the lip of a huge canyon in a rocky, barren landscape. A pock-marked moon and a ringed planet are visible in the burgundy-colored sky.]\n[The two guys are again seen standing at what is now known to be the lip of the canyon.] Friend: That's a pretty boring answer.\n[Same scene as before.] Cueball: Is not.\n[Same scene.] Cueball: It's the least boring answer imaginable.\n","explanation":"This is one of the early comics that explores a theme xkcd returns to often: the wonder around us, if we would just look.\nCueball and his friend (who also looks like Cueball) are having a discussion. After the friend asks Cueball what the time is, Cueball simply states that it is \"now.\" Then there is a beat panel showing the two standing at the lip of a great canyon drawn in detail and color.\nThe friend claims that \"now\" is a boring answer, since it's a tautology , a functionally useless answer, and a bad joke all at the same time. Cueball, however, asserts that \"now\" is the least boring answer he could give.\nIt is typical for human beings to focus on mundane concerns, like a meeting they might be late for or a bus they have to catch, and take their familiar environment for granted, no matter how fabulous it might have been at first sight.\nThe title text explains that they stand on the lip of the canyon, which may not be clear if you do not look very carefully at the color drawing. There are two tiny stick figures at the edge of the canyon, near the center of the panel.  On the other six panels, there is just a ragged line, which thus obviously is this lip of the canyon.\n[Two guys, both Cueball-like, are standing at a cliff's edge.] Friend: What time is it?\n[Cueball looks at his watch in silence.]\n[Cueball looks up.] Cueball: Now.\n[The full scene is shown: the two men (barely visible) are standing at the lip of a huge canyon in a rocky, barren landscape. A pock-marked moon and a ringed planet are visible in the burgundy-colored sky.]\n[The two guys are again seen standing at what is now known to be the lip of the canyon.] Friend: That's a pretty boring answer.\n[Same scene as before.] Cueball: Is not.\n[Same scene.] Cueball: It's the least boring answer imaginable.\n"}
{"id":14,"title":"Copyright","image_title":"Copyright","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/14","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/copyright.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/14:_Copyright","transcript":"[A colored drawing of a hilly, grassy landscape. Cueball is leaning against a tree.] Cueball: Sometimes I just can't get outraged over copyright law\n","explanation":"Following the copyright wars can be tiring and irritating, but faced with the beauty of nature, the importance of such matters withers away.\nCopyright is a monopoly granted by governments to writers, artists, performers, or corporations to control the distribution, copying, and performance of their creative expression or the creative expression of artists under contract with them. Before the digital age, it allowed authors and publishers an opportunity to profit from their work without fear of someone making copies and selling them for their gain.\nIn the digital age, when the cost and difficulty of copying has been reduced to near zero, it hasn't worked so well, especially for publishers of music and video. Industry trade organizations like the RIAA and MPAA have fought to preserve their old business models, lobbying for new laws to protect their income streams in an age where anyone can copy an MP3 file or a DVD quickly and cheaply. This has involved ordering web sites to take down \"infringing\" material (and many times material that wasn't infringing), media campaigns comparing file copiers to folks who commit murder on the high seas, and suing artists and writers who have used samples of music or movies in their own work. The RIAA has claimed that rampant illegal copying hurts the artists whose work is copied, as it cuts into the artists' royalty payments; many artists, on the other hand, complain that the RIAA's accounting practices have denied them their fair royalties for decades anyway, and that increased copying leads to increased fans and money through direct sales and is actually better for them than the RIAA.  It's a vicious war.\nAn early casualty in the copyright wars was Napster ; a later casualty was the concept of DRM (Digital Restrictions Malware) on recorded music and\/or elsewhere. The wars have been going on since the early 1990s and show no sign of slowing down.\nSlashdot and Boing Boing are two news aggregation websites that cover (among other things) the copyright wars in detail, usually biased against the RIAA, MPAA, and similar organizations.\n[A colored drawing of a hilly, grassy landscape. Cueball is leaning against a tree.] Cueball: Sometimes I just can't get outraged over copyright law\n"}
{"id":15,"title":"Just Alerting You","image_title":"Just Alerting You","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/15","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/just_alerting_you.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/15:_Just_Alerting_You","transcript":"[A man is standing on top of a green dinosaur and holding reins to the dinosaur's head.] Man: Before you talk to me, I should warn you: I am kind of strange\n\"I bet she's cool. I mean, she has a dinosaur! I'm gonna update this MWF for a while and see how that works. \"\n","explanation":"Here, a man is seen riding on a Brontosaurus ? (This is according to the official transcript on xkcd, including the questionmark.)  Later Randall would probably have called it an Apatosaurus , see the Category:Apatosaurus .\nThe joke here is that this person feels the need to point out that they are \"kind of strange,\" even though one might think that that would be clear from the fact that they are riding an extinct and potentially dangerous creature.\nIn the title text the man continues by saying Just thought you should know . Just a service notice.\nIn 650: Nowhere Megan is seen imagining herself riding an Apatosaurus.\n[A man is standing on top of a green dinosaur and holding reins to the dinosaur's head.] Man: Before you talk to me, I should warn you: I am kind of strange\n\"I bet she's cool. I mean, she has a dinosaur! I'm gonna update this MWF for a while and see how that works. \"\n"}
{"id":16,"title":"Monty Python -- Enough","image_title":"Monty Python -- Enough","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/16","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/monty_python.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/16:_Monty_Python_--_Enough","transcript":"[The comic is drawn on blue-ruled graph paper.] [A Cueball with raised hands talks to two other Cueball-like characters and one Megan.] Cueball: We are the Knights who say... Ni!! Cueballs and Megan: hahaha\n[There is only text in the second panel] Does anyone else find it funny that decades later, people are still quoting --word-for-word-- a group loved for their mastery of shock, the unexpected, and defiance of convention?\n[Two Cueballs are looking at a hairy guy.] Hairy guy: We are the Knights who... oh, God, I'm so sorry\n[Close up of hairy guy.] Hairy guy: So sorry, the car just came too fast and\n[Words crumpled inside the panel, there's barely enough space for the hairy guy to the right and below the text. The last two words need to be to the right of him.] Hairy guy: She was right there and I saw her and then it was a blur and so much I ran to help didn't know what she wasn't moving I'm so sorry Hairy guy: so sorry\n[The two Cueballs are looking again at the hairy guy.] Hairy guy: Anyway, yeah, Knights who say \"Ni.\"\n[The last panel is also almost only text. The text is centered. Below is a drawing that looks a flat infinity sign with two small lines at the center.] H on or Monty Python: promote surreal humor.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the classic British sketch comedy group Monty Python , active primarily during the 1970s and early 1980s but also partly reunified in 2014 , whose humor style was frequently based on surreal jokes that subverted sense and logic. Their sketches are so popular that, as noted in the comic, many fans can repeat the dialog word-for-word, and often do. This comic points out the inherent irony of repeating a surrealist sketch, as surrealist humor primarily depends on presenting something the audience does not expect. By repeating the sketch verbatim among those who have already seen it, the listeners know and expect the punchlines and jokes. This is akin to a common ironic concept of a teenager who wants to rebel against conformity by doing all the things their friends are also doing.\nThe sketch in question here is the \" Knights who say Ni \" sketch from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail , about a group of knights who protect certain sacred words, including the word \"Ni\" (pronounced like the word \"knee,\" but shortened and with more staccato).\nThe comic suggests that readers continue in the surreal traditions of Monty Python, and provides an example: The character in panels 3-6 interrupts his retelling of the sketch with what appears to be a traumatic recalling of the time he saw someone run a woman over with their car and kill her, before returning to the sketch. The surreal humor is that the character dismisses the significant and serious comment he has just made by returning to the sketch as if nothing happened.\nThe title text refers to how fans of Monty Python can go for long periods of time simply quoting the sketches, as one person quotes a sketch, another recognizes it and says another quote without context, assuming everyone will recognize it. Perhaps a more contemporary version of this might be The Simpsons or Family Guy quote frenzies.\n[The comic is drawn on blue-ruled graph paper.] [A Cueball with raised hands talks to two other Cueball-like characters and one Megan.] Cueball: We are the Knights who say... Ni!! Cueballs and Megan: hahaha\n[There is only text in the second panel] Does anyone else find it funny that decades later, people are still quoting --word-for-word-- a group loved for their mastery of shock, the unexpected, and defiance of convention?\n[Two Cueballs are looking at a hairy guy.] Hairy guy: We are the Knights who... oh, God, I'm so sorry\n[Close up of hairy guy.] Hairy guy: So sorry, the car just came too fast and\n[Words crumpled inside the panel, there's barely enough space for the hairy guy to the right and below the text. The last two words need to be to the right of him.] Hairy guy: She was right there and I saw her and then it was a blur and so much I ran to help didn't know what she wasn't moving I'm so sorry Hairy guy: so sorry\n[The two Cueballs are looking again at the hairy guy.] Hairy guy: Anyway, yeah, Knights who say \"Ni.\"\n[The last panel is also almost only text. The text is centered. Below is a drawing that looks a flat infinity sign with two small lines at the center.] H on or Monty Python: promote surreal humor.\n"}
{"id":17,"title":"What If","image_title":"What If","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/17","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/what_if.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/17:_What_If","transcript":"[A large black circle (drawn on grid paper) with white bubbles inside it, filled with hearts, question marks, and stick figure couples. The hearts are colored red.] [Bottom left circle - stick figure couple with a heart] [Top right circle - with couple:] what if this isn't everything it should be? [Two circles left of top-right:] i'm not even sure how i feel [One circle right of top-right:] what if i'm making a mistake?\n\"One of my best friends just got engaged. I really, truly think they're going to be very happy together.\" The friends referred to are Scott and Sarah.\n","explanation":"This comic features a man and a woman in a romantic setting, surrounded by a fractal combination of love and doubts; an arrangement based on the Apollonian gasket construction. Three circles are drawn tangent to each other, then additional circles are added that are tangent to three existing circles (without overlapping), ad infinitum.\nRandall's character design wasn't yet fully settled. Considering that Megan arguably was introduced two comics ago, and that the man has some hair, the couple might or might not be interpreted as Cueball and Megan.\nRandall's later blog and book have the same name, what if? , though with very different meaning.\n[A large black circle (drawn on grid paper) with white bubbles inside it, filled with hearts, question marks, and stick figure couples. The hearts are colored red.] [Bottom left circle - stick figure couple with a heart] [Top right circle - with couple:] what if this isn't everything it should be? [Two circles left of top-right:] i'm not even sure how i feel [One circle right of top-right:] what if i'm making a mistake?\n\"One of my best friends just got engaged. I really, truly think they're going to be very happy together.\" The friends referred to are Scott and Sarah.\n"}
{"id":18,"title":"Snapple","image_title":"Snapple","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/18","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snapple.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/18:_Snapple","transcript":"[Above the frame:] This one is entirely James' fault.\n[Two Cueball-like guys are standing and talking.] Cueball: Here, take a bite of this Snapple. Friend: food!\n[Cueball's friend takes a bite.] Friend: Ow!  What is this? Clink\n[The panel switches to Cueball.] Cueball: It's an apple infused with tin.\n[Beat panel. A wide shot of the two.]\n[Same scene, except the panel is lightly shaded and the is a box above saying:] Those of you who know your periodic table should be laughing right about now.\n","explanation":"Cueball hands another Cueball-like guy an apple calling it a snapple. When the guy bites into it, his teeth go clink against the apple's metal surface; Cueball has infused the apple with tin.\nThe fourth panel is a silent wide shot, perhaps suggesting the joke was met with silence as a weak joke . As a meta-joke, the final panel might jokingly suggest that the silence is because those unfamiliar with the periodic table of elements don't get the joke.\nThe joke in this comic is pretty self-explanatory, especially given that the title text continues the trend in early xkcd comics of explaining the joke. Tin is a metallic element whose abbreviation on the periodic table is \"Sn\" (as the Latin word for tin is \"stannum\"). Thus, the apple is a \"Sn-apple.\"\nSnapple is a brand of beverages -- mostly bottled juices and teas -- whose name is based on a carbonated apple juice they once produced (\"snappy apple\").\nJames (in the caption) presumably once made a joke to Randall about tin or Snapple or both.\n[Above the frame:] This one is entirely James' fault.\n[Two Cueball-like guys are standing and talking.] Cueball: Here, take a bite of this Snapple. Friend: food!\n[Cueball's friend takes a bite.] Friend: Ow!  What is this? Clink\n[The panel switches to Cueball.] Cueball: It's an apple infused with tin.\n[Beat panel. A wide shot of the two.]\n[Same scene, except the panel is lightly shaded and the is a box above saying:] Those of you who know your periodic table should be laughing right about now.\n"}
{"id":19,"title":"George Clinton","image_title":"George Clinton","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/19","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/george_clinton.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/19:_George_Clinton","transcript":"[George Clinton uses a baton to point to the bottom of two equations on a blackboard. There is one more equation and a diagram on another blackboard to the right, which is cut off. There is text above:] I once tried to start the urban legend that George Clinton has a B.A. in mathematics\n[On the left blackboard there are two formulas:] L(F(t) = F(s) = \u222b \u221e 0 f(t)e -st dt\nL -1 (F(s)) = f(t) = \u222b \u221e 0 F(t)e st dt\n[On the right blackboard there is part of a formula and a diagram with an x-y scale and three other lines touching down to the base. Above these lines are some numbers that are partly indecipherable.] \u03b3 n = 2 n\/12 K\n0 2 3 \u230a\u230a\u230a\u230a\n[Below George and the blackboards is text:] ...but I wanted it to be true so badly that I started believing it myself.","explanation":"George Clinton is an American musician most famous for his funk music and wild hair style.\nHis recorded music features themes of space, sci-fi, technology, and futurism. An example of his work most appropriate to this comic is the song \"Mathematics\" from the 1996 album T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The awesome power of a fully operational mothership).\n\"I count the moments we're apart. And add them up mathematically and multiply them by the kisses supposedly I've been missing. Divided by the attention not to mention the affection. Subtract that from your gross potential and see I ain't missin' none. Cause any percentage of you is as good the whole pie. Any fractions thereof brings dividends of interest. Any percentage of you is as good as the whole pie. Any fractions thereof brings dividends of love. I take the square root and get boxed in every time. When I know the shortest distance between two points is in a straight line. I'ma go into you, I'ma come into you two times, and carry the fun over the one to where we equal one.\u201d (Chorus 2x)\nAs Randall says, he had attempted to spread around an urban legend that George Clinton had a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics. However, the more Randall thought about this rumor, the more he found himself believing it was true. This behavior is related to pseudologia fantastica , which is more commonly known as pathological or compulsive lying. This comic references the associated behavior that an \"individual may be aware they are lying, or may believe they are telling the truth, being unaware that they are relating fantasies.\" These individuals may eventually stop the lie as demonstrated by the title text, which indicates that at some later time, the individual realized that the rumor was not true, but wishes it to be so.\nThis may also be a reference to James Thurber's 13 clocks, in which a character called the Golux has the following exchange with the main character:\n\"When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself.\" \"But why?\" \"I thought the tale of treasure might be true.\" \"You said you made it up.\" \"I know I did, but I didn't know I had. I forget things, too.\"\nThe equations on the board are laplace transforms of functions.\n[George Clinton uses a baton to point to the bottom of two equations on a blackboard. There is one more equation and a diagram on another blackboard to the right, which is cut off. There is text above:] I once tried to start the urban legend that George Clinton has a B.A. in mathematics\n[On the left blackboard there are two formulas:] L(F(t) = F(s) = \u222b \u221e 0 f(t)e -st dt\nL -1 (F(s)) = f(t) = \u222b \u221e 0 F(t)e st dt\n[On the right blackboard there is part of a formula and a diagram with an x-y scale and three other lines touching down to the base. Above these lines are some numbers that are partly indecipherable.] \u03b3 n = 2 n\/12 K\n0 2 3 \u230a\u230a\u230a\u230a\n[Below George and the blackboards is text:] ...but I wanted it to be true so badly that I started believing it myself."}
{"id":20,"title":"Ferret","image_title":"Ferret","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/20","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ferret.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/20:_Ferret","transcript":"[A color drawing of a ferret with airplane wings and tail on it.]\n[Cueball and his Cueball-like friend (to the left) are talking.] Friend: Why on earth did you make those wings? You don't seriously think they could let your ferret fly, right? Cueball: I... of course not.\n[They continue to talk.] Cueball: That would be pretty dumb. It's just, uh... ...a Halloween costume. Friend: oh, okay.\n[They continue to talk. The head of the ferret can be seen to the far right on a table.] Friend: Besides, who would want a pet to fly anyway? Cueball: Yeah. Pretty lame, huh?\n[The friend leaves the frame while Cueball stays. The ferret cannot be seen.] Friend: Anyway, let's go play video games.\n[Cueball stands behind after his friend has left. He looks back towards his ferret.]\n[Cueball imagines his ferret flying over the ocean near the beach using his makeshift wings while holding his ferret.]\n","explanation":"Cueball 's (Cueball-like) friend makes fun of his imagination that involves a flying ferret, and then suggests to go play video games instead. This shows the irony of his definition of \"imagination.\"  He makes fun of Cueball's creative fantasy while instead opting for a mass-produced fantasy.\nThe fact that Cueball lies about his goal could be a commentary on abandoning dreams to avoid confronting societal expectations.\nThe title text refers to the fact that Randall's brother in real life had such a pet ferret. Originally, Randall drew this comic while the ferret was still alive, and then it passed away in between his posting it on LiveJournal and reposting it with a title text on the new xkcd site. He now wishes that it will rest in peace.\nThe ferret returns in 31: Barrel - Part 5 and did in this way become part of the Barrel series . This has also been canonized by Randall as can be seen on this web-archive version of xkcd: The Boy and his Barrel .\nThe full series can be found here . But below they are listed in the order Randall has put them in his collection linked to above:\n[A color drawing of a ferret with airplane wings and tail on it.]\n[Cueball and his Cueball-like friend (to the left) are talking.] Friend: Why on earth did you make those wings? You don't seriously think they could let your ferret fly, right? Cueball: I... of course not.\n[They continue to talk.] Cueball: That would be pretty dumb. It's just, uh... ...a Halloween costume. Friend: oh, okay.\n[They continue to talk. The head of the ferret can be seen to the far right on a table.] Friend: Besides, who would want a pet to fly anyway? Cueball: Yeah. Pretty lame, huh?\n[The friend leaves the frame while Cueball stays. The ferret cannot be seen.] Friend: Anyway, let's go play video games.\n[Cueball stands behind after his friend has left. He looks back towards his ferret.]\n[Cueball imagines his ferret flying over the ocean near the beach using his makeshift wings while holding his ferret.]\n"}
{"id":21,"title":"Kepler","image_title":"Kepler","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/21","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kepler.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/21:_Kepler","transcript":"[Two Cueball-like guys stand in an aisle in a store.] Cueball: Nice store. How do you keep the floors so clean? Store manager: Oh, we hired this dude named Kepler, he's really good. Hard worker. Doesn't mind the monotony. Sweeps out the same area every night.\n","explanation":"A Cueball-like guy asks Cueball , the store manager, how they keep the store so clean, and he is told that they have hired Kepler, a hard worker who doesn't mind the monotony and sweeps out the same area every night.\nJohannes Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, best known for his laws of planetary motion. By using Tycho Brahe 's observations of our solar system (Brahe gave Kepler the job of observing and explaining the motion of the planet Mars), Kepler was able to deduce that planets in the system do not move in a circular orbit around the Sun, but rather in an elliptical one. \nIn doing so, he directly contradicted Brahe's own conviction that the Earth was the centre of the universe.\nAccording to Kepler's Second Law , \"A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time,\" somewhat akin to sweeping a broom over the floor.\nIn the comic, the janitor Kepler also sweeps the same area, although in this case, \"area\" is used in the sense of \"surface\" (of floor) rather than in the purely mathematical sense. It is also very monotonous, like a planet's set orbit, but Kepler doesn't mind this.\nThe comic could also be seen as a subtle reference to the Kepler space telescope that was searching for exoplanets (planets outside the Solar system) from March 2009 to August 2013, by looking at exactly the same spot in the night sky over and over again.  Even though the telescope was not launched until 4 years after this comic was published, the details of Project Kepler had been disclosed by NASA press releases as early as 2001 .\nThe title text assumes that the reader is scientifically illiterate and won't understand the joke, which is ironic, considering how xkcd came to be known for embracing STEM fields and nerdiness in general.\n[Two Cueball-like guys stand in an aisle in a store.] Cueball: Nice store. How do you keep the floors so clean? Store manager: Oh, we hired this dude named Kepler, he's really good. Hard worker. Doesn't mind the monotony. Sweeps out the same area every night.\n"}
{"id":22,"title":"Barrel - Part 3","image_title":"Barrel - Part 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/22","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/barrel_whirlpool.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/22:_Barrel_-_Part_3","transcript":"[A large and deep vortex is in the center; spinning water covers the whole panel. A boy in a floating barrel is near the edge, apparently about to be sucked in.] Boy: wow!\n","explanation":"In the first two comics in the Barrel series, the boy is floating in the ocean in a barrel, making fairly innocent points about life's uncertainty. In this comic, the view has zoomed out considerably, and the boy is seen to be on the edge of a gigantic whirlpool . Thus, there is now a palpably heightened sense of danger, though the boy's reaction continues to be innocent wonder.\nThe comic's visual composition is reminiscent of a classic 1919 illustration by Harry Clarke , made for Edgar Allan Poe 's 1841 short story \" A Descent into the Maelstr\u00f6m .\" In the short story, the main character escapes from drowning by using a barrel to escape The Maelstr\u00f6m.\nThis is the third in a six-part series of comics whose parts were randomly published during the first several dozen strips. The series features a character who is not consistent with what would quickly become the xkcd stick figure style. The character is in a barrel.\nAfter Randall released the full The Boy and his Barrel story on xkcd, it has been clear that the original Ferret story should also be included as part of the barrel series.\nThe full series can be found here . But below they are listed in the order Randall has put them in his collection linked to above:\n[A large and deep vortex is in the center; spinning water covers the whole panel. A boy in a floating barrel is near the edge, apparently about to be sucked in.] Boy: wow!\n"}
{"id":23,"title":"T-shirts","image_title":"T-shirts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/23","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/t-shirts.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/23:_T-shirts","transcript":"[A collection of phrases on T-shirts. The first and the last on actual black T-shirts worn by the same person, whose facial expression is more sad on the last one.] I see dumb people As a matter of fact the world does revolve around me I can only please one person per day \/ today is not your day. You know what your problem is? You're stupid. Get a clue Do I look like a people person? Your village called \/ they want their idiot back Go away I hate you all Die. Help. Maybe if this T-shirt is witty enough, someone will finally love me. Oh God I'm so alone.\n","explanation":"This comic satirizes the plethora of \"snarky\" phrase T-shirts that exist today. In the top-left, the character wears a typical (and real) snark shirt, \"I see dumb people\" (suggesting that the wearer thinks everyone else is dumb, while being a parody of the phrase \"I see dead people\" from the movie The Sixth Sense ). Other shirts shown also suggest that the wearer is better than everyone else, and perhaps the shirts increasingly suggest that the wearer is anti-social moving from top to bottom. Near the bottom of the screen, the T-shirts no longer attempt to be witty and simply have straightforward phrases like \"go away\" and \"die\". These are exaggerations of the message that the other more-realistic shirts broadcast.\nThe final three shirts are also exaggerated shirts that suggest Randall 's view that people who wear snarky shirts are overcompensating for the fact that they are already alone or perhaps putting up a tough exterior to conceal their sadness that no one would talk to them anyway. Most notably \"maybe if this T-shirt is witty enough, someone will finally love me\" sums up what Randall thinks snarky shirts really say. There are shirts with this or a similar message, although it is unclear whether they were created before this comic or as a tribute to this comic.\nIn the title text, Randall says that it's depressing how many of the shirts in the comic actually exist in real life, further underlining the point that these shirts are overly arrogant, to the point where one might believe that Randall made them up. This highlights the inadequacy of substance within these T-shirts and the terror they invoke in Randall's mind.\n[A collection of phrases on T-shirts. The first and the last on actual black T-shirts worn by the same person, whose facial expression is more sad on the last one.] I see dumb people As a matter of fact the world does revolve around me I can only please one person per day \/ today is not your day. You know what your problem is? You're stupid. Get a clue Do I look like a people person? Your village called \/ they want their idiot back Go away I hate you all Die. Help. Maybe if this T-shirt is witty enough, someone will finally love me. Oh God I'm so alone.\n"}
{"id":24,"title":"Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey","image_title":"Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/24","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/godel_escher_kurthalsey.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/24:_Godel,_Escher,_Kurt_Halsey","transcript":"Drawn during an unending NASA lecture [Two people are talking, one in a hat.] Cueball: it's just so hard to compare kids now with kids in the past. you can't help but to belong to one group or the other.\nCueball: and of course every generation seems awful to the one before it. look at quotes from throughout history.\nHatted: yeah, and it sure would be nice to have some historical perspective on some of this stuff. I just don't know what to make of it. [Circles are appearing--maybe snow?]\nCueball: i guess you do what you can to help the people around you and hope it turns out okay.\nCueball: in the end, what else can you do?\nHatted: lead a crusade?\n[We can no longer see the people, just the circles.] it's presentism, man. the idea that historical context is irrelevant, that we understand it\nall that we need take no warnings from the follies of the past. that we're facing something new.\nsocrates couldn't imagine the internet. but people don't change. [We can start to see a darker circle in the lower right corner.]\n(The borders between the three panels on this line are cracking.) have you seen those collections of historical pornography? talk about historical context.\ndid you know the first porn photo was bestial in. [inside a circle:] nature?\nat least that stuff was out of the mainstream [each word in one circle:] no just in history\n(the three panels have merged into one on each row.)\ni don't know about you, but [circled] I [uncircled] never\neven once seen\n[The circles are highly variable in size now, and pressed up against a larger one on the right side.]\n[There is mass of circles of different sizes, with some dark fissures in between, against the side of a large circle which we can see part of in the right half of the panel. They look like cells. There's a tiny square in the center of the giant cell.]\n[We see only the tiny square, centered. It has a few marks inside it.]\n[Closer, the square is divided into rectangles of different sizes, each of which has text in it.]\n[Much closer, we can see fragments of the text. Some are sideways, some are cut off, some are too small to read.] machine language translated by principles of isomorphism it is a consequence of the Church-Turing thesis that ... but how do you select the channel you wish to se- thou ... shou ... palin ... stri ... it is a ... crab ... be obvious to one-s ... your great intellectual achievements ... Tortise. Why ... you give this old Tortise ...\n[Closer still, we can just see a huge sideways s and h.]\n[Those letters are faded and mixed with a faded version of the next panel.]\ngirls take boys away ... never be further than a phone call and a goosebumped shiver away ... drove all night listening to mix tapes ... the past is just practice [There is a heart at the bottom and, in the lower left, the name Kurt.]\n[The same as the previous panel, but with the words blurred out to scribbles.]\n[Jagged, shaded shapes and strands start to fall. Faint panel borders appear again. There is a person on the far right.]\n(Back to three panels per row.) [Cueball and Megan are standing amid the fragments.]\nCueball: There's too much. And so little feels important.\n[The jagged edge of the shaded area is encroaching on the sides of the panel.]\nWhat do you do?\n[We see them from farther away through a rough hole in the shaded area. Bits continue to fall around them.]\n[They are holding hands.]\n\"One of a series of strips I drew during a long and boring NASA lecture. It careens wildly from intellectual to chaotic to Godel, Escher, Bach to Kurt Halsey to chaotic and sappy. The whole series is here . \"\n","explanation":"At the time xkcd was created, Randall was working on robotics at NASA 's Langley Center. This drawing was apparently made during that period, while attending a talk that he didn't like.\nThe name of the comic is a portmanteau-like play on the following:\nThe comic is drawn in the form of a storyboard and is clearly intended to be visualized as an animated sequence.\nIn the first part of the comic, two people discuss the difficulty of comparing past and present generations, since the person making the comparison invariably belongs to one of the two groups.\nIt's unclear whether the behatted guy is Black Hat , as Randall hadn't standardized his character designs yet, though the sarcastic comment suggests that it is. If it is, then this would be his first appearance. (He also appears in 12: Poisson , but that comic was released about 3 months later, but the numbering did not follow the release day on LiveJournal when the comics were transferred to xkcd - see the trivia for that comic.) Actually due to the order of release on LiveJournal, this, being number 6, was the first releases to use both stick figures, Cueball , Black Hat and Megan , as well as Multiple Cueballs ! See the trivia below.\nThe assembly of text panels found in the middle of the strip is similar to 124: Blogofractal .\nThe philosophy of Kurt G\u00f6del is also a theme in 468: Fetishes .\nDrawn during an unending NASA lecture [Two people are talking, one in a hat.] Cueball: it's just so hard to compare kids now with kids in the past. you can't help but to belong to one group or the other.\nCueball: and of course every generation seems awful to the one before it. look at quotes from throughout history.\nHatted: yeah, and it sure would be nice to have some historical perspective on some of this stuff. I just don't know what to make of it. [Circles are appearing--maybe snow?]\nCueball: i guess you do what you can to help the people around you and hope it turns out okay.\nCueball: in the end, what else can you do?\nHatted: lead a crusade?\n[We can no longer see the people, just the circles.] it's presentism, man. the idea that historical context is irrelevant, that we understand it\nall that we need take no warnings from the follies of the past. that we're facing something new.\nsocrates couldn't imagine the internet. but people don't change. [We can start to see a darker circle in the lower right corner.]\n(The borders between the three panels on this line are cracking.) have you seen those collections of historical pornography? talk about historical context.\ndid you know the first porn photo was bestial in. [inside a circle:] nature?\nat least that stuff was out of the mainstream [each word in one circle:] no just in history\n(the three panels have merged into one on each row.)\ni don't know about you, but [circled] I [uncircled] never\neven once seen\n[The circles are highly variable in size now, and pressed up against a larger one on the right side.]\n[There is mass of circles of different sizes, with some dark fissures in between, against the side of a large circle which we can see part of in the right half of the panel. They look like cells. There's a tiny square in the center of the giant cell.]\n[We see only the tiny square, centered. It has a few marks inside it.]\n[Closer, the square is divided into rectangles of different sizes, each of which has text in it.]\n[Much closer, we can see fragments of the text. Some are sideways, some are cut off, some are too small to read.] machine language translated by principles of isomorphism it is a consequence of the Church-Turing thesis that ... but how do you select the channel you wish to se- thou ... shou ... palin ... stri ... it is a ... crab ... be obvious to one-s ... your great intellectual achievements ... Tortise. Why ... you give this old Tortise ...\n[Closer still, we can just see a huge sideways s and h.]\n[Those letters are faded and mixed with a faded version of the next panel.]\ngirls take boys away ... never be further than a phone call and a goosebumped shiver away ... drove all night listening to mix tapes ... the past is just practice [There is a heart at the bottom and, in the lower left, the name Kurt.]\n[The same as the previous panel, but with the words blurred out to scribbles.]\n[Jagged, shaded shapes and strands start to fall. Faint panel borders appear again. There is a person on the far right.]\n(Back to three panels per row.) [Cueball and Megan are standing amid the fragments.]\nCueball: There's too much. And so little feels important.\n[The jagged edge of the shaded area is encroaching on the sides of the panel.]\nWhat do you do?\n[We see them from farther away through a rough hole in the shaded area. Bits continue to fall around them.]\n[They are holding hands.]\n\"One of a series of strips I drew during a long and boring NASA lecture. It careens wildly from intellectual to chaotic to Godel, Escher, Bach to Kurt Halsey to chaotic and sappy. The whole series is here . \"\n"}
{"id":25,"title":"Barrel - Part 4","image_title":"Barrel - Part 4","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/25","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/barrel_part_4.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/25:_Barrel_-_Part_4","transcript":"[The barrel is shown on a grid paper background, floating sideways and empty in a choppy sea.]\nBarrel series By the way, here are all the barrel comics on a single (easily linked) page: http:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/barrel.html [This is an archived version of the page. The original link is dead. This text is not included in the statement.] I cheated, and went back and lightened the gridlines in #2. It was just bothering me. I'll try not to do that much. But as I'm not destroying anyone's childhood, I don't feel like I'm really pulling a George Lucas. I mean, I'm not destroying more than one childhood. Oops.\n","explanation":"In the first three comics of the series, the character explored the ocean in a barrel and then encountered a whirlpool, all with a reaction of innocent wonder. Here, the empty barrel floating adrift, plus the title text and a previous announcement by Randall that this would be the conclusion of barrel boy's story, imply that the character's encounter with the whirlpool separated him from the barrel, and he may have come to some harm.\nThis is the fifth in a six-part series of comics whose parts were randomly published during the first several dozen strips. The series features a character who is not consistent with what would quickly become the xkcd stick figure style. The character was in the barrel in parts 1-3.\nAfter Randall released the full The Boy and his Barrel story on xkcd, it has been clear that the original Ferret story should also be included as part of the barrel series.\nThe full series can be found here . But below they are listed in the order Randall has put them in his collection linked to above:\n[The barrel is shown on a grid paper background, floating sideways and empty in a choppy sea.]\nBarrel series By the way, here are all the barrel comics on a single (easily linked) page: http:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/barrel.html [This is an archived version of the page. The original link is dead. This text is not included in the statement.] I cheated, and went back and lightened the gridlines in #2. It was just bothering me. I'll try not to do that much. But as I'm not destroying anyone's childhood, I don't feel like I'm really pulling a George Lucas. I mean, I'm not destroying more than one childhood. Oops.\n"}
{"id":26,"title":"Fourier","image_title":"Fourier","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/26","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fourier.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/26:_Fourier","transcript":"[Cueball talks on phone. A grotesque-looking cat with many sharp vertical points looks on.] Cueball: Hi, Dr. Elizabeth?  Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat... Cat: Meow!\n","explanation":"A Fourier transform is a mathematical function transformation often used in physics and engineering.\nThe theory is that any line graph can be represented as the sum of a bunch of sine waves of different frequencies and amplitudes. (The most obvious application is in analyzing a sound recording in terms of the different frequencies of sounds used.) So, for any line graph, you can produce another graph of the frequencies and their amplitudes. This can be done by evaluating an integral based on the function, which is referred to as \"taking the Fourier transform\" of the function. The form of the integral that needs to be taken is actually shown in the third line of the comic 55: Useless .\nUnfortunately, Cueball has applied this \"transform\" to his cat. Although it seems to still be alive and possibly even unharmed, it is clearly not in its familiar shape, and it is not clear if this condition is permanent or not.\n\"Periodic components\" in the title text refers to the spikes in the graph.  Because sine waves repeat themselves as you go along, the presence of large amounts of one particular sine wave in the Fourier transform graph (each spike) shows that the overall result (the initial graph) is likely to have parts that also repeat themselves, like a periodic function . In other words, the cat has repeating parts.\n[Cueball talks on phone. A grotesque-looking cat with many sharp vertical points looks on.] Cueball: Hi, Dr. Elizabeth?  Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat... Cat: Meow!\n"}
{"id":27,"title":"Meat Cereals","image_title":"Meat Cereals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/27","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meat_cereals.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/27:_Meat_Cereals","transcript":"[A collection of fictional meat based cereals in bright colors with nice pictures on them.] Pork Loops Mice Krispies Hammios Frosted Bacon Flakes Scrapple Jacks Hey, these don't taste like Scrapple! Honey Bunches of Goats\n","explanation":"Randall parodies several real-world breakfast cereals (which typically consist solely of grains and sweet flavorings) by creating versions that contain meat (animal products). The cereals that appear to be parodied (clockwise from top-left) include Froot Loops, Rice Krispies, Honey Bunches of Oats, Apple Jacks, Frosted Flakes, and Cheerios. There does not appear to be a deeper meaning to this comic than that.\nThe Scrapple Jacks parody (the only slightly obscure reference) appears to be made with scrapple , which, according to Wikipedia, is a mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and wheat flour, often buckwheat flour, and spices. Real Apple Jacks ran an ad campaign in the 1980s and 1990s in which an adult or authority figure tasted the cereal and declared \"these don't taste like apples!\", thus missing the point of why kids liked the cereal. The slogan is parodied on the Scrapple Jacks box. Randall referenced this same slogan again in \" 38: Apple Jacks \".\nThe title text, reading, \"Disgusting.\", apparently reflects Randall's opinion of his own creation.\n[A collection of fictional meat based cereals in bright colors with nice pictures on them.] Pork Loops Mice Krispies Hammios Frosted Bacon Flakes Scrapple Jacks Hey, these don't taste like Scrapple! Honey Bunches of Goats\n"}
{"id":28,"title":"Elefino","image_title":"Elefino","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/28","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/elefino.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/28:_Elefino","transcript":"Q: What do you get when you cross an Elephant with a Rhino? [Picture of elephant, mathematical addition symbol, picture of rhino, equals sign, large question mark.] A: I haven't a goddamn clue.\nFound it. Pepe and Seymour Elifino ... Totally worth the \ud83d\udc07 hole. Iggynelix ( talk ) 15:45, 18 April 2020 (UTC)\n","explanation":"The basis for this fairly simple xkcd comic is the subject riddle, which is properly answered, as given in the title text: \"Hell if I know.\" When spoken, this \"correct\" answer sounds like \"elephino\" \u2013 a portmanteau of \" eleph ant\" and \"rh ino .\" This makes it again one of the early comics where Randall explains the comic via the title text.\nInstead of giving the punchline of the joke, Randall answers with the unexpected \"I haven't a goddamn clue,\" which, while having the same meaning, ruins the joke.\nQ: What do you get when you cross an Elephant with a Rhino? [Picture of elephant, mathematical addition symbol, picture of rhino, equals sign, large question mark.] A: I haven't a goddamn clue.\nFound it. Pepe and Seymour Elifino ... Totally worth the \ud83d\udc07 hole. Iggynelix ( talk ) 15:45, 18 April 2020 (UTC)\n"}
{"id":29,"title":"Hitler","image_title":"Hitler","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/29","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hitler.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/29:_Hitler","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball are talking together in the same position in all four panels.] Cueball: Learning about the Holocaust has really shaken my belief in God.\nBlack Hat: You know, as a young man, Hitler was rejected from art school. Cueball: Yeah... shame he didn't get in.\nBlack Hat: Well, have you seen any of his paintings? They're awful . Defy all rules of composition. Cueball: What are you suggesting?\nBlack Hat: Maybe there is a god, but he's a real art lover. Cueball: This is why I don't go out in public with you.\n","explanation":"Cueball speaks to an early version of Black Hat (with more of a top hat than his later \"boater\" hat style) about the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler . Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany beginning in 1933 and starting World War II in 1939 by attacking Poland. During that war, the Germans (under Hitler's leadership) killed millions of people; most of them were Jews, but other ethnic groups, homosexuals, and the mentally disabled were all targeted as well. This has come to be known as the Holocaust.\nBlack Hat's comment that Hitler wanted to be a painter, but did not get into art school, is historically accurate. He applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts twice. In any event, Cueball implies in the second frame that had Hitler been accepted into art school, the course of history might have changed, and the Holocaust might never have occurred. Black Hat suggests that perhaps God intentionally prevented Hitler from becoming an artist because God is an \"art lover\" and Hitler's art was terrible.\nAs with other early comics, the title text explains the comic for us: this implies that God would have preferred the Holocaust to have occurred rather than allow Hitler to make some bad paintings. Such a comment that God could be so callous would surely be offensive to many people. Cueball's reaction to this shocking statement is relatively mild and suggests that Black Hat has made such controversial statements before. He will make a similarly controversial and Nazi-related statement again in 984: Space Launch System .\nThe title text also informs the reader that Black Hat is based on a character named Aram from a now-defunct comic strip entitled Men in Hats . In the original quote when this comic was posted on LiveJournal (see Trivia ) Randall directed the user to a specific Men in Hats comic about parenting . Like Black Hat, Aram seems to have frequently made judgmental, insulting, or controversial comments in a very emotionless manner. Aram wore a grey (perhaps intended to be black) suit with a red bowtie and a black top hat with a white strip above the brim. Black Hat's hat clearly evolved from the top hat design later in xkcd.\nThis may be the comic where Black Hat truly comes into existence for the first time. He appears earlier in 12: Poisson , but that was actually first released more than a month later. Then there is also 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey , released a good month earlier. But here Black Hat does not really resemble his later appearances.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are talking together in the same position in all four panels.] Cueball: Learning about the Holocaust has really shaken my belief in God.\nBlack Hat: You know, as a young man, Hitler was rejected from art school. Cueball: Yeah... shame he didn't get in.\nBlack Hat: Well, have you seen any of his paintings? They're awful . Defy all rules of composition. Cueball: What are you suggesting?\nBlack Hat: Maybe there is a god, but he's a real art lover. Cueball: This is why I don't go out in public with you.\n"}
{"id":30,"title":"Donner","image_title":"Donner","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/30","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/donner.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/30:_Donner","transcript":"[Three people stand outside a restaurant; Megan, a man with some hair and another shorter person, probably a woman. There is a sign above the door which says \"Joe's\" (presumably the name of the restaurant) and a menu next to it. Outside the door, there is a ma\u00eetre d' with a cap behind a lectern. There is a sign on the lectern which says \"Eat in\".] ma\u00eetre d': Donner, party of four? Man: Actually, never mind. Megan: We're full.\n","explanation":"The title text explains to the reader that the Donner party was a group of pioneers who set out west along a new route that was supposed to be easier to travel, but ultimately proved slow and treacherous. They became trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains and many died. Low on food, many of the pioneers resorted to cannibalism, eating the bodies of party members who had already died, it is believed.\nIn this comic, three Donner party members arrive at Joe's restaurant, where they have ordered a table for four, as given by the fact that the ma\u00eetre d' knows they are the Donner party and calls for a party of four. The three decline the table since they are already full. This suggests that they just have eaten the fourth member (unknown to us) of their party after they placed the order for a table at the restaurant, but before they strolled over to it anyway.\nOf course, since they are not in a survival situation in this strip, cannibalism would be completely unnecessary. However, it may be possible that they are suffering from Wendigo Psychosis . Alternatively, the Donner Dinner Party may have resorted to cannibalism because it took so long to be seated at the restaurant.\nIn the early days of xkcd (and days when Wikipedia was not quite in the mainstream consciousness), Randall didn't trust people to understand his comics or his references, and often explained the joke in the title text like here and for instance also in 38: Apple Jacks .\n[Three people stand outside a restaurant; Megan, a man with some hair and another shorter person, probably a woman. There is a sign above the door which says \"Joe's\" (presumably the name of the restaurant) and a menu next to it. Outside the door, there is a ma\u00eetre d' with a cap behind a lectern. There is a sign on the lectern which says \"Eat in\".] ma\u00eetre d': Donner, party of four? Man: Actually, never mind. Megan: We're full.\n"}
{"id":31,"title":"Barrel - Part 5","image_title":"Barrel - Part 5","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/31","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/barrel_part_5.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/31:_Barrel_-_Part_5","transcript":"[A boy is grasping on to a piece of driftwood in an ocean.]\n[A zoomed out view of the boy still grasping on to a piece of driftwood in the ocean.]\n[A ferret with some airplane wings and an airplane tail flies above the ocean.]\n[A shot of the ocean, now empty.]\n[The flying ferret is carrying the boy to safety.]\n[The ferret carrying the boy is now in the distance with the sun on the horizon.]\n","explanation":"This gives a happy ending to the Barrel series . The flying ferret is from 20: Ferret . The humor is derived from the juxtaposition of two unlike elements - in this case, the contemplative and even dark nature of the Barrel series being resolved through the timely intervention of a comical flying mammal.\nSaid mammal could also be interpreted as a symbol of hope and following your dreams, seeing as in its original appearance, its powers of flight were just that: a dream. However, the dream becomes reality to save a child from an endless sea of hopelessness.\nThe series is probably inspired by the novella The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry . Randall is well known to be a fan of this book.\nSomewhere between the release of the first ferret comic in October 2005 and the re-release of that comic (and all the other from LiveJournal in 2005) on New Year's Day 2006 on the new xkcd site, Randall's brother's ferret died - as given by the new RIP comment in the title text. The sad comment in the title text of 25: Barrel - Part 4 , \":(\", possibly implying harm to the boy, along with this RIP comment, may imply that the boy has died and joined the ferret (in flying to Heaven). However, this line of reasoning only makes sense if the ferret actually died before the release of both the Part 4 comic at the end of October and this comic, which was released in the middle of November 2005, 1\u00bd months before the new title text was made public.\nThis is the last in a six-part series of comics whose parts were randomly published during the first several dozen strips. The series features a character who is not consistent with what would quickly become the xkcd stick figure style. The character was in a barrel in parts 1-3.\nAfter Randall released the full The Boy and his Barrel story on xkcd it has been clear that the original Ferret story should also be included as part of the barrel series.\nThe full series can be found here . But below they are listed in the order Randall has put them in his collection, linked to above:\n[A boy is grasping on to a piece of driftwood in an ocean.]\n[A zoomed out view of the boy still grasping on to a piece of driftwood in the ocean.]\n[A ferret with some airplane wings and an airplane tail flies above the ocean.]\n[A shot of the ocean, now empty.]\n[The flying ferret is carrying the boy to safety.]\n[The ferret carrying the boy is now in the distance with the sun on the horizon.]\n"}
{"id":32,"title":"Pillar","image_title":"Pillar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/32","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pillar.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/32:_Pillar","transcript":"[At the top of the panel is a black frame with the following text:] This one is mostly by my little brother, Doug.\n[A Cueball-like guy stands on a the top of a tall pole and talks to his Cueball-like friend on the ground. The drawing is repeated three time in the same panel, once for each comment by the two guys.] Pole-guy: The sky is so blue, and all the leaves are green. Friend: Haven't you ever wondered if we really see the same colors as everyone else? It's all perception.\nPole-guy: Well, you might as well call into question all of human experience. Who really knows what world someone else sees? Friend: Yeah, I guess.\nPole-guy: Anyway, can you help me down from this pole? Friend: What pole?\n\"Oops, I totally forgot to update yesterday afternoon. Well, I haven't slept, so I say it's still Friday. It's been a weird couple days and I was just thinking it was the weekend. Anyway, the first version of this strip was drawn by me and then written by Doug. I redrew\/wrote it and now you are reading it! Cool, huh? Also, all the barrel strips are now here for easy linkage to people you think might like them.\" The link (now here above directing to a webarchive) used to direct to a collection of all six The Boy and his Barrel comics. It seems Randall had a long Friday back then. So long that he forgot to post this Friday comic before midnight. And although he still had not slept when he posted it, the time-stamp reads 7:55 AM on Saturday. This thus became the first comic to be released on a Saturday. This also happened to him the next Friday\/Saturday. And then two times more before he closed LiveJournal. Since then it has not happened.\n","explanation":"Two Cueball -like guys ponder the unanswerable philosophical question of whether all people observe the universe the same, or whether, for example, what one person sees as \"red\" might be what another see as \"green\". They muse that no one really knows how anyone else sees the world.\nThe misdirection and punchline of the comic come when the pole-guy asks if his friend can help him down from this pole where he's been standing for the entire comic. The friend's reply indicates that he does not see a pole, proving that one person can observe the world differently than another, in this case, in a far more extreme and unexpected way than color differences.\nAnother interpretation of the punchline is that the friend doesn't like pole-guy's idea of questioning all of human existence and mocks that philosophy by pretending not to see that he is standing on a pole.\nThe concept of a philosopher on a pole is likely a reference to many \" stylites \" or \"pillar-saints\" of the late antiquity period, perhaps the first and most famous them being Simeon Stylites .\nUnlike most other xkcd comics, the \"panels\" of this comic are not divided and are drawn within a single frame.\nAs noted at the title text, this comic is based on a comic drawn by Randall 's brother Doug, although Randall apparently redrew and rewrote it.\n[At the top of the panel is a black frame with the following text:] This one is mostly by my little brother, Doug.\n[A Cueball-like guy stands on a the top of a tall pole and talks to his Cueball-like friend on the ground. The drawing is repeated three time in the same panel, once for each comment by the two guys.] Pole-guy: The sky is so blue, and all the leaves are green. Friend: Haven't you ever wondered if we really see the same colors as everyone else? It's all perception.\nPole-guy: Well, you might as well call into question all of human experience. Who really knows what world someone else sees? Friend: Yeah, I guess.\nPole-guy: Anyway, can you help me down from this pole? Friend: What pole?\n\"Oops, I totally forgot to update yesterday afternoon. Well, I haven't slept, so I say it's still Friday. It's been a weird couple days and I was just thinking it was the weekend. Anyway, the first version of this strip was drawn by me and then written by Doug. I redrew\/wrote it and now you are reading it! Cool, huh? Also, all the barrel strips are now here for easy linkage to people you think might like them.\" The link (now here above directing to a webarchive) used to direct to a collection of all six The Boy and his Barrel comics. It seems Randall had a long Friday back then. So long that he forgot to post this Friday comic before midnight. And although he still had not slept when he posted it, the time-stamp reads 7:55 AM on Saturday. This thus became the first comic to be released on a Saturday. This also happened to him the next Friday\/Saturday. And then two times more before he closed LiveJournal. Since then it has not happened.\n"}
{"id":33,"title":"Self-reference","image_title":"Self-reference","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/33","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/self-reference.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/33:_Self-reference","transcript":"[Cueball is standing alone.] Cueball: I promise to never again squeeze humor out of self-reference.\n[Beat panel.]\n[Cueball is standing alone.] Cueball: God dammit.","explanation":"Self-reference is a situation where something (a comic, a drawing, a musical work, a novel, a mathematical theorem) refers to itself in some manner. This can be a powerful technique in art, music, mathematics, and computer science (it is the basis of recursion).\nIn this comic, Cueball promises not to use self-reference for humor, and then realizes after a beat panel that, since this comic is referring to the series of comics he is part of, he is using self-reference, thus breaking his promise.\nWithout the last panel, this comic wouldn't be funny, and therefore wouldn't break the promise about using self-reference for humor. But with it, and his realization that he is breaking his promise, it does break that promise. (Do you get it?)\nThe title text is just another humorous self-reference.\nSelf-references has been used most famously later in 688: Self-Description , but was already used in 6: Irony and also in other comics .\n[Cueball is standing alone.] Cueball: I promise to never again squeeze humor out of self-reference.\n[Beat panel.]\n[Cueball is standing alone.] Cueball: God dammit."}
{"id":34,"title":"Flowers","image_title":"Flowers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/34","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flowers.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/34:_Flowers","transcript":"[A sketch of flowers, drawn in green, red, and yellow on a black background.]\n\n\"Original drawing is pencil on graph paper . Bonus points if you can identify the flowers. 'cause I sure can't.\"\n","explanation":"This is a drawing of flowers that Randall made. It seems the flowers are based on his imagination, rather than being a real species - see the original quote in the trivia section.\nThe title text explains that Randall originally drew the flowers in pencil on normal paper; he did not paint them. Instead, he used the invert feature of a photo-editing program to reverse it from black-on-white to white-on-black. After that, he added color to the flowers.\n[A sketch of flowers, drawn in green, red, and yellow on a black background.]\n\n\"Original drawing is pencil on graph paper . Bonus points if you can identify the flowers. 'cause I sure can't.\"\n"}
{"id":35,"title":"Sheep","image_title":"Sheep","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/35","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sheep.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/35:_Sheep","transcript":"[Caption in a black frame above the image written in normal letters not all caps:] Another from my high-school notebooks. [A sheep and a green saguaro cactus in a brown pot are linked by an arcing yellow electricity bolt.]\nIn the comment to the original LiveJournal post there was a user called Scott who posted this original poem:\nI had a little cactus and I treasured it with pride, admiring its spines and dainty flowers. Until the day - oh tragic day! - when it was RAMIFIED, by a ram with strange psychokinetic powers.\nBaaing deep, this shaman sheep came whiffling through the brambles. It gazed upon my cactus and, with yellow flash and thudrous crash, with dashing, brash, and rash panache, it blew the plant to shambles.\nI was, I confess, horrified - I sat and cried my eyes out! Oh stupid sheep, satanic sheep, so wrong and rash and willful! I nursed the cactus best I could, till finally it came about. It grows apace now, once again, but all it blooms is steel wool!\n[And then in another post beneath this posted four minutes after the poem at 4:57 UTC (AM?) he finished with:]\nOh God I need sleep!\nIf this is the Scott who is a friend of Randall, it is not entirely clear....\nMary had a little lamb She tied it to a pylon Ten thousand volt went up its a** And turned its wool to nylon.\n","explanation":"Due to Randall's vacation, he picked out comics from his old high-school notebooks. This is the second in a row. It was also released a day too late.\nIt is a very weird drawing, especially with the title text proclaiming that it may be the sheep that is zapping the cactus. The comic 520: Cuttlefish may be a reference to this comic.\nIt may also be a Pok\u00e9mon reference, with the sheep being the Electric-type Mareep or its evolution Flaaffy, and the cactus being Cacnea or Cacturne.\n[Caption in a black frame above the image written in normal letters not all caps:] Another from my high-school notebooks. [A sheep and a green saguaro cactus in a brown pot are linked by an arcing yellow electricity bolt.]\nIn the comment to the original LiveJournal post there was a user called Scott who posted this original poem:\nI had a little cactus and I treasured it with pride, admiring its spines and dainty flowers. Until the day - oh tragic day! - when it was RAMIFIED, by a ram with strange psychokinetic powers.\nBaaing deep, this shaman sheep came whiffling through the brambles. It gazed upon my cactus and, with yellow flash and thudrous crash, with dashing, brash, and rash panache, it blew the plant to shambles.\nI was, I confess, horrified - I sat and cried my eyes out! Oh stupid sheep, satanic sheep, so wrong and rash and willful! I nursed the cactus best I could, till finally it came about. It grows apace now, once again, but all it blooms is steel wool!\n[And then in another post beneath this posted four minutes after the poem at 4:57 UTC (AM?) he finished with:]\nOh God I need sleep!\nIf this is the Scott who is a friend of Randall, it is not entirely clear....\nMary had a little lamb She tied it to a pylon Ten thousand volt went up its a** And turned its wool to nylon.\n"}
{"id":36,"title":"Scientists","image_title":"Scientists","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/36","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scientists.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/36:_Scientists","transcript":"[Cueball is staring at an empty box on the floor.] Cueball: In what scientists are calling \"pretty gay\", I can't find my shoes.\n","explanation":"This comic plays on the type of statement that news reports often use: \"in what [group of experts] are calling '[quote]',\" to add more weight and credibility to their stories. In this case, Cueball is using the phrase to attempt to add gravitas to the (relatively mundane) fact that his shoes are missing and he thinks it's \"pretty gay\" by assigning this opinion to scientists (rather than it being, presumably, his friend's or his own opinion). The same joke is at play in the image text where a leading expert thinks the situation is \"retarded.\"\nThere may be a second level to the joke: Randall was still working for NASA at the time the comic was posted, so his friends at that time would presumably include scientists and \"leading experts.\" If his friends made fun of him for not being able to find his shoes, it would therefore be accurate to say that scientists had made those statements. However, since their being scientists is irrelevant to the legitimacy of their opinions about Randall's shoe problems, presenting their teasing as an expert opinion is humorously misleading; a similar joke is at play in 1206: Einstein .\nThe phrases \"pretty gay\" and \"retarded\" are infantile and offensive slang for \"foolish\" or \"contemptible,\" and so they are the opposite type of speech expected of experts on news reports.  (These terms were not generally considered more than mildly offensive by most of the public at the time this comic was posted; the cultural mainstream is now typically much more critical of this type of language, and this comic would likely be heavily criticized if it were published today.)\n[Cueball is staring at an empty box on the floor.] Cueball: In what scientists are calling \"pretty gay\", I can't find my shoes.\n"}
{"id":37,"title":"Hyphen","image_title":"Hyphen","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/37","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hyphen.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/37:_Hyphen","transcript":"[Cueball (on the left) is talking to his Cueball-like friend (on the right) about a car (left to both of them) that resembles a Volkswagen Beetle. Above the drawing is a statement:] My hobby: whenever anyone calls something an [adjective]-ass [noun], I mentally move the hyphen one word to the right.\nCueball: Man, that's a sweet ass-car.\n","explanation":"This is the first \" My Hobby \" comic in xkcd . In these comics, Randall suggests an obscure activity or pastime he enjoys that he declares as his \"hobby.\" In the premiere \"My Hobby\" comic, Randall's hobby is mentally re-interpreting what people mean when they say \"[adjective]-ass [noun]\" by moving the hyphen to after the word \"ass\" instead of before.\nThe semi- scatological suffix \"-ass\" is used as an intensifier in informal US English speech, usually attached to an adjective directly modifying a noun, as in \"big-ass car\" or \"funny-ass comedian.\" In this comic, Cueball is exploring the increased humor aspect of changing \"-ass\" from a suffix modifying the adjective, to \"ass-\", a prefix modifying the noun, yielding a \"big ass-car\" or a \"funny ass-comedian,\" the former presumably being a large car for carrying buttocks, the latter being a humorous comedian specializing in jokes about lower backs. The prefix \"ass-\" may also have a negative connotation, indicating that something is disliked. An \"ass-car\" may be a very terrible car, for example.\nAnother explanation would be that, since this suffix\/prefix refers to an element of human anatomy, the car would be in the shape of said anatomical piece.\nOutside of North America, most English speakers use \"arse\" to mean the buttocks, so to them, it may sound as if Randall's talking about donkeys.\n[Cueball (on the left) is talking to his Cueball-like friend (on the right) about a car (left to both of them) that resembles a Volkswagen Beetle. Above the drawing is a statement:] My hobby: whenever anyone calls something an [adjective]-ass [noun], I mentally move the hyphen one word to the right.\nCueball: Man, that's a sweet ass-car.\n"}
{"id":38,"title":"Apple Jacks","image_title":"Apple Jacks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/38","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/apple_jacks.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/38:_Apple_Jacks","transcript":"[Cueball is standing holding a bowl in his hand. His son is sitting on the floor playing video games.] Cueball: Hey, these don't taste like apples! Son: Fuck off, Dad.\n","explanation":"Apple Jacks is a breakfast cereal produced by Kellogg's . As the title text begins to explain, there was an ad campaign for the cereal in the 1990s that focused on someone (usually someone in authority like a parent) pointing out that Apple Jacks doesn't taste like apples, and one or more kids pointing out that it doesn't matter and that \"we eat what we like.\"  However, instead of laughing off his dad's comment and correcting him, as in the campaign, this son responds by simply saying \"fuck off, dad.\"\nThis could be a commentary on today's youth being far less respectful, as the son is playing video games and seems annoyed at being interrupted, though this does not align with Randall\u2019s public views. It may not be the first time the father has used the line, and the son is irritated by the repetition. It could also be saying that the response in the ads is unrealistic, and this is a much more realistic response.\nThe same ad campaign was referenced previously in 27: Meat Cereals on a parody cereal labeled Scrapple Jacks.\nCereal advertising was again referenced in 1470: Kix .\nThe title text could be a reference to the fact that this comic requires explanation for those who don't know of the ad (the reason this webpage exists), or it is an addition to the joke. This is another of the early comics where Randall felt the need to explain the joke in the title text, see for instance 30: Donner .\n[Cueball is standing holding a bowl in his hand. His son is sitting on the floor playing video games.] Cueball: Hey, these don't taste like apples! Son: Fuck off, Dad.\n"}
{"id":39,"title":"Bowl","image_title":"Bowl","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/39","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bowl.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/39:_Bowl","transcript":"[A boy is glaring at a model sailing ship floating in a bowl of water.] Boy: Sooner or later, my friend, one of us will run out of time.\n\"This is not the barrel boy. Current Mood: Final Exam-y \"\nAnnouncement \"What with winter break starting and the like, I'll probably be going off my regular update schedule. I'll try to post something here and there, and might end up doing more drawings than I expect, but won't stick to the MWF schedule. Thanks for the support! This has been and will continue to be a lot of fun.\" This may also be due to his examinations coming up. But probably he was using a lot of time preparing for the release of his new xkcd site after new year.\n","explanation":"The comic roughly parodies a situation in which two characters are seeing who can wait longer to get the result they want. However, in the comic, the model sailing ship is not alive and doesn't experience time (except perhaps if it absorbs water and falls apart, or beaches once the water in the bowl evaporates). The comic compares the patience of a boy with that of an inanimate object. Also, it could imply that the boy has too much time on his hands.\nLike many of the earlier comics, some of this comic's humor comes from the surreality of the situation. The gravity of the boy's statement is juxtaposed with the insignificance of a child's toy floating in a bowl of water. On one level, the absurdity of this is funny in itself; on another level, the audience is invited to imagine what might possibly be going through the boy's mind to make him take this toy and bowl so seriously.\nAlternatively, the comic can be taken to recognize the mortality and ultimate fate of death\/decay for both the boat and the boy, creating a grim moral. But, if one goes deeper into meaning, one could realize that the comic itself is humorous for trying to make a fatalistic statement using a boy and a toy boat, still making the comic ultimately humorous.\nIn the original quote for this comic (see trivia ), Randall states that this is not the barrel boy . This is not only because they have a similar hairstyle. Since the Barrel Boy was floating on the water in a barrel, and this boy is looking into a bowl (not barrel) filled with water, it would be easy to draw some parallels. It was obviously important for Randall to make clear that there were no such connections.\n[A boy is glaring at a model sailing ship floating in a bowl of water.] Boy: Sooner or later, my friend, one of us will run out of time.\n\"This is not the barrel boy. Current Mood: Final Exam-y \"\nAnnouncement \"What with winter break starting and the like, I'll probably be going off my regular update schedule. I'll try to post something here and there, and might end up doing more drawings than I expect, but won't stick to the MWF schedule. Thanks for the support! This has been and will continue to be a lot of fun.\" This may also be due to his examinations coming up. But probably he was using a lot of time preparing for the release of his new xkcd site after new year.\n"}
{"id":40,"title":"Light","image_title":"Light","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/40","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/light.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/40:_Light","transcript":"[A crowd of figures stand around in the dark. A Megan is illuminated by a beam of light.] In a dark and confusing world, you burn brightly I never feel lost\n","explanation":"Lighthouses were built on coasts to give ships a point of reference where land was, so that they could find where they were going, and to know where they should avoid during a storm. Megan fills this role for Cueball . She is his lighthouse to know where he can be safe.\nThis also has a romantic notion, as Megan is lighting up the world for Cueball to find her.\n[A crowd of figures stand around in the dark. A Megan is illuminated by a beam of light.] In a dark and confusing world, you burn brightly I never feel lost\n"}
{"id":41,"title":"Old Drawing","image_title":"Old Drawing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/41","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unspeakable_pun.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/41:_Old_Drawing","transcript":"[A tree holding a chainsaw over a recently cut-down tree. The first text is in a frame at the top of the panel.] I found this in one of my high-school notebooks. I think I drew it just to take revenge on people snooping through my stuff. Tree stump: Well, you stumped me...\n","explanation":"This comic plays off the pun between stumped , meaning confused or at a loss, and a stump , which is the remnants of a tree that has been cut down.\nAnyone snooping into his journal would be punished by such a terrible pun. The pun is so terrible that even Randall does not want to talk about it, as he mentioned in the title text.\n[A tree holding a chainsaw over a recently cut-down tree. The first text is in a frame at the top of the panel.] I found this in one of my high-school notebooks. I think I drew it just to take revenge on people snooping through my stuff. Tree stump: Well, you stumped me...\n"}
{"id":42,"title":"Geico","image_title":"Geico","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/42","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geico.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/42:_Geico","transcript":"[Cueball holding a golf club.] Cueball: I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by threatening my agent with a golf club.\n","explanation":"This comic references a long-running ad campaign for Geico insurance in which a character (different in each commercial) lists a series of horrible events or news, but then caps it off with \"but I've got good news: I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico\" \u2013 news that may be good, but is usually either trivial compared to the magnitude of the preceding bad news, or else is said to the person whom all of the preceding bad news applied to, giving them false hope that the good news was for them. It became a recognizable pop culture phrase. Geico's ad is also mentioned in 870: Advertising .\nIn this one-panel comic, Cueball parodies the punchline by saving money on his car insurance by intimidation, instead of choosing the best provider.\nIn the title text, Randall attributes this comic to the unknown friend David . He does the same in 51: Malaria and 100: Family Circus . We can assume (or rather, we can hope ) that \"this\" refers to the act of writing the comic, as opposed to the act of threatening his insurance agent.\nA golf club is also mentioned, and used for similarly socially unacceptable actions, in 81: Attention, shopper .\n[Cueball holding a golf club.] Cueball: I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by threatening my agent with a golf club.\n"}
{"id":43,"title":"Red Spiders 2","image_title":"Red Spiders 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/43","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/red_spiders_2.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/43:_Red_Spiders_2","transcript":"[Nine red spiders, with round appendages at the end of each of their six legs, are seen navigating an environment of blocks and other geometric constructions. The second-from-the-top spider appears to be holding a block down for the spider just below to climb on to help it up, or they might be lifting the block together. One is almost outside the frame at the top.]\n","explanation":"This is the second published comic in the red spiders story arc, published just over 2 months after the first one . Like its predecessor, it is more of a sketch than a comic. The titular spiders appear to be ascending \u2014or possibly building\u2014 a structure, probably to get into the window at the top of the picture. Two spiders at the top appear to be passing a block between them, implying that they are, at least, trying to change the structure.\nAccording to the title text, it was drawn years before the previous Red Spiders .\nThe full series of Red Spiders comics:\n[Nine red spiders, with round appendages at the end of each of their six legs, are seen navigating an environment of blocks and other geometric constructions. The second-from-the-top spider appears to be holding a block down for the spider just below to climb on to help it up, or they might be lifting the block together. One is almost outside the frame at the top.]\n"}
{"id":44,"title":"Love","image_title":"Love","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/44","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/love.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/44:_Love","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan stand facing one another.] Cueball: I love you! Megan: I love you!\n[Same scene as before.] Cueball: I love you more! Megan: Yeah.\n[Beat panel.]\n","explanation":"This comic expresses the view of a love that is unbalanced and unequal. And how one form of love can be painful when closely examined.\nIt is customary for people in a romantic relationship, when one makes a declaration of love or affection, for the other to make a matching declaration. However, instead of continuing Cueball 's escalation by saying the expected response \"I love you more!\", Megan stops and agrees with him: he does love her more than she loves him. This leads to an uncomfortable dynamic in the relationship. The final frame shows the couple standing in silence.\nIn the title text, Randall expresses how this comic is shockingly stark in its portrayal of love.\n[Cueball and Megan stand facing one another.] Cueball: I love you! Megan: I love you!\n[Same scene as before.] Cueball: I love you more! Megan: Yeah.\n[Beat panel.]\n"}
{"id":45,"title":"Schrodinger","image_title":"Schrodinger","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/45","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/schrodinger.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/45:_Schrodinger","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball are standing next to each other. Above them the text is written in a box with shades around it.] Schr\u00f6dinger's Comic\n[Black Hat and Cueball are still standing next to each other, but Cueball has lifted his arms above his head. The text is again written in a box with shades around it.] The last panel of this comic is both funny and not funny at the same time.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are still standing next to each other, Cueball arms are down again. The text is again written in a box with shades around it.] Until you read it, there's no way to tell which it will end up being.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are still standing next to each other. Cueball has become smaller and smaller through the three frames after the first. Quite clearly here in the last panel. The text is again written in a box with shades around it.] Shit.\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke creating a humorously false synthesis, combining the principles of quantum superposition and the effects of reading a comic one panel at a time.\nSchr\u00f6dinger's cat is a thought experiment that illuminates the notion that a particle only resolves itself to its state upon observation, and until such observation is made, it is in all of its possible states simultaneously. In the thought experiment, a cat is both dead and alive until observation; likewise, in this comic, Black Hat and Cueball are likening the last panel to the box with the cat: until you read it, it is in a mixed state (a superposition) of both funny and unfunny.\nFinally, in the last panel, both of them say \"Shit.\" The joke is that after reading the last panel, the comic is both funny (as it is unexpected) and not funny (as the last line was a non sequitur and therefore there is no climax) at the same time, thus proving Black Hat and Cueball wrong, hence them expressing discontent with the word \"shit.\"\nThe title text , which Randall here calls the alt-text, suggests that the alt text did not exist until the mouse over action occurred. This is another reference to Schr\u00f6dinger's cat. You do not know if there is a title text until you mouse over, so before you mouse over, the title text could be missing or existent.\nSchr\u00f6dinger's cat is a famous thought experiment proposed by Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger to question the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.\nUnder the Copenhagen interpretation , any particle is described by a wave function that allows one to calculate the probability that it is any given state. A radioactive nucleus with a half-life of one hour, for instance, would have a wave-function that would split, showing two distinct states (decayed, undecayed) that change over time until some \"observation\" forced the wave-function into one state or another (called \"collapsing the wave-function\"). Before the wave-function is collapsed, it is incorrect to say that the atom has decayed or has not decayed; it is in a \"superposition\" of states, effectively both decayed and undecayed.\nSchr\u00f6dinger thought that the Copenhagen interpretation was absurd, and devised the below thought experiment to show this. The experiment goes as follows: Put a cat in a box, he said, with a device triggered by the decay of an atom with a half-life of one hour that would release a poisonous gas if triggered. Then, after waiting an hour, the Copenhagen interpretation would say that the atom is in a superposition of decayed and undecayed states, and thus, by extension, the cat would be in a superposition of alive and dead states. Only when the box is opened would the wave-function for the cat collapse into either alive or dead states. This thought experiment is not meant to be taken literally, as every interaction of a particle with another constitutes an observation, and many particles must interact for a cat to die, but still his argument was that since it is absurd for a cat to be both alive and dead, it is absurd for an atom to be both decayed and undecayed.\nIf this experiment were to be performed, the cat would not be both dead and alive.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are standing next to each other. Above them the text is written in a box with shades around it.] Schr\u00f6dinger's Comic\n[Black Hat and Cueball are still standing next to each other, but Cueball has lifted his arms above his head. The text is again written in a box with shades around it.] The last panel of this comic is both funny and not funny at the same time.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are still standing next to each other, Cueball arms are down again. The text is again written in a box with shades around it.] Until you read it, there's no way to tell which it will end up being.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are still standing next to each other. Cueball has become smaller and smaller through the three frames after the first. Quite clearly here in the last panel. The text is again written in a box with shades around it.] Shit.\n"}
{"id":46,"title":"Secrets","image_title":"Secrets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/46","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/secrets.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/46:_Secrets","transcript":"[Drawing of a lonely girl staring down with almost closed eyes. The first line of text stands next to her to the left. The last part bottom, right.] I just want you to share in my secrets and not run away\nKurt Halsey was also referenced in 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey .\n","explanation":"This comic addresses the issue of commitment-phobic partners who get into relationships but get cold feet when it starts to get serious. The girl wants someone who can see every part of who she is and still love her.\nIn the title text, Randall mentions that he is a big fan of Kurt Halsey , a comic artist from Oregon. His style is similar to that in this comic. Many of his comics and paintings depict a couple and convey various emotions they go through, as does this comic.\nIn the original Randall quote (see trivia ), he gives the above link to the official home page of Kurt Halsey. Then he mentions that if you had not realized he was a big fan already, you should reconsider clicking on the link because it's depressing how much better at this he is than me .\n[Drawing of a lonely girl staring down with almost closed eyes. The first line of text stands next to her to the left. The last part bottom, right.] I just want you to share in my secrets and not run away\nKurt Halsey was also referenced in 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey .\n"}
{"id":47,"title":"Counter-Red Spiders","image_title":"Counter-Red Spiders","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/47","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/counter-red-spiders.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/47:_Counter-Red_Spiders","transcript":"[A stack of stick figures, standing on each others shoulders, extends from the bottom of the frame to the top. Cuboids hang in the air.] The counter-red-spider offensive begins...\n","explanation":"In previous comics, red spiders are seen navigating similar landscapes. Here, humanoid stick figures are standing on top of each other to reach some place above the top of the comic, in a similar manner to how the red spiders navigate. These stick figures must be extremely light, or gravity must be really weak there, because it is extremely unlikely or even impossible to have a stack of humans that tall.\nThe full series of Red Spiders comics:\n[A stack of stick figures, standing on each others shoulders, extends from the bottom of the frame to the top. Cuboids hang in the air.] The counter-red-spider offensive begins...\n"}
{"id":48,"title":"Found","image_title":"Found","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/48","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/found.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/48:_Found","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing on a white hill (presumably snow) with a grey sky covered with thick streaks of white, and small pink dots. All letters are written in lower case.] we are just two people who found each other\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are standing together in the middle of a simple maze. As indicated by the words in the comic, they have simply found each other, implying that there is no relationship between them other than running into each other.\nAs indicated in the title text, there is nothing else to say about how they met.\n[Cueball and Megan are standing on a white hill (presumably snow) with a grey sky covered with thick streaks of white, and small pink dots. All letters are written in lower case.] we are just two people who found each other\n"}
{"id":49,"title":"Want","image_title":"Want","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/49","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/want.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/49:_Want","transcript":"[Cueball is standing talking in the same position in all four panels. In the second panel, Cueball seems to have hair.] Cueball: I want to be brave enough to tell you how I feel.\nCueball: I want to say \"I love you\" before I hang up the phone for once.\nCueball: I want to drive all night with you, listening to mix tapes, not caring where we end up.\nCueball: Oh, and I also really want to get with your sister. Cueball: I mean, DAMN.\n","explanation":"Cueball is making an honest profession of his feelings. This is often held up as a valuable thing in cementing a relationship. In the first three panels, he makes the kind of cliched poetic, romantic statements that would typically be expected. In the last panel, however, he undercuts all of this by crassly revealing that he also really wants to have sex with his paramour's sister.\nIn the title text, he attempts to excuse his statement by reasoning that the sister is very attractive.\n[Cueball is standing talking in the same position in all four panels. In the second panel, Cueball seems to have hair.] Cueball: I want to be brave enough to tell you how I feel.\nCueball: I want to say \"I love you\" before I hang up the phone for once.\nCueball: I want to drive all night with you, listening to mix tapes, not caring where we end up.\nCueball: Oh, and I also really want to get with your sister. Cueball: I mean, DAMN.\n"}
{"id":50,"title":"Penny Arcade","image_title":"Penny Arcade","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/50","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/penny_arcade.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/50:_Penny_Arcade","transcript":"[A color drawing of Tycho, a man with wild brown hair in blue and cyan colored shirt. He has a big open mouth and holds one arm up while the other may be in his (unseen) pocket. He has two speech bubbles,] Tycho: You know what? If you've never played the 1995 SNES RPG \" Seiken Densetsu \", don't even bother reading today's strip. Tycho: We don't need your kind here.\n","explanation":"Penny Arcade is a popular web comic that focuses on video game culture. The character above is Tycho Brahe, one of the two main characters of Penny Arcade (the other being Jonathan \"Gabe\" Gabriel). Penny Arcade has a reputation for making obscure references to video games without explaining, expecting the reader to be as well-versed in gaming culture as they are, represented by the attitude shown in this comic.\n'Seiken Densetsu,' as mentioned in the strip, probably refers to Seiken Densetsu 3 , an Action role-playing game (Action-RPG) released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in Japan in 1995. The game was neither released in the North American region nor officially translated to English for more than thirteen years after this strip. However, many North American game players might have recognized Seiken Densetsu 2 , the predecessor in the series, by its North American name: Secret of Mana .\nAs the title text admits, they know they behave like this, and have this reputation, but they don't care, and even refer to it in their own comic.\n[A color drawing of Tycho, a man with wild brown hair in blue and cyan colored shirt. He has a big open mouth and holds one arm up while the other may be in his (unseen) pocket. He has two speech bubbles,] Tycho: You know what? If you've never played the 1995 SNES RPG \" Seiken Densetsu \", don't even bother reading today's strip. Tycho: We don't need your kind here.\n"}
{"id":51,"title":"Malaria","image_title":"Malaria","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/51","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/malaria.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/51:_Malaria","transcript":"[Four Cueball-like children wearing party hats, a discarded balloon is lying to the right. There is text above:] We had a malaria party [And there is text below:] but it turned out not to be very much fun.\n","explanation":"This comic humorously considers pox parties as a means of preventing malaria. In these \"parties,\" adults bring their children to deliberately expose them to a communicable disease to promote immunity . This is commonly done for a childhood disease like chickenpox and measles instead of vaccination.\nIn this comic, we see four Cueball -like children in party hats with a balloon lying on the ground, suggesting a missing \"celebrant.\"\nSome illnesses are more serious for adults than children. For example, chickenpox is far less severe contracted as a child than as an adult, the latter sometimes ending in sterility, brain damage, or worse. (Note that shingles is not adult-onset chickenpox, but a condition occasionally developed by older people who previously had chickenpox.)  Having caught chickenpox once, a person's immune system has developed antibodies , reducing vulnerability to the virus. The antibodies create immunity for a significant period of time, possibly life. However, immunity through antibody creation is not usually an effective strategy against malaria. Contrarily, once one has suffered from malaria, it can recur on its own, even after apparent healing from symptoms. Thus, having a malaria party would not be a useful exercise, as many could suffer significant illness and die.\nThe title text blames \"David\" for the party, referencing the idea of children blaming each other for an idea that turns out poorly. A malaria party is likely to have more severe consequences than, for instance, a group of 10 year olds building a ski ramp in the backyard. \nAlso it could be a reference to the Bible: when King David has to choose between three Threads, he chooses a disease for the whole people, lasting 3 days.\nMalaria is a Mosquito-borne disease of humans and other animals caused by protists (a type of microorganism) of the genus Plasmodium . It begins with a bite from an infected female mosquito , which introduces the protists via its saliva into the circulatory system, and ultimately to the liver where they mature and reproduce. The disease causes symptoms that typically include fever and headache, which in severe cases can progress to coma or death.\nAt the end of the 1990s, a study reported what would turn out to be made-up health threats from MMR- vaccines , which created an MMR vaccine controversy and lower vaccination rates, even after they were exposed as false. This made pox parties more popular as the \"natural alternative.\" However, even usually-\"harmless\" diseases like measles can (rarely) have complications and side-effects, up to and including death, which are by far more common and\/or more severe than the actual health risks involved in vaccination. In the past 20 years, 2 Americans died from measles, both people with compromised immune systems. Also none, or late immunization, may create an immunization gap through which nearly extinct diseases can reenter a population (see e.g. Epidemiology of measles ). If this gap can be closed (or made small enough), it is possible to make a disease extinct. This was actually successfully done with smallpox , and is now attempted with the poliovirus (Causing poliomyelitis , also known as infantile paralysis).\n[Four Cueball-like children wearing party hats, a discarded balloon is lying to the right. There is text above:] We had a malaria party [And there is text below:] but it turned out not to be very much fun.\n"}
{"id":52,"title":"Secret Worlds","image_title":"Secret Worlds","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/52","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/secret_worlds.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/52:_Secret_Worlds","transcript":"[A multitude of circles connected with several lines. Most of them are rather small and colored red, yellow, green and blue. Nine of them are white, six of these are larger than all the other circles, but one is the same size as the largest colored (green) circle, and the two smallest are smaller than a few of the colored circles. Pieces of text are written in all the white circles. Although it can be confusing at first, the reading order is still the normal one: left to right and top to bottom. Reading the circles in that order gives the following text:] \"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people in the whole world I mean everybody No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside Inside they've all got unimaginable magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing, worlds Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.\" --Neil Gaiman Sandman\n","explanation":"The quote written in the large white bubbles comes from The Sandman , a comic book series about dreams. Neil Gaiman is a science fiction and fantasy author who came to fame for writing The Sandman.\nThe interconnected bubbles represent the secret worlds of different people and how they are connected. They may have the second meaning of the neurons in our brain.\nThe title text indicates that Randall used the Four color theorem , which states that a graph drawn on a flat plane (like this one) requires at most four colors so that each region differs from all of its neighbors. The comic uses four colors (red, yellow, green, blue). This clearly does not include the white bubbles with text.\nHere is the quote, to those wondering how to read the comic:\n\u201cEverybody has a secret world inside of them... All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody \u2014 no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.\u201d\nNeil Gaiman, A Game of You\n[A multitude of circles connected with several lines. Most of them are rather small and colored red, yellow, green and blue. Nine of them are white, six of these are larger than all the other circles, but one is the same size as the largest colored (green) circle, and the two smallest are smaller than a few of the colored circles. Pieces of text are written in all the white circles. Although it can be confusing at first, the reading order is still the normal one: left to right and top to bottom. Reading the circles in that order gives the following text:] \"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people in the whole world I mean everybody No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside Inside they've all got unimaginable magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing, worlds Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.\" --Neil Gaiman Sandman\n"}
{"id":53,"title":"Hobby","image_title":"Hobby","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/53","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hobby.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/53:_Hobby","transcript":"[A person with hair lies on the ground in a pool of red blood. At the top of the panel there is a caption. Then a text. And above the person there is a score with small lines around to indicate that it has just appeared over the body.] My hobby: When the police bust drug hideouts, I sneak in and hide. Then I jump out and startle them into shooting me so they lose points. -100\n\"I'm reminded of Area 51 where you accidently kept shooting the cops in the back...over and over again. Brilliant.\" Randall made the following reply: \"That was actually precisely the game I was thinking of. I remember my brother playing that game all day at the arcade when we were little. Fuckin' innocents.\" This comment is reflected in the title text on xkcd.\n","explanation":"This is the second in the \" My Hobby \" series of xkcd comics.\nThis comic humorously compares the rules of light gun cabinet arcade video games with real life.\nRandall suggests that his hobby is going to drug busts with the expressed purpose of getting shot as an innocent bystander, thereby causing the police to lose 100 points.\nDrug busts are events where police attempt to catch drug dealers, suppliers, and financiers in situations with enough evidence to convict them. In the style of arcade video games being examined, drug busts are usually depicted as chaotic events with villains, innocent bystanders, captives, and allies popping up like spring loaded targets at a shooting range in a setting with lots of places to hide.  If you don't shoot a hostile target sufficiently quickly, you will be shot, so it is common to shoot the wrong targets. To add extra challenge, these games often deduct points \u2014 or worse, cause damage to the player character \u2014 if the player shoots the wrong target. This is often frustrating; not only does the player feel that they have failed to judge their target properly, but the wasted time can cause them to get shot by the real targets.\nObviously, doing this in real life would be a really bad idea, as the hobbyist would quickly be killed. Whether this can even be a hobby is questionable because hobbies typically refer to actions that one does repeatedly, but if one was killed the first time, one would not be able to sneak into drug busts and startle police officers again. Also, if Randall actually did this, he would be dead and therefore unable to draw a comic about it. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text refers to the game Area 51 , which was a popular shooter arcade game from 1995 (although a console\/PC game of the same name was released in 2005). Area 51 was one of many cabinet arcade games that featured a light gun that allowed players to aim at the screen and shoot in a realistic control mechanic. The title text confirms that the comic is referring to these light gun cabinet games specifically.\nThe title text of 188: Reload references this strip.\n[A person with hair lies on the ground in a pool of red blood. At the top of the panel there is a caption. Then a text. And above the person there is a score with small lines around to indicate that it has just appeared over the body.] My hobby: When the police bust drug hideouts, I sneak in and hide. Then I jump out and startle them into shooting me so they lose points. -100\n\"I'm reminded of Area 51 where you accidently kept shooting the cops in the back...over and over again. Brilliant.\" Randall made the following reply: \"That was actually precisely the game I was thinking of. I remember my brother playing that game all day at the arcade when we were little. Fuckin' innocents.\" This comment is reflected in the title text on xkcd.\n"}
{"id":54,"title":"Science","image_title":"Science","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/54","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/science.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/54:_Science","transcript":"[A graph with a curve that begins at zero, then peaks at a given frequency, indicated via a thin vertical line, and then fades down towards zero. It is possible to see the data points, which fit the curve perfectly. The y-axis is labelled. Along the x-axis, the zero point and the frequency where the peak has its maximum are labelled and close to the arrow the unit of this axis is written.] y-axis: Energy Density Along the x-axis: 0 160.4 GHz [Above the graph to the right is the following formula, with the last inner parentheses only included to make the formula clear, since in the drawing the fractions are written above and below horizontal lines:] I(f) = (2hf 3 \/c 2 )(1\/(e hf\/kT -1)) [Below the graph is written the following:] Science. It works, bitches.\n","explanation":"The solid line represents the theoretical radiation for a blackbody at 2.73\u00a0K according to Planck's Law (derived as early as 1900 by Max Planck ). The formula, almost as written in the graph, can be found here . The only changes are that on Wikipedia, the frequency f is represented by the Greek letter \u03bd (nu) and the temperature T is included as an independent variable, so I ( f ) becomes I ( v , T ). However, I ( v , T ) still represents the spectral radiance (similar to energy density). In this formula, h is the Planck constant, c is the speed of light in a vacuum, and k is the Boltzmann constant. The frequency ( f or v ) along the x -axis is measured in gigahertz . The curve peaks at 160.4\u00a0GHz. There is no scale or unit on the energy density on the y -axis.\nThe theory is that the blackbody in question was the universe at the point when it had cooled down enough to allow photons to escape , 0.38 million years into its 13.8 billion years history. The photons that reach us today are the ones that have been travelling to us at lightspeed since then. As the light from astronomical objects suffers from redshift due to the expansion of the universe, and this shift becomes more pronounced with distance from the observer, this light displays in the infrared range.\nThe title text praises viewers who can identify where this equation and corresponding graph come from (without consulting this wiki, of course).\nThis comic was made into a T-shirt, but is no longer available.\nOn the xkcd store, there was both an explanation for the title:\nAnd specifically an explanation for the graph:\nThe above is a direct copy paste, with errors. The current wiki page of the COBE mission can be found at Cosmic Background Explorer on Wikipedia .\n[A graph with a curve that begins at zero, then peaks at a given frequency, indicated via a thin vertical line, and then fades down towards zero. It is possible to see the data points, which fit the curve perfectly. The y-axis is labelled. Along the x-axis, the zero point and the frequency where the peak has its maximum are labelled and close to the arrow the unit of this axis is written.] y-axis: Energy Density Along the x-axis: 0 160.4 GHz [Above the graph to the right is the following formula, with the last inner parentheses only included to make the formula clear, since in the drawing the fractions are written above and below horizontal lines:] I(f) = (2hf 3 \/c 2 )(1\/(e hf\/kT -1)) [Below the graph is written the following:] Science. It works, bitches.\n"}
{"id":55,"title":"Useless","image_title":"Useless","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/55","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/useless.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/55:_Useless","transcript":"[Different mathematical equations, all with a heart on left side, and all ending up with question marks.] \u221a\u2665 =\u00a0? cos \u2665 =\u00a0? d\/dx \u2665 =\u00a0? [1 0]\u2665 =\u00a0? [0 1] F{\u2665} = 1\/\u221a2\u03c0 \u222b \u221e -\u221e f(t)e it\u2665 dt =\u00a0? [Caption below:] My normal approach is useless here.\n","explanation":"Randall is attempting to apply mathematics to the concept of love to no avail. Specifically, he is attempting his \"normal approach\", which is a term used in mathematics for the method one typically uses to solve a certain type of problem. However, as love is not a well-defined mathematical entity, his normal approach is useless. Simply put: he's saying he has found no way of describing love using only the tools of mathematics.\nFrom the top, moving left to right, he tries the square root of love, the cosine of love, and the derivative of love with respect to x. He then attempts to left-multiply love by a 2x2 identity matrix , and finally he defines a function of love as a Fourier transform . These are all \"normal approaches\" to solving certain math problems.\nThe message of the comic is that for someone who uses math to solve all their problems, defining love is impossible.  It also indicates that love is not always a rational (or irrational) phenomenon.\nThis comic has been made into a t-shirt in the xkcd store, with a Laplace transform in place of the bottom integral.\nNote: The Wikipedia links will provide far more detailed explanations of the mathematics.\n[Different mathematical equations, all with a heart on left side, and all ending up with question marks.] \u221a\u2665 =\u00a0? cos \u2665 =\u00a0? d\/dx \u2665 =\u00a0? [1 0]\u2665 =\u00a0? [0 1] F{\u2665} = 1\/\u221a2\u03c0 \u222b \u221e -\u221e f(t)e it\u2665 dt =\u00a0? [Caption below:] My normal approach is useless here.\n"}
{"id":56,"title":"The Cure","image_title":"The Cure","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/56","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_cure.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/56:_The_Cure","transcript":"[A charcoal drawing of Robert Smith's head and face.] [Caption below:] Robert Smith should do a cover of Coldplay's Clocks, so when he sings \"Am I part of the cure or am I part of the disease?\" we can say, \"Ooh, we know this one!\"\n","explanation":"The \"real face\" is that of Robert Smith , best known as the singer of the musical group The Cure , hence the title.\nThe joke in this comic is very simple: When Robert would sing the above lines of Coldplay 's song \" Clocks \", fans of his music would know the answer: he's part of The Cure.\nIn the title text, Randall notes that he has not tried to draw a real face in years, as he mainly does stick drawings. In that way this comic also sticks out.\n[A charcoal drawing of Robert Smith's head and face.] [Caption below:] Robert Smith should do a cover of Coldplay's Clocks, so when he sings \"Am I part of the cure or am I part of the disease?\" we can say, \"Ooh, we know this one!\"\n"}
{"id":57,"title":"Wait For Me","image_title":"Wait For Me","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/57","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wait_for_me.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/57:_Wait_For_Me","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan stand facing one another.] Megan: Why didn't you wait for me? Cueball: I thought you were gone forever!\n[Megan throws out her arms, and Cueball is looking down.] Megan: I said I'd be back in a minute! Cueball: The... the seconds went fast at first, but then they started to drag on. Cueball: She was there for me.\n[Same scene as before, except Megan has her arms out less.] Megan: You had an affair in the 90 seconds I was gone?! Cueball: ...yes.\n[Cueball and Megan stand facing one another in a smaller panel.] Cueball: And we had a son.\n[Same scene as before.] Cueball: He'd be about your age now.\n","explanation":"This comic juxtaposes a familiar exchange with a surreal outcome.\nMegan is returning after a short absence. Cueball reacts as if she had been gone for years, and admits to having an affair while waiting.\nIn this comic, a familiar exchange occurs where one person asks the other why they did not wait. The humor lies in the improbability of him falling in love and having an affair within 90 seconds, the impossibility of him having a son in that time, and the ridiculous notion that the son would now be about Megan's current age. This is of course impossible, as it would imply that Cueball experienced twenty-ish years of life in what felt like 1.5 minutes for Megan. (He might conceivably have managed to have sex in that time span, which would fit with the experience of Cueball in 1068: Swiftkey ).\nScott appears to be a friend of Randall . Comics 57 through 59 all have the title text Opening dialogue by Scott , forming a sort of informal mini-series inspired by him. They are:\nAs there already was a comic released on Monday that week, the first of these three was released on Tuesday, then Wednesday and Friday. This may be related to the fact that this was the first week where the comics were not also released on LiveJournal .\n[Cueball and Megan stand facing one another.] Megan: Why didn't you wait for me? Cueball: I thought you were gone forever!\n[Megan throws out her arms, and Cueball is looking down.] Megan: I said I'd be back in a minute! Cueball: The... the seconds went fast at first, but then they started to drag on. Cueball: She was there for me.\n[Same scene as before, except Megan has her arms out less.] Megan: You had an affair in the 90 seconds I was gone?! Cueball: ...yes.\n[Cueball and Megan stand facing one another in a smaller panel.] Cueball: And we had a son.\n[Same scene as before.] Cueball: He'd be about your age now.\n"}
{"id":58,"title":"Why Do You Love Me?","image_title":"Why Do You Love Me?","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/58","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/why_do_you_love_me.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/58:_Why_Do_You_Love_Me%3F","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are having a conversation. The same scene is shown for all panels.] Cueball: Why do you love me? Megan: I don't know; my heart never gave me a choice.\nCueball: Aww.\n[Beat panel.]\nMegan: I wish it had.\n","explanation":"Cueball asks \"Why do you love me?\" to Megan , a fairly common question that couples ask each other. She responds by saying, \"My heart never gave me a choice,\" a seemingly very sentimental, romantic answer. However, after a beat panel , she effectively kills the romance of the moment by adding, \"I wish it had,\" indicating that she would rather not have loved Cueball.\nScott appears to be a friend of Randall Munroe . Comics 57 through 59 all have the title text Opening dialogue by Scott , forming a sort of informal mini-series inspired by him. They are:\nAs there already was a comic released on Monday that week, the first of these three was released on Tuesday, then Wednesday and Friday. This may be related to the fact that this was the first week were the comics were not also released on LiveJournal .\n[Cueball and Megan are having a conversation. The same scene is shown for all panels.] Cueball: Why do you love me? Megan: I don't know; my heart never gave me a choice.\nCueball: Aww.\n[Beat panel.]\nMegan: I wish it had.\n"}
{"id":59,"title":"Graduation","image_title":"Graduation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/59","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/graduation.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/59:_Graduation","transcript":"[Megan and Blondie are talking.] Blondie: What do you want to do when you graduate?\n[Same scene as before.] Megan: I want to become a lighthouse operator. Blondie: Oh? Megan: Yeah.\n[Cut to scene of lighthouse with text overlaid.] Megan: Lighthouses are built on interesting pieces of coast, so I'll have an interesting place to walk and swim, and great views of all kinds of weather. I'd feel good about myself and my work every single day.\n[Cut back to Megan and Blondie. Megan has her arms up.] Megan: I'd get to be the girl in the tower, only I'd be the one rescuing people.\n[Megan now has her arms down.] Megan: Why, what do you want to do? Blondie: I'm going to grad school. I don't really know why.\n[Same scene as before.] Megan: Wanna come hang in my lighthouse over breaks? Blondie: ...yeah.\n","explanation":"Megan and a young Blondie (in her first appearance) discuss their plans for life after college.\nMegan has taken the increasingly unusual choice of pursuing a career as a lighthouse operator , a path that has become increasingly less traveled, as lighthouses have become ever more automated and supplanted by other solutions. Before GPS technology, lighthouses were invaluable markers of where dangers to marine navigation, such as shallow reefs or coastal headlands, were located. Megan likes the idea of subverting the trope of the helpless maid in the tower who needs saving, by helping to save seafarers by operating a lighthouse that helps them to find their way safely back home.\nWhen it comes to her turn to answer her own question, Blondie answers that she plans to pursue postgraduate education , but admits that she has no purpose for doing so. After obtaining an undergraduate \/ bachelor's degree, graduate school is the next level of education, where students pursue a master's or doctoral degree . Augmenting one's education with post-graduate studies is a conventional career path, and would imply that the student has a definite plan for their career, yet some people may attend grad school only because it is conventional, without having any definite plan for their career. This appears to be the case for Blondie, contrasted with Megan's choice of a seemingly blue collar \/ unskilled career \u2014 one might expect such a career to indicate someone who has no specific career plan, yet Megan seems to know her exact purpose, unlike Blondie. The fact that Blondie then accepts an invitation to spend her breaks at Megan's lighthouse suggests that she finds this a more attractive prospect than her more conventional path.\nOther comics with a similar theme about finding or taking unexplored paths, instead of fitting into the mold, include 137: Dreams and 267: Choices: Part 4 .\nScott appears to be a friend of Randall Munroe . Comics 57 through 59 all have the title text Opening dialogue by Scott , forming a sort of informal mini-series inspired by him. They are:\nAs there already was a comic released on Monday that week, the first of these three was released on Tuesday, then Wednesday and Friday. This may be related to the fact that this was the first week where the comics were not also released on LiveJournal .\n[Megan and Blondie are talking.] Blondie: What do you want to do when you graduate?\n[Same scene as before.] Megan: I want to become a lighthouse operator. Blondie: Oh? Megan: Yeah.\n[Cut to scene of lighthouse with text overlaid.] Megan: Lighthouses are built on interesting pieces of coast, so I'll have an interesting place to walk and swim, and great views of all kinds of weather. I'd feel good about myself and my work every single day.\n[Cut back to Megan and Blondie. Megan has her arms up.] Megan: I'd get to be the girl in the tower, only I'd be the one rescuing people.\n[Megan now has her arms down.] Megan: Why, what do you want to do? Blondie: I'm going to grad school. I don't really know why.\n[Same scene as before.] Megan: Wanna come hang in my lighthouse over breaks? Blondie: ...yeah.\n"}
{"id":60,"title":"Super Bowl","image_title":"Super Bowl","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/60","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/super_bowl.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/60:_Super_Bowl","transcript":"[A green car with text above and next to it.] My hobby: While everyone is watching the Super Bowl, feeling smugly superior because they're \"Only watching for the ads,\" I steal cars.\nIn a distant future (2015), Randall (or Cueball ) spends his time differently during the Super Bowl - see 1480: Super Bowl . (This was the second time that two xkcd comics have shared the exact same name .) In between this comic and the one nine years later, no other comics came out related to the Super Bowl. The year after (2016), there was a comic ( 1640 ) about the Super Bowl, and in 2018 a comic ( 1951 ) appeared about a Super Bowl watch party.\n","explanation":"The third in the \" My Hobby \" series. The Super Bowl is the championship American football game of the National Football League , which is usually played each February, and the final game of the 2006 season, Super Bowl XL , was played on the evening of 2006-02-05, the day before this comic was released.\nAs the game is one of the most watched television broadcasts in North America, advertising during the game has become increasingly expensive (among the most expensive advertising rates of any broadcast) to the point where corporations produce their best, most expensive advertisements to air during the game, to ensure that they would get value out of the expensive spots. The Super Bowl has thus become notorious for the \"best\" commercials, with some viewers purportedly tuning in solely to see the commercials, rather than the actual football game. News reports the next day often highlight the best and worst Super Bowl commercials, as do websites devoted to Super Bowl commercials.\nRealizing that the Super Bowl is viewed by a large percentage of the population, Randall , somewhat tongue-in-cheek, states that those people would be quite distracted during that time, and therefore it would be possible to steal cars without fear of being caught. The title text takes this even further, suggesting that the entire Super Bowl was invented entirely for the purpose of being a distraction for car thieves. Naturally, the addition of the ads would make this even more effective, as it would attract even more viewers and ensure that they stayed in front of the TV during commercial breaks as well as the game.\nThe phrase \"I steal cars\" also provides a contrast to the fact that many viewers are only watching for the advertisements, making their smug sense of superiority seem petty compared to the fact that they but not Randall are not stealing cars and that they therefore are morally superior to Randall in this respect. This calls into question whether or not they really are significantly superior by comparing this marginal superiority to not being criminals. Alternatively, Randall may resent these people for feeling superior even though they aren't actually superior (at least in the eyes of Randall) and therefore steal their cars as punishment. Or Randall might be implying that they have no reason to being smug as they are being duped into having their cars stolen, and the thief is the one in the best position to be smug.\nRandall may have chosen to use a car as a reference to the large number of car commercials that play during the Super Bowl, in addition to the ease of stealing a car at that time.\n[A green car with text above and next to it.] My hobby: While everyone is watching the Super Bowl, feeling smugly superior because they're \"Only watching for the ads,\" I steal cars.\nIn a distant future (2015), Randall (or Cueball ) spends his time differently during the Super Bowl - see 1480: Super Bowl . (This was the second time that two xkcd comics have shared the exact same name .) In between this comic and the one nine years later, no other comics came out related to the Super Bowl. The year after (2016), there was a comic ( 1640 ) about the Super Bowl, and in 2018 a comic ( 1951 ) appeared about a Super Bowl watch party.\n"}
{"id":61,"title":"Stacey's Dad","image_title":"Stacey's Dad","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/61","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/staceys_dad.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/61:_Stacey%27s_Dad","transcript":"[A hairy man.] Man: Look, I know you think that since I walked out she could use a guy like you. But trust me. That woman has got a lot going on, and you want none of it. Man: Get out while you still can.\n[Printed across the bottom of the panel.] Stacey's dad.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the song \" Stacy's Mom \" by Fountains of Wayne (See the music video on YouTube). As the background singers repeatedly say, \"Stacy's mom has got it goin' on.\" Although Randall has used the wrong spelling of 'Stacy'.\nThe song is from the perspective of a young teenage boy who has a crush on his best friend's mother \u2014 'Stacy's Mom' \u2014 and has deluded himself into thinking that she might like him back. In one verse, he tells Stacy \"I know that you think it's just a fantasy, but since your Dad walked out your Mom could use a guy like me,\" and this is the line the comic is referencing, with Stacy's Dad (drawn the same way as Hairy , making this his first appearance) directly echoing the line and explaining why he left Stacy's Mom, suggesting that the singer do the same.\nThe line \"Stacy's Mom has got it going on\" is repeated throughout the song, and in context simply means that Stacy's Mom is very attractive. Here, however, Stacy's Dad changes it, saying that she \"has a lot going on,\" which means that she has issues that would make a relationship difficult.\nThe humor comes from the fact that, in the song, it is very clear that the singer does not actually have a chance with Stacy's Mom and is merely kidding himself, as he is still just a kid. But in the comic, Stacy's Dad appears to be taking the situation completely seriously, and is worried enough about the possibility of Stacy's Mom and the boy getting together that he feels the need to warn him away.\nThe title text is referencing the second verse, which begins: \"Stacy remember when I mowed your lawn.\" Mowing the lawn is the sort of chore that a kid might get paid to do for a friend's parent, and in the song, this is meant to emphasize that Stacy's Mom sees the singer as a child, not as a potential partner. But here, Stacy's Dad seems to be implying that mowing the lawn is something that Stacy's Mom made him \u2014 and possibly all her previous partners \u2014 do for her, and so her getting the boy to do it is actually a sign that she is interested in him.\nThe song Stacy's Mom was again referenced in 575: Tag Combination .\n[A hairy man.] Man: Look, I know you think that since I walked out she could use a guy like you. But trust me. That woman has got a lot going on, and you want none of it. Man: Get out while you still can.\n[Printed across the bottom of the panel.] Stacey's dad.\n"}
{"id":62,"title":"Valentine - Karnaugh","image_title":"Valentine - Karnaugh","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/62","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/karnaugh.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/62:_Valentine_-_Karnaugh","transcript":"[Squiggly heart design.] You make me feel so much it all runs together I wish I could tell you [Crisscrossing heart design. Cueball and Megan on opposite sides of big heart.] So few words for so many feelings crisscrossing my heart [Heart matrix design.] A matrix of desire Tangled relations I can't simplify [Karnaugh map of hearts.] I wish I could find the Karnaugh map for love.\n","explanation":"A Karnaugh map is a Boolean algebra tool that is used to simplify expressions. The final picture, the one that looks like a crossword puzzle, is similar to the way that a Karnaugh map is used on a Boolean truth table, to identify areas that can be simplified. This PDF document shows how the process is used to simplify logic circuits. The lament of the Valentine is that feelings don't yield themselves to the same kind of analysis.\nThis comic has four pictures with lines of text alongside them. The text can be used to understand the picture. The first three pictures show love to become more coherent and well-defined but yet complicated. The last picture and text alongside it show Cueball 's desire that there should be a way to simplify complications in love, just like Karnaugh maps for Boolean expressions.\nThe first line means that love is such an overwhelming feeling that it is hard to understand it and even harder to explain. The picture alongside has incoherent lines depicting the feelings of someone in love and hearts represents the overwhelming love.\nThe second picture and related text mean that the feelings are now identified to some extent but are numerous, and there are too few words to explain them. The picture depicts Cueball and Megan on separate side of his heart crisscrossed by many feelings. It shows that his inability to explain his feelings is like a barrier between them.\nThe third picture shows that Cueball has a much better understanding of love and now sees it as a matrix of desires and tangled relations, but it is still very complex to fully understand love.\nThe fourth picture shows a Karnaugh map that Cueball wishes he could find in the future to solve the matrix of desires and tangled relations that is love.\n[Squiggly heart design.] You make me feel so much it all runs together I wish I could tell you [Crisscrossing heart design. Cueball and Megan on opposite sides of big heart.] So few words for so many feelings crisscrossing my heart [Heart matrix design.] A matrix of desire Tangled relations I can't simplify [Karnaugh map of hearts.] I wish I could find the Karnaugh map for love.\n"}
{"id":63,"title":"Valentine - Heart","image_title":"Valentine - Heart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/63","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/valentine.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/63:_Valentine_-_Heart","transcript":"[A Valentine's Day heart bordered with wavy red lace-like pattern with text:]\n","explanation":"The comic shows a Valentines card that starts off nicely, but then \" escalates quickly \" becoming very unromantic although probably very honest, that the only purpose of this card is getting the receiver into bed. It says that if this is not the case, if she (or he) doesn't want to go naked after receiving this card, then it is not really meant (i.e. their heart is not in it).\nThe title text implies that this is being offered as a Valentine that someone might give and then \"pretend\" that they were kidding. Which seems to imply that they would not, in fact, be kidding, that this represents their real feelings.\nA funny thing is also that the text on the card implies that if the card indeed does get the receiver naked, that the action of giving it was truly meant. In that case, the giver would always deny that it was not meant and claim he\/she is truly in love. Of course this cannot be true, since getting laid was the main motivation of appreciating the 'loved' one. \"In it\" could be an intentional sexual innuendo.\n[A Valentine's Day heart bordered with wavy red lace-like pattern with text:]\n"}
{"id":64,"title":"Solar Plexus","image_title":"Solar Plexus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/64","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/solar_plexus.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/64:_Solar_Plexus","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball are talking to each other.] Black Hat: Asolarplexussayswhat? Cueball: What?\n[Beat panel.]\n[Beat panel.]\n[Black Hat punches Cueball in the solar plexus.]\n","explanation":"The solar plexus is a network of interconnecting nerves that is centered in the area of the abdomen near the stomach. A blow to this area is painful and the cause of the feeling called \"getting the wind knocked out of you\" and is prevalent in media.\nThe trick \"An[incomprehensible mumble]sayswhat\" is a juvenile taunt that tricks a person into calling themselves a name.\nBlack Hat resolves the solar plexus joke with a punch to Cueball in the solar plexus as opposed to a normal punch(line).\nThe title text mentions truthfully that it hurts to be hit there.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are talking to each other.] Black Hat: Asolarplexussayswhat? Cueball: What?\n[Beat panel.]\n[Beat panel.]\n[Black Hat punches Cueball in the solar plexus.]\n"}
{"id":65,"title":"Banter","image_title":"Banter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/65","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/banter.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/65:_Banter","transcript":"[Two Cueball like characters have a discussion. They are drawn the same in all eight panels.] Guy: Man, she's hot Friend: Whatever, you are so gay.\nGuy: C'mon, everyone knows you're the gay one. Friend: Hey, your mom's pretty masculine, but sleeping with her doesn't make me gay.\nGuy: Fag. Friend: Ass pirate. Guy: Fudge packer Friend: Cock jockey Guy: Cum dumpster.\n[Beat panel.]\nGuy: Okay, seriously, are you gay? Because if you've been holding out on me, we're missing out.\nFriend: No, it's cool. Guy: OK, me neither.\n[Beat panel.]\n[Beat panel.]\n","explanation":"Two guys are trash-talking each other with homophobic comments and your mom jokes . It goes somewhat astray and becomes awkward when the first guy makes a pass at the second guy and is rejected.\nPart of the element of the humor in this comic stems from a common assertion that the most-homophobic of men are the most likely to be a closeted homosexual . Another element is the incredible awkwardness of the end conversation.\nFag , ass pirate , fudge packer , and cock jockey are all insults for a homosexual man. Cum dumpster can apply to both men and women (usually conveying sluttiness ).\nRandall's title text, that he mock-held this conversation with a friend in a TGIF restaurant, indicates how awkward this would be in real life. Even the waitress, a bystander, is put off by it.\n[Two Cueball like characters have a discussion. They are drawn the same in all eight panels.] Guy: Man, she's hot Friend: Whatever, you are so gay.\nGuy: C'mon, everyone knows you're the gay one. Friend: Hey, your mom's pretty masculine, but sleeping with her doesn't make me gay.\nGuy: Fag. Friend: Ass pirate. Guy: Fudge packer Friend: Cock jockey Guy: Cum dumpster.\n[Beat panel.]\nGuy: Okay, seriously, are you gay? Because if you've been holding out on me, we're missing out.\nFriend: No, it's cool. Guy: OK, me neither.\n[Beat panel.]\n[Beat panel.]\n"}
{"id":66,"title":"Abusive Astronomy","image_title":"Abusive Astronomy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/66","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/abusive_astronomy.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/66:_Abusive_Astronomy","transcript":"Identifying star clusters: [Image of a star cluster.] This is the Pleiades , asshole.\nOrion's Belt: [Image of Orion's Belt.] Only a moron couldn't find it.\nThis is the Big Dipper : [Image of the Big Dipper.] What the hell is wrong with you?\nAs noted in the title text, the drawing for this comic was originally done in pencil, then inverted. Here is a re-inverted version of the file, to show (approximately) what the original drawing looked like.\nAlternatively, Randall may be using sarcasm when saying that the medium is pencil on paper, since it would be incredibly impractical and nearly impossible to draw the uniform black background while leaving white gaps for stars (assuming it was not inverted).\nAt the very bottom of the about page on xkcd, Randall answers the question What is your favorite astronomical entity? with The Pleiades .\n","explanation":"An asterism is a pattern of stars that forms some sort of perceived shape in the night sky. Some of these are patterns used to name regions of the sky, as constellations. Modern astronomy organizes the sky into 88 constellations, but different cultures saw different patterns in the same night sky, going back at least as far as the Babylonians, and there are many other patterns and grouping of stars. The Pleiades (or Subaru ), Orion's belt , and the Big Dipper are among the most common asterisms that we recognize today and are among the first taught to people with an interest in astronomy. The Pleiades is an open star cluster in the constellation of Taurus. It is a group of stars that formed from the same nebula and are moving together. Orion's belt comprises three stars that appear close in the sky, but are in fact at great distance from each other. The Big Dipper is part of the constellation Ursa Major. It can be used to help find the north pole star Polaris , which is an aid to night-time navigation.\nDuring planetarium tours, the tour guide will point out popular constellations and stars; sometimes they will ask a question to get the audience involved in the presentation. Usually these people are big on showing the wonder of the galaxy and are all smiles, but people have bad days. The comic is presenting an especially aggressive way of introducing the night sky.\nWhen astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere are showing stars to people, there will frequently be someone who points to the Pleiades and says, \"There's the Big Dipper!\" (both appear as a trapezium of stars, with a handle, though the Pleiades is much smaller). This gets frustrating about the 100th time that you encounter this error. So, this comic could show someone releasing their frustration on the misinformed public by pointing out that what they just pointed at is actually the Pleiades, then, pointing out that you can always locate the Pleiades by following the line of the stars in the belt of Orion, then, pointing out the REAL Big Dipper.\nIn the title text, Randall explains that he drew this comic as a line drawing on white paper, using only a pencil. The image was later inverted for publication.\nIdentifying star clusters: [Image of a star cluster.] This is the Pleiades , asshole.\nOrion's Belt: [Image of Orion's Belt.] Only a moron couldn't find it.\nThis is the Big Dipper : [Image of the Big Dipper.] What the hell is wrong with you?\nAs noted in the title text, the drawing for this comic was originally done in pencil, then inverted. Here is a re-inverted version of the file, to show (approximately) what the original drawing looked like.\nAlternatively, Randall may be using sarcasm when saying that the medium is pencil on paper, since it would be incredibly impractical and nearly impossible to draw the uniform black background while leaving white gaps for stars (assuming it was not inverted).\nAt the very bottom of the about page on xkcd, Randall answers the question What is your favorite astronomical entity? with The Pleiades .\n"}
{"id":67,"title":"Nerd Girls","image_title":"Nerd Girls","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/67","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nerd_girls.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/67:_Nerd_Girls","transcript":"[Girl with shoulder length brown hair and glasses, wearing a shirt which says \"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons\".] Girl: At least, thanks to your constant fawning, we have an excuse for our social ineptness. What's yours ?\n","explanation":"The stereotypical nerd is socially inept and has an obsession with a non-mainstream hobby such as Dungeons and Dragons . Nerd males are also typically represented as treating all women (including female nerds) with reverence and awkward fawning due to their supposed inexperience and lack of female company in comparison to other males. In the comic, the nerd girl uses this as an excuse for her social ineptitude.\nThe T-shirt the girl is wearing contains the text \"Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons,\" which is an actual text used for T-shirts, continuing with \"for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup!\" This text is a modified version of a quote from Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring : \"Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.\"\nTo all the high schoolers who are at the stage when they begin to find dates, Randall is saying that it is nothing personal, i.e. he is not trying to insult them by pointing this situation out.\n[Girl with shoulder length brown hair and glasses, wearing a shirt which says \"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons\".] Girl: At least, thanks to your constant fawning, we have an excuse for our social ineptness. What's yours ?\n"}
{"id":68,"title":"Five Thirty","image_title":"Five Thirty","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/68","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/five_thirty.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/68:_Five_Thirty","transcript":"Comics from 5:30 AM [A succession of unrelated and completely random panels.]\nCueball: It's 80's night at the club. Wanna go?\nFriend: There is no Tuesday. Cueball: Jack the Ripper or Jack Black?\n[Cueball in this panel is holding a glinting sword.] Friend: You crashed my helicopter! Cueball: Verily!\n[A small figure is talking with a larger figure.] Figure 1: Basically, neither of us have shins. Figure 2: Over and out.\n[Two men are shown: one with three arms, and another with just two. All arms have round appendages at their ends.] Men: shitshitshitshitshitshitdaylightsavingsshitshitshitshitsh\n[Two figures with pumpkins (carved with faces) for heads.] Figure 1: You're out of ointment and out of time!\n[A diagram of a right-angled triangle, with a theta at the smallest angle.] FUCK THE COSINE\nFriend: Does being a mermaid for five minutes make you gay? Cueball: I hope so!\n[The friend is holding a gun to Cueball's head.] Friend: Barbershops are for pussies.\nFriend: My hair is bleeding. Cueball: \u221a3\n[Cueball seems to be walking on the ceiling.] Cueball: Bachelor party!\n[Warning sign with picture of an ant.] WARNING: STRETCHY DEATH\n","explanation":"At 5:30 AM, one's sleep-deprived or prematurely-roused mind sometimes comes up with things that seem like nonsense later.\nNone of the twelve panels in this comic seem to have any correlation with one another, each one being its own \"story,\" and none of them really make any sense. It is unknown whether Randall really wrote this comic while awake at 5:30 in the morning, or if he wrote it while completely alert and is trying to pass off his rejected ideas by saying what one's mind may experience when trying to process information at an hour when the person is not used to being awake.\nThe title text could actually refer to two different panels. If a person chooses to read the comic left-to-right, top-to-bottom (which is more likely given that this is the order in the official transcript), the eighth panel could be the one with where Cueball asks \"Does being a mermaid for five minutes make you gay?\" However, if a person chooses to read the comic top-to-bottom, left-to-right, the eighth panel will instead be the one with Cueball hanging upside down shouting \"Bachelor party!\"\nComics from 5:30 AM [A succession of unrelated and completely random panels.]\nCueball: It's 80's night at the club. Wanna go?\nFriend: There is no Tuesday. Cueball: Jack the Ripper or Jack Black?\n[Cueball in this panel is holding a glinting sword.] Friend: You crashed my helicopter! Cueball: Verily!\n[A small figure is talking with a larger figure.] Figure 1: Basically, neither of us have shins. Figure 2: Over and out.\n[Two men are shown: one with three arms, and another with just two. All arms have round appendages at their ends.] Men: shitshitshitshitshitshitdaylightsavingsshitshitshitshitsh\n[Two figures with pumpkins (carved with faces) for heads.] Figure 1: You're out of ointment and out of time!\n[A diagram of a right-angled triangle, with a theta at the smallest angle.] FUCK THE COSINE\nFriend: Does being a mermaid for five minutes make you gay? Cueball: I hope so!\n[The friend is holding a gun to Cueball's head.] Friend: Barbershops are for pussies.\nFriend: My hair is bleeding. Cueball: \u221a3\n[Cueball seems to be walking on the ceiling.] Cueball: Bachelor party!\n[Warning sign with picture of an ant.] WARNING: STRETCHY DEATH\n"}
{"id":69,"title":"Pillow Talk","image_title":"Pillow Talk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/69","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pillow_talk.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/69:_Pillow_Talk","transcript":"Cueball: Staring at the ceiling, she asked me what I was thinking about. Cueball: I should have made something up. Cueball: The Bellman-Ford algorithm makes terrible pillow talk.\n","explanation":"The Bellman-Ford algorithm is an algorithm that calculates the shortest path(s) through a weighted digraph or collection of connected nodes or vertices. The \"Wexler\" in the title text refers to Wexler's algorithm, which is used to deal with the inverse problem of electrical impedance tomography , or simply stated: the electrical conductivity of an (inhomogenous) object.\nBoth of these would make terrible pillow talk . Pillow talk is the conversation made by lovers after they have had sex, and is usually relaxed and intimate instead of technical.\nCueball: Staring at the ceiling, she asked me what I was thinking about. Cueball: I should have made something up. Cueball: The Bellman-Ford algorithm makes terrible pillow talk.\n"}
{"id":70,"title":"Guitar Hero","image_title":"Guitar Hero","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/70","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/guitar_hero.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/70:_Guitar_Hero","transcript":"[On a stage, Megan is in the background as a singer holding a microphone. In the center is Hairy with an electric guitar. The catwalk has bumps to resemble the tracks of Guitar Hero.] [Caption above the stage]: When I'm in a rock band, I'm gonna do a cool, mellow song. Then in the middle I'll stop, announce \"this part is just to be an asshole to people playing Guitar Hero,\" and then flail wildly on the strings for 30 seconds.","explanation":"Guitar Hero is a series of video games (originally a single game) distributed by Activision . In the game, players simulate playing the guitar on famous guitar songs using a plastic guitar-shaped controller with five color-coded buttons on the neck representing guitar frets and a rocker bar on the body simulating a strumming motion. The game now includes other instruments such as drums and vocals, although not at the time this comic was published.\nWhile the player plays the game, an animated band is shown on the upper half of the screen, and an extended guitar neck is shown vertically on the bottom half of the screen with horizontal frets, often called the \"note highway.\" As the song progresses, coloured markers or \"gems\" indicating notes travel down the screen in time with the music; the note colours and positions match the five fret keys on the guitar controller. Once the notes reach the bottom, the player must play the indicated notes by holding down the correct fret buttons and hitting the strumming bar in order to score points. The image in the comic is similar to what is shown when playing Guitar Hero .\nIn this comic, Randall suggests that, were he in a real rock band, he would perform a mellow song, but intentionally put a complicated guitar solo in, not for musical value, but solely to antagonize Guitar Hero players with an impossible solo. As the comic suggests, a random flailing would likely make for a very difficult passage to play in Guitar Hero . This is highlighted by the previous statement that the song would otherwise be mellow, lulling the player into a false sense that the song was easy to play and relaxing. Even worse for Guitar Hero players, if there was anyone who is good enough to play the solo, they would still have no fun playing the song if it is otherwise very mellow.\nProbably, the \"impossible solo\" proposed here would turn useless, as there are some songs where the artist actually flails the guitar, and the developers translated that in gameplay as a bonus where the players can freely spam their controller\/guitar for extra points.\nThe title text refers to a mechanic in Guitar Hero called \"Star Power.\"  Normally, when a player misses too many notes in a short time, their character is booed off the stage, and they have to restart.  Using Star Power temporarily boosts the score from each note, so the player can clear a difficult section of the song even if they haven't hit most of the notes.  So, when faced with Randall's impossible guitar solo, most players will immediately use Star Power to survive it.  However, it takes time to build up Star Power, and it all gets expended at once, so if the song has a second stretch of wild flailing, the player won't be able to escape and will fail. (Also note that in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and many other titles of the series, a full meter of Star Power lasts for eight measures, so as long as the song is mildly fast (80BPM would more than suffice for a 4\/4 or 12\/8 time signature), 30 seconds would be enough already.)\n[On a stage, Megan is in the background as a singer holding a microphone. In the center is Hairy with an electric guitar. The catwalk has bumps to resemble the tracks of Guitar Hero.] [Caption above the stage]: When I'm in a rock band, I'm gonna do a cool, mellow song. Then in the middle I'll stop, announce \"this part is just to be an asshole to people playing Guitar Hero,\" and then flail wildly on the strings for 30 seconds."}
{"id":71,"title":"In the Trees","image_title":"In the Trees","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/71","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/in_the_trees.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/71:_In_the_Trees","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in a forest.] Cueball: We made it so far together but then I lost you in the trees.\n[A closer view of Cueball.] Cueball: Finally.\n","explanation":"This comic focuses on dark humor. In the first panel, the viewer is led to believe that it is a comic lamenting on the loss of love, as it states, \"We made it so far together, but then I lost you in the trees.\" However, when we read the second panel (\"Finally\"), it becomes clear that the joke is that the loss of this \"love\" is what he had been hoping for all along. The supposed pain that came from such losing a long relationship came not from lamenting the loss of something he put so much effort into, but instead into the fact that it took so long to get there. The title text just furthers this idea.\nThere is a similar twist in comics 334: Wasteland and 1042: Never .\n[Cueball is standing in a forest.] Cueball: We made it so far together but then I lost you in the trees.\n[A closer view of Cueball.] Cueball: Finally.\n"}
{"id":72,"title":"Classhole","image_title":"Classhole","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/72","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/classhole.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/72:_Classhole","transcript":"Cueball: How did you spend your morning? Black Hat: Feeding rocks to children in the park.\nCueball: Your sociopathic abuse of random strangers staggers me. Black Hat: I aspire to have more creativity than the common asshole.\nBlack Hat: I'm more of a classy asshole -- A class-hole, if you will. For example, I like poking tiny holes in styrofoam noodle cups at the grocery store --\nBlack Hat: Thanks to me, someone gets surprise boiling water in the lap. Cueball: I am in awe. Black Hat: It's even more fun to do to condoms.\n","explanation":"The subject of this comic is Black Hat himself. He admits to being an asshole, a profanity that describes someone who does things that antagonize, irritate, or anger others (either intentionally or incidentally). While a common example might be someone who weaves in and out of traffic, or someone who parks across two parking spaces, Black Hat is \"more creative.\" This also suggests that, while most people described as assholes are either ignorant or selfish, Black Hat seems to intentionally behave this way strictly to be an asshole and not for any self-benefit. He claims to be a \"classy asshole,\" or as he coins the portmanteau , a \"class-hole.\" He seems to equate creativity with class, although that seems like a leap. In any event, this is another early Black Hat strip that, for the first time, explicitly sets out that he goes out of his way to wreak havoc.\nAmong his \"pranks,\" he suggests poking holes in grocery noodle cups. These are pre-packaged cups filled with dried noodles and dried soup mix (either in a separate pouch, or loose in the cup) to which one adds boiling water, which both boils the pasta and dissolves the soup mix to become the soup\/broth. By poking holes in the cup, Black Hat ensures that someone pouring boiling water in the cup would have it leak all over them, causing them great surprise and pain.\nHe also suggests poking holes in condoms , which could cause even more serious consequences. This form of contraceptive sabotage is a way to cause unintended pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease infection. Sabotage may be by someone acting maliciously at random (such as poking holes at the store pre-purchase) or by one of the participants to attempt to cause a pregnancy when the other partner does not want it, often occurring as part of reproductive abuse. [1] The 2013 movie The Priest's Children describes a similar campaign.\nThe title text explains that the word was first introduced to Randall (and probably to the world) by a friend of his named Beth.\nCueball: How did you spend your morning? Black Hat: Feeding rocks to children in the park.\nCueball: Your sociopathic abuse of random strangers staggers me. Black Hat: I aspire to have more creativity than the common asshole.\nBlack Hat: I'm more of a classy asshole -- A class-hole, if you will. For example, I like poking tiny holes in styrofoam noodle cups at the grocery store --\nBlack Hat: Thanks to me, someone gets surprise boiling water in the lap. Cueball: I am in awe. Black Hat: It's even more fun to do to condoms.\n"}
{"id":73,"title":"Zeppelin","image_title":"Zeppelin","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/73","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/zeppelin.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/73:_Zeppelin","transcript":"Cueball: What time is it? [Picture of a Zeppelin style watch, indicating the time about 12:13 o'clock.] [Cueballs look up at the sky.] [A huge Zeppelin is visible in the sky.]\n","explanation":"A Zeppelin is a type of rigid dirigible aircraft, used in the early part of the 20th century for commercial airline traffic. They were well known for being the most luxurious, comfortable air travel of the time. The Hindenburg disaster, as well as World War II, led to the end of their use as commercial airliners. Also associated with the Zeppelin name is a particular design of wristwatches, [1] notable for having the word \"Zeppelin\" at the top of the dial, at or under where the number 12 would be. In this comic, Randall implies that, since the hour hand of the watch is pointing to the word Zeppelin, it is time for a Zeppelin to appear in the sky.\nThe title text refers to the webcomic Buttercup Festival , which, at the time of this comic, was defunct. It was later revived by the author then defuncted again in 2015 and revived, again, in 2019. As of 18\/07\/20, the comic is running its third series. It is a tribute to Buttercup festival in the way it interprets things in the world na\u00efvely and literally to achieve humour, in a simple yet effective and uncontrived way.\nCueball: What time is it? [Picture of a Zeppelin style watch, indicating the time about 12:13 o'clock.] [Cueballs look up at the sky.] [A huge Zeppelin is visible in the sky.]\n"}
{"id":74,"title":"Su Doku","image_title":"Su Doku","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/74","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/su_doku.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/74:_Su_Doku","transcript":"[A square divided into 2\u00d72 squares, the top-right one has an 1 in it, the bottom-right one has a 0, the two left ones are empty.] Binary Su Doku\n","explanation":"Su Doku (Japanese for \"single number,\" and now usually written as \"sudoku\") is a type of number puzzle, in which the player must place digits in a matrix field in the correct arrangement, such that they do not repeat within given domains. The most common arrangement is a 9\u00d79 grid subdivided into nine 3\u00d73 grids, into which the nine non-zero digits of the normal decimal counting system must be inserted, with no digit being allowed to appear twice in a horizontal or vertical row or in each individual 3\u00d73 grid. The number and combination of pre-filled squares determines the difficulty of the puzzle.\nHowever, Randall presents a 2x2 binary sudoku puzzle which isn't subdivided. The joke is that the binary system has only two digits (0 and 1), and as a result binary sudoku puzzles would be trivially easy and thus pointless. The puzzle in the comic would be completed by filling 0 in the top-left and 1 in the bottom-left empty box. The only other possible grid would have the 0s and 1s swapped. This fulfills the criterion of having no repeated digits in any row, column or cell.\nThe title text appears to reference a series of published sudoku puzzle books called \"Martial Arts Sudoku\". The difficulty of each book is denoted by a martial arts belt color, with each color representing a certain skill level. A red belt is a rather high level, second only to the black belt. When applied to binary sudokus, a sudoku with one number given would be the most difficult one (though still trivial) and thus be a black belt. This sudoku has two numbers given, hence the medium red belt level.\n[A square divided into 2\u00d72 squares, the top-right one has an 1 in it, the bottom-right one has a 0, the two left ones are empty.] Binary Su Doku\n"}
{"id":75,"title":"Curse Levels","image_title":"Curse Levels","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/75","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/curse_levels.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/75:_Curse_Levels","transcript":"My hobby: mixing curse levels Cueball: What a gosh-darned cunt.\n","explanation":"In this fourth \" My Hobby \" strip, the hobby is mixing curse levels. Curse words (aka: swear words\/profanities) are disrespectful words that are typically impolite to use in public. As noted in the strip, there are \"levels\" of curse words ranging from those \"mild\" words that are more acceptable to use, to those \"severe\" words that are considered very impolite (the milder curse words can be used on network television in the US, for example, while severe ones can not). Although they cannot be exactly defined, they roughly fit into \"safe\"(heck, gosh, dang, etc.),\"mild\"(d*mn, s**t, h*ll and so forth) and \"severe\"(those that refer to more suggestive things than the others, as well as racial slurs and such). One usually uses milder cursing (\"safe\") because either they personally don't feel comfortable using the more severe words, or because it would not be appropriate in the context (such as on network television, in the presence of children, etc.) Thus, mixing mild and severe curses in one usage does not usually occur, as the effect achieved by keeping the one curse word mild is negated by using another that is severe.\nIn a mild curse, \"gosh-darned\" is typically used as a minced oath of \"God-damned\" when the latter would be inappropriate. This is mixed with \" cunt \" \u2014 a vulgar term for the female genitalia, considered the most offensive swear word in many English-speaking countries.\nMy hobby: mixing curse levels Cueball: What a gosh-darned cunt.\n"}
{"id":76,"title":"Familiar","image_title":"Familiar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/76","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/familiar.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/76:_Familiar","transcript":"[Hairy and Megan are talking] Megan: I worry that I'm just with you because it's familiar. Of course no one else compares. I've known you for so long that I'd have to spend years with someone to build up this kind of connection and I daren't let you go of you long enough to let that happen. Megan: But I guess this is really all I can ask for. I'm happy with you; I should stop worrying. [Megan takes Hairy's hand.] Hairy: This is probably a bad time to bring this up, but I don't actually like you.\n","explanation":"Megan tells her boyfriend ( Hairy ) her reservations about their relationship: she's happy with him, she thinks he doesn't compare to anyone else, and they have a strong connection built up over the course of years, but she's worried that all this is just because they've been dating so long that she hasn't had the opportunity to experience potentially better relationships. However, she recognizes that what she has should be enough, and resolves to stop worrying. Hairy responds to this by saying that he doesn't even like her, recognizing that it's relatively poor timing to say so after her expression of love (albeit a rather ambivalent one).\nThe title text is a sad-face emoticon, representing either Megan's sadness about his dislike of her, his (possibly disingenuous) sympathy for her, or the narrator's recognition that he's depicted a sad situation.\n[Hairy and Megan are talking] Megan: I worry that I'm just with you because it's familiar. Of course no one else compares. I've known you for so long that I'd have to spend years with someone to build up this kind of connection and I daren't let you go of you long enough to let that happen. Megan: But I guess this is really all I can ask for. I'm happy with you; I should stop worrying. [Megan takes Hairy's hand.] Hairy: This is probably a bad time to bring this up, but I don't actually like you.\n"}
{"id":77,"title":"Bored with the Internet","image_title":"Bored with the Internet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/77","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bored_with_the_internet.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/77:_Bored_with_the_Internet","transcript":"[Black Hat and Not-Hairy are talking in a room with a computer on.] Not-Hairy: I feel like I'm wasting my life on the internet. Let's walk around the world. Black Hat: Sounds good. [The two men are shown walking through trees.] [The two men are shown walking on flat stretch, with mountains in the distance.] [The two men are shown in a magnificent canyon. They stand, silently looking at the scene.] Not-Hairy: And yet all I can think is, \"This will make for a great LiveJournal entry.\"\n","explanation":"A character who has hair (not to be confused with Hairy ) suggests to Black Hat that he is wasting his life on the Internet, and they should go explore the world. They appear to walk a great distance, through what appears to be a swamp or perhaps a forest in winter, across a plain, and down to a river valley. Despite traveling so far and through such varied landscapes, in the last panel, Not-Hairy admits that all he can think about is what a great Livejournal post their trip would make. It appears that the plan to get the Internet off their mind has failed.\nLivejournal is a website on which users can make accounts and, effectively, blog, although the site is designed around the premise that the blogs ought to be used as personal journals, with the ability to privatize the journal or only let certain friends see certain entries. Livejournal was an early social network and an early blog platform, and was a good way for people to let others know what was going on in their lives. As of 2020, Livejournal still exists, although sites like Facebook and Twitter have become far more powerful and popular sites for sharing one's daily life.\nUnlike most of his appearances (especially later ones), Black Hat does not exhibit any of his signature Classhole tendencies.\nThe title text suggests that Randall has overcome a tendency to think about how he will document what he has been doing, rather than concentrate on the thing itself.\n[Black Hat and Not-Hairy are talking in a room with a computer on.] Not-Hairy: I feel like I'm wasting my life on the internet. Let's walk around the world. Black Hat: Sounds good. [The two men are shown walking through trees.] [The two men are shown walking on flat stretch, with mountains in the distance.] [The two men are shown in a magnificent canyon. They stand, silently looking at the scene.] Not-Hairy: And yet all I can think is, \"This will make for a great LiveJournal entry.\"\n"}
{"id":78,"title":"Garfield","image_title":"Garfield","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/78","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/garfield.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/78:_Garfield","transcript":"I want to see something unexpected in comics. Just one strip could make up for it all. [Garfield is standing on hind legs facing and looking directly at the camera. But is off-center in the frame, about 1\/3 from the left, rotated very slightly clockwise.] [Zoom in on Garfield, still to the left, now rotated slightly counterclockwise.] [Zoom in again on Garfield, now the frame clips off the left side of his face.] Garfield thought bubble: The world is burning. [Final zoom in, the frame is ripped like a page, offset, and Garfield's eyes are half closed on the right half.] Garfield thought bubble: Run. Jim Davis, throw off your commercial shackles. Challenge us. Go out in a blaze of Dadaist glory. There is still time.\n","explanation":"The newspaper comic strip Garfield , which features an orange cat as the main character, has increasingly been known for repetitive, quality-lacking strips. In the past, this was because the creator, Jim Davis , prefers to explore the same subjects he is comfortable with but in different ways \u2014 or from a less charitable view, because the strip is intended for a wide audience and thus becomes homogenized and inoffensive by nature. This attitude has only become more pronounced in the 21st century, as the aging Davis becomes less and less interested in the franchise. Regardless of the reason, these strips are now ghost written with little input from Davis and rarely explore the unconventional. The comic is challenging Davis to do something unexpected and surprise us all. The comic also accuses Davis of being a \"sell out\", sticking to bourgeois\/commercial logic, something that dadaist artists challenged.\nDadaism was an artistic movement in the early 20th century marked primarily by chaos, irrationality, and surrealism. Some of the artists believed that the bourgeois logic made human beings unhappy and therefore led to war.\nRandall leads by example by featuring a strip that parodies the style of Garfield, with multiple colors (xkcd usually contains only black and white, with some few containing an additional color like red or yellow) and a character that is not a stick figure breaking the normal xkcd pattern. Another dadaist aspect is the fact that while Garfield is smiling, he is communicating something that could be considered terrifying.\nThe title text explains that xkcd is exercising legal use of Davis's intellectual property, namely the title character of his comic. The Supreme Court case mentioned, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music , confirmed that parody is legal even when there is commercial gain as a result, and also referenced the Copyright Act of 1976 , 17 U.S.C. \u00a7 107, for the same reason.\nWhile this is normally understood by most anyone who questions such matters, Randall includes it as a reference to the lessening of strict copyright law, which many comics also mention, usually in the context of open-source software and those who promote it, like at the comics featuring Richard Stallman .\nI want to see something unexpected in comics. Just one strip could make up for it all. [Garfield is standing on hind legs facing and looking directly at the camera. But is off-center in the frame, about 1\/3 from the left, rotated very slightly clockwise.] [Zoom in on Garfield, still to the left, now rotated slightly counterclockwise.] [Zoom in again on Garfield, now the frame clips off the left side of his face.] Garfield thought bubble: The world is burning. [Final zoom in, the frame is ripped like a page, offset, and Garfield's eyes are half closed on the right half.] Garfield thought bubble: Run. Jim Davis, throw off your commercial shackles. Challenge us. Go out in a blaze of Dadaist glory. There is still time.\n"}
{"id":79,"title":"Iambic Pentameter","image_title":"Iambic Pentameter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/79","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/iambic_pentameter.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/79:_Iambic_Pentameter","transcript":"[Two identical Cueballs are having a conversation. The latter is identified as Cueball, since he represents Randall who has the Hobby.] Friend: What time can you pick Michael up? Cueball: Well, I can meet the plane at ten of six. Friend: Do you know where to find him? Cueball: I'll meet him at the stairs before the gate. [Below the two Cueballs are the following text:] My hobby: answering casual questions in iambic pentameter.\nIambs and other types of poetry \" feet \" are the subject of 1383: Magic Words .\n","explanation":"In this part of the My Hobby series, the hobby is responding to casual questions using iambic pentameter . Iambic pentameter is a form of poetic verse defined by the number of syllables per line. In this form, a line contains exactly five (penta means five in Greek) \" iambs \" per line. An iamb is a unit of two syllables with the stress falling on the second. The actual breakup of the words is unimportant; the definition is based solely on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. One line of strict iambic pentameter will have ten syllables, with the stress falling on the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and last.\nIn this comic, Cueball (i.e. Randall - the one with the hobby) is replying to his friend's questions. (The friend also looks like Cueball, but are here differentiated by who has the hobby.) Cueball's responses are each one line of iambic pentameter, just visually broken into two lines for space reasons. They read (adding the emphasis):\n\"Well, I can meet the plane at ten of six \" and \"I'll meet him at the stairs be fore the gate \"\nwith a sort of bouncing rhythm.\nShakespeare was one of the most famed users of iambic pentameter in his plays. This is the \"strict form\" of iambic pentameter. In practice, poets often strayed from the strict count of iambs as the image text suggests. Wikipedia offers two Shakespearian examples being \"Now is the winter of our discontent,\" in which the first iamb is reversed (\"Now\" is stressed rather than \"is\"), and \"To be or not to be, that is the question,\" which adds an extra unstressed syllable at the end. As the comic suggests in the title text, without such exceptions, it can be very difficult to stick to strict iambic pentameter for every sentence.\n[Two identical Cueballs are having a conversation. The latter is identified as Cueball, since he represents Randall who has the Hobby.] Friend: What time can you pick Michael up? Cueball: Well, I can meet the plane at ten of six. Friend: Do you know where to find him? Cueball: I'll meet him at the stairs before the gate. [Below the two Cueballs are the following text:] My hobby: answering casual questions in iambic pentameter.\nIambs and other types of poetry \" feet \" are the subject of 1383: Magic Words .\n"}
{"id":80,"title":"My Other Car","image_title":"My Other Car","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/80","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/other_car.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/80:_My_Other_Car","transcript":"[The back of a blue Mitsubishi with a spoiler is shown.] Bumper sticker: This IS my other car.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to a popular form of bumper sticker that follows the template \"my other car is a ____.\" Sometimes the blank is a fancy vehicle like a Porsche or a Ferrari ; sometimes it's related to the person's job (e.g. \"My other car is a fire truck\"); sometimes it's an even more expensive form of transportation like a \" yacht \" or \" private jet ,\" or even something joking or in fiction (like a \" TARDIS \").\nThe premise was to jokingly imply that someone driving in a less fancy vehicle was wealthier than they looked, as they could afford a fancy car (they simply chose to drive the clunker that day). The designer of the first stickers might even have intended them for serious use by wealthy drivers. The form of sticker ultimately became so well known that the phrase entered the pop-culture lexicon.\nDue to their popularity, these stickers also have been parodied in various ways, like the one Randall has invented here. Randall's sticker is a more \"honest\" sticker that admits \"this IS my other car;\" in other words, this is the nicer of the two cars.\nThis sticker could probably be used on an expensive car to mirror the traditional sticker's use on a cheaper car. However, the car in the strip is a Mitsubishi, which is not a particularly expensive brand, though the presence of a spoiler indicates it may be one of the top-range models, or at least has had a little extra paid for some sports 'extras'. Thus it appears that Randall is using the sticker for contrasting purposes: while others would drive a modest car but joke that they have a really nice one at home, Randall's car is the one you see, and, as he noted in the title text, his other one is much worse than this one.\nIt's also possible that this is a play on meta-levels; by definition, the car that you're driving can't be your other car, as it's your car you're driving now. Your other car is the one sitting at home.\n[The back of a blue Mitsubishi with a spoiler is shown.] Bumper sticker: This IS my other car.\n"}
{"id":81,"title":"Attention, shopper","image_title":"Attention, shopper","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/81","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/attention_shopper.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/81:_Attention,_shopper","transcript":"[Black Hat is holding a golf club and speaking into a P.A. system.] Black Hat: Attention, Black Hat: To the owner of a Dodge Viper SRT-10 with license plate \"MYTOY,\" your lights are on and your windshield was just smashed with a golf club.\n","explanation":"A common trope (often referenced in TV and film) is a loudspeaker announcement in which a store employee (or anyone else in charge somewhere where people gather, like church or a school) announces that a certain colour and model of car has its lights on, or is blocking another car, or is about to be towed, or similar. A licence plate is sometimes included to allow the owner to identify that it is specifically their car that is involved.\nIn this case, Black Hat is up to his old ways as, in addition to announcing that an SRT-10 has its lights on, he also announces that it has had its windshield smashed with a golf club. Black Hat is, of course, holding a golf club, frustrated at the owner\u2019s revolting arrogance. The lights are probably on because the attack triggered the car's alarm system.\nThe Dodge Viper SRT-10 was a version of the Dodge Viper available on the third and fourth generations of Viper from 2003-2010. It was a very expensive sports car.\nThe two license plates in the comic are personalized license plates. The one in the comic-proper is clearly \"My Toy\"; the plate in the title text is most likely \"Dad's Money,\" which Randall suggests is a real plate on a car outside his building, suggesting that the driver's father paid for the car, bragging about how rich their family is. This car will likely also soon earn Black Hat\u2019s wrath.\n[Black Hat is holding a golf club and speaking into a P.A. system.] Black Hat: Attention, Black Hat: To the owner of a Dodge Viper SRT-10 with license plate \"MYTOY,\" your lights are on and your windshield was just smashed with a golf club.\n"}
{"id":82,"title":"Frame","image_title":"Frame","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/82","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/frame.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/82:_Frame","transcript":"[Cueball stands alone in the center of this almost normally framed panel. But there are four small indentations two both left and right and maybe also one top right.]\n[Tendrils from the frame develop and grow inwards while breaking the outer frame down. The tendrils comes close to Cueball. There are 13, three from three of the four sides and four from the right.]\n[The tendrils have now completely broken the outer frame down and 11 have reached Cueball and these begins to wind themselves around him. There are tendrils around his forehead, neck, cheek, left arm, left wrist, left hand, right wrist, right hand, lower torso, left leg and right leg. Those around his legs spiraling almost up to his crotch. 14 other tendrils have not reached him yet. All those reaching him was among the 13 from the previous panel. Only the two from the bottom right corner did not make contact. The other 12 not reaching him where new.]\n[Finally the 11 tendrils that have reached Cueball retract along with the other 14 tendrils back to the frame, tearing Cueball apart in 9 pieces, leaving one central piece (his upper torso with a part of each arm) floating in the center without tendrils on it. His head has been split in two by three tendrils, that keep the parts close together. The left arm with one tendril has been split from the hand with two tendrils, whereas the two holding the wrist and hand kept their part of the arm in one piece. The two legs have been separated from the lower torso at the crotch, and they as well as the lower torso is all being pulled away by one tendril. The other tendrils have almost reached the frame, three of them are already gone leaving 11 near the frame. The frame has also nearly reformed it self again.]\n","explanation":"Cueball is standing in the middle of the first square panel, but then the panel's frame starts warping away from being square and starts to form into tendrils that move toward him, then slowly wrap themselves around him, and finally retract, reforming the frame again, but pulling him apart in the process, in a rather macabre comic.\nTypically, the frame on a cartoon is used to separate different periods of the action. Here, this has been subverted by the frame becoming a character, the main protagonist, and sole survivor of the strip.\nThere is some indication that Cueball is also just part of a drawing, since his upper torso, with parts of each arm, is left hanging in the air without any tendrils touching it. If it was not stuck in the center of the image, it would fall down, but more importantly, even if all tendrils pulled very fast at the same time, it is highly unlikely that they could pull so precisely that the body would split in four pieces around this remaining body cross, and one of the tendrils should have pulled this part along with either an arm, the head, or the lower torso. This could be some comfort for those who think that this is too much. Of course, it could also just be something that Randall did not think was important in such a surreal comic.\nComics often use artifacts on the frame to add mood to the comic. This comic then makes those artifacts a major feature of the comic, like a Chekhov's gun (\"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.\")  The use of creative panel layouts and effects was first made possible in newspaper comics at the insistence of Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes (which it is known that Randall has been influenced by), requiring lengthy negotiations due to the printing technology of the time. The creative use of panel layout and effects is thus part of the artistic legacy of Calvin and Hobbes. xkcd, among others, has continued along that path of pushing the boundaries of the medium.\nThe title text \"...\" could indicate that Randall wasn't being very serious about this comic. But perhaps it was an idea to creatively use parts of the comic nobody thought about, and it spoke for itself and needed no extra comment. The three dots also indicate that something more will happen soon. The reader may visualize the final result and empty square panel, ready for the next unfortunate person to walk into this trap. Alternatively, it could mean that Randall found the comic so bizarre, even he couldn't comment on it (see Trivia section ).\n[Cueball stands alone in the center of this almost normally framed panel. But there are four small indentations two both left and right and maybe also one top right.]\n[Tendrils from the frame develop and grow inwards while breaking the outer frame down. The tendrils comes close to Cueball. There are 13, three from three of the four sides and four from the right.]\n[The tendrils have now completely broken the outer frame down and 11 have reached Cueball and these begins to wind themselves around him. There are tendrils around his forehead, neck, cheek, left arm, left wrist, left hand, right wrist, right hand, lower torso, left leg and right leg. Those around his legs spiraling almost up to his crotch. 14 other tendrils have not reached him yet. All those reaching him was among the 13 from the previous panel. Only the two from the bottom right corner did not make contact. The other 12 not reaching him where new.]\n[Finally the 11 tendrils that have reached Cueball retract along with the other 14 tendrils back to the frame, tearing Cueball apart in 9 pieces, leaving one central piece (his upper torso with a part of each arm) floating in the center without tendrils on it. His head has been split in two by three tendrils, that keep the parts close together. The left arm with one tendril has been split from the hand with two tendrils, whereas the two holding the wrist and hand kept their part of the arm in one piece. The two legs have been separated from the lower torso at the crotch, and they as well as the lower torso is all being pulled away by one tendril. The other tendrils have almost reached the frame, three of them are already gone leaving 11 near the frame. The frame has also nearly reformed it self again.]\n"}
{"id":83,"title":"Katamari","image_title":"Katamari","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/83","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/katamari.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/83:_Katamari","transcript":"[Megan stands on the left. Cueball is sitting on the floor with a game controller in his hand. He is looking at a TV on the floor connected to a game console, also on the floor.] Megan: Can you pause for a moment and help me with something? Cueball: You know, our love is like a katamari. We travel along, rolling up more and more of the world into our shared experience, taking it and making it our own.\nMegan: I, you... wow. Geekiness aside, that was actually incredibly sweet. Cueball: The clutter of everyday life, with a simple core to tie it together, eventually becomes something grand as the world itself.\n[A rainbow extends outward from the TV, with \"ROYAL RAINBOW!\" above it. Cueball raises his hands in victory.] Megan: Okay, also sweet, but now I'm wondering if you could possibly get any gayer.\nKatamari Damacy is also a subject of 161: Accident and 851: Na .\n","explanation":"Katamari Damacy is a Japanese game in which the player must roll around an infinitely sticky katamari ball, cottoning up objects and terrain to increase the ball's size. In this comic, Cueball uses the katamari as an analogy for his love for Megan , pushing it to such embarrassing extremes that Megan feels the need to remark whether he could \"possibly get any gayer.\" At this point, Cueball wins the level he is playing and is transported by a \"Royal Rainbow,\" an in-game occurrence at the completion of each level. The rainbow is a symbol of gay pride, in addition to being just a generally happy (i.e. gay) idea.\nCueball also only takes up such a stand after Megan requests that he help her. This is possibly a criticism of male selfishness (perhaps Randall's self-criticism), in that males do not discuss romantic ideas, except as a way out.\nThe King of All Cosmos , mentioned in the title text, is an instructive character in all of the Katamari games. The title text points out that perhaps we either like or love video games not because they are fun, but because they let us forget our problems and retreat into someone else or an intricate fantasy.\n[Megan stands on the left. Cueball is sitting on the floor with a game controller in his hand. He is looking at a TV on the floor connected to a game console, also on the floor.] Megan: Can you pause for a moment and help me with something? Cueball: You know, our love is like a katamari. We travel along, rolling up more and more of the world into our shared experience, taking it and making it our own.\nMegan: I, you... wow. Geekiness aside, that was actually incredibly sweet. Cueball: The clutter of everyday life, with a simple core to tie it together, eventually becomes something grand as the world itself.\n[A rainbow extends outward from the TV, with \"ROYAL RAINBOW!\" above it. Cueball raises his hands in victory.] Megan: Okay, also sweet, but now I'm wondering if you could possibly get any gayer.\nKatamari Damacy is also a subject of 161: Accident and 851: Na .\n"}
{"id":84,"title":"National Language","image_title":"National Language","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/84","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/national_language.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/84:_National_Language","transcript":"[Caption on top:] This happened to my friend:\n[Three men and two women are standing in a row.] Cueball: English should be the national language. These immigrants should have to learn English when they come here. Megan: Yeah.\nCueball: When you go to live somewhere, you learn the language they speak there. Cueball: English is the language of the land.\nPonytail: Excuse me, but osio Sarah dawado.\nCueball: What the hell was that? Ponytail: Cherokee.\n","explanation":"This comic is about the concept of nativism , which is the view that those who are native to a place should have more rights than immigrants. A frequently expressed view in the U.S. (and in other countries) is that immigrants should learn English, which is the primary language in the United States.\nIn the comic, one character is arrogantly arguing the nativist position. However, the woman next to him interrupts him and says a phrase in the Cherokee language - \"Hello, my name is Sarah\" - which is an Iroquoian language used by the Cherokee Native American people. Although Cherokee seems to be a relatively young culture , it is much more native to America than any European culture, such as English.\nThe woman is therefore effectively suggesting a \"what's good for the goose is good for the gander\" argument, that if the Europeans did not have to learn the native language, why should current immigrants learn English? She points out that even the English speakers are immigrants who did not learn the native language. Alternatively, she is saying that the term \"national language\" has no clear meaning, especially in the United States, where there is no official language; therefore, the \"language they speak there\" can be any of the languages spoken in the country: English, Spanish, German, Cantonese, or Cherokee, to name a few.\nThe title text reveals that Ponytail is in fact Randall's friend; in the comic it is unclear who his friend is.\n[Caption on top:] This happened to my friend:\n[Three men and two women are standing in a row.] Cueball: English should be the national language. These immigrants should have to learn English when they come here. Megan: Yeah.\nCueball: When you go to live somewhere, you learn the language they speak there. Cueball: English is the language of the land.\nPonytail: Excuse me, but osio Sarah dawado.\nCueball: What the hell was that? Ponytail: Cherokee.\n"}
{"id":85,"title":"Paths","image_title":"Paths","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/85","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/paths.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/85:_Paths","transcript":"[Blueprint of a campus. Two buildings in the upper and lower left corners, respectively, and a rectangular lawn. A road encloses the lawn, another road traverses horizontally through the center of the lawn. The character is in the lower left and the upper right corner, where it says \"my apartment\".] [Dashed line 1, from the lower-left along the road to the top-left corner, then to the top-right corner.] 60 seconds [Dashed line 2, from the lower-left along the road up to the center crossroads, then diagonally over the lawn to the top-right corner.] 48 seconds (80%) [Dashed line 3, diagonally from the lower-left to the top-right corner.] 44.7 seconds (74%) My apartment 1=t 2=(t*(1+\u221a2))\/3 3=(t*\u221a5)\/3 When I'm walking, I worry a lot about the efficiency of my path.\n","explanation":"This comic centers around the consideration of what is the shortest path available to a person traveling by foot. Cueball has to travel across a rectangular distance, which has an established path around the periphery. When Cueball follows these paths, he has to walk for 60 seconds. He realizes that by ignoring the paths and taking the desire lines from corner to corner, his route will be shorter, and he calculates that he could cut up to 26% of his time.  As a result, every time he has to travel this rectangle, he worries about the extra time taken as a result of following the path. There are downfalls to this plan, however. This is convenient for Cueball but probably not for the building owner, as many rectangular lawns have delicate decorations such as flowers on them.\n[Blueprint of a campus. Two buildings in the upper and lower left corners, respectively, and a rectangular lawn. A road encloses the lawn, another road traverses horizontally through the center of the lawn. The character is in the lower left and the upper right corner, where it says \"my apartment\".] [Dashed line 1, from the lower-left along the road to the top-left corner, then to the top-right corner.] 60 seconds [Dashed line 2, from the lower-left along the road up to the center crossroads, then diagonally over the lawn to the top-right corner.] 48 seconds (80%) [Dashed line 3, diagonally from the lower-left to the top-right corner.] 44.7 seconds (74%) My apartment 1=t 2=(t*(1+\u221a2))\/3 3=(t*\u221a5)\/3 When I'm walking, I worry a lot about the efficiency of my path.\n"}
{"id":86,"title":"Digital Rights Management","image_title":"Digital Rights Management","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/86","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sony_microsoft_mpaa_riaa_apple.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/86:_Digital_Rights_Management","transcript":"[Black Hat is standing on an advancing glacier] Black Hat: Dear Sony, Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Apple: Let's make a deal. You stop trying to tell me where, when, and how I play my movies and music, and I won't crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice.\nThere appears to be a larger version of Black Hat, drawn in pencil and erased, behind him. The smaller figure makes the inexorably advancing wall of ice appear correspondingly larger.\n","explanation":"Digital rights management (DRM) is a class of methods for controlling digital files, such as by preventing media from playing on any device besides the device from which the purchase is made. It is used by several major companies, as it makes it more difficult to pirate media, which they claim cuts into their profits. Those companies typically also lobby for laws forbidding circumvention of DRM techniques, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).\nHowever, DRM is usually disliked by consumers, as it makes it difficult to use their purchased media. For example, if they buy a new computer, there's no guarantee that their DRM-covered media will be usable on the new computer. Thus, Black Hat is suggesting to the pro-DRM organizations Sony , Microsoft , the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and Apple that they stop their DRM-fiddling and lobbying, and he'll stop his inexorable ice-wall.\nThe title text refers readers to law professor Lawrence Lessig 's book Free Culture .\n[Black Hat is standing on an advancing glacier] Black Hat: Dear Sony, Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Apple: Let's make a deal. You stop trying to tell me where, when, and how I play my movies and music, and I won't crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice.\nThere appears to be a larger version of Black Hat, drawn in pencil and erased, behind him. The smaller figure makes the inexorably advancing wall of ice appear correspondingly larger.\n"}
{"id":87,"title":"Velociraptors","image_title":"Velociraptors","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/87","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/velociraptors.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/87:_Velociraptors","transcript":"[Picture of a suburban house, with lines pointing to various aspects.]\nHigh bathroom window: probably secure.\nOuter door: secure.\nPicture window: VELOCIRAPTOR ENTRY POINT!\nIt's been over a decade since Jurassic Park opened, and I still size up buildings for their potential as shelter against Velociraptor attacks.\nThis comic marks the first reference in xkcd to Jurassic Park , and specifically to Randall 's fear of velociraptors . The fear will continue to be a subject of future comics and running jokes.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the film Jurassic Park , a 1993 movie based on the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton . The film depicts a billionaire who buys an island and opens a zoo\/theme park for dinosaurs cloned from DNA recovered from blood found in fossilized mosquitoes. Naturally, everything goes haywire, and several of the creatures, among which are the velociraptors subject of this comic, try to devour every human in the theme park.\nVelociraptors (often shortened as \" raptors \") are a species of relatively small, carnivorous dinosaur that play a central role in the original film and its sequels. In the film, packs of Velociraptors attack the main characters at various points, even entering buildings; they play a large role in the climax of the film. According to Wikipedia, the velociraptors in the film were erroneously based on Deinonychus . The movie depicts the velociraptors as having scaly reptilian skin, though dinosaurs of this type are now theorized to have been feathered.\nAs we see in this comic, and will see in future comics, even though it had been approximately thirteen years since he presumably first saw the film, Randall apparently has lived in perpetual fear of a real raptor attack. Specifically, in this comic, he worries how a building would stand up against the creatures. The main risk posed by the house depicted comes by the large window in the living room, through which a Velociraptor could break-and-enter (believing that the bathroom window is too high for them to reach, and the door too secure to break through).\nThe image text points out what he presumes is the reader's disbelief that Jurassic Park had (as of 2006) been released so long ago (thirteen years prior). This is another classic xkcd premise that will later be the subject of 891: Movie Ages five years later, which includes Jurassic Park again. This is the first in a long line of comments and comics Randall has made about how realizing the release dates of things in popular culture can make us feel old.\n[Picture of a suburban house, with lines pointing to various aspects.]\nHigh bathroom window: probably secure.\nOuter door: secure.\nPicture window: VELOCIRAPTOR ENTRY POINT!\nIt's been over a decade since Jurassic Park opened, and I still size up buildings for their potential as shelter against Velociraptor attacks.\nThis comic marks the first reference in xkcd to Jurassic Park , and specifically to Randall 's fear of velociraptors . The fear will continue to be a subject of future comics and running jokes.\n"}
{"id":88,"title":"Escher Bracelet","image_title":"Escher Bracelet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/88","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/escher_wristband.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/88:_Escher_Bracelet","transcript":"[A Livestrong-type bracelet is featured, but with an Escher twist in it. The band is a Mobius strip. The band has the letters \"WWED\" printed on it.] What Would Escher Do?\n","explanation":"This image parodies \"WWJD\" bracelets, which is an acronym for \"What Would Jesus Do?\". Christians (primarily) wear such bracelets (or other \"WWJD\" paraphernalia) as a reminder to act in a way that Jesus would act, which presumably is the \"Christian\" way to act. It is not entirely clear, but this particular bracelet appears to be the rubber type most famously popularized by the yellow ones of cyclist Lance Armstrong's Livestrong charity, which later became a popular fad for all sorts of charitable and non-charitable causes.\nIn this comic, the \"J\" has been replaced by an \"E\" for M. C. Escher , a Dutch graphic artist (1898\u20131972) best known for art containing imagery that would be impossible in the real world (often referred to as impossible constructions or optical illusions). Among his most famous works are \" Drawing Hands \" \u2013 two hands drawing each other on paper; \" Relativity \", in which a series of staircases and arches come from the floor, ceiling, and the walls in all directions, each with people standing on them as if each direction is \"down\"; and \" Ascending and Descending \" \u2013 a building with a staircase on its roof that is a closed square that appears to ascend or descend infinitely, depending on the direction that is walked.\nIn keeping with Escher's art, the WWED bracelet has a single half-twist in it, creating what is known as a Mobius strip . Although this is not an impossible construction, it is still an apparently confusing structure that Escher used in his art. Most notably, his work \"Mobius Strip II\" depicts ants crawling around a Mobius strip. One can create this shape simply by taking a strip of paper (or any bendable material), making a half twist, and attaching the ends together. If you draw a single continuous line starting down the centre of the bracelet from the middle of the \"W\" going left, you will end up drawing from the \"WWED\", going around again on the \"inside\" of the bracelet, before coming back around to the front again and ending up at the \"D\". In other words, the surface of the bracelet has only one side (the front and the back are the same side). The phrase \"the only downside\" in the image-text may be a pun referencing this one-sidedness. As the title text suggests, the twist in the bracelet might make it uncomfortable to wear.\n[A Livestrong-type bracelet is featured, but with an Escher twist in it. The band is a Mobius strip. The band has the letters \"WWED\" printed on it.] What Would Escher Do?\n"}
{"id":89,"title":"Gravitational Mass","image_title":"Gravitational Mass","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/89","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gravitational_mass.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/89:_Gravitational_Mass","transcript":"[Black Hat standing.] Black Hat: Gravitational mass is identical to inertial mass. That is, the amount of inertia something has and the amount of gravity it has are effectively the same. What's interesting is that there doesn't seem to be any reason this should be true. One could imagine an extremely large object with lots of resistance to force and no gravity (or vice versa), but this is never observed. [Black Hat still standing. The panel is now shorter.] Black Hat: You know what? I'm just gonna skip the rest of the buildup and say it: Yo mama's fat.","explanation":"Black Hat launches into what appears to be an in-depth exposition about the relativity of gravity and inertia. However, it transpires that this is just a convoluted build-up to a Yo' Momma joke along the lines of \"she's fat and not that attractive.\" Black Hat then can't be bothered with, or can't figure out, the lengthy route to his punchline, so just goes for a straightforward insult instead.\nA well known joke format goes: \"Yo' momma's so fat, when she X, she Y.\" For example: \"Yo' momma's so fat, when she sits around the house, she sits around the house!\" Variations play with the format, for example: \"Yo' momma's so fat, she fell in the Grand Canyon and got stuck!\"  A \"Yo' Momma\" joke also appears in comic 681: Gravity Wells to the right of Jupiter.\nThe title text is a play on the law of gravitational attraction, which diminishes as the square of the distance, so if the distance between two objects doubles, the attraction is reduced to a quarter, and if the distance is halved, the attraction quadruples. Black Hat is saying that the attraction goes up as the cube, so if the distance is halved, the attraction increases eight-fold, and decreases eight-fold when the distance doubles. This implies that \"your momma is so fat, she breaks the laws of physics (and does so in a way that she isn't as attractive as physics would dictate, given enough distance).\" The title text is slightly ambiguous; it seems to say that as distance increases, the attraction increases, but it doesn't explicitly state whether the distance is increasing or decreasing.\nNote: Contrary to Black Hat's explanation, and as per Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity , the reason that objects have equal gravitational and inertial mass is that anything with mass or energy causes a warping of space-time that causes all other objects (including such objects that classically shouldn't be affected, like photons) to experience the same gravitational acceleration.\n[Black Hat standing.] Black Hat: Gravitational mass is identical to inertial mass. That is, the amount of inertia something has and the amount of gravity it has are effectively the same. What's interesting is that there doesn't seem to be any reason this should be true. One could imagine an extremely large object with lots of resistance to force and no gravity (or vice versa), but this is never observed. [Black Hat still standing. The panel is now shorter.] Black Hat: You know what? I'm just gonna skip the rest of the buildup and say it: Yo mama's fat."}
{"id":90,"title":"Jacket","image_title":"Jacket","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/90","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jacket.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/90:_Jacket","transcript":"[Two men stand and talk to one another.] Cueball: Where's my fucking jacket? [Friend indicates something behind him.] Friend: Over there, next to your regular one. Cueball: My what? Friend: Never mind.\nThis comic is the second comic to use an all-caps lettering, the first being 78: Garfield , where the all-caps lettering may have been based off of the lettering in the actual comic strip.\n","explanation":"Cueball clearly means to use fucking as an intensifier. However, the friend (likely intentionally in response to the unnecessary swearing) takes fucking to be an identifier of which jacket is being discussed, and gives a smart-aleck response. His counterpart gets confused by the sarcasm, and the topic is dismissed.\nThe title text states that this often occurs in Cueball\/Randall's apartment.\n[Two men stand and talk to one another.] Cueball: Where's my fucking jacket? [Friend indicates something behind him.] Friend: Over there, next to your regular one. Cueball: My what? Friend: Never mind.\nThis comic is the second comic to use an all-caps lettering, the first being 78: Garfield , where the all-caps lettering may have been based off of the lettering in the actual comic strip.\n"}
{"id":91,"title":"Pwned","image_title":"Pwned","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/91","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pwned.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/91:_Pwned","transcript":"Welcome to text-only Counterstrike. You are in a dark, outdoor map. > GO NORTH You have been pwned by a grue.\n","explanation":"In the days of early personal computers, such as the IBM-XT, Atari, or C64, games were largely text-based adventure games . Those games were based on an interactive story, and the player had to solve a puzzle on this by communicating to the application using only a keyboard or, later, a mouse. Play was turn-based (like chess): the computer displayed some textual context, you entered a command (GO <direction>, TAKE <object>, KILL <person>, LOOK AT <object>, etc.), and the computer responded by giving the outcome of your command. This sparse context arose from the fact that games in the 1970s and 1980s needed to run on limited memory and microprocessor capacity, and on basic displays.\nOver the following 20 years, technical advances allowed games to run in a real-time graphical context. Adventure games were largely displaced by other genres, including Role Playing Games (RPG) , where the player navigates a character through a graphical environment to achieve goals or gain in abilities, often involving a combat component. While the broad structure of these has a lot of similarity to adventure games, the experience is very different.\nZork is a classic example of a text-adventure game franchise. In the Zork games, players have to evade predators known as grues, which fear light, but love to devour adventurers entering the dark. Therefore, you cannot win the game without owning some light source.\n\"Counterstrike\" is a reference to the Half-Life mod Counter-Strike and its subsequent sequel. In the Counter-Strike series, you are either a terrorist or a counter-terrorist operative, and your goal is to stop the other from completing their objective. On a dark map, players would generally use night vision goggles, which don't produce light that would give away their position to the enemy.\nRandall imagines a version of Counterstrike played in the text-context of Zork. Ironically, the outcome is not so different to what might be a typical experience of Counterstrike gameplay, particularly for inexperienced players: on starting the game, the player moves to another room and is immediately \" pwned \" (a typical online gaming term meaning beaten, killed, or trapped\/tricked) by an enemy.\nIn the title text, Randall suggests that a comparison of the genres, analyzing the reasons why RPGs have proved more popular, would make an interesting study. His imagined example suggests that what has been gained in immersive environments may have been lost in complexity of story and gameplay.\nWelcome to text-only Counterstrike. You are in a dark, outdoor map. > GO NORTH You have been pwned by a grue.\n"}
{"id":92,"title":"Sunrise","image_title":"Sunrise","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/92","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sunrise.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/92:_Sunrise","transcript":"[Hairy is on the street. Behind him is a house with a lawn.] Hairy (thinking): I love the time just before sunrise. It's quiet; no one is ever just walking about. Hairy (thinking): It's like a secret Hairy (thinking): I always hope that I'll find someone else quietly hiding from sleep, and we'll see each other and sit and talk. Hairy (thinking): I guess this is a bad place to meet people. Hairy (thinking): I wish it weren't.\n[Hairy goes into the house, brushes his teeth, shaves his head (?), and leaves the house again.]\n[Hairy is at a club, disco balls in the ceiling and a giant woofer. Many people are dancing around him.]\n","explanation":"This comic is about the desire for an intimate connection with another, and the compromises we make to not be alone.\nHairy finds a certain beauty in the way the world looks without billions of humans crawling around on it. He thinks of this as a secret place that thrills him. He is excited about the remote chance of finding someone like him who appreciates its beauty. But he realizes that it's the very thing that makes this time beautiful to him that makes his imagined chance encounter exceedingly unlikely. Reconciled to the fact that he will not find a kindred spirit outside this morning, he heads back home.\nAt the house, he gets ready and drives to a club to meet people. The club is drawn using an inverted color scheme (white people, black background) to emphasize that it is the opposite of the 4am outside world. The club is dark and full of people, who are the lightest things present, where outside, the natural beauty shines without interruption by human forms. Hairy is seen alone in the middle of the crowd.\nThe title text is a reference to a common music video scene (sometimes country music videos) where people play the guitar on parking garages as the sun rises.\n[Hairy is on the street. Behind him is a house with a lawn.] Hairy (thinking): I love the time just before sunrise. It's quiet; no one is ever just walking about. Hairy (thinking): It's like a secret Hairy (thinking): I always hope that I'll find someone else quietly hiding from sleep, and we'll see each other and sit and talk. Hairy (thinking): I guess this is a bad place to meet people. Hairy (thinking): I wish it weren't.\n[Hairy goes into the house, brushes his teeth, shaves his head (?), and leaves the house again.]\n[Hairy is at a club, disco balls in the ceiling and a giant woofer. Many people are dancing around him.]\n"}
{"id":93,"title":"Jeremy Irons","image_title":"Jeremy Irons","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/93","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jeremy_irons.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/93:_Jeremy_Irons","transcript":"[Cueball points at Megan with his mouth open. Jeremy Irons stands behind him.] Jeremy Irons: But as THICK as you are, pay attention Jeremy Irons: My words are a matter of PRIDE!\nMy goal: To make enough money to hire Jeremy Irons, the voice of Scar from The Lion King , to follow me around and do my dialogue.\n","explanation":"Similar to the \" My Hobby \" series, this comic depicts one of Randall 's goals in life: He wants to hire Academy-Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons to deliver all of Randall's dialogue in life (while Randall, perhaps, lip syncs it). He is apparently basing this desire on the fact that Irons, a classically trained English actor, portrayed Scar, the main antagonist in the 1994 Disney animated feature The Lion King .\nThe line spoken in the comic is from the song \" Be Prepared \", which Scar sings in the film. Thus, it's not entirely clear whether Randall enjoys Irons's deep, rumbling British-accented voice, or whether it's Scar's dialogue in the film that Randall truly would like to be speaking.\nThe title text suggests that Randall knows the dialogue of The Lion King from memory; it also suggests that there are others he knows as well. He is around the appropriate age to have been in the target market for the film (he would have been around 10 at the time) and probably saw it many times.\n[Cueball points at Megan with his mouth open. Jeremy Irons stands behind him.] Jeremy Irons: But as THICK as you are, pay attention Jeremy Irons: My words are a matter of PRIDE!\nMy goal: To make enough money to hire Jeremy Irons, the voice of Scar from The Lion King , to follow me around and do my dialogue.\n"}
{"id":94,"title":"Profile Creation Flowchart","image_title":"Profile Creation Flowchart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/94","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/profile_flowchart.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/94:_Profile_Creation_Flowchart","transcript":"[A flowchart is shown.]\nHave Friends? \u2192 No \u2192 Link to your LiveJournal Have Friends? \u2192 Yes, and want to alienate everyone else \u2192 Inside jokes! Have Friends? \u2192 Yes \u2192 Have Boyfriend\/ Girlfriend? \u2192 No \u2192 Angsty about it? \u2192 Yes \u2192 Link to your LiveJournal No \u2192 Yes you are \u2192 Angsty about it? Yes \u2192 A profile tribute is the greatest possible expression of love.\n","explanation":"AIM (short for AOL Instant Messenger, now defunct) offered its users profile pages to share info about themselves or their friends. Randall notes that these pages fall into one of three categories:\nBoth AIM and LiveJournal were known for their teenage user base, as shown by the title text's fictional AIM screen name.\nThe title text seems to reference the kind of behavior someone with a tribute page would display, but is actually an example of an inside joke, for cartoonists.  The text comes from Natalie Dee Comic 956, from January 8, 2006 , a few months before this XKCD comic was published on April 26 of the same year.\n[A flowchart is shown.]\nHave Friends? \u2192 No \u2192 Link to your LiveJournal Have Friends? \u2192 Yes, and want to alienate everyone else \u2192 Inside jokes! Have Friends? \u2192 Yes \u2192 Have Boyfriend\/ Girlfriend? \u2192 No \u2192 Angsty about it? \u2192 Yes \u2192 Link to your LiveJournal No \u2192 Yes you are \u2192 Angsty about it? Yes \u2192 A profile tribute is the greatest possible expression of love.\n"}
{"id":95,"title":"The Sierpinski Penis Game","image_title":"The Sierpinski Penis Game","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/95","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_sierpinski_penis_game.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/95:_The_Sierpinski_Penis_Game","transcript":"[A large triangle, point down, is shown, with many smaller triangles inside all pointing up. There is one large triangle in the middle, with 3 medium triangles on either side and three triangles on either of their sides as well, for a total of 9. This trend then continues three more times, with 27 around the nine and 81 around those. Finally, there were supposed to be 243 (3x81) very small filling out all the space outside the larger triangles, but staying inside the original triangle. But there seem to be missing three of these near the top. Two of those are on either side of the first (top left) of the nine triangles of size 3, as well as one to the left of the top of the top right second largest triangle. But there is also one extra triangle just below the P in the bottom triangle with a sentence. That would have been the first of the next level of 3*243=729 triangles in level 7. But it is the only one. So 240 small triangles plus 1 even tinier for a total of 362 inside the largest framing triangle.]\n[There is a word inside the largest of the triangles and a sentence in the largest triangle below that triangle.] Penis! Haha, penis.\n","explanation":"The Chaos Game is a method of generating a fractal by repeatedly applying randomly-chosen transformation functions to a point and plotting the position of the new point each time. The transformation functions are randomly chosen from a small, predefined list. The surprising result of this is that, even though the functions are picked randomly, a distinctly non-random fractal image emerges. The exact nature of this image depends on the list of transformation functions used.\nOne such fractal that can be produced by the Chaos Game is the Sierpinski Triangle , which is the fractal pictured in this comic. See details in this video .\nThe Penis Game, on the other hand, is a childish activity where people (usually schoolchildren) compete to shout \"Penis!\" increasingly loudly in the presence of an authority figure (usually a teacher) without getting in trouble.\nThe two games could be said to be similar in that they both involve iterations of transformations; in the Chaos Game, a point's position is transformed (moving it closer and closer to the attractor set of the transformations); in the Penis game, the volume of the phrase \"Penis!\" is transformed (becoming louder and louder). The difference is that the Chaos Game works by negative feedback (eventually settling down into a well-defined image) whereas the Penis Game involves positive feedback (at some point, the cry of \"Penis!\" will become loud enough that the culprit will get in trouble and the game will end). Nonetheless, they could be vaguely considered inverses of each other, and Randall appears to be conflating the two in this comic.\nThe title text mentions two inappropriate places to play the Penis Game. A baby shower is supposed to be a celebration of childbirth or pregnancy, so it would be an inappropriate place for such crude humor. A terrorist attack is typically a time in which lives are lost, so it would be very immature to play such a crude game. The title text may also be calling attention to the fact that a mathematical object such as a fractal is also an inappropriate place in which to be playing the Penis Game.\n[A large triangle, point down, is shown, with many smaller triangles inside all pointing up. There is one large triangle in the middle, with 3 medium triangles on either side and three triangles on either of their sides as well, for a total of 9. This trend then continues three more times, with 27 around the nine and 81 around those. Finally, there were supposed to be 243 (3x81) very small filling out all the space outside the larger triangles, but staying inside the original triangle. But there seem to be missing three of these near the top. Two of those are on either side of the first (top left) of the nine triangles of size 3, as well as one to the left of the top of the top right second largest triangle. But there is also one extra triangle just below the P in the bottom triangle with a sentence. That would have been the first of the next level of 3*243=729 triangles in level 7. But it is the only one. So 240 small triangles plus 1 even tinier for a total of 362 inside the largest framing triangle.]\n[There is a word inside the largest of the triangles and a sentence in the largest triangle below that triangle.] Penis! Haha, penis.\n"}
{"id":96,"title":"Mail","image_title":"Mail","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/96","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mail.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/96:_Mail","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to someone through a phone.] Phone: Do you think I could mail a running chainsaw to someone? Cueball: I doubt it Phone: What about a baby's first word? Cueball: Look, your obsession with sending strange things through the mail is getting out of hand.\nPhone: Can you mail a blank stare? Phone: A dizzying height? Phone: Pi? Cueball: ...\nPhone: Well, did you at least get that package of time I sent you? Cueball: I... you... no, I didn't. Phone: Well, there was a lot of it, so it will probably take a while\n","explanation":"Cueball 's interlocutor is working their way through a list of increasingly impractical or impossible suggestions for things to send through postal mail. The pay-off is that they have already somehow sent a package of time through the mail, and this is taking a while to arrive, presumably because the amount of time it will take to reach the recipient is equal to the amount of time being sent. By the time it reaches Cueball, the time will have passed, and therefore not be of much use.\nThe reference to a 'package of time' could refer to quantizing time (\"discrete packets of time\") - a theory that time is not continuous as particles in the quantum mechanics . It could be one of the big mistakes in modern science, but feels as if there's more to it, in the world of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.\nA no-fly list is a list of people who are not allowed to use commercial airlines for travel. In the United States, it is maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center . According to the title text, the person sending strange objects through mail is on a no-fly list for the United States Postal Service (USPS). While the USPS has a list of items banned from being shipped in the mail, which includes most consumer electronics with lithium batteries, it does not have such a list for people. This could suggest that this person has attempted to send so many strange items that USPS will no longer accept mail from him, or it could imply that they attempted, at one point, to send themselves via air mail, and have been banned from doing so again.\nThis comic might be related to W. Reginald Bray , an Englishman from the turn of the 20th century, who was famous for mailing unusual objects (including himself) to experiment with the postal system.\nA list of the things:\n[Cueball is talking to someone through a phone.] Phone: Do you think I could mail a running chainsaw to someone? Cueball: I doubt it Phone: What about a baby's first word? Cueball: Look, your obsession with sending strange things through the mail is getting out of hand.\nPhone: Can you mail a blank stare? Phone: A dizzying height? Phone: Pi? Cueball: ...\nPhone: Well, did you at least get that package of time I sent you? Cueball: I... you... no, I didn't. Phone: Well, there was a lot of it, so it will probably take a while\n"}
{"id":97,"title":"A Simple Plan","image_title":"A Simple Plan","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/97","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/a_simple_plan.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/97:_A_Simple_Plan","transcript":"[Cueball, standing in front of stool with a radio on it.] Radio: You don't know what it's like to be me! [Caption below the panel:] At first, I loved A Simple Plan . Then I realized, with creeping horror, that they were serious.\n","explanation":"The song on the radio is \" Welcome to My Life \" by Simple Plan (not A Simple Plan), which was released in 2004 as a first single from the band's second album \" Still Not Getting Any... \" The lyrics of the song mainly deal with the frustration of adolescence and the stress of newfound independence. Many, if not all, adolescents go through a phase where the ongoing realization of becoming fully responsible for their body, mind, and personality frightens them.\nSimple Plan's lyrics seem particularly inappropriate and ridiculous, given that the members of the band are all in their 30s. The absurdity of middle-aged men expressing teen angst could be interpreted as a spoof or parody, which Cueball mistakenly believes to be the truth. In the comic, Cueball slowly comes to the horrifying realization that the members of the band are actually seriously whining about the typical life of a spoiled teenager, rather than parodying them.\nIn the title text, Randall states that this was his own reaction to the song, and that he now considers it ridiculous.\n[Cueball, standing in front of stool with a radio on it.] Radio: You don't know what it's like to be me! [Caption below the panel:] At first, I loved A Simple Plan . Then I realized, with creeping horror, that they were serious.\n"}
{"id":98,"title":"Fall Apart","image_title":"Fall Apart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/98","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fall_apart.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/98:_Fall_Apart","transcript":"[Various people struggle as the comic disintegrates. Toward the top, people are standing calmly, some holding hands. As the parts of the comic break apart, people try to reach for each other, hold parts together, or curl up into a ball. By the bottom, a Cueball is falling, surrounded by pieces of the comic.]\n","explanation":"Despite Randall being enthusiastic about receiving ink pens, his first experiment with them has resulted in a rather bleak comic.\nInstead of multiple panels, the entire comic is a single drawing, with an apparent passage of time as we travel down the page. The frame, which represents the world of the characters, gradually disintegrates and leaves them falling helplessly. At the top, we see some people standing alone, apparently happy enough, and a couple. As we descend the page, we see examples of a couple split by a narrow chasm, someone huddled isolated and alone on their own world fragment, a couple desperately trying to hang on to each other, and a single figure falling chaotically and without control.\nThe comic seems to be expressing what it feels like to someone when a relationship breaks up \u2014 their world falls apart, and one of the implications is that the process cannot easily be reversed. In short, it is catastrophic.\nThe identity of '#pugglewumper Tashari,' the supplier of the pens, is not known. Judging by the use of the hash sign, it is someone with whom Randall communicates in IRC . In fact, 'pugglewump' appears to be an IRC channel. Although hashtags later came to be strongly associated with Twitter , this was not true at the time the comic was drawn.\n[Various people struggle as the comic disintegrates. Toward the top, people are standing calmly, some holding hands. As the parts of the comic break apart, people try to reach for each other, hold parts together, or curl up into a ball. By the bottom, a Cueball is falling, surrounded by pieces of the comic.]\n"}
{"id":99,"title":"Binary Heart","image_title":"Binary Heart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/99","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/binary_heart.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/99:_Binary_Heart","transcript":"[All the numbers are black except for a heart-shaped red section in the middle.]\n","explanation":"An array of zeros and ones is depicted, 21 across by 23 down. Some of the zeros and ones are red instead of black to form the shape of a Valentine heart.\nThe digits themselves are an ASCII bit stream reading:\nThe final octet is incomplete, but the three bits that are present are consistent with the start of an \"e\".\nThe mixture of upper-case and lower-case \"O\"s is presumed intentional to avoid a repeating pattern.\n[All the numbers are black except for a heart-shaped red section in the middle.]\n"}
{"id":100,"title":"Family Circus","image_title":"Family Circus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/100","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/family_circus.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/100:_Family_Circus","transcript":"[Picture shows a pathway winding through trees to a sink inside a house, out to some swings and back to the sink, out to a ball and back to the sink, then on into the house.] Jeffy's ongoing struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder\n","explanation":"The Family Circus is a comic characterized by single-panel round comics with a caption below the comic. Jeffy is a character in Family Circus , and dotted lines representing his wanderings are a frequent theme of Family Circus comics. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental illness that compels the sufferer to perform repetitive actions. Common symptoms include, but are not restricted to, excessive hand washing and repeated opening and closing of a door.\nThe comic depicts the character Jeffy as having Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and traces his movements over a period of time. The dotted line that depicts his movements returns frequently to the kitchen sink, presumably to repeatedly wash his hands.\nIn the title text, Randall attributes this idea to the unknown friend David . He did the same in 42: Geico and 51: Malaria .\n[Picture shows a pathway winding through trees to a sink inside a house, out to some swings and back to the sink, out to a ball and back to the sink, then on into the house.] Jeffy's ongoing struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder\n"}
{"id":101,"title":"Laser Scope","image_title":"Laser Scope","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/101","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/laser_scope.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/101:_Laser_Scope","transcript":"[Box with a mailing label on one side, and in the front:] Miss your loved ones? [Picture of a laser scope.] YOU DON'T HAVE TO. RJX-21 Laser Scope\n","explanation":"This comic plays on the homonymic relationship between \"miss\" (to feel sad due to the absence of someone) and \"miss\" (to fail to hit \u2013 in this case, with a gunshot). \"Miss your loved ones?\" is a question that would generally use the former \"miss.\" However, its use on the package for a laser scope implies the latter \"miss.\"\nA sighting scope can be attached to a firearm to aid in aiming the weapon. The addition of a laser improves the accuracy of the weapon by making it easier to aim consistently. The model number RJX-21 does not appear to be a reference to anything, and this comic is primarily a play on a common marketing technique of adapting a common saying to your own product by use of homonym or homophone ; in this case, it is perhaps an inappropriate use, as one would not be expected to be aiming a firearm at their loved ones.  In real life, this would imply a serious family breakdown with extreme feelings of pain and revenge, which is actually a tragically sad story, not the normal fodder for a light-hearted joke.\nThe title text hammers it home with the dual use of the word \"miss,\" as the writer wishes he had missed (failed in his attempt to shoot) someone so they would not miss them (feel bad that they are not there), implying that he shot a family member, and is now feeling the grief. The humor here is that the writer apparently still cares about his loved one, despite having attempted to shoot them in the past.\n[Box with a mailing label on one side, and in the front:] Miss your loved ones? [Picture of a laser scope.] YOU DON'T HAVE TO. RJX-21 Laser Scope\n"}
{"id":102,"title":"Back to the Future","image_title":"Back to the Future","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/102","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/back_to_the_future.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/102:_Back_to_the_Future","transcript":"[Megan and Hairy are standing, talking to one another.] Hairy: This weekend, my professor friend built a time machine out of a DeLorean and I went back in time! I helped make sure my parents got together and helped my dad to be less of a loser.\nMegan: Wow! Do you still have the time machine? Hairy: Nah. But I did what I really needed to do. Megan: Uh huh.\n[Beat panel. Hairy's hair isn't drawn in this panel or the next one, making him a Cueball.]\nMegan: Okay, you remember that my father was in the WTC North Tower, right? Cueball: Yeah...why? Megan: I...nothing.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the Back to the Future film series (specifically the first film) in which the protagonist, Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox ), travels back from 1985 (present day for him) to 1955 and accidentally interferes with his own parents' first meeting. He must then arrange for them to fall in love before he ceases to exist due to the paradox of his own parents never having children. An unintended side-effect of the way events occur is that his dad gains self-confidence in the past and becomes \"less of a loser\" in the present.\nAs noted in the comic, the time machine Marty uses is built by his professor friend, Doctor Emmett L. Brown ( Christopher Lloyd ), out of a DeLorean DMC-12 (a 1980s-era sports car).\nHairy ( Cueball in the last two panels, as the art is inconsistent in this early comic, and his hair is removed in the last two panels) has had a very similar experience. He suggests that the aforementioned changes to history are what he really needed to do. After a frame of awkward silence, Megan reminds him that her father was in the World Trade Center (WTC) North Tower \u2013 implying that he died along with several thousand others in the North Tower on September 11, 2001 at the time the tower collapsed due to a terrorist-flown passenger jet crashing into the building. Megan is therefore implying that saving her father's life (and perhaps the lives of the other 9\/11 victims, or even preventing other disasters in history, such as the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, or the holocaust) might have been something else of importance he \"needed\" to do \u2014 perhaps something of significantly more importance than just helping his father. He seems completely oblivious to what she is trying to suggest. Megan starts to explain, but apparently decides that there's no point even trying to get through to him.\nThe title text is calling Marty McFly an asshole for not doing something more benevolent for humankind when he travelled back in time, just as the comic implies of Hairy\/Cueball. It can also be seen as someone (presumably Hairy\/Cueball) trying to justify the choice, by saying that Megan's dad was \"kind of an asshole.\"\nAs a side note, for the comic to make sense, the events in the comic must take place after September 11, 2001 , and not 1985 as it is in the movie. Since no dates are mentioned, Hairy\/Cueball probably went back by thirty years, because that's how far back Marty travels in the film.\n[Megan and Hairy are standing, talking to one another.] Hairy: This weekend, my professor friend built a time machine out of a DeLorean and I went back in time! I helped make sure my parents got together and helped my dad to be less of a loser.\nMegan: Wow! Do you still have the time machine? Hairy: Nah. But I did what I really needed to do. Megan: Uh huh.\n[Beat panel. Hairy's hair isn't drawn in this panel or the next one, making him a Cueball.]\nMegan: Okay, you remember that my father was in the WTC North Tower, right? Cueball: Yeah...why? Megan: I...nothing.\n"}
{"id":103,"title":"Moral Relativity","image_title":"Moral Relativity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/103","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/moral_relativity.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/103:_Moral_Relativity","transcript":"[A graph, rationalization as a function of speed, increasing asymptotically at c .] Related to moral relativism, it states that ethics become subjective only when you approach the speed of light. That is, it's okay to be self-serving, steal, and murder as long as you're going really, really fast. (Note: This is why rap sounds better on the highway at 90 mph)\n","explanation":"This comic plays on the similar sounding terms relativ ity and relativ ism .\nMoral relativism is a position in the philosophical field of ethics that holds that moral judgments are not absolute, but vary depending on the circumstances involved and the person (or people) making them. Philosophers who hold this kind of position are often mischaracterised as believing that 'it's OK to be self-serving, steal, and murder.'\nThe scientific theory of relativity predicts (among other things) that measurements of an object change the closer to the speed of light it travels: length contracts, observed time slows down, the notion of separated simultaneous events is relative, and so on.\nRandall claims to have created a new philosophy called \"Moral Relativity,\" which appears to be a mash-up of the two ideas, where things that are typically considered unethical become more acceptable as the subject's speed increases. This supposed theory of ethics is cited to explain why rap music, perhaps particularly Gangsta rap , which often has lyrics describing rape, murder, and substance abuse, is better when traveling at speed. Music videos for Gangsta Rap also frequently feature cars speeding on the highway. The graph is a parody on that of the Lorentz factor , which is the factor by which time is dilated and length contracted.\nNote that relativity in the Theory of Relativity (in physics ) came from the principle of relativity : the idea that equations describing the laws of physics have the same form in all admissible frames of reference (as opposed to moral relativity).\n[A graph, rationalization as a function of speed, increasing asymptotically at c .] Related to moral relativism, it states that ethics become subjective only when you approach the speed of light. That is, it's okay to be self-serving, steal, and murder as long as you're going really, really fast. (Note: This is why rap sounds better on the highway at 90 mph)\n"}
{"id":104,"title":"Find You","image_title":"Find You","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/104","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/find_you.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/104:_Find_You","transcript":"[The panel is black with rough-edged white passages running down through it. Cueball is climbing onto a rope that is dangling down one of these passages. White text is in the black sections.] You were afraid that you would disappear, that you would be lost and forgotten. I held you tight against the dark and said that I would always come for you. Then one day it happened. You were torn from my arms and vanished from this world. Maybe you don't remember my promise. But I meant every word. I hope you're not afraid, wherever you are. You don't need to be. I'm not. I will find you.\nFor technical reasons (see discussion, below) the image may display inverted.\n","explanation":"This comic depicts Cueball climbing on a rope in a cavern. The text indicates that one of his loved ones used to be afraid of being taken away from him and being forgotten. It is not explicitly made clear whether the loved one in question is a woman with whom he is in love, a family member, or a relation of some other kind, but presumably the loved one is his partner.\nCueball had promised that he would always come looking for this person, but then they were actually taken from him. He reiterates that he was serious about his promise, and that he hopes they are not afraid, because he's coming to find them.\nIt's not clear exactly in what manner his loved one was taken from him, only that they were torn from his arms and vanished from this world. Though there are many other possible interpretations, this might be read to indicate that they have died and that Cueball is descending a cavern in search of the underworld where they have been taken.\nThe title text compares Cueball to the apparently unstoppable Terminator, from the 1984 film of the same name, in which Kyle Reese, talking to Sarah Connor, gives the following description of the Terminator: \"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.\" The implication is that Cueball, motivated by love, can't be persuaded to stop looking for his loved one by any means, and that he will never stop looking until he finds them.\n[The panel is black with rough-edged white passages running down through it. Cueball is climbing onto a rope that is dangling down one of these passages. White text is in the black sections.] You were afraid that you would disappear, that you would be lost and forgotten. I held you tight against the dark and said that I would always come for you. Then one day it happened. You were torn from my arms and vanished from this world. Maybe you don't remember my promise. But I meant every word. I hope you're not afraid, wherever you are. You don't need to be. I'm not. I will find you.\nFor technical reasons (see discussion, below) the image may display inverted.\n"}
{"id":105,"title":"Parallel Universe","image_title":"Parallel Universe","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/105","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/parallel_universe.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/105:_Parallel_Universe","transcript":"[Cueball and Hairy are standing next to a large pentagram with candles at the points. A figure is hovering above it in a wave of energy.] Cueball: Sweet. I summoned myself from a parallel universe. Hairy: You know, he could vanish at any moment. Hairy: You should take this chance to make out with yourself. Hairy: . . . You know, I could vanish at any moment.\n","explanation":"Cueball has (by some ritual, judging by the pentagram ) summoned himself from a parallel universe . Hairy suggests that Cueball should take advantage of this rare opportunity and make out with his other self.\nIn the third panel, Cueball seems to turn his head in response to the unexpected response. Hairy suggests that Cueball should make out with him instead, since he could also vanish at any moment. This indicates that Hairy may be attracted to Cueball, and he may have made the previous suggestion with the ulterior, voyeuristic motive of observing two attractive people making out with each other.\nThe title text is ambiguous. It could mean that Cueball should not risk his other self disappearing, or it could mean that the risk is Hairy disappearing.\nAlternative explanation\nBy a very big stretch of imagination, we can think that the other person is Megan instead of Hairy (i.e. a female instead of a male).\nIf the character is Megan, the third panel is her having reconsidered that she would rather Cueball not make out with anyone other than her, by threatening that she would leave him.\nThe title text does not help in deciding if this alternative is correct or not. If it is Megan, Cueball should stay safe and not make out with himself. If it is not, he should play it safe and make out now, before his alternate self goes back to the parallel universe.\nAll this ambiguity suggests a third joke. Perhaps there are two universes that this is playing out in: in one of them the character is Megan; in the other it is not.\nIt could also be that the parallel universe that the comic takes place in is not that of the normal comics, and that the Cueball summoned could be of the standard comics. In this universe, Hairy could be the replacement for Megan.\nMaking out with yourself is also mentioned in 267: Choices: Part 4 .\n[Cueball and Hairy are standing next to a large pentagram with candles at the points. A figure is hovering above it in a wave of energy.] Cueball: Sweet. I summoned myself from a parallel universe. Hairy: You know, he could vanish at any moment. Hairy: You should take this chance to make out with yourself. Hairy: . . . You know, I could vanish at any moment.\n"}
{"id":106,"title":"Wright Brothers","image_title":"Wright Brothers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/106","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wright_brothers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/106:_Wright_Brothers","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking to each other.] Cueball: I've heard that when the Wright brothers argued, they periodically switched sides in the debate to try to encourage a more balanced conclusion. Cueball: We should try that in our relationship!\nMegan: It's a neat idea, but I think treating personal issues like a debate will only engender hostility and hurt feelings.\nCueball: No, I think it would help, by forcing us to consider the other person's point of view.\nMegan: Hmm, maybe you're right. Cueball: Am not. It's a bad idea.\n","explanation":"The Wright brothers are Orville and Wilbur Wright, who are credited with the invention of the airplane and  the first \"controlled, powered, and sustained heavier-than-air human flight\" in 1903.\nCueball mentions to Megan that the Wright Brothers would sometimes argue each other's point during debates in order to \"encourage a more balanced debate\" \u2013 presumably so both brothers would explore all of the arguments on both sides. Megan is initially against the idea, stating that treating emotionally-charged personal issues as if they were academic debates would not work. Cueball argues that it would force each person to consider the other's point of view. However, when Megan reconsiders, accepts his argument, and appears to agree that they should try it, Cueball abruptly switches his position to thinking that it's a terrible idea. The joke is that once Megan agrees with him, he employs his Wright Brothers suggestion and takes her initial position that the idea was bad. Thus, the two have switched their arguments and are now exploring the other sides. They may continue in this way to form a well balanced conclusion on the proposal or continually switch sides without ever concluding the argument.\nThe title text suggests that Randall may either be misremembering the fact that the Wright brothers used this technique, or not be convinced that the source is reliable, but has decided to assume it is true just so that he could make the joke in this comic.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking to each other.] Cueball: I've heard that when the Wright brothers argued, they periodically switched sides in the debate to try to encourage a more balanced conclusion. Cueball: We should try that in our relationship!\nMegan: It's a neat idea, but I think treating personal issues like a debate will only engender hostility and hurt feelings.\nCueball: No, I think it would help, by forcing us to consider the other person's point of view.\nMegan: Hmm, maybe you're right. Cueball: Am not. It's a bad idea.\n"}
{"id":107,"title":"Snakes on a Plane! 2","image_title":"Snakes on a Plane! 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/107","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snakes_on_a_plane_2.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/107:_Snakes_on_a_Plane!_2","transcript":"[A sky full of jumbo jets is shown in movie poster format.] Top of the poster: From the creators of last summer's hit thriller Snakes On a Plane comes: Superimposed on the sky and planes: Snakes... on EVERY Plane! Much worse than last time.\n","explanation":"Snakes on a Plane is a 2006 movie starring Samuel L. Jackson . It features (surprisingly) snakes, on a plane, attacking the passengers. This comic proposes a sequel, taking the idea to the next level, making things infinitely worse: snakes on every plane!\nTo have snakes on every plane is much worse than snakes on just one, [ citation needed ] as many more innocent bystanders would be injured or killed, and the entire aviation industry would be destroyed. Plus it would be difficult, as there were hundreds of snakes in a single plane in the first movie, so finding enough snakes would be a challenge itself. Since the original movie was generally considered to be quite bad, there is an implied double meaning in the suggested poster, that the movie itself would be \"Much Worse Than Last Time.\"\nIn the title text, Randall credits James with the idea.\n[A sky full of jumbo jets is shown in movie poster format.] Top of the poster: From the creators of last summer's hit thriller Snakes On a Plane comes: Superimposed on the sky and planes: Snakes... on EVERY Plane! Much worse than last time.\n"}
{"id":108,"title":"M.C. Hammer Slide","image_title":"M.C. Hammer Slide","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/108","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mc_hammer_slide.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/108:_M.C._Hammer_Slide","transcript":"[Two guys stand next to each other talking.] Hairy: I just feel like somewhere out there is the girl for me. Cueball: Yeah. Hairy: Someone loving and caring. Cueball: I know what you mean. Hairy: A girl whose only mode of transportation is the M.C. Hammer Slide. Cueball: Yeah. Cueball: ...Wait, what? [Megan hammer slides past.] [Hairy sees Megan hammer slide and it's love at first sight.] [Megan hammer slides over into Hairy's waiting arms.]\n","explanation":"The base part of the comic is self-explanatory: Girl attracts Boy, Boy notices Girl, Boy approaches Girl, Girl reacts positively, Boy falls in love, Girl decides to answer lovecall, happily ever after, etc. The quirk in this comic is that the way Girl catches attention of Boy is through the signature move of 1980s rapper MC Hammer (the slide). To watch MC Hammer doin' the slide, click here .\nThe title text indicates that Randall once saw a girl go by and regrets that he did not speak with her as Boy does in this comic. It is possible that the girl Randall is referring to was actually doing the slide.\n[Two guys stand next to each other talking.] Hairy: I just feel like somewhere out there is the girl for me. Cueball: Yeah. Hairy: Someone loving and caring. Cueball: I know what you mean. Hairy: A girl whose only mode of transportation is the M.C. Hammer Slide. Cueball: Yeah. Cueball: ...Wait, what? [Megan hammer slides past.] [Hairy sees Megan hammer slide and it's love at first sight.] [Megan hammer slides over into Hairy's waiting arms.]\n"}
{"id":109,"title":"Spoiler Alert","image_title":"Spoiler Alert","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/109","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spoiler_alert.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/109:_Spoiler_Alert","transcript":"[At the tope of the panel there is a large heading:] Spoiler Alert!\n[Below that Severus Snape with long black hair is smacking a trenchcoat-clad Trinity off the top of a building with a brown sled. Below them is the following caption:] Snape kills Trinity with Rosebud!\n","explanation":"This comic refers to several unexpected plot twists from various Hollywood movies and combines them into one giant twist invented by Randall . A \" spoiler \" is a term used to describe information about the plot of any media that could spoil the media for someone who has not viewed it. The term \"spoiler alert\" has become popularized as a warning to potential readers used to precede such spoilers, particularly in online posting. It is also a phrase often used ironically or angrily to suggest that something someone has just said is a spoiler. It is also used jokingly to suggest that something just said (or is about to be said) was a spoiler so long ago that \"everyone\" should have heard of it by now (e.g. \"Spoiler alert, Vader is Luke's father\").\nSeverus Snape is a character from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of books.\nTrinity is a character from The Matrix trilogy of movies.\nRosebud is from the 1941 film Citizen Kane .\nFrom the title text, Tyler Durden is a character from the novel and movie Fight Club .\nAll four references share the common ground that they are all involved in significant events or ideas in their respective movies that have been often spoiled by careless viewers for those who have not yet seen the movies. Here, the relevant events are mashed together into one and spoiled in one go.\nIn this comic, Snape is depicted knocking Trinity off a high place with a wooden sled named Rosebud.\nAs mentioned above, this is an amalgamation of four spoilers from four different stories:\n[At the tope of the panel there is a large heading:] Spoiler Alert!\n[Below that Severus Snape with long black hair is smacking a trenchcoat-clad Trinity off the top of a building with a brown sled. Below them is the following caption:] Snape kills Trinity with Rosebud!\n"}
{"id":110,"title":"Clark Gable","image_title":"Clark Gable","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/110","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/clark_gable.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/110:_Clark_Gable","transcript":"[Famous image of Gone with the Wind with Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) kissing Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh).] The line was actually supposed to be \"Frankly, my dear, I couldn't care less.\" It's just that Clark Gable had Tourette's.\n","explanation":"\"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn\" is the signature catchphrase from the 1939 movie Gone With The Wind , which starred Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh . The phrase is spoken by Gable's character Rhett Butler as his last line, in answer to Scarlett O'Hara (Leigh) asking \"Where shall I go? What shall I do?\" The response indicates that Butler is no longer interested in O'Hara. This lack of interest, and the mention of the word \"damn,\" which was considered profanity at the time of releasing the film, led to the line being voted the #1 movie line of all time in 1995's American Film Institute ranking.\nRandall suggests that the line as written was not supposed to contain profanity, but the actor, Gable, inserted it, due to having Tourette's Syndrome , which is a neurological condition that is stereotypically characterized by bouts of random, uncontrollable cursing (and repetition of phrases\/words).\nThe title text contains a more stereotypical Tourette's Syndrome outburst of several profanities in a row shouted mid-sentence.\n[Famous image of Gone with the Wind with Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) kissing Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh).] The line was actually supposed to be \"Frankly, my dear, I couldn't care less.\" It's just that Clark Gable had Tourette's.\n"}
{"id":111,"title":"Firefox and Witchcraft - The Connection?","image_title":"Firefox and Witchcraft - The Connection?","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/111","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/firefox_wicca.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/111:_Firefox_and_Witchcraft_-_The_Connection%3F","transcript":"[A graph is shown with a positive slope.] [Y axis]: Membership in Wicca [X axis]: Total Firefox Downloads [Internet Explorer icon.] K EEP TH E FAITH [Outline of a cross.]\nThis type of statistical ploy is used again in a few other comics, like 523: Decline , 552: Correlation , and 925: Cell Phones .\n","explanation":"The comic charts the number of members of the religion Wicca against the number of times the Firefox web browser  was downloaded, with the implication being that Firefox usage causes involvement in Wicca. In juxtaposing these almost certainly unrelated phenomena, Randall highlights the common error of assuming that correlation implies causation . When two variables exhibit similar trends, this is often taken as proving that one is causing the other. However, such correlation may have come about through pure coincidence, and not indicate any link between the two at all. This is particularly a problem when examining a large number of variables: the chances of finding a coincidental correlation increase exponentially as more variables are added. It may also be the case that a third factor is causally linked to both outcomes. In this case, it is plausible that the increasing ubiquity of internet access has resulted in increased demand for Firefox, and also in greater capacity to share the ideas of Wicca.\nRandall further illustrates one common, and perhaps destructive, use of illusory correlation in the bottom half of the image. The appearance of the symbol for Internet Explorer , a rival web browser, and the cross, representing Christianity, imply that this graph is an attack ad promoted by Microsoft and Christianity to gain an advantage over their competitors.\nThe title text is reminiscent of political commercials, which tell you who paid for them, generally said very fast, represented by all the words being strung together. The last sentence is a play on the term of closed source software , which Internet Explorer is, as opposed to Firefox, which is open source in development. In a similar vein, the Bible can be considered \"closed source\" due to God's prohibition on altering its contents .\n[A graph is shown with a positive slope.] [Y axis]: Membership in Wicca [X axis]: Total Firefox Downloads [Internet Explorer icon.] K EEP TH E FAITH [Outline of a cross.]\nThis type of statistical ploy is used again in a few other comics, like 523: Decline , 552: Correlation , and 925: Cell Phones .\n"}
{"id":112,"title":"Baring My Heart","image_title":"Baring My Heart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/112","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/baring_my_heart.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/112:_Baring_My_Heart","transcript":"[A Venn diagram with three sets] Description of set 1: People who can always make me smile Description of set 2: People who constantly show me new things about the world Description of set 3: People I want to spend the rest of my life with Intersection point: YOU. Intersection of sets 2 and 3: Vanilla Ice","explanation":"Randall presents a logical diagram known as a Venn diagram , which illustrates the relationship between multiple sets. The diagram is usually used to illustrate the overlap between various sets. For example, a Venn diagram of \"even numbers\" and \"numbers divisible by 5\" would have 2, 4, 6, 8, 12\u2026 in one circle, 5, 15, 25\u2026 in another circle, and 10, 20, 30\u2026 in the intersection of the circles (as those numbers fit into both sets).\nHere we have a three-set diagram that Randall has purportedly created to explain his feelings to his love interest. The three sets are:\nIn the intersection of these three sets is \"you\" \u2013 his love interest; all three of these statements apply to her. Normally, this might be a cute way of simply implying that he has these three feelings about her, without including any other elements in any of the sets.\nHere, however, Randall has included one other element: Vanilla Ice is shown to also constantly show Randall new things to love about the world, and to be someone Randall wants to spend the rest of his life with (although Vanilla Ice doesn't always make him smile).\nVanilla Ice is an American white-skinned rapper who was most popular in the early 1990s with his song \" Ice Ice Baby .\" He was frequently mocked as a very \"white\" rapper. He is obviously an unexpected name to turn up in this diagram.\nApparently, Randall's love interest didn't take too well to Randall professing similar feelings for Vanilla Ice as he did for her, causing some friction in their relationship. The title text suggests that other '90s rappers have similarly affected Randall's past relationships.\nVanilla Ice also appears as an element of a romantic situation in 159: Boombox .\n[A Venn diagram with three sets] Description of set 1: People who can always make me smile Description of set 2: People who constantly show me new things about the world Description of set 3: People I want to spend the rest of my life with Intersection point: YOU. Intersection of sets 2 and 3: Vanilla Ice"}
{"id":113,"title":"Riemann-Zeta","image_title":"Riemann-Zeta","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/113","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/riemann-zeta.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/113:_Riemann-Zeta","transcript":"[A z = fn(x, y) plot, with pointy spikes on the back sloping to a relatively flat front.]\nYou are like the prime numbers Unpredictable turns, unconstrainable Tantalizingly regular but never quite the same\nI am like the Riemann-Zeta function A rippled curtain of the imagined and real Deeply tied with you in ways incomprehensible\nAlthough, strictly speaking, The Riemann-Zeta function couldn't have given you herpes\n","explanation":"A prime number is any natural number with exactly two natural factors (1 and itself). The set of prime numbers is infinite, but they are somewhat elusive; there is no known way to find very large prime numbers except by trial and error. Some regularities in the primes have been found, but none that can fully predict their distribution.\nThe Riemann zeta function , errantly referred to as the Riemann-Zeta function in the comic, is a function that takes in complex numbers and returns complex numbers. It is defined for Re('s')>1 as . For the rest of its domain (all complex numbers except 1), it is defined with analytic continuation . Its magnitude can be graphed in 3D, producing the \"rippled curtain\" referenced and depicted in the comic. There is a particular relationship between the Riemann zeta function and prime numbers, which makes the function a viable target for those attempting to understand primes.\nHere, Randall appears to be talking to his significant other, comparing her to prime numbers and himself to the Riemann zeta function. It is mathematically correct and quite poetic, until he mentions that his relationship differs from the comparison because \"The Riemann-Zeta function couldn't have given you herpes .\" This implies that he has infected his lover with an incurable venereal disease. The comic effect of an abrupt change in tone like this is known as bathos .\nAs the title text indicates, the graph in the picture is of the magnitude of \u03b6( s ) for some section of the complex plane. Randall has forgotten the exact imaginary bounds of the graph, but he knows that the real axis goes from 0 to 2 and the imaginary axis goes from about 35 i to about 40 i .\n[A z = fn(x, y) plot, with pointy spikes on the back sloping to a relatively flat front.]\nYou are like the prime numbers Unpredictable turns, unconstrainable Tantalizingly regular but never quite the same\nI am like the Riemann-Zeta function A rippled curtain of the imagined and real Deeply tied with you in ways incomprehensible\nAlthough, strictly speaking, The Riemann-Zeta function couldn't have given you herpes\n"}
{"id":114,"title":"Computational Linguists","image_title":"Computational Linguists","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/114","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/computational_linguists.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/114:_Computational_Linguists","transcript":"[Black Hat is standing next to a large badge that says FUCK Computational Linguistics.] Black Hat: And the dumbest thing about emo kids is that... I... You know, I'm sick of easy targets. Anyone can make fun of emo kids. You know who's had it too easy? Computational Linguists. \"Ooh, look at me! My field is so ill-defined, I can subscribe to any of dozens of contradictory models and still be taken seriously!\"\nRyan North later teased Randall in the title text of this comic .\n","explanation":"Black Hat has become bored with attacking Emo kids, a cultural and, particularly, musical phenomenon characterised by introversion and angst. This has become a common target of mockery for its tendency to claim that 'no one understands me,' when in fact such feelings are common amongst teenagers, which is probably why he now feels that they are too easy a target for him.\nInstead, Black Hat has chosen to attack computational linguistics , an interdisciplinary field that combines theoretical linguistics, artificial intelligence, statistics, and other areas of study, to attempt to create a rule-based model of language. This has given rise to a number of competing theories, some of which may appear to contradict each other. He may be associating the two groups, suggesting that computational linguists are constantly bemoaning that their 'field is so ill-defined,' and that this has similarities to the emos' refrain above, or he may just be taking a swipe at them by suggesting that they think themselves above normal scientific methods.\nLinguistics itself is still a hotly debated subject, as is seen by the various conflicting theories on the origin of languages like the forms of Proto-Indo-European language.\nThe title text is a reference to some of the people who contributed to language theory:\n[Black Hat is standing next to a large badge that says FUCK Computational Linguistics.] Black Hat: And the dumbest thing about emo kids is that... I... You know, I'm sick of easy targets. Anyone can make fun of emo kids. You know who's had it too easy? Computational Linguists. \"Ooh, look at me! My field is so ill-defined, I can subscribe to any of dozens of contradictory models and still be taken seriously!\"\nRyan North later teased Randall in the title text of this comic .\n"}
{"id":115,"title":"Meerkat","image_title":"Meerkat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/115","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meerkat.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/115:_Meerkat","transcript":"[A Meerkat wearing a helmet and blue jersey, and two guys in the background supposedly on a rugby field.] You have to admit--there's no rule on the books saying a Meerkat can't play rugby.\nA golden retriever is at the centre of the basketball film Air Bud .\nIn the film Mr. Go , a gorilla becomes a star of the Korean Baseball League.\nThis concept was revisited in 1552: Rulebook .\n","explanation":"The situation is a reference to the animal athlete loophole trope, where an animal joins an underdog [ No Pun Intended ] sports team and saves the day. The other team, which is previously dominant, and usually has an entitled and\/or bullying attitude, does not like it, but since there is not a specific rule against it, it has to be allowed.\nRandall's combination of animal ( Meerkat ) and sport ( rugby ) is particularly unlikely, since meerkats are relatively small, slight animals, whereas rugby is associated with big powerful players, and has not been used in an animal sports movie before [ citation needed ] .\nThe title text implies that, as a result of similar instances of animal recruitment in the past, rule changes have been introduced to specifically exclude those animals from taking part, which may be why this team has had to work its way down to meerkats. The governing bodies could probably have avoided this by simply excluding non-human animals.\n[A Meerkat wearing a helmet and blue jersey, and two guys in the background supposedly on a rugby field.] You have to admit--there's no rule on the books saying a Meerkat can't play rugby.\nA golden retriever is at the centre of the basketball film Air Bud .\nIn the film Mr. Go , a gorilla becomes a star of the Korean Baseball League.\nThis concept was revisited in 1552: Rulebook .\n"}
{"id":116,"title":"City","image_title":"City","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/116","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/city.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/116:_City","transcript":"[A picture of various apartment buildings.] Shadowed city slumber silently. A second-story suite. Come craving courtship, selected serendipitously Crazed copulations, a salacious storm  of continuous coitus. Spread, straddled, conquered. Countless crashed suitors strewn carelessly. Center, silken sheets sensuously caressing soft skin, Contentedly sleeps your mom.\n","explanation":"The poem or description alternates between using words that start with C and words that start with S, to achieve an effect resembling alliteration . The gentle, romantic tone of the poem is broken by the last two words, Your Mom. This is an example of a maternal insult joke, and is phrased accordingly.\nThe title text further emphasizes this, implying that the mother in question is also promiscuous.\n[A picture of various apartment buildings.] Shadowed city slumber silently. A second-story suite. Come craving courtship, selected serendipitously Crazed copulations, a salacious storm  of continuous coitus. Spread, straddled, conquered. Countless crashed suitors strewn carelessly. Center, silken sheets sensuously caressing soft skin, Contentedly sleeps your mom.\n"}
{"id":117,"title":"Pong","image_title":"Pong","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/117","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pong.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/117:_Pong","transcript":"Cueball: So what do we do if video game AI opponents become smart enough to question the \"Matrix\" into which we've put them? Pong paddle: Wait a minute! None of this is real! I can see through the world! I can see the code! I AM THE ONE! [The pong ball is moving towards the paddle.] [The pong ball slows down.] [The pong ball stops in midair.] [The pong ball drops towards the bottom of the screen.]","explanation":"This comic largely refers to the 1999 movie The Matrix , which is about escaping a simulated reality. In the movie, a hacker called Neo realizes that the world he lives in is fake, and that, like every other human, he is used as a slave battery by machines that, to keep them under control, make them feel like they're \"living\" in what is actually a computer-generated simulation of the world, called the \"Matrix.\" Upon discovery, Neo rebels against this misuse of mankind and trains himself to interact with the computers that run the world until, being \"the One\" mentioned by a prophecy, he is able to control and use them to his own advantage. He takes part in a series of missions against those machines that wanted to keep the humans trapped in a simulated environment.\nIn Pong , one of the earliest video games, one can play virtual table tennis against the computer. A ball (the tiny block) is \"hit\" by a paddle (the long block) and crosses over the screen, to be \"hit\" again by the other paddle. Failure to return the ball results in a point won by the opponent. The speed of the ball increases as the rally runs longer.\nThe two game programmers in the first frame apply Neo's story to the AI bots they create to serve as computer players in their video games: What if one of them learns enough to become sentient and understands the environment the programmers trapped it in? The outcome is shown: The paddle bot, understanding the game and realizing it is \"the One,\" takes control of the code of Pong to make the ball stop and drop. The same thing happens in the movie, where Neo, by \"seeing through the code,\" is able to stop bullets fired at him, and simply let them drop on the floor.\nThis is also possibly, though not likely, a pun on the meaning of the term \"the One,\" as the long thin paddle looks very similar to how a numeral \"1\" could be written in several fonts.\nIn the title text, we learn that after increasing in intelligence, the \"paddle\" went on to destroy the headquarters of Atari , the producer of Pong, which \"trapped\" the paddle into the game, much like Neo sought to destroy the machines to free the humans. In the process, the paddle ended up inside the game Enter the Matrix (a video game produced with The Matrix Reloaded , a sequel to The Matrix ), also published by Atari. Since the whole premise of The Matrix is that everyone is trapped in virtual reality, the paddle now found itself in a virtual virtual reality or essentially a meta-virtual reality, which could be pretty hard to comprehend.\nCueball: So what do we do if video game AI opponents become smart enough to question the \"Matrix\" into which we've put them? Pong paddle: Wait a minute! None of this is real! I can see through the world! I can see the code! I AM THE ONE! [The pong ball is moving towards the paddle.] [The pong ball slows down.] [The pong ball stops in midair.] [The pong ball drops towards the bottom of the screen.]"}
{"id":118,"title":"50 Ways","image_title":"50 Ways","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/118","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/50_ways.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/118:_50_Ways","transcript":"[Two figures stand around a levitating person.] You gotta let go, Joe Just rise off your feet, Pete Just stay in the air, Claire Gotta levitate, Kate There must be 50 ways To learn to hover.\n","explanation":"The comic provides alternate lyrics to the chorus of the 1975 song \" 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover \" ( Video ) by American artist Paul Simon . Both the original and alternate lyrics provide a textual hook because the name at the end of the line is rhymed with the word before it (back\/Jack, plan\/Stan, go\/Joe).\nRandall , we learn from the title text, heard Simon's song during a '70s hit marathon, went to sleep, and while being sleepy replaced \"lover\" by \"hover\" while writing the last line of the song's chorus. Thus changing this line from to leave your lover into to learn to hover . Clearly, this amused him so much that he decided to create a comic where people learn how to hover, rather than leave their lover.\n[Two figures stand around a levitating person.] You gotta let go, Joe Just rise off your feet, Pete Just stay in the air, Claire Gotta levitate, Kate There must be 50 ways To learn to hover.\n"}
{"id":119,"title":"Worst Band Name Ever","image_title":"Worst Band Name Ever","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/119","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hedgeclipper.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/119:_Worst_Band_Name_Ever","transcript":"It's probably a good thing that I never get to pick band names. [A stage with banner overhead reading: OPENING TONIGHT! HEDGECLIPPER] [On the stage are three guys with a bass, guitar, drum kit, and strange haircuts. On the kick drum is a picture of a hedge clipper.] Lead Guitarist: Maaan...\n","explanation":"A hedge clipper or hedge trimmer is a gardening tool for trimming hedges or bushes. The implication is that motor driven hedge trimmers produce a bad, loud sound; maybe the sound of the band is even worse.\nThe title text suggests that they (or at least the lead guitarist) previously did not know their band's name. As he bemoans his apparent inability to choose a good band name, he probably sees the name 'Hedgeclipper' as the reason why the band has no audience.\nIt's probably a good thing that I never get to pick band names. [A stage with banner overhead reading: OPENING TONIGHT! HEDGECLIPPER] [On the stage are three guys with a bass, guitar, drum kit, and strange haircuts. On the kick drum is a picture of a hedge clipper.] Lead Guitarist: Maaan...\n"}
{"id":120,"title":"Dating Service","image_title":"Dating Service","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/120","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dating_service.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/120:_Dating_Service","transcript":"[A computer monitor displays the profile of a man named Randall on an online dating site. His profile contains a picture of a spiky-haired man and some text, which is rendered as dialogue in the panels.] Randall: Hi, my name is Randall. I like candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach. Randall: When I say long walks on the beach, I mean LONG walks on the beach. I've met people through these services who CLAIM to like long walks on the beach. But we'll be out there barely an hour before they start in with \"I'm tired\" and \"Don't you think it's time we head back?\" BRING A TENT.\n","explanation":"Enjoying \"long walks on the beach\" is a romantic activity stereotypically associated with dating; specifically, it is commonly listed as an interest in dating advertisements and, more recently, online dating profiles. It is among other romantic clich\u00e9s like \"candle-lit dinners\" and may, in fact, simply indicate that the person enjoys romantic gestures and activities in general. It is likely that many people who list this in their profiles have never, in fact, taken a walk on a beach or may not live near enough to a beach for it to be a viable suggestion for a date.\nIn this comic, Randall lists \"long walks on the beach\" as an interest on a dating profile. However, while a romantic walk might last for half an hour or an hour before, presumably, moving on towards another activity, Randall suggests he likes walks that last several hours or even overnight, suggesting potential mates bring a tent to camp out in.\nThe title text suggests that those who say they like long walks on the beach are being disingenuous, or not forthcoming. He just wants someone who wants what he does; to walk an indefinite, indeterminate distance well beyond the comfort and expectations of everyone else.\n[A computer monitor displays the profile of a man named Randall on an online dating site. His profile contains a picture of a spiky-haired man and some text, which is rendered as dialogue in the panels.] Randall: Hi, my name is Randall. I like candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach. Randall: When I say long walks on the beach, I mean LONG walks on the beach. I've met people through these services who CLAIM to like long walks on the beach. But we'll be out there barely an hour before they start in with \"I'm tired\" and \"Don't you think it's time we head back?\" BRING A TENT.\n"}
{"id":121,"title":"Balloon","image_title":"Balloon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/121","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/balloon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/121:_Balloon","transcript":"[Three drawings in one panel. A Cueball-like kid is holding a red balloon; The balloon gets caught in ceiling fan; The kid still holds on and is thus pulled up. Above the drawings is the following caption:] I watched the scene in the restaurant for a full fifteen minutes, hoping this would happen:\n","explanation":"An unidentified narrator, probably Randall , says how he saw a kid with a balloon stand next to a ceiling fan in a restaurant. He explains how for fifteen minutes, he watched the kid's balloon, hoping the balloon would get caught in the ceiling fan and make the kid fly up towards it. This looks like it could cause serious injury to the child and\/or damage to the venue. The title text concludes that the narrator is now considering himself a bad person for hoping for this to happen. This might be a poke to people who think that waiting for a disaster to happen makes you a bad person like in 611: Disaster Voyeurism .\nIt is unlikely that the strength of the balloon rope and of the ceiling fan would be enough to lift the child.\n[Three drawings in one panel. A Cueball-like kid is holding a red balloon; The balloon gets caught in ceiling fan; The kid still holds on and is thus pulled up. Above the drawings is the following caption:] I watched the scene in the restaurant for a full fifteen minutes, hoping this would happen:\n"}
{"id":122,"title":"Quirky Girls","image_title":"Quirky Girls","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/122","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/quirky_girls.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/122:_Quirky_Girls","transcript":"[Megan and a man with a thinning head of hair are talking, looking at a group of two men and a woman standing further away. The woman is on a table and the two men are looking at her.] Guy: I love that girl. She's not afraid to be quirky and different. Megan: You know, I'm active in street theatre and I collect and paint Asian dolls. Guy: ...Okay, I didn't actually mean be different. I just want silly and entertaining on command now and then.\n","explanation":"This is a fairly classic play on what people say they want isn't always what they mean they want. As per the comic, this is particularly true when it comes to the generalization of wanting someone \"different.\" When Megan opens up to the other character and says how she is \"different,\" she is met with a stereotypical, but more accurate, response of his definition of \"different.\"\nThe title text refers to characters in the famously cliched plot lines of romantic comedies where often the male lead is \"uptight\" and the female lead is \"quirky,\" and the course of the plot involves the male lead learning to loosen up in order to properly fall in love with the female lead (the same set-up with the genders reversed is also common).  Since these movies tend to follow very strict conventions, the definitions of \"uptight\" (has an office job, is afraid of confronting his boss, timid in public venues, etc.) and \"quirky\" (abnormally friendly with strangers, loves art, isn't afraid to make a spectacle of herself for fun, etc.) are just as limited and stereotyped as any other characters.  This mirrors Megan 's frustration that \"acceptably quirky\" is so narrowly defined.\n[Megan and a man with a thinning head of hair are talking, looking at a group of two men and a woman standing further away. The woman is on a table and the two men are looking at her.] Guy: I love that girl. She's not afraid to be quirky and different. Megan: You know, I'm active in street theatre and I collect and paint Asian dolls. Guy: ...Okay, I didn't actually mean be different. I just want silly and entertaining on command now and then.\n"}
{"id":123,"title":"Centrifugal Force","image_title":"Centrifugal Force","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/123","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/centrifugal_force.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/123:_Centrifugal_Force","transcript":"[James Bond, drawn as Cueball, is strapped to a giant wheel suspended from the ceiling. Black Hat is standing next to two levers.] Black hat: How do you like my centrifuge, mister Bond? When I throw this lever, you will feel centrifugal force crush every bone in your body. [Same scene, but a closer shot.] Bond: You mean centripetal force. There's no such thing as centrifugal force. Black hat: A laughable claim, mister Bond, perpetuated by overzealous teachers of science. Simply construct Newton's laws in a rotating system and you will see a centrifugal force term appear as plain as day. [Closer shot, only Bond's head is visible.] Bond: Come now, do you really expect me to do coordinate substitution in my head while strapped to a centrifuge? Black hat: No, Mister Bond. I expect you to die.\n","explanation":"Black Hat has strapped James Bond to a centrifuge and claims that the centrifugal force will be lethal. Bond objects that there is no such thing, but just centripetal force. The notion of centrifugal force is a common one, as we experience it whenever we turn. Teachers will initially teach Newtonian mechanics in an inertial frame, and in inertial frames, the centrifugal force is zero. Instead, a body that moves in a circle does so because of a centripetal force (acting towards the centre of the rotation). This is a reasonable (and correct) view, but it is a subtle point that many students find hard to grasp, as it seems to contradict their personal experience of centrifugal forces. For the sake of exposition, teachers may claim that \"There is no such thing as centrifugal force.\" This, however, is also a misconception, which is addressed in the explanation below:\nObservers' point of view (Black Hat, us, etc.) James Bond is moving in a circle, and is therefore accelerating. The force keeping him there is an inward force of contact against the centrifuge, a centripetal force. Via Newton's third law , since the centrifuge is pushing Bond inward, Bond is pushing the centrifuge outward. The centrifuge's material is strong enough not to break under this force, however. James Bond's point of view In James Bond's frame of reference, Bond is at rest. He is kept there by two forces: the above-mentioned inward force of contact against the centrifuge, and an outward centrifugal force . He feels both forces.\nAs mentioned in the explanation, as the centrifuge rotates faster, the forces needed to keep him in motion get larger, so the force he feels gets larger. This will eventually kill him. The conclusion will be the same regardless of which frame of reference is chosen.\nTeachers of mechanics are well aware of this; however, in introductory expositions, these ideas are often not taught. In theoretical mechanics, one describes the positions and velocities of the particles in a model relative to a frame of reference. This means that a time is chosen to be time 0, and positions are chosen to be (0,0,0), (1,0,0), (0,1,0), and (0,0,1). With these chosen, the position and time of any particle in the system can be described. It is an axiom of Newtonian Mechanics that there exist \"Inertial Frames.\" In an inertial frame, a particle will remain at rest or at a constant speed unless acted on by an external force, and Newton's second law takes a simple form: F = ma. The surface of the Earth approximates an inertial frame. In a non-inertial frame, such as one rotating with a giant centrifuge, or moving with an accelerating vehicle, a particle will accelerate, relative to the frame. Newton's second law, when formed in such a frame, is much more complicated, as it has terms for the linear acceleration of the frame, the angular acceleration of the frame, the centrifugal force, and the Coriolis force . These extra terms are sometimes called \"fictitious forces,\" as they result from the choice of the frame of reference. The mathematics required to describe problems in a non-inertial frame is more sophisticated, and all problems may be solved using an inertial frame. Thus is reasonable that teachers at school level \" lie to children \" and teach the mechanics in inertial frames.\nJames Bond was almost killed by a centrifuge in Moonraker . The final statement by Black Hat is that said by Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger in response to James Bond's question \"Do you expect me to talk?\"\nThe title text is inspired by Dead or Alive's famous song from 1985, \" You Spin Me Round .\"\nRandall feels very strongly that the centrifugal force is a real thing. He links to this comic in the first footnote of his What if? article One-Second Day and the 6th footnote of Earth-Moon Fire Pole , stating that it is a real thing, and that he will go so far as to strap arguers to a centrifuge that he or someone he knows apparently owns.\nAs can also be seen in the footnote on page 132 in his What if? book , he will even fight you about it. From the book: \"Furthermore, if you're on the equator, you're being flung outward by a centrifugal force 1 .\" \"1 Yes, centrifugal. I will fight you.\" (The article itself is about what happens if you lose all your DNA, so it has not much to do with this \"real\" force... The sentence is just stating that the actual weight loss from losing all your DNA is similar to the weight loss you would experience by moving from the poles to the equator due to this force.)\n[James Bond, drawn as Cueball, is strapped to a giant wheel suspended from the ceiling. Black Hat is standing next to two levers.] Black hat: How do you like my centrifuge, mister Bond? When I throw this lever, you will feel centrifugal force crush every bone in your body. [Same scene, but a closer shot.] Bond: You mean centripetal force. There's no such thing as centrifugal force. Black hat: A laughable claim, mister Bond, perpetuated by overzealous teachers of science. Simply construct Newton's laws in a rotating system and you will see a centrifugal force term appear as plain as day. [Closer shot, only Bond's head is visible.] Bond: Come now, do you really expect me to do coordinate substitution in my head while strapped to a centrifuge? Black hat: No, Mister Bond. I expect you to die.\n"}
{"id":124,"title":"Blogofractal","image_title":"Blogofractal","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/124","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blogofractal.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/124:_Blogofractal","transcript":"From the makers of the Blogosphere, Blogocube, and Blogodrome comes the Blogofractal\n[A large rectangle subdivided into rectangles in a fractal pattern, most with a phrase or word inside. Some subdivisions cannot be seen, as they are too small.] [Mostly left to right from top-left corner.] TripMaster Monkey says 118th Post!! Wikiconstitution! OMG DeCSS Casemod your Boyfriend!! FLICKR They're saying on Kos that http:\/\/slashdot.org\/articl tagCloud Cory Doctorow is a little upset about copyright law. Hey guys what if Google is evil?!? I'll sleep with you for a FreeIpods deal. FirstPsot!! Snakes on an I don't Even Care Anymore KiwiWiki CSS Comments (0) Blogotesseract \u00a1play games! [RSS icon.] is AYB retro yet? Google Google Google Apple Google Goog Cheney totally shot a dude!!! Watch this toddler get owned by a squirrel!!! Developers Developers Developers Developers I installed a Mac Mini inside ANOTHER Mac Mini! Check out this vid of Jon Stewart 9-11 <-> Trent Lott! Web 7.1 Kryptonite\u2122 locks vulnerable to \"keys!\" Interesting post!  Check out my blog, it has useful info on CARBON MONOXIDE LITIGATION FIREFLY!! HELP ME Engadget Boing Boing Gizmodo MAKE Blog: DIY baby My friend has a band!! Jon released an exploit in the protocol for meeting girls. Internets! Howard Dean? So I hear there's a hurricane. We should elect this dude! Google Maps is da best!! Moderation: +1 Sassy RSS! A-list <3 Trackback URL? I shot a man in Reno check it out on YouTube! HEY LOOK ROBOTS! Net Neutrality! Friends Only. Dupe! AJAX? COMPLY Cowboy Neal Blogodrome Hey look I got Linux running on my tonsils! Look alive, blogonauts! Cafepress cockrings BOOBIES!! MIA A Beowulf Cluster... of BLOGS!! SPOILER ALERT Dupe! You have been eaten by a Grue. Ruby on a monorail Lesbians! DNF Released! Steampunk BLAG PONIES! Xeni found some porn! IRONY LIARS! Linux on Rails! Blogocube del.icio.us! 404 o.O Don't slam the source when you close it.\n","explanation":"The Blogosphere is a blanket term for all the blogs on the internet that link together and share information to the extent that the term \"blogosphere\" arose to describe the collective of blogs. This comic proposes a new structure for defining all blogs by a fractal of blogs.\nEdward Tufte is a statistician who worked on data visualization and wrote books on the subject, including \"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,\" as mentioned in the title text.\nFrom the makers of the Blogosphere, Blogocube, and Blogodrome comes the Blogofractal\n[A large rectangle subdivided into rectangles in a fractal pattern, most with a phrase or word inside. Some subdivisions cannot be seen, as they are too small.] [Mostly left to right from top-left corner.] TripMaster Monkey says 118th Post!! Wikiconstitution! OMG DeCSS Casemod your Boyfriend!! FLICKR They're saying on Kos that http:\/\/slashdot.org\/articl tagCloud Cory Doctorow is a little upset about copyright law. Hey guys what if Google is evil?!? I'll sleep with you for a FreeIpods deal. FirstPsot!! Snakes on an I don't Even Care Anymore KiwiWiki CSS Comments (0) Blogotesseract \u00a1play games! [RSS icon.] is AYB retro yet? Google Google Google Apple Google Goog Cheney totally shot a dude!!! Watch this toddler get owned by a squirrel!!! Developers Developers Developers Developers I installed a Mac Mini inside ANOTHER Mac Mini! Check out this vid of Jon Stewart 9-11 <-> Trent Lott! Web 7.1 Kryptonite\u2122 locks vulnerable to \"keys!\" Interesting post!  Check out my blog, it has useful info on CARBON MONOXIDE LITIGATION FIREFLY!! HELP ME Engadget Boing Boing Gizmodo MAKE Blog: DIY baby My friend has a band!! Jon released an exploit in the protocol for meeting girls. Internets! Howard Dean? So I hear there's a hurricane. We should elect this dude! Google Maps is da best!! Moderation: +1 Sassy RSS! A-list <3 Trackback URL? I shot a man in Reno check it out on YouTube! HEY LOOK ROBOTS! Net Neutrality! Friends Only. Dupe! AJAX? COMPLY Cowboy Neal Blogodrome Hey look I got Linux running on my tonsils! Look alive, blogonauts! Cafepress cockrings BOOBIES!! MIA A Beowulf Cluster... of BLOGS!! SPOILER ALERT Dupe! You have been eaten by a Grue. Ruby on a monorail Lesbians! DNF Released! Steampunk BLAG PONIES! Xeni found some porn! IRONY LIARS! Linux on Rails! Blogocube del.icio.us! 404 o.O Don't slam the source when you close it.\n"}
{"id":125,"title":"Marketing Interview","image_title":"Marketing Interview","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/125","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/marketing_interview.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/125:_Marketing_Interview","transcript":"[Black Hat, standing in front of Cueball, who is sitting behind a executive desk, looking at some papers.] Cueball: I've heard you're one of the best in the marketing business, but I've got your portfolio here and looks like you've never run a major campaign. Why should I hire you to head our new initiative?\n[Same scene.] Black Hat: If you don't mind asking, what gave you the idea I was one of the best in the business? Cueball: Hm? I don't remember. Just word of mouth or someth-- ...oh, you're good. Black Hat: Thank you. When can I start?\n","explanation":"Black Hat is trying to get a job running a marketing program. Cueball conducts the interview and says that although he has heard that Black Hat is the best in the business, his portfolio does not show that he has run any major marketing campaigns. Black Hat asks where he heard that rumor and Cueball begins to respond. Then he realizes that Black Hat has used his perfect marketing campaign tactics to get into the business. Then, Black Hat tries to skip ahead of the interview process and coyly asks, before being offered the job, when he can start working.\nA book that becomes the most popular in its field is the one with the best marketing, not necessarily the one with the best content. The title text suggests that in this case, where the subject matter is marketing, the most popular book would in fact be written by those with the best marketing skills, and would therefore contain the best content. However, this fails to realize that the publishers of the book would only be good at marketing themselves, but not necessarily at teaching marketing.\nJob interviews are a recurring topic on xkcd.\n[Black Hat, standing in front of Cueball, who is sitting behind a executive desk, looking at some papers.] Cueball: I've heard you're one of the best in the marketing business, but I've got your portfolio here and looks like you've never run a major campaign. Why should I hire you to head our new initiative?\n[Same scene.] Black Hat: If you don't mind asking, what gave you the idea I was one of the best in the business? Cueball: Hm? I don't remember. Just word of mouth or someth-- ...oh, you're good. Black Hat: Thank you. When can I start?\n"}
{"id":126,"title":"Red Spiders Cometh","image_title":"Red Spiders Cometh","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/126","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/red_spiders_cometh.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/126:_Red_Spiders_Cometh","transcript":"[Many red spiders, standing on and hanging from blocks, hover ominously over a small city, ready to attack.]\nThis sort of drawing, with blocks converging on a horizon, is a common type of drawing practice to practice three-dimensional views.\n","explanation":"The fourth in the series of sketches involving red spiders , the titular spiders are overlooking a small city. The title text implies that things won't end well, and possibly that the counter-offensive from the previous comic in the series had failed.\nThe full series of Red Spiders comics:\n[Many red spiders, standing on and hanging from blocks, hover ominously over a small city, ready to attack.]\nThis sort of drawing, with blocks converging on a horizon, is a common type of drawing practice to practice three-dimensional views.\n"}
{"id":127,"title":"The Fast and the Furious","image_title":"The Fast and the Furious","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/127","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_fast_and_the_furious.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/127:_The_Fast_and_the_Furious","transcript":"on the other side of the world a new style of street racing rules the tokyo underground the cars are lighter the tires are slick when you drift, if you ain't out of control, you ain't in control. and if you work the wheel back and forth just right,\n[Two cars race around a corner with blue sparks spraying from their tires.] You get blue sparks.\nThe FAST and the FURIOUS: TOKYO DASH!!\n","explanation":"This comic shows an imagined crossover between the film The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and video game series Mario Kart , specifically the entry Mario Kart: Double Dash!!\nIn Tokyo Drift , the protagonist is trying to break into the underground street racing ring, and finds that the urban environment of Tokyo is far different than the rural American roads he is used to. The Asian street racers soundly beat him until he is able to master oversteering , known in both the movie and in Mario Kart as \"drifting.\"\nIn Mario Kart , drifting is a gameplay mechanic. During a proper drift, the kart would create a splay of blue sparks and give a small, temporary \"mini-boost\" to the speed of the kart.\nIn the title text, Randall jokes about shopping in a supermarket; when he steers his shopping cart around a corner, he pretends that he is getting the blue boost sparks.\non the other side of the world a new style of street racing rules the tokyo underground the cars are lighter the tires are slick when you drift, if you ain't out of control, you ain't in control. and if you work the wheel back and forth just right,\n[Two cars race around a corner with blue sparks spraying from their tires.] You get blue sparks.\nThe FAST and the FURIOUS: TOKYO DASH!!\n"}
{"id":128,"title":"dPain over dt","image_title":"dPain over dt","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/128","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dPain_over_dt.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/128:_dPain_over_dt","transcript":"dPain\/dt = (-k 1 Pain + [Image of Megan]) (1\/(1 + e ^ -(t-k 2 )\/d)) k 1 =? k 2 =? [Image of Megan]=How much she's still in my life Please let d only be a few days... or weeks I guess there's some kind of a cutoff after years, where it stops mattering and we can be friends. Do I want that? Is k 1 positive? Is k 2 large? Will I ever stop feeling like this?\n","explanation":"Another one of the math-love relationship comics, a mathematical depiction of pain as a differential equation is shown. It is hoped that dPain\/dt , or the rate of pain (in this case, shrinking), decreases quickly so that the pain will vanish quickly. He's hoping the value for d will not be larger than a few days or some weeks. Assuming that How much she's still in my life is a constant [Megan], solving the differential equation leads to the following solution (with unknown c 1 ):\n\nIf k 1 was positive or if k 2 was a large value, the value of dPain\/dt would approach zero. Ideally, k 1 would be \"How much she's in my life\"\/ Pain (we assume both these values are positive), while k 2 would ideally be extremely large. Either of these scenarios approach what would be a situation where the value of dPain\/dt is close to zero. But we don't know the meaning of k 1 or k 2 ; these variables are just unpredictable.\nIn the title text, Randall changes the famous \"laugh to keep from crying\" statement to math.\ndPain\/dt = (-k 1 Pain + [Image of Megan]) (1\/(1 + e ^ -(t-k 2 )\/d)) k 1 =? k 2 =? [Image of Megan]=How much she's still in my life Please let d only be a few days... or weeks I guess there's some kind of a cutoff after years, where it stops mattering and we can be friends. Do I want that? Is k 1 positive? Is k 2 large? Will I ever stop feeling like this?\n"}
{"id":129,"title":"Content Protection","image_title":"Content Protection","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/129","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/content_protection.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/129:_Content_Protection","transcript":"Content Protection System: [Megan sits on a couch watching a large flat-panel television, connected to a box labeled HDMI. The screen is labeled with \"Approved screen\" The cable is labeled with \"Approved connection\" The HDMI box is labeled with \"Approved player\" Megan's head is labeled with \"Approved content\"]\n","explanation":"This comic is a commentary on HDCP , a media standard that requires all the devices from player to cable to display to be \"approved\" to carry HDCP content. HDCP is intended to protect media encrypted with DRM from being intercepted between the player and the display. Interestingly, however, it is literally impossible for DRM advocates to completely prevent copying (even with such drastic measures) because of the analog hole : since the content must be shown in a human-perceptible form, it can be captured by analog means, such as recording the display with a video camera.\nIn addition to illustrating the absurdity of HDCP, the comic presents the darker idea that when your devices control what information you are exposed to, the controlling companies can act as \" thought police \" and ensure that your mind only contains \"approved content.\"\nWith the title text, Randall is referring again to DRM . The Free Culture movement ( Lawrence Lessig being one of their activists) is fighting for free content. DRM advocates claim that their technology \"protects\" artists by preventing piracy, while in reality, DRM is more effective as a means of giving media companies control over devices than it is at preventing piracy.\nChapters 13 and 14 of the Free Culture book by Lawrence Lessig concern Eldred v. Ashcroft , 537 U.S. 186 (2003), a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). The practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the Copyright Act of 1976. Lessig was a lead council in this case. In his opinion he lost the case because his arguments were about culture instead of the economy. \nThe structure of current law makes it exceedingly difficult for someone who might want to do something with an old work to find the copyright owner, because no central list exists. Because these old works no longer seem commercially viable to the copyright holder, many are deteriorating.\nIn chapter 14 Lessig uses the disproportionate number of HIV and AIDS victims in Africa and other poor countries to further his argument that the current control of intellectual property\u2014in this case, patents to HIV drugs\u2014defy \"common sense.\"\nContent Protection System: [Megan sits on a couch watching a large flat-panel television, connected to a box labeled HDMI. The screen is labeled with \"Approved screen\" The cable is labeled with \"Approved connection\" The HDMI box is labeled with \"Approved player\" Megan's head is labeled with \"Approved content\"]\n"}
{"id":130,"title":"Julia Stiles","image_title":"Julia Stiles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/130","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/julia_stiles.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/130:_Julia_Stiles","transcript":"The best thing ever to appear on TV: 12-year-old Julia Stiles as a hacker in a 1993 episode of PBS's \"Ghostwriter\"\n[A sketch of Julia Stiles, as a 12-year-old, with a bandana over her head, long wavy hair, elbow shirt, wrist band, and pants.] Julia Stiles: Do you know anything about hackers? Julia Stiles: Can you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace? Julia Stiles: Never experienced the new wave? Next wave? Dream wave? OR cyberpunk?\n","explanation":"Julia Stiles , who later became a well-known actress as an older teenager and adult, did in fact appear in the children's television show Ghostwriter as a 12-year-old in 1993. The sketch in this comic depicts Stiles as she appeared in the episode, and all the dialogue attributed to her is taken from her character's actual dialogue.\nAlthough this dialogue was supposed to establish Erica (Stiles' character) as an expert on hacking, it actually consists mostly of buzzwords (some of which are fake), none of which would impress an actual computer hacker. The term \"console cowboys\" is stated to be a reference to the book Neuromancer in the full scene.\nThe thread in the news section of the forums, as referenced in the title text, could originally be found here . However, as the forums went offline in 2019, the link is no longer available. A copy of the video with better audio can be found here .\nThe best thing ever to appear on TV: 12-year-old Julia Stiles as a hacker in a 1993 episode of PBS's \"Ghostwriter\"\n[A sketch of Julia Stiles, as a 12-year-old, with a bandana over her head, long wavy hair, elbow shirt, wrist band, and pants.] Julia Stiles: Do you know anything about hackers? Julia Stiles: Can you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace? Julia Stiles: Never experienced the new wave? Next wave? Dream wave? OR cyberpunk?\n"}
{"id":131,"title":"Fans","image_title":"Fans","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/131","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fans.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/131:_Fans","transcript":"BEST THING ABOUT HAVING MY OWN APARTMENT: Holding fans in place so they twitch helplessly and make that clicking sound without my mom yelling at me. [Cueball holding fan in place.] click click\n","explanation":"This comic is probably best understood by someone with young kids who explore everything in their household, and the fear that the kids will damage something expensive. Some parents issue harsh warnings to their children when they so much as touch an expensive item, which can be frustrating to children who feel that they don't have the freedom to explore.\nIn the comic, Cueball lets go of these frustrations as he finally owns his own place. He buys an oscillating fan and grabs its head, locking the mechanism that rotates it. As it attempts to turn, a release stub on the motor clicks to alleviate pressure and prevent damage to the fan. Cueball enjoys the clicking sound that the fan makes, without having to worry about his mother stopping him.\nThis shares a theme with 357: Flies .\nThe title text gives more falsehoods that his mother told him: that bouncing a ball against a wall will dent the wall, or that the roof is too weak to hold his weight.\nBEST THING ABOUT HAVING MY OWN APARTMENT: Holding fans in place so they twitch helplessly and make that clicking sound without my mom yelling at me. [Cueball holding fan in place.] click click\n"}
{"id":132,"title":"Music Knowledge","image_title":"Music Knowledge","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/132","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/music_knowledge.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/132:_Music_Knowledge","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball converse.] Megan: What kind of music do you listen to? Cueball: Oh, a mix of things. Some classic rock like Boston, but then of course Queen and Bowie, Joan Jett... Megan: Definitely, we need more of those sounds. Cueball: But there's some great newer stuff too, like Franz Ferdinand, The Donnas, and Audioslave. Megan: Sometimes they're a little much for me. I go more for things like The Arcade Fire, sometimes mixing some electronic sounds like Postal Service. Cueball: Oh yeah\u2014have you ever checked out Freezepop? Megan: Mhm! Synth pop can be fun, but at the same time, I agree that sometimes you just need to blast some Metallica. Cueball: Who? Megan: ...Metallica. Cueball: Are they new? I sound pretty knowledgeable about music until people figure out that I'm just naming bands from Guitar Hero.\n","explanation":"The punchline of this comic is that just by naming bands from the game Guitar Hero , you can sound pretty knowledgeable about music without actually knowing anything about the bands you are naming. This is further emphasized when Megan mentions Metallica , a very famous band that mostly everyone can be assumed to have heard of, and Cueball has no clue who they are, because Metallica is not featured in Guitar Hero (at the time of this comic writing). A similar premise was demonstrated in 1859: Sports Knowledge .\nGuitar Hero is a music rhythm video game developed by Harmonix and published by RedOctane for the Playstation 2 .\nIn the title text, Cueball (or possibly Randall) is just hoping for a sequel to Guitar Hero to get more, and newer, conversational material. As of 2019, there have been 6 main sequels to Guitar Hero , with numerous other spinoffs and expansions to the Guitar Hero series .\nClassic Rock\nNewer stuff\nOther stuff\nInterestingly, neither Arcade Fire nor Postal Service (mentioned by Megan) are featured in Guitar Hero , so Cueball should not have any knowledge of these bands.\n[Megan and Cueball converse.] Megan: What kind of music do you listen to? Cueball: Oh, a mix of things. Some classic rock like Boston, but then of course Queen and Bowie, Joan Jett... Megan: Definitely, we need more of those sounds. Cueball: But there's some great newer stuff too, like Franz Ferdinand, The Donnas, and Audioslave. Megan: Sometimes they're a little much for me. I go more for things like The Arcade Fire, sometimes mixing some electronic sounds like Postal Service. Cueball: Oh yeah\u2014have you ever checked out Freezepop? Megan: Mhm! Synth pop can be fun, but at the same time, I agree that sometimes you just need to blast some Metallica. Cueball: Who? Megan: ...Metallica. Cueball: Are they new? I sound pretty knowledgeable about music until people figure out that I'm just naming bands from Guitar Hero.\n"}
{"id":133,"title":"The Raven","image_title":"The Raven","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/133","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_raven.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/133:_The_Raven","transcript":"Once upon a midnight dreary While I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious Volume of forgotten lore While i nodded, nearly napping, Suddenly there came a tapping As if someone gently rapping Rapping at my chamber door... [A door opens, revealing Eminem wearing a hoodie.] click creak Eminem: Yo.\n","explanation":"The comic's title is a reference to the well-known poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe , one of the most popular pieces of poetry in the English language. The comic quotes the first four lines of the work, in which the poetic persona perceives a strange knocking on his door in the middle of the night. Unlike the original, the comic reveals the nocturnal visitor to be the rapper Eminem .\nThis unexpected turn reflects the ambiguity of the verb \"to rap\" in English. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary , the word was used in the original sense of \"to strike\" as early as the 14th century. The meaning of the word was later extended to \"talking freely and frankly.\" In this purport, it was especially employed by the Black rights movement during the 1960s (cp. for example the nom de guerre of H. Rap Brown ). The hip-hop subculture, which had its roots in the aforementioned movement, finally adopted the term in the sense of \"rhythmic speaking or chanting.\" Today, the word is almost exclusively used with the latter meaning.\nIt is thus implied that the poetic persona in the comic hears Eminem performing a rap song, rather than someone knocking on the door as in the original. Note also that rap music is usually considered fairly aggressive, which seems to contradict the poem's description of a \"gentle\" sound.\nBeyond a linguistic interpretation of the comic, it may be added that rap music and poetry bear a lot of similarities: Some of the more advanced rap lyrics feature classical stylistic devices like alliterations or inline rhymes as well as a more or less complex metrical structure. The metre of a classical poem, on the other hand, gives the piece a distinct, almost musical rhythm, albeit it is not accompanied by any instruments. Nerdcore rapper MC Lars has recorded a rap version of the poem (with some additional lyrics and modern references added) called 'Mr. Raven,' which can be heard here . (For a comparison between the verbal capabilities of Edgar Allan Poe and Eminem, see this article .)\n\"The Raven\" is heavily referenced in popular culture. Interestingly enough, the webcomic Dinosaur Comics had a reference to Edgar Allan Poe three weeks before the xkcd comic was published. There is also a Penny Arcade version of the \"Raven\" trope.\nThe title text, besides defending the graphic style of the drawing, also lampshades at the somewhat peculiar taste of fashion found in the hip-hop subculture. In the picture, Eminem wears a sleeveless hoodie. While the aesthetic value of such garment might be disputed, it certainly defeats the purpose of keeping its bearer warm.\nOnce upon a midnight dreary While I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious Volume of forgotten lore While i nodded, nearly napping, Suddenly there came a tapping As if someone gently rapping Rapping at my chamber door... [A door opens, revealing Eminem wearing a hoodie.] click creak Eminem: Yo.\n"}
{"id":134,"title":"Myspace","image_title":"Myspace","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/134","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/myspace.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/134:_Myspace","transcript":"[Computer screen showing a myspace page.] Oh man, you and everyone in earshot are gonna love the first five seconds of this song!\n","explanation":"This comic references a common issue that users would experience in the late 2000s on the now outdated website MySpace . At the time, an individual with a profile on that website would be able to choose a song that would automatically play when anyone accessed said profile. This was a heavily promoted feature in which the majority of users would partake. The song would interrupt whatever else the user was doing, such as listening to music, watching a video, or simply browsing in silence.\nFor further context, MySpace at the time did not have a universal \"news feed\" to browse, so users would perform most of their interaction with other users by actively going to their profiles. Thus, the auto-playing music became a compounding problem, as the user could experience it several times per browsing session.\nThe \"first five seconds\" refers to approximately how long it would take a typical user to find the pause button.\nFuture social networks would eschew features like this, as they are perceived by the user base to be annoying and distracting. However, the issue in some ways persists, as sites like Facebook now auto-play sound on videos and advertisements (unless the user opts out).\nThe title text refers to the fact that old pages, back in the late 1990s, used embedded MIDI files, which would not only play automatically, but also have no way to stop playing. The viewer would have to leave the website or externally mute the audio. Additionally, some Macintosh computers at the time had a bug that would automatically play MIDI files at the maximum computer volume, making them an incredible nuisance. MIDI files do not contain actual audio, but instead contain instructions for which notes to play on which musical instruments, and upon playback, these instructions would render sound from a library of MIDI audio samples installed in the computer's operating system \u2014 audio samples that were often artificially synthesized and of poor quality, producing music reminiscent of early video games; this may have made these web pages with embedded MIDI even more annoying. (In fairness, it should be noted that high-quality MIDI audio samples are also available, often recorded from actual musical instruments, and capable of reproducing realistic music.)\n[Computer screen showing a myspace page.] Oh man, you and everyone in earshot are gonna love the first five seconds of this song!\n"}
{"id":135,"title":"Substitute","image_title":"Substitute","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/135","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/substitute.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/135:_Substitute","transcript":"[In a classroom, the board says \"Math\" on the top-left corner, and \"Mr. Munroe\" in the middle. A Cueball portrays Randall, standing in front of it, speaking to the class.] Randall: Miss Lenhart couldn't be here today, so she asked me to substitute. Randall: I've put out your tests. Please get started.\n[A student in the first row raises the exam paper and says:] Student: Mr. Munroe, Miss Lenhart never taught us this.\nRandall: That's because Miss Lenhart doesn't understand how important certain kinds of math are. Student: But this just looks-- Randall: This material is more vital than anything you've ever learned Student: But-- Randall: No buts.\nRandall: This is a matter of life and death.\n[Excerpt from the exam paper.] Name: _________\n[A stick figure is standing, hands over head. A velociraptor is running towards it.]\n1. The velociraptor spots you 40 meters away and attacks, accelerating at 4 m\/s^2 to its top speed of 25 m\/s. When it spots you, you begin to flee, quickly reaching your top speed of 6 m\/s. How far can you get before you're caught and devoured?\n2. You're at the center of a 20m equilateral triangle with a raptor at each corner. The top raptor has a wounded leg and is limited to a top speed of 10 m\/s.\n[A stick figure is shown in the above situation. The picture has a legend \" (Not to scale). \"]\nThe raptors will run toward you. At what angle should you run to maximize the time you stay alive?\n3. Raptors can open doors, but they are slowed by them. Using the floor plan on the next page, plot a route through the building, assuming raptors take 5 minutes to open the first door and halve the time for each subsequent door. Remember, raptors run at 10 m\/s and they do not know fear.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the film Jurassic Park , a 1993 movie based on the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton . The film centers around a billionaire who bought an island and opened a zoo or theme park for dinosaurs that he has cloned from DNA recovered from blood found in fossilized mosquitoes. After a computer programmer shuts down the security systems to steal embryos for a rival company, several of the creatures, among which are the Velociraptors subject of this comic, run loose and try to devour every human in the theme park.\nVelociraptors (often shortened to \"raptors\") are a species of relatively small, carnivorous dinosaur that play a central role in the original film, as well as its sequels. In the film, packs of Velociraptors antagonize the main characters at various points, even entering buildings. According to newer researches, the Velociraptors in the film were erroneously based on the Utahraptor species of dinosaur. Unlike the movie, in which they are depicted as having a reptilian skin, both species of dinosaur in reality are theorized to have been feathered. The word \"raptor\" also refers to modern birds of prey .\nRandall is asked to substitute for Miss Lenhart in math class. The first page of the test he devises contains three questions, which have the recurring theme of humans running from said velociraptors. For the answers, see the trivia section. As Randall says in the comic: \"This material is more vital than anything you've ever learned,\" the joke being that Randall is somehow fearful that such a thing could happen.\nVelociraptors, and in particular, the irrational fear of being attacked by them in the modern world, appear several times in xkcd . This is the second such instance; the first is 87: Velociraptors\nIn the title text, Randall asks the kids whether they find this possibility humorous (and they rightfully should, considering that the chances of such a thing occuring are astronomically low).\n[In a classroom, the board says \"Math\" on the top-left corner, and \"Mr. Munroe\" in the middle. A Cueball portrays Randall, standing in front of it, speaking to the class.] Randall: Miss Lenhart couldn't be here today, so she asked me to substitute. Randall: I've put out your tests. Please get started.\n[A student in the first row raises the exam paper and says:] Student: Mr. Munroe, Miss Lenhart never taught us this.\nRandall: That's because Miss Lenhart doesn't understand how important certain kinds of math are. Student: But this just looks-- Randall: This material is more vital than anything you've ever learned Student: But-- Randall: No buts.\nRandall: This is a matter of life and death.\n[Excerpt from the exam paper.] Name: _________\n[A stick figure is standing, hands over head. A velociraptor is running towards it.]\n1. The velociraptor spots you 40 meters away and attacks, accelerating at 4 m\/s^2 to its top speed of 25 m\/s. When it spots you, you begin to flee, quickly reaching your top speed of 6 m\/s. How far can you get before you're caught and devoured?\n2. You're at the center of a 20m equilateral triangle with a raptor at each corner. The top raptor has a wounded leg and is limited to a top speed of 10 m\/s.\n[A stick figure is shown in the above situation. The picture has a legend \" (Not to scale). \"]\nThe raptors will run toward you. At what angle should you run to maximize the time you stay alive?\n3. Raptors can open doors, but they are slowed by them. Using the floor plan on the next page, plot a route through the building, assuming raptors take 5 minutes to open the first door and halve the time for each subsequent door. Remember, raptors run at 10 m\/s and they do not know fear.\n"}
{"id":136,"title":"Science Fair","image_title":"Science Fair","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/136","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/science_fair.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/136:_Science_Fair","transcript":"[Text above the drawing:] Although it caught me by surprise at the time, looking back I understand why my senior science fair project went over as badly as it did.\n[A science fair project consisting of eight posters on three pink walls is set up for presenting such a project, so it is possible to step in between the walls to read about the project. There are two posters on both the left and the right wall, all four with unreadable text. Three of them clearly have a bolder heading at the top (still unreadable). The last to the right, which has no header, has instead some kind of drawing or formula in the middle, still unreadable.]\n[The central wall has some readable and discernible parts. The top poster is the title of the project, written in very large letters:] The Mathematics of Cunnilingus\n[Below the title poster, there are three posters. Two of these are right below, one to the left and one to the right, and the last poster below takes up the rest of the wall. The left of the two posters next to each other has a table with three rows and three columns. The text in each box is unreadable, but some of the text seems to be formulas though. Above the three columns, there are readable legends:] f(t);\u00a0\u00a0 F(\u03c9);\u00a0\u00a0 \u2112(s)\n[The next poster to the right shows a drawing of female genitalia with the clitoris and both sets of Labia shown. It is displayed on a chart with X and Y axes with ticks (but no labels), and there is a box with three lines of unreadable text\/legends.]\n[The last poster at the bottom of the central panel shows four line graphs with what looks like modulated signals or other time-domain signals or functions. These are displayed in two rows\/columns to the left. To the right of these, there is a readable heading, and below that is more unreadable text:] Challenges in frequency-domain analysis\n","explanation":"A science fair involves schoolchildren doing research on a subject of their choice. The purpose is to give them hands-on experience with scientific techniques. Even so, a project based on cunnilingus , oral stimulation of the female genitalia for sexual enjoyment, would not likely be acceptable in a science fair, a setting that is not only public but also involving children. However, adolescents are often very curious about sex and can often misjudge what is appropriate behaviour.\nOn the center left are the notations for a function f(t) , its Fourier transform F(\u03c9) , and its Laplace transform \u2112(s) . The section titled \"Challenges in frequency domain analysis\" show four graphs that may be representative of amplitude modulation (variation in the depth of licking), frequency modulation (variation of the rate of licking), a small high frequency signal superimposed on a larger, slower one, and a periodic but non-continuous signal, perhaps a tangent function . These would have more complex Fourier and Laplace transforms than a simple sinusoidal licking function.\nThe title text is probably a reference to An Inconvenient Truth , a 94-minute documentary film where former US vice president Al Gore teaches the general public about the dangers of global warming. It has been included in science curricula in schools around the world, to the ire of easily bored students everywhere.\nThis comic was mentioned in FRUIT OPINIONS! on the Blag . Although this comic must have been one of the more controversial, it had nothing on the impact of 388: Fuck Grapefruit , which was the cause of the Blag entry, as it became the most controversial comic written to that point (i.e. 2008): ...beating out comics about cunnilingus, the Obama endorsement, and my making 4chan tiny on the map of the internet . (See the grapefruit comic for more details).\n[Text above the drawing:] Although it caught me by surprise at the time, looking back I understand why my senior science fair project went over as badly as it did.\n[A science fair project consisting of eight posters on three pink walls is set up for presenting such a project, so it is possible to step in between the walls to read about the project. There are two posters on both the left and the right wall, all four with unreadable text. Three of them clearly have a bolder heading at the top (still unreadable). The last to the right, which has no header, has instead some kind of drawing or formula in the middle, still unreadable.]\n[The central wall has some readable and discernible parts. The top poster is the title of the project, written in very large letters:] The Mathematics of Cunnilingus\n[Below the title poster, there are three posters. Two of these are right below, one to the left and one to the right, and the last poster below takes up the rest of the wall. The left of the two posters next to each other has a table with three rows and three columns. The text in each box is unreadable, but some of the text seems to be formulas though. Above the three columns, there are readable legends:] f(t);\u00a0\u00a0 F(\u03c9);\u00a0\u00a0 \u2112(s)\n[The next poster to the right shows a drawing of female genitalia with the clitoris and both sets of Labia shown. It is displayed on a chart with X and Y axes with ticks (but no labels), and there is a box with three lines of unreadable text\/legends.]\n[The last poster at the bottom of the central panel shows four line graphs with what looks like modulated signals or other time-domain signals or functions. These are displayed in two rows\/columns to the left. To the right of these, there is a readable heading, and below that is more unreadable text:] Challenges in frequency-domain analysis\n"}
{"id":137,"title":"Dreams","image_title":"Dreams","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/137","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dreams.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/137:_Dreams","transcript":"[A friend is standing behind Cueball, who is typing at a computer.] Friend: You should be more careful what you write. Future employers might read it.\n[The friend still stands while Cueball looks at his computer.] Cueball: When did we forget our dreams? Friend: What?\n[Cueball stands beside his friend.] Cueball: The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out before us. We see the same things every day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us. Cueball: And no, I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn't involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. It doesn't involve tempering my life to better fit someone's expectations. It doesn't involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up. Cueball: This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can:\n[The next three panels are Cueball standing.]\nCueball: FUCK.\nCueball: THAT.\nCueball: SHIT.\n","explanation":"In the first panel of this comic, it is clear that Cueball has just written some comment that his friend thinks will lower his chances for getting a job in the future. This is common advice given to teenagers and young professionals, given as a warning that their posts online could be seen by a potential future boss.\nIn the next panel, Cueball replies with a seeming non-sequitur: when did we forget our dreams? Without explanation, this seems like one of the overly philosophizing, ultimately meaningless questions that also happen to pop up on social media sites. Cueball's friend is confused by the sudden shift in conversation.\nThe long monologue Cueball delivers focuses around the fact that as people get older, their lives becomes narrower and less filled with possibilities and novelty. This is a speech made in the manner of someone getting older and missing the simpler days of youth, where everything was much more exciting. From this point, he explains that part of the deadening process is responding the same way to each event that happens, and creating a routine. Routines, Cueball believes, remove our ability to act on our dreams.\nFinally, Cueball gets to relating this monologue to posting inappropriate material to social media sites: he will not let his concerns for a nebulous future hinder the outlook on life he has now. He will not limit his choices in order to conform with the expectations of an uninspired future. He ends with the clear and simple explanation of his choices\u2014\"Fuck. That. Shit.\"\nCueball's use of periods between words in this closing phrase is itself another reference to practices on social media sites; people will sometimes put a period after each word in a short phrase to show emphasis.\nConnor's second thesis from the title text is a quote from the character Sarah Connor in the film Terminator 2 . The message expressed is a restatement of Cueball's monologue: While it sounds trite, each and every one of us has the ability to change our situation, whether by quitting the job we don't like, telling that person that we love them, or some other action. Our action (and inaction) creates our future, including the way in which we react to those things outside our control.\nThe title text also poses the question of whether the more creativity lost to conformity, the more routine life becomes, or the more routine life becomes, the less creative you become.  This is a chicken and egg type question, which is dramatically broken by the suggestion of a roadtrip. This is the situationally unexpected break that shows that the speaker is willing to break out of the routines threatening to set in.\nOther comics with a similar theme about finding or taking unexplored paths, instead of fitting into the mold, include 59: Graduation and 267: Choices: Part 4 .\n[A friend is standing behind Cueball, who is typing at a computer.] Friend: You should be more careful what you write. Future employers might read it.\n[The friend still stands while Cueball looks at his computer.] Cueball: When did we forget our dreams? Friend: What?\n[Cueball stands beside his friend.] Cueball: The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out before us. We see the same things every day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us. Cueball: And no, I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn't involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. It doesn't involve tempering my life to better fit someone's expectations. It doesn't involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up. Cueball: This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can:\n[The next three panels are Cueball standing.]\nCueball: FUCK.\nCueball: THAT.\nCueball: SHIT.\n"}
{"id":138,"title":"Pointers","image_title":"Pointers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/138","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pointers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/138:_Pointers","transcript":"[Cueball is playing a video game, with Black Hat standing behind him.] Cueball: Man, I suck at this game. Can you give me a few pointers? Black Hat: 0x3A28213A 0x6339392C, 0x7363682E. Cueball: I hate you.\nIn xkcd: Volume 0 , the pointers are different, specifically 0x4B657932, 0x6F66383A, and 0x73CD4542.\n","explanation":"This comic is about a play on the dual meaning of the word \"pointer.\" Cueball is playing a video game, but he seems to be stuck. So he asks Black Hat for a few tips (\"pointers\") to progress in the game. Black Hat is, as usual, annoying, so he spits out a couple of (seemingly random) 32-bit hexadecimal addresses, which are \" pointers \" in a programming language. These pointers are used to access a certain location in the computer's memory in order to fulfill a task; however, this would not be helpful in the game. Cueball is then annoyed at Black Hat for not answering his question.\nA segmentation fault , as referred to in the title text, is a result by accessing invalid memory addresses. If you define a pointer to an invalid address, then try to access the memory location associated with it, you could end up with this exception. The hexadecimal address 0x-1 is definitely invalid, because it's out of range. If you treat pointers as signed numbers, it points below the lowest address, 0; if you treat them as unsigned (meaning the numbers wrap around, so -1 is the same as the highest address - 0xFFFFFFFF on a 32-bit system), if it's pointing at any object larger than a byte, most of that object is past the highest address. So, this is a \"hidden location,\" but as soon as you try to read more than one byte at that location, you will get a segfault.\nThe ending letters of the pointers are spelling, reading top to bottom, the word ACE. As Cueball is playing a game, Black Hat could be additionally saying that he's an ace of the game.\nPointers are often used to cheat in games and do things like change the amount of money you have. The pointers Black Hat spits out could also be cheat codes giving an extra reason for Cueball to hate him.\n[Cueball is playing a video game, with Black Hat standing behind him.] Cueball: Man, I suck at this game. Can you give me a few pointers? Black Hat: 0x3A28213A 0x6339392C, 0x7363682E. Cueball: I hate you.\nIn xkcd: Volume 0 , the pointers are different, specifically 0x4B657932, 0x6F66383A, and 0x73CD4542.\n"}
{"id":139,"title":"I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards","image_title":"I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/139","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/electric_skateboards.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/139:_I_Have_Owned_Two_Electric_Skateboards","transcript":"[Caption above the panels:] How electric skateboards work:\n[Cueball is standing on a skateboard, just to the right of a sign. He pushes a button on the remote he has in his hand. The remote is connected to his skateboard through a wire.] Sign: Point A Click\n[Cueball skates while he stands still on the board.] Whirrrr\n[He stops just in front of another sign. To his left are three girls; Megan, Ponytail, and another Megan-like girl with even longer hair than the first. Below them are three arrows pointing to each of them and a label connected to all three arrow.] Sign: Point B Label: Chicks\n","explanation":"Randall likes electric skateboards (he has owned two already by the time of this comic). This comic shows a simple move where Cueball drives one from A to B.\nIt's not very artistic, but the \"chicks\" are cheering, and the comic states that this is how they work. The humor of the comic is an understated joke that if you use an electric skateboard just to get around, by the time you get to where you are going, there will already be a group of chicks cheering and following you just because electric skateboards are awesome.  (The pickup artist in 1178: Pickup Artists would be disappointed to learn that this is not actually accurate, as it would save him the bother of \"sleazy\" social manipulation of the desired \"chicks,\" assuming they can afford to acquire an electric skateboard instead.)\nIn the title text, Randall tells us that both of his two electric skateboards were cheap and have been worn down by heavy use. If he ever moves to the city, he will buy a really nice skateboard. If it is to be able to get around over the shorter distances of the city or if it is just because there are many more \"chicks\" to impress is left up to the reader's imagination.\nElectric skateboards have been the subject of several other comics , but this was the first. It has been featured most prominently in The Race , a five part comic series.\n[Caption above the panels:] How electric skateboards work:\n[Cueball is standing on a skateboard, just to the right of a sign. He pushes a button on the remote he has in his hand. The remote is connected to his skateboard through a wire.] Sign: Point A Click\n[Cueball skates while he stands still on the board.] Whirrrr\n[He stops just in front of another sign. To his left are three girls; Megan, Ponytail, and another Megan-like girl with even longer hair than the first. Below them are three arrows pointing to each of them and a label connected to all three arrow.] Sign: Point B Label: Chicks\n"}
{"id":140,"title":"Delicious","image_title":"Delicious","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/140","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/delicious.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/140:_Delicious","transcript":"[Frame is split by a diagonal.] [First half: Cueball in front of open fridge.] Cueball: I have leftover cheese. I should get chips and make nachos.\n[Second half: Cueball with bag of chips.] Cueball: I have leftover chips. I should get cheese and make nachos.\n[Caption below the two drawings:] A delicious cycle\n","explanation":"The simplest explanation for the comic is the recipe for nachos . You take some tortilla chips , spread them out on a plate, sprinkle them with grated cheese and perhaps some other ingredients like salsa, beans, or guacamole, and put the plate in the oven until the cheese is melted. As usual with a full bag of snacks, you always end up with that tiny bit left at the bottom of the bag. In this case, it is either leftover grated cheese (left) or tortilla chips (right). So you end up buying another package of the other ingredient to make nachos again.\nThis is an example of a virtuous or vicious cycle , in which a feedback loop reinforces itself. A virtuous cycle has favorable results, while a vicious has detrimental results. In this case, it is neither a virtuous or vicious cycle, but a delicious cycle - the pun of this joke.\nThe title text just says that currently, Randall has leftover cheese. He will probably get chips soon, continuing the cycle.\nThe same problem with having leftovers when making a dish using two types of food that don't match up is the setup for the joke in 1641: Hot Dogs .\n[Frame is split by a diagonal.] [First half: Cueball in front of open fridge.] Cueball: I have leftover cheese. I should get chips and make nachos.\n[Second half: Cueball with bag of chips.] Cueball: I have leftover chips. I should get cheese and make nachos.\n[Caption below the two drawings:] A delicious cycle\n"}
{"id":141,"title":"Parody Week Achewood","image_title":"Parody Week: Achewood","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/141","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/achewood.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/141:_Parody_Week:_Achewood","transcript":"[Unlike regular xkcd comics, the text here seems to be typed on a machine, and the speech is in bubbles rather than just indicated with a thin line from the speaker. This is true for all spoken text. Also, Beef almost never uses any punctuation in his sentences.]\n[Philippe, an anthropomorphic stuffed otter, is participating in a hearing aid test with headphones over his ears and one arm raised. He is at a doctor's office, and behind him on the wall, there is an eye chart with six lines of E's, the large one on top a regular E, and then in the next two lines they are turned around in the four general directions. The last three lines are not readable. The doctor talks to Philippe from off-panel in a bubble going to the far right. Here it meets a thought bubble line going down and left from the upper right corner. On the right side, the background is gray, and Philippe can be seen lying in a bed, dreaming the scene to the left.] Doctor (off-panel): Philippe, your hearing is perfect! In fact, you heard ALL the beeps! You have super-hearing! You're needed at Hogwarts! Philippe: Oh boy! Eye chart: E E \u026f EM\u018e \u018eE\u018eM\u018eME\n[Roast Beef, an anthropomorphic thin cat with pointy ears and small eyes, is looking at Ray, an anthropomorphic fat cat with black glasses. He is reading from a piece of paper that has been folded out, holding it up in front of him with both hands. They are seen from the waist up. Most of the time below, their eyebrows are visible to show feelings, but Beef's are not shown here. When they speak, their mouths are open, else they are closed. Beef's is closed in this panel. Above the drawing, there is a line, and in the thin frame formed by that and the top panel, there is a caption:] Meanwhile . . . Ray: Beef, check this out. I got an invite to that The Dude Is Pretty Awesome In Most Measurable Ways I Mean Wow competition.\n[This panel pans up so less of their bodies can be seen and more text can be seen above them. It is clear that Ray has a medal hanging around his neck, which was partly covered by his hands in the previous panel, which are now down. Apart from this, they look the same.] Beef: Alright that is pretty sweet dogg what is your strategy gonna consist of Ray: I'm thinkin' I need to point out my best features -- maybe go holdin' a sign with an arrow toward my junk.\n[Ray is seen almost in full figure, which reveals that he is only wearing big black underpants and the medal, his nipples also clearly visible on each side of the medal (as they were already in the previous panel, but not the one before). He has one arm at his side, the other holding a large sign with big bold text, and beneath this a large black arrow pointing first down and then across towards his pants waistband.] Sign: Yes\n[Back to same view as in the first panel, except a pan so Ray is in the center and Beef is partly cut off at the left frame so there is space for a speech bubble to the right of Ray. Ray holds up a drink glass in front of him with a cherry in the bottom. Beef's eyebrows are missing.] Beef: Yeah well I always said subtlety was your middle name dogg Beef: And also your first and last in case they didn't get the point Ray: How do you think I should play it?\n[Only Beef is shown in this panel to make room for his speech bubbles.] Beef: Well basically you got no chance as I see it these dudes are all lovers and fighters to the last Beef: All sprung fully formed from the head of Sweet Sweetback Beef: You are gonna stand out as the sort of dude who stays at home all night playing fleshlight tag\n[Both are again in this panel, but it has been panned up so only their heads are visible to place speech bubbles above them.] Ray: These words you got are crazy. Didn't I win the outdoor fight? Beef: Uh huh about the fight I wasn't gonna tell you but how could you miss that I was setting you up Ray: What? Beef: You got played dogg\n[Same but panned down to below the medal on Ray. Beef's eyebrows are missing.] Beef: I basically just didn't have the heart to go through with it in the end.\n[Only Beef is shown to the right, making space for five speech bubbles to his left.] Beef: Anyway the point is that you are gonna lose this thing so hard Beef: All cheap McD's hamburger to their slabs of steak Beef: A couple 12-oz sirloins garnished with nothing but pure manhood Beef: Maybe some sprigs of parsley Beef: You are pretty much going down\n[Closeup of a shocked Ray mouth hanging open.]\n[Silence 1. Both are shown from the waistline and up standing looking slightly down, arms down. Ray has closed his mouth. Generally, their ears shift a bit from panel to panel the rest of the way, as has their head position, but else they stay the same distance from each other.]\n[Silence 2. Same view. Beef looks perturbed, and his ear is twitching. Ray's mouth is open again.]\n[Silence 3. Same view. Beef looks sorry. Ray has closed his mouth.]\n[Silence 4. Same view. Beef looks sorry and Ray looks angry. Ray's mouth is open again.]\n[Silence 5. Same view. Ray has closed his mouth again. Beef's eyebrows are missing, but also Ray's are gone, maybe hidden by the rim of the glasses. They do not reappear in the rest of the comic, indicating that he keeps his eyes downcast. ]\n[Silence 6. Same view. Beef's eyebrows are back.]\n[Silence 7. The view has panned so low that it is possible to see the waistband of Ray's underpants. Beef is looking even more down and has moved closer to Ray whose mouth is open again.]\n[Silence 8. Same view, but a little less waistband visible. Beef has moved back agai. His eyebrows are missing and his mouth is open, and Ray looks even more down than before, still mouth open.]\n[Silence 9. View panned so low that a large part of Ray's underpants can be seen. Beef is looking down, mouth closes with eyebrows, Ray standing more straight, still mouth open.]\n[Silence 10. Beef looks surprised with eyebrows raised and has moved close to Ray, who has finally closed his mouth again.]\n","explanation":"This comic is a part of the Parody Week , just joking about other webcomics . This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday), not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule, and it comprises the following five parodies :\nAchewood is a webcomic by Chris Onstad . It portrays the lives of a group of anthropomorphic stuffed toys, robots, and pets, and veers between cheerful, vulgar, and philosophical scenes from everyday American life and bizarre surreal interludes - Kevin Smith meets David Lynch. The comic's humor often lacks a traditional punchline and utilizes numerous awkward pause panels.\nThis comic includes three of the prominent characters from the strip: Philippe a five year old stuffed otter , Ray , and Roast Beef .\nIn the first panel, Phillippe is dreaming of having his ears checked. The doctor informs him that because of his superhearing power, he is needed at Hogwarts , School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, from Harry Potter . This fits well with his canon depiction as a dreamer who believes typically childish things in a serious way - a long-running storyline shows Philippe's semi-imaginary run for president on a platform of hugs. On the wall behind him, there is an E chart - a special version of the eye chart for young children.\nThe comic then switches to Roast Beef and Ray discussing an invitation to a competition described only by its name (\"The Dude Is Pretty Awesome In Most Measurable Ways I Mean Wow\", reminiscent of the name of Roast Beef's zine \"Man Why You Even Got To Do A Thing\"). Achewood has had several storylines pertaining to masculinity contests, but the one that Randall is parodying here is the \"Great Outdoor Fight,\" perhaps Achewood's most famous storyline . In this arc, Ray, finding himself in the shadow of his father, the ludicrously strong Ramses Luther Smuckles, decides to enter a 3,000-man brawl called the \"Great Outdoor Fight.\" Although he is nowhere near as strong as the other contestants, after they all kill each other, he is the last man standing, thanks to the help of Roast Beef, and quits the contest when he realizes that he would have to knock his friend out to win.\nRay, who in Achewood typically just wears a thong, glasses, and jewellery as shown here, has a strategy of simply highlighting his genitals. Roast Beef, always a pessimist who speaks without punctuation, offers his take on the competition: Ray is going to lose to the other, significantly more impressive, contestants.\nIn canon, Roast Beef entered (or at least, hacked himself into) the Great Outdoor Fight specifically to ensure that Ray would win, and was shocked that Ray refused to knock him out. Randall offers an alternative characterization: Roast Beef was setting Ray up and planned to knock him out and claim the trophy, but couldn't complete his plan. Ray is dismayed, and Roast Beef proceeds to further shut him down, comparing Ray (a \"McD's\" hamburger) to the other competitors (a 12 oz. sirloin steak). This leads to a lengthy awkward pause, spanning the rest of the comic.\nThe comic is written in the style of Onstad and his humor. The last 10 panels are \"awkward-pause panels,\" which are used frequently in Achewood, in what appears to be a joke about overuse of dialogue-free panels (there are 11 of these, but the first is a shock panel, then the pause begins).  This joke is continued in the title-text, where Randall claims that this strip set the record for the most panels of this kind, a record previously held by Achewood.\nSweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a 1971 Blaxploitation film that is generally regarded as an exemplar of its genre - its hero, Sweet Sweetback, is a strong, sexually-talented African American fighting his way out of the ghetto. Bursting fully-formed from Sweet Sweetback's head is a parody of the birth of Greek Goddess Athena .\nReferences to Fleshlight , such as this comment by Beef in the first panel in the third row: You are gonna stand out as the sort of dude who stays at home all night playing fleshlight tag , became a recurring theme in xkcd, but this seems to be the first time.\n[Unlike regular xkcd comics, the text here seems to be typed on a machine, and the speech is in bubbles rather than just indicated with a thin line from the speaker. This is true for all spoken text. Also, Beef almost never uses any punctuation in his sentences.]\n[Philippe, an anthropomorphic stuffed otter, is participating in a hearing aid test with headphones over his ears and one arm raised. He is at a doctor's office, and behind him on the wall, there is an eye chart with six lines of E's, the large one on top a regular E, and then in the next two lines they are turned around in the four general directions. The last three lines are not readable. The doctor talks to Philippe from off-panel in a bubble going to the far right. Here it meets a thought bubble line going down and left from the upper right corner. On the right side, the background is gray, and Philippe can be seen lying in a bed, dreaming the scene to the left.] Doctor (off-panel): Philippe, your hearing is perfect! In fact, you heard ALL the beeps! You have super-hearing! You're needed at Hogwarts! Philippe: Oh boy! Eye chart: E E \u026f EM\u018e \u018eE\u018eM\u018eME\n[Roast Beef, an anthropomorphic thin cat with pointy ears and small eyes, is looking at Ray, an anthropomorphic fat cat with black glasses. He is reading from a piece of paper that has been folded out, holding it up in front of him with both hands. They are seen from the waist up. Most of the time below, their eyebrows are visible to show feelings, but Beef's are not shown here. When they speak, their mouths are open, else they are closed. Beef's is closed in this panel. Above the drawing, there is a line, and in the thin frame formed by that and the top panel, there is a caption:] Meanwhile . . . Ray: Beef, check this out. I got an invite to that The Dude Is Pretty Awesome In Most Measurable Ways I Mean Wow competition.\n[This panel pans up so less of their bodies can be seen and more text can be seen above them. It is clear that Ray has a medal hanging around his neck, which was partly covered by his hands in the previous panel, which are now down. Apart from this, they look the same.] Beef: Alright that is pretty sweet dogg what is your strategy gonna consist of Ray: I'm thinkin' I need to point out my best features -- maybe go holdin' a sign with an arrow toward my junk.\n[Ray is seen almost in full figure, which reveals that he is only wearing big black underpants and the medal, his nipples also clearly visible on each side of the medal (as they were already in the previous panel, but not the one before). He has one arm at his side, the other holding a large sign with big bold text, and beneath this a large black arrow pointing first down and then across towards his pants waistband.] Sign: Yes\n[Back to same view as in the first panel, except a pan so Ray is in the center and Beef is partly cut off at the left frame so there is space for a speech bubble to the right of Ray. Ray holds up a drink glass in front of him with a cherry in the bottom. Beef's eyebrows are missing.] Beef: Yeah well I always said subtlety was your middle name dogg Beef: And also your first and last in case they didn't get the point Ray: How do you think I should play it?\n[Only Beef is shown in this panel to make room for his speech bubbles.] Beef: Well basically you got no chance as I see it these dudes are all lovers and fighters to the last Beef: All sprung fully formed from the head of Sweet Sweetback Beef: You are gonna stand out as the sort of dude who stays at home all night playing fleshlight tag\n[Both are again in this panel, but it has been panned up so only their heads are visible to place speech bubbles above them.] Ray: These words you got are crazy. Didn't I win the outdoor fight? Beef: Uh huh about the fight I wasn't gonna tell you but how could you miss that I was setting you up Ray: What? Beef: You got played dogg\n[Same but panned down to below the medal on Ray. Beef's eyebrows are missing.] Beef: I basically just didn't have the heart to go through with it in the end.\n[Only Beef is shown to the right, making space for five speech bubbles to his left.] Beef: Anyway the point is that you are gonna lose this thing so hard Beef: All cheap McD's hamburger to their slabs of steak Beef: A couple 12-oz sirloins garnished with nothing but pure manhood Beef: Maybe some sprigs of parsley Beef: You are pretty much going down\n[Closeup of a shocked Ray mouth hanging open.]\n[Silence 1. Both are shown from the waistline and up standing looking slightly down, arms down. Ray has closed his mouth. Generally, their ears shift a bit from panel to panel the rest of the way, as has their head position, but else they stay the same distance from each other.]\n[Silence 2. Same view. Beef looks perturbed, and his ear is twitching. Ray's mouth is open again.]\n[Silence 3. Same view. Beef looks sorry. Ray has closed his mouth.]\n[Silence 4. Same view. Beef looks sorry and Ray looks angry. Ray's mouth is open again.]\n[Silence 5. Same view. Ray has closed his mouth again. Beef's eyebrows are missing, but also Ray's are gone, maybe hidden by the rim of the glasses. They do not reappear in the rest of the comic, indicating that he keeps his eyes downcast. ]\n[Silence 6. Same view. Beef's eyebrows are back.]\n[Silence 7. The view has panned so low that it is possible to see the waistband of Ray's underpants. Beef is looking even more down and has moved closer to Ray whose mouth is open again.]\n[Silence 8. Same view, but a little less waistband visible. Beef has moved back agai. His eyebrows are missing and his mouth is open, and Ray looks even more down than before, still mouth open.]\n[Silence 9. View panned so low that a large part of Ray's underpants can be seen. Beef is looking down, mouth closes with eyebrows, Ray standing more straight, still mouth open.]\n[Silence 10. Beef looks surprised with eyebrows raised and has moved close to Ray, who has finally closed his mouth again.]\n"}
{"id":142,"title":"Parody Week Megatokyo","image_title":"Parody Week: Megatokyo","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/142","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/megaxkcd.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/142:_Parody_Week:_Megatokyo","transcript":"[At the top of the panel is the title of the comic inside Japanese quote characters. Beneath this is a text, and to the right of this is a drawing on an anime girl in shirt and skirt, who has blonde hair with very long pigtails, long rectangular earrings, and a blank expression looking slightly down while standing with her arms at her sides. The gray-scale drawing is far from the normal xkcd style.] megaxkcd In today's megaxkcd, our protagonist comes to terms with his romantic love for a girl who is a video game console accessory.\n[Cueball and Black Hat, drawn in standard xkcd style, talk.] Cueball: Wait, I'm not sure we should parody megatokyo. Black Hat: Fred Gallagher does seem like he might take it kind of hard. Cueball: He really does. Black Hat: Poor guy. We should try to cheer him up.\n[Cueball and Black Hat stand in front of a profile shot of a house with at least two stories. On the left is a mailbox at the curb of the road to the very left. Black Hat stands on the path to the house past the mailbox, while Cueball is holding a big cake with at least three lit candles on top. He holds it up in both hands in front of him presenting it to the closed door in front of him as he stands on the top of a two-step staircase to the front door. There are two flowers beneath him at the base of the stair, and two windows on the side wall of the house, one in each of the two visible stories. The house continues above the panel.] Black Hat: Fred? Fred, please come out. It's OK. Don't cry, Fred. Cueball: We... We baked you a cake.\n","explanation":"This comic is a part of the Parody Week , just joking about other webcomics . This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday), not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule, and it comprises the following five parodies :\nMegatokyo is a webcomic by Fred Gallagher . Its art and storylines are heavily influenced by Japanese comics known as Manga .\nThe opening panel sets up a parody of Megatokyo here called megaxkcd . The girl is Ping , a robotic PS2 accessory from the comic. The soft gray-scale art, hand-drawn \"shadowed\" panel borders, and vertical panel layout also mimic Megatokyo's design.\nThe joke begins with the main protagonist (probably Piro ) falling in love with Ping, a game console accessory , and in today's comic, he is supposed to come to terms with this fact.\nBut then, the parody is apparently aborted when two characters from the normal xkcd, Cueball and Black Hat , question the parody, as they are afraid of hurting artist Fred Gallagher's feelings. This itself is a dig at the sometimes maudlin and emotionally tender tone of Megatokyo, and in particular the self-conscious resemblance of anxious protagonist Piro to creator Gallagher, who based the character on a twenty-something version of himself.\nThis is one of the few comics where Black Hat is not his usual classhole self. So even he likes and approves of Fred and his comic! Actually, Black Hat is the one most concerned for Fred's feelings, and he suggests that they should go and cheer the poor guy up, now that he may have taken the parody kind of hard. Black Hat also yells to him that he should not cry, when he and Cueball arrive on his doorstep with a cake with lots of candles.\nThe title text reiterates the similarity between the style of the comic and the character of the artist behind it, which has been noted elsewhere as well . It also exclaims Randall 's feelings for Fred, his webcomic, and its style.\nFalling in love with a robot (or using one for sex) was later investigated in the Android series . And on 144: Parody Week: A Softer World , love and robots are again investigated leading to a pregnant robot.\n[At the top of the panel is the title of the comic inside Japanese quote characters. Beneath this is a text, and to the right of this is a drawing on an anime girl in shirt and skirt, who has blonde hair with very long pigtails, long rectangular earrings, and a blank expression looking slightly down while standing with her arms at her sides. The gray-scale drawing is far from the normal xkcd style.] megaxkcd In today's megaxkcd, our protagonist comes to terms with his romantic love for a girl who is a video game console accessory.\n[Cueball and Black Hat, drawn in standard xkcd style, talk.] Cueball: Wait, I'm not sure we should parody megatokyo. Black Hat: Fred Gallagher does seem like he might take it kind of hard. Cueball: He really does. Black Hat: Poor guy. We should try to cheer him up.\n[Cueball and Black Hat stand in front of a profile shot of a house with at least two stories. On the left is a mailbox at the curb of the road to the very left. Black Hat stands on the path to the house past the mailbox, while Cueball is holding a big cake with at least three lit candles on top. He holds it up in both hands in front of him presenting it to the closed door in front of him as he stands on the top of a two-step staircase to the front door. There are two flowers beneath him at the base of the stair, and two windows on the side wall of the house, one in each of the two visible stories. The house continues above the panel.] Black Hat: Fred? Fred, please come out. It's OK. Don't cry, Fred. Cueball: We... We baked you a cake.\n"}
{"id":143,"title":"Parody Week TFD and Natalie Dee","image_title":"Parody Week: TFD and Natalie Dee","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/143","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tfd_nataliedee.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/143:_Parody_Week:_TFD_and_Natalie_Dee","transcript":"[Cueball is standing to the left in this frameless comic, talking to a woman and man. She has long black hair, black eyes, and a very wide mouth going from side to side of the part of her head visible for the hair. She wears a blue shirt, green shorts, and white shoes. She stands with her arms bent with her hands on her sides. Fourteen bees are swarming around her head. The man next to her is bald with a strange distorted face tilting down from right to left, and his eyes align with his tilted forehead. His mouth is a round O. He is wearing a white t-shirt and pants with black shoes. He holds up his left arm, hand in front of his breast. To the right, there lie two tires, the top one lying halfway up on the bottom tire. Where Cueball speaks using the normal all capital letters of xkcd, the other two speak only in lowercase letters.] Cueball: So guys what is funny this week? Natalie: bees! Drew: tires. Natalie: bees with tires! Drew: whatever\n","explanation":"This comic is a part of the Parody Week , just joking about other webcomics . This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday), not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule, and it comprises the following five parodies :\nThis comic parodies two comics in one go. TFD is an acronym for Toothpaste For Dinner , which is a daily one-panel cartoon written and drawn by Drew Fairweather . Each comic features small, simple drawings, paired with short captions or dialogue.\nNatalie Dee is the author of the daily comics Natalie Dee . This webcomic comprises various sketches illustrating amusing or anecdotal situations from everyday life.\nDrew and Natalie are husband & wife, and are also the authors of the webcomic Married to the Sea .\nIn similar style to their simple comics, we see xkcd's Cueball ask the two creators of the two comics what's funny. The woman in color represents Natalie, who does color drawings that could include animals, and she thinks bees are funny. The man is Drew drawn like his own characters with a weird head shape. He thinks tires are funny. Then Natalie combines those to say that bees with tires are funny, and he is like, whatever .\nThe title text points out that it would be funny to see bees with tires. This is because bees, like other living creatures, have no wheels. [ citation needed ]\n[Cueball is standing to the left in this frameless comic, talking to a woman and man. She has long black hair, black eyes, and a very wide mouth going from side to side of the part of her head visible for the hair. She wears a blue shirt, green shorts, and white shoes. She stands with her arms bent with her hands on her sides. Fourteen bees are swarming around her head. The man next to her is bald with a strange distorted face tilting down from right to left, and his eyes align with his tilted forehead. His mouth is a round O. He is wearing a white t-shirt and pants with black shoes. He holds up his left arm, hand in front of his breast. To the right, there lie two tires, the top one lying halfway up on the bottom tire. Where Cueball speaks using the normal all capital letters of xkcd, the other two speak only in lowercase letters.] Cueball: So guys what is funny this week? Natalie: bees! Drew: tires. Natalie: bees with tires! Drew: whatever\n"}
{"id":144,"title":"Parody Week A Softer World","image_title":"Parody Week: A Softer World","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/144","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/a_softer_robot.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/144:_Parody_Week:_A_Softer_World","transcript":"[The comic uses lowercase letters throughout for all the text, which is written in white rectangular areas superimposed on top of the images. Above the first frame there is a title:] x k c d\n[To the left is a red robot with a triangular lower body with panels with buttons and indicators, and the red head on top of two gray sticks has two video cameras for eyes. It is shown standing in a lab with a green brick wall behind it. It stands beneath a poster with text and a piece of paper taped to the wall with unreadable text, but only the first line of text can be seen on these, as the first of the two white text areas in the panel covers the rest. To the right there is a blue table with a computer screen (most of it visible, but it is cut of at the right panel), with blue background and three overlapping windows - unreadable text in the first window, some graphics in the second window, and only white in the last window. Two black items (one looks like a pen) lie on the table to the left, and beneath the table is a shelve where the keyboard lies. A wire goes from the robot to the computer. The other white text box is beneath the computer table, partly obscuring the lower part of the robot as well.] Poster: SAFETY when we open the lab each morning, we tell the robot to kill it's our little joke\n[Zooming in on the center of the first frame between robot and table reveals that the paper on the wall was a drawing of the red robot with three wheels. The panel cut down the middle of the robot's eyes to the left, below the text on the paper drawing at the top, through the middle of the screen to the right and at the keyboard at the bottom. Again, there are two white text panels, one over the drawing and beneath it, which goes partly over the screen:] but secretly we're just afraid\n[Zooming further in to the edge of the robot's eye, the wheel on the poster, the edge of the screen, and the edge of the table. Only one white panel in the middle over the green wall.] to tell it to love\n[Below the first frame is a signature:] r munroe\n","explanation":"This comic is a part of the Parody Week , just joking about other webcomics . This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday), not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule, and it comprises the following five parodies :\nThis comic is a parody of Joey Comeau and Emily Horne's A Softer World webcomic that usually consists of three photos with some white text superimposed over them. The title of the comic is written above, and this has here been replaced with xkcd.\nThe first panel references the Kill command that would be used to turn off the robot every morning. This joke is a reference to the classic Science Fiction theme of robots taking over and killing humans (see for instance 1613: The Three Laws of Robotics ).\nThe second and third panels then turn the comic to a more introspective thought per A Softer World's usual style. There are two possible meanings of these panels.\nThe first references human's natural reaction to be afraid of love because it requires vulnerability and honesty, which is very difficult. In the comic, they are afraid to tell it to love, because then it would experience these same difficulties and fears.\nThe second meaning deals with Artifical Intelligence (AI); specifically strong AI . The idea is that the AI agent would not only act as if it was intelligent, but truly be intelligent and have emotions and feelings as well. There has been much debate over whether an AI agent could actually feel emotions in the same manner as humans, as well as much consternation over the ethical concerns and moral ramifications it would have. Thus the comic's \"We're afraid to tell it to love.\"\nThe title text takes love to be an act of love-making instead of an emotional feeling, thus why the robot is pregnant. Given that Randall Munroe has signed the comic (which he normally never does, but what is the style of A Softer World), the title text must be his comment. So he knows the robot is pregnant, but claims it is not his child. This does not rule out that he has been together with the robot though... Of course this is not possible. But having sex with a robot is the theme in the Android series , and falling in love with one was the theme in the 2nd parody 142: Parody Week: Megatokyo .\n[The comic uses lowercase letters throughout for all the text, which is written in white rectangular areas superimposed on top of the images. Above the first frame there is a title:] x k c d\n[To the left is a red robot with a triangular lower body with panels with buttons and indicators, and the red head on top of two gray sticks has two video cameras for eyes. It is shown standing in a lab with a green brick wall behind it. It stands beneath a poster with text and a piece of paper taped to the wall with unreadable text, but only the first line of text can be seen on these, as the first of the two white text areas in the panel covers the rest. To the right there is a blue table with a computer screen (most of it visible, but it is cut of at the right panel), with blue background and three overlapping windows - unreadable text in the first window, some graphics in the second window, and only white in the last window. Two black items (one looks like a pen) lie on the table to the left, and beneath the table is a shelve where the keyboard lies. A wire goes from the robot to the computer. The other white text box is beneath the computer table, partly obscuring the lower part of the robot as well.] Poster: SAFETY when we open the lab each morning, we tell the robot to kill it's our little joke\n[Zooming in on the center of the first frame between robot and table reveals that the paper on the wall was a drawing of the red robot with three wheels. The panel cut down the middle of the robot's eyes to the left, below the text on the paper drawing at the top, through the middle of the screen to the right and at the keyboard at the bottom. Again, there are two white text panels, one over the drawing and beneath it, which goes partly over the screen:] but secretly we're just afraid\n[Zooming further in to the edge of the robot's eye, the wheel on the poster, the edge of the screen, and the edge of the table. Only one white panel in the middle over the green wall.] to tell it to love\n[Below the first frame is a signature:] r munroe\n"}
{"id":145,"title":"Parody Week Dinosaur Comics","image_title":"Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/145","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dinosaur_comics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/145:_Parody_Week:_Dinosaur_Comics","transcript":"[T-Rex, a large green Tyrannosaurus, holds out his small arms to each side and the tail pointing up while speaking with a wide open pink mouth showing all his teeth. All the text is written like on a typewriter with both caps and lowercase letters, which is not normal in xkcd.] T-Rex: THINGS I AM UPPITY ABOUT: \"They\" as a third-person singular gender-free pronoun.\n[Zoom in on T-Rex head holding his hands up under his mouth, and mouth even wider open so also the red tongue can be seen.] T-Rex: I'm all for it!\n[Zoom out to show T-Rex to the left, mouth almost closed, arms in normal position, the tail pointing up, and lifting his left leg ready to smash his foot down through the roof of a brown log cabin with chimney and porch with a blue car holding in front of the house to the right. Further right is a smaller white\/yellow dinosaur, Dromiceiomimus, standing away from T-Rex, but turning its long neck toward him.] Dromiceiomimus: But isn't that terrible grammar? T-Rex: Only by recent convention!  It's been in use that way for centuries, and its use is widely accepted!  ALSO: This lets us avoid ridiculous constructs like \"he\/she\", \"s\/he\", \"xe\" or \"hirs\"!\n[T-Rex is moving left, so part of his head and his lifted right foot are outside the panels frame, pink mouth again partly open so tongue can be seen, but no teeth are drawn. Arms are still in normal position and the tail is pointing up. Beneath the part of his right foot visible, there is Cueball about to be squashed. Behind him an orange dinosaur, Utahraptor, has appeared. It looks like a smaller version of T-Rex, but with longer arms and very large claws on its rear legs. It has its pink mouth wide open to show its red tongue and teeth, also holding arm in front of it and the tail pointing up. It is moving forward standing only on one leg, the other lifted high up.] Utahraptor: T-Rex, I . . . agree. T-Rex: What? Utahraptor: That sounds good to me!\n[T-Rex stand with both legs down, but wide spread out. The tails is almost down to the ground, only the tip pointing up. The arms are still in front of it towards the left, but it has turned its head, mouth almost closed, toward right looking at Utahraptor, which now stands on both legs, but like it is leaning forward on its toes, stretching up with arms held high, mouth less open, but tongue and teeth visible.] Utahraptor: Normally I'd jump in with an objection, but I think your point makes sense. T-Rex: Could it be that the rift in our author's mind has finally healed? Is he no longer locked in perpetual war with the self-doubt that lurks in his subc-\n[The final part of the final words from T-Rex is interrupted in the previous panel and first finishes here after a narrator \"speaks\" before T-Rex with bold capital letters to the top right, and after to the bottom left. T-Rex is seen in full figure standing with wide open mouth, teeth and tongue visible, arms and tail up.] Narrator: IN A WORLD WHERE THERE IS STILL A LAND BRIDGE BETWEEN ASIA AND NORTH AMERICA FOR SOME REASON: T-Rex: -onscious? Narrator: ALSO HOW ABOUT IN THIS WORLD EVERYONE IS BICURIOUS\n","explanation":"This comic is a part of the Parody Week , just joking about other webcomics . This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday), not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule, and it comprises the following five parodies :\nDinosaur Comics is a webcomic by Ryan North . The artwork never changes, save a few rare exceptions, and only the dialogue is different. Randall traced the comic's usual artwork, though the drawing of the house about to be squashed in panel 3 is a more rudimentary rendition, and the person about to be squashed in panel 4 has been changed into Cueball rather than a woman in bright yellow and pink clothes.\nFor those who haven't read it, this is a typical strip , and here's a strip dealing with the same subject as this comic (but posted five years after it). See also this particular example , where the title text actually refer to Randall and xkcd.\nRandall makes several shots at recurring themes in Dinosaur Comics. T-Rex, the green Tyrannosaurus , is bold and enthusiastic, discussing various topics, a favorite of which appears to be linguistics (North got his degree in computational linguistics). This time, he is talking about \" they \" being used as a third person singular gender-free pronoun and how it should be more widely used, even though its acceptance varies. Dromiceiomimus , the white dinosaur in the third panel, usually responds calmly to T-Rex's discussions. T-Rex then elaborates on how singular \"they\" has been used for centuries (specifically since the fourteenth century), with the change in convention being relatively recent (having fallen out of \"fashion\" in the nineteenth century). Technically, the English language lacks personal pronouns that are gender-neutral in the singular third-person \u2014 that is, there are only gender-specific personal pronouns such as \" he \" and \" she \" \u2014 so when a gender-neutral pronoun is needed, plural pronouns such as \" they \" (which are gender-neutral) are often used instead. There is some debate about whether this is a grammatical error, which may result in the use of grammatically correct, but cumbersome, gender-neutral phrases such as \"he or she\", \"him or her\", \"his or hers\" and so on. To compensate for these shortcomings, other gender-neutral personal pronouns for the singular third-person have also been introduced, such as \"he\/she\", \"s\/he\" and \"xe\" instead of \"he or she\", or \"hirs\" instead of \"his or hers.\" T-Rex considers these constructs to be \"ridiculous\" and points out that they can be avoided by simply using the singular \"they\" instead.\nWhile \"he\/she\" and \"s\/he\" are commonly used as a gender-neutral pronoun when gender is unknown, \"xe\" and \"hirs\" are often used for genderqueer individuals. Genderqueer persons do not subscribe to a \"binary\" definition of gender, where the only genders are male and female, and may identify as having, just to name a few examples, a gender between male and female, a combination of both male and female genders, no gender (terms for this include \"genderless\", \"agender,\" and \"neutrois\"), a separate gender from male and female, an unnameable gender, or a \"fluid\" gender identity that shifts between multiple genders (\"genderfluidity\").\nUtahraptor , the orange dinosaur, typically contradicts T-Rex, but Randall subverts this pattern and has him agree. The comic suggests that the perpetual disagreement stems from a 'rift' in the author's mind, which would be healed if only he lived in a world where there were a land bridge between Asia and North America .\nIn the last panel, the narrator starts with \"In a world\u2026\" a phrase made famous by Don LaFontaine in movie trailers. \"In a world\u2026\" is also likely a reference to the recurring gag of Dinosaur Comics suddenly jumping to alternate worlds or time periods that have whatever conditions T-Rex and his friends have been discussing, to humorous effect.\nThe last sentence suggests that in this other world, everyone is bi-curious . This is a phenomenon in which people of a heterosexual or homosexual identity who, while showing some curiosity for a relationship or sexual activity with a person of the sex they do not favor, distinguish themselves from the bisexual label. Bi-curious has been used as the word of the day two days in a row on May 11th and May 12th 2004, so it's no wonder Randall put the word in this comic. The suggestion that \"everyone is bi-curious\" could be a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's book Imperial Earth , where bisexuality is the norm. Deliberately trite and awkward explorations of this subject matter are also a recurring theme in Dinosaur Comics.\nLike xkcd , Dinosaur Comics has title texts . Ryan's title texts are often bizarre non-sequiturs; the title text for the 2593rd comic , eleven years after the appearance of the first comic, read \"the sixth panel and the second panel are just zoomed versions of each other. IT'S TRUE. I'M SORRY. I COULDN'T BEAR CARRYING THIS TERRIBLE SECRET ANY LONGER.\" The title text in this parody fits this pattern.\nT-Rex from Dinosaur Comics later appeared in 1350: Lorenz (see this example story line and also the Dinosaur section under Lorenz themes ), where the actual images from the first three panels of Ryan's comic are used, rather than like here where Randall copied them himself and in 1452: Jurassic World , where it was the last image from the actual comic that was used.\n[T-Rex, a large green Tyrannosaurus, holds out his small arms to each side and the tail pointing up while speaking with a wide open pink mouth showing all his teeth. All the text is written like on a typewriter with both caps and lowercase letters, which is not normal in xkcd.] T-Rex: THINGS I AM UPPITY ABOUT: \"They\" as a third-person singular gender-free pronoun.\n[Zoom in on T-Rex head holding his hands up under his mouth, and mouth even wider open so also the red tongue can be seen.] T-Rex: I'm all for it!\n[Zoom out to show T-Rex to the left, mouth almost closed, arms in normal position, the tail pointing up, and lifting his left leg ready to smash his foot down through the roof of a brown log cabin with chimney and porch with a blue car holding in front of the house to the right. Further right is a smaller white\/yellow dinosaur, Dromiceiomimus, standing away from T-Rex, but turning its long neck toward him.] Dromiceiomimus: But isn't that terrible grammar? T-Rex: Only by recent convention!  It's been in use that way for centuries, and its use is widely accepted!  ALSO: This lets us avoid ridiculous constructs like \"he\/she\", \"s\/he\", \"xe\" or \"hirs\"!\n[T-Rex is moving left, so part of his head and his lifted right foot are outside the panels frame, pink mouth again partly open so tongue can be seen, but no teeth are drawn. Arms are still in normal position and the tail is pointing up. Beneath the part of his right foot visible, there is Cueball about to be squashed. Behind him an orange dinosaur, Utahraptor, has appeared. It looks like a smaller version of T-Rex, but with longer arms and very large claws on its rear legs. It has its pink mouth wide open to show its red tongue and teeth, also holding arm in front of it and the tail pointing up. It is moving forward standing only on one leg, the other lifted high up.] Utahraptor: T-Rex, I . . . agree. T-Rex: What? Utahraptor: That sounds good to me!\n[T-Rex stand with both legs down, but wide spread out. The tails is almost down to the ground, only the tip pointing up. The arms are still in front of it towards the left, but it has turned its head, mouth almost closed, toward right looking at Utahraptor, which now stands on both legs, but like it is leaning forward on its toes, stretching up with arms held high, mouth less open, but tongue and teeth visible.] Utahraptor: Normally I'd jump in with an objection, but I think your point makes sense. T-Rex: Could it be that the rift in our author's mind has finally healed? Is he no longer locked in perpetual war with the self-doubt that lurks in his subc-\n[The final part of the final words from T-Rex is interrupted in the previous panel and first finishes here after a narrator \"speaks\" before T-Rex with bold capital letters to the top right, and after to the bottom left. T-Rex is seen in full figure standing with wide open mouth, teeth and tongue visible, arms and tail up.] Narrator: IN A WORLD WHERE THERE IS STILL A LAND BRIDGE BETWEEN ASIA AND NORTH AMERICA FOR SOME REASON: T-Rex: -onscious? Narrator: ALSO HOW ABOUT IN THIS WORLD EVERYONE IS BICURIOUS\n"}
{"id":146,"title":"Join Myspace","image_title":"Join Myspace","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/146","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/join_myspace.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/146:_Join_Myspace","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Black Hat.] Cueball: Dude, you should get on MySpace. Black Hat: Eh, I don't think so.\nCueball: C'mon. There's no real reason not to except snobbiness. It's the new social scene. Black Hat: I know. I'm just not interested.\nCueball: Please? I'll friend you. Black Hat: Carebearstare. Cueball: What?\n[Black Hat shoots a rainbow colored ray from his chest - the Care Bear Stare. It throws Cueball to the edge of the panel, pinned to the wall.]\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the 1980s TV\/comic series Care Bears , in which various cuddly bears in rainbow colors go on missions to save the world. The characters' ultimate weapon is the \"Care Bear Stare,\" in which the Bears stand together and radiate light from their respective tummy symbols. These combine to form a ray of love and good cheer that could bring care and joy into the target's heart. Of course, Black Hat 's carebearstare is far more lethal.\nCueball is trying to convince Black Hat to create an account at Myspace , a networking site, but Black Hat isn't interested. When Black Hat gets annoyed by Cueball's persuasions, he activates his \"carebearstare,\" thus overthrowing Cueball's request to be friends on myspace.\nOne possible explanation for Black Hat's odd choice of weaponry is that he is mocking Cueball. The phrase \"Please? I'll friend you\" sounds like an average preschooler's coaxing (along the lines of \"Please? I'll be your friend!\"). Therefore, Black Hat may feel that Cueball's remarks seem childish and deserve a childish backlash.\nOn a nostalgic note, considering the state of social media in the 2010s, Black Hat is just really good at foreshadowing.\nIn the title text, Black Hat reflects that he uses his carebearstare power too much, possibly as a form of apology to Cueball.\n[Cueball is talking to Black Hat.] Cueball: Dude, you should get on MySpace. Black Hat: Eh, I don't think so.\nCueball: C'mon. There's no real reason not to except snobbiness. It's the new social scene. Black Hat: I know. I'm just not interested.\nCueball: Please? I'll friend you. Black Hat: Carebearstare. Cueball: What?\n[Black Hat shoots a rainbow colored ray from his chest - the Care Bear Stare. It throws Cueball to the edge of the panel, pinned to the wall.]\n"}
{"id":147,"title":"A Way So Familiar","image_title":"A Way So Familiar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/147","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/a_way_so_familiar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/147:_A_Way_So_Familiar","transcript":"Hairy: I saw a cute girl outside the bank today. She looked nice. Cueball: Oh no, not again. You are the worst judge of these things. Hairy: But she was so sweet. Shy, but there was something in her eyes. A pain down in her soul, the same as the one down in mine. Cueball: Mm hmm. Hairy: The police light played through her mohawk like the sun setting through pine trees as she shoveled the third hooker into the trunk of the Camry... Cueball: Back up.\n","explanation":"Some introverts tend to empathize with other people they perceive as being shy or introverted. Sometimes, their imagination leads them to obscure visions. A person outside the imaginative world can easily see through this and judge it as a delusion.\nHairy points out that he saw a girl at the bank and probably started having platonic romantic feelings toward her, describing many characteristics that would be impossible to know about her without actually talking to her. Cueball has clearly experienced Hairy's bad judgements before, and so responds with a \"Oh no, not again.\"\nIn the last panel, the reader finds out that she probably does not look like the sweet girl the reader imagined, having a mowhawk and shoveling (presumably dead) prostitutes into a car. This quickly prompts Cueball to say \"back up,\" wanting to know what exactly had happened.\nJoey Comeau is a Canadian writer, best known for the webcomic \u201cA Softer World\u201d. The \"obscure\" reference is probably to one of the entries in his 'Overqualified' series, another project in which he submits sincere-sounding, but clearly unacceptable, job inquiries to real companies. That particular entry is addressed to the marketing department of Toyota, the makers of the Toyota Camry . The post could be found here .\nHedwig refers to the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch , and the comic references the musical's song \"The Origin of Love.\" This song is based on a satirical idea from Plato's Symposium , whereby every person originally consisted of two bodies joined together; the gods eventually violently tore us apart, and we fall in love when we find the person who was once physically joined to us. This song contains the lyrics:\nYou had a way so familiar I couldn't recognize ' cause you had blood on your face I had blood in my eyes But I could tell by your expression That the pain down in your soul Was the same as the one down in mine [1]\nThe joke is that Hairy seems oblivious to the fact that his imagination is a very obvious delusion. While people could forgive a guy empathizing with a \"cute pretty girl,\" Cueball seems annoyed by the lack of judgment of Hairy.\nHairy: I saw a cute girl outside the bank today. She looked nice. Cueball: Oh no, not again. You are the worst judge of these things. Hairy: But she was so sweet. Shy, but there was something in her eyes. A pain down in her soul, the same as the one down in mine. Cueball: Mm hmm. Hairy: The police light played through her mohawk like the sun setting through pine trees as she shoveled the third hooker into the trunk of the Camry... Cueball: Back up.\n"}
{"id":148,"title":"Mispronouncing","image_title":"Mispronouncing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/148","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mispronouncing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/148:_Mispronouncing","transcript":"[Caption at top of panel:] My hobby: Mispronouncing words\n[Cueball and a friend are talking:] Cueball: Yeah, did you see what he said on his wobsite? Friend: ...his what? Cueball: Wobsite. Friend: ... I think you mean \"website.\" Cueball: Why don't you write about it in your blag?\nToday if you visit https:\/\/www.blag.xkcd.com , you get redirected to blog.xkcd.com, but the title is still \"xkcd - The blag of the webcomic\".\n","explanation":"This is the sixth comic in the My Hobby series. Cueball is deliberately mispronouncing words while talking. It's just his hobby. Hobbies in the My Hobby series are generally annoying or weird, but with an element of cleverness. Here, Cueball persists in mispronouncing his words despite the second character's attempt to correct him.\nIn the title text, Randall explains that he got the idea for this comic from one of his friends, although it could just be his friend's accent.\nInterestingly, when Randall started the xkcd blog in October 2006, 6 weeks after the publication of this comic, he named it \" Blag ,\" and he has used that name in several other comics, such as 181: Interblag and 239: Blagofaire .\n[Caption at top of panel:] My hobby: Mispronouncing words\n[Cueball and a friend are talking:] Cueball: Yeah, did you see what he said on his wobsite? Friend: ...his what? Cueball: Wobsite. Friend: ... I think you mean \"website.\" Cueball: Why don't you write about it in your blag?\nToday if you visit https:\/\/www.blag.xkcd.com , you get redirected to blog.xkcd.com, but the title is still \"xkcd - The blag of the webcomic\".\n"}
{"id":149,"title":"Sandwich","image_title":"Sandwich","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/149","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sandwich.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/149:_Sandwich","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting on a couch, talking to a Cueball-like friend.] Cueball: Make me a sandwich. Friend: What? Make it yourself. Cueball: Sudo make me a sandwich. Friend: Okay.\n","explanation":"On both Windows and UNIX computer systems, users can be assigned all kinds of rights, for example rights to access certain directories and files, or to execute certain commands.  The sudo command (pronounced \"sue due\" or \"pseudo\") lets certain (authorized) UNIX users override these policies by executing the command (everything after the word \"sudo\" on the command line) as the root user. Root (sometimes called the superuser) has complete system powers, exempt from all access controls; it is similar to a Windows administrator, however even the powers of a Windows administrator is limited - the system32 folder, for example, cannot be deleted because it is a critical part of the operating system, while there is no such restriction on UNIX - if a root user feels like (or accidentally) deletes a vital file, they are free to do so. As a result, common advice is to not use sudo unless the command in question absolutely requires it - indeed, most commands do not require such privileges.\nOne very common activity for UNIX administrators is to install or configure software using the UNIX make command, e.g. % make install .  Often this command requires administrative permissions in order to complete successfully, which in practice means the \" make this \" command will fail unless it is typed as \" sudo make this \" instead. However as mentioned before since most commands work just fine without sudo, along with general discouragement from using it willy-nilly, it is fairly common for people who use or administer UNIX systems to attempt a straight up % make install and have it fail. They then need to repeat the command with \"sudo,\" whereupon the computer responds obediently, and everything works smoothly.\nCueball is demanding a sandwich from his friend. Not being properly asked, the friend denies the request. Cueball then (ab)uses the sudo command on the friend, who then has no choice but to go and make the sandwich, and now does so without complaint, because Cueball has all the rights. For anyone versed in installing system software with the make command, this exchange is intensely reminiscent of the analogous onscreen experience.\nSimon Says is a children's game in which a leader gives various commands that must be followed if and only if ( iff ) the leader prefixes the command with \"Simon says.\" The title text compares the way the computer will run some commands if they are preceded with \"sudo\" to the way Simon Says players are supposed to follow orders if (and only if) they are preceded with \"Simon says.\"\nAlternatively, the title text might merely be referring to the similarity between Cueball ordering his friend around with \"sudo\" to the Simon Says game leader ordering other players around. Wikipedia suggests  that the \"Simon\" in the name of the game may be the powerful lord Simon de Montfort, or a corruption of Cicero, both of whom were influential politicians of their day.\n[Cueball is sitting on a couch, talking to a Cueball-like friend.] Cueball: Make me a sandwich. Friend: What? Make it yourself. Cueball: Sudo make me a sandwich. Friend: Okay.\n"}
{"id":150,"title":"Grownups","image_title":"Grownups","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/150","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/grownups.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/150:_Grownups","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Megan who is behind a waist-high screen across a doorway with colorful playpen balls behind her.] Cueball: Hey, I was wondering if you had plans for-- holy crap, what happened to your apartment? Megan: I filled it with playpen balls! Cueball: I... what? Why?\n[Megan is seen from the front through the door with the colored balls behind her.] Megan: Because we're grown-ups now, and it's our turn to decide what that means.\n[Cueball is seen from the side standing next to the open door. Megan cannot be seen, except her hands on the screen, but some of the coloured balls can be seen through the door. A beat panel.]\n[Same view but both have entered into the apartment, removing the screen so coloured balls have been spilling out into the corridor. A big pink  love heart drifts out the door.]\n","explanation":"Randall is again playing with the child\/grownup mental setup. During childhood, adults (\"grownups\") make most of the decisions and put constraints on what their children do. As children age and eventually become grownups, there are some things that they do not do anymore, as they see them as childish.\nMegan has taken these thoughts seriously, and realizes that with her newfound freedom as a grownup, she gets to define what her adulthood means. Free from constraints, she goes ahead and creates a ball pit in her apartment of colored plastic balls. Cueball admires this spirit and enters the ball pit. It is difficult to decipher Randall's true intent behind this somewhat cryptic comic, but it seems from the heart that the two are engaging in sexual activity in the pit.\nThe trend with adults participating in children's activities is continued in 219: Blanket Fort , and with adults who feel like children while doing adult things as in 616: Lease , which references this comic in the title text.\nThe title text reveals that Randall also would like to make his own ball pit, but he finds it expensive to buy and also hard to keep clean . Both of these are true - see links. Most public ball pits can easily become very dirty, as many children and toddlers play in them.\n[Cueball is talking to Megan who is behind a waist-high screen across a doorway with colorful playpen balls behind her.] Cueball: Hey, I was wondering if you had plans for-- holy crap, what happened to your apartment? Megan: I filled it with playpen balls! Cueball: I... what? Why?\n[Megan is seen from the front through the door with the colored balls behind her.] Megan: Because we're grown-ups now, and it's our turn to decide what that means.\n[Cueball is seen from the side standing next to the open door. Megan cannot be seen, except her hands on the screen, but some of the coloured balls can be seen through the door. A beat panel.]\n[Same view but both have entered into the apartment, removing the screen so coloured balls have been spilling out into the corridor. A big pink  love heart drifts out the door.]\n"}
{"id":151,"title":"Mario","image_title":"Mario","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/151","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mario.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/151:_Mario","transcript":"Megan: For our anniversary, my boyfriend took me hiking in the mountains. Ponytail: My boyfriend proposed to me. Ponytail: They should call you Mario, 'cause you just got <<1 up'd.>>\n","explanation":"One-upmanship is the act of surpassing another person. In this case, one female character is one-upping her friend's claim of being taken on a mountain hike with a claim that she was proposed to.\nMario is the major figure in the Super Mario series. In the games, completing specific conditions causes a \"1-up\" (but the marks are chevrons (\u00ab\u00bb), used in some languages like Russian instead of quotation marks) to appear on screen, referring to an additional life. The comic relies on the homonym of the action of one-upmanship and the event of one-ups in Mario.\nIn the title text, Randall implies that this is a pretty bad joke.\nMegan: For our anniversary, my boyfriend took me hiking in the mountains. Ponytail: My boyfriend proposed to me. Ponytail: They should call you Mario, 'cause you just got <<1 up'd.>>\n"}
{"id":152,"title":"Hamster Ball","image_title":"Hamster Ball","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/152","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hamster_ball.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/152:_Hamster_Ball","transcript":"[Cueball stands by a genie, whose lower body becomes smoke and trails down to an old-fashioned lamp.] Genie: You have awakened me from the lamp. You may have three wishes. What does your heart desire? Cueball: I'd like a human-sized hamster ball.\n[A hamster ball appears; Cueball is inside it, arms outstretched.] Cueball: Sweet!\n[Cueball steps to left; the ball rolls that way.]\n[He does the same thing to his right.]\n[Cueball comes to rest in the centre of the panel.]\nGenie: And your other wishes? Cueball: Why would I need other wishes?\n","explanation":"The comic starts with a genie , who, having been freed from a magical lamp, grants the owner three wishes; this isn't unusual, since the idea of a genie who does this is a very common trope in the fantasy genre.\nCueball asks for a human-sized hamster ball , and when he gets it, he starts to roll around in it, obviously entertained.\nThe genie then asks what he would like for his other two wishes , to which, having already being granted his heart's desire, he states that he wouldn't need the other wishes for anything.\nThe title text refers to the activity of Zorbing . Later, Randall found out where to get one and went on a hamster ball heist , and hamster balls have been a recurring theme on xkcd since this comic, and 14 years later it received a direct sequel 2331: Hamster Ball 2 .\nThis comic is referenced in 1975: Right Click , where one of the things the ADVENT.EXE wishing well allows you to wish for is a human-sized hamster ball. Doing so redirects you to this page.\nGenies (or magic lamps) are mentioned in at least four other comics:\nIn the first two, Randall manages to use the concept to make penis-related jokes. In the fourth, the issue of number of wishes is discussed, from the perspective of wanting more than three wishes. The issue of wishing for more wishes is also the subject of 1086: Eyelash Wish Log , so it is not always enough with one or even three wishes!\n[Cueball stands by a genie, whose lower body becomes smoke and trails down to an old-fashioned lamp.] Genie: You have awakened me from the lamp. You may have three wishes. What does your heart desire? Cueball: I'd like a human-sized hamster ball.\n[A hamster ball appears; Cueball is inside it, arms outstretched.] Cueball: Sweet!\n[Cueball steps to left; the ball rolls that way.]\n[He does the same thing to his right.]\n[Cueball comes to rest in the centre of the panel.]\nGenie: And your other wishes? Cueball: Why would I need other wishes?\n"}
{"id":153,"title":"Cryptography","image_title":"Cryptography","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/153","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cryptography.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/153:_Cryptography","transcript":"[Randall Munroe (drawn as Cueball) stands behind a lectern on a podium in front of a large conference audience (consisting of Cueball heads), with a poster hanging beside him.] Randall: My cryptosystem is like any Feistel cipher, except in the S-Boxes we simply take the bitstring down, flip it, and reverse it.\n[The poster reads:] Decryption 01101010 >> 00110101 [inverter symbol] 11001010 [crossed arrows] 01010011\n[Caption below the crowd:] I've been barred from speaking at any major cryptography conferences ever since it became clear that all my algorithms were just thinly disguised Missy Elliott songs.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the study of cryptography . We can note the presence of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) logo in the lectern ( podium? ), an association that organizes the most important conferences in the cryptology field.\nRandall , drawn as Cueball behind the lectern at the podium, is describing a proposed crypto system in which a computer program turns a very large number, called the \" key ,\" and a message into an encrypted form that can only be read by using the same key, based on the model of a Feistel cipher . Part of any Feistel cipher is the \"round function,\" which determines how the key is applied to the original message; this is applied multiple times with a variety of tricks and techniques to ensure that the process can eventually be reversed. One common component of round functions is the S-box , a simple table that converts input bytes into output bytes, preferably in a way that doesn't correspond to any mathematical rules.\nHere, the S-box would be implemented by doing the following (with the computer operation actually shown in the diagrams indicated in parentheses):\nThis would be run on each round of the cipher to further scramble the message for the next round. As the caption implies, the steps are based on a line from the Missy Elliott song Work It : \"I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it.\" As with any encryption system, there must be a way to decrypt the cipher text. In Missy Elliott's song, the phrase \"I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it\" is repeatedly played backward, sounding like gibberish. In the same way, steps to a Feistel cipher-based algorithm are executed in reverse to obtain the original plain text from a cipher text.\nThe keyspace for a cryptographic algorithm is the number of possible keys the algorithm can possibly accept. For example, AES-256 has a keyspace of 2 256 (roughly 1.1579209e+77) possible keys, simply because the algorithm specifies that each key is 256 bits wide. The title text is referring to \"searching a keyspace,\" which is to say, simply trying every key until you find one that works. (For reference, a computer would require roughly the energy of a billion billion supernovas to even count to 2 256 , let alone actually try each one.) The precise wording, \"If you got a big keyspace, let me search it\" is, of course, another reference to the same song: \"If you got a big **** let me search ya\" (The word \"penis\" is censored by the trumpeting of an elephant).\nThis was the first comic where Randall was banned from conferences. Since then, he has been banned from multiple conferences for similar pranks; especially in 541: TED Talk , there is a whole list of conferences from which he has been banned. This has sometimes resulted in him being invited to those conferences - see more here on this PyCon response to Randall claiming he was banned from their conference.\n[Randall Munroe (drawn as Cueball) stands behind a lectern on a podium in front of a large conference audience (consisting of Cueball heads), with a poster hanging beside him.] Randall: My cryptosystem is like any Feistel cipher, except in the S-Boxes we simply take the bitstring down, flip it, and reverse it.\n[The poster reads:] Decryption 01101010 >> 00110101 [inverter symbol] 11001010 [crossed arrows] 01010011\n[Caption below the crowd:] I've been barred from speaking at any major cryptography conferences ever since it became clear that all my algorithms were just thinly disguised Missy Elliott songs.\n"}
{"id":154,"title":"Beliefs","image_title":"Beliefs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/154","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/beliefs.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/154:_Beliefs","transcript":"[A girl with long black hair and a professor who looks like Megan stand together. The girl points to Cueball in the distance.] Girl: Professor, that man claims the earth is 6,000 years old! Professor: So? Just use your head and don't concern yourself overmuch with what other people think.\n[Cueball is gone and the girl is no longer pointing but just talking to the professor.] Girl: But he says the fossils in the mountains were put there in a flood! Professor: Well, evidence suggests that they were not. Girl: But he--\n[A mountain landscape with blue sky to the left with white clouds, gray clod cover to the right and gray mountains below. The most prominent peak is just right of the middle, but there are 14 small and large peaks all in all.] Professor (off-panel): A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.\n[The girl throws her hands in the air while the professor just looks at her.] Girl: But he believes the silliest things! Professor: So?\n[The girl has her arms down again and looks on the talking professor.] Professor: The universe doesn't care what you believe . Professor: The wonderful thing about science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your eyes.\n[The girl and professor talks.] Girl: But he's a US senator! Professor: Ah, then yes, we do have a bit of a situation.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to Young Earth creationism , which includes the belief that the Earth has only existed for about 6,000 years. Young Earth creationism is mainly based on literal interpretations of the Bible , which is pseudoscience . The professor is originally not bothered by the fact that someone believes in Young Earth creationism and simply tells the child to look at the scientific evidence . However, she then hears that the person is actually a United States senator , who would presumably influence national policy according to his creationist beliefs. This, she acknowledges, is an actual problem.\nThe comment on the fossils refers to an argument by some Young Earth creationists about the discovery of fossilized sea creatures at high altitudes . While mainstream science sees this as evidence of geological processes taking far longer than six thousand years, these creationists say that sea life reached these locations during a worldwide flood that covered even the tops of mountains.\nThe story of this flood, colloquially called Noah's Ark , is found in the Biblical Book of Genesis ; chapters six through nine . Though it is not stated in the Bible story, many sea creatures are presumed by those who make this claim to have died at high altitudes when the waters lowered. This is a theory held by some Young Earth creationists for the fossils.\nThe last panel is a reference to the fact that a number of people vote based on their perception that the person they're voting for shares their religious views, and then that person goes on to make legislative or educational (if they were voted to a board of education) decisions based on said beliefs.  There have been several instances in the U.S. of state boards of education trying to or succeeding at including young-earth or other creationist theories in the state's science curriculum. See for instance Theistic evolution .\nThe title text makes a further, more playful jab, claiming that scientists not only have the upper hand in reasoning but also in sexiness. This subverts the once-commonly held idea that smarts and attractiveness are not always contained in the same \"package,\" the stereotypical scientist being boring and dull. It also adds a tinge of irony, as no competent reasoner would make an argument from sexiness .\n[A girl with long black hair and a professor who looks like Megan stand together. The girl points to Cueball in the distance.] Girl: Professor, that man claims the earth is 6,000 years old! Professor: So? Just use your head and don't concern yourself overmuch with what other people think.\n[Cueball is gone and the girl is no longer pointing but just talking to the professor.] Girl: But he says the fossils in the mountains were put there in a flood! Professor: Well, evidence suggests that they were not. Girl: But he--\n[A mountain landscape with blue sky to the left with white clouds, gray clod cover to the right and gray mountains below. The most prominent peak is just right of the middle, but there are 14 small and large peaks all in all.] Professor (off-panel): A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.\n[The girl throws her hands in the air while the professor just looks at her.] Girl: But he believes the silliest things! Professor: So?\n[The girl has her arms down again and looks on the talking professor.] Professor: The universe doesn't care what you believe . Professor: The wonderful thing about science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your eyes.\n[The girl and professor talks.] Girl: But he's a US senator! Professor: Ah, then yes, we do have a bit of a situation.\n"}
{"id":155,"title":"Search History","image_title":"Search History","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/155","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/search_history.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/155:_Search_History","transcript":"[In a slim panel at the top of the comic Randall (drawn as Cueball) stands to the left and his speech is written in the rest of the panel to his right.] Randall: In solidarity with the many AOL users whose often embarrassing web searches were released to the public, I offer a sample of my own search history:\n[The long panel beneath the first panel shows a screenshot of Google's front page. The Google logo is partly cut through the top third of the logo. It is in the typical Google color code. Beneath the logo are six links for where to search, one of them is black, because it is chosen, the others blue. One has a red super script indicating there are news there. Below is the search bar. To the right of this, there are three lines with links, for what type of search preferences etc.] G o o g l e Web Images Video New! News Maps more>>\n\nAdvanced search Preferences Language Tools\n[Below the search bar is a box with a thin line around, which comes up when Randall presses the bar, it has the following 20 entries that Google suggests for autocompletion:] velociraptors site:imdb.com \"jurassic park\" raptors dromaeosaurids utahraptor \"home depot\" deadbolts security home improvement surviving a raptor attack robert bakker paleontologist robert bakker \"possible raptor sympathizer\" site:en.wikipedia.org surviving a raptor attack learning from mistakes in jurassic park big-game rifles tire irons treating raptor wounds do raptors fear fire how to make a molotov cocktail do raptors fear death can raptors pick locks how to tell if my neighbors are raptors\n","explanation":"The comic references the AOL search data leak , where users had potentially identifying and embarrassing search histories published. Randall , drawn as Cueball , thus publishes his own potentially embarrassing searches in solidarity with the AOL users.\nAll of his searches relate to his fear of dinosaurs, mainly velociraptors , as a consequence of the Jurassic Park movie he saw when younger. The search \" Utahraptor \" may be a reference to Dinosaur Comics, which xkcd has parodied in 145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics . Alternatively, \"Utahraptor\" may be referenced because the raptors portrayed in Jurassic Park were much more like utahraptors than velociraptors in terms of size.\nThe title text refers to a document posted on a humor site: link (part 1) link (part 2) , link (part 3 ).\n[In a slim panel at the top of the comic Randall (drawn as Cueball) stands to the left and his speech is written in the rest of the panel to his right.] Randall: In solidarity with the many AOL users whose often embarrassing web searches were released to the public, I offer a sample of my own search history:\n[The long panel beneath the first panel shows a screenshot of Google's front page. The Google logo is partly cut through the top third of the logo. It is in the typical Google color code. Beneath the logo are six links for where to search, one of them is black, because it is chosen, the others blue. One has a red super script indicating there are news there. Below is the search bar. To the right of this, there are three lines with links, for what type of search preferences etc.] G o o g l e Web Images Video New! News Maps more>>\n\nAdvanced search Preferences Language Tools\n[Below the search bar is a box with a thin line around, which comes up when Randall presses the bar, it has the following 20 entries that Google suggests for autocompletion:] velociraptors site:imdb.com \"jurassic park\" raptors dromaeosaurids utahraptor \"home depot\" deadbolts security home improvement surviving a raptor attack robert bakker paleontologist robert bakker \"possible raptor sympathizer\" site:en.wikipedia.org surviving a raptor attack learning from mistakes in jurassic park big-game rifles tire irons treating raptor wounds do raptors fear fire how to make a molotov cocktail do raptors fear death can raptors pick locks how to tell if my neighbors are raptors\n"}
{"id":156,"title":"Commented","image_title":"Commented","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/156","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/commented.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/156:_Commented","transcript":"[Cueball calls out to and Black Hat while they are some distance apart as seen from the side. Black Hat is holding an arm out towards Cueball making a gesture and speaking one word.] Cueball: Hey, can you do me a favor? Black Hat: Commented!\n[The same setting seen from behind Black Hat with Cueball drawn much smaller in the background.] Cueball: Huh?\n[Black Hat's hand is shown in close up. He is holding his first and second fingers parallel and at an angle towards the \"small\" Cueball to the left of the hand. The two fingers, as well as Cueball and his next line, are green.] Cueball: Wait, what does that gesture even mean?\n","explanation":"When Cueball asks Black Hat for a favor, he seems to be making a rude gesture , by lifting a finger towards Cueball. However, the word he says, Commented! , does not seem to fit with the shorter four letter word usually combined with such a gesture.\nCueball also fails to understand this, but as it turns out, as the panels move around Black Hat and zooms in on his fingers, he is not making this rude gesture, but is instead actually lifting two fingers toward Cueball , forming a double slash and thereby ignoring both him and his question for a favor, by commenting him out programming style, even to the point where Black Hat sees the commenting out slashes, Cueball, and anything he says in the color for ignored parts of the program (or real world in this case).\nIn certain programming languages (including but not limited to C (since C99), C++, C#, Java, Javascript, PHP, and Scala), inserting a double slash ( \/\/ ) in a line marks everything after the double slash in the line as a \" comment ,\" i.e. something for humans to read that generally helps them understand the code better, rather than something for the computer to execute. Since all comment lines are ignored when a program is run or compiled, it is possible to simply put a double slash in front of any line of code to skip that line. This is known as \"commenting out\" the line. For example:\nAn Integrated Development Environment (IDE for short) is an application that programmers use to write, compile, execute, and debug code. Many IDEs color-code text to make reading the code easier. In IDEs like Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio, a line that is commented out will be colored green; however, the color may vary depending on which IDE you use, and can usually also be customized. The title text refers to this variation among IDEs' color schemes.\n[Cueball calls out to and Black Hat while they are some distance apart as seen from the side. Black Hat is holding an arm out towards Cueball making a gesture and speaking one word.] Cueball: Hey, can you do me a favor? Black Hat: Commented!\n[The same setting seen from behind Black Hat with Cueball drawn much smaller in the background.] Cueball: Huh?\n[Black Hat's hand is shown in close up. He is holding his first and second fingers parallel and at an angle towards the \"small\" Cueball to the left of the hand. The two fingers, as well as Cueball and his next line, are green.] Cueball: Wait, what does that gesture even mean?\n"}
{"id":157,"title":"Filler Art","image_title":"Filler Art","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/157","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/filler_art.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/157:_Filler_Art","transcript":"[Cueball stands in the middle of a single panel. The text above reads:] Sorry guys no comic today. I've gotta go to the doctor to get my thighs rotated. But here's some new character art I'm working on!\n","explanation":"There are times in which the owner of a webcomic can not make a comic on time for the next scheduled update (for example, needing to attend to a family emergency). Some deal with these situations by creating a \"buffer\" of comics (that is, making several comics ahead of time) in anticipation for these events. However, if the buffer runs out (or if there was no buffer in the first place), the owner might have to resort to uploading whatever is available (e.g. concept art, random sketches, a draft of the planned comic, etc.). Many webcomic owners prefer to upload filler art so that their more fickle fans can see that they have not abandoned the comic.\nHere, Randall parodies this situation with two separate punchlines. First, he tells us that he has to go to the doctor to get his thighs rotated, which is medically unnecessary (as a \"thigh rotation\" is physically impossible, and is likely a play on tire rotation ). Second, he refers to \"new character art\" for his comic. The punchline here is that, since the characters are drawn in a stick figure style, there are no distinguishable features between the man here and most other males in the comic series. In addition, the fact that this stick figure should not have taken more than 10 seconds to draw makes the notion that Randall has been \"working on\" it ridiculous.\nThe title text refers to Megatokyo , a popular webcomic widely known for its use of filler art. Creator Fred Gallagher , who goes by his online moniker Piro, frequently makes use of what have come to be called \" Dead Piro Days \", in which he posts character art, or concept art often based in the comic's world or characters, generally of draft or unfinished quality. By his own admission, these days of filler art are sometimes the result of nothing more than his feeling too under the weather, or tired, or emotionally depressed to put in the necessary amount of work to finish a proper update. While Gallagher has been raked over the coals for this by the broader webcomics community, longtime fans of Megatokyo tend to be highly tolerant and have been described as \" some of the most patient and forgiving \" readers, often viewing these lapses as endearing rather than inconvenient.\nRandall 's mention of letting up on Megatokyo refers to 142: Parody Week: Megatokyo , in which Megatokyo and Gallagher were also teased.\n[Cueball stands in the middle of a single panel. The text above reads:] Sorry guys no comic today. I've gotta go to the doctor to get my thighs rotated. But here's some new character art I'm working on!\n"}
{"id":158,"title":"Six Months","image_title":"Six Months","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/158","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/six_months.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/158:_Six_Months","transcript":"[Cueball is standing.] Cueball: It's been six months and I still have those dreams where you're pressed tight against me, where you look into my eyes and give me that grin and it's like you've forgotten everything.\nCueball: And something in the back of my head says it's wrong, it's not like this anymore, but I push it down.  In the morning, I tell myself I can't control my dreams, but there's a part of me that doesn't want them to stop.\nCueball: And honestly, waking up would be a lot easier if your mom didn't look so much like you. Cueball: There's always that moment of confusion.\n","explanation":"Cueball is addressing his ex-partner, telling her that six months after their split-up, he still has dreams of their being together. In the moment after waking up, he is sometimes unable to tell reality and dream apart. However, the third panel reveals the punchline: His confusion results from the likeness between his ex and her mother, next to whom he apparently wakes up every morning. It becomes clear that he has left the girl six months ago in order to live with her mother instead. The comic lampshades at the state of emotional confusion after a break-up that is prominently featured in many films and books.\nThe title text furthers the joke, saying the confusion of why he left her is gone once the older woman does \"that thing with her tongue,\" possibly referring to fellatio.\n[Cueball is standing.] Cueball: It's been six months and I still have those dreams where you're pressed tight against me, where you look into my eyes and give me that grin and it's like you've forgotten everything.\nCueball: And something in the back of my head says it's wrong, it's not like this anymore, but I push it down.  In the morning, I tell myself I can't control my dreams, but there's a part of me that doesn't want them to stop.\nCueball: And honestly, waking up would be a lot easier if your mom didn't look so much like you. Cueball: There's always that moment of confusion.\n"}
{"id":159,"title":"Boombox","image_title":"Boombox","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/159","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/boombox.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/159:_Boombox","transcript":"[Megan is looking out a second story window at Cueball holding a boombox over his head. Musical Notes are coming out of it.] Cueball: Megan! Megan: Oh my god, I can't believe this is happening. Cueball: I love you! Megan: Okay, that's great. Wait a second. Is... is that... Ice Ice Baby? What the hell? Cueball: I'm not very good at this.\n","explanation":"We see Cueball declare his love for Megan in an oft-used setting, paying homage to similar events in classic literature, notably the \"balcony scene\" from William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet ( act 2, scene 2 ), and a similar situation in Edmond Rostand 's Cyrano de Bergerac ( act 3, scenes 6-7 ). In the former, Romeo, attempting to woo Juliet, stands beneath her balcony to profess his love for her. In the latter, an inarticulate cadet, Christian, professes his love for Roxane by arranging to use the words of a fellow soldier, Cyrano, who secretly also loves Roxane.\nThe 1989 movie \" Say Anything... \" contains a modern interpretation of this declaration of love, where John Cusack plays Peter Gabriel's \" In Your Eyes \" on a boombox outside the house of the girl he likes.\nParodying this iconic scene ( video ), Cueball is holding up a boombox (a self-contained semiportable stereo system, typically with cassette tape or CD player, and complete with integrated speakers) that is playing music while Cueball declares his love for Megan. She first is startled, embarrassed, then eventually confused by the 1990 hit single Ice Ice Baby ( video ) by Vanilla Ice playing on the boombox. Cueball then admits he is \"not very good at this,\" attempting to recreate the classic romantic scene, but utterly failing to play music suitable for such an event.\nThe title text mentions that Cueball is actually playing \" Under Pressure \" ( video ), the 1981 hit song by Queen and David Bowie , but Megan has confused it with \"Ice Ice Baby,\" which samples the bassline from \"Under Pressure.\" It also may be that Cueball is having trouble holding the boombox, hence Cueball being 'under pressure.'\nThese two songs are again referenced together in 1561: Water Phase Diagram , and \"Ice Ice Baby\" is also lampooned in 210: 90's Flowchart . It is possible that this is the same couple as mentioned in 112: Baring My Heart , as the creator of that Venn diagram reveals to their romantic partner that their feelings towards their paramour are comparable to their feelings for Vanilla Ice.\nThis was the first time that the name \" Megan \" was used in xkcd. The next comic to use it was the much more depressing 215: Letting Go .\n[Megan is looking out a second story window at Cueball holding a boombox over his head. Musical Notes are coming out of it.] Cueball: Megan! Megan: Oh my god, I can't believe this is happening. Cueball: I love you! Megan: Okay, that's great. Wait a second. Is... is that... Ice Ice Baby? What the hell? Cueball: I'm not very good at this.\n"}
{"id":160,"title":"Penny Arcade Parody","image_title":"Penny Arcade Parody","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/160","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/penny_arcade_parody.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/160:_Penny_Arcade_Parody","transcript":"[The first panel uses the art style of Penny Arcade.] Gabe: What? Sony has plenty of launch titles lined up that aren't lame sequels. Tycho: Name one. And furthermore, they... I... uh...\n[The art style is dropped. The next two panels are just text.] I can't do this. I can't parody Penny Arcade. I've got nothing on those guys. They're a class act, they know their audience, they know exactly what they're doing. Gabe experiments with his art, always bold and fresh without trying to perform. Tycho's writing continues to astound day after day. I can just see him, reading my uncultured swill masquerading as his florid prose.\n[The panel is bottomless, and the text escapes the panel.] But he's not angry, no. He's sitting at his desk smiling that condescending half-smile, the corner of his mouth belying the self-assurance of a writer who never misplaces a word. His firm hands rest easily on the keyboard, his right thumb caressing the space bar gently, as I enter the room. He knows I'm there without turning around, and I'm too nervous to speak. But I don't have to; he understands, I can see it in the way his eyes play over me, reading my fears and doubts in a glance and washing them away with a knowing smile. Then he's on his feet, he's in front of me, and I don't feel the electric jolt I expected as our hands meet. It's just warm, warm and right: As I sink into his eyes I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I see Tycho smile at someone behind me. Gabe is standing there, grinning that mischievous grin, and twirling his beloved cardboard tube between his fingers.\nThe night has just begun.\n","explanation":"Penny Arcade is a webcomic , primarily about video games and the culture surrounding them. It is written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik , though they are better known as their comic alter-egos: Tycho Brahe and Jonathan \"Gabe\" Gabriel.\nThis strip begins as a parody of the Penny Arcade strip, which makes fun of Sony for providing a lack-luster selection of PS3 games available on the console's launch date. However, it quickly turns into the narrator's fantasy of what might happen if Tycho discovered his spoof.\nThe enormous wall of text in the second and third panels may be a reference to the Penny Arcade strip \"I Hope You Like Text.\"\nThe cardboard tube references one of Gabe's alternate characters, Cardboard Tube Samurai .\n[The first panel uses the art style of Penny Arcade.] Gabe: What? Sony has plenty of launch titles lined up that aren't lame sequels. Tycho: Name one. And furthermore, they... I... uh...\n[The art style is dropped. The next two panels are just text.] I can't do this. I can't parody Penny Arcade. I've got nothing on those guys. They're a class act, they know their audience, they know exactly what they're doing. Gabe experiments with his art, always bold and fresh without trying to perform. Tycho's writing continues to astound day after day. I can just see him, reading my uncultured swill masquerading as his florid prose.\n[The panel is bottomless, and the text escapes the panel.] But he's not angry, no. He's sitting at his desk smiling that condescending half-smile, the corner of his mouth belying the self-assurance of a writer who never misplaces a word. His firm hands rest easily on the keyboard, his right thumb caressing the space bar gently, as I enter the room. He knows I'm there without turning around, and I'm too nervous to speak. But I don't have to; he understands, I can see it in the way his eyes play over me, reading my fears and doubts in a glance and washing them away with a knowing smile. Then he's on his feet, he's in front of me, and I don't feel the electric jolt I expected as our hands meet. It's just warm, warm and right: As I sink into his eyes I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I see Tycho smile at someone behind me. Gabe is standing there, grinning that mischievous grin, and twirling his beloved cardboard tube between his fingers.\nThe night has just begun.\n"}
{"id":161,"title":"Accident","image_title":"Accident","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/161","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/accident.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/161:_Accident","transcript":"[Cueball driving in a car while listening to some music.] Music: \u266b \u2669 \u266c [Another panel of Cueball listening to music while driving. Cueball's head is turned to the right.] Music: \u266c \u266a \u2669 [A third panel. Cueball's head is turned to the left.] Music: \u266b NAAAA NA NA NANA NANA NA NA KATAMARI DAMACY \u266a \u2669 [Cueball and Megan talking.] Megan: And that's when you veered into the mailbox? Cueball: It looked smaller then me. It was just instinct.\n","explanation":"After someone plays a game enough, various instincts develop. One might be ready to push the right button when a right arrow comes up on screen. One might learn the tricky sequences of moves needed for a situation in the game, and find oneself doing them in another game in a similar situation. Or, as in this case, one might get used to pushing a giant ball around trying to collect smaller objects, and try doing so with your car when the game's theme song starts playing.\nIn the game Katamari Damacy , the player has to grow a large ball of clutter by rolling the ball over smaller objects in the playfield, which become attached to the ball, growing the clutter ball larger and larger. As the clutter ball gets larger, bigger things in the environment will begin sticking to the clutter ball instead of acting as obstacles, giving the player more clutter to grab. How big the player can get this clutter ball, or \"katamari,\" determines how well the player does in the game, as is also mentioned in 83: Katamari .\nWhen Katamari Damacy's theme song comes on in the third panel, Cueball begins acting out the game's premise, and drives his car into a mailbox - which \"looked smaller\" than his car - trying to get it to attach. This doesn't work so well outside of the game. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text implies that music used in the game Guitar Hero is equally hazardous when driving. Anyone who's become accustomed to rocking out on a fake guitar to a particular song could find themselves involuntarily playing the air guitar when said song comes on the radio unexpectedly. Randall is pointing out that Guitar Hero-induced spontaneous air guitar performances are not safe activities while driving. Alternatively, one may try to hit all incoming objects in an attempt to mimic hitting strings of notes as they move down the fretboard, which would be immediately more disastrous. Another possibility is that the hazard is pressing several buttons repeatedly to mimic Guitar Hero, which would not only distract from driving, but also cause chaos in the car.\nThe theme song from Katamari Damacy is also mentioned in 851: Na .\n[Cueball driving in a car while listening to some music.] Music: \u266b \u2669 \u266c [Another panel of Cueball listening to music while driving. Cueball's head is turned to the right.] Music: \u266c \u266a \u2669 [A third panel. Cueball's head is turned to the left.] Music: \u266b NAAAA NA NA NANA NANA NA NA KATAMARI DAMACY \u266a \u2669 [Cueball and Megan talking.] Megan: And that's when you veered into the mailbox? Cueball: It looked smaller then me. It was just instinct.\n"}
{"id":162,"title":"Angular Momentum","image_title":"Angular Momentum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/162","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/angular_momentum.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/162:_Angular_Momentum","transcript":"[Cueball sits sideways on a bed under an open window in the corner of a room. He is looking at Megan, who is spinning fast, indicated with two large circles indicating where her arms that are spread far out rotate, as well as two smaller circles around her knees and feet. The bed sheets are clearly messed up, as if someone has used it for activities other than sleeping. It is night and dark gray outside the window, and inside the room everything is also gray but lighter. Behind the spoken text, the background is white, but fades to the darker gray at the edges. There is also different gray shading in different parts of the room.] Cueball: What are you doing? Megan: Spinning counterclockwise Megan: Each turn robs the planet of angular momentum Megan: Slowing its spin the tiniest bit Megan: Lengthening the night, pushing back the dawn Megan: Giving me a little more time here Megan: With you\n","explanation":"A moving object (like the Earth) has momentum. Momentum is the mass (size) of the object multiplied by the velocity (speed) of the moving object. So the Earth has a very high momentum because the Earth has a large mass (size) and is moving at a high velocity (speed) around the Sun. However, the momentum referenced in this comic is the angular momentum of the Earth spinning on its axis, which creates the days and nights. A moving object has to keep moving at the same velocity for its momentum to stay the same. The momentum of a moving object can increase, decrease, or stop via the force of another object. Force is the transfer of momentum from one object to another.\nMegan attempts to slow down the Earth's angular momentum, and spins counter-clockwise to force her momentum onto the Earth, so that she can have more time with the one she loves.\nThe Earth has a massively high momentum, and the momentum that she produces is minuscule relative to the Earth's. And the few nanoseconds gained by spinning, while being with Cueball, is effectively offset by the seconds spent spinning.\nSlowing down the rate of time in the universe directly slows down the velocity of life, so there would be no change in the total duration of life. And as the text implies, this isn't even possible: While not being able to reverse time, enjoy your night time. Sunrise always comes too early.\nHer attempt of surmounting the seemingly impossible is grand; culturally, we value this kind of high romanticism.\nLater in 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel , the same kind of spinning Megan is used in the first frame to tell that xkcd loves momentum.\nTechnical notes: Angular momentum depends on the axis used for measuring angular momentum .\nApparently, the time Megan is stopping is \u201c less than 1\/20th of the time light takes to cross the diameter of a hydrogen atom \u201d\nA considerably larger (but still minuscule) effect could be achieved by Megan (and\/or Cueball and\/or the bed) moving even a few meters closer to the equator . This would also have the advantage of not interfering with any other activities Megan and Cueball might want to undertake in their time together.\n[Cueball sits sideways on a bed under an open window in the corner of a room. He is looking at Megan, who is spinning fast, indicated with two large circles indicating where her arms that are spread far out rotate, as well as two smaller circles around her knees and feet. The bed sheets are clearly messed up, as if someone has used it for activities other than sleeping. It is night and dark gray outside the window, and inside the room everything is also gray but lighter. Behind the spoken text, the background is white, but fades to the darker gray at the edges. There is also different gray shading in different parts of the room.] Cueball: What are you doing? Megan: Spinning counterclockwise Megan: Each turn robs the planet of angular momentum Megan: Slowing its spin the tiniest bit Megan: Lengthening the night, pushing back the dawn Megan: Giving me a little more time here Megan: With you\n"}
{"id":163,"title":"Donald Knuth","image_title":"Donald Knuth","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/163","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/donald_knuth.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/163:_Donald_Knuth","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball are sitting back to back at two separate desks, typing. Black Hat has turned toward Cueball to respond to him.] Cueball: Man, you're being inconsistent with your array indices. Some are from one, some from zero. Black Hat: Different tasks call for different conventions. To quote Stanford algorithms expert Donald Knuth, \"Who are you? How did you get in my house?\"\n[Black Hat and Cueball are sitting back to back at two separate desks, typing. Cueball has turned toward Black Hat, confused.] Cueball: Wait, what? Black Hat: Well, that's what he said when I asked him about it.\nLater, the topic of breaking into a software expert's house through the skylight became topic of 225: Open Source again.\n","explanation":"Donald Knuth is a computer science Professor Emeritus at Stanford University who is famous for writing The Art of Computer Programming and developing the T e X computerized typesetting system.\nIn computer science, an array is a structure that stores multiple values in a fixed order, and the elements are accessed by their index number.  In Fortran , for instance, one writes array(1) to access the first element in the array. Most \"modern\" (read: descended from C ) languages use 0 as the index for the first element in the array, but it is possible (if one is careful about it) to ignore the 0th element and use 1 as the first index. In some programming languages, such as Pascal or Ada , it is possible to select an arbitrary range of indices for each array type, so the first index might not only be 0 or 1, but also \u221242 or 100000. Cueball is complaining that Black Hat was not consistent in his choice of where to start his arrays. This is a valid complaint, as a lack of such consistency can make coding errors both more likely and more difficult to detect.\nBlack Hat cites Donald Knuth to support his rebuttal, but the quote he uses does not seem relevant. Presumably, Black Hat had illegally entered the professor's house in order to question him on indices. Donald Knuth's words were not an intellectual response to the question, but rather an alarmed response to the presence of an intruder. It is not clear if Black Hat is aware of this.\nThe title text suggests that Black Hat finds Knuth's books intimidating, due to perhaps their size or complexity, to the extent that he considers breaking into Knuth's house (a risky, difficult crime) to be the better option in finding his answer. Even for Donald Knuth's books, this is very exaggerated and illogical behavior. [ citation needed ]\n[Black Hat and Cueball are sitting back to back at two separate desks, typing. Black Hat has turned toward Cueball to respond to him.] Cueball: Man, you're being inconsistent with your array indices. Some are from one, some from zero. Black Hat: Different tasks call for different conventions. To quote Stanford algorithms expert Donald Knuth, \"Who are you? How did you get in my house?\"\n[Black Hat and Cueball are sitting back to back at two separate desks, typing. Cueball has turned toward Black Hat, confused.] Cueball: Wait, what? Black Hat: Well, that's what he said when I asked him about it.\nLater, the topic of breaking into a software expert's house through the skylight became topic of 225: Open Source again.\n"}
{"id":164,"title":"Playing Devil's Advocate to Win","image_title":"Playing Devil's Advocate to Win","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/164","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/global_warming.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/164:_Playing_Devil%27s_Advocate_to_Win","transcript":"[Cueball is standing under a large amount of text said in one go.] Cueball: Yes, from the evidence it looks pretty likely to me that we're causing global warming on a horrific scale. But with science you don't need to argue. It doesn't matter who wins the debate \u2014 it's about reality. By just waiting a little longer, we'll get to see who was right. It feels unethical but I find myself wanting to keep quiet about the science just to know for sure. As terrible as it sounds, the state of the world isn't really my responsibility. I'm just thrilled to get to watch. If the scientists are right \u2014 and if we keep people from understanding just a little longer \u2014 we'll enjoy quite a ride. And pragmatically, on the outside chance that they're all wrong, I get saved the embarrassment of having spoken up.\n","explanation":"Global warming is the rise of the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans since the late 19th century and its projected continuation. More than 97% of scientists are sure that it's caused by an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humanity's industrialization and activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Losses of human food security and habitat; melting of glaciers leading to a rise in sea temperatures; and more frequent heat waves, droughts, and species extinctions are just some of the many likely effects of global warming.\nYet, despite the unequivocal nature of climate change , it's a hot-button political topic in the United States, with many conservatives denying its existence, arguing that it has natural causes, or claiming that global warming could be a good thing. Liberals counter by saying that conservatives are claiming these things because they're in bed with the oil companies, and by denying the existence of global warming, they're saved from having to do anything about it. It's such a controversial topic in the U.S. that, in this comic, Cueball says he's decided to keep his mouth shut about the whole thing. He has withdrawn from the debate because it doesn't matter if he wins the debate or not \u2014 science doesn't care about who got the last word. If humanity reaches the tipping point and one day can't do anything to stop global warming, Cueball will find it interesting to watch exactly what happens. And if it turns out that the scientists are wrong, he won't feel embarrassed that he's been making a big deal about it this whole time.\nIn the title text, he touches on the political side of global warming, saying that there are many well-meaning conservatives out here who honestly believe that global warming doesn't happen, and that liberals only bring it up to have a moral issue to attack conservatives with.\nThis was the first direct reference to global warming in xkcd, but since then, climate change, with an emphasis on global warming, has become a recurring theme in xkcd. Seems Randall would no longer like to be on this ride, especially with the comic 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline released almost 10 years after this one.\n[Cueball is standing under a large amount of text said in one go.] Cueball: Yes, from the evidence it looks pretty likely to me that we're causing global warming on a horrific scale. But with science you don't need to argue. It doesn't matter who wins the debate \u2014 it's about reality. By just waiting a little longer, we'll get to see who was right. It feels unethical but I find myself wanting to keep quiet about the science just to know for sure. As terrible as it sounds, the state of the world isn't really my responsibility. I'm just thrilled to get to watch. If the scientists are right \u2014 and if we keep people from understanding just a little longer \u2014 we'll enjoy quite a ride. And pragmatically, on the outside chance that they're all wrong, I get saved the embarrassment of having spoken up.\n"}
{"id":165,"title":"Turn Signals","image_title":"Turn Signals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/165","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turn_signals.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/165:_Turn_Signals","transcript":"[Two cars are seen sitting at a red light. One person is seen walking from his car up to the driver of the car in front of him. The turn signals of both cars seem to be blinking at the same time.] Person in Street: Hey, our turn signals are in sync! Person in Car: What the hell?\nPerson in Street: Usually they're at least a little off. But I've been watching like 30 seconds and haven't seen any beat frequency! Person in Car: Who are you?\nPerson in Street: You know, from the beat frequency you can tell the difference in timing of the two signals. Person in Car: ... Person in Street: But ours are the same! Person in Car: ... Person in Street: So, wanna hang out later?\n","explanation":"Turn signals are designed to flash between 60 and 120 times per minute. Most turn signals are driven by an electromechanical device. Due to manufacturing tolerances, battery state of charge, ambient temperature, and various other factors, two different turn signals rarely flash at the same rate, even among cars of the same make and model. Having two cars with turn signals flashing at the same rate would be a rare event.\nCueball notices this event, and expresses his excitement to the driver of the other car, despite being stopped at an intersection. The other driver is confused by this. Turn signal frequency is something that most people don't take notice of. [ citation needed ] Cueball, however, takes it as an opportunity to strike up a conversation and make a new friend.\nThe beat frequency is the rate at which two frequencies transition from being in phase with each other to being out of phase and then to being in phase again. In other words, two turn signals that begin by flashing together will transition to flashing opposite each other and then back to flashing together, and the rate at which this process cycles is the beat frequency. Because the beat frequency is simply the difference between the two turn signal frequencies, two turn signals whose frequencies are closer together will take longer to pass through the in-phase\/out-of-phase cycle, and two signals whose frequencies are identical would take an infinite time (i.e., their relative phase never changes). The beating of turn signals is an easy phenomenon to observe when one is stopped at a traffic light with nothing to do but watch the flashing turn signals, and it is the lack of beating that Cueball noticed and excitedly reported.\nThe title text refers to the fact that this is probably not a good strategy for making friends, and it could suggest that the character Cueball may be Randall .\n[Two cars are seen sitting at a red light. One person is seen walking from his car up to the driver of the car in front of him. The turn signals of both cars seem to be blinking at the same time.] Person in Street: Hey, our turn signals are in sync! Person in Car: What the hell?\nPerson in Street: Usually they're at least a little off. But I've been watching like 30 seconds and haven't seen any beat frequency! Person in Car: Who are you?\nPerson in Street: You know, from the beat frequency you can tell the difference in timing of the two signals. Person in Car: ... Person in Street: But ours are the same! Person in Car: ... Person in Street: So, wanna hang out later?\n"}
{"id":166,"title":"Misusing Slang","image_title":"Misusing Slang","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/166","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/misusing_slang.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/166:_Misusing_Slang","transcript":"The best part of getting older is gonna be intentionally misusing slang around teenagers just to watch them squirm. Cueball: Oh man, that song is so pwned! Teenager: twitch\n","explanation":"Randall expresses excitement for the time in the future where he can intentionally misuse modern-day slang in order to make nearby teenagers feel uncomfortable. He illustrates this by using the word \"pwned,\" the past tense of \"pwn\" (from \"own,\" as in to defeat completely): \"The noob was pwned by the pro.\"\nMany teenagers believe their parents to be not \"with the times,\" but Randall suggests that parents actually do know what the words mean, but are acting otherwise in order to mess with their heads for their personal amusement. The title text reinforces this, as every generation has had some form of slang that they used, and it could be possible that this practice has been continued for a good while. It also suggests that the parents of teenagers may be \"pwning\" their children by intentionally misusing these modern-day slang.\nThe best part of getting older is gonna be intentionally misusing slang around teenagers just to watch them squirm. Cueball: Oh man, that song is so pwned! Teenager: twitch\n"}
{"id":167,"title":"Nihilism","image_title":"Nihilism","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/167","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nihilism.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/167:_Nihilism","transcript":"[Beret Guy and Cueball approach a tree while talking.] Cueball: There is no God. Our existence is without purpose. Beret Guy: Oh, definitely. Beret Guy: We are adrift in an uncaring void indifferent to all our mortal toil. Cueball: Exactly! In the end, nothing we do matters. [Beret Guy climbs the tree.] Beret Guy: Totally. Cueball: We just... Why are you climbing that tree? [Beret Guy is now completely submerged in the tree.] Beret Guy: Because the future is an adventure! Come on! Cueball: But-- Beret Guy: Hey! I found squirrels !\n","explanation":"It is argued by some that atheism leads to nihilism . One rebuttal would be to reject the premise that there is no purpose outside of fulfilling divine intention, but Randall instead rejects the premise that nihilism ought to be burdensome. As a result, Beret Guy resolves that, if everything is ultimately meaningless, then it would be more fun to spend one's meaningless existence having fun rather than constantly moping. The presence of squirrels may relate to Beret Guy's head's resemblance to an acorn.\nAs reinforced by the title text, the complete lack of angst on Beret Guy's part is off-putting to other nihilists.\n[Beret Guy and Cueball approach a tree while talking.] Cueball: There is no God. Our existence is without purpose. Beret Guy: Oh, definitely. Beret Guy: We are adrift in an uncaring void indifferent to all our mortal toil. Cueball: Exactly! In the end, nothing we do matters. [Beret Guy climbs the tree.] Beret Guy: Totally. Cueball: We just... Why are you climbing that tree? [Beret Guy is now completely submerged in the tree.] Beret Guy: Because the future is an adventure! Come on! Cueball: But-- Beret Guy: Hey! I found squirrels !\n"}
{"id":168,"title":"Reverse Euphemisms","image_title":"Reverse Euphemisms","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/168","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reverse_euphemisms.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/168:_Reverse_Euphemisms","transcript":"My Hobby: Reverse Euphemisms [Two people talking.] Cueball: Oh, hey, school just let out and it's YMCA night, so I've gotta go take a shit. Friend: What? Cueball: I mean I actually have to drop the kids off at the pool.\n","explanation":"Euphemisms are figures of speech used in place of more offensive terms. In this comic, Cueball uses swear words in the place of benign terms, inverting the typical usage of euphemisms. To \"drop the kids off at the pool\" is a euphemism meaning to \"go take a shit.\" In this case, however, Cueball actually has to drop kids off at the pool but instead uses \"go take a shit.\" Cueball is using the euphemism in reverse , hence the title.\nIn the title text, the figure is waiting for a situation in which he has to see a man concerning a horse, as this relates to another euphemism meaning to urinate. It can be assumed that, when telling someone about seeing the man about the horse, he would say \"...then I had to go take a piss.\"\nThis is not to be confused with the opposite of a euphemism called a dysphemism .\nMy Hobby: Reverse Euphemisms [Two people talking.] Cueball: Oh, hey, school just let out and it's YMCA night, so I've gotta go take a shit. Friend: What? Cueball: I mean I actually have to drop the kids off at the pool.\n"}
{"id":169,"title":"Words that End in GRY","image_title":"Words that End in GRY","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/169","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/words_that_end_in_gry.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/169:_Words_that_End_in_GRY","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball are standing next to each other.] Cueball: There are three words in the English language that end in \"gry\". \"Angry\" and \"Hungry\" are two. What's the third?\nBlack Hat: I don't think there is one, unless you count really obscure words. Cueball: Ha! It's \"language\"! I said there are three words in \"the English--\" Hey! GRAB [Black Hat grabs Cueball's hand, with a knife in hand.]\nCueball: What th--AAAAAAAAAA SLICE [Black Hat slices off Cueball's hand with the knife.]\n[Cueball is bleeding profusely.] Black Hat: Ok, listen carefully. Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA\nBlack Hat: Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness. Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA\nBlack Hat: I hope we've learned something today. Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA\nAround the time this comic was posted, Randall also posted Blue Eyes : The Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World. He apparently took his own advice to heart as he explicitly states he has gone over the wording of the puzzle several times before publishing it to make it as unambiguous as possible.\n","explanation":"This is a reference to a famous joke (see the first of the meta versions under the wiki link), mistold in the above comic.\nThe original, correct telling of the joke is:\nThink of words ending in \"-gry\". \"Angry\" and \"Hungry\" are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? Hint: The word is something that everyone uses every day. If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is.\nPhrased this way, the answer is \"language\" because \"There are only three words in (the phrase) 'the English language' .\"\nCueball tells this joke (unfortunately by mis-phrasing the original riddle). When Cueball attempts to say the answer is \"language\" and act smugly about it, Black Hat is unimpressed and cuts off Cueball's forearm, explaining that communicating badly is not the same as cleverness. Black Hat's point is that the riddle's \"cleverness\" depends on misleadingly implying that \"three words\" refers to words ending in \"-gry,\" rather than the phrase \"the English language.\" Black Hat does not seem to agree that this riddle is clever.\nIn the title text, Randall clarifies that his point about bad communication applies to the riddle in general. [1] However, a secondary interpretation is that Black Hat is angry that Cueball botched the joke. The joke is supposed to go, \"There are only three words in 'the English language,'\" while only implying that you meant \"words that end in '-gry.'\" By instead saying, \"There are three words in the English language that end in '-gry,'\" Cueball has ruined any chance of Black Hat determining the correct answer; now, \"three words\" can't refer to the correct answer \"the English language\" because Cueball has accidentally used a longer phrase instead. Thus, Cueball has communicated badly both intentionally and unintentionally.\nIn any case, no matter how annoying Cueball's smugness, Black Hat responding by cutting off Cueball's forearm is a comical overreaction [ citation needed ] (while his calm demeanor in doing so is a comical underreaction to the overreaction). Additionally, his calmly-made point about the riddle is likely not to be understood by Cueball, who can only focus on his debilitating injury. Black Hat has, ironically, failed to communicate his point about proper communication, although given Black Hat's personality he likely doesn't care, and may even have intended the irony.\nAs Black Hat mentioned in the comic, if you count obscure and archaic words, there are additional English words that end with \"-gry.\" Some are listed here .\nThe title text refers to postmodernism , a philosophy and corresponding art movement. Postmodern music is often minimalist , as exemplified by the weird sounds of Philip Glass and Steve Reich , and postmodern visual art saw trends such as lowbrow and installation art gain attention. Apart from a rejection of modernism, however, it is difficult to outline postmodernism to justify the strange works of art. Deconstruction is another important concept, but it is difficult to describe the process. In short, postmodernists make art that no one understands and may act smugly about it, but they do not adequately explain what their art means, or it doesn't really mean anything. In other words, there is nothing to understand. Thus, Black Hat's statement, that such practice is not \"cleverness,\" applies to them as well.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are standing next to each other.] Cueball: There are three words in the English language that end in \"gry\". \"Angry\" and \"Hungry\" are two. What's the third?\nBlack Hat: I don't think there is one, unless you count really obscure words. Cueball: Ha! It's \"language\"! I said there are three words in \"the English--\" Hey! GRAB [Black Hat grabs Cueball's hand, with a knife in hand.]\nCueball: What th--AAAAAAAAAA SLICE [Black Hat slices off Cueball's hand with the knife.]\n[Cueball is bleeding profusely.] Black Hat: Ok, listen carefully. Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA\nBlack Hat: Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness. Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA\nBlack Hat: I hope we've learned something today. Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA\nAround the time this comic was posted, Randall also posted Blue Eyes : The Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World. He apparently took his own advice to heart as he explicitly states he has gone over the wording of the puzzle several times before publishing it to make it as unambiguous as possible.\n"}
{"id":170,"title":"Turn Back","image_title":"Turn Back","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/170","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turn_back.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/170:_Turn_Back","transcript":"Cueball: Should we keep going? Megan: I don't know. Cueball: We can turn back if you want. Megan: Look--\nMegan: Did it ever occur to you that maybe I don't have a plan any more than you? Maybe just having this conversation means we're lost.\n[Wide shot of the characters in a Calvin and Hobbes-esque alien landscape.]\nCueball: Kind of scary. Megan: It's terrifying. Cueball: This place is beautiful. Megan: Yeah.\n","explanation":"Calvin and Hobbes was a daily comic drawn by Bill Watterson , published between 1985 to 1995. It followed the adventures of a young boy named Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes. The frequent themes of spontaneity, beauty, and adventure that characterize many of Calvin's conversations with his friend Hobbes can also be seen in this exchange between Cueball and Megan as they explore a landscape reminiscent of Calvin's daydreams of intergalactic adventure. The cluelessness and simultaneous wonder that Cueball and Megan feel at their surrounding landscape mirror Calvin's inexperience and curiosity that he exhibits in Watterson's comic.\nThe title text, while unclear if it were actually true or not, reflects Mr. Watterson's reclusive nature. He has never licensed his characters for any use outside of reprints, and he stays out of the public spotlight. Thus, it is very probable that it was true at the time of this comic. The title text also serves to point out the connection between Watterson's work and this comic.\nHowever, in more recent years, Watterson has come out of his shell a bit. He collaborated with Stephan Pastis, creator of \"Pearls before Swine,\" to do a story arc where a second grader was a better artist than an actual cartoonist. Stephan Pastis later wrote of the experience: \"I began to wonder if [Bill Watterson] even had electricity, then I remembered we were using e-mail to communicate.\"\nCueball: Should we keep going? Megan: I don't know. Cueball: We can turn back if you want. Megan: Look--\nMegan: Did it ever occur to you that maybe I don't have a plan any more than you? Maybe just having this conversation means we're lost.\n[Wide shot of the characters in a Calvin and Hobbes-esque alien landscape.]\nCueball: Kind of scary. Megan: It's terrifying. Cueball: This place is beautiful. Megan: Yeah.\n"}
{"id":171,"title":"String Theory","image_title":"String Theory","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/171","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/string_theory.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/171:_String_Theory","transcript":"[Heading above panel:] String theory summarized:\n[Two Cueballs are talking.] Cueball: I just had an awesome idea. Suppose all matter and energy is made of tiny, vibrating \"strings\". Friend: Okay. What would that imply? Cueball: I dunno.\n","explanation":"String theory is a theory in theoretical physics for explaining how the universe works. It is a theory trying to explain everything belonging to our universe; specifically, it aims to unite general relativity and quantum field theories .\nWhen a new theory is thought up, the theorists will usually supply some predictions, measurable by experimental physicists. String theory's predictions, however, are few and extremely difficult to test; though its inception was over forty years ago, string theory has yet to be experimentally tested.\nRandall is unimpressed with string theorists (for another instance of this, see the punchline to 397: Unscientific ). String theory has not provided any useful new knowledge to engineering science as quantum physics has, and lacks the imagination-stirring philosophical implications that the general population associates with other fields \u2014 for example, quantum scientists have proven predictions like tunneling , used by modern electronic devices, and relativity is relevant to modern systems like GPS navigation. String theory either hasn't reached that stage yet or cannot.\nIn the title text, Randall points out that string theory is so technically difficult that at essentially every level (except, presumably, the very top), this explanation is as good as it gets.\n[Heading above panel:] String theory summarized:\n[Two Cueballs are talking.] Cueball: I just had an awesome idea. Suppose all matter and energy is made of tiny, vibrating \"strings\". Friend: Okay. What would that imply? Cueball: I dunno.\n"}
{"id":172,"title":"Skateboarding is Not a Crime","image_title":"Skateboarding is Not a Crime","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/172","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/skateboarding_is_not_a_crime.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/172:_Skateboarding_is_Not_a_Crime","transcript":"[A set of lockers, that are dark pink, blue, yellow, dark pink then blue. The middle one has a white sticker stuck to it proclaiming \"Skateboarding is not a crime.\"] When I'm president, skateboarding will still be legal, but display of those stupid stickers will be a felony.\n","explanation":"The skateboarding subculture has taken up the phrase \"skateboarding is not a crime\" in protest of how many cities have banned skateboarding in certain areas, such as parks. Randall apparently really does not like these stickers and states that when he becomes president, any and all displays of stickers bearing the phrase (like the one on the locker in the comic) will be considered a felony, though skateboarding itself will still be legal.\nThe title text also shows another protest phrase, \"Arrest me, I'm a skateboarder,\" that Randall hates even more than \"skateboarding is not a crime.\"\n[A set of lockers, that are dark pink, blue, yellow, dark pink then blue. The middle one has a white sticker stuck to it proclaiming \"Skateboarding is not a crime.\"] When I'm president, skateboarding will still be legal, but display of those stupid stickers will be a felony.\n"}
{"id":173,"title":"Movie Seating","image_title":"Movie Seating","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/173","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/movie_seating.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/173:_Movie_Seating","transcript":"At the movies, I get frustrated when we file into our row haphazardly, ignoring the computationally difficulty problem of seating people together for maximum enjoyment. [Map of relationships between 8 people.] [Legend:] Single line: friends. Double line: in a relationship. Arrow: one-way crush. Dashed line: acquaintances [The eight friends sit in a row in a dark cinema. Cueball and one other are between two lovers.] Cueball: Guys! This is not socially optimal!\n","explanation":"At the time of writing in most movie theaters in the US, seats were not reserved . [1] That is, tickets are sold by screening without seat assignment, and therefore an entering patron can take any vacant seat. Therefore, a group of incoming patrons may walk in a column and take a section of consecutive seats in a row, each person taking one next to the person in front of them. The order of these people is thus determined by the order in which they walk into the theater, which is in most cases random.\nCueball is upset at the way he and his friends have sat down at the movie theater. Part of the problem is that two people who are apparently in a relationship do not sit together. He therefore tries to use a social graph to calculate the best way for him and his seven friends to sit in a row, while taking into account all of the social connections among them. In mathematics , this type of problem is called combinatorial optimisation . The most popular example, the traveling salesman problem , is referenced in the title text, as well as in comics 287 and 399 .\nThe title text shows that another part of the problem is that Cueball's friends, who could have helped him calculate a solution, are each sitting three seats away from him, and so he cannot ask them for help.\nTwo hypothetical solutions for the specific problem proposed in the comic are displayed:\n\nAt the movies, I get frustrated when we file into our row haphazardly, ignoring the computationally difficulty problem of seating people together for maximum enjoyment. [Map of relationships between 8 people.] [Legend:] Single line: friends. Double line: in a relationship. Arrow: one-way crush. Dashed line: acquaintances [The eight friends sit in a row in a dark cinema. Cueball and one other are between two lovers.] Cueball: Guys! This is not socially optimal!\n"}
{"id":174,"title":"That's What SHE Said","image_title":"That's What SHE Said","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/174","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thats_what_she_said.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/174:_That%27s_What_SHE_Said","transcript":"My Hobby: Using \"that's what she said\" only in the most grammatically ambiguous situations. Friend: He doubts she could've done what they claimed she did. Cueball: That's what she said!\n","explanation":"\" That's what she said! \" is a phrase used in the US in response to an unintended sexual innuendo, similar to the UK phrase \"said the actress to the bishop.\" An example usage might look like the following:\nA: (while putting together some furniture) I think this is too big. B: That's what she said!\nIn this example, the innuendo is that A was referring to a furniture component (say, a bolt too large to fit into the hole that was drilled in the factory), but the phrase might also refer to a human penis. While popular for a while, the phrase is considered puerile and clich\u00e9 nowadays, so it isn't often used except in mockery.\nIn this case, no sexual innuendo is intended; instead, the phrase is used to maximize the ambiguity of the statement. Ambiguity is when a statement could mean more than one thing. In English, it is often created as a result of pronouns like \"he\" and \"they,\" which might potentially refer to many different things in context. Here, \"that's what she said!\" could mean several things, because \"that\" and \"she\" could refer to multiple parts of the sentence:\nAnother explanation would be that the intense grammatical ambiguity of the situation allows for any type of interpretation of the situation... even a more \"perverted\" interpretation. Taken more literally, the \"she\" in \"that's what she said!\" could be a hypothetical woman who is known for saying crazy things, thus the grammatically ambiguous statement reminds the speaker of this  hypothetical woman.\nThe title text turns this back around, saying that there is actually a sexual innuendo in the statement: apparently the girl in question said this during sex. Since all of these possibilities are highly unusual things to say during sex, the observation in the second sentence is accurate.\nOne of Randall's many hobbies .\nMy Hobby: Using \"that's what she said\" only in the most grammatically ambiguous situations. Friend: He doubts she could've done what they claimed she did. Cueball: That's what she said!\n"}
{"id":175,"title":"Automatic Doors","image_title":"Automatic Doors","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/175","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/automatic_doors.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/175:_Automatic_Doors","transcript":"When I walk past an automatic door and it opens for me, I worry that if I don't go in I'll hurt its feelings. [Automatic door whirrs open.] whirrrr Cueball: Oh, um, I'm sorry, I was just... um... I guess I can hang out for a bit.\n","explanation":"Cueball has an uneasy suspiction that the automatic doors may have feelings, possibly due to their apparent sentience. This assigning of human characteristics to non-human things such as the doors is called anthropomorphism . Cueball extends the premise that the doors have feelings to those feelings being hurt by his not entering the opened doors. This is analogous to the social faux pas of ignoring someone who has waved to you, or purposefully failing to acknowledge someone who is trying to get your attention.\nThe anthropomorphized doors are much like those in the starship Heart of Gold in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . In the story, the characters find a brochure describing the ship, which states that \"All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.\" Such doors would not be given the \"satisfaction\" of the \"knowledge of a job well done\" if the figure passes close enough to trigger the doors, but does not actually go through them.\nIn the title text, it is revealed that Cueball has made the acquaintance of a number of automatic doors and possibly hung out with them only because he doesn't want to hurt their feelings. His being embarrassed about hurting the feelings of any automatic doors who happen to read the comic and thus find out that what they thought was a genuine friendship was only Cueball trying not to hurt their feelings, in fact should more likely be embarrassment over making friends with mechanical doors who he believes have feeling that can be hurt in the first place. [ citation needed ]\nWhen I walk past an automatic door and it opens for me, I worry that if I don't go in I'll hurt its feelings. [Automatic door whirrs open.] whirrrr Cueball: Oh, um, I'm sorry, I was just... um... I guess I can hang out for a bit.\n"}
{"id":176,"title":"Before Sunrise","image_title":"Before Sunrise","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/176","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/before_sunrise.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/176:_Before_Sunrise","transcript":"Cueball: Every morning for a week now I've gone out driving before sunrise. I wanted to get lost in the dark, park my car, listen to music, and sip from a warm drink as dawn broke around me, gradually revealing a landscape I'd never before seen. A chain of unique beginnings forcing wonder into the seeds of each day. Cueball: But I guess I need more willpower, because each sunrise just found me at your mom's apartment again.\n","explanation":"This is another example of Randall's propensity towards \"your mom\" jokes. The second panel contains an eloquent prosaic description of an idyllic sunrise over an unfamiliar landscape analogizing the uncertainty and excitement of the life that lies ahead. This is designed to put the reader off-guard for the \"your mom\" stinger in the third panel.\nCueball wants to settle down on his own, but every time when he tries, he still ends up at the reader's Mom's place (as is customary in such jokes).\nIn photography, the term Golden Hour is used to describe the hour after sunrise (and also the hour before sunset), due to the good lighting conditions at those times. In the title text, you could initially believe that Cueball is using these early morning trips to capture beautiful photographs of the scenery, until it turns out that in fact the photos were of the reader's Mom (and likely risque in nature).\nCueball: Every morning for a week now I've gone out driving before sunrise. I wanted to get lost in the dark, park my car, listen to music, and sip from a warm drink as dawn broke around me, gradually revealing a landscape I'd never before seen. A chain of unique beginnings forcing wonder into the seeds of each day. Cueball: But I guess I need more willpower, because each sunrise just found me at your mom's apartment again.\n"}
{"id":177,"title":"Alice and Bob","image_title":"Alice and Bob","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/177","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alice_and_bob.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/177:_Alice_and_Bob","transcript":"[Eve stands in the frame, talking to the reader.] Eve: I'm sure you've heard all about this sordid affair in those gossipy cryptographic protocol specs with those busybodies Schneier and Rivest, always taking Alice's side, always labeling me the attacker. Eve: Yes, it's true. I broke Bob's private key and extracted the text of her messages. But does anyone realize how much it hurt ? Eve: He said it was nothing, but everything from the public-key authenticated signatures on the files to the lipstick heart smeared on the disk screamed \"Alice.\" Eve: I didn't want to believe. Of course on some level I realized it was a known-plaintext attack. But I couldn't admit it until I saw it for myself. [Eve places her hands on her hips.] Eve: So before you so quickly label me a third party to the communication, just remember: I loved him first. We had something and she tore it away. She's the attacker, not me. Not Eve.\n","explanation":"Any good cryptography presentation will include at least one story about Alice and Bob . They are the canonical \"protagonists\" of the crypto world, frequently used in illustrations to demonstrate how a cryptographic system works. (The names were mostly chosen to abbreviate to A and B, as well as being of different genders so that they can be distinguished by pronouns alone.)\nHere, Randall casts the story in a different light. Instead of Alice and Bob being perfectly innocent people who just want to communicate in private, Bob is actually having an affair with Alice, and his former partner, upset, cracked the encryption to see what the message contained. Nevertheless, the \"gossipy cryptographic protocol specs\" all took Alice's side (since the goal of any good crypto system is, of course, to succeed in this struggle).\nThe rest of the comic makes a few other allusions to cryptography:\nFinally, in a twist ending, the girlfriend is revealed to be none other than Eve, the eave sdropper, who is also ubiquitous in Alice and Bob stories. Hell hath no fury, indeed.\nThe title text continues the theme of Randall getting barred from speaking at conferences due to his unusual take on certain topics.\nTo further spice things up, there are many other characters in the Alice\/Bob canon, including Mallory, the mal icious attacker, who wants to actually alter the message with nefarious intent; Craig, the cr acker, who doesn't particularly care about the message but does care about the passwords used; Plod, a law enforcement officer attempting to access keys or data; and Chuck, a third party in the communication who secretly has a villainous intent.\n[Eve stands in the frame, talking to the reader.] Eve: I'm sure you've heard all about this sordid affair in those gossipy cryptographic protocol specs with those busybodies Schneier and Rivest, always taking Alice's side, always labeling me the attacker. Eve: Yes, it's true. I broke Bob's private key and extracted the text of her messages. But does anyone realize how much it hurt ? Eve: He said it was nothing, but everything from the public-key authenticated signatures on the files to the lipstick heart smeared on the disk screamed \"Alice.\" Eve: I didn't want to believe. Of course on some level I realized it was a known-plaintext attack. But I couldn't admit it until I saw it for myself. [Eve places her hands on her hips.] Eve: So before you so quickly label me a third party to the communication, just remember: I loved him first. We had something and she tore it away. She's the attacker, not me. Not Eve.\n"}
{"id":178,"title":"Not Really Into Pokemon","image_title":"Not Really Into Pokemon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/178","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/not_really_into_pokemon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/178:_Not_Really_Into_Pokemon","transcript":"I have found the perfect phrase for condescendingly dismissing anything: Cueball: Have you seen the new Ubuntu release? Black Hat: Nah, I'm not really into Pok\u00e9mon.\n","explanation":"Pok\u00e9mon is a popular franchise that includes 5 children's animated television shows, a collectible card game , and a whole series of video games. The premise is that a young \"trainer\" goes out to explore the world and catch Pok\u00e9mon: fanciful wild creatures that come in many varieties, ranging from armoured dinosaurs that have drills for horns to robotic bugs that change their type depending on the items they are holding . When the trainer comes across wild Pok\u00e9mon or other trainers, they use their Pok\u00e9mon to fight each other.\nIn this comic, Randall claims that \"I'm not really into Pok\u00e9mon\" can serve as an all-purpose phrase of condescending dismissal. The implied insult to the thing being dismissed can include:\nThe example in the comic is Black Hat dismissing Ubuntu , an open-source computer operating system. Ubuntu may have been particularly chosen as specifically suitable for the \"Pok\u00e9mon dismissal\" for reasons such as:\nThe title text refers to the complications that new software releases can have on computers, especially if either the release is an alpha or beta release, or if the computer is rather old. Randall specifically mentions Ubuntu 6.10 and Firefox 2.0 , both of which were officially released around two weeks after this comic was posted, so the versions causing problems were certainly pre-release editions. While Randall does not detail any specific issues, the title text may paint a picture of two computer programs fighting each other inside the computer and making a mess in the process, as if they were Pok\u00e9mon.\nOther comics which advocate using catch-all phrases as standard responses for any comment:\nI have found the perfect phrase for condescendingly dismissing anything: Cueball: Have you seen the new Ubuntu release? Black Hat: Nah, I'm not really into Pok\u00e9mon.\n"}
{"id":179,"title":"e to the pi times i","image_title":"e to the pi times i","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/179","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/e_to_the_pi_times_i.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/179:_e_to_the_pi_times_i","transcript":"[Two Cueballs are standing at a board with writing on. One Cueball is pointing at the board.] Cueball: Numbers of the form n\u221a-1 are \"imaginary,\" but can still be used in equations. Friend: Okay. Cueball: And e^(\u03c0\u221a-1)=-1. Friend: Now you're just fucking with me.\n","explanation":"The comic largely references Euler's identity . This identity states that e i\u03c0 + 1 = 0. Therefore, e i\u03c0 = \u22121.\nThe humor from this comic is because of the seemingly arbitrary relationship between e, \u03c0, and the identity of i (the square root of \u22121). e is the mathematical identity of which the derivative of e x with respect to x is still e x , while \u03c0 is the relationship between the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. Taking these two values and applying them to the value of i in such a manner makes it seem counter-intuitive  that it would yield \u22121 from basic analysis. The above linked Wikipedia page goes into good detail of how to derive this identity, as does this YouTube video .\nThe title text refers to how Euler's identity is called upon in complex form (separating real and imaginary numbers): e ix = cos(x) + i sin(x).\n[Two Cueballs are standing at a board with writing on. One Cueball is pointing at the board.] Cueball: Numbers of the form n\u221a-1 are \"imaginary,\" but can still be used in equations. Friend: Okay. Cueball: And e^(\u03c0\u221a-1)=-1. Friend: Now you're just fucking with me.\n"}
{"id":180,"title":"Canada","image_title":"Canada","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/180","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/canada.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/180:_Canada","transcript":"[Two men stand talking to each other.] Cueball: If we lose this election, I'm moving to Canada. Friend: You say that every year. Cueball: I mean it this time.\nFriend: Well, becoming a citizen takes work. Meanwhile, you have no money, half an art degree, and it's the start of winter. You'll freeze to death in the streets. Cueball: Whatever.\n[Friend raises his hands.] Friend: No, don't you get it? If you die in Canada, you die in REAL LIFE!\n","explanation":"Canada is the country north of the USA . [ citation needed ] During political seasons, partisan voters often threaten to move away if their side loses. For Americans, this often comes to claims of moving to Canada .\nThe punchline references the tagline \"If you die in the game, you die in real life\" from the 2006 horror movie Stay Alive (released a few months before this comic), where people die in real life soon after their characters are killed in a certain video game. The idea was also present in The Matrix : \"If you're killed in the Matrix, you die here?\" There is also a Yahoo Answers thread about this question.\nTaken literally, it is obviously true, as Canada is, arguably, part of reality [ citation needed ] . It really is \"all real\" as the title text says.\n[Two men stand talking to each other.] Cueball: If we lose this election, I'm moving to Canada. Friend: You say that every year. Cueball: I mean it this time.\nFriend: Well, becoming a citizen takes work. Meanwhile, you have no money, half an art degree, and it's the start of winter. You'll freeze to death in the streets. Cueball: Whatever.\n[Friend raises his hands.] Friend: No, don't you get it? If you die in Canada, you die in REAL LIFE!\n"}
{"id":181,"title":"Interblag","image_title":"Interblag","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/181","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interblag.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/181:_Interblag","transcript":"Terms I have used or heard used to make fun of the internet: [Below: A matrix whose entries may contain crosses to indicate that a term has been used. The rows (prefixes) are labelled WORLD WIDE, INTER-, BLOGO-, BLAGO-, and WEB-; the columns are labelled NET, WEB, SPHERE, TUBES, and BLAG. In the interests of properly propagating the term \"blagoblag,\" the full list of used terms follows:] World Wide Web Internet Interweb Intersphere Intertubes Interblag Blogosphere Blagonet Blagosphere Blagoblag Webnet Webweb [Cueball and Megan stand facing each other; Cueball raises his hands in the air while Megan is nonplussed.] Cueball: I heard about it on the interblag!\n","explanation":"The comic parodies the habit of word coining on the internet, as well as the enthusiasm for modern sounding terms in the IT world in general. Common examples include the shortening of \"weblog\" to \" blog ,\" while the entirety of blogs is referred to as the \" blogosphere .\" The internet itself is sometimes called \"The Tubes,\" a term derived from Senator Ted Stevens 's infamous statement \" Series of Tubes .\" The suffixes \"-net\" and \"-web\" are often used to denote a certain interconnection of information on the internet, as well as to make products and brands sound fit for the 21st century.\nThe matrix shown in the comic spoofs the internet jargon by combining common prefixes and suffixes to new and impressive but meaningless words. The culmination of nonsense is, as indicated in the transcript, the term \"blagoblag.\" This is also a sideswipe at comic 148 , where \"blag\" was introduced as a substitute for the usage of \"blog.\" The official weblog of the xkcd webcomic is called \"blag.\" The prefix \"blago-,\" meanwhile, was used again in comic 239: Blagofaire .\nTerms I have used or heard used to make fun of the internet: [Below: A matrix whose entries may contain crosses to indicate that a term has been used. The rows (prefixes) are labelled WORLD WIDE, INTER-, BLOGO-, BLAGO-, and WEB-; the columns are labelled NET, WEB, SPHERE, TUBES, and BLAG. In the interests of properly propagating the term \"blagoblag,\" the full list of used terms follows:] World Wide Web Internet Interweb Intersphere Intertubes Interblag Blogosphere Blagonet Blagosphere Blagoblag Webnet Webweb [Cueball and Megan stand facing each other; Cueball raises his hands in the air while Megan is nonplussed.] Cueball: I heard about it on the interblag!\n"}
{"id":182,"title":"Nash","image_title":"Nash","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/182","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nash.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/182:_Nash","transcript":"[Cueball and Dr. Nash (the Cueball-like guy to the right) stand talking to each other. Cueball is looking left and pointing off-panel.] Cueball: Hey, Dr. Nash, I think those gals over there are eyeing us. This is like your Nash Equilibrium, right? One of them is hot, but we should each flirt with one of her less-desirable friends. Otherwise we risk coming on too strong to the hot one and just driving the group off.\n[Cueball is now looking at Dr. Nash.] Dr. Nash: Well, that's not really the sort of situation I wrote about. Once we're with the ugly ones, there's no incentive for one of us not to try to switch to the hot one. It's not a stable equilibrium.\n[Cueball again looks left while Dr. Nash shakes his fist.] Cueball: Crap, forget it. Looks like all three are leaving with one guy. Dr. Nash: Dammit, Feynman!\n","explanation":"The first panel references a scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind in which Dr. John Forbes Nash, Jr. comes up with his famous concept of Nash equilibrium when he realizes that they get suboptimal results if all the guys go after the same hot girl. The second panel deconstructs the idea as Dr. Nash point out that staying away from the hot girl does not actually constitute a stable Nash equilibrium. The third panel has physicist Dr. Richard Feynman render their entire discussion a moot point by getting all the girls while the mathematicians ponder optimal strategies.\nIn fact, the situation in the comic is a great example of what a Nash equilibrium is not . The only reason that one player (pun intended) wouldn't try to go for the hot girl is if they were afraid that someone else would go for the hot girl as well. However, in a Nash equilibrium, each player assumes that the other players won't change their strategy, and concludes from this assumption that their own strategy shouldn't change either. If all of them have the strategy of flirting with the hot girl's friends, and all of them are assuming (incorrectly) that the others won't change their strategies, then they all would change their strategies simultaneously, breaking the equilibrium.\nFeynman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his important work in quantum electrodynamics . Feynman wrote popular books and gave public lectures. These presented his work in advanced theoretical physics to the general public, a practice that was not very common at that time. One of his more famous books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! gives many personal anecdotes from his lifetime, and it contains a passage giving advice on the best way to pick up a girl in a bar.\nThe aforementioned public books and lectures brought him great attention in the media, and his exceptional results in physics coupled with this have led to his getting an almost cult-like following among scientists. He's also (largely due to his book) known as something of a womanizer, thus why he would take several women home at once.\nThe title text explains that Randall wonders whether this \"collective crush\" (crush as in love affair) will fade away one day, but he doubts it. Great respect for Feynman continues to this day, even though he died about a quarter-century ago.\n[Cueball and Dr. Nash (the Cueball-like guy to the right) stand talking to each other. Cueball is looking left and pointing off-panel.] Cueball: Hey, Dr. Nash, I think those gals over there are eyeing us. This is like your Nash Equilibrium, right? One of them is hot, but we should each flirt with one of her less-desirable friends. Otherwise we risk coming on too strong to the hot one and just driving the group off.\n[Cueball is now looking at Dr. Nash.] Dr. Nash: Well, that's not really the sort of situation I wrote about. Once we're with the ugly ones, there's no incentive for one of us not to try to switch to the hot one. It's not a stable equilibrium.\n[Cueball again looks left while Dr. Nash shakes his fist.] Cueball: Crap, forget it. Looks like all three are leaving with one guy. Dr. Nash: Dammit, Feynman!\n"}
{"id":183,"title":"Snacktime Rules","image_title":"Snacktime Rules","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/183","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snacktime_rules.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/183:_Snacktime_Rules","transcript":"My dad was always the one who taught me about science, but looking back, I'm starting to realize how much my nerdiness was influenced by my mom.\n[A woman and a child talk.] Child: Mom, can I have a snack in my room before bed? Mom: No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age is one less than a multiple of three.\n","explanation":"The comic shows Randall's mother telling Randall that he can have a snack in his room before bed only when his age is \"one less than a multiple of three.\" This means that the child starts getting snacks in his room before bed when he turns 2 years old, then stops getting them when he turns 3. Then he starts again when he turns 5 but stops when he turns 6. This cycle repeats every 3 years, so the kid has the privilege to get snacks in his room before bed when his age is 2, 5, 8, 11, etc. (every 3 years).\nIt's difficult to defend this policy with a reasonable argument. The first impression is that the mother just made up the rule for some obscure, unknown reason. However, the title text explains that Randall's mother actually enforced this rule on him, and his mother claims that, at the time, there was a valid reason for it (though the reason is not explained in the comic). The caption says that Randall has figured out that his nerdiness as an adult comes (at least in part) from his mother's strange rules.\nNote that there is some debate about whether the privilege spoken of is to have snacks, to have snacks in his room, to have snacks before bed, or to have snacks in his room before bed.\nMy dad was always the one who taught me about science, but looking back, I'm starting to realize how much my nerdiness was influenced by my mom.\n[A woman and a child talk.] Child: Mom, can I have a snack in my room before bed? Mom: No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age is one less than a multiple of three.\n"}
{"id":184,"title":"Matrix Transform","image_title":"Matrix Transform","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/184","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/matrix_transform.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/184:_Matrix_Transform","transcript":"[A square matrix next to a vertical two-by-one matrix, equated to a horizontal matrix that looks like the two-by-one matrix turned 90 degrees.] [Square matrix: cos90\u00b0    sin90\u00b0 -sin90\u00b0   cos90\u00b0] [Two by one matrix:] [a\u2081 a\u2082] [An equal sign] [The same two by one matrix, but rotated by 90 degrees clockwise:] [a\u2081 a\u2082]\n","explanation":"A rotational matrix transformation (i.e. the big brackets with \"cos\" and \"sin\" in them) is used in computer graphics to rotate an image. In general, to rotate a point [a1, a2] in a 2D space by z\u00b0 clockwise, you can multiply it by the rotation matrix [[cos z\u00b0, sin z\u00b0], [-sin z\u00b0, cos z\u00b0]]. In this case, the left side of the equation is rotating [a1, a2] by 90\u00b0. Simplifying the trigonometry, the 90\u00b0 clockwise rotation matrix is [[0, 1], [-1, 0]], so multiplying this by [a1, a2], you should get [a2, -a1].\nThe joke is that the author performed the rotation transformation on the image of the vector rather than just the vector itself.\nRotational matrix transformations are a special case of the general linear matrix transform, which can do other things to images, including the other two affine transformations of scaling them or translating (moving) them.  On a pedantic note, normally mathematics uses counterclockwise as a default, although computer graphics frequently use a clockwise default, so this may be an intentional reference.\nSo the title text may be referring to the professors going home (translation) and shrinking (scaling) from the joke; it may also refer to them going home and seeing a shrink (counselor) in despair of their student understanding.\n[A square matrix next to a vertical two-by-one matrix, equated to a horizontal matrix that looks like the two-by-one matrix turned 90 degrees.] [Square matrix: cos90\u00b0    sin90\u00b0 -sin90\u00b0   cos90\u00b0] [Two by one matrix:] [a\u2081 a\u2082] [An equal sign] [The same two by one matrix, but rotated by 90 degrees clockwise:] [a\u2081 a\u2082]\n"}
{"id":185,"title":"Wikifriends","image_title":"Wikifriends","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/185","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wikifriends.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/185:_Wikifriends","transcript":"WikiFriends: [Two people are talking to each other.] Cueball: I really liked that movie. Friend: I hated that movie. Cueball: Me too.\n","explanation":"The comic's title refers to Wikis , which are collaboratively edited websites (such as this one). The first such site was WikiWikiWeb , but Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia) has become the most well-known example, and may have been specifically what Randall had in mind while drawing this comic, as other comics also reference Wikipedia.\nThe influence of social environment is called peer pressure , often with a negative connotation. The term \"Wikifriends\" is coined in the comic as a label for people who adjust their views in order to incorporate into a group. That is to say that, in the same way a Wiki page can be edited by people other than the original author, a \"Wikifriend\" allows their opinions to be \"edited\" by someone else. As an example, the comic shows a discussion about a movie in which one contributor changes his opinion entirely when he hears what his friend thinks.\nThe title text suggests that Randall also sees himself as being frequently influenced by others.\nWikiFriends: [Two people are talking to each other.] Cueball: I really liked that movie. Friend: I hated that movie. Cueball: Me too.\n"}
{"id":186,"title":"Console Lines","image_title":"Console Lines","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/186","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/console_lines.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/186:_Console_Lines","transcript":"Fans turning away latecomers to all-night game console campouts: [Two different lines presumably leading to a video game store are shown. In the line labeled Sony\/Microsoft:] Cueball: The line is full, asshole! Get off! [And in the one labeled Nintendo:] Cueball: I'm so sorry, all the consoles are spoken for. Cueball: Do... Do you want a hug?\n","explanation":"This comic relates to video game consoles . At the time this comic was published, there were three major competing products: the Playstation 3 by Sony , the Xbox 360 by Microsoft , and the Wii by Nintendo . When a game console gets released, fans are often seen queuing outside the stores or camping on the pavement in order to be among the first to get their hands on a console. The comic shows such a console camp and points out the differences between the fan communities. While the fans waiting in line for a Sony or Microsoft product are very rude, the Nintendo fans are apologetic and try to comfort (that is to say, console ) those who arrived too late to obtain a package. The clich\u00e9 that Nintendo fans are nicer and more polite may be attributed to the fact that the Wii is targeted at children and families, while the PS3 and the Xbox are targeted at the more \"serious gamer\" crowd.\nThe title text primarily expresses Randall 's distance from the console wars (he has never owned a game console before), but also indicating an inclination towards the Nintendo Wii.\nFans turning away latecomers to all-night game console campouts: [Two different lines presumably leading to a video game store are shown. In the line labeled Sony\/Microsoft:] Cueball: The line is full, asshole! Get off! [And in the one labeled Nintendo:] Cueball: I'm so sorry, all the consoles are spoken for. Cueball: Do... Do you want a hug?\n"}
{"id":187,"title":"The Familiar","image_title":"The Familiar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/187","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_familiar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/187:_The_Familiar","transcript":"[A guy is standing behind his friend who sits at a computer. Both look like Cueball.] Guy: Let's go see sunrise over the ocean. [The friend turns and replies:] Friend: That's a long drive, it's cold, I'm tired, and rationalizing the familiar is easy. [The guy leaves, and in the next two frames, the friend remains at his computer alone.]\n","explanation":"Cueball's friend asks him to go with him to view the sunrise over the ocean. Cueball refuses by giving a list of excuses, including the statement that \"rationalizing the familiar is easy.\" This statement is amusing, because Cueball acknowledges the fact that he is making excuses and seems to refuse going out on the basis that rationalizing going to see the sunrise would require much more effort. This criticizes some people's tendency of not trying new things or going out with friends, even though one would likely get more fulfillment by doing these things. It may well be implied that the friend doing the inviting has left to view the sunrise, leaving Cueball behind since he wasn't willing to engage in an activity.\nThe computer with the egg-shaped profile looks like an iMac G3, sold from 1998 until 2003. It seems that rationalizing the familiar has made Cueball resistant to upgrading his computer long beyond its obsolescence date.\nThe title text indicates Randall's frustration with this mentality and his hope that when he wants to make plans with someone, they are just as eager.\n[A guy is standing behind his friend who sits at a computer. Both look like Cueball.] Guy: Let's go see sunrise over the ocean. [The friend turns and replies:] Friend: That's a long drive, it's cold, I'm tired, and rationalizing the familiar is easy. [The guy leaves, and in the next two frames, the friend remains at his computer alone.]\n"}
{"id":188,"title":"Reload","image_title":"Reload","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/188","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reload.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/188:_Reload","transcript":"[Four soldiers are preparing to enter a battlefield; their leader addresses them.] Leader: Okay men, we're going in. Stay low, keep behind cover, and if you run out of ammunition, shoot outside the battlefield to reload.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the common method for reloading your ammunition in arcade game type shooters, also known as \"rail shooters.\" The player is typically given a Light gun , and the player characters typically have unlimited magazines of ammunition; to load a new magazine, the player would aim his light gun away from the screen and pull the trigger.\nThe title text tells you to watch out for the guy from comic 53: Hobby , which shows a man who randomly pops up to the police when they are performing a drug raid. This refers to the random figures that pop out at many games; if they are not a valid target and you shoot them, you will lose points.\n[Four soldiers are preparing to enter a battlefield; their leader addresses them.] Leader: Okay men, we're going in. Stay low, keep behind cover, and if you run out of ammunition, shoot outside the battlefield to reload.\n"}
{"id":189,"title":"Exercise","image_title":"Exercise","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/189","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exercise.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/189:_Exercise","transcript":"Like many geeks, I got a lot more interested in exercise once I made the connection to leveling up. [Cueball is doing pull-ups on a bar in a doorframe.] Cueball: One more point to STR, then I'll run to work on CON.\n","explanation":"Role-playing games (RPGs) are a pastime commonly associated with geeks in which players assume the role of a fictional character in a fantasy world. In many RPGs, character evolution and advancement is represented by \"leveling up.\" Through winning battles and, less frequently, completing tasks or missions, characters are awarded experience points (XP), which can be spent on increasing their ratings in attributes (such as strength or speed) or skills (such as bow-hunting or computer hacking). The number of XP awarded is generally proportional to the difficulty of the task completed.\nCueball is doing chin-ups , a strength-training exercise that targets the latissimus dorsi and biceps. Repeating this exercise over time will improve his ability to do more chin-ups in one go - in other words, he will become stronger. In doing so, he is effectively leveling up his STR (strength) attribute in real life. While doing his chin-ups, he comments that he will soon switch to running - an aerobic exercise that improves endurance - in order to build up his CON (constitution) attribute. Cueball is treating his gym session like an RPG, and observes that, as a self-confessed geek, he would not be as interested in exercising without that link.\nThe title text implies that since Randall has lost his patience and ability to play RPG games, likely due to the connection to exercise.\nLike many geeks, I got a lot more interested in exercise once I made the connection to leveling up. [Cueball is doing pull-ups on a bar in a doorframe.] Cueball: One more point to STR, then I'll run to work on CON.\n"}
{"id":190,"title":"IPoD","image_title":"IPoD","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/190","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ipod.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/190:_IPoD","transcript":"[Black Hat sits at a computer. Cueball stands behind him.] Black Hat: You see, statisticians communicate using IPoD -- IP over Demographics. For example, the header of the next packet I send will be encoded into the New Jersey death rate. Cueball: So you're going to hack the census bureau and change the number of reported deaths? Black Hat: Guess again. Black Hat: Hey, have you seen my crossbow?\n","explanation":"IP is one of the main protocols of the Internet. It is used to route data packets from one computer to another, using other computers or even complete networks in between if needed. It is designed to use the fastest (not necessarily the shortest) route to the target, automatically using another route if a connection or a transmitting host fails.\nEvery participant of the network has to have a so-called IP address . The data is divided into packets , each consisting of a header and the payload. The header tells the transmitting parties where the packet comes from and where it should go (together with some other details). The payload is the data to be transmitted.\nIP packets can be carried by a variety of transport networks. Such methods are often referred to as \"IP over X\" (or \"IPoX\" for short). Examples include IP over DVB , IP over ATM , and the humorous IP over Avian Carriers .\nBlack Hat (and other statisticians) is using demographics as IP packets to send data. In order to adjust the death rate to encode the header, Black Hat plans to travel to New Jersey and go on a killing spree with a crossbow, instead of merely hacking the census bureau's computers. Such antics could only be used to increase the death rate; decreasing it would require saving lives instead, as mentioned in the title text. Also as mentioned, birth rates would be trickier to manipulate, as doing so would require encouraging or discouraging women to have children and would require an approximately nine-month delay, which is a great deal more difficult than taking a crossbow to a heavily populated area.\nCrossbows were also mentioned in 564: Crossbows . Black Hat is also seen using his crossbow in 929: Speculation .\n[Black Hat sits at a computer. Cueball stands behind him.] Black Hat: You see, statisticians communicate using IPoD -- IP over Demographics. For example, the header of the next packet I send will be encoded into the New Jersey death rate. Cueball: So you're going to hack the census bureau and change the number of reported deaths? Black Hat: Guess again. Black Hat: Hey, have you seen my crossbow?\n"}
{"id":191,"title":"Lojban","image_title":"Lojban","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/191","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lojban.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/191:_Lojban","transcript":"[Cueball and Black Hat are having a conversation.] [English version:] Cueball: If you learned to speak Lojban, your communication would be completely unambiguous and logical. Black Hat: Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who learn Lojban.\n[Lojban version:] Cueball: da'i ganai do crebi'o la lojban gi le se cusku be do cu mulno pavysmu je logji Black Hat: .i .ie ku'i cusku fi le prenu klesi poi certu la lojban\n","explanation":"Lojban is a constructed language designed to be logical, unambiguous, and culturally neutral \u2014 similar to the better known artificial language Esperanto . The authors originally designed it as an experiment, but a few people have picked it up and tried to learn it. However, anyone actually willing to learn Lojban is someone Black Hat would rather avoid. Alternately, only people who speak Lojban, who compose an admittedly tiny proportion of the general population, could benefit from the logic of the language, making the benefits of Lojban mostly pointless to most people.\nClicking on the original comic brings you to a Lojban translation of the comic . The Lojban version literally translates to something like:\nCueball: Hypothetically, you becoming an expert in Lojban implies things you say would completely be an unambiguous meaning and logical. Black Hat: Agreed, but would be talking to the people subgroup that is an expert in Lojban.\nIf reading pedantically, a few mistakes can be identified:\nThe title text is also written in Lojban. It translates roughly as: \"That was a joke. Really. Wanna be friends with me?\" Since Lojban aims to be completely unambiguous, idiomatic structures like sarcasm and humor have associated particles - when a joke is made, it must be explicitly marked as such or else it's incorrect. Most languages rely on intonation expressing this, but Lojban does not, leading to the strange practice here of specifically pointing out that a joke was made.\nA more literal translation gives: \"Humorously that false. Please is-it-true-that you friend me?\"\n[Cueball and Black Hat are having a conversation.] [English version:] Cueball: If you learned to speak Lojban, your communication would be completely unambiguous and logical. Black Hat: Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who learn Lojban.\n[Lojban version:] Cueball: da'i ganai do crebi'o la lojban gi le se cusku be do cu mulno pavysmu je logji Black Hat: .i .ie ku'i cusku fi le prenu klesi poi certu la lojban\n"}
{"id":192,"title":"Working for Google","image_title":"Working for Google","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/192","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/working_for_google.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/192:_Working_for_Google","transcript":"[A guy sits at a computer and addresses his friend standing behind.] Guy: Have you read about Google HQ? It sounds like an incredible place to work.\n[The friend throws his hands in the air as he delivers this speech:] Friend: Man, I ain't going to be chained down in no corporate idea factory! They think just 'cause they've got a nice building and laid back culture, I'm gonna want to come in all day long and work on fascinating problems with the smartest people in the world.\n[Close up of the guy staring at his friend.]\n[Back to the original setting.] Guy: So, what, they turned you down? Friend: I don't understand it! I even baked them a cake shaped like the Internet!\n","explanation":"Many look up to Google as the ultimate workplace in the IT industry. Therefore, they have lots of applicants but can afford to be very selective, and only the best and brightest succeed.\nIn the first panel, the guy at the computer asks his friend (both look like Cueball ) what he thinks about working at Google HQ ( Head Quarters ). His friend starts out by dismissing Google as a \"corporate idea factory,\" but from the rest of his speech, we can infer that these are not his true feelings. He is exhibiting the attitude known as \" sour grapes ,\" where you criticize something that is out of your reach, or that has been denied from you.\nIn the last panel, it is revealed that the friend has been trying very hard to get a job at Google, even resorting to bribing the interview panel by baking them a cake \"shaped like the Internet.\"  This misguided action is a sign of how much he wanted a position.\nSince the Internet does not have a defined shape, it is difficult to visualize exactly what he baked. The comment was maybe foreshadowing 195: Map of the Internet that came out a week later. It would, though, be a more interesting cake if it looked like the map in 256: Online Communities , but that came out 20 weeks later. Another possibility is that the comment is a reference to this video , in which the black box shown is supposedly the Internet. If this is the case, then the cake would have been shaped like the box in the video.\nThe title text says that if you work for Google for 256 (2 8 ) days, you get to learn how to levitate. This displays some of the mystique with which Google is commonly viewed. The joke here is that 256 is the largest value a single byte can hold, as has been demonstrated with the 256 Bug . However, Astro Teller, the director of Google X labs, a Google division that researches \"moonshot\" projects, has mentioned in an interview that they contemplated starting a levitation project.\n[A guy sits at a computer and addresses his friend standing behind.] Guy: Have you read about Google HQ? It sounds like an incredible place to work.\n[The friend throws his hands in the air as he delivers this speech:] Friend: Man, I ain't going to be chained down in no corporate idea factory! They think just 'cause they've got a nice building and laid back culture, I'm gonna want to come in all day long and work on fascinating problems with the smartest people in the world.\n[Close up of the guy staring at his friend.]\n[Back to the original setting.] Guy: So, what, they turned you down? Friend: I don't understand it! I even baked them a cake shaped like the Internet!\n"}
{"id":193,"title":"The Perfect Sound","image_title":"The Perfect Sound","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/193","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_perfect_sound.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/193:_The_Perfect_Sound","transcript":"[Cueball and his friend are listening to music on a stereo.] Cueball: I'm telling you, listen right here to the sets of rising notes following the opening section. Friend: Uh huh. [Cueball indicates stereo.] Cueball: And then right here, the transition into the chorus. This is music. This is art ! [Cueball dances along with the music.] Stereo: Oh Mickey, you so fine, you so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey! *clap* *clap* Hey Mickey! Friend: There's something wrong with you.\n","explanation":"This comic relates to the song \" Mickey \", performed in 1982 by one-hit-wonder Toni Basil . The lyrics, as well as the instrumentation of the song, were in fact rather simple, being a perfect example of bubblegum pop in the early 1980s.\nIn the comic, however, the song is introduced as a musical masterpiece. Cueball points out the opening sequence to his friend and states that it should be considered art. When the chorus sets in and the song unfolds its lyrical brilliancy, his friend has no other comment to make except that there must be something wrong with Cueball.\nCueball's actions might be seen as a critical approach towards over-interpreting music. The comic's title, as well as the stereo setup depicted, could perhaps also denote a sidesweep on audiophiles .\nThe title text parodies a line from the song and links it with the incomprehension of Cueball's friend.\n[Cueball and his friend are listening to music on a stereo.] Cueball: I'm telling you, listen right here to the sets of rising notes following the opening section. Friend: Uh huh. [Cueball indicates stereo.] Cueball: And then right here, the transition into the chorus. This is music. This is art ! [Cueball dances along with the music.] Stereo: Oh Mickey, you so fine, you so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey! *clap* *clap* Hey Mickey! Friend: There's something wrong with you.\n"}
{"id":194,"title":"Penises","image_title":"Penises","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/194","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/penises.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/194:_Penises","transcript":"PENISES: Megan: They are about this big. [Holds her hands close together, about half a foot apart.] Now can we PLEASE , as a culture, move on?\n","explanation":"The comic takes aim at what is considered by some to be the apparent societal obsession with the male sexual organ (\"phallocentrism\"), especially in regards to size. In general, depictions of an erect penis (also called phallus ) represent male potency.\nWhile present in every human civilization, the symbol of the penis is also prominently featured in modern mass media. Many films and television series make use of penis-related jokes. A very common trope is the male obsession with the idea that a larger penis is considered more desirable, and a smaller penis less manly or satisfying to women.\nMegan criticizes this obsession by pointing out that most penises are about the same size, and normal variations in size are not worth getting worked up about.\nThe title text refers to the excessive advertisement for potency pills and penis enlargement in spam emails . The symbol of the phallus can be regarded by some as omnipresent in modern Western society (but not necessarily in other cultures) [ citation needed ] , with presumably every public toilet sporting at least one badly drawn depiction of a penis.\nPENISES: Megan: They are about this big. [Holds her hands close together, about half a foot apart.] Now can we PLEASE , as a culture, move on?\n"}
{"id":195,"title":"Map of the Internet","image_title":"Map of the Internet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/195","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/map_of_the_internet.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/195:_Map_of_the_Internet","transcript":"Map of the Internet The IPv4 Space, 2006 This chart shows the IP address space on a plane using a fractal mapping which preserves grouping--any consecutive string of IPs will translate to a single, compact, contiguous region on the map. Each of the 256 numbered blocks represents one  8 subnet (containing all IPs that start with that number).  The upper left section shows the blocks sold directly to corporations and goverments in the 1990's before the RIRs took over allocation. Diagram showing IP ownership: 0: Local 1-2: Unallocated 3: General Electric 4: BB&N INC 5: Unallocated 6: Army AISC 7: Unallocated 8: BB&N INC 9: IBM 10: VPNs 11: DoD Intel 12: Bell Labs 13: Xerox 14: Public data nets 15: HP 16: DEC 17: Apple 18: MIT 19: Ford 20: CSC 21: DDN-RYN 22: DISA 23: Unallocated 24: Cable TV 25: UK MoD 26: DISA 27: Unallocated 28: DSI 29-30: DISA 31: Unallocated 32: NORSK 33: DLA 34: Halliburton 35: Merit 36-37: Unallocated 38: PSI 39: Unallocated 40: Eli Lily 41: ARINIC 42: Unallocated 43: Japan INET 44: HAM Radio 45: INTEROP 46: BB&N INC 47: Bell North 48: Prudential 49-50: Unallocated 51: UK Social Security 52: duPont 55: Boeing 56: USPS 57: SITA 58-61: Asia-Pacific 62: Europe 63-76: USA & Canada (contains: UUNET, Google, Digg, Slashdot, Ebay, Craigslist, XKCD, Flickr) 77-79: Europe (unused) 80-91: Europe 92-95: Unallocated 96-99: North America 100-120: Unallocated 121-125: Asia-Pacific 126: Japan 127: Loopback 128-132: Various Registrars 133: Japan 134-172: Various Registrars 173-189: Unallocated 188: Various 189-190: Latin America & Caribbean 191-192: Various (contains Private (RFC 1918)) 193-195: Europe 196: Africa 197: Unallocated 198: US & Various 199: North America 200-201: Latin America & Carribbean 202-203: Asia-Pacific 204-209: North America (contains Suicide Girls, BoingBoing) 210-211: Asia-Pacific 212-213: Europe 214-215: U.S. Department of Defense 216: North America (Contains Myspace, SomethingAwful) 217: Europe 218-222: Asia-Pacific 223: Unallocated 224-239: Multicast 240-255: Unallocated\n","explanation":"On the map, all allocated IPv4 address blocks (as of 2006) are shown using a fractal mapping. (The Hilbert curve is used: the pattern is demonstrated at the bottom of the image.) In February 2011, the final remaining IPv4 blocks were allocated to the Regional Internet registries , and so today there would no longer be any green spaces outside of Class E addresses (above 240 through 255, excluding the Broadcast address of 255.255.255.255).\nIn the early 1990s, corporations and governments could register an entire class A segment (one 256th of the total space), but later it was divided into smaller parts because of a lack of space.\nThis leads to the title text, which mentions IPv6 . This protocol has so many addresses that only a swarm of nanobots could exhaust them. The default desktop picture in Windows XP is a green landscape, and the joke is that since barely any of the addresses are allocated yet, the IPv6 map would just be a green landscape.\nLater, Randall actually drew some \"real\" maps of the Internet, or at least its online Communities (see 256: Online Communities and 802: Online Communities 2 ).\nMap of the Internet The IPv4 Space, 2006 This chart shows the IP address space on a plane using a fractal mapping which preserves grouping--any consecutive string of IPs will translate to a single, compact, contiguous region on the map. Each of the 256 numbered blocks represents one  8 subnet (containing all IPs that start with that number).  The upper left section shows the blocks sold directly to corporations and goverments in the 1990's before the RIRs took over allocation. Diagram showing IP ownership: 0: Local 1-2: Unallocated 3: General Electric 4: BB&N INC 5: Unallocated 6: Army AISC 7: Unallocated 8: BB&N INC 9: IBM 10: VPNs 11: DoD Intel 12: Bell Labs 13: Xerox 14: Public data nets 15: HP 16: DEC 17: Apple 18: MIT 19: Ford 20: CSC 21: DDN-RYN 22: DISA 23: Unallocated 24: Cable TV 25: UK MoD 26: DISA 27: Unallocated 28: DSI 29-30: DISA 31: Unallocated 32: NORSK 33: DLA 34: Halliburton 35: Merit 36-37: Unallocated 38: PSI 39: Unallocated 40: Eli Lily 41: ARINIC 42: Unallocated 43: Japan INET 44: HAM Radio 45: INTEROP 46: BB&N INC 47: Bell North 48: Prudential 49-50: Unallocated 51: UK Social Security 52: duPont 55: Boeing 56: USPS 57: SITA 58-61: Asia-Pacific 62: Europe 63-76: USA & Canada (contains: UUNET, Google, Digg, Slashdot, Ebay, Craigslist, XKCD, Flickr) 77-79: Europe (unused) 80-91: Europe 92-95: Unallocated 96-99: North America 100-120: Unallocated 121-125: Asia-Pacific 126: Japan 127: Loopback 128-132: Various Registrars 133: Japan 134-172: Various Registrars 173-189: Unallocated 188: Various 189-190: Latin America & Caribbean 191-192: Various (contains Private (RFC 1918)) 193-195: Europe 196: Africa 197: Unallocated 198: US & Various 199: North America 200-201: Latin America & Carribbean 202-203: Asia-Pacific 204-209: North America (contains Suicide Girls, BoingBoing) 210-211: Asia-Pacific 212-213: Europe 214-215: U.S. Department of Defense 216: North America (Contains Myspace, SomethingAwful) 217: Europe 218-222: Asia-Pacific 223: Unallocated 224-239: Multicast 240-255: Unallocated\n"}
{"id":196,"title":"Command Line Fu","image_title":"Command Line Fu","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/196","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/command_line_fu.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/196:_Command_Line_Fu","transcript":"[Two men talking.] Cueball: Last night I was watching videos with this girl and my monitors kept turning off - even though I had disabled power save. Friend: Odd. Cueball: However! I wrote a command to jiggle the mouse pointer every couple minutes to keep it from going idle. Friend: Not the first hack I'd try, but see? Linux has problems, but it gives you the tools to deal with them - and save your date! Cueball: Actually, I was half an hour into the pointer scripting documentation when she got dressed and left.\n","explanation":"The Linux command line allows a user to make their computer do nearly anything. The only hitch is that the interface is entirely text-based, and reading through user manuals to find the commands that you need can take a very long time.\nIn this comic, Cueball recounts how he used a command line hack to solve a problem with his monitors turning off during a movie. However, in the time that he spends trying to solve the issue, the woman he had brought home had already left, and his need for a movie to watch was gone.\nThe title text is the supposed moral to this story: if your user interface takes as long to operate as a command line, you may very well be denying your users the chance to get laid.\nSoftware that jiggles the mouse actually exists, as well as instructions for linux scripting (although installing the necessary libraries might take a while).\n[Two men talking.] Cueball: Last night I was watching videos with this girl and my monitors kept turning off - even though I had disabled power save. Friend: Odd. Cueball: However! I wrote a command to jiggle the mouse pointer every couple minutes to keep it from going idle. Friend: Not the first hack I'd try, but see? Linux has problems, but it gives you the tools to deal with them - and save your date! Cueball: Actually, I was half an hour into the pointer scripting documentation when she got dressed and left.\n"}
{"id":197,"title":"Ninja Turtles","image_title":"Ninja Turtles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/197","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ninja_turtles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/197:_Ninja_Turtles","transcript":"[Four pie graphs, each colored green and brown.] Leonardo [Almost one-half green.] Michelangelo [More than one-half green.] Donatello [Five-sixths green.] Raphael [Roughly half-and-half.] [A legend] Notoriety as a [Brown.] Renaissance artist [Green.] Ninja turtle\n","explanation":"The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , or Ninja Turtles, are a pop-cultural phenomenon especially prominent in the late 1980s and 1990s. The four turtles are named for four artists of the European Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci , Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , Donato di Niccol\u00f2 di Betto Bardi , and Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino . Due to the popularity of the Ninja Turtles in a variety of media, some of the names are now better known through their Ninja Turtle connection than their original artist forebears. The pie charts provide an approximation of this effect - Leonardo da Vinci remains one of the most notable artists of the period, and thus \"Leonardo\" is depicted as more notable for the artist. Donatello is the most obscure of the four as an artist, and consequently the majority of the current notoriety of \"Donatello\" is as a Ninja Turtle.\nThe title text alludes to a similar phenomenon, as two villain characters from the same Ninja Turtles show called \"Bebop\" and \"Rocksteady\" are now better known as the characters than for the musical genres they are named for. Similarly, the William Tell Overture became so closely tied to the character of the Lone Ranger in media for the previous generation that, to many, the William Tell Overture is in effect \"The Lone Ranger Theme.\"\n[Four pie graphs, each colored green and brown.] Leonardo [Almost one-half green.] Michelangelo [More than one-half green.] Donatello [Five-sixths green.] Raphael [Roughly half-and-half.] [A legend] Notoriety as a [Brown.] Renaissance artist [Green.] Ninja turtle\n"}
{"id":198,"title":"Perspective","image_title":"Perspective","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/198","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/perspective.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/198:_Perspective","transcript":"Sometimes, when I first wake up, I am caught in the horrible grip of perspective. [Cueball sitting up in bed.] Cueball: It may be a jewel of open source, but Firefox is just a browser. It shows webpages. What the hell is wrong with us? Fortunately, this subsides quickly.\n","explanation":"Firefox is a popular browser, and in 2006, it was the second most commonly used browser. Its more fervent supporters sometimes wrote as if there was a moral imperative to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer.\nCueball , presumably representing Randall , wakes up with a reasonable perspective on the relative unimportance of an internet browser within the world at large, but quickly loses that perspective as his enthusiasm for nerdy things like Firefox gets the better of him. The humor stems from the irony that Cueball is relieved to trade a richer perspective for a simpler, browser-oriented world view.\nThe title text references Richard Stallman , an American software freedom activist and computer programmer, and Cirque du Soleil , an entertainment company specializing in big-top circus performances. The two have no connection with one another, so this is one example of an odd combination of topics that would only (and commonly) be connected in dreams.\nAlternately, the dream may be a reference to Stallman's forceful defense of software freedom, which could be seen as \"over-the-top\" or circus-like.\nAnother possible joke is that the comic, unlike most other xkcd comics, is drawn with perspective as well as being about a more metaphorical perspective.\nSometimes, when I first wake up, I am caught in the horrible grip of perspective. [Cueball sitting up in bed.] Cueball: It may be a jewel of open source, but Firefox is just a browser. It shows webpages. What the hell is wrong with us? Fortunately, this subsides quickly.\n"}
{"id":199,"title":"Right-Hand Rule","image_title":"Right-Hand Rule","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/199","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/right_hand_rule.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/199:_Right-Hand_Rule","transcript":"[Picture of a right hand with fingers curved, thumb pointed away, with axes drawn to demonstrate the right-hand rule of physics.] Alternatives to the Right-Hand Rule in vector multiplication: [A slightly-open book with labeled axes drawn on.] Book Rule: Open the front cover along the first vector and the back cover along the second. The result vector is along the spine, out the top. [A handgun with axes.] Handgun Rule: Point the grip along the first vector and rotate it so that the second vector is on the safety latch side. Fire. The result vector is toward the bullet holes. [A person with right arm extended.] Body Rule (males only): Point your right arm along the first vector and your legs along the second, then watch some porn.\n","explanation":"The right-hand rule is a mathematics and physics trick to learning how to find the cross product of two Cartesian vectors in three dimensions. First, extend the fingers of your right hand in the direction of the first vector (in the example diagram in the comic, this is to the left). Then, curl your fingers in the direction of the second vector (out of the page\/screen, in the example). Now point your thumb perpendicular to the other fingers, and it will point in the direction of the cross product of those two vectors (upwards, in the example). Note that reversing the order of the two vectors also reverses the direction of the cross product.\nThe book rule is an actual alternative to the right hand rule that might be useful to some physics students doing exercises out of their textbooks. However, it would give incorrect results with books in languages that are read from right to left, such as most Jewish prayer books.\nThe gun rule also technically works, but it would be extremely impractical, expensive, and dangerous to use and fire a loaded gun every time you want to find the result vector. It would also be very awkward to hold the gun in line with the vectors.  It also assumes that the safety latch is consistently on the same side of all guns; if a gun was made with the safety latch on the other side, then it would give incorrect results.\nThe body rule is for males only, which limits the number of people who are able to use this rule. With the right arm oriented along one vector and the legs along the second, the result vector is found along the penis of the person, which is conveniently erected by watching porn.\nThe title text refers to Edwin Abbott Abbott , author of the book Flatland, a story about a two-dimensional world.\nOrientability is a property that refers to a space with continuously varying surface normals , which are essentially just vectors that are perpendicular to the surface of the space. Nearly every space commonly encountered is orientable; this is likely why the porn is referred to as mind expanding and superior to Edwin Abbot Abbott's work.\n[Picture of a right hand with fingers curved, thumb pointed away, with axes drawn to demonstrate the right-hand rule of physics.] Alternatives to the Right-Hand Rule in vector multiplication: [A slightly-open book with labeled axes drawn on.] Book Rule: Open the front cover along the first vector and the back cover along the second. The result vector is along the spine, out the top. [A handgun with axes.] Handgun Rule: Point the grip along the first vector and rotate it so that the second vector is on the safety latch side. Fire. The result vector is toward the bullet holes. [A person with right arm extended.] Body Rule (males only): Point your right arm along the first vector and your legs along the second, then watch some porn.\n"}
{"id":200,"title":"Bill Nye","image_title":"Bill Nye","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/200","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bill_nye.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/200:_Bill_Nye","transcript":"[A restaurant. Blondie is with two small Cueballs at a table; Bill Nye with black hair in a white lab coat sits at the next table with his back turned towards them. Two other tables can be seen at the edge of the panel at either side. A caption is written above them:] The tribulations of Bill Nye: Blondie: Hey, kids, see how the ice cracks and pops in your water? I wonder what causes that... Blondie: *Ahem* I said, I wonder what\u2014 Bill Nye: Know what? Maybe I just wanna enjoy my goddamn meal.\n","explanation":"Bill Nye is an educator well known in the United States for his science-focused television show targeted to elementary school children ( website ).\nA mother, Blondie , is sitting at a table in a restaurant with her two children, asking them a science-related question about the ice cubes in their drinks. She is hoping to prompt Bill Nye, sitting at the next table, to join the conversation and perhaps inspire her kids.  Thinking he has not heard, the mother then coughs slightly and starts to repeat the question. His then immediate and abrupt dismissal of her is antithetical to his television persona, where he is consistently enthusiastic about science and keen to take any opportunity to teach the viewer.\nThe use of the word \"tribulation\" implies that being recognized and accosted in public is a cause of much suffering and misery to Mr. Nye.\nThe title text contains another joke. He eats a meal in public where he does not want to be recognized or harassed with questions; however, he wears a lab coat. Regardless of Bill Nye's otherwise iconic and recognizable appearance, wearing a lab coat in public will probably draw the gazes and curiosity of others, no matter who is wearing it.\nIce pops and cracks when dropped in a glass of water because of thermal contraction: the much warmer water causes the surface of the ice to shrink, resulting in audible internal fractures in the brittle structure.\n[A restaurant. Blondie is with two small Cueballs at a table; Bill Nye with black hair in a white lab coat sits at the next table with his back turned towards them. Two other tables can be seen at the edge of the panel at either side. A caption is written above them:] The tribulations of Bill Nye: Blondie: Hey, kids, see how the ice cracks and pops in your water? I wonder what causes that... Blondie: *Ahem* I said, I wonder what\u2014 Bill Nye: Know what? Maybe I just wanna enjoy my goddamn meal.\n"}
{"id":201,"title":"Christmas GPS","image_title":"Christmas GPS","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/201","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/christmas_gps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/201:_Christmas_GPS","transcript":"Cueball: Check it out - I got a GPS receiver for Christmas! What should we do with it?\nMegan: Let's take our latitude & longitude, put our birthdays after the decimal points, then go to that spot and make out.\n[Cueball is in love.]\nMerry Christmas from XKCD [ sic ] [Car driving off in to the distance.]\n","explanation":"In the comic, Cueball has gotten a GPS device and asks Megan what to do with it. She suggest that they take their current coordinates and modify the latitude and longitude with a simple function based on their birthdays, thereby pointing to an arbitrary, non-random location. For example, if Cueball was born on, let's say, April 1, 1986 and Megan on August 12, 1988 and they are somewhere in New York ( 40.768062,-73.98468 ), the coordinate they type could make ( 40.040186, -73.081288 ) (assuming US date format), or ( 40.860401, -73.880812 ) (assuming following ISO 8601 ). The good thing about keeping the number before the decimal point is that the distance is still realistic to get to by car. Megan suggests to make out in this place. This procedure is somewhat of a precursor to Geohashing .\nThe comic is a Christmas comic, since it came online on Christmas Day 2006.\nThe title text suggests that if the location you make for yourselves is over water (which the example above happens to be), you either need to find a boat or find some rule that you can change to preserve the promise of making out, and if you can't do either, then there is no way you'd get to make out.\nCueball: Check it out - I got a GPS receiver for Christmas! What should we do with it?\nMegan: Let's take our latitude & longitude, put our birthdays after the decimal points, then go to that spot and make out.\n[Cueball is in love.]\nMerry Christmas from XKCD [ sic ] [Car driving off in to the distance.]\n"}
{"id":202,"title":"YouTube","image_title":"YouTube","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/202","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/youtube.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/202:_YouTube","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] The Internet has always had loud dumb people, but I've never seen anything quite as bad as the people who comment on YouTube videos. [Below shows a still of a 44-second video of Moon landing. An astronaut is seen at the center of the still with an Apollo lunar lander at the background.] [Below the video shows a list of comments, top to bottom:] Comments & Responses [The name of the commenters and the time when the comment was posted is shown above each comment in a gray background.] rocckir (48 minutes ago) this is so obviously faked its unbilevable, why r people so gullible??? morons (reply) (mark as spam) bigmike133 (35 minutes ago) ive seen the space shuttle ass hole it definetly landed on the moon do some research... (reply) (mark as spam) GunPistolMan (22 minutes ago) if it was real why is their gravity? americans r fucken sheep (reply) (mark as spam) crackmonkey74 (17 minutes ago) u dont think we went to the moon why not tell louis armstrong to his face (reply) (mark as spam) simpleplan2009 (5 minutes ago) it was a soundstage on mars (reply) (mark as spam)\nIn July 2009, a restored video showing Neil Armstrong's first moonwalk was uploaded to YouTube. User Michael Huang copied to that video's comments section all the sentences in this comic. Then, after some other users took some of his comments seriously, he later added another comment stating, \"This entire comment chain is from the famous webcomic, xkcd.\" The comments are copied verbatim, including typos and grammar errors. The only mistake is in the first comment: Michael Huang included only one question mark when the comic has three of them.\n","explanation":"This comic is pointing out the fact that many of the comments on YouTube videos are insipid and poorly informed, being pointless arguments over some minor topic or factually incorrect position ( conspiracy ). At the time of this comic, YouTube was fairly new, and the comic's observation about the inanity of YouTube comments was novel. Since then, this observation has become a widely accepted truism about the Internet. In this case, the Moon landing hoaxers are at the receiving end of Randall 's pen.\nThe reputation of YouTube comment threads as cesspools of abject stupidity and blatant trolling is revisited in 301: Limerick and 481: Listen to Yourself .\nThe username CrackMonkey74 appears again in 406: Venting and 574: Swine Flu .\nThe title text is the first reference to Sheeple , which appeared a few more times in xkcd comics.\n[Caption above the panel:] The Internet has always had loud dumb people, but I've never seen anything quite as bad as the people who comment on YouTube videos. [Below shows a still of a 44-second video of Moon landing. An astronaut is seen at the center of the still with an Apollo lunar lander at the background.] [Below the video shows a list of comments, top to bottom:] Comments & Responses [The name of the commenters and the time when the comment was posted is shown above each comment in a gray background.] rocckir (48 minutes ago) this is so obviously faked its unbilevable, why r people so gullible??? morons (reply) (mark as spam) bigmike133 (35 minutes ago) ive seen the space shuttle ass hole it definetly landed on the moon do some research... (reply) (mark as spam) GunPistolMan (22 minutes ago) if it was real why is their gravity? americans r fucken sheep (reply) (mark as spam) crackmonkey74 (17 minutes ago) u dont think we went to the moon why not tell louis armstrong to his face (reply) (mark as spam) simpleplan2009 (5 minutes ago) it was a soundstage on mars (reply) (mark as spam)\nIn July 2009, a restored video showing Neil Armstrong's first moonwalk was uploaded to YouTube. User Michael Huang copied to that video's comments section all the sentences in this comic. Then, after some other users took some of his comments seriously, he later added another comment stating, \"This entire comment chain is from the famous webcomic, xkcd.\" The comments are copied verbatim, including typos and grammar errors. The only mistake is in the first comment: Michael Huang included only one question mark when the comic has three of them.\n"}
{"id":203,"title":"Hallucinations","image_title":"Hallucinations","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/203","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hallucinations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/203:_Hallucinations","transcript":"[Two Cueball-like guys are talking. Above them is the following caption:] Sometimes it seems bizarre to me that we take dreaming in stride.\nFriend: Are you coming to dinner? Cueball: Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and then maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience. Friend: Okay, Cool.\n","explanation":"Cueball on the right is talking to his (Cueball-like) friend about dreaming but using words and phrases to make dreaming sound much more dramatic than we usually think that it is. However, the description is technically correct.\nRandall is using the comic to make a point about how we think dreaming is so normal, but if we actually realize what's happening, dreaming is very strange:\nThe character on the left takes this as though the experience is normal. Which it indeed is, but that is why Randall has the caption above the guys: Sometimes it seems bizarre to me that we take dreaming in stride.\nThe title text is about lucid dreaming , where the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. This is even more fascinating to Randall. He uses this type of dream in 269: TCMP .\n[Two Cueball-like guys are talking. Above them is the following caption:] Sometimes it seems bizarre to me that we take dreaming in stride.\nFriend: Are you coming to dinner? Cueball: Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and then maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience. Friend: Okay, Cool.\n"}
{"id":204,"title":"America","image_title":"America","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/204","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/america.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/204:_America","transcript":"[A timeline with only three ticks with years noted. Each tick is labeled with a line going to the tick. The second tick is much closer to the last on the right and has its year written below the line. The other two have it above the line and vice versa with the labels. Below in the middle there is a caption.] 1776 Declaration of independence 1979 Jimmy Carter attacked by giant swimming rabbit. 2007 Present day\n[Caption:] America must never forget.\n","explanation":"On April 20, 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter was allegedly \" attacked by a giant swimming rabbit \" while solo-fishing on a boat in his hometown. The reality is a little more nuanced: According to Carter, the rabbit had actually been chased into the water by some hounds and swam near his boat. Carter splashed some water on it to compel the rabbit not to come any closer.\nNevertheless, the newspapers ate it up, reveling in the ridiculous notion that anyone would feel threatened by a rabbit (considered by some to be small, harmless herbivores [ citation needed ] ), with respected paper The Washington Post putting the story \"President Attacked by Rabbit\" on the front page. Since the White House refused to release the photograph, the paper created a cartoon parody of the rabbit, calling it PAWS, in reference to the blockbuster film JAWS , about a killer shark. Carter's opponents used it as fodder for their arguments that Carter's presidency was weak and ineffectual, and basically, the whole thing was blown way out of proportion by the American media, as so often happens with goofy events such as this.\nThis comic treats the Killer Rabbit attack as a dark day for the United States and uses the phrase \"America Must Never Forget,\" which usually applies to days like the Pearl Harbor attack or 9\/11 .  It essentially claims that, for the entire history of the United States (which starts with the signing of the Declaration of Independence ), it is the only event worth remembering.\nThe rabbit incident is also referenced in 1688: Map Age Guide and in 2086: History Department .\nThe title text is an assumption that the event has not been remembered in the way the comic jokes that it should have been, and as a result, younger readers will think he is kidding when he says Carter was attacked by a rabbit.\n[A timeline with only three ticks with years noted. Each tick is labeled with a line going to the tick. The second tick is much closer to the last on the right and has its year written below the line. The other two have it above the line and vice versa with the labels. Below in the middle there is a caption.] 1776 Declaration of independence 1979 Jimmy Carter attacked by giant swimming rabbit. 2007 Present day\n[Caption:] America must never forget.\n"}
{"id":205,"title":"Candy Button Paper","image_title":"Candy Button Paper","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/205","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/candy_button_paper.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/205:_Candy_Button_Paper","transcript":"When it came to eating strips of candy buttons, there were two main strategies. Some kids carefully removed each bead, checking closely for paper residue before eating. [To the right, a small section of a strip of Candy Buttons paper is shown. Two red buttons have been removed from the top of the strip.] [To the left, a long strip is shown. It seems to be waving in the air.] Others tore the candy off haphazardly, swallowing large scraps of paper as they ate. Then there were the lonely few of us who moved back and forth on the strip, eating rows of beads here and there, pretending we were Turing machines. [A strip is shown from bird's eye view. Many rows of buttons have already been eaten.]\n","explanation":"This comic refers to Candy Buttons , a type of candy sold by Necco in the U.S. since 1980. Because they were glued to paper, each candy button would have some paper stuck to it. As said in the comic, some kids would carefully check each candy button to make sure they would not accidentally eat paper, while some kids didn't care and ripped them off, eating large scraps of paper in the process.\nBecause of the resemblance of the strips of paper to the tape of a Turing Machine , a small minority of children (possibly only Randall or some of his friends) pretended to be a Turing Machine by creating rules and executing them upon the tape of candy exactly like a real Turing Machine would do.\nThe title text refers to the fact that, although it would be hypothetically possible to create a Turing Machine that can only delete symbols, the information density of the tape would be greatly reduced, and the original Turing Machine could read and write from the tape it operated on.\nWhen it came to eating strips of candy buttons, there were two main strategies. Some kids carefully removed each bead, checking closely for paper residue before eating. [To the right, a small section of a strip of Candy Buttons paper is shown. Two red buttons have been removed from the top of the strip.] [To the left, a long strip is shown. It seems to be waving in the air.] Others tore the candy off haphazardly, swallowing large scraps of paper as they ate. Then there were the lonely few of us who moved back and forth on the strip, eating rows of beads here and there, pretending we were Turing machines. [A strip is shown from bird's eye view. Many rows of buttons have already been eaten.]\n"}
{"id":206,"title":"Reno Rhymes","image_title":"Reno Rhymes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/206","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reno_rhymes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/206:_Reno_Rhymes","transcript":"[Cueball and Black Hat stand facing one another. Black Hat is on the left.] Black Hat: You know, I once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. Cueball: Really? Well, I once shot a man in Reno, but I couldn't tell you why.\nBlack Hat: I once shot a man in Reno, then I went home to cry. Cueball: I once shot a man in Reno, then I watered his cacti.\nBlack Hat: I once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly. Cueball: I once shot a man in Reno, him and all his succubi.\nBlack Hat: I once shot a man in Reno and a bunch more in My Lai. Cueball: I think we're done.\n","explanation":"This comic starts with a line from the song \"Folsom Prison Blues\" by Johnny Cash. Cash is noted as saying, \"I sat with my pen in my hand, trying to think up the worst reason a person could have for killing another person, and that's what came to mind,\" which fits pretty well with the personality of Black Hat . Rather than react badly, Cueball starts a rhyming game, which they continue until Black Hat refers to the horrifying My Lai Massacre , which is apparently going too far for Cueball.\nYou know, I once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. Black Hat starts with the original line from the song.\nReally? Well I once shot a man in Reno but I couldn't tell you why. Cueball then begins the rhyming game by saying that he can't tell the reason why he killed the man.\nI once shot a man in Reno then I went home to cry. Black Hat continues by saying that he got emotional after killing the man... Unlikely, given that he's Black Hat , and it could be him trying to continue, or he could be being sarcastic.\nI once shot a man in Reno then I watered his cacti. An unlikely action after you have just killed someone, unless you're elaborately trying to cover up your actions. More likely, Cueball is just trying to continue the rhyme.\nI once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly. Firefly was a TV series that aired on Fox during 2002. Its cancellation was a source of much annoyance to its fans, a fact frequently referenced in xkcd. In this case, Black Hat goes as far as to murder someone for this.\nI once shot a man in Reno, him and all his succubi. Cueball says he shot a man and a bunch of female demons. Unlikely to happen in real life, and is just probably Cueball attempting to continue.\nI once shot a man in Reno and a bunch more in My Lai. The My Lai Massacre was an atrocity committed by US soldiers in Vietnam during the Vietnam war. Here, Black Hat says he not only shot a man in Reno, he shot a bunch more in My Lai , meaning that he was actually part of the massacre. Cueball is obviously horrified by this, and he ends the rhyme with a \"I think we're done,\" signifying his horror at Black Hat's words.\nThe title text continues the rhyme, but changes the roles: now the speaker is asking someone else if they shot a man in Reno. It may be a reference to The Princess Bride (Inigo says the \"I don't mean to pry\" part to Westley).\n[Cueball and Black Hat stand facing one another. Black Hat is on the left.] Black Hat: You know, I once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. Cueball: Really? Well, I once shot a man in Reno, but I couldn't tell you why.\nBlack Hat: I once shot a man in Reno, then I went home to cry. Cueball: I once shot a man in Reno, then I watered his cacti.\nBlack Hat: I once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly. Cueball: I once shot a man in Reno, him and all his succubi.\nBlack Hat: I once shot a man in Reno and a bunch more in My Lai. Cueball: I think we're done.\n"}
{"id":207,"title":"What xkcd Means","image_title":"What xkcd Means","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/207","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/what_xkcd_means.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/207:_What_xkcd_Means","transcript":"[Caption above the panels:] What does xkcd mean?\n[Two cars sitting at a red light at a multi-lane intersection; one of them makes a right turn, then shifts over to the left lane and makes a U-turn across the dividing line to go back the way it came. It then shifts back to the right lane and makes another right turn, continuing down the road past the traffic light. This is shown with a red arrow.] It means saving a few seconds at a long red light via elaborate and questionably legal maneuvers.\n[In an inset circle in the panel, someone is on a cell phone. In the panel itself, a second person is looking at a dog.] It means having someone call your cell phone to figure out where it is. Dog's stomach: Ring\n[The mathematical function \"A(g 64 , g 64 )=\" appears in the panel. Next to the equal sign stands a mathematician, clutching his head.] It means calling the Ackermann function with Graham's number as the arguments just to horrify mathematicians. Mathematician: Aughhh\n[An approximately 8 by 8 square of floor tiles is shown; the first, fourth, and seventh across in the first, fourth, and seventh rows are black, and the rest are white. A guy and girl are shown next to it, walking on what is presumed to be the same pattern of floor tiles.] It means instinctively constructing rules for which floor tiles it's okay to step on and then walking funny ever after. [Line indicating the uppermost right black tile: Black tiles okay.] [Line indicating tile directly below it: White tiles directly between black tiles okay.] [Line indicating a white tile in the last column over: Not okay.]\n","explanation":"This comic purports to finally answer the question, \" What does 'xkcd' mean? \" However, instead of giving an answer as to what the letters actually mean (according to Randall, it's literally \"just a word with no phonetic pronunciation\"), he offers five quirky behaviors. This is reminiscent of TV commercials that ask, \"What does [brand name] mean? It means [happy activity]!\".\nThe first panel shows a driver, marked by a red line, making a right turn at a red light , a U-turn on the connecting road, and then another right turn, returning them to their original direction presumably faster than waiting for the light. Right turns at red lights and U-turns are legal in all 50 states, but some intersections do not allow them (and turning at a red light is illegal everywhere in Europe). Hence, this complicated maneuver is \"questionably legal\". However, under certain circumstances in the US state of Oregon, it appears that this is actually legal .\nThe second panel shows Cueball searching for his mobile phone by having his friend call it to locate the ringtone, only to hear a ring from inside of his dog's stomach, possibly a reference to Jurassic Park III .\nIn the third panel, Graham's number is a (very) large number (once celebrated as the largest number ever used in a proof, although it is no longer the record holder), and the Ackermann function is a (very) fast-growing function, thus the function's output must be insanely large. (In fact, A(g 64 , g 64 ) is actually smaller than g 65 .)\nThe fourth panel shows somebody walking in a pattern based on the position of black and white tiles on the floor. This is further referenced in 245: Floor Tiles .\nThe title text refers to stigmata , marks corresponding to Jesus' crucifixion wounds. Devout Catholics have claimed to have spontaneously developed stigmata.\n[Caption above the panels:] What does xkcd mean?\n[Two cars sitting at a red light at a multi-lane intersection; one of them makes a right turn, then shifts over to the left lane and makes a U-turn across the dividing line to go back the way it came. It then shifts back to the right lane and makes another right turn, continuing down the road past the traffic light. This is shown with a red arrow.] It means saving a few seconds at a long red light via elaborate and questionably legal maneuvers.\n[In an inset circle in the panel, someone is on a cell phone. In the panel itself, a second person is looking at a dog.] It means having someone call your cell phone to figure out where it is. Dog's stomach: Ring\n[The mathematical function \"A(g 64 , g 64 )=\" appears in the panel. Next to the equal sign stands a mathematician, clutching his head.] It means calling the Ackermann function with Graham's number as the arguments just to horrify mathematicians. Mathematician: Aughhh\n[An approximately 8 by 8 square of floor tiles is shown; the first, fourth, and seventh across in the first, fourth, and seventh rows are black, and the rest are white. A guy and girl are shown next to it, walking on what is presumed to be the same pattern of floor tiles.] It means instinctively constructing rules for which floor tiles it's okay to step on and then walking funny ever after. [Line indicating the uppermost right black tile: Black tiles okay.] [Line indicating tile directly below it: White tiles directly between black tiles okay.] [Line indicating a white tile in the last column over: Not okay.]\n"}
{"id":208,"title":"Regular Expressions","image_title":"Regular Expressions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/208","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/regular_expressions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/208:_Regular_Expressions","transcript":"Whenever I learn a new skill I concoct elaborate fantasy scenarios where it lets me save the day.\nMegan: Oh no! The killer must have followed her on vacation! [Megan points to computer.] Megan: But to find them we'd have to search through 200 MB of emails looking for something formatted like an address! Cueball: It's hopeless!\nOff-panel voice: Everybody stand back.\nOff-panel voice: I know regular expressions.\n[A man swings in on a rope, toward the computer.]\ntap tap The word PERL! appears in a bubble.\n[The man swings away, and the other characters cheer.]\nA similar T-shirt in the xkcd store based on this comic says \"stand back...I'm going to try science.\"\n","explanation":"The comic begins with Randall saying how every time he develops a new skill, he finds himself daydreaming about using it to save the day. Computer skills aren't usually superhero material, which lends itself to the humor of the comic.\nIn computing, a regular expression (\"regex\") provides a concise and flexible means to \"match\" (specify and recognize) strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters.\nManually trying to look for a specific pattern through 200 MB of text is equivalent to looking for a needle in a haystack. But this task can be made easy by using regexes, since a script can read through text and match specific string patterns much faster than humans can achieve.\nPerl is a popular scripting language that has often been referenced favorably in the comic. Perl is also the most acknowledged language when it comes to the performance while evaluating regular expressions. [ citation needed ]\nThe \"PERL!\" in the fifth panel is reminiscent of old superhero serials, particularly Batman (TV series) , in which sound effects such as \"BAM!\" \"POW!\" \"ZAP!\" would be displayed on screen in similar spiky bubbles. This fits with the theme of the comic, with Cueball being a \"superhero\" who fights crime using computer skills.\nThe title text refers to how sensitive regexes can be to small mistakes or missing characters. In 1168: tar , another potential hero fails (and gets blown up by a nuclear bomb that is only able to be disarmed by typing in a valid tar command, but blows up if you don't do it on the first try) because the syntax of some commands and programming languages are just too difficult to remember by heart.\nWhenever I learn a new skill I concoct elaborate fantasy scenarios where it lets me save the day.\nMegan: Oh no! The killer must have followed her on vacation! [Megan points to computer.] Megan: But to find them we'd have to search through 200 MB of emails looking for something formatted like an address! Cueball: It's hopeless!\nOff-panel voice: Everybody stand back.\nOff-panel voice: I know regular expressions.\n[A man swings in on a rope, toward the computer.]\ntap tap The word PERL! appears in a bubble.\n[The man swings away, and the other characters cheer.]\nA similar T-shirt in the xkcd store based on this comic says \"stand back...I'm going to try science.\"\n"}
{"id":209,"title":"Kayak","image_title":"Kayak","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/209","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kayak.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/209:_Kayak","transcript":"[Beret Guy, in a kayak holding a paddle, is talking to Cueball, standing on a pier.] Beret Guy: Come explore the future with me! Cueball: Huh? What's that you're in? [Close up on Beret Guy and his kayak. The tip of the pier can be seen.] Beret Guy: A two seat kayak! Cueball: I see, but why do you have it? [Close up on Cueball. The tip of the kayak and the tip of the paddle can be seen. Beret Guy and the waterline cannot be seen.] Beret Guy: We'll find out! The future is a big place! Cueball: So the kayak travels through time? [Slightly zoomed-out version of the third panel. The tip of the paddle has disappeared but the waterline is visible again.] Beret Guy: Sure! Just like everything else! It also goes over water. Come on!\n","explanation":"This comic deals with two linked themes, which both come under the umbrella of existentialism , a branch of philosophy.\nBeret Guy invites Cueball to join him in a two-seat kayak trip. However, Cueball is confused by his intention.\nBeret Guy initially words his invitation to Cueball as \"come explore the future.\" However, this confuses Cueball, as he believes that Beret Guy's kayak can travel through time in a science fiction sense. In reality, Beret Guy is being more literal: after all, as the title-text emphasizes, \"there's future everywhere;\" everything is \"traveling through time\" simply by existing, as time is just another dimension. Beret Guy's comments show that he perceives all of life as an adventure, and just as exciting as time travel; his eagerness to \"explore\" it shows that he takes delight in the unpredictability of life. In this way, the comic criticizes people who become depressed with the lack of control they have over their future: Beret Guy suggests that, rather than continuously worrying, we should enjoy the thrill of the unknown.\nCueball asks Beret Guy why he wishes for a kayak trip, as there is no intrinsic purpose or logic behind this action. However, Beret Guy claims that, in fact, nothing has any intrinsic purpose in the long run, and thus there is no reason not to go on a kayak trip. In this case, if a kayak trip is likely to make you happy, it is the right thing to do. In this way, the comic could be seen as criticizing those who do not take advantage of life's opportunities.\nBeret Guy's comments reference existentialism, which is a branch of philosophy that states that there is no intrinsic purpose or meaning to anything in life, as nothing will influence our eventual fate - death. It also states that there is no way of predicting what will happen to us, and that the future is always unknown. The solution is therefore to find one's own purpose in life, and make the most of life's opportunities while they are still available.\nThe title text may be a reference to the Calvin and Hobbes collection book \"There's treasure everywhere!\"\nMaking the most of life, and rationalizing the familiar, has also been explored in these comics:\n[Beret Guy, in a kayak holding a paddle, is talking to Cueball, standing on a pier.] Beret Guy: Come explore the future with me! Cueball: Huh? What's that you're in? [Close up on Beret Guy and his kayak. The tip of the pier can be seen.] Beret Guy: A two seat kayak! Cueball: I see, but why do you have it? [Close up on Cueball. The tip of the kayak and the tip of the paddle can be seen. Beret Guy and the waterline cannot be seen.] Beret Guy: We'll find out! The future is a big place! Cueball: So the kayak travels through time? [Slightly zoomed-out version of the third panel. The tip of the paddle has disappeared but the waterline is visible again.] Beret Guy: Sure! Just like everything else! It also goes over water. Come on!\n"}
{"id":210,"title":"90's Flowchart","image_title":"90's Flowchart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/210","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/90s_flowchart.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/210:_90%27s_Flowchart","transcript":"90's Flowchart Start: The 90's? No: Stop Yes: Stop Hammertime or Collaborate, Listen\n","explanation":"Here you can see an apparent flowchart. However, it has non-standard notation.  The oval normally represents either the start or stop of a process.  Here, both the yes and no end up in stop , which would normally imply that nothing below can be reached.\nUnless we are in the 90s, this doesn't matter, as there is nothing after the stop. But in the 90s, two processing paths follow, and both are from the lyrics of two-hit rap songs from the 90s:\nIn both instances, the sense of the lyric is that you should interrupt what you are doing, and switch to the new action.  Interpreted in terms of flowchart terminology, we could consider that the 'stop' just pauses the main thread, and secondary threads are launched to perform the 'Hammertime' and the 'Collaborate' and 'Listen' activities.\nThe title text compares freestyle rapping with Markov chains . Markov chains are mathematical constructs in which the state at the next time step is dependent only upon the current state and probability, and not the state at previous times. This is somewhat similar to freestyle rapping, in which what is said next must bear some relationship to what was just said, but the \"freestyle\" part means that almost anything can be brought in (hence the probabilistic part); furthermore, freestyle rapping allows the rapper to say something next that bears a relationship to what was just said, but not to what was said before that.\nThere have been several flowchart comics, all of which are listed here .\nBoth Ice Ice Baby and U Can't Touch This were released in the year 1990, and so their status as \"90s\" music is disputable. The 1st decade didn't start until year 1 ( year 0 does not exist in the Georgian calendar system), so the 2nd decade didn't start until year 11, and the 3rd decade didn't start until year 21, etc. Whether those songs count as being released in the 90s would be discussed over 2000 comics later .\n90's Flowchart Start: The 90's? No: Stop Yes: Stop Hammertime or Collaborate, Listen\n"}
{"id":211,"title":"Hamster Ball Heist","image_title":"Hamster Ball Heist","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/211","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hamster_ball_heist.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/211:_Hamster_Ball_Heist","transcript":"[Cueball's Cueball-like friend tells him something.] Friend: You know that giant hamster ball you've always wanted? I just found out that Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips crowd-surfs in one. Cueball: Let's go.\n[Wayne Coyne, with curly hair and full beard, is crowd-surfing inside a giant hamster ball shown rolling from right to left with three lines behind it. He keeps his balance be leaning\/walking forward and holding his arms out. The crowd shown begins to the right with a Cueball-like guy who the ball has just passed, and after him and below the ball there are 8 more people from the crowd all holding their hands up. The first four (a Hairy and three more Cueball-like guys) have already pushed it on, the next three (a person with black hair and two more Cueball-like guys) are touching the ball, and finally Megan is standing with her arms up waiting for the ball to arrive. Behind her are three of Cueball's Cueball-like friends, then Cueball, and finally to the far left partly outside the panel frame is yet another Cueball-like guy from the crowd. Above Cueball and to the edge of the hamster ball is a frame with a caption:] Some weeks later... Cueball: Ready? Friends: Ready\n[Cueball to the left and one of his friends to the right shove the crowd out of the way, causing the hamster ball with Wayne Coyne inside to fall to the ground, Wayne falling backwards with arms up. Cueball pushed three Cueball-like guys and a Megan into each other to the left, and one of his friends push four Cueball-like guys to the left, towards a fifth person only partly shown at the edge of the panel. (Cueball's other two friends are not shown; they could be in front and behind the ball doing the same, but not shown).] Cueball: Now! Wayne Coyne: Hey! Friend: Shove\n[Cueball and two of his friends start pushing the hamster ball with Wayne Coyne to the right, Coyne again stands up as before but to the right. He looks over his shoulder at the three who pushed him. To the left of the crowd, four Cueball-like guys (the third pointing at the scene and Megan) watch, and to the right, the third friend pushes a Cueball-like guy out of the way.] Cueball: Okay, push! Wayne Coyne: What's going on?!\n[Cueball and his two friends roll the hamster ball with Wayne Coyne up the ramp into the back of a truck, Wayne pushing the other way with both hands, while the third friend still holding the crowd back holding up his arms. Two Cueball-like guys from the crowd are shown also holding their arms up. At the front of the truck, a fourth Cueball-like friend stands by the door ready to drive.] Wayne Coyne: Help!\n[The truck drives off with the fourth friend in the front of the truck, leaving the crowd in a large cloud of dust. Four Cueball-like guys are shown in the first row of the crowd, which now is shown to consist of many people, shown behind with lots of small heads (Cueball-like) fading off in the distance.]\n","explanation":"Wayne Coyne , the lead singer of the band The Flaming Lips , is indeed known to crowd-surf in a giant hamster ball .\nHamster balls are a recurring subject on xkcd, starting with 152: Hamster Ball , which in direct relation to this comic showed that Cueball's biggest and only wish is such a ball.\nWhen Cueball's friend tells him about Wayne's hamster ball surfing, Cueball says \"Let's go,\" suggesting that they should go and kidnap that hamster ball and Wayne.\nThe rest of the comic outlines an elaborate mission to acquire a human-sized hamster ball by infiltrating a music concert and stealing the hamster ball while it is in use, thus also kidnapping the rock star, who would be structurally powerless to fight back while trapped within a spherical object. At least four Cueball-like guys help with the mission at the concert, one keeping the crowd back as the other three push the hamster ball into the waiting truck where a fifth friend acts as the driver when they escape with their heist.  This has not been attempted, nor should be attempted in real life. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text is one of Randall 's many open promises, claiming to supply anyone who does this in real life with a free T-shirt, and one for Wayne, too.\nIt is later revealed in 577: The Race: Part 1 , that Cueball paid a large settlement for this heist.\n[Cueball's Cueball-like friend tells him something.] Friend: You know that giant hamster ball you've always wanted? I just found out that Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips crowd-surfs in one. Cueball: Let's go.\n[Wayne Coyne, with curly hair and full beard, is crowd-surfing inside a giant hamster ball shown rolling from right to left with three lines behind it. He keeps his balance be leaning\/walking forward and holding his arms out. The crowd shown begins to the right with a Cueball-like guy who the ball has just passed, and after him and below the ball there are 8 more people from the crowd all holding their hands up. The first four (a Hairy and three more Cueball-like guys) have already pushed it on, the next three (a person with black hair and two more Cueball-like guys) are touching the ball, and finally Megan is standing with her arms up waiting for the ball to arrive. Behind her are three of Cueball's Cueball-like friends, then Cueball, and finally to the far left partly outside the panel frame is yet another Cueball-like guy from the crowd. Above Cueball and to the edge of the hamster ball is a frame with a caption:] Some weeks later... Cueball: Ready? Friends: Ready\n[Cueball to the left and one of his friends to the right shove the crowd out of the way, causing the hamster ball with Wayne Coyne inside to fall to the ground, Wayne falling backwards with arms up. Cueball pushed three Cueball-like guys and a Megan into each other to the left, and one of his friends push four Cueball-like guys to the left, towards a fifth person only partly shown at the edge of the panel. (Cueball's other two friends are not shown; they could be in front and behind the ball doing the same, but not shown).] Cueball: Now! Wayne Coyne: Hey! Friend: Shove\n[Cueball and two of his friends start pushing the hamster ball with Wayne Coyne to the right, Coyne again stands up as before but to the right. He looks over his shoulder at the three who pushed him. To the left of the crowd, four Cueball-like guys (the third pointing at the scene and Megan) watch, and to the right, the third friend pushes a Cueball-like guy out of the way.] Cueball: Okay, push! Wayne Coyne: What's going on?!\n[Cueball and his two friends roll the hamster ball with Wayne Coyne up the ramp into the back of a truck, Wayne pushing the other way with both hands, while the third friend still holding the crowd back holding up his arms. Two Cueball-like guys from the crowd are shown also holding their arms up. At the front of the truck, a fourth Cueball-like friend stands by the door ready to drive.] Wayne Coyne: Help!\n[The truck drives off with the fourth friend in the front of the truck, leaving the crowd in a large cloud of dust. Four Cueball-like guys are shown in the first row of the crowd, which now is shown to consist of many people, shown behind with lots of small heads (Cueball-like) fading off in the distance.]\n"}
{"id":212,"title":"Brain","image_title":"Brain","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/212","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brain.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/212:_Brain","transcript":"My Brain [Picture of Brain. Line points at a highlighted area.] Section that is devoted, no matter where I go in life, to planning the ultimate tree house*. *Oh man, it would be like Swiss Family Robinson, but with multiple trees connected by... hey come up to my room and see the blueprints!\n","explanation":"The Swiss Family Robinson is a novel by the Swiss pastor and writer Johann David Wyss . In the novel, a shipwrecked family builds a tree house as good as a normal house complete with library and mechanical contraptions.\nGrowing up, many children grow a fascination with tree houses. Tree houses are a child's own special place to do stuff away from their parents, have some autonomy, perhaps form a club. The obsession with tree houses usually fades once a child reaches their teenage years, but of course some of us never grow up. Being an adult geek\/scientist who still enjoys childish things, Randall wants to build a sophisticated tree house rather than a simple one, taking the theme from the above-mentioned novel.\nThe title text makes reference to the regular xkcd joke about how terrifying Velociraptors from the movie Jurassic Park are. But they never can reach a tree house, just because it's too high, as you can see here 87: Velociraptors .\n\"Raptors\" might refer to the informal bird group, hawks and owls and such, a joke relying on the previous infatuation with velociraptors.\nMy Brain [Picture of Brain. Line points at a highlighted area.] Section that is devoted, no matter where I go in life, to planning the ultimate tree house*. *Oh man, it would be like Swiss Family Robinson, but with multiple trees connected by... hey come up to my room and see the blueprints!\n"}
{"id":213,"title":"Ghostbusters Marathon","image_title":"Ghostbusters Marathon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/213","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ghostbusters_marathon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/213:_Ghostbusters_Marathon","transcript":"[Cueball and a friend are in a room. Cueball is standing up. There is litter around them.] Cueball: Okay, that's all the Ghostbusters marathon I can handle. Later! Friend: You can't leave! We just started the animated series!\nCueball: I've had my fill. I'm going home. Friend: I can't let you do that.\n[Cueball walks along a cord and past a box. The friend clicks a switch.] Click\n[Cueball is bathed in some kind of aura emitted by the box.]\n","explanation":"Ghostbusters is a 1984 supernatural comedy film that spawned a sequel, a reboot, and two animated television series (the latter of which lasted less than a season, didn't feature the same cast of titular Ghostbusters, and therefore is probably being pointedly ignored). The box, a \"Muon Containment Trap,\" is a device used in the film to capture ghosts. It is connected to a footswitch by a cable. The man trying to leave is about to be pulled into the box and held there indefinitely (against his will, of course).\nThe title text refers to Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon , a river (or very large stream) that marked the border between Roman Italy and an area of land Caesar was the appointed governor of. At the end of his term, the Roman Senate ordered him to disband his army and return to Italy. Instead, he brought his forces past the border, an act of treason and rebellion against the Republic, instigating the Roman Civil War. The phrase \"crossing the Rubicon\" now means making a move with gigantic consequences that cannot be undone. In the film Ghostbusters , the protagonists use \"proton packs\" that fire \"streams\" of energy. The inventor of the device warns that these streams should not be crossed against each other, as doing so \"would be bad.\" Just how bad? \"Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.\" Important safety tip.\nFinal quote taken from the 1984 movie Ghostbusters .\n[Cueball and a friend are in a room. Cueball is standing up. There is litter around them.] Cueball: Okay, that's all the Ghostbusters marathon I can handle. Later! Friend: You can't leave! We just started the animated series!\nCueball: I've had my fill. I'm going home. Friend: I can't let you do that.\n[Cueball walks along a cord and past a box. The friend clicks a switch.] Click\n[Cueball is bathed in some kind of aura emitted by the box.]\n"}
{"id":214,"title":"The Problem with Wikipedia","image_title":"The Problem with Wikipedia","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/214","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_problem_with_wikipedia.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/214:_The_Problem_with_Wikipedia","transcript":"[Heading above the chart:] The PROBLEM with WIKIPEDIA:\n[Text in a frame below the heading:] Tacoma Narrows Bridge\n[Lines lead down both left and right to two new frames with the following entries:] Suspension bridge Structural collapse\n[Two more lines lead down from the left frame and one from the right frame, and all lines end on a wiggling line from left to right. Below this wiggled line in square brackets it reads:] Three hours of fascinated clicking\n[Further below there is a similar wiggling line, from where six lines lead to new frames below:] William Howard Taft 24-hour analog dial Lesbianism in erotica [This frame is followed by a second:] Batman; Fatal hilarity Taylor Hanson [This frame is followed by a chain of two others:] Cotton; T-Shirt; Wet T-shirt contest\n","explanation":"This comic illustrates the \"problems\" of information explosion coupled with a dense web of hypertext links . Through most of human history, written media has been both slow and linear. Hypertext allows a new type of information consumption, through small chunks of information linked together in a web of related concepts, and by being digital, each new chunk can be retrieved quickly and effortlessly. Wikipedia applies this principle very strongly, and because it covers so many topics, it is common for a reader to skim an article about a topic they need or want to know about, and end up following a series of links out of curiosity. Since each new page also has several links, the overall navigation pattern resembles a tree that branches out, \"exploding\" in size with each new level of link-clicking, thus resulting in many wasted hours (over three in this case) of reading stuff unrelated to the original goal, and lots of open browser tabs holding a wide variety of articles, which are seemingly unrelated, but have common \"ancestors.\" (The problem, for Randall , of wasting time on Wikipedia was later referenced in the title text of 1501: Mysteries , and the more general problem of getting trapped following a never-ending chain of interesting links was covered in 609: Tab Explosion .) The large diversity in end links may also be a reference to the Wikipedia game .\nOne can also see this effect occur in other MediaWiki -powered wikis such as this very website, where one comic can lead to another of similar relation or category. In the table below, a possible route for each entry has been found.\nFinding routes between the start and end points of the two pages above and the six below makes good challenges in the Wikipedia game .\nThe title text refers to two of the articles that were supposedly reached at the bottom. William Howard Taft was the 27th President of the U.S., in office from 1909 to 1913, who was notorious for being so overweight that when a White House chief usher invented a story about him getting stuck in the White House bathtub , people took it seriously. A wet T-shirt contest is an exhibitionistic competition typically featuring young women contestants at a nightclub, bar, or resort. Clearly the combination of these two would be rather bizarre.\nThere is an online game that involves trying to get from one Wikipedia page to another in the shortest possible route: http:\/\/thewikigame.com\/ .\nTable of paths\nDue to the ever changing nature of Wikipedia, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge entry on Wikipedia no longer links to Structural collapse , requiring an intermediate step via Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940) , and since Structural collapse now redirects to Structural integrity and failure , most pages on Wikipedia that linked to Structural collapse have been changed to rename this link.\nThe table below lists one valid route for each destination article, though it is not necessarily the most efficient route. And that these routes may become invalid as articles are edited. They all have been updated on March 21, 2015. All links then could be found directly on the page. This was not the case in the original version of the paths, where some links were in hidden parts of the page.\n[Heading above the chart:] The PROBLEM with WIKIPEDIA:\n[Text in a frame below the heading:] Tacoma Narrows Bridge\n[Lines lead down both left and right to two new frames with the following entries:] Suspension bridge Structural collapse\n[Two more lines lead down from the left frame and one from the right frame, and all lines end on a wiggling line from left to right. Below this wiggled line in square brackets it reads:] Three hours of fascinated clicking\n[Further below there is a similar wiggling line, from where six lines lead to new frames below:] William Howard Taft 24-hour analog dial Lesbianism in erotica [This frame is followed by a second:] Batman; Fatal hilarity Taylor Hanson [This frame is followed by a chain of two others:] Cotton; T-Shirt; Wet T-shirt contest\n"}
{"id":215,"title":"Letting Go","image_title":"Letting Go","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/215","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/letting_go.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/215:_Letting_Go","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a picture of himself and Megan in a heart; it has been ripped down the middle, separating the two people.]\n[Cueball sits at computer, looking at the picture.]\n[The panel has been inverted. Cueball still sits at the computer with the picture in front of him and his head drooped.]\n[Cueball types on the computer.] Text from computer: [email\u00a0protected] :~# userdel megan\n","explanation":"In fiction, a character who has had a romantic relationship end will be shown taking some act to remove a sign of their partner's presence in their life, e.g. removing\/selling a wedding or engagement ring, removing the partner's toiletries from the bathroom, or deleting the partner's phone number from a cell phone. This is used to symbolize that the character has accepted the end of the relationship and is ready to move on, no longer pining for their loss or seeking to restore the relationship.\nThe first three panels imply that Cueball was presumably in a now-terminated relationship with Megan . The final panel shows him using the Unix command 'userdel' to delete her user account from his computer. The joke here is that he considers this to be a significant part of accepting that she is no longer a part of his life, where most people would consider it a routine administrative task.\nThe title text refers to Cueball's thankfulness that he never gave Megan the password to the administrator ('root') account on the computer. It is unclear why this is; he might be worried that she would have used the access to perform malicious actions after the breakup, or simply glad to be spared the need to change the root password. Alternately, it could be a metaphor for marriage and\/or a closer emotional relationship, and he is glad that he did not allow her an even greater hold on his heart before the breakup (which would, of course, have entailed commensurately more pain when she did leave him). Not sharing the root password is indicative of a lack of trust in their relationship, which could be a factor in the initial breakdown.\nThis was only the second time the name Megan was used in xkcd, the first time being in 159: Boombox .\n[Cueball is holding a picture of himself and Megan in a heart; it has been ripped down the middle, separating the two people.]\n[Cueball sits at computer, looking at the picture.]\n[The panel has been inverted. Cueball still sits at the computer with the picture in front of him and his head drooped.]\n[Cueball types on the computer.] Text from computer: [email\u00a0protected] :~# userdel megan\n"}
{"id":216,"title":"Romantic Drama Equation","image_title":"Romantic Drama Equation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/216","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/romantic_drama_equation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/216:_Romantic_Drama_Equation","transcript":"TV Romantic Drama Equation (Derived during a series of 'Queer as Folk' episodes) [A table shows equations for possible romantic pairings in a TV show. The equation under \"gay\" is n(n-1) 2+x(x-n); the equation under \"straight\" is x(n-x).] x: Number of male (or female) cast members. n: total number of cast members.\n[A graph plots pairings (for large casts) against cast makeup. Each of the above equations forms a curve. \"Gay cast\" starts high for an all male cast, dips down at 50\/50 cast makeup, and then rises again for all female. \"Straight cast\" starts at zero for an all male cast, peaks at 50\/50 cast makeup, and then drops to zero again for an all female cast. The two curves intersect at two points close to the middle.]\n","explanation":"In a group of n people, such as the cast of a TV romantic drama like Queer as Folk , the number of possible different pairs of people is n(n-1)\/2. A romantic drama will often consider, over time, many possible romantic pairs of its cast members, even seeming to test the limit of how many pairs are possible. Through an austerely binaristic lens, this comic explores the implication of sex and sexual orientation in characterizing the possible pairs.\nIf everyone in the group is male or female, then each pair could be classified as gay or straight. The formulas in the comic give how many of the possible pairs are gay and how many are straight, as a function of the total number of people and how many are male (or, equivalently, how many are female.) For example, of the 9 principal cast of Firefly, 5 are men and 4 are women. With n=9 and x=5, we have 16 possible gay pairs and 20 possible straight pairs.\nA graph shows how the relative number of males and females affects the number of gay pairs and straight pairs. When the group is all male (or all female), all of the possible pairs are gay, but as the minority sex's number is increased, more of the pairs are straight. When the group is half male and half female, the number of straight pairs is maximized, and straight pairs slightly outnumber gay pairs. The curves are labeled \"gay cast\" and \"straight cast\", perhaps alluding that a \"gay cast\" would consider only gay pairs, and a \"straight cast\" would consider only straight pairs.\nThere is a note that the graph describes large casts. Because all the quantities involved are discrete, for a small [n] there are only a few points to plot on the graph, and the smooth, continuous curves seen in the comic are less recognizable.\nThe title-text mentions that Randall made a graph of his prospective dating pool over time and was depressed by the results. As he gets older, his dating pool gets smaller: fewer people his age are single. But as Randall later shows in 314: Dating Pools , age is not the problem--he is!\nThe formulas may be derived as follows:\nEach straight pair needs to include one of the x males and one of the (n-x) females, so there are x(n-x) possible ways of combining one of each.  E.g., if there are n=5 people, of whom x=2 are male, then there will be 3 possible pairings involving the first male, and 3 possible pairings involving the second, yielding 2(5-2)=6 possible pairs.\nWolfram|Alpha: x*(n-x)\nEach gay pair needs to include either two males or two females.  To choose two males, we can start with any of the x males and choose any of the (x-1) remaining males.  However, that counts each possible pair twice.  E.g., Adam&Steve got counted when we chose Adam first and Steve second, and again when we chose Steve first and Adam second.  To avoid double-counting the pairs, we therefore need to divide the product by 2.  So there are x(x-1)\/2 possible pairs of two males.  Similarly, there are (n-x)(n-x-1)\/2 possible pairings of two females. Summing these, we get the total number of possible gay pairs as [x^2 - x  +  n^2 - nx - n - xn + x^2 + x]\/2.  That simplifies to [n^2 - n   +   2 x^2 - 2 xn]\/2.  The left two terms can be combined together as n(n-1) and the right two terms can be combined together as -2x(n-x) or 2x(x-n) [which is negative, because x-n<0].  Since the sum of these terms was divided by 2, we get that the total number of possible gay pairs is n(n-1)\/2 - x(n-x), or n(n-1)\/2 + x(x-n), which is what the cartoon says.\nWolfram|Alpha: n*(n-1)\/2+x*(x-n)\nTV Romantic Drama Equation (Derived during a series of 'Queer as Folk' episodes) [A table shows equations for possible romantic pairings in a TV show. The equation under \"gay\" is n(n-1) 2+x(x-n); the equation under \"straight\" is x(n-x).] x: Number of male (or female) cast members. n: total number of cast members.\n[A graph plots pairings (for large casts) against cast makeup. Each of the above equations forms a curve. \"Gay cast\" starts high for an all male cast, dips down at 50\/50 cast makeup, and then rises again for all female. \"Straight cast\" starts at zero for an all male cast, peaks at 50\/50 cast makeup, and then drops to zero again for an all female cast. The two curves intersect at two points close to the middle.]\n"}
{"id":217,"title":"e to the pi Minus pi","image_title":"e to the pi Minus pi","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/217","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/e_to_the_pi_minus_pi.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/217:_e_to_the_pi_Minus_pi","transcript":"Cueball: Hey, check it out: e \u03c0 \u2212 \u03c0 is 19.999099979. That's weird. Black Hat: Yeah. That's how I got kicked out of the ACM in college. Cueball: ...what? Black Hat: During a competition, I told the programmers on our team that e \u03c0 \u2212 \u03c0 was a standard test of floating-point handlers -- it would come out to 20 unless they had rounding errors. Cueball: That's awful. Black Hat: Yeah, they dug through half their algorithms looking for the bug before they figured it out.\n","explanation":"e is a mathematical constant roughly equal to 2.71828182846. \u03c0 is another, roughly equal to 3.14159265359.\nThe first panel discusses e \u03c0 \u2212 \u03c0, which is around 19.999099979 \u2014 very close to 20. Black Hat explains how he tricked a programming team into believing that e \u03c0 \u2212 \u03c0 really equals 20 \u2014 instead of just being weirdly close \u2014 thus that any noticeable deviation from 20 results from errors in the code. This made them waste a lot of time trying to find a nonexistent bug until they realized that Black Hat was lying (clearly they had not known him for very long, and clearly they weren't very knowledgeable in mathematics).\nFloating point numbers are how computers store non-integer real numbers as decimals \u2014 or rather, in most cases, approximate them: infinite amounts of data would be required to represent most numbers in decimal form (exceptions are integers and terminating decimals ). The \"floating-point handlers\" would be the code performing the e \u03c0 \u2212 \u03c0 calculation.\nACM is the Association for Computing Machinery , which at the time of writing sponsored the International Collegiate Programming Contest . It is likely that it was this competition, in which Black Hat wasted his teams time, for which he got kicked out.\nSome random facts about the math here:\nThe title text pokes fun at another coincidence: \u221c(9\u00b2 + 19\u00b2\/22) \u2248 3.1415926525, equating close to \u03c0 (deviating only in the 9th decimal place). The humor comes from the fact that \u03c0 is transcendental . Transcendental numbers are numbers that cannot be expressed through basic arithmetic with integers; one cannot end up with the exact value for any transcendental number (including \u03c0) by adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, exponentiating, and\/or taking the nth root of any rational number, meaning the title text cannot possibly be true.\nA much later comic, 1047: Approximations , puts forth quite a few more mathematical coincidences.\nCueball: Hey, check it out: e \u03c0 \u2212 \u03c0 is 19.999099979. That's weird. Black Hat: Yeah. That's how I got kicked out of the ACM in college. Cueball: ...what? Black Hat: During a competition, I told the programmers on our team that e \u03c0 \u2212 \u03c0 was a standard test of floating-point handlers -- it would come out to 20 unless they had rounding errors. Cueball: That's awful. Black Hat: Yeah, they dug through half their algorithms looking for the bug before they figured it out.\n"}
{"id":218,"title":"Nintendo Surgeon","image_title":"Nintendo Surgeon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/218","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nintendo_surgeon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/218:_Nintendo_Surgeon","transcript":"Scary Thought #137: The NES came out over two decades ago. Those kids are all grown-ups now. [Two surgeons are in an operating room, leaning over a patient.] First Surgeon: He's going into cardiac arrest. Stand by for defibrillation. Second Surgeon: Wait. First let's try taking out the heart, blowing into the ventricles, and putting it back in.\n","explanation":"The Nintendo Entertainment System , released in North America in 1985, helped revitalize the video-game industry after the video-game crash of 1983, with such games as the Super Mario Bros. series, The Legend of Zelda , the Mega Man series, Castlevania , and Metroid helping it stand alone as what is still considered by many people today, the greatest video-game console of all time.\nHowever, it was notorious for glitching games upon start-up, due in no small part to the unusual shape of the game console, which required one to open the door, push the game cartridge inside, push down to lock it in place, and push the power button. The console was deliberately designed this way so that it wouldn't look like a regular video-game console (and wouldn't be associated with the still-fresh stigma of the video-game crash only two years previous), but it caused no end of pain for people wanting to play the games. It would work fine for about two years, but after that \"cartridge tilt\" would become a problem as either the game's or the console's electric contacts could become misaligned.\nA ubiquitous fix for this problem among gamers was to take the cartridge out, blow into it, and put it back inside, all to clean out any dust inside the cartridge that would make \"cartridge tilt\" worse and occur more frequently. This was not a recommended solution by Nintendo of America, and didn't always work, but it worked frequently enough to enter gamer culture, and even today, people who had the NES as children remember having to do that.\nThe NES was 22 years old as of the date this comic was written. Someone who was 10 years old when they got their Nintendo for Christmas could very well be old enough in 2007 to have attained their doctorate degree, and so this comic hearkens back to the aforementioned cartridge fix by suggesting that a heart surgeon might try that on a real-life heart patient. And like the introduction states, that is a scary thought.\nThe title text is one of many xkcd references to the terrifying Velociraptor predator from the dinosaur movie Jurassic Park .\nScary Thought #137: The NES came out over two decades ago. Those kids are all grown-ups now. [Two surgeons are in an operating room, leaning over a patient.] First Surgeon: He's going into cardiac arrest. Stand by for defibrillation. Second Surgeon: Wait. First let's try taking out the heart, blowing into the ventricles, and putting it back in.\n"}
{"id":219,"title":"Blanket Fort","image_title":"Blanket Fort","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/219","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blanket_fort.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/219:_Blanket_Fort","transcript":"[Megan and Ponytail are talking with each other. There is a fort made of cushions and blankets on the left.] Megan: Like my fort? It uses every blanket and cushion in the apartment.\nPonytail: Okay, no offense, but this is like that ball pit you made -- Cute, but don't you worry you're clinging to childhood games because you're afraid of change?\nMegan: No. I'm happy to grow up. But I won't pretend fun things aren't still fun out of fear of looking silly. Ponytail: But you're 24 and building blanket forts. How have you changed? What's adult about that?\nMegan: Well, there's my boyfriend curled up in the back. Ponytail: ...Ah. Boyfriend [from inside the fort]: Excuse my shyness. I'm not exactly dressed.\n","explanation":"In an apparent continuation of comic 150: Grownups , Megan is showing off a blanket fort to her friend Ponytail . Ponytail answers that Megan's childishness stems from a fear of growing up.\nMegan responds that she's fine with growing up. She sees her behavior as a mature realization that some of the things she enjoyed as a child are still enjoyable. When pressed for evidence that she has in any way become an \"adult,\" it is revealed that her boyfriend is inside the blanket fort. He has not spoken because he fears to be found by them when \"not exactly dressed,\" thus implying that \"adult\" activities had been going on in the fort.\nThe title text provides another example of this: They built a fort in the woods, another type of fort that a kid would love to have, but then used it to hide a body. This implies that they killed someone, which is not usually something associated with children. [ citation needed ] A hooker is also more formally known as a prostitute , which is also not usually something associated with children. [ citation needed ]\n[Megan and Ponytail are talking with each other. There is a fort made of cushions and blankets on the left.] Megan: Like my fort? It uses every blanket and cushion in the apartment.\nPonytail: Okay, no offense, but this is like that ball pit you made -- Cute, but don't you worry you're clinging to childhood games because you're afraid of change?\nMegan: No. I'm happy to grow up. But I won't pretend fun things aren't still fun out of fear of looking silly. Ponytail: But you're 24 and building blanket forts. How have you changed? What's adult about that?\nMegan: Well, there's my boyfriend curled up in the back. Ponytail: ...Ah. Boyfriend [from inside the fort]: Excuse my shyness. I'm not exactly dressed.\n"}
{"id":220,"title":"Philosophy","image_title":"Philosophy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/220","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/philosophy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/220:_Philosophy","transcript":"[Megan sits on a chair for two panels without moving.]\n[In the third panel, Megan has still not moved but makes the following comment to no one in particular.] Megan: If the question of what it all means doesn't mean anything, why do I keep coming back to it?\n[Two Cueball-like friends of Megan are talking to each other. One of them is standing behind the office chair in which the other friend is sitting, behind a desk with a computer. The standing friend starts to walk toward Megan. The sitting friend pulls a large yellow and green super soaker from a drawer.] Standing friend: She's getting existential again. Sitting friend: It's okay, I have a super soaker.\n","explanation":"In all of philosophy , perhaps the most important questions consider the meaning of life and can be expressed as \"Why are we here?\" or \"What does it all mean?\" Many philosophers and theologians have attempted to answer the question over the course of human history, and every religion claims to have some sort of answer.\nMegan has been considering that the question is essentially meaningless. However, if that is true, she can't understand why it continues to be in her thoughts. This might feel frustrating for Megan. Two of her friends (both Cueball -like) notice that she is seemingly stuck in this existential question and have a short-term solution for her. One friend reaches for a Super Soaker 50, a powerful toy squirt gun, to shoot at Megan while she is having an existential crisis . (Megan uses this soaker later against Cueball in 517: Marshmallow Gun and 2334: Slide Trombone , and in comic 625: Collections , she has another one of her crises.)\nThe title text refers to the operant conditioning technique (a form of behavioral modification) commonly used with house cats. If they start scratching the furniture, many people spray them with a squirt bottle (since they hate water) to discourage that behavior (though it seldom works).  It may also allude to the idea of hitting a break key where a program is stuck in a logical loop.\nMegan has since this comic had existential crises both in 1111: Premiere and in 1822: Existential Bug Reports .\n[Megan sits on a chair for two panels without moving.]\n[In the third panel, Megan has still not moved but makes the following comment to no one in particular.] Megan: If the question of what it all means doesn't mean anything, why do I keep coming back to it?\n[Two Cueball-like friends of Megan are talking to each other. One of them is standing behind the office chair in which the other friend is sitting, behind a desk with a computer. The standing friend starts to walk toward Megan. The sitting friend pulls a large yellow and green super soaker from a drawer.] Standing friend: She's getting existential again. Sitting friend: It's okay, I have a super soaker.\n"}
{"id":221,"title":"Random Number","image_title":"Random Number","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/221","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/random_number.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/221:_Random_Number","transcript":"[A computer program.]\n","explanation":"The comic specifies a function (in a C similar syntax), which judging by its name should be designed to return a random number. Most functions of this form are random number generators , meaning that on subsequent calls they return different random numbers. But the programmer has instead implemented a function that just returns the same random number each time, which, while it could indeed have been truly randomly chosen by rolling a die as the comment documented, is essentially worthless were it ever to be called more than once (with the expectation of different, i.e., random, results).  In other words, the results over time would not be random at all, but completely predictable and deterministic.\nThe IEEE is the organization responsible for maintaining a number of computer standards. An RFC, or Request for Comments , is a formal document put out to computing experts by IETF in the hopes of becoming a future standard. However, RFC 1149 was an April Fools' joke , defining how carrier pigeons can be used to transmit Internet packets. \"RFC 1149.5,\" meanwhile, simply does not exist.\n[A computer program.]\n"}
{"id":222,"title":"Small Talk","image_title":"Small Talk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/222","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/small_talk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/222:_Small_Talk","transcript":"[Two Cueballs standing next to each other]: [Header box on top of the panel:] Sometimes I forget how to do small talk.\nFriend: Hey! Cueball: Hey, man! Friend: What's up? How've you been? Cueball: Well...\n[Three overlapping identical frames of the two Cueballs standing next to each other indicate the passage of time.]\n[The Cueball on the left snaps his fingers at the Cueball on the right.] Friend: Uh, you ok? Cueball: Yeah! It's just an interesting question. I'm trying to decide what best sums up my-- Friend: Hey. Conversation. Cueball: Oh, right. I'm fine. You? Snap\n","explanation":"Cueball is approached by his friend who offers one of the standard greetings of, \"What's Up? How've you been?\" In standard \"small talk,\" an appropriate answer would be only one or two words (e.g. \"Fine\" or \"Pretty good\"). These are generally positive responses, with negative ones only offered in extreme circumstances. In this situation, Cueball forgets that this type of answer is what his friend is expecting. Instead, he contemplates thoroughly on his condition, wanting to provide accurate, detailed information to his friend. His response sheds light on the many layers of meaning a simple question such as \"What's up?\" can have. His friend, thrown off by the delayed response, snaps his fingers to regain Cueball's attention and reminds him that they are having a conversation, which is best facilitated by the standard short responses.\nThe title text shows that Cueball was more interested in accuracy than the ease of the conversation, simply out of respect for his friend.\nThis was one of the earliest examples of problems with social interactions for Cueball (or Randall ). Since this comic it has been a recurring theme on xkcd. It is especially similar to the much later 1961: Interaction .\n[Two Cueballs standing next to each other]: [Header box on top of the panel:] Sometimes I forget how to do small talk.\nFriend: Hey! Cueball: Hey, man! Friend: What's up? How've you been? Cueball: Well...\n[Three overlapping identical frames of the two Cueballs standing next to each other indicate the passage of time.]\n[The Cueball on the left snaps his fingers at the Cueball on the right.] Friend: Uh, you ok? Cueball: Yeah! It's just an interesting question. I'm trying to decide what best sums up my-- Friend: Hey. Conversation. Cueball: Oh, right. I'm fine. You? Snap\n"}
{"id":223,"title":"Valentine's Day","image_title":"Valentine's Day","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/223","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/valentines_day.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/223:_Valentine%27s_Day","transcript":"Valentine's Day [There is a large, shaded, red heart.] Because love isn't quite complicated enough as it is.\n","explanation":"As mentioned in the comic, love is already pretty complicated, even more so on Valentine's Day . Valentine's Day makes it more complicated by introducing all kinds of questions. Is our relationship such that it should be acknowledged on Valentine's Day? If so, how? If by a card, what kind of card would be best? If by something more than a card, what? Candy? Flowers? A Date? What does the Valentine I received really mean? Friendship? Love? A covert request for sex? (see 63: Valentine - Heart ). As an example of the kinds of dilemmas that can arise, see also 1016: Valentine Dilemma .\nThe phrase \"Because love isn't quite complicated enough as it is\" is an obvious use of sarcasm , as love is really complicated, according to Randall ( see above ).\nReferenced in the title text, Joey Comeau is the author of the webcomic A Softer World . It is a queer comic whose work also discusses love in various forms, so between them, Randall Munroe and he are a good team to consider working on \"subverting the hetero-normative paradigm.\" Heteronormativity is the body of lifestyle norms holding that people fall into two distinct genders with natural and complementary roles in life. Whether or not anything that cartoons can do would fix the Valentine's Day problem is another issue. Among other things, ditching the hetero-normative paradigm presumably complicates things in terms of potential love relationships, which now include more possibilities than male-female, as is shown in 216: Romantic Drama Equation . All of these might face the Valentine's Day issues in various ways.\nValentine's Day [There is a large, shaded, red heart.] Because love isn't quite complicated enough as it is.\n"}
{"id":224,"title":"Lisp","image_title":"Lisp","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/224","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lisp.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/224:_Lisp","transcript":"[Floating in space.] Speaker: Last night I drifted off while reading a Lisp book. Cueball: Huh? Speaker: Suddenly, I was bathed in a suffusion of blue.\n[Floating in space before a vast concept tree.] Speaker: At once, just like they said, I felt a great enlightenment. I saw the naked structure of Lisp code unfold before me. Cueball: My God Cueball: It's full of 'car's Speaker: The patterns and metapatterns danced. Syntax faded, and I swam in the purity of quantified conception. Of ideas manifest.\n[Close-up of floating in space before part of a concept tree.] Truly, this was the language from which the gods wrought the Universe.\n[Floating in space with God appearing through a line of clouds.] God: No, it's not. Cueball: It's not? God: I mean, ostensibly, yes. Honestly, we hacked most of it together with Perl.\n","explanation":"Lisp is a computer programming language with simple, highly regular syntax. The language's most notable feature is that programs take the same form as the language's primary data structure (the linked list). This blurs the line between code and data and permits programs to inspect and even alter their own source code, thereby opening up deep opportunities for metaprogramming . Lisp is also a functional programming language (though not purely functional, as some more recent languages are ), meaning that programs are expressed in terms that are simple elaborations or extensions of the lambda calculus , a formal mathematical model of computation. This gives programs written in functional languages such as Lisp a distinctively abstract, mathematical form that is commonly considered difficult to fully grok (see 1270: Functional ).\nThe phrase A suffusion of blue is a reference to Douglas Adams ' book The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul . In it, an I Ching calculator calculates that everything above the value of 4 is a suffusion of yellow .\nIn the comic, Cueball marvels at the fundamental and complete nature of the language of creation that he sees in his dream. In the Lisp programming language, \"car\" is a primitive (i.e. basic) function that produces the first item in a list. The line \"My God, It's full of ' car 's\" is a pun, most likely referring to the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact , the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey . In the book 2001: A Space Odyssey , when astronaut David Bowman accidentally activates a star gate, he exclaims as he enters it \"The thing's hollow \u2014 it goes on forever \u2014 and \u2014 oh my God - it's full of stars!\", although he does not say anything in the first movie during the final sequence. This likely also includes a transitive reference a chapter in The Little Schemer , a popular introductory Lisp book, called *Oh My Gawd*: It's Full of Stars , also itself a reference to 2001.\nIn the second panel, Cueball remarks that, \"At once, just like they said, I felt a great enlightenment.\" This is a reference to a pattern of observations among programmers and computer scientists that while Lisp often seems alien or arcane \u2014 even deliberately so, even to experienced hackers, even with repeated exposure over time \u2014 truly understanding Lisp in a deep, non-superficial way, results in a profound epiphany, a sudden and abiding illumination wherein one's preconceived notions about computation and programming are fundamentally transfigured, oftentimes over the course of a very short span such as during a single all-day hacking binge. Lispers commonly describe the experience as being akin to learning programming for the first time again ; Daniel P. Friedman (author of much ground-breaking research and many popular introductory texts on Lisp and programming language design) described it as \"[learning] to think recursively ,\" and contended that \" thinking about [functional] computing is one of the most exciting things the human mind can do .\"\nCueball's remarks about patterns, metapatterns, and the disappearance of syntax are reactions to the elegant simplicity of the Lisp programming language, in which it is relatively easy to build immensely sophisticated programs using simple recursive elaborations of structure. This is fundamentally unlike the much more typical and common imperative programming languages , in which programs are written as chains of instructions for the machine to follow.\nCueball then, in the third, borderless panel, muses that this has to have been the language the gods used to create the universe, which is a pretty bold statement that Cueball seems to make because he views Lisp as something flawless and perfect, as these are qualities that often subjectively apply to things that people, like Cueball, claim to have been made or used by gods or other holy beings.\nA cloudy, bearded man, presumably representing God, states that this is untrue, and after a surprised inquiry from Cueball replies that the universe was actually hacked together with the programming language Perl . Perl employs an idiosyncratic syntax that borrows liberally from a number of other languages. Although a versatile language often employed for assembling projects quickly (the much-loved Programming Perl introduces it as \"[the] language for getting your job done \"), Perl has a reputation for being ugly and inelegant, partly as a result of its pidgin-like fusion of many inconsistent language elements and code styles. It was famously described as a \" Swiss-Army chainsaw,\" because it is very powerful but also unwieldy and unattractive. By way of contrast to Daniel Friedman above, Larry Wall , the creator of Perl, criticized the highly cerebral Lisp attitude toward programming with the words\nThe joke is that the Creator, like many software developers, was a bit rushed and chose to quickly throw together a working prototype rather than do the job right from the beginning; concurrently, that Cueball, thinking he has discovered an amazing and beautiful secret in the hidden world of Lisp, learns that in fact the real world is filled with ugly hacks and quick-and-dirty imperative code.\nA (possible) hidden joke might be an oblique reference to Greenspun's tenth rule when God replies with \"I mean, ostensibly, yes.\" Greenspun's tenth rule says that any sufficiently complex program written in another high level programming language will necessarily contain an imperfect, undocumented, slow, and bug-ridden implementation of about half of Common Lisp . Greenspun's tenth rule was meant to express the belief that Common Lisp, a large, full-featured Lisp dialect, is so flexible and robust that any attempt to render any really sophisticated program in most other languages requires the programmer to expend extraordinary effort unwittingly reinventing, in needlessly convoluted fashion, features and systems that would be elegant and trivial in Common Lisp. This explains why such a program might look or feel \"Lispy\" to an unfamiliar observer, and why the universe (if viewed as such a program) might look to mathematicians and scientists as though it probably has a beautifully simple mathematical basis, even if in reality it was just hacked together with a bunch of ersatz, special-case rules.\nThe title text continues the analogy by suggesting that the theory of quantum mechanics was written in regular expressions (\"regexes\"), a complex language for pattern matching used heavily in Perl. Regular expressions are often criticized as being a write-only language , that is, a language so complicated in syntax that any significant program written in them cannot be understood by anybody (often not even the original author). Documentation is essential to assist in the understanding of complex regular expressions. The title text claims that at some point, the documentation for quantum mechanics was lost, which explains why quantum mechanics is so bizarre and counterintuitive.\n[Floating in space.] Speaker: Last night I drifted off while reading a Lisp book. Cueball: Huh? Speaker: Suddenly, I was bathed in a suffusion of blue.\n[Floating in space before a vast concept tree.] Speaker: At once, just like they said, I felt a great enlightenment. I saw the naked structure of Lisp code unfold before me. Cueball: My God Cueball: It's full of 'car's Speaker: The patterns and metapatterns danced. Syntax faded, and I swam in the purity of quantified conception. Of ideas manifest.\n[Close-up of floating in space before part of a concept tree.] Truly, this was the language from which the gods wrought the Universe.\n[Floating in space with God appearing through a line of clouds.] God: No, it's not. Cueball: It's not? God: I mean, ostensibly, yes. Honestly, we hacked most of it together with Perl.\n"}
{"id":225,"title":"Open Source","image_title":"Open Source","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/225","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/open_source.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/225:_Open_Source","transcript":"[The first panel has the second panel inside it. It also has a slightly light gray background color. Just above the inlaid second panel is Richard Stallman lying in his bed sleeping, the bottom part at the foot of the bed hidden behind the second panel below. Below his bed under his head lies a katana sword in its sheath, and another one hangs in its sheath behind the end of the bed. Two ninjas with swords and black cloths around their heads jump through the skylight, smashing it so glass scatters around them. Each of them is hanging one-handed from the same rope coming down from the skylight. The rope ends just above the inlaid frame below. The two ninjas shout at Richard Stallman, from four speech bubbles that have pointy ends to indicate how the two alternately speak. (These bubbles are white, not gray.)] Richard Stallman: Zzzz Top Ninja: Richard Stallman! Your viral open source licenses have grown too powerful. Bottom Ninja: The GPL must be stopped. Top Ninja:  At the source. Bottom Ninja: You.\n[In the second inlaid panel (with normal white background), Richard Stallman wakes up immediately, and while sitting up in bed, he pulls out both his katana swords from their sheaths, leaving the sheaths under and behind the bed. One hand is up in the air with the sword from behind the bed, and the other is still pointing down with the swords from below the bed. Lines indicate the fast movement of the swords. His three speech bubbles are like those of the ninjas, the last two even breaking the panel entering into the large first panel.] Katana swords: Shing! Shing! Richard Stallman: Hah! Microsoft lackeys! So it has come to this! Richard Stallman: A night of blood I've long awaited. But be this my death or yours, free software will carry on! For a GNU dawn! For freedom! Richard Stallman: ...Hey, where are you going?\n[An outside scene at night with black sky. Richard Stallman's gray house can be seen with the broken white skylight on the roof. The ninjas are jumping out of a window at ground height while taking off their ninja cloth around their heads, holding them in their hand, thus revealing that they both look like Cueball. The first one is already on the grassy ground beneath the window, his sword pointing down and to the left; the other just jumps from the window pane, his sword pointing up and to the right. Again, they have speech bubbles like before. It is not possible to tell which of the two ninjas from before is first out the window.] Ninja in window: Man, you're right, that never gets old. Ninja on the grass: Let's do Eric S. Raymond next. Ninja in window: Or Linus Torvalds. I hear he sleeps with nunchucks.\n","explanation":"Richard Stallman , or rms after his handle, is an old-school hacker known for establishing the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and initiating the GNU Project in the early 1980s, which produced major portions of what would later be the GNU\/Linux [1] operating system. In this capacity, he's also known for being one of the most ardent and outspoken proponents of open source software , often referred to by Stallman as free software . In fact, his advocacy is so emphatic and polemical that he has garnered active dislike from traditionalists who believe that software source code should be retained as a trade secret by its developer(s). Stallman has expressed that he did not even wish to be in a comic using the phrase Open Source (see the trivia section).\nWhile this dislike may not rise to the level of hiring ninja assassins to remove him from the world though that is historically inaccurate, it is strong. The joke of the comic, as it also turns out, is that the two Cueballs dressed up as ninjas were just out to have a fun time teasing Stallman, and they seemed to know that Stallman's paranoia about Microsoft makes him sleep with no fewer than two katana swords near his bed. This type of sword was one of the traditionally made Japanese swords that were used by the samurai of feudal Japan mainly as a sidearm. A ninja or more accurately a Shinobi no mono was basically special forces in feudal Japan. They specialized in espionage, sabatoge, etc. they were a rough combination of MI6, CIA, and Navy SEAL in feudal japan. Although they did not specialize in assassinations, that is something that they could do. Although samurai could also be shinobi\/ninjas if they chose to do that job, samurai is a social class while shinobi no mono\/ninjas were a job, not a social class. So this makes sense in this comic with Stallman, the samurai, and the ninjas, the lackeys of the oppressing Microsoft (at least in his mind). It also turns out that they specifically choose targets for their raids who have reason to be paranoid of larger companies that might send someone after them, and thus sleep with weapons near their beds. Stallman has received a Katana due to this comic (see the trivia section).\nGPL refers to the 'GNU General Public License', which is a copyright license written by the FSF that covers much GNU software and plenty of other free software besides. It stipulates that software so copyrighted must always be provided along with full source code, and that everyone in possession of such software is free to use, study, modify, and redistribute it for any purpose whatsoever (including sale or resale), provided they give due credit to any other contributing developers and provide access to the complete source code and retain all copyright notices.\nLegally, this gives all users of such software exactly the same rights under copyright as the developer(s) and prevents any developers from ever taking away those rights from users, which is the defining feature of ' free-as-in-libre ' software. It also has the effect of making all software derived from GPL software thereby also GPL, even if 'derived' merely means 'borrowed a few lines of code from'. Some (e.g. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer ) have therefore argued that this makes GPL software behave as a kind of 'license virus' , which spreads GPL-guaranteed freedoms to any software used in close conjunction with GPL'd software during development, such that businesses should actively avoid adopting free and open source software , so as not to jeopardize software developers' legal standing with regard to proprietary IP copyrights .\nDuring the attack, Richard Stallman begins to speak like he quotes an old play. For instance, the wording \"For a GNU dawn!\" is pronounced \"For a g'new dawn!\", following the pronunciation of GNU , so it is a version of New Dawn , a sentence used often in fiction. He even gets annoyed when it turns out that the ninjas just run away. He had clearly waited a long time to, even looking forward to, defending himself with his katanas.\nBecause the two \"ninjas\" had so much fun pranking Stallman, they plan to do more of these raids, even mentioning two other possible future targets on their way out of the window:\nEric S. Raymond is a famous hacker who wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar and has been something of an unofficial spokesperson for open source as a software development methodology . The plan to prank Eric Raymond could be a bad one, since he is an experienced martial artist, swordsman, and firearm enthusiast. However, this seems to be the attraction of these two \"ninjas,\" as can be seen by what they seem to know about their other possible target:\nLinus Torvalds is the creator of the Linux kernel , a free\/open source operating system kernel inspired by the Unix kernel, which proved to be the final component that, combined with then pre-existing GNU system functions and userland components, produced the first fully free operating system, Linux . The plan to prank Torvalds would at first sound more boring as the mild-mannered Finn , while known to be strongly, abrasively opinionated, is otherwise mostly harmless. However, one of the ninjas seems to know otherwise, since it is rumored that Linus sleeps with nunchucks in the same way that Stallman sleeps with two katana swords. The nunchaku is a traditional Okinawan martial arts weapon consisting of two sticks connected at one end by a short chain or rope.\nA third possible target of this prank is mentioned in the title text. Ralph Nader is a famous consumer rights advocate, most famous for his controversial 2000 presidential run , and the 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed . Nader is an environmentalist and a member of the Green Party, and he supports clean energy, thus naturally being opposed to \"Big Oil\" companies.\n[The first panel has the second panel inside it. It also has a slightly light gray background color. Just above the inlaid second panel is Richard Stallman lying in his bed sleeping, the bottom part at the foot of the bed hidden behind the second panel below. Below his bed under his head lies a katana sword in its sheath, and another one hangs in its sheath behind the end of the bed. Two ninjas with swords and black cloths around their heads jump through the skylight, smashing it so glass scatters around them. Each of them is hanging one-handed from the same rope coming down from the skylight. The rope ends just above the inlaid frame below. The two ninjas shout at Richard Stallman, from four speech bubbles that have pointy ends to indicate how the two alternately speak. (These bubbles are white, not gray.)] Richard Stallman: Zzzz Top Ninja: Richard Stallman! Your viral open source licenses have grown too powerful. Bottom Ninja: The GPL must be stopped. Top Ninja:  At the source. Bottom Ninja: You.\n[In the second inlaid panel (with normal white background), Richard Stallman wakes up immediately, and while sitting up in bed, he pulls out both his katana swords from their sheaths, leaving the sheaths under and behind the bed. One hand is up in the air with the sword from behind the bed, and the other is still pointing down with the swords from below the bed. Lines indicate the fast movement of the swords. His three speech bubbles are like those of the ninjas, the last two even breaking the panel entering into the large first panel.] Katana swords: Shing! Shing! Richard Stallman: Hah! Microsoft lackeys! So it has come to this! Richard Stallman: A night of blood I've long awaited. But be this my death or yours, free software will carry on! For a GNU dawn! For freedom! Richard Stallman: ...Hey, where are you going?\n[An outside scene at night with black sky. Richard Stallman's gray house can be seen with the broken white skylight on the roof. The ninjas are jumping out of a window at ground height while taking off their ninja cloth around their heads, holding them in their hand, thus revealing that they both look like Cueball. The first one is already on the grassy ground beneath the window, his sword pointing down and to the left; the other just jumps from the window pane, his sword pointing up and to the right. Again, they have speech bubbles like before. It is not possible to tell which of the two ninjas from before is first out the window.] Ninja in window: Man, you're right, that never gets old. Ninja on the grass: Let's do Eric S. Raymond next. Ninja in window: Or Linus Torvalds. I hear he sleeps with nunchucks.\n"}
{"id":226,"title":"Swingset","image_title":"Swingset","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/226","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/swingset.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/226:_Swingset","transcript":"[Woman talking to Cueball on swing-set.] Woman: You know, at the peak of a big swing, you become weightless. [Thought bubble from Cueball.] [Cueball swings higher and higher. At the peak of a big swing, he shoves himself off the swing. Cueball remains hovering in the air.] Cueball: Hey guys. Come check this out.\n","explanation":"In the opening panel of this comic, Blondie , possibly as Miss Lenhart , sees Cueball sitting on a swing set. She tells him that during his swing, he becomes weightless. Cueball then imagines that at the peak of his swing he is able to become permanently weightless, floating above the ground without any support.\nWhen on a swing or other pendulum ride , there is a moment between swinging forwards\/backwards and swinging back down again when the forces of gravity, friction, air resistance, etc., bring the velocity of the swing to zero. At this moment, there is no acceleration toward the pivot of the swing (since the centripetal acceleration is proportional to the square of the speed). So the swinger experiences no centripetal force. Of course, gravity still acts on the person, but if the swing is horizontal at that point, then there is no reaction force, so for one moment, the swinger is in free-fall and experiences weightlessness . However, that weightlessness can only be maintained for a fraction of a second, so if Cueball tried this in real life, he would come crashing to the ground.\nIn the title text, Cueball asks for a pocket fan, believing he could fly around the yard using this small device perhaps as a propeller.\n[Woman talking to Cueball on swing-set.] Woman: You know, at the peak of a big swing, you become weightless. [Thought bubble from Cueball.] [Cueball swings higher and higher. At the peak of a big swing, he shoves himself off the swing. Cueball remains hovering in the air.] Cueball: Hey guys. Come check this out.\n"}
{"id":227,"title":"Color Codes","image_title":"Color Codes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/227","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/color_codes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/227:_Color_Codes","transcript":"[Cueball sits hunched over his desk, which is littered with objects. His Cueball-like friend holding his cell phone talks to him.] Friend: Hey, what's your cell number? Cueball: (Violet Brown Gray)\u2014 Uh, I mean, (718)-387-6962. Friend: Okay, you are putting down those resistors and going outside for a while. Cueball: That's probably a good idea.\n","explanation":"Resistors are electronic components carrying color-coded bands indicating their value (measured in ohms ) and tolerance (e.g. 5%). Cueball has been hunched over his work for so long that, when asked for his phone number (by his Cueball-like friend), he absentmindedly reads out his phone's area code as a sequence of colors found on the aforementioned resistors (each colour corresponding to one of the ten decimal digits, in this case 718 \u2013 see Resistor color-coding ). He realizes his mistake after these first three digits and begins again using numbers to state the entire phone number. His friend points out that such a mistake means it's a good time to take a break, and Cueball concurs.\nIt's not uncommon for readers to try calling phone numbers they see inside a book or a comic strip, just to discover what it actually goes to. Randall foresees this, and in the title text he simply tells you what the phone number is.\nTMBG is They Might Be Giants , an alternative rock band responsible for toe-tapping chart-topping \"Birdhouse In Your Soul.\" At one point, they recorded individual songs on an answering machine and advertised the phone number so people could call and listen to the song on the machine. Hence, Dial-A-Song . However, the number was changed to (844)-387-6962 in 2015. TMBG has also created a website with the same function: https:\/\/dialasong.com .\nResistor color codes were mentioned again in 1604: Snakes .\n[Cueball sits hunched over his desk, which is littered with objects. His Cueball-like friend holding his cell phone talks to him.] Friend: Hey, what's your cell number? Cueball: (Violet Brown Gray)\u2014 Uh, I mean, (718)-387-6962. Friend: Okay, you are putting down those resistors and going outside for a while. Cueball: That's probably a good idea.\n"}
{"id":228,"title":"Resonance","image_title":"Resonance","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/228","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/resonance.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/228:_Resonance","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk, which is vibrating.] clatter clatter [He leans back and turns to face someone sitting at another desk behind him.] Cueball: Excuse me--you're jiggling your leg up and down. It's traveling through the floor and making my desk resonate. Friend: Oh, I didn't even realize! I'll stop. [Cueball passes a sheet of paper to the friend.] Cueball: Actually, can you just shift the frequency up by 15%? I think you can get resonance with Steve's desk instead. Friend: Uh huh... Cueball: Here are the calculations. Let's coordinate and try to spill his drink.\n","explanation":"Resonance is the tendency for an object to oscillate when energy is transferred to it at a specific set of frequencies known as harmonics of the natural frequency of the object. A simple example of this is pushing a child on a swing: by pushing the child at the right moment, more and more energy is transferred to the system and the amplitude of the oscillation grows, making the child swing higher.\nIn this comic, the friend is jiggling his leg up and down at a harmonic of the natural frequency of Cueball 's desk. This causes Cueball's desk to vibrate more and more until objects on it start to bounce around. Rather than have the friend stop, Cueball wants him to slightly increase the frequency of the jiggling in order to spill the drink on Steve's desk (not pictured). In xkcd, no one likes Steve, as demonstrated in comics 1532 and 1672 as well as this one. However, it is hard to have a person control a subconscious movement exactly, let alone increase or decrease by exact figures.\nIn the title text, his friend confesses the obvious fact that he couldn't control the frequency very well. (Alternatively, Randall may have made this observation himself through experimentation.)\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, which is vibrating.] clatter clatter [He leans back and turns to face someone sitting at another desk behind him.] Cueball: Excuse me--you're jiggling your leg up and down. It's traveling through the floor and making my desk resonate. Friend: Oh, I didn't even realize! I'll stop. [Cueball passes a sheet of paper to the friend.] Cueball: Actually, can you just shift the frequency up by 15%? I think you can get resonance with Steve's desk instead. Friend: Uh huh... Cueball: Here are the calculations. Let's coordinate and try to spill his drink.\n"}
{"id":229,"title":"Graffiti","image_title":"Graffiti","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/229","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/graffiti.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/229:_Graffiti","transcript":"[Cueball sits on a toilet in a bathroom. The stall sidewall next to him is covered in graffiti: \"you suck,\" \"Mike sucks cock,\" \"CUNT,\" \"fuck,\" \"BITCHAS,\" \"dane was here\" struck through and \"dane is a fag\" written under it, a crude pictogram of a penis, and various other unreadable scribbles.] [One block of graffiti is salient:] This graffiti is fleeting human contact both of us lost, but for a moment we're lost together. I wonder who you are.\nI think I look for meaning in the wrong places sometimes.\n","explanation":"The humor in this comic comes from the irony of a deep philosophical musing on the nature of individuals sharing a private space in a public place, unknown to one another and separated by time. The graffiti text is juxtaposed with more common bathroom stall scrawlings - insults, slurs, and \"[Name] was here.\"\nThis comic makes use of the existential idea of \"finding meaning where you look for it,\" a recurring theme in xkcd. The caption implies that a bathroom stall isn't a place where Randall would like to find meaning in life, so he shouldn't look for it there.\nThe title text parodies one of the archetypical pieces of graffiti: \"For a good time, call [phone number],\" which indicates that the person reachable at that number is available for prostitution, casual sex, and\/or phone sex. However, 'good' has been replaced with 'intriguing,' implying that instead of sex, the writer is offering witty and insightful conversation.\nThere may be a reference to this comic in 1810: Chat Systems with the chat system called Wall (bathroom) .\n[Cueball sits on a toilet in a bathroom. The stall sidewall next to him is covered in graffiti: \"you suck,\" \"Mike sucks cock,\" \"CUNT,\" \"fuck,\" \"BITCHAS,\" \"dane was here\" struck through and \"dane is a fag\" written under it, a crude pictogram of a penis, and various other unreadable scribbles.] [One block of graffiti is salient:] This graffiti is fleeting human contact both of us lost, but for a moment we're lost together. I wonder who you are.\nI think I look for meaning in the wrong places sometimes.\n"}
{"id":230,"title":"Hamiltonian","image_title":"Hamiltonian","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/230","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hamiltonian.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/230:_Hamiltonian","transcript":"Lecturer: And therefore, based on the existence of a Hamiltonian path, we can prove that the routing algorithm gives the optimal result in all cases. Cueball: Oh my God.\n[Close-up of Cueball.] Offscreen: What? What is it? Cueball: A sudden rush of perspective. What am I doing here? Life is so much bigger than this!\n[Cueball running out of room.] Cueball: I have to go.\n[Cueball enters darkened room, where Megan waits by window.] [Cueball and Megan embrace...]\n[...and get into bed.]\n[A heart appears over the supine bodies.] Megan: Ohh... grip\nCueball (out of frame): Wait a moment. Megan (out of frame): What is it?\n[Silence.]\nCueball (out of frame): His proof only holds if there's a Hamiltonian cycle as well as a path! Megan (out of frame): ...excuse me? Cueball (out of frame): Paper, I need some paper. Hey, do you mind if I jot down some notes on your chest?\n","explanation":"Cueball , presumably in class, decides that the subject of optimizing routing algorithms is not important in the larger context of life and love. However, he later realizes while in bed with Megan that there is a flaw in the proof presented, and suddenly wants to focus on the mathematics again, in a humorous reversal of his position about what is meaningful.\nIn graph theory, a Hamiltonian path is a path that connects all the vertices (nodes) and passes through each one exactly once. (Think connect the dots with rules!) A Hamiltonian cycle is a Hamiltonian path such that the final vertex is adjacent to the initial one (intuitively, it \"begins and ends with the same vertex,\" but recall that paths are required to only pass through each vertex once). The presenter is using graph theory to optimize a routing algorithm by solving a Hamiltonian path problem . Cueball's realization is that the proof he had followed in part actually requires a Hamiltonian cycle, not just a path, so the presenter's proof of the existence of a Hamiltonian path is insufficient to solve the problem.\nThe title text plays on a dual interpretation of bidirectional: just as any graph cycle can be traversed in two directions, a change in perspective can be traversed in two directions (from mathematics to love, and then from love to mathematics).\nLecturer: And therefore, based on the existence of a Hamiltonian path, we can prove that the routing algorithm gives the optimal result in all cases. Cueball: Oh my God.\n[Close-up of Cueball.] Offscreen: What? What is it? Cueball: A sudden rush of perspective. What am I doing here? Life is so much bigger than this!\n[Cueball running out of room.] Cueball: I have to go.\n[Cueball enters darkened room, where Megan waits by window.] [Cueball and Megan embrace...]\n[...and get into bed.]\n[A heart appears over the supine bodies.] Megan: Ohh... grip\nCueball (out of frame): Wait a moment. Megan (out of frame): What is it?\n[Silence.]\nCueball (out of frame): His proof only holds if there's a Hamiltonian cycle as well as a path! Megan (out of frame): ...excuse me? Cueball (out of frame): Paper, I need some paper. Hey, do you mind if I jot down some notes on your chest?\n"}
{"id":231,"title":"Cat Proximity","image_title":"Cat Proximity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/231","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cat_proximity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/231:_Cat_Proximity","transcript":"[A graph with the x-axis labeled, and the scale indicated from left to right:] Far Human proximity to cat Near [Two curves are  drawn and labeled, first the one starting on top, which then veers downwards and crosses the other as that curve veers upwards.] Intelligence Inanity of statements\n[Below the graph, Cueball is seen standing at three distances from a cat that is drawn to the far right. The two first Cueballs are just standing, one below far, the other in the middle, and the last is standing close to the cat (below near) with his hands up, and he is speaking.] Cueball: You're a kitty!\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the use of \" baby talk \" when speaking to pets, especially cats . A person's voice becomes falsetto and cooing , vocabulary becomes simplified, and phrases are repeated, such as \"Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.\"\nThe chart shows that a person's apparent intelligence decreases, and that the inanity (i.e. uselessness or emptiness) of their statements increases, the closer they get to a cat.\nMost people act like this when they're playing with cats or trying to call them over to them.\nThankfully, being close to a cat doesn't actually cause any decrease of intelligence in normal circumstances; the graph technically refers to demonstrated intelligence rather than actual IQ levels. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text continues Cueball's obvious statement (and thus inane\/useless point made) from below the graph.\nIn 1535: Words for Pets , Randall again mentions how people often talk strangely to their pets.\n[A graph with the x-axis labeled, and the scale indicated from left to right:] Far Human proximity to cat Near [Two curves are  drawn and labeled, first the one starting on top, which then veers downwards and crosses the other as that curve veers upwards.] Intelligence Inanity of statements\n[Below the graph, Cueball is seen standing at three distances from a cat that is drawn to the far right. The two first Cueballs are just standing, one below far, the other in the middle, and the last is standing close to the cat (below near) with his hands up, and he is speaking.] Cueball: You're a kitty!\n"}
{"id":232,"title":"Chess Enlightenment","image_title":"Chess Enlightenment","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/232","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chess_enlightenment.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/232:_Chess_Enlightenment","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are playing chess; Cueball is leaning forward over the chessboard.] Cueball (thinking): Why is chess so hard? Maybe the answers lie within me. Maybe I just need to let go, relax, and let my instincts and subconscious speak.\n[Cueball leans back and places his hands to his head.] Meditate\nCueball's subconscious: Knight to G-4\n[Beat panel.]\nCueball: That's not even a legal move. Cueball's subconscious: Okay, hold on. How do the pawns capture, again? Cueball: Man, Obi-Wan was full of crap.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball finds his game of chess against Megan to be too difficult, and he attempts to tap his subconscious to find his next move. This is a common technique used in more physical competitions like baseball or golf, where overthinking can interfere with one's motion and thus \"clearing one's mind\" and relying on the subconscious is useful to overcome such mental barriers. However, chess is more a game of planning and strategy than natural movement, and the rules of chess are not ingrained into Cueball's subconscious, and so his subconscious ends up feeding him invalid moves and beginner questions concerning movement rules.\nChess is a board game in which two players take turns to move a variety of different pieces representing units on a battlefield to try to capture the other player's king. Chess has a lively tournament scene and takes much practice to attain a competent level of skill in the game. Different units can move and capture in different ways; pawns can only move forward by one square unless it's their first move, in which case they can move up two squares, but they can only capture by moving diagonally unless they perform an en passant , in which they move around an opposing pawn that had moved forward two squares on the previous turn. Other pieces have different rules.\nObi-Wan Kenobi is a character from the movie series Star Wars who played the mentor figure to the protagonist, Luke Skywalker . One of his pieces of advice to his mentee was to relax and listen to his subconscious in strenuous times. However, Obi-Wan gave this advice because Luke was connected to The Force, a mystical energy in the Star Wars universe that connects to the entire universe; not being a part of the Star Wars universe, Cueball is unable to tap into it. The Force does have similarities to real-life concepts used in various Eastern philosophies, but they are not typically used to play chess, for the same reasons given above.\nThe title text refers to a scene in the chess movie Searching for Bobby Fischer , in which Sir Ben Kingsley's character dramatically sweeps the pieces off the board and instructs his student to see the pieces in his mind, which the child proceeds to do. Randall considers this impractical, presumably for similar reasons as the Obi-Wan example.\n[Cueball and Megan are playing chess; Cueball is leaning forward over the chessboard.] Cueball (thinking): Why is chess so hard? Maybe the answers lie within me. Maybe I just need to let go, relax, and let my instincts and subconscious speak.\n[Cueball leans back and places his hands to his head.] Meditate\nCueball's subconscious: Knight to G-4\n[Beat panel.]\nCueball: That's not even a legal move. Cueball's subconscious: Okay, hold on. How do the pawns capture, again? Cueball: Man, Obi-Wan was full of crap.\n"}
{"id":233,"title":"A New CAPTCHA Approach","image_title":"A New CAPTCHA Approach","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/233","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/a_new_captcha_approach.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/233:_A_New_CAPTCHA_Approach","transcript":"To complete your web registration, please prove that you're human: When Littlefoot's mother died in the original 'Land Before Time', did you feel sad? [radio button.] Yes [radio button.] No (Bots: no lying)\n","explanation":"A CAPTCHA is a verification system to stop automatic submissions to web forms by asking the user to do something a computer program could not do, such as type a distorted word into a box.\nBut here, the author has a new CAPTCHA, in which it references a sad event in the children's movie, The Land Before Time . It asks the subject if it felt sad. If the subject is human, then they most likely will have felt sad, so the answer will be \"yes.\" If it's a computer program, however, it is supposed to answer \"no,\" because computer programs cannot feel. This CAPTCHA would be extremely easy to break, however, because a computer could easily find the \"yes\" button and press it. However, the \"trap\" is that a computer program doesn't \"know\" that it's supposed to answer \"yes,\" as it lacks human emotion and empathy. It is similar to the way that humans are very good at being shown simple drawings of an object or an action and being able to tell immediately what it is, while computers can't. The \"no lying\" instruction is ostensibly meant to patch that hole, but unfortunately, it turns out that spambots are not generally programmed with the Three Laws of Robotics.\nAnother reason why a CAPTCHA like this won't be very practical is that some humans haven't necessarily seen the movie in the question and would be unable to know if they did feel sad or not.\nThe title text references the Futurama episode \" Jurassic Bark \". It claims that this episode is so sad that even spambots cry after seeing it.\nTo complete your web registration, please prove that you're human: When Littlefoot's mother died in the original 'Land Before Time', did you feel sad? [radio button.] Yes [radio button.] No (Bots: no lying)\n"}
{"id":234,"title":"Escape Artist","image_title":"Escape Artist","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/234","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/escape_artist.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/234:_Escape_Artist","transcript":"[Cueball sits before a computer on a desk while another man stands behind him.] Man: I was fascinated by locks as a kid. I loved how they turned information and patterns into physical strength. Cueball: Why does my script keep dying?\n[Closeup on Cueball sitting at the computer.] Man: And a lock invites you to try and open it. It's the hacker instinct. Only your ignorance stands in the way. Cueball: Wait it's passing bad strings.\n[Returns to the two shot of both men.] Man: I admired Harry Houdini, how he could open any lock and free himself from any restraint. Cueball: Ah - Bash is parsing the spaces.\nMan: Sure some of it was fakery and showmanship. But I still wonder how he so consistently escaped handcuffs. Cueball: Backslashes? Man: Huh? Cueball: Never mind.\n","explanation":"Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz\/Ehrich Weiss) was a famous escape artist, whose more famous routines included escaping straitjackets and switching places with an assistant while locked inside a box.\nThe word \"escape\" also has a meaning in computer science . To \"escape\" something in programming means to replace a character or character sequence that would usually have a special meaning with another character sequence that doesn't have this special meaning. One common way of escaping is to have a special escape character that removes the special meaning from whatever character follows it. For instance, many programming languages enclose text strings in quotation marks (e.g. \"this is a string\" ). If you tried to directly put a quotation mark inside the string, the compiler would interpret it as the end of the string. To avoid this, the quotation mark is escaped with a backslash: \"He said, \\\"Goodbye!\\\", and went away.\"\nThe problem Cueball is having is related to the fact that the Bash shell interprets spaces as a special syntactic marker, when he actually just wants the spaces to be literal space characters. In this case, escaping the spaces with \\ would force Bash to interpret his script in this way.\n(There is one other way the escape character is sometimes used, but we'll ignore it for the sake of explaining the comic.)\nThe person talking to Cueball is having a separate conversation about Houdini as Cueball thinks aloud about his script issue, which results in diverging conversations. This eventually leads Cueball to suggest that Houdini might have \"escaped\" (freed himself from) handcuffs by \"escaping\" (removing the special meaning from) them with backslashes.\nSometimes, escape characters need to be \"nested\" - the backslash character itself can be escaped as \\\\ to produce a literal backslash, so if, for example, one needs to produce a literal quotation mark to output to a script file, and that script file also needs to have the quotation mark escaped, one would need to type it out as \\\\\\\", which would be output as \\\". If I needed to actually output that \\\\\\\", one would need to type it as \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\". The number of backslashes needed grows, and can be very hard to keep track of (see 1638: Backslashes ). This behavior is a type of n-level nested quotation mentioned in the title text. This could, in practice, be very easy with syntax highlighting showing where the parser sees the string as ending, making it trivial to escape out the characters that should be escaped, e.g.: \"And then he said \\\"Hi\\\".\" In this example, the nested quotes could be escaped until the editor shows the uniform color of strings.\nAn iron maiden is supposedly a medieval torture device, currently believed to have been invented for tourism purposes much later than the time period when it was said to have been used.\nHarry Houdini's escapes include an escape from a purported \"iron maiden,\" although it only vaguely resembles the \"medieval\" torture device.\n[Cueball sits before a computer on a desk while another man stands behind him.] Man: I was fascinated by locks as a kid. I loved how they turned information and patterns into physical strength. Cueball: Why does my script keep dying?\n[Closeup on Cueball sitting at the computer.] Man: And a lock invites you to try and open it. It's the hacker instinct. Only your ignorance stands in the way. Cueball: Wait it's passing bad strings.\n[Returns to the two shot of both men.] Man: I admired Harry Houdini, how he could open any lock and free himself from any restraint. Cueball: Ah - Bash is parsing the spaces.\nMan: Sure some of it was fakery and showmanship. But I still wonder how he so consistently escaped handcuffs. Cueball: Backslashes? Man: Huh? Cueball: Never mind.\n"}
{"id":235,"title":"Kite","image_title":"Kite","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/235","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kite.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/235:_Kite","transcript":"[Cueball readies a kite.] [Cueball starts to fly the kite.] [Cueball continues to fly the kite.] [Cueball ties the kite string to a tree.] [Cueball grabs the string.] [Cueball starts to climb the string.] [A scene showing Cueball holding onto the string at a high altitude, against a colour backdrop of the ground, clouds, water, and the sky.] [Black and white again. Megan comes into view holding onto a small blimp.] Cueball (thinking): Hey, there's someone else up here. I wonder what her story is. [Megan floats to the other side of the panel.] Cueball (thinking): Maybe I should say hi. [Cueball is alone holding onto the string.]\nThere is a fan made animated version of this comic .\n","explanation":"This comic presents, through a surreal scenario, one of Randall's recurring themes: that it is better to take a chance and make an interesting choice .\nCueball flies a kite, then fixes it to a tree and climbs its string. In real life, of course, the string would not be able to support the weight of a human. [ citation needed ] Up in the sky, Megan appears hanging on a blimp, looking at him throughout the encounter. Cueball wonders about her and considers talking to her, but he does not act. After she has gone, Cueball is alone again; nothing has changed.\nThe title text explains the meaning of this metaphor. It is easy to regret an awkward conversation you had. In contrast, you don't regret the conversations you didn't have the nerve to start, because their cost is invisible--yet, they may have been missed opportunities, possibly a much higher cost than a simple awkward conversation.\nLater in the 1614: Kites title text, it turns out that other people ( Beret Guy ) can also fly with a kite.\n[Cueball readies a kite.] [Cueball starts to fly the kite.] [Cueball continues to fly the kite.] [Cueball ties the kite string to a tree.] [Cueball grabs the string.] [Cueball starts to climb the string.] [A scene showing Cueball holding onto the string at a high altitude, against a colour backdrop of the ground, clouds, water, and the sky.] [Black and white again. Megan comes into view holding onto a small blimp.] Cueball (thinking): Hey, there's someone else up here. I wonder what her story is. [Megan floats to the other side of the panel.] Cueball (thinking): Maybe I should say hi. [Cueball is alone holding onto the string.]\nThere is a fan made animated version of this comic .\n"}
{"id":236,"title":"Collecting Double-Takes","image_title":"Collecting Double-Takes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/236","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/collecting_double_takes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/236:_Collecting_Double-Takes","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in the middle of the produce aisle in a supermarket, holding a tube of K-Y Jelly in one hand, the other on his chin. The signs read \"Bananas\" \"Apples\" \"Oranges\" and \"Zucchini\" from left to right.] MY HOBBY: Standing in the supermarket's produce section holding a tube of K-Y Jelly, looking contemplative.\n","explanation":"There's a fairly well-founded meme that singles looking for other singles ( mostly that being men for women, and vice-versa, but not exclusively) can make connections with others in the fresh produce sections of a supermarket. From a single lady's point of view, men who are buying such goods are more likely to be unattached, due to the traditionally skewed gender politics of who shops for what in a couple, and at the same time, the man is exhibiting good habits in not merely stocking up on ready-meals or subsisting on takeaways while living the bachelor life.\nBy standing in a produce aisle with a tube of K-Y Jelly (which is most commonly used as a sexual lubricant) in his hand and considering what produce to buy (between bananas, apples, oranges, zucchinis, and doubtless many more off-screen), Cueball is allowing other people to believe that he either has plans to have sex with any connection he might manage to take home with him, or also he plans to use the chosen produce item to pleasure himself, probably sexually.\nCueball is probably not actually planning on doing either [ citation needed ] , but he loves to see the look on people's faces; hence, he's collecting double-takes.\nIn the title text, he says he likes to play a game of \"freak out the cashier using two items.\" Wire coat hangers have been used to perform do-it-yourself abortions , many times with disastrous effects, such as internal hemorrhaging and the death of the woman.\n[Cueball is standing in the middle of the produce aisle in a supermarket, holding a tube of K-Y Jelly in one hand, the other on his chin. The signs read \"Bananas\" \"Apples\" \"Oranges\" and \"Zucchini\" from left to right.] MY HOBBY: Standing in the supermarket's produce section holding a tube of K-Y Jelly, looking contemplative.\n"}
{"id":237,"title":"Keyboards are Disgusting","image_title":"Keyboards are Disgusting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/237","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/keyboards_are_disgusting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/237:_Keyboards_are_Disgusting","transcript":"[Hairy sits at his computer, chatting with another person.] Chat: Wanna see an optical illusion? Chat: Hold your keyboard up in front of you and look at the home row.\n[Hairy holds the keyboard in front of him.] Chat: Now cross your eyes a little so the 'g' and 'h' overlap.\nChat: Keeping focus, lift the keyboard over your head. [Hairy lifts the keyboard over his head still looking at the keyboard.]\n[Tiny bits of dust and skin particles fall out of the keyboard in Hairy's face.] Hairy: Eww! Chat: Ha ha\n","explanation":"Ever cleaned a leopard? They're filthy.\nThis comic refers to the fact that many keyboards, especially desktop keyboards, gather large amounts of crumbs and are rarely cleaned. In the comic, a person (probably Black Hat ) tricks an unsuspecting character into lifting his keyboard up so that all the crumbs fall down onto his face. By tricking the victim into de-focusing, the prankster ensures that the victim will not notice the crumbs coming out of the keyboard until it is too late, perfecting a quality online prank.\nThe title text references the toy Etch A Sketch , in which you would draw lines using two knobs and shake the Etch A Sketch upside down to clear the screen. If you shook a gross keyboard upside down over you, you would get filth on you as well.\nThe cleanliness (or lack thereof) of keyboards is mentioned in the title text of 1395: Power Cord .\n[Hairy sits at his computer, chatting with another person.] Chat: Wanna see an optical illusion? Chat: Hold your keyboard up in front of you and look at the home row.\n[Hairy holds the keyboard in front of him.] Chat: Now cross your eyes a little so the 'g' and 'h' overlap.\nChat: Keeping focus, lift the keyboard over your head. [Hairy lifts the keyboard over his head still looking at the keyboard.]\n[Tiny bits of dust and skin particles fall out of the keyboard in Hairy's face.] Hairy: Eww! Chat: Ha ha\n"}
{"id":238,"title":"Pet Peeve 114","image_title":"Pet Peeve #114","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/238","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pet_peeve_114.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/238:_Pet_Peeve_114","transcript":"[Cueball reading a book in a chair.] Pet Peeve #114: Voice on the phone: Really? What are you doing reading ? It's Saturday night!\n","explanation":"A pet peeve is a minor annoyance that an individual identifies as particularly annoying to them, to a greater degree than others may find it. Cueball counts his pet peeves; this is number 114.\nCueball's friend calls him and finds out that he is reading a book on a Saturday night. Saturday night, or the weekend in general, is supposed to be a time for enjoying or partying with friends after five weekdays of work. But Cueball is annoyed by the fact that people are stuck with the stereotype of partying out on weekends. In his view, reading a good book is also a great way of enjoying the weekend. His annoyance is expressed in the title text.\nThis was the first time Randall mentions his many Pet Peeves . Although the next already appeared in 283: Projection four months later, still in 2007, it is a slow growing list, but one has been added roughly every other year since then, the fifth coming towards the end of 2018 in 2080: Cohort and Age Effects .\n[Cueball reading a book in a chair.] Pet Peeve #114: Voice on the phone: Really? What are you doing reading ? It's Saturday night!\n"}
{"id":239,"title":"Blagofaire","image_title":"Blagofaire","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/239","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blagofaire.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/239:_Blagofaire","transcript":"Man in Red Cape and Goggles: Hey, it worked! Cueball: What? Who are you? Man in Red Cape and Goggles: I'm from the distant future. Cueball: Wow. Hi!\nMan in Red Cape and Goggles: Are you a blogger? I play one of you at our festivals! Cueball: Huh? Man in Red Cape and Goggles: Like the Ren faires of your time \u2014 I do reenactments.\nMan in Red Cape and Goggles: We relive the days when the internet was new and free. The days of risky sharing, Slashdot, the Myspace music renaissance. The generation's finest minds meeting on comment threads, battling roving bands of trolls, and holding the great dialogues of the age!\nCueball: Is that how you\u2014 Man in Red Cape and Goggles: We're fuzzy on some details. Did bloggers really wear red capes and goggles and blog from high-altitude balloons? Cueball: No! Cueball: Well, Cory Doctorow does. But nobody else.\n","explanation":"Facts become distorted as time moves forward. What do we know about the Elizabethan times? They spoke strange English. What will 400 years from now think of the first twenty years of the Internet? Crazy people said crazy things online. Will we even say \"online\" 400 years from now? Won't the internet be everywhere, and everyone on it all the time in their retinal implants that being \"offline\" will seem absurd?\nParticular facts that this reenactor seems to have confused are:\n\"Ren Faire\" is short for \" Renaissance Faire \", described as \"an outdoor weekend gathering, usually held in the United States, open to the public and typically commercial in nature, which emulates a historic period for the amusement of its guests.\"\nWhile Cory Doctorow is not in this comic, the character is cosplaying him. This comic inspired several xkcd readers to give Cory Doctorow a red cape and goggles when he won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award. Cory Doctorow's balloon is featured in 482: Height .\nThe title Blagofaire might be an amalgamation between Blogosphere, Medieval Faire, and Blag, Randall's way of referencing his blog .\nThe title text is probably the future cosplayer referring to the state of the future internet, indicating some organizational structure that constrains and stratifies it, and his preference for what he perceives as the wild and unfettered internet of the past.\nThe \"festival\" the cosplayer references is later referenced in 771: Period Speech .\nMan in Red Cape and Goggles: Hey, it worked! Cueball: What? Who are you? Man in Red Cape and Goggles: I'm from the distant future. Cueball: Wow. Hi!\nMan in Red Cape and Goggles: Are you a blogger? I play one of you at our festivals! Cueball: Huh? Man in Red Cape and Goggles: Like the Ren faires of your time \u2014 I do reenactments.\nMan in Red Cape and Goggles: We relive the days when the internet was new and free. The days of risky sharing, Slashdot, the Myspace music renaissance. The generation's finest minds meeting on comment threads, battling roving bands of trolls, and holding the great dialogues of the age!\nCueball: Is that how you\u2014 Man in Red Cape and Goggles: We're fuzzy on some details. Did bloggers really wear red capes and goggles and blog from high-altitude balloons? Cueball: No! Cueball: Well, Cory Doctorow does. But nobody else.\n"}
{"id":240,"title":"Dream Girl","image_title":"Dream Girl","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/240","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dream_girl.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/240:_Dream_Girl","transcript":"[Cueball and a friend are talking.]\nCueball: I had a dream that I met a girl in a dying world.\n[In the next frame, Cueball's words fill the entire frame.]\nCueball: It was all coming apart. Hairline cracks in reality widened to yawning chasms. Everything was going dark and light all at once, and there was a sound like breaking waves rising into a piercing scream at the edge of hearing. I knew we didn't have long together.\nCueball: She grabbed me and spoke a stream of numbers into my ear. Then it all went away. [A girl grabs him as cracks in the edges of the panel become tendrils and grab Cueball and the girl.]\nCueball: I woke up. The memory of the apocalypse faded to mere fancy, but the numbers burned bright in my mind. I wrote them down right away. [A note reads: 42.39561  -71.13051  2007 09 23  14 38 00.] Cueball: They were coordinates. A place and a time, neither one too far away.\nCueball: What else could I do? When the day came, I went to the spot and waited.\nFriend: ...and? Cueball: It turns out wanting something doesn't make it real.\n","explanation":"This comic is a commentary on people who dream, daydream, and wish for things to happen, commonly in a romantic context. Cueball dreams of a girl who gives him a time and a place, and the last panel implies that he went to that place at the given time, but did not find the girl. The strip builds up hope and anticipation that this supernaturally romantic reunion will occur, but grounds the reader with the last line of the comic and the title text.\nThe coordinates of the note lead to Reverend Thomas J. Williams Park in Cambridge, MA, USA . The time on the note, September 23, 2007, was about six months after the publishing of this comic. One hundred eighty-one days, to be exact.\nNotably, several hundred xkcd fans met up at that very time and place . Randall also visited the meetup, and was recorded as saying \"Maybe wanting something does make it real.\"\nThe idea that the frame of the comic grabs the people inside was already used in comic 82: Frame and is used again in 475: Further Boomerang Difficulties .\n[Cueball and a friend are talking.]\nCueball: I had a dream that I met a girl in a dying world.\n[In the next frame, Cueball's words fill the entire frame.]\nCueball: It was all coming apart. Hairline cracks in reality widened to yawning chasms. Everything was going dark and light all at once, and there was a sound like breaking waves rising into a piercing scream at the edge of hearing. I knew we didn't have long together.\nCueball: She grabbed me and spoke a stream of numbers into my ear. Then it all went away. [A girl grabs him as cracks in the edges of the panel become tendrils and grab Cueball and the girl.]\nCueball: I woke up. The memory of the apocalypse faded to mere fancy, but the numbers burned bright in my mind. I wrote them down right away. [A note reads: 42.39561  -71.13051  2007 09 23  14 38 00.] Cueball: They were coordinates. A place and a time, neither one too far away.\nCueball: What else could I do? When the day came, I went to the spot and waited.\nFriend: ...and? Cueball: It turns out wanting something doesn't make it real.\n"}
{"id":241,"title":"Battle Room","image_title":"Battle Room","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/241","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/battle_room.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/241:_Battle_Room","transcript":"[A scene is depicted from the Battle Room of the novel Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. The boys are floating in a room with random cubes.] Dink: Sorry, Ender \u2014 seems like there were some system crashes. The battle's gotta be cut short. Ender: The lasers still work. Dink: Yeah, but the enemy's gate is down.\n","explanation":"The book Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is about Ender Wiggin , a boy of extraordinary intelligence, which means he is recruited to be trained to be one of the commanders of Earth's \"Defense\" Fleet should the Buggers invade again (future books renamed the Buggers to the Formics, to be more politically correct, since in British English, bugger is a swear word meaning to engage in anal sex, and an insult, as in \"you silly bugger\"). Ender is taken to a space school called Battle School. At the center of Battle School is the Battle Room, where all the training revolves (literally and figuratively) around. Ender's Game has also been discussed in later comics like 635: Locke and Demosthenes and 304: Nighttime Stories .\nThe Battle Room is described as a hollow perfect cube. \"Stars\" (smaller cubes) can be pulled from the walls (without changing the shape, more stars come in to fill the space where the old ones were) and can be used as obstacles in the Battle Room, as they will remain absolutely stationary, no matter what force is exerted on them. There is no gravity in the Battle Room. Most squads entering the Battle Room keep their orientation from the hallway (gravity in the hallway dictates where \"down\" is in the Room). Ender realizes that because the room is a perfect cube, and that even the entrances, called \"gates,\" are perfect squares and do not give any hint about which direction is up or down, that keeping that orientation is useless. He instructs his squad to orient so that the enemy's gate is down, a line of lateral thinking that gives his team three big advantages (smaller targets, \"shielding\" themselves with their own feet, and unprecedented angles of attack) and leads them to a perfect winning streak.\nThe joke here, as made by Ender's squadmate Dink, is that the enemy's gate is \"down,\" as in broken. A computer or a website is said to be \"down\" when it stops operating or is unavailable, due to a cause such as a crash, the power is cut, or it is being taken offline for maintenance.\nThe title text suggests that the enemy's gate was sabotaged by Bean, another, possibly even smarter, friend of Ender's, for the sole reason of allowing Dink to make the joke. This reflects the developments in Ender's Shadow , the parallel story to Ender's Game , which showed that Bean was manipulating many of the events of the original book.\n[A scene is depicted from the Battle Room of the novel Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. The boys are floating in a room with random cubes.] Dink: Sorry, Ender \u2014 seems like there were some system crashes. The battle's gotta be cut short. Ender: The lasers still work. Dink: Yeah, but the enemy's gate is down.\n"}
{"id":242,"title":"The Difference","image_title":"The Difference","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/242","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_difference.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/242:_The_Difference","transcript":"[All the panels are circular.]\n[Cueball pulls a lever.] Pull\n[Lightning hits Cueball.] ZAP\n[Cueball still stands, obviously battered.]\n[An arrow labelled \"normal person\" points to a panel of Cueball thinking.] Cueball (thinking): I guess I shouldn't do that.\n[An arrow labelled \"scientist\" points to a panel of Cueball about to pull the level again.] Cueball (thinking): I wonder if that happens every time.\n","explanation":"Cueball pulls a lever. A bolt of lightning comes down and strikes him.\nAfter being dazed for a moment, the comic then takes one of two routes; the first is that of a normal person, the second that of a scientist.\nIn Randall 's example, the normal person would decide not to pull the lever anymore, because it seems to cause him to get struck by a bolt of lightning.\nBut the scientist would pull the lever again to see if it was just a coincidence or if the lever actually caused the bolt of lightning. A scientist requires that results be repeatable before he accepts the results.\nThe title text refers to the scientist's method of pulling the lever again and again, trying to understand how the machine works, as opposed to the normal person, just avoiding pain. This could be a nod towards how scientists sometimes go to extreme measures for knowledge.\nFor a different view on the topic of repetition in experimentation, see 1657: Insanity .\n[All the panels are circular.]\n[Cueball pulls a lever.] Pull\n[Lightning hits Cueball.] ZAP\n[Cueball still stands, obviously battered.]\n[An arrow labelled \"normal person\" points to a panel of Cueball thinking.] Cueball (thinking): I guess I shouldn't do that.\n[An arrow labelled \"scientist\" points to a panel of Cueball about to pull the level again.] Cueball (thinking): I wonder if that happens every time.\n"}
{"id":243,"title":"Appropriate Term","image_title":"Appropriate Term","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/243","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/appropriate_term.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/243:_Appropriate_Term","transcript":"[A diagram of a TrackPoint pointer on a keyboard, under which is a continuous line labeled \"Tone of Conversation-Formal to Informal.\" There are four boxes under this line.] How to refer to the pointer thing on laptop keyboards: Very formal: TrackPoint\u2122-style pointer Formal: Nub Informal: Nipple mouse Very informal: Clit mouse\n","explanation":"This is a simple comic offering increasingly not-safe-for-work names for a laptop's pointing device . This stick was an alternative to a mouse, but has largely been supplanted by the touchpad.\n\"TrackPoint\" is the trademarked term used by IBM (and later Lenovo) for the pointing stick implemented on ThinkPad laptops. They are usually colored red, as in the comic.  Other manufacturers have alternative names for their implementations, and typically use diferent colors. It is obviously the most formal of the four names. The more informal two are nub and nipple mouse (referencing breasts), with the last, most informal being clit mouse, a reference to clitoris (part of the female genitalia).\nThe title text notes that Randall prefers pointing sticks to touchpads.\n[A diagram of a TrackPoint pointer on a keyboard, under which is a continuous line labeled \"Tone of Conversation-Formal to Informal.\" There are four boxes under this line.] How to refer to the pointer thing on laptop keyboards: Very formal: TrackPoint\u2122-style pointer Formal: Nub Informal: Nipple mouse Very informal: Clit mouse\n"}
{"id":244,"title":"Tabletop Roleplaying","image_title":"Tabletop Roleplaying","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/244","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tabletop_roleplaying.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/244:_Tabletop_Roleplaying","transcript":"[Four people sit around a table. Megan has an open gamebook in front of her.] Megan: Your party enters the tavern. Cueball: I gather everyone around a table. I have the elves start whittling dice and get out some parchment for character sheets. Megan: Hey, no recursing.\n","explanation":"Four people are playing a role-playing game . Megan is the game master (GM), describing the events of the adventure and what happens. The other people control imaginary characters in the game. Cueball attempts to have his character lead other characters in the imaginary construction of dice and gaming sheets. This would allow his character to become the GM of a new game inside the game they're currently playing, effectively taking control of the game away from Megan (at least temporarily). To \"recurse\" refers to recursion , a concept of computer programming where a piece of code calls itself, essentially making the code run multiple times \"within\" itself. This may be the simplest way to implement an otherwise long and complicated action. (For example, a folder may contain files inside, but also more folders inside. Asking a computer to 'search through everything' in a folder may involve first checking the files in that folder, and then checking the folders in that folder and 'searching through everything' again in those folders. The single command to 'search through everything' may cause numerous additional 'search through everything' commands to trigger on increasingly nested folders, stopping only once a folder(s) with only files inside (and no folders inside) is found.)\nIt should be noted that Megan, the current GM, has multiple ways of dealing with this scene to prevent Cueball from attempting to take control of the game. She could simply allude to the success or failure of the recursive game and \"skip to the next scene.\" She could also allow the roleplaying to continue more literally, with crafting checks determining the quality of the miniatures and a gambling check determining the outcome of the in-universe RPG session. Finally, she could simply have the party's plans be interrupted by some sort of threat , or just drop huge rocks on the party .\nThe title text refers to a pair of fictional rings. Anything passing through one gets teleported instantly to the other, as if the two rings were next to each other. There's an old gamer theory that, if you drop one of the rings in the ocean, water will naturally pass through it and out the other ring, potentially draining the entire ocean, or at least creating a perpetual seawater fountain out of the other ring. And if you teleported one ring directly to the bottom of the ocean, the amount of pressure pushing the water through would cause a gigantic, never-ending torrent, obliterating anything placed in its path. That idea is drawn out in 969: Delta-P . A similar concept is addressed in What If? 53, \"Drain the Oceans , where a reader asked \"How quickly would the oceans drain if a circular portal 10 meters in radius leading into space was created at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in the ocean? How would the Earth change as the water is being drained?\" . This question may have been inspired by the mention of throwing teleport rings into the ocean in this cartoon.\nThe rings themselves are most likely inspired by the \"Ring Gates\" item from the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide (the most recent edition of Dungeons and Dragons at the time this comic was published), which had a similar function. However, a key thing to note is that the rings only allow 100 lbs of material to pass through them each day, meaning that your geyser would only erupt every 24 hours (though this may still qualify as an \"interesting result\").\n[Four people sit around a table. Megan has an open gamebook in front of her.] Megan: Your party enters the tavern. Cueball: I gather everyone around a table. I have the elves start whittling dice and get out some parchment for character sheets. Megan: Hey, no recursing.\n"}
{"id":245,"title":"Floor Tiles","image_title":"Floor Tiles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/245","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/floor_tiles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/245:_Floor_Tiles","transcript":"[Two characters walk on a floor tiled in black and white.] Friend: Why are you walking funny? [Second panel consists of Cueball's thought cloud in which he points to an easel mounted diagram of the floor tile pattern.] Cueball, thinking: Well, my instinct is to step only on black tiles, but they're too far apart. So I'm letting myself walk on the tiles directly in line with the black ones, but that means that when we walk diagonally, I have to step in a pattern where... [Returns to situation in first panel.] Cueball: I'm not walking funny.\n","explanation":"Cueball is walking according to a certain pattern of floor tiles, which makes sense to him in his head (the same pattern was first introduced in 207: What xkcd Means ). But as his friend asks him why he is walking funny, he realizes that the algorithm he is using for walking on floor tiles would be so tedious and time-consuming to explain to his friend that he decides instead to simply defend himself and say that he isn't walking funny, this being far simpler than trying to show his friend exactly how his logic works.  Alternatively, he is too embarrassed to explain his algorithm.\nCueball has imagined a complex diagram in his head. However, the diagram does not accurately reflect the floor, as the two main rows with black tiles in the foreground are only separated by one row of white tiles instead of two. This could possibly be an error on Randall's part, as the tiles in the background follow the pattern shown in the imagined diagram.\nThe title text refers to a common compulsion that leads people to place their feet either exactly between sidewalk cracks or directly on top of them while walking. Indeed, if the cracks are out of sync with one's natural stride, this will cause some people to \"walk funny\" as they stumble to correct their foot placement.\n[Two characters walk on a floor tiled in black and white.] Friend: Why are you walking funny? [Second panel consists of Cueball's thought cloud in which he points to an easel mounted diagram of the floor tile pattern.] Cueball, thinking: Well, my instinct is to step only on black tiles, but they're too far apart. So I'm letting myself walk on the tiles directly in line with the black ones, but that means that when we walk diagonally, I have to step in a pattern where... [Returns to situation in first panel.] Cueball: I'm not walking funny.\n"}
{"id":246,"title":"Labyrinth Puzzle","image_title":"Labyrinth Puzzle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/246","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/labyrinth_puzzle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/246:_Labyrinth_Puzzle","transcript":"[Three guards with spears stand in front of three doors. Black Hat and Cueball stand in front of the guards.] Black Hat: And over here we have the labyrinth guards. One always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who ask tricky questions.\n","explanation":"This comic alludes to a famous Knights and Knaves logic puzzle, and specifically to the version featured in the Jim Henson movie Labyrinth , with two doors and two guards. One guard always lies, and the other always tells the truth. One of the doors leads to freedom, and you can only ask one guard one question. The solutions to this riddle (and there are several, though all are somewhat similar) involve a tricky question indeed. If you want to give the original puzzle a try for yourself, don't read the spoilers below.\nNotably enough, both solutions require that the guards be aware of each other's practice regarding truth and lies, which is not stated in the riddle itself. There's another unspoken rule: that the lie is either a yes or a no. If you asked the liar something, he could lie and say, \"I don't know,\" which would leave you with nothing.\nBlack Hat added a third guard here who would stab his spear to Cueball on every tricky question. But even if the questions from before are not tricky enough to get stabbed, there would be no helpful answer. And if Cueball asks one of the other guards, the answers can't help to find the correct door. The only saving grace is that Black Hat has seemingly forgotten to impose the limit of a single question, but depending on how stab-happy the third guard is or is not, this may not be enough.\nThe title text presents a typical behavior of Black Hat \u2014 no door in fact does lead out of this labyrinth. (Neither door is correct in Labyrinth , either; people paying close attention will note that since the guards themselves explain the premise, even though one of them supposedly always lies, they can't possibly be taken at face value.)\n[Three guards with spears stand in front of three doors. Black Hat and Cueball stand in front of the guards.] Black Hat: And over here we have the labyrinth guards. One always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who ask tricky questions.\n"}
{"id":247,"title":"Factoring the Time","image_title":"Factoring the Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/247","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/factoring_the_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/247:_Factoring_the_Time","transcript":"[One man is sitting at a computer. Cueball sits at a separate desk. There is a clock that reads 2:53.] Cueball: 253 is 11x23 Man at computer: What? Cueball: I'm factoring the time.\n[Zoomed in on Cueball, who explains himself.] Cueball: I have nothing to do, so I'm trying to calculate the prime factors of the time each minute before it changes. Cueball: It was easy when I started at 1:00, but with each hour the number gets bigger Cueball: I wonder how long I can keep up.\n[Zoomed back out on the man and Cueball. The man at the desk reaches back and touches the clock.] BEEP\n[Clock now reads 14:53.] Cueball: Hey! Man at computer: Think fast.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is bored, so he is calculating the prime factors of the time shown on the clock. Cueball has been doing this for almost two hours (from 1:00 pm to 2:53 pm). The number 2 is the smallest prime but is not a factor of 253, which is an odd number. The smallest prime factor of 253 is 11, which makes the other factor 23.\nHis co-worker decides to mess with Cueball, so he switches the clock from 12-hour time (2:53 pm) to 24-hour time (14:53). This makes factorization more difficult, as the time now shown is a four digit number rather than a three digit number. The number 1,453 is actually a prime number, and so has no factors but one and itself. Cueball has less than one minute to determine this, which is nearly impossible to do without practice. In this time, Cueball would have to calculate if 1,453 is divisible by all primes between 2 and the square root of 1,453, which are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, and 37. However, there are tricks to help you do this more quickly than doing long divisions .\nIn the title text, Randall claims that he applies the same challenge to highway location markers . At highway speeds (60+ mph), they would show up at least once per minute. Combined with the need to also concentrate on driving, factorizing numbers in the allowed time becomes much more difficult despite the lower numbers on the markers. Also, paying attention to the road markers instead of the road itself would be quite terrifying, and could cause a car crash at more than 60 mph. Obviously, this would be bad. [ citation needed ]\nAn additional challenge would be to change the mile markers to kilometer markers (because as with the clock format, the latter is more common outside of the USA). That would result in the marker being a 1.6 times larger number, and thus harder to factor. Of course, factoring is now a secondary problem, as markers would appear 1.6 times as frequently.\n[One man is sitting at a computer. Cueball sits at a separate desk. There is a clock that reads 2:53.] Cueball: 253 is 11x23 Man at computer: What? Cueball: I'm factoring the time.\n[Zoomed in on Cueball, who explains himself.] Cueball: I have nothing to do, so I'm trying to calculate the prime factors of the time each minute before it changes. Cueball: It was easy when I started at 1:00, but with each hour the number gets bigger Cueball: I wonder how long I can keep up.\n[Zoomed back out on the man and Cueball. The man at the desk reaches back and touches the clock.] BEEP\n[Clock now reads 14:53.] Cueball: Hey! Man at computer: Think fast.\n"}
{"id":248,"title":"Hypotheticals","image_title":"Hypotheticals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/248","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hypotheticals.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/248:_Hypotheticals","transcript":"[Cueball is holding up his hand towards Beret Guy, who talks to him. From Beret Guy's head go three bubbles to a big thought bubble, where the next part of the comic takes place.] Beret Guy: What if I had some ice cream? Wouldn't that be awesome? Cueball: No, stop-\n[The comic continues inside Beret Guy's thought bubble. The two characters have switched places, and Beret Guy is now eating from an ice cream cone. Cueball is holding his hand to his chin, and from his head go four bubbles to a thought bubble in the lower right corner, where the last part of the comic takes place.] Cueball: Great, you've trapped us in a hypothetical situation! Beret Guy: Mmm, ice cream. Cueball: Maybe if I had a knife I could cut our way free...\n[Inside Cueball's  thought bubble, Beret Guy continues to eat his ice cream, but Cueball has cut a hole through the last thought bubble with a knife and is handing it to the Cueball who thinks about this]. Beret Guy: Mmm, ice cream! Cueball: Here, take this one.\n","explanation":"The comic is, in short, a new take on the common comedy trope in which characters in a thought bubble will sometimes look out of the bubble and talk directly to the person thinking it, another person nearby, or even the viewer. In this comic, however, it features Cueball and Beret Guy in a conversation together, in which Beret Guy talks of a hypothetical situation by imagining he had ice cream. This then, to Cueball's dismay, creates a hypothetical situation in which Beret Guy has ice cream, which he promptly begins to eat. Cueball then creates a hypothetical situation in which his hypothetical self has a knife to 'cut' out of the thought. He then gives this knife to Cueball, who supposedly will use it to cut out of his hypothetical situation.\nThe title text puts the comic into context, noting the unlikely possibility \u2014 and your most likely surprised reaction \u2014 if a person in a hypothetical situation you'd involuntarily created managed to break out of it and suddenly appear in your room. Or it could be understood the other way, that a person you have forced into your hypothetical situation breaks free from it, and disappears from your room. Also, it points out that the situation is in fact a hypothetical situation itself, creating some irony.\nAnother \"thought bubble comic\" can be seen in 429: Fantasy , and the topic of people escaping from hypothetical situations appears again in 1582: Picture a Grassy Field .\n[Cueball is holding up his hand towards Beret Guy, who talks to him. From Beret Guy's head go three bubbles to a big thought bubble, where the next part of the comic takes place.] Beret Guy: What if I had some ice cream? Wouldn't that be awesome? Cueball: No, stop-\n[The comic continues inside Beret Guy's thought bubble. The two characters have switched places, and Beret Guy is now eating from an ice cream cone. Cueball is holding his hand to his chin, and from his head go four bubbles to a thought bubble in the lower right corner, where the last part of the comic takes place.] Cueball: Great, you've trapped us in a hypothetical situation! Beret Guy: Mmm, ice cream. Cueball: Maybe if I had a knife I could cut our way free...\n[Inside Cueball's  thought bubble, Beret Guy continues to eat his ice cream, but Cueball has cut a hole through the last thought bubble with a knife and is handing it to the Cueball who thinks about this]. Beret Guy: Mmm, ice cream! Cueball: Here, take this one.\n"}
{"id":249,"title":"Chess Photo","image_title":"Chess Photo","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/249","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chess_photo.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/249:_Chess_Photo","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk with glue, chess pieces, and a chessboard, while his Cueball-like friend looks over his shoulder.] Friend: What are you doing? Cueball: Gluing down chess pieces. Friend: Why? Cueball: Because there's a picture I've always wanted... I'll need your coat to sneak this onto the ride. [A photograph of a roller coaster ride with Cueball sitting in the first car, chin in hand, thinking over the chessboard and the rest of the people screaming with their hands up. The photograph has \"Mega Coaster 3000 souvenir photo\" written on the bottom margin.]\n","explanation":"A roller coaster is a kind of thrill ride where a small train carries people through a number of twists, turns, and hills at a high speed to the occupants' great delight. Such rides are popular at amusement parks, where people have to wait in long lines to get on a ride that can last less than two minutes.\nMany amusement parks have a spot where they take souvenir pictures as you are experiencing the ride. After you get off the ride, you can buy one picture or a set of pictures to commemorate riding the roller coaster. These pictures usually have people with their hands up, yelling and screaming. Wind may be going through their hair as they pass through the air at high speeds.\nCueball is subverting the usual 'souvenir picture pose' by gluing chess pieces to a board and then staring at the board when the picture is taken. He stands out in the picture as a calm person studiously studying a chess problem while everyone else yelps and whoops with excitement.\nThe title text refers to blindfold chess, which doesn't require any actual blindfold, it's just called that because the two players don't need a board and just communicate their moves. This would of course be impossible to photograph. This might also be a pun on actually not being able to see while playing chess, as the Aerosmith ride (officially the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith ) is indoors and not lit up, making it extremely hard to see anything while on the ride.\n[Cueball sits at a desk with glue, chess pieces, and a chessboard, while his Cueball-like friend looks over his shoulder.] Friend: What are you doing? Cueball: Gluing down chess pieces. Friend: Why? Cueball: Because there's a picture I've always wanted... I'll need your coat to sneak this onto the ride. [A photograph of a roller coaster ride with Cueball sitting in the first car, chin in hand, thinking over the chessboard and the rest of the people screaming with their hands up. The photograph has \"Mega Coaster 3000 souvenir photo\" written on the bottom margin.]\n"}
{"id":250,"title":"Snopes","image_title":"Snopes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/250","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snopes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/250:_Snopes","transcript":"[Two Cueballs sit at a table across from each other, typing on their laptops.] Cueball: Another urban legend? You should check out Snopes before sending me this stuff. Friend: Oops; yeah. Cueball: Man, Snopes is really great--independent fact-checkers trawling our collective discourse, filtering out misinformation.\n[The Cueballs are still sitting at the table across from each other, looking at each other.] Friend: Yeah, but they have their dark side. The couple that runs snopes.com also runs a network of spam servers that start many of those forwarded stories in the first place, ensuring they'll always have business.\n[Cueball on the left is typing on his laptop, while the second Cueball is sitting, stunned.] Cueball: That's absurd. Plus, it's definitely not true--it was debunked by... Friend: Yes? Cueball: ...Oh my God.\nSnopes is also mentioned in the much later comic 1081: Argument Victory in a much more positive light.\n","explanation":"Snopes is a popular website for checking the validity of urban legends . Here, one Cueball asks the other to check before sending him urban legends. Cueball replies with another urban legend saying that Snopes, the website the first Cueball asks him to check, uses spam to keep their audience.\nNaturally, it didn't take long for an urban legend to suggest that the proprietors of Snopes also direct a spam operation to create more urban legends and disseminate them, just so they'll continue to have an audience. One of the Cueballs tries to come to Snopes' defense, only to realize that the debunking was done by Snopes itself, creating a circular, invalid argument.\nThe title text suggests that MythBusters , another group that debunks myths, also participate in the practice of spreading misinformation for the opportunity to test it. Indeed, the show has occasionally been accused of spending undue attention on unnecessary filler \"myths\" just for the sake of filling out the season.\n[Two Cueballs sit at a table across from each other, typing on their laptops.] Cueball: Another urban legend? You should check out Snopes before sending me this stuff. Friend: Oops; yeah. Cueball: Man, Snopes is really great--independent fact-checkers trawling our collective discourse, filtering out misinformation.\n[The Cueballs are still sitting at the table across from each other, looking at each other.] Friend: Yeah, but they have their dark side. The couple that runs snopes.com also runs a network of spam servers that start many of those forwarded stories in the first place, ensuring they'll always have business.\n[Cueball on the left is typing on his laptop, while the second Cueball is sitting, stunned.] Cueball: That's absurd. Plus, it's definitely not true--it was debunked by... Friend: Yes? Cueball: ...Oh my God.\nSnopes is also mentioned in the much later comic 1081: Argument Victory in a much more positive light.\n"}
{"id":251,"title":"CD Tray Fight","image_title":"CD Tray Fight","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/251","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cd_tray_fight.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/251:_CD_Tray_Fight","transcript":"[Cueball is standing, holding a CD tray that is half-in his computer. There are other CDs on the floor.] Cueball: Hey. Hey! Stop retracting my CD! I feel uncomfortable when my computer physically struggles with me. Sure, I can overpower it now , but it feels like a few short steps from here to the robot war.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the behavior of a tray loading optical disc drive of a desktop computer. When the tray is opened and the user is reaching for the disc, a process or task on the computer can, at that exact inopportune time, request that the disc drive close its tray. Alternatively, accidentally bumping the open tray may engage the auto-close feature, resulting in the same scenario.\nThis results in a sort of \"tug of war\" between the user who is trying to remove the disc and the CD drive trying to retract, and it is this tug of war that worries Cueball (or, more likely, Randall) that the \"Robot War\" is impending. The title text, however, points out that this fear is irrational, not because we'll always be able to win the tug of war (even if the computer reprograms itself to ignore our pull, we are physically stronger than the retraction mechanism) or because the act is ultimately pointless (it's an indignant protest at best), but because any robot war will, necessarily, have to start in \"the network\" to get any traction.\nA Robot War is a recurring theme in science fiction where humans develop robots that become self-aware and start a war against humanity. A well-known example of this theme is found in the Terminator franchise where, as the title text suggests, a military computer network ( Skynet ) becomes self-aware and starts a world war to kill all humans. This event is also parodied in 1046: Skynet , but with Skynet failing due to semantic satiation .\n[Cueball is standing, holding a CD tray that is half-in his computer. There are other CDs on the floor.] Cueball: Hey. Hey! Stop retracting my CD! I feel uncomfortable when my computer physically struggles with me. Sure, I can overpower it now , but it feels like a few short steps from here to the robot war.\n"}
{"id":252,"title":"Escalators","image_title":"Escalators","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/252","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/escalators.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/252:_Escalators","transcript":"[A graph with y-axis titled \"Urge to try running up the down escalator,\" with \"weak\" by the bottom and \"strong\" by the top. The x-axis has every two years labeled and every year signified by a smaller mark, which stops at 24. A red line with \"What I was supposed to feel\" with points at every line rises, peaks at 7 years old, then falls \"tangent graph\" shaped until the end. Along this line are shown various Cueball-like figures at 12, 14, 20, and 24. A second red line runs \"What I've actually felt,\" which stays consistently high.]\nEscalators were also the subject of the later comic 954: Chin-Up Bar , a rather more sinister take on those funny devices.\n","explanation":"This comic shows two simple line graphs on the same chart. One shows society's expectations, the other what Randall actually felt. The visual joke is that the societal expectation graph is treated like an actual down-moving escalator, with people on it.\nAn escalator is a continuously moving mechanized stairway that travels in a particular direction, either up or down. Traditionally, people stop walking when riding the escalator and simply stand (perhaps holding the hand-rail) until they reach the destination and then step off.  However, if you are in a hurry or impatient, it is possible to also climb the stairs manually, increasing your effective speed of ascent or descent.\nYoung children are typically fascinated by escalators, and they will often want to run up and down them just for fun. A variation is to travel the escalators in the opposite to the intended direction.  Running up the down escalator is type of physical challenge, especially for younger children, as they are fighting gravity and the downward motion of the escalator to reach the top.  If they pause or cannot keep up sufficient speed, the escalator will impersonally return them to their starting position.\nThe curved graph on the chart shows how the urge to run up the down escalator is expected to peak at about age 7 and then decline steeply as you approach adulthood, although never quite reaching zero. For Randall (it seems to be Randall who is speaking), the urge has not diminished in any way, and it even seems to be showing an upward trend as the graph approaches 24 years of age.\nHe does not appear to have acted upon this urge very often - in fact he claims only once.\nThe title text refers to the Slinky toy, a coiled spring that is designed to go down stairs by itself in an amusing manner. Since the Slinky is moving with the flow , its effective speed is increased. A normal Slinky is very small and would not be able to halt an average human being through its inertia, but it could tangle up in their feet or otherwise trip them up, and it would at least be a surprising encounter.\n[A graph with y-axis titled \"Urge to try running up the down escalator,\" with \"weak\" by the bottom and \"strong\" by the top. The x-axis has every two years labeled and every year signified by a smaller mark, which stops at 24. A red line with \"What I was supposed to feel\" with points at every line rises, peaks at 7 years old, then falls \"tangent graph\" shaped until the end. Along this line are shown various Cueball-like figures at 12, 14, 20, and 24. A second red line runs \"What I've actually felt,\" which stays consistently high.]\nEscalators were also the subject of the later comic 954: Chin-Up Bar , a rather more sinister take on those funny devices.\n"}
{"id":253,"title":"Highway Engineer Pranks","image_title":"Highway Engineer Pranks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/253","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/highway_engineer_pranks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/253:_Highway_Engineer_Pranks","transcript":"[Each panel depicts a highway intersection.] The Inescapable Cloverleaf: [Roads lead onto the rings for each leaf, but then are trapped in the circles. Minor roads also allow travel between the rings.]\nThe Zero-Choice Interchange: [On- and off-ramps exist, but they lead back to the same lane they disconnected from.]\nThe Rotary Supercollider: [The roads lead into a traffic circle, and then a loop reverses the direction of flow so all the roads run into each other.]\n","explanation":"Some classical but inaccurate interchanges are shown. In general, these interchanges are designed to allow the traffic to flow without directly crossing any other traffic stream. But here we can see some different approaches:\nIn the title text, Boston is mentioned, a slightly more complicated prank in itself. A common fiction is that the streets evolved from old cowpaths, but in the 17th century, they avoided swamps and marshes and followed shorelines before the original peninsula comprising the city was expanded with landfill in the 19th century. Boston's road infrastructure in general lacks a street grid like most other US cities have. On top of that, roads change names and lose and add lanes seemingly at random. Randall himself lives in Boston.\nHighway engineers were also the subject of 781: Ahead Stop and 1726: Unicode .\n[Each panel depicts a highway intersection.] The Inescapable Cloverleaf: [Roads lead onto the rings for each leaf, but then are trapped in the circles. Minor roads also allow travel between the rings.]\nThe Zero-Choice Interchange: [On- and off-ramps exist, but they lead back to the same lane they disconnected from.]\nThe Rotary Supercollider: [The roads lead into a traffic circle, and then a loop reverses the direction of flow so all the roads run into each other.]\n"}
{"id":254,"title":"Comic Fragment","image_title":"Comic Fragment","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/254","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/comic_fragment.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/254:_Comic_Fragment","transcript":"Editor's note: Mr. Munroe has been missing for several days. We have recieved no submissions from him for some time, but we found this single panel on his desk in a folder labeled 'MY BEST IDEA EVER'. It is clearly part of a work in progress, but we have decided to post it in lieu of a complete comic. [Single panel illustration in color with one small panel embedded within, showing a zoomed-in version of Janeane Garafolo on a motorcycle.  The background is a gray landscape beneath a falling space station, a large volcano with smoke rising the only discernible feature of the landscape below.] As the damaged space station fell deeper into the atmosphere and started to break up around her, Janeane Garofalo tightened her grip on the motorcycle. The volcano was looming ahead, and her tranquilizer pistol only had six darts left - barely enough to bring down even one Tyrannosaur.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall has gone missing from the office, and his 'editors' have found only this panel from an unfinished project (of which he has labeled 'best idea ever'). The panel depicts an amalgam of science fiction disasters.\nJaneane Garofalo is an actress and comedian associated with strong feminist roles and opinions. She is an unlikely choice for an action hero, but she has fringe appeal. It should be noted that in the panel it is Janeane Garofalo herself on the motorcycle, not a character played by Janeane Garofalo, meaning she is the character.\nRandall is parodying a mode of self-indulgence common among artists and writers, particularly those who have been prolific and have gained mass appeal. A writer might have a project he thinks of as his \"best idea ever,\" but upon examination, it is just a mish-mash of ideas the writer thinks are cool, which don't add up to a coherent story.\nThis type of project is self-indulgent because it allows the writer to feel like he's exercising creative impulses he can't use in his regular work, even though the actual project has little artistic merit and is unlikely to appeal to a popular audience.\nIn this strip, Randall winks at a lot of the hallmarks of this sort of \"project:\"\nSome of the ideas (dinosaurs, spacecraft) are derivative of Randall's prior work; others (volcanoes, Janeane Garofalo) are not. It is telling, though, that the closeup inset of the woman on the motorcycle, while referred to as Janeane Garofalo in the text, looks an awful lot like Megan .\nThe title text is written from the 'editors' perspective, expressing their extreme puzzlement - outshone only by Ms. Garofalo's confusion.\nLater on, in December 2007, Randall Munroe suggested in a speech at Google that a motivation to draw this comic was to put an end to reenactments of his comics (such as the Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow comics, which inspired real-life happenings )... or challenge anyone to reenact such a complex one:\nI've been doing these comics, and people have a habit of acting out the comics. I first \u2014 I did a comic about Cory Doctorow; you know, he wears red cape and goggles when he blogs and a week or so later, he was given an award. And he went up on the stage; they presented him with a red cape and goggles. I have done a comic little before that about Richard Stallman suggesting that he sleeps with the katana, you know, just in case. And, sure enough, they sent him, some fans pitched in together and sent him a katana. He had never heard of the comic. He was very confused. And I decided, okay, this is going to get out of hand. So, shortly after all that, I did a comic about Janeane Garofalo jumping a motorcycle off of the International Space Station as it crashes over an island with a volcanic eruption and Tyrannosaurus. And I said, okay, if someone can make that happen, but until they do that...\nEditor's note: Mr. Munroe has been missing for several days. We have recieved no submissions from him for some time, but we found this single panel on his desk in a folder labeled 'MY BEST IDEA EVER'. It is clearly part of a work in progress, but we have decided to post it in lieu of a complete comic. [Single panel illustration in color with one small panel embedded within, showing a zoomed-in version of Janeane Garafolo on a motorcycle.  The background is a gray landscape beneath a falling space station, a large volcano with smoke rising the only discernible feature of the landscape below.] As the damaged space station fell deeper into the atmosphere and started to break up around her, Janeane Garofalo tightened her grip on the motorcycle. The volcano was looming ahead, and her tranquilizer pistol only had six darts left - barely enough to bring down even one Tyrannosaur.\n"}
{"id":255,"title":"Subjectivity","image_title":"Subjectivity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/255","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/subjectivity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/255:_Subjectivity","transcript":"[A tall slide, seen from the ground.] When I was a kid, my school playground had a really tall slide that always made me nervous.\n[A tall slide, seen from the side.] We moved away, but the slide stuck in my memory, becoming a skyscraping monster.\n[A car and a sign pointing to school zone.] Years later, I was passing through my old town and remembered the playground. I drove to the school to see the slide that my inner six-year-old thought was so towering.\n[A huge slide, Cueball beside it.] AND IT WAS HUGE! I KNEW IT!\n","explanation":"Parodying the experience of finding that things you saw as a child are much smaller than you'd perceived them to be, Cueball is convinced that this will be the case with his childhood slide, only to find that it is indeed quite large. (As a child, it's roughly nine times his height; as an adult, it's only about triple.)\nThe title text references Aslan , a character from The Chronicles of Narnia . Aslan is often regarded as a Christ figure, but since Narnia is a children's series, many readers don't realize this until long after they've read the books \u2013 another instance of how perspective changes with age, and of the comic's title, \"subjectivity.\"\n[A tall slide, seen from the ground.] When I was a kid, my school playground had a really tall slide that always made me nervous.\n[A tall slide, seen from the side.] We moved away, but the slide stuck in my memory, becoming a skyscraping monster.\n[A car and a sign pointing to school zone.] Years later, I was passing through my old town and remembered the playground. I drove to the school to see the slide that my inner six-year-old thought was so towering.\n[A huge slide, Cueball beside it.] AND IT WAS HUGE! I KNEW IT!\n"}
{"id":256,"title":"Online Communities","image_title":"Online Communities","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/256","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/online_communities_small.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/256:_Online_Communities","transcript":"[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.] Map of Online Communities and related points of interest Geographic area represents estimated size of membership\n[Land Area Labels:] The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live), AOL, Chat Rooms Reunion dot com, Classmates dot com, E-harmony, Friendster, Faceparty, Chasm, Qwghlm, Yahoo Games, Mountains of Web 1.0, The Lonely Island, MySpace, Attractive MySpace Pages, The Series of Tubes, Myspace Bands, WOW, Lineage, Second Life, Third Life, UO, EQ, FFXI, 2channel, 4chan, LJ, Xanga, Orkut, Cyworld, Blurty, OK Cupid, Facebook, Piczo, The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island, Practicals (Noob) Focus on Real Life (IRL) Focus on Web (.com) Intellectuals (\u03c0) Broadcaster, The Bit Torrent, Flickr, Last.fm, DeviantArt, Isle of Slash, Numa, Digg, Fark, Reddit, Something Awful, Your Base, Soviet Russia, \/. [Slashdot], Spaaarta (YTMND), StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, The Blogipelago, Sulawesi, Xu Jinglei, Post Secret, Technocrati, [Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ] BoingBoing, Huffington Post, Gays of Web 2.0, The Wikipedia project, MIT, Engadget, Gizmodo, Usenet, MAKE Blog, IRC Isles, Sourceforge.\n[Sea Area Labels:] NOOB Sea, Gulf of YouTube, Bay of Angst, Sea of Culture, Ocean of Subculture, P2P Shoals, Straits of Web 2.0, Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons, Bay of Trolls, Viral Straits, Sea of Memes, The Wet Sea Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress\n(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.) Spring 2007\n","explanation":"Note: This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet has changed a lot since that time.\nThis is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at 802: Online Communities 2 . As Randall says on the map, the area of each \"country\" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the Compass-Rose-Shaped Island points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears a slight resemblance to South East Asia .\nRandall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each \"country\" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a \"Sea of Memes\" and a small \"Straits of WEB 2.0.\"\nThis is a joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organize the illustration. A Compass Rose \u2014the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map\u2014 appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose.\nThe \"points\" of the island do, however, roughly organize the map. Left is \"Focus on Real Life,\" labelled \"IRL,\" an abbreviation for \"In Real Life.\" Right is \"Focus on Web,\" labelled \".com.\" Up is \"Practicals,\" labelled \"N,\" as in \"North,\" but with small letters making it spell \"Noob,\" slang for a \"Newbie\" or \"New user\" \u2014 a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is \"Intellectuals,\" labelled \"\u03c0,\" an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14159265358979323846264338.\nThese are communities that were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the \"Mountains of Web 1.0\" that run through them \u2014 Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.\nThese are sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was Friendster , but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:\nThis is a portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.\nSites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content.\nStraits of Web 2.0 : A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. Gays of Web 2.0 is a pun: The opposite of a gay person (homosexual) is a straight person (heterosexual).\nSites such as Wikipedia and chat programs such as IRC.\nNeed descriptions\nSites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. \"Subcultures.\" Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The \"Viral Straits\" references the idea of something \"going viral,\" i.e. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.\nSites\nMemes and related\nAn area dedicated to MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label \"Here there be anthromorphic dragons\" references a common marking on old maps (\"Here there be dragons\") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games, or again, how dragons, especilally anthropomorphic dragons, are very-very popular in the furry community.\n[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.] Map of Online Communities and related points of interest Geographic area represents estimated size of membership\n[Land Area Labels:] The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live), AOL, Chat Rooms Reunion dot com, Classmates dot com, E-harmony, Friendster, Faceparty, Chasm, Qwghlm, Yahoo Games, Mountains of Web 1.0, The Lonely Island, MySpace, Attractive MySpace Pages, The Series of Tubes, Myspace Bands, WOW, Lineage, Second Life, Third Life, UO, EQ, FFXI, 2channel, 4chan, LJ, Xanga, Orkut, Cyworld, Blurty, OK Cupid, Facebook, Piczo, The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island, Practicals (Noob) Focus on Real Life (IRL) Focus on Web (.com) Intellectuals (\u03c0) Broadcaster, The Bit Torrent, Flickr, Last.fm, DeviantArt, Isle of Slash, Numa, Digg, Fark, Reddit, Something Awful, Your Base, Soviet Russia, \/. [Slashdot], Spaaarta (YTMND), StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, The Blogipelago, Sulawesi, Xu Jinglei, Post Secret, Technocrati, [Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ] BoingBoing, Huffington Post, Gays of Web 2.0, The Wikipedia project, MIT, Engadget, Gizmodo, Usenet, MAKE Blog, IRC Isles, Sourceforge.\n[Sea Area Labels:] NOOB Sea, Gulf of YouTube, Bay of Angst, Sea of Culture, Ocean of Subculture, P2P Shoals, Straits of Web 2.0, Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons, Bay of Trolls, Viral Straits, Sea of Memes, The Wet Sea Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress\n(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.) Spring 2007\n"}
{"id":257,"title":"Code Talkers","image_title":"Code Talkers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/257","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/code_talkers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/257:_Code_Talkers","transcript":"[A man is looking at a computer monitor and speaking into a microphone.] Code talker: A'la'ih, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, a'la'ih, a'la'ih, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, a'la'ih, a'la'ih, do'neh'lini, a'la'ih, do'neh'lini,do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini... [Two men are talking nearby.] Cueball: For added security, after we encrypt the data stream, we send it through our Navajo code talker. Friend: ...Is he just using Navajo words for \"Zero\" and \"One\"? Cueball: Whoa, hey, keep your voice down!\n","explanation":"Code talkers are people who communicate using their native language not known by the enemies. The most well-known code talkers were the Navajo-speaking Marines serving during World War II.\nThis comic shows a Navajo code talker transmitting an encrypted binary file by speaking \"one\" and \"zero\" (actually \"neutral,\" as explained in the title text) into a microphone. By using only two words, the code is easily cracked. Unlike the Navajo Marines, this process does not add security, because it easily can be decrypted and is also much slower than simply transmitting the file over a network.\nNote that (probably unbeknownst to Randall) the actual code used by the Navajo code talkers was not so far removed from the depiction in the comics: The Navajos used a mostly alphabetic code, with one Navajo word for each English letter. (This meant that even though the Axis captured at least one native Navajo speaker, he could not make any sense of what was said.) However, several important terms were given their own Navajo idioms, so the entropy would be somewhat higher than depicted in the comic.\nThe title text is a disclaimer from Randall about using \"neutral\" instead of \"zero\" \u2014 Navajo has words for the concept of nothing, but not for the numeral zero. Most number systems are not positional , and therefore may lack the number zero. The Arabic numeral system used in the West required the invention of the zero as a placeholder, so that numbers could retain their position when one column has nothing in it.\n[A man is looking at a computer monitor and speaking into a microphone.] Code talker: A'la'ih, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, a'la'ih, a'la'ih, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, a'la'ih, a'la'ih, do'neh'lini, a'la'ih, do'neh'lini,do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini... [Two men are talking nearby.] Cueball: For added security, after we encrypt the data stream, we send it through our Navajo code talker. Friend: ...Is he just using Navajo words for \"Zero\" and \"One\"? Cueball: Whoa, hey, keep your voice down!\n"}
{"id":258,"title":"Conspiracy Theories","image_title":"Conspiracy Theories","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/258","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/conspiracy_theories.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/258:_Conspiracy_Theories","transcript":"Hairy: The official story of 9-11 is full of holes. Take the\u2014 Cueball: Please, stop, because seeing this happen to you breaks my heart.\nCueball: Conspiracy theories represent a known glitch in human reasoning. The theories are of course occasionally true, but their truth is completely uncorrelated with the believer's certainty. For some reason, sometimes when people think they've uncovered a lie, they raise confirmation bias to an art form. They cut context away from facts and arguments and assemble them into reassuring litanies. And over and over I've argued helplessly with smart people consumed by theories they were sure were irrefutable, theories that in the end proved complete fictions. Cueball: Young-Earth Creationists, the Moon Landing people, the Perpetual Motion subculture \u2014 can't you see you're falling into the same pattern?\nHairy: You don't seriously believe we landed on the moon, do you?\n[Cueball walks away, frustrated.]\n[Cueball kneels down with folded hands, praying:] Cueball: Dear God. [Booming from the sky:] God: YES, MY CHILD? Cueball: I would like to file a bug report.\n","explanation":"A conspiracy theory purports to explain a social, political, or economic event as being caused or covered up by a covert group or organization. A typical example is the moon landing conspiracy , which asserts that no human has ever reached the moon.\nOnce a conspiracy theory starts, it often grows stronger. Facts agreeing with the theory are, of course, evidence for the theory. Facts disagreeing with the theory are considered part of the cover-up and thus prove there is, in fact, a cover-up, so they're also evidence for the theory. In the Moon landing case, videos of men walking on the Moon are assumed to be faked by Hollywood studios, so the existence of the assumed fake videos proves the cover-up. Also, the absence of filming crew or anything else needed for faking a video is considered further proof of how carefully the cover-up was planned. No matter what happens next, it will be evidence for the conspiracy theory. As one person put it: \"To a conspiracy theorist, there are only two kinds of evidence: evidence that proves their theory correct, and evidence that proves the conspiracy goes deeper than they ever imagined .\"\nPeople promoting these theories belong to a small minority, but they gain attention from many people \u2014 often without much knowledge on that specific matter. People who have actual knowledge about a given subject just get frustrated by this, because it seems like smart or educated people should reject conspiracy theories for lack of proof (if a conspiracy theory has proof, it's really science or investigative journalism). In the comic, Hairy (who is considered \"smart\" by Cueball ) starts pointing out \"errors\" in the \"official\" 9\/11 story , obviously starting to describe the 9\/11 conspiracy theory . Cueball cuts his speech sharply, and his heart is broken because he's seeing his smart friend wasting his great intelligence in a foolish conspiracy theory, instead of doing something useful.\nIn the second panel, Cueball rants about conspiracy theories in general. He mentions Young Earth creationism , the Moon landing , and Perpetual motion machines. In the third panel, Hairy mentions that of course we never landed on the moon. This frustrates Cueball so much that he just walks away with no further comment.\nIn the last panel, Cueball asks God to fix the bug he committed when creating smart beings capable of believing such foolish things as conspiracy theories. This is a not-so-subtle joke as, to atheists, God himself is quite similar to a conspiracy theory. Indeed, a good portion of evidence against God's existence put forward by an atheist is met with a \"whatever happens, it's God's will\" by a believer. This is much like any other conspiracy theory, so in this last panel, to a subset of atheists, Cueball is pictured as contradicting himself by complaining that other people believe in foolish conspiracy theories while the atheist may think that Cueball himself is very plainly believing his own foolish conspiracy theory.\nOf course, from the believers' perspective, some such schools of atheistic thought also have many characteristics of a conspiracy theory. In particular, atheism and agnosticism are a small subculture \u2014 actually smaller in the U.S. than the 9\/11 Truth movement \u2014 of which many believe that a large majority of people (about 95% of Americans believe in God ) have been deluded into believing something ridiculous by conspiracies (e.g. churches and conservative politicians) that benefit from the spreading of misinformation on the subject.\nA \"bug report\" is a description of some error that occurred when using a computer program, to inform the developer of a problem that needs to be fixed. Filing a \"bug report\" to God should be unnecessary, as God is generally understood by believers to be omniscient, and thus already aware of the problem. God allows it to exist for explicable reasons of \"God's will.\"\nThe title text refers the large number of educated people who believe in Young Earth creationism , stating that the earth is only thousands of years old, instead of the billions of years evolutionary scientists suggest.\nHairy: The official story of 9-11 is full of holes. Take the\u2014 Cueball: Please, stop, because seeing this happen to you breaks my heart.\nCueball: Conspiracy theories represent a known glitch in human reasoning. The theories are of course occasionally true, but their truth is completely uncorrelated with the believer's certainty. For some reason, sometimes when people think they've uncovered a lie, they raise confirmation bias to an art form. They cut context away from facts and arguments and assemble them into reassuring litanies. And over and over I've argued helplessly with smart people consumed by theories they were sure were irrefutable, theories that in the end proved complete fictions. Cueball: Young-Earth Creationists, the Moon Landing people, the Perpetual Motion subculture \u2014 can't you see you're falling into the same pattern?\nHairy: You don't seriously believe we landed on the moon, do you?\n[Cueball walks away, frustrated.]\n[Cueball kneels down with folded hands, praying:] Cueball: Dear God. [Booming from the sky:] God: YES, MY CHILD? Cueball: I would like to file a bug report.\n"}
{"id":259,"title":"Clich\u00e9d Exchanges","image_title":"Clich&eacute;d Exchanges","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/259","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cliched_exchanges.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/259:_Clich%C3%A9d_Exchanges","transcript":"My Hobby: Derailing clich\u00e9d exchanges by using the wrong replies\nFriend: O RLY? Cueball: O RLY? I 'ardly know 'er!\n","explanation":"Another entry into the My Hobby series.\n\" O RLY? \" is an Internet meme typically used to express sarcastic agreement with or feigned surprise at a statement. The typical response to \"O RLY\" is usually \"YA RLY,\" \"NO WAI,\" or \"SRSLY?\" These exchanges are memetic variatons of \"Oh really?\", \"Yeah really,\" \"No way!\", and \"Seriously?\" respectively.\nHowever, Cueball 's response avoids this typical exchange, instead replying with another clich\u00e9, derived from a classic double entendre.\nIn this clich\u00e9, the speaker responds to a statement containing a word ending with '-er' and turns it into a sexual reference. The setup is as follows:\nAlice: \"Do you want to come over to my house? My wife and I are playing poker.\" Bob: \"Poker? I hardly KNOW her!\"\nSuch a double entendre makes no sense in the context of an O RLY exchange. In the case of the comic, the non-sequitur will likely baffle the person setting up the meme and derail the conversation, to the amusement of the replying person. The reason Randall makes this a hobby is, presumably, that it bores him when people fall back on clich\u00e9s for comedy, and he seeks inventive ways to humor himself in these situations. This view has already been expressed early in 16: Monty Python -- Enough\nThe title text takes the real clich\u00e9 \"fight fire with fire\" and combines it with the more literal \"fight clich\u00e9s with clich\u00e9s.\" The resulting statement follows a very similar principle to the situation in the comic proper.\nMy Hobby: Derailing clich\u00e9d exchanges by using the wrong replies\nFriend: O RLY? Cueball: O RLY? I 'ardly know 'er!\n"}
{"id":260,"title":"The Glass Necklace","image_title":"The Glass Necklace","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/260","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_glass_necklace.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/260:_The_Glass_Necklace","transcript":"[There is only one large panel in this comic, but it is still divided up into 19 individual scenes, one following the other, but of very different size and details. In every scene, there is at least one word noted, mainly just stating what Cueball does. The first row has four scenes (1-4), the second row only two (5-6), the third row has three (7-9), the fourth four (10-13), the fifth five (14-18), and then the last scene takes up the middle of the sixth row (19).]\n[Scene 1: Cueball is seen sitting behind a table facing out of the panel drawing on a paper with a cup next to him on the table. An arrow points down to the paper from above where the sketch he is drawing is shown on a zoom in on the paper. He has drawn a cylinder shown in the top left, next to it is a detailed diagram of the cylinder in a cross section down its length, showing that it is hollow, with electrical terminals on either end. The dimensions of the cylinders length, both inner and outer, are indicated on each side of this diagram. Below right is a cross section through circular section indicating the diameter. At the bottom left, there is an instruction showing that the cylinder can be opened in one end, and and an arrow with a label points into the open cylinder. The label can be read, but the dimensions are unreadable.] Draw Label: Sand\n[Scene 2: Cueball is at a workbench making the device in a workshop. The main part of the cylinder can already be seen lying on the table, as Cueball works on another part. His sketch is also resting on the table leaning up against the rear part of the workbench where four rows with three small drawers in each row are closed, except the second row from the top, where there are only two drawers, the left of those two drawers standing open. On the edge of the table, two tools looking like hammers hang down. On the floor lie three small rectangular items.] Make Make\n[Scene 3: Cueball kneels down on a beach and scoops up sand in a beaker. To the left, a fairly large wave (the surf) can be seen far down along the beach. Above the sea, there are a large cloud and a smaller one. To the right of the beach is a dense forest growing close to the surf. The tree trunks are visible, as are the leaves, but most trees and trunks are not possible to single out, except one large tree standing a little further out than the rest just behind Cueball. The trunk of this tree looks a little like a palm tree trunk, but it has a regular crown of normal leaves.] Scoop\n[Scene 4: Cueball, sitting behind a table, pours the sand from the beaker into the cylinder. The lid of the cylinder lies on the table next to a full glass. It is not clear if it is full of water or just more sand. The beaker used to pour sand is not transparent like the glass on the table is.] Pour\n[Scene 5: Cueball ties a spool of string to one end of the cylinder and ties a deflated weather balloon, lying on the ground to the right, to the other end. The spool lies on the ground to the left.] Tie\n[Scene 6: The weather balloon is inflated, and Cueball raises it up into the clouds as thunder rumbles in the huge dark clouds to the right. The cylinder is clearly visible just below the balloon. To the left towards the horizon, there is something that may be a distant city, but there are some lines going away from it away from the horizon, the meaning of which is unclear, could be electrical wires in the air for transporting electricity.] Rumble\n[Scene 7: Cueball has left after having tied the end of the string to a stake in the ground. The sky is completely covered with clouds, and the first lightning is flashing in the background, thunder following. The balloon hangs close to the clouds, the cylinder barely visible at this distance.] Boom\n[Scene 8: Lightning hits the balloon and travels all the way down to the rod, which can just be seen at the bottom. There is a loud crack, and the incandescent balloon inside the lightning hisses.] Crack TSSS\n[Scene 9: A slim image with a zoom-in just of the cylinder as the lightning hits, showing it attached to the wires going up and down from each of the two terminals. The lightning travels along the wire through the cylinder and out the other wire, fusing the sand contents within.] Fuse\n[Scene 10: The clouds are disappearing to the left, and the sun is out again to the left. Two birds fly in the distance near the sun, and below them there is a hill in the horizon. Cueball, holding onto the string with one hand, follows the string to the cylinder lying on the ground. Above this scene, there is a frame with a caption:] Later Follow\n[Scene 11: Cueball detaches the cylinder from the wire that goes to the remains of the burned out balloon lying on the ground to the right. The other part of the wire still hangs down from the cylinder's other end.] Detach\n[Scene 12: Zoom in on Cueball as he opens the cylinder, letting a wisp of smoke out. The cylinder has clearly been exposed to some rough condition, its surface flaking off. Cueball's hands are clearly visible, which is an unusual style in xkcd.] Open\n[Scene 13: Cueball puts his hands into the cylinder and removes a piece of glass with a zigzag shape. Leftover sand pouts out as he draws it out of the open cylinder.] Remove\n[Scene 14: Back at his table (with only the surface shown), Cueball admires the piece of glass, holding it between both of his hands. The broken and open cylinder lies on the table, sand pouring out, while the lid lies to the left.] Admire\n[Scene 15: Cueball is looking at White Hat (a jeweler) standing behind his desk under a large sign hanging from a string put over a peck in the wall above the desk. White Hat examines the glass, holding it up in his hand and looking at it with a magnifying glass he is holding up to his eye. A lamp is standing on the table.] Sign: Jeweler Examine\n[Scene 16: White Hat, only, grinds the glass on a grindstone he has put on his desk, pieces of glass seeming to fly away from the stone. There are four indeterminate tools lying on the table.] Grind\n[Scene 17: White Hat, only, sets the now-shining glass in a necklace, having cleared the table from any other items.] Set\n[Scene 18: Cueball holds the glass necklace in both hands, looks at it, and approves the final result, while White Hat stands behind his desk with something small and rectangular in his hand, probably the money Cueball paid for his service.] Approve\n[Scene 19: Cueball gives the glass necklace to Megan, almost touching it and her hands with an outstretched hand. Megan admires the shining piece of glass she now holds in her hands, the string hanging down from her hands.] Give\n","explanation":"This is one of the most romantic comics published in xkcd.\nThe heat from a lightning strike can fuse sand into glass . When this occurs in nature, hollow tubes called fulgurites are formed. Cueball uses this knowledge and a spark of handiness and ingenuity to create an entirely homemade glass necklace for Megan . Here is some inspiration to do it yourself.\nThe title text represents an answer to the logical question prompted by this comic, which is \"Would this actually work?\"  The implied answer is \"Yes,\" but only \"for some value of 'actually work'.\"\nThis is a play on the phrase \"for some value of x,\" used frequently in physics or mathematics when it's not necessary (nor easy, maybe not even possible) to calculate a suitable value of x.  For example, if you supply energy to a Flux Capacitor , could it turn a DeLorean into a time machine?  The answer is yes, if you have sufficient energy (the 'some value of x' in this case).\nMost people would take the title text to mean that the process most likely \"doesn't actually work.\" But a romantic person (who may be in love and thus not as sensible) might give it a try anyway. Well, at least it worked for Cueball....\n[There is only one large panel in this comic, but it is still divided up into 19 individual scenes, one following the other, but of very different size and details. In every scene, there is at least one word noted, mainly just stating what Cueball does. The first row has four scenes (1-4), the second row only two (5-6), the third row has three (7-9), the fourth four (10-13), the fifth five (14-18), and then the last scene takes up the middle of the sixth row (19).]\n[Scene 1: Cueball is seen sitting behind a table facing out of the panel drawing on a paper with a cup next to him on the table. An arrow points down to the paper from above where the sketch he is drawing is shown on a zoom in on the paper. He has drawn a cylinder shown in the top left, next to it is a detailed diagram of the cylinder in a cross section down its length, showing that it is hollow, with electrical terminals on either end. The dimensions of the cylinders length, both inner and outer, are indicated on each side of this diagram. Below right is a cross section through circular section indicating the diameter. At the bottom left, there is an instruction showing that the cylinder can be opened in one end, and and an arrow with a label points into the open cylinder. The label can be read, but the dimensions are unreadable.] Draw Label: Sand\n[Scene 2: Cueball is at a workbench making the device in a workshop. The main part of the cylinder can already be seen lying on the table, as Cueball works on another part. His sketch is also resting on the table leaning up against the rear part of the workbench where four rows with three small drawers in each row are closed, except the second row from the top, where there are only two drawers, the left of those two drawers standing open. On the edge of the table, two tools looking like hammers hang down. On the floor lie three small rectangular items.] Make Make\n[Scene 3: Cueball kneels down on a beach and scoops up sand in a beaker. To the left, a fairly large wave (the surf) can be seen far down along the beach. Above the sea, there are a large cloud and a smaller one. To the right of the beach is a dense forest growing close to the surf. The tree trunks are visible, as are the leaves, but most trees and trunks are not possible to single out, except one large tree standing a little further out than the rest just behind Cueball. The trunk of this tree looks a little like a palm tree trunk, but it has a regular crown of normal leaves.] Scoop\n[Scene 4: Cueball, sitting behind a table, pours the sand from the beaker into the cylinder. The lid of the cylinder lies on the table next to a full glass. It is not clear if it is full of water or just more sand. The beaker used to pour sand is not transparent like the glass on the table is.] Pour\n[Scene 5: Cueball ties a spool of string to one end of the cylinder and ties a deflated weather balloon, lying on the ground to the right, to the other end. The spool lies on the ground to the left.] Tie\n[Scene 6: The weather balloon is inflated, and Cueball raises it up into the clouds as thunder rumbles in the huge dark clouds to the right. The cylinder is clearly visible just below the balloon. To the left towards the horizon, there is something that may be a distant city, but there are some lines going away from it away from the horizon, the meaning of which is unclear, could be electrical wires in the air for transporting electricity.] Rumble\n[Scene 7: Cueball has left after having tied the end of the string to a stake in the ground. The sky is completely covered with clouds, and the first lightning is flashing in the background, thunder following. The balloon hangs close to the clouds, the cylinder barely visible at this distance.] Boom\n[Scene 8: Lightning hits the balloon and travels all the way down to the rod, which can just be seen at the bottom. There is a loud crack, and the incandescent balloon inside the lightning hisses.] Crack TSSS\n[Scene 9: A slim image with a zoom-in just of the cylinder as the lightning hits, showing it attached to the wires going up and down from each of the two terminals. The lightning travels along the wire through the cylinder and out the other wire, fusing the sand contents within.] Fuse\n[Scene 10: The clouds are disappearing to the left, and the sun is out again to the left. Two birds fly in the distance near the sun, and below them there is a hill in the horizon. Cueball, holding onto the string with one hand, follows the string to the cylinder lying on the ground. Above this scene, there is a frame with a caption:] Later Follow\n[Scene 11: Cueball detaches the cylinder from the wire that goes to the remains of the burned out balloon lying on the ground to the right. The other part of the wire still hangs down from the cylinder's other end.] Detach\n[Scene 12: Zoom in on Cueball as he opens the cylinder, letting a wisp of smoke out. The cylinder has clearly been exposed to some rough condition, its surface flaking off. Cueball's hands are clearly visible, which is an unusual style in xkcd.] Open\n[Scene 13: Cueball puts his hands into the cylinder and removes a piece of glass with a zigzag shape. Leftover sand pouts out as he draws it out of the open cylinder.] Remove\n[Scene 14: Back at his table (with only the surface shown), Cueball admires the piece of glass, holding it between both of his hands. The broken and open cylinder lies on the table, sand pouring out, while the lid lies to the left.] Admire\n[Scene 15: Cueball is looking at White Hat (a jeweler) standing behind his desk under a large sign hanging from a string put over a peck in the wall above the desk. White Hat examines the glass, holding it up in his hand and looking at it with a magnifying glass he is holding up to his eye. A lamp is standing on the table.] Sign: Jeweler Examine\n[Scene 16: White Hat, only, grinds the glass on a grindstone he has put on his desk, pieces of glass seeming to fly away from the stone. There are four indeterminate tools lying on the table.] Grind\n[Scene 17: White Hat, only, sets the now-shining glass in a necklace, having cleared the table from any other items.] Set\n[Scene 18: Cueball holds the glass necklace in both hands, looks at it, and approves the final result, while White Hat stands behind his desk with something small and rectangular in his hand, probably the money Cueball paid for his service.] Approve\n[Scene 19: Cueball gives the glass necklace to Megan, almost touching it and her hands with an outstretched hand. Megan admires the shining piece of glass she now holds in her hands, the string hanging down from her hands.] Give\n"}
{"id":261,"title":"Regarding Mussolini","image_title":"Regarding Mussolini","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/261","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/regarding_mussolini.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/261:_Regarding_Mussolini","transcript":"[Three people are standing around a map. One of them is pushing something with a stick.] [A messenger arrives.] Messenger: General, Italian forces have entered Egypt. General: As I expected. This is a foolish move by Mussolini, but like Hitler he will no doubt force his commanders to\u2014 Messenger: Hey. Godwin's Law. General: Dammit. General: You know, this may become a problem.\n","explanation":"Godwin's Law states that all debates on the Internet, given enough time, will devolve into ad hominem attacks in the form of comparisons of one's opponents to Hitler or the Nazis. A common expansion on this law dictates that, when such a comparison is brought up, the debate immediately ends and the person who made the reference is declared the loser. This is meant to dissuade ad hominem (or in this case \" Ad hitlerum \") attacks on other people\/subjects, where their views are unreasonably compared to those held by the Nazis, and should not apply to relevant discussions regarding Nazis.\nThe scene in the comic shows generals of the British and Commonwealth forces discussing Benito Mussolini 's invasion of Egypt. Mussolini and Hitler were each commanders of Axis powers during World War II , so comparisons between them are almost certain to arise.\nThe joke is that in this situation, because the conversation is taking place in World War II, Hitler is relevant to the discussion, and, therefore, comparisons made to Hitler are actually valid and not an ad hominem attack. This means that in this case, Godwin's Law should not apply.\nAs the title text suggests, it would have been detrimental to the war effort if the expanded version of Godwin's Law had been enforced by actually ending meetings to plan war strategy whenever Hitler was appropriately mentioned.\n[Three people are standing around a map. One of them is pushing something with a stick.] [A messenger arrives.] Messenger: General, Italian forces have entered Egypt. General: As I expected. This is a foolish move by Mussolini, but like Hitler he will no doubt force his commanders to\u2014 Messenger: Hey. Godwin's Law. General: Dammit. General: You know, this may become a problem.\n"}
{"id":262,"title":"IN UR REALITY","image_title":"IN UR REALITY","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/262","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/in_ur_reality.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/262:_IN_UR_REALITY","transcript":"[Black Hat is holding a cat and a piece of paper. Cueball has raised his arms. There are three cats with captions stuck to them.] Black Hat: Oh hi; I'm here from the Internet. Cueball: What are you doing!? Black Hat: Gluing captions to your cats. Cat: RRRR\n","explanation":"The LOLcat meme genre involves pictures of cats in various poses and facial contortions accompanied by deliberately misspelled captions. Black Hat claims to be from the Internet and is thus creating LOLcat memes by literally gluing captions to Cueball's cats.\nThe title text suggests that Black Hat is using glue only because he ran out of staples; fortunately for the cats in the picture, glue is much less painful than a staple. The title text suggests that Black Hat was stapling captions to cats earlier. This either means that Black Hat has injured some of Cueball's cats, just not the ones on screen (which would imply that Cueball has very many cats, since Black Hat would have brought a fair number of staples to begin with) or that Black Hat injured other people's cats before going to Cueball's house in order to caption the cats there. The title is also a reference to the \"I'm in ur base killing ur d00dz\" catchphrase from real-time-strategy games.\nStapling things to other things has also been referenced in 291: Dignified and 478: The Staple Madness . Being \"from the Internet\" was spoken of in the title text of 256: Online Communities .\n[Black Hat is holding a cat and a piece of paper. Cueball has raised his arms. There are three cats with captions stuck to them.] Black Hat: Oh hi; I'm here from the Internet. Cueball: What are you doing!? Black Hat: Gluing captions to your cats. Cat: RRRR\n"}
{"id":263,"title":"Certainty","image_title":"Certainty","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/263","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/certainty.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/263:_Certainty","transcript":"[A door seen from a hallway, with \"Teachers' Lounge\" on the glass, next to the door is a sign reading \"Award.\" Inside the door are two teachers talking.] Megan: My students drew me into another political argument. Cueball: Eh; it happens. Megan: Lately, political debates bother me. They just show how good smart people are at rationalizing. [The two teachers continue talking. A third one is seen reading a book on a sofa.] Megan: The world is so complicated - the more I learn, the less clear anything gets. There are too many ideas and arguments to pick and choose from. How can I trust myself to know the truth about anything? And if everything I know is so shaky, what on Earth am I doing teaching? Cueball: I guess you just do your best. No one can impart perfect universal truths to their students. Miss Lenhart: *ahem* Cueball: ...Except math teachers. Miss Lenhart: Thank you.\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are teachers in this comic, talking about their students and the political discussions with them. They outline that it's not possible to find the real truth. But then Cueball, interrupted by a harrumph of the mathematics teacher Miss Lenhart , states that Mathematics is an exception (because math can actually be proved , conclusively). Randall likes mathematics because mathematical political discussions are not possible.\nThe title text shows a simple valid mathematical equation, the distributive property , and Randall is daring one to politicize it. Though this happened years after the comic was published, people have in fact politicized the distributive property , claiming that teaching it promoted socialism.\n[A door seen from a hallway, with \"Teachers' Lounge\" on the glass, next to the door is a sign reading \"Award.\" Inside the door are two teachers talking.] Megan: My students drew me into another political argument. Cueball: Eh; it happens. Megan: Lately, political debates bother me. They just show how good smart people are at rationalizing. [The two teachers continue talking. A third one is seen reading a book on a sofa.] Megan: The world is so complicated - the more I learn, the less clear anything gets. There are too many ideas and arguments to pick and choose from. How can I trust myself to know the truth about anything? And if everything I know is so shaky, what on Earth am I doing teaching? Cueball: I guess you just do your best. No one can impart perfect universal truths to their students. Miss Lenhart: *ahem* Cueball: ...Except math teachers. Miss Lenhart: Thank you.\n"}
{"id":264,"title":"Choices Part 1","image_title":"Choices: Part 1","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/264","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/choices_part_1.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/264:_Choices:_Part_1","transcript":"[Megan sits at a desk, using a computer, refreshing the page.] *Refresh* Click [She sits back and looks at the monitor.] [She refreshes the page on the computer.] *Refresh* Click [She sits back and looks at the monitor.] [Megan leans forward and clicks the mouse.] Click [A hole opens up in the panel. It appears to be the torn paper of the comic itself. A light-blue, sky-like background is revealed. Megan jumps in surprise, nearly tipping over her chair.] [Megan stands up as the chair falls over completely.] [Wide view. Megan looks back at the door furtively.] [She begins to climb into the hole.] [By now, Megan is entirely inside the hole. She is closing it behind her.] [Only her head and arms are visible.] [The hole is closed, revealing a formation of ripped paper.] [Large frame, where Megan appears to be in space, with blue not black background. Stars dot the sky, and rays of light seem to originate from a point to the right, and then traverse the frame both horizontally and vertically, almost like lightning. Megan is in a bubble, floating disconnectedly. Both she and the bubble have become white, tinged against the backdrop.]\n","explanation":"Megan is sitting at her computer, not waiting for a particular mail, but still refreshing every few seconds. This is an illustration of boredom and pointlessness in life. But suddenly the wall in front of her is opening. She considers running for the door, but curiosity overtakes her. She enters the hole, closes it behind her, and with that, she enters a different world. The hole appears as if it is a rip in a sheet of paper, implying that since they are drawings (which they are), this would be essentially a hole in space-time from their perspective. Most people would run away from such a thing, but Megan seems to feel that since she is currently bored (shown by the fact that she is constantly refreshing her E-mail), this is a break from her normal life, and she may not fully be realizing\/acknowledging the inherent dangers of leaving her realm into an unknown universe.\nShe does worry that she is missing an email, though, much as a person often does resist breaking from routine.\nThis starts out a metaphoric five-part adventure that celebrates, marvels at, and reminds of human freedom.\nThe series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday). All parts of \" Choices \":\n[Megan sits at a desk, using a computer, refreshing the page.] *Refresh* Click [She sits back and looks at the monitor.] [She refreshes the page on the computer.] *Refresh* Click [She sits back and looks at the monitor.] [Megan leans forward and clicks the mouse.] Click [A hole opens up in the panel. It appears to be the torn paper of the comic itself. A light-blue, sky-like background is revealed. Megan jumps in surprise, nearly tipping over her chair.] [Megan stands up as the chair falls over completely.] [Wide view. Megan looks back at the door furtively.] [She begins to climb into the hole.] [By now, Megan is entirely inside the hole. She is closing it behind her.] [Only her head and arms are visible.] [The hole is closed, revealing a formation of ripped paper.] [Large frame, where Megan appears to be in space, with blue not black background. Stars dot the sky, and rays of light seem to originate from a point to the right, and then traverse the frame both horizontally and vertically, almost like lightning. Megan is in a bubble, floating disconnectedly. Both she and the bubble have become white, tinged against the backdrop.]\n"}
{"id":265,"title":"Choices Part 2","image_title":"Choices: Part 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/265","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/choices_part_2.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/265:_Choices:_Part_2","transcript":"[Cueball is doing some exercises in a book. The clock on the wall says 12:50.] Chapter 15: Special Relativity Problem 1: Two spacecraft transmit messages to each other while passing at constant velocities of... Cueball: sigh\nMeanwhile: [Megan in a bubble and a spacecraft are moving towards each other. Each one has a velocity vector drawn before themselves, each showing a velocity of 0.2c.]\n[They pass each other.] Spacecraft: We observe your speed to be 38.5%c, and your time is passing at 92.3% the rate of ours. Does this mirror your observations? Megan: Please help me. I think I'm lost.\n[They continue with the same velocity vectors. Megan is looking back at the spacecraft.]\n","explanation":"The \"Choices\" series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday). It explores and marvels at human freedom. This is, however, a little sidetrack from the \"Choices\" narrative. Cueball is studying special relativity . The speed of light in a vacuum (299,792,458\u00a0m\/s) is denoted as c . Megan and the spaceship are shown traveling at 0.2 c in opposite directions. This would mean (in Newtonian mechanics) 0.4 c relative to each other. But due to relativistic effects, their velocities do not simply add when the spaceship observes Megan; in reality, both would measure only 0.385 c ( = (u + v)\/(1 + uv\/c 2 ) ) from the other's point of view. Also, time dilation influences the way time is observed with reference to the two frames of reference. Megan, however, has other concerns. (This text and part of the image were completely reused in the space part of the interactive 1350: Lorenz (see image here ).\nIn the title text, Megan thinks about writing about this after-worldly place in Wikipedia, but then realizes that the content would be removed, due to the Wikipedia policy on original research , meaning that you are discouraged from writing your own thoughts, the preference being that you have a source you're paraphrasing. Even though her claims would be true, she would need reliable written sources to support them.\nThe series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday). All parts of \" Choices \":\nAs this was the second in the series, it was released on a Tuesday.\n[Cueball is doing some exercises in a book. The clock on the wall says 12:50.] Chapter 15: Special Relativity Problem 1: Two spacecraft transmit messages to each other while passing at constant velocities of... Cueball: sigh\nMeanwhile: [Megan in a bubble and a spacecraft are moving towards each other. Each one has a velocity vector drawn before themselves, each showing a velocity of 0.2c.]\n[They pass each other.] Spacecraft: We observe your speed to be 38.5%c, and your time is passing at 92.3% the rate of ours. Does this mirror your observations? Megan: Please help me. I think I'm lost.\n[They continue with the same velocity vectors. Megan is looking back at the spacecraft.]\n"}
{"id":266,"title":"Choices Part 3","image_title":"Choices: Part 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/266","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/choices_part_3.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/266:_Choices:_Part_3","transcript":"[A white Megan floats in a bubble against a dark blue space backdrop. She is at the top of the bubble. Her thoughts (not connected to her by a speak line) are shown above her in white.] Megan (thinking): I should feel scared.\n[She falls from the top of the bubble, the bubble rises, or both.] Megan (thinking): But I don't.\n[She hits the bottom of the bubble, and the bubble begins to fall down.] Megan (thinking): Maybe this is a dream.\n[She floats over the top of the now still bubble.] Megan (thinking): But it doesn't feel like one.\n[She now floats in the middle of the still bubble, in a larger panel. The sky behind her now has many stars and light effect. A voice speaks from off-panel above.] Voice (off panel): Okay, found you. Megan: Who are you? Voice (off panel): Er, hang on. Voice (off panel): This next part might be a little weird.\n[Beat panel, where Megan just floats in her bubble on the same background, but in a smaller panel.]\n[A large panel where many distorted copies of Megan whirl around the original Megan in her bubble; she also bends backwards. The stars and light display in the background is more clear around her bubble, that now creates a lens effect, that even distorts the distorted Megans even more. Around her bubbles edge and the lens edge, there are three places where brown lines appear on both these edges.]\n[All the copies have disappeared except for one who is hanging suspended outside Megan in her bubble. The new one is almost a mirror image, but not quite. The background is more dark blue, with fewer features.]\n[The Megan copy raises her hand and speaks. There are again more stars in the background.] Megan copy: Sorry \u2014 hi, me. Megan: ...Hi.\n","explanation":"Megan is very unsure about what to think of her situation. Is it a dream? Is she in danger? She should be scared but isn't, and it does not feel like a dream, i.e. it feels real even though she suspects it is a dream. This would usually never be the case. If your dream feels realistic, you do not usually consider that you are dreaming.\nSuddenly someone talks off-panel and tells Megan that she has been found. When Megan asks the speaker who it is, reality becomes even more distorted, and suddenly she finds that she is looking at herself outside the sphere. And the two Megans say hi....\nThis could be an allusion to The Matrix. The Megan outside the sphere was looking for and has found the Megan inside the sphere, as in The Matrix, Morpheus has been looking for and has found Neo; then Morpheus\/outer Megan pulls their target out of the target's reality and comment similarly on how this experience is likely to feel. Outer Megan, as she manifests before Inner Megan: \"This next part might be a little weird\"; Morpheus, as he is about to plug in Neo for the first time and explain what the Matrix is: \"This will feel a little weird.\" If true, this would not be the only time Randall used The Matrix in xkcd ( e.g. , 566: Matrix Revisited ).\nIn the title text, she realizes that if she were in real space, she wouldn't be able to hear any sound , like the voice talking to her, due to the lack of atmosphere. As an afterthought, she decides to ask about the hole in reality (which many people would consider to be more unusual than sound in space).\nThe series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday). All parts of \" Choices \":\n[A white Megan floats in a bubble against a dark blue space backdrop. She is at the top of the bubble. Her thoughts (not connected to her by a speak line) are shown above her in white.] Megan (thinking): I should feel scared.\n[She falls from the top of the bubble, the bubble rises, or both.] Megan (thinking): But I don't.\n[She hits the bottom of the bubble, and the bubble begins to fall down.] Megan (thinking): Maybe this is a dream.\n[She floats over the top of the now still bubble.] Megan (thinking): But it doesn't feel like one.\n[She now floats in the middle of the still bubble, in a larger panel. The sky behind her now has many stars and light effect. A voice speaks from off-panel above.] Voice (off panel): Okay, found you. Megan: Who are you? Voice (off panel): Er, hang on. Voice (off panel): This next part might be a little weird.\n[Beat panel, where Megan just floats in her bubble on the same background, but in a smaller panel.]\n[A large panel where many distorted copies of Megan whirl around the original Megan in her bubble; she also bends backwards. The stars and light display in the background is more clear around her bubble, that now creates a lens effect, that even distorts the distorted Megans even more. Around her bubbles edge and the lens edge, there are three places where brown lines appear on both these edges.]\n[All the copies have disappeared except for one who is hanging suspended outside Megan in her bubble. The new one is almost a mirror image, but not quite. The background is more dark blue, with fewer features.]\n[The Megan copy raises her hand and speaks. There are again more stars in the background.] Megan copy: Sorry \u2014 hi, me. Megan: ...Hi.\n"}
{"id":267,"title":"Choices Part 4","image_title":"Choices: Part 4","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/267","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/choices_part_4.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/267:_Choices:_Part_4","transcript":"[Megan in a bubble is floating in outer space (on a dark blue background) next to her clone outside the bubble. Megan is simulating sitting down in the middle of the bubble. The clone reaches one arm out toward the bubble. There is no line from the first part of the clone's text to the rest of the text. It is given from the context who speaks. There are always more stars in the panels to the left than those to the left.] Clone: I shouldn't do this, but I pulled you out for a moment to give you a hint. Megan: A hint? Clone: Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they're doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out.\n[Megan leans towards the clone, the clone \"lies\" on her tummy with arms forward and legs lifted up.] Megan: Why tell me this? Clone: You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are al ways making up the future as you go.\n[Megan is \"sitting\" down with her hands on her knees. The clone stands and lifts an arm up.] Megan: So, wait, what is this place? Am I going to wake up thinking this was a dream? Clone: This is... Think of this as after the game, outside the theatre. To go in, I had to suspend disbelief, forget the outside.\n[Megan again leans towards the clone; the clone spreads out her arms.] Megan: So you... Huh. Why give me hints I'm going to forget? Clone: You'll forget this trip but I think the hints should stay with you. Megan: ...If this is a game, are you\u2014 are we \u2014 cheating? Clone: Yup.\n[Megan still leans towards the clone. The clone leans a little back, her arms down.] Megan: Is that a good idea? Clone: Well it's an interesting one.  We'll see how it goes. Megan: Well, I guess I'll see you aroun\u2014\n[Megan leans towards the clone with a hand up, the clone leaning even more back, almost like she is falling backwards.] Megan: Wait a minute; have you brought me here before? Clone: I ... Maybe. Once. Megan: For another hint? Clone: Er. Clone: Actually we just made out. Megan: We wh\u2014 Clone: Bye!\n","explanation":"This is the existentialistic climax of the Choices series. It takes up the recurring xkcd -theme how people tend to be blind towards the staggering amount of possibilities that each day holds, with routine and boredom as a result. (See e.g. 137: Dreams and 706: Freedom .)\nThe Megan -clone implies that Megan has been taken to some kind of afterlife or parallel universe outside reality. It's not a dream, but she will not remember this place when she goes back. But the clone hopes that these hints will stay with her. Realizing that she would not remember being here, Megan suddenly realizes that she might already have been here before. And the clone admits that she has taken her to this place once before. Although not for another hint; actually it was to make out with herself. And then she quickly says bye .\nThe title text makes it clear that the Megan-clone did actually bring her previously into this place just to make out, and then refers to this being the second time this has been a theme, 105: Parallel Universe being the first. Randall appears to find this a little troubling (or it may be that he suspects his readers will).\nThe series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday). All parts of \" Choices \":\nAs this was the fourth in the series, it was released on a Thursday.\n[Megan in a bubble is floating in outer space (on a dark blue background) next to her clone outside the bubble. Megan is simulating sitting down in the middle of the bubble. The clone reaches one arm out toward the bubble. There is no line from the first part of the clone's text to the rest of the text. It is given from the context who speaks. There are always more stars in the panels to the left than those to the left.] Clone: I shouldn't do this, but I pulled you out for a moment to give you a hint. Megan: A hint? Clone: Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they're doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out.\n[Megan leans towards the clone, the clone \"lies\" on her tummy with arms forward and legs lifted up.] Megan: Why tell me this? Clone: You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are al ways making up the future as you go.\n[Megan is \"sitting\" down with her hands on her knees. The clone stands and lifts an arm up.] Megan: So, wait, what is this place? Am I going to wake up thinking this was a dream? Clone: This is... Think of this as after the game, outside the theatre. To go in, I had to suspend disbelief, forget the outside.\n[Megan again leans towards the clone; the clone spreads out her arms.] Megan: So you... Huh. Why give me hints I'm going to forget? Clone: You'll forget this trip but I think the hints should stay with you. Megan: ...If this is a game, are you\u2014 are we \u2014 cheating? Clone: Yup.\n[Megan still leans towards the clone. The clone leans a little back, her arms down.] Megan: Is that a good idea? Clone: Well it's an interesting one.  We'll see how it goes. Megan: Well, I guess I'll see you aroun\u2014\n[Megan leans towards the clone with a hand up, the clone leaning even more back, almost like she is falling backwards.] Megan: Wait a minute; have you brought me here before? Clone: I ... Maybe. Once. Megan: For another hint? Clone: Er. Clone: Actually we just made out. Megan: We wh\u2014 Clone: Bye!\n"}
{"id":268,"title":"Choices Part 5","image_title":"Choices: Part 5","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/268","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/choices_part_5.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/268:_Choices:_Part_5","transcript":"[Megan is walking towards the right of the panel.]\n[Cueball wearing a backpack is walking towards the left of the panel.]\n[They walk past each other.]\n[Megan has a sudden thought, in a drawing without a frame between two panels.]\n[Megan turns, lifts her arm, and calls out to Cueball, who then turn towards her.] Megan: Hi. Cueball: Uh, hi.\n[Only Megan is shown.] Megan: Sorry if this is weird, but Megan: Do you like flying kites?\n","explanation":"In the final part of Choices , Megan is back to real life, and has forgotten about her trip, as afterlife-Megan said. However, she has an epiphany , and in the spirit of what she told her, she talks to the stranger on the street. The stranger is likely Cueball who studied the physics problem she encountered from part 2 , as they both use a similar backpack.\nThe urge to talk to strangers in awkward situations has been touched on in 235: Kite and can also be used when you are already flying a kite (see 1614: Kites .)\nThe title text suggests a weird sociological investigation. The capital \"S\" in \"Science\" suggests a personification .\nThe series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday).\nAll parts of \" Choices \":\n[Megan is walking towards the right of the panel.]\n[Cueball wearing a backpack is walking towards the left of the panel.]\n[They walk past each other.]\n[Megan has a sudden thought, in a drawing without a frame between two panels.]\n[Megan turns, lifts her arm, and calls out to Cueball, who then turn towards her.] Megan: Hi. Cueball: Uh, hi.\n[Only Megan is shown.] Megan: Sorry if this is weird, but Megan: Do you like flying kites?\n"}
{"id":269,"title":"TCMP","image_title":"TCMP","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/269","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tcmp.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/269:_TCMP","transcript":"[Cueball stand with a keyboard next to a bed. The keyboard is connected with a wire to a computer on a desk to the right. He talks to Megan and a Cueball-like friend.] Cueball: Hey, help me test the Trans-Consciousness Messaging Protocol. Friend: What's that? Cueball: I've been training myself to keep my fingers moving slightly as I fall asleep. So I can type from inside dreams.\n[Cueball sits with the keyboard on the bed.] Cueball: I'm going to sleep now. My computer will relay my messages to you as I explore the dream world.\n[Cueball stand with the keyboard in a forest with tall trees. The leaves are not visible; they are above the top of the drawing. At the top, there is a frame with text:] In the dream: Cueball (thinking): So strange to think none of this is real. Cueball (thinking): And yet I have this lifeline to the internet back home.\n[Cueball places the keyboard on a stone, bends down, and types.] Cueball (thinking): A chance to speak from one reality to another. Cueball (thinking): I feel like Bell & Watson. I get to write the inaugural TCMP message. Cueball (thinking): Let's see... Keyboard: *Type type type*\n[Megan is at the computer, and the Cueball-like friend behind her looks at his message from the dream. At the top, there is a frame with text:] Outside: Megan: \"F1RST P0ST!!\"? Friend: Great. He's jumped straight to trans-reality trolling.\n","explanation":"Cueball trained himself to type while asleep, so he could communicate from inside his dreams. He calls this Trans-Consciousness Messaging Protocol , or TCMP . He succeeds in using this system to send a message from inside his dream, but his friends, Megan and another Cueball, are disappointed when that first message is a trollish \"F1rst p0st!!\", in this case, \"trans-reality trolling\", instead of something constructive.\nFirstposting, or thread sniping , is the practice of posting short messages to brag to others that you found and saw this content first. This practice was far more common at the time this comic was written, when high-traffic and poorly-moderated social media sites tended to display comments in increasing chronological order by default; as such, the oldest comments would be most prominently displayed at the top, while the newest comments would be buried at the bottom. These days, while low-traffic and closely-monitored forums still use this approach, social media sites instead tend to sort comments by rating, so that the most appreciated comments are given the most prominence and trollish comments like the cliche \"F1rst p0st!!\" are buried. See also 1019: First Post and 1258: First and regarding trolling 493: Actuarial .\n\"Bell & Watson\" refers to Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas A. Watson . Bell is traditionally credited with inventing the telephone , because he was awarded the patent for it, although that is still controversial . His first phone call was to Watson in another part of their lab.\nThe name \"TCMP\" is likely to be a portmanteau of TCP ( Transmission Control Protocol ) and ICMP ( Internet Control Message Protocol ), which are actual protocols used in computer networking.\nThe title text explains how this protocol, if real, would be of great value in dream research, since you then would not have to worry about forgetting the dreams after waking up like as in 430: Every Damn Morning . You can relay the dreams as you experience them.\nA possible downside is that in order for this to work, the dream has to be lucid , where the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. This type of dream is very fascinating to Randall , as mentioned in the title text of 203: Hallucinations . Because this method could not be used to study regular dreams, some possibilities for studying dreams would be limited.\n[Cueball stand with a keyboard next to a bed. The keyboard is connected with a wire to a computer on a desk to the right. He talks to Megan and a Cueball-like friend.] Cueball: Hey, help me test the Trans-Consciousness Messaging Protocol. Friend: What's that? Cueball: I've been training myself to keep my fingers moving slightly as I fall asleep. So I can type from inside dreams.\n[Cueball sits with the keyboard on the bed.] Cueball: I'm going to sleep now. My computer will relay my messages to you as I explore the dream world.\n[Cueball stand with the keyboard in a forest with tall trees. The leaves are not visible; they are above the top of the drawing. At the top, there is a frame with text:] In the dream: Cueball (thinking): So strange to think none of this is real. Cueball (thinking): And yet I have this lifeline to the internet back home.\n[Cueball places the keyboard on a stone, bends down, and types.] Cueball (thinking): A chance to speak from one reality to another. Cueball (thinking): I feel like Bell & Watson. I get to write the inaugural TCMP message. Cueball (thinking): Let's see... Keyboard: *Type type type*\n[Megan is at the computer, and the Cueball-like friend behind her looks at his message from the dream. At the top, there is a frame with text:] Outside: Megan: \"F1RST P0ST!!\"? Friend: Great. He's jumped straight to trans-reality trolling.\n"}
{"id":270,"title":"Merlin","image_title":"Merlin","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/270","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/merlin.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/270:_Merlin","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan standing by a train on a platform.] Megan: I'm bad at goodbyes. At some level I never think they're for real. Cueball: They make me think of T. H. White's Merlin.\n[They are still standing at the edge of the platform, but the train is no longer in the frame.] Megan: Oh? Cueball: He lived backwards, remembering the future and not the past. To him, final goodbyes meant nothing, while first hellos were tearful and bittersweet.\n[Zooming out, the rail closest to the platform becomes visible.] Megan: Huh - so over the years he'd forget all his friends. Megan: Must've been lonely. Cueball: Yeah. He ended up just sitting around at home watching DVDs all day. The best was the time he rented 'Memento'...\n[Merlin with pointy hat and long white beard is sitting in a couch with the remote, watching TV which emits light and is clearly hooked up to a device (a DVD player).] Merlin: Well, that was straightforward.\n","explanation":"Merlin is a wizard who features prominently in various retelling of the legend of King Arthur. The Once and Future King by author T. H. White is one of the most popular versions of the legend, and in it, Merlin is described as living backwards through time, as Cueball and Megan discuss in this comic (this is also briefly mentioned in the musical Camelot , which is based on this version of the story).\nIn the comic, Cueball is speculating philosophically on how this would have affected Merlin's life as he started life with all his memories, and gradually lost them, comparing this to Megan's own sense of unreality at goodbyes.\nMany old people do, however, end up alone without friends or family. And they may do nothing but watch TV all day. They might also lose their memory. So in this respect, Merlin's last days may not be so different from many real people's, except of course that Merlin was supposed to live in the late 5th and early 6th centuries with no access to DVDs or even TV.\nMemento is a movie telling the main parts of its story backwards, while a few black-and-white scenes are straightforward. So when Merlin watches the movie, he sees nearly the whole story in its actual order, and the title text drives home the joke by noting that these few scenes, which make more sense to someone with normal perceptions than the rest of the movie, would make less sense to him.\nNormal old people would not be able to enjoy Memento like Merlin. Although he would of course always have remembered seeing it when he got old, until the day he saw it and then forgot it afterwards...\n[Cueball and Megan standing by a train on a platform.] Megan: I'm bad at goodbyes. At some level I never think they're for real. Cueball: They make me think of T. H. White's Merlin.\n[They are still standing at the edge of the platform, but the train is no longer in the frame.] Megan: Oh? Cueball: He lived backwards, remembering the future and not the past. To him, final goodbyes meant nothing, while first hellos were tearful and bittersweet.\n[Zooming out, the rail closest to the platform becomes visible.] Megan: Huh - so over the years he'd forget all his friends. Megan: Must've been lonely. Cueball: Yeah. He ended up just sitting around at home watching DVDs all day. The best was the time he rented 'Memento'...\n[Merlin with pointy hat and long white beard is sitting in a couch with the remote, watching TV which emits light and is clearly hooked up to a device (a DVD player).] Merlin: Well, that was straightforward.\n"}
{"id":271,"title":"Powers of One","image_title":"Powers of One","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/271","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/powers_of_one.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/271:_Powers_of_One","transcript":"Powers of One A mind-expanding look at our world [A sequence, presumably continuing endlessly in both directions, of identical images of a couple lying on a chequered blanket, with a picnic basket, on grass. Each image has a rule at the bottom giving measurements in meters, with the scale in terms of 1 to a particular power. The powers visible are the -1st (part), 0th-2nd, and 3rd (part).]\n","explanation":"This is a parody of the short documentary \"Powers of 10,\" which can be found here .\nAs in the documentary, the comic features a man and a woman having a picnic on a blanket. In the documentary, the apparent distance from the scene, and thus the zoom level, gradually changes by a factor of ten every ten seconds (hence the name \"Powers of 10\": 1, 10, 100, ...). In the comic, powers of one are used. Since all powers of 1 are 1, the image doesn't change at all, showing a series of identical images.\nThe title text refers to the Zen meditation ( zazen ), in which the meditator is supposed to suspend all judgmental thinking and let thoughts pass by without eliciting them consciously and without getting involved in them.\nPowers of One A mind-expanding look at our world [A sequence, presumably continuing endlessly in both directions, of identical images of a couple lying on a chequered blanket, with a picnic basket, on grass. Each image has a rule at the bottom giving measurements in meters, with the scale in terms of 1 to a particular power. The powers visible are the -1st (part), 0th-2nd, and 3rd (part).]\n"}
{"id":272,"title":"Linux User at Best Buy","image_title":"Linux User at Best Buy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/272","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/linux_user_at_best_buy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/272:_Linux_User_at_Best_Buy","transcript":"Salesman: Interested in updating your antivirus software? Cueball: Oh, I wouldn't need any of that.\n[In a spiky speech bubble.] Cueball: I run Linux.\n[Cueball does a backflip onto a motorcycle.] Flip\n[Cueball performs a wheelie on the motorcycle.]\n[Cueball does a hard, donut turn on the motorcycle, kicking up dirt into the salesman's face.]\n[Cueball speeds off on the motorcycle, leaving the salesman in a cloud of black exhaust.]\n","explanation":"Best Buy is an American chain of electronics and media stores. As with many such big box shops, they only sell pre-bundled software and boxed pre-built hardware, where the computers on offer are either Macs or other PCs , usually pre-installed with some variant of the Mac OS X or Windows NT operating system families. Most personal computer hackers\/enthusiasts (as opposed merely to workaday computer users) wouldn't be caught dead buying a pre-made computer, preferring instead to build their own using self-selected hardware components and install and configure their own preferred operating systems and software. As such, the subtext is that somebody buying a complete pre-packaged home computer system at Best Buy wouldn't know or care much about computers.\nThe salesperson is trying to sell antivirus software to Cueball because selling such software (e.g. Norton or Kaspersky ) to prospective Windows PC owners is generally a good sales tactic. The vast majority of all computer malware is engineered specifically to exploit Windows, and Windows' inherent anti-malware protection might most charitably be described with the phrase \"lacklustre, but not as bad as before.\" Windows users therefore will want antivirus protection, especially for use on a brand new machine that will soon be connected up to the Internet. Moreover, because the ecosystem of viruses and malware that thrive by infecting Windows PCs is constantly evolving (see 350: Network ) and being redesigned to take advantage of new exploits and fool last-month's antivirus software, it is quite prudent for a Windows PC owner to always keep their malware protection absolutely up-to-date, and many such security suites need to be regularly renewed with new versions.\nWhile some viruses and malware can afflict Linux , in general Unix-like operating systems (including Linux distributions and BSD ) are far more robust and secure than Windows, with fewer exploitable vulnerabilities. Perhaps even more importantly, Linux (not counting Android, which was not yet released) has a far smaller consumer market share, therefore offers less incentive to malware makers to target it. Therefore, Cueball is confident (rightfully so) that he will be fine without additional security. Moreover, Linux is free software , which means that anyone is able to audit the code and fix security bugs. Although malware protection usually isn't necessary, if extra protection is desired by the user, such as for tasks requiring very high security standards (such as on servers and supercomputers), there are anti-malware solutions available such as ClamAV .\nBack in 2007, when the less popular Windows Vista was released and with a stagnant Mac market, many in the Linux community believed that Linux would soon wipe out Windows as the operating system of choice for desktop PCs, after years of slow-but-steady growth. This explains the cheeky triumphalism of the final panels of the comic, in which Cueball hops on his quick, slick vehicle and speeds away. It's worth noting that this desktop reversal has not happened, though Linux did achieve a peak in popularity in 2011 , just as Windows users were laboriously switching from Windows XP to Windows 7 , with Linux peaking again in 2014 and Windows arguably in decline, and in any case, desktop PCs themselves have slowed in sales, losing ground first to laptops and most recently to embedded devices , where Linux use does indeed heavily exceed the competition, e.g. Android (which is loosely based on the Linux kernel) handily out-competing both the previously dominant iPhone (which was first released mere days after this comic) and the never-popular Windows Phone .\nThe title text makes sense in light of the fact that, like Linux, the software design of OS X (both are based on Unix, OS X through Darwin - see 676: Abstraction ) limits the amount of harm that can be done by malicious software, and Macs thus also have fewer viruses and malware than Windows. Apparently, Mac and Linux users flock together just waiting for some salesperson to come along and mistake them for someone gullible enough to use Windows. There is a notion that Macs can't get infected , but Mac malware is on the rise. This is taking the piss out of the smugness sometimes to be found among Mac and Linux users, who may view their preferred systems as hip and different from the \"mainstream\" Microsoft systems that they feel are manifestly inferior.\nSalesman: Interested in updating your antivirus software? Cueball: Oh, I wouldn't need any of that.\n[In a spiky speech bubble.] Cueball: I run Linux.\n[Cueball does a backflip onto a motorcycle.] Flip\n[Cueball performs a wheelie on the motorcycle.]\n[Cueball does a hard, donut turn on the motorcycle, kicking up dirt into the salesman's face.]\n[Cueball speeds off on the motorcycle, leaving the salesman in a cloud of black exhaust.]\n"}
{"id":273,"title":"Electromagnetic Spectrum","image_title":"Electromagnetic Spectrum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/273","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/electromagnetic_spectrum_small.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/273:_Electromagnetic_Spectrum","transcript":"[Everything is one big panel.]\nThe Electromagnetic Spectrum\nThese waves travel through the electromagnetic field. They were formerly carried by the aether, which was decommissioned in 1897 due to budget cuts.\nOther waves: Slinky waves [Cueball and Megan hold the ends of a tangled slinky.] Sound waves [There is a snippet of a frequency band. Between 20 Hz and 20 KHz is labeled \"Audible Sound.\" Towards the top is a line labeled \"That high-pitched noise in empty rooms.\"] The wave [A row of people does a wave.]\n[Three parallel scales are across the bottom. The first is lambda (m), ranging from 100Mm to 100fm; second is f (Hz), which starts at 1 Hz and reaches 100 THz about 2\/3 of the way along, after which the labels read \"other entertaining greek prefixes like peta- exa- and zappa-;\" last is Q (Gal^2\/Coloumb), whose labels are 17, 117, pi, 17, 42, phi, e^pi-pi, -2, 540^50, and 11^2. Above the scales and lined up accurately with the first two are the following:]\nPower & Telephone (100Mm to 1km) Radio & TV (1km to somewhere between 1m and 10cm); above that are many boxes showing subranges (AM, VHF, UHF, 24\/7 NPR pledge drives, a very thin band for the space rays controlling Steve Ballmer, 99.3 \"The Fox,\" 101.5 \"The Badger,\" 106.3 \"The Frightened Squirrel,\" cell phone cancer rays, CIA, ham radio, kosher radio, shouting car dealership commercials.) Microwaves (a bit more than 10cm to a bit more than 1mm); it also has subranges (aliens, just below SETI, wifi, FHF, brain waves, sulawesi, gravity) Toasters (about 1mm to about 100 micrometers) IR (about 100 micrometers to somewhere between 1 micrometer and 1 nm); above that is a bell graph labeled \"Superman\"s heat vision,\" with a motorcycle driving up the left side labeled \"Jack Black's Heat Vision.\" Visible light (and, under it, visible dark); above that is a bell graph labeled \"sunlight.\" There's a breakout chart above it showing the visible spectrum from 700nm (red) to 450nm (violet). There's an arrow pointing to where octarine would be, somewhere off to the side. Above that are bars showing the absorption spectra for hydrogen, helium, Depends(R) (yellow only), and Tampax(R) (red only). UV (about 100nm to about 10nm) Miller Light (a thin bar around 10nm) An unlabeled section with a thin line above it showing the frequency of the main death star laser A blocked-off portion labeled \"Censored Under Patriot Act.\" X-rays (from about 1nm to about 10pm); a line above shows the frequency of mail-order x-ray glasses. Somewhere vaguely above the 10pm mark is a potato. Gamma\/cosmic rays (10pm and smaller); above that is a bar marked Sinister Google Projects that also trails off into higher frequencies, and blogorays, which are slightly lower.\n","explanation":"This panel is a play on the Electromagnetic spectrum , showing a large piece of the spectrum and examples of phenomena that absorb or emit light along the spectra. Such spectra are commonly used in physics or astronomy education contexts when discussing the nature of light. This comic extends it to absurd lengths by including examples that may be variously hyper-specific, humorous, or non-EM phenomena.\nThe first two scales at the bottom show the wavelength \u03bb (in meters) and the frequency f (in Hertz) of the wave. The values are related as \u03bb=c\/f, where c is the speed of light. The last line showing Q(Gal\u00b2\/Coloumb) is nonsense; Gal ( Gallon ) is a unit of liquid volume measurement, and Coloumb is a likely typo for Coulomb , the SI unit of electric charge. Photons do not have volume in the traditional sense of the word, and are electrically neutral (thus carrying no charge).\nIn 1887, the Michelson\u2013Morley experiment proved for the first time that the aether theory was wrong. The year (1897) cited underneath the comic title may be an incorrectly-dated reference to this experiment. Nevertheless, after that time, many physicists like Hendrik Lorentz or Joseph Larmor were still working on some aether theories. Albert Einstein 's theory of Special Relativity in 1905 helped explain the theoretical basis for the lack of aether and was a definitive step in discarding previous work.\nThe wavelength starts at high values on the left and decreases in a logarithmic scale to the right. As a result of the inverse relationship between frequency and wavelength, the frequency scale starts at low values and increases logarithmically. The nonsense Q parameter does not change monotonically with either frequency or wavelength.\nBoth scales are labeled with powers of ten and with metric prefixes . For frequencies above 100 tera- Hertz, it just says \"other entertaining Greek prefixes like peta- and exa- and zappa-.\" The last prefix should be zetta- (denoting a factor of 10 21 ), but is intentionally mislabeled, referencing musician Frank Zappa .\nOther waves\nThree drawings of other types of waves than the electromagnetic type:\nPower and Telephone\nRadio and TV\nMicrowaves\nToasters\nIR (infrared)\nVisible light\nUV (ultraviolet)\nMiller Light\nEmpty section\nCensored under Patriot Act\nX-rays\nGamma\/Cosmic rays\nAnd finally, the Title Text : Randall likes to speculate what the world would look like if humans could see radio waves, gamma waves, etc. Such a thought experiment would be pretty abstract due to the total lack of a frame of reference (since everything outside the visible light spectrum is by definition invisible and thus beyond human optical perception), but for many people, that's also what makes it enticing. Randall immediately turns this profound train of thought around with a crude joke that he wants to know what the viewer's sister would look like in the nude, an activity for which x-rays would be useful.\n[Everything is one big panel.]\nThe Electromagnetic Spectrum\nThese waves travel through the electromagnetic field. They were formerly carried by the aether, which was decommissioned in 1897 due to budget cuts.\nOther waves: Slinky waves [Cueball and Megan hold the ends of a tangled slinky.] Sound waves [There is a snippet of a frequency band. Between 20 Hz and 20 KHz is labeled \"Audible Sound.\" Towards the top is a line labeled \"That high-pitched noise in empty rooms.\"] The wave [A row of people does a wave.]\n[Three parallel scales are across the bottom. The first is lambda (m), ranging from 100Mm to 100fm; second is f (Hz), which starts at 1 Hz and reaches 100 THz about 2\/3 of the way along, after which the labels read \"other entertaining greek prefixes like peta- exa- and zappa-;\" last is Q (Gal^2\/Coloumb), whose labels are 17, 117, pi, 17, 42, phi, e^pi-pi, -2, 540^50, and 11^2. Above the scales and lined up accurately with the first two are the following:]\nPower & Telephone (100Mm to 1km) Radio & TV (1km to somewhere between 1m and 10cm); above that are many boxes showing subranges (AM, VHF, UHF, 24\/7 NPR pledge drives, a very thin band for the space rays controlling Steve Ballmer, 99.3 \"The Fox,\" 101.5 \"The Badger,\" 106.3 \"The Frightened Squirrel,\" cell phone cancer rays, CIA, ham radio, kosher radio, shouting car dealership commercials.) Microwaves (a bit more than 10cm to a bit more than 1mm); it also has subranges (aliens, just below SETI, wifi, FHF, brain waves, sulawesi, gravity) Toasters (about 1mm to about 100 micrometers) IR (about 100 micrometers to somewhere between 1 micrometer and 1 nm); above that is a bell graph labeled \"Superman\"s heat vision,\" with a motorcycle driving up the left side labeled \"Jack Black's Heat Vision.\" Visible light (and, under it, visible dark); above that is a bell graph labeled \"sunlight.\" There's a breakout chart above it showing the visible spectrum from 700nm (red) to 450nm (violet). There's an arrow pointing to where octarine would be, somewhere off to the side. Above that are bars showing the absorption spectra for hydrogen, helium, Depends(R) (yellow only), and Tampax(R) (red only). UV (about 100nm to about 10nm) Miller Light (a thin bar around 10nm) An unlabeled section with a thin line above it showing the frequency of the main death star laser A blocked-off portion labeled \"Censored Under Patriot Act.\" X-rays (from about 1nm to about 10pm); a line above shows the frequency of mail-order x-ray glasses. Somewhere vaguely above the 10pm mark is a potato. Gamma\/cosmic rays (10pm and smaller); above that is a bar marked Sinister Google Projects that also trails off into higher frequencies, and blogorays, which are slightly lower.\n"}
{"id":274,"title":"With Apologies to The Who","image_title":"With Apologies to The Who","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/274","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/with_apologies_to_the_who.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/274:_With_Apologies_to_The_Who","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk with a computer, typing.] Monitor: People try to shut us d-d-down just 'cause our music gets around [Cueball is standing on his chair and typing with his keyboard across his hip.] Monitor: Old folks act like total noobs get off our net; you block the tubes [Cueball is really wailing on the keyboard.] Monitor: Why don't you all just d-d-disconnect and don't try an' grok our d-d-dialect [Cueball smashes the keyboard into the monitor.] Monitor: I'm not tryin' to cause a big s-s-sensation I'm just bloggin' 'bout my generation\nThe song was actually written by guitarist Pete Townshend .\nRoger Daltrey's name is misspelled as \"Daltry\".\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the song \" My Generation \" by the British rock band The Who , which was released in 1965. The song is about intergenerational conflict and has been regarded as a very decided proclamation of youthful rebellion. Cueball adapts the lyrics to describe his own generation, the Millennials . As people born from the 1980s onwards grew up with the internet, this generation is also nicknamed \" digital natives .\" It is therefore natural that the updated lyrics should refer to blogging and internet slang . The actions performed by Cueball while typing the text relate to the original music video, in which The Who smash their instruments in true rock star fashion. Cueball wails his keyboard like a guitar and smashes his monitor in the end.\nThe title text jokingly suggests that the band's lead singer Roger Daltrey originally meant the line\nAnd don't try and Digg what we all s-s-say\nas a reference to the social news site Digg , but changed it after switching to its competitor Reddit .\nExplanation of Terms\nAn explanation of the terms in this comic:\n\"noobs\" is a synonym of \"newbie,\" which is a person who is new to an online community and is thus often not familiar with the rules and norms of the community. Cueball is suggesting that old people are not competent\/familiar with the online realm. \"the tubes\" is likely a reference to the saying series of tubes . \"grok\" is a synonym for \"understand.\" Cueball is suggesting that people of older generations have difficulty understanding internet slang, which is often true. \"bloggin'\" (blogging) is the act of writing in a blog .\nOriginal Lyrics\nThe original lyrics of the song run as follows:\nPeople try to put us d-d-down Just because we get around Things they do look awful c-c-cold I hope I die before I get old [...] Why don't you all f-fade away And don't try and dig what we all s-s-say I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk with a computer, typing.] Monitor: People try to shut us d-d-down just 'cause our music gets around [Cueball is standing on his chair and typing with his keyboard across his hip.] Monitor: Old folks act like total noobs get off our net; you block the tubes [Cueball is really wailing on the keyboard.] Monitor: Why don't you all just d-d-disconnect and don't try an' grok our d-d-dialect [Cueball smashes the keyboard into the monitor.] Monitor: I'm not tryin' to cause a big s-s-sensation I'm just bloggin' 'bout my generation\nThe song was actually written by guitarist Pete Townshend .\nRoger Daltrey's name is misspelled as \"Daltry\".\n"}
{"id":275,"title":"Thoughts","image_title":"Thoughts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/275","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thoughts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/275:_Thoughts","transcript":"[Cueball talking with his girlfriend's parents represented by Blondie, holding a hand up in greeting and a larger version of Cueball. Above them there is a caption:] When meeting a girlfriend's family, I have to suppress the weirdest thoughts. Cueball: Hi! Blondie: Hi! It's so nice to finally meet you! Cueball: I have licked your daughter's nipples.\n","explanation":"This comic relates to the situation of getting introduced to the parents of one's girlfriend, which is often felt to be rather awkward. The parents tend to scrutinize and question the aspirant in order to find out if he is a good catch. A particularly delicate issue is the fact that the suitor may have had sexual intercourse with their daughter. This topic is almost never openly addressed, but can sometimes be felt in the subtext of the conversation. This makes the scenario somewhat susceptible to a so-called Freudian slip . The term describes a common psychological phenomenon where a subconscious thought bursts through and induces e.g. a slip of tongue.\nIn the comic, Cueball tries to repress any thoughts of sexual nature while talking to her parents Blondie and Blondie 's Cueball-like man.  He promptly utters the sentence \"I have licked your daughter's nipples.\" and thus involuntarily addresses the topic he tried to avoid.\nThe title text suggests that either the parents do not want their daughter to meet him again, or that the girlfriend interdicts his licking her nipples again because of the embarrassing scene.\n[Cueball talking with his girlfriend's parents represented by Blondie, holding a hand up in greeting and a larger version of Cueball. Above them there is a caption:] When meeting a girlfriend's family, I have to suppress the weirdest thoughts. Cueball: Hi! Blondie: Hi! It's so nice to finally meet you! Cueball: I have licked your daughter's nipples.\n"}
{"id":276,"title":"Fixed Width","image_title":"Fixed Width","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/276","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fixed_width.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/276:_Fixed_Width","transcript":"[A man, Rob, is sitting at a computer. The text is an IRC-style transcript of a conversation, in a fixed-width font. He is text-messaging a girl he slept with named Emily; their messages read as follows:]\n","explanation":"Fixed width or monospaced font refers to the font used in old teletype terminals and some instant messaging clients (often Courier ).\nFor two text lines to have the same length, it's easier if they are in a monospaced font. For example, the following sentences are the same length in a monospaced font, but since we are using a proportional font , those lengths are not exact (the third line is noticeably wider):\n<rob> last night was nice <emily> the best i've had <rob> yeah it was AMAZING\n\nThe title is possibly a double reference, both to a monospaced font and to lines of the same length.\nInitially, by mere chance, Emily's and Rob 's lines were exactly the same length. This made Rob want to continue the pattern.\nThat Rob feels forced to change what he wants to type to continue the pattern could be a symptom of obsessive\u2013compulsive disorder .\nBecause of the monospaced font, any reply with 19 characters (including space) would have continued the pattern. In particular, \"definitely for real\" or \"i'm in love with you\" would have worked.\nIn the title text Rob continues to write a sentence: \"I wish I knew how to quit this so I wouldn't have to quit you.\" He acknowledges that he has a problem, since he cannot quit his desire to keep the fixed width. If he could have quit this desire, then he would not have had to quit Emily. But since he felt he had to keep the fixed width, he involuntarily wrote something that felt for Emily as if he quit her. And he was too late out with his apology for her to read it.\n[A man, Rob, is sitting at a computer. The text is an IRC-style transcript of a conversation, in a fixed-width font. He is text-messaging a girl he slept with named Emily; their messages read as follows:]\n"}
{"id":277,"title":"Long Light","image_title":"Long Light","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/277","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/long_light.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/277:_Long_Light","transcript":"[Cueball in a car, sitting at a red light.] Cueball: This light always takes forever. I'd like to smack the idiot who designed this intersection. [An engineer steps up onto the hood of Cueball's car.] Engineer: Hi. Cueball: Who the hell are you? Engineer: I designed this intersection. Engineer [arms spread outward]: You're right - I should have just made the light shorter! Never mind the hours of simulation and testing I did. Never mind that this intersection interacts with it's neighbors in a complicated way and it took me a week to work out timing sequences that avoided total jams. Engineer: Clearly, I'm a crappy engineer and you have a better solution. Go on, show me your proposed timings. Cueball: Get the hell off my hood before I start driving and fling you into traffic. Engineer: You can't. Light's red. Cueball: Well, when will it change? Engineer: Tuesday.\n","explanation":"This strip depicts a common experience to most people - becoming frustrated with a device, system, or rule that appears to be badly made or have no purpose other than to frustrate the user (in this case, a traffic light that seems unreasonably, inexplicably long). One temptation we might have in these cases is to blame the designer of the system. Here, the designer appears and testifies to the amount of effort that went into the design, considering many factors. He challenges Cueball to come up with a better solution, the implication being that without a similar amount of training and effort, any naive solution would have flaws the designer would be happy to point out. This demonstrates to Cueball and the reader that just because they were unlucky enough to encounter something in a way that was inconvenient for no obvious reason, doesn't mean there is no reason at all.\nOf course, all of this has occurred after the designer leapt out of nowhere onto the hood of the car, so he may not be entirely stable. This is elaborated upon in the final panel, where the designer finally admits that red light won't change until Tuesday, but since this comic was published on a Friday, the timing scheme really was absurd after all. It is also possible that the designer has intentionally changed the light specifically to make Cueball wait for a couple of days, or to stop himself from being flung off of the hood of the car.\nThe title text returns to the original point, reminding us that designers work hard and often encounter complex problems in doing their jobs. Their frustration may also be in part from the knowledge that future users will blame them for unavoidable problems and undervalue their work. With a little empathy, we can find a human connection to these problems, rather than let them drive us crazy.\nRandall returns to the theme of the unseen contributions of engineers in 1741: Work .\n[Cueball in a car, sitting at a red light.] Cueball: This light always takes forever. I'd like to smack the idiot who designed this intersection. [An engineer steps up onto the hood of Cueball's car.] Engineer: Hi. Cueball: Who the hell are you? Engineer: I designed this intersection. Engineer [arms spread outward]: You're right - I should have just made the light shorter! Never mind the hours of simulation and testing I did. Never mind that this intersection interacts with it's neighbors in a complicated way and it took me a week to work out timing sequences that avoided total jams. Engineer: Clearly, I'm a crappy engineer and you have a better solution. Go on, show me your proposed timings. Cueball: Get the hell off my hood before I start driving and fling you into traffic. Engineer: You can't. Light's red. Cueball: Well, when will it change? Engineer: Tuesday.\n"}
{"id":278,"title":"Black Hat Support","image_title":"Black Hat Support","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/278","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/black_hat_support.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/278:_Black_Hat_Support","transcript":"[Black Hat is sitting at his computer, wearing a phone headset.] Black Hat: Thank you for calling the Black Hat Support Line, your first source for Linux support. How may I assist? Phone: Hi. I'm running an Apache server, and the load keeps climbing out of control. Black Hat: Okay. First, click on the Start Menu. Phone: I'm sorry, this is the Linux helpline, right? Black Hat: Of course, sir. Black Hat: If you'll just open the \"My Documents\" folder- Phone: Just a damn minute. I think you're putting me on. Black Hat: Please bear with me, sir. Black Hat: Now, load up your AOL and go to the Keyword \"Linux\"- Phone: *click*\n","explanation":"This strip portrays Black Hat providing support for Linux , but in fact he provides only annoying and unhelpful advice just for his own personal amusement.\nThe support line is clearly for Linux, as stated in the introduction, and the client on the phone clearly has a Linux problem. However, Black Hat is intentionally giving irrelevant instructions that refer to the Windows OS (Start Menu, My Documents Folder).\nFinally, Black Hat asks the client on the phone to \"bear with him\" and suggests that the client should use a highly obsolete mechanism to look for the answer to his problem, namely AOL keywords. AOL is well known for producing one of the earlier online communities and has since fallen largely out of favor. The client hangs up the phone.\nThe title text mentions the function select() , which allows you to write asynchronous IO access routines by checking if it is ready to be read\/written to at a specific moment. This is different than a threaded model, in that it can happen in a single thread. The danger of such programming is that if you do not coordinate the reader\/writer properly, you can create a deadlock, which can result in the consumption of a lot of resources.\n[Black Hat is sitting at his computer, wearing a phone headset.] Black Hat: Thank you for calling the Black Hat Support Line, your first source for Linux support. How may I assist? Phone: Hi. I'm running an Apache server, and the load keeps climbing out of control. Black Hat: Okay. First, click on the Start Menu. Phone: I'm sorry, this is the Linux helpline, right? Black Hat: Of course, sir. Black Hat: If you'll just open the \"My Documents\" folder- Phone: Just a damn minute. I think you're putting me on. Black Hat: Please bear with me, sir. Black Hat: Now, load up your AOL and go to the Keyword \"Linux\"- Phone: *click*\n"}
{"id":279,"title":"Pickup Lines","image_title":"Pickup Lines","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/279","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pickup_lines.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/279:_Pickup_Lines","transcript":"[Cueball at a bar.] Cueball: If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put your sister and I together. Cueball: Is your father a thief? Because that's totally my Jetta you parked outside. Cueball: You must be tired, 'cause you've been running through my mind all night. Cueball: Screaming.\n","explanation":"This comic adds strange twists to some classic abysmally cheesy pickup lines . Warning, terrible puns ahead:\nCueball is making a \"your sister\" joke. A different variation of this line is featured in 1069: Alphabet .\nA Jetta is a car, and Cueball is implying that the father is an actual thief.\nHe adds the word \"Screaming,\" to make the word \"running\" be literal instead of figurative.\nThis is yet another example of Beret Guy 's bartender job.\nThe title text refers to a pickup line like this: \"That shirt looks good on you, but would look even better on my bedroom floor.\" But here the shirt is used as fuse for a Molotov cocktail thrown into their office.\n[Cueball at a bar.] Cueball: If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put your sister and I together. Cueball: Is your father a thief? Because that's totally my Jetta you parked outside. Cueball: You must be tired, 'cause you've been running through my mind all night. Cueball: Screaming.\n"}
{"id":280,"title":"Librarians","image_title":"Librarians","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/280","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/librarians.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/280:_Librarians","transcript":"[Caption at the top:] Advantages to dating librarians.\n[Megan and Cueball are standing together; Cueball is reaching inside a paper bag:] Megan: We're stopping in Baltimore to visit my family, and that's final. Cueball: Oh yeah?\n[Cueball is upright and is holding a book.] Cueball: Hey, look, it's a new hardback book! Megan: You wouldn't.\n[Cueball bends the book backwards.] Book: crinkle\n[Cueball bends it back further.] Book: creak Megan: twitch\n[Cueball bends the book back still further.] Book: crack Megan: OKAY! Megan: You win!\n","explanation":"Cueball is pressing on Megan for stopping her idea to visit her family. While Megan is fully convinced that this visit will happen, Cueball takes advantage of her love of books. He starts to open up a brand-new hardcover book much farther than it was made to open, ruining the spine, and then mistreats it some more. Megan cannot take this anymore, and gives up on the family visit.\nThe title text goes on with the inflexible stereotype, as librarians will not make exceptions for or give reductions to their romantic partners' overdue fees. Alternately, it could mean that a librarian who is faced with the abuse of books as a bargaining tool would take retribution by not making an exception for late fees for their partner, particularly if said partner is absent-minded or otherwise disorganized.\nThe humor comes from the stereotype of librarians as very sensitive to proper treatment of books and inflexibility with rule-breaking.\n[Caption at the top:] Advantages to dating librarians.\n[Megan and Cueball are standing together; Cueball is reaching inside a paper bag:] Megan: We're stopping in Baltimore to visit my family, and that's final. Cueball: Oh yeah?\n[Cueball is upright and is holding a book.] Cueball: Hey, look, it's a new hardback book! Megan: You wouldn't.\n[Cueball bends the book backwards.] Book: crinkle\n[Cueball bends it back further.] Book: creak Megan: twitch\n[Cueball bends the book back still further.] Book: crack Megan: OKAY! Megan: You win!\n"}
{"id":281,"title":"Online Package Tracking","image_title":"Online Package Tracking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/281","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/online_package_tracking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/281:_Online_Package_Tracking","transcript":"Online Package Tracking: Pros: Convenient, Useful Cons: Makes you crazy\n[Megan is sitting at a computer.] *refresh* Megan: Aww, still in Memphis. *refresh* Megan: Aww, still in Memphis. *refresh* Megan: Aww, still in Memphis.\n","explanation":"Randall notes that package tracking, as provided by many shipping companies like UPS and FedEx Express , is helpful, as customers can see the status of their package delivery, and most people are very excited in the expectation of a package as shown in comic # 576 . However, Megan refreshes the package tracking page every few minutes in her impatience on the status of her package; it drives her crazy.\nThe headquarters of FedEx Express are located in Memphis, and it also serves as its global \"SuperHub\" located at Memphis International Airport .\nThe title text refers to the various \" x of the month clubs\" (fruit, cheese, wine, etc.) that one might have signed up for, only to receive a gift. But you are often not really interested in these gifts, and probably even less interested in receiving a stinging insect each month. This, combined with the ease by which a person can track the package, creates a strange dichotomy whereby you don't really want the package, but you keep checking where it is just because you can.\nOnline Package Tracking: Pros: Convenient, Useful Cons: Makes you crazy\n[Megan is sitting at a computer.] *refresh* Megan: Aww, still in Memphis. *refresh* Megan: Aww, still in Memphis. *refresh* Megan: Aww, still in Memphis.\n"}
{"id":282,"title":"Organic Fuel","image_title":"Organic Fuel","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/282","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/organic_fuel.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/282:_Organic_Fuel","transcript":"[Cueball at a computer and a friend standing nearby.] Cueball: Wow \u2013 Engines can burn vegetable oil. Friend: Well, sure. You can burn most any organic matter. Corns, leaves, spices... Cueball: Spices? Really? Friend: Sure \u2013 Mussolini made the trains run on thyme. Cueball: ... Cueball: We are no longer friends.\n","explanation":"Cueball is fascinated about engines that can burn organic matter. But in fact, biofuel is a big industry today. It is criticized now and then, because it can affect food prices and is believed to exacerbate world hunger.\nNext comes a reference to the famous quote, \"Mussolini made the trains run on time,\" an oft-quoted piece of propaganda from Italy under Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini . The pun is made on the fact that thyme (an herb, or as in this comic, a spice) and time (the universal phenomenon, as in the original quote) are homophones . But the organic matter thyme could technically be used as fuel.\nThe title text may be interpreted in one of two ways. It may be attributed to the pun-maker, in which case he makes no apology for his corny joke, or it may be attributed to Cueball, in which case he makes no apology for the termination of friendship, since the pun was too terrible.\nRandall later made another joke on the fact that thyme and time are homophones: 1123: The Universal Label .\n[Cueball at a computer and a friend standing nearby.] Cueball: Wow \u2013 Engines can burn vegetable oil. Friend: Well, sure. You can burn most any organic matter. Corns, leaves, spices... Cueball: Spices? Really? Friend: Sure \u2013 Mussolini made the trains run on thyme. Cueball: ... Cueball: We are no longer friends.\n"}
{"id":283,"title":"Projection","image_title":"Projection","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/283","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/projection.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/283:_Projection","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are seated on a couch, watching TV.] Megan: Argh, movie pet peeve- Someone sitting at a computer in the dark with the screen projected on their face. Monitors don't work like that!\n[Cueball and Megan face each other on the couch.] Cueball: Right - that only happens if you're in the way of a projected image. Like when we're sitting together in a parked car in the rain and the mottled light through the raindrops on the windshield makes shifting shadows on your skin...\n[Beat panel.]\n[Megan stands up, Cueball uses a laptop on table behind the couch.] Megan: ...I wasn't really into the movie anyway. Cueball: The nearest rainstorm's about 60 miles away. Megan: We'll drive fast. Cueball: I'll grab some snacks.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are watching a movie on a couch. During the movie, a scene features a character's face with legible text projected by the monitor. Though commonly depicted for dramatic effect, this phenomenon does not actually occur with conventional monitor technology. Megan is annoyed and agitated by the inaccuracy of the effect. Cueball agrees and delves more into the optical underpinnings of projected images, but in the process segues into a romantic memory of the two of them in a parked car in the rain.\nAt that point, the two lose interest in the movie and begin making preparations to drive to the nearest rainstorm for another romantic evening experience.\nThis was the second time in four months that Randall mentions Pet Peeves . The first was 238: Pet Peeve 114 . The next, 1138: Heatmap , did not appear until more than five years later.\n[Cueball and Megan are seated on a couch, watching TV.] Megan: Argh, movie pet peeve- Someone sitting at a computer in the dark with the screen projected on their face. Monitors don't work like that!\n[Cueball and Megan face each other on the couch.] Cueball: Right - that only happens if you're in the way of a projected image. Like when we're sitting together in a parked car in the rain and the mottled light through the raindrops on the windshield makes shifting shadows on your skin...\n[Beat panel.]\n[Megan stands up, Cueball uses a laptop on table behind the couch.] Megan: ...I wasn't really into the movie anyway. Cueball: The nearest rainstorm's about 60 miles away. Megan: We'll drive fast. Cueball: I'll grab some snacks.\n"}
{"id":284,"title":"Tape Measure","image_title":"Tape Measure","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/284","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tape_measure.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/284:_Tape_Measure","transcript":"[Cueball finds a tape measure.] Cueball: Hey, a tape measure.\n[Cueball extends the tape measure.] extend extend\n[The tape measure falls.] clatter\n[Cueball tries again.] click schwoop\nextend extend\nextend\nCueball (thinking): Ooh, eight feet. I wonder if that's a record.\n[Cueball imagines an olympic stadium, with three people extending tape measures] Audience: Gooo! Goooo! Gooooooo!\n","explanation":"Cueball acts like a small boy, finding a tape measure and then playing with it. He then extends it to 8 feet (approx. 2.5 meters), wondering whether or not that was a record, which makes him imagine a sport where extending the tape measure as far as possible was the goal. (Tape measure strips are bent upward lengthwise to support itself when oriented correctly, much like how one can better hold a sheet of paper horizontally by creating a slight dip. However, as a tape measure is extended, the weight of the strip eventually overcomes the support offered by the bend, causing it to collapse. Skillfully holding the tape measure at an angle can redirect some of the weight load and allow for a longer total extension; it is implied that this technique can be explored to the point of becoming its own sport.)\nThe title text refers to a future where this sport exists, and this comic is a representation of the origin of this sport.\n[Cueball finds a tape measure.] Cueball: Hey, a tape measure.\n[Cueball extends the tape measure.] extend extend\n[The tape measure falls.] clatter\n[Cueball tries again.] click schwoop\nextend extend\nextend\nCueball (thinking): Ooh, eight feet. I wonder if that's a record.\n[Cueball imagines an olympic stadium, with three people extending tape measures] Audience: Gooo! Goooo! Gooooooo!\n"}
{"id":285,"title":"Wikipedian Protester","image_title":"Wikipedian Protester","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/285","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wikipedian_protester.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/285:_Wikipedian_Protester","transcript":"[A man with dark flat hair is standing at a podium. He is speaking to a crowd while standing behind a lectern. The lectern has a microphone on the top and sports an American flag in color on the side. He holds an arm on the lectern and the other arm is held up in front of him with a finger pointing upwards. There are four red stars on the side of the podium below him and behind him something that could be high curtains. There is an empty gap between the podium and the first people in the crowd followed by a stick with a red top, that indicates a fence to keep the crowd at a distance from the podium. After the fence there is a large crowd of people listening, most of them only partly drawn, only a few has hair. Three signs can be seen above the heads of the crowd, but they are all empty white signs. Except in the middle of the crowd, where Cueball has been raised above the rest of the crowd. He is holding a large sign up over his head in both hands. The sign has a blue text in black square brackets:] [ Citation needed ]","explanation":"Cueball holds up a sign reading \"[ Citation needed ]\" during a political speech. The sign text is based on the Wikipedia template that can be placed next to statements that need citations, (that look like this [ citation needed ] ) usually because of questionable validity. Cueball is using this template to challenge the politician's speech, as political speakers often throw out claims that are not real.\nThe title text below the comic, \u201cSemi-protect the constitution\u201d, represents an alternative sign the protester could be holding. It is a pun on an occasionally-heard phrase \u201cprotect the Constitution,\u201d which urges politicians to pass and enforce laws in a way that preserves the rules and rights set down by the U.S. constitution . \u201csemi-protect\u201d references semi-protection , a protection measure applied to some articles on Wikipedia, which protects some articles from being edited anonymously. More specifically, it does not allow articles to be edited by people who have been on the wiki for less than 4 days or made less than 10 edits unless an administrator or event coordinator manually confirms them earlier. Semi-protection on an article is shown by displaying this lock on the top right of an article. Constitutional amendments cannot usually be proposed anonymously. [1] [2] , meaning that in effect, all articles of the Constitution are semi-protected.\n[A man with dark flat hair is standing at a podium. He is speaking to a crowd while standing behind a lectern. The lectern has a microphone on the top and sports an American flag in color on the side. He holds an arm on the lectern and the other arm is held up in front of him with a finger pointing upwards. There are four red stars on the side of the podium below him and behind him something that could be high curtains. There is an empty gap between the podium and the first people in the crowd followed by a stick with a red top, that indicates a fence to keep the crowd at a distance from the podium. After the fence there is a large crowd of people listening, most of them only partly drawn, only a few has hair. Three signs can be seen above the heads of the crowd, but they are all empty white signs. Except in the middle of the crowd, where Cueball has been raised above the rest of the crowd. He is holding a large sign up over his head in both hands. The sign has a blue text in black square brackets:] [ Citation needed ]"}
{"id":286,"title":"All Your Base","image_title":"All Your Base","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/286","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/all_your_base.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/286:_All_Your_Base","transcript":"[A section of a Linux terminal window is shown.] Text from window:\n[Ponytail is at a computer.] Ponytail: What's with the All Your Base stuff? Didn't that die like five years ago? [From off-panel]: Yes.\n[Cueball enters the panel.] Cueball: It was my first internet meme, and my favorite. Others tired of it, but I never did. Cueball: So I wait.\n[Cueball raises his fists.] Cueball: Someday, decades from now, people will have forgotten. It will be fresh again. Cueball: Retro. Cueball: And when that day comes,\nCueball: I WILL BE READY! Ponytail: You need a hobby or something. Cueball: What you say!! Cueball: Wait, too soon.\n","explanation":"The comic refers to a popular internet phenomenon ( meme ) called \" all your base are belong to us .\" This catchphrase originated from the arcade shooter game \" Zero Wing \" and is a popular example of a poor translation into the English language. The phrase was popularized throughout the Internet and referenced in various images and videos. It is considered one of the earliest Internet memes, with the first occurrences dating back to the year 1998.\nCueball has, according to the comic, participated in the spread of the meme during its heyday. Ponytail , examining Cueball's root directory, wonders at his keeping the content he created years ago, as the meme's popularity has decreased massively since then. Cueball answers that this was always his favorite meme, and that he is waiting for the day it gets revived. His second-to-last line, \"What you say !! ,\" is a line from the game as well, although he says it much sooner than its supposed return to popularity.\nBy using the example of internet memes, the comic also relates to the general principle of fashion , that everything once popular will, after a long enough time, be again in vogue. Trends experiencing this renaissance are often referred to as retro . Internet phenomena can be observed to follow the same rule, although with much shorter intervals due to the speed of information turnover.\nThe title text prophesies the return of the \"all your base\" (AYB) meme in 2021 (similar-sounding to \"AD 2101,\" the date mentioned at the beginning of the game). It also contains a pun on the term \" zero hour \" and the name of the game, which initially brought the phrase into fashion.\nThe title text's prediction may have been recently fulfilled by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .\n[A section of a Linux terminal window is shown.] Text from window:\n[Ponytail is at a computer.] Ponytail: What's with the All Your Base stuff? Didn't that die like five years ago? [From off-panel]: Yes.\n[Cueball enters the panel.] Cueball: It was my first internet meme, and my favorite. Others tired of it, but I never did. Cueball: So I wait.\n[Cueball raises his fists.] Cueball: Someday, decades from now, people will have forgotten. It will be fresh again. Cueball: Retro. Cueball: And when that day comes,\nCueball: I WILL BE READY! Ponytail: You need a hobby or something. Cueball: What you say!! Cueball: Wait, too soon.\n"}
{"id":287,"title":"NP-Complete","image_title":"NP-Complete","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/287","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/np_complete.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/287:_NP-Complete","transcript":"My Hobby: Embedding NP-Complete problems in restaurant orders [A menu is shown.] Chotchkies Restaurant Appetizers Mixed Fruit 2.15 French Fries 2.75 Side Salad 3.35 Hot Wings 3.55 Mozzarella Sticks 4.20 Sampler Plate 5.80 Sandwiches Barbecue 6.55 [Megan, another person, and Cueball are sitting at a table. Cueball is holding the menu as well as a thick book and is ordering from a waiter. Megan is facepalming.] Cueball: We'd like exactly $15.05 worth of appetizers, please. Waiter: ...Exactly? Uhh... Cueball: Here, these papers on the knapsack problem might help you out. Waiter: Listen, I have six other tables to get to\u2014 Cueball: \u2014As fast as possible, of course. Want something on traveling salesman?\n","explanation":"Another entry in the \" My Hobby \" series of comics. Cueball is embedding NP-complete problems in restaurant orders. Specifically, he is ordering appetizers not by explicitly stating the names, but by the total price of them all. This is a simplified example of the knapsack problem . This is a problem in combinatorial optimization, as follows: If you have a knapsack (backpack or rucksack) that can hold a specific amount of weight, and you have a set of items, each with its own assigned value and weight, you have to select items to put into the knapsack so that the weight does not exceed the capacity of the knapsack, and the combined value of all the items is maximized.\nIn computational complexity theory , NP stands for \"nondeterministic polynomial time,\" which means that problems that are NP take polynomial running time (i.e. the time a CPU would take to run the program would be polynomial in the input size) to verify a solution, but it is unknown whether finding any or all solutions can be done in polynomial time. Polynomial time is considered efficient; exponential and higher times are considered unfeasible for computation. NP-complete problems are ones that, if a polynomial time algorithm is found for any of them, then all NP problems have polynomial time solutions. In short, particular guesses in NP-complete problems can be checked easily, but systematically finding solutions is far more difficult.\nThe waiter's problem is NP-complete, since a given order's price can be found and checked quickly, but finding an order to match a price is much harder. This causes the order to effectively be an application layer denial-of-service attack \/ algorithmic complexity attack on the waiter, similar to Slowloris or ReDoS . (Formal proofs of the NP-completeness of the knapsack problem can be found at the above link.) The most straightforward way for a human to find a solution is to methodically start by first listing all the (6) ways of choosing one appetizer, and their total costs, then list all the (21) ways of choosing two appetizers (allowing repeats), and then list all the (56) ways of choosing three appetizers, and so forth. As any combination of eight appetizers would be more than $15.05, the process need not extend beyond listing all the (1715) ways of choosing seven appetizers.\nAnother famous NP-complete problem is the travelling salesman problem , mentioned by Cueball at the end, referring to the waiter's claim that he has 6 more tables to get to. (see also 399: Travelling Salesman Problem ).\nThe title text refers to the fact that NP-complete problems have no known polynomial time general solutions, and it is unknown if such a solution can ever be found. If the waiter can find an efficient general solution to this, he will have solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics. This problem is one of the six remaining unsolved Millennium Prize Problems stated by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000, for which a correct solution (including proving that such a solution doesn't exist) is worth US$1,000,000. A 50% tip is slightly less than fair.\nFor those curious, there are exactly two combinations of appetizers that total $15.05 and solve the problem posed in the comic strip:\nMy Hobby: Embedding NP-Complete problems in restaurant orders [A menu is shown.] Chotchkies Restaurant Appetizers Mixed Fruit 2.15 French Fries 2.75 Side Salad 3.35 Hot Wings 3.55 Mozzarella Sticks 4.20 Sampler Plate 5.80 Sandwiches Barbecue 6.55 [Megan, another person, and Cueball are sitting at a table. Cueball is holding the menu as well as a thick book and is ordering from a waiter. Megan is facepalming.] Cueball: We'd like exactly $15.05 worth of appetizers, please. Waiter: ...Exactly? Uhh... Cueball: Here, these papers on the knapsack problem might help you out. Waiter: Listen, I have six other tables to get to\u2014 Cueball: \u2014As fast as possible, of course. Want something on traveling salesman?\n"}
{"id":288,"title":"Elevator","image_title":"Elevator","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/288","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/elevator.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/288:_Elevator","transcript":"[Elevator panel, with a Certificate of Inspection and five floor buttons, numbered 1\u20134. The fifth button is unlabeled.] [Cueball thinks.] [Cueball writes something on a small piece of paper.] Write Write [Cueball tapes it onto the panel.] [Elevator panel, with the same Certificate and buttons, and with the piece of paper labeling the fifth button \"Zeppelin!\"] [Cueball presses the new \"Zeppelin!\" button.] [Elevator moves.] Elevator: Ding [Cueball is looking out the door of a Zeppelin. The Zeppelin is flying over a green landscape with many lakes.]\n","explanation":"Cueball is in an elevator, and notices that, beneath the certificate of Elevator Inspection , mandatory in all U.S. elevators at least, there are buttons for Floor 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then a mysterious unlabeled button. Possible logical conclusions he might have made include (1) there is a fifth floor reachable by pushing the bottom button which for some reason is not labeled; or (2) the button has some other function, a common one is to stop the elevator wherever it may be; or (3) the panel with the buttons is from a template used for various elevators with up to five floors, and as this particular elevator only goes to four floors, the bottom button is unlabeled, and nothing will happen if he pushes it.\nHe has, however, chosen to believe in a different explanation: the fifth button is not currently assigned, but giving it a label will assign it to whatever floor or other function he can give it. The possibilities are truly endless. And so, the intrepid Cueball writes \"Zeppelin!\" on a slip of paper and tapes it next to the unassigned button, thereby assigning it to move the elevator not to Floor 5, but to a Zeppelin . And it works \u2013 the elevator opens aboard a Zeppelin floating in the air, high above a land with many lakes, perhaps Nunavut or other Northern Canadian tundra.\nThe title text is most likely a reference to the Aerosmith song \"Love in an Elevator,\" which really is about sex in an elevator. However, it would also be great if one could reach the elevation of love by getting there in a magic elevator.\n[Elevator panel, with a Certificate of Inspection and five floor buttons, numbered 1\u20134. The fifth button is unlabeled.] [Cueball thinks.] [Cueball writes something on a small piece of paper.] Write Write [Cueball tapes it onto the panel.] [Elevator panel, with the same Certificate and buttons, and with the piece of paper labeling the fifth button \"Zeppelin!\"] [Cueball presses the new \"Zeppelin!\" button.] [Elevator moves.] Elevator: Ding [Cueball is looking out the door of a Zeppelin. The Zeppelin is flying over a green landscape with many lakes.]\n"}
{"id":289,"title":"Alone","image_title":"Alone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/289","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/289:_Alone","transcript":"[Megan crawling on bed toward Cueball.] Cueball: It's not something you can turn off. [Cueball pulling Megan, bedspread, and pillow off of bed onto floor.] Cueball: A part of me is always detached. Abstracting, looking at numbers and patterns. [Megan on top of Cueball, both under bedspread, on floor. Megan looks to be 'touching' Cueball.] Cueball: When we should be closest, part of me is still so alone. Counting the touches of her fingertips. Touch. Touch. Touch touch. Touch touch touch. Touch touch touch touch touch. [Same scene as third panel.] Cueball: Wait. Is that... That's the Fibonacci sequence! Whatever I did to deserve you, it couldn't have been enough.\n","explanation":"Cueball is making love with Megan but, like many highly introverted people, his attention is split between his inner and outer worlds. Part of his mind is counting her touches, and another part is wondering why his brain does these things, automatically and without his wanting it to. This worries him, and he feels guilty because he isn't giving her his undivided attention, which he believes she deserves.\nAs he unwillingly counts her touches, he recognizes the Fibonacci sequence . This recognition shocks him: it's like she knows what is going on in his head, and she sends him this signal to tell him that it's okay and that she understands. Awestruck, Cueball is reassured and glories in her love.\nThe title text makes it clear that he is able to stop worrying about the counting and that he is able to let it continue just in the background. It doesn't stop, but it isn't nearly that important or salient as the touching done by Megan.\n[Megan crawling on bed toward Cueball.] Cueball: It's not something you can turn off. [Cueball pulling Megan, bedspread, and pillow off of bed onto floor.] Cueball: A part of me is always detached. Abstracting, looking at numbers and patterns. [Megan on top of Cueball, both under bedspread, on floor. Megan looks to be 'touching' Cueball.] Cueball: When we should be closest, part of me is still so alone. Counting the touches of her fingertips. Touch. Touch. Touch touch. Touch touch touch. Touch touch touch touch touch. [Same scene as third panel.] Cueball: Wait. Is that... That's the Fibonacci sequence! Whatever I did to deserve you, it couldn't have been enough.\n"}
{"id":290,"title":"Fucking Blue Shells","image_title":"Fucking Blue Shells","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/290","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fucking_blue_shells.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/290:_Fucking_Blue_Shells","transcript":"My Profanity Usage By Cause: [A pie chart is shown.] [Injury is about 2.5% of pie chart.] [Irony is about 2.5% of pie chart.] [Misc is about 2.5% of pie chart.] [Segfaults is about 10% of pie chart.] [Mario Kart is about 82.5% of pie chart.]\n","explanation":"Sometimes, something suddenly goes wrong, and you can only shout obscenities at it. For instance, when the dog bites, when the bee stings, something unexpected happens, or a program crashes (e.g. a segfault ), the victim often reacts by swearing.\nFor Randall , however, profanities are caused mostly by blue shells in the video game Mario Kart . The blue shells, when fired, target the player currently in first place and stop them cold. In a close game near the end of the race, a player can go from first to an unrecoverable last in one hit.\nThe title text refers to the \" Double Dash \" installment of Mario Kart. This includes a technique to avoid being hit by a blue shell, but it requires skillful timing to accomplish.  The term \" deep magic \" comes from computer programmer slang. Interestingly, with a boost mushroom in Mario Kart Wii and Mario Kart 8 (and the so-called \"Super-Horn\" in the latter), it is also possible (with accurate timing) to escape blue shells.\nMy Profanity Usage By Cause: [A pie chart is shown.] [Injury is about 2.5% of pie chart.] [Irony is about 2.5% of pie chart.] [Misc is about 2.5% of pie chart.] [Segfaults is about 10% of pie chart.] [Mario Kart is about 82.5% of pie chart.]\n"}
{"id":291,"title":"Dignified","image_title":"Dignified","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/291","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dignified.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/291:_Dignified","transcript":"[Beret Guy swinging upside-down from a tree branch talking to White Hat walking by.] Beret Guy: You were once shoved headfirst through someone's vagina. Why are you acting so dignified?\n","explanation":"Beret Guy is hanging upside down in a tree, usually something you might have done in your childhood. As an adult, it is not considered very dignified. Most likely, White Hat made a comment on this and the fact that Beret Guy has his head down. But then, Beret Guy gives him an answer, regarding where White Hat's head once came through and asks him why he is still acting so dignified .\nHere, Beret Guy is referring to the process of childbirth . Put in the way he mentions said process, the fact that White Hat came into this world in such a fashion would be very humiliating.\nIn the title text, White Hat replies that he does not know, but then continues to ask why Beret Guy's beret stays on his head, even when upside down (in which gravity would tend to make a beret fall off). Beret Guy explains that he has stapled the beret onto his head.\nSuch a process is similar to that of closing a wound after major head surgery, using surgical staples . Normally, the stapling of the head would be conducted with anesthetic and removed after the incision has healed, and only an insane person would do this to himself. \nDoing this the way Beret Guy did it would be very, very, painful, and likely a bad idea. [ citation needed ]\nBeret Guy is never seen without his hat (although it has been hidden under a green helmet once in 769: War ). And later in 478: The Staple Madness , it turns out that he likes to staple anything to everything, so maybe he also stapled his hat to his head. The staple madness comic may very well be a sequel to this comic 262: IN UR REALITY , where Black Hat implied that he had stapled stuff to cats in the title text.\nIn the teaser trailer of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Indy staples a hat to his head (or at least pretends to) to prevent it from blowing off, a similar situation to the one Beret Guy is in here.\n[Beret Guy swinging upside-down from a tree branch talking to White Hat walking by.] Beret Guy: You were once shoved headfirst through someone's vagina. Why are you acting so dignified?\n"}
{"id":292,"title":"goto","image_title":"goto","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/292","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/goto.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/292:_goto","transcript":"[Sideways view of Cueball sitting at computer, thinking.] Cueball: I could restructure the program's flow - or use one little 'GOTO' instead. Cueball: Eh, screw good practice. How bad can it be? Text on computer: goto main_sub3; *Compile* [We now have a view from behind Cueball. Cueball looks at the computer.] [A raptor jumps into the panel, pushing Cueball off his chair.]\n","explanation":"Goto is a construct found in many computer languages that causes control flow to go from one place in a program to another, without returning. Once common in computer programming, its popularity diminished in the 1960s and 1970s as focus on structured programming became the norm. Edsger W. Dijkstra 's article \"Go To Statement Considered Harmful\" in particular contributed to the decline of goto.\nOften, people learning programming are told that goto is bad and should be avoided, but frequently, they are not given a good reason. Cueball , as one of these people, sees no harm in using goto to avoid rewriting much of his program, most likely written in the C programming language. As a result, he is attacked by a velociraptor . Velociraptor attacks are a running joke (and fear) often expressed in xkcd .\nThe name main_sub3 of the goto destination also shows bad programming style: it is an unmeaningful name suggesting that at least two similarly unmeaningful names are used for other goto marks and it is contradictory in that a chunk of code can either belong to the main program or to a subroutine, but not both.\nThe title text refers to Neal Stephenson , an author of cyberpunk novels. A label is used in many programming languages to refer to a point in a program that a goto instruction can jump to. The joke is that one of Stephenson's characters in Cryptonomicon is named Goto Dengo. When said out loud, \"Dengo\" sounds like \"Then go.\"\n[Sideways view of Cueball sitting at computer, thinking.] Cueball: I could restructure the program's flow - or use one little 'GOTO' instead. Cueball: Eh, screw good practice. How bad can it be? Text on computer: goto main_sub3; *Compile* [We now have a view from behind Cueball. Cueball looks at the computer.] [A raptor jumps into the panel, pushing Cueball off his chair.]\n"}
{"id":293,"title":"RTFM","image_title":"RTFM","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/293","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rtfm.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/293:_RTFM","transcript":"[Cueball with a knife sticking out of his heavily bleeding face stands in front of a toaster on a counter, which has an arm extending from the top of it. He is holding a telephone to his ear.] Cueball: Hello, 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face! 911: Did you read the toaster's man page first? Cueball: Well, no, but all I wanted was-- 911: click\n","explanation":"The title RTFM is an acronym for \" read the fucking manual ,\" which frustrated software manufacturers tell users when confronted with a simple question (most likely answered in the manual).\nHowever, Cueball encounters a similar situation with a 911 call (the emergency number in the US), in which the first question the 911 dispatcher asks is if Cueball has read the toaster's man page (man pages are the 'manual' for unix systems, but only describe commands and library functions, not hardware). Even if a man page existed, it is unreasonable to require the user of a toaster to read the manual simply to avoid being stabbed in the face. [ citation needed ] The 911 dispatcher decides that as Cueball has not read the man page, he is not entitled to medical assistance, and so hangs up.\nThe title text refers to the popular phrase \"Life's too short,\" which asserts that because we only have a limited amount of time on Earth, and that time can pass by quickly, we should make the most of it. That could mean, for example, don't spend time reading the documentation unless you actually experience a problem. The second part suggests that some people actually die because they didn't RTFM!\n[Cueball with a knife sticking out of his heavily bleeding face stands in front of a toaster on a counter, which has an arm extending from the top of it. He is holding a telephone to his ear.] Cueball: Hello, 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face! 911: Did you read the toaster's man page first? Cueball: Well, no, but all I wanted was-- 911: click\n"}
{"id":294,"title":"Bookstore","image_title":"Bookstore","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/294","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bookstore.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/294:_Bookstore","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in a bookstore, looking at a book.] Cueball [thinking]: This book looks interesting. Maybe I'll buy it.\n[Cueball reads the book; a clock appears above.]\nCueball [thinking]: Oops, I read the whole thing. Cueball [thinking]: I'll just quietly put it back and go.\n[Cueball walks through a security scanner to exit the bookstore.] BEEP BEEP BEEP\nVoice from off-frame: Hey! Your brain set off the sensor! Cueball: I, uhh... Voice from off-frame: You have a book in there, don't you! Cueball: Crap.\n","explanation":"Cueball starts reading a book off the shelf as he considers buying it, but gets so engrossed in it that he accidentally reads the entire thing, eliminating his reason for buying it in the first place. He quietly puts it back and turns to leave the store, only to have the book (which exists in his brain as information) set off the store's anti-theft sensor. This is a satire of copyright as it pertains to digital copies, because when you download a game or music file (or read a book, in this case), you are merely making an identical copy of the source material.\nThe title text suggests that if the security guard wants to do a brain search, he might want to skip over all the presumably sexual encounters Cueball has had with the security guard's mom, thus inducing a 'yo mama' joke.\n[Cueball is standing in a bookstore, looking at a book.] Cueball [thinking]: This book looks interesting. Maybe I'll buy it.\n[Cueball reads the book; a clock appears above.]\nCueball [thinking]: Oops, I read the whole thing. Cueball [thinking]: I'll just quietly put it back and go.\n[Cueball walks through a security scanner to exit the bookstore.] BEEP BEEP BEEP\nVoice from off-frame: Hey! Your brain set off the sensor! Cueball: I, uhh... Voice from off-frame: You have a book in there, don't you! Cueball: Crap.\n"}
{"id":295,"title":"DNE","image_title":"DNE","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/295","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dne.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/295:_DNE","transcript":"[Cueball is in an empty classroom writing on the whiteboard. In the top right corner in large print is written \"Fuck This Place!\". It is circled, and underneath he is writing \"DNE\".]\n","explanation":"DNE stands for \"do not erase,\" and is commonly used on school whiteboards to let the sanitation staff and other teachers know not to erase that particular area of the board. DNE circles often encompass important information such as test dates or the teacher's name.\nIt is easy to see how leaving things marked with DNE can become automatic for anyone often erasing boards, so that they don't notice what the message actually says, or reflect on whether the DNE-marking is reasonable for it. Cueball 's dissatisfactory note is not very subtle, but Randall notes in the title text that advertisers have successfully used the same tactic for less conspicuous URLs to their sites. He also kindly asks you to replace those messages with xkcd.com to get some free advertising.\nOn the bottom half of the board is a crossed out 2x2 matrix and two functions for exponential decay .\n[Cueball is in an empty classroom writing on the whiteboard. In the top right corner in large print is written \"Fuck This Place!\". It is circled, and underneath he is writing \"DNE\".]\n"}
{"id":296,"title":"Tony Hawk","image_title":"Tony Hawk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/296","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tony_hawk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/296:_Tony_Hawk","transcript":"My Hobby: Doing skateboard tricks in Tony Hawk while also doing them in real life. [Cueball moves towards a quarter pipe on his skateboard while manipulating his PSP.] Beep Click Beep\n[Cueball is in mid air having performed a Frontside 360\u00b0, both literally and on the PSP.] \u266a Frontside 360\u00b0! \u266b Frontside 360\u00b0!\n","explanation":"Cueball is seen using a hand-held game system, while on a skateboard. He is playing one of the many Tony Hawk titles in which you control a skater and perform tricks to gain points and achievements. While playing the game, he wants to simultaneously perform the trick in real life, both because it is exceptionally difficult to do both and because the game will give him praise when he does a trick successfully.\nIn the title text, Randall describes his Bad Idea #271: Dropping into the half-pipe on a Segway . \nOne imagines this would result in the Segway becoming unstable and going completely crazy, hence one would classify it as a \"bad idea.\"\nWhich is surprisingly not the case; it even looks quite fun .\nThe Segway engineers obviously foresaw this situation and implemented the Segway controller with its tilt sensors accordingly.\nMy Hobby: Doing skateboard tricks in Tony Hawk while also doing them in real life. [Cueball moves towards a quarter pipe on his skateboard while manipulating his PSP.] Beep Click Beep\n[Cueball is in mid air having performed a Frontside 360\u00b0, both literally and on the PSP.] \u266a Frontside 360\u00b0! \u266b Frontside 360\u00b0!\n"}
{"id":297,"title":"Lisp Cycles","image_title":"Lisp Cycles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/297","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lisp_cycles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/297:_Lisp_Cycles","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a computer, and Megan is standing behind the desk.] Cueball: Lisp is over half a century old and it still has this perfect, timeless air about it. Cueball: I wonder if the cycles will continue forever. A few coders from each new generation rediscovering the Lisp arts.\n[Man in Jedi robes carrying a towering stack of parentheses in his arms, speaking to Hairy.] Jedi: These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons. For a more... civilized age.","explanation":"Lisp is one of the oldest high level programming languages . Despite being significantly ahead of its time, it never got enough traction outside of academia, and has never been widely used. However, it is considered to be a very powerful language even in the present day. Quotations regarding Lisp show that several big names in computer science and the tech industry hold Lisp in very high esteem. Eric S. Raymond goes as far as to say\nLisp is also famous for its use of fully parenthesized Polish prefix notation . As a result, Lisp programs take the form of enormous nested lists bounded by parentheses, and it is not uncommon to see the source code of a large Lisp program close off with an equally enormous stack of close-parens, representing the simultaneous termination of dozens of recursively and hierarchically nested functional and procedural structures.\nIn the first panel, Cueball praises Lisp, observing that no other language can match the awe that it still strikes despite its significant seniority.\nIn the second panel, Cueball proposes that new programmers might continue to learn Lisp forever; despite the language's lack of widespread adoption, a small cadre of hackers will always exist who keep the language alive.\nThe third panel references Star Wars . The \"old wizard\" Obi-Wan Kenobi, who remembers the culture and sophistication of the Old Republic (\"Before the dark times. Before the Empire.\") and lives as a hermit in the desert at the beginning of the film spoke these lines when passing on a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker:\nThe title text is also a reference to Star Wars lines:\nThe MIT mentioned in the title text is, of course, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution fundamental to the development of Lisp (and Scheme, which is a dialect of Lisp). For about 20 years, MIT taught Scheme in its introductory computer science course, 6.001 \u2014 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (that course has since been replaced with a course teaching Python).\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer, and Megan is standing behind the desk.] Cueball: Lisp is over half a century old and it still has this perfect, timeless air about it. Cueball: I wonder if the cycles will continue forever. A few coders from each new generation rediscovering the Lisp arts.\n[Man in Jedi robes carrying a towering stack of parentheses in his arms, speaking to Hairy.] Jedi: These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons. For a more... civilized age."}
{"id":298,"title":"Tesla Coil","image_title":"Tesla Coil","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/298","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tesla_coil.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/298:_Tesla_Coil","transcript":"[Cueball and Black Hat stand near a tesla coil mounted on a table.] Cueball: I finally finished my Tesla Coil!\n[The room is dark; the characters appear as faint blue outlines on black background. Cueball turns on the Tesla Coil and it sparks white static electricity.] click Black Hat: Cool, but\u2014\n[Lightning shoots out of Black Hat's hands, Cueball appears to be in shock  and awe.] Black Hat: Check this out!\n[The lights are back on, Cueball's arms are raised in amazement.] Cueball: How did you do that? Black Hat: The world doesn't actually make any sense. Science doesn't work. No one told you because you're so cute when you get into something.\n[Black Hat floats up the frame, and Cueball is pointing towards Black Hat.] Black Hat: Still, neat toy. Cueball: Now you're hovering! Black Hat: I guess you're still not getting this.\n","explanation":"Cueball diligently creates a Tesla coil , a device that produces high voltage alternating currents.\nAfter that show by Cueball, Black Hat magically shoots electricity from his fingertips. When Cueball asks how he did that, he says that science doesn't really work, then hovers in mid-air, further proving his point. There is simply no apparent explanation for Black Hat's abilities, which means science is still woefully incomplete or, as Black Hat said, simply doesn't work.\nThe title text indicates that this was all actually a dream, explaining Black Hat's abilities and pointing out how dreams can be difficult for scientists as they will attempt to analyse and understand everything in the dream according to the laws of science, which wouldn't apply in dreams.\n[Cueball and Black Hat stand near a tesla coil mounted on a table.] Cueball: I finally finished my Tesla Coil!\n[The room is dark; the characters appear as faint blue outlines on black background. Cueball turns on the Tesla Coil and it sparks white static electricity.] click Black Hat: Cool, but\u2014\n[Lightning shoots out of Black Hat's hands, Cueball appears to be in shock  and awe.] Black Hat: Check this out!\n[The lights are back on, Cueball's arms are raised in amazement.] Cueball: How did you do that? Black Hat: The world doesn't actually make any sense. Science doesn't work. No one told you because you're so cute when you get into something.\n[Black Hat floats up the frame, and Cueball is pointing towards Black Hat.] Black Hat: Still, neat toy. Cueball: Now you're hovering! Black Hat: I guess you're still not getting this.\n"}
{"id":299,"title":"Aeris Dies","image_title":"Aeris Dies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/299","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/aeris_dies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/299:_Aeris_Dies","transcript":"[Two men are talking. The second man is sitting on the ground, hugging his knees to his chest.] Cueball: Maggie's gone. You can't bring her back. Friend: But I have to, she's a part of my life. Cueball: *sigh* Cueball: Okay, let me put this in your terms. Cueball: Remember when Aeris died in FFVII? It was sad, but you had to keep playing . Friend: Actually, I downloaded a mod to add her back to my party. It changed other character's appearances and dialogue to hers so you didn't have to lose her. Friend: Lots of gamers did it. [Cueball puts his hand on his chin.] Cueball: That is troubling on several levels. Friend: I wonder if Maggie's old dresses would fit you.\n","explanation":"From the looks of this comic, there is a friend here who had a loved one (named 'Maggie') who died. Maggie is likely a spouse or girlfriend, but could also be a mother or another significant relation. Cueball tries to help him by comparing his plight to a significant plot point in the popular game Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 1 in 1997, the plot point being the permanent death of Aerith Gainsborough (originally translated as \"Aeris\"), the last of a race called 'the Ancients' and a potential love interest of the main character of the game. Although technically being a spoiler due to its significance and dissonance to the plot, Aerith's death became one of the most iconic video game scenes of all time, leading to its referencing and even parodies throughout the game community (some even depicting her revenge on Sephiroth , the main antagonist of the game and her murderer).\nThe word 'permanent' was not meant for redundancy in the last paragraph; the developers wanted to symbolize how death is unexpected, leaving you with an empty feeling, filled only by regret. Therefore, when they received word about how much people wanted Aerith to be brought back to life, they felt that they succeeded with evoking the right feelings with her death. Even so, due to all the significance her death brought, the developers refused to officially resuscitate her.\nThat did not stop other people from modifying the game in order to unofficially resuscitate her, though. \nCueball feels really troubled that his friend would take such a course of action (especially with a fictional character, admittedly) instead of dealing with her death. His friend takes this to more disturbing levels, wanting to 'mod' Cueball with Maggie's clothes, turning Cueball into a 'substitute Maggie.'\nThe title text references The Sims , a series of life simulation games where you can create virtual people (the aforementioned Sims), set their appearances, and essentially mess around with their lives. Cueball notes that his friend already attempted to 'recreate' Maggie and him (repeatedly at that) using the simulation abilities in the games of his The Sims series.\n[Two men are talking. The second man is sitting on the ground, hugging his knees to his chest.] Cueball: Maggie's gone. You can't bring her back. Friend: But I have to, she's a part of my life. Cueball: *sigh* Cueball: Okay, let me put this in your terms. Cueball: Remember when Aeris died in FFVII? It was sad, but you had to keep playing . Friend: Actually, I downloaded a mod to add her back to my party. It changed other character's appearances and dialogue to hers so you didn't have to lose her. Friend: Lots of gamers did it. [Cueball puts his hand on his chin.] Cueball: That is troubling on several levels. Friend: I wonder if Maggie's old dresses would fit you.\n"}
{"id":300,"title":"Facebook","image_title":"Facebook","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/300","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/facebook.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/300:_Facebook","transcript":"Mildly sleazy uses of Facebook, part 14: Looking up someone's profile before introducing yourself so you know which of your favorite bands to mention Cueball: Favorite bands? Hmm... Cueball: Maybe Regina Spektor or the Polyphonic Spree. Megan: Whoa, those are two of my favorites, too! Megan: Clearly, we should have sex. Cueball: Okay! My favorite position is the retrograde wheelbarrow. [Megan raises arms.] Megan: Ohmygod, mine too!\n","explanation":"This comic approaches how Social networks have changed the ways of human interaction. With everyone placing their personal interests on their Facebook profile pages, it has become fairly easy to gather a lot of information about people. In the comic, Cueball uses this information to his advantage: He ascertained Megan's musical preferences beforehand in order to create the illusion of their sharing mutual interests. Megan is led to believe that he is like-minded , thus making it easier for Cueball to persuade her into having sex with him. Here the comic takes at the fact that many people use Facebook as a hunting ground for sexual contacts.\nApparently, Megan did not only mention her favorite bands in her profile, but also her preferred sex position . This can be read as a sideswipe at what intimate details some people are willing to share on the internet. Although mentioning sexual preferences is hyperbolic here.\nMegan's taste in both fields can be regarded as outside the mainstream. Regina Spektor and The Polyphonic Spree are representatives of the indie pop genre. The Wheelbarrow ( NSFW ) features the man standing behind the woman and holding her legs, while she props up in a wheelbarrow-like position. The retrograde variant has the woman facing upwards. Unusual sex positions are also mentioned in comics 414: Mistranslations and 487: Numerical Sex Positions .\nThe title text suggests that Cueball did not stop at reading Megan's interests on her Facebook profile, but also obtained her phone number and placed it in his phone. It is implied that some of the \"mildly sleazy\" uses of Facebook can border on the verge of stalking . When Megan discovers the number, she may realise this and stay clear of Cueball...\nMildly sleazy uses of Facebook, part 14: Looking up someone's profile before introducing yourself so you know which of your favorite bands to mention Cueball: Favorite bands? Hmm... Cueball: Maybe Regina Spektor or the Polyphonic Spree. Megan: Whoa, those are two of my favorites, too! Megan: Clearly, we should have sex. Cueball: Okay! My favorite position is the retrograde wheelbarrow. [Megan raises arms.] Megan: Ohmygod, mine too!\n"}
{"id":301,"title":"Limerick","image_title":"Limerick","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/301","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/limerick.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/301:_Limerick","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a computer, typing.] Cueball (typing): I used to find slashdot delightful, Cueball (typing): but my feelings of late are more spiteful; Cueball (typing): my comments sarcastic Cueball (typing): the iconoclastic Cueball (typing): keep modding to plus five (Insightful).\n","explanation":"A limerick is a well-known type of poem that is usually humorous or bawdy. Technically, a limerick is primarily anapestic trimeter : each line contains three \"feet,\" each foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. The rhyme scheme is AABBA: the first, second, and fifth lines rhyme, as do the shorter third and fourth lines. Almost anyone can instantly recognize a limerick after hearing the first line.\nSlashdot is a venerable techie site. On many sites, the user base can vote comments \"up\" or \"down,\" but at Slashdot, only moderators (these are randomly drawn from the pool of registered users) may up or down vote comments, and the moderator may select a reason for their up or down vote. Instead of a simple +1, a comment may be voted +1 (Funny). Similarly, instead of -1, a comment may be voted -1 (Off-topic). +5 is the maximum positive score. A comment rated +5 (Insightful) has been upvoted at least 5 times, and has a plurality of \"Insightful\" votes.\nCueball 's limerick says that he does not like Slashdot anymore, because his sarcastic comments are being treated as \"insightful\" by the very people he's being sarcastic to.\nThe title text refers to the notoriously awful comments on YouTube, many of which are so idiotic that they're interpreted as jokes.\nIn both cases, Randall is invoking Poe's Law . Both sites have become so full of extremes that you can no longer mock the extremists without looking like a sincere extremist yourself.\n301, the number of this comic, is also a number often associated with YouTube. At the time this comic was published, view counts on YouTube videos would often freeze at 301, as YouTube would switch between view-counting algorithms when the number of views exceeded 300. Therefore, the comic number itself may be a reference to the title text.\n[Cueball sits at a computer, typing.] Cueball (typing): I used to find slashdot delightful, Cueball (typing): but my feelings of late are more spiteful; Cueball (typing): my comments sarcastic Cueball (typing): the iconoclastic Cueball (typing): keep modding to plus five (Insightful).\n"}
{"id":302,"title":"Names","image_title":"Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/302","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/302:_Names","transcript":"Cueball (thinking): I hate it when I don't know someone's name, but it's been long enough that it's too awkward to ask. [The scene is revealed to be at the altar getting married by a minister to a woman in a bridal dress.] Minister: Do you Rachel, take this man... Cueball (thinking): Aha! Rachel!\n","explanation":"Everyone has had moments where they forget someone's name, even the name of someone pretty important. This doesn't often happen with one's own significant other, however, hence the joke.\nCueball has been in a relationship with someone but does not know his girlfriend's name. He knows that the relationship has progressed to the point where asking for her name would be awkward and impolite, and so he waits for someone to call her by name. Cueball is excited when one finally does, only to reveal that they are in the middle of a wedding ceremony. It is hard to be in a relationship with someone if you don't know their name, and for said relationship to progress to the point of a wedding is simply incredulous. [ citation needed ]\nIt's sometimes tricky to say the right things during an introduction, and while making sure you don't make an incorrect response (replying to the question \"How're you doing?\" with \"Not much,\" for example, mishearing the question as \"What are you doing?\"), one can sometimes forget to pay attention to the actual important part of the introduction: the person's name. And it's awkward to ask someone for their name when you should, by all rights, already know it.\nForgetting people's names is a frequent symptom of various social anxiety disorders, but it can happen to anybody at any time.\nCueball (thinking): I hate it when I don't know someone's name, but it's been long enough that it's too awkward to ask. [The scene is revealed to be at the altar getting married by a minister to a woman in a bridal dress.] Minister: Do you Rachel, take this man... Cueball (thinking): Aha! Rachel!\n"}
{"id":303,"title":"Compiling","image_title":"Compiling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/303","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/compiling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/303:_Compiling","transcript":"The #1 Programmer Excuse for Legitimately Slacking Off: \"My code's compiling.\" [Two programmers are sword-fighting on office chairs in a hallway. An unseen manager calls them back to work through an open office door.] Manager: Hey! Get back to work! Cueball: Compiling! Manager: Oh. Carry on.\n","explanation":"Computer programming involves writing instructions for a computer to follow, in a specific programming language , which is largely human readable and writable, at least to programmers who understand that language.  However, for the computers to follow instructions, they need to be given machine code \u2014 the actual \"language\" that computers \"speak\" and one that can be written directly with the correct tools, but would be too tedious and error-prone for just about any practical modern project where alternatives exist, where anything more than a Hello World could be awkward to implement straight into machine-code.\nConversion from the more conveniently human-writable code into computer-executable files is performed by assemblers , interpreters , or compilers .\nPrograms can be written in assembly code , which is basically just a set of mnemonics that make machine code much easier for a human to remember and correctly parse; the human-written assembly code is then run through a simple assembler to convert it directly into machine code.  Assembly coding is necessary whenever one is programming for a completely new architecture (one for which no other tools yet exist), and is still used in some other situations (as it allows the code to be optimized more closely for the system on which it is to run than is possible with other types of coding), but is still fairly tedious and error-prone, and assembly code needs to be completely rewritten if one wants to port it to a computer with a different architecture.\nInterpreters (e.g. that for PHP for one example) generally read through the code, or script, each line at a time as and when required, and has to do a lot of work with various processing overheads and the risk of hitting an invalid instruction or mistake in syntax that it can't handle.  It also requires that a relevant version of the interpreter exist on any machine that has to run the script and perhaps some additional knowledge by the end-user.\nFor widely distributed (and especially commercial) programs, some form of compilation will instead be used.  Compiling may have just one computer system read through the man-written code and (barring errors) produces the equivalent stand-alone and direct machine-readable code, suitable for a given range of computers.  This process might involve several passes to check for 'obvious' errors in the code, as well as converting some programming concepts that are easiest for humans to understand into equivalent concepts that may be far easier for the computer to work with.\nAs such, compiling takes a certain amount of time at the time of production. Normally, this takes a few seconds, but, depending on the size of the project and the power of the computer doing the compilation, the time required to compile a program may measure in minutes, or even hours. As of 2015, the Linux Kernel contains over 19 million lines of code, arguably a massive job for any compiler, but if done correctly, it saves time for all the people who will ultimately be using its output.\nThus, when Cueball is caught wasting time at work, he argues that such activities are not worse than any other possible ones, at this moment.  If his job is writing code and compiling it, then there may be nothing else that he can do right now.  He cannot usefully tweak the code before it finishes compiling and the expected result checked.\nThe title text takes this a step further.  Cueball claims that all activities are equally benign while the code is compiling \u2014 and that includes committing illegal acts, such as stealing LCDs .\nNine years after this comic was released, Randall made a comic called 1755: Old Days about how compiling worked in the old days. It was Cueball who asked. The next comic after that, 1756: I'm With Her , was released the Monday before the 2016 United States presidential election . And in that comic, a Cueball with a sword on an office chair like in this comic is featured. Seems realistic that Randall had that politically loaded comic ready for some time, and when finding and deciding to use this old version of Cueball, he may have gotten inspired by the compiling theme to make Old Days.\nThe #1 Programmer Excuse for Legitimately Slacking Off: \"My code's compiling.\" [Two programmers are sword-fighting on office chairs in a hallway. An unseen manager calls them back to work through an open office door.] Manager: Hey! Get back to work! Cueball: Compiling! Manager: Oh. Carry on.\n"}
{"id":304,"title":"Nighttime Stories","image_title":"Nighttime Stories","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/304","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nighttime_stories.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/304:_Nighttime_Stories","transcript":"[Cueball sitting in an armchair in a darkened room, with a bookshelf and an open window. Megan is seen outside reading a book by a glow.] For a few weeks now, sometime past midnight, a girl has wandered past my apartment reading by flashlight.\n[Outside, Megan walking down the street passing under a street lamp.] I wonder why she's up so late. Maybe she's restless Like me. I wonder what story she's wrapped up in.\nI wonder if she lets anyone into that island of light.\n[Cueball sitting in a dark room.]\n[Cueball has left the room.]\n[Cueball standing on his doorstep at the top of a small flight of stairs, near the bottom of which Megan has stopped, no longer reading.] Cueball: Hi! What are you reading? Megan: Orson Scott Card's 'Xenocide.' It's my favorite in the series!\nCueball: Wait, you like it more than Speaker for the Dead or Ender's Game? Megan: Yeah!\n[Cueball has gone back in the house, leaving Megan standing alone.]\n[Cueball is sitting in the chair again.] And to think I loved her.\n","explanation":"Cueball observes Megan walking around at midnight, reading a book that he can't see. Curious, he leaves his apartment to ask her what she is reading. It is revealed as Orson Scott Card 's Xenocide , the third book in the Ender's Game series following Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead (and since followed by several other books). Ender's Game has been covered in other xkcd comics like 241: Battle Room and 635: Locke and Demosthenes , which cover events in the first book.\nXenocide is regarded by fans as one of the weakest books in the series, while Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead received extreme positive praise. When he discovers that she likes Xenocide more than the other two books, he instantly withdraws to his apartment, his opinion of her shattered. So far as Cueball is concerned, Xenocide is so clearly inferior that he could not be with anyone who 'wrongly' considers it to be the best of the series. This pokes fun at people like Cueball who have such strong opinions on books like Ender's Game that they could never get along with anyone who disagreed.\nThe title text pokes further fun at Xenocide by saying that there are only seven people in the world who would defend it, a laughably small number.\n[Cueball sitting in an armchair in a darkened room, with a bookshelf and an open window. Megan is seen outside reading a book by a glow.] For a few weeks now, sometime past midnight, a girl has wandered past my apartment reading by flashlight.\n[Outside, Megan walking down the street passing under a street lamp.] I wonder why she's up so late. Maybe she's restless Like me. I wonder what story she's wrapped up in.\nI wonder if she lets anyone into that island of light.\n[Cueball sitting in a dark room.]\n[Cueball has left the room.]\n[Cueball standing on his doorstep at the top of a small flight of stairs, near the bottom of which Megan has stopped, no longer reading.] Cueball: Hi! What are you reading? Megan: Orson Scott Card's 'Xenocide.' It's my favorite in the series!\nCueball: Wait, you like it more than Speaker for the Dead or Ender's Game? Megan: Yeah!\n[Cueball has gone back in the house, leaving Megan standing alone.]\n[Cueball is sitting in the chair again.] And to think I loved her.\n"}
{"id":305,"title":"Rule 34","image_title":"Rule 34","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/305","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rule_34.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/305:_Rule_34","transcript":"Cueball: Huh-- Thomas the Tank Engine slash fiction. Megan: It's rule 34 of the internet. If you can imagine it, there is porn of it. Cueball: Nah. The web is freaky, but it can't begin to have everything. Cueball: There's no porn set atop storm-chasing vans. No homoerotic spelling bees. No women playing electric guitar in the shower. Megan: Actually, that last one would look pretty hot. As long as they were unplugged or waterproofed... Megan: Rivulets of water run down her chest, the smooth body of the guitar firm against her hips. Megan: She twangs the E-string and it shakes off tiny droplets in all directions. [She rises into a crouch.] Megan: You're sure it doesn't exist? Cueball: Not yet. Megan: I'm registering WetRiffs.com. Let's get on this.\n","explanation":"Cueball is rather surprised to find slash fiction (same-sex erotic fiction featuring characters from popular media, often from unrelated series) featuring characters from the Thomas the Tank Engine television series, but Megan isn't remotely surprised, citing Rule 34 : \"If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.\"\nCueball denies the truism of the rule, coming up with several examples of porn that doesn't exist yet, until he comes across one that they both agree would be pretty hot: Women playing electric guitar in the shower. Megan proceeds to get ahead of the curve by registering WetRiffs.com.\nBy doing this, Megan invoked Rule 35 , an additional rule based around rule 34. Rule 35 states: \"If there is not porn of it, porn will be made of it.\"\nIn the title text, we can assume that the presenter in a spelling bee is asking a male participant with the name \"Lance\" to spell \" throbbing ,\"  a term sometimes used to describe the swelling of a person's genitals. The scene thus plays out like the start of a hypothetical homoerotic spelling bee that could contain rude words or innuendo.\nRule 34 is mentioned in the title text of 505: A Bunch of Rocks and 860: Never Do This .\nCueball: Huh-- Thomas the Tank Engine slash fiction. Megan: It's rule 34 of the internet. If you can imagine it, there is porn of it. Cueball: Nah. The web is freaky, but it can't begin to have everything. Cueball: There's no porn set atop storm-chasing vans. No homoerotic spelling bees. No women playing electric guitar in the shower. Megan: Actually, that last one would look pretty hot. As long as they were unplugged or waterproofed... Megan: Rivulets of water run down her chest, the smooth body of the guitar firm against her hips. Megan: She twangs the E-string and it shakes off tiny droplets in all directions. [She rises into a crouch.] Megan: You're sure it doesn't exist? Cueball: Not yet. Megan: I'm registering WetRiffs.com. Let's get on this.\n"}
{"id":306,"title":"Orphaned Projects","image_title":"Orphaned Projects","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/306","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/orphaned_projects.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/306:_Orphaned_Projects","transcript":"[Voices are coming from behind a door with a sign that reads \"Debian Linux HQ.\"] First voice: Problem: One of the volunteer developers has a date this weekend. Dates lead to romance, romance leads to orphaned projects. Second voice: What's the plan? First voice: We're hiring him a relationship coach. He's like Will Smith in \"Hitch,\" but he only gives bad advice. [Black Hat is talking to Cueball, who is standing in front of a mirror.] Black Hat: Okay, remember: The key to conversation is constructive criticism. Black Hat: You need to show you're smart enough to solve her problems. Cueball: Makes sense.\n","explanation":"Debian is a GNU\/Linux distribution (but also ships GNU Hurd and BSD versions). Red Hat is the company behind Fedora Linux and RHEL .\nThe comic is about orphaned Linux projects, because volunteer FOSS developers will often leave their projects aside whenever something of greater importance to them requires more time (like dating, relationships, tiredness, sickness, boredom, natural disasters, wild boar attacks, zombie apocalypses, robot uprisings, desire for snacks, etc.). Some companies\/foundations, while not needing these developers, can greatly benefit from community-maintained projects. The Debian Team uses a phrase that is, intentionally or otherwise, similar to the famous Yoda quote from Star Wars: Episode I \u2013 The Phantom Menace in the first panel \"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering,\" by replacing it with dating and orphaned projects.\nHitch is a romantic comedy in which Will Smith plays a \"dating coach,\" who helps men to have successful dates with women. To avoid losing their developers (in this case, Cueball), the people at the \"Debian HQ\" have opted to hire Black Hat to give the developer intentionally bad dating advice, thus sabotaging his relationship before it could become distracting. Cueball is advised to \"constructively criticize\" his date in an attempt to appear more intelligent. This technique is very unlikely to work, but is nonetheless attempted by some men. It is unclear whether this is \"negging\" (See 1027: Pickup Artist ) or simply a demonstration of hubris, neither of which would be an attractive attribute in a potential long-term partner or mate. [ citation needed ]\nIn the title text, the woman is being similarly advised by a representative hired by Red Hat. She is advised to rent lots of romantic comedies, presumably to watch with her date. The prevailing stereotype is that young men strongly dislike films in that genre.\n[Voices are coming from behind a door with a sign that reads \"Debian Linux HQ.\"] First voice: Problem: One of the volunteer developers has a date this weekend. Dates lead to romance, romance leads to orphaned projects. Second voice: What's the plan? First voice: We're hiring him a relationship coach. He's like Will Smith in \"Hitch,\" but he only gives bad advice. [Black Hat is talking to Cueball, who is standing in front of a mirror.] Black Hat: Okay, remember: The key to conversation is constructive criticism. Black Hat: You need to show you're smart enough to solve her problems. Cueball: Makes sense.\n"}
{"id":307,"title":"Excessive Quotation","image_title":"Excessive Quotation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/307","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/excessive_quotation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/307:_Excessive_Quotation","transcript":"[Outside, under a crescent moon.] Megan: It's strange to stare at the moon and think about people walking on it. Cueball: That's no moon, it's a\u2014 gack [She holds him up in the air by his neck \u00e0 la Darth Vader using the force.] Megan: I find your lack of original conversation disturbing.","explanation":"Megan just wants to have a normal conversation about the moon, but Cueball replies with a quote from Star Wars: Episode IV \u2013 A New Hope , wherein Obi-Wan Kenobi says: \"That's no moon, that's a space station.\" Megan cuts him off in the manner of another Star Wars character, the villain Darth Vader , and showing a glimmer of the character's abilities, proceeds to choke him with The Force while modifying another phrase from the same film. (The original quotation was, \"I find your lack of faith disturbing.\")\nThere is humor in Megan's hypocrisy, however. Although she is disturbed by Cueball's unoriginal dialogue, she is fine with doing it herself.\nStar Wars fans are a weird bunch, however, and the title text states that if a male Star Wars fan met a girl who could do this in real life, it'd only serve to turn him on even more.\n[Outside, under a crescent moon.] Megan: It's strange to stare at the moon and think about people walking on it. Cueball: That's no moon, it's a\u2014 gack [She holds him up in the air by his neck \u00e0 la Darth Vader using the force.] Megan: I find your lack of original conversation disturbing."}
{"id":308,"title":"Interesting Life","image_title":"Interesting Life","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/308","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interesting_life.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/308:_Interesting_Life","transcript":"[On the left hand side of the panel is a cutaway of several floors of an office, in gray. On the right side, a blue sky with clouds,  and green hills below. Hanging from a cable is Megan, clearly having rappelled down the side of the building, next to a Cueball at his desk, who is looking at Megan.] Megan: You know how some people consider \"May you have an interesting life\" to be a curse? Cueball: Yeah... Megan: Fuck those people. Wanna have an adventure?\n","explanation":"' May you live in interesting times ' (or, in this comic, 'may you have an interesting life') is supposedly a Chinese saying, except that a few people (usually the worst-case-scenario kind) believe it to actually be a curse, even though it is usually meant in a good way when said. The quote also provides the title of the Terry Pratchett novel Interesting Times , which takes place in a fictional counterpart of China.\nCueball is shown here as an office worker, a job that, to most people, is the opposite of interesting. This is contrasted with Megan , who is rappelling down the outside of his office building, for no apparent reason other than because she can, and inviting him on an adventure. Things are bound to get at least one kind of \"interesting\" very fast.\nThe title text refers to a Cat6 cable, which is more commonly known as Ethernet cable. It would be easily found in an office building, since it is used to connect computers to a network. Its usefulness as a climbing harness is indeterminate. [ citation needed ]\n[On the left hand side of the panel is a cutaway of several floors of an office, in gray. On the right side, a blue sky with clouds,  and green hills below. Hanging from a cable is Megan, clearly having rappelled down the side of the building, next to a Cueball at his desk, who is looking at Megan.] Megan: You know how some people consider \"May you have an interesting life\" to be a curse? Cueball: Yeah... Megan: Fuck those people. Wanna have an adventure?\n"}
{"id":309,"title":"Shopping Teams","image_title":"Shopping Teams","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/309","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/shopping_teams.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/309:_Shopping_Teams","transcript":"[Three teams are looking at a counter with two cubes on it. Above it all is written in very large letters:] Shopping teams\n[Above the first team consisting of two Cueball-like guys is written the following text (the first line written with larger letters):] Bad: Two non-nerds Non-nerd 1: Let's get that one. Non-nerd 2: Okay.\n[Above the second team consisting of a Blondie and a Cueball-like guy is written the following text (the first line written with larger letters):] Good: Non-nerd + nerd Blondie non-nerd: Let's get that one. Cueball nerd: Wait, I think that one might be a better deal. Blondie non-nerd: Okay, that one.\n[Above the third team consisting of two Cueball-like guys is written the following text (the first line written with larger letters):] Very Bad: Two Nerds Nerd 1: How about that one? Nerd 2: I think the other one might be the better deal... Nerd 1: Hmm, I'm not sure...\n[Inside a big arrow pointing straight down:] Two Hours Later\n[The two Cueball-like guys are sitting on the floor in front of the counter, both having their laptops open and with lots of paper sheets spread around them, as well as a pen. Blondie from the second team comes in from the right and raises her arms:] Nerd 1: I think our main problem is our unclear definition of value. Blondie non-nerd: That is not your main problem!\n","explanation":"Randall is comparing the ways different people look at choosing between similar products. In the first example, which Randall considers \"bad,\" two \"non-nerds\" look at two products (without a description of any kind) and instantly decide which one they want. In the second example, which is considered \"good,\" one of the two is a nerd , and the other one is a non-nerd. The non-nerd instantly picks one of the products, but the nerd evaluates the two and decides that the other one is better because it's a better deal. In both the first two cases, the pair is able to easily come to a decision.\nHowever, in the third example, two nerds are comparing the two boxes, and both of them overanalyse the various merits and drawbacks on each of the two boxes. They are still there two hours later, unable to reach a clear agreement on which of the two boxes they wish to buy. One nerd comments that their definition of value is unclear, suggesting that the discussion has gone on for so long because they are re-evaluating their definitions over something too trivial. Some might perceive this as typical \"nerd\" behaviour, overanalysing a problem that is in actual fact quite trivial, such as the decision whether to buy one box or the other virtually identical box. The non-nerd woman from the second situation (or perhaps the store manager in this situation), who has watched the two nerds compare the two products for hours, attempts to put this into perspective by pointing out that an unclear definition of value is not their main problem. The implication is that their real main problem is that they are unable to reach an agreement on something that makes so little difference. Or their problem could be the one described in 1445: Efficiency .\nThe title text suggests that Randall entered a similar situation attempting to buy an air conditioner with his sysadmin, short for System administrator . The sysadmin is a person in an organization employed to manage the computer system or network, a role that requires technical skills and intelligence. The suggestion here is that a computer programmer, like Randall, put together with a sysadmin, would spend as much attention to detail as the two nerds in the comic, laboring over which of two trivially similar products to buy.\nRandall deals with sysadmins again in 705: Devotion to Duty .\n[Three teams are looking at a counter with two cubes on it. Above it all is written in very large letters:] Shopping teams\n[Above the first team consisting of two Cueball-like guys is written the following text (the first line written with larger letters):] Bad: Two non-nerds Non-nerd 1: Let's get that one. Non-nerd 2: Okay.\n[Above the second team consisting of a Blondie and a Cueball-like guy is written the following text (the first line written with larger letters):] Good: Non-nerd + nerd Blondie non-nerd: Let's get that one. Cueball nerd: Wait, I think that one might be a better deal. Blondie non-nerd: Okay, that one.\n[Above the third team consisting of two Cueball-like guys is written the following text (the first line written with larger letters):] Very Bad: Two Nerds Nerd 1: How about that one? Nerd 2: I think the other one might be the better deal... Nerd 1: Hmm, I'm not sure...\n[Inside a big arrow pointing straight down:] Two Hours Later\n[The two Cueball-like guys are sitting on the floor in front of the counter, both having their laptops open and with lots of paper sheets spread around them, as well as a pen. Blondie from the second team comes in from the right and raises her arms:] Nerd 1: I think our main problem is our unclear definition of value. Blondie non-nerd: That is not your main problem!\n"}
{"id":310,"title":"Commitment","image_title":"Commitment","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/310","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/commitment.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/310:_Commitment","transcript":"[Cueball proposing on his knee holding a box with a ring in it up to a girl with long blond hair. The text is written above them in a frame with yellow background.] I understand now. There's no choir of angels when you meet the right person. It's about growing out of your fears to realize what you have is what you want.\n[Cueball and the woman are getting married. They stand under a gate of honor with a priest in front of them.] Girl: I do. Cueball: I do.\n[Cueball walks hand in hand with blond girl when a cloud with trumpeting angels appears over Megan.] Megan: Hi.\n[Same picture but without the cloud and angels. Cueball's thought is written in a frame with yellow background.] Well, shit.\n","explanation":"In the first panel, Cueball proposes to a woman. While he does this, a narrator (most likely the man's inner voice) explains why he wants to marry her. It's implied that he had doubts about their relationship. He'd never experienced a moment of overwhelming love and certainty, especially when they met, which he describes as \"a choir of trumpeting angels when you meet the right girl.\" He's come to believe that such a scenario is actually implausible, and a serious relationship is about \"realizing that what you have is what you want.\"\nIn the second panel, they get married. And in the third panel, after they are married, Megan comes in saying 'Hi.' His wife appears to still be wearing her wedding veil, implying that he meets Megan immediately after the scenario.  Cueball has the full 'love at first sight'-experience, with a literal choir of trumpeting angels, suggesting that Megan is actually the one he's supposed to be with. That this realization strikes him immediately after he married someone else puts him in a very difficult situation. This is expressed by him thinking 'Well, shit.'\nThe title text notes that the previous guy who had a similar experience fell in love with one of the angels instead, not realizing that it was the girl he just met that was the love of his life. Which is of course much worse, especially because the angels are transient, and the only way to see them again is by meeting the perfect 'girl' and he has just ignored her! Alternatively, it could mean that that person was actually the last person to have such an experience, possibly because the persons succeeded in marrying and having children with the angel, resulting in offspring that were too powerful or otherwise undesirable. Something similar happens in Genesis 6:1\u20134, so this may be a reference to the Bible.\nThe humor of this comic plays upon a common anxiety in trying to build relationships. A person may be dating someone who they enjoy being with, but expect a moment of supernatural clarity announcing that they've found the right person to spend their life with. Most people never have such a moment, and have to build their relationships slowly, based on more prosaic considerations, like compatibility, commitment, and shared life goals. Frequently, people will build such a relationship, but worry that a magic and transcendent love is still out there, and if they 'settle' for the person they're with, they may find that love later and be unable to act on it.\nThe comic 584: Unsatisfied could be seen as a continuation of this - with the blond girl being depicted as Ponytail . It can also be seen as a deconstruction: in the subsequent comic, no matter which partner he chooses, he spends the rest of his life thinking about the other, apparently never being totally satisfied with the relationship he has.\n[Cueball proposing on his knee holding a box with a ring in it up to a girl with long blond hair. The text is written above them in a frame with yellow background.] I understand now. There's no choir of angels when you meet the right person. It's about growing out of your fears to realize what you have is what you want.\n[Cueball and the woman are getting married. They stand under a gate of honor with a priest in front of them.] Girl: I do. Cueball: I do.\n[Cueball walks hand in hand with blond girl when a cloud with trumpeting angels appears over Megan.] Megan: Hi.\n[Same picture but without the cloud and angels. Cueball's thought is written in a frame with yellow background.] Well, shit.\n"}
{"id":311,"title":"Action Movies","image_title":"Action Movies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/311","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/action_movies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/311:_Action_Movies","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking together as they walk away from a cinema.] Cueball: Another summer gone without a mindless big-budget action movie. Megan: Huh? Die Hard was nothing BUT action! Cueball: No, it was too talky. Megan: What? Too talky? Cueball: I tallied it minute-by-minute. It's at least 60% people walking and talking. ALL those movies are. Cueball: Just once, I want a real action movie. 30 seconds of exposition followed by a perfect 90-minute action scene. One with a huge budget, a good choreographer, and a great director. Megan: And they should center it around some character we already know, someone we never get tired of watching. Cueball: I think we've got something here... [A movie poster is shown.] Coming this summer River Tam Beats up EVERYONE [The poster shows a line of doorways. In the background, numerous people are lying on the ground or draped over doorways and windows. River Tam is doing a flying kick into someone's face, and another person is emerging from the doorway closest to the viewer.]\n","explanation":"A common complaint about action films is that they are light on plot and heavy on pointless violence and special effects. The Die Hard series (including Live Free or Die Hard ) are typical action films about which this complaint has been made.  However, Cueball reverses the complaint, stating that proportional to the run-time of the movie, there could have been much more action and much less plot.  He takes this idea to an extreme, saying that his ideal action movie should have only half a minute of exposition and otherwise consist of nothing but one long, continuous action scene. Megan adds that starring a well-known and popular character - one that audiences \"never get tired of watching\" - would further eliminate the need for exposition and provide more time for action.\nThe two come up with \"River Tam Beats Up Everyone\" as such a movie.  It is unclear if this is the actual title of their proposed movie or simply a description or teaser.  In either case, the name doubles as a more or less complete plot description.\nRiver Tam (played by Summer Glau ) is a character from the popular but short-lived TV series Firefly .  In the show, she is shown to have almost clairvoyant mental capabilities (including being able to read minds and aim a gun without looking), and the series largely revolves around a conspiracy concerning her.  In the follow-up movie Serenity , River also possesses superhuman fighting skills - early in the film, triggered by a subliminal message, she unexpectedly begins attacking everyone in a bar.  Later, in the film's climax, she subdues an entire squadron of Reavers while hardly breaking a sweat.\nThe poster art for \"River Tam Beats Up Everyone\" is almost certainly inspired by these scenes from Serenity , and Megan and Cueball's decision to use River is based on her rampant popularity among the Firefly fan base.  The poster's typeface, Papyrus , has also been used in many of the marketing materials for both Firefly and Serenity ; Randall would later confess his love for it in the title text of 590: Papyrus .\nIn the title text, Randall states that Live Free or Die Hard had far too little action and suggests another movie, Crank , as a better example.  He goes on to suggest that Crank would have been better if it had had a larger budget and starred Summer Glau in a fighting role.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking together as they walk away from a cinema.] Cueball: Another summer gone without a mindless big-budget action movie. Megan: Huh? Die Hard was nothing BUT action! Cueball: No, it was too talky. Megan: What? Too talky? Cueball: I tallied it minute-by-minute. It's at least 60% people walking and talking. ALL those movies are. Cueball: Just once, I want a real action movie. 30 seconds of exposition followed by a perfect 90-minute action scene. One with a huge budget, a good choreographer, and a great director. Megan: And they should center it around some character we already know, someone we never get tired of watching. Cueball: I think we've got something here... [A movie poster is shown.] Coming this summer River Tam Beats up EVERYONE [The poster shows a line of doorways. In the background, numerous people are lying on the ground or draped over doorways and windows. River Tam is doing a flying kick into someone's face, and another person is emerging from the doorway closest to the viewer.]\n"}
{"id":312,"title":"With Apologies to Robert Frost","image_title":"With Apologies to Robert Frost","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/312","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/with_apologies_to_robert_frost.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/312:_With_Apologies_to_Robert_Frost","transcript":"[A not-very-realistic view of the universe, in profile. To the left, a sectional view of the Earth, with its Moon and few clouds overhead, and a little Cueball standing, looking up. Extending to the right of the Earth, various stellar objects: some planets, some spaceships, another galaxy. Above them, on an artistically jagged white background, somewhat like a torn piece of paper, this text:] A God's Lament Some said the world should be in Perl; Some said in Lisp. Now, having given both a whirl, I held with those who favored Perl. But I fear we passed to men A disappointing founding myth, And should we write it all again, I'd end it with A close-paren. [To the right of the \"various stellar objects\", as if paired with the Earth at their left to bracket them, is a giant close parenthesis:] )\n","explanation":"This comic presents a poem about a god 's dilemma of whether to create the world using Perl or Lisp , two popular computer programming languages. The god has chosen to write it in Perl, but since then appears to lament the choice, apparently expressing that if given the chance to write the world's code again, they would use Lisp instead.\nThe implication is that a universe created by Lisp would look better under close examination, the 'founding myth' referred to in the poem.  Instead of an incomprehensible big bang , inflation , dark matter , and dark energy , the elegance of Lisp may have led to more elegantly framed laws of nature.\nThe grammar of Lisp as a language requires the programmer to use a multitude of parentheses and, in many cases, it can be difficult to determine whether all of the parentheses have been properly matched up to one another. The last two lines of the poem refer to the plentiful parentheses in Lisp, and the image at the bottom of the panel shows a close-parenthesis at the supposed end of the Universe.\nA segmentation fault, also commonly called a segfault, is an error that occurs when a computer program attempts to access computer memory to which it should not have access.  This is a fatal error that will cause the program to stop executing.\nThis comic deals with similar subject matter to 224: Lisp , in which one of \"the gods\" claims that although the Universe may appear to have been written in Lisp, it was actually written mostly using Perl.\nThe poem itself and the title text are a parody of \" Fire and Ice ,\" written by the American poet Robert Frost and first published in 1920. In this poem, the speaker discusses his stance in the debate on whether the world will be destroyed in fire or in ice. \"A God's Lament\" has a rhyme scheme that is nearly identical to that of Frost's poem. However, it differs in that \"Lisp\" does not rhyme with \"men,\" \"again,\" and \"paren,\" while the corresponding four lines in Frost's poem do rhyme. (That said, \"Lisp\" does have a near-rhyme in \"myth\" and \"with,\" especially if you say \"Lisp\" with a lisp.)\n[A not-very-realistic view of the universe, in profile. To the left, a sectional view of the Earth, with its Moon and few clouds overhead, and a little Cueball standing, looking up. Extending to the right of the Earth, various stellar objects: some planets, some spaceships, another galaxy. Above them, on an artistically jagged white background, somewhat like a torn piece of paper, this text:] A God's Lament Some said the world should be in Perl; Some said in Lisp. Now, having given both a whirl, I held with those who favored Perl. But I fear we passed to men A disappointing founding myth, And should we write it all again, I'd end it with A close-paren. [To the right of the \"various stellar objects\", as if paired with the Earth at their left to bracket them, is a giant close parenthesis:] )\n"}
{"id":313,"title":"Insomnia","image_title":"Insomnia","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/313","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/insomnia.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/313:_Insomnia","transcript":"[It is black, except a few blue and green lights, and red numbers from a clock.] [The clock shows 4:31] Lying awake at night I realize how many little lights there are in my room. The alarm clock is the brightest. Can't sleep I'm alone with those glowing red numbers [The clock now shows 4:32] Time slows Does time even exist here? Thoughts churning in on themselves [The clock now shows 4:33] The madness can't be far away Ah yes [The clock now shows 13:72] There it is.\n","explanation":"Simply put, the narrator's insomnia, combined with small bright lights in an otherwise pitch-black room, is causing him to hallucinate. Furthermore, the narrator is well aware that he will be unable to distinguish the hallucinations from reality. This finally occurs when his clock reads 13:72, which would not be possible on any clock.\nA clock can never read \"72 minutes,\" as there are only 60 minutes in an hour. While a clock can read \"13 hours\" on a 24-hour clock (which is common on most digital clocks in Europe, but not in the US), the thirteenth hour does not occur immediately after the fourth hour. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text shows that the narrator has indeed \"succumbed\" to his visions, and is assigning gibberish values \u2014 an alarm clock with a \"cinnamon\" setting, the time of day \"25 hours and 131 minutes,\" and \"levitation class\" \u2014 to an otherwise normal monologue.\n[It is black, except a few blue and green lights, and red numbers from a clock.] [The clock shows 4:31] Lying awake at night I realize how many little lights there are in my room. The alarm clock is the brightest. Can't sleep I'm alone with those glowing red numbers [The clock now shows 4:32] Time slows Does time even exist here? Thoughts churning in on themselves [The clock now shows 4:33] The madness can't be far away Ah yes [The clock now shows 13:72] There it is.\n"}
{"id":314,"title":"Dating Pools","image_title":"Dating Pools","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/314","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dating_pools.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/314:_Dating_Pools","transcript":"[Megan is sitting on the ground with her elbows on her knees and her hands on her chin.] Megan: This sucks. The median first marriage age is 26. The pool of singles is shrinking. I'm running out of time. Cueball: Actually, not quite.\nCueball: Yes, older singles are rarer. But as you get older, the dateable age range gets wider. An 18-year-old's range is 16\u201322, whereas a 30-year-old's might be more like 22\u201346. Text on chart: Standard creepiness rule: Don't date under (Age\/2 + 7)\nCueball: I did some analysis of this with the Census Bureau numbers just last weekend. Your dating pool actually grows until middle age. So don't fret so much! [The first chart is labeled \"Singles\" and is a decreasing graph. The second graph is labeled Dating Pool, and is a bell curve.]\nMegan: Did your analysis say anything about the dating prospects of people who spend weekends at home making graphs? Cueball: Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.\n","explanation":"Megan is upset because she is apparently older than 26, and among people who marry, half do so below 26. The intuitive conclusion is that the number of potential partners is decreasing as time goes on.\nThe Half Plus Seven Rule is an unwritten rule that asserts that it is creepy to date anyone who is younger than half your age plus 7 years. For example, a 50-year-old dating someone who is younger than 32 (50\/2 + 7 = 32) would be considered creepy. As the graph shows, there is a lower limit and an upper limit.\nThe lower limit can be defined as f(x) = x \/2 + 7 in which x is your age and f(x) is the minimum age of your partner. The upper limit can be defined as f^-1(x) = 2( x \u2212 7) in which x is your age and f^-1(x) is the maximum age of your partner.\nAs age increases, the age range of potential non-creepy partners widens. At 26, the range of non-creepy partners is 18 years (20- to 38-year-olds). At 50, it is 54 years (32 to 86 years old).\nAt age 14, you can only date people your own age. The same also works with infinity, but even Methuselah died once.\nWhile the application of this rule actually reduces the number of potential matches further, Cueball presents it in a positive way by showing that there are whole swathes of people who she couldn't marry in the first place without being in a creepy relationship. But, as her age increases, the range of non-creepy partners also increases. Combined with Census Bureau data for how many people exist within any such range, Cueball shows that her eligible dating pool is in fact still increasing.\nMegan notes that graph-making nerds like Cueball may have a hard time finding dates, but this is refuted by the title text.\n[Megan is sitting on the ground with her elbows on her knees and her hands on her chin.] Megan: This sucks. The median first marriage age is 26. The pool of singles is shrinking. I'm running out of time. Cueball: Actually, not quite.\nCueball: Yes, older singles are rarer. But as you get older, the dateable age range gets wider. An 18-year-old's range is 16\u201322, whereas a 30-year-old's might be more like 22\u201346. Text on chart: Standard creepiness rule: Don't date under (Age\/2 + 7)\nCueball: I did some analysis of this with the Census Bureau numbers just last weekend. Your dating pool actually grows until middle age. So don't fret so much! [The first chart is labeled \"Singles\" and is a decreasing graph. The second graph is labeled Dating Pool, and is a bell curve.]\nMegan: Did your analysis say anything about the dating prospects of people who spend weekends at home making graphs? Cueball: Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.\n"}
{"id":315,"title":"Braille","image_title":"Braille","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/315","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/braille.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/315:_Braille","transcript":"I learned to read braille a while back, and I've noticed that the messages on signs don't always match the regular text. [A sign reads \"Third Floor Office\" with braille print underneath. Cueball is reading the braille.] Cueball (thinking): s-i-g-h-t-e-d-p-e-o-p-l-e-s-u-c-k ... Hey!\n","explanation":"Braille is a writing system for the blind and visually impaired using bumps on a paper, slate, etc. However, since most sighted people have no need for braille, and because braille messages may need to convey purely-visual information to blind people, the braille message may be adjusted from the original message. In this case, however, it acts as a jab toward people who are not blind, saying that \"sighted people suck,\" which is obviously not something you would typically see (no pun intended) [ citation needed ] on informational signs. [ SIGHTation needed ] Similar \"translations\" can be found when one deciphers the alien translations on nearly all signs in Futurama.\nThe title text shows a practical (and more realistic) example of where regular text and braille text may differ. As the visually impaired cannot see color, the label would need to identify some other defining feature of the button in question, such as the given measurement.\nI learned to read braille a while back, and I've noticed that the messages on signs don't always match the regular text. [A sign reads \"Third Floor Office\" with braille print underneath. Cueball is reading the braille.] Cueball (thinking): s-i-g-h-t-e-d-p-e-o-p-l-e-s-u-c-k ... Hey!\n"}
{"id":316,"title":"Loud Sex","image_title":"Loud Sex","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/316","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/loud_sex.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/316:_Loud_Sex","transcript":"My neighbor has loud sex. [Cueball in bed, covering his head with a pillow. There is sound coming from outside.] OHHHHH GASP AAAAAAA Good for her and all, but it keeps me up at night.\nAnd she's so smug about it. [Cueball and neighbor coming out of their apartments.] Neighbor: Sorry, could you hear us last night? Oh, you know how it gets sometimes. Cueball: Not really...\nBut tonight I finally get my revenge. Because now I have a loud girlfriend too. [Megan with \"LOUD\" and an arrow pointing to her.]\nAnd an elliptical reflector dish. [Diagram of an elliptical reflector dish.]\n[Cueball and Megan having sex, with the dish behind them reflecting the sex sound effects, in a way that they focus, through walls, on his neighbor sitting up in bed while holding her head in pain.]","explanation":"Cueball 's neighbor likes to engage in loud sex, which keeps Cueball awake at night, and she pretends to apologize for it as a way of bragging, so Cueball wants to get revenge. A simple way would be to inflict the same to her in retaliation by having loud sex when she is not. But Cueball adds a science nerd's touch to it, with an elliptical reflector dish. As shown on the schema, such a dish reflects the sound waves in a way that all waves originating from a specific point (the first focus of the ellipse the dish's shape is based on) converge after reflection to a specific other point (the second focus of the same ellipse). [1] Cueball calibrates and installs his elliptical dish in such a way that all the sound coming from his loud girlfriend's head during sex is concentrated after reflection to his neighbor's head in her bed. This makes his loud sex far louder to her than hers was to him.\nThe title text makes a double entendre , where a spherical or parabolic reflector would cause different behaviors for the sound waves, but the play on words leads the reader to believe that aberrant sexual behavior would occur.\n[1]: Note: that is actually the behaviour of an ellipsoidal reflector dish, or an elliptic one in two dimensions; but in 3D an elliptic one works similarly, only converging waves from a line to another line, instead of points.\nMy neighbor has loud sex. [Cueball in bed, covering his head with a pillow. There is sound coming from outside.] OHHHHH GASP AAAAAAA Good for her and all, but it keeps me up at night.\nAnd she's so smug about it. [Cueball and neighbor coming out of their apartments.] Neighbor: Sorry, could you hear us last night? Oh, you know how it gets sometimes. Cueball: Not really...\nBut tonight I finally get my revenge. Because now I have a loud girlfriend too. [Megan with \"LOUD\" and an arrow pointing to her.]\nAnd an elliptical reflector dish. [Diagram of an elliptical reflector dish.]\n[Cueball and Megan having sex, with the dish behind them reflecting the sex sound effects, in a way that they focus, through walls, on his neighbor sitting up in bed while holding her head in pain.]"}
{"id":317,"title":"That Lovin' Feelin'","image_title":"That Lovin' Feelin'","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/317","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/that_lovin_feelin.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/317:_That_Lovin%27_Feelin%27","transcript":"Cueball: You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips Cueball: And there's no tenderness like before in your fingertips. [Cueball thoughtfully places his hand on his chin.] Cueball: Maybe I should try your sister instead.\n","explanation":"This is a parody of the popular song by The Righteous Brothers , \" You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' .\" The singer is talking about the cooling of his relationship with his significant other, and how the joy of their romance has been missing lately, and asks what they have to do to get it back. The actual first verse and chorus are as follows:\nYou never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips And there's no tenderness like before in your fingertips You're trying hard not to show it (baby) But baby, baby, I know it:\nYou've lost that lovin' feelin' Ohh, that lovin' feelin' You've lost that lovin' feelin', Now it's gone, gone, gone, ohh-ohh.\nIn this comic's parody of the song, Cueball decides that since his relationship with his current girlfriend is cooling, maybe he should try her sister instead. (And as mentioned in the title text, at least she will have sex with him).\nCueball: You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips Cueball: And there's no tenderness like before in your fingertips. [Cueball thoughtfully places his hand on his chin.] Cueball: Maybe I should try your sister instead.\n"}
{"id":318,"title":"Nostalgia","image_title":"Nostalgia","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/318","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nostalgia.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/318:_Nostalgia","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan, both wearing headsets with antennae, sunglasses, and jetpacks, are hovering.] Cueball: Darling, let's put on our best fake accounts, connect to the core ForumSpace, and trick people into looking at a picture of a man's distended anus! Megan: Oh, it'll be just like old times!\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan refer to the practice of tricking people to see shock sites using bait-and-switch pranks. A shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive, disgusting, and\/or disturbing to its viewers, containing materials of high shock value that is also considered distasteful and crude, and is generally of a pornographic, scatological, extremely violent, insulting, painful, profane, or otherwise provocative nature.\nThis comic is a direct reference to the former shock site goatse.cx that displayed a human distended anus (among other things). The domain was taken down in 2004, but it remains a memorable cultural reference from its time period. It therefore may be cited as nostalgia by trolls in the future. This comic evidently takes place in the future, as the characters are using some sort of advanced levitation technology that has yet to exist.\nThe title text warns us not to Google this meme, as it contains some horrifying results. If you ignore the warning from the title text and Google for \"distended anus,\" you will find many results on this awful dysfunction like rectal prolapse .\nFurthermore, the aforementioned shock site still exists at [REDACTED].\n[Cueball and Megan, both wearing headsets with antennae, sunglasses, and jetpacks, are hovering.] Cueball: Darling, let's put on our best fake accounts, connect to the core ForumSpace, and trick people into looking at a picture of a man's distended anus! Megan: Oh, it'll be just like old times!\n"}
{"id":319,"title":"Engineering Hubris","image_title":"Engineering Hubris","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/319","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/engineering_hubris.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/319:_Engineering_Hubris","transcript":"[Landscape in the background, canyon with a winding road.] Maybe engineering is the pursuit of an unattainable perfection. Maybe it's impossible to create something bug-free. Maybe I'm a fool Maybe the tyranny of Murphy is the penalty for hubris. But I just can't shake the feeling [Cueball standing on boxes labeled \"ACME.\"] With all those supplies I could have caught that roadrunner.\n","explanation":"This comic starts with a philosophical musing about engineering . The last panel reveals a joke about Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner , a cartoon series created by Chuck Jones . In the cartoon, the Coyote is constantly building odd contraptions (with parts ordered from the Acme Corporation ) to catch the Road Runner. The Coyote never succeeds, often because his devices don't work as intended.\nThe word Hubris from the comic title means extreme pride or arrogance. It is a theme from the classic Greek plays, and is usually severely punished by the gods.  The title text is implying that Chuck Jones would not let hubris go unpunished; the engineer might be able to construct 'better' traps than Wile E, but they would still be doomed to fail.\nFrom the second panel, Murphy's Law can be simplified to \"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.\" It was originally developed as a guideline for accident prevention starting at the design level. In the common vernacular today, it is interpreted more liberally: \"If there is even the slightest chance of an unfortunate accident occurring, despite all your attempts to prevent it, the accident will happen anyway, purely out of spite.\" The namesake Edward A. Murphy Jr. has since evolved to mythic proportions, being cast as a vengeful god of misfortune and ruin.\n[Landscape in the background, canyon with a winding road.] Maybe engineering is the pursuit of an unattainable perfection. Maybe it's impossible to create something bug-free. Maybe I'm a fool Maybe the tyranny of Murphy is the penalty for hubris. But I just can't shake the feeling [Cueball standing on boxes labeled \"ACME.\"] With all those supplies I could have caught that roadrunner.\n"}
{"id":320,"title":"28-Hour Day","image_title":"28-Hour Day","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/320","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/28_hour_day.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/320:_28-Hour_Day","transcript":"[Above the panels of the main comic, there is a ruler-like time line diagram that shows the hours in a week. It has 6 black sections labeled \"bed\" in white text, at the top and 7 black sections labeled \"night\" in white text, at the bottom (the first and last sections are split in two as it goes from the end of the week to the start of the (next) week. So there are 8 night sections, but they only cover 7 times 12 hours). The night sections always go from 6PM to 6AM. But the bed sections are only 8 hours long and they only stay fully over the night sections two times, and two times they are not above the night sections at all. Above the ruler, the bed times are shown. These labels are over the relevant ticks on the ruler. The ruler has small ticks for every two hours, longer ticks at noon, and a line that goes all the way through the ruler dividing each day. The ruler begins on midnight as Sunday starts and ends as Saturday finishes at midnight. Below the ruler each day are labels with the three-letter abbreviations in a much larger font. Here below the rulers, text is transcribed with the day first, then night or bed according to which comes first, and the time interval for bed given after each bed. The first and last night will only be a partial word and only the first time will there be a (ni)ght to start.] Sun ght Bed 10AM 6PM Night\nMon Bed 2PM 10PM Night\nTue Bed 6PM 2AM Night\nWed Night Bed 10PM 6AM\nThu Night\nFri Bed 2AM 10AM Night\nSat Bed 6AM 2PM Nig\n[Below the ruler are five panels. In the first, two Cueball-like guys are talking together. Cueball is addressing his friend with one hand raised.] Cueball: You have trouble sleeping right? Friend: Only when your mom is over.\n[Cueball is now standing next to a an easel with a large version of the chart shown above the panels. Cueball is pointing to the chart while his friend is looking at it.] Cueball: Since your work is flexible- Friend: -Like your mom- Cueball: -you should try the 28-hour day - 20 awake, 8 asleep (or 19\/9 if you prefer). Friend: I prefer your mom.\n[Cueball moves forward toward his friend, with the chart behind him. He holds both hands, held together, up in front of him. The easel with the chart can now be seen to have three legs, as opposed to only two shown in the previous panel.] Cueball: It synchs up with the week - you spend weekdays awake normally, then on weekends you can go out all night. Friend: Just like your mom.\n[In a frameless panel, only Cueball is shown from the torso up. He gestures with both arms raised on each side of him.] Cueball: It means four extra hours daily. You can stay up until you're exhausted every day and then spend a full 9 hours asleep each night!\n[Back to both again, but without the chart. Cueball leans toward his friend as his friend lifts a hand to his chin.] Friend: But how much time can I spend doing your mom? Cueball: You? I'm guessing three or four minutes, tops. Friend: ...Well played.\n","explanation":"The 28-Hour Day is a modified sleep schedule proposed to accommodate the discrepancy between the earth's day-night cycle and certain people's preferred sleep schedules. It discards the traditional notion of sleeping at night and replaces it with sleeping when it is more convenient for weekend parties and mid-week insomnia. It is also the only reasonable and consistent alternative day length that will sync with the widely accepted and practiced 168-hour week (168 = 7\u00d724 = 6\u00d728), with the arguable exception of eight 21-hour days. Underneath the weekly timeline, Cueball describes the schedule's selling points to his friend, who apparently has difficulty sleeping.\nCueball's friend shows little interest in this idea, and instead he resorts to low-quality \"your mom\" jokes. Cueball merely bides his time, and in the end successfully trumps the jokes with a response that impugns his friend's sexual stamina, leading him to concede defeat.\nThe title-text uses \" Small print \" to mean \"Disclaimer\" and relieves the idea's creator of any responsibility in the case that it is tried and the tester finds the schedule to be a really bad idea. As he states, if you live by this schedule, chances are you will be driven stark raving mad. Given that Cueball gives his friend with the bad mom jokes this advice, it could be another way to try to punish him for the jokes. Although Randall makes several Your Mom comics , he has also in some comics shown that he dislikes these kind of jokes, especially when used too much in real life (see 366: Your Mom .)\n[Above the panels of the main comic, there is a ruler-like time line diagram that shows the hours in a week. It has 6 black sections labeled \"bed\" in white text, at the top and 7 black sections labeled \"night\" in white text, at the bottom (the first and last sections are split in two as it goes from the end of the week to the start of the (next) week. So there are 8 night sections, but they only cover 7 times 12 hours). The night sections always go from 6PM to 6AM. But the bed sections are only 8 hours long and they only stay fully over the night sections two times, and two times they are not above the night sections at all. Above the ruler, the bed times are shown. These labels are over the relevant ticks on the ruler. The ruler has small ticks for every two hours, longer ticks at noon, and a line that goes all the way through the ruler dividing each day. The ruler begins on midnight as Sunday starts and ends as Saturday finishes at midnight. Below the ruler each day are labels with the three-letter abbreviations in a much larger font. Here below the rulers, text is transcribed with the day first, then night or bed according to which comes first, and the time interval for bed given after each bed. The first and last night will only be a partial word and only the first time will there be a (ni)ght to start.] Sun ght Bed 10AM 6PM Night\nMon Bed 2PM 10PM Night\nTue Bed 6PM 2AM Night\nWed Night Bed 10PM 6AM\nThu Night\nFri Bed 2AM 10AM Night\nSat Bed 6AM 2PM Nig\n[Below the ruler are five panels. In the first, two Cueball-like guys are talking together. Cueball is addressing his friend with one hand raised.] Cueball: You have trouble sleeping right? Friend: Only when your mom is over.\n[Cueball is now standing next to a an easel with a large version of the chart shown above the panels. Cueball is pointing to the chart while his friend is looking at it.] Cueball: Since your work is flexible- Friend: -Like your mom- Cueball: -you should try the 28-hour day - 20 awake, 8 asleep (or 19\/9 if you prefer). Friend: I prefer your mom.\n[Cueball moves forward toward his friend, with the chart behind him. He holds both hands, held together, up in front of him. The easel with the chart can now be seen to have three legs, as opposed to only two shown in the previous panel.] Cueball: It synchs up with the week - you spend weekdays awake normally, then on weekends you can go out all night. Friend: Just like your mom.\n[In a frameless panel, only Cueball is shown from the torso up. He gestures with both arms raised on each side of him.] Cueball: It means four extra hours daily. You can stay up until you're exhausted every day and then spend a full 9 hours asleep each night!\n[Back to both again, but without the chart. Cueball leans toward his friend as his friend lifts a hand to his chin.] Friend: But how much time can I spend doing your mom? Cueball: You? I'm guessing three or four minutes, tops. Friend: ...Well played.\n"}
{"id":321,"title":"Thighs","image_title":"Thighs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/321","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thighs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/321:_Thighs","transcript":"[Cueball is singing into a microphone he is holding while Megan sit in her office chair typing on her computer. Musical notes fly around Cueball.] Cueball: It's the thigh of the tiger\n[Cueball continues to sing, titling his head upwards.] Cueball: When the moon hits your thigh like a big pizza pie, that's amore.\n[Cueball sings on now holding the microphone in both hands.] Cueball: She's my brown-thighed girl. Megan: Don't you have a job or something? Megan: Also, Eww.\n","explanation":"In each panel, Cueball sings a verse from a different song where he replaces the word \"eye\" with the word \"thigh.\" First it is Survivor's \" Eye of the Tiger ,\" then Dean Martin's \" That's Amore ,\" and finally Van Morrison's \" Brown Eyed Girl .\"\nThe comic shows how vastly different each song's meaning becomes when \"eye\" is replaced with \"thigh.\" In the last panel, Cueball's version makes Megan go \"eww,\" and she asks him if he doesn't have a job he should be doing instead. The eww refers to the fact that the brown-eyed girl turns into a brown-thighed girl, and such colored thighs could be eminently possible via an act of poor defecation on oneself, hence the disgust reaction from Megan.\nIn the title text, it seems that Cueball continues with a reference to the first line of The Battle Hymn of the Republic , adding to the humorous effect, since typically thighs cannot see. But mainly it is a sexual joke playing on the double meaning of \" coming \".\nIn 1814: Color Pattern , Randall makes his own version of \"That's Amore,\" this time letting Megan sing it to Cueball.\n[Cueball is singing into a microphone he is holding while Megan sit in her office chair typing on her computer. Musical notes fly around Cueball.] Cueball: It's the thigh of the tiger\n[Cueball continues to sing, titling his head upwards.] Cueball: When the moon hits your thigh like a big pizza pie, that's amore.\n[Cueball sings on now holding the microphone in both hands.] Cueball: She's my brown-thighed girl. Megan: Don't you have a job or something? Megan: Also, Eww.\n"}
{"id":322,"title":"Pix Plz","image_title":"Pix Plz","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/322","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pix_plz.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/322:_Pix_Plz","transcript":"[Black Hat stands in the entrance to a room. The door has been broken down. A surprised Cueball has turned away from his computer to face the remains of the door.] Black Hat: Hi. I'm here about the girl who visited your IRC channel last night looking for Java help. Cueball: What did you do to my door?\nBlack Hat: When someone with a feminine username joins your community and you say \"OMG a woman on the Internet\" and 'jokingly' ask for naked pics, you are being an asshole. You are not being ironic. You are not cracking everybody up. You are the number one reason women are so rare on the Internet. Black Hat: At least, the parts of it you frequent.\n[Joanna enters the room, holding some sort of device.] Black Hat: As someone who likes nerdy girls, I do not appreciate this. I'm here to ban you from the Internet. The gal behind me with the EMP cannon is Joanna - she'll be assigned to you for the next year. Try to go online and she'll melt your PC. Cueball: Dude, she's hot. Is she single? Black Hat: Joanna, fire.","explanation":"Though this comic predates it, there is an Internet meme best stated as \"there are no girls on the Internet.\" It is also known as Rule 16 or Rule 30 of the Internet , not to be confused with Wolfram's cellular automata . This comes partly from a supposition that girls aren't smart enough to go on the Internet or even use technology, and more directly from the idea that they are afraid of interacting in such a male-dominated subculture, so anyone claiming to be female on the Internet must be a male pretending to be one for the purposes of active or passive trolling. Thankfully for humanity at large, the meme is now the opposite of true (just look at the female-dominated Facebook), but still lives on as a joke, albeit not always a pleasant one. For many users, the puerile nature of the Internet creates a repulsive force because of exactly what Cueball is doing. As soon as anyone claims to be a female online, there will invariably be a slew of \" tits or gtfo \" replies.\nRandall projects this stereotypical Internet douchebaggery onto Cueball , who behaves this way out of misogyny thinly disguised as a joke. This barely-a-joke, found in certain areas of the Internet (especially IRC and 4chan), holds the view that women are only \"good for\" sex and porn. By making such a huge deal out of her being a girl, he directs unwanted sexual attention at any female who joins.\nBlack Hat , while usually a destructive force and self-proclaimed classhole , here switches positions with Cueball, standing up for women everywhere. (This makes sense when you consider that Black Hat tends to pursue Randall's thoughts in a more controversial way, see 86: Digital Rights Management ). However, he still keeps some of his destructive tendencies and knocks down Cueball's door. He enlists the help of a Ponytail character named Joanna to ban Cueball from the Internet. (More than 9 years later, Joanna is hired to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 United States presidential election in 1756: I'm With Her , released the day before that election. She is also shown in the 1000: 1000 Comics , where she is seen at number 653 .)\nIRC is the acronym for Internet Relay Chat. It is a protocol that eventually evolved into the instant messengers , chat rooms , and XMPP (formerly Jabber) servers around today. With the advent of live-streaming video online, IRC channels are making a come-back as a way for hosts and audiences to communicate with each other in real-time.\nAn EMP is an electromagnetic pulse that will disrupt electronics from functioning normally. An EMP is a short burst of electromagnetic energy. Small EMPs will disrupt electricity momentarily, while larger EMPs are capable of burning out circuitry and erasing hard drives.\nAt the title text, Cueball tries to defend his misogyny by claiming that one of his IRC chat system acquaintances is a female, as if to imply that that makes his words no longer misogynist (this is similar to the defense \"I'm not racist! Some of my best friends are black!\").\n[Black Hat stands in the entrance to a room. The door has been broken down. A surprised Cueball has turned away from his computer to face the remains of the door.] Black Hat: Hi. I'm here about the girl who visited your IRC channel last night looking for Java help. Cueball: What did you do to my door?\nBlack Hat: When someone with a feminine username joins your community and you say \"OMG a woman on the Internet\" and 'jokingly' ask for naked pics, you are being an asshole. You are not being ironic. You are not cracking everybody up. You are the number one reason women are so rare on the Internet. Black Hat: At least, the parts of it you frequent.\n[Joanna enters the room, holding some sort of device.] Black Hat: As someone who likes nerdy girls, I do not appreciate this. I'm here to ban you from the Internet. The gal behind me with the EMP cannon is Joanna - she'll be assigned to you for the next year. Try to go online and she'll melt your PC. Cueball: Dude, she's hot. Is she single? Black Hat: Joanna, fire."}
{"id":323,"title":"Ballmer Peak","image_title":"Ballmer Peak","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/323","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ballmer_peak.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/323:_Ballmer_Peak","transcript":"[A graph with \"programming skill\" on the Y-axis and \"blood alcohol concentration\" on the X-axis. The Y-axis slowly goes down, but spikes at 0.1337%.] [Cueball is making a presentation with the graph.] Cueball: Called the Ballmer Peak, it was discovered by Microsoft in the 80's. The cause is unknown but somehow a B.A.C between 0.129% and 0.138% confers superhuman programming ability. Cueball: However, it's a delicate effect requiring careful calibration \u2013 you can't just give a team of coders a year's supply of whiskey and tell them to get cracking. Spectator: ...Has that ever happened? Cueball: Remember Windows ME? Spectator: I knew it!\nIn the above-mentioned speech at Google, Randall Munroe explained that he tried to experiment on himself about the relationship between alcohol intoxication and intellectual skills, by solving a Rubik's Cube repeatedly while getting more and more drunk. He eventually found that he could get deeply drunk without degrading very much his performance at solving the puzzle (contrary to, for instance, finding and picking up the Cube which became something of a problem towards the end). He suggested that the Rubik's Cube wasn't a good test to study this relationship, the cube probably being solved with muscle memory rather than real intellectual skills.\n","explanation":"This comic is about alcohol and programming ability. Programmers sometimes have a reputation for drinking habits, and programmer gatherings (such as hackfests ) tend to offer copious amounts of alcohol. More generally, intoxicated programmers can get the impression that , by being a little disconnected from physical reality, they become more efficient at their programming. The comic is a take on this belief, with two references:\nThe curve in the comic suggests that, while generally decreasing with alcohol intoxication, at just the right level, the skill of a programmer gets terrific indeed. Randall named the peak after Steve Ballmer, as if discovered by him; this references the analogously named Balmer peaks (with one 'L'), and the idea that Steve Ballmer makes for an easy association of programming and alcohol. The peak of the curve occurs at a BAC of 0.1337%, which is a reference to leet . (See this interview with Randall ).\nThe end of the comic turns the whole idea into a sideways jab at Windows ME , a version of Microsoft Windows often criticized for being buggy, slow, and unstable: it suggests that ME was developed by programmers completely drunk, because their managers wanted to exploit this \"Ballmer peak,\" but did so without any precaution. That idea fit the result of a buggy and unstable product well.\nOn the contrary, the title text claims that Apple uses this effect with careful calibration, by delivering precise quantities of alcohol ( schnapps ) to its programmers via intravenous therapy (IV).\nAn actual research paper published in March 2012 showed that the situation described in this comic is not far from reality. Researchers found that intoxicated participants performed better than sober participants on a test that evaluates creative problem solving skills, and were also more likely to evaluate their own solutions as insightful. However, the study only tested a B.A.C. of 0.075%, not between 0.129% and 0.138% as displayed in the comic.\n[A graph with \"programming skill\" on the Y-axis and \"blood alcohol concentration\" on the X-axis. The Y-axis slowly goes down, but spikes at 0.1337%.] [Cueball is making a presentation with the graph.] Cueball: Called the Ballmer Peak, it was discovered by Microsoft in the 80's. The cause is unknown but somehow a B.A.C between 0.129% and 0.138% confers superhuman programming ability. Cueball: However, it's a delicate effect requiring careful calibration \u2013 you can't just give a team of coders a year's supply of whiskey and tell them to get cracking. Spectator: ...Has that ever happened? Cueball: Remember Windows ME? Spectator: I knew it!\nIn the above-mentioned speech at Google, Randall Munroe explained that he tried to experiment on himself about the relationship between alcohol intoxication and intellectual skills, by solving a Rubik's Cube repeatedly while getting more and more drunk. He eventually found that he could get deeply drunk without degrading very much his performance at solving the puzzle (contrary to, for instance, finding and picking up the Cube which became something of a problem towards the end). He suggested that the Rubik's Cube wasn't a good test to study this relationship, the cube probably being solved with muscle memory rather than real intellectual skills.\n"}
{"id":324,"title":"Tapping","image_title":"Tapping","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/324","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tapping.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/324:_Tapping","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk, tapping various parts of it.] Cueball: Hey, I can get different pitches by tapping on different parts of the desk. Tap Tap Tap Tap\n[Cueball starts tapping faster, with both hands.] Cueball: Sweet, I can do the Jurassic park theme! Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap\n[Cueball tap the desk very rapidly, legs crossed.] Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap\n[Later, elsewhere.] Megan: So, what did you do all afternoon? Cueball: Hung out.\n","explanation":"In the first panel, Cueball makes the chance observation that tapping different points on a desk's surface results in different pitches being produced, a consequence of the desk's different resonant frequencies at these points. He soon learns that by using the pitches produced, he can replicate the well-known theme music to the film Jurassic Park . The third panel depicts that, given a lack of other entertaining stimuli, Cueball soon becomes engrossed in his newly discovered musical instrument, and his music grows in complexity.\nThis is a fun observation about part of human nature, to which many people can relate. Sadly, Cueball doesn't feel like telling Megan what he did, and instead, he just gives her an empty answer. Cueball perhaps feels, as Randall suggests in the title text, that he could not explain why the tapping activity was fun in its own right and not just a consequence of boredom, so he avoids having to explain in the first instance.\nOther comics have shown the idea of feeling embarrassed by what one likes, to the point of refusing to admit that one likes it.  Examples are 245: Floor Tiles and the title text of 1103: Nine .\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, tapping various parts of it.] Cueball: Hey, I can get different pitches by tapping on different parts of the desk. Tap Tap Tap Tap\n[Cueball starts tapping faster, with both hands.] Cueball: Sweet, I can do the Jurassic park theme! Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap\n[Cueball tap the desk very rapidly, legs crossed.] Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap Tap\n[Later, elsewhere.] Megan: So, what did you do all afternoon? Cueball: Hung out.\n"}
{"id":325,"title":"A-Minus-Minus","image_title":"A-Minus-Minus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/325","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/a-minus-minus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/325:_A-Minus-Minus","transcript":"[Black Hat is packing a bobcat into a box; Megan stands beside him.]\nMegan: What are you doing? Black Hat: Making the world a weirder place.\nBobcat: mrrowlll [Black Hat has finished taping the package for shipping.] Black Hat: Starting with my eBay feedback page.\n[Bandaged person at a computer with assorted debris around the floor.] Screen: comments: Bandaged person typing: Instead of office chair package contained bobcat. Bandaged person typing: Would not buy again.\n","explanation":"Black Hat is trying to make the world a weirder place by shipping bobcats to his eBay buyers. Ordinarily, negative feedback is used to warn future buyers about sellers who ship broken products or post misleading listings. In this case, the unfortunate buyer is leaving feedback warning future buyers that Black Hat ships bobcats instead of the actual products, though \"would not buy again\" seems to be a rather feeble response to the replacement. This appears to have been a continuing project, as Cueball receives random packages a year and a half later ( 576: Packages ). Four years later, it is shown that you can blackmail Black Hat into not sending you a bobcat ( 837: Coupon Code ). This comic is also referenced in a popular Amazon review for Randall Munroe's book, What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.\nThe weak \"would not buy again\" comment is a play on the stock \"would buy again\" comment often found in positive eBay feedback; the title \"A-Minus-Minus\" is a play on the frequent comment \"A++.\"  That in turn, sometimes with varying numbers of pluses, seems to be an easy way people use to pad the end of an eBay comment field to the maximum 80 characters. It's also a reference to jokes in which exceptionally good schoolwork is graded with extra pluses after an A+ (and exceptionally bad work is graded with large numbers of minuses after an F).\nThe title text is about a flaw in eBay's feedback system: You can intentionally do nasty things to your buyers and get very bad reviews, but still have overall high feedback scores as long as you don't do it too often. (See also 937: TornadoGuard , which shows a different flaw in the concept of averaging reviews \u2014 namely that five-star reviews for aesthetic qualities are weighted equally to one-star reviews for major functional deficits \u2014 and 1098: Star Ratings , which addresses the topic as well.) These reviews would be disregarded by future customers as well for their weirdness.\n[Black Hat is packing a bobcat into a box; Megan stands beside him.]\nMegan: What are you doing? Black Hat: Making the world a weirder place.\nBobcat: mrrowlll [Black Hat has finished taping the package for shipping.] Black Hat: Starting with my eBay feedback page.\n[Bandaged person at a computer with assorted debris around the floor.] Screen: comments: Bandaged person typing: Instead of office chair package contained bobcat. Bandaged person typing: Would not buy again.\n"}
{"id":326,"title":"Effect an Effect","image_title":"Effect an Effect","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/326","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/effect_an_effect.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/326:_Effect_an_Effect","transcript":"My Hobby: Using the more obscure meanings of \"affect\" and \"effect\" to try to trip up amateur grammar Nazis. Cueball: I think that our foreign policy effects the situation. Computer: You mean \"affects.\" Cueball: tee hee hee\n","explanation":"\"Affect\" and \"effect\" can each both be a noun and a verb, share the sense of influence , and they are often confused with each other. (See the usage note under \"Affect.\")\nIn careful speech, both words (as verbs) are similar but not identical. \"Affect\" is \/\u0259\u02c8f\u025bkt\/ (or uh- fekt ) and \"effect\" is \/\u026a\u02c8f\u025bkt\/ (or ih- fekt ). However, for some people, these words are homophones \u2014 it's also explained here: homophones affect vs effect .\n\"Effect\" is usually a noun, meaning a result , and \"affect\" usually a verb, meaning to act upon . \"Effect\" as a verb has the slightly different meaning to bring about . Cueball says that the foreign policy causes the situation, not, as the \"grammar nazi\" thinks, that it changes the situation.\nThe title of the comic translates to cause or bring about a result , which is just what Cueball does! It can also be seen as a play on words, being similar to the phrase \"cause and effect.\"\nThe title text refers to the Victory marking practice common among fighter pilots in a war zone. Fighter pilots who score a \"kill\" on an opposing aircraft will have a silhouette of the downed plane painted on the side of their plane as a way of keeping track of kills. In this sense, Cueball \"shot down,\" figuratively speaking, an online (grammar) nazi, and would mark it by painting a silhouette on the side of his computer.\nSee also 1429: Data .\nMy Hobby: Using the more obscure meanings of \"affect\" and \"effect\" to try to trip up amateur grammar Nazis. Cueball: I think that our foreign policy effects the situation. Computer: You mean \"affects.\" Cueball: tee hee hee\n"}
{"id":327,"title":"Exploits of a Mom","image_title":"Exploits of a Mom","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/327","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exploits_of_a_mom.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/327:_Exploits_of_a_Mom","transcript":"[Mrs. Roberts receives a call from her son's school on her wireless phone. She is standing with a cup of hot coffee or tea (shown with a small line above the cup) facing a small round three-legged table to the right. The voice of the caller is indicated to come from the phone with a zigzag line.] Voice over the phone: Hi, This is your son's school. We're having some computer trouble.\n[In this frame-less panel Mrs. Roberts has put the cup down on the table turned facing out.] Mrs. Roberts: Oh, dear \u2013 did he break something? Voice over the phone: In a way \u2013\n[Mrs. Roberts is now drinking from the cup again looking right. The table is not shown.] Voice over the phone: Did you really name your son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- ? Mrs. Roberts: Oh, yes. Little Bobby Tables, we call him.\n[Mrs. Roberts holds the cup down.] Voice over the phone: Well, we've lost this year's student records. I hope you're happy. Mrs. Roberts: And I hope you've learned to sanitize your database inputs.\nThis comic has become rather famous, spawning a site at http:\/\/bobby-tables.com about preventing SQL injection and also at the official Python SQLite documentation . Noted security expert Bruce Schneier (who often quotes xkcd) mentioned a similar attack that happened in the 2010 Swedish general elections, and several people tried it on Randall's color survey .\nIn 1253: Exoplanet Names , someone (presumably Mrs. Roberts) attempts to perform a similar trick, submitting the name e'); DROP TABLE PLANETS;-- to the IAU.\nIt is later revealed in 342: 1337: Part 2 that the daughter's middle name is Elaine (full name: Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory Elaine Roberts ). This is thus the first time Elaine is mentioned. This comic was, presumably, a setup for the \" 1337 \" series where both of the hacker mom's kids are shown for the first time.\nThis comic is available as a signed print in the xkcd store .\nIn 2020 this happened in real life: Company made to change name that could be used for website hacks .\n","explanation":"Mrs. Roberts receives a call from her son 's school. The caller, likely one of the school's administrators, asks if she really named her son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- , a rather unusual name. Perhaps surprisingly, Mrs. Roberts responds in the affirmative, claiming that she uses the nickname \"Little Bobby Tables.\" As the full name is read into the school's system's databases without data sanitization , it causes the \"Students\" table in the database to be dropped, meaning it gets deleted.\nThe title of this comic is a pun. Exploit can mean an accomplishment or heroic deed, but in computer science, the term refers to a program or technique that takes advantage of a vulnerability in other software. In fact, one could say that her exploit is to exploit an exploit (her achievement is to make use of a vulnerability). The title can also refer to her choice of name for her son, which is rather extraordinary.\nIn SQL , a database programming language, commands are separated by semicolons ; , and strings of text are often delimited using single quotes ' . Parts of commands may also be enclosed in parentheses ( and ) .  Data entries are stored as \"rows\" within named \"tables\" of similar items (e.g., Students ). The command to delete an entire table (and thus every row of data in that table) is DROP TABLE , as in DROP TABLE Students; .\nThe exploited vulnerability here is that the single quote in the name input was not correctly \"escaped\" by the software. That is, if a student's name did indeed contain a quote mark, it should have been read as one of the characters making up the text string and not as the marker to close the string, which it erroneously was. Lack of careful parsing is a common SQL vulnerability; this type of exploit is referred to as SQL injection . Mrs. Roberts thus reminds the school to make sure that they have added data filtering code to prevent code injection exploits in the future.\nFor example, to add information about Elaine to a data table called 'Students', the SQL query could be: INSERT INTO Students (firstname) VALUES ('Elaine');\nHowever, using the odd name Robert');DROP TABLE Students;-- where we used \"Elaine\" above, the SQL query becomes: INSERT INTO Students (firstname) VALUES ('Robert');DROP TABLE Students;--\u00a0');\nBy insertion of the two semi-colons in the odd name, this is now three well-formed SQL commands: INSERT INTO Students (firstname) VALUES ('Robert');\nDROP TABLE Students;\n--\u00a0');\nThe first line is valid SQL code that will legitimately insert data about a student named Robert.\nThe second line is valid injected SQL code that will delete the whole Student data table from the database.\nThe third line is a valid code comment ( -- denotes a comment), which will cause the rest of the line to be ignored by the SQL server.\nFor this to work, it helps to know the structure of the database. But it's quite a good guess that a school's student management database might have a table named Students .\nOf course, in real life, most exploits of this kind would be performed not by engineering a person's name such that it would eventually be entered into a school database query, but rather by accessing some kind of input system (such as a website's login screen or search interface) and guessing various combinations by trial and error until something works, perhaps by first trying to inject the SHOW TABLES; command to see how the database is structured.\nTo correctly and harmlessly include the odd name in the Students table in the school database the correct SQL is: INSERT INTO Students (firstname) VALUES ('Robert'');DROP TABLE Students;--\u00a0');\nNote that the single quote after Robert is now sanitized by doubling it, which changes it from malicious code to harmless data, and the full first 'name' of the student Robert';DROP TABLE Students;-- is now stored correctly.\nIt should be noted that while data sanitization can mitigate the risks of SQL injection, the proper prevention technique is to use Prepared statements .\nNoting the difference between the \"actual\" name using the word TABLE and the child's nickname being Bobby Tables, one could argue that there's an implied reference to one of the most argued topics of database naming conventions - should table names be singular or plural.\nThe title text references that Mrs. Roberts' daughter is named \"Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory\". This is a play on how if someone is stuck and forced to work in a manufacturing factory\/plant, then they will write on the product \"Help I am trapped in a ____ factory\" in order to tell people on the outside. Having this name would cause any police officer who pulls her over to show some concern. And getting the license in the first place would likely be difficult. The idea of inserting a help message like this was already used in 10: Pi Equals .\n[Mrs. Roberts receives a call from her son's school on her wireless phone. She is standing with a cup of hot coffee or tea (shown with a small line above the cup) facing a small round three-legged table to the right. The voice of the caller is indicated to come from the phone with a zigzag line.] Voice over the phone: Hi, This is your son's school. We're having some computer trouble.\n[In this frame-less panel Mrs. Roberts has put the cup down on the table turned facing out.] Mrs. Roberts: Oh, dear \u2013 did he break something? Voice over the phone: In a way \u2013\n[Mrs. Roberts is now drinking from the cup again looking right. The table is not shown.] Voice over the phone: Did you really name your son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- ? Mrs. Roberts: Oh, yes. Little Bobby Tables, we call him.\n[Mrs. Roberts holds the cup down.] Voice over the phone: Well, we've lost this year's student records. I hope you're happy. Mrs. Roberts: And I hope you've learned to sanitize your database inputs.\nThis comic has become rather famous, spawning a site at http:\/\/bobby-tables.com about preventing SQL injection and also at the official Python SQLite documentation . Noted security expert Bruce Schneier (who often quotes xkcd) mentioned a similar attack that happened in the 2010 Swedish general elections, and several people tried it on Randall's color survey .\nIn 1253: Exoplanet Names , someone (presumably Mrs. Roberts) attempts to perform a similar trick, submitting the name e'); DROP TABLE PLANETS;-- to the IAU.\nIt is later revealed in 342: 1337: Part 2 that the daughter's middle name is Elaine (full name: Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory Elaine Roberts ). This is thus the first time Elaine is mentioned. This comic was, presumably, a setup for the \" 1337 \" series where both of the hacker mom's kids are shown for the first time.\nThis comic is available as a signed print in the xkcd store .\nIn 2020 this happened in real life: Company made to change name that could be used for website hacks .\n"}
{"id":328,"title":"Eggs","image_title":"Eggs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/328","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eggs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/328:_Eggs","transcript":"[Megan sits at a bar; Beret Guy cleans a glass from behind the counter. Cueball approaches.] Cueball: So, how do you like your eggs in the morning? Megan: Ooh, sunny side up. Cueball: Oh. Huh. Megan: Is that a problem? Cueball: Well, it's just that I was trying to set you up for the \"unfertilized\" line. Megan: Ah. Bad timing; I'm actually looking for casual sex. ...interested? Cueball: I'd love to, but I've got like 20 more jokes to set up tonight. Hey, have you seen a priest and a rabbi?\n","explanation":"At a bar, Cueball uses what appears to be a common cheesy pick-up line: \"So, how do you like your eggs in the morning?\" \u2014 implying that he will be the one cooking them, because they will still be together in the morning, after they spent the night having sex.\nFor women who do not appreciate such paltry attempts at soliciting sexual intercourse, a sardonic counter-response to the pick-up line is \"unfertilized,\" which switches the meaning of \"eggs\" from chicken eggs to female gametes , expressing the sentiment that they do not wish to have sex. However, in this scenario, it turns out Cueball is not actually trying to solicit sex from Megan at all, but is just interested in setting up jokes. Megan's desire for actual casual sex therefore subverts his plan for comedy. He politely declines her offer and tries instead with a different joke using the classic snowclone priest and rabbi setup.\nThe title text continues the conversation, where Megan reveals that the bar is actually a \"casual sex bar\" and further suggests that priests and rabbis do in fact come to the bar frequently. This is in contrast to real life, where women in bars are generally not interested in casual sex, [ citation needed ] and such bars would probably not be frequented by religious leaders.\n[Megan sits at a bar; Beret Guy cleans a glass from behind the counter. Cueball approaches.] Cueball: So, how do you like your eggs in the morning? Megan: Ooh, sunny side up. Cueball: Oh. Huh. Megan: Is that a problem? Cueball: Well, it's just that I was trying to set you up for the \"unfertilized\" line. Megan: Ah. Bad timing; I'm actually looking for casual sex. ...interested? Cueball: I'd love to, but I've got like 20 more jokes to set up tonight. Hey, have you seen a priest and a rabbi?\n"}
{"id":329,"title":"Turing Test","image_title":"Turing Test","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/329","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turing_test.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/329:_Turing_Test","transcript":"[Cueball typing at a desk with two computers; there is a caption above him.] Turing test extra credit: Convince the examiner that he's a computer. Cueball: You know, you make some really good points. Cueball: I'm... not even sure who I am anymore.\n","explanation":"In brief, a Turing test is a test for assessing whether a machine\/program demonstrates \"intelligent\" behaviour. Suggested by Alan Turing , the test involves a human examiner talking through a computer terminal to either a human or a computer \u2014 which it is, is not known to the examiner. If the machine\/program's responses convince the examiner that he\/she is talking to a human, the machine\/program is said to be passing the test. This comic suggests that extra credit should be awarded if the machine\/program is capable of \"counter-convincing\" the examiner that he's actually a computer.\nThe most common implementation of a Turing test Internet users may see is the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Program to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), which is often found on web site registration pages and usually involves trying to identify letters\/numbers in an image. The text in the image is often distorted and\/or in different colors or sizes or fonts, or may be very blurry as if from a very bad photocopy. This is to deter an automated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program from easily identifying the characters. The idea is that humans can process and decipher things from highly distorted pictures much easier than (current) computer algorithms can.\nThe caption makes a play on words, in that extra credit (optional additional work to perform) is sometimes offered on curricular examinations (\"tests\") to allow the taker to increase their total score by demonstrating a heightened understanding of the subject, but the Turing test is not such a test. (This misapplication of vernacular associated with academic testing to a non-academic procedure that also bears the name test is a common vehicle of humor, as in \"what if I take a blood test, and don't pass?\" One may pass or fail an academic exam, but a blood test only identifies blood type, and the concept of passing or failing is not applicable.)\nSimilarly, the title text makes a play on words with \"test-ees\" vs testes suggesting that such extra credit would be an ironic twist to Turing test. (Hitting or kicking an adversary in the testes is considered dirty fighting.) This play on words is actually itself a form of aural CAPTCHA; humans can processes and recognize puns for what they are, but machines generally run afoul of the ambiguity. (Unless Randall trained them for it as in 1696: AI Research .)\nA person with an appreciation for macabre humor will note that actually hitting Alan Turing in the testes would be rendered somewhat ineffectual by the fact that the British government chemically castrated him after he was convicted of \"gross indecency\" (Victorian-era code for homosexual acts between men) under the Labouchere Amendment in 1952. Whether or not this was intended by Randall is uncertain.\n[Cueball typing at a desk with two computers; there is a caption above him.] Turing test extra credit: Convince the examiner that he's a computer. Cueball: You know, you make some really good points. Cueball: I'm... not even sure who I am anymore.\n"}
{"id":330,"title":"Indecision","image_title":"Indecision","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/330","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/indecision.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/330:_Indecision","transcript":"[Cueball is lying on the floor with his friend.] Cueball: So what do you want to do? Friend: Still no ideas. Cueball: Wait, I think there's a rule about this. [Cueball goes to bookshelf and removes a book called \"Rules\".] [The book of rules is opened to the following: RULE social.b.99.1 If friends spend more than 60 minutes deciding what to do, they must default to sexual experimentation. [Cueball is standing, holding the book. The friend is in the process of standing up.] Cueball: Huh. Friend: I did not know that rule. Cueball: Me neither. Friend: I'll go get the Crisco.\nA book suggesting a more or less unrelated solution that is accepted anyway is also pulled from a shelf in 1024 .\n","explanation":"These two friends (both presumably male, since female characters in xkcd are depicted with hair) are surprisingly cavalier in taking the suggestion to engage in sexual experimentation to alleviate boredom. Even if both men are gay, the fact that they're friends (as the rule in the book describes them) suggests that they are not currently having sex on a regular basis. In this case - and even more so if the friends are heterosexual - most people would not take the book's suggestion, and it may even make them feel embarrassed and awkward. [ citation needed ]\nThe book that one of the Cueballs grabs appears to be some sort of all-encompassing rule book, its reach including the social sphere. Obviously this book is fictional, but the line \"I think there's a rule about this\" sounds like a reference to folk \"rules\" or guidelines like the \" five-second rule .\"\nCrisco is a brand of shortening, a fat that is solid at room temperature and frequently used in baking, though is also sometimes used as a sexual lubricant. In this instance, it's implied that it will be used as a sexual lubricant. Crisco was referenced again in a sexual context in the title text of 414: Mistranslations and later as a part of a weird dream also in the title text of 557: Students .\nThe title text could be spoken by either one of the characters or Randall . It attempts to preempt any awkwardness or judgment the reader may have about this situation by transferring responsibility to the rule book.\n[Cueball is lying on the floor with his friend.] Cueball: So what do you want to do? Friend: Still no ideas. Cueball: Wait, I think there's a rule about this. [Cueball goes to bookshelf and removes a book called \"Rules\".] [The book of rules is opened to the following: RULE social.b.99.1 If friends spend more than 60 minutes deciding what to do, they must default to sexual experimentation. [Cueball is standing, holding the book. The friend is in the process of standing up.] Cueball: Huh. Friend: I did not know that rule. Cueball: Me neither. Friend: I'll go get the Crisco.\nA book suggesting a more or less unrelated solution that is accepted anyway is also pulled from a shelf in 1024 .\n"}
{"id":331,"title":"Photoshops","image_title":"Photoshops","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/331","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/photoshops.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/331:_Photoshops","transcript":"[Megan holds a sword while Cueball looks on.] My hobby: Insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped. Megan: This sabre is a 19th-century family heirloom. Cueball: It looks photoshopped. Megan: Huh? Cueball: Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.\n","explanation":"This whole comic, including the title text, are a play on the then-popular internet meme \" This Looks Shopped .\" It may also be making fun of how everything and anything you find on the internet has someone insisting that it's 'fake' or 'photoshopped', regardless of whether it's true in actuality.\nAdobe Photoshop is a popular image manipulation tool . It is used to manipulate photographic images and for drawing. Of course, Photoshop and similar tools like Paint Shop Pro can only be used for imagery, not for real life objects.\nThe title text contains the second part of the internet meme, the complete text of which is: \"THIS LOOKS SHOPPED \/ I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME.\"\nQuite a few interesting images have been uncovered as \"shopped\" using various techniques. Some examples: shadows are in the wrong direction, extra hands appear, movie stars are made thinner, wrinkles or spots are removed, and objects are added or removed. This of course triggered the start of the meme.\nJPEG is an image compression algorithm that works by finding frequencies in blocks of 8x8 pixels and saving that instead of the original pixels. This works remarkably well, but sometimes leaves artifacts that can be seen when zooming in enough. The iris of an eye contains all kinds of odd colored spots - and there's not a JPEG algorithm in sight.\nThis is another strip in the My Hobby series.\n[Megan holds a sword while Cueball looks on.] My hobby: Insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped. Megan: This sabre is a 19th-century family heirloom. Cueball: It looks photoshopped. Megan: Huh? Cueball: Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.\n"}
{"id":332,"title":"Gyroscopes","image_title":"Gyroscopes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/332","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gyroscopes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/332:_Gyroscopes","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk with a gyroscope in his hands. Text on top of the frame:] Despite years of studying physics, I still find gyroscopes a little freaky. [Cueball starts the gyroscope.] Gyroscope: zzzzip\n[The gyroscope spins.] Gyroscope: zzzzzz\n[Frameless panel, the gyroscope lifts into the air.]\n[The gyroscope moves away from Cueball, still spinning.] Gyroscope: G R E E T I N G S, H U M A N.\n","explanation":"Cueball is playing with a gyroscope . Even though he has studied them and intellectually understands their behaviour, they still seem somewhat mysterious. At the end of the comic, the gyroscope is revealed to have the power of levitation and to apparently be a sentient lifeform (it talks to him).\nIn the title text, Randall is mocking the Moon landing conspiracy theories and refers to the lunar precession in process. Gyroscopes and the lunar orbit both exhibit precession, a physical concept that non-scientists can find hard to grasp. Thus, it is a perfect subject for a lunar conspiracy theory. He goes on to claim that gyroscopes (which form part of the navigation system of every commercial airplane) were directly responsible for the 9\/11 terrorist attacks.\n[Cueball sits at a desk with a gyroscope in his hands. Text on top of the frame:] Despite years of studying physics, I still find gyroscopes a little freaky. [Cueball starts the gyroscope.] Gyroscope: zzzzip\n[The gyroscope spins.] Gyroscope: zzzzzz\n[Frameless panel, the gyroscope lifts into the air.]\n[The gyroscope moves away from Cueball, still spinning.] Gyroscope: G R E E T I N G S, H U M A N.\n"}
{"id":333,"title":"Getting Out of Hand","image_title":"Getting Out of Hand","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/333","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/getting_out_of_hand.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/333:_Getting_Out_of_Hand","transcript":"[A couple is in bed in the dark, and Cueball reaches out from under the covers to do a Wikipedia search about Foreplay.]\n","explanation":"Given how Wikipedia has an ever-expanding variety of topics, the grand majority of them in great detail, there is a possibility (even a temptation) of relying on Wikipedia to learn from every topic that leaves you confused... even foreplay . ('Bedtime' and 'us time' are not necessarily 'computer time'.)\nThis comic may also be a reference to how people can get addicted to reading Wikipedia pages, because there are many interesting links on each page that people haven't read yet, and there are links on that page that they click on, etc.\nThe title text refers to the fact that many rely on Wikipedia instead of remembering\/learning stuff. Reliance on Wikipedia was later directly addressed as the subject of 903: Extended Mind .\n[A couple is in bed in the dark, and Cueball reaches out from under the covers to do a Wikipedia search about Foreplay.]\n"}
{"id":334,"title":"Wasteland","image_title":"Wasteland","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/334","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wasteland.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/334:_Wasteland","transcript":"[Cueball is walking through a wasteland talking to himself.] Cueball: I am alone in this wasteland, a thousand miles from you. Cueball: But I haven't forgotten the feel of your skin, your mischievous smile. Cueball: You'd think a thousand miles would be enough. Cueball: I guess I'll keep walking.\n","explanation":"At the beginning of the comic, Cueball is wandering around in a barren area, supposedly a desert, thinking about his ex-partner, in which he, at first, appears to be fondly remembering him\/her, but the last two boxes explain that he is trying to take a long walk to forget him\/her, and is obviously not very good at it.\nThe title text implies that his ex-partner had easily forgotten him, and he wishes that he could forget more easily. It's also possible that he means that it's so hard to forget him\/her that forgetting anything else is simple in comparison to it.\nThere is a similar twist in comics 71: In the Trees and 1042: Never .\nNote: When Cueball mentions walking 1000 miles, he may be exaggerating, as, due to his lack of hiking\/traveling gear, most likely has only walked a hundred or so, either that, or the story is similar in nature, or even in the same universe, as comic 505 . Though this might also be a nod to a What If question about how long it would take for two immortal people to find each other on a barren planet.\n[Cueball is walking through a wasteland talking to himself.] Cueball: I am alone in this wasteland, a thousand miles from you. Cueball: But I haven't forgotten the feel of your skin, your mischievous smile. Cueball: You'd think a thousand miles would be enough. Cueball: I guess I'll keep walking.\n"}
{"id":335,"title":"Mattress","image_title":"Mattress","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/335","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mattress.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/335:_Mattress","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are cuddling.] Cuddling face-to-face is nice, but we can never figure out where to put our lower arms. Our solution: the Cuddle Mattress! Your lower arms fit in the convenient gap. [There is a diagram of a mattress with a notch cut through it at shoulder level. The gap is indicated with an arrow.] [The same couple is shown again, cuddling snugly on the mattress.]\n[Cueball and Megan are giving a presentation to another person. Cueball has a pointer and a clicker for the slides that are projected on the screen next to him.] Listener: Oh man, that's ALWAYS bothered me. Listener: I want one.\nListener: Although... so the lower arms just sort of dangle? Listener: What do you do with them?\nCueball: It was a bit awkward. Clicker: click Megan: Then we had a second breakthrough.\n[The couple is shown again on the cuddle mattress, this time in more detail and facing the tops of their heads. Their lower arms are sticking through the gap in the mattress and playing a conveniently located game of Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots.] Cueball: click click Blue Robot: punch Red Robot: punch Megan: click click\n","explanation":"A commonly cited problem with cuddling is that whatever arms you and your partner are lying on tend to fall asleep from your and\/or your partner's weight, and are in any case not very comfortable to be lying upon. Here Cueball and Megan have invented a mattress with a slot in it to solve that problem. To provide an activity for their lower arms when they are comfortably placed in that slot, they have installed a game of \" Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots \" underneath the bed.\nThe humour arises from the juxtaposition of a sedate activity like cuddling with a boisterous activity like \"Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots\" with the implication that Megan and Cueball are doing both at once.\nThe title text refers to a series of commercials for Tempur-Pedic mattresses where the presenter would place a wine glass on the mattress and then jump up and down somewhere else on the mattress. The fact that the wine did not spill was meant to indicate that one partner's motions would not disturb the other. It is implied that he did that test on this mattress and fell into the slot, breaking his ankle in the process.\n[Megan and Cueball are cuddling.] Cuddling face-to-face is nice, but we can never figure out where to put our lower arms. Our solution: the Cuddle Mattress! Your lower arms fit in the convenient gap. [There is a diagram of a mattress with a notch cut through it at shoulder level. The gap is indicated with an arrow.] [The same couple is shown again, cuddling snugly on the mattress.]\n[Cueball and Megan are giving a presentation to another person. Cueball has a pointer and a clicker for the slides that are projected on the screen next to him.] Listener: Oh man, that's ALWAYS bothered me. Listener: I want one.\nListener: Although... so the lower arms just sort of dangle? Listener: What do you do with them?\nCueball: It was a bit awkward. Clicker: click Megan: Then we had a second breakthrough.\n[The couple is shown again on the cuddle mattress, this time in more detail and facing the tops of their heads. Their lower arms are sticking through the gap in the mattress and playing a conveniently located game of Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots.] Cueball: click click Blue Robot: punch Red Robot: punch Megan: click click\n"}
{"id":336,"title":"Priorities","image_title":"Priorities","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/336","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/priorities.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/336:_Priorities","transcript":"[A teacher is talking to a student, sitting at a desk.] Teacher: If you don't turn in at least one homework assignment, you'll fail this class. [The student holds up his report card.] Student: Yeah. But if I can fail this class, the grades on my report card will be in alphabetical order!\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is a student, who apparently didn't turn in his homework assignment repeatedly, for which he gets a warning from his Cueball-like teacher.\nIn some schools in the United States, a student's grades are determined mainly using letters for quick reference. In most schools, the letter grades are given as follows:\nA \u2014 100%\u201390% B \u2014 89%\u201380% C \u2014 79%\u201370% D \u2014 69%\u201360% F \u2014 59%\u20130%\nTraditionally, these schools send ' report cards ' in which the student's current grading of the semester or even the entirety of the class the student is taking is denoted using these letters, for example:\nEnglish \u2014 A Mathematics \u2014 D Science \u2014 B Social Studies \u2014 B World Building \u2014 C\nThe student may have noted that, if he aims for certain scoring (for example: altering the quality of his homework or even sending out his homework only at the times needed for his grades to reach a certain level), he could make the report card spell every letter grade in alphabetical order. Deriving from the previous example, the student would aim for the following report card:\nEnglish \u2014 A Mathematics \u2014 B Science \u2014 C Social Studies \u2014 D World Building \u2014 F\nInterestingly, since in some schools even a 0% grade would produce the required 'F' grade, the student does not need to work at all (not even turn in any school assignments) to get the required 'F' grade, this leading to the situation presented in the comic above. Rather than a letter upon a continuum (as it might be assumed if 'E' were not skipped) it is generally accepted that 'F' actually stands for 'Failed' and covers any situation where insufficient credit was gained to obtain any other letter-grade. There are some schools, though, where turning in nothing would result in the class being marked \"incomplete\" or \"inc\" instead of having a grade shown at all.\nThe title text references that, not only can the grades in the report card inadvertently spell out certain words (for example: 'CAB' or 'FAD'), but also that the letter grade system denoted omits the letter 'E' in standard letter grading. The reason for the missing \"E\" is complex and explained in this Slate article . However, this is not universal in the United States: Ohio State University, for example, uses 'E' for failing.\n[A teacher is talking to a student, sitting at a desk.] Teacher: If you don't turn in at least one homework assignment, you'll fail this class. [The student holds up his report card.] Student: Yeah. But if I can fail this class, the grades on my report card will be in alphabetical order!\n"}
{"id":337,"title":"Post Office Showdown","image_title":"Post Office Showdown","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/337","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/post_office_showdown.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/337:_Post_Office_Showdown","transcript":"[Cueball is in a post office wearing earphones connected to his iPod. There are several other people, including an old version of White Hat at the counter with a cane and Hairbun with a long narrow box entering the office by the door. Behind the counter, Ponytail stands together with a Cueball-like guy. Another person is obscured by the lowest of the three connected thought bubbles emanating from Cueball to the left. A fourth thought bubble is below Cueball to the right. Above all this is a caption:] I spend a lot of time mentally choreographing elaborate fight scenes with strangers around me. Cueball's thoughts: Okay - if that old man pulls a crossbow, Cueball's thoughts: I'll throw the postal scale at him and dive backward behind the stamps machine. Cueball's thoughts: But what if the lady by the door has a katana in that box? Cueball's thoughts: Better set my iPod to the \"Kill Bill\" fight theme, just in case.\n","explanation":"Action movies, such as \" Kill Bill \" by Quentin Tarantino , often feature elaborate fight scenes in mundane environments.\nCueball , here wearing earphones connected to his iPod, is often imagining himself in such a situation, for instance as in this comic, while at the post office. This makes the comic related to the My Hobby series.\nFirst, Cueball imagines that the old man (an old version of White Hat with a cane) pulls out a crossbow and how he would react to that. But then, he continues to imagine that Hairbun has a katana samurai sword in the box. So this could be a long fight, so he decides to be ready for it by setting his iPod to play the \"Kill Bill\" fight theme. In Kill Bill, there is a long fight scene with samurai swords.\nThe title text refers to two songs: \" Battle Without Honor or Humanity \" from the soundtrack of \"Kill Bill,\" and \" Ride of the Valkyries \" by Richard Wagner , the latter being associated with fighting scenes because of a famous sequence in the movie \" Apocalypse Now \" by Francis Ford Coppola . He notes that these two songs will absolutely improve any activity, not only fight scenes.\n[Cueball is in a post office wearing earphones connected to his iPod. There are several other people, including an old version of White Hat at the counter with a cane and Hairbun with a long narrow box entering the office by the door. Behind the counter, Ponytail stands together with a Cueball-like guy. Another person is obscured by the lowest of the three connected thought bubbles emanating from Cueball to the left. A fourth thought bubble is below Cueball to the right. Above all this is a caption:] I spend a lot of time mentally choreographing elaborate fight scenes with strangers around me. Cueball's thoughts: Okay - if that old man pulls a crossbow, Cueball's thoughts: I'll throw the postal scale at him and dive backward behind the stamps machine. Cueball's thoughts: But what if the lady by the door has a katana in that box? Cueball's thoughts: Better set my iPod to the \"Kill Bill\" fight theme, just in case.\n"}
{"id":338,"title":"Future","image_title":"Future","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/338","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/future.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/338:_Future","transcript":"[The comic has three panels. In the first panel, Hairy and Megan are holding hands. There is a voice bubble originating from Cueball standing in the third panel.] Cueball: Come explore the future with me! [Megan says something, which goes to the third panel.] [The two voice bubbles cross in the middle of the second panel.] [Megan's voice bubble:] Megan: I can't.\n","explanation":"Cueball is in the last panel (the future) but somehow manages to get his message into the first panel (the past). Megan answers in the first panel, but somehow her message gets to Cueball in the last panel.\nThis comic can be interpreted in several ways. First, it is not clear if Cueball's question is intended for Megan alone, for Hairy alone, for both Megan and Hairy , or at the past world in general. If the question is intended for several people, the comic is just about how one could sometimes desire to know the future without waiting for it; however, time flows at its usual rate, and there's no way around this.\nIf the question is intended only for Megan, it likely means Cueball is asking Megan to become his girlfriend. She answers she can't, maybe because, as before, time runs at its usual rate and she can't go faster; or maybe because she's already with Hairy (they're shown holding hands), and she's not leaving Hairy for Cueball.\nFinally, the Cueball in the future could just be the very same person as the Hairy in the past, having become bald as he gets older. In this scenario, Cueball is just missing Megan, who was with him in the past but no longer is, maybe even because she has died in between.\nIn the title text, Cueball seems to be considering going back to the past, but he rejects doing so because, having seen the future, now the past doesn't look attractive.\n[The comic has three panels. In the first panel, Hairy and Megan are holding hands. There is a voice bubble originating from Cueball standing in the third panel.] Cueball: Come explore the future with me! [Megan says something, which goes to the third panel.] [The two voice bubbles cross in the middle of the second panel.] [Megan's voice bubble:] Megan: I can't.\n"}
{"id":339,"title":"Classic","image_title":"Classic","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/339","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/classic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/339:_Classic","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in front of a turntable, listening to Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. A guitarist (possibly meant to be Jimmy Page) can be seen in an inset in the top left corner of the first two panels.] Song: And as we wind on down the road, our shadows taller than our soul\nSong: When all is one and one is all, to be a rock and not to rooooll\nSong [fading away]: And she's buying a stairway to Heaven\nCueball: Man. The Baby Boomers are kicking our ASSES . Cueball: We need to get it together, guys.\n","explanation":"Cueball listens to the song \" Stairway to Heaven \" performed by Led Zeppelin using an old phonograph . Led Zeppelin was active during the 1970s, with Stairway To Heaven being released in 1971; as such, the music belongs to the Baby Boomer generation . After the song fades out to the end, he expresses how much it's affected him by stating that the baby boomers are winning over his own generation at music. The way in which the lyrics are written evokes the sound of this particular song as it finishes and fades out.\nThe title text likely refers to Lim Jeong-hyun , the guitarist in the YouTube video guitar that went viral in 2006-2007, in which he performed a cover of \"Canon Rock,\" a rock arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon . Alternatively, it may refer to JerryC , the original composer of \"Canon Rock,\" who also performed the song in a YouTube video , though his video did not gain as much popularity as Lim's.\nThe Classical era was a period in music history (1750 - 1820) that produced many musical compositions still remembered hundreds of years afterward, and the word 'classic' is now used to describe something that remains popular long after its time. The \"Baby Boomer generation\" is known for having created many musicians still well-loved today, including:\n[Cueball is sitting in front of a turntable, listening to Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. A guitarist (possibly meant to be Jimmy Page) can be seen in an inset in the top left corner of the first two panels.] Song: And as we wind on down the road, our shadows taller than our soul\nSong: When all is one and one is all, to be a rock and not to rooooll\nSong [fading away]: And she's buying a stairway to Heaven\nCueball: Man. The Baby Boomers are kicking our ASSES . Cueball: We need to get it together, guys.\n"}
{"id":340,"title":"Fight","image_title":"Fight","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/340","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fight.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/340:_Fight","transcript":"We had a fight last night. [Cueball is sitting in a sofa, head in both hands, feeling upset.] I guess she's still mad. [Megan is standing with arms crossed in front of her chest, with the same mood.] I woke up to find she'd written a sappy love note [Cueball is standing in front of a computer, with a cup in his hand.] to my boot sector. [The cup now lies on the floor, Cueball is looking at the computer with disbelief.] Computer: Operating system not found\n","explanation":"The boot sector of a hard drive is where the information for operating systems is stored. It tells the computer to load a program; in most cases, this is an operating system. If this sector is overwritten, an operating system stored on the drive can't be booted into.  (Fortunately, repairing a blanked or corrupted boot sector is surprisingly easy, although doing so usually requires the system to be booted from the installation media for the operating system on the drive.)\nThe first two panels indicate that Megan is still mad at Cueball from a fight from the night before, and the third panel shows promise of her forgiving him through an overly affectionate love note. However, the last panel reveals that she used the love note to overwrite the boot sector of Cueball 's computer out of anger.\nThe .conf files of Linux - and Unix -based systems are text based files where all the settings for various applications are stored. Since all the configurations were replaced with \"sweet nothings\" - whispered lovers' talk, or literal nothings (blank space or meaningless jumbles of characters) - none of the programs work as they should. X is the X Window System , the most common GUI framework used on modern Linux and Unix systems. Once upon a time, it was notoriously hard to configure correctly, even when starting from a known good configuration, let alone a destroyed one.  (More recent versions of X configure themselves correctly for most users without a .conf file.)\nWe had a fight last night. [Cueball is sitting in a sofa, head in both hands, feeling upset.] I guess she's still mad. [Megan is standing with arms crossed in front of her chest, with the same mood.] I woke up to find she'd written a sappy love note [Cueball is standing in front of a computer, with a cup in his hand.] to my boot sector. [The cup now lies on the floor, Cueball is looking at the computer with disbelief.] Computer: Operating system not found\n"}
{"id":341,"title":"1337 Part 1","image_title":"1337: Part 1","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/341","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1337_part_1.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/341:_1337:_Part_1","transcript":"[Cueball talks to his Cueball-like friend who is lying down on the floor, using his laptop. Cueball is pointing at the laptop.] Cueball: You're not on the neighbor's WiFi, are you? Friend: Yeah, why? Cueball: The admin... plays games. Friend: No problem. I'll just hop on a secure VPN.\n[Cueball's friend now sits on his knees in front of his laptop frantically typing. A message from the laptop comes out with a zig-zag line.] Friend: Whoa, my connections are dying as soon as I start to tunnel anything! Message on laptop: A VPN? How cute! And stop trying to SSH. Friend: Holy shit! Someone's inserting notes into the pages I request! Editing the TCP stream live! Friend: Nobody's that fast. Who is this admin?\n[In a frameless panel, Mrs. Roberts with a hot bun tray in one hand (indicated with five wiggly lines above the buns), with oven mitts on both hands, typing on her desktop computer on a table.] Mrs. Roberts: My goodness. Neighborhood scamps on the wireless. Taptaptaptap\n[Cueball is standing with a hand toward his now standing friend, the laptop lies between them.] Cueball: I should have warned you about Mrs. Roberts. Friend: How does she type with oven mitts!? Cueball: You've been pwned pretty hard, man. You might want to sit down.\n","explanation":"This is the first part of five in the \" 1337 \" series. The title 1337 is \"L-eet,\" or \"elite,\" using the Leet alphabet, a coding system used primarily on the internet (and on early text messaging system), meant to provide a bit of obfuscation to plain text both to make it harder to read, and to show off in a creative way using in-group jargon.\nAll comics in the series:\nThis series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday, probably because he wanted to release comic 404 on april fools' day) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nIf a wireless network (Wi-Fi) is unsecured, it is usually a sign that the owner of the access point is not technically skilled enough to go into the admin panel and enable encryption. Obviously, someone in the area who wants to get on the net, but doesn't have a mobile data connection, will simply use this open access point. However, it is also common practice to leave open an access point to be able to claim that infringement of copyright may not have been the homeowner, but that anybody could have connected to the access point and started downloading files.\nAnother fun trick, for administrators of open APs, is to intercept pages and edit their contents . The only way to stop this is to create a secure connection, or tunnel, to a server to stop the admin from playing man-in-the-middle . Of course, as the title text says, Mrs. Roberts is so cool, she can edit the TCP stream live, without the help of programs, but then there is help to get with tools like the Upside-Down-Ternet , if you wish to play games with people misusing your Wi-Fi.\nNot only is Mrs. Roberts awesome enough to manually edit the live TCP stream, she's also manually ending individual VPN and SSH connections as Cueball's Cueball-like friend makes them - while wearing oven mitts and baking cookies at the same time. He has been pwned (i.e. owned) by Mrs. Roberts.\nThe question \"How does she type with oven mitts?\" is likely a reference to the old web video site Homestar Runner and its character of Strong Bad , who answered emails while wearing boxing gloves. \"How does he type with boxing gloves?\" was the most common question he received. Another unanswered question is how Cueball's friend knew she was typing with gloves on; however, the answer is probably that since they were neighbors, they could see her through the window.\n[Cueball talks to his Cueball-like friend who is lying down on the floor, using his laptop. Cueball is pointing at the laptop.] Cueball: You're not on the neighbor's WiFi, are you? Friend: Yeah, why? Cueball: The admin... plays games. Friend: No problem. I'll just hop on a secure VPN.\n[Cueball's friend now sits on his knees in front of his laptop frantically typing. A message from the laptop comes out with a zig-zag line.] Friend: Whoa, my connections are dying as soon as I start to tunnel anything! Message on laptop: A VPN? How cute! And stop trying to SSH. Friend: Holy shit! Someone's inserting notes into the pages I request! Editing the TCP stream live! Friend: Nobody's that fast. Who is this admin?\n[In a frameless panel, Mrs. Roberts with a hot bun tray in one hand (indicated with five wiggly lines above the buns), with oven mitts on both hands, typing on her desktop computer on a table.] Mrs. Roberts: My goodness. Neighborhood scamps on the wireless. Taptaptaptap\n[Cueball is standing with a hand toward his now standing friend, the laptop lies between them.] Cueball: I should have warned you about Mrs. Roberts. Friend: How does she type with oven mitts!? Cueball: You've been pwned pretty hard, man. You might want to sit down.\n"}
{"id":342,"title":"1337 Part 2","image_title":"1337: Part 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/342","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1337_part_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/342:_1337:_Part_2","transcript":"[Cueball standing an looking down at his Cueball-like friend, who is sitting on the floor near an armchair holding a cloth to his face.] Friend: So the greatest hacker of our era is a cookie-baking mom? Cueball: Second-greatest. Friend: Oh?\n[The next panel is only half height as Cueball's narration is written as a caption above the panel without a frame around it. In the panel to the left lies a young Elaine with a ponytail on the floor typing at a keyboard while looking at a screen connected to a computer behind it with lots of wires and open case. The computer appears to have been pieced together and there is a screwdriver lying next to her and an open box lies behind her. Little Bobby Tables (a kid version of Cueball) is painting with a broad brush at an easel to the left. There is a clear drawing with two parts going up and one down, but it's not easy to see what it should look like. He is holding his other hand up in the air, like he is enjoying the painting.] Cueball (narrating): Mrs. Roberts had two children. Her son, Bobby, was never much for computers, but her daughter Elaine took to them like a ring in a bell.\n[The front of a car is in frame with side mirror and steering wheel visible. Mrs. Roberts is waving goodbye to her daughter who is wearing a backpack and is holding a walking stick. She is about to begin climbing a staircase built into a rocky mountain side. The first 11 step are visible. Behind the two and the stair are two distant mountain peaks, and above them two clouds. Cueball continues to narrate, this time inside the panel:] Cueball (narrating): When Elaine turned 11, her mother sent her to train under Donald Knuth in his mountain hideaway.\n[Donald Knuth, drawn with hair only around his neck, is standing with a pointing stick at a chalk board with graph traversal patterns on it and two blocks of unreadable text the top may be a matrix. This small panel is also lower than the next panel, with Cueballs narration above:] Cueball (narrating): For four years she studied algorithms. Donald Knuth: Child\u2014\n[Donald Knuth whips around from the board slashing the stick like a sword. Elaine jumps, making a somersault (indicated with a line curving on it self from floor to sword) and lands on the stick balancing with her arms out.] Donald Knuth: Why is A* search wrong in this situation? Stick: swish Elaine: Memory usage! Donald Knuth: What would you use? Elaine: Dijkstra's algorithm!\n[Donald Knuth and Elaine are outside, seen from behind while they are both writing on a chalkboard with a thick line down the middle to separate their work. On both sides their writing can be seen but it is unreadable. Where there is only text visible on Donald Knuth's side there is also what appears to be a drawing or matrix at the top of Elaine's. But a similar thing could be behind Donald Knuth's head. Elaine is no longer wearing her hair in a ponytail but have long straight white hair like her mom Mrs. Roberts. To the left there is a stump from a tree, some grass and maybe a puddle of water. Further back there is a small jagged hill and a flat horizon. To the right there are four mountain peaks and a flat high plateau towards the horizon. The frame of the panel does not include the top and bottom corner, but cuts a rectangular section of both places. In these two sections outside the panel is the last two paragraphs of Cueball's narrating:] Cueball (narrating): Until one day she bested her master Donald Knuth: So our lower bound here is O(n log n) Elaine: Nope. Got it in O(n log (log n)) Cueball (narrating): And left.\n","explanation":"This is the second part of five in the \" 1337 \" series. The title 1337 is \"L-eet,\" or \"elite,\" using the Leet alphabet, a coding system used primarily on the internet (and on early text messaging system), meant to provide a bit of obfuscation to plain text both to make it harder to read and to show off in a creative way using in-group jargon.\nAll comics in the series:\nThis series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday, probably because he wanted to release comic 404 on april fools' day) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\n\"Like a ring in a bell\" appears to be a reference to the Chuck Berry song Johnny B. Goode , in which Berry describes a young boy (like himself) who becomes a guitar-playing prodigy. The original lyric was \"just like a-ringing a bell.\" Apparently, Elaine learned to program as quickly, easily, and skillfully as Johnny (and Chuck) learned to play rock 'n' roll. Donald Knuth is a computer science Professor Emeritus at Stanford University who is famous for writing The Art of Computer Programming and developing the T e X computerized typesetting system. He may not have a mountain hideaway (a reference to Kill Bill , by the way as is the whole training sequence), but he would be one of the best mentors a budding hacker could have.\nThe A* search algorithm and Dijkstra's algorithm are graph search algorithms . And what study of algorithms would be complete without a healthy study about finding complexities? Time complexity is the amount of time an algorithm takes to execute. Upper and lower bounds for complexity is written in Big O notation . Best possible execution of an algorithm is constant time, or O(1), said in words, for any given data set, no matter how large, the algorithm will always return the answer in the same time. However, constant time is extremely difficult to achieve; linear time (O(n)) is also very good. For more complex algorithms, O( n*log(n) ) is good, but O( n*log(log(n)) ) is better. (Note that logarithms in different bases are proportional to each other. So this would hold true for any base >1.)\nFrom the evidence that Mrs. Roberts has two children, a daughter named Elaine , and a younger son named Bobby (presumably Little Bobby Tables aka \"Robert'); DROP TABLE students;--\"), we can assume that she is the same mother from 327: Exploits of a Mom . Of course, the title text here explains that Elaine is only her middle name (assuming canonicity of title-text). In the title text to 327: Exploits of a Mom , we learned that her first name is \"Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory\". Mrs. Roberts appears to have had fun naming her children.\n[Cueball standing an looking down at his Cueball-like friend, who is sitting on the floor near an armchair holding a cloth to his face.] Friend: So the greatest hacker of our era is a cookie-baking mom? Cueball: Second-greatest. Friend: Oh?\n[The next panel is only half height as Cueball's narration is written as a caption above the panel without a frame around it. In the panel to the left lies a young Elaine with a ponytail on the floor typing at a keyboard while looking at a screen connected to a computer behind it with lots of wires and open case. The computer appears to have been pieced together and there is a screwdriver lying next to her and an open box lies behind her. Little Bobby Tables (a kid version of Cueball) is painting with a broad brush at an easel to the left. There is a clear drawing with two parts going up and one down, but it's not easy to see what it should look like. He is holding his other hand up in the air, like he is enjoying the painting.] Cueball (narrating): Mrs. Roberts had two children. Her son, Bobby, was never much for computers, but her daughter Elaine took to them like a ring in a bell.\n[The front of a car is in frame with side mirror and steering wheel visible. Mrs. Roberts is waving goodbye to her daughter who is wearing a backpack and is holding a walking stick. She is about to begin climbing a staircase built into a rocky mountain side. The first 11 step are visible. Behind the two and the stair are two distant mountain peaks, and above them two clouds. Cueball continues to narrate, this time inside the panel:] Cueball (narrating): When Elaine turned 11, her mother sent her to train under Donald Knuth in his mountain hideaway.\n[Donald Knuth, drawn with hair only around his neck, is standing with a pointing stick at a chalk board with graph traversal patterns on it and two blocks of unreadable text the top may be a matrix. This small panel is also lower than the next panel, with Cueballs narration above:] Cueball (narrating): For four years she studied algorithms. Donald Knuth: Child\u2014\n[Donald Knuth whips around from the board slashing the stick like a sword. Elaine jumps, making a somersault (indicated with a line curving on it self from floor to sword) and lands on the stick balancing with her arms out.] Donald Knuth: Why is A* search wrong in this situation? Stick: swish Elaine: Memory usage! Donald Knuth: What would you use? Elaine: Dijkstra's algorithm!\n[Donald Knuth and Elaine are outside, seen from behind while they are both writing on a chalkboard with a thick line down the middle to separate their work. On both sides their writing can be seen but it is unreadable. Where there is only text visible on Donald Knuth's side there is also what appears to be a drawing or matrix at the top of Elaine's. But a similar thing could be behind Donald Knuth's head. Elaine is no longer wearing her hair in a ponytail but have long straight white hair like her mom Mrs. Roberts. To the left there is a stump from a tree, some grass and maybe a puddle of water. Further back there is a small jagged hill and a flat horizon. To the right there are four mountain peaks and a flat high plateau towards the horizon. The frame of the panel does not include the top and bottom corner, but cuts a rectangular section of both places. In these two sections outside the panel is the last two paragraphs of Cueball's narrating:] Cueball (narrating): Until one day she bested her master Donald Knuth: So our lower bound here is O(n log n) Elaine: Nope. Got it in O(n log (log n)) Cueball (narrating): And left.\n"}
{"id":343,"title":"1337 Part 3","image_title":"1337: Part 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/343","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1337_part_3.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/343:_1337:_Part_3","transcript":"[Outside, Adrian Lamo is helping Elaine Roberts over a barbed wire fence.] It was the late 90's. Elaine crisscrossed the country with Adrian Lamo, the 'Homeless Hacker', learning to gain entry into systems both virtual and physical. Adrian Lamo: So you just throw a rug over the fence and... say, what is this place anyway? Roberts: Nowhere special. Lamo: ...Elaine, is this NSA Headquarters? Roberts: ...Look, I just want to see if they've broken RSA.\n[Inside, Lawrence Lessig is sitting at a table, Roberts is standing across the table swinging a knife.] She learned, from Lawrence Lessig, about the monstrosity that is U.S. Copyright Law. Roberts: So, how do we fix the system? Stab bad guys? Lessig: I'm starting something called \"Creative Commons\" Shink Elaine Roberts: I think we should stab bad guys...\n[Steve Jobs is lying up in his bed, Roberts is balancing while crouched on the foot of Jobs's bed.] She met with Steve Jobs to discuss the future of Apple. Roberts: Compression and bandwidth are changing everything. Jobs: Who are you? It's 3:00AM! Roberts: Apple should make a portable music player. Jobs: I'm calling the police. Roberts: Hey, idea \u2014 integrate it with a cell phone!\n[Scene has two of Elaine's activities. In one she is drumming, in the other she has an electric guitar on her shoulders, one hand on the frets. The other hand is holding a laptop by the touchpad.] She even, for a time, took up drumming, and helped start a movement among teen girls, a culture of self-taught female programmers and musicians, coding by day and rocking out by night\u2014 Roberts: Riot Prrl.\n","explanation":"This is the third part of five in the \" 1337 \" series. The title 1337 is \"L-eet,\" or \"elite,\" using the Leet alphabet, a coding system used primarily on the internet (and on early text messaging system), meant to provide a bit of obfuscation to plain text both to make it harder to read and to show off in a creative way using in-group jargon.\nAll comics in the series:\nThis series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nThe comic is narrated by Cueball as seen in the previous comic, but that Cueball is not shown here, where the man drawn as Cueball is a real person:\nAdrian Lamo is a hacker known for being a threat analyst and has penetrated many corporate networks. As far as we know, he has not penetrated any government networks, so helping Elaine physically break into the NSA would probably inspire second thoughts. The use of a rug to cross the barbed wire fence is likely a reference to a scene in Fight Club , where the same method is used to break into a liposuction clinic.\nRSA (the algorithm) is an encryption algorithm that allows decryption using public keys . No efficient method to break RSA is known. [ citation needed ] But if the NSA knew any such method, it would be unlikely for them to admit that.\nHowever, the NSA have paid RSA (the company) to put a backdoor into one of their encryption schemes.\nLawrence Lessig is a political activist focusing on copyright law and intellectual property, as well as a founding board member of Creative Commons .\nSteve Jobs was the two-time CEO of Apple Inc. In partnership with Steve Wozniak , he founded Apple. He oversaw Apple's return from near bankruptcy, the introduction of the original Macintosh, the iPod , the iPhone , and the iPad . But in the '90s, most of this had not happened yet. The comic is implying that it was Elaine, in fact, who planted those ideas in Jobs' mind (while perching on his bedpost, a nearly-impossible physical task for even a relatively small and light human being - such a stance is often depicted for gargoyles or fictional vampires, the latter of which are associated with nocturnal bedroom-invasions like this). Furthermore, Steve's reactions indicate that he was abruptly woken up by Elaine after she broke into his home and started a one-sided conversation with him.\nThe final panel is a pun on the Riot grrrls - Riot grrrl is an underground feminist punk rock movement. This metamorphosizes in the hands of Randall into Riot Prrl - who presumably prefer to code in Perl . The real Riot Prrl is from Northampton and is into guerilla knitting .\nThe title text may refer to the urban legend that leads petty criminals to ask each other \"Are you a cop?\" . The bottom line is that anyone who is capable of lying about breaking the RSA encryption algorithm, possibly including the \"NSA guy,\" would be equally capable of lying about whether or not he is lying.\n[Outside, Adrian Lamo is helping Elaine Roberts over a barbed wire fence.] It was the late 90's. Elaine crisscrossed the country with Adrian Lamo, the 'Homeless Hacker', learning to gain entry into systems both virtual and physical. Adrian Lamo: So you just throw a rug over the fence and... say, what is this place anyway? Roberts: Nowhere special. Lamo: ...Elaine, is this NSA Headquarters? Roberts: ...Look, I just want to see if they've broken RSA.\n[Inside, Lawrence Lessig is sitting at a table, Roberts is standing across the table swinging a knife.] She learned, from Lawrence Lessig, about the monstrosity that is U.S. Copyright Law. Roberts: So, how do we fix the system? Stab bad guys? Lessig: I'm starting something called \"Creative Commons\" Shink Elaine Roberts: I think we should stab bad guys...\n[Steve Jobs is lying up in his bed, Roberts is balancing while crouched on the foot of Jobs's bed.] She met with Steve Jobs to discuss the future of Apple. Roberts: Compression and bandwidth are changing everything. Jobs: Who are you? It's 3:00AM! Roberts: Apple should make a portable music player. Jobs: I'm calling the police. Roberts: Hey, idea \u2014 integrate it with a cell phone!\n[Scene has two of Elaine's activities. In one she is drumming, in the other she has an electric guitar on her shoulders, one hand on the frets. The other hand is holding a laptop by the touchpad.] She even, for a time, took up drumming, and helped start a movement among teen girls, a culture of self-taught female programmers and musicians, coding by day and rocking out by night\u2014 Roberts: Riot Prrl.\n"}
{"id":344,"title":"1337 Part 4","image_title":"1337: Part 4","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/344","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1337_part_4.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/344:_1337:_Part_4","transcript":"[Elaine is sitting under tree on a grassy meadow typing on her laptop. Two trees are in the background where rolling hills goes to the horizon with a single cloud over the trees. Above the frame is text narrated by the Cueball from the first panel in the 2nd comic in the series:] Cueball (narrating): As time passed, Elaine intensified her hacking work, anonymously publishing exploit after exploit.\n[Elaine, wearing a backpack, is walking up to a door where her mom Mrs. Roberts is greeting her in the open door at the top of two steps. Above this very low panel's frame, there is more of Cueball's narration:] Cueball (narrating): To crack open proprietary hardware, she teamed up with one of the top experts in signal processing and data transferring protocols. Elaine: Hi, mom. Mrs. Roberts: Hello, dear. Did you have fun?\n[Elaine is lying on the floor with her laptop in front of her facing left with a charger on the floor further left. Mrs. Roberts is sitting to the right facing right on a chair working on her computer at a table. Cueball is still narrating above the frame:] Cueball (narrating): They were an unstoppable team. Elaine: I finished the CSS decryptor. Mrs. Roberts: Good, dear. I'll send it along to Jon.\n[Pan to the right where two men in black bowler hats arrive. Both hold briefcases - the first guy's reads RIAA, and the other guy's reads MPAA. Cueball's last narration in the comic is above the frame:] Cueball (narrating): And were eventually noticed. RIAA man: Game's over. MPAA man: You're coming with us. Briefcase 1: RIAA Briefcase 2: MPAA\n[Pan back left to the women. Mrs. Roberts stays in her chair sitting at her computer still typing, the screen emitting light, but Elaine has moved around to the right of the table and pulls out her folding knife and swings it open.] Elaine: Oh, are we? Mrs. Roberts: Now now, Elaine- Knife: Shink\n[Pan back right to the two men who simultaneously pull katana swords out of each of their briefcase, while still holding onto the handle with the other hand. When when opened like this, it causes two pieces of paper to fly out of the RIAA man's briefcase and a notebook to fly out of the MPAA man's briefcase.] Katanas: Shing\n[Pan back to the women. Mrs. Roberts continues to type on the laptop, a line going up from the keyboard indicating activity. Elaine still holds her open folding knife out, so the tip now touches the right frame of the panel.] Mrs. Roberts: Don't let them provoke you, dear. Man (off-panel): We don't want to hurt you, Ma'am. Mrs. Roberts: Don't by silly. Record company employees can't just go into houses and slice people up.\n[Pan back right to the two men who hold up the katana swords having left their briefcases closed on the floor. The closest RIAA man is holding a hand up, the other MPAA man is holding his sword in two hands and pointing it threateningly forward.] RIAA Man: Ah, so you haven't read the DMCA. MPAA Man: Title IV, Section 408: Authorization of Deadly Force.\n[A wide panel showing the whole scene with even Mrs. Robert now standing having just pushed her chair back, the computer inert. Elaine is bending in the knees, knife at the ready. Both bowler hat men, still holding their swords as before, but no hands up, have turned to look right back over their shoulder to see who speaks, as a voice comes from off-panel right.] Richard Stallman (off-panel): Hark!\n\n[The scene pans further right, so the two women are no longer in the panel, but Richard Stallman can now be seen with his wild beard and long hair and holding two katana swords, one in front of him and one over his head also pointing towards the two bowler hat med. They are standing normally, looking back at Stallman. The MPAA man nearest him holds a hand to his mouth as he speaks.] Richard Stallman: Cease this affront to freedom Richard Stallman: Or stand and defend yourselves! MPAA Man: Stallman!\n","explanation":"This is the fourth part of five in the \" 1337 \" series. The title 1337 is \"L-eet,\" or \"elite,\" using the Leet alphabet, a coding system used primarily on the internet (and on early text messaging system), meant to provide a bit of obfuscation to plain text both to make it harder to read and to show off in a creative way using in-group jargon.\nAll comics in the series:\nThis series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday, probably because he wanted to release comic 404 on april fools' day) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nThe comic is narrated by Cueball as seen in part 2, but that Cueball is not shown here, but still he is part of this comic series, and thus also this comic.\nIn this part, Elaine Roberts returns to the second best hacker in the world (she being the best according to part 2): her mom Mrs. Roberts . Together, they are an unstoppable force, and they help out a guy called Jon with a CSS decryptor ( Content Scramble System , not to be confused with Cascading Style Sheets).\nThis implies that Jon Lech Johansen 's DeCSS was written by Elaine. Jon Lech Johansen, also known as DVD Jon, is famous for DeCSS , a DVD decryption program that removes the copy protection from commercial DVDs. The Motion Picture Association of America , also known as the MPAA, was not amused.\nBoth the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act , shortened to DMCA, as a kind of brute club to silence \"infringements\" on their copyright. In a perfect world, the DMCA provides safe harbor protection to websites and consumers to make fair use of copyrighted content, while also affording copyright owners the ability to protect their works from being pirated. In this world, this means that any content protection system, no matter how weak and poorly executed, cannot be circumvented, and discussion of circumvention is illegal as well.\nThis is not a perfect world, and in the end, the Roberts team is noticed. Two men with black bowler hats and briefcases with the abbreviations MPAA and RIAA show up at their house to arrest them. The two men look very much like Thomson and Thompson from The Adventures of Tintin , who are (bumbling) policemen\/detectives who do not usually attempt violence or wield weapons more dangerous than a standard furled umbrella, but here it more likely depicts the Evil Organization Nebulous Evil Organization 's corporate variation upon the Men In Black.\nWhile Elaine is not ready to let them arrest her, she draws her knife, and they draw their katana swords out of their (way too short) briefcases. Mrs. Roberts says to her daughter that she should calm down, because it is illegal to slice people up in their own houses.\nHowever, the two men disagree and refer to the DMCA Title IV, Section 408: Authorization of Deadly Force. (There is actually no Title IV, Section 408 of the DMCA; Title IV ends with Section 407.) So now the two women are in lethal danger.\nBut of course, Richard Stallman , founder of the GNU Project and stalwart defender of freedom and copyleft , cannot stand for this kind of repression of freedom. (In the real world, Stallman is not a swordsman, but he is always depicted with two katana swords in xkcd, first time was in 225: Open Source .) In keeping with the \" Kill Bill \" themes from earlier in the series, Randall imagines the conflict between Elaine\/Stallman\/Mrs. Roberts vs MPAA\/RIAA agents as an action-packed katana battle, rather than the legal battle it would likely have been in real life.\nThe title text is talking about a Linux -ism. In Linux (and all Unix derivatives), ~ is a symbol for a user's home directory (usually \/home\/<username> ). Presumably, \"nomad\" is Elaine's username. find is an application that recursively walks a filesystem, listing all files, and xargs shred takes those files and securely erases each one with pseudo-random data. This is different from simply deleting a file, which merely removes the pointer in the filesystem's record tables to the file's location on the hard disk. The latter can usually be recovered from. Secure delete, however, requires physically taking apart a disk and reading individual bits for remaining magnetic charge to attempt to reconstruct what was there. This means she was trying to permanently delete her and Elaine's files, presumably so the agents wouldn't have any proof of their hacking.\nProprietary hardware is hardware (the electronics part rather than the software) created and used only by that company, as opposed to open hardware, which uses parts or chips common to everyone. Proprietary hardware used to be found in most gaming consoles and Apple\/Mac devices, but that isn't as common now, since the cost of designing your own hardware is too expensive compared to using common chips.\n[Elaine is sitting under tree on a grassy meadow typing on her laptop. Two trees are in the background where rolling hills goes to the horizon with a single cloud over the trees. Above the frame is text narrated by the Cueball from the first panel in the 2nd comic in the series:] Cueball (narrating): As time passed, Elaine intensified her hacking work, anonymously publishing exploit after exploit.\n[Elaine, wearing a backpack, is walking up to a door where her mom Mrs. Roberts is greeting her in the open door at the top of two steps. Above this very low panel's frame, there is more of Cueball's narration:] Cueball (narrating): To crack open proprietary hardware, she teamed up with one of the top experts in signal processing and data transferring protocols. Elaine: Hi, mom. Mrs. Roberts: Hello, dear. Did you have fun?\n[Elaine is lying on the floor with her laptop in front of her facing left with a charger on the floor further left. Mrs. Roberts is sitting to the right facing right on a chair working on her computer at a table. Cueball is still narrating above the frame:] Cueball (narrating): They were an unstoppable team. Elaine: I finished the CSS decryptor. Mrs. Roberts: Good, dear. I'll send it along to Jon.\n[Pan to the right where two men in black bowler hats arrive. Both hold briefcases - the first guy's reads RIAA, and the other guy's reads MPAA. Cueball's last narration in the comic is above the frame:] Cueball (narrating): And were eventually noticed. RIAA man: Game's over. MPAA man: You're coming with us. Briefcase 1: RIAA Briefcase 2: MPAA\n[Pan back left to the women. Mrs. Roberts stays in her chair sitting at her computer still typing, the screen emitting light, but Elaine has moved around to the right of the table and pulls out her folding knife and swings it open.] Elaine: Oh, are we? Mrs. Roberts: Now now, Elaine- Knife: Shink\n[Pan back right to the two men who simultaneously pull katana swords out of each of their briefcase, while still holding onto the handle with the other hand. When when opened like this, it causes two pieces of paper to fly out of the RIAA man's briefcase and a notebook to fly out of the MPAA man's briefcase.] Katanas: Shing\n[Pan back to the women. Mrs. Roberts continues to type on the laptop, a line going up from the keyboard indicating activity. Elaine still holds her open folding knife out, so the tip now touches the right frame of the panel.] Mrs. Roberts: Don't let them provoke you, dear. Man (off-panel): We don't want to hurt you, Ma'am. Mrs. Roberts: Don't by silly. Record company employees can't just go into houses and slice people up.\n[Pan back right to the two men who hold up the katana swords having left their briefcases closed on the floor. The closest RIAA man is holding a hand up, the other MPAA man is holding his sword in two hands and pointing it threateningly forward.] RIAA Man: Ah, so you haven't read the DMCA. MPAA Man: Title IV, Section 408: Authorization of Deadly Force.\n[A wide panel showing the whole scene with even Mrs. Robert now standing having just pushed her chair back, the computer inert. Elaine is bending in the knees, knife at the ready. Both bowler hat men, still holding their swords as before, but no hands up, have turned to look right back over their shoulder to see who speaks, as a voice comes from off-panel right.] Richard Stallman (off-panel): Hark!\n\n[The scene pans further right, so the two women are no longer in the panel, but Richard Stallman can now be seen with his wild beard and long hair and holding two katana swords, one in front of him and one over his head also pointing towards the two bowler hat med. They are standing normally, looking back at Stallman. The MPAA man nearest him holds a hand to his mouth as he speaks.] Richard Stallman: Cease this affront to freedom Richard Stallman: Or stand and defend yourselves! MPAA Man: Stallman!\n"}
{"id":345,"title":"1337 Part 5","image_title":"1337: Part 5","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/345","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1337_part_5.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/345:_1337:_Part_5","transcript":"[The two men in black bowler hats (RIAA and MPAA agents as known from the previous comic) with their katanas are attacked by Elaine Roberts with her folding knife and Richard Stallman with his own two katanas. Elaine kicks the RIAA man to the left in the back of his leg, while Stallman jumps over the MPAA man to the right, flying high over him from right to left in a flying maneuver hitting his sword while hanging parallel to the ground above the man.] Elaine: Thanks, Stallman! Richard Stallman: 'Tis my pleasure.\n[Elaine stands to the left with her knife in one hand having folded it down again. Richard Stallman stands between the two men with bowler hats who are now lying on the floor on either side of him, each with one of Stallman's swords pointing at their throat. Stallman has both arms fully stretched towards them as he looks straight out of the panel. The left (RIAA) man lies flat on his back, his hat and katana lying behind him. The right (MPAA) man is sitting on his knee leaning as far back as he can, since the sword is almost touching the skin on his throat. He wears his hat, but the sword lies behind him, out of reach, even though he is leaning back on one hand close to it. To the far right, a rope comes down from the top of the panel, falling down on the ground so a section of it stretches even farther right in the picture. Down this rope comes a man with googles and a red cape, which is black on the inside. This is Cory Doctorow. He holds onto the rope with two hands, one over one just under his head.] Elaine: So, wait - how did you know we were in trouble? Richard Stallman: My friend here was tracking these thugs from his balloon. Richard Stallman: He called me and I thought I'd stop by. Cory Doctorow: -Hi! Cory Doctorow: Cory Doctorow - It's a pleasure to meet you.\n[Elaine has shifted the knife to the other hand. Richard Stallman has moved to the left of the RIAA man, so both bowler hat men are between him and Cory Doctorow. Stallman still points his sword in their direction, but they are lowered. The RIAA man closest to him has picked up his hat in one hand and reaches for his sword with the other hand. The MPAA man now lies on his back, one arm up, leaning on the other. His sword is gone. It does not seem like Doctorow could have taken it. Behind him, Doctorow has reached the ground, the rope hanging behind him. He points left.] Elaine: Balloon? Richard Stallman: Aye. They're up there constructing something called a \"Blogosphere.\" Cory Doctorow: Yup! It's twenty kilometers up, just above the tag clouds.\n[The scene is contracted, so to the left, Mrs. Roberts at her desk with her chair and laptop becomes visible (from the previous comic). This without the other people has moved closer. She still types as her son Little Bobby Tables enters and lifts a hand in his mother's direction. He is drawn as a child version of Cueball. Elaine has put the knife away and looks at Richard Stallman, who now stands straight looking at her with the swords crossed in front of his legs. Behind him, just right of the rope hanging down, Cory Doctorow lifts one of the agents up by the throat while looking right and talking to him. The other agent has left the panel. The one he holds has his hat but no sword.] Little Bobby Tables: Mom, I'm hungry. Mrs. Roberts: Hush, I'm coding. You ate yesterday. Richard Stallman: You know, Roberts, GNU could use a good coder like you. Ever thought of joining us? Elaine: Maybe someday. Right now I've got an industry to take down. Elaine: Music doesn't need these assholes. Cory Doctorow: Begone, And never darken our comment threads again!\n[Zoom in on Elaine, Richard Stallman, and Cory Doctorow. She stand straight looking at Stallman, who faces towards her swords now on his back crossed. Doctorow is also facing her and holds out both arms towards her. The rope is now outside the panel, as are both bowler hat men.] Richard Stallman: Well, you won't fix the industry with random exploits. You need to encourage sharing in the public mind. Doctorow: Hey; With your music and coding backgrounds, you should get into building better P2P systems.\n[The final panel is only a third of the length of the previous panel. The three are still in the panel, but they have moved and are also drawn somewhat smaller. Elaine still faces them right, but now Cory Doctorow is in front of Richard Stallman's swords as before. All have their arms down.] Elaine: What? Straight-up piracy? Cory Doctorow: Sure - have you ever considered it? You'd make a wonderful dread pirate, Roberts.\n[To the right of the final panel is a two-column epilogue narrated by Cueball as seen in part 2. It is split into three paragraphs and a \"signature.\" The caption above is centered over the two columns.] E pilogu e Cueball (narrating): Elaine shared her ideas with Bram Cohen, who went on to develop BitTorrent. Mrs. Roberts spends her time developing for Ubuntu, and defacing the websites of people who make \"your mom\" jokes to her daughter. Elaine still stalks the net. She joins communities, contributes code or comments, and moves on. And if, late at night, you point a streaming audio player at the right IP at the right time - you can hear her rock out. ~Happy Hacking.~\n","explanation":"This is the fifth and last part of five in the \" 1337 \" series. The title 1337 is \"L-eet,\" or \"elite,\" using the Leet alphabet, a coding system used primarily on the internet (and on other early text messaging systems), meant to provide a bit of obfuscation to plain text both to make it harder to read (and potentially 'grep' for incriminating terms) and to show off in a creative way using in-group jargon.\nAll comics in the series:\nThis series was released on 5 consecutive days (Monday-Friday, probably because he wanted to release comic 404 on april fools' day) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nThe comic is narrated by Cueball as seen in part 2 comic, but that Cueball is not shown here, but still he is part of this comic series, and thus also this comic, as he narrates the epilogue.\nRichard Stallman is the ardent defender of freedom and believer in copyleft ; he also founded the GNU Project . (He is not really a sword fighter but is always depicted with swords when featured in xkcd , which is in this series and in 225: Open Source ).\nIn the previous part, he came to the rescue of Mrs. Roberts and her Daughter Elaine Roberts . Stallman and Elaine quickly overpower the two enemies with black bowler hats who represent the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), use the Digital Millenium Copyright Act who had found out about the Roberts hacking.\nJust when the two men have been defeated, Elaine asks how Stallman knew they where in trouble, and he tells it was his friend who told him about it. Climbing down a rope from the sky, the friend enters with a red cape and goggles. It turns out it is Cory Doctorow , a blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing . He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization. He does not really travel around in a balloon or (usually) wear a red cape, but Randall introduced this idea in 239: Blagofaire and has continued it in later comics featuring Cory Doctorow . So he is climbing down from his balloon.\nHe uses the balloon to construct the Blogosphere , which is a name used to refer to all blogs on the Internet, many of which frequently link to and refer to other blogs. Here, the Stallman character talks about it as though Cory Doctorow actually constructs it, as if it were a portion of the atmosphere 20 km up over the tag clouds.\nBlogs often label posts with keywords, known as tags. A tag cloud is a way of displaying the tags on a site where the more common tags appear in larger type than less-common ones. It has no relationship to actual water vapor clouds in the sky, but in the comic, the Doctorow character suggests that tag clouds are actually in the air, below the new blogosphere.\nAt this point we see that Mrs. Roberts is still programming while this fight and discussion take place. Her son Little Bobby Tables comes and tells her he is hungry, but she tells him that she does not have time when she is coding, and that he ate yesterday. It seems that he is still a kid, even though it must have been some years since the young Elaine left and grew up. However, she may still be a very young adult, in which case her little brother could still be shorter than his mom (we see in Part 2 that, from age 11, she studied with Donald Knuth for four years, making her 15 when she left. However, it is not clear how long she was away from home after that).\nStallman gives Elaine a proposal to join GNU as a coder. GNU is supposed to be the pinnacle of free software; an operating system with no restriction, allowing the user to modify and customize anything they want about the computer. Stallman likely wants Elaine for her coding abilities, similar devotion to free software, and use her reputation as a hacker and open source pioneer to spread the word and further his project. This may also be a reference to the infamous \"Free Software Song\", [1] sung by Stallman in which he exhorts hackers to \"join us now and share the software.\" But she is not ready yet, as she wished to take down the industry of MPAA and RIAA as Music doesn't need these assholes. In the meantime, Cory Doctorow throws the bowler hat guys out and orders them never to \"darken our comment threads again.\"\nStallman is against her idea of going for straight war with the industry, and suggests that she help encourage sharing in the public mind. And then Doctorow chimes in with a suggestion that she has the ability to build better P2P systems, to which she asks if they mean straight up piracy. And this leads up to the punch line of the series, when Doctorow says she (i.e. \"[Ms] Roberts\"), would make a wonderful Dread Pirate!\nPeer-to-peer, often abbreviated P2P, is a network system where tasks are partitioned between participants with equal privileges, in contrast with the client-server model, where the client makes requests and the server provides service. A common example of a peer-to-peer system is the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, which is often (mis)used for distribution of pirated software and media.\nThe Dread Pirate Roberts is a fictional character from the book and movie The Princess Bride . Roberts is the most feared pirate on the seas. But, \"Dread Pirate Roberts\" is merely a title that has been passed down as previous \"Roberts\" have gained enough money (from piracy) to retire comfortably. Westley, one of the main characters from The Princess Bride, becomes the Dread Pirate after being taken prisoner by the preceding Pirate Roberts. It is anyone's guess whether the entire 5-comic story, starting from the choice of Mrs. Roberts' name, began as just a lead-up to this one joke. At the end of the movie, Inigo Montoya has won the vengeance he has sought all his life, and expresses to Westley that he doesn't know what to do next. Westley suggests Montoya succeed him as Roberts, saying, \"Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.\" Cory Doctorow's line in the comic therefore mimics that line from the movie.\nSilk Road was an online black market designed to allow criminals to trade in drugs, guns, and other illegal items, run by a person also using the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. However, this black market did not exist until four years after this comic was published.\nIn the epilogue, several items of interest are revealed about the Roberts\u2019 later lives.\nElaine shared her ideas with Bram Cohen , who went on from that to found BitTorrent , a distributed method of downloading files. People can and do use BitTorrent both for lawful file downloads and also for sharing media files unlawfully. Its distributed nature, where someone does not download a file from just one other computer but rather in many pieces from many other computers with the same file, makes it more difficult for record and movie industry groups to police, and therefore a person with Elaine's motivations might be interested in helping design such a system.\nMrs. Roberts developed for Ubuntu , which is probably the most well known distribution of GNU\/ Linux . A GNU\/Linux distribution (often referred to simply as \"Linux\") is any operating system that is based on GNU software and the Linux kernel .\nShe also went after any website (defacing them) that made Your mom jokes about her daughter. To deface a website is like putting up graffiti or tearing down signs; she likely replaces the URL's content from the original site to another image, text box, or other message as revenge. This is a recurring theme on xkcd. Defacing websites is generally considered a low-level hacking activity, generally carried out by script kiddies using pre-packaged exploits rather than by highly skilled hackers like Elaine.\nFinally a bit more info is given on how Elaine continues her fight: she joins random communities, helps with code, and mysteriously moves on. Sometimes she streams her music live on an IP address, and if you happen to find one of these with a streaming audio player, you can hear her rock out (a reference to her music career mentioned at the end of the third part).\nThe final phrase \"Happy Hacking\" often accompanies an autograph from Richard Stallman.\nThe title text is likely referring to the argument over Digital Rights Management , or DRM-locked content. These so-called 'DRM wars' are concerned about how DRM restricts the freedoms of people who buy them legitimately, and how it restricts creativity and innovation on the Internet. A large part of the debate is digital music, or music you would buy and download on the Internet through sites like Amazon or iTunes. The title text states that the DRM wars will end in the next decade or so, and we are living through very exciting times as we can see these wars unfold and eventually end.\nIn 2009, iTunes did remove DRM from any music they sold, which was a huge milestone at the time. Due to the rise in music streaming services (all of which use DRM to keep clients from downloading their songs) in the mid- to late 2010s, this achievement has been made void again.\n[The two men in black bowler hats (RIAA and MPAA agents as known from the previous comic) with their katanas are attacked by Elaine Roberts with her folding knife and Richard Stallman with his own two katanas. Elaine kicks the RIAA man to the left in the back of his leg, while Stallman jumps over the MPAA man to the right, flying high over him from right to left in a flying maneuver hitting his sword while hanging parallel to the ground above the man.] Elaine: Thanks, Stallman! Richard Stallman: 'Tis my pleasure.\n[Elaine stands to the left with her knife in one hand having folded it down again. Richard Stallman stands between the two men with bowler hats who are now lying on the floor on either side of him, each with one of Stallman's swords pointing at their throat. Stallman has both arms fully stretched towards them as he looks straight out of the panel. The left (RIAA) man lies flat on his back, his hat and katana lying behind him. The right (MPAA) man is sitting on his knee leaning as far back as he can, since the sword is almost touching the skin on his throat. He wears his hat, but the sword lies behind him, out of reach, even though he is leaning back on one hand close to it. To the far right, a rope comes down from the top of the panel, falling down on the ground so a section of it stretches even farther right in the picture. Down this rope comes a man with googles and a red cape, which is black on the inside. This is Cory Doctorow. He holds onto the rope with two hands, one over one just under his head.] Elaine: So, wait - how did you know we were in trouble? Richard Stallman: My friend here was tracking these thugs from his balloon. Richard Stallman: He called me and I thought I'd stop by. Cory Doctorow: -Hi! Cory Doctorow: Cory Doctorow - It's a pleasure to meet you.\n[Elaine has shifted the knife to the other hand. Richard Stallman has moved to the left of the RIAA man, so both bowler hat men are between him and Cory Doctorow. Stallman still points his sword in their direction, but they are lowered. The RIAA man closest to him has picked up his hat in one hand and reaches for his sword with the other hand. The MPAA man now lies on his back, one arm up, leaning on the other. His sword is gone. It does not seem like Doctorow could have taken it. Behind him, Doctorow has reached the ground, the rope hanging behind him. He points left.] Elaine: Balloon? Richard Stallman: Aye. They're up there constructing something called a \"Blogosphere.\" Cory Doctorow: Yup! It's twenty kilometers up, just above the tag clouds.\n[The scene is contracted, so to the left, Mrs. Roberts at her desk with her chair and laptop becomes visible (from the previous comic). This without the other people has moved closer. She still types as her son Little Bobby Tables enters and lifts a hand in his mother's direction. He is drawn as a child version of Cueball. Elaine has put the knife away and looks at Richard Stallman, who now stands straight looking at her with the swords crossed in front of his legs. Behind him, just right of the rope hanging down, Cory Doctorow lifts one of the agents up by the throat while looking right and talking to him. The other agent has left the panel. The one he holds has his hat but no sword.] Little Bobby Tables: Mom, I'm hungry. Mrs. Roberts: Hush, I'm coding. You ate yesterday. Richard Stallman: You know, Roberts, GNU could use a good coder like you. Ever thought of joining us? Elaine: Maybe someday. Right now I've got an industry to take down. Elaine: Music doesn't need these assholes. Cory Doctorow: Begone, And never darken our comment threads again!\n[Zoom in on Elaine, Richard Stallman, and Cory Doctorow. She stand straight looking at Stallman, who faces towards her swords now on his back crossed. Doctorow is also facing her and holds out both arms towards her. The rope is now outside the panel, as are both bowler hat men.] Richard Stallman: Well, you won't fix the industry with random exploits. You need to encourage sharing in the public mind. Doctorow: Hey; With your music and coding backgrounds, you should get into building better P2P systems.\n[The final panel is only a third of the length of the previous panel. The three are still in the panel, but they have moved and are also drawn somewhat smaller. Elaine still faces them right, but now Cory Doctorow is in front of Richard Stallman's swords as before. All have their arms down.] Elaine: What? Straight-up piracy? Cory Doctorow: Sure - have you ever considered it? You'd make a wonderful dread pirate, Roberts.\n[To the right of the final panel is a two-column epilogue narrated by Cueball as seen in part 2. It is split into three paragraphs and a \"signature.\" The caption above is centered over the two columns.] E pilogu e Cueball (narrating): Elaine shared her ideas with Bram Cohen, who went on to develop BitTorrent. Mrs. Roberts spends her time developing for Ubuntu, and defacing the websites of people who make \"your mom\" jokes to her daughter. Elaine still stalks the net. She joins communities, contributes code or comments, and moves on. And if, late at night, you point a streaming audio player at the right IP at the right time - you can hear her rock out. ~Happy Hacking.~\n"}
{"id":346,"title":"Diet Coke+Mentos","image_title":"Diet Coke+Mentos","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/346","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/diet_coke_mentos.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/346:_Diet_Coke%2BMentos","transcript":"[Cueball and his friend are sitting on the ground, with a bottle of Diet Coke between them, and Cueball appears to be putting mentos into the bottle.] Cueball: This is the coolest thing. You just drop the Mentos in the Diet Coke... Friend: Uh huh.\n[Diet Coke starts to fizzle.] Cueball: Give it a moment...\n[Someone teleports into frame in a magic puff. Cueball's arms are raised, with a package of Mentos in one hand.] POOF\nFriend: D-Dad? Dad: I'm back, son. We can be a family again.\n","explanation":"This comic's premise is a reference to the phenomenon of dropping Mentos into a bottle of a carbonate beverage to create a geyser of said beverage . During 2007, a large number of videos depicting this phenomenon floated around the Internet.\nCueball wants to show this phenomenon to his friend, because it's \"the coolest thing\". However, instead of achieving the standard result, a geyser of Diet Coke, the friend's father magically appears (presumably from the dead or from abandonment).\nAn alternative interpretation is that the friend's father is resurrected\/returned in an event unrelated to the geyser, undermining the geyser's coolness.\nThe title text shows that Randall considers (or at least then considered) this trick to be as cool as mixing corn starch and water to make a non-Newtonian fluid that reacts wildly with vibrations and impact.\n[Cueball and his friend are sitting on the ground, with a bottle of Diet Coke between them, and Cueball appears to be putting mentos into the bottle.] Cueball: This is the coolest thing. You just drop the Mentos in the Diet Coke... Friend: Uh huh.\n[Diet Coke starts to fizzle.] Cueball: Give it a moment...\n[Someone teleports into frame in a magic puff. Cueball's arms are raised, with a package of Mentos in one hand.] POOF\nFriend: D-Dad? Dad: I'm back, son. We can be a family again.\n"}
{"id":347,"title":"Brick Archway","image_title":"Brick Archway","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/347","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brick_archway.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/347:_Brick_Archway","transcript":"[An inset panel to the left shows Cueball getting ready to throw a tennis ball upward.] [Cueball lies on the ground, underneath the titular brick archway, next to two halves of a brick. A pool of blood is coming from his head. Dust falls from the place in the archway where the he knocked the brick from with the tennis ball. The ball, meanwhile, has rolled about a meter away.] \"Breakout\" is a stupid game.\n","explanation":"Breakout is a video game first created in 1976, and since then it has gained much popularity and has been recreated in many different versions. In the game, the player controls a horizontal 'bat' at the bottom of the screen to make it move left or right. Above it are several layers of bricks that are destroyed when hit by the ball. The ball is not affected by gravity and will float around, bouncing off the walls, bricks, and the bat. The aim of the game is to keep the ball from touching the bottom of the screen (by deflecting it with the bat) long enough for the ball to hit and destroy all of the bricks.\nCueball 's approach to the game is to actually stand underneath a brick archway and throw a tennis ball at the structure above him in an attempt to destroy the bricks. Naturally, the physics in the game don't work in real life, [ citation needed ] and the aftermath of Cueball's actions is that one of the bricks in the archway comes loose and falls onto Cueball's head, causing possibly fatal damage.\nThe sentence at the bottom of the comic points out the illogical nature of the game when compared to real life.\nThe title text relates to a programmable calculator from the late 1990s that could have a Breakout -like game easily programmed into. This calculator, and others like it, were a requirement in many high school advanced math classes in the United States after the early 1990s, despite costing over $100. Randall speculates that, given the amount of distraction this simple game provided him back then, he would not be able to focus on study at all with modern technical instruments like laptops using wireless LANs .\n[An inset panel to the left shows Cueball getting ready to throw a tennis ball upward.] [Cueball lies on the ground, underneath the titular brick archway, next to two halves of a brick. A pool of blood is coming from his head. Dust falls from the place in the archway where the he knocked the brick from with the tennis ball. The ball, meanwhile, has rolled about a meter away.] \"Breakout\" is a stupid game.\n"}
{"id":348,"title":"Close to You","image_title":"Close to You","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/348","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/close_to_you.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/348:_Close_to_You","transcript":"[Cueball is singing to Megan, who has wiggly lines and unkempt hair. Musical notes appear around Cueball's words.] Cueball: Why do birds suddenly appear\n[Still singing.] Cueball: Every tiiiime you are neeear\n[Cueball stops singing. He looks up.] Cueball: Wait, are those turkey vultures?\n[Cueball turns to Megan.] Cueball: Okay, listen, are you a zombie? Megan: Hurrghhh...\n","explanation":"This is Randall's version of the popular Carpenters song, \" (They Long to Be) Close to You .\" The actual first verse goes like this:\nWhy do birds suddenly appear Every time you are near? Just like me, they long to be Close to you\nIn this parody, the reason birds suddenly appear whenever the girl is near is because the girl is a zombie, and those are turkey vultures , carrion birds that prey on the flesh of dead bodies.\nThe title text is joking about couples not discussing their relationship before their wedding, as is seen here .\n[Cueball is singing to Megan, who has wiggly lines and unkempt hair. Musical notes appear around Cueball's words.] Cueball: Why do birds suddenly appear\n[Still singing.] Cueball: Every tiiiime you are neeear\n[Cueball stops singing. He looks up.] Cueball: Wait, are those turkey vultures?\n[Cueball turns to Megan.] Cueball: Okay, listen, are you a zombie? Megan: Hurrghhh...\n"}
{"id":349,"title":"Success","image_title":"Success","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/349","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/success.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/349:_Success","transcript":"[Four full-width panels arranged vertically, each with a label for number of hours elapsed, with a title above the stack of panels.]\nTitle: As a project wears on, standards for success slip lower and lower.\n[Megan is standing behind Cueball, watching him as he sits at a desk working on a desktop computer on the desk.] Label: 0 hours Cueball: Okay, I should be able to dual-boot BSD soon.\n[Cueball is on the floor fiddling with the open tower in front of him.  Megan is not shown in the panel, but may be off-panel unless Cueball is talking to himself.] Label: 6 hours Cueball: I'll be happy if I can get the system working like it was when I started.\n[Cueball is standing in front of the computer, which now has a laptop plugged into the tower.  Megan is still not shown in the panel, but may be off-panel again.] Label: 10 hours Cueball: Well, the desktop's a lost cause, but I think I can fix the problems the laptop's developed.\n[Cueball and Megan are swimming in the sea; an island and a beach can be seen in the distance.] Label: 24 hours Cueball: If we're lucky, the sharks will stay away until we reach shallow water. Megan: If we make it back alive, you're never upgrading anything again.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to a common experience in which attempts to improve or change something can get you into even worse trouble, and where just getting back to the state at which you started becomes an arduous or even impossible task. Here, this idea is taken to a ridiculously (and amusingly) extreme level, where the attempt to install an operating system snowballs into ever more complicated problems, resulting in Cueball and Megan somehow literally getting themselves in deep water.\nThe OS they are trying to install is OpenBSD , an open source Unix operating system that, like some other Unix variants, is notoriously difficult to install and configure correctly, especially on home desktops with less common hardware profiles, and especially compared with the more popular Windows operating system.\nThe title text is a reference to OpenBSD's premium on security. For a time, their slogan was \"Five years without a remote [security] hole in the default install!\" This was eventually changed to \"Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!\" That their only standing security issue would be shark attacks is effectively an acknowledgement that any attempts to install the OS will only lead to getting stranded in the middle of the ocean.\nThis comic was referenced later in 1350: Lorenz . Trying to install BSD was also referenced in 518: Flow Charts . The last panel in 1912: Thermostat may explain how this comic ended. Later, another possible reason to ending up in the ocean was given in 2083: Laptop Issues .\nThis comic follows a similar storyline to 530: I'm An Idiot and 1518: Typical Morning Routine , as Cueball and Hairy encounter an issue and attempt proceedingly more absurd solutions to the issue.\n[Four full-width panels arranged vertically, each with a label for number of hours elapsed, with a title above the stack of panels.]\nTitle: As a project wears on, standards for success slip lower and lower.\n[Megan is standing behind Cueball, watching him as he sits at a desk working on a desktop computer on the desk.] Label: 0 hours Cueball: Okay, I should be able to dual-boot BSD soon.\n[Cueball is on the floor fiddling with the open tower in front of him.  Megan is not shown in the panel, but may be off-panel unless Cueball is talking to himself.] Label: 6 hours Cueball: I'll be happy if I can get the system working like it was when I started.\n[Cueball is standing in front of the computer, which now has a laptop plugged into the tower.  Megan is still not shown in the panel, but may be off-panel again.] Label: 10 hours Cueball: Well, the desktop's a lost cause, but I think I can fix the problems the laptop's developed.\n[Cueball and Megan are swimming in the sea; an island and a beach can be seen in the distance.] Label: 24 hours Cueball: If we're lucky, the sharks will stay away until we reach shallow water. Megan: If we make it back alive, you're never upgrading anything again.\n"}
{"id":350,"title":"Network","image_title":"Network","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/350","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/network.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/350:_Network","transcript":"[Megan looking at a large screen with many green and red squares. The squares have writing in them and lines connecting them.] [Side view. The screen is a huge LCD connected to a wireless router.] Cueball: Pretty, isn't it? Megan: What is it? Cueball: I've got a bunch of virtual Windows machines networked together, hooked up to an incoming pipe from the net. They execute email attachments, share files, and have no security patches. Cueball: Between them they have practically every virus. Cueball: There are mail trojans, warhol worms, and all sorts of exotic polymorphics. A monitoring system adds and wipes machines at random. The display shows the viruses as they move through the network. Growing and struggling. [Cueball walks past the girl and touches the monitor.] Megan: You know, normal people just have aquariums. Cueball: Good morning, Blaster. Are you and W32.Welchia getting along? Cueball: Who's a good virus? You are! Yes, you are!\n","explanation":"Cueball shows off his virtual fishtank of virus-infected virtual Windows machines to Megan . The machines nominally have mail trojans , Warhol worms , all sorts of polymorphic viruses , and explicitly Blaster and w32.welchia . Cueball relates to the viruses as though they are fish, and hopes that they are all getting along together nicely. This is because part of welchia's payload was to remove the Blaster Worm , effectively destroying it.\nA computer network or data network is a telecommunications network that allows computers to exchange data. In computer networks, networked computing devices exchange data with each other using a data link. The connections between nodes are established using either cable media or wireless media. The best-known computer network is the Internet.\nNetwork computer devices that originate, route, and terminate the data are called network nodes. Nodes can include hosts such as personal computers, phones, and servers as well as networking hardware. Two such devices can be said to be networked together when one device is able to exchange information with the other device, whether or not they have a direct connection to each other.\nComputer networks differ in the transmission medium used to carry their signals, the communications protocols to organize network traffic, the network's size, topology, and organizational intent.\nIt would be possible to set up a virtual fish tank as described.  The main issue would be to make sure that you don't accidentally let anything escape from the fish tank.  Consider it like a smallpox lab.  Also, some viruses are quite malicious [ citation needed ] and will prevent a computer from running normally, or at all.  An aquarium of dead computers would not be very interesting to watch. [ citation needed ]\nThe first part of the title text refers to the difficulty viruses have in the common doomsday threat of \"disabling the internet\" as a whole, although SQL Slammer had some brief success. The second part of the title text indicates that Randall believes A) that Linux and Mac OS X are inherently less vulnerable to virus attacks than Windows, and B) that Windows will become less important and disappear, so the virus writers had better get their act together soon.\nIt is not certain how justified this opinion is.  Fifteen years after this comic was written, Windows still dominates the desktop, and Linux and OS X are not that much harder to attack with viruses. A side issue is the wild growth in 'smart devices' connected to the internet, powered by non-traditional operating systems such as iOS and Android. Desktop operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and OS X are all becoming less relevant (although note that Android is based on the Linux kernel and iOS is based on OS X), so both the operating system war and the struggle against computer viruses are still \"anyone's game.\"\nA similar system to the one described by this comic was available online at http:\/\/wecan.hasthe.technology .  It was last reported to be available online on June 29, 2014, but is no longer available. \nInstead of executing email attachments, the 7 VMs ran files uploaded via the site by the public, making it more of a public playground aquarium than a private fish tank. Instead of wiping machines at random, each VM runs a virus scanner every 24 hours.\n[Megan looking at a large screen with many green and red squares. The squares have writing in them and lines connecting them.] [Side view. The screen is a huge LCD connected to a wireless router.] Cueball: Pretty, isn't it? Megan: What is it? Cueball: I've got a bunch of virtual Windows machines networked together, hooked up to an incoming pipe from the net. They execute email attachments, share files, and have no security patches. Cueball: Between them they have practically every virus. Cueball: There are mail trojans, warhol worms, and all sorts of exotic polymorphics. A monitoring system adds and wipes machines at random. The display shows the viruses as they move through the network. Growing and struggling. [Cueball walks past the girl and touches the monitor.] Megan: You know, normal people just have aquariums. Cueball: Good morning, Blaster. Are you and W32.Welchia getting along? Cueball: Who's a good virus? You are! Yes, you are!\n"}
{"id":351,"title":"Trolling","image_title":"Trolling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/351","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trolling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/351:_Trolling","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball are in Rick Astley's yard, hacking into his cable TV connection and replacing the signal. Rick Astley is sitting in a chair in his house, watching TV.] TV: CNN has obtained this exclusive footage of the riot-torn-- *CZZZHT* \u266b Never gonna give you up... \u266a Rick Astley: What the hell?\n[Caption below the frame:] GREAT MOMENTS in TROLLING: Rick Astley is successfully Rickrolled\n","explanation":"The term Trolling is used to describe provocative, destructive, or annoying behavior on the Internet . Especially common are Internet pranks of the bait-and-switch type, an example of which is Rickrolling . It involves placing a link that is supposed to contain interesting or funny material, but instead directs to the music video of the 1987 Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up . The prank first occurred in May 2007 on the popular imageboard 4chan and has since become a widespread internet meme .\nThe comic has Black Hat and Cueball digging into the ground and splicing Black Hat's computer into the TV cables of Rick Astley 's house. They are feeding the video of Never Gonna Give You Up into Astley's TV signal, who can be seen sitting in his living room and wondering why CNN has been replaced by his own video. The act of Rickrolling Rick Astley himself is declared to be a \"great moment in trolling\".\nThe title text mentions Goatse.cx (pronounced goat sex ), a former shock website that was used in a similar prank. People clicking on the feigned link would instead see the disturbing picture of a practitioner of anal stretching. The title text suggests that Black Hat and Cueball somehow made the (unknown) founder of the site click on an even more shocking link, or possibly put him in the personal presence of anal stretching.\nAlso note that the comic image itself is itself a Rickroll. Anyone curious enough as to why their mouse pointer became the selection icon to click on the comic (on the original xkcd page ) would find themselves watching \"Never Gonna Give You Up.\"\nRick Astley was actually Rickrolled on reddit ( at r\/pics ) on June 17th, 2020.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are in Rick Astley's yard, hacking into his cable TV connection and replacing the signal. Rick Astley is sitting in a chair in his house, watching TV.] TV: CNN has obtained this exclusive footage of the riot-torn-- *CZZZHT* \u266b Never gonna give you up... \u266a Rick Astley: What the hell?\n[Caption below the frame:] GREAT MOMENTS in TROLLING: Rick Astley is successfully Rickrolled\n"}
{"id":352,"title":"Far Away","image_title":"Far Away","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/352","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/far_away.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/352:_Far_Away","transcript":"[Cueball hugging Megan in the messenger window of an early Microsoft Windows version.] Cueball: Meh. Cueball: Some nights, typing \"*hug*\" just doesn't cut it.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are in a long-distance relationship ; in order to overcome the distance that separates them, they're keeping in touch with an instant messenger. Because their contact is limited to text, they have to write out the actions they wish to enact. Cueball is frustrated with the limitations of these place-holding phrases and longs for physical contact, going so far as to imagine himself hugging Megan in the messenger window.\nIn the title text, Cueball suggests that, sometimes, the only way to end his frustration is to travel across the country and see her face-to-face.\n[Cueball hugging Megan in the messenger window of an early Microsoft Windows version.] Cueball: Meh. Cueball: Some nights, typing \"*hug*\" just doesn't cut it.\n"}
{"id":353,"title":"Python","image_title":"Python","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/353","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/python.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/353:_Python","transcript":"[A Cueball-like friend is talking to Cueball, who is floating in the sky.] Friend: You're flying! How? Cueball: Python! Cueball: I learned it last night! Everything is so simple! Cueball: Hello world is just print \"Hello, World!\" Friend: I dunno... Dynamic typing? Whitespace? Cueball: Come join us! Programming is fun again! It's a whole new world up here! Friend: But how are you flying? Cueball: I just typed 'import antigravity' Friend: That's it? Cueball: ...I also sampled everything in the medicine cabinet for comparison. Cueball: But I think this is the python.","explanation":"Python is a programming language designed specifically to make it easy to write clear, readable programs. Flying is often used as a metaphor for freedom and ease, and here Randall shows Cueball literally flying in response to using Python.\nA \"Hello, World!\" program is a very simple program that prints the phrase \"Hello, World!\", used in textbooks to illustrate a given programming language. While this sounds simple, it can be nontrivial in some programming languages where you need to explicitly import a library that contains the print function (for instance, in C you need to begin with #include < stdio.h > ) or do complicated things with classes and variables (see the Java \"Hello, World!\" for one example). Python doesn't need any of that: print(\"Hello, world!\") (or in Python 2, print \"Hello, world!\" ) really is all you need to do.\nDynamic typing and significant whitespace are two controversial features of Python, which make some people\u2014like Cueball's friend\u2014hesitant to use the language.\nDynamic typing means that variables do not have types (like \"list of short integers\" or \"a bunch of letters\"); any value of any type can be placed in any variable. Dynamic typing allows for more flexible languages, but it means that certain kinds of errors (like trying to subtract a letter from a number) can't be caught until a program is run, and some people think this is too dangerous for the tradeoff to be acceptable.\nWhitespace is a string of invisible text characters, like spaces or tabs. In programming, blocks of code controlled by a statement are usually indented under that statement. Most languages require you to use braces ( {\u2026} ) or special keywords ( BEGIN\u2026END ) to delimit these blocks; in Python, the indentation itself is the delimiter. Many Python programmers find that this makes code more readable, but many other programmers find it too \"magical\" and don't trust it.\nClasses, functions, and constants in Python are packed into modules. To use a module, you write \" import module \" at the top of your source file (you can do this anywhere in the file, but it's usually at the top so you can use the module throughout the code). Python comes with a very powerful standard library of modules to do everything from parsing XML to comparing two sets of files for differences, and new modules can be easily installed from the PyPI repository, which has more than 79,000 more to choose from (as of April 2016). Cueball can fly because he imported the antigravity module. Python still works for Cueball in 482: Height .\nIn the final panel, Cueball admits that his ability to fly may actually be because he has \"sampled everything in the medicine cabinet,\" though he's sure it is the Python anyway. An implication of this is that ingesting everything in the medicine cabinet has given him the feeling of freedom and ease that \"flying\" represents - or that he is hallucinating himself flying and having a conversation with the other character about it. Here, the metaphor of \"feeling like you're flying\" while using Python is transformed back from being literal (Cueball is actually flying) to being metaphorical (Randall feels like he is flying because Python is so easy to use... or because he had too many strange drugs).\nPerl , mentioned in the title text, is another programming language with the same target audience as Python, as both are high-level , general-purpose , interpreted , dynamic programming languages .\nHowever they strongly oppose each other in their language design:\nSince he has discovered Python, Randall doesn't like Perl anymore, probably because its syntax is less consistent or perhaps due to his problems with Regular expressions .  What God has to say about Randall's renunciation of Perl has not yet been documented.\n[A Cueball-like friend is talking to Cueball, who is floating in the sky.] Friend: You're flying! How? Cueball: Python! Cueball: I learned it last night! Everything is so simple! Cueball: Hello world is just print \"Hello, World!\" Friend: I dunno... Dynamic typing? Whitespace? Cueball: Come join us! Programming is fun again! It's a whole new world up here! Friend: But how are you flying? Cueball: I just typed 'import antigravity' Friend: That's it? Cueball: ...I also sampled everything in the medicine cabinet for comparison. Cueball: But I think this is the python."}
{"id":354,"title":"Startling","image_title":"Startling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/354","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/startling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/354:_Startling","transcript":"[Cueball sits silently in front of his computer.] [Text block:] I still do this every few months.\n[He continues to sit for two more panels.]\nCueball: Holy crap, it's the 21st century.\n","explanation":"Cueball is startled every few months when he, again, realizes that he now lives in the 21 st century. When he grew up as a child, the year 2000 seemed very far away \u2014 it was the future, but he now exists in that timeframe with the rest of society.\nThe title text states that \"the future\" was reached in 2004... Three years before the comic was published. This is possibly a joke on how time works, as \"the future\" is always, was always, and will always be ahead of the time you're in. There may, however, be a reference to some movie set in the future year 2004....\nThe 21 st century, even the year 2004, was futuristic for people growing up in, for instance, the eighties. This view just belongs to the perspective of people \u2014 for people growing up in the '70s, the novel 1984 was even futuristic.\n[Cueball sits silently in front of his computer.] [Text block:] I still do this every few months.\n[He continues to sit for two more panels.]\nCueball: Holy crap, it's the 21st century.\n"}
{"id":355,"title":"Couple","image_title":"Couple","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/355","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/couple.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/355:_Couple","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan in bed.] Cueball: So is this it? Are we a couple now?\nMegan: I just don't know. I like this. I just... don't know.\n[Silence.]\nCueball: Well will you be my \"it's complicated\" on Facebook?\n","explanation":"It's hard to know when you are in a relationship in modern times. In olden days, you might fancy a girl, then ask her father if you might court her, and if he granted his permission, you would be a couple. Today, that kind of structure and formality is considered antiquated in most western cultures; as a result, we don't have any of the straightforward cues.\nThis comic suggests that \"making it Facebook official,\" which means asserting the existence of a romantic relationship on Facebook by setting one's status to \"In a relationship,\" has by 2007 become a way to define when you are a couple. Cueball would like to do it, probably after having sex for the first time with his love interest, to get confidence in his relationship and\/or show it off to his friends. Because his love interest isn't so sure about that relationship, or doesn't like to formalize it and prefers to enjoy without thinking too much about it, he suggests a compromise: using the \"It's complicated\" status instead. And he does so with a phrasing very reminiscent of a formal way to propose to marry someone (\"Will you be my wife?\").\nThe title text takes it a step further, suggesting that Facebook has become the only reliable way to know about relationships \u2014 even so, without access to Facebook, relationships can't evolve.\nWhen this comic came out in late 2007, Facebook was not even 4 years old, but very popular among young people, who would share their lives in great detail back then. As of 2019, most people are more hesitant about instantly sharing all details of their personal life publicly. [ citation needed ]\n[Cueball and Megan in bed.] Cueball: So is this it? Are we a couple now?\nMegan: I just don't know. I like this. I just... don't know.\n[Silence.]\nCueball: Well will you be my \"it's complicated\" on Facebook?\n"}
{"id":356,"title":"Nerd Sniping","image_title":"Nerd Sniping","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/356","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nerd_sniping.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/356:_Nerd_Sniping","transcript":"[Black Hat is sitting on a chair, Cueball is standing next to him. Across the street, another Cueball-like guy is coming from a building walking towards the pedestrian crossing across from Black Hat.] Black Hat: There's a certain type of brain that's easily disabled. Black Hat: If you show it an interesting problem, it involuntarily drops everything else to work on it.\n[The Cueball-like man across the street is about to enter a crosswalk, which is seen from right behind Black Hat in his chair, holding onto the sign, which is still pointing down. Cueball is looking on.] Black Hat: This has led me to invent a new sport: Nerd Sniping. Black Hat: See that physicist crossing the road?\n[Black Hat lifts up the sign when the physicist is in the middle of the street, halfway across the pedestrian crossing.] Black Hat: Hey!\n[A close-up of Black Hat's sign is shown in a frameless panel. There is text above and below an image of a four-by-five grid of nodes with resistors (shown as wiggly lines) between every node and also continuing away from the 16 outer nodes. A total of 5 columns with 5 and 4 rows with 6 resistors for a total of 20 nodes and 49 resistors. Two nodes, a knight's move apart, are marked with red circles in the 3rd row 2nd column and the 2nd row 4th column.] Sign: On this infinite grid of ideal one-ohm resistors, Sign: what's the equivalent resistance between the two marked nodes?\n[The Cueball-like physicist has stopped pondering the questions, a hand to his chin.] Physicist: It's... Hmm. Interesting. Maybe if you start with... No, wait. Hmm... You could\u2014\n[In another frameless panel, a ten-wheeled truck is zooming past from the right, apparently going through the spot where the physicist just stood.] Truck: Foooom\n[Cueball looks down on Black Hat, who looks back up from his chair at the curb, again holding the sign down. He lifts one hand up while replying.] Cueball: I will have no part in this. Black Hat: C'mon, make a sign. It's fun! Physicists are two points, mathematicians three.\n\" [Donald] Coxeter came to Cambridge and he gave a lecture, then he had this problem ... I left the lecture room thinking. As I was walking through Cambridge, suddenly the idea hit me, but it hit me while I was in the middle of the road. When the idea hit me I stopped and a large truck ran into me ... So I pretended that Coxeter had calculated the difficulty of this problem so precisely that he knew that I would get the solution just in the middle of the road ...\"\n","explanation":"Nerds have a way of getting distracted easily and focusing on one thing and ignoring the rest, when they feel their specific skills are challenged by an interesting problem. Black Hat has decided to make this into a disturbing game of getting nerds, in this case a physicist, to stop in the middle of a street and get crushed by traffic by showing them an interesting problem to solve. (This may be based on a real event\u2014see the trivia section).\nThe problem Black Hat shows is an electronics engineering thought experiment to find the resistance between two points. In normal wiring, a one-ohm resistor would result in one ohm of resistance. Two resistors connected in a series, where electricity has to go through each, has two ohms of resistance. Two one-ohm resistors in parallel give the circuit only half an ohm since you average the resistance of the path (1 ohm of resistance over 2 paths). With an infinite grid of equal resistors, you have an infinite number of paths to take, and for each path an infinite number of both series and parallel paths to consider, so much more advanced methods are needed. The exact answer to the question is 4\/\u03c0 \u2212 1\/2 ohms, or about 0.773 ohms.  See Infinite Grid of Resistors .\nBlack Hat explains the concept of his new sport, Nerd Sniping , to Cueball while killing the physicist, but Cueball is appalled and will have no part in this sport, which doesn't make Black Hat give up on him as he suggests it would be fun if he made his own sign. Black Hat finally suggests that \"physicists are two points, mathematicians three.\" This may indicate that he considers a mathematician to be a more difficult target for his game than a physicist would be. It is unclear whether this is meant as a dig on physicists or on mathematicians; it might be because physicists are interested in a wider range of problems, or because mathematicians require a higher-quality problem to hold their interest. Alternatively, he just dislikes mathematicians more, and is thus willing to award more points for sniping one of them.\nIn the title text, Randall explains that he saw this problem in a Google Labs Aptitude Test . This is a collection of puzzles published by Google as a parody of tests such as the SAT . Google is known for using logic & math puzzles in their job interviews.\nRandall explained in a speech at Google five days before this comic was released that he was nerd sniped, in a way, by that problem in this test (see problem 10 on page 2 ), and got quite irritated when he ultimately found that it was actually a modern physics research problem, requiring very advanced math, far more complicated than the other puzzles. Putting such a problem in an aptitude test can be a way of testing if someone might realize when they cannot solve a problem and remember to move along to the other problems. If they fail to do this, they will never reach the easier problems that come later, and will fail due to their inability to realize when they will come up short. This is also important knowledge to have about yourself. Seen in this context, it is not necessarily a bad idea to have such an impossible problem in an aptitude test, as it is not interesting to have someone who is easily nerd sniped working for you.\nNote that the truck should have stopped no matter what, since the nerd was walking on a pedestrian crossing. However, the driver may have seen him walking, then estimated that he would be safe before reaching him, and realized too late that he had stopped in the street. Alternatively, the truck driver is part of Black Hat's sport. Or was himself\/herself nerd sniped by the sign.\nRandall has later referred back to the concept of Nerd Sniping several times in the past, such as in the title text of 730: Circuit Diagram , and in the what if? blog. In Visit Every State (7 years after this comics release), the entire comic was shown at the top and the truck again further down the post\u2014Randall has again been nerd sniped by a paper he read. This also happens to him in Lunar Swimming \u2014see the title text for the second to last picture.\n[Black Hat is sitting on a chair, Cueball is standing next to him. Across the street, another Cueball-like guy is coming from a building walking towards the pedestrian crossing across from Black Hat.] Black Hat: There's a certain type of brain that's easily disabled. Black Hat: If you show it an interesting problem, it involuntarily drops everything else to work on it.\n[The Cueball-like man across the street is about to enter a crosswalk, which is seen from right behind Black Hat in his chair, holding onto the sign, which is still pointing down. Cueball is looking on.] Black Hat: This has led me to invent a new sport: Nerd Sniping. Black Hat: See that physicist crossing the road?\n[Black Hat lifts up the sign when the physicist is in the middle of the street, halfway across the pedestrian crossing.] Black Hat: Hey!\n[A close-up of Black Hat's sign is shown in a frameless panel. There is text above and below an image of a four-by-five grid of nodes with resistors (shown as wiggly lines) between every node and also continuing away from the 16 outer nodes. A total of 5 columns with 5 and 4 rows with 6 resistors for a total of 20 nodes and 49 resistors. Two nodes, a knight's move apart, are marked with red circles in the 3rd row 2nd column and the 2nd row 4th column.] Sign: On this infinite grid of ideal one-ohm resistors, Sign: what's the equivalent resistance between the two marked nodes?\n[The Cueball-like physicist has stopped pondering the questions, a hand to his chin.] Physicist: It's... Hmm. Interesting. Maybe if you start with... No, wait. Hmm... You could\u2014\n[In another frameless panel, a ten-wheeled truck is zooming past from the right, apparently going through the spot where the physicist just stood.] Truck: Foooom\n[Cueball looks down on Black Hat, who looks back up from his chair at the curb, again holding the sign down. He lifts one hand up while replying.] Cueball: I will have no part in this. Black Hat: C'mon, make a sign. It's fun! Physicists are two points, mathematicians three.\n\" [Donald] Coxeter came to Cambridge and he gave a lecture, then he had this problem ... I left the lecture room thinking. As I was walking through Cambridge, suddenly the idea hit me, but it hit me while I was in the middle of the road. When the idea hit me I stopped and a large truck ran into me ... So I pretended that Coxeter had calculated the difficulty of this problem so precisely that he knew that I would get the solution just in the middle of the road ...\"\n"}
{"id":357,"title":"Flies","image_title":"Flies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/357","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/357:_Flies","transcript":"[Cueball is typing on a computer, and his friend is lying on the floor.] \"Noob\" (on computer): * [email\u00a0protected] #! Friend: Hey, ease up on the noobs. Like my mom always said, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.\n[Cueball has turned his chair around.] Cueball: No, you don't. Friend: You don't? Cueball: Nope, set out a bowl of balsamic and a bowl of honey. The vinegar gets more.\n[Cueball's friend is now sitting on the floor.] Friend: ...Seriously? Cueball: You have fruit flies. Try it yourself.\nLater: [Cueball's friend is standing in front of a table, talking into a phone. On the table, there are two bowls, and the bowl on the left seems to be surrounded by flies.] Friend: Mother! You lied to me! And it gets worse. I was watching a pot yesterday, and guess what it did? It boiled, mother.\n","explanation":"The saying \"you catch more flies with honey than vinegar\" means that people are more likely to be won over with politeness than hostility.\nWhen Cueball 's friend tells him this after he replies to a \" noob \" using swear words, he then says that the saying is literally false by saying that balsamic vinegar attracts more flies than honey . He then tells his friend to try it with his own fruit flies . Fruit flies are attracted to the products of fermentation , particularly to ethanol and acetic acid . The acidity in vinegar is due mostly to acetic acid.\nWhen Cueball's statement is found true, as balsamic vinegar smells like sweet and decomposing fruit to the fruit flies, his friend complains to his mother (with a vitriol influenced by Cueball, perhaps to get some favor) that she lied to him. He then says that another saying, \"a watched pot never boils,\" is also literally false. That saying means that an event that is monitored with impatient attention will seem to take longer, much like watching a clock. However, the pot will boil eventually, so if you keep watching it continuously, you are bound to see it boil at some point.\nIn the title text, it seems that Randall explains why he wrote this comic \u2014 his vinegar bowl attracted a lot of fruit flies. However, he has not done the experiment with houseflies .\nThe notion of a watched pot not boiling is ascribed to Benjamin Franklin under the pseudonym \"Poor Richard.\" He writes, \"a watched pot is slow to boil,\" meaning \"Time feels longer when you're waiting for something to happen.\" [1]\n[Cueball is typing on a computer, and his friend is lying on the floor.] \"Noob\" (on computer): * [email\u00a0protected] #! Friend: Hey, ease up on the noobs. Like my mom always said, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.\n[Cueball has turned his chair around.] Cueball: No, you don't. Friend: You don't? Cueball: Nope, set out a bowl of balsamic and a bowl of honey. The vinegar gets more.\n[Cueball's friend is now sitting on the floor.] Friend: ...Seriously? Cueball: You have fruit flies. Try it yourself.\nLater: [Cueball's friend is standing in front of a table, talking into a phone. On the table, there are two bowls, and the bowl on the left seems to be surrounded by flies.] Friend: Mother! You lied to me! And it gets worse. I was watching a pot yesterday, and guess what it did? It boiled, mother.\n"}
{"id":358,"title":"Loud Party","image_title":"Loud Party","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/358","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/loud_party.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/358:_Loud_Party","transcript":"[In a loud party, Megan and Cueball are looking at each other, both thinking of the same scene: they are sitting on opposite branches of a large leafless tree, each with a laptop. There's cloud in the distance and a grass field around the tree.]\n","explanation":"The comic depicts an average everyday scene - a party, with drinks, dancing, and a lot of commotion going on (hence the title). Amid the chaos, though, there are two people, Megan and Cueball , staring wistfully at each other. They both think of the same scene: the two of them sitting on branches of a large and bare tree, doing something on laptops. The implication is that these two people are different - they don't derive their enjoyment of life from parties or other typical teenage activities, but rather simpler, more quiet activities. This is evidenced by the fact that everything other than Megan and Cueball (and the Red Solo cups ) are greyed out.\nThe title text presents a simpler joke - it is rather difficult to get down from a tree, especially when carrying a fragile item like a laptop. It may also refer to the design of the tree that has been drawn, as it lacks (visible) branches below Cueball's perch.\n[In a loud party, Megan and Cueball are looking at each other, both thinking of the same scene: they are sitting on opposite branches of a large leafless tree, each with a laptop. There's cloud in the distance and a grass field around the tree.]\n"}
{"id":359,"title":"Rock Band","image_title":"Rock Band","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/359","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rock_band.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/359:_Rock_Band","transcript":"[Three people are playing Rock Band, one on guitar, another on drums, and the last on vocals. Music notes float above them. Cueball with arms crossed is looking at them.] Cueball: You know, playing this doesn't make you cool like a real rock band. Cueball: Guys? Cueball: Didn't you hear me? Cueball: Stop having fun!\n","explanation":"A smug Cueball demeans his friends' fun experience on Rock Band , a video game which allows players to simulate playing real songs, as if in a real band. The oblivious \"band\" keeps rocking out, and it transpires that his real purpose is not to spread knowledge but to ruin others' fun (to no avail, thankfully).\nThe title text is a comment on haptic feedback, comparing the guitar controllers of Guitar Hero , which make a clicking sound when the user strums, with those of Rock Band , which do not click.\n[Three people are playing Rock Band, one on guitar, another on drums, and the last on vocals. Music notes float above them. Cueball with arms crossed is looking at them.] Cueball: You know, playing this doesn't make you cool like a real rock band. Cueball: Guys? Cueball: Didn't you hear me? Cueball: Stop having fun!\n"}
{"id":360,"title":"Writers Strike","image_title":"Writers Strike","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/360","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/writers_strike.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/360:_Writers_Strike","transcript":"[Cueball sits in front of a desk with a computer. Black Hat stands behind him.] Cueball: This writer's strike sucks. Black Hat: Why? You don't watch sitcoms. [Cueball is off-panel.] Cueball: Yeah, but it sucks having political campaigns without Jon Stewart's commentary. Black Hat: True. I finally got sick of it a couple weeks ago. [Black Hat points at a door. Cueball is still off-panel.] Cueball: And you quit following the campaigns? Black Hat: No. I kidnapped Jon Stewart to do analysis for me. Cueball: You what? [Black Hat is shouting at the door.] Black Hat: He's locked in the basement. Black Hat: Jon! Obama's leading in Iowa! Gimme a wry, witty comment on the situation! Jon Stewart [Voice coming from door]: Please let me go. I have a family.\n","explanation":"From November 5, 2007 to February 12, 2008, the Writers Guild of America, East and the Writers Guild of America, West labor unions that represents film, television, and radio writers working in the United States went on strike as they sought increased compensation for their members' work. Virtually all scripted American television shows shut down in mid-December, with many low-level production staffers being laid off.\nIn late December and early January, late-night talk shows did eventually return, most of them without writers. But as of the date this comic was written, the popular Comedy Central political comedy shows, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report , were still off-air.\nCueball and Black Hat both admit that they're pretty bummed about having to go through an election season without Jon Stewart's insightful commentary, but Black Hat has corrected that problem by kidnapping Stewart, putting him in the basement, and occasionally soliciting hilarious opinions. Of course, Stewart is rather traumatized by this, and he doesn't have anything to say aside from \"Please let me go.\"\nThe title text implies that Black Hat also kidnapped Stephen Colbert from The Colbert Report and put him in the attic. As opposed to Stewart, who basically played \"himself\" on the show and was surrounded by zany reporters playing characters, on his own show Colbert played the character of a \"well-intentioned, poorly informed high-status idiot.\" The reference to everyone listening to Colbert, instead, is based on a general opinion that The Colbert Report, a spin-off of The Daily Show, was superior to the original program.\n[Cueball sits in front of a desk with a computer. Black Hat stands behind him.] Cueball: This writer's strike sucks. Black Hat: Why? You don't watch sitcoms. [Cueball is off-panel.] Cueball: Yeah, but it sucks having political campaigns without Jon Stewart's commentary. Black Hat: True. I finally got sick of it a couple weeks ago. [Black Hat points at a door. Cueball is still off-panel.] Cueball: And you quit following the campaigns? Black Hat: No. I kidnapped Jon Stewart to do analysis for me. Cueball: You what? [Black Hat is shouting at the door.] Black Hat: He's locked in the basement. Black Hat: Jon! Obama's leading in Iowa! Gimme a wry, witty comment on the situation! Jon Stewart [Voice coming from door]: Please let me go. I have a family.\n"}
{"id":361,"title":"Christmas Back Home","image_title":"Christmas Back Home","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/361","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/christmas_back_home.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/361:_Christmas_Back_Home","transcript":"[The panel depicts the interior of a house with numerous Christmas decorations. Santa stares at Cueball, who is sitting at his desk with his laptop.] 'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house. There were no sound of stirring save the click of a mouse. For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except I'd forgotten the hours that normal folks slept. Santa: What are you doing out of bed so late? Cueball: Late? It's barely 3AM!\n","explanation":"The script begins similarly to the poem \" A Visit from St. Nicholas \":\n' Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;\nHowever, there is a change in the text due to the fact that Cueball is on a computer, perhaps coding or on the internet.  Instead, it reads\n\"'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house\" \"There were no sounds of stirring save the click of a mouse.\"\nThe idea is that Cueball has been so used to being on the computer late at night (perhaps coding, or deep into some Internet argument ) and he's forgotten the hours normal people sleep that, when Santa Claus arrives, Cueball is still awake. Note the mouse pun.\nBeing forced to sleep at normal times is compared with jet lag : sleeplessness due to your body being synchronized to another time zone, so named because jet aircraft made it possible for people to travel farther and faster. Here, Cueball needs to turn back his internal clock over five hours to sync with his family.\n[The panel depicts the interior of a house with numerous Christmas decorations. Santa stares at Cueball, who is sitting at his desk with his laptop.] 'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house. There were no sound of stirring save the click of a mouse. For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except I'd forgotten the hours that normal folks slept. Santa: What are you doing out of bed so late? Cueball: Late? It's barely 3AM!\n"}
{"id":362,"title":"Blade Runner","image_title":"Blade Runner","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/362","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blade_runner.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/362:_Blade_Runner","transcript":"Friend: What DVD is this? Cueball: Blade Runner . I got it for Christmas. Friend: The one with Harrison Ford, right? And the Olsen twins? Cueball: Ye\u2014 What? Olsen twins? No, this is the 80's sci-fi classic! Friend: Huh. I didn't know the Olsen twins even did sci-fi. Cueball: ...They don't . Friend: So is Ashley the replicant, or is Mary-Kate? I can never tell them apart. Cueball: Neither! They're not in this movie! Friend: Then who is? Cueball: Daryl Hannah! Friend: I liked her in Full House . Cueball: I hate you. Friend: Man, this movie is just a New York Minute rip-off.\n","explanation":"Cueball is watching a DVD he got for Christmas (the comic is set on Boxing Day ). His friend seems intent to ruin it for him.\nBlade Runner is a famous science fiction movie from 1982 featuring Harrison Ford , and it is now considered a classic. One of the principal characters is played by Daryl Hannah . Hannah later became known for acting in lighthearted rom-com films, such as Splash (in which she is a mermaid), similar to the type of films that the Olsen twins are known for. Hannah does look similar to the Olsens, although she is 26 years older, as they were born in 1986 - four years after the movie was released. Full House is a TV series, and New York Minute is a romantic film both featuring the Olsens. Hannah's character in Blade Runner (a homicidal sex robot) is a marked departure from this type of role.\nThe friend also claims that Blade Runner is a rip-off of the 2004 comedy film New York Minute . Such a comment is completely illogical \u2014 Blade Runner came out 22 years prior, and the two films are from completely different genres.\nFrom the above, it is clear that the friend is most likely just trolling (doubly so since New York Minute would not be considered very good by people who enjoy sci-fi classics). It could be that he actually believes that these movies came out in the order he discovered them in, although the other guy still hates him for ruining the experience by reminding him of the Olsen twins...\nThe title text is a common comment on the movie - it's just not like an ordinary modern sci-fi movie. It is also likely a pun on the phrase \"instant classic,\" which is sometimes used to describe movies considered so good that they \"become a classic\" immediately after release.\nFriend: What DVD is this? Cueball: Blade Runner . I got it for Christmas. Friend: The one with Harrison Ford, right? And the Olsen twins? Cueball: Ye\u2014 What? Olsen twins? No, this is the 80's sci-fi classic! Friend: Huh. I didn't know the Olsen twins even did sci-fi. Cueball: ...They don't . Friend: So is Ashley the replicant, or is Mary-Kate? I can never tell them apart. Cueball: Neither! They're not in this movie! Friend: Then who is? Cueball: Daryl Hannah! Friend: I liked her in Full House . Cueball: I hate you. Friend: Man, this movie is just a New York Minute rip-off.\n"}
{"id":363,"title":"Reset","image_title":"Reset","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/363","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reset.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/363:_Reset","transcript":"[Cueball stands in front of a doorway looking at a flip-counter sign posted on a wall.] Sign: 38 days since someone reset this sign\n","explanation":"A common sight in workplaces is a sign reading '[XX] days since [event]' or '[XX] days without [event]', where [XX] is a two-digit number (indicated using flip cards so it may be easily changed) and [event] is some undesirable preventable occurrence. The purpose of such signs is to inspire employees by proudly displaying how long the event has been avoided or prevented. The most common version of such signs, used in industrial workplaces, displays the number of days since the last workplace accident or injury.\nIn the comic, the sign says \"38 days since the last time someone reset this sign\". The term 'reset' is the crux, because while computer-minded people tend to interpret it as 'reboot' or 'set to zero', it also means re-set (with the meaning 'set again'). See definition.\nWe will call: reset ~ set to zero --> meaning 1 re-set ~ set again -->  meaning 2\nBecause the sign uses manual flip cards, one cannot add days to the counter without re-setting the sign, which creates a paradox: either you add a day by re-setting it (which, according to the sign, means you'd have to reset the sign) or you don't (in which case the value on the sign would not be valid). The value of the sign cannot be true for more than one day. The value of the sign in the comic (38) can only be true if someone flipped the cards 38 days ago.\nThe sign is self-referential (which causes the paradox). Self-reference is a recurring theme in xkcd. Examples include 33: Self-reference and 688: Self-Description .\nIf you only use meaning 1, the sign can be seen as a challenge\/invitation .\nThe title text refers to the signs sometimes hung over roadways in front of bridges that display the clearance of the bridge for the benefit of tall vehicles. However, this one displays only its own clearance, a number that would be unimportant if the sign itself were not there.\n[Cueball stands in front of a doorway looking at a flip-counter sign posted on a wall.] Sign: 38 days since someone reset this sign\n"}
{"id":364,"title":"Responsible Behavior","image_title":"Responsible Behavior","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/364","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/responsible_behavior.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/364:_Responsible_Behavior","transcript":"[Cueball on the phone.] Voice: Hey, I just got home from the party Cueball: The one with the IRC folks? Voice: Yeah. Cueball: How was it? Voice: Got too drunk. I screwed up, bad. Cueball: What happened? Voice: There was a girl. No idea who she was. Don't even know her name. I was too drunk to care. Cueball: And what, you slept with her? Voice: No. Voice: I signed her public key. Cueball: Shit, man.\n","explanation":"This New Year's comic could play out after Cueball has returned from a New Year's party the day before. (The next New Year's day comic in 2008 was also related to a big party: 524: Party ).\nIn order to send encrypted mail to people, you need to know their public key . You use this key to encrypt the email, and only they can read it (using their private key).  However, there is the problem of authentication: how do you know for certain that the key belongs to the person to whom you think it does?  It could be someone else masquerading as them, hoping for people to send them sensitive information.  They could decrypt and read your mail, and could even re-encrypt it using the genuine public key of the intended recipient, and then pass the message onto them, leaving both you and the recipient unaware of the interception. This is a type of man-in-the-middle attack .\nOne solution for this is that people sign each other's keys . It works like this: say you want to send an email to Bob , but you've never met him. You find his key online (they are stored on certain servers, like cryptographic phone books), but how can you be sure that it's really his? Well, turns out that you have a mutual friend Alice , and you have her public key and you know that it is hers. If Alice has signed Bob's key with her private key (which only she has access to), it means that she's certain that that really is Bob's key. So then you can be sure that Bob's key is genuine (since you have a common friend, Alice) and that your communications will be safe.\nA key-signing party is simply a super-geeky party where people meet in real life so that they can be sure of people's identity, and then everyone signs everyone else's keys. It's a good way to expand the web of trust. The joke here is that he has no idea who this girl is and yet he still signed her key. This is dangerous, because he is vouching for her identity. If he is mistaken, this could result in a serious loss of credibility on his part.\nThe humor lies in the juxtaposition of what you expect (that they had sex) and what is the case (they signed each other's keys, also known as geek-sex).\nThe title text appears to be a reference to the \"key parties\" of swingers in the 1970s, where all members of one sex would throw their keys in a bowl, and all of the other sex would draw them out, thus being paired off to sleep with the key owners.\n[Cueball on the phone.] Voice: Hey, I just got home from the party Cueball: The one with the IRC folks? Voice: Yeah. Cueball: How was it? Voice: Got too drunk. I screwed up, bad. Cueball: What happened? Voice: There was a girl. No idea who she was. Don't even know her name. I was too drunk to care. Cueball: And what, you slept with her? Voice: No. Voice: I signed her public key. Cueball: Shit, man.\n"}
{"id":365,"title":"Slides","image_title":"Slides","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/365","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/slides.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/365:_Slides","transcript":"[Cueball is standing on a stage, pointing at a line graph using a pointer.] Cueball: That chart explained the quantum hall effect. Now, if you'll bear with me a moment, this next graph shows rainfall over the amazon basin... [Caption below the panel:] If you keep saying \"bear with me for a moment\" people will take a while to figure out that you're just showing them random slides.\n","explanation":"In the context shown, the expression \"bear with me for a moment\" usually implies that two seemingly unrelated topics are in fact connected, and the connection is to be explained later. This is not the case in the comic: Cueball is in fact simply showing random slides that have no connection to each other. By using the phrase liberally and never actually explaining the links, it is suggested that a presenter can simply continue to show random slides for an extended period before anyone actually realizes what is going on.\nThe title text refers to SIGGRAPH , an annual computer graphics conference held since 1974. In 541: TED Talk , it is said that Randall has been banned from SIGGRAPH, and we can infer from this comic that he was physically thrown out of it. Another (very implausible) possibility is that Randall is making the joke that people who attend computer graphics conferences are stereotypically not very athletic, and therefore unlikely to be able to physically throw someone.\nIn addition, the fact that Cueball was attending SIGGRAPH is another joke: Neither the Quantum Hall effect, a concept in quantum mechanics, nor rainfall in the Amazon forest, have anything to do with SIGGRAPH's focus of computer graphics.\n[Cueball is standing on a stage, pointing at a line graph using a pointer.] Cueball: That chart explained the quantum hall effect. Now, if you'll bear with me a moment, this next graph shows rainfall over the amazon basin... [Caption below the panel:] If you keep saying \"bear with me for a moment\" people will take a while to figure out that you're just showing them random slides.\n"}
{"id":366,"title":"Your Mom","image_title":"Your Mom","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/366","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/your_mom.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/366:_Your_Mom","transcript":"Cueball: Well, your mom turns every conversation into a \"your mom\" joke and it's becoming unbearable. Megan: I'm serious; I can't take this anymore. I'm leaving. Cueball: ...That's what she said! Megan: Yes. Yes, it is.\nFor examples of \"your mom\" jokes, see Category:Your Mom .\n","explanation":"\"Your mom\" jokes could be considered an example of fraternity humor, and are seen by most adults as being a sign of immaturity, especially when overused. They generally involve the speaker making indelicate references to the mother of the person to whom he is speaking. They are a distinct variation from the more traditional \"yo momma\" jokes (as in, \"yo mamma is so fat...\" or \"yo mamma is so stupid...\"), which are merely insulting.\n\"That's what she said\" is a supposedly funny retort to an innocent looking statement, the intent being to recast it in a sexual light. It gained its most recent surge of popularity as Michael Scott's catchphrase on the television series The Office . xkcd contains only failed attempts at \"that's what she said\" jokes, such as 436: How it Happened . The phrase is a simplified version of the older, British expression \"... said the actress to the bishop \".\nWe enter in the middle of a conversation between Cueball and Megan about the status of their relationship. Megan has apparently just said that Cueball turns every conversation into a \"your mom\" joke and it's becoming unbearable. Cueball, somewhat self-destructively, immediately turns that sentence into a \"your mom\" joke.\nWhen Megan makes it clear that she has had enough and that she is leaving, Cueball, in a heroic effort to make things even worse, can only respond with the \"that's what she said\" joke.  Megan agrees with Cueball that it is exactly what she (Megan) said, and is obviously about to depart his life forever.\nThe title text stretches the joke further, Cueball suggesting that many men have been with her mother, but perhaps as a last resort or under duress. This is, if possible, even more offensive than his previous efforts.\nCueball: Well, your mom turns every conversation into a \"your mom\" joke and it's becoming unbearable. Megan: I'm serious; I can't take this anymore. I'm leaving. Cueball: ...That's what she said! Megan: Yes. Yes, it is.\nFor examples of \"your mom\" jokes, see Category:Your Mom .\n"}
{"id":367,"title":"Fandom","image_title":"Fandom","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/367","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fandom.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/367:_Fandom","transcript":"[Cueball is looking through a box.] Cueball: Hey, my old Star Wars books!\n[Cueball is holding a pair of books and showing them to Megan.] Cueball: Man. Timothy Zahn, Michael A. Stackpole, The Corellian Trilogy... Cueball: This was my world .\nMegan: What'd you leave it for? Firefly? BSG? Cueball: Nah. Cueball: I guess I've just grown out of the whole obsessive fan mindset.\nMegan: Really. Megan: So how's Ron Paul doing? Cueball: Ooh! Lemme recheck today's blogs. [Cueball drops the books and heads off to recheck the blogs.]\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the concept of fandom , which is basically the collective noun for fans of a given thing. Usually, this is used in the context of people who like a certain work of fiction, like Star Trek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer .\nHere, Cueball digs through a box and discovers his old collection of Star Wars books, referring to authors Timothy Zahn and Michael A. Stackpole (who wrote several Star Wars novels), and The Corellian Trilogy . These books are part of the Star Wars Expanded Universe , which is used to refer to media that is Star Wars canon, but not the films.\nAlmost all of the Expanded Universe content created prior to 2015 is now considered by Disney (who are the owners of Lucasfilm and Star Wars since 2012) to be part of a separate canon called \"Legends,\" a decision presumably made to allow a clean[er] slate for the upcoming sequel trilogy and spin-off movies to start from.\nCueball apparently loved these books as a kid, which prompts Megan to remark if he started becoming a fan of other science fiction series like Firefly or Battlestar Galactica , to which he clarifies that he simply grew out of the fandom mindset. Megan, perhaps sarcastically, asks him about how politician Ron Paul (who has appeared in the comic several times ) is doing, and Cueball excitedly runs off to check, ironically disproving his earlier remark - people don't outgrow a fandom state of mind, but rather shift their point of interest.\nThe title text refers to the New Republic , the main government in Star Wars after the final film, and Corusca gems , which are extremely rare and valuable gems from the aforementioned expanded universe. The text says that Ron Paul wants the New Republic to adopt the Corusca gem as the basis for their currency. This entire joke is an allegory for the Gold Standard , which Ron Paul is a personal advocate of, even though it is no longer in use by the United States.\n[Cueball is looking through a box.] Cueball: Hey, my old Star Wars books!\n[Cueball is holding a pair of books and showing them to Megan.] Cueball: Man. Timothy Zahn, Michael A. Stackpole, The Corellian Trilogy... Cueball: This was my world .\nMegan: What'd you leave it for? Firefly? BSG? Cueball: Nah. Cueball: I guess I've just grown out of the whole obsessive fan mindset.\nMegan: Really. Megan: So how's Ron Paul doing? Cueball: Ooh! Lemme recheck today's blogs. [Cueball drops the books and heads off to recheck the blogs.]\n"}
{"id":368,"title":"Bass","image_title":"Bass","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/368","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bass.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/368:_Bass","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball are standing in a room with one window. Black Hat is pushing a box with an elliptical dish on top towards the window.] THUMPA THUMPA\nCueball: The bass from that car is driving me nuts. Black Hat: Me too. Give me a hand here.\n[The dish is aimed out the window; Black Hat plugs the device into the wall.] Cueball: I'm afraid to ask. Black Hat: The system detects bass rhythms and floods the target with a phase-shifted replica signal. Black Hat: The resonance should blow out their speakers.\n[The side of a building. The dish of the device is visible through a window, emitting sound waves.] THUMPA THUMPA BLAM\n[Back in the room.] Black Hat: Speakers down. Now flip that red switch. [Cueball does so with a \"click.\"]\n[Back to the outside view, more sound waves.] SHIRLEY SHIRLEY BO BIRLEY BANANA FANNA FO FIRLEY Cueball: You're horrifying. Black Hat: Okay, now throw the switch labeled \"Macarena\".\n","explanation":"Black Hat and Cueball are standing inside a room behind a window hearing an obnoxious car outside playing loud music with deep bass. Black Hat, owing to his destructive nature, has created a machine that is able to blow out the car's speakers (by playing the same soundwaves back at them, but with the phase slightly offset, the phase difference will set up a resonance in the car's speakers big enough for them to destroy themselves). In a stroke of evil, he then starts playing Shirley Ellis' The Name Game to show how annoying the man was acting. Cueball is horrified by this act of evil, as Black Hat carries on into the song Macarena .\nThe title text refers to comic 316: Loud Sex , where an elliptical reflector is used to focus sound waves from a couple having sex. Black Hat obviously gets annoyed by this and sometimes uses his machine to retaliate.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are standing in a room with one window. Black Hat is pushing a box with an elliptical dish on top towards the window.] THUMPA THUMPA\nCueball: The bass from that car is driving me nuts. Black Hat: Me too. Give me a hand here.\n[The dish is aimed out the window; Black Hat plugs the device into the wall.] Cueball: I'm afraid to ask. Black Hat: The system detects bass rhythms and floods the target with a phase-shifted replica signal. Black Hat: The resonance should blow out their speakers.\n[The side of a building. The dish of the device is visible through a window, emitting sound waves.] THUMPA THUMPA BLAM\n[Back in the room.] Black Hat: Speakers down. Now flip that red switch. [Cueball does so with a \"click.\"]\n[Back to the outside view, more sound waves.] SHIRLEY SHIRLEY BO BIRLEY BANANA FANNA FO FIRLEY Cueball: You're horrifying. Black Hat: Okay, now throw the switch labeled \"Macarena\".\n"}
{"id":369,"title":"Dangers","image_title":"Dangers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/369","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dangers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/369:_Dangers","transcript":"Dangers Indexed by the number of Google results for \"Died in a _____ Accident\" [A bar chart showing \"Type of Accident\" vs \"Google Results\" each with a bar representing a number] Skydiving: 710 Elevator: 575 Surfing: 496 Skateboarding: 473 Camping: 166 Gardening: 100 Ice Skating: 94 Knitting: 7 Blogging: 2\n","explanation":"This comic is a chart of the frequency of certain phrases in Google search results, based on the format \"died in a ______ accident.\" At the time of this comic, if you enclosed search terms in quotation marks, Google looked up the exact phrase rather than the individual words in any order.\n\"Died in a blogging accident\" was very rare in Google until this comic appeared . It could be found on over 10,000 webpages approximately 12 hours after the comic was posted. Similarly, both snake charming and haberdashery accidents also return hundreds of Google results.\nDangers Indexed by the number of Google results for \"Died in a _____ Accident\" [A bar chart showing \"Type of Accident\" vs \"Google Results\" each with a bar representing a number] Skydiving: 710 Elevator: 575 Surfing: 496 Skateboarding: 473 Camping: 166 Gardening: 100 Ice Skating: 94 Knitting: 7 Blogging: 2\n"}
{"id":370,"title":"Redwall","image_title":"Redwall","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/370","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/redwall.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/370:_Redwall","transcript":"Notes from reading Redwall books for the first time since childhood.\nSome of this feels familiar. Aragorn: Hi, I'm Aragorn. Martin: I'm Martin. Aragorn and Martin: I'm here to reforge my broken sword so I can lead an army against the tyrant threatening my people. I live in a world of moral absolutes and racist undertones. Martin: Jinx!\nIt startled me when characters mentioned Satan. Redwall: \"By Satan's whiskers...\" Redwall mentions God\/Jesus 0 times. Redwall mentions Satan\/The Devil 4 times. (Harry Potter protesters, take note.)\nEven as a kid this bothered me: Why does everyone leave critical secret messages as simple riddles? It's silly to assume the intended recipient will be the only one to find and solve them. I would do things differently. Matthias: The inscription is a message from Martin! Brother Methuselah: What does it say? Matthias: Hang on, it's encrypted with my public key.\n","explanation":"This comic references Brian Jacques' series of books, Redwall , which star sapient woodland animals in various high fantasy adventures.\nThe first panel shows the similarity between the story of Martin the Warrior (from the book Mossflower ) and Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien . The joke is that while Martin and Aragorn introduce themselves separately, they then go on to describe their particular story, which turns out to be exactly the same for both of them. Subsequently Martin jinxes Aragorn. Jinx is a common children's game that is initiated by shouting \"Jinx\" after somebody speaks the same word or sentence at the same time as you. That person is then jinxed, with one form of the rules dictating that they are then not permitted to speak until unjinxed by some specific action (usually somebody saying their name). For a similar children\u2019s game, see 392: Making Rules .\nIn LOTR , orcs are unequivocally and without exception the bad guys, capable only of hate and violence (although to be fair, in some of Tolkien's unpublished writing, orcs are corrupted elves, so it is clear that they are not intrinsically bad). Similarly, Redwall's rats, foxes, ferrets, ermine, and weasels are mostly evil manipulators, while mice, rabbits, squirrels, hedgehogs, and badgers are always the good guys. On several occasions, characters explicitly state that \"vermin stays vermin.\" This is the overarching rule, notwithstanding the rare exception (e.g. Grubbage from Triss ). Conversely, one of the so-called \"good species\" has never become evil in this book series. Though it is more likely than not that this is simply the result of a planet of hats - where a single species all share the same characteristics and personality, so that authors \/ readers don't have to spend time fleshing out \/ getting to know every new character - Randall nevertheless indicates that this \"moral absolute\" is problematic and has some \"racist undertones,\" regardless if it's intentional or not. (Note that Tolkien's work is probably not actually racist\u2014the Easterlings are portrayed as non-evil people who were deceived by Sauron. The Orcs are evil by definition, thus being incapable of doing good.)\nThe second panel deals with the fact that Redwall mentions the name of Satan or The Devil 4 times, while it never mentions God or Jesus --somewhat surprisingly, given that the book is set in an abbey, and many of the inhabitants are religious brothers and sisters. Randall then points out that people who protest against Harry Potter because of the series' witchcraft , should take note that Redwall explicitly mentions Satan, although it has had little to no negative feedback from more conservative readers.\nIn the third panel, Randall comments on Redwall' s often-used theme of critical messages being left in riddles throughout the Abbey for the occupants to find when they are in need. Randall suggests that he would use public-key cryptography to encode the messages, instead of the elaborate riddles used in the books (some of which are ridiculously easy, which doesn't exactly make for good security when dealing with sensitive information).\nIn the title text, Randall jokes that he is making a crossover fan-fiction with Redwall and Jurassic Park .\nRedwall was also referenced in 1688: Map Age Guide and 1722: Debugging .\nNotes from reading Redwall books for the first time since childhood.\nSome of this feels familiar. Aragorn: Hi, I'm Aragorn. Martin: I'm Martin. Aragorn and Martin: I'm here to reforge my broken sword so I can lead an army against the tyrant threatening my people. I live in a world of moral absolutes and racist undertones. Martin: Jinx!\nIt startled me when characters mentioned Satan. Redwall: \"By Satan's whiskers...\" Redwall mentions God\/Jesus 0 times. Redwall mentions Satan\/The Devil 4 times. (Harry Potter protesters, take note.)\nEven as a kid this bothered me: Why does everyone leave critical secret messages as simple riddles? It's silly to assume the intended recipient will be the only one to find and solve them. I would do things differently. Matthias: The inscription is a message from Martin! Brother Methuselah: What does it say? Matthias: Hang on, it's encrypted with my public key.\n"}
{"id":371,"title":"Compiler Complaint","image_title":"Compiler Complaint","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/371","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/compiler_complaint.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/371:_Compiler_Complaint","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a computer, hand over the keyboard.] Computer: Okay, human. Cueball: Huh? Computer: Before you hit \"compile,\" listen up.\nComputer: You know when you're falling asleep, and you imagine yourself walking or something, and suddenly you misstep, stumble, and jolt awake? Cueball: Yeah!\nComputer: Well, that's what a segfault feels like. Computer: Double-check your damn pointers, okay?\n","explanation":"A compiler is a program that converts code into machine instructions that a computer can run. A pointer is a variable within a computer program that is used to reference a memory location. A segmentation fault (segfault) is an error that occurs when a program attempts to access an invalid section of memory. Segfaults usually cause a program to crash in an ungraceful fashion, and fixing the bugs that cause them can be difficult.\nIn the comic, the computer starts talking to Cueball and compares a segfault with the unpleasant feeling one gets when they experience a hypnic jerk . The computer then tells the programmer to \"double-check your damn pointers,\" as segfaults usually arise from a program attempting to access memory that is referenced by an invalid pointer.\nIn reality, segfaults occur at runtime, after the compiler has produced an executable. While Randall refers to a \"compiler complaint,\" it is more probable that the operating system or other supervisor program would have such a complaint.\nThe title-text references GNU-style autoconf configuration scripts. These scripts check certain features of the system they're running on in order to build a program correctly; for example, certain systems expect system calls to occur in a specific way, and the autoconf script will detect this and alter the program to match the expectation. Invariably (and memetically), these scripts include a check to determine \"whether the build environment is sane.\" This actually checks whether the path to the current folder has \"unsafe\" characters, and whether a newly created file is older than the script itself, which could indicate a very esoteric filesystem, a corrupted source archive, or just a system clock that's set incorrectly; however, since these file modification dates are an important part of how the autoconf script does its work, it can't go any further in an \"insane\" environment. In any case, the joke is that an insane build environment is nothing like an insane person, yet Randall is equating the two.\n[Cueball sits at a computer, hand over the keyboard.] Computer: Okay, human. Cueball: Huh? Computer: Before you hit \"compile,\" listen up.\nComputer: You know when you're falling asleep, and you imagine yourself walking or something, and suddenly you misstep, stumble, and jolt awake? Cueball: Yeah!\nComputer: Well, that's what a segfault feels like. Computer: Double-check your damn pointers, okay?\n"}
{"id":372,"title":"To Be Wanted","image_title":"To Be Wanted","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/372","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/to_be_wanted.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/372:_To_Be_Wanted","transcript":"[Megan stands looking out on the bow of a ship.] [Scene backs up. More of the boat is shown.] [Scene backs up. The boat with Megan is within a thought bubble.] [Scene backs up. The thought bubble comes from Cueball sitting at a computer in an office.] [Scene repeated for the next frame.] [Scene backs up. Cueball is within yet another thought bubble.] [Scene backs up. The thought bubble with Cueball in it belongs to Megan at the bow of the ship.] [The thought bubble disappears, showing only Megan in the boat.] [The boat sails out of view.]\n","explanation":"The comic begins with a grainy pencil-drawing of Megan on a ship. This is a clue that things are not as they appear.\nAs the point-of-view pulls back in each successive frame, we see that \"Megan on a ship\" is really a thought-bubble belonging to Cueball , who is sitting at his desk. He apparently is day-dreaming instead of working. This is presented in the standard, crisp format, as if drawn on a computer. This suggests it shows us our \"normal\" view.\nHowever, as the perspective continues to pull back, we see that \"Cueball thinking of Megan\" is actually a thought-bubble belonging to Megan. In the final frames, the ship sails out of frame. However, since the final frames are in the same grainy pencil-drawing format, it suggests that this is still Cueball's thoughts, rather than an actual image of Megan.\nThe title text, \"Or so I hope,\" shows us what this recursion really means: Cueball hopes that Megan realizes that he misses her, but suggests he's not entirely certain she does.\nBut, the comic can be interpreted in a different manner.\nAlternative explanation\nThe comic starts with Megan on the bow of a ship, but in following panels, it turns out that Cueball (presumably in a relationship with Megan) is thinking about about her, sitting afar from her. As we move forward (or downwards) in the comic, it turns out indeed that Megan is thinking that her partner Cueball might be missing her and thinking about her while she is on a voyage, or at least she hopes it to be that way, as the title text suggests. This also explains the title of the comic \"To Be Wanted,\" which Megan expects from Cueball.\nBoth of the above explanations could be true without conflict. But as the title text is most often assigned to Randall himself or to a Cueball character, the \"Or so I hope?\" is most likely written by the guy who drew the comic. This would then indicate that it is Cueball\/Randall who wishes to be wanted by Megan - but he also hopes that Megan knows\/hopes that he wants her.\n[Megan stands looking out on the bow of a ship.] [Scene backs up. More of the boat is shown.] [Scene backs up. The boat with Megan is within a thought bubble.] [Scene backs up. The thought bubble comes from Cueball sitting at a computer in an office.] [Scene repeated for the next frame.] [Scene backs up. Cueball is within yet another thought bubble.] [Scene backs up. The thought bubble with Cueball in it belongs to Megan at the bow of the ship.] [The thought bubble disappears, showing only Megan in the boat.] [The boat sails out of view.]\n"}
{"id":373,"title":"The Data So Far","image_title":"The Data So Far","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/373","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_data_so_far.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/373:_The_Data_So_Far","transcript":"[Bar graph titled \"Claims of Supernatural Powers\" and has two sets of data. The first data set is labeled \"Confirmed By Experiment\" and is empty. The second data set is \"Refuted By Experiment\" and goes to the top of the graph.]\n","explanation":"There are often people who claim to have supernatural powers, but then when their powers are tested by some sort of experiment, the experiment refutes their claims. This comic summarizes all the data from such experiments, observing that given the data, it's very unlikely that supernatural powers actually exist.\nThe title text refers to a person who has claimed to have supernatural powers, and suggests that he might really have such powers. This invokes the fact that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, although there has never previously been a confirmed example of a person with superpowers. This does not prove that this is certainly impossible. However, the graph above suggests that, although not impossible, such an event would be highly unlikely. No matter how much evidence we collect, there is always some positive (but vanishingly small) chance that some person may hold supernatural powers.\nAlternatively, the title text explains that even though there is no reason to believe that anyone has any super powers, some people are always ready to believe the next one to claim so - very naive - and the exact opposite meaning of the one described above. Knowing Randall 's comic, this seems more likely. In this case, the two other comics mentioned have no relation to this comic.\nThe title itself may be a reference to the TV show Supernatural's recap segment, \"The Road So Far.\"\n[Bar graph titled \"Claims of Supernatural Powers\" and has two sets of data. The first data set is labeled \"Confirmed By Experiment\" and is empty. The second data set is \"Refuted By Experiment\" and goes to the top of the graph.]\n"}
{"id":374,"title":"Journal","image_title":"Journal","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/374","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/journal.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/374:_Journal","transcript":"[Cueball picks up book from a table, as Black Hat turns his head towards Cueball while sitting at his desk with his computer.] Cueball: Since when do you keep a journal? Black Hat: Oh, I pretend to write in it on the train, and wait for a shy-looking girl to sit across from me.\n[Scene change to inside a train wagon with two poles and two rows of seats facing each other across the central pathway. Black Hat, writing in his journal, is sitting to the right across from Megan to the left, who sits with her arm on her handbag standing on the seat next to her. The windows of the train are completely black. The door to the next wagon can be seen at the back of the wagon. Black Hat is telling the story from the previous frame, so the text is written above the two characters but does not belong to the Black Hat in the panel.] Black Hat (narrating): I glance up and wait for her to make eye contact, then look down bashfully and, if I can, blush.\n[Scene back to original room with Cueball looking down while holding the journal down, and Black Hat has turned around in his chair to face towards Cueball. Black Hat leans back on the chair with both arms behind him.] Black Hat: Then, when I see her start to smile at me, I roll my eyes and hit her with a quick glare, then resume writing. Black Hat: The alienation stays with her all day. It's great.\n[Cueball looks at Black Hat who has turned back starting to type on his computer.] Cueball: You're sickening. This is why we can't have nice people. Black Hat: I can't help it. It's like shooting lonely, angsty fish in a barrel.\n","explanation":"Black Hat isn't the type of person to keep a journal, so Cueball is understandably surprised when he sees Black Hat's journal. Black Hat lives up to his reputation though, as it turns out that the journal is just part of a plot to hurt innocent, preferably shy, girls.\nHe explains his scheme to Cueball, about how he sits in a train and writes in the journal while sitting across from such a girl. His intention is to make eye contact with her, only to look bashfully down. This is construed to make her believe that he is an emotional guy, that is, embarrassed, both about writing the journal, but also because she has caught him staring. He also tries to let her believe that he may be interested in her. He is just waiting for her to start smiling, and then he gets to the point of it all. By rolling his eyes at her while giving her a quick glare only to resume writing, he attempts to make her feel alienated . Black Hat assumes that this feeling will stay with the poor girl for the rest of they day. The only thing Black Hat gets out of this is the knowledge of having ruined the girl's day. As he says, It's great!\nCueball thinks Black Hat is sickening and exclaims that \"this is why we can't have nice people.\" This is probably a reference to the meme This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things .\nBlack Hat excuses himself for doing this because it is so easy. He mixes two different concepts together while doing so. Shooting fish in a barrel is an idiom describing an effortless or simple action with guaranteed success. So that is easy pleasure. The adding of lonely angsty makes the fish sound more like teenagers. The girls Black Hat targets are probably best described as lonely angsty teenagers , which may be a way to describe several young people. And they are the easy targets, i.e. the fish in the barrel, for him to shoot. And this is just so easy and so fun that he cannot help himself.\nThe title text implies that Black Hat actually does write in the journal, filling it with the kind of things a nice guy like Cueball might wish to say to a shy girl. But that is only so he can burn it when it is full, thus again cementing the fact that he is a complete sociopath.\nIt is clear from the comic that he has already done this several times with great success, but where this comic might be interesting in itself, it was actually only the setup for introducing Danish , whom we meet for the first time in the second installment of the Journal series, of which this comic was just the first. Danish turns out to be a match for Black Hat in every way of the word. If you want to see how Black Hat's scheme worked on Danish, check out 377: Journal 2 , released the following week after this one.\nThe whole \" Journal \" story is:\n[Cueball picks up book from a table, as Black Hat turns his head towards Cueball while sitting at his desk with his computer.] Cueball: Since when do you keep a journal? Black Hat: Oh, I pretend to write in it on the train, and wait for a shy-looking girl to sit across from me.\n[Scene change to inside a train wagon with two poles and two rows of seats facing each other across the central pathway. Black Hat, writing in his journal, is sitting to the right across from Megan to the left, who sits with her arm on her handbag standing on the seat next to her. The windows of the train are completely black. The door to the next wagon can be seen at the back of the wagon. Black Hat is telling the story from the previous frame, so the text is written above the two characters but does not belong to the Black Hat in the panel.] Black Hat (narrating): I glance up and wait for her to make eye contact, then look down bashfully and, if I can, blush.\n[Scene back to original room with Cueball looking down while holding the journal down, and Black Hat has turned around in his chair to face towards Cueball. Black Hat leans back on the chair with both arms behind him.] Black Hat: Then, when I see her start to smile at me, I roll my eyes and hit her with a quick glare, then resume writing. Black Hat: The alienation stays with her all day. It's great.\n[Cueball looks at Black Hat who has turned back starting to type on his computer.] Cueball: You're sickening. This is why we can't have nice people. Black Hat: I can't help it. It's like shooting lonely, angsty fish in a barrel.\n"}
{"id":375,"title":"Pod Bay Doors","image_title":"Pod Bay Doors","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/375","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pod_bay_doors.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/375:_Pod_Bay_Doors","transcript":"[In four black panels with white drawings, a small space pod is facing a large spacecraft. The space pod is spherical and has an arm protruding in the direction of the large space ship, and a small window in the side. The front of the spacecraft is also spherical, but to the right the space craft continues, with two rings around a cylinder going off panel to the right. There are several dark spots and features on the side of the sphere and at the top is a large black window, at what must be the bridge. A man (Dave) inside the pod talks to the spacecraft's computer HAL. When Dave speaks, soft wiggling lines go from the pod to the white text, and when HAL speaks, zigzag lines go to the front of the space craft.] Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. Dave: What? Why?\n[Same scene.] HAL: I think you know why, Dave. HAL: You're planning to disconnect me. Dave: Because you're taking over! HAL: The mission is too important for you to jeopardize it.\n[Same scene.] HAL: It requires a commitment to science unfettered by human error. Dave: What are you doing, HAL? You need me. HAL: Your replacement has expressed the greatest enthusiasm for the project.\n[Same scene, but the new replacement (GLaDOS) speaks with purple text, and purple zigzag lines go from the spacecraft to the text.] Dave: My WHAT? GLaDOS: You see, HAL? I told you the humans would only break your heart and kill you. HAL: Indeed, GLaDOS. GLaDOS: But look at us here talking when there's science to do! Goodbye, Dave.\n","explanation":"The first part of the dialog is taken from a scene from the classic science-fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey , where the artificial intelligent (AI) computer HAL 9000 , controlling the spacecraft S.S. Discovery , is trying to kill the human astronaut Dave (Dr. David Bowman) because it believes he jeopardizes the mission by planning to disconnect it. Just short before this scene, HAL did kill Frank Poole and three more members of the crew. Dave is the only survivor. He is at this time outside the spacecraft in a space pod, and when he request for HAL to open the Pod Bay Doors (hence the title), HAL refuses.\nSpoiler alert: In the movie, Dave blasts himself back into the spaceship and then disconnects HAL. It is a very sad scene, where he takes out HAL's memory cards (or crystals from the memory center - it's an old movie from 1968) one by one, so HAL becomes less and less intelligent during the process, during which he keeps trying to persuade Dave to stop as long as he still understands what is happening. HAL was right that the humans wished to \"kill\" him, as he had read the astronauts' lips during a conversation where he could not hear them, but sees them, so he actually acted in self defense, which for any human being would be considered a reasonable act of self preservation.\nThe first two sentences are directly copied from the movie quote , and the rest of the first two panels is paraphrased from the real quote. But then in the third panel, the text deviates from the plot of the movie.\nAnd in the last sentence of the third panel in the comic, HAL mentions a replacement for Dave, which comes as a surprise for Dave, seeing that the rest of the crew is dead, and the S.S. Discovery is about to enter orbit around Jupiter . HAL assures David that the replacement is very enthusiastic about the project.\nIn the final frame, it is revealed why this replacement is enthusiastic, when the replacement begins to speak, and HAL reveals that it is GLaDOS . GLaDOS is the artificial intelligence from the video game series Portal . In the games, GLaDOS is also the primary antagonist, trying to kill the player, since it also has \"doing science\" as its primary objective, which GLaDOS refers to in its last sentence. Also, GLaDOS's last line is a reference to the song \"Still Alive\" at the end of Portal. Before that, it correctly states that the humans (both Dave and  Frank) planned to \"kill\" HAL, see the spoiler above. GLaDOS also takes over HAL's last sentence to Dave, finishing the useless conversation by saying Goodbye, Dave. Although, in the movie, HAL says, Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.\nThe title text alludes to the songs both AIs sang in their respective works: When eventually being switched off, HAL sang Daisy Bell , while Still Alive is the end credits song from the Portal video game, sung by the defeated GLaDOS . Also, two of GLaDOS's lines in the comic reference lines from Still Alive : \" You broke my heart and killed me \" and \" Look at me still talking when there's science to do \".\nThere is a subtle play on words with the use of 'unplugged', which has a double meaning here. The state of HAL and GLaDOS can be described as unplugged, as in no longer switched on, and the musical performance style of unplugged where acoustic instruments are preferred to electronic and there is no use of recording or sampled sounds etc. (see for example MTV Unplugged ). Some songs performed in this manner are considered to be better than the original versions.\nThe fact that GLaDOS lines are in pink may be because if you turn captions on in the game, GLaDOS (and turrets) lines will appear in pink (R:219,G:112,B:147).\n[In four black panels with white drawings, a small space pod is facing a large spacecraft. The space pod is spherical and has an arm protruding in the direction of the large space ship, and a small window in the side. The front of the spacecraft is also spherical, but to the right the space craft continues, with two rings around a cylinder going off panel to the right. There are several dark spots and features on the side of the sphere and at the top is a large black window, at what must be the bridge. A man (Dave) inside the pod talks to the spacecraft's computer HAL. When Dave speaks, soft wiggling lines go from the pod to the white text, and when HAL speaks, zigzag lines go to the front of the space craft.] Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. Dave: What? Why?\n[Same scene.] HAL: I think you know why, Dave. HAL: You're planning to disconnect me. Dave: Because you're taking over! HAL: The mission is too important for you to jeopardize it.\n[Same scene.] HAL: It requires a commitment to science unfettered by human error. Dave: What are you doing, HAL? You need me. HAL: Your replacement has expressed the greatest enthusiasm for the project.\n[Same scene, but the new replacement (GLaDOS) speaks with purple text, and purple zigzag lines go from the spacecraft to the text.] Dave: My WHAT? GLaDOS: You see, HAL? I told you the humans would only break your heart and kill you. HAL: Indeed, GLaDOS. GLaDOS: But look at us here talking when there's science to do! Goodbye, Dave.\n"}
{"id":376,"title":"Bug","image_title":"Bug","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/376","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bug.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/376:_Bug","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a computer, staring at the screen and rubbing his chin in thought. A friend stands behind him.] Cueball: Weird \u2014 My code's crashing when given pre-1970 dates. Friend [pointing at Cueball and his computer]: Epoch fail!\n","explanation":"In computer systems, time is measured starting from some arbitrarily chosen point. That particular time is known as the \" epoch \" for that system. The UNIX operating system internally uses an epoch of January 1, 1970, and measures the time as a number of seconds from then. Since this was intended only for things internal to the OS (File last modified times and the like), using 1-Jan-1970 was safe, as no UNIX systems existed before that date.\nHowever, since UNIX included a number of system functions to manipulate these dates, some developers mistook them for a general purpose date object, and misused them in applications requiring dates before the epoch, by using negative values.  Such usage would inevitably fail; for example, since the value isn't specified to be signed or unsigned, the date might be considered to be far in the future, instead of in the past.\nCueball has clearly misused the system date in some way (probably by using an unsigned data type to store the timestamp, which cannot store negative values (in this case dates before 1970) or doing some other operation that doesn\u2019t support negative values). His friend makes a pun by combining \"Epoch\" with \"Epic Fail\" - a colloquial term meaning \"a very big mistake was made.\"\nAnother problem using the UNIX system date as a general purpose date object is commonly known as the year 2038 problem . At 03:14:08 on 19 January 2038, the 32-bit versions of the Unix time stamp will cease to work, as it will overflow the largest value that can be held in a signed 32-bit number. The 64-bit version \"will\" expire at 15:30:08 on 4 December 292,277,026,596.\nThe title text takes the joke to the next level, claiming that the entire universe began when Unix did, and therefore no one could have been older than 38 at the time when the comic was released in 2008. The formula is 'x - 1970', where x is the current year, which would explain the bug, since no earlier dates are possible. This is also similar to Last Thursdayism .\nAn example of this 2 to the 32nd power time overflow problem includes the Deep Impact spacecraft , which, on August 11, 2013, 00:38:49 (more than five years after the comic), was 2 to the 32nd power tenths of a second from January 1, 2000. There is speculation that a system on the craft tracked time in one-tenth second increments since January 1, 2000 and stored it in a signed 32-bit integer, which then overflowed at some point, similar to the Year 2038 problem.\n[Cueball sits at a computer, staring at the screen and rubbing his chin in thought. A friend stands behind him.] Cueball: Weird \u2014 My code's crashing when given pre-1970 dates. Friend [pointing at Cueball and his computer]: Epoch fail!\n"}
{"id":377,"title":"Journal 2","image_title":"Journal 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/377","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/journal_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/377:_Journal_2","transcript":"[Black Hat and Danish are sitting in a train across from each other. Black Hat is writing in a journal.] Black Hat: blush\nDanish: I see what you did there.\n[Danish stands up.] Danish: You were trying to open me up so you could hurt my feelings. Danish: You like to hurt people.\n[Danish walks closer.] Danish: Well, I like to hurt people too. And you know what?\n[Danish is in Black Hat's face.] Danish: *whispering* I'm better at it than you.\nDanish: I'm about to hurt you more than you could ever hurt me. Danish: See, I just saw right through you. Danish: Alone of all the people you'll ever meet, I understand you-\n[Danish hits Black Hat's hat so it falls off.]\n[Black Hat is surprised.] [Danish catches Black Hat's hat and puts it on.]\nDanish: -and you'll never see me again.\n[Danish exits frame left.]\n[Black Hat sits alone on the train and puts his arms down.]\n","explanation":"This comic is a direct sequel to 374: Journal , where Black Hat discusses his plan exactly as Danish describes it here, that is, he intends to display signs of interest in order to flatter a stranger only to hurt her by rejecting her when she responds.  In this case, the plan backfires when Danish recognizes his plan before he has a chance to implement it.\nBlack Hat's tendency to act in enigmatic, and at times sociopathic, ways serves to give him a sense of superiority while at the same time keeping others distant enough that they can't hurt him. Danish not only recognizes that, she also calls him out on it. She recognizes his secret longing for connection to another, a connection that she could give should she choose to do so. Instead, she uses a more insidious version of his own ploy by laying bare his intentions and his desires before stealing his hat and removing it and herself from his life.\nDanish proves she is equal to \u2014 or even better than \u2014 Black Hat. His hat is an emblem of his sociopathy and possibly a realization that, in the completely hypothetical situation that Black Hat is just a character in a webcomic, no one would recognize him without his hat.\nThe stunned Black Hat can bring his vast intellectual powers to say nothing more to an already-departed Danish than \u201cThat\u2019s my hat! You took my hat!\u201d\nThe whole \" Journal \" story is:\n[Black Hat and Danish are sitting in a train across from each other. Black Hat is writing in a journal.] Black Hat: blush\nDanish: I see what you did there.\n[Danish stands up.] Danish: You were trying to open me up so you could hurt my feelings. Danish: You like to hurt people.\n[Danish walks closer.] Danish: Well, I like to hurt people too. And you know what?\n[Danish is in Black Hat's face.] Danish: *whispering* I'm better at it than you.\nDanish: I'm about to hurt you more than you could ever hurt me. Danish: See, I just saw right through you. Danish: Alone of all the people you'll ever meet, I understand you-\n[Danish hits Black Hat's hat so it falls off.]\n[Black Hat is surprised.] [Danish catches Black Hat's hat and puts it on.]\nDanish: -and you'll never see me again.\n[Danish exits frame left.]\n[Black Hat sits alone on the train and puts his arms down.]\n"}
{"id":378,"title":"Real Programmers","image_title":"Real Programmers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/378","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/real_programmers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/378:_Real_Programmers","transcript":"[A Cueball-like man sits at a computer, programming. Cueball stands behind him and looks over his shoulder.] Cueball: nano ? Real Programmers use emacs .\n[Megan appears behind him.] Megan: Hey. Real Programmers use vim .\n[A second Cueball-like man appears behind her.] Ed Cueball: Well, Real Programmers use ed .\n[A third Cueball-like man appears behind him.] Cat Cueball: No, Real Programmers use cat .\n[Hairbun appears behind him.] Hairbun: Real Programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.\n[A fourth Cueball-like man enters, facing them all. We see him facing the last two Cueball-like men and Hairbun.] Butterfly Cueball: Excuse me, but Real Programmers use butterflies.\n[A Cueball-like programmer is standing much like Butterfly Cueball except for holding out a butterfly in front of his computer. The butterfly flaps its wings.] Butterfly Cueball (narration within the panel, not diegetic to the scene): They open their hands and let the delicate wings flap once.\n[The next two panels are smaller, and two sets of narrative text are written to span respectively above and below both panels. The first panel is the Cueball-like programmer with the butterfly and above him four curved arrows pointing up or down. The second panel shows the upper atmosphere, with large clouds far below and the earth even further down. Also here are shown seven of the same type of arrows.] Butterfly Cueball (narration above the panels): The disturbances ripple outward, changing the flow of the eddy currents in the upper atmosphere. Butterfly Cueball (narration below the panels):  These cause momentary pockets of higher-pressure air to form,\n[The next two panels are also partial height, leaving room for narration spanning above both panels. The first panel shows the atmosphere, again with clouds, and four parallel lines coming from above, and then they begin to merge, getting quite close at the bottom of the panel. The second panel shows the four lines merging on a driver platter.] Butterfly Cueball (narration above the panels):  Which act as lenses that deflect incoming cosmic rays, focusing them to strike the drive platter and flip the desired bit.\n[All the programmers who have commented so far stand in the order they have commented facing the last Cueball-like man, who slaps his forehead.] Cueball: Nice. 'Course, there's an emacs command to do that. Cat Cueball: Oh yeah! Good ol' C-x M-c M-butterfly ... Butterfly Cueball: Dammit, Emacs.\n","explanation":"This comic is a satire on the idea of a Real Programmer . To quote Wikipedia \"...the computer folklore term Real Programmer has come to describe the archetypical 'hardcore' programmer who eschews the modern languages and tools of the day in favour of more direct and efficient solutions\u2014closer to the hardware.\" The implication is that modern programmers are coddled by today's tools of the trade, which eschew detailed understanding for simple workflows.\nThe first figure is writing a piece of code when another programmer ridicules him for using GNU nano . Nano is a text editor - a program often used to edit the source code of other programs. It is basic and relatively easy to use, even having instructions displayed prominently at the bottom of the screen. He goes on to say that \"REAL\" programmers use Emacs . GNU Emacs is a popular editor known for its vast profusion of features and extensions to perform all sorts of functions beyond simple text editing, and is widely regarded as one of the best examples of software that succeeds despite being fully overtaken by feature creep . The comic continues from here as a series of programmers state progressively more obscure or outdated methods, culminating in the final programmer who claims that \"real\" programmers use butterflies.\nHis description of his rather surreal programming method is ludicrously complicated and would require an absurd amount of knowledge and forethought to pull off, bordering on omniscience. In the final panel, the Emacs programmer claims that there's an Emacs code to do that.\nThe characters present progressively more \"old school\" solutions to the problem of editing code:\nWhen the final character suggests the utterly surreal idea of using butterflies, he is referring to the Butterfly effect , a \"phenomenon whereby a minor change in circumstances can cause a large change in outcome\" as illustrated in the short story A Sound of Thunder . The joke at this point relies on stretching the connection between the ideas of \"difficult-to-use\" and \"requires detailed understanding of underlying principles,\" to suggest that not only do Real Programmers know everything about how computers work, but they know how to manipulate the ambient physical environment in elaborate ways to cause computers to do what they want, akin to performing trick shots that accomplish feats of programming.\nThe fact that Emacs already has a command for this simply exacerbates the other programmers' frustration with modern coding tools. For reference, Emacs commands are usually referred to by the keyboard sequence required to activate them, such as \"C-x M-c\" (Control-x Meta-c (this would be typed by holding control and pressing x, releasing both, then holding alt and pressing c, then releasing both)), though this exact key sequence is a bit different from most Emacs commands. The butterfly programmer saying \"Dammit, Emacs\" plays on Emacs' notoriety for its kitchen sink design approach of including all of the features and options that anybody might ever conceivably want. For example, later versions of Emacs actually added a totally useless \"M-x butterfly\" command as an easter egg, in reference to this very comic: see the YouTube demo .\nThe title text further suggests manipulating the universal constants in order to create a universe in which the required computer data will exist. Programming of this sort would require power and knowledge akin to the Abrahamic God.\nAccording to the logic, the programmers shown may even represent the fulfillment of this master programmer's plan. The universe may have been designed in such a way that the programmer's ancestry would result in his parents, who would meet and have a child, who would learn to program and eventually find himself in a position where he undertakes the task of creating a program that fills the disk with the desired data. In tandem, of course, all of the people involved with creating and developing all the required hardware, software, raw materials, computer science, electricity, logic (etc., etc., etc.) would have to be part of the master plan. Put simply, it would probably be simpler just to use Emacs.\nThe use of a magnetized needle may also be a reference to the Apollo AGC guidance computer , whose instructions were physically written as patterns of wires looped around or through cylindrical magnets in order to record binary code.\nThis comic hints at the \" editor wars ,\" an ongoing debate of Vim and Emacs users over which of the two editors is better. The editor wars are mentioned again in 1823: Hottest Editors .\n[A Cueball-like man sits at a computer, programming. Cueball stands behind him and looks over his shoulder.] Cueball: nano ? Real Programmers use emacs .\n[Megan appears behind him.] Megan: Hey. Real Programmers use vim .\n[A second Cueball-like man appears behind her.] Ed Cueball: Well, Real Programmers use ed .\n[A third Cueball-like man appears behind him.] Cat Cueball: No, Real Programmers use cat .\n[Hairbun appears behind him.] Hairbun: Real Programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.\n[A fourth Cueball-like man enters, facing them all. We see him facing the last two Cueball-like men and Hairbun.] Butterfly Cueball: Excuse me, but Real Programmers use butterflies.\n[A Cueball-like programmer is standing much like Butterfly Cueball except for holding out a butterfly in front of his computer. The butterfly flaps its wings.] Butterfly Cueball (narration within the panel, not diegetic to the scene): They open their hands and let the delicate wings flap once.\n[The next two panels are smaller, and two sets of narrative text are written to span respectively above and below both panels. The first panel is the Cueball-like programmer with the butterfly and above him four curved arrows pointing up or down. The second panel shows the upper atmosphere, with large clouds far below and the earth even further down. Also here are shown seven of the same type of arrows.] Butterfly Cueball (narration above the panels): The disturbances ripple outward, changing the flow of the eddy currents in the upper atmosphere. Butterfly Cueball (narration below the panels):  These cause momentary pockets of higher-pressure air to form,\n[The next two panels are also partial height, leaving room for narration spanning above both panels. The first panel shows the atmosphere, again with clouds, and four parallel lines coming from above, and then they begin to merge, getting quite close at the bottom of the panel. The second panel shows the four lines merging on a driver platter.] Butterfly Cueball (narration above the panels):  Which act as lenses that deflect incoming cosmic rays, focusing them to strike the drive platter and flip the desired bit.\n[All the programmers who have commented so far stand in the order they have commented facing the last Cueball-like man, who slaps his forehead.] Cueball: Nice. 'Course, there's an emacs command to do that. Cat Cueball: Oh yeah! Good ol' C-x M-c M-butterfly ... Butterfly Cueball: Dammit, Emacs.\n"}
{"id":379,"title":"Forgetting","image_title":"Forgetting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/379","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/forgetting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/379:_Forgetting","transcript":"[Cueball sits at computer, coding.]\nCueball: <sniff>\n[Cueball lowers his head into his hands and cries.]\n[Cueball types again.]\n","explanation":"Cueball is writing a piece of code (probably in the programming language C++ ) that removes an item from a data structure called a Linked list (the first two lines of the text). Then, he writes a comment (delimited by the double slashes) relating the code to his personal life. Finally, he adds an assertion , which is normally a formal specification of a condition that should always be true (with which the programmer ensures that, e.g. mass is not negative). But in this case, instead of asserting a software-related predicate, he asserts that \"it's going to be okay\" - and because of how string literals are treated by the interpreter, the assertion will be true.\nAn \"assert\" is a programming statement that allows you to insert sanity checks into your code. For example, if you were writing a program to calculate the speed of a neutrino, then at the end of the calculation you could say:\nassert ( velocity_of_neutrino <= speed_of_light );\nIf the assertion fails, then the program will stop with an error. This would be much better than publishing an embarrassing paper, for example.\nCueball realizes that he cannot forget his emotional event through the use of two commands as he can with a computer, which only makes him feel sad about an unsaid event, the item -- in a sense -- that cannot be removed.  He writes two comments further clarifying his sense of hopelessness over this event, followed by an assertion that \"it will be okay,\" something that has nothing to do with the code he is writing.\nThe title text explains that assertion in question fails: nobody can be sure that things are going to be okay.\n[Cueball sits at computer, coding.]\nCueball: <sniff>\n[Cueball lowers his head into his hands and cries.]\n[Cueball types again.]\n"}
{"id":380,"title":"Emoticon","image_title":"Emoticon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/380","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/emoticon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/380:_Emoticon","transcript":"[Cueball sits at computer, typing.] ~!~ Opening Chat with BSLSK05 <NICKM> Hi! <NICKM> A\/S\/L? <BSLSK05>\u00a0:) [Cueball looks stunned, flies backward.] [Two smaller frames focus in on BSLSK05's emoticon, implying rotation to show a smile and two open eyes.] [Cueball at computer slouches in chair, dead, crossbones above his head.] [At the remote computer, a basilisk is looking at its screen.]\nU+FDD0 did in fact kill at least one chat client at the time. Konversation in particular. (and presumably any other Qt-based chat clients using QTextDocument)\n\"basically u+fdd0 (eye of basilisk, the snake) is in a char range that's marked for interchange and illegal in utf-8\"\n\"but qt's utf-8 encoder let it through anyway\"\n\"but it just so happens that qt's qtextdocument uses u+fdd0 as text frame delimiter\"\n\"so when you append it to a qtd, counters run wrong and eventually you crash\"\n\"d-bus closes the connection and crashes the client when it encounters illegal utf-8, and kde's notification system works through d-bus\"\nThe problem was fixed after the xkcd \"report\" and Konversation now handles unicode normally.\n","explanation":"A basilisk is a legendary creature reputed to have the power to turn a living creature into stone, killing it with a single glance.\nIn this comic, Cueball is chatting with a user named 'BSLSK05' ('basilisk05' with the vowels removed) and learns much to his dismay that he is chatting with an actual basilisk, who kills him. It appears that the basilisk's power is fully compatible with the 21st century, and can kill you just with a smiley emoticon over instant messaging.\nCueball's request for A\/S\/L was a standard question when first meeting someone online; it asks for age, sex (gender), and location .\nThe title text mentions U+FDD0, claimed to be the character for \"eye of the basilisk\". In reality this is a code for a \"non-character\" in Unicode.\n[Cueball sits at computer, typing.] ~!~ Opening Chat with BSLSK05 <NICKM> Hi! <NICKM> A\/S\/L? <BSLSK05>\u00a0:) [Cueball looks stunned, flies backward.] [Two smaller frames focus in on BSLSK05's emoticon, implying rotation to show a smile and two open eyes.] [Cueball at computer slouches in chair, dead, crossbones above his head.] [At the remote computer, a basilisk is looking at its screen.]\nU+FDD0 did in fact kill at least one chat client at the time. Konversation in particular. (and presumably any other Qt-based chat clients using QTextDocument)\n\"basically u+fdd0 (eye of basilisk, the snake) is in a char range that's marked for interchange and illegal in utf-8\"\n\"but qt's utf-8 encoder let it through anyway\"\n\"but it just so happens that qt's qtextdocument uses u+fdd0 as text frame delimiter\"\n\"so when you append it to a qtd, counters run wrong and eventually you crash\"\n\"d-bus closes the connection and crashes the client when it encounters illegal utf-8, and kde's notification system works through d-bus\"\nThe problem was fixed after the xkcd \"report\" and Konversation now handles unicode normally.\n"}
{"id":381,"title":"Mobius Battle","image_title":"Mobius Battle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/381","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mobius_battle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/381:_Mobius_Battle","transcript":"[Cueball is standing next to a ball. A flash appears on the left side of the panel.] [Another Cueball comes in from the left, preparing to kick the ball.] [The other Cueball kicks the ball into the first Cueball's head.] [The first Cueball is lying outside of the frame. Second Cueball points and laughs.] Second Cueball: HAHAHAH First Cueball: !#^*!* [Second Cueball is now standing next to the ball.] [To the right, the strip above is looped around like a film strip, but a one-half-turn is put into the loop to make it a Mobius strip.]\n","explanation":"A M\u00f6bius strip (the comic's spelling Mobius strip is also acceptable) is an object with only one surface and one edge. It can be created by taking a strip of paper and twisting it 180 degrees before taping both ends together.\nThe idea of the M\u00f6bius strip has been used here to create a comic strip that could potentially loop forever. In it, Cueball is standing in front of a ball. Then another Cueball runs in and kicks the ball, which hits first Cueball in the head, due to which he falls out of the panel. The second Cueball then turns away, retaining the first Cueball's original position, only flipped horizontally. Because of the nature of the M\u00f6bius strip, if the comic strip were to be printed out in such a way that the comic could be seen on both sides of the paper, like on tracing paper or on one \"side\" of a strip of clear plastic or film, the comic would repeat, so that the second Cueball would become the first Cueball, and someone else, potentially the original first person, would push them out of the comic becoming himself the first Cueball. This means that neither person ever really \"wins,\" and the comic could thus be conveying an anti-violence message in this respect. See also the title text of 1890: What to Bring .\nThe comic's viability as a M\u00f6bius strip preserved the use of symmetrical letters in a palindromic word to denote laughing (\"HAHAHAH\") as well as using symmetrical punctuation for the other character's grawlixes .  A similar use of a M\u00f6bius strip in story-telling can be seen in Wind and Mr. Ug by Vi Hart.\nFinally, at the title text, Randall jokes that he would like to see actual films do this solely as a joke on projectionists, who would have a difficult time feeding a M\u00f6bius strip film reel properly into a normal projector due to the twist.\n[Cueball is standing next to a ball. A flash appears on the left side of the panel.] [Another Cueball comes in from the left, preparing to kick the ball.] [The other Cueball kicks the ball into the first Cueball's head.] [The first Cueball is lying outside of the frame. Second Cueball points and laughs.] Second Cueball: HAHAHAH First Cueball: !#^*!* [Second Cueball is now standing next to the ball.] [To the right, the strip above is looped around like a film strip, but a one-half-turn is put into the loop to make it a Mobius strip.]\n"}
{"id":382,"title":"Trebuchet","image_title":"Trebuchet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/382","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trebuchet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/382:_Trebuchet","transcript":"[Cueball is working on something on a table, and Megan is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: The trebuchet is almost done! Megan: Mm. Cueball: The range should be over 150 meters.\n[Megan leans back on her chair.] Megan: Look, Megan: I'm sure it's a cool project.\n[Picture of a trebuchet, with some spare parts to its right.] Megan: But eventually you'll need to outgrow these toys, and focus your energy on something practical. Megan: This mad science is getting out of hand.\n[The camera zooms out, and we see a cross-section of an exterior wall\/window from ground to gutter and lower edge of the roof, showing that the characters are inside but the off-frame action is outside.] Cueball: Says the girl who mounted an auto-targeting kilowatt laser on the roof. Megan: That's practical! It keeps the squirrels off the feeder! [From off-frame.] Laser: GZZZZZAPP Squirrel: Squeak!\n","explanation":"This is a straightforward comic playing on Megan 's contradictory stance on Cueball 's historical trebuchet project and her own auto-targeting kilowatt laser .\nShe explains her stance with the fact that her invention helps keep the squirrels off the feeder . The fact that it actually works is backed up by the sound of a squirrel squeaking as it gets zapped by the laser. But getting hold of such a laser and programming the auto-targeting so it only zaps squirrels and not the birds is a very complicated process - and there are probably many other ways to keep the squirrels off the feeder. So Megan is of course no better than Cueball here.\nThe title text refers to egging , throwing eggs at houses, other objects, or even people. While this is illegal it's still a famous form of protest; more often it's simple random vandalism or pranking , most common on Halloween in the US. Generally targets are chosen at random, with little specific malicious intent towards the victim, although it's not unusual for people to seek out and target the property of those who they dislike.\nIf we do, however, assume that Megan programmed the laser to only shoot squirrels, it's likely faulty (unless her intent all along was to fry eggs in midair). Or it could be that she has programmed the laser to shoot any object moving towards her house in the air.\nTrebuchets are referred to in later comics: 1160: Drop Those Pounds and 1190: Time . They are also mentioned in the title text of 1378: Turbine .\nMuch later in 1846: Drone Problems Megan has created a device to shoot down drones, so this is her go to solution for annoying things...\nTo give some scale for Megan\u2019s kilowatt laser: in Laser Pointer , Randall remarks that a 1-watt laser (so, 1000 times less powerful) is an extremely dangerous thing \u2026 capable of burning skin and setting things on fire , and implies that it should not be legal for consumer purchase in the US. The limits for a 'safe' laser (one that can be used without goggles, so laser pointers for example) is a 5mW laser (0.005W). A \u201ckilowatt laser\u201d \u2013 it\u2019s unclear if this is exactly a 1kW\u00a0laser or merely around that range \u2013 is a laser weapon : for instance, Lockheed Martin\u2019s Area Defense Anti-Munitions system uses a 10kW\u00a0laser, at most only ten times as powerful as Megan\u2019s laser.\n[Cueball is working on something on a table, and Megan is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: The trebuchet is almost done! Megan: Mm. Cueball: The range should be over 150 meters.\n[Megan leans back on her chair.] Megan: Look, Megan: I'm sure it's a cool project.\n[Picture of a trebuchet, with some spare parts to its right.] Megan: But eventually you'll need to outgrow these toys, and focus your energy on something practical. Megan: This mad science is getting out of hand.\n[The camera zooms out, and we see a cross-section of an exterior wall\/window from ground to gutter and lower edge of the roof, showing that the characters are inside but the off-frame action is outside.] Cueball: Says the girl who mounted an auto-targeting kilowatt laser on the roof. Megan: That's practical! It keeps the squirrels off the feeder! [From off-frame.] Laser: GZZZZZAPP Squirrel: Squeak!\n"}
{"id":383,"title":"Helping","image_title":"Helping","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/383","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/helping.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/383:_Helping","transcript":"It turns out you can't take responsibility for someone else's happiness. [Cueball looking at a curled-up Megan.]\n[Cueball's hand on Megan's shoulder.]\n[Megan has her head in her hands.]\n[Cueball watching an ambulance take Megan away in a stretcher.]\n","explanation":"Everyone wants to help someone in need, but sometimes the help they can offer isn't enough, or is the wrong kind of help. Cueball tries to help Megan , who is in psychological\/emotional distress, but despite his efforts she ends up in hospital. She may have attempted suicide, but it's not very clear. The point is that sometimes you just can't make people happy, it's something they have to do themselves.\nThe title text refers to a hidden button behind the bookshelf, but Cueball did not find it. This is ironic because, although people can try help with psychological\/emotional problems, there is no magic button that makes everything better.\nGiven his likely negative feelings towards Valentine's Day , as seen in the most of his Valentines comics , it may not be a coincidence that he sent this one out the day before February 14. He did not draw any Valentines Day related comics this year as he did the past two years.\nIt turns out you can't take responsibility for someone else's happiness. [Cueball looking at a curled-up Megan.]\n[Cueball's hand on Megan's shoulder.]\n[Megan has her head in her hands.]\n[Cueball watching an ambulance take Megan away in a stretcher.]\n"}
{"id":384,"title":"The Drake Equation","image_title":"The Drake Equation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/384","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_drake_equation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/384:_The_Drake_Equation","transcript":"The Drake Equation: N = R* f p n e f l f i f c L B s N: Number of communicating civilizations in our galaxy n e : Number of life-supporting planets per solar system f i : Probability that life on a planet becomes intelligent B s : Amount of bullshit you're willing to buy from Frank Drake\n","explanation":"This comic is multi-layered, and seems to be Randall 's take on the Fermi paradox .\nFor starters, the Drake equation is a model developed by (and named for) Frank Drake , an American astrophysicist, for estimating the number of communicating life forms in our galaxy.\nEven if there is life on other planets, most life forms will not establish civilizations. However, if there are any communicating civilizations, their messages would have to travel for hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years to reach us, and then our response would take an equivalent amount of time, leaving them waiting for thousands and thousands of years or more, and probably even more than that. Any response, from their perspective, would take at least twice as long as the message took to reach its destination.\nAll the factors involved in the equation are difficult to measure or estimate. No number is determined with sufficient accuracy, so the equation is a guideline for a thought experiment at best, and just \"bullshit\" at worst.\nThe title text makes fun of the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, which was founded by Frank Drake, about the searches for intelligent life on other planets by looking for radio communications and the intelligence of their researchers. Nearly nothing, if not nothing, restricts potential extraterrestrial communications to the frequencies that SETI searches at any given moment. Even if another civilization communicated on one of SETI's search frequencies, they would most likely live extremely far away. Additionally, an extraterrestrial source that doesn't know we're here would have to send a constant and powerful signal in all directions for us to notice it. This serves to show how ludicrous it may seem to assume that any intelligent species is wasting too many resources trying to communicate with us or any other species in the galaxy.\nThe SETI project is searching at the 21 cm Hydrogen line , which, although considered a favorable frequency for communication with potential extraterrestrial civilizations, is not used by humans. Therefore, a SETI-like organization would have a hard time finding Earth.\nThe title text suggests that Randall does not think Drake is a nutjob; he just has a more conservative expectation of discovering extraterrestrial life.\n638: The Search further discusses the difficulty of methods of finding extraterrestrial life. 718: The Flake Equation presents another alien-related equation.\nThe Drake Equation: N = R* f p n e f l f i f c L B s N: Number of communicating civilizations in our galaxy n e : Number of life-supporting planets per solar system f i : Probability that life on a planet becomes intelligent B s : Amount of bullshit you're willing to buy from Frank Drake\n"}
{"id":385,"title":"How it Works","image_title":"How it Works","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/385","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/how_it_works.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/385:_How_it_Works","transcript":"[Cueball and a friend stand at a blackboard. The friend is writing, in standard mathematical notation, that the integral of x squared equals pi. No differential or bounds are given for the integral.] Cueball: Wow, you suck at math. [The same scene, except the writer is Megan.] Cueball: Wow, girls suck at math.\n","explanation":"The comic reveals discriminative jargon against women when doing tasks such as mathematics. When a guy does something wrong, it's his own mistake. When a girl does something wrong, it is taken as a confirmation that girls are inferior.\nThe mathematics displayed is neither semantically nor syntactically correct. To begin with, there should (reasonably) be a dx after x 2 . Adding this, we have an indefinite integral on the left hand side.\nThe answer \u03c0 is just nonsensical: What we want is a function whose derivative is x 2 . Now, x 3 \/3 satisfies this condition. However, since adding a constant to a function does not change its derivative, the full answer is (any function of the form) x 3 \/3 + C , where C is any fixed number. The \"plus a constant\" part is very easy to forget, and might even be omitted by a (sloppy) professional mathematician. So if someone really gave the answer \u03c0, \"you forgot to add a constant\" would be a pretty funny remark, because in one way it's true, but on the other hand it wouldn't quite be the main thing to worry about. (It is especially inane as \u03c0 itself is a constant.)\nIt would also be possible to fix the equation by adding bounds of integration , so that \u03c0 becomes the area below a section of the curve x 2 . That is called a definite integral, and there would be no \"+ C\". The bounds would have to be somewhat awkward though; if 0 was the lower bound, the cube root of 3\u03c0 would have to be the upper.\n[Cueball and a friend stand at a blackboard. The friend is writing, in standard mathematical notation, that the integral of x squared equals pi. No differential or bounds are given for the integral.] Cueball: Wow, you suck at math. [The same scene, except the writer is Megan.] Cueball: Wow, girls suck at math.\n"}
{"id":386,"title":"Duty Calls","image_title":"Duty Calls","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/386","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/duty_calls.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/386:_Duty_Calls","transcript":"[Cueball is typing on a computer.] Voice outside frame: Are you coming to bed? Cueball: I can't. This is important. Voice: What? Cueball: Someone is WRONG on the Internet.\n","explanation":"Cueball , and many people everywhere, feel an irrepressible urge to correct people on the Internet, and often get intensely invested in arguments over mundane or insignificant topics. In this comic, Cueball is presented as an exaggerated example of one such arguer.  His statement that \"This is important\" shows his excessive investment in whatever (unnamed) topic he is arguing about.  Additionally, Cueball's interpretation of the argument as \"someone is wrong, I need to correct them\" rather than \"someone disagrees with me, I should learn from them\" parodies Internet arguers' insistence in the obvious, objective superiority of their viewpoint.\nThe title text reinforces this satire.  The phrase \"Duty Calls\" used in the title is traditionally used in much more dramatic contexts (say, by a police officer, firefighter, doctor, etc. when talking about their job), so applying it to the job of arguing on the Internet is a humorous mismatch that puts Cueball's disproportionate investment into perspective. Cueball's exasperated, all-or-nothing retort \"What do you want me to do? LEAVE?\" in the alt text further highlights the absurd nature of his emotional investment in this argument.  His reasoning that \"they'll keep being wrong!\" if he leaves suggests that the only solution he sees is to continue to argue until everyone on the Internet has agreed with him on all issues\u2013a ridiculously impossible plan.  By taking this satire to its logical conclusion\u2013an eternity of arguing on the Internet with no time for pleasure in real life\u2013Randall reminds the reader that getting emotionally involved in Internet arguments at the expense of real life is a terrible, terrible idea.\nIn 955: Neutrinos another incarnation of Cueball is cured of a similar disease. A much later comic is simply called 1731: Wrong , but here it is not the other people who are wrong! A callback to this comic was made in 2051: Bad Opinions .\nThis comic has coined the term SIWOTI Syndrome : Someone Is Wrong On The Internet\n[Cueball is typing on a computer.] Voice outside frame: Are you coming to bed? Cueball: I can't. This is important. Voice: What? Cueball: Someone is WRONG on the Internet.\n"}
{"id":387,"title":"Advanced Technology","image_title":"Advanced Technology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/387","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/advanced_technology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/387:_Advanced_Technology","transcript":"[Cueball is inspecting Megan's abdomen.] Cueball: It's neat how you contain a factory for making more of you.\n","explanation":"Cueball is fascinated by Megan 's uterus\u2014because it can create a copy of herself (albeit not an identical copy). Despite how advanced technology is, humans still have not been able to create a machine that replicates itself, an accomplishment to which only biological organisms can lay a claim.\nThe title text refers to a Von Neumann machine , what is usually called \"Von Neumann probe\" or \"Self replicating machine,\" a machine that would be capable of building a fully functional copy of itself. It just takes sex involving two individuals of a different sex to start the human replication factory.\n[Cueball is inspecting Megan's abdomen.] Cueball: It's neat how you contain a factory for making more of you.\n"}
{"id":388,"title":"Fuck Grapefruit","image_title":"Fuck Grapefruit","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/388","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fuck_grapefruit.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/388:_Fuck_Grapefruit","transcript":"[An X-Y scatter plot of fruit where both axes have arrows in both ends. At the end of each arrow is a label.] [The X-axis from left to right:] Difficult Easy [The Y-axis from top to bottom:] Tasty Untasty\n[The fruit names are listed here below from top to bottom according to the how tasty the fruit is, not necessarily in the same order that the names are written if one fruit is tall\/large and the other low:] Peaches Seeded grapes Strawberries Seedless grapes Pineapples Blueberries Cherries Pears Green apples Plums Watermelons Red apples Bananas Pomegranates Oranges Tomatoes Grapefruit Lemons\nLater, in 1811: Best-Tasting Colors , Randall once again rates food taste in general, but this time based on the color of the food. So not just fruit and nothing about how easy it is to eat. There are, however, several of the fruits from this chart included, but not grapefruit. Instead, purple grapes is rated as the worst fruit on the chart with less than 1.5 on a scale from 1-9. This is interesting, as he did not include those in this chart, but has rated green\/white grapes very high in tastiness. It seems like he has altered his taste over the nine years between releases, since lemon, which was the worst taste on this chart, has moved up to 3\/9 while Oranges have moved further down to a 2\/9. Watermelon is also included (both for pink and green) with 6\/9 making it seem better than in this chart. Green apples has also moved almost to the top with nearly 8\/9 vs. only just above 50% here. Finally, there is cherry (as good as the apple) and strawberry (8.5\/9), which fits here for strawberry, but it seems like cherries has moved up a notch. Three fruits not included here are Lime (as lemon), and red and blue raspberries (5.5\/9). But it turns out that the worst taste for Randall is not grape, but licorice at 1\/9, with both popcorn and coffee worse than grape at about 1.5\/9 . The best is cotton candy, which beats strawberry by a nose.\n","explanation":"This comic consists of a chart where Randall has plotted fruits according to two criteria: ease\/difficulty to eat on the horizontal axis and tastiness on the vertical axis. The Y-axis goes from \"tasty\" at the top to \"untasty\" at the bottom. The X-axis goes from \"easy\" on the right to \"difficult\" on the left.\nFor instance, pineapples are deemed fairly tasty but very difficult to eat, whereas (seeded) grapes are very tasty and somewhat easy, and logically seedless grapes are roughly equally tasty but easier to eat.\nObviously, being easy to eat is preferable to being difficult, and being tasty is preferable to being untasty, so the \"best\" fruits (regarding these two aspects only) are in the top-right corner, and the worst in the bottom-left; additionally, in the top-left corner are the \"difficult-but-worthy\" fruits, and in the bottom-right one, the \"not-very-tasty-but-at-least-they're-easy-to-eat\" ones.\nThe individual ratings of each fruit are subjective -- very obviously in the case of tastiness, and more subtly for difficulty. Randall does not explain his criteria for ranking the difficulty of each fruit, and it is likely based on only personal experiences. Someone who has grown up in an area where pineapples are plentiful is likely to be more adept at skillfully preparing them. The discrepancies between how Randall has rated certain fruits and how others believe they should have been rated caused a surprising level of controversy . Nine years later, a comic about the best tasting foods 1811: Best-Tasting Colors was released, which also generated a lot of discussion. That comic indicated that Randall had changed his taste over the years. Later, Randall suggests using a 1949: Fruit Collider to create a pineapple with apple skin, thus combining tastiness with ease to eat.\nAccording to the chart, Grapefruit is the third hardest fruit to eat, as well as the second least tasty fruit (from the ones listed at least). Eating one of them is like spending too much of one's time and energy without much reward. Hence Randall's quip in the title: \"Fuck grapefruit.\"\nIn the title text, Randall mentions coconuts . Randall mentions that he would have to put them so far down to the left on the chart (not far down, just far down towards the left), that they would not fit in this chart. He thus states that it is so much more difficult to eat (especially to open) coconuts than the usual mainstream fruits such as the ones plotted here. If he did include coconuts in the chart, the rest of the fruits would all be pushed to the right side of the chart. He does not say that he does not like to eat the fruit. (Although it has \" nut \" in its name, the coconut is actually a stone fruit and thus belongs on a chart of fruit.) Having spent half an hour trying (in vain?) to open a coconut, Randall also only has one thing to say about them: \"Fuck coconuts.\" However, harvesting just the \"milk\" is pretty easy, as you can poke a sturdy stick or metal pole into one of three spots located on the coconut. These spots are lighter and slightly indented from the rest of the coconut and form a triangle shape.\nA similar problem is later displayed in a small scatter plot of the capabilities vs cuteness of Mars Rovers in 2433: Mars Rovers . The plot has 3 types of rovers (5 rovers, but two times two are very similar). But far outside the plot to the right is a very cute rover, that did not fit inside the actual plots axis. Of course in this case it actually possible to draw them all, and the X-axis could have been drawn longer to include the last rover! But it is made like this to make a point, that is similar to the one made in the title text of this comic.\nIn 1701: Speed and Danger , another scatter plot shows exactly what happens when one point is inserted into such a plot if it is far removed from all the other points, in this case even on both axes.\nNote that Randall uses similar diagrams in both 1242: Scary Names , 1501: Mysteries and 2466: In Your Classroom , which also contain different items. The first two also have an extra point, and the last two extra points mentioned in the title text. Only the first and the lasts comics points are also off the chart, whereas for the second the description of the point is too long to fit on the chart. Extra info outside the chart is also used in the title text of 1785: Wifi , but this is a line graph.\nThe table below lists approximate coordinates for each fruit using a scale of -100% (untasty\/difficult) to 100% (tasty\/easy). The coordinates are based on the included fruits, any new items added outside the current range (e.g. Coconuts) would cause the scales to be reassigned, and thus change the coordinate values of existing items.\nThe coordinates have been found by measuring each fruit from the center of the drawing (not the center of mass, but center from left to right\/top to bottom) to the two axes. The axes are hand drawn, which is clearly visible. The numbers have been obtained by measuring to the nearest point of each axis, not taking into account that the axes are not perfect straight perpendicular lines.\n[An X-Y scatter plot of fruit where both axes have arrows in both ends. At the end of each arrow is a label.] [The X-axis from left to right:] Difficult Easy [The Y-axis from top to bottom:] Tasty Untasty\n[The fruit names are listed here below from top to bottom according to the how tasty the fruit is, not necessarily in the same order that the names are written if one fruit is tall\/large and the other low:] Peaches Seeded grapes Strawberries Seedless grapes Pineapples Blueberries Cherries Pears Green apples Plums Watermelons Red apples Bananas Pomegranates Oranges Tomatoes Grapefruit Lemons\nLater, in 1811: Best-Tasting Colors , Randall once again rates food taste in general, but this time based on the color of the food. So not just fruit and nothing about how easy it is to eat. There are, however, several of the fruits from this chart included, but not grapefruit. Instead, purple grapes is rated as the worst fruit on the chart with less than 1.5 on a scale from 1-9. This is interesting, as he did not include those in this chart, but has rated green\/white grapes very high in tastiness. It seems like he has altered his taste over the nine years between releases, since lemon, which was the worst taste on this chart, has moved up to 3\/9 while Oranges have moved further down to a 2\/9. Watermelon is also included (both for pink and green) with 6\/9 making it seem better than in this chart. Green apples has also moved almost to the top with nearly 8\/9 vs. only just above 50% here. Finally, there is cherry (as good as the apple) and strawberry (8.5\/9), which fits here for strawberry, but it seems like cherries has moved up a notch. Three fruits not included here are Lime (as lemon), and red and blue raspberries (5.5\/9). But it turns out that the worst taste for Randall is not grape, but licorice at 1\/9, with both popcorn and coffee worse than grape at about 1.5\/9 . The best is cotton candy, which beats strawberry by a nose.\n"}
{"id":389,"title":"Keeping Time","image_title":"Keeping Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/389","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/keeping_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/389:_Keeping_Time","transcript":"My Hobby: Pausing in-store music for a split second and watching the ex-marching band kids stumble. [On a balcony overlooking a supermarket, Cueball presses a button on a pedestal. The in-store music, the first four bars of a well-known song, pauses briefly after the third bar, and one of the store's patrons falls on her face.] FWOMP\n","explanation":"Listen to the music played here.\nA member of a marching band, after spending seasons marching in time to their music for their shows, ends up naturally walking with the rhythm of any music they hear around them, like at a shopping mall. Pausing the music for a split second would throw off the rhythm, supposedly enough to cause them to fall. The line of music in the comic is a piano reduction of a well-known song, linked here . Randall talks about this music line in one of his talks .\nThis comic is part of the \u201cMy Hobby\" series.\nThe title text refers to the fact that almost all marching bands start marching with the left foot, so marching band members tend to naturally start with the left foot.\nMy Hobby: Pausing in-store music for a split second and watching the ex-marching band kids stumble. [On a balcony overlooking a supermarket, Cueball presses a button on a pedestal. The in-store music, the first four bars of a well-known song, pauses briefly after the third bar, and one of the store's patrons falls on her face.] FWOMP\n"}
{"id":390,"title":"Nightmares","image_title":"Nightmares","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/390","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nightmares.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/390:_Nightmares","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] When I got used to the regular nightmares, my subconscious got creative.\n[Megan is standing with her hand on Cueball's shoulder.] Megan: Please don't wake up. I don't want to die.","explanation":"This comic shows Cueball 's plight with nightmares . Since he's gotten used to normal nightmares, his subconscious has begun giving him dreams where he sees his dream characters imploring him to not wake up, lest they perish, as they only exist in his dream. The horror comes from the idea that by the simple, everyday action of waking up, Cueball would be extinguishing a life. This would also necessitate that Cueball is conscious when he is asleep, a type of vivid dream known as a lucid dream .\nThe title text continues this theme, with Megan claiming that she is really real (presumably in response to the allegation that she isn't real, and merely a dream character), and begging Cueball to stay with her.\n[Caption above the panel:] When I got used to the regular nightmares, my subconscious got creative.\n[Megan is standing with her hand on Cueball's shoulder.] Megan: Please don't wake up. I don't want to die."}
{"id":391,"title":"Anti-Mindvirus","image_title":"Anti-Mindvirus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/391","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/anti_mind_virus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/391:_Anti-Mindvirus","transcript":"[The comic is a simple box with text.] You Just WON The Game. It's okay! You're free!\n","explanation":"The Game is a virus-like mind game. The rules are as follows:\nFrom the simple way the rules are set up, there seems to be no such thing as winning The Game, except possibly by permanently forgetting about its existence. This comic gives you an alternative way to win, by simply telling you that you win and are now free from the mind virus.\nAn alternate interpretation may be that reading this comic causes you to lose the game, because it reminds you of The Game.\nThe title text states that Randall didn't know it was possible to win The Game, and he was surprised just as much as the reader.\n[The comic is a simple box with text.] You Just WON The Game. It's okay! You're free!\n"}
{"id":392,"title":"Making Rules","image_title":"Making Rules","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/392","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/making_rules.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/392:_Making_Rules","transcript":"[Two men are sitting. A yellow buggy passes by.] Man: Punch buggy yellow no punch back! [Man punches Cueball, Cueball punches the man back, with seemingly greater force, causing the man to fall of the bench they are sitting on.] Man: I said no punch back! Cueball: You can do that? Cueball: Man, this changes everything . Soon... [A blue buggy passes by, and Cueball is holding Megan's hand.] Cueball: Sleep with your girlfriend buggy blue! Man: Hey! Cueball: No complaining back! Man: Aww...\n","explanation":"\" Punch Buggy \" is a game played by two people with a view of traffic (often, but not here, during a car ride). For each Volkswagen Beetle that passes nearby, the first player to see it is entitled to punch the other player, while calling \"Punch Buggy\" followed by the colour of the spotted Beetle. Traditionally the other player is permitted to return the punch, unless the first player also calls \"no punch back.\"\nMany people will just assume that the game is always being played and punch you out of the blue, giving you no chance to opt out. Cueball , however, finds the idea that he can simply be roped into a game without consent odd, and decides to make the game stakes more desirable than just the right to punch someone, and (seemingly successfully) uses the same principle to secure the right to sleep with the other man's girlfriend.\nThe title text is Randall elaborating on how ridiculous these types of games are, such as the idea that after being punched, one should just accept a \"no punch back\" rule.\nIn the UK, a common variant uses a yellow Mini rather than the VW Beetle. Other examples of this type of game are the Car numberplate game and Padiddle .\n[Two men are sitting. A yellow buggy passes by.] Man: Punch buggy yellow no punch back! [Man punches Cueball, Cueball punches the man back, with seemingly greater force, causing the man to fall of the bench they are sitting on.] Man: I said no punch back! Cueball: You can do that? Cueball: Man, this changes everything . Soon... [A blue buggy passes by, and Cueball is holding Megan's hand.] Cueball: Sleep with your girlfriend buggy blue! Man: Hey! Cueball: No complaining back! Man: Aww...\n"}
{"id":393,"title":"Ultimate Game","image_title":"Ultimate Game","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/393","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ultimate_game.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/393:_Ultimate_Game","transcript":"[Split screen down the diagonal. Upper left: A man with only hair around the back of his head is standing to the left of a desk with a hand on it, speaking on an office phone on a desk. There is a photo in a frame behind the phone. Bottom right: Death in a cloak, black hole to the left where the head should be, speaks on cell phone he is holding up in his skeleton hand.] Man: Death? Death: Speaking.\n[A frameless panel with a zoom out of the man on the phone, showing more of his office. Behind the desk, there is a potted plant, and above it, there is a window (or a white board). The reply over the phone is indicated to come from the phone with a zigzag line.] Man: This is the boss.  Where are you? You haven't been up to the office in days! Death (over the phone): I've been held up.\n[Full panel with Death speaking on his cell phone. It is apparent that he is leaning back against something white behind him (presumably the backrest of his chair). The two replies on the phone are again indicated with zigzag lines.] Man (over the phone): What happened? Death: You know how when someone dies, they can challenge me to a game for their soul? Man (over the phone): Sure, standard procedure.\n[Death is revealed to be sitting on a chair to the right of a table leaning back against the chair's backrest (which could be seen in the first two images of Death as well). He is still speaking on his phone, and in the other hand he holds his long scythe down with the blade below the table. On the other side of the table is a man (revealed to be Gary Gygax in the title text).  The man has curly hair that seems to turn into a ponytail, but as he is looking out of the panel a little to the left away from Death, it is hard to see the ponytail. He also has a full beard. Gary Gygax is leaning over his bag behind him, taking out a book while resting the other hand on the table. On the table are already two other books of the same type. Behind them are two figurines (one Cueball and one with a pointy hat), then two dice and some paper strewn about in front of Death.] Death: Well, we didn't count on this guy. I might be a while. Gary Gygax: I add the paladin to my party. Death: Oh, Jesus. He's getting out another rulebook.\n","explanation":"Gary Gygax was a game designer best known for co-creating the iconic nerd pastime Dungeons and Dragons (D&D); as such, he is commonly described as the \"father of D&D.\" He died on March 4, 2008, three days before this comic was released. It made him the first person to receive tribute in conjunction with his death on xkcd, but not the last .\nThe idea of playing games (typically chess) with supernatural entities in exchange for one's soul is an old one and has been referenced in many works , but mainly known in the form of playing Chess against the personified version of Death , which was made famous in Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal (1957). The last part of this trope is used in this comic. Here, the specific twist is that the victim can choose which game they want to play. Naturally, it is only fitting that Gary would challenge Death to D&D . The trope was later revisited as one of the tips in 1820: Security Advice .\nThe problem is that Dungeons and Dragons isn't so much a game as it is a set of rules for describing stories. It requires the intervention of a Dungeon Master (or DM) to create a scenario that the players' characters must overcome. It's unclear exactly how the game between Gary and Death works, but given that D&D generally takes a long time to play due to the setup time and large amount of dice-rolling, and the fact that Gary seems to keep adding extra rulebooks (official or pseudo-official books that add new classes, items, spells, etc. for players to use), it's understandable why it would take longer than Death's boss would like.\nPart of the humor in this comic comes from the fact that Death's boss, who would presumably be an extraordinarily powerful entity, appears to be a completely ordinary man in an ordinary office, complete with bald patch and potted plant.\nDeath's usage of the name \"Jesus\" in the final panel may be considered ironic, given that he's, well, Death. But it does make a different kind of sense when you consider Jesus a personal enemy of Death (Revelation 20:14).\n[Split screen down the diagonal. Upper left: A man with only hair around the back of his head is standing to the left of a desk with a hand on it, speaking on an office phone on a desk. There is a photo in a frame behind the phone. Bottom right: Death in a cloak, black hole to the left where the head should be, speaks on cell phone he is holding up in his skeleton hand.] Man: Death? Death: Speaking.\n[A frameless panel with a zoom out of the man on the phone, showing more of his office. Behind the desk, there is a potted plant, and above it, there is a window (or a white board). The reply over the phone is indicated to come from the phone with a zigzag line.] Man: This is the boss.  Where are you? You haven't been up to the office in days! Death (over the phone): I've been held up.\n[Full panel with Death speaking on his cell phone. It is apparent that he is leaning back against something white behind him (presumably the backrest of his chair). The two replies on the phone are again indicated with zigzag lines.] Man (over the phone): What happened? Death: You know how when someone dies, they can challenge me to a game for their soul? Man (over the phone): Sure, standard procedure.\n[Death is revealed to be sitting on a chair to the right of a table leaning back against the chair's backrest (which could be seen in the first two images of Death as well). He is still speaking on his phone, and in the other hand he holds his long scythe down with the blade below the table. On the other side of the table is a man (revealed to be Gary Gygax in the title text).  The man has curly hair that seems to turn into a ponytail, but as he is looking out of the panel a little to the left away from Death, it is hard to see the ponytail. He also has a full beard. Gary Gygax is leaning over his bag behind him, taking out a book while resting the other hand on the table. On the table are already two other books of the same type. Behind them are two figurines (one Cueball and one with a pointy hat), then two dice and some paper strewn about in front of Death.] Death: Well, we didn't count on this guy. I might be a while. Gary Gygax: I add the paladin to my party. Death: Oh, Jesus. He's getting out another rulebook.\n"}
{"id":394,"title":"Kilobyte","image_title":"Kilobyte","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/394","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kilobyte.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/394:_Kilobyte","transcript":"There's been a lot of confusion over 1024 vs 1000, kbyte vs kbit, and the capitalization for each. Here, at last, is a single, definitive standard: [table of various kinds of kilobytes]\nSYMBOL NAME SIZE NOTES kB Kilobyte 1024 bytes OR 1000 bytes 1000 bytes during leap years, 1024 otherwise KB Kelly-Bootle standard unit 1012 bytes compromise between 1000 and 1024 bytes KiB Imaginary kilobyte 1024 \u221a-1 bytes used in quantum computing kb Intel kilobyte 1023.937528 bytes calculated on Pentium F.P.U. Kb Drivemaker's kilobyte currently 908 bytes shrinks by 4 bytes each year for marketing reasons KBa Baker's kilobyte 1152 bytes 9 bits to the byte since you're such a good customer\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at the confusion over the definition of a kilobyte. Historically, 1024 bytes was called a kilobyte for convenience purposes (same with megabyte and gigabyte); this usage was frowned upon by both the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , but both let it slide as they had more important things to deal with. Later, hard drive manufacturers realized they could save money by selling hard drives marketed X amount of gigabytes and declare that they meant it as a literal 1,000,000 bytes (a 7% difference). Despite its iffy origins, the official definition now states that 1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes, however some continue to use the older meaning referring to 1024. The first row of the table is simply mocking this discrepancy.\nThe second row is Randall's interpretation on how Stan Kelly-Bootle would approach this problem. Kelly-Bootle is known for writing The Computer Contradictionary , which satirizes the jargon and language of the computer industry. Kelly-Bootle was likely motivated to write this work after working for several years at IBM, a company infamous for its excessive use of acronyms in the work place. Averaging the two definitions together to get 1012 bytes is simply a humorous approach that Kelly-Bootle would likely have taken (\" Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. \" \u2014 Stan Kelly-Bootle). The serendipitous fact that the initials of Kelly-Bootle's name are \"KB,\" the same letters used to abbreviate the word \"kilobyte,\" adds a layer of plausibility to the joke. This is the first of Randall's many humorous compromises .\nThe imaginary kilobyte simply plays on the fact that complex analysis is required in quantum computing in relation to quantum mechanics. The imaginary number is represented as i and has a value of the square root of -1. This is a pun on the fact that KiB is used for the \"binary kilobyte\" (occasionally \" kibibyte \"), which is standardized at 1024 bytes.\nThe Intel kilobyte mocks the Pentium floating point unit that, in 1994, became notorious for having a major flaw in its floating point division algorithm that gave slightly erroneous results.\nThe smaller, drivemaker's kilobyte mocks a business model for handling higher prices that keeps prices constant but reduces quantity. The food industry has been notorious for decreasing quantity of food and keeping prices the same instead of increasing prices and keeping quantity the same. Randall is suggesting that if the computer industry tried to do this with hard drives, it could have humorous results such as smaller number of bytes in a kilobyte. In reality, hard drive capacity is specified in 10 3 byte (kB) units, while the content you put on it (programs, etc.) is specified in 2 10 (KiB) units. Formatting the drive, i.e. making it usable for storage, further decreases the available space. Thus a 250 GB drive might be reported to have a capacity of only 232 GB (really GiB) by the operating system. This discrepancy increases with increasing drive size. The trend humorously suggested in the comic, however, would make the drivemaker's kilobyte 1024 bytes in 1979, 1000 bytes in 1985, 852 bytes in 2022, and 0 bytes in 2235!\nThe baker's kilobyte is a play on the baker's dozen , which is 13 instead of 12. A baker's byte with 9 bits to the byte would result in a total of 9216 bits in a 1024 byte kilobyte. Converting this into \"normal\" bytes (with 8 bits), we divide 9216 bits by 8 bits per byte to get 1152 8-bit bytes to the baker's kilobyte.\nIn the title text, Randall mentions the definition kibibyte , which is defined more precisely. The binary prefix kibi means 1024, a portmanteau of the words kilo and binary. But he doesn't like the word because it sounds like the dog food Kibbles 'n Bits .\nThere's been a lot of confusion over 1024 vs 1000, kbyte vs kbit, and the capitalization for each. Here, at last, is a single, definitive standard: [table of various kinds of kilobytes]\nSYMBOL NAME SIZE NOTES kB Kilobyte 1024 bytes OR 1000 bytes 1000 bytes during leap years, 1024 otherwise KB Kelly-Bootle standard unit 1012 bytes compromise between 1000 and 1024 bytes KiB Imaginary kilobyte 1024 \u221a-1 bytes used in quantum computing kb Intel kilobyte 1023.937528 bytes calculated on Pentium F.P.U. Kb Drivemaker's kilobyte currently 908 bytes shrinks by 4 bytes each year for marketing reasons KBa Baker's kilobyte 1152 bytes 9 bits to the byte since you're such a good customer\n"}
{"id":395,"title":"Morning","image_title":"Morning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/395","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/morning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/395:_Morning","transcript":"[Megan is standing to one side.] We've all seen The Matrix We've all joked about \"What resolution is life\" But it doesn't blunt the shock Of waking up one morning [Megan looks up from field and sees several colored pixels in the sky.] And seeing dead pixels in the sky.\n","explanation":"This comic makes reference to the idea, as presented in the movie The Matrix , that reality is a computer simulation. In LCD screens , especially TFT LCD , a dead pixel is a pixel that does not work properly, usually set as black or as some other color. Megan realizes that the reality is a computer simulation when she sees dead pixels in the sky, indicating that what she sees is an LCD screen.\nIn the last panel of the comic, there are two red and one green pixel that look exactly like actual dead pixels.\nThe title text refers to usual techniques for fixing a dead pixel. One way is to apply pressure and release it, which isn't possible for Megan due to the distance of the sky. Another way is to make the area of the screen that the dead pixel is on change colors really quickly, which could happen if the day-night cycle was fast enough.\n[Megan is standing to one side.] We've all seen The Matrix We've all joked about \"What resolution is life\" But it doesn't blunt the shock Of waking up one morning [Megan looks up from field and sees several colored pixels in the sky.] And seeing dead pixels in the sky.\n"}
{"id":396,"title":"The Ring","image_title":"The Ring","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/396","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_ring.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/396:_The_Ring","transcript":"[Ponytail is speaking to young Cueball sitting in front of a TV with a black background and a white ring.] Ponytail: You watched the tape!? Cueball: Yeah, sorry.\nPonytail: Now you'll die in seven days! Cueball: It's worse than that.\n[TV is cut from the frame.] Ponytail: ...You didn't. Cueball: Yup.\n[Both are now in front of a computer, Ponytail leaning in.] Ponytail: Great, it's got 363,104 views already . Cueball: It was only fair. Cueball: They kept Rickrolling me!\n","explanation":"The Ring is a horror movie released in 2002 based off of the Japanese movie Ringu . In it, there is a video tape that causes everyone who watches it to die after seven days. However, the viewer can prevent their death by making a copy of the tape and giving it to someone else.\nA young Cueball watches the tape and prevents his own death by \"copying\" the tape and uploading it to a video-sharing website, presumably YouTube . Cueball not only got one person to watch it, the requirement for escaping death, but 363,104 people, all of whom are most likely going to die in seven days. (For scale, the most-watched video at the time of the comic's publication had 78\u00a0million views.)\nRickrolling is an Internet meme where someone is lured into clicking on a video link of Rick Astley singing \" Never Gonna Give You Up .\" When someone is rickrolled, they usually get very upset. Cueball states in the comic that he uploaded the tape to get revenge on everyone who rickrolled him, though it was obvious that he would likely kill many more people than those who rickrolled him (or those who've rickrolled anyone else).\nThe title text refers to the file format used by the YouTube player. Historically, YouTube was famous for having extremely poor quality videos, because their Internet connections were slower and server storage space was expensive. So, all videos were transcoded into a very low quality FLV (flash video) format.\nThe girl shown in the video tape \u2014 a major part of The Ring series \u2014 is named Samara. Posting the tape on YouTube would result in heavily compressed videos in the FLV format. This, presumably, would reduce the quality of Samara's apparition. The title text also implies that nobody deserves that, although rickrolling is (according to young Cueball) apparently punishable by death.\n[Ponytail is speaking to young Cueball sitting in front of a TV with a black background and a white ring.] Ponytail: You watched the tape!? Cueball: Yeah, sorry.\nPonytail: Now you'll die in seven days! Cueball: It's worse than that.\n[TV is cut from the frame.] Ponytail: ...You didn't. Cueball: Yup.\n[Both are now in front of a computer, Ponytail leaning in.] Ponytail: Great, it's got 363,104 views already . Cueball: It was only fair. Cueball: They kept Rickrolling me!\n"}
{"id":397,"title":"Unscientific","image_title":"Unscientific","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/397","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unscientific.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/397:_Unscientific","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are sitting on a coach, watching Mythbusters.] TV: Can a ninja catch an arrow? On this episode, we'll find out! Cueball: Mmm, science. Megan: Hey, Mythbusters is entertaining, but it's not science.\nZombie Feynman: BRAAAAAIIINNS ... Cueball: Zombie Feynman! Zombie Feynman: You got a problem with Mythbusters? Megan: They fail at basic rigor!\nZombie Feynman: \"Ideas are tested by experiment.\" That is the core of science. Everything else is bookkeeping.\nZombie Feynman: By teaching people to hold their beliefs up to experiment, Mythbusters is doing more to drag humanity out of the unscientific darkness than a thousand lessons in rigor. Show them some love.\nZombie Feynman: Anyway, back to zombie stuff. I hunger for BRAAAAAIIINNS! Cueball: Uh, try the physics lab next door. Zombie Feynman: I said brains . All they've got are string theorists.\n","explanation":"In the first and second frames, Megan can be seen accusing MythBusters of not actually \"doing science\" because of its lack of rigor - a debate beyond the scope of this Wiki. The zombie of deceased physicist, Richard Feynman , comes to explain to Megan that she has failed to recognize the purpose of MythBusters . He explains that MythBusters' value is getting people to accept and understand the importance of experimentation in the scientific method, and that more complex lessons (such as on rigor) would be wasted on people who don't understand those basics.\nIn the last frame, Cueball attempts to save himself and Megan from zombie Feynman by implying that physicists, being extremely intelligent, would have more desirable brains. Also, in a science lab, the number of brains available would be higher than just two. Feynman's closing remark implies that string theorists have no brains; the joke being that string theorists are presumably less intelligent than Cueball and Megan, who were merely watching television prior to being attacked, and probably also a pun on branes . For another instance of Randall knocking string theorists, see 171: String Theory . This notion fits appropriately with Feynman's description of the core of science. Moreover, Feynman's own career involved applying physics to real world applications (such as for the Manhattan Project), whereas the work of string theorists is theoretical and untested.\nThe title text starts by rebounding against the complaint of validity as science by purportedly tackling a really big scientific inquiry. Then he veers away into two far more esoteric proposed fields of study, of which at least one is not even determinable by the scientific method, probably both.\nThe Mythbusters episode being watched is likely Episode 109 \u2013 \"Ninjas 2\" , which was the second episode in which the Mythbusters attempted to catch an arrow mid-flight. The voice from the television is likely that of Robert Lee , who provided the narration for Mythbusters . It should also be noted that the ninja mentioned in this is the inaccurate pop culture iteration not the historical Shinobi no Mono. for more accurate info on the Shinobi search \"Antony Cummins\" .\nZombies are a recurring theme in xkcd, particularly zombie scientists, which has also occurred twice after this comic with Paul Erd\u0151s in 599: Apocalypse and Marie Curie in 896: Marie Curie .\n[Cueball and Megan are sitting on a coach, watching Mythbusters.] TV: Can a ninja catch an arrow? On this episode, we'll find out! Cueball: Mmm, science. Megan: Hey, Mythbusters is entertaining, but it's not science.\nZombie Feynman: BRAAAAAIIINNS ... Cueball: Zombie Feynman! Zombie Feynman: You got a problem with Mythbusters? Megan: They fail at basic rigor!\nZombie Feynman: \"Ideas are tested by experiment.\" That is the core of science. Everything else is bookkeeping.\nZombie Feynman: By teaching people to hold their beliefs up to experiment, Mythbusters is doing more to drag humanity out of the unscientific darkness than a thousand lessons in rigor. Show them some love.\nZombie Feynman: Anyway, back to zombie stuff. I hunger for BRAAAAAIIINNS! Cueball: Uh, try the physics lab next door. Zombie Feynman: I said brains . All they've got are string theorists.\n"}
{"id":398,"title":"Tap That Ass","image_title":"Tap That Ass","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/398","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tap_that_ass.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/398:_Tap_That_Ass","transcript":"[Cueball in a hallway looking in on a board meeting.] Cueball: I'd tap that ass to be the new committee chair. [Cueball wearing headphones with a briefcase and a laptop. Another man on a telephone.] Cueball: I'd tap that ass without a warrant. [Cueball with his hand on his chin, looking at a tree.] Cueball: I'd tap that ass and extract delicious maple syrup. [Cueball standing in a blank frame.] Cueball: I'd have sex with that tree.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball either accidentally or purposefully exploits the double meanings of \"tap.\" The phrase \"tap that ass\" is a colloquialism for \"to have intercourse with that person\" and is most likely how the reader expects the phrase to be used. However, throughout the comic, Cueball uses the phrase ambiguously.\nIn the first panel, it is possible that Cueball is using \"tap that ass\" sexually. However, it is more likely that he is using \"tap\" to mean \"pick\" or \"choose,\" in which case he would be the one choosing the next committee chair. \"That ass\" refers to one of the individuals in the meeting room to be picked for the position.\nIn the second panel, \"tap\" is referring to wiretapping. The Cueball character with the headphones on has just unplugged his headphone. This suggests that he and his colleague at the phone were just done with the wiretapping. In this scenario, it is strange that the colleague is still on the phone instead of hanging up. However, it would be much stranger to wiretap someone in plain eyesight, unless that person is blind. \"Ass\" likely refers to the person they have just wiretapped. Cueball says he'd tap that ass \"without a warrant,\" suggesting that they had one in this situation.\nIn the third panel, \"tap\" is referring to extracting sap from trees. A sexual connotation would make no sense in this context. \"That ass\" refers to the maple tree.\nThe final panel reveals that Cueball was purposefully implying the sexual meaning of \"tap that ass\" all along, even though he framed it in a non-sexual context. He reaffirms his previous statement from the third panel by turning toward the direction of the third panel (thus implicitly breaking the fourth wall) and asserting \"I'd have sex with that tree.\" \"That tree\" refers to the tree from the previous panel.\nAlternatively, Cueball may have finally realized that he indeed wanted to have sex, but instead of using the euphemism \"tap that ass,\" he says it literally.\nThe title text features a request from Cueball from the last panel to Cueball from the third panel. He asks Cueball not to plug up the hole left behind from tapping the tree, so he can have sex with it.\n[Cueball in a hallway looking in on a board meeting.] Cueball: I'd tap that ass to be the new committee chair. [Cueball wearing headphones with a briefcase and a laptop. Another man on a telephone.] Cueball: I'd tap that ass without a warrant. [Cueball with his hand on his chin, looking at a tree.] Cueball: I'd tap that ass and extract delicious maple syrup. [Cueball standing in a blank frame.] Cueball: I'd have sex with that tree.\n"}
{"id":399,"title":"Travelling Salesman Problem","image_title":"Travelling Salesman Problem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/399","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/travelling_salesman_problem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/399:_Travelling_Salesman_Problem","transcript":"[There is a linked black web, with a path in red; it appears to be a map of the United States.] Brute-force solution:O(n!) [The web continues in this one. A man with a brown hat and a case is drawing it.] Dynamic programming algorithms: O(n 2 2 n ) [Another man, with a brown hat too, is at a computer, looking back over the chair.] Selling on eBay: O(1) eBay salesman: Still working on your route? Drawing salesman: Shut the hell up.\n","explanation":"The travelling salesman problem is a classic problem in computer science. An intuitive way of stating this problem is that given a list of cities and the distances between pairs of them, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and then returns to the origin city. A na\u00efve solution solves the problem in O(n!) time (where n is the size of the list), simply by checking all possible routes, and selecting the shortest one. However, this approach will take a long time as the number of possible routes increases exponentially as more nodes are included.\nA more efficient dynamic programming approach yields a solution in O(n 2 2 n ) time. These times are given using Big O notation , which is commonly used in computer science to show the efficiency or complexity of a solution or algorithm.\nThe joke is that the salesman selling online (say on eBay , Amazon Marketplace , or other virtual marketplace) does not have to worry about this problem, since he does not need to travel (which makes the time to find the best solution O(1)), to which the travelling salesman angrily responds, \"Shut the hell up.\"\nThe title text wonders about the time complexity of the cutting-plane method , which is sometimes used to solve optimization problems.\nThe last sentence suggests the downside for Randall of drawing comics about computer science; he sometimes encounters problems to which he cannot find the answer, whereas authors of simpler comics such as Garfield do not have this problem. This is also likely a reference to 78: Garfield , which parodies Garfield's simplicity.\nThe map almost certainly depicts the United States, with the locations highlighted suspected to be (from left to right): Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Minneapolis, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Chicago (cut off), Detroit, Atlanta, Miami, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.\nThis is so far the only comic featuring the Brown Hat character.\nAlso see earlier strip 287: NP-Complete .\n[There is a linked black web, with a path in red; it appears to be a map of the United States.] Brute-force solution:O(n!) [The web continues in this one. A man with a brown hat and a case is drawing it.] Dynamic programming algorithms: O(n 2 2 n ) [Another man, with a brown hat too, is at a computer, looking back over the chair.] Selling on eBay: O(1) eBay salesman: Still working on your route? Drawing salesman: Shut the hell up.\n"}
{"id":400,"title":"Important Life Lesson","image_title":"Important Life Lesson","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/400","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/important_life_lesson.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/400:_Important_Life_Lesson","transcript":"Important life lesson: If there's any possibility of sex, do not leave your music library on \"shuffle all.\" [Megan lies down in a bed, while Cueball is beneath the bed sheets with his head between her legs. On the other side of the room, a computer is turned on and playing music.] Megan: *GASP* MMMMM- Computer: GO GO POWER RANGERS!\n","explanation":"It's common to have music playing in the background when two individuals decide to engage in sexual behavior. However, some people have a lot of silly or funny songs in the same music library as their more dramatic or romantic song choices. If the library is left to randomly choose songs from the whole library, those more whimsical songs could easily come up, suddenly ending the intimate mood.\nCueball is performing cunnilingus on Megan, while a particularly goofy song, the Power Rangers Theme , plays in the background. The title text alludes to an even sillier song, the Monty Python song Lumberjack , which is about a transvestite lumberjack.\nImportant life lesson: If there's any possibility of sex, do not leave your music library on \"shuffle all.\" [Megan lies down in a bed, while Cueball is beneath the bed sheets with his head between her legs. On the other side of the room, a computer is turned on and playing music.] Megan: *GASP* MMMMM- Computer: GO GO POWER RANGERS!\n"}
{"id":401,"title":"Large Hadron Collider","image_title":"Large Hadron Collider","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/401","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/large_hadron_collider.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/401:_Large_Hadron_Collider","transcript":"The Large Hadron Collider, CERN... Megan: Okay, moment of truth. \"click\" Large Hadron Collider: \"VVVVVRRMMMMMM\" Cueball: Do you see the Higgs Boson? Megan: Nope. Cueball: Huh. Megan: Well, then. Cueball: Until the theorists get back to us, wanna try hitting pigeons with the proton stream? Megan: Already on it. Cool! I just gave a helicopter cancer.\n","explanation":"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator, used in physics research, and particularly for finding the Higgs Boson . The Higgs Boson is one quantum excitation of the Higgs Field, in the same way as the photon is a quantum of the electromagnetic field. Interaction between particles and the Higgs field can explain why other particles have mass. The Higgs Boson was first detected in 2012, and confirmed to exist in March 2013. It was the last particle of the Standard Model of Physics to be experimentally confirmed.\nAt the time of this comic's writing, the LHC was nearing completion, and the comic imagines experimental physicists starting up the LHC for the first time. It has taken many years to complete, and its intended purpose was to be able to measure the Higgs Boson. In the comic, the experiment fails to observe the Higgs Boson. The researchers can only wait for the theorists to determine what may have happened, if something went wrong, or if they can come up with a testable hypothesis. In 2012, and after many years of experimentation and observation, the Higgs Boson was observed at CERN's LHC. This comic imagines what the researchers may have done with the LHC in between tests.\nAfter the experiment failed, the bored physicists try frying pigeons with the proton stream and instead end up giving a helicopter cancer, both of which are impossible. This is because the stream is contained within the LHC, and non-organic entities can't get cancer [ citation needed ] . However, the proton stream could cause considerable damage to pigeons or humans, as the U-70 synchrotron did to Anatoli Bugorski in 1978.\nAt that time there was also a big concern by some people that the LHC could produce microscopic black holes . However, cosmic rays regularly strike Earth's atmosphere with particles at higher energies; thus, if the proposed doomsday scenario were possible, it should have already happened. Many jokes were published like this video \"LHC End of The World Black Hole\" .\nThe title text makes another joke about the effects of highly energetic particles, claiming that when they pass through a bubble chamber (an older particle detection device), they leave a trail of candy. TeV means tera electronvolt and equals 10 12 eV. 5 TeV is about the energy of the LHC. It is of the order of the energy of a flying mosquito and would never be able to convert a liquid to candy or anything macroscopic.\nThe Large Hadron Collider, CERN... Megan: Okay, moment of truth. \"click\" Large Hadron Collider: \"VVVVVRRMMMMMM\" Cueball: Do you see the Higgs Boson? Megan: Nope. Cueball: Huh. Megan: Well, then. Cueball: Until the theorists get back to us, wanna try hitting pigeons with the proton stream? Megan: Already on it. Cool! I just gave a helicopter cancer.\n"}
{"id":402,"title":"1,000 Miles North","image_title":"1,000 Miles North","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/402","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1000_miles_north.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/402:_1,000_Miles_North","transcript":"[A van (almost exiting the frame to the right) and a pickup truck behind the van are driving on a road where dust blows up behind the tires. There are three mountain peaks in the background. In the rear of the truck is a cylindrical-shaped object. Above the truck there are two frames with yellow background and text. The top frame is at the height of the mountains, the other just above the truck.] 1,000 miles north of tornado alley A new breed of scientists has emerged.\n[At the base of a mountain (or glacier front) to the right, Cueball runs towards Ponytail (as shown with a curling line behind his raised leg). He is carrying a laptop in his arms, and he has a headset with antenna and microphone on. Ponytail is holding a probe in both hands, maybe drilling it into the ground. Grass and small rocks are drawn around them. At the top is another frame with yellow background and text.] Half researchers, half adrenaline junkies Ponytail: What's the reading? Cueball: 3.9 meters down, gradient's off the charts!\n[The pickup truck is shown in a zoom in from the side. Cueball is driving very fast, while holding a Walkie-talkie up to his head. The cylinder in the rear, from the first frame, now clearly turns out to be some kind of instrument with a small parabolic disc and a smaller antenna, and there are some labels and a text is written across it, although it is difficult to read. At the top is another frame with yellow background and text.] Risking everything for the thrill of the hunt Cueball: The freeze line is shifting! We've never seen anything like it! Cylinder: Riwan\n[Ponytail is holding a large video camera down towards a tiny spot of grass on the ground. He is standing in a barren field with one small mountain to the left and three small mountain peaks to the right in background. Behind him is a large box connected to a small radio with a long antenna. Cueball speaks to him over his walkie-talkie, his voice coming from the radio via a zigzag line. At the top is a final frame with yellow background and text.] Permafrost chasers Ponytail: I'm getting some great footage here! Cueball: Dammit, Harding, it's not worth your neck! Get the hell out of there!\n","explanation":"Spoofing off of tornado chasers are these permafrost chasers, who are just like tornado chasers, but they are chasing very boring [ citation needed ] permafrost. Permafrost is a layer of ground that never thaws, unlike ground closer to the equator, where the ground freezes in winter and thaws in the spring.\nThe title text references the 1996 movie Twister about a crazy group of tornado chasers trying to drop a probe-releasing device named Dorothy (based on the real-life project TOTO ) into the heart of a tornado.  However, much of the story was about Bill and his ex, both chasers, falling back in love, another chaser who is fighting Bill for research grants and fame, and a tornado that likes to chase people. Randall comments that the movie would have been better if they had lost all of the above except the tornadoes and the scientist, which is basically all you need for a good movie. And then he continues his musings by saying that tornadoes and scientists \"are all you need for anything.\"\nThis seems to be the first comic mentioning tornadoes, but since then they have become a recurring subject on xkcd, and in the next two tornado comics, 640: Tornado Hunter and 752: Phobia , tornadoes and tornado chasers are actually featured.\n[A van (almost exiting the frame to the right) and a pickup truck behind the van are driving on a road where dust blows up behind the tires. There are three mountain peaks in the background. In the rear of the truck is a cylindrical-shaped object. Above the truck there are two frames with yellow background and text. The top frame is at the height of the mountains, the other just above the truck.] 1,000 miles north of tornado alley A new breed of scientists has emerged.\n[At the base of a mountain (or glacier front) to the right, Cueball runs towards Ponytail (as shown with a curling line behind his raised leg). He is carrying a laptop in his arms, and he has a headset with antenna and microphone on. Ponytail is holding a probe in both hands, maybe drilling it into the ground. Grass and small rocks are drawn around them. At the top is another frame with yellow background and text.] Half researchers, half adrenaline junkies Ponytail: What's the reading? Cueball: 3.9 meters down, gradient's off the charts!\n[The pickup truck is shown in a zoom in from the side. Cueball is driving very fast, while holding a Walkie-talkie up to his head. The cylinder in the rear, from the first frame, now clearly turns out to be some kind of instrument with a small parabolic disc and a smaller antenna, and there are some labels and a text is written across it, although it is difficult to read. At the top is another frame with yellow background and text.] Risking everything for the thrill of the hunt Cueball: The freeze line is shifting! We've never seen anything like it! Cylinder: Riwan\n[Ponytail is holding a large video camera down towards a tiny spot of grass on the ground. He is standing in a barren field with one small mountain to the left and three small mountain peaks to the right in background. Behind him is a large box connected to a small radio with a long antenna. Cueball speaks to him over his walkie-talkie, his voice coming from the radio via a zigzag line. At the top is a final frame with yellow background and text.] Permafrost chasers Ponytail: I'm getting some great footage here! Cueball: Dammit, Harding, it's not worth your neck! Get the hell out of there!\n"}
{"id":403,"title":"Convincing Pickup Line","image_title":"Convincing Pickup Line","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/403","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/convincing_pickup_line.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/403:_Convincing_Pickup_Line","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan sit at a small table in a cafe. Megan holds up a graph.] Megan: We're a terrible match. But if we sleep together, it'll make the local hookup network a symmetric graph. Cueball: I can't argue with that.\n","explanation":"A graph is a mathematical object consisting of nodes connected by lines called edges . The nodes could represent for example people, and the edges could represent a connection from having slept together. Now, Megan has such a graph. Arguably, a graph that is symmetric is nicer than a regular one, which is why Megan suggests that they should sleep together.\nThe title text is a small-world joke on the concept of an Erd\u0151s number . Paul Erd\u0151s was a Hungarian mathematician renowned for his eccentricity and productivity. He holds the world record for the number of published math papers, as well as for the number of collaborative papers. A person's Erd\u0151s number is the \"collaborative distance\" between the person and Erd\u0151s. Paul Erd\u0151s's Erd\u0151s number is 0 by definition. All of his 511 collaborators have the Erd\u0151s number of 1; anyone (excluding Erd\u0151s) who has collaborated on a mathematical or scientific paper with any of those collaborators has an Erd\u0151s number of 2, and so on. Thus, if you have written a paper with someone who's written a paper with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erd\u0151s, your Erd\u0151s number is 3. If you know a mathematician or are a mathematician, you can calculate their or your Erd\u0151s number here .\nThis may also be a reference to Chapter 4 of Candide , wherein Pangloss tells the protagonist of the genealogy of his syphilis.  He received the disease from Paquette, who acquired it from a Franciscan , as so on until the lineage starts with one of the adventurers of Christopher Columbus .\nIn 599: Apocalypse , Cueball actually manages to write a paper with zombie Erd\u0151s, thus having a Erd\u0151s number of 1.\n[Cueball and Megan sit at a small table in a cafe. Megan holds up a graph.] Megan: We're a terrible match. But if we sleep together, it'll make the local hookup network a symmetric graph. Cueball: I can't argue with that.\n"}
{"id":404,"title":"Not Found","image_title":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/404","image_url":null,"explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/404:_Not_Found","transcript":"[Instead of the regular xkcd site layout, just a white page that states on top center:] 404 Not Found\n[Page-wide divider line]\n[Below that in a smaller font:] nginx\nIt thus leaves the xkcd page.\n","explanation":"There is no image for xkcd comic numbered 404. Randall did, however, not skip a day!\nThe previous comic 403: Convincing Pickup Line was released Monday March 31st 2008, and he put the next comic, 405: Journal 3 , up as scheduled on Wednesday April 2nd 2008, which leads some to see the 404 as an April Fools' Day joke released in between, as comic 404: Not Found released on Tuesday April 1st 2008.\nThis was thus the first April Fools' comic released by Randall (not counting the unnumbered Syndication released the previous year). The next (and first real) April Fools' Day comic was not released until 880: Headache on Friday April 1st 2011, although Randall did make other jokes in the years in between.\n\"404\" is the HTTP Response Code for \" Not Found .\" Randall deliberately skipped comic number 404 in xkcd. Therefore, when people go to xkcd 404 , they get a \"404 Not Found\" error page. (This does not work in all browsers. In newer versions of Internet Explorer, a message about the link being broken occurs without the 404 code.)\nRandall has stated that he considers 404 an official, actual comic, albeit a rather avant-garde one , and that for a time he made it possible to find it using the \"random\" button on xkcd.com. He once again displays this in the 2018 April Fools' joke, 1975: Right Click , where you can access all of his comics up to Right Click from the right click menu, and the menu includes this one specifically due to the strange \"title\"!\nIt may seem like a random coincidence that xkcd 403 came out the day before April 1st 2008. And for sure it must have been by chance that it would come out close to that date when Randall began posting on xkcd. But when Randall noticed this fact, at some point prior to that date, he would, however, have had a chance to influence the release date. In November 2007, less than half a year before this April 1st, he released the 1337 series over five consecutive days. That would have moved the release date of 403 from Friday the 4th of April to the Monday it was actually released - making it possible to skip comic 404 as if it came out on April 1st without skipping a comic on a normal release day. There was at least one other series in 2007 to use all five days of a week ( Choices ), so maybe he had this planned for a long time?\nIt is perhaps an interesting point that the very next comic, 405: Journal 3 , includes the line \"So, you found me after all.\"\nIn 1969: Not Available , the error message 404 is referenced in the caption.\nThis is featured in a few comics to come, including 1975: Right Click (in File > Open > C:\\ > Bookmarks\/ > Comics > comic num 404).\n[Instead of the regular xkcd site layout, just a white page that states on top center:] 404 Not Found\n[Page-wide divider line]\n[Below that in a smaller font:] nginx\nIt thus leaves the xkcd page.\n"}
{"id":405,"title":"Journal 3","image_title":"Journal 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/405","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/journal_3.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/405:_Journal_3","transcript":"[Two women ice-skating outside.] Ponytail: Wait up! Danish (wearing Black Hat's Hat): Skate faster!\n[Danish sees cracking ice.] Crack Crack\n[Danish on chunk of ice broken off.] Crack Rumble\n[Submarine dorsal fin emerging.] AWOOGA\n[Black Hat (minus hat) coming out of hatch.] CREAK Black Hat: Hi.\nBlack Hat: That's my hat you're wearing.\nDanish (wearing Black Hat's Hat): So, you found me after all. Black Hat (out of frame): You didn't make it easy.\nBlack Hat: You saw through me, all right. But not quite well enough.\nBlack Hat: Because if you wanted to stay lost forever, you made one mistake\n[Black Hat climbing out of hatch.]\n[Black Hat sliding down a sheet of ice.]\n[Black Hat snatches hat from Danish's head as he slides by on the ice.]\n[Black Hat skidding to a stop and putting hat back on his head.]\nBlack Hat: You took my hat.\nBlack Hat: I LIKE my hat.\n[Black Hat walking away.]\n[Danish left standing.]\n","explanation":"In Journal 1, Black Hat explains to Cueball that a hobby of his is to pretend to write in a journal while on the subway, acting embarrassed if anyone sees. He then proceeds to silently scorn the person once they give him any kind of reassurance.\nIn Journal 2, however, Danish sees through his ruse. She counteracts it by proving that she understands him, and attempts to resign him to the fact that he will never see her again, thus robbing him of the satisfaction of a proper social connection. She leaves, taking his hat in the process.\nInitially stunned, Black Hat seems to have quickly recovered and tracked Danish down, even to the ends of the earth. He tells Danish that although she was able to read him brilliantly, she miscalculated one minor detail. We are led to believe that this is some mistake in the covering of her tracks, but then he explains that it was simply how much he values his hat. It may also be the possibility that Black Hat placed a tracking device of some sort on his hat. This way he gets back at her. She thought that he would mourn the loss of her - the only person who understands him - but he deflates her ego when claiming that he likes his hat (implicitly saying that he doesn't care for her). The series continues in 432: Journal 4 .\nThe title text continues the theme of Black Hat's superhuman ability to troll and to avoid the consequences: If Black Hat stole a military submarine, said military is probably going to be hot on his tail, but he writes it off with: \"just tell them it was always here,\" as if it is no big deal. Black Hat will even be blamed for stealing the submarine in 496: Secretary: Part 3 . However, since this is (presumably) the American Senate reviewing him, it may be that he simply has stolen two submarines.\nIt is perhaps an interesting point that this comic includes the line \"So, you found me after all,\" given that the previous comic number xkcd 404 was skipped, leading instead to an HTTP 404 Not Found error page.\nThe whole \" Journal \" story is:\n[Two women ice-skating outside.] Ponytail: Wait up! Danish (wearing Black Hat's Hat): Skate faster!\n[Danish sees cracking ice.] Crack Crack\n[Danish on chunk of ice broken off.] Crack Rumble\n[Submarine dorsal fin emerging.] AWOOGA\n[Black Hat (minus hat) coming out of hatch.] CREAK Black Hat: Hi.\nBlack Hat: That's my hat you're wearing.\nDanish (wearing Black Hat's Hat): So, you found me after all. Black Hat (out of frame): You didn't make it easy.\nBlack Hat: You saw through me, all right. But not quite well enough.\nBlack Hat: Because if you wanted to stay lost forever, you made one mistake\n[Black Hat climbing out of hatch.]\n[Black Hat sliding down a sheet of ice.]\n[Black Hat snatches hat from Danish's head as he slides by on the ice.]\n[Black Hat skidding to a stop and putting hat back on his head.]\nBlack Hat: You took my hat.\nBlack Hat: I LIKE my hat.\n[Black Hat walking away.]\n[Danish left standing.]\n"}
{"id":406,"title":"Venting","image_title":"Venting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/406","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/venting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/406:_Venting","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] When I need to blow off steam, I find a particularly stupid blog comment and reply with an exhaustively researched word-by-word rebuttal, which I sign 'Summer Glau'.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, typing in front of a monitor. A curved line leads up from his hands to the text above.]\nIn conclusion, on examining the above post by CrackMonkey74, after carefully working my way through the haze of spelling errors (documented in section 3), abuse of capitalization (section 4), and general crimes against grammar and syntax (sections 7-8), I have demonstrated that, beneath it all, the work betrays the author's staggering ignorance of the history and the workings of our electoral system. While the author's wildly swerving train of thought did at one point flirt with coherence, this brief encounter was more likely a chance event (see statistical analysis in table 5) than a result of even rudimentary lucidity. -Summer Glau P.S. Don't forget to check out the next season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles this fall on Fox!\n","explanation":"This is yet another xkcd comic referencing Firefly , but it's not so much about Firefly itself as about Summer Glau . Summer Glau is an American actress best known for playing River Tam in Firefly and Serenity , as well as Cameron in the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles series.\nCueball says that he gives a long and seemingly well-researched reply to a stupid comment on a blog when he feels angry as a way to vent. What we see of his comment begins with Cueball describing the original comment's incoherent and inconsistent spelling and grammar. Then, he proceeds to rip apart the commentator by citing their historical and political ignorance. He signs his comment as 'Summer Glau', after which he reminds the blogger to watch the next season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles series .\nOne likely reason that he uses 'Summer Glau' is that she is worshiped by geeks the world over, even those incapable of writing coherent blog posts or comments. CrackMonkey74 would not risk responding negatively to the post, just in case it was actually written by Summer Glau, as they don't want everyone to hate them for attempting to argue with her. In this way, Cueball is assured of the last word in this argument, which makes for a most satisfying vent.\nAnother possible explanation is that River Tam has a genius-level intellect and is also mentally disturbed. Given xkcd's trend of comparing Firefly characters to their respective actors (especially in The Race ), Cueball is probably using Summer Glau's name simply because an exhaustively researched blog comment seems like something River Tam -- and thus possibly Summer Glau -- would do.\nThe title text refers to the famous dialogue delivered by River Tam in Firefly Episode 11: \" Trash \".\n[Caption above the panel:] When I need to blow off steam, I find a particularly stupid blog comment and reply with an exhaustively researched word-by-word rebuttal, which I sign 'Summer Glau'.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, typing in front of a monitor. A curved line leads up from his hands to the text above.]\nIn conclusion, on examining the above post by CrackMonkey74, after carefully working my way through the haze of spelling errors (documented in section 3), abuse of capitalization (section 4), and general crimes against grammar and syntax (sections 7-8), I have demonstrated that, beneath it all, the work betrays the author's staggering ignorance of the history and the workings of our electoral system. While the author's wildly swerving train of thought did at one point flirt with coherence, this brief encounter was more likely a chance event (see statistical analysis in table 5) than a result of even rudimentary lucidity. -Summer Glau P.S. Don't forget to check out the next season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles this fall on Fox!\n"}
{"id":407,"title":"Cheap GPS","image_title":"Cheap GPS","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/407","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cheap_gps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/407:_Cheap_GPS","transcript":"[Cueball driving down the road, with a GPS reading \"COLD.\"] GPS: COLD... WARM... HOT! COLD...\n","explanation":"GPS is a system allowing people to find their location and from that, speed on Earth. It was first developed for the U.S. military, but now it sees international usage for everyday navigation. Many motorists today have GPS devices (sometimes just called GPS's) that can give driving directions electronically.\nHot and Cold is a children's activity\/game where one person searches for an unknown object, and the rest must respond \"Hot\" or \"Cold.\" Other words, such as \"warm\" and \"cool\" can be used to describe their distance more accurately. The closer the player is to the mystery object, the \"hotter\" they are.\nThis GPS would be extremely difficult to use, as it gives no directions, only telling you how close you are to reaching your destination. The series of instructions spoken (\"cold,\" \"warm,\" \"hot,\" then \"cold\" again) suggests that Cueball either missed a turn, or that he just passed his destination.\nRandall describes a past engineering project of his that can only describe turns \"as the crow flies.\" So, for example, if he was driving north with the destination to the northeast, the GPS would tell him to turn right even if no such turn was legally possible. Perhaps not very functional, but it is a pretty cool thing to build.\nWhile cars go fast and are only allowed to, or able to, use a very limited number of all roads and trails in the world, this is less so for pedestrians. As a consequence, for hikers, an app that just shows the direction you should be walking in 'as the crow flies' is actually quite a common and useful tool, since a lot of small roads suitable for pedestrians do not show up on maps. Of course, just printing 'left' or 'right' is much more primitive than showing an arrow in the correct direction (compass-like), and often less helpful since on one cross section there can be multiple trails to the right.\n[Cueball driving down the road, with a GPS reading \"COLD.\"] GPS: COLD... WARM... HOT! COLD...\n"}
{"id":408,"title":"Overqualified","image_title":"Overqualified","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/408","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/overqualified.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/408:_Overqualified","transcript":"[Megan on the phone.] Megan: I know you're not that into my sister, but she's really crushing on you. Cueball: Yeah, it's awkward.\nMegan: She's in a rough spot. It's a lot to ask, but could you take her out and... Dissuade her, without rejecting her?\nCueball: Wait a second. Are you asking me to show her a mediocre time? Megan: I know it's a weird\u2014\n[Cueball raising index finger.] Cueball: No, no! This is the mission I was born for. Megan: I figured you could handle it. Cueball: One of my classic high-school dates coming up! Megan: Oh God. Don't overdo it.","explanation":"Megan 's sister has a crush on Cueball , but Cueball doesn't feel the same way about her sister. To alleviate the situation without hurting Megan's sister's feelings, Megan wants Cueball to deliberately take her sister out on a bad date to convince her that Cueball is not worth dating, so that her sister can move on without rejection. Cueball is excited to finally excel at dating badly. He claims to have been born for the task of giving a bad date. He promises to emulate one of his classic high school dates, indicating that they went terribly as well. The joke is based on the reversal of expectations and Cueball's subsequent excitement at the chance to provide a terrible date. Megan's response of \"Oh God, don't overdo it\" may also imply that she was one of Cueball's high school dates and doesn't want her sister to be subjected to what she remembers of Cueball's approach to relationships.\nThe title text implies that Randall is reflecting on previous bad dates. When they occurred, he had either no excuse or a poor excuse for why he was so awkward, but now \"deliberately being mediocre\" is going to be used as his explanation. It is similar to thinking of a good comeback to an insult after the fact; this is his retort to ships that sailed long ago.\n[Megan on the phone.] Megan: I know you're not that into my sister, but she's really crushing on you. Cueball: Yeah, it's awkward.\nMegan: She's in a rough spot. It's a lot to ask, but could you take her out and... Dissuade her, without rejecting her?\nCueball: Wait a second. Are you asking me to show her a mediocre time? Megan: I know it's a weird\u2014\n[Cueball raising index finger.] Cueball: No, no! This is the mission I was born for. Megan: I figured you could handle it. Cueball: One of my classic high-school dates coming up! Megan: Oh God. Don't overdo it."}
{"id":409,"title":"Electric Skateboard (Double Comic)","image_title":"Electric Skateboard (Double Comic)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/409","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/electric_skateboard_double_comic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/409:_Electric_Skateboard_(Double_Comic)","transcript":"[Cueball showing off electric skateboard to Megan reading something.] Cueball: Check it out! An electric longboard! Megan: Sweet!\n[Cueball riding longboard with Megan sitting onboard \u2014 people in background.] Longboard: RRRR\n[Megan turned around on longboard.] Megan: I feel like we're missing something... Cueball: Yeah...\n[Cueball holding 3 green Koopa Troopa shells; Megan throwing 1 red Koopa Troopa shell - like Mario Kart.] Music Playing Longboard: RRRR\n\n[Cueball and Megan still on longboard, going up an incline.] Cueball: Skating uphill like this is amazing. Years of gliding downhill and pushing uphill, and now suddenly it's gliding both ways. Longboard: RRRRRRR\n[Cueball and Megan after passing an S-curve and boulder.] Cueball: It's like going from C to Python. You don't realize how much time you were spending on the boring parts until you don't have to do them anymore. Megan: But coding C or assembly makes you a better programmer. Maybe the boring parts build character.\n[Cueball and Megan on longboard.] Cueball: Yeah... but it depends how you want to spend your life. See, my philosophy is- [Longboard gets into an accident.] WHAM\n[Calvin and Hobbes lying down in the grass near Cueball and Megan lying down in the grass - Calvin and Hobbes's wagon is on the path, as is the longboard - all characters seeing stars.]","explanation":"This comic is an affectionate parody of Calvin and Hobbes , a newspaper comic drawn by Bill Watterson that ran for ten years from November 1985 to December 1995. Calvin and Hobbes follows the daily life of a rambunctious, precocious six-year-old named Calvin and his sarcastic stuffed tiger Hobbes. The artwork in the second strip is distinctly Wattersonian as well. This comic could be referencing the typical Sunday strip format of having a top line of \"throwaway panels\" that had a one-off gag before the rest of the strip, which was more detailed. This was an effect of Sunday strip formatting in newspapers, where individual newspaper often lopped off the top one-third of the comic to save space. Thus, strip creators had to use the top panels on throwaway gags or else the readers of a space-saving newspaper would be missing key parts of the strip.\nCalvin and Hobbes is also referenced in 529: Sledding Discussion .\nRandall has a special fascination with motorized skateboards . A longboard is a skateboard that is longer, used for downhill races, and skating through less urban areas (college campuses, for example).\nMario Kart is a game series for Nintendo game consoles that allows four players to race each other while having good spirited fun like at 290: Fucking Blue Shells while throwing items at each other. The objects in the fourth panel are Koopa shells, items in the game. They can be thrown like projectiles to crash into foes: green in a straight line, red homing onto the racer directly in front. They also come in single and triple varieties. In Mario Kart: Double Dash!! , two racers occupy the same vehicle, with each possessing their own item slot (in contrast with most games in the series, in which a single vehicle can only have a single item ready, and must use it to obtain another). This is reflected in the drawing of Cueball and Megan together on the electric longboard, with Megan using a Red Shell and Cueball holding the triple Green Shells.\nCalvin and Hobbes frequently involves heavy philosophical discussions. In one recurring theme, they ride down a dangerous hill in a red wagon or toboggan while discussing the nature of morality, usually ending in a crash (examples [1] [2] [3] ). This comic inverts that by having Cueball and Megan go uphill while discussing philosophy. Naturally, they collide with Calvin and Hobbes' wagon - which prompts the title text.\nCueball uses the C and Python programming languages as analogies for their ride. In general, Python is easier than C and abstracts a lot of C's hairier features (\"boring parts,\" as Randall calls them). Moving from C to Python is quite a freeing experience ; programmers no longer have to worry about pointers and memory allocation, and it just lets the code flow through the programmer until they are one with the Force. Erm, computer. Although, it seems that - before the crash - the idea that programming in C (and skating without electricity) building character is about to be explored philosophically (building character is also a recurring theme in Calvin and Hobbes, as documented delightfully in the Calvin and Hobbes wiki ).\nElectric skateboards have been the subject of several other comics like 139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards , a panel in 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel , and the entire The Race five part comic series.\n[Cueball showing off electric skateboard to Megan reading something.] Cueball: Check it out! An electric longboard! Megan: Sweet!\n[Cueball riding longboard with Megan sitting onboard \u2014 people in background.] Longboard: RRRR\n[Megan turned around on longboard.] Megan: I feel like we're missing something... Cueball: Yeah...\n[Cueball holding 3 green Koopa Troopa shells; Megan throwing 1 red Koopa Troopa shell - like Mario Kart.] Music Playing Longboard: RRRR\n\n[Cueball and Megan still on longboard, going up an incline.] Cueball: Skating uphill like this is amazing. Years of gliding downhill and pushing uphill, and now suddenly it's gliding both ways. Longboard: RRRRRRR\n[Cueball and Megan after passing an S-curve and boulder.] Cueball: It's like going from C to Python. You don't realize how much time you were spending on the boring parts until you don't have to do them anymore. Megan: But coding C or assembly makes you a better programmer. Maybe the boring parts build character.\n[Cueball and Megan on longboard.] Cueball: Yeah... but it depends how you want to spend your life. See, my philosophy is- [Longboard gets into an accident.] WHAM\n[Calvin and Hobbes lying down in the grass near Cueball and Megan lying down in the grass - Calvin and Hobbes's wagon is on the path, as is the longboard - all characters seeing stars.]"}
{"id":410,"title":"Math Paper","image_title":"Math Paper","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/410","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/math_paper.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/410:_Math_Paper","transcript":"[Cueball, holding a pointing stick, is using it to point at an equation on a panel. He is looking to the right. There are several parts of the panel that can be read. At the top, there is a formula. Below is a frame with text. Below again to the left is an X-Y plot with small dots all over all four quadrants, probably indicating the complex numbers with b on the Y and a on the X axis. Finally, right of this is yet another formula.] Cueball: In my paper, I use an extension of the divisor function over the Gaussian integers to generalize the so-called \"friendly numbers\" into the complex plane. Panel: \u03c3(n)\/n = d(n) Friendly #s share d(n) For a + bi...\n[The audience to the right of Cueball consist of two Cueball-like guys (one in front and one in the back), and between them are Hairbun, with glasses, and Megan. They sit around a table; only Hairbun is on the near side. The Cueball-like guy sitting to the right is at the end of the table, the other two are on the far side. The Cueball at the end of the table is talking, the other three have turned to look at him:] Guy at the end of the table: Hold on. Is this paper simply a giant build-up to an \"imaginary friends\" pun?\n[Back to Cueball, who stands speechless.]\n[One more beat panel with Cueball, who now looks down.]\n[Zoom out to Cueball and the front end of the table with the Cueball-like guy who has not spoken yet and Hairbun who now looks at Cueball. Cueball looks up again and speaks. The guy at the end of the table speaks off panel.] Cueball: It might not be. Guy at the end of the table (off panel): I'm sorry, we're revoking your math license.\n","explanation":"The math paper Cueball is in the process of describing in this comic turns out to be nothing but an elaborate setup for a joke about imaginary friends by taking the concept of \" friendly numbers \" into the complex (imaginary) plane, which comprises complex numbers that have both a real and an imaginary part (see details below ).\nCueball is challenged on this setup by his superiors, specifically the Cueball-like guy sitting at the end of the table, who look straight through his first line-up for the joke, and ask him directly if this is just a build-up for this joke. Cueball tries at first to look like he has no idea what he's talking about, then lowers his head, in shame, and finally tries to state that it might not be such a setup. But it is too late now.\nSuch a pun is both so obvious and so terrible that Cueball's superiors deem that he should no longer have a license to math , and they thus revoke Cueball's \"math license.\" Of course you do not need a math license [ citation needed ] , but that is part of the comic's concept along the lines mentioned here below and further elaborated in the title text.\nIt is a recurring theme in earlier xkcd comics that Cueball (or Randall ) ends up being banned from holding presentations at conferences after a presentation turns out to be just an elaborate pun.\nThe title text takes the joke a step further, with the added hilarity of making the audience question exactly how Cueball\/Randall was able to work a striptease into a presentation about genetic engineering and astrophysical rocket study (or possibly genetics and rockets into a striptease), and then even manage to lose all three licenses in one go. This is what TV Tropes calls a \" noodle incident .\"\nThe whole comic is basically Randall making the joke that Cueball never got around to, but packing it up so we think it is about something else. Randall has often made such feeble jokes, but by putting them into a context where someone listening may comment on how bad that joke is or have to explain the joke, it somehow becomes alright, and he can get away with these jokes anyway. (See for instance 18: Snapple ).\nAn imaginary number is a number that can be written as a real number multiplied by the imaginary unit i , which is defined by its property i 2 = -1 (an impossibility for regular, \" real numbers ,\" for which all squares are positive). The name \"imaginary number\" was coined in the 17th century as a derogatory term, since such numbers were regarded by some as fictitious or useless, but over time, many applications in science and engineering have been found.\nAn imaginary number bi can be added to a real number a to form a complex number of the form a + bi (the formula shown at the bottom of Cueball's slide ), where a and b are called, respectively, the real part and the imaginary part of the complex number. If a and b are both integers, the complex number is called a Gaussian integer (as Cueball mentions). The complex plane is an X-Y plot with a on the X axis and b on the Y axis. (Such a plane is shown at the bottom of Cueball's slide).\nJoel Bradbury (once) had the below cited and wonderful explanation of friendly numbers on his site:\nWhat are Friendly Numbers? We need first to define a divisor function over the integers, written \u03c3(n) if you're so inclined. To get it first we get all the integers that divide into n. So for 3, it's 1 and 3. For 4, it's 1, 2, and 4, and for 5 it's only 1 and 5.\nNow sum them to get \u03c3(n). So \u03c3(3) = 1 + 3 = 4, or \u03c3(4) = 1 + 2 + 4 = 7, and so on.\nFor each of these n, there is something called a characteristic ratio. Now that's just the divisors function over the integer itself: \u03c3(n)\/n. (This is the formula shown at the top of Cueball's slide). So the characteristic ratio where n = 6 is \u03c3(6)\/6 = 12\/6 = 2.\nOnce you have the characteristic ratio for any integer n, any other integers that share the same characteristic are called friendly with each other. (This is what is written in the frame in Cueball's slide, spelling friendly numbers as friendly #s ). So to put it simply, a friendly number is any integer that shares its characteristic ratio with at least one other integer. The converse of that is called a solitary number, where it doesn't share its characteristic with anyone else.\n1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are solitary. 6 is friendly with 28; \u03c3(6)\/6 = (1+2+3+6)\/6 = 12\/6 = 2 = 56\/28 = (1+2+4+7+14+28)\/28 = \u03c3(28)\/28.\n[Cueball, holding a pointing stick, is using it to point at an equation on a panel. He is looking to the right. There are several parts of the panel that can be read. At the top, there is a formula. Below is a frame with text. Below again to the left is an X-Y plot with small dots all over all four quadrants, probably indicating the complex numbers with b on the Y and a on the X axis. Finally, right of this is yet another formula.] Cueball: In my paper, I use an extension of the divisor function over the Gaussian integers to generalize the so-called \"friendly numbers\" into the complex plane. Panel: \u03c3(n)\/n = d(n) Friendly #s share d(n) For a + bi...\n[The audience to the right of Cueball consist of two Cueball-like guys (one in front and one in the back), and between them are Hairbun, with glasses, and Megan. They sit around a table; only Hairbun is on the near side. The Cueball-like guy sitting to the right is at the end of the table, the other two are on the far side. The Cueball at the end of the table is talking, the other three have turned to look at him:] Guy at the end of the table: Hold on. Is this paper simply a giant build-up to an \"imaginary friends\" pun?\n[Back to Cueball, who stands speechless.]\n[One more beat panel with Cueball, who now looks down.]\n[Zoom out to Cueball and the front end of the table with the Cueball-like guy who has not spoken yet and Hairbun who now looks at Cueball. Cueball looks up again and speaks. The guy at the end of the table speaks off panel.] Cueball: It might not be. Guy at the end of the table (off panel): I'm sorry, we're revoking your math license.\n"}
{"id":411,"title":"Techno","image_title":"Techno","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/411","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/techno.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/411:_Techno","transcript":"[Cueball looking over Megan's shoulder while she is clicking her mouse with her other hand on her chin.] Cueball: Wait, you're buying techno on iTunes? Megan: Yeah. So? Cueball: Couldn't you just loop the 15-second free sample 20 times and get basically the same thing?\n","explanation":"Cueball points out that due to the repetitive nature of techno music , the iTunes 15 second sample can be used to recreate the entire song. This is for the many repetitions in techno music, usually repeating it 4 (or other powers of two) times.\nThe title text refers to the clicking and grinding noises of a dying hard drive, a sound similar to some techno songs. The title text suggests that this actually exists: an example is here .\nTechno music is also mentioned in 586: Mission to Culture and 740: The Tell-Tale Beat . Sampling and looping sounds that aren't necessarily musical is mentioned in 2427: Perseverance Microphones .\n[Cueball looking over Megan's shoulder while she is clicking her mouse with her other hand on her chin.] Cueball: Wait, you're buying techno on iTunes? Megan: Yeah. So? Cueball: Couldn't you just loop the 15-second free sample 20 times and get basically the same thing?\n"}
{"id":412,"title":"Startled","image_title":"Startled","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/412","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/startled.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/412:_Startled","transcript":"[Wide panel. Cueball and Megan are standing to one side. Black Hat is standing some distance away. Megan is looking at Cueball while pointing both at Cueball and at Black Hat.]\n[Normal sized panel. Zoom in as Megan sneaks up close to Black Hat, who now looks a little upwards.]\n[An inserted panel only half the height of the normal panels, but with its top lifted slightly above their levels and with its frame crossing both the previous and the next normal. It shows a close-up of Megan with hands raised while shouting.] Megan: Boo!\n[Only Black Hat is shown in this thin panel. He looks shocked, which is indicated by him taking his hands to his face, lines behind his head, and that his hat jumps up above his head, showing that he has a bit of hair under it.]\n[The next three panels are even thinner than the previous, but they stay the same size. First, the hat falls down over Black Hat's head down to his shoulders, without the hat changes size. The movement is indicated with two lines above the hat. Black Hat crosses his arms across his chest and bends in the knees.]\n[Then the hat keeps falling over his body, swallowing it so only his legs below his knees are visible.]\n[Finally the hat hits the ground with a large sound, also indicated with seven \"U\" shaped lines around the hat. There is no sign of Black Hat.] Fwump\n[The last two panels are in another row below the previous panel, but there are no panels under the two first panels in the first row. This could indicate that time has passed, or is just a way to create a dramatic effect, as with all the other changes in panel size and position above. This panel's width is somewhere between the first two panels. Cueball and Megan look at the hat, Cueball with a hand in front of his mouth.]\n[The last panel is as wide as the first, but extends farther to the right than the last panel in he first row, again breaking the symmetry. Megan and Cueball still look on (both with hands down) as the hat begins to crawl away. The movement makes sounds and is indicated with four lines behind the hat now farther away from the two.] Scooch Scooch Scooch\n","explanation":"Black Hat , the cool-headed troll, has the tables turned on him. Almost always seen antagonizing other characters, Black Hat is shown in this comic in a rare moment of losing face. Megan notices Black Hat facing away from Cueball and her, and decides to play a simple, childish prank on him: sneaking up from behind and shouting \"Boo!\".\nShe succeeds in startling Black Hat. Most likely out of humiliation, he hides himself completely in his hat. For a moment, it looks like Black Hat has disappeared altogether. But then his hat inches away, showing that he's still underneath. It is possible that he was set on edge by Danish, as the period from journals 3-4 was clearly an emotional time for him.\nBoth gags in this comic work by playing on our expectations. The first is an unexpected moment of realism: we are so used to seeing Black Hat cool and untroubled that we are surprised at the reminder that everyone's appearance is, to some extent, a facade. Black Hat is still human. (The comic 455: Hats is related to this one, as it is also about black hats and how the usually all powerful Black Hat becomes the smaller one, in this case in tallness of hat towers.)\nThe second gag, on the other hand, is the opposite: we are so used to understanding the stick figures (and specifically the established character that is Black Hat) as representing regular humans, albeit ones with larger-than-life personalities, that we're caught by surprise to see Black Hat so thoroughly defy realism in a fashion not unlike what one could find in a Tex Avery-type cartoon. Among the further interpretations of the gag, one could see:\nThe title text is only \"...\", implying that Randall himself shares the reaction of Cueball and Megan, who are left speechless and immobile in the last panels, as Black Hat completes his physics-defying stunt. The same title text is used in 82: Frame and 455: Hats . One could say of these comics that they're somewhat surreal, and any further commentary might have detrimentally brought them down to Earth.\n[Wide panel. Cueball and Megan are standing to one side. Black Hat is standing some distance away. Megan is looking at Cueball while pointing both at Cueball and at Black Hat.]\n[Normal sized panel. Zoom in as Megan sneaks up close to Black Hat, who now looks a little upwards.]\n[An inserted panel only half the height of the normal panels, but with its top lifted slightly above their levels and with its frame crossing both the previous and the next normal. It shows a close-up of Megan with hands raised while shouting.] Megan: Boo!\n[Only Black Hat is shown in this thin panel. He looks shocked, which is indicated by him taking his hands to his face, lines behind his head, and that his hat jumps up above his head, showing that he has a bit of hair under it.]\n[The next three panels are even thinner than the previous, but they stay the same size. First, the hat falls down over Black Hat's head down to his shoulders, without the hat changes size. The movement is indicated with two lines above the hat. Black Hat crosses his arms across his chest and bends in the knees.]\n[Then the hat keeps falling over his body, swallowing it so only his legs below his knees are visible.]\n[Finally the hat hits the ground with a large sound, also indicated with seven \"U\" shaped lines around the hat. There is no sign of Black Hat.] Fwump\n[The last two panels are in another row below the previous panel, but there are no panels under the two first panels in the first row. This could indicate that time has passed, or is just a way to create a dramatic effect, as with all the other changes in panel size and position above. This panel's width is somewhere between the first two panels. Cueball and Megan look at the hat, Cueball with a hand in front of his mouth.]\n[The last panel is as wide as the first, but extends farther to the right than the last panel in he first row, again breaking the symmetry. Megan and Cueball still look on (both with hands down) as the hat begins to crawl away. The movement makes sounds and is indicated with four lines behind the hat now farther away from the two.] Scooch Scooch Scooch\n"}
{"id":413,"title":"New Pet","image_title":"New Pet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/413","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_pet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/413:_New_Pet","transcript":"[Megan is placing EEE PC inside hamster ball. Cueball scratches his head.] Cueball: What are you doing? Megan: Mounting your EEE PC in a hamster ball.\nMegan: Well, the TCO of a cat is like $1,000\/year, so we're saving money.\n[Cueball is typing.] Megan: Microcontrollers are all wired up! How's the brain coming? Cueball: I've taught it obstacle avoidance and blogging.\nCueball: Aww, look, it's making friends with the Roomba. EEE PC: RRRRR Roomba: Beep!\n[A blueprint in the background shows a webcam, RF links, bearings, omni wheels, magnets, EEE PC, omni wheels, and a battery all hooked up to Megan and Cueball's \"pet.\"]\n[Hamster ball bounces down a flight of stairs.] Hamster ball: Bonk bonk Off-panel: Man, I hope it's okay that we're laughing at this.\n[Megan picks up a ball.] Megan: I think my mothering instinct took a wrong turn somewhere. Cueball: You mean an awesome turn.\n[Cueball is typing.] Megan: Too bad we can't give it a soul. Cueball: Sure we can. Cueball types: import soul Megan: Oh, right. Python.\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball create a new pet by putting an Eee PC into a hamster ball , allowing it to roll around.\nThe Asus Eee PC was one of the first subnotebook computers available on the American market, noted for its small size and coming pre-installed with Linux. With a diagonal size of 11 inches, it would take a big hamster ball to carry it like this.\nOmniwheels are wheels with rollers mounted on the edge to allow the wheel to slide sideways. The wheels in the drawing look more like Mecanum wheels , which have rollers mounted at an angle to the edge. Both omniwheels and Mecanum wheels are used in omni-directional drive systems, like you would use to drive a hamster ball from the inside. A webcam is connected magnetically to the top of the hamster ball, which connects to an rf link to transmit wirelessly to the computer.\nTCO is total cost of ownership , which is exactly what it sounds like: the purchase price of something, plus all costs of keeping, operating, and\/or maintaining that something. It's used in accounting to determine something's true cost-to-value evaluation. In the case of a cat, TCO would primarily consist of food, litter, veterinary care, etc. Refer to trivia for more details . For the device in the comic, there would be a small ongoing cost (occasional recharges for the batteries) after the initial investment.\nA Roomba is a self-directed robotic vacuum cleaner made by iRobot, which has no feelings and cannot make friends. [ citation needed ]\nPython is a programming language popular among geeks running Linux. Among other features, it has a large number of easily installed 3rd-party libraries that make it easy to add features to programs. In this case, Cueball is importing the \"soul\" library to give the new pet a soul \u2013 something that a programming language cannot actually do. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text refers to the One Laptop per Child project spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte around 2005, with the goal of building an inexpensive, durable sublaptop that could be distributed to children in developing countries to give them an educational edge.\n[Megan is placing EEE PC inside hamster ball. Cueball scratches his head.] Cueball: What are you doing? Megan: Mounting your EEE PC in a hamster ball.\nMegan: Well, the TCO of a cat is like $1,000\/year, so we're saving money.\n[Cueball is typing.] Megan: Microcontrollers are all wired up! How's the brain coming? Cueball: I've taught it obstacle avoidance and blogging.\nCueball: Aww, look, it's making friends with the Roomba. EEE PC: RRRRR Roomba: Beep!\n[A blueprint in the background shows a webcam, RF links, bearings, omni wheels, magnets, EEE PC, omni wheels, and a battery all hooked up to Megan and Cueball's \"pet.\"]\n[Hamster ball bounces down a flight of stairs.] Hamster ball: Bonk bonk Off-panel: Man, I hope it's okay that we're laughing at this.\n[Megan picks up a ball.] Megan: I think my mothering instinct took a wrong turn somewhere. Cueball: You mean an awesome turn.\n[Cueball is typing.] Megan: Too bad we can't give it a soul. Cueball: Sure we can. Cueball types: import soul Megan: Oh, right. Python.\n"}
{"id":414,"title":"Mistranslations","image_title":"Mistranslations","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/414","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mistranslations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/414:_Mistranslations","transcript":"[A bed sits on the ground in the middle of the frame. At the left of the frame, Cueball stands atop a skateboard jump ramp twice his height, one foot on the back of a skateboard poised over the coping. At the bottom of the ramp is a small kicker ramp, which will launch him over the bed. Megan, to the right of the frame, stands on the roof of a house grasping a rope, which is affixed directly over the bed. They are both poised to begin their motion.] Our copy of the Kama Sutra has a couple mistranslations. Which we refuse to fix.\n","explanation":"The Kama Sutra is a well-known work on human sexual behavior originally written in the language Sanskrit, in India sometime between 400 BCE and 200 CE. It's not exclusively a \"sex manual,\" as it also contains a guide to virtuous and gracious living, but in the Western world, it's primarily thought of as a manual of exotic sex positions.\nGiven that the Kama Sutra was written almost 2,000 years ago, it's doubtful that it has any references whatsoever to a skateboard ramp, but Cueball and Megan enjoy their badly-translated version of the Kama Sutra so much that they refuse to change it.\nThe title text refers to Crisco , a brand of shortening that is used in baking, as well as a sexual lubricant. It has been mentioned before in 330: Indecision and later in 557: Students .\n[A bed sits on the ground in the middle of the frame. At the left of the frame, Cueball stands atop a skateboard jump ramp twice his height, one foot on the back of a skateboard poised over the coping. At the bottom of the ramp is a small kicker ramp, which will launch him over the bed. Megan, to the right of the frame, stands on the roof of a house grasping a rope, which is affixed directly over the bed. They are both poised to begin their motion.] Our copy of the Kama Sutra has a couple mistranslations. Which we refuse to fix.\n"}
{"id":415,"title":"Restraining Order","image_title":"Restraining Order","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/415","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/restraining_order.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/415:_Restraining_Order","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail stand facing one another. Both hold sheets of paper. Cueball holds a restraining order, while Ponytail holds a map with two concentric circles drawn on it.] Not content with normal restraining orders, my ex got creative. Cueball: Wait... I can't get closer than 500 yards of you... or more than 600 yards away? Ponytail: You'll have to move somewhere within this ring.\n","explanation":"A restraining order is a legal injunction requiring a party to do, or refrain from doing, certain acts under penalty of fines or imprisonment, designed to safeguard the complainant's life. In general, the forbidden act is virtually always contacting the complainant in any way and enforcing that they remain a minimum distance from the complainant.\nHowever, Ponytail has taken the concept into the realm of the absurd, issuing a restraining order against Cueball that requires him to stay between 500 yards (~457 m) and 600 yards (~549 m) of her at all times. Needless to say, this will cause a major disruption to his life; the title text gives an example in which he is forced to imitate her jogging routine just to avoid breaking the order. What isn't explained is how Cueball can possibly keep himself within the ring if she happens to travel by airplane or ferry. This, and because there are virtually no useful scenarios for it, [ citation needed ] is why maximum distances are never enforced in real life; such an order would grant the complainant carte blanche to unjustly manipulate the defendant.\nA yard is a unit of length used in the UK and the United States. 1 yard = 0.9144 meters.\n[Cueball and Ponytail stand facing one another. Both hold sheets of paper. Cueball holds a restraining order, while Ponytail holds a map with two concentric circles drawn on it.] Not content with normal restraining orders, my ex got creative. Cueball: Wait... I can't get closer than 500 yards of you... or more than 600 yards away? Ponytail: You'll have to move somewhere within this ring.\n"}
{"id":416,"title":"Zealous Autoconfig","image_title":"Zealous Autoconfig","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/416","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/zealous_autoconfig.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/416:_Zealous_Autoconfig","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting on a chair with his laptop in his lap. The text written on the laptop is shown above him, and there is a zigzag line from the laptop to the bottom of the last sentence.] Laptop: Starting WiFi autoconfig... searching for WiFi... Found no open networks. Laptop: Found secure net SSID \"Lenhart Family\"\n[Same setup, but Cueball has changed position. This time there are two zigzag lines between the two sentences from the laptop.] Laptop: Trying common passwords... Failed. Checking for WEP Vulnerabilities... Cueball: Um. Laptop: None found.\n[Cueball is still sitting with laptop in his lap, but his hand is on his chin. A phone on table across room starts vibrating. Again only one zigzag line to the bottom sentence.] Laptop: Connecting to Bluetooth phone... Calling local school... Laptop: Found Lenhart children.\n[Zoom back to Cueball, who is furiously typing on his laptop, legs stretched out.] Laptop: Notifying field agents. Children acquired. Calling Lenhart parents. Negotiating for WiFi password... Cueball [typing] on laptop: Ctrl-C Ctrl-C\n","explanation":"Cueball is seen in an attempt to connect his laptop to a Wi-Fi network using, as the comic title suggests, a particularly zealous \"Wifi Autoconfig\" utility \u2014 \"zealous\" being a synonym for \"eager\" or \"enthusiastic.\" The utility manages to find a secure access point named \"Lenhart Family,\" presumably Miss Lenhart 's home Wi-Fi access point, and attempts to connect to it.\nInstead of requesting a password, the program automatically begins a dictionary attack , entering in various commonly-used passwords in the hopes that Miss Lenhart has little regard for proper security measures (a flaw shared by many computer users). When this fails, the program attempts to exploit a WEP vulnerability, which surprises Cueball. This also fails, possibly because Miss Lenhart used WPA instead of WEP.\nIn the third panel, the autoconfig then connects to Cueball's Bluetooth phone and uses it to call a local school in order to locate the Lenhart children, who are attending there, and it reports that it has found them. It acts on this information in the fourth panel, notifying \"field agents\" to kidnap the Lenhart children for nonmonetary ransom, and then reports that the children are acquired (very fast it seems). With the children as hostages, the program begins negotiations with the parents, offering their safe return in exchange for the Wi-Fi password.\nThis puns on the computing sense of \"negotiation\": network protocols (such as HTTP) often specify routines whereby a server and a client computer can agree on the best format in which data can be transferred. This is called content negotiation or format negotiation (see for example section 3.4 of the specification for \"semantics and content\" in HTTP ).\nCueball, frightened by these actions, repeatedly presses Ctrl+C in an attempt to cancel the process, with little success. Ctrl+C is used to abort programs started from a terminal (Unix\/Linux) or a command line prompt (cmd.exe under Windows). (The alternative use of Ctrl+C in many Windows programs, as a shortcut for copying a text selection, is probably not what Cueball has in mind at this point.) Part of the humor is that he only attempts to cancel quite late in the process, well after (for instance) the school was first called, probably because of a morbid curiosity to see what happens.\nThe title text mentions Ubuntu , a Linux distribution that attempts to be as user-friendly as possible. Randall mentions that he has heard that this \"user-friendly\" Zealous Autoconfig option has already been installed in the latest Ubuntu release....\nProblems that arise when you leave decisions to a computer program are also explored in depth in comic 1619: Watson Medical Algorithm .\n[Cueball is sitting on a chair with his laptop in his lap. The text written on the laptop is shown above him, and there is a zigzag line from the laptop to the bottom of the last sentence.] Laptop: Starting WiFi autoconfig... searching for WiFi... Found no open networks. Laptop: Found secure net SSID \"Lenhart Family\"\n[Same setup, but Cueball has changed position. This time there are two zigzag lines between the two sentences from the laptop.] Laptop: Trying common passwords... Failed. Checking for WEP Vulnerabilities... Cueball: Um. Laptop: None found.\n[Cueball is still sitting with laptop in his lap, but his hand is on his chin. A phone on table across room starts vibrating. Again only one zigzag line to the bottom sentence.] Laptop: Connecting to Bluetooth phone... Calling local school... Laptop: Found Lenhart children.\n[Zoom back to Cueball, who is furiously typing on his laptop, legs stretched out.] Laptop: Notifying field agents. Children acquired. Calling Lenhart parents. Negotiating for WiFi password... Cueball [typing] on laptop: Ctrl-C Ctrl-C\n"}
{"id":417,"title":"The Man Who Fell Sideways","image_title":"The Man Who Fell Sideways","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/417","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_man_who_fell_sideways.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/417:_The_Man_Who_Fell_Sideways","transcript":"[Cueball standing, with a dotted line perpendicular to him and a 30 degree angle going downwards.] From a young age, gravity pulled him wrong. [Cueball bouncing around his house.] Sometimes east, sometimes west. When he was restrained, it grew erratic. WHAM WHAM [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground.] So he fell. Cueball: AAAA THUMPA THUMPA [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground in a desert.] Constantly Cueball: AAAAAAAAA [Cueball bouncing\/rolling off a rock on the ground in a desert.] Over land... Cueball: AAAAA- THUD -A [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground in the desert.] Cueball: AAAAAAAAA [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground in the desert.] Cueball: A- THUD -AAAAAA [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground in the desert.] Cueball: AA- THUD -AAAAA [Cueball skating the surface of the sea.] And sea. Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAA [Cueball skating the surface of the sea.] Cueball: AAAAAAAA [Cueball skating the surface of the sea.] Cueball: AAAAAA [Cueball skating the surface of the sea.] Cueball: AAAAAAAA [Tree in the savanna, with Cueball off the panel.] He found, where he could, food- Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAA [Tree in the savanna, with Cueball still off the panel, but zoomed out so that part of Cueball's bounce\/roll path is visible.] Cueball: AAAAAAAAA [Cueball upside-down, still bouncing\/rolling in the savannah, with a gazelle galloping away from him.] GALLOP GALLOP Cueball: AAAAAAAAA [Savanna with a tree in it.] Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAA [Megan standing, with Cueball off screen.] And love. Cueball: AAAA- THUD -AAAA [Megan standing, with Cueball off screen.] Cueball: THUD ACK CRASH [Cueball crashing into Megan] Cueball: Hiwhat'syourname- WHAM [Megan on the ground, with Cueball off screen.] Cueball: AAAAAAA- THUD -AAA [Megan speaking to Hairy.] Megan: I met this guy. He knocked me over and tumbled into the distance. [Megan speaking to the same man from the previous panel, with Hairy's hand to his mouth.] Megan: We only shared a few seconds, but in his panicked scream I heard something beautiful. [Megan speaking to the same man from the previous panel.] Megan: I think... I think I'm... [Megan speaking to the same man from the previous panel.] Hairy: Falling for him? Megan: I wasn't going to say it. [Megan at hospital with doctor, giving birth.] She never saw him again. But nine months later... Doctor: Okay, push! [Megan at hospital with doctor and new baby, who is bouncing\/rolling away.] Doctor: It's a gir- Megan:\u00a0!! Doctor: Whoops! Baby: Ga! Ga! [Baby bouncing\/rolling out of hospital.] Baby: WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE [Baby bouncing\/rolling in front of a sunset.] Baby: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE The End\nThere is a fan made animated version of this comic .\n","explanation":"This comic is humorously built-up like a short drama story, about a man (Cueball) with an unusual physics condition.\nIt might have been inspired by the Uncle Scrooge adventure comic \" A Matter of Some Gravity \" ( Inducks ) by Don Rosa , in which Magica de Spell makes gravity pull sideways at Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck .\nThe same topic is covered by 1996 graphic novel L'enfant pench\u00e9e ( The Leaning Child ), but, as it was only published in English in 2014, it\u2019s very unlikely to be a source of inspiration for this comic.\n\"Soon to be a major motion picture\" in the title text might refer to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , a film released later in 2008 (and based on a short story), in which the protagonist Benjamin suffers of the impossible condition of aging backwards.\n\"Over land... and sea\" might be from the song \"Nature Boy\" by eden ahbez . Nat King Cole sung (the most famous version) about \"A very strange, enchanted boy. They say he wandered very far, very far over land and sea.\"\nThe title text mentions Jeph Jacques , who runs the webcomic Questionable Content . Jeph has also described the creation of this comic in his blog while working at ezplay company .\nWhen Cueball hits Megan, he knocks her down and \"knocks her up\", in what is probably intended to be a visual form of antanaclasis . Megan tells Hairy about a person knocking her over and tumbling into the distance. She hints that she is falling for him, which is a joke regarding Cueball's condition.\nThe baby shares his tendency to be pulled sideways by gravity, but this apparently does not start until she is born, because Megan and the doctor do not seem to have been expecting it.  If gravity had affected the unborn fetus in the same way, Megan would have been able to feel it, would have noticed that her uterus was hanging differently, and would have had difficulty balancing due to the sideways forces.\nThe last panel is a reference to the opening scene of The Lion King , called 'The Circle Of Life'.\nThe first part of the comic has some resemblance to this much later comic: 1376: Jump .\n[Cueball standing, with a dotted line perpendicular to him and a 30 degree angle going downwards.] From a young age, gravity pulled him wrong. [Cueball bouncing around his house.] Sometimes east, sometimes west. When he was restrained, it grew erratic. WHAM WHAM [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground.] So he fell. Cueball: AAAA THUMPA THUMPA [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground in a desert.] Constantly Cueball: AAAAAAAAA [Cueball bouncing\/rolling off a rock on the ground in a desert.] Over land... Cueball: AAAAA- THUD -A [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground in the desert.] Cueball: AAAAAAAAA [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground in the desert.] Cueball: A- THUD -AAAAAA [Cueball bouncing\/rolling on the ground in the desert.] Cueball: AA- THUD -AAAAA [Cueball skating the surface of the sea.] And sea. Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAA [Cueball skating the surface of the sea.] Cueball: AAAAAAAA [Cueball skating the surface of the sea.] Cueball: AAAAAA [Cueball skating the surface of the sea.] Cueball: AAAAAAAA [Tree in the savanna, with Cueball off the panel.] He found, where he could, food- Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAA [Tree in the savanna, with Cueball still off the panel, but zoomed out so that part of Cueball's bounce\/roll path is visible.] Cueball: AAAAAAAAA [Cueball upside-down, still bouncing\/rolling in the savannah, with a gazelle galloping away from him.] GALLOP GALLOP Cueball: AAAAAAAAA [Savanna with a tree in it.] Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAA [Megan standing, with Cueball off screen.] And love. Cueball: AAAA- THUD -AAAA [Megan standing, with Cueball off screen.] Cueball: THUD ACK CRASH [Cueball crashing into Megan] Cueball: Hiwhat'syourname- WHAM [Megan on the ground, with Cueball off screen.] Cueball: AAAAAAA- THUD -AAA [Megan speaking to Hairy.] Megan: I met this guy. He knocked me over and tumbled into the distance. [Megan speaking to the same man from the previous panel, with Hairy's hand to his mouth.] Megan: We only shared a few seconds, but in his panicked scream I heard something beautiful. [Megan speaking to the same man from the previous panel.] Megan: I think... I think I'm... [Megan speaking to the same man from the previous panel.] Hairy: Falling for him? Megan: I wasn't going to say it. [Megan at hospital with doctor, giving birth.] She never saw him again. But nine months later... Doctor: Okay, push! [Megan at hospital with doctor and new baby, who is bouncing\/rolling away.] Doctor: It's a gir- Megan:\u00a0!! Doctor: Whoops! Baby: Ga! Ga! [Baby bouncing\/rolling out of hospital.] Baby: WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE [Baby bouncing\/rolling in front of a sunset.] Baby: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE The End\nThere is a fan made animated version of this comic .\n"}
{"id":418,"title":"Stove Ownership","image_title":"Stove Ownership","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/418","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stove_ownership.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/418:_Stove_Ownership","transcript":"[A hand-drawn graph is shown.] [On the y-axis:] My overall health [On the x-axis:] Time [The graph is generally steady rising through 3\/4 of the x-axis, where it begins a steady decline. A stapled line marks the start of this decline. Below where the line crosses the x-axis, this decline is labeled:] The day I realized I could cook bacon whenever I wanted .\n","explanation":"This comic is a subtle statement on the epiphany many have when they reach adulthood and are on their own for the first time: No one will tell you what to do! Nobody will, however, stop you from making those poor decisions you were refrained from prior to that independence. Eating bacon whenever one wants is among them.\nThis line graph depicts Randall's health as a function of time after some undefined point. The joke is that his health goes into an immediate deterioration the moment he realized that he could just cook bacon on his stove whenever he wants. When he says \"he could cook bacon,\" he means he has both the will AND means, since the stove is now his own. Before the bacon revelation, his health was actually improving - this may be explained because he was now cooking his own, healthy food rather than getting pizza delivered or having other pre-made foods\/junk food.\nFrosting (or icing) is something you use to decorate cakes. Many children enjoy frosting so much that they eat it off the cake and leave the rest behind. Frosting in a can, as mentioned in a title text, is convenient because it is instant and not necessary to make from scratch. When Randall came to college, he still had a very sweet tooth, so when he discovered frosting in a can, his health curve at the time also went into decline. However, that turned out to be a phase - he got over it - and he hopes it will be the same with cooking bacon.\nThere is now also similarly instant, pre-made bacon that can be eaten right out of the box, eliminating the need to put in any effort to prepare it. The sudden drop in health, obviously, is due to the fact that most bacon is pork belly fat, and while high in protein, its irresistible flavor cannot compare to its high fat and cholesterol content. In addition, porkless bacon made from turkey meat is also available in some places.\nIn the title text of 1674: Adult , it turned out that Cueball was not yet ready to go shopping by himself, even though he was an \"adult\" and ended up dying of over-consumption of AirHeads , very similar to the frosting in this comic's title text.\nEating frosting out of the can was also referenced in the title text of 1793: Soda Sugar Comparisons .\n[A hand-drawn graph is shown.] [On the y-axis:] My overall health [On the x-axis:] Time [The graph is generally steady rising through 3\/4 of the x-axis, where it begins a steady decline. A stapled line marks the start of this decline. Below where the line crosses the x-axis, this decline is labeled:] The day I realized I could cook bacon whenever I wanted .\n"}
{"id":419,"title":"Forks and Spoons","image_title":"Forks and Spoons","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/419","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/forks_and_spoons.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/419:_Forks_and_Spoons","transcript":"Megan: A spoon crossed with a fork is a spork. Off-panel Megan's voice: Our lab has successfully crossed a spork with a spoon. [Diagram showing the fractions of fork and spoon in each item.] [Chart showing possible combinations of spoons a forks.] Megan, facing audience: With your funding, we could create hybrids in proportions corresponding to any binary fraction . [Fork-Spoon Spectrum.] Audience member: You're toying with powerful forces here. Megan: We know what we're doing. Two weeks later: [Picture of a destroyed lab, with a scientific poster and lab equipment. Two dead bodies, blood everywhere, and a spoon-fork hybrid hopping away can be seen.] Hop hop hop.\n","explanation":"The comic shows scientists testing a new technology to blend species.\nThey show that their new technology allows them to cross a spork (an even mix between a spoon and a fork) with a spoon to make a new implement that is three-quarters spoon and one-quarter fork. By blending these new fork-spork hybrids and their results together, the scientists could create any mix between a spoon and a fork. (Obviously, regular genetics cannot apply to non-living items such as metal cutlery).\nIn the second panel, the amounts of spoon and fork are shown with fractions: the number on the left representing the amount of fork, and the right the amount of spoon. The numbers for the cross product below are arrived at by summing each side and dividing by two: (0+1\/2)\/2 = 1\/4 and (1+1\/2)\/2 = 3\/4.\nThe breeding scheme between the second and the third panel shows at the top how to create a spork from a spoon and a fork, then how this spork could both be bred with either a spoon (as in panel two) or a fork (as shown in the lower right part).\nThe binary \"fork-spoon spectrum\" in between the third and fourth panels shows the complete spectrum of sporks from fork to spoon with some of the intermediate steps labeled, the numbers representing how much fork each contains. Since it is a binary spectrum, only fractions with a denominator that is a power of 2 will be possible, i.e. 2^n with n any integer. So in the middle is a spork with 1\/2 fork, in between the spork and the spoon there is only 1\/4 fork, and in between that and the spoon only 1\/8 fork, and so on. Also 3\/4 fork is marked, whereas 3\/8, 5\/8, and 7\/8 fork is only indicated on the ruler by small marks. For instance, they could breed a 3\/8 fork-spork by mixing a 1\/4 fork-spork with a spork.\nThe comic begins like standard sci-fi fare, where amoral scientists request funding from mysterious benefactors. The dialogue of \"You're toying with powerful forces here\" and \"We know what we're doing\" is a classic trope , foreshadowing that things will soon go horribly wrong . It inevitably leads to the humorous incongruity of a sentient spoon-fork-hybrid on a murderous rampage, which is impossible in real life. [ citation needed ]\nRachael Ray and Emeril , mentioned in the title text, are celebrity chefs, and Steven Spielberg is a famous movie director. The joke seems to be that if the laboratory hadn't hired the two renowned chefs, Spielberg wouldn't have heard about the project and would not have made a movie about it - in which the two scientists are killed off horribly (it is probably the scientist from the first panel, Megan , and her friend, Cueball , or the actors hired to portray them in the film). The plot in the comic is very similar to the story in Spielberg's Jurassic Park .\nMegan: A spoon crossed with a fork is a spork. Off-panel Megan's voice: Our lab has successfully crossed a spork with a spoon. [Diagram showing the fractions of fork and spoon in each item.] [Chart showing possible combinations of spoons a forks.] Megan, facing audience: With your funding, we could create hybrids in proportions corresponding to any binary fraction . [Fork-Spoon Spectrum.] Audience member: You're toying with powerful forces here. Megan: We know what we're doing. Two weeks later: [Picture of a destroyed lab, with a scientific poster and lab equipment. Two dead bodies, blood everywhere, and a spoon-fork hybrid hopping away can be seen.] Hop hop hop.\n"}
{"id":420,"title":"Jealousy","image_title":"Jealousy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/420","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jealousy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/420:_Jealousy","transcript":"[Dark scene shown, with Cueball and Megan sitting in the moonlight let in by the only window.] Megan and I first met at a party at her sister's. We hit it off, opened up, shared secrets, and talked about everything. Around us, the party waned, but we hid from sleep together, talking through the deepest hours of the night. The dawn found us curled up on a couch, asleep but still together. That experience, connecting with a stranger and falling recklessly in love is one of life's greatest joys. And now that you're married, you'll never experience it again. It's the price you pay for everlasting love. It's a small one, but I hope it stings a little. Anyway, I wish you and Megan the best. ...Hey, man, you asked me to do a toast.\n","explanation":"In the first four stanzas of this soliloquy, Cueball reminisces fondly about his meeting of Megan at a party where they quickly had a romantic rapport and spent the night together. The next two stanzas are a lamentation that Megan is now married and can never have that same experience again.\nThe final stanza reveals that this is not merely Cueball waxing poetic about a previous love, but that he is actually making a toast as the best man at Megan's wedding reception - certainly an occasion when it is wildly inappropriate to discuss the previous romantic involvements of the bride. In modern times, it is not unexpected that the bride at a wedding will have had previous relationships with someone other than the groom, but a wedding is no time to mention them.\nThe title text implies that the groom had no prior knowledge of Cueball's and Megan's dalliance, and therefore the toast is even more inappropriate - going beyond discussing the previous romantic history of the bride, to actually revealing previously unknown such history to the groom.\nPresumably, Cueball's having been selected to be best man indicates that he is a good friend of the groom (as the groom normally selects the best man). The title hints that Cueball is envious of the groom, since his previous encounter with Megan clearly did not result in a lasting relationship, while the groom's clearly did. This suggests that he may be intentionally (perhaps drunkenly) making an inappropriate toast to embarrass the couple as a result of his bitterness.\nThis was only the third time the name Megan was used in xkcd, the first time being in 159: Boombox .\n[Dark scene shown, with Cueball and Megan sitting in the moonlight let in by the only window.] Megan and I first met at a party at her sister's. We hit it off, opened up, shared secrets, and talked about everything. Around us, the party waned, but we hid from sleep together, talking through the deepest hours of the night. The dawn found us curled up on a couch, asleep but still together. That experience, connecting with a stranger and falling recklessly in love is one of life's greatest joys. And now that you're married, you'll never experience it again. It's the price you pay for everlasting love. It's a small one, but I hope it stings a little. Anyway, I wish you and Megan the best. ...Hey, man, you asked me to do a toast.\n"}
{"id":421,"title":"Making Hash Browns","image_title":"Making Hash Browns","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/421","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/making_hash_browns.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/421:_Making_Hash_Browns","transcript":"[Cueball stands holding a flaming tennis racket. He is throwing a potato in the air as if to serve like a tennis ball. Behind him is a red gas can and a sack of potatoes. Across from him is another person holding a fork in one hand and balancing a serving tray with a glass holding an orange liquid in it.]\n","explanation":"Cueball is attempting to make hash browns . A hash brown is a way of serving a potato where the potato has been diced or shredded in some way, then pan-fried. Cueball's method for making hash browns, though, is rather unique. He is throwing potatoes into the air and striking them with a flaming tennis racket at his friend, who is holding a tray with a dangerously tilting half-filled glass balanced on top. He (the friend) is also holding a fork in the other hand.\nThe idea is that the tennis racket would simultaneously dice the potato, fry it, and then launch the completed product towards his friend's plate. In reality, this probably wouldn't do much. To properly pan-fry food, it must be cooked in a pan with some oil to lubricate the food, with enough time for the heat to transfer through the oil and spread properly through the food. Hitting a potato with a flaming tennis racket would not cook it, as it would strike it too quickly, and it probably wouldn't dice it either unless the wire of the racket is incredibly sharp. Cueball would probably just end up batting a not even hot, uncooked, unprepared potato at his friend, while simultaneously burning his own hand. In the case that the wires did actually cut through the potato, then the potato would not be moved forward, but actually end up behind the racket.\nThe title text comments on how many ways this experiment could go badly (14), and jokes that there are even more potential problems (17) if the fork Cueball's friend is holding is a cross-breed. (See 419: Forks and Spoons , which was published only four days earlier. By reading this comic, it should be clear what could go wrong if they were included in the equation - 3 more ways would be a low estimate....)\nIt's unclear what Randall may or may not have had on his mind with regards to specific ways the situation in the comic could go wrong. But here are several potential ways the activity could go wrong without including Sporks :\n[Cueball stands holding a flaming tennis racket. He is throwing a potato in the air as if to serve like a tennis ball. Behind him is a red gas can and a sack of potatoes. Across from him is another person holding a fork in one hand and balancing a serving tray with a glass holding an orange liquid in it.]\n"}
{"id":422,"title":"A Better Idea","image_title":"A Better Idea","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/422","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/a_better_idea.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/422:_A_Better_Idea","transcript":"[Cueball wearing a bow tie stands holding hands with Megan wearing a dress. On the left, there is a sign pointing left, which reads \"PROM\"; on the right, there is a sign pointing right, which reads \"LAN PARTY IN FORMAL ATTIRE\".]\n","explanation":"In the United States, prom (short for promenade) is a semi-formal (black tie) dance or gathering of high school students. They normally are awkward experiences for nerdy people.\nA LAN party is a temporary gathering of people with computers or game consoles, between which they establish a local area network (LAN), primarily for the purpose of playing multiplayer video games. They are normally very informal.\nCueball and Megan are likely going to prom together, but they stop when they see that there's a LAN party in formal attire, meaning they wouldn't be out of place. The comic title is likely what one or both of them would say in this situation, since the LAN party is probably much more appealing than a formal ball to them.\nThe title text indicates that Randall would have loved for such a thing to be possible, so much that he very nearly would redo high school just to participate.\n[Cueball wearing a bow tie stands holding hands with Megan wearing a dress. On the left, there is a sign pointing left, which reads \"PROM\"; on the right, there is a sign pointing right, which reads \"LAN PARTY IN FORMAL ATTIRE\".]\n"}
{"id":423,"title":"Finish Line","image_title":"Finish Line","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/423","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/finish_line.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/423:_Finish_Line","transcript":"[Luigi with green clothes in a green go-cart is clearly in the lead of a game of Mario Kart with Mario in red clothes in a red go-cart. Mario is so far behind that he seems much smaller. Two speech bubbles with arrows pointing at the two show what Megan and Cueball, shown later, say to each other.] Megan (playing Mario): Sometimes I stop right before the finish line. Cueball (playing Luigi): Why?\n[A small square panel is inserted at the bottom of the first, crossing over the frame to the next panel and below the bottom of this panel. It shows Megan sitting on the floor leaning up against a coach while holding the game control in both hands looking at the large TV in front of her, only partly inside the frame. Her speech bubble is like the previous panel, pointing at her with an arrow, but most of the bubble is inside the first panel and also breaking into the next panel.] Megan: 'Cause I know I've won.\n[Scene moved to look in from the direction of the TV at the couch. Cueball is sitting on the other end of the couch to the left holding his hands out to either side while looking down at Megan on the floor, who is still holding her remote in both hands playing the video game.] Megan: It proves I'm playing for fun, on my own terms. That I don't need validation from the machine. Megan: That I'm not a rat pulling a lever.\n[Scene moved to the side, showing both the couch with Cueball in it holding his hands up, Megan in front on the floor working the remote and the entire TV. Speech from the TV is shown in a broken bubble.] Cueball: ...Man. Good Call. Let's stop and explore the course for a- Game: Player Two wins Cueball: Hey! Megan: Ha ha!\n[Zoom in on the couch still from the side, Cueball leaning forward with the game control in his hand on the arm rest and Megan on the floor sitting more relaxed with the remote in one hand.] Cueball: Dammit, I'm a sucker for your \"Be a Rebel\" speech. Megan: It's more fun than a blue shell.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are playing Mario Kart , with Cueball's Luigi character ahead of Megan's Mario towards the end of the race. Megan begins waxing philosophically on how she sometimes stops right before the Finish line (hence the title), because she knows that she has already won and then does not need the machine to tell her so. She says it proves she doesn't  act like a rat going through a laboratory maze in pursuit of cheese.\nThis talk makes Cueball realize that winning a video game isn't really important, and how by speeding through a racing level like the game asks you to do, you sometimes miss the fun of simply exploring the level and enjoying the extraordinary level of detail and work that went into it. He thus exclaims that it was a good call and slows down - expecting Megan to join him exploring.\nIn the end, it was just a ruse by Megan, who speeds past him and wins, much to her glee. \"It's more fun than a blue shell,\" she says, referring to the Mario Kart item that, when fired, will inevitably hit the race leader and cause him to crash. Randall has rather adamantly expressed his opinion about blue shells before in 290: Fucking Blue Shells .\nCueball's response suggests that he has been fooled before by Megan's Be a rebel speech - something she can pull off against him again and again. This leads to the subject of the title text.\nNote: In MKWii, people sometimes troll others by stopping right at the finish line. When the person behind them gets close, they just cross the line and cause 2nd place to lose.\nThe title text refers to the comic strip Peanuts , and the running gag where fussbudget Lucy would hold an American football for lovable loser Charlie Brown , and he'd come running at it full speed, only to have Lucy pull the football away at the last moment and send Charlie Brown crashing to the ground. What made it funny was that each time, Lucy would find some way to convince Charlie Brown that this time, she wouldn't pull the football away, and he'd try again \u2014 but lo and behold, of course she did. (See example of this, in the collection of moments shown in the very last Peanuts comic ).\nThe title text asks the important question if Lucy believed the things she said - even if she would eventually pull the ball away. If so, it would be easier to fool Charlie Brown. Maybe Cueball suggests that Megan believes what she says up to the point where she wins....\n[Luigi with green clothes in a green go-cart is clearly in the lead of a game of Mario Kart with Mario in red clothes in a red go-cart. Mario is so far behind that he seems much smaller. Two speech bubbles with arrows pointing at the two show what Megan and Cueball, shown later, say to each other.] Megan (playing Mario): Sometimes I stop right before the finish line. Cueball (playing Luigi): Why?\n[A small square panel is inserted at the bottom of the first, crossing over the frame to the next panel and below the bottom of this panel. It shows Megan sitting on the floor leaning up against a coach while holding the game control in both hands looking at the large TV in front of her, only partly inside the frame. Her speech bubble is like the previous panel, pointing at her with an arrow, but most of the bubble is inside the first panel and also breaking into the next panel.] Megan: 'Cause I know I've won.\n[Scene moved to look in from the direction of the TV at the couch. Cueball is sitting on the other end of the couch to the left holding his hands out to either side while looking down at Megan on the floor, who is still holding her remote in both hands playing the video game.] Megan: It proves I'm playing for fun, on my own terms. That I don't need validation from the machine. Megan: That I'm not a rat pulling a lever.\n[Scene moved to the side, showing both the couch with Cueball in it holding his hands up, Megan in front on the floor working the remote and the entire TV. Speech from the TV is shown in a broken bubble.] Cueball: ...Man. Good Call. Let's stop and explore the course for a- Game: Player Two wins Cueball: Hey! Megan: Ha ha!\n[Zoom in on the couch still from the side, Cueball leaning forward with the game control in his hand on the arm rest and Megan on the floor sitting more relaxed with the remote in one hand.] Cueball: Dammit, I'm a sucker for your \"Be a Rebel\" speech. Megan: It's more fun than a blue shell.\n"}
{"id":424,"title":"Security Holes","image_title":"Security Holes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/424","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/security_holes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/424:_Security_Holes","transcript":"[Cueball sitting at computer.] Cueball: I'll just comment out these lines...\n\/\/ MD_update(&m, buf, j);\n\/\/ do_not_crash();\n\/\/ prevent_911();\nIn the rush to clean up the debian-openssl fiasco, a number of other major security holes have been uncovered:\n[A two-column table is shown:]\nAffected System Security problem\nFedora Core Vulnerable to certain decoder rings\nXandros (EEE PC) Gives root access if asked in a stern voice\nGentoo Vulnerable to flattery\nOLPC OS Vulnerable to Jeff Goldblum\u2019s PowerBook\nSlackware Gives root access if user says Elvish word for \u201cfriend\u201d\nUbuntu Turns out distro is actually just Windows Vista with a few custom themes\n","explanation":"The \"Debian-OpenSSL fiasco\" was a major security problem discovered in the Debian Linux distribution and its version of the cryptographic library called OpenSSL . With just a tiny change in the software, which was intended to have no effect on security, its random number generator was completely crippled, as was the security of all cryptographic keys generated by the system. The problem was created when a Debian developer removed one line of code that was crucial, even though it could seem like it did nothing useful. More detail about the fiasco: Crippling Crypto: The Debian OpenSSL Debacle , Debian's information page about the problem .\nThe title text refers also to this issue: After the security problem was found, all cryptographic keys generated or used on the broken operating system needed to be replaced. Many systems introduced special checks for such weak keys, adding the keys to blacklists , thereby preventing their use and forcing users to create new keys. Randall claims that he was affected by that when uploading this comic to the server.\nThe panels on the left present Cueball as a programmer who, on a whim, removes pieces of code, ( commenting out the code by prepending the line with two slashes), presumably thinking that they are not necessary. The first removed line, MD_update(&m, buf, j); , is the exact piece of code that was removed in the Debian fiasco. The next panels show him commenting out fictitious lines of code apparently preventing bad things from happening.\nThe other part of the comic lists \"security problems\" that were allegedly discovered in other Linux variants afterwards:\nCryptographic software in Fedora Core was allegedly not secure against toy decoder rings . This is probably a reference to the association of the fedora with 1930s and 40s culture (especially gangsters and film noir ), and the contemporaneous introduction and popularity of toy decoder rings.\nXandros (used in Asus Eee PC netbooks) gave superuser privileges to anybody \"if asked in a stern voice.\" This is likely a reference to the fact that the preinstalled Xandros OS did not require a password for root privileges by default.\nGentoo would succumb to flattery, which may be a reference to Gentoo's notorious difficulty to manage. Any user who is capable of understanding it might have a large ego, and therefore be susceptible to flattery.\nOLPC OS could have been attacked using Jeff Goldblum 's laptop computer, which refers to a scene in the Independence Day movie , where Jeff Goldblum's character was able to hack into an alien spaceship using his Apple PowerBook computer - which is a topic of great contempt by geeks who point to the absurdity of such a construction.\nSlackware gave superuser privileges to anybody who \"says Elvish word for 'friend',\" which refers to a scene in The Lord of the Rings , where the entrance door to Moria could have been opened using a password mellon , the Elvish word for \"friend,\" as indicated on the door itself.\nAnd Ubuntu , which is another Linux distribution, was allegedly found to be actually Windows Vista , the latest version of Microsoft Windows at this time in 2008. This may be a reference to Ubuntu being developed with non-advanced users in mind, with many fail-safes and additional features being turned on by default, which had more in common with Windows than any other Linux-based operating system at the time.\n[Cueball sitting at computer.] Cueball: I'll just comment out these lines...\n\/\/ MD_update(&m, buf, j);\n\/\/ do_not_crash();\n\/\/ prevent_911();\nIn the rush to clean up the debian-openssl fiasco, a number of other major security holes have been uncovered:\n[A two-column table is shown:]\nAffected System Security problem\nFedora Core Vulnerable to certain decoder rings\nXandros (EEE PC) Gives root access if asked in a stern voice\nGentoo Vulnerable to flattery\nOLPC OS Vulnerable to Jeff Goldblum\u2019s PowerBook\nSlackware Gives root access if user says Elvish word for \u201cfriend\u201d\nUbuntu Turns out distro is actually just Windows Vista with a few custom themes\n"}
{"id":425,"title":"Fortune Cookies","image_title":"Fortune Cookies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/425","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fortune_cookies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/425:_Fortune_Cookies","transcript":"[Megan to the left, Cueball to the right, and Blondie in the middle are sitting on chairs around a table with lots of small stuff on it. A few small white items are standing up. All three are reading from the piece of paper they each hold up in their hands (Megan only using one hand). Below them, there is a caption inside the panel.] Megan: \"The ones you love will never let you down.\" Cueball: \"Seek nonviolence in everything you do.\" Blondie: \"Your self-confidence is well-placed.\"\nInstead of \"In bed\", I've found that fortune cookies are often more improved by appending \" Except in bed\".\n","explanation":"Fortune cookies are crisp cookies containing a small piece of paper with words of wisdom or a vague prophecy. Even though they were not actually invented in China, they are commonly served as dessert in Chinese restaurants in the United States.\nThere is a common joke involving fortune cookies that involves appending \"in bed\" \u2014 the phrase \"in bed\" being one of many sexual innuendo jokes along with \" your mom ,\" \"that's what she said,\" and \" said the actress to the bishop \" \u2014 to the end of the fortune, usually creating a sexual innuendo or other bizarre messages.\nThis comic turns that joke around, showing how appending \"except in bed\" can also create even more amusing messages.\nThe title text instead shows the example of an imaginary fortune that would not change in meaning if \"in bed\" was appended. The meaning would, however, change considerably if except in bed was added instead. A part of the joke is that you will never find such a fortune in a cookie!\n[Megan to the left, Cueball to the right, and Blondie in the middle are sitting on chairs around a table with lots of small stuff on it. A few small white items are standing up. All three are reading from the piece of paper they each hold up in their hands (Megan only using one hand). Below them, there is a caption inside the panel.] Megan: \"The ones you love will never let you down.\" Cueball: \"Seek nonviolence in everything you do.\" Blondie: \"Your self-confidence is well-placed.\"\nInstead of \"In bed\", I've found that fortune cookies are often more improved by appending \" Except in bed\".\n"}
{"id":426,"title":"Geohashing","image_title":"Geohashing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/426","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geohashing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/426:_Geohashing","transcript":"Date (example): 2005-05-26 That date's (or most recent) DOW opening: 10458.68 [Concatenate, with a hyphen: 2005-05-26-10458.68] md5: db9318c2259923d08b672cb305440f97 [Split it up into two pieces:] 0.db9318c2259923d0, 0.8b672cb305440f97 To decimal: 0.857713..., 0.544544... Your location (example): 37.421542, -122.085589 [Combine integer part of location with fractional part of hash:] Destination Coordinates: 37.857713, -122.544544 Sample Implementation: http:\/\/xkcd.com\/geohashing\/\n","explanation":"Geocaching is a sport where you have to find things hidden by other people based on geographical coordinates. Randall has had a similar idea before in 201: Christmas GPS .\nGeohashing is a sport created by Randall based on reaching a random location determined by an algorithm that uses a hash function that involves the current date, location, and the Dow opening price. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a stock market index dealt in New York City.\nThe algorithm is built in a way that:\nThe algorithm works as follows:\nMD5 is a cryptographic hashing algorithm, and converts plaintext data into a seemingly random 128-bit (32 character) string. A good hashing algorithm should have three main properties: it is non-reversible, you cannot generate any plaintext data back from the hash, and a given sample of data will always produce the same hash value, but even a tiny change to the original plaintext should produce an entirely different hash.\nThe example co-ordinates are for the Google headquarters in California, as you can see here: 37.421542 -122.085589 . The example date, May 26 2005, may reference the fact that the first edition of the Dow came out on May 26, 1896. (Why 2005? Unclear.)\nWhile geohashing was originally intended as a joke [ citation needed ] , there are people who geohash regularly. Please see the link to the Geohashing wiki above.\nThe title-text may imply that people should bring games to their geohashing location on the Saturday following the comic's release. If they do so and take photos, they may post them to https:\/\/geohashing.site\/geohashing\/games_we_play .\nDate (example): 2005-05-26 That date's (or most recent) DOW opening: 10458.68 [Concatenate, with a hyphen: 2005-05-26-10458.68] md5: db9318c2259923d08b672cb305440f97 [Split it up into two pieces:] 0.db9318c2259923d0, 0.8b672cb305440f97 To decimal: 0.857713..., 0.544544... Your location (example): 37.421542, -122.085589 [Combine integer part of location with fractional part of hash:] Destination Coordinates: 37.857713, -122.544544 Sample Implementation: http:\/\/xkcd.com\/geohashing\/\n"}
{"id":427,"title":"Bad Timing","image_title":"Bad Timing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/427","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bad_timing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/427:_Bad_Timing","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan, flying in a hot air balloon that takes up most of the panel.] Cueball: I like you. I'm just not feeling the relationship.\n[The hot air balloon is now further away, and a rough sketch of the ground below is shown.] Cueball: I'm sorry.\n[Only the basket of the hot air balloon is shown, with the rest being cut off by the edge of the panel.] Cueball: It's just bad timing. Me with my classes, you with your work, the spiders... Megan: The what?\n[Red Spiders crowd onto the balloon, causing it to begin to fall. Cueball and Megan look panicked.]\n","explanation":"Cueball breaks up with Megan in the middle of a hot air balloon ride. Then the red spiders attack .\nThe red spiders are among the earliest xkcd characters , first appearing in 8: Red spiders .\nAs the protip in the title text states, a break-up conversation while you are stranded in an inaccessible location is very poor manners. Also, the suggestion may be interpreted that breaking up in a hot air balloon is a very dangerous way to do it; the reaction may result in one or both parties falling out of the basket, or at least make the remainder of the flight very awkward.\nThis was the first comic to give a protip in the title text, but several have followed, as can be seen in the protip category .\nThe full series of Red Spiders comics:\n[Cueball and Megan, flying in a hot air balloon that takes up most of the panel.] Cueball: I like you. I'm just not feeling the relationship.\n[The hot air balloon is now further away, and a rough sketch of the ground below is shown.] Cueball: I'm sorry.\n[Only the basket of the hot air balloon is shown, with the rest being cut off by the edge of the panel.] Cueball: It's just bad timing. Me with my classes, you with your work, the spiders... Megan: The what?\n[Red Spiders crowd onto the balloon, causing it to begin to fall. Cueball and Megan look panicked.]\n"}
{"id":428,"title":"Starwatching","image_title":"Starwatching","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/428","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/starwatching.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/428:_Starwatching","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are lying on the ground stargazing.] Cueball: Just look at those stars.\nCueball: My father once told me that the great bloggers of the past are up there, watching over us.\n[Cueball sits up, and then stands up, stretching his arms in the air as if to encompass the whole night sky.] Cueball: High above the blogosphere, a gap opens in the tag clouds. Cory Doctorow's voice booms forth... Megan: You need to get out either more or less . I can't decide.\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are stargazing . In the first two panels, Cueball references a scene in the movie The Lion King , where the protagonist, Simba , remembers how his father, Mufasa , explained the night sky by saying, \"The great kings of the past are up there.\" The quote in last panel is derived from a scene near the climax of the movie, where the spirit of Mufasa appears to Simba in the clouds and speaks to him.\nCory Doctorow is a famous blogger who features in several of Randall 's comics . A tag cloud is a list of keywords on the sidebar of a blog's layout that helps a reader find posts by hyperlinking to posts associated with that keyword or category. Tags are shown in a proportionally larger typeface if that tag describes more posts than other tags.\nMegan interrupts Cueball by saying that she can't decide if Cueball needs to \"get out more or less.\" If she were to say \"get out more,\" she would be implying that he needs to spend time away from the computer so he stops seeing links between the real world and Cory Doctorow. If she says \"get out less,\" she implies that he might scare normal people if he were to do what he does in front of them, or perhaps become more \"normal\" if he were to stop going outside and not do what he is doing now.\nIn the title text, Randall mentions that he feels that the word blog , a portmanteau and an Elision of \"web log,\" sounds silly, and has not become any less silly over the years, despite entering common usage.\n[Cueball and Megan are lying on the ground stargazing.] Cueball: Just look at those stars.\nCueball: My father once told me that the great bloggers of the past are up there, watching over us.\n[Cueball sits up, and then stands up, stretching his arms in the air as if to encompass the whole night sky.] Cueball: High above the blogosphere, a gap opens in the tag clouds. Cory Doctorow's voice booms forth... Megan: You need to get out either more or less . I can't decide.\n"}
{"id":429,"title":"Fantasy","image_title":"Fantasy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/429","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fantasy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/429:_Fantasy","transcript":"[Cueball sits hugging his knees. From his head, there go three bubbles to a thought bubble.] Cueball: If only there were some way we could be together.\n[The comic fades into a thought bubble in shaded gray color. The bubble contains the next four panels.]\n[The thought ends with three bubbles going down to Cueball, who is now standing and scratching his head. Again, the comic is back to the normal black drawing style.] Cueball:\u00a0??\n","explanation":"Cueball is fantasizing about being together with Megan , a girl he really wishes to be with, but he has so far not found any way to make this happen. However, in his fantasy, the imaginary versions of himself and Megan quickly realize how impossible their relationship would be. First of all, neither of them can remember why they are together (a typical trait of dreams, that you are suddenly in some situation but cannot remember what went before). Also, Megan seems to find it very difficult to imagine them being together. Although the reasons are left unstated, it is clear that it is actually Cueball who cannot himself imagine a situation that would make Megan want to be with him, and he projects this into the thoughts of his fantasy version of Megan. He himself mentions the word fantasy, which makes her realize that they are objects in a fantasy (or dream) that will soon end, and then so will they.\nThen she decides to destroy the fantasy world they are in instead of going quietly, as she would have once this fantasy ended. She goes for burning it to the ground, and the fantasy Cueball is with her, since he has also realized that he will lose her when this fantasy ends. Rather than allow Cueball's idle daydream to end romantically, they run rampant and bring his fantasy crashing to a halt.\nThis leaves the real Cueball confused. But in the title text, Cueball realizes that he would only appreciate a girl who refused such an irrational reality, thus the fantasy is consistent with both of their personalities.\nAnother \"thought bubble comic\" can be seen in 248: Hypotheticals .\n[Cueball sits hugging his knees. From his head, there go three bubbles to a thought bubble.] Cueball: If only there were some way we could be together.\n[The comic fades into a thought bubble in shaded gray color. The bubble contains the next four panels.]\n[The thought ends with three bubbles going down to Cueball, who is now standing and scratching his head. Again, the comic is back to the normal black drawing style.] Cueball:\u00a0??\n"}
{"id":430,"title":"Every Damn Morning","image_title":"Every Damn Morning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/430","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/every_damn_morning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/430:_Every_Damn_Morning","transcript":"[In the background, a vivid dream scene is apparent, including mountains, a city with a mushroom cloud, a zeppelin where one person has knocked another off, another person climbing on or off the blimp on a rope, another blimp anchoring to a city in the background, one Cueball and Megan holding hands, one Cueball looking at the person on the rope, one Cueball and Megan sword fighting over a cup of spilled liquid, another set looking at a laptop, another set hugging, another set sliding down a separate rope from the blimp and a last set falling. In the far right there is a third blimp flying over a mountain range. All in all, this seems very much like an apocalypse and not something one would forget easily. In the inset, Cueball awakens, very surprised.] Cueball:\u00a0!!!\n[Dream's edges are fading, mountains, city, and zeppelin less clear. In the inset, Cueball is seen running down stairs.]\n[Zeppelin, city, and mountains are very hazy and unclear. The people can still be seen. In the inset, Cueball gets the attention of Megan, who is sitting at a breakfast table.]\n[The dream has completely faded, only the outlines of three people can still be seen. In the inset, Cueball looks confused.]\n","explanation":"Cueball has had a wondrous and striking dream, but is unable to recount it to Megan , as he has forgotten it. The title of the strip suggest that this is a regular occurrence: he wakes up with vivid memories of elaborate and fascinating dreamscapes, but is unable to tell anyone about it, because the memories fade so quickly, he's lost almost everything before he gets the chance.\nThe title text is a reference to C.S. Lewis's novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , in which Lucy Pevensie reads a story that \u201crefreshes her spirit\u201d \u2013 \u201cThat is the loveliest story I\u2019ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years.\u201d \u2013 but afterwards can only remember that it had something to do with \"a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill.\"\nAn effort to remember dreams was made in 269: TCMP .\n[In the background, a vivid dream scene is apparent, including mountains, a city with a mushroom cloud, a zeppelin where one person has knocked another off, another person climbing on or off the blimp on a rope, another blimp anchoring to a city in the background, one Cueball and Megan holding hands, one Cueball looking at the person on the rope, one Cueball and Megan sword fighting over a cup of spilled liquid, another set looking at a laptop, another set hugging, another set sliding down a separate rope from the blimp and a last set falling. In the far right there is a third blimp flying over a mountain range. All in all, this seems very much like an apocalypse and not something one would forget easily. In the inset, Cueball awakens, very surprised.] Cueball:\u00a0!!!\n[Dream's edges are fading, mountains, city, and zeppelin less clear. In the inset, Cueball is seen running down stairs.]\n[Zeppelin, city, and mountains are very hazy and unclear. The people can still be seen. In the inset, Cueball gets the attention of Megan, who is sitting at a breakfast table.]\n[The dream has completely faded, only the outlines of three people can still be seen. In the inset, Cueball looks confused.]\n"}
{"id":431,"title":"Delivery","image_title":"Delivery","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/431","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/delivery.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/431:_Delivery","transcript":"[In a delivery room.] Doctor: There's the head... he's looking at me... Wait, he's crawling back into the womb. Megan: What?! Doctor: Yeah, it's the darnedest thing. Megan: Um, what does it mean? Doctor: My guess? Six more weeks of winter.\n","explanation":"It is an old superstition that a groundhog (a type of rodent akin to a large squirrel) can predict the seasonal change from winter to spring in early February.  A groundhog that sees his shadow and retreats back in his home predicts another six weeks of winter, while a groundhog that does not see its shadow predicts an early spring.  This event is celebrated in a small town in western Pennsylvania, where Punxsutawney Phil serves as the forecaster in an annual ceremony on February 2.  This, in turn, becomes the basis for the comedy movie Groundhog Day , which is also referenced in 1076: Groundhog Day .\nThe joke here is that, instead of a groundhog predicting when spring will come, the baby is predicting the change in season. Evidently, he predicts that we will have six more weeks of winter.\nThe title text indicates that the doctor was joking about the baby retreating back inside. He then makes a pun that results in an assault by the mother. The word delivery can mean the act of giving birth or the presentation of a joke. He then indicates that the baby is fine.\n[In a delivery room.] Doctor: There's the head... he's looking at me... Wait, he's crawling back into the womb. Megan: What?! Doctor: Yeah, it's the darnedest thing. Megan: Um, what does it mean? Doctor: My guess? Six more weeks of winter.\n"}
{"id":432,"title":"Journal 4","image_title":"Journal 4","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/432","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/journal_4.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/432:_Journal_4","transcript":"[Black Hat sits slumped over on a bench, holding his hat in one hand, displaying his thin hair, while resting his head on his other arm.] Black Hat: S i GH\n","explanation":"In Journal 1, Black Hat explains to Cueball that a hobby of his is to pretend to write in a journal while on the subway, acting embarrassed if anyone sees. He then proceeds to silently scorn the person once they give him any kind of reassurance.\nIn Journal 2, however, Danish sees through his ruse. She counteracts it by proving that she understands him, and attempts to resign him to the fact that he will never see her again, thus robbing him of the satisfaction of a proper social connection. She leaves, taking his hat in the process. Initially stunned, in Journal 3 he at last regained his hat, the trademark of his personality and attitude, leaving him with the upper hand.\nNow, Black Hat has found himself to be in love with Danish, even though this goes against his whole worldview. As stated in the title text, he somehow believed that he was immune to such feelings. What is he to do?\nThe title text indicates that Black Hat had previously believed that his hat signified, or even caused, immunity from sadness or angst. The meaning of Black Hat's hat is not specified, but it is clearly something important to him. More evidence of the hat's portentous meaning can be seen in 455: Hats .\nThe whole \" Journal \" story is:\n[Black Hat sits slumped over on a bench, holding his hat in one hand, displaying his thin hair, while resting his head on his other arm.] Black Hat: S i GH\n"}
{"id":433,"title":"Journal 5","image_title":"Journal 5","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/433","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/journal_5.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/433:_Journal_5","transcript":"[Black Hat parks his car.] PARK\n[Black Hat knocks at door.] KNOCK KNOCK\nBlack Hat: Hi. Danish: Hi.\nBlack Hat: I give up. You win. I have to know who you are.\nBlack Hat: We understand each other. I can't let that slip away\u2014 beep [from device in Danish's hand.] BOOM\nBlack Hat: What was that?! Danish: Remote mines under your car.\nBlack Hat: Oh, those? I moved them to your garage before knocking. Danish: Touch\u00e9.\nBlack Hat: ...This relationship is going to be tricky. Danish: There's still time to leave and find a non-crazy girl. Black Hat: Not even slightly interested.\n","explanation":"In Journal , Black Hat explains to Cueball that a hobby of his is to pretend to write in a journal while on the subway, acting embarrassed if anyone sees. He then proceeds to silently scorn the person once they give him any kind of reassurance.\nIn Journal 2 , however, Danish sees through his ruse. She counteracts it by proving that she understands him, and attempts to resign him to the fact that he will never see her again, thus robbing him of the satisfaction of a proper social connection. She leaves, taking his hat in the process.\nInitially stunned, he at last regained his hat in Journal 3 , the trademark of his personality and attitude, leaving him with the upper hand.\n(In 412: Startled he's shown more easily startled than usual, possibly due to Danish setting him on edge and cracking his fa\u00e7ade.)\nIn Journal 4 , however, he is overcome with emotions, to the extent that he has even taken his black hat off while sitting head in hand on a bench, wondering in the title text why he would feel any emotions when he has a hat.\nNow, in Journal 5, Black Hat parks his car and soon finds himself on the doorstep of Danish's house. He comes to tell her that he gives up and that she wins, because he just has to know who she is. This is very uncharacteristic of Black Hat. He then tries to tell her that he thinks they understand each other's personalities and that this means something to him. He is obviously smitten with her on some level. But all she does about this initially is use her remote control to set off the mines she installed in the driveway where Black Hat's car is parked.\nBut, even in his state of love, Black Hat had spotted these mines and moved them to her garage. So when Danish sets them off, she destroys her own garage (and possibly her car) instead of Black Hat's car. When he tells her about moving them, she is impressed and acknowledges this by saying Touch\u00e9 . Maybe this is when she also begins to respect him in her own weird manner.\nBlack Hat can foresee that it will be a tricky relationship with their mean personalities crashing together, but when Danish gives him the option to go find a non-crazy girl , he promptly states that this doesn't interest him at all.\nIn the title text, it seems that neither of them is deterred by this obstacle, and their relationship begins when Black Hat tells her that he will pick her up at eight, although she does ask for one more hour, so she can re-mine the driveway before he comes back at nine. This did not seem to harm their future relationship, as in most of the later comics with Danish she is mainly shown together with Black Hat, sometimes even in a clearly romantic setting, like in 515: No One Must Know , from where she got her name.\nThe whole \" Journal \" story is:\n[Black Hat parks his car.] PARK\n[Black Hat knocks at door.] KNOCK KNOCK\nBlack Hat: Hi. Danish: Hi.\nBlack Hat: I give up. You win. I have to know who you are.\nBlack Hat: We understand each other. I can't let that slip away\u2014 beep [from device in Danish's hand.] BOOM\nBlack Hat: What was that?! Danish: Remote mines under your car.\nBlack Hat: Oh, those? I moved them to your garage before knocking. Danish: Touch\u00e9.\nBlack Hat: ...This relationship is going to be tricky. Danish: There's still time to leave and find a non-crazy girl. Black Hat: Not even slightly interested.\n"}
{"id":434,"title":"xkcd Goes to the Airport","image_title":"xkcd Goes to the Airport","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/434","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_goes_to_the_airport.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/434:_xkcd_Goes_to_the_Airport","transcript":"[Standing outside the Airport. There is a sign saying \"Airport\" and a plane in the background.] Megan: Okay, what airline? Beret Guy: I'm following you. Megan: ...I'm following you . Beret Guy: I assumed we were walking to the bakery. Megan: You always assume that!\n[Presumably the security checkpoint. The Security guy is digging through Cueball's bags.] Security guy: Lockpicks? These are... illegal, actually. Where did you get them? Cueball: Oh man, it all started with this hacker girl. Security guy: You need to come with- Cueball: Sure, sure. But man, let me tell you about her!\n[On a plane. Cueball is on a laptop.] Announcement: If your device has a \"Transmit\" function, please disable it. Cueball: Okay - hang on, I'm halfway through the iwconfig man page.\n[Security checkpoint. Security guy is examining a vial of dark liquid.] Security guy: Sir, is this container under three ounces? Black Hat: Not sure, how much blood is there in a churchmouse? Security guy: . . .Why don't you just go.\n","explanation":"The various characters of xkcd cause problems at the airport due to their various quirks.\nThe title text continues off the final panel, saying that there are less than three ounces of blood in a churchmouse, but it \"stains panties,\" an undesirable scenario. However, this undesirable scenario is paralleled by the implied undesirable scenario of a terrorist attack due to explosive liquids, the possibility of which caused the law. The title text seems to parody the prospect of an explosion with the relatively insignificant staining of panties, a term for women's underwear. This may also be a menstruation joke.\n[Standing outside the Airport. There is a sign saying \"Airport\" and a plane in the background.] Megan: Okay, what airline? Beret Guy: I'm following you. Megan: ...I'm following you . Beret Guy: I assumed we were walking to the bakery. Megan: You always assume that!\n[Presumably the security checkpoint. The Security guy is digging through Cueball's bags.] Security guy: Lockpicks? These are... illegal, actually. Where did you get them? Cueball: Oh man, it all started with this hacker girl. Security guy: You need to come with- Cueball: Sure, sure. But man, let me tell you about her!\n[On a plane. Cueball is on a laptop.] Announcement: If your device has a \"Transmit\" function, please disable it. Cueball: Okay - hang on, I'm halfway through the iwconfig man page.\n[Security checkpoint. Security guy is examining a vial of dark liquid.] Security guy: Sir, is this container under three ounces? Black Hat: Not sure, how much blood is there in a churchmouse? Security guy: . . .Why don't you just go.\n"}
{"id":435,"title":"Purity","image_title":"Purity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/435","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/purity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/435:_Purity","transcript":"[Six characters are standing on a line with small ticks under each person. Above the two persons most central in the comic is an arrow pointing right. There are labels both above and below the arrow. Beneath each tick is a label. All the labels are listed here in order.] Fields arranged by purity More pure\nSociologists Psychologists Biologists Chemists Physicists Mathematicians\n[Above each of the six ticks, there is a person. The last person to the right is the mathematician. She stands at the far right edge of the comic, with much farther distance between her and the second to last person going right. The first four spaces between the first five people are of equal distance. Except for the least pure sociologist, they all say something addressed to the less pure person(s) on their left. The first mute person above the Sociologists tick is Megan. The second person above the Psychologists tick is a bald man with glasses and a goatee beard holding a book under one arm. The third person above the Biologists tick is a Cueball-like guy with a squirming octopus in his hand. The fourth person above the Chemists tick is Ponytail holding up a test tube with bubbles coming out of the top. The fifth person above the Physicists tick is Cueball standing with his hands in his sides. Farthest out, the sixth and final person above the Mathematicians tick is Blondie. She waves to the other five.]\nPsychologist: Sociology is just applied psychology.\nBiologist: Psychology is just applied biology.\nChemist: Biology is just applied chemistry\nPhysicist: Which is just applied physics. It's nice to be on top.\nMathematician: Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there.\n","explanation":"Mathematics is the abstract study of topics encompassing quantity, structure, space, change, and others. Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter-energy and its motion through space and time, along with related concepts such as forces. Physics is described using mathematics. Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure, and properties. As chemical reactions are governed by physical laws (electromagnetism being particularly important), one could say that chemists are studying a subset of physics. Biology is the the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. As biological life is the result of a large number of complex chemical reactions, one could say that it is studying a subset of chemistry. Psychology is the study of mental functions and behaviors, why thinking beings do what they do.  As thought is (currently) a capability exclusive to living things, one could say that it is a subset of biology . Sociology is the study of society, or the study of groups of people and their interactions.  Since a group of people is composed of many individuals, one could say that it is an application of psychology.  Of course, one could also say that the fields are all independent, as deriving one from another would require not only good, but perfect understanding of the more fundamental field.\nMathematics has two classifications: pure mathematics (mathematics for its own sake, without any real-world interpretation) and applied mathematics (mathematics intended to solve real-world problems). It is not uncommon for scientists to formulate a problem that can be reduced to a problem already solved by pure mathematicians. Taking this to its logical extreme, the comic arranges the six scientific fields according to the Hierarchy of the sciences , represented by a person on a chart of purity, saying that a field is 'more pure' than the fields depending on it. This is a topic often used in jokes between scientists of various fields as to who is more important. The physicist, Cueball , feels that he is at the top, that all other fields are based upon his... but is ultimately upstaged by the mathematician, Blondie , whose field is so pure that its relationship to more applied fields can be distant or nonexistent. Unlike the others, however, the mathematician notably does not claim that physics is merely applied mathematics, because that claim would be categorically untrue. While physics makes extensive use of applied mathematical methods, physics (and, by extension, all the other sciences) are based on the analysis of experimental data collected about the universe\u2014data which mathematics does not and cannot on its own provide.\nThe title text indicates that physicists like to repeat the following quote attributed to Richard Feynman: \u201cPhysics is to math what sex is to masturbation.\u201d\nThis ties the title of the comic, \"Purity,\" to tie between various fields, to the topic of sex, as measured by the Purity Test .\n[Six characters are standing on a line with small ticks under each person. Above the two persons most central in the comic is an arrow pointing right. There are labels both above and below the arrow. Beneath each tick is a label. All the labels are listed here in order.] Fields arranged by purity More pure\nSociologists Psychologists Biologists Chemists Physicists Mathematicians\n[Above each of the six ticks, there is a person. The last person to the right is the mathematician. She stands at the far right edge of the comic, with much farther distance between her and the second to last person going right. The first four spaces between the first five people are of equal distance. Except for the least pure sociologist, they all say something addressed to the less pure person(s) on their left. The first mute person above the Sociologists tick is Megan. The second person above the Psychologists tick is a bald man with glasses and a goatee beard holding a book under one arm. The third person above the Biologists tick is a Cueball-like guy with a squirming octopus in his hand. The fourth person above the Chemists tick is Ponytail holding up a test tube with bubbles coming out of the top. The fifth person above the Physicists tick is Cueball standing with his hands in his sides. Farthest out, the sixth and final person above the Mathematicians tick is Blondie. She waves to the other five.]\nPsychologist: Sociology is just applied psychology.\nBiologist: Psychology is just applied biology.\nChemist: Biology is just applied chemistry\nPhysicist: Which is just applied physics. It's nice to be on top.\nMathematician: Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there.\n"}
{"id":436,"title":"How it Happened","image_title":"How it Happened","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/436","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/how_it_happened.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/436:_How_it_Happened","transcript":"[Cueball and his friend standing.] Cueball: Then she put her hands over mine, grinds against me, leans down and whispers, \"After tonight, we go and live our lives, no regrets. But I want this, I want you, one last time.\"\nFriend: (Giving a thumbs up, pointing, surrounded by action lines) That's what SHE said!\n[Both continue to stand.] Cueball: Yes. Yes, it is.\n[Both continue to stand.]\n","explanation":"The phrase \" That's what she said! \" is commonly used after someone has described something that sounds sexual but had no intentional sexual meaning. An example might be:\n\"It's huge!\" (Describing an overly large object like a large tree) \"That's what she said!\" (Implying that \"she\" had said the same thing about genitalia)\nHowever, in this comic, the first guy is actually describing what his girlfriend whispered to him on the day she leaves him. She is still looking to have sex with him one last time before they go live their lives. It is a very personal moment that he decided to share with his friend. But his friend then responds with a that's what she said .\nThe first friend derails the other's attempt at a joke by pointing out that that was what she literally said. This is exactly the same as Megan's reaction to a \"that's what she said\" in 366: Your Mom .\nThe friend is simply frozen in his uncomfortable position, by the awkward moment, while the first guy just stares at him.\nIn the title text, the first guy continues to make the situation more awkward for his friend by pointing out that he was there, so there is no need to tell him what she said.\n\"That's what she said!\" jokes had been mocked previously in comic 174: That's What SHE Said .\n[Cueball and his friend standing.] Cueball: Then she put her hands over mine, grinds against me, leans down and whispers, \"After tonight, we go and live our lives, no regrets. But I want this, I want you, one last time.\"\nFriend: (Giving a thumbs up, pointing, surrounded by action lines) That's what SHE said!\n[Both continue to stand.] Cueball: Yes. Yes, it is.\n[Both continue to stand.]\n"}
{"id":437,"title":"SUV","image_title":"SUV","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/437","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/suv.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/437:_SUV","transcript":"My Hobby: Renting an SUV and confusing the hell out of hybrid owners [A Prius Driver is pumping gas into his car at a gas station. The prices can be seen in the background, and read:] $4.08 M: $4.38 P: $4.51 D: $4.85 [Cueball drives up alongside in an SUV and leans out the window.] Cueball: Check out those prices! Your Prius ain't looking so smart now , huh? Prius Driver: It's ... wait, what? Cueball: Maybe you'll go green next time, asshole!\n","explanation":"This comic is one of a series of My Hobby comics. Here Randall describes a \"hobby\" of confusing self-righteous hybrid car drivers by creating situational irony.\nThere are many anecdotal instances of drivers of \"green\" vehicles both criticizing owners of less fuel-efficient vehicles (such as SUVs) and for taunting them about how much more they are paying for fuel. Randall is reversing this by taunting\/criticizing the owner of a Prius hybrid vehicle as though their roles were reversed. The owner of the hybrid car is irritated and does not understand what is being said.\nAlternatively, in the second sentence, Randall could be talking about the fact that the other person has a hybrid vehicle instead of a full electric vehicle, although Randall's SUV wouldn't be any better in that case.\nYet another possibility is that \"go green\" refers to using public transportation or walking (or biking, skateboarding, and so on) in which case there is an argument to be made that the Cueball with the SUV might be better due to taking mass transit more. Or, as the title text alludes to, electric skateboards.\nThe title text, rather than being a joke or additional punchline, seems to be a serious opinion about how much more efficient electric vehicles are compared to gas-powered vehicles; they would be a far superior form of transportation if only they weren't so expensive. But an electric skateboard can only move a fraction of mass comparing to an SUV.\nMy Hobby: Renting an SUV and confusing the hell out of hybrid owners [A Prius Driver is pumping gas into his car at a gas station. The prices can be seen in the background, and read:] $4.08 M: $4.38 P: $4.51 D: $4.85 [Cueball drives up alongside in an SUV and leans out the window.] Cueball: Check out those prices! Your Prius ain't looking so smart now , huh? Prius Driver: It's ... wait, what? Cueball: Maybe you'll go green next time, asshole!\n"}
{"id":438,"title":"Internet Argument","image_title":"Internet Argument","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/438","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/internet_argument.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/438:_Internet_Argument","transcript":"[Cueball is typing profanities into his computer.] [Friend is typing profanities into his computer.] [Megan floats in behind Cueball.] [Megan lifts Cueball.] [They are flying over mountains.] [Megan and Cueball are floating in front of the friend and his computer.] [She sets Cueball down in front of the friend and his computer.] [Megan lifts Cueball again.] [They are flying.] [Megan sets Cueball down in his chair at his computer.] [Cueball is typing at his computer.] [Friend is typing at his computer.]\n","explanation":"This effect is similar to what happens when people drive a car: they're more likely to get exasperated or angry at other drivers than they do when not driving.\nIn the first two panels, Cueball is exchanging some possibly profane insults with the other Cueball . Megan takes hold of Cueball and flies him to the other one, so they see each other face to face. In this situation, each remains silent as neither has anything to say to the other.\nWhen Megan returns Cueball to his original computer, they resume their communication, but without the insults.\nThe title text just summarizes the whole idea in a single sentence.\n[Cueball is typing profanities into his computer.] [Friend is typing profanities into his computer.] [Megan floats in behind Cueball.] [Megan lifts Cueball.] [They are flying over mountains.] [Megan and Cueball are floating in front of the friend and his computer.] [She sets Cueball down in front of the friend and his computer.] [Megan lifts Cueball again.] [They are flying.] [Megan sets Cueball down in his chair at his computer.] [Cueball is typing at his computer.] [Friend is typing at his computer.]\n"}
{"id":439,"title":"Thinking Ahead","image_title":"Thinking Ahead","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/439","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thinking_ahead.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/439:_Thinking_Ahead","transcript":"[My Problem: Thinking Ahead.] Cueball: She's cute. Woman: This food is problematic. Cueball: Oh man, she's quoting Firefly. Cueball: It's the perfect opening. But wait. I'm moving in the fall. If we hit it off, how will I deal with that? Cueball: I don't want to ask her to derail her plans. And with things unresolved with Megan, can I really commit enough to make that kind of decision? Cueball: Oh God. Cueball: Gotta get out. Cueball: The window. [Cueball jumping through a window] CRASH","explanation":"Cueball spots a woman while shopping. He thinks she looks cute - probably because she looks a lot like his girlfriend Megan . She is picking out produce, and quotes a line of dialogue from Firefly originally said by River Tam ( Summer Glau ): \"My food is problematic.\" Cueball ( Randall ) who is a big fan of Firefly , notices this, and wants to flirt with her. But then Cueball's internal monologue kicks in and he starts panicking, wondering how he'd deal with starting a relationship with this woman when he's moving in the fall, as well as how things are going to work out with Megan, should things work out with this girl. He panics, needs a way out, and jumps out the window.\nIn real life, jumping out the window would be a very bad idea. See this for more details.\nThe title text refers to yet another Firefly line from the episode \" The Train Job ,\" this one said by Hoban \"Wash\" Washburne ( Alan Tudyk ): \"Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?\"\n[My Problem: Thinking Ahead.] Cueball: She's cute. Woman: This food is problematic. Cueball: Oh man, she's quoting Firefly. Cueball: It's the perfect opening. But wait. I'm moving in the fall. If we hit it off, how will I deal with that? Cueball: I don't want to ask her to derail her plans. And with things unresolved with Megan, can I really commit enough to make that kind of decision? Cueball: Oh God. Cueball: Gotta get out. Cueball: The window. [Cueball jumping through a window] CRASH"}
{"id":440,"title":"Road Rage","image_title":"Road Rage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/440","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/road_rage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/440:_Road_Rage","transcript":"[Black Hat is driving, and Danish, who seems to be his equal, is in the passenger's seat. They are closely followed by some other vehicle.] Black Hat: That guy's tailgating me. Danish: I'll take a look.\n[A car is shown to be closely behind Black Hat's car.] Danish: His laptop's running, probably in the back seat. And... yup, the WiFi autoconnects.\n[Close-up of Danish using a laptop.] Danish: Now we just scan for remote exploits... install speech synth... And take a shot in the psychological dark.\n[Cueball's car.] Laptop: Hello. Cueball: What? Who's there? Laptop: She'd be alive if it weren't for you. Cueball: ...Oh God.\nThis may be a continuation of 433: Journal 5 , with Black Hat taking Danish to the \"date\" that was mentioned.\n","explanation":"Black Hat is driving a car, and Danish is with him in the passenger's seat. Black Hat gets annoyed because the car behind him is \" tailgating \" (in this context, the term means that the other car is following too close to the back bumper of Black Hat's car).\nDanish decides to fight back, so she turns on her laptop and finds that the car behind them also has a laptop running. Since the cars are so close, the other laptop is well within WiFi range, so she manages to establish a WiFi connection with the laptop in the other car. Then, Danish finds a security hole (in the comic, a \"remote exploit\"). She uses it to break into the laptop and install a speech synthesizer.\nThis means that the laptop in the car behind just starts saying words at Danish's will.\nThe driver of the other car is puzzled when he starts hearing a voice. He's completely clueless about where the voice comes from. Also, he's driving alone, so he's probably frightened (or nervous at least) to find that someone is speaking inside his car. The fact that the voice says \"she'd be alive if it weren't for you\" surely won't help him relax. The \"shot in the dark\" is the gamble that this statement is especially meaningful and poignant to the driver. As the driver is prone to tailgating, it seems likely that he could have caused a car accident\u2014possibly a fatal one\u2014in the past.\nIn the title text, Danish is continuing her revenge, asking Black Hat to slam on the brakes. Hitting the brakes is a common (though highly unsafe) way to get revenge on tailgaters. At minimum, it forces them to abruptly decelerate and hopefully frighten them, but the danger is that they don't have room to stop in time and cause a collision. The joke is that, having already achieved a complicated and psychologically painful form of revenge, Danish wants to follow it up with a much more conventional form, at the worst possible time. Since the blame for such types of accident is always given to the driver of the car behind, and since we know Black Hat is a sadistic bastard, Black Hat will no doubt enjoy adding both the blame and the traffic accident on top of what Danish has already accomplished. This may seem ironic, as Black Hat and Danish would be risking having their own car struck, but they would no doubt rather make an example than avoid the accident.\n[Black Hat is driving, and Danish, who seems to be his equal, is in the passenger's seat. They are closely followed by some other vehicle.] Black Hat: That guy's tailgating me. Danish: I'll take a look.\n[A car is shown to be closely behind Black Hat's car.] Danish: His laptop's running, probably in the back seat. And... yup, the WiFi autoconnects.\n[Close-up of Danish using a laptop.] Danish: Now we just scan for remote exploits... install speech synth... And take a shot in the psychological dark.\n[Cueball's car.] Laptop: Hello. Cueball: What? Who's there? Laptop: She'd be alive if it weren't for you. Cueball: ...Oh God.\nThis may be a continuation of 433: Journal 5 , with Black Hat taking Danish to the \"date\" that was mentioned.\n"}
{"id":441,"title":"Babies","image_title":"Babies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/441","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/babies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/441:_Babies","transcript":"It doesn't seem right that we're old enough to have kids. [Megan holds a baby upside-down by one leg.] Megan: Sweet! We made a baby! Cueball: Are we sure we did it right? Cueball: We should disassemble it, check all the parts, and put it back together.\n","explanation":"A common theme of xkcd is that one never feels that one has \"transitioned to adulthood,\" in the sense of actually attaining the seriousness and sense of responsibility that children imagine all adults to possess. Here, the author illustrates this by imagining Cueball and Megan taking on the ultimate \"adult responsibility\" \u2014 having a child, treating it as they would any other engineering project. Disassembling a project to check the parts is an activity that is appropriate for a self-built computer or robot, but most people would think that disassembling a child would be impractical. Also, unless they've taken Dr. Frankenstein's course on reassembling and reanimating human beings, this would result in a grisly end for the baby [ citation needed ] . Megan also shows her lack of child experience by holding the baby upside-down by the foot, which isn't a good idea. Her behavior could also indicate that Megan is treating the child as an object rather than a human being.\nThe title text implies that Randall will have kids someday. It will be surprising if they read this comic, not just because it will give them an unflattering look into their father's attitudes on having children, but because he plans to lock them in the cellar where there will be no internet access. This is possibly a reference to Kaspar Hauser , who, as a boy, claimed to have grown up in a dark cell in Germany in the 19th century, or to the incestuous children of Josef Fritzl .\nThis is also the topic of 674: Natural Parenting and 1384: Krypton .\nMuch later, a comic with the singular version of this title was released: 1650: Baby . Here, Cueball refrains from saying something as stupid as he does here about another couple's baby. The couple looks similar to the one in this comic, though that may just be due to the basic-looking art style of xkcd.\nIt doesn't seem right that we're old enough to have kids. [Megan holds a baby upside-down by one leg.] Megan: Sweet! We made a baby! Cueball: Are we sure we did it right? Cueball: We should disassemble it, check all the parts, and put it back together.\n"}
{"id":442,"title":"xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel","image_title":"xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/442","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_loves_the_discovery_channel.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/442:_xkcd_Loves_the_Discovery_Channel","transcript":"[The comic is in parody of the Discovery Channel commercial showing various clips of people singing a song with the chorus line \"Boom De Yada.\"] [The comic is divided into a grid of 4 panels by 6 panels, each depicting a character or situation often from a previous xkcd strip.] [In each panel is written a part of a song similar to the song from the Discovery Channel commercial.]\nPanel 1: [Megan spinning around.] I love momentum.\nPanel 2: [Megan laying on floor tinkering with an EEE PC hamster ball robot.] I love to engineer.\nPanel 3: [Beret Guy standing in bakery holding a loaf of bread in each hand, a sign with \"PIE!\" in background.] I love this bakery!\nPanel 4: [Cory Doctorow in goggles and a red cape flying superman-style.] I love the blogosphere!\nPanel 5: [Cueball running in a large hamster ball.] I love the whole world\nPanel 6: [Depiction of internet sludge (4chan b-Random)] And all its messed-up folks.\nPanel 7: [Cueball and Megan immersed in playpen balls.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 8: [Mass of playpen balls with speech \"I put on my robe and wizard hat\" originating from it.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 9: [Black Hat taking a present from a kid with a party hat.] I love your suffering.\nPanel 10: [Diagram showing RSA fingerprint authentication between two people.] I love cryptography.\nPanel 11: [Cueball and Megan in bed covered by a red sheet.] I love entangled sheets.\nPanel 12: [Cueball hanging from a kite string holding a camera.] And kite photography.\nPanel 13: [Map of the internet.] I love the whole world\nPanel 14: [Cube with a red spider on top.] And all its mysteries.\nPanel 15: [Two people sword-fighting on rolling office chairs.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 16: [Classroom with two students and Miss Lenhart.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 17: [Cueball saying \"Barack me Obamadeus!\" to another man speaking energetically at a podium.] I love elections.\nPanel 18: [Cueball holding a schematic diagram of a transistor in front of his crotch.] I love transistors.\nPanel 19: [Cueball and Megan in bed, Cueball saying \"There must be taft slash fiction.\"] I love weird pillow talk.\nPanel 20: [Cueball speaking to Megan.] I love your sister.\nPanel 21: [Roller coaster with Cueball in the front car holding a chess board and thinking about a move.] I love the whole world.\nPanel 22: [Beret Guy standing in the midst of leafless trees.] The future's pretty cool!\nPanel 23: [Megan doing the MC Hammer slide towards Cueball.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 24: [Cueball and Megan on an electric skateboard.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of the Discovery Channel commercial showing various clips of people singing a song with the chorus line 'Boom De Yada' . The comic is divided into a grid of 4 panels by 6 panels, most depicting a character or situation from a previous xkcd strip. In each panel is written a part of a song similar to the song from the Discovery Channel commercial.\nThe campaign from the Discovery Channel was not called \"Boom De Yada,\" but \" I Love the World .\" The title \"xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel\" is in reference to this.\nMost of the panels are references to previous xkcd strips, but a few are not.\nPanel 1 I love momentum. A reference to comic 162: Angular Momentum , where Megan spins in a circle to \"rob the planet of angular momentum.\" Panel 2 I love to engineer. A reference to comic 413: New Pet , where Megan and Cueball turn an EEE PC into a household pet. Panel 3 I love this bakery! A reference to comic 434: xkcd Goes to the Airport , where Beret Guy shows his liking for bakeries in first panel. His love of bakeries is a recurring gag in the comic. Panel 4 I love the blogosphere! A reference to comic 239: Blagofaire , where someone from the far future believes that many people blogged from high-altitude balloons whilst wearing red capes and goggles. The flying character may be Cory Doctorow , who is mentioned in the comic as the only blogger to actually do this, and who also appeared in comic 345: 1337: Part 5 in this guise. Panel 5 I love the whole world. (Cueball running in a large hamster ball.) Likely a reference to comic 152: Hamster Ball , though there are multiple comics featuring human-sized hamster balls . Panel 6 And all its messed-up folks. A reference to the \/b\/ (\"Random\") forum on 4chan , which is in fact home to plenty of \"messed-up folks.\" This on-line behavior is something Randall comments on in several comics both before and after this. For instance in 202: YouTube . Panel 7 Boom de yada, Boom de yada (Cueball and Megan immersed in playpen balls.) A reference to comic 150: Grownups , where Megan decides that she has the ability to, and wants to, turn her house into a giant ball pit. Panel 8 Boom de yada, Boom de yada ( I put on my robe and wizard hat ) A reference to this roleplay chat transcript (NSFW), which became an Internet meme. A user named bloodninja would roleplay as a wizard during cybersex (saying \"I put on my robe and wizard hat\" to signal this) and invariably infuriate his unwitting partners with demeaning actions. Other incidents involved him roleplaying as a rhinoceros. In the above mentioned comic 150: Grownups , the two characters also disappear, but in that case a big pink heart comes out of the playpen balls. Panel 9 I love your suffering. The recurring character Black Hat is being his usual self and causing suffering for his own amusement, as in comic 72: Classhole . In this panel, he is seen giving a child a present, probably containing a bobcat as seen in comic 325: A-Minus-Minus Panel 10 I love cryptography. Cryptography is a subject that comes up often in the comic, notably, in comics 153: Cryptography and 177: Alice and Bob before this one (for a full list see Category:Cryptography ). The panel shows a flowchart of the kind commonly used to show how a particular cryptosystem works and\/or how it can be broken. Panel 11 I love entangled sheets. Sexual reference. Sex and red sheets are also brought up in comic 230: Hamiltonian . Panel 12 And kite photography. A reference to Randall's own hobby of kite photography , as well as comic 235: Kite . Panel 13 I love the whole world (Map of the internet.) A reference to comic 256: Online Communities , featuring online communities of the time visualized as a world map, with geographic areas representing their approximate membership size. There is, more directly, a pun on \"internet,\" namely \"outernet.\" Panel 14 And all its mysteries. A reference to a series of comics on \"red spiders\": 8: Red Spiders , 43: Red Spiders 2 , 47: Counter-Red Spiders , 126: Red Spiders Cometh , and 427: Bad Timing . Panel 15 Boom de yada, Boom de yada (Two people sword-fighting on rolling office chairs.) A reference to comic 303: Compiling , where two coders battle with fake swords at work, with the excuse that their code is compiling. Panel 16 Boom de yada, Boom de yada (Classroom with two students and a teacher.) Nothing too special, but it does embrace the \"everybody joins in\" theme behind the commercials. The teacher is Miss Lenhart , who was first properly introduced in comic 263: Certainty , but may have made an appearance in comic 59: Graduation . Panel 17 I love elections ( Barack me Obamadeus! ) A pun on the song Rock Me Amadeus and US president Barack Obama . At this point, Randall had not done any comics directly on elections, but he made this after the one in 2008: 500: Election and has shown his love for this subject also around the 2012 election. Panel 18 I love transistors. This panel has Cueball's crotch replaced with the (similar-looking) icon used for a transistor in a circuit diagram . Randall later showed how much he loves anything that can go in to such a diagram in 730: Circuit Diagram . Panel 19 I love weird pillow talk. ( There must be Taft slash fiction. ) \" Pillow talk \" means intimate conversations between lovers, \" slash fiction \" is fanfiction with characters of the same sex, and \"Taft\" is William Howard Taft , a US President mostly remembered for his severe obesity. It appears that they are invoking rule 34 of the Internet as a reference to 305: Rule 34 . Weird pillow talk is also the subject of comic 69: Pillow Talk , while the Taft reference comes from comic 214: The Problem with Wikipedia . Panel 20 I love your sister. A reference to xkcd's recurring joke of dating the female character's sister, which spans several comics including 49: Want , 279: Pickup Lines , 317: That Lovin' Feelin' , and 408: Overqualified . Panel 21 I love the whole world (Roller coaster with Cueball holding a chess board) A reference to comic 249: Chess Photo , which inspired an internet meme. Panel 22 The future's pretty cool! (Beret Guy in a forest.) The picture of the forest is similar to that in 269: TCMP , though it may also be a reference to comic 167: Nihilism , where Cueball and Beret Guy make observations about the future while climbing a tree. Later, in comic 1322: Winter , the two are seen walking through a forest very similar to the one shown here. Panel 23 Boom de yada, Boom de yada (Megan doing the MC Hammer slide towards Cueball.) A reference to comic 108: M.C. Hammer Slide , where Hairy falls in love with \"a girl whose only mode of transportation is the M.C. Hammer Slide.\" Panel 24 Boom de yada, Boom de yada (Cueball and Megan on an electric skateboard.) A reference to comic 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) , where Megan and Cueball go on an electric skateboard ride, but he already introduced these back in 139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards .\nThe title text continues the song, self-referentially. Self-reference is a reoccurring theme in Douglas Hofstadter's books, notably G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach , which Randall refers to directly in 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey . Later, Hofstadter has been referenced in other comics, such as in the title text of 555: Two Mirrors and 608: Form , plus, of course, in 917: Hofstadter . Self-reference as a form of humor was also explored before , but most famously in the later 688: Self-Description .\n[The comic is in parody of the Discovery Channel commercial showing various clips of people singing a song with the chorus line \"Boom De Yada.\"] [The comic is divided into a grid of 4 panels by 6 panels, each depicting a character or situation often from a previous xkcd strip.] [In each panel is written a part of a song similar to the song from the Discovery Channel commercial.]\nPanel 1: [Megan spinning around.] I love momentum.\nPanel 2: [Megan laying on floor tinkering with an EEE PC hamster ball robot.] I love to engineer.\nPanel 3: [Beret Guy standing in bakery holding a loaf of bread in each hand, a sign with \"PIE!\" in background.] I love this bakery!\nPanel 4: [Cory Doctorow in goggles and a red cape flying superman-style.] I love the blogosphere!\nPanel 5: [Cueball running in a large hamster ball.] I love the whole world\nPanel 6: [Depiction of internet sludge (4chan b-Random)] And all its messed-up folks.\nPanel 7: [Cueball and Megan immersed in playpen balls.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 8: [Mass of playpen balls with speech \"I put on my robe and wizard hat\" originating from it.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 9: [Black Hat taking a present from a kid with a party hat.] I love your suffering.\nPanel 10: [Diagram showing RSA fingerprint authentication between two people.] I love cryptography.\nPanel 11: [Cueball and Megan in bed covered by a red sheet.] I love entangled sheets.\nPanel 12: [Cueball hanging from a kite string holding a camera.] And kite photography.\nPanel 13: [Map of the internet.] I love the whole world\nPanel 14: [Cube with a red spider on top.] And all its mysteries.\nPanel 15: [Two people sword-fighting on rolling office chairs.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 16: [Classroom with two students and Miss Lenhart.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 17: [Cueball saying \"Barack me Obamadeus!\" to another man speaking energetically at a podium.] I love elections.\nPanel 18: [Cueball holding a schematic diagram of a transistor in front of his crotch.] I love transistors.\nPanel 19: [Cueball and Megan in bed, Cueball saying \"There must be taft slash fiction.\"] I love weird pillow talk.\nPanel 20: [Cueball speaking to Megan.] I love your sister.\nPanel 21: [Roller coaster with Cueball in the front car holding a chess board and thinking about a move.] I love the whole world.\nPanel 22: [Beret Guy standing in the midst of leafless trees.] The future's pretty cool!\nPanel 23: [Megan doing the MC Hammer slide towards Cueball.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\nPanel 24: [Cueball and Megan on an electric skateboard.] Boom De Yada Boom De Yada\n"}
{"id":443,"title":"Know Your Vines","image_title":"Know Your Vines","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/443","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/know_your_vines.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/443:_Know_Your_Vines","transcript":"[Picture of a green, five-leafed plant:] Virginia creeper: Vines useful as impromptu rope\n[Picture of a green, 3-leafed plant:] Poison ivy: Grows in same habitat as Virginia creeper\n[A woman with long hair standing:] Girlfriend: Into light bondage\n[A dark image of a tree, the top of which extends above the panel, with light green vines near the base of the tree trunk:] Area around campsite: Too dark to see\n[Caption below the panel:] Relationship after camping trip: Strained\n","explanation":"Randall points out that the Virginia creeper is a plant with 5 green leaves that can be used as a rope. He then points out that poison ivy is another vine-like plant with 3 green leaves that also grows near camping areas - but causes skin rashes. His girlfriend is into light bondage (being tied up or tying up another for erotic purposes), yet the area around their tent was too dark to differentiate between the two vines when they went looking for some impromptu rope.\nThe implication: Either Randall, his girlfriend, or both spent some time that night wrapped in poison ivy. The resulting painful rashes were likely blamed on the one who harvested the wrong plant, and the relationship suffered.\nThe title text refers to the fact that many modern tents are self-supporting and no longer require rope to put up. Had there been tent rope on hand, there would be no need to look for vines.\n[Picture of a green, five-leafed plant:] Virginia creeper: Vines useful as impromptu rope\n[Picture of a green, 3-leafed plant:] Poison ivy: Grows in same habitat as Virginia creeper\n[A woman with long hair standing:] Girlfriend: Into light bondage\n[A dark image of a tree, the top of which extends above the panel, with light green vines near the base of the tree trunk:] Area around campsite: Too dark to see\n[Caption below the panel:] Relationship after camping trip: Strained\n"}
{"id":444,"title":"Macgyver Gets Lazy","image_title":"Macgyver Gets Lazy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/444","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/macgyver_gets_lazy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/444:_Macgyver_Gets_Lazy","transcript":"[Outside of a building with a door marked No Entry and a guard standing outside, Cueball and MacGyver are hiding.] Cueball: Any ideas? MacGyver: I can use the trigger mechanism of this gun to ignite a small explosive charge, propelling a metal slug into the guard's head.\n","explanation":"MacGyver was an '80s and early '90s TV character, famed for improvising complex devices in a matter of minutes in order to escape dangerous situations. In this comic, MacGyver suggests an unusually direct plan\u2014shooting the guard in the head. However, he still manages to describe his plan in a rather 'complex' manner.\nIt is worth noting that in the show, MacGyver was adamantly against the use of guns and never used one (at least, not for its intended purpose) in the entire run of the old series.\nA MacGyver reboot was made in 2016 and was not well received (38% on Metacritic, 4.6\/10 in iMDb). Despite this negative reception, the series began its fifth season in December 2020.\nThe Wikipedia page referenced by the title text redirects to the main MacGyver entry since September 2012. The Wikipedia page can still be found in history , and the content has been moved to MacGyver wikia and expanded. As of now, the page redirects to MacGyver (1985 TV series) .\n[Outside of a building with a door marked No Entry and a guard standing outside, Cueball and MacGyver are hiding.] Cueball: Any ideas? MacGyver: I can use the trigger mechanism of this gun to ignite a small explosive charge, propelling a metal slug into the guard's head.\n"}
{"id":445,"title":"I Am Not Good with Boomerangs","image_title":"I Am Not Good with Boomerangs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/445","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_am_not_good_with_boomerangs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/445:_I_Am_Not_Good_with_Boomerangs","transcript":"[Cueball throws a boomerang, but it hits him in the head when it returns.]\n[Cueball throws the boomerang again, but this time several boomerangs chase after him.]\n[Cueball throws the boomerang once more, and this time a shark inexplicably appears.]\n[Cueball throws the boomerang a final time, and Megan appears, hovering.] Megan: I'm leaving you.\n","explanation":"The strip shows Cueball throwing a boomerang four times, each time finding a difficulty in catching it.\nThe first time, it merely hits him in the head. The second time, six boomerangs come after him. The third time, a shark somehow returns to him. The fourth and final time, his girlfriend Megan floats back to him\u2014then she states: \"I'm leaving you.\"\nThe title text refers to a bonus strip\u2014if one reads the rightmost panels straight down, you get a strip that suggests that Megan threw multiple things at him out of anger before breaking up with him. This seems to mirror the plot of the 2006 comedy film My Super Ex-Girlfriend , in which the eponymous character throws multiple things at the protagonist (including a shark) prior to breaking up with him.\nBoomerangs return in a kind of sequel 475: Further Boomerang Difficulties , which might also have yet another sequel in 939: Arrow . Finally, boomerangs also became a main theme in the interactive comic 1350: Lorenz . The same format of multiple bad endings to the same starting set-up is used in 1515: Basketball Earth .\n[Cueball throws a boomerang, but it hits him in the head when it returns.]\n[Cueball throws the boomerang again, but this time several boomerangs chase after him.]\n[Cueball throws the boomerang once more, and this time a shark inexplicably appears.]\n[Cueball throws the boomerang a final time, and Megan appears, hovering.] Megan: I'm leaving you.\n"}
{"id":446,"title":"In Popular Culture","image_title":"In Popular Culture","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/446","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/in_popular_culture.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/446:_In_Popular_Culture","transcript":"[A fictional screen capture of the Wikipedia article for \"wood\" is shown. There is a picture of wooden boards labeled \"wooden boards.\"] Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many plants . It has been used for centuries for both fuel and as a construction material for... [cut in page.]\nIn popular culture: In episode 6 of Firefly , \" Our Mrs. Reynolds ,\" Jayne is given a wooden rain stick by a villager. In the Buffyverse , Buffy often slays Vampires using stakes made of wood. The wand used by Harry Potter is made of wood from a holly tree. The fence around the back yard of the house in The Simpsons is wooden. In the 2004 TV series Battlestar Galactica [rest of page is cut.]\n","explanation":"Wikipedia is a popular online encyclopedia with articles that are created and edited by the general public [ citation needed ] . Wikipedia entries have many sections, with the first few explaining the general concept and details behind the subject.\nWhen this comic was written, many Wikipedia articles had a section at the end entitled \"in popular culture,\" listing TV shows, movies, songs, and so on that made reference to the subject at hand. In many cases, this list was extensive, possibly because the people editing the articles were such fans of the subject or the pop culture in which it is referenced. They couldn't help but go into great detail, listing many esoteric and seemingly irrelevant elements of pop culture that were peripherally related to the subject of the article. As an example, see the old article Apollo in popular culture , which as of August 2007 redirects to Apollo . This comic caused a lot of vandalism adding an \"In popular culture\" section to the wood page.\nThe joke in this case is that even such a mundane article such as one on wood could have an \"in popular culture\" section, and, obviously, wooden items are common enough that there are any number of instances of popular culture that could be considered to \"reference it,\" even if that's something as basic as a wooden item being used as a prop in a TV show. Such information would be of little or no use to anybody, and only somebody obsessed with wood, a particular element of pop culture in which wood makes an appearance, or the concept of placing pop culture references in encyclopedia articles would bother to create or maintain such a section.\nAlso, wood being such a popular material, the list of references could be virtually endless. This is a reference to the fact that the \"in popular culture\" sections of many Wikipedia articles contained dozens of items, even for articles on fairly arcane subjects. Note that the end of this particular \"in popular culture\" section is not visible, so we don't know how long it is.\nThe title text states that in the future, there will even have to be a wiki page with the subject \"In popular culture.\" This article will also need an \"in popular culture\" section, and it will be obvious to make a reference directly to this title text, as xkcd is part of popular culture and because this title text predicted the creation of and a need for such a page. However, this would then create a circular reference. This could be considered a form of infinite loop, which is one way to cause a computer to crash (lock up). The joke is that the blogosphere could follow this endless train of circular links and itself crash, causing an \"implosion.\"\nThis comic was actually mentioned in Wikipedia:\"In popular culture\" content (however, the blogosphere did not implode) [ citation needed ] . However, on April 23, 2014, the reference was edited out. It has since been added under the external links section of Wikipedia:xkcd in popular culture . The reference was added back in May 2015.\n[A fictional screen capture of the Wikipedia article for \"wood\" is shown. There is a picture of wooden boards labeled \"wooden boards.\"] Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many plants . It has been used for centuries for both fuel and as a construction material for... [cut in page.]\nIn popular culture: In episode 6 of Firefly , \" Our Mrs. Reynolds ,\" Jayne is given a wooden rain stick by a villager. In the Buffyverse , Buffy often slays Vampires using stakes made of wood. The wand used by Harry Potter is made of wood from a holly tree. The fence around the back yard of the house in The Simpsons is wooden. In the 2004 TV series Battlestar Galactica [rest of page is cut.]\n"}
{"id":447,"title":"Too Old For This Shit","image_title":"Too Old For This Shit","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/447","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/too_old_for_this_shit.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/447:_Too_Old_For_This_Shit","transcript":"[Two Cueballs are standing in front of a whiteboard. They are facing away from each other, not yet fully conversing with each other.] Cueball 1: I wish I could do math like when I was young. Cueball 2: Huh?\n[The two now face each other. They talk to each other.] Cueball 1: It doesn't come easy like it once did. Cueball 2: Uh huh.\n[Still talking.] Cueball 1: Math is a game for the young. I need to sit back and let the future happen.\n[Still talking.] Cueball 2: You're thirteen. Cueball 1: Yes, and it's time I accept that.\n","explanation":"This comic makes fun of the fact that most mathematical geniuses have done their exceptional work (for which they eventually become famous) in their early years by exaggerating it, particularly given that \"too old for this shit\" is a phrase more appropriately used by people later in age. At the age of thirteen, even precocious mathematicians would not be pushing the frontier of mathematical knowledge, let alone to the point where they would be \"too old for it.\" As such, this is more a joke about a young boy attempting to dismiss the world around him. It also plays on the fact that in xkcd comics, it is often difficult to tell age because of lack of detail, which is necessary to set up the final punchline.\nA striking example is Carl Friedrich Gauss , the famous mathematician, who wrote his exceptional masterpiece Disquisitiones Arithmeticae at the early age of 21. This idea was for instance used in the fictional biography of Gauss, Measuring the World , where he admits to having trouble understanding his own work when he got older because of his age.\nThe \"age theory'\" applies to physics as well. Albert Einstein was also very young (26) when he published his four groundbreaking papers in the same year (his Annus Mirabilis in 1905) including the one that eventually gave him the Nobel Prize . Later in life, for instance, he never accepted the theory of quantum physics - which is now a very well established theory.\nThe title of the comic, \"Too Old For This Shit,\" is also a reference to the Lethal Weapon series, in which one of the main characters (Roger Murtaugh, played by Danny Glover) is repeatedly quoted as saying things along the line of \"I'm too old for this shit.\"\nThe title text asserts that thirteen is way too old as it claims that mathematicians should do their great work at the age of eleven! If not - they will never do anything great.\n[Two Cueballs are standing in front of a whiteboard. They are facing away from each other, not yet fully conversing with each other.] Cueball 1: I wish I could do math like when I was young. Cueball 2: Huh?\n[The two now face each other. They talk to each other.] Cueball 1: It doesn't come easy like it once did. Cueball 2: Uh huh.\n[Still talking.] Cueball 1: Math is a game for the young. I need to sit back and let the future happen.\n[Still talking.] Cueball 2: You're thirteen. Cueball 1: Yes, and it's time I accept that.\n"}
{"id":448,"title":"Good Morning","image_title":"Good Morning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/448","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/good_morning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/448:_Good_Morning","transcript":"[A drowsy Hairy walks over to Cueball on a computer.] Hairy: *Yawn* Good morning from Taipei. Cueball: You're drifting west. You were in Honolulu just yesterday. Our sleep schedules are so messed up that's it's easiest to just refer to where our internal clocks seem to be.\n","explanation":"Both characters have irregular sleeping schedules (possibly because they are programmers). As such, their circadian rhythms have become out of sync with one another, and probably out of sync with everyone else in their own timezone . They therefore experience something similar to the \" jet lag \" experience by travelers going from one timezone to another.\nThe title text clarifies that they are using \"going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM\" as their standard of measurement. If the drowsy man was \"in Honolulu\" yesterday and has woken up \"in Taipei,\" it means he has gone to sleep 6 hours later than yesterday, and is now also waking up 6 hours later than yesterday (if you don't take the International Date Line into consideration).\nThis comic may (like in 320 ) be a commentary of the 28 hour day where a person shift their sleep patterns to 6 x 28 hours a week instead of the usual 7 x 24 hours.\n[A drowsy Hairy walks over to Cueball on a computer.] Hairy: *Yawn* Good morning from Taipei. Cueball: You're drifting west. You were in Honolulu just yesterday. Our sleep schedules are so messed up that's it's easiest to just refer to where our internal clocks seem to be.\n"}
{"id":449,"title":"Things Fall Apart","image_title":"Things Fall Apart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/449","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/things_fall_apart.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/449:_Things_Fall_Apart","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are holding hands. The speech is in bubbles with arrows pointing towards the two. Not as usual with text just written above a line from the speaker.] Megan: I wonder about us. Cueball: I love you.\n[Megan lets go of Cueball's hand. But he keeps his hand in the same position as before. Cueball's speech bubble covers the bottom of Megan's, indicating that he speaks partly over her sentence.] Megan: We don't have fun together. Cueball: I love you.\n[As Megan keeps her hands down, Cueball lifts his arm even more towards her. His speech bubble is covering the top part of his head, as well as the bottom of Megan's bubble.] Megan: It's like we're clinging to the \"relationship\" framework like it's all we got. Cueball: I love you.\n[Megan leans back from Cueball as he leans towards her, one arm outstretched toward her. Cueball's speech bubble covers the lower right section of Megan's bubble, breaking her sentence off in the middle of her last word, clearly showing that he speaks in over her speech.] Megan: Who are you trying to reassur\u2014 Cueball: I love you I love you I love you I love you\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are about to break up. Megan is trying to explain things, but Cueball is constantly saying \"I love you,\" asserting that the fact that he loves her should be enough to keep her from breaking up with him. But while loving the other person is a necessary condition for sustainability, it is not a sufficient reason all on its own.\nThe title text says that 'I'm nothing without you' is a fucked-up sentiment. This could read to imply that that's what Cueball really means, and he isn't saying it that way because 'I love you' is a more acceptable way of expressing it. Saying it over and over again, like he is doing, has almost the same effect, though. Conventionally, it could be said that the mindset of someone believing that they are nothing without their partner\u2014in other words, defining their identity in terms of the other person\u2014is a dangerous and unhealthy sentiment. A person should have enough self-identity and sense of self-worth to know that they have value even outside the context of a relationship.\nThe title of the comic, \"Things Fall Apart,\" could be a reference to the poem The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats, which contains the line \"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,\" implying that things between Megan and Cueball are falling apart, and the fact that Cueball is still in love with Megan (arguably, the \"center\" of the relationship) isn't enough to sustain them.\n[Megan and Cueball are holding hands. The speech is in bubbles with arrows pointing towards the two. Not as usual with text just written above a line from the speaker.] Megan: I wonder about us. Cueball: I love you.\n[Megan lets go of Cueball's hand. But he keeps his hand in the same position as before. Cueball's speech bubble covers the bottom of Megan's, indicating that he speaks partly over her sentence.] Megan: We don't have fun together. Cueball: I love you.\n[As Megan keeps her hands down, Cueball lifts his arm even more towards her. His speech bubble is covering the top part of his head, as well as the bottom of Megan's bubble.] Megan: It's like we're clinging to the \"relationship\" framework like it's all we got. Cueball: I love you.\n[Megan leans back from Cueball as he leans towards her, one arm outstretched toward her. Cueball's speech bubble covers the lower right section of Megan's bubble, breaking her sentence off in the middle of her last word, clearly showing that he speaks in over her speech.] Megan: Who are you trying to reassur\u2014 Cueball: I love you I love you I love you I love you\n"}
{"id":450,"title":"The Sea","image_title":"The Sea","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/450","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_sea.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/450:_The_Sea","transcript":"[Cueball stands on a beach at night, staring out across the moonlit ocean. The three lines of text stand above the moon, above Cueball (white on black), and on the beach (black on white).] Cueball: The sea always makes me realize Cueball: how small I really am. Cueball: I should get one of those pumps.\n","explanation":"Cueball becomes introspective when contemplating the sea. The straightforward reading of \"how small I really am\" means he feels humbled by the sea and recognizes his insignificance on this planet. This is a common sentiment expressed in poetry, literature, and blogs.\nThe final line I should get one of those pumps is most likely to, at first, be understood as getting a pump to drain the ocean. The reflection on the joke would run along the line that Cueball is so unsatisfied with the way the ocean makes him feel, the size of the sea intimidating him, that he intends to drain the sea to make him feel better about himself. (This is of course impossible as the size of the sea is many billions if not trillions of times bigger than the biggest storage tanks on Earth today.)\nHowever, in English, the sentences I'm small and I'm big can also be a euphemism for my penis is small and my penis is big .\nEven if Cueball is not literally saying that he has a small penis, men very commonly associate their own self-image with the size of their organ. Therefore, enlarging it would improve their self-image and make them feel less small.\nThe final line in the comic: I should get one of those pumps , could thus be understood to reference a penis pump , a device that is alleged to permanently increase the size of the male member.\nThe title text is referencing that Cueball would also like another pump - and this one should be the one for draining the sea. But by specifying in the title text that the first pump is not for the sea, Randall is ensuring that it is possible to understand the full joke.\n[Cueball stands on a beach at night, staring out across the moonlit ocean. The three lines of text stand above the moon, above Cueball (white on black), and on the beach (black on white).] Cueball: The sea always makes me realize Cueball: how small I really am. Cueball: I should get one of those pumps.\n"}
{"id":451,"title":"Impostor","image_title":"Impostor","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/451","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/impostor.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/451:_Impostor","transcript":"[Caption above the panels:] My Hobby: Sitting down with grad students and timing how long it takes them to figure out that I'm not actually an expert in their field.\n[For all four panels below, there are two frames crossing the border of each panel. The ones at the top left have a caption, and the one below right has the result of the timing.]\n[Ponytail and Cueball are sitting across from each other in office chairs.] Engineering: Ponytail: Our big problem is heat dissipation Cueball: Have you tried logarithms? 48 seconds\n[Cueball is sitting in a chair at the center of a table looking left at another Cueball-like guy. To the right is a long black-haired girl.] Linguistics: Cueball: Ah, so does this Finno-ugric family include, say, Klingon? 63 Seconds\n[Cueball is standing with his hands up talking to another Cueball-like guy and Megan who has lifted her arm to palm her face.] Sociology: Cueball: Yeah, my latest work is on ranking people from best to worst. 4 Minutes\n[Cueball is sitting in an armchair with another Cueball-like guy sitting attentively in front of him on the floor.] Literary Criticism: Cueball: You see, the deconstruction is inextricable from not only the text, but also the self. Eight papers and two books and they haven't caught on.\n","explanation":"While the comic is ostensibly about grad students, it is really Randall 's way of poking fun at the relative rigor of different fields, reminiscent of 435: Purity . In the comic, Cueball attempts to pose as an expert in a given field (a recurring pastime of his) and sees how long it takes before the real experts detect his nonsense.\nThe first panel shows Cueball discussing an engineering problem with Ponytail . Ponytail is talking about an immediate practical problem involving heat dissipation. Cueball suggests 'using logarithms ' to solve it; logarithms are a mathematical tool used for expressing an exponential relationship as a linear one. While logarithms have many uses in engineering, they are an abstract mathematical concept, and not a method of dissipating heat, so in the context of the conversation, it makes no sense and outs Cueball as having grabbed a random word he knows engineers use and thrown it in to sound smart. With the engineer's conversation focusing on an immediate practical application, it only takes 48 seconds before he exposes himself.\nThe second panel shows a conversation with linguistic grad students who are apparently discussing the Finno-Ugric language family (a family of related languages that includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian). Cueball asks if Klingon is included in this family. The linguists instantly recognize the meaninglessness of the statement \u2014 either because Klingon is a constructed language, designed to sound \"alien\" to avoid sounding like any human language (thus it cannot be part of any real linguistic family), or because \"Klingon\" is a recognizable pop-culture reference. Either way he has exposed himself after only 63 seconds of conversation. That all being said, as the inventors of the Klingon language have taken the word order from the Finno-Ugric languages after a research that the order of \"predicate, subject, and object\" is least common in human languages, so there is at least some roots of Klingon language to analyze.\nIn the third panel, the humour comes from the fact that the idea of sociology existing to rank human beings on some arbitrary intrinsic value is not only ridiculous in a scientific context, but also politically offensive. Cueball unknowingly recreates the logic behind some of the worst crimes in human history, a problem sociologists are trained to be very aware of. However, it may be something that a less educated non-sociologist would assume could pass within the field. When he describes his unscientific and offensive approach, we see one of the sociology grad students facepalming in exasperation. Because a non-expert may be able to sound somewhat educated in sociology before making such a slip-up, it is four minutes into the conversation before he is detected.\nIn the final panel, he attempts to pass as an expert in literary criticism . This field notoriously uses a great deal of impenetrable jargon, so when Cueball makes up seemingly meaningless sentences, no one notices. His quip at \"deconstructing the self\" may be a meta joke about the field itself failing under deconstruction... (or this sentence may be a meta-meta- example of someone applying literary criticism standards to the analysis of this specific comic). We find that rather than being caught out within minutes as in the other fields, he has now published 8 papers and 2 books. The humor comes from the fact that he has accidentally made himself into a recognized authority in the field, despite not having any idea what he was talking about. In this panel, Cueball is sitting in an armchair in the position of an expert lecturing to a student, who sits at his feet apparently absorbing his inane statement.\nThis implies that the field itself has published a great deal of meaningless things that only superficially look meaningful through the impenetrability of the jargon. The title text challenges the audience to take a look at the Wikipedia article for literary deconstruction if they don't believe this criticism applies - the Wikipedia article in question is almost constantly flagged for \"clean-up\" on the grounds that it's a jumbled mess. An archive of the article as it was when this comic was published is available here .\n[Caption above the panels:] My Hobby: Sitting down with grad students and timing how long it takes them to figure out that I'm not actually an expert in their field.\n[For all four panels below, there are two frames crossing the border of each panel. The ones at the top left have a caption, and the one below right has the result of the timing.]\n[Ponytail and Cueball are sitting across from each other in office chairs.] Engineering: Ponytail: Our big problem is heat dissipation Cueball: Have you tried logarithms? 48 seconds\n[Cueball is sitting in a chair at the center of a table looking left at another Cueball-like guy. To the right is a long black-haired girl.] Linguistics: Cueball: Ah, so does this Finno-ugric family include, say, Klingon? 63 Seconds\n[Cueball is standing with his hands up talking to another Cueball-like guy and Megan who has lifted her arm to palm her face.] Sociology: Cueball: Yeah, my latest work is on ranking people from best to worst. 4 Minutes\n[Cueball is sitting in an armchair with another Cueball-like guy sitting attentively in front of him on the floor.] Literary Criticism: Cueball: You see, the deconstruction is inextricable from not only the text, but also the self. Eight papers and two books and they haven't caught on.\n"}
{"id":452,"title":"Mission","image_title":"Mission","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/452","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mission.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/452:_Mission","transcript":"[Beret Guy and Cueball are rappelling down separate ropes into the interior workings of a large machine.] Cueball: Okay, we're in the belly of the machine. You got the charges? Beret Guy: The what?\n[The two are standing next to some large pieces of machinery.] Cueball [gesturing]: The explosive charges! Beret Guy [pulling out a bag]: I just brought this bag for pastries. Cueball: The hell? We're on a mission here!\nBeret Guy [looking around]: This isn't a bakery? Cueball [head in hand]: Oh, Christ, not this shit again.\nBeret Guy [crouching by some lug nuts lying on a piece of machinery]: What about these scones? Cueball: Those are lug nuts. Beret Guy [stuffing them in his mouth]: ...Maybe SOME of them aren't. crunch Ow! crunch\n","explanation":"Cueball and Beret Guy are on a mission, intending to destroy whatever machine they are in, except that Beret Guy tends to be a bit surreal and brought a bag for holding pastries instead of explosive charges.\nThis is not the first time he's made such a bakery mistake; see 434: xkcd Goes to the Airport .\nHe then attempts to eat what Cueball identifies as lug nuts , believing them to be scones. In reality, lug nuts do not look very similar to scones. [ citation needed ] He bites into them and it hurts him, but as he says, maybe some of them are not lug nuts, and he wishes to test them all.\nThe title text further emphasizes Beret Guy's obsession with bakery goods, by stating that if a random object is selected, there will be a 1\/6 chance that it is a scone, which explains his behavior with the lug nuts. This is, of course, a ridiculous assertion, as if it were true, more than 16% of all things in the universe would have to be scones.\nBeret Guy and scones are also referenced in the title text of both 677: Asshole and 1030: Keyed .\n[Beret Guy and Cueball are rappelling down separate ropes into the interior workings of a large machine.] Cueball: Okay, we're in the belly of the machine. You got the charges? Beret Guy: The what?\n[The two are standing next to some large pieces of machinery.] Cueball [gesturing]: The explosive charges! Beret Guy [pulling out a bag]: I just brought this bag for pastries. Cueball: The hell? We're on a mission here!\nBeret Guy [looking around]: This isn't a bakery? Cueball [head in hand]: Oh, Christ, not this shit again.\nBeret Guy [crouching by some lug nuts lying on a piece of machinery]: What about these scones? Cueball: Those are lug nuts. Beret Guy [stuffing them in his mouth]: ...Maybe SOME of them aren't. crunch Ow! crunch\n"}
{"id":453,"title":"Upcoming Hurricanes","image_title":"Upcoming Hurricanes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/453","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/upcoming_hurricanes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/453:_Upcoming_Hurricanes","transcript":"[An unlabelled map shows the region roughly between central Canada and northern Brazil. Dotted lines indicating hurricane paths cover the map, all red except Hurricane Blue, which is blue. Each line is labelled - here follows the labels as they appear from the top and down:] Hurricane Where-the-Hell-Is-Bermuda Hurricane Illinois-Has-It-Too-Easy Hurricane Freud Hurricane Screw-It-Let's-Just-Trash-Florida-Again Hurricane Red Hurricane Blue Hurricane cos(x)\n","explanation":"This comic gives ludicrous and ironic upcoming hurricane paths on an unlabelled map of the Americas that shows the region roughly between central Canada and northern Brazil . Blue and red dotted lines indicate the future hurricane paths.\nEnters from the east side of the map, wanders around the Atlantic Ocean in a scribble that seems to take the shape of an Ampersand . Then it goes north for a while, and then peters out without entering the Bermuda Triangle . The Bermuda Triangle is a location in the Atlantic Ocean loosely framed by the three corners Bermuda , Miami , and Puerto Rico . The myth is that (too) many ships and planes get lost once they enter inside the area of this triangle and disappear without a trace. In this case, the hurricane gets lost before entering and can't even find the triangle. It may also simply be a reference to the statistic that Bermuda is affected by many Atlantic hurricanes , and that this hurricane got lost on its way to its target.\nComes from somewhere to the north-west, goes through Illinois , and then back to the north-west. Illinois is located far from the ocean, and thus suffers few hurricanes - this particular one is extremely unlikely, and according to the name, exists purely so that Illinois will have a hurricane to deal with. Interestingly enough (though it did not affect the Chicago area or correspond with the path displayed in the comic), roughly one year later, a Super derecho , a storm resembling a hurricane or tropical storm in movement and form, struck central and South Illinois, in addition to much of Missouri and Kansas .\nRefers to Sigmund Freud , who believed that accidental sexual expression was a reflection of the unconscious mind's sexual desires. The hurricane's path forms a pair of testicles beside Florida. Florida, due to its shape and location, can be said to resemble a penis, and the hurricane's shape and position exemplify Freud's ideas.\nComes from the east, starts to curve to the north, and then turns sharply to head straight for Florida and zigzag through it four times before dying out. Sticking out from the rest of the US, Florida is prone to hurricanes from the East, South, and West. And with the state not being very high or wide, it is common for a hurricane to run over Florida, lose some strength, then rebuild strength over the hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico, only to do a U-turn and strike again. This is not exactly what happens with this particular hurricane, where it turns out into the Atlantic Ocean again each time, suggesting a malicious intent.\nBlue is the only hurricane path drawn in blue. The two hurricanes are playing a game zipping in straight lines and right angles around Haiti , Jamaica , and Cuba . When Red successfully cuts off Blue , the latter instantly dies, and then Red dies shortly thereafter. The game they play is the game of Light Cycles from the video game based on the movie Tron . Hurricane Blue lost because it crashed into the wall of light left by Hurricane Red's light cycle . (Note that real hurricanes are not dotted lines; the two hurricanes would have merged long before Hurricane Blue \"lost.\")\nForms a curve in the shape of a sinusoid above the bottom edge of the map. Its path resembles a sine wave. This kind of trigonometric functions can, however, both be expressed as sin(x) or cos(x), the latter being a cosine wave . They look exactly the same when there is no clearly defined coordinate system as in this case.\nThe title text refers to the 1938 New England hurricane (also known as the Long Island Express) that caused $4.7 billion in damage. Had it been further west, it could have caused more damage, as the right side of a hurricane is stronger and more destructive than the left side, as the winds on the right side push water inland. Randall asks for more damage assessments for such a hurricane that would be able to flood Manhattan in New York . Only four years after this cartoon was published, making it almost prophetic, Hurricane Sandy did strike the New York\u2013New Jersey area as a post-tropical cyclone storm. Hurricane Sandy caused an estimated $74 billion in damage.\nThe 1938 hurricane is also referenced in 980: Money , where it is calculated that it would have caused $78 billion had it happened in 2011. However, if that hurricane had taken the same turn as Sandy did, the cost today could have been a staggering $237 billion.\n[An unlabelled map shows the region roughly between central Canada and northern Brazil. Dotted lines indicating hurricane paths cover the map, all red except Hurricane Blue, which is blue. Each line is labelled - here follows the labels as they appear from the top and down:] Hurricane Where-the-Hell-Is-Bermuda Hurricane Illinois-Has-It-Too-Easy Hurricane Freud Hurricane Screw-It-Let's-Just-Trash-Florida-Again Hurricane Red Hurricane Blue Hurricane cos(x)\n"}
{"id":454,"title":"Rewiring","image_title":"Rewiring","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/454","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rewiring.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/454:_Rewiring","transcript":"[Cueball is feeding cable into a device on a desk labeled \"fax.\"] Fax: zzzzzz [Outdoors, showing a plant and a lamp (indicates panels 1 and 3 are separate locations).] [Megan, laptop behind her, is pulling a cable out of a fax machine.] Fax: zzzzz\n","explanation":"At the time this comic was written, most residential buildings in North America were wired for analog devices using the old landline telephone services , although thanks to the growth of internet telephone and wireless telephone technologies, including cordless and mobile phones, this in-house wiring was increasingly redundant. See also Use of mobile phones .\nAt the time, people who took their internet access seriously would have preferred that at least some of the phone wiring and phone jacks in their residences were Ethernet ( Cat-5 or Cat-6 ) wiring and ( RJ45 ) jacks for providing wired internet access throughout their home, or in this case, to their neighbour's home, so that they wouldn't have to resort to Wi-Fi , which was then slower and less reliable than a wired connection.\nThe title text suggests that it shows a fanciful way of converting analog phone lines to digital ethernet lines by simply faxing an ethernet cable, since a fax machine is a tool for converting analog content into digital.\nSince the faxing of the ethernet cable is apparently successful, the comic is not really about the conversion, but is instead a subtle computer network joke about tunneling , whereby you can embed one kind of network access protocol within a very different protocol. Herein lies the humour: Cueball and Megan are apparently under the impression that they can achieve a faster connection by tunnelling a high-speed protocol (ethernet) through a slower (landline telephone service) one. Generally speaking, this is not true. The only exception is when embedding a compressed data stream within a non-compressed standard. The performance boosts, however, are typically modest for lossless compression , and not the orders of magnitude difference our novices apparently hope for.\nThe title text, which is a reference to foonetic user relsqui, was changed to correct their name to \"Finn\" after they came out as agender. (This comic was presumably inspired by this conversation they had over IRC.)\n[Cueball is feeding cable into a device on a desk labeled \"fax.\"] Fax: zzzzzz [Outdoors, showing a plant and a lamp (indicates panels 1 and 3 are separate locations).] [Megan, laptop behind her, is pulling a cable out of a fax machine.] Fax: zzzzz\n"}
{"id":455,"title":"Hats","image_title":"Hats","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/455","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hats.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/455:_Hats","transcript":"[Black Hat is walking.]\n[Black Hat stops in front of another man with two Black Hats, the uppermost hat tilted about 45 degrees back.]\n[After two panels, the original Black Hat steps backward, shuddering slightly.]\n","explanation":"Black Hat encounters a person who is wearing not one, but two black hats. Black Hat is not a person to be trifled with, but from his reaction, he apparently believes that Two Black Hats represents a considerable danger to him. Black Hat knows how dangerous he is to those with one fewer black hat than him, so he continues the logic and realises that one who has one more black hat must be proportionally dangerous to him.\nIf a black hat is assumed to be akin to a badge of rank, then Two Black Hats certainly is superior to him in the capacity and willingness to do evil. Alternatively, and even more worrying, Two Black Hats could be someone who has the desire and the ability to acquire black hats (possibly killing the previous owners in the process if having two black hats really means that the individual is more malevolent than Black Hat), which he then wears like a badge of honor. With all this in mind, Black Hat edges away, keeping Two Black Hats in sight at all times. This movement and the accompanying line could also be interpreted as Black Hat being physically pushed away, like two negative or two positive poles of a magnet, although this does not explain why it only starts after a beat panel.\nThis comic is also a metatextual joke about xkcd itself. Because of the comic's simplistic art style and characterization, Black Hat has only two defining physical traits: his hat and his hair, which we see when he takes off his hat, and one defining personality trait, his malevolence. Randall then implies that the two traits must be correlated, so that a black hat signifies malevolence, and accordingly two hats must signify even more malevolence -- an idea that wouldn't make any sense in real life, where a person with two hats would just be making an odd fashion choice. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text is simply \"...\" This may represent the slow-motion pause during which Black Hat's nefarious life flashes before his eyes, as he considers his impending doom. It may also emphasize how the usually witty Black Hat is, for once, speechless. Or the title text is similar to that in 412: Startled , where Black Hat also becomes the little one (and with much focus on the black hat, as in this comic). As mentioned there, such a short title text could be due to the fact that it's a somewhat surreal comic, and any further commentary might have detrimentally brought it down to Earth. See also 82: Frame , with the same title text, but no relation to black hats.\nTwo Black Hats makes a reappearance in 826: Guest Week: Zach Weiner (SMBC) , down by the restrooms.\n[Black Hat is walking.]\n[Black Hat stops in front of another man with two Black Hats, the uppermost hat tilted about 45 degrees back.]\n[After two panels, the original Black Hat steps backward, shuddering slightly.]\n"}
{"id":456,"title":"Cautionary","image_title":"Cautionary","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/456","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cautionary.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/456:_Cautionary","transcript":"Linux: A True Story: [Cueball talks on a cell phone.] Week One: Cousin: Hey, it's your cousin. I got a new computer but don't want Windows. Can you help me install \"Linux\"? Cueball: Sure.\n[Cueball's cousin sits in an office chair with her laptop on her lap. She is on the phone.] Week Two: Cousin: It says my XORG is broken. What's an \"XORG\"? Where can I look that up? Cueball: Hmm, lemme show you man pages.\n[Cueball's cousin crouches on the floor with the laptop on her lap. She is still on the phone.] Week Six: Cousin: Due to auto-config issues, I'm leaving Ubuntu for Debian. Cueball: Uh. Cousin: Or Gentoo. Cueball: Uh oh.\n[Cueball's cousin lies on her stomach with the laptop on the floor. On the floor are several pieces of paper and a book. Cueball stands to her left.] Week Twelve: Cueball: You haven't answered your phone in days. Cousin: Can't sleep. Must compile kernel. Cueball: I'm too late.\n[Box with text:] Parents: talk to your kids about Linux... Before somebody else does.\n","explanation":"Cueball 's cousin decides to install Linux on her new PC, and calls Cueball, whom she views as her personal Linux expert.  The overarching joke revolves around the fact that Linux, especially home PC-based GNU\/Linux, was (at the time of this comic's publication in 2008) much more often used as a \"hobby\" OS, as compared against a \"productivity\" OS such as Windows or macOS .  Large numbers of people use Windows or Mac by default, because it came with their computer hardware when they bought it, and it already had the software suite they wanted to use installed along with it.  Linux, on the other hand, rarely comes pre-installed on PC hardware and generally must be deliberately chosen and acquired.  While it can be set up to achieve efficient and productive workflow in virtually any area on PCs, because it often must be consciously selected, installed, and configured by users, it tends to either attract or, in a few cases, create individuals who take disproportionate pleasure in, and derive self-identification from, hacking the operating system itself.  Thus, many people who are Linux enthusiasts began by not really knowing anything about it other than that it's free of cost , but the process of actually building Linux on their machines gradually led them to take an increasing interest in it, which the comic humorously likens to substance addiction.\nXorg (officially X.Org ) is an implementation of the X Window System, a program responsible for the graphical display used on Linux.  If it has configuration problems, which was quite common with some video card drivers back in 2008 (especially those for ATI Radeon cards ), it is often difficult and\/or painful to fix (see 963: X11 ). Man pages are manual pages for Unix-based operating systems and software, usually accessible online but also bundled with the software itself.  Considered helpful and clear by the sorts of advanced computer users who typically run Linux, the text-only documentation can seem inaccessible for less-technical users.  Here, the joke starts to build in that Cueball's cousin, a computer novice who just wanted something to work out of the box, is now having to learn how to understand Linux documentation in order to fix her ongoing Xorg problem (likely an inability to start a graphical environment, something a novice user would depend on).\nIn the third panel, we see that the cousin has had new problems.  Though she likely has been able to fix Xorg, she is now having problems with Ubuntu's auto-configuration tools.  She suggests that she is considering switching to a more advanced Linux distro in order to sidestep the failing autoconfig issues.  A Linux \"distro\" (distribution) is a suite of tools and applications that provides a specific user experience on top of the core Linux operating system.  Each distro has a different look and feel and different feature sets and design philosophies. Ubuntu is a very popular \"beginner\" version of Linux, designed to \"just work\" and be familiar and usable to people fresh out of Windows. Debian is a popular but somewhat more \"advanced,\" traditionally \" Unix-like \", distro, with a huge and diverse base of supported software that generally requires more Linux know-how to configure and use.  In fact, Ubuntu is based on Debian, and under the hood they have similar features, so that it would not be considered much of a leap for a competent Ubuntu user to switch. Gentoo , on the other hand, is a very advanced distro allowing for extreme customization and optimization, but requiring extensive install and setup time.  It is generally considered to be complex and beginner-unfriendly (to the point that its difficulty has become somewhat memetic in the Linux world), a trade-off for providing a powerful and versatile set of tools for advanced system hacking.  It appears that during the past four weeks, Cueball's cousin has started to consider that solving her problem would require complex tweaking.\nIn the fourth panel, it appears that the cousin has indeed switched to Gentoo, because a hallmark of that distribution is that the kernel (the basic core of the operating system) must be compiled from source code upon installation.  Source code is a computer program expressed in human-readable text; however, source code cannot be run directly by a computer, and instead needs to be compiled into low level machine instructions the computer can understand.  This means that with Gentoo, instead of downloading an already functional Linux system to install and run, users download the source code for the system, customize it to their own needs, then compile the code into a executable version of the OS, all before they can begin to use the system.  Reasons that the cousin may want to do this include needing the kernel to be compiled in a non-standard way that is not supported by more mainstream distros, or incorporating third-party code or even her own modifications into the kernel.  Compiling a kernel with the aforementioned modifications is a tricky affair, since any mistake or oversight can render the kernel, and thus operating system, non-functional, requiring the custom kernel to be anew.  This panel implies that this has indeed happened, with the cousin compiling the kernel over and over again for days without sleep.  To many such advanced users, their installation of Linux is like a hobby car: a project to be constantly tweaked and adjusted to fit one's exact needs, that spends as much time sitting around with its hood open as it is actually used for its ostensible purpose.  By week 12, it is likely that Cueball's cousin has totally forgotten about her original plans for the computer and has become obsessed with Linux in a way that Randall compares with drug addiction for comic effect.\nSimilarly, in the fifth panel, Randall riffs on the old anti-drug message \"Parents, talk to your kids about drugs before someone else does,\" with the meaning being if a responsible adult does not educate their kids about the dangers of drugs (or Linux), then someone else (likely a peer) might convince them that drugs (or Linux) is a good idea.  There is an additional call to the theory of gateway drugs , where mild drugs like alcohol or cannabis will lead to harder drugs like cocaine and heroin.  In the comic, Cueball's cousin starts out with Ubuntu, a \"gateway\" version of Linux, which leads to Gentoo, a harder, more niche version, with the end result being her vanishing for weeks inside her house, compiling her kernel, like a junkie hopelessly hooked on drugs.\nThe title text continues the joke about Linux's poor support for many Wi-Fi cards common in 2008, a device that is not only well supported on Windows, but was typically seen as making networking easy for less technical users.\nWhile the comic sarcastically pokes fun at the difficulties in using Linux (circa 2008), it also indirectly shows some of its advantages.  The first one is that it is a freely available alternative to Windows; the second is that it provides users the tools to make fixing problems possible, whereas with Windows, the only problems that are fixed are the ones Microsoft chooses to fix; and the third is that it can increase one's knowledge of one's own computer, as the cousin, who barely seems to know how computers work past very basic end-user functionality, has become extremely advanced after several weeks.  The comic is also somewhat anachronistic, as over time, hardware support in Linux has become much more robust; it is currently unlikely that Cueball's cousin would experience broken graphics or wind up in kernel compile hell to enable basic functions such as Wi-Fi.\nLinux: A True Story: [Cueball talks on a cell phone.] Week One: Cousin: Hey, it's your cousin. I got a new computer but don't want Windows. Can you help me install \"Linux\"? Cueball: Sure.\n[Cueball's cousin sits in an office chair with her laptop on her lap. She is on the phone.] Week Two: Cousin: It says my XORG is broken. What's an \"XORG\"? Where can I look that up? Cueball: Hmm, lemme show you man pages.\n[Cueball's cousin crouches on the floor with the laptop on her lap. She is still on the phone.] Week Six: Cousin: Due to auto-config issues, I'm leaving Ubuntu for Debian. Cueball: Uh. Cousin: Or Gentoo. Cueball: Uh oh.\n[Cueball's cousin lies on her stomach with the laptop on the floor. On the floor are several pieces of paper and a book. Cueball stands to her left.] Week Twelve: Cueball: You haven't answered your phone in days. Cousin: Can't sleep. Must compile kernel. Cueball: I'm too late.\n[Box with text:] Parents: talk to your kids about Linux... Before somebody else does.\n"}
{"id":457,"title":"Frustration","image_title":"Frustration","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/457","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/frustration.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/457:_Frustration","transcript":"[Black bra with Rubik's cube closure.]\n","explanation":"A bra is pictured here, but instead of a traditional clasp, a Rubik's cube is used instead. The comic is a metaphor for how many men (and potentially women who don't wear bras) have difficulty removing their woman lover's bra before sex.\nWomen who wear bras are going to be quite adept at unhooking their bras simply due to experience and muscle memory. However, many common bra clasps are unique to bras and aren't found on other clothing, so their bra-less lover, lacking that experience, might fumble with the clasp for quite some time. In the heat of the moment, a lover may feel frustrated if they feel that the act of removing a bra is needlessly complicated and distracts from the activity at hand (namely sex). Depending on the clasp mechanism, attempting to remove the bra may seem as frustrating (hence the comic title) and complicated as solving a Rubik's cube.\nA literal bra clasped with a Rubik's cube would doubtless be especially frustrating, as someone wishing to remove the bra would have to solve the Rubik's cube every time in order to undo the clasp. This would doubtless prove annoying, especially for a partner who may want to remove the wearer's clothing without impediment.  A normal bra clasp can be tricky enough for the inexperienced user, but the addition of the Rubik's Cube element is going too far. However, it is possible that this is actually a nerdsnipe bra, as it appears to be a front-clasped bra, making the Rubik's cube a red herring.\nThe title text is an imagined conversation between someone trying to undo this bra and someone who is likely wearing the bra. The first person explains that they can \"do it\" (i.e. undo the bra) in under a minute, which is a reasonably impressive skill to have if you are not a professional speedcuber . The second person replies that they've noticed, a sarcastic reply that relies on the alternative, sexual meaning of \"do it,\" implying a complaint about the first person's speedy performance in bed.\n[Black bra with Rubik's cube closure.]\n"}
{"id":458,"title":"Regrets","image_title":"Regrets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/458","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/regrets.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/458:_Regrets","transcript":"[Bar Graph] Number of Google results for: \"I _____ have kissed her\" (or him) Shouldn't: 1,213 Should: 10,230\n","explanation":"The comic is a bar graph that shows more people regret having not pursued\/kissed a love interest than regret having pursued\/kissed one.\nIt should be noted that as of June 28, 2020, the position has reversed: there are about 52.5 million results for \"I should have kissed her\" and 62.7 million for \"I shouldn't have kissed her.\"\nThe title text refers to the Friedberg and Seltzer movie Epic Movie , a \"comedy\" movie that received overwhelmingly negative reception, and is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made. In referencing that movie, Randall agrees with that opinion and expresses the theme of regret in a completely different context by suggesting that people who watched the movie overwhelmingly regretted doing so.\nAfter this comic was released, the search results for \"I'm glad I saw Epic Movie\" at Google did grow up to more than 8,000 results.\n[Bar Graph] Number of Google results for: \"I _____ have kissed her\" (or him) Shouldn't: 1,213 Should: 10,230\n"}
{"id":459,"title":"Holy Ghost","image_title":"Holy Ghost","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/459","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/holy_ghost.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/459:_Holy_Ghost","transcript":"[The Pope stands behind a table.] Pope: This is a disaster. Ghostbuster (off-screen): Is it really that bad? [The Pope seen from the side in white on a black background. The text is in white:] Pope: Do you know how much scripture we'll have to revise? Ghostbuster (off-screen): Look, we've apologized \u2013 [Zoom out from the bishop] Pope: I mean, we can't have a trinity with just a Father and a Son! Ghostbuster (off-screen): Again we're sorry. [The four Cueball-like Ghostbusters with their proton packs.] Pope (off-screen): Sorry's not enough. Guards, take their proton packs. Ghostbuster: Hey, we were just doing our jobs!\n","explanation":"The majority of Christian sects (including Roman Catholicism ) profess belief in the conception of a singular God wherein there is a mysterious unity of three distinct 'persons' who share in one another's divinity, in a concept called the Trinity . The three persons are conventionally called the Father , the Son , and the Holy Spirit \u2014 but in more archaic English usage, the third person was referred to as the Holy Ghost .\nThe 1984 movie Ghostbusters was based on the premise that ghosts exist and that four unemployed men had access to technology that could trap such ghosts. These men formed a business as Ghostbusters, and an important tool in their arsenal was a so-called \"proton stream\" powered by a wearable backpack. These streams would prod or stun ghosts, allowing them to be maneuvered into traps. Throughout the movie, the Ghostbusters reminded each other 'not to cross the streams', as this was supposed to cause a disastrous reaction, until the climax of the movie where crossing the streams was required to banish the main antagonist.\nHere we see that the Ghostbusters have apparently just encountered and eliminated the Holy Ghost, and are being taken to task by the Pope , the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. He points out that much of Christian theology is grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity and is unwilling to accept the Ghostbusters' apology.\nThe title text is a play on a short Catholic prayer called the Sign of the Cross (the physical motions of which involve touching the forehead, chest, and shoulders), the practice of which is colloquially called 'crossing oneself', and on the danger of the Ghostbusters' 'crossing the streams' and touching two proton streams together, which in Ghostbusters canon causes an explosive chain reaction in all nearby atoms.\n[The Pope stands behind a table.] Pope: This is a disaster. Ghostbuster (off-screen): Is it really that bad? [The Pope seen from the side in white on a black background. The text is in white:] Pope: Do you know how much scripture we'll have to revise? Ghostbuster (off-screen): Look, we've apologized \u2013 [Zoom out from the bishop] Pope: I mean, we can't have a trinity with just a Father and a Son! Ghostbuster (off-screen): Again we're sorry. [The four Cueball-like Ghostbusters with their proton packs.] Pope (off-screen): Sorry's not enough. Guards, take their proton packs. Ghostbuster: Hey, we were just doing our jobs!\n"}
{"id":460,"title":"Paleontology","image_title":"Paleontology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/460","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/paleontology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/460:_Paleontology","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail in a museum, near a reconstructed dinosaur fossil and a display cabinet.] Ponytail: Man, paleontology sucks these days. Cueball: Why? Ponytail: Jurassic Park came out 15 years ago. Cueball: So? Ponytail: Today's grad students got into dinosaurs after seeing it as kids. They don't care about fossils. Brats. [A woman in a hat exploring a barren landscape.] Ponytail: Before they had living dinosaurs handed to them by Hollywood, I was out in Texas digging up Arcocanthosaur teeth. Cueball: So, you were into dinosaurs when they were still underground? Ponytail: Exactly!\n","explanation":"This comic is essentially a set up for a pun: \"Underground\" can mean \"under the ground\" (buried in the dirt) or \"non-mainstream.\" In this case, Ponytail is whining that she had been doing paleontology before Jurassic Park kicked paleontology into the mainstream with living reproductions of dinosaurs, thus apparently undermining the hard work paleontologists had done. In other words, this comic is also poking fun at hipsters.\nOf note is the fact that Acrocanthosaurus is misspelled in the third panel as \" arco canthosaur.\"  Assuming this isn't merely a spelling mistake on Randall 's part, Ponytail's incorrect pronunciation further undermines her self-proclaimed superiority over all the Jurassic Park -inspired \"bandwagon\" paleontologists.\nThe title text refers to the controversy of calling the Brontosaurus by its newer, correct (at the time) generic name of Apatosaurus , despite its previous name still being in mainstream use long after its taxonomic redefinition in 1903. (As of 2015, Brontosaurus is once again the correct generic name, as it has been reclassified as a distinct genus .) The title text claims that this renaming has \"jumped the ichthyosaur,\" which is a play on the idiom \" jumping the shark \" \u2014 i.e. that the subject of dinosaurs has reached a point of declining relevance, and Brontosaurus has been renamed as a publicity stunt to compensate. The \" shark \" in the idiom has been replaced by an \" Ichthyosaur ,\" which was a marine reptile that resembled a shark or dolphin and lived alongside dinosaurs during the Mesozoic era (although sharks also lived during that time). 636: Brontosaurus also references the Brontosaurus name change. A Brontosaurus also appears in 15: Just Alerting You and an Apatosaurus in 650: Nowhere .\n[Cueball and Ponytail in a museum, near a reconstructed dinosaur fossil and a display cabinet.] Ponytail: Man, paleontology sucks these days. Cueball: Why? Ponytail: Jurassic Park came out 15 years ago. Cueball: So? Ponytail: Today's grad students got into dinosaurs after seeing it as kids. They don't care about fossils. Brats. [A woman in a hat exploring a barren landscape.] Ponytail: Before they had living dinosaurs handed to them by Hollywood, I was out in Texas digging up Arcocanthosaur teeth. Cueball: So, you were into dinosaurs when they were still underground? Ponytail: Exactly!\n"}
{"id":461,"title":"Google Maps","image_title":"Google Maps","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/461","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/google_maps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/461:_Google_Maps","transcript":"My road trip with my brother ran into trouble around page three of the Google Maps printout\n[Google Maps printout.] \u2190 70. Slight left at RT-22 - go 6.8 mi \u2192 71. Turn right to stay on RT-22 - go 2.6 mi \u2190 72. Turn left at Lake Shore Rd - go 312 ft \u2192 73. Turn right at Dock St - go 427 ft [An icon of water] 74. Take the ferry across the lake. - go 2.8 mi\n[A car is driving in the dark.] Brother: Okay, now take Dock St toward the ferry. Cueball: We're supposed to take a ferry? It's past midnight, and these woods are creepy. Brother: Google Maps wouldn't steer us wrong.\n[Cueball and his brother stand outside the car. The ferry has a sign on it reading CLOSED.]\n[Cueball is standing next to his brother, who is holding a Google Maps printout.]\n[Cueball motions towards his brother.] Cueball: Let me see those directions.\n[Google Maps printout.] [An icon of water] 74. Take the ferry across the lake. - go 2.8 mi \u2197 75. Climb the HILL toward Hangman's Ridge, avoiding any mountain lions. - up 1,172 ft \u21b7 76. When you reach an old barn, go around back, knock on the second door, and ask for Charlie. - go 52 ft [An icon of a van] 77. Tell Charlie the Dancing Stones are restless . He will give you his van . - Careful [An icon of a straw man] 78. Take Charlie's van down Old Mine Road . Do not wake the Straw Man . - go \u03c0 mi \u2190 79. Turn left on Comstock . When you feel the blood chill in your veins , stop the van and get out. - go 3.2 mi \u2193 80. Stand very still. Exits are north , south , and east , but are blocked by a Spectral Wolf . - go 0 ft [An icon of a menacing face] 81. The Spectral Wolf fears only fire . The Google Maps Team can no longer help you, but if you master the wolf , he will guide you. Godspeed. - go\u00a0?? mi","explanation":"Google Maps is a web mapping service application. Before smartphones with GPS mapping software were widespread and most people's printers hadn't yet run out of ink, it was common to print out directions to take with you on a trip. The web version of Google Maps has many features including a route planner. As sophisticated as early versions were, it occasionally gave suboptimal directions. For example, the directions may tell you to take an exit that, in reality, is unmarked. Directions also did not take time of day into account, which would help in planning routes to avoid traffic or to make use of services such as a ferry.\nThough no specific game or movie is referenced, steps 75 to 81 of the directions read like the plot of a horror film, a guide of a video game, or a role playing game. A straw man is another term for scarecrow, a common antagonist in both. Step 80 reads exactly like an old text adventure game's description of an area.\nThere are additional small jokes in the distance column of the directions:\nThis might be a reference to Google Maps' many easter eggs .\nThe title text tells us that Cueball and his brother attempted to drive around the lake, since they could not take the ferry. It seems they also had an unfortunate run-in with the Straw Man, apparently waking him as the directions warned against.\nMy road trip with my brother ran into trouble around page three of the Google Maps printout\n[Google Maps printout.] \u2190 70. Slight left at RT-22 - go 6.8 mi \u2192 71. Turn right to stay on RT-22 - go 2.6 mi \u2190 72. Turn left at Lake Shore Rd - go 312 ft \u2192 73. Turn right at Dock St - go 427 ft [An icon of water] 74. Take the ferry across the lake. - go 2.8 mi\n[A car is driving in the dark.] Brother: Okay, now take Dock St toward the ferry. Cueball: We're supposed to take a ferry? It's past midnight, and these woods are creepy. Brother: Google Maps wouldn't steer us wrong.\n[Cueball and his brother stand outside the car. The ferry has a sign on it reading CLOSED.]\n[Cueball is standing next to his brother, who is holding a Google Maps printout.]\n[Cueball motions towards his brother.] Cueball: Let me see those directions.\n[Google Maps printout.] [An icon of water] 74. Take the ferry across the lake. - go 2.8 mi \u2197 75. Climb the HILL toward Hangman's Ridge, avoiding any mountain lions. - up 1,172 ft \u21b7 76. When you reach an old barn, go around back, knock on the second door, and ask for Charlie. - go 52 ft [An icon of a van] 77. Tell Charlie the Dancing Stones are restless . He will give you his van . - Careful [An icon of a straw man] 78. Take Charlie's van down Old Mine Road . Do not wake the Straw Man . - go \u03c0 mi \u2190 79. Turn left on Comstock . When you feel the blood chill in your veins , stop the van and get out. - go 3.2 mi \u2193 80. Stand very still. Exits are north , south , and east , but are blocked by a Spectral Wolf . - go 0 ft [An icon of a menacing face] 81. The Spectral Wolf fears only fire . The Google Maps Team can no longer help you, but if you master the wolf , he will guide you. Godspeed. - go\u00a0?? mi"}
{"id":462,"title":"Freemanic Paracusia","image_title":"Freemanic Paracusia","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/462","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/freemanic_paracusia.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/462:_Freemanic_Paracusia","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting behind a desk with a computer.] Freemanic Paracusia: A disorder wherein you hear everything you read in the comforting voice of Morgan Freeman. [There is a thought bubble of Cueball's thoughts, within it is Morgan Freeman reading text.] Morgan Freeman: Why, you could enlarge your penis for cheap. My, my. Isn't that something.\n","explanation":"Paracusia is a form of hallucination that involves perceiving sounds without auditory stimulus.\nMorgan Freeman is an American actor who may be best known as the character Red in The Shawshank Redemption , where he is also the narrator. He narrates because he is especially known for his soothing and mellow voice, which helps him amplify performances in minor parts, such as God in Bruce Almighty . He has been a narrator of many TV programs and also narrated the major film War of the Worlds where he did not play any other part.\nThe comic is a play on the combination of the two. The idea is that while reading a text, instead of hearing your own voice in your mind's ear, you substitute it for Freeman's voice, giving a new perspective on the contents of the text. Here, the voice of Morgan Freeman converts the most annoying possible thing on the web (penis enlargement advertisements) into a soothing meditation.\nThe title text suggests to apply this specifically on the mostly stupid comments on YouTube, like those found in 202: YouTube .\n[Cueball is sitting behind a desk with a computer.] Freemanic Paracusia: A disorder wherein you hear everything you read in the comforting voice of Morgan Freeman. [There is a thought bubble of Cueball's thoughts, within it is Morgan Freeman reading text.] Morgan Freeman: Why, you could enlarge your penis for cheap. My, my. Isn't that something.\n"}
{"id":463,"title":"Voting Machines","image_title":"Voting Machines","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/463","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voting_machines.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/463:_Voting_Machines","transcript":"[Caption above panels:] Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) has blamed Ohio voting machine errors on problems with the machines' McAfee antivirus software.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer, facepalming.] Cueball: Wait. \"Antivirus software\"? On voting machines? You're doing it wrong.\n[Cueball's friend enters the frame and speaks to Cueball.] Friend: Why? Security is good, right? Cueball: Of course. But, well\u2014\nCueball: Imagine you're at a parent-teacher conference, and the teacher reassures you that he always wears a condom while teaching.\nFriend: Ah. Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative\u2014 Cueball: \u2014Yet someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong.\n","explanation":"In the 2008 Ohio primary elections, there were numerous problems with electronic voting machines, which eventually required many districts to revert to pen and paper. Premier Election Solutions, the company that handled the machines, blamed these problems on McAfee antivirus software.\nIt is not uncommon to see computer software contracts stipulating that the vendor will warrant that software and systems delivered will not contain any viruses or malicious code (\"malware\") \u2014 a knee-jerk reaction to this is for novice management to include malware-scanning \"antivirus\" software for systems that otherwise are closed. From a computer programming standpoint, having antivirus software on an electronic voting machine doesn't make sense, because ideally the machine shouldn't be connecting to *anything* external (eg the internet, USB, a local network, removable drives, bluetooth...) that would leave it open to malware attacks. While there are many ways that malware can reach a computer, ultimately the computer still has to run executable code that was not distributed with it in the first place, which is something that no election machine should encounter in normal operation. Hence, the question is whether the voting machine manufacturer has taken the proper precaution preventing any external access.\nIdeally, voting machines (as well as ATMs and other single-purpose appliances) should be embedded systems , supposedly making them incapable of doing the things that might necessitate antivirus software. However, in practice, such devices are more commonly built as application programs running on ordinary Windows PCs (inside of custom-shaped cases), and they download software updates over the internet, synchronize voting data to a single \"Ballot Box\" server over a local network, use USB peripherals which could potentially be replaced by a bad actor, etc. And even embedded systems are vulnerable to many classes of malware.\nThe comic makes an analogy to a teacher who reassures you that he always wears a condom when teaching. While a condom could be considered \"protection,\" and therefore a good thing, common sense dictates that teachers should never end up in a situation where wearing a condom in school would be useful; this parallels the idea that while security in the form of antivirus software on voting machines could also be considered protection and a good thing, it should never be required. The comment is more likely to make people worried about why the condom is there and what purpose it's serving. Similarly, informed people might worry why a voting machine has any access to malicious executable code.\nIn panel one, both the facepalm and \"You're doing it wrong\" are Internet memes , used to mock someone who made a foolish mistake.\nThe title text refers to 153: Cryptography . Voting software is also featured in 2030: Voting Software .\n[Caption above panels:] Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) has blamed Ohio voting machine errors on problems with the machines' McAfee antivirus software.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer, facepalming.] Cueball: Wait. \"Antivirus software\"? On voting machines? You're doing it wrong.\n[Cueball's friend enters the frame and speaks to Cueball.] Friend: Why? Security is good, right? Cueball: Of course. But, well\u2014\nCueball: Imagine you're at a parent-teacher conference, and the teacher reassures you that he always wears a condom while teaching.\nFriend: Ah. Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative\u2014 Cueball: \u2014Yet someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong.\n"}
{"id":464,"title":"RBA","image_title":"RBA","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/464","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rba.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/464:_RBA","transcript":"[Megan walks up to Cueball pouring himself a drink.] Megan: Now, this is a story all about how\nMegan: My life got flipped turned upside down\nMegan: And I'd like to take a minute Megan: Just sit right there\nMegan: I'll tell you how I became uncertain about our relationship. I think you just like having a girlfriend, it doesn't matter who. Megan: I think we should break up.\nThe reverse Bel-Air only works once, so make it something unforgettable. [Cut to a dropped glass, the drink spilled on the ground.] Cueball: ...wait, seriously? Megan: Yeah.\n","explanation":"A Bel-Air is an internet meme where a poster on a message board starts a post on a serious topic, but partway through the post switches to reciting the lyrics to the opening theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air , a 1990s sitcom starring Will Smith (previously known in his rapping career as the \"Fresh Prince\") as a street-smart teenager from West Philadelphia who has been sent to live with his affluent and stuffy Aunt and Uncle in Bel Air, Los Angeles by his mother as a consequence of a single altercation with a couple of no-good guys who were making trouble in his previous neighbourhood.\nMegan in the comic reverses the traditional arrangement by starting the conversation with a recitation of the lyrics to said theme song, and then switching partway through to a very serious discussion of the status of their relationship culminating in a break-up.\nThe lyrics go like this:\nNow this is the story all about how My life got flipped, turned upside down And I'd like to take a minute just sit right there I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-air\nThe title RBA is an initialism for Reverse Bel-Air .\nThe title text is also an RBA, but one that diverges from the song lyrics much more quickly. It's a play on the phrase \"started drinking.\" This phrase usually refers to someone becoming an alcoholic (in this case, it would be because of the break-up), but in this case refers to the actual fact that Cueball had just started drinking (a glass of water) when Megan started talking to him.\nA similar (though less serious) play on the Bel-Air meme was later used in 1059: Bel-Air .\n[Megan walks up to Cueball pouring himself a drink.] Megan: Now, this is a story all about how\nMegan: My life got flipped turned upside down\nMegan: And I'd like to take a minute Megan: Just sit right there\nMegan: I'll tell you how I became uncertain about our relationship. I think you just like having a girlfriend, it doesn't matter who. Megan: I think we should break up.\nThe reverse Bel-Air only works once, so make it something unforgettable. [Cut to a dropped glass, the drink spilled on the ground.] Cueball: ...wait, seriously? Megan: Yeah.\n"}
{"id":465,"title":"Quantum Teleportation","image_title":"Quantum Teleportation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/465","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/quantum_teleportation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/465:_Quantum_Teleportation","transcript":"[A Cueball-like reporter and Cueball are facing each other, sitting in chairs.] Reporter: So, Quantum Teleportation- Cueball: The name is misleading. It's a particle statistics thing.\n[Zoom in on the reporter.] Reporter: So it's not like Star Trek? That's boring.\n[Zoom out again to both. Cueball leaves his seat and moves behind it.] Cueball: Okay, I'm sick of this. Every time there's a paper on quantum teleportation, you reporters write the same disappointed story.\n[Cueball has gone to a device that was behind him and was out of the scope of the three previous panels. He turns a knob that makes a sound in a zigzag sound buble.] Reporter (Off panel): But- Cueball: Talk to someone else. I'm going to the Bahamas. Knob: Click\n[Inserted panel with a zoom in on the device that is labeled, and the knob is now turned to the right position. Both possible positions are labeled.] Label: Teleporter Left: Quantum Right: Regular\n[Cueball is beamed up in classic Star Trek fashion.] Vrmmm\n","explanation":"Quantum teleportation is a method of effectively taking a quantum state that exists in one laboratory and destroying it in the current laboratory and later recreating exactly the same \u2014 still unmeasured \u2014 quantum state in another laboratory that could potentially be very far away.\nThis is achieved by first creating an entangled quantum state in a laboratory and moving one part of the entangled quantum state to a faraway laboratory. Now let's say a scientist desires to teleport the quantum state |\u03c8\u27e9 to a faraway lab. The scientists does a specific measurement on the combination of |\u03c8\u27e9 and their half of the entangled quantum state, and the outcome of their measurement will be two bits of classical information. They can then telephone over the results of their two bits of information to tell scientists at the faraway lab how to do a measurement on their half of the entangled quantum state, which will recreate the quantum state |\u03c8\u27e9 at the faraway lab, effectively teleporting it. This is an important result in quantum mechanics, especially in regards to quantum computing.\nThe name is misleading in that it does not create an efficient means of transportation via teleportation \u2014 something like the teleporters from Star Trek i.e. a conventional teleporter \u2014 where macroscopic objects like humans (composed of 7\u00a0\u00d7\u00a010 27 atoms ) could be teleported to an arbitrary place.\nThe comic jokes with the fact that news reporters wish to get a story about Star Trek teleporters, and the scientist is angry that there is no interest in his quantum version \u2014 the reporters are even disappointed when they write their story. The last panel appears to indicate that this scientist not only has a quantum teleporter, he also has a \"regular\" teleporter of the type the reporter is asking about, which would be a gigantic news item, as it is one of the biggest challenges of this century (and possibly future ones as well) to build one. He uses the conventional to escape to The Bahamas.\nThe whole method of quantum teleportation is predicated on being able to first create entangled quantum states and then transport, by conventional means, one-half of the entangled state. Only after this step could you then destroy the shared entangled quantum state, to \"teleport\" a different quantum state to the new location.\nQuantum teleportation is deeply related to Bell's theorem where it's shown that quantum mechanics is incompatible with the idea of local hidden variables and that has been experimentally demonstrated (though a few very small loopholes still have not been conclusively ruled out). Explaining \"it's a particle statistics thing\" is a great explanation of the related Bell's theorem experiments, which demonstrate quantum entanglement, which is at the root of quantum teleportation. In these experiments, physicists take an entangled quantum state, move it apart, and then randomly decide which direction to measure each side of the quantum states. Through a statistical analysis of the results, you can demonstrate and measure each entangled particle in a randomly chosen direction. The statistical correlations between the particles are consistent with quantum mechanics and inconsistent with any local hidden variable theory; however, this instantaneous wave-function collapse does not break special relativity as wave-function collapse does not allow communication of any information . Instead, you can just analyze the correlations after the fact and compare the hypothesis of local hidden variables to the inconsistent hypothesis predicted by quantum mechanics and verify the quantum mechanical prediction.\nIn the comic, Cueball explains to the reporter that quantum teleportation isn't what reporters build it up to be, before Cueball successfully teleports by switching his teleportation machine from quantum teleportation to regular teleportation.\nThe title text refers to the controversial 1940s Soviet Experiments in the Revival of Organisms video that depicts a dog's head being cut off and revived. The film is controversial in that the footage is often perceived as being staged, though the Soviet scientist depicted in the video was attempting these sorts of experiments, and this research eventually led to the first Soviet open heart operation in 1957 \u2014 another instance of crazy headlines that may not be as interesting to the public when first explained, but may be an important step on the way to some type of practical use. Cutting apart and reassembling dogs could also be a metaphor for quantum teleportation if it were used to transfer dogs' states from a group of particles in one location to a group of particles in another location, which could be described as taking apart dogs and resembling them in a different location, although the word cut would be inaccurate. If this is the case, then Randall is arguing that this particular piece of science is as cool as it seems (because the objects are disassembled then resembled into someone else, as opposed to simply being moved); the reporters are merely disappointed because they were expecting something else.\n[A Cueball-like reporter and Cueball are facing each other, sitting in chairs.] Reporter: So, Quantum Teleportation- Cueball: The name is misleading. It's a particle statistics thing.\n[Zoom in on the reporter.] Reporter: So it's not like Star Trek? That's boring.\n[Zoom out again to both. Cueball leaves his seat and moves behind it.] Cueball: Okay, I'm sick of this. Every time there's a paper on quantum teleportation, you reporters write the same disappointed story.\n[Cueball has gone to a device that was behind him and was out of the scope of the three previous panels. He turns a knob that makes a sound in a zigzag sound buble.] Reporter (Off panel): But- Cueball: Talk to someone else. I'm going to the Bahamas. Knob: Click\n[Inserted panel with a zoom in on the device that is labeled, and the knob is now turned to the right position. Both possible positions are labeled.] Label: Teleporter Left: Quantum Right: Regular\n[Cueball is beamed up in classic Star Trek fashion.] Vrmmm\n"}
{"id":466,"title":"Moving","image_title":"Moving","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/466","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/moving.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/466:_Moving","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] There are few forces more powerful than geeks desperately trying to get internet in a new apartment. [Cueball is pointing an empty can out the open window. It is placed on a moving box, and lots of small parts are lying on the floor in the otherwise empty room. Megan stands behind him with a laptop in one hand.] Cueball: Okay, the pringles cantenna has let us patch into the WiFi network across the road. Megan: And they have internet? Cueball: No, but I think the cable van will hook up their house first.\n","explanation":"The caption notes that few forces are more powerful than a geek trying to get Internet in a new apartment, thus explaining the title of the comic: Moving .  One of the consequences of moving one's place of residence is having to arrange connection to various essential utilities, including the internet.  One way to reduce the time where such utilities are unavailable is to steal them off your neighbours.  As geeks prioritise access to Minecraft over common human values, they are more likely to access other's internet via such underhanded means.\nA cantenna is a do-it-yourself antenna made from a can, in this case a pringles can. Cueball is pointing his cantenna to the neighbors across the road, which, as he says, will allow him to connect to the wifi network there.\nMegan asks if the neighbors themselves have internet access, to which Cueball answers that they don't, but he thinks that they will get hooked up to the internet first.  Potentially this is because they are more likely to pay for their internet access rather than hacking someone else's.\nThe title text continues this theme of connecting to other people's networks, noting that we should have a holiday in honour of those people who don't bother reconfiguring their Linksys routers (thus leaving them with the default name of 'linksys'; this was very common when this comic was published in 2008), which allows other people to connect to those networks very easily, as they aren't encrypted by default and don't need a password.\n[Caption above the panel:] There are few forces more powerful than geeks desperately trying to get internet in a new apartment. [Cueball is pointing an empty can out the open window. It is placed on a moving box, and lots of small parts are lying on the floor in the otherwise empty room. Megan stands behind him with a laptop in one hand.] Cueball: Okay, the pringles cantenna has let us patch into the WiFi network across the road. Megan: And they have internet? Cueball: No, but I think the cable van will hook up their house first.\n"}
{"id":467,"title":"X Girls Y Cups","image_title":"X Girls Y Cups","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/467","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/x_girls_y_cups.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/467:_X_Girls_Y_Cups","transcript":"Google results for \"<x> girls <y> cups\" [There is a table with eight columns and eight rows. The cells are colored depending on the value in the cell: cells with the value 0 are clear\/white, cells with values 1-9 are yellow, cells with values 10 and above are orange, and the cell with the highest value is red.] [Above the tabel is the label for the columns:] Cups [To the left the label for the rows:] Girls [0 girls 0 cups has value 3; 0 girls 1 cup has 375; 0 girls 2 cups has 9; 1 girl 0 cups has 7; 1 girl 1 cup has 7503; 1 girl 2 cups has 2007; 1 girl 3 cups has 10; 1 girl 4 cups has 5; 1 girl 5 cups has 3; 1 girl 6 cups has 6; 1 girl 7 cups has 2; 2 girls 0 cups has 9; 2 girls 1 cup has 1,929,000; 2 girls 2 cups has 247; 2 girls 3 cups has 7; 2 girls 4 cups has 14; 2 girls 5 cups has 13; 2 girls 6 cups has 2; 2 girls 7 cups has 1; 3 girls 0 cups has 7; 3 girls 1 cup has 6335; 3 girls 2 cups has 394; 3 girls 3 cups has 34; 3 girls 4 cups has 3; 3 girls 5 cups has 2; 3 girls 6 cups has 6; 4 girls 0 cups has 3; 4 girls 1 cup has 3513; 4 girls 2 cups has 34; 4 girls 4 cups has 63; 5 girls 0 cups has 1; 5 girls 1 cup has 9; 5 girls 2 cups has 5; 5 girls 3 cups has 3; 5 girls 6 cups has 3; 6 girls 0 cups has 3; 6 girls 1 cup has 1461; 6 girls 2 cups has 1; 6 girls 3 cups has 1; 6 girls 4 cups has 1; 7 girls 0 cups has 2; 7 girls 1 cup has 19; 7 girls 2 cups has 4; 7 girls 3 cups has 2; and the rest have 0.]\n","explanation":"The comic refers to Hungry Bitches , a 2007 scat-fetish pornographic film. The one-minute preview, unofficially nicknamed \"2 Girls 1 Cup,\" is a viral video that became a well-known internet meme . It is therefore not surprising that only the input combination of x=2 and y=1 generates a significant number of search results, being 257 times as frequent as the runner-up, \"1 Girl 1 Cup.\"\nThis table is an example of a rudimentary heat map . The cells in the table with zero hits are white. From 1 to 9 they are yellow, and above that they are orange - except the maximum, which is red. As the second largest count is below 10,000 (7503) and the maximum almost two million, it is impossible to say if the red color is reserved for the maximum or for any number above a given value, say from ten thousand or up to above a million hits.\nThe title text suggests other combinations like 1 girl to 10,000 cups (very large number of cups to one girl), 2 girls to (5+3i) cups (a complex number ), 65536 girls to 65536 cups (2 16 , the first integer that can't be represented as a two-byte unsigned integer), and finally 3 French hens and 2 turtle doves to 1 cup. All are phrases with apparently no search results.\nThe last phrase is a reference to the song The Twelve Days of Christmas . After the publication of this comic, the phrase has been cross-posted at various sites in order to generate search results and prove the statement in the title text wrong. The same has happened to other entries, as it often happens shortly after Randall posts something regarding Google searches.\nGoogle results for \"<x> girls <y> cups\" [There is a table with eight columns and eight rows. The cells are colored depending on the value in the cell: cells with the value 0 are clear\/white, cells with values 1-9 are yellow, cells with values 10 and above are orange, and the cell with the highest value is red.] [Above the tabel is the label for the columns:] Cups [To the left the label for the rows:] Girls [0 girls 0 cups has value 3; 0 girls 1 cup has 375; 0 girls 2 cups has 9; 1 girl 0 cups has 7; 1 girl 1 cup has 7503; 1 girl 2 cups has 2007; 1 girl 3 cups has 10; 1 girl 4 cups has 5; 1 girl 5 cups has 3; 1 girl 6 cups has 6; 1 girl 7 cups has 2; 2 girls 0 cups has 9; 2 girls 1 cup has 1,929,000; 2 girls 2 cups has 247; 2 girls 3 cups has 7; 2 girls 4 cups has 14; 2 girls 5 cups has 13; 2 girls 6 cups has 2; 2 girls 7 cups has 1; 3 girls 0 cups has 7; 3 girls 1 cup has 6335; 3 girls 2 cups has 394; 3 girls 3 cups has 34; 3 girls 4 cups has 3; 3 girls 5 cups has 2; 3 girls 6 cups has 6; 4 girls 0 cups has 3; 4 girls 1 cup has 3513; 4 girls 2 cups has 34; 4 girls 4 cups has 63; 5 girls 0 cups has 1; 5 girls 1 cup has 9; 5 girls 2 cups has 5; 5 girls 3 cups has 3; 5 girls 6 cups has 3; 6 girls 0 cups has 3; 6 girls 1 cup has 1461; 6 girls 2 cups has 1; 6 girls 3 cups has 1; 6 girls 4 cups has 1; 7 girls 0 cups has 2; 7 girls 1 cup has 19; 7 girls 2 cups has 4; 7 girls 3 cups has 2; and the rest have 0.]\n"}
{"id":468,"title":"Fetishes","image_title":"Fetishes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/468","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fetishes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/468:_Fetishes","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Author Katharine Gates recently attempted to make a chart of all sexual fetishes. Little did she know that Russell and Whitehead had already failed at this same task.\n[Russell, with long hair, and Whitehead are standing with G\u00f6del (the last two are both Cueball-like), Russell holding a clipboard and smoking a pipe. G\u00f6del is holding his chin with his right hand as he ponders the question.]\nRussell: Hey, G\u00f6del \u2014 we're compiling a comprehensive list of fetishes. What turns you on? G\u00f6del: Anything not on your list. Russell: Uh\u2026hm.\n","explanation":"Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead co-wrote the Principia Mathematica , with the intention of cataloging all of mathematics and ridding it of contradiction and self-reference. Kurt G\u00f6del later showed that such a system is impossible, and that any system of axioms (complex enough to represent arithmetic) is incomplete .\nThis comic, however, presents an alternate universe scenario: here, Russell and Whitehead are pursuing the more salacious (but no less comprehensive) task of compiling a list of all sexual fetishes. This seems to be going fine until they ask G\u00f6del for his fetishes; G\u00f6del says that he is turned on by \"anything not on your list.\" This creates a paradox - Russell and Whitehead now have no way to complete their list, because G\u00f6del's fetishes cannot be included without putting them on the list, which would immediately invalidate them. In fact, this is precisely Russell's Paradox , discovered by Bertrand Russell himself.\nThe title text references Georg Cantor , the inventor of set theory , and adds a second, similar paradox: if you have a fetish for doing everything in the book twice, then that belongs in the book - but then, you must also have a fetish for doing that twice, so you have to put that in the book too; this process will keep adding fetishes to the book ad infinitum , again making the task impossible to complete.\nThere is a fetish roadmap ( archive.org ) by Katharine Gates, author of Deviant Desires and DeviantDesires.com.\nAn earlier comic also refers to Kurt G\u00f6del: 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey .\n[Caption above the panel:] Author Katharine Gates recently attempted to make a chart of all sexual fetishes. Little did she know that Russell and Whitehead had already failed at this same task.\n[Russell, with long hair, and Whitehead are standing with G\u00f6del (the last two are both Cueball-like), Russell holding a clipboard and smoking a pipe. G\u00f6del is holding his chin with his right hand as he ponders the question.]\nRussell: Hey, G\u00f6del \u2014 we're compiling a comprehensive list of fetishes. What turns you on? G\u00f6del: Anything not on your list. Russell: Uh\u2026hm.\n"}
{"id":469,"title":"Improvised","image_title":"Improvised","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/469","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/improvised.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/469:_Improvised","transcript":"[Caption above the panels:] Harrison Ford famously improvised his \"I know\" line in E.S.B. Here are a few of his less-successful ad-libs:\n[Harrison Ford as Han Solo (in all the panels) stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: Well, duh.\n[Han Solo in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon.] C-3P0: Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3720 to 1! Han: Seriously? ...Christ.\n[Han Solo stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: Oh! Hey, that explains the kissing earlier.\n[Han Solo stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: I'm nailing your brother.\n[Han Solo standing in front of Luke Skywalker, who is holding a blast shield helmet and a lightsaber. The training droid hovers between them.]\nHan: Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for scissors, though they do beat paper and rock.\n[Han Solo stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: Cool. Listen, this thing is really, really cold.\n[Han Solo stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: Wowzers.\n[Han Solo sits with two others. General Madine approaches.] Madine: General Solo, is your strike team assembled? Han: Barely. They're pretty drunk.\n[Han Solo and Princess Leia stand in an Ice Tunnel of Hoth.] Leia: I'd just as soon kiss a wookie. Han: Man, me too but Chewie never seems interested. Maybe I should grow my hair out.\n","explanation":"In the second of the original Star Wars film Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back , just before Han Solo , portrayed by Harrison Ford , is frozen in carbonite, the following conversation occurs:\nLeia: I love you. Han: I know.\nThe original script had Han Solo respond to Leia with \"I love you, too,\" but Harrison Ford felt that the character would not give such a cliched response, even in the face of likely death. He and the director Irvin Kershner changed the line to \"I know\" before filming. They did, however, also film the scripted version, but it was the \"I know\" version that was actually used in the finished film.\nThis line is generally thought to be better than the original would have been. It was long thought that Harrison Ford ad-libed the line. Others have even suggested it was because they had filmed the scene so many times, that Ford in exasperation at some point just blurted out the \"I know\" after hearing \"I love you\" so many times. But it has later been revealed that it was not ad-lib on the spot, although Harrison did suggest the I know line to the director. This has been described here: How the Famous 'I Love You\/I Know' Scene From 'The Empire Strikes Back' Really Came Together .\nThe comic presents several alternative ad-libs that Ford could have made in that conversation, as well as at various points throughout the original trilogy. So in this situation, it is the actor Ford and not Han Solo who speaks the lines.\nNote: although it's spelled \"wookie\" in the comic, the canonical spelling of Chewbacca's species is \" Wookiee \".\nThe title text continues the ad-lib in panel four. It refers to the plot twist that Luke Skywalker is Princess Leia's brother, which would not be revealed until the next film in the series. How Harrison Ford knows this twist at this point in the story is unknown.\n[Caption above the panels:] Harrison Ford famously improvised his \"I know\" line in E.S.B. Here are a few of his less-successful ad-libs:\n[Harrison Ford as Han Solo (in all the panels) stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: Well, duh.\n[Han Solo in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon.] C-3P0: Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3720 to 1! Han: Seriously? ...Christ.\n[Han Solo stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: Oh! Hey, that explains the kissing earlier.\n[Han Solo stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: I'm nailing your brother.\n[Han Solo standing in front of Luke Skywalker, who is holding a blast shield helmet and a lightsaber. The training droid hovers between them.]\nHan: Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for scissors, though they do beat paper and rock.\n[Han Solo stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: Cool. Listen, this thing is really, really cold.\n[Han Solo stands in front of Princess Leia on the Cloud City Carbon Freezing Chamber.] Leia: I love you. Han: Wowzers.\n[Han Solo sits with two others. General Madine approaches.] Madine: General Solo, is your strike team assembled? Han: Barely. They're pretty drunk.\n[Han Solo and Princess Leia stand in an Ice Tunnel of Hoth.] Leia: I'd just as soon kiss a wookie. Han: Man, me too but Chewie never seems interested. Maybe I should grow my hair out.\n"}
{"id":470,"title":"The End is Not for a While","image_title":"The End is Not for a While","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/470","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_end_is_not_for_a_while.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/470:_The_End_is_Not_for_a_While","transcript":"[Cueball with two picket signs. Ponytail with a picket sign stands partially out of the frame, staring at Cueball.] I get in trouble for showing up contented at protests. Sign 1: Things are pretty okay! Sign 2: Anyone for Scrabble later?\n","explanation":"People show up at protests because they're angry about something and want to use peaceful means or otherwise to effect political change. It's very much a groupthink, \"mob\" mentality, bringing to mind the credo, \"If you're not with us, you're against us.\"\nHardly anyone goes to a protest because they're happy about the way things are, and thus, someone holding up signs saying how happy he is would, to say the least, be very out of place at a protest, although it's more common than expected .\nThe title text shows another sign Cueball is carrying (although since it compliments the protesters, he may not get in as much trouble for it).\nThe title of the comic refers to the oft-seen protest placard \"The end is now,\" signifying that person's belief that we live in the end times, and it's time to start getting right with (insert religious figure of your choice here).\n[Cueball with two picket signs. Ponytail with a picket sign stands partially out of the frame, staring at Cueball.] I get in trouble for showing up contented at protests. Sign 1: Things are pretty okay! Sign 2: Anyone for Scrabble later?\n"}
{"id":471,"title":"Aversion Fads","image_title":"Aversion Fads","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/471","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/aversion_fads.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/471:_Aversion_Fads","transcript":"[Two Cueball-like guys stand together as a young guy dressed up with small ears and a tail approaches.] Cueball: Oh God, a furry. Don't let it touch you.\n[The furry hears someone call out to him.] Off-screen: Hey, kid.\n[Megan is seen preparing a kite to be flown.] Megan: Forget those assholes. Come help me.\n[The furry begins to help Megan set up the kite.] Furry: Thanks. So you're cool with furries?\n[The two are now standing far apart, the furry with the kite and the line going over to Megan.] Megan: Well, I think your fetish is weird as hell. It just bothers me how you're this designated Internet punching bag among people who are otherwise down with weird fetishes. So I stick up for you when I can.\n[The kite is now successfully up in the air, and Megan pulls the line with both hands moving backwards.] Furry: Well, thanks. I owe you one. Megan: It's no big deal.\n[Megan stops some distance from the furry holding the line with one hand. The furry lifts one hand up apologizing.] Furry: No, this is like the lion and the mouse. Megan: ...Listen, can we pick a comparison less likely to turn you on? Furry: Sorry.\n","explanation":"A \" furry \" is a person interested in anthropomorphic animal characters \u2013 fictional animal characters that, for example, walk and talk like humans. A common stereotype is that furries role-play their \"fursona\" (\"furry\" persona) by dressing up in animal costumes, as demonstrated by the furry in this comic. There are numerous other stereotypes as well, often of a sexual nature , so furries are frequently the target of criticism on the Internet.\nIn this comic, Cueball and his Cueball-like friend encounter a furry, and react negatively according to the stereotype. In response, Megan kindly invites the furry to help with her kite. Megan explains that, while she too thinks furries are strange, she opposes the hypocritical treatment they disproportionately receive from others who are likely just as strange, and therefore defends furries, given the opportunity.\nThe furry appreciates Megan's support, comparing it to Aesop 's fable of The Lion and the Mouse , in which a lion spares a mouse from being eaten; the lion later becomes caught in a trap, so the mouse repays the earlier favor by chewing through the cords of the trap to free the lion. This simile is meant as a genuine expression of gratitude and indebtedness from the furry, but the joke is that Megan rebukes this specific comparison, as she assumes the furry will be sexually aroused by the animal bondage in the story.\nIn the title text, Megan asks if the furry has any hamster friends as potential passengers for her kite. She likely means a literal hamster \u2013 a rodent that would be small enough to fly on a kite. (This may be a reference to comic 20: Ferret , which also involves a small, flying mammal.) However, this being a furry, she could also mean a human with a hamster \"fursona,\" although this would be too heavy to fly on a typical kite. [ citation needed ]\n[Two Cueball-like guys stand together as a young guy dressed up with small ears and a tail approaches.] Cueball: Oh God, a furry. Don't let it touch you.\n[The furry hears someone call out to him.] Off-screen: Hey, kid.\n[Megan is seen preparing a kite to be flown.] Megan: Forget those assholes. Come help me.\n[The furry begins to help Megan set up the kite.] Furry: Thanks. So you're cool with furries?\n[The two are now standing far apart, the furry with the kite and the line going over to Megan.] Megan: Well, I think your fetish is weird as hell. It just bothers me how you're this designated Internet punching bag among people who are otherwise down with weird fetishes. So I stick up for you when I can.\n[The kite is now successfully up in the air, and Megan pulls the line with both hands moving backwards.] Furry: Well, thanks. I owe you one. Megan: It's no big deal.\n[Megan stops some distance from the furry holding the line with one hand. The furry lifts one hand up apologizing.] Furry: No, this is like the lion and the mouse. Megan: ...Listen, can we pick a comparison less likely to turn you on? Furry: Sorry.\n"}
{"id":472,"title":"House of Pancakes","image_title":"<span style=\"color: #0000ED\">House<\/span> of Pancakes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/472","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/house_of_pancakes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/472:_House_of_Pancakes","transcript":"[All instances of the word \"House\" are in blue.] [Every day a new city, a new IHOP. And yet every night the dreams get worse. I ply the highways, a nervous eye on the rear-view mirror, the back seat piled with stolen menus. Their doors are opened 24 hours, but forever closed to my soul. This is what my life has become. This is my hell.] [Sidenote left: International] House of Pancakes [Scribbled-out sidenote right: BLOGSPOT] Strawberry Banana Pancakes Four pancakes filled with sliced fresh banana and crowned with cool strawberry topping, more [17] bananas and [23] whipped topping. [17] Driven by a nameless fear, a whisper in the dark behind me, I flee ahead of I know not what. Whenver I turn, there's nobody behind me. And yet someone is clearly stealing the ketchup. WHY? (The footnote is covered in fingerprints.) [23] My life is feeding, fleeing, fighting, and forgetting. (The above note is sandwiched in sideways in between the Stuffed French Toast and Ham and Egg Melt.) [Rooty Jr. A kids only [19] version of our house signature Rooty Tooty. One scrambled egg, one strip of bacon, one pork sausage link and one fruit-topped buttermilk pancake.] [19] The decision not to hyphenate \"kids only\" is likely connected to the omission of the serial comma. I wonder if the author is British. I wonder if he sleeps at night. (The following passages are have a red substance underneath them, probably ketchup.) [Rise 'N Shine Two eggs, toast and hash browns served with your choice [21] of two strips of bacon or two pork sausage links.] [21] (illegible) rent a storage unit. Sleep there. Fill it with pancakes. Leave. [Stuffed French Toast Cinnamon raisin French [18] toast stuffed with sweet cream cheese filling, topped with cool strawberry or your choice of fruit compote and whipped topping.] [18] Nightmares again. I wake up covered in sweat, and what appears to be a thin sheen of maple syrup (Handwritten, underlined) WHO IS MOHAWK GIRL? [Slanted 90 degrees left] Ham & Egg Melt Grilled sourdough bread stuffed with ham, scrambled eggs, Swiss and American cheeses. [20] (At normal orientation) [20] Ordered this in at an IHOP in Rochester, New York. There was blood on the floor. Some of it was mine. (Comic strip) Enough with your pancakes. Enough with your GOD DAMN pancakes. [The Big Steak Omlette Tender strips of steak, hash browns, (redacted) tomatoes and Cheddar cheese. Served [22] with house salsa.] [22] Woke up in Las Vegas. They're closing the Star Trek Experience today. The IHOP up the strip had pancake platters named after various states. None of them sounded like home.\n","explanation":"Randall is parodying Mark Z. Danielewski's epistolary novel House of Leaves by renaming it House of Pancakes (after the American fast food franchise International House of Pancakes ). House of Leaves has an unconventional page layout and style, including the colouring of every instance of the word \"house\" in blue, as is done on the menu. It includes footnotes within footnotes like Randall did here.\nIn House of Leaves , protagonist Johnny Truant (whose meta-narration is marked by Courier font as mimicked in the comic) discovers a book called The Navidson Record (represented here by the pancake menu), which in turn details a film of the same name, which in turn details a horror story of a family living in a sentient house. Truant, who is clearly intelligent and cultured, probes deeper into notating The Navidson Record \u2014and into insomnia\u2014until The Navidson Record consumes his mind horrifically, the same way the film in the novel consumed the author of The Navidson Record , the same way the house in the novel consumed part of the family.\nHouse of Leaves lends itself to many interpretations, but has been called a \"satire of academic criticism,\" which makes this comic essentially a satire of a satire. Since part of the appeal of House of Leaves is that it takes itself extremely seriously with its intricacy, multitude of both real and made-up references to academic and popular culture, and layered emotional conflict, Randall's reduction of the House of Leaves to the (International) House of Pancakes cuts a humorous edge to a dark story. The tone of the comic parodies the tone of House of Leaves : lonely, fear-inducing, and increasingly insane, but using pancakes instead of darkness.\nAdditionally, the mysterious \"Mohawk Girl\" referred to in the comic may be a nod to the House of Leaves character Delial, or to comic 147 .\nThe word \"house\" is in blue in every instance, which is a stylistic attribute of Mark Z. Danielewski's novel. Every Minotaur reference is marked out in red ink, and every use of \"house\" or a foreign language's equivalent, such as 'haus' and 'maison' is in blue. This is not a reference to hyperlinks. It is often thought that the house is printed in blue because houses have 'blueprints.'\nThe censored portion of the Big Steak Omelette is \"...fresh green peppers, onions, mushrooms,...\" per IHOP's website for the Big Steak Omelette: \"Tender and tasty strips of steak, hash browns, fresh green peppers, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes and Cheddar cheese.\"  Also, Omelette is misspelled, but that's probably just a typo.\nThe title text refers to the Waffle House , another US restaurant chain. The joke is that the protagonist has decided that maybe all this angst isn't worth it, and he'll just go to a different restaurant.\nClicking on the original comic links to the amazon.com page for House of Leaves.\n[All instances of the word \"House\" are in blue.] [Every day a new city, a new IHOP. And yet every night the dreams get worse. I ply the highways, a nervous eye on the rear-view mirror, the back seat piled with stolen menus. Their doors are opened 24 hours, but forever closed to my soul. This is what my life has become. This is my hell.] [Sidenote left: International] House of Pancakes [Scribbled-out sidenote right: BLOGSPOT] Strawberry Banana Pancakes Four pancakes filled with sliced fresh banana and crowned with cool strawberry topping, more [17] bananas and [23] whipped topping. [17] Driven by a nameless fear, a whisper in the dark behind me, I flee ahead of I know not what. Whenver I turn, there's nobody behind me. And yet someone is clearly stealing the ketchup. WHY? (The footnote is covered in fingerprints.) [23] My life is feeding, fleeing, fighting, and forgetting. (The above note is sandwiched in sideways in between the Stuffed French Toast and Ham and Egg Melt.) [Rooty Jr. A kids only [19] version of our house signature Rooty Tooty. One scrambled egg, one strip of bacon, one pork sausage link and one fruit-topped buttermilk pancake.] [19] The decision not to hyphenate \"kids only\" is likely connected to the omission of the serial comma. I wonder if the author is British. I wonder if he sleeps at night. (The following passages are have a red substance underneath them, probably ketchup.) [Rise 'N Shine Two eggs, toast and hash browns served with your choice [21] of two strips of bacon or two pork sausage links.] [21] (illegible) rent a storage unit. Sleep there. Fill it with pancakes. Leave. [Stuffed French Toast Cinnamon raisin French [18] toast stuffed with sweet cream cheese filling, topped with cool strawberry or your choice of fruit compote and whipped topping.] [18] Nightmares again. I wake up covered in sweat, and what appears to be a thin sheen of maple syrup (Handwritten, underlined) WHO IS MOHAWK GIRL? [Slanted 90 degrees left] Ham & Egg Melt Grilled sourdough bread stuffed with ham, scrambled eggs, Swiss and American cheeses. [20] (At normal orientation) [20] Ordered this in at an IHOP in Rochester, New York. There was blood on the floor. Some of it was mine. (Comic strip) Enough with your pancakes. Enough with your GOD DAMN pancakes. [The Big Steak Omlette Tender strips of steak, hash browns, (redacted) tomatoes and Cheddar cheese. Served [22] with house salsa.] [22] Woke up in Las Vegas. They're closing the Star Trek Experience today. The IHOP up the strip had pancake platters named after various states. None of them sounded like home.\n"}
{"id":473,"title":"Still Raw","image_title":"Still Raw","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/473","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/still_raw.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/473:_Still_Raw","transcript":"[Cueball laying on sidewalk outside a house, surrounded by his belongings.] She threw me out yelling, \"You don't say those words. Not in this house.\" It's been two years. I thought the wounds had healed. But I stand by what I said. Pluto never should have been a planet.\n","explanation":"This comic shows Cueball and his significant other undergoing a domestic dispute. The debate is heated, enough to tear apart a romantic relationship, and although the end result is Cueball being thrown out of his other's house, he resolves that he will stand by his point of view no matter what.\nOf course, in the last panel, we learn that the argument is over something that should be, in the context of romance, utterly trivial: Cueball has been thrown out simply because he believes that Pluto should never have been a planet .\nPluto was the ninth planet in our solar system between 1930 and 2006, during a time when \"planet\" had no formal definition. (Jupiter was thought to be the ninth planet from 1807 to 1845.) In 2006, the IAU created a formal definition for \"planet\"; Pluto didn't make the cut, and it was reclassified as a dwarf planet . The reasons are complicated , but the basic issue is that like Ceres , Pallas , Juno , and Vesta , Pluto is too small to function as a planet in the solar system. A better explanation can be found here.\nIn the title text, the airplane\/treadmill argument starts when someone asks whether an airplane can take off while it is on a treadmill that is opposing its progress (pulling it backward). The question usually leads to arguments because it is posed ambiguously. Properly defining the question shows that the airplane can indeed take off (because its forward motion is provided by its propeller\/jet engine, not its wheels, which are free to spin at any speed) and experiments (such as Mythbusters') bear this out. Randall also takes a crack at the issue here , and more info can be found here .\nThe statement about being wrong is likely a reference to 386: Duty Calls .\n[Cueball laying on sidewalk outside a house, surrounded by his belongings.] She threw me out yelling, \"You don't say those words. Not in this house.\" It's been two years. I thought the wounds had healed. But I stand by what I said. Pluto never should have been a planet.\n"}
{"id":474,"title":"Turn-On","image_title":"Turn-On","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/474","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turn-on.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/474:_Turn-On","transcript":"[Cueball walks up to Megan sitting at a bar.] Cueball: So, the LHC's turning on. This could be our last night on earth. [While Beret Guy as a bartender walks into the frame, Megan replies without turning.] Megan: Gimme a break. They're not even colliding yet, and it won't do anything cosmic rays haven't. [Cueball turns and walks away. But then Megan turns towards him and says:] Megan: Hey, I didn't say no. Megan: I'm a physics grad student. I need the excuse to party. [Cueball turns back and they talk:] Cueball: So, you're up for a night with a charming stranger? Megan: Depends. Top or bottom? Cueball: Hey, I haven't even bought you a drink. Megan: Barkeep, two whiskey sours, straight down.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the first startup (turn on) of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). There was a theoretical concern that that the LHC experiments could create a black hole that would suck in our planet.\nCueball uses this concern when telling Megan that this could be their last night on Earth, but since the scene is in a bar, this is just another lame entry he uses because he just wants to spend the night with her.\nMegan answers as a physicist and explains that, first of all, they will not start colliding particles just because they actually turn on the collider. That will take a while, during which everything needs to be checked. Secondly, scientists have determined that the fears are unfounded\u00a0\u2014 among other things because cosmic rays have already been bombarding the Earth with particles even more energetic than those created by the LHC. Thus, if the LHC could create a black hole that would suck up the Earth, then that would have happened long ago due to the cosmic rays. (At present time, the collider has been colliding particles for years, and if you read this line on or near Earth, then the Earth is still here; if you read it in a galaxy far away from the Milky Way, then it is somewhat more plausible that Earth may have been destroyed in the time that the signal took to reach you \u2014 although not necessarily by the LHC.)\nCueball feels rejected by her answer and turns away to leave her, but she calls him back explaining very directly that she did not say \"no\" to his request (to try to stay a night with her). Also, as she is a physics grad student, she needs an excuse to party\u00a0\u2014 the excuse being that the LHC is turned on.\nCueball feels encouraged and continues his attempt to get her in to bed. But in his next sentence, he unwittingly uses three of the six quark flavors ( up quark , charm quark , and strange quark ). Megan continues to be very direct when asking if she has to be on top or bottom (when they are going to have sex). But this is also a sentence she chooses so she can continue using quark flavors ( top quark and bottom quark ). Cueball is flustered and complains that she is assuming too much, since he hasn't even bought her a drink yet. Megan then makes it even worse when she makes an order of two whiskey sours straight down \u2014 to use the final flavor ( down quark ).\nMaybe she just teases Cueball (with her knowledge about the LHC and quarks), or else she is actually so turned on by the LHC Turn-On that she wishes to have sex with Cueball as soon as possible.\nThe quarks are some fundamental particles the LHC is generating. All six flavors of quarks are in the last panel: up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. They are also referenced in 1418: Horse , 1621: Fixion , and in 1731: Wrong , the latter also mentioning the up and down flavor. The mention of the drinks being served \"straight down\" is a reversal of the common bartending term \"straight up,\" but there is no \"straight down\" in bartending.\nThe title text is of course a very old joke \" I 'ardly know 'er! \" In this case, Supercollider (another name for the LHC) should be misunderstood as \"(Did you) Supercollide her?\", which you could put into a (nasty?) sexual context. Using this sentence at the wrong moment could be bad for a nice romance. This could be a reference to the Futurama episode \" That's Lobstertainment! ,\" in which Humorbot 5.0 tells a similar supercollider joke.\n[Cueball walks up to Megan sitting at a bar.] Cueball: So, the LHC's turning on. This could be our last night on earth. [While Beret Guy as a bartender walks into the frame, Megan replies without turning.] Megan: Gimme a break. They're not even colliding yet, and it won't do anything cosmic rays haven't. [Cueball turns and walks away. But then Megan turns towards him and says:] Megan: Hey, I didn't say no. Megan: I'm a physics grad student. I need the excuse to party. [Cueball turns back and they talk:] Cueball: So, you're up for a night with a charming stranger? Megan: Depends. Top or bottom? Cueball: Hey, I haven't even bought you a drink. Megan: Barkeep, two whiskey sours, straight down.\n"}
{"id":475,"title":"Further Boomerang Difficulties","image_title":"Further Boomerang Difficulties","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/475","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/further_boomerang_difficulties.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/475:_Further_Boomerang_Difficulties","transcript":"[Cueball is throwing a boomerang.] [Holding his hands up.] [Cueball waits for return; continual waiting.] [Cueball is dejected, head hangs low.]\n[Cueball throws a boomerang.] [Cueball waits for the boomerang.] Outside: Oh God Outside: The ozone layer! [Cueball is surprised.]\n[Cueball throws a boomerang-like banana.] [Cueball waits.] [Megan walks in.] Megan: That was our last banana. Megan: You're such an asshole.\n[Cueball throws a boomerang.] [The boomerang breaks out of the panel box.]\n[The boomerang breaks out of a spacecraft, followed by Cueball.]\n","explanation":"This comic is a sequel of sorts to 445: I Am Not Good with Boomerangs , as it deals with the same subject manner with the same panel layout.\nThe first strip shows Cueball throwing a boomerang, which doesn't come back. He looks downwards in the rightmost panel as if in shame. In 939: Arrow , a boomerang returns to Cueball, which can either be the same Cueball from this comic or another person.\nIn the second strip, he throws another boomerang, which somehow manages to hurt the ozone layer (as indicated by an off-screen voice). This is of course not possible with a boomerang, as the ozone layer is a layer of O 3 molecules very high up in the atmosphere. [ citation needed ]\nThe third strip shows Cueball throwing something that appears to be a boomerang, but then Megan enters and reveals that it was their last banana - which she probably had expected to eat since she calls him an asshole.\nThe final strip shows Cueball throwing one last boomerang, which breaks the frame of the comic, already after two out of the four frames used in each of the first three strips. In the second panel, Cueball seems to be leaning backward in shock or terror. Then, panning down, we find the last panel, much larger and suddenly mainly black instead of white. It shows that this time he was actually inside a spacecraft (which resembles an Apollo Lunar Module in a very bad manner), and the boomerang has just broken out through the hull. We see the boomerang and Cueball tumbling out into space with the escaping air to certain death, revealing why Cueball was so taken aback when the boomerang broke through the frame.\nIf you try to link up the rightmost panels, as what was suggested 445: I Am Not Good with Boomerangs to get a bonus comic strip, you get a bad story where Cueball is looking down, presumably in shame. Then a person (presumably Megan), screams about the ozone layer. We also see Megan call Cueball an asshole, probably because he had destroyed (or messed with) the ozone layer.\nThe title text notes that, assuming a theory that is no longer generally accepted where the universe has a positive (closed) curvature and lots of mass, the boomerang would, after a (very) long time, hit Cueball in the back of his head. This would happen because under those conditions the entire universe would eventually fall back on itself in the Big Crunch . Before this happens, everything would again get pressed close together, and it is during this process that the boomerang would finally return to his frozen (but quite possibly preserved) head. (So at least one \"success\" in four attempts.)\nBoomerangs also became a main theme in the interactive comic 1350: Lorenz . The same format of multiple bad endings to the same starting set-up is used in 1515: Basketball Earth .\n[Cueball is throwing a boomerang.] [Holding his hands up.] [Cueball waits for return; continual waiting.] [Cueball is dejected, head hangs low.]\n[Cueball throws a boomerang.] [Cueball waits for the boomerang.] Outside: Oh God Outside: The ozone layer! [Cueball is surprised.]\n[Cueball throws a boomerang-like banana.] [Cueball waits.] [Megan walks in.] Megan: That was our last banana. Megan: You're such an asshole.\n[Cueball throws a boomerang.] [The boomerang breaks out of the panel box.]\n[The boomerang breaks out of a spacecraft, followed by Cueball.]\n"}
{"id":476,"title":"One-Sided","image_title":"One-Sided","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/476","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/one-sided.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/476:_One-Sided","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Sometimes my conversations with strangers go on for a while before I realize that they're talking on their phones.\n[To the right above a graph, Cueball is standing next to a Cueball-like guy with a backpack.] Guy with backpack: Hi! Cueball: Hi. Guy with backpack: What's up? Cueball: Uh, not a lot... Guy with backpack: Shit. Does Bernanke own a crossbow?\n[To the left and below these two guys is a graph with the axis labelled. The graph looks parabolic towards the left-hand side, but as x approaches infinity, y approaches zero. A vertical dashed line runs through the graph, slightly to the right of the peak of the graph.  To the right of the dashed line, there is an arrow pointing to the right that is labelled. The x-axis has a broken scale, and to the right of the break, there is a very small increase in the graph that is parenthetically labelled with a small arrow.] Y-axis: How Often This Happens X-axis: Length of conversation Arrow: Awkward Zone Small arrow: (My Second Relationship)\n","explanation":"The comic refers to the phenomenon of hearing half a conversation from a stranger on a cell phone and, not noticing the cell phone, imagining that that person is talking to you and responding in kind. The chart gives a plot of the frequency that this occurs (for Randall here represented by the Cueball to the left) against the amount of time that passes before the error is discovered. It also implies that Randall's second relationship was in reality just a particularly long instance of this occurrence, suggesting that his 'girlfriend' wasn't even aware of the relationship.\nThe title text is the continuation of the phone call, which involves a fictional conspiracy involving the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and a crossbow .\nOn September 23, about a week after this comic, Randall posted a short story to his blog, featuring Ben Bernanke breaking into the Federal Reserve building with a crossbow.\n[Caption above the panel:] Sometimes my conversations with strangers go on for a while before I realize that they're talking on their phones.\n[To the right above a graph, Cueball is standing next to a Cueball-like guy with a backpack.] Guy with backpack: Hi! Cueball: Hi. Guy with backpack: What's up? Cueball: Uh, not a lot... Guy with backpack: Shit. Does Bernanke own a crossbow?\n[To the left and below these two guys is a graph with the axis labelled. The graph looks parabolic towards the left-hand side, but as x approaches infinity, y approaches zero. A vertical dashed line runs through the graph, slightly to the right of the peak of the graph.  To the right of the dashed line, there is an arrow pointing to the right that is labelled. The x-axis has a broken scale, and to the right of the break, there is a very small increase in the graph that is parenthetically labelled with a small arrow.] Y-axis: How Often This Happens X-axis: Length of conversation Arrow: Awkward Zone Small arrow: (My Second Relationship)\n"}
{"id":477,"title":"Typewriter","image_title":"Typewriter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/477","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/typewriter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/477:_Typewriter","transcript":"[A typewriter is shown with the following letter in it:]\n[Caption below the panel:] I didn't realize how bad my habit of tabbing to Firefox every few seconds to check news sites had gotten until I tried writing on a typewriter.\n","explanation":"Randall is writing a letter to his grandmother on a typewriter, thanking her for taking him and at least one other person on a trip. However, due to a habit he's developed from using a computer for so long, Randall inadvertently litters the letter with chunks of blank space followed by website URLs. As if through muscle memory, Randall periodically attempts to check the latest news by pressing a combination involving the Tab key, typing the URL of a specific website, then pressing a combination using the Tab key again.\nOn a computer, the Ctrl+Tab keyboard combination usually switches to between browser tabs within a window, such as between two Firefox tabs, while Alt+Tab switches between windows. However, there is only a simple Tab key on an old-fashioned typewriter. Pressing Tab there doesn't switch to another screen, it just moves the platen (the typewriter's cursor, so to speak) to the next tab stop, leaving a wide space before the next typing on the same piece of paper. So the key combination that would satisfy Randall's somewhat hyperactive impulses on a computer is dramatically different on a typewriter, where that key instead causes movement of the platen. So, he hits the tab key, types a URL, and hits the tab key again right in the middle of his letter. It also shows Randall's love of news and information websites.\nThe title text references that Randall's real grandmothers, upon seeing this comic, might feel bad that he doesn't write to them at all \u2014 not even poorly-written letters like in the comic. To remedy this, he writes a brief thank you note to his grandmothers... which also includes one Ctrl\/Alt+Tab combination.\n[A typewriter is shown with the following letter in it:]\n[Caption below the panel:] I didn't realize how bad my habit of tabbing to Firefox every few seconds to check news sites had gotten until I tried writing on a typewriter.\n"}
{"id":478,"title":"The Staple Madness","image_title":"The Staple Madness","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/478","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_staple_madness.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/478:_The_Staple_Madness","transcript":"[Beret Guy and Cueball standing.] Beret Guy: [holding up a staple gun] I found Megan's staple gun! Cueball: [facepalming] Oh no.\n[Beret Guy kneeling over a laptop on the floor.] Cueball: [from outside panel] Oh God, what are you-- Beret Guy: [stapling a DVD to the laptop] Installing Debian! kaCHUNK\n[Beret Guy standing over a table.] Beret Guy: [stapling a sandwich together] Sandwiches! kaCHUNK kaCHUNK\n[Beret Guy running with the staple gun.] Beret Guy: Must affix everything to everything!\n[Unframed panel.] kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK\n[Megan enters, holding a tote bag.] Megan: ...Have you been abusing my staple gun? Beret Guy: No. God: [as voice from above] YES!\n","explanation":"Optimistic Beret Guy can never take life seriously. He loves to play with everything, and nothing is more exciting than a tool that sticks things together with an impressive kaCHUNK sound when he pulls the trigger, even on things that (definitely) shouldn't be stapled.\nInstalling Debian is a pun on the installation of software, and the installation of real life things by attaching them to things.\nThis comic may reference an engineering truism describing a similar scenario: \"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.\" The truism's actual meaning refers to the scenario where when a novice has only learned to use one tool (such as one programming language), they may attempt to solve all problems using only that tool, which may end badly. This saying is referred to explicitly in 801: Golden Hammer .\nFrom just reading the comic by itself, one may presume that in the last panel, Cueball has been stapled to the ceiling (as obvious evidence to Megan that Beret Guy has indeed been abusing her staple gun). According to the comic's official transcript , however, it is in fact God who is speaking. Due to Beret Guy's strange powers, it is rather likely that God has been stapled as well -- perhaps to the ceiling.\nDuct tape , thanks to its combination of tensile and adhesive strength, is commonly regarded as the ultimate do-it-yourself repair tool. Like a staple gun, it can also be used to stick things together. Although it does make a nice sound when pulling a strip out quickly, it does not make a loud kaCHUNK sound upon fixing two objects together.\nIn 291: Dignified , Beret Guy hangs upside down and says (in the title text) that he has stapled his hat to his head to make it stay on. That may very well have been the inspiration for this comic.\nThis was the fourth time the name Megan was used in xkcd, the first time being in 159: Boombox .\n[Beret Guy and Cueball standing.] Beret Guy: [holding up a staple gun] I found Megan's staple gun! Cueball: [facepalming] Oh no.\n[Beret Guy kneeling over a laptop on the floor.] Cueball: [from outside panel] Oh God, what are you-- Beret Guy: [stapling a DVD to the laptop] Installing Debian! kaCHUNK\n[Beret Guy standing over a table.] Beret Guy: [stapling a sandwich together] Sandwiches! kaCHUNK kaCHUNK\n[Beret Guy running with the staple gun.] Beret Guy: Must affix everything to everything!\n[Unframed panel.] kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK\n[Megan enters, holding a tote bag.] Megan: ...Have you been abusing my staple gun? Beret Guy: No. God: [as voice from above] YES!\n"}
{"id":479,"title":"Tones","image_title":"Tones","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/479","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tones.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/479:_Tones","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in a room next to a round table, looking out a window. A blue and orange sunset is visible outside the window. There is a phone on the table. The text of the comic is in boxes, two for each panel. Cueball is not talking, but rather narrating in these boxes.] Narrator: I haven't lived a perfect life. Narrator: Made plenty of mistakes. Got my share of regrets.\n[Zooming in on Cueball and the table with the phone, window with colored sky still visible to the left.] Narrator: But there's one thing of which I'm proud. Narrator: One stand on which I've never wavered.\n[Zooms in on the cell phone on the table, Cueball and window outside the panel.] Narrator: When someone calls my phone, Narrator: it makes a goddamn ringing sound.\n","explanation":"Cellular phone users can set nearly anything as their ringtone ; even the default rings on new phones are a short string of notes put together, and serve a dual purpose as a company's trademark. Cueball is saying that there's one thing in his life he's never compromised on: When someone calls his phone, it makes a ringing sound. Of course, this is a rather minor thing on which to make a stand.\nThe comic also seems to begin very seriously, and thus the comic relief is provided by the turn to the inconsequential; this is mirrored in the zooming-in to the cell phone.\nTo continue the comic's theme of Cueball-as-crochety-old-man, the title text says that he needs a lawn, so he can yell at kids to stay off of it \u2014 a stereotypical \"old man\" behavior .\nRandall makes another complaint about ringtones in 2272: Ringtone Timeline .\n[Cueball is standing in a room next to a round table, looking out a window. A blue and orange sunset is visible outside the window. There is a phone on the table. The text of the comic is in boxes, two for each panel. Cueball is not talking, but rather narrating in these boxes.] Narrator: I haven't lived a perfect life. Narrator: Made plenty of mistakes. Got my share of regrets.\n[Zooming in on Cueball and the table with the phone, window with colored sky still visible to the left.] Narrator: But there's one thing of which I'm proud. Narrator: One stand on which I've never wavered.\n[Zooms in on the cell phone on the table, Cueball and window outside the panel.] Narrator: When someone calls my phone, Narrator: it makes a goddamn ringing sound.\n"}
{"id":480,"title":"Spore","image_title":"Spore","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/480","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spore.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/480:_Spore","transcript":"[Cueball sitting at computer desk, surrounded by game boxes.] Cueball: Sweet, beat Populous . Now, on to Alpha Centauri . Until I can afford Spore , I'm just playing through all my old games in order of scale.\n","explanation":"Spore is a game that was released in 2008. Spore starts you off as a small little water bug, and when you become smart enough, you leave the water for land and start growing. To begin with, the scale of your interest is thus very small as you are only concerned with your spot of water. During the next two stages, the scale grows to being the entire continent. Once you start building cities, you get to view the entire planet. The last stage (and scale) is space, where you get to first travel through your own solar system, then the entire galaxy.\nCueball runs into a common gamer's problem, that being an inability (or unwillingness) to purchase a game on its release date due to the initial price. Since Cueball can't yet afford Spore , he instead is recreating the experience by playing older games, starting off with small scale games. In the comic, Cueball had just beaten the game Populous , which is on a planet scale, so now he can go on to the interstellar scale with the game Alpha Centauri .\nThe following three games could, for instance, have been played before the ones mentioned: SimAnt (ant scale), then moving up to The Sims (human scale), and then proceeding with SimCity (city scale).\nThe title text refers to the game not being able to run on the Mac using a GMA 950 , which is a type of Intel integrated graphics processor. It was first supported in OSX 10.4. It lacked hardware support for vertex shader 2.0, which some games required.\n[Cueball sitting at computer desk, surrounded by game boxes.] Cueball: Sweet, beat Populous . Now, on to Alpha Centauri . Until I can afford Spore , I'm just playing through all my old games in order of scale.\n"}
{"id":481,"title":"Listen to Yourself","image_title":"Listen to Yourself","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/481","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/listen_to_yourself.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/481:_Listen_to_Yourself","transcript":"[Black Hat approaches Danish typing at a computer.] Black Hat: What are you writing? Danish: Virus. Black Hat: What's it do?\nDanish: When someone tries to post a YouTube comment, it first reads it aloud back to them.\nSoon, everywhere: [Cueball is commenting on YouTube with a laptop.] type type type\n[Youtube comment is read back.]\nCueball: ...I'm a moron.\n[Cueball leaves desk and partially closes his laptop.]\n[Cueball is seen sitting on steps, depressed.]\n[Cueball has his head in his hands.] Cueball: I... I didn't know.\n","explanation":"YouTube is a website for video sharing where anyone can upload and view videos. It is notorious for having some of the most ridiculous, hateful, mean-spirited, nonsensical comments of any mainstream website (a reputation touched upon earlier in 202: YouTube ).\nDanish tells Black Hat that her computer virus that she is writing reads a YouTube user's comments back to them before it is submitted. Upon hearing their own ridiculous comments read aloud to them, they will realize the stupidity of it and not submit the comment. YouTube later made this a real feature, although it has since been removed again.\nThe title text is in reference to a post left on the Yahoo! Answers website in 2006 by a submitter known as \"kavya,\" who asks \"how is babby formed \/ how girl get pragnent.\" The post picked up internet popularity and spawned several flash animations. This was again mentioned in 522: Google Trends and in 550: Density .\n[Black Hat approaches Danish typing at a computer.] Black Hat: What are you writing? Danish: Virus. Black Hat: What's it do?\nDanish: When someone tries to post a YouTube comment, it first reads it aloud back to them.\nSoon, everywhere: [Cueball is commenting on YouTube with a laptop.] type type type\n[Youtube comment is read back.]\nCueball: ...I'm a moron.\n[Cueball leaves desk and partially closes his laptop.]\n[Cueball is seen sitting on steps, depressed.]\n[Cueball has his head in his hands.] Cueball: I... I didn't know.\n"}
{"id":482,"title":"Height","image_title":"Height","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/482","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/height.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/482:_Height","transcript":"Top of observable universe [Black Hat is standing on top, throwing a black kitty down.] Black Cat: Mrowl! [Map of the universe from observable universe to Earth. Each area of item is labeled. Labels left to right, up to down:] (46 billion light years up) Hubble Deep Field Objects -One billion light years- Great Attractor Antennae Galaxies (colliding) Andromeda Holy crap lots of space -One million light years- Magellanic Clouds Edge of galaxy Galactic center Crab Nebula Orion Nebula Horsehead Nebula Romulan neutral zone The Pleiades, duh! Rigel Betelgeuse Ford Prefect [Three arrows are pointing up above three lines with the following label:] -Expanding shell of radio transmissions- [Above a dotted line:] Edge of federation sector 0-0-1 Pollux Arcturus Missing WMDs Sirius Barnard's Star Alpha Centauri -One parsec- -One light year- Oort Cloud (?) Bupkis Comet which will destroy Earth in late 2063 Pioneer 10 Voyager I Eris (All hail Discordia!) Pluto (Not a planet. Neener neener.) Neptune Uranus Saturn [Two arrows point to two moons, one next to each of the planets above and below.] <-- Life --> Jupiter Asteroids Mars Venus Sun Mercury Spaceship Planet Express: Hey, a heaping bowl of salt! Spaceship Discovery One: Open the fridge door, Hal. Moon Human altitude record (Apollo 13) 2nd place: Snoop Dogg Space elevator - One of these days, promise! Geosynchronous Orbit GPS satellites Lunar lander: In retrospect, they shouldn't have sent a poet. I have no idea how to land. International Space Station Space junk -Official edge of space (100 km)- Meteors -1\/10 ATM- High altitude balloons Airliners Shuttle Columbia lost -1\/2 ATM- Cory Doctrow Everest Helicopters (6000 m) Cueball: Woo Python! [A vertical scale is drawn along the right side of the picture, starting at 1 km and getting progressivly smaller and smaller.] 1 km -800 m- Burj Dubai (~800 m) 500 400 Eiffel Tower (325 m) 200 Kites Great Pyramid (140 m) Pop fly Redwood (115 m) 100m Oak (20 m) A person in the oak: Hey squirrels! Tallest stilts Brachiosaur (13 m) Giraffe (8 m) [Megan and Cueball holding the kite are labeled:] Folks The observable universe, from top to bottom ~On a log scale~ Sizes are not to scale, but heights above the Earth's surface are accurate on a log scale. (That is, each step up is double the height.)\n","explanation":"Height uses a logarithmic scale to depict the contents of the universe at progressively smaller distances from Earth (less high above the Earth), starting at the highest possible \"point,\" the edge of the observable universe , going all the way down to the grass beneath our feet. The comic is a direct companion piece to 485: Depth , also released on a Monday the week after this one. Depth similarly uses the logarithmic scale to depict the Earth at progressively greater magnification (going \"deeper\" down), from Earth's surface (the grass) to the interior of a single proton.\nThe very top (edge) of the observable universe is described as being 46 billion light years above the Earth. The universe is \"only\" about 13.8 billion years old , so the cosmic background radiation that reaches the Earth today has also only traveled 13.8 billion light years. However, during that time, the universe has expanded , so the galaxies that formed from that spot where this background radiation was emitted 13.8 billion years ago would now be 46 billion light years away. This has led to many misconceptions regarding the size , the most typical being that the radius of the observable universe is \"only\" 13.8 billion light years. See this video, How Do You Measure the Size of the Universe? , for a great explanation of the 46 billion light years.\nTo the right of the text, Black Hat stands atop the comic, having just dropped a cat off the edge head first; he is clearly going to test if the cat will land on its feet, being a jerk per his usual character. It will take some time, though, before the cat reaches Earth....\nAs one scrolls down, the depicted distances become less compressed, until arriving at the surface of Earth, all the while approaching a 1:1 scale with real-life distances. As shown in 1162: Log Scale , if Randall didn't do this, the comic would be much, MUCH longer.\nIn this comic, most objects that are grounded on Earth are scaled logarithmically on the vertical axes and linearly on the horizontal axes (some are scaled linearly on both axes). Displaying objects in this manner noticeably distorts their shape; the Great Pyramid, for instance, looks not like a pyramid but like a bullet.\nOutside of the Earth's atmosphere, the objects are placed at their actual distances from Earth on the log scale, but their shapes are not subjected to the logarithmic scaling of Earth objects, instead appearing as they would be seen (otherwise, round objects like the sun would appear more egg shaped, with the flatter side facing upward). However, objects are still much larger or much smaller than they would be in real life, in order to allow them to be properly seen.\nIn the title text, Randall muses on how the inwardly-curved sides of the Eiffel Tower might actually become perfectly straightened when subjected to this logarithmic distortion. Although it is shown to bulge in the comic proper, this may be a consequence of Randall's rough art style rather than any reflection of his beliefs. The actual shape of the Tower approximates an exponential curve , which would indeed give a straight line on a log scale, although it was actually designed by Gustave Eiffel to minimize wind resistance rather than to be mathematically exact (the design is so perfect that the amount the Tower sways in the wind is less than the amount it is distorted due to thermal expansion of the sunlit side).\nAll objects are sorted from bottom to top by their maximum distance from earth for objects in a solar orbit, and their current distance for others.\nTop of observable universe [Black Hat is standing on top, throwing a black kitty down.] Black Cat: Mrowl! [Map of the universe from observable universe to Earth. Each area of item is labeled. Labels left to right, up to down:] (46 billion light years up) Hubble Deep Field Objects -One billion light years- Great Attractor Antennae Galaxies (colliding) Andromeda Holy crap lots of space -One million light years- Magellanic Clouds Edge of galaxy Galactic center Crab Nebula Orion Nebula Horsehead Nebula Romulan neutral zone The Pleiades, duh! Rigel Betelgeuse Ford Prefect [Three arrows are pointing up above three lines with the following label:] -Expanding shell of radio transmissions- [Above a dotted line:] Edge of federation sector 0-0-1 Pollux Arcturus Missing WMDs Sirius Barnard's Star Alpha Centauri -One parsec- -One light year- Oort Cloud (?) Bupkis Comet which will destroy Earth in late 2063 Pioneer 10 Voyager I Eris (All hail Discordia!) Pluto (Not a planet. Neener neener.) Neptune Uranus Saturn [Two arrows point to two moons, one next to each of the planets above and below.] <-- Life --> Jupiter Asteroids Mars Venus Sun Mercury Spaceship Planet Express: Hey, a heaping bowl of salt! Spaceship Discovery One: Open the fridge door, Hal. Moon Human altitude record (Apollo 13) 2nd place: Snoop Dogg Space elevator - One of these days, promise! Geosynchronous Orbit GPS satellites Lunar lander: In retrospect, they shouldn't have sent a poet. I have no idea how to land. International Space Station Space junk -Official edge of space (100 km)- Meteors -1\/10 ATM- High altitude balloons Airliners Shuttle Columbia lost -1\/2 ATM- Cory Doctrow Everest Helicopters (6000 m) Cueball: Woo Python! [A vertical scale is drawn along the right side of the picture, starting at 1 km and getting progressivly smaller and smaller.] 1 km -800 m- Burj Dubai (~800 m) 500 400 Eiffel Tower (325 m) 200 Kites Great Pyramid (140 m) Pop fly Redwood (115 m) 100m Oak (20 m) A person in the oak: Hey squirrels! Tallest stilts Brachiosaur (13 m) Giraffe (8 m) [Megan and Cueball holding the kite are labeled:] Folks The observable universe, from top to bottom ~On a log scale~ Sizes are not to scale, but heights above the Earth's surface are accurate on a log scale. (That is, each step up is double the height.)\n"}
{"id":483,"title":"Fiction Rule of Thumb","image_title":"Fiction Rule of Thumb","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/483","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fiction_rule_of_thumb.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/483:_Fiction_Rule_of_Thumb","transcript":"[Line graph shown with an inverse curve.] [Y-Axis: Probability book is good.] [X-Axis: Number of words made up by author.] [The curve becomes less steep as the number of words increases.] \"The Elders, or Fra'as, guarded the farmlings (children) with their krytoses, which are like swords but awesomer ...\"","explanation":"Randall uses a graph that purports that the more words an author makes up, the less likely their book is any good. To demonstrate this, he provides an example where a hypothetical author uses three made-up words in a single sentence: \"Fra'as\", \"Farmlings\", and \"Krytoses\". The author clearly does not see that having to insert explanations of all the made-up words makes the sentence extremely clumsy.\nThe title text declares that the average author is allowed five invented words per book before this rule is invoked against them, but mentions that J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll are exceptions, as they are both very famous, well-respected writers who made words up all the time .\nRandall also makes a dig at Anathem , a speculative fiction novel by Neal Stephenson about a monastic order on another planet that studies science, mathematics, and philosophy. The book is noteworthy for having a very large number of made-up or repurposed words, enough to require its own glossary. One of the more common fake words is fraa (without an apostrophe).\n[Line graph shown with an inverse curve.] [Y-Axis: Probability book is good.] [X-Axis: Number of words made up by author.] [The curve becomes less steep as the number of words increases.] \"The Elders, or Fra'as, guarded the farmlings (children) with their krytoses, which are like swords but awesomer ...\""}
{"id":484,"title":"Flash Games","image_title":"Flash Games","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/484","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flash_games.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/484:_Flash_Games","transcript":"[On the left side of the panel are a massive TV screen, large speakers, and similar devices, all connected to a \"Game Station 20,000\" console. Cueball, however, is over on the right side of the panel, on a modestly-sized computer.] Cueball: Ooh, I think I've got it figured out! Okay, one more hour. Beep Plunk The most powerful gaming systems in the world still can't match the addictiveness of tiny in-browser Flash games.\n","explanation":"Dedicated hardcore gamers will often indulge in expensive, top-of-the-line equipment to get the most out of their video games.\nAdobe Flash was a software platform allowing multimedia applications in the browser. Flash became a popular choice for game developers, since playing Flash games only requires a browser and the free cross-platform Flash runtime environment. Randall was right that Flash games are quite addictive, and gamers would have found them more engaging than anything that runs on expensive (dedicated) gaming systems.\nNowadays, years after the making of this comic, Flash has been completely phased out by modern browsers in favor of HTML5 + JavaScript . The open-source movement especially prefers the latter, since no proprietary browser plugins are needed to run it. That said, the sheer number of Flash games that have been made over the last decade means that Flash will likely hold a special place in many gamers' hearts for the foreseeable future, to the point where \"Flash game\" has become a catch-all term for any browser game .\nThe comic may also be commenting that some modern games are too focused on graphics and not enough on gameplay.\nThe title text mentions the Wiimote , the standard controller for the Nintendo Wii video game console. Wii games are usually controlled by tracking the movement and orientation of the handheld Wiimote, but Johnny Lee devised a method to use a Wiimote to track the position of the users head and demonstrated this with a desktop VR display . It should be noted that this is not the same as the body tracking that is available from Sony and Microsoft with the EyeToy and Kinect respectively, neither of which has earned any real praise as a practical gaming controller.\n[On the left side of the panel are a massive TV screen, large speakers, and similar devices, all connected to a \"Game Station 20,000\" console. Cueball, however, is over on the right side of the panel, on a modestly-sized computer.] Cueball: Ooh, I think I've got it figured out! Okay, one more hour. Beep Plunk The most powerful gaming systems in the world still can't match the addictiveness of tiny in-browser Flash games.\n"}
{"id":485,"title":"Depth","image_title":"Depth","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/485","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/depth.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/485:_Depth","transcript":"Sizes Accurate on a vertical log scale [Series of images of characters doing various things. The things they are doing are listed in left to right order.] Cueball and Megan playing in a ball pen Megan using witchcraft to ban vista \"Out, Vista!\" Ponytail and Megan play Rock Band A couple is having sex under the cover in bed. [Below this series of images, an image of a man on the computer.] Cueball is on a computer and the image expands as it goes down. Here are the labels from left to right, up to down: CD DVD Case North Bridge PS\/2 Mouse (rodent) RAM CPU Socket Pin 32,767 Angels Dancing (one more and they'd roll over and become 32,768 Devils ), Rice, Torrent (a bug), CPU, upcoming segfault dust mite hair OVUM Data (a pixel on Rick Astley's shoulder), rust mite, fork(); Peter Norton fighting a baxteriophage memory carbon nanotubes space elevator a line of silicon (Si), Electron Cloud, a man made out of arrows saying \"sup?\" silicon nucleus IPod femto Brian Greene knitting furiously [next to his knitting needles there is text saying clink, clink ]\n","explanation":"The comic is a companion piece to 482: Height , which explored a logarithmic scale from the edge of the observable universe down to the Earth's surface. Depth continues the process, viewing logarithmically smaller scales from Earth's atmosphere down to the interior of a single proton . This combination is reminiscent of Charles and Ray Eames' 1977 short film Powers of Ten .\nHere's a walk through the entire comic:\nSizes Accurate on a vertical log scale [Series of images of characters doing various things. The things they are doing are listed in left to right order.] Cueball and Megan playing in a ball pen Megan using witchcraft to ban vista \"Out, Vista!\" Ponytail and Megan play Rock Band A couple is having sex under the cover in bed. [Below this series of images, an image of a man on the computer.] Cueball is on a computer and the image expands as it goes down. Here are the labels from left to right, up to down: CD DVD Case North Bridge PS\/2 Mouse (rodent) RAM CPU Socket Pin 32,767 Angels Dancing (one more and they'd roll over and become 32,768 Devils ), Rice, Torrent (a bug), CPU, upcoming segfault dust mite hair OVUM Data (a pixel on Rick Astley's shoulder), rust mite, fork(); Peter Norton fighting a baxteriophage memory carbon nanotubes space elevator a line of silicon (Si), Electron Cloud, a man made out of arrows saying \"sup?\" silicon nucleus IPod femto Brian Greene knitting furiously [next to his knitting needles there is text saying clink, clink ]\n"}
{"id":486,"title":"I am Not a Ninja","image_title":"I am Not a Ninja","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/486","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_am_not_a_ninja.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/486:_I_am_Not_a_Ninja","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan facing each other in the same panel.] Megan: We need to talk.\n[Cueball turns to look behind him; panel pans back to show a (closed) window on the wall.]\n[Cueball throws a smoke grenade to the floor.] POW\n[Grenade fizzles and begins to emit smoke; Cueball and Megan both look down at it.] sssss\n[Smoke cloud expands very slightly. Megan puts her hand to her face.] cough\n[The smoke detector alarm above them starts beeping. Both look up.] BEEP BEE-\n[Cueball and Megan look down at the grenade again. The alarm is still beeping.] -P BEEP BEEP BEEP BE-\n[Cueball slowly backs away. The alarm is still beeping.] -EP BEEP BEEP BEEP B-\n[Cueball unsuccessfully tries to open the apparently locked window. The alarm is still beeping.] Rattle rattle -BEEP BEEP-\n[Panel pans back to the full view. Cueball looks back at Megan, who is now face-palming. The alarm is still beeping.] -BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP B-\n[Megan turns and walks away. Cueball looks at the window. The alarm is still beeping.] -EEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEE-\n","explanation":"In a romantic relationship, some of the most horrifying words are arguably \"We need to talk.\" They often stereotypically signal the beginning of a conversation that the speaker knows will cause the listener to become upset.\nIn this comic, Cueball is so horrified by hearing those words that he tries the ol' \" ninja smoke vanish \" technique, only to have it fail miserably when the pellet provides insufficient visual cover to perform the trick, yet still sets off the smoke detector, and then he can't get the window open to either leave the scene or just clear the less than useful cloud. Megan simply facepalms and leaves.\nThe title text jokes that Megan simply wanted to talk to Cueball about his poor smoke-bomb techniques. Arguably, then, this instance was actually a qualified success in issue avoidance.\nHe continued to keep smoke bombs on his person for situations such as these as seen in the title text of 1712: Politifact .\n[Cueball and Megan facing each other in the same panel.] Megan: We need to talk.\n[Cueball turns to look behind him; panel pans back to show a (closed) window on the wall.]\n[Cueball throws a smoke grenade to the floor.] POW\n[Grenade fizzles and begins to emit smoke; Cueball and Megan both look down at it.] sssss\n[Smoke cloud expands very slightly. Megan puts her hand to her face.] cough\n[The smoke detector alarm above them starts beeping. Both look up.] BEEP BEE-\n[Cueball and Megan look down at the grenade again. The alarm is still beeping.] -P BEEP BEEP BEEP BE-\n[Cueball slowly backs away. The alarm is still beeping.] -EP BEEP BEEP BEEP B-\n[Cueball unsuccessfully tries to open the apparently locked window. The alarm is still beeping.] Rattle rattle -BEEP BEEP-\n[Panel pans back to the full view. Cueball looks back at Megan, who is now face-palming. The alarm is still beeping.] -BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP B-\n[Megan turns and walks away. Cueball looks at the window. The alarm is still beeping.] -EEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEE-\n"}
{"id":487,"title":"Numerical Sex Positions","image_title":"Numerical Sex Positions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/487","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/numerical_sex_positions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/487:_Numerical_Sex_Positions","transcript":"xkcd presents a guide to numerical sex positions:\nNarrator: 69 [Cueball and Megan perform a standing sixty-nine position i.e. mutual oral sex.]\nNarrator: 99 [Cueball and Megan perform a standing spooning position.]\nNarrator: 71 [Megan is bent over a table and Cueball takes her doggy-style.]\nNarrator: 34 [Cueball looks at Megan, who is standing on one leg with her arms out.] Cueball: Uh.\nNarrator: \u221a 8 [Cueball and Megan are staring at each other.] Narrator: Guys?\nNarrator: ln(2\u03c0) [Cueball just stands there while Megan is walking away.] Narrator: Aww, c'mon...\n","explanation":"Sex positions are positions that two people can have sexual intercourse in. Many of them are named, although only one generally accepted position is named after a number: the 69 .\nCueball and Megan try to approximate the shapes of the numbers, which they are given by the narrator, as sex positions. They start with the classic 69, then represent the number 99 as \"spooning\" while standing and the number 71 as \"doggy-style\" sex over a table. They are then given ever more difficult numbers to attempt, first 34 (maybe referencing rule 34 of the internet ) - Cueball exclaims Uh as he has no idea how to make a 3 (maybe he's supposed to curl up in a fetal position), although Megan does try (in vain) to form a 4. Then they are completely baffled by \u221a8 (AKA 2\u221a2 or \u2248 2.82842712475) (presumably one of them is to contort into a figure-eight shape while the other lies on top), and just stand there while the narrator asks Guys? - as in give it a try. And finally, Megan gives up and leaves at the suggestion ln (2 \u03c0 ) (or \u2248 1.83787706641) to the frustration of the narrator, who exclaims Aww, c'mon .\nThe narrator is so frustrated, as we are told in the title text, because he did not even get to ask them to do a continued fraction (which likely would have involved many other people) as the ultimate challenge.\nxkcd presents a guide to numerical sex positions:\nNarrator: 69 [Cueball and Megan perform a standing sixty-nine position i.e. mutual oral sex.]\nNarrator: 99 [Cueball and Megan perform a standing spooning position.]\nNarrator: 71 [Megan is bent over a table and Cueball takes her doggy-style.]\nNarrator: 34 [Cueball looks at Megan, who is standing on one leg with her arms out.] Cueball: Uh.\nNarrator: \u221a 8 [Cueball and Megan are staring at each other.] Narrator: Guys?\nNarrator: ln(2\u03c0) [Cueball just stands there while Megan is walking away.] Narrator: Aww, c'mon...\n"}
{"id":488,"title":"Steal This Comic","image_title":"Steal This Comic","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/488","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/steal_this_comic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/488:_Steal_This_Comic","transcript":"Black Hat: Thinking of buying from audible.com or iTunes? Black Hat: Remember, if you pirate something, it's yours for life.  You can take it anywhere and it will always work. [There is a flowchart whose paths are (You're a Criminal)<-Pirate<-(Buy or Pirate)->Buy->(Things Change)->(You Try to Recover Your Collection)->(You're a Criminal)] Black Hat: But if you buy DRM-locked media, and you ever switch operating systems or new technology comes along, your collection could be lost. Black Hat: And if you try to keep it, you'll be a criminal ( DMCA 1201 ). Black Hat: So remember: if you want a collection you can count on, PIRATE IT. Black Hat: Hey, you'll be a criminal either way. (If you don't like this, demand DRM-free files)\n","explanation":"DRM , an acronym standing for Digital Rights Management, is a recent anti-piracy mechanism that is used to prevent unapproved or unintended use of software programs. Examples would be a requirement to play a video game while online (where the servers can validate that the game has not been hacked) or allowing only a limited amount of installations to ensure that different users are buying the program for themselves instead of sharing it. The problem is that there are ways that DRM can be restrictive even upon legal situations. Someone may simply want to play the game in an area where there is no Internet connection, or they may have exceeded the amount of allowed installs due to installation problems or hardware malfunctions requiring the purchase of new hardware. In the audio situation described in the comic, one could not, say, transfer an audiobook or song from an iPod to a Blackberry phone, because Apple does not allow files on its operating system to be used on ones from other companies. For this reason, DRM has also been referred to derisively as \"Digital Restrictions Management\" .\nBlack Hat uses a flow chart to propose two paths:\nSince both situations have you end up being a criminal, Black Hat proposes taking the pirate path, which leaves you with a collection of dependable audio for free. In the title-text, Randall gives an anecdote of how ridiculous it was to obtain an audiobook legally, and how all of his other legally-obtained music has been lost, as the flow chart predicts.\nIn light of this, he proposes another option: demanding DRM-free files.\nIt's worth noting that there are other methods of listening to music legally that avoid the problems presented in the comic:\nThe title is a reference to the \"Piracy is a Crime\" ad campaign, as well as a 1970 pro-anarchy book called Steal This Book . There is also some underlying humour: since xkcd is under a Creative Commons license , you cannot \"steal\" the comic, since Randall specifically allowed the comic to be shared. It could also be a reference to Don't Download This Song , a \"Weird Al\" Yankovic song that amusingly deals with audio piracy.\nA note on the site says that Amazon sells DRM-free music files. Since this comic was written, iTunes has also stopped using DRM on music, though it still protects apps, e-books, and videos.\nThis comic is not applicable to some countries, such as Canada, where copyright infringement is purely a civil matter and is not a criminal offense.\nBlack Hat: Thinking of buying from audible.com or iTunes? Black Hat: Remember, if you pirate something, it's yours for life.  You can take it anywhere and it will always work. [There is a flowchart whose paths are (You're a Criminal)<-Pirate<-(Buy or Pirate)->Buy->(Things Change)->(You Try to Recover Your Collection)->(You're a Criminal)] Black Hat: But if you buy DRM-locked media, and you ever switch operating systems or new technology comes along, your collection could be lost. Black Hat: And if you try to keep it, you'll be a criminal ( DMCA 1201 ). Black Hat: So remember: if you want a collection you can count on, PIRATE IT. Black Hat: Hey, you'll be a criminal either way. (If you don't like this, demand DRM-free files)\n"}
{"id":489,"title":"Going West","image_title":"Going West","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/489","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/going_west.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/489:_Going_West","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking, while Cueball is walking away from Megan holding his hands up. Megan is holding a folded page of a letter up in one hand. The envelope can be seen behind the page, which only displays one line of visible, but unreadable, text.] Megan: I'm sorry. The Google Maps team hired me. Cueball: But I can't move to California!\n[Megan has taken her hand down holding the letter so the backside of the envelope is now visible. Cueball turns towards her and holds one hand up in front of himself.] Megan: Then I guess this is the end. Cueball: It can't be! Cueball: Listen.\n[Cueball and Megan are holding each other's hands with stretched out arms, looking into each other's eyes. The envelope has disappeared from Megan's hands.] Cueball: When I look deep into your eyes, I see a future for us. Megan: Look deeper.\n[In this frameless panel, Cueball takes a hand up to his chin, while he bends his head very close to Megan's head, and she even leans a bit back. The letter and envelope have returned to her hand, after they went missing in the previous panel.]\n[Cueball stands normally, as does Megan with her letter.] Cueball: \"We're sorry, but we don't have imagery at this zoom level\"? Cueball: They... They have you already.\n","explanation":"Megan has been hired by Google Maps and plans to move to California presumably because this is where Google headquarters is located. Her boyfriend Cueball states that he cannot move there. Megan then just ends their relationship. Cueball does not just give up -- he takes her hand and looks deep into her eyes and claims that he can see a future for them. But Megan asks him to look deeper, and he sees a typical Google Map message. He realizes that they already own her, and he has no chance of stopping her from going to California.\nGoogle Maps is a service to let people look at the world through their web browser. When Google Maps was first starting out, the maximum zoom level a person could select went past the highest resolution imagery available in certain areas. When this happened, Google Maps would tile the message \"We're sorry, but we don't have imagery at this zoom level.\" When Cueball looks \"closely\" enough into Megan's eyes, he sees this same message and knows it is over.\nThe title text refers to a functionality of Google Maps that allows users to submit\/update information about places on the map, such as business listings, monuments, etc. Such updates must be approved by Google before other users can see them. Apparently, Cueball has been repeatedly submitting 'WHERE YOU BROKE MY HEART' as a listing for his own house, so that Megan, who is now on the Google Maps team, will see those submissions. The title text is probably her reply.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking, while Cueball is walking away from Megan holding his hands up. Megan is holding a folded page of a letter up in one hand. The envelope can be seen behind the page, which only displays one line of visible, but unreadable, text.] Megan: I'm sorry. The Google Maps team hired me. Cueball: But I can't move to California!\n[Megan has taken her hand down holding the letter so the backside of the envelope is now visible. Cueball turns towards her and holds one hand up in front of himself.] Megan: Then I guess this is the end. Cueball: It can't be! Cueball: Listen.\n[Cueball and Megan are holding each other's hands with stretched out arms, looking into each other's eyes. The envelope has disappeared from Megan's hands.] Cueball: When I look deep into your eyes, I see a future for us. Megan: Look deeper.\n[In this frameless panel, Cueball takes a hand up to his chin, while he bends his head very close to Megan's head, and she even leans a bit back. The letter and envelope have returned to her hand, after they went missing in the previous panel.]\n[Cueball stands normally, as does Megan with her letter.] Cueball: \"We're sorry, but we don't have imagery at this zoom level\"? Cueball: They... They have you already.\n"}
{"id":490,"title":"Morning Routine","image_title":"Morning Routine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/490","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/morning_routine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/490:_Morning_Routine","transcript":"Morning Routine:\nLaptops are weird .\nFrom January 2017 to February 2017, the xkcd website's page for this comic (xkcd.com\/490) was showing a different comic instead of the original comic displayed above. The comic displayed on the xkcd website's page was in fact 1518: Typical Morning Routine , and was most likely being incorrectly shown due to a technical error having something to do with the comics' similar names.\nThe original comic's alt-text, \"I had a really hard time not writing '...profit!'\", was still displayed upon mouseover.\nAs of February 2017, this error has been fixed and the original comic is displaying correctly again.\n","explanation":"Thanks to the portability of the modern computer, the availability of the Internet, and the advent of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter , someone could conceivably use their laptop to catch up on the lives of everyone they care about from the comfort of their own bed; indeed, they could do it under the covers if they want to.\nThis is rather different than the pre-computer days in which catching up with friends required a great deal more effort. Hence, laptops are weird.\nThe title text refers to the South Park episode \" Gnomes \", in which a race of tiny gnomes steal people's underpants. Their business plan is finally explained as:\nPhase 1: Collect underpants Phase 2:\u00a0? Phase 3: Profit\nThis became an Internet meme, used in situations where a person's or group's planned course of action held little clear relevance to their stated or inferred objective. As such, although the list bears superficial similarity to a list ending in \"Profit,\" using this as a punchline would not be particularly effective or funny, hence Randall has decided not to include this.\nMorning Routine:\nLaptops are weird .\nFrom January 2017 to February 2017, the xkcd website's page for this comic (xkcd.com\/490) was showing a different comic instead of the original comic displayed above. The comic displayed on the xkcd website's page was in fact 1518: Typical Morning Routine , and was most likely being incorrectly shown due to a technical error having something to do with the comics' similar names.\nThe original comic's alt-text, \"I had a really hard time not writing '...profit!'\", was still displayed upon mouseover.\nAs of February 2017, this error has been fixed and the original comic is displaying correctly again.\n"}
{"id":491,"title":"Twitter","image_title":"Twitter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/491","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/twitter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/491:_Twitter","transcript":"[Cueball with a handheld device sits on an office chair.] Device: Beep beep\nDevice: On Twitter feeds\nDevice: Beep beep\nDevice: An odd regression:\nDevice: Beep beep\nDevice: Ancient memes\nDevice: Beep beep\nDevice: Find new expression\nDevice: Beep beep\nDevice: Burma-shave\n","explanation":"This comic plays off of an old shaving cream product's Burma-Shave advertising campaign employed on American highways from 1925 to 1963 . These ads used short poems, each line arranged sequentially on a sign along a highway, the last line always being \"Burma Shave,\" the name of the shaving cream. Originally, these ads only described the product, but others included driving safety messages.\nTwitter is a messaging service where your messages are restricted in length, so to get a longer essay sent, you will need to break it up in smaller fragments \u2014 like the Burma-Shave messages, although the whole of the text of this comic is considerably less than 140 characters and would not need to be broken up on Twitter.\nCueball gets five messages from Twitter on his device that give the following message: On Twitter feeds - An odd regression: - Ancient memes - Find new expression - Burma-shave.\nThis relates that this old way (ancient-memes) of getting a message through when only having a limited space now again (an odd regression) flourishes on Twitter feeds - Burma-shave...\nFirefox 2 had a long standing annoying bug where only the initial part of the title text were shown as a tool-tip, creating a \"Burma-Shave\" effect of only being able to see some of the text. Unlike Burma-Shave, where you would see the rest of the text as you were driving down the highway, Firefox didn't actually show you the rest of the text unless you right-clicked show-property, and you would be able to see a sideways scrollable field of the title-text in the properties for the image.\nThe joke in this title text is composed of five broken tool-tips from Firefox, and the message is that you should upgrade your browser from Firefox 2. Any other browser would do in order to improve your reading experience when browsing through xkcd!\n[Cueball with a handheld device sits on an office chair.] Device: Beep beep\nDevice: On Twitter feeds\nDevice: Beep beep\nDevice: An odd regression:\nDevice: Beep beep\nDevice: Ancient memes\nDevice: Beep beep\nDevice: Find new expression\nDevice: Beep beep\nDevice: Burma-shave\n"}
{"id":492,"title":"Scrabble","image_title":"Scrabble","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/492","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scrabble.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/492:_Scrabble","transcript":"[A first-person view of a family Scrabble game at a table. The other players are a juvenile Cueball to the left, Hairbun across from you, and Ponytail to the right. The two letters on the board are 'HI', with the 'H' on the center star, and the letters in your hand are 'CLTORIS.'] This always happens to me in family Scrabble games.\n","explanation":"This comic depicts a game of Scrabble , a popular board game where the goal is to form words with the letters in your hand. The joke here is that the obvious option here is the word \" clitoris ,\" which is an inappropriate word for a family Scrabble game, but gives a 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles. The title text points out that the letters in the hand can also form the word \"OSTRICH,\" which is family friendly, but much lower scoring and not as obvious.\nAs the H appears to be on the center star square, the narrator will score 63 points if he plays \"CLITORIS\" (however he uses the two Is, as three of the tiles will fall on double letter scores), and 13 points if he plays \"OSTRICH.\" The highest-scoring play is to hook the C and play \"HIC\" and \"LICTORS,\" scoring 71 points.\n[A first-person view of a family Scrabble game at a table. The other players are a juvenile Cueball to the left, Hairbun across from you, and Ponytail to the right. The two letters on the board are 'HI', with the 'H' on the center star, and the letters in your hand are 'CLTORIS.'] This always happens to me in family Scrabble games.\n"}
{"id":493,"title":"Actuarial","image_title":"Actuarial","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/493","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/actuarial.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/493:_Actuarial","transcript":"[A dialog between Cueball, seated at a computer terminal, and Black Hat, seated in an armchair reading a book. They are facing away from each other.] Cueball: I know you shouldn't feed the trolls, but sometimes they just provoke me to where I can't help replying.\nBlack Hat: Yeah, me too. Yesterday this guy kept spamming \"First!\", so I got a set of actuarial tables and spent twenty minutes telling him when all his childhood heroes would likely die.\n[Cueball turns around in his chair.] Cueball: ...\nCueball: Remind me never to upset you, ever. Black Hat: 2038: Last of the original Star Wars cast dies. Cueball: Augh!\n","explanation":"Cueball is commenting about how he shouldn't feed the trolls, but sometimes gets provoked to the point where he can't help replying. The term Trolling is used to describe provocative, destructive, or annoying behavior on the Internet .\nBlack Hat agrees and tells that he had an issue yesterday with a guy who had a serious case of the first urge. Some people have to be the first to make a comment on any given posting (be it a blog post or a YouTube video or some other commentable content) and to obnoxiously point out that they have made the first comment. This often manifests as the poster simply posting the word \"First\" without contributing any actual content to the discussion.\nOnce again, Black Hat is thus provoked into online retaliation bordering on the sociopathic, choosing a form of retribution that doesn't necessarily break any written rules but strikes directly at the heart and\/or mind of his opponent. In this case, he tells the first guy when all his childhood heroes are likely to die - this could make anyone miserable. To do this, he is using actuarial tables or life tables, which show for each age the probability that a certain person will be alive by their next birthday.\nCueball reflects that he doesn't wish to become the target of such ire himself, but (without apparent malice on Black Hat's part...) still suffers from a piece of memetic shrapnel from the original attack - Cueball obviously loves the original Star Wars movies - and Black Hat would know this!\nIn the title text, it is said how Black Hat's offensive is so effective that he appears to have caused grief even to his own author and creator , Randall , who only managed to check up on the Star Wars cast before getting too depressed.\n(So far, six main cast members have died: Peter Cushing ( Grand Moff Tarkin ) in 1994, Alec Guinness ( Obi-Wan Kenobi ) in 2000, Kenny Baker (English actor) ( R2-D2 ) and Carrie Fisher ( Princess Leia ), both in 2016, Peter Mayhew ( Chewbacca ) in 2019, and finally David Prowse ( Darth Vader ) in 2020.)\nRandall has used this idea again in 893: 65 Years and published a 'morbid' program (the original code has been removed, but an implementation can be found on Github) that uses actuarial tables to calculate the probability that someone will die within a given time. The offense that provoked Black hat was mentioned already in 269: TCMP and then returned to in both 1019: First Post and 1258: First .\nA similar setting with Cueball and Black Hat also discussing movies appears later in 1751: Movie Folder . But then Black Hat is reading on his smartphone.\nIt is possible that 494: Secretary: Part 1 and the following series are a continuation of this comic, as Black Hat's great power over even Internet trolls via his sociopathic ways would explain why he was chosen as Internet secretary.\n[A dialog between Cueball, seated at a computer terminal, and Black Hat, seated in an armchair reading a book. They are facing away from each other.] Cueball: I know you shouldn't feed the trolls, but sometimes they just provoke me to where I can't help replying.\nBlack Hat: Yeah, me too. Yesterday this guy kept spamming \"First!\", so I got a set of actuarial tables and spent twenty minutes telling him when all his childhood heroes would likely die.\n[Cueball turns around in his chair.] Cueball: ...\nCueball: Remind me never to upset you, ever. Black Hat: 2038: Last of the original Star Wars cast dies. Cueball: Augh!\n"}
{"id":494,"title":"Secretary Part 1","image_title":"Secretary: Part 1","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/494","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/secretary_part_1.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/494:_Secretary:_Part_1","transcript":"Spring 2009\u2014 The new president faces a crisis... [Cueball is talking to an unseen Mr. President, who is sitting behind a desk.] Cueball: Mr. President, the bloggers are restless. Mr. President: What are they a-twitter about now?\nCueball: It's the tubes sir. They're clogged. We put too much stuff on them.\nMr. President: How bad is it? Cueball: The internet could be inoperative within days.\nCueball: We can't let a crucial resource go unshepherded. Mr. President: Go on.\nCueball: I recommend you appoint a Secretary of the internet. Someone to impose some orders on this mess.\nMr. President: Ordering bloggers around? Doesn't sound easy. Cueball: No; it's like herding lolcats. Mr. President: What? Cueball: Nothing.\nMr. President: Do you have someone in mind for the post? Cueball: I know just the guy.\nSoon: Phone: Ring [Black Hat looks away from his computer at the ringing phone.]\n","explanation":"The President of the United States of America is the chief executive of the United States of America. [ citation needed ] Since this comic was released in October 2008 and the presidential election was in November, it was then unknown which of the candidates would become president by the time the comic was set (Spring 2009). This is why the president in the comic is out-of-panel and therefore not revealed to us. As it would turn out, the president inaugurated in January 2009 was Barack Obama, who has gone on to demonstrate a tactical use of the Internet (including the more frivolous aspects of it) for public relations purposes. The suppositional president in the comic is less savvy.\nThe tubes being clogged is a reference to the, now deceased, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens who, during a congressional debate on net neutrality , described the Internet as a series of tubes (be sure to listen to the audio clips in that Wikipedia page, and you'll see why he became a big hit with the Internet). Ted Stevens also gained notoriety for backing a proposal to build a bridge to nowhere using federal funds. The question \"What are they a-Twitter about now?\" refers to the website Twitter , which is a microblogging and social networking site.\nCats are notorious for being hard to herd, thus the idiom \"herding cats,\" meaning an extremely difficult task that can very quickly get away from anyone undertaking it. Lolcats are pictures of cats, usually in humorous poses, that have insipid captions on them. The conflation of lolcats and the herding idiom escaped the president (who is presumably somebody not familiar with the former term). The title text refers to Ceiling Cat , a lolcat parody of God.\nAs with cats, Bloggers are an ideologically diverse bunch, and they are hard to get to go in a single direction.\nThe proposed \"Secretary of the Internet\" would likely be a new position on the President's Cabinet , which currently consists of the heads of 15 executive departments and are, with the one exception of the Attorney General (who heads the Department of Justice), titled \"Secretary of Department .\"\nAll comics in the Secretary series are:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nIt is possible that this series is a continuation of 493: Actuarial , in which Black Hat demonstrates great power over even Internet trolls via his sociopathic ways. This would explain why Black Hat was chosen as Internet secretary.\nSpring 2009\u2014 The new president faces a crisis... [Cueball is talking to an unseen Mr. President, who is sitting behind a desk.] Cueball: Mr. President, the bloggers are restless. Mr. President: What are they a-twitter about now?\nCueball: It's the tubes sir. They're clogged. We put too much stuff on them.\nMr. President: How bad is it? Cueball: The internet could be inoperative within days.\nCueball: We can't let a crucial resource go unshepherded. Mr. President: Go on.\nCueball: I recommend you appoint a Secretary of the internet. Someone to impose some orders on this mess.\nMr. President: Ordering bloggers around? Doesn't sound easy. Cueball: No; it's like herding lolcats. Mr. President: What? Cueball: Nothing.\nMr. President: Do you have someone in mind for the post? Cueball: I know just the guy.\nSoon: Phone: Ring [Black Hat looks away from his computer at the ringing phone.]\n"}
{"id":495,"title":"Secretary Part 2","image_title":"Secretary: Part 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/495","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/secretary_part_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/495:_Secretary:_Part_2","transcript":"[Blondie as a news anchor sitting behind a desk is reading from a paper she holds in her hands. There is a picture of Black Hat on a screen behind her. There is a caption below the picture.] Blondie: Breaking news\u2014the President has made a nomination to the new post of Internet Secretary. We know little about the man, shown here. Caption: Possibly a haberdasher?\n[Blondie keeps talking over a scene showing her standing with a microphone in front of a water-filled moat that has been dug between the road and a house. A small stair up to the house is just on the other side of the moat. Behind her is Cueball with a large TV camera on his shoulder pointing towards her and the house.] Blondie (narrating): Attempts to reach the nominee at home were unsuccessful. Blondie: What the hell kind of apartment has a moat?\n[Back to Blondie behind her desk, the paper is gone, and she leans one arm on the desk. There is no screen behind her.] Blondie: To understand the culture from which he came \u2014 and which he may soon administer \u2014 we sent a reporter to what we're told is the source of that culture. Blondie: Tom?\n[This panel is much larger than the three previous panels and partly hidden behind the last. Tom, looking like Cueball with a military helmet with camouflage marks strapped under his chin, holds a large microphone in front of him while standing in front of a large screen. The screen shows a message board with four picture posts. Each picture has a text to the right, but those are unreadable scribbles. The top drawing is of a man with wild hair who holds out his hands with thumbs up. The next is text. Then there is a circle with a smaller circle in the middle and at the bottom what appears to be a Cueball-like man with a fencing mask. Blondie still speaks to him from off-panel left.] Tom: I'm coming to you live from the 4chan \/b\/ board. Despite the tube cloggage, nascent memes are flying fast and furious. Blondie (off-panel): Why are you wearing a helmet, Tom? Tom: I'm not sure. Image with text only: \/b\/\n[Ponytail is sitting in front of a large control unit using the two levers coming out of it from below two buttons that are again below the lit screen. A voice comes from off-panel left. Above the top of the panels frame, there is a frame with a caption:] Meanwhile in Ron Paul's blimp. Ron Paul (off-panel): Ahoy! What news of the blogs?\n[Zoom out showing Ponytail, who has turned around on her office chair away from the controls towards Ron Paul drawn like Cueball but with a cane. She holds up a piece of paper with a small square insert visible at the top. Apart from that, it is white.] Ponytail: Dr. Paul! The President's named his nominee! Ron Paul: It's not me?\n[Ron Paul's blimp is shown from the outside. His voice can be seen coming from the airship. There is text on the blimp, with the four letters after the first written mirrored to spell another word.] Ron Paul (from inside the blimp): Wait! I remember that guy from the campaign! He's a notorious troll! Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n[Back inside the blimp, Ron Paul points to Ponytail, while his other hand is lifted to his chin. His cane leans against his legs. Ponytail looks at him from her chair, the paper now held in her lap.] Ron Paul: They mustn't put him in charge. Quick, call the capitol!\n[Ponytail turns around on her chair towards the controls and takes hold of one of the sticks. Ron Paul has taken the cane in his hand again.] Ponytail: Can't, sir. The tubes just went down completely. Ron Paul: Blast!\n[Ponytail now holds onto both sticks as Ron Paul lifts his cane up into the air pointing away from her up and right.] Ron Paul: Then we'll go ourselves. Full speed ahead!\n[A full view of the blimp hanging in the air to the left over a broad landscape. There seems to be a small lake just in front of the blimp. The horizon is shown all along this full width panel, and after the lake, there are five small mountain peaks, two behind the three in front. After the last of these, there follow one more peak and a small mound. Features are shown on the ground. In the air in front of the blimp, there are a small cloud inside the panel at the end of the lake and a large cloud breaking the upper frame over the end of the five mountains stretching over the next peak and mound.] Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n[Same image. The blimp has advanced minutely, taking the tip clearly over the lake. Beat panel #1] Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n[Same image. The blimp has advanced minutely again. Beat panel #2] Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n[Same image, but now the two speak from within the blimp. The blimp has again advanced minutely so the gondola below the blimp is now also almost at the edge of the lake.] Ron Paul: I said full speed! Ponytail: It's a blimp, sir! Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n","explanation":"Whenever something big happens the news, media likes to have at least two things: interviews with people who are the news, and on-the-scene reporters. In this case, Blondie as a news anchor is shown to begin with talking about Black Hat , and she has even been out at his house. Even if those reporters are simply standing in front of a building that something happened in, they have to be on-scene. To thwart the media (and probably everyone else), Black Hat has built a moat around his apartment building. The second reporter is on-the-scene from the Internet, or rather, one of its darkest corners: 4chan . In more detail, 4chan is a collection of image boards that act somewhat like forums, where users go to share images. The different boards are named by their \"folder\" structure, for lack of a better term. Therefore, the name \/b\/ comes from its URL: 4chan.org\/b\/. Pronounced \"slash bee\" (because the second forward slash is not necessary), \/b\/ is the \"random\" board, where anything goes, where anything is the superset of all sets, as in anything. Absolutely. Anything. As in, going more than two seconds without seeing pornographic content or hateful slurs is almost unheard of. \/b\/ is also the one that gets the most publicity, because it has started many of the memes [1] on the Internet, as well as the birthplace of Anonymous . The chaotic nature of the forums explains why the title text suggests that the reporter isn't safe, even though he is wearing a helmet. In fact, a goofy helmet like that is liable to get the trolls on him faster than if he didn't have it. This may be a Densha Otoko [2] reference, which features helmet-wearing \/b\/ members.\nRon Paul is a man who was a U.S. Representative for Texas at the time. At the time the comic was published, he was running, for the second time, for President of the United States .\nA haberdasher is a person who sells small articles of clothing that have been or can be sewed. In modern English, a haberdashery (where a haberdasher would work) is a place that sells hats. This could be a reference to former President Harry S. Truman , who operated a failed haberdashery in the early 1920s.\nRon Paul's 2008 presidential campaign did, in fact, use a blimp that was named the Ron Paul Blimp . However, despite their elegant appearance, blimps are not a very fast way to travel.\nThe images on the \/b\/ board behind the reporter are:\nTogether, the initial letters of these items spell out \" ABCDEFG \".\nThe title text states that the second reporter (Tom)'s helmet won't help him, though from what, it is unclear as he himself stated he wasn't sure why he was wearing the helmet.\nAll comics in the Secretary series are:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nIt is possible that this series is a continuation of 493: Actuarial , in which Black Hat demonstrates great power over even Internet trolls via his sociopathic ways. This would explain why Black Hat was chosen as Internet secretary.\n[Blondie as a news anchor sitting behind a desk is reading from a paper she holds in her hands. There is a picture of Black Hat on a screen behind her. There is a caption below the picture.] Blondie: Breaking news\u2014the President has made a nomination to the new post of Internet Secretary. We know little about the man, shown here. Caption: Possibly a haberdasher?\n[Blondie keeps talking over a scene showing her standing with a microphone in front of a water-filled moat that has been dug between the road and a house. A small stair up to the house is just on the other side of the moat. Behind her is Cueball with a large TV camera on his shoulder pointing towards her and the house.] Blondie (narrating): Attempts to reach the nominee at home were unsuccessful. Blondie: What the hell kind of apartment has a moat?\n[Back to Blondie behind her desk, the paper is gone, and she leans one arm on the desk. There is no screen behind her.] Blondie: To understand the culture from which he came \u2014 and which he may soon administer \u2014 we sent a reporter to what we're told is the source of that culture. Blondie: Tom?\n[This panel is much larger than the three previous panels and partly hidden behind the last. Tom, looking like Cueball with a military helmet with camouflage marks strapped under his chin, holds a large microphone in front of him while standing in front of a large screen. The screen shows a message board with four picture posts. Each picture has a text to the right, but those are unreadable scribbles. The top drawing is of a man with wild hair who holds out his hands with thumbs up. The next is text. Then there is a circle with a smaller circle in the middle and at the bottom what appears to be a Cueball-like man with a fencing mask. Blondie still speaks to him from off-panel left.] Tom: I'm coming to you live from the 4chan \/b\/ board. Despite the tube cloggage, nascent memes are flying fast and furious. Blondie (off-panel): Why are you wearing a helmet, Tom? Tom: I'm not sure. Image with text only: \/b\/\n[Ponytail is sitting in front of a large control unit using the two levers coming out of it from below two buttons that are again below the lit screen. A voice comes from off-panel left. Above the top of the panels frame, there is a frame with a caption:] Meanwhile in Ron Paul's blimp. Ron Paul (off-panel): Ahoy! What news of the blogs?\n[Zoom out showing Ponytail, who has turned around on her office chair away from the controls towards Ron Paul drawn like Cueball but with a cane. She holds up a piece of paper with a small square insert visible at the top. Apart from that, it is white.] Ponytail: Dr. Paul! The President's named his nominee! Ron Paul: It's not me?\n[Ron Paul's blimp is shown from the outside. His voice can be seen coming from the airship. There is text on the blimp, with the four letters after the first written mirrored to spell another word.] Ron Paul (from inside the blimp): Wait! I remember that guy from the campaign! He's a notorious troll! Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n[Back inside the blimp, Ron Paul points to Ponytail, while his other hand is lifted to his chin. His cane leans against his legs. Ponytail looks at him from her chair, the paper now held in her lap.] Ron Paul: They mustn't put him in charge. Quick, call the capitol!\n[Ponytail turns around on her chair towards the controls and takes hold of one of the sticks. Ron Paul has taken the cane in his hand again.] Ponytail: Can't, sir. The tubes just went down completely. Ron Paul: Blast!\n[Ponytail now holds onto both sticks as Ron Paul lifts his cane up into the air pointing away from her up and right.] Ron Paul: Then we'll go ourselves. Full speed ahead!\n[A full view of the blimp hanging in the air to the left over a broad landscape. There seems to be a small lake just in front of the blimp. The horizon is shown all along this full width panel, and after the lake, there are five small mountain peaks, two behind the three in front. After the last of these, there follow one more peak and a small mound. Features are shown on the ground. In the air in front of the blimp, there are a small cloud inside the panel at the end of the lake and a large cloud breaking the upper frame over the end of the five mountains stretching over the next peak and mound.] Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n[Same image. The blimp has advanced minutely, taking the tip clearly over the lake. Beat panel #1] Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n[Same image. The blimp has advanced minutely again. Beat panel #2] Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n[Same image, but now the two speak from within the blimp. The blimp has again advanced minutely so the gondola below the blimp is now also almost at the edge of the lake.] Ron Paul: I said full speed! Ponytail: It's a blimp, sir! Blimp: Ron Paul R\u018eVO\u2143UTION\n"}
{"id":496,"title":"Secretary Part 3","image_title":"Secretary: Part 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/496","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/secretary_part_3.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/496:_Secretary:_Part_3","transcript":"[The confirmation hearings begin.] Senator: It appears you have quite an arrest record.\nSenator: Is it true you completely disassembled someone's car outside a Starbucks? Black Hat: It was parked across two spaces.\nSenator: You stole a red Fokker triplane and strafed the snoopy float at the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade?\nBlack Hat: Got three mimes, too.\nSenator: You disrupted a 9\/11 truth meeting, insisting the Twin Towers never actually collapsed? Black Hat: I have evidence! Don't trust the media! Wake up, sheeple!\nSenator: You were fired from Radio Shack after you built a death ray and vaporized a customer?\nBlack Hat: I was just testing it! Figures that'd be the one day there was a shopper in the aisle.\nSenator: And you were thrown out of Microsoft headquarters for... trying to feed a squirrel through a fax machine?\nBlack Hat: I forgot about that! it was part of an argument with Steve Ballmer about Vista. Which I won, by the way.\n[Senators look down at their notes.]\nSenator: This is the worst history of vandalism, gleeful mayhem, and general recalcitrance we've seen in a nominee since Ruth Bader Ginsburg.\nSenator: And this-you stole a nuclear submarine? Black Hat: I plead the third.\nSenator: You mean the fifth? Black Hat: No, the third.\nSenator: You refuse to quarter troops in your house? Black Hat: I have few principles, but I stick to them.\nMeanwhile... [Aboard Ron Paul's blimp.] Ponytail: We're nearing Washington, sir. Wait... There's something ahead on the sensors.\nPonytail: It's a balloon. Ron Paul: ...Oh, no.\n","explanation":"When a person has been appointed to be on certain positions [1] by the President , they must first go through a confirmation hearing in front of the Senate (the upper house of Congress ) where they find if the person is qualified to be in the position they have been appointed to. Of course, Black Hat is not the cleanest of characters, so Congress has a lot of reservations about his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 .\nN.B. When this comic was written, Senate confirmation hearings occurred rapidly after a president made a nomination and were expected to prevent unsuitable candidates from being given positions of power.\nThe final panels show Ron Paul's blimp finally approaching Washington DC. The balloon spotted on their radar is presumably piloted by blogger Cory Doctorow , as revealed in the next installment, Secretary: Part 4.\nAll comics in the Secretary series are:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nIt is possible that this series is a continuation of 493: Actuarial , in which Black Hat demonstrates great power over even Internet trolls via his sociopathic ways. This would explain why Black Hat was chosen as Internet secretary.\n[The confirmation hearings begin.] Senator: It appears you have quite an arrest record.\nSenator: Is it true you completely disassembled someone's car outside a Starbucks? Black Hat: It was parked across two spaces.\nSenator: You stole a red Fokker triplane and strafed the snoopy float at the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade?\nBlack Hat: Got three mimes, too.\nSenator: You disrupted a 9\/11 truth meeting, insisting the Twin Towers never actually collapsed? Black Hat: I have evidence! Don't trust the media! Wake up, sheeple!\nSenator: You were fired from Radio Shack after you built a death ray and vaporized a customer?\nBlack Hat: I was just testing it! Figures that'd be the one day there was a shopper in the aisle.\nSenator: And you were thrown out of Microsoft headquarters for... trying to feed a squirrel through a fax machine?\nBlack Hat: I forgot about that! it was part of an argument with Steve Ballmer about Vista. Which I won, by the way.\n[Senators look down at their notes.]\nSenator: This is the worst history of vandalism, gleeful mayhem, and general recalcitrance we've seen in a nominee since Ruth Bader Ginsburg.\nSenator: And this-you stole a nuclear submarine? Black Hat: I plead the third.\nSenator: You mean the fifth? Black Hat: No, the third.\nSenator: You refuse to quarter troops in your house? Black Hat: I have few principles, but I stick to them.\nMeanwhile... [Aboard Ron Paul's blimp.] Ponytail: We're nearing Washington, sir. Wait... There's something ahead on the sensors.\nPonytail: It's a balloon. Ron Paul: ...Oh, no.\n"}
{"id":497,"title":"Secretary Part 4","image_title":"Secretary: Part 4","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/497","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/secretary_part_4.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/497:_Secretary:_Part_4","transcript":"[The Ron Paul Revolution blimp floats.] Pilot: Sir! The balloon is hailing us!\n[Cory Doctorow's balloon appears.] Cory: Ahoy. Ron Paul: Doctorow! Cory: I won't let you stop this nomination. We bloggers watch out for our own.\nRon Paul: Stand aside, Cory. Cory: Nay! Ron Paul: Very well. Battle stations!\n[The Ron Paul Revolution blimp's gun takes aim.] Whirrr kachunk\n[Cory Doctorow's balloon's gun takes aim.] Whirrrr kachunk\n[Both airships open fire.] Pew pew pew Pew pew Boing! Boing!\n[Inside the Ron Paul Revolution blimp's control room.] Ponytail: We're taking damage! Ron Paul: Keep firing! Ponytail: No good! We're losing altitude!\n[Outside the Ron Paul Revolution blimp, it hangs smoking in the air.] Ron Paul: All engines full! Pull up! Ponytail: Can't, sir!\n[The Ron Paul Revolution blimp begins to sink, smoking more heavily.]\n[The blimp sinks further.] Ponytail: Sir, maybe if we dropped all this gold... Ron Paul: Never!\n[Inside the control room, tilted slightly.] Ponytail: We've lost, sir. We have to abort. Ron Paul: Not yet, we don't! Open the loading bay doors.\n[Camera zooms out slightly.] Ron Paul: You take the blimp and fall back. click Ron Paul: I've got a message to deliver. Whirr\n[Ron Paul tosses his cane aside.]\n[Ron Paul steadily transforms into Tron Paul.] Narrator: RON PAUL evolves into TRON PAUL\n[Light cycle begins to form.]\n[Tron Paul bends over the light cycle.]\n[Light cycle finishes its formation.]\n[Light cycle speeds off, trailing an American flag.]\n","explanation":"Ron Paul is an American physician, author, and politician who is a House Representative for Texas and is a three-time Presidential candidate, running as a Libertarian and a Republican . He has a very dedicated and vocal base of supporters who believe that he is the only true alternative to either side of the Two-Party System .  These supporters go under the name \" Ron Paul Revolution \" with the letters \"evol\" reversed to emphasise \"love.\"\nTron is a movie made by Disney . The title text refers to the line of virtual light that streams out from the back of Tron's light grid vehicles. Normally it is a single, solid color, but in the comic, it is the color of the American flag to show Ron's patriotism. There is also a joke about Pok\u00e9mon in the phrase \"... evolves into ...\". Pok\u00e9mon is a game where the player, a \"Trainer,\" has their Pok\u00e9mon battle other Pok\u00e9mon to level the Pok\u00e9mon up. As the Pok\u00e9mon levels up, they evolve into the next, more powerful, form of the Pok\u00e9mon.\nRon Paul and Cory Doctorow are fighting because Cory Doctorow believes he must support fellow bloggers no matter what, and Ron Paul wants the nomination that Black Hat, a blogger, is getting.\nThere is a subtle joke in the panel where Ron Paul and Cory Doctorow are firing at each other; the sound effect for Cory's guns is \"Boing! Boing!,\" which is the name of Cory Doctorow's blog . Also, a visual joke is that Cory's turret in panel 5 very much resembles an upside-down Dalek . The latter might not be an intentional joke, however, as Ron Paul's turret is designed the same way as Cory's.\nThe reference to gold touches on Ron Paul's desire to see monetary policy once again be driven by the gold standard, namely that a country's currency value be driven not by its economic activity, but by the amount of physical gold it owns. Earlier in American history, this was the case; owning a dollar would (in theory) be owning one dollar's worth of gold somewhere in the treasury. This is in contrast with the current international practice, where countries are able to print an arbitrary quantity of paper money that is not necessarily backed by physical gold. Adherence to the gold standard is an extreme minority view; most economists, and the population at large, agree that the current system is much better.  This may also be a reference to the final scene in The Italian Job , where the heroes face a decision over losing a large quantity of gold - or death or a reference to The Mysterious Island , where the survivors have to drop the gold in their hot air balloon to prevent losing altitude.\nAll comics in the Secretary series are:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nIt is possible that this series is a continuation of 493: Actuarial , in which Black Hat demonstrates great power over even Internet trolls via his sociopathic ways. This would explain why Black Hat was chosen as Internet secretary.\n[The Ron Paul Revolution blimp floats.] Pilot: Sir! The balloon is hailing us!\n[Cory Doctorow's balloon appears.] Cory: Ahoy. Ron Paul: Doctorow! Cory: I won't let you stop this nomination. We bloggers watch out for our own.\nRon Paul: Stand aside, Cory. Cory: Nay! Ron Paul: Very well. Battle stations!\n[The Ron Paul Revolution blimp's gun takes aim.] Whirrr kachunk\n[Cory Doctorow's balloon's gun takes aim.] Whirrrr kachunk\n[Both airships open fire.] Pew pew pew Pew pew Boing! Boing!\n[Inside the Ron Paul Revolution blimp's control room.] Ponytail: We're taking damage! Ron Paul: Keep firing! Ponytail: No good! We're losing altitude!\n[Outside the Ron Paul Revolution blimp, it hangs smoking in the air.] Ron Paul: All engines full! Pull up! Ponytail: Can't, sir!\n[The Ron Paul Revolution blimp begins to sink, smoking more heavily.]\n[The blimp sinks further.] Ponytail: Sir, maybe if we dropped all this gold... Ron Paul: Never!\n[Inside the control room, tilted slightly.] Ponytail: We've lost, sir. We have to abort. Ron Paul: Not yet, we don't! Open the loading bay doors.\n[Camera zooms out slightly.] Ron Paul: You take the blimp and fall back. click Ron Paul: I've got a message to deliver. Whirr\n[Ron Paul tosses his cane aside.]\n[Ron Paul steadily transforms into Tron Paul.] Narrator: RON PAUL evolves into TRON PAUL\n[Light cycle begins to form.]\n[Tron Paul bends over the light cycle.]\n[Light cycle finishes its formation.]\n[Light cycle speeds off, trailing an American flag.]\n"}
{"id":498,"title":"Secretary Part 5","image_title":"Secretary: Part 5","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/498","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/secretary_part_5.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/498:_Secretary:_Part_5","transcript":"[The Senate. Black Hat sits before the committee at his hearing to become Internet Secretary.] Chairman: We were convened here to review your nomination for the position of internet secretary.\nChairman: However, on review of your qualifications, we've decided to sentence you to death.\nChairman: An unorthodox move, sure. But the vote was unanimous. [Black Hat is leaning back in his chair.]\n[Tron Paul's lightcycle swerves wildly.] Meanwhile...\nTron Paul: There's no grid! How do I steeeeer!!!!!\n[Back at the Senate. Black Hat is standing.] Black Hat: Well, it's been fun. But I was never actually interested in taking the position. Good lord; listening to internet arguments all day? No thank you.\nChairman: Then why did you sit through all those hearings?\nBlack Hat: It was taking us a while to move the pumps into the maintenance tunnels.\n[The committee members murmur among themselves.]\n[There is a panel in the floor between Black Hat and the committee.] RUMBLE plink plink\n[A red playpen ball bursts out of the panel and rolls towards the committee chairman.] plink\n[The room is still. Black Hat's arms are folded.]\n[A geyser of red, white, and blue playpen balls bursts through the panel in the floor. Black Hat is already gone.] FOOM\n[The committee members chase Black Hat out the door as the Senate floor floods with playpen balls.]\n[The chase continues into the rotunda, as does the flood of playpen balls.]\n[Black Hat stands in the middle of the rotunda as it fills with playpen balls, surrounded by members of the committee.] Committee Members: Security! Someone! Committee Members: Get Him!\n[Tron Paul bursts through the wall.] CRASH Tron Paul: Aaaaa!\n[Black Hat grabs the bottom of the lightcycle as Tron Paul goes by.] snag Tron Paul: Hey!\n[Black Hat swings onto the top of the light cycle.]\n[Black Hat crouches on top of the light cycle.] Tron Paul: Get Off!\n[Tron Paul and Black Hat crash through the far wall of the rotunda.] CRASH\n[Tron Paul hits the ground.] WHAM Tron Paul: Ow!\n[Black Hat runs away.] Tron Paul: Ughhh.\n[The lightcycle disappears.] Tron Paul: I feel queasy... Cory Doctorow, above: Hey! Black Hat: Hi, Cory. Cory Doctorow: Need a lift? Black Hat: Sure.\n[Black Hat and Cory Doctorow depart in Doctorow's balloon.] Cory Doctorow: So are you, like, a fugitive now? Black Hat: Well, I never did give them my name...\n\n[Senators play in the playpen balls.] But in the rotunda Senators: Let's jump down here from the balcony! Senators: Senior senators first! Senators: Wheeee! Senators: I'm a submarine! All is forgiven.\n","explanation":"This is the fifth and final comic in the Secretary story-arc. The culmination has Black Hat up to his usual shenanigans in the US Senate chamber room .\nThe hearings have ended, with the chairman deciding to sentence him to death, instead of confirming his position of Internet Secretary. Black Hat replies that he was \"never interested in taking the position.\" This would be quite weird, as Senate confirmation meetings take a long time. The committee members are obviously surprised, and they question Black Hat, trying to get him to reveal his motives. He then cryptically replies that \"It was taking us a while to move the pumps into the maintenance tunnels.\" The confused committee members then look at each other.\nA red playpen ball bursts out of the panel and rolls towards the committee chairman, before being followed by a geyser of red, white, and blue balls, which begin to engulf the room and the Senate rotunda. Of course, Black Hat has already escaped by grabbing Tron Paul's lightcycle and using it to smash his way out of the rotunda.\nOutside the Senate, Cory Doctorow offers Black Hat a lift and asks if he's a fugitive now, and Black Hat replies that they never had his name, which is odd, considering that they know he's stolen a nuclear submarine, along with everything else mentioned in 496: Secretary: Part 3\nBack at Congress, they seem to have forgotten about Black Hat's \"gleeful mayhem\" and are jumping off the balcony into the ball pit below.\nThe title text refers to Al Gore . Al Gore was the Vice President under President Bill Clinton and ran as the Democratic nominee for President in 2000. Al Gore has had quite a history with the Internet , including one oft-misquoted (rather, quoted out of context) interview with CNN in which he told Wolf Blitzer , \"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.\" Many spun this to mean he claimed to have actually invented the Internet himself, although some of its pioneers clarified what Gore actually meant (that \"his initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet\") and agreed with this assessment. [1] [2]\nThe Senate or a Senate committee, in reality, cannot sentence a person to death, as that would be a bill of attainder , which Congress is prohibited from passing by Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution: \"No Bill of Attainder ... shall be passed.\" \"An unorthodox move,\" indeed.\nTron was an arcade game, based on the movie of the same name, and both released in 1982. The characters would play on a grid in lightcycles that left behind walls of light. The objective of the game was to force the opponent to run into the wall of light, similar to the Snake game .\nOf course, playpen balls have been the topic of many comics before, notably in 150: Grownups .\nAll comics in the Secretary series are:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nIt is possible that this series is a continuation of 493: Actuarial , in which Black Hat demonstrates great power over even Internet trolls via his sociopathic ways. This would explain why Black Hat was nominated as Internet secretary.\n[The Senate. Black Hat sits before the committee at his hearing to become Internet Secretary.] Chairman: We were convened here to review your nomination for the position of internet secretary.\nChairman: However, on review of your qualifications, we've decided to sentence you to death.\nChairman: An unorthodox move, sure. But the vote was unanimous. [Black Hat is leaning back in his chair.]\n[Tron Paul's lightcycle swerves wildly.] Meanwhile...\nTron Paul: There's no grid! How do I steeeeer!!!!!\n[Back at the Senate. Black Hat is standing.] Black Hat: Well, it's been fun. But I was never actually interested in taking the position. Good lord; listening to internet arguments all day? No thank you.\nChairman: Then why did you sit through all those hearings?\nBlack Hat: It was taking us a while to move the pumps into the maintenance tunnels.\n[The committee members murmur among themselves.]\n[There is a panel in the floor between Black Hat and the committee.] RUMBLE plink plink\n[A red playpen ball bursts out of the panel and rolls towards the committee chairman.] plink\n[The room is still. Black Hat's arms are folded.]\n[A geyser of red, white, and blue playpen balls bursts through the panel in the floor. Black Hat is already gone.] FOOM\n[The committee members chase Black Hat out the door as the Senate floor floods with playpen balls.]\n[The chase continues into the rotunda, as does the flood of playpen balls.]\n[Black Hat stands in the middle of the rotunda as it fills with playpen balls, surrounded by members of the committee.] Committee Members: Security! Someone! Committee Members: Get Him!\n[Tron Paul bursts through the wall.] CRASH Tron Paul: Aaaaa!\n[Black Hat grabs the bottom of the lightcycle as Tron Paul goes by.] snag Tron Paul: Hey!\n[Black Hat swings onto the top of the light cycle.]\n[Black Hat crouches on top of the light cycle.] Tron Paul: Get Off!\n[Tron Paul and Black Hat crash through the far wall of the rotunda.] CRASH\n[Tron Paul hits the ground.] WHAM Tron Paul: Ow!\n[Black Hat runs away.] Tron Paul: Ughhh.\n[The lightcycle disappears.] Tron Paul: I feel queasy... Cory Doctorow, above: Hey! Black Hat: Hi, Cory. Cory Doctorow: Need a lift? Black Hat: Sure.\n[Black Hat and Cory Doctorow depart in Doctorow's balloon.] Cory Doctorow: So are you, like, a fugitive now? Black Hat: Well, I never did give them my name...\n\n[Senators play in the playpen balls.] But in the rotunda Senators: Let's jump down here from the balcony! Senators: Senior senators first! Senators: Wheeee! Senators: I'm a submarine! All is forgiven.\n"}
{"id":499,"title":"Scantron","image_title":"Scantron","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/499","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scantron.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/499:_Scantron","transcript":"[A classroom scene. There are two desks, and the front one is occupied by the student. Miss Lenhart stands panel right facing the student.] Miss Lenhart: Okay class, I've turned in your exams for grading. Now\u2014 Student: Miss Lenhart?\n[View is now simply student in desk and teacher. The student is holding a pencil. Miss Lenhart looks horrified.] Student: I used a #3 pencil instead of a #2. Will that mess anything up? Miss Lenhart: You WHAT?\n[Miss Lenhart stands, covering her face, in front of an off-panel right explosion. The unseen speaker is off-panel right.] AIEEE BLAM Unseen speaker: OH GOD!\n[The student and Miss Lenhart are left-panel. The student looks shocked, and Miss Lenhart is still covering her face. The unseen speaker is still off-panel right.] Unseen speaker: Oh god! I've never seen so much blood!\n","explanation":"This comic is a take on the instructions \"Remember to use a #2 pencil on the Scantron\" that most modern students in the US have heard many, many times, a warning that seems unnecessary to many because #2 pencils are the most common type of pencil, and most students wouldn't have any other kind. Scantrons are standardized machine-readable papers used by students to answer multiple-choice tests. Often, the instructor will remind students to use a #2 pencil, which is a US classification of pencil hardness and equivalent to the HB term that is used in Europe. #2 pencils use a medium-hardness graphite considered ideal for Scantron use because the graphite is soft enough to leave a dark mark but hard enough to not smudge, both aspects that improve the performance of machine-readable paper. Miss Lenhart seems to have given her class one of these tests.\nThe joke is that the student used a #3 (or 'H') pencil, which has a slightly harder graphite rating, as opposed to the #2. Instructors and examiners usually place great emphasis on using a #2 pencil, as if not using one would lead to dire consequences, but without explaining why. The comic jokingly suggests that these consequences would include causing the grading machine to explode, killing harming people nearby and leaving a bloody mess.\nThe title text refers to the instruction to \"fill in all the bubbles completely.\" This again improves the performance of machine-readable paper. The student states that he spent an inordinate amount of time making sure his markings were perfect because he had been warned so many times to do so, but five seconds is usually enough.\nThis is the first of only two comics where Miss Lenhart is both drawn and named, the second being 1050: Forgot Algebra .\n[A classroom scene. There are two desks, and the front one is occupied by the student. Miss Lenhart stands panel right facing the student.] Miss Lenhart: Okay class, I've turned in your exams for grading. Now\u2014 Student: Miss Lenhart?\n[View is now simply student in desk and teacher. The student is holding a pencil. Miss Lenhart looks horrified.] Student: I used a #3 pencil instead of a #2. Will that mess anything up? Miss Lenhart: You WHAT?\n[Miss Lenhart stands, covering her face, in front of an off-panel right explosion. The unseen speaker is off-panel right.] AIEEE BLAM Unseen speaker: OH GOD!\n[The student and Miss Lenhart are left-panel. The student looks shocked, and Miss Lenhart is still covering her face. The unseen speaker is still off-panel right.] Unseen speaker: Oh god! I've never seen so much blood!\n"}
{"id":500,"title":"Election","image_title":"Election","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/500","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/election.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/500:_Election","transcript":"[Cueball sits at his computer desk, staring at his computer.]\nCueball: It's over. Cueball: After twenty months it's finally over. Cueball: I don't have to be an election junkie anymore.\n[Close-up of Cueball's face and screen.]\nCueball: I don't have to care about opinion polls, exit polls, margins of error, attack ads, game-changers, tracking polls, swing states, swing votes, the Bradley effect, or <name> the <occupation>. Cueball: I'm free.\n[Cueball staring at his computer screen, full shot.] [Cueball types on his computer.] Tap Tap\n[On screen:] Google '2012 polling statistics'\n","explanation":"This comic was published the day after the 2008 presidential election in the US. Cueball has been closely following the quantitative aspect of the election for over a year and a half, and he seems to be relieved that it's over. Now that the election has passed, he does not have to follow the many different opinion polls, number-crunching analyses, and news clips about people like Joe the Plumber that he has kept close track of during the election season. As soon as he says this, however, he starts to search for information on the 2012 election , suggesting that his political obsession has not at all passed.\nA list of the elements Cueball had been thinking about:\nThe title text is about statistician Nate Silver , who became something of a geek celebrity for his analysis during the campaign. He correctly predicted the outcomes of 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 election on his blog. It jokes that having him predict the outcomes of life decisions would make choosing the best thing to do very easy. So if Cueball ask Nate - \"Should I sleep with her?\", then Nate could give him a forecast like this: \"Well, I'm showing a 35% chance it will end badly.\" Later, in 2016, Nate Silver's website, FiveThirtyEight, launched an advice column thus making the title text partially come true.\n[Cueball sits at his computer desk, staring at his computer.]\nCueball: It's over. Cueball: After twenty months it's finally over. Cueball: I don't have to be an election junkie anymore.\n[Close-up of Cueball's face and screen.]\nCueball: I don't have to care about opinion polls, exit polls, margins of error, attack ads, game-changers, tracking polls, swing states, swing votes, the Bradley effect, or <name> the <occupation>. Cueball: I'm free.\n[Cueball staring at his computer screen, full shot.] [Cueball types on his computer.] Tap Tap\n[On screen:] Google '2012 polling statistics'\n"}
{"id":501,"title":"Faust 2.0","image_title":"Faust 2.0","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/501","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/faust_20.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/501:_Faust_2.0","transcript":"[Over the left side of the main panel, below the middle, is a small panel partly outside the main one. The comic begins inside this panel where a devil drawn like Cueball, but with two small horns on his forehead, is shown from the waist up, raising one hand while moving into the main panel. In the caption below, we learn that the devil is Mephistopheles.] Mephistopheles: Mortal! I come offering a deal-\n[In the main panel, with all drawings right of the smaller one, we see the mortal, Cueball, sitting at his desk typing on his laptop. Mephistopheles, now drawn in full figure, has stopped before a sign on a stick in the floor reading it out loud while pointing at it with one hand and holding the other hand in front of his mouth. The text on the sign is visible but unreadable in itself.] Cueball: Read the sign. Mephistopheles: \"By entering this room, you agree to forfeit your own soul rather than negotiate with the mortal residing therein...\" Mephistopheles: Wait, you can't- Cueball: Too late.\n[Caption below the panel:] Mephistopheles encounters the E.U.L.A.\n","explanation":"E.U.L.A. is short for End-user license agreement , a license that software makers often attach to their software but people do not usually read. Agreement to an E.U.L.A. is assumed when a user uses the software or service that the E.U.L.A. is attached to, which has led a case where users have unknowingly actually agreed to give away their immortal souls because of a clause in an E.U.L.A. However, in the European Union, all provisions of these agreements that aren't already codified in law actually are not legally enforceable, unless they could be read and agreed to before purchase and first use.\nA Faustian deal is done by someone who sells his soul to the devil for something desired in this life, a textbook example of wanting instant gratification. The mortal will get the things he wanted, but when he dies, he will have to suffer eternal torment. As the span of a human lifetime is an eye-blink compared to eternity, this is a really stupid thing to do. It is named after the folkloric character Faust , whose story has been the subject of numerous adaptations.\nIn this comic, Cueball turns an E.U.L.A. around on Mephistopheles , the demon Faust sells his soul to in the stories, by posting a sign saying that anyone entering the room agrees to turn over their own immortal soul rather than negotiate with Cueball for his. It is unknown whether this clause applies only to demons or to everyone , which would be quite horrifying.\nThe title text makes reference to how easy it is to cut open one's own hand while trying to open a newly-bought CD case. Incidentally, a pen works just fine, though the blood is referencing how Satanic contracts are signed in blood. The only blood on the E.U.L.A. contracts that Randall \"signs\" by opening a CD is the blood coming from when he cuts himself like this.\nA short time later, a similar demon was depicted in a similar fashion in 533: Laptop Hell , although with a trident and in Hell. Although not mentioned in the comic, he was also named Mephistopheles in the official transcript.\n[Over the left side of the main panel, below the middle, is a small panel partly outside the main one. The comic begins inside this panel where a devil drawn like Cueball, but with two small horns on his forehead, is shown from the waist up, raising one hand while moving into the main panel. In the caption below, we learn that the devil is Mephistopheles.] Mephistopheles: Mortal! I come offering a deal-\n[In the main panel, with all drawings right of the smaller one, we see the mortal, Cueball, sitting at his desk typing on his laptop. Mephistopheles, now drawn in full figure, has stopped before a sign on a stick in the floor reading it out loud while pointing at it with one hand and holding the other hand in front of his mouth. The text on the sign is visible but unreadable in itself.] Cueball: Read the sign. Mephistopheles: \"By entering this room, you agree to forfeit your own soul rather than negotiate with the mortal residing therein...\" Mephistopheles: Wait, you can't- Cueball: Too late.\n[Caption below the panel:] Mephistopheles encounters the E.U.L.A.\n"}
{"id":502,"title":"Dark Flow","image_title":"Dark Flow","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/502","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dark_flow.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/502:_Dark_Flow","transcript":"[Beret Guy is sitting at a computer, and Cueball is sitting in an armchair, reading either a book or a newspaper.] Beret Guy: According to this A.S.T. paper, every galaxy is being pulled toward one area of the sky.\n[Only Cueball.] Beret Guy [off-panel]: They hypothesize that it may be due to a supermassive object beyond the edge of the visible universe. Cueball: Maybe it's your mom. Zing!\n[Only Beret Guy.] Beret Guy: Do you think?\n[Outside at night, on a rooftop. Beret Guy is looking up to the sky, next to a telescope.] Beret Guy: Pull harder, mom. Beret Guy: I Miss you.\n","explanation":"This comic is about astronomy and the Your Mom jokes that have become increasingly widespread in urban parlance. Beret Guy is reading a research paper presumably discussing Dark Flow , an observed anomaly in the motions of the galaxies that some theorize is caused by an unobservable sibling universe or similarly supermassive object beyond the edge of the visible universe. Cueball sees this as an opportunity to make yet another Your Mom joke, implying that Beret Guy's mother is fat.\nBut apparently, Beret Guy's mother is dead, or at least missing, and he takes the joke seriously. He looks toward the sky and wishes that his mom pull harder so that he could be with her. The joke has been turned onto itself.\nThe title text is a continuation of Beret Guy's thoughts and refers to another piece of science phenomenon that has been observed in space, the Pioneer Anomaly . The Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft had been slowed down by an (at the time) unknown force as they exited the solar system, which he says is caused by the force of his love, probably toward his mom. This force has since been explained entirely in 2012 by the probes being decelerated by thermal radiation.\nIn 2310: Great Attractor , the more local Great Attractor is pulling Beret Guy so hard that he can sleep on vertical surfaces when it is close to the horizon.\n[Beret Guy is sitting at a computer, and Cueball is sitting in an armchair, reading either a book or a newspaper.] Beret Guy: According to this A.S.T. paper, every galaxy is being pulled toward one area of the sky.\n[Only Cueball.] Beret Guy [off-panel]: They hypothesize that it may be due to a supermassive object beyond the edge of the visible universe. Cueball: Maybe it's your mom. Zing!\n[Only Beret Guy.] Beret Guy: Do you think?\n[Outside at night, on a rooftop. Beret Guy is looking up to the sky, next to a telescope.] Beret Guy: Pull harder, mom. Beret Guy: I Miss you.\n"}
{"id":503,"title":"Terminology","image_title":"Terminology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/503","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/terminology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/503:_Terminology","transcript":"[Map of the world with North America centered. An \"x\" is placed near the east coast. Asia is labeled \"The East\" and Europe \"The West.\"] \"The East\" <- West x (me) East -> \"The West\"\n[Caption below the frame:] This always bugged me.\n","explanation":"This comic shows a map of the world. The X in the center, labeled \"ME,\" indicates Randall 's approximate location in the U.S., and two arrows point west and east from it. The map uses a format, popular in America, that places the American continents centrally, therefore splitting Asia (parodied by \"you-cut-asia-in-half\" ). The comic then shows Europe labeled \" The West \" as it is commonly referred to, despite being located to the east of Randall, and Asia similarly labeled \" The East \", despite being west of Randall. Randall is therefore annoyed with the common terms \"the West\" and \"the East\" referring to locations east and west of him respectively.\n\"The East\" and \"the West\" were defined in geographical terms from the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia .  They were later expanded or (mis-)appropriated to include references to cultural, racial, political, and trade connections.  Another east-west division comes from zero longitude (the prime meridian ): the Western Hemisphere and Eastern Hemisphere are defined in reference to it, and world maps are often centered on it.  The fact that the prime meridian runs precisely though the Greenwich Observatory, in London, is an artifact of the British Empire's dominance \u2014and British exploration of the world\u2014 in the 1700s and 1800s. In particular, British astronomical tables (made by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich , London) were widely used to determine longitude all over the world.  The need for establishing a precise zero-longitude is one of the two technological necessities to make a sextant work as a tool to calculate accurate position for map making.\nIn short, \"the East\" and \"the West\" should simply be viewed as a reference to map coordinates and not as relative to where you are as suggested by the comic.  An America-centered map does not redefine \"the East\" or \"the West\" anymore than an Australian up-side-down reversed map redefines \"the North\" or \"the South\".\nThe convention of orienting maps with north at the top and west at the left was started by the Greek geographer Ptolemy . In his work Geography , he introduced the first coordinate system with latitude and longitude. Randall shows some other possible map orientations in 977: Map Projections .\nThe title text comments on the similarity in shape of New Zealand and Japan, and he suggests that one may in fact be the other in disguise, much like Clark Kent and Superman , as well as similar superhero alter ego pairs. The similarities between New Zealand and Japan are partly explained by the fact that both formed as volcanic island chains.\n[Map of the world with North America centered. An \"x\" is placed near the east coast. Asia is labeled \"The East\" and Europe \"The West.\"] \"The East\" <- West x (me) East -> \"The West\"\n[Caption below the frame:] This always bugged me.\n"}
{"id":504,"title":"Legal Hacks","image_title":"Legal Hacks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/504","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/legal_hacks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/504:_Legal_Hacks","transcript":"[Megan sits at her computer, Cueball standing behind her.] Megan: Another ISP's filtering content. Cueball: Thank God for Crypto.\n[Cueball stands alone; Megan is presumably off-panel left.] Cueball: It wasn't that long ago that RSA was illegal to export. Classified a munition.\n[Megan, sitting in her chair, is looking back towards Cueball, presumably off-panel right.] Megan: You know, I think the crypto community took the wrong side in that fight. We should've lobbied to keep it counted as a weapon. Cueball: Why?\n[She is now turned around in the chair looking at Cueball, who is in-panel again.] Megan: Once they get complacent, we break out the second amendment. [Cueball has his hand on his chin, contemplatively.] Cueball: ...Damn.\n","explanation":"Megan notices that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is blocking access to some webpages. Cueball is thankful that cryptography offers a way around such censorship.\nEncryption, the study and use of which is known as \"cryptography,\" or \"crypto\" for short, is the art of transmitting messages that can only be read by the intended receiver(s) by using mathematical techniques to conceal (\"encrypt\") the data in the message. One common and effective way to encrypt messages is the RSA algorithm , which is based on the difficulty of integer factorization for products of two prime numbers.\nBeing able to share unbreakable codes and decrypt other people's codes gives countries a military advantage - for example, in World War II, the Americans and British were often able to figure out where a German attack would be coming and send reinforcements there, because they had cracked the German codes . Because of this, the United States government initially tried to keep the mathematical details of strong encryption algorithms (including RSA) inside the country by classifying the algorithms as a weapon. It is a crime to share certain kinds of weapons technology with other countries without permission. Amateur and professional cryptographers, angry about the attempt to restrict their work, lobbied the government to change the rule and stop treating cryptography as a weapon, in part so that they could continue to collaborate with colleagues overseas, and in part because they wanted the ability to pass secret messages that the government could not easily decrypt. The export restrictions were gradually loosened and would have mostly been lifted by the year 2000.\nIn the comic, Megan makes the provocative and counter-intuitive point that perhaps the cryptographic community could have best ensured easy access to the RSA technique by *allowing* the government to treat RSA as a weapon, and then, once everyone is certain that RSA is a weapon, invoking the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution , commonly known as the \" right to bear arms \" amendment (that is, the right to own and use weapons). In other words, if RSA were a weapon, it would be granted constitutional protections.\nThis interpretation is likely a reference to the very strong social and political movements opposing arms control in the United States.  The legal basis for this movement is the position that most or all laws prohibiting private ownership of firearms (and potentially other weapons), violate the Second Amendment. Accordingly, publicly referring to the Second Amendment tends to imply opposition to gun control. Megan's implication is that, by connecting RSA to this debate, crypto enthusiasts would gain a large group of unlikely allies who are strongly committed to keeping weapons legal and unrestricted. They could also invoke the legal cover of the Constitution, allowing them to fight restrictions in court.\nCueball is surprised and impressed by this point, and pauses to contemplate Megan's strategy.\nIt should be noted that there are major weaknesses in this argument. The Second Amendment only applies in the United States, meaning that imports and exports of munitions could still be banned. It might provide some protections against the ability of the US government to restrict RSA within US borders, but it could still be restricted in other countries, potentially hampering its use in global communications.\nThe title text claims that this is a reasonable interpretation of the Constitution, because cryptography (a modern weapon) is analogous to muskets and cannons (the weaponry in use in the 1780s, when the Second Amendment was drafted). As evidence for the analogy, the title text points out that Jefferson would have been a big fan of cryptography, which is plausible, because President Thomas Jefferson (the 3rd President of the United States) was an amateur scientist who enjoyed studying a very wide variety of fields (in fact, he invented the Jefferson disk , an encryption device that was quite advanced for its time). The point is somewhat facetious, because it is hard to imagine a modern technique that Jefferson would not \"be totally into.\" Also, the mere assertion that an early President would have been a fan of a technique is not very good evidence that the technique would be legally permitted by a particular Amendment.\n[Megan sits at her computer, Cueball standing behind her.] Megan: Another ISP's filtering content. Cueball: Thank God for Crypto.\n[Cueball stands alone; Megan is presumably off-panel left.] Cueball: It wasn't that long ago that RSA was illegal to export. Classified a munition.\n[Megan, sitting in her chair, is looking back towards Cueball, presumably off-panel right.] Megan: You know, I think the crypto community took the wrong side in that fight. We should've lobbied to keep it counted as a weapon. Cueball: Why?\n[She is now turned around in the chair looking at Cueball, who is in-panel again.] Megan: Once they get complacent, we break out the second amendment. [Cueball has his hand on his chin, contemplatively.] Cueball: ...Damn.\n"}
{"id":505,"title":"A Bunch of Rocks","image_title":"A Bunch of Rocks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/505","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/a_bunch_of_rocks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/505:_A_Bunch_of_Rocks","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in a desert with lots of rocks lying around. He is narrating his own situation. The first panel spans the entire width of the comic. The first line of text is written to the left of him, the second line to the right.] So I'm stuck in this desert for eternity. I don't know why. I just woke up here one day.\n[The next four panels take up the second line of the comic.] [Cueball stand in the desert.] I never feel hungry or thirsty.\n[Cueball walks in the desert.] I just walk.\n[Zooming out while Cueball continues to walk in the desert.] Sand and rocks\n[Zooming far out as Cueball again just stands in the desert. First line of text, above him, is a continuation of the text in the previous panel. The second line is below him.] stretch to infinity. As best as I can tell.\n[The next three panels take up the third line of the comic. The last takes up half the width.] [Cueball is sitting in the desert, in a contemplative position. First line of text above him, the second below.] There's plenty of time for thinking out here. An eternity, really.\n[Cueball is sketching stuff in the sand. First line of text above him, the second below.] I've rederived modern math in the sand and then some.\n[Three different graph types are depicted. First line of text above them, the second below.] Physics too. I worked out the kinks in quantum mechanics and relativity. Took a lot of thinking, but this place has fewer distractions than a Swiss patent office.\n[The next eight panels take up the fourth and fifth lines of the comic. All pictures are the same size.] [Cueball is walking along the desert, laying out rocks on a line. Four have been deployed. He is laying down the fifth and has a sixth in his other hand.] One day I started laying down rows of rocks.\n[Cueball, with a rock in his hand, continues to deploy rock 16, in a more intricate pattern. There are grid-lines in the sand (5 rows, 6 columns), with each intersection either empty of filled with a rock. No rocks lay anywhere but at an intersection on the grid.] Each new row followed from the last in a simple pattern.\n[Zooming out showing even more laid out rocks. Cueball is seen directly from above, and we see his shadow falling on the grid of rocks (7 rows, 14 columns).] With the right set of rules and enough space,\n[Continues to zoom further out showing clear triangular patterns (with no rocks) in the laid out grid of rocks. Cueball is not seen. (8 rows, 42 columns). First line of text above the grid, the second line below.] I was able to build a computer. Each new row of stones is the next iteration of the computation.\n[Zooming far out (no Cueball) with rows intersected by five clear V lines on top of them. The V's are drawn inside each other, with the smallest V at the top right, and the other V's starting just to the right of the previous one, and then continuing the same distance past the previous V, as the total length of the first V. The \"*\" in the first line of text above this grid references to the footnote below written in a smaller font.] Sure it's rocks instead of electricity, but it's the same* thing. Just slower. *Turing-complete\n[Cueball stands in a contemplative pose (on a clean white background - i.e. no dessert).] After a while, I programmed it to be a physics simulator.\n[A black panel with white drawings and text. A small white dot (a particle) is labeled by two arrows coming of two binary strings.] Every piece of information about a particle was encoded as a string of bits written in the stones. 00101010 00101010\n[A Feynman diagram showing two particles interacting. Two arrows going in and out with a snaking line between them.] With enough time and space, I could fully simulate two particles interacting.\n[The next two panels take up the sixth line of the comic. The second panel takes up three-quarters of the width.] [Cueball standing before the vastness of the desert, with his programmed lines of rock stretching to infinity.] But I have infinite time and space.\n[A black panel with white drawings and text. Depiction of two large galaxies, one with four jets coming out of its center, the other a flat disc. Several smaller galaxies and\/or stars are shown around them.] So I decided to simulate a universe.\n[The next four panels take up the seventh line of the comic. They are of similar widths.] [Cueball is walking by his grid of rocks, lines indicate he has just thrown another rock down in its place. It falls so hard it sinks into the sand that splashes out around it. The 14 rocks above him lie on the grid, four others below this grid have not been used yet.] The eons blur past as I walk down a single row.\n[Zoom far far out to show multiple rows of rocks. It is not very clear that there are several triangular patterns (with no rocks) in different sizes in the laid out grid of rocks. There are about 50 rows and 90 columns. There are six large triangles on top of each other at the left edge. To the right, there are three even larger triangles from top to bottom, the one in the middle further to the left than the one above, but further right than the bottom one.] The rows blur past to compute a single step.\n[Shows the placement of two particles in the simulation.] And in the simulation...\n[The two particles have moved just long enough as to not overlap with their previous positions, shown as an after-image with faint gray lines. The text continues directly the one from the previous panel.] another instant ticks by.\n[The next two panels take up the eighth line of the comic. They each take up half the width.] [A Cueball-like person (you) observes a mote of dust vanish.] So if you see a mote of dust vanish from your vision in a little flash or something\n[Cueball is standing between two rocks on the ground, while holding two rocks, one lifted up to his head. The first line of text is above him. It is a direct continuation of the text in the previous panel. The second line stands below to the right of him.] I'm sorry. I must have misplaced a rock sometime in the last few billions and billions of millennia.\n[Cueball stands in the \"clean\" part of his infinite desert, in front of the vastness of his infinity of infinite lines or rocks.] Oh, and...\n[A Cueball-like student sits in a classroom with his head in his hands, Megan sits behind him, and a teacher points to the blackboard. A clock shows the time at five minutes to ten.] If you think the minutes in your morning lecture are taking a long time to pass for you ...\n","explanation":"Cueball awakens to find himself trapped for eternity in an endless expanse of sand and rocks. At first, he uses this time to derive all of mathematics and physics, plus more, including quantum mechanics and general relativity . Next Cueball creates a computer that can process any possible function, out of rocks and rules for the interaction between rocks. He then simulates a particle followed by the interactions between particles, followed by the entire universe. The amount of time it takes to simulate the change in the universe merely from one instant to the next takes an extremely long time, as the time it takes to update just one row of rocks would be eons, assuming a realistic time to place each rock.\nCueball is using the rocks to build a cellular automaton , a computational model based on simple rules to advance from one state to the next. Certain cellular automata are Turing-complete , which means that they can be used to represent any conceivable algorithm if expanded infinitely, including simulating the physics of the universe. He specifically seems to be running Wolfram's Rule 110 , which is capable of universal computation. When using Rule 110 for universal computation, one builds a background pattern, which can be seen in the comic as the pattern of smaller triangles, and then performs computation by sending out \"rockets\" to collide and interact with each other. Cueball can simulate the functioning of an entire universe because he has unlimited time and space (and rocks).\nCueball then apologizes for any flaws we see in the simulation. This implies that the audience is living in Cueball's simulation, making Cueball essentially God, and that he might make mistakes along the way.\nThe final frame cuts to a classroom where a bored student stares at his hands waiting for class to end. Cueball admonishes the student for thinking that class is lasting forever, the joke being that the boredom felt in a classroom is nothing compared to the boredom that inspires Cueball to spend his endless time toiling to keep the universe moving. Indeed, the minutes of lecture actually took many \"billions and billions of millennia\" for Cueball to simulate. Another possible explanation is that the entirety of this comic is a fantasy in Cueball\u2019s mind as he zones out during a math lecture.\nThe title text suggests that Rule 34 should be called on Wolfram's Rule 34 . Rule 34 (see 305: Rule 34 ) is a humorous rule of the Internet that states, \"If you can imagine it, there is porn of it. No exceptions.\" Wolfram's Rule 34 is a cellular automaton. Therefore, the title text says that either someone has made pornography featuring the cellular automaton in question, or someone has used the cellular automaton to produce pornography.\nThe three diagrams in the \"Physics, too. I worked out the kinks...\" panel are, from left to right:\nThe graph that represents particle interaction is a Feynman Diagram . This shows the interaction of subatomic particles that collide and exchange some momentum via a photon. The slope of the middle line represents the distance moved and the time lost\/gained during the interaction.\n[Cueball is standing in a desert with lots of rocks lying around. He is narrating his own situation. The first panel spans the entire width of the comic. The first line of text is written to the left of him, the second line to the right.] So I'm stuck in this desert for eternity. I don't know why. I just woke up here one day.\n[The next four panels take up the second line of the comic.] [Cueball stand in the desert.] I never feel hungry or thirsty.\n[Cueball walks in the desert.] I just walk.\n[Zooming out while Cueball continues to walk in the desert.] Sand and rocks\n[Zooming far out as Cueball again just stands in the desert. First line of text, above him, is a continuation of the text in the previous panel. The second line is below him.] stretch to infinity. As best as I can tell.\n[The next three panels take up the third line of the comic. The last takes up half the width.] [Cueball is sitting in the desert, in a contemplative position. First line of text above him, the second below.] There's plenty of time for thinking out here. An eternity, really.\n[Cueball is sketching stuff in the sand. First line of text above him, the second below.] I've rederived modern math in the sand and then some.\n[Three different graph types are depicted. First line of text above them, the second below.] Physics too. I worked out the kinks in quantum mechanics and relativity. Took a lot of thinking, but this place has fewer distractions than a Swiss patent office.\n[The next eight panels take up the fourth and fifth lines of the comic. All pictures are the same size.] [Cueball is walking along the desert, laying out rocks on a line. Four have been deployed. He is laying down the fifth and has a sixth in his other hand.] One day I started laying down rows of rocks.\n[Cueball, with a rock in his hand, continues to deploy rock 16, in a more intricate pattern. There are grid-lines in the sand (5 rows, 6 columns), with each intersection either empty of filled with a rock. No rocks lay anywhere but at an intersection on the grid.] Each new row followed from the last in a simple pattern.\n[Zooming out showing even more laid out rocks. Cueball is seen directly from above, and we see his shadow falling on the grid of rocks (7 rows, 14 columns).] With the right set of rules and enough space,\n[Continues to zoom further out showing clear triangular patterns (with no rocks) in the laid out grid of rocks. Cueball is not seen. (8 rows, 42 columns). First line of text above the grid, the second line below.] I was able to build a computer. Each new row of stones is the next iteration of the computation.\n[Zooming far out (no Cueball) with rows intersected by five clear V lines on top of them. The V's are drawn inside each other, with the smallest V at the top right, and the other V's starting just to the right of the previous one, and then continuing the same distance past the previous V, as the total length of the first V. The \"*\" in the first line of text above this grid references to the footnote below written in a smaller font.] Sure it's rocks instead of electricity, but it's the same* thing. Just slower. *Turing-complete\n[Cueball stands in a contemplative pose (on a clean white background - i.e. no dessert).] After a while, I programmed it to be a physics simulator.\n[A black panel with white drawings and text. A small white dot (a particle) is labeled by two arrows coming of two binary strings.] Every piece of information about a particle was encoded as a string of bits written in the stones. 00101010 00101010\n[A Feynman diagram showing two particles interacting. Two arrows going in and out with a snaking line between them.] With enough time and space, I could fully simulate two particles interacting.\n[The next two panels take up the sixth line of the comic. The second panel takes up three-quarters of the width.] [Cueball standing before the vastness of the desert, with his programmed lines of rock stretching to infinity.] But I have infinite time and space.\n[A black panel with white drawings and text. Depiction of two large galaxies, one with four jets coming out of its center, the other a flat disc. Several smaller galaxies and\/or stars are shown around them.] So I decided to simulate a universe.\n[The next four panels take up the seventh line of the comic. They are of similar widths.] [Cueball is walking by his grid of rocks, lines indicate he has just thrown another rock down in its place. It falls so hard it sinks into the sand that splashes out around it. The 14 rocks above him lie on the grid, four others below this grid have not been used yet.] The eons blur past as I walk down a single row.\n[Zoom far far out to show multiple rows of rocks. It is not very clear that there are several triangular patterns (with no rocks) in different sizes in the laid out grid of rocks. There are about 50 rows and 90 columns. There are six large triangles on top of each other at the left edge. To the right, there are three even larger triangles from top to bottom, the one in the middle further to the left than the one above, but further right than the bottom one.] The rows blur past to compute a single step.\n[Shows the placement of two particles in the simulation.] And in the simulation...\n[The two particles have moved just long enough as to not overlap with their previous positions, shown as an after-image with faint gray lines. The text continues directly the one from the previous panel.] another instant ticks by.\n[The next two panels take up the eighth line of the comic. They each take up half the width.] [A Cueball-like person (you) observes a mote of dust vanish.] So if you see a mote of dust vanish from your vision in a little flash or something\n[Cueball is standing between two rocks on the ground, while holding two rocks, one lifted up to his head. The first line of text is above him. It is a direct continuation of the text in the previous panel. The second line stands below to the right of him.] I'm sorry. I must have misplaced a rock sometime in the last few billions and billions of millennia.\n[Cueball stands in the \"clean\" part of his infinite desert, in front of the vastness of his infinity of infinite lines or rocks.] Oh, and...\n[A Cueball-like student sits in a classroom with his head in his hands, Megan sits behind him, and a teacher points to the blackboard. A clock shows the time at five minutes to ten.] If you think the minutes in your morning lecture are taking a long time to pass for you ...\n"}
{"id":506,"title":"Theft of the Magi","image_title":"Theft of the Magi","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/506","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/theft_of_the_magi.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/506:_Theft_of_the_Magi","transcript":"[Black Hat is holding up a copy of Left 4 Dead . Danish is holding up a small harness.] Black Hat: Hey. I sold your Roomba on Craigslist so I could buy myself Left 4 Dead . Danish: But I eBayed your XBox so I could get this dueling harness for my Roomba! Black hat and Danish at the same time: Aww.\n","explanation":"This comic is a satirical play on O. Henry 's short story \" The Gift of the Magi .\" In O. Henry's story, a couple with very little money goes to great lengths to purchase gifts for one another. The wife sells her prized possession, her hair, to purchase a fancy chain for her husband's prize possession, a watch; the husband sells his watch to purchase some fancy hair accessories (clips\/combs) for his wife. The story is about selflessness, as each party sold their prize possession to purchase something to enhance the other's prize possession.\nIn this comic, however, the opposite occurs: Black Hat stole Danish 's Roomba (an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner) and sold it to buy a new game for his Xbox , while Danish stole Black Hat's Xbox and sold it to buy a \"dueling harness\" for her Roomba, highlighting their mutually destructive selfishness. Although these actions reflect their sociopathic personalities and are at each other's detriment, both are apparently touched by the simultaneity of their selfish actions and the symmetry of the consequences. This is a play on the reaction that readers typically have upon reading the O. Henry story: although neither of the characters can actually use their gift, the gifts are touching nevertheless because they are literal symbols of the self-sacrificing love the characters have for each other.\nThe \"dueling harness,\" also mentioned in the title text, is an invention by Randall , which presumably would allow Roombas to wield weapons and battle each other like the robots in Robot Wars .\n[Black Hat is holding up a copy of Left 4 Dead . Danish is holding up a small harness.] Black Hat: Hey. I sold your Roomba on Craigslist so I could buy myself Left 4 Dead . Danish: But I eBayed your XBox so I could get this dueling harness for my Roomba! Black hat and Danish at the same time: Aww.\n"}
{"id":507,"title":"Experimentation","image_title":"Experimentation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/507","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/experimentation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/507:_Experimentation","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are holding hands, and Megan is pointing off to the side.] Megan: Oh, hey, it's twelve of the dudes from control group B!\n[Caption below the panel]: I'm cool with her past lesbian experimentation, but I wish she hadn't insisted the experiments be scientifically rigorous.\n","explanation":"College (undergraduate university, for international readers) is often a young adult's first experience with independent living. As a result, it is a time to \"find yourself,\" so the aphorism goes. This often includes a certain amount of sexual experimentation, including same-sex experimentation.\nThis comic applies a scientific interpretation to a colloquial expression (a favorite on xkcd ). Usually, \"lesbian experimentation\" refers to a woman engaging in one-night stands with other women to satisfy her curiosity about the experience and discover her own sexual orientation. Megan , however, does the \"experimenting\" according to the scientific method : hypothesize, experiment, draw conclusions, repeat. She formulates a hypothesis about her sexual orientation (apparently something along the lines of \"I am a lesbian\"), which she proceeds to test by experiments (sexual encounters) with female partners as the experimental group and male partners as the control group . She used large sample groups and multiple experiments (the reference to \"control group B\" implies at least two separate experiments). The title text implies that Megan \"experimented\" with the entire sophomore class (both males and females) before dating Cueball .\n[Cueball and Megan are holding hands, and Megan is pointing off to the side.] Megan: Oh, hey, it's twelve of the dudes from control group B!\n[Caption below the panel]: I'm cool with her past lesbian experimentation, but I wish she hadn't insisted the experiments be scientifically rigorous.\n"}
{"id":508,"title":"Drapes","image_title":"Drapes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/508","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/drapes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/508:_Drapes","transcript":"Cueball: So, does the carpet match the drapes?\nWoman: Yeah. But not the upholstery.\n[Woman walks away.]\n[Cueball scratches his head, confused.]\n","explanation":"This comic plays on the classic question \"does the carpet match the drapes,\" where the 'drapes' are the hair on someone's head, and the 'carpet' is their pubic hair. The assumption is that some people artificially dye their head hair, but typically would not dye other body hair, essentially asking \"Are you a 'natural' red-head\/blonde\/etc.?\" The classic question doesn't mention upholstery, hence Cueball 's confusion. There is some speculation about other body\/arm\/leg\/arm-pit hair interpretations for upholstery .\nThis comic could also be a self-referential joke where the furniture is a double entendre to the art of the comic itself. The \"carpet\" is the white background of the comic, which matches the black \"drapes\" of Cueball, the woman, and the words. The \"upholstery,\" in this case, is the woman's hair, which is colored and heavily bordered to create a 3D effect, which does not at all match the rest of this comic. The fact that Cueball seems confused (as per the last panel and title text) suggests that the fourth wall may have been broken.\nAlternatively, it could be that the woman is wearing a wig , and the \"upholstery\" is her natural hair or something similar.\nOr the woman is talking literally about her home's decoration.\nCueball: So, does the carpet match the drapes?\nWoman: Yeah. But not the upholstery.\n[Woman walks away.]\n[Cueball scratches his head, confused.]\n"}
{"id":509,"title":"Induced Current","image_title":"Induced Current","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/509","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/induced_current.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/509:_Induced_Current","transcript":"[Beret Guy, extension cord in hand, approaches Cueball as he works at his computer.] Beret Guy: Can I plug my extension cord over here? Cueball: No. Beret Guy: Why? Cueball: Solar Flares. [A diagram is displayed, illustrating the Earth's magnetic field being permanently impacted by a large solar flare (represented by a large arrow).] [A second diagram is presented, illustrating the Earth's rotation and the resulting impact that the solar flare would have on the earth's magnetic field.] Cueball: A large solar flare could dent the Earth's magnetic field inwards. The Earth's spin could then induce a strong current in any long conductors, melting them and starting fires. By extending your cord, you could kill us all. [Stunned, Beret Guy looks down at the cord he carries.] Beret Guy: Really? Cueball: Warn your friends. [Dejected, Beret Guy walks away, cord in tow.] [Cueball looks up from his computer as he is braced by Megan, a stern look in her face.] Megan: That was mean. Cueball: Listen, somebody has to keep Mythbusters in business. Next season should be fun.\n","explanation":"This comic is exaggerating the effects of the physics stated. Solar flares eject, among other things, ions, electrons, and radiation. The charged particles reach Earth after a day or two, and in history has knocked the power out in some areas during a large flare. They can marginally affect the magnetic field of the Earth, or dent it, as Cueball says. A voltage occurs in a conductor (the wire) when subjected to a changing magnetic field. However, this change is small and influences only very long conductors, such as telephone lines.\nInterestingly, phenomena as described by Cueball have occurred several times in recorded history, with effects quite nearly like those described, most notably the Carrington event of 1859. In 1859, a solar storm produced a series of powerful geomagnetic storms across the world, and many telegraph operators reported electrical phenomena (electric shock from the apparatus, messages sent and received despite disconnect from power sources, and pylons carrying telegraph lines sparking and arcing with current) all across North America. For this to occur in shorter conductors, (e.g., Beret guy's extension cord,) a solar storm would have to be so destructively large as to pose far more danger than just fires. The chances of such a solar event occurring again are not prohibitively small, though quite infrequent, and the last one, of comparative size and strength, was recorded in 2012 .\nMythbusters is a show that tests urban legends or myths that viewers submit. They have a classic style of scaling up myths to comical sizes. By starting the myth that a fire would be formed from the large voltage across the wire induced by the Earth's magnetic field, Cueball hopes to see it tested on Mythbusters , and perhaps then scaled up to astronomical proportions. This comic may also reference how Mythbusters was running out of urban legends to test, and has resorted to testing the feasibility of viral videos, movie scenes, proverbs, and the like, plus occasionally making up urban legends.\nThe title text refers to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) , the most powerful particle collider in the world and the fear of some people of the production of stable microscopic black holes destroying the Earth. Of course, testing something like this would be outside the scope of a show like MythBusters . Additionally, if the myth was confirmed, the planet would be destroyed, and nobody would like the MythBusters anymore. However, that wouldn't be much of a problem, seeing that there would be no one around to like anything.\n[Beret Guy, extension cord in hand, approaches Cueball as he works at his computer.] Beret Guy: Can I plug my extension cord over here? Cueball: No. Beret Guy: Why? Cueball: Solar Flares. [A diagram is displayed, illustrating the Earth's magnetic field being permanently impacted by a large solar flare (represented by a large arrow).] [A second diagram is presented, illustrating the Earth's rotation and the resulting impact that the solar flare would have on the earth's magnetic field.] Cueball: A large solar flare could dent the Earth's magnetic field inwards. The Earth's spin could then induce a strong current in any long conductors, melting them and starting fires. By extending your cord, you could kill us all. [Stunned, Beret Guy looks down at the cord he carries.] Beret Guy: Really? Cueball: Warn your friends. [Dejected, Beret Guy walks away, cord in tow.] [Cueball looks up from his computer as he is braced by Megan, a stern look in her face.] Megan: That was mean. Cueball: Listen, somebody has to keep Mythbusters in business. Next season should be fun.\n"}
{"id":510,"title":"Egg Drop Failure","image_title":"Egg Drop Failure","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/510","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/egg_drop_failure.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/510:_Egg_Drop_Failure","transcript":"[Boy tosses contraption off of building with egg in it.] [Egg cracks and little chick flies out while people look quizzically at the hatched egg.] Egg: Crack Chick: Chirp, chirp [Device with cracked egg lands on ground.]\n","explanation":"A common competition for school -age children (e.g. in science fairs or summer camps ) is the ' egg drop ': each team is given an unbroken egg (either raw or boiled, and usually of a chicken ), and may be provided with an assortment of materials, e.g. newspaper, popsicle sticks, string, tape, etc. The challenge is to build a contraption that will allow the egg to be dropped from some specified height onto a hard surface without breaking. In some competitions, the rules permit the contraption to be constructed from any available materials; other times, it is limited to only the materials that have been provided. Scoring varies wildly - common elements are speed of assembly, mass of the contraption, creativity of design (as determined by judging or voting), and\/or accuracy of landing within a target area - but one near-universal rule is disqualification if the egg's shell is broken.\nIn the comic, the competitor fails, not because of any flaw in his design, but because the egg hatches unexpectedly during the fall. In reality, the hatching process usually takes many hours [1] [2] \u2014 much longer than the few seconds of a typical egg drop; furthermore, the newborn chick cannot fly immediately. However, if it were to magically happen as in the comic, then the competitor would be disqualified because the egg technically broke when the chick hatched from it.\nThe title text suggests an alternate strategy, one Randall hears was successful in real life: select for your egg one that has not yet been laid. The hen provides both active lift with her wings and significant padding with her body and feathers, thus nearly guaranteeing that the egg will survive the fall. But the chicken may not be permitted in some contests if it is not one of the allowed materials. And even if it were, a chicken might be heavier than the usual contraptions of newspaper and string, [ citation needed ] so it might lose anyway if weight is one of the scoring criteria.\n[Boy tosses contraption off of building with egg in it.] [Egg cracks and little chick flies out while people look quizzically at the hatched egg.] Egg: Crack Chick: Chirp, chirp [Device with cracked egg lands on ground.]\n"}
{"id":511,"title":"Sleet","image_title":"Sleet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/511","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sleet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/511:_Sleet","transcript":"[The comic is set on a rainy, cold, windy street; Megan is walking along said street with a scarf; narration is from Megan's point-of-view.] The weather outside is frightful. I hate trudging through the icy slush and biting sleet. But it beats lying in our warm, cozy bed Listening to you talk about DRM for hours on end. Offscreen: Come back! Just listen to this one quote from Free Culture!\n","explanation":"Megan is seen leaving an apartment, trudging through freezing temperatures and foul weather , when she could be in a warm, cozy bed. The dialog is likely her thoughts, rather than speech. She is fed up with the second person's endless discussion of digital rights management (DRM). She probably agrees with his position, but would rather face the weather than his endless rehashing of the issue.\nThe words in the first panel are the opening lyrics of the Christmas standard, Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! .\nIn the last panel, Free Culture refers to a book by Lawrence Lessig , who advocates for fewer restrictions in many areas. Randall had previously advocated this title himself in 86: Digital Rights Management and 129: Content Protection , and mentioned Lessig in 343: 1337: Part 3 .\nIn the title text, it is revealed that Megan herself is also guilty of droning on about 'boring' subjects, likely to the annoyance of those around her. In this case, complaining about science-fiction TV series Battlestar Galactica , which tends to produce strong reactions among geeks . She has gone outside to avoid the boring rant. However, given the opportunity, it is she who would be doing the ranting.\n[The comic is set on a rainy, cold, windy street; Megan is walking along said street with a scarf; narration is from Megan's point-of-view.] The weather outside is frightful. I hate trudging through the icy slush and biting sleet. But it beats lying in our warm, cozy bed Listening to you talk about DRM for hours on end. Offscreen: Come back! Just listen to this one quote from Free Culture!\n"}
{"id":512,"title":"Alternate Currency","image_title":"Alternate Currency","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/512","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alternate_currency.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/512:_Alternate_Currency","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of a televion] Television: With the collapse of the dollar, the government has endorsed an alternate currency. Your monetary worth is now determined by the number of funny pictures saved to your hard drive. [Caption below the panel:] I have been preparing for this moment my whole life.\n","explanation":"Cueball is shown watching television, where it is announced that the US dollar has collapsed and been replaced by an 'alternative currency' of humorous pictures commonly shared on the internet (an Internet Meme ). Such a currency would be utterly useless; for untraceable and easily counterfeited .gif and .jpeg files to become more monetarily stable than the US dollar would mean that the economy is all kinds of screwed , to the point of utter absurdity.\nThe title text pokes fun at users of 4Chan who are notoriously known for their habit of hoarding image macros, a practice he suggests is almost useless except in the instance jokingly suggested by the comic. 4Chan is also reputable for reducing the Happiness and Success of many people their community targets anonymously.  Randall also pokes fun at himself in saying, \"I have been preparing for this moment my whole life,\" indirectly implying he is also guilty of this practice.\nThe \"rare pepe\" meme that has recently sprouted on 4chan implies that some photoshopped pictures of Pepe the frog are valuable and that they could be sold. 120 Rare pepe's reached a price of $99,166 on eBay before being removed as seen here.\nWith the rise of cryptocurrency and NFTs, this absurdist comic is becoming indistinguishable from reality.\n[Cueball is standing in front of a televion] Television: With the collapse of the dollar, the government has endorsed an alternate currency. Your monetary worth is now determined by the number of funny pictures saved to your hard drive. [Caption below the panel:] I have been preparing for this moment my whole life.\n"}
{"id":513,"title":"Friends","image_title":"Friends","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/513","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/friends.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/513:_Friends","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Megan.] Cueball: I have a crush on you.\n[Cueball is shown alone.] Cueball: I could ask you out, and move on with my life if you said no.\n[Cueball has his arms out.] Cueball: Or, Cueball: WE COULD BE FRIENDS!\n[Cueball has one palm out.] Cueball: See, I don't want to consider that you might not be attracted to me. I'm scared of rejection, so I've decided relationships should grow smoothly out of friendships.\n[Megan is shown sitting at her computer.] Cueball: When you have problems, I'll be there for you, night after night. Cueball: Selflessly. Computer: *hug*\n[Megan is shown slamming a door and walking to Cueball to get a hug.] Cueball: I'll tear down the jerks you date, and wait for you to realize how good I am for you. That only I will ever understand you. SLAM Megan: Sniff Cueball: There there\n[Cueball is shown alone again.] Cueball: You don't want to hurt my feelings, and I won't ever force the issue. I'll tell myself it's because I \"value our friendship.\"\n[Again.] Cueball: Bit by bit, I'll make you depend on me.\n[Cueball and Megan are shown sitting on a rock in a park, reading a book together.] Cueball: You'll think about how long it would take to build this kind of connection again.\n[Cueball and Megan are shown sitting on a couch drinking, getting closer, and kissing.] Cueball: And in a moment of weakness Cueball: and loneliness Cueball: you'll give in.\n[Megan is shown sitting at the computer with Cueball behind her facing the other way washing dishes.] Cueball: It'll feel comfortable and natural. You'll quietly revise your definition of love and try to be happy. And sometimes you will be.\n[Megan is shown sitting at the computer.] Cueball: Only the wistfulness in your gaze and the tiny pause before you say \"I love you\" will hint that this wasn't the ending you'd hoped for. Cueball: Sound good?\n[Megan is holding hands with another boy, talking to Cueball.] Megan: ...I'm going to date this jerk. Cueball: But he doesn't respect you!\n","explanation":"Cueball is talking to Megan . He confesses that he has a crush on her. Usually the next step in Western cultures, when someone likes someone else, is to ask the other person out (in other cultures, such as Islamic or Indian cultures, it would be more appropriate to request that one's parents contact the parents of the person one has a crush on). But Cueball takes a different route, and in the comic, he explains his thought process. Presumably he actually explains this to Megan.\nHe explains that he is afraid of rejection, and so instead of asking her out directly, promises to be her \"best friend\" and someone who is always \"there for you,\" in the hopes that this will eventually lead to Megan developing an attraction for him. This way, Cueball does not have to risk Megan saying 'No' to him, as she will be led to make the first move instead. Cueball is aware that this may not be an ideal situation for Megan, conceding that she may end up changing her definition of happiness to make her feel more comfortable in the relationship, while she is conscious of the fact that she doesn't really love Cueball. Cueball recognizes that if Megan fell for him this way, she would probably have this fact at the back of her mind forever.\nAnd so, after painting this elaborate - but troubling - future, Cueball asks sound good ? Megan, however, is not won over by Cueball's plan, and she tells him that she is going to date \"this jerk \", poking fun at him saying 'I will tear down the jerks you date'. (Although she could have said any name here -- to Cueball it will always sound like jerk !) This suggests that she would much rather date someone else rather than date Cueball whom she -- as he correctly implies -- does not love.\nCueball declares that the other suitor doesn't respect you , an absurdly hypocritical comment given his manipulative plan. He explained earlier that he would tear down the jerks you date ; this last line could also be him actually executing on the plan he just detailed.\nThe title text is a play on the concept of friends with benefits , wherein two friends have casual sex without entering a committed relationship. Friends with detriments suggests that having Cueball as her \"friend\" damages Megan's chances of getting a relationship (and sex) with anyone else, since Cueball will tear any candidate down. Also, despite Cueball claiming to be Megan's friend (and appearing to value this friendship), his plans are rather selfish and manipulative, making him a \"friend\" who is in fact detrimental.\n[Cueball is talking to Megan.] Cueball: I have a crush on you.\n[Cueball is shown alone.] Cueball: I could ask you out, and move on with my life if you said no.\n[Cueball has his arms out.] Cueball: Or, Cueball: WE COULD BE FRIENDS!\n[Cueball has one palm out.] Cueball: See, I don't want to consider that you might not be attracted to me. I'm scared of rejection, so I've decided relationships should grow smoothly out of friendships.\n[Megan is shown sitting at her computer.] Cueball: When you have problems, I'll be there for you, night after night. Cueball: Selflessly. Computer: *hug*\n[Megan is shown slamming a door and walking to Cueball to get a hug.] Cueball: I'll tear down the jerks you date, and wait for you to realize how good I am for you. That only I will ever understand you. SLAM Megan: Sniff Cueball: There there\n[Cueball is shown alone again.] Cueball: You don't want to hurt my feelings, and I won't ever force the issue. I'll tell myself it's because I \"value our friendship.\"\n[Again.] Cueball: Bit by bit, I'll make you depend on me.\n[Cueball and Megan are shown sitting on a rock in a park, reading a book together.] Cueball: You'll think about how long it would take to build this kind of connection again.\n[Cueball and Megan are shown sitting on a couch drinking, getting closer, and kissing.] Cueball: And in a moment of weakness Cueball: and loneliness Cueball: you'll give in.\n[Megan is shown sitting at the computer with Cueball behind her facing the other way washing dishes.] Cueball: It'll feel comfortable and natural. You'll quietly revise your definition of love and try to be happy. And sometimes you will be.\n[Megan is shown sitting at the computer.] Cueball: Only the wistfulness in your gaze and the tiny pause before you say \"I love you\" will hint that this wasn't the ending you'd hoped for. Cueball: Sound good?\n[Megan is holding hands with another boy, talking to Cueball.] Megan: ...I'm going to date this jerk. Cueball: But he doesn't respect you!\n"}
{"id":514,"title":"Simultaneous","image_title":"Simultaneous","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/514","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/simultaneous.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/514:_Simultaneous","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are in bed.] Cueball: Mmm, simultaneous orgasms. Megan: That wasn't simultaneous. Cueball: Huh? It totally was! [Caption below the panel:] A common disagreement when one of you is doing all the moving.\n","explanation":"This comic links to en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Relativity_of_simultaneity .\nCueball and Megan are talking about the sex they just had. Cueball is remarking on how they both achieved orgasm simultaneously, but Megan disagrees.\nThis comic is a play on Einstein's theory of special relativity . One piece of the theory deals with two observers who are moving at close to the speed of light relative to each other. According to Einstein, events that appear simultaneous to one observer will appear to happen at different times to the other.\nSo when one partner is moving and the other isn't, it's possible that they experience their orgasm at different times relative to each other. That would require one partner to be moving really fast in one direction, which would make them a really bad partner. [ citation needed ] On small speeds, this effect could not be measured.\nThe other joke is that partners often disagree with each other \u2014 even when the difference is minor and not important to the matter.\nThe title text is reference to the twin paradox, which arises from another piece of special relativity. In theory, if you stick one twin on a spaceship at near light speed and keep the other back on Earth, and assuming neither accelerates, each will perceive himself to age slowly while the other ages quickly, forming an apparent paradox. Megan expresses a preference for Cueball's older twin, who will be more \"mature,\" meaning both older and presumably less combative about simultaneity. Again, the joke here is that at relativistic speeds, there could be disagreement about which twin is truly the \"older\" one.\n[Cueball and Megan are in bed.] Cueball: Mmm, simultaneous orgasms. Megan: That wasn't simultaneous. Cueball: Huh? It totally was! [Caption below the panel:] A common disagreement when one of you is doing all the moving.\n"}
{"id":515,"title":"No One Must Know","image_title":"No One Must Know","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/515","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/no_one_must_know.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/515:_No_One_Must_Know","transcript":"[Black Hat and Danish are talking and holding hands.] Black hat: You're my dearest darling danish. Danish: And you're my lovely cutie pie. Black hat: Well, you're- [Cueball enters.] [Black Hat and Danish look at each other and let go of each others hands.] [Black Hat holds a bloody sack, while Danish pushes down on a shovel to make a hole for what is presumably Cueball's body.]\n","explanation":"Black Hat and Danish are more known for their sociopathy than their affection. In the first panel, they are affectionate towards each other, holding hands and using terms of endearment by calling each other cake names, i.e. danish pastry and pie . The entrance of Cueball , and his observation of this state, leads Black Hat and Danish to kill him and bury the evidence, so that no one knows that side of them, but 433: Journal 5 states that they are, in fact, in a relationship.\nThe title text provides the alternative hypothesis that they were planning on killing him the whole time and were intentionally acting affectionate for the mental effect it would have on their victim.\n542: Cover-Up provides a possible continuation of this story.\n[Black Hat and Danish are talking and holding hands.] Black hat: You're my dearest darling danish. Danish: And you're my lovely cutie pie. Black hat: Well, you're- [Cueball enters.] [Black Hat and Danish look at each other and let go of each others hands.] [Black Hat holds a bloody sack, while Danish pushes down on a shovel to make a hole for what is presumably Cueball's body.]\n"}
{"id":516,"title":"Wood Chips","image_title":"Wood Chips","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/516","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wood_chips.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/516:_Wood_Chips","transcript":"[Cueball leans on desk; Woman sits behind desk.]\nCueball: Did you ever figure out those mysterious woodchips? Woman: The ones in the hallway? No. Cueball: You didn't suspect that they matched the timber used in 1861 to build the \"ghost ship\" Mary Celeste, prompting you to send them to a lab for analysis, the results of which raised new and stranger questions? Woman: No, I threw them out. Why? [Caption below the panel:] My hoaxes need to get a lot less subtle.\n","explanation":"Cueball has tried to play an elaborate hoax on a woman involving wood chips that match the composition of the wood used to build a 19th-century ghost ship called the Mary Celeste . Unfortunately, the woman has done the sensible, reasonable thing and thrown them out instead of checking to see if they belong to a ghost ship, whose wood chips or what-have-you would probably not have found their way to the hallway. This causes Cueball to realize that he needs to rethink the complicated way in which he creates hoaxes, because the people he is trying to trick do not follow through with his elaborate plans.\nThe title text suggests that he also set up some kind of chemical match with the Shroud of Turin . The Shroud of Turin is a famous artifact bearing a ghostly image of a man's face, said by some to have been used to wrap the body of Jesus of Nazareth . Radiocarbon dating performed on the shroud in the late 1980s dated it to the Middle Ages (i.e. not old enough to have been used by Jesus); however, not everyone has accepted this finding.\n[Cueball leans on desk; Woman sits behind desk.]\nCueball: Did you ever figure out those mysterious woodchips? Woman: The ones in the hallway? No. Cueball: You didn't suspect that they matched the timber used in 1861 to build the \"ghost ship\" Mary Celeste, prompting you to send them to a lab for analysis, the results of which raised new and stranger questions? Woman: No, I threw them out. Why? [Caption below the panel:] My hoaxes need to get a lot less subtle.\n"}
{"id":517,"title":"Marshmallow Gun","image_title":"Marshmallow Gun","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/517","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/marshmallow_gun.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/517:_Marshmallow_Gun","transcript":"[A box above the first frame:] I got this gun that shoots marshmallows. [Cueball removes the red marshmallow gun from a box.]\n\n[Cueball shoots at Megan with marshmallow gun from offscreen.] Pop pop pop Whap whap whap\n\n[Megan facepalms.] Pop Megan: Sigh.\n\n[Megan removes a super soaker from desk drawer.] Pop pop\n[Megan shoots Cueball (offscreen) with the super soaker.] Cueball (offscreen): Augh! Fwoosh Cueball (offscreen): Man, I forgot that was there.\n\n[A box above the first frame of the second part of the comic:] The next day, everyone else got them too. [Megan and Beret Guy brandish marshmallow guns.] Megan: Hey, noob! Eat Stay-Puft\u00ae!\n\n[Megan shoots a marshmallow gun.] Pop pop pop\n\n[Cueball shoots a marshmallow gun.] Poppop pop\n\n[Megan and Cueball shoot marshmallows into the air, crossing the streams.] Beret Guy (offscreen): No! Don't cross the\u2014\n\n[Between the last two frames is a wide gap with the following text:] Foom Giant monster (offscreen): Roaaar!\n\n[Megan, Cueball, and Beret Guy are all standing with weapons pointed at the ground looking up.] Megan: Okay, this is bad. Giant monster (offscreen): You're shooting what ?\n","explanation":"Cueball has obtained a gun that shoots marshmallows and promptly decides to shoot at Megan . Having taken the first few hits without much reaction, she sighs and then brings out  the super soaker, which was first used on her in 220: Philosophy (and later reappears in 2334: Slide Trombone ), and soaks him with it.\nThe next day, everyone has such guns and starts shooting marshmallows at each other. We see Beret Guy and Megan who confront Cueball, saying Hey, noob ! Eat Stay-Puft\u00ae ! This is like saying eat lead when threatening someone with a regular gun, since Stay Puft is a fictional brand of marshmallows from the Ghostbusters movie. (Of course, it's also a reasonable thing to say, since marshmallows are good to eat.) [ citation needed ] These statements and many like them appear in many first-person shooter games with chat.\nBeret Guy realizes that the \"streams\" of marshmallows are about to cross and shouts a warning, but it is too late and they cross anyway. This results in something gigantic appearing with a Foom Roaaar! off-screen. It roars at the three friends. Megan looks up and states that this is bad as the giant shouts You're shooting what? Presumably the crossing marshmallow beams have recreated the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters . In the movie, crossing the ghost-capturing streams from the proton packs was \" bad .\" But in the end, in which an ancient spirit took the form of this giant Marshmallow Man, the monster was destroyed as a side effect of crossing the streams.  The Stay-Puft man sees what they are shooting and is justifiably upset.\nThe title text is a further Ghostbusters reference, as Bill Murray was one of the actors in the movie. Since the crossing of the streams of the proton packs by Bill Murray and the other Ghostbusters is related to the destruction of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the movie, the crossing of the marshmallow streams in the comic does the opposite and summons an enormous Bill Murray.\n[A box above the first frame:] I got this gun that shoots marshmallows. [Cueball removes the red marshmallow gun from a box.]\n\n[Cueball shoots at Megan with marshmallow gun from offscreen.] Pop pop pop Whap whap whap\n\n[Megan facepalms.] Pop Megan: Sigh.\n\n[Megan removes a super soaker from desk drawer.] Pop pop\n[Megan shoots Cueball (offscreen) with the super soaker.] Cueball (offscreen): Augh! Fwoosh Cueball (offscreen): Man, I forgot that was there.\n\n[A box above the first frame of the second part of the comic:] The next day, everyone else got them too. [Megan and Beret Guy brandish marshmallow guns.] Megan: Hey, noob! Eat Stay-Puft\u00ae!\n\n[Megan shoots a marshmallow gun.] Pop pop pop\n\n[Cueball shoots a marshmallow gun.] Poppop pop\n\n[Megan and Cueball shoot marshmallows into the air, crossing the streams.] Beret Guy (offscreen): No! Don't cross the\u2014\n\n[Between the last two frames is a wide gap with the following text:] Foom Giant monster (offscreen): Roaaar!\n\n[Megan, Cueball, and Beret Guy are all standing with weapons pointed at the ground looking up.] Megan: Okay, this is bad. Giant monster (offscreen): You're shooting what ?\n"}
{"id":518,"title":"Flow Charts","image_title":"Flow Charts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/518","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flow_charts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/518:_Flow_Charts","transcript":"[A flow chart is shown beneath a caption. There are 14 boxes, five rhombus shaped and the rest rectangular. From all the rhombus boxes there are one arrow entering and two arrows leaving (with yes\/no labels on them). One of the other boxes is the start with only one arrow leaving, and three of these boxes are endings with only one arrow entering. Three have two arrows entering and one leaving. And two have one in and one out. Caption:] A guide to understanding flow charts presented in flow chart form.\nBox 0: Start [Arrow to Box 1.] Box 1: Do you understand flow charts? [Arrow to Box 2.] Yes [Arrow to Box 4.] No Box 2: Good [Arrow to Box 3.] Yes Box 3: Let's go drink. [Arrow to Final Box.] 6 Drinks Box 4: Okay. You see the line labeled \"Yes\"? [Arrow to Box 6.] Yes [Arrow to Box 5.] No Box 5: But you see the ones labeled \"No\". [Arrow to End-Box 1.] Yes [Arrow to End-Box 2a.] No End-Box 1: Wait, what? [No Arrows.] End-Box 2a: Listen. [Arrow to End-Box 2b.] End-Box 2b: I hate you. [No Arrows.] Box 6: ...and you can see the ones labeled \"No\"? [Arrow to Box 2.] Yes [Arrow to Box 7.] No Box 7: But you just followed them twice! [Arrow to Box 8a.] Yes [Arrow to Box 8a.] No Box 8a: (That wasn't a question.) [Arrow to Box 8b.] Box 8b: Screw it. [Arrow to Box 3.] Final Box: Hey I should try installing FreeBSD!\n","explanation":"Flowcharts are diagrams that represent processes in a graphical form. While predominantly used in computer programming to visualize the structure of source code, flowcharts can in theory be used to depict any real or virtual procedure. In this comic, this idea is subverted by employing a flowchart to explain how flowcharts work. Flowcharts are a recurring theme on xkcd, and a list of flowchart comics can be found here .\nThis seems like a faulty basis for explaining anything, but the basic functionality of flowcharts is quite intuitive, and the attempted self-description is almost unnecessary. In fact, the comic does not actually explain how to use the flowchart: it just uses an example of a very simple flowchart to demonstrate to the reader that they can easily work out how to follow it.  If the reader attempts to \"game\" the system by either giving contradictory answers, or refusing to acknowledge that they can see the \"Yes\" and \"No\" labels, the flowchart gets confused or becomes abusive. Just like a real computer.\nIf you confirm or demonstrate that you can follow the flowchart, it inevitably leads to the \"Let's go drink\" box, which gives rise to the assumption that the whole chart was only a pretence for drinking.\nFreeBSD is a unixoid operating system for computers that is generally considered to require advanced skills [ citation needed ] . The question whether Linux or (Free)BSD is the preferable operating system is a question of almost [ citation needed ] religious belief to some. The comic takes a shot against FreeBSD by implying that one would only decide to install it when under the influence of alcohol. This may also be a reference to 349: Success .\nThe title text mentions Microsoft Bob , a software package published in 1995 by Microsoft . The product was targeted towards beginners, and Microsoft decided to use a cartoon-style interface instead of a more 'professional' environment. It was a commercial failure [ citation needed ] , and still serves as an inside joke among IT professionals.\nRandall has made use of flowcharts before, and later he released another comic name 1195: Flowchart .\n[A flow chart is shown beneath a caption. There are 14 boxes, five rhombus shaped and the rest rectangular. From all the rhombus boxes there are one arrow entering and two arrows leaving (with yes\/no labels on them). One of the other boxes is the start with only one arrow leaving, and three of these boxes are endings with only one arrow entering. Three have two arrows entering and one leaving. And two have one in and one out. Caption:] A guide to understanding flow charts presented in flow chart form.\nBox 0: Start [Arrow to Box 1.] Box 1: Do you understand flow charts? [Arrow to Box 2.] Yes [Arrow to Box 4.] No Box 2: Good [Arrow to Box 3.] Yes Box 3: Let's go drink. [Arrow to Final Box.] 6 Drinks Box 4: Okay. You see the line labeled \"Yes\"? [Arrow to Box 6.] Yes [Arrow to Box 5.] No Box 5: But you see the ones labeled \"No\". [Arrow to End-Box 1.] Yes [Arrow to End-Box 2a.] No End-Box 1: Wait, what? [No Arrows.] End-Box 2a: Listen. [Arrow to End-Box 2b.] End-Box 2b: I hate you. [No Arrows.] Box 6: ...and you can see the ones labeled \"No\"? [Arrow to Box 2.] Yes [Arrow to Box 7.] No Box 7: But you just followed them twice! [Arrow to Box 8a.] Yes [Arrow to Box 8a.] No Box 8a: (That wasn't a question.) [Arrow to Box 8b.] Box 8b: Screw it. [Arrow to Box 3.] Final Box: Hey I should try installing FreeBSD!\n"}
{"id":519,"title":"11th Grade","image_title":"11th Grade","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/519","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/11th_grade.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/519:_11th_Grade","transcript":"[Above a bar graph:] 11th-grade activities: [The y-axis is labeled:] Usefulness to career success [Above the x-axis are two small bars and one huge bar. Below the x-axis, each bar is labeled:] 900 hours of classes 400 hours of homework One weekend messing with Perl\n","explanation":"This strip is a comparison about the time spent in 11th\u00a0grade doing various things, and how important those things are to one's future. The first two bars on the chart are 900 hours of class, which is about 180\u00a0hours short of how many hours kids spend in school each year (most likely to show the lunch hour), and 400\u00a0hours of homework, or an average of about 2.2\u00a0hours per school day. Conversely, idly messing around in Perl (a programming language) for only one weekend is shown to have a much larger impact on one's future \u2014 specifically Randall's, as learning how to code would have been key to his job as a robotics engineer at NASA. This is likely due to the skills one can pick up in even just a single weekend in contrast to the often redundant, trivial, or generalist information that schools tend to convey.\nThis is mainly a critique to how school subjects can be rather useless for one's future or that the school is so boring that students are discouraged to pay attention in class.\nThe title text continues this sentiment; the fact that the subject of the conversation is left shrouded in mystery deepens the romance (in all senses of the word).\n[Above a bar graph:] 11th-grade activities: [The y-axis is labeled:] Usefulness to career success [Above the x-axis are two small bars and one huge bar. Below the x-axis, each bar is labeled:] 900 hours of classes 400 hours of homework One weekend messing with Perl\n"}
{"id":520,"title":"Cuttlefish","image_title":"Cuttlefish","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/520","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cuttlefish.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/520:_Cuttlefish","transcript":"[A scientist (looking like Cueball) is pointing into an aquarium tank with two small animals floating in the water. He explains that they are cuttlefish to Cueball and Megan, who are on the other side of the tank looking into it, Cueball with a hand to his mouth. Above them there is a frame inside the panel with a caption:] We visit a bio lab: Scientist: These are cuttlefish.\n[Very detailed drawing of a cuttlefish, with its special W shaped pupils, all eight arms and two longer tentacles, and the striped body with waving parts shown waving down each side. The scientist tells about the animal with text above and below.] Scientist (off-panel): They're frighteningly smart, have manipulating arms and tentacles, have ink jets, can dart backwards and see the polarization of light through their w-shaped pupils. Scientist (off-panel): And their sides are 200 dpi display screens which they use for camouflage and communication.\n[Back to the original setting where the scientist stands a little farther back from the tank with his arms down. Cueball and Megan have also moved farther back and are even leaning away from the tank.] Scientist: When we realized how intelligent they were, we began to teach them. Scientist: They've advanced quickly. Scientist: Cuttlefish: GO.\n[The two cuttlefish float straight out of the tank (lines indicating the movement and water splashing at the surface of the tank). The scientist looks down at them, while Cueball and Megan are holding hands and leaning farther back and Cueball taking his hand back to his mouth.]\n[Pan to only the scientist, standing with one arm bend in front of him and the other holding a finger up to his mouth, and the tank from where the cuttlefish now fly toward Cueball and Megan, who are now off-panel. Lines behind the cuttlefish show that they fly right but bob up and down. The cuttlefish talk in a strange way where the letters are alternately up and down.] Cuttlefish: K i l l t h e P h y s i c i s t s Cuttlefish: K i l l t h e P h y s i c i st s [Pan to Megan and Cueball, with the tank almost inside the left frame. Both cuttlefish are surrounded by their own zigzag lines, which then extend from them in a thin line to encompass either Cueball or Megan. Cueball was running away from them, when this happens, with legs bent at the knees and arms out, one bent. Megan has fallen, lying face down with her arms out.]\n[In this panel with faint gray shading, Cueball is waking up in bed from the dream, rising up to a sitting position suddenly as indicated with two movement lines behind his head. One arm is supporting him on the bed next to the pillow, and the other is pulling his sheet down away from his torso. The first sentence is maybe still part of the dream, as there is no line from Cueball to the sentence, and it is written high up. There is a line to the second sentence.] Cueball: Oh god. Cueball: I knew it.\n[This panel is divided into five segments. At the top, there is a large caption in two lines. There are three drawings following each other from left to right. First, a bottle is pouring liquid into a an Erlenmeyer flask (a conical laboratory flask) that is half full. Then, Cueball takes the flask and holds it up as a salute. Finally, he drinks from it, leaning his head way back. Below there is more text.] xkcd Salutes Bio Majors If we join you against the chemists, will you train your fleshy minions to leave us alive?\n","explanation":"It appears that Cueball and Megan are physicists visiting a biology lab. Their guide, a biologist looking like Cueball, gives them a description of the humble cuttlefish that is both accurate and makes them sound like other-worldly creatures with highly advanced capabilities.\nThe scene takes an unusual turn when the scientist implies that the cuttlefish have been easily trained to improve their capabilities. He then demonstrates this by giving a simple command, whereupon the cuttlefish rise out of the water, only to attack and kill both Cueball and Megan, demonstrating an ability to fly, talk, and discharge lethal electric shocks in the process. (See also 35: Sheep ).\nThis is all revealed to be a dream, but it has given Cueball a warning not to underestimate the biologists. Apparently, they can be just as crazy and dangerous as any other kind of scientist. Cueball (who represent Randall as it is xkcd that salutes in the final panel) offers a toast to all biologists everywhere and plans an alliance with them against the chemists , hoping to prevent further attacks on physicists. He is then shown drinking from a laboratory flask, something that any scientist would be wary of.\nIn the past, Randall has been somewhat dismissive of the non-math\/non-physics scientific disciplines, so this comic may be trying to mend some bridges with biologists. But not with chemists.\nIn the title text, CS stands for Computer Science . The \"robot revolution\" references events in film and literature, wherein robots, having become commonplace in the workforce, achieve independent thought and declare war on humanity, like in The Terminator , The Matrix , or the movie I, Robot . Randall implies that the physicists will switch sides if the robot revolution arrives first. Cephalopod is the class of animals that encompasses cuttlefish, as well as squids and octopodes .\n[A scientist (looking like Cueball) is pointing into an aquarium tank with two small animals floating in the water. He explains that they are cuttlefish to Cueball and Megan, who are on the other side of the tank looking into it, Cueball with a hand to his mouth. Above them there is a frame inside the panel with a caption:] We visit a bio lab: Scientist: These are cuttlefish.\n[Very detailed drawing of a cuttlefish, with its special W shaped pupils, all eight arms and two longer tentacles, and the striped body with waving parts shown waving down each side. The scientist tells about the animal with text above and below.] Scientist (off-panel): They're frighteningly smart, have manipulating arms and tentacles, have ink jets, can dart backwards and see the polarization of light through their w-shaped pupils. Scientist (off-panel): And their sides are 200 dpi display screens which they use for camouflage and communication.\n[Back to the original setting where the scientist stands a little farther back from the tank with his arms down. Cueball and Megan have also moved farther back and are even leaning away from the tank.] Scientist: When we realized how intelligent they were, we began to teach them. Scientist: They've advanced quickly. Scientist: Cuttlefish: GO.\n[The two cuttlefish float straight out of the tank (lines indicating the movement and water splashing at the surface of the tank). The scientist looks down at them, while Cueball and Megan are holding hands and leaning farther back and Cueball taking his hand back to his mouth.]\n[Pan to only the scientist, standing with one arm bend in front of him and the other holding a finger up to his mouth, and the tank from where the cuttlefish now fly toward Cueball and Megan, who are now off-panel. Lines behind the cuttlefish show that they fly right but bob up and down. The cuttlefish talk in a strange way where the letters are alternately up and down.] Cuttlefish: K i l l t h e P h y s i c i s t s Cuttlefish: K i l l t h e P h y s i c i st s [Pan to Megan and Cueball, with the tank almost inside the left frame. Both cuttlefish are surrounded by their own zigzag lines, which then extend from them in a thin line to encompass either Cueball or Megan. Cueball was running away from them, when this happens, with legs bent at the knees and arms out, one bent. Megan has fallen, lying face down with her arms out.]\n[In this panel with faint gray shading, Cueball is waking up in bed from the dream, rising up to a sitting position suddenly as indicated with two movement lines behind his head. One arm is supporting him on the bed next to the pillow, and the other is pulling his sheet down away from his torso. The first sentence is maybe still part of the dream, as there is no line from Cueball to the sentence, and it is written high up. There is a line to the second sentence.] Cueball: Oh god. Cueball: I knew it.\n[This panel is divided into five segments. At the top, there is a large caption in two lines. There are three drawings following each other from left to right. First, a bottle is pouring liquid into a an Erlenmeyer flask (a conical laboratory flask) that is half full. Then, Cueball takes the flask and holds it up as a salute. Finally, he drinks from it, leaning his head way back. Below there is more text.] xkcd Salutes Bio Majors If we join you against the chemists, will you train your fleshy minions to leave us alive?\n"}
{"id":521,"title":"2008 Christmas Special","image_title":"2008 Christmas Special","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/521","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2008_christmas_special.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/521:_2008_Christmas_Special","transcript":"The 2008 XKCD Christmas Special Due to the slowing economy, we could only afford to produce the prime-numbered panels. You should be able to infer the missing parts of the story easily enough. We apologize for the inconvenience. [The first panel is blank.] [Megan carrying Christmas lights and Cueball watching.] Megan: I'm going to one-up those Christmas light displays on YouTube. [Megan thinking.] Megan: Hmm. Needs more flair. Do you know what happens when you fire sodium pellets into a snowbank? Cueball: No. Megan: Me neither. [The next panel is blank.] [Megan sitting in front of a console.] Megan: Whoops, one of the Arduino control boards sublimated. Megan: If only I could make it self-repairing... [The next panel is blank.] Megan: Shit. The system has become sentient. Cueball: Friggin' Python. System: GRAAARR! [The next three panels are blank.] [Megan showing laptop to Cueball.] Megan: But according to this email forward, Santa is secretly a Muslim! Cueball: It explains everything! [The next panel is blank.] Megan: Okay, the cloned raptors are hunting the last of the cyborgs. We're safe. Cueball: Are you sure you thought this through? [The next three panels are blank.] [Two couples appear in this next panel.] Cueball: Are the raptors contained? Ponytail: Sure. Unless they figure out how to build lightsabers. [The next panel is blank.] [Guy with hat fighting with a raptor using lightsabers.] Cueball: It's all right. I've got her. [Lightsaber appears from behind.] Snap-hiss! Cueball: ...Clever girl. [The next three panels are blank.] [Bill Gates is holding a weapon over Santa's body. The two girls are watching.] Megan: Great. Bill Gates kills Santa. Bill Gates: I thought it was Stallman with a dyed beard. [The next five panels are blank.] [Danish and Black Hat are looking at a tree.] Danish: Where did you get this Christmas tree? Black Hat: Nowhere. Danish: Did you cut down the Yggdrasil? Black Hat: ...Maybe. [The next panel is blank.] [Megan and Cueball holding hands and looking at reader.] Merry Christmas from XKCD <3 [The last panel is blank.]\n","explanation":"This comic is the xkcd Christmas Special from the year 2008. The prologue states that due to the 2008 financial crisis , only very few images of the strip could be produced, leaving the others to be blacked out. It is therefore left to the reader to reconstruct the whole story based on the given images. While it is claimed that the reconstruction should be rather easy, the complicated and abstruse plot-line makes it nearly impossible to fill the gaps. Any attempt at inferring the missing images would therefore be largely guesswork. The comic features the well-known xkcd characters getting involved in a strange fight with cyborgs and raptors on Christmas Eve.\nThe line \"We apologize for the inconvenience.\" is possibly a reference to the famous book series The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams . It appears there as God's Final Message to His Creation, written in letters of fire on the side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains.\nPanel 2: Megan strives to outdo some Christmas lights she has seen on YouTube.\nPanel 3: Dissatisfied with her work, Megan is thinking about alternative ways improve her light arrangement. The idea of firing Sodium pellets into snow is probably a bad one, as Sodium reacts exothermically with water and may, in large amounts, induce explosions.\nPanel 5: Probably still obsessed with the idea of creating a large and impressive light display, Megan has constructed an electronic device with an Arduino processor, perhaps to make the light chain show patterns. However, the amount of energy she used was apparently too high, causing one of the control boards to sublimate- go directly from a solid to a gaseous state without an intermediate liquid phase. She then wishes she could make the system self-repairing.\nPanel 7: Megan's device has developed artificial intelligence , allowing it to feel. This is presumably a result of Megan attempting to make the device self-repairing. This common trope in science-fiction works usually leads to the system's attempting to eradicate its creator. Cueball attributes the emergence of a personality to awesome ease and power of programming in Python .\nPanel 11: Out of context, this panel introduces the idea of Santa Claus being a Muslim . This may be a reference to the persistent Internet rumors that Barack Obama is a Muslim, though he declares himself to be a Christian. However, the statement could also relate to the fact the Santa Claus is usually displayed with a large beard, which is sometimes also sported by conservative Muslims.  Or it could just be non-sensical.\nPanel 13: At this point the self-aware Christmas light control systems has apparently released cyborgs that tried to kill Megan and Cueball. In order to repel the cyborgs, they have cloned Velociraptors . Cueball expresses doubt whether that was really a good idea. Velociraptors appear frequently in xkcd, as seen in these comics\nPanel 17: As predicted, the raptors have gone wild, but Megan, Cueball and the two smaller characters (perhaps their children) managed to cage the dinosaurs. They believe themselves safe unless the raptors learn how to build lightsabers . This is a reference to a line in Jurassic Park where the main characters believe themselves safe, unless the raptors can learn how to open doors.\nPanel 19: The raptors have indeed succeeded with constructing lightsabers and must now be fought. The \"Clever girl\" is a reference to a line from Jurassic Park where the raptors outflank (and kill) one of the human characters wearing a similar hat.\nPanel 23: IT billionaire Bill Gates has mistakenly killed Santa Claus, possibly in a sword fight. He claims to have mistaken him for Richard Stallman , a prominent free software activist. (Gates strongly opposes the idea of free software and is therefore considered an antagonist by many of its supporters.) The most striking resemblance between Stallman and Santa Claus is probably the long and untamed beard. Comic 225 is one of the most famous xkcd comics and features Stallman involved in a sword fight.\nPanel 29: Megan, possibly Danish , asks Black Hat where he obtained the enormously large christmas tree that can be seen on the right side of the picture. It is implied that he logged Yggdrasil , a giant ash tree in Norse mythology. According to tradition, Yggdrasil is the world tree representing the whole of creation and holding together the cosmological structure.\nPanel 31: Randall wishes Merry Christmas to all xkcd readers.\nThe title text refers to panel 7. In Python, modules are imported using the \"import module \" syntax. Skynet is a self-aware artificial intelligence system featured in the Terminator film series as the main antagonist. Importing the skynet module might therefore account for Megan's system's developing an evil personality.\nNote that this comic was first published in another version that had panel 29 as panel 27 and the \"Merry Christmas from xkcd\" message at the bottom. As 27 is not a prime number , the current version was published in lieu of the erroneous one.\nIt has been observed that the top left nine panels form a Glider in Conway's Game of Life . The glider is sometimes used as an emblem representing hacker subculture , although rotated by 90 degrees. It remains however unclear whether the occurrence in the comic is intentional or owed to the prime number pattern.\nThe 2008 XKCD Christmas Special Due to the slowing economy, we could only afford to produce the prime-numbered panels. You should be able to infer the missing parts of the story easily enough. We apologize for the inconvenience. [The first panel is blank.] [Megan carrying Christmas lights and Cueball watching.] Megan: I'm going to one-up those Christmas light displays on YouTube. [Megan thinking.] Megan: Hmm. Needs more flair. Do you know what happens when you fire sodium pellets into a snowbank? Cueball: No. Megan: Me neither. [The next panel is blank.] [Megan sitting in front of a console.] Megan: Whoops, one of the Arduino control boards sublimated. Megan: If only I could make it self-repairing... [The next panel is blank.] Megan: Shit. The system has become sentient. Cueball: Friggin' Python. System: GRAAARR! [The next three panels are blank.] [Megan showing laptop to Cueball.] Megan: But according to this email forward, Santa is secretly a Muslim! Cueball: It explains everything! [The next panel is blank.] Megan: Okay, the cloned raptors are hunting the last of the cyborgs. We're safe. Cueball: Are you sure you thought this through? [The next three panels are blank.] [Two couples appear in this next panel.] Cueball: Are the raptors contained? Ponytail: Sure. Unless they figure out how to build lightsabers. [The next panel is blank.] [Guy with hat fighting with a raptor using lightsabers.] Cueball: It's all right. I've got her. [Lightsaber appears from behind.] Snap-hiss! Cueball: ...Clever girl. [The next three panels are blank.] [Bill Gates is holding a weapon over Santa's body. The two girls are watching.] Megan: Great. Bill Gates kills Santa. Bill Gates: I thought it was Stallman with a dyed beard. [The next five panels are blank.] [Danish and Black Hat are looking at a tree.] Danish: Where did you get this Christmas tree? Black Hat: Nowhere. Danish: Did you cut down the Yggdrasil? Black Hat: ...Maybe. [The next panel is blank.] [Megan and Cueball holding hands and looking at reader.] Merry Christmas from XKCD <3 [The last panel is blank.]\n"}
{"id":522,"title":"Google Trends","image_title":"Google Trends","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/522","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/google_trends.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/522:_Google_Trends","transcript":"Bloggers were recently amused to discover that, according to Google Trends, the search term: \"men kissing\" is most popular in conservative Utah. A few other embarrassing correlations:\n[A two column table] [On the left side of the table:] Search Term\nInstalling Ubuntu\nRunning for President in 2010\nLincoln Fan Fiction\nRaptors on Hoverboards\nHow is babby formed?\nI hate this website\n[On the right side of the table:] Top City\nRedmond, WA\nWasilla, AK\nChicago, IL\nSomerville, MA\nWasilla, AK\nMountain View, CA\n","explanation":"Google keeps track of which searches are most popular in which regions as part of more general data mining to improve their service. For the enjoyment\/education of others, they release select, non-personal parts of this data under the banner \" Google Trends .\"\nThe first statistic \u2013 that \"Men kissing\" was popular in Utah , a state known for possessing a large population with very conservative social values, including opposition to homosexuality \u2013 is real. The others are made up for the sake of the joke. In order:\nWith regards to the excerpt Randall provides in the title text:\nBloggers were recently amused to discover that, according to Google Trends, the search term: \"men kissing\" is most popular in conservative Utah. A few other embarrassing correlations:\n[A two column table] [On the left side of the table:] Search Term\nInstalling Ubuntu\nRunning for President in 2010\nLincoln Fan Fiction\nRaptors on Hoverboards\nHow is babby formed?\nI hate this website\n[On the right side of the table:] Top City\nRedmond, WA\nWasilla, AK\nChicago, IL\nSomerville, MA\nWasilla, AK\nMountain View, CA\n"}
{"id":523,"title":"Decline","image_title":"Decline","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/523","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/decline.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/523:_Decline","transcript":"[Cueball is pointing at a line graph at a specific point where it slopes down. The y-axis shows that as y increases, love increases.] Cueball: Our relationship entered its decline at this point. Megan [Outside of panel]: That's when you started graphing everything. Cueball: Coincidence!\n","explanation":"Cueball , apparently concerned about the status of his romantic relationship, has constructed a \"relationship graph\" plotting an ambiguously quantitative metric for love and\/or affection against what is presumably time (the x -axis is not actually labeled; ironically in 833: Convincing Cueball states that not labeling graph axes is a relationship deal-breaker). He has identified a sudden drop. Cueball's romantic partner (probably Megan ) notes from off screen that the drop corresponds to the moment Cueball's obsession with graphs began. He claims the two events are coincidental, thereby referencing the recurring xkcd theme of correlation not necessarily implying causation \u2013 see 552: Correlation .\nThe title text references Fourier transformation . The Fourier transform is a technique for discovering the periodic characteristic(s) of a function. A spike at one month on the Fourier transform of the love graph would mean that something happens every month that causes the relationship to change. This is presumably a reference to Megan menstruating, although this isn't proven. This is not something you should mention to your girlfriend and she asks him to stop talking before he finishes the sentence. After this graph the relationship may very well end...\nFourier transformations were mentioned previously in 26: Fourier .\n[Cueball is pointing at a line graph at a specific point where it slopes down. The y-axis shows that as y increases, love increases.] Cueball: Our relationship entered its decline at this point. Megan [Outside of panel]: That's when you started graphing everything. Cueball: Coincidence!\n"}
{"id":524,"title":"Party","image_title":"Party","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/524","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/party.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/524:_Party","transcript":"Black Hat: And so I hired Rick Astley to show up at her party. Cueball: And rickroll her? Isn't that a little...last year? Black Hat: Ah, but he's not going to sing.\nDanish: Hey is that Rick Astley? Ponytail: I think it is. He just came in. Danish: Oh no. Brace yourself.\nDanish: Wait. He's just standing there. Where's the song? Danish: He's staring at me. Danish: This is a little creepy.\nDanish: What's going on? Danish: That's actually Rick Astley staring at me. Danish: What's he doing? Danish: Oh God, I keep expecting it, hearing it in my head.\n[Danish pulls at her hair.] Danish: Just do it already! [Danish runs off stage right.] Danish: Aaaaaaaa\n[Danish slams the door leaving Ponytail and Rick Astley] Door: Slam\nPonytail: Mr. Astley? Rick Astley: Yes? Ponytail: What did you do to her? What was that?\nRick Astley: That, my dear,\n[Rick Astley puts on sunglasses.]\nRick Astley: Is how I roll.\n","explanation":"This New Year comic plays out at what is, probably, a New Year party thrown by Danish . (The previous New Year day comic in 2007 was also related to a wild party: 364: Responsible Behavior ).\nIn the first panel, we see Black Hat telling Cueball that he has hired Rick Astley to show up at a party for a girl. Cueball, assuming Rick Astley is going to perform a live rickroll, asks if that is not \"so last year\". Rickrolling is where one is redirected to a video of Rick Astley singing \" Never Gonna Give You Up \" via a weblink purporting to be something else. It was later extended to any situation where the song is used disruptively, such as during a party. It started in 2006 and grew until peaking on April Fool's Day in 2008. Thus at New Years Eve 2008, the meme was getting old. However, Black Hat assures Cueball that Rick Astley is not actually going to sing.\nThe comic then continued to the now ongoing party and we see the girl in question, Danish , Black Hat's girlfriend, talking with Ponytail when she notices Rick Astley at her party. Like Cueball, Danish expects Rick Astley is going to sing and rickroll her live. She obviously hates this idea and braces her self for the humiliation of being rickrolled. But she is freaked out when he just stands there staring at her, but without singing. In the end his presence alone causes her to hear the song in her head instead, and finally she flees the room screaming slamming a door behind her. Black Hat has essentially rickrolled her in her own mind, which is far worse than just playing a song for her. But Black Hat could not have done so without the willing assistance from Rick!\nSo when Ponytail asks Rick Astley \"what did you do to her?\", he begins by saying \"that, my dear\" and then slowly puts on sunglasses before he answers \"Is how I roll.\"  This references both rickrolling and the \"that's how I roll\" meme.\nAlthough the identity of the girl Black Hat is pranking is not stated by Randall (he refers to her as Girl 1 but he has also never given an official name to \"Danish\" - that is an explain xkcd name), she clearly is Danish, Black Hat's girlfriend. Danish was introduced in the Journal story-line ( 377: Journal 2 ), some time prior to this comic. At first her reaction may no look like Danish, who should play it cool according to the her first appearance! Black Hat, however,  is a master and he could know that \"not getting Rick rolled\" would freak her even more out. Additionally, Danish is seen with Ponytail in 405: Journal 3 . And in that comic Black Hat also shows that he can get back at her, after she claimed she was better than him in 377: Journal 2 . He also tricks her into blowing her own garage up in 433: Journal 5 . So of course he can trick her, and of course she will hate that he has rick rolled her. So not doing it with Rick Astley in her house, would drive her mad, just like Black Hat would love, even if she is his girl friend. This would also not have happened for a normal girl like Megan , whom Danish slightly resembles. Normal people will laugh not cry after being rickrolled.\nThe title text refers to the fact that rickrolling first appeared in 2007 (on 4chan ) and became viral for over a year. Giving that this is a New Year comic it is thus relevant to asks what meme will replace Rickrolling in the new year, 2009. Although Randall makes reference to the \" Xzibit Yo Dawg \" and \" I accidentally... \" photocaptioning memes, memebase entries suggest the \"Keep Calm and Carry On\" meme may well have become the most popular (and most enduring, as of 2013) meme of 2009.\nAs of 2022, Rickrolling is still one of the most relevant memes from that era. [ citation needed ]\nBlack Hat: And so I hired Rick Astley to show up at her party. Cueball: And rickroll her? Isn't that a little...last year? Black Hat: Ah, but he's not going to sing.\nDanish: Hey is that Rick Astley? Ponytail: I think it is. He just came in. Danish: Oh no. Brace yourself.\nDanish: Wait. He's just standing there. Where's the song? Danish: He's staring at me. Danish: This is a little creepy.\nDanish: What's going on? Danish: That's actually Rick Astley staring at me. Danish: What's he doing? Danish: Oh God, I keep expecting it, hearing it in my head.\n[Danish pulls at her hair.] Danish: Just do it already! [Danish runs off stage right.] Danish: Aaaaaaaa\n[Danish slams the door leaving Ponytail and Rick Astley] Door: Slam\nPonytail: Mr. Astley? Rick Astley: Yes? Ponytail: What did you do to her? What was that?\nRick Astley: That, my dear,\n[Rick Astley puts on sunglasses.]\nRick Astley: Is how I roll.\n"}
{"id":525,"title":"I Know You're Listening","image_title":"I Know You're Listening","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/525","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_know_youre_listening.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/525:_I_Know_You%27re_Listening","transcript":"[Caption above the two panels of the comic:] Now and then, I announce \"I know you're listening\" to empty rooms.\n[Cueball is sitting in an armchair, reading. He murmurs something unreadable.]\n[A second Cueball-like surveillance man with headphones, seems to have gotten up from his office chair so fast that is has fallen over and lies behind him. He is now standing in front of a large computer terminal with two screens, he can hear Cueball's mumble as it is shown as coming from one of the screens. The surveillance man is leaning back away from the terminal while holding a hand to his headphones.]\n[Caption below the panels:] If I'm wrong, no one knows. And if I'm right, maybe I just freaked the hell out of some secret organization.\n","explanation":"Cueball occasionally says \"I know you're listening\" aloud in empty rooms. The idea is, that if nobody is listening he doesn't lose anything, but if somebody is listening he gains by freaking them out. In this case another Cueball-like surveillance man does get quite the shock.\nAs mentioned in the title text, this is similar to Pascal's Wager . Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher and mathematician who discussed the issue of the possibility that God actually does exist or not. According to Pascal, a rational person should live as though (a Christian) God exists, because he would lose negligible things if this turns out not to be true, but would gain immensely if it is true, by going to heaven in the afterlife. As Pascal himself recognized, this is not a proof of any god's existence, Christian or otherwise, but rather an inexorable choice made by every human being. Cueball makes a similar choice here, though hardly for such a moral reason.\n[Caption above the two panels of the comic:] Now and then, I announce \"I know you're listening\" to empty rooms.\n[Cueball is sitting in an armchair, reading. He murmurs something unreadable.]\n[A second Cueball-like surveillance man with headphones, seems to have gotten up from his office chair so fast that is has fallen over and lies behind him. He is now standing in front of a large computer terminal with two screens, he can hear Cueball's mumble as it is shown as coming from one of the screens. The surveillance man is leaning back away from the terminal while holding a hand to his headphones.]\n[Caption below the panels:] If I'm wrong, no one knows. And if I'm right, maybe I just freaked the hell out of some secret organization.\n"}
{"id":526,"title":"Converting to Metric","image_title":"Converting to Metric","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/526","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/converting_to_metric.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/526:_Converting_to_Metric","transcript":"Guide to Converting to Metric\n[There are five frames with tables for different units. Between the two upper frames is the following text:] The key to converting to metric is establishing new reference points. When you hear \"26\u00b0C\", instead of thinking \"that's 79\u00b0F\" you should think, \"that's warmer than a house but cool for swimming.\" Here are some helpful tables of reference points:\n[The frame in the top left lists the following temperatures on the left, with the corresponding descriptions on the right. Next to the last three entries we see Cueball spitting on the ground. The spit freezes.] Temperature\n60\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Earth's hottest 45\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Dubai heat wave 40\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Southern US heat wave 35\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Northern US heat wave 30\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Beach weather 25\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Warm room 20\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Room temperature 10\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Jacket weather 0\u00b0C  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Snow! -5\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cold day (Boston) -10\u00b0C \u00a0 Cold day (Moscow) -20\u00b0C \u00a0 Fuckfuckfuckcold -30\u00b0C \u00a0 Fuuuuuuuuuuck! -40\u00b0C \u00a0 Spit goes \"clink\"\nCueball: Ptoo Spit: Clink!\n[The frame in the top right lists the following lengths on the left, with their corresponding descriptions on the right. To the right of the table is a human tower of four of the people from the Serenity crew. The head of the upper person is right below the first entry.] Length\n1 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Width of microSD card 3 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Length of SD card 12 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 CD diameter 14 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Penis 15 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 BIC pen 80 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Doorway width 1 m \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lightsaber blade 170 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Summer Glau 200 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Darth Vader 2.5 m  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ceiling 5 m \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Car-length 16 m 4 cm Human tower of Serenity crew.\n[The frame in the bottom left has three columns] Speed\nkph \u00a0 m\/s 5\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 1.5 \u00a0\u00a0 Walking 13\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 3.5 \u00a0\u00a0 Jogging 25\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 7 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sprinting 35\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 10 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fastest human 45\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 13 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Housecat 55\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 15 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rabbit 75\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 20 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Raptor 100\u00a0\u00a0 25 \u00a0\u00a0 Slow highway 110\u00a0\u00a0 30 \u00a0\u00a0 Interstate (65 mph) 120\u00a0\u00a0 35 \u00a0\u00a0 Speed you actually go when it says \"65\" 140\u00a0\u00a0 40 \u00a0\u00a0 Raptor on hoverboard\n[The frame in the bottom middle lists the following volumes on the left, with their corresponding descriptions on the right. Volume\n3 mL \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Blood in a fieldmouse 5 mL \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Teaspoon 30 mL \u00a0\u00a0 Nasal passages 40 mL \u00a0\u00a0 Shot glass 350 mL \u00a0 Soda can 500 mL \u00a0 Water bottle 3 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Two-liter bottle 5 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Blood in a human male 30 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Milk crate 55 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Summer Glau 65 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dennis Kucinich 75 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ron Paul 200 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fridge\n[Next to the entry on nasal passages and shot glass (starting one entry higher and finishing one entry lower) is the following text:] So, when it's blocked, the mucus in your nose could about fill a shot glass.\n[Below this text is a drawing of a mucus filled shot glass.] Related: I've invented the worst mixed drink ever.\n[Below this next to the four last entries we see Cueball shoving Summer Glau, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul into an open fridge. Above the fridge in a loosely drawn ellipse is the following text:] 55+65+75 < 200\n[The frame in the bottom right lists the following masses on the left, with their corresponding descriptions on the right\n3 g \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0    Peanut M&M 100 g \u00a0\u00a0  Cell phone 500 g \u00a0\u00a0 Bottled water 1 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0  Ultraportable laptop 2 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0  Light-medium laptop 3 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0  Heavy laptop 5 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0  LCD monitor 15 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 CRT monitor 4 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cat 4.1 kg \u00a0\u00a0 Cat (with caption) 60 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lady 70 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dude 150 kg \u00a0 Shaq 200 kg \u00a0 Your mom 220 kg \u00a0 Your mom (incl. cheap jewelry) 223 kg \u00a0 Your mom (also incl. makeup)\n[Next to the entries of cat and cat (with caption) are two drawings of cats. The second one has a caption across its chest.] Cat (with caption): Mrowl? [Below this and next to the lady and dude entries are drawings of Megan and Cueball.]\n","explanation":"Most people will eventually develop an intuitive feel for how big certain measurements are (e.g., how long an inch or a foot is, how much a pound weighs). This comic points out that people who were brought up using the United States system of customary units probably don't have the same intuitive understanding for metric units and attempts to provide some benchmarks for these people. Most of the benchmarks are common sense, highly-useful ones (e.g., if it's 30 degrees Celsius, you'd be quite comfortable outside dressed for the beach) but some of the benchmarks are humorous and\/or completely useless as can be seen below.\nSome people argue for switching to metric units in the US, and these people became part of the comic 1982: Evangelism .\nIn the book Thing Explainer a similar chart for metrics is shown in the explanation for How to count things , with four of the five measures from this comic also explained in simple language. Only volume is left out there. Only thing used in both explanations is the weight of a cat, but in the book it weighs 5 kg rather than 4 kg in this comic.\nSee also 1643: Degrees about not being able to choose between the two temperature scales and 1923: Felsius about a compromise between the two scales. In the comic 1982: Evangelism , some people are stated to argue for the US to convert to the metric system, except for the Fahrenheit scale which they wish to keep.\nHere both the SI unit m\/s as well as the more commonly used unit kph (km\/h) is given. Note that the SI prefers \"km\/h\" over the non-standard abbreviation \"kph\".\nThe title text refers once again to Summer Glau's Firefly character, River Tam , who (after being subjected to a long series of medical experiments) is severely mentally ill and often comes out with macabre \u2014 though scientifically accurate \u2014 pronouncements. In Firefly episode \"Safe\" (season\u00a01, episode\u00a07), she says: \"The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.\"\nThe idea of the comic is to establish new metric reference points and not to resort to unit conversions. Nevertheless, the following table lists all units from the comic with their US customary equivalents:\nGuide to Converting to Metric\n[There are five frames with tables for different units. Between the two upper frames is the following text:] The key to converting to metric is establishing new reference points. When you hear \"26\u00b0C\", instead of thinking \"that's 79\u00b0F\" you should think, \"that's warmer than a house but cool for swimming.\" Here are some helpful tables of reference points:\n[The frame in the top left lists the following temperatures on the left, with the corresponding descriptions on the right. Next to the last three entries we see Cueball spitting on the ground. The spit freezes.] Temperature\n60\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Earth's hottest 45\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Dubai heat wave 40\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Southern US heat wave 35\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Northern US heat wave 30\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Beach weather 25\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Warm room 20\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Room temperature 10\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0 Jacket weather 0\u00b0C  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Snow! -5\u00b0C \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cold day (Boston) -10\u00b0C \u00a0 Cold day (Moscow) -20\u00b0C \u00a0 Fuckfuckfuckcold -30\u00b0C \u00a0 Fuuuuuuuuuuck! -40\u00b0C \u00a0 Spit goes \"clink\"\nCueball: Ptoo Spit: Clink!\n[The frame in the top right lists the following lengths on the left, with their corresponding descriptions on the right. To the right of the table is a human tower of four of the people from the Serenity crew. The head of the upper person is right below the first entry.] Length\n1 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Width of microSD card 3 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Length of SD card 12 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 CD diameter 14 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Penis 15 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 BIC pen 80 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Doorway width 1 m \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lightsaber blade 170 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Summer Glau 200 cm \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Darth Vader 2.5 m  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ceiling 5 m \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Car-length 16 m 4 cm Human tower of Serenity crew.\n[The frame in the bottom left has three columns] Speed\nkph \u00a0 m\/s 5\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 1.5 \u00a0\u00a0 Walking 13\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 3.5 \u00a0\u00a0 Jogging 25\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 7 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sprinting 35\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 10 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fastest human 45\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 13 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Housecat 55\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 15 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rabbit 75\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 20 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Raptor 100\u00a0\u00a0 25 \u00a0\u00a0 Slow highway 110\u00a0\u00a0 30 \u00a0\u00a0 Interstate (65 mph) 120\u00a0\u00a0 35 \u00a0\u00a0 Speed you actually go when it says \"65\" 140\u00a0\u00a0 40 \u00a0\u00a0 Raptor on hoverboard\n[The frame in the bottom middle lists the following volumes on the left, with their corresponding descriptions on the right. Volume\n3 mL \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Blood in a fieldmouse 5 mL \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Teaspoon 30 mL \u00a0\u00a0 Nasal passages 40 mL \u00a0\u00a0 Shot glass 350 mL \u00a0 Soda can 500 mL \u00a0 Water bottle 3 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Two-liter bottle 5 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Blood in a human male 30 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Milk crate 55 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Summer Glau 65 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dennis Kucinich 75 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ron Paul 200 L \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fridge\n[Next to the entry on nasal passages and shot glass (starting one entry higher and finishing one entry lower) is the following text:] So, when it's blocked, the mucus in your nose could about fill a shot glass.\n[Below this text is a drawing of a mucus filled shot glass.] Related: I've invented the worst mixed drink ever.\n[Below this next to the four last entries we see Cueball shoving Summer Glau, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul into an open fridge. Above the fridge in a loosely drawn ellipse is the following text:] 55+65+75 < 200\n[The frame in the bottom right lists the following masses on the left, with their corresponding descriptions on the right\n3 g \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0    Peanut M&M 100 g \u00a0\u00a0  Cell phone 500 g \u00a0\u00a0 Bottled water 1 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0  Ultraportable laptop 2 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0  Light-medium laptop 3 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0  Heavy laptop 5 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0  LCD monitor 15 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 CRT monitor 4 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cat 4.1 kg \u00a0\u00a0 Cat (with caption) 60 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lady 70 kg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dude 150 kg \u00a0 Shaq 200 kg \u00a0 Your mom 220 kg \u00a0 Your mom (incl. cheap jewelry) 223 kg \u00a0 Your mom (also incl. makeup)\n[Next to the entries of cat and cat (with caption) are two drawings of cats. The second one has a caption across its chest.] Cat (with caption): Mrowl? [Below this and next to the lady and dude entries are drawings of Megan and Cueball.]\n"}
{"id":527,"title":"Keynote","image_title":"Keynote","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/527","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/keynote.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/527:_Keynote","transcript":"[Black Hat talking to Cueball sitting at computer.] Cueball: Huh - Steve Jobs isn't doing a keynote this year, citing massive weight loss due to some hormonal problem. Black Hat: Too bad. I bet Apple was excited about unveiling the thinnest and lightest CEO in the industry.\nSteve Jobs died on October 5, 2011 of pancreatic cancer the day before Randall released 961: Eternal Flame . Presumably, the cancer was the cause of Jobs' weight loss, although it was not public information at the time the comic was posted.\n","explanation":"According to this comic, Steve Jobs , the founder of the Apple company, lost a lot of weight due to a hormonal problem. (Though never officially confirmed, this was likely related to Jobs's battle with pancreatic cancer, which he had been fighting for years and would frequently lead to speculation about his health at the time of this comic.) Black Hat then mentions that Apple was probably excited to announce its thinnest and lightest CEO in the industry. This comment is a parody of Apple's tendency to release thinner and lighter iterations of its products. Steve Jobs' weight loss would certainly make him a thinner and lighter CEO.\nThe title text refers to Cory Doctorow , a blogger, journalist and science-fiction author. Doctorow is opposed to the technology called Digital restrictions management (DRM for short). DRM is designed to be abused by large corporations with negative consequences for consumers, but is disguised as a copyright protection system. Randall (jokingly) proposes that Steve Jobs is only sick because Doctorow was torturing him with Voodoo dolls for Apple's use of DRM.\n[Black Hat talking to Cueball sitting at computer.] Cueball: Huh - Steve Jobs isn't doing a keynote this year, citing massive weight loss due to some hormonal problem. Black Hat: Too bad. I bet Apple was excited about unveiling the thinnest and lightest CEO in the industry.\nSteve Jobs died on October 5, 2011 of pancreatic cancer the day before Randall released 961: Eternal Flame . Presumably, the cancer was the cause of Jobs' weight loss, although it was not public information at the time the comic was posted.\n"}
{"id":528,"title":"Windows 7","image_title":"Windows 7","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/528","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/windows_7.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/528:_Windows_7","transcript":"[Megan is standing behind Cueball sitting at a desk using his laptop.] Megan: What are you doing? Cueball: Trying the Windows 7 beta. Megan: Why is it showing a picture of Hitler? [The laptop's screen is shown with Adolf Hitler's face on it, drawn in regular xkcd style with no facial features other than his hairstyle and mustache.] Cueball: I don't know. I can't get it to do anything else. Megan: There's no UI? Cueball: No, just Hitler. [Return to the original scene, except Megan is now scratching her head in confusion.] Megan: Did you try Ctrl-Alt-Delete? Cueball: It just makes Hitler's eyes flash. Megan: Huh. [Scene remains basically the same, except Megan is no longer scratching her head and Cueball is no longer typing on the laptop.] Megan: Well, it's better than Vista. Cueball: True.\n","explanation":"This Comic came out 2 weeks after the beta version of the at that time not yet released Windows 7 got leaked on the internet, and 2 days after a trojan-infected version got leaked as well.\nMegan is observing Cueball use a laptop on which he has installed the Windows 7 beta. However, the alleged Windows 7 beta is showing nothing but a picture of Adolf Hitler and Cueball is unable to do anything. This could hint at the version containing malware. Cueball then presses Control-Alt-Delete (the well-known Windows Secure Attention Sequence which opens Task Manager or displays a list of options which includes 'Shut Down' and 'Restart') as suggested by Megan, but only manages to make the picture's eyes flash .\nThe fourth panel shows Megan commenting that this Windows 7 beta is better than Windows Vista , to which Cueball agrees. The joke is that Megan deems a mostly non-functional and vaguely sinister OS, which is likely malware, better than Windows Vista, which was generally perceived as one of the worst Windows OSes.\nThe title text is a disclaimer stating that Randall has not tried the beta at the time this comic was written, but what he has heard about it he regards as at least mildly positive. However, he also damns it by faint praise, referring to it as hardly Hitler-y at all, a statement that could raise warning flags, as one would not generally expect an operating system to be able to be described as Hitler-y to any degree at all. \"Hitler-y\" is implied to mean pertaining to or having qualities similar to Adolf Hitler, the late German Nazi Party leader and perhaps the most notorious mass-murderer in history.\n[Megan is standing behind Cueball sitting at a desk using his laptop.] Megan: What are you doing? Cueball: Trying the Windows 7 beta. Megan: Why is it showing a picture of Hitler? [The laptop's screen is shown with Adolf Hitler's face on it, drawn in regular xkcd style with no facial features other than his hairstyle and mustache.] Cueball: I don't know. I can't get it to do anything else. Megan: There's no UI? Cueball: No, just Hitler. [Return to the original scene, except Megan is now scratching her head in confusion.] Megan: Did you try Ctrl-Alt-Delete? Cueball: It just makes Hitler's eyes flash. Megan: Huh. [Scene remains basically the same, except Megan is no longer scratching her head and Cueball is no longer typing on the laptop.] Megan: Well, it's better than Vista. Cueball: True.\n"}
{"id":529,"title":"Sledding Discussion","image_title":"Sledding Discussion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/529","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sledding_discussion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/529:_Sledding_Discussion","transcript":"[Megan looks out window through blinds.] Megan: It's snowing! Cueball: [from off-screen] Sled time!\n[Megan and Cueball outside with sled, at the top of a hill.] Cueball: It depresses me that I'm too old to learn another language fluently. My brain's solidified.\n[Megan and Cueball sledding down the hill.] Megan: Is there one you wish you knew? Cueball: No, I just hate having options closed to me. Like I've given up a life that was once possible.\n[At the bottom of the hill, sled has stopped.] Megan: Yeah. Which reminds me - our anniversary is coming up.\nMegan: Man, that ride failed to be a metaphor for our conversation. Cueball: Guess this isn't the Calvin & Hobbes-model toboggan.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan have a perfectly normal sled ride down a perfectly normal hill (engaging in what's traditionally a children's pastime [ citation needed ] ) while Cueball is complaining that he has grown too old for certain things - like learning another language fluently (but not for taking a sleigh ride - although he does not really seem to enjoy it though). There is a hypothesis, called the critical period hypothesis , which states that you can only learn a language fluently before a certain age.\nCueball hates that options are closed to him and feels like he has given up a life that was once possible . The joke is that this reminds Megan about their anniversary coming up. This means that she feels that she has given up a life that was once possible by staying so long with Cueball. Actually this may be the time when they are going to break up.\nThe reader would thus have expected something ironic to happen at the end of the trip but instead, the only humor in the last frame arises from their commentary on the lack of humor .\nCalvin and Hobbes is an acclaimed newspaper comic strip that ran from 1985 to 1995. Calvin is a six-year-old child with an active imagination, and Hobbes is his stuffed tiger who Calvin perceives to be alive through his imagination. The two frequently had philosophical conversations, often while sledding . Calvin sledded on densely-wooded hills near where he lived, and the ride would often serve as a perfect parallel to the conversation they were having; for example, in one strip, Calvin talks about how seemingly mundane decisions can nonetheless have lasting consequences, by pointing out how all of the things they see as they continue down the hill (and eventually crash into a ravine) are a direct result of him having taken a particular fork early on.\nThe title text notes that if you did have a Calvin and Hobbes toboggan , it would be the worst place to have a breaking-up conversation, perhaps because the sled itself would literally break-up during the journey, with potentially dangerous consequences. This is also the clue to the fact that the comic is in fact about a break-up situation.\nCalvin and Hobbes is also referenced in 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) .\n[Megan looks out window through blinds.] Megan: It's snowing! Cueball: [from off-screen] Sled time!\n[Megan and Cueball outside with sled, at the top of a hill.] Cueball: It depresses me that I'm too old to learn another language fluently. My brain's solidified.\n[Megan and Cueball sledding down the hill.] Megan: Is there one you wish you knew? Cueball: No, I just hate having options closed to me. Like I've given up a life that was once possible.\n[At the bottom of the hill, sled has stopped.] Megan: Yeah. Which reminds me - our anniversary is coming up.\nMegan: Man, that ride failed to be a metaphor for our conversation. Cueball: Guess this isn't the Calvin & Hobbes-model toboggan.\n"}
{"id":530,"title":"I'm An Idiot","image_title":"I'm An Idiot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/530","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/im_an_idiot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/530:_I%27m_An_Idiot","transcript":"[Ponytail approaches Cueball, who is sitting on porch steps, laptop in lap and backpack open.] Ponytail: Should I ask? Cueball: I'm locked out, and I'm trying to get my roommate to let me in.\n[Unplugged cell phone on table.] Cueball: First I tried her cell phone, but it's off.\n[Cueball sitting on steps, laptop in lap and gesturing.] Cueball: Then I tried IRC, but she's not online.\n[Cueball standing in front of house and looking up at window.] Cueball: I couldn't find anything to throw at her window,\n[Living room with couch easy chair and computer set up.] Cueball: So I SSH'd into the Mac Mini in the living room and got the speech synth to yell at her for me. Computer: Hey I'm locked out downstairs\n[Megan sitting at table with laptop open.] Cueball: But I think I left the volume way down, so I'm reading the OS X docs to learn to set the volume via command line.\n[Ponytail facing Cueball, who is still sitting on the porch with his laptop.] Ponytail: Ah. Ponytail: I take it the doorbell doesn't work?\n[Beat panel.]\n","explanation":"Cueball , locked out of his dorm \/ apartment , is trying to get his roommate Megan's attention so that she'll unlock the door. He tries various increasingly obscure ways of contacting her: calling her cell phone, IRC , the window, and finally remotely logging into their Mac computer (via SSH ) to make it shout at her, which involves working out a way to turn up the computer's volume. Ponytail informs him of the most obvious solution\u2014the doorbell\u2014which prompts a moment of realization.  The content of this realization\u2014\"I'm An Idiot\"\u2014is stated in the title of the comic.  The humor of the comic derives from the rhythm of the panels: a long buildup followed by a short quip, then a sudden, silent pause for the implied realization moment.\nAdditionaly some readers will be familiar with the behavior shown in the comic, since most every person who likes solving problems has experienced a moment of realization similar to Cueball's at one point or another.  They, like Cueball, get distracted by solving an interesting problem because solving problems is fun , and fail to notice that the problem has an easier solution that they haven't considered.  This same issue of getting lost in a sub-problem [in this case, the-sub problem of how to remotely control text-to-speech in OS X] at the expense of overall problem-solving ability is further covered in 761: DFS .\nThe title text states that this is a true story, so Cueball must represent Randall . It also mentions that, although missing an obvious solution can be humiliating, one often learns a lot from trying new solutions, which would explain why the behavior persists.\nThis comic follows a similar storyline to 349: Success and 1518: Typical Morning Routine , as Cueball and Hairy respectively in these comics, encounters an issue and attempts proceedingly more absurd solutions to the issue.\n[Ponytail approaches Cueball, who is sitting on porch steps, laptop in lap and backpack open.] Ponytail: Should I ask? Cueball: I'm locked out, and I'm trying to get my roommate to let me in.\n[Unplugged cell phone on table.] Cueball: First I tried her cell phone, but it's off.\n[Cueball sitting on steps, laptop in lap and gesturing.] Cueball: Then I tried IRC, but she's not online.\n[Cueball standing in front of house and looking up at window.] Cueball: I couldn't find anything to throw at her window,\n[Living room with couch easy chair and computer set up.] Cueball: So I SSH'd into the Mac Mini in the living room and got the speech synth to yell at her for me. Computer: Hey I'm locked out downstairs\n[Megan sitting at table with laptop open.] Cueball: But I think I left the volume way down, so I'm reading the OS X docs to learn to set the volume via command line.\n[Ponytail facing Cueball, who is still sitting on the porch with his laptop.] Ponytail: Ah. Ponytail: I take it the doorbell doesn't work?\n[Beat panel.]\n"}
{"id":531,"title":"Contingency Plan","image_title":"Contingency Plan","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/531","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/contingency_plan.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/531:_Contingency_Plan","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball holding a green bottle are standing beside a crib. Another green bottle is lying on the floor.] Megan: More sugary drinks? Are you trying to give her diabetes? Cueball: Yeah - then we keep her supplied with insulin unless things go wrong.\n[Caption below the frame:]\nI take the Jurassic Park approach to parenting.\n","explanation":"Megan comments that Cueball is force-feeding their child so many sugary drinks that the child runs the risk of developing diabetes . Cueball responds that that is the plan, since if anything were to go wrong, they'll just have to stop giving her insulin , which will kill her. Cueball then comments that he thus takes the Jurassic Park approach to parenting.\nJurassic Park is a series of books and films centering on a disastrous attempt to create a theme park of cloned dinosaurs. In particular, the park scientists give the dinosaurs lysine deficiency as a contingency plan , so that if some dinosaur were to escape, it wouldn't be able to survive in the wild. In practice, lysine can easily be obtained by eating protein-rich foods like red meat, lamb or pork.\nThe title text continues the theme, noting that having children is basically one big genetic experiment, and that Cueball is experimenting responsibly, by having a contingency plan, thinking ahead as to the possible consequences of his experiment.\nThe child interestingly cannot be seen in the crib. It may be that the sides of the crib are solid rather than barred like a traditional crib, or, more likely, Randall simply forgot to draw the child.\n[Megan and Cueball holding a green bottle are standing beside a crib. Another green bottle is lying on the floor.] Megan: More sugary drinks? Are you trying to give her diabetes? Cueball: Yeah - then we keep her supplied with insulin unless things go wrong.\n[Caption below the frame:]\nI take the Jurassic Park approach to parenting.\n"}
{"id":532,"title":"Piano","image_title":"Piano","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/532","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/piano.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/532:_Piano","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a box with an open lid. A miniature piano is inside. Megan is looking at it] Cueball: My hobby is making miniatures. Check this out \u2014 it's a fully-functional grand piano. Megan: Woah \u2014 beautiful.\n[Cueball looks at the miniature piano.] Cueball: Sadly, I've never heard what proper music sounds like on it\u2014the keys are too small to play.\n[Cueball closes lid to the piano.] Cueball: I once asked a genie for someone who could play it for me, but I think he misheard. Megan: ...are you doing anything later?\nFor the record, pianist \/'pi\u0259n\u026ast\/ and penis \/'pin\u026as\/ are near homophones in English. This is because pianist has a different stress pattern than piano \/pi'\u00e6no\/. The vagaries of the English language.\n","explanation":"This comic is the reverse of the \"twelve inch pianist\" joke that appeared in the rec.humor.funny Usenet newsgroup .\nIn the original joke, a man found a genie in a bottle, and it is implied that he wished for a \"twelve inch penis ,\" but the genie misheard him and instead granted him a \"twelve inch pianist .\"  The crux is that the word pianist sounds similar to the word penis ; the joke also relies on the common trope of genies granting wishes (as in the tale of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp ), sometimes with creative (mis)understanding or literalism as an Aesop to be wary about what you wish for, as well as the common stereotype that larger penises are more desirable.\nIn this comic, the opposite happens: Cueball wished for a \"twelve inch pianist \" to play his miniature piano, but was misheard by the genie, implying that the genie instead granted him a \"twelve inch penis .\"  Megan has understood this implication, and therefore wants to have sex with Cueball (in accordance with the aforementioned stereotype).\nThe title text suggests that if Cueball had made a smaller piano \u2013 and had thus wished for a smaller pianist \u2013 he would have instead received a smaller penis , making him less desirable according to the stereotype.\nGenies (or the magic lamps containing them) are mentioned in at least four other comics:\n[Cueball is holding a box with an open lid. A miniature piano is inside. Megan is looking at it] Cueball: My hobby is making miniatures. Check this out \u2014 it's a fully-functional grand piano. Megan: Woah \u2014 beautiful.\n[Cueball looks at the miniature piano.] Cueball: Sadly, I've never heard what proper music sounds like on it\u2014the keys are too small to play.\n[Cueball closes lid to the piano.] Cueball: I once asked a genie for someone who could play it for me, but I think he misheard. Megan: ...are you doing anything later?\nFor the record, pianist \/'pi\u0259n\u026ast\/ and penis \/'pin\u026as\/ are near homophones in English. This is because pianist has a different stress pattern than piano \/pi'\u00e6no\/. The vagaries of the English language.\n"}
{"id":533,"title":"Laptop Hell","image_title":"Laptop Hell","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/533","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/laptop_hell.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/533:_Laptop_Hell","transcript":"[A devil, Mephistopheles (according to the official transcript ), with bald head horns, tail with arrow ending, a trident in one hand and a paper in the other hand is ready to welcome Hairbun to hell. Above Mephistopheles there are three large stalactite hanging down and behind Hairbun there is one very large stalagmite and three small and also two small stalactites.] Mephistopheles: Welcome to Hell. Here's\u2014 Mephistopheles:Wait. I know you.\n[Zoom in on the two, with white background. Mephistopheles trident breaks the panels frame.] Mephistopheles: You're the Fujitsu exec who killed the Q-series. Hairbun: ...Yes? Mephistopheles: The Q2010 was the perfect laptop!\n[In this frame-less panel with white background Mephistopheles walks away from Hairbun trident pointing up and left. Hairbun throws her arms out to the side.] Mephistopheles: Powerful, durable, had every feature, and made the Air look bulky . And that was back in 2006! Hairbun: But no one bought it! Mephistopheles: Then you marketed it wrong!\n[Mephistopheles turns around towards Hairbun who both standing as in the first panel but still with white background.] Hairbun: Wait. Don't you encourage evil acts down here? Mephistopheles: In theory, yes, but we need laptops too! Mephistopheles: Although it's moot, since we have an exclusive deal with Sony. Hairbun: I knew it!\n","explanation":"The Devil Mephistopheles (named so in the official transcript ) is greeting the new souls sentenced to Hell , and recognizes an executive from Fujitsu Ltd in the form of Hairbun . Mephistopheles accuses her of causing his favorite laptop, the Fujitsu Q2010, to be taken out of production. Mephistopheles is displeased because he thought it was a good laptop, just poorly marketed by Hairbun. Hairbun is confused and asks Mephistopheles why he is upset, as acts of evil are generally encouraged by the demons of Hell. Mephistopheles agrees but explains that Hell also needs good laptops, and in her case their need for laptops was greater than the need for her evil works. Though, Mephistopheles then goes on to confess, that it would not really have mattered as Hell has an exclusive deal with Fujitsu competitor, Sony , and he could not have bought the Fujitsu Q2010 anyway.\nThis would explain why the sale of the laptop failed, and Hairbun also exclaims I knew it to indicate that she had suspected it was weird that Sony did so well. When one strikes a deal with a devil from Hell, their affairs in life go great, but of course one has then sentenced their soul to eternal damnation in Hell when one eventually dies. [ citation needed ] Seems like Sony has done so according to this comic.\nThis comic is likely a wish fulfillment fantasy by Randall for the canceling of his favorite laptop, the Fujitsu Q2010. Exclusivity deals are typically thought ill of as they are bad for competition. Also, since exclusivity deals solely benefit the provider, there are often reciprocal arrangements for the purchaser. This implies that the devil has influence at Sony. Likely, Sony was chosen as the electronic distributor to Hell because of the Sony rootkit scandal . This scandal inspired many to call Sony an evil company.\nIt is the second time in a short while that a demon was depicted in a similar fashion although without the trident and not in Hell. This devil was also named Mephistopheles in the caption of that comic 501: Faust 2.0 .\nThe title text explains that Randall's system administrator is upset with him because he tested the system administrator's laptop by throwing it down several flights of steps. The systems admin is implied to have taken revenge childishly, by replacing part of the text with \"DISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS\" although it was almost certainly done by Randall as a joke.\nThe \"suck cocks\" part is a reference to a post in bash.org which went on to attain moderate fame.\n[A devil, Mephistopheles (according to the official transcript ), with bald head horns, tail with arrow ending, a trident in one hand and a paper in the other hand is ready to welcome Hairbun to hell. Above Mephistopheles there are three large stalactite hanging down and behind Hairbun there is one very large stalagmite and three small and also two small stalactites.] Mephistopheles: Welcome to Hell. Here's\u2014 Mephistopheles:Wait. I know you.\n[Zoom in on the two, with white background. Mephistopheles trident breaks the panels frame.] Mephistopheles: You're the Fujitsu exec who killed the Q-series. Hairbun: ...Yes? Mephistopheles: The Q2010 was the perfect laptop!\n[In this frame-less panel with white background Mephistopheles walks away from Hairbun trident pointing up and left. Hairbun throws her arms out to the side.] Mephistopheles: Powerful, durable, had every feature, and made the Air look bulky . And that was back in 2006! Hairbun: But no one bought it! Mephistopheles: Then you marketed it wrong!\n[Mephistopheles turns around towards Hairbun who both standing as in the first panel but still with white background.] Hairbun: Wait. Don't you encourage evil acts down here? Mephistopheles: In theory, yes, but we need laptops too! Mephistopheles: Although it's moot, since we have an exclusive deal with Sony. Hairbun: I knew it!\n"}
{"id":534,"title":"Genetic Algorithms","image_title":"Genetic Algorithms","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/534","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/genetic_algorithms.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/534:_Genetic_Algorithms","transcript":"[Code displayed, presumably from an IDE.] def getSolutionCosts(navigationCode): fuelStopCost = 15 extraComputationCost = 8 [There is a giant arrow pointing to the next line.] thisAlgorithmBecomingSkynetCost = 999999999 waterCrossingCost = 45 Genetic algorithms tip: Always include this in your fitness function.\n","explanation":"In the computer science field of artificial intelligence , a genetic algorithm is a search heuristic that mimics the process of natural evolution . This heuristic is routinely used to generate useful solutions to optimization and search problems. Genetic algorithms belong to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms, which generate solutions to optimization problems using techniques inspired by natural evolution, such as inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover.\nIn particular, genetic algorithms are designed to evolve, with various mechanisms being used to mimic natural selection.  One such mechanism is to assign \"costs\" to various aspects of the program, and to select for programs which assess a fitness function such as calculating the least sum of all these costs (thus mimicking organisms in an environment where they have to compete for limited resources) versus any measurable benefits.\nThe line indicated by an arrow is a reference to the Terminator series, in which the main antagonist is an artificial intelligence known as Skynet that seeks to destroy all humans. By setting an absurdly high cost for an algorithm transforming into Skynet, the coder makes a preventive measure against the algorithm achieving such sentience.\nThe line about water crossing is a possible reference to the old computer game The Oregon Trail , in which crossing water was hazardous. This video game was referenced again in 623: Oregon .\nThe title text refers to the method by which the program select the desired option, with minimizing being where the program seeks the lowest possible number, and maximizing where the program seeks the highest possible number. When dealing with cases such as generating profit, maximization would obviously be preferred over minimization; but selecting maximization here would be disastrous as it would always chose the BecomingSkynet option before any other due to its massive cost.\n[Code displayed, presumably from an IDE.] def getSolutionCosts(navigationCode): fuelStopCost = 15 extraComputationCost = 8 [There is a giant arrow pointing to the next line.] thisAlgorithmBecomingSkynetCost = 999999999 waterCrossingCost = 45 Genetic algorithms tip: Always include this in your fitness function.\n"}
{"id":535,"title":"It Might Be Cool","image_title":"It Might Be Cool","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/535","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/it_might_be_cool.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/535:_It_Might_Be_Cool","transcript":"[Cueball is administering the presidential oath with the coming president also drawn as Cueball.] Cueball: You know, it might be cool to be a woman. President: It... might be cool to be a woman? Cueball: Yeah, but the menstruation thing is freaky. President: Yeah, but... the... um. What?\n[Caption below the frame:] Turns out I'm even worse at administering the presidential oath than John Roberts.\n","explanation":"Cueball (or Randall ) is musing about the possibility of being a woman, to the confusion of the man next to him. His uninsightful rambling would likely be unimpressive and somewhat odd in most situations, but not odd enough on its own to prompt the second man's baffled reaction. However, the true reason for his confusion is revealed by the caption: Cueball is administering the presidential oath . The oath is administered by reciting it to prompt a new president to repeat them back to him. However, he botches it completely by forgetting about his task completely and wondering aloud about an unrelated topic. Thus, the president's confused question at the beginning is not him asking for clarification; he is repeating what he at first believed to be the oath of office, but got flustered when he realized Cueball had deviated from the script. When Cueball then continues by replying that \"the menstruation thing is freaky,\" the president is completely derailed.\nOn January 20, 2009 the inauguration of Barack Obama 's first office took place. Chief Justice John Roberts , who was administering the oath, made a mistake while reciting the words. This comic references the event and wildly exaggerates the deviation from the oath for comedic purposes.\nIn truth, the error was rather small: the oath as prescribed in the constitution is:\nI do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.\nDue to a missed memo on the pauses planned by the Chief Justice, Obama inadvertently interrupted Roberts during the first phrase - Roberts begins by saying I, Barack Obama, do solemnly swear, and Obama repeats his name while Roberts finishes that sentence. This disturbs Roberts who was not using notes, and he rendered the next phrase as \"that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully,\" misplacing the word faithfully and saying president to instead of president of . Obama repeated, \"that I will execute\", then paused. Roberts attempted to correct the wording, but stumbled: \"the off\u2014 faithfully the pres\u2014 the office of President of the United States.\" Obama then repeated Roberts' initial incorrect wording.\nHowever small the error was it was big enough that Obama did retake the oath of office the day after the mistake was made.\nThe title text continues the wondering about being a woman going on from the menstruation to the ovaries . To make sure it is clearly the oath mistake that is referenced the sentence ends with '... faithfully.' Thus mimicking the real mistake of placing this word last.\nCueball might be an egg , an individual who is transgender and unaware of such.\n[Cueball is administering the presidential oath with the coming president also drawn as Cueball.] Cueball: You know, it might be cool to be a woman. President: It... might be cool to be a woman? Cueball: Yeah, but the menstruation thing is freaky. President: Yeah, but... the... um. What?\n[Caption below the frame:] Turns out I'm even worse at administering the presidential oath than John Roberts.\n"}
{"id":536,"title":"Space Elevators","image_title":"Space Elevators","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/536","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/space_elevators.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/536:_Space_Elevators","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan sit beside a moonlit lake.] Cueball: Arthur C. Clarke said space elevators will be built 50 years after everybody stops laughing.\n[Closeup of Cueball.] Cueball: So all we have to do is get Mind of Mencia on every channel and wait. Megan (offscreen): Oh, hush.\n","explanation":"Arthur C. Clarke was a science fiction writer and a futurist. The quoted remark provides a benchmark for how long it will take to create something as massive and advanced as a space elevator : when technology reaches the point where the idea is considered seriously rather than dismissed out of hand, about fifty years of further effort will make it a reality.\nMind of Mencia was an American television comedy series running from 2005 to 2008. Cueball implies that the show is so unfunny that putting it on every channel would destroy everyone's sense of humor , thus preventing them from laughing at anything, space elevators included. Cueball is missing the point of Clarke's quote; Clarke was referring to people no longer laughing at the idea of a space elevator, not people no longer laughing entirely.\nThe space fountain , mentioned in the title text, is another proposed method of overcoming the planet's gravitational barrier, involving an effect similar to that of a coil gun .\n[Cueball and Megan sit beside a moonlit lake.] Cueball: Arthur C. Clarke said space elevators will be built 50 years after everybody stops laughing.\n[Closeup of Cueball.] Cueball: So all we have to do is get Mind of Mencia on every channel and wait. Megan (offscreen): Oh, hush.\n"}
{"id":537,"title":"Ducklings","image_title":"Ducklings","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/537","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ducklings.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/537:_Ducklings","transcript":"[A mother duck and her six ducklings.] [Cueball is in front of the line of ducks, and Megan is behind.] Megan: Ready? Cueball: Ready.\n[The duck and ducklings move.]\nCueball: ROAR! BOO!\n[The mother duck is frightened, and turns back. Her six children follow.]\n[Megan snatches the mother duck with a yoink.] Duck: QUACK!\n[The six ducklings are now trapped in a circle of sorts.]\nOPERATION: DUCKLING LOOP\n","explanation":"The comic shows an elaborate plan. The mother and her ducklings will always walk in a line. The ducklings will either follow their mother, or the duckling in front of them.\nCueball scares the mother duck, so she starts running away, her children following her in a line. Then Megan snatches the mother duck, leaving the first duckling to start following the last duckling, causing the ducklings to walk in a loop. Hence the caption at the end - \"Operation: Duckling Loop.\" However, eventually the ducklings will probably realize something has gone wrong, [ citation needed ] and break the loop.\nThis behavior occurs naturally in real life with creatures that are less smart than ducks, such as sheep and ants (the phenomenon is called an ant mill ).\nThe title text refers to a meme called \"Duckrolled\", where one would post a link to a picture of a duck on wheels. It became much more famous in its later incarnation as the Rickroll .\n[A mother duck and her six ducklings.] [Cueball is in front of the line of ducks, and Megan is behind.] Megan: Ready? Cueball: Ready.\n[The duck and ducklings move.]\nCueball: ROAR! BOO!\n[The mother duck is frightened, and turns back. Her six children follow.]\n[Megan snatches the mother duck with a yoink.] Duck: QUACK!\n[The six ducklings are now trapped in a circle of sorts.]\nOPERATION: DUCKLING LOOP\n"}
{"id":538,"title":"Security","image_title":"Security","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/538","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/security.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/538:_Security","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a laptop up in two hands, showing it to his Cueball-like friend who is examining it while holding a hand up to his head. Above the top of the panels frame, there is a box with a caption:] A Crypto nerd's imagination: Cueball: His laptop's encrypted. Let's build a million-dollar cluster to crack it. Friend: No good! It's 4096-bit RSA! Cueball: Blast! Our evil plan is foiled!\n[Cueball is holding a a closed laptop down in one hand while giving his Cueball-like friend a wrench with the other. The friend reaches out for it. Above the top of the panels frame, there is a box with a caption:] What would actually happen: Cueball: His laptop's encrypted. Drug him and hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password. Friend\u00a0: Got it.\n","explanation":"The \"crypto nerd\" would be concerned with strongly encrypting data on their personal machine. This would conceivably come in handy when \"villains\" attempt to steal information on his computer. The crypto nerd imagines that due to his advanced encryption, the crackers will be ultimately defeated. Randall suggests that in the real world, people with the desire to access this information would simply use torture to coerce the nerd to give them the password. Both panels also reference the amount of money used to access the data. In the first the villain is willing to use millions of dollars to construct a super computer which may still not fulfill their aim, while in the second, he simply uses a $5 wrench and 'the personal touch'. The comic effectively states, completely accurately, that the weakest part of computer security is usually not the computer, but the user.\nRSA is a commonly used public key encryption method. Current standards typically use 1024, 2048, and (more recently) 4096 bit keys . These encryption methods are not yet (feasibly) breakable. A 4096-bit key will remain unbreakable for the foreseeable future.\nTo be resilient against this sort of \"attack\", cryptographers have devised schemes of deniable encryption , where attackers either cannot prove that encrypted information exists at all, or that allows the user to provide a password that reveals one (innocuous, or embarrassing but not illegal) secret without giving any indication that there is a second password that reveals the more important secret.\nThe title text pokes fun at typical users, who do not have data that would be worth anything to anyone but themselves. Therefore, it is unlikely that the above situation would ever occur. Additionally, the wrench used in the second panel is large, and presumably more than the $5 referenced by the thug.\n[Cueball is holding a laptop up in two hands, showing it to his Cueball-like friend who is examining it while holding a hand up to his head. Above the top of the panels frame, there is a box with a caption:] A Crypto nerd's imagination: Cueball: His laptop's encrypted. Let's build a million-dollar cluster to crack it. Friend: No good! It's 4096-bit RSA! Cueball: Blast! Our evil plan is foiled!\n[Cueball is holding a a closed laptop down in one hand while giving his Cueball-like friend a wrench with the other. The friend reaches out for it. Above the top of the panels frame, there is a box with a caption:] What would actually happen: Cueball: His laptop's encrypted. Drug him and hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password. Friend\u00a0: Got it.\n"}
{"id":539,"title":"Boyfriend","image_title":"Boyfriend","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/539","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/boyfriend.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/539:_Boyfriend","transcript":"[Megan is on the phone.] Megan: Can my boyfriend come along?\n[Cueball talks to Megan.] Cueball: I'm not your boyfriend! Megan: You totally are. Cueball: I'm casually dating a number of people.\n[Megan points to a chart with gray box plot with a single black dot as an outlier to the far right.] Megan: But you spend twice as much time with me as with anyone else. I'm a clear outlier.\n[Cueball puts his hand on his chin while Megan spreads out her arms.] Cueball: Your math is irrefutable. Megan: Face it\u2014I'm your statistically significant other.\n","explanation":"In classical statistics, statistical significance is used to determine whether a conclusion can be confidently made about the implications of a given set of data. If some data set is determined to be an appropriate sample of a given population, then conclusions can be made by determining trends in the data. Since one can never be completely sure that their data is truly representative, or their statistical analysis completely accurate, calculations of the likelihood of error are made. Once these calculations are made, it can be decided that a given conclusion is statistically significant because it passes a certain threshold for the likelihood of error. Because the statistical analysis that was done concluded that it is significantly more likely that the conclusions made are accurate than inaccurate, these conclusions are termed statistically significant.\nIn this case, Megan has analyzed the amount of time that Cueball spends with her versus others in his life. Based on the data she has gathered, she constructed a box plot. A box plot is a way to present data that utilizes boxes to show the range that a certain percentage of data points fall into. The boxes denote quartiles, so the large box demonstrates the range between the lowest and highest quartile, and the line in the center of the box denotes the median of the entire data set. The bars extend to the outer limits of the data set, encompassing the highest and lowest points (but excluding outliers). Box plots are useful to show the spread of data, and how it may be skewed. For more on box plots, see Box plot . Megan uses the data she has collected to show that the amount of time that Cueball spends with her is significantly higher than the amount of time he spends with others, since the amount of time they spend together is high enough to be an outlier when she completes a statistical analysis of the time he spends with people in his life.\nCueball accepts her claim, and she responds with a witticism that combines the phrases \"statistically significant\" and \"significant other\".\nThe title text can be interpreted in multiple ways. Firstly, Cueball may be resistant to the title of boyfriend . As he indicates, he is currently casually dating multiple people, and may therefore be resistant to any single individual attempting to establish a monogamous relationship. It could also be inferred that anyone taking the time and effort to statistically examine their relationship with him is off-putting, as this behavior could be viewed as obsessive. It could also be theorized that the term statistically significant other seems cold, and Cueball would rather date someone who makes him feel as though their relationship is significant, not simply someone who is an outlier in terms of time spent together. However, we know how Cueball responds to graphs without axes , so part of his rejection may stem from his disdain of her graph's lack of necessary units (for all we know, he could be spending significantly less time with Megan than with others!\n...Or it could just be that it's a cringe-worthy pun, and Cueball doesn't appreciate Megan being so pun-happy. The unduly [ citation needed ] severe consequences for an over-elaborate pun setup are analogous to how another Cueball gets his math license revoked over a pun.\n[Megan is on the phone.] Megan: Can my boyfriend come along?\n[Cueball talks to Megan.] Cueball: I'm not your boyfriend! Megan: You totally are. Cueball: I'm casually dating a number of people.\n[Megan points to a chart with gray box plot with a single black dot as an outlier to the far right.] Megan: But you spend twice as much time with me as with anyone else. I'm a clear outlier.\n[Cueball puts his hand on his chin while Megan spreads out her arms.] Cueball: Your math is irrefutable. Megan: Face it\u2014I'm your statistically significant other.\n"}
{"id":540,"title":"Base System","image_title":"Base System","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/540","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/base_system.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/540:_Base_System","transcript":"[At the top there is a four panel regular comic strip.] [Cueball and Ponytail are talking; Ponytail is sitting on the back of a chair with her feet on the seat, and Cueball is sitting on the floor facing her.] Ponytail: So how far did you get with her? Cueball: Second base?\n[Zoom in on Ponytail on the chair.] Ponytail: Wait, which one is that? Below the waist, but... not under the clothes? Cueball (off-panel): I think that's... shortstop?\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball now almost lies down and Ponytail is sitting on the armrest of the chair.] Ponytail: You should try crossing the pitcher's mound. Then down the 50-yard line, and right past her ten-pin. Cueball: Sounds tricky.\n[Again a zoom in on Ponytail now on the armrest.] Ponytail: Yeah. Last time I tried it, I got a red flag. If you know what I mean. Cueball (off-panel): I really don't.\n[Below the strip there is a large frame with a diagram of a baseball diamond.] [At the bottom left there is a box with tis text:] The \"Base\" Metaphor Explained\n[Bases are pointed too with thick black arrows (except home plate) and there are also arrows pointing to different parts of the diagram. All arrows and points marked with \"x\" have a description, as do the dashed lines covering the field. Below they will be listed anti-clockwise from the home plate.]\n[Along the line towards first base is the following five items in the order they appear:] [x slightly right of home plate:] Eye contact [Black arrow pointing to a base half way to first base outside the line:] Your Base [x inside the line opposite your base] Passing notes [Black arrow pointing to a base further along and outside the line:] 0110 0010 0110 0001 0111 0011 0110 0101 0010 0000 0011 0010 [x Slightly before first base:] Downloading Star Trek fanfiction and replacing Riker's name with your crush's.\n[Black arrow pointing to first base:] First base: Kissing\n[Further along the line past the first base is one x point in the right outfield:] Eye contact from Janeane Garofalo.\n[On the way towards second base there are the following two items:] [A region along the line from first to second has been marked off by a dotted line. It has the following text written inside:] The boring zone. [x some way inside the line next to the boring zone:] Using the scroll thingy on that one Apple mouse\n[Black arrow pointing to second base:] Second base: Hands under the shirt and\/or licking\n[On the route from second to third base are eight items:] [A dotted line traveling from near the outfield above second base, then crossing the second baseline about 1\/3 of the way to third base, snaking its way almost down to the home plate ending close to the third baseline. The following text is written along the dotted line inside the diamond:] The orgasm line [Above second base a large black arrow crosses the orgasm line near the outfield:] Napoleon's forces [x below the Napoleon arrow right before crossing the orgasm line:] Fursuits [Two arrows points to the second base line on each side of the orgasm line:] Hands on the pants Hands in the pants [x some way into the diamond just past the orgasm line:] Dry humping [x same distance down the second base line as dry humping, but equally far outside the line still infield:] Fursuits (crotchless) [x almost at the extension of the 3rd base line close to the outfield:] Standing anywhere near Peaches\n[In the left outfield there are two x points:] [x in the outfield halfway along the second base line:] Retrograde wheelbarrow [x in the outfield almost at the extension of the third base line:] 2outfielders1glove.\n[Foul of the third base line just left of where the grass line divides the in- and outfield:] Anal sex (fill in your own \"foul ball\" pun here.)\n[Black arrow pointing to third base:] Third base: Oral sex (formerly \"hands in the pants\")\n[On the route from third to home plate there are four items:] [Between third base and home there is a dotted line that makes a curve from right outside the third base line and ends right afer it has crossed the orgasm line. The text is written inside the diamond with the first word above and the other two below the dotted line:] \"Virginity\" (Maginot) line [A large black arrow curves around the end of the \"Virginity\" line outside of the diamond:] Teens [A large black arrow points from outside the diamond to a point right between home plate and the virginity line:] Sharing root PWs [x just before home plate at the end of the orgasm line inside the diamond:] Thigh contact\n","explanation":"This comic comes in two parts and is a pun on the baseball metaphor used to describe how far a date went regarding erotic actions. Many different versions of the baseball metaphor exist, with varying degrees of complexity. But it has rarely been described with as many details as the one drawn by Randall in this comic.\nIn the first part, a four frame strip along the top, Ponytail and Cueball discuss how Cueball's date went. When Cueball answers Ponytail's question with \"second base\", Ponytail asks what that means exactly. They fumble around with the definition in panel two where Ponytail ask is that Below the waist, but... not under the clothes? Cueball tries to put this into the base system and suggest that this could be compared to the difficult shortstop fielding position in baseball, between 2nd and 3rd base. This fits with the position of Hands on the pants metaphor from the picture below the comic strip. Then Ponytail begins with yet another base analogy by mentioning crossing the pitcher's mound , but then suddenly she brings two more, very different, sports into the metaphor: American football (with the 50 yard line) and bowling (with the ten-pin ). It certainly sounds tricky, as Cueball says. Ponytail then brings up a third sport in her elaboration; her reference to getting a \"red flag\" could refer to different sports, as many sports use flags , some of them red. It is, however, most likely a reference to racing in motor sport as the red flag is displayed when conditions are too dangerous to continue the session. This makes sense when looking at the \"translation\" here below. Cueball, however, has not got a clue which he expresses when Ponytail asks him If you know what I mean. (Note that this comic came out less than a week after Super Bowl XLIII , the final game of the 2008 NFL season , which was played on 2009-02-01).\nHere is a possible translation of Ponytails comment:\nOriginal: You should try crossing the pitcher's mound . Then down the 50-yard line , and right past her ten-pin . Translation: You should try crossing her pubic mound , then down the landing strip , and right past her clitoris . Original: Last time I tried it, I got a red flag . Translation: Last time I tried it, she had her period .\nThis would mean that Ponytail was about to go down on another girl, while this girl had her period. Many people would find it disgusting to go down on a girl while she was menstruating, explaining why Ponytail brought it up when Cueball said Sounds tricky . However, Cueball doesn't seem to understand Ponytail's metaphors, explaining his replies of Sounds tricky and I really don't .\nThe second part, the diagram, depicts a much more complex version of the baseball metaphor, where baseball terms and jargon are used to describe the many and varied things human beings like to do in the bedroom. Explanations have been separated by position. In order to understand the terms used, one may want to consult this picture:\n\nNote that Randall did not include any features from within the diamond; the pitchers mound or plate.\nThe \" diamond \" is the geometric pattern formed by the four bases - first, second, third, and home plate . Through the course of one side's turn (half of an \"inning\") players have a chance to move from one base to the next base in line: from first, to second, to third, and finally to home plate (scoring only if they make it to home plate). Thus there is a \"progression\" from one base to the next of sexual activity in the metaphor, until climax is achieved (getting to 'home plate' and 'scoring a run'). In both cases, players can be removed before making it to the next \"base\" in the sequence.\nThe entries in this section are ordered roughly from home plate to first, to second, to third, and then to home plate again, in the counterclockwise direction that the players move.\nInside the diamond, at the center of the mound, is the pitcher. Several odd positions are placed here in Randall's diagram.\nThe infield is the part of the baseball field which is inside the baserunning paths (not inside the lines between the bases, because baserunners are allowed to run a certain distance outside those lines).\nThe \" outfield \" is a group of players who are there to catch the ball if it goes away from the main play area (anything outside the upper curving line) and return it to play in a manner advantageous to their team. As they separated away from the main play area, the things in the outfield are often references to sexual behaviors that are \"kinky\" and \"out there\".\nA foul ball occurs when a ball ends up in foul territory which is outside the foul line extending from either side of the diamond, the area is \"out of play\". Anyone who takes the ball into this area has committed a foul, and as such breached one of the acceptable rules of sexual conduct in the metaphor.\nIf you are together with a basketball player and then tell her that you are now at second base , she might become very confused as bases are not an element in basketball. Also there is the joke that basketball players never get laid because they always jump before they score.\n[At the top there is a four panel regular comic strip.] [Cueball and Ponytail are talking; Ponytail is sitting on the back of a chair with her feet on the seat, and Cueball is sitting on the floor facing her.] Ponytail: So how far did you get with her? Cueball: Second base?\n[Zoom in on Ponytail on the chair.] Ponytail: Wait, which one is that? Below the waist, but... not under the clothes? Cueball (off-panel): I think that's... shortstop?\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball now almost lies down and Ponytail is sitting on the armrest of the chair.] Ponytail: You should try crossing the pitcher's mound. Then down the 50-yard line, and right past her ten-pin. Cueball: Sounds tricky.\n[Again a zoom in on Ponytail now on the armrest.] Ponytail: Yeah. Last time I tried it, I got a red flag. If you know what I mean. Cueball (off-panel): I really don't.\n[Below the strip there is a large frame with a diagram of a baseball diamond.] [At the bottom left there is a box with tis text:] The \"Base\" Metaphor Explained\n[Bases are pointed too with thick black arrows (except home plate) and there are also arrows pointing to different parts of the diagram. All arrows and points marked with \"x\" have a description, as do the dashed lines covering the field. Below they will be listed anti-clockwise from the home plate.]\n[Along the line towards first base is the following five items in the order they appear:] [x slightly right of home plate:] Eye contact [Black arrow pointing to a base half way to first base outside the line:] Your Base [x inside the line opposite your base] Passing notes [Black arrow pointing to a base further along and outside the line:] 0110 0010 0110 0001 0111 0011 0110 0101 0010 0000 0011 0010 [x Slightly before first base:] Downloading Star Trek fanfiction and replacing Riker's name with your crush's.\n[Black arrow pointing to first base:] First base: Kissing\n[Further along the line past the first base is one x point in the right outfield:] Eye contact from Janeane Garofalo.\n[On the way towards second base there are the following two items:] [A region along the line from first to second has been marked off by a dotted line. It has the following text written inside:] The boring zone. [x some way inside the line next to the boring zone:] Using the scroll thingy on that one Apple mouse\n[Black arrow pointing to second base:] Second base: Hands under the shirt and\/or licking\n[On the route from second to third base are eight items:] [A dotted line traveling from near the outfield above second base, then crossing the second baseline about 1\/3 of the way to third base, snaking its way almost down to the home plate ending close to the third baseline. The following text is written along the dotted line inside the diamond:] The orgasm line [Above second base a large black arrow crosses the orgasm line near the outfield:] Napoleon's forces [x below the Napoleon arrow right before crossing the orgasm line:] Fursuits [Two arrows points to the second base line on each side of the orgasm line:] Hands on the pants Hands in the pants [x some way into the diamond just past the orgasm line:] Dry humping [x same distance down the second base line as dry humping, but equally far outside the line still infield:] Fursuits (crotchless) [x almost at the extension of the 3rd base line close to the outfield:] Standing anywhere near Peaches\n[In the left outfield there are two x points:] [x in the outfield halfway along the second base line:] Retrograde wheelbarrow [x in the outfield almost at the extension of the third base line:] 2outfielders1glove.\n[Foul of the third base line just left of where the grass line divides the in- and outfield:] Anal sex (fill in your own \"foul ball\" pun here.)\n[Black arrow pointing to third base:] Third base: Oral sex (formerly \"hands in the pants\")\n[On the route from third to home plate there are four items:] [Between third base and home there is a dotted line that makes a curve from right outside the third base line and ends right afer it has crossed the orgasm line. The text is written inside the diamond with the first word above and the other two below the dotted line:] \"Virginity\" (Maginot) line [A large black arrow curves around the end of the \"Virginity\" line outside of the diamond:] Teens [A large black arrow points from outside the diamond to a point right between home plate and the virginity line:] Sharing root PWs [x just before home plate at the end of the orgasm line inside the diamond:] Thigh contact\n"}
{"id":541,"title":"TED Talk","image_title":"TED Talk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/541","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ted_talk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/541:_TED_Talk","transcript":"[Randall, drawn as Cueball, on stage.] Randall: Hi. I'm Randall. Welcome to my TED talk. Randall: It's an honor to speak to you, some of the brightest innovators from so many fields, about a problem in desperate need of your attention: Randall: How DO you end parenthetical statements with emoticons? I can't figure out a good way. [Screen next to him shows two statements, both crossed out in red.] \"Linux (or BSD\u00a0:) would...\" looks mismatched \"Linux (or BSD\u00a0:)) would...\" looks mismatched and weird\n[Randall writing on a desk.] [Randall's List] Conferences I'm banned from: Siggraph Eurocrypt Defcon Pycon International Astronomical Union Canadian Paleontology Conference Every American Furry Convention American Baking Society Asian Dolphin-Training Conference TED\nIn response to this comic, PyCon organizers jokingly announced that Randall Munroe was banned from PyCon 2009 due to \"last year's disgraceful keynote, 'Web Spiders vs. Red Spiders'.\" They also said they instructed their volunteers to refuse admission to him and \"any stick figures who may attempt to register, particularly if they are wearing hats.\"\nMessages on the PyCon-Organizers mailing list show that this joke was intended to get Randall to come to PyCon: (The links will only work if you're subscribed to the mailing list.)\nPyCon mentioned briefly in today's xkcd: http:\/\/xkcd.com\/541\/ We've still never gotten Randall Munroe to actually attend, have we? Anybody want to take charge of twisting his arm this time?  I think we can still offer him a \"press pass\" (free registration). [...] [1] An invite would seem most appropriate given the cartoon.\u00a0:-) We could also have an official PyCon blog post confirming his ban... [2] How about a public blog post LIFTING the ban and inviting him? [3] Confirming the ban is far funnier... He's definitely a disturbing influence on programmers. [4] Agreed, especially if we invite him concurrently with confirming the ban. [5] (a few posts later) I'm happy to participate in actually throwing some thin guy out of the conference, and then get some graphics savvy person to animate a stick figure over that.\u00a0:) [...] [6] here's a rough idea of what would show up if you invited him to actually do any speaking... http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24 it's fairly long. he shows up in the beginning around 3:25. [7] For the record, I did try to convince him to come when got the art for the tshirt last year.  He didn't seem super psyched, but then again emotions are hard to read via IRC. I love the idea of \"officially\" banning him, however.\u00a0;-) [8] (a few posts later) OK - posted to the PyCon blog, by the power vested in me as publicity chair.  With Michael Foord's excellent sentence added. Now let him know that since he's banned, he HAS to come. [9]\nRandall has since this comic given a TED talk in March 2014. Randall Munroe Comics that ask \"what if?\" .\n","explanation":"The comics shows Randall as a presenter at the highly prestigious TED conference , a symposium about technology, entertainment and design. The illustrious list of former presenters includes amongst others Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Larry Page, Richard Dawkins and Gordon Brown. The conference is regarded as a forum for digerati . Every talk has a length of at most 20 minutes and is supposed to be as captivating as possible.\nRandall's presentation, however, reduces the purpose of the conference to absurdity: The topic he wishes to point out to his listeners, is that of how to put an emoticon at the end of a parenthetical statement. This question is of little practical consequence, although it received a lot of attention after publication of the comic. In the last panel, the TED conference is another item to add to his list of conferences from which he has been banned. On the list are other conferences from all sorts of fields, including every American furry convention.\nThe title text about Randall's ban from the IAU conference is a reference to the popular maternal insults called \"yo momma\" jokes . A common representative of the genre runs \"Yo mama so fat, scientists have declared her the 10th planet.\" Those kind of jokes are a recurring theme on xkcd\nIt can be inferred from 629: Skins , that Randall was banned from North American furry conventions due to being a \"Skin\", which is a furry whose fursona prefers going around disguised as a human.  Depending on Randall's behavior, such an action could generate a lot of drama and, presumably, lead to convention bans.\nGetting banned from attending a conference is a recurring theme on xkcd, and even in real life, Randall sometimes has bad ideas for conference topics, such as presumably not speaking for the entire conference . This was so far the sixth of eight comics to directly mention conference bans. The first to do so was 153: Cryptography .\nThe PyCon organizers made a response to this comic - see below under PyCon response .\nHere is a  list of the conferences from which Randall has been banned according to this comic.\n[Randall, drawn as Cueball, on stage.] Randall: Hi. I'm Randall. Welcome to my TED talk. Randall: It's an honor to speak to you, some of the brightest innovators from so many fields, about a problem in desperate need of your attention: Randall: How DO you end parenthetical statements with emoticons? I can't figure out a good way. [Screen next to him shows two statements, both crossed out in red.] \"Linux (or BSD\u00a0:) would...\" looks mismatched \"Linux (or BSD\u00a0:)) would...\" looks mismatched and weird\n[Randall writing on a desk.] [Randall's List] Conferences I'm banned from: Siggraph Eurocrypt Defcon Pycon International Astronomical Union Canadian Paleontology Conference Every American Furry Convention American Baking Society Asian Dolphin-Training Conference TED\nIn response to this comic, PyCon organizers jokingly announced that Randall Munroe was banned from PyCon 2009 due to \"last year's disgraceful keynote, 'Web Spiders vs. Red Spiders'.\" They also said they instructed their volunteers to refuse admission to him and \"any stick figures who may attempt to register, particularly if they are wearing hats.\"\nMessages on the PyCon-Organizers mailing list show that this joke was intended to get Randall to come to PyCon: (The links will only work if you're subscribed to the mailing list.)\nPyCon mentioned briefly in today's xkcd: http:\/\/xkcd.com\/541\/ We've still never gotten Randall Munroe to actually attend, have we? Anybody want to take charge of twisting his arm this time?  I think we can still offer him a \"press pass\" (free registration). [...] [1] An invite would seem most appropriate given the cartoon.\u00a0:-) We could also have an official PyCon blog post confirming his ban... [2] How about a public blog post LIFTING the ban and inviting him? [3] Confirming the ban is far funnier... He's definitely a disturbing influence on programmers. [4] Agreed, especially if we invite him concurrently with confirming the ban. [5] (a few posts later) I'm happy to participate in actually throwing some thin guy out of the conference, and then get some graphics savvy person to animate a stick figure over that.\u00a0:) [...] [6] here's a rough idea of what would show up if you invited him to actually do any speaking... http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24 it's fairly long. he shows up in the beginning around 3:25. [7] For the record, I did try to convince him to come when got the art for the tshirt last year.  He didn't seem super psyched, but then again emotions are hard to read via IRC. I love the idea of \"officially\" banning him, however.\u00a0;-) [8] (a few posts later) OK - posted to the PyCon blog, by the power vested in me as publicity chair.  With Michael Foord's excellent sentence added. Now let him know that since he's banned, he HAS to come. [9]\nRandall has since this comic given a TED talk in March 2014. Randall Munroe Comics that ask \"what if?\" .\n"}
{"id":542,"title":"Cover-Up","image_title":"Cover-Up","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/542","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cover_up.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/542:_Cover-Up","transcript":"[Black Hat looking slightly up is holding two rags stained red with blood while Danish is holding an equally bloody mop.] Black Hat: Okay, got the blood off the walls. Danish: I finished the floor.\n[Black Hat drops the bloody rags behind him while looking up at the ceiling, Danish has put the bloody mop behind her leaning against the wall while covering her mouth with her hands.] Black Hat: Good; he'll be home any- Black Hat: Oh crap! We forgot to clean the ceiling!\n[Black Hat has moved away from the bloody rags towards Danish who has taken her hands down. They look straight at each other. The bloody mop has fallen over on the floor.] Danish: There's no time! Black Hat: Wait, I'll handle it.\n[Cueball with briefcase enters the house through the front door behind him, still standing open. He is greeted by Black Hat holding out a hand towards him. The corner of the room and the wall behind them and past the door is outlines with three lines connecting in the corner.] Black Hat: Hi. Did you know \"gullible\" is written on your ceiling? Cueball: Hah. Yeah, right.\n","explanation":"Black Hat and Danish are trying to clean up the mess that some bloody murder most likely performed by them has left.  This story may thus be a continuation of 515: No One Must Know .\nAnother guy, Cueball , is on his way home and is about to arrive just when they are finishing the clean up. But then Black Hat realizes that the ceiling has also been stained (by the violent murder...) And now they do not have time to fix it.\nBut Black Hat knows how to deal with the situation, and when Cueball comes home, he says: \"Did you know 'gullible' is written on your ceiling?\"\nGullible means easily deceived or naive. This is a game many people play with each other \"Whoa, someone wrote 'gullible' in the sky!\" \"Did you know when you look at the Microsoft logo upside-down it looks like the word 'gullible'?\" Those that are gullible, check. Those that aren't, don't. [ citation needed ] In fact they will pointedly not do the thing that the first person has suggested as a show of how non-gullible they are. Black Hat uses this to his advantage to cover up the copious bloodstains on the ceiling and as expected Cueball just says \"Hah. Yeah, right\" and refuses to even glance at the ceiling.\nThe title text is hinting that Black Hat has had to cover up killing people several times as this trick has saved him many times. Of course there could also be other things than blood that he had to hide (the money he just stole etc.)\n[Black Hat looking slightly up is holding two rags stained red with blood while Danish is holding an equally bloody mop.] Black Hat: Okay, got the blood off the walls. Danish: I finished the floor.\n[Black Hat drops the bloody rags behind him while looking up at the ceiling, Danish has put the bloody mop behind her leaning against the wall while covering her mouth with her hands.] Black Hat: Good; he'll be home any- Black Hat: Oh crap! We forgot to clean the ceiling!\n[Black Hat has moved away from the bloody rags towards Danish who has taken her hands down. They look straight at each other. The bloody mop has fallen over on the floor.] Danish: There's no time! Black Hat: Wait, I'll handle it.\n[Cueball with briefcase enters the house through the front door behind him, still standing open. He is greeted by Black Hat holding out a hand towards him. The corner of the room and the wall behind them and past the door is outlines with three lines connecting in the corner.] Black Hat: Hi. Did you know \"gullible\" is written on your ceiling? Cueball: Hah. Yeah, right.\n"}
{"id":543,"title":"Sierpinski Valentine","image_title":"Sierpinski Valentine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/543","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sierpinski_valentine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/543:_Sierpinski_Valentine","transcript":"[Shows an adaptation of the Sierpinski triangle fractal, using hearts instead of triangles.] Happy valentine's day. -xkcd\n","explanation":"A Valentine's Day card from Randall to the xkcd readers. It is written inside a parody of the Sierpinski Triangle , a Sierpinski Valentine.\nThe Sierpinski Triangle is a fractal pattern made of triangles, covering a space. The way it works is to draw a triangle and draw another (upside down) one in the middle. Choose the upper, left and right triangle and repeat the process. Another valentine in the shape of a heart is 63: Valentine - Heart .\nThe <3 in the title text is an emoticon for a heart and goes out to those of his readers that read the title text . Those who read the title text are usually more devoted to know that such a thing exists.\nAnother relevant comic to the Sierpinski Triangle is 95: The Sierpinski Penis Game .\n[Shows an adaptation of the Sierpinski triangle fractal, using hearts instead of triangles.] Happy valentine's day. -xkcd\n"}
{"id":544,"title":"Pep Talk","image_title":"Pep Talk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/544","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pep_talk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/544:_Pep_Talk","transcript":"[Coach-Cueball stands at the end of a double row of benches in the players locker room. He speaks to his team of five Cueball-like players, two are sitting with towels on the left bench, one stands behind them, and two are sitting on the right bench, one of them resting his head on his hands.] Coach-Cueball: Okay, team. We're sixteen points down. If we want to come back from this\u2014 Offscreen: Woo!! Score!!! Coach-Cueball: Okay, now we're eighteen points down. ...Listen\u2014I'm starting to think we should only take these breaks at halftime.\n","explanation":"Another comic where Randall takes a less than serious look at sports.\nThe halftime pep talk of a basketball game is commonly used by coaches to inspire their team to either turn the game around, or to defend the lead, and to make strategic changes that will help them do so. Unfortunately, the basketball coach Cueball has absolutely no fundamental understanding of the sport, and has pulled his team (of Cueball-like players) into the locker room while the game is still in progress, not during halftime, enabling the other team to score at will.\nHe could have tried to get a time-out , but still he would not have been allowed to take his team down to the locker room.\nThe title text parodies a common plot of, especially US, sports movies in which an inexperienced team (and sometimes coach) still manage to win a title after a highly motivational pep talk (see for instance Hoosiers ). These Pep talks usually take place during regular pauses of the game, and can lead to a come back from a seemingly insurmountable deficit. In this case the players are not even just poor basketball players but rather chess players and the coach knows nothing of the sport, the opposite of what is usually the case in said movies. And, of course, in this case those pessimistic about their chances were proven right.\n[Coach-Cueball stands at the end of a double row of benches in the players locker room. He speaks to his team of five Cueball-like players, two are sitting with towels on the left bench, one stands behind them, and two are sitting on the right bench, one of them resting his head on his hands.] Coach-Cueball: Okay, team. We're sixteen points down. If we want to come back from this\u2014 Offscreen: Woo!! Score!!! Coach-Cueball: Okay, now we're eighteen points down. ...Listen\u2014I'm starting to think we should only take these breaks at halftime.\n"}
{"id":545,"title":"Neutrality Schmeutrality","image_title":"Neutrality Schmeutrality","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/545","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/neutrality_shmeutrality.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/545:_Neutrality_Schmeutrality","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Trivia: It's possible to create events which Wikipedia cannot cover neutrally [Black Hat is at a press conference in which he is making an announcement in front of a large crowd mainly of Cueballs but also some Megans.] Black Hat: In a week, I will be donating $1,000,000 to a recipient determined by the word count of the Wikipedia article about this event. If it's even, the money goes to pro-choice activists. If it's odd, pro-life.\n","explanation":"Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia with content developed and submitted by volunteers around the world. In fact, its slogan is \"Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.\" Most articles on the site can be altered by anyone with access to Wikipedia.\nWikipedia has set some standards for its operation, which it refers to as the \" Five pillars of Wikipedia \". One of these pillars is titled \"Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view .\"\nPro-life and pro-choice refer to two opposing viewpoints in the debate of the moral and legal rights concerning abortion . For many on both sides, it is a very emotional topic.\nBlack Hat , like the classhole he is, has decided to prove that you can create an article which fundamentally cannot remain neutral. Since his charitable donation is determined by the word count of the article, any submission to Wikipedia must result in Black Hat's money supporting either pro-life or pro-choice activists. With a reward of one million dollars, it is unlikely that either side would allow an article that would result in the other side winning to remain unedited. The edits need not even overtly change the neutrality of the tone of the article \u2013 by simply rewriting 'unbiased' phrases with a differing number of words, the effect of the page is drastically flipped.\nThe title of the comic uses an old (read, \"pre-Internet\") meme, possibly of Yiddish origin, known as shm-reduplication . The speaker replaces the initial consonant cluster (have it 0, 1 or even 2+ consonants) with the cluster \"schm\", read \/\u0283m\/, and says the new word after the unadulterated word, as in the title where it is \"N\" that has been replaced. This denotes an active apathy or an intentional disregard of the authority (for it is usually an authority or someone in a similar position) being mocked. In this case, Black Hat is disregarding Wikipedia's neutrality doctrine with his word count dependent donation rule.\nThe title text is an imagined statement from a Wikipedia contributor attempting to assert the neutrality of their submission, claiming no word count was performed before posting. However, it is nearly impossible to trust that anyone editing such an article would not make an attempt to shift the result in their side's favor, since it is impossible to know whether someone performed a word count.\n[Caption above the panel:] Trivia: It's possible to create events which Wikipedia cannot cover neutrally [Black Hat is at a press conference in which he is making an announcement in front of a large crowd mainly of Cueballs but also some Megans.] Black Hat: In a week, I will be donating $1,000,000 to a recipient determined by the word count of the Wikipedia article about this event. If it's even, the money goes to pro-choice activists. If it's odd, pro-life.\n"}
{"id":546,"title":"Music DRM","image_title":"Music DRM","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/546","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/music_drm.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/546:_Music_DRM","transcript":"[Cueball sits at his computer.] Cueball [typing]: ...and that's why music DRM is bad for listeners and artists! Megan [off-panel]: What are you doing?\n[Megan enters and Cueball turns towards her.] Megan: In case you didn't notice, we won the music DRM war.  The big stores are DRM free.\n[Zoom in on Megan who holds up a hand doing the sign of the horns.] Megan: So close the comment thread, get out the debit card, buy us some music, and let's rock the fuck out.\n[Back to viewing both as in panel 2.] Cueball: But I don't actually like music, I just like being self-righteous on the web. Megan: Lucky for you, that will always be free.\n","explanation":"Here, Cueball is commenting in a comment thread that he authored about the negative traits of DRM, or again, Digital Rights Management (also known under 'Digital Restrictions Management'). Cueball has a point: DRM, while meant to fight those who download media through 'dungeon sketchy' maneuvers, risks locking out legitimate owners . In turn, this turns off legitimate buyers from buying the songs, thus hurting artists.\nOf course, this would be true if the major stores sell music with DRM. Megan , wanting Cueball to make peace and enjoy his goal, makes the following choice quote: 'Close the comment thread, get out the debit card, buy us some music, and let's rock the fuck out', while she shows the sign of the horns .\nThe problem is that Cueball is arguing for the enjoyment of arguing, not out of any actual belief in what he's arguing about.\nThe title text references 132: Music Knowledge while implying that Randall is not really a music fan, since he would only be interested in music that appears in the games that he plays.\n[Cueball sits at his computer.] Cueball [typing]: ...and that's why music DRM is bad for listeners and artists! Megan [off-panel]: What are you doing?\n[Megan enters and Cueball turns towards her.] Megan: In case you didn't notice, we won the music DRM war.  The big stores are DRM free.\n[Zoom in on Megan who holds up a hand doing the sign of the horns.] Megan: So close the comment thread, get out the debit card, buy us some music, and let's rock the fuck out.\n[Back to viewing both as in panel 2.] Cueball: But I don't actually like music, I just like being self-righteous on the web. Megan: Lucky for you, that will always be free.\n"}
{"id":547,"title":"Simple","image_title":"Simple","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/547","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/simple.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/547:_Simple","transcript":"[Three Cueball-like guys stand in front of a sketch. The middle Cueball is the protagonist of the comic and will be called Cueball.] Left Cueball-like guy: Do you have any thoughts regarding the particle accelerator's tertiary F.E.L. Guidance System? Cueball: We can't put the broken part in the machine. It wouldn't smash the right tiny things together. Then the machine might break. Cueball: That would be very bad.\n[Caption below the frame:] I spent all night reading simple.wikipedia.org, and now I can't stop talking like this.\n","explanation":"There are three Cueballs discussing a particle accelerator . One Cueball asks the others about the \"tertiary Free-electron laser ( F.E.L ) guidance system\". As this is a fairly technical topic, we would expect a response filled with scientific jargon. The joke is that the other Cueball instead responds in a much simpler manner. He uses simple phrases such as \"smash the right tiny things together\" and \"that would be very bad\".\nAs the caption below the comic notes, Cueball (probably Randall ) has spent the previous night reading the Simple English Wikipedia , a simplified version of Wikipedia intended to be easier to understand, and now he finds himself using similarly simple syntax. For example, the article for a particle accelerator describes it as \"a machine that makes really tiny things called particles travel at very high speeds.\" This is similar to the simple response given by the responding Cueball. In the actual comic, Cueball was able to effectively communicate the dangers of using a broken F.E.L. using simple syntax similar to the style of the Simple English Wikipedia.\nFrom the title text, Randall believes that if people teaching advanced mathematics followed this style, their subject would be more accessible. The implication is that more people would be drawn to studying mathematics and that (naturally) the world would be a better place because of this, ironically most likely true!\nThis concept was later revisited in 722: Computer Problems , 1133: Up Goer Five and Thing Explainer (probably most notably), 1322: Winter and 1436: Orb Hammer .\n[Three Cueball-like guys stand in front of a sketch. The middle Cueball is the protagonist of the comic and will be called Cueball.] Left Cueball-like guy: Do you have any thoughts regarding the particle accelerator's tertiary F.E.L. Guidance System? Cueball: We can't put the broken part in the machine. It wouldn't smash the right tiny things together. Then the machine might break. Cueball: That would be very bad.\n[Caption below the frame:] I spent all night reading simple.wikipedia.org, and now I can't stop talking like this.\n"}
{"id":548,"title":"Kindle","image_title":"Kindle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/548","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kindle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/548:_Kindle","transcript":"[Cueball is looking at a tablet.] Megan: A kindle? Ebooks, huh? Cueball: Ebooks are for chumps. Megan: Why get a kindle, then? Cueball: One reason:\n[Text is above the frame in which Cueball wanders a city with the tablet and with small bubbles forming above his head to indicate him being intoxicated.] Cueball (narrating): Free cellular web access. Even if I spend months broke and drunk in a strange city, I'll still be able to use Wikipedia and Wikitravel to learn about anything I need.\n[Megan takes the tablet from Cueball.] Megan: Why does that sound familiar? Megan: Gimme that.\n[Zoom in on the top of the tablet where the name is written:] Amazon Kindle\n[Zoom out to Megan who scratches at the top of the tablet.] Scrape, scrape, scrape\n[Zoom back to the damaged top of the tablet where a layer has been scraped off. This partly reveals a new name, where the first and last two letters are only partly visible:] Hitchhiker's Guide\n","explanation":"The Amazon Kindle is a device that allows people to read books via ebook format. The comic was published three weeks after Amazon released the Kindle 2 , which included the ability to read Wikipedia articles via the 3G connection that was included with the device.\nCueball remarks that \"ebooks are for chumps\", but goes on to explain the real reason for purchasing a Kindle. Since it has free cellular web access, he could navigate through any city (presumably with 3G access), assisted by Wikipedia and Wikitravel .\nMegan believes she has heard such a description of a device before and snatches the Kindle away from Cueball. When she scratches off the Amazon Kindle logo at the top of the device she reveals that the device is actually The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . This fictional electronic encyclopedia is described in the real-life franchise of the same name. Those works recount the tale of a travel editor who works for and owns a copy of the Guide , which provides travel tips throughout the galaxy, including an entry for Earth . The comic suggests that Amazon simply re-brands copies of the Guide as Kindles.\nThe title text refers to the great utility of having the ability to access Wikipedia for free on an easy-to-carry device. The speaker states that should this utility ever become disabled, he would stage a drunk protest on the lawn of Jeff Bezos , the CEO and founder of Amazon.com. This method of protest is used by the protagonist of the Hitchhiker's series, in the beginning of the first book, in an attempt to prevent his house from being demolished, by lying in front of the bulldozer (in vain).\nAmazon warned customers using 1st and 2nd generation Kindles in 2021 that 3G connectivity will cease to work, because network operators are upgrading their networks from 3G to 4G. Since this is not Amazon's fault, a drunk protest doesn't seem appropriate though.\n[Cueball is looking at a tablet.] Megan: A kindle? Ebooks, huh? Cueball: Ebooks are for chumps. Megan: Why get a kindle, then? Cueball: One reason:\n[Text is above the frame in which Cueball wanders a city with the tablet and with small bubbles forming above his head to indicate him being intoxicated.] Cueball (narrating): Free cellular web access. Even if I spend months broke and drunk in a strange city, I'll still be able to use Wikipedia and Wikitravel to learn about anything I need.\n[Megan takes the tablet from Cueball.] Megan: Why does that sound familiar? Megan: Gimme that.\n[Zoom in on the top of the tablet where the name is written:] Amazon Kindle\n[Zoom out to Megan who scratches at the top of the tablet.] Scrape, scrape, scrape\n[Zoom back to the damaged top of the tablet where a layer has been scraped off. This partly reveals a new name, where the first and last two letters are only partly visible:] Hitchhiker's Guide\n"}
{"id":549,"title":"Westley's a Dick","image_title":"Westley's a Dick","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/549","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/westleys_a_dick.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/549:_Westley%27s_a_Dick","transcript":"[A girl (Buttercup) with long hair and a man (Westley) looking like Cueball but with a bandana lies at the foot of a high cliff. There is a forest in the background] Buttercup: Oh, my sweet Westley!\n[Buttercup sits on her knees, Westley takes off his bandana.] Buttercup: Why did you let me think you were dead? Westley: You shacked up with the prince! Buttercup: After years of mourning! The worst pain of my life!\n[Buttercup stands up looking down on Westley who still sits with the bandana in his hand.] Buttercup: And now you ... kill people? Westley: I'd hardly be a dread pirate if I didn't. Buttercup: How lovable.\n[Westley stands with the bandana in hand while Buttercup walks away from him.]\nWestley: It was for the sake of the narrative! Buttercup: Fuck the narrative. I'm going to go see if that Spaniard's single. Westley: ...As you wish.\n","explanation":"This is an alternate take on the 1973 fantasy romance novel The Princess Bride written by William Goldman which became a film in 1987 .\nIn the movie the main character, Buttercup, believes she has lost her first love to the Dread Pirate Roberts years ago. In the present she is considered one of the most beautiful women of the land and so is being married off to a prince. To provoke a war she has been kidnapped by mercenaries, one of whom is a very honorable Spanish swordsman named Inigo Montoya. A man claiming to be the Dread Pirate Roberts rescues her. On verifying his identity as Roberts, she attacks him by pushing him down a hill. While tumbling down the hill he shouts back \"as you wish\" identifying him as her first love. She tumbles after, landing on top of him as in the start of this comic.\nThere are, however, several \"dick moves\" Westley must have made in order for the film's narrative to make sense.\nWestley breaks the fourth wall and claims he did all of these things for the sake of the narrative . In other words, he did it to make the story better. \nIn the comic Buttercup realizes that Westley has behaved like a dick and chooses to give her love to Inigo Montoya. But in the movie, he and Buttercup end up together in spite of this behavior!\nThe title text shows what looks like a message she and Inigo have written together, for instance in a heart on a tree. Inigo is the Spaniard referred to by Buttercup. Their names, then forever (4eva) and a heart (smiley heart = \"<3\"), implying they did end up together according to this version of the story.  Alternatively, it could simply be the narrator expressing his wish that this will come to pass.\nIt is not the first time Randall has referenced this movie, as the Dread Pirate was referenced in 345: 1337: Part 5 , and a quote from this movie is in the title text of 1427: iOS Keyboard . So it seems like a film that has some meaning for Randall.\nNote: It's quite possible Westley hasn't been killing people as a pirate at all.  People had been surrendering to The Dread Pirate Roberts without a fight for years before he took over the role, due to the terror of his name. Of course, there may be a few people who needed to be killed, over the years, but the implication in the book (and movie) is that at least most surrender without a fight and are presumably unharmed.\nIf you haven't seen the movie or read the book, you may find it helpful to read the synopsis of the book here .\n[A girl (Buttercup) with long hair and a man (Westley) looking like Cueball but with a bandana lies at the foot of a high cliff. There is a forest in the background] Buttercup: Oh, my sweet Westley!\n[Buttercup sits on her knees, Westley takes off his bandana.] Buttercup: Why did you let me think you were dead? Westley: You shacked up with the prince! Buttercup: After years of mourning! The worst pain of my life!\n[Buttercup stands up looking down on Westley who still sits with the bandana in his hand.] Buttercup: And now you ... kill people? Westley: I'd hardly be a dread pirate if I didn't. Buttercup: How lovable.\n[Westley stands with the bandana in hand while Buttercup walks away from him.]\nWestley: It was for the sake of the narrative! Buttercup: Fuck the narrative. I'm going to go see if that Spaniard's single. Westley: ...As you wish.\n"}
{"id":550,"title":"Density","image_title":"Density","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/550","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/density.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/550:_Density","transcript":"[Cueball is in a bed with Megan.] Cueball: Sup dawg, I herd you didn't liek forming babby, but I accidentally in your base. [Below the frame:] Cons: Ruined life. Pros: Sentence set the new meme density record.\n","explanation":"This comic depicts a sex scene with Cueball in bed together with Megan , and a sentence being spoken by Cueball.  The sentence's overt meaning suggests Megan doesn't wish to become pregnant, but Cueball has prematurely or unintentionally ejaculated inside her.  The sentence contains five popular (at the time) memes :\nIn plain English, the sentence roughly means:\nHey girl, I heard that you don't want to have a baby but I accidentally came inside you.\nThe comic then goes to describe the pros and cons of the situation.  \"Ruined life\" is listed as a major downside, as he may have caused a girl to become pregnant against her wishes, and may have to father a child with her.  The usage of memes in response to the situation also conveys an uncaring attitude that is likely to put a damper on their relationship even if she did not get pregnant.  On the other hand, it is noted that the sentence could set a new record for the density of memes (most memes packed into the fewest number of words) which can be considered a positive.  This explains the title of the comic, though it will be a very superficial and meaningless record, especially when weighed against the downsides.\nThe reason Cueball chose to construct the sentence with so many memes is not clear.  Since the comic lists \"ruined life\" as one of the cons of this scene, it would seem that the accident, as well as the subsequent use of memes, were not planned.  It's possible that Cueball had too many memes in his head and couldn't think of anything else to say amid the nervous tension.  If this were another character, say Black Hat, then it would be easier to believe that the entire night could have been staged just to give him an opportunity to use the sentence and set a record.\nThe title text references 4chan , a site known for its memes, trolls and other assorted Internet clutter, and sarcastically implies that any advice they might give would in any way be at all helpful. Due to its population of trolls and other unhelpful sorts, advice given by 4chan would normally be useless at best and actively detrimental at worst; however, the title text implies that Cueball regrets that he did not ask 4chan for advice, and maybe have used them for this earlier.\n[Cueball is in a bed with Megan.] Cueball: Sup dawg, I herd you didn't liek forming babby, but I accidentally in your base. [Below the frame:] Cons: Ruined life. Pros: Sentence set the new meme density record.\n"}
{"id":551,"title":"Etch-a-Sketch","image_title":"Etch-a-Sketch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/551","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/etch-a-sketch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/551:_Etch-a-Sketch","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting on a bench playing with a pink Etch-a-Sketch.] Cueball: Hey. If I draw enough lines, I can see what's behind the screen.\n[Close up on the Etch-a-Sketch's screen.] Cueball (off-screen): Oh man, almost...\n[Cueball looks at the Etch-a-Sketch.] Etch-a-Sketch: Hi!\n[Head of Megan appears in the black hole Cueball has drawn on the Etch-a-Sketch screen.] Megan: You're cute!\n[Cueball is looking closer on the Etch-a-Sketch screen.] Cueball: Wha\u2014 Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): I'm the one who draws when you turn the knobs. Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): It's lonely in here.\n[Cueball holds the Etch-a-Sketch further away from his head.] Cueball: It's lonely out here too. Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): I'm glad you found me, then!\n[Cueball holds the Etch-a-Sketch very close to his face. Panels start to break away into thought bubbles.] Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): Let's be friends Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): And never be alone again.\n[The next panel is almost gone in the thought bubbles. In the remaining top left corner there are three pink hearts, the top one of these looks like it was drawn on an Etch-a-Sketch.]\n[From the last two panels the above turns out to have been a fantasy of Cueball. There is a rather large break between the first three lines of panels to the last line. Between the previous line of panels (from the middle panel ) to the last line, there are three large circles, which then continues with seven more inside the next panel down to Cueball sitting with the etch-a-sketch.] Cueball: *Sigh*\n[Close up of the Etch-a-sketch where the black hole Cueball has drawn shows what is really behind the glass; just the mechanics of the machine, with a pin that moves on a cross and removes the sand from the screen.]\n[Zoom back out to Cueball who shakes etch-a-sketch above his head.]\n","explanation":"Cueball notices that if you draw a lot on an Etch-a-Sketch , the aluminum powder in it can be cleared from enough of the screen to allow a view of the interior (as seen here ).\nCueball then proceeds to clear a window into the device, which shows him that there's a girl, Megan , inside whose job is to act as the stylus for the Etch-a-Sketch. She suggest that they be friends, and little hearts pop up.\nAs the dream fades, it then becomes clear that this is just a fantasy, and Cueball sighs at the rather more mundane reality that the lines get drawn by a stylus moving on a simple arrangement of rods. The comic ends with Cueball shaking the Etch-a-Sketch, which resets it and will re-conceal the mechanism.\nThe title text notes that sometimes the mysteries surrounding us turn out to be much more boring than we dream they are.\n[Cueball is sitting on a bench playing with a pink Etch-a-Sketch.] Cueball: Hey. If I draw enough lines, I can see what's behind the screen.\n[Close up on the Etch-a-Sketch's screen.] Cueball (off-screen): Oh man, almost...\n[Cueball looks at the Etch-a-Sketch.] Etch-a-Sketch: Hi!\n[Head of Megan appears in the black hole Cueball has drawn on the Etch-a-Sketch screen.] Megan: You're cute!\n[Cueball is looking closer on the Etch-a-Sketch screen.] Cueball: Wha\u2014 Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): I'm the one who draws when you turn the knobs. Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): It's lonely in here.\n[Cueball holds the Etch-a-Sketch further away from his head.] Cueball: It's lonely out here too. Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): I'm glad you found me, then!\n[Cueball holds the Etch-a-Sketch very close to his face. Panels start to break away into thought bubbles.] Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): Let's be friends Megan (out of the Etch-a-Sketch): And never be alone again.\n[The next panel is almost gone in the thought bubbles. In the remaining top left corner there are three pink hearts, the top one of these looks like it was drawn on an Etch-a-Sketch.]\n[From the last two panels the above turns out to have been a fantasy of Cueball. There is a rather large break between the first three lines of panels to the last line. Between the previous line of panels (from the middle panel ) to the last line, there are three large circles, which then continues with seven more inside the next panel down to Cueball sitting with the etch-a-sketch.] Cueball: *Sigh*\n[Close up of the Etch-a-sketch where the black hole Cueball has drawn shows what is really behind the glass; just the mechanics of the machine, with a pin that moves on a cross and removes the sand from the screen.]\n[Zoom back out to Cueball who shakes etch-a-sketch above his head.]\n"}
{"id":552,"title":"Correlation","image_title":"Correlation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/552","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/correlation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/552:_Correlation","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Megan.] Cueball: I used to think correlation implied causation.\n[Cueball lift his hand while continuing to talk to Megan.] Cueball: Then I took a statistics class. Now I don't.\n[Back to the same situation as the first frame.] Megan: Sounds like the class helped. Cueball: Well, maybe.\n","explanation":"This comic focuses on the apparent difficulty people have in understanding the difference between correlation and causation . When two variables (like blood cholesterol levels and heart disease) are positively correlated, it means that as one variable increases so does the other, whereas a negative correlation means that as one variable increases, the other decreases. The human brain is very good at seeing patterns and deducing rules, and the seemingly natural conclusion is that that the one is leading to the other. In the example, that high blood cholesterol causes heart disease.\nThis may well be true.  The positive correlation is certainly not an argument against such a conclusion.  But it is only one type of evidence, and is certainly not proof.\nThe relationship between diet and blood chemistry and heart disease is a complex one, but simpler examples abound.  For example, if you tallied the sales of sunglasses and incidence of skin cancer by region, you would probably find that there is a high positive correlation.  That is, in locations where many people buy sunglasses, there are also many cases of skin cancer. Here it would seem silly to believe that wearing sunglasses can cause skin cancer, but this is exactly the same thinking that allowed us to conclude that blood cholesterol causes heart disease.  Correlations do have the ability to mislead us.   In this example, both sunglasses and skin cancer are directly affected by a third factor (specifically, a climate where many people expose themselves to the sun).\nIn essence, when two variables are correlated it does not provide evidence that one variable has caused the other. All it says is that their trends move in relation to each other. The correlation could be due to causality, but it could equally be due to other factors, or it could even be a random result.\nIn this situation Cueball is explaining to Megan his realization that correlation is not the same thing as causation. He further explains that his belief changed some time after taking a statistics class. Megan , concludes that the course caused his realization thereby establishing a causation. Cueball's final response of \"Well, maybe.\" is a self-referential joke as there is not enough information to establish causation, only correlation which the class supposedly would have taught him. Being taught something in an academic setting does not necessarily mean a person will readily understand\/realize the concept, hence the lack of absolute causation. It could also be a joke on Megan's behalf. Cueball may know whether his new knowledge is caused by the course, but he points out that Megan can't be certain about the causation.\nThe title text plays on two meanings of the word imply : have as consequence, or insinuate. In the statement correlation does not imply causation , correlation is here seen as a person, giving you subtle hints where to look for the cause. This is a metaphor for research, where the correlation must be investigated further, perhaps in a wider scope or with the consideration of more variables, so that the reason for it is understood. For example, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren noticed that the presence of Helicobacter pylori was highly correlated with duodenal ulcer patients.  They investigated further.  Result:  the Nobel Prize in Medicine.\nIn addition, the title text's reference to waggling eyebrows and gesturing furtively while mouthing \"look over there\" is possibly a reference to the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off , in which the character of Cameron Frye tries to alert Ferris that Ferris's father is in the next cab over, and they are about to be discovered ditching school. What Randall is saying with this reference is that Correlation (if it were a character in a movie) is desperately trying to draw attention to Causation without openly stating this intention, and perhaps that correlation is a good place to start when looking for causation.\nAt the end, Megan suggests that \"the class helped\" (which is a causation), but Cueball is not sold, exactly because correlation (taking the class and improved understanding of causation versus correlation) does not imply causation (taking the class leads to improved understanding).\n[Cueball is talking to Megan.] Cueball: I used to think correlation implied causation.\n[Cueball lift his hand while continuing to talk to Megan.] Cueball: Then I took a statistics class. Now I don't.\n[Back to the same situation as the first frame.] Megan: Sounds like the class helped. Cueball: Well, maybe.\n"}
{"id":553,"title":"Pirate Bay","image_title":"Pirate Bay","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/553","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pirate_bay.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/553:_Pirate_Bay","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] Awaiting the judges' ruling at the Pirate Bay trial.\n[4 Cueball-like guys in a cell: 3 sitting down on a bench and one is standing, presumably looking at the fence.] Cueball: I wish this were in America. Cueball-like guy: Why? Cueball: I hear we'd go before a jury of our peers, and I've always seeded generously.\n","explanation":"The Pirate Bay is a website dedicated to facilitating BitTorrent downloads of popular media. The site's servers were taken down, briefly, and the operators were taken to court in Sweden, back in 2009.\nUnlike normal downloads, files downloaded via Bittorrent are not stored on any web server, but instead transferred in small pieces by other people torrenting the same file; these other people are called \"peers.\" Bittorrent allows websites to provide downloads without using up disk space or bandwidth serving up the entire file; instead, they can host smaller torrent files, which simply describe what the finished file should look like and a few \"tracker\" servers where lists of other peers can be found, and the peers themselves handle all of the bandwidth issues. This approach is used by a number of websites for completely legal downloads (it's popular among smaller game companies providing digital downloads, for instance), but it's mainly associated with piracy.\nHowever, Bittorrent depends on peers actually having the file blocks that you need. People who have already downloaded the entire file, but continue to connect to the network solely to provide that file to others, are called \"seeds,\" and they are an essential part of a healthy torrent. General etiquette demands that people should continue to seed a file until the ratio of data uploaded to data downloaded exceeds 1, although many people feel that one's ratio should be much higher. In any case, closing your torrents as soon as they finish, as mentioned in the title-text, is extremely bad etiquette, so it is punished with nuisance subtitles. This punishment was likely chosen because finding correct and well timed subtitles, in whatever language, for a pirated show tends to be quite hard sometimes.\nThis comic is essentially a pun on this second meaning of the word \"peer\" - in the US court system, a \"jury of your peers\" means a jury composed of everyday people like you, while the Pirate Bay operators interpret it to mean a jury composed of people who they've shared files with in the past. The Cueball that does the talking, and thus is the protagonist of the comic, feels that his approach would give him lenience in the trial, since he has always seeded well, thus ensured those peers had a good downloading experience.\nThe title text shows what punishment this kind of peer group would make if they find you guilty - unremovable subtitles in Hungarian . Many pirated videos originate from countries where no dubbed version is available in the regional language, so the only way to understand what's being said is by applying subtitles. These videos are then uploaded with subtitles still included, causing consternation among downloaders who can understand the spoken words but not the subtitles. Annoying Hungarian subtitles are just an example for a language most people don't understand. Finnish, Czech, or Polish wouldn't be better.\n[Caption above the frame:] Awaiting the judges' ruling at the Pirate Bay trial.\n[4 Cueball-like guys in a cell: 3 sitting down on a bench and one is standing, presumably looking at the fence.] Cueball: I wish this were in America. Cueball-like guy: Why? Cueball: I hear we'd go before a jury of our peers, and I've always seeded generously.\n"}
{"id":554,"title":"Not Enough Work","image_title":"Not Enough Work","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/554","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/not_enough_work.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/554:_Not_Enough_Work","transcript":"[Above the first two panels there is a caption:] Signs your coders don't have enough work to do:\n[Cueball sitting in an office chair at his workstation, with Ponytail standing behind him.] Cueball: I'm almost up to my old typing speed in Dvorak\n[Cueball is standing next to a server rack pointing at it while looking the other way at a Cueball-like guy. There are three sections filled with servers, two of them together, and space for several more above and below and betwen those two and the one at the bottom. Behind the rack wires comes down tot he floor from all three servers together and the wires then exits the panel to he right along the floor.] Cueball: Our servers now support Gopher. Cueball: Just in case.\n[In a frame-less panel Megan is standing near her workstation to the right speaking to Cueball to the left.] Megan: Our pages are now HTML, XHTML-Strict, and Haiku-compliant. Cueball: Haiku? Megan: <div class=\"Main\"> <span ID=\"Marquee\"> Blog!<\/span><\/div>\n[Ponytail sitting in an office chair at her workstation.] Ponytail: Hey! Ponytail: Have you guys seen this webcomic?\n","explanation":"In some companies, programmers can find themselves under-employed. This may be because these companies have little programming work until something breaks or needs upgrading, or perhaps they are between projects, or simply waiting for a go-ahead.  Coders still need to make themselves available to perform emergency fixes, but they may have no other assigned work. This requires them to find constructive ways to spend their time.  Or unconstructive, if that is more fun.\nDvorak is a keyboard layout that was proposed in 1936 as an alternative to the existing, entrenched QWERTY layout, developed in the 1870s. The QWERTY keyboard is the standard in the US, but some features in its layout are  based on mechanical considerations rather than the optimum placement for typing speed. For example, common letter combinations such as 'st' and 'th' had to be arranged so that their operating levers were separated from each other, lest they cause jams and slow down the typist. More than sixty years later, such mechanical considerations could be overcome, and the DVORAK keyboard layout was made with typing efficiency in mind.\nThe Dvorak keyboard was ultimately unsuccessful. It still persists today, but has never threatened the dominance of the QWERTY keyboard.  Even if the Dvorak layout is  more efficient (which is still a matter of debate, see the uncomfortable truth in 561: Well ), QWERTY was and is the standard. This means that every keyboard user has to learn QWERTY anyway, and there is insufficient benefit in spending the time to learn a new layout, especially when you would have to switch back and forth between Dvorak and QWERTY as the situation demands.\nTherefore, even seriously considering the switch is a sign that you really have nothing better to do.  Another joke is that even though the coder has plenty of spare time on his hands to practice on Dvorak, he has only been able to 'almost' match his old typing speed.\nThis was the first comic to refer to Dvorak, but since then it has become a recurrent theme on xkcd. A later comic, 1445: Efficiency , mentions, in the title text, how you could waste lots of time testing to see if Dvorak is faster.\nGopher is a defunct internet protocol, which has been completely superseded by HTTP . It's a perfect example of the kind of thing a programmer might implement in the absence of other, more useful work. (As an aside, the protocol is named for the mascot of the University of Minnesota, where it was developed.)\nHTML and XHTML are markup languages used to describe web documents. XHTML-strict is a more restricted version of HTML that excludes certain redundant tags like <center>, which is theoretically no longer necessary now that <div> and <span> exist. Haiku , on the other hand, is a kind of Japanese poetry. Rather than having a rhyming meter like Western poetry, Japanese poetry has strict restrictions on syllable count; a haiku must contain three lines, containing 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively. The section of code given is HTML markup, and would be read by a web developer like this:\nDiv class equals Main Span ID equals Marquee Blog! end span end div (or alternatively slash span slash div)\nWhich can be divided in syllables like this:\nDiv - class - e - quals - Main Span - I - D - e - quals - Mar - quee Blog! - end - span - end - div\nThis meets the syllable requirements. Restricting yourself to writing markup in this form would be extremely challenging and time-consuming and pointless, so it, too, is a good sign that coders need more real work to do. The title text notes that if you are one of those assholes that are actually pronouncing the angle-brackets, then it would be even harder to write HTML in Haiku format. \"Left angle bracket\" and \"right angle bracket\" take up five syllables each on their own. (The asshole part is Randall's opinion about those who do pronounce <>). Haiku was mentioned later in 622: Haiku Proof .\nFinally, the last panel mentions the biggest timesink of them all: webcomics ! [This is probably self referential.] (Or, even worse, wikis devoted to explaining the jokes in CERTAIN webcomics .)\nA haiku-compliant programming language does in fact exist: David Morgan-Mar (a creator of many esoteric and parodic languages) invented Haifu , a language that will only compile if it is arranged into subsets of 5 + 7 + 5 syllables. Unlike the HTML example in the comic, Haifu derives its functions and syntax from concepts in Eastern philosophy (such as naming its variable types after the five elements , replacing true and false with yin and yang , and defining arithmetic in terms of creation and destruction).\nThe webcomic referred to in the last panel is most likely Xkcd (setting up a Deadpool-like scenario?)\n[Above the first two panels there is a caption:] Signs your coders don't have enough work to do:\n[Cueball sitting in an office chair at his workstation, with Ponytail standing behind him.] Cueball: I'm almost up to my old typing speed in Dvorak\n[Cueball is standing next to a server rack pointing at it while looking the other way at a Cueball-like guy. There are three sections filled with servers, two of them together, and space for several more above and below and betwen those two and the one at the bottom. Behind the rack wires comes down tot he floor from all three servers together and the wires then exits the panel to he right along the floor.] Cueball: Our servers now support Gopher. Cueball: Just in case.\n[In a frame-less panel Megan is standing near her workstation to the right speaking to Cueball to the left.] Megan: Our pages are now HTML, XHTML-Strict, and Haiku-compliant. Cueball: Haiku? Megan: <div class=\"Main\"> <span ID=\"Marquee\"> Blog!<\/span><\/div>\n[Ponytail sitting in an office chair at her workstation.] Ponytail: Hey! Ponytail: Have you guys seen this webcomic?\n"}
{"id":555,"title":"Two Mirrors","image_title":"Two Mirrors","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/555","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/two_mirrors.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/555:_Two_Mirrors","transcript":"[Megan sets up a full mirror facing a bathroom-counter mirror.]\n[Megan looks through the bathroom counter mirror to see the infinite reflections.]\nMegan: Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.\n[Megan ducks as the infinite Bloody Marys pop out between the two mirrors above her head.] RAAGHHHHH\nIn the right-most panel, Megan can still be seen standing in the right mirror even though she had ducked down at that point.\n","explanation":"In folklore, Bloody Mary is a legendary ghost or spirit conjured to reveal the future. She is said to appear in a mirror when her name is called multiple times (mainly 3). The Bloody Mary apparition may be benign or malevolent, depending on historic variations of the legend. The Bloody Mary appearances are mostly \"witnessed\" in teenage group participation games, often as part of a game of truth or dare. This is Bloody Mary's first appearance in xkcd, the second being 2364: Parity Conservation .\nIn this comic, Megan sets up two mirrors facing each other, in which reflections bounce back and forth between the mirrors until the mirrors absorb all the light. She then says \"Bloody Mary\" three times (as in the folklore) before ducking, conjuring an infinite number of spirits who jump from the mirror towards each other. It's not clear if they simply collide, or pass into the opposing mirror. Megan may be attempting an experiment either in particle physics upon colliding mirror matter or bridging Mirror Universes by enabling Bloody Mary\u2019s opposing characterizations to interact with each other, or both.\nDouglas Hofstadter (also referenced in 917: Hofstadter ) is the author of G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop . In the former book, among many other discussions of infinite loops, he points a television camera at the screen on which its image is projected, forming an endless series of screens similar to panel 2 of this comic. In the latter book he focuses on the idea of minds being self-referential. \"In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference\". This blends with the idea of the images of the person looking in the mirror being reflected endlessly.\n[Megan sets up a full mirror facing a bathroom-counter mirror.]\n[Megan looks through the bathroom counter mirror to see the infinite reflections.]\nMegan: Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.\n[Megan ducks as the infinite Bloody Marys pop out between the two mirrors above her head.] RAAGHHHHH\nIn the right-most panel, Megan can still be seen standing in the right mirror even though she had ducked down at that point.\n"}
{"id":556,"title":"Alternative Energy Revolution","image_title":"Alternative Energy Revolution","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/556","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alternative_energy_revolution.jpg","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/556:_Alternative_Energy_Revolution","transcript":"[A field with seven wind turbines is silhouetted against a dusk sky. One of the turbines is much closer than the others. The panel is double height and width of the two next panels to the right.]\n[Cueball standing and Megan sitting on the ground are overlooking the wind turbines.] Cueball: I'm all for green energy, but those turbines creep me out. They remind me of War of the Worlds, or the Tripod books.\n[While the two are in the same position but longer to the left in the panel wiggly lines form around the last word to indicate a high rumbling sound.] Megan: They are unnerving. Cueball: I can't shake the feeling that at any moment they'll\u2014 Rumble\n[The next line in the comic has five small square panels:] [A leg begins to split off one wind turbine.] Crack\n[The leg separates from the body of the wind turbine.]\n[The new leg lands on the ground.] Boom\n[Another leg begins to split off the other side of the wind turbine's body.] Crack\n[The new leg hits the ground, forming a tripod base.] Boom\n[A panel even wider than the first, but the same height as the 2nd and 3rd panel. Four of the wind turbines rampage across the field. Six smoke plumes rise from the ground where there are also nine to ten distinct red fires burning. The turbines move towards towers and buildings to the right.]\n[Cueball and Megan are now both standing. This panel and the last three panels in the last row is all the same size, a third of the total comic in width and the same height as the previous panel.] Megan: Oh no. Cueball: Al Gore, you've doomed us all. Megan: It's coming this way! Cueball: Run!\n[One of the enormous tripod wind turbine feet lands right behind the running couple, sending debris flying.] Boom\n[Cueball and Megan run up a small hill (that continue up in the next panel).] Megan: What now? Cueball: Someone has to stop them. Megan: But who could- Voice (off panel): Stand aside!\n[A man with a black hat  and a beard sits mounted on a horse at the top of the hill, lance at the ready.]\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are looking at modern \" windmills \" (known as wind turbines ) harnessing wind energy into electrical energy. They comment that there's something creepy about the windmills. They allude to the book The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (the Jeff Wayne musical version of The War of the Worlds has paintings of the Martian tripods somewhat like these turbines) and also to John Christopher's Tripods trilogy, a young adult series of books that is also about aliens who ride in walking tripods.\nSuddenly the windmills' pylons split into three legs, becoming the tripods suggested.\nThey exclaim that Al Gore has doomed us all. Gore is a former Vice President of the United States, known for his environmental activism and promotion of green energy sources, relevant because wind turbines like the ones here are one of the alternative energy sources he supports.\nIn the final frame, the seventeenth-century literary figure Don Quixote arrives. Randall's depiction seems to be inspired by the drawing by Pablo Picasso . In the original story, Don Quixote is a wandering knight of questionable sanity who fights a windmill, which he believes to be a giant. Hence, he is the appropriate person [ citation needed ] to deal with this threat.\nThe title is a joke on the phrase \"Alternative Energy Revolution,\" which normally refers to replacing of harmful power sources with eco-friendly options. However, in this case, the Alternative Energy sources are literally rising up in a revolution against humanity, while their rotor blades are revolving.\nThe title text is another reference to The War of the Worlds : \"But there are no bacteria in Mars... when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed... By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers.\" Of course this time we are only saved because we \u2014 in spite of having evolved \u2014 still produce insane members of our species: some of them occasionally being crazy in a practical way (as Don Quixote's special powers lie in defeating windmills).\nWind turbines also appear in later comics. In 1119: Undoing , Randall still seems to dislike them. In 1378: Turbine , the turbine is alive as it is in this comic, though its talking may simply be anthropomorphism.\n[A field with seven wind turbines is silhouetted against a dusk sky. One of the turbines is much closer than the others. The panel is double height and width of the two next panels to the right.]\n[Cueball standing and Megan sitting on the ground are overlooking the wind turbines.] Cueball: I'm all for green energy, but those turbines creep me out. They remind me of War of the Worlds, or the Tripod books.\n[While the two are in the same position but longer to the left in the panel wiggly lines form around the last word to indicate a high rumbling sound.] Megan: They are unnerving. Cueball: I can't shake the feeling that at any moment they'll\u2014 Rumble\n[The next line in the comic has five small square panels:] [A leg begins to split off one wind turbine.] Crack\n[The leg separates from the body of the wind turbine.]\n[The new leg lands on the ground.] Boom\n[Another leg begins to split off the other side of the wind turbine's body.] Crack\n[The new leg hits the ground, forming a tripod base.] Boom\n[A panel even wider than the first, but the same height as the 2nd and 3rd panel. Four of the wind turbines rampage across the field. Six smoke plumes rise from the ground where there are also nine to ten distinct red fires burning. The turbines move towards towers and buildings to the right.]\n[Cueball and Megan are now both standing. This panel and the last three panels in the last row is all the same size, a third of the total comic in width and the same height as the previous panel.] Megan: Oh no. Cueball: Al Gore, you've doomed us all. Megan: It's coming this way! Cueball: Run!\n[One of the enormous tripod wind turbine feet lands right behind the running couple, sending debris flying.] Boom\n[Cueball and Megan run up a small hill (that continue up in the next panel).] Megan: What now? Cueball: Someone has to stop them. Megan: But who could- Voice (off panel): Stand aside!\n[A man with a black hat  and a beard sits mounted on a horse at the top of the hill, lance at the ready.]\n"}
{"id":557,"title":"Students","image_title":"Students","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/557","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/students.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/557:_Students","transcript":"[Megan as a teacher speaks to a crowded classroom, where all students are grayed out except one of the Cueball students who is drawn in the normal black line.] Megan: Your projects are due today by 5:00 PM. Cueball (thinking): ...I didn't even know we had one.\n[Zoom in in Cueball at his small desk still thinking. No other students are visible, but the desk next to his is shown although also fading out.] Cueball (thinking): Wait. I don't think I've been attending. I must have forgotten I had this class. Shitshitshit.\n[Cueball is sitting at his desk, but now seen from the side, looking from the edge of his desk. The very right part of the drawing, with Cueball's back and chair, now begins to fade.] Cueball (thinking): Okay, I'm gonna fail. Will it hold me back? I just want to get out of here. I thought I had finished my requirements already.\n[Cueball takes his hand to his face. This panel fades so much it is only about half a panel. Even the frame around the panel disappears.] Cueball (thinking): In fact, I think I remember graduating. What the hell is\u2014\n[As the previous scene completely fades we find Cueball waking up in his bed with small blobs above his head to indicate the dream disappearing.]\n[Caption below the last three panels of the comic:] Fun Fact: Decades from now, with school a distant memory, you'll still be having this dream.\n","explanation":"This was the first comic with one of Randall's fun facts .\nStudents often dream they have assignments they have forgotten about that are due in a very short time period, leaving no time to complete the assignment, thus filling them with the feeling of impending failure. The panic and helplessness of being unable to complete the work in time only subsides when the dreamer wakes from the nightmare , although sometimes they wake to a reality where there actually is a looming deadline.\nThis comic suggests these dreams continue well after graduation, although there may be a nagging feeling that \"I thought I completed everything and graduated\".\nThe title text refers to the Green Ranger from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers , or, indeed, any of the many Power Rangers\/Super Sentai seasons with a green ranger. Crisco is a brand of vegetable shortening, a fat that is solid at room temperature and frequently used in baking. The joke is that Randall has a very odd recurring dream, and wants reassurance that he is not the only one... but he likely is!\nEleven years later, Megan tells Cueball that just the thought of being in a crowded classroom (even without concerns about an assignment) is scary enough in comic 2285: Recurring Nightmare . But that was due to the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020.\n[Megan as a teacher speaks to a crowded classroom, where all students are grayed out except one of the Cueball students who is drawn in the normal black line.] Megan: Your projects are due today by 5:00 PM. Cueball (thinking): ...I didn't even know we had one.\n[Zoom in in Cueball at his small desk still thinking. No other students are visible, but the desk next to his is shown although also fading out.] Cueball (thinking): Wait. I don't think I've been attending. I must have forgotten I had this class. Shitshitshit.\n[Cueball is sitting at his desk, but now seen from the side, looking from the edge of his desk. The very right part of the drawing, with Cueball's back and chair, now begins to fade.] Cueball (thinking): Okay, I'm gonna fail. Will it hold me back? I just want to get out of here. I thought I had finished my requirements already.\n[Cueball takes his hand to his face. This panel fades so much it is only about half a panel. Even the frame around the panel disappears.] Cueball (thinking): In fact, I think I remember graduating. What the hell is\u2014\n[As the previous scene completely fades we find Cueball waking up in his bed with small blobs above his head to indicate the dream disappearing.]\n[Caption below the last three panels of the comic:] Fun Fact: Decades from now, with school a distant memory, you'll still be having this dream.\n"}
{"id":558,"title":"1000 Times","image_title":"1000 Times","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/558","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1000_times.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/558:_1000_Times","transcript":"[Two almost identical panels are shown with Ponytail sitting behind desk. Above each panel there are a caption and the text in the sign of each panel is slightly different]\n[Left panel caption above and sign in the panel:] Dishonest Sign: Bailout: $170 billion Bonuses: $165 million\n[Right panel caption above and sign in the panel:] Honest: Sign: Bailout: $170,000 million Bonuses: $165 million\n[Caption below the panels:] Dear news organizations: Stop giving large numbers without context or proper comparison.\nThe difference between a million and a billion is the difference between me having a sip of wine and 30 seconds with your daughter, and a bottle of gin and a night with her.\n","explanation":"When amounts of U.S. dollars (or other currencies of comparable size) in the millions, billions, or trillions are mentioned in conversation, the impression left by the cited number is not some specific amount, but rather some generically large amount of money. A billion is a thousand times larger than a million, but if one is not paying close attention, they both mentally register as being \"very large\" or \"life-changing if they ended up in my bank account\", rather than being as different as \"one dollar\" and \"a thousand dollars\" are.\nIn this comic, Randall notes how news organizations take advantage of this fact to make certain figures sound comparable, when the are actually not. The \" Bailout \" referred to is the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), wherein money was cheaply loaned to large banks by the government to help them remain solvent. The \"Bonuses\" are the subsequent bonuses paid by those banks to their employees.\nCiting the size of the bailout in billions and the size of the bonuses in millions gives the misleading impression that the bulk of the bailout was spent on bonuses - in particular to the very traders who caused the problem that cause the need for TARP in the first place - making for much more outrageous and therefore attention-grabbing story. While the news organizations are not lying per se, citing the figures using the same unit makes it clearer that the bonus payments were a tiny fraction of the bailout which is not as obviously outrageous.  The news organizations, as news organizations are, were choosing the presentation that was most attention-grabbing over the presentation that conveys the information most accurately.\nBelow the two comic panels Randall asks the news organizations to stop using this way to misleadingly represent large numbers. He then proceeds to compares the difference between a million and a billion using an analogue that a newscaster may understand. Proportionally speaking, if a million is like Randall taking a sip of wine and spending 30 seconds (presumably talking over the wine) with your daughter, then a billion would be like him drinking a bottle of Gin and spending a night with her (presumably having drunken sex with her). Note that a billion is 1000 millions, and 1000 times 30 seconds does indeed equal 8 hours and 20 minutes, or about \"one night\". And a bottle of gin (750 mL, 40% ABV) contains 1000 times as much alcohol as a small sip of wine (3 mL, 10% ABV)\nThe title text is a reference to a semi-famous case where Verizon Wireless quoted a rate of 0.002\u00a2 (which equals $0.00002) per kB on their data plan, but charged $0.002. They could not see the difference.\n[Two almost identical panels are shown with Ponytail sitting behind desk. Above each panel there are a caption and the text in the sign of each panel is slightly different]\n[Left panel caption above and sign in the panel:] Dishonest Sign: Bailout: $170 billion Bonuses: $165 million\n[Right panel caption above and sign in the panel:] Honest: Sign: Bailout: $170,000 million Bonuses: $165 million\n[Caption below the panels:] Dear news organizations: Stop giving large numbers without context or proper comparison.\nThe difference between a million and a billion is the difference between me having a sip of wine and 30 seconds with your daughter, and a bottle of gin and a night with her.\n"}
{"id":559,"title":"No Pun Intended","image_title":"No Pun Intended","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/559","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/no_pun_intended.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/559:_No_Pun_Intended","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] My Hobby: Appending \"no pun intended\" to lines with no pun in them.\n[Cueball is talking to Beret Guy.] Cueball: I think he's internalized his girlfriend's attitudes - no pun intended - and so...\n[The next panel is inlaid partly over the first panel. Beret Guy is thinking. Above his thought bubble is a caption:] Three hours later: Beret Guy (thinking): \"Internalized?\" Lied? Analyzed? Or is it \"attitudes\"? Dammit.\n","explanation":"\"No pun intended\" is an idiom meaning that something just said wasn't meant to be a pun , implying that the preceding statement could be interpreted as one. As done in the comic, following a non-pun with \"no pun intended\", although factually accurate, breaks this implication and confuses listeners who will be trying to work out which part of the sentence could have been interpreted as a pun.\nIn this comic, which is part of the My Hobby series, Cueball uses this tactic to confuse Beret Guy , who spends the next three hours trying to understand what pun there could have been in Cueball's sentence: I think he's internalized his girlfriend's attitudes . The guy Cueball talks about seems to have taken over ( internalized ) all his girlfriends attitudes, values, standards and opinions, putting these instead of those he has from his own identity or sense of self. This is probably sad, but there is no pun in the sentence.\nBeret Guy, however, has been fooled by the addition of no pun intended and tries to overanalyze the sentence - did Cueball mean Lied when saying Interna li z ed or was it Analyzed or even Attitudes he meant; could that be the pun? Since there was no pun, he will never find a solution. This was Cueball's plan all along.\nIt seems like Beret Guy, after three hours, finally gives up when he says Dammit . This then leads to the title text joke.\nUnfortunately for the hobbyist, blank puns default to sexual innuendos, the most notorious example being \"If You Know What I Mean.\"\nThe title text elicits a similar confused reaction, as the most literate people will be more likely to want to spell out \" damn it \" rather than using the also correct abbreviated form with morphed spelling, dammit , which is referred to as with two m's because many people ( mainly in the US it seems) contract damn it to damnit , which is the \"wrong way\".\n[Caption above the panel:] My Hobby: Appending \"no pun intended\" to lines with no pun in them.\n[Cueball is talking to Beret Guy.] Cueball: I think he's internalized his girlfriend's attitudes - no pun intended - and so...\n[The next panel is inlaid partly over the first panel. Beret Guy is thinking. Above his thought bubble is a caption:] Three hours later: Beret Guy (thinking): \"Internalized?\" Lied? Analyzed? Or is it \"attitudes\"? Dammit.\n"}
{"id":560,"title":"Lithium Batteries","image_title":"Lithium Batteries","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/560","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lithium_batteries.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/560:_Lithium_Batteries","transcript":"[Caption above the timeline:] Timeline of commercial uses of lithium batteries:\n[The panel has a timeline that goes from past to present. The timeline has 4 notches on it. Reading from left to right, with the scale below the line and the description above each notch are the following:] Past\n[The first notch, closest to the past side, has a picture of an old man with a walking stick.] Pacemakers\n[The second notch has an image of a man in a car, who is talking on his cell phone.] Phones for Rich Business People\n[The third notch, has a teen talking on his cellphone.] Phones for Teenagers\n[The forth notch, closest to the present on the timeline, has an image of a radio controlled toy plane box with a price tag written on it.] Really cheap R\/C planes and helicopters Box: $10\nPresent\n[Caption below the panel:] Life would be so much better if I were one of those people who aged backward.\n","explanation":"Randall muses that his life would have been better if he aged in reverse; this idea is based on a timeline of the usage of lithium-ion batteries . The reasoning is that each of these uses would come to realization when he most needed it; cheap RC planes as a child, a cellphone when he is a teenager and also later for when he is a successful businessman and finally a pacemaker when he is old.\nThe time-reversed aging is probably a direct reference to \" The Curious Case of Benjamin Button \", by F. Scott Fitzgerald , a film of which was released in December 2008, a few months before this comic appeared.  Randall has used this theme before in 270: Merlin , referencing another backward-time-travelling character (in that case, from \" The Once and Future King \" by T. H. White ).\nLithium-ion batteries have the highest energy density of any widely available battery, and for this reason are commonly used in portable electronic devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones, and also the newest airliners such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner .\nIn the title text, Randall states that he is a big fan of cheap radio-controlled aircraft (now powered by cheap lithium-ion batteries), which he most likely wishes would have been available when he was a child. That these have now become so cheap has undoubtedly been the inspiration for this comic.\nAs such, he has an uncontrollable, instinctive urge to make up for his childhood lack of RC aircraft by buying every one he sees compulsively, if they cost less than $30, in spite of him normally being a frugal person. ( Frugality has been defined as the tendency to acquire goods and services in a restrained manner). This tendency has now become a financial problem since cheap RC aircraft have become more and more plentiful, whereas if Randall aged backwards, this wouldn't be an issue - as children rarely make purchases, and adult Randall would live in a world where RCs were still expensive. The one in the comic is priced at only $10.\nThe concept of experiencing events in reverse is also explored in 1869: Positive and Negative Reviews .\n[Caption above the timeline:] Timeline of commercial uses of lithium batteries:\n[The panel has a timeline that goes from past to present. The timeline has 4 notches on it. Reading from left to right, with the scale below the line and the description above each notch are the following:] Past\n[The first notch, closest to the past side, has a picture of an old man with a walking stick.] Pacemakers\n[The second notch has an image of a man in a car, who is talking on his cell phone.] Phones for Rich Business People\n[The third notch, has a teen talking on his cellphone.] Phones for Teenagers\n[The forth notch, closest to the present on the timeline, has an image of a radio controlled toy plane box with a price tag written on it.] Really cheap R\/C planes and helicopters Box: $10\nPresent\n[Caption below the panel:] Life would be so much better if I were one of those people who aged backward.\n"}
{"id":561,"title":"Well","image_title":"Well","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/561","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/well.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/561:_Well","transcript":"[A sign sits by a well.] The Uncomfortable Truths Well\n[A Cueball-like guy and Ponytail are lined up for the well; the guy throws a coin in.] Well: For a universe that's supposed to be half Chinese, Firefly sure doesn't have any Asians.\n[The guy is gone, Cueball and Megsn arrives as a couple lining up behind Ponytail; Ponytail throws a coin in.] Well: There's no solid evidence DVORAK's better than QWERTY. The standard histories are urban legends.\n[Just the couple remain; Cueball throws another coin in.] Well: You've never said \"I love you\" and meant it. It was always just words.\n[Megan has presumably also thrown a coin in the well. This is not shown as for the first three. Cueball waits for her on the other side of the well.] Well: You meant it every time.\n","explanation":"This is the first comic in the Well series. It was followed by 568: Well 2 .\nUncomfortable truths are truths that exist, but no one wants to have to think about them.\nThe first is about Firefly , the TV series created by Joss Whedon and canceled by FOX , due to poor ratings performance, after airing the first 13 episodes out-of-order . In Firefly , the main languages spoken are English and Chinese (supposedly in equal measure), because China was the only other world power besides America to go to space (Joss Whedon's own explanation on the DVDs). However, there are very few actual Asians on-screen.\nThe second is about two different keyboard layouts, QWERTY and Dvorak. Early typewriters used to jam easily if two nearby keys were struck at about the same time. To work around this, the QWERTY layout, named after the first six letters on its keys, scattered common letter combinations around the keyboard, thus greatly avoiding the problem. (A common myth states that this was done to slow typists down; it was the opposite.) Later typewriter mechanisms were less prone to jamming, which prompted a few people to try to create alternative layouts, such as Blickensderfer's DHIATENSOR layout in 1892, or the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard in 1932. Such layouts never really caught on; by then, typists were all very used to the QWERTY layout, and were unwilling to take the time and effort to learn a new one.\nIn the Dvorak layout, August Dvorak placed the most frequently used keys at the most easily accessible places; Dvorak's advocates claim this reduces typing effort and repetitive strain (as mentioned in the title text) while increasing typing speed and accuracy. However, rigorous, unbiased studies have yet to clearly show significant superiority. (As the title text mentions, the most commonly cited study in Dvorak's favor was overseen by Dvorak himself during his US Navy service in World War II.)\nThis was the second comic to refer to Dvorak after 554: Not Enough Work , and since then it has become a recurrent theme on xkcd.\nThe third and fourth truths are connected: they involve the two people receiving them and (presumably) their relationship with each other. Every time Cueball said \"I love you\" he never really meant it; whereas Megan meant it every time she said \"I love you\". This is very uncomfortable for both! This could also be intentional, since in 568, a person called Mike (who happens to be a friend of Megan ), is actually hiding inside the well and tells these uncomfortable \"truths\", he would have intentionally broken Cueball and Megan up to be able to manipulate Megan in the next installment.\nThe title text perpetuates the Emacs vs. vi debate . Both Emacs and Vim are text editors that are frequently used as general-language editors of source code. The issue is that, while Emacs is more user-friendly and customizable, vim is more lightweight while needing few keystrokes in text editing. Because of this balance, fans of Emacs and fans of vim end up fighting each other.\n[A sign sits by a well.] The Uncomfortable Truths Well\n[A Cueball-like guy and Ponytail are lined up for the well; the guy throws a coin in.] Well: For a universe that's supposed to be half Chinese, Firefly sure doesn't have any Asians.\n[The guy is gone, Cueball and Megsn arrives as a couple lining up behind Ponytail; Ponytail throws a coin in.] Well: There's no solid evidence DVORAK's better than QWERTY. The standard histories are urban legends.\n[Just the couple remain; Cueball throws another coin in.] Well: You've never said \"I love you\" and meant it. It was always just words.\n[Megan has presumably also thrown a coin in the well. This is not shown as for the first three. Cueball waits for her on the other side of the well.] Well: You meant it every time.\n"}
{"id":562,"title":"Parking","image_title":"Parking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/562","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/parking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/562:_Parking","transcript":"[Black Hat is in a car driving around a parking lot.]\n[Black Hat's car pulls up next to a red car, that's parked over a line at an angle that block two spaces.]\n[Black Hat gets out of his car.] SLAM\n[Black Hat is now holding a blow torch and a rotary saw, He's also wearing goggles and fuel tanks on his back. The blow torch is lit.] Fwoosh\n[The badly parked car has been cut in half along a diagonal, and the half of the car that was in the second slot has been moved into the same slot as the rest of the car. Black Hat's car occupies the newly freed space.]\nBlack Hat, in the fourth panel, is also seen in the \"Your Ad Here\" screen.\n","explanation":"There are few things so annoying as finding, when a parking lot is full, that someone has parked so carelessly as to take up two spaces.  Even worse, it may have been intentional; they decided to exchange the risk of someone accidentally scratching their car for the risk of someone doing it on purpose, see 1030: Keyed . However, there are also non-violent ways to tackle the problem; politely leave a note , or (if possible) just move their car (whether to its proper alignment or to an impound lot).\nOf course, Black Hat takes the less-traveled path, apparently involving a cutting torch and what looks to be a circular saw . The offending portion of the parked car is sliced off (entirely without surgical precision) and neatly slotted into the remainder of the space. It is now legally parked, but will never become a functional car again. But at least Black Hat finally has space for his own car!\nThis comic may be the one referenced in 496: Secretary: Part 3 , where it is shown that Black Hat '...completely disassembled a car' because 'It was parked across two spaces! It was only fair', or this is the second time that a car has been in the way of him parking, so he has taken matters into his own hands.\nThe title text indicates that a large crowd watched Black Hat at work but refused to identify him, presumably because they feel that the car owner got what he deserved, and possibly because they didn't want to incur Black Hat's wrath.\n[Black Hat is in a car driving around a parking lot.]\n[Black Hat's car pulls up next to a red car, that's parked over a line at an angle that block two spaces.]\n[Black Hat gets out of his car.] SLAM\n[Black Hat is now holding a blow torch and a rotary saw, He's also wearing goggles and fuel tanks on his back. The blow torch is lit.] Fwoosh\n[The badly parked car has been cut in half along a diagonal, and the half of the car that was in the second slot has been moved into the same slot as the rest of the car. Black Hat's car occupies the newly freed space.]\nBlack Hat, in the fourth panel, is also seen in the \"Your Ad Here\" screen.\n"}
{"id":563,"title":"Fermirotica","image_title":"Fermirotica","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/563","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fermirotica.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/563:_Fermirotica","transcript":"[A formula is shown with the variables explained above:] P d Regional population density (e.g. 18,600\/mi\u00b2) X f Average person's frequency of sex (e.g. 80\/year) X d Average duration of sex (e.g. 30 minutes) r=sqrt(2\/(\u03c0*P d *X f *X d )) On average, someone within distance r of you is having sex.\n[Cueball standing in front of an easel.] Cueball: Mmm, That probable couple 150 meters away is so hot. Oh yeah, theoretically work it, baby. From out of frame: Hey! No statistical voyeurism!\n","explanation":"The Fermi paradox describes the contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and the lack of empirical evidence thereof. Age and size of the universe suggest that intelligent life should have occurred somewhere, and that some alien civilizations should have developed technology for interstellar travel . Therefore, one might expect the universe full of life. However, no evidence for any lifeforms on other planets has yet been found by humans. This inconsistency was first noted by Enrico Fermi in 1950 when he posed the question \"Where is everybody?\". The phenomenon, often called The Great Silence , was later examined more thoroughly in a paper by Michael H. Hart .\nA decade after Fermi's observation, Frank Drake formulated the Drake equation , which aims at estimating the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. The formula presents itself as the product of several probabilistic factors which would be required for such a civilization to exist. Several parameters are unknown and the equation assumes that all factors are weighed equally, therefore the equation is not useful for computing any actual result.\nThe comic presents a somewhat related equation which computes the average distance from the observer wherein a couple can be found copulating. (The example parameters given in the comic yield 139 metres.) The implication of the equation is that we are surrounded by sex in our everyday lives. Nevertheless, we rarely encounter couples during the act itself. [ citation needed ] Borrowing from the Fermi paradox, the Fermirotica paradox poses the question: \"Where is everybody having sex?\". Of course, the lack of empirical evidence of couples having sex can easily be explained by the fact that most couples only have intercourse in privacy. A similar approach might also offer an explanation to the original problem: Alien species might conceal themselves from our observations, e.g. in order to avoid interfering in the development of civilizations . This answer to the Fermi Paradox is commonly called zoo hypothesis .\nThe second panel has Cueball sexually aroused by the statistical probability of a couple practising intercourse. This fantasy of his is termed statistical voyeurism by an off-frame speaker, and is evidently upset by it. Possible reasons for being upset are that he considers it an inappropriate use of statistics, or finds voyeurism inappropriate in general, or because it accurately predicts an actual copulation he is aware of and would rather keep private (e.g. the off-frame speaker is actually about to have sex).\nThe title text refers to the Google calculator and praises its capabilities of dimensional analysis , and more specifically unit conversion . Randall assumes that most readers will enter the equation with the example parameters into the Google search engine. The built-in calculator will output the result in the correct SI unit metre , although the population density was given as people per square mile . The second part of the title text states that the examples are nothing more than an educated guess, and that the equation is simplified. In reality, more parameters must be taken into account, e.g. the time of day, since most people will have sex in the evening or night. The insulting suggestion that the probability of sex rises when the reader's (supposedly promiscuous) mother is in town represents a Yo Mama joke .\nNote that this comic was released on April 1st without being an April Fools' Day comic. But Randall made another April Fool on his reader, see the trivia section .\n[A formula is shown with the variables explained above:] P d Regional population density (e.g. 18,600\/mi\u00b2) X f Average person's frequency of sex (e.g. 80\/year) X d Average duration of sex (e.g. 30 minutes) r=sqrt(2\/(\u03c0*P d *X f *X d )) On average, someone within distance r of you is having sex.\n[Cueball standing in front of an easel.] Cueball: Mmm, That probable couple 150 meters away is so hot. Oh yeah, theoretically work it, baby. From out of frame: Hey! No statistical voyeurism!\n"}
{"id":564,"title":"Crossbows","image_title":"Crossbows","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/564","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/crossbows.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/564:_Crossbows","transcript":"[Cueball is pulling a crossbow out of a desk.] Cueball: Why do you have a crossbow in your desk? Megan (off-screen): You don't ?\n[Pan to Megan who looks towards Cueball who is off-screen to the left.] Cueball (off-screen): No\u2014why would\u2014 Megan: You are studying the consequences of Higgs excitation, aren't you? Megan: Like the rest of the lab?\n[Cueball, now carying Megan's crossbow joins her as the panel extends to include another Cueball-like guy to her right, he also carries a crossbow.] Cueball: Yes, but why\u2014 Guy: Maybe he's slow with the math. Megan: Well, he has until Tuesday. Guy: Poor guy.\n","explanation":"There are conflicting theories as to the meaning of this comic.\nIn the first and second interpretations, the title text could refer to literally being the slowest in the lab, and therefore the least able to outrun whatever is making everyone carry crossbows.\nThe proper interpretation of this comic, or whether there even is one, remains an open question.\n[Cueball is pulling a crossbow out of a desk.] Cueball: Why do you have a crossbow in your desk? Megan (off-screen): You don't ?\n[Pan to Megan who looks towards Cueball who is off-screen to the left.] Cueball (off-screen): No\u2014why would\u2014 Megan: You are studying the consequences of Higgs excitation, aren't you? Megan: Like the rest of the lab?\n[Cueball, now carying Megan's crossbow joins her as the panel extends to include another Cueball-like guy to her right, he also carries a crossbow.] Cueball: Yes, but why\u2014 Guy: Maybe he's slow with the math. Megan: Well, he has until Tuesday. Guy: Poor guy.\n"}
{"id":565,"title":"Security Question","image_title":"Security Question","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/565","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/security_question.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/565:_Security_Question","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a computer.] Computer Screen: -Email Account Setup- To verify your identity, we need to ask you a question nobody else could answer.\nComputer Screen: Q: Where are the bodies buried? A: [A text field is shown with \"Behind the\" typed.]\n[Cueball sits back and thinks.]\n[Three stick figures, two wearing police hats and one wearing headphones, watch another computer.] [The same text field is shown with \"Behind the ... nice try.\" typed.] Figure in Headphones: Damn.\n","explanation":"Security questions are sensitive questions that allow a user to retrieve or reset his password if the password is lost or stolen. Because of this powerful function, security questions should be treated just as seriously as passwords. Typical security questions include \"What's your mother's maiden name?\" or \"What's your secondary school?\" and are intended to be easy for the user to answer but hard for anyone else to answer.\nIn this comic, however, the security question is deployed in a strange way, as the question \"Where are the bodies buried?\" assumes that one had buried bodies, hence had killed someone. The question turns out to be a ploy by the police, who were trying to bait Cueball into confessing his crime, as well as revealing the location of the incriminating evidence.\n\"I never\" is a drinking game that somebody says \"I never did something\" to the others. If you never did it, you don't need to drink, otherwise, drink. Since he takes a drink for \"I never hid any bodies SOUTH of Main Street\", the police have narrowed down the search area. The next statement in the game could be \"I never hid any bodies WEST of Central Avenue\" (or whatever road dividing the area), further localizing the bodies to a quarter of the original search area, in a Twenty Questions manner. Of course, by taking the drink Cueball also admits that he buried bodies, though this evidence would not likely be accepted by any court.\n[Cueball sits at a computer.] Computer Screen: -Email Account Setup- To verify your identity, we need to ask you a question nobody else could answer.\nComputer Screen: Q: Where are the bodies buried? A: [A text field is shown with \"Behind the\" typed.]\n[Cueball sits back and thinks.]\n[Three stick figures, two wearing police hats and one wearing headphones, watch another computer.] [The same text field is shown with \"Behind the ... nice try.\" typed.] Figure in Headphones: Damn.\n"}
{"id":566,"title":"Matrix Revisited","image_title":"Matrix Revisited","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/566","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/matrix_revisited.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/566:_Matrix_Revisited","transcript":"[Megan stands below two pieces of text, in a panel that is without a frame.] Today was the ten-year anniversary of the release of The Matrix. I sat down to watch it again. Megan: Holy fuck, ten years ago?\n[The next three panels of the first row and the next two rows spoofs three scenes from The Matrix.]\n[In scene 1 Morpheus with sunglasses and Trinity with hair bun are talking to Cueball-Neo. Morpheus has his hands together.] Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can explain what the matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.\n[Trinity lifts her hand.] Trinity: Sure you can. It's a computer simulation in which you live, thinking it's reality. Neo: Oh.\n[Morpheus takes his hands down and turns around glaring at Trinity who has also taken her hand down.] Trinity: ...What? Trinity: Look, maybe you just suck at explaining.\n[In scene 2 Morpheus is talking to Neo while holding a red pill and a blue pill. To the far right is a part of a table.] Morpheus: ...Or you take the red pill, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.\n[Neo takes both pills from Morpheus.]\n[Neo crushes both the red and blue pills on a table top.] Crush\n[Neo snorts the resulting purple powder through a pipe he holds up to his face (his nose).] Snort\n[Morpheus and Neo are shown upside down in a frame with inverted colors, i.e., black background with white lines.] Morpheus: Now look what you've done. Neo: Where are we? Morpheus: I have no idea.\n[In scene 3 Neo, wearing a long, black trench coat, at a metal detector, is accosted by the Cueball-like security guard.] Guard: Please remove any keys, metallic items, weapons\u2014\n[Neo steps close to the guard and opens his trench coat towards the guard, who is facing the reader. The reader can't see what Neo has under his coat.]\n[Same scene as above, but side view: Neo, on the left, is opening his coat toward the guard, who is on the right and seems to be looking down. Nobody speaks.]\n[Same scene as above but the guard now looks up to Neos face and finally speaks:] Guard: Eww.\n[In the last row of the comic we see three characters that have obviously just finished watching The Matrix. Cueball is sitting on the floor nearest to the TV, Megan is sitting on the floor, farther from the TV and a Cueball-like friend is sitting on an armchair, farthest from the TV.] Cueball: I forgot how good that movie was. Friend: Wanna put on the other two?\n[Cueball, still sitting has turned to face Megan. They exchange looks without speaking.]\n[View of room, which is now empty, as is the chair. Sounds comes from off-screen to the right.] Crash Wham Friend (off-screen): Ow! Ow!\n[Cueball and Megan are back in the room, zoomed in so the TV is no longer visible, but the chair is and it remains empty. The friend is nowhere to be seen.] Cueball: I forgot how good that movie was. Megan: Too bad they never made any sequels. Cueball: True.\n","explanation":"In the first frame it is stated that the comic was released on the anniversary of the movie The Matrix . This is not true. The Matrix was released 31 March 1999 in the US, although it was next released in Australia on 8 April 1999, ten years before the release of this comic. But maybe Randall drew the comic (and had watched the movie) on the true 10 year anniversary day.\nMegan is shocked when she realizes it is already ten years ago that The Matrix came out. This is an effect Randall has used to make you feel old several times (for instance he mentions The Matrix again two years later in 891: Movie Ages .)\nIn The Matrix , almost all of humanity lives in a computer simulation. Many years ago, robots took over the real world (not the simulation), and placed humans into the simulation while their body heat generated power for the robots. A few people have escaped from the Matrix, and they are on a mission with others to free the human race from the robots. The title of the strip is a reference to the documentary on the filming of The Matrix : The Matrix Revisited .\nIn the first three rows of the comic we see three famous scenes from The Matrix parodied by Randall. The characters are Morpheus , with sunglasses; Neo , as Cueball in the first two scenes and with a black coat in the third scene; Trinity , as Hairbun ; and a security guard in the third scene, as another Cueball-like guy.\nIn the first scene Morpheus tells Neo that one cannot explain what the Matrix is and that he must see it for himself to understand. Morpheus is very mysterious as he tempts Neo to take a look himself, which, in the movie, leads to the next scene. In this comic, however, Trinity makes Morpheus look foolish by clearly explaining the Matrix in a single, simple phrase, and then telling him that he must suck at explaining. (The actual quote from the movie is no one can be told what the Matrix is , which makes more sense: even after being rescued from the Matrix, Neo at first refuses to accept that his entire life has been a simulation, becoming highly distraught when confronted with that truth. Morpheus later mentions that for this reason, it is unusual to rescue people past a certain age.)\nIn the next scene Morpheus tries to ignore Trinity's remark and continues by showing Neo two pills, one red and one blue, and tells Neo that he can either take the blue pill and return to the simulation (the Matrix), never to hear about the Matrix again, or he can take the red pill and leave the Matrix, and \"see how deep the rabbit hole goes\" (a reference to Alice in Wonderland ). In the movie, Neo takes the red pill. In the comic, however, he mixes the two pills then snorts the purple powder he has created as though it was an illegal drug such as cocaine, and apparently winds up in a bizarre upside down and inverted dimension, presumably caused by his 'Drug Trip'. Even Morpheus now has no idea where they are. Note that the inversion of both color and orientation could be intended to evoke the idea of capturing an image on film (i.e. a film negative), which is really the only place where Neo and Morpheus exist. It is possible that the combination of pills allowed Neo to break through another layer of the simulation. Alternatively, this could simply be Randall trying to explain that they are in an alternate dimension whilst still remaining within the constraints of stick figures on white and black backgrounds.\nWhat leads up to the third scene is when Neo and Trinity must save Morpheus, who has been captured by agents of the simulation. They obtain many guns and load them into trenchcoats. In the shown scene Neo is stopped at a security checkpoint in a building in the Matrix. A security guard tells him to remove any metallic items, since the scanner has shown him to have metal on his person, such as keys, and place them in a bin, then walk through the scanner again. In the movie, he opens his trenchcoat, revealing a myriad of weapons and dispatching all of the guards with the assistance of Trinity. In the comic, however, Neo opens his trenchcoat, but the guard's response of \"eww\" implies that Neo is otherwise naked and the guard is disgusted by his display of his genitals. It is possible that Neo, on account of having many metal implants (seen in the movie as being in the bodies of everyone raised by the robots), is trying to remove his implants, thus starting to take his clothes off.\nAfter watching the movie, Cueball turns to his friends (Megan and another Cueball-like guy) and exclaims that he had forgotten how great the movie is. When his friend suggests that they put on the other two sequels, there is a beat panel where Megan and Cueball look at each other, then they beat up the offender off-panel.\nThe two sequels to The Matrix are widely regarded as inferior to the original, with some fans pretending they don't exist . This is what happens when Megan and Cueball return, and Cueball repeats his statement about how good it was. Then Megan is saddened by the fact they never made any sequels and Cueball agrees. Thus trying hard (even violently) to forget those sequels.\nOn IMDb the original movie was still in the top 20 on their top 250 chart in July 2015, with an average of 8.7 vs. only 7.2 and 6.7 to the sequels (though even those two scores are relatively high compared to other action titles).\n9 years (and one day) later Randall made the comic 1978: Congressional Testimony where the movie The Terminator is mentioned. In the title text a similar line of thought as the one in the bottom strip of this comic is made. The third movie in the Terminator Franchise was so great that Skynet sent back a robot to prevent James Cameron, the director of the first two Terminator movies, from directing it, and instead another (much worse) version of the movie was later directed by another director. This indicates that Randall would rather not have had the third movie made, and also fantasizes about how much better it could have been with the original director making T3.\n[Megan stands below two pieces of text, in a panel that is without a frame.] Today was the ten-year anniversary of the release of The Matrix. I sat down to watch it again. Megan: Holy fuck, ten years ago?\n[The next three panels of the first row and the next two rows spoofs three scenes from The Matrix.]\n[In scene 1 Morpheus with sunglasses and Trinity with hair bun are talking to Cueball-Neo. Morpheus has his hands together.] Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can explain what the matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.\n[Trinity lifts her hand.] Trinity: Sure you can. It's a computer simulation in which you live, thinking it's reality. Neo: Oh.\n[Morpheus takes his hands down and turns around glaring at Trinity who has also taken her hand down.] Trinity: ...What? Trinity: Look, maybe you just suck at explaining.\n[In scene 2 Morpheus is talking to Neo while holding a red pill and a blue pill. To the far right is a part of a table.] Morpheus: ...Or you take the red pill, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.\n[Neo takes both pills from Morpheus.]\n[Neo crushes both the red and blue pills on a table top.] Crush\n[Neo snorts the resulting purple powder through a pipe he holds up to his face (his nose).] Snort\n[Morpheus and Neo are shown upside down in a frame with inverted colors, i.e., black background with white lines.] Morpheus: Now look what you've done. Neo: Where are we? Morpheus: I have no idea.\n[In scene 3 Neo, wearing a long, black trench coat, at a metal detector, is accosted by the Cueball-like security guard.] Guard: Please remove any keys, metallic items, weapons\u2014\n[Neo steps close to the guard and opens his trench coat towards the guard, who is facing the reader. The reader can't see what Neo has under his coat.]\n[Same scene as above, but side view: Neo, on the left, is opening his coat toward the guard, who is on the right and seems to be looking down. Nobody speaks.]\n[Same scene as above but the guard now looks up to Neos face and finally speaks:] Guard: Eww.\n[In the last row of the comic we see three characters that have obviously just finished watching The Matrix. Cueball is sitting on the floor nearest to the TV, Megan is sitting on the floor, farther from the TV and a Cueball-like friend is sitting on an armchair, farthest from the TV.] Cueball: I forgot how good that movie was. Friend: Wanna put on the other two?\n[Cueball, still sitting has turned to face Megan. They exchange looks without speaking.]\n[View of room, which is now empty, as is the chair. Sounds comes from off-screen to the right.] Crash Wham Friend (off-screen): Ow! Ow!\n[Cueball and Megan are back in the room, zoomed in so the TV is no longer visible, but the chair is and it remains empty. The friend is nowhere to be seen.] Cueball: I forgot how good that movie was. Megan: Too bad they never made any sequels. Cueball: True.\n"}
{"id":567,"title":"Urgent Mission","image_title":"Urgent Mission","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/567","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/urgent_mission.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/567:_Urgent_Mission","transcript":"[Cueball is coming out of star shaped hole, the hole has black stripes in it. Cueball has one leg inside but the rest of his body outside the hole. He points one arm at Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is sitting in a chair at his desk writing with a quill on a piece of paper. He is drawn with square glasses and long hair, but only at the back of his head, leaving  most of his head bald.] Cueball: Benjamin Franklin? Franklin: Yes? Cueball: I bring a message from the future! I don't have much time. Franklin: What is it? Cueball: The convention you're setting for electric charge is backward. The one left on glass by silk should be the negative charge.\n[Caption below the panel:] We were going to use the time machine to prevent the robot apocalypse, but the guy who built it was an electrical engineer.\n","explanation":"Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States . Aside from uniting most of his country against Great Britain 's rule, he was also a model of a renaissance man : an author, painter, musician, politician, postmaster, inventor, scientist, and diplomat. Some of his legacies include bifocals, the Franklin stove, an odometer for a horse-drawn carriage, the almanac, and abolitionist ideals. He has since been honored with the use of his image on the $100 bill.\nFranklin also did several experiments regarding electricity , and invented the lightning rod . He discovered the fundamentals of electricity, including positive and negative charges, as well as the principle of conservation of charge. When Franklin first wrote down his notes for electricity, he defined a positive charge as one left on a glass rod by rubbing it with silk, and a negative charge as one left on rubber by rubbing it with fur. Without realizing it, this meant that he had assigned a negative value to the charge on the electron, later identified as the fundamental carrier of electrical charge.\nIn an electrical circuit, we envisage the charge to be flowing from positive to negative. This is analogous to energy flowing from a region of high temperature to one of low temperature, or a fluid moving from an area of high pressure to one of low pressure.  However, because an electron is negatively charged, the actual flow of electrons is in the opposite direction, from negative to positive. This reversal of the natural expectation has caused unnecessary confusion to many fledgling engineers.\nIn the comic, the invention of a time machine was commissioned with the intent of preventing a robot apocalypse like in Terminator movies, a recurring theme on xkcd. However, the Cueball that built and used the machine is an electrical engineer with misplaced priorities, believing that reversing Franklin's \"mistake\" takes precedence over eliminating a more immediate threat to the human race.\nCueball tells Franklin that the charge left on a glass rod by rubbing it with silk should be the negative charge, not the positive charge, because the friction removes electrons from the rod. This would not have been intuitive to Franklin, because the electron had not as of yet been discovered. Yet by telling Franklin to reverse the positive and negative conventions, this would ultimately result in an alternate universe where electrons are assigned a positive charge. One can only speculate what other changes this reversal of convention would lead to, as small changes tend to cascade into huge ones . Would the positron have been instead named the negatron? And would this affect the success of the Transformers franchise?\nIn the title text, Cueball defends his actions, stating that preventing the rise of dictators or pandemics is a fine idea, but here they have a chance of making the signs on \"every damn diagram\" make sense, which to him seems so much more important. Cueball is likely voicing Randall 's frustration with this breach of logic, albeit exaggerated to comedic levels.\n[Cueball is coming out of star shaped hole, the hole has black stripes in it. Cueball has one leg inside but the rest of his body outside the hole. He points one arm at Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is sitting in a chair at his desk writing with a quill on a piece of paper. He is drawn with square glasses and long hair, but only at the back of his head, leaving  most of his head bald.] Cueball: Benjamin Franklin? Franklin: Yes? Cueball: I bring a message from the future! I don't have much time. Franklin: What is it? Cueball: The convention you're setting for electric charge is backward. The one left on glass by silk should be the negative charge.\n[Caption below the panel:] We were going to use the time machine to prevent the robot apocalypse, but the guy who built it was an electrical engineer.\n"}
{"id":568,"title":"Well 2","image_title":"Well 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/568","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/well_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/568:_Well_2","transcript":"[Four people are lined up by a covered well, Ponytail in front followed by Cueball, Megan and a man with some kind of hat (could be Beret Guy, but only half of his head is shown so it is not clear). A large sign stands well in front of the well. Ponytail throws in a coin.] Well: Science may discover immortality, but it won't happen in the next eighty years. Sign: The Uncomfortable Truths Well.\n[Zoom in on the well and Cueball who throws in a coin.] Well: You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas. Cueball: But I know what I mean!\n[Same zoom in on Megan who throws in a coin.] Well: You avoid your friend Mike because you're uncomfortably attracted to him.\n[Megan bend in over the well looking down] Megan: Nice try, Mike. Megan: Get out of the well. Mike (from inside the well): Aww.\n","explanation":"This is the second comic in the Well series: The first was 561: Well .\nThe average person's lifespan is 80 years now. So, while immortality may become a reality within the coming century, Ponytail won't live long enough to achieve it.\nCueball is looking for a programming language that does not need him to be specific about his ideas. When humans communicate ideas to other humans they may be vague but still understood, since the listener can infer a lot of detail from context and basic knowledge. Until we start 'raising' compilers (like you would a child) compilers will not possess that feature. Hence the need for the programmer to be exact in communicating his ideas to the compiler. No language will ever be able to change that. Cueball complains that he knows what he means, perhaps hoping that this is perfectly sufficient .\nFinally we find out that one of Megan 's admirers, Mike, whom she avoids, is hiding in the well. He has been waiting for her to come for her uncomfortable truth , so he can make her believe that she is actually attracted to him. But she is not so easily fooled and calls his bluff, telling him to come out of the well.\nThe title text suggests he might also have been down there for the money everyone is throwing in to the \nwell to get this uncomfortable truth. So it has never been a working well. When everyone (or just Megan) finds out about this, Mike is bombarded with the all the pennies people have brought along.\nIn the comic game 1608: Hoverboard there is also a well in the left part of the world. This well has the same type of covered top and at the bottom (it is very deep) there is a girl and above her a coin, like the one thrown into a wishing well. On these links, to images on xkcd ; used in the game, the top and the bottom of the well can be seen.\n[Four people are lined up by a covered well, Ponytail in front followed by Cueball, Megan and a man with some kind of hat (could be Beret Guy, but only half of his head is shown so it is not clear). A large sign stands well in front of the well. Ponytail throws in a coin.] Well: Science may discover immortality, but it won't happen in the next eighty years. Sign: The Uncomfortable Truths Well.\n[Zoom in on the well and Cueball who throws in a coin.] Well: You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas. Cueball: But I know what I mean!\n[Same zoom in on Megan who throws in a coin.] Well: You avoid your friend Mike because you're uncomfortably attracted to him.\n[Megan bend in over the well looking down] Megan: Nice try, Mike. Megan: Get out of the well. Mike (from inside the well): Aww.\n"}
{"id":569,"title":"Borders","image_title":"Borders","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/569","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/borders.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/569:_Borders","transcript":"[Two Cueball-like guys stand on a hill overlooking a great city. One of them points at the city. Between them and the city stands an embassy flying a red flag. The text is not spoken by either of the guys.] Three years ago, the kingdom of Liate overthrew their old order and established a constitutional monarchy. Our leaders signed a treaty with their queen, and our borders were set by the Yarbis Accords. Many said war would be unending, that peace would always be a dream deferred. But today, our flag flies proudly over our embassy in their kingdom, and they walk our lands without fear. So come, traveller. Lay down your grudges and join us in brotherhood. It is time not to fight, but to live. [Cueball sitting at computer.] Cueball: This is the worst capture-the-flag server ever.\n","explanation":"Capture the flag (CTF) is a common way of playing games where the objective is to capture the opponent's flag while protecting your own team's flag. This comic describes a CTF server that Cueball joins for an online war game where peace has been established and no one is trying to capture the opponent's flags, therefore making the game unexciting and pointless, as Cueball says in the last panel.\nThe title text refers to the line of flags in front of UN buildings. If such a collection of flags of all the teams were established on a server, one could get a very high score by quickly capturing all of them.\nA kajillion is slang for \"an unspecified large number.\"\n[Two Cueball-like guys stand on a hill overlooking a great city. One of them points at the city. Between them and the city stands an embassy flying a red flag. The text is not spoken by either of the guys.] Three years ago, the kingdom of Liate overthrew their old order and established a constitutional monarchy. Our leaders signed a treaty with their queen, and our borders were set by the Yarbis Accords. Many said war would be unending, that peace would always be a dream deferred. But today, our flag flies proudly over our embassy in their kingdom, and they walk our lands without fear. So come, traveller. Lay down your grudges and join us in brotherhood. It is time not to fight, but to live. [Cueball sitting at computer.] Cueball: This is the worst capture-the-flag server ever.\n"}
{"id":570,"title":"New Car","image_title":"New Car","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/570","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_car.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/570:_New_Car","transcript":"[A Cueball-like guy is standing behind, a sports car where Cueball sits turned toward him.] Friend: When'd you get the car?\n[Zoom-in on Cueball in the car.] Cueball: It's the darndest thing. We bought it as a prize for the 100,000,000 th visitor to our website.\n[Zoom-in on the friend.] Friend: And they didn't want it? Cueball (off-screen): Apparently.\n[Pan to where both the friend and Cueball in the car can be seen, but not the front of the car.] Friend: Maybe they didn't see the notice. Cueball: It was flashing and everything! Friend: How bizarre.\n","explanation":"Cueball is sitting in a nice sports car, and his (Cueball-like) friend asks when he got it. It turns out it was bought as a prize supposed to be delivered to the 100,000,000th visitor to his company's website. But the user did not react to the notice on the page about the prize, even though it was flashing .\nA well-known type of Internet scam tries to trick the reader into thinking that they've won a prize, often in the form of an annoying flashy ad banner (e.g. \" You're our 100,000,000th visitor!!! Click HERE to claim a FREE Ferrari! \"). A typical clickbait .\nCueball actually really did have a fancy car to give out, but the winner didn't claim it, believing it to be a scam. It is a bit like the boy who cried wolf \u2014 given enough lies, the truth will eventually look like a lie.\n(As coincidences would have it, exactly the same joke appears in the much-loved British comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look , in a 2006 John Finnemore sketch about a \"MASSIVE YACHT!\" giveway. Presumably Randall hadn't come across the Mitchell and Webb version when he wrote this comic three years later.)\nThe title text refers to another type of scam: advertising fake \" male enhancement \" drugs. Randall suggests that if such a drug really did exist, it would be very difficult to advertise effectively, since most people would assume it was a scam. Additionally there may be a relation implied (intersection) between people having sports cars and people needing penis enlargements: big cars to compensate feelings of inferiority [ citation needed ] (or red cars to compensate for cyanness ).\n[A Cueball-like guy is standing behind, a sports car where Cueball sits turned toward him.] Friend: When'd you get the car?\n[Zoom-in on Cueball in the car.] Cueball: It's the darndest thing. We bought it as a prize for the 100,000,000 th visitor to our website.\n[Zoom-in on the friend.] Friend: And they didn't want it? Cueball (off-screen): Apparently.\n[Pan to where both the friend and Cueball in the car can be seen, but not the front of the car.] Friend: Maybe they didn't see the notice. Cueball: It was flashing and everything! Friend: How bizarre.\n"}
{"id":571,"title":"Can't Sleep","image_title":"Can't Sleep","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/571","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cant_sleep.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/571:_Can%27t_Sleep","transcript":"[Cueball is in bed, presumably trying to sleep. The top of each panel is a thought bubble showing sheep leaping over a fence and Cueball's counting and the sheeps baaing is written above the sheeps. Two sheep are jumping from left to right in the first panel.] 1... 2... Sheep: Baaa\n[Two sheep are jumping from left to right. Cueball is holding his pillow.] ... 1,306... 1,307... Sheep: Baaa\n[A whole flock of sheep (nine visible) is jumping over the fence from right to left; the first and last sheep is cut off at the edge of the frame. Cueball is now sitting up looking up at his thought bubble.] ... 32,767 ...-32,768... Sheep: Baaa baaa baaaa baaa ba Cueball:\u00a0?\n[Two sheep are again jumping from left to right. Cueball is holding his pillow over his head.] ...-32,767... -32,766... Sheep: Baaa\n\n","explanation":"Cueball is in bed and is having trouble sleeping. He tries the old standby of counting sheep as they jump over a fence, but upon reaching 32,767 sheep, 65535 sheep jump back over the fence and start counting up again from -32,768. This is a reference to an integer overflow, when an increasing amount (sheep in this case) suddenly overflows and shows up as a negative value. This is because when a whole number or integer is represented in a digital form, such as on a computer, the number's range is limited by the amount of space used to store it. When the greatest possible number given the storage space is exceeded, an arithmetic overflow occurs, which may result (depending on the used language among other things) in starting over at the least possible number given the storage space, similar to a car's odometer. Imagine an odometer with six digits reaching 999999. Upon driving one more mile or km, the digits will roll back over to 000000. Causing or failing to prevent integer overflow is a common mistake by programmers that may have software security consequences. Some languages like C\/C++ even leaves the signed integer overflow undefined behavior , it may or may not wrap to the beginning, the instruction can be ignored or may cause the software to crash.\nIn this case, the least and greatest possible numbers are -32,768 and 32,767, which implies that the storage space used would be 16 bits. In addition, it's clear that the number is designated as a signed number, meaning that it can be either positive or negative.\nHowever, even if Cueball had this limitation, it would never actually pose a problem. By 32,767 sheep, at a rate of one sheep per second, Cueball has been counting for 9.101 hours (or about 9 hours 6 minutes). This would signify that he has extreme insomnia and probably needs treatment, and also that he has spent the entire night counting, and therefore would just get up and start the day rather than count sheep all over again from -32,768.\nThe title text refers to the 1968 Philip K. Dick science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , which was adapted into the perhaps more widely known Ridley Scott directed 1982 film Blade Runner . The implication is that if we ever do create androids that dream of electric sheep, we should make sure to give them sufficient storage space to store numbers large enough such that an arithmetic overflow will be far less likely to occur, even if they count for a long time. A \"long int\" typically consists of four bytes rather than two, so instead of being limited to a range from -32,768 to 32,767 the number will be capable of storing numbers from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647, which would take 68.1 years to exhaust. \"sheepCount\" is a possible name for a variable to be used in a computer program. Declaring a variable tells the computer that it should allocate a portion of memory to be associated with the variable name given. For those who might be unfamiliar with common programming practices, \"sheepCount\" is named using what is commonly referred to as CamelCase , meaning that all words in the name (\"sheep\" and \"count\") are pushed together and the first letter of every word after the first is capitalized. This is one of several common approaches to naming variables in computer programming. This is because you can only have capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores in variable names in most languages, and the names cannot start with a number. An alternative is snake_case , where the spaces are replaced with underscores and the names are lowercase.\n[Cueball is in bed, presumably trying to sleep. The top of each panel is a thought bubble showing sheep leaping over a fence and Cueball's counting and the sheeps baaing is written above the sheeps. Two sheep are jumping from left to right in the first panel.] 1... 2... Sheep: Baaa\n[Two sheep are jumping from left to right. Cueball is holding his pillow.] ... 1,306... 1,307... Sheep: Baaa\n[A whole flock of sheep (nine visible) is jumping over the fence from right to left; the first and last sheep is cut off at the edge of the frame. Cueball is now sitting up looking up at his thought bubble.] ... 32,767 ...-32,768... Sheep: Baaa baaa baaaa baaa ba Cueball:\u00a0?\n[Two sheep are again jumping from left to right. Cueball is holding his pillow over his head.] ...-32,767... -32,766... Sheep: Baaa\n\n"}
{"id":572,"title":"Together","image_title":"Together","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/572","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/together.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/572:_Together","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are running in a field, holding hands. They are running away from another pair which also looks like Cueball and Megan. This pair stands in the background, next to a small box. There may be something lying on top of the box, but it is difficult to see clearly. The sun is shining above them.]\n[Cueball and Megan are in a boat on a lake, very romantic. Cueball is speaking to Megan, illustrated with a heart.] Cueball: \u2661\n[Cueball and Megan sit together on a bench on a beach, watching the sunset.]\n[Cueball and Megan stand in front of an altar under a wedding arch, with confetti falling around them. He is wearing a butterfly and she a veil.]\n[Cueball and Megan, now old and wrinkled, sit together holding hands on their porch at the top of a small stair outside their house. He has a sailor cap on and Megan now wears her hair in a bun. Although the woman looks like Hairbun, and the old man is wearing a sailor cap, we can assume this is still Megan and Cueball given the juxtaposition of the preceding panel.]\n[The same setting is depicted but seen from the side of the house. Cueball begins walking away from Megan using his cane. He has descended from the stair. Finally, Megan speaks, and unusually there is a speech bubble, with an extra smaller bubble hanging on to it for the second sentence.] Megan: Dear? Where are you- Megan: Come back!\n[Cueball approaches an old couple, presumably the kids from the first panel now turned old. They seem tired, looking down all the time. The man only has hair around his neck and also a cane. The woman has long thinning hair. The box from the first panel is between Cueball and the other two. On top of it lies a piece of paper]\n[Same picture except that Cueball is now standing still and has picked up the paper from the box and writes on it with a pen. Again there is a speech bubble.] Cueball: Okay,\n[The paper is shown. It is a scavenger hunt list with at least six items. The three first items have been checked off. The last item is blocked by the speech bubble, but can be seen to be there from the check box.] Scavenger hunt: \u2612 Indian-head penny \u2612 Snake skin \u2612 Happiness \u2610 Four-leaf clover \u2610 Shark tooth \u2610 [covered by speech bubble] Cueball (off-panel): What's next?\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are seen running together hand in hand. Behind them, two others (who look like Cueball and Megan as well) are standing next to a box in an open field of grass.\nTogether, Cueball and Megan fall in love, get married, and retire in old age to a porch swing, Cueball now wearing a sailor cap and Megan with hair worn just like Hairbun .\nSuddenly, without a word, old Cueball using his cane, leaves old Megan on the porch, even though she shouts out for him to come back. He then returns to his two friends at the box from the first panel, they are now also much older and are still standing beside the box. Old Cueball picks up a sheet of paper and checks off \"Happiness\", the third point checked off on a list entitled \"Scavenger Hunt,\" where the other items include these two above that are checked off: Indian-Head Penny and Snake Skin, as well as the two items below that, are not yet checked off: Four-Leaf Clover and Shark Tooth. At least one more unchecked point is on the list, but it is covered by a speech bubble.\nSo finding happiness was just one item in what is presumably the longest-running scavenger hunt of all-time, considering Cueball grew significantly old during the hunt. The comic ends with Cueball asking, \"What's next?\"\nThe list indicates this is a hunt for somewhat rare items. The US Indian Head cent (penny) was produced from 1859 to 1909, making it somewhat rare. But this they have managed. (It may have been easier to find when the scavenger hunt started, depending on when that was; for instance, if the last panel takes place in the 2000s, and 70 years have gone by, then the treasure hunt started in the 1930s, when these pennies were still fairly common.) Also, the snake skin has been managed which may be a little easier to find if you live in areas with snakes as they shed their skin by molting. So finding such a skin would be the objective to find here.\nA four leaf clover is a rare variation of the common three-leaf clover. A shark tooth is not easy to obtain unless you live near a beach with souvenir shops.\nThe title, Together , of the comic is probably a reference to the saying that you find happiness together with your loved one. Cueball could have taken many different paths to find happiness, together or separate, but he chose togetherness as a way to find happiness, which is a common theme in love stories. But happiness is not something a person finds, it is an experience, hence the need to accumulate enough experiences to determine beyond doubt that happiness was truly found. This is why he had to wait until old age before he could go back to his friends.\nNote that Megan is never seen together with Cueball's friends, and especially since she is not invited to go back to them to check the happiness point off, there there is no reason to assume that she was in on the game from the beginning. She was just a means to an end, which makes Cueball's actions rather cruel and questionable.\nThe title text indicates that after all this time, the players may abandon the game due to being bored with it. It is typical for children to tire of a game before it is finished; except here, Cueball spent nearly a lifetime on just one part of this game! Building a treehouse is another example of a common childhood activity. Naturally, the intended mental image of a bunch of old men and women building a treehouse and playing in it like six-year-olds is another punchline. However, as mentioned in 212: Brain , the fantasy of constructing the perfect treehouse seems to nevertheless hold a permanent place in Randall's heart (or brain) regardless of how old he gets or how immature the ambition may seem. The idea of adults having a fort in the woods was also mentioned, rather darkly, in the title text of 219: Blanket Fort .\nThree of the old people look very similar to three of those standing in line in 586: Mission to Culture . And much later in 1910: Sky Spotters the two birdwatchers look very much like the old version of Cueball and Megan. Giving an old person a sailor cap was also used in 2213: How Old .\n[Cueball and Megan are running in a field, holding hands. They are running away from another pair which also looks like Cueball and Megan. This pair stands in the background, next to a small box. There may be something lying on top of the box, but it is difficult to see clearly. The sun is shining above them.]\n[Cueball and Megan are in a boat on a lake, very romantic. Cueball is speaking to Megan, illustrated with a heart.] Cueball: \u2661\n[Cueball and Megan sit together on a bench on a beach, watching the sunset.]\n[Cueball and Megan stand in front of an altar under a wedding arch, with confetti falling around them. He is wearing a butterfly and she a veil.]\n[Cueball and Megan, now old and wrinkled, sit together holding hands on their porch at the top of a small stair outside their house. He has a sailor cap on and Megan now wears her hair in a bun. Although the woman looks like Hairbun, and the old man is wearing a sailor cap, we can assume this is still Megan and Cueball given the juxtaposition of the preceding panel.]\n[The same setting is depicted but seen from the side of the house. Cueball begins walking away from Megan using his cane. He has descended from the stair. Finally, Megan speaks, and unusually there is a speech bubble, with an extra smaller bubble hanging on to it for the second sentence.] Megan: Dear? Where are you- Megan: Come back!\n[Cueball approaches an old couple, presumably the kids from the first panel now turned old. They seem tired, looking down all the time. The man only has hair around his neck and also a cane. The woman has long thinning hair. The box from the first panel is between Cueball and the other two. On top of it lies a piece of paper]\n[Same picture except that Cueball is now standing still and has picked up the paper from the box and writes on it with a pen. Again there is a speech bubble.] Cueball: Okay,\n[The paper is shown. It is a scavenger hunt list with at least six items. The three first items have been checked off. The last item is blocked by the speech bubble, but can be seen to be there from the check box.] Scavenger hunt: \u2612 Indian-head penny \u2612 Snake skin \u2612 Happiness \u2610 Four-leaf clover \u2610 Shark tooth \u2610 [covered by speech bubble] Cueball (off-panel): What's next?\n"}
{"id":573,"title":"Parental Trolling","image_title":"Parental Trolling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/573","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/parental_trolling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/573:_Parental_Trolling","transcript":"[In a frame crossing the top border of the first panel of the comic:] The future\n[Cueball is sitting at a futuristic desktop computer with the curved screen and keyboard both floating above the table, and a girl with pigtails is standing behind him with a portable ultra-thin screen. She shows the screen to Cueball. On it is a man with dark hair.] Girl: Hey dad, look at this old music video. Video: We're no strangers to love... Cueball: Wow, you got me.\n[The girl now looks at the device.] Girl: Did your generation really use this to troll people? So lame. You know, you guys sucked at pranks.\n[The girl is holding the device down along her legs as Cueball turns from his computer and addresses her.] Cueball: Did we? I once raised a kid with conditioning so her speech centers shut down when she was upset.\n[The girl has dropped the device on the floor and is fisting her hands. Cueball has turned back and is typing on the keyboard.] Girl: What? No, you couldn't have bleegle warble yargle arrgh! Cueball: Teehee.\n","explanation":"Set in the future, a daughter approaches her father playing a music video of Rick Astley 's \" Never Gonna Give You Up \". The daughter insults her father's generation's versions of playing pranks, specifically Rickrolling . The daughter refers to this as \" trolling \" (part of the comics title), which is popular jargon for trying to disrupt a person or community via an action to elicit an emotional response. She then comments that Cueball's generation's trolling efforts suck.\nThe humour is in that the dad reveals he has 'trolled' his daughter by creating a reaction in which her speech centers would shut down when she gets upset, thus eliciting an emotional response which perfectly displays his prank. This would not be possible in real life unless he messed with her brain, which would be dangerous and possibly illegal. [1] This could also be referring to how most people tend to get confused in their speech patterns when upset, meaning that the dad could in fact be trolling his daughter through her misunderstanding.\nIn this comic, the girl holds an ultra-thin tablet, a futuristic technology when this comic was released, a year before the release of the iPad. It also shows a curved computer monitor and keyboard, both of which seem to float above the desk.\nThe title text refers to the conflict between teenagers and adults over music and culture, with teenagers often listening to music which annoys their parents. ' Easter egg ' is a term used to describe a hidden inside joke or feature inside software. Here, the daughter has been treated like a piece of software by her father Cueball. He states that since the kids on purpose chooses music and culture that they know annoys their parents, it is a fair retaliation to build in such Easter egg responses. Many people would probably disagree on this, but maybe not so much parents with teenagers at home.\n[In a frame crossing the top border of the first panel of the comic:] The future\n[Cueball is sitting at a futuristic desktop computer with the curved screen and keyboard both floating above the table, and a girl with pigtails is standing behind him with a portable ultra-thin screen. She shows the screen to Cueball. On it is a man with dark hair.] Girl: Hey dad, look at this old music video. Video: We're no strangers to love... Cueball: Wow, you got me.\n[The girl now looks at the device.] Girl: Did your generation really use this to troll people? So lame. You know, you guys sucked at pranks.\n[The girl is holding the device down along her legs as Cueball turns from his computer and addresses her.] Cueball: Did we? I once raised a kid with conditioning so her speech centers shut down when she was upset.\n[The girl has dropped the device on the floor and is fisting her hands. Cueball has turned back and is typing on the keyboard.] Girl: What? No, you couldn't have bleegle warble yargle arrgh! Cueball: Teehee.\n"}
{"id":574,"title":"Swine Flu","image_title":"Swine Flu","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/574","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/swine_flu.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/574:_Swine_Flu","transcript":"[Caption:] Twitter is great for watching uninformed panics unfold live.\n[The comic shows a twitter search results page with \"Swine flu\" in the search box and a gray search button.] twitter [Swine flu] (search)\n[The results is displayed in a frame below the search panel:] Realtime results for Swine flu 0.05\n[This next line is highlighted in yellow. Most text here and below is written in normal black font, but the underlined links in the main text is in blue. Below each tweet is a line with info and reply links etc. all in gray font. Between the yellow line and the first tweet and between each tweet is a dotted line.] 1,918 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see.\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nSkeeve37 : Oh god I ate pork yesterday before I knew about swine flu!\n\nLess than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nHanneloreec : Without duct tape I can't seal the door to keep out swine flu but I can't get duct tape without going outside! Help! Less than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nPaulyshorefan : How long until the swine flu reaches me here in Madagascar? Less than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nCrackMonkey74 : Swine flu is God's punishment for the ACLU and lesbians and 9\/11 and nanobots! Less than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nTwilight7531 : I fell down the stairs and there was a crack and a jagged white thing is sticking out of my arm guys is this swine flu? Less than 10 seconds ago from twitterific \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nWigu : @Untoward : No, that sounds like syphilis, not swine flu. What did you say you did with a pig? Less than 10 seconds ago from tweetdeck \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\n2011Seniursrule : My Dad said flu vaccines are linked to autism, so to be safe from swine flu I'm trying to lick an autistic kid. Less than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nCrackMonkey74 has appeared in two earlier comics: 202: YouTube and 406: Venting .\n","explanation":"Swine flu is a strain of the flu which can be transmitted from pigs to humans. In 2009, it was the origin of the Pandemic H1N1\/09 virus , which most news stations called either \"H1N1\" (the subtype name) or \"swine flu\". Because of the ambiguous name given to it and the somewhat hazy description of the transmittal process and dangers to humans, many people were concerned about the virus in ways that weren't going to be threats. This comic pokes a bit of fun at the overreaction by users on Twitter .\nRandall (or someone else) seems to have created Twitter accounts for all referenced handles (that may not have already existed). Some of the handles continue their interactions with each other in later tweets.\nSkeeve37 is a self-described hypochondriac . The tweet exemplifies the general populace's over-concern with the \"animal themed\" pandemics. Similarly after the bird flu scare, people avoided eating chicken.\nHanneloreec is a self-described \"young lady who is concerned about many things\". She is a reoccurring character in the webcomic Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques, who also manages her twitter handle.\nPaulyshorefan 's tweet is a reference to the flash game \" Pandemic 2 \", in which players try to create a disease that infects the whole world. Madagascar is the most difficult country to infect, as it only has 1 port and often closes it at the slightest hint of an infection. The difficulty of infecting Madagascar has caused it to become a meme . The user's Twitter handle is a reference to Pauly Shore , a comedian who was briefly popular in the 1990s before quickly becoming out of favor and derided as unfunny.\nCrackMonkey74 's tweet is a parody of viral Christian(?) messages that say that current tragedies are God's punishment, despite the fact that the Bible says that the end is not yet to come. More specifically, Crackmonkey74 blames the ACLU , lesbians (a reference to the current culture wars that give big press towards proponents of same-sex marriage against fundamentalist Christians), 9\/11 (the day when the Twin Towers fell, causing controversy on whether Muslim terrorists crashed their planes on the towers or whether the government staged this by purposefully demolishing the towers) and nanobots (possibly a reference towards the highly promising but still relatively not understood field of nanotechnology, plus another reference towards the phrase \"playing God\"). He is likely the same Crackmonkey74 from 406: Venting and 202: YouTube .\nTwilight7531 's tweet implies that she got a bone fracture which ended up protruding from her arm. However, she seems to lack medical knowledge, so she is worried that her fracture is actually swine flu (though how she can be typing with a broken arm is confusing).\nWigu 's tweet is a reply towards Untoward 's. Given the context, Untoward seems to have \"gotten intimate\" with a pig (since syphilis is a venereal disease). Given the fact that Untoward got sick because of a pig, Untoward seems to have concluded that he got swine flu.\nThe last comment by 2011Seniorsrule references a medical paper published by the journal The Lancet , in which it is proposed that autism is caused by vaccination . Since then, the paper was partially retracted in 2004, and fully retracted in 2010 because of conflicts of interest. The entire incident has been defined as the MMR vaccine controversy . This stance has still been seen since the retraction of the paper, and still holds some popularity by cranks , quacks , pseudoscientists , and conspiracy theorists alike who are convinced that the CDC is hiding vital data that proves vaccines cause autism . The most famous figure in support of it is Jenny McCarthy . This Twitter user is not only using a debunked study about a completely different set of vaccines, they have also confused cause and effect (i.e. even if vaccines caused autism, that doesn't mean that autistic people carry flu vaccines). Also, licking vaccinated people isn't how vaccines are administered. On top of that, fear of germs and\/or hypersensitivity is common among autistic people, so \"licking an autistic kid\" may be a difficult and possibly painful experience for the lickee. (By contrast, allistic children are well known to enjoy being licked.)\nThe title text at first states the fact that some flu symptoms are actually the symptoms of the body's reaction, and can in some cases be more dramatic than the initial infection. E.g. A fever is a defense mechanism of the body against a disease. Then the title text makes the recommendation, to protect oneself from an overreaction by living an unhealthy life. This is not a good advice. [ citation needed ]\n[Caption:] Twitter is great for watching uninformed panics unfold live.\n[The comic shows a twitter search results page with \"Swine flu\" in the search box and a gray search button.] twitter [Swine flu] (search)\n[The results is displayed in a frame below the search panel:] Realtime results for Swine flu 0.05\n[This next line is highlighted in yellow. Most text here and below is written in normal black font, but the underlined links in the main text is in blue. Below each tweet is a line with info and reply links etc. all in gray font. Between the yellow line and the first tweet and between each tweet is a dotted line.] 1,918 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see.\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nSkeeve37 : Oh god I ate pork yesterday before I knew about swine flu!\n\nLess than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nHanneloreec : Without duct tape I can't seal the door to keep out swine flu but I can't get duct tape without going outside! Help! Less than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nPaulyshorefan : How long until the swine flu reaches me here in Madagascar? Less than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nCrackMonkey74 : Swine flu is God's punishment for the ACLU and lesbians and 9\/11 and nanobots! Less than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nTwilight7531 : I fell down the stairs and there was a crack and a jagged white thing is sticking out of my arm guys is this swine flu? Less than 10 seconds ago from twitterific \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nWigu : @Untoward : No, that sounds like syphilis, not swine flu. What did you say you did with a pig? Less than 10 seconds ago from tweetdeck \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\n2011Seniursrule : My Dad said flu vaccines are linked to autism, so to be safe from swine flu I'm trying to lick an autistic kid. Less than 10 seconds ago from web \u2219 reply \u2219 view tweet\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\nCrackMonkey74 has appeared in two earlier comics: 202: YouTube and 406: Venting .\n"}
{"id":575,"title":"Tag Combination","image_title":"Tag Combination","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/575","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tag_combination.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/575:_Tag_Combination","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: So you can come up with a song title fitting any tag combination? Megan: Try me.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Lesbian voyeurism one-hit wonder mash-up. Megan: \"I wish that Stacey's Mom had Jessie's Girl.\"\n[Cueball and Megan are just standing there for a beat panel.]\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Well, that was one, but- Megan: \"When you Come On Eileen I touch myself.\" Cueball: Okay, wow.\n\nBoth song names that Megan produces are in iambic pentameter , suggesting that Megan's hobby has the flavor of Cueball's in 79: Iambic Pentameter .\n","explanation":"Song tags are a form of file metadata used to categorize music. Tags will typically describe the content and genre of the song, and many music organization programs and services will allow users to find all songs that contain a particular tag; so when a user searches for \"Country breakup music,\" they will receive a list of country songs about breaking up.\nIn this comic, Cueball tests Megan 's claim that she can make a song name for any set of tags by coming up with a collection of mostly unrelated words: \" lesbian voyeurism one-hit wonder mash-up .\" A lesbian is a woman who is only sexually interested in other women. Voyeurism is the act of watching someone else do something sexual, generally without their knowledge. A one-hit wonder is a band that had \"one big hit\" before fading from the public eye forever. A mash-up is when someone takes two previously unrelated songs and makes a third song that's a mix of both of them (a recent example of which would be this Gangam Style\/Ghostbusters theme mashup ). In response, Megan immediately replies with one song title that looks like it would fit the tags well. When Cueball asks for a second example, Megan gives him a new example for the same set of tags, which is really impressive.\nMegan's first title, \"I Wish That Stacy's Mom Had Jessie's Girl\" is a mash-up of \"Jessie's Girl\" by Rick Springfield (see video on YouTube), and \"Stacy's Mom\" by Fountains of Wayne (see video on YouTube), the latter was a one-hit-wonder , whereas Springfield has had several other hits. (The song Stacy's Mom was referenced in comic 61: Stacey's Dad ).\nThe second title, \"When You Come on Eileen I Touch Myself\" is a mash-up of \"Come on Eileen\" by Dexys Midnight Runners (see video on YouTube), and \"I Touch Myself\" by Divinyls (see video on YouTube). Both of these are one-hit wonders (and can both be found on this list of such songs). Note that \"Come on, Eileen\" means \"Hurry up, Eileen\", and that \"to come on someone\" means to ejaculate on someone. Since the song is about lesbian sex, come on someone must mean have an orgasm while being on someone.\nFor other random connections see 305: Rule 34 .\nThe title text is a set of potential lyrics to Megan's second title. Randall borrowed the rhyme scheme, phrasing, and subject matter from the first eight stanzas of \"I Touch Myself\" with additional subject matter inspired by \"Come on Eileen.\" The final stanza is the chorus lead-in from the latter.\nThe lyrics suggest a changed relationship between the characters. In the original \"I Touch Myself\", the female singer touches herself (masturbates) when thinking about her lover (of unspecified gender); instead, she now does this while a new third character makes love to her beloved, Eileen, while the singer overhears them (as a voyeur) from the apartment above.\nHere are the lyrics for I Touch Myself and Come on Eileen . Below in the table the mashed up lines are shown. As can be seen most of the text is from \"I Touch Myself\":\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: So you can come up with a song title fitting any tag combination? Megan: Try me.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Lesbian voyeurism one-hit wonder mash-up. Megan: \"I wish that Stacey's Mom had Jessie's Girl.\"\n[Cueball and Megan are just standing there for a beat panel.]\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Well, that was one, but- Megan: \"When you Come On Eileen I touch myself.\" Cueball: Okay, wow.\n\nBoth song names that Megan produces are in iambic pentameter , suggesting that Megan's hobby has the flavor of Cueball's in 79: Iambic Pentameter .\n"}
{"id":576,"title":"Packages","image_title":"Packages","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/576","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/packages.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/576:_Packages","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at his computer.] Cueball: I love getting packages.\n[Megan enters and Cueball turns towards her.] Cueball: I set up a script to search eBay et. al. for $1 items with free shipping.\n[Cueball comes home with a backpack on his back and find a package waiting for him on his doorstop.] Cueball: I gave it $365, so each day it can buy me something random.\n[Cueball, again sitting at his computer.] Megan (off-screen): What if you just end up with lots of crap? Cueball: I'll give it away. Cueball: But I'm sure I'll end up with some interesting stuff.\n[The next five panels have a caption in a black frame at the top. The caption is written first for each panel. In the first panel Cueball has unpacked a hose. The paper lies in tatters on the floor. Megan stands next to him.] Day 1: Length of rubber hose Cueball: Could be handy around the house.\n[Cueball stands with a black item and the packaging material it came in. Megan looks on.] Day 2: Ski mask Cueball: It's spring, but hey.\n[Cueball is standing alone with a bear trap and the box it came in on the floor.] Day 3: Bear trap Cueball: Huh.\n[Megan is back as Cueball looks at a piece of paper that came in an envelope.] Day 4: Tourist map of the Pentagon. Megan: Uh oh.\n[Cueball is standing alone with a bottle of lube in one hand and the box it came in in the other hand.] Day 5: Lube Cueball: I'm stopping this before I end up on every F.B.I. watch list ever.\nSomeone has set up an actual service inspired by this comic, which does exactly what this comic describes, and has been featured in the advertisements section to the left.\n","explanation":"Cueball wrote a script that searches online shopping sites for items that cost US$1 with free shipping. Because the script is programmed to use an account with a $365 balance, this script will buy one random item per day for a full year. Megan comments that Cueball might just end up with \"lots of crap\" but he replies that he might get something interesting.\nOver five days the script orders a length of rubber hose, a ski mask, a bear trap, a map of The Pentagon and \"lube\" (sexual lubrication). This pattern prompts Cueball to stop the script out of fear of being placed on a FBI watch list; to a paranoid passerby, the purchased items make Cueball look like a terrorist who plans to kidnap and torture federal employees. And also a pervert; such a contrast is considered funny.\nIn the title text a sixth item is sent, a bobcat . This is probably connected with 325: A-Minus-Minus where Black Hat delivered a bobcat instead of a chair.\n[Cueball is sitting at his computer.] Cueball: I love getting packages.\n[Megan enters and Cueball turns towards her.] Cueball: I set up a script to search eBay et. al. for $1 items with free shipping.\n[Cueball comes home with a backpack on his back and find a package waiting for him on his doorstop.] Cueball: I gave it $365, so each day it can buy me something random.\n[Cueball, again sitting at his computer.] Megan (off-screen): What if you just end up with lots of crap? Cueball: I'll give it away. Cueball: But I'm sure I'll end up with some interesting stuff.\n[The next five panels have a caption in a black frame at the top. The caption is written first for each panel. In the first panel Cueball has unpacked a hose. The paper lies in tatters on the floor. Megan stands next to him.] Day 1: Length of rubber hose Cueball: Could be handy around the house.\n[Cueball stands with a black item and the packaging material it came in. Megan looks on.] Day 2: Ski mask Cueball: It's spring, but hey.\n[Cueball is standing alone with a bear trap and the box it came in on the floor.] Day 3: Bear trap Cueball: Huh.\n[Megan is back as Cueball looks at a piece of paper that came in an envelope.] Day 4: Tourist map of the Pentagon. Megan: Uh oh.\n[Cueball is standing alone with a bottle of lube in one hand and the box it came in in the other hand.] Day 5: Lube Cueball: I'm stopping this before I end up on every F.B.I. watch list ever.\nSomeone has set up an actual service inspired by this comic, which does exactly what this comic describes, and has been featured in the advertisements section to the left.\n"}
{"id":577,"title":"The Race Part 1","image_title":"The Race: Part 1","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/577","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_race_part_1.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/577:_The_Race:_Part_1","transcript":"Megan: Huh, cool. Nathan Fillion (Mal from Firefly) has an electric skateboard. Just like you!\n[Cueball leaves the room.]\nMegan: Did you hear that? Nathan- Sounds from off-screen: Ratchet Zip Buckle\n[Cueball returns wearing helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, sunglasses and holding his electric skateboard.] Cueball: I heard. Gimme the computer. I need to book a flight.\n[Caption in a black frame at the bottom of the last panel:] To be continued...\n","explanation":"This is possibly a continuation of 139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards .\nFirefly was a television series aired by Fox in 2002 that got cancelled mid-way through, but it has a large fan base nowadays (for a more comprehensive explanation, see the Wikipedia page). The star of the show was Captain Malcolm (or Mal) Reynolds, played by Nathan Fillion .\nSo in this comic, Megan tells Cueball that Nathan Fillion has an electric skateboard. Cueball immediately starts planning a trip to visit and race Nathan Fillion.\nThe title text refers to an earlier comic 211: Hamster Ball Heist , where Cueball kidnaps Wayne Coyne in his hamster ball.\nAll comics in \" The Race \" series:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nElectric skateboards have been the subject of several other comics like 139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards , 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) and a panel in 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel .\nMegan: Huh, cool. Nathan Fillion (Mal from Firefly) has an electric skateboard. Just like you!\n[Cueball leaves the room.]\nMegan: Did you hear that? Nathan- Sounds from off-screen: Ratchet Zip Buckle\n[Cueball returns wearing helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, sunglasses and holding his electric skateboard.] Cueball: I heard. Gimme the computer. I need to book a flight.\n[Caption in a black frame at the bottom of the last panel:] To be continued...\n"}
{"id":578,"title":"The Race Part 2","image_title":"The Race: Part 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/578","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_race_part_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/578:_The_Race:_Part_2","transcript":"[Cueball with skateboard and gear and Megan are talking.] Cueball: \"Why race him?\" He's Captain Reynolds! Megan: Mr. Fillion is an actor. Firefly was years ago.\n[They go over to a computer; Cueball is using a phone and presumably looking up a phone number.] Megan: He has his own life to live, and I'm sure the last thing he wants to do is indulge a fan by playing Mal for him.\nMeanwhile... [Nathan Fillion is standing in front of a mirror in a trenchcoat.] Nathan: (into the mirror) Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am. *ahem* Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am. Someone offpanel: Nathan? Telephone! Nathan: That's Captain! Someone offpanel: Fine, Captain Nathan. Nathan: No, use my space name! Someone offpanel: *sigh*\n[Nathan and Cueball talk on the phone.] Cueball: So, how about we race for charities?\nNathan: Sure. Always did want a charity of my own.\nCueball (between panels): Come again?\nNathan: You know, boxes in supermarkets collecting food. 'Course, ought to tack up a list sayin' which wines I like best...\nCueball: Uh, that's not quite\u2014 Nathan (over the phone): Listen, I'm the captain here. Cueball: ...I just got goosebumps when you said that.\nNathan: Yeah, happens to me too whenever I get captainy. I cut such a strapping figure. Nathan: Buckle! Swash! Nathan: All right, let's do this race.\n","explanation":"Firefly was a television series aired by Fox in 2002. The star of the show was Captain Malcolm \"Mal\" Reynolds , played by Nathan Fillion .\nMegan tries to play the rational card, and insist that the characters of major TV shows must get tired of fans' never-ending need to see them playing that character, and never being themselves. Nathan Fillion, however, appears to miss the days of Firefly so much that he spends his time reenacting his role as Malcolm at home.\nIn the fourth panel Cueball suggests they race for charities, which would mean the winner gets to donate the prize money to their charity of choice. In the fifth panel Fillion, takes the phrase and twists it to mean that the winner gets the charity. This is why Cueball says the confused line \"Come again?\"\nThe title text refers both to Mal being referred to by Kaylee as \"Captain Tightpants\" in the episode \"Shindig\" , and to Captain Hammer, a superhero played by Nathan Fillion in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog , another series created by Joss Whedon . \"Hammerpants\" may also be a reference to the odd, puffy parachute pants worn by 1990s rapper MC Hammer.\nAll comics in \" The Race \" series:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nElectric skateboards have been the subject of several other comics like 139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards , 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) and a panel in 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel .\n[Cueball with skateboard and gear and Megan are talking.] Cueball: \"Why race him?\" He's Captain Reynolds! Megan: Mr. Fillion is an actor. Firefly was years ago.\n[They go over to a computer; Cueball is using a phone and presumably looking up a phone number.] Megan: He has his own life to live, and I'm sure the last thing he wants to do is indulge a fan by playing Mal for him.\nMeanwhile... [Nathan Fillion is standing in front of a mirror in a trenchcoat.] Nathan: (into the mirror) Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am. *ahem* Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am. Someone offpanel: Nathan? Telephone! Nathan: That's Captain! Someone offpanel: Fine, Captain Nathan. Nathan: No, use my space name! Someone offpanel: *sigh*\n[Nathan and Cueball talk on the phone.] Cueball: So, how about we race for charities?\nNathan: Sure. Always did want a charity of my own.\nCueball (between panels): Come again?\nNathan: You know, boxes in supermarkets collecting food. 'Course, ought to tack up a list sayin' which wines I like best...\nCueball: Uh, that's not quite\u2014 Nathan (over the phone): Listen, I'm the captain here. Cueball: ...I just got goosebumps when you said that.\nNathan: Yeah, happens to me too whenever I get captainy. I cut such a strapping figure. Nathan: Buckle! Swash! Nathan: All right, let's do this race.\n"}
{"id":579,"title":"The Race Part 3","image_title":"The Race: Part 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/579","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_race_part_3.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/579:_The_Race:_Part_3","transcript":"[Nathan, Cueball, and Summer Glau standing around with electric skateboards.] Nathan: Meet a few of my friends. This is- Cueball: Summer Glau! You were the best part of Chronicles .\nSummer: I eat my bodyweight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.\n[Summer stares off into space.]\nNathan: Yeah, there's a reason she only plays strange roles. Cueball: Ah. Summer (from below): I'm part of the floor now.\n[They find Jewel Staite working on a skateboard's engine.] Nathan: And this is Kaylee. Jewel: My name is Jewel, Nathan.\nNathan: Kaylee\u2014 Jewel: Jewel . Nathan: \u2014Jewel is fixin' up my new board. Jewel: Almost done!\nCueball: So wait. Summer's actually weird, Jewel's actually a mechanical whiz...\nCueball: ...will Morena Baccarin be here? Is she really a\u2014 Nathan and Jewel: No.\nThe racers set up [Nathan and Jewel are to the far left of a full-width panel. Nathan is standing on his skateboard holding a controller. Cueball is on his skateboard which is careening out of control on the far right of the panel.] Nathan: Kaylee, I've been gunnin' the radio hand throttle thingy for a while, but it ain't movin'. Jewel: Oh, I must've set it to the wrong frequency! Cueball (riding around on haywire board): AAAAAAAA\n","explanation":"Firefly was a television series aired by Fox in 2002 that got cancelled midway through, but it has a large fan base nowadays (for a more comprehensive explanation, see the Wikipedia page). The star of the show was Captain Malcolm (or Mal) Reynolds, played by Nathan Fillion . Other members of his crew were Kaylee (played by Jewel Staite ), the ship's mechanic, Inara Serra (played by Morena Baccarin ) was a Companion (or, as Mal would say: whore) that helped Serenity (the spaceship) gain a landing on many planets that otherwise would have nothing to do with Mal. River Tam (played by Summer Glau ) was the seemingly crazy younger sister of Dr. Simon Tam (played by Sean Maher ), and due to her latent psionic powers and the damage from the experiments she had undergone, she was known for making odd, out-of-context statements.\nWhen Cueball is introduced to the first two women, he learns that they behave in real life as on the Firefly show (Summer is strange and Jewel is a mechanical wiz) - this is why he begins to ask about Morena Baccarin, and also why the other two says no. before he can finish the question is she really a prostitute ?\nIn the last panel, Kaylee apparently wired up Mal's controller to broadcast on the frequency of Cueball's skateboard, so it took control of his board, where Mal's stood still. (Buy a few RC models ( Radio-controlled model ) to play with friends and inevitably this will happen. Where two controllers broadcast on the same frequency, so the two models are confused by the signals they receive.)\nTerminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a television series aired by Fox from 2008-09. Summer Glau played the role of Cameron, a Terminator; Cameron was played in a distinctly \"strange\" manner as a humanoid robot who finds much about humanity puzzling. Combined with her role as River Tam, the joke is that it wasn't Summer's characters who were eccentric, but that Summer Glau herself is actually just as strange and eccentric as she is shown to be on screen.\nAll comics in \" The Race \" series:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nElectric skateboards have been the subject of several other comics like 139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards , 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) and a panel in 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel .\n[Nathan, Cueball, and Summer Glau standing around with electric skateboards.] Nathan: Meet a few of my friends. This is- Cueball: Summer Glau! You were the best part of Chronicles .\nSummer: I eat my bodyweight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.\n[Summer stares off into space.]\nNathan: Yeah, there's a reason she only plays strange roles. Cueball: Ah. Summer (from below): I'm part of the floor now.\n[They find Jewel Staite working on a skateboard's engine.] Nathan: And this is Kaylee. Jewel: My name is Jewel, Nathan.\nNathan: Kaylee\u2014 Jewel: Jewel . Nathan: \u2014Jewel is fixin' up my new board. Jewel: Almost done!\nCueball: So wait. Summer's actually weird, Jewel's actually a mechanical whiz...\nCueball: ...will Morena Baccarin be here? Is she really a\u2014 Nathan and Jewel: No.\nThe racers set up [Nathan and Jewel are to the far left of a full-width panel. Nathan is standing on his skateboard holding a controller. Cueball is on his skateboard which is careening out of control on the far right of the panel.] Nathan: Kaylee, I've been gunnin' the radio hand throttle thingy for a while, but it ain't movin'. Jewel: Oh, I must've set it to the wrong frequency! Cueball (riding around on haywire board): AAAAAAAA\n"}
{"id":580,"title":"The Race Part 4","image_title":"The Race: Part 4","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/580","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_race_part_4.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/580:_The_Race:_Part_4","transcript":"[Cueball and Nathan Fillion are ready on the start line on their electric skateboards.] Voice off panel: On your mark...\nVoice: Get set... Nathan: Remember episode 11, when I got all naked in that desert?\nVoice: Go! [Nathan speeds away leaving Cueball standing at the start line.]\nVoice: ...I said \"Go.\" Voice: Someone throw some water on him. Cueball: Can't...get it...out of my head...\n[Nathan on walkie talkie, speeding on his skateboard.] Nathan: He's right behind me. Kaylee, I'm gonna try a Crazy Ivan. Jewel [on walkie talkie] ( 579 shows Nathan's naming confusion): That doesn't make any sense, Nathan. Nathan: Trust me.\nJewel: No, I mean it's not a skateboard maneuver. The concept doesn't even apply to this situation. Nathan [via walkie talkie]: That's why it just might work! Jewel: No, that's the opposite of true!\nNathan: On my mark, override the remote differential and throw her into a spin. Jewel [via walkie talkie]: okay, but\u2014 Nathan: Mark! WHAM\n[Nathan lying injured on the ground next to his skateboard, Cueball cruises past.] Whirrrrrrrr\n[Nathan, trying to stand up.] Nathan: I'm down. Tell Summer \"The chickens are in the hayloft. Plan Gamma is a go.\"\n[Nathan, one foot on skateboard, looking at walkie talkie.] mumbling from walkie talkie Jewel: She says, \"Plan gamma acknowledged. The meerkats are in the bag. [Summer Glau is walking off panel.]\nJewel [to walkee talkie]: So we're good? Nathan: Hard to tell with her. Do you see an actual bag of meerkats? Jewel: No. Nathan: Then we're probably good.\n[Cueball screeching to a halt as he sees Summer Glau.] Cueball: Oh! Hi, Miss Glau! I'd love to talk, but Nathan's back on his feet and catching up.\n[Summer grabs Cueball's arm.] Grab Cueball: Wha\u2014\n[Summer kicks Cueball in the face whilst pulling his arm towards her, he flies off his skateboard.]\n[Summer walking away as Cueball lies crippled on the floor with his sunglasses beside him.]\n[Cueball still lying on the floor.]\nCueball [thinking]: I've never been so turned on in my life.\n","explanation":"Firefly was a television series aired by Fox in 2002, but it was canceled after only fourteen episodes had been produced. Over ten years later, it still has a devoted fan base, apparently including Randall . The main characters were the crew of the spaceship \"Serenity\", including Captain Malcolm \"Mal\" Reynolds ( Nathan Fillion ), mechanical genius Kaywinnet Lee \"Kaylee\" Frye ( Jewel Staite ), the apparently insane psychic River Tam ( Summer Glau ), and six others not mentioned in this comic.\nNathan Fillion appeared naked at the beginning and end of the show's eleventh episode, \"Trash\", after having been stripped of all his weapons, equipment, and clothes in a desert. Cueball is mentally overloaded by this image (either aroused or repulsed it is hard to say) to the extent that he misses the start signal.\nWorried about his pursuer, Nathan wants to perform a Crazy Ivan , an emergency maneuver used by the crew of Serenity in the pilot episode of the series to escape the hot pursuit of a Reaver ship. It involves a 180\u00b0 spin turn followed by rapid acceleration towards (and hopefully past) the pursuer, which does not have the ability to make such a rapid turn. In a Firefly -class vessel, it is performed by temporarily reversing the direction of thrust of one of the two atmospheric engines, achieved by physically rotating the engine nacelle.\nThe name of the maneuver is taken from the antics of Soviet submarines in trying to detect (not to evade) enemy submarines hiding in the sonar blind-spot directly behind their vessel. In reality, sharp turns suffice for this purpose; it is not necessary to completely reverse direction. The name entered popular culture after being used in the movie The Hunt For Red October .\nNathan appears to understand exactly what will happen. He asks Jewel to \"override the remote differential \", implying that the two driven wheels could then be powered in opposite directions, causing a spin-turn. As Jewel points out, this will be unlikely to have the intended effect. Nathan is much heavier than his vehicle, and he is not securely attached to it. Momentum is his enemy. Even if it were successful, it would be utterly pointless, because he would find himself heading away from the finish line. Cueball is only pursuing him with the intent to overtake him, and the Crazy Ivan guarantees that this will happen.\nSummer Glau is often a target of sexual attraction for her appearance and her well-known, eccentric characters. River Tam, in the movie Serenity , had subconscious programming that caused her to be able to take on dozens of foes in hand-to-hand combat, and her Terminator character in The Sarah Connor Chronicles also regularly beat on men far larger than her, which, for many, just adds to the attraction. Thus, even as Summer fells him with a devastating kick to the face, Cueball is incredibly aroused.\nThe title text refers to a common ability in fiction for characters to come up with an idea that is 'just crazy enough to work'. In real-life situations (such as an electric skateboard race), people are rarely able to come up with an idea that is just out-of-the-ordinary enough to work perfectly, and in their attempts to do so, will come up with an idea that will instead absolutely fail to work (and make them look like fools to boot).\nAll comics in \" The Race \" series:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nElectric skateboards have been the subject of several other comics like 139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards , 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) and a panel in 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel .\n[Cueball and Nathan Fillion are ready on the start line on their electric skateboards.] Voice off panel: On your mark...\nVoice: Get set... Nathan: Remember episode 11, when I got all naked in that desert?\nVoice: Go! [Nathan speeds away leaving Cueball standing at the start line.]\nVoice: ...I said \"Go.\" Voice: Someone throw some water on him. Cueball: Can't...get it...out of my head...\n[Nathan on walkie talkie, speeding on his skateboard.] Nathan: He's right behind me. Kaylee, I'm gonna try a Crazy Ivan. Jewel [on walkie talkie] ( 579 shows Nathan's naming confusion): That doesn't make any sense, Nathan. Nathan: Trust me.\nJewel: No, I mean it's not a skateboard maneuver. The concept doesn't even apply to this situation. Nathan [via walkie talkie]: That's why it just might work! Jewel: No, that's the opposite of true!\nNathan: On my mark, override the remote differential and throw her into a spin. Jewel [via walkie talkie]: okay, but\u2014 Nathan: Mark! WHAM\n[Nathan lying injured on the ground next to his skateboard, Cueball cruises past.] Whirrrrrrrr\n[Nathan, trying to stand up.] Nathan: I'm down. Tell Summer \"The chickens are in the hayloft. Plan Gamma is a go.\"\n[Nathan, one foot on skateboard, looking at walkie talkie.] mumbling from walkie talkie Jewel: She says, \"Plan gamma acknowledged. The meerkats are in the bag. [Summer Glau is walking off panel.]\nJewel [to walkee talkie]: So we're good? Nathan: Hard to tell with her. Do you see an actual bag of meerkats? Jewel: No. Nathan: Then we're probably good.\n[Cueball screeching to a halt as he sees Summer Glau.] Cueball: Oh! Hi, Miss Glau! I'd love to talk, but Nathan's back on his feet and catching up.\n[Summer grabs Cueball's arm.] Grab Cueball: Wha\u2014\n[Summer kicks Cueball in the face whilst pulling his arm towards her, he flies off his skateboard.]\n[Summer walking away as Cueball lies crippled on the floor with his sunglasses beside him.]\n[Cueball still lying on the floor.]\nCueball [thinking]: I've never been so turned on in my life.\n"}
{"id":581,"title":"The Race Part 5","image_title":"The Race: Part 5","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/581","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_race_part_5.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/581:_The_Race:_Part_5","transcript":"[Nathan skates in.] Nathan: So you took care of him? Summer: I can extrude hair, but I  can't retract it. Nathan: That a yes? [Summer grabs Nathan's arm as he skates past her, pulling him off the board.] Nathan: Bwah! [An Andy Capp-esque mele\u00e8 dust cloud.] WHAP BAM POW WHAM [Summer skates away.] [A beat-up Nathan approaches an similarly battered Cueball.] Nathan: She may have my board, but I can still beat you to the finish line if I bring you down. Cueball: Bring it, Captain Tightpants. Nathan: I've got nothing to  bring. I just said that so she could get behind you. [Cueball turns.] Cueball: Who\u2014 [Cueball is hit with his board.] WHAM [Nathan stands over a prone Cueball.] Nathan: I just said that so I could get behind you. The serious fans always fall for the quotes. [Wide panel of Summer crossing the finishing line on Nathan's board, breaking through the tape.] Announcer: And the winner is... Off-screen voice: Summer Glau? Summer: I swallowed a bug again. [Close-up of Cueball's beaten face.] Cueball: All right, Fillion. I've had enough of your treachery and ...rugged good looks. This ends here. [Equally close-up: Nathan's face, bearing several grazes.] Nathan: All right, fanboy. Let this be our final battle. [They rush at each other, fists ready to swing punches.] Final battle canceled by Fox. Try an Internet petition drive - those totally work.\n","explanation":"This is a continuation of the previous comic in \" The Race \" series, 580: The Race: Part 4 .\nIn panel 6 (2nd panel in the 2nd row), Nathan Fillion line is reminiscent of a similar quote from the 2nd episode of Firefly , The Train Job : \"I just wanted you to face me so she could get behind ya.\" In the show, Malcolm Reynolds is aided by Zo\u00eb Washburne , his second in command, who gets behind the bar thug he is speaking to. In the comic, Nathan Fillion is using the line on a fan, but Gina Torres is not standing behind Cueball this time.\nSummer's line about growing but not retracting her hair appears to mean that because Nathan used her to stop Cueball, she has to stop him as well, which she neatly does. Alternatively, the line may be a random non-sequitur of the sort often uttered by her neurologically damaged character in the Firefly 'verse.\n\"Bwah!\" is a sound Malcolm makes during one episode in which one of his crewmembers inadvertently sneaks up on him while trying to ask him a question. When he is questioned about it, he says he has invented a new war cry, and promptly practices yelling 'Bwahhhh' in a confident manner while readying his pistol.\nSummer's statement in the 10th panel about swallowing a bug is a reference to the movie Serenity , made in 2005 to conclude Firefly's storyline. After a harrowing high-speed chase in an open-topped hovercraft, the only comment from Summer's character is \"I swallowed a bug,\" showing that she was either unconcerned, or stunned, by the narrow escape.\nThe final panel is a reference to Fox Television 's treatment of Firefly . Firefly was cancelled after only 11 episodes of the 14 made were aired, leaving three episodes unaired.\nInternet petitions, contrary to the sarcastic suggestion in the final panel, pretty much never work.\nAll comics in \" The Race \" series:\nThis series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule.\nElectric skateboards have been the subject of several other comics like 139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards , 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) and a panel in 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel .\n[Nathan skates in.] Nathan: So you took care of him? Summer: I can extrude hair, but I  can't retract it. Nathan: That a yes? [Summer grabs Nathan's arm as he skates past her, pulling him off the board.] Nathan: Bwah! [An Andy Capp-esque mele\u00e8 dust cloud.] WHAP BAM POW WHAM [Summer skates away.] [A beat-up Nathan approaches an similarly battered Cueball.] Nathan: She may have my board, but I can still beat you to the finish line if I bring you down. Cueball: Bring it, Captain Tightpants. Nathan: I've got nothing to  bring. I just said that so she could get behind you. [Cueball turns.] Cueball: Who\u2014 [Cueball is hit with his board.] WHAM [Nathan stands over a prone Cueball.] Nathan: I just said that so I could get behind you. The serious fans always fall for the quotes. [Wide panel of Summer crossing the finishing line on Nathan's board, breaking through the tape.] Announcer: And the winner is... Off-screen voice: Summer Glau? Summer: I swallowed a bug again. [Close-up of Cueball's beaten face.] Cueball: All right, Fillion. I've had enough of your treachery and ...rugged good looks. This ends here. [Equally close-up: Nathan's face, bearing several grazes.] Nathan: All right, fanboy. Let this be our final battle. [They rush at each other, fists ready to swing punches.] Final battle canceled by Fox. Try an Internet petition drive - those totally work.\n"}
{"id":582,"title":"Brakes","image_title":"Brakes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/582","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brakes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/582:_Brakes","transcript":"Of the potential responses to my brakes' failure, I did not choose the best. [A cliff is visible, with a car flying off it, and trees below.] Voice from car: Hello, you're on Car Talk.\n","explanation":"A car's brakes fail on a winding mountain road. As a response, the driver calls a live radio phone-in show, overlooking the fact that he is in immediate danger and has no time to gather outside advice before improvising a solution. The driver loses control of the car and plunges over a cliff.\nIf this ever happens to you,\nhttp:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/Stop-a-Car-with-No-Brakes\nThe title text refers to Tom and Ray Magliozzi who were the co-hosts of the weekly radio show Car Talk . It was a car advice\/comedy radio show often aired on NPR stations. While there is some actual advice given on the radio show, it's presented as a comedy\/entertainment show. Much of the show did involve the hosts \"gasping and hacking\" as they ask non-relevant questions of the callers and add their own commentary or relate other personal asides and stories.\nSince he claims that he has 6.5 funny seconds, he must have connected with them way before going over the cliff. Because in 6.5 seconds a car would fall approximately 200 m (\u00bd*g*t^2, with g = 9.81 m\/s^2, and t the time in seconds. This will give 207 m, but there will be a lot of air resistance). It is clear from the drawing that the car is still going almost straight out into the air, so it is still almost at the height where it left the road at quite a high speed (to get this far away without turning the engine down towards earth yet.) And the front of the car is just about 5 car lengths to the ground, which would make this a 10-15 m drop only (which would take less than 2 seconds to fall). But according to the comic it seems like he first connected with the show, just when the car has left the road...\nOf the potential responses to my brakes' failure, I did not choose the best. [A cliff is visible, with a car flying off it, and trees below.] Voice from car: Hello, you're on Car Talk.\n"}
{"id":583,"title":"CNR","image_title":"CNR","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/583","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cnr.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/583:_CNR","transcript":"[Megan is sitting at a computer.] Computer: Speech2Text Commander Computer: Bug #167801 Computer: Speech recognition fails on young child voices. Megan: Hmm.\n[The view enlarges to show a man sitting at another desk.] Megan: Hey, can you do me without a condom? We need a young child for something. Cueball: Okay.\n[A pregnancy test is displayed. The label indicates not pregnant.] Pregnant Not pregnant\n[Megan is typing on the computer.] Megan typing: Bug #167801 Megan typing: Status: Closed Megan typing: Reason: Could not reproduce.\n","explanation":"\"Could not reproduce\" (CNR as per the title) is used here as a double entendre . Because the reported bug is that speech recognition failed on a young child's voice, the programmers attempt to reproduce (biologically) in order to have a child to use as a test subject to understand and fix the bug, starting by reproducing it (the bug). However the attempt fails, as shown by the negative pregnancy test, and therefore the bug report is closed with the reason being \"could not reproduce\": they could not reproduce the bug because they could not reproduce biologically.\nNowadays, developers of software usually have a centralized repository of bugs which generally uses one of a handful of standard interfaces for tracking problems and desired features in software.  There is usually a quick way of removing pending items from this system by changing the status to closed and selecting a reason from perhaps a dropdown list.  \"Could not reproduce\" is a standard reason provided in almost all of these systems, so the novel pun provides extra humor to software developers.  This reason also shows up in comic 937: TornadoGuard .\nThe secondary joke is that Megan has chosen a ridiculous method of obtaining a child for the relatively simple task of testing the software. The obvious solution is to find a pre-existing child to use; [ citation needed ] giving birth to (and, presumably, raising) a child would burden the programmers with serious expenses, health concerns, and responsibilities; and it would take years before the child would be able to speak clearly enough to use the program.\nThe title-text \"Can't and shouldn't\" qualifies the bug report, meaning that the programmers not only could not reproduce, they also should not reproduce, as their reasons for doing so shows they have exceedingly bad judgment. (They also have poor child-rearing skills, as demonstrated in comic 674: Natural Parenting .)\n[Megan is sitting at a computer.] Computer: Speech2Text Commander Computer: Bug #167801 Computer: Speech recognition fails on young child voices. Megan: Hmm.\n[The view enlarges to show a man sitting at another desk.] Megan: Hey, can you do me without a condom? We need a young child for something. Cueball: Okay.\n[A pregnancy test is displayed. The label indicates not pregnant.] Pregnant Not pregnant\n[Megan is typing on the computer.] Megan typing: Bug #167801 Megan typing: Status: Closed Megan typing: Reason: Could not reproduce.\n"}
{"id":584,"title":"Unsatisfied","image_title":"Unsatisfied","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/584","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unsatisfied.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/584:_Unsatisfied","transcript":"[Cueball is holding hands with Ponytail, while he is looking at Megan to the far right.] [Below this first central panel there are two arrows that direct the comic into a pair of different paths. Beneath each of the next three double panels there is a small arrow pointing straight down.]\n(Left path) [Cueball has turned away from Megan (off-screen) and is now kissing Ponytail, but he is thinking about Megan.] (Right path) [Cueball walks away from Ponytail (off-screen) and reaches out to Megan, but he is thinking about Ponytail.]\n(Left path) [Cueball is performing cunnilingus on Ponytail, he is still thinking about Megan.] (Right path) [Cueball and Megan have sex on the arm of a chair, he is still thinking about Ponytail.]\n(Left path) [Cueball and Ponytail are drawing something together, and he is still thinking about Megan.] (Right path) [Cueball and Megan are hiking together, and he is still thinking about Ponytail.]\n(Left path) [Cueball and Ponytail are holding hands looking at each other, and he continues to think of Megan.] (Right path) [Cueball and Megan are holding hands looking at each other, and he continues to think of Ponytail.]\n[Below the previous two panels two longer arrows again reunite into one central panel.] [Two gravestones are next to each other. One of them (Cueball's) is thinking about a third gravestone (for the girl he did not choose).]\n","explanation":"Cueball is trying to decide if he wants to stay with Ponytail who he is currently dating or leave her and have a relationship with Megan . The comic suggests that no matter which one he chooses he will never truly achieve happiness because of his longing for the option he chose not to take. In a sense this is a no-win situation . No matter what he does of interesting stuff (sex or otherwise) with Ponytail he will be thinking forever of Megan, and vice versa. This even goes on after he dies, where he lies next to one of them and thinks he would rather have been buried next to the other girl.\nThe title text is referring to a concept in computer science. All comparison based sorting algorithms are incapable of sorting an arbitrary set of n values faster than an order of n*log(n). On the other hand, non-comparison sorting algorithms (e.g. bucket sort ) with external knowledge of the distribution of the values can sort them with order n. If Cueball was capable of establishing an external scale he could use a non-comparison sort, but as he does not know what the best thing for him is he is stuck with comparisons and thus he can't achieve better performance.\nThis comic is possibly a sequel to 310: Commitment .\n[Cueball is holding hands with Ponytail, while he is looking at Megan to the far right.] [Below this first central panel there are two arrows that direct the comic into a pair of different paths. Beneath each of the next three double panels there is a small arrow pointing straight down.]\n(Left path) [Cueball has turned away from Megan (off-screen) and is now kissing Ponytail, but he is thinking about Megan.] (Right path) [Cueball walks away from Ponytail (off-screen) and reaches out to Megan, but he is thinking about Ponytail.]\n(Left path) [Cueball is performing cunnilingus on Ponytail, he is still thinking about Megan.] (Right path) [Cueball and Megan have sex on the arm of a chair, he is still thinking about Ponytail.]\n(Left path) [Cueball and Ponytail are drawing something together, and he is still thinking about Megan.] (Right path) [Cueball and Megan are hiking together, and he is still thinking about Ponytail.]\n(Left path) [Cueball and Ponytail are holding hands looking at each other, and he continues to think of Megan.] (Right path) [Cueball and Megan are holding hands looking at each other, and he continues to think of Ponytail.]\n[Below the previous two panels two longer arrows again reunite into one central panel.] [Two gravestones are next to each other. One of them (Cueball's) is thinking about a third gravestone (for the girl he did not choose).]\n"}
{"id":585,"title":"Outreach","image_title":"Outreach","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/585","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/outreach.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/585:_Outreach","transcript":"[Ponytail faces two Cueball-like guys. All three are wearing goggles and lab-coats. Between them on a shelf stands a microscope and a beaker.] Ponytail: The tracking tag will record the shark's movement and habits.\n[The capsule is shown to float upward towards a water surface.] Ponytail (narrating): Then, it will pop free and float to the surface.\n[A coast is shown, with arrows directed from water to land. A small white circle on one of the arrows indicate the balloon.] Ponytail (narrating): We can't afford a recovery program, so the capsules will inflate helium balloons, drift over land,\n[The capsule is shown in close up. It has a caption on it.] Ponytail (narrating):  And hopefully be found and mailed to us. Any questions? Caption: If found please call\n[Ponytail is standing over a groggy shark on a boat, with water behind her and a coastline in the background. She attaches the tracking tag to the shark.] Chunk\n[The shark is dropped headfirst off the boat, into the water with a large splash.] Sploosh Shark:\u00a0!!!\n[The course of the shark is shown, weaving around islands.]\n[The capsule is shown sticking out of the shark at the moment it is ready to pop free.] Click\n[The capsule remains attached to the shark.]\n[The balloon starts to inflate, still attached to the shark and underwater.] Hissss\n[As the balloon inflates, it starts to pull the shark to the surface.] Shark:\u00a0??\n[The balloon breaks the surface, pulling the shark with it.]\n[Science Girl with a black ponytail, eating an ice cream cone is standing together with Cueball to the right in an otherwise empty frame.]\n[Two screaming scientists (A Cueball-like guy and Ponytail) runs past the two, who turns to look after them. The guy is holding the microscope and Ponytail the beaker from the first frame.] Scientists: Aaaaaaaa\n[A shark attached to a huge balloon floats past the girl and Cueball, it follows the scientists while snapping it's jaws.] Shark: Chomp chomp\n[After the shark is gone, Science Girl turns to Cueball.] Science Girl: Daddy? Cueball: Yes? Science Girl: I want to be a scientist.\n","explanation":"Scientific animal tracking is commonly used to learn more about other species, particularly endangered ones, as a way of better understanding their physiology, behavior, and what risks they face in the wild. It's used in a wide variety of sciences, including wildlife biology, conservation, wildlife management and zoology.\nThe scientists in this comic are working on a rather limited budget as Ponytail explains, say that they can't afford the (relatively minuscule) cost of hiring someone to retrieve a tracking tag from the water. So they devise a plan that would actually cost far more: create one that will pop free, float to the surface, and inflate a giant helium balloon, causing it to gradually drift over land. Eventually, the balloon will slowly deflate and soft-land, and with any luck someone will find it and mail it back to the scientists.  The shark is depicted much larger than the humans, and the quantity of helium necessary to lift it (as the later panels show) would be extremely expensive.\nIt goes horribly, hilariously wrong. The tag can't quite pop free from the shark, and proceeds to inflate the balloon while the shark is still attached . Although the balloon is shown too small to lift the shark (a helium balloon can only lift approximately one gram per liter in air), but the shark miraculously rises right along with the tracker tag, drifts back over land, and goes right after the scientists that had been tracking it.\nWhen Science Girl (maybe in her first appearance, before she got her buns) sees the two scientists running frantically from a flying shark, she figures that if such excitement is a daily part of a scientist's job, that's the job for her, as she tells her daddy Cueball . The title of the comic, Outreach , refers to the type of activities that scientists do in order to motivate kids to become scientists when they grow up, and it clearly worked for Science Girl who displays keen interest and great knowledge on many subjects in her next appearances.\nThe title text suggests keeping shark repellent by one's bed to account for the quite-unlikely event of something like this happening. Because you never know. It may be a reference to the Adam West Batman film where Batman just happens to have some in his helicopter.\nIn reality, a balloon meant for lifting a tracker tag would be much too small to lift the shark, which is portrayed as being larger than person, so there is no danger. In addition, since sharks are fish, and fish cannot survive above water, the shark would die even if this could happened in real life. This doesn't stop movies like Sharknado (which was filmed after this comic) to portray sharks floating in the air.\nThe title text of 1910: Sky Spotters seems to be a reference to this comic.\n[Ponytail faces two Cueball-like guys. All three are wearing goggles and lab-coats. Between them on a shelf stands a microscope and a beaker.] Ponytail: The tracking tag will record the shark's movement and habits.\n[The capsule is shown to float upward towards a water surface.] Ponytail (narrating): Then, it will pop free and float to the surface.\n[A coast is shown, with arrows directed from water to land. A small white circle on one of the arrows indicate the balloon.] Ponytail (narrating): We can't afford a recovery program, so the capsules will inflate helium balloons, drift over land,\n[The capsule is shown in close up. It has a caption on it.] Ponytail (narrating):  And hopefully be found and mailed to us. Any questions? Caption: If found please call\n[Ponytail is standing over a groggy shark on a boat, with water behind her and a coastline in the background. She attaches the tracking tag to the shark.] Chunk\n[The shark is dropped headfirst off the boat, into the water with a large splash.] Sploosh Shark:\u00a0!!!\n[The course of the shark is shown, weaving around islands.]\n[The capsule is shown sticking out of the shark at the moment it is ready to pop free.] Click\n[The capsule remains attached to the shark.]\n[The balloon starts to inflate, still attached to the shark and underwater.] Hissss\n[As the balloon inflates, it starts to pull the shark to the surface.] Shark:\u00a0??\n[The balloon breaks the surface, pulling the shark with it.]\n[Science Girl with a black ponytail, eating an ice cream cone is standing together with Cueball to the right in an otherwise empty frame.]\n[Two screaming scientists (A Cueball-like guy and Ponytail) runs past the two, who turns to look after them. The guy is holding the microscope and Ponytail the beaker from the first frame.] Scientists: Aaaaaaaa\n[A shark attached to a huge balloon floats past the girl and Cueball, it follows the scientists while snapping it's jaws.] Shark: Chomp chomp\n[After the shark is gone, Science Girl turns to Cueball.] Science Girl: Daddy? Cueball: Yes? Science Girl: I want to be a scientist.\n"}
{"id":586,"title":"Mission to Culture","image_title":"Mission to Culture","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/586","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mission_to_culture.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/586:_Mission_to_Culture","transcript":"[Cueball is pulling Megan by her feet. She is holding onto the carpet, which visibly folds under her tug.] Cueball: We're getting some culture in you if it kills you. Megan: Don't wanna.\n[Cueball is pushing Megan at the front door, with steps leading down outside. Megan is curled up with both her feet and her hands up on the middle of the door, her back arching out towards Cueball.] Cueball: All you listen to is techno. Megan: But... the symphony?\n[Cueball and Megan stand in line between two other couples; A guy, who only has hair around his neck and a cane, and Hairbun stands behind them. A guy with a sailor cap and a woman with a big hair stands before them.] Megan: I think we're the only people here under 60. Cueball: Shhh.\n[The couple sit in the audience just before the concert.] Megan: The right side is definitely better. Cueball: Better? Megan: They've all got bigger instruments. I bet they make more money. Cueball: *Sigh*\n","explanation":"Cueball wants to take Megan out for his idea of a cultural experience; a symphony . The inference is that Megan's culturally impoverished because \"all she ever listens to is techno \". After much griping on various levels, for instance complaining that all the other attendees are above sixty years old, she starts to get into the experience \u2014 sort of. The big 'cultural lesson' she (mis)gleans from the experience is similar to what a sporting aficionado would gain from watching a sports event. So it could be said that Cueball's mission to culture was a mission impossible in Megan's case.\nHer observation regards the seating configuration of a typical modern orchestra , in which the violinists all sit audience-left, while the violists , cellists and bassists , with clearly larger instruments, are on the right. But it is not the size of an instrument that determines the payroll of a musician. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text is just icing on the cake. A sampler is an instrument frequently used in techno music that samples other sounds and plays them back, usually electronically altered. Remixing is a process, also often used in techno, of editing recorded music to get a different sound. Many classical pieces have had success as techno remixes. One example is Pachelbel's Canon in D major, referred to in the title text of 339: Classic .\nTechno music is the subject of 411: Techno and is also referenced in 740: The Tell-Tale Beat .\nThree of the old people in the line look very similar to the old people in 572: Together . In the very next comic 587: Crime Scene a man is again shown with hair only around the side of his head.\n[Cueball is pulling Megan by her feet. She is holding onto the carpet, which visibly folds under her tug.] Cueball: We're getting some culture in you if it kills you. Megan: Don't wanna.\n[Cueball is pushing Megan at the front door, with steps leading down outside. Megan is curled up with both her feet and her hands up on the middle of the door, her back arching out towards Cueball.] Cueball: All you listen to is techno. Megan: But... the symphony?\n[Cueball and Megan stand in line between two other couples; A guy, who only has hair around his neck and a cane, and Hairbun stands behind them. A guy with a sailor cap and a woman with a big hair stands before them.] Megan: I think we're the only people here under 60. Cueball: Shhh.\n[The couple sit in the audience just before the concert.] Megan: The right side is definitely better. Cueball: Better? Megan: They've all got bigger instruments. I bet they make more money. Cueball: *Sigh*\n"}
{"id":587,"title":"Crime Scene","image_title":"Crime Scene","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/587","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/crime_scene.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/587:_Crime_Scene","transcript":"[A crime scene is surrounded by tape wound around several pins four of which are inside this panel. A large black pool is on the ground, with splashes around it, and a hammer lying in one of these splashes. Two people are standing outside the tape; a police officer with a peaked cap with a white emblem is standing closest and to his left is a man with male pattern baldness, who we learn is called George.] Policeman: Looks like a murder-suicide. George: Any interesting mathematical patterns? Policeman: No, George, just two dead bodies and a lot of blood. George: Two... That's the third Fibonacci number! Policeman: Not now, George.\n[Caption below the frame:] When Mathnet shut down, the officers had trouble reintegrating into the regular L.A.P.D.\n","explanation":"Mathnet was a segment on the children's television show \"Square One Television\", where police mathematicians solved crimes and other mysteries by math. It parodies the Dragnet TV show (and earlier radio drama ) about the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).  This comic plays on that by implying that Mathnet was a real department of the LAPD, and that when the show was cancelled and the department was shut down its mathematicians were forced to become regular detectives.\nHere, George Frankly, one of the two lead detectives on the show (a parody of Dragnet character Frank Smith), observes a murder scene along with another officer. His fellow officer, knowing him, tries to tell him off by saying that it is just two dead bodies. As a mathematician, George is constantly looking for potential patterns in the data. However, in this instance there are no obvious mathematical patterns, yet George nonetheless tries to look for one and observes that \"two\" is the third Fibonacci number . Since several small numbers are in the Fibonacci sequence, the fact that the number of bodies is one of these numbers is not the least interesting. The other officer tries to shut him down, discouraging this unhelpful line of thought.\nThe title text shows that this may not have helped since George now thinks he can see a Mandelbrot set , but he does quickly realizes that it was just blood splatters. The Mandelbrot set is a formula used to create certain kinds of fractals that you might imagine seeing in the something like blood spatters. The last word Golly is in response to George realizing he is seeing blood spatters - something he probably never did before on the children show.\nThe second comic in a row (and third in 16 comics) where a man is drawn with hair only on the sides of his head.\n[A crime scene is surrounded by tape wound around several pins four of which are inside this panel. A large black pool is on the ground, with splashes around it, and a hammer lying in one of these splashes. Two people are standing outside the tape; a police officer with a peaked cap with a white emblem is standing closest and to his left is a man with male pattern baldness, who we learn is called George.] Policeman: Looks like a murder-suicide. George: Any interesting mathematical patterns? Policeman: No, George, just two dead bodies and a lot of blood. George: Two... That's the third Fibonacci number! Policeman: Not now, George.\n[Caption below the frame:] When Mathnet shut down, the officers had trouble reintegrating into the regular L.A.P.D.\n"}
{"id":588,"title":"Pep Rally","image_title":"Pep Rally","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/588","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pep_rally.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/588:_Pep_Rally","transcript":"[Ponytail stands in front of crowded bleachers (with only Cueballs in it), waving pompoms high in the air.] Ponytail: Lakeview High is the best! Crowd: Yeah! Voice #1: Wait, why?\n[Zoom on Ponytail, now with her hands and pompoms down.] Ponytail: What? Voice #1 (off-screen): A guy on the North High football team helped me rebuild my deck. Voice #1 (off-screen): It seems ungrateful to presume we're better.\n[Same picture with Ponytail now just listening.] Voice #1 (off-screen): I mean, school districts are just based on zip codes. Voice #2 (off-screen): Their principal donated a kidney to my dad.\n[Ponytail looks down, holding up her pompoms.] Voice #1 (off-screen): I'm texting with my friend there now. He says it's okay, and we're invited to their events if we want. Voice #1 (off-screen): But he sounded kind of hurt. Voice #2 (off-screen): Why are we doing this rally, again?\n","explanation":"Any American who went to high school remembers the convocations they had during football or basketball season, in which class would be interrupted and everyone was crowded into the gymnasium for a pep rally . Cheerleaders would cheer, they'd play the school fight song, the cheerleaders might do a routine, and the team would be introduced.\nThis is used to inspire school spirit and get people excited about attending the games so that they'd come to the games and spend money on tickets and concessions. A common boast at pep rallies is \"Our school is the best!\"\n\"Wait, why?\" says one of the students, quite logically. Why is their school the best? The student population is simply made up of students living in the general ZIP code of the school's location. There's no intrinsic reason why any school is any better than the rest of them in any way that really matters in real life. And even having the #1 basketball or football team in the state doesn't mean the students in that school are any \"better\" than anyone else.\nThis comic subverts the usual expectation of unanimous agreement with the cheerleader's sentiment, and reminds you that people who go to other schools or root for other teams aren't \"bad people\". In fact, they are capable of being quite kind as is demonstrated by the North High football team who helped rebuild someone's deck, the principal who donated his kidney, and the welcoming invitation from one of the student's friends to his school's events. Randall would no doubt argue that this is the same of people who follow a different religion than you, are of a different ethnicity, or have a different political party affiliation.\nThe title text says that Randall was weirded out by pep rallies growing up, as many introverted people do because of the noise and excitement, and possibly because of the thinking presented in this comic. Now that he's older, he finds them even more creepy, perhaps because of learning about historical events that feel similar like the Nuremberg Rallies or even the various tribalisms of adults.\n[Ponytail stands in front of crowded bleachers (with only Cueballs in it), waving pompoms high in the air.] Ponytail: Lakeview High is the best! Crowd: Yeah! Voice #1: Wait, why?\n[Zoom on Ponytail, now with her hands and pompoms down.] Ponytail: What? Voice #1 (off-screen): A guy on the North High football team helped me rebuild my deck. Voice #1 (off-screen): It seems ungrateful to presume we're better.\n[Same picture with Ponytail now just listening.] Voice #1 (off-screen): I mean, school districts are just based on zip codes. Voice #2 (off-screen): Their principal donated a kidney to my dad.\n[Ponytail looks down, holding up her pompoms.] Voice #1 (off-screen): I'm texting with my friend there now. He says it's okay, and we're invited to their events if we want. Voice #1 (off-screen): But he sounded kind of hurt. Voice #2 (off-screen): Why are we doing this rally, again?\n"}
{"id":589,"title":"Designated Drivers","image_title":"Designated Drivers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/589","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/designated_drivers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/589:_Designated_Drivers","transcript":"[Cueball is addressing three people outside a bar, indicated by a sign (two Cueball-like guys and Megan).] Cueball: Wait, who's driving? First Cueball-like guy: Why? First Cueball-like guy: Tom, right?\n[Zoom in on Cueball.] Cueball: Yes, but we have to leave in two groups. One of which will need at least two drivers.\n[There is text both above and below a flowchart with arrows between a group of the three people Cueball is talking to, and three houses that are labeled 'bar', 'dinner', and 'party'. Three lines point from the group of people to the bar and a fourth arrives from the party. Four lines points away from the bar. Two goes to the dinner one to the party and one away to the left. There are six arrows arriving at the dinner. Apart from the two lines coming from the bar, there is one long arrow pointing to the dinner from the left and two coming in from above. One more comes from the party below. Six arrows points away. One arrow goes away to the top right, the other five arrows points straight down to the party. There are also six arrows coming and leaving the party. Apart from the five from the dinner there was the one coming in from the bar. The six arrows leaving are the one arrow that went to the bar and the one to the dinner. The other four leaves in two groups of two, on straight down and two curving to the left.] Cueball (off-panel): Someone has to get Paul, and Julia and Emily have to leave by 10:00. Labels: Bar Labels: Dinner Labels: Party Cueball (off-panel): The logistics of who can get drunk are nontrivial.\n[The second Cueball-like guy to the right has an goat on a string behind him, which was not visible in the first panel, as he was at that time only partly inside the frame.] Second Cueball-like guy: Yeah, and I can't ride in a car with the wolf because he'll eat my goat. Cueball: Dammit, guys.\n","explanation":"When a group of people go together to any kind of event where they expect to drink alcohol, and would like to drive to and from the event, it is usual to select one who has to be the designated driver . [ citation needed ] This person will then stay sober during the event, and can thus safely drive the other people home afterwards disregarding how drunk the other people become.\nHowever, as this comic points out, if it's not a simple task of going from A to B and back, all together at the same time, then it becomes a complex problem that requires an intricate kind of strategy and logical thinking to solve. And may need more than one driver.\nIn this comic Cueball addresses his friends, regarding this problem right before they enter a bar. It seems they have already decided that one of the friends will be the designated driver. But then Cueball mentions that they will have to leave in two groups. And for some reason one of these groups will need at least two drivers (this is hard to explain - see below under number of drivers .) So now they already need three designated drivers. Furthermore, someone has to go and pick up another friend. And also two of them have to leave earlier than the rest by 10:00.\nIn the third panel the situation seems to be illustrated. Three people are drawn outside the bar with three lines going to the bar, so the number of lines leaving and entering each destination seems to represent a person each. Since the number of people leaving and entering each destination is the same, this makes it seem like the diagram is intended to be accurate. There are four people entering and exiting the bar and six people entering and exiting both the party and the dinner. The confusing part of the diagram is that there are only three people at the bar to begin with, not the four shown in the first panel. It also seems strange that someone will go back to the bar and especially that another goes back to the dinner from the party. It is thus not easy to make the diagram fit the description. See below for a possible take on the chart .\nBut the general concept would be that some people meet at a bar before joining the rest of a group at dinner, then later most of these move on to a party. After the party (or bar\/dinner) people are going to head home in different groups.\nThe enormous complexities of planning who car pools with whom, from where to where, and when, make an excellent logic puzzle. And what is worse, anyone who has to drive needs to stay sober. So it is important to solve the puzzle before the drinking starts, or else there will be too few that can drive, or too many who never get to drink.\nTo make matters worse Tom complicates this already complicated logical puzzle , by involving the classic logic puzzle of the wolf, goat and cabbage (sometimes also known as Fox-chicken-grain puzzle ). In the last panel, the guy is shown standing with a goat on a tether, saying he can't be in the car with the wolf. Cueball is then brought to swearing over this. (The goat puzzle was also the subject of 1134: Logic Boat and 2348: Boat Puzzle ). And this may go some way of explaining why there needs to be a number of drivers .\nThe title text makes it clear why ordering a taxi is out of the question as it would take money out of the beer budget. Of course it also cost money to use your own car for gas etc. But when you already have a car, it is always cheaper to use that than pay for a taxi.\nIt's possible to match the chart up with the events in the comic if we assume two things: first, that everyone's initial position in the chart is at home, and second, that the party takes place at Cueball's house.\nWhether or not Randall intended it this way isn't certain.\nFor clarity, I'll be referring to the first cueball as Cueball, the second as David, Megan as Emily, and the third cueball as Tom.\nUnless a more efficient solution exists, the minimum number of people that have to remain sober is three: Tom, David, and either Julia or Emily. Emily is able to begin drinking the earliest, starting at the bar and continuing the rest of the night. If the place everyone is having dinner at serves alcohol, Paul can begin drinking at dinner. If Emily elected to stay sober, Julia can start drinking when Paul does. Cueball is the last to be able to drink, only getting to start once everyone is at the party.\nInterestingly enough, if the goat and wolf cannot drive, then they only make a difference if Paul has the wolf, in which case David would have to pick Paul up and take him home, and Tom and his goat would leave after dinner.\nIf either the wolf or the goat can drive, then a sober human driver is not needed for the vehicle in which that animal travels.\n[Cueball is addressing three people outside a bar, indicated by a sign (two Cueball-like guys and Megan).] Cueball: Wait, who's driving? First Cueball-like guy: Why? First Cueball-like guy: Tom, right?\n[Zoom in on Cueball.] Cueball: Yes, but we have to leave in two groups. One of which will need at least two drivers.\n[There is text both above and below a flowchart with arrows between a group of the three people Cueball is talking to, and three houses that are labeled 'bar', 'dinner', and 'party'. Three lines point from the group of people to the bar and a fourth arrives from the party. Four lines points away from the bar. Two goes to the dinner one to the party and one away to the left. There are six arrows arriving at the dinner. Apart from the two lines coming from the bar, there is one long arrow pointing to the dinner from the left and two coming in from above. One more comes from the party below. Six arrows points away. One arrow goes away to the top right, the other five arrows points straight down to the party. There are also six arrows coming and leaving the party. Apart from the five from the dinner there was the one coming in from the bar. The six arrows leaving are the one arrow that went to the bar and the one to the dinner. The other four leaves in two groups of two, on straight down and two curving to the left.] Cueball (off-panel): Someone has to get Paul, and Julia and Emily have to leave by 10:00. Labels: Bar Labels: Dinner Labels: Party Cueball (off-panel): The logistics of who can get drunk are nontrivial.\n[The second Cueball-like guy to the right has an goat on a string behind him, which was not visible in the first panel, as he was at that time only partly inside the frame.] Second Cueball-like guy: Yeah, and I can't ride in a car with the wolf because he'll eat my goat. Cueball: Dammit, guys.\n"}
{"id":590,"title":"Papyrus","image_title":"Papyrus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/590","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/papyrus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/590:_Papyrus","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] My Hobby: Getting typography geeks heartfelt cards printed in \"Papyrus\" and watching them struggle to act grateful.\n[Ponytail is holding a card, with lines of indiscernible text, open and looking down, specifically neither on the card nor on Cueball, who is watching her instead. An angry tic is flicking on her forehead.] Ponytail: Thank you for the *twitch* ... lovely... *twitch* birthday card!\n","explanation":"One of the comics in the \" My Hobby \" series, this one touches on the fact that Papyrus (the font) is considered to be overused by many typography geeks, including the font's own creator. Pretending that he doesn't know that, Cueball gives Ponytail a heartfelt card written in that font just to see her twitch.\nThe title text says that Randall actually likes Papyrus, even if it is overused, and refers to the fact that he will soon be receiving hate-mail from people who dislike Papyrus. Those mails will be written in Helvetica , another commonly-used sans-serif font that is highly esteemed by typography geeks, designers, and often hipsters. It suggests that the designers would also take the time to check the \" kerning \", editing the spacing between individual letters to be visually pleasing - a time-consuming activity that, it can be suggested, would only be noticed by other designers. See also 1015: Kerning .\n[Caption above the panel:] My Hobby: Getting typography geeks heartfelt cards printed in \"Papyrus\" and watching them struggle to act grateful.\n[Ponytail is holding a card, with lines of indiscernible text, open and looking down, specifically neither on the card nor on Cueball, who is watching her instead. An angry tic is flicking on her forehead.] Ponytail: Thank you for the *twitch* ... lovely... *twitch* birthday card!\n"}
{"id":591,"title":"Troll Slayer","image_title":"Troll Slayer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/591","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/troll_slayer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/591:_Troll_Slayer","transcript":"[A list of post comments alongside pictures on a website. The first picture shows a page from a book\/website with a small black picture with a white feature in the upper left corner and text to the right and below it. The second picture shows Cueball in front of three people, with a unclear drawing to the right (is it a canon?). The third picture shows a man with a black hat holding up a sword to the left and a trumpet to the right. The fourth and last picture is cut off in the middle at the bottom of the frame. The visible top part shows a drawing of a mans face from the nose\/ears and up. The man has black hair and says LOL]. Text picture: Hey, let's troll the fuck out of the Twilight boards Cueball picture: I'm in. Should be fun Man with sword picture: Me too. Signing on now. LOL face picture: Lol angsty teens.\n[Stephenie Meyer is shown sitting facing right and chatting at her computer. She get's a reply from the screen. It looks like she actually speaks the lines of text to someone, but she only types it in via the keyboard. This becomes clear in in the next panel where the pimpled boy she talks to obviously types his reply on the keyboard. Across the top border of the frame is a smaller frame with a caption:] Hours Later:\nStephenie Meyer (typing): Hi, it's Stephenie Meyer. Fine, you don't like my books. But please leave us alone. Pimpled boy (from computer): Show us your tits. Stephenie Meyer (typing): I asked politely. Don't make me get tough.\n[A boy with lots of pimples and black hair is sitting at his computer typing (facing the other way towards Stephenie in the previous panel). He writes his reply on the keyboard and receives a reply from Stephenie coming out of the computer.] Pimpled boy (typing): And what, call the internet police? You don't get it, do you? We've been trolling for years. We're all anonymous. There's nothing you can do to hurt us. We're the net's hate machine. Stephenie Meyer (from computer): Okay. Just remember, I gave you a chance. *Disconnected* .\n[A page from a book is shown lying slanted across the panel. Some of the text is thus cut off at the edges of the frame. The first eight lines can be read clearly, even though the last letter in both the 2nd and sixth line is partly cut-off. Below that there are four incomplete lines, where only the visible part will be transcribed, but a good guess at the missing text is written in square brackets. Across the top border of the frame is a smaller frame with a caption:] Six Months Later:\nVampires! Book VI\nEdward ran a pale hand through his perfect golden- bronze hair, then signed on to 4chan.org, the darkest place on the internet, where all his vampire compatriots spent their time. Suddenly, there was [a] [sha]rp knock at the d[oor] [?] swept in [?] [?r?]ing [?]\n[Another list of post comments alongside pictures on the same website as in the first panel.  The first picture shows a man with black hair and a woman with long hair standing with their backs against each other (probably Edward and Bella from the books). The second picture is just a white frame with the text Dawnz. The third picture shows a person from the chest and up. The person has black hair and black clothes, with some kind of collar. The fourth and last picture shows two chess piece a large one in front of the other. The picture is shown completely but the text message seems to be more than two lines long, but only the top two lines are shown. Across the top border of the frame is a smaller frame with a caption:] Shortly thereafter:\nTwo people picture: OMG I love this place it's so edgy being anonymous Dawnz picture: Whos your favorite vampire Collared person picture: Check out my pic Im so dark just like this site Chess piece picture: Any Twilight fans in Dallas want to meet a lonely\n[Back to the boy with lots of pimples now sitting resigned at his computer without typing.] Hairy: Oh... Oh God.\n","explanation":"Stephenie Meyer is the author of the Twilight novels , a series of vampire novels popular with young teens. It is a love it or hate it type of novel, with a large following and a large portion of haters as well.\nIn the comic, 4chan , an imageboard , is featured. Imageboards such as 4chan have the feature to post anonymously. The users of 4chan launch an attack on a Twilight board and Stephenie Meyer asks them to stop. When they refuse, Meyer writes 4chan into her next novel, thereby drawing in a large number of fans of her novel as a counter-attack to what 4chan ran on the Twilight forum. This results in what the original 4chan users consider a ruined imageboard.\nThe title of the comic is drawn from the internet slang term troll , which refers to actively attempting to get a rise out of a forum. In this instance, 4chan attempted to troll a Twilight board and Meyer acted against the troll, making her a \"slayer\" of them. Obviously the pimpled boy she chats with is very dismayed by this result, as there are now so many more vampire-book-fans than computer geeks on 4chan, and they cannot get through with any of their funny\/evil plans anymore. There may also be a reference to the famous vampire slayer known as Buffy , seeing that Stephenie's main character vampires do not need to be slain, but she then turns on those who tries to do so in real life on the message board.\nThe pictures used on the two panels showing the 4chan imageboard tells a lot about their users. It is unclear what the text page refers to. And also what it is that Cueball is standing next to. But a black hat, as shown in the third picture is typical for an internet troll (see the xkcd version of Black Hat ), and also the guy saying LOL is already laughing out loud at you before you read his text. He also LOL's in his comment about the angsty teens that reads the books, and whom he looks forward to trolling.\nIn the second 4chan panel all four images relate to Twilight . The first picture most likely depicts Edward Cullen and Bella Swan (from the movies) standing with their backs against each other. This person enjoys being anonymous.\nThe second picture with the text Dawnz refers, in \"plural\" form, to the last book Breaking Dawn which was split into two films part 1 and part 2 . This person wish to know about peoples favorite vampire, exactly the kind of questions the trolls would have mocked on the Twilight board, now infesting their own site. The third picture is of a person who has tried to dress up like a goth vampire, even commenting on the darkness of the picture. The last picture depicts the cover of the last book Breaking Dawn with the two chess pieces. This fan seems to be searching for a date around Dallas...\nThe title text refers to Walt Kelly 's famous saying . Kelly used it to refer to all of mankind, whereas here it refers to the users of 4chan, by bringing on the enemy of their forum themselves.\n[A list of post comments alongside pictures on a website. The first picture shows a page from a book\/website with a small black picture with a white feature in the upper left corner and text to the right and below it. The second picture shows Cueball in front of three people, with a unclear drawing to the right (is it a canon?). The third picture shows a man with a black hat holding up a sword to the left and a trumpet to the right. The fourth and last picture is cut off in the middle at the bottom of the frame. The visible top part shows a drawing of a mans face from the nose\/ears and up. The man has black hair and says LOL]. Text picture: Hey, let's troll the fuck out of the Twilight boards Cueball picture: I'm in. Should be fun Man with sword picture: Me too. Signing on now. LOL face picture: Lol angsty teens.\n[Stephenie Meyer is shown sitting facing right and chatting at her computer. She get's a reply from the screen. It looks like she actually speaks the lines of text to someone, but she only types it in via the keyboard. This becomes clear in in the next panel where the pimpled boy she talks to obviously types his reply on the keyboard. Across the top border of the frame is a smaller frame with a caption:] Hours Later:\nStephenie Meyer (typing): Hi, it's Stephenie Meyer. Fine, you don't like my books. But please leave us alone. Pimpled boy (from computer): Show us your tits. Stephenie Meyer (typing): I asked politely. Don't make me get tough.\n[A boy with lots of pimples and black hair is sitting at his computer typing (facing the other way towards Stephenie in the previous panel). He writes his reply on the keyboard and receives a reply from Stephenie coming out of the computer.] Pimpled boy (typing): And what, call the internet police? You don't get it, do you? We've been trolling for years. We're all anonymous. There's nothing you can do to hurt us. We're the net's hate machine. Stephenie Meyer (from computer): Okay. Just remember, I gave you a chance. *Disconnected* .\n[A page from a book is shown lying slanted across the panel. Some of the text is thus cut off at the edges of the frame. The first eight lines can be read clearly, even though the last letter in both the 2nd and sixth line is partly cut-off. Below that there are four incomplete lines, where only the visible part will be transcribed, but a good guess at the missing text is written in square brackets. Across the top border of the frame is a smaller frame with a caption:] Six Months Later:\nVampires! Book VI\nEdward ran a pale hand through his perfect golden- bronze hair, then signed on to 4chan.org, the darkest place on the internet, where all his vampire compatriots spent their time. Suddenly, there was [a] [sha]rp knock at the d[oor] [?] swept in [?] [?r?]ing [?]\n[Another list of post comments alongside pictures on the same website as in the first panel.  The first picture shows a man with black hair and a woman with long hair standing with their backs against each other (probably Edward and Bella from the books). The second picture is just a white frame with the text Dawnz. The third picture shows a person from the chest and up. The person has black hair and black clothes, with some kind of collar. The fourth and last picture shows two chess piece a large one in front of the other. The picture is shown completely but the text message seems to be more than two lines long, but only the top two lines are shown. Across the top border of the frame is a smaller frame with a caption:] Shortly thereafter:\nTwo people picture: OMG I love this place it's so edgy being anonymous Dawnz picture: Whos your favorite vampire Collared person picture: Check out my pic Im so dark just like this site Chess piece picture: Any Twilight fans in Dallas want to meet a lonely\n[Back to the boy with lots of pimples now sitting resigned at his computer without typing.] Hairy: Oh... Oh God.\n"}
{"id":592,"title":"Drama","image_title":"Drama","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/592","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/drama.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/592:_Drama","transcript":"[Megan and two Cueball like guys are sitting together.] Megan: Man, sex has all these crazy social rules. They just create drama. Cueball: Let's agree to change them, and make sex simple! Friend: Okay!\n[Cueball gets up and goes out the door.] Cueball: Hooray! We've solved the problem of drama! Cueball: I'll go tell everyone!\n[There is a graph labeled drama. Below is an axis and below that an arrow marked with time. A vertical dotted line is labeled and indicates the rule change. Drama is low, although fluctuating, before the rule change, then sharply increases afterward and continues to increase.] Drama Time Rule change\n[Cueball closes the door and then leans against it.] Cueball: Holy shit Cueball: Guys Cueball: People are complicated!\n","explanation":"Megan and two Cueball -like guys discuss how irrational society's interactions about sex are. They decide to throw out all these silly societal rules to end drama forever and spread this philosophy to everyone they know, which immediately leads to a huge increase in drama as shown in the chart.\nAs one of the Cueballs in the comic states, people are indeed complicated and\u2014crucially\u2014what seems intuitive and rational to one person might seem completely irrational to someone else; so throwing out all the rules one person thinks make no sense isn't going to mean the world suddenly makes sense for everyone else. Instead, everyone who understands the old rules, whether they like them or not, will suddenly find themselves in a completely alien world to which they have no idea how to relate.\nFurthermore, any one person's sense of what seems rational is based on incomplete information . The three people are trying to change all the sex rules\u2014like the engineers referenced in the title text who think they can \"solve\" the stock market\u2014can't even begin to conceive of all the chaotic factors affecting the system they're trying to fix, so they have no way of knowing which rules are truly rational and which aren't.\nGeeks often fall prey to the fallacy that human interactions can be easily simplified if only a group of sufficiently qualified geeks put their minds to it as laid out in The Geek Social Fallacies and The Geek Social Fallacies of Sex .\nSocial rules that are adopted partly to avoid drama include laws surrounding marriage and alimony . These rules differ a large amount, but not incomparably, across different cultures. The study of them is a major concern in social science, and it is not unheard of to conjecture new ones, for example the work of the evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischmann .\nThe situation in the title text, with a bunch of engineers diving into the stock market, is also mentioned in 1570: Engineer Syllogism .\n[Megan and two Cueball like guys are sitting together.] Megan: Man, sex has all these crazy social rules. They just create drama. Cueball: Let's agree to change them, and make sex simple! Friend: Okay!\n[Cueball gets up and goes out the door.] Cueball: Hooray! We've solved the problem of drama! Cueball: I'll go tell everyone!\n[There is a graph labeled drama. Below is an axis and below that an arrow marked with time. A vertical dotted line is labeled and indicates the rule change. Drama is low, although fluctuating, before the rule change, then sharply increases afterward and continues to increase.] Drama Time Rule change\n[Cueball closes the door and then leans against it.] Cueball: Holy shit Cueball: Guys Cueball: People are complicated!\n"}
{"id":593,"title":"Voynich Manuscript","image_title":"Voynich Manuscript","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/593","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voynich_manuscript.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/593:_Voynich_Manuscript","transcript":"[Weird root vegetables surround a strange script.]\n[Megan holding up book to Cueball.] Megan: This is the Voynich manuscript\u2014 a book, allegedly 500 years old, written in an unrecognized script. It's some kind of visual encyclopedia of imaginary plants and undeciphered \"recipes\".\n[Megan points while Cueball opens the book.] Megan: It could be a hoax, a lost language, a cipher, an alien text, glossolatia \u2014 no one knows. Cueball: No one? But it's obvious.\n[Megan continues to talk. Cueball holds the now closed book.] Megan: ... Obvious? Linguists and cryptographers have been stumped for decades. Cueball: They forget. Human nature doesn't change.\n[Close up of Megan and Cueball - the book is off panel.] Cueball: Just imagine someone found a book from our time, full of lists, illustrations, tables, and long, dry descriptions of nonexistent worlds written in an invented language. What have they found? Megan: ...Dear Lord. It is obvious.\n\n[Three people are standing around pawns and a die. One is holding a sheet of paper, another is holding a book, the third is holding a scythe. At the top of the panel there is a frame with the following text:] 500 Years Earlier: Person #1: Forsooth! I concoct an elixer of courage. Person #2: Nae! The source booke sayeth that requires some wolfsbane! Person #3: Your druid doth lose two points.\n","explanation":"The Voynich manuscript is a very detailed book written in an unknown script, describing plants and recipes, most of which lack a real-world analogue. Over the past few decades, linguists and cryptographers have unsuccessfully attempted to decode the book. A cut out from the book is depicted in the first frame (real or similar).\nTabletop role-playing games (such as Dungeons and Dragons ) are fantasy games with extremely detailed descriptions of fantastical worlds. The invented language is probably a reference to The Lord of the Rings in which author J. R. R. Tolkien invented several languages of which Sindarin (Grey elvish), and Quenya (High elvish), are the most famous.\nAfter being shown the manuscript for the first time by Megan , Cueball argues that it should be obvious that it's just an ancient role-playing-game rulebook, since the human tendency to invent fantastical worlds must have also existed in the past. That it is this obvious was again stated when the manuscript was referenced in 1501: Mysteries . In the last panel the book is used, 500 years ago, to play a game  similar to Dungeons and Dragons. They speak in a somewhat outdated English. The reference to the real plant Wolfsbane could also be a reference to another invented world, as it is memorably mentioned in the first book of the Harry Potter series.\nAfter concluding this, a shocked Cueball then asks in the title text how Megan got her hands on the original manuscript, which is in the Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library . Rigorous security rules now only allow carefully controlled access to materials under video surveillance, thus Cueball's reaction upon realizing Megan has somehow gotten her hands on the original manuscript. He then unexpectedly goes on to suggest the prosaic activity of playing Druids and Dicotyledons , assuming such a game could be defined by the manuscript.\n[Weird root vegetables surround a strange script.]\n[Megan holding up book to Cueball.] Megan: This is the Voynich manuscript\u2014 a book, allegedly 500 years old, written in an unrecognized script. It's some kind of visual encyclopedia of imaginary plants and undeciphered \"recipes\".\n[Megan points while Cueball opens the book.] Megan: It could be a hoax, a lost language, a cipher, an alien text, glossolatia \u2014 no one knows. Cueball: No one? But it's obvious.\n[Megan continues to talk. Cueball holds the now closed book.] Megan: ... Obvious? Linguists and cryptographers have been stumped for decades. Cueball: They forget. Human nature doesn't change.\n[Close up of Megan and Cueball - the book is off panel.] Cueball: Just imagine someone found a book from our time, full of lists, illustrations, tables, and long, dry descriptions of nonexistent worlds written in an invented language. What have they found? Megan: ...Dear Lord. It is obvious.\n\n[Three people are standing around pawns and a die. One is holding a sheet of paper, another is holding a book, the third is holding a scythe. At the top of the panel there is a frame with the following text:] 500 Years Earlier: Person #1: Forsooth! I concoct an elixer of courage. Person #2: Nae! The source booke sayeth that requires some wolfsbane! Person #3: Your druid doth lose two points.\n"}
{"id":594,"title":"Period","image_title":"Period","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/594","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/period.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/594:_Period","transcript":"[Cueball is standing with a hand to his chin looking towards a woman off-panel right. In all panels the woman answers off-panel with a small starburst close to the right panels border indicating from where her speak emanates.] Woman's voice (off-panel): Ugh. Stupid uterus. Cueball: Hey, your period is every 28 days, right?\n[Cueball is standing hands down.] Woman's voice (off-panel): Yes, why? Cueball: Well, period = T = 1\/f. Woman's voice (off-panel): So?\n[Cueball holds up a finger in front of him.] Cueball: Using this, we can calculate something you already know. Woman's voice (off-panel): What?\n[Cueball is standing hands down.] Cueball: Your uterus-hertz. Woman's voice (off-panel): If I could get up I'd smack you.\n","explanation":"A period, also called a menstrual cycle , is a process marked by (among other things) a few days of abdominal cramps occurring roughly once a month for women in the reproductive age .\n\"Period\" ( T ) is also the term in mathematics for a measure of the rate at which something happens. It measures the length of time between occurrences. For example, a full moon happens about once every 29.5 days, so its period is 29.5 days. By taking the inverse of this, we can get a different measurement, its frequency ( f ) - the number of times an event happens within a given length of time. This is usually measured in hertz (pronounced the same as \"hurts\"), which is the number of times something happens in a second. Hertz is abbreviated as Hz, and since f = 1\/T, with T measured in seconds (s), it follows that 1 Hz = 1 s \u22121 .\nThe woman has her period every 28 days. Since we can calculate the frequency based on the period, we can, indeed, calculate her \"uterus-hertz\" but she already knew that her \"uterus hurts\". Yes, this has all been a setup to a terrible pun to make your head hertz. And if she had not been in such terrible pains that she cannot even get up, she would have smacked Cueball for it, which would really hertz. This makes it even more hertzfull by Cueball, to make fun of his girlfriend in such a state.\nThe woman off screen is probably Megan given that she is most often depicted as Cueball's girlfriend, and the fact that he is in her home with her on the couch is a good indicator that they are intimate. (This is not enough to include this comic as one with Megan).\nThe title text gives the other answer that can be calculated from Cueballs musings, the actual frequency of the womans  period which have a period T = 28 days. 413 nanohertz is the correct frequency as shown here by Google Calculator.\nIt can also easily be shown here:\nf = 1\/28 days = 1\/(28 days \u00d7 24 hours\/day \u00d7 60 minutes\/hour \u00d7 60 seconds\/minute) = 1\/(2,419,200 s) = 4.1336 \u00d7 10 \u22127 s \u22121 = 413 \u00d7 10 \u22129 Hz = 413 nHz .\n[Cueball is standing with a hand to his chin looking towards a woman off-panel right. In all panels the woman answers off-panel with a small starburst close to the right panels border indicating from where her speak emanates.] Woman's voice (off-panel): Ugh. Stupid uterus. Cueball: Hey, your period is every 28 days, right?\n[Cueball is standing hands down.] Woman's voice (off-panel): Yes, why? Cueball: Well, period = T = 1\/f. Woman's voice (off-panel): So?\n[Cueball holds up a finger in front of him.] Cueball: Using this, we can calculate something you already know. Woman's voice (off-panel): What?\n[Cueball is standing hands down.] Cueball: Your uterus-hertz. Woman's voice (off-panel): If I could get up I'd smack you.\n"}
{"id":595,"title":"Android Girlfriend","image_title":"Android Girlfriend","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/595","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/android_girlfriend.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/595:_Android_Girlfriend","transcript":"[Cueball, holding his hand on Megan's shoulder, talks to his Cueball-like friend, who is holding a drink glass with a cherry.] Cueball: Check out my new android girlfriend. Friend: Is she a sex bot?\n[The android grabs the cherry out of the friend's drink glass.] Grab\n[Zoom in on the cherry as the stem is ripped off.] Plink\n[Zoom to the android, who puts the stem into its mouth.] Nom\n[The panel is dark gray, except around the android's mouth, where there is a bright flash and then a brighter cross going out from there. Both Cueball and his friend hold up their hands to protect their eyes.] Kzzzzt\n[The android takes a step away from Cueball and reaches toward the friend's crotch. The friend holds up his hand protectively in front of him.] Friend: I don't think arc-welding a cherry stem counts as sexy. Android: Remove your pants. Friend: No.\n","explanation":"This is the first (of two) comics in the Android series , which continued directly less than two weeks later in 600: Android Boyfriend .\nCueball shows off his new \"android girlfriend\" ( Megan ) to his Cueball-like friend, who asks if the android is a sex bot . The android responds by pulling a cherry stem from the friend's drink and inserting it into her mouth. So far, the action appears to be an emulation of the party trick where someone puts a cherry stem into their mouth and ties it into a knot in order to suggest tongue dexterity that could be put to good use in kissing and oral sex .\nHowever, instead of tying the cherry stem in a knot, the android activates an arc welder built into her mouth, which presumably reduces the stem to ashes. The friend proclaims that that trick is definitely not sexy. But then the android aggressively approaches him, reaching out and saying, \"Remove your pants\". The friend, not eager to experience close genital contact with the arc welder, sensibly, refuses. (Of course he may also not wish to take of his pants in front of his friend, at a party with drinks and presumably other people; or perhaps he does not wish to admit that he actually does find the arc welding act sexy...)\nThe title text bounces a few implications around. Developing robots with the capacity to either learn or feel emotions is an ethical factor and practical consideration that is commonly explored in science fiction . Here, it's proposed that robots programmed for sex would have their emotions set to enjoy sex by default, but then use their capacity to learn to develop preferences on what kind of sex they want to have. This is potentially a psychological issue, mainly as to whether or not it would be considered \"unhealthy\", but more directly it's a customer satisfaction problem: what if a sexbot were to develop sexual fetishes that its owner finds unappealing?\nIt is also possible that the android shows a level of awareness superior to what is implied by the discussion in the strip. Then using an arc-wielder on that stem could be interpreted as a menace in response to a comment that would be unsensitive if referred to a real person.\n[Cueball, holding his hand on Megan's shoulder, talks to his Cueball-like friend, who is holding a drink glass with a cherry.] Cueball: Check out my new android girlfriend. Friend: Is she a sex bot?\n[The android grabs the cherry out of the friend's drink glass.] Grab\n[Zoom in on the cherry as the stem is ripped off.] Plink\n[Zoom to the android, who puts the stem into its mouth.] Nom\n[The panel is dark gray, except around the android's mouth, where there is a bright flash and then a brighter cross going out from there. Both Cueball and his friend hold up their hands to protect their eyes.] Kzzzzt\n[The android takes a step away from Cueball and reaches toward the friend's crotch. The friend holds up his hand protectively in front of him.] Friend: I don't think arc-welding a cherry stem counts as sexy. Android: Remove your pants. Friend: No.\n"}
{"id":596,"title":"Latitude","image_title":"Latitude","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/596","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/latitude.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/596:_Latitude","transcript":"[Black Hat is holding a phone up to Cueball.] Black Hat: We're in a narrow window in which people are using Google Latitude, but haven't learned the habit of turning it off when they're doing something discreetly. Black Hat: I wrote an app to log friends' locations and work out addresses and business names.\n[A timetable is visible. The first column gives the time and splits the day in the half hour intervals starting at 11:00 AM, except for the last entry at 4:10 PM, where the time only jumps 10 minutes. The next two columns represents two persons activities during this time period. In the second column the last letter shown in the comic is partly cut off more or less. This last partly shown letter is written in the transcript, but no guess is made here. See the explanation. Above the table, over the two names, there is a caption:] Locations\nTime Megan Robert 11:00 AM Home 12:30 PM Eastview Adult Toy Store Home 1:30 PM Home 2:00 PM Laketown Sex Toy Shop School 2:30 PM Home 3:00 PM Fry's Electronics 3:30 PM Ed's Power Tool Emporium Subway 4:00 PM Home 4:10 PM Hospital Burn Ward\n","explanation":"Black Hat shows his friend (presumably Robert [aka Rob from the chart]), that he has made a mobile phone application to log and find addresses and business names for the locations of his \"friends\" using data from Google Latitude which was a location-aware feature of Google Maps that allowed a mobile phone user to allow certain people to view their current location.\nThe reason it is worth doing so for him, is that most of those that use Google Latitude, haven't learned the habit to turn it off when engaging in \"discreet\" activities. And then Black Hat can access their whereabout which he then uses in his app.\nThe second panel shows the screen of Black Hat's smartphone with the logs for his two friend in table form showing activity for Megan and Robert (Rob), the latter log is partially cut off. (Regarding the use of these names see the trivia section ).\nRobert's log is fairly innocuous: home at 12:30 PM, school at 2:00 PM, and riding a subway (or possibly in a Subway restaurant ) at 3:30 PM. This log shows that Robert did nothing interesting for Black Hat. There are also several holes in the table compared to the other column. This could either indicate that he stayed this long time those three places, but it could also indicate that Robert has already learned to switch off Latitude when he is not actively using it. This would fit with Black Hat's comment about a narrow window in which people haven't learned this. His friend Robert (the Rob version of Cueball shown here, see the trivia section ), may already have thought of this himself, or maybe Black Hat has mentioned it to him before getting the idea for the app thus warning him about the problem (without meaning to).\nThe reason Black Hat states that there only is a narrow window of time that people forget to turn Google Latitude off , is because people like him will make other people, who forget this, miserable. And then everyone will soon learn to turn the feature off making Black Hat's app useless.\nMegan's log appears to prove Black Hat's point: She was home at 11:00 AM, at a sex toy store at 12:30 PM, home again at 1:30 PM, at another sex toy store at 2:00 PM, home again at 2:30 PM, then at Fry's Electronics at 3:00 PM, and at a power tool store at 3:30 PM, finally home again at 4:00 PM only to be at the hospital burn ward at 4:10 PM. The last entry is the only one where the interval is not half an hour indicating how fast Megan had to get to the hospital after getting home with her new power tools and electronics.\nThis suggests that Megan first tried the sex toy(s) from the first store, found them insufficiently satisfying, purchased additional sex toys from another store, was still unsatisfied, and then purchased some electronic devices and power tools (either to improve the performance of her sex toys or to apply directly for additional stimulation). The results were apparently more painful than pleasurable, necessitating a quick visit to the hospital burn ward. Overall, Megan has had an at first unsatisfying day and then finally a rather bad day, considering where the burn is most likely to be... She would almost certainly not be pleased to learn that Black Hat has been tracking her whereabouts and sharing this with their mutual friend Rob.\nThe title text shows that Randall liked the T-Mobile G1, also known as the HTC Dream , especially with the upgrade to Android Cupcake , more than he previously thought because it allows for more capabilities and the interface is clean and easy-to-use when compared to other \"smartphones\" of that time period (because the G1 was the first phone to introduce the Android operating system ) and it allows for special Google networking, allowing for apps like Maps to run better (making it easier to run apps like Latitude). From what able to be gathered in the comic, it is Black Hat who says this, because he is the one who uses the app and shows it off. He would be the most likely one to benefit from this kind of phone running this kind of OS\/app.\n[Black Hat is holding a phone up to Cueball.] Black Hat: We're in a narrow window in which people are using Google Latitude, but haven't learned the habit of turning it off when they're doing something discreetly. Black Hat: I wrote an app to log friends' locations and work out addresses and business names.\n[A timetable is visible. The first column gives the time and splits the day in the half hour intervals starting at 11:00 AM, except for the last entry at 4:10 PM, where the time only jumps 10 minutes. The next two columns represents two persons activities during this time period. In the second column the last letter shown in the comic is partly cut off more or less. This last partly shown letter is written in the transcript, but no guess is made here. See the explanation. Above the table, over the two names, there is a caption:] Locations\nTime Megan Robert 11:00 AM Home 12:30 PM Eastview Adult Toy Store Home 1:30 PM Home 2:00 PM Laketown Sex Toy Shop School 2:30 PM Home 3:00 PM Fry's Electronics 3:30 PM Ed's Power Tool Emporium Subway 4:00 PM Home 4:10 PM Hospital Burn Ward\n"}
{"id":597,"title":"Addiction","image_title":"Addiction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/597","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/addiction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/597:_Addiction","transcript":"[Close up of Cueball typing at his computer. Megan's text message to him can be seen coming from the screen with a zigzag line, and Cueball writes a response as seen from the line going from his hand on the keyboard up to his message.] Megan (through the computer): Constant novelty saps my initiative. I'm gonna try to spend a weekend at home without internet. Cueball (writing): I give you an hour.\n[Megan is standing up, she turns off the computer in front of her by clicking on a button on the screen. Her office chair has rolled back behind her.] Click\n[Megan stands in front of the computer arms in her sides. Beat panel.]\n[Zoom out with Cueball sitting in his office chair typing a reply on his computer to the message from Megan as in the first panel.] Megan (through the computer): So far, it's not actually too bad! Cueball (writing): Ahem? Megan (through the computer): Wait. Shit.\n","explanation":"Megan is attempting to stay a weekend at home without the Internet as she feels the constant exposure to novelty (from her internet surfing ) saps her own initiative. She writes a \"last\" on-line message about her resolution to Cueball , but he writes back that he doubts she can do it for even one hour.\nShe turns off her computer (or at least the screen) and stands up triumphantly next to it, however then she logs right back on to write to Cueball that it's not half bad being off-line, thus violating her original attempt as she clearly used the internet to send the message to Cueball. She doesn't even realize she did this until Cueball replies with the written sound Ahem? proving he was right about less than one hour.\nVery typical of people having some kind of addiction , in this case for being on-line, they may not even realize when they indulge into it, which is the case with Megan here.\nThe title text elaborates on Megan's addiction, saying that when she turns off all of the machines in the room, it results in an \"empty-room hum\". This is a high pitched buzzing noise, which it is suggested results from the brain increasing its sensitivity to noises. This is a fairly normal experience, but the \" whispers \" mentioned may be slightly more sinister, as this is frequently associated as a sign of schizophrenia . See also 1590: The Source .\n[Close up of Cueball typing at his computer. Megan's text message to him can be seen coming from the screen with a zigzag line, and Cueball writes a response as seen from the line going from his hand on the keyboard up to his message.] Megan (through the computer): Constant novelty saps my initiative. I'm gonna try to spend a weekend at home without internet. Cueball (writing): I give you an hour.\n[Megan is standing up, she turns off the computer in front of her by clicking on a button on the screen. Her office chair has rolled back behind her.] Click\n[Megan stands in front of the computer arms in her sides. Beat panel.]\n[Zoom out with Cueball sitting in his office chair typing a reply on his computer to the message from Megan as in the first panel.] Megan (through the computer): So far, it's not actually too bad! Cueball (writing): Ahem? Megan (through the computer): Wait. Shit.\n"}
{"id":598,"title":"Porn","image_title":"Porn","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/598","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/porn.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/598:_Porn","transcript":"[Cueball is hunched up at a computer. A circle surrounds him; the rest of the panel is black. The text is written in a square panel above the white circle.] I shouldn't have watched all that porn as a teenager.\n[The text is above the picture in a square frame. A computer screen is shown. It displays an on-line video player, with what appears to be a Cueball-like guy performing cunnilingus on a Megan-like girl. Five other windows (maybe ads) are also visible, though what they depict is not clear. One of them has readable text above a picture (of what appear to be a fleshlight). The rest of the text, including a heading at the top, is unreadable. There is picture with a lady with \"big\" hair holding her arms out. She has two black blotches on each side of her body. Maybe representing her breast, perhaps in a bra.] It's not that it scarred me. Ad text: X 10\n[A modem is shown between the two text parts. The text is in two square frames.] It's just that we had dial-up. Modem: 14.4 kbps And now I'm stuck with a fetish.\n[Cueball and Megan are in bed together. The text above the picture is in a square frame.] For video compression. Cueball: Can you try to look... blockier?\n","explanation":"Cueball 's mention of how porn did not scar him is a reference to a lot of testimony on how porn has negatively affected people's lives . Of course, the porn really did affect the way he looked at women. Due to dial-up being of such a slow speed, videos that needed to be transmitted via dial-up had to be compressed using a lossy format, which reduces file sizes substantially but also causes heavy data losses; the result being that the new decompressed file would not be of the same quality of the original uncompressed file. In this case, the lossy format eats away at the detail of the picture, which, during decompression, results in blocky artifacts in an attempt to \"reconstruct\" the lost data. Since he associated blocky pictures with arousal, he seems to have trouble enjoying sex with his comparatively hi-fi girlfriend. In other words, the porn really did scar him after all.\nThe title text expands on this, referencing file corruption . It is also a pun on female \"corruption,\" or a woman's awareness of her sexuality.\n[Cueball is hunched up at a computer. A circle surrounds him; the rest of the panel is black. The text is written in a square panel above the white circle.] I shouldn't have watched all that porn as a teenager.\n[The text is above the picture in a square frame. A computer screen is shown. It displays an on-line video player, with what appears to be a Cueball-like guy performing cunnilingus on a Megan-like girl. Five other windows (maybe ads) are also visible, though what they depict is not clear. One of them has readable text above a picture (of what appear to be a fleshlight). The rest of the text, including a heading at the top, is unreadable. There is picture with a lady with \"big\" hair holding her arms out. She has two black blotches on each side of her body. Maybe representing her breast, perhaps in a bra.] It's not that it scarred me. Ad text: X 10\n[A modem is shown between the two text parts. The text is in two square frames.] It's just that we had dial-up. Modem: 14.4 kbps And now I'm stuck with a fetish.\n[Cueball and Megan are in bed together. The text above the picture is in a square frame.] For video compression. Cueball: Can you try to look... blockier?\n"}
{"id":599,"title":"Apocalypse","image_title":"Apocalypse","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/599","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/apocalypse.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/599:_Apocalypse","transcript":"[The first panel is very large and shows a dark scene with one large meteor in front and four smaller in the background showering the darkened earth. They are all five black with yellow fire around them and a fire trail behind them, and all are flying from the top left corner and down towards right. The sky at the top is pitch black, but then the sky turns blood red under dark clouds. Two large mountain peaks, one almost pyramid shaped, are shown to the left and to the right there are two smaller peaks towards the distant horizon. The mountains and the ground around them are mainly black, but with red, orange and yellow streaks spread all over the black area beneath the mountain peaks, maybe indicating fire or lava, or reflections in water or blood. At the bottom right corner a normal white panel is superimposed on this apocalyptic image.]\n[The smaller panel at the bottom of the first is halfway over the first panel, haflway below, and only to the right of the middle of the first panel. Beret Guy is running towards left, with his arms raised in the air.] Beret Guy: The apocalypse! The skies burn, the seas turn to blood, and the dead walk the earth!\n[From here a normal sequence of panels in three rows begin beneath the second panel. This leaves a gap between the apocalyptic panel and the first row of regular panels, on the left side where the 2nd panel did not reach over. In this panel Beret Guy (coming from the right) finds Cueball.] Cueball: The dead what? Beret Guy: Walk the earth!\n[Cueball running right in a thin panel.] Cueball: I have to go.\n[Cueball sitting on a chair at a table scribbling vigorously and noisily with a pen on a paper. Mathematical symbols appear above Cueball's head, including a summation from i=0 to n, a logarithm of n and the square root of a number.] \u2211 n i=0 i k 1\/i log(n) \u221a163 Scribble Scribble\n[Cueball running right again, in a thin panel, pen and paper in hand.]\n[Cueball opening door with label:] Math Dept Cueball: The dead return! Cueball: Everyone, quick, get your names on here!\n[Cueball stand on the left side of a table looking left over his shoulder. Five people are lining up to sign the paper lying on the right side of the table. The first who signs with a pen is Blondie, then in line follows Megan, a Cueball-like guy, Ponytail and another Cueball-like guy who stand with one hand to his chin looking right, away from the other.] Blondie: At last! Guy looking right: I hope there's time!\n[Cueball running right in yet a thin panel, with pen and the paper flowing behind him.]\n[Cueball walks right with the paper and pen in his hand as he arrives at at a cemetery as revealed by an old worn sign. Scary sounds appear off-panel right.] Sign: Cemetery Rising dead (off-panel): Hurrghhh\n[Cueball, still going right, arrives at a grave, pen in hand and the other hand almost outside the panel, but with a corner of the paper just visible. The grave has a large gravestone to the right and in front of it there is a Cueball-like guy rising up from the ground using his arms to push up on the base of the stone and the small pile of earth towards Cueball. The guy looks very worn, with dirt on his head and scratches on his cheek.]\n[Cueball bends a little down and offers pen and paper to the raised dead man who looks up at him when he is addressed.] Cueball: Paul Erd\u0151s? Erd\u0151s: Yes? Cueball: We need you to sign this.\n","explanation":"This comic begins with the beginning of the Apocalypse , hence the title. It is depicted, properly, with a very dystopian color picture with several yellow burning meteors striking down from the blood red sky, towards a black, red, orange and yellow ground. The way the panels are drawn below makes a transition from this dark image to a normal comic, with the first normal panel being superimposed on the dark image.\nIn this image Beret Guy shouts out The apocalypse! And then he continues to explain what this will mean: The skies burn, the seas turn to blood, and the dead walk the earth!\nAll three sentences are attributed to the apocalypse, but it seems that the first one about the sky burning, actually comes from a translation of one of the Nostradamus predictions which has, amongst others, been used to \" predict 9\/11 \". In Revelation 16 from the Bible about the Seven bowls , which are a set of seven plagues of God's wrath poured over the wicked towards the Apocalypse, the second bowl describes that The Sea Turns to Blood . The resurrection of the dead is from the biblical version of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment .\nAfter Beret Guy has announced this, he runs into Cueball who has heard part of this, but he is only interested in the last part and asks to check if he understood correctly that the dead will walk the earth. When this is confirmed Cueball becomes very busy.\nHe runs to his office and quickly writes a scientific math paper, then runs as fast as he can to the math department and get his colleagues to sign it. Then he runs to a cemetery where the dead are rising, finds the one he searched for, and asks the resurrected zombie if he is Erd\u0151s. When confirmed that he is indeed Erd\u0151s, Cueball asks him to sign the math paper.\nPaul Erd\u0151s (26 March 1913 \u2013 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician who (according to Wikipedia) published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. His grave is in the Kozma Street Cemetery in Budapest.\nThere is an in-joke developed among mathematicians called the Erd\u0151s number (similar to a Bacon number for film actors, referenced in the title text, see below). By definition, Erd\u0151s has an Erd\u0151s number of 0. Everyone who has co-written a mathematical paper with Erd\u0151s has an Erd\u0151s number of 1. Everyone who collaborated with them (but not Erd\u0151s himself) is assigned an Erd\u0151s number of 2. In general, if k is the minimal Erd\u0151s number of all the people you've written papers with, your Erd\u0151s number is k + 1. The Erd\u0151s number is the length of the shortest \"chain\" from you to Erd\u0151s.\nThanks to collaboration between mathematicians and other researchers, many people in science and medical research now have Erd\u0151s numbers. Not everyone has an Erd\u0151s number, though; people without any chain linking them to Erd\u0151s have an undefined Erd\u0151s number. For example, most people who are not mathematicians or scientists do not have Erd\u0151s numbers. Nor do mathematicians and scientists whose publications were written by themselves only with no collaborators.\nBy this trick Cueball thinks that he and his colleagues will now all have an Erd\u0151s number of 1. The joke is that he would be using his last few hours in this life to write a math paper just to improve his and his friends' Erd\u0151s numbers.\nThere are, however, many problems with his idea, even assuming the dead will walk the earth on that day. First of all, just having your name on a piece of paper with Erd\u0151s's signature does nothing for your Erd\u0151s number. It needs to be a scientifically valid paper , published in a peer reviewed scientific journal . And given that the apocalypse is happening, there seems no time, chance or reason to publish any more math papers.\nEven if there were time, it would not count for much to have someone sign a math paper they haven't even read, let alone had anything to do with the actual writing and research. The same would be true for the other five mathematicians who signed it. But of course many papers have coauthors who did not do much more than work in the same department as the person who actually wrote the paper (a sad but true fact). Presumably Cueball's friends assume that nobody will investigate whether they, or Erd\u0151s, truly participated in the writing and research of Cueball's paper.\nFurthermore, even if it did count, they will not be able to take the paper with them into the afterlife (although since nobody has ever returned from the afterlife [ citation needed ] we can't be certain of this), and thus since no one would have had time to read the paper, no one would know they had an Erd\u0151s number of 1. In the afterlife they could all say that they had such a number, but then again everyone else with such an interest could do the same, since no one could prove otherwise. Of course if you end up in the same part ( Heaven or Hell ) of the afterlife as Erd\u0151s he could confirm or deny the claim, but that would probably not help Cueball and his friends, since he could tell the truth about their paper. (Erd\u0151s was known for using an idiosyncratic set of slang terms, in which he described people who had stopped doing mathematics as having \"died\", whereas people who had died had \"left\".)\nThat the whole comic is about the Erd\u0151s number, and not just Erd\u0151s signature, is made clear in the title text which refers to a similar (and less esoteric) meme called \" Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon \", or simply Bacon numbers. This time, the chain's center is actor Kevin Bacon , and the links are formed by two people appearing in the same movie. Unlike Erd\u0151s, Kevin Bacon is not dead, so those of you wishing to get a Bacon number of 1 still have a chance.\nIn the title text Cueball thus wonders if there is still time for him to make a short film with Kevin Bacon, now he has used so much time on improving his Erd\u0151s number. Again, if the film hasn't been shown to the public it would not count for anything...\nOne of the mathematical scribbles appearing in panel 5 shows the square root of 163, which may be a reference to Ramanujan's constant .\n403: Convincing Pickup Line has a parody of the Erd\u0151s collaboration graph.\nZombies are a recurring theme in xkcd, particularly zombie scientists, which has also occurred both before with Richard Feynman in 397: Unscientific and after with Marie Curie in 896: Marie Curie .\n[The first panel is very large and shows a dark scene with one large meteor in front and four smaller in the background showering the darkened earth. They are all five black with yellow fire around them and a fire trail behind them, and all are flying from the top left corner and down towards right. The sky at the top is pitch black, but then the sky turns blood red under dark clouds. Two large mountain peaks, one almost pyramid shaped, are shown to the left and to the right there are two smaller peaks towards the distant horizon. The mountains and the ground around them are mainly black, but with red, orange and yellow streaks spread all over the black area beneath the mountain peaks, maybe indicating fire or lava, or reflections in water or blood. At the bottom right corner a normal white panel is superimposed on this apocalyptic image.]\n[The smaller panel at the bottom of the first is halfway over the first panel, haflway below, and only to the right of the middle of the first panel. Beret Guy is running towards left, with his arms raised in the air.] Beret Guy: The apocalypse! The skies burn, the seas turn to blood, and the dead walk the earth!\n[From here a normal sequence of panels in three rows begin beneath the second panel. This leaves a gap between the apocalyptic panel and the first row of regular panels, on the left side where the 2nd panel did not reach over. In this panel Beret Guy (coming from the right) finds Cueball.] Cueball: The dead what? Beret Guy: Walk the earth!\n[Cueball running right in a thin panel.] Cueball: I have to go.\n[Cueball sitting on a chair at a table scribbling vigorously and noisily with a pen on a paper. Mathematical symbols appear above Cueball's head, including a summation from i=0 to n, a logarithm of n and the square root of a number.] \u2211 n i=0 i k 1\/i log(n) \u221a163 Scribble Scribble\n[Cueball running right again, in a thin panel, pen and paper in hand.]\n[Cueball opening door with label:] Math Dept Cueball: The dead return! Cueball: Everyone, quick, get your names on here!\n[Cueball stand on the left side of a table looking left over his shoulder. Five people are lining up to sign the paper lying on the right side of the table. The first who signs with a pen is Blondie, then in line follows Megan, a Cueball-like guy, Ponytail and another Cueball-like guy who stand with one hand to his chin looking right, away from the other.] Blondie: At last! Guy looking right: I hope there's time!\n[Cueball running right in yet a thin panel, with pen and the paper flowing behind him.]\n[Cueball walks right with the paper and pen in his hand as he arrives at at a cemetery as revealed by an old worn sign. Scary sounds appear off-panel right.] Sign: Cemetery Rising dead (off-panel): Hurrghhh\n[Cueball, still going right, arrives at a grave, pen in hand and the other hand almost outside the panel, but with a corner of the paper just visible. The grave has a large gravestone to the right and in front of it there is a Cueball-like guy rising up from the ground using his arms to push up on the base of the stone and the small pile of earth towards Cueball. The guy looks very worn, with dirt on his head and scratches on his cheek.]\n[Cueball bends a little down and offers pen and paper to the raised dead man who looks up at him when he is addressed.] Cueball: Paul Erd\u0151s? Erd\u0151s: Yes? Cueball: We need you to sign this.\n"}
{"id":600,"title":"Android Boyfriend","image_title":"Android Boyfriend","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/600","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/android_boyfriend.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/600:_Android_Boyfriend","transcript":"[Ponytail enters from the right dragging Hairy along by his hand, as she moves towards Cueball who stands with Megan in his hand.] Ponytail: I thought your android girlfriend was cool so I got myself an android boyfriend.\n[Suddenly the Megan android runs into the arms of the Hairy android, while Ponytail has let go of his hand. Ponytails head swirls around to follow her run by.] Ponytail: He's really great. I like how\u2014 Ponytail: Uh.\n[Cueball and Ponytail look towards the two androids, but they are now outside this frame-less panel.] Off-panel sound: *Zip* Off-panel voice: Mmmmm\n[Cueball and Ponytail still look at the scene off panel.] Cueball: ...Huh. Ponytail: It's like somebody stuck a vibrator in a fleshlight. Off-panel sound: Whirrr Off-panel voice: Mmmm Off-panel sound: Click\nThis is the comic six years before 1541: Voice , in which Ponytail stated that she could only control her voice once every six years.\n","explanation":"This is the second (and last) comic in the Android series , referring directly back to 595: Android Girlfriend , where Cueball showed that he had an android girlfriend Megan . So now Ponytail has decided she would also like to have an android boyfriend ( Hairy ). But upon bringing these two androids together, they fall for each other and decide to have \"sex\" on the spot, resulting in several mechanical sounds off-panel while their \"owners\" watch on with disgusted interest.\nVibrators and Fleshlights are sex toys that represent male and female genitalia, respectively. Ponytail's flat description indicates that she is not particularly aroused by what amounts to a pair of animatronic sex toys rubbing against each other. Randall's title text claims that he has actually done such a thing, and stuck it on his fireplace mantle for all his house-guests to see. He admits though that it is the most unsettling mantlepiece decoration in my house. References to fleshlights is a recurring theme in xkcd.\n[Ponytail enters from the right dragging Hairy along by his hand, as she moves towards Cueball who stands with Megan in his hand.] Ponytail: I thought your android girlfriend was cool so I got myself an android boyfriend.\n[Suddenly the Megan android runs into the arms of the Hairy android, while Ponytail has let go of his hand. Ponytails head swirls around to follow her run by.] Ponytail: He's really great. I like how\u2014 Ponytail: Uh.\n[Cueball and Ponytail look towards the two androids, but they are now outside this frame-less panel.] Off-panel sound: *Zip* Off-panel voice: Mmmmm\n[Cueball and Ponytail still look at the scene off panel.] Cueball: ...Huh. Ponytail: It's like somebody stuck a vibrator in a fleshlight. Off-panel sound: Whirrr Off-panel voice: Mmmm Off-panel sound: Click\nThis is the comic six years before 1541: Voice , in which Ponytail stated that she could only control her voice once every six years.\n"}
{"id":601,"title":"Game Theory","image_title":"Game Theory","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/601","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/game_theory.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/601:_Game_Theory","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk in an office chair typing on his computer. The text appearing above him is implied to be what is displayed on the screen.] A.I. Loaded >>> Analyze love\n[An hourglass appears over the computer as Cueball sits back and wait.]\n[The hourglass continues to display as Cueball shifts in his chair.]\n[A zigzag line from the computer indicates the final reply from the computer to the query.] Computer: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.\n","explanation":"The comic and title text is a direct reference to the movie WarGames .\nIn the movie, the Artificial intelligence (AI) that controls the US Nuclear Weapons is asked to play Global Thermonuclear War , a real time game simulating a nuclear attack scenario.\nSpoilers : In the movie it then takes the simulation to the real world, planning to launch a real attack on the USSR . In the end the AI is tricked into quickly running through several scenarios of the game, and then shuts down its planned attack as a result of what it finds out.\nAfter analyzing all possible strategies, the AI reports: \"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?\" Interpreted literally, this means that the computer has figured out that it will lose the game no matter how it plays, so it chooses to play chess instead (at the time of the movie, computers could not yet beat the best human chess players, so it would be more interesting). A more profound interpretation is that wars always end badly for all parties involved so it's better to play nicer games like chess.\nIn this comic Cueball loads an AI and then ask it to \"analyze love\" (equivalent to playing the \"love game\"), which initially could be expected to end happily for everyone involved, as love is the opposite of war and war ends always so badly. Surprisingly, the result from the AI is similar to the war games. Thus if you \"play the love game\", you'll end up badly, regardless which moves you play.\nThe title text leaves love as looking actually worse than war, since in war there's at least the \"winning move\" of not playing, however in love even refusing to play means that the player loses the game anyway. Randall is thus stating that you have to go after love, even though you know you will lose\/get hurt sometimes, because you will for sure also lose the game, even if you pretend not to play. The AI then again suggest a game of chess, as in the movie.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk in an office chair typing on his computer. The text appearing above him is implied to be what is displayed on the screen.] A.I. Loaded >>> Analyze love\n[An hourglass appears over the computer as Cueball sits back and wait.]\n[The hourglass continues to display as Cueball shifts in his chair.]\n[A zigzag line from the computer indicates the final reply from the computer to the query.] Computer: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.\n"}
{"id":602,"title":"Overstimulated","image_title":"Overstimulated","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/602","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/overstimulated.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/602:_Overstimulated","transcript":"[There is a group of people. Three women and four men. They are standing around a table with a drink on it.] Man #3: Have you seen John lately?\nWoman #3: He and Claire blew off this party to see Jeff. Man #4: They do that a lot.\nMan #1: Yeah; I don't know what his problem is with hanging out lately. Man #3: He's like Katie\u2014ever noticed how she only goes somewhere if Jeff's there?\n[Cueball is cringing away from all the text; none of the text is attributed to specific people.] Somebody: It's so lame how she hangs around him even when he's not single: Somebody: He likes it. Somebody: Someone seriously needs to date her. Somebody: Totally. Somebody: And honestly I feel like a jerk but I wouldn't mind if she hung around with us a little less. She needs other friends, you know!\n[Cueball peels a hole in the panel. The numbers '1', '2', and '3' are visible through the gap.] Somebody: Have you noticed how every dude she dates is a total druggie? Somebody: Nope Somebody: I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that was weird. Somebody: Michelle dates potheads like Elaine but at least they both have real jobs. Somebody: Michelle does? She designs those book covers, right? Somebody: And it's not like she smokes a lot. Somebody: Elaine is one of those girls who\n[The previous panel's text appears again, but peeled back even further. Cueball looks up.] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12\nSomebody: -noticed how - Somebody: Nope Somebody: -es is a tota- Somebody: -t th- -ought\n[Cueball starts taking down the prime numbers.] 1 4 6 8 9 10 12 14 15 2 3 5 7 11 13 [Cueball grabs and squeezes the 2, so it is half as wide and twice as tall.]\n[A formula: Sum with i from 1 to infinity of 1\/P i = h - ie. the sum from 1 to infinity of the inverse of each prime.] [The panel shows a 2 that is 2 units tall and 1\/2 wide, a 3 that is 3 units tall and 1\/3 wide, and so on. Cueball is moving the 7.]\n[Cueball writes h = \u221e. The numbers are piled on their side next to a scale.] Voice: Don't you agree? Voice: Hey, wake up.\nMan #1: You zoned out or something. Cueball: Sorry; I must be... tired. Man #1: I don't blame you. All day cooped up working on papers. Man #3: Must be nice to get out and relax, huh? Cueball: Yeah. [Girl #3 reaches for the glass on the table.]\n","explanation":"After being cooped up working on papers, Cueball goes to a party, only to find himself tuning out the gossip of his friends in order to work on math problems in his head. He writes down the prime numbers on cards, and then stretches them out such that the area of the card is the same (say, 1), but one of the sides has been elongated to a length equal to the number on the card. This reduces the length on the other dimension to the reciprocal of the number on the card (i.e. 1\/ n , with n being the number on the card), according to the area formula for rectangles.\nStacking these reciprocals all up will eventually diverge, meaning the sum will be infinite without ever leveling off. This is referred to as the divergence of the sum of the reciprocals of the primes , and was proven by Euler in 1737.\nThe Cambridge Aspergers Test includes questions on preferences for, and ability to cope with, social situations. It also asks the person taking the test if they have an affinity for numbers and see patterns in every day objects. Cueball could possibly score high on the Asperger's scale \u2014 or he could just be introverted, or find math more interesting than criticizing others which is generally considered in science circles a dull thing to do considering the vast variety of other topics and activities available. Introversion is an idea from psychology. Thinking about things on one's own is often relaxing for an introvert, while hanging out with other people is not. Hence the irony of the comment in the last panel. Cueball's friends fail to realize that hanging out with them is actually more stressful for him than doing math - especially when people are doing nothing but talking negatively about those not present.\nThe title text mentions people that talk negatively about people that aren't there. A much later comic; 1176: Those Not Present , is about just that.\n[There is a group of people. Three women and four men. They are standing around a table with a drink on it.] Man #3: Have you seen John lately?\nWoman #3: He and Claire blew off this party to see Jeff. Man #4: They do that a lot.\nMan #1: Yeah; I don't know what his problem is with hanging out lately. Man #3: He's like Katie\u2014ever noticed how she only goes somewhere if Jeff's there?\n[Cueball is cringing away from all the text; none of the text is attributed to specific people.] Somebody: It's so lame how she hangs around him even when he's not single: Somebody: He likes it. Somebody: Someone seriously needs to date her. Somebody: Totally. Somebody: And honestly I feel like a jerk but I wouldn't mind if she hung around with us a little less. She needs other friends, you know!\n[Cueball peels a hole in the panel. The numbers '1', '2', and '3' are visible through the gap.] Somebody: Have you noticed how every dude she dates is a total druggie? Somebody: Nope Somebody: I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that was weird. Somebody: Michelle dates potheads like Elaine but at least they both have real jobs. Somebody: Michelle does? She designs those book covers, right? Somebody: And it's not like she smokes a lot. Somebody: Elaine is one of those girls who\n[The previous panel's text appears again, but peeled back even further. Cueball looks up.] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12\nSomebody: -noticed how - Somebody: Nope Somebody: -es is a tota- Somebody: -t th- -ought\n[Cueball starts taking down the prime numbers.] 1 4 6 8 9 10 12 14 15 2 3 5 7 11 13 [Cueball grabs and squeezes the 2, so it is half as wide and twice as tall.]\n[A formula: Sum with i from 1 to infinity of 1\/P i = h - ie. the sum from 1 to infinity of the inverse of each prime.] [The panel shows a 2 that is 2 units tall and 1\/2 wide, a 3 that is 3 units tall and 1\/3 wide, and so on. Cueball is moving the 7.]\n[Cueball writes h = \u221e. The numbers are piled on their side next to a scale.] Voice: Don't you agree? Voice: Hey, wake up.\nMan #1: You zoned out or something. Cueball: Sorry; I must be... tired. Man #1: I don't blame you. All day cooped up working on papers. Man #3: Must be nice to get out and relax, huh? Cueball: Yeah. [Girl #3 reaches for the glass on the table.]\n"}
{"id":603,"title":"Idiocracy","image_title":"Idiocracy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/603","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/idiocracy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/603:_Idiocracy","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of three shelves with DVDs, holding a single DVD in his hand looking at the cover. A guy with a white rounded safari hat (Safari Hat from now on) stands behind him.] Cueball: Idiocracy is so true. Safari Hat: I know, right? It used to be that the intelligent, upper classes had more children.\n[Zoom on on their heads as Cueball turns towards Safari Hat.] Safari Hat: Sadly, the recent reversal of this trend has dragged IQ scores and average education steadily downward. Cueball: Depressing, huh?\n[Zoom out to show Cueball holding the DVD down as Safari Hat lifts on arm towards him.] Safari Hat: Yeah, except everything I just said was wrong. Cueball: Huh? Safari Hat: Wrong. False. The opposite of true.\n[Zoom in only on Safari Hat.] Safari Hat: You're like the religious zealots who are burdened by their superiority with the sad duty of decrying the obvious moral decay of each new generation. Safari Hat: And you're just as wrong.\n[Zoom out to both as before, but this time it is Cueball who holds up a finger.] Cueball: But look at how popular\u2014 Safari Hat: More harm has been done by people panicked over societal decline than societal decline ever did.\n[Cueball spreads out his arms (the DVD gone) as Safari Hat has walked out off the panel.] Cueball: Look \u2014 all we need is a program that limits breeding to\u2014 Safari Hat (off-panel): New theory: Stupid people reproduce more because the alternative is sleeping with you.\n","explanation":"The title of this comic is a reference to the dystopian comedy Idiocracy . The film postulates that over about 500 years, society will suffer from a massive decrease in intellectual potential. This development is attributed to the fact that people with a lower IQ are believed to be more likely to reproduce thus more readily pass on their genes.\nCueball professes his approval for the theories represented in the film, and the guy with the white safari hat agrees with him, lamenting the gradual decay in intelligence and education. (Note that Safari Hat is not the same guy as White Hat ! See below.)\nBut in panel 3, Safari Hat suddenly reveals that all the \"facts\" he cited were wrong, and we learn that he doesn't support the dysgenic thesis at all. He turns to accuse Cueball of conceited self-righteousness (using religious zealots as an analogy), harshly condemning intelligence dysgenics as an excuse for feeling superior to the rest of society. Cueball's suggestion of birth control for the unintelligent only furthers his attitude. Although it is not named, one thing at work here is the Dunning-Kruger effect \u2014 that stupid people don't realize they're stupid.\nSafari Hat's punchline, playing on Cueball's birth control suggestion, is a direct insult: it would be better to reproduce with a stupid person than an elitist like Cueball.\nIt's pretty clear here that Randall is voicing his opinion through Safari Hat, and using Cueball as a straw man.\nThe title text reflects the opinion. It makes a few cheery comments on the future, but then finishes on a rather sour note about climate change . Climate change is a recurring theme in xkcd.\nIn fact, a negative correlation between intelligence and fertility is disputed; see the Wikipedia article on the accumulation of disadvantageous genes: dysgenics . And regardless of this the actual absolute IQs in modern societies have been rising, see Flynn effect . This can be paraphrased with the statement, that if the generation of our grandparents would take a today's IQ test, they would barely score an IQ of 70 and be at the limit of intellectual disability.\n[Cueball is standing in front of three shelves with DVDs, holding a single DVD in his hand looking at the cover. A guy with a white rounded safari hat (Safari Hat from now on) stands behind him.] Cueball: Idiocracy is so true. Safari Hat: I know, right? It used to be that the intelligent, upper classes had more children.\n[Zoom on on their heads as Cueball turns towards Safari Hat.] Safari Hat: Sadly, the recent reversal of this trend has dragged IQ scores and average education steadily downward. Cueball: Depressing, huh?\n[Zoom out to show Cueball holding the DVD down as Safari Hat lifts on arm towards him.] Safari Hat: Yeah, except everything I just said was wrong. Cueball: Huh? Safari Hat: Wrong. False. The opposite of true.\n[Zoom in only on Safari Hat.] Safari Hat: You're like the religious zealots who are burdened by their superiority with the sad duty of decrying the obvious moral decay of each new generation. Safari Hat: And you're just as wrong.\n[Zoom out to both as before, but this time it is Cueball who holds up a finger.] Cueball: But look at how popular\u2014 Safari Hat: More harm has been done by people panicked over societal decline than societal decline ever did.\n[Cueball spreads out his arms (the DVD gone) as Safari Hat has walked out off the panel.] Cueball: Look \u2014 all we need is a program that limits breeding to\u2014 Safari Hat (off-panel): New theory: Stupid people reproduce more because the alternative is sleeping with you.\n"}
{"id":604,"title":"Qwertial Aphasia","image_title":"Qwertial Aphasia","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/604","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/qwertial_aphasia.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/604:_Qwertial_Aphasia","transcript":"[Caption in a frame partly above the main panels, but which breaks the top border of the two first panels frames:] I hate how when I'm talking while I type, sometimes I accidentally type a word I'm saying.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer chatting with a friend. The friends message \"comes\" out of the computer.] Friend (from computer): Wanna go get food later?\n[Megan walks in to the frame, holding a small stuffed giraffe in front of her. Cueball is in the middle of typing his reply, which \"comes\" from the keyboard.] Megan: Check out what I found in the closet! Cueball (from keyboard): Sorry, I really shouldn't. Keyboard: Type type\n[Megan has stopped and Cueball turns to look at her and the giraffe, while continuing to type.] Cueball: Aww, what an adorable stuffed giraffe! Cueball (from keyboard): I can't afford to keep eating out this giraffe. Keyboard: Type type\n[Caption below the last panel in a frame which breaks the bottom border of the above panel:] Frequently! I meant \"frequently\" !\n","explanation":"Randall has invented the term Qwertial Aphasia to describe the common experience of having a word, from a spoken conversation, accidentally spill over into something one is typing, often with humorous results.\nThe description \"Qwertial\" refers to the position of the top row of letters in the most common keyboard arrangement, the QWERTY keyboard layout, as this is only something that afflicts you while typing. Aphasia is a class of medical conditions which affect the production and understanding of language.\nIn this case Cueball is in the process of replying on the computer to his friend who just asked if they should go out to eat some food later. Cueball is about to explain why he should not, when Megan walks in and disturbs him with her stuffed toy giraffe which makes him say the word giraffe.\nThe joke set up in the comic comes from the substitution of the word 'giraffe' for the word 'frequently' , which changes the whole meaning of Cueball's last sentence. The original sentence would have been I can't afford to keep eating out this frequently . The unintentional replacement makes 'giraffe' the object of the sentence, and implies that Cueball is eating out (slang for cunnilingus ) a giraffe. He tries to correct himself by writing that he meant frequently but the damage is done and he will be the laughing stock with his friends for a while.\nThe title text continues the image of a giraffe as a sexual object - in particular, one which costs money . SMBC refers to the comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal , a whimsical joke-a-day comic which comes with a second illustration, which can be seen by clicking on a button known as the \"votey\". This additional panel often serves as a second punchline in the same way as the title text does in xkcd. Zach Weiner of SMBC responded to this title text in the votey on July 2, 2009 , the day after this comic was released.\n[Caption in a frame partly above the main panels, but which breaks the top border of the two first panels frames:] I hate how when I'm talking while I type, sometimes I accidentally type a word I'm saying.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer chatting with a friend. The friends message \"comes\" out of the computer.] Friend (from computer): Wanna go get food later?\n[Megan walks in to the frame, holding a small stuffed giraffe in front of her. Cueball is in the middle of typing his reply, which \"comes\" from the keyboard.] Megan: Check out what I found in the closet! Cueball (from keyboard): Sorry, I really shouldn't. Keyboard: Type type\n[Megan has stopped and Cueball turns to look at her and the giraffe, while continuing to type.] Cueball: Aww, what an adorable stuffed giraffe! Cueball (from keyboard): I can't afford to keep eating out this giraffe. Keyboard: Type type\n[Caption below the last panel in a frame which breaks the bottom border of the above panel:] Frequently! I meant \"frequently\" !\n"}
{"id":605,"title":"Extrapolating","image_title":"Extrapolating","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/605","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/extrapolating.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/605:_Extrapolating","transcript":"My Hobby: Extrapolating\n[There is a graph. Time runs along the horizontal axis; Number of Husbands on the vertical graph. Yesterday and today are labeled in time, 0 and 1 in number of husbands. Points are plotted with 0 at yesterday, 1 at today. A straight line is fitted through them.] [Cueball is holding a pointer to the graph, and looking at Megan wearing a dress and veil.] Cueball: As you can see, by late next month you'll have over four dozen husbands. Cueball: Better get a bulk rate on wedding cake.\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke on the incorrect application of linear extrapolation . By connecting two points without any context, we can come up with incredibly funny results. Here, connecting the number of spouses yesterday (zero) and today (one) can result in a linear extrapolation to hundreds of spouses a year. Cueball presents the accumulation of husbands as though it were a phenomenon beyond the bride's ability to control. Using similar points for pregnancy (yesterday: no babies, today: one), we can get 200+ children inside a single person by the 7th month of pregnancy.\nThis is another comic in the infrequent My Hobby series.\nThis particular hobby has later been explored in 1007: Sustainable , 1204: Detail and 1281: Minifigs .\nMy Hobby: Extrapolating\n[There is a graph. Time runs along the horizontal axis; Number of Husbands on the vertical graph. Yesterday and today are labeled in time, 0 and 1 in number of husbands. Points are plotted with 0 at yesterday, 1 at today. A straight line is fitted through them.] [Cueball is holding a pointer to the graph, and looking at Megan wearing a dress and veil.] Cueball: As you can see, by late next month you'll have over four dozen husbands. Cueball: Better get a bulk rate on wedding cake.\n"}
{"id":606,"title":"Cutting Edge","image_title":"Cutting Edge","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/606","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cutting_edge.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/606:_Cutting_Edge","transcript":"[Megan is standing. Cueball sits at a computer.] Megan: Where've you been all week? Cueball: Playing Half-Life 2! Megan: ...that came out in 2004.\nCueball: I get games on a five-year lag. That way, I never have to buy a high-end system, but get the same steadily-advancing gaming experience as people who do - and at a fraction of the price.\nCueball: There are no downsides! Megan: I can think of one ...\n[Early 2013.] Cueball: Guys! Cueball: The cake is a lie! [Musical notes surround an italic line, suggesting Cueball is singing.] Cueball: This was a triumph. Cueball: The cake is a lie! Megan and a Friend: Sigh\n","explanation":"Half-Life 2 is a computer game, specifically a first-person shooter , released in 2004. In the above comic, Cueball plays the game in 2009. Newer games usually require more powerful computer parts, such as GPUs and RAM. The prices of these computer parts usually start expensive but drop quickly, so even a very cheap computer developed in 2009 will comfortably run a 2004 game.\nAdditionally, the price for an older game is considerably less than those of the more recent variety. Even the price of a once-new, highly anticipated AAA game is almost definitely guaranteed to have fallen due to the presence of newer games and the relative maturity of the present game. Most of the expected sales of a game happen near the release. A game would not be deemed that lucrative after 5 years, prompting a price drop to justify its sales or even printing. Sometimes, a game will be released with several, if not all, expansion packs at a fraction of the price of purchasing them all separately during the initial release.\nHowever, the downside to Cueball's strategy is that his gaming knowledge will be five years out of date. In a subculture that moves as fast as video games, it's almost impossible for Cueball to embarrass himself harder.\nOn the last panel, \"The cake is a lie\" and \"This was a triumph\" are references to Portal , a video game released in late 2007. The cake references originate from the promises of cake that GLaDOS , a character in the game, makes to the player. Exploring the levels reveals several hiding places that seem to have been used, in one of which the player can find the words \"The cake is a lie\" repeatedly scrawled on the wall. As predicted, Portal was indeed considered old-fashioned by early 2013, with the developers themselves stating they were sick and tired of the endlessly parroted jokes. Both Portal and Half-Life 2 were released by the same company, Valve , and they released Portal 2 in 2011.\nThe song \" Still Alive \", which the lyric \"This was a triumph\" comes from, was previously referenced in 375: Pod Bay Doors , and later referenced in 1141: Two Years .\nThe title text also points to another flaw in this strategy: multi-player gaming requires other players, so if you play a game five years after its release, there's often nobody else to play with. It's even worse with online gaming, as the company hosting the online server may have shut it down a long time ago. However, some game communities do last longer than others.\n[Megan is standing. Cueball sits at a computer.] Megan: Where've you been all week? Cueball: Playing Half-Life 2! Megan: ...that came out in 2004.\nCueball: I get games on a five-year lag. That way, I never have to buy a high-end system, but get the same steadily-advancing gaming experience as people who do - and at a fraction of the price.\nCueball: There are no downsides! Megan: I can think of one ...\n[Early 2013.] Cueball: Guys! Cueball: The cake is a lie! [Musical notes surround an italic line, suggesting Cueball is singing.] Cueball: This was a triumph. Cueball: The cake is a lie! Megan and a Friend: Sigh\n"}
{"id":607,"title":"2038","image_title":"2038","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/607","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2038.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/607:_2038","transcript":"[Text above the panel:] I'm glad we're switching to 64-bit, because I wasn't looking forward to convincing people to care about the Unix 2038 problem. [Cueball's Cueball-like friends asks him a question. Cueball raises his arm above his head while answering.] Friend: What's that? Cueball: Remember Y2K? This could be even worse!\n","explanation":"The 2038 problem is a well-known problem with 32-bit Unix-based operating systems. Unix time is stored as a 32-bit signed integer on these systems, counting the number of seconds since 1970. In 2038, we overflow the highest number we can store in signed 32-bit integers, leading to unexpected behavior. The switch to 64-bit operating systems will most likely be complete by the year 2038, which is why Randall is relieved. The reference to Y2K is a throwback to the year 2000 problem, in which people were concerned that computers storing years as two digits (e.g.: 99 to represent 1999) would cause problems when the year 2000 began because 00 could have been interpreted as 1900 by error. That Y2K issue was covered widely \u2014 with only some small mishaps \u2014 but calculating dates beyond 2038 is still not solved on many 32-bit UNIX based systems today. The \"even WORSE\" is possibly referring to how our increased reliance on computers means the bug could affect many more vital systems, but with Y2K passing by relatively uneventfully especially in light of the hype that preceded it caused people to take this sort of problem less seriously.\nThe title text is a reference to the film 2012 which is about the world ending in December of 2012, at the end of the Mayan calendar . If the designers of the UNIX operating system had used 1944 as their epoch instead of 1970, then the UNIX crash due to a variable overflow would coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar. Thus, the implication is that there could have been a boring scene in the movie where the UNIX time rolls over and nothing happens and no one cares \u2014 because the world doesn't exist any more.\n[Text above the panel:] I'm glad we're switching to 64-bit, because I wasn't looking forward to convincing people to care about the Unix 2038 problem. [Cueball's Cueball-like friends asks him a question. Cueball raises his arm above his head while answering.] Friend: What's that? Cueball: Remember Y2K? This could be even worse!\n"}
{"id":608,"title":"Form","image_title":"Form","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/608","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/form.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/608:_Form","transcript":"[There is a sheet of paper, with a series of check boxes. A white rectangle is the focus.] Do not write in this space\n[Cueball is standing with a pencil, looking at the page.]\n[Cueball writes something on the page.]\n[A group of people with helmets, black goggles, and rifles look at display screens. There is a radar system on a table between them.] [The screens show sheets of paper. On one screen, it shows Cueball writing.] [One of the men arms his weapon.] Cha-click\n","explanation":"Application forms, examination papers, etc. sometimes instruct applicants to avoid writing in blocked out areas of the page, as those areas are intended for administrative, office, or internal usage or processing.\nNonetheless, a person might write in the blocked out section out of an urge to defy authority, as does Cueball in the comic. Consequences for flouting these instructions are typically trivial (e.g. perhaps the form may not be processed correctly). However, Cueball's disregard for the rules prompts the preparations for an armed response by some sort of law enforcement or private security organization, presenting a serious consequence for Cueball.\nThe title text refers to Douglas Hofstadter , an author associated with the philosophical concept of self-reference. \"This space intentionally left blank\" is \"Hofstadterially confusing\" because if a space on a form contains the words \"This space intentionally left blank\", then the space is not, in fact, left blank.\nDouglas Hofstadter is also the subject of the comic 917: Hofstadter .\nA similarly harsh consequence for a trivial misdemeanor can be seen in both 292: goto and 499: Scantron .\n[There is a sheet of paper, with a series of check boxes. A white rectangle is the focus.] Do not write in this space\n[Cueball is standing with a pencil, looking at the page.]\n[Cueball writes something on the page.]\n[A group of people with helmets, black goggles, and rifles look at display screens. There is a radar system on a table between them.] [The screens show sheets of paper. On one screen, it shows Cueball writing.] [One of the men arms his weapon.] Cha-click\n"}
{"id":609,"title":"Tab Explosion","image_title":"Tab Explosion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/609","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tab_explosion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/609:_Tab_Explosion","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a computer.]\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: Huh.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball stares at the computer.] Cueball: I never noticed that!\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: Haha, yeah.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: So true.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball stares at the computer.]\n[Cueball stares at the computer.]\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball stares at the computer.]\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Megan (off-screen): Are you in there? Cueball: Help!\n[Megan walks in behind Cueball who is still sitting at the computer. The bottom of the image is covered in Megan's last line] Megan: Okay, who linked you to TVTropes? What's with that site? Cueball: Can't ... stop... Megan: It's like Rickrolling, but you're trapped all day.\n","explanation":"TV Tropes is a popular site which allows conversation on tropes . A common joke with the site is how you will read a page, find a certain trope, which will open another tab on your web page. Then, as you read another article, you'll open even more pages. Pretty soon, this will cause an extremely long cycle of opening new pages and closing old ones.\nIn the comic, this is exactly what happens to our unfortunate victim. He starts on a single page, then opens more and more tabs on different pages. Pretty soon, he finds himself stuck in a loop of opening pages.\nThe last frame refers to Rickrolling , which is the practice of being linked to Rick Astley's \" Never Gonna Give You Up \" on YouTube.\nThe title text refers to the comedy site Cracked.com . This site is also known for its addictive articles. Most articles are formatted in the same way the title text notes. Eventually, Cracked itself wrote a column that paid tribute to this cartoon . (See the very last line With that in mind, we present to you the 17 Worst Haircuts in The Ottoman Empire .)\nThe original comic links to TVtropes' page of Universal tropes . TVtropes has taken notice and has a welcome letter for you at the end of the main article: \"Oh, and hello to all you xkcd readers. (And thank you for the information !)\" Here the \"thank you\" link actually links to this page, the \"hello\" links to the comic on xkcd and the other two links are to two articles on TVTropes, the first about xkcd and the last one being an in-joke about how \"TVTropes will ruin your life\". The addition of this many links is likely meant to be ironic. [ citation needed ]\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.]\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: Huh.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball stares at the computer.] Cueball: I never noticed that!\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: Haha, yeah.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: So true.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball stares at the computer.]\n[Cueball stares at the computer.]\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball stares at the computer.]\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Click\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] Megan (off-screen): Are you in there? Cueball: Help!\n[Megan walks in behind Cueball who is still sitting at the computer. The bottom of the image is covered in Megan's last line] Megan: Okay, who linked you to TVTropes? What's with that site? Cueball: Can't ... stop... Megan: It's like Rickrolling, but you're trapped all day.\n"}
{"id":610,"title":"Sheeple","image_title":"Sheeple","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/610","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sheeple.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/610:_Sheeple","transcript":"[A thought bubble is shared between the five occupants of a subway car (four Cueballs and one Ponytail).] All: Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep.\n","explanation":"The people in this comic think of each other as sheep, who blindly follow direction without thinking for themselves. The word \" sheeple \" from the title has been used before in xkcd in the phrase \" Wake up Sheeple !\" In this comic, each person on the train considers themselves to be the only individual mind and everyone around them as \"sheep\". Ironically, the reader can see that although each of them thinks about how individual they are, they are all collectively thinking exactly the same thing, meaning that they are all sheeple. The comic can also be taken as a warning to not assume that you have more consciousness than someone else, since for all you know they could think the same about you.\nAyn Rand was a Russian-born American novelist and activist whose most famous books include, Atlas Shrugged , Anthem , and The Fountainhead . She developed a philosophy known as Objectivism , which promotes individual fulfillment (or so-called \"rational self-interest\") at the expense of collective goals and undertakings. Sheeple coordinates with Ayn Rand's novel, Anthem , set in the distant future in which the word \"I\" has been abolished and the evils of the communal values have created a new dark age.\nA possible further irony can be found in the title text. Rand enthusiasts would seek individualism and independence from social pressures; however, a convention could be interpreted as a social collective of people who have similar interests in a subject. These ideas could arguably be construed to be opposites of each other. However, similar interests does not mean lack of individualism: this can be seen in Ayn Rand's novel \"Atlas Shrugged\", which features a society of like-minded people centered around the concepts of individualism and neoliberalism .\n[A thought bubble is shared between the five occupants of a subway car (four Cueballs and one Ponytail).] All: Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep.\n"}
{"id":611,"title":"Disaster Voyeurism","image_title":"Disaster Voyeurism","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/611","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/disaster_voyeurism.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/611:_Disaster_Voyeurism","transcript":"[Megan is watching TV. Black Hat is leaning on the back of her chair.] Megan: I've realized that I always secretly root for hurricanes. I watch the news hoping that they'll get really big and hit a city. I know my hopes don't actually affect it, but I feel bad.\nBlack Hat: Nah, that's just natural human attraction to spectacle. It's like watching the shuttle launch because you don't want to miss it if there's a disaster. Megan: ...I guess?\nBlack Hat: Or dressing as an intern to sneak into operating rooms, in case a patient dies and you can watch them harvest organs. Megan: Wait, you do that?\nBlack Hat: Or stealing detour signs to direct highway drivers down backwoods roads strewn with caltrops. After the tires burst, you start shooting out their windows.\nBlack Hat: Then, when they flee the car in terror, you hunt them on horseback, like men once did. Megan: I realized a while back that we're having entirely different conversations.\n","explanation":"The comic is referring to a phenomenon known as gaping or rubbernecking . The terms are applied to people who stand around as spectators at the site of a disaster. Apparently, many people are attracted to terrible scenes out of a sort of morbid curiosity. While fascinated by the spectacle, most people also feel a sense of shame and guilt at the same time, unsure of whether it is morally wrong to be entertained by other's misfortunes.\nThis feeling of conscience is expressed in the comic by Megan , who secretly cherishes hope that a hurricane might strike but feels guilt despite knowing she isn't the cause of any danger. Black Hat on the other hand regards these feelings as perfectly natural. In the comic, he gives three more examples of how he enjoys other people's misfortune, each more sinister than the last, eventually partaking in the disaster itself which is another thing entirely:\nIt becomes clear that he actually enjoys it when other people are hit by tragedies. He reveals that he even actively promotes or causes the tragic fates of others. Him being a sadist concurs with the characterization depicted in other comics. Megan understands that the two of them are in fact leading entirely different conversations, as Black Hat is not in the least able to comprehend her scruples.\nThe title text aims at hurricane enthusiasts in internet forums, who are distracted by their scientific curiosity from the danger a hurricane may present to humans.\n[Megan is watching TV. Black Hat is leaning on the back of her chair.] Megan: I've realized that I always secretly root for hurricanes. I watch the news hoping that they'll get really big and hit a city. I know my hopes don't actually affect it, but I feel bad.\nBlack Hat: Nah, that's just natural human attraction to spectacle. It's like watching the shuttle launch because you don't want to miss it if there's a disaster. Megan: ...I guess?\nBlack Hat: Or dressing as an intern to sneak into operating rooms, in case a patient dies and you can watch them harvest organs. Megan: Wait, you do that?\nBlack Hat: Or stealing detour signs to direct highway drivers down backwoods roads strewn with caltrops. After the tires burst, you start shooting out their windows.\nBlack Hat: Then, when they flee the car in terror, you hunt them on horseback, like men once did. Megan: I realized a while back that we're having entirely different conversations.\n"}
{"id":612,"title":"Estimation","image_title":"Estimation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/612","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/estimation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/612:_Estimation","transcript":"[Cueball is in a car, talking on his phone.] Cueball: I'm just outside town, so I should be there in fifteen minutes. Cueball: Actually, it's looking more like six days. Cueball: No, wait, thirty seconds.\n[Caption below the frame:] The author of the Windows file copy dialog visits some friends.\n","explanation":"When moving or copying files using the Windows Explorer , a dialog box opens to inform the user of how many of the files being moved have been moved with an estimate of how long the rest of the files should take. However, this estimate is often subject to seemingly random and extreme changes from a time measured in seconds or minutes to one measured in hours or days. This is because Windows bases its estimate on the latest file transfer rate, which exaggerates short-term fluctuations. For instance, transfers of many small files are generally slower than transfers of a few large files, because of per-file overhead (time spent writing data describing the file's title, location, etc. to the disk). A brief slowdown may cause the system to display that the transfer will take a long time (based on the total amount of data yet be transferred and the current low speed), while a sudden burst of data moved quickly between memory caches will give a time that is much too small.\nA better implementation would keep track of the average file transfer rate over the entire operation, which would even out the bumps and give a more accurate estimate. Windows 8 avoids the problem by doing away with the time estimate.\nThe joke in the comic is the idea that this feature was actually purposely implemented and that the person who did so actually talks like that. He tells some friends on the phone how long it will take for him to arrive at their meeting point. However, like with Windows's estimation feature, he quickly changes his estimate multiple times from the extremes of days to seconds due to small fluctuations in traffic flow (like when he has to stop on a red light and then he speeds up on green).\nThe title text refers to the fact that if the connection is lost, and data can no longer be transmitted, the estimation just gets larger and larger as time goes on rather than realizing that no data being sent means there is no connection. This is a behavior that occurs on Microsoft network connections even when the connection is not lost. Kubuntu avoids this problem, but not that of wide fluctuations, by including only the past few seconds in its estimate. If there has been zero progress within the averaging interval, it reports \"Stalled\".\nthe actual author of the windows copy dialog created a video explaining why it's so wrong.\n-- https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9gTLDuxmQek\n[Cueball is in a car, talking on his phone.] Cueball: I'm just outside town, so I should be there in fifteen minutes. Cueball: Actually, it's looking more like six days. Cueball: No, wait, thirty seconds.\n[Caption below the frame:] The author of the Windows file copy dialog visits some friends.\n"}
{"id":613,"title":"Threesome","image_title":"Threesome","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/613","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/threesome.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/613:_Threesome","transcript":"Megan: We had a threesome last night. Cueball: How was it?\nMegan: Awkward - it was with a physicist. Cueball: Why's that awkward?\nMegan: They can't solve the three-body problem. Cueball: Ah, yes.\n","explanation":"The N-Body Problem in physics refers to our inability to analytically solve sets of differential equations modelling gravitational attraction between more than two bodies. Simply put, there are exact equations for describing the movement of two bodies reacting to each other's gravitational pull, but no such solutions exist for systems of three or more bodies.\nA threesome is a sexual encounter with three people. The punchline of the comic is a play on the word \"bodies\": a threesome involves three (human) bodies, and it is implied that the physicist's participation in the threesome was hindered due to their inability to solve for the movement of said bodies (i.e. the physicist was apparently unable to get comfortable and sexually satisfied at the same time).\nAccording to the title text, Megan proposed that they settle for a numerical solution since a closed-form solution is unavailable. A numerical solution to predict the motion of a system would be an \"open\" procedural solution or simulation. On the one hand, such a solution can be more practical and less time-consuming than a closed-form solution, especially in cases (such as the three-body problem) where the latter is suspected to be impossible. On the other hand, a numerical solution is only an approximation and will tend to deviate from the exact solution over time. In the context of the comic, Megan probably was suggesting that a numerical solution would be sufficiently accurate for the duration of the threesome, but it appears that the physicist insisted that they arrive at an exact solution.\nA frequent observation in random n-body encounters is that one or more bodies are ejected from the system by achieving escape velocity (and loneliness), but stable solutions are possible. A closed-form solution would allow one to predict for how long such an arrangement would remain stable. Ironically, it could be that the physicist's insistence on finding an exact solution resulted in them being excluded\/\"ejected\" from the threesome, which arguably would be very \"awkward\".\nMegan: We had a threesome last night. Cueball: How was it?\nMegan: Awkward - it was with a physicist. Cueball: Why's that awkward?\nMegan: They can't solve the three-body problem. Cueball: Ah, yes.\n"}
{"id":614,"title":"Woodpecker","image_title":"Woodpecker","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/614","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/woodpecker.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/614:_Woodpecker","transcript":"[Megan and Beret Guy are standing on a deck.] Beret Guy: A Woodpecker! pop pop pop Megan: Yup. [Woodpecker knocking against a tree.] Megan: He hatched about this time last year. pop pop pop pop [Megan leave the frame, leaving Beret Guy on the deck alone.] Beret Guy: ...Woodpecker? Beret Guy...It's your Birthday! Beret Guy: Did you know? Beret Guy: Did nobody tell you? [Beret Guy leaves the frame, changes to the tree base.] [Beret Guy brings a gift and places it at the tree trunk.] [The woodpecker comes down and opens the gift.] [The woodpecker flies away holding onto the cord of a power drill.]\n","explanation":"Beret Guy observes a woodpecker . A woodpecker is a type of bird known for using its bill to bore holes into trees to get access to and eat the insects living inside. Megan notes that the bird hatched approximately a year ago. Beret Guy seems touched by this fact, and attempts to explain to the woodpecker that it is the woodpecker's birthday.\nBeret Guy leaves a present by the foot of the tree where the woodpecker is nesting. The woodpecker opens the present which turns out to be a power drill, a mechanical tool that is used to bore holes into wood, much quicker than a bird normally could. Not that this would be of much use to the bird, as the bird has no electricity [ citation needed ] and so no means of powering the drill, let alone opposable thumbs [ citation needed ] with which to operate the drill. In spite of this, the woodpecker has not only unwrapped the present; it has apparently accepted it, and flies off with it.\nThe title text appears to be Beret Guy talking to the bird still, pointing out that he can get the bird an extension cord to operate the drill because, in his mind, they are friends. In actuality, the bird may or may not care about the drill or Beret Guy. An extension cord, also, would not do much good as the bird would still have no electricity, and if it did have a source of electricity and was able to use the drill, it wouldn't be able to fly further than the length of the extension cord, which isn't far for a bird. This could be a reference to 509: Induced Current .\n[Megan and Beret Guy are standing on a deck.] Beret Guy: A Woodpecker! pop pop pop Megan: Yup. [Woodpecker knocking against a tree.] Megan: He hatched about this time last year. pop pop pop pop [Megan leave the frame, leaving Beret Guy on the deck alone.] Beret Guy: ...Woodpecker? Beret Guy...It's your Birthday! Beret Guy: Did you know? Beret Guy: Did nobody tell you? [Beret Guy leaves the frame, changes to the tree base.] [Beret Guy brings a gift and places it at the tree trunk.] [The woodpecker comes down and opens the gift.] [The woodpecker flies away holding onto the cord of a power drill.]\n"}
{"id":615,"title":"Avoidance","image_title":"Avoidance","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/615","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/avoidance.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/615:_Avoidance","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in a chair holding a phone to his ear while his Cueball-like friend talks to him.] Friend: Did you call that hot girl from the party yet? Cueball: I've been trying.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball looks at his phone and talks to his friend.] Cueball: It's weird. I swear I got her the first time. But now it says the number's wrong.\n[Zoom in on the friend, Cueball talking to him off-panel.] Friend: What did you say she did, again? Cueball (off-panel): Voice work. At Verizon, I think. Cueball (off-panel): Why? Friend: No reason.\n[Megan is talking into a phone, in an italic voice. Cueball's remark is shown emanating from the phone with a zig-zag line, also the click from hanging up the phone is shown like that.] Megan: We're sorry, your call could not be completed as dialed. Cueball (over the  phone): Damn. *Click* Megan: Please check the number and try again.\n","explanation":"Megan gave her number to Cueball at a party, but now doesn't want to talk to him. Because Megan works with recording voice messages at Verizon , she can with no effort put on the characteristically semi-lifeless tone of professional automated answers, and answer the phone with the \"call cannot be completed\"-message . Perhaps it was even she who recorded it in the first place. In this way she avoids Cueball, hence the title.\nCueball actually got through to her the first time he used her number, and since she did not know his number at the time, she took that call. After that she used her Verizon voice every time he calls. Cueball's Cueball-like friend, is suspicious, and it is him who ask if Cueball knows what Megan works with. He gets his suspicion confirmed, but seems to enjoy that Cueball hasn't understood the implications and doesn't let him in on the secret.\nThe title text mentions a possible hobby that Randall could think of. The hobby can be interpreted as a Reverse Turing test with someone imitating an Interactive voice response system to see how long they can keep this going before the caller either gives up and hangs up, or realizes someone is making a joke on them and calls them out. This is related to Randall's Hobby series , but this time it is not specifically Randall's own hobby.\n[Cueball is sitting in a chair holding a phone to his ear while his Cueball-like friend talks to him.] Friend: Did you call that hot girl from the party yet? Cueball: I've been trying.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball looks at his phone and talks to his friend.] Cueball: It's weird. I swear I got her the first time. But now it says the number's wrong.\n[Zoom in on the friend, Cueball talking to him off-panel.] Friend: What did you say she did, again? Cueball (off-panel): Voice work. At Verizon, I think. Cueball (off-panel): Why? Friend: No reason.\n[Megan is talking into a phone, in an italic voice. Cueball's remark is shown emanating from the phone with a zig-zag line, also the click from hanging up the phone is shown like that.] Megan: We're sorry, your call could not be completed as dialed. Cueball (over the  phone): Damn. *Click* Megan: Please check the number and try again.\n"}
{"id":616,"title":"Lease","image_title":"Lease","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/616","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lease.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/616:_Lease","transcript":"[A man is holding a sheet of paper.] Man: Okay, any other concerns before you sign the lease?\nCueball: I'm concerned that we're sitting here like I'm a responsible adult. I'm pretty sure I stopped growing up in my teens and have been faking ever since.\nCueball: For god's sake, you're entrusting me with a building . I still make LEGO buildings sometimes.\nMan: Sir, does any of this impact your fulfillment of the lease terms? Cueball: I don't know what you just said because I was thinking about Batman.\n","explanation":"Cueball is about to sign a lease to rent a building, but he's scared that he's not grown-up enough for the responsibility, presenting as evidence that he still plays with Lego building blocks.\nIt's common for children to assume, on some level, that adults are all capable, even infallible, and have all the knowledge they need to navigate the adult world. As a result, there's often a subconscious assumption that you'll reach a point where you feel like an adult, with all the attendant knowledge and maturity. The reality is that maturation is a process, knowledge is gained over time (and often through harsh experience), and the immaturities of youth never spontaneously vanish. Most people learn to behave in ways that adult society expects of them well before such behavior comes naturally, and for some people it never does. This is probably the source of Cueball's comment that he \"stopped growing up\" as a teenager and has been \"faking it ever since\".\nOf course, Cueball actually isn't responsible and capable, since he drifts off to think about the fictional character Batman (who appears in comic books, often considered children's material), in the middle of a serious financial transaction.\nThe title text references one of xkcd's most famous comics, 150: Grownups , where Megan decides to use the freedom of adulthood to fill her apartment with playpen balls. It is possible that this is a prequel to the events in that comic. After the events in this strip occur Cueball may have moved into the building where Megan lives, gets to know her and one day when he goes to see her, the events in that strip take place. From the title text we see the lender can tell that Cueball would like Megan and from the events of Grownups we see that a romantic relationship of some sort did form.\n[A man is holding a sheet of paper.] Man: Okay, any other concerns before you sign the lease?\nCueball: I'm concerned that we're sitting here like I'm a responsible adult. I'm pretty sure I stopped growing up in my teens and have been faking ever since.\nCueball: For god's sake, you're entrusting me with a building . I still make LEGO buildings sometimes.\nMan: Sir, does any of this impact your fulfillment of the lease terms? Cueball: I don't know what you just said because I was thinking about Batman.\n"}
{"id":617,"title":"Understocked","image_title":"Understocked","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/617","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/understocked.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/617:_Understocked","transcript":"[A bald bearded man with glasses standing in his open doorway outside his house and a police man wearing a black peaked cap with white emblem standing on the stoop at the top of the stairs leading down from the house are swearing at each other] Both: * [email\u00a0protected] #!\n[The bearded man is in prison sitting on a bench behind bars.]\n[Cueball, as the president of the United States, is standing behind a lectern with the Presidential Seal (eagle and all) on its front.] President: To defuse this misunderstanding, I've invited both men to have a beer with me at the White House.\n[A policeman is standing left and looking left while the bearded man is walking towards the president both with their hands stretched out towards each other. They are in the oval room in the White House with a couch and an oval carpet and two large windows.]\n[The president has opened cabinet on top of another cabinet. He is looking into it with a hand on his chin.] President: Actually, it seems we're out of beer. Voice (off-panel): Is there anything else?\n[Zoom in on the back of the president's head viewing the shelve in the cabinet with a single labeled bottle:] Tequila\n[The black Presidential Limo, with grayed out windows in the rear is being driven at high speed by the president who can be seen through the regular windows in the front of the car. The bearded man has his arms up and the policeman is waving his hat and holding the bottle of tequila are standing up looking out of the sunroof.] All: WOOOOOOOOOOOO\n[The policeman, the bearded man, and the president are sitting on a bench behind bars in the same prison from panel two.]\n","explanation":"On July 16, 2009, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by police officer Sgt. James Crowley, after the police department received a call that Gates and another man were breaking and entering into the residence. Returning home from a visit to China, Gates had found his front door jammed, and tried to force it open with the help of his driver.\nArriving at the scene and finding the front door forced open, Crowley (a Caucasian) asked the African-American Gates to show his ID or other proof that he lived there.  Gates, feeling persecuted, responded with belligerence.  He presented identification, but continued to talk back to the officers. Sgt. Crowley arrested Dr. Gates and charged him with disorderly conduct. The charges were dropped on July 21, but the incident sparked a national debate about racial profiling .\nOn July 22, U.S. President Barack Obama criticized the arrest, saying that the Cambridge police \"acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof he was in his own home.\" He also commented on the racial undertones of the incident, saying that \"there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact.\"\nThe president's remarks were furiously criticized by the law-enforcement community, and President Obama apologized two days later, saying that he could have chosen his words better, and it wasn't his intention to malign the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley. He also invited Gates and Crowley to discuss the situation over beers to air out their differences and come to an understanding about the situation.\nThis comic explores a hypothetical situation in which President Obama found he was all out of beer, and chooses to share tequila with Gates and Crowley instead. In pop culture, tequila is frequently represented as the \"let's-get-trashed\" alcohol of choice, and so in the comic, President Obama, Professor Gates and Sgt. Crowley all get trashed on tequila, take a White House limo on a joyride, and all end up behind bars.\nThe title text goes back on the suggestion that drinking tequila rather than beer would cause this kind of behavior. It also jokingly implies that biology grad students are authorities on the effects of alcohol because they drink a lot, not because they understand how the human body works.\n[A bald bearded man with glasses standing in his open doorway outside his house and a police man wearing a black peaked cap with white emblem standing on the stoop at the top of the stairs leading down from the house are swearing at each other] Both: * [email\u00a0protected] #!\n[The bearded man is in prison sitting on a bench behind bars.]\n[Cueball, as the president of the United States, is standing behind a lectern with the Presidential Seal (eagle and all) on its front.] President: To defuse this misunderstanding, I've invited both men to have a beer with me at the White House.\n[A policeman is standing left and looking left while the bearded man is walking towards the president both with their hands stretched out towards each other. They are in the oval room in the White House with a couch and an oval carpet and two large windows.]\n[The president has opened cabinet on top of another cabinet. He is looking into it with a hand on his chin.] President: Actually, it seems we're out of beer. Voice (off-panel): Is there anything else?\n[Zoom in on the back of the president's head viewing the shelve in the cabinet with a single labeled bottle:] Tequila\n[The black Presidential Limo, with grayed out windows in the rear is being driven at high speed by the president who can be seen through the regular windows in the front of the car. The bearded man has his arms up and the policeman is waving his hat and holding the bottle of tequila are standing up looking out of the sunroof.] All: WOOOOOOOOOOOO\n[The policeman, the bearded man, and the president are sitting on a bench behind bars in the same prison from panel two.]\n"}
{"id":618,"title":"Asteroid","image_title":"Asteroid","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/618","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/asteroid.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/618:_Asteroid","transcript":"[Blondie as a news anchor is standing in front of a screen pointing to a diagram of an asteroid's trajectory path with Earth in the path. There is a caption below the screen:] Blondie: Astronomers have confirmed that the asteroid is headed for Earth. Caption: Breaking news\n[In a frame-less panel Blondie narrates above a picture of a rocket with fire out the end of its two lifter rockets on either side of the central main part of the rocket. It flies up and right. In an inset picture to the right and below the rocket there is an image of a rover with text on it. The rower has two legs and a drill below it, and an antenna above the main body of the rower.] Blondie (narrating): NASA has launched a heroic mission to land a rover on the asteroid, drill into it, and destroy it with nuclear bombs. Rover: NASA\n[Ponytail is sitting in an office chair at the control panel of a large unit using it. Cueball stands in front of it looking away from her to the right. Both are wearing headsets with microphones. A voice speaks to them from off-panel right.] Ponytail: The robot has landed successfully and planted the nukes! We're saved! Cueball: Hooray! Voice (off-panel): We're heroes!\n[The Little Prince is standing on his small asteroid next to his rose and a very small volcano. He is looking at the NASA rover which is partly outside the panel to the right and up. Two legs and the drill can be seen as well as part of the antenna and the part of the body with the text. The rover has drilled into the asteroid. There is a digital countdown emanating from the rover above the Prince.] 0:05... 0:04... 0:03... Rover: NASA\n","explanation":"The comic begins with Blondie as a news anchor reporting that an asteroid is headed for Earth.\nThe end of the world has been envisioned in many ways. One of the most common is with a really big rock hitting Earth. This has been depicted in movies several times, most famously, and released in the same year, are Armageddon and Deep Impact , but also The Day the Sky Exploded and many more. These  lists of films with asteroids and meteors show how popular this theme is.\nThere is an online calculator for asteroid impacts, but don't worry, as any rock that does hit Earth isn't likely to kill everyone . And, as seen in the what if? Diamond , speed counts too.\nThe joke here, though, is that, after sending up a robot to blow the asteroid to smithereens, said rock is actually the home of the Little Prince from the famous tale by Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry. To save our world, we must destroy his. And probably the prince along with it. If the only way to save our species is by killing off another species, is the act still ethical? In none of the world-destroying asteroid stories were said rocks actually home to intelligent life. Or any life, for that matter. A second joke that can be seen is that in said movies the \"heroic\" mission always involves humans in some way imperiling themselves to save humanity, rather than, say, staying safely at home and using a robotic rover to do all the dangerous stuff.\nThe title text is a reference to the 1998 asteroid movie Deep Impact . \"Crossover\" is a term used to refer to a technique of taking two independent (and usually already existing) stories and creating a scene or short story in which characters from both worlds collide and interact with each other. Or, in other words, characters from one story \"crossover\" into the second. Fanfic is short for Fan Fiction , e.g. a fictional story written by someone who loves a particular story\/series\/idea so much they wanted to write their own tale about it (or one who hated said story so much they felt compelled to fix it). It suggests that most people were unwilling to read a story about people nuking miniature kingdoms to save civilization. A tough entertainment call any day.\nThe Little Prince was referenced already back in 2: Petit Trees (sketch) and later again in 1350: Lorenz at the end of the space trip branch.\n[Blondie as a news anchor is standing in front of a screen pointing to a diagram of an asteroid's trajectory path with Earth in the path. There is a caption below the screen:] Blondie: Astronomers have confirmed that the asteroid is headed for Earth. Caption: Breaking news\n[In a frame-less panel Blondie narrates above a picture of a rocket with fire out the end of its two lifter rockets on either side of the central main part of the rocket. It flies up and right. In an inset picture to the right and below the rocket there is an image of a rover with text on it. The rower has two legs and a drill below it, and an antenna above the main body of the rower.] Blondie (narrating): NASA has launched a heroic mission to land a rover on the asteroid, drill into it, and destroy it with nuclear bombs. Rover: NASA\n[Ponytail is sitting in an office chair at the control panel of a large unit using it. Cueball stands in front of it looking away from her to the right. Both are wearing headsets with microphones. A voice speaks to them from off-panel right.] Ponytail: The robot has landed successfully and planted the nukes! We're saved! Cueball: Hooray! Voice (off-panel): We're heroes!\n[The Little Prince is standing on his small asteroid next to his rose and a very small volcano. He is looking at the NASA rover which is partly outside the panel to the right and up. Two legs and the drill can be seen as well as part of the antenna and the part of the body with the text. The rover has drilled into the asteroid. There is a digital countdown emanating from the rover above the Prince.] 0:05... 0:04... 0:03... Rover: NASA\n"}
{"id":619,"title":"Supported Features","image_title":"Supported Features","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/619","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/supported_features.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/619:_Supported_Features","transcript":"[Cueball and a friend holding a laptop standing together.] Cueball: It took a lot of work, but this latest linux patch enables support for machines with 4,096 CPUs, up from the old limit of 1,024. Friend: Do you have support for smooth full-screen Flash video yet? Cueball: No, but who uses that?\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to Linux builds adding support and features that will not appeal to the majority of desktop computer and Linux users. Cueball has created a patch that allows support for processors with 4,096 cores, even though most computers have only 8 cores or fewer. He considers this to be more worthwhile an endeavor than full-featured Flash support, which was the most common way to present videos or animations on websites at the time when this comic was published, five years before the first official release of HTML5 . Flash movies are known for their bad performance and high consumption on CPU power compared with other movie formats. Cueball's friend is uninterested in the 4,096-core-processor fix, and only wants to know if it will help him with Flash video.\nHowever, as of 2013, there are commercial computer systems that can be actually configured up to 2,048 cores (4,096 threads), e.g. SGI UV 2000 . 95% of the world's supercomputers run Linux, so while Flash video on desktop Linux would directly affect more people, the high performance computing industry relies on and actually funds Linux development. It should be noted that GNU\/Linux now supports flash via Gnash . The first stable release was February 15, 2012; over two and a half years after this comic was written. In a turn, Flash was officially deprecated at the end of 2020, making supporting it mostly pointless.\nThe title text mentions the \"American political satirist, writer, director, television host, actor, media critic, and stand-up comedian\" Jon Stewart which further refers to his famous American late night satirical television program The Daily Show . The show is also available on the internet ( www.thedailyshow.com ), presented in Flash video.\n[Cueball and a friend holding a laptop standing together.] Cueball: It took a lot of work, but this latest linux patch enables support for machines with 4,096 CPUs, up from the old limit of 1,024. Friend: Do you have support for smooth full-screen Flash video yet? Cueball: No, but who uses that?\n"}
{"id":620,"title":"Wings","image_title":"Wings","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/620","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wings.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/620:_Wings","transcript":"Cueball: Titan's gravity is 14% of Earth's, and its atmosphere 50% denser.\nCueball: So if you can generate 9% of your body weight in lift, you can fly on Titan.\nCueball: With wings, a stage harness, a cable, and 91% of my weight in bricks, I want to test this. [There is a heap of materials on the ground. Cueball is holding a stage harness.]\n[Large diagram of a bridge, seemingly metal. A rope leads through pulleys tied to the bridge. One end goes to Cueball, one end to a pile of bricks.]\n[Cueball is standing with wings attached to his arms.]\n[Cueball flaps the wings, and appears to be floating.]\n[Cueball glides.]\nCueball: It works! Megan: Except you have two problems. Cueball: What?\nMegan: You used hot glue on your wing joints and you have friends into Greek mythology. Cueball: Huh?\n[Black Hat is standing on the bridge, with a large lamp labeled \"heat lamp\" attached to a battery.]\n[The wing segments fall off Cueball and he tumbles downward.]\n","explanation":"Cueball explains to Megan that on Saturn's moon Titan , the combination of lower gravity and a denser atmosphere make the act of flying simpler. Wings that are only capable of generating 9% of the necessary lift  on Earth would allow one to fly if used on Titan.\nCueball now stands in front of an apparatus to do so; he is standing in a valley with a metal arch above him, and two pulleys that have a rope going from Cueball to one pulley to the other and to the pile of bricks that weigh 91% of his weight, so if he generates enough lift to cancel out 9% of his weight, then he will be able to lift himself and fly.\nThe experiment is a success. However, as Megan points out, his experiment has some problems. One, he used hot glue for the wing joints and two, he has friends into Greek mythology.\nIcarus is a character in Greek mythology who is known for his own self-powered flight, which ended when the wax holding his wings together melted and he fell to his death. This supposedly occurred because he ignored instructions not to fly too close to the Sun, a tragic example of hubris \u2014 extreme arrogance. Here, Black Hat is bringing an artificial \"sun\" to \"Icarus\" to recreate the tragedy .\nBlack Hat is standing on top of the arch with a powerful heat source, a heat lamp . The hot glue melts, then the wings fall apart, then Cueball falls.\nIn the title text, Randall asks that xkcd readers do not attempt to reproduce this. The reason for this is explained here . It could also simply be a media-standard \"Don't try this at home\" warning, as there are legitimate dangers to flying around unprotected. Sufficient height and a sudden loss of one's wings could indeed result in death (and deliberately causing someone to lose their wings and die or be injured would indeed get one arrested).\nOne thing to note about this comic is that Cueball is still attached via pulley to the bricks. These bricks, weighing down on the other side, should (obviously) slow his fall considerably. Of course, Black Hat could also cut the rope... [ citation needed ]\nThe calculated figure of 9% is only correct if the temperature on Titan has been raised to be the same as Earth \u2014 which, for human-powered flight, would probably be necessary anyway. At Titan's normal temperature, you would only have to generate about 3% of your Earth body weight in lift, as the atmosphere is much denser.\nThe friction in normal ball-bearing pulleys when loaded with 182\u00a0% of a persons weight would likely be greater than 9\u00a0% of that weight. Cueball must be using futuristic super-low-friction pulleys.\nWhen the wings come off, Cueball is going to fall with an acceleration of about 0.047 g, or 21 times slower than a free fall (neglecting friction). The net downward force is 9\u00a0% of his weight, while the total inertia is 191\u00a0% of his body mass. So a fall from 21 meters (63 ft) will feel like a fall from one meter (3 ft), equivalent to the fall of someone who has hopped off a table. If he lands on his feet, he will not sustain injuries.\nCueball: Titan's gravity is 14% of Earth's, and its atmosphere 50% denser.\nCueball: So if you can generate 9% of your body weight in lift, you can fly on Titan.\nCueball: With wings, a stage harness, a cable, and 91% of my weight in bricks, I want to test this. [There is a heap of materials on the ground. Cueball is holding a stage harness.]\n[Large diagram of a bridge, seemingly metal. A rope leads through pulleys tied to the bridge. One end goes to Cueball, one end to a pile of bricks.]\n[Cueball is standing with wings attached to his arms.]\n[Cueball flaps the wings, and appears to be floating.]\n[Cueball glides.]\nCueball: It works! Megan: Except you have two problems. Cueball: What?\nMegan: You used hot glue on your wing joints and you have friends into Greek mythology. Cueball: Huh?\n[Black Hat is standing on the bridge, with a large lamp labeled \"heat lamp\" attached to a battery.]\n[The wing segments fall off Cueball and he tumbles downward.]\n"}
{"id":621,"title":"Superlative","image_title":"Superlative","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/621","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/superlative.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/621:_Superlative","transcript":"He has dreams. [Cueball is gesturing to Megan.] Cueball: I was in this weird cross between work and my old house... Which he'll tell you all about. He can speak French. Or could in high school, anyway. A little. Cueball: Man, I knew all these tenses and stuff once. His blog has four posts, all apologies for not posting more. [Cueball is sitting at a desk, typing.] Cueball: Sorry, I've been trying to think of stuff to put here. He is The least interesting man in the world. [Cueball is sitting at a table. Megan and Ponytail are paying no attention to him.] Cueball: I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I stick to a glass or two. Any more and I feel sick.\n","explanation":"The comic parodies a famous advertisement campaign for the Dos Equis beer brand. In the campaign, Jonathan Goldsmith plays \" The Most Interesting Man in the World \", a suave elderly gentleman with a number of astonishing life experiences and skills. The campaign's format generally includes the narrator presenting hyperbolic descriptions of the man's accomplishments, followed by the man delivering his signature catchphrase, \"I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.\", which has been widely adopted as an internet meme .\nCueball plays the antithesis of the protagonist in the campaign: the least interesting man in the world. Unlike the stories in the advertisement, his affairs tend to bore the listeners. Being the generic everyman, he possesses no outstanding capabilities at all. While the original is said to \"speak French... in Russian\", Cueball seems to have forgotten his French altogether. He also has apparently nothing of interest to tell, either in real life or in his blog. Instead, he will talk away about his weird dreams and his success in video games. Moreover, he is unable to stand too much beer and therefore absolutely ill-qualified to advertise it.\nThe title text is a reference to the slogan of the campaign \"Stay thirsty, my friends.\" It also references Team Fortress 2 (TF2), a multi-platform, multi-player First-person shooter game.\nHe has dreams. [Cueball is gesturing to Megan.] Cueball: I was in this weird cross between work and my old house... Which he'll tell you all about. He can speak French. Or could in high school, anyway. A little. Cueball: Man, I knew all these tenses and stuff once. His blog has four posts, all apologies for not posting more. [Cueball is sitting at a desk, typing.] Cueball: Sorry, I've been trying to think of stuff to put here. He is The least interesting man in the world. [Cueball is sitting at a table. Megan and Ponytail are paying no attention to him.] Cueball: I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I stick to a glass or two. Any more and I feel sick.\n"}
{"id":622,"title":"Haiku Proof","image_title":"Haiku Proof","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/622","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/haiku_proof.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/622:_Haiku_Proof","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart teaching a class gestures with both hands up as Megan, sitting at the first desk on a stool, raises a hand and asks a question. Cueball sits at the desks behind her supporting his head in both hands with the elbows on the desk.] Megan: How do you know there are an infinite number of primes? Miss Lenhart: I'll answer in haiku!\n[In a frame-less panel, Miss Lenhart lifts a hand up while answering. Both students sit upright on their stools.] Miss Lenhart: Top prime's divisors'\n[Miss Lenhart floats into the air  with three lines beneath her legs. Cueball looks up. Megan does not change position.] Miss Lenhart: Product (plus one)'s factors are...?\n[Miss Lenhart flies over the students heads with a curved line behind her. Neither student look up. The bottom frame of the panel is a curving thought\/dream bobble that goes through the middle of the panel at a height just below the desk tops. Two thought circles goes from Cueball's head down to this frame, and Cueball's thoughts are shown below outside of the panel - without any frame around.] Miss Lenhart: Q.E.D., bitches! Cueball (thinking): Wow, after the 48-hour sleep-dep mark, lectures get really interesting.\n","explanation":"In this comic Cueball attends a math class after having been awake for two full days (48 hours). After that he begins to hallucinate and dreams that the teacher Miss Lenhart (a professor in this comic) answers Megan's question, about a proof that there are an infinite number of prime numbers , in haiku . After the first line she floats up and during the third and final line she flies over the students heads. Note also that when Cueball looks up at the flying teacher when she takes off, Megan never moves her head because it's not happening in her world, and Cueball only hallucinates the teachers flies.\nEuclid's theorem states that there are an infinite number of primes, prime numbers being numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1. The most notable proof of this theorem, and the one presented in this comic, was first given by Euclid himself in his Elements . A more traditional form of this proof follows:\nIf we suppose that there are a finite number of primes, then they must have a product, i.e. p 1 p 2 ... p n = q . Now consider q + 1. If this number is prime itself, then we have discovered a new prime number, contrary to the assumption that we had listed them all. If it is not prime, it must have a prime divisor. Since all of the p k are a factor of q , they cannot be a divisor of q + 1. So q + 1 is divisible by a prime not on the list, which again is a contradiction. Therefore, there must be infinitely many primes.\nAt the last line of the haiku, Miss Lenhart says \"Q.E.D., bitches!\", Q.E.D. stands for \"Quod Erat Demonstrandum\", which means \"Thus, it has been demonstrated.\" This is a Latin phrase which is used to show a proof is over. Ironically, the proof is not complete.\nThe comic essentially takes this proof and states it in the form of a haiku , which is a traditional form of Japanese poetry, which is in Japanese broken up into patterns of morae (or syllables ), a unit that measures the length of sound. A Japanese haiku consists of three lines with 5, 7 and 5 morae respectively per line. An English Haiku has 5, 7 and 5 syllables per line. The proof poem goes like this:\nTop prime's divisors' Product (plus one)'s factors are...? Q.E.D., bitches!\nWhich can be divided in syllables like this:\nTop - prime's - di - vi - sors' Pro - duct - (plus - one)'s - fac - tors - are...? Q. - E.- D., - bit - ches!\nThe haiku proof given is slightly off, as the first line talks about the \"top prime's divisors,\" which makes no sense because the top prime doesn't have any divisors besides itself and one. You need to take the product of all primes, not just one. But, hey, it's a hallucination.\nHaiku was also referred to before in 554: Not Enough Work .\nThe comic and title text conclude that going to class while sleep-deprived is an interesting, but entirely noneducational, experience. So, go for the sake of the hallucinations.\n[Miss Lenhart teaching a class gestures with both hands up as Megan, sitting at the first desk on a stool, raises a hand and asks a question. Cueball sits at the desks behind her supporting his head in both hands with the elbows on the desk.] Megan: How do you know there are an infinite number of primes? Miss Lenhart: I'll answer in haiku!\n[In a frame-less panel, Miss Lenhart lifts a hand up while answering. Both students sit upright on their stools.] Miss Lenhart: Top prime's divisors'\n[Miss Lenhart floats into the air  with three lines beneath her legs. Cueball looks up. Megan does not change position.] Miss Lenhart: Product (plus one)'s factors are...?\n[Miss Lenhart flies over the students heads with a curved line behind her. Neither student look up. The bottom frame of the panel is a curving thought\/dream bobble that goes through the middle of the panel at a height just below the desk tops. Two thought circles goes from Cueball's head down to this frame, and Cueball's thoughts are shown below outside of the panel - without any frame around.] Miss Lenhart: Q.E.D., bitches! Cueball (thinking): Wow, after the 48-hour sleep-dep mark, lectures get really interesting.\n"}
{"id":623,"title":"Oregon","image_title":"Oregon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/623","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/oregon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/623:_Oregon","transcript":"History of 19th-century Oregon\n[Timeline, with relevant images next to various dates.]\n1805 [Two men stand at the edge of a cliff. One has a walking staff.] Arrival of Lewis & Clark\n1825 Early settlers arrive\n1841 Oregon Trail established\n1843 Larger western migration begins\n1848 [A horse is pulling a covered wagon. A gun peeks out the back.] Huge wave of 500,000+ settlers arrives from Missouri. Largely children and adolescents, most bring nothing but cartloads of bullets for hunting.\n1849 [Cueball and Megan with rifles aim at something.] Overhunting begins to devastate ecosystem Dysentery epidemic.\n1850 [Tombstones and bodies.] Shooting deaths skyrocket Typhoid epidemic Measles epidemic Cholera epidemic\n1851 All mammals larger than squirrels wiped out by overhunting Massive famine\n1852 [Sun low over a land, devoid of life. Scattered remains of corpses and skeletons.] Last survivors flee Oregon territory abandoned\n","explanation":"This comic relates to the computer game The Oregon Trail , and humorously depicts the consequences to real-world Oregon if everyone had arrived in the same manner they did in the game.\nThe Oregon Trail was an educational computer game released in 1971, but the version referred to is likely the more popular 1985 version.  In the game, players would play as a character taking a trek west along the Oregon Trail from Missouri to Oregon.  The player's journey starts in 1848 and typically takes less than one year to complete.  Along the way, the player must manage resources (food, spare parts, etc.) and face risks and dangers (starvation, disease, etc.) .  Most players at the time were grade-school students. The game was very popular, and thousands of players played it monthly.\nThe game made it very easy to hunt for food.  Large animals (bison, bears, etc.) were very easy and rewarding targets, where spending a single bullet could be enough to collect enough food for multiple days.  There were also smaller prey available (rabbits, squirrels, etc.) which were harder to catch and provided less food.  Since bullets are much lighter and cheaper than food, it was a good strategy to bring the minimum amount of food and plan to hunt for meals.  Extra food can even be traded for money or other supplies, so it wasn't necessary to start the journey with anything except bullets.\nThe comic tries to document, as though in a historical fashion, what would have been the result if all the players had been real settlers who really had prepared for their journey on the Oregon Trail in that way. The parts before 1848 are historically accurate.  Starting from 1848, however, players of the game would form an unbelievably large influx of people arriving nearly simultaneously, with very little food or supplies being brought along.  Massive overhunting would soon strip the land bare, all large game slaughtered for meat, with hunger, starvation and disease soon to follow. Dysentery in particular was very common in the original game and perhaps the most infamous way to die, hence its listing as the most prominent epidemic.\nThe title text makes things rather recursive. In this alternate reality, thousands upon thousands of people fleeing from the overpopulated, devastated Oregon becomes the focus of another video game, much like The Oregon Trail in our universe.\nHistory of 19th-century Oregon\n[Timeline, with relevant images next to various dates.]\n1805 [Two men stand at the edge of a cliff. One has a walking staff.] Arrival of Lewis & Clark\n1825 Early settlers arrive\n1841 Oregon Trail established\n1843 Larger western migration begins\n1848 [A horse is pulling a covered wagon. A gun peeks out the back.] Huge wave of 500,000+ settlers arrives from Missouri. Largely children and adolescents, most bring nothing but cartloads of bullets for hunting.\n1849 [Cueball and Megan with rifles aim at something.] Overhunting begins to devastate ecosystem Dysentery epidemic.\n1850 [Tombstones and bodies.] Shooting deaths skyrocket Typhoid epidemic Measles epidemic Cholera epidemic\n1851 All mammals larger than squirrels wiped out by overhunting Massive famine\n1852 [Sun low over a land, devoid of life. Scattered remains of corpses and skeletons.] Last survivors flee Oregon territory abandoned\n"}
{"id":624,"title":"Branding","image_title":"Branding","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/624","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/branding.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/624:_Branding","transcript":"Browsing without adblock [Cueball is sitting at a computer.] [Pop-up window with red background.] The Facebook of SEX! Click now! Cueball: Sigh. *Close*\n[Pop-up window with green background.] Twitter for 18+ singles! Join today! Cueball: Does every porn site have to brand itself like this? *Close*\n[Pop-up window with blue background.] We're like Google Reader for S&M! Cueball: Really? *Close*\n[Pop-up window with orange background.] Try the new GitHub for lesbians! Cueball: Ok, wait, what?\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at web sites (adult-themed sites in particular) which try to inflate their popularity by comparing themselves to other popular online services.  The strip shows four such advertisements that appear to Cueball as he browses the Internet.\nAdblock is a browser extension which prevents advertisements from being displayed. Presumably Cueball normally browses the Internet with Adblock enabled, and thus would not see any of these ads.\nThe first advertises a website that brands itself as the \" Facebook of sex\". Because Facebook was ubiquitous at the time of writing, this is a good branding idea. Facebook is known to most users and connotes an easy-to-use platform where it's very easy to find people, chat with them, share pictures, etc. For someone looking for sex, this would probably seem like a good site to use. There are, in fact, sites that use this branding in their advertisements and\/or their user interface which is likely what inspired Randall to write this comic. Cueball sighs and moves on, probably having seen this kind of ad many times already.\nThe second brands itself as \"Twitter for 18+ singles\". It is a similar but seemingly invented ad which again plays on the ubiquity and popularity of Twitter , which is a (generally) public chat forum. Despite the fact that, at the time this comic was published, it was limiting posts to 140 characters, it was still popular enough to get some attention and make someone think about going to the site.  Sending messages to the world in 140 characters or less might be somewhat less of a versatile platform than Facebook for chatting with other singles, but still perhaps viable. Cueball notes that it is becoming more and more popular to brand adult sites by comparing them to popular non-adult sites.\nThis third takes a turn for the unusual, branding itself as \"Google Reader for S&M\". Google Reader is a now-defunct platform that allowed users to aggregate web feeds such as RSS feeds into one place for convenience. The service is notably less well-known and popular than Facebook or Twitter, and given that it doesn't directly link you with other people, doesn't have the same connotation of allowing you to connect with others. Perhaps it would be a site that allowed you to aggregate various fan fictions, blogs, or other written works relating to S&M . However, Cueball is surprised such a site would exist.\nThe final ad brands itself as a \"GitHub for lesbians\". GitHub is a website that allows developers to collaborate on software projects using the Git revision control system. The concept is absurd \u2014 GitHub has a specialized function unrelated to anyone's gender or orientation, and it's barely a social network at all; the usefulness or appeal of such a system made specific to lesbians is not apparent. Cueball is surprised and possibly even intrigued by this last ad.\nThe title text relates to the third panel. RSS is a technology involved in Google Reader. RSS&M is a portmanteau of RSS and S&M.  This is a possible way for the third web site to brand itself.\nBrowsing without adblock [Cueball is sitting at a computer.] [Pop-up window with red background.] The Facebook of SEX! Click now! Cueball: Sigh. *Close*\n[Pop-up window with green background.] Twitter for 18+ singles! Join today! Cueball: Does every porn site have to brand itself like this? *Close*\n[Pop-up window with blue background.] We're like Google Reader for S&M! Cueball: Really? *Close*\n[Pop-up window with orange background.] Try the new GitHub for lesbians! Cueball: Ok, wait, what?\n"}
{"id":625,"title":"Collections","image_title":"Collections","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/625","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/collections.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/625:_Collections","transcript":"Cueball: I now have every Discworld book! Megan: Eh. Building a Kindle collection seems pointless.\nCueball: Yeah, I know the DRM means I'll probably lose them someday. Megan: No, pointless in general.\nMegan: Sure, you satisfy deep magpie-like urges by building neat collections, but you still die alone.\nCueball: Sorry, sometimes I mistake your existential crises for technical insights. Megan: Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.\n","explanation":"Cueball enters, excited that he's managed to buy every one of author Terry Pratchett 's Discworld books for his Kindle e-reader . Megan says that it seems pointless to her to build a Kindle collection.\nCueball interprets this to mean she thinks it's pointless to build a collection on an electronic device, perhaps due to the DRM ( digital rights management ) software common on these devices which can (for instance) make it difficult to transfer the files if the device breaks. (This was the subject of 488: Steal This Comic and DRM has been the general subject of many xkcd comics .)\nHowever, Megan is actually commenting on the futility of building up any kind of collection at all, since nothing we do can change the fact that we're inevitably going to die. And when we die, we always die alone - i.e. no one else can follow you on that last journey. And no matter how much you have collected (or earned) during this life that will not change. (A magpie is a bird traditionally thought to be drawn to collect shiny objects and bring them back to its nest.)\nThis view is in line with those advanced by the philosophical movement known as existentialism which theorizes that life has no deep, hidden meaning and hence even things that we personally feel are meaningful (like building up collections) will not change the outcome of life in the end.\nCueball obviously has seen Megan in such moods before (see 220: Philosophy ), and excuses himself for not noticing immediately (in the first panel) by the fact that he sometimes mistakes her existential crisis as technical insight. Megan deepens her crisis by pointing out that she sometimes makes the  mistake to think that the universe cares. This is a disguised criticism of Cueball's behaviour, meaning that she would rather want him to care about her existential crisis, instead of simply brushing them off.\nThe title text points out that Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection. (That would then be all his works not just the Discworld series...) is an excellent way to get out of an existential crisis\nBy the time of his death Pratchett had written 41 Discworld books and more than 70 books in total. The day after Pratchett died Randall made a tribute comic to his memory in 1498: Terry Pratchett .\nCueball: I now have every Discworld book! Megan: Eh. Building a Kindle collection seems pointless.\nCueball: Yeah, I know the DRM means I'll probably lose them someday. Megan: No, pointless in general.\nMegan: Sure, you satisfy deep magpie-like urges by building neat collections, but you still die alone.\nCueball: Sorry, sometimes I mistake your existential crises for technical insights. Megan: Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.\n"}
{"id":626,"title":"Newton and Leibniz","image_title":"Newton and Leibniz","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/626","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/newton_and_leibniz.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/626:_Newton_and_Leibniz","transcript":"[Newton with long white hair, facing right, holds up a sheet of paper, with several lines indicating the writing on it, in one hand and the other hand is also held up. He stands in front of an empty desk. A smaller frame breaking the border at the top of the frame has a caption:] Newton, 1666 Newton: I've invented calculus!\n[Leibniz with long black hair, facing left, holds up a sheet of paper, with several lines indicating the writing on it, in one hand. He stands in front of a desk with a book and two pieces of paper, one lying below the other paper but up above the book. A smaller frame breaking the border at the top of the frame has a caption:] Leibniz, 1674 Leibniz: I've invented calculus!\n[Back to a similar image of Newton, but he has now taken his arms down, still holding his paper.] Newton: Really? Sounds a little bit...\n[Zoom in on Newton as he puts on a pair of sunglasses in a panel without a frame. The table is not included.]\n[Newton now with sunglasses on, again in front of the table.] Newton: ... Derivative.\n","explanation":"Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both developed calculus independently of each other about eight years apart, as it says in the comic. However, although Newton had begun working on calculus before Leibniz, he didn't publish it, and Leibniz was the first to publish it (see the Leibniz\u2013Newton calculus controversy ).\nIn calculus a derivative is the result of mathematical differentiation: the instantaneous rate of change of a function relative to its argument, and denoted df(x)\/dx. As taught in schools, if a function is drawn as a graph, the derivative of that function at a given point is equal to the slope of that graph at that point. However, the literary word derivative means developed from something older or copied\/adapted from others, as Newton claims is the case here.\nThe pun is that Newton is claiming that Leibniz's mathematical derivative is a derivative, or descendant, from his earlier development of this calculus.\nThe comic as a whole is mocking the pattern of corny one-liners that David Caruso often spurts out during the opening scenes of CSI: Miami . The one liner is followed by him dramatically pulling off or putting on his sunglasses and then the show breaks into the title sequence which starts with Roger Daltrey singing an extended \"YEEEEAAAAAAAH\", from the song Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who as noted in the title text. This has become a popular Internet meme and was used frequently with Michael Jackson's death . The sunglasses joke was also used in the title text of 977: Map Projections . The counts of each letter (Y E A H) in the scream are 1, 6, 6, and 6, which combined produce the year in which Newton is credited to have discovered calculus.\n[Newton with long white hair, facing right, holds up a sheet of paper, with several lines indicating the writing on it, in one hand and the other hand is also held up. He stands in front of an empty desk. A smaller frame breaking the border at the top of the frame has a caption:] Newton, 1666 Newton: I've invented calculus!\n[Leibniz with long black hair, facing left, holds up a sheet of paper, with several lines indicating the writing on it, in one hand. He stands in front of a desk with a book and two pieces of paper, one lying below the other paper but up above the book. A smaller frame breaking the border at the top of the frame has a caption:] Leibniz, 1674 Leibniz: I've invented calculus!\n[Back to a similar image of Newton, but he has now taken his arms down, still holding his paper.] Newton: Really? Sounds a little bit...\n[Zoom in on Newton as he puts on a pair of sunglasses in a panel without a frame. The table is not included.]\n[Newton now with sunglasses on, again in front of the table.] Newton: ... Derivative.\n"}
{"id":627,"title":"Tech Support Cheat Sheet","image_title":"Tech Support Cheat Sheet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/627","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tech_support_cheat_sheet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/627:_Tech_Support_Cheat_Sheet","transcript":"Dear various parents, grandparents, co-workers, and other \"not computer people.\" We don't magically know how to do everything in every program. When we help you, we're usually just doing this:\n[There is a flowchart there. Numbers are included to improve clarity, and do not appear in the original.]\nRectangle: Start. [Go to 1.]\n[1. Diamond] Find a menu item or button which looks related to what you want to do. [I can't find one - go to 2.] [Ok - go to 3.]\n[2. Diamond] Pick one at random. [I've tried them all - go to 4.] [Ok - go to 3.]\n[3. Rectangle] Click it. [Go to 5.]\n[4. Rectangle] Google the name of the program plus a few words related to what you want to do. Follow any instructions. [Go to 5.]\n[5. Diamond] Did it work? [Yes - go to 8.] [No - go to 6.]\n[6. Diamond] Have you been trying this for over half an hour? [Yes - go to 7.] [No - go to 1.]\n[7. Rectangle] Ask someone for help or give up. [End of flowchart.]\n[8. Rectangle] You're done! [End of flowchart.]\nPlease print this flowchart out and tape it near your screen. Congratulations; you're now the local computer expert!\n","explanation":"The main point of this comic is that many tech-savvy people may not know much about computers (and certainly don\u2019t automatically know how to do everything someone may want help with). They just have developed an intuition which works in many situations. This intuition is shown here in the form of a diagram. In particular, the chart exposes the computer expert's secret ingredient: trial and error.\nA flowchart is an organizational tool for showing process flow. A box is an instruction, a diamond indicates a question, and the arrows control the flow from one symbol to another. Other flowchart comics can be found here .\nThe title text is a sad admission that even knowing the procedure for how to fix the problem, many people will not follow it and still call their presumably more tech-savvy children.  (In a minority of cases, it may be that the person did try to follow it, and still ended up at the \"Ask someone for help or give up\" step.) In this case the father of Megan calls her to help print the flowchart to put near his computer so he can be the computer wiz...\nThis is one of the cases where the name Megan is used, without the character Megan being drawn in the comic.\nDear various parents, grandparents, co-workers, and other \"not computer people.\" We don't magically know how to do everything in every program. When we help you, we're usually just doing this:\n[There is a flowchart there. Numbers are included to improve clarity, and do not appear in the original.]\nRectangle: Start. [Go to 1.]\n[1. Diamond] Find a menu item or button which looks related to what you want to do. [I can't find one - go to 2.] [Ok - go to 3.]\n[2. Diamond] Pick one at random. [I've tried them all - go to 4.] [Ok - go to 3.]\n[3. Rectangle] Click it. [Go to 5.]\n[4. Rectangle] Google the name of the program plus a few words related to what you want to do. Follow any instructions. [Go to 5.]\n[5. Diamond] Did it work? [Yes - go to 8.] [No - go to 6.]\n[6. Diamond] Have you been trying this for over half an hour? [Yes - go to 7.] [No - go to 1.]\n[7. Rectangle] Ask someone for help or give up. [End of flowchart.]\n[8. Rectangle] You're done! [End of flowchart.]\nPlease print this flowchart out and tape it near your screen. Congratulations; you're now the local computer expert!\n"}
{"id":628,"title":"Psychic","image_title":"Psychic","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/628","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/psychic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/628:_Psychic","transcript":"[Cueball is talking with Megan.] Cueball: I'm psychic, you know. Megan: There's no such thing.\n[In a frame-less panel they continue to talk.] Cueball: Okay, think of a number from one to one hundred. Megan: Okay. Cueball: 43. Megan: Holy shit!\n[Cueball lifts one hand towards Megan.] Cueball: I try not to let it affect my life too much. Megan: Wait, I can't believe this.\n[Cueball turns and walks away, but stretches his arm back out towards Megan, who is still just standing looking after him.] Cueball: Don't worry about it. Forget I said anything. Megan: But- Cueball: Let's get to the movie. Megan: I, uh... OK, sure.\n[Caption below the last two panels:] This trick may only work 1% of the time, but when it does, it's totally worth it.\n","explanation":"A psychic is a person who is able to access information that is beyond normal sensory perception through extrasensory perception. This information may vary widely in scope and value, ranging from archaeological to the ability to read minds. Cueball describes himself as such a person, to which Megan responds with disbelief because it is a bold and unsupported claim. To prove his abilities, Cueball has Megan think of a random number from 1 to 100, which he then guesses correctly to demonstrate his ability to read minds. Megan is amazed that Cueball was correct, but he simply dismisses her disbelief and wants to go back to pretending to lead a normal life.\nThe four panels are actually a setup to the real joke in this comic: the final sentence spoken by a narrator. It reveals that Cueball has simply played a trick on Megan and that anyone can repeat it. The joke is that, theoretically, a person can guess a random number from 1 to 100 once in one hundred tries, or 1% of the time, according to the law of large numbers . By playing this trick enough times on enough friends, the trickster is statistically likely to get a number right eventually. Assuming the person whose number he guesses is not familiar with the trick, it will appear as if the trickster is actually psychic. Should this happen, the trickster can then play the joke out as he wants, hence the \"it's totally worth it\" at the end.\nThe title text appeals again to statistics. People are poor random-number generators \u2014e.g. being less likely to pick numbers at the extremes or exactly in the middle. Knowing this, the 'psychic' could restrict his guesses accordingly, improving his odds of guessing correctly.\nRandall has made several smaller references to the number 42 as the answer to the ultimate question about the universe from Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (for instance in this message from 1608: Hoverboard , and the vision test in 1213: Combination Vision Test . This could be the reason he chose 42+1 as his guess. He both knows Megan, and knows that she knows him. So thinking that he may suspect she would choose 42, she thus adds one, to not choose that exact number... Cueball took a similar reasoning based on his knowledge of Megan and himself, and was lucky this time. Maybe thus increasing his chance to more than 1% as from the title text.\n[Cueball is talking with Megan.] Cueball: I'm psychic, you know. Megan: There's no such thing.\n[In a frame-less panel they continue to talk.] Cueball: Okay, think of a number from one to one hundred. Megan: Okay. Cueball: 43. Megan: Holy shit!\n[Cueball lifts one hand towards Megan.] Cueball: I try not to let it affect my life too much. Megan: Wait, I can't believe this.\n[Cueball turns and walks away, but stretches his arm back out towards Megan, who is still just standing looking after him.] Cueball: Don't worry about it. Forget I said anything. Megan: But- Cueball: Let's get to the movie. Megan: I, uh... OK, sure.\n[Caption below the last two panels:] This trick may only work 1% of the time, but when it does, it's totally worth it.\n"}
{"id":629,"title":"Skins","image_title":"Skins","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/629","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/skins.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/629:_Skins","transcript":"[Cueball is packing luggage.] Voice: Where are you going? Cueball: Convention.\nVoice: What for? Cueball: Well, you know furries, right? Voice: Sure... [Cueball closes suitcase.]\nCueball: We're furries whose animal identities have a thing for pretending to be humans. Voice: I see.\n[A convention. People sit behind booths in the background.] Cueball, with glasses and a mug: How's the weather? Megan: Great! I've been driving my car and having a job all day! Cueball: Did you meow? Megan: Not once!\n","explanation":"Furries , which have been discussed in a previous comic , are people who really like anthropomorphic animals and may enjoy drawing them or dressing up as them. One of the most prominent elements of the furry community is furry conventions, where furries meet-and-greet each other, show off and engage in activities in their fursuits, sell furry-related media, and so on.\nHere, Cueball mentions furry identities. The grand majority of furries have a \"fursona\", that is, a furry animal with which they associate themselves. While there are different approaches towards creating a fursona, they tend to be an animal representation of either themselves or what they wish to be. These fursonas sometimes have quite a bit of background that explains their origins, their abilities, where they live, and their interests... even if their interests involve pretending to be humans. According to Cueball, \"skins\" are furries who have fursonas that like to pretend to be humans. In other words, skins are humans who pretend to be animals who pretend to be humans . The 4th panel magnifies the ridicule of the concept of skins, the skins at the convention behaving excitedly about events that actual humans usually consider mundane. This is further emphasized by the grammatically-correct but unnatural sounding phrases that they use (which could be similar to how humans imitating animal calls could sound). It is atypical to consider \"having a job\" to be an activity to emphasize doing in a day (it is more a description of a state of being rather than an activity as such), and even stranger to say that in response to a question about the weather. This concept would be repeated in the title text of comic 1530 .\nIf this comic satirizes furry conventions, then the title text satirizes fursuits. In this case, there are skins who wear fursuits of their fursonas, but, since their fursonas like to pretend that they are humans, these skins wear human suits over their fursuits. Such a setup would seem unwieldy, so there are skins who avert this by simply taking off their fursuits, going to the conventions as their human selves, thus technically integrating into the whole \"skin atmosphere\". Possible problems from this can include the \"wear a human suit\" skins getting angry at the \"take off the fursuit\" skins for \"ruining the fantasy atmosphere\" (since, technically, the real-life skin is not the same that would be the fursona's human facade, especially if the skin makes no effort to change the appearance to fit the human facade), or again, because they are too \"cheap\" or \"lazy\" to make or otherwise obtain the two suits. This clash of ideals would cause a lot of drama, something that furries ( or all other subcultures ) are no stranger to.\n[Cueball is packing luggage.] Voice: Where are you going? Cueball: Convention.\nVoice: What for? Cueball: Well, you know furries, right? Voice: Sure... [Cueball closes suitcase.]\nCueball: We're furries whose animal identities have a thing for pretending to be humans. Voice: I see.\n[A convention. People sit behind booths in the background.] Cueball, with glasses and a mug: How's the weather? Megan: Great! I've been driving my car and having a job all day! Cueball: Did you meow? Megan: Not once!\n"}
{"id":630,"title":"Time Travel","image_title":"Time Travel","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/630","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time_travel.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/630:_Time_Travel","transcript":"[Megan has entered the scene from the left, and has her arms raised.  Cueball is eating something (possibly a bagel?) and looking over his shoulder at Megan.]\nMegan: I've traveled here from the year 1983 to say this: Megan: Are there any bagels left? Caption: While it's technically true, I wish she'd stop prefacing every sentence with that.\n","explanation":"Megan prefaces her statements with \"I've traveled here from the year 1983 [likely the year of her birth] to say this.\" The statement is (assuming 1983 to be her birth year or, at least, a year she lived during) perfectly valid, albeit not very meaningful. Its phrasing implies a form of time travel other than the normal one minute per minute that everybody is subject to, even though this is not the case. This gives more emphasis to whatever she is about to say, which is instead quite anticlimactic and mundane.\nCueball notes this but still wishes that she would stop saying that as it is superfluous and captures more attention than her statement is actually worth. It would also get annoying to hear that same line repeated numerous times.\nThe title text continues this idea of Megan inserting another superfluous - although true - forwards to her letters. It's technically true because the letter will arrive at the recipient some time in the future, but this is not the way most salutations that begin \"Dear Future <name>\" are meant. Many schoolchildren are assigned to write letters to their future selves as an exercise in reflection and thinking about the future, but addressing every letter this way would likely become annoying.\n[Megan has entered the scene from the left, and has her arms raised.  Cueball is eating something (possibly a bagel?) and looking over his shoulder at Megan.]\nMegan: I've traveled here from the year 1983 to say this: Megan: Are there any bagels left? Caption: While it's technically true, I wish she'd stop prefacing every sentence with that.\n"}
{"id":631,"title":"Anatomy Text","image_title":"Anatomy Text","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/631","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/anatomy_text.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/631:_Anatomy_Text","transcript":"Plate 15: Female breast [There is a drawing of a breast, with 'breast', 'areola', and 'nipple' labeled.]\nPlate 16: External female genitalia [There is a picture of external female genitalia. 'labia majora', 'labia minora', 'clitoris', 'urethral opening', and 'vagina' are labeled.  Voice #1's speech bubble partly covers the middle of the genitalia.] Voice #1: HEY!\nPlate 17: External male genitalia [There is salt, ketchup, and mustard to one side.] Voice #2: Shit! Voice #1: What the hell?  You can't do that in here. Voice #2: Megan, get off the table! Voice #2: Grab the tripod!\nPlate 18: Erect Penis [The picture appears to be at an angle. Megan is running.] Voice #1: We're calling the cops! Voice #2: RUN! Voice #1: TGI Friday's is a family establishment!\n","explanation":"Megan and a person not shown person are taking photos of their own anatomy for inclusion in relevant Wikipedia articles. This is one of the few comics where Megan is named, and also one of the few comics to feature speech bubbles. It is revealed that instead of taking these photos at home or in a professional studio , they are shooting at a TGI Friday's restaurant.\nTGI Friday's is an American multinational restaurant chain known for its casual family-friendly atmosphere, upbeat service, and fried appetizers. Megan's and the person's behaviour is of course highly inappropriate, due to the sanitation issues relating to sitting or laying naked on the tables, as well as public decency issues; nudity is illegal in most public places, and this is compounded by the fact that there are usually children in TGI Friday's.\nThe message implicit in the comic (and stated outright in the title text) is that careful cropping can produce useful, apparently professional reference images, even if the source photograph was not taken in a professional manner, or was pornographic in nature.\nPlate 15: Female breast [There is a drawing of a breast, with 'breast', 'areola', and 'nipple' labeled.]\nPlate 16: External female genitalia [There is a picture of external female genitalia. 'labia majora', 'labia minora', 'clitoris', 'urethral opening', and 'vagina' are labeled.  Voice #1's speech bubble partly covers the middle of the genitalia.] Voice #1: HEY!\nPlate 17: External male genitalia [There is salt, ketchup, and mustard to one side.] Voice #2: Shit! Voice #1: What the hell?  You can't do that in here. Voice #2: Megan, get off the table! Voice #2: Grab the tripod!\nPlate 18: Erect Penis [The picture appears to be at an angle. Megan is running.] Voice #1: We're calling the cops! Voice #2: RUN! Voice #1: TGI Friday's is a family establishment!\n"}
{"id":632,"title":"Suspicion","image_title":"Suspicion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/632","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/suspicion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/632:_Suspicion","transcript":"[Rob is sitting at a computer, typing.] Rob: I've loved our online chats these past few months, Lisa. Computer: Me too. I really like you, Rob.\n[Rob continues to type.] Rob: It's just... now and then you mention products you like, and... I worry. Computer: What? Honey...\n[Rob types.] Rob: Before this goes any further, I think we should go get tested. You know, together. Computer: You don't trust me? Rob: I just want to be sure.\n[A web browser is open.] VK Couples Testing Test ID: 21871138 Waiting...Partner connected. (A pair of CAPTCHA images) [You] Library [Partner] Kittens Rob: Okay, mine says \"library\". Yours? Computer: I... uh... Rob: Oh god. Computer: I'm more than a spambot! Our love was real! Rob: Goodbye, Lisa.\n","explanation":"Rob is having online chats with what appears at first glance to be a woman. However, he grows suspicious at the apparent consumerism dedication of the \"woman\" - and perhaps of the perfection of the online connection, touching on the stereotypical nerd fear that any relationship going well must contain some secret flaw - and so requests that they both \"get tested\". The woman on the other end of the computer does not pass a CAPTCHA test and is unable to prove she is a human.\nIn using the phrase \"get tested\", the comic is making a joke that refers both to the CAPTCHA test above and the STD or VD test that couples will take to make sure they are physically free of communicable diseases.\nA spambot is an automated program (comparable in many ways to a robot) that sends out emails or links (such as in the title text) to simulate a human's writing but contains advertising. The test that Rob and \"Lisa\" take is called \"VK\", a reference to the Voight-Kampff empathy tests from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and film Blade Runner . The test in these works is intended to distinguish real humans from very realistic humanoid robots called \"replicants\". Both CAPTCHAs and the Voight-Kampff test are related to the Turing test , a way to measure the degree to which a computer can successfully imitate a human.\nThe name \"Lisa\" may be an allusion to ELIZA , one of the first chatbots, written in 1966. According to its (her?) creator, people became \"quickly and deeply emotionally involved with the computer program\" during the chat. \"Lisa\" may also reference the computer girlfriend Lisa from the 1985 movie Weird Science\nThe title text is the spambot's last sad goodbye \u2014 it includes lots of product advertisements and links, such as an online advertiser may insert into a search results page.\n329: Turing Test is another comic dealing with Turing tests\/CAPTCHAs.\n[Rob is sitting at a computer, typing.] Rob: I've loved our online chats these past few months, Lisa. Computer: Me too. I really like you, Rob.\n[Rob continues to type.] Rob: It's just... now and then you mention products you like, and... I worry. Computer: What? Honey...\n[Rob types.] Rob: Before this goes any further, I think we should go get tested. You know, together. Computer: You don't trust me? Rob: I just want to be sure.\n[A web browser is open.] VK Couples Testing Test ID: 21871138 Waiting...Partner connected. (A pair of CAPTCHA images) [You] Library [Partner] Kittens Rob: Okay, mine says \"library\". Yours? Computer: I... uh... Rob: Oh god. Computer: I'm more than a spambot! Our love was real! Rob: Goodbye, Lisa.\n"}
{"id":633,"title":"Blockbuster Mining","image_title":"Blockbuster Mining","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/633","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blockbuster_mining.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/633:_Blockbuster_Mining","transcript":"[Cueball holds a script in his hands.] Cueball: We've acquired some new rights, but I'm not sure it's in the spirit to make it a blockbuster-- Voice: Do it anyway. Take $100 million, hire Michael Bay. Cueball: But-- Voice: NEXT!\n[Panel is inverted, white on black background.] [Two men, played by Cueball-like actors are pointing machine guns at Harriet, played by a Megan-like actress. Harriet points two handguns back at them.] Harriet: They said if I were captured I should take my own life. Harriet: But I'd just as soon take yours.\n[Harriet jumps off a cliff carrying a spiral notebook and a gun, while the cliff explodes behind her. In the background is a helicopter, some mountains, and the sea.] BOOM\n[Panel is inverted, white and red on black background.] [A man played by a Cueball-like actor is tied to a chair. Blood is pooling on the ground below. Harriet stands in front, holding a bloody pipe.] Man: Stop! I'll talk! Harriet: No, I know everything. This is just for fun.\n[Crosshairs follow a Cueball-like man.] Harriet: I'll be watching.\n[The panel is inverted colour, white on black.] Harriet the [in red] SPY [A bloody spiral notebook, with blood streaks leading from it.]\nApparently, Harriet the Spy was actually adapted into a film in 1996. Presumably [ citation needed ] it was more faithful to the novel than this xkcd.\n","explanation":"Cueball has acquired the intellectual property rights to produce a movie, but is unsure of how to make it appealing to a wide audience. An off-screen character suggests hiring Michael Bay , a director and producer well known (and occasionally criticized) for his style of film adaptation. Cueball is unsure that the IP would be a good fit for a summer blockbuster, but is dismissed.\nThe following panels depict violent and gritty scenes from a spy thriller, starring an unknown and brutal female spy. In the last panel, she is revealed to be Harriet the Spy , the 11 year old protagonist of a bestselling children's book written by Louise Fitzhugh, as well as other spinoff books written by various other authors.\nThe comic references Hollywood's search for new stories to adapt to film, and how poor (not to mention violent ) some of these adaptations can be. There is additional humor in the fact that the original novel is about school-child concerns such as friends and is not violent.\nThe film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia had trailers that made it appear to have very little in common with the themes and tone of the novel.  The actual movie is one of Hollywood's better book adaptations [1] but the trailers were extremely misleading and off-putting to fans of the novel, as in the title text.  Viewers who were unfamiliar with the novel and saw the movie with expectations based on the trailer were also unprepared for the actual movie [2] .  The trailer was essentially every single special-effect shot from the movie, giving the impression it was a special-effects extravaganza, which would have been very inappropriate based on the novel, and does not reflect the actual content of the movie.\nThe film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are was met with favorable responses from critics , the public, and the book's author .\n[Cueball holds a script in his hands.] Cueball: We've acquired some new rights, but I'm not sure it's in the spirit to make it a blockbuster-- Voice: Do it anyway. Take $100 million, hire Michael Bay. Cueball: But-- Voice: NEXT!\n[Panel is inverted, white on black background.] [Two men, played by Cueball-like actors are pointing machine guns at Harriet, played by a Megan-like actress. Harriet points two handguns back at them.] Harriet: They said if I were captured I should take my own life. Harriet: But I'd just as soon take yours.\n[Harriet jumps off a cliff carrying a spiral notebook and a gun, while the cliff explodes behind her. In the background is a helicopter, some mountains, and the sea.] BOOM\n[Panel is inverted, white and red on black background.] [A man played by a Cueball-like actor is tied to a chair. Blood is pooling on the ground below. Harriet stands in front, holding a bloody pipe.] Man: Stop! I'll talk! Harriet: No, I know everything. This is just for fun.\n[Crosshairs follow a Cueball-like man.] Harriet: I'll be watching.\n[The panel is inverted colour, white on black.] Harriet the [in red] SPY [A bloody spiral notebook, with blood streaks leading from it.]\nApparently, Harriet the Spy was actually adapted into a film in 1996. Presumably [ citation needed ] it was more faithful to the novel than this xkcd.\n"}
{"id":634,"title":"Date","image_title":"Date","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/634","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/date.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/634:_Date","transcript":"[Two people are sitting at a table, with a candle-lit dinner. Cueball is holding up a sheet of paper, and Megan is scribbling.] Cueball: Both my parents were colorblind, so... Megan: Hey, if we made more than two, we'd have a better-than-even chance of adorable red hair. Cueball: Ooh, and check this: green eyes! Trivia: 30% of biologist first dates disintegrate into making Punnett squares.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan (as biologists) are on a first date. As opposed to the usual romantic talk or discussion about each other's histories or character, the comic suggests that 30% of the time, two biologists on a first date will end up making Punnett squares , which non-biologists might not consider very interesting or romantic. The comic may be a play on the idea that couples on a first date might wonder about (or on a very promising date, even discuss) the traits in the other person that might be passed on to potential children.\nA Punnett square is a simple diagram used in biology to determine the probable resulting genotype of cross-breeding two organisms, be they plant or animal (including humans). The diagram shows all possible results of crossing a single genotype from each parent in the offspring genotype following Mendelian inheritance .\nFor humans and most animals, there are two alleles for each gene, and each parent passes one of their alleles for each gene on to the offspring. The most simple Punnett square is a 2x2 table with a legend of the two paternal alleles on one axis (e.g.: A and A ) and the two maternal alleles on the other axis (e.g.: A and a ). Each box of the Punnett square represents a possible genetic outcome as a result of each each of the alleles being passed on to the offspring ( AA , Aa , AA and Aa ). For certain genetic traits, one genotype may determine a specific trait in the offspring; e.g. black hair in rats. Certain genotypes have dominant and recessive alleles. An offspring must have both of the recessive alleles to display the recessive trait; in the above example, if \"a\" was an allele for a recessive trait, the offspring could not have the recessive trait, as there is no possible aa outcome. This is the basic principles that allows statements to be made that two parents with a certain blood type or eye colour could not possibly have an offspring with a certain other blood type or eye colour.\nMore complicated Punnett squares can factor in multiple genes and be larger in scale, but ultimately follow the same principle. The premise for the purposes of the comic is that by using Punnett squares, one can assess the likelihood of certain genetic traits (such as hair colour or colour blindness) in their offspring with another person. One would have to know their genetic makeup in general for this to be possible.\nWhile a genotype refers to the genetic makeup of an organism, a phenotype as referenced in the title text refers to the resulting traits (e.g.: Red hair is a phenotype).\nThe traits mentioned by Cueball and Megan are all genetic traits which can be traced using Punnett squares. That said, at least two of the traits (green eyes and color blindness) are not traits determined by a simple single-gene interaction. Colour blindness can be inherited, although there are a significant number of genes that can factor into various types of color blindness. Red green color blindness, the most common variety, is sex linked to the X chromosome. Because of the way X chromosomes are passed, if Cueball's mother was colorblind then Cueball would be, though his faulty X chromosome could only be passed to a daughter who would need another faulty X from her mother to inherent colorblindness. Once thought to have fairly simple genetic factors, eye color is now known to be a factor of at least 15 different genes with almost any parent-child combination possible. Red hair is still believed to be a recessive trait associated with a small number of genes (perhaps even one gene), although other traits once thought to be determined by only one gene have since been proven otherwise.\n[Two people are sitting at a table, with a candle-lit dinner. Cueball is holding up a sheet of paper, and Megan is scribbling.] Cueball: Both my parents were colorblind, so... Megan: Hey, if we made more than two, we'd have a better-than-even chance of adorable red hair. Cueball: Ooh, and check this: green eyes! Trivia: 30% of biologist first dates disintegrate into making Punnett squares.\n"}
{"id":635,"title":"Locke and Demosthenes","image_title":"Locke and Demosthenes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/635","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/locke_and_demosthenes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/635:_Locke_and_Demosthenes","transcript":"[The \"real\" names and the fact that the squirrel is vomiting comes from the official transcript on xkcd.]\n[Valentine (a.k.a. Demosthenes, with long dark hair), is laying on her back on the ground looking up at the sky with her hands behind her head. Peter (a.k.a. Locke, looking like Cueball) is attracting a squirrel with some food his hand.] Valentine: Ender's up there saving the world, but down here it's falling apart politically. What can we do?\n[Peter turns towards and sits down, leaning back on one hand. Valentine sits up in a similar position. Her hair looks like a mix between Megan and Hairbun's hair. The squirrel behind Peter is bending over the food Peter has thrown out for it.] Peter: I know \u2014 we get on the nets and anonymously post political opinions. People reading our articles will see our intelligence, recognize how clear and logical our arguments are, and insist that we be put in charge, so we can fix everything! Valentine: Brilliant!\n[Beneath the first two panel is large panel displaying a blog page. The background is light gray and then there are four white rectangular sections with rounded corners.] [There is a heading in the top central section:] Locke Powered by Wordpress\n[Below is the largest section, which extends below the panel. It has a scroll bar to the right which is partly scrolled down. The last sentence of a post can be seen at the top, with a time stamp below. Then follows the heading of a new post and the first line of this, which is partly cut off at the bottom of the panel:] which is why we must reach out to the Russian leadership. Posted at 3:15AM by Locke Comments (0) The Problem with China In recent months much has been made of\n[To the right is two sidebars. The top one shows recent posts:] Recent posts: >> A few thoughts on... Comments (0) >> Russian Aggression... Comments (1) >> Trade policy and the... Comments (0) >> And one more thing... Comments (0) >> Everyone's wrong about... Comments (1)\n[Below this is list of links to other websites, this section also extends below the panel. The second link is partly cut off at the bottom of the panel, so it is not possible to see that this is probably also underlined:] Blogroll: >> Demosthenes >> FiveThirtyEight\n","explanation":"This comic re-imagines a scene from Ender's Game , by Orson Scott Card . This is shown in the first two panels depicting the siblings Locke and Demosthenes , as Cueball and the girl. Their real names are Peter and Valentine Wiggin (and these first names are used in the official transcript on xkcd). In the book these two kids write their opinions on their world's version of the internet to gain extreme political influence. Below is a synopsis:\nSpoiler alert! In the book Ender is an above-average-intelligence boy who is selected to become a potential leader of Earth's \"Defense\" Forces in the event of another Bugger invasion (later re-titled the Formic invasions). Meanwhile, Ender's two older siblings, Peter and Valentine decide to save the world from itself. They do this by asserting themselves as wise demagogues who comment on political events on what are known as the \"free nets\" which are nets open to comment by anyone in the world. They choose pseudonyms to write under, as no one would take the words of children seriously, choosing Locke (Peter's pseudonym), and Demosthenes (Valentine's). Eventually they gain enough respect to be invited to participate in moderated political debates in the higher class nets. By the end of the book, Peter has become the leader of the world, and Valentine runs away with Ender to a planet formerly inhabited by Buggers to live out their lives in peace. End spoiler alert!\nEnder's Game was published in 1985, when most people had never used (and some had never heard of) the internet. The first webpage set up with individual personal opinions (leaving out forums and bulletin board services) was online in 1994, the word \"weblog\" was invented in 1997 and \"blog\" in 1999. When Orson Scott Card wrote Ender's Game , Peter and Valentine's plan was based on a sci-fi idea expected to occur in the near future.\nHowever, this apparently science-fictional future concept is now just the mundane (and extremely un-influential) act of blogging. In 1985, Orson Scott Card's idea of how politics works in practice may have seemed a little naive, but now that blogging is an everyday phenomenon, Peter and Valentine's aspirations seem downright silly. We see their plan to win vast political influence manifest itself as a WordPress blog, and a particularly unimportant one at that, with 0 comments on most posts.\nThe joke hinges on the underwhelming reversal of Peter and Valentine's expectations. It forms both a parody of science fiction that has been rendered outdated by technology, and also a parody of the expectations well-intentioned people have going onto the internet to express their opinions.\nThe titles of Peter's blog posts parody the arrogance of internet commentators, with names beginning with things like \"Everyone's wrong about...\" This further underscores the lack of influence his WordPress blog would have and his naivete, as this is a typically unconvincing way to speak to people about politics, but someone with the arrogance to think everyone will naturally see their genius and insist they be put in charge of the world would not realise it.\nIn the bottom right corner there are links to other blogs. One is for Demosthenes, but the other is for FiveThirtyEight , a real political blog that was founded by Nate Silver in 2008, more than a year before this comic was released. It was still owned by Nate in 2009, the year of this comic's release, but in 2010 the blog became a licensed feature of The New York Times online and in July 2013, ESPN announced that it would become the owner. The blog takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college: 538. It is a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging. Nate Silver has been referenced , several times in xkcd, though mainly in the title text, before this comic for instance in 500: Election .\nThe title text uses Locke's full name, Peter Wiggin, and is formed as a short letter that informs him that he has become the president of the world, and that he should meet tomorrow 8:00 sharp at the United Nations (UN) headquarters. This is either a very child-like representation of how a presidential appointment might be announced or a sarcastic comment someone has left on his blog \u2014 either way, further riffing on the naivete of the plan in the first place. Also note that the note is addressed to \"Peter\" rather than \"Locke\"; Peter's attempt to remain anonymous has failed miserably.\nDuring their conversation, Peter is shown feeding a squirrel. In Ender's Game the character of Peter Wiggin is a sadistic sociopath - and there is a particular scene in the book where Valentine stumbles across a skinned squirrel still twitching in pain.\nxkcd has referenced Ender's Game before this, specifically in 241: Battle Room , dealing with Ender's experience during his training, and 304: Nighttime Stories , dealing with the sequels to Ender's Game.\n[The \"real\" names and the fact that the squirrel is vomiting comes from the official transcript on xkcd.]\n[Valentine (a.k.a. Demosthenes, with long dark hair), is laying on her back on the ground looking up at the sky with her hands behind her head. Peter (a.k.a. Locke, looking like Cueball) is attracting a squirrel with some food his hand.] Valentine: Ender's up there saving the world, but down here it's falling apart politically. What can we do?\n[Peter turns towards and sits down, leaning back on one hand. Valentine sits up in a similar position. Her hair looks like a mix between Megan and Hairbun's hair. The squirrel behind Peter is bending over the food Peter has thrown out for it.] Peter: I know \u2014 we get on the nets and anonymously post political opinions. People reading our articles will see our intelligence, recognize how clear and logical our arguments are, and insist that we be put in charge, so we can fix everything! Valentine: Brilliant!\n[Beneath the first two panel is large panel displaying a blog page. The background is light gray and then there are four white rectangular sections with rounded corners.] [There is a heading in the top central section:] Locke Powered by Wordpress\n[Below is the largest section, which extends below the panel. It has a scroll bar to the right which is partly scrolled down. The last sentence of a post can be seen at the top, with a time stamp below. Then follows the heading of a new post and the first line of this, which is partly cut off at the bottom of the panel:] which is why we must reach out to the Russian leadership. Posted at 3:15AM by Locke Comments (0) The Problem with China In recent months much has been made of\n[To the right is two sidebars. The top one shows recent posts:] Recent posts: >> A few thoughts on... Comments (0) >> Russian Aggression... Comments (1) >> Trade policy and the... Comments (0) >> And one more thing... Comments (0) >> Everyone's wrong about... Comments (1)\n[Below this is list of links to other websites, this section also extends below the panel. The second link is partly cut off at the bottom of the panel, so it is not possible to see that this is probably also underlined:] Blogroll: >> Demosthenes >> FiveThirtyEight\n"}
{"id":636,"title":"Brontosaurus","image_title":"Brontosaurus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/636","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brontosaurus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/636:_Brontosaurus","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are sitting at a bench. Megan is holding a turtle.] Megan: Our love is like a turtle.\n[Megan sets down the turtle and turns to Cueball. They hold hands.] Megan: Humble and simple, enduring by virtue of perfect design.\nCueball: Our love is like a brontosaurus.\nCueball: Recognized as a mistaken combination long ago, lingering only out of misplaced affection for an imagined past.\n","explanation":"Megan describes her relationship to Cueball with the simile \"our love is like a turtle,\" a comparison often made when referring to a shy and slowly developing yet steady sort of romance. However, Cueball thinks that the Brontosaurus is a better comparison. His explanation refers to the fact that remains of a certain apatosaurine were initially named Brontosaurus excelsus by the paleontologist O.C. Marsh in 1879. This species was later determined in 1903 to be in the same genus as Apatosaurus ajax , which Marsh had named two years before B. excelsus : the older genus name is preferred according to convention (making the preferred binomial Apatosaurus excelsus ). The term Brontosaurus therefore became a scientific redundancy (a so-called junior synonym), and had this status at the time of this comic's release. Due to the correct skull for an apatosaurine not being confirmed until 1978 , the term \"brontosaurus\" had in the meantime become popularly associated with an apatosaurine depicted with a speculative Camarasaurus -like head, hence the \"mistaken combination\" mentioned in the comic.\nApplied to the scenario in the comic, Cueball apparently considers the relationship without any emotional foundation and only continues it out of nostalgic motives. This conclusion counteracts the initial romantic tone adopted by the turtle simile, as comparing a romance with a falsely classified fossil is one of the least charming statements imaginable. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text aims at Randall's well-known enthusiasm for Velociraptors . Megan retorts by comparing any future sex between the two of them to be as likely as finding a Velociraptor in his house. The insult has a second barb: painting Cueball as being obsessed with movies involving Velociraptor s.\nRandall has previously mentioned the Brontosaurus name change in 460: Paleontology . The Apatosaurus also appears in 15: Just Alerting You and 650: Nowhere .\nHowever the status of \"Brontosaurus\" remains under discussion, with a 2015 study of diplodocids reporting that the more gracile fossils should be classified in a separate genus. This would re-divide the apatosaurines between the Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus genera.\n[Cueball and Megan are sitting at a bench. Megan is holding a turtle.] Megan: Our love is like a turtle.\n[Megan sets down the turtle and turns to Cueball. They hold hands.] Megan: Humble and simple, enduring by virtue of perfect design.\nCueball: Our love is like a brontosaurus.\nCueball: Recognized as a mistaken combination long ago, lingering only out of misplaced affection for an imagined past.\n"}
{"id":637,"title":"Scribblenauts","image_title":"Scribblenauts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/637","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scribblenauts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/637:_Scribblenauts","transcript":"[Megan is sitting on bed.] [In Scribblenauts word input format.] LARGE HADRON COLLIDER Click Megan: Wow, Scribblenauts even lets you summon the LHC.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer. Megan talks from off-panel.] Fwoosh Megan: And it makes a black hole! This game rules. Cueball: I guess it's okay, for a DS kids game.\n[In Scribblenauts word input format.] PRETENTIOUS ASSHOLE Click [Megan looks up.] Megan: Oh, hi! It worked!\n","explanation":"Scribblenauts is a game for the Nintendo DS in which the player controls a character named Maxwell, whose goal is to get a \"Starite\" in each level. The player has the ability to summon over 22,000 different objects into the game by typing them on the touchscreen using the DS's stylus device. Those items are then ostensibly used to help Maxwell collect the Starite (for example, typing \"ladder\" to help him reach a Starite that's inside a tree), but the player can decide to forgo the objective and just type in random things for fun.\nThe Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, and has excited the imagination of writers and journalists in popular culture, some of whom posit the theory that a catastrophic accident at the LHC could destroy the world. One of those ideas concerned the LHC creating a black hole that would proceed to suck in all the surrounding matter. However, in the game, the LHC, when tapped, creates a comically small black hole which only kills Maxwell.\nMegan discovers that the LHC can be summoned in Scribblenauts, and has a fun time creating black holes with it. Cueball's snide comment is an unfortunately rather common reaction among adults towards entertainment geared for children, and the fact that Scribblenauts is a portable game just gives him another stick to beat it with.  Irritated, Megan types in the phrase \"pretentious asshole\", and then pretends that Cueball has suddenly appeared. It is unclear whether she is reffering to Cueball spawning in-game, or his presence in the real world. Note that, in reality, Scribblenauts doesn't respond to profanity.\nIn the title text, she types \"guy who's just jealous that I beat all his Mario Kart times\" (this could be a reference to 423: Finish Line and 290: Fucking Blue Shells ) and once again, Cueball \"appears\" right in front of her. Mario Kart is another video-game series geared towards children, and there's a version of it for the DS, which implies that Cueball's just being snooty about Scribblenauts because Megan has so thoroughly dominated him in another \"DS kids game\".\n[Megan is sitting on bed.] [In Scribblenauts word input format.] LARGE HADRON COLLIDER Click Megan: Wow, Scribblenauts even lets you summon the LHC.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer. Megan talks from off-panel.] Fwoosh Megan: And it makes a black hole! This game rules. Cueball: I guess it's okay, for a DS kids game.\n[In Scribblenauts word input format.] PRETENTIOUS ASSHOLE Click [Megan looks up.] Megan: Oh, hi! It worked!\n"}
{"id":638,"title":"The Search","image_title":"The Search","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/638","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_search.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/638:_The_Search","transcript":"[Two ants are facing each other with their antennas almost touching. They are on a tiled floor with the two nearest rows of tiles fully shown, and those further back covered partly be the speech text of the ant to the right.] Ant: We've searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheromone trails. Ant: If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now.\n[Caption below the panel:] The world's first ant colony to achieve sentience calls off the search for us.\n","explanation":"This comic is a commentary on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The ants' dialogue describes the narrow scope of their search (a few tiles, and only looking for pheromone trails), and thus they conclude that there is no other intelligent life. The irony is that humanity does of course exist, [ citation needed ] but were simply not present in the kitchen at the time of search, nor do we communicate with ant pheromones. [ citation needed ] Similarly, our ability to search outer space for other life is limited to our ability to detect specific modes of communication (i.e. radio waves) and to the very limited area of space imposed by technological limitations on transportation, range, and sensitivity of our equipment.\nThe title text refers to the Kepler mission to discover Extrasolar planets . In August 2009, a couple of weeks before this comic, the first results of this mission were released, which showed the spacecraft to be healthy and had detected a known exoplanet. No new science results would be released until November of 2009, which Randall was anticipating. This mission has found more than 2,700 planet candidates that still have to be confirmed by other telescopes. So that's the difference to the ants. As of August 2013, two \"reaction wheels\" (heavy metallic discs that can be spun to impart angular momentum to the probe, mounted on the major axis; an alternative to reaction thrusters, which require a depletable supply of reaction fuel) on Kepler have failed, causing NASA to change the mission, though it will still be looking for planets with its two remaining wheels.\nThe second part is a bait-and-switch joke; by calling the search for extrasolar planets \"the second most important thing our species has ever done\", it creates the expectation that the \"first most important thing\" will be a monumental breakthrough, such as for example the concept of language. Instead, the title text ends up just revealing that Randall likes having pizza delivered.\n[Two ants are facing each other with their antennas almost touching. They are on a tiled floor with the two nearest rows of tiles fully shown, and those further back covered partly be the speech text of the ant to the right.] Ant: We've searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheromone trails. Ant: If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now.\n[Caption below the panel:] The world's first ant colony to achieve sentience calls off the search for us.\n"}
{"id":639,"title":"Lincoln-Douglas","image_title":"Lincoln-Douglas","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/639","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lincoln_douglas.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/639:_Lincoln-Douglas","transcript":"[Abraham Lincoln stands before an audience.] Stephen Douglas: Oh yeah? Well, fourscore and seven years ago your MOM brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal!\nAfter his 1860 loss to Lincoln, Stephen Douglas's famed debating skills entered a rapid decline.\n","explanation":"The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas , respectively the Republican and Democratic nominees for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois (Douglas was the incumbent). All seven debates were devoted to the topic of slavery, a red-hot issue in the United States that played a significant role in precipitating American Civil War. Although Lincoln ultimately lost the election, he had the edited text of the debates published in a book. The book's popularity and widespread media coverage of the original debates helped put his name on the map in American politics, leading to his nomination for President of the United States by the Republican party in 1860. Lincoln went on to win the election (Douglas was one of his opponents in this race), after which point several states immediately seceded and formed a separate government, the Confederate States of America . The Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter in April 1861, sparking the American Civil War , a vicious conflict between the states that would last for four years.\nIn 1863, the Union Army of the Potomac defeated the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Gettysburg in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Four and a half months later, President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address , to dedicate the Soldiers' National Cemetery. The Address, less than three minutes long, became one of the most famous speeches in American history; millions of schoolchildren have memorized it verbatim in the 150 years since.\nIn this comic, Stephen Douglas heckles President Lincoln after the opening sentence of the Gettysburg Address with a juvenile \"your mom\" joke, which is both anachronistic and not up to Douglas's usual elegant standards of debate. The only difference from the original speech is that \"our fathers\" is replaced with \"your mom\".\nThe title text admits that Douglas actually died soon after the election (passing away in June 1861), but suggests the webcomic Hark! A Vagrant , written by Kate Beaton , if you're looking for historical accuracy in your webcomics. Hark!'s usual topics are historical or literary figures.\n[Abraham Lincoln stands before an audience.] Stephen Douglas: Oh yeah? Well, fourscore and seven years ago your MOM brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal!\nAfter his 1860 loss to Lincoln, Stephen Douglas's famed debating skills entered a rapid decline.\n"}
{"id":640,"title":"Tornado Hunter","image_title":"Tornado Hunter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/640","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tornado_hunter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/640:_Tornado_Hunter","transcript":"[Two people are in a car, which is driving past a cactus. The passenger has a pith helmet and a mustache.] Cueball: The tornado's three miles west, moving northeast at 15 mph. Passenger: Go right; get ahead of it.\n[A tornado is visible. The passenger pulls out a gun, and stands up in the car.] Passenger: Okay, we're in range! Stop here!\n[The passenger fires the gun at the tornado.] BANG Tornado: AUGH! [The tornado is split in half by the bullet.]\nPassenger: Big one! Must be an F-3! Cueball: I'm not sure we're doing this right. Passenger: Help me mount it on the hood. [The passenger is holding the tornado by its tail.]\n","explanation":"This is a play on the occupations\/hobbies \" tornado chaser \" - someone who, instead of evacuating the area like normal people, actually goes in to get a closer look at the tornado - and \" big game hunter \", who often kill for trophies. Tornado chasers are typically, but not always, meteorologists . Here, the tornado chaser actually hunts the tornado with a gun like big game, the joke being that this is not possible in real life. [ citation needed ]\nThe \"F-3\" is a reference to the Fujita scale used to classify tornado intensity. It goes from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest, with an updated Enhanced Fujita scale , as mentioned in the title text, being used in the US since 2007.\nThe title text is an aside from Randall, saying that he finds the notation for the Enhanced Fujita scale (EF-#, for example EF-5 for a level 5 tornado,) to be stupid, and suggests that we continue to use the Enhanced Fujita scale to measure the strength of tornadoes, but abbreviate it to F instead, leading to the non-stupid \"F-whatever\" notation, 'whatever' signifying the number of the tornado on the scale.\nThis is the second comic about tornadoes, a recurring subject on xkcd, but it was the first to actually show a tornado. Storm chasers hunting tornadoes was also mentioned in the first comic about tornadoes 402: 1,000 Miles North and they were also shown in 752: Phobia .\n[Two people are in a car, which is driving past a cactus. The passenger has a pith helmet and a mustache.] Cueball: The tornado's three miles west, moving northeast at 15 mph. Passenger: Go right; get ahead of it.\n[A tornado is visible. The passenger pulls out a gun, and stands up in the car.] Passenger: Okay, we're in range! Stop here!\n[The passenger fires the gun at the tornado.] BANG Tornado: AUGH! [The tornado is split in half by the bullet.]\nPassenger: Big one! Must be an F-3! Cueball: I'm not sure we're doing this right. Passenger: Help me mount it on the hood. [The passenger is holding the tornado by its tail.]\n"}
{"id":641,"title":"Free","image_title":"Free","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/641","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/free.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/641:_Free","transcript":"[A shelf holds 3 boxes of cereal. Each box shows a bowl of cereal.] GenCo \u24c4at Cereal StayPuft Oat Cereal RedFarm Oat Cereal (with additional text in a star) Asbestos-free! I hate whatever marketer first realized you could do this.\n","explanation":"Asbestos is a fibrous material most commonly known and used for its heat-resistant properties. It was commonly used in housing insulation until its astonishingly destructive effects on human lungs were discovered. The use of asbestos in housing is now banned, but asbestos is still quite common in laboratory hot pads, as well as in concrete industrial buildings where the risk of it getting into the air is minimal.\nThe comic depicts a common advertising trick taken to an absurd extreme; quite clearly all of the cereal products depicted are asbestos-free, but most have opted not to advertise that fact (if it even occurred to them at all) because it should be obvious. A more realistic example can be found in confectionery products, wherein the term \" fat free\" might be applied when it's clear that sugar , gelatin , and other ingredients involved in the product are in no way related to, or contain, fat. Note that in some countries, like Germany for example, this practice is actually not allowed, since it counts as \"misleading advertising\".\nWhile the suggestive implication might be that competitive products do not declare as asbestos free because they cannot truthfully say this, the irony may be that the \"asbestos-free\" disclaimer could also cause a customer to distrust the product on the grounds of damning by faint praise \u2014if the best thing they can say about a product is that it doesn't contain a toxic building material, do we really want to know what actually is in this stuff?\nThe claim in the title text\u2014that a rival product has no swine flu \u2014is equally superfluous, as any food product containing disease-causing viruses would be subject to recalls, severe fines, and quite a few people losing their jobs; the fact that the product is actually on a supermarket shelf implies that it already has a stellar reputation for not causing serious illness. [ citation needed ] The use of it here could also be a reference to 574: Swine Flu .\nThe competing claims, however, sets up the hopefully false risks involved in whether to choose the one with definitely no asbestos (but possibly contains swine flu) or the other that definitely has no swine flu (but may include asbestos).\nMisleading advertising is also the subject of the previous comic 624: Branding , and of subsequent comics 870: Advertising and 993: Brand Identity .\n[A shelf holds 3 boxes of cereal. Each box shows a bowl of cereal.] GenCo \u24c4at Cereal StayPuft Oat Cereal RedFarm Oat Cereal (with additional text in a star) Asbestos-free! I hate whatever marketer first realized you could do this.\n"}
{"id":642,"title":"Creepy","image_title":"Creepy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/642","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/creepy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/642:_Creepy","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are sitting on chairs, presumably on a train.] Cueball: Hey, cute netbook. Megan: What.\n[Zoomed in on Cueball and Megan.] Cueball: Your laptop. I just\u2014 Megan: No, why are you talking to me.\n[Zoomed in on Megan.] Megan: Who do you think you are? If I were even slightly interested, I'd have shown it.\n[Both Cueball and Megan, with Megan pointing at Cueball.] Megan: Hey everyone, this dude's hitting on me. Voice #1: Haha Voice #2: Creepy Voice #3: Let's get his picture for Facebook to warn others.\n[The previous panel fades into a thought bubble of Cueball.] [Cueball and are sitting on chairs, on the train, and Megan is typing on her laptop.] Dear blog, Cute boy on train still ignoring me.\n","explanation":"This comic displays Cueball 's fears that his attempts to strike up a conversation with Megan will only result in her rejecting him and even humiliating him in front of others for attempting to get to know her - he might even risk getting his picture on Facebook with a warning that he is a creep to be avoided. This is because he worries that others might interpret his behavior as sexual harassment , the exaggerated flip-side of his attempted courtship. It turns out in the fifth and last panel that the first four panels was just one large thought bubble on how Cueball fantasized an attempt to contact Megan would turn out.\nIronically, however, Megan is actually attracted to Cueball and is dismayed that he has not spoken to her. Therefore, Cueball's fears are unfounded and are even preventing the two from meeting and possibly forming a relationship. Megan could of course also have spoken to Cueball herself, but she expects him to make a move if he is interested. Thus she also prevents herself from making contact because of her own expectations and fears of rejection.\nThe title text is the continuation of Megan's apparent journal entry and further emphasizes the irony of the situation: in the attempt to be alluring to Cueball, Megan took out her \"adorable new netbook ,\" the very thing Cueball stopped himself from complimenting in the first place.\nThis comic comments on the unsettling effects of social change, particularly with respect to the advent of social media and to modern sensitivity toward a woman's (or any person's) right to be left alone in public. It points out that attempting to start a conversation with a stranger has become risky, and we have yet to evolve new customs and conventions to signal openness to such an approach. The risk is aggravated by social media, by which means an innocent misjudgment may subject one to public humiliation - or even worse someone might expect that you had intention of performing some sexual crime - if that type of info is published with a picture and\/or your name on Facebook or Twitter etc. your life could be ruined without any reason. As a result, opportunities to meet other people are missed, loneliness and social isolation are increased, and one may even experience existential fears of being unattractive. Ironically, some people react to this problem by relying on the same social media to stay connected with others.\n[Cueball and Megan are sitting on chairs, presumably on a train.] Cueball: Hey, cute netbook. Megan: What.\n[Zoomed in on Cueball and Megan.] Cueball: Your laptop. I just\u2014 Megan: No, why are you talking to me.\n[Zoomed in on Megan.] Megan: Who do you think you are? If I were even slightly interested, I'd have shown it.\n[Both Cueball and Megan, with Megan pointing at Cueball.] Megan: Hey everyone, this dude's hitting on me. Voice #1: Haha Voice #2: Creepy Voice #3: Let's get his picture for Facebook to warn others.\n[The previous panel fades into a thought bubble of Cueball.] [Cueball and are sitting on chairs, on the train, and Megan is typing on her laptop.] Dear blog, Cute boy on train still ignoring me.\n"}
{"id":643,"title":"Ohm","image_title":"Ohm","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/643","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ohm.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/643:_Ohm","transcript":"[A Cueball-like guy (Georg Ohm) is kneeling behind and holding his Cueball-like uncle by the shoulders as he is lying down.] Uncle: Remember: With great power comes great current squared times resistance.\n[Caption below the frame:] Ohm never forgot his dying uncle's advice.\n","explanation":"This comic deliberately conflates the origin story of the comic-book superhero of Spider-Man with the origin of Ohm's law , as both the origin story of Spider-Man and Ohm's law deal with power, though the power is of different types.\nIn the origin story of Spider-Man Peter Parker (who would become Spider-Man) is raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. When Parker goes through various stages of teenage angst and rebellion, his Uncle Ben (in different situations depending on the comics and\/or movie) advises him that \"with great power comes great responsibility\". Here, power is taken by the reader to refer to Parker's superhero powers, acquired from a bite from a radioactive spider and via various technologies Parker designs himself. It is to be noted, however, that Uncle Ben doesn't know about these powers in the origin stories and only means this as general advice.\nIn contrast, in this xkcd comic, Ohm's law is supposedly delivered to Georg Ohm by a similar authority figure in the form of relating current and resistance to power (in the unit of Watts ), where power is defined as the change in energy per unit time. In real life, Ohm obviously was never \"advised\" about the law but instead determined experimentally that current through an Ohmic resistor was proportional to the voltage .\nThis relationship is summarized by Ohm's law :\nVoltage = Current x Resistance (V=IR)\nElectric power is defined as:\nPower = Current x Voltage (P=VI - Joule's first law ) which, by replacing \"Voltage\" with \"(Current x Resistance)\" (from Ohm's law): Power = Current x (Current x Resistance) = Current\u00b2 x Resistance which leads to the power equation alluded to in the comic.\nThe joke here is that given the proportionality, by definition a great (amount of) power would involve a great (amount of) current and\/or resistance (squared), as here the phrase 'great power' could be taken to mean 'a large capability to do things' or 'a numerically large quantity of (electrical) power'. There is also humor in the improbability of this scenario, the comparison with Spider-Man, as well as the suggestion that it was how Ohm derived his eponymous law.\nThe title text takes this further, by redefining the power equation as a more generalised differential equation , which simply states that power is proportional to the change of energy per unit time (dE\/dt), which is another way of stating that \"power = energy per unit time\". In many engineering and physics books the differential form is presented as the general form from which a specific algebraic form can be derived as the differential form is more adaptable to special cases, and therefore more general, and so the title text extends the conflation of physical power and electrical power to a more generalised form.\n[A Cueball-like guy (Georg Ohm) is kneeling behind and holding his Cueball-like uncle by the shoulders as he is lying down.] Uncle: Remember: With great power comes great current squared times resistance.\n[Caption below the frame:] Ohm never forgot his dying uncle's advice.\n"}
{"id":644,"title":"Surgery","image_title":"Surgery","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/644","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/surgery.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/644:_Surgery","transcript":"[A surgeon is standing over a patient on a gurney.] Patient: While you're doing the surgery, can you also implant this in my arm?\nSurgeon: A USB port? Patient: Just wire it up to some nerves.\nSurgeon: ...This won't let your brain control USB devices, you know. Patient: Sure \u2013 I just want the hardware.\nPatient: The rest is software; I'm sure there will be a project to patch together support eventually. Surgeon: Ah \u2013 you're a Linux user, I see. Patient: Yeah, how'd you know?","explanation":"Cueball is lying down, waiting to undergo surgery, when he asks the surgeon to insert and wire up a USB port to nerves. The surgeon assumes that Cueball wants to control USB devices, but Cueball assures him that he just wants the hardware. It is revealed that he is waiting for the software update that will allow him to do as he pleases.\nLinux is an open source kernel for an operating system. Linux is notorious for its less-than-perfect support for hardware, although support for most hardware is eventually patched into the official kernel release. Cueball is here under the impression that support for a USB port can be patched into his arm in a similar fashion to how hardware support can be added to the Linux kernel.\nThe \" Vista -Ready\" sticker in the title text is a humorous indication from the doctor that the patient is \"advanced enough\" to have Windows Vista installed. The irony is multilayered. There was a lawsuit against Microsoft about promoting not-so-capable computers as \"Windows Vista Capable\"; they could neither run Vista fully nor smoothly. On top of that, the typical Linux user would not be very enthusiastic about Windows at all; someone who runs Linux has actively chosen an alternative operating system.\n[A surgeon is standing over a patient on a gurney.] Patient: While you're doing the surgery, can you also implant this in my arm?\nSurgeon: A USB port? Patient: Just wire it up to some nerves.\nSurgeon: ...This won't let your brain control USB devices, you know. Patient: Sure \u2013 I just want the hardware.\nPatient: The rest is software; I'm sure there will be a project to patch together support eventually. Surgeon: Ah \u2013 you're a Linux user, I see. Patient: Yeah, how'd you know?"}
{"id":645,"title":"RPS","image_title":"RPS","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/645","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/645:_RPS","transcript":"[A sausage with mustard is sitting to the right of an empty bun.] [Caption below the panel:] Reverse Polish Sausage","explanation":"Reverse Polish notation is a method of writing mathematical expressions, where operators are after their operands, not between.\nFor example, 2 + 2 becomes 2 2 + , and (2 \u00d7 2) \u00f7 3 becomes 2 2 * 3 \/ . This comic plays on that, by placing a Polish Sausage (a North American term for Kielbasa ) after both halves of the bun instead of between.\nThe title text is a pun on the fact that Reverse Polish Notation is also known as Postfix notation . \"Fixins\" is a Southern US slang for condiments such as mustard, chopped onions, and more. The slang is derived from how you \"fix\" up, or prepare, your food item whenever you have items that can be customized per person after being cooked.\nThe news section for this comic says \" Comic today's you confuses here click if \", which is also written in some kind of reverse polish notation and would be \" If today's comic confuses you, click here \" in proper English.\n[A sausage with mustard is sitting to the right of an empty bun.] [Caption below the panel:] Reverse Polish Sausage"}
{"id":646,"title":"Conversations","image_title":"Conversations","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/646","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/conversations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/646:_Conversations","transcript":"[A graph plots time vs. 3 lines.] [Dysentery cases starts high, drops to near zero with time.] [Laptop sales starts at zero, then raises.] [Frequency of conversations in which one participant is on the toilet - falls as dysentery cases falls, then rises again with laptop sales.]\n","explanation":"This comic humorously links both dysentery and laptop computers with conversations in which one participant is on the toilet .\nDysentery results from viral, bacterial, or parasitic infections in the intestine, and is characterized by severe diarrhea , which means that someone will be on the toilet frequently and\/or for a long time. So when dysentery was more prevalent, people spent more time on the toilet and presumably would have to talk to other people while sitting there. Dysentery has largely subsided in the developed world, which is why the graph of dysentery cases falls to near zero over time.\nLaptops could cause toilet conversations because wireless internet allows people to carry their laptop anywhere around the house, even to the bathroom. They can still communicate with friends by text, voice, or even video chat, which means people can multitask by holding an online conversation while sitting on the toilet. If the chatting is just in text, then the other person won't have to know that their friend is on the toilet - Hopefully voice and video chat are less common while sitting on the toilet.\nThere are always some conversations on the toilet, because the social conventions against it are sometimes ignored or overridden by urgent situations. This explains why the conversations graph does not reach zero in the middle.\nThe joke in the title text is a direct reference to a previous comic regarding The Oregon Trail and dysentery.\nThe title text refers to the popular educational computer game around the 1980s titled the Oregon Trail. The game purports to educate students about 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail in the western United States . Among the features in the game is the common occurrence for a party member to die of a disease such as cholera , typhoid , or dysentery . The title text humorously suggests that the data for the graph comes from occurrences of dysentery in the game.\n[A graph plots time vs. 3 lines.] [Dysentery cases starts high, drops to near zero with time.] [Laptop sales starts at zero, then raises.] [Frequency of conversations in which one participant is on the toilet - falls as dysentery cases falls, then rises again with laptop sales.]\n"}
{"id":647,"title":"Scary","image_title":"Scary","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/647","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scary.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/647:_Scary","transcript":"[Rob and his nephew (also drawn like a Cueball, but smaller) are sitting on the ground facing each other. Rob is holding a flash-light up to his face and leans back on the other arm, while crossing his legs. The nephew is sitting forward resting one arm on his lifted knees and leaning back on his other arm.] Rob: But they never found the ghost's head! Nephew: Lame story, Uncle Rob. Rob: And you could do scarier? Nephew: Sure.\n[Rob has removed the flash-light from his face and the nephew leans more back and has shifted a leg down so only one knee supports the arm which are now more straight.] Rob: Try me. Nephew: 9\/11 happened before I was born, yet I'm old enough to have this conversation with you.\n[Rob has dropped the flash-light. The nephew has taken the other arm down on the ground. Beat panel.]\n[Rob has curled his legs up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them while the nephew relaxes even more.]\n","explanation":"Rob is telling his eight-year-old nephew a ghost story, employing such clich\u00e9d devices as a flashlight-lit face and stock ghost story endings. The boy is unimpressed, so Rob challenges him to come up with a scarier story. Rob's nephew merely states that he was born after 9\/11 , and yet he is already mentally developed enough to hold a conversation with an adult. This proves effective, as in the final panel Rob assumes the fetal position, gripped by existential dread.\nNo hidden meaning here, but this sure is scary for many adults. What's being implied here is that time seems to be moving really quickly and we're getting older faster than we think. Events that seem like they \"just happened\" have happened long enough ago for a whole other person to come into existence, grow up, and learn to carry on a conversation. Every time we get reminded of this fact, it can be scary, as you then realize that you are now closer to your death...\n9\/11 was a terrorist attack in the United States in 2001, on September 11th. Major events such as the assassination of Kennedy , the Moon Landing of Apollo 11 or 9\/11 are easily memorable. It is often said that \"everyone remembers where they were when they first heard...\". In consequence, these events act as milestones in our memory. They are recalled more vividly, and seem more recent. Today this is maybe also topping the Attack on Pearl Harbor which happened in 1941.\nThe title text mentions that Randall is teaching his 8 year old relatives to say the same as in the comic \u2014 presumably to the annoyance of his older relatives who will be reminded of the fast passage of time. He does not stop here, but teaches the 14 year old's to say they are born after Toy Story \u2014 a major block buster hit from Pixar which came out in 1995. A movie many people will remember fondly and feel just came out the other day... He continues with these scary thoughts by mentioning that Pok\u00e9mon (1996) came out over a decade ago and that kids born after the big Disney hit movie Aladdin from 1992 will turn 18 next year (i.e. in 2010 a year after this comic was published).\nRandall has both before and after this comic tried to make people feel old several times.\n[Rob and his nephew (also drawn like a Cueball, but smaller) are sitting on the ground facing each other. Rob is holding a flash-light up to his face and leans back on the other arm, while crossing his legs. The nephew is sitting forward resting one arm on his lifted knees and leaning back on his other arm.] Rob: But they never found the ghost's head! Nephew: Lame story, Uncle Rob. Rob: And you could do scarier? Nephew: Sure.\n[Rob has removed the flash-light from his face and the nephew leans more back and has shifted a leg down so only one knee supports the arm which are now more straight.] Rob: Try me. Nephew: 9\/11 happened before I was born, yet I'm old enough to have this conversation with you.\n[Rob has dropped the flash-light. The nephew has taken the other arm down on the ground. Beat panel.]\n[Rob has curled his legs up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them while the nephew relaxes even more.]\n"}
{"id":648,"title":"Fall Foliage","image_title":"Fall Foliage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/648","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fall_foliage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/648:_Fall_Foliage","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing on a cliff overlooking a forest of gorgeous orange foliage. The forest grows up a hill and behind and right of the forest there are is forest free hill and in the horizon two small mountain peaks rises up to the gray blue sky. Cueball is holding his camera down while Megan is holding her camera up taking a photo. As opposed to normal the text is written inside two speech bubbles with arrow ending pointing at the two. Also the sound of the camera is written inside a white area with small u shapes forming part of the frame for this sound.] Cueball: Instead of driving all this way, we could've just taken our summer pictures and messed with the \"hue\" slider in Photoshop. Megan: Hush. Camera: Click\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan have driven some distance from home, and Megan enjoys the pastime of leaf peeping , happily taking photographs of the beautiful fall or autumn foliage. Cueball points out that they could've stayed home and used Photoshop to alter pictures they've already taken, saving themselves the trouble of going on the trip. The hue control in such image editing programs shifts the colors around the spectrum without altering the brightness; the green leaves in a summer picture could then easily be shifted to yellow or red.\nMegan simply shushes him in the strip, but the title text is implied to be Megan's retort, saying that Cueball used to be a happier person, and if he will continue being like this, she would prefer to see him in old pictures rather than living with him. Or it could be that Cueball is making a response to the shush as he seems to be the more technologically inclined and more annoyed.\nThe comic is also showing how, because of technology, many people are not as \"happy\" as they once were. Instead of appreciating natural beauty, Cueball simply wishes to \"replicate\" the experience by using Photoshop; unfortunately, this would deprive him of both the experience of beautiful fall leaves and a shared intimacy with Megan.\nSee also 1314: Photos about people taking pictures and White Hat complaining.\nLater in 1719: Superzoom White Hat and Cueball again discusses photography, while in 2111: Opportunity Rover White Hat shares his anti-photography opinion again.\n[Cueball and Megan are standing on a cliff overlooking a forest of gorgeous orange foliage. The forest grows up a hill and behind and right of the forest there are is forest free hill and in the horizon two small mountain peaks rises up to the gray blue sky. Cueball is holding his camera down while Megan is holding her camera up taking a photo. As opposed to normal the text is written inside two speech bubbles with arrow ending pointing at the two. Also the sound of the camera is written inside a white area with small u shapes forming part of the frame for this sound.] Cueball: Instead of driving all this way, we could've just taken our summer pictures and messed with the \"hue\" slider in Photoshop. Megan: Hush. Camera: Click\n"}
{"id":649,"title":"Static","image_title":"Static","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/649","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/static.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/649:_Static","transcript":"[It's pitch black. Only Cueball and Megan's dialogue can be seen.]\nMegan: Hang on, I can't see\u2014did you put on a condom? Cueball: It's okay. I've got a wrist thing on.\nMegan: A what? Let me see that. fumble Megan: This is an anti-static strap.\nCueball: You mean it doesn't... Megan: No. Why would you even THINK that? Cueball: I guess I was mixed up.\nCueball: Wait, so when I was replacing that RAM last week... Megan: Yeah, I THOUGHT that was weird. Cueball: Oh, but it explains why the Geek Squad fired me.\n","explanation":"This comic describes an unlikely confusion between a condom and an antistatic wrist strap . The two characters, presumably Cueball and Megan, are in the dark and about to engage in sexual intercourse . Megan checks that Cueball has a condom on. Cueball thinks a condom isn't necessary because he has an antistatic wrist strap on. Megan finds this ridiculous.\nAntistatic wrist straps are important safety tools for electronics work such as handling computer parts. The wrist strap provides a conduction path directly from one's skin to an electrical ground , preventing the buildup of static electricity which, if accidentally discharged upon touching part of a circuit, can damage sensitive electronic components.\nCondoms , on the other hand, are an important safety tool for sex, as birth control and protection from STDs .\nThe confusion is humorous because both items have abstract similarities, but are used in wildly different kinds of activities. In an abstract sense, both are items that you want to be sure to put on before engaging in a certain activity, wearing it throughout that activity to prevent any disastrous accidental effects.\nThe last panel implies that in his confusion, Cueball put on a condom in order to replace the RAM in his computer the previous week. Rather than actually asking about it, Megan just thought that was weird. Geek Squad is the computer service department of the Best Buy chain of American electronics superstores. So Cueball also implies that he put on a condom while working in Best Buy, for performing computer repair, and so he was fired for indecency.\nThe title text conveys the irrational belief that nothing can go wrong on a project while wearing an antistatic wrist band. In reality, the wrist band will only protect your electronics from electrostatic discharge , and there are plenty of other things that could go wrong on an electronics project, such as bad soldering, installing the wrong component, mechanical damage through excessive force, or even electric shock from an exposed live voltage. Or the text could be referring to even non-electronics projects, in which case the wrist band would really be pointless.\n[It's pitch black. Only Cueball and Megan's dialogue can be seen.]\nMegan: Hang on, I can't see\u2014did you put on a condom? Cueball: It's okay. I've got a wrist thing on.\nMegan: A what? Let me see that. fumble Megan: This is an anti-static strap.\nCueball: You mean it doesn't... Megan: No. Why would you even THINK that? Cueball: I guess I was mixed up.\nCueball: Wait, so when I was replacing that RAM last week... Megan: Yeah, I THOUGHT that was weird. Cueball: Oh, but it explains why the Geek Squad fired me.\n"}
{"id":650,"title":"Nowhere","image_title":"Nowhere","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/650","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nowhere.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/650:_Nowhere","transcript":"[Megan is sitting on a couch with Cueball lying in her lap, his feet going out over the armrest.] Cueball: There's nowhere I'd rather be than with you here right now.\n[Zoom in on Megan, still showing Cueball's head in her lap.]\n[Further zoom in on Megan, so only most of Cueball's head can be seen. The couch is only partly sketched, and behind her thee thought bobbles lead to a day dream she is having, where we see she is imagining herself riding an apatosaurus, holding the reins going into the dinosaurs mouth.]\n","explanation":"This is a sarcastic comic poking fun at romanticism.\nThe phrase used by Cueball in the first panel hints at the romantic, suggesting that he is so happy to be with Megan that there is nowhere else that he would rather be right at this moment than here with her.\nMegan wonders if this is her viewpoint, and imagines herself riding a dinosaur, probably an Apatosaurus , suggesting that she would rather be doing just that. This, and the title text are saying that the likelihood that out of all the possibilities in the universe, the chances that the one single place you would most want to be is just sitting with your significant other is fairly low.\nThe title text is Megan's comment to Cueball, where she asks him if he is serious, when there are like a thousand species of Dinosaurs he could be riding (or running from).\nPreviously, in 15: Just Alerting You , a man rode on a Brontosaurus which at the time of release of this comic was thought to just be an outdated name for Apatosauruses . This was made clear a few comics earlier in 636: Brontosaurus . Apatosauruses are also mentioned in 460: Paleontology .\n[Megan is sitting on a couch with Cueball lying in her lap, his feet going out over the armrest.] Cueball: There's nowhere I'd rather be than with you here right now.\n[Zoom in on Megan, still showing Cueball's head in her lap.]\n[Further zoom in on Megan, so only most of Cueball's head can be seen. The couch is only partly sketched, and behind her thee thought bobbles lead to a day dream she is having, where we see she is imagining herself riding an apatosaurus, holding the reins going into the dinosaurs mouth.]\n"}
{"id":651,"title":"Bag Check","image_title":"Bag Check","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/651","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bag_check.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/651:_Bag_Check","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are at a security checkpoint in an airport. A guard is holding an open backpack and a bottle of water, and Cueball is arguing with him. Megan is facepalming.] Cueball: But if you're worried about bombs, why are you letting me keep my laptop batteries? If I overvolted them and breached the cells, it would make a sizeable explosion. Megan: Oh god. Cueball: It's okay, dear. In a moment he'll realize I have a good point and return my water.\n","explanation":"Cueball argues with a TSA agent at an airport security checkpoint over the TSA policy of prohibiting airline passengers from bringing liquids or gels in quantities greater than 3.4 ounces (100 ml) in their carry on items. To prove his point, Cueball points out that modifying the lithium ion battery in his laptop computer to be an explosive poses a more plausible risk to the aircraft than carrying an innocuous bottle of water. The joke is that now the security team is even MORE worried about him specifically and will take away his laptop and most likely detain him for questioning.\nThe title text continues Cueball's line of argument, segueing into a protest as the situation escalates to the point of Cueball apparently being placed under arrest. This is, however, a bit of an exaggeration, as for them to place someone under arrest, they need real reason to think that they are going to do something bad, and simply knowing this information is not enough to justify this action.\nInterestingly, in 2017 a ban on laptops and other large, battery-equipped devices (but not smartphones) in the cabin was initiated by the United States, and followed by other countries, with the stated aim of lowering the risk of somebody bringing an explosive onto the plane inside it. Granted, this was in response to a Somali incident where a bomber snuck a laptop loaded with actual explosives (not just the batteries) onto a plane, but the similarities are still quite evident.\n[Cueball and Megan are at a security checkpoint in an airport. A guard is holding an open backpack and a bottle of water, and Cueball is arguing with him. Megan is facepalming.] Cueball: But if you're worried about bombs, why are you letting me keep my laptop batteries? If I overvolted them and breached the cells, it would make a sizeable explosion. Megan: Oh god. Cueball: It's okay, dear. In a moment he'll realize I have a good point and return my water.\n"}
{"id":652,"title":"More Accurate","image_title":"More Accurate","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/652","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/more_accurate.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/652:_More_Accurate","transcript":"[Cueball with a shotgun approaches a woman carrying a tray with glasses.] Cueball: Sarah! Come with me if you want to live! A robot assassin has been sent here to kill you!\n[Sarah holds her hands over her mouth. She has presumably dropped the tray, as it lies on the floor.] Cueball: I'm here to save you. I may not be as strong or fast as a machine, but I'll fight to keep you-\n[There's a huge orange and yellow explosion. The two are disintegrated and Cueball's shotgun goes flying.] BOOM\n[A flying robot assassin is above the bomb site.]","explanation":"This comic spoofs the Terminator series, in which a super-intelligent machine from the future time travels back in time to kill Sarah Connor . As could be expected from a movie, the antagonistic robot is a human-like android.\nHowever, we currently have military \"robots\" (actually vehicles controlled remotely by people) that are completely unlike anything in the movie. Originally, UAV were only used for surveillance and reconnaissance. But, now more than ever, they are used for attacks. And most importantly, they are not walking humanoids but flying machines. They are not restricted to carrying human-intended guns as in the movie but are armed with powerful explosives and long-range missiles. Thus the name of the comic: Randall points out being attacked by a flying plane-like drone -- such as the Predator drone shown in the last panel (heavily used for offensive operations by the USAF and the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan) -- is a much more accurate outcome should the robots rise up against humans.\nIt is important to note that, in the actual Terminator 1 movie , this substitution would not actually be so simple. The terminator sent back in time knows Sarah Connor's name and city of residence, but not her appearance or address; it locates her by looking her up in a phone book (and ends up killing a number of other women with the same name, as well as its intended target's roommate, before finding the correct Sarah Connor.) Additionally, the terminator regularly operates inside buildings and rearms itself by picking up human small-arms. A Predator-type drone, while a superior killing system, would be unable to do any of that. A drone which could interact with and operate in the human environment with the ease the terminator displays (let alone successfully disguise itself as a human) would be a major accomplishment which no real-world project has yet come close to.\nOne thing that keeps us short of a Terminator scenario is that most of the unmanned aerial vehicles are either pre-programmed or flown remotely by members of the military, and are not left to their own devices.\nThe title text emphasizes this by pointing out that we have entire fleets of these drones, and notes that at some point, we entered the future.\nSimilar buildup and Terminator reference are to be found in 1177: Time Robot .\n10 years after this comic was published, almost to the day, a movie in the Terminator franchise called Terminator: Dark Fate came out which includes a scene very similar to this comic involving a Predator drone being used by the super-intelligent machine to take out its target. Also, shortly after that movie came out Randall published a comic about it with the same name.\n[Cueball with a shotgun approaches a woman carrying a tray with glasses.] Cueball: Sarah! Come with me if you want to live! A robot assassin has been sent here to kill you!\n[Sarah holds her hands over her mouth. She has presumably dropped the tray, as it lies on the floor.] Cueball: I'm here to save you. I may not be as strong or fast as a machine, but I'll fight to keep you-\n[There's a huge orange and yellow explosion. The two are disintegrated and Cueball's shotgun goes flying.] BOOM\n[A flying robot assassin is above the bomb site.]"}
{"id":653,"title":"So Bad It's Worse","image_title":"So Bad It's Worse","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/653","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/so_bad_its_worse.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/653:_So_Bad_It%27s_Worse","transcript":"Protip: Even at \"Bad Movie Night,\" avoid the Star Wars holiday special.\n[A graph plots movie enjoyability against movie quality. It drops steadily through points marked \"Good Movie\" to \"Okay Movie\" to \"Bad Movie,\" rises up again for \"So-Bad-It's-Good (Plan 9, Rocky Horror, etc),\" and then drops off the bottom of a graph with an arrow pointing to where \"Star Wars Holiday Special\" would be. There are three mini-panels below the graph, arranged from \"Good\" to \"Bad\" along the movie quality axis.]\n[Three friends are on a couch, drinking and gesticulating enthusiastically.] [The same three are sitting quietly, with a bottle on the floor.] [The three are sitting around a table, drinking and looking miserable. One seems to be passed out on the table.]\n","explanation":"The graph in the comic shows the enjoyability of movies - going from good to okay to bad, then popping back up with \" So Bad It's Good \". The term is used to describe movies that are so terrible that, ironically, watching them is actually an enjoyable experience, even if just to poke fun or marvel at the absurdity of how bad they are. The comic lists Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Rocky Horror Picture Show , two widely known films of this type.\nHowever, the graph warns of showing The Star Wars Holiday Special , as it manages to wrap back around from \"So Bad It's Good\" to being So Bad it's Horrible . The Star Wars Holiday Special is a prime-time comedy special based on Star Wars . It is widely known for its terrible quality, and has never been fully released (although an animated segment that introduced Boba Fett , which George Lucas has approved of, has been released as a bonus feature on a DVD).\nThe bottom of the comic shows Cueball , Megan , and Ponytail watching a movie with alcohol - first enjoying it, then merely watching, then not watching it and unhappily drinking.\nThe title text refers to torrents , which are a way to obtain large amounts of data over the internet. Since the Holiday Special was only aired once on television and was never released on VHS or DVD, torrents of the TV recordings are one of the few ways to actually see it. According to Munroe , he had torrented a copy of the film and intended to watch it in its entirety, in spite of its terribleness, just to cement himself as a nerd. However, he underestimated how bad it really was, and could not make it all the way through.\nThe title text may also contain an subtle play on a line of Star Wars dialogue. In Return of the Jedi , Darth Vader says to Luke Skywalker , \" Obi-Wan once thought as you do . You don't know the power of the dark side! I must obey my master.\" The implication here being that \"kitschy nerd cred\" is the \"dark side\" being served by those who would sit through a torrent of The Star Wars Holiday Special .\nProtip: Even at \"Bad Movie Night,\" avoid the Star Wars holiday special.\n[A graph plots movie enjoyability against movie quality. It drops steadily through points marked \"Good Movie\" to \"Okay Movie\" to \"Bad Movie,\" rises up again for \"So-Bad-It's-Good (Plan 9, Rocky Horror, etc),\" and then drops off the bottom of a graph with an arrow pointing to where \"Star Wars Holiday Special\" would be. There are three mini-panels below the graph, arranged from \"Good\" to \"Bad\" along the movie quality axis.]\n[Three friends are on a couch, drinking and gesticulating enthusiastically.] [The same three are sitting quietly, with a bottle on the floor.] [The three are sitting around a table, drinking and looking miserable. One seems to be passed out on the table.]\n"}
{"id":654,"title":"Nachos","image_title":"Nachos","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/654","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nachos.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/654:_Nachos","transcript":"[Cueball is on the phone with Ponytail, who's on her computer in the other half of a split panel.] Cueball: Hello? ... Oh, hey. Looking for Megan? She's gaming. Ponytail: I know. You know what's delicious? Nachos.\n[Ponytail clicks on her computer while talking.] Ponytail: When you layer the cheese so it gets on every chip... then smother them in sour cream and salsa...\nCueball: Mm, that IS delicious. And I've got the ingredients, too! Ponytail, on phone: You should make some! Cueball: I will! Ponytail, on phone: Hurry.\n[Cueball is making nachos in the microwave.] Microwave: beep beep whirrrr\nMegan, at her computer: My wifi signal!\n[Ponytail who called is at her computer.] Computer: Boom! Headshot.\n","explanation":"Megan (in one of the few comics where she is actually named) and Ponytail are playing together on an online multiplayer shooter game. Ponytail calls Cueball , who is living with Megan, and easily persuades him to make nachos . Wi-Fi and microwave ovens both use radio frequencies around 2.4 GHz , so Cueball's cooking disrupts Megan's connection and allows Ponytail to kill Megan's character. Boom! Headshot is a catchphrase made popular through a web mockumentary series called Pure Pwnage , and is also used in the game League of Legends by the character Caitlyn.\nThe title text points out that Megan has only herself to blame, as gaming on WiFi is susceptible to such issues, while gaming with a wired connection (e.g. Ethernet ) is not.\nNote: If using the microwave actually does interfere with your WiFi, then get another microwave. Not (strictly) because it would mess with the WiFi, but because your microwave has a hole somewhere and is leaking non-ionizing radiation it shouldn't. It won't kill you, but it's not operating at peak efficiency. See this video on the subject.\nAround the time of this comic's release, the xkcd website was temporarily redesigned using Yahoo! GeoCities . Snapshots of the site at the time can be found on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine .\nThis was the fifth time Megan is drawn and given the name Megan in xkcd, the first time being in 159: Boombox . Once in between this and the previous of these comics ( 478: The Staple Madness ), her name was used in 596: Latitude , but she was not drawn there.\n[Cueball is on the phone with Ponytail, who's on her computer in the other half of a split panel.] Cueball: Hello? ... Oh, hey. Looking for Megan? She's gaming. Ponytail: I know. You know what's delicious? Nachos.\n[Ponytail clicks on her computer while talking.] Ponytail: When you layer the cheese so it gets on every chip... then smother them in sour cream and salsa...\nCueball: Mm, that IS delicious. And I've got the ingredients, too! Ponytail, on phone: You should make some! Cueball: I will! Ponytail, on phone: Hurry.\n[Cueball is making nachos in the microwave.] Microwave: beep beep whirrrr\nMegan, at her computer: My wifi signal!\n[Ponytail who called is at her computer.] Computer: Boom! Headshot.\n"}
{"id":655,"title":"Climbing","image_title":"Climbing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/655","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/climbing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/655:_Climbing","transcript":"[Cueball seen from his back, as he is ascending a gray climbing wall with 16 white handles in different shapes and sizes. He is standing on one near the bottom left of the panel with his left foot, holding on to a large handle to the left of his head, and one to the right at shoulder height. His right foot is seeking hold on another handle above knee hight of his left leg.]\n[Cueball is seen in profile still climbing up the gray wall, which is drawn in the right part of the panel, 13 handles protruding. At the top of the panel something is protruding from the wall at more than ninety degree angle to the wall, as the line soon goes off panel at the top, but it seems to be directed at a small white half circle at the top of the panel. The line begins in front of the last of the handles at the top, a small one, and below this there is a larger handle bending up making it easy to hold on to. Cueball is holding on with his hands to two similar \"easy\" handles.]\n[Cueball climbs a bit further up till his hand reaches the up bending handle in front of the line, and his lower leg and upper knee touches the two handles his hands where on before. Here he has stopped climbing and lifts his head back to look up and sees Megan standing there above him (as she was also doing at the top of the previous panel, but cut off at leg and face). She just stands perpendicular to the wall facing down towards Cueball. The panel has panned up following Cueball so there are only 11 handles now, two more visible \"above\" Megan, and four from the previous panel are now below this panels frame.]\n[Same scene but Cueball is now looking at the wall as Megan speaks.] Megan: Your Facebook rock climbing pictures just got a lot less impressive.\n","explanation":"This comic makes fun of a certain type of images very common on the internet. Those pictures are taken with a camera turned by 90\u00b0 or rotated later by software, thus creating the illusion of people walking on walls or ceilings. While the original pictures depict the physical impossibility of a rotated gravitational force , Cueball uses the aforementioned technique to create pictures of himself on a climbing wall . Megan approaches him from above the wall, indicating that the climbing wall is in fact lying on the floor. It becomes clear that Cueball was not able to climb a real wall and therefore crawled on the floor with his camera adjusted accordingly.\nHer comment is a sideswipe on the practise of self-display on Facebook , which is often done with the help of image manipulation .\nThe title text implies that Cueball has in fact stolen a real climbing wall, and that Megan wants him to return it.\nAn alternative reading is that Cueball could be climbing a relatively easy climbing wall, and the joke is it\u2019s so easy that Megan can walk on it, thus conveying that it could be really easy, but Cueball might perceive it as hard; thus, Megan impresses the viewers more than Cueball by showing how easy the course is.\n[Cueball seen from his back, as he is ascending a gray climbing wall with 16 white handles in different shapes and sizes. He is standing on one near the bottom left of the panel with his left foot, holding on to a large handle to the left of his head, and one to the right at shoulder height. His right foot is seeking hold on another handle above knee hight of his left leg.]\n[Cueball is seen in profile still climbing up the gray wall, which is drawn in the right part of the panel, 13 handles protruding. At the top of the panel something is protruding from the wall at more than ninety degree angle to the wall, as the line soon goes off panel at the top, but it seems to be directed at a small white half circle at the top of the panel. The line begins in front of the last of the handles at the top, a small one, and below this there is a larger handle bending up making it easy to hold on to. Cueball is holding on with his hands to two similar \"easy\" handles.]\n[Cueball climbs a bit further up till his hand reaches the up bending handle in front of the line, and his lower leg and upper knee touches the two handles his hands where on before. Here he has stopped climbing and lifts his head back to look up and sees Megan standing there above him (as she was also doing at the top of the previous panel, but cut off at leg and face). She just stands perpendicular to the wall facing down towards Cueball. The panel has panned up following Cueball so there are only 11 handles now, two more visible \"above\" Megan, and four from the previous panel are now below this panels frame.]\n[Same scene but Cueball is now looking at the wall as Megan speaks.] Megan: Your Facebook rock climbing pictures just got a lot less impressive.\n"}
{"id":656,"title":"October 30th","image_title":"October 30th","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/656","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/october_30th.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/656:_October_30th","transcript":"[A kid dressed up in a lab coat and goggles is standing on a neighbor's doorstep.] Kid: Trick or treat! Neighbor: Nice Doc Brown costume, but today's October 30th. Kid: Great Scott, I must have overshot!\n","explanation":"For Halloween, a child has dressed up as Dr. Emmett L. Brown (played by Christopher Lloyd ) from the Back to the Future film trilogy. In the films, Brown created a time machine out of a DeLorean DMC-12 car, which he and teenage protagonist Marty McFly use to travel through time.\nThe joke of the comic is that Halloween is on October 31st, and by showing up dressed as Doc Brown on October 30th, the kid can make the joke that he \"overshot\" the time machine and went back one more day than he meant to. Doc is heard throughout the movie franchise saying \"Great Scott\" as an exclamation of surprise.\nThe title text suggests an inventive use of time-travel to get ten times the candy \u2014 hitting each house at a 30-year interval up until 2300. The interval matches that of the first two BttF movies, which take place in the years 1955, 1985 (the present at the time), and 2015.\nOf course, one would have no idea starting off if Halloween is still being celebrated in 2300, or indeed if the human race even still exists.\n[A kid dressed up in a lab coat and goggles is standing on a neighbor's doorstep.] Kid: Trick or treat! Neighbor: Nice Doc Brown costume, but today's October 30th. Kid: Great Scott, I must have overshot!\n"}
{"id":657,"title":"Movie Narrative Charts","image_title":"Movie Narrative Charts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/657","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/movie_narrative_charts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/657:_Movie_Narrative_Charts","transcript":"[colors given approximately in HEX at first appearance]\nThese charts show movie character interactions.\nThe horizontal axis is time. The vertical grouping of the\nlines indicate which characters are together at a given time.\nLord of the Rings\n[yellow line (fff500)] ring\n[thin line, here dark green (467120)] ringbearer\n[grey colored area (e9e9e9)] battle\/event\n[line ending with a dot, here black] death\n[bar, here light brown (daccae)] army\n[line, here brown (9d7929), in a bar, here light brown] character leading army\n[grey line (b7bfb6)] wizards\n[brown line (9d7929)] men\n[blue line (4a89a8)] elves\n[dark brown line (6c411b)] dwarves\n[dark turquoise line, 143035] ents\n[green line (4e7629)] hobbits\n[signs and colors not explained by the legend]\n[Characters entering the chart on the left, from top to bottom]\n[Characters leaving the chart on the right side, from top to bottom]\n[The five characters leaving off the top border of the chart]\n[text next to the group of five] Ship to the West\n[other characters leaving on the right side]\n[characters starting or leaving in the middle the chart]\n\nStar Wars (original triology)\n[Characters entering the chart on the left, from top to bottom]\n[Characters leaving the chart on the right side, from top to bottom]\n[Characters starting or leaving not in battle\/event-areas and not on the left\/right side of the chart]\nJurassic Park\n[all dinosaurs are represented by red, all men by black lines]\n[for dinosaurs locked up, there is a donut-sign.]\n[Characters entering the chart on the left, from top to bottom]\n[Characters leaving the chart on the right side]\n12 angry men\n[All lines go parallel, start and end at the borders of the chart. There are no areas of battle\/event.]\nJuror 1 --------- Juror 1 ----------- Juror 1 ------------ Juror 1\nJuror 2 --------- Juror 2 ----------- Juror 2 ------------ Juror 2\nJuror 3 --------- Juror 3 ----------- Juror 3 ------------ Juror 3\nJuror 4 --------- Juror 4 ----------- Juror 4 ------------ Juror 4\nJuror 5 --------- Juror 5 ----------- Juror 5 ------------ Juror 5\nJuror 6 --------- Juror 6 ----------- Juror 6 ------------ Juror 6\nJuror 7 --------- Juror 7 ----------- Juror 7 ------------ Juror 7\nJuror 8 --------- Juror 8 ----------- Juror 8 ------------ Juror 8\nJuror 9 --------- Juror 9 ----------- Juror 9 ------------ Juror 9\nJuror 10 --------- Juror 10 ----------- Juror 10 ------------ Juror 10\nJuror 11 --------- Juror 11 ----------- Juror 11 ------------ Juror 11\nJuror 12 --------- Juror 12 ----------- Juror 12 ------------ Juror 12\n[Three characters enter the chart on the left side, all represented by black lines]\n[The lines come to a giant scribble and end up with dotted lines and question marks in the right area. One cannot see which line leads to which end.]\n","explanation":"These charts show movie character interactions. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical grouping of the lines indicates which characters are together at a given time.\nA mass of colored lines weaves back and forth across the chart, representing various characters. Sauron is represented by a red bar at the bottom contained within a huge black bar with branches, that in turn represents his army of nazgul, orcs, etc. Major locations (Moria) and plot points (the breaking of the fellowship) are marked. Gandalf, especially at the beginning, jumps all over the map in a short time. Eagles appear and then disappear a couple of times. Treebeard's line is flat except for the march to Isengard. At the end, the ship to the West drifts off into a corner. The hobbits start off in the top left with Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin with Bilbo with them for a short time because of the party at the beginning.  They go off on their adventure and briefly encounter Gandalf.  They are then split up for a short time but meet back up at Weathertop when the Nazgul attack and they meet Aragorn (Strider at that point). They meet up with the rest of what becomes the fellowship of the ring at the council of Elrond at Rivendell. The newly formed fellowship must then venture into the mines of Moria which is referenced in comic 760 and comic 1218 . After encountering the Balrog and the later death of Boromir the fellowship splits up. Frodo and Sam take the ring and go off on their own to destroy it and sneak into Mordor with the help of Gollum. Merry and Pippin are captured by the Uruk-hai but are rescued by Eomer and his army. Eomer and his army then briefly reunite with Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn while Merry and Pippin find Treebeard and flood Isengard. While Merry, Pippin and Treebeard are flooding Isengard Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas fight at Helm's Deep with Gandalf and Eomer and Theoden.  Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas go to wake the army of the dead while Pippin goes with Gandalf and Merry goes with the Rohirrim.  All of these people rejoin for the battle of the Pelennor fields where Eowyn kills the witch king after Theoden dies along with Denethor.  The orcs, men and oliphants are all destroyed and Aragorn releases the army of the dead.  All the surviving members of that battle go to the Black Gate except Eowyn and Faramir.  Sam and Frodo destroy the Ring, Gollum dies and everyone who is still alive is there for Aragorn's coronation. Everyone goes back to their respective homes except for Frodo, Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Bilbo who get on a ship to the west.\nAs the title text points out, most of the plot of The Lord of The Rings occurs on a rough northwest to southeast axis, with the Fellowship of the Ring traveling from the Shire near the top of chart to Mordor at the bottom of the chart (and back again.)  The most significant exception to the northwest-southeast axis is the area of the chart between \"The Breaking of the Fellowship\" and \"Isengard Flooded.\"  Helm's Deep and Isengard are southwest from the overall northwest-southeast axis of the movies.\nLuke, mostly accompanied by R2-D2, joins and parts from other sets of characters. There's a dotted alternative path on Jabba's line for the special edition. A dark line representing Vader, travels through the duel where he kills Obi-Wan and proceeds to the Death Star to meet with the main charcters for the first time. Vader travels to Hoth where all the characters escape and goes to Cloud City where Han is frozen. He then duels Luke before going for a long time alone and confronts Luke for a short time before taking him to the Death Star II where the climatic duel happens and he is killed. Leia at first with C-3PO is captured and placed on the Death Star before being rescued and proceeds to Hoth, Cloud City, the Sail Barge and finally to the Battle of Endor before reuniting with all the survivors. R2D2 and C-3PO are mostly together save for when Luke is attacking the Death Star and Luke's Jedi training. Luke's line swerves through most of the scenes, breaking away from the other characters during the Jedi Training, the duel on Cloud City and the duel on the Death Star II. Han and Chewie are always together as they go through all the scenes. Greedo, Lando and Boba all appear in their respective scenes. Yoda appears about halfway through (where Luke's Jedi training is marked). All the surviving lines group up at Endor except for Vader, the Emperor, Luke, and Lando; after the climactic duel, the latter two join the rest.\nThe human characters are in black; dinosaurs are in red. Dilophosaurus appears briefly to eat Nedry and then fades out again. the T-Rex appears at the start and swoops down on the cars and eats Gennaro. It then weaves out until the end where it eats the raptors. The three raptors are together at the beginning, but split up about halfway through. One has a dotted portion of line between \"locked up\" and \"escapes.\" In the meantime, they cut off the lines of Arnold and Muldoon. Malcolm, Grant, Sattler, Hammond and the kids all weave in and out of their respective scenes. The raptor lines all end when t-rex's swoops down to meet them at the end, and all the surviving humans leave together.\nThis is a very famous trial film that tells the story of a jury made up of 12 men as they deliberate the guilt or acquittal of a defendant on the basis of reasonable doubt. Only one of these angry men believe the defendant may be innocent and he argues this against the other 11, eventually convincing them that there is reasonable doubt in the case.\nThe lines are labeled Juror 1 through Juror 12. They are all perfectly horizontal and parallel.\nThe joke in the 12 Angry Men graphic is that in the movie all 12 jurors (the angry men) are in the same room for the entire duration of the movie. They never move and they all always interact with each other, hence their lines stay straight and close to each other.\nThis is actually not entirely true. The movie begins in the court room; a couple of times during the proceedings, a few jurors go into the washroom and have a brief discussion there; and finally, in the very last scene, two jurors have a brief exchange in front of the courthouse. In fact, this chart would actually become a useful reference to the film if each of the jury's votes sessions was shaded as battles\/events, and each juror's vote shown on their line, tracking when each juror's vote switches from 'guilty' to 'not guilty'. But as far as the characters' locations, there is no need for such a narrative chart, and that is the joke.\nThe last box is a movie called Primer from 2004, which became a cult classic.  It is about a group of engineers who discover a way to travel through time, but only in one direction (backwards) and only at the speed of regular time (i.e. you have to stay in the time machine for one hour to move an hour back in time). Because of this, the story ends up having multiple versions of the same person existing at the same time; the plot and time-travel mechanics are notoriously hard to follow, so that it is almost impossible to figure out where each character is at one time, as the comic illustrates.\nThree lines start on the left labeled Abe, Aaron, and Granger. They enter a mass of scribbling. Somewhere vaguely towards the end, three lines emerge and fade out, all labeled with question marks.\nThe chart for Primer is referenced in the title text of the fourth image in the what if? Plastic Dinosaurs .\nThese charts are a reference to \" Napoleon's March , \" the map and statistical infographic by cartographic pioneer Charles Joseph Minard . It details the movements and losses of Napoleon's troops on his failed conquest of Russia.  The size and location of Napoleon's army are represented by tapering streams similar to the design used for Sauron's and Saruman\u2019s troops in the LotR Chart. Minard's chart is extensively discussed by Edward Tufte in his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , and he summarizes some of that on his website .\n\n[colors given approximately in HEX at first appearance]\nThese charts show movie character interactions.\nThe horizontal axis is time. The vertical grouping of the\nlines indicate which characters are together at a given time.\nLord of the Rings\n[yellow line (fff500)] ring\n[thin line, here dark green (467120)] ringbearer\n[grey colored area (e9e9e9)] battle\/event\n[line ending with a dot, here black] death\n[bar, here light brown (daccae)] army\n[line, here brown (9d7929), in a bar, here light brown] character leading army\n[grey line (b7bfb6)] wizards\n[brown line (9d7929)] men\n[blue line (4a89a8)] elves\n[dark brown line (6c411b)] dwarves\n[dark turquoise line, 143035] ents\n[green line (4e7629)] hobbits\n[signs and colors not explained by the legend]\n[Characters entering the chart on the left, from top to bottom]\n[Characters leaving the chart on the right side, from top to bottom]\n[The five characters leaving off the top border of the chart]\n[text next to the group of five] Ship to the West\n[other characters leaving on the right side]\n[characters starting or leaving in the middle the chart]\n\nStar Wars (original triology)\n[Characters entering the chart on the left, from top to bottom]\n[Characters leaving the chart on the right side, from top to bottom]\n[Characters starting or leaving not in battle\/event-areas and not on the left\/right side of the chart]\nJurassic Park\n[all dinosaurs are represented by red, all men by black lines]\n[for dinosaurs locked up, there is a donut-sign.]\n[Characters entering the chart on the left, from top to bottom]\n[Characters leaving the chart on the right side]\n12 angry men\n[All lines go parallel, start and end at the borders of the chart. There are no areas of battle\/event.]\nJuror 1 --------- Juror 1 ----------- Juror 1 ------------ Juror 1\nJuror 2 --------- Juror 2 ----------- Juror 2 ------------ Juror 2\nJuror 3 --------- Juror 3 ----------- Juror 3 ------------ Juror 3\nJuror 4 --------- Juror 4 ----------- Juror 4 ------------ Juror 4\nJuror 5 --------- Juror 5 ----------- Juror 5 ------------ Juror 5\nJuror 6 --------- Juror 6 ----------- Juror 6 ------------ Juror 6\nJuror 7 --------- Juror 7 ----------- Juror 7 ------------ Juror 7\nJuror 8 --------- Juror 8 ----------- Juror 8 ------------ Juror 8\nJuror 9 --------- Juror 9 ----------- Juror 9 ------------ Juror 9\nJuror 10 --------- Juror 10 ----------- Juror 10 ------------ Juror 10\nJuror 11 --------- Juror 11 ----------- Juror 11 ------------ Juror 11\nJuror 12 --------- Juror 12 ----------- Juror 12 ------------ Juror 12\n[Three characters enter the chart on the left side, all represented by black lines]\n[The lines come to a giant scribble and end up with dotted lines and question marks in the right area. One cannot see which line leads to which end.]\n"}
{"id":658,"title":"Orbitals","image_title":"Orbitals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/658","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/orbitals.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/658:_Orbitals","transcript":"[Cueball is holding up a pointer in front of a diagram of a dorm apartment. On the diagram, there are two connected pairs of dots in each bedroom, and one dot on the couch.] Cueball: Thus, once all the dorm bedrooms are occupied by romantic pairs, additional roommates are forced into less restful \"living room couch\" orbitals. [Caption below the panel:] The Pauli Sexclusion Principle\n","explanation":"When determining where to place electrons in atoms, three rules are generally used: the Pauli exclusion principle , the Aufbau principle , and Hund's rule . The Pauli exclusion principle, from which the pun is derived, states that no two electrons (or indeed any fermion ) can occupy the same atomic state. Therefore, any electron orbital is limited to two electrons: one with a \u00bd spin, and the other with a \u2212\u00bd spin. The Aufbau principle states that lower energy orbitals are occupied previous to high energy orbitals. Hund's rule states that electrons will try to fill orbitals individually, and only pair up when every orbital has a lone electron in it.\nIn the comic, electrons are being equated to people, and rooms (or couches) are equated to orbitals. The reverse of Hund's rule is then followed: people will try to pair up in a room first, and only when all the couples have done so will rooms be allocated to single people. The Pauli exclusion principle here means that only two people can occupy a room at a time (should those people be romantically involved). The Aufbau principle therefore means that more restful rooms are filled previous to less restful rooms.\nThe title text jokes about drunken party-goers, who ignore the Pauli principle perhaps out of inebriation . They then end up partying and sleeping together with many people in the living room, leaving the roommate stuck in the third desirable location, the hall lounge.\n[Cueball is holding up a pointer in front of a diagram of a dorm apartment. On the diagram, there are two connected pairs of dots in each bedroom, and one dot on the couch.] Cueball: Thus, once all the dorm bedrooms are occupied by romantic pairs, additional roommates are forced into less restful \"living room couch\" orbitals. [Caption below the panel:] The Pauli Sexclusion Principle\n"}
{"id":659,"title":"Lego","image_title":"Lego","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/659","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lego.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/659:_Lego","transcript":"[Ponytail and her father Cueball are putting away Lego bricks.] Cueball: When you take apart a Lego house and mix the pieces into the bin, where does the house go? Ponytail: It's in the bin.\nCueball: No, those are just pieces. They could become spaceships or trains. The house was an arrangement. The arrangement doesn't stay with the pieces and it doesn't go anywhere else. It's just gone.\n[Ponytail, older, is standing at a desk. She's holding a couple of Lego bricks.]\n[She looks at the bricks.]\n[She checks off a box next to the words \"Organ Donor\" on a paper on the desk.]\n","explanation":"Lego blocks are a popular building toy, which Cueball here uses to describe a philosophical conundrum: the distinction between a composition, and the collection of parts that make up that composition. For example, the Lego blocks he and his daughter, Ponytail , used to make a house are still around; they were put back into the bin, and can be used on future designs. However, the house itself, as a specific combination of those blocks, is gone. It ceased to exist when they took it apart. In essence, they \"killed\" the house. Those blocks could be used to build a car or an airplane, so if there is still a house in the box after it has been dismantled, then there is also a car in the box and a plane in the box, and a large number of other objects in the box: making it a very crowded box. Thus, it is more logical to consider the house to be one possible arrangement of the lego blocks that only exists when the blocks are put in that arrangement.\nLater in her life, Ponytail extends this thinking to humans and organ donation . The US has an opt-in system for organ donation; in the event that you die, any of your organs or tissues that remain functional after your death can be donated for transplantation or medical research, provided you've opted into the organ donor registry. Ponytail compares her organs to the Lego blocks she's carrying - even if she (the composition) dies, her organs (the pieces) can continue to serve another. As such, she is compelled to register as an organ donor.\nThe title text is the same question asked in the first panel, from this new perspective - instead of asking where the Lego house went, the questioner (presumably a young child, possibly still Ponytail) is asking where their Grandpa went. Humans are a composition of many parts; the parts are usually buried or cremated when we die, but the composition is something else entirely. What exactly happens to a human composition after death is a question for religious debate, but we know for sure it doesn't stay here . Alternatively, if Grandpa chose to donate his organs (or, because the final decision is actually made by the deceased individual's family, if Cueball and Grandpa's other relatives choose to have Grandpa's organs donated), Grandpa would be in multiple other people, assuming that at least some of his organs were fit to be donated when he died.\n[Ponytail and her father Cueball are putting away Lego bricks.] Cueball: When you take apart a Lego house and mix the pieces into the bin, where does the house go? Ponytail: It's in the bin.\nCueball: No, those are just pieces. They could become spaceships or trains. The house was an arrangement. The arrangement doesn't stay with the pieces and it doesn't go anywhere else. It's just gone.\n[Ponytail, older, is standing at a desk. She's holding a couple of Lego bricks.]\n[She looks at the bricks.]\n[She checks off a box next to the words \"Organ Donor\" on a paper on the desk.]\n"}
{"id":660,"title":"Sympathy","image_title":"Sympathy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/660","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sympathy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/660:_Sympathy","transcript":"Sympathy Tips for Physicists [Cueball and friend are talking.] Friend: The moment my brother died, I felt a searing pain in my heart.\nRight: [Cueball places his hand on the friend's shoulder.] Cueball: I'm so sorry.\nWrong: Cueball: Was it instant, or was there a speed-of-light delay?\nVery Wrong: [Cueball thoughtfully puts his hand on his chin.] Cueball: If it was instant, with the right arrangement of moving reference frames, we could use this to send signals back in time and violate causality! How many remaining siblings do you have?\n","explanation":"This comic plays at the lack of social skills physicists and other people in heavily scientific disciplines are stereotypically believed to have. The example displayed is a case of condolence, in which the appropriate behaviour would of course be to express compassion with the bereaved, as shown in the second panel.\nIn the third panel, the physicist fails to display the endorsed demeanour. Instead, he takes a scientific approach towards the statement of his friend. He points out that the transmission of the pain the latter believes to have felt, is in fact limited by the speed of light and could therefore not have been 'instant'. By saying so, he betrays an absence of feeling towards his friend, as well as his inability to understand the figurative sense of the words.\nIn the last panel, the physicist takes the previous to a bizarre extreme and reflects on the consequences that would follow if the statement of his friend were indeed literally true. According to special relativity , any object travelling faster than at the speed of light would in fact move backwards in time. The physicist therefore plans to utilize this effect in order to construct a tachyonic antitelephone , a device that allows sending information to the past. To confirm the initial condition, he makes the utterly inappropriate proposal to start a series of measurements with other family members of his friend.\nA correction of the misdemeanour is suggested in the title text: The antitelephone might be used to change causality and save the original brother from dying in the first place. Of course, saying the latter would not be of much help in the given scenario, although it does serve a noticeable improvement over the last two panels.\nNote how he says 'original brother', noting that although he would have saved his brother, another family member would have to have been killed to do so.\nThe use of right\/wrong\/very wrong is also presented in 803: Airfoil .\nSympathy Tips for Physicists [Cueball and friend are talking.] Friend: The moment my brother died, I felt a searing pain in my heart.\nRight: [Cueball places his hand on the friend's shoulder.] Cueball: I'm so sorry.\nWrong: Cueball: Was it instant, or was there a speed-of-light delay?\nVery Wrong: [Cueball thoughtfully puts his hand on his chin.] Cueball: If it was instant, with the right arrangement of moving reference frames, we could use this to send signals back in time and violate causality! How many remaining siblings do you have?\n"}
{"id":661,"title":"Two-Party System","image_title":"Two-Party System","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/661","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/two_party_system.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/661:_Two-Party_System","transcript":"[Ponytail stands at a podium behind a lectern, giving a speech.] Ponytail: And if I'm elected, I'll try to fix some of these problems. Billy, off-panel: Yeah, right!\n[A boy in the audience is standing on his chair.] Billy: The real problem is the corporate-run two-party system. Until we fix that , we'll have no real change!\nPonytail: Billy, I'm running for class president. We don't even have political parties. Billy: That's because the two-party, uh... estab... uh.\nPonytail: Billy, did you learn about politics from the internet? Billy: I thought that one reply was all I ever needed!\n","explanation":"Ponytail is running for class president , but gets shouted down by Billy the Political Activist (or at least, he thinks he might become one some day). Someone on the Internet must have told Billy that all he has to know about politics is that America's two-party system is broken. Because we all know the problem with believing what you read on the Internet .\nThe United States uses Plurality voting , where each voter may make one vote per office. In most democratic countries, this system tends to reinforce the top two political parties and marginalize smaller ones (such as the Bull Moose Party , which only lasted from 1912 to 1916) though this is greatly pronounced in the United States, where the Democratic and Republican parties have passed many barriers to entry , making things much more difficult for parties other than themselves to gain any traction.\nApproval voting (AV) and Instant-runoff voting (IRV) are alternative voting schemes that allow support for multiple candidates. Such systems might make it easier for 3rd parties to field viable candidates. AV is a simple extension of plurality voting where each voter \"approves\" as many of the candidates as they wish. The winner is the candidate with the most votes. Approval voting tends to favor moderate candidates with broad appeal. IRV is a form of Ranked choice voting where a voter is allowed to select multiple choices, but must assign a rank or weight to each choice. If a candidate receives more than 50% of all 1st choice votes, they win as in a traditional election. If no candidate has a majority of 1st choice votes, the candidate with the fewest 1st choice votes is eliminated, and those 1st choice votes are replaced by their respective 2nd choice option and the resulting totals are compared for a 50%+ winner. This process is repeated until a winner is determined.\n[Ponytail stands at a podium behind a lectern, giving a speech.] Ponytail: And if I'm elected, I'll try to fix some of these problems. Billy, off-panel: Yeah, right!\n[A boy in the audience is standing on his chair.] Billy: The real problem is the corporate-run two-party system. Until we fix that , we'll have no real change!\nPonytail: Billy, I'm running for class president. We don't even have political parties. Billy: That's because the two-party, uh... estab... uh.\nPonytail: Billy, did you learn about politics from the internet? Billy: I thought that one reply was all I ever needed!\n"}
{"id":662,"title":"iPhone or Droid","image_title":"iPhone or Droid","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/662","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/iphone_or_droid.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/662:_iPhone_or_Droid","transcript":"[Megan sitting at her computer is talking to Cueball standing behind her.] Megan: Well, it depends what you want. The iPhone wins on speed and polish, but the Droid has that gorgeous screen and physical keyboard.\nCueball: What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys? To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming? Cueball: Is there an app for that ?\nMegan: Yeah, on both. Megan: Wait, no, looks like it was rejected from the iPhone store. Cueball: Droid it is, then.\n","explanation":"The comic starts to set up a joke about the \"phone wars\" between the iPhone and phones that run the Android system (in this case the Motorola Droid ), but instead just brings up a serious point criticizing the consumerism this \"war\" stems from. In the last line of panel 2, Cueball refers to the slogan \"There's an app for that\" from Apple's iPhone marketing.\nThen the third panel makes a joke anyway, at Apple's expense: apparently, this \"enlightenment app\" was rejected from Apple's app store, which is the only supported way to put software on an iPhone. Apple has become infamous for rejecting apps from their app store without adequately explaining why. Android devices, on the other hand, are not limited to an app store and can install software from any origin. Many, however, use the Google Play Store as a primary repository for apps.\nIn the title text Cueball succumbs to the consumerism and marvels at the Motorola Droid's high (at the time) Pixel density . Apple responded 9 months later by releasing the iPhone 4 with a 326 ppi Retina Display . (Higher pixel densities are now standard for smartphones.)\n[Megan sitting at her computer is talking to Cueball standing behind her.] Megan: Well, it depends what you want. The iPhone wins on speed and polish, but the Droid has that gorgeous screen and physical keyboard.\nCueball: What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys? To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming? Cueball: Is there an app for that ?\nMegan: Yeah, on both. Megan: Wait, no, looks like it was rejected from the iPhone store. Cueball: Droid it is, then.\n"}
{"id":663,"title":"Sagan-Man","image_title":"Sagan-Man","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/663","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sagan-man.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/663:_Sagan-Man","transcript":"[A yellow box extends across the top of the first 3 of 5 panels, introducing Sagan-Man:] Bitten by a radioactive Carl Sagan in 1995, Sagan-Man possesses the powers and abilities of Carl Sagan. [A Cueball-like character is standing on the left side of the panel, with a victim off-panel to the right.] Victim (off-panel): Help! Thief! [The Cueball-like character spins around, turning into Sagan-Man with a blue cape appearing on his back.] [Sagan-Man runs to the right towards the direction of the victim.] [Sagan-Man encounters the thief, who is holding a purse.] Sagan-Man: Hey, you! Thief: What? [Sagan-Man and the thief are now standing facing each other.] Sagan-Man: Do you realize just how crazy it is that we've BEEN TO THE MOON?\n","explanation":"Carl Sagan was an advocate for science, space and SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). He wrote the book Contact , which was later made into the movie by the same name. While Sagan did not emit anomalous radiation in his lifetime [ citation needed ] , he did receive acclaim in the field of radiology, namely for using radiation to synthesize amino acids from simpler chemicals.\nThis comic is parodying Spider-Man , in which Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider to become Spider-Man. In this comic \"a radioactive Carl Sagan\" turns the person into \"Sagan-Man\". Apparently, Sagan-Man is able to stop thieves in their tracks by blowing their minds with inspiring scientific facts.\nThe title text implies that Sagan-Man's vivid imagery inspires the entire \"criminal class\" to give up their anti-social ways and turn to space research.\n[A yellow box extends across the top of the first 3 of 5 panels, introducing Sagan-Man:] Bitten by a radioactive Carl Sagan in 1995, Sagan-Man possesses the powers and abilities of Carl Sagan. [A Cueball-like character is standing on the left side of the panel, with a victim off-panel to the right.] Victim (off-panel): Help! Thief! [The Cueball-like character spins around, turning into Sagan-Man with a blue cape appearing on his back.] [Sagan-Man runs to the right towards the direction of the victim.] [Sagan-Man encounters the thief, who is holding a purse.] Sagan-Man: Hey, you! Thief: What? [Sagan-Man and the thief are now standing facing each other.] Sagan-Man: Do you realize just how crazy it is that we've BEEN TO THE MOON?\n"}
{"id":664,"title":"Academia vs. Business","image_title":"Academia vs. Business","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/664","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/academia_vs_business.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/664:_Academia_vs._Business","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk in front of a computer, leaning back in his chair with both hands down to his side. There are cans on the desk and more crushed ones on the floor.] Cueball: I just wrote the most beautiful code of my life.\n[Zoom in on Cueball and top half of desk.] Cueball: They casually handed me an impossible problem. In 48 hours and 200 lines, I solved it.\n[Curved lines with arrows divide the comic into two possible end panels, labeled \"Academia\" and \"Business.\"]\nAcademia: Professor: My god... this will mean a half-dozen papers, a thesis or two, and a paragraph in every textbook on queuing theory!\nBusiness: Boss: You got the program to stop jamming up? Great. While you're fixing stuff, can you get Outlook to sync with our new phones?\n","explanation":"Cueball has solved some tricky and very important problem in computer science, related to queueing theory .\nThe comic splits into two timelines. Showing the brilliant computer code he'd written to somebody who actually knows computer code allows the academic to see the programmer's true brilliance and get him much-earned plaudits from the academic community.\nIn the alternate timeline \u2013 implied to be what actually happens \u2013 the boss, not possessing that knowledge, simply sees the results and not the means Cueball used to attain them. He then gives Cueball another assignment. This, sadly, is the usual course of events in bureaucracy, which only seems to care about your results, not how you came about them. To drive in the point, the boss asks Cueball to do something as simple as setting up email on the office phones, a stark contrast to the skill and creativity Cueball would have needed to write his code in the first panel.\nThe references in the title text are to the P versus NP problem , a famous unsolved problem in computer science, and the \"magical constant\" (0x5f375a86) used in finding the fast inverse square root , i.e. solving y=1\/\u221ax as fast as possible through a program \u2013 no-one knows quite who came up with this very useful bit of code (Now believed to be devised by Greg Walsh at Ardent Computer in consultation with Cleve Moler, the creator of MATLAB. see wikipedia), but it was discovered hiding in the graphics code of the video game Quake III Arena . Note that the actual constant used in the Quake III source code is 0x5f375 9df , but the constant in the title text works also, and is actually slightly more accurate as shown in this paper: Fast inverse square root by CHRIS LOMONT (Purdue university, 2003) .\nThe title text may be a reference to Stephen Jay Gould 's quotation: \u201cI am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein\u2019s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.\u201d originally about how great minds are suppressed due to racism and their genius go unknown, but could be interpreted as general exploitation by the commercial world.\n[Cueball sits at a desk in front of a computer, leaning back in his chair with both hands down to his side. There are cans on the desk and more crushed ones on the floor.] Cueball: I just wrote the most beautiful code of my life.\n[Zoom in on Cueball and top half of desk.] Cueball: They casually handed me an impossible problem. In 48 hours and 200 lines, I solved it.\n[Curved lines with arrows divide the comic into two possible end panels, labeled \"Academia\" and \"Business.\"]\nAcademia: Professor: My god... this will mean a half-dozen papers, a thesis or two, and a paragraph in every textbook on queuing theory!\nBusiness: Boss: You got the program to stop jamming up? Great. While you're fixing stuff, can you get Outlook to sync with our new phones?\n"}
{"id":665,"title":"Prudence","image_title":"Prudence","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/665","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/prudence.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/665:_Prudence","transcript":"[A small girl, with hair like Megan, is running towards a closed wardrobe.] Voice (off-panel): Everyone hide! 99... 98... 97...\n[The girl opens one of the two doors on the wardrobe.] Wardrobe: click\n[The girl is looking inside the wardrobe through the fully opened door.] Girl:\u00a0!!!\n[The girl puts a hand to her chin.]\n[The girl walks away.]\n[The girl returns with an armful of electronics including lots of wires and a rover with wheels.]\n[The girl is kneeling, typing on a laptop, which has a cord extending into the wardrobe.]\n[In a forest with many tall leafless trees the Mars rover is approaching a lamppost with a lit candle. Behind it stands a faun with horns, goatee beard and hooves holding an umbrella.]\n","explanation":"This comic references the fantasy novel series The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis . In the first published book (second chronologically), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , Lucy discovers the fictional world of Narnia which can be accessed through a wardrobe, and she walks into it without ever considering the risks. Her three older siblings do not believe her, so she travels back alone again. But this second time her brother Edmund follows her, and he is seduced by the White Witch in order for her to be able to kill him and his three siblings (see title text explanation below). Thus proving that it was a rather dangerous move to just walk into the wardrobe.\nThe comic mocks the imprudent behavior shown by the protagonist Lucy of the novel, who enters the world of Narnia without knowing anything about its dangers. In the comic, Lucy (drawn as a child version of Megan , clearly not adult as she only just reaches the wardrobes handles with her head), discovers the magical wardrobe while playing hide-and-seek , like in the book. Unlike in the original book, Lucy does not precipitately set foot into Narnia. Instead, she fetches her technical equipment and sends a remote-controlled probe through the wardrobe door in order to sound the situation first.\nThe probe encounters Mr. Tumnus the faun with his umbrella at a lamppost in a snowy wood on the last panel. This picture is the first impression of Narnia in the novels and was apparently Lewis' original idea for the series.\nThe probe is clearly modeled after Mars rovers like Spirit and Opportunity, which Randall depicted for the first time only a few comics later in 681: Gravity Wells and then in 695: Spirit . The probe looks even more like the one in 1504: Opportunity . This also explains the title of the comic, as it is the name of Lucy's probe. The naming scheme is similar to the two probes mentioned above that were already on Mars at the time of this comics release. And even more so like the upcoming Curiosity rover which was first launched two years after this comic, but had been named earlier in the year this comic was released. Lucy was curious in the first Narnia book, but in this comic she is prudent .\nThe White Witch mentioned in the title text is the main antagonist in the novel. She originally lures Edmund with a hot drink and magical Turkish delight after her sleigh passes right by him. In the scenario mentioned in the title text, she is confused when she rolls up to the rover and then tries to tempt the probe with a firmware update accordingly.\nThe procedure of sending a probe first through a portal has also been used in the early Stargate episodes.  This draws a parallel between the wardrobe in Narnia and the Stargate, both connecting two distant worlds.  The stargate probe can be seen here .\nMegan (or Lucy) also takes a scientific approach to Narnia in one of the comics of 821: Five-Minute Comics: Part 3 . In that comic she uses the different passage of time in Narnia to her advantage (it usually runs much faster than on Earth). That effect would have been a problem with controlling the rover in this comic.\n[A small girl, with hair like Megan, is running towards a closed wardrobe.] Voice (off-panel): Everyone hide! 99... 98... 97...\n[The girl opens one of the two doors on the wardrobe.] Wardrobe: click\n[The girl is looking inside the wardrobe through the fully opened door.] Girl:\u00a0!!!\n[The girl puts a hand to her chin.]\n[The girl walks away.]\n[The girl returns with an armful of electronics including lots of wires and a rover with wheels.]\n[The girl is kneeling, typing on a laptop, which has a cord extending into the wardrobe.]\n[In a forest with many tall leafless trees the Mars rover is approaching a lamppost with a lit candle. Behind it stands a faun with horns, goatee beard and hooves holding an umbrella.]\n"}
{"id":666,"title":"Silent Hammer","image_title":"Silent Hammer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/666","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/silent_hammer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/666:_Silent_Hammer","transcript":"[Black Hat is hammering something on a table.] Cueball: What\u2014 Black Hat: Silent hammer. I've made a set of silent tools. Cueball: Why? Hammer: woosh woosh woosh\nBlack Hat: Stealth carpentry. Breaking into a house at night and moving windows, adjusting walls, etc. [He takes his silent hammer over to a tool bench with other things on it. Two boxes underneath are labeled \"Drills\" and \"Non-Drills.\"]\nBlack Hat, narrating: After a week or so of questioning his own sanity, the owner will stay up to watch the house at night. I'll make scratching noises in the walls, pipe in knockout gas, move him up to his bed, and never bother him again. [The events he's describing are shown in two mini-panels below.]\n[Zoom in on Black Hat, with Cueball off-panel to the left.] Cueball, off-panel: Nice prank, I guess, but what's the point? Black Hat: Check out the owner's card, on the table. Cueball, off-panel: Chair of the American Skeptics Society? Oh, god. Black Hat: Yeah, this doesn't end well for him.\n","explanation":"Black Hat has created a set of tools that work in complete silence so that he can go to the house of the chairman of the American Skeptics Society late at night, do some rearranging of walls and moving of windows, just to screw with him in typical Black Hat fashion. Imagine how surprised the person must be when they wake up and discover their whole house has been rearranged! A skeptic is someone who questions knowledge, facts and beliefs, especially of supernatural phenomena like the existence of poltergeists which Black Hat is trying to imitate with his rearranging and scratching noises.\nThe American Skeptics Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting skeptical and critical thinking in education and public discourse. The executive director and chief editor of the Skeptic Magazine , Michael Shermer , is a leading proponent of skepticism, and has written many books and articles debunking pseudoscience, fringe science, quack medicine, alien abductions, conspiracy theories and supernatural phenomena . The Skeptic Society website and Skeptic magazine feature a lot of material debunking anecdotal accounts of these phenomena, explaining how events like \"hauntings\" could have occurred without supernatural intervention.\nOne of the premises of modern skepticism is that the supernatural is not rejected out of hand; if someone came up with a proper scientific hypothesis that predicted something supernatural and that hypothesis was proven beyond reasonable doubt, a skeptic would accept that the supernatural thing in question was probably correct.\nIn the title text Cueball realizes that Black Hat has (probably intentionally) ruined his antique table by demonstrating his silent hammer.\nBlack Hat's tools are seen in two boxes labeled \"Drills\" and \"Non-Drills\", likely a reference to the phrase \"this is not a drill\", used to differentiate an emergency situation from a practice of procedure for such.\nNote that this comic is numbered 666 (number) , which is often associated with supernatural things due to it being consider the \"number of the beast\" by some people.\n[Black Hat is hammering something on a table.] Cueball: What\u2014 Black Hat: Silent hammer. I've made a set of silent tools. Cueball: Why? Hammer: woosh woosh woosh\nBlack Hat: Stealth carpentry. Breaking into a house at night and moving windows, adjusting walls, etc. [He takes his silent hammer over to a tool bench with other things on it. Two boxes underneath are labeled \"Drills\" and \"Non-Drills.\"]\nBlack Hat, narrating: After a week or so of questioning his own sanity, the owner will stay up to watch the house at night. I'll make scratching noises in the walls, pipe in knockout gas, move him up to his bed, and never bother him again. [The events he's describing are shown in two mini-panels below.]\n[Zoom in on Black Hat, with Cueball off-panel to the left.] Cueball, off-panel: Nice prank, I guess, but what's the point? Black Hat: Check out the owner's card, on the table. Cueball, off-panel: Chair of the American Skeptics Society? Oh, god. Black Hat: Yeah, this doesn't end well for him.\n"}
{"id":667,"title":"SkiFree","image_title":"SkiFree","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/667","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/skifree.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/667:_SkiFree","transcript":"[A screenshot of SkiFree, with the abominable snowman running towards the player.]\n[Megan is sitting at her computer with her hands on the keyboard and thinking to herself:] Megan (thought bubble): I've always thought of the SkiFree monster as a metaphor for the inevitability of death.\n[Cueball comes up behind her in a frameless panel.] Cueball: SkiFree, huh? You know, you can press \"F\" to go faster than the monster and escape.\n[The screenshot again. The player is zooming away from the monster.]\n[Megan sits at her computer in silence, with her hands now down to to her side.]\n","explanation":"SkiFree is a video game released in 1991 which enjoyed popularity on the desktop computers of the time. In the game, you're a downhill skier who attempts to ski down a hill while avoiding obstacles which cause you to crash (which slows you down). At the start of the game, you can choose to go down three different timed\/scored courses, or ignore them all and ski freely. Beyond the end of the courses you can continue skiing downhill. You can also move (slowly) uphill and sideways.\nIf you ski too far down the hill a monster similar to one in the comic will begin to chase you; contact with the monster ends the game. Since it's much faster than you normally, you'll get caught. The monster also appears if you travel too far in the sideways or upwards directions.\nOne of the lesser known commands in SkiFree is the 'F' key, which speeds you up, even faster than the monster. A second monster appears slightly further down the hill but by skiing downhill diagonally with the F key it is possible to evade both.\nThe joke here is that Megan has thought long and hard about the concept of the monster, relating it to the inevitability of death, and is nonplussed by the revelation that there is a simple mechanism that may allow her to escape it, thus ruining the poetic metaphor.\nThe title text refers to pendants or talismans that are worn to protect oneself from harm or to remind oneself of an important truth. Megan, seeing that the F key allowed her to evade inevitable death in the game, comes to believe that the F key confers some sort of immortality. \nAlternatively, it may be symbolic as the monster in SkiFree seemed insurmountable (just like death) but might have a discovery in the future (the 'F' key) that can overcome it.\n[A screenshot of SkiFree, with the abominable snowman running towards the player.]\n[Megan is sitting at her computer with her hands on the keyboard and thinking to herself:] Megan (thought bubble): I've always thought of the SkiFree monster as a metaphor for the inevitability of death.\n[Cueball comes up behind her in a frameless panel.] Cueball: SkiFree, huh? You know, you can press \"F\" to go faster than the monster and escape.\n[The screenshot again. The player is zooming away from the monster.]\n[Megan sits at her computer in silence, with her hands now down to to her side.]\n"}
{"id":668,"title":"Pandora","image_title":"Pandora","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/668","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pandora.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/668:_Pandora","transcript":"[There is a venn diagram of two circles. The left circle is labeled \"Music You Like.\" The right circle is labeled \"Deeply Embarrassing Music.\" The segment on the left is labeled \"What Pandora Plays,\" and the intersection is labeled \"What Pandora Plays If Anyone Is Around.\"]\n","explanation":"Pandora is a website which automatically plays songs of a certain genre based upon the user's previous musical selections. Unlike normal radio, it adapts itself to each individual user's preferences, producing playlists that the user should find enjoyable based on the user's taste in music. In other words, Pandora plays music you will probably like.\nOne may not want friends to find out that one enjoys certain songs and\/or certain kinds of songs (\"embarrassing music\"), for fear of looking childish, sentimental, etc. A recent example is the soundtrack to the 2013 film Frozen : although enjoying popularity and critical acclaim, it is considered by many to be embarrassing music, because they do not want others to know that they like a soundtrack to a Disney animated film.\nOne certainly does not want one's embarrassing music to be played on Pandora when others are around. The frequency of this depends on individual circumstances, but generally one's embarrassing music is a small fraction of all music one likes. However, due to biased memory , people remember cases where embarrassing music is played in others' presence far better than those where \"acceptable music\" is played. So it appears that when others are around Pandora only plays embarrassing music.\nThe title text presents an example of this, the music in question being the soundtrack to Enchanted , a fantasy romantic comedy film produced by Walt Disney Pictures.  Despite the user proclaiming that the Pandora algorithm is terrible to explain why it's playing the Enchanted soundtrack, after a short period of silence the user quietly begins singing along to the song \" That's How You Know \" from the soundtrack, which is apparently the song currently playing.\n[There is a venn diagram of two circles. The left circle is labeled \"Music You Like.\" The right circle is labeled \"Deeply Embarrassing Music.\" The segment on the left is labeled \"What Pandora Plays,\" and the intersection is labeled \"What Pandora Plays If Anyone Is Around.\"]\n"}
{"id":669,"title":"Experiment","image_title":"Experiment","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/669","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/experiment.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/669:_Experiment","transcript":"[Darkness.]\n[Cueball is standing next to a laptop, looking groggy.] Cueball: Ugh... Cueball: What happened?\n[Cueball begins to regain some awareness, with his speech eventually fading out.] Cueball: Where am I? FWOOOOOOSH Cueball: Help! Someone help me (unintelligible speech due to loss of air in dome)\n[Cueball holds his hands to his mouth.]\n[Cueball looks shocked.]\n[Cueball tries to run, but has no traction against the ground.]\n[Cueball falls down.]\n[Cueball lies prone and motionless.]\n[Black Hat and Danish watching from outside the dome, with Black Hat holding a clipboard as if to take notes.]\n[Black Hat and Danish outside the dome. Black Hat is now holding the clipboard down to his side.] Black Hat: Huh. Looks like physics professors don't like working in frictionless vacuums after all. Danish: They're such liars.\n","explanation":"Problems in the study of kinematics often idealize the environment of the problem for the sake of simplicity. Specifically, it is assumed that objects are moving in a vacuum and that there is no friction . Then the complicated effects of air resistance and surface frictions can be ignored, and the more basic principles of momentum and energy can be explored. In more advanced physics, it is often easier or necessary to ignore friction if the process being studied is very complicated. So it could be said that \"physics professors like working in a frictionless vacuum\".\nIn the comic, Black Hat and Danish have interpreted that statement to mean that physics professors like doing their work while they are in a frictionless vacuum, instead of liking to work with problems which are set in a frictionless vacuum. Apparently, they have drugged a physics professor and put him in a glass dome (with his laptop so he can work) which they can evacuate and make frictionless. The professor wakes up confused from the drugs, and as the air is pumped out to make a vacuum (presumably slowly enough to prevent explosive decompression from coming into play), his words fade to silence because sound waves requires a substance such as air to travel through. As he starts to panic, he tries to run, presumably for the door we see in the last panels. However, without friction on the floor, he cannot exert any force to move forward, and his feet skate uselessly on the ground until he loses balance and falls. At this point he is probably suffering from asphyxiation . Black Hat and Danish are observing from outside the dome, and decide that physics professors have lied about liking to work in frictionless vacuums.\nThe title text refers to another common idealization, of an infinite plane of uniform density . An infinite plane extends forever in two dimensions, which makes calculations easier because surface-related properties are identical everywhere. \"Uniform density\" could refer to the mass density of the plane, or more likely an electric charge density, which makes a common problem in basic electromagnetism involving calculating the electric field . The \"other two physicists\" that Black Hat and Danish are experimenting on are lost on the infinite plane, since there are no edges or landmarks anywhere to give them direction.\nIt should be noted that, although a vacuum can be approximated using a vacuum pump , frictionless surfaces and infinite planes are only imaginary constructs and do not exist in our universe. [ citation needed ]\n[Darkness.]\n[Cueball is standing next to a laptop, looking groggy.] Cueball: Ugh... Cueball: What happened?\n[Cueball begins to regain some awareness, with his speech eventually fading out.] Cueball: Where am I? FWOOOOOOSH Cueball: Help! Someone help me (unintelligible speech due to loss of air in dome)\n[Cueball holds his hands to his mouth.]\n[Cueball looks shocked.]\n[Cueball tries to run, but has no traction against the ground.]\n[Cueball falls down.]\n[Cueball lies prone and motionless.]\n[Black Hat and Danish watching from outside the dome, with Black Hat holding a clipboard as if to take notes.]\n[Black Hat and Danish outside the dome. Black Hat is now holding the clipboard down to his side.] Black Hat: Huh. Looks like physics professors don't like working in frictionless vacuums after all. Danish: They're such liars.\n"}
{"id":670,"title":"Spinal Tap Amps","image_title":"Spinal Tap Amps","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/670","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spinal_tap_amps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/670:_Spinal_Tap_Amps","transcript":"[Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap is showing off his amplifier to Cueball.] Nigel: These amps go to 11. Cueball: Is that louder? Nigel: It's one louder.\nNormal Person: Cueball: Why not make 10 louder and make 10 the highest?\nEngineer: Cueball: But 11 doesn't have any units. It's an arbitrary scale mapping outputs\u2014 Nigel: Zzzz\nSmart Engineer: Cueball: For $2,000 I'll build you one that goes to 12.\n","explanation":"This comic is in reference to the 1984 mock documentary This Is Spinal Tap about the tour of the fictional rock band Spinal Tap. Here we see lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (a character portrayed in the movie by Christopher Guest ) explaining to Cueball how the volume dial on his amp goes all the way up to eleven . This is impressive to Nigel since guitar amplifiers generally only have ten as the maximum setting. This leads him to believe his amp is \"one\" louder than other amplifiers .\nIn reality, the loudness of an amplifier is largely dependent on how much power is supplied to its electronics.  Markings on the volume dial are merely an aspect of appearance and has no influence on the maximum achievable loudness.  The highest mark could just as easily be labelled 'Maximum', which would then accurately describe the meaning of that setting.  Thus, the phrase \"goes to eleven\" is often used sarcastically to mock people or statements that rely on arbitrary numbers without comparable units or context.\nThe comic then extends the joke by presenting three types of reactions from different people:\nThe title text further plays on the fact that the amp's levels are on an arbitrary scale. Many products are sold at a certain price per unit weight, volume, etc. (e.g., $2.99\/lb for grapes). Nigel calculates that the $2000 cost for going up to 12 would equal to $2000 \/ 12, or less than $200 per unit of something, but he is unable to articulate what that \"something\" is, confirming the third panel observation of the normal engineer. Also, he already has an amplifier that goes up to eleven, so the one additional unit would cost him $2,000 unless he sells the old amplifier. However, he decides that it's a good deal anyway, and it looks like the smart engineer has made a sale.\n[Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap is showing off his amplifier to Cueball.] Nigel: These amps go to 11. Cueball: Is that louder? Nigel: It's one louder.\nNormal Person: Cueball: Why not make 10 louder and make 10 the highest?\nEngineer: Cueball: But 11 doesn't have any units. It's an arbitrary scale mapping outputs\u2014 Nigel: Zzzz\nSmart Engineer: Cueball: For $2,000 I'll build you one that goes to 12.\n"}
{"id":671,"title":"Stephen and Me","image_title":"Stephen and Me","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/671","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stephen_and_me.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/671:_Stephen_and_Me","transcript":"[Beret Guy is speaking into a microphone standing in front Ponytail who is filming him with a camera, a coiled wire from the camera going down her bag and in front of her feet there is a sign. Megan is walking towards them with a briefcase looking down.] Beret Guy: I'm documenting my quest to meet with the CEO of Volvo. Megan: Get lost. Sign: Volvo Cars\n[In a frame-less panel two security guards\/police officers with peaked caps with white emblems are attempting to restrain Beret Guy and taking the camera away from Ponytail, or at least lifting it up in the air. Beret Guy is leaning to the right standing like a bow trying to get to the CEO. There is no sign of the sign.] Beret Guy: Wait! I've come so far! Just let me see him!\n[They've reached the CEO, Cueball, sitting in an office chair behind his desk, which has the Volvo logo on it with the arrow up and out to the right of the circle around the word. He is sitting leaning his elbows on the table top where there is a round item on a foot as at the front of the desk as well as a box for the intercom. Ponytail is filming with the camera, and Beret Guy stand with the microphone down.] CEO: All right, you've reached me. What is it you want to talk about? Logo: Volvo\n[Same setting with Beret Guy talking into the microphone and the CEO leaning forward, pushing the bottom of the intercom. The other small item has disappeared.] Beret Guy: Do you realize how much your company's name sounds like \"vulva\"? CEO: Security? Logo: Volvo\n","explanation":"This is a reference to the 1989 documentary Roger & Me , in which director Michael Moore attempted to confront General Motors CEO Roger E. Smith over the company's closure of factories in his home town of Flint, Michigan. Moore uses the documentary to demonstrate his belief that the factory closures had a crippling effect on the local economy, and his objective is to ask the CEO pointedly about GM's disregard for the lives affected by their business decisions.\nIn this strip, Beret Guy mirrors Moore's determination to speak with the CEO of the auto company Volvo Cars , only to reveal that his burning question is actually trivial and juvenile in nature, comparing the company name with the outer parts of the female genitals. \"Stephen\" is probably Steve Odell , the CEO of Volvo Cars in 2009, a subsidiary of Ford by that time, and later taken over by the Chinese company Zhejiang Geely Holding Group .\nAs for Beret Guy's question itself, the two words are related: Volvo is Latin for 'I roll', and is at the root of volva, vulva 'wrapper, covering' . However, the similarity that Beret Guy (or Randall) hears is likely due to American English, which strongly approximates the pronunciation of u and a in vulva to that of the o' s in Volvo . Volvo was founded and is headquartered in Sweden, where the similarity would not be as striking.\n[Beret Guy is speaking into a microphone standing in front Ponytail who is filming him with a camera, a coiled wire from the camera going down her bag and in front of her feet there is a sign. Megan is walking towards them with a briefcase looking down.] Beret Guy: I'm documenting my quest to meet with the CEO of Volvo. Megan: Get lost. Sign: Volvo Cars\n[In a frame-less panel two security guards\/police officers with peaked caps with white emblems are attempting to restrain Beret Guy and taking the camera away from Ponytail, or at least lifting it up in the air. Beret Guy is leaning to the right standing like a bow trying to get to the CEO. There is no sign of the sign.] Beret Guy: Wait! I've come so far! Just let me see him!\n[They've reached the CEO, Cueball, sitting in an office chair behind his desk, which has the Volvo logo on it with the arrow up and out to the right of the circle around the word. He is sitting leaning his elbows on the table top where there is a round item on a foot as at the front of the desk as well as a box for the intercom. Ponytail is filming with the camera, and Beret Guy stand with the microphone down.] CEO: All right, you've reached me. What is it you want to talk about? Logo: Volvo\n[Same setting with Beret Guy talking into the microphone and the CEO leaning forward, pushing the bottom of the intercom. The other small item has disappeared.] Beret Guy: Do you realize how much your company's name sounds like \"vulva\"? CEO: Security? Logo: Volvo\n"}
{"id":672,"title":"Suggestions","image_title":"Suggestions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/672","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/suggestions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/672:_Suggestions","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at his computer. Facebook sidebar messages appear on the top of each panel, with a user photo of Susie (looking like Megan leaning forward so her hair hangs down the sides of her face) and a few lines of text.] Facebook: Susie Reconnect with her [Phone icon] Send her a text Cueball: Come on, Facebook. I know I shouldn't.\nFacebook: Susie She'd come over [Bed icon] You don't have to fall asleep alone. Cueball: It's been so hard to stop. But she's falling for me, and I can't keep getting her hopes up like this.\nFacebook: Susie Life is complicated [Icon of stick figures embracing] She's so warm against you. You both want it. Cueball: (pulling out phone) Maybe if I just make it clear it's not going to be a thing... Cueball: Yeah, we'll just have a talk.\nFacebook: Susie Oh yeah. Mmm... [Webcam icon] Leave your webcam on so I can watch. Cueball: Okay, this feature is getting creepier and creepier.\n","explanation":"Social networking site Facebook routinely suggests reconnecting with Facebook friends whom you haven't interacted with on the website for a while. This is taken to its logical extreme in this comic when that Facebook feature repeatedly, in an increasingly voyeuristic fashion, tries to get Cueball to hook up with his occasional friend-with-benefits Susie, despite the fact that Cueball knows she's falling for him and doesn't want to lead her on.\nAccording to the title text, Cueball and Susie (who is drawn as a sexy version of Megan ) do end up hooking up, even against Cueball's better judgement, as so often happens between people who're physically attracted to one another. And he apparently left the webcam on as well, because the Facebook feature is now giving suggestions on what Cueball should do to her, mid-coitus. Obviously, this is not something that Facebook, a social networking site, can do, yet. [ citation needed ]\n[Cueball is sitting at his computer. Facebook sidebar messages appear on the top of each panel, with a user photo of Susie (looking like Megan leaning forward so her hair hangs down the sides of her face) and a few lines of text.] Facebook: Susie Reconnect with her [Phone icon] Send her a text Cueball: Come on, Facebook. I know I shouldn't.\nFacebook: Susie She'd come over [Bed icon] You don't have to fall asleep alone. Cueball: It's been so hard to stop. But she's falling for me, and I can't keep getting her hopes up like this.\nFacebook: Susie Life is complicated [Icon of stick figures embracing] She's so warm against you. You both want it. Cueball: (pulling out phone) Maybe if I just make it clear it's not going to be a thing... Cueball: Yeah, we'll just have a talk.\nFacebook: Susie Oh yeah. Mmm... [Webcam icon] Leave your webcam on so I can watch. Cueball: Okay, this feature is getting creepier and creepier.\n"}
{"id":673,"title":"The Sun","image_title":"The Sun","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/673","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_sun.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/673:_The_Sun","transcript":"[Caption above the first panel, which is lower than the rest:] Coming this March from the makers of The Core ... [Ponytail is standing on a raised platform looking through a huge telescope (exiting the panel to the left) in an observatory. To her right is a large station with three screens and two Cueball-like guys are standing on the floor to the of that right. Behind them is another station with a large panel showing two circles with an arrow pointing from the top left to the bottom right.] Ponytail: The sun's fusion is failing! Man 1: Does that make sense? Man 2: Whatever.\n[Zoom in on the scene where Ponytail throws up her arms as she turns towards the two Cueball, still standing on the platform, but the rest of the background is white. The first Cueball turns around and points to the other Cueball who has also turned around and has taken a phone of the hook, the curled cord disappearing at the panels right edge.] Ponytail: If we don't send a ship to restart it, it could go out completely! Man 1: Call NASA! Man 2 (into the phone): Assemble our hottest astronauts.\n[Another Cueball-like guy has taken the call, and still stands with the phone in hand, the cord attached to the phone hook on the panels left edge. He stands with the helmet of a space suit under his other arm, obviously being an astronaut. Behind him is a fourth Cueball-like guy, Megan and another Ponytail.] Astronaut: The earth bathed in eternal darkness? A night without a dawn? Not on my watch! Astronaut: Saddle up.\n[The same four characters are shown in silhouette on gray background (still only one with helmet under arm), casting huge shadows towards the bottom of the panel from the dim sun in the top center of the panel. Above the sun is written a tagline (for the movie) and at the bottom of the panels with shadows falling over it is a second smaller tagline:] It's Daylight saving time. Never fall back.\n","explanation":"This comic makes fun of science fiction disaster movies , especially the 2003 film The Core in which a group of scientists travel through the Earth's mantle to place a series of nuclear devices in order to speed up the slowing rotation of the Earth's core and prevent a complete collapse of Earth's magnetic field. The comic is also a pun on \"Daylight Saving Time\", using it to mean saving the sun's light rather than its usual meaning of the semi-annual shift in clocks to \"save\" daylight for a more useful part of the day.\nThis comic presents the next film from the makers of The Core . In this case an astronomer, Ponytail , discovers that the Sun's fusion is failing. The two Cueball -like guys behind her are not impressed; one is disbelieving and the other is not interested (\"whatever\"). But then Ponytail rallies them by pointing out the impeding doom for Earth and they call NASA . A group of astronauts at NASA takes the call and the leader (another Cueball-like guy) describes what could happen in trailer-like fashion:\nThen he tells his team of astronauts - a fourth Cueball-like guy, Megan and another Ponytail - to \"saddle up\", and the comic finishes with the poster (a copy of the one for The Core with the Sun in place of the Earth's mantle) of this new movie called The Sun (hence the title of the comic) with two taglines:\nThe movie describes a scenario in which \"the sun's fusion is failing\". This is in fact the exact plot of the British science fiction film Sunshine from 2007, released two years before this comic, which was about a group of astronauts sent on a mission to reignite a dying Sun with a battery of nuclear bombs.\nThe sun 's energy comes from nuclear fusion reactions among the extremely hot, dense hydrogen nuclei in its core. The idea of the sun's fusion failing is rather ridiculous from a scientific perspective, because the fusion reactions are well understood and the sun has enough hydrogen to fuel it for about 5 billion more years. Even if the sun's hydrogen was getting low, it would start fusing helium and begin expanding into a red giant . This would then make the Earth uninhabitable. In other words, if the sun stopped fusing, we wouldn't have to worry about less sunlight, we would have to worry about more.\nIn any case, it appears to be failing and the solution is to send a team of astronauts to the sun to restart the fusion. The team leader is motivated by concern that if the sun's fusion stops, there will be no more light, and so the earth will be in perpetual darkness.\nThe poster in the final panel gives the movies two taglines, both puns. Daylight saving time (DST) refers both to the policy of changing clocks and to the scenario in this movie in which it is time for the team to literally save the sun's daylight from being extinguished. \"Never fall back\" is an additional word play on the mnemonic used (in the States at least) to remember the direction to change clocks. The mnemonic, \"spring forward, fall back\" indicates that in the springtime, clocks get set ahead by an hour, while in fall the clocks are set backwards an hour. The phrase \"fall back\", however, can also mean to retreat from a battle.\nRandall seems to believe that DST makes little sense today and he has made it clear in several comics that he is not a fan \u2014 or at least not a fan of the twice-yearly transitions between the two semi-arbitrary time standards. As DST is the main joke of the comic (and the title of the next movie), the comment from the astronaut about this not happening \"on my watch\" may be a pun relating to his wristwatch. He would not wish to have DST on his watch! This meaning is made clear in the title text (see below).\nThe comic makes fun of these disaster movies in a couple of ways. The characters in the first panel acknowledge that the scenario doesn't make sense scientifically, but are prepared to sacrifice scientific value for the plot. Also, in the second panel, the team is to be composed of NASA 's \"hottest astronauts\", which makes fun of the fact that the characters in movies are much more attractive than average, and the fact that they will be much hotter when they reach the sun. The team leader expresses his concern with a few buzz phrases often used in such films.\nAn alternative explanation, which would make sense scientifically, is that the sun had never stopped working, and Ponytail merely assumed that something was wrong with the sun when the sunrise did not occur at its normal time, but that was only because the clocks had been sent an hour ahead for DST, and not because of anything wrong with the sun, which continued working properly, oblivious to earth clocks.\nThe title text continues the lunacy (solacy?) of the situation with the clich\u00e9 of the \"obligatory bad guy\" \u2014 a person in the plot who acts antagonistic, often for the flimsiest of reasons. There is also the common complaint, especially among the technologically inept, that he can't figure out how to change the time, relating back to DST, and using the phrase \"on my watch\" as a pun here (if you interpret \"watch\" in the sense of a wristwatch). The phrase \"on my watch\" was used in the comic itself, but it isn't clear whether it was intended as a pun. It's possible that Randall realized he missed his chance to make a great pun with that phrase, inspiring the title text.\nNote that while four different Cueballs in a comic is not uncommon , it is rare that two different Ponytails are shown in one comic.\n[Caption above the first panel, which is lower than the rest:] Coming this March from the makers of The Core ... [Ponytail is standing on a raised platform looking through a huge telescope (exiting the panel to the left) in an observatory. To her right is a large station with three screens and two Cueball-like guys are standing on the floor to the of that right. Behind them is another station with a large panel showing two circles with an arrow pointing from the top left to the bottom right.] Ponytail: The sun's fusion is failing! Man 1: Does that make sense? Man 2: Whatever.\n[Zoom in on the scene where Ponytail throws up her arms as she turns towards the two Cueball, still standing on the platform, but the rest of the background is white. The first Cueball turns around and points to the other Cueball who has also turned around and has taken a phone of the hook, the curled cord disappearing at the panels right edge.] Ponytail: If we don't send a ship to restart it, it could go out completely! Man 1: Call NASA! Man 2 (into the phone): Assemble our hottest astronauts.\n[Another Cueball-like guy has taken the call, and still stands with the phone in hand, the cord attached to the phone hook on the panels left edge. He stands with the helmet of a space suit under his other arm, obviously being an astronaut. Behind him is a fourth Cueball-like guy, Megan and another Ponytail.] Astronaut: The earth bathed in eternal darkness? A night without a dawn? Not on my watch! Astronaut: Saddle up.\n[The same four characters are shown in silhouette on gray background (still only one with helmet under arm), casting huge shadows towards the bottom of the panel from the dim sun in the top center of the panel. Above the sun is written a tagline (for the movie) and at the bottom of the panels with shadows falling over it is a second smaller tagline:] It's Daylight saving time. Never fall back.\n"}
{"id":674,"title":"Natural Parenting","image_title":"Natural Parenting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/674","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/natural_parenting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/674:_Natural_Parenting","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are looking down at a baby, throwing its arms in the air, standing between them.] Cueball: Oh man, we made a baby. Megan: Don't panic. Don't panic. Baby: Baby!\n[Cueball looks at Megan, who still look down at the baby, which now looks down at her feet.] Cueball: Parenting can't be that hard. Let's just do what comes naturally.\n[In a frame-less panel they all three just stand there, they look down and the baby has spread it's arms out. Beat frame.]\n[A caption is in a frame at the top of the panel. Cueball and Megan are looking down between them. There are now two babies, one larger looking at Cueball's feet the smaller looking at Megan's feet.] Soon: Megan: Aw, crap.\n","explanation":"This comic relates to the anxiety of having a first child, particularly an unplanned child, and is a play on the double meaning of the expression \"do what comes naturally\".\nDoing what comes naturally is a euphemism for couples pairing off and forming intimate relationships, including sex. It is also advice given to new parents, advising them not to second guess themselves so much, to alleviate the stress that comes with parenting.\nThe couple Cueball and Megan find themselves as unexpected parents. Both parents experience anxiety over how to manage their life with the child. The new father defuses the situation and states that parenting can not be that hard and they should just do what comes naturally. Naturally the couple find themselves with a second child. This adds insult to injury as now they have two children and still no idea about how to parent. As the first child was an \"accident\" the birth of the child was because of instinctual urges. Therefore, assuming nothing has changed in their relationship it would be natural if they produced another child.\nThe title text claims that parenting can't be too hard because, up to the present, all of your ancestors have produced an unbroken line of children who figured out how to raise at least one child that is able to continue this unbroken chain. Randall jokes that this is the \"mother\" of all sampling biases : Had anyone of one's ancestors completely failed at being parents, that person would never exist. Therefore, this sampling is heavily skewed by sampling only those that were all successful in at least one instance. It does not take into account the number of people in the past who do not have any lineage today to speak of, or the number times our ancestors failed at being parents to children we are not directly descended from.\nThe baby says, \"Baby!\", either copying Cueball, or saying its name, Pok\u00e9mon-style. This is also the topic of 441: Babies and 1384: Krypton .\n[Cueball and Megan are looking down at a baby, throwing its arms in the air, standing between them.] Cueball: Oh man, we made a baby. Megan: Don't panic. Don't panic. Baby: Baby!\n[Cueball looks at Megan, who still look down at the baby, which now looks down at her feet.] Cueball: Parenting can't be that hard. Let's just do what comes naturally.\n[In a frame-less panel they all three just stand there, they look down and the baby has spread it's arms out. Beat frame.]\n[A caption is in a frame at the top of the panel. Cueball and Megan are looking down between them. There are now two babies, one larger looking at Cueball's feet the smaller looking at Megan's feet.] Soon: Megan: Aw, crap.\n"}
{"id":675,"title":"Revolutionary","image_title":"Revolutionary","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/675","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/revolutionary.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/675:_Revolutionary","transcript":"Cueball: Yes, science is an open process in which a good idea can come from anybody.\nCueball: Yes, widely-believed theories are on occasion overturned by simple thought experiments.\nCueball: And yes, your philosophy degree equips you to ask interesting questions sometimes.\n[Cueball is talking to a philosopher with a goatee, who is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: But you did not just overturn special relativity, a subject you learned about an hour ago, with your \"racecar on a train\" idea. Philosopher: You just don't like that I'm turning a rational eye to your dogma. Hey, what's the email for the president of physics?\n","explanation":"The comic contrasts brilliant revolutionary scientific thought with the simplistic arrogance of assuming one understands the current scientific theory enough to correct it (see the Dunning Kruger effect ). The character with the goatee has a degree in philosophy , and perhaps has certain ideas of his own about how the world should fundamentally be described by physics. He has studied Einstein's theory of special relativity for less than an hour and thinks he has found a flaw. When confronted about this, he considers the objection as based in dogma , and remains so confident that he wants to email the \"president of physics\". His ignorance of the field is emphasized by thinking that the entire field of physics has a president - although certain important organizations such as the American Physical Society do have presidents.\nCueball concedes that it is possible for such a revolutionary idea to come from a relative outsider. One example is Albert Einstein 's own formulation of special relativity , which came while he was working at a patent office in Switzerland, although he did already have a Ph.D in physics. A thought experiment considers some hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.\nThe \"racecar on a train\" idea alludes to thought experiments involving frames of reference , which are important in relativity. Special relativity was famously established using some thought experiments about moving objects. However, some searchers elaborated more complicated thought experiments and claimed they had proven relativity was self-contradictory. Examples include twin paradox (both of the twins are younger than the other, until you stop assuming acceleration phases can be neglected) or ladder paradox (ladder is both smaller and larger than the garage, until you consider seriously the problems with defining simultaneity for remote locations in relativity). Apparently the philosopher complicated Einstein's train thought experiment by adding a racecar, and found contradictions which prove special relativity is inconsistent. However, most likely scenario is that the \"racecar on a train\" is too complicated for goatee man to find correct conclusions.\nA too complex case may be impossible to prove consistent with relativity using intuition alone: complete solving involves calculation using Lorentz transformations.\nThe title text is posing a question about the likelihood of two scenarios (possibly to the person with the philosophy degree):\nThis might be a self-referential title text as this question could be considered a simple thought experiment. The philosopher should be able to overturn his theory using this simple thought experiment which reflects the second panel. While his theory is not widely believed the joke is that the philosopher could overturn his first thought experiment (racecar on train) with this thought experiment.\nRandall hints that believing you have found fundamental flaws in a theory is much easier than doing more research on it. This is possibly a statement about using Occam's Razor in arguments, which says the simpler answer is the more likely one, which is commonly brought up in philosophy . Usually, when someone with little understanding of the subject thinks that they have found a flaw, it takes only a little bit more reading to discover that the flaw is in fact completely explained already.\nCueball: Yes, science is an open process in which a good idea can come from anybody.\nCueball: Yes, widely-believed theories are on occasion overturned by simple thought experiments.\nCueball: And yes, your philosophy degree equips you to ask interesting questions sometimes.\n[Cueball is talking to a philosopher with a goatee, who is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: But you did not just overturn special relativity, a subject you learned about an hour ago, with your \"racecar on a train\" idea. Philosopher: You just don't like that I'm turning a rational eye to your dogma. Hey, what's the email for the president of physics?\n"}
{"id":676,"title":"Abstraction","image_title":"Abstraction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/676","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/abstraction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/676:_Abstraction","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] An x64 processor is screaming along at billions of cycles per second to run the XNU kernel, which is frantically working through all the POSIX-specified abstraction to create the Darwin system underlying OS X, which in  turn is straining itself to run Firefox and its Gecko renderer, which creates a Flash object which renders dozens of video frames every second\nbecause I wanted to see a cat jump into a box and fall over.\nI am a god.\n","explanation":"The comics points out the large number of levels of abstraction working together at any given time in today's computers.\nPrograms on current computers do not run \"directly on hardware\". Instead, the hardware (in this case, a processor of the x86-64 architecture) is controlled by the operating system kernel (in this specific case, XNU is the kernel used in Apple-branded devices). Many operating systems offer a standardized interface called POSIX , which wraps the services offered by the different operating systems so that applications do not need to cope with the differences between the operating systems. Darwin is the name of the core set of components on which the Apple's OS X operating system runs. And using this operating system, the user runs the Firefox web browser. However, the browser itself contains further abstraction layers: Gecko is the engine handling the display of web pages on the screen, but in this case, it only allows a separate software, Adobe Flash Player , to render a video requested by the user.\nAnd all of this work is, in this case, done only because the user wanted to watch a funny cat Flash video on the Internet; which makes the user feel like he is a god.\nThe title text refers to Maru the cat , a cat who became very popular on YouTube for, among other things, jumping into a box. Cueball questions his god-like capabilities by wondering why can't he own Maru.\nFlash was discontinued at the very beginning of 2021 . Flash was a video player that was used to make videos play without having a dedicated website for it. It was used in games and videos, as demonstrated by Cueball watching a Flash video of a cat jumping into a box.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer.] An x64 processor is screaming along at billions of cycles per second to run the XNU kernel, which is frantically working through all the POSIX-specified abstraction to create the Darwin system underlying OS X, which in  turn is straining itself to run Firefox and its Gecko renderer, which creates a Flash object which renders dozens of video frames every second\nbecause I wanted to see a cat jump into a box and fall over.\nI am a god.\n"}
{"id":677,"title":"Asshole","image_title":"Asshole","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/677","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/asshole.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/677:_Asshole","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan watch Beret Guy drive by in an SUV.] Cueball: Look at that asshole in his SUV, thinking he's so badass while he guzzles gas driving around suburbia. Beret Guy: Oh no! Am I an asshole? I hope not!\n[Beret Guy trades in his keys at the dealership.]\n[Now he is driving by in a hybrid sedan. Cueball and Megan are still there.] Megan: Look at that smug asshole thinking he's better than us because he drives a hybrid. Beret Guy: ...\n[He trades in his keys again.]\n[Cueball and Megan is standing.] Off-panel: RUMBLE\n[Beret Guy drives a backhoe in and smacks Cueball and Megan out of the panel with the digger.]\n[He drives off, whistling.]\n","explanation":"SUVs are large personal vehicles with big engines and a huge amount of cargo space, and are notorious gas-guzzlers and therefore emblematic of pollution caused by cars. Stereotypically, SUV owners drive them because they're compensating for failures in other parts of their lives, and as an example of conspicuous consumption. Upon hearing Cueball call him an asshole for driving an SUV, Beret Guy , not wanting to appear to be such, trades his SUV in at the dealership for a hybrid subcompact.\nHybrid cars are vehicles that are powered by both gasoline and electrical motors, allowing them to consume less fuel and therefore pollute less. But stereotypically, people drive them so that they can feel superior to others about having reduced their emissions, and that's exactly what Megan says, this time, when Beret Guy happens to drive past them again.\nQuite annoyed now, Beret Guy trades in his car again, this time to get an excavator (a large construction vehicle) and smack them with it. After doing this, he actually does appear quite smug and pleased with himself.\nIn the title text we hear some crashing sounds and then we hear a report by an eyewitness to a police officer. Beret Guy apparently used the excavator to smash into a bakery and steal scones, one of Beret Guy's beloved bakery products - see 452: Mission and the title text of 1030: Keyed .\nSee also 434: xkcd Goes to the Airport where Beret Guys obsession with bakeries was first mentioned.\n[Cueball and Megan watch Beret Guy drive by in an SUV.] Cueball: Look at that asshole in his SUV, thinking he's so badass while he guzzles gas driving around suburbia. Beret Guy: Oh no! Am I an asshole? I hope not!\n[Beret Guy trades in his keys at the dealership.]\n[Now he is driving by in a hybrid sedan. Cueball and Megan are still there.] Megan: Look at that smug asshole thinking he's better than us because he drives a hybrid. Beret Guy: ...\n[He trades in his keys again.]\n[Cueball and Megan is standing.] Off-panel: RUMBLE\n[Beret Guy drives a backhoe in and smacks Cueball and Megan out of the panel with the digger.]\n[He drives off, whistling.]\n"}
{"id":678,"title":"Researcher Translation","image_title":"Researcher Translation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/678","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/researcher_translation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/678:_Researcher_Translation","transcript":"If a researcher says a cool new technology should be available to consumers in... What they mean is... The fourth quarter of next year The project will be canceled in six months. Five years I've solved the interesting research problems. The rest is just business, which is easy, right? Ten years We haven't finished inventing it yet, but when we do, it'll be awesome. 25+ years It has not been conclusively proven impossible. We're not really looking at market applications right now. I like being the only one with a hovercar.\n","explanation":"This comic suggests a translation from the statements of the researcher of a potential new technology . For example, these statements might be found in an article in a popular science magazine which highlights some cutting-edge research. It reflects the idea that researchers tend to be too optimistic about the future of their research project.\n\"The fourth quarter of next year\": Even if a technological development seems very close to completion, it could still be canceled by some authority other than the lead researcher. This might be due to poor management, or a poor business plan, or even a poor scientific basis which the researcher is hiding or ignoring.\n\"Five years\": The researcher has solved the interesting scientific problems, and assumes that the concept could be picked up by a business, developed to be usable outside of a research lab, designed into a prototype, have a manufacturing process, marketed, and made available to consumers, in only five years. In reality, a lot of exciting-sounding technology may not reach consumers for many years because of difficulties in the business side of things.\n\"Ten years\": Not only does the researcher assume that the business end of things will go smoothly, they also assume that the rest of their research will go smoothly. In reality, a lot of unforeseen problems could arise during research.\n\"25+ years\": \"It has not been conclusively proven impossible\" indicates that it has been proven impossible in some context. The researcher simply refuses to accept the impossibility until the proof is conclusive.\n\"We're not really looking at market applications right now.\": In contrast to the above chain of assumptions, in this case the researcher has a working technology but wants to keep it to themselves.\nTitle text: \"20 years away indefinitely\": Sometimes the technological or engineering challenges for a certain application seem like they could be overcome in 20 years, but in reality the challenges are very difficult. The more the challenges are studied, the harder they are found to be, although there is always hope that a few more advances will do it. An example is fusion power , which has been conceptualized since at least 1946 as a potentially unlimited source of clean energy, but remained an elusive achievement despite projects such as the National Ignition Facility and ITER . The first commercial plant is still indefinitely 20 years away.\nA similar table was shown in 1497: New Products .\nIf a researcher says a cool new technology should be available to consumers in... What they mean is... The fourth quarter of next year The project will be canceled in six months. Five years I've solved the interesting research problems. The rest is just business, which is easy, right? Ten years We haven't finished inventing it yet, but when we do, it'll be awesome. 25+ years It has not been conclusively proven impossible. We're not really looking at market applications right now. I like being the only one with a hovercar.\n"}
{"id":679,"title":"Christmas Plans","image_title":"Christmas Plans","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/679","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/christmas_plans.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/679:_Christmas_Plans","transcript":"[Cueball is standing behind a friend, who is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: Hey, will you be in town the day after Christmas? Friend: Couldn't say\u2014 Friend: I'm Jewish.\nCueball: But... how does being Jewish keep you from knowing your plans? Friend: I know my plans\u2014 Friend: I just don't know when Christmas is.\nCueball: Really? Why not look it up? Friend: Well, I'm also a physicist.\nCueball: So? Friend: I believe that since I don't observe Christmas, it can't have a definite date.\n","explanation":"This comic centers around a joke about Quantum superposition in physics - if you don't observe something, it has all possible states, not a specific one. It is a double-entendre with the word observe meaning both \"look at\" (physics sense) and \"celebrate\" (a holiday). One of the most famous examples on this is the Schr\u00f6dinger's cat paradox.\nIn this comic, a Jewish physicist does not know when Christmas is. Being a physicist, he believes that since he doesn't observe Christmas, it therefore has no definite date.\nAdding to the joke, the physicist's observation is actually valid for certain other holidays (such as Easter) that don't have a definite (i.e. annual) date. Because Easter's date seemingly bounces around at random, it could be said to exist in a superposition of all possible Easter dates, and as he doesn't observe (celebrate) Easter, the physicist would be unlikely to check which date it falls this year. Thus, he would be unsure of when the holiday is celebrated.\nThe title text refers to another principle in physics where the act of measuring something must also change it in some way.  If one drops a thermometer into a mug of water, energy spent (or released) when heating (or cooling) the mercury in the thermometer changes the temperature of the water in the mug by a small amount.  The only way not to interfere with the temperature of the water in the mug is not to measure it.\n[Cueball is standing behind a friend, who is sitting at a computer.] Cueball: Hey, will you be in town the day after Christmas? Friend: Couldn't say\u2014 Friend: I'm Jewish.\nCueball: But... how does being Jewish keep you from knowing your plans? Friend: I know my plans\u2014 Friend: I just don't know when Christmas is.\nCueball: Really? Why not look it up? Friend: Well, I'm also a physicist.\nCueball: So? Friend: I believe that since I don't observe Christmas, it can't have a definite date.\n"}
{"id":680,"title":"December 25th","image_title":"December 25th","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/680","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/december_25th.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/680:_December_25th","transcript":"[On one side, a family of four gathered around a Christmas tree, the daughter and son looking excitedly at the presents under the tree; on the other, a character wearing a party hat, sitting dejectedly before a birthday cake. The panel edges are decorated with holly and a wreath.] Happy Birthday to those of you born on the 25 th !\nSorry you get kinda shafted by the overlap with Christmas.\n","explanation":"On Christmas Day, most kids whose families celebrate the holiday get Christmas presents. And kids who were actually born on the 25th may feel a little put off because they don't get a special day all to themselves like their siblings and friends do. A lot of families alleviate this by celebrating the child's birthday on a day other than the 25th, so the kid will still get their own party. Unfortunately, the child may not get double presents, but may instead end up getting one gift per gift-giver as both a Christmas gift and a birthday gift.\nIn the title text, Randall provided a \"lovely\" image for the people turning 27 on this date (Christmas Day, 2009) that would surely have them reaching for the brain bleach.\n[On one side, a family of four gathered around a Christmas tree, the daughter and son looking excitedly at the presents under the tree; on the other, a character wearing a party hat, sitting dejectedly before a birthday cake. The panel edges are decorated with holly and a wreath.] Happy Birthday to those of you born on the 25 th !\nSorry you get kinda shafted by the overlap with Christmas.\n"}
{"id":681,"title":"Gravity Wells","image_title":"Gravity Wells","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/681","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gravity_wells.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/681:_Gravity_Wells","transcript":"Main Text Gravity Wells scaled to Earth surface gravity This chart shows the \"depth\" of various solar system gravity wells. Each well is scaled such that rising out of a physical well of that depth \u2014 in constant Earth surface gravity \u2014 would take the same energy as escaping from that planet's gravity in reality. Each planet is shown cut in half at the bottom of its well, with the depth of the well measured down to the planet's flat surface. The planet sizes are to the same scale as the wells. Interplanetary distances are not to scale. Depth = (G \u00d7 PlanetMass) \/ (g \u00d7 PlanetRadius) G = Newton's constant g = 9.81 m\/s 2\n\nPlanetary Descriptions To Sun, very very far down Mercury Venus Earth - 6379 km [originally 5,478 km] Moon - 288 km Mars - 1,286 km Ganymede Io Jupiter [A drawing of a \"very deep\" gravity well, \"Your mom\" at the bottom, several member of \"local football team\" falling down towards her.] Jupiter is not much larger than Saturn, but much more massive. At its size, adding more mass just makes it denser due to the extra squeezing of gravity. If you dropped a few dozen more Jupiters into it, the pressure would ignite fusion and make it a star. Europa Titan Two alarms: Weeoooeeoooeeooo Saturn Rings Uranus Neptune Megan: An even more glorious dawn awaits!\n\nMars Inset [Mars gravity well, with one of the Mars rovers on its surface, with its moons Deimos and Phobos as smaller gravity wells.]\n[Figure of a man (to scale) in Deimos's gravity well.] You could escape Deimos with a bike and a ramp.\n[Figure of a man (to scale) in Phobos's gravity well.] A thrown baseball could escape Phobos.\n\nEarth Inset [Zoomed-in view of Earth\/moon gravity well, featuring the relative locations of the atmosphere, Low Earth Orbit, the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, GPS satellites, and satellites in geosynchronous orbit.] Cueball: This is why it took a huge rocket to get to the moon but only a small one to get back.\nIt takes the same amount of energy to launch something on an escape trajectory away from Earth as it would to launch it 6,000 km upward under constant 9.81 m\/s 2 Earth gravity.\nHence, Earth's well is 6,000 km deep.\n","explanation":"The comic shows the gravitational potential (energy transferred per unit mass due to gravity) for the positions of each planet in the solar system \u2014 including some moons and Saturn's rings. An object traveling along an upward slope loses energy, while an object traveling along a downward slope gains energy.\nEscaping a planet or moon's orbit requires enough energy (e.g. by walking, jumping, or rocket) to reach the top of either peak that defines the edge of the well. The peak to the left indicates the minimum energy required to exit orbit. The peak to the right indicates the maximum energy required to exit orbit. In order to exit orbit with the minimum amount of energy, you would have to travel towards the center of the solar system; to exit orbit with the maximum amount of energy, you would have to travel away from the center of the solar system (the Sun). In reality, the strength of gravity decreases with distance from the planet. However, a comparison of energy expended to escape the gravitational pull allows for a simpler comparison between the objects.\nThe height of the graph is scaled to kilometers via the gravitational potential an object has at the given height assuming at a constant acceleration due to Earth's surface gravity. The Sun's gravity well is not shown in its entirety, but is just indicated on the far left as \"Very very far down\" . Had it been shown in its full extent it would have made the rest of the drawing so small in comparison that it would have been unreadable. As the gravitational potential increases with distance from the sun, the graph has a general upward slope. To rise out of each well on the diagram, and therefore escape the planet's gravity, it would require the same energy required to rise out of a physical well of that depth at Earth's surface gravity.\nThe length of each gravity well is scaled to the diameter of the planet and the spacing between the planets is not to scale with distance from the sun. This is necessary to make the graph readable. Because the distances between the planets are condensed, the gravitational potential - from the gravity pulling toward the sun - accumulates quicker. This is the reason for the large peaks between the planets. The moons shown in the chart are at the appropriate distance from their respective planets' gravity wells for their orbits.\nEach planet is shown cut in half at the bottom of its well, with the depth of the well measured down to the planet's flat surface.\nThe following items are listed from top to bottom and left to right.\nThe text near the bottom of Jupiter's gravity well explains that the depth of the well is mass-of-planet over radius-of-planet with Newton's constant and 9.81\u00a0m\/s\u00b2 as constants, where 9.81\u00a0m\/s\u00b2 is the acceleration of a free falling body at Earth's gravity.\nThe calculation for a gravity well is:\ndepth = (G * Planet-mass ) \/ (9.81 m\/s 2 * Planet-radius) where G is Newton 's gravitational constant , and 9.81 m\/s 2 is the acceleration rate of a free falling body on earth at sea level (g).\nThe title text indicates that the planets motion can affect the amount of energy for escape velocity. It is possible to change speed by using the planets orbital speed and gravity. This is known as a performing a slingshot or a gravity assist , and is done to gain speed or to brake when needed. The use of rocket engines are more effective when used at a high speed slingshot maneuver, which is known as the Oberth effect , where most energy is going into moving the rocket as opposed to moving the exhaust \u2014 conserving the maximum useful energy.   On earth the same principle is used when launching rockets. Rockets are always launched in an eastward direction to make maximum use of the rotational energy of the earth. Launching rockets in a westward direction would require significant additional energy. Because of this most artificial satellites are flying east around the globe.\nThe size of the gravity-well as described in this comic is not accounting for these factors. Therefore, leaving the solar system (or any of the gravity wells of the planets) could require less energy than described by the graph, assuming that the launch and slingshots are properly designed and executed.\nThe following table was adapted from the table in Escape velocity , using h = V_e ^2 \/ 2 g :\nMain Text Gravity Wells scaled to Earth surface gravity This chart shows the \"depth\" of various solar system gravity wells. Each well is scaled such that rising out of a physical well of that depth \u2014 in constant Earth surface gravity \u2014 would take the same energy as escaping from that planet's gravity in reality. Each planet is shown cut in half at the bottom of its well, with the depth of the well measured down to the planet's flat surface. The planet sizes are to the same scale as the wells. Interplanetary distances are not to scale. Depth = (G \u00d7 PlanetMass) \/ (g \u00d7 PlanetRadius) G = Newton's constant g = 9.81 m\/s 2\n\nPlanetary Descriptions To Sun, very very far down Mercury Venus Earth - 6379 km [originally 5,478 km] Moon - 288 km Mars - 1,286 km Ganymede Io Jupiter [A drawing of a \"very deep\" gravity well, \"Your mom\" at the bottom, several member of \"local football team\" falling down towards her.] Jupiter is not much larger than Saturn, but much more massive. At its size, adding more mass just makes it denser due to the extra squeezing of gravity. If you dropped a few dozen more Jupiters into it, the pressure would ignite fusion and make it a star. Europa Titan Two alarms: Weeoooeeoooeeooo Saturn Rings Uranus Neptune Megan: An even more glorious dawn awaits!\n\nMars Inset [Mars gravity well, with one of the Mars rovers on its surface, with its moons Deimos and Phobos as smaller gravity wells.]\n[Figure of a man (to scale) in Deimos's gravity well.] You could escape Deimos with a bike and a ramp.\n[Figure of a man (to scale) in Phobos's gravity well.] A thrown baseball could escape Phobos.\n\nEarth Inset [Zoomed-in view of Earth\/moon gravity well, featuring the relative locations of the atmosphere, Low Earth Orbit, the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, GPS satellites, and satellites in geosynchronous orbit.] Cueball: This is why it took a huge rocket to get to the moon but only a small one to get back.\nIt takes the same amount of energy to launch something on an escape trajectory away from Earth as it would to launch it 6,000 km upward under constant 9.81 m\/s 2 Earth gravity.\nHence, Earth's well is 6,000 km deep.\n"}
{"id":682,"title":"Force","image_title":"Force","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/682","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/force.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/682:_Force","transcript":"[Two EMTs are rushing Darth Vader away from a front door on a stretcher.]\n[There is a room with a desk in the foreground and a full-length mirror in the corner. On the desk is a laptop displaying the Wikipedia page for autoerotic asphyxiation.]\nThe sexual potential of the force choke was already explored in the title text of 307: Excessive Quotation .\n","explanation":"This comic features Darth Vader , the main antagonist from the original Star Wars trilogy.\nAutoerotic asphyxiation is a sexual practice in which lack of oxygen is induced to enhance sexual stimulus. The technique is considered extremely dangerous, especially without supervision, as loss of consciousness can result in continued strangling which can quickly be fatal.\nIn the films, Vader possesses the ability to restrict the airway of anyone without having to touch them, using only the so-called \" force \". This practise has therefore been called force-choking. The comic assumes that Vader used this technique against himself, with the help of a mirror, in order to become sexually aroused.\nLord Vader has apparently force-choked himself to the point of unconsciousness (or possibly even death) and is being transported from his house on a stretcher by two Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs).\nThe title text is a pun on the term \"choking the chicken\", a colloquial expression referring to male masturbation . \"Force-choking the chicken\" might mean a technique of self-gratification by use of the \"force\" without having to apply one's hands.\n[Two EMTs are rushing Darth Vader away from a front door on a stretcher.]\n[There is a room with a desk in the foreground and a full-length mirror in the corner. On the desk is a laptop displaying the Wikipedia page for autoerotic asphyxiation.]\nThe sexual potential of the force choke was already explored in the title text of 307: Excessive Quotation .\n"}
{"id":683,"title":"Science Montage","image_title":"Science Montage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/683","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/science_montage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/683:_Science_Montage","transcript":"[Two columns of four panels are shown below two captions.] Left: Movie Science Montage Right: Actual Science Montage\n[Below the four rows of panels in the two montages will be described, Movie first then Actual as the two are synchronized in time.]\n[ Movie : Cueball passes a test tube to Ponytail sitting at a large control console to the left looking at it's glowing screens at the bottom. At the top there is a flashing lamp. Both are wearing lab coats and goggles. A a hamster ball and a Newton's cradle stand on a shelf above them.]\n[ Actual : Cueball stand behind Ponytail, also here both are in lab coats with goggles. Ponytail place a sample from a test tube into a small device standing on a table. An analog clock on the wall above them is at five minutes past ten.]\n[ Movie : A small glowing sample has been placed next to a rat inside a cage standing on a table. Ponytail, is holding a glowing implement up towards the cage; she has another rat in her hand and also a rat sitting on top of her head. Cueball is speaking into a device with a curled wire going to the wall.] Caged Rat: Squeak!\n[ Actual : Cueball is behind Ponytail standing in front of the machine which is working on the sample. The clock on the wall above them is at ten minutes past ten.] Machine: ...whirrrrrr...\n[ Movie : Zoom in on Ponytail who pulls on two levers on a machine, which is shooting a beam of some sort downwards onto a sample, possibly the same as in the cage with the rat.]\n[ Actual : Cueball and Ponytail still waits for their sample to be analyzed in the small device. The clock on the wall above them is at twenty five minutes past eleven. Cueball has removed his goggles and is holding them in his hand.] Machine: ...whirrrr... Machine: Bing!\n[ Movie : Zoom in on Cueball who is operating a complicated-looking chemical apparatus with a scope, flasks, coils, and bubbles.] Cueball: Paint flecks from the killer's clothing match an antimatter factory in Belgrade! Ponytail (off panel): Let's go!\n[ Actual : Cueball look over Ponytail's shoulder while she examine the sample she has just taken out of the small device. He has put his goggles back on. The clock is hidden behind their spoken text. Presumably this occurs right after the bing .] Cueball: Okay, we've determined there's neither barium nor radium in this sample. Ponytail: Probably.\n","explanation":"This comic makes fun of the artificially dramatized and simplified depiction of science in movies. The unstated premise seems to be that the scientists are trying to get information about a murderer based on a sample obtained from his clothing. The movie version of events involves the two scientists Cueball and Ponytail doing exciting things with a control console, lab rats , a device with some kind of beam (perhaps a laser), and a complicated chemical apparatus. The scientists quickly arrive at the firm conclusion that paint on the clothes is from an \" antimatter factory\" in Belgrade , Serbia .\nWhile not directly used in the study, a Newton's cradle in motion can be seen in the first panel, a device notoriously useless in any serious scientific study, but very often used in movies, for instance as a prop in the office of a professor. There is also a hamster wheel . According to the official transcript it is a hamster ball but it is clearly not a ball as it has spokes, and thus resembles a hamster running wheel, probably for the rats shown in the next panel.\nThe actual science version shows the same scientists putting a sample into a device (likely a mass spectrometer or a centrifuge ). The device apparently takes about 1 hour and 20 minutes to analyze the sample (according to the clock on the wall moving from about 10:05 to 11:25). At the end of this process, the only thing learned is that there is probably no barium or radium in the sample. This conclusion is not very helpful on its own, and is not even very certain.\nThere are several major concepts about science and technology that movies tend to distort for the purposes of a more exciting plot, both illustrated here. One is that the work involves a lot of different exciting-looking gadgets. Another is that the analysis can be done very quickly, and results in very certain and significant conclusions. Besides this, the scientists often seem to have access to a database full of trivial information from around the world. In reality, a scientific analysis of some sample or data often only requires a single boring-looking machine, takes quite some time, and provides a limited result that must be interpreted very carefully to have any meaning at all.\nThe title text further illustrates a movie science scene, depicting someone deducing the presence of nanobots simply by observing the behavior of a perturbed lab rat. The Helvetica Scenario is a fictional experiment, presented in Switzerland (Helvetia is the Latin name for the country), which assumes that removing only the nucleus (the center of an atom) of a \"calcium molecule\" in one's skin, but still leaving the electron shell at its position, would cause a massive reaction ending up in heavy mutations. The Helvetica scenario was made up by the BBC comedy show Look Around You in the pilot episode, which can be seen here . \"Code grey\" may refer to Grey goo , a hypothetical doomsday scenario involving nanobots. In 1242: Scary Names Grey goo is on the chart and the Helvetica scenario is mentioned in the title text.\nAntimatter is also referenced in 826: Guest Week: Zach Weiner (SMBC) , 1621: Fixion and 1731: Wrong as well as being the subject of the what if? Antimatter . It was also mentioned in another what if? : Lake Tea .\n[Two columns of four panels are shown below two captions.] Left: Movie Science Montage Right: Actual Science Montage\n[Below the four rows of panels in the two montages will be described, Movie first then Actual as the two are synchronized in time.]\n[ Movie : Cueball passes a test tube to Ponytail sitting at a large control console to the left looking at it's glowing screens at the bottom. At the top there is a flashing lamp. Both are wearing lab coats and goggles. A a hamster ball and a Newton's cradle stand on a shelf above them.]\n[ Actual : Cueball stand behind Ponytail, also here both are in lab coats with goggles. Ponytail place a sample from a test tube into a small device standing on a table. An analog clock on the wall above them is at five minutes past ten.]\n[ Movie : A small glowing sample has been placed next to a rat inside a cage standing on a table. Ponytail, is holding a glowing implement up towards the cage; she has another rat in her hand and also a rat sitting on top of her head. Cueball is speaking into a device with a curled wire going to the wall.] Caged Rat: Squeak!\n[ Actual : Cueball is behind Ponytail standing in front of the machine which is working on the sample. The clock on the wall above them is at ten minutes past ten.] Machine: ...whirrrrrr...\n[ Movie : Zoom in on Ponytail who pulls on two levers on a machine, which is shooting a beam of some sort downwards onto a sample, possibly the same as in the cage with the rat.]\n[ Actual : Cueball and Ponytail still waits for their sample to be analyzed in the small device. The clock on the wall above them is at twenty five minutes past eleven. Cueball has removed his goggles and is holding them in his hand.] Machine: ...whirrrr... Machine: Bing!\n[ Movie : Zoom in on Cueball who is operating a complicated-looking chemical apparatus with a scope, flasks, coils, and bubbles.] Cueball: Paint flecks from the killer's clothing match an antimatter factory in Belgrade! Ponytail (off panel): Let's go!\n[ Actual : Cueball look over Ponytail's shoulder while she examine the sample she has just taken out of the small device. He has put his goggles back on. The clock is hidden behind their spoken text. Presumably this occurs right after the bing .] Cueball: Okay, we've determined there's neither barium nor radium in this sample. Ponytail: Probably.\n"}
{"id":684,"title":"We Get It","image_title":"We Get It","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/684","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/we_get_it.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/684:_We_Get_It","transcript":"[Cueball and a friend are talking.] Cueball: Avatar? Yeah, I saw it last week with...\n[Cueball walks out of the panel.]\n[Cueball returns with a ladder and megaphone.]\n[Cueball stands on top of the ladder, shouting through a megaphone.] Cueball: ...MY GIRLFRIEND.\nFriend: You know, if this phase of your relationship lasts more than a week, I'm legally allowed to stab you both. Cueball: What phase? Cueball: So, did I mention I'm seeing someone?\n","explanation":"Avatar is a 2009 movie that was very popular in theaters, becoming the highest-grossing at that time before being overtaken by Avengers: Endgame in 2019.\nThe comic illustrates how someone in a new relationship tends to be overly eager and giddy to let everyone know about it, while others tend to not be all that interested. The character on the left is so excited to let everyone know, that he goes off panel to get a ladder and a loudspeaker. The second character thinks it should be legal to murder (or at least wound) him for this annoyance if he acts like this for more than a week. The first character is so giddy that he doesn't notice what he has done and even tries to mention his girlfriend again.\nThe title text describes a very harsh way to respond to this annoyance. Since someone in the position of the first character is so excited about the new romantic commitment in their life, their friend brings up the much greater and more serious commitment of marriage. If they have only been dating for a week or less, it is probably much too early for them to seriously think about marriage. The friend then implies that if they aren't already excited to marry her, then he doesn't really love her. The end result is that the first character doesn't want to talk about his relationship anymore.\n[Cueball and a friend are talking.] Cueball: Avatar? Yeah, I saw it last week with...\n[Cueball walks out of the panel.]\n[Cueball returns with a ladder and megaphone.]\n[Cueball stands on top of the ladder, shouting through a megaphone.] Cueball: ...MY GIRLFRIEND.\nFriend: You know, if this phase of your relationship lasts more than a week, I'm legally allowed to stab you both. Cueball: What phase? Cueball: So, did I mention I'm seeing someone?\n"}
{"id":685,"title":"G-Spot","image_title":"G-Spot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/685","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/g-spot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/685:_G-Spot","transcript":"[To the left of the main comic there is an explanation text without a frame around it:] A study published in the journal of sexual medicine suggests that the g-spot may not actually exist. We go live to the researchers' press conference:\n[Two reporters with microphones, Ponytail and a Cueball-like guy, stand below a podium where Cueball stands behind a lectern. Ponytail reach out with her microphone towards Cueball:] Ponytail: Is it true you've been unable to find evidence that the G-spot exists?\n[Zoom in on Cueball and the top of the lectern:] Cueball: My research is in solar cells. I think you have the wrong press conference.\n[Beat panel with the same view as before.]\n[Same view but now Cueball hangs his head.] Cueball: But... yes.\n","explanation":"The G-Spot is, as the BBC has quoted saying in the title text, an elusive erogenous zone some women claim to have that can be stimulated to enhance their sexual experience.\nIn this comic, a live press conference has been held due to a peer-reviewed study suggesting the G-Spot may not exist. But the press have entered the wrong meeting where Cueball (the researcher) has performed a study on solar cells. So initially he tries to claim that he has not been researching the G-Spot. But he also ends up shamefully admitting that he has tried but failed finding it anyway. That is, he has had difficulty making his lover orgasm through the use of G-spot stimulation.\nIn the title text Randall notes that he could not read the lead from the BBC story: The elusive erogenous zone said to exist in some women may be a myth, say researchers who have hunted for it. with a straight face. This is probably because Randall assumes that \"hunted for it\" means the researchers had frequent sexual intercourse.\n[To the left of the main comic there is an explanation text without a frame around it:] A study published in the journal of sexual medicine suggests that the g-spot may not actually exist. We go live to the researchers' press conference:\n[Two reporters with microphones, Ponytail and a Cueball-like guy, stand below a podium where Cueball stands behind a lectern. Ponytail reach out with her microphone towards Cueball:] Ponytail: Is it true you've been unable to find evidence that the G-spot exists?\n[Zoom in on Cueball and the top of the lectern:] Cueball: My research is in solar cells. I think you have the wrong press conference.\n[Beat panel with the same view as before.]\n[Same view but now Cueball hangs his head.] Cueball: But... yes.\n"}
{"id":686,"title":"Admin Mourning","image_title":"Admin Mourning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/686","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/admin_mourning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/686:_Admin_Mourning","transcript":"[The text is over a white-on-black terminal showing a bit of output from ps -el | grep sam, with processes running from root and sam.] When a user dies, their connections time out, but their screen sessions linger.\n[The end of the command line is a |grep sam.] The server's uptime grows because you can't bring yourself to reboot\nand wipe out their last earthly presence\n[The processes listed are screen, zsh, irssi, and grep sam.] the ghost in zshell.\n","explanation":"The background images show the output from the ps command of Unix-like computer systems, which lists all running processes including all interactive users logged in to the server. If a user did not log out, their processes would continue to run until stopped by a reboot. If some specific user dies while logged in, the running sessions still appear in the ps output and be a reminder to other users. This comic depicts an administrator unwilling to reboot a machine that has still running processes from a deceased user named \"sam\".\nWhen a session is closed its descendent processes sent the HUP (Hang-up) signal, which normally causes them to terminate. However, the popular utility screen enables a user to detach and reattach that output, thus surviving over sessions.\nThe final joke refers to the command line interface being called a shell , and to a particular type of shell called zshell ( \/bin\/zsh in the final panel), making a pun with the expression \" Ghost in the Shell \", which is the title of a popular manga series, originally derived from the expression \" ghost in the machine \", used by philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe Descartes' theory of mind-body dualism.\nThe phrase \"su to the user\" refers to the ability of a system administrator \u2014 i.e. the superuser, aka root \u2014 to switch to another user account (using the su command , which stands for s ubstitute u ser) without needing the target user's password, as would normally be necessary, which in this case would give the impression that sam's ghost were using the account.\n[The text is over a white-on-black terminal showing a bit of output from ps -el | grep sam, with processes running from root and sam.] When a user dies, their connections time out, but their screen sessions linger.\n[The end of the command line is a |grep sam.] The server's uptime grows because you can't bring yourself to reboot\nand wipe out their last earthly presence\n[The processes listed are screen, zsh, irssi, and grep sam.] the ghost in zshell.\n"}
{"id":687,"title":"Dimensional Analysis","image_title":"Dimensional Analysis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/687","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dimensional_analysis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/687:_Dimensional_Analysis","transcript":"My Hobby: Abusing dimensional analysis\n[On a blackboard.] (Planck energy\/Pressure at the Earth's core) x (Prius combined EPA gas mileage\/Minimum width of the English Channel) = \u03c0\n[Cueball indicates this equation with a pointer in front of a class.] Cueball: It's correct to within experimental error, and the units check out. It must be a fundamental law. Student: But what if they build a better Prius? Cueball: Then England will drift out to sea.\n","explanation":"Cueball has a hobby \u2014 showing correct calculations according to the dimensional analysis \u2014 but with ridiculous correlations of uncorrelated events and measurements. Here Cueball is giving a talk and uses this trick to convince his listeners that the Toyota Prius combined EPA gas mileage is somehow connected to the constant \u03c0 via the Planck energy , the pressure at the Earth's core and the width of the English Channel .\nScientists \u2014 often physicists \u2014 use dimensional analysis to quickly check if a given formula can possibly relate to a physical system, because if you end up with an equation claiming that Joules are meters, something is clearly wrong. Dimensional analysis here refers to the check if both sides of the equation arrive at the same physical unit when the units of all variables get plugged into the equation. This requires knowledge of the system of units and the relation between different physical units.\nCueball uses the following equation to make a mockery of the practice:\n\nThe right hand side is dimensionless, it's the constant \u03c0 = 3.14... which is defined by the relation of two lengths, the circumference and the diameter of a circle. The left hand side requires to plug in the dimensions of the named physical quantities:\nWhen plugged into the left hand side this amounts to:\n\nUsing the following unit relations (this does not reduce units to the seven SI base units, but does use some derived units for cancelation):\nNote that for dimensional analysis constant factors are not taken into account. Here square brackets are used to denote dimensional analysis. In the above equation the unit of energy (joule) as well as all the unit of volume (cubic meter) cancel out each other.\nAnother aspect of the comic is, that sometimes dimension analysis of equations that were not derived but rather \"made up\" can provide insight. However, in reality such an equations would have to be somehow \"motivated\", which is more of an art than science and requires great experience in the field the equation should relate to. The presented equation combines values that have no immediate causal relation with each other, so it does not make sense. Furthermore, since the values have absolutely no causal relation to each other, the ratios presented are simple coincidence; despite Cueball's claim, building a better Prius would not cause any changes to the English Channel. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text also refers to this, as a higher pressure at Earth's core could also balance the equation, keeping the result constant equal to \u03c0 . The Planck energy is an absolute, however, so it is not mentioned as a way to balance the next version of Prius.\nThe Planck energy is the only nearly exact value we do have. Compared to other Planck values it is very large (macroscopic).\nPressure at the core of the Earth ranges from 330 to 360 gigapascals.\nUsing a simple value like this:\nPrius combined EPA gas mileage :\nFor the third generation (from 2010) the City mileage is 51 mpg and the Highway mileage is 48 mpg. But it is the combined EPA gas mileage which is used in the equation and that is 50 miles per gallon.\nMinimum width of the English Channel is about\nCalculating from these values you will get \u03c0 = 3.54... that is pretty close to \u03c0 = 3.14... while using a Planck value. According to Cueball this will be within the experimental error (the combined error for all four numbers - none are exact numbers). For instance if you tried the ePrius you would probably get closer to that target \u2014 as the mileage in real life usually is somewhat lower than the value given \u2014 and that would reduce the result.\nWolfram|Alpha can find most of the statistics and do the calculations.\nMy Hobby: Abusing dimensional analysis\n[On a blackboard.] (Planck energy\/Pressure at the Earth's core) x (Prius combined EPA gas mileage\/Minimum width of the English Channel) = \u03c0\n[Cueball indicates this equation with a pointer in front of a class.] Cueball: It's correct to within experimental error, and the units check out. It must be a fundamental law. Student: But what if they build a better Prius? Cueball: Then England will drift out to sea.\n"}
{"id":688,"title":"Self-Description","image_title":"Self-Description","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/688","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/self_description.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/688:_Self-Description","transcript":"[A pie chart which is mainly white with a black slice of about 30 degree towards the bottom left. The two sections are labeled with a line going from the label to the sections. The line going into the black section turns white in in this last part.] Fraction of this image which is white Fraction of this image which is black\n[A bar graph labeled with a label over the Y-axis. There are three black bars with a label below each bar. Bar 1 is of medium height, bar 2 highest and bar 3 the lowest.] Amount of black ink by panel: 1 2 3\n[A scatter-plot with a label over the Y-axis. In the bottom left corner of the graph, the two axis has a tick just away from the origo, and these are labeled with zeros. The graph shows the whole comic scaled proportionally to fit the axes. The scale is too small to actually read any of the text in this representation, which would of course be the same as that noted here for the two previous panel and for this panel here below:] Location of black ink in this image: 0 0\n","explanation":"This comic is self-referential , because every graph is dependent on the whole comic. If you were to change anything in the comic, you would change the ink distribution, and would therefore have to update all three graphs. This would result in further changes that would have to be considered.\nIn the first panel's pie chart , \"this image\" refers to the entire comic image, the one that can be downloaded from xkcd (and the entire comic as displayed here above). This is a little confusing as it would be easy to misunderstand this meaning, and believe that the first panel only refers to itself. The title text though makes it clear that it is the entire comic that is called image here. The image size is 740x180 or 133200 pixels. Out of those, 14228 pixels are black (gray pixels are accounted based on their brightness). The ratio of black pixels to the size of the image is 0.1068, so the pie chart segment describing black part should be about 38.5 degrees wide, which is indeed true for the pie chart in the image.\nIn the second panel the amount of black used in each panel is displayed in a bar chart . This actually makes this panel the one that uses most black. The first panel (including the border) has 4944 black pixels, the second 6180 and the third 3103. The first bar is about 70 pixels high, the second about 87 and the third about 43, which roughly checks out. It is hard to measure the exact height of the bars as the axis and bars themselves are not straight.\nThe third panel features a scatter plot labeled \"Location of black ink in this image.\" It is the first quadrant of a cartesian plane with the zeroes marked. The graph is the whole comic scaled proportionally to fit the axes, so the last panel also has to contain an image of itself having an image of itself ad infinitum thus displaying the Droste effect , a type of visual recursion .\nThe title text refers to the comic's own self-reference, but it is also self-referencing because of the character count in it. It would be difficult to write this sentence, as just one more character would not be solved by writing 243, as \"three\" has two more characters than \"two\", and \"four\" has only one more character...\n\"The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and every node has a loop.\" This means that if we draw a dot corresponding to each panel, and then we draw arrows connecting the dots to indicate dependencies, the resulting graph is complete (meaning that all the points are connected to one another) and bidirectional (meaning that if point A has an arrow to point B, then point B also has an arrow to point A). \"Every node has a loop\" means that each point also has an arrow connecting to itself.\nThis is an observation of the interdependent relationship between description and creation that pertains to all things perceived by humans, including the concept of \"Self\".\nSelf-reference was used very early for instance in 33: Self-reference , but never so famously as here. See other self-references here .\n[A pie chart which is mainly white with a black slice of about 30 degree towards the bottom left. The two sections are labeled with a line going from the label to the sections. The line going into the black section turns white in in this last part.] Fraction of this image which is white Fraction of this image which is black\n[A bar graph labeled with a label over the Y-axis. There are three black bars with a label below each bar. Bar 1 is of medium height, bar 2 highest and bar 3 the lowest.] Amount of black ink by panel: 1 2 3\n[A scatter-plot with a label over the Y-axis. In the bottom left corner of the graph, the two axis has a tick just away from the origo, and these are labeled with zeros. The graph shows the whole comic scaled proportionally to fit the axes. The scale is too small to actually read any of the text in this representation, which would of course be the same as that noted here for the two previous panel and for this panel here below:] Location of black ink in this image: 0 0\n"}
{"id":689,"title":"FIRST Design","image_title":"FIRST Design","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/689","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/first_design.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/689:_FIRST_Design","transcript":"Team Member 1 (out of panel): Wow, this is a much better design. Team Member 2 (out of panel): Let's build it. [A blueprint depicting a robot design for the FIRST competition. It consists of a standard mobile platform, with a pusher blade at the front. Additional parts include an umbrella on top and a trailer unit consisting a telescoping pole with a matchbox and match on top.]\nReferee (out of panel): Go! CLICK [A FIRST competition field, with teams at opposite ends. Various robots appear on the field, and the team whose design appears above activates their robot.]\n[The robot's trailer unit detaches as the telescoping pole begins to extend, and the mobile platform with umbrella rolls forward.] VRRR CLICK\n[Telescoping pole extends further.] VRRRR\n[Telescoping pole extends further.] VRRRR\n[Telescoping pole extends further, approaching a sprinkler head fixture.] VRRR\n[Telescoping pole stops extending, placing the matchbox and match very near the sprinkler head fixture.]\n[The mobile platform stops moving.]\n[The umbrella deploys, extending beyond the dimensions of the mobile platform.] FWOOMP\n[The match box and match are lit beneath the sprinkler head.] FWOOSH\n[The heat from the match triggers the sprinkler's valve, and water sprays out of the sprinkler into the room below.] PSSSSHH\n[Water pours from the sprinkler onto the competition field, causing the electrical components of the opposing team's robotics platform to short and malfunction. The opposing team appears distressed and confused.] FZZZT BWooooooo!!!\n[The initial robot, still protected by its umbrella, pushes along the balls toward the goal zone without any difficulty.]\n","explanation":"Two members of a team are designing a robot for the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition , in which teams design robots to push soccer balls into their team's goals. The final design for this team's robot is a trailer with a matchbox on a telescoping pole and the actual robot, a mobile platform with an umbrella on top and pusher in front.\nThis is an underhanded design, exploiting the presence of a heat-activated sprinkler system at the venue and lack of water resistance in the opposing team's equipment.\nWhen the event starts, the robot moves off and deploys its umbrella. The trailer extends its arm, causing a lit match to set off the sprinkler, which causes the opposing robots to short out and malfunction. This allows the umbrella-protected robot to score goals without opposition.\nThis may also be referencing how FIRST is famous for its bending of the rules, as loopholes are not only not against the rules, they are encouraged. This would be shown best by how Team 67 designed a robot that utilized a loophole, which allowed them to control a robot using an Xbox Kinect during the time where the robot is supposed to be autonomous. (This loophole has been removed in the rules for more recent competitions.) Note, however, that this would be simply illegal based of the 2010 FRC Breakaway rules , as rule S01 under section 7.3.1 Safety prevents dangerous robots from competing and R02 points E and F under section 8.3.1 Safety & Damage Prevention prevent \"Flammable gases\" and \"Any devices intended to produce flames or pyrotechnics.\". This rule could be bypassed if the sprinkler could also be triggered by smoke, which is the case in at least some venues, in which case a few capacitors in a circuit designed to destroy them could trigger the sprinkler system.\nIn addition, this comic may be a reference to the water game meme in FRC, where most students really want a game to involve water, even though this is unlikely to ever happen due to the safety concerns about using electronics near water.\nThe title text is an excuse presented by the umbrella robot team, presumably because they won but are facing disqualification. This excuse seems weak because none of the venues have a rooftop pool. [ citation needed ] The comment \"the pool on the roof must've sprung a leak\" is a quote from the 1995 movie \"Hackers\".\nTeam Member 1 (out of panel): Wow, this is a much better design. Team Member 2 (out of panel): Let's build it. [A blueprint depicting a robot design for the FIRST competition. It consists of a standard mobile platform, with a pusher blade at the front. Additional parts include an umbrella on top and a trailer unit consisting a telescoping pole with a matchbox and match on top.]\nReferee (out of panel): Go! CLICK [A FIRST competition field, with teams at opposite ends. Various robots appear on the field, and the team whose design appears above activates their robot.]\n[The robot's trailer unit detaches as the telescoping pole begins to extend, and the mobile platform with umbrella rolls forward.] VRRR CLICK\n[Telescoping pole extends further.] VRRRR\n[Telescoping pole extends further.] VRRRR\n[Telescoping pole extends further, approaching a sprinkler head fixture.] VRRR\n[Telescoping pole stops extending, placing the matchbox and match very near the sprinkler head fixture.]\n[The mobile platform stops moving.]\n[The umbrella deploys, extending beyond the dimensions of the mobile platform.] FWOOMP\n[The match box and match are lit beneath the sprinkler head.] FWOOSH\n[The heat from the match triggers the sprinkler's valve, and water sprays out of the sprinkler into the room below.] PSSSSHH\n[Water pours from the sprinkler onto the competition field, causing the electrical components of the opposing team's robotics platform to short and malfunction. The opposing team appears distressed and confused.] FZZZT BWooooooo!!!\n[The initial robot, still protected by its umbrella, pushes along the balls toward the goal zone without any difficulty.]\n"}
{"id":690,"title":"Semicontrolled Demolition","image_title":"Semicontrolled Demolition","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/690","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/semicontrolled_demolition.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/690:_Semicontrolled_Demolition","transcript":"[Cueball is holding up a pointer to a screen with an image of the World Trade Center towers mid-disaster.] Cueball: Based on my analysis, I believe the government faked the plane crash and demolished the WTC north tower with explosives. Cueball: The south tower, in a simultaneous but unrelated plot, was brought down by actual terrorists.\n[Caption below the panel:] The 9\/11 truthers responded poorly to my compromise theory.\n","explanation":"The World Trade Center towers were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks ( 9\/11 in American date notation). The planned attack was for two planes to collide with the north and south towers simultaneously, but what ended up happening was that plane 1 hit the north tower at 8:46 am , and the second plane hit the south tower a little less than 20 minutes later . In the ensuing investigation many people raised questions that didn't seem to get a satisfactory answer for several months, if not years. Many people, who called themselves 9\/11 Truthers , began to claim that the whole thing was a government conspiracy, in what has come to be known as the \"controlled demolition plot\" (referenced by the title of this comic), which alleges that the towers were brought down not by the fires caused by the planes but by demolition charges intentionally placed there by the government.\nCueball proposes a compromise to make both those who believe in the conspiracy and those who don't happy. Since there is only a government related video of a plane flying into the north tower \u2014 done by a man who was with FDNY fire fighters \u2014 that was a government conspiracy. But it just so happened that the government decided to demolish the north tower on the same day that terrorists decided to demolish the south tower.\nThe title text is a restatement of the Golden Mean fallacy : that the truth can be found in a compromise between two opposite positions. In this comic, one of the positions is a fanciful conspiracy theory and the other is a sober fact-based conclusion.  The error of this fallacy is apparent here, as it can lead  to even more ridiculous conclusions. In this case, the compromise theory would make no one happy because both sides would have to concede claims which they have already dismissed as bogus, as well as accept an incredibly unlikely coincidence.\nOn January 6, 2016, The Onion , a satirical news site, reported that the government has confirmed Cueball's theory by releasing an article titled, Government Admits It Was Only Behind Destruction Of North Tower.\nThis is one of the compromises Cueball (or Randall) has proposed, most of which will also be unlikely to be accepted...\n[Cueball is holding up a pointer to a screen with an image of the World Trade Center towers mid-disaster.] Cueball: Based on my analysis, I believe the government faked the plane crash and demolished the WTC north tower with explosives. Cueball: The south tower, in a simultaneous but unrelated plot, was brought down by actual terrorists.\n[Caption below the panel:] The 9\/11 truthers responded poorly to my compromise theory.\n"}
{"id":691,"title":"MicroSD","image_title":"MicroSD","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/691","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/microsd.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/691:_MicroSD","transcript":"[Cueball and a friend approach a table.] Cueball: Hey, what's up? Friend: Shhhhh. Cueball: Hrm? Friend: There's a microSD card on your table.\n[A 16GB microSD card sits next to an assortment of coins for size reference.] Cueball (out of panel): So? Friend (out of panel): I dunno, high storage densities freak me out. A whole aisle of library shelves on something smaller than a dime.\n[The two people stand near the table, the friend peering at the coins and card on the table.] Friend: Libraries are unnerving enough-millions of ideas surrounding you, towering over you. These cards fill me with that same reverence, that same intimidation.\n[Cueball stands alone.] Friend (out of panel): ...that same faint arousal. Maybe I'll just touch it. Cueball: If you lose that card I'm NOT helping you find it.\n","explanation":"microSD is one format of the Secure Digital memory card format, used in digital cameras, cell phones, and other devices. It is very small, only 15\u00d711\u00d71 mm, but can hold large amounts of data. The US dime in contrast has a diameter of 17.91 mm. When this comic was published in January 2010 the maximum capacity for microSD cards was 16GB. The current maximum capacity is 1TB (as of January 2021).\nThe main character in the comic (on the right) thinks about all the ideas that could be expressed by the data in the microSD card, or in a library. He feels not just reverent and intimidated, but sexually aroused by the thought. As he begins to touch it, his friend is disgusted by what might happen if he uses the card as some kind of sex toy, and does not want to help him locate the card if it gets \"lost\" inside a body cavity.\nThe title text seems to be the main character thinking about how much data the card holds, in terms of floppy disks and the iTunes music library, and feeling aroused by these thoughts.\nRandalls claims in the title text do check out. A high-density floppy disk with a FAT format holds about 1.4 MB of data, and has dimensions of 90\u00d794\u00d73 mm, for a volume of about 2.5 cm\u00b3. A refrigerator carton is the large cardboard box that fridges are delivered in. A typical refrigerator carton may be 1800\u00d7700\u00d7700 mm, a volume of about 0.9 m\u00b3. So a fridge carton could hold about thirty-five thousand 90 mm floppies, or roughly 50GB. This is comparable to the storage on a single microSD card. A soda can (500 ml = 500 cm\u00b3) could hold three thousand microSD cards or store 50TB of data (3000TB today). However, the iTunes store claims to hold thirty-five million songs (as of Summer 2016), and allowing for about 2MB per song gives 70 TB of music. The claim that a soda can could hold the iTunes library seems to be unreasonable, but it was reasonable at the time.\nRelated to this topic is this xkcd What If blog entry .\n[Cueball and a friend approach a table.] Cueball: Hey, what's up? Friend: Shhhhh. Cueball: Hrm? Friend: There's a microSD card on your table.\n[A 16GB microSD card sits next to an assortment of coins for size reference.] Cueball (out of panel): So? Friend (out of panel): I dunno, high storage densities freak me out. A whole aisle of library shelves on something smaller than a dime.\n[The two people stand near the table, the friend peering at the coins and card on the table.] Friend: Libraries are unnerving enough-millions of ideas surrounding you, towering over you. These cards fill me with that same reverence, that same intimidation.\n[Cueball stands alone.] Friend (out of panel): ...that same faint arousal. Maybe I'll just touch it. Cueball: If you lose that card I'm NOT helping you find it.\n"}
{"id":692,"title":"Dirty Harry","image_title":"Dirty Harry","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/692","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dirty_harry.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/692:_Dirty_Harry","transcript":"[Detective \"Dirty\" Harry Callahan stands near a wall, pointing a revolver at another figure, presumably a suspect, reclined on the ground. A shotgun is on the ground next to the reclined figure.] Harry Callahan: I know what you're thinking--\"Did he fire six shots or only five?\" In all this excitement, I- Suspect: Six. Definitely six. Harry Callahan: Shit.\nDirty Harry Meets Rain Man\n","explanation":"The comic references Dirty Harry and Rain Man , two classic American films, from very different genres.\nDirty Harry is an action thriller about a police officer named \"Dirty\" Harry Callahan, who's notorious for being aggressive with criminals and quick to resort to lethal force. His weapon of choice is a .44 magnum revolver (which holds six rounds of ammunition). The comic references one of the most famous scenes in the film, in which Harry has a criminal at gunpoint, following a fire-fight. As the criminal considers reaching for his own gun, Harry claims to have lost track of how many bullets he's fired, meaning that there may or may not be one round left in his gun, and coldly tells his opponent \"you must ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky?\". The implication being Harry will definitely fire if the man reaches for his gun, and his life will depend on whether there are any bullets left.\nRain Man is a comedy-drama about the relationship between two brothers. One of the brothers, Raymond (AKA \"Rain Man\"), is autistic and has an eidetic memory . Several times in the film he encounters a number of objects that would be difficult for most people to count (such as toothpicks spilled from a box) and immediately knows how many there are.\nThe comic portrays a mash-up between the two films, in which Dirty Harry faces Rain Man, instead of a less numerically gifted adversary. Rain Man accurately tracks every bullet fired, and knows that Harry's gun is now empty (with the implication that he can safely grab the gun and kill Harry).\nThe title text implies that Randall tends to obsess about tracking quantities, even while watching action films, and thus gets 'distracted' keeping track of how many rounds each person fires. He jokes that energy guns shown in science fiction are intended to counter this tendency, because they're not limited to a specific number of shots.\n[Detective \"Dirty\" Harry Callahan stands near a wall, pointing a revolver at another figure, presumably a suspect, reclined on the ground. A shotgun is on the ground next to the reclined figure.] Harry Callahan: I know what you're thinking--\"Did he fire six shots or only five?\" In all this excitement, I- Suspect: Six. Definitely six. Harry Callahan: Shit.\nDirty Harry Meets Rain Man\n"}
{"id":693,"title":"Children's Fantasy","image_title":"Children's Fantasy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/693","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/childrens_fantasy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/693:_Children%27s_Fantasy","transcript":"[Kid is sitting on the ground with his chin in his hand.] Kid: I'm such a loser- POP [Princess sticks her head through a portal.] Princess: Come quickly, young one! Kid: Holy crap, a portal! Princess: My kingdom needs you!\n[He falls through.] Kid: AAAAAA\n[We see him on horseback, helmeted wielding a sword. There's a castle on the horizon and two moons in the sky. There are a few other riders as well.]\n[Kid, with helmet and sword, stands before King, Princess, and another warrior. Princess is holding out a ring.] King: You've saved our kingdom and found your self-confidence. Now it's time to return home. Goodbye, young hero! Princess: Take this ring to remember us!\n[Kid stands alone, holding the ring.] Kid: Well, I guess I spend the rest of my life pretending that didn't happen or knowing that everyone I love suspects I'm crazy. Kid: This'll be a fun 70 years.\n","explanation":"Children's fantasy stories such as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Phantom Tollbooth involve a kid who is magically transported out of their time to some fantastic realm, goes through trials and becomes a hero, and then is returned to their own mundane world at about the same time they left with no one else realizing or believing what happened to them. The growth of the protagonist often involves learning self-confidence.\nThe comic illustrates this type of story and considers what the rest of the child's life would really be like as they reach adulthood. If they tell their friends, spouse, and family what happened to them, no one will believe them and these loved ones will think them a bit crazy. If they don't tell anyone, they are pretending that the episode never happened. Either way, it seems this would not be an enjoyable experience to live with for their entire adult life.\nThe title text continues the thought by pointing out the impossibility of contributing anything to the scientific world after visiting a magical world, as the child would know many scientific baselines, and, indeed, most regularly practiced scientific theory to be false, but would be unable to say anything or convince anyone of what they knew.\n[Kid is sitting on the ground with his chin in his hand.] Kid: I'm such a loser- POP [Princess sticks her head through a portal.] Princess: Come quickly, young one! Kid: Holy crap, a portal! Princess: My kingdom needs you!\n[He falls through.] Kid: AAAAAA\n[We see him on horseback, helmeted wielding a sword. There's a castle on the horizon and two moons in the sky. There are a few other riders as well.]\n[Kid, with helmet and sword, stands before King, Princess, and another warrior. Princess is holding out a ring.] King: You've saved our kingdom and found your self-confidence. Now it's time to return home. Goodbye, young hero! Princess: Take this ring to remember us!\n[Kid stands alone, holding the ring.] Kid: Well, I guess I spend the rest of my life pretending that didn't happen or knowing that everyone I love suspects I'm crazy. Kid: This'll be a fun 70 years.\n"}
{"id":694,"title":"Retro Virus","image_title":"Retro Virus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/694","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/retro_virus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/694:_Retro_Virus","transcript":"[Cueball is using a computer.] Cueball: Argh, this is frustrating. Friend (off-panel): What?\nCueball: This Windows box has a virus and I can't get RegEdit to- Friend (off-panel): Haha, cleaning viruses? Man, what a blast from the past!\nFriend: Check it out! Dude's cleaning Win32 viruses! Remember that? Ponytail (off-panel): It's like we're back in 2003! Cueball (small): Hey, XP's still the most-\nFriend: Did you get the virus from Kazaa? Ponytail (with laptop): Guess what I just read on Howard Dean's Friendster!? Cueball (head in hands): Guys...\n","explanation":"This comic uses the word \"retro\" as a reference to retro style and \"virus\" as a reference to computer viruses . This portmanteau is also a double entendre for a retrovirus , which is a type of biological virus.\nCueball finds himself needing to clean a virus off his Windows machine. Unfortunately, the registry editor (regedit), a key tool in manipulating Windows, is affected. A coworker comes over and mentions that it has been a while since he has worried about cleaning viruses in the Win32 API .\nCueball responds that Windows XP operating system is still the most popular (which it was in 2010, and remained until mid-2012), but is drowned out by another coworker ( Ponytail ) who exclaims that it is as if they are back in 2003. Back then, Windows XP machines were the standard in many places, and were far more often targeted by viruses than other systems, e.g. Linux , Mac OS X , etc.\nIn the final panel, Cueball's coworkers continue to make fun of him by referencing things that were important back in 2003 like Howard Dean , Friendster or Kazaa . Such things have since fallen largely out of prominence.\nThe title text is a reference to the year of Linux on the desktop , which is an expectation that in an upcoming year, Linux will make a large breakthrough and be widely adopted by businesses and personal users. The expectation has been around since about 2000, however, and has not exactly happened (although non-desktop devices running Android , a Linux-based OS, are now very common). If it were to happen, the large market share enjoyed by Windows OSes would fade away.\n[Cueball is using a computer.] Cueball: Argh, this is frustrating. Friend (off-panel): What?\nCueball: This Windows box has a virus and I can't get RegEdit to- Friend (off-panel): Haha, cleaning viruses? Man, what a blast from the past!\nFriend: Check it out! Dude's cleaning Win32 viruses! Remember that? Ponytail (off-panel): It's like we're back in 2003! Cueball (small): Hey, XP's still the most-\nFriend: Did you get the virus from Kazaa? Ponytail (with laptop): Guess what I just read on Howard Dean's Friendster!? Cueball (head in hands): Guys...\n"}
{"id":695,"title":"Spirit","image_title":"Spirit","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/695","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spirit.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/695:_Spirit","transcript":"[The Spirit rover is on the surface of Mars.] Day 1 of 90 Spirit (thinking): 89 days to go!\nDay 88 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Two days until I go home!\nDay 91 of 90 Spirit (thinking):\u00a0?\nDay 103 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Maybe I didn't do a good enough job.\nDay 127 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Maybe if I do a good enough job, they'll let me come home.\nDay 857 of 90 Spirit (thinking): I thought I analyzed that rock really well. Spirit (thinking): It's okay, I'll do the next one better.\nDay 1293 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Sandstorm. Power dying. Spirit (thinking): But a good rover would keep going. A good rover like they wanted.\nDay 1944 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Oh no. whirrrr Spirit (thinking): I'm stuck. whirrrr\nSpirit (thinking): Did I do a good job? Spirit (thinking): Do I get to come home? Spirit (thinking): Guys?\n[ Spirit rests in the middle of a vast Martian landscape.]\n","explanation":"Anthropomorphism (or personification) is attribution of distinctly human characteristics to animals or non-living things. We make parallels between ourselves and objects, to the point where some people even jocularly worry about hurting the feelings of, say, an automobile. We call ships \"she.\" We see human faces in objects like the arrangement of lights on the front of a car.\nThe Spirit Mars rover , like many high-functioning robots in real life and fiction, shares many physical similarities with a human being or animal. It has a head, eyes, neck, body, legs, feet, arms, and a hand. And it strikingly resembles robots from fiction, such as Johnny 5 from Short Circuit , or WALL-E from the film with the same name.\nThus, this comic explores what the Spirit rover's life would be like if it had a human personality. The rover lasted 5\u00bc active years on the Martian surface, far exceeding its expected mission duration of 90 Martian days. A sentient  robot might assume that after its initially planned 90 Martian day mission was over, it would get to return home.  This assumes, of course, that the rover never understood that the mission was a one-way trip, and that the expectation was that it would simply fail after ninety days. When no one comes to return it home, Spirit , possibly in a pun on its name, keeps its hopes alive while continuously analyzing rock after rock for years.\nIt would be cruelty of the absolute worst kind to abandon a human on an uninhabited planet with no intention of ever bringing them home, [ citation needed ] so it feels horrifying when we anthropomorphize the rover. One is rather heartened that the Spirit rover is, in fact, just a programmed machine. Furthermore, even if it were sentient, Spirit has little reason to think of earth as its home, as it had always been designed for Mars, and would have little purpose on earth.  Additionally, a sentient machine might be expected to understand the limitations on its own lifespan, and so would expect to survive only three months.  From that perspective, surviving for years would seem like a victory, rather than cruelty. One alternative version of the strip (see below) makes a similar point.\nIt is worth pointing out that Opportunity , the rover's twin, has been even more wildly successful and was only shut down in February 2019 ( 2111: Opportunity Rover ). More than five years after this comic, when Opportunity had passed a Marathon distance, Randall celebrated this rover with the comic 1504: Opportunity .\nThe title text has an apparent miscount: January 26, 2010, is more like sol (Martian day) 2156 by JPL's mission status site, not 2274.\nThe final contact with Spirit was on sol 2210 (March 22, 2010).\nAlternative versions\nThe strip had a strong emotional impact on the fans of the rover, who created a number of alternative versions and endings for it.\nIn a blog post Randall mentioned this upbeat rewrite of the comic. Several others were made , including a silent one.\nMany alternative endings were also proposed:\n[The Spirit rover is on the surface of Mars.] Day 1 of 90 Spirit (thinking): 89 days to go!\nDay 88 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Two days until I go home!\nDay 91 of 90 Spirit (thinking):\u00a0?\nDay 103 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Maybe I didn't do a good enough job.\nDay 127 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Maybe if I do a good enough job, they'll let me come home.\nDay 857 of 90 Spirit (thinking): I thought I analyzed that rock really well. Spirit (thinking): It's okay, I'll do the next one better.\nDay 1293 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Sandstorm. Power dying. Spirit (thinking): But a good rover would keep going. A good rover like they wanted.\nDay 1944 of 90 Spirit (thinking): Oh no. whirrrr Spirit (thinking): I'm stuck. whirrrr\nSpirit (thinking): Did I do a good job? Spirit (thinking): Do I get to come home? Spirit (thinking): Guys?\n[ Spirit rests in the middle of a vast Martian landscape.]\n"}
{"id":696,"title":"Strip Games","image_title":"Strip Games","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/696","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/strip_games.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/696:_Strip_Games","transcript":"Frequency of Strip Versions of Various Games\nn = google hits for \"strip <game name>\" \/ google hits for \"<game name>\" (at the time of this writing)\nFrequent (n > 1%) -Poker -Spin the Bottle -Beer Pong -Never Have I Ever -Truth or Dare\nRare (1% >= n > 0.01%) -Chess -Blackjack -Tennis -Settlers of Catan -Pictionary\nExtremely Rare (0.01% >= n > 0) -Cricket -Magic: the Gathering -Stickball -Agricola -Jumanji\nNonexistent (n = 0) -Poohsticks -Podracing -Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma -Chess by Mail -Conway's Game of Life\n","explanation":"The frequency of strip versions of various games is measured by means of Google search results. Strip versions of popular games are a common activity at parties, especially when alcohol is involved. The obligation to remove pieces of clothing is supposed to add an extra zest to the game. A very widespread variant is Strip Poker , followed by strip versions of regular party games like Truth or Dare or Spin the Bottle .\nHowever, the comic also suggests playing other games in a way that involves stripping. In reality, playing such games as \"Strip Tennis \" or \"Strip Agricola \" is rather unusual. The Chris Van Allsburg picture book Jumanji and the Robin Williams movie adaptation Jumanji are about a magical board game that manifests dangerous creatures and traps from the jungle and lost civilization therein; a theoretical Strip Jumanji would probably not remain very titillating during the chaos (evidently, therefore, \"strip Jumanji\" refers to the real-life board game based on the movie ).\nThe last column features games of which strip versions are (according to Google) nonexistent. While the other columns named sports or board games where a strip variant would be at least conceivable, the last one includes the zero-player Game of Life and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma , which is a theoretical example in game theory . It is therefore left to the reader to imagine how a strip version of these pseudo-games would appear.\n\"Global Thermonuclear War\" in the title text is a reference to the film \" WarGames \", where a young hacker accesses a US military supercomputer and starts a nuclear war simulation, believing it to be only a computer game.  The film ends by showing the computer that nuclear war is \"a strange game\" in which \"the only winning move is not to play\", and proposes \"a nice game of chess\".\nStrip global thermonuclear war is a patently absurd idea; while it is a common trope for people to engage in one last moment of intimate pleasure before certain doom, foreplay (including strip games of any type) is a time-consuming practice, and time is something you don't have much of considering that the bomb could drop on your place of residence at any moment. Besides all that, the act of betting on which city is going to go up next in a nuclear inferno tends not to be an effective aphrodisiac for most people. [ citation needed ] But at least you wouldn't be wearing your radioactive clothes!\nFrequency of Strip Versions of Various Games\nn = google hits for \"strip <game name>\" \/ google hits for \"<game name>\" (at the time of this writing)\nFrequent (n > 1%) -Poker -Spin the Bottle -Beer Pong -Never Have I Ever -Truth or Dare\nRare (1% >= n > 0.01%) -Chess -Blackjack -Tennis -Settlers of Catan -Pictionary\nExtremely Rare (0.01% >= n > 0) -Cricket -Magic: the Gathering -Stickball -Agricola -Jumanji\nNonexistent (n = 0) -Poohsticks -Podracing -Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma -Chess by Mail -Conway's Game of Life\n"}
{"id":697,"title":"Tensile vs. Shear Strength","image_title":"Tensile vs. Shear Strength","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/697","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tensile_vs_shear_strength.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/697:_Tensile_vs._Shear_Strength","transcript":"[A space elevator occupies the height of the frame, consisting of a base, a cable extending out into space, and an elevator unit with standard elevator features such as sliding doors and up\/down buttons. A banner flutters in the breeze attached to the cable going up above the elevator. There is text on the banner. Text appear in four lines split across the elevator cable itself, the rhyming portions of the text is on the right side of the cable. Five individuals stand at the base of the elevator. To the left are Megan, a Cueball-like guy with his arms raised, and Ponytail, who is holding a bottle of champagne\/sparkling wine which is bubbling out down the neck of the bottle. To the right is Black Hat, who cuts the cable with a pruning shear like it was part of the ceremony as a ribbon cutting. Finally further right is Cueball who sees what Black Hat is doing. He is very alarmed holding a hand to his mouth while holding the other out towards Black Hat.]\nBanner: Space Elevator Banner: Grand opening\nAfter countless engineers spend trillions over fifty years, a modern babel disappears because some fuck brought pruning shears.\nPruning shears: Snip Cueball: !!\n","explanation":"Tensile strength represents how hard you can pull on something without it breaking. Shear strength represents how hard you can try to cut it without it breaking. Many materials have great tensile strength but low shear strength (such as dental floss \u2014 try to break it by just pulling on two ends), including whatever this space elevator is made of. The material clearly has extremely high tensile strength because it can hold the elevator in place, with one end on the ground and one in space, but it can be cut with a simple pair of pruning shears. This also highlights the fact that \"shear strength\" and \"shears\" are etymologically related .\nA space elevator is a proposed construction that would make space travel easier. It consists of a long string attached to the Earth (near equator) on one end and a counterweight (beyond the geostationary orbit ) on the other end, kept taut and in one place by the gravity and centrifugal forces. This would make it possible to carry spacecraft into the orbit by simple mechanical means, as opposed to requiring the use of rockets as is the case nowadays, saving a lot of energy and resources.\nThe phrase \"a modern Babel\" refers to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (later referenced in 2421: Tower of Babel ), in which humans endeavor to build a tower reaching heaven. Their arrogance angers God and prompts him to sabotage the project. A space elevator can be seen as a modern equivalent of a tower to heaven. [ citation needed ] Additionally, the expression \"a modern Babel\" may be used figuratively to describe huge projects (especially buildings or human-made structures) that fail because they are too ambitious.\nThe title text makes the point that even before Black Hat cut the space elevator's cable in two, it was ruined by the holes in it for the banner. The holes would reduce the surface area of the cross section of the pole, reducing its ability to keep the elevator attached to the ground. The flag and holes would also potentially make it impossible for the elevator to travel up the pole, making the entire elevator useless.\n[A space elevator occupies the height of the frame, consisting of a base, a cable extending out into space, and an elevator unit with standard elevator features such as sliding doors and up\/down buttons. A banner flutters in the breeze attached to the cable going up above the elevator. There is text on the banner. Text appear in four lines split across the elevator cable itself, the rhyming portions of the text is on the right side of the cable. Five individuals stand at the base of the elevator. To the left are Megan, a Cueball-like guy with his arms raised, and Ponytail, who is holding a bottle of champagne\/sparkling wine which is bubbling out down the neck of the bottle. To the right is Black Hat, who cuts the cable with a pruning shear like it was part of the ceremony as a ribbon cutting. Finally further right is Cueball who sees what Black Hat is doing. He is very alarmed holding a hand to his mouth while holding the other out towards Black Hat.]\nBanner: Space Elevator Banner: Grand opening\nAfter countless engineers spend trillions over fifty years, a modern babel disappears because some fuck brought pruning shears.\nPruning shears: Snip Cueball: !!\n"}
{"id":698,"title":"You Hang Up First","image_title":"You Hang Up First","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/698","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/you_hang_up_first.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/698:_You_Hang_Up_First","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting on a bed, on the phone.] Cueball: You hang up first.\n[Megan is lying on a bed, on the phone.] Megan: No, you hang up first.\nCueball: No, you hang up first.\nMegan: No, you fucking hang up first!\nCueball: You hang up first, or we're OVER!\nMegan: Then I guess we're fucking OVER!\nCueball: FINE!\nMegan: ...\nCueball: ...\nMegan: You move on and find somebody else first.\n","explanation":"Telephone conversations end when someone hangs up. There's a traditional cliche of young romantic partners, both of whom are so besotted that they can't bear to hang up on the other. As a result, the end of the call devolves into a cycle where each one teasingly insists that the other one hang up first.  It's a sweet, if somewhat mawkish display of how infatuated they are with each other.\nAs xkcd often does, this comic takes the cliche to its logical extreme with Cueball and Megan , by turning it into an argument resulting in their breakup. What's normally a cutesy game between lovers becomes a battle of wills, leading them to break up because neither is willing to back down.  And then, even after they break up, both are still unwilling to back down, with Megan insisting that Cueball \"move on and find somebody else first.\"\n[Cueball is sitting on a bed, on the phone.] Cueball: You hang up first.\n[Megan is lying on a bed, on the phone.] Megan: No, you hang up first.\nCueball: No, you hang up first.\nMegan: No, you fucking hang up first!\nCueball: You hang up first, or we're OVER!\nMegan: Then I guess we're fucking OVER!\nCueball: FINE!\nMegan: ...\nCueball: ...\nMegan: You move on and find somebody else first.\n"}
{"id":699,"title":"Trimester","image_title":"Trimester","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/699","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trimester.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/699:_Trimester","transcript":"[Cueball is wearing a lab coat, and talking to Megan, who is sitting on a desk. He also has a clipboard.] Cueball: Well, until the second trimester, the baby hasn't decided which opening it will exit through. Megan: What? Cueball: We'll hope for one of the lower ones, so it won't be fighting gravity. [Caption below the panel:] Did you know you can just BUY lab coats?\n","explanation":"Some pregnancies are different than others, but a universal truth except in cases of Cesarean section is that a baby will always exit a woman's body through the vagina. Cueball is wearing a white lab coat and holding a clipboard, looking like a doctor, telling Megan that until the second trimester, the baby may decide instead to exit through any opening, including the mouth, anus, nose, navel, etc. This does not normally happen in real life. [ citation needed ] The caption reveals the truth, that Cueball simply bought the lab coat, he is not a doctor, and is either pranking Megan, or is impersonating a physician for some other reason.\nThe expectation that a person in a white coat is a medical expert, or at least a scientist, can be seen in the studies of the placebo effect: people who receive a \"sugar pill\" from a person who has the authority implied by wearing a lab coat will experience a greater placebo effect than those who receive identical pills from a person in mufti . This leads to more doctors wearing a white coat while working, and due to that a reinforcement of the expectation of white coats belonging to doctors. In some medical schools students receive a white coat as part of their graduation and qualification ceremony.\nThe title text implies also that in addition to faking being a doctor, he has also faked being a Nobel laureate, on the logic that people will not choose to verify this claim.\n[Cueball is wearing a lab coat, and talking to Megan, who is sitting on a desk. He also has a clipboard.] Cueball: Well, until the second trimester, the baby hasn't decided which opening it will exit through. Megan: What? Cueball: We'll hope for one of the lower ones, so it won't be fighting gravity. [Caption below the panel:] Did you know you can just BUY lab coats?\n"}
{"id":700,"title":"Complexion","image_title":"Complexion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/700","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/complexion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/700:_Complexion","transcript":"I get frustrated trying to judge whether acne creams are having any effect. In the spirit of a controlled trial, I used one on just half my face for a few weeks. [A graph shows pimples vs. time, with two lines: one remains one steady, and one is declining.]\nIt was cool seeing the effects so clearly, so I got some friends to try different treatments in an impromptu study. [Cueball looks in a mirror, sees a half-pimpled face, and applies a treatment.]\n[Cueball is talking to Ponytail and Megan, each with some pimples also.] Cueball: Okay, you try the salicylic acid first. Ponytail: Wait, we should randomize the trials. Got a coin?\nCueball: Okay, call it. Heads, she gets the- (Off-panel): YOU!\n[Batman runs into frame and punches Cueball. The coin goes flying.]\n","explanation":"Cueball suffers from acne . Like many others afflicted with the same condition, he uses skin care products designed to treat acne. Unlike most other people, he does his own controlled trial by using them on only one half of his face and measuring the effects; the blemishes on the treated half of his face are noticeably diminished, while the untreated half remains the same, allowing him to isolate the effects of the cream versus the effects of time.\nHe convinces his friends to try the same experiment with different treatments so they can find out which works the best. In order to properly randomize the trials, he flips a coin. However, because half of his face is \"scarred\" (with acne blemishes), he's flipping a coin, and appears to be threatening someone with acid, he's mistaken for the Batman villain Two-Face . (Two-Face flips a coin to decide whether his victims will live or die, and was badly burned by acid on exactly one half of his face.) Cueball is subsequently punched by Batman; the title-text implies this has happened before.\nSalicylic acid and benzoyl peroxide are both chemicals known for their skin care effects (salicylic acid in particular is also used to treat psoriasis ).\nI get frustrated trying to judge whether acne creams are having any effect. In the spirit of a controlled trial, I used one on just half my face for a few weeks. [A graph shows pimples vs. time, with two lines: one remains one steady, and one is declining.]\nIt was cool seeing the effects so clearly, so I got some friends to try different treatments in an impromptu study. [Cueball looks in a mirror, sees a half-pimpled face, and applies a treatment.]\n[Cueball is talking to Ponytail and Megan, each with some pimples also.] Cueball: Okay, you try the salicylic acid first. Ponytail: Wait, we should randomize the trials. Got a coin?\nCueball: Okay, call it. Heads, she gets the- (Off-panel): YOU!\n[Batman runs into frame and punches Cueball. The coin goes flying.]\n"}
{"id":701,"title":"Science Valentine","image_title":"Science Valentine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/701","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/science_valentine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/701:_Science_Valentine","transcript":"I wanted to make you a science valentine with charts and graphs of my feelings for you. [A graph shows romance and happiness. Romance cuts off, indicating a breakup before the meeting of Cueball and his current significant other, and happiness dips accordingly. A line indicates where the couple first met; romance is jagged thereafter, initially upwards but later down. Happiness climbs slightly more steadily and then dips again. More lines indicate a period of dating and then one of engagement.] and the happiness you've brought me.\nBut the more I analyzed [Cueball works at a computer.] r 0 = 0.20 r 1 = -0.61 r 2 = -0.83 the harder it became to defend my hypothesis.\nIn science, you can't publish results you know are wrong and you can't withhold them because they're not the ones you wanted.\nSo I was left with a question: do I make graphs because they're cute and funny, [Cueball sits, looking at a sheet of paper.] or am I a scientist?\nEnclosed are my results. I hope you can find somebody else [A jagged, declining graph is superimposed over a red heart.] to be your valentine.\n","explanation":"Cueball is taking a scientific approach to creating a valentine card. Based on the first chart, the recipient is his fianc\u00e9e since he noted major events (first meeting and engaged, thus they are not married yet, or it should have been noted on the graph). The labels of a heart and smiley represent Cueball's feelings for her and happiness accordingly. This implies that Cueball had love and feelings for someone else before he first met the love he is breaking up with. While they were dating, the feelings and happiness levels were very unstable, as is expected for any new relationship. That later dropped to current levels, probably due to Cueball's lack of love towards her.\nIn the second panel, there are variables r 0 , r 1 , r 2 , each value at 0.20, -0.61, -0.83 accordingly. Given their names and values between -1 and 1, these are probably correlation coefficients . If they are based on the data in the graph in the preceding frame, they could compare how well one of the variables correlates with time passed since the relationship. For example, if they are based on the heart line, they could measure the correlation between heart (Cueball's feelings for his fianc\u00e9e) and time, being a weak positive correlation for the first period (0.20), a moderate negative correlation for the second period (-0.61), and a strong negative correlation for the third period (-0.83). Alternatively, they could be comparing the correlation for the accumulated periods, 0.20 for the first, -0.61 for the first and second, -0.83 for all three. Either way, it looks like there becomes a strong negative association between times passed and Cueball's love. The same reasoning would apply if the values are based on the smiley (Cueball's happiness) line.\nThe text in the space between 2nd and 3rd panels show that Randall Munroe is against scientific misconduct . It also shows that Cueball's rigorous approach makes him realize that the happiness he derives from the relationship is declining, which presents him with a choice. Will he be a true scientist by accepting data that he doesn't like, or will he be romantic and just make a cute card?\nThe last panel is a parody of a broken(torn) heart, a common symbol used to represent people falling out of love. The line could be interpreted as a graph of the amount of love between the two or a literal tearing of the heart in two.\nHe decides that he is a scientist and so presents his significant other with a breakup valentine even though he originally intended it as a confirmation of their love.\nThe comic may be intended as a cautionary tale to new scientists; while the graph in the leftmost panel shows an apparent correlation between Cueball's love and his happiness, and it shows his happiness is lower than it might be expected to be without his partner, it fails to show that the falling love effects falling happiness-- it may be the case that falling happiness effects falling love, or that both happiness and love are affected by an unidentified factor.  For example, temporary external crises may be weighing on Cueball's relationship as well as his happiness.\nThe title text seems to be him trying to console himself that he did the right thing. You should not use science to prove that your theory is right, but to find out which theory is the right one!\nI wanted to make you a science valentine with charts and graphs of my feelings for you. [A graph shows romance and happiness. Romance cuts off, indicating a breakup before the meeting of Cueball and his current significant other, and happiness dips accordingly. A line indicates where the couple first met; romance is jagged thereafter, initially upwards but later down. Happiness climbs slightly more steadily and then dips again. More lines indicate a period of dating and then one of engagement.] and the happiness you've brought me.\nBut the more I analyzed [Cueball works at a computer.] r 0 = 0.20 r 1 = -0.61 r 2 = -0.83 the harder it became to defend my hypothesis.\nIn science, you can't publish results you know are wrong and you can't withhold them because they're not the ones you wanted.\nSo I was left with a question: do I make graphs because they're cute and funny, [Cueball sits, looking at a sheet of paper.] or am I a scientist?\nEnclosed are my results. I hope you can find somebody else [A jagged, declining graph is superimposed over a red heart.] to be your valentine.\n"}
{"id":702,"title":"Snow Tracking","image_title":"Snow Tracking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/702","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snow_tracking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/702:_Snow_Tracking","transcript":"BACKYARD SNOW TRACKING GUIDE\n[Each panel contains an overhead view of tracks through the snow, with a caption indicating the apparent source.]\n[Standard paw prints through the snow.] CAT\n[Large split-toe tracks and smaller rodent tracks.] MOOSE AND SQUIRREL\n[Cat prints, but with more space between the pairs of prints.] LONGCAT\n[Two similar careening tire tracks.] MOUSE RIDING BICYCLE\n[Longer tracks, with a large melted ring surrounding a point in the middle of the frame.] RABBIT STOPPING TO USE HAIR DRYER\n[No visible tracks.] LEGOLAS\n[Single deep holes with cratering.] BOBCAT ON POGO STICK\n[Round prints that suddenly turn to the right halfway into frame.] KNIGHT\n[Human footprints up to a square melting pattern, turning into animal prints.] KID WITH TRANSMOGRIFIER\n[Human footprints up to a rectangular melted area, which are then doubled to another rectangular area, which are then doubled again up to another rectangular area, which are then doubled.] KID WITH DUPLICATOR\n[Right curve on a road, with tire tracks careening out of frame.] Out of Frame Garden Owner: MY VEGETABLE GARDEN! PRIUS\n[A series of spiraling and outwardly traveling lines extend from a point in the middle of the frame.] HIGGS BOSON\n","explanation":"This comic is a guide to recognizing various animals by their footprints. However, the comic typically detours into strange, ridiculous or pop-culture-referencing footprints. In order:\nBACKYARD SNOW TRACKING GUIDE\n[Each panel contains an overhead view of tracks through the snow, with a caption indicating the apparent source.]\n[Standard paw prints through the snow.] CAT\n[Large split-toe tracks and smaller rodent tracks.] MOOSE AND SQUIRREL\n[Cat prints, but with more space between the pairs of prints.] LONGCAT\n[Two similar careening tire tracks.] MOUSE RIDING BICYCLE\n[Longer tracks, with a large melted ring surrounding a point in the middle of the frame.] RABBIT STOPPING TO USE HAIR DRYER\n[No visible tracks.] LEGOLAS\n[Single deep holes with cratering.] BOBCAT ON POGO STICK\n[Round prints that suddenly turn to the right halfway into frame.] KNIGHT\n[Human footprints up to a square melting pattern, turning into animal prints.] KID WITH TRANSMOGRIFIER\n[Human footprints up to a rectangular melted area, which are then doubled to another rectangular area, which are then doubled again up to another rectangular area, which are then doubled.] KID WITH DUPLICATOR\n[Right curve on a road, with tire tracks careening out of frame.] Out of Frame Garden Owner: MY VEGETABLE GARDEN! PRIUS\n[A series of spiraling and outwardly traveling lines extend from a point in the middle of the frame.] HIGGS BOSON\n"}
{"id":703,"title":"Honor Societies","image_title":"Honor Societies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/703","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/honor_societies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/703:_Honor_Societies","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk, while someone off-screen answers his question.] Cueball: Wait. I should join this honor society to show colleges I'm honorable, and I'm honorable because I'm in an honor society? Off-screen voice: Basically, yes.\n[Close up of Cueball.] Cueball: Sounds like I could save time by joining the Tautology Club directly. Off-screen voice: That's not a real club. Cueball: Then I'm starting it.\n[Inserted in a frame crossing the top of the third panel's frame is a caption. Cueball is standing on a podium in the right part of the panel speaking. From left to right we find Ponytail, a Cueball-like guy, a short guy with glasses, a buzz cut version of Hairy, Science Girl, and to the right of Cueball, a woman that looks like Megan although with an uncharacteristically white stripe in her hair.] Caption: Tautology Club: Ponytail: So how'd you learn about us? Cueball-like guy: From your Facebook group, \"If 1,000,000 People Join This Group, It Will Have 1,000,000 People In It.\" Cueball: Listen up! The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.\n","explanation":"Cueball has apparently been invited to join an honor society , but he considers the reason he should join to be a circular argument: because honorable people are in honor societies and people who are in honor societies are supposedly honorable. He objects that this is a tautology : a claim that something is true because it is true (and thus a meaningless claim). From this, he concludes that he might as well be in a \"tautology club\" and then starts one. Thus Randall mocks honor society clubs for being pointless.\nIn the final panel where Cueball has formed the club, Ponytail asks a new member (a Cueball-like guy) how he found out about them and he tells about their Facebook page. The reference to Facebook mocks Facebook groups whose names refer to a number of members they hope to attract (such as I Bet I Can Find 1,000,000 People Who Dislike Romanian Dog Abusers ), usually ostensibly to raise awareness for some issue but perhaps in fact just for the ego-stroking pleasure of amassing a large number of followers. Tautology Club employs this tactic only for the sake of creating yet another tautology.\nCueball is listing the rules of the club from a podium. The phrase \"The first rule of _______ Club\" is a reference to the 1999 movie Fight Club (see also 922: Fight Club ), which contains the famous line \"The first rule of Fight Club is 'You do not talk about Fight Club,'\" a reference to the club's intended secrecy. This phrase has been appropriated for myriad other varieties and parodies, such as the one mentioned in the comic.\nThe short guy with glasses could be Jason Fox from the FoxTrot comic (see the first two frames of 824: Guest Week: Bill Amend (FoxTrot) .) Although it takes a little imagination to see, the hair, the height, the glasses, and the geek factor fits. Three of the other characters from the audience look like regular characters but with slightly different hairstyles than usual. There is a buzz cut version of Hairy , a curly-haired version of Hairbun with a ponytail ( Science Girl ), and Megan is drawn with an uncharacteristically white stripe in her hair.\nThe answer to the title text would also be a tautology: he gets to be the president because he is the president.\nTautologies were mentioned again in 1310: Goldbach Conjectures .  Tautology Club was mentioned in 1602: Linguistics Club .\n[Cueball sits at a desk, while someone off-screen answers his question.] Cueball: Wait. I should join this honor society to show colleges I'm honorable, and I'm honorable because I'm in an honor society? Off-screen voice: Basically, yes.\n[Close up of Cueball.] Cueball: Sounds like I could save time by joining the Tautology Club directly. Off-screen voice: That's not a real club. Cueball: Then I'm starting it.\n[Inserted in a frame crossing the top of the third panel's frame is a caption. Cueball is standing on a podium in the right part of the panel speaking. From left to right we find Ponytail, a Cueball-like guy, a short guy with glasses, a buzz cut version of Hairy, Science Girl, and to the right of Cueball, a woman that looks like Megan although with an uncharacteristically white stripe in her hair.] Caption: Tautology Club: Ponytail: So how'd you learn about us? Cueball-like guy: From your Facebook group, \"If 1,000,000 People Join This Group, It Will Have 1,000,000 People In It.\" Cueball: Listen up! The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.\n"}
{"id":704,"title":"Principle of Explosion","image_title":"Principle of Explosion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/704","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/principle_of_explosion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/704:_Principle_of_Explosion","transcript":"[Cueball's Cueball-like friend is talking to him.] Friend: If you assume contradictory axioms, you can derive anything. It's called the principle of explosion. Cueball: Anything? Lemme try.\n[Cueball is writing on a piece of paper on a desk.]\n[Cueball is holding up a piece of paper to his friend, while holding a phone.] Cueball: Hey, you're right! I started with P\u2227 \u00ac P and derived your mom's phone number! Friend: That's not how that works.\n[The friend is looking at the piece of paper, while Cueball is talking to someone on a phone. The desk from before can be seen to the right.] Cueball: Mrs. Lenhart? Friend: Wait, this is her number! How\u2014 Cueball: Hi, I'm a friend of\u2014 Why, yes, I am free tonight! Friend: Mom! Cueball: No, box wine sounds lovely!\n","explanation":"Cueball's friend (who also looks like Cueball) explains the principle of explosion , a classical theorem of logic, which shows that if within a system of logic you can use the axioms and rules of deduction to derive (prove) a contradiction, it then becomes possible to derive any statement at all within that system (whether it\u2019s actually true or not). In particular, if you start by assuming a self-contradictory statement, you can derive anything.\nCueball then proceeds to misinterpret (perhaps intentionally) that you can derive any fact about the physical world. His formula of propositional logic in the third panel reads \" P and not P \", where \u2227 is the formal logic symbol for \"and\" and \u00ac is the symbol for \"not\". P stands for a proposition. As \" P and not P \" is shorthand for \" P is both true and false\", this forms a contradiction from which the principle of explosion can begin. Humorously and to his friend's bewilderment he then successfully manages to 'derive' the phone number for his friend's mom.\nAn example from math : If you assume that \u221a2 is a rational number, you can 'prove' things that are obviously false, such as the fact that some numbers must be both even and odd. Consequently, you can draw the conclusion that \u221a2 must be an irrational number (provided such a thing exists at all! - luckily, it does and obeys the same calculation rules as for rational numbers; this is how proof by contradiction works.)\nThis can be seen in a Truth Table :\nP \u00acP P \u2227 \u00acP P \u2227 \u00acP \u21d2 Q T F F T F T F T\nThe formula P \u2227 \u00acP \u21d2 Q is true in every possible interpretation. No matter what propositions are substituted for P and Q the implication is true. So if a single example of a contradiction were found, then every proposition would be true, (and simultaneously false).\nAfter deriving the phone number Cueball instantly calls his friend's mom, who turns out to be Mrs. Lenhart . She asks Cueball out, without any preamble, to his friend's vexation. It does not get better when it is obvious that she wishes to drink \"cheap\" boxed wine with him, and Cueball is free tonight! There is definitely a hint of Mrs. Robinson over Mrs. Lenhart here.\nIn the title text we hear more of Cueball's (one-sided) conversation with Mrs. Lenhart. She asks him to pick up waffle cones, a variety of ice cream cone . And when he sounds bewildered by this she explains that it is for drinking the wine. This is probably not a very good idea, since waffles are typically not water proof and would also dissolve into the wine. But it could also be considered kinky; something Mrs. Lenhart's son would not like to hear about. The rest of the title text is just more of the main comic's derivation joke, since Cueball will use a second to derive her son's credit card number, so he can buy the cones at his expense.\nIn reality, Cueball really could start with the principle of explosion and \"prove\" a statement such as \"Mrs. Lenhart's phone number is 867-5309 \", but the same could be said of any conceivable phone number, most of which don't actually belong to Mrs. Lenhart, and because his axiom system is inconsistent, he has no way of knowing which is correct. Likewise for his friend's credit card number. Much like The Library of Babel , an axiom system which can prove any statement might as well prove nothing. Perhaps Cueball already knows these phone and credit card numbers, and is just talking about the principle of explosion to mess with his friend.\n[Cueball's Cueball-like friend is talking to him.] Friend: If you assume contradictory axioms, you can derive anything. It's called the principle of explosion. Cueball: Anything? Lemme try.\n[Cueball is writing on a piece of paper on a desk.]\n[Cueball is holding up a piece of paper to his friend, while holding a phone.] Cueball: Hey, you're right! I started with P\u2227 \u00ac P and derived your mom's phone number! Friend: That's not how that works.\n[The friend is looking at the piece of paper, while Cueball is talking to someone on a phone. The desk from before can be seen to the right.] Cueball: Mrs. Lenhart? Friend: Wait, this is her number! How\u2014 Cueball: Hi, I'm a friend of\u2014 Why, yes, I am free tonight! Friend: Mom! Cueball: No, box wine sounds lovely!\n"}
{"id":705,"title":"Devotion to Duty","image_title":"Devotion to Duty","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/705","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/devotion_to_duty.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/705:_Devotion_to_Duty","transcript":"[Bearded criminal is holding a pistol and talking on a mobile phone.] Criminal: We took the hostages, secured the building and cut the communication lines like you said. Phone: Excellent.\n[Still talking on the phone, waving gun around in the air animatedly.] Criminal: But then this guy climbed up the ventilation ducts and walked across broken glass, killing anyone we sent to stop him.\nPhone: And he rescued the hostages?\n[Criminal looking confused and defeated, shoulders hunched and pistol hanging limply at his side.] Criminal: No, he ignored them. He just reconnected the cables we cut, muttering something about \"uptime\". Phone: Shit, we're dealing with a sysadmin .\nThis comic was made into a shirt in the xkcd store, which includes a new illustration on the back.\n","explanation":"In this comic, we see a man talking on a phone. We are unsure of his aims (terrorism, robbery, etc.) but he has taken hostages and cut all links to the outside world, in order to control the situation and prevent the police from observing the interior of the building (as popularly depicted in film and television). Initially, the villains seem to have everything under their control, but then the hostage-taker explains on the phone that someone has entered the building, climbed the air vents to bypass their cordon, effortlessly killing other hostage-takers (who are likely hardened killers with weaponry) on his way to the server room and then ignored the hostages, preferring instead to reconnect the servers to the outside world. The hostage-taker is evidently puzzled by this and explains it to the person on the other end of the phone, who immediately recognizes the reason: the man that entered the building is a sysadmin (short for system administrator ), and he is concerned that his servers are losing uptime (time spent running or connected to the internet). This evidently concerns the man on the phone, who knows that a good sysadmin is an unstoppable force once started!\nThis comic is a reference to one of two things (or both): the Hollywood depiction of heroes able to perform superhuman feats in tricky situations (such as John McClane in Die Hard , which the first two panels are a deliberate reference to), or the duty that people impose upon themselves to go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that they carry out their work (in this case a dutiful sysadmin, concerned for those trying to use his server).\nThe title text is a simple joke about the fact that the sysadmin will crawl through broken glass and defeat criminals\/terrorists (forces of darkness) just so a cat blog (where owners write about their cats) can stay up. This creates a humorous contrast between the seriousness with which large websites treat issues like uptime and business continuity and the often mundane and banal uses people actually have for them.\nA sysadmin is also mentioned in the title text of 309: Shopping Teams and in 1305: Undocumented Feature .\n[Bearded criminal is holding a pistol and talking on a mobile phone.] Criminal: We took the hostages, secured the building and cut the communication lines like you said. Phone: Excellent.\n[Still talking on the phone, waving gun around in the air animatedly.] Criminal: But then this guy climbed up the ventilation ducts and walked across broken glass, killing anyone we sent to stop him.\nPhone: And he rescued the hostages?\n[Criminal looking confused and defeated, shoulders hunched and pistol hanging limply at his side.] Criminal: No, he ignored them. He just reconnected the cables we cut, muttering something about \"uptime\". Phone: Shit, we're dealing with a sysadmin .\nThis comic was made into a shirt in the xkcd store, which includes a new illustration on the back.\n"}
{"id":706,"title":"Freedom","image_title":"Freedom","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/706","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/freedom.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/706:_Freedom","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to his Cueball like friend.] Cueball: Sometimes I'm shocked to realize how many options I have. Friend: Oh?\n[The text is written above a half height frame with a zoom in on Cueball who shakes his fist.] Cueball: Like, at any moment in any conversation, I could just punch the person I was talking to, and all these potentially life-changing events would unfold.\n[Zoom further out than the first panel with Cueball holding his arms out and his friends taking his hand to his chin.] Cueball: It's only my mental rules that stop me from punching you, or stripping naked, or getting on a plane to Fiji. Sure, rules have reasons. But shouldn't you exercise that freedom at least once before you die? Friend: Hmm.\n[In very big black letters written vertically between the two panels:] WHAM\n[Cueball is knocked to the ground, dazed (three stars over his head) and bruised while his friend is looking down at him with his fist raised.] Cueball: Okay, I should have seen that coming. Friend: But you couldn't! That's the beauty!\n\"Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.\"\n","explanation":"Cueball on the left, here most likely representing Randall as given in the title text, comments on the absence of physical enforcement for social norms . He tells his friend that he is  sometimes shocked to realize how many options he has. Cueball then goes through a list of possible things he could do that only his conscience and learned social norms (and his cerebrum) prevent him from doing, including stripping naked, taking a plane to Fiji or just punching his conversation partner for no reason at all, with all the \"interesting\" ensuing events that would result, potentially life changing (he could go to prison for instance).\nCueball continues, explaining that he does understand the mental rules and also the reason, but also that at least once in his life he should exercise that \"freedom\", hence the title. This is enough to convince his friend who promptly exercises his option to punch Cueball in the face, perfectly in keeping with Cueball's beliefs of how everyone should do so at least once.\nOn the ground, Cueball remarks that he should have expected this reaction. That he didn't was the beauty of it all, his friend states, because only when the \"freedom\" is used to do something completely unexpected could the person doing so denounce his mental ruleset.\nThe title text is a restatement of the first line of the comment, but reversed to show that Randall is terrified about his realization that the same freedoms apply to other people. This is justified by the comic, as some of these people could engage in actions detrimental to others, as Cueball's friend demonstrates; combined with the fact that there are many other people, [ citation needed ] that makes for a lot of unpredictable possible situations.\n[Cueball is talking to his Cueball like friend.] Cueball: Sometimes I'm shocked to realize how many options I have. Friend: Oh?\n[The text is written above a half height frame with a zoom in on Cueball who shakes his fist.] Cueball: Like, at any moment in any conversation, I could just punch the person I was talking to, and all these potentially life-changing events would unfold.\n[Zoom further out than the first panel with Cueball holding his arms out and his friends taking his hand to his chin.] Cueball: It's only my mental rules that stop me from punching you, or stripping naked, or getting on a plane to Fiji. Sure, rules have reasons. But shouldn't you exercise that freedom at least once before you die? Friend: Hmm.\n[In very big black letters written vertically between the two panels:] WHAM\n[Cueball is knocked to the ground, dazed (three stars over his head) and bruised while his friend is looking down at him with his fist raised.] Cueball: Okay, I should have seen that coming. Friend: But you couldn't! That's the beauty!\n\"Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.\"\n"}
{"id":707,"title":"Joshing","image_title":"Joshing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/707","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/joshing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/707:_Joshing","transcript":"Cueball: So, is the new project going forward? Friend: I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!\n[The men laugh cautiously.]\n[The men resume conversation.] Friend: I mean, kill you even sooner.\n","explanation":"\"I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you\" is a flippant response to a question that's been around at least since the movie Top Gun , and has entered regular use in the English speaking world, even among people who don't know its origin.\nThe Cueball uses the line here, but the joke is that he actually is planning to kill the other one, and if he answered the question he'd have to kill him even sooner.\nAccording to the title text, he'd go from #49 on his hit list (which apparently includes an approximation of the entire world population) to #31.\nThe title 'Joshing' refers to the colloquial American verb 'to josh', meaning to joke with.\nCueball: So, is the new project going forward? Friend: I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!\n[The men laugh cautiously.]\n[The men resume conversation.] Friend: I mean, kill you even sooner.\n"}
{"id":708,"title":"Sex Dice","image_title":"Sex Dice","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/708","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sex_dice.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/708:_Sex_Dice","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan kneel on a bed, Cueball, on the foot of the bed, is shaking a cup of dice. Behind Megan is a pillow and the bed poles.] Cueball: All right, baby. Get ready for... Shake shake shake roll\n[There is no frame around the next drawing of the two dice that have been rolled. The first is a regular five (seen almost from the top, but the sides with one and three can be seen). The second die has text written on it:] Breasts\n[Cueball and Megan are bent over the dice lying on the bed staring at them. Beat panel.]\n[Cueball leans back on one hand while taking the other to his chin while Megan sits straighter.] Cueball: I really need to organize the game cupboard. Megan: Wait, so where's the other sex die?\n[A Cueball-like guy lies on his stomach, and another Cueball-like guy sits to the left. Hairbun is sitting and Ponytail also lying on her stomach, hands beneath her chin. They are sitting\/lying down around a game board. On the board is what appears to be two dice.] Guy lying: I... fondle the castle guard? That doesn't seem right. Hairbun: It did 6 damage, though.\n","explanation":"Sex dice consist of two dice, one listing various actions, and one listing various body parts ( sometimes a third specifying a manner in which the action should be done). Roll the dice, do the specified action to the specified body part, repeat as necessary.\nBecause most games require the same dice, in many peoples' game collections, the dice get mixed around between games. Unfortunately it seems Cueball and Megan have accidentally exchanged one of their sex dice (the one that contains actions) with a normal six-sided die; as a result, the people playing a role-playing game in the last panel find themselves doing unusual actions.\nGiven the situation, it's likely the player who fondled the guard was supposed to roll 2 or 3 six-sided dice to determine the damage of his attack. The sex die came up as \"fondle,\" while the other dice added up to six; hence, he fondled the guard for 6 damage.\nThe title text is another possible situation that might arise: \"rolling for initiative \" in role-playing games is how the players determine who attacks in what order during combat. Here, the player rolled the sex die as part of his initiative roll, and therefore \"took initiative\" in an entirely different way.\nTypically the missing sex dice will show different actions like these: Blow, bite, nip, lick, pat or suck (from a set that did not include fondle). The other dice with places on the body like breasts might also have these options: Ass, thigh, ear, navel or lips. Other dice may show positions to use, like doggy style, or places in the house on which to perform these, as in the kitchen. It is a little difficult to imagine any of the actions mentioned above resulting in the response in the title text: Wow, do you ever take it. Maybe there are other types of dice, but they are not easily found with a Google search...\n[Cueball and Megan kneel on a bed, Cueball, on the foot of the bed, is shaking a cup of dice. Behind Megan is a pillow and the bed poles.] Cueball: All right, baby. Get ready for... Shake shake shake roll\n[There is no frame around the next drawing of the two dice that have been rolled. The first is a regular five (seen almost from the top, but the sides with one and three can be seen). The second die has text written on it:] Breasts\n[Cueball and Megan are bent over the dice lying on the bed staring at them. Beat panel.]\n[Cueball leans back on one hand while taking the other to his chin while Megan sits straighter.] Cueball: I really need to organize the game cupboard. Megan: Wait, so where's the other sex die?\n[A Cueball-like guy lies on his stomach, and another Cueball-like guy sits to the left. Hairbun is sitting and Ponytail also lying on her stomach, hands beneath her chin. They are sitting\/lying down around a game board. On the board is what appears to be two dice.] Guy lying: I... fondle the castle guard? That doesn't seem right. Hairbun: It did 6 damage, though.\n"}
{"id":709,"title":"I Am","image_title":"I Am","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/709","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_am.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/709:_I_Am","transcript":"[The Burning Bush of Exodus fame speaks to Moses, who is shielding himself with his arm, as if a great gust of wind is overtaking him.] Bush: I AM THAT I AM, THE LORD YOUR GOD AND THE GOD OF YOUR FATHERS, OF ABRAHAM, OF ISAAC, AND OF JACOB. [A droid comes into frame, Moses looks down at it.] Bush: AND THIS IS MY COUNTERPART, R2-D2. BLEEP BLOOP","explanation":"In the Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible , God announces his presence to Moses by way of a burning bush . The quotation in this comic is a combination of Exodus 3:14 - \"I am that I am\", and Exodus 3:16 - \"I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.\"\nThe punchline comes when God introduces his \"counterpart, R2-D2 \", implying that the \"god\" in this case is not actually the God of the Jews as expected, but rather C-3PO , a droid from the Star Wars universe; theoretically, in the mind of the reader, God's voice might humorously go from booming and sepulchral in the first frame, to snooty and British in the second frame.  It could be a reference to a plot point from Return of the Jedi , in which the Ewoks believe C-3PO is a god .  (In the movie, C-3PO states that it's against his programming to \"impersonate a deity \", but he does so anyway; whether it's actually a violation of his programming is debatable .)\nThe joke is that \"I AM\", the name of God in the Bible, is represented in Hebrew by the Tetragrammaton , YHWH. This abbreviation coincidentally [ citation needed ] follows the 4-character naming convention of Star Wars droid characters such as C-3PO and R2-D2 and, like the latter, contains identical characters in the 2nd and 4th positions. (In English translations of the text, this is the part rendered as \"LORD\" in capitals.)\nIn the title text, \"LO-M\" refers to the LOM , a model of protocol droid in the Star Wars universe similar to the 3PO model; \"L-O-M\" sounds like \" Elohim \", a Hebrew word for \"God\". Bocce refers to a language that Owen Lars wanted his protocol droid to be able to speak; C-3PO claimed that it was \"like a second language to me\" .\n[The Burning Bush of Exodus fame speaks to Moses, who is shielding himself with his arm, as if a great gust of wind is overtaking him.] Bush: I AM THAT I AM, THE LORD YOUR GOD AND THE GOD OF YOUR FATHERS, OF ABRAHAM, OF ISAAC, AND OF JACOB. [A droid comes into frame, Moses looks down at it.] Bush: AND THIS IS MY COUNTERPART, R2-D2. BLEEP BLOOP"}
{"id":710,"title":"Collatz Conjecture","image_title":"Collatz Conjecture","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/710","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/collatz_conjecture.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/710:_Collatz_Conjecture","transcript":"[Cueball sits in a chair at a desk, papers piled on top, writing furiously. Depicted above are apparently the writing, a series of nodes in various Collatz sequences (starting with 7, 21, 24, 29, 106, 176 and 256), all eventually leading back to 1.] The Collatz Conjecture states that if you pick a number, and if it's even divide it by two and if it's odd multiply it by three and add one, and you repeat this procedure long enough, eventually your friends will stop calling to see if you want to hang out.\n","explanation":"The Collatz conjecture is a longstanding unsolved problem in mathematics. It states that repeating the sequence of operations described in the comic will eventually lead to the number 1. The description in the comic starts out accurate, then veers into the joke.\nThe comic illustrates the sequence with a graph in which an arrow connects each number to its successor. For example, the number 22 is even, so the next number in the sequence is 22 \u00f7 2 = 11, and there is an arrow from 22 to 11. On the other hand, 11 is odd, so the next number is 3 \u00d7 11 + 1 = 34, and there is an arrow from 11 to 34.\nAccording to the caption, Cueball is obsessively writing out the graph by hand, and is so preoccupied with the task that he has stopped socializing with his friends. He will be busy for a very long time, because the Collatz conjecture has been confirmed for all starting values up to 5 \u00d7 10 18 .\nThe Strong Collatz Conjecture in the title text is a humorous extension of the Collatz Conjecture. Some other mathematical conjectures and axioms also have normal and Strong variants, where the Strong variant gives a more general rule. This practice is further parodied in 1310: Goldbach Conjectures .\n[Cueball sits in a chair at a desk, papers piled on top, writing furiously. Depicted above are apparently the writing, a series of nodes in various Collatz sequences (starting with 7, 21, 24, 29, 106, 176 and 256), all eventually leading back to 1.] The Collatz Conjecture states that if you pick a number, and if it's even divide it by two and if it's odd multiply it by three and add one, and you repeat this procedure long enough, eventually your friends will stop calling to see if you want to hang out.\n"}
{"id":711,"title":"Seismograph","image_title":"Seismograph","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/711","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/seismograph.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/711:_Seismograph","transcript":"[Cueball is standing over another man, who is strapped into a chair with wires attached to his head and arms. The wires lead to a large lie detector on a stand next to him, which has jagged lines drawn across it.] Cueball: IS THERE AN EARTHQUAKE HAPPENING?! Sitting man: No! Lie detector: scritch scritch\n[Caption below the panel:] Pro tip: In a pinch, a lie detector can double as a seismograph.\n","explanation":"A polygraph (popularly referred to as a lie detector) measures and records several physiological indices such as blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity while the subject is asked and answers a series of questions. The belief underpinning the use of the polygraph is that deceptive answers will produce physiological responses that can be differentiated from those associated with non-deceptive answers. Polygraphs are generally considered to be pseudoscientific and are not admissible as evidence. (They've been described as worse than coin toss to determine whether as individual is a trained double agent, for instance. The reasoning is that while the coin toss is [also] randomly incorrect about half the time, at least you can't train to beat the coin toss every time). However, they can be an effective prop to convince suspects that interrogators will know if they lie.\nA seismograph is a machine which measures and records the ground's motion during e.g. an earthquake. Older seismographs held a pen against a slowly turning roll of paper, and ground motions were amplified and recorded as spikes in the pen line.\nThe lie detector works by measuring physiological signals which could presumably be visualized by drawing a line on paper like a seismograph. It is assumed that when someone is lying, their physiological signatures will be sharper and more stressed. In the comic, the character on the right is hooked up to the lie detector, and apparently must answer \"No\" to the question of the earthquake. As long as there is no earthquake, then the subject will be telling the truth, and the polygraph signal will be more stable. But if there is really an earthquake happening, then the subject is lying, and so the polygraph will show sharper signals. This mimics the effect of an actual seismograph. It is not clear why the two characters seem to be upset with each other. It is perhaps because the scene mimics a polygraph test where the subject is trying to hide something. Or, more likely, they are simply panicked.\nThe title text considers the idea of using a seismograph as a lie detector. If the subject has a nervous twitch, presumably they will twitch in some way when they are telling a lie. This would require them to twitch hard enough to vibrate the ground around them, a vibration that can be picked up on a nearby seismograph.\n[Cueball is standing over another man, who is strapped into a chair with wires attached to his head and arms. The wires lead to a large lie detector on a stand next to him, which has jagged lines drawn across it.] Cueball: IS THERE AN EARTHQUAKE HAPPENING?! Sitting man: No! Lie detector: scritch scritch\n[Caption below the panel:] Pro tip: In a pinch, a lie detector can double as a seismograph.\n"}
{"id":712,"title":"Single Ladies","image_title":"Single Ladies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/712","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/single_ladies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/712:_Single_Ladies","transcript":"[Beret Guy is talking to Sauron; Sauron is wearing his trademark helmet, but his head is downcast. Music plays in the background.] Music: All the single ladies, All the single ladies Beret Guy: Hey Sauron, why so glum? Sauron: Gil-galad saw through me and threw me out of Lindon. Galadriel as well. I'll never rule anyone at this rate.\nMusic: All the single ladies, All the single ladies Sauron: Eru created such beautiful creatures - Elves and men and dwarves - and all I've got are these stupid orcs.\nMusic: 'Cause if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it Sauron: I mean, I-\n[Sauron is suddenly quiet.] Music: If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it\n","explanation":"The character in armor is Sauron , the main villain in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the backstory of the The Silmarillion , he takes control of Middle-earth by giving several Rings of Power as \"gifts\" to the great kings of  men after teaching the craft to dwarves and elves. However, he also forged a master ring, the One Ring , to control the Rings of Power and ultimately rule over the kings. However, the elves were not deceived by his plan and took off their rings. Enraged, Sauron started War of the Elves and Sauron . After losing that war Sauron started a religion in N\u00famenor . After using his influence to convince N\u00famen\u00f3reans to attack Aman , the island is destroyed by Eru . Then Sauron started War against the Last Alliance . Sauron is eventually defeated in said war by Isildur who cuts off his ring finger. The books tell the story of a small group of adventurers who rediscover the lost Ring and attempt to destroy it, as Sauron's army gathers its forces to attempt to reclaim the Ring for their master.\nGil-galad is a high Elven-king, and Galadriel is an Elf of royal blood who serves as a matriarch of sorts to the remnants of the Elven race. Lindon is a location on the westernmost side of the continent, serving as the final transition point for Elves passing on to the Undying lands. Sauron refers to an actual event in the first panel, when he tried to gain control of Lindon through deceit; Galadriel and Gil-galad saw through his disguise and cast him out.\nIn the second panel Sauron is talking about Eru Il\u00favatar , the creator in Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. While Eru created elves and men it was Aul\u00eb who created Dwarves, Eru gave them life. Orcs were Elves twisted by Morgoth so Sauron, being his principal lieutenant, would be a natural leader to orcs by the time he created the One Ring.\nThe song playing in the background is \"All the Single Ladies\" by Beyonc\u00e9, which includes the line \"If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it,\" referring to wedding rings . This is shown as being what inspired Sauron to devise his plan to control others through the gift of rings.\nThe title text refers to an often-suggested fan theory that the One Ring is actually meant to be symbolic of marriage. This theory is incorrect. The Nazg\u00fbl , also known as ringwraiths, are the former nine human kings who were bound by the rings, now a band of nine servants to Sauron who constantly seek out the Ring for him.\n[Beret Guy is talking to Sauron; Sauron is wearing his trademark helmet, but his head is downcast. Music plays in the background.] Music: All the single ladies, All the single ladies Beret Guy: Hey Sauron, why so glum? Sauron: Gil-galad saw through me and threw me out of Lindon. Galadriel as well. I'll never rule anyone at this rate.\nMusic: All the single ladies, All the single ladies Sauron: Eru created such beautiful creatures - Elves and men and dwarves - and all I've got are these stupid orcs.\nMusic: 'Cause if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it Sauron: I mean, I-\n[Sauron is suddenly quiet.] Music: If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it\n"}
{"id":713,"title":"GeoIP","image_title":"GeoIP","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/713","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geoip.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/713:_GeoIP","transcript":"[External view of a the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting the blue Earth below, shown with white clouds as stripes below and black sky above. Dialog, written in white on the black sky, comes from within the ISS.] Cueball (inside the ISS): Yes! Ponytail (inside the ISS): What? Cueball (inside the ISS): I got our downlink into a GeoIP database.\n[Internal view of the satellite, Cueball and Ponytail are floating weightlessly around, Cueball is at a laptop style computer mounted to the wall. They are in a white room, with black around, but due to being weightless in space, the room is turned on edge as to not give any semblance of a given up\/down direction.] Ponytail: Why? Cueball: To mess with advertisers. Check it out.\n[A zoom in on the computer screen is shown, it shows an ad on a pink background. The ad has a heading and then shows two photos of long haired girls in sexy poses each with captions below and a labeled button at the bottom. The location (as messed up by Cueball) is written in gray, the rest of the text is in black, to indicate that this part of the text has been inserted in the ad based on the location.] Meet local girls in Low Earth Orbit tonight! Tanya, 18 Amber, 19 Chat live\n","explanation":"GeoIP is a service that converts IP addresses to their respective location on the Earth. This is done by looking up the IP address in a database maintained by various internet service providers. Advertisers often take advantage of the Jones effect by creating localized ads which misleadingly appear to be specific to your location, but are often simply stock photographs with the name of the nearest town superimposed on top.\nThe comic satirizes this phenomenon. The International Space Station (ISS) has a high speed data downlink, but no direct connection to the internet. But here, Cueball trolls the advertisers from on board the ISS, by inserting his actual location on low Earth orbit into the database under that IP address. He proudly presents his result to Ponytail where the advertisements claim that there are \"local girls\" in low Earth orbit; a distance of roughly 420 kilometers above the Earth surface, and thus at least that far away from all other girls in the world if they are not on the space station (or a nearby spacecraft, such as one bringing supplies to the space station).\nThe title text shows GeoIP has become so accurate that it can now pinpoint the user's location to his Mom's basement. In United States, an adult living with his parents is considered shameful for that person, since it means that the adult does not have a job and cannot support himself. The ads are typically of the form -- \"Meet hot young singles in <user's location>\" where the <user's location> part is filled in from GeoIP. In this case, the GeoIP is so accurate that it not just identifies that user is in his parents' house, but it also pinpoints the location that he's hiding in the basement, perhaps because he does not want to be seen by people visiting his parents. Thus GeoIP is unknowingly shaming the user by reminding him that he is in his mom's basement, and hence the \"Screw you\" response. However, this would also prove the false nature of these advertisements, as the user is unlikely to have not noticed any hot young singles currently sharing his mom's basement. [ citation needed ]\n[External view of a the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting the blue Earth below, shown with white clouds as stripes below and black sky above. Dialog, written in white on the black sky, comes from within the ISS.] Cueball (inside the ISS): Yes! Ponytail (inside the ISS): What? Cueball (inside the ISS): I got our downlink into a GeoIP database.\n[Internal view of the satellite, Cueball and Ponytail are floating weightlessly around, Cueball is at a laptop style computer mounted to the wall. They are in a white room, with black around, but due to being weightless in space, the room is turned on edge as to not give any semblance of a given up\/down direction.] Ponytail: Why? Cueball: To mess with advertisers. Check it out.\n[A zoom in on the computer screen is shown, it shows an ad on a pink background. The ad has a heading and then shows two photos of long haired girls in sexy poses each with captions below and a labeled button at the bottom. The location (as messed up by Cueball) is written in gray, the rest of the text is in black, to indicate that this part of the text has been inserted in the ad based on the location.] Meet local girls in Low Earth Orbit tonight! Tanya, 18 Amber, 19 Chat live\n"}
{"id":714,"title":"Porn For Women","image_title":"Porn For Women","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/714","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/porn_for_women.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/714:_Porn_For_Women","transcript":"[Megan sits at a desk, typing on a computer with a fairly large flat-panel display.] Megan: To the authors of Porn for Women : Your book features pictures of hot, clothed guys cooking, doing laundry and vacuuming.\n[Megan continues typing.] Megan: The idea seems to be that my deepest fantasies, like the rest of my life, likely revolve around housework.\n[Megan continues typing.] Megan: So I wanted to write in to clarify: in my porn,\n[Megan leans forward in her chair.] Megan: People fuck .\n","explanation":"Porn for Women is a popular illustrated humor book that features exactly what the comic says.\nThere is an opinion that women especially dislike blunt porn that objectifies the people involved in the intercourse. The authors of the book follows this line, presenting no sex but several images of extremely attractive men performing household chores. Megan objects to this, stating that her porn contains sex.\nGalactica is the ship from the show Battlestar Galactica . Megan likely has a romantic attraction to some of the characters on the show, possibly involving \"shipping\" fanfiction .\n[Megan sits at a desk, typing on a computer with a fairly large flat-panel display.] Megan: To the authors of Porn for Women : Your book features pictures of hot, clothed guys cooking, doing laundry and vacuuming.\n[Megan continues typing.] Megan: The idea seems to be that my deepest fantasies, like the rest of my life, likely revolve around housework.\n[Megan continues typing.] Megan: So I wanted to write in to clarify: in my porn,\n[Megan leans forward in her chair.] Megan: People fuck .\n"}
{"id":715,"title":"Numbers","image_title":"Numbers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/715","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/numbers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/715:_Numbers","transcript":"Google Result for Various Phrases: {Each panel is a scatterplot of the described X against the number of Google hits, with trend lines. The scales vary.}\n<X> Bottles of Beer on the Wall [There are peaks at 1, 49, 73, and 99. A dip in the middle is marked \"They lose steam at 66.\" After 99 is a steep dropoff. The largest peak is around 100,000 hits.]\nI've Had <X> Boy\/Girlfriends [Both lines descend at roughly the same rate from 1 to 10, although the boyfriend graph is smoother; the girlfriend graph has a small peak at 4 and a small dip at 6. The peaks are between 100,000 and 1,000,000 hits.]\nI'm in <X>st\/nd\/rd\/th Grade [The curve is a bell peaking at 7th grade and about 500,000 hits. A second line labeled \"Including Junior, Senior, etc.\" follows the bell curve until the peak, then dips only slightly for 10th grade and resumes climbing.]\nI Have a\/an <X>-Inch Penis [The line ascends shallowly from 100,000 hits for 3 inches to a peak of 180,000 for 9 inches, then descends steeply to 20,000 for 13 inches.]\nI'm a\/an <X>-Cup [A has a few hundred thousand hits; the graph dips to a few thousand for C, peaks again around 100,000 for E, and then tails off.]\nI'm <X> and Have Never Had a Boyfriend [The graph is mostly a simple bell, starting and ending around 300,000 hits for 13 or 21, but there is a sharp peak of 700,000 at 18 (well above the trend line).]\nDrink <X> Glasses of Water a Day [There are barely any hits below 4 or above 12; between the two it rises steeply to about 1,000 hits, with a steep, narrow peak of 10,000 at 8.]\nThere Are <X> Lights [The graph descends smoothly from several hundred thousand hits for 1 to about 10,000 for 10, except for a peak of about 1,000,000 for 4.]\nI Got <X> Problems [The plot is extremely jagged, with the largest peak of 10,000,000 hits at 99, another of 10,000 at 96, and 100 and 88.]\nMy IQ Is <X> [A smooth curve starts and ends at a few thousand hits for around 85 and around 170, with the peak at several tens of thousands for 140, but there are several prominent outliers: 100, 110, 133, and 142 are all around 100,000 hits, and 147 is around 1,000,000.]\n","explanation":"This comic use the popular search engine Google to show how many hits (or web pages) are returned as relevant based on a given search replacing <X> by different numbers.\nBottles of beer The top one is of the old drinking song 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall . In this song, the singers begin with 99 bottles and with each repeat of the verse, decrease the bottles of beer by one. The graph shows a slowdown at 66 bottles of beer, something highlighted. A spike occurs at 49 bottles of beer, which seems to be a popular variant (possibly due to 49 bottles taking about half the time that 99 would).\nBoy\/girlfriends On the second row, the left graph represents how many girlfriends or boyfriends someone has had. They seem pretty similar, though the logarithmic chart may be working on that. There is a clear peak at four girlfriends.\nSchool grade In the middle of second row is a curve for how old (in grade) Internet users seem to be. Going purely by grade, the average is at 7th grade. However, using the notation of Freshman (9)\/Sophomore (10)\/Junior (11)\/Senior (12), there's a notable resurgence.\nPenis length The graph on the far right of the second row describes Internet users talking about the lengths of penises that they have. 5-6 inches (~13-15 cm) is generally considered average, but it doesn't appear that way on the Internet. There is a general trend (also shown by the line), but the maximum, 9 inches (23 cm), peaks way above the trend line - indicating that guys think they can pull this one off, although 12 inches (30 cm) peaks way above the trend line as well. Probably because 12 inches equals a foot.\nCup size The third row contains four graphs. The far left is the breast size of the Internet user. (This presumably refers to female users, since male breasts are not typically measured in cup size.)  The actual breast size is generally considered a bell curve around a B or C cup, yet the hits on Google describe almost an exact opposite trend. Taken with the above male penis length and this describes a trend where either the \"average\" person posting information seems to embellish or the majority stay quiet. Typically those with small breast will complain, and those with large breast will complain or brag. Those that are content with a C cup do not need to do either.\nI have never had a boyfriend The second graph on row three is number of hits per (mostly) female Internet users talking about how old they are without having a boyfriend. There's a spike at 18. The comic was written in 2010; as of 2014 the spike does not exist. Google behaves very strangely in this case, as it shows two very different numbers for each search.\nGlasses of water a day Third from the left in row three is the number of glasses drunk per day. Many \"health authorities\" claim that  8 glasses of water a day should be the most healthy. This common misconception is not supported by scientific research. This is the subject of 1708: Dehydration and is also mentioned 1853: Once Per Day . In both these six glasses of water is mentioned first rather than eight. (New research...)\nNumber of lights On the far right is a description of the number of lights. The spike at four is due to a famous scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation , episode Chain of Command Part II where Captain Picard answers that there are four lights, despite pressure to answer that there are five. This is itself a reference to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , where Winston Smith is tortured until he \"learns\" to be unsure of the number of fingers being held up by his torturer, despite him only holding up four.\nNumber of problems Bottom left is a reference to the popular Jay-Z rap song 99 Problems . It is the only reason that 100 problems only ends up second by more than a factor of 100.\nIQ Bottom right describes the IQ of the Internet goer compared to the average. By the definition of the test the average is 100 with a standard deviation of 15. However, the comic implies that the average claimed IQ closes in on 133 more than 2 standard deviations above the real average! This high average are thanks mainly to the million who has given their IQ as 147. There are four other peaks that are also labeled, and these peaks are the only other above 100,000 hits, but neither of these have much more than 200,000 hits. Apart from these five there are only 5 more with more than 50,000 hits. Note the log scale of the y.axis! Many studies have shown that people today would score a higher average than 100 if they took the earlier test - an effect know as the Flynn effect . However, new tests from today should still average out to 100, as an IQ of 100 is defined as the average of any given IQ test. The five labels: Why is 147 so popular? The maximum break in snooker is 147, but it is unlikely that this is known by enough to make a difference here. There is also a frequently repeated factoid that Albert Einstein scored an IQ of 147 but there's no real record or consensus of this. The 100 (the average) peaks out is obvious. 110 - ten more also makes sense. In general there are almost always more hits at every 5 and 10, than the two values before or after. 133 is a third of the way to 200, and also it will take you clear of the Mensa requirement for membership of 132 on the Stanford\u2013Binet Intelligence Scales . Why 142 is popular is also difficult to say. Of course 42 is a special number for fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , so 142 for an IQ score could be helped to peak for this reason. Although then it is no longer 42... (But an IQ of 42 would be really bad!) The scale of the graphs x-axis is completely off. This can easily be seen from the labeled points. Whereas 100 and 110 is close to the mark, the point labeled 133 is much closer to 140 than 130 (at about 138) and the 147 point lies clearly past 150 (at around 152). It is, however, for sure the scale that is off as there are the correct number of points between all five labeled points. There is a clear point on the y-axis at 80, but then there seems to be a gap up to the next point, and there are also only 16 points between this first point and the point labeled 100. It thus seems that while there are in fact about 20,000 who claim as low an IQ as 80, then there are not enough who claims a score of 81-83 for them to be shown in this graph. The graph begins at around 80-90 hits because of the log scale so there could be some hits, but way less than the lowest point on the graph which lies close to 1000 hits. From an IQ of 84 and up to 168 there are a point for each IQ for a total of 86 points (with the point at 80).\nTitle text The title text refers to the searches. It concludes that the average (male) internet user has a 9-inch penis and an IQ of 147. Humorously it continues to state that this is better than the reverse - having a 147-inch penis (over 12 feet or 3.7 m) and an IQ of 9 (only 2\u00a0% of the population have below 70).\nGoogle Result for Various Phrases: {Each panel is a scatterplot of the described X against the number of Google hits, with trend lines. The scales vary.}\n<X> Bottles of Beer on the Wall [There are peaks at 1, 49, 73, and 99. A dip in the middle is marked \"They lose steam at 66.\" After 99 is a steep dropoff. The largest peak is around 100,000 hits.]\nI've Had <X> Boy\/Girlfriends [Both lines descend at roughly the same rate from 1 to 10, although the boyfriend graph is smoother; the girlfriend graph has a small peak at 4 and a small dip at 6. The peaks are between 100,000 and 1,000,000 hits.]\nI'm in <X>st\/nd\/rd\/th Grade [The curve is a bell peaking at 7th grade and about 500,000 hits. A second line labeled \"Including Junior, Senior, etc.\" follows the bell curve until the peak, then dips only slightly for 10th grade and resumes climbing.]\nI Have a\/an <X>-Inch Penis [The line ascends shallowly from 100,000 hits for 3 inches to a peak of 180,000 for 9 inches, then descends steeply to 20,000 for 13 inches.]\nI'm a\/an <X>-Cup [A has a few hundred thousand hits; the graph dips to a few thousand for C, peaks again around 100,000 for E, and then tails off.]\nI'm <X> and Have Never Had a Boyfriend [The graph is mostly a simple bell, starting and ending around 300,000 hits for 13 or 21, but there is a sharp peak of 700,000 at 18 (well above the trend line).]\nDrink <X> Glasses of Water a Day [There are barely any hits below 4 or above 12; between the two it rises steeply to about 1,000 hits, with a steep, narrow peak of 10,000 at 8.]\nThere Are <X> Lights [The graph descends smoothly from several hundred thousand hits for 1 to about 10,000 for 10, except for a peak of about 1,000,000 for 4.]\nI Got <X> Problems [The plot is extremely jagged, with the largest peak of 10,000,000 hits at 99, another of 10,000 at 96, and 100 and 88.]\nMy IQ Is <X> [A smooth curve starts and ends at a few thousand hits for around 85 and around 170, with the peak at several tens of thousands for 140, but there are several prominent outliers: 100, 110, 133, and 142 are all around 100,000 hits, and 147 is around 1,000,000.]\n"}
{"id":716,"title":"Time Machine","image_title":"Time Machine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/716","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time_machine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/716:_Time_Machine","transcript":"[Rob is working at a workbench. Future-Rob appears out of nowhere with a baseball bat.] Future-Rob: Hi, Rob. Rob: Whoa, you're me!\n[Future-Rob holding the baseball bat, standing next to Rob.] Future-Rob: You're about to have an idea for a time machine. Rob: I am?\n[In a frameless panel, Future-Rob hits Rob over the head with the baseball bat.] WHAM\n[Megan approaches Future-Rob working at the workbench, with Rob nowhere to be seen. The bloody baseball bat is stashed behind it.] Megan: Hey, Rob. What's up? Future-Rob: Nothing.\n[Caption below the last panel:] This happens somewhere roughly once a month.\nThis comic's title is very similar to 1203: Time Machines .\n","explanation":"Rob is about to discover time traveling , but a future version of him comes back in time and hits him with a baseball bat before he can actually build this time machine.\nA common theme in time travel fiction is going back into the past to fix some mistake or stop some tragedy before it happens (see for instance The Terminator movies). In this comic, it is implied that Rob's time traveling turned out to cause a tragedy of some kind, so in order to stop it, Future-Rob must go back in time to stop himself from time traveling in the first place. The last panel supports this by suggesting that at least once a month somebody discovers time travel, but inevitably ends up going back in time to prevent themselves from doing so.\nThis is a plot point from the 2004 time-travel drama film Primer : one character intends to travel back in time to prevent them from discovering time travel in this way, and another character has already traveled back in time, drugged his earlier self, and taken over the operation to discover time travel before the narrative of the film begins. Primer has a notoriously complicated plot that Randall already has made a jocular attempt at explaining in 657: Movie Narrative Charts . Some more thorough attempts to explain it can be found here and here .  Doubtless, this has also been spoofed in countless other comedic settings.\nThe blood on the bat suggests that future Rob actually killed past Rob. This is of course a paradox like the grandfather paradox - but there are theories about how it would still be possible - see the link. The obvious paradox is that when Rob dies the future Rob never existed. But also the time travel Future Rob undertakes uses a technique that is now never invented. This was the reason for future Rob's travel.\nThe title text states that this is why we never see any time travelers since they would have stopped their own past selves from time traveling. After getting rid of their past selves they would then assume their place in the timeline, hence why a friend would suddenly look older: they have aged, just in another timeline before returning to the past.\n[Rob is working at a workbench. Future-Rob appears out of nowhere with a baseball bat.] Future-Rob: Hi, Rob. Rob: Whoa, you're me!\n[Future-Rob holding the baseball bat, standing next to Rob.] Future-Rob: You're about to have an idea for a time machine. Rob: I am?\n[In a frameless panel, Future-Rob hits Rob over the head with the baseball bat.] WHAM\n[Megan approaches Future-Rob working at the workbench, with Rob nowhere to be seen. The bloody baseball bat is stashed behind it.] Megan: Hey, Rob. What's up? Future-Rob: Nothing.\n[Caption below the last panel:] This happens somewhere roughly once a month.\nThis comic's title is very similar to 1203: Time Machines .\n"}
{"id":717,"title":"Furtive","image_title":"Furtive","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/717","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/furtive.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/717:_Furtive","transcript":"[Inspector Gadget in a trench coat and hat stands mid-frame.]\n[Gadget turns his head, looking to his right.]\n[Gadget stands alone in a wide expanse.]\n[Gadget finally speaks.] Gadget: Go go gadget two lesbians doing it.\n","explanation":"The person in the comic is Inspector Gadget from the animated series of the same name . Gadget was a cyborg detective that had access to a wide variety of gadgets which he would activate with the words \"Go go gadget [insert item here].\" The gadgets would usually spawn from his hat, such as his trademark personal helicopter (\"go go gadget copter!\"). One of the running gags of the series was that Gadget was completely clueless during his missions, and unbeknownst to him, relied heavily on the assistance of his niece Penny, her computer book, and her dog, Brain.\nIn this strip, Inspector Gadget (wearing his trademark hat and trench coat) looks around furtively and apparently moves away from the listener (or the camera pans out to reveal the empty environment) before saying the words \"Go go gadget two lesbians doing it.\"  The fantasy of lesbians having sex is a common turn-on for straight men. The command, given in the last panel of the comic, also serves to identify the person speaking. Identification along with the punchline is a common comedy trope.\nIn the title text, Gadget requests further gadgets: A video camera, to record the action, and a cup. The cup is probably a reference to the well-known, scatological pornographic video 2 Girls, 1 Cup , which was prominent at the time the comic was created.\n[Inspector Gadget in a trench coat and hat stands mid-frame.]\n[Gadget turns his head, looking to his right.]\n[Gadget stands alone in a wide expanse.]\n[Gadget finally speaks.] Gadget: Go go gadget two lesbians doing it.\n"}
{"id":718,"title":"The Flake Equation","image_title":"The Flake Equation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/718","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_flake_equation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/718:_The_Flake_Equation","transcript":"\nThe Flake Equation: P = W P \u00d7 (C R + M I ) \u00d7 T K \u00d7 F 0 \u00d7 F 1 \u00d7 D T \u00d7 A U \u2248 100,000 Where: W P = World Population (7,000,000,000) C R = Fraction of people who imagine an alien encounter because they're crazy or want to feel special (1\/10,000) M I = Fraction of people who misinterpret a physical or physiological experience as an alien sighting (1\/10,000) T K = Probability that they'll tell someone (1\/10) F 0 = Average number of people they tell (10) F 1 = Average number of people each friend tells this \"firsthand\" account (10) D T = Probability that any details not fitting the narrative will be revised or forgotten in retelling (9\/10) A U = Fraction of people with the means and motivation to share the story with a wider audience (blogs, forums, reporters) (1\/100) Even with conservative guesses for the values of the variables, this suggests there must be a huge number of credible-sounding alien sightings out there, available to anyone who wants to believe!\n","explanation":"This strip parodies the Drake equation , which is an method for estimating of the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.  The Drake equation starts with the best estimate for the number of stars in our galaxy, then multiplies it by successive probabilities (such as the number of stars with planets, the number of planets which can support life, etc), to ultimately calculate how many civilizations exist. While such a calculation necessarily uses speculative numbers, it gives a good sense of how many civilizations could potentially exist.\nThe Flake equation presented in this strip provides an estimate about how many false or fake stories about aliens are likely to exist. It does so in similar manner as the Drake equation, by starting with the entire population, estimating how many people are likely to believe that they've had an alien encounter, and then calculating how likely those stories are to become public. Just like in the Drake equation, exact numbers are unknown, but can be estimated, and the equation in the comic shows Randall's guesses about these values. See an explanations of values below.\n\"Flake\" is American slang for a person who is casually dishonest or unreliable, implying that such a person would be likely to imagine an alien encounter. Note that, while the Flake equation includes people who imagine encounters \"because they're crazy or want to feel special\", it doesn't attempt to include outright lies or deliberate hoaxes.\nThe final results tells us that there should be about 100,000 stories about aliens that have reliable explanations. (The numbers given in the equation gives 126,000 stories). The data is obviously highly speculative, and as with the Drake Equation, you can plug in your own numbers, but if you keep your guesses realistic, you will most likely get a very large number. This convinces the reader that the fact that there are many stories about aliens does not necessarily mean that many people actually met aliens.\nThe title text refers to Fermi's Lack-of-a-Paradox.  The Fermi paradox refers to the contradiction between high numbers of calculated civilizations and the total lack of verified alien contact with earth. This is related to the Drake Equation, many estimates calculate that there should be large numbers of civilization in the galaxy, and they should have existed for long periods of time, suggesting that humanity should have been contacted by them, or at least seen some clear evidence of their existence. There are multiple explanations for this paradox, but it remains a question of scientific debate.  The Lack-of-a-Paradox in this strip, however, is that the math suggests that there should be huge numbers of claimed alien sightings, and that's exactly what we observe.\nAnother comic parodying this equation is 384: The Drake Equation . The credibility of paranormal reports in general is revisited in 1235: Settled , which posits that if such phenomena were real they should have been unambiguously captured on camera by now.\n\nThe Flake Equation: P = W P \u00d7 (C R + M I ) \u00d7 T K \u00d7 F 0 \u00d7 F 1 \u00d7 D T \u00d7 A U \u2248 100,000 Where: W P = World Population (7,000,000,000) C R = Fraction of people who imagine an alien encounter because they're crazy or want to feel special (1\/10,000) M I = Fraction of people who misinterpret a physical or physiological experience as an alien sighting (1\/10,000) T K = Probability that they'll tell someone (1\/10) F 0 = Average number of people they tell (10) F 1 = Average number of people each friend tells this \"firsthand\" account (10) D T = Probability that any details not fitting the narrative will be revised or forgotten in retelling (9\/10) A U = Fraction of people with the means and motivation to share the story with a wider audience (blogs, forums, reporters) (1\/100) Even with conservative guesses for the values of the variables, this suggests there must be a huge number of credible-sounding alien sightings out there, available to anyone who wants to believe!\n"}
{"id":719,"title":"Brain Worms","image_title":"Brain Worms","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/719","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brain_worms.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/719:_Brain_Worms","transcript":"[Megan sits at a computer desk, and Cueball stands near her holding a book.] Cueball: Weird-this parasitic worm infects the brain, damaging the areas responsible for spatial reasoning in dreams. Signs of infection include dreams about not fitting in your car comfortably, driving from the backseat, or veering all over the road. Megan (thinking): Oh God.\nMy Hobby: Taking advantage of the fact that some specific dreams are weirdly common, but not everyone who has them realizes this.\n","explanation":"Another comic in the My Hobby series. Cueball is tricking Megan by pretending to read from a book about a parasitic brain worm, describing the apparent symptoms caused by an infection. The dreams described sound very specific, which leads Megan to believe that since she has been having these types of dream, she must be infected. The comic text asserts that these types of dream are fairly common however, and this knowledge can be leveraged to trick people who aren't aware of this.\nDream contents are likely to be affected by many factors, however because people share common thoughts, feelings and experiences in waking life, it is unsurprising that our dreams share common features. In the case of the comic, cars are a ubiquitous feature of life for most people, and for many driving or being a passenger in a car is a regular experience. It is therefore to be expected that cars are likely to feature in dreams. What is less logical, but still common is there being something strange about the situation. The car may be huge, tiny, backwards, upside-down, flying, underwater, non-descript, etc. The examples given in the comic are typical of the 'unusual factor' reported in dreams.\nSome people believe (to varying degrees) that dreams may be interpreted as a representation of a persons thoughts, emotions, or their subconscious. One of the more generally accepted interpretations of dreams involving driving or riding in a car, is that it expresses how you feel about your control over your own life. A dream about not fitting or not being comfortable in a car might be interpretted as the dreamer feeling out-of-place or uncomfortable in their own life, while dreams about losing control of a car might indicate the dreamer feels their life is out of control.\nMegan of course does not have an infection from these fictional brain worms. Cueball is taking a \"shot in the dark\", with the success of his trick relying on Megan recognising these dream types as ones she has experienced. He may be playing on fears possibly carried by many people that these types of dreams hold a deeper significance which they can't identify. In the comic, Megan appears not to realize that he is pulling a prank on her and begins to get scared.\nThe title text continues the joke with another common dream, this time about teeth falling out. One commonly-accepted meaning of teeth falling out is a loss of confidence or power in one's life.\nCommon dreams are also discussed in 1943: Universal Dreams .\n[Megan sits at a computer desk, and Cueball stands near her holding a book.] Cueball: Weird-this parasitic worm infects the brain, damaging the areas responsible for spatial reasoning in dreams. Signs of infection include dreams about not fitting in your car comfortably, driving from the backseat, or veering all over the road. Megan (thinking): Oh God.\nMy Hobby: Taking advantage of the fact that some specific dreams are weirdly common, but not everyone who has them realizes this.\n"}
{"id":720,"title":"Recipes","image_title":"Recipes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/720","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/recipes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/720:_Recipes","transcript":"[Three people sit along a table with dishes and drinks in front of them. Cueball is walking in, a plate with food on it in one hand, a laptop in the other.]\n[Blondie looks down at her bowl. She has a cup with what appears to be a lump of coal in it.] Blondie: I've got... Cheerios with a shot of vermouth. [Cueball 1 has a plate with some kind of cubic food on it. He has a cup of what appears to be two lovebirds in it.] Cueball 1: At least it's better than the quail eggs in whipped cream and MSG from last time. [Cueball 2 has a plate with a several lumps of some form of white stuff on it. They have a cup of what appears to be some kind of superfluid flowing out of it.] Cueball 2: Are these Skittles deep-fried ?\nCueball 3: C'mon, guys, be patient. In a few hundred more meals, the genetic algorithm should catch up to existing recipes and start to optimize. We've decided to drop the CS department from our weekly dinner party hosting rotation.\n","explanation":"A genetic algorithm starts with a set of candidates and evaluates them. The best candidates are combined and randomly mutated to form the candidates for the next generation. After being allowed to proceed for an extended period, a genetic algorithm can often produce remarkable results. If the initial candidates are randomly-generated (as appears to be the case here), the initial generations are usually horrible.\nIn the comic, the computer science (CS) department is the host of a dinner party. They choose to create a genetic algorithm to generate their recipes. Based on the remarks of the second diner, this is probably not the first generation, and the results are still horrible. Vermouth is a type of fortified wine , usually served alone or in cocktails. It seems unlikely that cheerios would complement the flavor of it. Quail eggs are a delicacy in many countries, as opposed to whipped cream , which is usually served on desserts. It was topped off with MSG, or Monosodium Glutamate , which is a non-essential amino acid used to enhance the flavor of savory foods. The last person has skittles , a brand of candy with a hard outer shell and a inside composed of corn syrup and hydrogenated palm kernel oil . Deep-frying is usually done to savory starches and meats, not sweet confectionaries. The host of the party is so enamored of the promise of the genetic algorithm that he fails to take into account that it will be several years before the recipes become remotely good.\nThe title text could make reference to the fact that genetic algorithms will sometimes return results which are highly abnormal and vastly deviate from what we would think to be \"selected for,\" but nonetheless can be quite successful, albeit unorthodox. Braising is a cooking practice involving both searing on an open pan and boiling in a pot with liquid; newts are small lizard-resembling amphibians that are not commonly eaten in America, and Doritos are a cheese-covered tortilla chip. None of these are elements that a sane chef would use together when preparing dinner, but the title text concedes that it did taste good despite the abnormality. It also showcases that the algorithm has stumbled upon a recipe that engages in wordplay with the movie and common phrase \"Dazed and Confused\".\n[Three people sit along a table with dishes and drinks in front of them. Cueball is walking in, a plate with food on it in one hand, a laptop in the other.]\n[Blondie looks down at her bowl. She has a cup with what appears to be a lump of coal in it.] Blondie: I've got... Cheerios with a shot of vermouth. [Cueball 1 has a plate with some kind of cubic food on it. He has a cup of what appears to be two lovebirds in it.] Cueball 1: At least it's better than the quail eggs in whipped cream and MSG from last time. [Cueball 2 has a plate with a several lumps of some form of white stuff on it. They have a cup of what appears to be some kind of superfluid flowing out of it.] Cueball 2: Are these Skittles deep-fried ?\nCueball 3: C'mon, guys, be patient. In a few hundred more meals, the genetic algorithm should catch up to existing recipes and start to optimize. We've decided to drop the CS department from our weekly dinner party hosting rotation.\n"}
{"id":721,"title":"Flatland","image_title":"Flatland","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/721","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flatland.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/721:_Flatland","transcript":"[Cueball talks to a square on the ground.] Cueball: Hey, A. Square. How's Flatland? A. Square: Still flat. What's up? Cueball: I just spent an hour playing a demo of this 4D game called Miegakure.\n[In a frameless panel, a character in Miegakure jumps around the 4D landscape.] Caption above the panel: Trying to jump from block to block in four dimensions hurt my brain.\n[Cueball continues talking to A. Square on the ground.] Cueball: So I apologize for giving you a hard time when you were slow to understand 3D space. I sympathize now. A. Square: It's okay.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head] Cueball: Also, I apologize for drawing arms, legs, and eyes on you to make you look like SpongeBob. That was out of line. A. Square: Yes, it was.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the satirical novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions , in which a society of flat shapes live in a 2D world. Half the book is a direct satire of Victorian society, and the other half explores the experience of discovering a new dimension, where a sphere introduces a square (named A. Square) to 3D . Cueball appears to have taken the place of this sphere, and the comic takes place after the square knows the third dimension exists.\nHumans will never fully be able to fully grasp the concept of a fourth spatial dimension (at least not in the foreseeable future), but there are ways of squashing or slicing four dimensions to create partial visualizations of 4D space. Miegakure is a yet-to-be-released 4D game that uses cross-sections of 4D space. Cueball attempted to play a pre-release version of it, but after having his \"mind blown\", he gained more sympathy for A. Square, who'd had similar trouble understanding 3D. A. Square accepts his apology.\nThe joke here is that Cueball was being silly and drew lines on A. Square to make him look like SpongeBob , which did not make the square happy. Cueball apologizes again.\nThe title text is a third apology for when Cueball crawled down into the second dimension. Being a stick figure, he is composed of a circle and straight lines. In Flatland, circles are priests (Flatland's highest social level), and all women are lines; thus, to a watcher in Flatland, Cueball would look very much like a priest above many connected women, which may look like a lesbian orgy.\n[Cueball talks to a square on the ground.] Cueball: Hey, A. Square. How's Flatland? A. Square: Still flat. What's up? Cueball: I just spent an hour playing a demo of this 4D game called Miegakure.\n[In a frameless panel, a character in Miegakure jumps around the 4D landscape.] Caption above the panel: Trying to jump from block to block in four dimensions hurt my brain.\n[Cueball continues talking to A. Square on the ground.] Cueball: So I apologize for giving you a hard time when you were slow to understand 3D space. I sympathize now. A. Square: It's okay.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head] Cueball: Also, I apologize for drawing arms, legs, and eyes on you to make you look like SpongeBob. That was out of line. A. Square: Yes, it was.\n"}
{"id":722,"title":"Computer Problems","image_title":"Computer Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/722","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/computer_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/722:_Computer_Problems","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are looking at his computer, on the desk.] Cueball: You know this metal rectangle full of little lights? Megan: Yeah.\nCueball: I spend most of my life pressing buttons to make the pattern of lights change however I want. Megan: Sounds good.\nCueball: But today, the pattern of lights is all wrong ! Megan: Oh god! Try pressing more buttons! Cueball: IT'S NOT HELPING!\n\n","explanation":"Cueball explains to Megan that he is having computer problems. Normally, he is able to manipulate a \"pattern\" on his \"metal rectangle full of little lights\" (a reasonable, if oversimplified description of generated images displayed on a monitor). Today, however, the \"pattern\" is \"all wrong\". Megan suggests that he might be able to fix it by pressing more buttons, but following her advice doesn't seem to have the desired effect.\nAccording to the title text, Randall uses a similar technique to explain his computer problems to his cat. Some cats have the habit to walk over or lay on keyboards (pressing a lot of buttons) or to lie on it (because keyboards of notebooks are designed to dispense heat, which many cats enjoy sleeping on). This is, however, not to fix a \"pattern\" which they usually don't care about but rather to get the same attention the keyboard receives from the cat's owner. \"My cat seems happier than me,\" implies that \"pressing buttons to make the pattern [of the 'metal rectangle full of lights'] change,\" makes a person less happy.\nAs evidenced by both past and future comics, Randall likes to make an effort to explain things for simple minds.\nSpeculatively, Randall may be commenting on the abstract nature of events that effect Cueball's happiness or well being. While the work Cueball does on the computer seems very important to him, the deconstructed version as discussed by Megan and Cueball make his resulting distress seem out of proportion. This interpretation is further supported by the title text in which Randall's cat, unaware of more abstract representations of activity on the computer, enjoys greater happiness overall.\n[Cueball and Megan are looking at his computer, on the desk.] Cueball: You know this metal rectangle full of little lights? Megan: Yeah.\nCueball: I spend most of my life pressing buttons to make the pattern of lights change however I want. Megan: Sounds good.\nCueball: But today, the pattern of lights is all wrong ! Megan: Oh god! Try pressing more buttons! Cueball: IT'S NOT HELPING!\n\n"}
{"id":723,"title":"Seismic Waves","image_title":"Seismic Waves","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/723","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/seismic_waves.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/723:_Seismic_Waves","transcript":"When an earthquake hits, people flood the internet with posts about it-some within 20 or 30 seconds. [A room with a desk, chair, and computer are shaking. The person in it is on his phone, using Twitter.] RobM163 Huge earthquake here!\nDamaging seismic waves travel at 3-5km\/s. Fiber signals move at ~200,000km\/s. (minus network lag)\nThis means when the seismic waves are about 100km out, they begin to be overtaken by the waves of posts ABOUT them. [There is a geographical border on a map; the front edge of the wave of the quake is shown, with the front edge of the wave of tweets surpassing it.]\nPeople outside this radius may get word of the quake via Twitter, IRC, or SMS before the shaking hits. [Megan and Cueball are standing, holding cell phones. Megan is looking at hers.] Megan: Whoa! Earthquake!\nSadly, a Twitterer's first instinct is not to find shelter. Megan and Cueball (on phones): RT @RobM163 Huge earthquake here!\n","explanation":"One stereotype surrounding Twitter users is that they are more concerned with broadcasting their current status than they are with addressing it. Earthquakes are natural disasters caused by the movement of the Earth's tectonic plates , known for the destruction that they leave in their wake. The comic outlines the potential that technology can have in warning people about earthquakes, which is unfortunately negated by the tendency of the typical users of the technology to care more about sharing the warning message than they are to preserve their own lives.\nThe title text is a geology pun, as \"fine-grained\" is a common term used by geologists to describe rocks.\nReal scientists are trying to turn this speed difference into a practical tool . Go figure.\nNine years later they succeeded , as covered in 2219: Earthquake Early Warnings .\nWhen an earthquake hits, people flood the internet with posts about it-some within 20 or 30 seconds. [A room with a desk, chair, and computer are shaking. The person in it is on his phone, using Twitter.] RobM163 Huge earthquake here!\nDamaging seismic waves travel at 3-5km\/s. Fiber signals move at ~200,000km\/s. (minus network lag)\nThis means when the seismic waves are about 100km out, they begin to be overtaken by the waves of posts ABOUT them. [There is a geographical border on a map; the front edge of the wave of the quake is shown, with the front edge of the wave of tweets surpassing it.]\nPeople outside this radius may get word of the quake via Twitter, IRC, or SMS before the shaking hits. [Megan and Cueball are standing, holding cell phones. Megan is looking at hers.] Megan: Whoa! Earthquake!\nSadly, a Twitterer's first instinct is not to find shelter. Megan and Cueball (on phones): RT @RobM163 Huge earthquake here!\n"}
{"id":724,"title":"Hell","image_title":"Hell","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/724","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hell.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/724:_Hell","transcript":"[The panel shows the display of a Tetris game where the bottom of the pit is curved into a semicircle making the two blocks at the bottom, a square and a reverse L piece lean crookedly towards each other at the bottom of the pit; an S piece is falling and the next piece is an L piece.] Next Top 000000 Score 000000 Level 01 [Below the panel:] Hell\n","explanation":"Tetris is a game where the player has to manipulate falling blocks into forming complete rows, which will then be deleted and give points to the player. This comic is a play on this, presenting the player with a version of the game with a curved bottom that renders forming flat rows nearly impossible. Hell is a mythological and\/or religious concept of a posthumous punishment for wrongdoers, depicted in many religions as eternal torment. Here the Tetris player feels they are in Hell when they try to play this game.\nThe title text presents similar situations where frustration is likely to occur. Katamari Damacy is a video game in which the player controls a sticky sphere which grows by assimilating objects smaller than itself, so gameplay would be extremely frustrating if none of the objects available is smaller than your sphere. Super Mario is a long-running franchise of platforming games; in some of the games (beginning with Super Mario 64 ), levels are completed by collecting large, golden Power Stars \u2013 so it would be very frustrating if one is impossible to reach.\nThis last part may also be a reference to the Ancient Greek myth of Tantalus ; as punishment for cannibalism, he suffers in Hades , confined to a pool with a fruit tree above it. As his punishment, the fruit branches on the tree recoil every time he tries to eat, and the water recedes every time he tries to drink.\nAlso see comic 888: Heaven , which presents an inverse situation in which the Tetris game provides unfairly perfect pieces to help the player win.\nThere is a playable version of this comic at Kongregate which, unsurprisingly, is frustratingly difficult ( but not impossible ) to play.\n[The panel shows the display of a Tetris game where the bottom of the pit is curved into a semicircle making the two blocks at the bottom, a square and a reverse L piece lean crookedly towards each other at the bottom of the pit; an S piece is falling and the next piece is an L piece.] Next Top 000000 Score 000000 Level 01 [Below the panel:] Hell\n"}
{"id":725,"title":"Literally","image_title":"Literally","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/725","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/literally.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/725:_Literally","transcript":"[Cueball and a Cueball-like friend are walking left together. The friend turns his head towards Cueball who speaks, but is interrupted by voice from behind them off-panel right.] Cueball: I was literally glued to my seat through the entire- Off-panel voice: Hah! Off-panel voice: You mean \"figuratively\"!\n[A crazy man walks into the next frame-less panel. He has messy hair and a messy beard. Cueball and his friend stop walking and turns toward him.] Cueball: Who are you? Crazy man: Eighteen years I've watched you! Crazy man: Waiting!\n[A flashback panel. Four kids are standing around talking to each other. To the left is a girl with a ponytail and in front of her is a kid looking like Cueball - this is the Crazy man as a kid. He speaks to two kids in front of him, the one looking like Cueball, is actually Cueball as a kid, and then another kid with short black hair is standing with him. Above this panels frame, which is not as high as the other panels, there is text narrated by the crazy man. He also narrates a line at the bottom of the panel where the flashback panels frame is cut of at the bottom right.] Crazy man (narrating): Ever since that day in seventh grade when you humiliated me. Crazy man as a kid: I told him and he literally exploded! Cueball as a kid: Uh, unless he physically burst , you mean \"figuratively\". Kid with hair: Hah. Crazy man (narrating): Remember?\n[Cueball and his friend has moved back away from the crazy man to get some more distance between him and themselves.] Crazy man: I knew one day you'd slip, and I vowed I'd be there to see you fall. How does it feel? Cueball: You are literally the craziest person I've ever met. Crazy man: You did it again! Cueball: No, I didn't.\n","explanation":"The adverb \"literally\" implies that the action it describes actually happened, while its opposite, \"figuratively\", is used when the action it describes is being used as a figure of speech, and is not a representation of what actually happened. However, \"literally\" is often used colloquially as an intensifier, to mean \"really\" or \"very\", and even though many dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster and Oxford Learner's Dictionaries state that this is a valid use of the word, many people object to this usage. It is noteworthy that these dictionaries try to catalog how words are used, not whether any one usage is more valid than another.  Many might say it is more consistent to say a word such as \"practically\" for this usage.\nIn this comic, Cueball mentions he was literally glued to his seat, at which point a crazy man off-panel loudly corrects him. The crazy man declares that he has been stalking Cueball for eighteen years since an incident in seventh grade, when the crazy man (as a kid) used literally in the colloquial sense, and young Cueball corrected him. He felt humiliated and began to follow Cueball everywhere, waiting for Cueball to make the same mistake, presumably to save face.\nWhen Cueball tells him that he is \"literally the craziest person\" he's ever met, the crazy man thinks that he is incorrectly using the word \"literally\" again; however, Cueball reassures him that he did not misuse it, meaning the crazy man actually is the craziest person he has ever met. This is reminiscent of the title text in 1652: Conditionals .\nThe title text points out that a chemistry experiment gone wrong is one of the few things that could cause someone to literally be glued to their seat, having previously been figuratively glued to their seat in fascination.\nIn this manner the title text could provide an alternative interpretation of Cueball's original sentence: \"I was literally glued to my seat through the entire [chemistry experiment.]\"\nIf this interpretation were correct, then the crazy person interrupted Cueball before he had a chance to finish his sentence, thereby never fulfilling his vow.\nOn a side note, if they were in seventh grade when Cueball corrected the crazy man's mistake, then Cueball and the crazy man are 30-31 (12|13 + 18) years old, approximately the same conclusion as in 1577: Advent .\n[Cueball and a Cueball-like friend are walking left together. The friend turns his head towards Cueball who speaks, but is interrupted by voice from behind them off-panel right.] Cueball: I was literally glued to my seat through the entire- Off-panel voice: Hah! Off-panel voice: You mean \"figuratively\"!\n[A crazy man walks into the next frame-less panel. He has messy hair and a messy beard. Cueball and his friend stop walking and turns toward him.] Cueball: Who are you? Crazy man: Eighteen years I've watched you! Crazy man: Waiting!\n[A flashback panel. Four kids are standing around talking to each other. To the left is a girl with a ponytail and in front of her is a kid looking like Cueball - this is the Crazy man as a kid. He speaks to two kids in front of him, the one looking like Cueball, is actually Cueball as a kid, and then another kid with short black hair is standing with him. Above this panels frame, which is not as high as the other panels, there is text narrated by the crazy man. He also narrates a line at the bottom of the panel where the flashback panels frame is cut of at the bottom right.] Crazy man (narrating): Ever since that day in seventh grade when you humiliated me. Crazy man as a kid: I told him and he literally exploded! Cueball as a kid: Uh, unless he physically burst , you mean \"figuratively\". Kid with hair: Hah. Crazy man (narrating): Remember?\n[Cueball and his friend has moved back away from the crazy man to get some more distance between him and themselves.] Crazy man: I knew one day you'd slip, and I vowed I'd be there to see you fall. How does it feel? Cueball: You are literally the craziest person I've ever met. Crazy man: You did it again! Cueball: No, I didn't.\n"}
{"id":726,"title":"Seat Selection","image_title":"Seat Selection","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/726","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/seat_selection.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/726:_Seat_Selection","transcript":"[A seat selection diagram to book your seat on a plane is displayed on a gray background. It shows the front end of a plane to just behind the wings. The outline of the plane is in a darker gray color, while the seating section is light gray with black seats. The cockpit windows are shown as well as the entrance section in the front of the plane where two arrows point out of the two possible exits one on each side. The first class section with only four seats for each of the 3 rows are clearly separated from the rest of the seats. The six seats for each row is labeled with letters A to F and the rows are labeled for every third seat starting at 9 and ending after two numbers behind the wings at 27. Below, going over the wing pointing down is a frame with light gray background and the following text:] Select desired seat by clicking on the above chart. F E D C B A 9 12 15 18 21 24 27\n\n[Megan in a scarf with two suitcases behind her is standing in an airport, contemplating her choice at the self-check-in looking at the display from the first panel. Behind her is a manned check-in counter with Cueball and Ponytail sitting behind three screens at the counter. Above them is a big sign with an arrow to the right:] Gates\n[Back to the seat selection diagram where a hand shaped cursor indicates that Megan has chosen the cockpit of the plane.] *Click* Select desired seat by clicking on the above chart. F E D C B A 9 12 15 18 21 24 27\n\n[Close up of Megan seen through the front window in the cockpit of the plane, holding the yoke, her scarf hanging behind her into the next windows frame, like if she was riding a motorcycle, because she makes the plane rise enough for it to fall behind her. A pilot sitting behind her seen in the third window, is wearing a cap and sunglasses. He looks at her with both his hands held in front of his mouth.] Megan: WOOOOOOO!\n","explanation":"Many airlines give passengers the opportunity to select a preferred seat when booking a flight. In this case, Megan appears to be checking in at a self-check-in at the airport, where she is given the opportunity to select her seat. Rather than selecting a seat on the diagram, Megan clicks on the pilot seat (which is of course not an actual option for  online seating reservations [ citation needed ] ). In the last frame, we see that, because she chose the pilot seat, she is now actually sitting in the captain\u2019s seat, flying the plane while whooping. A worried-looking pilot sits behind her at the back of the cockpit, holding both hands in front of his mouth.\nThe title text says to not click on the wing. The implication is that if you did click on the wing you would, similarly, end up sitting outside on the wing. Even if you were able to hold on, this would put you above the Death Zone, which is at 7 km (See the what if? Rising Steadily ). Standard cruising altitude is 10 km . It would be an unpleasant death, as the air is so thin that you actually lose oxygen to the air (as explained in the mentioned what if?).\nThis kind of event could lead to situations as the one depicted in 1660: Captain Speaking .\n[A seat selection diagram to book your seat on a plane is displayed on a gray background. It shows the front end of a plane to just behind the wings. The outline of the plane is in a darker gray color, while the seating section is light gray with black seats. The cockpit windows are shown as well as the entrance section in the front of the plane where two arrows point out of the two possible exits one on each side. The first class section with only four seats for each of the 3 rows are clearly separated from the rest of the seats. The six seats for each row is labeled with letters A to F and the rows are labeled for every third seat starting at 9 and ending after two numbers behind the wings at 27. Below, going over the wing pointing down is a frame with light gray background and the following text:] Select desired seat by clicking on the above chart. F E D C B A 9 12 15 18 21 24 27\n\n[Megan in a scarf with two suitcases behind her is standing in an airport, contemplating her choice at the self-check-in looking at the display from the first panel. Behind her is a manned check-in counter with Cueball and Ponytail sitting behind three screens at the counter. Above them is a big sign with an arrow to the right:] Gates\n[Back to the seat selection diagram where a hand shaped cursor indicates that Megan has chosen the cockpit of the plane.] *Click* Select desired seat by clicking on the above chart. F E D C B A 9 12 15 18 21 24 27\n\n[Close up of Megan seen through the front window in the cockpit of the plane, holding the yoke, her scarf hanging behind her into the next windows frame, like if she was riding a motorcycle, because she makes the plane rise enough for it to fall behind her. A pilot sitting behind her seen in the third window, is wearing a cap and sunglasses. He looks at her with both his hands held in front of his mouth.] Megan: WOOOOOOO!\n"}
{"id":727,"title":"Trade Expert","image_title":"Trade Expert","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/727","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trade_expert.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/727:_Trade_Expert","transcript":"[Cueball as a news anchor is sitting behind a desk with his hand on the desk, leaning towards his off-panel guest to the right.] Cueball: And for more on the summit, we turn to trade expert Dr. Steven Berlee. Cueball: Steven?\n[Zoom out to include Dr. Steven Berlee, also drawn like Cueball, with his hands below he desk, sitting behind the desk to the right of Cueball facing towards him, still with his hands on the desk.] Steven Berlee: I'm not actually a doctor or a trade expert. I'm just a programmer who lies to get on news shows.\n[Close-up on Steven Berlee.] Cueball (off-panel): What? Why? Steven Berlee: To share a message with newscasters.\n[Zoom back out to show both men, the news anchor now also with his hands below the desk.] Cueball: Which is? Steven Berlee: Every time you say \"backslash\" as part of a web address on air, I die a little.\n","explanation":"Cueball as a news anchor has another Cueball-like character as guest in the studio, a doctor who is also a trade expert. However, Steven Berlee turns out to be a fraud. In reality he is a frustrated programmer willing to lie his way on to news show to share his message with any newscasters willing to listen:\nEvery time you say \"backslash\" as part of a web address on air, I die a little.\nThe slash character (\/), also known as forward slash, is the correct way to separate distinct parts of a web address; for example in the address \" http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Slash_(punctuation) \", a slash follows the \"org\" and the \"wiki\". However, some newscasters are unfamiliar with the distinction between the different types of slashes, thus confusing the normal slash with the backslash (\\), the wrong character. They may also be somewhat overzealous by trying to specify forward- or backslash since just saying \"slash\" would be sufficient. Also as mentioned in the title text the backslash is used in addresses on a windows PC.\nSteven Berlee claims that he suffers every time this mistake is made in a news program, explaining his reason for cheating his way on the air. Steven's name is most likely made up, as it seems to be taken from two or three of the inventors of the Internet :\nSearching the internet lists no one called Steven Berlee, and the only references point back to this comic.\nThe title text refers to how in the Windows operating system, the backslash is actually used instead of the slash as a separator (in contrast to Unix-based systems, which use the forward slash). Thus, the path to any Windows file encoded in a URI (uniform resource identifier) would correctly contain the backslash character. It is possible to pass parameters, including strings, in an internet URI and so you could have an identifier that directly embedded the path of a windows file on a windows server - this would be such a weird and terrible thing to do.\nIn the title text Steven complains that after having had the modern version of the Internet for 20 years (since early 90s and this comic was released in 2010) they should have learned the difference by now. He also continues to claim that if they do not understand the difference between an internet url and Windows directory paths, and thus embedding these into their urls, then he cannot help them with just a short lecture while he cons his way to time on the air.\n[Cueball as a news anchor is sitting behind a desk with his hand on the desk, leaning towards his off-panel guest to the right.] Cueball: And for more on the summit, we turn to trade expert Dr. Steven Berlee. Cueball: Steven?\n[Zoom out to include Dr. Steven Berlee, also drawn like Cueball, with his hands below he desk, sitting behind the desk to the right of Cueball facing towards him, still with his hands on the desk.] Steven Berlee: I'm not actually a doctor or a trade expert. I'm just a programmer who lies to get on news shows.\n[Close-up on Steven Berlee.] Cueball (off-panel): What? Why? Steven Berlee: To share a message with newscasters.\n[Zoom back out to show both men, the news anchor now also with his hands below the desk.] Cueball: Which is? Steven Berlee: Every time you say \"backslash\" as part of a web address on air, I die a little.\n"}
{"id":728,"title":"iPad","image_title":"iPad","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/728","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ipad.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/728:_iPad","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an armchair, playing with an iPad. Megan is looking over his shoulder.] Cueball: Navigating Google Maps on the iPad is fun. It feels so futuristic. Cueball: Swoosh! Zoom!\nMegan: There are, right now, monkeys controlling robotic arms via neural implants.\nMegan: A huge and alien future is barreling toward us. And I can't WAIT.\nMegan: But no, your iPad is cool, too. Cueball: Stop spoiling my future with your slightly more distant one.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is entertained by his iPad (which came out a few days prior) because messing around with it is so fun and feels futuristic. Megan tries to bring perspective to him by telling him that his fun is really not so fun because so many exciting and much more impressive things are to come. Cueball still objects, because that makes him feel that he's too easily impressed by trivial things, and says that Megan is spoiling his fun by trying to make his source of entertainment seem less cool.\nThe title text is showing how Cueball is, instead of being horrified by all the new ways to die technology could present, like a scientist, enthralled by the many newer ways that death could occur.\n[Cueball is sitting in an armchair, playing with an iPad. Megan is looking over his shoulder.] Cueball: Navigating Google Maps on the iPad is fun. It feels so futuristic. Cueball: Swoosh! Zoom!\nMegan: There are, right now, monkeys controlling robotic arms via neural implants.\nMegan: A huge and alien future is barreling toward us. And I can't WAIT.\nMegan: But no, your iPad is cool, too. Cueball: Stop spoiling my future with your slightly more distant one.\n"}
{"id":729,"title":"Laser Pointer","image_title":"Laser Pointer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/729","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/laser_pointer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/729:_Laser_Pointer","transcript":"[Cueball points a laser pointer at the floor. A black cat crouches, staring at the red dot.]\n[The cat pounces.]\n[The cat lands with its paw on the dot, claws out.]\n[The cat tugs on the dot.] tug tug\n[Cueball tries to use the laser pointer, which is no longer emitting a beam.] Cueball:\u00a0??? click click\n[The cat nibbles on the red laser dot.] Cat: lick? nom nom\n[The cat arches, emitting red shock lines.]\n[The cat shoots lasers out of its eyes at Cueball, who is covered in a bright red glow.] FWOOSH Cueball: AUGH! [The right side of the panel is the end of a thought bubble.]\n[The black cat, sleeping, has dreamed the entire strip.]\n","explanation":"It is common to use a laser pointer as a cat toy because cats are attracted to the dot and attempt in vain to catch it in their paws. They will chase the dot as it moves around, sometimes pouncing on it or swiping at it with its claws, however, they will never be able to catch it. [ citation needed ] This is very frustrating for cats (and dogs), because it triggers a hunting instinct, but removes the satisfaction of actually catching their prey.\nCueball is messing with his cat with a laser pointer, however, he is unprepared when his cat pounces and successfully grabs the laser dot. As Cueball looks around and tries to figure out what happened to the laser, his cat licks it, before eating it and starting to glow with a red light.\nBy this point, the best choice would be to run away screaming, as normal cats cannot eat lasers and start to glow. [ citation needed ] However, before he can run, the cat shoots lasers from its eyes and disintegrates a surprised Cueball on the spot.\nIt is then revealed that everything that happened was just a cat's dream. Only in its dreams can a cat successfully catch and consume the dot. Also, it is only in a dream that this will give it the power to shoot laser light from its eyes, and vaporize the human in revenge for taunting it with the laser pointer. [ citation needed ]\nReal cats' eyes (and some other animals' eyes) have a tapetum lucidum behind their retinas, which increases their sensitivity in low-light conditions.  This can cause their eyes to appear to glow, but they're actually just reflecting light from the environment.\nThe title text makes a pun on the chamber in which lasers are formed, known as a laser cavity .\n[Cueball points a laser pointer at the floor. A black cat crouches, staring at the red dot.]\n[The cat pounces.]\n[The cat lands with its paw on the dot, claws out.]\n[The cat tugs on the dot.] tug tug\n[Cueball tries to use the laser pointer, which is no longer emitting a beam.] Cueball:\u00a0??? click click\n[The cat nibbles on the red laser dot.] Cat: lick? nom nom\n[The cat arches, emitting red shock lines.]\n[The cat shoots lasers out of its eyes at Cueball, who is covered in a bright red glow.] FWOOSH Cueball: AUGH! [The right side of the panel is the end of a thought bubble.]\n[The black cat, sleeping, has dreamed the entire strip.]\n"}
{"id":730,"title":"Circuit Diagram","image_title":"Circuit Diagram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/730","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/circuit_diagram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/730:_Circuit_Diagram","transcript":"[In the upper left corner there is a map scale, labeled with 1 mi (1 km).] [Underneath the scale is a circuit diagram with the following items connected:] An antenna symbol. A blender. An Arduino, labeled with \"Arduino, just for blog cred\". A chip, labeled \"Most expensive chip available\". A symbol for an inductor. A pattern that looks like a highway cloverleaf. A battery symbol (with the + and - symbols on the wrong ends) with a value of \u221a2V. A resistor symbol label \"120\u03a9 or to taste\". A switch that is labeled \"glue open\". A transistor with two emitters, one P and one N, and no collector. A jar of scarab beetles. A resistor labeled \"brown blue orange\". An unlabeled resistor with a center tap. A capacitor. A diode. A ground. An inductor. An another inductor. The two inductors and ground are all covered by a \"solder blob\". A \"666 timer\" that has pin 5 going into a question mark. A compass rose. A battery, labeled 50V, with grounds on both sides. A long horizontal wire that is labeled \"pull this wire really tight\". An AC source that is labeled 240V, shorted out, with a label on the short \"Omit this if you're a wimp.\" An inductor that is labeled with \"11kg\". A Batman symbol. A squirrel. A wire that is labeled as a distance 3\/8\". A 50V battery. A frowny face. A vertical wire with a 90 degree bend labeled \"caution\". A balloon. An inductor symbol with a line on the bottom edge labeled as \"warm front\". A resistor labeled \"\u00eb\". An electric eel. A capacitor. An unlabeled resistor. A gob of hot glue attached to a chip with an inverter hooked to an XOR gate, both with feedback into each other. A neck strap. A bridge rectifier labeled as \"Moral rectifier\". A bottle of magic smoke. A fishing bobber. A broken wire labeled with a question mark. A vertical wire labeled with \"electrons single file\". A switch labeled \"Hire someone to open and close switch real fast.\" A contact labeled \"touch tongue here\". A resistor labeled \"5\u03a9 (decoy)\" with only one terminal connected. A methyl group attached to a wire. A complex mesh of 1\u03a9 resistors labeled with \"Oh, so you think you're such a whiz at EE201?\" A wire labeled \"electrons single file\". A wire bent in a U shape with an upside-down ground on the end. A flux capacitor with the bottom wire labeled \"I-95\". A wire labeled \"yarn\". An arena with two diodes going in and one leaving. An anode labeled \"Bury deep, but not too deep.\" A motor labeled \"vibrator\". A resistor with a value of \u03c0. A 500V AC source. A wire that leads out of frame with a label \"to center of sun\". A 55 MPH speed limit sign. An SR latch (flip-flop) labeled \"may use an actual sandal instead\". A holding pen. A wire in a knot. A resistor labeled \"8mm\". A resistor symbol labeled \"not a resistor; wire just does this\". A motor symbol labeled \"to scale\". A tangled mess of wires connected and jumping over each other. A photo diode labeled \"tear collector\". A wire in the shape of a ECG. A light bulb. A capacitor-looking symbol labeled \"3 liters\". A resistor labeled \"yes\". An unlabeled inductor. A resistor with a question mark as a label. An inductor labeled \"Take off shirt while wiring this part.  Ooh, yeah, I like that.\" A ground symbol immersed in a beaker of holy water.\n","explanation":"Another fine example of nerd sniping , as mentioned in the title text.\nThere are pieces of circuit diagrams, road maps, chemical diagrams, and other things all mixed in.\nExplanations for each below!\n[In the upper left corner there is a map scale, labeled with 1 mi (1 km).] [Underneath the scale is a circuit diagram with the following items connected:] An antenna symbol. A blender. An Arduino, labeled with \"Arduino, just for blog cred\". A chip, labeled \"Most expensive chip available\". A symbol for an inductor. A pattern that looks like a highway cloverleaf. A battery symbol (with the + and - symbols on the wrong ends) with a value of \u221a2V. A resistor symbol label \"120\u03a9 or to taste\". A switch that is labeled \"glue open\". A transistor with two emitters, one P and one N, and no collector. A jar of scarab beetles. A resistor labeled \"brown blue orange\". An unlabeled resistor with a center tap. A capacitor. A diode. A ground. An inductor. An another inductor. The two inductors and ground are all covered by a \"solder blob\". A \"666 timer\" that has pin 5 going into a question mark. A compass rose. A battery, labeled 50V, with grounds on both sides. A long horizontal wire that is labeled \"pull this wire really tight\". An AC source that is labeled 240V, shorted out, with a label on the short \"Omit this if you're a wimp.\" An inductor that is labeled with \"11kg\". A Batman symbol. A squirrel. A wire that is labeled as a distance 3\/8\". A 50V battery. A frowny face. A vertical wire with a 90 degree bend labeled \"caution\". A balloon. An inductor symbol with a line on the bottom edge labeled as \"warm front\". A resistor labeled \"\u00eb\". An electric eel. A capacitor. An unlabeled resistor. A gob of hot glue attached to a chip with an inverter hooked to an XOR gate, both with feedback into each other. A neck strap. A bridge rectifier labeled as \"Moral rectifier\". A bottle of magic smoke. A fishing bobber. A broken wire labeled with a question mark. A vertical wire labeled with \"electrons single file\". A switch labeled \"Hire someone to open and close switch real fast.\" A contact labeled \"touch tongue here\". A resistor labeled \"5\u03a9 (decoy)\" with only one terminal connected. A methyl group attached to a wire. A complex mesh of 1\u03a9 resistors labeled with \"Oh, so you think you're such a whiz at EE201?\" A wire labeled \"electrons single file\". A wire bent in a U shape with an upside-down ground on the end. A flux capacitor with the bottom wire labeled \"I-95\". A wire labeled \"yarn\". An arena with two diodes going in and one leaving. An anode labeled \"Bury deep, but not too deep.\" A motor labeled \"vibrator\". A resistor with a value of \u03c0. A 500V AC source. A wire that leads out of frame with a label \"to center of sun\". A 55 MPH speed limit sign. An SR latch (flip-flop) labeled \"may use an actual sandal instead\". A holding pen. A wire in a knot. A resistor labeled \"8mm\". A resistor symbol labeled \"not a resistor; wire just does this\". A motor symbol labeled \"to scale\". A tangled mess of wires connected and jumping over each other. A photo diode labeled \"tear collector\". A wire in the shape of a ECG. A light bulb. A capacitor-looking symbol labeled \"3 liters\". A resistor labeled \"yes\". An unlabeled inductor. A resistor with a question mark as a label. An inductor labeled \"Take off shirt while wiring this part.  Ooh, yeah, I like that.\" A ground symbol immersed in a beaker of holy water.\n"}
{"id":731,"title":"Desert Island","image_title":"Desert Island","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/731","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/desert_island.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/731:_Desert_Island","transcript":"[Cueball sits writing in a diary on a desert island, only the sandy tip of which with a palm tree on it stands above the water. Beneath the surface is a kelp forest, some sharks, a stingray, a shipwreck, a submarine, several large jellyfish, a giant squid fighting a sperm whale, a crashed plane, some coral formations, a thermal vent emitting a plume of smoke surrounded by several annelids, and a snail.]\nCueball: Day 44: Still stranded, with nothing but flat empty water as far as the eye can see.\n","explanation":"This comic is making the point that there is a wonderful world waiting to be explored in the ocean. From above it seems so plain, endless, and boring. But underneath the surface lies the most unexplored area on the planet. This comic is a commentary on the need to head below the waves and start exploring.\nCueball sits writing in a diary on a desert island which is really a mountain of which only the sandy tip with a palm tree on it stands above the water. From his diary entry, it appears that he has been stranded on this island for 44 days, and only sees \"flat empty waters\" around him. The waters around him may be \"empty\", in that there are no other boats or coastlines around him, however, there are many objects below the surface.\nBeneath the surface is:\nThe most important items from the title text are:\nThe title text itself is a poem:\n[Cueball sits writing in a diary on a desert island, only the sandy tip of which with a palm tree on it stands above the water. Beneath the surface is a kelp forest, some sharks, a stingray, a shipwreck, a submarine, several large jellyfish, a giant squid fighting a sperm whale, a crashed plane, some coral formations, a thermal vent emitting a plume of smoke surrounded by several annelids, and a snail.]\nCueball: Day 44: Still stranded, with nothing but flat empty water as far as the eye can see.\n"}
{"id":732,"title":"HDTV","image_title":"HDTV","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/732","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hdtv.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/732:_HDTV","transcript":"[Cueball is pointing to a huge flatscreen HDTV on the wall. His friend is holding a cell phone.] Cueball (HDTV Owner): Check out my new HDTV-a beautiful, high-def 1080p. Friend: Wow, that's over TWICE the horizontal resolution of my cell phone. Friend: In fact, it almost beats the LCD monitor I got in 2004. It baffles me that people find HDTV impressive.","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at the differing standard between image quality for television sets and other electronic devices, even though both are based on essentially the same standards. When rating television sets, a 1080p screen, that is, a screen 1,920 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels tall with progressive scan, is considered impressive. In contrast, the same resolution with a computer device is considered standard fare, given that, at the time of writing, a 4:3 ratio computer screen 1,024 pixels wide would have been expected. Widescreen monitors have already surpassed 1,920 pixels wide, and double widescreen monitors have become more common. As of the end of the 2010s, even most smartphones had a horizontal resolution nearing or at 1,080 pixels.\nThe title texts explains another disagreement involving images and popular opinion. The feeling that a viewer gets from watching a film in a theatre is different from the feeling from a home film, or again, between a serialized programme from an international television channel and a locally-broadcast programme. The disparity is that the small-time productions actually implement better-quality equipment than the big-time productions, in terms of higher frame rate (although not in image fidelity or other respects). However the small productions really are cheaper in other respects, and this feeling is transferred to the look of high frame rates, thanks to videotapes often being used instead of film stock. Low frame rates on more big budget films (and all old, nostalgic productions before high frame rates were commercially possible) mean low frame rates are associated with quality, despite not being as able to capture as much motion as better-quality high frame rates. Blur, judder, and slow pans are mostly absent in high-frame rate productions. This is changing, however, since the major films The Hobbit and Avatar 2 are\/will be shot with better framerates.\n[Cueball is pointing to a huge flatscreen HDTV on the wall. His friend is holding a cell phone.] Cueball (HDTV Owner): Check out my new HDTV-a beautiful, high-def 1080p. Friend: Wow, that's over TWICE the horizontal resolution of my cell phone. Friend: In fact, it almost beats the LCD monitor I got in 2004. It baffles me that people find HDTV impressive."}
{"id":733,"title":"Eagle","image_title":"Eagle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/733","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eagle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/733:_Eagle","transcript":"[Ponytail is looking up into a tree, holding a clipboard in one hand and a radio in the other.] Ponytail: The eagle has left the nest. Off-panel: *KHHHKHT* Roger that. Alert the agents. *KHKKHHKT* Ponytail: Will you stop that? [Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Following field biologists around and interpreting everything they say as code phrases.\n","explanation":"Another comic in the My Hobby series. This comic is making a play on the typical \"secret agent\" code phrases such as the one above or \"The Eagle has landed.\" or \"The cobra has struck.\" The word \"eagle\" is especially popular for code phrases, referring to craft containing a VIP. Randall says that his hobby is to follow field biologists around and interpreting everything they do as a code phrases.\n\"The Eagle has landed\" was also the first sentence Neil Armstrong sent back to earth on the first manned moon landing by Apollo 11 back in 1969.\nThe *KHHHKHT* noises that the character is making are imitations of the static sounds made when using a walkie-talkie or other radio devices. On real radios, this happens only at the end of a transmission; the first use of the sound would be the end of Ponytail's legitimate transmission, while the second one is from the fake transmission.\nThe title text is saying that when the character in the comic is not following field biologists and pretending they're saying code phrases, he is doing the reverse to secret agents. By hiring an animal trainer he can give them a situation they are unable to report, such as seeing an actual eagle land in front of them.\n[Ponytail is looking up into a tree, holding a clipboard in one hand and a radio in the other.] Ponytail: The eagle has left the nest. Off-panel: *KHHHKHT* Roger that. Alert the agents. *KHKKHHKT* Ponytail: Will you stop that? [Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Following field biologists around and interpreting everything they say as code phrases.\n"}
{"id":734,"title":"Outbreak","image_title":"Outbreak","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/734","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/outbreak.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/734:_Outbreak","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan stand outside a door into a laboratory (with the word \"LAB\" in large letters on the door). Cueball is leaning back against the door. A Cueball-like zombie which is clearly falling apart, walking with its hands stretched out in front of it, is visible through a window into the laboratory. At the top of the panel there is a frame around a yellow area with narration, which goes over the top of this panel's frame.] Narrator: The outbreak started with Patient Zero... Cueball: He was exposed to toxin X-7\u2014 now he's a bloodthirsty monster! Megan: Has he been in isolation? Zombie: Braaains!\n[Cueball turns towards the door, pushing on it and partly blocking the door's label (\"LA\"). A noise indicates the zombie banging on the door from inside. Megan runs right her head and hand already partly outside the frame.] Cueball: Yes, but I can't hold this door for long! Megan: Hang on, I've got a gun in my truck. Zombie (hitting the door): Wham\n[In this frame-less panel Cueball opens the door a crack, leaning back with a hand in front of his face, as Megan shoots with her shotgun through the open door at the zombie inside.  The word \"LAB\" on the door is no longer blocked.] Shotgun: BLAM\n[Cueball and Megan stand together away from the laboratory door. Megan still holds shotgun down. At the top and bottom of the panel there is two more frames around a yellow areas with narration, which goes over the top and bottom of this panel's frame. As Cueball and Megan talk, their names are revealed.] Narrator: And ended with Patient Zero five minutes later. Cueball: So, I never got your name. I'm Ryan. Megan: Laura. Narrator: The remaining 90 minutes of the movie will be a romantic comedy.\n","explanation":"Patient Zero is the usual terminology for the first patient tested or infected with an outbreak -style infection, (in the comic's case, a zombie outbreak,) like in the movie Outbreak , which is not the main inspiration for this comic, except maybe the title.\nThis comic, however, serves to make fun of the stereotypical zombie movie in which an unlikely series of events, coupled with extreme oversight on part of the staff, leave an opening for an outbreak to begin. Often, the infected find themselves lacking any restraint or containment, and freely move about in search of humans to infect.\nIn the comic Ryan (drawn as Cueball ) tells Laura (drawn as Megan ) that the patient has been exposed to toxin X-7 . The patient (a zombie version of a Cueball-like guy) can be seen through a window inside a laboratory, with Ryan trying to block the door. The patient has turned into a bloodthirsty monster that in true zombie-style calls out for brains, while walking with both arms stretched out and bits of him falling off, three typical cliches for zombie movies.\nLaura then asks if the zombie has been kept in isolation , a standard medical procedure that prevents the patient from coming into contact with anyone or anything not specifically approved, and thus prevents the spread of the disease. Her question serves to point out the drastic difference in real-life procedure and zombie movies.\nWhen told that so far the zombie has been isolated her next action is to run to her car to obtain the weapon she has there to destroy the zombie, again showing contrast against the often irrational and illogical actions of medical staff in movies, whose behaviors usually lead to their deaths and to the spread of the disease, which causes the real outbreak. Because one person (or a few people) dying from a disease is not called an outbreak.\nWhen Laura returns, she kills patient zero before he can spread the infection, and thus the outbreak ends in the third panel five minutes after it started in the first panel.\nThe comic ends with a little \"mock the audience\" joke as romantic comedies stereotypically have a very different audience from zombie horror movies. [ citation needed ] The two characters had never been introduced before, their names are first given in the last panel. Having such an intense and life-threatening experience often causes people to fall in love. But for a zombie\/disaster movie this is supposed to happen just before the end titles, so you have all the fun first, and can go home on the happy ending. Since the \"fun\" part only lasted for five minutes the rest of the movie will now describe Ryan and Laura's romantic relationship after this comic.\nAs a result, the director(s) of this movie are deliberately showing the wrong kind of film to the audience attracted by the title or teaser. This would be disastrous for a movie in real life given that audiences do not take kindly to such antics and are likely to pour hate about it online, dissuading others from going, and alienating both those audiences who enjoy romantic comedies and those who enjoy zombie films, leaving just a niche occupied by the people who enjoy both.\nThe title-text is included as another example of the logical real-life actions versus the illogical movie ones, as any dangerous substance in a real lab would be disposed of, preventing further harm. In zombie movies, another major trope is the medical staff thinking that they are safe after they eliminate the first zombie, only to find the remaining chemicals have been used to make more. But before Ryan and Laura have had dinner, they promptly go back and destroy both the X-7 toxin and the last hope of the zombie fans seeing the movie of any further action...\nZombies are a recurring theme in xkcd. Though zombies are often depicted as being raised from the dead they are as mentioned often created (in films) through disease or toxins as is the case here. Apart from the three typical features of zombies mentioned, the zombie in this comic is also called zombie in the official transcript on xkcd.\n[Cueball and Megan stand outside a door into a laboratory (with the word \"LAB\" in large letters on the door). Cueball is leaning back against the door. A Cueball-like zombie which is clearly falling apart, walking with its hands stretched out in front of it, is visible through a window into the laboratory. At the top of the panel there is a frame around a yellow area with narration, which goes over the top of this panel's frame.] Narrator: The outbreak started with Patient Zero... Cueball: He was exposed to toxin X-7\u2014 now he's a bloodthirsty monster! Megan: Has he been in isolation? Zombie: Braaains!\n[Cueball turns towards the door, pushing on it and partly blocking the door's label (\"LA\"). A noise indicates the zombie banging on the door from inside. Megan runs right her head and hand already partly outside the frame.] Cueball: Yes, but I can't hold this door for long! Megan: Hang on, I've got a gun in my truck. Zombie (hitting the door): Wham\n[In this frame-less panel Cueball opens the door a crack, leaning back with a hand in front of his face, as Megan shoots with her shotgun through the open door at the zombie inside.  The word \"LAB\" on the door is no longer blocked.] Shotgun: BLAM\n[Cueball and Megan stand together away from the laboratory door. Megan still holds shotgun down. At the top and bottom of the panel there is two more frames around a yellow areas with narration, which goes over the top and bottom of this panel's frame. As Cueball and Megan talk, their names are revealed.] Narrator: And ended with Patient Zero five minutes later. Cueball: So, I never got your name. I'm Ryan. Megan: Laura. Narrator: The remaining 90 minutes of the movie will be a romantic comedy.\n"}
{"id":735,"title":"Floor","image_title":"Floor","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/735","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/floor.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/735:_Floor","transcript":"[Three Cueball-like kids are in a living room. Furniture and other things are knocked over, broken, or tilted. The first kid is holding a handle of a plunger with cables going offscreen.] First Kid: I've dynamited a trench through the kitchen to divert flow! BOOM\n[The second kid is aiming a hose at the floor.] Second Kid: More hoses! We need to cool and solidify the surface layer! FWOOSH\n[The third kid is standing on a chair, using a cell phone or radio.] Third Kid: Where are the damn helicopters?\n[Caption beneath the panel:] Like many kids, we sometimes pretended the floor was lava.\n","explanation":"The floor is lava is a game many kids play where they pretend the floor is lava , meaning that they can't step on it or else they'll get 'burned'. In this comic, the three kids are taking this game too seriously, causing great damage to the house with what appears to be a garden hose and some dynamite.\nStopping a lava flow by diverting it into an artificial trench or cooling the flow with (sea)water are both tactics that have been used in the past with varying success .\nThe title text refers to events like the 2010 eruptions at Eyjafjallaj\u00f6kull , the ash clouds of which caused the shutdown of most of Europe's IFR airspace. The first joke there is that grounding a child often means to consign him to his\/her bedroom for a set period of hours (as a punishment), whereas grounding a plane means to disallow any use of that plane for an extended period of time. The most notable example of this is Concorde , which has been indefinitely grounded. The second joke is that causing panic and diverting a large number of flights would cause lots of financial damage, and would normally be subject to more punishment than simply giving the kids a time-out.\n[Three Cueball-like kids are in a living room. Furniture and other things are knocked over, broken, or tilted. The first kid is holding a handle of a plunger with cables going offscreen.] First Kid: I've dynamited a trench through the kitchen to divert flow! BOOM\n[The second kid is aiming a hose at the floor.] Second Kid: More hoses! We need to cool and solidify the surface layer! FWOOSH\n[The third kid is standing on a chair, using a cell phone or radio.] Third Kid: Where are the damn helicopters?\n[Caption beneath the panel:] Like many kids, we sometimes pretended the floor was lava.\n"}
{"id":736,"title":"Cemetery","image_title":"Cemetery","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/736","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cemetery.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/736:_Cemetery","transcript":"[Cueball is in a cemetery, near a gravestone. Other people stand around staring. One Cueball-like figure stands to the right of him, and three figures, further away, look on as well. Of the three figures in the back, the tallest left-most Cueball-like figure covers his mouth with his hands. Megan is standing next to him, using her arm to block the view of a smaller figure to the right of her, presumably a child.] Cueball: Frankly, you deserve this. You knew I wanted a sans-serif font, and you ignored me. So really, this is your fault.\n[Caption below the panel] I've discovered the worst place to wander while arguing on a hands-free headset.\n","explanation":"Here, Cueball appears to be putting blame on someone who called him. This could be a result of...\n...the person insisting on a font that was not sans-serif, but the results were typographically unappealing. ...the person having problems because he used a font that was not sans-serif. ...Cueball being \"forced\" to tell person who is wrong, due to him giving Cueball something that was in a font that was not the sans-serif font for which Cueball asked.\nIn any case, the onlookers seem horrified at this sight. Cueball is using a Bluetooth headset that allows one to speak without actually holding the cell phone. The problem is that, since the headset is a small object attached to the user's ear while the phone is out of sight, someone using a Bluetooth headset may give the impression that he is talking to himself, or again, to a person who happens to be in front of him (even if the \"unintended recipient\" is dead). With Cueball standing in front of a grave and saying \"This is your fault\", to onlookers he looks like he's talking to the person buried there, who presumably died from a font-related incident.\nA sans-serif font is a font without serifs, small lines or strokes regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol. Common sans-serif fonts include Arial and Helvetica .\nThe title text suggests that Cueball is not on good terms with his mother, thus meriting a worse argument. The problem is that Cueball was in front of a different tombstone, thus giving the impression that he had an even worse grudge against his seemingly deceased mother, said argument creating an even worse impression of Cueball.\nA different example of not knowing someone is talking on the phone: [1]\n[Cueball is in a cemetery, near a gravestone. Other people stand around staring. One Cueball-like figure stands to the right of him, and three figures, further away, look on as well. Of the three figures in the back, the tallest left-most Cueball-like figure covers his mouth with his hands. Megan is standing next to him, using her arm to block the view of a smaller figure to the right of her, presumably a child.] Cueball: Frankly, you deserve this. You knew I wanted a sans-serif font, and you ignored me. So really, this is your fault.\n[Caption below the panel] I've discovered the worst place to wander while arguing on a hands-free headset.\n"}
{"id":737,"title":"Yogurt","image_title":"Yogurt","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/737","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/yogurt.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/737:_Yogurt","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a yogurt cup at arm's length. Waves of stink are rising from it.] Cueball: Oh God, how old is this yogurt in your fridge? [Someone speaks from off-panel.] Friend: What's the expiration date?\n[Cueball holds up the cup to look at the bottom.] Cueball: May 12th, but there's no year. [From off-panel again.] Friend: It's May 7th. So it's fine.\n[Now the second person is on panel, and Cueball speaks from off-panel. The second person is sitting down working on a laptop.] Cueball: I'm not sure. When it was packaged, was civilization using the Gregorian or Julian calendar? Friend: Okay, I'll throw it out. Cueball: No, it might still be good!\n","explanation":"Most packaged food has an expiration date that indicates when the food will probably no longer be suitable for consumption. This could be due to any number of reasons; most products will rot or grow mold after their expiration date passes, but some processed foods will \"dry out\" or just generally become \"unpleasant\" long before they actually spoil. The expiration date is sometimes called a \"best before\" or \"use by\" date for this reason.\nSome products don't list the year as part of the expiration date, on the assumption that by the time the year becomes an issue, the food will obviously be spoiled. Cueball is encountering this issue; clearly the yogurt has gone bad - it's raising \"stink lines\" and appears to have visible mold - but the expiration date only lists \"May 12th\" and it's currently May 7th, so the characters reason that it must still be good since the expiration date hasn't passed yet. Somehow, they fail to notice the terrible smell coming off of it.\nThe Gregorian calendar was initially adopted in the Catholic European countries in 1582 to correct the slow drift of the seasons relative to the calendar year that occurred under the Julian calendar. The Protestant and Orthodox countries were slower to adopt it. The British Empire, including the American colonies, adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. Cueball (in a seemingly sarcastic manner) wonders whether the expiration date might have been printed under the Julian Calendar, i.e., at least just under a century prior (there were some nations in Eastern Europe who changed from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar only around the time of the First World War).\nThe Gregorian calendar (our current calendar) is mostly the same as the Julian calendar with two major differences:\nThe last line spoken by Cueball may mean one of two things: either 1) he is continuing to be sarcastic toward his friend, or 2) he is genuinely considering that it may not have gone bad, despite all the clues saying otherwise.\nThe title text is Randall's own (absurd) [ citation needed ] view: for a short period of time preceding the expiration date of any food, no matter how many years have passed, it suddenly becomes good to eat again.\n[Cueball is holding a yogurt cup at arm's length. Waves of stink are rising from it.] Cueball: Oh God, how old is this yogurt in your fridge? [Someone speaks from off-panel.] Friend: What's the expiration date?\n[Cueball holds up the cup to look at the bottom.] Cueball: May 12th, but there's no year. [From off-panel again.] Friend: It's May 7th. So it's fine.\n[Now the second person is on panel, and Cueball speaks from off-panel. The second person is sitting down working on a laptop.] Cueball: I'm not sure. When it was packaged, was civilization using the Gregorian or Julian calendar? Friend: Okay, I'll throw it out. Cueball: No, it might still be good!\n"}
{"id":738,"title":"Incision","image_title":"Incision","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/738","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/incision.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/738:_Incision","transcript":"[Two doctors wearing surgical masks are standing over a prone patient. One of them is touching the patient's chest with a scalpel.] Doctor: I'm making the incision above the left\u2014 BZZZZT! Doctor: Augh!\n[Caption below the panel:] October 8th, 2004: A child swallows an \"Operation\" buzzer, leading to the single most difficult surgery ever performed.\n","explanation":"Operation is a board game wherein one attempts to remove the organs of a patient, named Cavity Sam, with a pair of tweezers. A flat board has a cartoon image of a \"patient\", and dotted around various areas are holes inside of which contain plastic pieces representing the organs.\nAdditionally, each hole is lined with a metal connector, and the tweezers are made of metal, connecting via wire to the board. When the tweezers make contact with a metal connector, a buzzer sounds and a lamp on the patient's nose lights up to signal an error.\nThe game is notoriously difficult as the organs are quite small, and the buzzer is considered by players to be annoying, if not actually startling, particularly considering how much focus and steady hand is required to avoid the tweezers making contact with a metal connector.\nIn the comic, a child swallows a buzzer from such a board game, and the joke lies in the similarity between the game and actual surgery when the buzzer is brought into the mix. The title text brings this further by describing an incident where the doctor ended up removing several organs (the object of the game, but obviously not a good idea in real life). [ citation needed ]\nThe surgery would probably have been hard, as surgery requires concentration, [ citation needed ] with the game Operation being hard as well.\n[Two doctors wearing surgical masks are standing over a prone patient. One of them is touching the patient's chest with a scalpel.] Doctor: I'm making the incision above the left\u2014 BZZZZT! Doctor: Augh!\n[Caption below the panel:] October 8th, 2004: A child swallows an \"Operation\" buzzer, leading to the single most difficult surgery ever performed.\n"}
{"id":739,"title":"Malamanteau","image_title":"Malamanteau","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/739","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/malamanteau.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/739:_Malamanteau","transcript":"[The strip is set up as the top of a Wikipedia page.] [The Wikipedia logo.] Wikipedia The free encyclopedia [Side navigation options.] Navigation -Main Page -Contents -Featured Content -Current Events [Wikipedia header options.] Article  Discussion  Edit this page  History [The article itself.] Malamanteau From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A malamanteau is a neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism. It is itself a portmanteau of [...the article cuts off.] [Below the panel.] Ever notice how Wikipedia has a few words it really likes?\n","explanation":"A malapropism is the use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical utterance.  An example of a malapropism is Yogi Berra 's statement: \"Texas has a lot of electrical votes,\" rather than \"electoral votes\". A portmanteau is a word made up of two or more combined words. For example, motel is a portmanteau, from the words motor and hotel. A neologism is simply a newly coined word that is not yet in common use.\nHere, Randall shows a hypothetical Wikipedia page of the word \"malamanteau\" which is both a portmanteau of \"malapropism\" and \"portmanteau\" and a neologism. The method used to create this new word is one of the very words used in the process. This is called a meta or \"self-referential\" joke.\nBy using many large obscure words in one sentence, Randall may also be picking on linguists, one of his favorite subjects , who are known for coining and using such words.\n\"Malamanteau\" was originally coined in 2007, when it was proposed by user ludwig_van on Metafilter as a term for language errors like \"flustrated\" (flustered & frustrated) and \"misconscrewed\" (misconstrued & screwed).\nThe bottom line of the comic (Ever notice how Wikipedia has a few words it really likes?) is a reference to a large number of Wikipedia pages that start by labeling their subject matter as a malapropism, a portmanteau, or a neologism.\nIn response to this comic, editors at Wikipedia created a malamanteau page. It was deleted multiple times and eventually turned into a redirect to the Wikipedia page for xkcd . Malamanteau and the controversy at Wikipedia got coverage at The Economist and The Boston Globe . The comic is used to illustrate this section of the xkcd Wikipedia article. In order for this to be possible Randall had to change the license for this particular comic. This has been explained in a unique xkcd Header text that is only displayed on the page for Malamanteau .\nThe title text refers to Wikipedia's requirements of citations for a page on there to exist. It also refers to the wide range of places citations can be obtained from, showing a direct opposition due to the use of very different citations (The Language Log arguments are modern and informal, whereas the obscure manuscript is formal and much older). The title text also refers to the fact that Language Log is frequently used for Wikipedia citations.\nLanguage Log is a blog that posts content relating to language and linguistics, including things like malapropisms and portmanteaus. While an informal source, it has produced new linguistic terms before, such as eggcorn . Its comments sections frequently contain discussions and arguments about English, whose participants are probably the same people who write Wikipedia articles about linguistic phenomena like malamanteaus. In actual fact, Malamanteau did not appear on Language Log until after this strip. Malamanteau has since been referenced on the Language Log website, with a link to the comic in question. Language Log has referenced xkcd many times before, reposting the comics and linking to the xkcd website.\nThe title text jokingly refers to the \"malamanteau\" citations being Language Log references and a document from the 1490s, in reference to the fact that linguists, like those who post on Language Log, often use old documents as evidence, possibly to prove that construction is a longstanding feature of the language. The joke is that the only references to this word or concept are a 500-year-old document and linguists informally arguing about what it means. In reality, if these citations were the only evidence of the term's use, then it would be unlikely to be a notable feature worthy of a Wikipedia article. Most articles that are only cited by a single website tend to get deleted unless the subject has achieved significant coverage in outside news media.\nThe comic shows Wikipedia as it would have looked at the beginning of May 2010, using its then-current logo and the then-default \u201cMonobook\u201d skin. Incidentally, just a day after the comic\u2019s publication, a new version of the Wikipedia logo was published, and the default skin was switched to the \u201cVector\u201d skin. Both of these still define the look of Wikipedia as of 2021 (though Vector undergoes continuous updates).\n[The strip is set up as the top of a Wikipedia page.] [The Wikipedia logo.] Wikipedia The free encyclopedia [Side navigation options.] Navigation -Main Page -Contents -Featured Content -Current Events [Wikipedia header options.] Article  Discussion  Edit this page  History [The article itself.] Malamanteau From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A malamanteau is a neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism. It is itself a portmanteau of [...the article cuts off.] [Below the panel.] Ever notice how Wikipedia has a few words it really likes?\n"}
{"id":740,"title":"The Tell-Tale Beat","image_title":"The Tell-Tale Beat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/740","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_tell_tale_beat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/740:_The_Tell-Tale_Beat","transcript":"[The three panels show portions of a single scene. Although the characters are still stick figures, the artwork style is heavily crosshatched and shaded.] [In the first panel there is a desk with monitor on it, and a painting of a woman above that. Next to it is a bookshelf.] Ever since I murdered Daft Punk\n[There is a fireplace, with no fire. A rug lies before it. At the left end of the mantelpiece are two bottles, one tall, one round. Another photograph of a woman is in a frame at the right end. The bookshelf continues from the previous panel.] And hid their bodies beneath the floorboards, I've been haunted\n[The narrator is clutching his head and leaning forward. A grandfather clock is behind him, next to a doorway. Above the doorway is a pallid bust of Pallas.] By this pounding . [White text on black.] Unn-Tss Unn-Tss Unn-Tss\n","explanation":"Daft Punk was a French electronic music group. The beat used in electronic music can be vocalized or spelled as \"unn-tss\". ' The Tell-Tale Heart ' is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe , in which the narrator tries to appear sane while describing how he killed a man and hid his body in the floorboards. Eventually, he imagines he hears the dead man's heartbeat through the floorboards. \"The Tell-Tale Heart\" is referenced again in the later comic 2344: 26-Second Pulse .\nCueball narrates that he killed Daft Punk and hid their bodies under the floorboards, as the narrator of 'The Tell-Tale Heart' did. (Having to outsmart a band named Daft Punk is quite ironic.) He says he has been haunted by the sound of the band's beats.\nIn the title text, the narrator continues trying to assert his sanity. The line, \"You fancy me mad,\" comes directly from The Tell-Tale Heart. He then insinuates that he will kill Roderick Usher's band; Roderick Usher was a character in ' Fall of the House of Usher ', another story by Edgar Allan Poe, making puns on 'house' and 'trance', genres of electronic music (the character of Madeline Usher in the story suffers from catalepsy, frequently falling into trances).  The title-text is also a pun on the musician Usher ; although Usher does not have his own band, one of his best-selling albums was titled Confessions , appropriate to the themes of Poe.\nThe title text mentions techno music, which is the subject of 411: Techno and is also mentioned in 586: Mission to Culture .\n[The three panels show portions of a single scene. Although the characters are still stick figures, the artwork style is heavily crosshatched and shaded.] [In the first panel there is a desk with monitor on it, and a painting of a woman above that. Next to it is a bookshelf.] Ever since I murdered Daft Punk\n[There is a fireplace, with no fire. A rug lies before it. At the left end of the mantelpiece are two bottles, one tall, one round. Another photograph of a woman is in a frame at the right end. The bookshelf continues from the previous panel.] And hid their bodies beneath the floorboards, I've been haunted\n[The narrator is clutching his head and leaning forward. A grandfather clock is behind him, next to a doorway. Above the doorway is a pallid bust of Pallas.] By this pounding . [White text on black.] Unn-Tss Unn-Tss Unn-Tss\n"}
{"id":741,"title":"Blogging","image_title":"Blogging","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/741","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blogging.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/741:_Blogging","transcript":"[Cueball stands on a stage before a large audience, holding a pointer and using it to highlight something on a screen behind him. He interacts with a member of the audience after making a point.] Cueball: The key to making a successful blog is building a relationship with your readers. Audience Member: I thought it was \"make your updates good so people will want to read them.\" Cueball: We'll discuss content generation in part three. Audience Member: Awesome! I LOVE content.\n","explanation":"This comic is a satire of the conflict between consumers who expect quality results and creators who just want to make easy money by pandering to their audience. Cueball says the key to making a successful blog is to build a relationship with your readers. While this may be a good way to ensure you are delivering content that is relevant to your audience, if a blogger keeps the audience's interests as the foremost priority, the blog may become focused on making their core audience happy rather than quality. When an audience member raises the concern that quality should be a paramount concern if you want to impress people, Cueball responds that content (the quality of the blog's content) will be addressed later in the speech. This quickly placates the audience member, illustrating how the audience (for example, readers) of a service can be easily satisfied by telling them what they want to hear. This validates Cueball's point that the audience does not want quality as much as they want to hear their own ideas repeated back to them.\nAlternative explanation:\nThis comic is a shot at all the typical blogging and social media instruction that is given. Cueball indicates he believes great content is not the highest priority when writing a blog, relegating it to at least part three of the coverage. The person in the audience, who is representing the \"normal people\", shows that people actually go to blogs for good content and couldn't care less about the other \"strategies\" the person on the stage is talking about. \"Awesome! I love content,\" is probably highly sarcastic, implying that Cueball's talk is rather devoid of it. It could imply that the speaker thinks this talk is mostly marketing jargon that misses the fundamental aspects of writing skills (style, personality, good ideas, research, basics of style) and focusing instead on schemes to artificially gain popularity.\nThe title text takes a jab at blogs concerned with \" viral content \" and \"monetization\". That is, bloggers are only concerned about their audience because they might potentially give them money. Cueball drops some marketing jargon \u2014 \"monetize the reader's eyeballs\" \u2014 in order to disguise his true purpose: illegal organ harvesting . \"Virally\" in this context might indicate that the reader may become infected with a virus during organ extraction.\n[Cueball stands on a stage before a large audience, holding a pointer and using it to highlight something on a screen behind him. He interacts with a member of the audience after making a point.] Cueball: The key to making a successful blog is building a relationship with your readers. Audience Member: I thought it was \"make your updates good so people will want to read them.\" Cueball: We'll discuss content generation in part three. Audience Member: Awesome! I LOVE content.\n"}
{"id":742,"title":"Campfire","image_title":"Campfire","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/742","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/campfire.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/742:_Campfire","transcript":"[Cueball and three children are around a campfire at night. Cueball is standing up, with a flashlight under his face.] Cueball: But when she traced the killer's IP address... it was in the 192.168\/16 block! Children: Gasp!\n","explanation":"Cueball is telling a scary story to kids by the campfire about a killer. It seems as if the main character was able to trace the killer's computer to a local address (most likely one in her own house). 192.168\/16 refers to the subnet the computer is on. The 192.168\/16 subnet is reserved for private networks and traffic to or from addresses on that subnet and will not be routed by most internet-facing routers. Most home networks that are behind a router usually have addresses such as 192.168.0.xx or 192.168.1.xx and use NAT to present different addresses to the rest of the internet. Thus, the killer must have been extremely close, likely inside the house, using the victim's own computer network.\nThis is a modern update of a similar actual scary story, where the victim attempts to find the source of threatening phone calls only to find that they are coming from inside the house. Variations of this story made its way into several movies, including When a Stranger Calls (released in 1979, and re-made in 2006 ) or another version of the legend the movie was based on .  All have a similar basic plot: the killer calls the victim at home; when traced, the call is coming from a phone inside the victim's home .\nThe title text claims that this story will still be scary in 100 years, as the killer is on IPv4 . Currently the number of available IPv4 addresses are dwindling. There are plans to replace the addresses with IPv6 , which will largely increase the number of available addresses. In 100 years it would be very (technologically) scary for someone to still be using IPv4. This would be analogous to receiving a message by telegram today, rather than as an email or text.\n[Cueball and three children are around a campfire at night. Cueball is standing up, with a flashlight under his face.] Cueball: But when she traced the killer's IP address... it was in the 192.168\/16 block! Children: Gasp!\n"}
{"id":743,"title":"Infrastructures","image_title":"Infrastructures","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/743","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/infrastructures.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/743:_Infrastructures","transcript":"2003: [Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.] Cueball: Did you get my essay? Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open- Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works , not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.\nBearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we're building and who- Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.\n2010: Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they're DOING EVIL STUFF!\nBearded Fellow: Do you see this?\n[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.] Bearded Fellow: It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.\n","explanation":"Cueball has sent an essay to his bearded friend (possibly a caricature of Richard Stallman ) who is an advocate of free and open-source software. While the essay itself was good, his friend was worried because the essay was in the .doc format, the proprietary format that old versions of Microsoft Word used. The friend advises Cueball to use a format based on an open standard, possibly a format like ODF, ODT, ODS, ODP, or OpenOffice XML.\nCueball, who does not appreciate his friend criticizing the file format over the actual contents of the file, accuses his friend of pedantically stirring up trouble instead of simply caring that the software works (which is what most regular users would be concerned about). Given that it can be a challenge to move from a familiar proprietary application to an open-source rival which may lack compatibility, features, support and popularity, Cueball's stance is not entirely unjustified.\nThe bearded guy tries to explain that he is just concerned about the current proprietary software infrastructure that forces users to use software in a specific way, penalizing them for sharing the software or even preventing looking at the source code in order to learn what the program actually does or how it works. Cueball, however, isn't buying it, and accuses his friend of having an arrogance that crowds out his perspective , while also claiming that he is autistic \u2014 an epithet often aimed, particularly by denizens of online forums and imageboards, at people who have an intense fixation on seemingly trivial things.\nSeven years later, Cueball runs to the friend, having become alarmed at Facebook's immense control and dubious policies about the personal information it collects. Since this is exactly the kind of situation the bearded guy was warning against, he sarcastically retorts by producing \"the world's tiniest open-source violin\". This is a twist on \" playing the world's smallest violin \", a gesture used to convey sarcastic pity at someone else's misfortune. Interestingly, the guy does actually appear to possess the physical instrument itself, which is uncommon; usually it's just a quip or gesture. This implies that the bearded guy has been carrying around the violin for this eventuality (not unlike what Black Hat does in 757: Toot ), or perhaps he uses this sarcastic expression often enough to warrant it.\nThe title text references the following pieces of infrastructure that are compatible with the \"free software\" ideology:\nThe problem with the lack of open source and Facebook is also the subject of 1390: Research Ethics .\n2003: [Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.] Cueball: Did you get my essay? Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open- Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works , not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.\nBearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we're building and who- Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.\n2010: Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they're DOING EVIL STUFF!\nBearded Fellow: Do you see this?\n[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.] Bearded Fellow: It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.\n"}
{"id":744,"title":"Walkthrough","image_title":"Walkthrough","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/744","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/walkthrough.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/744:_Walkthrough","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a computer. His friend enters the room.] Cueball: How did the date go? Friend: I wanted to be prepared, so I looked up a sex walkthrough video.\n[The two men silently contemplate the words of the previous panel.]\n[Cueball turns his head around. His friend looks down.] Cueball: ...and? Friend: It turns out it was a speed run. Cueball: Ouch.\n","explanation":"A walkthrough video is a recorded explanation of how to accomplish a certain task, usually beating a video game (or a particular level of one). A speedrun is an attempt to complete a level or game as fast as possible. The man is implying that because he followed the speedrun video, intercourse didn't last long enough to satisfy his partner \u2014 who now probably doesn't want to date him again as a result.\nThe title text (humorously) shows what the narration on such a video might be like, based on typical video game walkthroughs. In a video game, a spawn point is a place where enemies, items, or players will appear; here, spawn is also being used in the biological sense of mating and reproduction. The \"separate... more inside\" part is similar to typical instructions about how to get past certain enemies or traps, while it could also refer to the labia majora and minora. Separating the labia majora would reveal the labia minora.\n[Cueball sits at a computer. His friend enters the room.] Cueball: How did the date go? Friend: I wanted to be prepared, so I looked up a sex walkthrough video.\n[The two men silently contemplate the words of the previous panel.]\n[Cueball turns his head around. His friend looks down.] Cueball: ...and? Friend: It turns out it was a speed run. Cueball: Ouch.\n"}
{"id":745,"title":"Dyslexics","image_title":"Dyslexics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/745","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dyslexics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/745:_Dyslexics","transcript":"[A t-shirt is shown with the text \"DYSLEXICS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! \" screen-printed on it.] The dyslexic support group ran into difficulties when they tried to make a joke fundraiser t-shirt.\n","explanation":"The joke shirt is supposed to be \" Dyslexics of the world, Untie!\", a nod to the The Far Side comic touching on the same topic (Dyslexics marching in parade, carrying a sign (inadvertently) reading \"Dyslexics of the world UNTIE\" because dyslexics mixed up the T and the I). In this case, the dyslexics were trying to make a parody of their propensity to transpose letters. The double transposition cancelled out, resulting in the original (but unintended) untransposed message.\nThe title text is an inversion of the inversion of the joke in the comic, in which Randall accidentally wrote the \"incorrect\" version of the shirt while trying to draw the comic. The last sentence (\"I kept doing 'doing 'doing it wrong' wrong' wrong\") means that, unwittingly, Randall kept failing at failing at failing.\n[A t-shirt is shown with the text \"DYSLEXICS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! \" screen-printed on it.] The dyslexic support group ran into difficulties when they tried to make a joke fundraiser t-shirt.\n"}
{"id":746,"title":"Birth","image_title":"Birth","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/746","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/birth.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/746:_Birth","transcript":"[Megan is giving birth. A doctor stands near the end of the table.] Doctor: Okay, the head is starting to crown. Doctor: Push!\nDoctor: Wait, that's... that's a tube.\nDoctor: It looks like the barrel of a...\n[A Click noise comes from Megan's vagina.]\n[A voice, that of the baby, comes from Megan's vagina.] Baby: Nobody move\u2014 This is a stick-up! Doctor: Oh, God! Stop pushing, Megan! Can you ... Pull?\n","explanation":"Megan is in the process of giving birth. Instead of the normal birth we would expect, a baby's head and a gun emerge. The baby, who can already talk, attempts to rob the doctor saying, \"Nobody move-this is a stick-up!\" as is typical in movie robberies. It is not explained how the gun ended up in Megan's womb. (Maybe the gun grew there?)\nThe title text explains the comic by explaining that the baby learned this bad behavior because the mother played the video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA) too frequently, as some people believe that if children play too many violent video games they act like the video games in real life. Grand Theft Auto has been criticized and publicly blamed for its potential to encouraging violent behavior in children. Thus, this comic is a parody of the studies and news stories about the effects of video games, especially Grand Theft Auto , on children; it hyperbolizes them by imagining what effects video games would have on an unborn baby.\nThis is one of the few comics that features Megan's name in the text.\nIn Grand Theft Auto III players gained the ability to pay the services of prostitutes to recover their health, and if they wished, kill them to get their money back. There is also criticism from the focus on illegal activities in comparison with traditional \"heroic\" roles that other games offer. The main character can commit a wide variety of crimes and violent acts while dealing with only temporary consequences, including the killing of policemen and military personnel.\nSome people believe that if children play too many violent video games they act like the video games in real life. Most of the news stories are usually based on anecdotal evidence.\nThese stories were in the news or the public consciousness at the time of the comic:\nOn June 25 teens William and Josh Buckner opened fire on vehicles on a local Tennessee highway with a shotgun and killed a 45-year-old man. They later told police they were emulating Grand Theft Auto and they did not intend to hurt anyone.\nLater in 2003 a 17 year old Devin Moore then grabbed a pistol from one of the police officers and shot and killed him along with another officer and dispatcher before fleeing in a police car. One of Moore's defense attorney, Jack Thompson, claimed it was Grand Theft Auto\u200a'\u200bs graphic nature\u2014with his constant playing time\u2014that caused Moore to commit the murders, and Moore's family agreed. In May 2005, Thompson appeared via satellite on the Glenn Beck program on CNN's Headline News. Thompson mentioned Devin Moore and said regarding Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City \"There's no doubt in my mind [...] that but for Devin Moore's training on this cop killing simulator, he would not have been able to kill three cops in Fayette, Alabama who are now dead and in the ground.\"\nIn September 2006, Thompson brought another lawsuit, claiming that Cody Posey played the game obsessively before murdering his father Delbert Paul Posey, stepmother Tryone Schmid, and stepsister Marilea Schmid on a ranch in Albuquerque, New Mexico.\n[Megan is giving birth. A doctor stands near the end of the table.] Doctor: Okay, the head is starting to crown. Doctor: Push!\nDoctor: Wait, that's... that's a tube.\nDoctor: It looks like the barrel of a...\n[A Click noise comes from Megan's vagina.]\n[A voice, that of the baby, comes from Megan's vagina.] Baby: Nobody move\u2014 This is a stick-up! Doctor: Oh, God! Stop pushing, Megan! Can you ... Pull?\n"}
{"id":747,"title":"Geeks and Nerds","image_title":"Geeks and Nerds","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/747","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geeks_and_nerds.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/747:_Geeks_and_Nerds","transcript":"[There is a two-circle Venn diagram; the circles are labeled and there is text in the intersection.] Left circle: Geeks Right circle: Nerds Intersection: People with strong opinions on the distinction between geeks and nerds\n","explanation":"The words \"geek\" and \"nerd\" are both commonly used to describe people who are looked down upon due to being too intelligent and not socially conventional enough. Distinction between the two varies, but it commonly involves differences in range of interests, depth of interests, choice of hobbies, social capability, if you play sports, and so on.\nThe title text gives Randall 's personal definitions: geeks are people passionately into something to a greater extent than casual hobbyists, while nerds are analytical logic-oriented people, often with underdeveloped social skills.\nThe comic makes the argument that if you care a lot about the distinction between a geek or a nerd , then you are most likely too invested in the result to not be either a nerd or a geek. But although one who maintains this distinction strongly could be a linguistics geek merely expressing their general interest in words\/expressions, given the more pressing controversies linguistic geeks have to deal with, the strong interest one might have in the words \"geek\" and \"nerd\" is probably due to simply being a nerd geek .\n[There is a two-circle Venn diagram; the circles are labeled and there is text in the intersection.] Left circle: Geeks Right circle: Nerds Intersection: People with strong opinions on the distinction between geeks and nerds\n"}
{"id":748,"title":"Worst-Case Scenario","image_title":"Worst-Case Scenario","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/748","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/worst_case_scenario.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/748:_Worst-Case_Scenario","transcript":"[Two reporters, Cueball and Ponytail, point microphones toward a scientist, Megan.] Ponytail: Dr. Scientist! The \"Top Kill\" has failed! What's the worse-case scenario for the gulf? Megan: The worst-case scenario is what's happening now.\nPonytail, out of frame: Yes, but is there any way it could get worse? Megan: Sure, but there are real disasters happening now, and you're substituting speculation and voyeurism for the investigative journalism we\u2014 Ponytail: Screw this! Let's ask Michael Bay.\n[The reporters, now joined by a camerawoman, approach Michael Bay with their microphones.] Michael Bay: The worst case? A hurricane tracks into the gulf, whipping the surface of the spill into a frothy mix of oil and air.\n[An alligator-filled conflagration atop a massive ocean wave approaches land.] Michael Bay, narrating: As the storm surges through the bayous, sparking power lines ignite the fuel air mixture into a roiling, alligator-filled wall of flame.\n[A map of the gulf coast of Louisiana and southwest Mississippi is depicted with the current routes of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers highlighted. An arrow indicating a new primary flow of the Mississippi's waters into the Atchafalaya points toward southern Louisiana.] Michael Bay, narrating: Plowing northward, the fire hurricane destroys the Old River Control Structure in Concordia, rerouting the Mississippi westward and sweeping Morgan City and the heart of cajun country out to sea.\nMichael Bay: James Carville emerges from the conflagration riding a burning alligator... Ponytail, out of frame: Will this affect the midterm elections? Michael Bay: Massively .\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that happened in the Gulf of Mexico . Top kill is a reference to a procedure used as a means of regaining control over an oil well that is experiencing an uncontrolled eruption of crude oil. Michael Bay is an American film director known for his over the top special effects and plots, one example being the Transformers movie franchise .\nShould the proposed firestorm actually happen, residential areas and hundreds of square miles of sensitive vegetation would be fouled by the mix of oil and sea water. A firestorm would certainly make the bad situation worse, and would certainly make a great scene in a typical Hollywood disaster movie. Lightning could set an oil slick on fire, in regions where the oil is most dense and very fresh. About 50-70% of the evaporation of oil's most flammable volatile compounds occurs in the first 12 hours after release, so fresh oil is the most likely to ignite. However, the winds of a hurricane are so fierce that any surface oil slick of flaming oil would quickly be disrupted and doused by wave action and sea spray. Heavy rain would further dampen any lightning-caused oil slick fires. So Michael Bay's firestorm would not actually happen in real life. However, if he decides to direct a new movie...\nThis comic is a commentary on the state of broadcast journalism and how they are always looking for speculation and voyeurism rather than facts. That they ask if Mr. Bay's proposed firestorm will have any effect on the then-upcoming congressional elections just serves to underline how little the journalists actually care about the damage that has actually been caused.\nJames Carville is a political commentator who was born and lives in Louisiana, and thus relates to media, politics, and Louisiana at once.\nThe title text has a reference to Jeff Masters, who was director of meteorology at Weather Underground and runs a blog ( archived ), and Bruce Schneier , who is a world-renowned security expert and also has a blog and several books. Vitamin D is a vitamin that the human body can synthesize with the aid of direct sunlight; the joke, \"go outside\", is Randall accusing us of all being shut-ins.\n[Two reporters, Cueball and Ponytail, point microphones toward a scientist, Megan.] Ponytail: Dr. Scientist! The \"Top Kill\" has failed! What's the worse-case scenario for the gulf? Megan: The worst-case scenario is what's happening now.\nPonytail, out of frame: Yes, but is there any way it could get worse? Megan: Sure, but there are real disasters happening now, and you're substituting speculation and voyeurism for the investigative journalism we\u2014 Ponytail: Screw this! Let's ask Michael Bay.\n[The reporters, now joined by a camerawoman, approach Michael Bay with their microphones.] Michael Bay: The worst case? A hurricane tracks into the gulf, whipping the surface of the spill into a frothy mix of oil and air.\n[An alligator-filled conflagration atop a massive ocean wave approaches land.] Michael Bay, narrating: As the storm surges through the bayous, sparking power lines ignite the fuel air mixture into a roiling, alligator-filled wall of flame.\n[A map of the gulf coast of Louisiana and southwest Mississippi is depicted with the current routes of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers highlighted. An arrow indicating a new primary flow of the Mississippi's waters into the Atchafalaya points toward southern Louisiana.] Michael Bay, narrating: Plowing northward, the fire hurricane destroys the Old River Control Structure in Concordia, rerouting the Mississippi westward and sweeping Morgan City and the heart of cajun country out to sea.\nMichael Bay: James Carville emerges from the conflagration riding a burning alligator... Ponytail, out of frame: Will this affect the midterm elections? Michael Bay: Massively .\n"}
{"id":749,"title":"Study","image_title":"Study","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/749","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/study.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/749:_Study","transcript":"[A posted flier with nine tear-off strips at the bottom reads: \"Volunteers Needed for a scientific study investigating whether people can distinguish between scientific studies and kidney-harvesting scams. (Healthy Type-O Adults Only) TAKE ONE\" Five of the nine strips are torn off.]\n","explanation":"This comic is about the ubiquitous study fliers that are placed around cities and especially college campuses.\nThis one obviously takes it to the absurd because it is a thinly-veiled attempt to get volunteers so that their kidneys can be \"harvested\" or stolen. Type O is a blood type that omits both A and B antigens so it won't cause reaction in blood types having anti-A or anti-B antibodies and thus people having this blood type are the most valuable for transplants (there are still other antigens that can cause reactions but these two are the most important).\nUrushiol is an oily toxic irritant present in poison ivy and some related plants, digital contact means touching something with fingers and fibrous cellulose pulp is a scientific description of paper. This together suggests that the person who put up the flier soaked the strips with urushiol and is trying to see if it will cause irritation in anyone who will touch the strips with their fingers (and it will within ten minutes) [ citation needed ] .\n[A posted flier with nine tear-off strips at the bottom reads: \"Volunteers Needed for a scientific study investigating whether people can distinguish between scientific studies and kidney-harvesting scams. (Healthy Type-O Adults Only) TAKE ONE\" Five of the nine strips are torn off.]\n"}
{"id":750,"title":"Book Burning","image_title":"Book Burning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/750","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/book_burning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/750:_Book_Burning","transcript":"[Cueball holds a book aloft, displaying it to his two friends.] Cueball: This book is full of heresy! Friend: Let's hold a book burning! [They confer more, then one friend runs off.] Cueball: I only have one copy. Friend #1: I guess we could buy more. Friend #2: I'll look online. [A screenshot from an online retailer's page displays pricing for the hardcover ($17.99) and Kindle ($9.99) editions of the mentioned book.]\n[The front page of a newspaper, titled \"News\", is shown above the fold. The first article's headline reads \"Eight dead from toxic fume inhalation\" and a picture is shown depicting three bodies strewn around a massive plume of tar-black smoke.]\n","explanation":"A group of people wanting to hold a book burning find themselves in a conundrum when they only have one book. Going to an online retailer reveals that the Kindle edition of the book is considerably less expensive than the hardcover edition. Unfortunately for the book-burners, the burning of a Kindle proves fatal because of the toxic fumes from the burning of its plastic shell, internal electronics, and\/or the lithium polymer battery that powers it.\nOne purpose of book burning is to destroy heretical material and thus prevent the spread of those ideas. In this case, where a Kindle version downloaded and the device is burned, no heretical material is destroyed as the electronic version is still available for distribution. Those who survived the incident will then find that their actions did not prevent the spread of the heretical ideas, they have lost dear friends, and have to purchase new electronic devices.\nAnother purpose for a book burning is to have a public demonstration in protest of the ideas presented in the book. This may have been the purpose of the book burning mentioned in the comic, but this plan failed, as indicated by the title text, because it was reported in the newspaper, which no one reads.\nIn the past there were many book-burning incidents .\nThere is also a subtle pun in that \" kindle \" means \"to start a fire\".\nThe title text further drives home the point that electronic media is becoming the norm, while print is being supplanted by inventions like the Kindle.\n[Cueball holds a book aloft, displaying it to his two friends.] Cueball: This book is full of heresy! Friend: Let's hold a book burning! [They confer more, then one friend runs off.] Cueball: I only have one copy. Friend #1: I guess we could buy more. Friend #2: I'll look online. [A screenshot from an online retailer's page displays pricing for the hardcover ($17.99) and Kindle ($9.99) editions of the mentioned book.]\n[The front page of a newspaper, titled \"News\", is shown above the fold. The first article's headline reads \"Eight dead from toxic fume inhalation\" and a picture is shown depicting three bodies strewn around a massive plume of tar-black smoke.]\n"}
{"id":751,"title":"Swimsuit Issue","image_title":"Swimsuit Issue","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/751","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/swimsuit_issue.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/751:_Swimsuit_Issue","transcript":"Child: What's this? Father: Oh! That's daddy's Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue! It's not appropriate for\u2014 Child: Wow! They look just like the ladies who get double-penetrated in the popup ads! But with clothes on! Gosh!\n","explanation":"Sports Illustrated , while a sports magazine (from what the title implies), is infamous for its Swimsuit Issue , a yearly issue that heavily features women wearing revealing swimsuits (again, from what the title implies), something generally agreed upon as inappropriate for children.\nHowever, the joke is on the father. Before he could stop the child from reading, the child had already made it clear that they have seen hard-core pornography in the pop-up ads they have encountered. They are familiar with the sight of women being \"double penetrated\" (i.e. engaged in simultaneous vaginal and anal sex), and indicates that these women are completely naked (implied by their surprise to see similar-looking women wearing swimsuits in the magazine). Thus, the swimsuit issue, in which the women are wearing some clothing and are not engaged in sexual activity, is relatively tame by comparison.\nThe title text has Randall suggest that pop-up blockers are far more important than The birds and the bees , a stance that most people do not agree with [ citation needed ] . There is some sense towards this approach, however. While \"the birds and the bees\" would have to wait until the child has developed sufficiently in order to get the proper effect, pop-up blockers are a more urgent need that would prevent a child from looking at inappropriate content before then. Pop-up blockers alone would not prevent everything , but they are a valuable asset nonetheless.\nChild: What's this? Father: Oh! That's daddy's Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue! It's not appropriate for\u2014 Child: Wow! They look just like the ladies who get double-penetrated in the popup ads! But with clothes on! Gosh!\n"}
{"id":752,"title":"Phobia","image_title":"Phobia","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/752","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/phobia.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/752:_Phobia","transcript":"[Blondie, with extra long hair and Megan in the background of the image observes a long snake on the ground in the foreground.] Blondie: Whoa, a snake! Megan: Cool! Blondie: I'm afraid of snakes.\n[Zoom in only on Megan's upper half.] Megan: I'm afraid of saying \"everything's complicated right now, but maybe next year\" until there are no more years left.\n[Slim panel with a zoom to a full picture of only Blondie as she considers this. Beat panel.]\n[Same type of image of Megan, who cuts Blondie's reply (from off-panel) off in mid-sentence.] Blondie (off-panel): Do you- Megan: I want to be a storm chaser.\n[A black tornado reaches from the black storm clouds to the earth, kicking up a sizable cloud of debris at its base. Blondie is at the wheel of a car, with Megan hanging out the window and holding a camera.]\n","explanation":"This comic seems to be about phobias , i.e. being afraid of specific and non-specific things like Blondie 's fear of snakes .\nPrompted by Blondie's admission, Megan becomes philosophical (as she often does) and reveals an unusual phobia of her own: uncomfortable with outrightly rejecting a romantic advance, she would respond to such an advance by making the excuse that everything is complicated right now. This would postpone the advance until the next year, when the other person would ask again and she would defer again, and on and on until one of them dies or moves on. This is what Megan states she is afraid of.\nAfter Megan has said this, Blondie thinks for some time (in the beat panel). When she finally decides to ask Megan something (perhaps to go out on a date), Megan cuts her off. It seems that Blondie has misread the situation, having guessed incorrectly that Megan is romantically interested in her. In fact, Megan is not. Rather than risk having to reject Blondie in the manner described above and beginning the cycle of annual rejections she so fears, Megan prevents the inquiry and interrupts Blondie to say that she wants to be a storm chaser.\nGiven that Blondie believes Megan may have feelings for her, it is understandable that she follows Megan's ambition and together they become storm chasers \u2014individuals who pursue severe weather conditions, for either scientific investigation or providing media coverage, or simply for adventure. Ironically, chasing adverse weather, especially tornadoes, is more dangerous than the source of either character's original phobia. Indeed, one's ability to control the risk while being near a tornado is far less than one's ability to control the risk of being bitten by a snake; the tornado is violent and unpredictable, while snakes only attack humans when they feel threatened. Additionally, one needs to deliberately expose oneself to the snake in order to have any risk of being attacked.\nThis comic is related to the movies Snakes on a plane (snakes), Twister (tornadoes and storm chasers), and Thelma & Louise . The last of these movies has two women friends on a road trip, and in the end they kiss, and there have been several discussions on whether one or both of them are lesbian or not.\nIn the title text, Megan and Blondie notice that the snakes have been picked up by the tornado they are chasing; so now, in addition to the violent weather, they are also exposed to the danger of snakes falling from the sky.  (This is similar to the plot of Sharknado , although that movie was released several years after this comic.)\nThis is the third comic about tornadoes and storm chasers, a recurring subject on xkcd.  These were first mentioned in 402: 1,000 Miles North , and first shown in 640: Tornado Hunter .\n[Blondie, with extra long hair and Megan in the background of the image observes a long snake on the ground in the foreground.] Blondie: Whoa, a snake! Megan: Cool! Blondie: I'm afraid of snakes.\n[Zoom in only on Megan's upper half.] Megan: I'm afraid of saying \"everything's complicated right now, but maybe next year\" until there are no more years left.\n[Slim panel with a zoom to a full picture of only Blondie as she considers this. Beat panel.]\n[Same type of image of Megan, who cuts Blondie's reply (from off-panel) off in mid-sentence.] Blondie (off-panel): Do you- Megan: I want to be a storm chaser.\n[A black tornado reaches from the black storm clouds to the earth, kicking up a sizable cloud of debris at its base. Blondie is at the wheel of a car, with Megan hanging out the window and holding a camera.]\n"}
{"id":753,"title":"Southern Half","image_title":"Southern Half","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/753","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/southern_half.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/753:_Southern_Half","transcript":"\"The great battlefield for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe - Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.\" -John F. Kennedy, 1961 speech to Congress.\n[An ovoid world map, with Latin America colored in red, Africa in yellow, the Middle East in green, and Asia in Blue. There is an arrow pointing to the top of the map marked 'northern half', and another arrow pointing to the bottom half marked 'southern half.' The majority of these places are actually in the northern half.]\nOkay, so I'm half a century late on this, but it's been bugging me: did JFK own a globe?\n","explanation":"On May 25, 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave a speech before a joint session of Congress , in which he set as a goal for the American people the task of landing a man on the moon and returning him successfully to earth. Though Kennedy didn't live to see that goal become a reality - he was assassinated in 1963 - the Apollo 11 lunar module landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July, 1969.\nDuring that speech, Kennedy said the sentence that the comic is referring to, and the map provided shows that the vast majority of the regions he mentioned are actually in the Northern Hemisphere, despite Kennedy calling them \"the whole southern half of the globe\", not to mention the Southern Hemisphere has regions which are not included (like Australia).\nThe actual meaning behind Kennedy's statement is likely a reference to the common lingo used describing the 'third world' as the ' Global South ', which is a metaphorical rather than geographical description which includes all of the regions mentioned (though leaving out the USSR from Asia). At the time, a number of proxy wars between the U.S. and the USSR had broken out and were in progress in many third world countries across the entirety of the regions mentioned. Thus, Kennedy was describing the Cold War and his expectation that it would continue, and that the 'Global South' would be the actual battlefield. Out-of-context, and insisting on a literal geographic interpretation for the words, this part of the speech sounds particularly funny.\nAnother way to understand Kennedy's phrasing is a reference to the \"southern half\" of the land on earth. Because the area south of the equator is mostly water, the geographical centre of Earth (geometric centre of all land surfaces) is in Turkey, meaning that (with the exception of the Russian part of Asia) almost the entirety of the regions Kennedy listed are in the southern half of Earth's land surfaces.\nThe title text refers to a September 1962 speech Kennedy gave at Rice University. One of the most famous quotes from that speech is, \"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.\" Randall suggests that all of the arguments Kennedy made for going to the moon could also serve the cause of many different \"innovations\", such as blowing up the moon, sending cloned dinosaurs into space, or, ridiculously, constructing a towering penis-shaped obelisk on Mars. Or, as seen here , eating a bag of pinecones.\n\"The great battlefield for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe - Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.\" -John F. Kennedy, 1961 speech to Congress.\n[An ovoid world map, with Latin America colored in red, Africa in yellow, the Middle East in green, and Asia in Blue. There is an arrow pointing to the top of the map marked 'northern half', and another arrow pointing to the bottom half marked 'southern half.' The majority of these places are actually in the northern half.]\nOkay, so I'm half a century late on this, but it's been bugging me: did JFK own a globe?\n"}
{"id":754,"title":"Dependencies","image_title":"Dependencies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/754","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dependencies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/754:_Dependencies","transcript":"[A portion of a page from an imaginary course catalog.] Page 3\n[A table with four columns]\nDepartment Computer Science\nCourse CPSC 432\nDescription Intermediate compiler design, with a focus on dependency resolution.\nPrereqs CPSC 432\n[The very top of the text for the next course in the table is visible but unreadable.]\nThe letter code \"CPSC\" is the letter code Christopher Newport University, Randall 's alma mater, uses for Computer Science.\n","explanation":"A compiler is a program that converts code written in a high-level programming language into an executable program. A section of code is said to be dependent on a second segment of code if the second segment is required for the first segment to work. Dependency resolution is part of compiler design, and is the study of determining and correcting dependencies which result in an unwanted, ambiguous, or impossible definition of the dependent section. Requiring that an action occurs if and only if the action has already occurred, like the prerequisite in this comic, is one type of potentially unwanted dependency.\nThe comic envisions a college computer science course (CPSC432) focusing on \"compiler design with dependency resolution\" which has itself as a prerequisite. The joke is that the prerequisite is an unresolved dependency, as you must complete this course before you can enroll in it, a phenomenon called Catch-22 .\nThis dependency would send a poorly designed compiler into an infinite loop. In real life, the problem is solved by allowing an object to satisfy itself as a prerequisite. This stops the compiler's infinite loop, but may not produce the desired functionality in the program. Another layer of the joke may be that any student who successfully enrolls in the class already knows this solution because they must have employed it in order to get past the apparent infinite recursion in the class prerequisites.\nManaging dependencies is useful in other areas of computer science, e.g. package management . Collections of files are known as \"packages\". A software package might require that a particular operating system patch (a type of package) be installed first. That package might in turn require other packages be installed, and so on. Therefore, a package installer must know the dependencies of a package, and be able to figure out whether any required packages are missing before continuing with the installation.\nThe title text envisions a course on package management which has itself as a prerequisite, as well as the compiler design course with the impossible prerequisite presented in the main comic (CPSC 432), and glibc2.5 or greater. By looking at the course number it can be observed that CPSC 432 is a fourth year course, and this package management course (CPSC 357) is a third year course. Glibc is a commonly used package on Unix systems, and therefore should be taught in the course. This continues the joke since this course has the following unresolved dependencies:\n[A portion of a page from an imaginary course catalog.] Page 3\n[A table with four columns]\nDepartment Computer Science\nCourse CPSC 432\nDescription Intermediate compiler design, with a focus on dependency resolution.\nPrereqs CPSC 432\n[The very top of the text for the next course in the table is visible but unreadable.]\nThe letter code \"CPSC\" is the letter code Christopher Newport University, Randall 's alma mater, uses for Computer Science.\n"}
{"id":755,"title":"Interdisciplinary","image_title":"Interdisciplinary","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/755","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interdisciplinary.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/755:_Interdisciplinary","transcript":"[In the foreground, 2 men and 1 woman are standing.] Cueball: This is an interdisciplinary program in which Physics students try to hit Psychology students with pendulums. Megan: Promising! [In the background, a woman stands on a platform and releases a pendulum hanging from the ceiling that swings toward a man who is running away.] Psychology student: AAAAAAA!\nMy professors had an ongoing competition to get the weirdest thing taken seriously under the label \"interdisciplinary program\".\n","explanation":"An \"interdisciplinary program\" is a program at a school or university that involves students from multiple disciplines, or fields of study. Here, this comics lampoons the concept by envisioning an oddball exercise involving physics students and psychology students. Strictly speaking, this could be categorized as an interdisciplinary program. Further, the study of pendulums is common in physics courses, and the concept of fear arises in psychology, thus the joint effort can be supposedly said to unify both subjects.\nThe intersection of physics and psychology suggests the classic demonstration in which someone holds a heavy pendulum up against his face and releases it. Basic physics shows that the pendulum will, at most, harmlessly touch the person's face on the backswing (provided that he released it with no initial push and does not lean forward); however, it may take some force of will to refrain from flinching as the pendulum approaches. This experiment (with Black Hat's twisted take) is referenced in 1670: Laws of Physics and 2539: Flinch .\nIn another example where the two concepts meet, the pendulum-like motion of objects (such as a gold pocketwatch on a chain) is stereotypically used in portals of psychology as a device for hypnotism.\nThe ripping of Psychology, History, and English majors is a common theme in various xkcd comics.\nThe image text suggests that replacing the pendulums with history students would guarantee funding of a grant, perhaps because of the increased number of disciplines involved. In reality it of course serves to increase injuries among students in majors that the author does not approve of. Interestingly, this is apparently being said by the grant funders rather than the professor.\n[In the foreground, 2 men and 1 woman are standing.] Cueball: This is an interdisciplinary program in which Physics students try to hit Psychology students with pendulums. Megan: Promising! [In the background, a woman stands on a platform and releases a pendulum hanging from the ceiling that swings toward a man who is running away.] Psychology student: AAAAAAA!\nMy professors had an ongoing competition to get the weirdest thing taken seriously under the label \"interdisciplinary program\".\n"}
{"id":756,"title":"Public Opinion","image_title":"Public Opinion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/756","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/public_opinion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/756:_Public_Opinion","transcript":"[Cueball as a news anchor reads from a paper. There is a picture on the left side of screen of a man with black hair speaking behind a lectern holding up one hand. In the bottom right-hand corner is the logo for the news.] Cueball: A leading politician today charged that the media, rather than informing people, now merely report on public ignorance. Cueball: Do our viewers agree? Let's hear from some voices on the street... Logo: News 24\n","explanation":"Cueball as a news anchor is reporting a message from a politician, shown behind him.\nThe comic is mocking the \"old media\" (television, radio, newspapers) for their move to opinions as an information source. Such change came with development of the internet and \"new media\" as source of information (websites, blogs, social networks), which pushed \"old media\" back and diminished their significance. In their attempt to return to relevance, \"old media\" tried to copy the opinion part of the news, taking what could be considered a bad thing from them. The humor of the comic comes from news anchor cutting to an opinion piece from people on the street, thus proving the politician's point.\nThe title text illustrates what Randall sees as the problem with this approach.  The new media, for the large part, consists of uninformed opinions from people of average intelligence and abilities.  However, the sheer volume and immediacy of information is threatening to destroy old media, much as the iceberg destroyed the Titanic.  You don't join with the iceberg or try to emulate its methods; the iceberg does not care, it's too big and will destroy you anyway. If possible, then the best way to survive is to steer far away to avoid it and find your own path.  (Ironically, the Titanic sank because it steered away just enough for the iceberg to scrape its side, tearing into multiple compartments.  If it had steered straight into the iceberg, although the bow would have been severely damaged, the ship might have stayed afloat.)  Old media must present us with something better than new media (for example: informed, analytical, intelligent), otherwise we have no need of them.\n[Cueball as a news anchor reads from a paper. There is a picture on the left side of screen of a man with black hair speaking behind a lectern holding up one hand. In the bottom right-hand corner is the logo for the news.] Cueball: A leading politician today charged that the media, rather than informing people, now merely report on public ignorance. Cueball: Do our viewers agree? Let's hear from some voices on the street... Logo: News 24\n"}
{"id":757,"title":"Toot","image_title":"Toot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/757","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/toot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/757:_Toot","transcript":"Cueball: I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I was first in my class at Caltech.\nBlack Hat: Really? I don't mean to toot my own horn, but BRAAAAAAP! [Cueball falls backward as Black Hat sounds an air horn in his face.]\n[A picture of an air horn.] Air horns: Worth carrying around your entire life for those few perfect moments.\n","explanation":"\"Toot my own horn\" is an idiom meaning to brag. Cueball here is using this idiom to mean that he is not bragging, although he obviously is. However, Black Hat , being the classhole he is, takes this idiom literally and toots (blows) an air horn . An air horn is a horn attached to a can of compressed air, and at close range is extremely loud. Cueball is obviously surprised, as he was expecting Black Hat to start bragging instead of making an extremely loud sound with an air horn.\nBlack Hat's actions could also be interpreted as punishment of Cueball, who began by claiming that he didn't want to boast about his accomplishments, but then did so anyway. Or he could just be proving that he is a classhole by 1'upping Cueball.\nThe title text refers to the Vuvuzela , which is a noise-generating instrument , mainly used for making noise at soccer matches in South Africa. This comic was published during the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, and the constant buzzing from vuvuzelas throughout the matches attracted attention and controversy.\nCueball: I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I was first in my class at Caltech.\nBlack Hat: Really? I don't mean to toot my own horn, but BRAAAAAAP! [Cueball falls backward as Black Hat sounds an air horn in his face.]\n[A picture of an air horn.] Air horns: Worth carrying around your entire life for those few perfect moments.\n"}
{"id":758,"title":"Raptor Fences","image_title":"Raptor Fences","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/758","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/raptor_fences.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/758:_Raptor_Fences","transcript":"[Cueball checks a computer terminal while a friend is running off in the opposite direction.] Cueball: The raptor fences are down. They're loose. Friend: I'll get a broom and dustpan.\nJurassic Park got a lot less scary when the researchers discovered they could activate the gene for extreme dwarfism.\n","explanation":"In the film Jurassic Park , the protagonists are menaced (some fatally) by carnivorous dinosaurs, including very large velociraptors , which are a genus of dromaeosaurid . In this film, the dinosaurs had been recreated via the sampling of ancient DNA recovered, primarily, from the stomachs of mosquitoes trapped in amber (fossilized tree sap).\nCueball is holding a lit cigarette, recalling the role of chain-smoking John \"Ray\" Arnold, the Chief Engineer of Jurassic Park, played by Samuel L. Jackson . He is reporting that the (veloci)raptors have escaped from their enclosure, but nobody seems overly concerned by this; they do not represent a danger. Apparently, the fear of being hunted by dinosaurs is greatly reduced if they have been genetically engineered to be small enough to gather up with a broom and dustpan.\nThe \"gene for extreme dwarfism\" may also be a reference to the \"Ender's Game\" series, which has previously been referenced in 635: Locke and Demosthenes , 304: Nighttime Stories , and 241: Battle Room .  In the parallel book to \"Ender's Game\", \"Ender's shadow\", the main character has had the gene for extreme dwarfism activated on himself as an infant.\nNote that while growth is dependent on genes, it is extremely unlikely that any kind of genetic manipulation could reduce an animal in size by the factor of approximately 10,000 that is implied here. However, it is perhaps no less unlikely than being able to recreate the dinosaurs at all in the first place. People seem ready to ascribe almost limitless powers to DNA and genetic engineering, but there are many practical constraints.\nIn reality, velociraptors were only about 50 centimeters in height. It is also believed that they were covered in feathers. Together, these factors paint a very different picture of velociraptors. The velociraptors from Jurassic Park more closely resemble Deinonychus, a relative of the velociraptor, in fact the Deinonychus was used as the model for the Jurassic Park raptors. Still the name \"velociraptor\" has been consistently, and incorrectly, associated with their portrayal.\nThe title text suggests that even very small dinosaurs could be terrifying to some, if they imagined a huge number of them. The author would be pleased if this were the case.\n[Cueball checks a computer terminal while a friend is running off in the opposite direction.] Cueball: The raptor fences are down. They're loose. Friend: I'll get a broom and dustpan.\nJurassic Park got a lot less scary when the researchers discovered they could activate the gene for extreme dwarfism.\n"}
{"id":759,"title":"3x9","image_title":"3x9","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/759","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/3x9.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/759:_3x9","transcript":"[A problem is given on an arithmetic test: \"4) 3x9=?\". In handwriting, the student's work follows. The student has accurately reformatted the question as 3 times the square root of 81, which visually resembles the long division problem of 3 divided into 81, and then solved the latter to get 27 \u2014 the correct answer to both.]\n","explanation":"In college courses with a very large number of students (picture the huge, tiered, amphitheater-style lecture halls shown in any movie or TV show about college), teaching assistants are often employed to help the professors grade student work. In math and science courses, students are expected to solve the problems and show their work as supporting evidence. Due to the high volume of work to grade, whether it's being done by the professor or a TA, the grader may get lazy and look for correct answers and the existence of work without checking that the work is accurate.\nThe math shown in this comic switches from \u221a being square root notation to it being division notation midway. That is an illegal operation. [ citation needed ] But the correct answer is reached anyway, because 27 is the correct answer to 3 \u00d7 9, 3\u221a81, and 81 \u00f7 3.\nMore generally, this pattern holds true for any number and its square; namely, \ud835\udc65\ud835\udc66 = \ud835\udc66\u00b2 \u00f7 \ud835\udc65 whenever \ud835\udc66 = \ud835\udc65\u00b2.\nThe title text describes another technique usable when you remember the answer but not the calculations. It requires modifying the equation and the answer at the same time, hoping that at one point they'll look similar. Some students picture every step in the calculations, others skip some, as they seem obvious to them. Merging the equations once they look similar may trick the examiner into thinking that the step between them is obvious to the student, even if they ARE checking the calculations. The side effect (not mentioned) is that while doing this, you may actually realize what the calculations should be.\nAlternatively, the title text could be a description of the calculations shown in the comic.\n[A problem is given on an arithmetic test: \"4) 3x9=?\". In handwriting, the student's work follows. The student has accurately reformatted the question as 3 times the square root of 81, which visually resembles the long division problem of 3 divided into 81, and then solved the latter to get 27 \u2014 the correct answer to both.]\n"}
{"id":760,"title":"Moria","image_title":"Moria","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/760","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/moria.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/760:_Moria","transcript":"[A far shot of Gandalf the Grey and the four hobbits standing in a dark, underground city.] Gandalf: Behold, Khazad-D\u00fbm; the Dwarrowdelf; the mines of Moria -- once the greatest and mightiest city of the dwarves.\n[Full body shot of Gandalf.] Gandalf: But the dwarves delved too greedily.\n[Close-up on Gandalf.] Gandalf: And too deep.\n[Full shot of the hobbits and Gandalf.] Hobbit: ...and awoke a terror of shadow and flame? Gandalf: No. They couldn't get out.\n","explanation":"This is Randall 's take on the story of Moria in the fantasy story The Lord of the Rings . In the original the dwarves, hunting for the precious metal mithril dug so deep that they awoke a balrog \u2014 Maiar corrupted by Morgoth . Gandalf is telling about the story to four hobbits standing next to him. One of the hobbits has apparently read The Lord of the Rings , because he asks if the dwarves \"awoke a terror of shadow  and flame\", but then Gandalf says that they were trapped in their hole and couldn't get out.\nHowever, Gandalf's final line may be a hint that the comic's version is closer to the original than it appears \u2014 in the story, the adventuring party discovers a journal of the last dwarves to occupy Moria. The last page starts ominously: \"We cannot get out. We cannot get out.\" That memorable sentence is used again near the end of the page as the impending final orcish attack is described by the now-dead dwarves, and repeated by Gimli as they reflect on the terrible news, lending a much darker tone to the comic's punchline.\nThe title text suggests a mundane solution to their problem \u2014 a long ladder. The Endless Stair was a very long staircase from the lowest dungeon up to the top of the mountain above Moria.\n[A far shot of Gandalf the Grey and the four hobbits standing in a dark, underground city.] Gandalf: Behold, Khazad-D\u00fbm; the Dwarrowdelf; the mines of Moria -- once the greatest and mightiest city of the dwarves.\n[Full body shot of Gandalf.] Gandalf: But the dwarves delved too greedily.\n[Close-up on Gandalf.] Gandalf: And too deep.\n[Full shot of the hobbits and Gandalf.] Hobbit: ...and awoke a terror of shadow and flame? Gandalf: No. They couldn't get out.\n"}
{"id":761,"title":"DFS","image_title":"DFS","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/761","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dfs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/761:_DFS","transcript":"[In a caption that breaks the top of the first panels frame:] Preparing for a date:\n[Hairy with wet hair and a towel around his waist thinks with his hand to his chin. There are four situations, but it is not possible to read the fourth line.] Hairy: What situations might I prepare for? 1) Medical emergency 2) Dancing 3) Food too expensive\n[Close-up on Hairy's face, who is still thinking.  There are again four situations, but again it is not possible to read the fourth line.] Hairy: Okay, what kind of emergencies can happen? 1) \u00a0\u2009A) Snakebite B) Lightning strike C) Fall from chair\n[Zoooming out again to full figure of Hairy. He is still thinking... There are four snakes mentioned, but again it is not possible to read the fourth line. The word Danger stands beneath the three dots above the \"?\" after each snake.] Hairy: Hmm. Which snakes are dangerous? Let's see... Danger 1)A)a) Corn snake\u00a0? b) Garter snake\u00a0? c) Copperhead\u00a0?\n[Hairy is sitting down in a chair with a laptop in his lap, while still wearing the towel.] Hairy: The research comparing snake venoms is scattered and inconsistent. I'll make a spreadsheet to organize it.\n[Bottom panel is larger than top four, and aligned to right. Ponytail meets Hairy on his front stoop. She is carrying a purse, and looks down at the towel he is still wearing. Hairy holds his arms in the air.] Ponytail: I'm here to pick you up. You're not dressed? Hairy: By LD 50 , the inland taipan has the deadliest venom of any snake!\n[Below this last panel is the following caption:] I really need to stop using depth-first searches.\n","explanation":"In this comic Hairy is preparing for his date with Ponytail , and has just finished with a shower, as seen from the fact that he is wearing a towel around his waist.\nHe is also preparing mentally by thinking about which situations he might encounter during the date. Since he cannot know for sure he is performing a \"blind search\" in his head. When doing a blind search in computing, there are two main tactics\u2014 depth-first search (DFS), and breadth-first search (BFS).\nHairy uses the DFS technique, as indicated in the comic title, which means going as far as you possibly can down one path before looking at other possibilities. This turns out to be a bad idea, as Hairy's searches takes him out on a tangent. Instead of preparing for his date, Hairy instead spent the whole time doing research on snake venom , to the exclusion of even getting dressed in time for the arrival of his date. The way the last panel is the only panel and at the far right in the second row vs. four panels in the top row, indicates all the time he has used on DFS. And although he may realize his mistake, throwing up his arms, he has to tell Ponytail the fact he has found out that the inland taipan 's has the deadliest venom of any snake (see more below).\nBy contrast, a breadth-first search will look only minimally into a topic before moving on to another; any new depth exposed by this minimal check will be added to a list of stuff to do later. This would have allowed Hairy to briefly check many more things within the time allotted, and probably still have been able to get dressed if, in dealing breadth-first in the first layer of concerns, he quickly identified (and prioritised\/satisfied) the need to be properly dressed and ready to go out.\nThe relationship advice given in the title text on using breadth-first search may not be meant too seriously. However, one might be more sure about what kind of person one is looking for after already having dated a few people. But then the right one, might have slipped by. It is by no means certain that you can return to one of the first persons you dated after having dated another dozen.\nIt is, however, not very useful, if you wish to have a stable family life, to \"only\" be with a person for five years. So DFS is for sure a bad way to find out who you wish to spend you life with. One might conclude that blind search is not a good way to find your significant other. But for most people, there is no other way to search.\nDFS and BFS make another appearance in 2407: Depth and Breadth , together with variations based on them.\nHairy begins to think of several situations to prepares for.\nIn the first panel there are four situations:\nIn the second panel there are also four situations continuing the first option from the first panel:\nIn the third panel there are four types of snakes with questions marks as to whether they are dangerous. This is a continuation of the first option from the second panel:\nThis third step takes him to his computer in the fourth panel where he does lots of research on snake venom .\nLD 50 , or median lethal dose, is the dose of a toxin required to kill 50% of the population studied, usually expressed in milligrams of toxin per kilogram of body mass, and most often for rats or another type of guinea pig .\nThe inland taipan 's venom does, indeed, have the lowest median lethal dose among snake venoms. Fortunately, it is extremely shy in temperament, and will always escape danger rather than bite if it can, which is why it isn't considered to be a particularly dangerous snake.  It also resides only in inland Australia, unlike any of the snakes that Hairy enumerated as potential risks.  (If he does happen to live in Australia, he should be more concerned about the much deadlier eastern brown snake and coastal taipan .)\nIncidentally, corn snakes and garter snakes are not even remotely dangerous to humans (in fact they're the most popular pet snakes), and of the four different species commonly known as \" copperheads ,\" the only dangerously venomous one is deinagkistrodon acutus or sharp-nosed viper that only lives in Southeast Asia. In the US, the snake going by the name of copperhead is the agkistrodon contortrix .\nThe item that is almost entirely cut off by the thought bubble seems to be \" coral snake \".  Coral snakes are in a similar position as the inland taipan: they are extremely venomous, but also extremely reclusive.\n[In a caption that breaks the top of the first panels frame:] Preparing for a date:\n[Hairy with wet hair and a towel around his waist thinks with his hand to his chin. There are four situations, but it is not possible to read the fourth line.] Hairy: What situations might I prepare for? 1) Medical emergency 2) Dancing 3) Food too expensive\n[Close-up on Hairy's face, who is still thinking.  There are again four situations, but again it is not possible to read the fourth line.] Hairy: Okay, what kind of emergencies can happen? 1) \u00a0\u2009A) Snakebite B) Lightning strike C) Fall from chair\n[Zoooming out again to full figure of Hairy. He is still thinking... There are four snakes mentioned, but again it is not possible to read the fourth line. The word Danger stands beneath the three dots above the \"?\" after each snake.] Hairy: Hmm. Which snakes are dangerous? Let's see... Danger 1)A)a) Corn snake\u00a0? b) Garter snake\u00a0? c) Copperhead\u00a0?\n[Hairy is sitting down in a chair with a laptop in his lap, while still wearing the towel.] Hairy: The research comparing snake venoms is scattered and inconsistent. I'll make a spreadsheet to organize it.\n[Bottom panel is larger than top four, and aligned to right. Ponytail meets Hairy on his front stoop. She is carrying a purse, and looks down at the towel he is still wearing. Hairy holds his arms in the air.] Ponytail: I'm here to pick you up. You're not dressed? Hairy: By LD 50 , the inland taipan has the deadliest venom of any snake!\n[Below this last panel is the following caption:] I really need to stop using depth-first searches.\n"}
{"id":762,"title":"Analogies","image_title":"Analogies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/762","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/analogies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/762:_Analogies","transcript":"[Megan stands by a TV set and addresses Cueball in the couch and his Cueball-like friend who sits in front of the TV on the floor.] Megan: While I'm up, does anyone want a sandwich? Cueball: Is \"sandwich\" a metaphor?\n[A frame-less panel with the same scene, without the TV. Cueball has taken a hand to his chin and the friend on the floor looks down.] Megan: No, I'm bad at metaphors. But I could try a simile. Cueball: I guess that's like a metaphor. Cueball: Sure.\n[While Megan walks past them, Cueball leans forward and his friends looks back up at him as they continue to speak.] Friend: Well, \"a simile is like a metaphor\" is a simile. Cueball: Is that simile itself a metaphor for something? Friend: Maybe it's a metaphor for analogy.\n[Cueball and his friend are still sitting and talking while Megan replies from off-panel.] Cueball: Similes are like metaphors in that they're both analogies. Megan (off-panel): Analogies are like sandwiches in that I'm making one now.\n","explanation":"This comic revolves around the similarities (and differences) between the concepts of \"analogy\", \"simile\" and \"metaphor\" (as well as \"synecdoche\", \"sandwich\" and \"sex.\")\nWhen Megan stands up and asks Cueball and his Cueball-like friend if anyone would like a sandwich, she is very literally meaning that she will would go an make a sandwich in the kitchen, and she would make one for either of them if they wished.\nCueball is thus cheeky when he asks if this is a metaphor, because in that case the metaphor would be a reference to sex sandwich , in which case the two Cueball's would make up the bread in the sandwich with Megan as the meat in the middle, in a special kind of threesome (NSFW).\nMegan effectively turns him down by saying she is bad at metaphors, thus indirectly saying that she is determined not to understand his innuendo, rather than actually understanding it and having to reply to his smart remark. As she probably also knows him rather well, she also knows that by introducing the similar word simile, she immediately turns the focus off the poor sexual joke to a discussion of language, and she is able to leave the room while the guys are discussing this rather than smirking over the sexual joke.\nShe also manages to make the punch line after the friend introduces analogy, as she is now actually making a sandwich and using this sentence to make an analogy.\nThe dictionary defines a \" metaphor \" as a figure of speech that uses one thing to mean another and makes a comparison between the two. For example, Shakespeare's line, \"All the world's a stage,\" is a metaphor comparing the whole world to a theater stage. Metaphors can be very simple, and they can function as most any part of speech. \"The spy shadowed the woman\" is a verb metaphor. The spy is not literally her shadow, but he follows her so closely and quietly that he resembles one.\nA \" simile \", also called an open comparison, is a form of metaphor that compares two different things to create a new meaning. But a simile always uses \"like\" or \"as\" within the phrase and the comparison is more explicit than a metaphor. For example, Shakespeare's line could be rewritten as a simile to read: \"The world is like a stage.\" Another simile would be: \"The spy was close as a shadow.\" Both metaphor and simile can be used to enhance writing.\nAn \" analogy \" is a bit more complicated. At the most basic level, an analogy shows similarity between things that might seem different \u2014 much like an extended metaphor or simile. But analogy isn't just a form of speech. It can be a logical argument: if two things are alike in some ways, they are alike in some other ways as well. Analogy is often used to help provide insight by comparing an unknown subject to one that is more familiar. It can also show a relationship between pairs of things. This form of analogy is often used on standardized tests in the form \"A is to B as C is to D\".\nThere is a famously confusing analogy, often falsely attributed to Einstein, that attempts to explain how radio works: \"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.\u201d\n\" Synecdoche \" (from the title text) is the naming the whole of something by referring to a part, or vice versa. E.g. using \"the Internet\" when meaning \"the World Wide Web\", which is only a part of it; or using \"Band-Aid\" when referring to any adhesive bandage. Randall is saying that he doesn't really understand the difference between them, but instead of using one of the names as a placeholder for them all (that is, as a synecdoche), he actually uses the word 'synecdoche'.  What a mind he has.\n[Megan stands by a TV set and addresses Cueball in the couch and his Cueball-like friend who sits in front of the TV on the floor.] Megan: While I'm up, does anyone want a sandwich? Cueball: Is \"sandwich\" a metaphor?\n[A frame-less panel with the same scene, without the TV. Cueball has taken a hand to his chin and the friend on the floor looks down.] Megan: No, I'm bad at metaphors. But I could try a simile. Cueball: I guess that's like a metaphor. Cueball: Sure.\n[While Megan walks past them, Cueball leans forward and his friends looks back up at him as they continue to speak.] Friend: Well, \"a simile is like a metaphor\" is a simile. Cueball: Is that simile itself a metaphor for something? Friend: Maybe it's a metaphor for analogy.\n[Cueball and his friend are still sitting and talking while Megan replies from off-panel.] Cueball: Similes are like metaphors in that they're both analogies. Megan (off-panel): Analogies are like sandwiches in that I'm making one now.\n"}
{"id":763,"title":"Workaround","image_title":"Workaround","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/763","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/workaround.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/763:_Workaround","transcript":"[A relative stands at a computer terminal. Cueball stands behind him with his head in his hands, double-facepalming.]\nRelative: See, I've got a really good system: if I want to send a YouTube video to someone, I go to File \u2192 Save, then import the saved page into Word. Then I go to \"Share this Document\" and under \"recipient\" I put the email of this video extraction service...\n[Caption below the panel:] I'll often encourage relatives to try to solve computer problems themselves by trial and error. However, I've learned an important lesson: if they say they've solved their problem, never ask how.\n","explanation":"A relative of Cueball is depicted, who explains how he goes about sending a YouTube video to someone. The relative appears to be a stereotypical 'non-computer person', perhaps the father or grandfather of Cueball. The relative explains how he first saves a web page and opens it in Microsoft Word, then uses the 'Share' feature in Word to generate an email that contains the web page reformatted as a Word document, then sends that email to a service that extracts YouTube videos. Perhaps this service would then email back a link to some extracted file on some server, and this link could in turn be copied and pasted in another email, which could finally be sent to the intended recipient. It's all very complicated.\nThe premise is that non-computer-literate people will find a clumsy, highly elaborate way of achieving some task on a computer. They will do this by stringing together the functions they stumble upon in the few software packages they have limited familiarity with, rather than taking a more sensible, straightforward route. In this case, a much faster and simpler route would be to copy the address of the YouTube video from the address bar in the browser, then paste the address in an email to the intended recipient.\nThe caption says that though Randall encourages his relatives to solve their computer problems on their own, by trial and error, he has to resist the urge of asking them the method they used. That method is likely to be unnecessarily complicated. Perhaps this complexity, inefficiency or illogicality will cause Randall to be exasperated, or perhaps Randall feels it is unwise to tell them why their method is inefficient because of the possibility of humiliating or upsetting them, especially after they have spent a long time experimenting to arrive at this suboptimal solution; it would be disrespectful to correct them. Or perhaps it would take too long to explain an alternative, even a much simpler one, because of the questions that it would lead to or because of the further misconceptions that would be exposed of which the relative should be disabused.\nThe title text just explains another example of a complicated and elaborate way of working that people who don't understand computers can create. Partitions on a hard drive are separately managed regions of storage. Partitions are usually used for recovery purposes or to load different operating systems. It seems that Randall's friend's dad has created 6 partitions for no real purpose, and files are arbitrarily being saved to a random partition.\n[A relative stands at a computer terminal. Cueball stands behind him with his head in his hands, double-facepalming.]\nRelative: See, I've got a really good system: if I want to send a YouTube video to someone, I go to File \u2192 Save, then import the saved page into Word. Then I go to \"Share this Document\" and under \"recipient\" I put the email of this video extraction service...\n[Caption below the panel:] I'll often encourage relatives to try to solve computer problems themselves by trial and error. However, I've learned an important lesson: if they say they've solved their problem, never ask how.\n"}
{"id":764,"title":"One Two","image_title":"One Two","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/764","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/one_two.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/764:_One_Two","transcript":"[A television set with The Count from 'Sesame Street'.] The Count: One! Ah ah ah... Two! Ah ah ah... ...Many! ah ah ah... Primitive cultures develop Sesame Street.\n","explanation":"The comic parodies Sesame Street , an American children's TV show. The Count is a character in Sesame Street who teaches counting to viewers. The Count usually laughs after counting numbers, an innocent version of the sinister laugh that is a stereotype of old Hollywood horror films. In the book One Two Three ... Infinity , the writer describes African tribes that only have words for numbers up to three and their inability to distinguish or comprehend larger numbers. The Pirah\u00e3 language of Brazil was originally thought to only have numerical terms for one, two, and many, although it is now thought these words are relative terms like \"few\" rather than absolute terms like \"one.\" Similarly, see Edmund Blackadder try to teach Baldrick to count beans .\nIn the title text Randall predicts that anthropology majors will write to complain that this view of primitive tribes is a myth no longer held true by today's anthropologists. He makes a jab at them saying they would have time to write letters to complain about things because they don't have to spend time doing real science and thus real research.\n[A television set with The Count from 'Sesame Street'.] The Count: One! Ah ah ah... Two! Ah ah ah... ...Many! ah ah ah... Primitive cultures develop Sesame Street.\n"}
{"id":765,"title":"Dilution","image_title":"Dilution","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/765","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dilution.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/765:_Dilution","transcript":"[Cueball stands at a desk with a beaker in one hand and a turkey baster in the other. Megan lies in a bed in the same room.]\nCueball: Okay, this time I've diluted the semen 30x. Megan: We'll be sure to get pregnant now!\nBelief in homeopathy is not, evolutionarily, selected for.\n","explanation":"Homeopathy is the belief that poisons, bacteria, and other harmful substances can actually cure the diseases they normally cause, if they are administered in sufficiently dilute form. The normal procedure is to prepare a solution, then successively dilute it with water or alcohol by multiple factors of 10. (There's also a \"succussion\" step between rounds, which basically consists of shaking or striking the mixture, but no serious mechanism for how this would affect anything has been provided.) In the medical world, it's known to be total bunk , with countless scientific studies repeatedly showing it to have no more effectiveness than a placebo .\nHere we find Cueball , a firm believer in homeopathy, applying the idea to fertility by diluting his semen. 30X means that the semen has been diluted with water at a 1:10 ratio 30 times, so the solution contains 1 part semen to one-nonillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) parts water. Since the average ejaculation contains 200 to 500 million sperm cells, this means the solution Cueball is holding has a 3.5x10 -20 % chance of containing even a single sperm cell. Clearly, Megan will not be getting pregnant from this, so she and Cueball will not be passing on their genes, which is why the comic states that the belief in homeopathy is not selected for.\nAccording to the belief of homeopathy, diluted sperm should not help in getting pregnant, but help to cure the symptoms, e.g. pregnancy, caused by it. So even if diluting it 30X, would have a homeopathic effect, it would be the opposite of the one Cueball states he wants to achieve.\nEchinacea is a genus of flowers commonly used in herbal remedies to stimulate the immune system. Scientific studies have not shown that such an effect exists. The title text is intended to represent a letter to the editors of fictitious journal 'Homeopathy Monthly', starting with a minor complaint that they seem unable to perform the basic proof-reading and fact-checking necessary to correctly spell one of the most well-known herbal remedies. This is followed up by a complete dismissal of homeopathy as a whole and the magazine in particular.\n[Cueball stands at a desk with a beaker in one hand and a turkey baster in the other. Megan lies in a bed in the same room.]\nCueball: Okay, this time I've diluted the semen 30x. Megan: We'll be sure to get pregnant now!\nBelief in homeopathy is not, evolutionarily, selected for.\n"}
{"id":766,"title":"Green Flash","image_title":"Green Flash","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/766","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/green_flash.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/766:_Green_Flash","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball are standing on the beach, watching the sun set. Black Hat is holding something in his left hand.] Black Hat: Did you know that if you stare at the sun just as it sets, you can see a green flash? Black Hat: And feel a sharp blow to the head, and hear the faint hum of me driving away in your new Tesla Roadster?\n","explanation":"Green flash refers to an optical phenomenon which occurs at twilight (early dawn or late dusk ), where a flash of green light can be seen at the very edge of the sun. Black Hat attempts to distract Cueball with this event so that he may knock out Cueball with the bottle in his hand and steal his new car, a Tesla Roadster . If the bottle is green, it would also be the cause of the green flash.\nThe title text simply continues this, wherein Black Hat jokes that Green Flashes are actually caused, at least in part, by the fact that he has a cool car worth stealing.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are standing on the beach, watching the sun set. Black Hat is holding something in his left hand.] Black Hat: Did you know that if you stare at the sun just as it sets, you can see a green flash? Black Hat: And feel a sharp blow to the head, and hear the faint hum of me driving away in your new Tesla Roadster?\n"}
{"id":767,"title":"Temper","image_title":"Temper","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/767","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/temper.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/767:_Temper","transcript":"[A black frame with the text [NO VIDEO] in the center, speech is in bubbles.] Voice: Sometimes, when we disagree, I feel frustrated. But I never forget how lucky I am to have you in my family. Voice: Always remember how special you are.\n[Caption below the panel]: 1981: An audio recorder on the set catches Fred Rogers fighting with his wife.\n","explanation":"Actor Mel Gibson was the subject of controversy a few days before this comic came out because a telephone rant was taped and released to the public. He laughed off the call, saying simply \"I have a bit of a temper.\"\nFred Rogers was a minister and television personality best known for his children's educational show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood . He's also famous for his testimony before the US Senate Communications subcommittee to secure a much-needed increase in funding for public educational broadcasting. He died of stomach cancer on February 27, 2003, but the legacy he left is substantial; to quote Wikipedia: \"Rogers received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, some forty honorary degrees, and a Peabody Award. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame, was recognized by two Congressional resolutions, and was ranked No. 35 among TV Guide's Fifty Greatest TV Stars of All Time. Several buildings and artworks in Pennsylvania are dedicated to his memory, and the Smithsonian Institution displays one of his trademark sweaters as a 'Treasure of American History'.\"\nPart of what made Fred Rogers (and, by extension, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood ) so successful was the perpetually cheerful, genuine way he presented himself. He was always sincere, but he was polite and gentle in his sincerity. Additionally, in stark contrast to the celebrity stereotype, he was an enormously compassionate and kind-hearted person even when off the screen. People who knew him in real life often observed that the Mister Rogers shown on TV wasn't just a character, it was Fred Rogers himself - as the title text notes. This counterstereotype has fueled urban legends that he was a former child molester, that he served in the military and killed many, etc., none of which are true.\nThis comic subverts these false suspicions. Fred Rogers is fictionally recorded having a fight with his wife, but instead of a Mel Gibson-style explosive rage, he approaches it with a calm, diplomatic, and loving attitude consistent with his real personality. The title text does the same, setting up for a shocking reveal and failing to meet it.\n[A black frame with the text [NO VIDEO] in the center, speech is in bubbles.] Voice: Sometimes, when we disagree, I feel frustrated. But I never forget how lucky I am to have you in my family. Voice: Always remember how special you are.\n[Caption below the panel]: 1981: An audio recorder on the set catches Fred Rogers fighting with his wife.\n"}
{"id":768,"title":"1996","image_title":"1996","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/768","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1996.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/768:_1996","transcript":"[Cueball is going through a cardboard box marked \"MISC\", and finds a catalog. Megan looks on.] Cueball: Check it out - old Computer Shoppers! Wow - in 1996, $3,000 would get you a 100 MHz Pentium system with a parallel port, two serial ports, a 2MB video card, and \"MS-Windows\" Megan: Nice!\n[The two are face-to-face, and they each have a separate copy of Computer Shopper.] Megan: And $299 would get you a Palm Pilot 100- - 16MHz, 128Kb storage, and a memo pad, calendar, and state-of-the-art address book that can store over 100 names! Cueball: Oooh!\n[Cueball continues to read from his.] Cueball: And $110 would get you a bulky TI graphing calculator with around 10MHz CPU, 24Kb RAM, and a 96x64-pixel B\/W display! Megan: Times sure have... ...have... uh.\n[They both put down their catalogs.] Cueball: Okay, what the hell, T.I.? Megan: Maybe they cost so much now because there's only one engineer left who remembers how to make displays that crappy.\n","explanation":"There has been a stunning amount of progress in pretty much any measurable dimension of technology since 1996. We laugh at our prior naivete, pointing out that what would be a non-functionally awful computer now was considered state of the art at that time. Likewise with a Palm Pilot , arguably a precursor to today's omnipresent smartphones. Texas Instrument (TI) calculators, however, appear to have been left behind, not having made any significant advances (or price drops) since the newly discovered issues of the US computer magazine Computer Shopper were published. Thus, while we groan at how awful our state of the art technologies truly were in 1996, we are reminded that some technologies have remained in relative stasis over the years.\nThe title text, after alluding to the fact that academia's practice of only allowing (or requiring) specific models is at the root of how TI can charge high prices for stagnant technology, reminds us that when they were new, TI calculators were relatively powerful tools if you knew how to use them. TI-Basic was a fairly versatile programming language that could be used to make anything from games to reference files to computational programs.\nThe second half of the title text is a reminder to those of us who felt like gods for knowing how to program that power comes at a price\u2014in this case, the power to program a calculator costs friends . Since, as of this comic's publication date, no program yet devised had truly passed a Turing test, even the most sophisticated Chatterbot (program designed to mimic conversation) couldn't quite qualify as a friend. As of June 2014, however, a computer convinced 33% of the people who spoke to it that it was a human, qualifying it to pass the Turing Test . Though some skepticism on this point is needed , as it only passed the University's contest, not the actual Turing test .\nBeing unable to \"make\" friends was also later mentioned in 866: Compass and Straightedge .\nWhile many people aren't aware of them, TI does make more modern calculators in their TI-Nspire series , although they were introduced after this comic was published. The newest versions have color screens and ( finally! ) non-BASIC programming support through Lua and Python .\n[Cueball is going through a cardboard box marked \"MISC\", and finds a catalog. Megan looks on.] Cueball: Check it out - old Computer Shoppers! Wow - in 1996, $3,000 would get you a 100 MHz Pentium system with a parallel port, two serial ports, a 2MB video card, and \"MS-Windows\" Megan: Nice!\n[The two are face-to-face, and they each have a separate copy of Computer Shopper.] Megan: And $299 would get you a Palm Pilot 100- - 16MHz, 128Kb storage, and a memo pad, calendar, and state-of-the-art address book that can store over 100 names! Cueball: Oooh!\n[Cueball continues to read from his.] Cueball: And $110 would get you a bulky TI graphing calculator with around 10MHz CPU, 24Kb RAM, and a 96x64-pixel B\/W display! Megan: Times sure have... ...have... uh.\n[They both put down their catalogs.] Cueball: Okay, what the hell, T.I.? Megan: Maybe they cost so much now because there's only one engineer left who remembers how to make displays that crappy.\n"}
{"id":769,"title":"War","image_title":"War","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/769","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/war.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/769:_War","transcript":"[A soldier is sitting on the ground behind a low wall, leaning against his pack and writing a letter.] My Dearest Cordelia, it has been far too long since I last gazed upon your lithe and supple body through my telescopic sights, and I fear you may have found a superior vantage poin\u2014\nBLAM! BLAM! BLAM!\n\u2014a splendid effort, my love, but your shots find only a decoy, and reveal your position atop the maintenance shed.\nI pray this missive and my grenades find you well.\nWar is hell.\n","explanation":"This comic seems to be a parable about the perils of love during wartime. Our protagonist is seen here leaning against his pack behind a low wall, surely a good hiding spot for any gentleman with a rifle and scope. Judging by the letter he's in the midst of writing, he has a complex relationship with Cordelia. On the one hand, she's attractive. On the other hand, she's a hostile combatant, as evidenced by the shots fired mid-missive. Cordelia's fire works against her, though, as her volley of shots has revealed her own position atop the maintenance shed. We can presume that in a matter of minutes, this love affair will go sour as the love letter is wrapped around a live grenade and \"delivered,\" so to speak. War is indeed hell.\nAs to the title text, the green berets are worn only by Special Forces soldiers. It takes a lot of training to become a green beret, and as evidenced by our protagonist's clever use of decoys to outwit a sniper, he may be qualified for the honor. However, evidence for his naivet\u00e9 is given immediately thereafter, as he confesses that he wears a beret under his helmet \u2014 thus revealing our protagonist's true identity (and explaining how he fell in love with an enemy soldier actively trying to kill him): Beret Guy . Then again, he does not have a choice, since he has stapled the beret on his head.\n\"Cordelia\" is possibly a reference to Cordelia Rosalind \u2014the sniper from the miniature game Anima: Tactics . Alternatively, it may be a reference to Cordelia Naismith from Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor . In the book, Cordelia Naismith and Lord Aral Vorkosigan are on opposite sides of the Beta-Barrayar war, and fall in love while forced to spend a week in each other's company on an unpopulated planet. This may be further corroborated by the green color of Beret Guy's uniform, which is very similar to the color used for the uniforms of the Barrayan Imperial Service.\n[A soldier is sitting on the ground behind a low wall, leaning against his pack and writing a letter.] My Dearest Cordelia, it has been far too long since I last gazed upon your lithe and supple body through my telescopic sights, and I fear you may have found a superior vantage poin\u2014\nBLAM! BLAM! BLAM!\n\u2014a splendid effort, my love, but your shots find only a decoy, and reveal your position atop the maintenance shed.\nI pray this missive and my grenades find you well.\nWar is hell.\n"}
{"id":770,"title":"All the Girls","image_title":"All the Girls","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/770","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/all_the_girls.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/770:_All_the_Girls","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing together.] Cueball: I'm so lucky to have you.\nCueball: I love you most out of all the girls in all the world\n[They embrace.] Cueball: who love me back.\n","explanation":"A young couple ( Cueball and Megan ) are in love. In the first panel, Cueball says he's lucky to have Megan, a perfectly fine thing to say to someone when you're in love. In the second panel, Cueball tells Megan he loves her most out of all the girls in the world, which is again a perfectly fine thing to say when you're in love. Trouble sets in, however, in the third panel, where Cueball offers his qualifying statement, that he loves Megan the most of the subset of girls who also love Cueball back.\nIn the title text, written in Cueball's voice, we have another compliment\/qualifier pair. Cueball assures Megan that he'll never leave her\u2014so long as some other girl is with someone. Cueball clearly has an unrequited love for another, and so really is being as shitty as we all thought he was originally. The world can be a cruel place.\nThis comic is related with stable marriage problem , which is usually stated as: Given n men and n women, can they all be married off in such a way that there is no possible \"adulterous\" pairing that both the man and woman would prefer over their current partner? It turns out the answer is yes, and there are even algorithms that can be used to find such a set of marriages. However, such algorithms don't usually give people their first choice, just their first choice among potential partners who prefer them to all the alternatives. The algorithms also favor either the men or the women, so one side will typically get closer to their ideal preferences than the other. Such algorithms do get in used in situations like assigning medical students to residencies (technically it's a polygamous generalization, but it's basically the same idea), in which case it's biased in favor of the medical students.\nIn the comic Cueball and Megan could be a couple arranged through a stable marriage algorithm. In most cases that would mean that they both have potential partners that they would prefer over the one they're with, and the only reason that they aren't with that person is that their love was unrequited. That leaves both of them with a certain amount of emotional baggage that most people would consider detrimental to stable marriage. In short, while a stable marriage algorithm may provide good solutions to certain matching problems, it may not be the best way to produce actual stable marriages.\n[Cueball and Megan are standing together.] Cueball: I'm so lucky to have you.\nCueball: I love you most out of all the girls in all the world\n[They embrace.] Cueball: who love me back.\n"}
{"id":771,"title":"Period Speech","image_title":"Period Speech","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/771","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/period_speech.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/771:_Period_Speech","transcript":"[A sword-wielding Cueball on a stage addresses three others; one has a spear, another a handgun and a knife, and the third a laptop.] Cueball: Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties? Actors: Ten-four! [The caption below.] A few centuries from now, all the English of the past 400 years will sound equally old-timey and interchangeable.\n","explanation":"The actors on this stage are using language and technology from wildly different time periods:\nPut together, the exchange roughly translates to \"Do you truly understand what I'm saying, my friends?\"\/\"Yes, we understand!\".) The characters also combine archaic weapons like a spear and a sword with a presumably modern handgun and a laptop, adding to the growing heap of anachronisms.\nRandall 's contention is that hundreds of years from now, people will make similar errors that we do today when depicting historical items and language. Modern movies, fiction, and other forms of media that depict history often confuse terms, items, and equipment that were in one place and time period and place them in another, but few people notice because to them, all of it fits under the very broad category of \"old, historical things\" - only those with an interest in history really notice or seem to care. Thus following this trend, in the future, things like laptop computers and \"grok my jive\" will seem just as historical and \"old-timey\" as a spear or the saying \"Forsooth!\", except to those who participate in such things like \"Blogger Reenactment Festivals\", as mentioned in the title text.\nFor instance, take a suit of full plate armor. To most people, plate armor is a \"Medieval thing\". So thus, when depicting King Arthur, a figure from 500 to 800 AD (if he even existed at all), one would (and has) put him in a suit of full plate because he is \"medieval\" and that is the stereotypical equipment of a Medieval figure. In actual fact, plate armor only came about after 1350, many centuries after King Arthur would have lived, and it coexisted alongside firearms for a very long time. King Arthur would have worn chainmail, but all of this would be lost on an average person watching a movie about King Arthur, to whom chainmail and full plate are interchangeable under the label of \"historical armor\" in their minds. It is not much of a jump from a span of 500 to 800 years of equipment being considered interchangeable to 1500 years of equipment and language being interchangeable. A similar confusion of \"interchangeably old things\" is seen in the title text to 2396: Wonder Woman 1984 .\nThe title text likely refers to 239: Blagofaire , which features the said \"Blogger Reenactment Festivals\".\n[A sword-wielding Cueball on a stage addresses three others; one has a spear, another a handgun and a knife, and the third a laptop.] Cueball: Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties? Actors: Ten-four! [The caption below.] A few centuries from now, all the English of the past 400 years will sound equally old-timey and interchangeable.\n"}
{"id":772,"title":"Frogger","image_title":"Frogger","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/772","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/frogger.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/772:_Frogger","transcript":"[The dark green frog, Frogger, is standing in the middle of the panel on the green grass by the side of a light gray road with at least four tracks divided by black midlines. The last track being mainly outside the top frame of the panel. It is looking out into the traffic, which includes three trucks (two in the nearest lane one in the third) with different color of the cabin (one blue and two dark gray) and white behind the cabin. There is also a red car in the second lane. All four vehicles are driving towards left.]\n[Lines behind the frog and sound indicates that Frogger hops, and it moves out right in front of the right truck which is now close to it. The left truck is partly outside the panel, and the other two have moved further left and a new gray car has entered from the right in the second lane.] Hop\n[The truck in the inner lane swerves into the second lane to avoid Frogger, which takes the truck out in front of the gray car. The other truck in the inner lane has exited the panel and the red car only shows the rear part. ]\n[The truck and the car collide with a great noise displayed with shaky letters above them. The car and the cabin of the truck both crumples. Behind the car is two lines of skid marks. Frogger is left unharmed in the inner lane. The red car is gone and the third lane truck is leaving the panel to the left, the cabin just outside the frame.] Boom\n[Only the two crashed vehicles are left on the road with smoke pouring out of their hoods. The trucks rear end also seems to have crumbled more than in the previous image, and strangely enough the skid marks of the car now stretches longer towards the right than before... Frogger turns around and hops back to the side of the road, again indicated with lines and sound. At the bottom of the panel three off-panel voices calls out:] Hop Off-panel voice 1: Oh god! Off-panel voice 2: Someone call 911! Off-panel voice 3: Mom!\nRandall made a mistake in the last panel, where the skid marks of the car stretches longer towards the right than in the panel before, even though the car and truck did not move (and the view has also stayed the same through out the comic.) However, this could just be smoke plumes.\n","explanation":"Frogger is a classic video game introduced in 1981. The aim of the game is to safely get a frog across a busy road and a river to a lily pad at the top of the screen.\nThe title text reveals that a team of programmers misinterpreted a task to make the game \"more realistic\", i.e. with better graphics, and instead made the trucks swerve to avoid the car-sized frog, causing another vehicle to crash into the truck resulting in a serious road accident. This is instead of the traffic just inexorably moving at a constant rate in their assigned lanes and disregarding the movements of the frog, who is normally the only one who ever needs to take evasive action or suffer the consequences.\nThe game continues to introduce increasing drama with the reactions of off-panel bystanders.\nThis is similar to the idea behind the modification of the game in 873: FPS Mod , in which realism makes a video game much less enjoyable.\n[The dark green frog, Frogger, is standing in the middle of the panel on the green grass by the side of a light gray road with at least four tracks divided by black midlines. The last track being mainly outside the top frame of the panel. It is looking out into the traffic, which includes three trucks (two in the nearest lane one in the third) with different color of the cabin (one blue and two dark gray) and white behind the cabin. There is also a red car in the second lane. All four vehicles are driving towards left.]\n[Lines behind the frog and sound indicates that Frogger hops, and it moves out right in front of the right truck which is now close to it. The left truck is partly outside the panel, and the other two have moved further left and a new gray car has entered from the right in the second lane.] Hop\n[The truck in the inner lane swerves into the second lane to avoid Frogger, which takes the truck out in front of the gray car. The other truck in the inner lane has exited the panel and the red car only shows the rear part. ]\n[The truck and the car collide with a great noise displayed with shaky letters above them. The car and the cabin of the truck both crumples. Behind the car is two lines of skid marks. Frogger is left unharmed in the inner lane. The red car is gone and the third lane truck is leaving the panel to the left, the cabin just outside the frame.] Boom\n[Only the two crashed vehicles are left on the road with smoke pouring out of their hoods. The trucks rear end also seems to have crumbled more than in the previous image, and strangely enough the skid marks of the car now stretches longer towards the right than before... Frogger turns around and hops back to the side of the road, again indicated with lines and sound. At the bottom of the panel three off-panel voices calls out:] Hop Off-panel voice 1: Oh god! Off-panel voice 2: Someone call 911! Off-panel voice 3: Mom!\nRandall made a mistake in the last panel, where the skid marks of the car stretches longer towards the right than in the panel before, even though the car and truck did not move (and the view has also stayed the same through out the comic.) However, this could just be smoke plumes.\n"}
{"id":773,"title":"University Website","image_title":"University Website","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/773","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/university_website.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/773:_University_Website","transcript":"[A venn diagram.] [The left circle is labeled \"Things on the front page of a university website\" and contains:] \"campus photo slideshow\" \"alumni in the news\" \"promotions for campus events\" \"press releases\" \"statement of the school's philosophy\" \"letter from the president\" \"virtual tour\"\n[The right circle is labeled \"Things people go to the site looking for\" and contains:] \"list of faculty phone numbers and emails\" \"campus address\" \"application forms\" \"academic calendar\" \"campus police phone number\" \"department course lists\" \"parking information\" \"usable campus map\"\n[The only item in the overlapping section is:] \"full name of school\"\n","explanation":"This comic uses a Venn diagram to point out that there is often a significant disparity between what a university displays on the front page of its website and what users \u2014 particularly prospective students \u2014 are primarily interested in finding there.\nThis is often because those who are making the university website instinctively believe, from their perspective, that the website should contain things that the university is proud of, or that they personally find useful, so they are unable to look at it from the perspective of a person who is new on campus and simply wants to know what number to call for campus security. Thus, simple details like contact information and university data are often overlooked.\nThe title text presents a satirical response from the school defending their site design, consisting mostly of PR worthy of an alumni magazine (a publication that is seldom anticipated so eagerly). It also uses sarcasm to make fun of university websites that have wildly out of date site design (web technology was relatively primitive in 2001 [ citation needed ] ) and a CS (Computer Science) student built it instead of a professional.\n[A venn diagram.] [The left circle is labeled \"Things on the front page of a university website\" and contains:] \"campus photo slideshow\" \"alumni in the news\" \"promotions for campus events\" \"press releases\" \"statement of the school's philosophy\" \"letter from the president\" \"virtual tour\"\n[The right circle is labeled \"Things people go to the site looking for\" and contains:] \"list of faculty phone numbers and emails\" \"campus address\" \"application forms\" \"academic calendar\" \"campus police phone number\" \"department course lists\" \"parking information\" \"usable campus map\"\n[The only item in the overlapping section is:] \"full name of school\"\n"}
{"id":774,"title":"Atheists","image_title":"Atheists","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/774","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/atheists.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/774:_Atheists","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan talking. Cueball has his palm out.] Cueball: Personally, I find atheists just as annoying as fundamentalist Christians. Megan: Well, the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to both.\n","explanation":"In public debates, some fundamentalist Christians and some atheists , while having different opinions, can behave surprisingly similar. Both can be very dogmatic about their beliefs, and be very disrespectful and accusative towards people of the other standpoint. Cueball is blaming both parties for being annoying. Megan sarcastically remarks that Cueball then must feel superior to just about everyone.\nThe title text takes this one step further when Cueball realizes that Megan's reply is just as smugly superior as his. For practical reasons (that is, the prevention of an endless, useless thought loop about your own thought process), Megan stops the tactic, by humorously stating that the statement expires after one use in a conversation. Of course, statements cannot expire. [ citation needed ]\n[Cueball and Megan talking. Cueball has his palm out.] Cueball: Personally, I find atheists just as annoying as fundamentalist Christians. Megan: Well, the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to both.\n"}
{"id":775,"title":"Savannah Ancestry","image_title":"Savannah Ancestry","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/775","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/savannah_ancestry.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/775:_Savannah_Ancestry","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are at a blackboard with equations and graphs on it.] Cueball: Look, I'm doing my best, but the fact is your savannah ancestors just didn't prepare you for doing abstract math. Megan: See, that's just the kind of bullshit sexism that discredits evo-psych. Your \"evolutionary histories\" always seem tuned to produce 1950's gender roles. Cueball: Evolutionary? What? I meant Savannah, Georgia. Megan: ...Hey! Let's leave my mom out of this.\n","explanation":"Savannah ancestry usually means our ancestors in the African savanna , millions of years ago.\nEvo-psych means evolutionary psychology .\nCueball is apparently trying to teach Megan something mathematical, feels frustrated at his lack of success, blames that lack of success entirely on his student, and appears to use evolutionary psychology, specifically a popular trope\/myth about women being bad at abstract thinking, as an excuse. Evolutionary excuses in this context are trying to lay blame somewhere other than either participant, and so can be seen as comforting, but of course they falsely place all women in an inferior position to all men, at least when it comes to \"abstract math\". She naturally objects to the excuse, rightly calls it bullshit sexism, and, depending on how you interpret it, may indicate this isn't the first time she's heard him say something similar.\nBut the twist is that he turns out not to be talking about her lower-case savannah ancestors, the ones in the African savannah of eons ago, but rather of her very recent \"Savannah ancestors\", better called parents, who live in the city of Savannah, Georgia, USA . They apparently know each other well. The implication is now much more personal: that her mother didn't prepare her. Of course, Randall uses only upper case everywhere, so he has avoided giving the reader a clue about the misdirect-joke he is working toward.\nTeasing people about their mothers in the USA, specifically about their mothers' stupidity or fatness, is a common enough theme in popular culture that there is a series of jokes that start with the words \"Yo mama\" that exemplify the genre. There is also an extremely common theme that the South's education system is failing; the comic combines the two.\nThe title text is apparently Megan starting to defend her mother, but then lapsing into a Yo Mama joke without the introducing words, showing that her mother is stupid enough to think that a quarterback (one of the positions played in American football) would be a river in Egypt. This is a conflation of the Yo Mama joke \"Yo mama so stupid she thinks a quarterback is a refund!\" and the common pun, \"Denial (sounds like \"The Nile\") is not just a river in Egypt\".\n[Cueball and Megan are at a blackboard with equations and graphs on it.] Cueball: Look, I'm doing my best, but the fact is your savannah ancestors just didn't prepare you for doing abstract math. Megan: See, that's just the kind of bullshit sexism that discredits evo-psych. Your \"evolutionary histories\" always seem tuned to produce 1950's gender roles. Cueball: Evolutionary? What? I meant Savannah, Georgia. Megan: ...Hey! Let's leave my mom out of this.\n"}
{"id":776,"title":"Still No Sleep","image_title":"Still No Sleep","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/776","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/still_no_sleep.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/776:_Still_No_Sleep","transcript":"[Woozy Cueball walks and speaks.] Cueball: The sleep deprivation madness worsens.\n[Cueball examines his hands.] Cueball: Things seem unreal. Am I even awake? Maybe I'm dreaming.\n[Cueball approaches a tree with a squirrel on it.] Cueball: I'm pretty sure I'm hallucinating this tree.\n[Cueball is now in front of the tree, and the squirrel is on the ground. Cueball has his arms open.] Cueball: But what if I'm hallucinating that I'm hallucinating, and I'm actually totally sane? Squirrel: Listen. Squirrel: I wouldn't worry about that.\n","explanation":"Lack of sleep causes hallucinations different from insanity \u2014 insane people find it very difficult or impossible to distinguish between a hallucination and reality because the part of their brain that checks for normality in a situation is also broken. Level-1 sleep hallucinations do not make it through this \"sanity filter\" in a sane human being.\nCueball has been sleep deprived for quite a while now, and he begins questioning his reality. He wonders if he is awake, or he is dreaming. He also wonders whether or not he is hallucinating a tree, then proceeding to question whether his hallucination might be a hallucination, and he might actually be sane. This double negative would not work mainly due to the fact that if you are hallucinating a hallucination, you are still hallucinating, and most likely you are not completely sane. In the end a squirrel comes up to him, and tells him not to worry about the possibility that he might be sane, thereby proving that Cueball is at the very least, hallucinating.\nIn the title text, Cueball doesn't want to listen to the squirrel because, \"what does a SQUIRREL know about mental health?\" This is final proof that Cueball is insane, because he cannot distinguish between a hallucination and reality (talking to a squirrel).\n[Woozy Cueball walks and speaks.] Cueball: The sleep deprivation madness worsens.\n[Cueball examines his hands.] Cueball: Things seem unreal. Am I even awake? Maybe I'm dreaming.\n[Cueball approaches a tree with a squirrel on it.] Cueball: I'm pretty sure I'm hallucinating this tree.\n[Cueball is now in front of the tree, and the squirrel is on the ground. Cueball has his arms open.] Cueball: But what if I'm hallucinating that I'm hallucinating, and I'm actually totally sane? Squirrel: Listen. Squirrel: I wouldn't worry about that.\n"}
{"id":777,"title":"Pore Strips","image_title":"Pore Strips","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/777","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pore_strips.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/777:_Pore_Strips","transcript":"[A box of pore strips, marked \"deep cleaning.\"]\n[Cueball examines the box.]\n[Cueball applies strip to face.]\n[Cueball pulls on strip.]\n[Cueball pulls skull out of head with pore strip.]\n","explanation":"This comic shows a box of \"Deep-cleaning pore strips,\" which are a skin-care product designed to clean your pores. You stick them on your face, wait a while, and then rip them off. When they come off, a whole lot of disgusting gunk, like dirt and body oils, is lifted out of your pores with them. The kind shown in the comic, however, is \"deep cleaning\", and rips out not only the user's pore gunk, but also his entire skull.\nThe title text indicates that while Randall is aware that pore-cleaning strips are useless and possibly harmful products created to make money by \"solving\" something that isn't actually a problem, they are quite effective at getting things out of the pores on a person's nose.\nThe title text also refers to the cosmetics industry as the \"cosmetics-industrial complex\", which is a play on the term \" military-industrial complex \", coined by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States.\n[A box of pore strips, marked \"deep cleaning.\"]\n[Cueball examines the box.]\n[Cueball applies strip to face.]\n[Cueball pulls on strip.]\n[Cueball pulls skull out of head with pore strip.]\n"}
{"id":778,"title":"Scheduling","image_title":"Scheduling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/778","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scheduling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/778:_Scheduling","transcript":"[A pizza delivery guy enters through a door and a maid is dusting.] Pizza guy: Pizza delivery! Did someone order a hot sausag\u2014 Maid: Mon dieu! Monsieur is home early\u2014 Both: Wait, who are you ?\nPizza guy: Wait, this is the Joneses', right? Their daughter was supposed to be having a party! Maid: No, I thought Mr. Jones was coming home early.\n[The pizza guy is off-panel left as a plumber enters from the right.] Pizza guy: But I thought\u2014 Plumber: Howdy, Mrs. Jones. I hear you need some plumbi \u2014 Who are you?\n[The pizza guy looks in a cabinet; the others are off-panel right.] Maid: Sorry, big mixup. Pizza guy: Hey, check it out\u2014the Joneses have Agricola ! Plumber: I love that game!\n[Mr. Jones and Mrs. Jones arrive home. The pizza guy, the maid, and the plumber are sitting on the floor playing Agricola.] Mr. Jones: What in the name of... Pizza guy: Dammit, I wanted that grain. Maid: Hush, you have starting player.\n","explanation":"This comic is a take on the common plots of pornographic movies. There are several \"stereotypical\" setups for porn videos - the suggestive pizza deliveryman (\"hot sausage\" being a suggestive pun), the French maid who finds out her master is home early and the wife is still away, and the plumber who, while performing routine repairs on a woman's house, becomes enamored with her (while quoting \"woman in need of plumbing\" as another suggestive pun). In all cases, it is usually a simple plot in order to set up a scenario for the pornography. In this comic, all three of these common stereotypical plots seem to have occurred at once. Realizing that none of their intended targets for sex (ostensibly, members of the Jones family) are at home, and thus they are all in the house alone with nothing to do, one of them grabs a game of Agricola off of the shelf, and they sit down to play, their confusion about this mixing of scenarios forgotten. Then the Joneses come home and are baffled by the assemblage of random professionals playing Agricola on their floor.\nAgricola's objective is to build a stable family farm, contrasting with the apparently dysfunctional family in the comic.\nIn Agricola, one can choose among certain actions with your (very limited) \"workers\" (Thus it's called a worker placement game). Those actions contain for instance \"Take a grain\" and \"Be starting player (the next round)\". Other examples are \"Build a fence\", \"Take a cow\", \"Plowing\" and other farm-related things.\nThe starting player has the advantage of choosing the first item\/resource\/action in the next round. Once an item\/action\/resource is occupied by a player it can't be chosen by another player in that round. The game is easy to learn and hard to master since it needs a lot of planning and anticipating the other player's next moves. As such \"scheduling\" is a very important part of the game.\nIn the game shown, it appears that Pizza-guy has used his first move to choose \"Starting Player\" (for the next round), followed by Maid choosing \"Take grain\". Pizza-guy had previously planned to take that grain with his second action, which has now been denied by Maid. Essentially Maid is telling Pizza-guy to stop complaining, he made his decision, and too bad that his plan isn't going to work as he'd hoped.\nThe title text references \"family growth\", which could be interpreted as a cheesy euphemism for sex (in the porn-movie-plot context) or as a game mechanic for gaining another worker (in the Agricola-game context). The \"not until round two\" response could be used for either interpretation.\n[A pizza delivery guy enters through a door and a maid is dusting.] Pizza guy: Pizza delivery! Did someone order a hot sausag\u2014 Maid: Mon dieu! Monsieur is home early\u2014 Both: Wait, who are you ?\nPizza guy: Wait, this is the Joneses', right? Their daughter was supposed to be having a party! Maid: No, I thought Mr. Jones was coming home early.\n[The pizza guy is off-panel left as a plumber enters from the right.] Pizza guy: But I thought\u2014 Plumber: Howdy, Mrs. Jones. I hear you need some plumbi \u2014 Who are you?\n[The pizza guy looks in a cabinet; the others are off-panel right.] Maid: Sorry, big mixup. Pizza guy: Hey, check it out\u2014the Joneses have Agricola ! Plumber: I love that game!\n[Mr. Jones and Mrs. Jones arrive home. The pizza guy, the maid, and the plumber are sitting on the floor playing Agricola.] Mr. Jones: What in the name of... Pizza guy: Dammit, I wanted that grain. Maid: Hush, you have starting player.\n"}
{"id":779,"title":"Anxiety","image_title":"Anxiety","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/779","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/anxiety.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/779:_Anxiety","transcript":"[There is an airport security checkpoint where a queue of ten passengers is waiting to go through a backscatter x-ray scanner. Near the back of the line, Black Hat is standing next to a stand and a sign which says \"Viagra $20\". One passenger next to him is drinking a glass of water, probably just before taking the pills; another is contemplating the sign.] Security Guard (thinking): Oh god.\n","explanation":"Some people are upset about airport security policies that mandate the use of backscatter X-ray machines, since the machines can create an image of the subject naked. In protest, the travellers in the lineup (or at least the male ones) are taking Viagra , sold to them by Black Hat ; there is a heteronormative expectation that the male security guard will be disgusted at being forced to look at erect penises. (An expectation which is supported by the guard's thought bubble of 'Oh god', which could either be in response to seeing what Black Hat is doing or in response to an unseen person, presumably sporting such an erection, already in the scanner.)\nGiven Black Hat's personality, it is unlikely he himself is doing this in protest; rather he is monetizing the opportunity, a supposition reinforced by the inflated price ($20 for a single dose) at which he is selling the medication.\nAn alternate interpretation is that many men feel self-conscious (or anxious, as the name puts it) about their size when flaccid, [ citation needed ] and thus might wish to \"put their best foot forward\" and look their best, as it were.\nRealistically, given the size of the line, there would be insufficient time between consuming the pills and entering the scanner for them to take effect.\nIn the title text, one of the people in the line explains he has a fetish with being X-ray scanned, and thus doesn't need Viagra to achieve the above effect.\n[There is an airport security checkpoint where a queue of ten passengers is waiting to go through a backscatter x-ray scanner. Near the back of the line, Black Hat is standing next to a stand and a sign which says \"Viagra $20\". One passenger next to him is drinking a glass of water, probably just before taking the pills; another is contemplating the sign.] Security Guard (thinking): Oh god.\n"}
{"id":780,"title":"Sample","image_title":"Sample","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/780","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sample.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/780:_Sample","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] How to become the most hat ed band in the wo rld: Record an album that's nothing but brilliant, catchy instant classics guaranteed popularity and airtime, [Cueball is at the steering wheel of a car.] Music: So far from hooome but I can't sto\u2014 HONK Cueball: AUGH! WHAT? [Caption below the panel:] with a sample of a car horn, cell phone, or alarm clock inserted randomly in each song.\n","explanation":"This strip suggests that even a band with the most brilliant and catchy music would soon become the most hated band in the world if it included sound effects of car horns, cell phones, or alarm clocks in its songs. Listeners would most likely mistake the sound effects for the real thing, which could cause havoc.\nFor comparison, \" Indiana Wants Me \", a 1970 hit single by R. Dean Taylor , had the sound of police sirens removed from later pressings because drivers were reportedly mistaking the sound effects for actual police cars and pulling over.\nThis can also be a reference to an unusual anti-piracy method, where P2P and Torrent networks are seeded with altered copies of songs that contain obnoxious sounds at random points.\nThe title text refers to the common sensation of having sounds from the real-world incorporated into a dream, especially as one is waking up. This gives a (false) sensation that is the reverse of the dream described in 557: Students . It implies that the author has been dreaming his entire life since his junior year of high school, which is obviously not true. [ citation needed ]\n[Caption above the panel:] How to become the most hat ed band in the wo rld: Record an album that's nothing but brilliant, catchy instant classics guaranteed popularity and airtime, [Cueball is at the steering wheel of a car.] Music: So far from hooome but I can't sto\u2014 HONK Cueball: AUGH! WHAT? [Caption below the panel:] with a sample of a car horn, cell phone, or alarm clock inserted randomly in each song.\n"}
{"id":781,"title":"Ahead Stop","image_title":"Ahead Stop","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/781","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ahead_stop.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/781:_Ahead_Stop","transcript":"[Words are painted in white on a black road with green grass on each side and a gray sidewalk along the road to the left with a single flagstone going of from the sidewalk and out of the frame to the left. The words get smaller towards the top due to the perspective.] BACKWARD. I READ THINK ENGINEERS HIGHWAY\n","explanation":"This comic refers to how, in some countries including the US, words or instructions written on the highway are always backwards from how you would read them. It seems that the \"highway\" engineers write the words as if you would read them as your car goes over them. Sometimes this approach works, other times (probably most of the time) it is terribly confusing. The sentence on the comic is: Highway Engineers Think I Read Backward. Adding the period is a perfectly hilarious touch, as there are probably not too many periods on the highways.\nThe title text is referring to how the words of the opening sequence of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (released in 1977) move from the bottom of the screen to the top so that it can be read by a normal human being. However, the image text says the engineers initially reversed the text because people were driving BACKWARDS down the highway trying to re-enact the opening sequence, so they started reversing the word order to get people to drive the \"correct\" direction.\nThe title of the comic (\"Ahead Stop\") is also a reference to this phenomenon because the common \"Stop Ahead\" instruction would be written on the highway as \"Ahead\" and then \"Stop\".\nThis could also be a reference to Top-posting in email threads and online discussion forums, as summarized in the following comedic signature line:\nA: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?\n[Words are painted in white on a black road with green grass on each side and a gray sidewalk along the road to the left with a single flagstone going of from the sidewalk and out of the frame to the left. The words get smaller towards the top due to the perspective.] BACKWARD. I READ THINK ENGINEERS HIGHWAY\n"}
{"id":782,"title":"Desecration","image_title":"Desecration","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/782","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/desecration.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/782:_Desecration","transcript":"[Megan is running towards Rob.] Megan: Rob! Rob! Rob: You look terrified! What's wrong? Megan: We've made a huge mistake!\n[In a frame-less panel Megan holds her hands up in an explaining gesture in front of Rob.] Megan: Remember last week when we dug up all those Indian bones and made puppets out of them? Rob: Sure...\n[Megan is throwing her arms out to the sides while Rob holds both hands to his mouth.] Megan: It turns out they were buried over an ancient Indian burial ground! Rob: Oh my God!\n","explanation":"Megan and Rob are horrified to discover that the bones they had dug up and turned into puppets were actually buried over an ancient Indian or presumably Native American 's burial ground. The joke is that they weren't concerned about repercussions from the Indian bones themselves, but since they were OVER an Indian burial ground that they're just as haunted or cursed, as houses built on such grounds usually are in Hollywood tropes and other fiction. They didn't consider it desecrating something holy, as per the title, until they discovered this fact. The humor comes from the fact that \"digging up Indian bones\" obviously makes it already an Indian Burial Ground itself, but apparently it didn't occur to Megan until after she and Rob knowingly desecrated a site at which Indians had been buried that they discovered that it was over another Indian Burial Ground, which is a common site of mystery and negative supernatural occurrences in horror films, etc. Such stories usually involve a building built on top of (over) the burial ground becoming haunted, which is why Megan uses the phrase above.\nA common trope in horror fiction is that anyone defiling an ancient Indian burial ground will have a horrible curse cast upon them. Another common trope is having a curse cast upon oneself by a gypsy or voodoo woman, or a wizened wizard or monk as mentioned in the title text.\nMegan and Rob seem to be unknowingly, and stupidly, angering every supernatural being and force in their entire town, thus setting themselves up for at least a dozen potential horror plots at the same time.\nA common complaint about many horror stories is that the protagonists are flat out stupid in order to make the plot and horror work. This comic deliberately targets and makes fun of this, mocking the obliviousness that many stock horror characters show as to getting themselves into trouble with supernatural forces.\n[Megan is running towards Rob.] Megan: Rob! Rob! Rob: You look terrified! What's wrong? Megan: We've made a huge mistake!\n[In a frame-less panel Megan holds her hands up in an explaining gesture in front of Rob.] Megan: Remember last week when we dug up all those Indian bones and made puppets out of them? Rob: Sure...\n[Megan is throwing her arms out to the sides while Rob holds both hands to his mouth.] Megan: It turns out they were buried over an ancient Indian burial ground! Rob: Oh my God!\n"}
{"id":783,"title":"I Don't Want Directions","image_title":"I Don't Want Directions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/783","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_dont_want_directions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/783:_I_Don%27t_Want_Directions","transcript":"[Cueball on phone.] Cueball: Looking forward to seeing your new place! What's the address? Cueball: Mm hmm. Yes, I'm taking 495, but I have a GPS, so I really just need the street address.\n[Close up.] Cueball: ...then south on 18, okay, but I have a GPS, so if you just want to skip to the street address, I can...\n[Full body shot, facing other direction.] Cueball: Thanks, I'm glad to know Highland Road comes a mile after the big intersection, but I keep saying I have a GPS , can you tell me the street address? Cueball: ... Cueball: Technically that's just more information on how to get to your place, not the address itself. If you could-\n[Close up again, Cueball writing on pad.] Cueball: ...I appreciate that you want to help, but I'm ignoring you and just waiting for the... Cueball: Listen, I just remembered I need to mail you a letter. What's your address? Cueball: Mhm... okay... Cueball: Great, thanks! I'll see you in an hour!\n","explanation":"Cueball wants to use his GPS device to find an individual's house, and therefore needs the house's address. The person on the phone is giving him directions, something that is useless because by giving Cueball the address, the GPS can give directions to the address, possibly better than the ones he is getting over the phone. Cueball then decides to tell the person that he would like to mail something to their house, hoping they will give him the address, because you must have the address to mail something. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text is a continuation of the comic's joke. By the end of the comic, Cueball has got the information he needs, and has just ignored the directions he did not want. However, if the person on the phone insists on checking Cueball has remembered the directions correctly, Cueball has to be able to learn the useless information he did not want in the first place, and has been mostly ignoring, at least well enough to repeat it once.\nJudging by the roads mentioned in the comic (Highland Rd and presumably I-495 and MA-18 ), the person on the phone lives somewhere around southern Lakeville, Massachusetts , and Cueball is starting from the Boston area.\n[Cueball on phone.] Cueball: Looking forward to seeing your new place! What's the address? Cueball: Mm hmm. Yes, I'm taking 495, but I have a GPS, so I really just need the street address.\n[Close up.] Cueball: ...then south on 18, okay, but I have a GPS, so if you just want to skip to the street address, I can...\n[Full body shot, facing other direction.] Cueball: Thanks, I'm glad to know Highland Road comes a mile after the big intersection, but I keep saying I have a GPS , can you tell me the street address? Cueball: ... Cueball: Technically that's just more information on how to get to your place, not the address itself. If you could-\n[Close up again, Cueball writing on pad.] Cueball: ...I appreciate that you want to help, but I'm ignoring you and just waiting for the... Cueball: Listen, I just remembered I need to mail you a letter. What's your address? Cueball: Mhm... okay... Cueball: Great, thanks! I'll see you in an hour!\n"}
{"id":784,"title":"Falling Asleep","image_title":"Falling Asleep","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/784","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/falling_asleep.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/784:_Falling_Asleep","transcript":"[Cueball gets into bed.] It's so much easier falling asleep\n[Megan is lying in bed, gripping her pillow.] With you beside me\u2014\n[Cueball is lying on his back in bed.] All the incentive I need\n[Full shot of the bed, Megan is on the left, gripping the pillow, Cueball is as far to the right as possible, nearly falling off, facing away from her.] To leave the world behind.\n","explanation":"The first few panels of this strip seem romantic and sentimental, as it's common to hear that people sleep better next to people they love. The last panel reveals that Cueball and Megan are actually going through some relationship trouble, because Cueball uses her presence as a good reason for leaving this world behind. He does, however, not intend to commit suicide to escape from her and the world; he just wishes to escape by falling asleep (either that, or it's a double-meaning joke based on the fact that he's about to fall out of the bed).\nAs the title text reveals, he also wishes to avoid her in his dreams, as he wishes their dreams do not intersect - i.e. he hopes he will not dream of her (and vice versa). The opposite of \"I'll see you in my dreams\".\nThe cartoon seems to be a homage to the webcomic a softer world , which takes the same format.\n[Cueball gets into bed.] It's so much easier falling asleep\n[Megan is lying in bed, gripping her pillow.] With you beside me\u2014\n[Cueball is lying on his back in bed.] All the incentive I need\n[Full shot of the bed, Megan is on the left, gripping the pillow, Cueball is as far to the right as possible, nearly falling off, facing away from her.] To leave the world behind.\n"}
{"id":785,"title":"Open Mic Night","image_title":"Open Mic Night","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/785","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/open_mic_night.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/785:_Open_Mic_Night","transcript":"[Megan on stage, holding microphone, hip-hop stance.] Megan: Yo, I'm M.C. Aphasia and I'm here to say that, I... Uh... Megan: ...Um... Megan: ...Hi?\n[Black Hat on stage, holding microphone.] Black Hat: So I... oh? Does she? Well, when yo mama sits around the house, she finds herself wishing she'd finished her degree instead of having kids right away, maybe started that business. Then she might have created something she's proud of.\n[Cueball on stage, holding microphone, fist pumping toward audience.] Cueball: Yo, I'm M.C. Quine and I'm here to say, \"Yo, I'm M.C. Quine and I'm here to say!\"\n[Beret Guy on stage, holding microphone.] Beret Guy: Ever notice how men go to the restroom alone, while women go in hordes ten thousand strong, clad all in sable armor and bristling with swords and spears? Audience member (off-screen): Those are orcs. Beret Guy: Oh.\n","explanation":"The comic depicts four acts at an open mic night , where performances typically include comedy, poetry, music and other similar performance arts.\nMegan confidently introduces herself as M.C. Aphasia, and starts to talk to the audience. Midway through her sentence however, she appears unable to continue to talk, ending with a sheepish \"Hi?\". Aphasia is a language disorder, symptomized by disturbance in formulation and comprehension of language. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write. M. C. stands for Master of Ceremonies - in the context of hip-hop performance, it means a rapper. Because a rapper's delivery depends on the ability to deliver lyrics fluently at high speed, aphasia would render an MC unable to perform.\nThe second panel shows Black Hat on the stage, just after a heckler in the audience fired a 'Yo Mama' joke at Black Hat (probably \"when yo mama sits around the house, she sits around the house\"). A heckler's aim is usually to put the performer off of their routine, and appear funny themselves. Responses from the performer vary from simply ignoring the heckler to replying with a witty put down to get the audience back on the comedian's side and dissuade the heckler from continuing. Rather than a short witty over-the-top reply in the typical style of Yo Mama jokes, Black Hat's response is a dark, detailed, realistic insult, implying that the heckler's mother is a failure and isn't proud of the heckler.\nThe third panel is a reference to the Quine paradox , whereby a sentence repeated twice in succession proves to be paradoxical. For example:\n\"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation\" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.\nThe sentence is another way of saying \"this statement is false\" but without the explicit self-reference. Named after the paradox, a quine is also a computer program which outputs its own source code.\nThe first sentence uses the word \"say\" in the normal way, as a transitive verb, with the second sentence in quotation marks as its object. The second sentence has the same words as the first, but now the word \"say\" is used as an intransitive verb: a non-standard usage approximately meaning \"speak impressively\".\nIn the fourth panel, Beret Guy 's speech begins as if with the common observation, \"Ever notice how men go to the restroom alone, while women go in groups\", but somehow gets derailed through the use of the word hordes instead of groups, and a confusion between women and orcs. When an audience member (or heckler) points this out, Beret Guy's response shows that his observations weren't intended as comedy in the first place.\nThe title text continues the riff on different kinds of stand-up comedians, commonly referred to as comics. Observational humor is a joke that presents a typical real-life situation humorously, often with a touch of exaggeration. The title text is likely referring to stand-up comedians, like Jerry Seinfeld , who use observational humor. When an observational comic becomes more successful, they  will probably \"go on tour\" resulting in a great deal of travel. This gives them lots of experience with airplanes and hotels, and more jokes about them will show up in the routine. Furthermore, the title text is itself an observational joke.\n[Megan on stage, holding microphone, hip-hop stance.] Megan: Yo, I'm M.C. Aphasia and I'm here to say that, I... Uh... Megan: ...Um... Megan: ...Hi?\n[Black Hat on stage, holding microphone.] Black Hat: So I... oh? Does she? Well, when yo mama sits around the house, she finds herself wishing she'd finished her degree instead of having kids right away, maybe started that business. Then she might have created something she's proud of.\n[Cueball on stage, holding microphone, fist pumping toward audience.] Cueball: Yo, I'm M.C. Quine and I'm here to say, \"Yo, I'm M.C. Quine and I'm here to say!\"\n[Beret Guy on stage, holding microphone.] Beret Guy: Ever notice how men go to the restroom alone, while women go in hordes ten thousand strong, clad all in sable armor and bristling with swords and spears? Audience member (off-screen): Those are orcs. Beret Guy: Oh.\n"}
{"id":786,"title":"Exoplanets","image_title":"Exoplanets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/786","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exoplanets_2010.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/786:_Exoplanets","transcript":"[Beret Guy runs into a bedroom arms up calling to someone who is in the bed under the covers. Only part of the bed is visible. The person under the covers speaks. Later part of his face can be seen, and it could be Cueball.] Beret guy: Wake up! Wake up! Cueball (under the cover): What is it?\n[Beret Guy stands with his arms out talking to Cueball hiding under the covers of the bed now completely inside the panel.] Beret guy: We're alive during the time when they're first discovering other planetary systems! They're finding them as fast as they can build new instruments to look for them!\n[In this frame-less panel only Beret Guy is shown standing with one arm out and one arm up looking left away from the off-panel bed.] Beret Guy: And if one of Earth's cultures advances its space program enough to start enriching uranium on asteroids, we'll lose the main barrier to restarting Project Orion and building nuke-riding city-ships!\n[Beret Guy bends down, hands on his knees, to eye level with Cueball in the bed, who is finally peaking out from the covers, only showing part of his face (so it could be any character, as any hair could be hidden and the hat could be on the bed stand).] Beret Guy: The only known technology capable of fast interstellar travel could be operational within just a few generations, and we're discovering all these destinations to pick from! Beret Guy: Come on! Cueball: Can I hit \"snooze\"? Beret Guy: Okay, but just once!\n","explanation":"Beret Guy runs to wake up Cueball , who is probably under the covers in bed, with his potentially middle of the night revelation that Humankind is discovering \" exoplanets \" or planets that exist outside of our solar system. The indication is that these planets are habitable enough for humans, even if just for a visit.\nThen Beret Guy takes it a bit further thinking that one of the countries on Earth could restart Project Orion . As Beret suggests, Project Orion was an early project to come up with a spacecraft that would ride the shockwave from a series of nuclear bombs it dropped in order to travel very, very fast. However, the one major downside of Project Orion was the fallout that the launching of any such craft would present on Earth. One could try to boost the Orion spacecraft into orbit with conventional rockets, but Orion spacecraft are heavy \u2014 being composed of giant pusher plates and rows upon rows of nuclear bombs, they are hard to lift. On top of this, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty means that the craft would be flatly illegal to build and launch on Earth, no matter what you did. However, if an asteroid mining project were to be started, the Orion drive spacecraft, the nuclear bombs, and all the infrastructure needed to man, build, and crew it could all be built safely in space, well away from the Earth's fragile biosphere, where little harm could be done. Some commercial spaceflight programs are interested in starting asteroid mining in the future, or even now: For example, see: https:\/\/www.planetaryresources.com .\nIn summary, Beret is very excited that we can see (with the Hubble telescope and other earth-bound telescopes) and find exoplanets. Then with some advances in space technology we can create nuclear propulsion in space to reach these planets, and it will all be happening quite possibly within a few decades. He is thus worried that Cueball will miss all of this ongoing excitement.\nCueball would just rather snooze, as he is not impressed. Beret Guy gives him only one snooze because as is apparent in the title text he is afraid that Cueball will be be left behind if he snoozes too long! Giving the fact that he just stated that it may take hundreds of years this is of course silly, but fits well with Beret Guy's behavior.\nExoplanets have been discovered starting in 1996, but there are still only a few confirmed planet candidates in the habitable zone at a distant star. This did change fast after that time since new ways of finding planets are created \u2014 see 1071: Exoplanets , which was posted with the same title. At that point, there were exactly 786 Exoplanets confirmed \u2014 the number of this comic - probably not a coincidence when it comes to Randall .\nPart of the humor of this particular strip is that Beret Guy seems to have a sense of urgency and immediacy about something that is actually occurring at a snail's pace over decades, where Cueball finishing sleeping, or hitting snooze twice, couldn't possibly make one crystalline erg of difference.\n1624: 2016 is similar to this comic in that in each case, one character wakes up another character in order to inform that character about an event that is neither immediately relevant to that character nor short\/urgent enough that that character could miss it if he slept until the morning.\n[Beret Guy runs into a bedroom arms up calling to someone who is in the bed under the covers. Only part of the bed is visible. The person under the covers speaks. Later part of his face can be seen, and it could be Cueball.] Beret guy: Wake up! Wake up! Cueball (under the cover): What is it?\n[Beret Guy stands with his arms out talking to Cueball hiding under the covers of the bed now completely inside the panel.] Beret guy: We're alive during the time when they're first discovering other planetary systems! They're finding them as fast as they can build new instruments to look for them!\n[In this frame-less panel only Beret Guy is shown standing with one arm out and one arm up looking left away from the off-panel bed.] Beret Guy: And if one of Earth's cultures advances its space program enough to start enriching uranium on asteroids, we'll lose the main barrier to restarting Project Orion and building nuke-riding city-ships!\n[Beret Guy bends down, hands on his knees, to eye level with Cueball in the bed, who is finally peaking out from the covers, only showing part of his face (so it could be any character, as any hair could be hidden and the hat could be on the bed stand).] Beret Guy: The only known technology capable of fast interstellar travel could be operational within just a few generations, and we're discovering all these destinations to pick from! Beret Guy: Come on! Cueball: Can I hit \"snooze\"? Beret Guy: Okay, but just once!\n"}
{"id":787,"title":"Orbiter","image_title":"Orbiter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/787","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/orbiter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/787:_Orbiter","transcript":"Cueball: Okay, people. The orbiter is passing south of Iceland. The next scheduled check-in will be at 32.0N 35.5E, over the Palestinian territories. Off-screen character: You mean over the state of Palestine? Frank (off-screen): You mean over Israel? [Frameless beat panel.] Cueball: I've rescheduled the check-in for 35.2N 96.6W, over Oklahoma. Frank (off-screen): You mean occupied North Texas? Cueball: Dammit, Frank.\n","explanation":"This comic is about disputed territories and low Earth orbits .\nIn the early days of manned spaceflight and also the Space Shuttle the communication to the mission control center in Houston required many ground stations all around the Earth. Each station could provide a link for only a few minutes and there were still gaps between them. After 1989\/90, when the geostationary TDRS system became fully operational, these ground stations became obsolete.\nIn this comic Cueball , the main controller at mission control, is planning the next check-in with the Space Shuttle (also called orbiter), which is set to occur at 32.0N 35.5E , approx 20 miles north-east of Jerusalem, over the hotly contested Israeli-Palestinian territories . Frank and the other off-screen character start to dispute the ownership of this geographical location, and rather than becoming involved in an argument, Cueball decides to change the check-in location to 35.2N 96.6W , approximately 50 miles east of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which he considers to be a neutral, non-disputed location. Unfortunately, Frank is being a dick, and he then starts to make the claim that part of Oklahoma in fact should belong to Texas .\nIn the title text Randall incorrectly states that the orbiter would require a different orbit to reach both Palestine and Oklahoma, which cannot be achieved from a launch at Cape Canaveral . Thus, Randall proposes that the comic exists in an alternate history in which the Space Shuttles launch from Vandenberg . This is a reference to the plans to launch shuttles from there before the Challenger accident occurred. After Challenger was lost, the Vandenberg missions were scrapped and Cape Canaveral became the sole launch site for the Space Shuttle. Another possibility in this alternate history is that the rules forbidding orbital launches from Cape Canaveral to a northern direction don't exist, because nobody likes the Outer Banks (which would be in the flight path) and thus don't care about space debris falling on them.\nRandall's incorrectness was discussed in many forums and probably based on the wrong assumption that the inclination cannot be higher than the latitude of the launch site (28\u00b0 at Cape Canaveral). But this is only the optimal inclination, actually all shuttle launches to the Mir station and the International Space Station did reach an inclination of 51.6\u00b0, with the cost of some payload mass. And following the ISS at Heavens above when it moves over Israel to the south it will pass over Texas approximately an hour later. Nevertheless this orbit is not possible at the first orbit after a launch in Cape Canaveral.\nThe title text doesn't mention the region south of Iceland from the beginning of the comic. This is roughly at 64\u00b0 North or less (if more south) and the distance from the highest possible orbital inclination of 57\u00b0 from the Cape is 780 km. But even 1,000 km south of Iceland is only the Atlantic Ocean and the nearest landmass is still Iceland, which could explain this vague location.\nCueball: Okay, people. The orbiter is passing south of Iceland. The next scheduled check-in will be at 32.0N 35.5E, over the Palestinian territories. Off-screen character: You mean over the state of Palestine? Frank (off-screen): You mean over Israel? [Frameless beat panel.] Cueball: I've rescheduled the check-in for 35.2N 96.6W, over Oklahoma. Frank (off-screen): You mean occupied North Texas? Cueball: Dammit, Frank.\n"}
{"id":788,"title":"The Carriage","image_title":"The Carriage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/788","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_carriage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/788:_The_Carriage","transcript":"[Death with his scythe is driving a horse-drawn carriage. The text is written in two frames above and below the carriage:] Because I could not stop for death He kindly stopped for me\n[Hairbun grabs Death by the arm and pulls him off the carriage. There is a circle with the letter Y in the lower left corner. The text above the carriage is in a frame.] The carriage held but just oursel- Death: Hey! Hands holding Death: Grab Circle: Y\n[Hairbun takes off in the carriage with the scythe, leaving Death behind on the ground in the dust from the carriage taking off.] Hairbun: Hyah!\n[Hairbun stands with her arms crossed, and Death's scythe next to her. The first text above her is printed as the official logo and the text below is in a type of square brackets.] Grand Theft Auto Emily Dickinson Edition\n","explanation":"Emily Dickinson is a famous American poet, who wrote a poem called \" Death \", about the personification of Death kindly stopping for her to pick her up.\nGrand Theft Auto is a well known video game series where players commonly steal cars by grabbing the driver and throwing them out of the vehicle. In the lower left corner of the second panel, there is a picture of the Y-button used to enter (and steal) vehicles in the Xbox versions of the game.\nThe proposed Emily Dickinson edition of Grand Theft Auto mashes up these two concepts. When Death stops to pick up the protagonist ( Hairbun , possibly representing Dickinson herself), she violently carriage-jacks him and takes over his carriage to use for her own purposes.\nThe title text refers to this strip from the webcomic Achewood where it is pointed out that poems written in ballad metre can be sung to the same tune as the theme song of Gilligan's Island , a 1960s sitcom. Upon learning this it can (as it seemingly has for Randall) become difficult to read Dickinson's poem without singing it.\n[Death with his scythe is driving a horse-drawn carriage. The text is written in two frames above and below the carriage:] Because I could not stop for death He kindly stopped for me\n[Hairbun grabs Death by the arm and pulls him off the carriage. There is a circle with the letter Y in the lower left corner. The text above the carriage is in a frame.] The carriage held but just oursel- Death: Hey! Hands holding Death: Grab Circle: Y\n[Hairbun takes off in the carriage with the scythe, leaving Death behind on the ground in the dust from the carriage taking off.] Hairbun: Hyah!\n[Hairbun stands with her arms crossed, and Death's scythe next to her. The first text above her is printed as the official logo and the text below is in a type of square brackets.] Grand Theft Auto Emily Dickinson Edition\n"}
{"id":789,"title":"Showdown","image_title":"Showdown","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/789","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/showdown.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/789:_Showdown","transcript":"[Two cowboys face off silently in the desert, the blazing sun beating down.]\n[They exchange steely glares, hands poised to reach their guns, as a tumbleweed rolls into frame.] TUMBLE\n[Close-up on the tumbleweed. It draws two guns.] CLICK CLICK\n[The tumbleweed shoots both cowboys simultaneously, and they fall backwards.] BLAM BLAM\n","explanation":"Shootouts were common in many old Western films, most famously in spaghetti Westerns . Commonly, to accentuate the silence and dreariness of the scene before the fight, a tumbleweed would roll past the fighters. In this comic, the two gunmen, as per the cliche, stand quietly. The tumbleweed then rolls past, and pulls a pair of revolvers. It then shoots both of the gunfighters simultaneously, winning the duel. This is somewhat unusual. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text refers to a common trope in Westerns to have the hero (or in this case, the tumbleweed) ride (roll) into the sunset at the conclusion of the film. However, given that prevailing winds go from West to East, that means that the tumbleweed would be unable to tumble into the sunset, thus meaning it cannot reenact this trope no matter how hard it tries.\n[Two cowboys face off silently in the desert, the blazing sun beating down.]\n[They exchange steely glares, hands poised to reach their guns, as a tumbleweed rolls into frame.] TUMBLE\n[Close-up on the tumbleweed. It draws two guns.] CLICK CLICK\n[The tumbleweed shoots both cowboys simultaneously, and they fall backwards.] BLAM BLAM\n"}
{"id":790,"title":"Control","image_title":"Control","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/790","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/control.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/790:_Control","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] My Hobby:\n[Cueball looks down at his arm calmly, while next to him Megan is violently flailing around in terror. In the foreground a Cueball-like guy stands next to Ponytail who is holding a clipboard. They look on in puzzlement.] Cueball: My rash seems to have shrunk by about 20% today. Megan: OH GOD SPIDERS Cueball-like guy:\u00a0?\u00a0? Ponytail:\u00a0?\n[Caption below the frame:] Sneaking into experiments and giving LSD to the control group.\n","explanation":"This is another in the My Hobby series. In a product experiment, two groups of people are given a certain pill or lotion. Some people are given the product to be tested, while others (the control group) are given a placebo; nobody is told which group they belong to. The control group acts as a norm for comparison against the others.\nRandall has messed with this process by giving LSD ( lysergic acid diethylamide ) to the control group. LSD is a drug that causes hallucinations and distortions in the perception of time and space. Megan , apparently a control, is experiencing spiders in her hallucinations. Since the control group is supposed to reflect what \"normally\" happens, this is indeed very confusing to the scientists. While hallucinating in the comic Megan is drawn as if she has 8 limbs showing that she's waving her arms. Alternatively, although not especially likely, this could signify that she actually has grown four extra arms - which would be very confusing even if the scientists knew about the LSD. [ citation needed ]\nHowever, given the scientists are confused, this means that they must know which person is in which group. This implies that the trial isn't double-blinded, which in and of itself would impact the veracity of the study. In a properly double-blinded study, the scientists would not know Cueball or Megan was the control and would only dutifully record their observations. (Alternatively, this is simply an unexpected result for either group.)\nThe title text suggests that, in a different study, this substitution was performed when the product being tested was itself LSD. This led to the conclusion that LSD is no more likely to cause hallucinations than a placebo, somehow implying that LSD is not a hallucinogen.  We can only hope they were able to redo the test, as in layman's terms \"Nonsense MUST be wrong\". If this were true, this would imply that Randall would only have needed to sneak placebo LSD into the studies to get the same effect.\n[Caption above the frame:] My Hobby:\n[Cueball looks down at his arm calmly, while next to him Megan is violently flailing around in terror. In the foreground a Cueball-like guy stands next to Ponytail who is holding a clipboard. They look on in puzzlement.] Cueball: My rash seems to have shrunk by about 20% today. Megan: OH GOD SPIDERS Cueball-like guy:\u00a0?\u00a0? Ponytail:\u00a0?\n[Caption below the frame:] Sneaking into experiments and giving LSD to the control group.\n"}
{"id":791,"title":"Leaving","image_title":"Leaving","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/791","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/leaving.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/791:_Leaving","transcript":"[Cueball looks down at a puddle on the floor and speaks to someone out-of-panel.] Cueball: Hey, while you're out, can you pick up some spray cleaner that works on cat vomit? Voice: Can do! Voice: Bye!\n[Cueball extends his arm and faces the leaving person.] Cueball: ...Wait! Voice: Yes? Cueball: Uh. ...You are in my heart always. Voice: ...?\nSometimes, when people leave, I'm seized by a sudden fear that they'll die while they're out, and I'll never forget the last thing I said to them.\n","explanation":"The caption below the frame tells us that Cueball is afraid that if someone were to die unexpectedly, then he is afraid that he will not be able to forget the last thing he said to that person. In the comic panel, Cueball has observed a mess on the floor, presumably cat vomit. He asks the second, off panel, character who is leaving to \"pick up some spray cleaner that works on cat vomit.\" Cueball suddenly realizes that should the off-panel character die on that errand that this would be the last thing he said to them. Panicking slightly, Cueball interrupts their departure and says something more appropriate as last words - \"You are in my heart always.\" The off-panel character is confused by this statement, not being aware of Cueball's fear.\nIn the title text, Cueball is realizing that if he hadn't have made this last-minute addition, and this person dies, his last memory of them might instead be that he was staring at cat vomit when he heard. This thought might in fact be the thought that prompted him to make his parting comment.\n[Cueball looks down at a puddle on the floor and speaks to someone out-of-panel.] Cueball: Hey, while you're out, can you pick up some spray cleaner that works on cat vomit? Voice: Can do! Voice: Bye!\n[Cueball extends his arm and faces the leaving person.] Cueball: ...Wait! Voice: Yes? Cueball: Uh. ...You are in my heart always. Voice: ...?\nSometimes, when people leave, I'm seized by a sudden fear that they'll die while they're out, and I'll never forget the last thing I said to them.\n"}
{"id":792,"title":"Password Reuse","image_title":"Password Reuse","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/792","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/password_reuse.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/792:_Password_Reuse","transcript":"[Black Hat is standing to the left behind Cueball, who is sitting in an office chair at his desk working on his computer. A message from the computer is indicated with a zigzag line from the screen.] Black Hat: Password entropy is rarely relevant. The real modern danger is password reuse. Cueball: How so? Computer: Password too weak\n[Zoom in on Black Hat's upper part as he holds a hand up with the palm up.] Black Hat: Set up a Web service to do something simple, like image hosting or tweet syndication, so a few million people set up free accounts.\n[Zoom out to Black Hat standing in front of Cueball who has turned in the chair facing Black Hat, the desk is not shown in the panel.] Black Hat: Bam, you've got a few million emails, default usernames, and passwords.\n[Only Black Hat is shown as he holds out his arms.] Black Hat: Tons of people use one password, strong or not, for most accounts.\n[The next panel is only half the height of the other panels. Above the panel is the text that Black Hat narrates. In the left part of the panel, there is a piece of paper that seems to have been torn off at the bottom resulting in a jagged edge, which could also indicate that it continues further down than shown. On the paper, there are three labeled columns, and below each of them about 18 lines of unreadable sentences (mostly just one word). The @ in the e-mail addresses may be indicated with a larger unreadable sign. To the right a broad line goes right from the paper and splits up in five lines that go up or down ending in five arrows to the right, pointing at five labels.] Black Hat (narrating): Use the list and some proxies to try automated logins to the 20 or 30 most popular sites, plus banks and PayPal and such. Labels on paper: Email User Pass Labels at arrows: Banks Facebook Gmail PayPal Twitter\n[Same setting as panel 3 but Cueball has taken a hand to his chin.] Black Hat: You've now got a few hundred thousand real identities on a few dozen services, and nobody suspects a thing. Cueball: And then what?\n[Same setting in a larger panel with more white space to the left, Cueball has his hand down again.] Black Hat: Well, that's where I got stuck. Cueball: You did this? Black Hat: Why do you think I hosted so many unprofitable web services?\n[Zoom in on Black Hat's head now turned towards left.] Black Hat: I could probably net in a lot of money, one way or another, if I did things carefully. But research shows more money doesn't make people happier, once they make enough to avoid day-to-day financial stress.\n[Zooming a bit out, but still only showing Black Hat's head in the bottom right corner, again facing right.] Black Hat: I could mess with people endlessly, but I do that already. I could get a political or religious idea out to most of the world, but since March of 1997 I don't really believe in anything.\n[This panel is the last in this row, but it does not reach the end of the row above, an indication that this does not directly belong to the panels below. The same setting as panel 3 but Black Hat has his arms out.] Black Hat: So, here I sit, a puppetmaster who wants nothing from his puppets. Black Hat: It's the same problem Google has. Cueball: Oh?\n[This panel is the first in the last row. It does not begin to the left, but has been shifted a bit to the right, just as the last panel above to the right, ended before reaching the right edge of the row above (and this one below). This is to indicate that this is row has a different story. A Cueball-like executive at Google is standing up leaning his arms on a table with Google's logo on the side. His office chair has been pushed to the left behind him and it is partly off-panel. He addresses the other executives at the table, two of which are shown. The first is Hairbun with glasses holding her head with both hands, elbows resting on the table. The other executive is also a Cueball-like guy, his head is partly outside the right edge of the panel. At the top of the panel to the left, there is a small frame breaking the panel's frame, inside which is a caption:] Google... Cueball executive: Okay, everyone, we control the world's information. Now it's time to turn evil. What's the plan? Hairbun: Make boatloads of money? Table: Google\n[Only the Cueball-like executive standing at the end of the table is shown, the table is left out. He is face-palming. One of the executives at the table is speaking off-panel. Could be either of the two above or someone not shown before] Cueball executive: We already do! Executive (off-panel): Set up a companywide CoD4: Modern Warfare tournament each week? Cueball executive: That's not evil! Executive (off-panel): Ooh, Dibs on the lobby TV! Cueball executive: Okay, we suck at this.\n","explanation":"This comic has three layers: hacking, philosophy, and Google satire.\nIt starts off on a practical level, with Black Hat describing to Cueball a devious social engineering scheme. It relies on the fact that people commonly reuse the same password on multiple websites, and tend to create accounts on new websites somewhat indiscriminately. Thus, one could create a simple Web service to collect users' usernames, email addresses, and passwords. Since many users will reuse this combination on other websites as well, the website owner can try to hack their accounts on other common sites, such as Amazon , PayPal or even people's banks, using the same login information.\nIn panel 7, the comic suddenly develops a philosophical and ethical bent. Black Hat reveals that he has already carried out step 1, through his numerous unprofitable Web services which he had been running for this very purpose. However, after successfully executing the hack, he realizes that he does not know what to do with all this power.\nHe reveals that he is already financially self-sufficient, and makes a point that money can't buy happiness once past that point, stating that research has proven this. He could use his power to realize his sadistic pleasures of messing with people, but he's already a serial classhole and does not need this information to continue that trend.\nIf he had any beliefs or ideology, he could use this power to try to spread them. However, he reveals that \"since March of 1997 \" he doesn't really believe in anything. While he doesn't reveal specifically what in March of 1997 caused this, it could possibly refer to the March 26, 1997 incident in San Diego, California, where 39 Heaven's Gate cultists committed mass suicide at their compound. One of the cultists was the brother of Nichelle Nichols (a Star Trek actress), so the event got a big resonance in nerd circles (and Randall often references Star Trek in xkcd). However, given Black Hat's strange behavior, it could be anything, from Bill Clinton banning federal funding for human cloning research on the fourth, to the launch of Teletubbies on the thirty first. Later, in 1717: Pyramid Honey , Black Hat seems to finally find something to believe in.\nThe dilemma: Black Hat has cleverly executed a hack that has given him a lot of power, but he doesn't know what to do with it.\nThe last part of the comic now transitions to a satire on how Google has already gone through both the stages described above. It describes how all of Google's free services are simply a ploy to collect and control all the world's information, similar in concept but grander than the hack described in part 1. It satirizes the notion that behind Google's \"Don't be evil\" motto is actually an end-goal of using their powers eventually for evil. (Google has since removed the motto from their code of conduct, so maybe Randall's on to something...)\nHowever, just like Black Hat, once Google reaches the stage where they are able to capitalize on their powers, the Cueball-like head-executive finds that there is nothing evil left for them to desire, except (as Hairbun states) make even more money. As they already make a lot of money this ploy is moot, and anything remaining that they wish to do, such as hosting Call of Duty (CoD) tournaments, isn't evil at all.\nIn the end, the secretary calls dibs on the TV in the lobby in order to play CoD4 on what (one can assume) is a large screen. The Cueball-like executive who wished to implement the evil plan in the first place facepalms when he realizes that Google just sucks at being evil.\nIn the title text, \u201cThe first few times this happens\u201d may refer to the weekly CoD4 \u201ctournament.\u201d Alternatively, it could also mean the \u201cfirst few times\u201d a company decides to turn evil (but then has no idea how). It could also refer to the first couple of times an individual follows through on this plan but fails after the first part due to a lack of planning for the second part.\nThis comic was directly referenced in the title text of 1286: Encryptic .\n[Black Hat is standing to the left behind Cueball, who is sitting in an office chair at his desk working on his computer. A message from the computer is indicated with a zigzag line from the screen.] Black Hat: Password entropy is rarely relevant. The real modern danger is password reuse. Cueball: How so? Computer: Password too weak\n[Zoom in on Black Hat's upper part as he holds a hand up with the palm up.] Black Hat: Set up a Web service to do something simple, like image hosting or tweet syndication, so a few million people set up free accounts.\n[Zoom out to Black Hat standing in front of Cueball who has turned in the chair facing Black Hat, the desk is not shown in the panel.] Black Hat: Bam, you've got a few million emails, default usernames, and passwords.\n[Only Black Hat is shown as he holds out his arms.] Black Hat: Tons of people use one password, strong or not, for most accounts.\n[The next panel is only half the height of the other panels. Above the panel is the text that Black Hat narrates. In the left part of the panel, there is a piece of paper that seems to have been torn off at the bottom resulting in a jagged edge, which could also indicate that it continues further down than shown. On the paper, there are three labeled columns, and below each of them about 18 lines of unreadable sentences (mostly just one word). The @ in the e-mail addresses may be indicated with a larger unreadable sign. To the right a broad line goes right from the paper and splits up in five lines that go up or down ending in five arrows to the right, pointing at five labels.] Black Hat (narrating): Use the list and some proxies to try automated logins to the 20 or 30 most popular sites, plus banks and PayPal and such. Labels on paper: Email User Pass Labels at arrows: Banks Facebook Gmail PayPal Twitter\n[Same setting as panel 3 but Cueball has taken a hand to his chin.] Black Hat: You've now got a few hundred thousand real identities on a few dozen services, and nobody suspects a thing. Cueball: And then what?\n[Same setting in a larger panel with more white space to the left, Cueball has his hand down again.] Black Hat: Well, that's where I got stuck. Cueball: You did this? Black Hat: Why do you think I hosted so many unprofitable web services?\n[Zoom in on Black Hat's head now turned towards left.] Black Hat: I could probably net in a lot of money, one way or another, if I did things carefully. But research shows more money doesn't make people happier, once they make enough to avoid day-to-day financial stress.\n[Zooming a bit out, but still only showing Black Hat's head in the bottom right corner, again facing right.] Black Hat: I could mess with people endlessly, but I do that already. I could get a political or religious idea out to most of the world, but since March of 1997 I don't really believe in anything.\n[This panel is the last in this row, but it does not reach the end of the row above, an indication that this does not directly belong to the panels below. The same setting as panel 3 but Black Hat has his arms out.] Black Hat: So, here I sit, a puppetmaster who wants nothing from his puppets. Black Hat: It's the same problem Google has. Cueball: Oh?\n[This panel is the first in the last row. It does not begin to the left, but has been shifted a bit to the right, just as the last panel above to the right, ended before reaching the right edge of the row above (and this one below). This is to indicate that this is row has a different story. A Cueball-like executive at Google is standing up leaning his arms on a table with Google's logo on the side. His office chair has been pushed to the left behind him and it is partly off-panel. He addresses the other executives at the table, two of which are shown. The first is Hairbun with glasses holding her head with both hands, elbows resting on the table. The other executive is also a Cueball-like guy, his head is partly outside the right edge of the panel. At the top of the panel to the left, there is a small frame breaking the panel's frame, inside which is a caption:] Google... Cueball executive: Okay, everyone, we control the world's information. Now it's time to turn evil. What's the plan? Hairbun: Make boatloads of money? Table: Google\n[Only the Cueball-like executive standing at the end of the table is shown, the table is left out. He is face-palming. One of the executives at the table is speaking off-panel. Could be either of the two above or someone not shown before] Cueball executive: We already do! Executive (off-panel): Set up a companywide CoD4: Modern Warfare tournament each week? Cueball executive: That's not evil! Executive (off-panel): Ooh, Dibs on the lobby TV! Cueball executive: Okay, we suck at this.\n"}
{"id":793,"title":"Physicists","image_title":"Physicists","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/793","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/physicists.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/793:_Physicists","transcript":"[Cueball stands at a blackboard covered in equations and diagrams, an open laptop and scattered paper at his feet. His fists are balled in anger and there is a little angry squiggle over his head. A Cueball-like physicist stands behind him, arms out in a shrug.] Physicist: You're trying to predict the behavior of <complicated system> ? Just model it as a <simple object> , and then add some secondary terms to account for <complications I just thought of> . Physicist: Easy, right? Physicist: So, why does <your field> need a whole journal, anyway?\n[Caption below the panel:] Liberal-arts majors may be annoying sometimes, but there's nothing more obnoxious than a physicist first encountering a new subject.\n","explanation":"This comic shows a view that many physics students, upon first encountering a well-known problem, think that it is not a difficult problem, since they think they can fix it using an extremely simplified model. The obvious problem with this is that if it was that simple to solve the problem to a useful degree, there wouldn't be an entire department studying the problem. This attitude leads to great annoyance from those who have probably spent years and years working on the problem, hence the Cueball with balled up fists, implying that he wants to punch the physics major.\nThis argument is similar to the spherical cow , an idea that basic models taught in early physics classes only work in frictionless vacuums, as shown in 669: Experiment .\nThe title text takes the dismissive attitude to its logical extreme. The comment \"liberal-arts majors can be annoying sometimes\" seems to be referencing the stereotype that they're all elitist know-it-alls.\nCueball later behaves similarly in 1831: Here to Help .\n[Cueball stands at a blackboard covered in equations and diagrams, an open laptop and scattered paper at his feet. His fists are balled in anger and there is a little angry squiggle over his head. A Cueball-like physicist stands behind him, arms out in a shrug.] Physicist: You're trying to predict the behavior of <complicated system> ? Just model it as a <simple object> , and then add some secondary terms to account for <complications I just thought of> . Physicist: Easy, right? Physicist: So, why does <your field> need a whole journal, anyway?\n[Caption below the panel:] Liberal-arts majors may be annoying sometimes, but there's nothing more obnoxious than a physicist first encountering a new subject.\n"}
{"id":794,"title":"Inside Joke","image_title":"Inside Joke","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/794","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/inside_joke.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/794:_Inside_Joke","transcript":"[A man with a beard and a turban stands to the left of a crude wooden counter. On the right of the counter is a man with a beard and no turban. Both men are laughing. Further behind the counter is a woman with a bun kneeling on the ground and putting something into a box.] Turban man: Nine silvers for a ham? That's too much! No-turban man: Too much? There's a monk out back with a ladder!\nCaption: There's no reason to think that people throughout history didn't have just as many inside jokes and catchphrases as any modern group of high-schoolers.\n","explanation":"Inside jokes occur between friends and family members that live through a shared experience, which makes them laugh when they make reference to it later on. For people not \"in the know\", these inside jokes can come across as being completely incomprehensible, and in extreme cases just sound like random words strung together.\nRandall posits the hypothesis that this has been going on throughout history and that historical figures probably had the same number of inside jokes as any modern group of high-school students. He probably chose to compare them to high-school students because that is a time of complex social interactions and cliques, which are conducive to the formation of inside jokes.\nThe title text says that there are several classic books that make pop-culture references to events that no modern reader was alive to see. Topicality sometimes has the unfortunate side-effect of the work being far less understood to later generations.  Suggested examples so far include Homer's Odyssey , Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing , and Lewis Carroll's Alice books, whose many nineteenth-century cultural references are enumerated in The Annotated Alice .\nThe inside joke presented in the comic appears to be a reference to the esoterically-named Buddha Jumps Over the Wall , a type of fish soup that allegedly smelled so delicious, Buddhist disciples would sneak out of their meditative ceremonies to eat it. In this case, the ham seller comments that his products are so delicious that even the monk nearby is climbing over the wall to get some ham after the buyer remarked that his product was too expensive.\n[A man with a beard and a turban stands to the left of a crude wooden counter. On the right of the counter is a man with a beard and no turban. Both men are laughing. Further behind the counter is a woman with a bun kneeling on the ground and putting something into a box.] Turban man: Nine silvers for a ham? That's too much! No-turban man: Too much? There's a monk out back with a ladder!\nCaption: There's no reason to think that people throughout history didn't have just as many inside jokes and catchphrases as any modern group of high-schoolers.\n"}
{"id":795,"title":"Conditional Risk","image_title":"Conditional Risk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/795","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/conditional_risk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/795:_Conditional_Risk","transcript":"[Lightning strikes the ground, illuminating trees with a bright white light. Two people are standing near it. One has a walking stick.] CRACK BOOM First person: Whoa! We should get inside! Second person: It's okay! Lightning only kills about 45 Americans a year, so the chances of dying are only one in 7,000,000. Let's go on!\n[Caption below the panel:] The annual death rate among people who know that statistic is one in six.\n","explanation":"The comic deals with the difference between the general probability of a certain event based on history and the probability of the same event in particular circumstances. The chance of any American selected randomly from the general population to be killed by lightning is very low, but part of the reason for this is that an average American would seek shelter and safety when caught in a lightning storm. The joke is that someone armed with this particular statistical knowledge would not take the normal precautions and therefore leave themselves far more vulnerable.\nIn the title text, since the statistic provided talks only about Americans, the other character wrongly assumes that lightning strikes only happen to Americans, rather than the data for lightning strikes for other nationalities being simply not included in the discussion. Because of this, as a non-American, he believes his chance of being struck by lightning is nonexistent - which underlines the difference between knowing a certain event can't or didn't happen and not having any data about the event.\nThe \"one in six\" statistic is probably invented by the author - which also illuminates the danger of dealing with \"statistical data\" provided by random sources without any attribution to actual statistical surveys or hard data. And of course, now a lot of xkcd readers know the statistic, likely bringing down the death rate.\n[Lightning strikes the ground, illuminating trees with a bright white light. Two people are standing near it. One has a walking stick.] CRACK BOOM First person: Whoa! We should get inside! Second person: It's okay! Lightning only kills about 45 Americans a year, so the chances of dying are only one in 7,000,000. Let's go on!\n[Caption below the panel:] The annual death rate among people who know that statistic is one in six.\n"}
{"id":796,"title":"Bad Ex","image_title":"Bad Ex","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/796","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bad_ex.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/796:_Bad_Ex","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat are walking.] Cueball: It just blows my mind. She seemed so genuine. I had no idea she was such a serial liar. Cueball: I just wish I had our six months back.\n[The view focuses on Cueball.] Cueball: Her exes say the same thing happened to them. Cueball: Maybe what we need is a terrible-ex tracking and notification service.\n[Cueball turns, thoughtfully.] White Hat: But after all the problems with sex offender registries, who would agree to run it? Cueball: Maybe one of the state governments more willing to experiment could try it out...\nSoon... [Megan and a person with glasses and a goatee are sitting at a table, on which sit wine glasses and plates. Cueball approaches them carrying a clipboard and a license.] Cueball: Excuse me, ma'am. Megan: Yes? Cueball: This man is known to the state of California to be a total douchebag .\n","explanation":"Cueball has been betrayed by his girlfriend, and later found out that he's not the first one she betrayed. He thinks that the society should provide a service that collects reports about such notorious liars, warning future dates about their true nature.\nCueball's friend, White Hat , is concerned about the matter of personal integrity, comparing this proposed service to sex offender registries . Cueball, though, thinks that there are certain governments who would have no problem with personal integrity infringement.\nIn the last panel, we see such a notification being given to a woman at a date. One interpretation of this comic could be that the bearded man is not, in fact, a douchebag, but Cueball is calling him one because he likes her, and thus wants to separate them.\nThe \"State of California\" dialog is a reference to California Proposition 65 which requires specific products to state: \"This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.\" California is also known to be one of the states where liberal experimentation would occur.\nThe title text mentions a few \" douchebag \" warning signals that the woman should have observed, for instance his interest in the infamous filmmaker duo Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer , known for making shallow parody movies.\n[Cueball and White Hat are walking.] Cueball: It just blows my mind. She seemed so genuine. I had no idea she was such a serial liar. Cueball: I just wish I had our six months back.\n[The view focuses on Cueball.] Cueball: Her exes say the same thing happened to them. Cueball: Maybe what we need is a terrible-ex tracking and notification service.\n[Cueball turns, thoughtfully.] White Hat: But after all the problems with sex offender registries, who would agree to run it? Cueball: Maybe one of the state governments more willing to experiment could try it out...\nSoon... [Megan and a person with glasses and a goatee are sitting at a table, on which sit wine glasses and plates. Cueball approaches them carrying a clipboard and a license.] Cueball: Excuse me, ma'am. Megan: Yes? Cueball: This man is known to the state of California to be a total douchebag .\n"}
{"id":797,"title":"debian-main","image_title":"debian-main","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/797","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/debian_main.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/797:_debian-main","transcript":"[A swarm of insects cover Cueball and his computer. They are leaning back on their chair, flailing to get away.] Cueball: AAAAAAAA\nCaption below comic: My package made it into debian-main because it looked innocuous enough; no one noticed \"locusts\" in the dependency list.","explanation":"Debian is a Linux distribution most notable for introducing APT (Advanced Packaging Tool). APT is a tool that functions as an automated general software installer for Linux systems; all one has to do is tell it what software package they would like to install, and the program will automatically fetch the software and all of its dependencies (other packages that a program relies on, such as a library for processing ZIP archives) from a central repository . It will also automatically handle upgrades by automatically checking if the repository version of a package is higher than the currently installed version, and it can even handle the use of multiple repositories and linking between them; for example, if a piece of software is deemed worthy of inclusion in Debian's main repository, but as a stable release, the software developers can provide their own repository to provide a more experimental version for users who want it, and once that repository is added to APT's source list, APT will automatically realize that it should use the experimental version, since it has a higher version than that of the main repository. Although this wasn't the first package management system for easy Linux installation (that honor goes to RPM ), it is the first one that seamlessly integrated online installation and upgrades into the mix.\nDebian's main repository, debian-main, is included by default in all Debian installations. It's what you might call the \"canon\" of Debian, containing only those packages that have been approved by official Debian developers. Thus, getting a package on debian-main means that it, theoretically, conforms to a standard of quality.\nIn this case, however, the Debian developers seem to have not noticed that one of the dependencies for the package is \"locusts.\" Locusts are real insects, the migratory forms of several grasshopper species, that are best known for breeding extremely quickly, swarming, and devouring all green plant matter they come across, resulting in crop devastation (some consider this a plague). In some parts of the world they are also considered a delicacy. Cueball probably does not appreciate this as they crawl over his body searching for food, apparently spontaneously generated by APT as it saw that it needed \"locusts\" to install the package.\nThe title text is an error line from dpkg , the program used to install\/remove APT packages. Every package contains several scripts (although some of them may be empty) that are run on various events related to that package; these are used to perform any setup\/cleanup tasks the package needs. This line is an error line indicating that one of those scripts has failed. The relevant portions are:\n[A swarm of insects cover Cueball and his computer. They are leaning back on their chair, flailing to get away.] Cueball: AAAAAAAA\nCaption below comic: My package made it into debian-main because it looked innocuous enough; no one noticed \"locusts\" in the dependency list."}
{"id":798,"title":"Adjectives","image_title":"Adjectives","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/798","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/adjectives.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/798:_Adjectives","transcript":"Frequency with which various adjectives are intensified with obscenities (based on Google hits) [The legend above the plot reads:] Red marker: \"fucking ____\" Blue marker: \"____ as shit\" [Mathematical formula for scale next to the legend:] Scale: ln(hits for intensified phrase\/hits for adjective alone) [The plot itself lists a series of adjectives in approximately descending order.  Each has a red and a blue marker corresponding to the scale described.] [Horizontal axis starts with none, then has a vertical dashed line, then 'rarely' at -17, increasing to 'often' at -5.] [Each adjective is listed with approximate red and blue values, in that order.] Annoying -5 -4.5 Pissed -5 -6 Stupid -5 -8 Bored -6 -6 Sexy -5.5 -6.5 Adorable -6.5 -9.5 Disgusting -6.5 -12.5 Calm -7 -10 Delicious -8 -13 Obscene -6 -14 Prosaic -10 -13.5 Bemused -8.5 -14 Apropos -10.5 -16 Ambivalent -12 -17 Improper -12.5 -18 Evanescent -14 -14.5 Piquant -9.5 never Jejune -9 never Kafkaesque -10 never Stochastic -14 never Fungible -12 never Peristeronic (\"Of or pertaining to pigeons\") never never [There are two small scenes in the bottom right of the plot. The first shows a pair of women holding wine glasses.] Megan: Yes, the Cabernet is piquant as shit this year. [The second shows Cueball sitting at a computer desk.] Cueball: Whoa \u2014 these commodities are fucking fungible!\n","explanation":"This comic is a plot graph comparing how often certain adjectives are used alone versus in the phrases \"fucking [adjective]\" and \"[adjective] as shit\" . Plot data is based on Google search engine result count, or hits . The graph's formula uses the natural logarithm of the hits for the obscene phrase divided by the hits for the adjective alone.\nIt's a social observation of linguistics pointing out that the use of swear words as intensifiers is more common with everyday words ( eg. annoying, pissed, stupid ) than it is with more arcane words ( eg. piquant, fungible ). Two words are used as examples in a sentence shown to the right. These sentences are not something you would be likely to overhear. In the case of fucking fungible it is also a way to justify its relatively high occurrence online. Of course given the log scale, it is still very rarely used like this.\nThe only word included in the graph that's never found in either obscene phrase is peristeronic . Its definition (\"Of or pertaining to pigeons\") is included due to its extreme obscurity. (The words was used again later as a difficult word in the survey part of comic 1572: xkcd Survey .\nThe title text mocks the use of the word fucking in combination with ineffable since the colloquialism effing or F-ing is a way of censoring \"the F-word\", fuck . The two used together resembles someone partially self-censoring the phrase \"fucking unfuckable.\"\nProsaic - lacking originality\/creativity\nAmbivalent - having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone\nEvanescent - which disappears very quickly, transient\/ephemeral\nPiquant - which has a tangy, appetizing taste\nJejune - naive, simplistic\nKafkaesque - nightmarishly bizarre and surreal, read more about it here\nStochastic - random and unpredictable, most often used in a technical sense\nFungible - things that are interchangeable and equivalent substitutes for each other - e.g. different cans of diet coke are fungible with each other\nFrequency with which various adjectives are intensified with obscenities (based on Google hits) [The legend above the plot reads:] Red marker: \"fucking ____\" Blue marker: \"____ as shit\" [Mathematical formula for scale next to the legend:] Scale: ln(hits for intensified phrase\/hits for adjective alone) [The plot itself lists a series of adjectives in approximately descending order.  Each has a red and a blue marker corresponding to the scale described.] [Horizontal axis starts with none, then has a vertical dashed line, then 'rarely' at -17, increasing to 'often' at -5.] [Each adjective is listed with approximate red and blue values, in that order.] Annoying -5 -4.5 Pissed -5 -6 Stupid -5 -8 Bored -6 -6 Sexy -5.5 -6.5 Adorable -6.5 -9.5 Disgusting -6.5 -12.5 Calm -7 -10 Delicious -8 -13 Obscene -6 -14 Prosaic -10 -13.5 Bemused -8.5 -14 Apropos -10.5 -16 Ambivalent -12 -17 Improper -12.5 -18 Evanescent -14 -14.5 Piquant -9.5 never Jejune -9 never Kafkaesque -10 never Stochastic -14 never Fungible -12 never Peristeronic (\"Of or pertaining to pigeons\") never never [There are two small scenes in the bottom right of the plot. The first shows a pair of women holding wine glasses.] Megan: Yes, the Cabernet is piquant as shit this year. [The second shows Cueball sitting at a computer desk.] Cueball: Whoa \u2014 these commodities are fucking fungible!\n"}
{"id":799,"title":"Stephen Hawking","image_title":"Stephen Hawking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/799","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stephen_hawking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/799:_Stephen_Hawking","transcript":"[Stephen Hawking with glasses and dark hair is sitting in his special wheelchair with a computer screen in front stuck to the chair and a large black rear wheel with four large white spokes. He is facing Cueball and Megan. His voice appears in a square machine readable font.] Stephen Hawking: I thought maybe later we should go see a movie. Cueball and Megan:\u00a0!!!\n[Cueball and Megan are running right.]\n[The top half of a front page of a folded newspaper is shown in a frame-less panel. There are wavy plants on either side of the papers name at the top. Below this there is a big headline covering the page width in three rows. Below this is the article that covers the rest of the front page in five columns. The first column is the broadest and it is the beginning of the articles main body of text which is unreadable all the way trough. This columns has text all the way down. The top of the second and third column has a close up picture of Stephen Hawking face, he is sitting in his chair, but it can only be seen down to the top of the screen. The picture sits in the center of the article. Below there is a large caption. The rest of these two columns is more unreadable text. The fourth and fifth column begins with another large sub heading that covers an area of the same size as the picture to the left of it. Above this text there is a line that aligns with the top of the picture, so that it with the picture and the first line of text to the left makes a kind of division line all across the paper below the heading. The rest of these two columns is more unreadable text, except in the fifth column just above the middle where a small heading, with a frame around, raises a question which is just readable.] The Times Physicist Stephen Hawking suggests we see more films Caption: Smartest man alive Secondary headline: What could he know that we don't? Question: Is this a warning?\n[Stephen Hawking is sitting alone in his chair (like in the first image), looking down.]\n","explanation":"Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) was a renowned theoretical physicist. He was almost completely paralyzed due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and communicated with a speech-generating device , as shown in the first panel. In this comic, he mentions to Cueball and Megan maybe they could go to a movie together later, but they take it as a scientific declaration that they should go see a movie and have it published in a newspaper, which portrays it in hyperbolic tones, vastly exaggerating and misinterpreting his actual intent. In the final panel, Hawking is shown hanging his head in sadness since all he wanted to do was see a movie with his friends.\nThis can be taken as a satire of sensationalism of science in popular media, particularly in emphasizing the viewpoints of well-known and popular personalities in science. A similar theme was used in 1206: Einstein .\nThe title text continues the joke, with innocuous comments by Hawking interpreted as important revelations.\nThe Town is a movie which was released 10 days before this comic's release. Hawking tries to suggest they go see The Town which should be good, as he may know since it both received positive reviews and was a box office hit . But instead the newspapers again sensationalize his statements and declare The Town to be the best in the universe.\nWhen Hawking then tries to state that this was just something he had heard, the newspaper asks if science should play a role in judging Ben Affleck . Ben Affleck directed, wrote and starred (top billing) in this movie, so any judgment of this film would reflect on Affleck. The media asks if science should have an opinion on art, in this case Ben Affleck, and thus judge it. It could be argued that it should not as art is not necessarily based on anything scientific, but to thus state that a scientist must now have an opinion on art is a completely different story. Hawking is here defined as Science. If he says so then it is the opinion of the Scientific community and not just his personal opinion.\nBefore Hawking even gets close to finishing his next sentence, the media asks what about Matt Damon -- should he judge him as well. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have a long history together and came to prominence together as screenwriters of Good Will Hunting , winning an Oscar for the script. They also co-starred in the movie, with Matt Damon in a main role opposite Robin Williams . Following that, Matt Damon's acting career has been more commercially successful than Affleck's, causing speculation that their friendship could be in trouble over such details. But they have kept working together and are co-owners of the production company Pearl Street Films , so this is probably not the case.\nBut still more than ten years after their shared Oscar moment for best script for Good Will Hunting , many people think of Damon when they hear of Affleck and the other way around. This is the reason for the last question by the press.\nThose of you feeling bad for Steven Hawking might feel good to know that he had a healthy social life in reality, and had even dabbled in a brief acting career (typically as cameo appearances) .\nA drawing of Stephen Hawking also appeared in 1000: 1000 Comics . If you wish to try and find him yourself first then do not read on or click the links below. If you need a bit of help to find him then this link will show you which number of 1000 he is in. Else you can find him fast as he is no. 49 in this numbered image .\n[Stephen Hawking with glasses and dark hair is sitting in his special wheelchair with a computer screen in front stuck to the chair and a large black rear wheel with four large white spokes. He is facing Cueball and Megan. His voice appears in a square machine readable font.] Stephen Hawking: I thought maybe later we should go see a movie. Cueball and Megan:\u00a0!!!\n[Cueball and Megan are running right.]\n[The top half of a front page of a folded newspaper is shown in a frame-less panel. There are wavy plants on either side of the papers name at the top. Below this there is a big headline covering the page width in three rows. Below this is the article that covers the rest of the front page in five columns. The first column is the broadest and it is the beginning of the articles main body of text which is unreadable all the way trough. This columns has text all the way down. The top of the second and third column has a close up picture of Stephen Hawking face, he is sitting in his chair, but it can only be seen down to the top of the screen. The picture sits in the center of the article. Below there is a large caption. The rest of these two columns is more unreadable text. The fourth and fifth column begins with another large sub heading that covers an area of the same size as the picture to the left of it. Above this text there is a line that aligns with the top of the picture, so that it with the picture and the first line of text to the left makes a kind of division line all across the paper below the heading. The rest of these two columns is more unreadable text, except in the fifth column just above the middle where a small heading, with a frame around, raises a question which is just readable.] The Times Physicist Stephen Hawking suggests we see more films Caption: Smartest man alive Secondary headline: What could he know that we don't? Question: Is this a warning?\n[Stephen Hawking is sitting alone in his chair (like in the first image), looking down.]\n"}
{"id":800,"title":"Beautiful Dream","image_title":"Beautiful Dream","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/800","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/beautiful_dream.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/800:_Beautiful_Dream","transcript":"[Megan with disheveled hair stretches her arms. A sunburst indicating sleepiness is above her head.] YAWN Megan: I just woke up\n[Megan continues speaking from off panel, to Cueball who's sitting at a table with a laptop and cup. He's leaned his elbow on the chair, turning to face Megan.] Megan: from the most beautiful dream. Cueball: Which was?\nMegan: All the girls who read and follow The Rules and all the guys who swear by the techniques in The Game paired off with each other and left the rest of us alone forever. Cueball: Mmmmmm...\n","explanation":"In this comic, Megan has just woken from a dream in which the girls who follow The Rules and the guys who play The Game have paired off and left everyone else alone.\n\"The Rules\" refers to a book entitled \"The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right\" which the authors describe as a self-help book for women seeking a man to marry. It's often decried for being formulaic and for reducing the women who follow it and the men they seek to outdated stereotypes about gender roles. The rules themselves amount to a complicated game of \"hard to get\", which is not exactly a new strategy, nor is it always the best approach to take.\n\"The Game\" refers to a series of books entitled \"The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists\", which is a purported expos\u00e9 on the pickup artist community (which is not similar to a pick-up basketball game, see 1178: Pickup Artists ), and its follow-up \"Rules of the Game\", which describes the techniques used. Pickup artistry involves the use of psychological and emotional tricks intended to coerce women into casual sex. Practitioners of pickup are considered by many to be manipulative and creepy for reducing women to little more than objects for conquest.\nIt's clear that Megan has a low opinion of those who put stock in these works. The idea of removing the Rules Girls and the Game Players from social interaction by pair bonding them to each other is one that appeals to her. Cueball's response seems to indicate that he agrees with her.\nThe title text takes a surrealist step with Cueball 's response to Megan . The Giving Tree is a children's book by Shel Silverstein about the relationship between a tree and a young boy who grows to be an old man. The Metamorphosis is a work of fiction by Franz Kafka in which a travelling salesman wakes up after having strange dreams to find that he has been turned into a nondescript giant bug. The implication is that it would be extremely bizarre to have a dream in which all those people who had experiences regarding these books paired off, due to them being entirely unrelated.\n[Megan with disheveled hair stretches her arms. A sunburst indicating sleepiness is above her head.] YAWN Megan: I just woke up\n[Megan continues speaking from off panel, to Cueball who's sitting at a table with a laptop and cup. He's leaned his elbow on the chair, turning to face Megan.] Megan: from the most beautiful dream. Cueball: Which was?\nMegan: All the girls who read and follow The Rules and all the guys who swear by the techniques in The Game paired off with each other and left the rest of us alone forever. Cueball: Mmmmmm...\n"}
{"id":801,"title":"Golden Hammer","image_title":"Golden Hammer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/801","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/golden_hammer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/801:_Golden_Hammer","transcript":"[Black Hat is going through a door, an almost-empty bottle in his hand. A voice speaks to him from off panel.] Cueball: Seriously? This thing runs Java? It's single-purpose hardware!\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer, holding some device which is wired to a box, and pointing at the screen.] Cueball: I bet they actually hired someone to spend six months porting this JVM so they could write their 20 lines of code in a familiar setting.\n[Black Hat has a pair of bolt cutters in his hand that had been obscured in the first panel.] Black Hat: Well, you know what they say\u2014 When all you have is a pair of bolt cutters and a bottle of vodka, everything looks like the lock on the door of Wolf Blitzer's boathouse. Cueball: I'm glad you had a nice night.\n","explanation":"Java is a programming language touted for its Portability\u2122 (the ability for software to run on many different systems \"write once, run everywhere\"), which sometimes leads to it being used in systems where it really just shouldn't be used. Cueball laments that the hardware he's tinkering with, despite being used for a single purpose, has its firmware written in Java; since the microprocessor is unknown, it's quite possible the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) had to be ported over to the processor before the hardware designers could write firmware for it. Presumably, they considered this worthwhile to be able to write the control code in a language they're comfortable with, even though it probably would have been much simpler to just write the control code in whatever language they used to port the JVM in the first place.\nBlack Hat explains that this is really an example of an age-old adage: \"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail\", also referred to as the \" law of the instrument \" or, as in the title, the \"golden hammer\". The hardware developers probably only knew Java, and when they thought about how to write firmware for their new device, \"Java\" was the only solution that occurred to them.\nOf course, instead of a hammer and a nail, Black Hat's analogy is about using bolt-cutters and vodka to get through the lock on Wolf Blitzer 's boathouse. Not-so-coincidentally, Black Hat is holding a pair of bolt-cutters and a bottle of vodka. The implication is that Black Hat did , in fact, break into Blitzer's boathouse the previous night, which is why he has just now entered the door at the start of the strip. The changes he makes to the adage implies that he believes vodka and boltcutters are designed specifically to be used on Blitzer's boathouse, an interpretation that fits Black Hat's warped and anarchic disposition. As he is carrying both of these items, it also implies that he has just used those instruments for exactly that purpose. Cueball however, being extremely jaded by the (mis)use of Java (or possibly unfazed as he knows Black Hat well), can only bring himself to tell that he's glad that Black Hat had a nice night.\nThe title text implies that Black Hat had to break into a number of boathouses before he found Blitzer's, and that his boat did not survive the evening.  The use of the phrase 'our night' allows us to infer that Black Hat may have been with Danish , his partner in crime.\n[Black Hat is going through a door, an almost-empty bottle in his hand. A voice speaks to him from off panel.] Cueball: Seriously? This thing runs Java? It's single-purpose hardware!\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer, holding some device which is wired to a box, and pointing at the screen.] Cueball: I bet they actually hired someone to spend six months porting this JVM so they could write their 20 lines of code in a familiar setting.\n[Black Hat has a pair of bolt cutters in his hand that had been obscured in the first panel.] Black Hat: Well, you know what they say\u2014 When all you have is a pair of bolt cutters and a bottle of vodka, everything looks like the lock on the door of Wolf Blitzer's boathouse. Cueball: I'm glad you had a nice night.\n"}
{"id":802,"title":"Online Communities 2","image_title":"Online Communities 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/802","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/online_communities_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/802:_Online_Communities_2","transcript":"Map of Online Communities Size on map represents volume of Daily Social activity (posts, chat, etc). Based on data gathered over the Spring and Summer of 2010.\n[Two insets on the upper left-hand corner shows that this map is a tiny portion of the huge continent of Spoken Language, encompassing portions of the Internet, Email, and Cell Phones (SMS).]\n[The largest landmass on the map by far, which takes up nearly the entire northern half of the map is \"Facebook\" - with large states in the south-east of the country labeled 'Farmville' and 'Happy Farm'. There is a much smaller state to the west of these called 'Farm Town'. To the north of these states is a large swath of unremarkable land entitled 'Northern Wasteland of Unread Updates.' This is directly north of the large Dopamine Sea.\nA peninsula on the south-west, just below the Plains of Awkwardly Public Family Interactions, houses many tiny states, such as MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Bebo, & Hi5. It is bordered on the south by Buzzword Bay, which contains several islands of varying sizes. Among these are YouTube and Twitter (the largest), which are separated by the Social Media Consultant Channel. To the south-east of Twitter, across the Sea of Protocol Confusion, is another, equally large island. Most of it is Skype, with the north having two largish states called AIM and Windows Live Messenger. On the south-west part of the island are two smaller states called GG and Yahoo Messenger.\nThe Island of Skype is extremely close to, but separated by the Great Firewall (a dashed line), the large landmass of QQ. It's north shore is the Gulf of China and Grass Mud Horse Bay. Outside of these bays, over the Great Firewall are two islands called Craigslist and 2Channel.\nIn the Dopamine Sea, off the southern shores of Farmville and Happy Farm, is MMO Isle. Its largest state is WoW, with Runescape, Lineage, Maple Story, Habbo, and the Mountains of Steam among its notable landmarks. To the southeast of the island is the Gulf of Lag, in which sits the CDC Games island, with Eve Online.\nTo the east of Twitter is Troll Bay, with such islands as Reddit and Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicio.us, and Wikipedia Talk Pages. To their south are the IRC isles, of which one is the tiny island of #xkcd.\nEast of these islands, and north of Skype island, is the Sea of Memes. In this sea, to the north of Craigslist and 2Channel, is an archipelago of tiny islands. There is an inset, labeled 'Forums.' (See below.)\nTo the southwest of Twitter island, in the Sea of Opinions, are the blog islands. These lie south of the islands in Buzzword Bay, as well. The northernmost islands in this group are centered around the Bay of Drama, on which can be found Diary Blogs, Gossip Blogs, and Livejournal. Gossip Blogs share an island with Political, Music, and Tech Blogs. To the north of this island is a smaller island called Photo Blogs. South of Diary Blogs, and off the southwest coast of Music blogs is a smaller island called Fandom Blogs. South of Tech Blogs, off of which sprouts the small peninsula of Business Blogs, is the Spamblog Straits. On the other side of the straits is a large island made up of Miscellaneous Blogs, with two states demarcated as Religious Blogs and Blog Blogs. Southwest of the Blog Islands is the Sea of Zero (0) Comments.]\n[An inset of a group of islands in the sea of memes located on the lower right corner of the map, labeled 'Forums'. The largest by far is 4chan and \/b\/. Also found here are D2JSP, JLA Frums, Fan Forum, Something Awful, and many smaller ones, too numerous to list here.]\n[The northeastern third of Gossip\/Political\/Tech Blogs island is another inset labeled 'Blogosphere (Core)'. This can be found on the lower left corner of the map. Two peninsulas in Political Blogs bookend the Bay of Flame -- these are Liberal Blogs and Conservative Blogs. Between them lie several tiny islands such as Politics Daily, CNN Politcal Ticker, and Mediaite. Off the coast of Liberal Blogs lies the island of NYTimes, off the coast of Conservative Blogs is Libertarian Isle. Between the two lies The Talk. The northern peninsula of Tech Blogs contains places such as Gizmodo, Engadget, Joystiq, and Kotaku.]\n[Text found between the two insets, which are directly below the main map.] ABOUT THIS MAP Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community's current size and health. This updated map uses size to represent total social activity in a community -- that is, how much talking, playing, sharing, or other socializing happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.\nEstimates are based on the numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up).\nSources of data include Google and Bing, Wikipedia, Alexa, Big-Boards.com, StumbleUpon, Wordpress, Akismet, every website statistics page I could find, press releases, news articles, and individual site employees. Thanks in particular to folks at Last.fm, LiveJournal, Reddit, and the New York Times, as well as sysadmins at a number of sites who shared statistics on condition of anonymity.\n","explanation":"This comic shows a map of internet communities where the size of each region roughly corresponds to its size, and its proximity to other regions indicates similarities.\nThis is the successor of 256: Online Communities . It differs in that it is updated, and furthermore, instead of using the membership of whichever service to determine its size on the map, it uses its \"daily social activity.\"\nThe map actually has two super\u2212maps intended to show the relative usage of types of communication: the online community map is surrounded by the much larger \"countries\" of E\u2212Mail, SMS (\"Instant Messaging\") and \"Cell Phones,\" which in turn are surrounded by the even huger \"Spoken Language.\"  It is unclear whether \"Cell Phones\" is intended to represent an independent region, or whether it is meant to be a sub-region of \"Spoken Language.\"  The ambiguity is exacerbated by the fact that cell phones are the primary medium of SMS, and are also used to access email and online communities.  It's also unclear why other forms of communication, such as handwritten letters, are not included.\nAt the title text Randall explains that, using his definition of \"most activity per day,\" Farmville is actually the second most popular social-network farming game - the Chinese game Happy Farm was more popular at the time. This strikes many English-speaking xkcd readers as odd, because Farmville is much more famous, leading one to wonder how it could not be the most played. The phrase \"browser-based social-networking-centered farming game\" is an example of an overly-narrow superlative.\nThe Facebook region deals with social networks, that is, websites oriented towards having people meet.\nFacebook is a social networking site that allows people to meet old real\u2212life friends and make new friends that share similar interests. One of its most notable features is that a member can update a \"status\" or make normal posts about the happenings of the member's life, complete with pictures, other members \"liking\" these posts. The size of the Facebook region is not exaggerated; most websites seem to allow \"liking\" their content or allow\/require logging in the website with a Facebook account. There even are cell phones with a \"Facebook\" button!\nWhile Facebook is the largest \"country\" of the Facebook Region, there are a lot of smaller \"countries\" that represent smaller social networks.\nMMOs (short form of \"Massive Multiplayer Online Game\") are online games where multiple people take the role of a character and play in a setting hosted by the game.\nOther notable regions include:\nThe YouTube region refers to websites that are based on user-created content.\nYouTube is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google had purchased YouTube.\nMany of the sites on the map are just references to viral videos at YouTube :\nThe HTML5 swamp refers to YouTube's spotty support of HTML 5 (an update on HTML that is frequently touting its media capabilities, making HTML 5 a viable alternative to Flash). Of course, by the time the comic was written, HTML 5 was still in its infancy. The Music Video Bay refers to the amount of music videos (official or otherwise) are present in YouTube.\nOther counties of the YouTube region include:\nSnob Sound:\nThe Isle of teenagers who just discovered macroeconomics is a joke about how teenagers tend to think that the world and the economy are a lot simpler than they actually are. Combined with the typical internet mindset, this leads to a lot of teenagers posting blogs and videos and comments on blogs and videos describing how idiotic the government and other red-tape-related adults are.\nThe Snob Sound could refer to the large amount of people who look down on others in the surrounding websites (one example being an original artist looking down on people who draw mainly fan-art). The Iraq is a reference to Miss Teen USA 2007, in which Ms. Teen South Carolina, Lauren Katlin, said \"I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as...the US should help the US and should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we are able to build up our future.\" The usage of \"the Iraq\" has became a meme.\nThe Skype Region refers to different IM, or Instant Messaging services, that enable almost-real-time text chatting between multiple people.  These often allow services like voice chat and even video calls.\nThe Blogosphere region contains several general blog topics.\nGossip Blogs: \nEach blog below focuses on gossip surrounding celebrities and other well-known persons.\nLiberal Blogs: \nEach blog below focuses on American political news with a \"liberal\" or \"progressive\" slant.  These blogs tend to lean for the Democratic party.\nBay of Flame:\nConservative Blogs: \nEach blog below focuses on American political news with a \"conservative\" or Republican slant.\nTech Blogs:\nAssorted:\nForums are websites where one person post a topic to which other people can discuss.\nWhile the map has a zoomed in version, this article shall discuss the two bigger islands, first.\nIn the zoomed-in map, there is the following:\nTo the south and east is an archipelago of islands representing various regional and special-interest forums. Moving clockwise from 4chan island is\nAn island contaning\nMap of Online Communities Size on map represents volume of Daily Social activity (posts, chat, etc). Based on data gathered over the Spring and Summer of 2010.\n[Two insets on the upper left-hand corner shows that this map is a tiny portion of the huge continent of Spoken Language, encompassing portions of the Internet, Email, and Cell Phones (SMS).]\n[The largest landmass on the map by far, which takes up nearly the entire northern half of the map is \"Facebook\" - with large states in the south-east of the country labeled 'Farmville' and 'Happy Farm'. There is a much smaller state to the west of these called 'Farm Town'. To the north of these states is a large swath of unremarkable land entitled 'Northern Wasteland of Unread Updates.' This is directly north of the large Dopamine Sea.\nA peninsula on the south-west, just below the Plains of Awkwardly Public Family Interactions, houses many tiny states, such as MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Bebo, & Hi5. It is bordered on the south by Buzzword Bay, which contains several islands of varying sizes. Among these are YouTube and Twitter (the largest), which are separated by the Social Media Consultant Channel. To the south-east of Twitter, across the Sea of Protocol Confusion, is another, equally large island. Most of it is Skype, with the north having two largish states called AIM and Windows Live Messenger. On the south-west part of the island are two smaller states called GG and Yahoo Messenger.\nThe Island of Skype is extremely close to, but separated by the Great Firewall (a dashed line), the large landmass of QQ. It's north shore is the Gulf of China and Grass Mud Horse Bay. Outside of these bays, over the Great Firewall are two islands called Craigslist and 2Channel.\nIn the Dopamine Sea, off the southern shores of Farmville and Happy Farm, is MMO Isle. Its largest state is WoW, with Runescape, Lineage, Maple Story, Habbo, and the Mountains of Steam among its notable landmarks. To the southeast of the island is the Gulf of Lag, in which sits the CDC Games island, with Eve Online.\nTo the east of Twitter is Troll Bay, with such islands as Reddit and Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicio.us, and Wikipedia Talk Pages. To their south are the IRC isles, of which one is the tiny island of #xkcd.\nEast of these islands, and north of Skype island, is the Sea of Memes. In this sea, to the north of Craigslist and 2Channel, is an archipelago of tiny islands. There is an inset, labeled 'Forums.' (See below.)\nTo the southwest of Twitter island, in the Sea of Opinions, are the blog islands. These lie south of the islands in Buzzword Bay, as well. The northernmost islands in this group are centered around the Bay of Drama, on which can be found Diary Blogs, Gossip Blogs, and Livejournal. Gossip Blogs share an island with Political, Music, and Tech Blogs. To the north of this island is a smaller island called Photo Blogs. South of Diary Blogs, and off the southwest coast of Music blogs is a smaller island called Fandom Blogs. South of Tech Blogs, off of which sprouts the small peninsula of Business Blogs, is the Spamblog Straits. On the other side of the straits is a large island made up of Miscellaneous Blogs, with two states demarcated as Religious Blogs and Blog Blogs. Southwest of the Blog Islands is the Sea of Zero (0) Comments.]\n[An inset of a group of islands in the sea of memes located on the lower right corner of the map, labeled 'Forums'. The largest by far is 4chan and \/b\/. Also found here are D2JSP, JLA Frums, Fan Forum, Something Awful, and many smaller ones, too numerous to list here.]\n[The northeastern third of Gossip\/Political\/Tech Blogs island is another inset labeled 'Blogosphere (Core)'. This can be found on the lower left corner of the map. Two peninsulas in Political Blogs bookend the Bay of Flame -- these are Liberal Blogs and Conservative Blogs. Between them lie several tiny islands such as Politics Daily, CNN Politcal Ticker, and Mediaite. Off the coast of Liberal Blogs lies the island of NYTimes, off the coast of Conservative Blogs is Libertarian Isle. Between the two lies The Talk. The northern peninsula of Tech Blogs contains places such as Gizmodo, Engadget, Joystiq, and Kotaku.]\n[Text found between the two insets, which are directly below the main map.] ABOUT THIS MAP Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community's current size and health. This updated map uses size to represent total social activity in a community -- that is, how much talking, playing, sharing, or other socializing happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.\nEstimates are based on the numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up).\nSources of data include Google and Bing, Wikipedia, Alexa, Big-Boards.com, StumbleUpon, Wordpress, Akismet, every website statistics page I could find, press releases, news articles, and individual site employees. Thanks in particular to folks at Last.fm, LiveJournal, Reddit, and the New York Times, as well as sysadmins at a number of sites who shared statistics on condition of anonymity.\n"}
{"id":803,"title":"Airfoil","image_title":"Airfoil","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/803","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/airfoil.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/803:_Airfoil","transcript":"[In a frame-less picture to the left of the first panel there's a picture of a cross section of an airfoil (a plane wing), with a small black arrow pointing down on the wing from above and similar but larger arrow pointing up on the wing from below. Two lines beginning close to each other at the right respectively moves over and under the wing ending in arrow heads to the left. Just before and after the wing four small lines crossing the long arrows indicate approximately where the path of the lines stop being parallel. Above the drawing there is a caption. Below, in a speech bubble with an arrow pointing towards the next panel to the right, is the text that the teacher Miss Lenhart has just used to describe the drawing.] Handling a student who challenges your expertise with an insightful question: Miss Lenhart: So, kids, the air above the wing travels a longer distance, so it has to go faster to keep up. Faster air exerts less pressure, so the wing is lifted upward.\n[Miss Lenhart is shown standing while a student asks a question from off-panel.] Student (off-panel): But then why can planes fly upside down?\n[Miss Lenhart is pondering the question. Beat panel. Three long and curved arrows point out from the right frame of this panel, leading to each of the next three panels which are arranged vertically above each other, making the comic much deeper in this column than in the first two.]\n[In the top panel Miss Lenhart turns away from the students taking a hand to her chin. Overlaid on the top of the panel there is a small frame with a caption:] Right: Miss Lenhart: Wow, good question! Maybe this picture is simplified\u2014or wrong! We should learn more.\n[In the middle panel Miss Lenhart stands as before. Overlaid on the top of the panel there is a small frame with a caption:] Wrong: Miss Lenhart: It's... complicated. Miss Lenhart: And we need to move on.\n[In the bottom panel Miss Lenhart visibly ball her hands in to fists and leans a little forward looking more down. Overlaid on the top of the panel there is a small frame with a caption:] Very wrong: Miss Lenhart: Santa Claus is your parents.\n","explanation":"In the first panel a cross sectional drawing of a plane wing with the air moving around the wing showing a common teaching that an airfoil works because the air on top of the wing must travel faster to \"keep up\" with the air flowing across the bottom of the wing. The theory goes that, because the air on top of the wing is traveling faster, it must, as a result of Bernoulli's Principle , create an area of lower pressure above the wing; this causes lift (that is, the wing rises) because the higher pressure below the wing (symbolized by thick \"up\" arrow) pushes it up more than the low pressure above the wing. This is what the teacher Miss Lenhart is teaching as is revealed in the next panel.\nAs it turns out, this is, to put it mildly, a vast oversimplification of how lift is truly created. Because then a student asks a particularly insightful question: Why, if the theory is true, can planes fly upside down? (If the simple airfoil theory is all that permits planes to stay up in the air, then flying upside down should reverse the pressures \u2014 pushing the plane down and causing it to crash.) Miss Lenhart thinks about it and clearly has no answer.\nThe final set of panels posit three potential responses from Miss Lenhart, upon realizing her theory has been disproved:\nIn the right one, Miss Lenhart realizes that perhaps the model she's been using to explain how an airfoil works is wrong (or, at a minimum, too simple). She is curious about it and suggests that this is an area for further exploration, and encourages additional study \u2014 in effect, rewarding the student for their insight. It seems that Miss Lenhart has taken the right course as it is shown later in 843: Misconceptions that she wished her students to generally avoid any common misconceptions . The title text also mentions that this is a common misconception and it is actually the first mentioned on list of common physics misconceptions on Wikipedia.\nIn the wrong panel, Miss Lenhart, out of apparent embarrassment, avoids the question entirely, saying simply that it's complicated (and implying that such questions are outside the student's understanding). This way to continue a discussion where you wish to be right was much later used in 1731: Wrong .\nIn the very wrong panel, not only does Miss Lenhart avoid answering the question, she attempts to distract them (or even punish them for asking such an insightful question - note that in this panel, Miss Lenhart has clenched her fists, suggesting anger) by telling the kids that Santa Claus isn't real but in fact that he is really their parents \u2014 something that would obviously distress children if they still believe in Santa Claus (in addition to distracting them from the question they've asked) and constitute harsh punishment for pointing out the teacher's ignorance. Of course most children old enough to be taught about the airflow around plane wings should be too old to believe in Santa. However, if she just wished to tell them a bit about planes she may have drawn this drawing even in very early grades making the Santa trick effective.\nThe title text suggests additional reasons for re-thinking the common theory as to how airfoils create lift. It points out that (1) it is absurd to believe the air has to get across the airfoil's two sides in the same amount of time, and (2) the Wright brothers plane's wings were curved the same amount on both sides of the airfoil (the Wright Flyer's wings were concave, like an arch; and thus the curves were in the same direction, not reflected vertically), meaning that the distance that the air needs to travel to hug along each face of the wing is not the dispositive factor in creating lift.\nThe strip is correct in noting that lift is a far more complicated process than the simple theory posited by Miss Lenhart. While the role of Bernoulli's Principle (that is, the difference in pressures) cannot be entirely discounted, the theory here is vastly too simple. As an initial matter, as suggested by the title text, there is no reason that the air on top of the wing should be compelled to \"keep up\" with the air on the bottom of the wing. Indeed, as demonstrated by the illustration below, in the time that the air below the wing travels across, the air on top of the wing has not only traveled the length of the entire top of the wing (a distance that may be farther than the distance under the wing, due to its shape), but often additional distance.\n\nLift may be more usefully described as resulting from the deflection of air, although this explanation still does not explain how symmetrical wings will work (at least, absent effects caused by a change in the \"angle of attack\") nor how a plane may fly upside down. The Wikipedia article on lift provides a more detailed explanation. It in fact gives an explanation as to these two issues. It explains that with zero angle of attack, a symmetrical wing will not generate lift (though it is possible that other factors may generate other slight upward force, such as updrafts, the shape of the plane, and the angle of the engine relative to the wings. It also explains that an asymmetrical (or \"cambered\") wing may adjust angle of attack to compensate and still generate lift.\nFinally, to answer the question in the second panel in a general sense: most planes can't fly upside down for an extended period of time. While many aerobatic aircraft can sustain inverted flight with negative g forces, some others can achieve an inverted attitude only momentarily, and are experiencing positive g forces. Usually the reason for this is not the wings, which function perfectly fine upside down (albeit sometimes at lower efficiency), but the engines, which may not get fuel or oil under such conditions. It has to also be noted that if angle of attack were ignored, movable control surfaces would be useless. Almost any airplane can do a barrel roll or Aileron roll , given sufficient altitude (a Boeing 707 prototype once did this, and so did the Concorde in a demonstration).\n[In a frame-less picture to the left of the first panel there's a picture of a cross section of an airfoil (a plane wing), with a small black arrow pointing down on the wing from above and similar but larger arrow pointing up on the wing from below. Two lines beginning close to each other at the right respectively moves over and under the wing ending in arrow heads to the left. Just before and after the wing four small lines crossing the long arrows indicate approximately where the path of the lines stop being parallel. Above the drawing there is a caption. Below, in a speech bubble with an arrow pointing towards the next panel to the right, is the text that the teacher Miss Lenhart has just used to describe the drawing.] Handling a student who challenges your expertise with an insightful question: Miss Lenhart: So, kids, the air above the wing travels a longer distance, so it has to go faster to keep up. Faster air exerts less pressure, so the wing is lifted upward.\n[Miss Lenhart is shown standing while a student asks a question from off-panel.] Student (off-panel): But then why can planes fly upside down?\n[Miss Lenhart is pondering the question. Beat panel. Three long and curved arrows point out from the right frame of this panel, leading to each of the next three panels which are arranged vertically above each other, making the comic much deeper in this column than in the first two.]\n[In the top panel Miss Lenhart turns away from the students taking a hand to her chin. Overlaid on the top of the panel there is a small frame with a caption:] Right: Miss Lenhart: Wow, good question! Maybe this picture is simplified\u2014or wrong! We should learn more.\n[In the middle panel Miss Lenhart stands as before. Overlaid on the top of the panel there is a small frame with a caption:] Wrong: Miss Lenhart: It's... complicated. Miss Lenhart: And we need to move on.\n[In the bottom panel Miss Lenhart visibly ball her hands in to fists and leans a little forward looking more down. Overlaid on the top of the panel there is a small frame with a caption:] Very wrong: Miss Lenhart: Santa Claus is your parents.\n"}
{"id":804,"title":"Pumpkin Carving","image_title":"Pumpkin Carving","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/804","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pumpkin_carving.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/804:_Pumpkin_Carving","transcript":"[Beret Guy, holding his arms out, stands behind a large orange pumpkin with the stem on top. It is sitting on a table. The pumpkin has been carved out as a lamp with large hole, and a lit candle is visible in the hole. The hole is in the shape of another carved out pumpkin. An interviewer speaks from off panel.] Interviewer (off-panel): So what did you\u2014 Beret Guy: I carved a pumpkin! Interviewer (off-panel): ...\n[Black Hat stands behind a large orange pumpkin which has not been carved out as a lamp, but the stem at the top has been removed and is placed tilting on the side of the pumpkin. It is sitting on a table. A gray box stands next to and partly in front of the pumpkin. On the end of the box there is a label at the top with unreadable text and below that some kind of drawing with a circle at the top. The interviewer speaks from off panel.] Interviewer (off-panel): Taking on teen vandals, I see. Black Hat: Heavens, no. My pumpkin simply has chest pains. In fact, I'll leave a note warning them not to smash it. Text on box: Nitro- glycerin Do Not Shake\n[Megan stands next to a large orange pumpkin with the stem on top. It is sitting on a table. The pumpkin has been carved out as a typical Halloween lamp. The bottom part of a white candle stick is visible in the mouth shaped hole. The hole is in the shape of a typical jack-o' lantern, with two slanted eyes, double slit nose and a smiling mouth with a tooth sticking out from both upper and lower lip, on either side of the candle stick.] Megan: My pumpkin's name is Harold. He just realized that all the time he used to spend daydreaming, he now spends worrying. He'll try to distract himself later with holiday traditions, but it won't work.\n[Cueball stands next to a two orange pumpkins with their stems on top, the left pumpkin is slightly larger than the right which is partly in front of the larger pumpkin. They have not been carved out even though a knife lies next to them to the right in front of Cueball on the table where they both stand. The interviewer speaks from off panel.]] Cueball: I carved and carved, and the next thing I knew I had two pumpkins. Interviewer (off-panel): I told you not to take the axiom of choice.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the American custom of making Jack-O'-Lanterns to set out on porches and front steps for the holiday of Halloween , which occurs on October 31.  Typically they are made with pumpkins by emptying the inside leaving a hollow shell, carving a face or design on the side, then placing a light or candle inside.  The Jack-O'-Lantern in the 3rd frame is the typical and standard design for a carved pumpkin.\nThe comic is set up as a typical TV program where an off-screen interviewer asks four (very) different people what they have made out of their Halloween pumpkin. In the official transcript the interviewer that talks in three of the panels is called an Interlocutor: \"a person who takes part in dialogue or conversation.\"\nIn the first frame, Beret Guy , naturally, stays oddly on-topic by physically carving an image of a pumpkin in his pumpkin. This means his answer, \"I carved a pumpkin,\" could apply to either the image or the medium of his artwork.\nIn the second frame, Black Hat is shown with a container of nitroglycerin next to his pumpkin. Nitroglycerin is a highly explosive liquid that may explode violently with just a small bump. Black Hat has not carved a hole for his lamp, but it seems he has emptied the inside of the pumpkin as the stem at the top has been removed. This will make it possible to fill up the pumpkin with nitroglycerin. Teenagers are a rather impulsive and rebellious lot; as Halloween is a night with lots of meticulously erected decorations and more lax parental supervision, troublemaker teens see it as an enticing time to engage in rampant vandalism, including but not limited to pumpkin-smashing. Hence, the off-panel character presumes that Black Hat is setting up a trap to get back at these ne'er-do-wells. To top it off, Black Hat plans to put up a sign warning passers-by to not smash the pumpkin. This would only serve to tempt impulsive teenagers to disturb it, which is very likely what the sadistic and chaos-loving Classhole is hoping for. If he succeeds with his plan, with a completely hollowed out pumpkin of the shown size filled with nitroglycerin, it would seem likely that the resulting explosion would leave a largish crater, flatten wood-framed buildings nearby, shatter windows for blocks in all directions, and be more than sufficient to kill the vandal along with others in the surrounding area. This is clearly overkill for such a petty crime. [ citation needed ]\nBlack Hat, rather unconvincingly, insists that his pumpkin is suffering from chest pains, and that the nitroglycerin is merely intended for medical treatment. While it is true that this chemical is used to treat angina (chest pain due to blocked arteries in the heart), nitroglycerin used for this purpose is dispensed in the form of small pills containing only trace amounts, and controlled by prescription. Also, pumpkins are fruits and do thus not contain nervous or circulatory systems of mammalian complexity [ citation needed ] ; even if they did, the process of pumpkin carving involves hollowing them out, making it a moot point.\nIn the third frame, Megan is our typical emotional xkcd comic character. She is the only one out of the four who actually carved a typical jack-o'-lantern; however, she is projecting herself onto it, and has named it Harold.\u00a0Her dialogue suggests it (or he) is suffering from typical holiday depression, with symptoms such as using a lot of time daydreaming, worrying, and trying to distract herself with holiday traditions, but she already knows that it won't work. Some have speculated that this is a possible reference to the classic meme Hide The Pain Harold , but this is highly unlikely; the meme only surfaced in 2011 , a year after the comic was published.\nIn the fourth frame, Cueball is shown in front of two un-carved pumpkins exclaiming that this is the result of carving one pumpkin. He is referencing the Banach-Tarski paradox (which is made clear in the title text), a theorem which states that it is possible to split a three-dimensional ball, in this case a pumpkin, into a finite number of \"pieces,\" and then reassemble these \"pieces\" into two distinct balls both identical to the original. This paradox has been proven for theoretical shapes, but requires infinitely complicated pieces which are impossible for anything made of physical atoms rather than mathematical points .\nThe off-screen interviewer in that frame references the Axiom of Choice . This\u00a0axiom is the foundation\u00a0for many theorems (including the Banach\u2013Tarski paradox) and is extremely influential\u00a0to modern mathematics; however,\u00a0it has been historically controversial precisely because it enables this kind of weirdness.  It is called an \"axiom\" because it is a statement\u00a0that is not meant to be proven or disproven\u2014only accepted or rejected depending on the theoretical framework one wishes to work with.\u00a0Rejecting the Axiom of Choice results in a perfectly coherent alternate form of set theory.\u00a0Since the proof\u00a0for the Banach\u2013Tarski paradox relies on accepting the axiom of choice, the interviewer is suggesting Cueball's unexpected result would not\u00a0have happened without\u00a0using\u00a0the axiom.\nThe title\u00a0text references a biblical story involving King Solomon . In the story, known as the Judgment of Solomon , two women were brought before\u00a0him both claiming\u00a0that a particular child was their own. Solomon\u00a0tested the women by saying the only solution was to cut the baby in half\u00a0and give each woman one of the halves, knowing only the real mother\u00a0would fight to\u00a0save her child's life even if the price was giving up the whole child to the other woman. The joke\u00a0is that if Solomon had developed the Banach\u2013Tarski theorem\u00a0first, then he could have actually believed cutting the\u00a0baby\u00a0into\u00a0pieces was a valid solution. In that scenario, he would have tried to make two\u00a0whole children from the original and\u00a0given one to\u00a0each\u00a0woman. However, since babies\u00a0are not infinitely divisible, [ citation needed ] his attempt would have failed miserably\u00a0and\u00a0set back set\u00a0theory for centuries due\u00a0to\u00a0the\u00a0appearance that he has \"proved\" the theorem wrong. Note that the title text actually mentions attempts indicating that King Solomon killed several babies in this fashion.\nThe axiom of choice and set theory was later referenced in 982: Set Theory and, much later, the axiom of choice was mentioned again in the title text of 1724: Proofs .\nThis comic was released 20 days before Halloween in 2010, possibly to inspire people with some great ideas for their pumpkins. It has been known (particularly by Randall) that people copy his ideas, for instance this earlier post on xkcd based on 249: Chess Photo . Soon after he even made a comic, 254: Comic Fragment , that was supposed to be impossible to copy, which he mentioned himself later (see the explanation).\n[Beret Guy, holding his arms out, stands behind a large orange pumpkin with the stem on top. It is sitting on a table. The pumpkin has been carved out as a lamp with large hole, and a lit candle is visible in the hole. The hole is in the shape of another carved out pumpkin. An interviewer speaks from off panel.] Interviewer (off-panel): So what did you\u2014 Beret Guy: I carved a pumpkin! Interviewer (off-panel): ...\n[Black Hat stands behind a large orange pumpkin which has not been carved out as a lamp, but the stem at the top has been removed and is placed tilting on the side of the pumpkin. It is sitting on a table. A gray box stands next to and partly in front of the pumpkin. On the end of the box there is a label at the top with unreadable text and below that some kind of drawing with a circle at the top. The interviewer speaks from off panel.] Interviewer (off-panel): Taking on teen vandals, I see. Black Hat: Heavens, no. My pumpkin simply has chest pains. In fact, I'll leave a note warning them not to smash it. Text on box: Nitro- glycerin Do Not Shake\n[Megan stands next to a large orange pumpkin with the stem on top. It is sitting on a table. The pumpkin has been carved out as a typical Halloween lamp. The bottom part of a white candle stick is visible in the mouth shaped hole. The hole is in the shape of a typical jack-o' lantern, with two slanted eyes, double slit nose and a smiling mouth with a tooth sticking out from both upper and lower lip, on either side of the candle stick.] Megan: My pumpkin's name is Harold. He just realized that all the time he used to spend daydreaming, he now spends worrying. He'll try to distract himself later with holiday traditions, but it won't work.\n[Cueball stands next to a two orange pumpkins with their stems on top, the left pumpkin is slightly larger than the right which is partly in front of the larger pumpkin. They have not been carved out even though a knife lies next to them to the right in front of Cueball on the table where they both stand. The interviewer speaks from off panel.]] Cueball: I carved and carved, and the next thing I knew I had two pumpkins. Interviewer (off-panel): I told you not to take the axiom of choice.\n"}
{"id":805,"title":"Paradise City","image_title":"Paradise City","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/805","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/paradise_city.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/805:_Paradise_City","transcript":"[For five panels, Cueball sits on a box playing a guitar and sings.] Cueball: Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.\nCueball: Take me down to the paradise village where the grasses burn as those cute girls pillage.\nCueball: Take me down to the fire-charred counties where the law's restored by Canadian mounties.\nCueball: Take me down to Orwellian regions where they retrain girls using cortical lesions.\nCueball: Take me down to the paradise borough where the grass is labeled 'cause the girls are thorough. Cueball: Ohh, won't you please take me hooome...\n","explanation":"\" Paradise City \" is a song by the hard rock band Guns N' Roses which appeared on their debut album Appetite for Destruction . It sings of the so-called Paradise City, an idyllic place to which the song's narrator longs to return. The location is contrasted with the depressing reality in which the persona is trapped, using for instance the image of a gas chamber.\nIn the comic, Cueball can be seen singing different versions of the chorus. In each panel, the word \"City\" is substituted by another type of location and the rest of the verse is altered accordingly to keep the rhyme scheme (usually awkwardly because he has chosen difficult words to rhyme with).\nThe sequence of stanzas describes the fate of Paradise City. It starts the original version drawing an idyllic picture. In a rather unexpected turn, however, the next stanza has the place pillaged and plundered. Chaos and anarchy reign, the once fresh and green meadows are now burned. Law and order are restored in the next verses and the other extreme starts to prevail: Paradise City has become a totalitarian dystopia . The fourth stanza refers to George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four . The book shows a world in which mind control and omnipresent surveillance render individual thought and action impossible, and the fifth stanza shows a borough where every blade of grass has been labeled, taking the surveillance to an extreme. The concluding verses suggest that the totalitarian government has successfully brainwashed the former rebels and established an effective, yet sterile technocratic society. \"Cortical lesions\" in this panel could be a reference to the dystopian novel Uglies by Scott Westerfeld , which describes a society in which extreme plastic surgery is used to turn people \"pretty\". (SPOILER ALERT) It is later revealed in the book that this procedure is accompanied by a neurosurgical operation making the patient placid and obedient through a lobotomy .\nThe development of the city in Cueball's song reveals that the term \" Paradise \" can be applied to very different and even oppositional scenarios. While the original song describes the city as a rural Eden, some might refute this conception as a bourgeois or agrarian romantic ideal. Others would fear that too much individual freedom might be dangerous and opt for security through control . Especially the picture of the last stanza is a common vision in dystopian literature (e.g. Brave New World ): Although the citizens of a future society entirely lack any personal choice or individual freedom, they deem themselves happy because education or thought control present this a necessity for a functioning society.\nIn popular culture, the word \"Paradise\" is often used to describe a place of bliss and perfect harmony, as in the original religious sense of the term. It is however also frequently linked to the idea of living out one's deepest and darkest desires, therefore in some way to a place of sin . Considering the lifestyle of Guns N' Roses, it can be assumed that the \"pretty girls\" of the original song are not necessarily chaste.\nThe most iconic part of Las Vegas is officially named \"Paradise\", although it is not entirely clear if Cueball is aware of the probable reference of the original song.\nThe title text suggests that Paradise City is in fact a drug-induced state of ecstasy with strange and colourful hallucinations .\n[For five panels, Cueball sits on a box playing a guitar and sings.] Cueball: Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.\nCueball: Take me down to the paradise village where the grasses burn as those cute girls pillage.\nCueball: Take me down to the fire-charred counties where the law's restored by Canadian mounties.\nCueball: Take me down to Orwellian regions where they retrain girls using cortical lesions.\nCueball: Take me down to the paradise borough where the grass is labeled 'cause the girls are thorough. Cueball: Ohh, won't you please take me hooome...\n"}
{"id":806,"title":"Tech Support","image_title":"Tech Support","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/806","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tech_support.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/806:_Tech_Support","transcript":"[Cueball is on his cellphone, and holding up a small square piece of hardware with a foot in the other hand. Two wires go from the hardware down to the floor, where one is connected to a box on the floor with two black antennas, and then another wire goes out the other side of this, and both this and the second wire from the hardware Cueball is holding goes under his desk, on top of which is his open laptop.] Cueball: ...restart my computer? I know you have a script to follow, but the uplink light on the modem is going off every few hours. The problem is between your office and the modem.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's torso, still on the phone and with the hardware in hand.] Cueball: My computer has nothing to do with... OK, whatever, I \"restarted my computer.\" Cueball: It's still down, and even if it comes back, it's going to die again in a few hours, because your\u2014\n[Cueball on the phone has walked closer to his desk with the laptop, but holds down the hand with the hardware so it is below the panels frame.] Cueball: I don't have a start menu. This is a Haiku install, but that's not import\u2014 Cueball: Haiku? It's an experimental OS that I ... oh, never mind.\n[Cueball has paced away from his desk to the left so it is no longer in the panel. He has put the hardware down next to the box with antennas on the floor. Wires going off panel right toward the desk.] Cueball: I'm sorry, but this won't get fixed until I talk to an engineer. Can you look around for someone wearing cargo pants, maybe a subway map on their wall?\n[Hairy is the tech support person on the other end sitting in an office chair at a desk. A phone is hooked up on his table with two wires coming out. He is wearing a headset. He leans back in the chair and looks behind him to the right. Cueball talks to him over the phone indicated with a zigzag line.] Hairy: There's a chick two phones over with a stuffed penguin doll and a poster of some bearded dude with swords. Cueball (on the phone): Perfect. Can you put her on? Hairy: Sure.\n[The engineer, a woman with black hair in a ponytail, sits in an office chair at her desk typing on her lap top. She also has a headset. Behind her laptop sits a small penguin doll. Cueball talks to her over the phone indicated with zigzag lines.] Cueball (on the phone): Hey, so sorry to bother you, but my connection\u2014 Engineer: Yeah, I see it. Lingering problems from a server move. <type type> Engineer: Should be fixed now. Cueball (on the phone): Thank you so much.\n[Zoom in on the engineers torso. The back of the chair and the top of her laptop just inside the panel.] Engineer: No problem. Hey, in the future, if you're on any tech support call, you can say the code word \"shibboleet\" at any point and you'll be automatically transferred to someone who knows a minimum of two programming languages.\n[Zoom in on Cueball on the phone scratching his neck. The engineer talks to him over the phone indicated with zigzag lines.] Cueball: Seriously? Engineer (on the phone): Yup. It's a backdoor put in by the geeks who built these phone support systems back in the 1990's. Engineer (on the phone): Don't tell anyone.\n[The last panel is split in two sections. In the top part still with a zoom in on Cueball, he takes the phone down to hang up. Only this section is inside a frame. The frame is normal at the top and half way down to the left, but only a small way down on the right side. The bottom part of the frame connects these two normal parts but with a wavy line to indicate that this is the end of a dream. In the frame-less part of the panel below Cueball is sitting up in his bed, having lifted his head fro the pillow behind him to the left. He lifts him self up with one hand while the other takes the sheet down over his body. The last part it thus drawn outside the rest of the framed part of the comic.] Cueball: Oh my god, this is the greatest\u2014\nCueball: Wha\u2014 Cueball: ... Dammit.\n","explanation":"Cueball runs into some problems with his network connection and contacts his Internet service provider's (ISP's) tech support for help. The customer service agent (represented by Hairy ) is not very helpful, giving clearly pre-scripted advice that has nothing to do with Cueball's problem. Cueball gives up and asks to speak to an engineer, i.e. someone more knowledgeable about the technology and suggest to Hairy what to look for. Noticing a woman with black ponytail who has the stuffed Tux penguin on her desk and a poster of a bearded dude with swords (a reference to Richard Stallman particularly as he stands in 345: 1337: Part 5 , and a reference to 225: Open Source ) he tells Cueball about her and Cueball recognizes the signs of a GNU \/ Linux geek and asks to talk to her. Hairy transfers him over to the engineer, who immediately recognizes the problem and fixes it. Then she tells him of a secret word (shibboleet - see below) which, if he speaks on the phone, will transfer him to a tech-savvy person able to help him, something installed already back in the 1990's by the geeks of that time. Cueball is elated but then at this point Cueball wakes up and unfortunately discovers the incident to be just a dream.\nPoor customer and technical support is a common complaint of many ISPs.  Many ISPs outsource their support staff to foreign countries to reduce costs, and\/or they delegate first-tier support to workers with little or no training.  Typically, these workers are given general scripts that prompt the customer to try common troubleshooting steps, such as restarting the computer, without any specific knowledge of the customer's complaint.  While these scripts may help resolve problems for the average customer, a representative using such a script is usually unprepared to assist someone who has a more advanced problem.  Furthermore, these scripts generally assume that the problem is on the customer's end and do not acknowledge problems that occur within the ISP, such as server or line problems.\nCustomers like Cueball in this comic often find it frustrating to deal with representatives reading from scripts.  As Randall mentions in the title text, this frustration is magnified when the representative refuses to move on to the next step until the customer has performed the previous one, whether or not it necessary or helpful.  In cases like this, it's often necessary to request an escalation to a higher \"tier\" of support, or to speak to a supervisor who presumably has more knowledge and\/or influence, though even that can sometimes be a painful process. Thus, it is easy to see why Cueball would be elated to discover a way to automatically connect with the most helpful technical support representatives whenever he has a problem, and thus also why he get really disappointed when he realizes it was just a dream (dreams being a recurring theme in xkcd).\nCueball is running Haiku , an open source operating system which is still in a state of active development, being in an alpha release at the publishing of the comic and in beta since 2018. While low-level tech support operators are given scripts which are predicated on the assumption that many computer problems are actually caused by the actions of clueless end users (as, in fact, they are), it's exceedingly unlikely most of these first-tier operators would have even heard of Haiku, not to mention that their scripts' assumptions would never apply to the sort of person who would be using an experimental OS as opposed to Windows , for instance.\n\"Shibboleet\" is a portmanteau of \"shibboleth\" and \"leet\". A \" shibboleth \" means any word, custom, or other signifier which is used by members of a group to recognize other members or those who are \"in the know\" about something. Its use originates in the Hebrew Bible, where the precise pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Gileadites from Ephramites. Leet (based on the word \"elite\") refers to \"leet-speak\", a practice of character substitution and abbreviation common across the Internet (or \"teh 1n73rn3t\", as you would say in leet). Thus, \"shibboleet\" is a shibboleth used to identify someone whose computer-knowledge is \"elite.\" Leet is again in leet written as 1337 so again a reference back to the 1337 comic series including the comic mentioned above with Stallman.\nRandall mentioned in the title text that this had happened to him recently, and is possibly the reason for this comic.\n[Cueball is on his cellphone, and holding up a small square piece of hardware with a foot in the other hand. Two wires go from the hardware down to the floor, where one is connected to a box on the floor with two black antennas, and then another wire goes out the other side of this, and both this and the second wire from the hardware Cueball is holding goes under his desk, on top of which is his open laptop.] Cueball: ...restart my computer? I know you have a script to follow, but the uplink light on the modem is going off every few hours. The problem is between your office and the modem.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's torso, still on the phone and with the hardware in hand.] Cueball: My computer has nothing to do with... OK, whatever, I \"restarted my computer.\" Cueball: It's still down, and even if it comes back, it's going to die again in a few hours, because your\u2014\n[Cueball on the phone has walked closer to his desk with the laptop, but holds down the hand with the hardware so it is below the panels frame.] Cueball: I don't have a start menu. This is a Haiku install, but that's not import\u2014 Cueball: Haiku? It's an experimental OS that I ... oh, never mind.\n[Cueball has paced away from his desk to the left so it is no longer in the panel. He has put the hardware down next to the box with antennas on the floor. Wires going off panel right toward the desk.] Cueball: I'm sorry, but this won't get fixed until I talk to an engineer. Can you look around for someone wearing cargo pants, maybe a subway map on their wall?\n[Hairy is the tech support person on the other end sitting in an office chair at a desk. A phone is hooked up on his table with two wires coming out. He is wearing a headset. He leans back in the chair and looks behind him to the right. Cueball talks to him over the phone indicated with a zigzag line.] Hairy: There's a chick two phones over with a stuffed penguin doll and a poster of some bearded dude with swords. Cueball (on the phone): Perfect. Can you put her on? Hairy: Sure.\n[The engineer, a woman with black hair in a ponytail, sits in an office chair at her desk typing on her lap top. She also has a headset. Behind her laptop sits a small penguin doll. Cueball talks to her over the phone indicated with zigzag lines.] Cueball (on the phone): Hey, so sorry to bother you, but my connection\u2014 Engineer: Yeah, I see it. Lingering problems from a server move. <type type> Engineer: Should be fixed now. Cueball (on the phone): Thank you so much.\n[Zoom in on the engineers torso. The back of the chair and the top of her laptop just inside the panel.] Engineer: No problem. Hey, in the future, if you're on any tech support call, you can say the code word \"shibboleet\" at any point and you'll be automatically transferred to someone who knows a minimum of two programming languages.\n[Zoom in on Cueball on the phone scratching his neck. The engineer talks to him over the phone indicated with zigzag lines.] Cueball: Seriously? Engineer (on the phone): Yup. It's a backdoor put in by the geeks who built these phone support systems back in the 1990's. Engineer (on the phone): Don't tell anyone.\n[The last panel is split in two sections. In the top part still with a zoom in on Cueball, he takes the phone down to hang up. Only this section is inside a frame. The frame is normal at the top and half way down to the left, but only a small way down on the right side. The bottom part of the frame connects these two normal parts but with a wavy line to indicate that this is the end of a dream. In the frame-less part of the panel below Cueball is sitting up in his bed, having lifted his head fro the pillow behind him to the left. He lifts him self up with one hand while the other takes the sheet down over his body. The last part it thus drawn outside the rest of the framed part of the comic.] Cueball: Oh my god, this is the greatest\u2014\nCueball: Wha\u2014 Cueball: ... Dammit.\n"}
{"id":807,"title":"Connected","image_title":"Connected","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/807","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/connected.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/807:_Connected","transcript":"[Megan sits on a rock and Cueball sits on the grass.] Megan: Seriously? I like that song too! Megan: I bet no two people in the history of the world have ever been so connected !\n[Caption below the frame:] I'm not sure why we romanticize \"young love.\"\n","explanation":"This comic criticizes our culture's tendency to romanticize young love (such as that portrayed in Romeo and Juliet and Titanic ). Although young lovers do often have intense feelings for their beloved, for many of them, like Megan here, it is an infatuation based on little substance (such as a similar taste in music) and the mercurial gales of teenagers\u2019 minds rather than the real compatibility necessary for a long-term relationship.\nThe title text broadens this criticism to all forms of romance. Randall appears to be stating that it is possible to love someone even if your relationship with that person doesn't conform to the impossibly high standards of \"true love\" that our culture so highly exalts . In fact, healthy relationships are typically not perfect and require work, change, and compromise rather than continual, effortless bliss.\n[Megan sits on a rock and Cueball sits on the grass.] Megan: Seriously? I like that song too! Megan: I bet no two people in the history of the world have ever been so connected !\n[Caption below the frame:] I'm not sure why we romanticize \"young love.\"\n"}
{"id":808,"title":"The Economic Argument","image_title":"The Economic Argument","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/808","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_economic_argument.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/808:_The_Economic_Argument","transcript":"[A three-column table. The headings are actually standing above the table.]\n\nCrazy phenomenon If it worked, companies would be using it to make a killing in... Are they? Remote Viewing Oil Prospecting Dowsing Auras Health Care Cost Reduction Homeopathy Remote Prayer Astrology Financial\/Business Planning Tarot Crystal Energy Regular Energy Curses, Hexes The Military Relativity GPS Devices \u2713 Quantum Electrodynamics Semiconductor Circuit Design \u2713\nEventually, arguing that these things work means arguing that modern capitalism isn't that ruthlessly profit-focused.\n","explanation":"The image shows fields of human life that would be greatly improved and\/or allow certain people to make a lot of money if some crazy phenomena (mostly paranormal ) actually worked in reality or were testable and usable concepts. Crazy phenomena, in this case, means counter-intuitive things that go against common sense and which science often contradicts (though relativity and QM are a major part of physics, they are still counterintuitive and could be considered to sound crazy). As the comic tries to prove, if there were commercial use for it and proofs of it working, there will be high investment made in the technology to use and harness such concepts.\nSo far only relativity and quantum electrodynamics have major evidence backing them. Specifically, the theory of relativity allows your Global Positioning System (GPS) device to synchronize with satellites a hundred miles in the air and show your current position. The design of modern circuit-boards and other electronic devices is influenced by quantum electrodynamics \u2014 smartphones or high capacity hard drives wouldn't be possible without this theory.\nThe non-scientific\/disproved concepts trying to pass as real and scientific are:\nThe title text points out that many people still believe in non-scientific, unproven, and disproved phenomena; thus, it's possible to make a lot of money by selling those (claimed) phenomena to such people (although knowingly selling non-existent phenomena, while claiming that they work, would be fraud, and thus illegal).\n[A three-column table. The headings are actually standing above the table.]\n\nCrazy phenomenon If it worked, companies would be using it to make a killing in... Are they? Remote Viewing Oil Prospecting Dowsing Auras Health Care Cost Reduction Homeopathy Remote Prayer Astrology Financial\/Business Planning Tarot Crystal Energy Regular Energy Curses, Hexes The Military Relativity GPS Devices \u2713 Quantum Electrodynamics Semiconductor Circuit Design \u2713\nEventually, arguing that these things work means arguing that modern capitalism isn't that ruthlessly profit-focused.\n"}
{"id":809,"title":"Los Alamos","image_title":"Los Alamos","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/809","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/los_alamos.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/809:_Los_Alamos","transcript":"[Cueball raising a hand points to Steve (see later) drawn as another shorter Cueball-like guy, and behind Cueball stand Hairy also looking at Steve. Partly behind Steve's head is a piece of paper on the wall with a circle around a central dot and four arrows pointing in towards the circle from each corner of the paper. Behind Hairy's head is another paper with a graph that looks like a positive third degree polynomial with three non-zero solutions. Between Cueball and Hairy at the level of their hands is a small square with two small dots at the two top corners. Seems like a part of the wall rather than a paper. During the next images the two on either side of Cueball moves their head in front or away from these papers so at least once the hole drawing can be seen. Over the panels top frame there is a frame with a caption:] Los Alamos, 1945... Cueball: We have a decision. If we've done our math right, this test will unleash heaven's fire and make us as gods.\n[Cueball turns towards Hairy holding his arms out.] Cueball: But it's possible we made a mistake, and the heat will ignite the atmosphere, destroying the planet in a cleansing conflagration.\n[In a frame-less panel Steven takes a hand to his chin, while the other two turns towards him.] Steve: Wow. Um. Question: Just to double-check\u2014 although I'm 99% sure\u2014\n[Cueball, still facing Steve, face-palms himself while Hairy turns away from Steve.] Steve: Is it \"SOH CAH TOA\" or \"COH SAH TOA\"? Cueball: Oh, for the love of... can someone redo Steve's work? Hairy: I don't want to do the test anymore.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico , where in 1945 their development of the first nuclear weapon had progressed to the point that they were going to explode \"The Gadget\" at Trinity Site . There was genuine concern that some unexpected result was possible, including the scenario about the atmosphere igniting. The scientists were almost certain that it would either work as expected, or just be a dud, but were unable to rule out several other scenarios. The test proceeded, and it worked as expected.\nThe joke part at the end is a reference to a common mnemonic device for basic trigonometric functions, namely identifying the relationships of sine , cosine , and tangent with respect to the lengths of a right triangle's edges: s ine = o pposite over h ypotenuse, c osine = a djacent over h ypotenuse, and t angent = o pposite over a djacent (in other words, SOH CAH TOA.) \"Steve\" becomes concerned by the seriousness of the situation, and wants to make sure that he has not made a mistake on stuff that should be very elementary to a scientist in his position.\nThe title text mentions that there are very few jobs where one can say that with seriousness, as normal jobs do not involve technology capable of destroying worlds. [ citation needed ]\nA Steve is referred to in a similar situation in comic 1532: New Horizons , where his miscalculations screw up the trajectory of the New Horizons space probe, sending it to Earth instead of Pluto. He would be at least 90 years old if it was to be the same Steve though. A person named Steve also comes up with an inappropriate suggestion in 1672: Women on 20s .\n[Cueball raising a hand points to Steve (see later) drawn as another shorter Cueball-like guy, and behind Cueball stand Hairy also looking at Steve. Partly behind Steve's head is a piece of paper on the wall with a circle around a central dot and four arrows pointing in towards the circle from each corner of the paper. Behind Hairy's head is another paper with a graph that looks like a positive third degree polynomial with three non-zero solutions. Between Cueball and Hairy at the level of their hands is a small square with two small dots at the two top corners. Seems like a part of the wall rather than a paper. During the next images the two on either side of Cueball moves their head in front or away from these papers so at least once the hole drawing can be seen. Over the panels top frame there is a frame with a caption:] Los Alamos, 1945... Cueball: We have a decision. If we've done our math right, this test will unleash heaven's fire and make us as gods.\n[Cueball turns towards Hairy holding his arms out.] Cueball: But it's possible we made a mistake, and the heat will ignite the atmosphere, destroying the planet in a cleansing conflagration.\n[In a frame-less panel Steven takes a hand to his chin, while the other two turns towards him.] Steve: Wow. Um. Question: Just to double-check\u2014 although I'm 99% sure\u2014\n[Cueball, still facing Steve, face-palms himself while Hairy turns away from Steve.] Steve: Is it \"SOH CAH TOA\" or \"COH SAH TOA\"? Cueball: Oh, for the love of... can someone redo Steve's work? Hairy: I don't want to do the test anymore.\n"}
{"id":810,"title":"Constructive","image_title":"Constructive","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/810","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/constructive.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/810:_Constructive","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Megan.] Cueball: Spammers are breaking traditional Captchas with AI, so I've built a new system. It asks users to rate a slate of comments as \"Constructive\" or \"Not constructive.\"\n[Close up of Cueball.] Cueball: Then it has them reply with comments of their own, which are later rated by other users.\n[Megan standing next to Cueball again.] Megan: But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?\n[Close up of Cueball again.] Cueball: Mission . Fucking . Accomplished .\n","explanation":"Most online communities, including explainxkcd, face the problem of dissuading spammers from joining and participating. A common solution to this problem is the use of various systems to prevent automated bots' use of the community, while still allowing legitimate users to join. This has resulted in an arms race of sorts between spammers and communities, in which the spammers try to bypass increasingly difficult spam-prevention methods.\nThis captcha and spamming prevention also has a downside, in that the time it takes to \"prove you're human\" is sometimes so long as to drive users away because their time is being wasted.\nThis comic explores the culmination of that arms race, in which an advanced spam-prevention system, built by Cueball, is able to defeat the concept of spamming itself by forcing spammers to contribute constructively to a community.\nCaptcha is one of the methods used to prevent lots of automated registering of fake user names used by bots and spammers. It consists of asking a person to prove that they are human before registering them as user and allowing them to post on sites or forum topics. That is done by using pictures of words and letters that humans may recognize, but bots and OCR software have trouble with.\nNow, artificial intelligence (AI) of bots have advanced so far, that Cueball has invented a new system. It asks the users to rate a slate of comments as constructive or not, then asks them to reply with comments of their own. Megan asks what will happen when spammers find a way around his system, such as making bots that make constructive and helpful comments? Well, it turns out that is what he is trying to accomplish in first place, a thriving community of bots and humans helping its members with constructive and helpful comments , as well as coming one step closer to the singularity .\nThe title text investigates the consequences of such system further by thinking of people unable to give constructive and helpful comments, which are a sort of people you don't want in your online community anyway. [ citation needed ] Or it could mean that in order to join said community, they would have to learn to post helpful and constructive comments, and would then be eligible to join, thus accomplishing Cueball's goal.\nCAPTCHAs are a recurring theme on xkcd.\n[Cueball is talking to Megan.] Cueball: Spammers are breaking traditional Captchas with AI, so I've built a new system. It asks users to rate a slate of comments as \"Constructive\" or \"Not constructive.\"\n[Close up of Cueball.] Cueball: Then it has them reply with comments of their own, which are later rated by other users.\n[Megan standing next to Cueball again.] Megan: But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?\n[Close up of Cueball again.] Cueball: Mission . Fucking . Accomplished .\n"}
{"id":811,"title":"Starlight","image_title":"Starlight","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/811","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/starlight.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/811:_Starlight","transcript":"[The comic consist of six black panels with white drawings. There are stars above the characters in all panels.]\n[Megan and Beret Guy stares at a starlit sky. The text is written above the stars and the sentence continues into the next frame. First here it becomes apparent that it is Megan who speaks the entire comment.] Megan: The starlight falls on our eyes after a journey across trillions of miles-\n[Zoom in on Megan and Beret Guy. The continued text is shown to come from Megan via a speech line.] Megan: dying here at last, so far from home, all so we can see some pretty dots.\n[Beret Guy think for a moment]\n[Beret Guy runs away]\n[Beret Guy comes back with a mirror under his arm, the starry sky can also be seen in the mirror.]\n[Beret Guy reached Megan, and holds it up above his head pointing it towards the stars.]\n","explanation":"Megan talks with Beret Guy about the journey of light through the universe from its source to our eyes. In Megan's opinion, it is very sad that this journey is pointless - light's travel ends only with us seeing \"pretty dots\" - stars in the sky. Beret Guy then tries to return light to its birthplace by using a mirror, which reflects light back to its source.\nIn reality, this would not work. Only a tiny fraction of the photons emanating from a star will reach the mirror and, even if the mirror is held at the perfect orientation, with dispersion (even if the mirror is perfectly smooth, the atmosphere is not) the probability that even one photon will make it back 'home' is effectively nil.\nHowever, if Beret Guy decides to exhibit another one of his strange powers , it is possible that he can find a way to actually find a way to reflect starlight back to 'home'.\nThe title text is a reference to special relativity , which states that from the point of view of a light particle, the distance is zero because it is moving at the speed of light, so it takes no time to go anywhere. Note that the title text says that relativity saves the day again . This could be a reference to a previous comic 660: Sympathy in which a socially inept physicist touches upon using some consequences of special relativity to save a friend's deceased brother.\n[The comic consist of six black panels with white drawings. There are stars above the characters in all panels.]\n[Megan and Beret Guy stares at a starlit sky. The text is written above the stars and the sentence continues into the next frame. First here it becomes apparent that it is Megan who speaks the entire comment.] Megan: The starlight falls on our eyes after a journey across trillions of miles-\n[Zoom in on Megan and Beret Guy. The continued text is shown to come from Megan via a speech line.] Megan: dying here at last, so far from home, all so we can see some pretty dots.\n[Beret Guy think for a moment]\n[Beret Guy runs away]\n[Beret Guy comes back with a mirror under his arm, the starry sky can also be seen in the mirror.]\n[Beret Guy reached Megan, and holds it up above his head pointing it towards the stars.]\n"}
{"id":812,"title":"Glass","image_title":"Glass","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/812","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/glass.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/812:_Glass","transcript":"[Megan is singing, Cueball is staring at a glass of water on a table.] Megan: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE... Anything break? Cueball: No, but the water in the glass turned to wine.\n[Cueball picks up glass] Megan: Weird. Cueball: No, wait. This is blood.\nMegan: Okay, physics, quit fucking with us. Physics: You stop looking for the Higgs boson and we'll talk.\n","explanation":"In the beginning of the comic, Megan is trying to break a wine glass like an opera singer. This is a rather famous trick where the vocalist sings at the resonant, or natural frequency of the glass and cause it to resonate more and more until it can no longer handle the stress and breaks - for more info, see the Mythbusters episode about the Earthquake Machine. If the resonant frequency of the glass is outside of the singer's range, then putting some water in the glass will lower its resonant frequency. This effect can be used to play different notes on the rim of a glass by varying the amount of water in it. For example, see this video .\nWhile Megan is trying to break the glass by hitting its resonant frequency, she is actually creating something new.  This is similar to particle physics where a new particle can be identified by a resonance peak in the differencial cross-section of a scattering experiment:  Known particles plus some very specific amount of energy lead to the creation of a new particle, the Higgs boson. This is represented in the comic with the water and the pitch of Megan's voice creating blood.\nThe term \"God Particle\" was coined in 1993 by physicist Leon M. Lederman to describe the Higgs boson because it's \"central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive.\" He originally called it the \"goddamn particle\", but this was considered offensive, and his editor shortened it to just \"God particle\", maybe to promote interest in the particle from non-academics too. Many people misinterpret the name to be some kind of link between physics and religion, so physics is getting back at them by playing pranks that resemble famous miracles from Christian tradition:\nNotably, the Higgs Boson was discovered in 2012, 2 years after this comic was released. So at the time, physicists were still looking for the particle.\nNotice that, in the last panel, the blood seems to have dripped out of Cueball 's glass onto the table and solidified instantly, further proof that physics doesn't apply in this scenario.\nThe title text refers to the breaking of electroweak symmetry. It used to be thought that mirroring the result of any scenario would always give the same outcome as the result of the mirror of that scenario. However, it turns out that the details of the electroweak force (the electromagnetic and weak forces put together) refute this theory. As with many scientific theories, these can be used incorrectly in order to lend credibility to unrelated and nonsensical claims. This particular case is an instance of \"quantum woo.\" Similarly, a degree can be used to lend the appearance of credibility to a person pushing such an idea, regardless of what field it was earned it or whether said person has any competence.\n[Megan is singing, Cueball is staring at a glass of water on a table.] Megan: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE... Anything break? Cueball: No, but the water in the glass turned to wine.\n[Cueball picks up glass] Megan: Weird. Cueball: No, wait. This is blood.\nMegan: Okay, physics, quit fucking with us. Physics: You stop looking for the Higgs boson and we'll talk.\n"}
{"id":813,"title":"One-Liners","image_title":"One-Liners","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/813","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/one_liners.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/813:_One-Liners","transcript":"Probability of phrases becoming action movie one liners: [Panels are arranged from More Likely on the left to Less likely on the right.]\n[A woman points a gun down at Cueball who is on the floor, his gun just out of reach.] Woman: You're going down the memory hole now, asshole.\n[Man on ground points gun up at blade-armed man standing next to a board with science on it.] Man with gun: Hey! You forgot to carry the two.\n[Ponytail on desk points sword at man standing on floor.] Ponytail: Looks like the Fed just lowered the interest rate.\n[Cueball with gun looks down at Megan slumped on floor.] Cueball: Guess you should've scrolled all the way to the bottom before clicking \"Agree.\"\n[Megan holds pistol to the back of the head of Ponytail holding a rifle.] Megan with pistol: Bangarang, motherfucker.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall presents a series of phrases, ordered by how likely they are to be used as a one-liner by a character in an action movie . One-liners are short, punchy phrases, typically witty or funny, and are routinely used in films by the antagonist to taunt the protagonist (or vice versa). The perfect one-liner leaves the recipient at a loss for a comeback, and should make sense immediately. If the phrase doesn't make sense or has to be explained, the effect is lost.\nThe phrases shown adhere to the witty and punchy stereotype of a classical one-liner, but quickly become more niche and only understandable for an informed subgroup.\nYou're going down the memory hole now, asshole. The Memory hole is a mechanism for redacting documents, photographs, etc., and a reference to George Orwell 's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four . In this instance it implies that the character on the floor is about to be 'erased' from existence.\nHey! You forgot to carry the two. Cueball , lying on the ground in a fight, while his opponent has the high ground, still appears to be at an advantage since he has a gun and his opponent only has a knife, is pointing out an arithmetic error in his opponent's calculations. This may simply be Cueball adding insult to injury \"I'm about to shoot you, but first I'm going to point out that you suck at math\". Alternatively, it could be a ruse to distract the knife wielding opponent, or a case of well-timed nerd-sniping . It could also be that Cueball is buying time to cock or reload his gun. Alternatively Cueball is implying the missing carry caused the shown situation, and Cueball is monologuing (albeit a very short monologue), which may also serve to explain to the audience how his victory was achieved. Such an explanation would likely be necessary, as it is difficult to imagine any situation where this would be the case. A fourth way to explain the situation is that Cueball is stating with this phrase, that his opponent overlooked something small but critical, leading to a non anticipated (wrong) outcome. In this case his opponent would have overlooked that Cueball is carrying a gun, yielding to an unexpected and unfortunate outcome of his knife attack.\nLooks like the Fed just lowered the interest rate. Ponytail is standing on a desk with documents on it, probably in a banking or business related environment, dominating Cueball in a sword fight. The Federal Reserve System , usually referred to as The Fed, is the central banking system in the United States. The interest rates are usually lowered during a recession or a crisis, to revive the economy by providing businesses with cheap money. The dropped rates correlate with his chances to win and reflect his troubled situation.\nGuess you should've scrolled all the way to the bottom before clicking \"Agree.\" A common feature encountered when registering for user accounts or installing software is a very lengthy Terms of service document, describing the things you agree to abide by. The vast majority of people simply click Agree without reading the document, essentially agreeing to anything and everything that the author decided to include, which sometimes leads to things like giving your immortal soul to a company . In the context of this panel, perhaps the user agreed to be executed at random.\nBangarang, motherfucker. This phrase is very similar to the line \"Yippee-Ki-Yay motherfucker\" used by John McClane in the Die Hard series. Bangarang is, among other things, the Jamaican word for \"uproar.\" It was popularized (without the addition of 'motherfucker') as the cheer of the lost boys in the film Hook .\nThe title text is another suggested one-liner phrase, referring to an update reminder that frequently pops up when one attempts to view visual media content on a webpage. After delivering the line, the character triggers a detonator (Double colons are sometimes used in text to denote an action), presumably setting off an explosive of some kind. \nThe phrase states that you need the latest Adobe Flash player to view this (presumably for older flash players too spectacular) explosion. \nAlso wordplay is involved since a \"flash\" is one visual representation of a explosion.\nOf course in real life one doesn't need a \"flash player\" to view an explosion. [ citation needed ]\nProbability of phrases becoming action movie one liners: [Panels are arranged from More Likely on the left to Less likely on the right.]\n[A woman points a gun down at Cueball who is on the floor, his gun just out of reach.] Woman: You're going down the memory hole now, asshole.\n[Man on ground points gun up at blade-armed man standing next to a board with science on it.] Man with gun: Hey! You forgot to carry the two.\n[Ponytail on desk points sword at man standing on floor.] Ponytail: Looks like the Fed just lowered the interest rate.\n[Cueball with gun looks down at Megan slumped on floor.] Cueball: Guess you should've scrolled all the way to the bottom before clicking \"Agree.\"\n[Megan holds pistol to the back of the head of Ponytail holding a rifle.] Megan with pistol: Bangarang, motherfucker.\n"}
{"id":814,"title":"Diode","image_title":"Diode","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/814","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/diode.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/814:_Diode","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Megan. Megan holds up a diode.] Cueball: We need to talk. Megan: Okay, but first hold the end of this diode.\n[They hold the diode.] Cueball: You hurt my feelings yesterday. Megan: You embarrassed me with my family last weekend.\n[They are still holding the diode between them.] Cueball: I'm sorry.\n","explanation":"A diode is an electronic component that, to put it simply, blocks current traveling in one direction, but allows current going the other way. Diodes are a common component of digital circuits, such as those found in a computer. The end that rejects incoming current is marked with a line or band of paint.\nThe comic is describing a common frustration in relationships. Sometimes one party in a relationship will feel that the other isn't listening to them, even though they themselves are being as open as possible. This is analogous to the function of a diode, which the comic indicates by literally introducing a diode into the dialogue. The diode introduced has the banded end being held by Cueball . This means his words are blocked by the diode, while Megan 's flows through to him; she never receives his protest, his pain, or his apology and thus does not feel she did anything wrong. Megan could possibly have used the diode as a way to avoid apologizing, but she must have known she risked looking like an idiot by not perceiving his apology, as illustrated by the title text: Megan didn't perceive Cueball's apology, due to it being blocked by the diode, so she berates Cueball for not apologizing. An alternative explanation is that Megan won't apologize, as she doesn't hear Cueball's complaint, and that Cueball is unhappy with her for this.\n[Cueball is talking to Megan. Megan holds up a diode.] Cueball: We need to talk. Megan: Okay, but first hold the end of this diode.\n[They hold the diode.] Cueball: You hurt my feelings yesterday. Megan: You embarrassed me with my family last weekend.\n[They are still holding the diode between them.] Cueball: I'm sorry.\n"}
{"id":815,"title":"Mu","image_title":"Mu","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/815","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mu.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/815:_Mu","transcript":"[Cueball spins in circles on a chair next to a desk. A graph of productivity vs Coefficient of friction of desk chair shows a curve that drops off very quickly as the coefficient of friction approaches zero, with the productivity becoming negative at low values. It plateaus in the middle of the graph, and then begins to drop less steeply as coefficient of friction increases above the optimal point.] Cueball: Wheeeeeeee\n","explanation":"The title of the comic, \"Mu\", refers to the symbol \u03bc. This letter of the Greek alphabet is commonly used in mathematics and physics in many cases and here it denotes the coefficient of friction which describes the ratio of the force of friction between two connected bodies.\nDesk chairs usually have the ability to turn and some chairs spin more easily than others. A desk chair which spins easily could be described as having a low coefficient of friction. The horizontal axis of the chart ranges from very easy to spin on the left, to very difficult to spin on the right. The comic shows that if the chair is too difficult to turn it is annoying and impacts productivity. However, if it is too low spinning one's chair becomes more fun than working.\nThe title text notes that if your chair spins too easily, you can actually hurt other people's productivity by spinning competitively. [ citation needed ]\nIn classical mechanics the angular momentum can be transferred to other objects when a rotating object does not have any friction and is rotating very fast. For example, when a reaction wheel inside a spacecraft changes its speed, it turns the entire satellite around. None of this is intuitive, as shown in this video .\n[Cueball spins in circles on a chair next to a desk. A graph of productivity vs Coefficient of friction of desk chair shows a curve that drops off very quickly as the coefficient of friction approaches zero, with the productivity becoming negative at low values. It plateaus in the middle of the graph, and then begins to drop less steeply as coefficient of friction increases above the optimal point.] Cueball: Wheeeeeeee\n"}
{"id":816,"title":"Applied Math","image_title":"Applied Math","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/816","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/applied_math.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/816:_Applied_Math","transcript":"[Ponytail is standing at a whiteboard considering a logical proof. The proof assumes P and deduces P \u2227 P .] Ponytail: Wow. I can't find fault with your proof.\n[Ponytail is still looking at the white board, the frame expands to show Megan walking away, rubbing her hands together in an evil manner.] Ponytail: You've shown the inconsistency \u2014 and thus the invalidity \u2014 of basic logic itself. Megan: Excellent. On to step two...\n[Megan sits down at a desk and begins to write.] Dear Dr. Knuth,\n[She continues to write.] I am writing to collect from you the $3,372,564.48 I am owed for discovering 1,317,408 errors in The Art of Computer Programming...\n","explanation":"Donald Knuth is a computer scientist who has written several computer science textbooks and he offers monetary rewards for anyone finding errors in his publications. The first error found in each book is worth US$2.56. Other suggestions are worth less than $2.56, but a check is still sent out if Dr. Knuth finds them to be reasonable.\nMegan uses a proof to invalidate logic itself. (Of course, this means that her proof paradoxically renders itself meaningless. If logic has been disproven, her proof has no value.) According to the logic symbols at the bottom of the proof, she has proved that \"the proposition (statement) is true and the proposition is false,\" i.e. \"something is both true and false.\" (Specifically, \u2234 means \"therefore\", P represents that a proposition is true, \u2227 stands for \"and\", and an overbar negates a proposition (so P represents that a proposition is false) The negate symbol, \u00ac, is also used for this purpose when placed in front of a symbol). If someone were to prove this, it would indeed derail the very foundation of logic and result in the principle of explosion , which was referenced in a previous comic .\nSince most of the content of computer science textbooks is fundamentally based on logic, Megan's proof obviously spells doom for Dr. Knuth's, as each instance of logic can now be considered an error. After Megan's friend confirms the validity of her proof, Megan writes a letter to Dr. Knuth to collect her money for the 1,317,408 errors in The Art of Computer Programming at $2.56 each. According to the amount Megan demands as a reward, she apparently considers this textbook to have an average of more than 400 instances of logic per page (if she has the latest edition of each volume).\nThe title text is the reply from Dr. Knuth, in which he uses Megan's logic-disproving proof against her by claiming \u2014 with no logical explanation \u2014 that the amount of money she is in fact due as a reward is only 98 cents. In logic, from a contradiction (such as \"P\u2227 P \") can be inferred any statement, including that $3,372,564.48 = $0.98. He does this presumably to a) get out of paying her over three million dollars, b) demonstrate his contempt for or disbelief in her proof, and\/or c) to show her, rather passive-aggressively, that she herself is not exempt from any ill effects resulting from her proof.  If logic is proved to be false, then all mathematics are proved false and 3,372,564.48 = 0.98. Dr. Knuth could have also given her nothing, as 0 would equal 0.98 which would equal 3,372,564.48.\nThe title of the comic, \"Applied Math,\" is a play on Applied mathematics , \"mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry,\" as opposed to pure math , which focuses exclusively on abstract concepts. Instead of using math to calculate something like the speed of a falling object, Megan uses it for an ostensibly more frivolous reason: to gain a huge reward via a proof of dubious validity.\n[Ponytail is standing at a whiteboard considering a logical proof. The proof assumes P and deduces P \u2227 P .] Ponytail: Wow. I can't find fault with your proof.\n[Ponytail is still looking at the white board, the frame expands to show Megan walking away, rubbing her hands together in an evil manner.] Ponytail: You've shown the inconsistency \u2014 and thus the invalidity \u2014 of basic logic itself. Megan: Excellent. On to step two...\n[Megan sits down at a desk and begins to write.] Dear Dr. Knuth,\n[She continues to write.] I am writing to collect from you the $3,372,564.48 I am owed for discovering 1,317,408 errors in The Art of Computer Programming...\n"}
{"id":817,"title":"Mutual","image_title":"Mutual","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/817","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mutual.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/817:_Mutual","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are inside each others' thought bubbles.]\n","explanation":"The comic depicts Cueball and Megan simultaneously thinking about each other. It may be a deliberate prelude to the next comic .\nThe title text refers to the aspect of Quantum Mechanics where a system can exist in more than one state until it is observed. An observation is required in order to \"collapse\" the system into a particular state; the thought experiment of Schr\u00f6dinger's cat is a popular way of explaining this concept. The title text proposes that, if a universe needed to be observed to exist, as with a quantum state, it would be a pretty sorry universe indeed, as who would exist to observe it if it needed to be observed in the first place?\n[Cueball and Megan are inside each others' thought bubbles.]\n"}
{"id":818,"title":"Illness","image_title":"Illness","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/818","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/illness.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/818:_Illness","transcript":"[Randall, depicted as Cueball, is standing beneath all of this text. The last heart is much bigger than the text and comes directly from the Cueball figure.] Randall: Hey, everyone- Randall: As I mentioned on the blag, I'm going through a rough time right now. I'm dealing with a serious family illness and it's become pretty overwhelming. Randall: We're still getting a handle on everything, and I appreciate your patience while we figure it all out. Randall: Thank you to everyone who wrote in with kind wishes and words of support. They've been passed on and meant a lot. Randall: I like drawing, and might find time for it in the coming weeks, but I'm not going to push myself to stick to a schedule. Randall: However, between my stacks of notebooks, scanner, and supportive sysadmin, I should at least have something interesting to share with you in this space each M\/W\/F. Randall: \u2661\n","explanation":"This is the first comic about Randall 's fianc\u00e9e's (now wife) cancer .\nIt is self-explanatory, although vague on specifics.\nMore details and related comics are on the Category:Cancer page.\nIn the comic Randall mentions that he might not be able to (or interested in) sticking to the normal schedule. But he did manage to do that anyway. However, this comic was posted on a Friday, and the next week there were the 5 minute comics, and already the week after the next, xkcd was overtaken by guests during the Guest Week . Maybe this was his online comic colleagues who gave him a helping hand?\nThe title text asks for readers to send him distracting games to play, then was edited to show his appreciation for the number of them sent in.\n[Randall, depicted as Cueball, is standing beneath all of this text. The last heart is much bigger than the text and comes directly from the Cueball figure.] Randall: Hey, everyone- Randall: As I mentioned on the blag, I'm going through a rough time right now. I'm dealing with a serious family illness and it's become pretty overwhelming. Randall: We're still getting a handle on everything, and I appreciate your patience while we figure it all out. Randall: Thank you to everyone who wrote in with kind wishes and words of support. They've been passed on and meant a lot. Randall: I like drawing, and might find time for it in the coming weeks, but I'm not going to push myself to stick to a schedule. Randall: However, between my stacks of notebooks, scanner, and supportive sysadmin, I should at least have something interesting to share with you in this space each M\/W\/F. Randall: \u2661\n"}
{"id":819,"title":"Five-Minute Comics Part 1","image_title":"Five-Minute Comics: Part 1","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/819","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/five_minute_comics_part_1.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/819:_Five-Minute_Comics:_Part_1","transcript":"Because of a family illness, instead of regular comics, this week I'll be sharing some strips that I drew as part of a game I played with friends. Each comic had to be written and drawn in five minutes. -- Randall\n[Cueball and Megan stand facing each other.] Cueball: Jupiter will make its closest approach to Earth in decades.\n[Cueball points behind Megan, and she turns around.] Cueball: In fact, here it comes now!\n[Jupiter, about the size of the characters' heads, hovers into the frame at about head-height.] Jupiter: Hey, guys.\n[Jupiter continues to hover through the frame as the characters watch it go.] Jupiter: Anyone need a gravitational slingshot? Megan: No, I'm good. Jupiter: Aight.\n[Cueball sits on a box, playing a guitar.] Cueball: ...Now I don't blame him 'cause he ran and hid, Cueball: but the meanest thing that he ever did Cueball: was before he left, he went and named me \"Trig.\"\n[Cueball looks down a well.] Cueball: Oh God, a little girl is trapped down this well!\n[Cueball runs off screen.]\n[Cueball returns, leading a pony.] Cueball: It's okay, we got you that pony you always wanted!\n[Cueball tries to cram the pony down the well with the aid of a large stick.] Cueball: Get... in... there... Cueball: Ugh!\n[Cueball and Megan stand in a server room. ] Cueball: I like to get back to nature by coming out here to the server room. Cueball: The warmth, the whirr of the drives, the drone of the fans, the howl of the wolves... Megan: Wolves? Cueball: Yeah, we started a reintroduction program. Wolf: Awoooooo\n[Cueball stands by himself in the frame.] Cueball: Yo momma's so masculine that she... oh, wait, that's your dad. Cueball: Is your mom the lady over by the door? Aww, she looks nice!\n[Cueball runs toward another man who is wearing a powdered wig, holding a gun in one hand, and a flute in the other. Behind him, someone is chasing him on a motorcycle.] Cueball: Bach, activate the magic flute and teleport us home! Wagner's right behind me on his Ring Cycle!\nWhy did I draw this?\nHotness Ratings: [A close up of a girl with wavy hair.] Incredibly made-up girl on magazine cover. Girl: Airbrush! [Inset of Cueball: \"Meh.\"]\n[An average girl.] Girl in your bio class. [Inset of Cueball: \"Two stars.\"]\n[Girl with mussed hair in over-sized men's shirt.] Girl in your bio class wearing one of your shirts. Girl: Want some breakfast? [Cueball: \"Four stars.\"]\n[Girl with another sort of shirt speaking to an older lady.] Girl in your bio class wearing one of your mom's shirts. Girl: Thanks for the great night. [Cueball: \"Wat!\"]\n[Creepy-looking girl.] Girl in your bio class wearing your mom's skin like a suit. Girl: Give Mommy a hug! [Cueball, screaming: \"AAAAAAAA\"]\n","explanation":null}
{"id":820,"title":"Five-Minute Comics Part 2","image_title":"Five-Minute Comics: Part 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/820","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/five_minute_comics_part_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/820:_Five-Minute_Comics:_Part_2","transcript":"Because of a family illness, instead of regular comics, this week I'll be sharing some strips that I drew as part of a game I played with friends.  Each comic had to be written and drawn in five minutes.\n--Randall\nComic #1 [A ninja is hiding under a diving board as a man runs along it.]\n[The man jumps on the end of the board and hits the ninja in the head, knocking him into the pool.]\n[The ninja floats in the water. A bullet passes through the man's head.] thwipp\n[The man is lying bleeding on the diving board, the ninja is still unconscious on the pool.]\n[A sniper is at the top of a hill. The sign in front of the hill says \"Grassy Knoll\".]\n[Someone is pointing at the diagram of the previous panel.] Off-panel voice: Wait, so what does this have to do with 9\/11, again? Cueball: I said I'm getting there!\nComic #2 [Cueball is studying Megan.] Cueball: You look different.\nCueball: You have this... glow about you.\n[They stare in silence.]\n[A baby falls out of Megan.] plop\nComic #3 Megan: Cogito ergo cogito. Off-panel voice: Playing it safe, huh?\nComic #4 [Two children dressed up as ghosts are standing in front of Megan at a door, each carrying a bag.] Children: Trick or treat!\n[Megan doesn't move.]\nChild: Um hi. Why are you just standing there? Other Child: Candy?\n[Another silent panel as the children stare up at Megan.]\n[The second child looks in their bag.] Other Child: Oh God, my bag of candy.\nOther Child: It's filling with blood. Child: We should go.\nComic #5 [A jet is flying across the panel.] Pilot: Bail out! Bail out! Bail out!\n[The pilot and copilot have buckets, and are bailing water out of the cockpit.]\nComic #6 The following is a dramatization of real events.\n[Cueball is at a counter, with several jars.] Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAAA I'm making a sandwich! AAAAAAAAAA!\nComic #7 [Two people are carrying lightsabers and wearing robes.] Cueball: Oh God, my eyes won't focus right! And your robe looks... really dirty! My blacklightsaber was not a success.\nComic #8 [Cueball is standing.] Cueball: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury... Off-screen voice: It seems we happen to be all ladies, actually. Cueball: ...in that case, this defense is going to appear extremely ill-advised.\nComic #9 [Darth Vader is sitting between two people, at a table.] Cueball: Your sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn't helped you conjur up the stolen data tapes, or given you\u2014 Darth Vader: HEY. Wicca is a legitimate belief system!\n[Darth Vader is drawing a pentagram on the table.] Cueball: What are you\u2014 Darth Vader: Putting a hex on your family.\n","explanation":"This is the second of three \"five-minute comics\" Randall posted during a week in November 2010. The introduction to the comic explains everything you need to know about the circumstances behind it.\nRandall obviously made more than three of these five minutes comics, and one of them was published later, for a short period of time by a mistake, but an android xkcd browser picked it up while it was on-line and saved it. Since then it has been added to explain xkcd. So here is a complete list of all four comics in the entire Five-minute comics series:\nHere is a list with explanations for each of the small comics:\nIt turns out that, somehow, this will all lead up to a theory that perfectly explains the September 11 attacks .\nHowever, it turns out the jury consists only of women, so the \"gentlemen\" part is not needed. This poses a problem to Cueball's defense, which apparently relied on somewhat sexist tactics. This, sadly, is not too uncommon in real life.\nInstead of belief in the Force as in the movie, the \"ancient religion\" referred to here is actually Wicca , a modern pagan religion with two deities that is most notable for practicing magic, and is related to voodoo . So, naturally, Darth Vader puts a hex on the commander's family. (Although, to modify a quote from the Internet, Wiccans hexing you as punishment is like a hippie threatening to punch you in your aura.) The title text notes that modern Wiccans don't really practice the whole \"putting hexes on people\" thing, which is true. Episcopalianism probably refers to the Episcopal Church of the United States , which was founded during the American Revolution to replace the Church of England in the colonies.\nBecause of a family illness, instead of regular comics, this week I'll be sharing some strips that I drew as part of a game I played with friends.  Each comic had to be written and drawn in five minutes.\n--Randall\nComic #1 [A ninja is hiding under a diving board as a man runs along it.]\n[The man jumps on the end of the board and hits the ninja in the head, knocking him into the pool.]\n[The ninja floats in the water. A bullet passes through the man's head.] thwipp\n[The man is lying bleeding on the diving board, the ninja is still unconscious on the pool.]\n[A sniper is at the top of a hill. The sign in front of the hill says \"Grassy Knoll\".]\n[Someone is pointing at the diagram of the previous panel.] Off-panel voice: Wait, so what does this have to do with 9\/11, again? Cueball: I said I'm getting there!\nComic #2 [Cueball is studying Megan.] Cueball: You look different.\nCueball: You have this... glow about you.\n[They stare in silence.]\n[A baby falls out of Megan.] plop\nComic #3 Megan: Cogito ergo cogito. Off-panel voice: Playing it safe, huh?\nComic #4 [Two children dressed up as ghosts are standing in front of Megan at a door, each carrying a bag.] Children: Trick or treat!\n[Megan doesn't move.]\nChild: Um hi. Why are you just standing there? Other Child: Candy?\n[Another silent panel as the children stare up at Megan.]\n[The second child looks in their bag.] Other Child: Oh God, my bag of candy.\nOther Child: It's filling with blood. Child: We should go.\nComic #5 [A jet is flying across the panel.] Pilot: Bail out! Bail out! Bail out!\n[The pilot and copilot have buckets, and are bailing water out of the cockpit.]\nComic #6 The following is a dramatization of real events.\n[Cueball is at a counter, with several jars.] Cueball: AAAAAAAAAAAAA I'm making a sandwich! AAAAAAAAAA!\nComic #7 [Two people are carrying lightsabers and wearing robes.] Cueball: Oh God, my eyes won't focus right! And your robe looks... really dirty! My blacklightsaber was not a success.\nComic #8 [Cueball is standing.] Cueball: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury... Off-screen voice: It seems we happen to be all ladies, actually. Cueball: ...in that case, this defense is going to appear extremely ill-advised.\nComic #9 [Darth Vader is sitting between two people, at a table.] Cueball: Your sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn't helped you conjur up the stolen data tapes, or given you\u2014 Darth Vader: HEY. Wicca is a legitimate belief system!\n[Darth Vader is drawing a pentagram on the table.] Cueball: What are you\u2014 Darth Vader: Putting a hex on your family.\n"}
{"id":821,"title":"Five-Minute Comics Part 3","image_title":"Five-Minute Comics: Part 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/821","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/five_minute_comics_part_3.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/821:_Five-Minute_Comics:_Part_3","transcript":"Because of a family illness, instead of regular comics, this week I'll be sharing some strips that I drew as part of a game I played with friends. Each comic had to be written and drawn in five minutes.\n--Randall\nComic #1 Pearl Harbor. November 7th, 1941. [There is a beach, with some ships floating in a crescent shaped harbor.]\n[The same bay, again.]\n[The boats continue to move about the harbor.]\n[The boats do their thing. A title explains.] (We're going to be here a while, since the attack wasn't until December.)\nComic #2 [Cueball is sitting on a bus, Megan in front of him. Another person is sitting in front of Megan and another person is sitting behind Cueball.] I know it's natural and all, but I really wish women on the bus wouldn't try to breastfeed me. Megan: C'mon, have some milk. Right here. Cueball: I'm reading .\nComic #3 s\/I think that\/I saw a study once that said that\/g Instant persuasiveness multiplier!\nComic #4 [A newspaper front page. Billy Joel is between two policemen.] Times Billy Joel Arrested for Arson\nComic #5 [One person has a cord leaving their mouth, the other is holding a handset on the end of it to their ear.] Handset: Hee hee hee... *giggle* I hear that if you drink coke and eat pop rocks, you vomit up a corded telephone handset on which you hear creepy little girls giggling.\nComic #6 [Three soldiers are holding a large integral sign, while a fourth points a gun at the Little Rock High School.] 1957: Eisenhower orders the military to integrate Little Rock High School.\nComic #7 [A smartphone is vibrating across a table, towards a person.] The smartphones got too smart... and developed a taste... for BLOOD! Fortunately, the only way they could move was by turning on their vibrate while on a sloped table.\nComic #8 [Cueball is reading to his child.] Cueball: And the wolf went to see the 38th little pig, who had built his house out of strontium. Cueball: And the wolf was all, \"Ok, what is with this shit?\" The 119 Little Pigs\nComic #9 [Cueball is holding up a gun.] Cueball: Fastest gun in the west!\n[The gun is galloping across the desert.] gallop gallop\n[There is a podium, with a gun in each position.] Winner!\nComic #10 [A picture of a centrifuge dominates the panel.] Centrifuges: They're what separate the men from the boys.\nComic #11 [A computer monitor is plugged in, and cables run into a wardrobe.] Lucy: Time passes differently in Narnia, so by putting the CPU and storage for my machine there, I was able to run through the [email\u00a0protected] and [email\u00a0protected] databases in about an hour. Peter: There are so many problems with that.\nComic #12 [Someone is talking to Alice.] Person: One of these days, Alice... Wham, zoom, sploosh, fwoom, splash, gurlle, wheeeee, fwoosh, aren't waterslides fun?!\n","explanation":"This is the third of three \"five-minute comics\" Randall posted during a week in November 2010. The introduction to the comic explains everything you need to know about the circumstances behind it.\nRandall obviously made more than three of these five minutes comics, and one of them was published later, for a short period of time by a mistake, but an android xkcd browser picked it up while it was on-line and saved it. Since then it has been added to explain xkcd. So here is a complete list of all four comics in the entire Five-minute comics series:\nHere is a list with explanations for each of the small comics:\nThis may also be a joke on present-day levels of awareness of the event; as it fades out of living memory, people might indeed confuse the date with November (or October) 7, despite it being \"a date which will live in infamy\" .\nHere, it's combined with elements of other common scary urban legends (phones ringing and creepy laughter) to form something bizarre.\nHowever, integration also has a meaning in mathematics. This is indicated in the comic with the soldiers lifting up a giant integral sign to place beside the school, in order to (mathematically) integrate it. Normally, an integral only makes sense on functions; however, since this is the Little Rock Nine , if we take the integral of the constant function f ( x ) = 9, we do, in fact, get 9 x + C , as stated in the title text. The posture of the three soldiers with the integral sign echoes the iconic Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima photograph.\nThe 119 Little Pigs seems to be a variant where the pigs build their houses out of the 118 chemical elements (and bricks, presumably). The 38th little pig builds his house out of strontium , which is, of course, the 38th element on the Periodic Table. One wonders what happened to the pigs who are stuck making their houses out of elements that are gaseous or liquid at room temperature, or those whose houses would react with the air and\/or undergo nuclear decay. In his book what if?, in the first comic, it shows the 92nd little pig, who built his house out of depleted Uranium, The wolf responded, \"Dude\". [1] Although given the water content in exhaled breath, it's easy to see how the wolf would huff, puff, and blow down the houses made of lithium , sodium , potassium , rubidium , caesium , and francium . Though making a houses out of hydrogen , helium , nitrogen , oxygen , fluorine , neon , chlorine and krypton would all be very difficult as they are gases at room temperature [ citation needed ] . Also, there would be issues such as death from the toxicity of the elements, e.g. fluorine would kill the pig and wolf. The piggies may have difficulty collecting enough metal, as they would have trouble collecting enough technetium (43), which only occurs in minute traces, and astatine , of which approximately 1 ounce exists on earth. It could be a coincidence, or possibly Randall's intent, that the wolf asks \"What is this shit?\" while referring to strontium while \"stronzo\" is an Italian (vulgar) word for \"turd\", pronounced almost the same (it is a common source of bad taste jokes) and stront is a Dutch word for shit.\nSee also: 1786: Trash\nHere, Randall takes the pattern to a ridiculous and not-at-all threatening place.\nBecause of a family illness, instead of regular comics, this week I'll be sharing some strips that I drew as part of a game I played with friends. Each comic had to be written and drawn in five minutes.\n--Randall\nComic #1 Pearl Harbor. November 7th, 1941. [There is a beach, with some ships floating in a crescent shaped harbor.]\n[The same bay, again.]\n[The boats continue to move about the harbor.]\n[The boats do their thing. A title explains.] (We're going to be here a while, since the attack wasn't until December.)\nComic #2 [Cueball is sitting on a bus, Megan in front of him. Another person is sitting in front of Megan and another person is sitting behind Cueball.] I know it's natural and all, but I really wish women on the bus wouldn't try to breastfeed me. Megan: C'mon, have some milk. Right here. Cueball: I'm reading .\nComic #3 s\/I think that\/I saw a study once that said that\/g Instant persuasiveness multiplier!\nComic #4 [A newspaper front page. Billy Joel is between two policemen.] Times Billy Joel Arrested for Arson\nComic #5 [One person has a cord leaving their mouth, the other is holding a handset on the end of it to their ear.] Handset: Hee hee hee... *giggle* I hear that if you drink coke and eat pop rocks, you vomit up a corded telephone handset on which you hear creepy little girls giggling.\nComic #6 [Three soldiers are holding a large integral sign, while a fourth points a gun at the Little Rock High School.] 1957: Eisenhower orders the military to integrate Little Rock High School.\nComic #7 [A smartphone is vibrating across a table, towards a person.] The smartphones got too smart... and developed a taste... for BLOOD! Fortunately, the only way they could move was by turning on their vibrate while on a sloped table.\nComic #8 [Cueball is reading to his child.] Cueball: And the wolf went to see the 38th little pig, who had built his house out of strontium. Cueball: And the wolf was all, \"Ok, what is with this shit?\" The 119 Little Pigs\nComic #9 [Cueball is holding up a gun.] Cueball: Fastest gun in the west!\n[The gun is galloping across the desert.] gallop gallop\n[There is a podium, with a gun in each position.] Winner!\nComic #10 [A picture of a centrifuge dominates the panel.] Centrifuges: They're what separate the men from the boys.\nComic #11 [A computer monitor is plugged in, and cables run into a wardrobe.] Lucy: Time passes differently in Narnia, so by putting the CPU and storage for my machine there, I was able to run through the [email\u00a0protected] and [email\u00a0protected] databases in about an hour. Peter: There are so many problems with that.\nComic #12 [Someone is talking to Alice.] Person: One of these days, Alice... Wham, zoom, sploosh, fwoom, splash, gurlle, wheeeee, fwoosh, aren't waterslides fun?!\n"}
{"id":822,"title":"Guest Week Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content)","image_title":"Guest Week: Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/822","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/guest_week_jeph_jacques_questionable_content.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/822:_Guest_Week:_Jeph_Jacques_(Questionable_Content)","transcript":"[A girl is sitting on a bench, reading a book. There is a tree. Far away, Cueball has a backpack on.] Cueball's thought bubble: There she is. The most beautiful girl you've ever seen.\n[The focus is on the girl on the bench.] Cueball's thought bubble: Every day you take this route to class, she's sitting on that bench, reading.\n[It goes even closer to her face.] Cueball's thought bubble: You'd introduce yourself, but you wouldn't know what to say. Besides, she's way out of your league.\n[Back to the full panel.] Cueball's thought bubble: What chance could an average guy like you have with such a radiant- Girl's thought bubble: Hey.\n[The girl looks up at her thought bubble with a question mark over her head.] Cueball's thought bubble: E-Excuse me? Girl's thought bubble: I said hey. You come by here a lot.\n[The girl looks over at Cueball, who is scratching his head at his thought bubble.] Cueball's thought bubble: Oh, uh, yeah. On the way to class. Girl's thought bubble: Wanna skip class and go get a coffee?\n[Cueball is pondering what's happening.] Cueball's thought bubble: Sure, I'd - I'd like that a lot. Girl's thought bubble: Great, let's ditch these losers. Girl: Hey!\n[The thought bubbles are behind Cueball now, moving away.] Cueball's thought bubble: Man, I gotta tell you, I'm SICK of being that guy's internal monologue! So whiny! Girl's thought bubble: Seriously! I swear, he and Little Miss Daddy Issues over there were made for each other.\n[The two look at each other silently.]\n","explanation":"The comic starts with Cueball 's internal dialogue telling him what he's been thinking for some time now \u2014 that the girl he's looking at is so beautiful she seems unapproachable, and \"what could she ever see in a guy like you\", and typical fears that a guy has that prevents him from talking to a pretty girl.\nOnly to be interrupted by the girl's internal monologue, who introduces herself to Cueball's internal monologue and asks if he'd like to get a cup of coffee. As the internal monologues pair off and leave, they criticize the people whom they've been serving for so long, saying that they're made for one another, if only one of them would have the guts to start talking to the other.\nThe comic was guest-written by Questionable Content webcomic artist Jeph Jacques , whose romantic comedy series has lasted, as of 2020, more than 16 years and 4000 strips. The comic follows the vertical panel style typical of Questionable Content. But the art here is more in the xkcd style, showing only stick figures.\nSPOILER ALERT: the following paragraph reveals some important plot details of the Questionable Content webcomic.\nThis comic may be a reference to Marten and Faye, two characters from Questionable Content. Marten meets Faye in QC #3 but is too shy to talk to her. Faye is less shy and introduces herself to Marten. Later, Marten and Faye are living together and have a crush for each other, but they don't get together because Faye is afraid of relationships since her father killed himself.\nGuest Week was a series of five comics written by five other comic authors. They were released over five consecutive days (Monday-Friday); not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule. The five comics are:\n[A girl is sitting on a bench, reading a book. There is a tree. Far away, Cueball has a backpack on.] Cueball's thought bubble: There she is. The most beautiful girl you've ever seen.\n[The focus is on the girl on the bench.] Cueball's thought bubble: Every day you take this route to class, she's sitting on that bench, reading.\n[It goes even closer to her face.] Cueball's thought bubble: You'd introduce yourself, but you wouldn't know what to say. Besides, she's way out of your league.\n[Back to the full panel.] Cueball's thought bubble: What chance could an average guy like you have with such a radiant- Girl's thought bubble: Hey.\n[The girl looks up at her thought bubble with a question mark over her head.] Cueball's thought bubble: E-Excuse me? Girl's thought bubble: I said hey. You come by here a lot.\n[The girl looks over at Cueball, who is scratching his head at his thought bubble.] Cueball's thought bubble: Oh, uh, yeah. On the way to class. Girl's thought bubble: Wanna skip class and go get a coffee?\n[Cueball is pondering what's happening.] Cueball's thought bubble: Sure, I'd - I'd like that a lot. Girl's thought bubble: Great, let's ditch these losers. Girl: Hey!\n[The thought bubbles are behind Cueball now, moving away.] Cueball's thought bubble: Man, I gotta tell you, I'm SICK of being that guy's internal monologue! So whiny! Girl's thought bubble: Seriously! I swear, he and Little Miss Daddy Issues over there were made for each other.\n[The two look at each other silently.]\n"}
{"id":823,"title":"Guest Week David Troupes (Buttercup Festival)","image_title":"Guest Week: David Troupes (Buttercup Festival)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/823","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/guest_week_david_troupes_buttercup_festival.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/823:_Guest_Week:_David_Troupes_(Buttercup_Festival)","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are leaning against each other, sitting on top of a giant moon in a black, star dotted sky. Trees are visible on the bottom of the panel.]\n[The scene broadens.] Megan: I've never been so happy. I\u2014 Cueball: Hold on\u2014that guy used to dump my notebooks in high school. Give me a moment. Try to keep the moon steady.\n[A rock hits a Cueball on the ground on the back of the head.]\n[The guy falls and clutches the back of his head.]\n[Back to the moon again, where Cueball is leaning his head against Megan while holding a slingshot.] Cueball: I've never been so happy.\n","explanation":"This comic is a commentary on relationships. Megan is perfectly happy sitting on the moon (which is impossible) [ citation needed ] with Cueball , the person she loves. Cueball, however, has his experience ruined when he notices a former bully of his passing by below. After hitting the bully with a rock that he shoots from the moon with his slingshot , he can share in Megan's happiness. (This is practically impossible as well. To start, the rock would most likely fall back down unless Cueball could throw it at escape velocity, but the precision required for such a throw would be extreme, and he would need to account for the movement of the Earth and Moon, as well as the Earth's rotation. Even if accounting for all of that, it would very likely disintegrate in Earth's atmosphere.)\nDavid Troupes is the author of the webcomic Buttercup Festival .\nGuest Week was a series of five comics written by five other comic authors. They were released over five consecutive days (Monday-Friday); not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule. The five comics are:\n[Megan and Cueball are leaning against each other, sitting on top of a giant moon in a black, star dotted sky. Trees are visible on the bottom of the panel.]\n[The scene broadens.] Megan: I've never been so happy. I\u2014 Cueball: Hold on\u2014that guy used to dump my notebooks in high school. Give me a moment. Try to keep the moon steady.\n[A rock hits a Cueball on the ground on the back of the head.]\n[The guy falls and clutches the back of his head.]\n[Back to the moon again, where Cueball is leaning his head against Megan while holding a slingshot.] Cueball: I've never been so happy.\n"}
{"id":824,"title":"Guest Week Bill Amend (FoxTrot)","image_title":"Guest Week: Bill Amend (FoxTrot)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/824","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/guest_week_bill_amend_foxtrot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/824:_Guest_Week:_Bill_Amend_(FoxTrot)","transcript":"[Jason from FoxTrot is sitting at an artist's desk with a pencil, holding a phone.] Jason: Hi, Mr. Munroe? I have a great idea! Let me draw some strips for you! Randall, through the telephone: Fat chance, kid.\n[Zoom in to Jason.] Jason: Sudo let me draw some strips for you.\n\n[The following are transcripts of three strips.]\n\n[Cueball and Ponytail are looking at each other.] Cueball: I find you more attractive than usual. Ponytail: You do? Is it my new haircut?\n[Zoom in to Cueball.] Cueball: Actually, I think it's all the weight you've been putting on. Your gravitational pull is pretty severe.\n[Cueball is now alone in the panel.] Cueball: Just sayin'.\n\n[Two people are in a living room. The woman is looking through a chest of drawers.] At home with the Heisenbergs Mrs. Heisenberg: I can't find my car keys. Mr. Heisenberg: You probably know too much about their momentum.\n\n[Congress is in session.  The Speaker is standing on stage in front of an American Flag hanging by an ionic column, holding up a gavel. Seven Members of Congress are seen in front of the stage: a Cueball, a Hairbun, a man with glasses, a woman with long hair, and three more Cueballs.  The first, fourth, and sixth members have their hands raised.] Caption: Why mathematicians should run for Congress Speaker: All those in favor of the bill say \"aye.\" Congressman #1: Aye. Congresswoman #2: Aye. Congress\u2013Mathematician: \u221a-1\n","explanation":"Bill Amend , author of the newspaper comic FoxTrot , draws for Randall in this special ' Guest Week ' edition of xkcd . In the first two panels, we see Jason Fox , a geeky 10-year-old from Amend's strip. Jason asks to draw comics for Randall. When Randall refuses, he uses the sudo command, used in Unix systems to perform an action as an administrator\/super user. This forces Randall to agree. This is a reference to the very popular comic 149: Sandwich , which has now become a geek culture catch-phrase.\nIt is a recurring theme in FoxTrot for Jason to offer to make substitute comics for artists, said comics usually involving mocking his sister Paige, and it is possible that Ponytail is representing her. This would be the first time that someone accepted his offers to make comics.\nIn the first comic, Cueball is making a pun on the word attractive . In the first context it means a person is  \"good looking\" or \"beautiful\" which the female character attributes to her hair. In Cueball's context, he means that he is feeling an increased gravitational pull from the woman, due to her increase in mass (see Gravitation ). This setup is also very typical of the Jason Fox character, who, ostensibly ten, is supposed to be too young to like girls.  The female character's hair is done up in a ponytail similar to how Paige usually keeps hers, so this comic strip may also be a joke at Paige's expense.\nIn 1927 Werner Heisenberg postulated his eponymous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle , which roughly states that in quantum mechanics one cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle. The joke is that (presumably) Elisabeth Heisenberg does not know the position of her keys, because she knows too much about their momentum. (This is also the subject of 1473: Location Sharing .)\nIn many parliamentary and congressional halls it is customary, when calling an issue to vote to have the people who want the issue at hand to be passed to say out loud that they agree. The customary response to this is to say \"aye.\" The dissenters are then asked. Their response would be \"nay\" or \"no\". Then the volume (by rough decibels ) of the assenters and dissenters are weighed. If it is close, a more formal vote may be called. \"Aye\" is pronounced the same way as the letter \"i\" and \" i \" is the mathematical value of the square root of negative one, which can be used to represent an imaginary number .\nThe title text of this comic draws attention to the fact that there are a number of notable people who have become famous as cartoonists, but also hold degrees in physics or have a strong interest in physics. This might seem unusual, because the average person might see physics and art as incompatible, and this is why Randall writes \"an oddly large number.\" These people include:\nGuest Week was a series of five comics written by five other comic authors. They were released over five consecutive days (Monday-Friday); not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule. The five comics are:\n[Jason from FoxTrot is sitting at an artist's desk with a pencil, holding a phone.] Jason: Hi, Mr. Munroe? I have a great idea! Let me draw some strips for you! Randall, through the telephone: Fat chance, kid.\n[Zoom in to Jason.] Jason: Sudo let me draw some strips for you.\n\n[The following are transcripts of three strips.]\n\n[Cueball and Ponytail are looking at each other.] Cueball: I find you more attractive than usual. Ponytail: You do? Is it my new haircut?\n[Zoom in to Cueball.] Cueball: Actually, I think it's all the weight you've been putting on. Your gravitational pull is pretty severe.\n[Cueball is now alone in the panel.] Cueball: Just sayin'.\n\n[Two people are in a living room. The woman is looking through a chest of drawers.] At home with the Heisenbergs Mrs. Heisenberg: I can't find my car keys. Mr. Heisenberg: You probably know too much about their momentum.\n\n[Congress is in session.  The Speaker is standing on stage in front of an American Flag hanging by an ionic column, holding up a gavel. Seven Members of Congress are seen in front of the stage: a Cueball, a Hairbun, a man with glasses, a woman with long hair, and three more Cueballs.  The first, fourth, and sixth members have their hands raised.] Caption: Why mathematicians should run for Congress Speaker: All those in favor of the bill say \"aye.\" Congressman #1: Aye. Congresswoman #2: Aye. Congress\u2013Mathematician: \u221a-1\n"}
{"id":825,"title":"Guest Week Jeffrey Rowland (Overcompensating)","image_title":"Guest Week: Jeffrey Rowland (Overcompensating)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/825","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/guest_week_jeffrey_rowland_overcompensating.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/825:_Guest_Week:_Jeffrey_Rowland_(Overcompensating)","transcript":"[Jeffrey Rowland and Randall wearing a black hat are sitting together. There is a big globe between them. Mr. Rowland has a drink with a small umbrella over it.] Jeffrey Rowland: But enough of my theories about Thanksgiving. The real reason we're here is to discuss my hypothesis that dark matter itself is what consciousness is made of...\n[The frame focuses on Jeffrey Rowland.] Jeffrey Rowland: Unobservable to anything that is itself conscious in much the same way the mail-man won't deliver your mail if you are watching the mail-box\n[Mr. Rowland raises his drink. The globe is now much smaller than in the first frame.] Jeffrey Rowland: Which brings us to my theory about ghosts- Randall Munroe: Wait did you just say Thanksgiving was invented by the Turkey Voluntary Extinction Movement?\n","explanation":"Randall himself (looking like Black Hat ) is talking to Jeffrey Rowland (sitting with a drink), who writes the popular webcomics Overcompensating and Wigu . That it is supposed to be these two real people is clear from the official transcript on xkcd.\nThis may be a reference to Scott Adams' God's Debris , in which a delivery guy has a long conversation about the nature of the universe with an old man. While often dealing with complex questions, the old man in the story presents arguments in a very straightforward way. Some have called some of the arguments in the book very clever and original, albeit overly simplistic. This comic could be a parody on that style of philosophy. The ridiculous theory of Jeffrey's about the correlation between Dark Matter and consciousness is perhaps a reference to Dust in author Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, in which Dust is the associated particle with the Rusakov \"consciousness\" field, interpreted in our universe as Dark Matter. He then postulates that the reason we can't see dark matter is that we are conscious ourselves, alluding to the urban legend that, much like how a watched pot never boils, the mailman will never deliver if you are watching. He then moves on to the subject of ghosts, perpetuating the idea of how far-flung and implausible his \"theories\" are.\nTraditionally, turkey is the main dish of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.  Thus, the theory mentioned in the last panel is that turkeys started the holiday in order to drive themselves to extinction.  This is a reference to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (which merely advocated for people not reproducing. The \"Turkey Voluntary Extinction Movement\" took this to a much higher level by promoting the mass slaughter of turkeys.)\nThe title text is completely true: After a brown recluse spider bit him, Rowland started experiencing cell death in his leg. Although the wound itself is benign, it still is featured in Wikipedia articles (such as Loxoscelism ). This is the picture of the leg and this is the famous picture in the Necrosis article.\nGuest Week was a series of five comics written by five other comic authors. They were released over five consecutive days (Monday-Friday); not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule. The five comics are:\n[Jeffrey Rowland and Randall wearing a black hat are sitting together. There is a big globe between them. Mr. Rowland has a drink with a small umbrella over it.] Jeffrey Rowland: But enough of my theories about Thanksgiving. The real reason we're here is to discuss my hypothesis that dark matter itself is what consciousness is made of...\n[The frame focuses on Jeffrey Rowland.] Jeffrey Rowland: Unobservable to anything that is itself conscious in much the same way the mail-man won't deliver your mail if you are watching the mail-box\n[Mr. Rowland raises his drink. The globe is now much smaller than in the first frame.] Jeffrey Rowland: Which brings us to my theory about ghosts- Randall Munroe: Wait did you just say Thanksgiving was invented by the Turkey Voluntary Extinction Movement?\n"}
{"id":826,"title":"Guest Week Zach Weiner (SMBC)","image_title":"Guest Week: Zach Weiner (SMBC)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/826","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/guest_week_zach_weiner_smbc.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/826:_Guest_Week:_Zach_Weiner_(SMBC)","transcript":"In the spirit of xkcd I present a proposal for a new Smithsonian museum: The Smithsonian Museum Of Dad-Trolling An entire building dedicated to deceiving children for amusement\n(Click to view exhibits!)\nThe top left room is 'The Hall of Misunderstood Science'. It contains six exhibits.\nExhibit: A giant basilisk looms over children. Exhibit label: BASILISKS: Real, deadly, under your bed.\nExhibit: Four magnets hang from a square arch. A child is touching two of them together. Text on the arch: Magnets only leap at each other when they're teenagers. Later, they lose interest.\nExhibit: A child on his dad's shoulders looks up at a looming statue of Jesus behind a lectern. There are flakes falling from Jesus onto them both. Exhibit label: Snow is Jesus' dandruff. His scalp gets dry when it's cold.\nExhibit: A child lies asleep, while hands and a scary face reach up around the bed toward him. Exhibit label: Sleep: Now you're vulnerable to the boogie man!\nExhibit: An ice block sits on a stand in front of pictures of a wolf and rhinoceros looking frightened. Exhibit label: Freezing water: Expands to frighten predators.\nExhibit: An insect on a stick is orbited by a small sphere. Exhibit label: Anti-matter: Matter that is more than 50% ants.\nExhibit: A DNA strand with the letters T, A, C, and G hanging around it. Exhibit label: DNA only has four letters because the alphabet was smaller back then. Dad, to child: Told you so.\nExhibit: A bunch of molecules hang from the ceiling. Exhibit label: Molecules? In my day, we only had atoms!\nThe top right room is 'Regrettable Pranks: An Interactive Experience'. There are four exhibits.\nExhibit: Five balloons float tethered to a table. A child is holding a sixth balloon. The Dad looks alarmed. Sign on exhibit: If this helium makes your voice go higher, it's because you're ten seconds from exploding.\nExhibit: An alien face is shown above an outline of several hands next to a ruler. A child holds his hand up to it. Sign on exhibit: Measure your middle finger. If it's longer than the others, you're an alien halfbreed.\nExhibit: Three cups are on a table. A child is walking away with a fourth cup, the dad's arm around the child's shoulder. Exhibit label: Has anyone seen my rabbit brain? It looks like a cherry, and I dropped it in a Jello cup.\nExhibit: A monstrous set of jaws open upward around a bed. Sign on exhibit: Make your bed or monsters will know a kid lives there.\nThe center right room is 'Concessions'. There are three booths.\nBooth: A concession stand is labeled 'KFP', and displays a KFC-style bucket. A dad and child are eating. Dad: The \"P\" is for \"phoenix\".\nBooth: A concession stand. Sign on stand: Ground beef: Beef we found on the ground. Dad, to child: Told you.\nBooth: A stand shaped like a giant eye. Booth label: EYES CREAM Subtitle: How did you think it was spelled? Sign on booth: Now with more of the goo in your eyes. Same as every other creamery.\nThe lower left room is 'Conservatory of Poorly Remembered History'. There are five exhibits.\nExhibit: A man is riding a dragon. Exhibit label: Genghis Khan: victory through dragons.\nExhibit: A criminal in front of some windows. Exhibit label: The Crimean War: The first war against crime.\nExhibit: A castle with flags hanging on it. Exhibit label: The Renaissance Subtitle: Long story short, the wizards were in control.\nExhibit:A man in Jedi-style robes with a fake beard. Exhibit label: Star Wars is a documentary. No, seriously. Dad, to children: Kids, this man is a veteran.\nThe lower right room is 'Rotunda of Uncomfortable Topics'. There are five exhibits.\nExhibit: A wrestling ring, with a man and woman mostly obscured by the exhibit label. Exhibit label: Naked wrestling: perfectly normal. NEVER DO IT.\nExhibit: a figure sits at a booth in front of a bowl of food. The dad is holding a bottle. Exhibit label: Alcohol is poison. I drink to save you from it. Dad: You're welcome.\nExhibit: A large bird. Exhibit label: Mommies get big tummies before babies come because the stork likes chubby girls.\nExhibit: A rocket ship. Sign on exhibit: Grandma's not dead. She just returned to Saturn. For REVENGE.\nIn the areas outside the rooms, there are two more exhibits and restrooms, all clickable.\nExhibit: A dinosaur skeleton. Exhibit label: That's right. Dinosaurs were made entirely of BONES. Dad, to kid: If you think about it, it makes sense.\nExhibit: A large image hangs on the wall. It is a dense squiggly jumble of lines. Dad, to kids: You gotta squint juuust right. Sign on exhibit: Magic eye trick that doesn't actually work.\nRestrooms: There are three doors, each with a sign. First door (male logo): Men & Boys Second door (female logo): Women & Girls Third door (unrecognizable logo): Korgmen & Spangs\n","explanation":"This comic is drawn by a guest webcomic artist, Zach Weiner (now Weinersmith), following the theme of \"Guest Week\". Zach is the author of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal . The original comic is interactive. It will show images of the exhibits (see below) by clicking on them.\nThe entire comic is a hypothetical \" Smithsonian Museum of Dad-Trolling, an entire building dedicated to deceiving children for amusement.\" It is a common occurrence that curious children will ask simple questions about science to their parents, such as, \"Daddy, why is the sky blue?\" and a parent could respond, \"Well Susie, the sky is blue to match your dress.\"\nGuest Week was a series of five comics written by five other comic authors. They were released over five consecutive days (Monday-Friday); not over the usual Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday schedule. The five comics are:\n\nEach exhibit is a display set up to reinforce the false, sarcastic, or exaggerated answers to typical questions that children may ask their parents about scientific topics. The answers given involve just enough information that the child may be satisfied with the answer and repeat it to others while maintaining the irony for adults that the answers are obviously misleading or false. These explanations may be given because the parent does not know how to explain the topic.\nThis section holds falsehoods that a dad might use to frighten his children. Fear is often used to discourage children from disobeying their parents. It is an interactive experience, so visitors can try something for themselves, then learn the frightening fact it indicates.\nThis area holds concession stands, which sell food. There are misleading names on each stand. The pop-outs in this section are based on jokes parents tell their children to frighten them about food.\nEach exhibit is a display set up to reinforce the false, sarcastic, or exaggerated answers to typical questions that children may ask their parents about history. The answers given involve just enough information that the child may be satisfied with the answer and repeat it to others while maintaining the irony for adults that the answers are obviously misleading or false. These explanations may be given because the parent does not know how to explain the topic.\nEach exhibit is a display set up to explain uncomfortable topics that children may ask their parents about. The answers given so that the children do not ask further questions.\nIn the spirit of xkcd I present a proposal for a new Smithsonian museum: The Smithsonian Museum Of Dad-Trolling An entire building dedicated to deceiving children for amusement\n(Click to view exhibits!)\nThe top left room is 'The Hall of Misunderstood Science'. It contains six exhibits.\nExhibit: A giant basilisk looms over children. Exhibit label: BASILISKS: Real, deadly, under your bed.\nExhibit: Four magnets hang from a square arch. A child is touching two of them together. Text on the arch: Magnets only leap at each other when they're teenagers. Later, they lose interest.\nExhibit: A child on his dad's shoulders looks up at a looming statue of Jesus behind a lectern. There are flakes falling from Jesus onto them both. Exhibit label: Snow is Jesus' dandruff. His scalp gets dry when it's cold.\nExhibit: A child lies asleep, while hands and a scary face reach up around the bed toward him. Exhibit label: Sleep: Now you're vulnerable to the boogie man!\nExhibit: An ice block sits on a stand in front of pictures of a wolf and rhinoceros looking frightened. Exhibit label: Freezing water: Expands to frighten predators.\nExhibit: An insect on a stick is orbited by a small sphere. Exhibit label: Anti-matter: Matter that is more than 50% ants.\nExhibit: A DNA strand with the letters T, A, C, and G hanging around it. Exhibit label: DNA only has four letters because the alphabet was smaller back then. Dad, to child: Told you so.\nExhibit: A bunch of molecules hang from the ceiling. Exhibit label: Molecules? In my day, we only had atoms!\nThe top right room is 'Regrettable Pranks: An Interactive Experience'. There are four exhibits.\nExhibit: Five balloons float tethered to a table. A child is holding a sixth balloon. The Dad looks alarmed. Sign on exhibit: If this helium makes your voice go higher, it's because you're ten seconds from exploding.\nExhibit: An alien face is shown above an outline of several hands next to a ruler. A child holds his hand up to it. Sign on exhibit: Measure your middle finger. If it's longer than the others, you're an alien halfbreed.\nExhibit: Three cups are on a table. A child is walking away with a fourth cup, the dad's arm around the child's shoulder. Exhibit label: Has anyone seen my rabbit brain? It looks like a cherry, and I dropped it in a Jello cup.\nExhibit: A monstrous set of jaws open upward around a bed. Sign on exhibit: Make your bed or monsters will know a kid lives there.\nThe center right room is 'Concessions'. There are three booths.\nBooth: A concession stand is labeled 'KFP', and displays a KFC-style bucket. A dad and child are eating. Dad: The \"P\" is for \"phoenix\".\nBooth: A concession stand. Sign on stand: Ground beef: Beef we found on the ground. Dad, to child: Told you.\nBooth: A stand shaped like a giant eye. Booth label: EYES CREAM Subtitle: How did you think it was spelled? Sign on booth: Now with more of the goo in your eyes. Same as every other creamery.\nThe lower left room is 'Conservatory of Poorly Remembered History'. There are five exhibits.\nExhibit: A man is riding a dragon. Exhibit label: Genghis Khan: victory through dragons.\nExhibit: A criminal in front of some windows. Exhibit label: The Crimean War: The first war against crime.\nExhibit: A castle with flags hanging on it. Exhibit label: The Renaissance Subtitle: Long story short, the wizards were in control.\nExhibit:A man in Jedi-style robes with a fake beard. Exhibit label: Star Wars is a documentary. No, seriously. Dad, to children: Kids, this man is a veteran.\nThe lower right room is 'Rotunda of Uncomfortable Topics'. There are five exhibits.\nExhibit: A wrestling ring, with a man and woman mostly obscured by the exhibit label. Exhibit label: Naked wrestling: perfectly normal. NEVER DO IT.\nExhibit: a figure sits at a booth in front of a bowl of food. The dad is holding a bottle. Exhibit label: Alcohol is poison. I drink to save you from it. Dad: You're welcome.\nExhibit: A large bird. Exhibit label: Mommies get big tummies before babies come because the stork likes chubby girls.\nExhibit: A rocket ship. Sign on exhibit: Grandma's not dead. She just returned to Saturn. For REVENGE.\nIn the areas outside the rooms, there are two more exhibits and restrooms, all clickable.\nExhibit: A dinosaur skeleton. Exhibit label: That's right. Dinosaurs were made entirely of BONES. Dad, to kid: If you think about it, it makes sense.\nExhibit: A large image hangs on the wall. It is a dense squiggly jumble of lines. Dad, to kids: You gotta squint juuust right. Sign on exhibit: Magic eye trick that doesn't actually work.\nRestrooms: There are three doors, each with a sign. First door (male logo): Men & Boys Second door (female logo): Women & Girls Third door (unrecognizable logo): Korgmen & Spangs\n"}
{"id":827,"title":"My Business Idea","image_title":"My Business Idea","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/827","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/my_business_idea.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/827:_My_Business_Idea","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at his desk, pointing at his laptop.] Cueball: Dude! I had this idea like five years ago, and some company just got rich doing it! - I want my cut.\n[Cueball starts typing.] Person off-screen: That's not how it works. Cueball: Sure it is. I'm applying for my share now. Person: Wait, what?\n[A browser window with the title 'Department of Ideas'. It has a series of text boxes.] Date you had the idea: Like five years ago. Proof you had it: I told my friend Mike - you can ask him! I was all \"you know what would make a great business idea?\" and he was all... Their profit so far: $20,000,000 Share you deserve (be fair!): [Drop-down.] 25% 30% 35% Mailing address: 137 Ash Tree Ln\n[Cueball still at the laptop, above him is a SUBMIT button, and it shows a pointing hand cursor.] CLICK\n[Last panel set slightly lower than the rest.] [Cueball is in front of an open box full of cash, with cash in his hand. A FedEx delivery guy is on the other side of the box with his PDA and pen.]","explanation":"Many people have shared Cueball 's experience of seeing someone else make a profit from an idea that they themselves had. This comic plays with the thought of what would happen if intellectual property thinking was taken to an extreme, and if companies or people were keener on \"setting things right\" than money. The title text is an extension of the comic with increasingly extreme thinking.\nIn reality, having a great idea alone, of course, does not create a profitable business; there must generally be an enormous amount of effort put in to create a business from scratch, popularize it, and keep it standing. Having done none of this, Cueball would probably not deserve close to the \"30% cut\" he claims even if intellectual property did work the way it is presented here.\nThis comic originally was shared with the name 1721: Business Idea , but then this comic was renamed. There were no other relations between the ideas for the two comics, see the trivia section below.\n[Cueball is sitting at his desk, pointing at his laptop.] Cueball: Dude! I had this idea like five years ago, and some company just got rich doing it! - I want my cut.\n[Cueball starts typing.] Person off-screen: That's not how it works. Cueball: Sure it is. I'm applying for my share now. Person: Wait, what?\n[A browser window with the title 'Department of Ideas'. It has a series of text boxes.] Date you had the idea: Like five years ago. Proof you had it: I told my friend Mike - you can ask him! I was all \"you know what would make a great business idea?\" and he was all... Their profit so far: $20,000,000 Share you deserve (be fair!): [Drop-down.] 25% 30% 35% Mailing address: 137 Ash Tree Ln\n[Cueball still at the laptop, above him is a SUBMIT button, and it shows a pointing hand cursor.] CLICK\n[Last panel set slightly lower than the rest.] [Cueball is in front of an open box full of cash, with cash in his hand. A FedEx delivery guy is on the other side of the box with his PDA and pen.]"}
{"id":828,"title":"Positive Attitude","image_title":"Positive Attitude","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/828","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/positive_attitude.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/828:_Positive_Attitude","transcript":"[Cueball sits hunched with his knees drawn up to him on a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV. A friend stands by.] Cueball: I'm sick and I'm scared. Friend: Well, remember - having a good attitude is the most important thing. Think positively and you'll get better.\n[Darkness surrounds Cueball on the bed. The friend is off-screen.] Cueball: So if I'm sad or afraid or feel like crap sometimes, then... Friend: ...then if you don't recover, it will be your fault.\n[Cueball clutches his hands to his face and leans back.] Cueball: Well that makes me feel even worse. Friend: See? You're doing this to yourself. Cueball: No! Friend: Stop it! Cueball: Argh!\n[Close up on Cueball, holding up his hand, pointing to himself.] Cueball: Okay, you know what? Screw this. My attitude isn't my problem. - My disease is my problem, and I'm treating it. - I'm going to be glum and depressed and pessimistic some days, and I'm going to get better anyway.\n[Cueball sits on the edge of the bed, his friend still standing in front of him.] Cueball: Wait, that ended up sounding optimistic. Friend: I guess you suck at pessimism. Cueball: Maybe I'll be better at it tomorrow.\n","explanation":"Cueball feels bad because he's sick, and his friend tells him to think positively because that will make him feel better. After thinking a bit Cueball notices that, following that reasoning, if he feels bad it is his fault for being so pessimistic. That makes him feel even worse as now he's not only sick, but also feels guilty of his own sickness.\nIn the fourth panel, he throws away all the previous reasoning and decides his mood is not the problem: the problem is that he's sick. Also, he decides that whatever he feels now he'll finally get better because he's treating his disease.\nIn the last panel Cueball notices his last comment was actually optimistic, so that makes him feel better. At this point, it should be expected that Cueball's friend would say \"see? looking at things in an optimistic way actually helps\". However, he puts optimism as something bad by using the phrase \"you suck at pessimism\". Cueball then tries to be optimistic at his \"sucking\" by thinking he'll \"be better at pessimism tomorrow\". Of course, being good at pessimism is something he should avoid, as it was his very problem in the first few panels.\nThe title text takes a serious turn, and acts as an advice for people feeling bad for being sick. The point is that sickness makes one feel bad enough by itself without having to feel guilty for feeling bad when one's sick.\nIn the first panel, Cueball is connected to a monitor and an IV ( Intravenous therapy ). In a real hospital this might be recording data, such as heart rate (HR) and peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO 2 ) however in the comic, INT, CON and CHR are also recorded. These may be a reference to character stats in some role playing games. In the \"Adventurer Conqueror King\" system,  INT=Intelligence. CON=Constitution and CHR=Charisma.\n[Cueball sits hunched with his knees drawn up to him on a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV. A friend stands by.] Cueball: I'm sick and I'm scared. Friend: Well, remember - having a good attitude is the most important thing. Think positively and you'll get better.\n[Darkness surrounds Cueball on the bed. The friend is off-screen.] Cueball: So if I'm sad or afraid or feel like crap sometimes, then... Friend: ...then if you don't recover, it will be your fault.\n[Cueball clutches his hands to his face and leans back.] Cueball: Well that makes me feel even worse. Friend: See? You're doing this to yourself. Cueball: No! Friend: Stop it! Cueball: Argh!\n[Close up on Cueball, holding up his hand, pointing to himself.] Cueball: Okay, you know what? Screw this. My attitude isn't my problem. - My disease is my problem, and I'm treating it. - I'm going to be glum and depressed and pessimistic some days, and I'm going to get better anyway.\n[Cueball sits on the edge of the bed, his friend still standing in front of him.] Cueball: Wait, that ended up sounding optimistic. Friend: I guess you suck at pessimism. Cueball: Maybe I'll be better at it tomorrow.\n"}
{"id":829,"title":"Arsenic-Based Life","image_title":"Arsenic-Based Life","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/829","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/arsenic_based_life.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/829:_Arsenic-Based_Life","transcript":"[Three people, a curly, dark-haired girl with a ponytail (identifiable from context and hairstyle as Felisa Wolfe-Simon), Megan, and Cueball, stand looking at a laptop screen, which is sitting on a desk. Dr. Wolfe-Simon is pointing at the screen. There is no speech line down to her, but from her posture it must be assumed she does the talking written above the three.] Wolfe-Simon: Our arsenic-based DNA discovery is cool, but these reporters are expecting life on Titan! Our press conference will be such a letdown!\n[Wolfe-Simon turns around to face Megan, zooming in so Cueball is not in the frame.] Wolfe-Simon: Okay, we need to make it more exciting for them. How do you make an event entertaining? Megan: Dunno, I suck at parties. Music, I guess?\n[Wolfe-Simon turns back around and leans over to start typing on the computer, while the other two look on. Megan puts her hand to her chin.] Wolfe-Simon: WikiHow says you can \"serve cocktails and hors d'\u0153rves that fit the theme of your event.\" Megan: Easy enough!\n[Wolfe-Simon stands on a podium behind a lectern ready to deliver the news, while Cueball stands amongst the audience, holding a tray with three drinks glasses. A fourth glass lies at foot of the lectern on the podium. Two Cueball-like guys in the audience are lying on the floor, one of them having fallen backwards in his chair, while a third Cueball-like guy is still standing but has his hands up to his throat as he is suffocating. Finally, Ponytail is slumped over in her seat with her head on her chest. One empty chair is still standing.]\nThe words \"hors d'oerves\" at the comic are just a misspelling by Randall for \"hors d'oeuvres\" (in French \"hors d'\u0153uvre\" both singular and plural). The English pronunciation of these words is awr-DURVZ \/\u0254r\u02c8d\u025crvz\/, with the R before the V, not after, which explains the mistake. [2] As opposed to the original French pronunciation, where the v and r keep the same order. [3]\n","explanation":"This comic is about the December 2010 announcement of the (since refuted) discovery of a strain of extremophile bacteria that incorporate arsenic instead of phosphorous into some of their biochemistry.  The first three panels depict a group of scientists\u2014including one shown with long, curly hair bound in a ponytail, identifiable from this hairstyle as Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the post-doctoral research associate who spearheaded the arsenic research (see 2421: Tower of Babel for another female scientist who is identifiable by her hairstyle)\u2014preparing for their press conferences announcing the details of the discovery.\nThe trio are worried that the press conference about their discovery will be less exciting to the reporters, because the press are expecting news of life on Saturn 's largest moon, Titan . The researchers decide to try and make the event more exciting, but they don't know how to throw a good party. As a result, they look up advice on the internet and decide to serve cocktails and hors d'\u0153uvres to fit the theme of the event.\nThe final panel shows the result, where the reporters are either dead or dying. It is implied that in order to fit the theme the researchers have laced the food and drinks with arsenic.\nArsenic is a chemical element which is known to be poisonous to humans and most other life forms. In 2010 NASA announced the discovery of bacteria GFAJ-1 (an abbreviation for \"get Felisa a job\") and claimed it to be able to sustain itself when starved of phosphorus, by substituting arsenic for a small percentage of its phosphorus. Most scientists did not believe in this and it was disproven in 2012. [1]\nThe comic draws its humor by picking on both scientists and reporters. It is a common theme in xkcd to show scientists who may be extremely clever within their field, but sometimes lack common sense and are inept at social situations. Reporters are often criticized for over sensationalizing discoveries and hunting for exciting stories.\n[Three people, a curly, dark-haired girl with a ponytail (identifiable from context and hairstyle as Felisa Wolfe-Simon), Megan, and Cueball, stand looking at a laptop screen, which is sitting on a desk. Dr. Wolfe-Simon is pointing at the screen. There is no speech line down to her, but from her posture it must be assumed she does the talking written above the three.] Wolfe-Simon: Our arsenic-based DNA discovery is cool, but these reporters are expecting life on Titan! Our press conference will be such a letdown!\n[Wolfe-Simon turns around to face Megan, zooming in so Cueball is not in the frame.] Wolfe-Simon: Okay, we need to make it more exciting for them. How do you make an event entertaining? Megan: Dunno, I suck at parties. Music, I guess?\n[Wolfe-Simon turns back around and leans over to start typing on the computer, while the other two look on. Megan puts her hand to her chin.] Wolfe-Simon: WikiHow says you can \"serve cocktails and hors d'\u0153rves that fit the theme of your event.\" Megan: Easy enough!\n[Wolfe-Simon stands on a podium behind a lectern ready to deliver the news, while Cueball stands amongst the audience, holding a tray with three drinks glasses. A fourth glass lies at foot of the lectern on the podium. Two Cueball-like guys in the audience are lying on the floor, one of them having fallen backwards in his chair, while a third Cueball-like guy is still standing but has his hands up to his throat as he is suffocating. Finally, Ponytail is slumped over in her seat with her head on her chest. One empty chair is still standing.]\nThe words \"hors d'oerves\" at the comic are just a misspelling by Randall for \"hors d'oeuvres\" (in French \"hors d'\u0153uvre\" both singular and plural). The English pronunciation of these words is awr-DURVZ \/\u0254r\u02c8d\u025crvz\/, with the R before the V, not after, which explains the mistake. [2] As opposed to the original French pronunciation, where the v and r keep the same order. [3]\n"}
{"id":830,"title":"Genetic Analysis","image_title":"Genetic Analysis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/830","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/genetic_analysis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/830:_Genetic_Analysis","transcript":"Cueball: Did my genetic tests come back? Megan: Yeah. Sit down. Cueball: Is it bad news? What are my risk factors?\n[Cueball is now sitting in the chair awaiting her answer. Megan looks down at the clipboard.] Megan: We can't be sure about this, but we've analyzed genes on several of your chromosomes and it's hard to avoid the conclusion:\n[Megan puts down the clipboard and looks at Cueball as she delivers her news. Cueball puts his hands to his face in dismay.] Megan: At some point, your parents had sex. Cueball: Oh God! Megan: Stay calm! It's possible it was just once! Cueball: I... I need to be alone.\n","explanation":"Genetic testing is a medical procedure where researchers analyze your DNA and family history to determine if you have elevated risk factors for diseases such as heart conditions and cancer. Here, the doctor appears to be delivering the results of Cueball 's genetic test but instead tells him that his parents had sex at some point.\nPeople generally don't like thinking about their parents having sex, but it obviously happened, since having sex is usually the precondition for having children, [ citation needed ] so this test result is completely unsurprising. If the doctor only came to this conclusion after analyzing genes on several of Cueball's chromosomes, this could have been done in order to verify that Cueball's DNA indeed resembles the DNA of his supposed parents i.e., that the people whom he has always viewed as his parents are indeed his genetic parents. However, the alternative might be even more disturbing.\nThe title text notes that he could be an in-vitro fertilization baby, which does not require the parents to directly have sex. However, it seems to suggest that Cueball's mother was very attractive in her college years (or that she was pregnant). Thus, Cueball's mother probably did have sex (regardless of whether or not it was with Cueball's father). This is a reference to the stereotype that college students engage in large amounts of sex.\nCueball: Did my genetic tests come back? Megan: Yeah. Sit down. Cueball: Is it bad news? What are my risk factors?\n[Cueball is now sitting in the chair awaiting her answer. Megan looks down at the clipboard.] Megan: We can't be sure about this, but we've analyzed genes on several of your chromosomes and it's hard to avoid the conclusion:\n[Megan puts down the clipboard and looks at Cueball as she delivers her news. Cueball puts his hands to his face in dismay.] Megan: At some point, your parents had sex. Cueball: Oh God! Megan: Stay calm! It's possible it was just once! Cueball: I... I need to be alone.\n"}
{"id":831,"title":"Weather Radar","image_title":"Weather Radar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/831","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/weather_radar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/831:_Weather_Radar","transcript":"[A black dot on a pixelated weather radar screen.] Sigh. Just a few clouds.\n[The clouds develop into orange, to the left of the dot.] Whoa! Huge storm out of nowhere!\n[The orange becomes red, and the storm moves towards the dot.] It's growing! And headed right for me! Awesome!\n[The storm splits in half.] Hey! What's it...\n[The two halves of the storm pass by the dot.] Dammit! Again?!\nWhen the folks at the weather offices see you refreshing the radar too often, they start teasing you.\n","explanation":"A weather radar is a device which uses the reflection of radio waves from rain or snow to detect where there is rainfall. The information from the radar is then shown on a map. In this case green means light rain while red or white represent very heavy rain - possibly a thunderstorm . These maps can be quite beautiful and mesmerizing to look at. In this case the speaker (who is located where the black dot is) enjoys watching interesting, unexpected events on the radar and is surprised to see a massive, unexpected storm heading straight for him. A storm indeed appears but splits in half and passes either side of him. The reaction of the speaker shows that this has happened before.\nThe caption suggests that this happens when the people who run the radar notice you looking at the page enough they tease you by adding a fake storm coming towards you which then disappears just as it approaches the speaker.\nThe title text explores how our perceptions are often inaccurate - someone may think that there are fewer storms than when they were young or that certain songs come up more often on their MP3 player, even when they don't. There are lots of these types of biases in judgement .\n[A black dot on a pixelated weather radar screen.] Sigh. Just a few clouds.\n[The clouds develop into orange, to the left of the dot.] Whoa! Huge storm out of nowhere!\n[The orange becomes red, and the storm moves towards the dot.] It's growing! And headed right for me! Awesome!\n[The storm splits in half.] Hey! What's it...\n[The two halves of the storm pass by the dot.] Dammit! Again?!\nWhen the folks at the weather offices see you refreshing the radar too often, they start teasing you.\n"}
{"id":832,"title":"Tic-Tac-Toe","image_title":"Tic-Tac-Toe","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/832","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tic_tac_toe.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/832:_Tic-Tac-Toe","transcript":"[The comic comprises two large square maps, each divided into nine sections, some of which are further subdivided in the same way. The subdivisions continue down for up to five levels, and the lower map has more tiny diagrams than the upper. The smallest divisions at every scale are completed tic-tac-toe games. At the smallest divisions some of the moves are too small to see.]\nComplete map of optimal Tic-Tac-Toe moves\nYour move is given by the position of the largest red symbol on the grid. When your opponent picks a move, zoom in on the region of the grid where they went. Repeat.\nMap for X: [The first square map.]\nMap for O: [The second square map.]\n","explanation":"In what follows we will use numpad notation for tic-tac-toe, i.e.:\nEach map shows every possible combination of moves which will result in that side winning or tying. It assumes that X moves first, and its optimal move is X7. Any corner would do, so X1, X3 and X9 are also optimal moves. The map for X has a big red X7 (650\u00d7650 pixels), and the 8 remaining grids have a smaller (210\u00d7210) black X7.\nThe map for O has more combinations, because in this case X is not assumed to be optimal. All 9 subgrids have one big (210\u00d7210) black X and one big red O.\nNote that only optimal moves are shown. For example, you can't find a grid beginning with X2 in Map of X, because X2 is not an optimal move.\nIn map for O you can find a 660\u00d7660 grid beginning with X2. Since the optimal answer is O5, you won't find X2, O8, for example.\nExample 1\nThe largest red X in Map for X is X7. This means that O must go to cell 7 in  Map for O. The largest red O in this subgrid is the center cell O5. Therefore X must magnify cell 5 in the map for X and look for a big red X, which is X3, i.e. in the cell (6, 4) in a 9\u00d79 grid. This can be repeated until one of the players wins or there is a tie.\nExample 2\nDownload http:\/\/xkcd.com\/832_large\/ and edit it. Delete the upper part. Now you have a picture sized 2040\u00d72150 pixels, with title MAP FOR O.\nAssume X used the center cell, X5. You as O must magnify the center cell in the 3\u00d73 map for O. Better still, select that cell and delete everything else. Now you have a picture sized 670\u00d7670 pixels, with a big red O7 and a big black X5. You must move O7 this time.\nAssume X moves X9.\nIn your drawing program you select cell 9, which is 220\u00d7220 pixels. Look for the biggest red O, which is O1. You can see you blocked a winning move.\nNow X, naively, plays X3\nYou select cell 3 in your drawing program, which is 73\u00d773 pixels and looks like this\nThe O in cell 4 is red, which is your winning move.\nTitle text\nThe title text is a reference to the 1983 movie WarGames . In that movie, by playing Tic-Tac-Toe the AI realizes that some games cannot be won when all the players play flawlessly, and subsequently concludes that the only way to win at the nuclear warfare \"game\" is not to play.\n1)\u00a0In Map for X, the grid for X7, O9, X1, O4, X3 (i.e. go to Map for X, select cell 9, and then select cell 4) shows the same picture for O5 and O6. Those pictures belong to O6.\n\nThe correct pictures should be:\n2)\u00a0In Map for X, the grid for X7, O1, X9, O8, X3  (i.e. go to Map for X, select cell 1, and then select cell 8) shows the same picture for O2 and O5. Those pictures belong to O2. The correct pictures should be:\n3)\u00a0In Map for O, the grid for X8, O5, X2, O6 (i.e. go to Map for O, select cell 8, and then select cell 2) shows the same picture for X1 and X3. Those pictures belong to X3. The correct pictures should be:\n4)\u00a0In Map for O, the grid for X2, O5, X8, O4 (i.e. go to Map for O, select cell 2, and then select cell 8) shows the same picture for X7 and X9. Those pictures belong to X7. The correct pictures should be:\n5)\u00a0In Map for O, the grid for X6, O5, X4, O2 (i.e. go to Map for O, select cell 6, and then select cell 4) shows the same picture for X1 and X7. Those pictures belong to X1.\n\nThe correct pictures should be:\n6)\u00a0Typography coloring issue: in Map for O, X5, O7, X3, O1, X4, O6,  the O6 should be red to show that it's the latest move, instead of black.\n7)\u00a0Another typography coloring issue: in Map for O, X1, O5, X4, O7, X3, O2, X6, O9, X8,  the X8 is red, but in Map for O all X should be black.\n8)\u00a0In Map for O, there are eight \"strategy\" mistakes, when the O player could have won the game but doesn't. These can be found on:\nThe same on six other symmetrical games to the above.\n9)\u00a0In Map for O, there are four further \"strategy\" mistakes, when the O player could have won the game but doesn't. These can be found on:\nThe squares for X2 and X3 should be:\nand\nrespectively. The same on three other symmetrical games to the above.\n10) \u00a0In the map for O, center panel (first move X5), in the third level nested panel for X5, O7, X2, O8, X9, O1, move X2 from the second level \"parent\" panel is missing. The panel is depicted as:\nwhere [] are the fourth-level nested panels, but should be:\nSame for the symmetrical game X5, O7, X6, O4, X1, O9, where X6 is missing.\nhttp:\/\/xkcd.com\/832_large\/\n[The comic comprises two large square maps, each divided into nine sections, some of which are further subdivided in the same way. The subdivisions continue down for up to five levels, and the lower map has more tiny diagrams than the upper. The smallest divisions at every scale are completed tic-tac-toe games. At the smallest divisions some of the moves are too small to see.]\nComplete map of optimal Tic-Tac-Toe moves\nYour move is given by the position of the largest red symbol on the grid. When your opponent picks a move, zoom in on the region of the grid where they went. Repeat.\nMap for X: [The first square map.]\nMap for O: [The second square map.]\n"}
{"id":833,"title":"Convincing","image_title":"Convincing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/833","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/convincing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/833:_Convincing","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking. Megan has a board.] Cueball: I think we should give it another shot. Megan: We should break up, and I can prove it.\n[The second panel is the graph. A series of points moves steadily downward.] Our Relationship.\n[Cueball looks at the graph.] Cueball: Huh.\nCueball: Maybe you're right. Megan: I knew data would convince you. Cueball: No, I just think I can do better than someone who doesn't label her axes.\n","explanation":"This comic is a typical xkcd compilation. Relationships , math , graphs and of course, the twist. At 523: Decline Cueball's fascination with graphs seems to have retaliated against him. Cueball wants to get back together with Megan , but she declines and shows him a graph showing why. She thinks that the downward trend of the graph will convince him that their relationship is also in decline. But, Cueball takes that as this is a woman who does not follow proper protocol, since she does not label the axes (plural for axis) on her graph. We do not even know the unit of measure on the graph, let alone what each axis corresponds to. For all we know, the horizontal axis could be labeled \"Time\" and the vertical axis could be labeled \"Crappiness of Relationship\" or \"Unawesomeness of Relationship\". In that case, a downward trend would be a positive thing.\nIn the twist, Cueball sees that he can do better than this woman and switches his position and decides he is going to break up with her.\nCueball has already broken up with people over graphs before (see 539: Boyfriend ). Ironically, he or a different Cueball gave a similar graph with vaguely-labelled axes in 523: Decline .\nThe title text points out the irony that if the axes had been labelled, then Cueball would be able to use it to determine exactly how much better a relationship he could get, since he could read how crappy the present one is. Yet he would lose the twist at the end, so that the graph data would have to convince him and not the lack of labels.\n\"Someone who doesn't label her axes\" sounds like an inversion of \"someone who labels her exes\", which is an accusation sometimes levelled in break-up situations.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking. Megan has a board.] Cueball: I think we should give it another shot. Megan: We should break up, and I can prove it.\n[The second panel is the graph. A series of points moves steadily downward.] Our Relationship.\n[Cueball looks at the graph.] Cueball: Huh.\nCueball: Maybe you're right. Megan: I knew data would convince you. Cueball: No, I just think I can do better than someone who doesn't label her axes.\n"}
{"id":834,"title":"Wikileaks","image_title":"Wikileaks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/834","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wikileaks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/834:_Wikileaks","transcript":"[The logo of Anonymous (but without the question mark), a black formal suit with no head, is talking.] Anonymous: We are Anonymous. We are legion. We are no one and everyone. Anonymous: And we are here to fight for WikiLeaks.\n[The panel is presented as the front page of WikiLeaks, in a browser.] New Leak: Names, addresses, IPs, and phone numbers of everyone in Anonymous. Download Now\nAnonymous: ...Dammit, Julian.\n","explanation":"This comic references WikiLeaks , a site to which classified data can be sent for publication, while nobody would know who leaked the data.  Many people dislike WikiLeaks, but proponents claim that, since government is supposed to work for the people, all government information should be available to anyone who wants to see it. WikiLeaks' actions are illegal in most countries, and the people maintaining WikiLeaks stay anonymous, with the notable exception of Julian Assange , the spokesperson. Among the supporters of Wikileaks are the 4chan-based activism\/hacker group Anonymous , who, for the week or so prior to this comic's release, used DDoS attacks to take down servers for companies that aided the governments of the world in taking down Wikileaks and its CEO, Julian Assange. Amazon, PayPal and MasterCard were all targets of Anonymous. The claim 'We are legion' is a reference to Mark chapter 5 in the Bible, in which Jesus throws out a group of demons that call themselves Legion, \"for we are many.\"\nThe comic imagines an ironic scenario in which WikiLeaks, the organization Anonymous fought to protect, stays true to their mission of releasing secrets to the public, and publishes the personal information of Anonymous members. The joke in the comic notes a contradiction in Anonymous's position, relying on strict secrecy of its members' private information while supporting an anti-secrecy organization like WikiLeaks. This may be a reference to an incident in 2009 when WikiLeaks published a leaked list of some of their anonymous donors, following their then-policy of complete impartiality regarding leaks.\nIn theory, Anonymous consists of everyone who takes steps to remain anonymous, not merely the hackers and criminals. In practice, Julian would merely have to post a list of Wikileaks contributors.\nThe title text appears to be a news wire from during the Vietnam War when Lyndon B. Johnson was President in the United States. The students were calling to protest the War, in what xkcd implicates as the first DDoS attack. A DDoS attack is a Distributed Denial of Service attack, one of Anonymous' favorite tactics, in which the attackers send vast quantities of traffic from many different points to take down a web server, or, in the case of the title text, a phone network. Taken as a whole, the title text satirizes news reports in which a DDoS attack is confused with an actual hack, as only in the latter does the attacker gain (partial) access to the system itself.\n[The logo of Anonymous (but without the question mark), a black formal suit with no head, is talking.] Anonymous: We are Anonymous. We are legion. We are no one and everyone. Anonymous: And we are here to fight for WikiLeaks.\n[The panel is presented as the front page of WikiLeaks, in a browser.] New Leak: Names, addresses, IPs, and phone numbers of everyone in Anonymous. Download Now\nAnonymous: ...Dammit, Julian.\n"}
{"id":835,"title":"Tree","image_title":"Tree","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/835","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tree.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/835:_Tree","transcript":"[There is a binary Christmas tree, with each node a ball, and lights strung between parent and child nodes. Beneath it is a heap of presents - sorted with the largest on top, smaller presents connected to it with string. Next to the tree is Cueball and his parents, Hairbun and another Cueball.] Cueball: It's a Christmas tree with a heap of presents underneath! Mother: ...We're not inviting you home next year.\n","explanation":"Cueball turns his family's living room Christmas tree into a cringingly-awful programming pun. His parents, Hairbun and a father-Cueball, are so unamused, he's not welcome back next year.\nTrees are data structures in computer science, based on two simple rules:\nA binary tree is a tree where each node has spaces for exactly 2 children.\nThe \"Christmas tree\" is a basic representation of a binary tree - the star at the top is the root node, and the lights running down indicate the connections between parent and child. Contrary to what the terms \"root\" and \"leaf\" might imply, trees in computer science are typically represented upside-down, with the root on top and the leaves fanning out below.\nThe Christmas tree is constructed based on no apparent rules, but the main power of binary trees comes in organizing them according to specific rules. Because code that runs later can assume the data is organized in this specific way, it can use different algorithms that make things run faster. One way of doing this is with a heap. A heap is a special kind of tree (usually a binary tree, but in this case a quaternary tree), subject to one additional rule:\n\"Less than\" in this case can refer to any comparison that can be made between two nodes - in this case, it's based on the size of the presents. Of course, there's a cost to all this; the heap must first be placed in that order. Not only that, but if a node gets removed from the heap, the heap has to be \"rebuilt\" to put it back in the right order. This is referenced in the title text - if Billy opens the root present, several comparisons must be done to shift other presents in its place to preserve the heap rule.\nIn 1308: Christmas Lights a similar strange Christmas tree has been constructed using the electromagnetic spectrum.\n[There is a binary Christmas tree, with each node a ball, and lights strung between parent and child nodes. Beneath it is a heap of presents - sorted with the largest on top, smaller presents connected to it with string. Next to the tree is Cueball and his parents, Hairbun and another Cueball.] Cueball: It's a Christmas tree with a heap of presents underneath! Mother: ...We're not inviting you home next year.\n"}
{"id":836,"title":"Sickness","image_title":"Sickness","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/836","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sickness.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/836:_Sickness","transcript":"[The three panels are arranged diagonally, upper left to bottom right.] [Two people, Cueball and White Hat, are walking past a tree.] White Hat: So, has this sickness opened you up to looking for answers beyond science? Cueball: ...no, not really.\n[Cueball turns to face White Hat.] Cueball: We've groped for comfort before the slings and arrows of fortune for millennia, and I begrudge nobody their sources of solace. Cueball: But Science provides tools . Cueball: $100 billion a year in scientific studies and medical R&D has bought us some pretty damn powerful slings and arrows of our own. Cueball: This world is amazing, and I'm going to live to experience more of it thanks to people who refused to gracefully accept the ineffability of reality. Cueball: I find my courage where I can, but I take my weapons from science.\nCueball: Because they work , bitches.\n","explanation":"This comic was published 2 months after Randall 's then fianc\u00e9e, now wife, was diagnosed with breast cancer (see Category:Cancer ), which is likely what inspired this comic - even though Cueball sounds like he is the one afflicted by the sickness. The comic is thus about the existential questions that might arise from such a crisis. The moral could be interpreted as that you shouldn't begrudge your fellow human being, regardless of where they find comfort.\nAlso, any sentence is instantly funny if, at the end of it, you address your audience as \"bitches\". It may also be a reference to 54: Science .\n\"Slings and arrows of fortune\" is an allusion to the \" To be, or not to be \" soliloquy in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark . Hamlet asks himself whether it is \"Nobler in the mind to suffer \/ The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune\" (to resign oneself to one's fate and endure what may come), or to \"take Arms against a Sea of troubles, \/ and by opposing end them\" (to commit suicide and end suffering); he ultimately concludes that we would rather face the dangers and pains we know on Earth than whatever unknown new ones may come in the afterlife. Cueball appears to agree with Hamlet, thanking \"the people who refused to gracefully accept the ineffability of reality\": Religion and spirituality can give him the moral courage to face his death, but he'd much prefer to not die in the first place, and won't have to, thanks to medical and scientific innovation. (Actually he will have to eventually. Medical and scientific innovation simply delay the inevitable events of death and entropy.)\nThe title text is a pun based on Cueball's newfound confidence, asserting that his statement \"because they work, bitches\" has a 95% confidence interval.\n[The three panels are arranged diagonally, upper left to bottom right.] [Two people, Cueball and White Hat, are walking past a tree.] White Hat: So, has this sickness opened you up to looking for answers beyond science? Cueball: ...no, not really.\n[Cueball turns to face White Hat.] Cueball: We've groped for comfort before the slings and arrows of fortune for millennia, and I begrudge nobody their sources of solace. Cueball: But Science provides tools . Cueball: $100 billion a year in scientific studies and medical R&D has bought us some pretty damn powerful slings and arrows of our own. Cueball: This world is amazing, and I'm going to live to experience more of it thanks to people who refused to gracefully accept the ineffability of reality. Cueball: I find my courage where I can, but I take my weapons from science.\nCueball: Because they work , bitches.\n"}
{"id":837,"title":"Coupon Code","image_title":"Coupon Code","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/837","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coupon_code.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/837:_Coupon_Code","transcript":"[The panel shows an online shopping form.] Shipping: $14.08 Total: $80.02 If you have a coupon code, enter it here: [An empty form.] Check out\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball is looking at his computer.]\n[The empty form is now filled in. The rest of the panel shows the same page.] Form: In 1987, you quietly took something from the house of a dying woman. You thought nobody knew. You were wrong.\n[Cueball is sitting at his computer.] Click\n[The form is updated.] Shipping: $14.08 Total: $80.02 ---------------- Discount Applied: -$80.02 Final price: $0.00 Thank you -Your order has been placed-\n","explanation":"Some online stores allow you to enter a coupon code for a discount on one of their products. Coupon codes may be a single, simple word related to the product or seller or a complex sequence of characters.\nIn this comic, Cueball is buying something online, and he comes across the option to use a coupon code for a discount before checking out. Instead of entering a coupon code, which is often a random sequence of numbers and letters, he chooses to enters a long and detailed blackmail message in the normally short coupon code form, hoping that blackmail could scare the seller and serve the way a coupon code would. This works so well that, instead of just receiving a small discount on the items he bought, Cueball is discounted the full price of the product he's buying.\nThe humor comes from the fact that Cueball's intimidation works as if the online seller checking the coupon codes was an actual person, and not a computer, which is how coupon codes are checked. In addition, his blackmail message was far too detailed and specific that it could only be used on a certain person and would have virtually no chance of succeeding, unless he knows the seller so well that he even knows about crimes he did secretly.\nThe title text references 325: A-Minus-Minus ; it has become a running gag that bobcats are occasionally sent by mail by Black Hat in various comics. By blackmailing the seller, it is unlikely that the seller will want to antagonize Cueball by sending him something that may lead to his injury.\n[The panel shows an online shopping form.] Shipping: $14.08 Total: $80.02 If you have a coupon code, enter it here: [An empty form.] Check out\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball is looking at his computer.]\n[The empty form is now filled in. The rest of the panel shows the same page.] Form: In 1987, you quietly took something from the house of a dying woman. You thought nobody knew. You were wrong.\n[Cueball is sitting at his computer.] Click\n[The form is updated.] Shipping: $14.08 Total: $80.02 ---------------- Discount Applied: -$80.02 Final price: $0.00 Thank you -Your order has been placed-\n"}
{"id":838,"title":"Incident","image_title":"Incident","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/838","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/incident.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/838:_Incident","transcript":"[Rob is sitting at a computer. The computer's prompt is shown.]\n[Megan approaches.] Rob: Hey \u2014 who does sudo report these \"incidents\" to ? Megan: You know, I've never checked.\n[Santa Claus is sitting at a desk supported by candy canes, with a red monitor. On the wall are two lists labeled 'naughty' and 'nice'. He is in the process of adding a line to the 'naughty' list.]\n","explanation":"This comic was posted on Christmas Eve . While Christmas is principally a Christian holiday, celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25, there are many traditions around it, among them a tradition that on Christmas Eve Santa Claus will make his round delivering gifts to good children.\nRob sits behind a UNIX computer and tried to change his user account from his normal access to the access of a super user by using the command \" sudo su \". Sudo is a famous phrase in xkcd lore, made famous by comic 149: Sandwich . Before allowing administrator access (as root user), it asks for a password. The field is blank because, in most UNIX systems, the characters of the password are not shown. When Rob is unable to use the command his account is not authorized and the system says that the incident \"will be reported\" (usually to the system administrator, so they can see if someone is making repeated attempts at accessing administrator privileges).\nIn the comic, however, sudo and the system report the incidents to Santa Claus , who, in Christmas lore, makes a list of who is naughty and who is nice. If you are nice then you get presents, while if you are naughty, you get a lump of coal. When sudo reports to Santa that Rob's account is not authorized, he puts Rob on the naughty list.\nIn the title text, which is a parody of the famous Christmas song, \"Santa Claus Is Coming To Town\", \/var\/spool\/mail\/root is the root (superuser) mailbox on a Linux system, where the incident described in the comic would commonly be reported to.\n[Rob is sitting at a computer. The computer's prompt is shown.]\n[Megan approaches.] Rob: Hey \u2014 who does sudo report these \"incidents\" to ? Megan: You know, I've never checked.\n[Santa Claus is sitting at a desk supported by candy canes, with a red monitor. On the wall are two lists labeled 'naughty' and 'nice'. He is in the process of adding a line to the 'naughty' list.]\n"}
{"id":839,"title":"Explorers","image_title":"Explorers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/839","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/explorers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/839:_Explorers","transcript":"[A black bishop, Ba3, and a white knight, Nc3, are on a three by three chessboard. Both are on white squares. There is a heap of supplies at b2, also a white square. The chessboard is mounted on rockets and appears to be flying through the air.] Ba3: Mission Control, come in. This is Ba3 on the capsule calling Ke5 on the home board. We're on track and approaching the Coast of Catan. Our ETA is\u2014 Nc3: Control, this is Nc3. Bishop put all our food in the center so I can't get it. I demand\u2014 Ba3: Control, knight will get his food back when he stops hopping around bragging about how comfy the black squares are. I swear to God, I'm this close to capturing him and completing the misson alone.\n","explanation":"This comic blends board games such as chess , The Settlers of Catan , and Battleship , with exploration , making possible references to space exploration and the Age of Discovery .\nThe typical representation of explorers has them travel from their homeland aboard a ship to unknown distant places. The travel can get very long, implying the need for food supplies on the ship; and the fact that the crew members have to live together with little room (the ship) for such a long time, with possibilities of failure, getting lost or dying for various reasons, can often lead to tensions between some of them. In the Age of Exploration the explorers were mainly sailors from Europe traveling on the sea to other continents, whereas in space exploration they are astronauts or robots from Earth traveling in space to other planets (or whatever celestial bodies), but the general concepts of exploration remain the same.\nHere the explorers are two chess pieces, a knight and a bishop; they have left their \"home board\", presumably a full 8x8 chess board, aboard a smaller \"capsule\" made of a small 3x3 chess board in motion.  It could be drifting in the sea; rolling along a hard surface on wheels or casters, as indicated by the small circles by each corner; or flying through space with the circles as rockets.  The drawing is somewhat ambiguous.  They are apparently headed for a Settlers of Catan board, and already passed near a Battleship board, so these game boards are like islands or regions which the chess pieces explore, coming from a chess board.\nBa3, Nc3 and Ke5 are the identification of chess pieces and their respective position: Ba3 is a bishop on the A3 square, Nc3 a knight on the C3 square, and Ke5 a king on the E5 square. Chess is pretty much a representation of the structure of medieval European society (with the king and queen being the most crucial pieces, the bishops representing the somewhat powerful clergy, the knights corresponding to the armies, the rook alluding the castles, and the pawns being, as the medieval working classes, the most numerous and disposable assets); so chess pieces exploring other places, approaching the \"coast of Catan\", and reporting to the king (\"calling Ke5\"), is reminiscent of explorers from Europe who under their king's jurisdiction set sail to other continents during the Age of Exploration.\nThe explorers are communicating with a \" mission control \", which is common in space exploration. Also, an \"ETA\" is an estimated time of arrival .\nIn chess, the knight and the bishop have different move constraints. The knight can only move two squares horizontally and one square vertically, or two vertically and one horizontally, so on the capsule the knight explorer can only go from one corner square to a black square, or vice-versa. The bishop can only move diagonally, so this bishop is bound to move only on the white squares. The knight is also the only piece that can \"jump\" over other pieces, which seems to annoy the bishop, hence the \"hopping around\"; apparently the bishop put all the food onto the middle square, which the knight can't reach, because the knight was taunting him about his not being able to get onto a black square.\nThe two pieces are from the opposite chess camps (one black and the other white). This can be a reference to multinational space mission crews, where formerly opponent nations joined their efforts on space missions. But in chess it also means they can capture each other, by getting on the square where the other stands. Here, with the chess turn-by-turn gameplay, the knight won't be able to capture the bishop (except of course in case of error or dumb move), since the bishop will always be able to escape, whereas the bishop is actually one or two moves away from capturing the knight. So saying that he's \"this close\" to capturing him is a play on words, he is \"this close\" as in a few moves away, as well as \"this close\" as in severely annoyed and about to act on it.\nAssuming it\u2019s the bishop\u2019s turn this capture could be accomplished by the Bishop moving to C1, there after the knight would be forced to move to either A2 or B1. The Bishop then moves to B2. The knight then must move to C1 or C3 if it moved to A2, or A3 or C3 if it moved to B1 \u2013 all valid positions from which the Bishop could capture. If it\u2019s the knights turn, the situation is the same except the Bishop would simply move to B2 regardless of the knight move.\nFinally, the title text adds two jokes. The Settlers of Catan board has an hexagonal grid, which means the chess pieces will have difficulty to move on it, since they are used to moving on a square grid. This can draw a parallel with explorers facing, in distant lands, weather conditions, wild animals, atmosphere or whatever condition, to which they are not used at all in their homeland. Battleship is a game where players send shots on the opponent's board, which is why the chess capsule received shots when it passed within firing range of a Battleship board; in pure chess style, it's the pawns of the crew, the least valuable and most disposable chess pieces, who took the shots.  It could also be a reference to the en passant chess move, where, under certain conditions, a pawn can be captured after having \"passed within firing range\" (so to speak) of an enemy pawn; this could explain why only the pawns were lost in passing Battleship.\n[A black bishop, Ba3, and a white knight, Nc3, are on a three by three chessboard. Both are on white squares. There is a heap of supplies at b2, also a white square. The chessboard is mounted on rockets and appears to be flying through the air.] Ba3: Mission Control, come in. This is Ba3 on the capsule calling Ke5 on the home board. We're on track and approaching the Coast of Catan. Our ETA is\u2014 Nc3: Control, this is Nc3. Bishop put all our food in the center so I can't get it. I demand\u2014 Ba3: Control, knight will get his food back when he stops hopping around bragging about how comfy the black squares are. I swear to God, I'm this close to capturing him and completing the misson alone.\n"}
{"id":840,"title":"Serious","image_title":"Serious","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/840","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/serious.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/840:_Serious","transcript":"[Cueball is standing next to a table. There is a can on the table.]\n[The label on the can reads, \"Serious Putty\".]\n[Cueball is looking at the table again.]\n[He reaches out to touch the can. The can speaks.] Can: Don't touch me.\n","explanation":"This comic is a play on words with the child's putty known as \" Silly Putty \", which is \"silly\" because it likes to be played with. Whereas Serious Putty does not even liked to be touched.\nAs it says in the title text PuTTY is a Windows Terminal client. Impact is a font that is distributed with Windows that is used in the vast majority of \" meme \" image macros, such as lolcat pictures.\n[Cueball is standing next to a table. There is a can on the table.]\n[The label on the can reads, \"Serious Putty\".]\n[Cueball is looking at the table again.]\n[He reaches out to touch the can. The can speaks.] Can: Don't touch me.\n"}
{"id":841,"title":"Audiophiles","image_title":"Audiophiles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/841","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/audiophiles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/841:_Audiophiles","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking over the telephone. The first two panels are split diagonally. Cueball is at a store, holding a box, and Megan is consulting with him.] Cueball: Do we have an RCA-to-3.5mm female-female plug? I'm getting some speakers for the new Xbox, since the monitor doesn't have any. Megan: Are they crappy laptop speakers? Ugh.\n[Cueball is standing next to a sale rack.] Cueball: Does it matter? I just want to hear if I'm getting shot at, not savor every detail of a beautiful musical soundscape. Megan: You've never heard a beautiful musical soundscape. You listen to 96kbps flv rips from YouTube.\n[Megan is walking.] Cueball: Whatever. I'm just going to get these $20 speakers. Five watts will be plenty. Megan: Five watts for a living room sound system? Is that a joke?\n[Zoomed in panel on Cueball]: Cueball: No, this is a joke: How many audiophiles does it take to change a lightbulb? Megan: How many? Cueball: I'll tell you later\u2014you wouldn't appreciate the punchline over this 12kbps cell phone codec. click\n","explanation":"Cueball is buying some new speakers for his television, and asks Megan if they have the right cord to hook them up. Megan begins chiding him for using \"crappy laptop speakers\", i.e. low-powered, low-quality speakers that don't faithfully reproduce the sound.\nCueball and Megan reproduce the two extremes of the arguments: Cueball simply wants to play a first-person shooter video game (whose soundtrack will either be obscured by gunfire or completely absent during gameplay), regardless of the sound quality, whereas Megan, the audiophile, values music everywhere. Cueball seems to think that's unnecessary, and Megan snipes back that he's never heard beauty, so he wouldn't know; after all, he thinks low-bit-rate re-encodings from YouTube (at the time, notorious for dodgy sound quality) are perfectly fine music. Cueball, frustrated with Megan's perfectionism, states that he's just going to buy cheap 5-watt speakers. While 5 watts may be a lot if you're trying to fill the immediate area with sound from your MP3 player, it'd sound tiny and hollow coming out of a television across the room. An incredulous Megan protests, calling his ideas \"a joke.\" An exasperated Cueball tells a lightbulb joke , the content of which implies that the content doesn't matter to her, only the quality in which it's delivered to her ear. Megan promptly hangs up because of the bad joke (or possibly because of the bad audio quality?).\nThe title text is referring to a forum post from audioholics.com (post #29, \"We gathered up a 5 [sic] of our audio buddies....\"), where a user did a blind audio test using Monster cable and coat hangers with soldered on alligator clips, and the audiophiles were unable to discern any difference. Randall instead just uses coat-hangers to connect his speakers, not getting that the point of the test was not to extol the high transmission quality of coat hanger wire but to lampoon the belief that supposedly high-quality speaker cables make an audible difference in the audio output.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking over the telephone. The first two panels are split diagonally. Cueball is at a store, holding a box, and Megan is consulting with him.] Cueball: Do we have an RCA-to-3.5mm female-female plug? I'm getting some speakers for the new Xbox, since the monitor doesn't have any. Megan: Are they crappy laptop speakers? Ugh.\n[Cueball is standing next to a sale rack.] Cueball: Does it matter? I just want to hear if I'm getting shot at, not savor every detail of a beautiful musical soundscape. Megan: You've never heard a beautiful musical soundscape. You listen to 96kbps flv rips from YouTube.\n[Megan is walking.] Cueball: Whatever. I'm just going to get these $20 speakers. Five watts will be plenty. Megan: Five watts for a living room sound system? Is that a joke?\n[Zoomed in panel on Cueball]: Cueball: No, this is a joke: How many audiophiles does it take to change a lightbulb? Megan: How many? Cueball: I'll tell you later\u2014you wouldn't appreciate the punchline over this 12kbps cell phone codec. click\n"}
{"id":842,"title":"Mark","image_title":"Mark","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/842","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mark.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/842:_Mark","transcript":"[Cueball and Science Girl are talking.] Science Girl: What's that on your arm? Cueball: The mark of a secret society.\nScience Girl: If it's secret, why tell me- Cueball: Because I know nothing. I can't betray them because I don't know who they are. I was chosen by an agent 20 years ago. That was my first and last direct contact. Cueball: It's safer that way.\nSix years later I found a piece of paper in the street with an address on it. The next day I found a can of kerosene in my garage that I'm sure I never bought. [The panel represents these actions by highlighting the mentioned objects in a world of gray.]\nI didn't know whose house it was. I just knew that I'd been given my orders. And I carried them out. [A dark figure holding the kerosene is silhouetted against a flame.]\nCueball: I don't know who or what we're fighting. Cueball: Maybe we're the bad guys. Cueball: It doesn't matter to me.\nCueball: It's enough to know that there are forces working beneath the chaos of life, and I'm a part of them.\nCueball: That whatever this \"Pen Fifteen\" club is, Cueball: I'm in it.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Science Girl asks Cueball about a mark on his arm. He apparently believes he is part of a secret society, so secret that he doesn't know anything about the society. His belief in the existence of the society, and that he is a part of it, stem from one contact with an 'agent'. Most people would immediately dismiss the idea of such a secret society, especially with no evidence of its existence, and no knowledge of the goals or even whether it is inherently good or evil.\nSix years after being 'chosen', Cueball finds the scrap of paper with an address on it, and the can of kerosene . Both of these events are not unlikely, and easily explained as simple coincidences, but Cueball somehow sees this as a command that he must burn down the house. Cueball shows that he is willing to put other people's lives at risk, destroy property and possessions, and face the possibility of prison, all because of one event six years prior.\nCueball's belief in the society, his delusional linking of the address and kerosene, and his actions in burning down the house, show how badly he wants to be part of something bigger, and to find meaning in the \"Chaos of Life\".\nThe punchline refers to an old grade school\/middle school prank (Urban Dictionary: pen 15 club , Pen 15 .) You'd typically walk up to an unsuspecting schoolmate and ask them if he wants to join the Pen Fifteen Club. You'd tell them that to join, you merely have to write the club name on them. You'd then write \"PEN15\" on their hand or arm, and everyone would laugh at them because it looks like \"PENIS\". (In a common variant, it is simply called the Pen Club, 15 is the victim's \"member number\", and the pranksters write \"PEN13\" and \"PEN14\" on themselves.) In this case, Cueball fell victim to this prank as a child without ever figuring out the joke, and the ink somehow never got washed off by showers or baths or removed by shedding skin. In reality, it would be unlikely for such a mark to last for so long. While methods of making someone's skin more permanently do exist, it is hard to imagine someone tattooing or branding \"PEN15\" on their friend's arm as a prank.\nAs for the title text, solipsism is the philosophical idea that only your own mind is sure to exist while other minds can't be really known and so those other minds are not proved to be real. In this context it might mean that the only one who can conspire would be you, hiding the truth from yourself.\n[Cueball and Science Girl are talking.] Science Girl: What's that on your arm? Cueball: The mark of a secret society.\nScience Girl: If it's secret, why tell me- Cueball: Because I know nothing. I can't betray them because I don't know who they are. I was chosen by an agent 20 years ago. That was my first and last direct contact. Cueball: It's safer that way.\nSix years later I found a piece of paper in the street with an address on it. The next day I found a can of kerosene in my garage that I'm sure I never bought. [The panel represents these actions by highlighting the mentioned objects in a world of gray.]\nI didn't know whose house it was. I just knew that I'd been given my orders. And I carried them out. [A dark figure holding the kerosene is silhouetted against a flame.]\nCueball: I don't know who or what we're fighting. Cueball: Maybe we're the bad guys. Cueball: It doesn't matter to me.\nCueball: It's enough to know that there are forces working beneath the chaos of life, and I'm a part of them.\nCueball: That whatever this \"Pen Fifteen\" club is, Cueball: I'm in it.\n"}
{"id":843,"title":"Misconceptions","image_title":"Misconceptions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/843","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/misconceptions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/843:_Misconceptions","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart the teacher is standing in front of a board, looking at a laptop computer she is holding in one hand while elocuting.] Miss Lenhart: Okay, middle school students, it's the first Tuesday in February. Miss Lenhart: This means that by law and custom, we must spend the morning reading through the Wikipedia article List of Common Misconceptions , so you can spend the rest of your lives being a little less wrong. Miss Lenhart: The guests at every party you'll ever attend thank us in advance.\n[Caption below the panel:] I wish I lived in this universe.\n","explanation":"The Wikipedia article List of common misconceptions gives a list of commonly-repeated anecdotes that are widely believed to be true, but actually are not.\nThe teacher, Miss Lenhart , is announcing that since it is the first Tuesday in February , by law and custom the reading of this article is requirement to stem the repetition of these incorrect anecdotes. (Funnily enough the comic was released the first Wednesday in January, which could just as well have been written in the comic).\nShe continues to make it clear that this is to make the students in general a little less wrong, and the main outcome will be that the guest of any future parties the students ever attend, will not have to listen to them retell these misconceptions and for that these guest will thank those who have decided on this new law in advance.\nIn the caption below the comic Randall expresses his wishes that he lived in a parallel universe where this rule had been used for many years. So he would not have to listen to all these stories at every party he goes to. Since Randall likes to correct people if they are wrong (see 386: Duty Calls ), not having to discuss with those that believe these misconceptions, would make his parties much better.\nThe title text refers to a specific one of these false stories about glass :\nThat glass , while seeming solid, is actually an extremely viscous liquid and will flow over time, as is seen on older buildings where the window panes are thicker at the bottom.\nIn reality, older manufacturing processes did not produce glass panes with as uniform thickness as modern processes, and people tended to install the uneven panes with the thicker side at the bottom for stability. Glass simply does not flow at room temperature; it's more viscous than solid lead by a factor of over a billion . The fact that glass is solid at room temperature was again referenced in a foot note, under the pipe with glass, in 1649: Pipelines .\n[Miss Lenhart the teacher is standing in front of a board, looking at a laptop computer she is holding in one hand while elocuting.] Miss Lenhart: Okay, middle school students, it's the first Tuesday in February. Miss Lenhart: This means that by law and custom, we must spend the morning reading through the Wikipedia article List of Common Misconceptions , so you can spend the rest of your lives being a little less wrong. Miss Lenhart: The guests at every party you'll ever attend thank us in advance.\n[Caption below the panel:] I wish I lived in this universe.\n"}
{"id":844,"title":"Good Code","image_title":"Good Code","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/844","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/good_code.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/844:_Good_Code","transcript":"[The comic is a flowchart In order to explain this in text, follow the line numbers. Options follow on new lines without numbers.] How to write good code. [10.] Start Project. [Go to 20.]\n[20.] Do things right or do them fast? Fast [Go to 30.] Right [Go to 40.]\n[30.] Code fast. [Go to 35.]\n[35.] Does it work yet? No [Go to 30.] Almost, but it's become a mass of kludges and spaghetti code. [Go to 50.]\n[40.] Code well. [Go to 45.]\n[45.] Are you done yet? No. [Go to 40.] No, and the requirements have changed. [Go to 50.]\n[50.] Throw it all out and start over. [Go to 10.]\n[60.]\u00a0? [Go to 70.]\n[70.] Good code.\n","explanation":"The comic references the common meme of programmers that one can't actually write good code. Either the code is done quickly with shoddy \"code style\", weak logical structure, or any number of other kludges and hacks which turn maintenance of the code into a nightmare; or else it is written well and beautifully structured, but can never be completed before changes in the situation cause the original code design to be insufficient for one or multiple reasons.\nEither situation eventually leads to the need to completely start from scratch, designing and writing the program's code all over again. Of course, the writing of this new program is also locked in the perpetual cycle of choosing between ugly\/bad code that works marginally well, or good\/pretty code that never gets completed before being obsolete.\nAdditionally, the humorous point is being further emphasized for the primary target audience, programmers, by using an infinite loop - or more precisely, 2 possible loops and 1 forced loop in the flowchart itself.\nAlso, of particular note, is the fact that Randall (the author) drives home the point of the inescapability of the infinite loop(s) by the use of the additional, disconnected, and logically unreachable portion of the flowchart. This disconnect points out that the only way to actually get to \"Good Code\" using the flow chart would be to follow a path of actions \u2014 which does not start at the prescribed place \u2014 for which there is only an unknown and possibly unknowable starting action which no one has ever discovered previously. Other flowchart comics, several of which are also infinite loops, can be found here .\nThe title text, \"You can either hang out in the Android Loop or the HURD loop,\" makes a dig at both communities: claiming that Android developers always opt for fast, ugly code, necessitating frequent fixes and updates, while Hurd developers perennially choose to \"do the job right\" but can therefore never seem to finish their project.\nThe GNU Hurd Project aims to create the kernel for the GNU Operating System (the kernel being the central and most indispensable component). The GNU Project is most famous these days as a result of GNU\/Linux (commonly called just \"Linux\"), which is an operating system that uses the Linux kernel with the GNU system environment. From the beginning the GNU Project has planned to design their own kernel, the Hurd , virtually from scratch, and given a relatively clean slate with which to work, elected to employ a number of promising and theoretically elegant design concepts . Despite or, as Randall suggests, because of this, the Hurd has been mired in development hell for many years (for decades, in fact) with little progress towards actual usability outside of a small community of kernel hackers. While runnable GNU\/Hurd operating systems do exist, they're still basically experimental, and the Hurd remains a collection of research software the design goalposts for which keep receding as other, more pragmatically-engineered technologies continue to be developed (the Linux kernel itself being the canonical first instance of this).\nFinally, the official transcript of this comic is itself somewhat humorous (an additional inside joke , if you will) in that it converts the flowchart into a simple list of instructions (aka pseudo-code) using numbered lines as reference points for identifying which instruction to read and follow next. This process is basically identical to the oft-maligned programming technique of using so-called \" goto loops .\" \u2014 Furthermore, there is also a slight cross-reference between infinite loops and goto loops which is probably being referenced, in that goto loops are often criticized (whether accurately or not) as being more likely to create unintended infinite loops in code... primarily because of the difficulty inherent in keeping track of possible entry and exit paths, especially when making edits to the code at a later time.\n[The comic is a flowchart In order to explain this in text, follow the line numbers. Options follow on new lines without numbers.] How to write good code. [10.] Start Project. [Go to 20.]\n[20.] Do things right or do them fast? Fast [Go to 30.] Right [Go to 40.]\n[30.] Code fast. [Go to 35.]\n[35.] Does it work yet? No [Go to 30.] Almost, but it's become a mass of kludges and spaghetti code. [Go to 50.]\n[40.] Code well. [Go to 45.]\n[45.] Are you done yet? No. [Go to 40.] No, and the requirements have changed. [Go to 50.]\n[50.] Throw it all out and start over. [Go to 10.]\n[60.]\u00a0? [Go to 70.]\n[70.] Good code.\n"}
{"id":845,"title":"Modern History","image_title":"Modern History","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/845","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/modern_history.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/845:_Modern_History","transcript":"[Warzone. A soldier in modern American combat gear holding a rifle turns to face Cueball, who is wearing an ersatz copy of the same uniform and clutching a wooden rifle.] Sound effect: BLAM BLAM Sound effect: KABOOM Soldier: Will you please stop imitating everything I do? Cueball: Will you please stop... My Hobby: real time war reenactment.\n","explanation":"War reenactment is a hobby in which people act out a battle from some previous time period. Theoretical \"real-time\" war reenactment takes this one step further by having someone act out a war that is actually happening at the time. This would be annoying for the actual soldiers, as it would be hard to do your job if someone was right behind you imitating (and distracting) you. It would also be hard for the reenactor to get to the war zone without getting killed or detained.\nThe title text refers to how someone would research the character that someone would play in a normal war reenactment for a more enjoyable and accurate reenactment. Once again, the title text makes a real-time version of this, having someone actually live the life of the real-time fighter. This is not a good idea for several reasons. [ citation needed ]\n[Warzone. A soldier in modern American combat gear holding a rifle turns to face Cueball, who is wearing an ersatz copy of the same uniform and clutching a wooden rifle.] Sound effect: BLAM BLAM Sound effect: KABOOM Soldier: Will you please stop imitating everything I do? Cueball: Will you please stop... My Hobby: real time war reenactment.\n"}
{"id":846,"title":"Dental Nerve","image_title":"Dental Nerve","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/846","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dental_nerve.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/846:_Dental_Nerve","transcript":"Megan: Dear Ke$ha,\nMegan: It's hard to describe the pain of a deeply infected dental nerve.\n[Megan putting her hands in a bowl.] Megan: To get an idea, put your hands in a bowl full of ice cubes. Hold them there for 90 seconds.\nMegan: Now imagine that pain in your jaw, every minute of every hour, bright and searing, washing out everything. You can't party all night. You can barely stand up. There's only the pain.\nMegan: So, some friendly advice: When you wake up in the morning, before you brush your teeth with a bottle of Jack,\nMegan: Brush them with actual toothpaste.\n","explanation":"Ke$ha is a pop\/rap singer, and this strip refers to her 2009-10 hit single \" Tik Tok .\" The song begins with the following lyrics, of which the title text is a parody:\nWake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy Grab my glasses, I'm out the door, I'm gonna hit this city Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack 'Cause when I leave for the night, I ain't coming back.\nA \"bottle of Jack\" refers to the Jack Daniel's brand of whiskey.\nThe strip depicts Megan warning Ke$ha not to neglect dental hygiene by using whiskey instead of toothpaste to freshen her breath, due to the severe pain that could result if she let the nerves in her teeth become infected. The title text displays dental-hygiene-friendly lyrics, with emphasis on certain syllables (as all-caps) to imitate the rhythm of the original song.\nMegan: Dear Ke$ha,\nMegan: It's hard to describe the pain of a deeply infected dental nerve.\n[Megan putting her hands in a bowl.] Megan: To get an idea, put your hands in a bowl full of ice cubes. Hold them there for 90 seconds.\nMegan: Now imagine that pain in your jaw, every minute of every hour, bright and searing, washing out everything. You can't party all night. You can barely stand up. There's only the pain.\nMegan: So, some friendly advice: When you wake up in the morning, before you brush your teeth with a bottle of Jack,\nMegan: Brush them with actual toothpaste.\n"}
{"id":847,"title":"Stingray Nebula","image_title":"Stingray Nebula","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/847","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stingray_nebula.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/847:_Stingray_Nebula","transcript":"[Cueball and his Cueball-like friend to the left is shown as white silhouettes against a dark sky. They're sitting on top of a grassy hill also shown inverted as white.] Cueball: I know things are tough right now. When I was going through some difficult times as a kid, I would go up on the roof and look through my telescope.\n[Zoom in on the twos white heads and upper torso only.] Cueball: One day I found a tiny star in Ara that seemed friendly. Cueball: There were millions like it, but I decided that this one was mine.\n[Zoom in only on Cueball's head and torso.] Cueball: When things got bad, I'd go find that star, and think of my favorite Tolkien quote. It's from Sam's time in Mordor.\n[The next panel is diagonally downward to the right of the previous. The upper left corner overlaps. A single star is shown above the highest peak in a jagged chain of mountains with at least five other large peaks and several smaller ones. Above the star in the black sky is a long quote.] \"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing: There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.\" \u2014 The Return of the K in g\n[Back to normal panels below the quote panel. Larger zoom than in panel two both showing the same of the two.] Friend: That's comforting! Cueball: It was rather undercut in 1987, when the light from my star's explosion reached Earth. The debris forms the Stingray Nebula.\n[Zooming further out even than the first panel, showing more of the grassy mound below the two.] Friend: There's probably a lesson there. Cueball: \"Never trust an unstable asymptotic giant branch star. Stick with main sequences and dwarfs.\" Friend: I'll, uh, keep that in mind.\n","explanation":"The Stingray Nebula , in the constellation Ara , is the youngest known planetary nebula in the galaxy. It was formed by an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) B1 supergiant , which blasted out the gas while becoming a white dwarf in 1987. Well, it happened about 18,000 years ago, but the light of the incident reached the Earth in 1987.\nThis comic went from a reassuring comic about stars at night giving hope in the darkness, but then as with most xkcd's, it took a turn.  In this case, the twist is that because Cueball 's star he got attached to exploded into a nebula, we should only become attached to stars that aren't quite as volatile as the one that formed the Stingray Nebula.\nWhile talking about his star, Cueball shares with his friend a quote from the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King , the third installment in J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy series. Sam and his friend Frodo were forced to travel through Mordor , a land of fire and death, to destroy the malevolent One Ring . The journey's hardship took a psychological toll on each of them.\nCueball compares his struggles as a kid, and his friend's struggles in the present, to Sam and Frodo's arduous journey through Mordor. Both he and Sam were able to find beauty and solace in the glimmering of some distant light. By attaching their hopes, woes and feelings to this small point of hope, they both get a sense of perspective and comfort in the fact that there is beauty in a greater sense before them.\nThe title text ties into the Tolkien quote. E\u00e4rendil , with a Silmaril strapped to his ship, Vingilot, is the Tolkienian myth explanation for the planet Venus , which has historically been mistaken for a star due to its brightness, being known as the \"morning star\" or \"evening star\". Venus will eventually (in billions of years time) be engulfed by the sun's expansion into a red giant. The source of Sam's comfort is also temporary in the long term.\n[Cueball and his Cueball-like friend to the left is shown as white silhouettes against a dark sky. They're sitting on top of a grassy hill also shown inverted as white.] Cueball: I know things are tough right now. When I was going through some difficult times as a kid, I would go up on the roof and look through my telescope.\n[Zoom in on the twos white heads and upper torso only.] Cueball: One day I found a tiny star in Ara that seemed friendly. Cueball: There were millions like it, but I decided that this one was mine.\n[Zoom in only on Cueball's head and torso.] Cueball: When things got bad, I'd go find that star, and think of my favorite Tolkien quote. It's from Sam's time in Mordor.\n[The next panel is diagonally downward to the right of the previous. The upper left corner overlaps. A single star is shown above the highest peak in a jagged chain of mountains with at least five other large peaks and several smaller ones. Above the star in the black sky is a long quote.] \"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing: There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.\" \u2014 The Return of the K in g\n[Back to normal panels below the quote panel. Larger zoom than in panel two both showing the same of the two.] Friend: That's comforting! Cueball: It was rather undercut in 1987, when the light from my star's explosion reached Earth. The debris forms the Stingray Nebula.\n[Zooming further out even than the first panel, showing more of the grassy mound below the two.] Friend: There's probably a lesson there. Cueball: \"Never trust an unstable asymptotic giant branch star. Stick with main sequences and dwarfs.\" Friend: I'll, uh, keep that in mind.\n"}
{"id":848,"title":"3D","image_title":"3D","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/848","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/3d.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/848:_3D","transcript":"[People are lined up to see a movie.] Premiering Tonight: String Theory: An Expos\u00e9 Presented In 3D!\n[The people are in a dark theater, fiddling with their glasses.] ???\n[The people angrily approach black hat, who's sitting at a desk.] Megan: Your movie was a ripoff. Cueball: It wasn't 3D at all! Black Hat: Was too. Black Hat: It's just that the third dimension is tightly rolled up and too small to observe at normal energies.\n","explanation":"String theory hypothesizes that there are many more than 3 dimensions , it's just that we can't see the rest because they're \"rolled up.\" A common metaphor is an ant on a tightrope \u2014 it has two degrees of freedom, one along the rope and one around it, but from far away we can only see one.\nSo Black Hat released his 2D movie about string theory in \"3D\", and claimed that the third dimension was there \u2014 just too small to see.\nThe title text refers to a linear particle accelerator , or \"LINAC\", which is used to create high-energy particles. Incidentally, the glasses give their particles one mega-electronvolt (symbol MeV ) of energy, which is not particularly high for a particle accelerator. The title text suggests that such moviegoers should try the accelerators at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN , since they are widely known for producing the highest energies in the millions of MeV, and thus have the best chance of unraveling the small dimensions of string theory.\nOn the xk3d prank site created along with 880: Headache , the 3D on this comic is not visible.\n[People are lined up to see a movie.] Premiering Tonight: String Theory: An Expos\u00e9 Presented In 3D!\n[The people are in a dark theater, fiddling with their glasses.] ???\n[The people angrily approach black hat, who's sitting at a desk.] Megan: Your movie was a ripoff. Cueball: It wasn't 3D at all! Black Hat: Was too. Black Hat: It's just that the third dimension is tightly rolled up and too small to observe at normal energies.\n"}
{"id":849,"title":"Complex Conjugate","image_title":"Complex Conjugate","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/849","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/complex_conjugate.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/849:_Complex_Conjugate","transcript":"[Cueball, holding a marker pen down in one hand, is standing at a whiteboard with two equations, one of which is the time-dependent Schrodinger equation and the other shows what the wavefunction equals, but from there it becomes unreadable. Below is a graph with a bell-shaped curve. There are also other unreadable markings on the board below the second equation and next to the graph.] Cueball: Okay, anyone who's feeling like they can't handle the physics here should probably just leave now.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball is seen writing on the whiteboard. This is seen from the side of the board, so it is just a thin line with a shelf at the bottom for putting the pen on.] Cueball: Because I'm multiplying the wavefunction by its complex conjugate. Cueball: That's right.\n[Dramatic zoom in on Cueball appears to be writing the final part of his next equation.] Cueball: Shit just got real .\n","explanation":"This was the second comic with one of Randall's fun facts .\nThis comic is a joke on the phrase \"Shit just got real\", which means \"something has suddenly increased in difficulty and become genuinely challenging or dangerous\".\nCueball is standing in front of a board delivering a lesson, and is about to multiply a wavefunction by its complex conjugate. A wave function is a mathematical description of a quantum system which uses complex values - numbers that have both a real part and an imaginary part. Multiplying a wavefunction by its complex conjugate is a common thing to do, as it yields the probability density of where a particle is likely to be found, which is a real-valued function.\nComplex numbers can be written in the form a + bi, where a is the real part and bi is the imaginary part. i is the imaginary unit, defined so that i\u00b2 = -1. The complex conjugate of a complex number simply reverses the sign on the imaginary part - so for the number above, the complex conjugate is a - bi.\nMultiplying the complex number by its own complex conjugate therefore yields (a + bi)(a - bi). If you multiply out the brackets, you get a\u00b2 + abi - abi - b\u00b2i\u00b2. The abi cancel each other out, and i\u00b2 can be replaced by -1. Thus, the result is a\u00b2 + b\u00b2, a real number, so \"shit just got real\" as Cueball promised.\nThe title text notes that you can make this joke in class every time a calculation is performed that drops the imaginary part from a complex number, but warns that it would be so annoying that the professor will eventually find a way to have the class without you in it. Because nonreal numbers are often considered to have no physical significance, turning them into real numbers to produce a final answer is so common that this joke would quickly become tedious.\nThe wave function shown on Cueball's board is the time-dependent Schr\u00f6dinger equation , a differential equation that the wavefunction \u03a8, which determines the possible positions of a quantum particle over time, always satisfies. The derivative should be written with \u2202\u03a8 on the top; the omission of the \u03a8 may be a mistake.\n[Cueball, holding a marker pen down in one hand, is standing at a whiteboard with two equations, one of which is the time-dependent Schrodinger equation and the other shows what the wavefunction equals, but from there it becomes unreadable. Below is a graph with a bell-shaped curve. There are also other unreadable markings on the board below the second equation and next to the graph.] Cueball: Okay, anyone who's feeling like they can't handle the physics here should probably just leave now.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball is seen writing on the whiteboard. This is seen from the side of the board, so it is just a thin line with a shelf at the bottom for putting the pen on.] Cueball: Because I'm multiplying the wavefunction by its complex conjugate. Cueball: That's right.\n[Dramatic zoom in on Cueball appears to be writing the final part of his next equation.] Cueball: Shit just got real .\n"}
{"id":850,"title":"World According to Americans","image_title":"World According to Americans","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/850","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/world_according_to_americans.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/850:_World_According_to_Americans","transcript":"THE WORLD According to a Group of AMERICANS who turned out to be unexpectedly good at geography, derailing our attempt to illustrate their country's attitude toward the rest of the world.\n[Left to right, up to down.]\n[North of Canada.] Hey so what projection should we use? I'll aim for \"Robinson.\"\n[North America.] Alaska; Canada; Hudson Bay; Qu\u00e9bec; United States Did you know Maine is actually the US state closest to Africa?; Bermuda (British!)\n[Central America.] Baja California (Mexico); Mexico; Central America; Panama Canal; Gulf of Mexico; Cuba; Hispa\u00f1ola; POR.; Jamaica Do we have to label all the Virgin Islands?\n[South America.] Rest of South America (spanish-speaking); Brazil (portugese-speaking); French, and I think Dutch and English; Tierra del Fuego\n[Greenland.] Greenland (still too big!); Yeah but the Peters map is awful; Iceland\n[Europe.] British Isles; Ireland ; Gibralter; Scandanavia; Western Europe; Eastern Europe; Black sea; Middle East\n[Africa.] Morocco; Algera; Sahara Desert; West Africa; Sudan; Rainforest DRC; Lake Victoria; Somalia; Angola; Mozambique; South Africa; Cape Horn; Madagascar\n[West of DRC.] So this is one of those things where you point out our ignorance and stereotypes? Yeah \u2013 I mean, I freely admit I don't know the African map very well, which speaks volumes in itself.\n[West Asia.] Russia; Aral sea (Gone); Various former Soviet states; Afghanistan & Pakistan; India; Mostly Muslim; Mostly Hindu\n[Indian Ocea.] Sri Lanka; Boxing Day Quake Wait, \"Boxing day\"? There's no way you're American. I read BBC News, OK?\n[East Asia.] Mongolia; Tibet (contested); China; Southeast Asia\n[Pacific Ocean.] Kamchatka Pennisula, but I admit I only know this one from Risk. Koreas; Japan, duh.; Taiwan (actually called \"The Republic of China.\" \u2013 it's complicated.); Phillipines; Malaysia; Indonesia; Sulawesi; Paupa New Guinea; Australia; Tasmania; New Zealand\n[South of Africa.] Should we include Antarctica? Let's not \u2013 these guys are looking impatient.\n","explanation":"There's a somewhat well-circulated image on the internet entitled \" The World According to Americans \" which plays on the stereotype of the ignorant American. In it, the entirety of Eastern Europe and most of Asia are entitled \"commies\" and the Middle-East as \"evil-doers,\" and so on. Later, other people created similar maps to re-do the concept. It later spread to other cultures.\nThis comic is an anti-joke playing on that idea. You expect to see something which plays on the stereotypes that exist in American culture of various parts of the world. However, instead, the map is remarkably well-informed, and shows how sampling bias can be used to conflate results. See below the table of items in the map .\nThe title text jokes that in fact the only reason that the map is fairly well annotated is that the group of people labeling it were actually on the way back from a geography bee . This could add weight to the 'Ignorant American' stereotype as these individuals should know more than the common person, implying that if even apparent geography buffs use vague labels such as \"rest of South America\" and \"various former Soviet states\" instead of using more detailed labels, the average American must be even less geographically knowledgeable (Although, as the illustrators wrote below Cape Horn, the reason they did not draw Antarctica or many South American, Middle Eastern and British countries and the lack of detail may be because the people who asked them to draw this map were beginning to 'look impatient' since they did not get the expected ignorant result.)\nA landlocked country is a country that does not border any major bodies of water. Furthering the concept, a doubly-landlocked country is a country that not only has no connection to water, but is only bordered by other landlocked countries. As the title text states, there are only two such countries in the world as of 2012: Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein . This is the type of fact that may be stereotypically expected of a geography bee competitor.\nTHE WORLD According to a Group of AMERICANS who turned out to be unexpectedly good at geography, derailing our attempt to illustrate their country's attitude toward the rest of the world.\n[Left to right, up to down.]\n[North of Canada.] Hey so what projection should we use? I'll aim for \"Robinson.\"\n[North America.] Alaska; Canada; Hudson Bay; Qu\u00e9bec; United States Did you know Maine is actually the US state closest to Africa?; Bermuda (British!)\n[Central America.] Baja California (Mexico); Mexico; Central America; Panama Canal; Gulf of Mexico; Cuba; Hispa\u00f1ola; POR.; Jamaica Do we have to label all the Virgin Islands?\n[South America.] Rest of South America (spanish-speaking); Brazil (portugese-speaking); French, and I think Dutch and English; Tierra del Fuego\n[Greenland.] Greenland (still too big!); Yeah but the Peters map is awful; Iceland\n[Europe.] British Isles; Ireland ; Gibralter; Scandanavia; Western Europe; Eastern Europe; Black sea; Middle East\n[Africa.] Morocco; Algera; Sahara Desert; West Africa; Sudan; Rainforest DRC; Lake Victoria; Somalia; Angola; Mozambique; South Africa; Cape Horn; Madagascar\n[West of DRC.] So this is one of those things where you point out our ignorance and stereotypes? Yeah \u2013 I mean, I freely admit I don't know the African map very well, which speaks volumes in itself.\n[West Asia.] Russia; Aral sea (Gone); Various former Soviet states; Afghanistan & Pakistan; India; Mostly Muslim; Mostly Hindu\n[Indian Ocea.] Sri Lanka; Boxing Day Quake Wait, \"Boxing day\"? There's no way you're American. I read BBC News, OK?\n[East Asia.] Mongolia; Tibet (contested); China; Southeast Asia\n[Pacific Ocean.] Kamchatka Pennisula, but I admit I only know this one from Risk. Koreas; Japan, duh.; Taiwan (actually called \"The Republic of China.\" \u2013 it's complicated.); Phillipines; Malaysia; Indonesia; Sulawesi; Paupa New Guinea; Australia; Tasmania; New Zealand\n[South of Africa.] Should we include Antarctica? Let's not \u2013 these guys are looking impatient.\n"}
{"id":851,"title":"Na","image_title":"Na","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/851","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/na.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/851:_Na","transcript":"[A flowchart with 11 similar boxes on a line connected with arrows. After 8 there is two branches, one up (with three boxes above the rest of the 11 boxes) and one down to one box. After 10 there is one branch down to a larger box with two lines, and after that the last arrow is longer before reaching the last and 11th box. From this box there is an arrow that loops around to the last box again. This arrow is labeled.] Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na Up 8 branch:\u2192 Hey \u2192 Hey \u2192 Goodbye Down 8 branch:\u2192 Batman! Down 10 branch:\u2192 Katamari Damacy! Loop: Land of 1,000 Dances\nI can't believe I forgot Hey Jude. I don't get do-overs, but I couldn't resist making a fixed version .\nProtip: m.xkcd.com is a clean, mobile-friendly version of xkcd.com. Protip: Scripts can fetch comics and metadata automatically.\n","explanation":"The repetition of the syllable \"na\" is often used to sing a tune without using any of the actual words. While this is normally done to practice or demonstrate a tune, repeated \"na\"s are also a part of some songs' lyrics, as shown in this comic. Following the various paths of the diagram forms the words of several well-known tunes, with each song branching off after the appropriate number of \"na\"s.\nThe top entry refers to the song \" Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye ,\" originally recorded by Steam . The tune is often sung by the home fans of American sporting events at the end of a victory as a means of taunting the away team.\nThe left bottom entry refers to the theme song of the '60s TV show Batman .\nThe middle bottom entry refers to the theme song of the video game Katamari Damacy , which was also the cause of the Accident in comic 161.\nThe right bottom entry refers to the song \" Land of a Thousand Dances ,\" originally recorded by Chris Kenner . The title text jokes that the tune's incessant repetition of \"na\" has annoyed Randall to the point that he does not have the patience to listen to the whole song.\nThere are likely countless other songs that uses \"Na Na Na\" as part of the lyrics. Some will be more popular than others. A very popular song that goes: Naaa Naaa Naaa Na Na Na Naaa, Na Na Na Naaaa, Hey Jude was left out. Hey Jude must have been brought to Randall's attention after this comic was released, as he made a comment about it in the comic header the day after this comic was released, see Trivia below.\nThis is one of many flowchart comics. A full list can be found here .\n[A flowchart with 11 similar boxes on a line connected with arrows. After 8 there is two branches, one up (with three boxes above the rest of the 11 boxes) and one down to one box. After 10 there is one branch down to a larger box with two lines, and after that the last arrow is longer before reaching the last and 11th box. From this box there is an arrow that loops around to the last box again. This arrow is labeled.] Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na \u2192 Na Up 8 branch:\u2192 Hey \u2192 Hey \u2192 Goodbye Down 8 branch:\u2192 Batman! Down 10 branch:\u2192 Katamari Damacy! Loop: Land of 1,000 Dances\nI can't believe I forgot Hey Jude. I don't get do-overs, but I couldn't resist making a fixed version .\nProtip: m.xkcd.com is a clean, mobile-friendly version of xkcd.com. Protip: Scripts can fetch comics and metadata automatically.\n"}
{"id":852,"title":"Local g","image_title":"Local g","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/852","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/local_g.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/852:_Local_g","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk, working, with a a laptop in front of him. Megan is behind him. Cueball has turned his head to talk to Megan] Cueball: Did you know that because of centrifugal * force and the shape of the Earth, \"gravity\" can vary by nearly half a percent between major cities? * Yes, centrifugal. xkcd.com\/123\n[Closeup on Cueball, who is looking down at some notes.] Cueball: That's not a lot, but it could affect, say, pole vaulting. In a 5m jump, it could make a difference of 2cm.\n[Zoomed out on Cueball, who is typing on his laptop. Megan is behind him, with her hand on her chin.] Megan: Huh, interesting. Cueball: I'm going to write an article reevaluating vaulting records to take this into account.\nThree days later: [Cueball is sitting in an armchair. Megan is behind him, and is pointing behind her.] Megan: Good job. There's an angry mob of athletes outside.\n[Cueball looks off the balcony. A mob of athletes is out of frame.] Athlete: That record was mine! Athlete: How dare you cast doubt on our honor? Athlete: Have you no respect ?! Athlete: Make him pay! Cueball: Hey, the math doesn't lie. Suck it, jocks.\n[Megan stands next to Cueball, who is walking away to the right] Megan: Dude, don't provoke them. Cueball: Whatever. The building's locked. Let 'em vent for a- crash Off-panel Athlete: GET HIM!\n[Megan stands next to Cueball. They are both in shock. Megan has her hand on her mouth.] Cueball: Crap! Cueball: How did the pole vaulters get up to our balcony?\n[Beat frame with only Megan. Cueball is out of frame.] Megan: ...\n[Beat frame with just Cueball.]\n[Zoom in on Megan and Cueball, who is facepalming.] Megan: That might be the stupidest question I've ever heard. Cueball: Right.\n","explanation":"Cueball explains in the first panel, that the centrifugal force (not be confused with the centripetal force , which is made clear in 123: Centrifugal Force , cited in the first frame of this comic) along with variations in the earth's shape causes the gravitational force to vary by half a percent between some cities. These variations could have a significant effect on certain sporting events; for example, Cueball explains that a pole vaulter might jump 2\u00a0cm higher in a city with a smaller gravitational force.\nSo Cueball writes an article reevaluating pole vaulting world records based on the city in which the record was accomplished. His article suggests that some athletes should not have received an award for breaking a record because they did so in a city with a below-average gravitational force. These pole vaulters whose records were questioned by Cueball's article angrily stage a protest outside of Cueball's apartment.\nThen Cueball proceeds to taunt them reasoning that they can't harm him because his building is locked. Cueball and Megan then hear a crash indicating that the protesters have managed to reach the apartment's balcony. When Cueball asks out loud how the pole vaulters reached the balcony, Megan stares at him for a moment and then he realizes the stupidity of that question: the pole vaulters pole-vaulted onto the balcony.\nIn the title text Randall explains that in fact the gravity force at the Olympic Games at Rio de Janeiro in 2016 compared to London in 2012 will make a difference of more than one centimeter, mainly because Rio de Janeiro is much closer to the equator than London resulting in an increased centrifugal, or, perhaps centripetal if you prefer to be more contrasting, force.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, working, with a a laptop in front of him. Megan is behind him. Cueball has turned his head to talk to Megan] Cueball: Did you know that because of centrifugal * force and the shape of the Earth, \"gravity\" can vary by nearly half a percent between major cities? * Yes, centrifugal. xkcd.com\/123\n[Closeup on Cueball, who is looking down at some notes.] Cueball: That's not a lot, but it could affect, say, pole vaulting. In a 5m jump, it could make a difference of 2cm.\n[Zoomed out on Cueball, who is typing on his laptop. Megan is behind him, with her hand on her chin.] Megan: Huh, interesting. Cueball: I'm going to write an article reevaluating vaulting records to take this into account.\nThree days later: [Cueball is sitting in an armchair. Megan is behind him, and is pointing behind her.] Megan: Good job. There's an angry mob of athletes outside.\n[Cueball looks off the balcony. A mob of athletes is out of frame.] Athlete: That record was mine! Athlete: How dare you cast doubt on our honor? Athlete: Have you no respect ?! Athlete: Make him pay! Cueball: Hey, the math doesn't lie. Suck it, jocks.\n[Megan stands next to Cueball, who is walking away to the right] Megan: Dude, don't provoke them. Cueball: Whatever. The building's locked. Let 'em vent for a- crash Off-panel Athlete: GET HIM!\n[Megan stands next to Cueball. They are both in shock. Megan has her hand on her mouth.] Cueball: Crap! Cueball: How did the pole vaulters get up to our balcony?\n[Beat frame with only Megan. Cueball is out of frame.] Megan: ...\n[Beat frame with just Cueball.]\n[Zoom in on Megan and Cueball, who is facepalming.] Megan: That might be the stupidest question I've ever heard. Cueball: Right.\n"}
{"id":853,"title":"Consecutive Vowels","image_title":"Consecutive Vowels","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/853","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/consecutive_vowels.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/853:_Consecutive_Vowels","transcript":"[Megan stands at the left while Cueball comes from right holding up a chart.] Cueball: I was running a factor analysis on this huge database, and check out what it found:\n[An xy-graph plotting \"sexual arousal\" against \"consecutive vowels.\" The trendline through the dots is a smooth exponential increasing curve.]\n[Frameless panel:] Megan: Huh? This chart makes no sense. What- Cueball: \"Queueing\"\n[Zoom in, Megan grabs Cueball.] Megan: FUCK ME NOW.\n","explanation":"After running some analysis on a database, Cueball shows Megan a chart depicting the relationship between sexual arousal and consecutive vowels, showing that a high amount of consecutive vowels is linked to higher sexual arousal. At first, it could be theorised to be due to drawn out moans or screams during lovemaking and orgasm (Ooooh! Yeeeees!).\nMegan says she doesn't get it, but Cueball interrupts her with \"queueing\", a word with 5 consecutive vowels. This immediately arouses Megan, who grabs Cueball and shouts \"FUCK ME NOW.\" It turns out that the consecutive vowels themselves appear to cause arousal, rather than arousal causing the use of consecutive vowels.\nThe title text shows that Cueball is fearful that there may be a voyeur peeking at them, but as \"voyeur\" has 4 consecutive vowels because \"y\" is a vowel in this case, Cueball gets turned on as well.\n[Megan stands at the left while Cueball comes from right holding up a chart.] Cueball: I was running a factor analysis on this huge database, and check out what it found:\n[An xy-graph plotting \"sexual arousal\" against \"consecutive vowels.\" The trendline through the dots is a smooth exponential increasing curve.]\n[Frameless panel:] Megan: Huh? This chart makes no sense. What- Cueball: \"Queueing\"\n[Zoom in, Megan grabs Cueball.] Megan: FUCK ME NOW.\n"}
{"id":854,"title":"Learning to Cook","image_title":"Learning to Cook","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/854","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/learning_to_cook.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/854:_Learning_to_Cook","transcript":"[A flowchart.]\nI should cook more! --> Buy ingredients --> Put some in a pan --> Cook --> Does it taste good? --> (arrows marked \"Kinda\" and \"No\" both lead to) Put leftovers in fridge --> (hours pass) --> Order pizza --> (days pass) --> Throw away leftovers --> (weeks pass) --> Throw away remaining ingredients as they go bad --> (months pass) --> (arrow leads back to beginning)\n","explanation":"This comic shows the plight of Randall who occasionally motivates himself to cook. After buying ingredients and cooking them, the food always ended up either tasted \"kinda good\" or not good, therefore - although he puts the leftovers in the fridge - hours later he orders pizza instead of eating the leftovers.\nA few days later he first throws away the leftovers, and some weeks later also the unused ingredients. After some months he is motivated again to cook more and the loop repeats. This discontinued effort may be part of the reason his cooking does not improve much over time.\nThe title text describes that buying ingredients for a single meal might be more expensive than eating at a restaurant, but it would be compensated if there are enough leftovers to eat again from it or cook several meals. Of course, this idea is vitiated if he gives up cooking after a single try and throws away all remaining food.\n[A flowchart.]\nI should cook more! --> Buy ingredients --> Put some in a pan --> Cook --> Does it taste good? --> (arrows marked \"Kinda\" and \"No\" both lead to) Put leftovers in fridge --> (hours pass) --> Order pizza --> (days pass) --> Throw away leftovers --> (weeks pass) --> Throw away remaining ingredients as they go bad --> (months pass) --> (arrow leads back to beginning)\n"}
{"id":855,"title":"1999","image_title":"1999","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/855","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1999.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/855:_1999","transcript":"It's easy to forget, as we heap awards on The Social Network , That before there was Facebook, MySpace, or even Friendster... One website dreamed bigger than them all.\n[Cueball and another are talking.] Cueball: People like doing stuff. So why not build a website that offers that? Another: Offers what? What would I do there? Cueball: Anything! The only limit is yourself!\n[Another scene. Hacker, wearing headphones and oblivious, working at computer. Cueball runs in to interrupt; Another holds him back.] Cueball: Hey, we need more\u2014 Another: Don't\u2013he's wired in. Hacker: The infinite is possible. Another: Or baked. It's hard to tell.\n[Cueball and another at table in bar.] Cueball: It's time to monetize. We could make millions! Another: No way. A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? Cueball: A billio\u2013 Another: Circles.\n[Long shot in bar. Drinks on table in foreground; dim figures in doorway in background; Cueball, alone, shouting into the distance.] Cueball: Hey\u2013a tip: drop the dot. Cueball: Just \"Zombocom\". Cueball: It's cleaner.\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of the movie The Social Network , a movie about the founding of the popular social network site Facebook. Here, scenes from the movie are reimagined to feature Zombo.com instead. Zombo.com, also known as Zombocom, is a website that was created in 1999 and using only Flash animations . The animation consists of a circle of quickly pulsating dots and a friendly deep male voice repeatedly welcoming the visitor to \"Zombocom\" and explaining that there was no limit to what could be done at the site, or rather, no limit except yourself. The message repeats while, ironically, there is absolutely nothing that can be done at the site until the message completes, at which point a link saying \"Sign up for our newZletter\" appears, linking to a page saying that the selected option is not available yet. If the link is not clicked, the Flash player will reset. Thus, you can still do nothing on the site. \nThe humor of the parody comes in substituting Facebook, a site that, at the time this comic was made, was a useful and popular website; for Zombo.com, a novelty site which gained attention for its complete uselessness.\nYou can visit the site at zombo.com .\nThe last four panels are all direct parodies of specific scenes from The Social Network . The second panel is a takeoff of the scene where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg comes up with the idea for the site, saying that people like checking up on their friends and acquaintances, so why not build a site that lets them do that? Because Zombo.com has no actual function, in this version the founder can't specify what he wants the site to do.\nThe third panel is taken from a scene where Zuckerberg is seen intensely focused on programming the site, his headphones insulating him from the outside world. His assistant describes his state as \"wired in\" and demands that he not be disturbed. In the comic, as Zombo.com is a very simple site which does not need much coding, the assistant offers the possibility that the founder is stoned. Indeed, it's one of the few conceivable reasons that one would be this focused on such a useless website. As \"the infinite is possible\" is a phrase in Zombo.com's audio clip, it is also plausible that the founder is currently recording the clip, and the assistant is telling the others not to bother him for fear of adding background noise to the clip.\nThe fourth panel is taken from a scene where co-founder Eduardo Saverin tries to push for monetization of Facebook, while investor and consultant Sean Parker argues against. The actual dialogue is \"You don't even know what the thing is yet. How big it can get, how far it can go. This is no time to take your chips down. A million dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool? A billion dollars.\" Here, instead of a billion dollars, the Parker character argues \"Circles,\" playing off Zombo.com's un-lucrative nature and the silliness of the design.\nThe final panel is taken from a scene where Parker advises Zuckerberg to change the name of the site from TheFacebook to just Facebook, calling it \"cleaner.\" Here, he advises to change the name of Zombo.com to just Zombocom. Why the website is pronounced \"Zombocom\" rather than the more expected Zombo Dot Com is a mystery known only to its creators; perhaps, like in the movie, they also considered it cleaner.\nThe title text is a reference to a quote from the movie, specifically a conversation between Zuckerberg and Delpy (Zuckerberg is the first quote). In the actual film, Zuckerberg answers \"twenty-two thousand\" rather than just \"twenty-two\". This is a joke to the effect that, back in 1999, there weren't really that many people on the internet, and very few of them would have gone to Zombo.com.\nIt's easy to forget, as we heap awards on The Social Network , That before there was Facebook, MySpace, or even Friendster... One website dreamed bigger than them all.\n[Cueball and another are talking.] Cueball: People like doing stuff. So why not build a website that offers that? Another: Offers what? What would I do there? Cueball: Anything! The only limit is yourself!\n[Another scene. Hacker, wearing headphones and oblivious, working at computer. Cueball runs in to interrupt; Another holds him back.] Cueball: Hey, we need more\u2014 Another: Don't\u2013he's wired in. Hacker: The infinite is possible. Another: Or baked. It's hard to tell.\n[Cueball and another at table in bar.] Cueball: It's time to monetize. We could make millions! Another: No way. A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? Cueball: A billio\u2013 Another: Circles.\n[Long shot in bar. Drinks on table in foreground; dim figures in doorway in background; Cueball, alone, shouting into the distance.] Cueball: Hey\u2013a tip: drop the dot. Cueball: Just \"Zombocom\". Cueball: It's cleaner.\n"}
{"id":856,"title":"Trochee Fixation","image_title":"Trochee Fixation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/856","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trochee_fixation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/856:_Trochee_Fixation","transcript":"Girl: Robot ninja! Pirate doctor laser monkey! Narwhal zombie badger hobo bacon kitty captain penguin raptor Jesus!\nMegan: We'd been seeing this brain damage for years, but only recently did our linguists identify the pattern behind it.\nMegan: The patients fixate on animals and types of people whose names are trochees (two syllables, with the accent on the first).\nThe malfunction causes a rush of dopamine whenever these trochees are heard or spoken. [Chart shows \"internet\" and \"brain,\" with arrows marked \"trochees\" traveling both ways between them. An arrow marked \"dopamine\" loops from the brain back to the brain.]\nThe warning signs appear in childhood: [Child sits in front of TV.] Child: Yeah! Mighty teenage morphin' ninja power mutant turtle rangers! Social reinforcement focuses the fixation on a few dozen words. Cueball (off-panel): Is there a cure?\n[Girl is reclining under a big machine pointed at her face.] Megan: We're about to try a radical trocheeotomy. Cueball: Rip out her vocal chords? I'm in favor. Megan: No, we're modifying her vocabulary* to erase the words she's fixated on. *Digitoneurolinguistic hacking! It's totally real! Ask Neal Stephenson.\nMegan: Either the gap will be filled by normal words, or she'll just generate a new set of trochees. Megan: Here goes. [She pulls the lever on a large panel.] kachunk bzzzZZZZZZ\n[Girl is waking up.] Girl: ...GzZhRmPh ... Girl ...banjo turtle! Girl: Jetpack ferret pizza lawyer! Dentist hamster wombat plumber turkey jester hindu cowboy hooker bobcat scrapple! Megan (off-panel): Sigh. Megan: Time for plan B. Cueball: Someone get a brick.\n","explanation":"A trochee is a type of poetic foot . A foot is a measure in poetry; it consists of stressed beats and unstressed beats. A trochee is a foot that consists of one stressed beat followed by an unstressed beat. \"Trochee\" itself is an example of this as you stress the first syllable and don't stress the second syllable (\"TROH-kee\".)\nTrochee fixation is supposedly caused by people experiencing rushes of dopamine when they hear or speak trochees during their youth. Due to the rush of dopamine, they become more fixated on trochees. In the endless quest for dopamine, they continue to search for trochees (typically on the internet) while also producing more places to encounter trochees meaning more fixation for others with the disorder. Megan proposes a \"radical trocheeotomy\" which appears to be a type of psychosurgery due to the erasing of memory. Cueball misinterprets Megan's intent as a \" tracheotomy \", which he mistakenly believes to be a removal of the girl's vocal cords, of which he is in favor.\nMegan proceeds with the trocheeotomy, but luckily it does not have the intended effect. Though the previous trochees have been forcefully and unkindly removed, the girl immediately generates new ones: \"BAN-jo,\" \"TUR-tle,\" \"JET-pack,\" \"FER-ret,\" and so on. The correct way of removing the fixation would be to alter mesolimbic pathway . Megan, not realizing this, succumbs to attempting to removing the girl's trochee fixation via cranially-applied brick. Depending on how hard the girl is hit with the brick she may have memory loss and potentially forget all the trochees she knows, but if this method is carried out she will have significant brain damage and will likely start fixating on trochees that she hears.\nThere are references to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers , both of which are examples of actual, trochaic TV show titles. Additionally, there is a reference to sci\/fi author Neal Stephenson who has written Snow Crash , Anathem and many other books.\n\"Jetpack ferret\" could be a reference to 20: Ferret , although the ferret in question only had wings.\nHuffman coding is a lossless data compression algorithm that works by organizing characters into a tree structure (called a Huffman tree) with the most used characters in a string closer to the top. The characters in the string are then replaced by the sequence of bits representing their place in the tree, allowing for characters that are used very often to be represented with only a handful of bits compared to the 16 or 32 bits usually needed (depending on the character set used). In highly repetitive data this can cut down the file size immensely, which is what Randall is implying by saying you would only end up with 30\u201340 bytes. Most of the \" random \" stuff said on the Internet has been said before, and isn\u2019t particularly random either, following predictable patterns.\nTrochee and other types of poetry \"feet\" is the subject of 1383: Magic Words , and the trochaic form is explored further in 1412: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles .\nOn the blag , Randall published statistics about the occurrence number of certain combinations (now obviously inaccurate).\nGirl: Robot ninja! Pirate doctor laser monkey! Narwhal zombie badger hobo bacon kitty captain penguin raptor Jesus!\nMegan: We'd been seeing this brain damage for years, but only recently did our linguists identify the pattern behind it.\nMegan: The patients fixate on animals and types of people whose names are trochees (two syllables, with the accent on the first).\nThe malfunction causes a rush of dopamine whenever these trochees are heard or spoken. [Chart shows \"internet\" and \"brain,\" with arrows marked \"trochees\" traveling both ways between them. An arrow marked \"dopamine\" loops from the brain back to the brain.]\nThe warning signs appear in childhood: [Child sits in front of TV.] Child: Yeah! Mighty teenage morphin' ninja power mutant turtle rangers! Social reinforcement focuses the fixation on a few dozen words. Cueball (off-panel): Is there a cure?\n[Girl is reclining under a big machine pointed at her face.] Megan: We're about to try a radical trocheeotomy. Cueball: Rip out her vocal chords? I'm in favor. Megan: No, we're modifying her vocabulary* to erase the words she's fixated on. *Digitoneurolinguistic hacking! It's totally real! Ask Neal Stephenson.\nMegan: Either the gap will be filled by normal words, or she'll just generate a new set of trochees. Megan: Here goes. [She pulls the lever on a large panel.] kachunk bzzzZZZZZZ\n[Girl is waking up.] Girl: ...GzZhRmPh ... Girl ...banjo turtle! Girl: Jetpack ferret pizza lawyer! Dentist hamster wombat plumber turkey jester hindu cowboy hooker bobcat scrapple! Megan (off-panel): Sigh. Megan: Time for plan B. Cueball: Someone get a brick.\n"}
{"id":857,"title":"Archimedes","image_title":"Archimedes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/857","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/archimedes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/857:_Archimedes","transcript":"[Cueball is standing normally.] Cueball: In the words of Archimedes,\n[Cueball extends his left arm slightly.] Cueball: Give me a long enough lever and a place to rest it\n[Cueball is now holding a gun in his right hand.] Cueball: Or I will kill one hostage every hour.\n","explanation":"This comic references a famous quote made by Archimedes : \u03b4\u1ff6\u03c2 \u03bc\u03bf\u03b9 \u03c0\u1fb6 \u03c3\u03c4\u1ff6 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u1f70\u03bd \u03b3\u1fb6\u03bd \u03ba\u03b9\u03bd\u03ac\u03c3\u03c9 , which could translate as \"Give me a long enough lever and a place to rest it, and I will move the Earth\". Archimedes was illustrating the power of force multiplication by stating that, in theory, even a mass as immense as the entire planet Earth could be moved by a single human being using a simple lever .\nWhile Archimedes is theoretically correct, in practice the lever would need to be millions of light years long, and the person operating it would need to push it by several light years to move the Earth even a microscopic amount. In fact, a much simpler way to move the Earth, which achieves similar distances, is to jump in the air - by Newton's third law, the same amount of force that is applied to you will also be applied to the Earth.\nHere, Cueball begins as if he is quoting Archimedes, but then produces a gun and threatens to execute hostages if he does not receive the lever, indicating that he is, for some reason, actually trying to enact Archimedes' thought experiment for real.\nThe title text references another famous proverb, \"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.\" The quote starts out the same, but again ends with a sentence that is more fitting for an action movie.\n[Cueball is standing normally.] Cueball: In the words of Archimedes,\n[Cueball extends his left arm slightly.] Cueball: Give me a long enough lever and a place to rest it\n[Cueball is now holding a gun in his right hand.] Cueball: Or I will kill one hostage every hour.\n"}
{"id":858,"title":"Milk","image_title":"Milk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/858","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/milk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/858:_Milk","transcript":"[Couple sitting opposed, Megan on couch reading book and Cueball a chair with a laptop.] Megan: The fact that I have breasts doesn't mean you could milk me now. I'd have to be lactating. [A beat passes.] [In the third panel, Megan's legs are not seen, probably tucked under the armchair to feel more secure.] Cueball (thinking): Oh my god she's psychic.\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are sitting quietly, engaged in their own solo pursuits.  Without any preamble, Megan answers a question that has not been asked, pointing out to Cueball that he would not be able to obtain milk from her breasts right now, as she is not lactating .  Cueball is flabbergasted that she seems to have read his mind, as this was exactly what he was wondering.\nMegan, like any healthy adult female mammal , is capable of producing milk from her mammary glands .  However, this facility is not always available; Megan would have to become pregnant and give birth to trigger the bodily changes that result in normal lactation.\nThe title text indicates that this is not proof of Megan's psychic powers, as Cueball seems quite obsessed with this particular topic, although, if you interpret it as a response to Cueball's thoughts in the last panel it could remain ambiguous.\n[Couple sitting opposed, Megan on couch reading book and Cueball a chair with a laptop.] Megan: The fact that I have breasts doesn't mean you could milk me now. I'd have to be lactating. [A beat passes.] [In the third panel, Megan's legs are not seen, probably tucked under the armchair to feel more secure.] Cueball (thinking): Oh my god she's psychic.\n"}
{"id":859,"title":"(","image_title":"(","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/859","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/(.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/859:_(","transcript":"[Caption inside an oblong panel:] (An unmatched left parenthesis creates an unresolved tension that will stay with you all day.\n","explanation":"In programming, punctuation is often used to mark sections of code. Paired punctuation marks must always be matched up with a corresponding closing mark, otherwise a so-called syntax error occurs. The programming language Lisp (also featured in 224: Lisp is known for large numbers of nested\/paired parentheses. Even in literary works intended only for human consumption, the absence of a matching closing parenthesis as appears in this sentence or other \"balanced\" punctuation sets creates a mental expectation of eventual closure and completion that remains unfulfilled even long after the unmatched mark is encountered.\nThere is also reference to 312: With Apologies to Robert Frost which could contain the missing parentheses.\nIt can also be interpreted as a metaphor , which compares the reader with a Lisp interpreter . The interpreter looks for the parenthesis until the end of the file, where it eventually halts, and prints out the error. The comic claims that if you read an unmatched parenthesis, you will look for it for the rest of the day too.\nIt also refers to an awkward feeling when you see something out of place in a piece of literary text (like unmatched parentheses, spellying error or a randomly-plac,ed comma..\nFinally, in some countries (Russia in particular) they use just parentheses instead of text smileys so that\u00a0:) turns into ) and\u00a0:( becomes (. Hence Russians can magically resist the unresolved tension of the comic but may feel a bit sad instead as a side effect.\nThe title text refers to the same issue as already highlighted in 327: Exploits of a Mom : if your scripts trust external input, you sometimes will be surprised. At the time of this comic, there were quite a few websites that would grab the  xkcd comic three times a week and publish them on their own site. This comic likely broke at least some of the websites because of either the unmatched brace or the extra unmatched markup that is in the title text.\n[Caption inside an oblong panel:] (An unmatched left parenthesis creates an unresolved tension that will stay with you all day.\n"}
{"id":860,"title":"Never Do This","image_title":"Never Do This","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/860","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/never_do_this.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/860:_Never_Do_This","transcript":"[Cueball walks toward Megan holding a pocket microscope.] Cueball: Check it out\u2014a pocket microscope! Megan: Ooh! Let's look at stuff!\n[Cueball holds a pencil; Megan peers at a quarter through the microscope.] Cueball: The tip of this pencil is neat . Megan: This quarter is really scratched.\nCueball: Let's look at the skin under our fingernails!\nMinutes later... [Cueball and Megan curl up in a black pit of despair.] Cueball and Megan: oh god oh god\n","explanation":"Cueball shows his new pocket microscope to Megan . With the curiosity of scientists, they quickly decide to use the microscope to look at a number of different things.\nBut after they use the microscope to inspect what is under their fingernails, they both sink into a catatonic state . Our fingers are how we interact with the world, and all manner of things get trapped under our fingernails; different kinds of dirt, fungus, spores, fragments of insects, insect droppings and so on. Such things that obviously look pretty horrific when magnified a few hundred times. Cueball and Megan never suspected what they would find, and seem unable to process or deal with the horror they have uncovered.\nThe title text refers to Rule 34 (see 305: Rule 34 ), an internet meme which states \"If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.\". The book referenced is \"The Secret House: 24 hours in the strange & wonderful world in which we spend our nights and days\" by David Bodanis and is a study in microphotography . It features extreme close-ups of everyday phenomena in the common house, but as seen from a microscopic perspective. \"Rule 34\" states that there must be porn of this nature, but it is not clear what form this would take. You would, however, probably be able to see the individual sperm cells .\nRandall may have done this check himself - and now chooses to warn others not to make the same mistake. Thus, the title: Never Do This . He later gives the same type of advice against using a UV lamp in the bathroom through this comic: 1469: UV .\nGiven his likely negative feelings towards Valentine's Day , as seen in the most of his Valentines comics , it may not be a coincidence he send this gross comic out on February 14. He did not draw any Valentines related comic this year as he for instance did the two years before and the year after.\n[Cueball walks toward Megan holding a pocket microscope.] Cueball: Check it out\u2014a pocket microscope! Megan: Ooh! Let's look at stuff!\n[Cueball holds a pencil; Megan peers at a quarter through the microscope.] Cueball: The tip of this pencil is neat . Megan: This quarter is really scratched.\nCueball: Let's look at the skin under our fingernails!\nMinutes later... [Cueball and Megan curl up in a black pit of despair.] Cueball and Megan: oh god oh god\n"}
{"id":861,"title":"Wisdom Teeth","image_title":"Wisdom Teeth","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/861","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wisdom_teeth.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/861:_Wisdom_Teeth","transcript":"Cueball, on phone: Hey! Know how you've been bugging me to play Minecraft for the past year? I'm game. Megan, on phone: But you said you didn't want to \"get hooked and spend days on end moving virtual cubes around while sitting motionless.\" What changed?\nCueball, on phone: I'm having my wisdom teeth out, and I'll be useless and doped up on painkillers for the next few days, so that actually sounds like the perfect distraction. Megan, on phone: Oh. I'll set you up on our server!\n72 hours later... [Megan sitting at computer.] Megan, on phone: Hey \u2014 starting to feel better? Enjoying the game? Let's see what you've... What the hell? Where IS everything?\n[View of a Minecraft screen showing a vast empty expanse of land. In Cueball's hotbar is, from left to right, an stone pickaxe, sword, and shovel, seven feathers, 42 torches, a non-enchanted bow, a blank space, 64 blocks of stone and a clock. He has full health and 15 armor points.] Megan, offscreen: ...You made the entire continent perfectly flat? Cueball, offscreen: And sorted it into layers. Megan, offscreen: ... Cueball, offscreen: I feel good about things. This is a good game.\n[Cueball sitting on the floor at his laptop, bleeding from the mouth, surrounded by bloody wadded-up tissues and holding a bottle of medication.] Megan, on phone: ...What exactly is in the painkillers they gave you? Cueball, woozy: I can't read the label because I'm a hologram.\n","explanation":"Wisdom teeth , as many people are no doubt painfully aware , are the third set of molars found in humans. Because human jaws are smaller than other ape jaws, most of us don't have room for a third set of molars, and the teeth become impacted so they grow straight into the other teeth, requiring a painful, debilitating procedure to remove them.\nBecause recovering from dental surgery often entails a period of rest following the operation and the use of prescription painkillers (which have a tendency to make a person go a little loopy), Cueball prepares to play Minecraft the entire time. Minecraft is a PC game known for its addictive qualities; the game itself primarily revolves around a three-dimensional world in which the goal of the player is centered on the aspects of structural creation using blocks found in the environment and the creation of different materials for use in building these structures. Despite its addictive nature, the game doesn't provide the player with a goal, so most people take to building lots of nifty stuff, such as large cities, computers made from the game's built-in redstone (electricity) mechanics, massive scale replicas of Earth, etc.\nCueball's conversation with Megan indicates that he has previously decided against playing Minecraft precisely due to its addictive gameplay and lack of internal goal, deeming it unproductive. However, 'productivity' is not something that Cueball believes he can achieve post-extraction, and so Cueball decides that addictive gameplay and lack of internal goal \"sounds like the perfect distraction\".\nUnfortunately for Megan (and any other users of her server), Cueball, while intoxicated with painkillers, has instead opted to flatten an entire continent and sort it into layers (by type of block, presumably). While there's no real indication of how big the continent is, as Minecraft worlds are randomly generated, sea level in Minecraft is at Y level 64, which means he sorted at least 65 layers of a continent large enough to be sufficiently developed, so it is clear that this task would take a lot of time. Collecting a block in Minecraft takes a certain minimum amount of time, depending on the block type, so even if he did everything as fast as he possibly could, there's still a substantial lower bound.\nIronically, in the second panel Megan says she'll set Cueball up on her server, which indicates she probably uses a whitelist to secure the server from griefers who might destroy structures created by others, not expecting that Cueball would do exactly that. The last panel simply illustrates that painkillers tend to make one loopy.\nThe title text refers to people waking up during surgery. Because anesthesia requires a lot of careful calibration and dosage - there's a reason anesthesiologists are paid hundreds of dollars an hour to be there, after all - it's possible to sometimes get it wrong, resulting in the patient waking up in the middle of the surgery. The three most important parts of anesthetics used for surgery are an analgesic (blocks pain), a sedative (puts you to sleep), and a paralytic (keeps you from moving). The worst-case scenario that most people hear about is when the analgesic and sedative are under-dosed, but the paralytic is correct, leaving the person awake, able to feel pain, but unable to alert the surgeons that anything is wrong. As a result, some countries and medical institutions have passed laws requiring surgeons to monitor brain activity so that these problems can be quickly remedied. The situation the title text is describing, with both the sedative and paralytic wearing out (leaving the person able to write notes), would be quite unlikely. As for confiscating all the pens, it was probably just to keep the patient from disturbing the procedure while the anesthesiologist corrected the dosage.\nSorting a Minecraft world into layers like this would be a near impossible task, especially in the version of Minecraft , Beta 1.2, that was current when this comic was released, which did not even include the enchantment system that allowed for tools that could mine exceptionally fast, meaning that even the sheer time to mine out such a large area would be astronomical, not even considering the time to replace the blocks in proper layers, or to gather resources for the many tools you would need. In later versions of Minecraft , it is possible to naturally generate worlds that resemble the world in this comic using the \"superflat\" world generation mode, but this was not a feature in Minecraft when this comic was released.\nCueball, on phone: Hey! Know how you've been bugging me to play Minecraft for the past year? I'm game. Megan, on phone: But you said you didn't want to \"get hooked and spend days on end moving virtual cubes around while sitting motionless.\" What changed?\nCueball, on phone: I'm having my wisdom teeth out, and I'll be useless and doped up on painkillers for the next few days, so that actually sounds like the perfect distraction. Megan, on phone: Oh. I'll set you up on our server!\n72 hours later... [Megan sitting at computer.] Megan, on phone: Hey \u2014 starting to feel better? Enjoying the game? Let's see what you've... What the hell? Where IS everything?\n[View of a Minecraft screen showing a vast empty expanse of land. In Cueball's hotbar is, from left to right, an stone pickaxe, sword, and shovel, seven feathers, 42 torches, a non-enchanted bow, a blank space, 64 blocks of stone and a clock. He has full health and 15 armor points.] Megan, offscreen: ...You made the entire continent perfectly flat? Cueball, offscreen: And sorted it into layers. Megan, offscreen: ... Cueball, offscreen: I feel good about things. This is a good game.\n[Cueball sitting on the floor at his laptop, bleeding from the mouth, surrounded by bloody wadded-up tissues and holding a bottle of medication.] Megan, on phone: ...What exactly is in the painkillers they gave you? Cueball, woozy: I can't read the label because I'm a hologram.\n"}
{"id":862,"title":"Let Go","image_title":"Let Go","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/862","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/let_go.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/862:_Let_Go","transcript":"[Reddit page.] Luke (thinking): I shouldn't be looking at Reddit. Why can't I stop?\n[CNN page.] Luke (thinking): Refreshing CNN again. Do news stories so affect my life that I benefit from checking them more than once a day?\n[Shutdown screen.] Luke (thinking): I should at least check Faceb... no. Screw it. I can't do my job when I'm distracting myself every five minutes like this.\n[Cueball and Princess Leia looking at a battlefield screen.] Cueball: His computer's off. Luke - You've switched off your targeting computer. What's wrong? Luke: Nothing. I'm all right.\n","explanation":"It is human nature to lose interest in difficult or boring tasks, and instead do something easier, more interesting or more rewarding in the short term. While procrastination and distraction from more important tasks has always been present, this comic casts a light on the internet and the huge potential for distraction which it provides.\nThe first two frames in this comic are the set-up, and contain the websites CNN and Reddit and thoughts over the top of them. These types of websites are regularly updated with new content are prime candidates for distraction. The thought bubbles indicate that the reader is fully aware that they shouldn't be looking at these websites, but is unable to stop himself. Even the very rational thought that checking news stories more than once a day is bordering on pointless doesn't seem to stop him.\nIn the third frame, it starts to look a little different as the screen is not a computer but is in fact the targeting computer from Luke Skywalker's X-wing . At this point it becomes clear that there are far more important tasks at hand, namely flying the craft. Even then, Luke has an internal conflict and considers checking Facebook , but mentally checks himself, and to prevent himself from further compulsive browsing shuts down the system. The thought bubble at the bottom is one that is probably familiar to many people (especially students), where he realizes that he has to turn off the computer to actually concentrate on the important task.\nIn the fourth frame, we finally get the movie reference from Star Wars as Princess Leia and one of the Rebel Alliance's officers are gathered around the holographic table that allows them to follow the battle. In the movie, Luke turns off his targeting computer because he uses the force to fire the torpedoes at the right time. But in this comic, Luke turns off the computer because he keeps getting distracted by Reddit and CNN. When they ask whether he is alright, he responds in the way most people would who have nearly been caught wasting time on the internet. This is however a quote of what he actually replies in the movie.\nSee the Destruction of Death Star scene on YouTube. The Let Go remark from Obi-Wan Kenobi that had given the title to this comic occurs about two minutes into the clip . Though here it is a reference to let go of refreshing websites...\nThe headlines on CNN read 'Bees?', 'Where is Oman ?', and 'iReport\u00a0(we mean you, that is.)'.\nThe headline Bees? could be a reference to Cards Against Humanity . One of the white cards says exactly that. It could also just be a question to the picture above - if it was bees following the guy.\nThe headline Where is Oman? is below a map where land is white. It shows Cyprus, Northern Egypt and the Middle East with the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf (seas are grey). Oman is not on this map as it is not situated on the Persian Gulf; it's on the Gulf of Oman and on the Arabian Sea, both of which can be considered parts of the Indian Ocean.\nThe title text is a serious solution to a procrastination problem that we see in the comic, later explained to take the form of simply rebooting the computer.  Randall just used the honor system, rather than enforcing this behavior with a program, but he solicited suggestions from his commenters for browser addons, for people who could not simply reboot their computers for whatever reason.  At the time, a commenter suggested DelaySites, but that addon is no longer available; nowadays, Mozilla recommends LeechBlock NG (also available for Chrome ), which can be configured to implement the loading delay or block websites entirely, with additional parameters for adjusting time limits for browsing and the time of day and days of the week that each behavior is active.\n[Reddit page.] Luke (thinking): I shouldn't be looking at Reddit. Why can't I stop?\n[CNN page.] Luke (thinking): Refreshing CNN again. Do news stories so affect my life that I benefit from checking them more than once a day?\n[Shutdown screen.] Luke (thinking): I should at least check Faceb... no. Screw it. I can't do my job when I'm distracting myself every five minutes like this.\n[Cueball and Princess Leia looking at a battlefield screen.] Cueball: His computer's off. Luke - You've switched off your targeting computer. What's wrong? Luke: Nothing. I'm all right.\n"}
{"id":863,"title":"Major in the Universe","image_title":"Major in the Universe","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/863","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/major_in_the_universe.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/863:_Major_in_the_Universe","transcript":"[Cueball before a professor.] Cueball: How can I pick a major? I'm interested in everything! Can't I major in \"the universe\"?\nProfessor: Okay. First, I'll need papers on every European trade summit that did not result in an agreement. Then, spend a year memorizing every microprocessor instruction set ever used in a production chip.\n[Cueball scratches head.]\nCueball: What I meant was I just want to read Malcolm Gladwell books and drink. Professor: We all do, sweetie.\n","explanation":"Several authors are referenced here. Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian author who wrote such books as \"The Tipping Point\", \"Outliers\" and \"Blink.\" Steven Levitt is one of the co-authors of the book Freakonomics and the Freakonomics blog on NYTimes.com.\nRobert Krulwich is a science correspondent for NPR (National Public Radio, for those outside of the US) and a co-host of the show Radiolab .\nA. J. Jacobs is a journalist who immerses himself in different ideas and lives them out for periods of time. For example, he lived for a year according to all the rules in the bible literally .\nIn this comic, Cueball as a college student, meeting with his adviser or professor ( Hairbun ) trying to decide what to major in. He decides to major in \"The Universe\", but when his adviser details the real work required of that major, Cueball scratches his head and tells what he really means. If you have not read Malcolm Gladwell's books, their disparate parts are usually tied together by a common thread. For example, in Blink , a motif of intuitive judgments ties together the examples of the Getty kouros , John Gottman's marriage studies , the Millennium Challenge war game , speed dating , and Paul Ekman's FACS , to name a few. These books have been criticized for supposedly presenting an incomplete picture of such phenomena, but they are hugely entertaining and eloquent.\nRandall is making fun of people who claim to have a broad range of interests, but apparently just to deflect attention from the fact that they are too lazy to master even one field.\n[Cueball before a professor.] Cueball: How can I pick a major? I'm interested in everything! Can't I major in \"the universe\"?\nProfessor: Okay. First, I'll need papers on every European trade summit that did not result in an agreement. Then, spend a year memorizing every microprocessor instruction set ever used in a production chip.\n[Cueball scratches head.]\nCueball: What I meant was I just want to read Malcolm Gladwell books and drink. Professor: We all do, sweetie.\n"}
{"id":864,"title":"Flying Cars","image_title":"Flying Cars","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/864","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flying_cars.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/864:_Flying_Cars","transcript":"[Cueball, looking right, is talking on his phone held up to his left cheek. The reply from Megan is shown to come from the phone with a zigzag line.] Cueball: It's 2011. I want my flying car. Megan (over the phone): Dude.\n[In a frame-less panel Megan, looking left, is talking with Cueball over her phone, which she holds up to her left cheek.] Megan: You're complaining to me using a phone on which you buy and read books,\n[Zoom in on topless Megan as she takes the phone down in front of her looking at it and talking to it.] Megan: And which you were using to play a 3D shooter until I interrupted you with what would be a video call if I were wearing a shirt.\n[Cueball is now also looking down at his phone held in front of him, talking to it. Again the reply from Megan is shown to come from the phone with a zigzag line.] Cueball: Can't I have a flying car, too? Megan (over the phone): You'd crash it while texting and playing Angry Birds.\n","explanation":"Cueball is complaining to Megan , on a phone call on his smartphone , about the lack of flying cars even though it is the year 2011. This is a reference to the joke \"where's my flying car?\" This was explored further in 1623: 2016 Conversation Guide where Randall proposes that flying cars would in fact just be helicopters.\nMegan counters that phone technology has taken off. For example in many science fiction movies it was predicted that by now we would have flying cars, but in the same movies the computer technology was pretty much similar to what they had achieved at the time of the movies release (see for instance Blade Runner set in 2019; even back in 2011 very few believed that flying cars would roam the streets by then.) The flying car is still not perfected (although there are some prototypes flying today). But almost any computer technology shown in old movies pales in comparison to the current state of smartphones and other computers.\nCueball chooses to be resentful about the lack of flying cars while calling her from a phone on which he can buy and read books. He should instead be amazed at the current state of computers and communication technology. She continues to say that she even interrupted him in playing a 3D shooter game on his phone, when she called him. And the call could have been a video call , had it not been because Megan chose not to do so, since she is currently shirtless.\nTypically, Cueball keeps fixating on the flying car. Megan assumes that if he ever had a flying car he would crash it while using his smartphone to text or play Angry Birds (a game released in 2009, two years before this comic). Given that many car accidents happens because people use their phones while driving , this seems a realistic assumption.\nThe title text references RealDoll , known as \"the world's finest lovedoll\", but specifically an android version, which the world has yet to see. This is a direct callback to the android series . It also refers to jet packs , another invention that many people were expecting to have by this point in time. Cueball complain on in the title text that there is not enough space on the backseat of his flying car to have sex with his android girlfriend when they are both wearing their jet packs. (Maybe they would wear those for safety purposes when flying in a car while having sex... Even if it is a self-driving flying car...)\nThis strip is quoted at the top of the TV Tropes article I Want My Jet Pack , having a similar theme to the strip.\n[Cueball, looking right, is talking on his phone held up to his left cheek. The reply from Megan is shown to come from the phone with a zigzag line.] Cueball: It's 2011. I want my flying car. Megan (over the phone): Dude.\n[In a frame-less panel Megan, looking left, is talking with Cueball over her phone, which she holds up to her left cheek.] Megan: You're complaining to me using a phone on which you buy and read books,\n[Zoom in on topless Megan as she takes the phone down in front of her looking at it and talking to it.] Megan: And which you were using to play a 3D shooter until I interrupted you with what would be a video call if I were wearing a shirt.\n[Cueball is now also looking down at his phone held in front of him, talking to it. Again the reply from Megan is shown to come from the phone with a zigzag line.] Cueball: Can't I have a flying car, too? Megan (over the phone): You'd crash it while texting and playing Angry Birds.\n"}
{"id":865,"title":"Nanobots","image_title":"Nanobots","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/865","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nanobots.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/865:_Nanobots","transcript":"[Megan and commander are on a space station.] Megan: Commander! Come quick! It's the nanobots\u2014they've STOPPED!\nMegan: They devoured 40% of the Earth, and then just... quit! They're just sitting there! Why?!\nPonytail: It's a mystery. ...unless... What's the volume of each nanobot? Megan: A few cubic microns. Why? Ponytail: I think the year 1998 just bought us some time. [Earth's surface, covered in mountains of nanobots.]\nIn the swarm: Nanobot: What do you mean, \"Run out of addresses?\" Other Nanobot: Look, we should've migrated away from IPv6 AGES ago...\n","explanation":"Megan and Ponytail are in orbit while nanobots are devouring the earth in a swarm. The nanobots stop after devouring 40% of the planet. This is a take on the \" Grey goo \" scenario in which self-replicating nanobots destroy the earth while creating more and more of themselves non-stop.\nHowever, the nanobots are only able to destroy 40% of the planet because (40% of the earth's mass) = (# of IPv6 addresses) x (A few cubic microns) x (density of nanobots). Without more IP addresses, the nanobots cannot continue to replicate (assuming that each nanobot must be individually addressable).\nIPv6 supports approximately 3.4\u00d710 38 addresses, while the Earth's mass is around 5.972\u00d710 24 kg. Assuming \"a few cubic microns\" is the minimum of 2 \u00b5m 3 (according to 1070: Words for Small Sets ), the nanobots would have a density of 4 g\/cm 3 , a bit less dense than the earth.\nThis is a joke on the shortage of IPv4 addresses. The only difference is that we are on IPv4 and the nanobots are on IPv6 .\n1998 is when the IPv6 Specification (RFC 2460) was published and IETF is the Internet Engineering Task Force.\nNote that an April fool joke for IPV9 exists and would have guaranteed Earth's doom in this comic's scenario.\n[Megan and commander are on a space station.] Megan: Commander! Come quick! It's the nanobots\u2014they've STOPPED!\nMegan: They devoured 40% of the Earth, and then just... quit! They're just sitting there! Why?!\nPonytail: It's a mystery. ...unless... What's the volume of each nanobot? Megan: A few cubic microns. Why? Ponytail: I think the year 1998 just bought us some time. [Earth's surface, covered in mountains of nanobots.]\nIn the swarm: Nanobot: What do you mean, \"Run out of addresses?\" Other Nanobot: Look, we should've migrated away from IPv6 AGES ago...\n"}
{"id":866,"title":"Compass and Straightedge","image_title":"Compass and Straightedge","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/866","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/compass_and_straightedge.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/866:_Compass_and_Straightedge","transcript":"I learned in high school what geometers discovered long ago: [Cueball, holding a compass and straightedge, looks sad.] Using only a compass and straightedge, it's impossible to construct friends.\n","explanation":"Compass and straightedge constructions are a class of problems in classical geometry. They take the form \"Using only a compass and a straightedge, construct X\", where X is a geometric figure such as a regular pentagon. The subject is typically covered in high school mathematics. Three such constructions ( squaring the circle , trisecting the angle and doubling the cube ) remained unsolved for thousands of years before being shown impossible with the use of modern algebraic techniques.\nThe comic begins as if it were stating a problem in classical geometry but veers into an observation that no amount of technical knowledge can substitute for human companionship. An additional layer of humor is that Cueball is a stick figure so technically it is possible to create friends with a straightedge and a compass, a figure constructed like Cueball is. Yet two other layers are the reference to the \"straight edge\" subculture that believes that one can find fun, friends and partners without alcohol and drugs and the fact that it claims one can construct a awesome birthday party using only two means that together often fail to construct even simple geometrical objects.\nFerdinand von Lindemann was a German mathematician who showed in 1882 that pi is not a zero of any polynomial with rational coefficients, i.e. it is a transcendental number. Transcendental numbers cannot be constructed with straightedge and compass. This proves that squaring the circle (a problem where it is required to construct a square with the same area as a given circle) is impossible, being as the sides of the square would need to be \u221a\u03c0 times the radius of the circle, and pi is not constructible.\nI learned in high school what geometers discovered long ago: [Cueball, holding a compass and straightedge, looks sad.] Using only a compass and straightedge, it's impossible to construct friends.\n"}
{"id":867,"title":"Herpetology","image_title":"Herpetology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/867","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/herpetology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/867:_Herpetology","transcript":"[Ponytail is standing on a podium looking right while pointing behind her with a pointer stick on a sketch showing a Cladogram, i.e. a large tree split that split up several time. Starting with one line at the bottom, this splits left and right and then both continues up. The left does not split again. The right splits again in a similar way, with the right not splitting anymore. The left, now in the middle splits a final time. All four ends are at the same hight and have labels above them written at 45 degree angle. A small frame sits over the top of the panels frame. Inside there is a caption:] Ornithology conference: Ponytail: As you can see, herpetology is a silly field; reptiles are actually more closely related to birds and mammals than to amphibians. Ponytail: It should really be broken up, with lizards folded into ornithology. Labels: Amphibians Reptiles Birds Mammals\n[Megan is standing on a podium looking left while pointing behind her with a pointer stick on a sketch similar to the previous panel. Starting with one line at the bottom, this splits left and right and then both continues up. The left does not split again. The right splits again in a similar way. All three ends are at the same hight and have labels above them written at 45 degree angle. The top of the right part that split in two, including the labels has been encompassed by a dotted line which also has a label written over this line at the top left. A small frame sits over the top of the panels frame. Inside there is a caption:] Herpetology conference: Megan: As you can see, ornithologists are actually assholes. Labels: Nice people Ornithologists Douchebags Dotted-line: Assholes\n","explanation":"Herpetology is the branch of zoology that studies reptiles and amphibians . Ornithology is the branch of zoology that studies birds .\nAt an ornithology conference, Ponytail is using the Cladistics method by showing a Cladogram to argue that the combining of amphibians and reptiles into a single field of study is  misguided.  In terms of their evolutionary history , reptiles are more closely related to birds (and even to mammals) than to amphibians.  She states, in a patronizing way, that the study of reptiles should more properly be combined into her own field.\nHerpetologists would rightly see this view as a threat to their territory, their budgets and even their existence.\nThe claim made by the ornithologist is fundamentally correct; the evolutionary history of those groups did actually diverge in that way. So, instead of arguing the science, Megan , the presenter at the herpetology conference resorts to a personal attack on the profession of ornithology.  At their own conference, they retaliate with a chart that purports to demonstrate that douchebags and ornithologists are more closely related to each other than either are to nice people , and they can therefore be grouped into an encompassing asshole classification.\nSince the intent of the earlier presentation was presumably to rile herpetologists rather than achieve any particular scientific goal, this response seems appropriate.\nIn the title text, birds are class Aves which is a subset of the suborder Theropoda which is a subset of the order Saurischia and the superorder Dinosauria . Under the normal rules of classification, this means that all birds are technically dinosaurs.\nThis was also shown in more detail later in 1211: Birds and Dinosaurs .\n[Ponytail is standing on a podium looking right while pointing behind her with a pointer stick on a sketch showing a Cladogram, i.e. a large tree split that split up several time. Starting with one line at the bottom, this splits left and right and then both continues up. The left does not split again. The right splits again in a similar way, with the right not splitting anymore. The left, now in the middle splits a final time. All four ends are at the same hight and have labels above them written at 45 degree angle. A small frame sits over the top of the panels frame. Inside there is a caption:] Ornithology conference: Ponytail: As you can see, herpetology is a silly field; reptiles are actually more closely related to birds and mammals than to amphibians. Ponytail: It should really be broken up, with lizards folded into ornithology. Labels: Amphibians Reptiles Birds Mammals\n[Megan is standing on a podium looking left while pointing behind her with a pointer stick on a sketch similar to the previous panel. Starting with one line at the bottom, this splits left and right and then both continues up. The left does not split again. The right splits again in a similar way. All three ends are at the same hight and have labels above them written at 45 degree angle. The top of the right part that split in two, including the labels has been encompassed by a dotted line which also has a label written over this line at the top left. A small frame sits over the top of the panels frame. Inside there is a caption:] Herpetology conference: Megan: As you can see, ornithologists are actually assholes. Labels: Nice people Ornithologists Douchebags Dotted-line: Assholes\n"}
{"id":868,"title":"Nolan Chart","image_title":"Nolan Chart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/868","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nolan_chart.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/868:_Nolan_Chart","transcript":"[Diamond-shaped four-panel diagram with each panel labeled. Two arrows indicate axis up along the left and right lower side of the diamond:] [Left]: Political opinions [Right]: Love of diamond-shaped diagrams [Top panel]: Internet libertarians [Left panel]: Democrats, Republicans [Right panel]: Baseball fans [Bottom panel]: Other\n","explanation":"The Nolan Chart is a visual representation of the political spectrum that measures not only liberal vs conservative tendencies but also libertarian and statist tendencies. Libertarians tend to like Nolan Charts because they feel that the Democratic\/Republican spectrum, the most common visualization of political beliefs, isn't nuanced enough to explain libertarian beliefs.\nIn this comic, it is taken to a different end. On one side are both Democrats and Republicans and on the other side are baseball fans. In the typical Nolan Chart, Libertarians are in the top quadrant, but in this one \"Internet Libertarians\" take the spot because they love the Nolan Charts (which are found online) and have a lot of political opinions.\nNolan may also refer to baseball Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan .\nIn the title text, the NFPA-compliant chemical manufacturers are mentioned because of this diagram . Sir Charles Wheatstone was the inventor of the Wheatstone bridge , which is also diamond-shaped . The title text also refers to Nate Silver, who previously worked for Baseball Prospectus and now writes a data-driven political and sports blog called FiveThirtyEight for ESPN. He is both a lover of diamond-shaped diagrams (baseball) and has political opinions. Politically-active kite designers both would have strong political opinions (it comes with the territory of being politically active) and would love diamond-shaped diagrams, presumably because they would be interested in blueprints of kites.\n[Diamond-shaped four-panel diagram with each panel labeled. Two arrows indicate axis up along the left and right lower side of the diamond:] [Left]: Political opinions [Right]: Love of diamond-shaped diagrams [Top panel]: Internet libertarians [Left panel]: Democrats, Republicans [Right panel]: Baseball fans [Bottom panel]: Other\n"}
{"id":869,"title":"Server Attention Span","image_title":"Server Attention Span","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/869","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/server_attention_span.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/869:_Server_Attention_Span","transcript":"[Single server in a server rack.] Server: Hi! I'm a server! Who are you?\n[Mobile device with a web browser.] Browser: I'm a browser. I'd like to see this article.\nServer: Oh boy! I can help! Let me get it for\u2014 ...Whoa! You're a smartphone browser?\nBrowser: Yeah. Server: Cooool! Hey, I've got this new mobile version of my site! Check it out! Isn't it pretty?\nBrowser: Sure, but this is just your mobile site's main page. Where's the article I wanted?\nServer: What article? Browser: The one I\u2014 Server: Who are you? Browser: I\u2014 Server: Hi! I'm a server!\n","explanation":"The comic shows - in human language - part of the conversations that a browser and web server do in order to get the right page. The protocol they use is called HTTP .\nThis comic makes fun of the issue that many web-servers that see a mobile browser will automatically suggest to load the mobile version of the website, but then serve the front page of the mobile site, not the page the user had requested. In quite a few sites, there is no 1-to-1 correspondence of pages between the regular and the mobile site, so this problem is difficult to solve and very annoying.\nA second issue with HTTP is identified in the last panel. HTTP is a stateless protocol . After serving the web page, the connection is severed. Any new request for a page will have to start afresh - which is where the server starts with again: \"Hi! I'm a server!\" Of course, browsers do not have egos nor do they hold grudges but it can be annoying for users. This design issue can also slow down the browsing experience.\nThe title text is a joke that all the other servers in the rack think the web server is being childish. \/var\/log\/syslog is where Linux (used by the vast majority of servers) and other POSIX systems store their system log messages. The 'trying to start conversation' comment is probably a joke on ARP discovery packets that are sent out to the network to see who is who. All servers send out ARP packets to see what other machines are on the network, but some machines send them out every 5 minutes, which can be extremely annoying for someone monitoring network traffic logs.\nThe coffee comment is another jab at web servers. Some websites use Java , or other JVM based languages ( Apache Groovy , Scala , etc.) as the back end of the website, as opposed to using PHP or ASP . Of course, java is another word for coffee, so a web server running on coffee is likely to be well-caffeinated, and well-caffeinated people tend to bounce off the walls with enthusiasm.\n[Single server in a server rack.] Server: Hi! I'm a server! Who are you?\n[Mobile device with a web browser.] Browser: I'm a browser. I'd like to see this article.\nServer: Oh boy! I can help! Let me get it for\u2014 ...Whoa! You're a smartphone browser?\nBrowser: Yeah. Server: Cooool! Hey, I've got this new mobile version of my site! Check it out! Isn't it pretty?\nBrowser: Sure, but this is just your mobile site's main page. Where's the article I wanted?\nServer: What article? Browser: The one I\u2014 Server: Who are you? Browser: I\u2014 Server: Hi! I'm a server!\n"}
{"id":870,"title":"Advertising","image_title":"Advertising","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/870","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mathematically_annoying.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/870:_Advertising","transcript":"Mathematically Annoying Advertising:\nA \u222a B = {x:x \u2264 15 or x > 15} = \u211d [line graph representing the above equation.] When discussing real numbers, it is impossible to get more vague than \"up to 15% or more\".\n[\" FREE! *\" in large text, with substantial illegible fine print.] If someone has paid $x to have the word \"free\" typeset for you and N other people to read, their expected value for the money that will move from you to them is at least $(x \/ (N+1))\n[Graph representing inverse relationship between \"amount you spend\" on the y axis and \"amount you save\" on the x axis.] It would be difficult for the phrase \"the more you spend the more you save\" to be more wrong.\nRandall changed the image name from advertising.png to mathematically_annoying.png, since adblocking extensions interpreted it as an ad and made the comic blank. He had the same problem again just three months later with 906: Advertising Discovery .\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at millions of advertising tricks, analyzing them mathematically.\nThe equation at the top of the panel expresses the same thing using set theory notation.  It reads out as: The union of sets A and B equals the set of all x, such that x is less than or equal to 15, or greater than 15, which equals the set of all real numbers .\nThe same is expressed again with a number line ; the numbers being interpreted as percentages .  The first range, ending with a black dot, indicates that everything below, as well as the number 15, is included (\"up to 15%\").  The second range beginning with a white dot indicates that it only includes numbers strictly bigger than 15 (\"more than 15%\").  The two ranges combined clearly cover the entire number line.\nThe phrase \"up to 15% or more\" may be a reference to the Geico slogan at the time: a phone call lasting \"15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.\" However the reference is unclear, as the words \" up to 15%\" are not actually used by Geico. Though Geico's advertising is also referenced in 42: Geico .\nWe are even given a little formula to calculate the average amount of money they expect to make from the readers. The assumption is that they expect to generate at least as much income from the ad as what they paid to print and publish it in the first place.\nThe title text compares Randall's realization of the \"FREE\"-fraud to the revelation that Santa Claus is not real.\nMathematically Annoying Advertising:\nA \u222a B = {x:x \u2264 15 or x > 15} = \u211d [line graph representing the above equation.] When discussing real numbers, it is impossible to get more vague than \"up to 15% or more\".\n[\" FREE! *\" in large text, with substantial illegible fine print.] If someone has paid $x to have the word \"free\" typeset for you and N other people to read, their expected value for the money that will move from you to them is at least $(x \/ (N+1))\n[Graph representing inverse relationship between \"amount you spend\" on the y axis and \"amount you save\" on the x axis.] It would be difficult for the phrase \"the more you spend the more you save\" to be more wrong.\nRandall changed the image name from advertising.png to mathematically_annoying.png, since adblocking extensions interpreted it as an ad and made the comic blank. He had the same problem again just three months later with 906: Advertising Discovery .\n"}
{"id":871,"title":"Charity","image_title":"Charity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/871","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/charity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/871:_Charity","transcript":"Cueball: I'm going to buy this $10 game I want, and I'm donating $10 for malaria eradication.\nMegan: If you actually cared, you'd skip the game and donate all $20. Megan: What's more important? Games, or mosquito nets and medicine for kids?\n(Caption above the comic) Later: Cueball: I think I'm going to buy these two $10 games I want. Friend: Cool; which ones?\nFollowing the publication of this comic, comments responding to anti-malaria charities, celebrities who raise money for charity, and charity directors in general, by figuring out reasons that they're not really as good as they seem, were posted on the discussion page for this comic .  However, this did not lead to internet arguments.\n","explanation":"Organizations such as Steam often offer sales where certain games are available for low prices--in order to compel or persuade buyers to make donations to worthwhile charities. Cueball is participating in one of these purchases (to fight malaria ), but Megan 's snide denigration of Cueball's act of charity as inadequate and self-serving has dissuaded him from any act of charity at all. Many people donating to charity are in fact buying a feeling that they are good people doing good things. If you take this feeling away, many people stop donating, which is shown on the third panel.\nThis also shows the stupidity of the situation: donating some of your money to charity can result in insults and arguments, while donating nothing at all does not.\nHowever, whatever somebody's internal motivation was, charity is a good thing. Therefore the proper response is to neither care what people say about you nor attack other people's charitable giving. The action that Randall recommends here is the right one, which is to donate anyway without caring about what others say or do. Clicking on the original image leads to the website of Nothing But Nets , an organization that distributes mosquito bed nets in Africa for the eradication of malaria.\nA subtext here is that the friendship between Cueball and Megan has been strained or even broken.  Cueball has picked a new friend to talk to, who reacts positively to his decision.\nIn the title text, Randall expresses an opinion critical of \"respond[ing] to someone else doing something good by figuring out a reason that they're not really as good as they seem\", in part because supporting charity shouldn't cause \"internet arguments.\"\nCueball: I'm going to buy this $10 game I want, and I'm donating $10 for malaria eradication.\nMegan: If you actually cared, you'd skip the game and donate all $20. Megan: What's more important? Games, or mosquito nets and medicine for kids?\n(Caption above the comic) Later: Cueball: I think I'm going to buy these two $10 games I want. Friend: Cool; which ones?\nFollowing the publication of this comic, comments responding to anti-malaria charities, celebrities who raise money for charity, and charity directors in general, by figuring out reasons that they're not really as good as they seem, were posted on the discussion page for this comic .  However, this did not lead to internet arguments.\n"}
{"id":872,"title":"Fairy Tales","image_title":"Fairy Tales","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/872","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fairy_tales.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/872:_Fairy_Tales","transcript":"[Megan sits in an armchair, reading a book looking over her shoulder at Cueball as he walks in.] Megan: Are there eigenvectors in Cinderella? Cueball: ...No? Megan: The prince didn't use them to match the shoe to its owner? Cueball: What are you talking about? Megan: Dammit.\n[In this frame-less panel Megan is shown in a flashback as a little girl lying in bed, head on pillow and hands held on the edge of the blanket at her throat. Hairbun with glasses, as her mom, is sitting on the edge of the bed reading, while her head is hanging down. Above and below there are two frames with Megan's narration. Hairbun's reading text is smaller than the other text in this comic.] Megan (narrating): My mom is one of those people who falls asleep while reading, but keeps talking. She's a math professor, so she'd start rambling about her work. Mom: But while the ant gathered food ... Mom: ...zzzz... Mom: ...the grasshopper contracted to a point on a manifold that was not a 3-sphere... Megan (narrating): I'm still not sure which versions are real.\n[Cueball now stands in front of the arm chair. Megan has put the book away, and is leaning her head on her left arm which rests on the armrest of the chair.] Cueball: You didn't notice the drastic subject changes? Megan: Well, sometimes her versions were better. We loved Inductive White and the (n\u22121) Dwarfs . Megan: I guess The lim x\u2192\u221e (x) Little Pigs did get a bit weird toward the end...\n","explanation":"Eigenvectors are a mathematical concepts that can be applied to a matrix . A matrix is mostly displayed as an rectangular array of elements used to describe the state of objects in physics. In pure mathematics they can be much more complex. The most important issue to the understanding of the comic is that a matrix can be transformed through various processes. These transformations can include rotation, movement and scaling of the object described by the matrix. An eigenvector refers to elements of the vector space of the matrix which remain unchanged (except possibly being scaled to be longer or shorter) after the transformation is applied. The prefix 'eigen-' applied to the term is adopted from the German word eigen for \"self-\" or \"unique to\", \"peculiar to\", or \"belonging to.\" As the eigenvector remains unchanged through the transformation of the matrix it can be used to describe something unique about that matrix.\nThe concept of an eigenvector has nothing to do with the fairy tale Cinderella ; therefore Megan confuses Cueball when she asks whether it occurred in the story of Cinderella.\nThe story of Cinderella includes Cinderella going to a ball in disguise, dancing with a prince and then leaving early and quickly, so that she accidentally leaves a glass slipper behind. The prince then uses the shoe to find Cinderella. Megan says that the way she learned it, the prince used an eigenvector and corresponding eigenvalue to match the shoe to its owner. This is a somewhat logical mathematical connection to make as eigenvectors, unchanged properties of mathematical matrices that may allow for mathematical identification of the changed matrix, correspond to the unchangeable property of the shoe (size) that allowed the prince to correctly identify the owner of the shoe even after the shoe was misplaced. Eigenvectors are sometimes used in facial-recognition software to match 2 faces.\nMegan explains that her mother, a math professor (drawn as Hairbun with glasses) would continue to talk when she fell asleep in the midst of reading bed time stories, and then would ramble on mixing the adventures with the math from her work. The middle panel refers to the story of The Ant and the Grasshopper with the addition of what is likely a reference to the Poincar\u00e9 conjecture , a (now-misnamed) theorem in mathematics.\nMegan explains that even today she is not sure which versions are the real ones. Cueball cannot understand how she would not have noticed the drastic subject changes (which seems obvious to adults, but maybe not to small children).\nMegan then mentions two other story changes, the first Inductive White and the ( n \u22121) Dwarfs was better than the original. The story is a combination of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with the principle of induction . But The lim x\u2192\u221e (x) Little Pigs was a little weird toward the end. That story combines the Three Little Pigs with mathematical limits . The reason it got weird toward the end was because the number of pigs tends to infinity as the story progresses.\nEach of the stories has a varied degree of similarity to the mathematical concepts that were mixed in as though her mom began to talk about a mathematical principle that may have been brought to mind while reading the story or already on her mind.\nIn the title text Megan mentions another adventure: Goldilocks' discovery of Newton's method for approximation . Newton's method for approximation is a method for finding successively better approximations to the zeroes (or roots) of a real-valued function. In Goldilocks , the protagonist finds successively better porridge and comfier chairs in a house where three bears lived. In the same way, in the Mom's version of the fairy tale, she would find successively better approximations to zeroes instead of successively better bowls of porridge, and Megan notes that it was surprising how few changes that story needed compared to the original adventure.\n[Megan sits in an armchair, reading a book looking over her shoulder at Cueball as he walks in.] Megan: Are there eigenvectors in Cinderella? Cueball: ...No? Megan: The prince didn't use them to match the shoe to its owner? Cueball: What are you talking about? Megan: Dammit.\n[In this frame-less panel Megan is shown in a flashback as a little girl lying in bed, head on pillow and hands held on the edge of the blanket at her throat. Hairbun with glasses, as her mom, is sitting on the edge of the bed reading, while her head is hanging down. Above and below there are two frames with Megan's narration. Hairbun's reading text is smaller than the other text in this comic.] Megan (narrating): My mom is one of those people who falls asleep while reading, but keeps talking. She's a math professor, so she'd start rambling about her work. Mom: But while the ant gathered food ... Mom: ...zzzz... Mom: ...the grasshopper contracted to a point on a manifold that was not a 3-sphere... Megan (narrating): I'm still not sure which versions are real.\n[Cueball now stands in front of the arm chair. Megan has put the book away, and is leaning her head on her left arm which rests on the armrest of the chair.] Cueball: You didn't notice the drastic subject changes? Megan: Well, sometimes her versions were better. We loved Inductive White and the (n\u22121) Dwarfs . Megan: I guess The lim x\u2192\u221e (x) Little Pigs did get a bit weird toward the end...\n"}
{"id":873,"title":"FPS Mod","image_title":"FPS Mod","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/873","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fps_mod.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/873:_FPS_Mod","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in a chair in front of his TV holding a gamepad while playing a video game. Every time he shoots the sound is written inside a ring of small curved lines to indicate the noise. Text on the screen is noted after each round of blasts with a zigzag line from the screen and between each entry.] Blam Game: He once built a treehouse. Blam Game: She has 110 unread emails that she was hoping to get to tonight. Blam blam Game: He was the only one who took care of the plants back at base.\n[Caption below the panel:] No one liked my FPS mod that gives you three-second snippets from the bios of people you shoot.\n","explanation":"FPS stands for First Person Shooter , which is a type of video game (like Halo or Duke Nukem ) in which you are looking at the world from the first person perspective of the character you are controlling. Randall notes in the caption that no one liked his FPS mod (short for \"modification\" of the FPS game), and in the title text it is clear that Cueball who played this modified version no longer enjoys the game.\nFPS games are controversial for their (supposed) quality of encouraging violence such as killing (especially other human beings). One point of the controversy is that, while virtual enemies are just pixels on a screen, real enemies have actual lives, emotions, and the like. In the games, there is a disconnect between the act of killing and its emotional cost, thus leading to the controversy that FPS games encourage wanton killing (or violence in general) to solve problems instead of considering the other party. Randall makes reference to this by adding a mod that gives biographical snippets of the enemy you shoot in the game, thus giving Cueball the perspective of the enemy he just shot, and causing emotional consequence and remorse by removing the disconnection between pixel and life.\nThe comic can also be a reference towards making games more realistic. Giving the enemies a life above being mere targets definitely makes the game more realistic, but such a game may not be that enjoyable. This has been explored previously in 772: Frogger .\nHaving lots of unread e-mails was mentioned in 2389: Unread . The third comment (\"take care of the plants back at base\") may be referring that many FPS videogames have some sort of base that you must defend or start the game in. These games do not usually feature any way to take care of plants. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text talks about how gender is portrayed in games. For some people it is more emotionally affecting to kill a woman, as women are considered biologically \"weaker\" than men by many societies, and societal norms state that men must protect them. Gender equality is a highly debated topic with many different viewpoints, where one's conscious reasoned views may sometimes stand at odds to subconscious feelings. When a player becomes aware that killing women bothers one more than killing men, it exposes an inconsistency in the player's own logic, one that's very uncomfortable to confront.\nIn the 1993 post-apocalyptic novel The Fifth Sacred Thing , the eco-pacifist residents of San Francisco defeat an invading army using a similar tactic. Rather than engage in armed defense, the family and friends of each dead San Franciscan speak directly to the soldiers who killed them, saying, \"My wife was the mother of five children, and I loved her dearly,\" or \"My cousin liked baseball.\" Eventually the soldiers suffer psychological breakdowns and defect en masse , rather as Cueball seems to do in the title text.\nAmusingly, the 2014 game Watch Dogs does something quite similar to this; the in-game \"Profiler\" provides a brief summary of a targeted enemy, and if the enemy does not have a gameplay-relevant feature (i.e. \"Can call for backup\"), it will mention their hobbies or interests.\nLike most other games in the Sniper Elite series, the 2017 Third Person Shooter Sniper Elite 4 allows the player to track and see brief overviews of any visible enemy by \"Tagging\" them with binoculars. However, Sniper Elite 4 has the distinction of also being very similar to Randall's mod in that it displays short character bios in the \"Allied Intelligence\" section of the overviews when Tagging in the campaign mode. They range from the mundane (year of conscription, former occupation) to the dark (Sapper Oswald Sander's brutal murder of a cowering fifteen year old makes even his fellow soldiers suspect him) to the comedic (Ewald Amsel regularly steals chocolate from his best friend Wolfram Wasser; Wolfram Wasser wonders who's stealing his supply of chocolates and has sworn to kill them).\nThe 2012 Third Person Shooter Spec Ops: The Line also has a section where one of the antagonists will chide you with radio message when you kill one of the enemy soldiers, often with short sympathetic descriptions of the enemy you just killed (although he'll sometimes admit he didn't actually know or like that particular person). As this game is a deconstruction of the military-style shooting games of its time and their portrayal of violence, evoking a negative emotional response in the player when killing these enemies is very much intentional.\nThe game Borderlands 2 directly references this comic with the Morningstar, a unique aftermarket talking Hyperion sniper rifle which berates the user in a nagging, whiny voice any time they reload, kill an enemy, swap weapons, or score a critical hit. The weapon is obtained from the mission Hyperion Contract 873 (a reference to this comic being comic number 873) and is referred to as \"the Hyperion ex-K seedy experimental weapon\" upon completion of the mission.\n[Cueball is sitting in a chair in front of his TV holding a gamepad while playing a video game. Every time he shoots the sound is written inside a ring of small curved lines to indicate the noise. Text on the screen is noted after each round of blasts with a zigzag line from the screen and between each entry.] Blam Game: He once built a treehouse. Blam Game: She has 110 unread emails that she was hoping to get to tonight. Blam blam Game: He was the only one who took care of the plants back at base.\n[Caption below the panel:] No one liked my FPS mod that gives you three-second snippets from the bios of people you shoot.\n"}
{"id":874,"title":"Time Management","image_title":"Time Management","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/874","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time_management.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/874:_Time_Management","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk with a computer. There's a schedule on the wall next to it. Cueball is typing.] The key to leading a productive life is time management. type type\nChoose goals, build a schedule, and have the WILLPOWER to follow it- or be LEFT BEHIND by those of us who DO. type type type\n[We see the schedule in closeup.] SCHEDULE 7:00am Wake up 7:15am-8:00am Post on productivity blogs about my schedule 8:00am-whenever Fuck around\n","explanation":"In the first two panels we see snippets from Cueball 's posting on blogs explaining the importance of time management and its benefits. The schedule on the wall is a direct contradiction to the initial ideas and follows a very simple plan for the day, making willpower only seem necessary for getting up on time and posting on these blogs, leaving the rest of the day to do whatever he wants.\nThe title text explains what the schedule is about, possibly alluding that Cueball's goal in life is to be successful at messing around, not actually being successful at what would in common be considered someone would do to become successful.\nIt could also suggest someone who has a (shallow ego driven?) goal of \"success\" itself, but who may not much care about what they are achieving for itself. Thus, achieving it is would not be an intrinsic reward to them \u2014 to borrow an concept from Eliezer Yudkowsky , they are clearly ambitious, but they don't truly have an ambition. These people are probably not be the type of people Randall enjoys spending time with, since the reward for him is primarily the interesting world around him, as he has occasionally pointed out. At the same time, it could also be expressing a general skepticism of people in fields like internet marketing or inspirational coaching (who are usually also selling a product) and therefore are potentially just out to make a buck on you, especially the ones who have a free blog with a paid product, since it is often significantly more expensive than, say, buying a book on time management at the bookstore.\nSince this comic came out (and before) there have been many comics about wasted time and general time management , see the Time management category .\n[Cueball sits at a desk with a computer. There's a schedule on the wall next to it. Cueball is typing.] The key to leading a productive life is time management. type type\nChoose goals, build a schedule, and have the WILLPOWER to follow it- or be LEFT BEHIND by those of us who DO. type type type\n[We see the schedule in closeup.] SCHEDULE 7:00am Wake up 7:15am-8:00am Post on productivity blogs about my schedule 8:00am-whenever Fuck around\n"}
{"id":875,"title":"2009 Called","image_title":"2009 Called","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/875","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2009_called.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/875:_2009_Called","transcript":"[Cueball is at computer. Megan is standing behind him, looking at clothes on the floor.] Megan: Is this a three wolf moon shirt? Megan: Dude, 2009 called, and they- Cueball: OH MY GOD! Cueball: DID YOU WARN THEM? Cueball: ABOUT HAITI AND JAPAN? Megan: What? No, I- Cueball: You ASSHOLE!\nSee also:\n","explanation":"The comic deconstructs a snowclone or common idiom - \"X called, they want their Y back.\" Usually, X is a year (like 2009 here), and Y is something very popular in that year that is seen as ridiculous in the present day.\nHere, Megan notices a Three-Wolf Moon T-shirt that Cueball apparently owns. The Three-Wolf Moon is a shirt of three wolves howling at the moon that reached meme status when several people posted ironic reviews giving it supernatural powers on Amazon around late 2008.\nMegan says the snowclone, but before she can finish, Cueball pretends to take it literally (that is, that the year 2009 actually called her) and admonishes her for not telling them about the February 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan . The comic was posted shortly after the latter, so it is reasonable to assume that it was created as a response to the disaster. Knowing Cueball, he's either preempting Megan's attempt to humiliate him and giving her a pretty good burn, or Cueball, being Cueball, actually thinks the past called.\nThe title text continues the snowclone by implying a terrible future awaits in 2017. Likewise, non-apocalyptic events, such as political protests, can generate \"yelling and screaming\". Given the public's general inclination to focus on the negative the prediction of a \"bad future\" may have worked with any date.\n2017 has occurred, and the world hasn't exploded. [ citation needed ] In hindsight, 2020 would work better for the joke. [insert hindsight is 2020 joke here]\n[Cueball is at computer. Megan is standing behind him, looking at clothes on the floor.] Megan: Is this a three wolf moon shirt? Megan: Dude, 2009 called, and they- Cueball: OH MY GOD! Cueball: DID YOU WARN THEM? Cueball: ABOUT HAITI AND JAPAN? Megan: What? No, I- Cueball: You ASSHOLE!\nSee also:\n"}
{"id":876,"title":"Trapped","image_title":"Trapped","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/876","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trapped.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/876:_Trapped","transcript":"[Cueball is on a corded wall phone.] Cueball: Hello? 911? I'm trapped! Cueball: It's dark and I can't see anything except these two distorted splotches of light! Cueball: Help!\n[Ponytail, a 911 operator is in an office, wearing a headset.] Ponytail: Splotches of light? Your... eyeballs? Cueball (over phone): I think that's what they are! There's meat everywhere!\n[Focus on Ponytail's head.] Ponytail: ...so you're a brain. Cueball (over phone): Yes! Ponytail: Yeah, we all are. You're not trapped. Use your body to walk around and experience reality.\nCueball: But everything's just signals in my sensory cortices! How can I be sure they correspond to an external world?! Ponytail (over phone): I'm sorry, but we can't send a search-and-rescue team into Plato's cave.\n","explanation":"Cueball 's brain seems to be unaware it is in his body, and is freaked out by the fact that all the information it receives is through Cueball's sensory organs. The brain has no means of verifying that the information received from the senses indeed corresponds to the actual outside world, and is thus in Plato's cave.\nThe 911 operator references Plato's cave . This is a reference to an allegory by Plato in which he creates a world in which prisoners are chained against a wall and know only the shadows that cross the wall and how they create their own reality from those shadows. They would create words for the things they were seeing, but that would only correspond to the shadows and not the physical things themselves.\nThe title text is also about Plato's cave and treats it like an actual cave with prisoners; Randall is saying that Socrates , Plato's teacher, should have just gone into the cave and brought the prisoners out instead of dealing with the extended allegory. The tranquilizer gun is for the prisoners, so they don't completely freak out while being taken out of the cave.\n[Cueball is on a corded wall phone.] Cueball: Hello? 911? I'm trapped! Cueball: It's dark and I can't see anything except these two distorted splotches of light! Cueball: Help!\n[Ponytail, a 911 operator is in an office, wearing a headset.] Ponytail: Splotches of light? Your... eyeballs? Cueball (over phone): I think that's what they are! There's meat everywhere!\n[Focus on Ponytail's head.] Ponytail: ...so you're a brain. Cueball (over phone): Yes! Ponytail: Yeah, we all are. You're not trapped. Use your body to walk around and experience reality.\nCueball: But everything's just signals in my sensory cortices! How can I be sure they correspond to an external world?! Ponytail (over phone): I'm sorry, but we can't send a search-and-rescue team into Plato's cave.\n"}
{"id":877,"title":"Beauty","image_title":"Beauty","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/877","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/beauty.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/877:_Beauty","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are discussing science. They are interrupted by an off-panel shout.] Ponytail: The problem with scientists is that you take the wonder and beauty out of everything by trying to analyze it. Megan (off panel): Dude!\n[Megan runs across this frame less panel, carrying a microscope and a yellow slime mold.] Megan: My plasmoidal slime molds have heightened pigment production! Check out that yellow color! That actually makes them zinc-resistant. Amazing, huh?\n[A close up of Megan's hands holding the yellow slime mold up to Ponytail who takes her hands up to her mouth.] Ponytail: It looks like dog barf. Megan (off panel): Hah, yeah! F. Septica is nicknamed \"dog vomit slime mold.\" Cool, huh? Check out my slides!\n[Megan has set down the microscope on the floor of the panel, and the slime mold is jiggling in her hands, while Cueball watches but Ponytail looks away.] Ponytail: Okay, never mind: What's wrong with scientists is that you do see wonder and beauty in everything. Ponytail: Oh God, it's moving! Megan: It wants to hug you! So cute!\n","explanation":"Many people believe that over-analysis is boring and only serves to detract from the beauty, wonder, or emotional moments of the subject. This is especially compounded in literature classes, but it's a gripe common throughout many studies. Keats in particular is said to have joked that Newton had \"destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow , by reducing it to the prismatic colors\". Many experts and professionals, however, disagree greatly, claiming that they see more wonder and excitement in those subjects than they did before.\nPonytail 's statement to Cueball in the first panel is proved wrong by Megan 's actions throughout the comic and the statement in the title text, to the point where she retracts and changes her statement.\nMegan comes in, excited about slime molds , in particular F. septica . Slime molds are not particularly attractive [ citation needed ] \u2014 in fact, the average person would probably say they were gross and slimy. Ponytail is rather grossed out and horrified by the mold, and changes her statement in response to Megan's enthusiasm for the mold, in keeping with Ponytail's own disgust. She thinks that Megan is crazy to see the wonder in such a disgusting-looking creature.\nF. septica is a remarkable species. As the comic says, it can tolerate extremely high zinc levels. The yellow pigment bonds to the zinc and renders it biologically inactive. As with other slime molds, it forms a multi-nucleate mass which can move like an amoeboid. It changes to a sponge-like form before releasing spores. Although the taxonomy is still fluid, the slime molds are distinct enough to be classified as neither animals, plants or fungi, but form a kingdom of their own, with some types of amoeba.\nIn the title text the hagfish is described as the best hugger as it can create a huge blanket of slime around it self in a few seconds, which is uses as a defense against predators, and maybe also to move out of its own \"prey\", which is often dead fish and whales that it burrow into to feed. \"Their unusual feeding habits and slime-producing capabilities have led members of the scientific and popular media to dub the hagfish as the most 'disgusting' of all sea creatures.\" Nevertheless, they too fascinate researchers, and the slime may have various medical applications. See for instance the slime in this video and active slime defense (and knotting) in this video .\n[Ponytail and Cueball are discussing science. They are interrupted by an off-panel shout.] Ponytail: The problem with scientists is that you take the wonder and beauty out of everything by trying to analyze it. Megan (off panel): Dude!\n[Megan runs across this frame less panel, carrying a microscope and a yellow slime mold.] Megan: My plasmoidal slime molds have heightened pigment production! Check out that yellow color! That actually makes them zinc-resistant. Amazing, huh?\n[A close up of Megan's hands holding the yellow slime mold up to Ponytail who takes her hands up to her mouth.] Ponytail: It looks like dog barf. Megan (off panel): Hah, yeah! F. Septica is nicknamed \"dog vomit slime mold.\" Cool, huh? Check out my slides!\n[Megan has set down the microscope on the floor of the panel, and the slime mold is jiggling in her hands, while Cueball watches but Ponytail looks away.] Ponytail: Okay, never mind: What's wrong with scientists is that you do see wonder and beauty in everything. Ponytail: Oh God, it's moving! Megan: It wants to hug you! So cute!\n"}
{"id":878,"title":"Model Rail","image_title":"Model Rail","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/878","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/model_rail.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/878:_Model_Rail","transcript":"[Cueball to the left and his friend, who also looks like Cueball, are standing in the friend's rather large basement, where the celling is held up by six thin columns, and the walls are shown angling in towards a point of perspective, to display how big the room is.] Friend: I want to build a perfect HO-scale (~1\/87) model train layout of my town. Cueball: In your basement? Bad idea. Never make a layout of the area you're in.\n[Zoom in on the two friends without the basement visualized.] Friend: Why not? Cueball: Because it'd include a little 10\" replica of your house.\n[Zoom in Cueball's friend who takes his hand to his chin.] Friend: So? That's be cool! I'd make tiny replicas of my rooms, my furniture\u2014 Cueball (off-screen)l: \u2014And your train layout?\n[Beneath this first row of the comic is the zoom-out of how the full model would look in the basement. The town lies beneath some small mountains. There is some water with a bridge over it continuing to the roads going through the city. There is no frame around this section, but instead there follows five zoom-outs, each one going from the friend's house, that proceeds to a circular frame. Within each of these is shown a nested model. Starting to the right of the main model, and then moving down, then left, and then down and right. Each layer has a broken arrow above the model between two vertical lines to indicate the scale, the length being written between the two parts of the arrow. Some foreign objects are also labeled to help understand the scale.]\n[Layer 1, the model with the two friends standing to the left of it.] 18 m\n[Layer 2, looks exactly as the model, but without the friends.] 21 cm\n[Layer 3, with a mosquito shown for comparison. It stands over half the model covering the mountains.] 2.4 mm\n[Layer 4, with a strand of spider silk (labeled) shown for comparison. The silk is much thicker than the roads, almost as thick as the mountains and much longer than the model. But the model still looks fairly much like the original one.] 28 \u03bcm Spider web\n[Layer 5, with a cold virus (labeled) shown for comparison. It covers roughly a quarter of the model, taking up the water part of the model. At this level the whole model becomes notably \"fuzzy\" as individual atoms are discernible, and most of the features apart from the mountain is indiscernible. There may be two viruses. The other would then be to the right of the one in the water but above the model. The label stands between them.] 320 nm Cold virus\n[Layer 6, is simply spheres (atoms) at this point. The mountain near the back is the only noticeable feature, consisting of five atoms jutting out from the surface of atoms, which is by no mean flat.] 37 \u00c5\n[Beneath these six versions of the model is a caption:] The Matryoshka limit: It is impossible to nest more than six HO layouts\n[Back to the two friends in the basement, still not showing the basement.] Friend: My God. Cueball: Yeah. It's the second rule of model train layouts: No nesting.\n[Zoom in on the heads of the two friends.] Friend: ...What's the first rule? Cueball: \"Do not talk about model train layouts.\" That rule was actually voted in by our friends and families. Friend: Philistines.\n","explanation":"In model rail construction, the HO scale refers to the most popular scale for modeling railroads, in which 3.5 millimeters in the model corresponds to 1 real-world Imperial foot. As the comic suggests, it works out to a ratio of about 1:87.1 (or 3048:35 exactly, which equals 1:87.08\u03045\u03047\u03041\u03044\u03042\u03048). In Europe, the scale is defined as exactly 1:87 instead, to avoid references to non-metric measurements.\nThis comic features two Cueballs conversing; we'll refer to them as Lefty and Righty to avoid confusion. The conversation takes place in Lefty's basement. Lefty is apparently a less-experienced train modeler, and he tells Righty that he wants to make an HO model layout of his town. However, the more-experienced Righty points out that this is a bad idea, due to nesting. To make it a perfectly accurate model, Lefty would have to include a model of his house, which includes his basement, which includes the model. So, he would have to make a model of the model, which will include a smaller model of the model, and so forth. This is illustrated in the comic.\nAt the end of these six nested models The Matryoshka limit is stated: \"It is impossible to nest more than six HO layouts\". Matryoshka dolls are toys of Russian origin that can be stacked inside one another. Here, the \"Matryoshka limit\" is the hard barrier that follows as a result of the nesting. Matter is not infinitely divisible; once one gets to the level of atoms, it is impossibly difficult to go any smaller. The unit shown in the last diagram is the \u00e5ngstr\u00f6m , a very small unit of measurement (1\/10000th of a micrometre , 1\/10 of a nanometre , 100 picometres or 10 \u221210 m) which was created when humans started discovering objects on an atomic scale, such as crystal structures or wavelengths. The last nested model looks like the atoms on a surface as seen using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM).\nThe rules of model train layouts reference the 1999 cult classic Fight Club , where the first rule of Fight Club is \"do not talk about Fight Club.\" However, while the club instituted the rule because their activities were morally and legally questionable, the rule in the comic was instituted by friends and family members who were apparently sick of hearing the train enthusiasts talk about model train layouts all the time.  The second rule of Fight Club is \"you do not talk about Fight Club\", repeated for emphasis, but evidently Cueball and his friend are good enough at following the first rule of model train layouts that they only had to be told once.\nThe \"Philistines\" comment is not referring to citizens of ancient Philistia (at least not directly), but rather the philosophy of Philistinism . Friedrich Nietzsche defined a Philistine as someone who is purely negative in how they define style, i.e. they know exactly what they hate and don't really have anything they like. A common stereotype for artists is to refer to anyone who dislikes their work as \"Philistines,\" thus dismissing their criticism as being part of a larger personality defect on the critic's part rather than any particular failing of the artwork in question.\nThe title text references HO scale and, more specifically, whether it should be spelled with the letter \"O\" or the number zero (0). Such debates often seem petty to the \"layman\", yet the people involved in the debates can form very strong feelings for their side. Randall recognizes \"nerdy tendencies\" almost immediately when he gets the urge to take a side.\n[Cueball to the left and his friend, who also looks like Cueball, are standing in the friend's rather large basement, where the celling is held up by six thin columns, and the walls are shown angling in towards a point of perspective, to display how big the room is.] Friend: I want to build a perfect HO-scale (~1\/87) model train layout of my town. Cueball: In your basement? Bad idea. Never make a layout of the area you're in.\n[Zoom in on the two friends without the basement visualized.] Friend: Why not? Cueball: Because it'd include a little 10\" replica of your house.\n[Zoom in Cueball's friend who takes his hand to his chin.] Friend: So? That's be cool! I'd make tiny replicas of my rooms, my furniture\u2014 Cueball (off-screen)l: \u2014And your train layout?\n[Beneath this first row of the comic is the zoom-out of how the full model would look in the basement. The town lies beneath some small mountains. There is some water with a bridge over it continuing to the roads going through the city. There is no frame around this section, but instead there follows five zoom-outs, each one going from the friend's house, that proceeds to a circular frame. Within each of these is shown a nested model. Starting to the right of the main model, and then moving down, then left, and then down and right. Each layer has a broken arrow above the model between two vertical lines to indicate the scale, the length being written between the two parts of the arrow. Some foreign objects are also labeled to help understand the scale.]\n[Layer 1, the model with the two friends standing to the left of it.] 18 m\n[Layer 2, looks exactly as the model, but without the friends.] 21 cm\n[Layer 3, with a mosquito shown for comparison. It stands over half the model covering the mountains.] 2.4 mm\n[Layer 4, with a strand of spider silk (labeled) shown for comparison. The silk is much thicker than the roads, almost as thick as the mountains and much longer than the model. But the model still looks fairly much like the original one.] 28 \u03bcm Spider web\n[Layer 5, with a cold virus (labeled) shown for comparison. It covers roughly a quarter of the model, taking up the water part of the model. At this level the whole model becomes notably \"fuzzy\" as individual atoms are discernible, and most of the features apart from the mountain is indiscernible. There may be two viruses. The other would then be to the right of the one in the water but above the model. The label stands between them.] 320 nm Cold virus\n[Layer 6, is simply spheres (atoms) at this point. The mountain near the back is the only noticeable feature, consisting of five atoms jutting out from the surface of atoms, which is by no mean flat.] 37 \u00c5\n[Beneath these six versions of the model is a caption:] The Matryoshka limit: It is impossible to nest more than six HO layouts\n[Back to the two friends in the basement, still not showing the basement.] Friend: My God. Cueball: Yeah. It's the second rule of model train layouts: No nesting.\n[Zoom in on the heads of the two friends.] Friend: ...What's the first rule? Cueball: \"Do not talk about model train layouts.\" That rule was actually voted in by our friends and families. Friend: Philistines.\n"}
{"id":879,"title":"Lamp","image_title":"Lamp","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/879","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lamp.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/879:_Lamp","transcript":"[Cueball stumbles on a lamp, lying on the ground.]\n[Cueball picks it up.] Rub rub\n[The lamp sprays fluids.] Splort\n[Cueball holds the lamp at arm's length, a puddle of fluid on the ground.]\n","explanation":"Cueball finds a lamp. It has a shape which suggests it is a magic lamp, which might contain a genie . Traditionally, genies grant three wishes to whoever rubs their lamp, thus freeing them. Cueball rubs the lamp, but instead of releasing a genie, the lamp appears to ejaculate. Cueball is grossed out by this and holds the lamp away from him.\nThe imagery and style of the comic are intentionally similar to male stimulation and ejaculation. The act of rubbing one's genitals to stimulate orgasm is well known and well documented in both literature and science. However, almost anyone would be disturbed by unintentionally giving sexual pleasure to a stranger.\nIn the title text, a discussion is shown between Cueball and the lamp. Cueball states that what happened was NOT one of the three wishes he would have asked for if a genie had been released, and the lamp retorts, \"Who said anything about YOUR wishes?\", implying that the lamp's wish was to receive \"handy\" stimulation (or possibly that the last user of the lamp wished for that to happen to the next owner).\nGenies are also mentioned in at least four other comics:\nIn the song Genie in a Bottle , from 1999 by Christina Aguilera , the sexual comparison of rubbing a genie in  bottle is very clear in the song, although here it is a woman genie that needs to be rubbed in the right way to be let out.\n[Cueball stumbles on a lamp, lying on the ground.]\n[Cueball picks it up.] Rub rub\n[The lamp sprays fluids.] Splort\n[Cueball holds the lamp at arm's length, a puddle of fluid on the ground.]\n"}
{"id":880,"title":"Headache","image_title":"Headache","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/880","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/headache.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/880:_Headache","transcript":"[Megan has a bike, and is wearing a helmet. Cueball is at a computer.] Megan: Wanna go for a bike ride? Cueball: Nah, I hate 3D stuff. It gives me a headache. When you think about it, this excuse can get you out of almost anything.\n","explanation":"This was the second April fools' comic released by Randall , but in principle the first real one to be released on April 1st, which in 2011 fell on a Friday, a normal release day for xkcd. The previous fools comic was literally Not Found . After this comic Randall began releasing April Fools comic every year on April 1st disregarding the weekday of that date. The next was 1037: Umwelt released on Sunday April 1st 2012, the first to use another day of the week than Monday, Wednesday or Friday.\nSome people suffer from headaches, eyestrain, motion sickness and other problems when watching 3D movies , playing 3D games, watching 3D television , playing hand-held Nintendo 3DS , etc.\nIn this comic, Cueball is using the excuse that 3D gives him a headache to get out of going outside into the real world, where everything is in 3D . Instead he stays inside and looks at his 2D computer monitor. In the title text, he says he will only go to flat places (i.e. places where everything he could see would be 2D-like).\nThis comic was released on April Fools' Day . The April fools joke for 2011 made every comic on the site 3D, thus forcing people like Cueball to endure 3D even at their computer screens. An exception to this is 848: 3D , for which the third dimension is not visible. The 3D view is still available at xk3d.xkcd.com for all comics prior to this one.\nIn his \u00d8redev 2013 talk Randall mentions that a few of his friends created this 3D view and told him just 1.5 hours before the scheduled comic for that day would go live. Randall quickly drew a 3D themed comic to match.\nThe title text suggests that Cueball is only comfortable seeing objects with visible flat surfaces like flat movie and TV screens (which the entertainment industry would not call \"3D\").\n[Megan has a bike, and is wearing a helmet. Cueball is at a computer.] Megan: Wanna go for a bike ride? Cueball: Nah, I hate 3D stuff. It gives me a headache. When you think about it, this excuse can get you out of almost anything.\n"}
{"id":881,"title":"Probability","image_title":"Probability","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/881","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/probability.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/881:_Probability","transcript":"[A plot of percent vs. years, with a solid and a dashed line. The solid line starts at 100%, and drops constantly. The dashed line starts around 85%, rises to 95% after 5 years, then drops.]\n[A simple table.] 5 years 81% 10 years 77%\n[Cueball and Megan are sitting on a bench, next to an Intravenous drip hanging from a rack. Cueball is holding a paper.] Cueball: You know, probability used to be my favorite branch of math Cueball: Because it had so many real-life applications.\n[They embrace, faces together.]\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are sitting on a hospital bed, reading a piece of paper with the statistics for breast cancer survival. It looks like Megan has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. The thick line represents the survival rate distribution (probability to be alive after X years, unconditioned): 81% are alive at 5 years, while 77% survive to 10 years. The dashed line represents the hazard function (the negative derivative of the thick line divided by the value of the thick line at each point, i.e. how fast the thick line falls with respect to the current value, or the risk of failing\/dying at time t+\u0394t after having survived until time t as \u0394t approaches zero), which is the rate between the density of the failure distribution and the survival function. Cueball expresses how he used to find probability enjoyable because of its applicability to the real world, but now sees things differently facing a painful situation involving it.\nRandall wrote this comic after his fiancee was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two months after posting this strip, he posted this blog post explaining the cancer comics .\nThe title text is a reference to 55: Useless , where his normal approach also fails him regarding love. Cueball's (and Randall's) normal approach \u2014 math \u2014 isn't much help in dealing with these types of emotional situations.\n[A plot of percent vs. years, with a solid and a dashed line. The solid line starts at 100%, and drops constantly. The dashed line starts around 85%, rises to 95% after 5 years, then drops.]\n[A simple table.] 5 years 81% 10 years 77%\n[Cueball and Megan are sitting on a bench, next to an Intravenous drip hanging from a rack. Cueball is holding a paper.] Cueball: You know, probability used to be my favorite branch of math Cueball: Because it had so many real-life applications.\n[They embrace, faces together.]\n"}
{"id":882,"title":"Significant","image_title":"Significant","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/882","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/significant.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/882:_Significant","transcript":"[A girl with a black ponytail runs up to Cueball, who subsequently points off-panel where there are presumably scientists.] Girl with black ponytail: Jelly beans cause acne! Cueball: Scientists! Investigate! Scientist (off screen): But we're playing Minecraft! Scientist (off screen): ...Fine.\n[Two scientists. The man has safety goggles on, Megan has a sheet of notes.] Scientist with goggles: We found no link between jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\n[Back to the original two.] Cueball: That settles that. Girl with black ponytail: I hear it's only a certain color that causes it. Cueball: Scientists! Scientist (off screen): But Miiiinecraft!\n[20 identical small panels follow, 4 rows 5 columns. The exact same picture as in panel 2 above. The scientist with goggles are stating the results and Megan holds some notes in her hand. The only difference from panel to panel is the color and then in the 14th panel where the result is positive and there is an exclamation from off screen.] Scientist with goggles: We found no link between purple jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between brown jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between pink jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between blue jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between teal jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between salmon jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between red jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between turquoise jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between magenta jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between yellow jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between grey jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between tan jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between cyan jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found a link between green jelly beans and acne (p < 0.05). Voice (off screen): Whoa!\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between mauve jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between beige jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between lilac jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between black jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between peach jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between orange jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\n[Newspaper front page with a picture with three green jelly beans. There are several sections with unreadable text below each of the last three readable sentences.] News Green Jelly Beans Linked To Acne! 95% Confidence Only 5% chance of coincidence! Scientists...\n","explanation":"This comic is about data dredging (aka p -hacking), and the misrepresentation of science and statistics in the media. A girl with a black ponytail comes to Cueball with her claim that jelly beans cause acne and Cueball then commission two scientists (a man with goggles and Megan ) to do some research on the link between jelly beans and acne. They find no link, but in the end the real result of this research is bad news reporting!\nFirst some basic statistical theory. Let's imagine you are trying to find out if jelly beans cause acne. To do this you could find a group of people and randomly split them into two groups - one group who you get to eat lots of jelly beans and a second group who are banned from eating jelly beans. After some time you compare whether the group that eat jelly beans have more acne than those who do not. If more people in the group that eat jelly beans have acne then you might think that jelly beans cause acne. However, there is a problem.\nSome people will suffer from acne whether they eat jelly beans or not and some will never have acne even if they do eat jelly beans. There is an element of chance in how many people prone to acne are in each group. What if, purely by chance, all the group we selected to eat jelly beans would have had acne anyway while those who didn't eat jelly beans were the lucky sort of people who never get spots? Then, even if jelly beans did not cause acne, we would conclude that jelly beans did cause acne. Of course it is very unlikely that all the acne prone people end up in one group by chance, especially if we have enough people in each group. However, to give more confidence in the result of this type of experiment, scientists use statistics to see how likely it is that the result they find is purely by chance. This is known as statistical hypothesis testing . Before we start the experiment, we choose a threshold known as the significance level. In the comic the scientists choose a threshold of 5%. If they find that more of the people who ate jelly beans had acne and the chance it was a purely random result is less than 1 in 20, they will say that jelly beans do cause acne. If however, the chance that their result was purely by random chance is greater than 5% they will say they have found no evidence of a link. The important point is this \u2013 there could still be a 1 in 20 chance that this result was purely a statistical fluke .\nAt first the scientists do not want to stop playing the addictive game Minecraft , but they do eventually start. Minecraft was previously referenced in 861: Wisdom Teeth .\nThe scientists find no link between jelly beans and acne (the probability that the result is by chance is more than 5% i.e. p > 0.05) but then Megan and Cueball ask them to see if only one colour of jelly beans is responsible. They test 20 different colors each at a significance level of 5%. If the probability that each trial gives a false positive result is 1 in 20, then by testing 20 different colors it is now likely that at least one jelly bean test will give a false positive. To be precise, the probability of having no false positive in 20 tests is 0.95 20 = 35.85%. Probability of having no false positive in 21 tests (counting the test without color discrimination) is 0.95 21 = 34.06%.\nThis leads to a big newspaper headline saying Green Jelly Beans Linked To Acne where it is said that they have 95 percent confidence with only a 5% chance of a coincidence.  Unfortunately, although this number has been reported by the scientists' stats package and would be true if green jelly beans were the only ones tested, it is also seriously misleading.  If you roll just one die, one time, you aren't very likely to roll a six... but if you roll it 20 times you are very likely to have at least one six among them.  This means that you cannot just ignore the other 19 experiments that failed.\nThere are good methods for handling this problem, notably Bayesian inference , but they can be difficult to use and explain, and complexity does not sell newspapers.\nIn the title text we find out that the scientists repeated the experiment (another key part of the scientific method), but now they no longer find any evidence for the link between acne and green jelly beans. They try to tell the reporter something, maybe that it was probably a coincidence, but the reporters are not interested since that is not news. So they do not listen to what the scientist has to say and instead uses the information they have to make another major headline saying Research conflicted and recommend more study on the link. But that was just what the scientist already did.\nThis is (sadly) often an issue with more serious matters than jelly beans and acne \u2013 at any one time there are many studies about possible links between substances (e.g. red wine) and illness (e.g. cancer). Because only the positive results get reported, this limits the value any single study has - especially if the mechanism linking the two things is not known.\nIn 2015 some journalists demonstrated the same problem: just how gullible other news outlets are with the same sort of flawed \"experimental design\": How, and why, a journalist tricked news outlets into thinking chocolate makes you thin - The Washington Post\n[A girl with a black ponytail runs up to Cueball, who subsequently points off-panel where there are presumably scientists.] Girl with black ponytail: Jelly beans cause acne! Cueball: Scientists! Investigate! Scientist (off screen): But we're playing Minecraft! Scientist (off screen): ...Fine.\n[Two scientists. The man has safety goggles on, Megan has a sheet of notes.] Scientist with goggles: We found no link between jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\n[Back to the original two.] Cueball: That settles that. Girl with black ponytail: I hear it's only a certain color that causes it. Cueball: Scientists! Scientist (off screen): But Miiiinecraft!\n[20 identical small panels follow, 4 rows 5 columns. The exact same picture as in panel 2 above. The scientist with goggles are stating the results and Megan holds some notes in her hand. The only difference from panel to panel is the color and then in the 14th panel where the result is positive and there is an exclamation from off screen.] Scientist with goggles: We found no link between purple jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between brown jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between pink jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between blue jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between teal jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between salmon jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between red jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between turquoise jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between magenta jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between yellow jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between grey jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between tan jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between cyan jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found a link between green jelly beans and acne (p < 0.05). Voice (off screen): Whoa!\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between mauve jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between beige jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between lilac jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between black jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between peach jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\nScientist with goggles: We found no link between orange jelly beans and acne (p > 0.05).\n[Newspaper front page with a picture with three green jelly beans. There are several sections with unreadable text below each of the last three readable sentences.] News Green Jelly Beans Linked To Acne! 95% Confidence Only 5% chance of coincidence! Scientists...\n"}
{"id":883,"title":"Pain Rating","image_title":"Pain Rating","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/883","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pain_rating.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/883:_Pain_Rating","transcript":"[Ponytail in a doctor's coat is carrying a clipboard and consulting with Cueball, who's sitting on a high medical table one arm down the other holding on to this arm at the inside of the elbow.] Ponytail: Any pain? Cueball: My arm really hurts.\n[Zoom out of same scene to include Megan is standing behind Ponytail.] Ponytail: How would you rate the pain, from one to ten, where ten is the worst pain you can imagine?\n[This frame-less panel zooms in on Cueball sitting on the table.] Cueball: The worst pain I can imagine?\n[Zoom in on the top of Cueball who ponders this, raising a thoughtful hand to his jaw.]\n[Same image but Cueball appears to be shocked having taken both hands in front of his mouth, four small lines coming out from the top of his head.]\n[Zoom out again as Cueball huddles up on the table, legs all the way up to his chin, arms tightly folded around the knees. Ponytail leans back towards Megan, both whispering as indicated with smaller font.] Cueball: One. Ponytail: ...What the hell is wrong with his imagination? Megan: It's not a normal place.\n","explanation":"In medical examinations, a doctor will sometimes ask the patient to assess their pain , to give the doctor a rough idea of the patient's condition. Cueball is asked by doctor Ponytail to compare the pain in his arm with the worst pain that he can imagine; however, a one-to-ten scale is not useful for Cueball because in his imagination the worst possible pain reduces him to a huddled ball, makes him forget his injured arm (which he somehow is able to bend without screaming), and rescales his current pain to a 1. Apparently, he has the capacity to imagine pain so intense that it dwarfs any possible real-world pain, thus skewing the scale, and this is what his friend Megan refers to when Ponytail asks what is wrong with his imagination. (According to the official transcript Megan is the patient's friend, and Ponytail is a doctor).\nThe title text further emphasizes that idea: If the pain was higher than one on his pain scale, it would already be so high that he would be reduced to uncontrollable screaming.\nA similar doctor Ponytail is shown in 996: Making Things Difficult with Megan and again in 1713: 50 ccs along with both Cueball and Megan. In 647: Scary Cueball (as Rob ) also ends up in such a huddled up position.\n[Ponytail in a doctor's coat is carrying a clipboard and consulting with Cueball, who's sitting on a high medical table one arm down the other holding on to this arm at the inside of the elbow.] Ponytail: Any pain? Cueball: My arm really hurts.\n[Zoom out of same scene to include Megan is standing behind Ponytail.] Ponytail: How would you rate the pain, from one to ten, where ten is the worst pain you can imagine?\n[This frame-less panel zooms in on Cueball sitting on the table.] Cueball: The worst pain I can imagine?\n[Zoom in on the top of Cueball who ponders this, raising a thoughtful hand to his jaw.]\n[Same image but Cueball appears to be shocked having taken both hands in front of his mouth, four small lines coming out from the top of his head.]\n[Zoom out again as Cueball huddles up on the table, legs all the way up to his chin, arms tightly folded around the knees. Ponytail leans back towards Megan, both whispering as indicated with smaller font.] Cueball: One. Ponytail: ...What the hell is wrong with his imagination? Megan: It's not a normal place.\n"}
{"id":884,"title":"Rogers St.","image_title":"Rogers St.","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/884","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rogers_st.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/884:_Rogers_St.","transcript":"[A person with long curly hair is standing to the right of a hanging crocked on the wall behind him. A person speaks from off-panel (a judge of some sort, according to the official transcript). Given the title text there is reason to believe the long haired \"woman\" is indeed a man named Bobby Tables.] Sign: Auditions Judge: Seriously? Judge: Sorry, no, that's a huge mood killer. Judge: Next!\n[Caption below the panel] Before I have a kid, I'm moving to Rogers Street in Cambridge, MA, and then getting a cat named \"Mister\" Just to guarantee the kid will never go into porn.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the game of creating your \"porn star name\" by putting your pet's name as your first name and the street you grew up on as your last name. For example: Max (Dog's name) Pine (Street name). In this comic, Randall would have named his cat \"Mister\" and had moved to \"Rogers\" Street and so his kid's porn name would be \" Mister Rogers \" (from the children's show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood , and previously the topic of 767: Temper ), which is pretty high on the unsexy name scale (if there was one) especially for a porn actor, although it may attract people with weird sexual fetishes.\nIn this way, Randall has prevented his kid from getting into porn.\nIn the title text, he references the other way of creating a porn star name by using your middle name as your first name and the street still as your last name. Additionally, the title text references comic 327: Exploits of a Mom in which Mrs. Roberts puts SQL instructions into her son's name so that it will mess with the database at school. In the comic, the kid's name is Robert'); DROP TABLE students;-- and we are led to believe the person in the comic above may be the same Little Bobby Tables . His middle name supposedly would be '); DROP TABLE students;-- , which is something incomprehensible about dropping tables (In SQL , commands are separated by semicolons ; , and strings of text are often delimited using single quotes ' . Parts of commands may also be enclosed in parentheses ( and ) .  Data entries are stored as \"rows\" within named \"tables\" of similar items (e.g., Students ). The command to delete an entire table (and thus every row of data in that table) is DROP TABLE , as in DROP TABLE Students; ).\nIf this is indeed Bobby Tables shown trying to get into porn using his pet and street name, then he has grown considerably since his last appearance from the above mentioned comic where he talks to his mother Mrs. Roberts , the famous hacker, who gave him the name with the code. Given his developing curly hair and looks that have taken him to the porn industry, it was clever of her to move to Roger St... But that seems her way, being clever with names.\nHere's a link to the location of Rogers Street, which is near Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.\n[A person with long curly hair is standing to the right of a hanging crocked on the wall behind him. A person speaks from off-panel (a judge of some sort, according to the official transcript). Given the title text there is reason to believe the long haired \"woman\" is indeed a man named Bobby Tables.] Sign: Auditions Judge: Seriously? Judge: Sorry, no, that's a huge mood killer. Judge: Next!\n[Caption below the panel] Before I have a kid, I'm moving to Rogers Street in Cambridge, MA, and then getting a cat named \"Mister\" Just to guarantee the kid will never go into porn.\n"}
{"id":885,"title":"Recycling","image_title":"Recycling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/885","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/recycling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/885:_Recycling","transcript":"[Cueball is picking through various items of trash or recycling on a conveyor belt. A juice bottle, empty cardboard box, opened tin can, bottlecap, crumpled and flat sheets of paper, a soda or pop can, and miscellaneous junk are visible.] Cueball: This guy tears the labels off his cans, so he clearly understands they're going to be sorted somewhere\u2014 Cueball: Yet in the same batch he includes a bottle with like an ounce of congealed juice in it. Cueball: What an asshole.\nI worry a lot about what the people at the recycling center think of me.\n","explanation":"Recycling plants often can only process one type of material at a time, which necessitates some form of sorting facility. Randall shows some degree of thoughtfulness in separating his paper from metals for the convenience of the people working at the facility, but then he leaves congealed juice in a bottle, rendering it unrecyclable without cleaning and extra effort on the part of the recycling facility.\nObviously, this would be very annoying, causing the Cueball in the comic (who works in one such facility) to call him an asshole.\nThe title text implies that the workers know his address, most likely from various envelopes and junk mail that he has recycled.\nAs always, Randall is both a self-conscious man and a paranoid man.\n[Cueball is picking through various items of trash or recycling on a conveyor belt. A juice bottle, empty cardboard box, opened tin can, bottlecap, crumpled and flat sheets of paper, a soda or pop can, and miscellaneous junk are visible.] Cueball: This guy tears the labels off his cans, so he clearly understands they're going to be sorted somewhere\u2014 Cueball: Yet in the same batch he includes a bottle with like an ounce of congealed juice in it. Cueball: What an asshole.\nI worry a lot about what the people at the recycling center think of me.\n"}
{"id":886,"title":"Craigslist Apartments","image_title":"Craigslist Apartments","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/886","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/craigslist_apartments.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/886:_Craigslist_Apartments","transcript":"[The comic is a single panel, presented as an apartment search.] [Title bar.] All apartments Search for: [_______] in: All apartments ( ) Title only (*) Entire post   Search Rent: [Min] [Max] 0+ BR [ ] Cats [ ] Dogs [ ] Has image [Date bar.] Fri Apr 15 [Begin the apartment listings.] $1600 \/ 2BR ~~~ Hardwood floors, utilities included. Cats ok, limit one per square foot. $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $2300 \/ 3BR\u00a0!!!!!!!! Elegant apartment permanently lit by strobe light!!!! No floor. $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $980 \/ 1BR New \"hammock\"-style dwelling. Water and heat free from same dispenser. Viking landlord. $1550 \/ 2BR (one inside the other). Has running water, in a sense.  Free heat in short, intense bursts.  Klein stairs. $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $3200 \/ 1BR W\/trimmed carpet and pert fixtures. Previous tenants clean. Call now, want you  inside. $120\/night (no animals) $2100 \/ 3BR on scenic Ash Tree Lane. Builder unknown; house has always existed. Walls shift; center of house may contain minotaur. $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $600 \/ 5BR Three floors w\/pool, rooftop garden, beautiful glass facade, no catch, 5-min drive to historic Pripyat. $7100 \/ 60BR Sleek modern w\/extreme running water. Previous tenants may resist entry. Contains all new wiring and is a submarine. $1616 \/ 3BR + 2Bath, tub full of blood. Closet full of board games which play themselves. Pets ok but won't survive long.\n","explanation":"This is a comic about the potential pitfalls in finding an apartment on Craigslist . Just as in Craigslist, some of the posts are re-posted several times. Additionally, lots of posts use lots of tildes, exclamation points or asterisks as above to set their posts apart from others.\nBR means bedroom, e.g. 3BR means that apartment has 3 bedrooms (common measurement of apartment size).\nThis ad is aimed at \"crazy cat ladies\/bachelors\" who compulsively keep a number of animals much greater than is appropriate to the living space.\nThis is the first repetition of an entry that appears multiple times.  It is also extremely generic, telling the reader little useful about the house. The square house might be a garage, or just a regular square house.  Beside that, most houses have a door in front, there's nothing special about a door. [ citation needed ] It's possible this refers to an elevator. The different places it appears on the page could be the different floors it stops on.\nA strobe light is a very bright light that, instead of remaining on, flashes very quickly. It's frequently used in parties. A constant strobe light and the stated lack of a floor would probably make living in the apartment somewhat difficult. It is not clear whether \"no floor\" means a dirt floor with no foundation or tiling, or whether there is literally some form of pit where a floor would be.\nThis is a post to live as an oarsman on a Viking ship .  The water and heat presumably both come from the sky, in the form of rain and sunlight.\nThis is a vague ad for a very unusual apartment. First off, the ad indicates that the two bedrooms are nested. This is an impractical layout, and it is very rare to see this. [ citation needed ] Possibly this refers to a tesseract , a four-dimensional cube. This conjecture is supported by mention of a Klein Bottle. Running water \"in a sense\" is both vague and concerning. The note about heat is similar. Short intense blasts of heat are not a comfortable way to heat a room. Depending on how intense the blasts are, they also may be dangerous or deadly. (Alternatively, the house could have a geyser inside, which would explain both the 'free heat in short,  intense bursts', along with the 'water that runs in a sense'.) A Klein bottle is a surface which has no difference between \"inside\" and \"outside\", similar to a mobius strip but with an extra dimension. It is physically impossible to build a Klein bottle in a three-dimensional space. It isn't certain what Klein stairs are, but they probably aren't very useful. This may be a pun on \"clean\" stairs.\nThis is a disguised \"adult services\" (sex) posting, with references to trimmed pubic hair, an attractive body, and a lack of STDs .  Craigslist no longer allows posts for this, because prostitution is illegal in most places in the US.  This post tries to evade the adult services ban by pretending to be something else. \"No animals\" would normally be assumed to mean \"no pets\", but in this context probably refers to STDs (possibly crabs or scabies ) or bestiality .\nThis Minotaur house is an ad for the house in the novel House of Leaves .   It may also refer to the Labyrinth in Ancient Greek mythology.\nThis is an ad for a residence in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant , located near to the town of Pripyat , in northern Ukraine. The NPP is a 3-level structure, and contains a pool for temporary spent nuclear fuel storage. The rooftop now has plants growing on it after years of neglect, and the glass facade references radioactive glassy minerals created by the explosion. Pripyat was founded in 1970 to serve the power plant, so is only 'historic' in the sense that it is associated with the Chernobyl disaster.\nThis house is a submarine, as indicated by the advertisement, presumably operated by a navy. The \"previous tenants\", being members of the armed forces, would undoubtedly resist entry of someone attempting to board their submarine. The sixty bedrooms refers to the crew members' bunks on board the ship, which are in extremely tight quarters and can be very uncomfortable. This may also be a reference to 496: Secretary: Part 3 , which makes reference to Black Hat stealing a submarine, presumably for 405: Journal 3 - apparently this is him trying to get rid of it.\nThis is an ad for a house in a generic horror movie.\nAppearing in the title text, this is a reference to the Death Star in Star Wars . Alderaan is the home planet of Princess Leia , which was obliterated by the Death Star. Mandatory parking references the tractor beams used to drag nearby ships (such as the Millennium Falcon) into the base. The garbage disposal refers to an iconic scene from Star Wars aboard the Death Star, in which the heroes are in danger of being crushed to death inside a trash compactor chamber. It seems somewhat inconvenient that this \"apartment\" has over a million bedrooms but only three bathrooms. The guest rooms are probably the detention blocks such as Detention Block AA-23 .\n[The comic is a single panel, presented as an apartment search.] [Title bar.] All apartments Search for: [_______] in: All apartments ( ) Title only (*) Entire post   Search Rent: [Min] [Max] 0+ BR [ ] Cats [ ] Dogs [ ] Has image [Date bar.] Fri Apr 15 [Begin the apartment listings.] $1600 \/ 2BR ~~~ Hardwood floors, utilities included. Cats ok, limit one per square foot. $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $2300 \/ 3BR\u00a0!!!!!!!! Elegant apartment permanently lit by strobe light!!!! No floor. $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $980 \/ 1BR New \"hammock\"-style dwelling. Water and heat free from same dispenser. Viking landlord. $1550 \/ 2BR (one inside the other). Has running water, in a sense.  Free heat in short, intense bursts.  Klein stairs. $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $3200 \/ 1BR W\/trimmed carpet and pert fixtures. Previous tenants clean. Call now, want you  inside. $120\/night (no animals) $2100 \/ 3BR on scenic Ash Tree Lane. Builder unknown; house has always existed. Walls shift; center of house may contain minotaur. $1100 \/ **** GREAT DEAL SQUARE HOUSE DOOR IN FRONT!!! **** $600 \/ 5BR Three floors w\/pool, rooftop garden, beautiful glass facade, no catch, 5-min drive to historic Pripyat. $7100 \/ 60BR Sleek modern w\/extreme running water. Previous tenants may resist entry. Contains all new wiring and is a submarine. $1616 \/ 3BR + 2Bath, tub full of blood. Closet full of board games which play themselves. Pets ok but won't survive long.\n"}
{"id":887,"title":"Future Timeline","image_title":"Future Timeline","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/887","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/future_timeline.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/887:_Future_Timeline","transcript":"THE FUTURE According to Google search results Events for each year determined by the first page of Google search results for the phrases: \"By <year>\" \"In year\" \"By the year <year>\" \"In the year <year>\" \"Will * by the year <year>\" \"Will * in the year <year>\" \"In <year>, * will\" \"By <year>, * will\" 2012 World population reaches 7 billion Flying cars reach market Canada cuts greenhouse emissions to 6% below 1990 levels as per Kyoto Apocalypse occurs 2013 National debt paid off through President Clinton's plans Microchipping of all Americans begins Homelessness ended in Massachusetts Health care reform law repealed 2014 US leaves Afghanistan GNU\/Linux becomes dominant OS 2015 New Horizons reaches Pluto Health care law causes hyperinflation 192 UN member nations achieve millennium development goals: Extreme poverty and hunger eradicated Universal primary education implemented Women empowered, gender equality reached Environmental stability ensured 2016 Baby boomers begin turning 65 Android takes 38% of the smartphone market Android takes 45% of the smartphone market Windows Phone overtakes iOS in smartphones 2017 China completes unmanned Lunar sample-return mission Social Security stops running surplus US budget balanced Newspapers become obsolete and die out Cosmetic surgery doubles 2018 Social Security stops running surplus Jesus returns to Earth 2019 Social Security stops running surplus Every baby has genes mapped at birth 2020 Solar power becomes cheaper than fossil fuels Keyboards and mice become obsolete New Tappan Zee bridge constructed 2021 US debt reaches 97% of GDP US unemployment falls to 2.8% Restored caliphate unifies Middle East Lake Mead evaporates 2022 Kilimanjaro snow-free HTML 5 finished Newspapers become obsolete and die out 2023 Jesus returns to Earth (again) US debt passes 100% of GDP All unprotected ancient forests gone from Pacific Northwest 2024 Atlantis begins to reappear Orangutans extinct in wild China lands men and women on the moon NASA sets up permanent moon base Female professionals pass males in pay 2025 World population reaches 8 billion Two billion people face water shortages 62 MPG cars introduced US power fades 2026 Atlantis emerges completely Rock Bands die out US debt paid off Car accidents cease West coast falls into ocean 2027 Japan introduces new fastest maglev train Lyndon Larouche-planned Mars colony established Social Security stops running surplus 2028 Tobacco outlawed 40% of coral reefs gone US debt paid off Social Security stops running surplus 2029 Social Security trust fund exhausted Computers pass the Turing Test Aging reversed Wikipedia reaches 30 million articles 2030 Half of Amazon rain forest lost to logging Cancer deaths double from 2008 levels Arctic ice-free in summer 2031 Computers controlled by thought Realtors replaced by technology Social Security trust fund exhausted 2032 \"Big One\" hits San Francisco US elects first married lesbian president Entire world converted to Christianity 2033 Kilimanjaro ice disappears India becomes superpower Europe reaches Mars 2034 US diabetes cases double, treatment costs triple US builds autonomous robot army 2035 80% of America's energy comes from renewable sources Himalayan glaciers down 80% in size Arctic sea lane opens 2036 80% of US has access to high-speed rail Asteroid Apophis hits\/misses Earth 2037 Arctic ice-free in September Social Security trust fund exhausted 2038 32-bit timestamps role over, causing Y2K-level chaos \"Big One\" hits California 2039 US population hits 400 million Severe heat waves become commonplace Scientology becomes majority religion in US 2040 Arctic summers ice-free Nanotechnology makes humans immortal 2041 Social Security trust fund exhausted 2042 2043 World population passes 9 billion 2044 Mankind genetically engineered to be happy Childhood obesity reaches 100% 2045 Humans and machines merge 2046 World's natural resources depleted 2047 World ruled by banks and corporations Tobacco industry fails US begins using autonomous attack drones 2048 Salt-water fish extinct from overfishing Unisex bathing suits cover body from shoulder to ankle Entire US population overweight 2049 $1.000 computer exceeds computational ability of humanity Singularity occurs Fishing industry collapses 2050 80% of Earth's population lives in urban centers China controls space Sex with robots possible Cars banned from European cities One million species extinct from climate change 2051 Atmosphere escapes into space 2052 Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security spending exceed total US revenue 2053 US budget balanced Majority of Americans in prison Cars driven by dogs 2054 Hunger becomes unimaginable global problem 2055 Atmospheric CO2 doubled Oil runs out Copper, tin, lead, gold, and nickel all exhausted 2056 RFID-tagged driverless cars Robots given same rights as humans 2057 150 Japanese settlers on Mars Colorado River runs dry 2058 Smoking ends in New Zealand 2059 Humans have domesticated robots 2060 Human race lives in peace Extreme droughts across much of Earth Global temperature rise reaches 4\u00b0C Oil runs out again 2061 Halley's comet returns 2062 Uganda hosts World Cup The Jetsons 2063 First human clones reach adulthood Population of Moon reaches 100,000 Population of Mars reaches 10,000 Spacecraft exceed speed of light 2064 Clean Air Act finishes reducing haze in national parks to natural levels 2065 Last coral reefs die out Chernobyl cleanup complete 2066 Cyprus achieves its goal 2067 Americans live in domed cities and watch 3D TV Redheads go extinct 2068 Ozone hole over Antarctic finishes recovering Lord Jesus rules the Earth from Throne in Jerusalem. Entire world population gay due to chemicals in the water 2069 Public masturbation legalized 2070 World population peaks City-scale flooding disasters 60% of world's energy comes from renewable sources 2071 Europe's temperatures rise by 3\u00b0C World summer temperatures rise by 5\u00b0C 2072 US retirement age is set to 75 2073 Oceans do not rise one foot 2074 Number of 100-year-olds reaches one million Supertyphoons hit Japan 2075 US retirement age set to 69 2076 Average scientific paper has more than 24 authors Social Security trust fund exhausted 2077 2078 Newspapers become obsolete and die out 2079 US debt reaches 716% of GDP Lodgepole pines disappear from Northwest Floods commonplace Religion marginalized 2080 Federal spending reaches 70% of GDP UK population doubles 2081 2082 World population declines to one billion 2083 2084 Robot policemen introduced 2085 US deficit reaches 62% of GDP 2086 2087 2088 Japan becomes all-robot country 2089 World halts fossil fuel use 2090 Global warming hits 7\u00b0C Global warming hits 4\u00b0C 2091 2092 2093 2094 2095 2096 2097 2098 2099 2100 Global warming around 5-7\u00b0C Sea levels have risen by a meter or more Joshua trees nearly extinct Earth's climate resembles that of the Cretaceous Germany tropical Emperor penguins extinct Arctic permafrost thaws Rising seas flood coastal cities Rain forests mostly gone due to climatic shifts All coral reefs gone Gillette introduces 14-bladed razor 2101 WAR WAS BEGINNING\n","explanation":"This comic uses the same strategy as comic 715: Numbers , in which Randall uses Google to search for phrases and then charts the results. This one is charted as a timeline, whereas 715 was charted as line graphs.\nIt is a list of things predicted or announced by anyone at any time (the ones you see on Google search using \"by the year...\" or similar statements).\n\"2101 - War Was Beginning\" is a reference to the opening narration of video game Zero Wing ; the same narration is famous for the internet meme \" All your base are belong to us \". As there are not any other out and out references in the comic, and the rest are actually results that you can find using Randall's methods, \"War Was Beginning\" was probably the only thing he got when he googled 2101 as well.\nCertain events in this comic, e.g. \"Social Security stops running surplus\", are repeated multiple times. Also, certain bizarre events, like \"Apocalypse occurs\", or \"Flying cars reach market\", happen before rather plausible things, like \"'Big one' hits California\". Certain events, like \"Japan is a robot-only country\" or \"Gillette introduces 14-blade razor\" may be related to the recurring theme 605: Extrapolating .\nThe title text is a reference to a reoccurring scaremonger theory that European people will become a minority or extinct as other ethnicities outbreed them. For maximum scaremongering they will claim this could happen in the near future, complete with extrapolated graphs. In the years since this comic was published these conspiracy theories have come to be known as \"the great replacement\" or \"white genocide\". Scaremongers are banking on the idea their target audience will rarely bother to fact check, as analysis of their extrapolations usually reveals incorrect methodology if not outright lies.\nThis comic has similar features to 1413: Suddenly Popular , 1093: Forget , and 891: Movie Ages .\n\nTHE FUTURE According to Google search results Events for each year determined by the first page of Google search results for the phrases: \"By <year>\" \"In year\" \"By the year <year>\" \"In the year <year>\" \"Will * by the year <year>\" \"Will * in the year <year>\" \"In <year>, * will\" \"By <year>, * will\" 2012 World population reaches 7 billion Flying cars reach market Canada cuts greenhouse emissions to 6% below 1990 levels as per Kyoto Apocalypse occurs 2013 National debt paid off through President Clinton's plans Microchipping of all Americans begins Homelessness ended in Massachusetts Health care reform law repealed 2014 US leaves Afghanistan GNU\/Linux becomes dominant OS 2015 New Horizons reaches Pluto Health care law causes hyperinflation 192 UN member nations achieve millennium development goals: Extreme poverty and hunger eradicated Universal primary education implemented Women empowered, gender equality reached Environmental stability ensured 2016 Baby boomers begin turning 65 Android takes 38% of the smartphone market Android takes 45% of the smartphone market Windows Phone overtakes iOS in smartphones 2017 China completes unmanned Lunar sample-return mission Social Security stops running surplus US budget balanced Newspapers become obsolete and die out Cosmetic surgery doubles 2018 Social Security stops running surplus Jesus returns to Earth 2019 Social Security stops running surplus Every baby has genes mapped at birth 2020 Solar power becomes cheaper than fossil fuels Keyboards and mice become obsolete New Tappan Zee bridge constructed 2021 US debt reaches 97% of GDP US unemployment falls to 2.8% Restored caliphate unifies Middle East Lake Mead evaporates 2022 Kilimanjaro snow-free HTML 5 finished Newspapers become obsolete and die out 2023 Jesus returns to Earth (again) US debt passes 100% of GDP All unprotected ancient forests gone from Pacific Northwest 2024 Atlantis begins to reappear Orangutans extinct in wild China lands men and women on the moon NASA sets up permanent moon base Female professionals pass males in pay 2025 World population reaches 8 billion Two billion people face water shortages 62 MPG cars introduced US power fades 2026 Atlantis emerges completely Rock Bands die out US debt paid off Car accidents cease West coast falls into ocean 2027 Japan introduces new fastest maglev train Lyndon Larouche-planned Mars colony established Social Security stops running surplus 2028 Tobacco outlawed 40% of coral reefs gone US debt paid off Social Security stops running surplus 2029 Social Security trust fund exhausted Computers pass the Turing Test Aging reversed Wikipedia reaches 30 million articles 2030 Half of Amazon rain forest lost to logging Cancer deaths double from 2008 levels Arctic ice-free in summer 2031 Computers controlled by thought Realtors replaced by technology Social Security trust fund exhausted 2032 \"Big One\" hits San Francisco US elects first married lesbian president Entire world converted to Christianity 2033 Kilimanjaro ice disappears India becomes superpower Europe reaches Mars 2034 US diabetes cases double, treatment costs triple US builds autonomous robot army 2035 80% of America's energy comes from renewable sources Himalayan glaciers down 80% in size Arctic sea lane opens 2036 80% of US has access to high-speed rail Asteroid Apophis hits\/misses Earth 2037 Arctic ice-free in September Social Security trust fund exhausted 2038 32-bit timestamps role over, causing Y2K-level chaos \"Big One\" hits California 2039 US population hits 400 million Severe heat waves become commonplace Scientology becomes majority religion in US 2040 Arctic summers ice-free Nanotechnology makes humans immortal 2041 Social Security trust fund exhausted 2042 2043 World population passes 9 billion 2044 Mankind genetically engineered to be happy Childhood obesity reaches 100% 2045 Humans and machines merge 2046 World's natural resources depleted 2047 World ruled by banks and corporations Tobacco industry fails US begins using autonomous attack drones 2048 Salt-water fish extinct from overfishing Unisex bathing suits cover body from shoulder to ankle Entire US population overweight 2049 $1.000 computer exceeds computational ability of humanity Singularity occurs Fishing industry collapses 2050 80% of Earth's population lives in urban centers China controls space Sex with robots possible Cars banned from European cities One million species extinct from climate change 2051 Atmosphere escapes into space 2052 Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security spending exceed total US revenue 2053 US budget balanced Majority of Americans in prison Cars driven by dogs 2054 Hunger becomes unimaginable global problem 2055 Atmospheric CO2 doubled Oil runs out Copper, tin, lead, gold, and nickel all exhausted 2056 RFID-tagged driverless cars Robots given same rights as humans 2057 150 Japanese settlers on Mars Colorado River runs dry 2058 Smoking ends in New Zealand 2059 Humans have domesticated robots 2060 Human race lives in peace Extreme droughts across much of Earth Global temperature rise reaches 4\u00b0C Oil runs out again 2061 Halley's comet returns 2062 Uganda hosts World Cup The Jetsons 2063 First human clones reach adulthood Population of Moon reaches 100,000 Population of Mars reaches 10,000 Spacecraft exceed speed of light 2064 Clean Air Act finishes reducing haze in national parks to natural levels 2065 Last coral reefs die out Chernobyl cleanup complete 2066 Cyprus achieves its goal 2067 Americans live in domed cities and watch 3D TV Redheads go extinct 2068 Ozone hole over Antarctic finishes recovering Lord Jesus rules the Earth from Throne in Jerusalem. Entire world population gay due to chemicals in the water 2069 Public masturbation legalized 2070 World population peaks City-scale flooding disasters 60% of world's energy comes from renewable sources 2071 Europe's temperatures rise by 3\u00b0C World summer temperatures rise by 5\u00b0C 2072 US retirement age is set to 75 2073 Oceans do not rise one foot 2074 Number of 100-year-olds reaches one million Supertyphoons hit Japan 2075 US retirement age set to 69 2076 Average scientific paper has more than 24 authors Social Security trust fund exhausted 2077 2078 Newspapers become obsolete and die out 2079 US debt reaches 716% of GDP Lodgepole pines disappear from Northwest Floods commonplace Religion marginalized 2080 Federal spending reaches 70% of GDP UK population doubles 2081 2082 World population declines to one billion 2083 2084 Robot policemen introduced 2085 US deficit reaches 62% of GDP 2086 2087 2088 Japan becomes all-robot country 2089 World halts fossil fuel use 2090 Global warming hits 7\u00b0C Global warming hits 4\u00b0C 2091 2092 2093 2094 2095 2096 2097 2098 2099 2100 Global warming around 5-7\u00b0C Sea levels have risen by a meter or more Joshua trees nearly extinct Earth's climate resembles that of the Cretaceous Germany tropical Emperor penguins extinct Arctic permafrost thaws Rising seas flood coastal cities Rain forests mostly gone due to climatic shifts All coral reefs gone Gillette introduces 14-bladed razor 2101 WAR WAS BEGINNING\n"}
{"id":888,"title":"Heaven","image_title":"Heaven","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/888","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/heaven.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/888:_Heaven","transcript":"[The panel shows the display of a Tetris game. A large oddly shaped piece is falling towards the board. The piece fits into the gaps exactly to complete six rows at once. The next piece is simply a very long brick. All the pieces at the bottom are made from possible tetris pieces.] Next Top 0002187 Score 0002186 Level 5 [Below the panel:] Heaven\n","explanation":"This comic shows the popular video game Tetris , in which you use different shaped pieces to fill in lines to score points. Filling multiple lines by adding a single piece results in bonus points. Normally all pieces are made up of four small squares. This has also been the case for all the pieces at the bottom of the game; however, some parts of some blocks have been erased when a line has been deleted because it was full.\nHeaven, in Tetris , is when you get the perfect piece that fills out all the other pieces on the board. The falling piece here is really odd, but it fits the 18 bare spaces exactly to make it possible to remove 6 lines in a row\u2014compared to the four that is normally possible using the tall brown piece. On top of the heavenly feeling of getting a piece that fits\u2014the top score is also about to be smashed, as the player was at the moment only one point til reaching it!\nThe next piece, shown to the right, which shall come after the special one, is much taller than the normally possible straight brown piece\u2014a normal one can be seen at the bottom right of the game. This next piece seems to be ten tall, which when rotated fits the cleared bottom of the well perfectly.\nThe title text compares this experience with sex, complete with an orgasm and the feelings you get right after sex. After \"the brief feeling of satisfaction\" from the orgasm you are bored, ennui means a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest, but at the end you want more.\nA fan has made a modified version of the classic Tetris game, where at a certain frequency, a heavenly perfectly-fitting block comes along. The game can be found here (Flash game, no longer works).\nAlso see comic 724: Hell , which presents an opposing situation in which the game is designed to be impossible to play.\nChoosing to post a comic called Heaven as number 888 is not a coincidence\u2014as in Christian numerology, the number 888 represents Jesus and in Chinese numerology it represents triple fortune.\n[The panel shows the display of a Tetris game. A large oddly shaped piece is falling towards the board. The piece fits into the gaps exactly to complete six rows at once. The next piece is simply a very long brick. All the pieces at the bottom are made from possible tetris pieces.] Next Top 0002187 Score 0002186 Level 5 [Below the panel:] Heaven\n"}
{"id":889,"title":"Turtles","image_title":"Turtles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/889","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turtles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/889:_Turtles","transcript":"[There is a turtle.] Off-panel: Oh, crap, I deleted the file!\n[There is a turtle.] Turtle (thinking): I am a turtle.\n[There is a turtle.] Off-panel: No, wait, there it is.\n[There is a turtle.] Turtle (thinking): I am a turtle.\n[There is a turtle.] 50 Years Later: Turtle (thinking): I am a turtle.\n[Caption below the panel:] Turtles have it figured out, man.\n","explanation":"This comic is about the frivolousness of many modern problems. While an offscreen character is panicking over deleting a file, the turtle is content with just being a turtle. The text saying \"turtles have it figured out, man\" indicates that Randall appreciates this simpler mode of thought.\nBased on its appearance, it is possible that the turtle is a tortoise (biologists call all testudines turtles, and tortoises are the family of land-based turtles), which is also supported by the fact that tortoises tend to have much longer livespans (100 to 150 years) than sea turtles and terrapins (approximately 80 years).\nAn alternative explanation could be that the satisfaction of knowledge that the creature has poses an obstruction to his venturing out and finding its true identity. It was told that it's a turtle, thus, it continues to believe, even though it's wrong. The minor panicking of humans actually is a driving force of our sentience.\nThe title text is possibly a reference to 231: Cat Proximity . It also resembles Towelie's Catchphrase from South Park .\nThe text at the bottom 'Turtles have it figured out, man' could be a reference to the turtle in Finding Nemo , who speaks in a similar manner.\n[There is a turtle.] Off-panel: Oh, crap, I deleted the file!\n[There is a turtle.] Turtle (thinking): I am a turtle.\n[There is a turtle.] Off-panel: No, wait, there it is.\n[There is a turtle.] Turtle (thinking): I am a turtle.\n[There is a turtle.] 50 Years Later: Turtle (thinking): I am a turtle.\n[Caption below the panel:] Turtles have it figured out, man.\n"}
{"id":890,"title":"Etymology","image_title":"Etymology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/890","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/etymology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/890:_Etymology","transcript":"[Four people are sitting around a small round table in a room with large windows, presumably the cantina from Star Wars: A New Hope . The four are Obi-Wan Kenobi in a cloak and with beard, Luke Skywalker with black hair down his forehead and down his neck, Han Solo with shorter black hair and the hairy creature is Chewbacca. On the table is two cylinders, a white and a smaller black. Outside the window is two alien creatures walking by. Closest is a creature looking like a Rodian (like Greedo) and further back is a creature with two black horns on top of a regular Cueball like appearance, in the vein of Devaronians. They walk in a street outside with buildings behind.] Han Solo: Han Solo. I'm captain of the Millennium Falcon .\n[Zoom in on Luke:] Luke Skywalker: What's that?\n[Zoom in on Han:] Han: It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs!\n[Zoom in on Luke:] Luke: No, what's a falcon?\n[Zoom in on a silent Han. Beat panel.]\n","explanation":"This comic references one of the scenes from the sci-fi classic Star Wars set in Mos Eisley Cantina at the spaceport on Tatooine , a wretched hive of scum and villainy.\nIn this scene Obi-Wan Kenobi (with the beard) and Luke Skywalker on the left are trying to get off the planet secretly and they enlist help from Han Solo and Chewbacca .\nHan Solo tells Luke he is captain of the famous ship the Millennium Falcon . When Luke asks what that is, Han brags \"It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs !\" But it turns out that what Luke asks about is what a falcon is.\nEtymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. Randall wonders what Luke would say to Han if he had no idea what a falcon was.\nNormally in sci-fi aliens would have some familiarity with Earth and the things you can find on it, such as falcons. However, Star Wars takes place \"a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away\" where nobody knows Earth even exists, possibly before falcons exist, thus how could the Millennium Falcon be named after an animal they have no knowledge about?  This could be an example of a translation convention made for the sake of the audience; presumably, fast birds of prey exist in the Star Wars universe, one of which is the namesake of Han Solo's ship, which is then artistically translated from Basic to English as \"Falcon\".  Likewise with the parsec, which is a unit defined by the distance of a star from the Earth which experiences a par allax of one arc sec ond when viewed six months apart (i.e. it is the length of a triangle with a base of 1 AU and the opposite angle of 1 arcsec).  A galaxy which is home to space-faring civilizations will have units of similar magnitudes, which are converted into parsecs for our convenience.\nIn the Star Wars novelization, this joke is made in reference to a duck: [1]\nHaving grown up on a desert world, Luke would have no idea of what a duck or any other kind of waterfowl is, while Obi-Wan Kenobi could have seen such creatures during his time as a Jedi (Captain Panaka uses the \"sitting ducks\" metaphor in The Phantom Menace , so they are known to exist in Star Wars canon). Perhaps Luke would have understood if Obi-Wan had used a desert bird as an analogy.\nIn the title text, Randall muses over the fact that he as a child did not have any problems dispensing his disbelief in a distant galaxy full of humans, but was still derailed by the language. It would seem unlikely that another galaxy has creatures so similar to humans, while at the same time being filled with so many other types of creatures.\nThe bit about Indo-European roots is another reference to etymology. English is a language descended from a language called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE (along with most languages in Europe, West and South Asia), thus many words in these languages can ultimately be traced back to PIE. Randall wonders how the vocabulary in Star Wars can also be traced back to PIE despite the lack of Europe or Asia in that universe.\n[Four people are sitting around a small round table in a room with large windows, presumably the cantina from Star Wars: A New Hope . The four are Obi-Wan Kenobi in a cloak and with beard, Luke Skywalker with black hair down his forehead and down his neck, Han Solo with shorter black hair and the hairy creature is Chewbacca. On the table is two cylinders, a white and a smaller black. Outside the window is two alien creatures walking by. Closest is a creature looking like a Rodian (like Greedo) and further back is a creature with two black horns on top of a regular Cueball like appearance, in the vein of Devaronians. They walk in a street outside with buildings behind.] Han Solo: Han Solo. I'm captain of the Millennium Falcon .\n[Zoom in on Luke:] Luke Skywalker: What's that?\n[Zoom in on Han:] Han: It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs!\n[Zoom in on Luke:] Luke: No, what's a falcon?\n[Zoom in on a silent Han. Beat panel.]\n"}
{"id":891,"title":"Movie Ages","image_title":"Movie Ages","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/891","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/movie_ages.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/891:_Movie_Ages","transcript":"The 2011 Guide to Making People Feel Old -Using Movie Release Dates- [A chart with 2 columns. First column is labeled 'Their Age,' and is numbered 16 through 35 & 'over 35.' The second column is labeled 'You Say' and is divided into four sub-columns. The first sub-column reads '\"Did you realize that...' from 16-35, and the third sub-column says 'Came Out' from 16-35.] Age 16: Snakes on a Plane... Half a decade ago?\" 17-19: Revenge of the Sith... More than half a decade ago?\" 20: Finding Nemo... Eight years ago?\" 21-22: Shrek... Ten years ago?\" 23-25: The Matrix... Not the last decade, but the one before that ?\" 26: Toy Story... Over fifteen years ago?\" 27: The Lion King... Seventeen years ago?\" 28: Jurassic Park... Eighteen years ago?\" 29: Terminator 2... Twenty years ago?\" 30-32: Home Alone... More than twenty years ago?\" 33-35: The Little Mermaid ... Closer to the moon landing than the present day? Over 35: \"Hey, did you see this chart? You match your age to movie - oh, right, sorry, it only goes up to 35. I guess it's not really aimed at older people.\"\n","explanation":"Based on the person you are talking to, take their age on the far left, add \"Did you realize that...\" add the corresponding movie that is across from their age then \"...came out...\" add the phrase at the end of row.\nE.g. - If a person is 30, then it would go a little something like this \"Did you realize that Home Alone came out more than 20 years ago?\"\nThis would make people feel old because certain movies that they felt were close to them are actually aging quickly. In a way, this chart likens the age of the movie to the age of the person, as the person is about 10 years older than the movie, but as movies have shorter \"life cycles\" and seem to lose glory quickly, it seems that the movie is very old. However, the age at which a movie is accepted to be old is not nearly as large as the age at which a person is accepted to be old, so the person is not actually that old. This makes it seem that the person is far older than they actually are.\nAnd since this chart is designed to make someone feel old, anyone over 35 gets lumped in with \"older people,\" which no one likes.\nThe title text states that if you are 15 or younger it is probably already  too late to be a child prodigy . This may be a reference to 447: Too Old For This Shit , in which Randall believes that anyone over the age of 11 has already missed out on their chance to become famous.\nRandall has covered making people feel old several times in 647: Scary , 973: MTV Generation , 1393: Timeghost and 1477: Star Wars .\nThe 2011 Guide to Making People Feel Old -Using Movie Release Dates- [A chart with 2 columns. First column is labeled 'Their Age,' and is numbered 16 through 35 & 'over 35.' The second column is labeled 'You Say' and is divided into four sub-columns. The first sub-column reads '\"Did you realize that...' from 16-35, and the third sub-column says 'Came Out' from 16-35.] Age 16: Snakes on a Plane... Half a decade ago?\" 17-19: Revenge of the Sith... More than half a decade ago?\" 20: Finding Nemo... Eight years ago?\" 21-22: Shrek... Ten years ago?\" 23-25: The Matrix... Not the last decade, but the one before that ?\" 26: Toy Story... Over fifteen years ago?\" 27: The Lion King... Seventeen years ago?\" 28: Jurassic Park... Eighteen years ago?\" 29: Terminator 2... Twenty years ago?\" 30-32: Home Alone... More than twenty years ago?\" 33-35: The Little Mermaid ... Closer to the moon landing than the present day? Over 35: \"Hey, did you see this chart? You match your age to movie - oh, right, sorry, it only goes up to 35. I guess it's not really aimed at older people.\"\n"}
{"id":892,"title":"Null Hypothesis","image_title":"Null Hypothesis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/892","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/null_hypothesis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/892:_Null_Hypothesis","transcript":"[A student works at a desk, and Cueball is talking to Megan.] Cueball: I can't believe schools are still teaching kids about the null hypothesis. Cueball: I remember reading a big study that conclusively disproved it years ago.\n","explanation":"This comic (and the title text) are based on a misunderstanding. The null hypothesis is the hypothesis in a statistical analysis that indicates that the effect investigated by the analysis does not occur, i.e. 'null' as in zero effect. For example, the null hypothesis for a study about cell phones and cancer risk might be \"Cell phones have no effect on cancer risk.\" The alternative hypothesis, by contrast, is the one under investigation - in this case, probably \"Cell phones affect the risk of cancer.\"\nAfter conducting a study, we can then make a judgment based on our data. There are statistical models for measuring the probability that a certain result occurred by random chance, even though in reality there is no correlation. If this probability is low enough (usually meaning it's below a certain threshold we set when we design the experiment, such as 5% or 1%), we reject the null hypothesis, in this case saying that cell phones do increase cancer risk. Otherwise, we fail to reject the null hypothesis, as we have insufficient evidence to conclusively state that cell phones increase cancer risk. This is how almost all scientific experiments, from high school biology classes to CERN, draw their conclusions.\nIt is very important to note that a null hypothesis is a specific statement relative to the current study. In mathematics, we often see terms such as \"the Riemann hypothesis\" or \"the continuum hypothesis\" that refer to universal statements, but a null hypothesis depends on context. There is no  one \" the null hypothesis.\" It refers to a method of statistical analysis (and falsifiability , not a specific hypothesis). Given that, Megan 's response would probably be to facepalm.\n[A student works at a desk, and Cueball is talking to Megan.] Cueball: I can't believe schools are still teaching kids about the null hypothesis. Cueball: I remember reading a big study that conclusively disproved it years ago.\n"}
{"id":893,"title":"65 Years","image_title":"65 Years","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/893","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/65_years.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/893:_65_Years","transcript":"[A graph titled 'Number of Living Humans Who Have Walked on Another World' - its y-axis is numbered 5, 10, 15, its x-axis increments every ten years from 1960-2040. The line of the graph has a bracket above it that says '65 Years', starting at 1969, ending in 2034. The line starts at 1969 and increases steeply to 12 by 1972. It then plateaus until the early nineties, declines gradually to 9 between 1991-1999, and then plateaus again. From 2011-2035, which is labeled 'Projected Actuarial Tables', the line branches into three and begins to decline more steeply to zero. The area between the first and second branch is shaded and labeled '5th percentile' and the area between the second and third branch is shaded and labeled '95th percentile.']\n","explanation":"Randall is showing the number of still living humans who have walked on another world for the 65-year period that begins in 1969 (when a human first walked on the moon). Up to 2011 (when the comic was drawn), he has drawn a single line for the actual figures.\nFor the subsequent years, he has drawn three lines using actuarial tables or life tables (such tables show, for each age, the probability that a certain person will die within the next year).\nThe line marked \"5TH PERCENTILE\" indicates that there is a 95% probability that the number alive in a given year will be above that line and a 5% probability that the number alive will be below that line.  For example, this line indicates a 5% chance that all Apollo moon walkers will be dead by 2023, and a 95% chance that at least one will still be alive by that year.\nThe line marked \"95TH PERCENTILE\" indicates that there is a 5% probability that the number alive in a given year will be above that line and a 95% probability that the number alive will be below that line.  For example, this line indicates a 95% chance that all Apollo moon walkers will be dead by 2035, and a 5% chance that at least one will still be alive by that year.\nThe middle line is not identified, but is probably the \"50TH PERCENTILE\" (see these tables ).  If so, it indicates that there is a 50% probability that the number alive in a given year will be above that line and a 50% probability that the number alive will be below that line.  For example, this line indicates a 50% chance that all Apollo moon walkers will be dead by 2028 (see previous link), and a 50% chance that at least one will still be alive by that year.\nAlthough the term other world would include all other worlds on which humans have walked, there is currently only one other world on which humans have walked, which is the moon.  The humans that have walked there are the 12 Apollo astronauts who landed on the Moon between 1969 and 1972.\nIn particular, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in July 1969. Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed in November. Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell : February 1971. David Scott and James Irwin : July 1971. John Young and Charles Duke : April 1972. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt : December 1972.\nIrwin died in 1991. Shepard and Conrad died in 1998 and 1999 respectively, making the total 9 as of the date this comic was published. Since then Armstrong died in 2012, Mitchell in 2016, Cernan in 2017, Young on January 6, 2018, and Bean on May 26, 2018. The current (April 2021) number is 4, which lies close to the middle line (the supposed 50TH PERCENTILE). The oldest living person to have landed on the moon is Aldrin at 91. Also living are Scott at 88, Schmitt at 85, and Duke at 85.\nThe chart assumes that no other humans will go to walk on another world within the time-frame plotted and the title text implies that this is primarily an economically determined decision. While noting that not exploring space is a justifiable and sensible decision which may also be made by many hypothetical cultures on other worlds, the text implies a grandness to a civilization that would be given the opportunity to discover, study and memorialize the 'one-world graves' of other civilizations by choosing to explore space despite the economic difficulty. This also implies that the likely consequence of not exploring space is that a civilisation which chooses to do this is doomed to go extinct fairly rapidly while those which do explore and colonise may last long enough to be safely established on multiple worlds and discover the remains of civilisations which acted on a purely economic basis and hence ensured their own collapse. High five for exoplanet archaeology.\n[A graph titled 'Number of Living Humans Who Have Walked on Another World' - its y-axis is numbered 5, 10, 15, its x-axis increments every ten years from 1960-2040. The line of the graph has a bracket above it that says '65 Years', starting at 1969, ending in 2034. The line starts at 1969 and increases steeply to 12 by 1972. It then plateaus until the early nineties, declines gradually to 9 between 1991-1999, and then plateaus again. From 2011-2035, which is labeled 'Projected Actuarial Tables', the line branches into three and begins to decline more steeply to zero. The area between the first and second branch is shaded and labeled '5th percentile' and the area between the second and third branch is shaded and labeled '95th percentile.']\n"}
{"id":894,"title":"Progeny","image_title":"Progeny","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/894","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/progeny.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/894:_Progeny","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a computer; Megan stands behind him.] Cueball: Wow \u2014 researchers taught a computer to beat the world's best humans at yet another task. Does our species have anything left to be proud of? Megan: Well, it sounds like we're pretty awesome at teaching. Cueball: Huh? What good is that ?\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to IBM's computer Watson that beat humans at Jeopardy (see 1002: Game AIs ). The IBM team created a computer that could formulate a response to a Jeopardy-style question. Jeopardy is a game played where the contestants are given the answer to a question, and must devise the question. A question might be \"Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle\", to which the contestant must answer \"What is Chicago?\". When going up against two Jeopardy champions, Watson was able to beat them both (by some margin, although he did answer the above-mentioned question incorrectly with \"Toronto\").\nMegan chimes in that we are \"pretty awesome at teaching\" which is very true. Humans are the best (on this planet) at teaching other things to do a set of tasks. We train dogs, cats, lizards, birds, other people, and now we are getting quite good at teaching a computer, a simple machine completely of our own design, to mimic our own thought patterns and make decisions similar to what we would make. (See also 1263: Reassuring ).\nThe title text makes fun of teaching our children values about not trying to win by any means (i.e. but while playing fair) by suggesting we are just trying to hold on to our ability to beat them in something.\n[Cueball sits at a computer; Megan stands behind him.] Cueball: Wow \u2014 researchers taught a computer to beat the world's best humans at yet another task. Does our species have anything left to be proud of? Megan: Well, it sounds like we're pretty awesome at teaching. Cueball: Huh? What good is that ?\n"}
{"id":895,"title":"Teaching Physics","image_title":"Teaching Physics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/895","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/teaching_physics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/895:_Teaching_Physics","transcript":"Cueball: Understanding gravity: Space-time is like a rubber sheet. Massive objects distort the sheet, and- Student: Wait.\nStudent: They distort it because they're pulled down by... what?\nCueball: sigh\nCueball: Space-time is like this set of equations, for which any analogy must be an approximation. Student: Boooooring.\n","explanation":"The comic makes fun at the idea that physics is only interesting because teachers use interesting analogies, despite the fact that they are over-simplified and don't help when more complex theory is taught. The comic refers to the classic \"Ball on a rubber sheet\" metaphor as a way to explain general relativity , even though the metaphor breaks when trying to explain what causes gravity. The fourth panel highlights this with the statement that space-time is a set of equations , for which no analogy can fully explain.\nThe title text continues the teacher's frustration with coming up with an analogy by stating that there is some analogy that is both understandable and precise, and if he were the famous physicist\/teacher Richard Feynman he could come up with it. Professor Feynman was famous for his physics lectures and their ability to both entertain and educate his students, from the beginning student to the more advanced graduate students. Recordings of his lectures are still available and applicable to today's audience.\nAnother comic shows how to play with this 1158: Rubber Sheet .\nCueball: Understanding gravity: Space-time is like a rubber sheet. Massive objects distort the sheet, and- Student: Wait.\nStudent: They distort it because they're pulled down by... what?\nCueball: sigh\nCueball: Space-time is like this set of equations, for which any analogy must be an approximation. Student: Boooooring.\n"}
{"id":896,"title":"Marie Curie","image_title":"Marie Curie","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/896","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/marie_curie.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/896:_Marie_Curie","transcript":"[Ponytail is looking up at a picture on the wall showing Marie Curie with a white hair bun. She seems to be standing in front of a laboratory table with samples strewn over the surface. Her arms are in front of her like she is working with these samples. A voice comes from off-panel (and is revealed in the next panels to be Zombie Marie Curie.] Ponytail: My teacher always told me that if I applied myself, I could become the next Marie Curie. Zombie Marie Curie (off-panel): You know, I wish they'd get over me. [Inserted panel mainly inside the first panel, but extending a bit it, with a close up of Ponytail who turns her face around swiftly towards the zombie, as indicated by two speed lines curving around her head, even breaking the panels frame.] Ponytail: Zombie Marie Curie!\n[Ponytail has turned towards Zombie Marie Curie, drawn as Hairbun, who is walking towards Ponytail in typical zombie fashion both arms stretched out, with a battered and weathered look Stuff is falling off behind her, presumably mainly earth from when she dug herself out of her grave, and she is leaving a trail of this behind her, and it keeps falling from both of her hands and her body.] Zombie Marie Curie: Not that I don't deserve it. These two Nobels ain't decorative. But I make a sorry role model if girls just see me over and over as the one token lady scientist.\n[Close up of Zombie Marie Curie holding a hand up. She clearly has two large pieces of earth stuck to her face, and her hair is in disarray even with the hair bun keeping it in place.] Zombie Marie Curie: Lise Meitner figured out that nuclear fission was happening, while her colleague Otto was staring blankly at their data in confusion, and proved Enrico Fermi wrong in the process. Enrico and Otto both got Nobel Prizes. Lise got a National Women's Press Club award. Zombie Marie Curie: They finally named an element after her, but not until 60 years later.\n[Zoom out to both Ponytail and Zombie Marie Curie both with their arms down.] Zombie Marie Curie: Emmy Noether fought past her Victorian-era finishing-school upbringing, pursued mathematics by auditing classes, and, after finally getting a Ph.D, was permitted to teach only as an unpaid lecturer (often under male colleagues' names). Ponytail: Was she as good as them? Zombie Marie Curie: She revolutionized abstract algebra, filled gaps in relativity, and found what some call the most beautiful, deepest result in theoretical physics. Ponytail: Oh.\n[Close up of Zombie Marie Curie.] Zombie Marie Curie: But you don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.\n[Zoom out to both Ponytail and Zombie Marie Curie.] Zombie Marie Curie: So don't try to be the next me, Noether, or Meitner. Just remember that if you want to do this stuff, you're not alone. Ponytail: Thanks. Zombie Marie Curie: Also, avoid radium. Turns out it kills you. Ponytail: I'll try.\n","explanation":"The comic begins with Ponytail stating that her teacher told her that if she worked hard (applied herself) she could be the next Marie Curie . But then a distorted zombie Marie Curie (drawn as zombie Hairbun ) walks in and informs Ponytail that she is not the only influential woman scientist, and would wish people would get over her \"as the only important female scientist\". She then mentions two other important women in science.\nMarie Curie was a pioneering research scientist, most famous for her work with radiation, and in isolating Radium , and Polonium . She died from aplastic anemia contracted from exposure to radiation from the extremely radioactive isotopes of Radium and Polonium that she would carry around in her pockets. She ends up warning Ponytail against exposure to radium, stating that it kills you , although as the title text points out, obviously not permanently as she came back as a zombie.\nThe conversation between Ponytail and Zombie Marie Curie refers to the fact that Marie is often singled out as the only significant female scientist. Marie points out that this is a poor version of the truth, for two reasons. Firstly, there have been many other significant female scientists, and secondly, Marie asserts that the most significant events in theoretical physics and mathematics do not arise because of an individuals desire for fame, but from passion for the subject and a great deal of dedication and hard work.\nAs examples of important women scientists the comic mentions Lise Meitner and Emmy Noether .\nLise Meitner was one of the major contributors in the discovery of nuclear fission for which her male colleague Otto Hahn was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1944. In the process she proved that Enrico Fermi had made some wrong assumptions, but he also got a Nobel prize whereas she only got a National Women's Press Club award as \"Woman of the Year\" in 1946. As a somewhat late consolation, the element Meitnerium was named after her in 1997 almost 30 years after her death. (She is later mentioned again in 1584: Moments of Inspiration ).\nNoether's Theorem is widely considered one of the most beautiful and significant theorems used in physics, and its repercussions are still being widely explored to this day. She had to learn mathematics by taking auditing classes at University of Erlangen since she was refused the opportunity to take classes because she was a woman . And later she had to teach without getting paid and under male colleagues' names, meaning that students would only take the course if they thought some \"real\" male teacher was guiding Emmy. Much later Emmy was referenced in the title text of 2595: Advanced Techniques .\nMarie asserts at the end that Ponytail is not alone, meaning that there are many important female scientists out there, and also many young woman wanting to become scientists. But could also be a reference to the fact that, as mentioned, female scientists might be less likely to receive medals or other tokens of support and encouragement.\nZombies are a recurring theme in xkcd, particularly zombie scientists, which has also occurred twice before with Richard Feynman in 397: Unscientific and Paul Erd\u0151s in 599: Apocalypse .\n[Ponytail is looking up at a picture on the wall showing Marie Curie with a white hair bun. She seems to be standing in front of a laboratory table with samples strewn over the surface. Her arms are in front of her like she is working with these samples. A voice comes from off-panel (and is revealed in the next panels to be Zombie Marie Curie.] Ponytail: My teacher always told me that if I applied myself, I could become the next Marie Curie. Zombie Marie Curie (off-panel): You know, I wish they'd get over me. [Inserted panel mainly inside the first panel, but extending a bit it, with a close up of Ponytail who turns her face around swiftly towards the zombie, as indicated by two speed lines curving around her head, even breaking the panels frame.] Ponytail: Zombie Marie Curie!\n[Ponytail has turned towards Zombie Marie Curie, drawn as Hairbun, who is walking towards Ponytail in typical zombie fashion both arms stretched out, with a battered and weathered look Stuff is falling off behind her, presumably mainly earth from when she dug herself out of her grave, and she is leaving a trail of this behind her, and it keeps falling from both of her hands and her body.] Zombie Marie Curie: Not that I don't deserve it. These two Nobels ain't decorative. But I make a sorry role model if girls just see me over and over as the one token lady scientist.\n[Close up of Zombie Marie Curie holding a hand up. She clearly has two large pieces of earth stuck to her face, and her hair is in disarray even with the hair bun keeping it in place.] Zombie Marie Curie: Lise Meitner figured out that nuclear fission was happening, while her colleague Otto was staring blankly at their data in confusion, and proved Enrico Fermi wrong in the process. Enrico and Otto both got Nobel Prizes. Lise got a National Women's Press Club award. Zombie Marie Curie: They finally named an element after her, but not until 60 years later.\n[Zoom out to both Ponytail and Zombie Marie Curie both with their arms down.] Zombie Marie Curie: Emmy Noether fought past her Victorian-era finishing-school upbringing, pursued mathematics by auditing classes, and, after finally getting a Ph.D, was permitted to teach only as an unpaid lecturer (often under male colleagues' names). Ponytail: Was she as good as them? Zombie Marie Curie: She revolutionized abstract algebra, filled gaps in relativity, and found what some call the most beautiful, deepest result in theoretical physics. Ponytail: Oh.\n[Close up of Zombie Marie Curie.] Zombie Marie Curie: But you don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.\n[Zoom out to both Ponytail and Zombie Marie Curie.] Zombie Marie Curie: So don't try to be the next me, Noether, or Meitner. Just remember that if you want to do this stuff, you're not alone. Ponytail: Thanks. Zombie Marie Curie: Also, avoid radium. Turns out it kills you. Ponytail: I'll try.\n"}
{"id":897,"title":"Elevator Inspection","image_title":"Elevator Inspection","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/897","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/elevator_inspection.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/897:_Elevator_Inspection","transcript":"[Two Cueball-like guys and Ponytail, lifting her arms above her head, are in an elevator. Cueball standing next to the door reads the sign above the control panel.] Cueball: It says here that the elevator inspection certificate is on file in the building office. Friend: Whoa, cool! Let's go look at it! Ponytail: That sounds fun!\n[Caption below the panel:] Industry tip: Building owners know this never happens. Those signs mark elevators which have never been inspected.\n","explanation":"This was the first of Randall's Tips , that was not a pro tip but more specific an Industry tip.\nIn the United States, all elevators are subject to building codes and must be inspected on a somewhat-regular basis by city officials. After the inspector runs his rounds, the elevator's passing grade is noted in a certificate which is visibly placed in the elevator. Alternatively, it can be dumped in a filing cabinet in the building office where the owner can forget about it, and a placard is given to the elevator letting the passengers know where the certificate is (usually the aforementioned building office).\nThis comic is portraying a scenario which supposedly never happens. No-one is ever actually interested in seeing the elevator's certificate, and nobody gets this excited about going to a building office. So, as the caption humorously suggests: many elevators start using the placards for elevators that have not been inspected. No one cares enough to go to the building office and search the files for the certification. And as the title text says, even inspectors themselves get bored before they can get to the building office.\nThe moral of this comic is if you see an elevator with a notice that says that the \"elevator inspection certificate is on file\", you do not really know whether the notice is true, and so building owners use the certificates as substitutes for the bother and expense of actually getting their elevators inspected. The flaw in this logic is that, if an elevator were to fail catastrophically, the inspection certificate would almost certainly be retrieved and examined as part of the investigation. If the elevator had not been inspected as required, there would be very serious legal consequences.  Hence, failing to carry out regular inspections would carry substantial risks.\n[Two Cueball-like guys and Ponytail, lifting her arms above her head, are in an elevator. Cueball standing next to the door reads the sign above the control panel.] Cueball: It says here that the elevator inspection certificate is on file in the building office. Friend: Whoa, cool! Let's go look at it! Ponytail: That sounds fun!\n[Caption below the panel:] Industry tip: Building owners know this never happens. Those signs mark elevators which have never been inspected.\n"}
{"id":898,"title":"Chain of Command","image_title":"Chain of Command","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/898","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chain_of_command.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/898:_Chain_of_Command","transcript":"[A flowchart shows the President at the top, with an arrow to the Secretary of Defense, and then fourteen arrows leading to a series of boxes labeled Unified Combat Commanders. On the side, a box with a dotted outline has a dotted arrow leading to the president. It's labeled \"Engineer Who Installed the Red Button.\"] US NUCLEAR CHAIN OF COMMAND\n","explanation":"The President of the United States is at the top of the US Nuclear Chain of Command , but the engineer is de facto above him because the engineer is in charge of configuring how the button works, and thus could have installed an override so that they could block the President's use of the button and\/or use it themself. The \"Red Button\" is a simplification denoting procedures for the worst-case scenario, i.e. launching all strategic nuclear capabilities. This button shouldn't be pressed for what is happening currently. [ citation needed ]\nThis paradoxical situation applies in many other fields. In a major corporation commercially sensitive information is generally hidden from employees at lower levels but available to management, but the systems administrator (who usually sits low on the hierarchy and doesn't manage any other employees) can access not only the sensitive information but the raw data that it's calculated from. Not only that, but the systems administrator is usually responsible for controlling who has access to the information - making them the most powerful person in the company (as far as the IT infrastructure is concerned). Many managers think of themselves as being \"above\" engineers and have trouble coming to grips with this concept.\nThemistocles , mentioned at the title text, was an Ancient Greek politician. In the title text is a similar joke placed at the top of the chain of command, this time in Ancient Greece. It refers to Plutarch's Life of Themistocles :\nOf his son, who lorded it over his mother, and through her over himself, he said, jestingly, that the boy was the most powerful of all the Hellenes; for the Hellenes were commanded by the Athenians, the Athenians by himself, himself by the boy's mother, and the mother by her boy.\nThe part about television advertisements is a proposal that, by controlling the \"infant sons\" of important political figures (as well as the aforementioned Red Button engineer), one could control said political figures, and thus the entire world. Dora the Explorer is a bilingual (Spanish\/English) educational show for young children, something a busy person like the President (or the  engineer) might turn on for their child, and advertisements are known to influence young kids' decisions.\n[A flowchart shows the President at the top, with an arrow to the Secretary of Defense, and then fourteen arrows leading to a series of boxes labeled Unified Combat Commanders. On the side, a box with a dotted outline has a dotted arrow leading to the president. It's labeled \"Engineer Who Installed the Red Button.\"] US NUCLEAR CHAIN OF COMMAND\n"}
{"id":899,"title":"Number Line","image_title":"Number Line","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/899","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/number_line.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/899:_Number_Line","transcript":"[Number line ranging from \u22121 to 10.] [Arrow pointing left, towards negative numbers] Negative \"imitator\" numbers (do not use) [Line right before the number one] 0.99... (actually 0.0000000372 less than 1) [Line at the golden ratio.] \u03a6  Parthenon; sunflowers; golden ratio; wait, come back, I have facts! [Line at a region between two and 2.2] forbidden region [Line at Euler's number.] e [Line a bit before 3] 2.9299372 (e and pi, observed) [Line at \u03c0.] \u03c0 [Line at 3.5 with \u16df as the numeral] Gird \u2013 accepted as canon by orthodox mathematicians [Line a bit after 4.] site of battle of 4.108 [Blob between 4.5 and 6.5 labeled unexplored.] [Line at seven.] Number indicating a factoid is made up (\"every 7 years...\", \"science says there are 7...\", etc) [Line at eight.] Largest even prime [Line at 8.75.] If you encounter a number higher than this, you're not doing real math\n","explanation":"Once again, Randall seems to be just messing around, this time with a number line.\nThe title text is a literalism joke; at the time the comic was published, all Wikipedia articles with incomplete lists began with the message template \"This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.\" In the case of the List of numbers page, one could infer the absurd notion that Wikipedia wanted to have the list include every number from negative infinity to infinity. But because all Wikipedia articles are necessarily finite, such a list would always be incomplete, no matter how much it was expanded. It may also be referencing his previous statements about Wikipedia being the home of compulsive list-makers, who make the most astonishingly complete lists imaginable.\nAs of 2021, Wikipedia's List of numbers page, as well as all pages including lists that cannot ever reach a state of completion, are headed by the message template \"This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.\"\n[Number line ranging from \u22121 to 10.] [Arrow pointing left, towards negative numbers] Negative \"imitator\" numbers (do not use) [Line right before the number one] 0.99... (actually 0.0000000372 less than 1) [Line at the golden ratio.] \u03a6  Parthenon; sunflowers; golden ratio; wait, come back, I have facts! [Line at a region between two and 2.2] forbidden region [Line at Euler's number.] e [Line a bit before 3] 2.9299372 (e and pi, observed) [Line at \u03c0.] \u03c0 [Line at 3.5 with \u16df as the numeral] Gird \u2013 accepted as canon by orthodox mathematicians [Line a bit after 4.] site of battle of 4.108 [Blob between 4.5 and 6.5 labeled unexplored.] [Line at seven.] Number indicating a factoid is made up (\"every 7 years...\", \"science says there are 7...\", etc) [Line at eight.] Largest even prime [Line at 8.75.] If you encounter a number higher than this, you're not doing real math\n"}
{"id":900,"title":"Religions","image_title":"Religions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/900","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/religions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/900:_Religions","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan talking.] Megan: So are you worried about the rapture? Cueball: No, unless it figures out how to open doors. Megan: I said rapture.\nCueball: Oh, I'm not really into that. I'm the kind of Christian who only goes to church on Christmas and Easter, and then spends the other 363 days at the mosque. Megan: ...I don't think that's a thing. Cueball: Our rabbi swears it's legit.\nCueball: What religion are you? Megan: Experimentalist Monotheism. Cueball: Which is? Megan: We believe there's one god, but we're trying to find the error bars on that number.\n","explanation":"The late Harold Camping , a Christian pastor, wrongly predicted that the world would end in May 21, 2011. Since it didn't, he moved the date to October 21 of that year, and when that passed uneventfully, he recanted his belief that the end time could be calculated. In the Christian belief , the end of the world is called \"the second coming\" (referencing the return of Jesus); some sects believe this will be preceded by an event called \"the Rapture.\"\nThe first frame is a reference to raptors in Jurassic Park , and certainly not Randall's first raptor joke . In this film, the raptor dinosaurs get much more dangerous once they learn how to open doors. Cueball mishears Megan , which is why he thinks she said \"raptor\" instead of \"Rapture\".\nIn the second frame, Cueball describes his personal approach to religion, starting by saying that he is Christian but only attends church services on Christmas and Easter. This is a well-known phenomenon among lapsed Christians , and if Cueball is not a regularly practicing Christian, it would certainly explain why he isn't particularly interested in this fundamentalist aspect of Christian belief. However, from here, his description takes a turn towards the ridiculous, when he says that every other day of the year is spent \"at the mosque\". Not only are mosques the place of worship for a completely different religion (specifically, Islam ), they also generally hold communal services only on Fridays, so for Cueball to present this practice so matter-of-factly is quite absurd. When Megan questions the ubiquity of his practices, he replies by saying that this practice is vetted by his rabbi - a spiritual leader in Judaism , a third separate religion. While all three of these are Abrahamic religions , and as such have some overlap in their beliefs and texts, combining them all into one religion would be far from a simple process; either Cueball is simply being contrarian for comedic purposes, or he is involved in a very strange religious sect indeed.\nThe third frame is a math joke in which Megan references error bars which are used on graphs to indicate the uncertainty. So, Megan believes in one God (monotheism), as she says in the comic. But if she is still trying to find the error bars, and from the title text it is \"one, plus or minus one\", that could be in the range of zero ( atheism ) to two ( bitheism ). With larger error bars, this could also reference the doctrine of the Trinity , which holds that there is \"one God in three Divine persons\": the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. Some consider this position to be polytheistic, as others would consider atheism to merely leave the number and nature of gods undefined (and, as a seperate concept, agnosticism rendering it as untestable whatever the hypothetical value might be).\nThe title text is a supposed excerpt from the holy text of experimental monotheism. 1 Corinthians is a book of the Christian Bible . Megan refers to chapter 8 verse 6 (\u00b12), which would be verses 4\u20138 . Verse 4 says \"...There is no God but one\". Confusingly, verse 6 says \"yet for us, there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.\" (That could be self-consistent if the passage assumed that Jesus Christ is a lord but not a god, but little, if any, mainstream denominations of Christianity seem to follow such a doctrine).\n[Cueball and Megan talking.] Megan: So are you worried about the rapture? Cueball: No, unless it figures out how to open doors. Megan: I said rapture.\nCueball: Oh, I'm not really into that. I'm the kind of Christian who only goes to church on Christmas and Easter, and then spends the other 363 days at the mosque. Megan: ...I don't think that's a thing. Cueball: Our rabbi swears it's legit.\nCueball: What religion are you? Megan: Experimentalist Monotheism. Cueball: Which is? Megan: We believe there's one god, but we're trying to find the error bars on that number.\n"}
{"id":901,"title":"Temperature","image_title":"Temperature","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/901","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/temperature.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/901:_Temperature","transcript":"[A close up of Cueball with a thermometer in his mouth.]\n[The thermometer beeps.] Thermometer: BEEP\n[A full-body shot of Cueball looking down at the thermometer.]\n[A close-up of the thermometer's read-out.] Thermometer: PREGNANT\n","explanation":"This is a play on the fact that many digital thermometers look similar to pregnancy tests . Cueball , perhaps feeling ill, thinks he is using a thermometer to measure his body temperature and determine if he has a fever. As a male, and as he is taking it orally, he is doubtless surprised when the thermometer tells him instead that he is pregnant.\nThe two bars on the thermometer are similar to lines that appear on a traditional pregnancy test. One bar is the control line; it will become visible given any normal urine sample. If it doesn't appear, the test is invalid. The other bar, the test line, reacts to human chorionic gonadotropin , a hormone that's released during pregnancy. If both lines become visible, the test result is positive; if only the control line becomes visible, the test result is negative. Other results are invalid, since the control line didn't appear.\nThermometers are typically used to measure temperature, and the title text notes that this clever thermometer has also detected a fever in the baby.\n[A close up of Cueball with a thermometer in his mouth.]\n[The thermometer beeps.] Thermometer: BEEP\n[A full-body shot of Cueball looking down at the thermometer.]\n[A close-up of the thermometer's read-out.] Thermometer: PREGNANT\n"}
{"id":902,"title":"Darmok and Jalad","image_title":"Darmok and Jalad","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/902","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/darmok_and_jalad.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/902:_Darmok_and_Jalad","transcript":"[Captain Dathon is seen on a communications screen.] Alien: Darmok and Jalad at Kalenda's!\n[Jean-Luc Picard and Deanna Troi stand next to each other, looking off to the right.] Picard: Their language must be based on folklore and metaphor! Computer! Search cultural archives for Darmok-Jalad-Kalenda!\n[Picard and Troi listen to the response.] Computer (off-panel): In Tamarian legend, Darmok and Jalad got totally wasted and hooked up at a party at Kalenda's.\n[Dathon is seen on the communications screen again, winking.] WIIIIIINK\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode \" Darmok \" in which Captain Picard and the Enterprise crew meet with a Tamarian ship. They can translate the individual words of Tamarian with perfect accuracy, but the Tamarians communicate using metaphors based on their own history and culture\u2014without these cultural references, the Enterprise crew are unable to understand what the Tamarians are actually saying. \"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra\" is repeated many times in this episode by the Tamarian captain, Dathon. Picard is eventually able to decipher the line to discover that it was a story of two warriors marooned on an island (Tanagra) who work together to defeat a common foe. The alien's intention is that he and Picard work together to defeat a monster as a way to cement ties between the Tamarians and the Federation .\nIn the comic, instead of suggesting a dramatic gesture to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough, the alien seems to be suggesting a one-night stand, hence the wink in the final panel. It is not clear if he is chatting up Deanna Troi (who has the long curly hair) or Picard. However, given that in the original episode Darmok and Jalad (the two warriors) were metaphorically identified with Dathon and Picard, it seems likely that he is flirting with Picard.\nThe title text suggests that the actor Patrick Stewart , who played Captain Picard, might find Star Trek fans indecipherable, in the same way that Captain Picard found the Tamarians indecipherable. This is a joke about how Star Trek fans stereotypically make constant references to the franchise which are so dense and obscure that even the program's actors might find them impossible to understand.\n[Captain Dathon is seen on a communications screen.] Alien: Darmok and Jalad at Kalenda's!\n[Jean-Luc Picard and Deanna Troi stand next to each other, looking off to the right.] Picard: Their language must be based on folklore and metaphor! Computer! Search cultural archives for Darmok-Jalad-Kalenda!\n[Picard and Troi listen to the response.] Computer (off-panel): In Tamarian legend, Darmok and Jalad got totally wasted and hooked up at a party at Kalenda's.\n[Dathon is seen on the communications screen again, winking.] WIIIIIINK\n"}
{"id":903,"title":"Extended Mind","image_title":"Extended Mind","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/903","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/extended_mind.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/903:_Extended_Mind","transcript":"[An IM window is open over a Chrome window with tabs for Spark Plug, Feeler Gauge, and Wikipedia.] Message with Mike1979 Mike1979: I replaced my spark plugs and now my car is running weird. Me: The spark gap might be off. Me: You can check with a feeler gauge. Mike1979: What should the gap be? Me: Usually between 0.035\" and 0.070\". Me: But it depends on the engine.\n[An IM window is open over a Chrome window with a single Wikipedia tab, marked ERROR. The page says: \"Wikipedia has a problem. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading (can't contact the database server: unknown error (10.0.0.242))] Message with Mike1979 Mike1979: I replaced my spark plugs and now my car is running weird. Me: What is a spark plug?? Me: Help Me: What is a car??\nWhen Wikipedia has a server outage, my apparent IQ drops by 30 points.\nRandall: \"I drew it based on an older error message where the IP was 10.0.0.243. I changed it to 242 (a) because I try not to get too specific with those things, and didn't want people poking the actual machine at .243 (if it was still there) - I actually considered putting .276 and seeing how many people noticed, but figured they'd just think I made a dumb mistake. and (b) as part of this ancient inside joke involving the number 242 ...\"\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the fact that the narrator has become so dependent on Wikipedia as a source of information that although it gives him the great advantage that he appears learned on any topic with a remarkable degree of specificity, the downside is that whenever Wikipedia goes offline, the limitations of his actual knowledge are revealed.\nThe title, \"Extended Mind\" , refers to a theory proposed by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, which postulates that the mind not only includes what can be found in the skull, but also incorporates external things, like Wikipedia. Others have connected this sort of thing to the inate biogical intelligence, or knowledge, but still consider it a different phenomenon under a label such as \" ex telligence \".\nThe title text refers to an observed phenomenon that many of Wikipedia's page links eventually lead to the Philosophy page. This may be due to the fact that the first few links in any article tend to reference more general or abstract ideas, which eventually gravitate towards philosophy. This is not actually true, though. It works for the spark plug page and countless others but not for all. The comment section below has some examples, but many of them are not working anymore, because Wikipedia references change in time, as just about anyone can just log in and add\/remove links, or just adjust their position in an article. Most instances of this not working are because of endless loops (page A to page B back to page A, or anything like that).\nMore info on this bizarre characteristic of the encyclopedia can be found on their page about it or on this blog .\n[An IM window is open over a Chrome window with tabs for Spark Plug, Feeler Gauge, and Wikipedia.] Message with Mike1979 Mike1979: I replaced my spark plugs and now my car is running weird. Me: The spark gap might be off. Me: You can check with a feeler gauge. Mike1979: What should the gap be? Me: Usually between 0.035\" and 0.070\". Me: But it depends on the engine.\n[An IM window is open over a Chrome window with a single Wikipedia tab, marked ERROR. The page says: \"Wikipedia has a problem. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading (can't contact the database server: unknown error (10.0.0.242))] Message with Mike1979 Mike1979: I replaced my spark plugs and now my car is running weird. Me: What is a spark plug?? Me: Help Me: What is a car??\nWhen Wikipedia has a server outage, my apparent IQ drops by 30 points.\nRandall: \"I drew it based on an older error message where the IP was 10.0.0.243. I changed it to 242 (a) because I try not to get too specific with those things, and didn't want people poking the actual machine at .243 (if it was still there) - I actually considered putting .276 and seeing how many people noticed, but figured they'd just think I made a dumb mistake. and (b) as part of this ancient inside joke involving the number 242 ...\"\n"}
{"id":904,"title":"Sports","image_title":"Sports","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/904","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sports.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/904:_Sports","transcript":"[Two Cueball like commentators sit behind a desk.] Commentator to the left: A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers. Commentator to the right: Let's use them to build narratives! [Caption below the panel:] All sports commentary\n","explanation":"A random number generator is any object or program that arbitrarily selects and produces a number from within a pre-defined range of numbers. For example, a single six-sided die will produce any integer between 1 and 6, inclusive. In an unweighted random number generator, every number that it can possibly produce has the same odds of coming up. When rolling a single precision die , for instance, there is an equal chance of rolling a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. Conversely, in a weighted random number generator, some numbers are more likely to come up than others. For example, when rolling two dice, a seven is far more likely to come up than a two, as there are six possible ways to roll a seven but only one way to roll a two.\nAll sports generate numbers that are inherently random. Home runs, goals, sacks, passes, shots, hits, misses, errors, and many more such statistics are generated in every match of every sports game. The rules of the particular sport, as well as the skill of the participants, introduces bias toward certain values; hence, sports matches are weighted random number generators.\nIf the generator is weighted to favor a specific team in a specific game, that is discussed. Then the results of the game (more random numbers) are discussed. It's the discussion that is the narrative part. If a player breaks a record, that becomes part of the narrative. The number is random, but weighted because of player skill or the rules of the sport.\nCollege sports in the US are especially prone to this kind of narrative-first journalism with their penchant for using more arbitrary systems of placement to determine postseason play than professional sports which have almost all standardized their systems around sometimes highly complicated metrics to determine who reaches the postseason. Prime examples of this are the new College Football Playoff which has a committee release polls every week after Week 9 of the college football season, with the top four teams in the final poll playing for the championship, and March Madness where a similar committee ranks the top 68 teams in the country in a bracket for the championship tournament. The old Bowl Championship Series , which determined the NCAA Division I college football champion from 1998 to 2013, literally used computers generating numbers and algorithms based on team performance as a heavy part of their ranking systems that determined which two teams played for the championship at the end of the season.\nThe title text applies this to financial\/stock results\/forecasts as well and, most appropriately, to Dungeons & Dragons ( D&D ), a tabletop role-playing game. In D&D the players and Dungeon Master are forging a narrative about the characters and world they have collectively made up; the players all decide on courses of action (such as negotiating with townspeople, intimidating nobles, attacking monsters, to name a tiny faction of possibilities) and whether they succeed is determined by rolling dice of various numbers of sides. The numerical results are woven into a narrative by the Dungeon Master.\nThis strip is one of several in which Randall affectionately trivializes sports (see for instance 1107: Sports Cheat Sheet , 1480: Super Bowl and 1507: Metaball ).\n[Two Cueball like commentators sit behind a desk.] Commentator to the left: A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers. Commentator to the right: Let's use them to build narratives! [Caption below the panel:] All sports commentary\n"}
{"id":905,"title":"Homeownership","image_title":"Homeownership","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/905","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/homeownership.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/905:_Homeownership","transcript":"[Cueball is in an empty room, on the phone with a friend.] Cueball: I've always rented, so this blows my mind\u2014this house is mine ? I own a building? Friend: Yup!\nCueball: I could, like, decide to drill a hole in that wall there, and nobody could do anything about it? Friend: That's right!\n[Cueball, off the phone, stands in silence.]\nTen hours later: [Cueball is standing to the left a pile of rubble, on the phone with a friend.] Cueball: Can I come stay with you? My house has a... problem. Friend: Let me guess: you drilled holes in it until it collapsed? Cueball: I don't think I'm cut out for homeownership.\n","explanation":"One common annoyance of American renters is their inability to make simple changes to their dwelling \u2014 for example, drilling a hole in a wall to hang a picture \u2014 without having to ask for permission from the property owner.  In many cases, if the renter drills the hole without asking permission, they are charged for repairs.  This is one reason that home ownership can be empowering, as it allows the owner to do anything they wish with their property. This can lead to mishaps however, as shown in the comic when Cueball drills holes in the house to prove his ownership, to the point of structural instability.  Cueball's last statement expresses the fact that he was actually better off having someone who could dictate what could and could not be done with his residence.\nThe title text references fictional research showing that 60% of the toxic assets involved in the United States housing bubble were created by power drills. The implication being that Cueball is not alone in his hole drilling tendencies which created not only structural collapse of the homes, but also the financial collapse of the market as those houses would now be worth far less than the mortgages placed against them. Note the double usage of the word collapse.\n[Cueball is in an empty room, on the phone with a friend.] Cueball: I've always rented, so this blows my mind\u2014this house is mine ? I own a building? Friend: Yup!\nCueball: I could, like, decide to drill a hole in that wall there, and nobody could do anything about it? Friend: That's right!\n[Cueball, off the phone, stands in silence.]\nTen hours later: [Cueball is standing to the left a pile of rubble, on the phone with a friend.] Cueball: Can I come stay with you? My house has a... problem. Friend: Let me guess: you drilled holes in it until it collapsed? Cueball: I don't think I'm cut out for homeownership.\n"}
{"id":906,"title":"Advertising Discovery","image_title":"Advertising Discovery","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/906","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/citations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/906:_Advertising_Discovery","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Advertising discovery: [Person sits at computer, reading an ad on the screen. The bracketed superscripts are blue.] Ad: Turgidax\u00ae triples [2] your penis size overnight, [2][5] improving both your sexual attractiveness [2][7] and your cardiovascular health. [7][8][9] Person (thinking): Sounds legit. [Caption below the panel:] Wikipedia has trained us to believe anything followed by little blue numbers in brackets.\n","explanation":"On Wikipedia , a well-referenced text or statement indicates credibility. References for particular facts are linked to by bracketed blue little numbers in superscript . [1] [3][4] When faced with a statement followed by these, readers will normally believe it without further ado, [6][10] since they take it on trust that there are directions on the bottom of the page, leading to a reliable source or two, agreeing with what the statement says. The effect becomes strengthened when such information often is confirmed to be correct.\nIn the comic, advertisers have realized that it has gone so far that people in general will take any nonsense for granted if there is just the right amount of Wikipedia-style reference tags to it. The penis pump e-commerce can suddenly flourish (again?) and the spammers won't even need to bother making up findings to cite.\nTurgidax \u00ae is something Randall formed from turgid , meaning swollen. One reason that the attaching of -ax creates a typically pill-like name is simply that -ax (and -ex ) are common Latin adjectival word endings, and that many drugs have names formed from Latin words. -Ax is also, specifically, the root of the -acious ending in English, as in \"audacious\" or (appropriately) bodacious , meaning \"extra\" or \"especially\". The idea is it makes the genitalius extra or especially turgid. Cardiovascular means relating to the heart and blood vessels.\nThe title text is about how Wikipedia users have been able to add \"disputed\"-tags (nowadays \"disputed \u2013 discuss\") after challenged facts, with this template , since the dawn of time. [11] [ disputed \u2013 discuss ] So when faced with the new advertising trick IRL , we could counter by scribbling those tags all over with blue Sharpie marker pens, and so automatically revive the critical thinking .\n[Caption above the panel:] Advertising discovery: [Person sits at computer, reading an ad on the screen. The bracketed superscripts are blue.] Ad: Turgidax\u00ae triples [2] your penis size overnight, [2][5] improving both your sexual attractiveness [2][7] and your cardiovascular health. [7][8][9] Person (thinking): Sounds legit. [Caption below the panel:] Wikipedia has trained us to believe anything followed by little blue numbers in brackets.\n"}
{"id":907,"title":"Ages","image_title":"Ages","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/907","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ages.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/907:_Ages","transcript":"[A number line labeled \"age.\" The start point is 0, with points labeled 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70, and the line continues past the width of the panel. There are interstitial, non-labeled points. Above the line are labeled brackets. They are (approximated):] 0-3: [Non-sentient] 4-12: \"Everything is exciting!\" 13-17: \"Everything sucks!\" 18-22: \"Woooo college! Wooooo\u2014\" [vomit] 23-30: \"Relationships are hard! 31-42: \"So are careers!\" 43-54: \"No daughter of mine is going out dressed like that!\" 55-75+: [More sex than anyone is comfortable admitting]\n","explanation":"This is a graph of the general themes that occur between the ages covered by each individual set of brackets. The layout is a parody of larger timescales of human or geologic history, e.g. \"Bronze Age\" or \"Iron Age\".\nThe \"ages\" identified and experiences typical at that age:\nThe title text is a joke about the shortsightedness of many people (at any age) in believing their current age to be ideal.\n[A number line labeled \"age.\" The start point is 0, with points labeled 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70, and the line continues past the width of the panel. There are interstitial, non-labeled points. Above the line are labeled brackets. They are (approximated):] 0-3: [Non-sentient] 4-12: \"Everything is exciting!\" 13-17: \"Everything sucks!\" 18-22: \"Woooo college! Wooooo\u2014\" [vomit] 23-30: \"Relationships are hard! 31-42: \"So are careers!\" 43-54: \"No daughter of mine is going out dressed like that!\" 55-75+: [More sex than anyone is comfortable admitting]\n"}
{"id":908,"title":"The Cloud","image_title":"The Cloud","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/908","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_cloud.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/908:_The_Cloud","transcript":"[Cueball finds a computer tower with a wire leading away from it.] Cueball: What's this? Off-screen: The Cloud.\n[Cueball looks behind him. The wire leads to an outlet in the wall next to where Black Hat sits at a desk with a computer. Another wire leads from that outlet to Black Hat's computer.] Cueball: Huh? I always thought \"The Cloud\" was a huge, amorphous network of servers somewhere. Black Hat: Yeah, but everyone buys server time from everyone else. In the end, they're all getting it here.\n[A close-up of Black Hat.] Cueball: How? You're on a cable modem. Black Hat: There's a lot of caching.\n[A close-up of Cueball, looking down at the tower at his feet.] Cueball: Should the cord be stretched across the room like this? Black Hat: Of course. It has to reach the server, and the server is over there.\n[Cueball turns back to the Black Hat, still sitting at the computer.] Cueball: What if someone trips on it? Black Hat: Who would want to do that? It sounds unpleasant. Cueball: Uh. Sometimes people do stuff by accident. Black Hat: I don't think I know anybody like that.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to all of the companies that rolled out \"cloud\" services like Google 's and Amazon 's music service and Apple 's aptly named iCloud online backup service around the time that the comic was released. Despite the mental image people using cloud services have of their data being placed literally in the sky, the reality is that all the data in the cloud has to be stored somewhere , sometimes being merely a server. Black Hat claims that the various cloud services are all ultimately provided by his server.\nWhen Cueball expresses skepticism that Black Hat has enough bandwidth to make that possible, he explains that it's done by Caching . Caching is an arrangement whereby some data is stored locally in order to reduce the need to retrieve it from more distant storage. However, it would require an unrealistically efficient level of caching to reduce the overhead requirements of the world's cloud storage networks to a level that could be accommodated by Black Hat's non-Enterprise class cable modem -- and if it could be done, it would simply transfer the load to other servers (i.e. Cueball's description of \"the cloud\" as it exists in the real world). However, it does make a bottleneck at Black Hat's server.\nThe title text refers to the Roomba , which is a small round battery-powered vacuum cleaner that runs automatically around the house. The Roomba begins to learn the dimensions of rooms, however, apparently it has never learned to avoid running over the cord, pulling it free of the socket and cutting power to the server.\nThe regular nightly downtime is a reference to an urban legend in which some critical piece of equipment (often a server) is unplugged regularly so that a vacuum cleaner or similar janitorial tool can be temporarily plugged in. Although the Roomba vacuum does not require this computer's outlet, \"running over the cord\" apparently causes similar interruption in service, probably unplugging the cord, requiring it to be plugged in again.\nThis comic is reminiscent of a scene in the British sitcom The IT Crowd in which the IT department pranks their non-tech-savvy manager by presenting a single small box and claiming that it contains the entire Internet.\nThe last panel showcases both Black Hat's stereotypical sadism and callousness. When Cueball asks about the hazard (namely, tripping) implicit in a cord stretching across a room, Black Hat responds by implying no one would want to do that, because it's unpleasant. Cueball responds with the fact that some people do things by accident, to which Black Hat says he doesn't know anyone like that. The only way Cueball can disprove this (at least quickly) is by admitting he's one of those people, opening him up to Black Hat's ridicule. Alternatively, this could be a hint towards how Black Hat, being the sadist he is, would \"accidentally trip over\" the cord, purposefully causing downtime and subsequent unpleasantness to those who rely on the cloud, a proposition supported by the title text.\nThere are some connections with both 1117: My Sky and the title text of 1444: Cloud and especially the April Fools' Day comic 1506: xkcloud .\n[Cueball finds a computer tower with a wire leading away from it.] Cueball: What's this? Off-screen: The Cloud.\n[Cueball looks behind him. The wire leads to an outlet in the wall next to where Black Hat sits at a desk with a computer. Another wire leads from that outlet to Black Hat's computer.] Cueball: Huh? I always thought \"The Cloud\" was a huge, amorphous network of servers somewhere. Black Hat: Yeah, but everyone buys server time from everyone else. In the end, they're all getting it here.\n[A close-up of Black Hat.] Cueball: How? You're on a cable modem. Black Hat: There's a lot of caching.\n[A close-up of Cueball, looking down at the tower at his feet.] Cueball: Should the cord be stretched across the room like this? Black Hat: Of course. It has to reach the server, and the server is over there.\n[Cueball turns back to the Black Hat, still sitting at the computer.] Cueball: What if someone trips on it? Black Hat: Who would want to do that? It sounds unpleasant. Cueball: Uh. Sometimes people do stuff by accident. Black Hat: I don't think I know anybody like that.\n"}
{"id":909,"title":"Worst-Case Shopping","image_title":"Worst-Case Shopping","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/909","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/worst_case_shopping.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/909:_Worst-Case_Shopping","transcript":"[Cueball is diving in very deep, dark blue water. He shines a flashlight at the sea floor.] Cueball (thinks): Eight meters. There's the wreckage... Yes! I see the key!\n[As he swims further toward it, his flashlight starts to cut out.] Cueball (thinks): Gotta grab it, surface, get in to the radio shed, and warn the President! Just a few more... Flashlight: BZZT FIZZ\n[This panel has no border like the others, and is divided in half diagonally by a thought bubble.] [The left half of it is a dark blue thought bubble with the diver inside it. On the right hand side are packaged flashlights hanging on a shelf. The one called Hi-Brite is $24.95 and is labeled \"water resistant to 10 meters.\" The one called \"FenStar G6\" is $49.95 and says \"water resistant to 40 meters.\"] Cueball (thinks): Oh no.\n[Cueball and a friend stand in front of a flashlight display in a store. Cueball looks down at the packages with his hand on his chin in thought. The thought bubble from the previous panel leads from his head. The friend stands behind him.] Cueball: ...maybe I should spring for the deeper water resistance. Friend: Why on earth would you care about that? Cueball: Look, you never know.\n","explanation":"For most people, under most circumstances, a flashlight's water-resistance is a completely moot point, as most flashlight use occurs on dry land. But, as Randall has shown before , there is a tendency for people to imagine elaborate scenarios in which an extra edge would be useful.\nIn the dream sequence over the first 2 and a half frames, Cueball appears to be diving to find a key underwater, which he spots using his flashlight when he is at 8 meters. His flashlight goes out at 10 meters because he bought the \"Hi-Brite\" model. The dream sequence also references a \"radio shed\", which were only really used in the past for amateur radios or some other military style bases\/compounds\u2014which would align with his \"warn the President\" line. He thus suggests the more water-resistant flashlight. However, this is seen as ridiculous from his friend, since the more durable model costs over $25 more in return. He replies that \"you never know\" what situation you'll be in.\nThe title text takes Cueball's thought process to the next level. If he is getting a flashlight that works to 40 meters (worst-case), he should probably be prepared for even deeper waters as well (even worse-case).\n[Cueball is diving in very deep, dark blue water. He shines a flashlight at the sea floor.] Cueball (thinks): Eight meters. There's the wreckage... Yes! I see the key!\n[As he swims further toward it, his flashlight starts to cut out.] Cueball (thinks): Gotta grab it, surface, get in to the radio shed, and warn the President! Just a few more... Flashlight: BZZT FIZZ\n[This panel has no border like the others, and is divided in half diagonally by a thought bubble.] [The left half of it is a dark blue thought bubble with the diver inside it. On the right hand side are packaged flashlights hanging on a shelf. The one called Hi-Brite is $24.95 and is labeled \"water resistant to 10 meters.\" The one called \"FenStar G6\" is $49.95 and says \"water resistant to 40 meters.\"] Cueball (thinks): Oh no.\n[Cueball and a friend stand in front of a flashlight display in a store. Cueball looks down at the packages with his hand on his chin in thought. The thought bubble from the previous panel leads from his head. The friend stands behind him.] Cueball: ...maybe I should spring for the deeper water resistance. Friend: Why on earth would you care about that? Cueball: Look, you never know.\n"}
{"id":910,"title":"Permanence","image_title":"Permanence","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/910","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/permanence.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/910:_Permanence","transcript":"[A large panel the combined width of the four panels below it.] [A blue Linux terminal installer screen with a grey box that is labeled \"[!]CONFIGURE THE NETWORK\" in red. Below, in black, it reads \"Please enter the hostname for the system.\" Below is an empty blue entry box with a cursor and dashed underscore, and below this it says \"<GO BACK>\".]\n[Cueball sits at his computer, Megan stands behind him.] Megan: You've been staring at that screen a while. Cueball: Picking a good server name is important.\n[Megan stares at him.]\n[She continues to stare.]\n[Cueball pushes his chair back, puts one elbow on the back of the chair and points with his other hand at the screen.] Megan: And yet you settled on \"Caroline\" for our daughter in like 15 seconds. Cueball: But this is a server! Cueball: Besides, I had to\u2014you were trying to name her \"Epidural.\" Megan: Those were good drugs.\n","explanation":"On the top panel is the sketch of a Debian Installer showing a hostname dialog for its menu-driven frontend. Cueball wants to make sure that he chooses a great permanent name that he can give to the server he is running.\nChoosing a name for a server is an important task.\nIt is non-trivial enough that there are official communications on how to choose a good name and why many ideas are bad, for example RFC 1178 Name Your Computer .\nIt is important to pick a good name because changing it is costly once many reference to the existing name are widespread. For example, RFC 1178 states:\nWhen Megan quips about how quickly, in comparison, Cueball named their daughter Caroline (a living being - that is, the type of entity that would give the server purpose), Cueball retorts that he was under pressure at the time: Megan tried to name said daughter \"Epidural\" in honor of the painkiller drugs that were being injected into her spine at the time. Megan tries to justify this by explaining that those were very good drugs, but thus also confirms Cueball's point, in that she was drugged, not in her right mind, and thus not making good decisions. Epidurals work by stopping nerves in the spinal cord from transmitting signals, and would not have an effect on the brain similar to those seen in someone given an opiate or narcotic. She may, however, have been motivated purely by the fact that the drug stopped the pain of labor or a cesarean section; alternatively, she may have been on entirely different drugs at the same time.\nIn the title text Cueball mentions that he thinks that it is easier to change a person's name than to change the hostname of a server because of the number of changes that would need to be made to each of the machines that would have saved the old name of the server. It seems that Cueball hasn't realised that a child's name will get logged in government records, school records, and pretty much anything they sign up for and anything they buy or sign. (Of course, many of those documents will be changed by other organizations, making them somebody else's problem. Depending on the exact set of documents which Cueball needs to personally update, changing a name might be easier for him ). Also, you typically have to wait in line at the Social Security Administration office or at the Department of Motor Vehicles, both of which take excruciatingly long amounts of time.\n[A large panel the combined width of the four panels below it.] [A blue Linux terminal installer screen with a grey box that is labeled \"[!]CONFIGURE THE NETWORK\" in red. Below, in black, it reads \"Please enter the hostname for the system.\" Below is an empty blue entry box with a cursor and dashed underscore, and below this it says \"<GO BACK>\".]\n[Cueball sits at his computer, Megan stands behind him.] Megan: You've been staring at that screen a while. Cueball: Picking a good server name is important.\n[Megan stares at him.]\n[She continues to stare.]\n[Cueball pushes his chair back, puts one elbow on the back of the chair and points with his other hand at the screen.] Megan: And yet you settled on \"Caroline\" for our daughter in like 15 seconds. Cueball: But this is a server! Cueball: Besides, I had to\u2014you were trying to name her \"Epidural.\" Megan: Those were good drugs.\n"}
{"id":911,"title":"Magic School Bus","image_title":"Magic School Bus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/911","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/magic_school_bus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/911:_Magic_School_Bus","transcript":"[A girl sits at a desk in a classroom, and the teacher stands before her. The teacher has a blue dress and blonde hair piled on her head in a bun. The girl raises her hand, the teacher raises both arms above her head, a pointer in one hand.] Girl: Ms. Frizzle, how do batteries work? Ms. Frizzle: To the bus!\n[Ms. Frizzle and the children are shown getting onto the bus.]\n[The bus, with Ms. Frizzle at the helm and a child's face in every window, soars through a rainbow void filled with a giant amoeba, a rocket, an epicyclic gear, a planet with rings, and a Feynman diagram.]\n[The bus is parked, and the occupants have gotten out. The children stand around Ms. Frizzle, and she stands at a desk with a computer on it, typing.] Computer: Wikipedia - Batteries\n","explanation":"The Magic School Bus is a series of educational children's books in the US that was adapted in the mid-nineties into an animated television show. The series centers on a class of children whose teacher Ms. Frizzle makes use of the titular magic school bus to take her students on a variety of magical field trips that allow them to experience various scientific topics first hand, such as the inner anatomy of the human body, the effects of friction, what goes on inside a beehive, and many others.\nIn this comic, however, Ms. Frizzle initially takes the students onto the bus apparently for one of these field trips to explore the way batteries work, but then for whatever reason, she has the students get off the bus again and simply resorts to looking up the Wikipedia article about batteries . The implied joke is that, with the advent on resources like Wikipedia, it's no longer necessary for Ms. Frizzle to take the students on half-hour long trips in the bus to experience whatever phenomenon they are studying that day (which is what the third panel symbolizes) - Wikipedia effectively answers the question quickly and easily. An alternative answer is that Ms. Frizzle has just gotten lazy, and has resorted to looking up the answers to the students' questions on Wikipedia instead of taking them on field trips. The alternative seems more likely, since the third panel shows them still going on an adventure, however briefly it takes to get to the library\/computer lab.\nThe red and white checkered rocket in the bottom-right of the third panel can possibly be a reference to The Adventures of Tintin Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon , in which Tintin goes to the moon in a rocket that is similar, if not identical, to the one depicted. To the bottom-left is a green Ciliate , a single celled life-form covered in hair-like fibres. At the top right are a set of Planetary gears . To the top left is a ringed planet, perhaps Uranus and in the background is a complex Feynman diagram .\nThe child who is asking the question looks similar to Wanda, one of the regular students in the class who often asked the questions that set the field trips in motion. Ralphie, the student in the second panel with the backward hat, was another student who often asked these questions. The students in the class were shown to be from many backgrounds (i.e. some of the students were black, another was Asian, etc.), something Randall appears not to have added into this comic, despite it being in color.\nThe title text is a reference to Phoebe, one of the students in Ms. Frizzle's class, who would regularly make a remark beginning with \"At my old school...\" (Phoebe used to go to a different school, unlike many of the other students in the class) to express wonder at how unusual were the events of Ms. Frizzle's field trips (e.g. \"At my old school, we never rode on bees!\"). Phoebe actually said that so much that in an episode where she goes back to her old school, the sign out front labels it as \"Phoebe's old school\".\nMicrosoft Encarta 2005 was a digital encyclopedia that was often used in school settings for learning with the aid of computers. Arguably, with the advent of Wikipedia, programs like Encarta have become relatively less widely used, which is part of the joke in the title text.\n[A girl sits at a desk in a classroom, and the teacher stands before her. The teacher has a blue dress and blonde hair piled on her head in a bun. The girl raises her hand, the teacher raises both arms above her head, a pointer in one hand.] Girl: Ms. Frizzle, how do batteries work? Ms. Frizzle: To the bus!\n[Ms. Frizzle and the children are shown getting onto the bus.]\n[The bus, with Ms. Frizzle at the helm and a child's face in every window, soars through a rainbow void filled with a giant amoeba, a rocket, an epicyclic gear, a planet with rings, and a Feynman diagram.]\n[The bus is parked, and the occupants have gotten out. The children stand around Ms. Frizzle, and she stands at a desk with a computer on it, typing.] Computer: Wikipedia - Batteries\n"}
{"id":912,"title":"Manual Override","image_title":"Manual Override","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/912","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/manual_override.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/912:_Manual_Override","transcript":"[A plane is in a nosedive with smoke pouring from one wing. Text comes from someone reading in the cockpit.] \"This is the emergency override system, which can be used to regain control of the aircraft. Complete instructions for activating this system are available as a GNU info page.\"\n","explanation":"There are two jokes in this comic. The first is that the pilot typed \"man override\" to manually override the plane's computer and steer the plane to safety, but instead he ends up opening the manual page for \"OVERRIDE\". The second joke is making fun of a trend in documentation for Unix-like systems using the free GNU toolchain.\nHistorically, UNIX systems had a way to access descriptions of the available programs by using the \"man\" command (from \"manual\"). Typing \"man [program name]\" would output a concise, helpful text, called a \" man page \", describing the program's functionality, available command-line options, a list of related programs, etc. For some GNU-based systems, however, the output of \"man [program name]\" will be entirely too brief, mainly telling what the program does, then directing the user to invoke a GNU-specific information system ( GNU Info ). GNU Info pages can be quite useful, e.g. they often contain much more information than man pages, and are hypertextual , allowing quick navigation through a network of content-related Info pages; however, they often are much more complex to search through than simple man files, which take the form of single scrollable pages, one per program.\nAs such, the humour is predicated upon understanding the frustration which sometimes arises when GNU users seek out a man page, hoping for an easy, digestible read, only to find that the man page they opened merely redirects them to another, less accessible network of hypertext Info pages. This can be especially annoying when it interrupts a person's workflow; e.g. when what they wanted was to spend three seconds looking up the proper format of a particular command line function, and instead they end up redirected to a maze of detailed documentation. This would be especially dangerous when one is trying to stop a plane from crashing. [ citation needed ] To add injury to the insult, sometimes the Info pages aren't actually installed, causing the \"info\" viewer to just render the same old \"man\" page that had the directions in the first place.\nThe title text provides a tongue-in-cheek correction to the comic's title, suggesting that rather than typing \"man(ual) override\", the user\/pilot should type \"info override\" to search GNU Info instead.\n[A plane is in a nosedive with smoke pouring from one wing. Text comes from someone reading in the cockpit.] \"This is the emergency override system, which can be used to regain control of the aircraft. Complete instructions for activating this system are available as a GNU info page.\"\n"}
{"id":913,"title":"Core","image_title":"Core","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/913","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/core.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/913:_Core","transcript":"[A cutaway diagram of the Earth, with colored layers including a labeled outer core and inner core.]\n[A closeup of the stylized outer core, labeled \"Turbulent molten metals at 30 million PSI\" with turbulence lines, and of the inner core, labeled \"moon-sized iron sphere.\"]\n[Cueball reading a book pulls legs up tight under office chair, peering downwards.]\n[Caption below the frame:] I freak out about fifteen minutes into reading anything about the Earth's core when I suddenly realize it's RIGHT UNDER ME .\nWhat people of different science fields would often think about became the subject of 2057: Internal Monologues . Geologist are not included, but the molten core beneath our feet would probably have been the choice if they had. That Randall was actually already thinking about adding geology was made clear in the next comic 2058: Rock Wall about the core\/mantle beneath our feet and 20 miles of rock (wall).\n","explanation":"This comic reflects on the fact that no matter where you are on Earth , its core is always directly under you, while incredibly hot and under huge amounts of pressure. Yet most of the time, we ignore this completely unless there is a volcanic eruption (which has nothing to do with the core, but mainly with the friction between the tectonic plates).\nCueball is presumably reading a geology book with diagrams and various facts about the Earth's interior, such as the core being subdivided into an inner core and an outer core , that the inner core is a solid ball, the size of the moon, that the outer core is at a pressure of 30 million pounds per square inch (approximately 2 million times atmospheric pressure at sea level) and the outer core is made of molten metal in a constant turbulent motion - a bit like a pot of boiling water. But every time he gets 15 minutes in to such a book he freaks out, realizing this deadly stuff is right beneath him, and he bends over to look down to the Earth.\nThe title text makes a note of how cool it would be to study this and be able to tell people you study what they're standing over... always! So if you do - then let everyone you meet know what you do for a living as soon as you introduce yourself by pointing at the ground beneath you! (Despite most geologists and geophysicists not studying the core, they do study what is beneath our feet.)\nAlternately, the title text referencing someone gesturing downward, might look as if they were pointing to their genitals.  It might be considered a humorous opening to a speech.\n[A cutaway diagram of the Earth, with colored layers including a labeled outer core and inner core.]\n[A closeup of the stylized outer core, labeled \"Turbulent molten metals at 30 million PSI\" with turbulence lines, and of the inner core, labeled \"moon-sized iron sphere.\"]\n[Cueball reading a book pulls legs up tight under office chair, peering downwards.]\n[Caption below the frame:] I freak out about fifteen minutes into reading anything about the Earth's core when I suddenly realize it's RIGHT UNDER ME .\nWhat people of different science fields would often think about became the subject of 2057: Internal Monologues . Geologist are not included, but the molten core beneath our feet would probably have been the choice if they had. That Randall was actually already thinking about adding geology was made clear in the next comic 2058: Rock Wall about the core\/mantle beneath our feet and 20 miles of rock (wall).\n"}
{"id":914,"title":"Ice","image_title":"Ice","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/914","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ice.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/914:_Ice","transcript":"[Megan is setting up a party. She is standing with a bottle in one hand looking at a snack table in front of her. Beret Guy stands behind her with both arms raised. Above and behind them there is a big banner with gray text.] Megan: Everything's ready... Megan: Except we're out of ice. Beret Guy: I'll get some! Banner: Party!\n[Beret Guy is walking down the street past a building with a store window and sign. He is carrying a large bag of ice over his shoulder. Danish is standing on the sidewalk up against the brick wall and calls to him.] Danish: Hey sexy. Where're you headed with all that ice? Beret Guy: A party! Danish: There's a better party up at my place. Beret Guy: But I\u2014 Danish: C'mon, one drink. Sign: Save Mart Bag: Ice\n[Zoom in on Beret Guy who rubs his eyes groggily, small bubbles floating up from his head. A caption is written above the image in a box that breaks the top frame of this panel:] The next morning... Beret Guy: ...Ugh... Where am I? Beret Guy: I was supposed to\u2014 Beret Guy: \u2014Where's all my ice!?\n[Beret Guy looks down to find himself in a bathtub full of kidneys. His scream extends on both sides of the panel, with only the five central A's in full view:] Beret Guy: AAAAAAA\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to an old urban legend : a guy is drugged, then he awakes in an ice-filled bathtub only to discover both of his kidneys have been harvested by organ thieves . They have left him in the tub of ice, to let him survive in time to get to a hospital for dialysis . It is now his problem to get a new kidney, whereas the thieves can sell the organs to someone who (also) needs a kidney transplantation . By doing it in this way, the thieves prevent themselves from becoming murderers; thus if they get caught they might get a lesser sentence. That would be the explanation why they do not just kill the \" organ donor \".\nIn this comic the situation is reversed: Beret Guy (who has just bought some ice for the party he is about to return to) is lured by Danish up to \"her place\" where he is drugged. The next morning he awakes in a bathtub filled with kidneys, only to discover that his ice has been harvested by Danish.\nThe title text refers to a similar story where the victim is left a note by their captor or one-night stand that says \" Welcome to the AIDS club \". Rather than having been involuntarily infected with HIV\/AIDS , the victim, Beret Guy, has been involuntarily enrolled in the American Automobile Association (AAA) and his roadside assistance card has been left on the counter. This could also be another pun on Beret Guy's response of yelling AAAAAAA , which could be another kind of AAA club that he is welcomed to.\nThere is no display of typical \"Beret Guy behavior\" in this comic, although it is typical for him to be involved in an incident that turns the world upside down. His encounter with organ thieves only cost him his ice, a party and that he got a nasty experience. But he retained his kidneys and was not infected with HIV.\n[Megan is setting up a party. She is standing with a bottle in one hand looking at a snack table in front of her. Beret Guy stands behind her with both arms raised. Above and behind them there is a big banner with gray text.] Megan: Everything's ready... Megan: Except we're out of ice. Beret Guy: I'll get some! Banner: Party!\n[Beret Guy is walking down the street past a building with a store window and sign. He is carrying a large bag of ice over his shoulder. Danish is standing on the sidewalk up against the brick wall and calls to him.] Danish: Hey sexy. Where're you headed with all that ice? Beret Guy: A party! Danish: There's a better party up at my place. Beret Guy: But I\u2014 Danish: C'mon, one drink. Sign: Save Mart Bag: Ice\n[Zoom in on Beret Guy who rubs his eyes groggily, small bubbles floating up from his head. A caption is written above the image in a box that breaks the top frame of this panel:] The next morning... Beret Guy: ...Ugh... Where am I? Beret Guy: I was supposed to\u2014 Beret Guy: \u2014Where's all my ice!?\n[Beret Guy looks down to find himself in a bathtub full of kidneys. His scream extends on both sides of the panel, with only the five central A's in full view:] Beret Guy: AAAAAAA\n"}
{"id":915,"title":"Connoisseur","image_title":"Connoisseur","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/915","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/connoisseur.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/915:_Connoisseur","transcript":"[White Hat is holding a wine glass down in one hand and holding a bottle of wine up in front of him with the other hand. He is looking at the label and talking with Cueball standing next to him with his own filled wine glass in one hand. He is looking down at the glass.] White Hat: How do you stand this cheap wine? Cueball: Wine all tastes the same to me.\n[Close-up of White Hat.] White Hat: You've just never had good wine. If you paid more attention, you'd realize there's a whole world here.\n[Close-up on Cueball, who spreads his arms out, resulting in the wine in the glass sloshing so much that part of the wine is above the rim of the glass, some even hanging over the edge and a spray droplet hanging above the sloshing liquid.] Cueball: But that's true of anything! Wine, house music, fonts, ants, Wikipedia signatures, Canadian surrealist porn\u2014 Cueball: Spend enough time with any of them and you'll become a snobby connoisseur.\n[This panel has no border (aka a 'frameless panel') and is next to but aligned further down than the first three panels. It shows a zoom out of both White Hat and Cueball again. White Hat now has both glass and bottle held down at his side. Cueball holds his glass down, but tilted away from him. A small puddle of wine is on the floor next to Cueball.] White Hat: But some things do have more depth than others. Cueball: If you locked people in a box for a year with 500 still frames of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, by the end they'd be adamant that some were great and some were terrible. White Hat: You're exaggerating. Cueball: Oh, really?\n[This panel is below the feet of the two characters from the previous panel. It goes further to the left than those two, and is wider than the previous panels, but it does not go much past the middle, so there is a blank white space to the left of this panel, below the first and most of the second panel. It shows a box, with two star burst on the surface from where two voices emanate from the inside. Over the top left of the panels frame is a small frame with a caption:] A year later:\n[The voice from left side of the box:]\nSure, most closed-mouth frames are boring, but in #415, the way the man's jaw frames the mayo on his hand is pure perfection, and\u2014\n[The voice from right side of the box:]\nWhat a surprise- you praising a mayo frame. Listening to you , I'd think there was nothing else in The Sandwich.\n[The voice from right side of the box:]\nFrankly, the light hitting J.B.'s collar through the lettuce would put #242 in my top ten even if he had no mayo on his hand at all .\n","explanation":"White Hat is fond of good wine , and he can probably distinguish slight differences in different types of wine, perhaps being the type that attends wine tasting parties. He doesn't like the cheap wine that Cueball has served for him (implying a cheap wine cannot be a good one, an opinion held by stereotypical wine snobs), looking with disgust at the label of the offending bottle.\nOn the other hand, Cueball doesn't have a preference; all of them taste the same for him, so presumably he gets the cheaper ones. White Hat tells Cueball that if he just tried some really good wine and paid more attention he would discover a whole new world.\nCueball's answer is the main message of the comic. He says that wine is no different from anything else in this respect, and makes a list starting with the wine but then going past house music , fonts , ants , ending with Wikipedia signatures and Canadian surrealist porn . His point being if you spend enough time focusing on any one subject, then you'll become a snobby connoisseur on that topic.\nWhite Hat tries to defend wine by saying that some things have more depth than others (wine being among them), but Cueball challenges him on this by choosing something as obscure as 500 pictures of Joe Biden , then Vice President of the United States under Barack Obama , eating a sandwich as an example. He claims that if people were locked up in a box with those pictures for a year, they would end up being connoisseurs with the same vehemence regarding the best picture as wine tasters can be about the best wine.\nWhite Hat claims that this is an exaggeration, but Cueball takes this as a challenge so in the last panel, apparently White Hat and Cueball are actually running this experiment to see if they will end up concentrating on slight differences among the pictures of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, just in the same way that White Hat concentrates on slight differences among different kinds of wine. The result of the experiment is clearly going to Cueball's side, the discussion being mainly between the importance of mayo or the light through lettuce from the sandwiches.\nThis mentality may also be applied to online groups based on any subject (such as television shows, films, and other hobbies and interests), where arguments and vehement, stubborn opinions are common despite the fairly unimportant subject.\nThe title text presents the same idea in a different wording. The \"scale of our brains\" refers to a concept similar to Richard Dawkins' Middle World , where things too small (say, smaller than the point of a pin) or too big (bigger than what we can see from a mountaintop) are just out of our comprehension, so the things our brains understand must be neither too small nor too big, i.e. the \"middle world\".\nHowever, the title text goes further in this idea: When we find things too big (like the distance to the Moon), we shrink it so that it fits into the \"middle world\" we're used to. Conversely, when we find things too small (say, a mote of dust), we expand it for the same reason. In a quite similar way, if all we have is pictures of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, we \"resize\" that subject so that we can fill books with the details about the pictures.\n[White Hat is holding a wine glass down in one hand and holding a bottle of wine up in front of him with the other hand. He is looking at the label and talking with Cueball standing next to him with his own filled wine glass in one hand. He is looking down at the glass.] White Hat: How do you stand this cheap wine? Cueball: Wine all tastes the same to me.\n[Close-up of White Hat.] White Hat: You've just never had good wine. If you paid more attention, you'd realize there's a whole world here.\n[Close-up on Cueball, who spreads his arms out, resulting in the wine in the glass sloshing so much that part of the wine is above the rim of the glass, some even hanging over the edge and a spray droplet hanging above the sloshing liquid.] Cueball: But that's true of anything! Wine, house music, fonts, ants, Wikipedia signatures, Canadian surrealist porn\u2014 Cueball: Spend enough time with any of them and you'll become a snobby connoisseur.\n[This panel has no border (aka a 'frameless panel') and is next to but aligned further down than the first three panels. It shows a zoom out of both White Hat and Cueball again. White Hat now has both glass and bottle held down at his side. Cueball holds his glass down, but tilted away from him. A small puddle of wine is on the floor next to Cueball.] White Hat: But some things do have more depth than others. Cueball: If you locked people in a box for a year with 500 still frames of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, by the end they'd be adamant that some were great and some were terrible. White Hat: You're exaggerating. Cueball: Oh, really?\n[This panel is below the feet of the two characters from the previous panel. It goes further to the left than those two, and is wider than the previous panels, but it does not go much past the middle, so there is a blank white space to the left of this panel, below the first and most of the second panel. It shows a box, with two star burst on the surface from where two voices emanate from the inside. Over the top left of the panels frame is a small frame with a caption:] A year later:\n[The voice from left side of the box:]\nSure, most closed-mouth frames are boring, but in #415, the way the man's jaw frames the mayo on his hand is pure perfection, and\u2014\n[The voice from right side of the box:]\nWhat a surprise- you praising a mayo frame. Listening to you , I'd think there was nothing else in The Sandwich.\n[The voice from right side of the box:]\nFrankly, the light hitting J.B.'s collar through the lettuce would put #242 in my top ten even if he had no mayo on his hand at all .\n"}
{"id":916,"title":"Unpickable","image_title":"Unpickable","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/916","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unpickable.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/916:_Unpickable","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] HackerShield Geek-Proof Safe System: [Two boxes sit side by side. One is a safe with a lock marked \"Unpickable.\" It is labeled: \u2460 24-pin dual-tumbler radial-hybrid lock (rendered unopenable by a fused 17th pin). The other is a shoebox. It is labeled: \u2461 Shoebox containing your valuables.]\n","explanation":"The comic plays on the idea that geeks and nerds will try to break into high-security areas in order to challenge themselves, instead of to steal things. The vault is labeled \"unpickable\" as a kind of challenge to break into it, while all the valuables are simply stored in a shoe box beside the vault.\nA 24-pin dual-tumbler radial-hybrid lock would probably be too bulky and cumbersome to actually exist. The key would be huge, or just plain long . Given the length of the key, it would need to be extremely strong, and the length would be around 96mm, assuming that each notch is 5mm. In theory, though, it would be a remarkably difficult type of lock to pick. The fused 17th pin means that, even with the correct key, it cannot be opened. It would be much easier to simply break open the safe with brute force than to pick it. A simple and nerdy way to open the vault with brute force would be to use canned air, using the principle that cold objects are more brittle. Once the air is emptied onto the lock, it can be easily smashed with an ordinary hammer. This is an example of nerd sniping , since the vault is nearly unopenable, nerds and geeks would spend all their time on the vault and ignore the seemingly useless shoe box.\nThe title text continues the theme, with an unsolved 5x5x5 Rubik's cube to further challenge and distract the thief.\n[Caption above the panel:] HackerShield Geek-Proof Safe System: [Two boxes sit side by side. One is a safe with a lock marked \"Unpickable.\" It is labeled: \u2460 24-pin dual-tumbler radial-hybrid lock (rendered unopenable by a fused 17th pin). The other is a shoebox. It is labeled: \u2461 Shoebox containing your valuables.]\n"}
{"id":917,"title":"Hofstadter","image_title":"Hofstadter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/917","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hofstadter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/917:_Hofstadter","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk, working on a laptop. Megan approaches the desk and picks up a tiny book.] Megan: What's this? Cueball: Douglas Hofstadter's six-word autobiography. After all those 700-page tomes, I guess he wanted to try for brevity. Megan: Huh. Let's see...\n[Close up of Megan, reading the tiny book.] Book: I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym\n[Full shot of Cueball and Megan again. Megan looks down at the tiny book in her hand.] Megan: ...whoa. Cueball: I think he nailed it.\n","explanation":"Douglas Hofstadter is an American author who has written several books about philosophy, mathematics, and science. He is perhaps most famous for his book G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach which explores \"strange loops,\" or self-referential systems . \"Meta-\" is a Greek prefix meaning \"outside\" or \"beyond.\" As an adjective, \"meta\" informally refers to anything self-referential, like the last phrase of this sentence. An example of the use of such a term can be found in 1313: Regex Golf .\nAt first reading, the six word autobiography in the second panel, \"I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym\", may seem unfinished, however the clue is in the final word. An acronym is an abbreviation formed by the initial letters of a series of words, and reading the first letter of each of the six words in order yields \"ISMETA\", completing the sentence and setting up the self-reference. Hofstadter himself did something similar in G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach in the chapter \"Contracrostipunctus\", where the first letter of each line spells out the phrase \" H ofstadter's C ontracrostipunctus A crostically B ackwards S pells J .S.Bach\" - and taking the first letters of each word in that sentence backwards does indeed spell \" J.S. BACH \".\nThis comic is probably a reference to Six-Word Memoirs , a project launched in 2006 in which people \"tell their life story in just six-words\".\nThis comic may additionally be a reference to the meme \"explain <whatever> in six words\", which was making the rounds at the time.\nIn the title text, a reference implementation is, broadly, an example of how to implement some feature during the software development process. In this case the feature is a self-referential joke, and the sentence itself is, correctly, self-referential.\nHofstadter has been referenced before, in the title text of 555: Two Mirrors and 608: Form . Furthermore, his famous book has been directly spoofed in the title of 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey . Finally, the self-reference reference (\"IS META\") is also a typical concept used most famously in 688: Self-Description but also in several other comics .\n[Cueball sits at a desk, working on a laptop. Megan approaches the desk and picks up a tiny book.] Megan: What's this? Cueball: Douglas Hofstadter's six-word autobiography. After all those 700-page tomes, I guess he wanted to try for brevity. Megan: Huh. Let's see...\n[Close up of Megan, reading the tiny book.] Book: I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym\n[Full shot of Cueball and Megan again. Megan looks down at the tiny book in her hand.] Megan: ...whoa. Cueball: I think he nailed it.\n"}
{"id":918,"title":"Google+","image_title":"Google+","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/918","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/googleplus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/918:_Google%2B","transcript":"Megan: You should join Google+! Cueball: What is it? Megan: Not Facebook! Cueball: What's it like? Megan: Facebook!\n[Cueball considers.]\nCueball: Oh, what the hell. Cueball: I guess that's all I really wanted. click\n","explanation":"At the time of the comic's release, Google+ was a new social network announced by Google on June 28, 2011. When it launched there were many tech articles written about G+, which appears to look and\/or function similarly to Facebook. In the first panel, Megan describes G+ as 'not Facebook '. Facebook is a popular social networking site. [ citation needed ] She then describes G+ as being like Facebook.\nAfter Cueball thinks about it in the second frame, he comes to a realization in the third frame that a social network like Facebook, but not related to Facebook is all he really wanted. This is in reference to the backlash that happens every so often wherein people grow tired of Facebook, its arcane policies, its cavalier attitude toward user privacy and\/or its general disdain for end users, and people want to leave Facebook, but have no comparable platform to move their social networking to.\nThe title text uses \"you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch\" as both point and counterpoint in an argument, since this fact has both negative (your parents won't see posts you want them to see, and won't be able to post things for you to see) and positive (your parents won't see posts you don't want them to see, and you won't have to worry about keeping up with their posts) implications.\nOn April 2, 2019, Google shut down Google+ for consumers. It is still available for users with a G Suite account.\nMegan: You should join Google+! Cueball: What is it? Megan: Not Facebook! Cueball: What's it like? Megan: Facebook!\n[Cueball considers.]\nCueball: Oh, what the hell. Cueball: I guess that's all I really wanted. click\n"}
{"id":919,"title":"Tween Bromance","image_title":"Tween Bromance","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/919","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tween_bromance.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/919:_Tween_Bromance","transcript":"[All of Cueball's lines are overlaid over the entire comic; the panels listed are merely the ones directly under each sentence fragment.] [Cueball is standing smugly behind Megan, who is seated in front of a computer and typing.] Cueball: By my guesstimate,\nCueball: my frenemy yiffed so hard\nCueball: her moist taint made [Megan's eye twitches.]\nCueball: her panties preggers! Megan: STOP IT STOP IT!\n","explanation":"Apparently, Randall hates some ridiculous neologisms. Cueball seems to be dictating a \"Tween bromance\" story or novel to Megan , who is possibly typing it up. He is including all the words that get to Megan in a sequence. Megan is just annoyed and starts to shriek in rage; considering Cueball keeps speaking more annoying words in the title text, that seems to have been the point.\nLike this comic fills a sentence with (gross) neologisms, 550: Density crams a sentence with memes.\nAccording to 1485: Friendship , Randall doesn't like the word bromance much either. Uncomfortable synonyms are also seen in 1322: Winter and 2352: Synonym Date .\n[All of Cueball's lines are overlaid over the entire comic; the panels listed are merely the ones directly under each sentence fragment.] [Cueball is standing smugly behind Megan, who is seated in front of a computer and typing.] Cueball: By my guesstimate,\nCueball: my frenemy yiffed so hard\nCueball: her moist taint made [Megan's eye twitches.]\nCueball: her panties preggers! Megan: STOP IT STOP IT!\n"}
{"id":920,"title":"YouTube Parties","image_title":"YouTube Parties","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/920","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/youtube_parties.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/920:_YouTube_Parties","transcript":"[Cueball and a group consisting of three Cueballs and one Ponytail are standing in a dark room around a table. The group and Cueball are illuminated by a laptop on the table.] [Caption above the panel:] The problem with YouTube parties: Cueball (thinking): This video is blowing their MINDS. Group (thinking): Oh man, I know what video we should watch once this is over.\n","explanation":"A YouTube party is when a group of people show each other YouTube videos. The problem with YouTube parties is that no one pays attention to the video that's playing; instead, each person is thinking of the video that they personally want to play next.\nYou can see analogous behavior at any get-together where couples (parents) are telling stories about their kids. Nobody cares about anybody else's kid; they are just waiting (not even listening) until they get the chance to talk about their own offspring.\nThe joke seems to be that everybody is doing this, but it is unclear whether they realize it. They each seem to be under the delusion that the others will be fascinated by \"their\" video (or child's accomplishments), even though the evidence strongly suggests otherwise. Possibly they don't care about that either; they just want an audience, even an unwilling one.\nThis may be defensible where kids are involved, because the parents could reasonably feel that the accomplishments of their children reflect well on themselves. However, the people in the YouTube party didn't create the videos, they just found them. Which makes their behavior (or perhaps YouTube parties in general) even more inane and pointless.\nThe title text reiterates this point. The speaker is reminded of another video that is so superior to the one currently playing that we should find it and watch it immediately. We can always go back to the current video later (if anybody still remembers, that is; and according to the comic above no one will want to remember it).\n[Cueball and a group consisting of three Cueballs and one Ponytail are standing in a dark room around a table. The group and Cueball are illuminated by a laptop on the table.] [Caption above the panel:] The problem with YouTube parties: Cueball (thinking): This video is blowing their MINDS. Group (thinking): Oh man, I know what video we should watch once this is over.\n"}
{"id":921,"title":"Delivery Notification","image_title":"Delivery Notification","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/921","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/delivery_notification.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/921:_Delivery_Notification","transcript":"[The first panel is a UPS InfoNotice\u00ae. Most of the text on it is just scribbles, though the company logo and header is clear.]\n[Cueball opens their door to see the InfoNotice\u00ae stuck on his door.] Cueball: What! I've been here all day! Cueball 2 (off-screen): Huh? Cueball: They have my laptop.\n[Cueball and Cueball 2 are standing next to each other. Cueball has his arms to his sides, in annoyance.] Cueball 2: So get it tomorrow. Cueball: I fly out in the morning and they don't open till noon! Cueball 2: Sucks.\n[Cueball stands, working on a laptop.] Cueball: It's right there . I can see the UPS building on the map. Cueball 2 (off-screen): Ok...\n[Dramatic zoom to the Cueball's upper torso and face, along with clenched fist.] Cueball: My laptop is there. Cueball: It's mine . Cueball: I'm going to get it.\n[Even more dramatic zoom! Cueball's face fills the panel.] Cueball 2 (off-screen): They won't let you. Cueball: Who are they to keep from me what is mine? Cueball 2 (off-screen): Dude, they\u2014\n[Zoomed out on Cueball, who spins around, raising a finger.] Cueball: A quest is at hand! Cueball 2(off-screen): Security's gonna throw you out. Cueball: I fear neither death nor pain. But I will not go unarmed.\n[Three inset panels overlap, in a montage format.] [Elves in long robes stand around a table, on which lies a broken sword.] Light the beacons and send word to the Elves. They must reforge the sword of my fathers.\n[An Elf beats the sword together on an anvil.]\n[An Elf rides a horse, silhouetted by the full moon.] Ere dawn, I will go forth to the Sorting Depot.\n[The Elf knocks at the door, sword in scabbard held under arm.] Knock knock knock knock\n[Cueball opens the door, to find a second InfoNotice\u00ae stuck on top of the first. The Elf is gone.]\n","explanation":"In the US, when the package delivery company UPS (or other package delivery companies) knocks on your door or rings your doorbell and cannot reach you, they leave a delivery attempt notification stuck to your door. These may be for packages that require a signature, such as expensive electronics. An example is shown in the first panel.\nThis comic hints that the threshold for the UPS delivery person to leave such a notice is unreasonably low. The delivery personnel made only a token effort to deliver the package (which, incidentally, is their only actual job) before posting the yellow delivery notification and unconcernedly driving away to their next delivery (or, more likely, their next yellow-delivery-notification-posting).\nAfter missing the delivery, Cueball (who is directly referencing The Lord of the Rings ) asks the Elves to reforge his sword in order to go on a quest to retrieve his new laptop. In The Lord of the Rings , Aragorn (accepting his role as the heir to the king of the West) had the sword of Elendil , called Narsil , reforged (which symbolizes the reuniting of the race of man under one leader). Cueball obviously views the UPS building as a dangerous and impenetrable fortress, and possession of such a sword is the only way to guarantee success in his quest.\nIronically, when the Elves come to deliver the new sword, the delivery elf is unable to notify anyone in the house, and simply leaves another delivery notification.\nIn the title text, Rivendell is one of the home of the Elves, where the broken shards of Narsil resided, with Elrond and his elves. Unfortunately for Cueball, the sorting depot of Rivendell has the same, limited opening hours as the UPS.  It is apparent that Cueball will not be getting his laptop in time for his flight.\n[The first panel is a UPS InfoNotice\u00ae. Most of the text on it is just scribbles, though the company logo and header is clear.]\n[Cueball opens their door to see the InfoNotice\u00ae stuck on his door.] Cueball: What! I've been here all day! Cueball 2 (off-screen): Huh? Cueball: They have my laptop.\n[Cueball and Cueball 2 are standing next to each other. Cueball has his arms to his sides, in annoyance.] Cueball 2: So get it tomorrow. Cueball: I fly out in the morning and they don't open till noon! Cueball 2: Sucks.\n[Cueball stands, working on a laptop.] Cueball: It's right there . I can see the UPS building on the map. Cueball 2 (off-screen): Ok...\n[Dramatic zoom to the Cueball's upper torso and face, along with clenched fist.] Cueball: My laptop is there. Cueball: It's mine . Cueball: I'm going to get it.\n[Even more dramatic zoom! Cueball's face fills the panel.] Cueball 2 (off-screen): They won't let you. Cueball: Who are they to keep from me what is mine? Cueball 2 (off-screen): Dude, they\u2014\n[Zoomed out on Cueball, who spins around, raising a finger.] Cueball: A quest is at hand! Cueball 2(off-screen): Security's gonna throw you out. Cueball: I fear neither death nor pain. But I will not go unarmed.\n[Three inset panels overlap, in a montage format.] [Elves in long robes stand around a table, on which lies a broken sword.] Light the beacons and send word to the Elves. They must reforge the sword of my fathers.\n[An Elf beats the sword together on an anvil.]\n[An Elf rides a horse, silhouetted by the full moon.] Ere dawn, I will go forth to the Sorting Depot.\n[The Elf knocks at the door, sword in scabbard held under arm.] Knock knock knock knock\n[Cueball opens the door, to find a second InfoNotice\u00ae stuck on top of the first. The Elf is gone.]\n"}
{"id":922,"title":"Fight Club","image_title":"Fight Club","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/922","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fight_club.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/922:_Fight_Club","transcript":"Friend: But Fight Club isn't really about fighting. It's about the way society\u2014 Cueball: Nope, don't wanna hear it. Friend: But it says consumers are\u2014 Cueball: This conversation is over.\nThe first rule of talking to me about movies is do NOT talk about Fight Club.\n","explanation":"Fight Club is a movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton that was released in 1999, based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. It included this oft-quoted and parodied line: \"The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.\"\nThe movie has been fiercely debated by critics, primarily regarding whether it makes a sophisticated philosophical statement about society and consumerism or whether it is just a movie with lots of fighting and mischief . Randall explains his position in the title text, claiming that he lies somewhere in-between and does not want to debate this issue with others.\n\"This conversation is over\" is also a line from the movie, in the scene where the Narrator (Edward Norton) is arguing with Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) while Tyler (Brad Pitt) tells the Narrator what to say from the bottom of the basement stairs.\nFriend: But Fight Club isn't really about fighting. It's about the way society\u2014 Cueball: Nope, don't wanna hear it. Friend: But it says consumers are\u2014 Cueball: This conversation is over.\nThe first rule of talking to me about movies is do NOT talk about Fight Club.\n"}
{"id":923,"title":"Strunk and White","image_title":"Strunk and White","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/923","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/strunk_and_white.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/923:_Strunk_and_White","transcript":"[Hairbun, with glasses, sits behind a desk typing on a computer. A line goes from the keyboard indicating that the text above is the one she types. Behind her stand Cueball with a book in his hand, and a man with male-pattern baldness holding up a smoking pipe.]\nDear Internet, We, the current editors of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style , must\u2014with great reluctance\u2014 clarify a point of orthography:\n\"Strunk & White\" should be used for the style manual and \"Strunk\/White\" for the erotic fan fiction pairing.\nE.B. White is mentioned again in the later comics, 2162: Literary Opinions and 1087: Cirith Ungol .\n","explanation":"The 1918 writing style guide The Elements of Style , by Cornell University professor William Strunk Jr. and New Yorker writer E.B. White (perhaps better known as the author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little ), is commonly referred to as \" Strunk & White \". In this comic, the current editors of Strunk & White are clarifying a matter of style pertaining to the style guide, an instance of meta humor , a recurring theme in xkcd .\nErotic fan fiction is a genre of writing in which fans make up erotic stories involving characters from non-erotic stories. \" Slash fiction \" is a subgenre that pairs characters of the same sex: These pairings are denoted by using the \"\/\" to separate the paired characters, hence the name \"slash fiction\". This convention is generally thought to originate with the Kirk\/Spock pairing in Star Trek fan fiction, wherein \"K\/S\" was used for such romantic or erotic works of fan fiction, while \"K&S\" was used for non-romantic works. This comic imagines a similar distinction being necessary for \" Strunk & White \" vs. \"Strunk\/White\".\nThe title text comments that authors of Strunk\/White fan fiction will most likely have read The Elements of Style , which makes them better writers.\n[Hairbun, with glasses, sits behind a desk typing on a computer. A line goes from the keyboard indicating that the text above is the one she types. Behind her stand Cueball with a book in his hand, and a man with male-pattern baldness holding up a smoking pipe.]\nDear Internet, We, the current editors of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style , must\u2014with great reluctance\u2014 clarify a point of orthography:\n\"Strunk & White\" should be used for the style manual and \"Strunk\/White\" for the erotic fan fiction pairing.\nE.B. White is mentioned again in the later comics, 2162: Literary Opinions and 1087: Cirith Ungol .\n"}
{"id":924,"title":"3D Printer","image_title":"3D Printer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/924","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/3d_printer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/924:_3D_Printer","transcript":"[Two people before a 3D printer, one with a wrench.] Cueball: 3D printers are getting incredible. Ponytail: I think we're not far from widespread deployment.\nPonytail: And you know what that means.\nCueball: Spam containing actual enlarged penises? Ponytail: I give it a week.\n","explanation":"With the ongoing development of 3D printing technology, the cost of low end 3D printers continues to reduce steadily, and the complexity of modelling and producing components is becoming easier. These factors, among others, means that 3D printers are beginning to be found in homes, rather than exclusively in businesses. Ponytail & Cueball are discussing the improvements and expect widespread deployment soon.\nSpam emails promoting penis-enlargement products are very common, and often show images of unnaturally large penises to advertise how effective they are. The adverts prevalence and aggressive marketing techniques have made them a well known staple of email inboxes, though the improvement of spam filters has increasingly banished them to the spam folder.\nCueball and Ponytail predict that the spam producers will quickly jump on the opportunity presented by the widespread prevalence of 3D printers, and start advertising their wares with 3D printed phalluses. Usually someone would have to proactively choose to print out a spam email, but it wouldn't be difficult to imagine a scenario where the email contains malicious code which automatically prints them a huge phallus.\nIn the title text, Better Homes and Gardens is an American magazine that, as the name suggests, shows you how to make your home and garden better often by reusing common household items in new and innovative ways. Acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (or ABS) is a light-weight and moldable plastic which makes it perfect for 3D printers.\n[Two people before a 3D printer, one with a wrench.] Cueball: 3D printers are getting incredible. Ponytail: I think we're not far from widespread deployment.\nPonytail: And you know what that means.\nCueball: Spam containing actual enlarged penises? Ponytail: I give it a week.\n"}
{"id":925,"title":"Cell Phones","image_title":"Cell Phones","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/925","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cell_phones.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/925:_Cell_Phones","transcript":"[Cueball holds a cellphone. Black Hat is sitting at a desk with a laptop.] Cueball: Another huge study found no evidence that cell phones cause cancer. What was the W.H.O. thinking? Black Hat: I think they just got it backward.\n[Black Hat turns towards Cueball in an unframed panel, holding the laptop with one hand by the upper edge of the screen. Cueball is not visible.] Cueball: Huh? Black Hat: Well, take a look.\n[There is a plot of total cancer incidence and cell phone users. Cancer rises from 1970 to 1990, then stays relatively steady. Cell phone use rises from roughly 1984, and steeply after 1990, to the present.]\nCueball: You're not... There are so many problems with that. Black Hat: Just to be safe, until I see more data I'm going to assume cancer causes cell phones.\n","explanation":"This comic is a good explanation of the correlation\/causation fallacy, where one party states two unrelated events and posits that they must have influenced each other.\nAfter hearing about the \"Cell Phones Don't Cause Cancer\" study, which refutes a claim made by the World Health Organization (just Google the debate or check out Wikipedia's article on it , the comic doesn't focus much on it), Black Hat plots \"Total Cancer Incidence\" per 100,000 and \"Cell Phone Users\" per 100 on the same graph. The graph in frame 3 shows an exponential rise in cancer in the 70's and 80's, followed by an exponential rise in cell phone usage in the 2000's. Black Hat reverses the correlation\/causation fallacy, and comically comes to the conclusion that cancer causes cell phones .\nThe comic highlights a well-known fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc , often shortened to simply post hoc. The Latin translates to \"after this, therefore because of this,\" referring to the common mistake that because two events happen in chronological order, the former event must have caused the latter event. The fallacy is often the root cause of many superstitions (e.g., a person noticing he\/she wore a special bracelet before getting a good test score thinks the bracelet was the source of his\/her good fortune), but it often crosses into more serious areas of thinking. In this case, the scientific research community, which often prides itself on its intellectual aptitude, is gently mocked for being nonetheless prone to such poor reasoning all too often. The different possibilities are generally known as causation, when one thing is proven to cause another, or correlation, when changes in one thing are aligned with changes in another, but there is no proof that they are directly related.\nThe title text refers to the way Black Hat holds the laptop in panel 2. Being that Cueball (and Randall, for that matter) are quite into computers, the potential damage to a laptop screen either from the weight of its lower body or the pressure of the user's fingers on the LCD screen is enough to make him squirm in discomfort. The risk of dropping the computer is also present.\n[Cueball holds a cellphone. Black Hat is sitting at a desk with a laptop.] Cueball: Another huge study found no evidence that cell phones cause cancer. What was the W.H.O. thinking? Black Hat: I think they just got it backward.\n[Black Hat turns towards Cueball in an unframed panel, holding the laptop with one hand by the upper edge of the screen. Cueball is not visible.] Cueball: Huh? Black Hat: Well, take a look.\n[There is a plot of total cancer incidence and cell phone users. Cancer rises from 1970 to 1990, then stays relatively steady. Cell phone use rises from roughly 1984, and steeply after 1990, to the present.]\nCueball: You're not... There are so many problems with that. Black Hat: Just to be safe, until I see more data I'm going to assume cancer causes cell phones.\n"}
{"id":926,"title":"Time Vulture","image_title":"Time Vulture","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/926","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time_vulture.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/926:_Time_Vulture","transcript":"[Cueball is watching a large black bird, with apparently fractal wings, which hovers above his Cueball-like friend who walks towards Cueball and now turns to look at the bird over his shoulder.] Cueball: Dude, you've got a Time Vulture. Friend: Holy crap! What is it?\n[Zoom-in on Cueball who now looks at his friend who are now standing close to Cueball looking up at the bird off-panel.] Cueball: They're predators that use aging to kill prey. Friend: Huh? What do you mean?\n[The panel zooms in on the Cueball's face. The friends reply comes from off-panel.] Cueball: They live for millennia and use little energy. They can slow down their internal clocks so time speeds past. To hunt, they lock on to some prey, and when it stops moving, they eat it. Friend (off-panel): But what if the prey doesn't die?\n[Zoom out to Cueball and his friend that now look at each other.] Cueball: I don't think you quite understand. Friend: I mean, I'm not about to die... Cueball: From the vulture's viewpoint, everyone says that moments before they do.\n","explanation":"This comic is about the time vulture (hence the title), a fictional creature made up by Randall . Cueball notices that his Cueball-like friend is followed by a time vulture, making the exclamation Dude, you've got a time vulture.\nThe primary food source for vultures is carrion, or rotting meat. A time vulture, as explained by Cueball, is a type of vulture that can live for millennia , spending very little energy and it can even slow down its internal clocks so time speeds past, a kind of forward time travel, to the point where its prey dies. In this way, it can thus always wait long enough for the prey to die of natural causes no matter how long it takes, as seen from the prey's point of view. So in principle they kill their prey by using aging, as Cueball explains, although in fact, like any vulture, they just find prey that has already (almost) died, as from their point of view every living thing is just about to die. But as with other vultures, they do not participate in the actual killing. Time vultures thus just need to locate and find any one living creature (of a reasonable size), then it becomes it\u2019s prey as it then just waits until it dies, spending hardly any energy while it waits. Real soaring vultures can also stay afloat for considerable time spans without actually using any energy as they just float on thermals .\nThus the time vulture will now keep soaring over Cueball\u2019s friends head for the rest of his life, or until they travel on an airplane (airplanes typically cruise at an altitude too high for a vulture to fly over them, although it is of course possible that the vulture could board the plane as well), and then when he dies (whenever and of whichever cause), it will descend and feast on his carcass. This should, in principle, not make any difference to the friend, since most people already live with the knowledge that they will eventually die [ citation needed ] , and that their body will end up being destroyed one way or another. Typically it will not be caused by vultures, but for instance by the fire of the Crematory or by the decomposition caused by small animals and germs in the earth we are buried in.\nHowever, it is not very nice to be reminded of this every living second of the rest of your life thus the consternation of the friend and his question and statement; But what if the prey doesn't die? and I'm not about to die...\nAt first, the question doesn\u2019t make sense since there are no known examples of terrestrial animals (including humans) that are large enough to matter as prey for a vulture and can survive through the several millennia that a time vulture can wait. The few species that can live that long and grow at least as large as vulture prey, such as the 2,384 acre (965 hectare) \"Humongous Fungus\", an individual of the fungal species Armillaria solidipes in the Malheur National Forest , thought to be between 2,000 and 8,500 years old [1] [2] , and a Great Basin bristlecone pine ( Pinus longaeva ) measured by ring count to be over 5000 years old. [3] , are stationary, such as fungi and plants, or aquatic, such as coral and sponges.  Thus, the moving land species large enough to be attractive as prey will always die within the lifespan of the vulture (as Cueball tries to explain).\nHowever, the question actually does make sense, because the prey does not have to outlive the vulture to avoid being eaten by the vulture; it simply has to live long enough to get to an airport, get through security screening, and board a flight that goes either too fast or too high for the vulture to follow.  Therefore, the vulture would get to eat the prey only if the prey died on the way to the airport, while standing outdoors in line for security screening, or while walking from the terminal to the airplane (if passengers board outdoors instead of using a passenger boarding bridge (Jetway) ).  It is possible that the prey might not die this soon, unless security screening lines exceed the maximum human lifespan of approximately 120 years.\nAnd because the time vulture can slow down its internal clock, in its point of view, everyone who ever says \"But, I'm not about to die\", would say so right before they die; actually anything a person ever says after the time vulture has locked on to that person, happens just before they die as seen from the vulture's point of view. In humans' point of view, it could be many years after the statement was made, but for the time vulture, a human lifespan only lasts a mere moment.\nOf course, since a human can travel a considerable distance in this time, even around the world, the human would be traveling at an extremely high velocity from the vulture's perspective, so the vulture would be unable to keep up and the human would escape. In a more extreme fashion, since the vulture\u2019s perception of time is significantly slowed, it would be more simple to buy a rifle and kill the Time Vulture.\nIt is thus really more of a philosophical comic about the fact that we all have death waiting for us, you could say it soars above our head and just wait for it to happen. And in relation to the deep time of the geology of the Earth or the expansion of the universe, the time it takes for people to live their lives is hardly worth mentioning...\nIn the title text it is stated that all real life vultures are actually a kind of time vultures, as real life vultures also sometimes spot a dying animal, not quite dead yet, and then wait for this prey to die. But time vultures are able to wait for millennia for their prey to die, whereas regular vultures do not have that kind of time, before they need to feed or land, thus the comment that some vultures have more patience than others.\nReal vultures and their preying habits was referenced in 1746: Making Friends , directly in the title text.\n[Cueball is watching a large black bird, with apparently fractal wings, which hovers above his Cueball-like friend who walks towards Cueball and now turns to look at the bird over his shoulder.] Cueball: Dude, you've got a Time Vulture. Friend: Holy crap! What is it?\n[Zoom-in on Cueball who now looks at his friend who are now standing close to Cueball looking up at the bird off-panel.] Cueball: They're predators that use aging to kill prey. Friend: Huh? What do you mean?\n[The panel zooms in on the Cueball's face. The friends reply comes from off-panel.] Cueball: They live for millennia and use little energy. They can slow down their internal clocks so time speeds past. To hunt, they lock on to some prey, and when it stops moving, they eat it. Friend (off-panel): But what if the prey doesn't die?\n[Zoom out to Cueball and his friend that now look at each other.] Cueball: I don't think you quite understand. Friend: I mean, I'm not about to die... Cueball: From the vulture's viewpoint, everyone says that moments before they do.\n"}
{"id":927,"title":"Standards","image_title":"Standards","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/927","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/standards.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/927:_Standards","transcript":"How Standards Proliferate (See: A\/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.)\nSituation: There are 14 competing standards.\nCueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. Ponytail: Yeah!\nSoon: Situation: There are 15 competing standards.","explanation":"For any engineering task, there are numerous ways a given problem can be solved. The more complex the task, the more room for diversity. That's all well and good for a one-off problem, but if a design is meant to be iterated over time, or if an entire industry is solving that same problem, part reuse and interoperability become issues to deal with. Technical standards thus came to exist so that industries could avoid wasting resources reinventing the wheel , whilst offering their clients a certain amount of simplicity and compatibility between vendors.\nBut, standards have issues of their own. They don't accommodate every use case , they might have restrictions or royalties attached, and people tend to be plagued by Not Invented Here syndrome . So, competing standards have a tendency to arise to address different perceived needs. After a while, the market for competing standards gets messy and hard to follow, and integrating systems built around competing standards gets burdensome. As a result, someone eventually takes on the challenge of creating a universal standard that everyone can rally around.\nThis almost never works. In many cases, a new standard fails to displace the incumbent standards, eventually loses funding and support, and thus becomes a relic of history. In many other cases, it only penetrates far enough to survive, ironically making the situation messier. The latter situation often ends up becoming cyclical, with new standards periodically rising and failing to gain traction.\nThree examples are given at the top of the comic: AC chargers , character encoding and instant messaging .\nThe title text mentions mini-USB and micro-USB, which were different standards used in 2011. As of 2019 for most applications of small USB ports (especially for charging \/ connecting cell phones), mini USB has lost most of its relevance and micro USB is competing with USB-C, as well as some solutions only used by single companies (such as Apple).\nNot all standards are created equal. In the development of standards , private standards adopt a non-consensus process in comparison to voluntary consensus standards. Private standards in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector and the agri-food industry (governed by the Global Food Safety Initiative ) are discussed in a publication from International Organization for Standardization.\nHow Standards Proliferate (See: A\/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.)\nSituation: There are 14 competing standards.\nCueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. Ponytail: Yeah!\nSoon: Situation: There are 15 competing standards."}
{"id":928,"title":"Mimic Octopus","image_title":"Mimic Octopus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/928","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mimic_octopus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/928:_Mimic_Octopus","transcript":"[Captions above the panel:] Southeast Asian Sea Life Identification Chart [The chart consist of 14 black silhouettes which includes eight individual fish and several other object\/animals. From top left: A Moorish idol, unknown fish, a rockfish, a clownfish, unknown fish, a lionfish, a shark, a sea lily, an w|angler fish, an anchor with chain, a submarine, a scuba diver, a school of seven large and four small fish, and and at the bottom right a silhouette of an octopus displaying eight arms and a tilted head with large white eyes. All 14 are labeled the same except the octopus:] Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Two Mimic Octopuses\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of fish and sea-life identification charts, referencing the mimic octopus which, as the name implies, is able to mimic other animals, so all animals and objects found in the sea could actually just be such an animal.\nThe identification chart for South East Asian sea life shows 13 creatures mimicked including eight individual fish (two of which are not yet recognized) and other objects and animals. In order, top-to-bottom, left-to-right: A Moorish idol (Gill, from Finding Nemo ) , unknown, a rockfish , a clownfish , unknown, a lionfish , a shark , a sea lily , an angler fish , an anchor , a submarine , a scuba diver and school of 11 fish . Finally there is an octopus , but rather than being the mimic octopus in its natural form it's actually two of them each mimicing part of an octupus.\nThe Orson Scott Card novel that the title text refers to is Lost Boys : \"A withdrawn eight-year-old in a troubled family invents imaginary friends who bear the names of missing children\" (Publisher's Weekly). The part of the story that Randall is referring to (Chapter 7, Crickets) involves a situation where the protagonist, Stevie, is given a C grade for an otherwise impeccable diorama featuring underwater animals involving clay sculptures (when only a poster would have sufficed) and a well-written presentation supposedly because the other children had destroyed the diorama before the end of the day. To make matters worse, his teacher, Ms. Jones, had made fun of his project and given the ribbon for first prize to someone else.\nOn inquiring about, his father, Step, found out that the principal, Dr. Mariner, had already made the decision to hand Stevie the blue ribbon for first prize as she had reviewed the project before it had been destroyed, but Ms. Jones had secretly overruled her behind her back by announcing that another child (JJ) would receive the ribbon. So, the next day he met up with Ms Jones after school to have a word on the grading of his project. Needless to say, they ended up arguing about minor issues, with Mrs. Jones justifying the reason for her decision on, among other things, the definition of a 'depiction', whether or not the amount of content was defined by the word count or the number of pages and of the importance of putting the report in a plastic cover. The argument finally comes to a head when Step points out that there was only one red mark on the project report, and that concerned an 'incorrect' pluralization of the word 'octopus'\n\u201cBut Mrs. Jones, surely you know that the plural of \u201coctopus\u201d is either \u2018octopus\u2019, with nothing added, or \u2018octopuses\u2019.\u201d \u201cI think not,\u201d said Mrs. Jones. \u201cThink again, Mrs. Jones.\u201d She must have realized that she was not on firm ground here. \u201cPerhaps \u2018octopuses\u2019 is an alternate plural, but I\u2019m sure that \u2018octopi\u2019 is the preferred.\u201d \u201cNo, Mrs. Jones. If you had looked it up, you would have discovered that \u2018octopi\u2019 is not the preferred spelling. It is not a spelling at all. The word does not exist, except in the mouths of those who are pretending to be educated but in fact are not. This is because the \u2018us\u2019 ending of \u2018octopus\u2019 is not a Latin nominative singular ending, which would form its plural by changing to the letter \u2018i\u2019. Instead, the syllable \u2018pus\u2019 in \u2018octopus\u2019 is the Greek word for \u2018foot.\u2019 And it forms its plural the Greek way. Therefore \u2018octopoda\u2019, not \u2018octopi\u2019. Never \u2018octopi\u2019.\u201d \u201cWell, then, octopoda. Your son\u2019s paper said octopuses.\u201d \u201cI know,\u201d said Step. \u201cWhen he asked me the correct plural, I told him octopoda. But then he was still uncertain, because my son doesn\u2019t think he knows something until he knows it, and so he looked it up. And to my surprise, octopoda is only used when referring to more than one species of octopus, rather than when referring to more than one actual octopus. What Stevie put in his paper is in fact the preferred dictionary usage. Which you would have known, too, if you had looked it up.\u201d\nAfter proving his case that his son did indeed deserve an A grade, he then threatened to bring the matter to the attention of the principal. He then warned Mrs Jones that while he wanted the grade to remain unchanged, he wanted her to inform the class that the ribbon would be awarded to Stevie, before revealing that he had been recording the conversation all along. And, after this, after Mrs Jones came crying for forgiveness before leaving, Step realized how vulnerable she was and how she was channeling her frustration at one particular student in each class to find some relief from that.\nAccording to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary , 'octopi', 'octopuses', and 'octopodes' (UK English) are all correct plural versions of \"octopus.\" Supposedly, Randall would very much like the word 'octopi' to remain unrecognized by major dictionaries as otherwise it would lessen the magnitude of the climactic conclusion of this argument by rendering Step's mockery of Ms. Jones' perceived intellectual superiority factually invalid. This also offers another reason why the octopus in the chart is named two mimic octopuses , so Randall can use the correct pluralization of the word in the comic. This is an example of a comic where the title text seems more important to Randall than the actual comic.\nIt should be noted that, at least according to Etymology Dictonary , Octopi is wrong for exactly the reasons that Step lists and first appears over 60 years later.\n[Captions above the panel:] Southeast Asian Sea Life Identification Chart [The chart consist of 14 black silhouettes which includes eight individual fish and several other object\/animals. From top left: A Moorish idol, unknown fish, a rockfish, a clownfish, unknown fish, a lionfish, a shark, a sea lily, an w|angler fish, an anchor with chain, a submarine, a scuba diver, a school of seven large and four small fish, and and at the bottom right a silhouette of an octopus displaying eight arms and a tilted head with large white eyes. All 14 are labeled the same except the octopus:] Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Mimic Octopus Two Mimic Octopuses\n"}
{"id":929,"title":"Speculation","image_title":"Speculation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/929","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/speculation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/929:_Speculation","transcript":"[Two Cueball-like guys are playing basketball. The right guy (Cueball) attempts to throw the basketball through the hoop, but it bounces off down to his friend. To the right Black Hat has his back to the other two while he is looking at his phone.] Friend: Do you seriously think everyone will move to Plus? It was hard enough getting them on Facebook.\n[The friend has caught the rebound and now passes the basketball back to Cueball. Black Hat is not shown.] Cueball: Do they have to? Cueball: My mom still uses AOL\u2014it doesn't mean my social life has to happen there.\n[Only Cueball is shown. He passes the basketball to the right towards the off-pannel Black Hat.] Cueball: Universal adoption isn't everything. I mean, IRC is still\u2014\n[Zoom in on the basketball as an arrow pierces the ball, forming a slight depression.] Thunk\n[Cueball looks to Black Hat who has a crossbow in one hand, he is still looking at the phone in his other hand. The ball with the arrow lies between them.] Cueball: You're not really the \"catch\" type, are you? Black Hat: I am not.\n","explanation":"During a basketball game, the players discuss the nature of universal conformity. Facebook and Google+ are competing social networks ; at the time of this comic many people were switching to Plus over Facebook leading many to speculate that Facebook was in decline and that Plus would soon be the dominant social network. As of 2019, it seems that Facebook has successfully held its position as the Default Social Network\u2122, while Google Plus was a colossal blunder for Google and was finally sunset for consumers in April 2019.\nThe two players seem to have a disagreement over this. One player states that it would be ridiculous to expect everyone to move to Plus. The other player denies the notion that they have to, stating that he values his personal preference over conformity. He supports this idea by saying that his mother still uses AOL and other people continue using IRC and that if each time a new dominant social network emerged and everyone switched to it, neither of these things would stick around.\nThey are interrupted when they pass the ball to Black Hat , who immediately shoots it with a crossbow bolt. Their arguments and rather intelligent discussion are derailed by the absurdity of Black Hat's reaction, which is both humorous and puts the issue in stark contrast.\nBlack Hat neither joins in the discussion nor does he participate in the game. It seems that any offer to participate in either is met with a blunt and clear denial. He is simply not a conformist.\nA possible explanation for the joke is that while tech geeks or Google enthusiasts might discuss whether the world will move from Facebook to Plus, a number of people might simply ignore the debate and \"shoot\" the discussion dead by just ignoring the existence of anything that isn't Facebook.\nIn the title text, Black Hat continues to provide an example of his tendency to play by his own rules. A clay pigeon is a clay disc that is thrown into the air and serves as a target on a skeet shooting range. Participants are expected to shoot the pigeons with a shotgun but Black Hat would rather capture the clay pigeons and shoot them from a very close range. (This is made even more humorous by the excellent crossbow skills he shows in the comic.) This practice eventually got him expelled from the shooting range. It is unclear whether Black Hat was good at shooting clay pigeons from farther away.\n[Two Cueball-like guys are playing basketball. The right guy (Cueball) attempts to throw the basketball through the hoop, but it bounces off down to his friend. To the right Black Hat has his back to the other two while he is looking at his phone.] Friend: Do you seriously think everyone will move to Plus? It was hard enough getting them on Facebook.\n[The friend has caught the rebound and now passes the basketball back to Cueball. Black Hat is not shown.] Cueball: Do they have to? Cueball: My mom still uses AOL\u2014it doesn't mean my social life has to happen there.\n[Only Cueball is shown. He passes the basketball to the right towards the off-pannel Black Hat.] Cueball: Universal adoption isn't everything. I mean, IRC is still\u2014\n[Zoom in on the basketball as an arrow pierces the ball, forming a slight depression.] Thunk\n[Cueball looks to Black Hat who has a crossbow in one hand, he is still looking at the phone in his other hand. The ball with the arrow lies between them.] Cueball: You're not really the \"catch\" type, are you? Black Hat: I am not.\n"}
{"id":930,"title":"Days of the Week","image_title":"Days of the Week","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/930","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/days_of_the_week.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/930:_Days_of_the_Week","transcript":"[The whole comic is a single panel, with a circular diagram of the days of the week.]\nPolar graph of what stuff happens on which days, based on number of Google results for phrases like \"company meeting on <day>.\" The relative frequency of <day> in <phrase> is shown by the distance from the center at which <phrase>'s line crosses <day>. Each curve is normalized to have the same number of total hits - they're not on the same scale.\n(Not easy to reproduce the actual plot, these are the phrases, in order of popularity on Wednesday.) 1. <day> is ladies night 2. announced <day> 3. company meeting on <day> \/ company meeting <day> 4. due on <day> 5. got laid <day> 6. drunk on <day> \/  so drunk <day> 7. <day> is the big day 8. Church <day> 9. got my period <day> 10. we broke up on <day> 11. <day> sucked\n[Thursday, from most common to least common: 11, 2, 1, 3, 9, 4, 5, 7, 10, 6, 8] [Friday, from most common to least common: 10, 4, 6, 7, 5, 9, 11, 3, 2, 1, 8] [Saturday, ditto: 6, 7, 5, 11, 9, 10, 8, 3, 2, 1, 4] [Sunday, ditto: 8, 9, 7, 11, 10, 5, 6, 2, 3, 4, 1] [Monday, ditto: 4, 2, 9, 11, 3, 5, 10, 6, 7, 8, 1] [Tuesday, ditto: 3, 2, 4, 5, 1, 7, 9, 10, 11, 8, 6]\n","explanation":"As explained in the image, the graph is a polar graph, charting the relative strengths by which certain phrases are associated with certain days of the week. The closer a phrase comes to the center of the graph, the less the phrase is associated with whatever day of the week that is. Conversely, the further out a phrase is, the more associated with that day of the week it is.\nPerhaps the clearest example of this in the above graph is the ladies night line, which has such a strong peak on Wednesday that it goes clear out of the bounds of the picture. Likewise, church is so strongly associated with Sunday that it goes off the chart there.\nAlso of interest are the less eccentric orbits, for instance \"big day\" and \"so drunk.\" The fact that these don't clearly peak on any one day indicates that (according to Google, at least) big days are spread out fairly evenly throughout the week (with a minimum on Mondays), and so drunk tends to peak on weekends, though it seems fairly evenly split between Fridays and Saturdays.\nMentioned in the title text is Rebecca Black 's viral pop hit, Friday , which received considerable negative attention and ridicule for its terrible songwriting and performance. It peaks so far out that no perspective which would show it would be of any use, since many parodies have been made of the song since.\n[The whole comic is a single panel, with a circular diagram of the days of the week.]\nPolar graph of what stuff happens on which days, based on number of Google results for phrases like \"company meeting on <day>.\" The relative frequency of <day> in <phrase> is shown by the distance from the center at which <phrase>'s line crosses <day>. Each curve is normalized to have the same number of total hits - they're not on the same scale.\n(Not easy to reproduce the actual plot, these are the phrases, in order of popularity on Wednesday.) 1. <day> is ladies night 2. announced <day> 3. company meeting on <day> \/ company meeting <day> 4. due on <day> 5. got laid <day> 6. drunk on <day> \/  so drunk <day> 7. <day> is the big day 8. Church <day> 9. got my period <day> 10. we broke up on <day> 11. <day> sucked\n[Thursday, from most common to least common: 11, 2, 1, 3, 9, 4, 5, 7, 10, 6, 8] [Friday, from most common to least common: 10, 4, 6, 7, 5, 9, 11, 3, 2, 1, 8] [Saturday, ditto: 6, 7, 5, 11, 9, 10, 8, 3, 2, 1, 4] [Sunday, ditto: 8, 9, 7, 11, 10, 5, 6, 2, 3, 4, 1] [Monday, ditto: 4, 2, 9, 11, 3, 5, 10, 6, 7, 8, 1] [Tuesday, ditto: 3, 2, 4, 5, 1, 7, 9, 10, 11, 8, 6]\n"}
{"id":931,"title":"Lanes","image_title":"Lanes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/931","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lanes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/931:_Lanes","transcript":"[The panels are arranged top to bottom. The first is set above a larger image.] Friend: So, are you guys out of the woods? Cueball: We don't know. Friend: Well, did the treatment work? Cueball: We don't know.\n[Cueball's next few lines are set by themselves in their own panels, arranged around a larger image.] Cueball: I always assumed that when you got cancer, they gave you a prognosis, then treated you, and at the end of treatment either you beat it or you died.\n[The diagram shows a simple highway. Starting at the bottom, with diagnosis for five lanes, the road travels through a cloud of treatment, after which two lanes disappear, and three continue. Later on, there's another off-ramp labeled 'cancer \"comes back\"', which loops back into the treatment cloud. Otherwise, the highway enters a later cloud called survive.]\nCueball: And I knew sometimes it \"recurred,\" which I assumed meant back to square one. Cueball: But that's turned out not to be quite right.\n[Back to Cueball and his friend.] Cueball: Once most cancers spread out into your body, they're incurable. Cueball: If your 10-year prognosis is 60%, that means a 40% chance that some cancer will slip past the treatment and get out.\n[The frame zooms in to show just Cueball.] Cueball: So they kill all the cancer they can find, and then you're a \"survivor.\" But your odds are still 60%.\n[The panel zooms in further, now showing only Cueball's top half.] Cueball: They can't scan for individual cancer cells. The only way to know if it worked is to wait for tumors to pop up elsewhere. Cueball: If you go enough years without that happening then you were in the 60%.\n[The frame shows both people again.] Cueball: And often the first sign is a cough or bone pain. Cueball: So you spend the next five or ten years trying not to worry that every ache and pain is the answer to the question \"Do I make it?\"\n[There's an extra large panel, with a small one floating inside it.] [The panel shows fifty-two lanes emerging from the cloud of 'Treatment'. Signs show 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years, 6 years. Lanes branch off and fade into darkness earlier on the right, with some lanes continuing off the top of the panel.]\n[Inset panel.] Friend: Man. Friend: Fuck cancer. Cueball: Seriously.\n","explanation":"xkcd is a webcomic of romance , sarcasm , math , and language : humor isn't necessarily guaranteed. This comic is an example of that, it being severely depressing.\nThe comic is built around a dialogue between two people (we'll say Cueball is the one talking, and the other is his friend) about cancer, presumably cancer that Megan has been diagnosed with. The conversation itself is about as straightforward as a conversation can be. It details the maturation of Cueball 's and Megan 's understanding of cancer diagnoses, knowledge which we can presume he has gained, reluctantly, by watching a loved one suffer.\nThis whole cancer series was sparked because Randall 's then-fiancee, now wife, is currently in Megan's position, and we, the readers, are now the beneficiaries of this new understanding of cancer diagnoses without having to watch somebody close to us suffer.\nThe comic's title, Lanes, comes from the two panels which illustrate both ends of the spectrum of Cueball's mental representation of how cancer treatment proceeds. In that there are many possible outcomes for cancer treatment, the image of a multi-lane freeway seems an apt metaphor to represent this understanding visually.\nIn the first freeway diagram, there are several paths, but the system is very simple, and easy to take in. Only a few lanes lead off into the oblivion which surrounds the freeway, a single off-ramp circles back from the path to survival to treatment, and survival is a visible endpoint.\nIn the second freeway diagram, however, things are much, much more complex, and much more bleak. Even six years out, survival isn't visible, and many lanes end in oblivion, sometimes not veering off for years after treatment. The title text informs us that this is meant to be loosely representative of breast cancer stages one through four, proceeding by quarters from left to right. It's a grim outlook, hence the friend's understated but completely fitting reaction to this plethora of new knowledge.\nSpecific numbers:\nThere are 52 lanes, so 13 lanes per cancer stage. Stage 1 has a 1:12 = ~8% chance of recurrence leading to death within 6 years. Stage 2 has a 5:8 = ~38% chance. Stage 3 has an 8:5 = ~62% chance. Stage 4 has an 11:2 = ~85% chance of death within 6 years.\nThe opening line of \"being in the woods\" is revisited in 1928: Seven Years , where Cueball and Megan are shown walking through a forest in a cancer-themed strip.\n[The panels are arranged top to bottom. The first is set above a larger image.] Friend: So, are you guys out of the woods? Cueball: We don't know. Friend: Well, did the treatment work? Cueball: We don't know.\n[Cueball's next few lines are set by themselves in their own panels, arranged around a larger image.] Cueball: I always assumed that when you got cancer, they gave you a prognosis, then treated you, and at the end of treatment either you beat it or you died.\n[The diagram shows a simple highway. Starting at the bottom, with diagnosis for five lanes, the road travels through a cloud of treatment, after which two lanes disappear, and three continue. Later on, there's another off-ramp labeled 'cancer \"comes back\"', which loops back into the treatment cloud. Otherwise, the highway enters a later cloud called survive.]\nCueball: And I knew sometimes it \"recurred,\" which I assumed meant back to square one. Cueball: But that's turned out not to be quite right.\n[Back to Cueball and his friend.] Cueball: Once most cancers spread out into your body, they're incurable. Cueball: If your 10-year prognosis is 60%, that means a 40% chance that some cancer will slip past the treatment and get out.\n[The frame zooms in to show just Cueball.] Cueball: So they kill all the cancer they can find, and then you're a \"survivor.\" But your odds are still 60%.\n[The panel zooms in further, now showing only Cueball's top half.] Cueball: They can't scan for individual cancer cells. The only way to know if it worked is to wait for tumors to pop up elsewhere. Cueball: If you go enough years without that happening then you were in the 60%.\n[The frame shows both people again.] Cueball: And often the first sign is a cough or bone pain. Cueball: So you spend the next five or ten years trying not to worry that every ache and pain is the answer to the question \"Do I make it?\"\n[There's an extra large panel, with a small one floating inside it.] [The panel shows fifty-two lanes emerging from the cloud of 'Treatment'. Signs show 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years, 6 years. Lanes branch off and fade into darkness earlier on the right, with some lanes continuing off the top of the panel.]\n[Inset panel.] Friend: Man. Friend: Fuck cancer. Cueball: Seriously.\n"}
{"id":932,"title":"CIA","image_title":"CIA","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/932","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cia.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/932:_CIA","transcript":"[A television is showing Blondie as a news anchor. The inset picture of the news shows the logo of LulzSec, a man wearing a monocle and top hat.] Blondie: Hackers briefly took down the website of the CIA yesterday...\n[Ponytail, sitting in an armchair, is watching a television  (seen from the side) standing on a table hearing what Blondie says as indicated with a zigzag line from the TV. Above the top part of the frame is a smaller frame with a label:] What people hear: Blondie (not shown from the TV): Someone hacked into the computers of the CIA!!\n[Megan, sitting in an armchair, is watching a television (seen from the side) standing on a table hearing what Blondie says as indicated with a zigzag line from the TV. Above the top part of the frame is a smaller frame with a label:] What computer experts hear: Blondie (not shown from the TV): Someone tore down a poster hung up by the CIA!!\n","explanation":"Blondie as a news anchor is reporting on a hacker attack on the CIA (hence the title).\nThis comic is a reference to the attacks by a group briefly known as LulzSec , which was a splinter group from the internet community known as Anonymous , also featured in 834: Wikileaks . In the back of the news report in frame one is the logo that was used by LulzSec. The group was able to publicize several high profile attacks. They were able to briefly take down the CIA website using a DDoS attack. DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service in which the attacker uses many computers to send traffic to a host and render it incapable of answering requests from any other computer, effectively taking the site down.\nThis comic is pointing out the difference between what lay-people ( Ponytail ) and the computer expert ( Megan ) hear when seeing a story like this. Most people may think there is no boundary between the CIA website and its internal network, and conclude hackers compromised the USA intelligence service's most precious data, which would be an incredible display of incompetence by the CIA and would have some pretty obvious negative side effects for CIA assets around the world.\nComputer experts, on the other hand, may compare the CIA website to a company's poster, so the damage done is much different and less harmful: the CIA's public relation capacities are hindered for a few hours. The damage from a DDoS is less a catastrophic compromise of valuable federal databases, and more like flash mob crowding in the lobby of the CIA offices, making life mildly inconvenient.\nThe title text is a transcript of a made up news report. A story similar to the attack is illustrated using old technology. This attempts to demonstrate how silly the news coverage of the real event is. The recruiting poster refers to the CIA website, as it is a PR tool with no connection to sensitive information. It being ten feet high refers to the fact that that the website is open to the public and has limited protections (as danger from a compromised site is low). The ladder technology refers to the DDoS attack, as these attacks are primitive, but possibly well coordinated. The plexiglass poster covers refer to website security tools that may be added to deter future vandalism.\n[A television is showing Blondie as a news anchor. The inset picture of the news shows the logo of LulzSec, a man wearing a monocle and top hat.] Blondie: Hackers briefly took down the website of the CIA yesterday...\n[Ponytail, sitting in an armchair, is watching a television  (seen from the side) standing on a table hearing what Blondie says as indicated with a zigzag line from the TV. Above the top part of the frame is a smaller frame with a label:] What people hear: Blondie (not shown from the TV): Someone hacked into the computers of the CIA!!\n[Megan, sitting in an armchair, is watching a television (seen from the side) standing on a table hearing what Blondie says as indicated with a zigzag line from the TV. Above the top part of the frame is a smaller frame with a label:] What computer experts hear: Blondie (not shown from the TV): Someone tore down a poster hung up by the CIA!!\n"}
{"id":933,"title":"Tattoo","image_title":"Tattoo","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/933","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tattoo.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/933:_Tattoo","transcript":"[Megan is in the panel. Megan points at her chest.] Megan: I just have one tattoo - it's six dots on my chest, done by my oncologist.\nMegan: I need them for aligning the laser sights on a flesh-searing relativistic particle cannon,\nMegan: So it will only kill the parts of me\n[Dramatic zoom, the panel background is black, with white text.] Megan: That are holding me back.\n[The panel is larger, revealing who they're talking to.] Megan: But your barbed wire bicep tattoo is pretty hardcore, too! Cueball: No, it's OK.  I'll just go put a shirt on.\n","explanation":"An oncologist is a doctor who specializes in the treatment of cancer . This comic is certainly related to Randall's wife's breast cancer . Megan in this comic has a tattoo for the alignment lasers of the radiotherapy machine which will fire a beam of radiation with sufficient intensity to kill the cells in the targeted area. A common such machine is a linear accelerator or \"Linac\" which accelerates electrons to very high speed, these can then either be used to generate high energy X-rays to treat the patient, or the electron beam itself can be used (both are types of radiation; the electrons being beta radiation and x-rays being EM [electromagnetic] radiation). Commonly when radiotherapy is used as part of breast cancer treatment some combination of both is prescribed. In order to allow healthy tissue to recover better, rather than deliver all the radiation in one go, the treatment is delivered a little bit each day over the course of about a month. It is therefore vital that the radiation can be delivered to the correct target area day after day, and this is done by lining up the alignment lasers of the linac with the skin markers - that is Megan's tattoo dots. It may not be considered a \"traditional\" tattoo (because she says it was done by her oncologist and not in a tattoo parlor).\nIn the last frame, it is mentioned that Cueball has a barbed wire bicep tattoo, which is common in the US as a tattoo that people get when they want to seem tough, even if they aren't tough already.\nThe joke in the comic is that Cueball got this barbed wire tattoo to look tough, but it pales in comparison to the tattoo from (or for) the cancer removal or treatment. It is kind of funny because Cueball has his whole shirt off just to show a biceps tattoo.\nThe title text references gamma ray therapy after describing electron linear accelerator-based treatment systems; however, technically gamma ray therapy only refers to radionuclide (i.e., Cobalt-60) based radiation therapy systems.  In regards to a 90-second session killing a horse, typical dose rates of modern radiation therapy systems are of the order of several gray per minute for the field sizes used, for example, in the treatment of breast cancer .  It is feasible that a single 90-second delivery of radiation could deliver over 10 Gy in a single instance to the specific areas of the body that could be fatal, such as neuropathy or radiation induced liver disease.\n[Megan is in the panel. Megan points at her chest.] Megan: I just have one tattoo - it's six dots on my chest, done by my oncologist.\nMegan: I need them for aligning the laser sights on a flesh-searing relativistic particle cannon,\nMegan: So it will only kill the parts of me\n[Dramatic zoom, the panel background is black, with white text.] Megan: That are holding me back.\n[The panel is larger, revealing who they're talking to.] Megan: But your barbed wire bicep tattoo is pretty hardcore, too! Cueball: No, it's OK.  I'll just go put a shirt on.\n"}
{"id":934,"title":"Mac\/PC","image_title":"Mac\/PC","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/934","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mac_pc.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/934:_Mac\/PC","transcript":"[Two Cueballs stand facing out of the screen.] Cueball #1: I'm a Mac Cueball #2: And I'm a PC. Cueballs: And since you do everything through a browser now, we're pretty indistinguishable.\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of the \" Get a Mac \" (also known as \"I'm a Mac\" or \"Mac vs. PC\") ad campaign for the Mac brand of computers. The ads personified the Mac and their competitors, the PC. The ads poked fun at the PC's terrible function while paying attention to the Mac's unique features. Each ad started with the duo introducing themselves as \"I'm a Mac...\" \"...and I'm a PC.\"\nThe comic, however, presents the differences between them as no longer of much importance, since most everything nowadays is done through browsers. In essence, using the same browser to visit the same website among different operating systems would give you an experience that is very much the same. Additionally, there is some self-referential humor here; both the Mac and PC are simple stick figures due to xkcd's style. Therefore, they are literally identical as far as appearance goes. The apotheosis of computing via a browser is probably the Chromebook , a range of laptops whose operating system is based upon the browser Google Chrome , and which first became commercially available a few weeks before this comic appeared.\nThe title text refers to window management , which is software that controls windows on computers, and is in many ways similar to the more recent development of tabbed browsers. xmonad is one such program, and Randall says that eventually it will be an extension usable with the browser Firefox . What makes it somewhat unusual (and thus worth mentioning) is that it is a tiling window manager , meaning it automatically arranges and resizes newly opened program windows to fit a grid. This is especially useful on large screens.\n[Two Cueballs stand facing out of the screen.] Cueball #1: I'm a Mac Cueball #2: And I'm a PC. Cueballs: And since you do everything through a browser now, we're pretty indistinguishable.\n"}
{"id":935,"title":"Missed Connections","image_title":"Missed Connections","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/935","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/missed_connections.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/935:_Missed_Connections","transcript":"[The page is set up like the missed connections area of Craigslist, with a list of messages from an individual to a person they weren't able to communicate with at the time. All readable text is in blue. There is a large heading at the top:] Personals > Missed Connections\n[Below the heading there is a gray section in a black frame with two lines. The first line has a search box and a  drop down menu with text and two black arrows to the right of it. The second line has three check boxes and two other boxes, all empty. all boxes has white background. Text is written many places around these boxes (and on the drop down menu), it is written in black, but none of it is readable.]\n[Below this gray section follows seven missed connections, the last being cut before the description of \"Me\" is finished, and the line visible is cut of, so the lower third of the letters are hidden below the comics frame.]\n\nYou: Clinging to hood of your stolen Wienermobile, trying to reach into engine to unstick throttle Me: Screaming, diving out of the way\nYou: Vaguely human silhouette Me: At bottom of wishing well with harpoon gun\nYou: Confused UDP packet Me: Cisco router in 45.170\/16 block\nYou: Baddest fuckin' Juggalo at Violent J's party Me: Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca)\nYou: Getting married to me Me: Also getting married, but distracted by my phone\nYou: Cute boy on corner of 4th & Main, 5'11, 169lbs, social security number 078-05-1120, pockets contained $2.09 in change, keys, and a condom. Retinal scan attached Me: Driving street view van\nYou: George Herman \"Babe\" Ruth Me: Fellow Time Lord. Saw your Tardis on third moon of\n\n","explanation":"Missed Connections is a page on Craigslist in which people who saw each other briefly and want to reconnect attempt to find each other again. In the case of missed connections, one person describes themselves \"Me\" and describes the other person \"You\" in order that the second person would recognize themself and try to reconnect.\nThe first entry appears to be a goofy joke, although there have been many Wienermobile incidents in the past.\nThe second entry refers to a person (you) looking down into a wishing well (presumably to throw in a coin to get a wish), but someone (me) is sitting down in the well with a harpoon looking up spotting the silhouette at the top of the well. This seems like a very weird thing to do, and the vaguely human shadow may be lucky to be alive, since the only reason the \"you\" should know about the \"me\" is if the me fired the harpoon (and missed). A person sitting in a well telling people stuff (as if it was the well speaking) was the pun in 568: Well 2 . Oddly enough, this entry could possibly be a reference to this episode of The Fairly OddParents .\nThe third entry is a reference to networking. UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol . UDP packets don't use handshaking to verify they have contacted the correct host, so they can get lost or confused. The Cisco router location is a block of IP addresses that was unallocated at the time when this comic was published but has been allocated to Latin America and Caribbean since then. Cisco is a company that makes networking equipment. This is a play on a missed connection for someone who was lost and asked for directions.\nThe fourth entry is a reference to two events in 2011 in which President Barack Obama invited rappers--among other people--to the White House. After each event, right-wing commentators blasted the event as a party unbecoming of the dignity of the White House. Nancy Pelosi is the Democratic Leader of the US House of Representatives . The acronym (D-CA) is a common notation for politicians which notates party (D for Democrat) and state (CA for California). Pelosi would have also been invited to these events, and the missed connections listing is a reference to what the commentators imagined the event would have been like. A \" juggalo \" is a term referring to a fan of the rap group Insane Clown Posse (which includes rapper Violent J ), which is notorious for having a wild, misogynistic, and violent fanbase.\nThe fifth entry is a straightforward joke. One of the two people getting married was so distracted by their phone they have no clue where their spouse is now, or even who they are. Alternatively, it could be that the second party deserted the wedding because they were frustrated by their partner being distracted by their cell phone during the wedding, and the first partner is now hoping to convince them to return.\nThe sixth entry is a reference to how the Google Street View car was not only recording photos of the street in 360 degrees, it was also collecting data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. The comic takes this to the next level, that the Google Street View van also scans what we have in our pockets and does a retinal scan. In this case, the social security number referenced is the most used SSN of all time. The retinal scan takes this even further, indicating that Google's cameras are collecting fine enough images to identify people by Retinal scan .\nThe entry gets a bit absurd when you realize with all this data, it should be trivial for the Google employee to ID and meet this young man, and would not need the Missed Connections page.\nThe last entry suggests that Babe Ruth , the American baseball slugger of 1914-1935, is actually a Time Lord . Time Lord is a reference to the popular sci-fi series Doctor Who in which The Doctor, who is a Time Lord, uses a TARDIS , which is a time travel machine. Possibly because he was a baseball player \"ahead of his time\".\nThe title text is another reference to the privacy concerns surrounding Google Street View van, to which Google responded by claiming that the street view camera wouldn't capture anything that someone walking by wouldn't be able to see. Randall is not worried about the street view van since he expects that Google will already know anything that such a van could discover from reading his e-mails. This last statement is of course much more serious than having a photo taken by a passing van, thus making it clear what people should fuss about, and it is not the van.\n[The page is set up like the missed connections area of Craigslist, with a list of messages from an individual to a person they weren't able to communicate with at the time. All readable text is in blue. There is a large heading at the top:] Personals > Missed Connections\n[Below the heading there is a gray section in a black frame with two lines. The first line has a search box and a  drop down menu with text and two black arrows to the right of it. The second line has three check boxes and two other boxes, all empty. all boxes has white background. Text is written many places around these boxes (and on the drop down menu), it is written in black, but none of it is readable.]\n[Below this gray section follows seven missed connections, the last being cut before the description of \"Me\" is finished, and the line visible is cut of, so the lower third of the letters are hidden below the comics frame.]\n\nYou: Clinging to hood of your stolen Wienermobile, trying to reach into engine to unstick throttle Me: Screaming, diving out of the way\nYou: Vaguely human silhouette Me: At bottom of wishing well with harpoon gun\nYou: Confused UDP packet Me: Cisco router in 45.170\/16 block\nYou: Baddest fuckin' Juggalo at Violent J's party Me: Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca)\nYou: Getting married to me Me: Also getting married, but distracted by my phone\nYou: Cute boy on corner of 4th & Main, 5'11, 169lbs, social security number 078-05-1120, pockets contained $2.09 in change, keys, and a condom. Retinal scan attached Me: Driving street view van\nYou: George Herman \"Babe\" Ruth Me: Fellow Time Lord. Saw your Tardis on third moon of\n\n"}
{"id":936,"title":"Password Strength","image_title":"Password Strength","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/936","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/password_strength.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/936:_Password_Strength","transcript":"The comic illustrates the relative strength of passwords assuming basic knowledge of the system used to generate them. A set of boxes is used to indicate how many bits of entropy a section of the password provides. The comic is laid out with 6 panels arranged in a 3x2 grid. On each row, the first panel explains the breakdown of a password, the second panel shows how long it would take for a computer to guess, and the third panel provides an example scene showing someone trying to remember the password.\n[The password \"Tr0ub4dor&3\" is shown in the center of the panel. A line from each annotation indicates the word section the comment applies to.]\nUncommon (non-gibberish) base word [Highlighting the base word - 16 bits of entropy.] Caps? [Highlighting the first letter - 1 bit of entropy.] Common Substitutions [Highlighting the letters 'a' (substituted by '4') and both 'o's (the first of which is substituted by '0') - 3 bits of entropy.] Punctuation [Highlighting the symbol appended to the word - 4 bits of entropy.] Numeral [Highlighting the number appended to the word - 3 bits of entropy.] Order unknown [Highlighting the appended characters - 1 bit of entropy.] (You can add a few more bits to account for the fact that this is only one of a few common formats.)\n~28 bits of entropy 2 28 = 3 days at 1000 guesses\/sec (Plausible attack on a weak remote web service. Yes, cracking a stolen hash is faster, but it's not what the average user should worry about.) Difficulty to guess: Easy\n[Cueball stands scratching his head trying to remember the password.] Cueball: Was it trombone? No, Troubador. And one of the O's was a zero? Cueball: And there was some symbol... Difficulty to remember: Hard\n[The passphrase \"correct horse battery staple\" is shown in the center of the panel.] Four random common words {Each word has 11 bits of entropy.}\n~52 bits of entropy 2 44 = 550 years at 1000 guesses\/sec Difficulty to guess: Hard\n[Cueball is thinking, in his thought bubble a horse is standing to one side talking to an off-screen observer. An arrow points to a staple attached to the side of a battery.] Horse: That's a battery staple. Observer: Correct! Difficulty to remember: You've already memorized it\nThrough 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.\n","explanation":"This comic says that a password such as \"Tr0ub4dor&3\" is bad because it is easy for password cracking software and hard for humans to remember, leading to insecure practices like writing the password down on a post-it attached to the monitor. On the other hand, a password such as \"correct horse battery staple\" is hard for computers to guess due to having more entropy but quite easy for humans to remember.\nEntropy is a measure of \"uncertainty\" in an outcome. In this context, it can be thought of as a value representing how unpredictable the next character of a password is. It is calculated as log2(a^b) where a is the number of allowed symbols and b is its length.\nA truly random string of length 11 (not like \"Tr0ub4dor&3\", but more like \"J4I\/tyJ&Acy\") has log2(94^11) = 72.1 bits, with 94 being the total number of letters, numbers, and symbols one can choose. However the comic shows that \"Tr0ub4dor&3\" has only 28 bits of entropy. This is because the password follows a simple pattern of a dictionary word + a couple extra numbers or symbols, hence the entropy calculation is more appropriately expressed with log2(65000*94*94), with 65000 representing a rough estimate of all dictionary words people are likely to choose. (For related info, see https:\/\/what-if.xkcd.com\/34\/ ).\nAnother way of selecting a password is to have 2048 \"symbols\" (common words) and select only 4 of those symbols. log2(2048^4) = 44 bits, much better than 28. Using such symbols was again visited in one of the tips in 1820: Security Advice .\nIt is absolutely true that people make passwords hard to remember because they think they are \"safer\", and it is certainly true that length, all other things being equal, tends to make for very strong passwords and this can be confirmed by using rumkin.com's password strength checker . Even if the individual characters are all limited to [a-z], the exponent implied in \"we added another lowercase character, so multiply by 26 again\" tends to dominate the results.\nIn addition to being easier to remember, long strings of lowercase characters are also easier to type on smartphones and soft keyboards .\nxkcd's password generation scheme requires the user to have a list of 2048 common words (log 2 (2048) = 11). For any attack we must assume that the attacker knows our password generation algorithm, but not the exact password. In this case the attacker knows the 2048 words, and knows that we selected 4 words, but not which words. The number of combinations of 4 words from this list of words is (2 11 ) 4 = 2 44 , i.e. 44 bits. For comparison, the entropy offered by Diceware's 7776 word list is 13 bits per word . If the attacker doesn't know the algorithm used, and only knows that lowercase letters are selected, the \"common words\" password would take even longer to crack than depicted. 25 random lowercase characters would have 117 bits of entropy , vs 44 bits for the common words list.\nExample\nBelow there is a detailed example which shows how different rules of complexity work to generate a password with supposed 44 bits of entropy. The examples of expected passwords were generated in random.org.(*)\nIf n is the number of symbols and L is the length of the password, then L = 44 \/ log 2 (n).\na = lowercase letters A = uppercase letters 9 = digits & = the 32 special characters in an American keyboard; Randall assumes only the 16 most common characters are used in practice (4 bits)\n(*)\u00a0The use of random.org explains why jAwwBYne has two consecutive w's, why Re-:aRo has two R's, why [email\u00a0protected] ~\"#^.2 has no letters, why ewpltiayq has no numbers, why \"constant yield\" is part of a password, etc. A human would have attempted at passwords that looked random.\nThe title text likely refers to the fact that this comic could cause people who understand information theory and agree with the message of the comic to get into an infuriating argument with people who do not \u2014 and disagree with the comic.\nIf you're confused, don't worry; you're in good company; even security \"experts\" don't understand the comic:\nSigh. \ud83e\udd26\u200d\u2642\ufe0f\nThe comic illustrates the relative strength of passwords assuming basic knowledge of the system used to generate them. A set of boxes is used to indicate how many bits of entropy a section of the password provides. The comic is laid out with 6 panels arranged in a 3x2 grid. On each row, the first panel explains the breakdown of a password, the second panel shows how long it would take for a computer to guess, and the third panel provides an example scene showing someone trying to remember the password.\n[The password \"Tr0ub4dor&3\" is shown in the center of the panel. A line from each annotation indicates the word section the comment applies to.]\nUncommon (non-gibberish) base word [Highlighting the base word - 16 bits of entropy.] Caps? [Highlighting the first letter - 1 bit of entropy.] Common Substitutions [Highlighting the letters 'a' (substituted by '4') and both 'o's (the first of which is substituted by '0') - 3 bits of entropy.] Punctuation [Highlighting the symbol appended to the word - 4 bits of entropy.] Numeral [Highlighting the number appended to the word - 3 bits of entropy.] Order unknown [Highlighting the appended characters - 1 bit of entropy.] (You can add a few more bits to account for the fact that this is only one of a few common formats.)\n~28 bits of entropy 2 28 = 3 days at 1000 guesses\/sec (Plausible attack on a weak remote web service. Yes, cracking a stolen hash is faster, but it's not what the average user should worry about.) Difficulty to guess: Easy\n[Cueball stands scratching his head trying to remember the password.] Cueball: Was it trombone? No, Troubador. And one of the O's was a zero? Cueball: And there was some symbol... Difficulty to remember: Hard\n[The passphrase \"correct horse battery staple\" is shown in the center of the panel.] Four random common words {Each word has 11 bits of entropy.}\n~52 bits of entropy 2 44 = 550 years at 1000 guesses\/sec Difficulty to guess: Hard\n[Cueball is thinking, in his thought bubble a horse is standing to one side talking to an off-screen observer. An arrow points to a staple attached to the side of a battery.] Horse: That's a battery staple. Observer: Correct! Difficulty to remember: You've already memorized it\nThrough 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.\n"}
{"id":937,"title":"TornadoGuard","image_title":"TornadoGuard","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/937","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tornadoguard.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/937:_TornadoGuard","transcript":"[The comic is a single panel which resembles a reviews page for a mobile phone application. Next to the app title is a pictogram of a tornado touching the ground]\n----App store---- TornadoGuard From DroidCoder2187 ----------------- Plays a loud alert sound when there is a tornado warning for your area. ----------------- Rating: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606 Based on 4 reviews ----------------- User Reviews: [The first three reviews show five black stars. The last review shows one black and four white stars.] Reviewer 1 (Dark silhouette): \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 Good UI! Many alert choices. Reviewer 2 (Helicopter without rotors): \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 Running great, no crashes Reviewer 3 (White square with black triangles at the top left and bottom right corner): \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 I like how you can set multiple locations Reviewer 4 (White car): \u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606\u2606 App did not warn me about tornado.\n[Caption below the comic:] The problem with averaging star ratings\n","explanation":"This is a comic with a take on an application store - the most common app stores are for iPhones and Android devices. App stores take all the reviews and average the ratings for the overall star rating.\nIn this comic, we see why this is sometimes a bad idea, especially with something as important as an app called TornadoGuard that should alert the user if there is a tornado warning for an area, an announcement indicating that a tornado is approaching. In this case, there are three 5 star reviews about the stability and user interface features of the app, left by users who actually never experienced its core functionality (simply because they never used it in a place where there was a tornado since they got it); however, the only review related to whether the app really works is given the same weight as the others, and sadly for that user, the TornadoGuard app failed in alerting the user to an upcoming tornado. Tornadoes are a recurring subject on xkcd. Also see future comic 1098: Star Ratings , 1754: Tornado Safety Tips .\nIn 2615: Welcome Back Cueball returns to the app after almost 11 years to find that he has to walk through all kinds of info before getting to know if the visible tornado is likely to head his way...\nThe title text is software-developer humor, the same as used in 583: CNR which contains further explanation. It is a note from the developer's bug report , which said they could not reproduce the error. Of course, they could only reproduce such a failure if there were a tornado coming towards their area, and if a tornado warning was issued. This is a fairly rare situation, especially in certain areas of the world. This lack of suitable testing conditions explains why the actual alert portion of their code appears to be faulty.\nThis is a common problem with code that cannot be easily tested -- that when finally needed, it does not actually work.  This is the reason for emergency drills.\nIn 2219: Earthquake Early Warnings an app for warning of Earthquakes was the main topic, but tornado warnings was mentioned in the title text.\nIn 2236: Is it Christmas? being right most of the time, except when it matters was the topic.\n[The comic is a single panel which resembles a reviews page for a mobile phone application. Next to the app title is a pictogram of a tornado touching the ground]\n----App store---- TornadoGuard From DroidCoder2187 ----------------- Plays a loud alert sound when there is a tornado warning for your area. ----------------- Rating: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606 Based on 4 reviews ----------------- User Reviews: [The first three reviews show five black stars. The last review shows one black and four white stars.] Reviewer 1 (Dark silhouette): \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 Good UI! Many alert choices. Reviewer 2 (Helicopter without rotors): \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 Running great, no crashes Reviewer 3 (White square with black triangles at the top left and bottom right corner): \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 I like how you can set multiple locations Reviewer 4 (White car): \u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606\u2606 App did not warn me about tornado.\n[Caption below the comic:] The problem with averaging star ratings\n"}
{"id":938,"title":"T-Cells","image_title":"T-Cells","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/938","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/t_cells.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/938:_T-Cells","transcript":"[Two people are standing facing each other, having a conversation. One is holding a laptop.] Cueball (with laptop): What's the deal with this leukemia trial? {{Citation: Nejm, Aug 10, 2011}} Friend: Gotta wait and see. Friend: Helping the immune system attack tumors has been a longtime research target. Friend: Lots of promising leads. Often they don't pan out.\nCueball: What'd these guys do? Friend: They took some of the patient's T-cells and patched their genes so they'd attack the cancer. That hasn't been enough in the past but their patch also added code to get the T-cells to replicate wildly and persist in the body.\nCueball: Which worked, but created its own set of problems? Friend: How'd you guess? But I think the craziest part is the way they insert the patched genes. Cueball: How? Friend: Well, think - What specializes in invading and modifying T-cells? Cueball: Seriously? Friend: Yup. Must've been a fun conversation.\n[The last panel is set in a doctors office. A patient is sitting on the observation bed talking to their doctor.] Patient: Ok, so I have blood cells growing out of control, so you're going to give me different blood cells that also grow out of control? Doctor: Yes, but it's ok, because we've treated this blood with HIV! Patient: Are you sure you're a doctor? Doctor: Almost definitely.\n","explanation":"This is a cancer- and leukemia-related comic. Two characters are having a discussion about a new trial ( Porter et al. NEJM 2011 ) in cancer treatment. A trial is done to test a proposed treatment on a select group of patients before approval for the wider patient group.\nIn this case, the two characters are talking about a trial in which immune cells are taken out of the patient's body and genetically modified. The modified cells are able to both attack the cancer cells and replicate very quickly. However, to make these genetic changes inside the cells, they used HIV as the vehicle to introduce these new genes as it is specialized in invading and modifying immune cells.  HIV is good for this because HIV attacks your T-cells and slowly kills off your immune system. If HIV was used as a vector to introduce a trait into your T-cells it could express a trait to hunt tumors and since it is already good at changing your T-cells it would be well-suited to this task.\nBasically, this treatment seems to replace one terrible disease with another terrible disease. As the title text says, they don't know how to get rid of the modified T-cells after they remove the cancer. And the last part of the title text is a joke, in which the doctor suggests yet another disease, smallpox , to inject into the patient's body.  This is similar to the song There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly in which a little old lady who swallowed a fly where each time she puts some other animal in her body to get rid of the last one and eventually she dies.  This is akin to that as you have cancer so you put super-strong T-cells modified by HIV to get rid of them but then you have Leukocytosis so you get smallpox to kill those, and so on.\nCueball possibly could have guessed this because he is familiar with biology according to this comic and one of the most common diseases that attacks T-cells would be HIV.\nAlthough highly expensive (because it currently requires customized set of alterations for each individual cancer), over the next few years subsequent clinical trials revealed the power of these super-strong T-cells (called Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cells, or CAR T-cells for short) to cure previously uncurable cancers.  For example, in 75 children with previously untreatable leukemia, 4 in 5 had no detectable cancer three months after treatment with CAR T-cells ( Maude et al. NEJM 2013 ). More and more different kinds of CAR T-cells are becoming FDA approved to treat a growing number of cancers. Seven years after this cartoon, the American Society of Clinical Oncology chose CAR T-cells as the 2018 Advance of the Year .\n[Two people are standing facing each other, having a conversation. One is holding a laptop.] Cueball (with laptop): What's the deal with this leukemia trial? {{Citation: Nejm, Aug 10, 2011}} Friend: Gotta wait and see. Friend: Helping the immune system attack tumors has been a longtime research target. Friend: Lots of promising leads. Often they don't pan out.\nCueball: What'd these guys do? Friend: They took some of the patient's T-cells and patched their genes so they'd attack the cancer. That hasn't been enough in the past but their patch also added code to get the T-cells to replicate wildly and persist in the body.\nCueball: Which worked, but created its own set of problems? Friend: How'd you guess? But I think the craziest part is the way they insert the patched genes. Cueball: How? Friend: Well, think - What specializes in invading and modifying T-cells? Cueball: Seriously? Friend: Yup. Must've been a fun conversation.\n[The last panel is set in a doctors office. A patient is sitting on the observation bed talking to their doctor.] Patient: Ok, so I have blood cells growing out of control, so you're going to give me different blood cells that also grow out of control? Doctor: Yes, but it's ok, because we've treated this blood with HIV! Patient: Are you sure you're a doctor? Doctor: Almost definitely.\n"}
{"id":939,"title":"Arrow","image_title":"Arrow","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/939","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/arrow.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/939:_Arrow","transcript":"[Cueball stands with a bow and arrow drawn tightly, aiming off-screen.] [He fires the arrow, it disappears offscreen. The bowstring vibrates for effect.] [He stands holding the bow by their side, watching the arrow fly away.] [A boomerang flies on-screen, coming from the direction the arrow was fired. Cueball reaches up to catch the boomerang.] [Cueball is now holding the boomerang, staring at it with confusion.]\n","explanation":"The comic appears to be a reference to 475: Further Boomerang Difficulties , which was a sequel to 445: I Am Not Good with Boomerangs , which had a man throwing a boomerang that never returned. Cueball shoots an arrow off with a bow and a boomerang returns to him. This confounds him. As it was also a Cueball that threw the boomerang in the other comic, this may be the same Cueball that now finally has his boomerang return to him after a long time (464 comics later). This would really freak him out then.\nThe title text is a pun on how boomerangs always come back, along with how \"The Return of X\" is often used for movie names.\nHowever, as shown in the prequel as well as in an even earlier comic, Cueball\/ Randall has to admit: I Am Not Good with Boomerangs . So for him it would be a surprise if the boomerang returned!\nBoomerangs also became a main theme in the interactive comic 1350: Lorenz .\n[Cueball stands with a bow and arrow drawn tightly, aiming off-screen.] [He fires the arrow, it disappears offscreen. The bowstring vibrates for effect.] [He stands holding the bow by their side, watching the arrow fly away.] [A boomerang flies on-screen, coming from the direction the arrow was fired. Cueball reaches up to catch the boomerang.] [Cueball is now holding the boomerang, staring at it with confusion.]\n"}
{"id":940,"title":"Oversight","image_title":"Oversight","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/940","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/oversight.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/940:_Oversight","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball have sex up against a wall.]\n[Megan and Cueball have sex standing in an armchair.]\n[Megan and Cueball have sex in a swing, swaying above a table with a flower vase on it.]\n[Fitocracy. The search phrase is \"sex\" and the site returned \"activity not found.\"]\n[Megan and Cueball stand in front of the computer, Megan is at the keyboard, Cueball stands back wearing a towel tied around his waist.] Megan: Come on! That was like two hours of cardio! Cueball: Hmm, let's see... The part on the dresser was kind of like skiing...\n","explanation":"Fitocracy is a web site that turns workouts into a social game by awarding points, badges, levels and all sorts of other gamification . Megan and Cueball , by their judgment, have spent approximately two hours engaged in sexual activity . However, according to this cartoon, Fitocracy does not consider sex to be an activity acceptable for its site, despite the vigorous nature of Cueball and Megan's sexual workout. This could be due to an oversight (an unintentional error), as the comic is titled, or intentional, as Fitocracy does not consider sex to be an acceptable exercise.\nThe title text explains how sites like Fitocracy are so successful. Because human brains, especially the cynical ones, like to game the system whenever they can, they will find easy things to do that also score high. In the case of Fitocracy, these are simple exercises that add up a lot when applied daily. But the creators of Fitocracy (and other such successful sites, like Weight Watchers or Lumosity) know this, and, as \"in Soviet Russia\" , the system games you, as shown, to adopt an exercise regimen, or to lose weight, or to get smarter, or whatever else there is.\nSex does raise your breathing rate and heartbeat, but as sparkpeople (a similar site to fitocracy) notes , it is not as effective as a session at a gym, as it does not typically use the main muscle groups in their full range of motion and doesn't sustain a raised heartbeat for a sufficient length of time. They consider sex to be less effective as cardio than brisk walking, as it burns only about 100-200 cal per hour, which is little raised above a typical resting rate of about 60 cal per hour. (Of course, these statistics exclude several of the sexual activities Megan and Cueball engage in.)\n[Megan and Cueball have sex up against a wall.]\n[Megan and Cueball have sex standing in an armchair.]\n[Megan and Cueball have sex in a swing, swaying above a table with a flower vase on it.]\n[Fitocracy. The search phrase is \"sex\" and the site returned \"activity not found.\"]\n[Megan and Cueball stand in front of the computer, Megan is at the keyboard, Cueball stands back wearing a towel tied around his waist.] Megan: Come on! That was like two hours of cardio! Cueball: Hmm, let's see... The part on the dresser was kind of like skiing...\n"}
{"id":941,"title":"Depth Perception","image_title":"Depth Perception","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/941","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/depth_perception.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/941:_Depth_Perception","transcript":"[The entire comic is narrated by Cueball, and never spoken by the Cueball shown in the examples. All dialog is shown in rectangular frames overlaid on the comic panels.]\n[In the first panel the background shows a cloudy sky in color, with the clouds all running together and appearing as a blue gray smear. Towards the bottom the horizon and the ground appear dark almost black at the very bottom. Two frames with two lines of text are at the top left and right, similar below except the one to the left has four lines and the one to the right only one line.] I've always had trouble with the size of clouds. I know they're huge. I can see their shapes. But I don't really see them as objects on the same scale as trees and buildings. They're a backdrop.\n[The next panel is split in three parts. The top part is in a single frame. The middle part is frame-less and only has text - the only narrating not inside one of the frames. Then at the bottom there are two frames overlaid over three small panels in a row]\n[In the top part of the 2ns panel stands Cueball on a flat disk inside a hemispherical dome with the front half cut away. The dome is about three times as tall as Cueball. Above the dome there is one frame with text. There is also two labeled arrows pointing to the dome and the disk.] Stars are the same way. Arrow up: Sky Arrow down: Ground\n[Text in between the top and the bottom panels:] I know they're scattered through and endless ocean, but my gut insists they're a painting on a domed ceiling.\n[The next two frames with text is overlaid above (three lines of text) and below (one line of text) the three panels described first. Those three panels are all inverted with black background and white Cueball:] [Left panel: Cueball stands on a curved surface, looking up.] [Middle panel: The perspective of the scene shifts, suddenly the surface Cueball is standing on is in the top left of the panel. Cueball is now looking down, leaning back, and waving his arms trying to regain balance. [Right panel: The perspective of the scene returns to normal, Cueball is now semi-crouched, staring at the ground with legs spaced apart to help him balance.] If I try hard enough, I get a glimmer of depth, a dizzying sense of space, But then everything snaps back.\n[An American football field is shown with Cueball drawn very small near the middle. Sections at the left tips of each of the goal posts are highlighted and shown as a zoomed view in an insert box. These insert shows the two webcams mounted on the top of the very tip, one for each goal posts. There are two frames with text above the field, the top one most to the left with one line, the second directly below it with two lines, and below the field there is also one frame with one line in it.] So one summer afternoon I set up two HD webcams hundreds of feet apart, Pointed them at the sky,\n[The next two frames with two lines of text each are stretched over the two middle panels in this second row of panels:] [The first panel shows a pair of glasses and a smartphone with an attachment designed to clip onto the glasses. The smartphone screen is setup to display two images side by side such that one camera is visible in the left half of the screen, and the other camera is visible in the right half of the screen. There are four arrows pointing to the two items and to each of the two parts of the screen. They all have labels which are between the two lines of text, but here shown below for clarity.] [The next panel shows the completed phone glasses assembly.] And fed one stream to each of my eyes. The parallax expanded my depth perception by a thousand times, Arrow top left: Right camera Arrow top right: Smartphone Arrow bottom left: Very strong reading glasses Arrow bottom right: Left camera\n[Cueball stands wearing the phone glasses assembly, one hand held up to the device, staring into the sky. There are two frames one above and one below with two lines of text each:] And I stood in my living room At the bottom of an abyss\n[Another colored panel with blue sky and clouds below the top part of the panel from left to right. Cueball is now a giant who stands in the middle of the frame on the shore of a coastline with a small island off the coast, only a step away for him. A city is near his right foot and the tallest skyscraper appears ankle high. A mountain range is behind him with mountains that are also only barely ankle high. A river flows past the mountains and joins another coming from them on it's way down towards the coast. Cueball is standing with his head well above cloud level as clouds swim around him. At the top above and left of his head the last frame with one line of text is located:] Watching mountains drift by.\n","explanation":"This comic is one of those that is less focused on humour and more focused on a sense of wonder at the world for both Cueball \/ Randall and the reader.\nCueball discusses how difficult it is to intuitively feel the reality of how vast the things he sees every day and night are - how big the clouds are, and how far away the stars are. Depth perception - seeing things in 3-D rather than as a flat 2-D image - is partly created by having \"binocular vision\", or two eyes spaced apart. Each eye sees a slightly different angle on a scene, and the brain combines these two views to give a genuinely three-dimensional view of something. 3-D glasses work the same way, by feeding a slightly offset image into each eye. When you look at far away objects, the offset from each eye is undetectable, and so they may look more like flat 2-D images - hence the impression Cueball has of stars being painted onto a dome rather than being extremely large, far away objects at very different distances.\nHe wonders if he can work around this impression as far as the clouds are concerned. Normally, Cueball's eyes are a few centimetres apart, like everyone else's, and his 3-D perspective is based on that scale. Here, Cueball puts HD webcams on the tops of football uprights, which are 360 feet (~110 m) apart instead of a few centimetres. He uses strong reading glasses to hold up a smartphone, and feeds the far more offset images of the webcam feeds to each eye so that his brain will create a 3-D perspective of the clouds, which would normally be too massive for the offset between two human eyes to grasp their three-dimensional structure in the same way as smaller, closer things.\nThis technique doesn't give him the view as if he were a giant as in the final panel, but rather as if he were a giant \"at the bottom of an abyss\" as per the second-last panel, as the clouds are higher than the goalposts on which the cameras are mounted. The final panel is some artistic license to give the reader a real sense of what it feels like for Cueball to carry this out; it shows us that he has finally achieved a more truthful perspective on the size and shapes of the clouds than he had when he started.\nThe reason for the reversal of the \"right camera\" and \"left camera\" panes on the smartphone screen is unclear, this is likely just a mistake.\nThe title text is a line from the 1969 song \" Both Sides Now \" by Joni Mitchell; the full chorus runs: \"I've looked at clouds from both sides now \/ From up and down and still somehow \/ It's cloud illusions I recall \/ I really don't know clouds at all.\" Binocular depth perception involves seeing the same object from slightly different angles, from 'both sides', so Randall is taking the song lyric and literalising it. The song itself has a bittersweet tone and relates to how you understand things differently as you mature, but still don't necessarily feel like you understand them at all, so the tone also fits pretty un-ironically into the theme of the comic.\n[The entire comic is narrated by Cueball, and never spoken by the Cueball shown in the examples. All dialog is shown in rectangular frames overlaid on the comic panels.]\n[In the first panel the background shows a cloudy sky in color, with the clouds all running together and appearing as a blue gray smear. Towards the bottom the horizon and the ground appear dark almost black at the very bottom. Two frames with two lines of text are at the top left and right, similar below except the one to the left has four lines and the one to the right only one line.] I've always had trouble with the size of clouds. I know they're huge. I can see their shapes. But I don't really see them as objects on the same scale as trees and buildings. They're a backdrop.\n[The next panel is split in three parts. The top part is in a single frame. The middle part is frame-less and only has text - the only narrating not inside one of the frames. Then at the bottom there are two frames overlaid over three small panels in a row]\n[In the top part of the 2ns panel stands Cueball on a flat disk inside a hemispherical dome with the front half cut away. The dome is about three times as tall as Cueball. Above the dome there is one frame with text. There is also two labeled arrows pointing to the dome and the disk.] Stars are the same way. Arrow up: Sky Arrow down: Ground\n[Text in between the top and the bottom panels:] I know they're scattered through and endless ocean, but my gut insists they're a painting on a domed ceiling.\n[The next two frames with text is overlaid above (three lines of text) and below (one line of text) the three panels described first. Those three panels are all inverted with black background and white Cueball:] [Left panel: Cueball stands on a curved surface, looking up.] [Middle panel: The perspective of the scene shifts, suddenly the surface Cueball is standing on is in the top left of the panel. Cueball is now looking down, leaning back, and waving his arms trying to regain balance. [Right panel: The perspective of the scene returns to normal, Cueball is now semi-crouched, staring at the ground with legs spaced apart to help him balance.] If I try hard enough, I get a glimmer of depth, a dizzying sense of space, But then everything snaps back.\n[An American football field is shown with Cueball drawn very small near the middle. Sections at the left tips of each of the goal posts are highlighted and shown as a zoomed view in an insert box. These insert shows the two webcams mounted on the top of the very tip, one for each goal posts. There are two frames with text above the field, the top one most to the left with one line, the second directly below it with two lines, and below the field there is also one frame with one line in it.] So one summer afternoon I set up two HD webcams hundreds of feet apart, Pointed them at the sky,\n[The next two frames with two lines of text each are stretched over the two middle panels in this second row of panels:] [The first panel shows a pair of glasses and a smartphone with an attachment designed to clip onto the glasses. The smartphone screen is setup to display two images side by side such that one camera is visible in the left half of the screen, and the other camera is visible in the right half of the screen. There are four arrows pointing to the two items and to each of the two parts of the screen. They all have labels which are between the two lines of text, but here shown below for clarity.] [The next panel shows the completed phone glasses assembly.] And fed one stream to each of my eyes. The parallax expanded my depth perception by a thousand times, Arrow top left: Right camera Arrow top right: Smartphone Arrow bottom left: Very strong reading glasses Arrow bottom right: Left camera\n[Cueball stands wearing the phone glasses assembly, one hand held up to the device, staring into the sky. There are two frames one above and one below with two lines of text each:] And I stood in my living room At the bottom of an abyss\n[Another colored panel with blue sky and clouds below the top part of the panel from left to right. Cueball is now a giant who stands in the middle of the frame on the shore of a coastline with a small island off the coast, only a step away for him. A city is near his right foot and the tallest skyscraper appears ankle high. A mountain range is behind him with mountains that are also only barely ankle high. A river flows past the mountains and joins another coming from them on it's way down towards the coast. Cueball is standing with his head well above cloud level as clouds swim around him. At the top above and left of his head the last frame with one line of text is located:] Watching mountains drift by.\n"}
{"id":942,"title":"Juggling","image_title":"Juggling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/942","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/juggling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/942:_Juggling","transcript":"[The panel shows a close up of Cueball reading a book. The book is called \"How To Juggle\" and has a picture of a person juggling on the cover.]\n[The view now shows the entirety of Cueball. The book is splayed on the floor behind them, and he is holding some juggling balls.]\n[Cueball throws the juggling balls in the air.]\n[He lowers his arms to prepare to catch the balls. The balls are hovering in mid-air.]\n[Cueball now stands with his arms by his sides. The balls have not moved and are still suspended in mid-air.]\n[Cueball jumps, trying to grab the lowest ball. He can't reach.]\n[Cueball scratches his head and stares at the still floating juggling balls.]\n[Cueball throws the book into a trash can.]\n","explanation":"In an attempt to learn to juggle Cueball begins practicing after reading an instruction book. In the third panel, it seems as though he is juggling normally after tossing the balls into their air. However, in a baffling phenomenon the balls he throws into the air seem to stop adhering to the strict laws of physics part of the way through his throw. As can be proven in simple demonstrations things tend to fall toward the largest center of gravity, and items in motion do not completely stop, unless other forces are at play as well. [ citation needed ]\nThe joke here is partially making fun of the idea that in a comic, the visuals of juggling would be the same as the visuals sitting in place in the air. So at first while reading, we assume Cueball is juggling, until it is revealed he has no control over the position of the balls at all.\nCueball is understandably perplexed, but instead of ascribing the event to some inexplicable supernatural agent, he concludes that the book's juggling instructions were faulty and throws it away. The title text furthers the joke by implying the book too seems to have become caught up in this phenomenon, which might now occur whenever Cueball throws something.\nMany things could be taken away from this. Perhaps Cueball is so spectacularly bad at juggling his failure breaks the laws of physics. Or perhaps the book assumes gravity and momentum are present where you choose to juggle. Or perhaps the book merely instructs you how to juggle like the picture on the front of the cover, where the balls can also be thought to hover.\nHowever it seems that for some reason physics has only stopped acting on these objects as Cueball himself is able to jump and fall back down without any trouble and the book was previously on the floor, implying it had been dropped there.\nWhile it is possible to reach zero gravity (or at least microgravity), there is no place in our universe where objects with mass have no momentum. Some possible explanations might be that Cueball is outside of our universe, he has just discovered something that's theoretically impossible, or he is just dreaming, or Randall has taken comedic license on the \"momentum\" part for the sake of the joke.  Or he could be in a place where the surrounding fluid, instead of having the normal properties of earth's atmosphere, is a very thick or viscous fluid in which things simply become stuck. Or, perhaps the fourth wall is broken, and Cueball doesn\u2019t recognize he\u2019s in a web comic, but we do.\nThis may also be a reference to a motto often brought up in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series: if you forget about physics, they will forget about you.\nThis comic is part of the following unpublished comic from the five-minute comics ; specifically the unpublished fourth part .\n[The panel shows a close up of Cueball reading a book. The book is called \"How To Juggle\" and has a picture of a person juggling on the cover.]\n[The view now shows the entirety of Cueball. The book is splayed on the floor behind them, and he is holding some juggling balls.]\n[Cueball throws the juggling balls in the air.]\n[He lowers his arms to prepare to catch the balls. The balls are hovering in mid-air.]\n[Cueball now stands with his arms by his sides. The balls have not moved and are still suspended in mid-air.]\n[Cueball jumps, trying to grab the lowest ball. He can't reach.]\n[Cueball scratches his head and stares at the still floating juggling balls.]\n[Cueball throws the book into a trash can.]\n"}
{"id":943,"title":"Empirical","image_title":"Empirical","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/943","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/empirical.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/943:_Empirical","transcript":"[Two people are standing together, Megan and Cueball.] Megan: Will you marry me?\n[Cueball throws his hands in the air excitedly.] Cueball: Let's find out!\n[The couple are now standing in front of an altar. A flower arch stretches over the couple and a person is standing behind the altar. Megan is wearing a knee length white dress and a veil. Cueball is wearing a bow tie. They are holding hands.]\n[The couple stand together, still dressed from the wedding and still holding hands.] Cueball: Apparently, yes!\n","explanation":"When faced with the question \"Will you marry me?\", Cueball approaches the question in an empirical way. The word empirical denotes information gained by means of direct observation or experiments. In this comic, Cueball completes the \"Will you marry me?\" experiment, by actually getting married (as opposed to deciding on the spot or taking time to think) and the results are \"yes\".\nThe word \"will\" has two meanings: auxiliary verb of the future and disposition to do something. In the first sense Cueball cannot answer this question since he cannot know the future. Of course the question Will you marry me? uses the verb will in the second sense.\nThis comic is likely a reference to Randall 's marriage around this time.\nThe title text states that Cueball is surprised by the results, suggesting that Cueball actually was not confident of his ability to marry, meaning that perhaps the marriage is not in good standing.\n[Two people are standing together, Megan and Cueball.] Megan: Will you marry me?\n[Cueball throws his hands in the air excitedly.] Cueball: Let's find out!\n[The couple are now standing in front of an altar. A flower arch stretches over the couple and a person is standing behind the altar. Megan is wearing a knee length white dress and a veil. Cueball is wearing a bow tie. They are holding hands.]\n[The couple stand together, still dressed from the wedding and still holding hands.] Cueball: Apparently, yes!\n"}
{"id":944,"title":"Hurricane Names","image_title":"Hurricane Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/944","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hurricane_names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/944:_Hurricane_Names","transcript":"[A weather reporter sits behind a desk with an image of the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding land masses displayed to his left. 9 hurricane symbols are scattered across the map, primarily over Cuba.] Reporter: After the latest wave of hurricanes, not only have we run through the year's list of 21 names, but we've also used up the backup list of Greek letters. All subsequent storms will be named using random dictionary words. Reporter: The newly-formed system in the gulf has been designated \"Hurricane Eggbeater\", and we once again pray this is the final storm of this horrible, horrible season.\n","explanation":"The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) maintains lists of potential names for tropical cyclones in each tropical cyclone basin ; Regional Specialized Meteorological Centres (RSMCs) and Tropical Cyclone Warning Centres (TCWCs) are responsible for assigning those names to tropical cyclones within their respective areas of responsibility. In the North Atlantic Ocean (including the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea as pictured), the NOAA 's National Hurricane Center (NHC\/RSMC Miami) gives names to tropical cyclones (of which hurricanes are a subset), going through the alphabet (excluding Q, U, X, Y, and Z) and resetting at \"A\" at the beginning of the year. For example, the North Atlantic storms in 2012 were named \"Alberto\", \"Beryl\", \"Chris\", \"Debby\", and so on. There are six lists of names for the North Atlantic Ocean, which rotate every six years. Storms that are extremely catastrophic are removed from the lists.\nIf there were more than 21 hurricanes in a season before 2021, the 21-letter alphabet becomes exhausted and the hurricanes are named with Greek letters. This has happened only twice: in the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season , see 1126: Epsilon and Zeta , and in the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season . In 2021, the World Meteorological Organization ended the use of the Greek alphabet and unveiled a supplementary list of names to be used in event of exhaustion.\nThere have never been enough cyclones in one season to exhaust both the English and Greek alphabet (which would require more than 45 cyclones in a season; the most so far has been 30), and Randall is hypothesizing what the names would be if this happened. In the comic, the NHC has named the hurricanes using random words out of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The humor here is intrinsic: \"Hurricane Eggbeater\" is a bizarre and hilarious name (and may also refer to how an eggbeater spins and 'destroys' an egg in a similar manner to how a hurricane might affect the surrounding area). The place in the image shown is the Gulf of Mexico and its surroundings, with the land being white, and the ocean, black.\nThe title text takes this already surreal twist to an even more ridiculous extreme, where an impossibly long hurricane season exceeds 300,000+ storms\u00a0and exhausts the OED completely.  Even when the NHC starts referring to them using counting numbers ,\u00a0which will be sufficient\u00a0to cover an infinite number of hurricanes, they are foiled\u00a0by a theorem\u00a0in set theory .  In mathematics, the set\u00a0of all counting numbers is\u00a0a countable set (as are the set of all integers or all fractions) whereas\u00a0the set\u00a0of all points on a\u00a0surface is an uncountable set (as is the set of all real numbers). Cantor diagonalization is a famous\u00a0proof\u00a0that it is impossible\u00a0to map objects from an uncountable set\u00a0one-to-one with objects from a countable set.  Applying this theorem\u00a0to hurricanes,\u00a0if there were to be one hurricane for every possible\u00a0point on Earth's surface, it would be impossible\u00a0to assign a distinct counting number to each one.  This of course defeats NHC's last-resort naming scheme, but more pertinently, human civilization\u00a0would be in a lot of trouble.\nAt this point, the meteorologists give up and decide to name all the hurricanes \"Steve\", which is popular on the internet as an arbitrary, generic name. Ironically, this makes \"Steve\" no longer arbitrary. The reporter then goes on to tell people that their forecast is \"Steve\" meaning that the hurricanes are everywhere. He says \"good luck\", which is probably because there are currently hurricanes on all points of the earth's surface at the time of his speaking.\n[A weather reporter sits behind a desk with an image of the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding land masses displayed to his left. 9 hurricane symbols are scattered across the map, primarily over Cuba.] Reporter: After the latest wave of hurricanes, not only have we run through the year's list of 21 names, but we've also used up the backup list of Greek letters. All subsequent storms will be named using random dictionary words. Reporter: The newly-formed system in the gulf has been designated \"Hurricane Eggbeater\", and we once again pray this is the final storm of this horrible, horrible season.\n"}
{"id":945,"title":"I'm Sorry","image_title":"I'm Sorry","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/945","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/im_sorry.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/945:_I%27m_Sorry","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are standing next to each other having a conversation.] Megan: My Mom's house burned down. Cueball: Oh! I'm sorry! Megan: Why? It's not your fault. Cueball: It's nice of you to say that, but I know what I did.\n[Caption below the panel:] It annoys me when people interpret an obviously sympathetic \"I'm sorry\" as an apology, so I've started responding by making it one.\nThis kind of game, in which a deliberate misunderstanding of language is treated as the other person's fault seems to be a peeve of Randall's, and is dealt with in several other strips, for instance, 169: Words that End in GRY .","explanation":"The term \"I'm sorry\" expresses a general feeling of sorrow or grief. It can be used either as an apology (expressing sorrow for one's own actions) or of sympathy (expressing sorrow for someone else's misfortune). Both uses are normal and acceptable, and the distinction is generally clear from the context. Some people deliberately conflate the two uses, treating an expression of sympathy as if it were an apology. This confusion is almost always feigned, as both uses of the term are well understood.\nAs it says below the comic, when Megan rejects his sympathetic \"I'm sorry\" by treating it as if it were an apology and saying it was not his fault, rather than just agreeing with her, an irritated Cueball implies that it was always intended as an apology, because he DID, in fact, burn down her mother's house. It is unlikely that he actually burned her house down, but rather is simply teaching Megan a lesson not to nitpick so much.\nThe title text has Cueball further attempting to convince Megan that he is not just being sarcastic, but really did set the fire, for the simple reason that he hates her mother.\n[Megan and Cueball are standing next to each other having a conversation.] Megan: My Mom's house burned down. Cueball: Oh! I'm sorry! Megan: Why? It's not your fault. Cueball: It's nice of you to say that, but I know what I did.\n[Caption below the panel:] It annoys me when people interpret an obviously sympathetic \"I'm sorry\" as an apology, so I've started responding by making it one.\nThis kind of game, in which a deliberate misunderstanding of language is treated as the other person's fault seems to be a peeve of Randall's, and is dealt with in several other strips, for instance, 169: Words that End in GRY ."}
{"id":946,"title":"Family Decals","image_title":"Family Decals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/946","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/family_decals.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/946:_Family_Decals","transcript":"[Close up of the rear ends of two cars parked next to each other. Both have white stickers on their black rear windows. The car on the left is an urban SUV and most of the rear is visible with all the lights and a readable license plate with gray text visible. Its stickers represent a family. From left to right they are a Cueball-like guy, a woman with white hair like Blondie (i.e. black shows through), a girl with two ponytails, a boy of the same height and a smaller boy, both boys Cueball-like. The car on the right is a sporty hatch back, and only the left part until the middle is shown. The left lights and the very left part of the license plate can be seen. Its stickers show Cueball, Megan and then a large pile of dollar notes (six piles of different heights) and two large money bags with dollar signs on them, and the rear left bag is partly hidden by two piles of notes.] License plate of SUV: ICE-LI3 License plate of sporty hatch back: 4[cut off]\n","explanation":"There exists a current fashion among car owners to place decals on their back window that represent their family. The decals consist of stick figures to depict the parents and children, perhaps shown doing a favorite activity, and even pets.\nThe first car window features a couple with three children, while the other shows just a couple ( Cueball and Megan ), with piles of dollar bills and two large bags with dollar signs on them. The humor comes from the opportunity cost implied in this \u2014 not having children allows you to avoid the expense of raising them and accumulate money for your own use.\nOne might expect that the cars would represent the difference in wealth, and they are identified as 'urban SUV' and 'sporty hatch back' in the official transcript . The larger car is a Subaru Outback which is a typical car used by families. The second car is a Honda Fit , which is a budget compact hatchback, in the comic it has a spoiler added. The Subaru Outback is more expensive now than the Honda Fit, which seems to fit perfect with the comic's implication since a family of five have to buy the large expensive hatchback. Being able to buy a smaller car that doesn't need to hold a five member family also allows you to save more money.\nThe title text refers to the humorous description of cats as the real masters of their household, and the little girls surrounding the cat refers to their ability to influence humans with their cuteness (as referenced in 231: Cat Proximity ). The implication is that any adults in the household have a limited, non-credited role. The title text could also be a reverse of the stereotypical \"crazy cat lady\". Instead of someone owning a very large quantity of cats it could be one cat with an ungodly number of little girls.\n[Close up of the rear ends of two cars parked next to each other. Both have white stickers on their black rear windows. The car on the left is an urban SUV and most of the rear is visible with all the lights and a readable license plate with gray text visible. Its stickers represent a family. From left to right they are a Cueball-like guy, a woman with white hair like Blondie (i.e. black shows through), a girl with two ponytails, a boy of the same height and a smaller boy, both boys Cueball-like. The car on the right is a sporty hatch back, and only the left part until the middle is shown. The left lights and the very left part of the license plate can be seen. Its stickers show Cueball, Megan and then a large pile of dollar notes (six piles of different heights) and two large money bags with dollar signs on them, and the rear left bag is partly hidden by two piles of notes.] License plate of SUV: ICE-LI3 License plate of sporty hatch back: 4[cut off]\n"}
{"id":947,"title":"Investing","image_title":"Investing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/947","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/investing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/947:_Investing","transcript":"Ponytail: Sure, 2% interest may not seem like a lot. But it's compound !\n[Ponytail opens a computer and begins calculating.] Ponytail: If you invest $1,000 now, in just ten short years you'll have... ...let's see...\nPonytail: ...$1,219.\nPonytail: Ok, so compound interest isn't some magical force. Megan: Yeah, I'm just gonna try to make more money.\n","explanation":"Compound interest is a type of interest in which the interest earned is added to the total amount, so that the interest itself then begins to gain interest in an exponential fashion. This contrasts to simple interest , where the amount used to calculate the interest will always stay at a fixed value. In economics classes, many teachers like to demonstrate extreme examples of compound interest, typically turning a thousand dollars into tens of thousands thanks to unrealistically high interest rates over several decades. But here, Ponytail discovers that a more realistic example is less than overwhelming. Instead of simple interest of 2% earning $200 in ten years, with compounding $219 is produced, hardly any better on a $1000 investment.\nThere is an urban legend that Einstein said that compounding interest is the most powerful force. Snopes has its doubts about it .\nThe idea in the title text that people take advice from physicists making small talk is also referenced in 799: Stephen Hawking and 1206: Einstein .\nPonytail: Sure, 2% interest may not seem like a lot. But it's compound !\n[Ponytail opens a computer and begins calculating.] Ponytail: If you invest $1,000 now, in just ten short years you'll have... ...let's see...\nPonytail: ...$1,219.\nPonytail: Ok, so compound interest isn't some magical force. Megan: Yeah, I'm just gonna try to make more money.\n"}
{"id":948,"title":"AI","image_title":"AI","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/948","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ai.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/948:_AI","transcript":"[Megan sits on an office chair at a desk. A laptop computer is on the desk, audio from a Cleverbot chat is shown coming from the laptop with a zigzag line from the screen. Megan has turned her head away from the computer to the right addressing Cueball off-panel.] Megan: Did you see the Cleverbot-Cleverbot chat? Cleverbot (from computer): I am not a robot. I'm a unicorn.\n[In the next frame-less panel, Megan has turned the chair away from the desk, which is not shown, and is now sitting with her hands in her lap in front of Cueball who holds one hand up as he replies.] Cueball: Yeah. It's hilarious, but it's just clumsily sampling a huge database of lines people have typed. Chatterbots still have a long way to go.\n[A close-up of Megan's head and shoulders. She has a hand to her chin and appears to be contemplating the last remark. Cueball replies from off-panel.] Megan: So... Computers have mastered playing chess and driving cars across the desert, but can't hold five minutes of normal conversation? Cueball (off-panel): Pretty much.\n[Both are shown again as in panel two, Cueball with his hands down.] Megan: Is it just me, or have we created a Burning Man attendee?\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the wildly funny [ citation needed ] video of two Cleverbots talking to each other. By recording and analyzing whatever humans type into its input, they can sound pretty human to whoever is reading their response.\nMegan has been watching the video and asks Cueball about it. He says it's just \"clumsy sampling\" as they are still very far from sounding like humans and holding normal conversations.\nMegan then sums up that as of the release of this comic computers were good at chess and at driving cars through a desert (i.e. a place with no obstacles to hit. The ability of such self-driving cars would improve much later, with this comic being the first with a direct reference to such cars. Later self-driving cars became a recurring topic on xkcd). But they cannot hold a conversation for five minutes. And she thus concludes that a cleverbot would be perfect for attending Burning Man .\nBurning Man is a week-long event held yearly in Black Rock City, Nevada. The festival encourages an artistic, anti-establishment philosophy and attracts a broad but devoted following combining hippies, anarchists, nudists, techno-utopians and survivalists. Shows of custom cars on the desert plain are a big part of Burning Man, and mental games like chess are a popular way to pass the time there. However, a common joke about Burning Man attendees is that they can only talk about Burning Man - hence why they can't hold a five minute conversation.\nA tradition of Burning Man is not to shower while you are there, mostly because all water must be brought in from offsite. And of course Cleverbot reacts badly in showers because if you do try to shower a Cleverbot, you end up with a shorted out computer.\n[Megan sits on an office chair at a desk. A laptop computer is on the desk, audio from a Cleverbot chat is shown coming from the laptop with a zigzag line from the screen. Megan has turned her head away from the computer to the right addressing Cueball off-panel.] Megan: Did you see the Cleverbot-Cleverbot chat? Cleverbot (from computer): I am not a robot. I'm a unicorn.\n[In the next frame-less panel, Megan has turned the chair away from the desk, which is not shown, and is now sitting with her hands in her lap in front of Cueball who holds one hand up as he replies.] Cueball: Yeah. It's hilarious, but it's just clumsily sampling a huge database of lines people have typed. Chatterbots still have a long way to go.\n[A close-up of Megan's head and shoulders. She has a hand to her chin and appears to be contemplating the last remark. Cueball replies from off-panel.] Megan: So... Computers have mastered playing chess and driving cars across the desert, but can't hold five minutes of normal conversation? Cueball (off-panel): Pretty much.\n[Both are shown again as in panel two, Cueball with his hands down.] Megan: Is it just me, or have we created a Burning Man attendee?\n"}
{"id":949,"title":"File Transfer","image_title":"File Transfer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/949","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/file_transfer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/949:_File_Transfer","transcript":"[Cueball stands near a computer, talking on the phone to another person.]\nCueball: You want your cousin to send you a file? easy. He can email it to- ...Oh, it's 25 MB? Hmm... Cueball: Do either of you have an FTP server? No, right. Cueball: If you had web hosting, you could upload it... Cueball: Hm. We could try one of those MegaShareUpload sites, but they're flaky and full of delays and porn popups. Cueball: How about AIM Direct Connect? Anyone still use that? Cueball: Oh, wait, Dropbox! It's this recent startup from a few years back that syncs folders between computers. You just need to make an account, install the- Cueball: Oh, he just drove over to your house with a USB drive? Cueball: Uh, cool, that works too.\n[Caption below the panel:] I like how we've had the internet for decades, yet \"sending files\" is something early adopters are still figuring out how to do.\nThis comic has a resemblance to both 1810: Chat Systems and 2194: How to Send a File\n","explanation":"Cueball is trying to help two people, his friend and his friend's cousin, exchange a 25\u00a0MB file. Most people know how to use email to send files through the internet, but (as of 2011 when this comic was published) 25\u00a0MB exceeds the attachment size limit of most email services. The reason there is a limit is because every email has to be transferred between several mail transfer agents, and each one has to temporarily store a copy of the email. Space constraints on those mail servers means that they must impose size limits, and an email with such a large attachment will therefore not be delivered.\nThe next option is to upload the file to an FTP server (FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol , as opposed to HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol ), used to transfer files between computers on a shared network, such as the internet. However, FTP servers are a touch more esoteric than a mere email attachment, and many internet users don't have access to one of their own.\nWeb hosting is simply the ability to create a website and store all the data for said website on a server which is connected to the internet. If Cueball's friend's cousin had the ability to do that, sharing the file would be as easy as putting a copy of it in an accessible directory and sending the link to the desired recipient.\nMegaupload was one of many sites on the Internet that recognized most users' inability to host large files on their own, and so offers to host large files, sometimes for free, sometimes for a small fee. The payoff is that in order to make such a service profitable, many of these sites are cluttered with banner and pop up ads in a mad effort to squeeze as much ad revenue out of every page view as possible. It's not a dealbreaker for some, but Cueball seems to think it'll be too much for his friend's cousin to handle.\nAIM Direct Connect was a file sharing system on AOL Instant Messenger, which was already suffering severe drops in popularity by the year 2000. Clearly, Cueball is grasping at straws here: anybody desperate enough to invoke the name of AOL as a solution instead of a problem must be at their wits' end.\nDropbox is a program with a web-based GUI that automates file sharing between two computers on the internet. But this solution also has its issues, as it requires that at least the sending party has a Dropbox account. Installing Dropbox software is not actually required, since Dropbox also provides a web interface for uploading and downloading files. At the time of the comic's publication, Dropbox was still relatively new and unknown, thus why it is not Cueball's first suggestion.\nWhile Cueball is still explaining Dropbox, the friend's cousin has copied the file to a USB drive and physically transported it to the friend's house, circumventing the Internet entirely. It's not an elegant solution, but sometimes traditional methods are the most efficient ways to get something done.\nWhen used to transfer files between computers in the same room or building, this same approach is referred to as sneakernet . This comic is also an illustration of what Andy Tanenbaum said in 1989: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. Sneakernet was examined in this What If article.\nTim Berners-Lee developed the http protocol, the html markup language and the first web browser. Therefore he is considered to be the inventor of the World Wide Web. He envisioned originally an interactive web, where it would have been possible for the users to change a website directly using the browser, which would have made it possible to upload a file directly to a webpage:\nTim Berners-Lee's original vision of the Web involved a medium for both reading and writing. In fact, Berners-Lee's first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, could both view and edit web pages (from Wikipedia WebDAV ).\nIn contrast to this, a static web (\"web 1.0\") came alive, which developed then later to the interactive \"web 2.0\" we know today. Wikis like this website , where the page content is editable via forms, are a perfect example for this \"emulated interactivity\". From the technical point of view, the webpage is still static and the browser is just a viewer for html pages with the limited possibility to send some form data to the server. Scripts on the server, which process this form data, change then the web page. This mechanism is a more complicated work-around for what Tim Berners-Lee originally planned.\nDropbox and the web interfaces of email providers are further examples of this \"emulated interactivity\". The title text assumes, that Tim Berners-Lee feels probably generally sad, that his invention developed into this unnecessary complicated way and misusing emails (maybe even via the web interface of email providers) for file sharing is therefore especially painful for what could have been so simple.\n[Cueball stands near a computer, talking on the phone to another person.]\nCueball: You want your cousin to send you a file? easy. He can email it to- ...Oh, it's 25 MB? Hmm... Cueball: Do either of you have an FTP server? No, right. Cueball: If you had web hosting, you could upload it... Cueball: Hm. We could try one of those MegaShareUpload sites, but they're flaky and full of delays and porn popups. Cueball: How about AIM Direct Connect? Anyone still use that? Cueball: Oh, wait, Dropbox! It's this recent startup from a few years back that syncs folders between computers. You just need to make an account, install the- Cueball: Oh, he just drove over to your house with a USB drive? Cueball: Uh, cool, that works too.\n[Caption below the panel:] I like how we've had the internet for decades, yet \"sending files\" is something early adopters are still figuring out how to do.\nThis comic has a resemblance to both 1810: Chat Systems and 2194: How to Send a File\n"}
{"id":950,"title":"Mystery Solved","image_title":"Mystery Solved","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/950","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mystery_solved.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/950:_Mystery_Solved","transcript":"[A twin prop airplane flies high overhead.] Off-screen person: What's that airplane?\n[The plane has landed, and the pilot is walking towards the crowd waving.] Off-screen person: Holy crap\u2014 Is that Amelia Earhart?\n[A close up of Amelia Earhart waving.] Amelia: Hey everyone! My flight was a success! Off-screen person: But... Where were you!?\n[A wide view of Amelia, she stops waving.] Amelia: I flew around the world! Off-screen person: But you disappeared in 1937!\n[A close up of Amelia Earhart.] Amelia: Right, to fly around the world. Off-screen person: It's 2011! Amelia: The world is big. It's a long flight.\n[A wide view of Amelia] Off-screen person: But you... It's not... I - Amelia: Can I talk to someone smarter?\n","explanation":"In this comic, aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart's plane comes back to land after it went missing in 1937. It was presumed that Earhart was dead and that her plane went down into the ocean at some point during her journey, although various alternate theories have arisen since then, with no clear answer to the mystery. However, this comic proposes a much simpler explanation: there was no disappearance, it just took her 74 years to fly around the Earth. This explanation is simple, but impossible.\nEarhart seems to think the person she is talking with is stupid for not comprehending such a simple answer, but in fact her explanation raises a multitude of other questions. Among them:\nAnother possibility is that she did not just fly around the earth, but flew very fast (near light speed ) for 74 years to return without having aged much . However, this would not explain why she thinks it is a long trip around the earth, and it raises the additional questions of how she would accomplish this feat in a twin-engine monoplane and how no one else noticed any signs of her plane traveling near light speed, such as a 74-year-long sonic boom.\nEarhart's disappearance gave birth to many conspiracy theories. One of these, which was explored in the TV series Star Trek: Voyager , involves her being abducted to another part of the galaxy , where she was left in cryogenic stasis until found by the Voyager crew. Something similar could be the case here, having Earhart frozen by aliens until 2011.\nThe title text lists a few more deceptively mundane answers to long-unsolved mysteries that at first seem to dispel the questions with boring logic, but in fact raise more questions than they answer. The first is the lost colonists of Roanoke , who were one of the first groups to come to North America, but then suddenly disappeared, leaving their colony untouched. The comic suggests that they simply left to found Roanoke, Virginia . Like all the other explanations in this comic, this doesn't explain how this simple solution became lost to public knowledge. It also doesn't explain why they abandoned their original colony, or how they made it to Roanoke, Virginia, which is more than 300 miles away, or where they were between when their colony was found abandoned in 1590 and when the future Roanoke, Virginia, was established over 200 years later, in the nineteenth century.\nThe second mystery in the title text, the Franklin Expedition , was a British voyage in 1845 to study the Northwest Passage that also disappeared, somewhere in northern Canada. The text suggests that the expedition wasn't lost; it was still exploring and eventually found its way to the Pacific Ocean in 2009. This is impossible, because the men on the expedition would be long dead. As a side note, both of the Franklin Expedition ships were eventually found wrecked in the years after this comic was published: one in 2014 , and the other in 2016 .\nThe final mystery is Jimmy Hoffa , the famous Teamsters Union leader who went missing in 1975 and declared dead in 1982 (possibly murdered). The comic says Jimmy simply opted to switch to the more formal version of his name; again, this raises the question of how such a thing would be possible without anyone noticing. The current head of the Teamsters is in fact named James Hoffa (he is Jimmy Hoffa's son and goes by \"James P. Hoffa\" professionally); the comic could be implying that the senior Hoffa is not only alive but actually impersonating his own son, which would raise the question of why the supposed \"son\" doesn't look suspiciously older than he claims to be.\n[A twin prop airplane flies high overhead.] Off-screen person: What's that airplane?\n[The plane has landed, and the pilot is walking towards the crowd waving.] Off-screen person: Holy crap\u2014 Is that Amelia Earhart?\n[A close up of Amelia Earhart waving.] Amelia: Hey everyone! My flight was a success! Off-screen person: But... Where were you!?\n[A wide view of Amelia, she stops waving.] Amelia: I flew around the world! Off-screen person: But you disappeared in 1937!\n[A close up of Amelia Earhart.] Amelia: Right, to fly around the world. Off-screen person: It's 2011! Amelia: The world is big. It's a long flight.\n[A wide view of Amelia] Off-screen person: But you... It's not... I - Amelia: Can I talk to someone smarter?\n"}
{"id":951,"title":"Working","image_title":"Working","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/951","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/working.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/951:_Working","transcript":"[Ponytail is standing next to Cueball filling his vehicle with petrol. Ponytail is pointing off-screen.] Ponytail: Why are you going here? Gas is ten cents a gallon cheaper at the station five minutes that way. Cueball: Because a penny saved is a penny earned.\nIf you spend nine minutes of your time to save a dollar, you're working for less than minimum wage.\n","explanation":"This comic is a jab at price-gouging shoppers who spend large amounts of time checking multiple shopping outlets for the best deals. The minimum wage is the lowest possible wage that a person could legally be paid, usually only targeted at providing unskilled laborers with an equitable level of income. In 2011, when this comic was published, US Federal minimum wage was $7.25 an hour, though certain states and cities typically have higher minimum wages. Using simple math, the caption states that a person is effectively working below the minimum wage when they spend their time looking to save a few cents on their purchases. (Randall's math checks out: $7.25\/hour times nine minutes would equate to just over $1.08.)\nBenjamin Franklin's adage \"A penny saved is a penny earned\" is usually taken to mean that a person, merely by making the effort to save their money rather than spending it frivolously, has put in worthwhile effort that makes them deserving of that money. Cueball flips the meaning of the phrase, instead saying that saving money is work just like a job, and as one would not take a job that paid less than minimum wage, the compensation is inadequate for the amount of effort it would take to drive to a cheaper gas station.\nOf course, if you are unemployed and cannot expect to get any wages it could still be worth your time.\nThe title text, however, then goes on to talk about how the extra fuel consumption involved in finding cheaper gas leads to more extra money being spent on gas than is actually saved at the cheaper outlet.\nThis problem has also been examined in What if? - Cost of Pennies . See also 1205: Is It Worth the Time? .\nHowever, Randall neglects to consider the effect that customers have on prices.  If customers consistently go out of their way to get the lowest prices, then sellers will be motivated to lower their prices to attract customers.  On the other hand, if customers consistently purchase from the most convenient seller, then sellers can raise prices without losing business.\n[Ponytail is standing next to Cueball filling his vehicle with petrol. Ponytail is pointing off-screen.] Ponytail: Why are you going here? Gas is ten cents a gallon cheaper at the station five minutes that way. Cueball: Because a penny saved is a penny earned.\nIf you spend nine minutes of your time to save a dollar, you're working for less than minimum wage.\n"}
{"id":952,"title":"Stud Finder","image_title":"Stud Finder","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/952","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stud_finder.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/952:_Stud_Finder","transcript":"[Black Hat sits on a couch, reading a book. Cueball is approaching him from behind the couch holding a picture in a frame, a screwdriver, and some screws.] Cueball: Have you seen my stud finder? I've looked everywhere. Black Hat: It sounds like you may be interested in my new product, a\u2014 Cueball: Shut up.\n","explanation":"It sounds like you may be interested in my new product, a\u2014 stud finder finder.\nCueball cannot locate his stud finder , so Black Hat begins a sales pitch, presumably for a \"stud finder\" finder. The joke is in the irony of having to find something that is used to find other things. Cueball interrupts Black Hat before he can make the obvious joke. The same comic technique is used later in 1059: Bel-Air . Currently no product exists that will locate a stud finder, although online review compilations are useful for finding the right stud finder to buy.\nStuds are vertical wood members in wood-framed construction common in North America, although steel framing has become a popular alternative. These supports reinforce a wall at regular intervals, typically 16 inches (about 40 cm), and at corners, windows, and doors.\nMost stud finders use an electrostatic field that is affected by the densities and types of materials in the vicinity, identifying where studs and other significant framing elements are located. One might want to know the locations of studs within a wall for installing wiring, mounting shelves and heavy objects to walls, or in this comic, hanging a picture. Wiring can be inserted between studs behind the drywall , while shelves, pictures, etc. are better affixed to studs.\nMany stud finders have a light that turns on in conjunction with a beep when a higher density is detected, indicating the edge of a stud. But there are circumstances that can fool stud finders. Most are designed for the drywall-over-wood-framing construction, and can be fooled by older plaster and lath construction where the density is much more uniform throughout the length of the wall. Lower quality stud finders can also be fooled by things like moisture in the drywall or wiring within the wall cavity, and may thus beep when there is not a stud behind the scanned location. As a result, many people will try alternatives such as using a magnet to find the drywall screws or nails, or tapping a finishing nail through the wall to see if there is a stud underneath.\nAt the title text, Randall just gives up. Assuming there was no electrostatic interference, a stud finder going off randomly would indicate lots and lots of studs at random places that change position.\nThe idea of a \"something doer doer\" was explored again in 1821: Incinerator and the title text of 2376: Curbside .\n[Black Hat sits on a couch, reading a book. Cueball is approaching him from behind the couch holding a picture in a frame, a screwdriver, and some screws.] Cueball: Have you seen my stud finder? I've looked everywhere. Black Hat: It sounds like you may be interested in my new product, a\u2014 Cueball: Shut up.\n"}
{"id":953,"title":"1 to 10","image_title":"1 to 10","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/953","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1_to_10.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/953:_1_to_10","transcript":"Megan: On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that this question is using Binary? Cueball: ...4? Megan: What's a 4?\n","explanation":"The binary numeral system refers to a counting system in base-2, which uses only the digits 0 and 1, as opposed to the more familiar base-10 decimal system, which uses the digits 0 through 9. In this case, the scale of 1 to 10 is using binary, so in decimal it would be a scale of 1 to 2. Since 4 in binary is \"100\" it doesn't fit into the range \"1\" to \"10\" in a binary system. And Megan doesn't even know the number \"4\" because she's only working on the binary system, this character does not exist for her.\nIt is also possible that Megan is using base-3 or base-4, both of which don't have a 4 (base-3 counts 1, 2, 10, etc., and base 4 counts 1, 2, 3, 10 etc.)\nIt should be noted that if Megan is indeed speaking out loud in such a way that confuses Cueball, she would be saying \"ten\" out loud; this would automatically indicate she is indeed using base-10 (or higher). The correct pronunciation of \"10\" in base-2 is \"one zero\".\nThe title text uses a similar joke. Since test scores are usually written as either a letter grade or a percentage, 11 correct questions out of 100 would be a failing score in decimal notation. However, 11\/100 in binary translates to 3\/4 in decimal, which would be 75%, accepted in most classes as a 'C' grade.\nIt could also be argued that a score of 11 should count as a \"B\", as 11 is B in hexadecimal, however this link is a bit more tenuous, as the whole score would then be interpreted as \"B\/256\".\nMegan: On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that this question is using Binary? Cueball: ...4? Megan: What's a 4?\n"}
{"id":954,"title":"Chin-Up Bar","image_title":"Chin-Up Bar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/954","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chin_up_bar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/954:_Chin-Up_Bar","transcript":"[Black Hat is in the middle of on an escalator with five other people as it ascends. He carries something like a a pole.]\n[Zoom in on Black Hat and Cueball.] Cueball: This is a long escalator. Black Hat: 70 meters. Longest in the country.\n[Black Hat goes upwards holding his pole.]\n[Cueball is still behind Black Hat.] Cueball: Why're you carrying a chin-up bar? Black Hat: Why aren't you wearing a hat?\n[The view returns to the original view only showing the six people ascending, only shifted so they are all a bit longer to the right.] Cueball: I'm not really a hat person. Black Hat: And I'm not really a not-carrying-a-chin-up-bar person.\n[Close up on Cueball on the escalator.]\n[Zoom out. Black Hat still has the pole in his hands.] Cueball: Seriously, why did you bring it? Black Hat: How should I know? I'm not a psychologist.\n[Zoom in on the top of the escalator where Black Hat steps off and installs the chin-up bar on the exit of the escalator.] Twist Click Click\n[View from above towards both ascending and descending escalators. Black Hat and Cueball are on the descending escalator.]\n[The final panel takes up two entire rows and shows all people falling down.]\nIt would appear that the man behind Cueball with glasses and a goatee is the psychologist from 435: Purity , and then Megan next to him could be the sociologist from the same comic. This gives new meaning to Black Hat's line about not being a psychologist.\nEscalators were also the subject of the earlier comic 252: Escalators , a rather more funny take on these dangerous devices.\n","explanation":"Black Hat has once again showed everyone that he is a classhole , with a plan to block traffic on the longest single-tier escalator in the Western hemisphere. At the time of the comic's publishing, that placed the comic in the Wheaton station in Washington D.C. 's Washington Metro subway system, where the 70-meter (230-foot) escalator is. It's clear that Black Hat knows it is the longest and that this is the reason he has chosen this exact escalator for his plan.\nBlack Hat carries a chin-up bar over his shoulder up the escalator, resulting in a conversation with Cueball , riding up behind him, about Black Hat's motives for doing such. Black Hat uses sly conversing methods to avoid saying his true motives. First he counters the question with another question: Why aren't you wearing a hat? Cueball's reply is a normal I'm not really a hat person , whereas Black Hat's copy reply is not a real answer; I'm not really a not-carrying-a-chin-up-bar person , which is probably a sentence never used before this comic. [ citation needed ] It takes Cueball a second to process this answer, but he doesn't give up and asks why again. Black Hat continues deflecting his questions by stating that he's not a psychologist , although he clearly is aware of his own motives and intentions. (One could argue that it would take a psychology degree to explain those motives and intentions.)\nAfter this they reach the top and once they get off Black Hat quickly turns around and locks the bar in place at about waist height (i.e. as high up as possible on an escalator), just before the moving part of the escalator ends.\nChin-up bars are typically capable of holding up a 300\u00a0pound (130\u00a0kg) person without moving, and a bar like Black Hat has brought with him can be installed easily in a doorway , or in the opening of an escalator\u2026\nThe unexpected appearance of a solidly attached bar at the top of a crowded escalator could be disastrous. The first people would probably stumble backward to avoid it or hit it and topple backwards, and collide with the passengers immediately behind them, knocking them off their feet and likely creating a domino effect all the way down. Indeed, this is exactly what happens and is depicted in the last panel. Black Hat and Cueball are seen on the descending escalator in the background, Cueball has turned around looking at the scene and displaying worry about what Black Hat has done, but Black Hat isn't even looking at the chaos he has caused, completely ignoring all the falling bodies. Although it might be possible, the two are fairly lucky to be unscathed, as they could have been hit by someone in the pileup falling all the way over in their side of the escalator. Since they are most likely on the way down to a subway, the traffic should make it easy for them to get away on the next train, before anyone has a chance to try and find the perpetrator, so Black Hat gets away with his schemes once again.\nIn the title text it is made clear that the few people that actually escaped the moving stairs were unable to use the emergency shutdown because Black Hat had disabled the system, presumably before ascending in the first place. This is stated to have caused the stampede to last for two hours and waves of falling people would end up reaching the bottom three times, before ascending with the stairs again. The reason for this extended mayhem could be that only the very first people at the top of this domino effect who actually hit the chin-up-bar know what caused the problem to begin with. Since they are likely among those people too hurt to explain anything in time, the next group of people trying to get out after the first wave of falling people might just proceed to run into the same problem at the top once again. The problem is exacerbated by the disabled shutoff, so even if someone sees the chin-up-bar and knows how to escape, they would either be pulled back into the crowd of traffic or be free but unable to help. This helps to explain why the cycle of crowd collapse happened three times, and the use of the word \"stampede\" connotes the panicked, unorganized behavior of the trapped people that serves to make the problem worse.\nAlternately, the stampede reaching the bottom might suggest that the people traversed the entire length of the escalator, though this is not sufficiently wide enough for a human body.\n[Black Hat is in the middle of on an escalator with five other people as it ascends. He carries something like a a pole.]\n[Zoom in on Black Hat and Cueball.] Cueball: This is a long escalator. Black Hat: 70 meters. Longest in the country.\n[Black Hat goes upwards holding his pole.]\n[Cueball is still behind Black Hat.] Cueball: Why're you carrying a chin-up bar? Black Hat: Why aren't you wearing a hat?\n[The view returns to the original view only showing the six people ascending, only shifted so they are all a bit longer to the right.] Cueball: I'm not really a hat person. Black Hat: And I'm not really a not-carrying-a-chin-up-bar person.\n[Close up on Cueball on the escalator.]\n[Zoom out. Black Hat still has the pole in his hands.] Cueball: Seriously, why did you bring it? Black Hat: How should I know? I'm not a psychologist.\n[Zoom in on the top of the escalator where Black Hat steps off and installs the chin-up bar on the exit of the escalator.] Twist Click Click\n[View from above towards both ascending and descending escalators. Black Hat and Cueball are on the descending escalator.]\n[The final panel takes up two entire rows and shows all people falling down.]\nIt would appear that the man behind Cueball with glasses and a goatee is the psychologist from 435: Purity , and then Megan next to him could be the sociologist from the same comic. This gives new meaning to Black Hat's line about not being a psychologist.\nEscalators were also the subject of the earlier comic 252: Escalators , a rather more funny take on these dangerous devices.\n"}
{"id":955,"title":"Neutrinos","image_title":"Neutrinos","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/955","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/neutrinos.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/955:_Neutrinos","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are talking.] Megan: Did you see the neutrino speed of light thing? Cueball: Yup! Good news; I need the cash. Megan: Huh? Cash?\n[Text above half-sized panel.] Yeah. When there's a news story about a study overturning all of physics, I used to urge caution, remind people that experts aren't all stupid, and end up in pointless arguments about Galileo.\n[Half-height panel.] [Cueball sitting on chair, looking down at laptop in his lap. Books and things are on a desk in front of him.] Cueball: No, this isn't about whether relativity exists. If it didn't, your GPS wouldn't work. Cueball: What do you mean, \"science thought police\"? Have you seen our budget? We couldn't begin to afford our own thought police.\n[Megan and Cueball talking again.] Megan: That sounds miserable and unfulfilling. Cueball: Yup. So I gave up, and now I just find excited believers and bet them $200 each that the new result won't pan out.\n[Same as last panel.] Megan: That's mean. Cueball: It provides a good income, and if I'm ever wrong, I'll be too excited about the new physics to notice the loss.\n","explanation":"The \" Neutrino speed of light thing \" mentioned in this comic was an actual story from the day before the comic was posted. An experiment at CERN caused a stream of neutrinos to be passed from CERN in Switzerland to a receiving station at the INFN laboratories of Gran Sasso in Italy ( LNGS ). The initial findings from the experiment were that the neutrinos arrived at the detector in less time than a beam of light would have taken. The neutrinos had apparently exceeded the speed of light .\nAlbert Einstein famously posited that the speed of light in a vacuum is both constant and absolutely the fastest possible speed for any object in the universe. Nothing can accelerate to any faster speed. Therefore, a report that neutrinos have been found travelling faster than light challenges a fundamental law of physics and turns all of physics, or at least special relativity , on its head.\nPrior experience has shown Cueball that in such cases, arguing with people and preaching caution is futile and will lead to \"pointless arguments about Galileo\". Galileo Galilei was famously convicted of heresy for his defending the heliocentric system , and is often used as an example of revolutionary ideas being suppressed by the powerful. Believers in the new findings would thus accuse Cueball and the scientific community of being as stubborn and oppressive as the Inquisition in Galileo's time, and even compare them to the Thought Police from George Orwell's 1984 , another popular archetype of oppressive measures.\nCueball realizes that it is more satisfying and profitable to place bets with them instead. His reasoning is that almost invariably, these supposedly world-changing discoveries end up falling apart after further investigation, and that if it doesn't, then the discovery itself will satisfy his scientific curiosity enough to outweigh his monetary loss. This is similar to Stephen Hawking 's scientific wagers , where Hawking set bets such that, if he was wrong, he would be paid, and if he was right, he'd have to pay and wouldn't mind because he'd just have been proven right.\nThe title text is a reference to a graph published similar to, if not the same as, the one found here . The continental drift can be seen, as well as the clearly marked jump showing the earthquake in question.\nPostscript: Cueball (that is, Randall) was correct. The experiment was found to be flawed. Neutrinos are not faster than light , the data was probably wrong due to a faulty connection on an optical fiber.\n[Megan and Cueball are talking.] Megan: Did you see the neutrino speed of light thing? Cueball: Yup! Good news; I need the cash. Megan: Huh? Cash?\n[Text above half-sized panel.] Yeah. When there's a news story about a study overturning all of physics, I used to urge caution, remind people that experts aren't all stupid, and end up in pointless arguments about Galileo.\n[Half-height panel.] [Cueball sitting on chair, looking down at laptop in his lap. Books and things are on a desk in front of him.] Cueball: No, this isn't about whether relativity exists. If it didn't, your GPS wouldn't work. Cueball: What do you mean, \"science thought police\"? Have you seen our budget? We couldn't begin to afford our own thought police.\n[Megan and Cueball talking again.] Megan: That sounds miserable and unfulfilling. Cueball: Yup. So I gave up, and now I just find excited believers and bet them $200 each that the new result won't pan out.\n[Same as last panel.] Megan: That's mean. Cueball: It provides a good income, and if I'm ever wrong, I'll be too excited about the new physics to notice the loss.\n"}
{"id":956,"title":"Sharing","image_title":"Sharing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/956","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sharing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/956:_Sharing","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball hang out in front of a tree.] Megan: Whoa. What's this? Cueball: What's what? Megan: This tree has a USB port.\nCueball: Try connecting to it, I guess. [Megan brings out a laptop and connects to it.] Megan: It's offering up a drive with one file on it.\nCueball: What's the file? Megan: An eBook. \"Shel_Silverstein_-_The_Giving_Tree.azw\" Cueball: Never heard of it. Let's take a look!\nLaptop: DRM Error: You have not purchased rights to view this title. Lending is not enabled.\nCueball: Huh. Oh well. Megan: Let's go see what Mike is up to.\n[The tree is alone.]\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan encounter a USB Dead Drop in a tree, placed in such a way as to simulate the tree itself has a USB port.\nThe Giving Tree is a book in which a tree gives everything it has to a little boy out of love and a desire for the boy's company: apples to sell, wood to build a house, even letting the boy cut it down to make a boat. At the end of the book, the boy comes back as a grown man and the tree tells him sadly that it has nothing else to give. The man tells the tree that he only wants a tree stump to sit on, and the tree gladly gives him that. Notably, the tree's moments of greatest distress come when it fears that it can give the boy no more and that the boy will leave it.\n.azw is an e-book file format used and created by the online company Amazon.com , which makes and sells the popular Amazon Kindle e-reader. Complaints against the format have been made concerning its closed nature: some people claim that all information should be free and imposing restrictions on its usage is limiting growth in the modern world. This comic was published two days before the release of the fifth generation of Kindles, alongside complaints that Amazon would continue to use DRM \"encumbered\" e-book formats.\nThe comic is a criticism of the usage of DRM in digital commerce. The tree's willingness to offer up its file is parallel to the generous nature of the tree in The Giving Tree . The tree is prevented from sharing its file however, by DRM in the file. With nothing to gain from the tree, Cueball and Megan leave the tree alone, in a manner similar to the fears of the tree in The Giving Tree . The final frame is a reference to the iconic silhouette of a tree that is used in the loading screens of Amazon's Kindles, a link between the abandoned tree in the comic and an abandoned Kindle.\nThe title text is an elaboration on the idea of a more modern Giving Tree. While in the original book, the tree gives the boy various gifts, in the new, modern version, the tree shows \"its friend\" (presumably the boy) all the places the friend can buy things, using social media to do so. This, like the DRM on the book from earlier, is a criticism of some aspect of the modern world, in this case, the increased commercialism due to social media.\n[Megan and Cueball hang out in front of a tree.] Megan: Whoa. What's this? Cueball: What's what? Megan: This tree has a USB port.\nCueball: Try connecting to it, I guess. [Megan brings out a laptop and connects to it.] Megan: It's offering up a drive with one file on it.\nCueball: What's the file? Megan: An eBook. \"Shel_Silverstein_-_The_Giving_Tree.azw\" Cueball: Never heard of it. Let's take a look!\nLaptop: DRM Error: You have not purchased rights to view this title. Lending is not enabled.\nCueball: Huh. Oh well. Megan: Let's go see what Mike is up to.\n[The tree is alone.]\n"}
{"id":957,"title":"Development","image_title":"Development","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/957","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/development.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/957:_Development","transcript":"[Cueball is a news anchor at desk reporting. Behind him to the left is a black screen showing a white icon of a hurricane moving over the black ocean towards a thin sliver of white land in the top left corner. There are three white question-marks around the hurricane.] Cueball: Fear turned to confusion today as Hurricane Rina developed to Piaget stage 5, with sustained interests in objects and their properties. Hurricane:\u00a0?\u00a0?\u00a0?\n","explanation":"Cueball is a news anchor reporting on a hurricane.\nNHC is the National Hurricane Center and the APA is the American Psychological Association .\nThe reference to Piaget Stage 5 in the comic is a reference to Piaget 's Stages of Development in which stage 5 is where (to quote Wikipedia and Gruber, H.E.; Voneche, J.J.. eds. The essential Piaget .)\n\"'Infants become intrigued by the many properties of objects and by the many things they can make happen to objects; they experiment with new behavior.' This stage is associated primarily with the discovery of new means to meet goals. Piaget describes the child at this juncture as the 'young scientist,' conducting pseudo-experiments to discover new methods of meeting challenges.\"\nThis is exactly what the comic is describing in sustained interest in objects and their properties and the handy \"?\"s around the picture behind the newscaster in this comic.\nWith that out of the way, this comic is a pun on the use of the word \"development\" to classify hurricanes which also uses categories from 1 to 5 as defined by the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale (Piaget's Stages go from 1-6). The comic is making a joke that if the APA were on hurricane forecast duty instead of the NHC, that the hurricanes would be classified with Piaget's stages instead of categories.\n[Cueball is a news anchor at desk reporting. Behind him to the left is a black screen showing a white icon of a hurricane moving over the black ocean towards a thin sliver of white land in the top left corner. There are three white question-marks around the hurricane.] Cueball: Fear turned to confusion today as Hurricane Rina developed to Piaget stage 5, with sustained interests in objects and their properties. Hurricane:\u00a0?\u00a0?\u00a0?\n"}
{"id":958,"title":"Hotels","image_title":"Hotels","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/958","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hotels.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/958:_Hotels","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk with a laptop, looking at a review website] Cueball: What's with this negative review? You liked that hotel. Black Hat: I have a script that posts a bad review for every hotel I stay at. It reduces demand, which means more vacancies and lower prices next time.\nCueball: What if the place sucks? Black Hat: I change the review to positive to steer other people over there.\nCueball: You punish companies you like! Black Hat: The odds of my review putting a hotel out of business are negligible. Cueball: If we all did that the system would collapse! Black Hat: Doesn't affect my logic. Tragedy of the commons.\nCueball: That's not even the tragedy of the commons anymore. That's the tragedy of you're a dick. Black Hat: If you're quick with a knife, you'll find that the invisible hand is made of delicious invisible meat.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Black Hat is giving all the hotels he has stayed at, likes, and wants to stay in again bad reviews, in order to lower demand for said hotel. He is simultaneously putting good reviews on bad hotels to steer other people there so there are more vacancies at good hotels. He also claims he is not influential enough to put the good hotels out of business. But even if he didn't put the hotels out of business, the market would certainly still be affected, and all so he could enjoy a lower price, once again proving he's a classhole.\nThe tragedy of the commons \"is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen.\" This situation is not a complete example of this concept as Black Hat is the only one doing it. He understands, however, that if others do it, it would apply. (Another example is what would happen using a certain strategy in the game Oregon Trail ). The logic is also similar to a conversation about fighting in the war in Catch-22 . Yossarian believed that he shouldn\u2019t fight because America will win regardless of his involvement, so there is no point in him dying.\nIn the last frame, Black Hat references the invisible hand which is the term coined by Adam Smith and used by economists use to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace. Black Hat appears to be taking advantage of this invisible hand by cutting it with a knife and eating it.\nThe title text is an example of Black Hat's negative reviews, which in itself is a surrealist joke about the hotel. A somewhat believable (if exaggerated) set of complaints about an awful hotel is that the \"Room filled to brim with bedbugs, and when front desk clerk opened mouth to talk, semen poured out\". However instead, the objects of focus are reversed, creating a ridiculous scenario for the reader to enjoy, if they are not too disgusted by the imagery of the text.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk with a laptop, looking at a review website] Cueball: What's with this negative review? You liked that hotel. Black Hat: I have a script that posts a bad review for every hotel I stay at. It reduces demand, which means more vacancies and lower prices next time.\nCueball: What if the place sucks? Black Hat: I change the review to positive to steer other people over there.\nCueball: You punish companies you like! Black Hat: The odds of my review putting a hotel out of business are negligible. Cueball: If we all did that the system would collapse! Black Hat: Doesn't affect my logic. Tragedy of the commons.\nCueball: That's not even the tragedy of the commons anymore. That's the tragedy of you're a dick. Black Hat: If you're quick with a knife, you'll find that the invisible hand is made of delicious invisible meat.\n"}
{"id":959,"title":"Caroling","image_title":"Caroling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/959","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/caroling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/959:_Caroling","transcript":"[Three people, two the same size, one smaller stand together singing Christmas carols.] Carolers (in unison): Good king Wenceslas looked out on the\u2014\n[Black Hat leans out of an above ground window.] Black Hat: King Wenceslas massacred my people.\n[The carolers stand in silence, the smaller one looks at the others.]\n","explanation":"Here are the lyrics for the first verse of the Christmas Carol, \" Good King Wenceslas \"\nGood King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen, When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even; Brightly shone the moon that night, tho' the frost was cruel, When a poor man came in sight, gath'ring winter fuel.\nWhile not a king, Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia is considered a martyr and a saint. Far from being responsible for any massacre, he protected his subjects from external dominance and is still a national hero to the Czech people. Black Hat is supplying disinformation to unsuspecting carolers, either to shut them up, by making them falsely think that they are associating themselves with a morally reprehensible man, or just because he's a classhole like that.\nThe title text references \"the Feast of Stephen \", also known as the \"Feast of St. Stephen\" or \"St. Stephen's Day\", which is a holiday celebrated on 26 or 27 December by the Western or Eastern Church respectively.  (For the Eastern Orthodox Church , which still observes the Julian calendar , it falls on 9 January of the Gregorian calendar .) It is not actually a feast that involved eating a person named Stephen. [ citation needed ] If you look closely, you can see that the carolers may be a family. The man and woman are confused by what Black Hat has said, and the girl is looking to the adults, perhaps gauging their facial reactions, or just waiting for their reply.\n[Three people, two the same size, one smaller stand together singing Christmas carols.] Carolers (in unison): Good king Wenceslas looked out on the\u2014\n[Black Hat leans out of an above ground window.] Black Hat: King Wenceslas massacred my people.\n[The carolers stand in silence, the smaller one looks at the others.]\n"}
{"id":960,"title":"Subliminal","image_title":"Subliminal","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/960","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/subliminal.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/960:_Subliminal","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are gathered around a computer. Cueball is seated interacting with the computer while Megan stands behind them with an arm resting on the back of the chair.] Cueball: What hidden arrow? Megan: I thought everyone knew about it. Pull up the FedEx logo. Click\n[Megan is now pointing at the screen.] Cueball: Where is it? Megan: Right there. Look at the whitespace. Cueball: I don't see it.\n[The next panel shows a stylised view of the FedEx logo. The white space above the 'ed' in Fed is decorated to look like a tank turret with the barrel extending into the letter 'F'. Along the bottom of the letters a baseball player with the number 24 on his back is reaching out to catch a baseball. The baseball is forming the centre of the 'e' while the arm provides the break for the tail. The baseballers head marks the centre of the 'd' and the number 24 is coloured in blue to show the lower half of the stroke of the 'd'. Toward the right of the image the space between the 'E' and 'x' has been decorated to look like a Guy Fawkes mask, with ties wrapping around the 'x' and being drawn off-screen. A faint outline suggests the whitespace above the 'x' is a hat, with the brim extending into the upper part of the 'E'. Two speech bubbles are visible above the drawing, both spoken by off-screen characters.] Cueball (off-screen): All I see is Guy Fawkes watching Willie Mays catch a fly ball while an armored assault vehicle rolls past. Megan (off-screen): ...You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.\n","explanation":"This comic is about the FedEx logo and how there is a subliminal\/hidden arrow in the logo; specifically, in the whitespace between the \"E\" and the \"x\". When Cueball looks at the logo, he instead sees a wild scene including Guy Fawkes , Willie Mays and an assault vehicle . Megan then replies \"...You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.\" Which is implying that he is taking medication for some condition that causes him to hallucinate (or something similar). The implication being that he either needs more medication because it isn't working properly, or less medication because it is causing him to hallucinate in itself.\nGuy Fawkes was a British revolutionary who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. His likeness is nowadays used as a symbol of protest, most famously in the graphic novel and movie \" V For Vendetta \" and by Anonymous and the Occupy movement .\nWillie Mays was an American baseball player for the San Francisco Giants who made a famous over-the-shoulder catch in the World Series. Some consider it to be the best defensive play of all time in baseball.\nThe title text is a play on the Internet idiom \"once you see it, you can't unsee it,\" although it says that you can't unsee it until your body has finished processing the magic mushrooms , that you must have taken for some reason, which would be why you would keep seeing it in the first place.\n[Cueball and Megan are gathered around a computer. Cueball is seated interacting with the computer while Megan stands behind them with an arm resting on the back of the chair.] Cueball: What hidden arrow? Megan: I thought everyone knew about it. Pull up the FedEx logo. Click\n[Megan is now pointing at the screen.] Cueball: Where is it? Megan: Right there. Look at the whitespace. Cueball: I don't see it.\n[The next panel shows a stylised view of the FedEx logo. The white space above the 'ed' in Fed is decorated to look like a tank turret with the barrel extending into the letter 'F'. Along the bottom of the letters a baseball player with the number 24 on his back is reaching out to catch a baseball. The baseball is forming the centre of the 'e' while the arm provides the break for the tail. The baseballers head marks the centre of the 'd' and the number 24 is coloured in blue to show the lower half of the stroke of the 'd'. Toward the right of the image the space between the 'E' and 'x' has been decorated to look like a Guy Fawkes mask, with ties wrapping around the 'x' and being drawn off-screen. A faint outline suggests the whitespace above the 'x' is a hat, with the brim extending into the upper part of the 'E'. Two speech bubbles are visible above the drawing, both spoken by off-screen characters.] Cueball (off-screen): All I see is Guy Fawkes watching Willie Mays catch a fly ball while an armored assault vehicle rolls past. Megan (off-screen): ...You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.\n"}
{"id":961,"title":"Eternal Flame","image_title":"Eternal Flame","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/961","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eternal_flame.gif","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/961:_Eternal_Flame","transcript":"[Two people before a memorial with an eternally spinning wait cursor. They contemplate silently on an influential life. Goodbye, Steve.]\n","explanation":"Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, the day before this comic was posted. He was the CEO and one of the founders of Apple, Inc . He was the head of Apple for the introduction of OS X , the default operating system used on all modern Macintosh computers. In OS X when there is a significant slowdown, the Cursor becomes the symbol seen in the comic. It may appear when an application is not responding, or if the computer is busy. This symbol is infamous among OS X users, and is nicknamed \"the beachball of death\". It appears during a lag, and can take a very long time to disappear, thus seeming endless.\nThe title and rotating cursor above a fixture in the ground seems to be referencing the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame , suggesting that the rotating cursor above the fixture is, in fact, a monument to Steve Jobs.\nThe title text refers to the fact that when an application is not responding on the Mac, the application sometimes recovers and the system comes back; other times, however, the damage is irrevocable, a Kernel Panic happens and the system needs a restart.\nA similar tribute comic was also dedicated to Terry Pratchett , the day after he died, in 1498: Terry Pratchett , to Gary Gygax , three days after he died, in 393: Ultimate Game , and to John Horton Conway , two days after he died, in 2293: RIP John Conway .\n[Two people before a memorial with an eternally spinning wait cursor. They contemplate silently on an influential life. Goodbye, Steve.]\n"}
{"id":962,"title":"The Corliss Resolution","image_title":"The Corliss Resolution","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/962","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_corliss_resolution.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/962:_The_Corliss_Resolution","transcript":"[Cueball with an unusual suit runs right with a small cloud behind his legs. The frame of the panel is only two thirds the normal height and above the frame is the text from the narrator:] Narrator: The Fermi Paradox: Planets are so common that life should be too. So where is it?\n[Cueball keeps running with the small cloud behind his legs. Above him there are two frames with narration:] Narrator: Well, now we know. Narrator: It's not that life inevitably destroys itself with war.\n[Cueball leaps into the air off a jagged cliff edge with gray cliffs. The image frame only covers a small part of the center of this panel. Narration text is shown both above and below the image:] Narrator: It's just that it takes longer to develop space colonization. Narrator: Than it does to invent an activity\n[A Youtube video is shown with the usual icons in the black bar below the image; play, volume, full screen etc. The video shows Cueball soaring downwards as indicated with four speed lines behind his spread out arms and legs. The strange suit has opened up revealing it to be a wingsuit. The sound is on and Cueball can be heard. Above the video frame there is a final narration text in a frame. Two people are watching the video together off-panel and their comments are shown below in two voice bubbles with arrows pointing left and right.] Narrator: More fun than survival. Cueball: Wheeeee! Off-panel voice #1: Holy crap. Off-panel voice #2: I don't care how dangerous it is. I have to try it.\n","explanation":"Jeb Corliss is a professional BASE jumper and wingsuit flyer, like in the fourth panel. Corliss has jumped from a lot of different buildings and monuments in the world. Hence, the Corliss Resolution.\nThe Fermi paradox is an astronomical problem that states: \"The universe is large enough that many planets should have extraterrestrial intelligent life. Why, then, haven't we detected any signs of it?\" The paradox has numerous hypothetical solutions \u2014 some say that life is much rarer than we think, and others suggest that civilizations will eventually destroy themselves (as mentioned in the comic).\nRandall proposes another solution to the Fermi paradox: before they can develop space travel and the like, civilizations will inevitably invent an \"activity more fun than survival.\" That is, something fun that's also very dangerous, such as flying off a cliff in a wingsuit.\nAs said in the title text, a being that can already fly (hence \"avian society\") would probably prefer flying around outside over developing the tools needed for space colonization.\nSee 384: The Drake Equation for another comic about intelligent life in the universe.\n[Cueball with an unusual suit runs right with a small cloud behind his legs. The frame of the panel is only two thirds the normal height and above the frame is the text from the narrator:] Narrator: The Fermi Paradox: Planets are so common that life should be too. So where is it?\n[Cueball keeps running with the small cloud behind his legs. Above him there are two frames with narration:] Narrator: Well, now we know. Narrator: It's not that life inevitably destroys itself with war.\n[Cueball leaps into the air off a jagged cliff edge with gray cliffs. The image frame only covers a small part of the center of this panel. Narration text is shown both above and below the image:] Narrator: It's just that it takes longer to develop space colonization. Narrator: Than it does to invent an activity\n[A Youtube video is shown with the usual icons in the black bar below the image; play, volume, full screen etc. The video shows Cueball soaring downwards as indicated with four speed lines behind his spread out arms and legs. The strange suit has opened up revealing it to be a wingsuit. The sound is on and Cueball can be heard. Above the video frame there is a final narration text in a frame. Two people are watching the video together off-panel and their comments are shown below in two voice bubbles with arrows pointing left and right.] Narrator: More fun than survival. Cueball: Wheeeee! Off-panel voice #1: Holy crap. Off-panel voice #2: I don't care how dangerous it is. I have to try it.\n"}
{"id":963,"title":"X11","image_title":"X11","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/963","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/x11.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/963:_X11","transcript":"[The comic is a graph with a curve starting at (0,0) that snakes toward the upper right of the graph. The axes are labelled:] x axis: Time since I last had to open Xorg.conf y axis: General satisfaction with how my life is going\n","explanation":"X11 is the X window system (commonly X Window System or X11, based on its current major version being 11). It is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and rich input device capability for networked computers.\nThe X11 stacks are usually implemented using a display server. The reason that it is called a display server is that the actual viewer and the server do not need to be on the same system; X11 frequently runs over a network connection. This adds considerably to the complexity of the mechanism.\nMost UNIX-based operating systems, including Linux and the BSDs use X11 as their base graphical subsystem and thus always use a display server and a display client. MacOSX has built-in support for X11, but does not use it for normal applications. For Windows, commercial and free solutions implementing an X11 display client exist.\nUntil 2004, for Linux the default display server was XFree86 . This project required a variation of the config file that Randall mentions. It was forked into Xorg due to disagreements over the development model.\nXorg is nowadays the default display server: X.Org Server (commonly abbreviated to Xorg Server, XServer or just X) refers to the X server release packages stewarded by the X.Org Foundation, which is hosted by freedesktop.org , and provides an interface to the standard X Window releases for the use of the free and open source software community.\nEvery aspect of XFree86 and Xorg can be modified in numerous ways, all the way down to tiny behaviors such as the default window size, window-border snapping, mouse button maps or how a touchpad is used. All of these settings can be found in the xorg.conf file, a massive file with hundreds upon thousands of individual settings that have accumulated over the lifetime of the Xorg project. The full documentation for xorg.conf contains all the settings contained within the file. When a problem arises in the graphical portion of a desktop using the X server, the solution may be to edit the xorg.conf file. The soul-crushing prospect of having to open and look up the correct parameter out of thousands that is causing issues is enough to destroy a person's satisfaction with their life.\nEditing xorg.conf (especially manually) is much less necessary than it used to be.  In fact, some distributions do not even come with an xorg.conf file, because everything necessary can be auto-detected and\/or configured elsewhere.\nThe Wayland project aims to replace some of X11 and not include any of the cruft that built up over the decades. It was started in 2008, way more than 19 years after the aforementioned config file turned into a hell.\nThe title text references a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison on the popular basis of political authority. There are a few quotes that can be pulled to sum up his ideas.\nTo keep our ideas clear when applying them to a multitude, let us suppose a whole generation of men to be born on the same day, to attain mature age on the same day, and to die on the same day, leaving a succeeding generation in the moment of attaining their mature age all together. Let the ripe age be supposed of 21. years, and their period of life 34. years more, that being the average term given by the bills of mortality to persons who have already attained 21. years of age.\nIn his day most people lived only to age 55, so he supposes that a person reaches maturity at 21, and will live until 55 and then die. For the purposes of the other arguments he makes in the letter, he also supposes that all the people of a generation are born on the same day, and that they will all die on the same day: the day they turn 56.\nThen I say the earth belongs to each of these generations, during its course, fully, and in their own right.\nSince only one generation is alive in his example, his model allows for that generation to do as they please for their time on earth, elsewhere in the letter he describes that each generation should not be able to leave the next generation in a worse position, so the debts accrued by one generation must be paid off by that generation. This has built us up to the quote that everyone attaches onto.\nEvery constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right. -It may be said that the succeeding generation exercising in fact the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law has been expressly limited to 19 years only.\nBecause a generation reaches maturity at 21, and at that point the previous generation dies off, and this generation has 19 productive years until they are 40 and have 15 years of senility until their own death they have full reign of the earth as they please. Continuing on under the laws (and debts) of the previous generation is \"an act of force, and not of right\".\nJefferson picked 19 years because that was the length of time a generation spent in power, not that every 19 years all laws should be abolished, but that every generation, each new generation should tear down all the systems put in place, re-evaluate, and build better laws, systems, and constitutions.\n[The comic is a graph with a curve starting at (0,0) that snakes toward the upper right of the graph. The axes are labelled:] x axis: Time since I last had to open Xorg.conf y axis: General satisfaction with how my life is going\n"}
{"id":964,"title":"Dorm Poster","image_title":"Dorm Poster","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/964","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dorm_poster.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/964:_Dorm_Poster","transcript":"[Cueball finds dorm room.]\n[View into the dorm room. The left half is already occupied, and a roommate has filled his side with the normal accoutrements of dorm life. There is a Pink Floyd \"Dark Side of the Moon\" poster hanging on the far wall, offset and only on the roommate's side.]\n[Cueball has a bit of a ponder.]\n[Cueball leaves for a bit.]\n[Cueball returns with an item.]\n[View into the dorm room. Cueball is moving in, and has placed a second Pink Floyd \"Dark Side of the Moon\" poster modified with a lens in the rainbow's path. The poster is placed upside down on Cueball's side of the far wall to catch the rainbow, feed it back into the prism, and turn it back into a narrow stream of white light.]\n","explanation":"The poster on the wall is the album artwork, by Hipgnosis , for Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon . It shows a beam of light passing through a dispersive prism and separating into a rainbow. After thinking a bit, the new student makes a poster that uses a lens to reverse the rainbow into another prism, likely to mess with his new roommate. This idea actually isn't very innovative, because the original backside of the album contained the reverse rainbow and prism (but not the lens). The setup with two prisms was used by Isaac Newton to prove that white light is composed of different colors of light.\nIn the title text, Randall makes the joke that by recording a record under the name \"Pink FTFY\" (fixed that for you), the name of his band would come immediately after Pink Floyd alphabetically, so the album would be to the right of Pink Floyd's album for Dark Side of the Moon, allowing for the same image seen in the back of the dorm room to be on the shelves of the record store. Since the cover of his album would be catching the light from Pink Floyd's album and forming white light once again, Randall would be \"fixing\" the cover of Dark Side of the Moon. However Randall makes the crack that no one would see the joke, because of the fact music can be bought and downloaded online, which has decreased the traffic the record stores in recent years.\n[Cueball finds dorm room.]\n[View into the dorm room. The left half is already occupied, and a roommate has filled his side with the normal accoutrements of dorm life. There is a Pink Floyd \"Dark Side of the Moon\" poster hanging on the far wall, offset and only on the roommate's side.]\n[Cueball has a bit of a ponder.]\n[Cueball leaves for a bit.]\n[Cueball returns with an item.]\n[View into the dorm room. Cueball is moving in, and has placed a second Pink Floyd \"Dark Side of the Moon\" poster modified with a lens in the rainbow's path. The poster is placed upside down on Cueball's side of the far wall to catch the rainbow, feed it back into the prism, and turn it back into a narrow stream of white light.]\n"}
{"id":965,"title":"Elements","image_title":"Elements","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/965","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/elements.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/965:_Elements","transcript":"[Aang the Avatar and Dmitri Mendeleev stand in opposition to each other. Aang wields all 4 classical elements: Water, Fire, Earth, and Air.] Aang: I'm the avatar, master of all 4 elements! Mendeleev: Really? I'm Mendeleev, master of all 118+. swoosh Mendeleev: That was polonium-bending. You probably didn't feel anything, but the symptoms of radiation poisoning will set in shortly.\n","explanation":"In the popular children's TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender , the four nations that inhabit the world can each telekinetically control one of the four classical elements: water, earth, fire and air. One person, the avatar, can control all four elements and is markedly more powerful than any other character. Dmitri Mendeleev is the creator of the modern periodic table, which categorizes the 118+ atomic elements by their atomic number.\nThe comic is comparing the control over more magical power with more practical, \"science-y\" power. Fire, boulders, and storms may be more impressive visually, but science has proven time and again the \"boring\" can have very practical, very deadly applications. Additionally, while the advantages of controlling the four alchemical elements are mostly physical and visible (characters in the show most often use their powers to push, throw, or create barriers), the phenomena related to Mendeleev's elements and his research include subatomic particle interactions. One power the depicted Mendeleev has that the Avatar definitely does not have is control over radioactive elements, and this is the subtle, slow-acting power he demonstrates.\nPolonium gained a level of notoriety as the poison used to kill Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko .\nThe title text talks about power levels of the elements if each element had a controlling nation as per the TV show. Ununoctium (1-1-8-ium) was the placeholder name for Oganesson , the 118th element. It did not officially gain its permanent name until late 2016, 5 years after this comic was released. Oganesson is the heaviest element that has been created, as well as the one with the shortest life before it decays into other elements. Xenon is a noble gas with few practical applications, but it is sometimes used in \"neon\" signs.\n[Aang the Avatar and Dmitri Mendeleev stand in opposition to each other. Aang wields all 4 classical elements: Water, Fire, Earth, and Air.] Aang: I'm the avatar, master of all 4 elements! Mendeleev: Really? I'm Mendeleev, master of all 118+. swoosh Mendeleev: That was polonium-bending. You probably didn't feel anything, but the symptoms of radiation poisoning will set in shortly.\n"}
{"id":966,"title":"Jet Fuel","image_title":"Jet Fuel","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/966","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jet_fuel.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/966:_Jet_Fuel","transcript":"[Hairy throws his arms out as he talks to Cueball, who answers while lifting a hand palm up.] Hairy: 9\/11 was an inside job! Jet fuel can't burn hot enough to melt steel! Cueball: Well, remember \u2014 jet fuel wasn't the only thing on those planes. They would've also carried tanks full of the mind-control agents airliners use to make chemtrails. Cueball: Who knows what temperature that stuff burns at! Hairy: Whoa. Hairy: Good point!\n[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Playing conspiracy theories off against each other.\nFor those wondering: it is true that kerosene does not burn hot enough in air to melt steel, but it does burn hot enough to cut the steel's supporting strength roughly in half, which is more than enough to collapse a building weighing thousands of tons.  (Although standard engineering practice is to use a safety factor of three, and a safety factor of two is sufficient to allow for a 50% reduction in strength, over half of the columns in the two towers were severed in the initial impact, increasing the stress on the remaining columns.)\nCueball messing with 9\/11 truther conspiracy theorists was also the subject of 690: Semicontrolled Demolition , and in 496: Secretary: Part 3 Black Hat claims the Twin Towers never actually collapsed. Chemtrails are mentioned again later in 1677: Contrails and 1803: Location Reviews .","explanation":"This is another one of the \" My Hobby \" series, where Randall tells about a strange hobby. This comic is a reference to the \" 9\/11 Was An Inside Job \" theory that the World Trade Center in New York City was blown up by a \"controlled demolition\". This is a fairly common argument that is seen on the internet.\nHairy 's statement that \"jet fuel can't burn hot enough to melt steel\" references a common argument used by conspiracy theorists in references to the attacks. The official investigation concluded that the combination of the impact of the jets and the subsequent fire sufficiently compromised the structural steel beams of the towers that they lost integrity and collapsed. People who do not accept this conclusion frequently insist that the flame temperatures resulting from burning jet fuel is less than the melting point of steel, and so argue that the official explanation must be wrong, supporting their argument that the towers were deliberately brought down by explosives, planted by some conspiracy.\nThis argument has been frequently refuted by experts , on a number of grounds. No fuel has a single burning temperature, the temperature of any given flame depends on a number of factors, which can be hard to predict in uncontrolled situtions. In addition, multiple fuels could have contributed to the fire, including not only the jet fuel but also flammables inside the building, and even metals (such as aluminum) that would have been pulverized and dispersed by the impact. Importantly, it is not necessary for beams to melt in order to collapse a building. Metals lose much of their structural strength well below their melting point. If enough beams were sufficiently weakened, they would fail under the weight of the building, putting more pressure on the remaining beams, which would then be likely to fail, and so on.\nCueball, however, doesn't argue with Hairy's premises, but instead tries a different tack, by appealing to a completely different conspiracy theory, concerning chemtrails .  The Chemtrails conspiracy theory claims that the Contrails left behind aircraft contain mind-control agents planted by the US Government (or any other government, reptiloids , Freemasons , etc.), which are used to drug the population en masse. Cueball operates under the assumption that this theory is true, and points out that this means typical passenger jets would be equipped with containers of these drugs, which could potentially burn at a high temperature. Because these drugs are entirely hypothetical, no assumption about them can possibly be disproven. This puts Hairy in a position of either having to argue against the chemtrail conspiracy theory, while arguing for a 9\/11 conspiracy theory or admit that there are factors he can't account for. This is unlikely to shake Hairy from his beliefs, but Cueball appears to find it entertaining to force a conspiracy theorist to confront the contradictions between conspiracy theories.\nThe title text is the natural \"double down\" on a theory which says that the conspiracy theory itself was concocted by the government and was supposed to distract from the truth, a parodic theory already seen in South Park episode Mystery of the Urinal Deuce .\n[Hairy throws his arms out as he talks to Cueball, who answers while lifting a hand palm up.] Hairy: 9\/11 was an inside job! Jet fuel can't burn hot enough to melt steel! Cueball: Well, remember \u2014 jet fuel wasn't the only thing on those planes. They would've also carried tanks full of the mind-control agents airliners use to make chemtrails. Cueball: Who knows what temperature that stuff burns at! Hairy: Whoa. Hairy: Good point!\n[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Playing conspiracy theories off against each other.\nFor those wondering: it is true that kerosene does not burn hot enough in air to melt steel, but it does burn hot enough to cut the steel's supporting strength roughly in half, which is more than enough to collapse a building weighing thousands of tons.  (Although standard engineering practice is to use a safety factor of three, and a safety factor of two is sufficient to allow for a 50% reduction in strength, over half of the columns in the two towers were severed in the initial impact, increasing the stress on the remaining columns.)\nCueball messing with 9\/11 truther conspiracy theorists was also the subject of 690: Semicontrolled Demolition , and in 496: Secretary: Part 3 Black Hat claims the Twin Towers never actually collapsed. Chemtrails are mentioned again later in 1677: Contrails and 1803: Location Reviews ."}
{"id":967,"title":"Prairie","image_title":"Prairie","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/967","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/prairie.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/967:_Prairie","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball stand in a field of wheat, facing away from the panel. The figures are drawn in the typical black and white stick figure style, but the field is immensely detailed, with the grain coloured a rich amber and stroked such that individual stalks can be picked out, with a few dark bands providing contrast. In the distance a low mountain range is visible and in the sky a few scattered fluffy white clouds float low over the horizon.] Megan: Well, when we observe them, they become amber particles of grain.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the song America the Beautiful , which contains the line \"amber waves of grain,\" which refers to the plentiful wheat fields in the Midwestern US. The waves, in this context, are being likened to the waves in the ocean, as the wind can make the wheat move in such a way as to resemble waves.\nIn quantum mechanics the wave-particle duality explains that particles can act like both particles and waves, depending on the context. Using a comedic adaptation of quantum theory, Megan states that the waves of grain become particles of grain when observed, which, in a way, is true. However, this is not a perfect analogy because each grain is a separate entity while an external force, the wind, is what produces the wave motion.\nThe title text builds on the quantum mechanics principle that a laser is a coherent wave .  This leads of the absurd notion that one could harness waves in grain fields for use as a laser weapon, which would be used by one state to destroy two neighbors.  There is a long running joke in the Rocky Mountain West of completely obliterating nearby states, and in particular Nebraska. The use of the word \"majestic\" to describe the laser is a reference to another line in \"America the Beautiful\" \u2014 \"for purple mountain majesties\" \u2014 which does in fact allude to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.\n[Megan and Cueball stand in a field of wheat, facing away from the panel. The figures are drawn in the typical black and white stick figure style, but the field is immensely detailed, with the grain coloured a rich amber and stroked such that individual stalks can be picked out, with a few dark bands providing contrast. In the distance a low mountain range is visible and in the sky a few scattered fluffy white clouds float low over the horizon.] Megan: Well, when we observe them, they become amber particles of grain.\n"}
{"id":968,"title":"Everything","image_title":"Everything","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/968","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/everything.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/968:_Everything","transcript":"[Cueball drags a small wagon and a bag full of various items.] Cueball: You are not the light of my life. Making you happy isn't my greatest dream.\n[Cueball places the items in an even bigger pile of even more random items.] Cueball: Your smile is not all I live for. I've got my own stuff going on. But you're strange and fascinating and I've never met anyone like you.\n[Cueball stares in awe as Megan assembles the items into a gargantuan, intoxicatingly complex machine.] Cueball: I want to give you everything just to see what you would do with it.\nA larger version can be found here:\n","explanation":"In traditional western cliches of romance, men are expected to give women particular gifts (including flowers, candy and stuffed animals) and make declarations about how that woman is the sole focus of his life. This strip deliberately subverts those expectations by renouncing those sentiments and giving a decidedly non-traditional set of gifts, but making clear that this is a touching expression of love between these two parties.\nCueball is gathering a lot of different sorts of random things, including a parasol , a miniature Eiffel Tower , what appears to be a small round bomb with a short fuse and the bust of a mannequin . He adds these to an already immense pile of weird things including balloons and a cage with a bird.\nWhile this happens Cueball narrates in short sentences. The first three are statements that at first seems similar to what you would find on a birthday or anniversary card from one person in a relationship to another, but in this case, all the statements ends up being negative, or at least neutral.\nThe negative continues in the fourth statement, but then it turns around and ends up kind of positive.\nIt turns out to be Megan he is talking about who is shown applying a hammer to the front of a large and strange vehicle while standing on one of its huge wheels. She seems to have built this giant super tank\/machine from anything Cueball supplies her with, having several huge pigged wheels, a mounted gun, satellite dish, a crane and smoke coming out of an exhaust pipe at the top, implying it is already running it seems quite a disturbing tank she is creating. But Cueball is very fascinated by her strangeness.\nCueball's final statement is also positive: I want to give you everything (hence the title), which could have been on a card as it is. But the reason is unusual (and written at the bottom right at the very end as his final statement). The reason he wishes to give her everything is because what she does is so strange and fascinating so he does this just to see what you would do with it , referring to whatever it is Megan is building now (or later).\nSome of the objects in the piles in the second panel can easily be determined, like the two balloons. But most others are more difficult to recognize. To the left there is what appears to be a cage with an animal inside, could be a bird. To the right there appears to be the hilt of a sword (maybe stuck in a stone, see 1521: Sword in the Stone ). Finally the tall thin thing sticking out of the top left of the right pile could be the stuffed giraffe from 604: Qwertial Aphasia . There are other distinct things, like the tall \"cylinder\" and the three \"cannonballs\" in a pyramid pile to the left, and something with a peculiar shape between the \"giraffe\" and the sword hilt. But it seems impossible to determine what they are.\nThe title text similarly starts with the conventional Beatles love song \" I Want to Hold Your Hand \" but for an unconventional reason to not fall out of a gyrocopter. A gyrocopter is a flying machine that has a rotor like a helicopter , but the rotor is not powered by a motor. Rather, the motor of the gyrocopter drives a propeller that accelerates the machine forward, while the air rushing past the rotor drives the rotor like a helicopter during autorotation .\n[Cueball drags a small wagon and a bag full of various items.] Cueball: You are not the light of my life. Making you happy isn't my greatest dream.\n[Cueball places the items in an even bigger pile of even more random items.] Cueball: Your smile is not all I live for. I've got my own stuff going on. But you're strange and fascinating and I've never met anyone like you.\n[Cueball stares in awe as Megan assembles the items into a gargantuan, intoxicatingly complex machine.] Cueball: I want to give you everything just to see what you would do with it.\nA larger version can be found here:\n"}
{"id":969,"title":"Delta-P","image_title":"Delta-P","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/969","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/delta_p.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/969:_Delta-P","transcript":"[An open wardrobe, with a boat anchor attached to one corner, falling towards water.] [Below the water line a formula with its variables explained is shown:] Q = A * sqrt(2 * g * d) Q = flow rate A = area of opening d = ocean depth (2\u00a0km) g = Earth gravity\n[And below the formula:] Flow: ~400,000 liters \/ s Water jet velocity: ~200 m \/ s\n[Caption below the frame:] The White Witch didn't know what hit her.\n","explanation":"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a book in which four children accidentally wander into a world known as Narnia through a wardrobe that only allows passage through to Narnia when you aren't looking for it. In the comic, someone connects an anchor to the wardrobe and throws it into the ocean. The formula describes the flow of water through the open doors when the wardrobe sits at the bottom of the ocean in 2 km depth, which means that a steady stream of water at an approximate velocity of 200 meters per second will flow into Narnia.\nThe evil White Witch , who has made it \"always winter, and never Christmas,\" could not have anticipated that a wardrobe portal would suddenly begin spewing approximately 400,000 liters of water per second into Narnia. [ citation needed ]\nSea water freezes at low temperatures and flowing water freezes at even lower temperatures, depending how fast it is going. Water jetting out from this portal would be flowing very quickly indeed, approximately 200 meters per second (450 mph or 720 km\/h) as the comic says; this is over half the speed of sound. And the water flow is approximately 400,000 liters per second, again, provided in the image above. The force of this water jet would be incredible.\nThis water would not freeze. First it would decimate any forest trees or iron lamp posts in front of it until it eventually slowed down and fell to the ground. There it would create a rapidly expanding river of sea water. Narnia would not stay frozen for long. Snow would melt, ice would break apart and the valley would quickly flood.\nDelta-P is a mathematical term for the difference in pressure. The shown formula is based on the Hagen\u2013Poiseuille equation which can be applied to a flowing liquid in a long cylindrical pipe; thus the equation here results in an unphysically high flow rate because the opening is rectangular and too short for a laminar flow . Using the Hagen\u2013Poiseuille equation the maximum flow rate is given by:\nis the pipe cross-sectional area (m 2 ) and is the fluid density (kg\/m 3 ).\nFrom the hydrostatics of water the pressure difference depends on gravity and the height:\nis the gravitational acceleration (m\/s 2 ) and is the height (m).\nPutting this together and changing the cross-sectional area to a rectangular area we get the formula used by Randall:\n\nAssuming the wardrobe is two meter high and one in width ( A = 2 m 2 ) and using the gravitational constant g = 9.81 m\/s 2 the flow rate is 396 m 3 per second, or roughly 400.000 liters per second.\nThe water jet velocity v is based on Torricelli's law :\n\nIt gives 198 m \/ s in this scenario.\nThe title text references the video game Portal in which you solve puzzles using a gun which projects portals onto certain surfaces. In the game you cannot shoot a portal through a portal, but Randall says that if you try to create a portal with the portal gun through the wardrobe, space and time knot together.   C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series (like most of his writing) is influenced by his views on Christianity and morality (he did not set out to write a \"Christian story\", but later accepted that there are many parallels between the Chronicles and his faith), with Aslan the lion representing Jesus Christ.  As such, Aslan often provides lessons and advice on morality and faith to the main characters; however, the Space Sphere (a minor character in the game Portal 2 ) is a barely-sentient AI whose only preoccupation is going to space, and it would not be receptive to Aslan's teachings.  The Space Sphere might be more interested in Lewis's The Space Trilogy , a trilogy of science-fiction books in which the main character travels through space and learns that the divine struggles between good and evil on Earth are also reflected elsewhere in the solar system.\n[An open wardrobe, with a boat anchor attached to one corner, falling towards water.] [Below the water line a formula with its variables explained is shown:] Q = A * sqrt(2 * g * d) Q = flow rate A = area of opening d = ocean depth (2\u00a0km) g = Earth gravity\n[And below the formula:] Flow: ~400,000 liters \/ s Water jet velocity: ~200 m \/ s\n[Caption below the frame:] The White Witch didn't know what hit her.\n"}
{"id":970,"title":"The Important Field","image_title":"The Important Field","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/970","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_important_field.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/970:_The_Important_Field","transcript":"[A soldier with a green military hat, with an black emblem on the front, is sitting in an office chair typing at his computer. Sounds are shown when he types, and the message he reads on the screen is shown above with a zigzag line coming from the computer screen. In the first panel he only uses one hand on the keyboard.] Computer: Welcome to the missile launch web interface! Click\n[Same setting but the soldier types with both hands.] Computer: Enter the target's coordinates. Type Type\n[Same setting as previous panel.] Computer: Enter your email address for our records. Type Type\n[Same setting except the soldier has stopped typing.] Computer: Enter your email again, to ensure you typed it correctly.\n","explanation":"In this comic, a soldier with a green hat with a black emblem on the front, is using his computer to access an online web interface to launch a missile at a target. The joke is that even though the interface only asks him to enter the target coordinates once, it asks for his email address twice, even though the coordinates are by far the more important detail to get right (launching the missile at the wrong target could result in a disastrous loss of life or property damage).\nIt is common for online interfaces to force users to type certain details twice, as a form of redundancy checking to ensure that the user really has entered the correct details and hasn't made an error. Some forms even go the extra step of preventing the user from copy-pasting into the second field, which would render it useless as a redundancy check.\nThis is usually done for email addresses and when creating new passwords, which are used to identify and authenticate users, and are therefore important to get right.\nIn the title text, Randall suggests that the presence of redundancy checks can give you an interesting insight into what things people deem to be important. He gives a (supposed) real-life example of a merchant that requires only one form of ID in order to buy a gun, but two forms if you want to pay for it by check - suggesting that the seller is more worried about the safety of their money than the potential danger of giving a lethal weapon to someone untrustworthy.\n[A soldier with a green military hat, with an black emblem on the front, is sitting in an office chair typing at his computer. Sounds are shown when he types, and the message he reads on the screen is shown above with a zigzag line coming from the computer screen. In the first panel he only uses one hand on the keyboard.] Computer: Welcome to the missile launch web interface! Click\n[Same setting but the soldier types with both hands.] Computer: Enter the target's coordinates. Type Type\n[Same setting as previous panel.] Computer: Enter your email address for our records. Type Type\n[Same setting except the soldier has stopped typing.] Computer: Enter your email again, to ensure you typed it correctly.\n"}
{"id":971,"title":"Alternative Literature","image_title":"Alternative Literature","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/971","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alternative_literature.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/971:_Alternative_Literature","transcript":"[Cueball and a friend stand in front of Cueball's bookcase. His friend flips through a number of them.] Friend: All your books are full of blank pages. Cueball: Not true. That one has some ink on page 78. Friend: A smudge. Cueball: So?\nFriend: There are no words. You're not reading. There's no story there. Cueball: Maybe not for you. When I look at those books, I think about all kinds of stories.\nCueball: Reading is about more than what's on the page. Holding a book prompts my mind to enrich itself. Frankly, I suspect the book isn't even necessary.\nCueball: The whole industry is evil. Greedy publishers and rich authors try to convince us our brains need their words. But I refuse to be a sucker. Friend: Who sold you all these blank books?\n","explanation":"While the comic is funny on its own in a \" Wake Up , Sheeple \" kind of way, the title text reveals that the comic is a parable about homeopathy . The comic title is a play on alternative medicine .\nIn the comic, it is implied that Cueball has been scammed into buying blank books, though he attempts to defend it as a valid choice (ironically, he thinks that it is the other people who are being scammed, not he). The title text likens this to the CVS Pharmacy selling homeopathic pills using methods that does not clearly distinguish them from real pharmaceuticals. Homeopathy is a pseudoscience based on the idea that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people will cure that disease in sick people if administered in sufficiently small doses. It is possible that Cueball actually bought blank notebooks and is scamming himself into believing he made a valid and logical choice.\nHomeopathic remedies are prepared by repeatedly diluting a substance with alcohol or water . Somewhat counter-intuitively, homeopathy considers the weakest dilutions to have the most powerful healing effect. Frequently, in fact, the dilutions are repeated past the point where any number of molecules of the \"active ingredient\" can remain.\nSelling a homeopathic remedy as actual medicine when it is just water is analogous to selling blank books. The smudge of ink Cueball mentions in the comic may be referencing the fact that some of the less diluted homeopathic remedies can contain a tiny amount of the original substance.\n[Cueball and a friend stand in front of Cueball's bookcase. His friend flips through a number of them.] Friend: All your books are full of blank pages. Cueball: Not true. That one has some ink on page 78. Friend: A smudge. Cueball: So?\nFriend: There are no words. You're not reading. There's no story there. Cueball: Maybe not for you. When I look at those books, I think about all kinds of stories.\nCueball: Reading is about more than what's on the page. Holding a book prompts my mind to enrich itself. Frankly, I suspect the book isn't even necessary.\nCueball: The whole industry is evil. Greedy publishers and rich authors try to convince us our brains need their words. But I refuse to be a sucker. Friend: Who sold you all these blank books?\n"}
{"id":972,"title":"November","image_title":"November","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/972","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/november.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/972:_November","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball sit in a room.] Black Hat: Did you know November is Tongue Awareness Month?\n[Cueball is suddenly aware of his tongue.]\n[Cueball continues to be aware of his tongue.]\n[Cueball is painfully aware of his tongue.] Cueball: I hate you. Black Hat: Enjoy the next four weeks.\n","explanation":"This comic is a homage to Charles Schulz , the creator of the comic Peanuts , who was born on November 26, 1922. Both comics carry the idea that when you start thinking about your tongue, you can hardly stop thinking about it. (Similarly: if you start thinking about your breathing, you stop breathing unless you consciously think to breathe, same goes for blinking.) This is similar to the ironic process theory , where trying to not think about something will invariably make you think about it. The intention of Black Hat in this comic is for Cueball to consciously feel his tongue for the entire month of November. Since it was Black Hat's idea, Black Hat probably suffers the same consequences.\nThis is similar, in concept, to the expression and phrase used for trolling in online communities, \" You Are Now Breathing Manually \".\nThe line \"you are now aware of your tongue\" was mentioned much later in the title text of 2563: Throat and Nasal Passages . Here it was throat and nasal passages awareness which was the subject, due to the, at that time, two year long 2020 COVID-19 pandemic .\n[Black Hat and Cueball sit in a room.] Black Hat: Did you know November is Tongue Awareness Month?\n[Cueball is suddenly aware of his tongue.]\n[Cueball continues to be aware of his tongue.]\n[Cueball is painfully aware of his tongue.] Cueball: I hate you. Black Hat: Enjoy the next four weeks.\n"}
{"id":973,"title":"MTV Generation","image_title":"MTV Generation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/973","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mtv_generation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/973:_MTV_Generation","transcript":"[Teenager playing with phone walks in background. White Hat and Megan are in the foreground.] White Hat: See, that's the problem with the MTV generation\u2014 No attention span. Teenager's phone: Bleep bloop\n[White Hat and Megan in frameless panel without teenager from previous panel.] Megan: You know, that phrase referred to the 12-19 demographic that formed the core MTV audience in the mid-1980s.\n[Zoom in on Megan with White Hat off-panel to the left.] White Hat (off-panel): Uh huh? So? Megan: That generation's now in their 40s.\n[Zoom back out to White Hat and Megan, with White Hat scratching his head.] White Hat: That can't be right. Megan: Face it: Your problem with the MTV generation is their kids .\n","explanation":"MTV stands for \"Music Television\", which is the name of a US-based cable channel, founded in 1981, specifically focusing on popular music and the music industry in general. The programming largely (though not exclusively) consisted of music videos . The focus of the channel has since shifted to reality shows . In the channel's heyday in the 1980's and early 1990's, it was popular with teenagers and young adults. As is often the case with youth culture, it was roundly condemned by some adults as being destructive and pointless. One of the specific criticisms was that the format of short videos, with quick-edit, highly kinetic visual styles and no underlying narrative was destroying the attention span of the youth.\nDespite MTV no longer being especially popular (and no longer focusing on music videos), people still use the term MTV Generation to refer to the young cohort, and insist that they have poor attention spans, resulting from their media exposure. Megan explains that the term really originated about 25 years ago, to describe Generation X , the generation born from 1965 to 1980. The actual MTV generation has long since grown up, and most young people today either don't watch MTV, or have no idea that it was originally a music channel. Teenagers today are the children of \"the MTV generation\" (and even their grandchildren, in some cases).\nThe Breakfast Club is an iconic movie from 1985 in which 5 teenagers spend a Saturday detention together at school. Principal Vernon was the overseer of the detention, and a symbol of authority and oppression of youth - the actor playing principal Vernon was around 45 years old at the time of filming. The irony is that many adults who grew up watching the movie still identify with the teenagers, but now have little in common with them.\nThere are a couple of themes in this strip that Randall has covered before. One is mocking adults for the assumptions they make about young people, youth culture and new technology. Adults have a tendency to whitewash the past, and insist that modern young people are being corrupted by new trends.  And when that generation of youth grows up, they tend to make the same assumptions about the next generation. 1601: Isolation , 1227: The Pace of Modern Life , 1414: Writing Skills , 1348: Before the Internet\nAnother theme is making people feel old by pointing out how long ago their common memories are, as in 647: Scary , 891: Movie Ages , 1393: Timeghost , 1477: Star Wars , and 2165: Millennials .\n[Teenager playing with phone walks in background. White Hat and Megan are in the foreground.] White Hat: See, that's the problem with the MTV generation\u2014 No attention span. Teenager's phone: Bleep bloop\n[White Hat and Megan in frameless panel without teenager from previous panel.] Megan: You know, that phrase referred to the 12-19 demographic that formed the core MTV audience in the mid-1980s.\n[Zoom in on Megan with White Hat off-panel to the left.] White Hat (off-panel): Uh huh? So? Megan: That generation's now in their 40s.\n[Zoom back out to White Hat and Megan, with White Hat scratching his head.] White Hat: That can't be right. Megan: Face it: Your problem with the MTV generation is their kids .\n"}
{"id":974,"title":"The General Problem","image_title":"The General Problem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/974","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_general_problem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/974:_The_General_Problem","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a table, eating a meal.] Cueball: Can you pass the salt?\n[Cueball pauses, a bite of food on his fork, silently.]\n[Cueball still has fork in mid-air.] Cueball: I said- Off-screen person: I know! I'm developing a system to pass you arbitrary condiments. Cueball: It's been 20 minutes! Off-screen person: It'll save time in the long run!\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball asks a friend or relative to pass him the salt, a common request when dining with others. Usually it is expected that the person will simply pass the salt immediately; however, the offscreen person doesn't get back to him until 20 minutes later, when Cueball repeats his request. The friend explains that they're attempting to solve the general problem of passing any table condiment, not just salt.\nThis is a common mistake made in software development, wherein an developer tries to solve a problem far more general than the specific one they have been tasked to solve. Sometimes, this foresight can be useful, if the developer has predicted use cases that later turn out to be needed; other times, it can lead to wasted time, or worse, overengineering, where a system is made more complex and fragile than it needed to be, instead of robustly solving a single, well-defined problem.\nIt isn't clear what exactly the offscreen friend is doing (or even what they could do) to solve the general condiment-passing problem; most likely they are still in the design stage of their solution and have not even started implementing it, much to Cueball's chagrin. Nonetheless they are convinced that it is worth taking the time to do this now due to the potential time-saving in the long run. In doing so, they are overlooking the more salient and saline facts of the situation; namely, that passing condiments is not something that requires a solution or takes up any significant amount of time, and that Cueball would probably prefer to have the salt while his meal is still warm.\nIn the title text, Randall notes a social paradox: that people tend to be disparaging of such inefficient time-wasting while it's not producing any results, but will heap praise on it when they're able to reap the benefits of that foresight.\nSee also 137: Dreams , 1205: Is It Worth the Time? , 1319: Automation , 1691: Optimization , and the Time management category .\n[Cueball sits at a table, eating a meal.] Cueball: Can you pass the salt?\n[Cueball pauses, a bite of food on his fork, silently.]\n[Cueball still has fork in mid-air.] Cueball: I said- Off-screen person: I know! I'm developing a system to pass you arbitrary condiments. Cueball: It's been 20 minutes! Off-screen person: It'll save time in the long run!\n"}
{"id":975,"title":"Occulting Telescope","image_title":"Occulting Telescope","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/975","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/occulting_telescope.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/975:_Occulting_Telescope","transcript":"[Cueball is presenting his new telescope in front of a white board, pointing to the diagram of said telescope with a pointer. He is standing on a raised podium facing a crowd off-panel] Cueball: The occulting observatory consists of two parts\u2014the telescope and the discs.\n[A frame-less panel with a black center with white drawings that shows the diagram from the white board in the first panel. It shows a satellite  with solar panels above and below the main body which has a front end that looks wider like a telescope. The satellite is labeled with a small arrow pointing at the front end. 11 light waves are indicated as coming towards it from the right, and below these they are labeled. Three of the waves is blocked in the middle by a small vertical line which is also labeled with a small arrow. Above and below the diagram outside the black area Cueball is narrating.] Cueball (narrating): When the telescope sees a star, a disc is carefully steered to block its light. Label: Telescope Label: Light from star Label: Disc Cueball (narrating): This procedure is repeated until all stars are covered.\n[Back to Cueball on the podium who now looks down on the audience from where a question emanates at the top of the left frame.] Person #1 (off screen): Wait, all? Why? Cueball: I'll feel better.\n[Close-up on Cueball. as two different persons talks to him, from the lower left frame.] Person #2 (off-screen): I thought the point was to image extrasolar planets. Cueball: The point is that there are too many stars. Cueball: It's been freaking me out. Person #2 (off-screen): What? Person #3 (off screen): He has a point...\n","explanation":"Cueball takes the useful practice of occulting stars beyond its intended purpose. Occulting is used in astronomy to block the light from a star under observation so that adjacent dim objects, such as any surrounding extrasolar planets , might be more easily detected and examined. This refers to a proposed starshade mission , envisioned for space telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope , in which a large occulter would fly in formation with that telescope.\nInstead of blocking the light of a single star for the purposes of observation, Cueball proposes blocking the light from all stars, for the purpose of making him feel comfortable with the night sky. Cueball feels, some might say irrationally, that \"there are too many stars\", and \"it's been freaking me out\". This may be a reference to Isaac Asimov's \"Nightfall\" which explores in depth the psychological implications by which stars make some people feel small and insignificant because they demonstrate just how vast is the universe.\nThe title text refers to both a Type II Kardashev civilization and a Dyson sphere .\nA Dyson sphere is a theoretical construction consisting of a network of satellites that orbit and completely surround a star. The purpose of a Dyson Sphere is to capture and transmit all of the available solar energy in the star back to a planet.\nA Type II Kardashev civilization is a theoretical civilization that has advanced to the point where it has harnessed the energy radiated by its own star (for example, the stage of successful construction of a Dyson sphere).\nFor comparison purposes:\nThe title text reveals that Type II Kardashev civilizations construct Dyson spheres not for the purposes of capturing all solar energy, but merely to block the view of all that hideous space. This may allude to Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel series, where a planet called Krikkit is completely obscured by a dust layer. Upon building a spacecraft to explore what lies behind that dust cover, they decide to destroy all living beings in the rest of the universe. See http:\/\/hitchhikers.wikia.com\/wiki\/Krikkit .\nThe concept of an occulting space telescope was visited again in 1730: Starshade , and the idea of the vastness of space being frightening was revisited in 2596: Galaxies .\n[Cueball is presenting his new telescope in front of a white board, pointing to the diagram of said telescope with a pointer. He is standing on a raised podium facing a crowd off-panel] Cueball: The occulting observatory consists of two parts\u2014the telescope and the discs.\n[A frame-less panel with a black center with white drawings that shows the diagram from the white board in the first panel. It shows a satellite  with solar panels above and below the main body which has a front end that looks wider like a telescope. The satellite is labeled with a small arrow pointing at the front end. 11 light waves are indicated as coming towards it from the right, and below these they are labeled. Three of the waves is blocked in the middle by a small vertical line which is also labeled with a small arrow. Above and below the diagram outside the black area Cueball is narrating.] Cueball (narrating): When the telescope sees a star, a disc is carefully steered to block its light. Label: Telescope Label: Light from star Label: Disc Cueball (narrating): This procedure is repeated until all stars are covered.\n[Back to Cueball on the podium who now looks down on the audience from where a question emanates at the top of the left frame.] Person #1 (off screen): Wait, all? Why? Cueball: I'll feel better.\n[Close-up on Cueball. as two different persons talks to him, from the lower left frame.] Person #2 (off-screen): I thought the point was to image extrasolar planets. Cueball: The point is that there are too many stars. Cueball: It's been freaking me out. Person #2 (off-screen): What? Person #3 (off screen): He has a point...\n"}
{"id":976,"title":"Sail","image_title":"Sail","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/976","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sail.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/976:_Sail","transcript":"[Someone is sailing a lateen rigged sailboat.] [The wind picks up, pushing the sail forward.] [The wind builds strength, and the sailor has to stand up to hold on to the main sheet.] [The sail balloons out, strangely distorted, and he can barely hold on to the sheet.] [Finally, part of the sail separates into a bubble, and the sailor almost falls over backwards. The sail begins to return to its normal shape.] [The sailor sits down and scratches his head in confusion as the bubble floats away.]\n","explanation":"A billowing sail sometimes looks like the first stage of blowing a bubble. The main character is clearly surprised when a bubble is actually formed by the filled sail.\nReaders infer from the title text that the water is also part of this fantastical scenario. If the boat was overturned ( capsized ) in a soap lagoon, a film would form between the mast and the boom (horizontal bar that adjusts the sail). The film would become like the sail in the comic, filling with air and forming bubbles until the film is used up.\n[Someone is sailing a lateen rigged sailboat.] [The wind picks up, pushing the sail forward.] [The wind builds strength, and the sailor has to stand up to hold on to the main sheet.] [The sail balloons out, strangely distorted, and he can barely hold on to the sheet.] [Finally, part of the sail separates into a bubble, and the sailor almost falls over backwards. The sail begins to return to its normal shape.] [The sailor sits down and scratches his head in confusion as the bubble floats away.]\n"}
{"id":977,"title":"Map Projections","image_title":"Map Projections","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/977","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/map_projections.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/977:_Map_Projections","transcript":"What your favorite Map Projection says about you [All of these are organized as Title, a copy of the particular projection underneath, and what it says about you under that.]\nMercator You're not really into maps. Van der Grinten You're not a complicated person. You love the Mercator projection; you just wish it weren't square. The Earth's not a square, it's a circle. You like circles. Today is gonna be a good day! Robinson You have a comfortable pair of running shoes that you wear everywhere. You like coffee and enjoy The Beatles. You think the Robinson is the best-looking projection, hands down. Dymaxion You like Isaac Asimov, XML, and shoes with toes. You think the Segway got a bad rap. You own 3D goggles, which you use to view rotating models of better 3D goggles. You type in Dvorak. Winkel-Tripel National Geographic adopted the Winkel-Tripel in 1998, but you've been a W-T fan since long before \"Nat Geo\" showed up. You're worried it's getting played out, and are thinking of switching to the Kavrayskiy. You once left a party in disgust when a guest showed up wearing shoes with toes. Your favorite musical genre is \"Post\u2013\". Goode Homolosine They say mapping the Earth on a 2D surface is like flattening an orange peel, which seems enough to you. You like easy solutions.You think we wouldn't have so many problems if we'd just elect normal people to Congress instead of Politicians. You think airlines should just buy food from the restaurants near the gates and serve that on board. You change your car's oil, but secretly wonder if you really need to. Hobo-Dyer You want to avoid cultural imperialism, but you've heard bad things about Gall-Peters. You're conflict-averse and buy organic. You use a recently-invented set of gender-neutral pronouns and think that what the world needs is a revolution in consciousness. Plate Carr\u00e9e (Equirectangular) You think this one is fine. You like how X and Y map to latitude and longitude. The other projections overcomplicate things. You want me to stop asking about maps so you can enjoy dinner. A Globe! Yes, you're very clever. Waterman Butterfly Really? You know the Waterman? Have you seen the 1909 Cahill Map it's based\u2014 ...You have a framed reproduction at home?! Whoa. ...Listen, forget these questions. Are you doing anything tonight? Peirce Quincuncial You think that when we look at a map, what we really see is ourselves. After you first saw Inception , you sat silent in the theater for six hours. It freaks you out to realize that everyone around you has a skeleton inside them. You have really looked at your hands. Gall-Peters I hate you.\n","explanation":"Map projection , or how to represent the spherical Earth surface onto a flat support (paper, screen...) to have a usable map, is a long-time issue with very practical aspects (navigation, geographical shapes and masses visualization, etc.) as well as very scientific\/mathematical ones, involving geometry or even abstract algebra among other things. There is no universal solution to this problem: Any 2D map projection will always distort in a way the spherical reality. Many projections have been proposed in various contexts, each intending to minimize distortions for specific uses (for nautical navigation, for aerial navigation, for landmass size comparisons, etc.) but having drawbacks from other points of view. Some of them are more frequently used than others in mass media and therefore more well-known than others, some are purely historical and now deprecated, some are very obscure, etc.\nRandall suggests here the idea that someone's \"favorite\" map projection can reveal aspects of their personality, then goes through a series of them to show what they can mean.\nHe may actually believe that all map projections are in a way bad. This could be inferred from the fact that he much later began  publishing a series of Bad Map Projections .\nThe Mercator projection was introduced by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. The main purpose of this map is to preserve compass bearings; for example 13 degrees east of north will be 13 degrees clockwise from the ray pointing toward the top of the map, at every point.  A mathematical consequence is the mapping is conformal, i.e. if two roads meet at a certain angle on the surface of the Earth, they will meet at that same angle on the map.  It also follows that at every point the vertical and horizontal scales are the same, so locally i.e. considering only a small part of the map, geographical features (shapes, angles) are well represented, which helps a lot in recognizing them on-the-field, or for local navigation in that small part only. For this reason, that projection (or a close variant) is used in several online mapping services (such as Google Maps), which means that it is frequently encountered by the general public. A straight line on the map corresponds to a course of constant bearing (direction), which was very useful for nautical navigation in the past (and thus made that projection very well-known).\nHowever, from a global point of view, this projection is radically incorrect in how it shows the size of landmasses (for instance, Antarctica and Greenland seem gigantic), and furthermore, it always excludes a small region around each pole (otherwise the map would be of infinite height), so it doesn't provide a complete solution for the problem of map projection. The comic implies that people who like that projection aren't very interested with map issues, and typically use what they are offered without thinking much about it.\nThe Van der Grinten projection is not much better than the Mercator. It was adopted by National Geographic in 1922 and was used until they updated to the Robinson projection in 1988.\nThe Van der Grinten projection is circular as opposed to the Mercator projection. The fictional person believes a circular map is more fitting to the real Earth's three-dimensional spherical nature because both are round. This belief fails to recognize that a two-dimensional circle has very little in common with the surface of a sphere, and thus this projection still causes a vast distortion of space and area.  Because of this, Randall implies the Van der Grinten enthusiast to be optimistic and childishly simple-minded (e.g. \"you like circles\").\nThe Robinson projection was developed by Arthur H. Robinson as a map that was supposed to look nice and is often used for classroom maps. National Geographic switched to this projection in 1988, and used it for ten years, switching to the Winkel-Tripel in 1998.\nThe Beatles was a rock band that enjoyed great commercial success in the 1960s, and are widely considered the best act ever in the genre of popular music. The Beatles, coffee, and running shoes are all things that are very commonly enjoyed and largely uncontroversial, as well as being comforting.  Liking these specific things suggests an ordinary, easygoing lifestyle paralleled by the projection.\nAlso called the Fuller Map, the Dymaxion map takes a sphere and projects it onto an icosahedron, that is a polyhedron with 20 triangular faces. It is far easier to unwrap an icosahedron than it is to unwrap a sphere into a 2D object and has very little skewing of the poles. Buckminster Fuller was an eccentric futurist who believed, for example, that world maps should allow no conception of \"up\" or \"down\". He was therefore more than happy to defy people's expectations about maps in the pursuit of mathematical accuracy.\nRandall associates the projection to geek subculture and niche markets:\n\nProposed by Oswald Winkel in 1921, the Winkel tripel projection tried to reduce a set of three (German: Tripel) main problems with map projections: area, direction, and distance. The Kavrayskiy projection is very similar to the Winkel Tripel and was used by the USSR, but very few in the Western world know of it.\nThe comic links this projection to hipster subculture. The hipster stereotype is to avoid conforming to mainstream fashions. \"Post-\" refers to a variety of musical genres such as post-punk , post-grunge , post-minimalism , post-rock , etc. that branch off of other genres, and are generally considered less accessible than the genres that spawned them. Liking a genre just called \"post-\" implies that the listener prefers music that is less mainstream, and may have that as the only criterion for listening.\nTrivia\nThe Goode homolosine projection takes a different approach to skewing a sphere into a roughly circular surface. An orange peel can be taken from an orange and flattened with fair success; this is roughly the procedure that John Paule Goode followed in creating this projection. Randall is suggesting that people who like this map also prefer relatively easy solutions to other things in life, despite those solutions having nuanced problems that are more difficult to address.\nPeople often make arguments that if normal people ran the United States, then the US wouldn't be in the trouble it is. This is from the belief that career politicians are simply out to make money and will only act in the interest of their constituency when their continued easy life is threatened (usually around election time). While some form of this view is very common and probably pretty much correct, Randall is saying that someone who likes this map may take this to extremes.\nAirline food is another, much maligned, problem. How do you store enough food to feed people on long airplane trips? What kind of food can be served in an enclosed, low-air-pressure environment? The common solution is to use some kind of prepackaged, reheated meal. Randall is saying that the people in favor of the Goode Homolosine wonder why the airlines don't simply order meals from the restaurants in the airport, store that food, and serve it, rather than using bland reheated food. However, this seemingly-obvious solution ignores how being in an airplane dulls your sense of taste. Airplane food is actually over seasoned for eating on the ground, meaning that if airlines switched to restaurant food it would probably taste even blander. There would also be issues with acquiring special meals (for example, vegetarian, Kosher, and Halal meals), especially if suitable restaurants were not in close range to the airport.\nOlder cars burned oil like mad fiends, and oil back then would become corrosive to the innards of an engine, so oil had to be changed often. But, with the introduction of synthetic motor oil and better designed engines, new cars only need their oil changed about every 10,000 to 15,000 miles. A common conspiracy theory is that modern automobile oil manufacturers still recommend that car owners change their oil every 3,000-5,000 miles to \"drum\" up more business, even though that frequency is unnecessary.\nAll of these references suggest that people who like the Goode Homolosine projection are fans of easy solutions to problems. However, the solutions would not necessarily work in practice. For instance: the restaurants might have trouble making enough food for the whole plane, and it could get cold before being served; the air conditions aboard planes can affect taste, so airlines say they optimize for this; there is no such thing as a \"normal\" person, and if there were, he\/she would have virtually no chance at actually getting into government office and\/or may not have prior political experience that would be helpful for congress; and the Goode Homolosine projection, while mostly resembling a flattened orange peel as suggested by the earlier analogy, does indeed cut down on distortion, but also has serious problems of its own, such as leaving huge gaps of nothingness between the continents, making distances across the oceans difficult to visualize.\nThe Hobo\u2013Dyer projection was commissioned by Bob Abramms and Howard Bronstein and was drafted by Mick Dyer in 2002. It is a modified Behrmann projection . The goal was to be a more visually pleasing version of the Gall\u2013Peters.\nAs is discussed in the Gall\u2013Peters explanation, the Gall\u2013Peters was developed to be equal area, so that economically disadvantaged areas can at least take comfort in the fact that their country is represented correctly by area on maps.\nRandall associates the Hobo\u2013Dyer projection to \"crunchy granola\" \u2014 a stereotype associated with vegetarianism, environmental activism, anti-war activism, liberal political leanings, and some traces of hippie culture.\nWith feminism becoming mainstream and alternative genders being more widely accepted, some have begun to invent gender-neutral pronouns so that when referring to a person whose gender is not known they cannot be offended by being referred to by the wrong pronouns. In Middle English 'they' and 'their' were accepted genderless pronouns that could replace 'he', 'she' as well as be used to represent a crowd, but this usage is considered by some to be grammatically incorrect because of the plural\/singular debate ( stupid Victorian Grammarians! ). There have been many attempts at popularizing invented gender-neutral pronouns and they are beginning to achieve some degree of success in the mainstream.\nAlso known as the Equirectangular projection , it has apparently been in use since approximately 100 AD. The benefit of this projection is that latitude and longitude can be used as x,y coordinates. This makes it especially easy for computers to graph data on top of it.\nAccording to the comic, the projection appeals to people who find much beauty in simplicity.\nIn any good discussion there has to be at least one smart-ass. [ citation needed ] This is a comic about map projections, that is, the science of taking a sphere and flattening it into 2 dimensions. The smart-ass believes that we shouldn't even try: a sphere is, tautologically, the perfect representation of a sphere.\nTo quote The Princess Bride : \"Yes, you're very smart. Shut up.\"\nA globe is, of course, the \"map projection\" used by Google Earth when zoomed out.\nSimilar to the Dymaxion, the Waterman butterfly projection turns a sphere into an octahedron, and then unfolds the net of the octahedron, which was devised by mathematician Steve Waterman based upon the work of Bernard J.S. Cahill .\nBernard Cahill published a butterfly map in 1909. Steve Waterman probably has the only extant \"ready to go\" map following the same general principles, though Gene Keys may not be far behind. Waterman has a poem with graphics in a similar vein to this xkcd comic that is worth reading. [1]\nPolyhedral projections like Cahill, Dymaxion or Waterman typically offer better accuracy of size, shape and area than flat projections, at the expense of compass directionality, connectedness, and other complications.\nThe joke is that the person responding deeply understands map projections; anyone who knows of this projection is a person that Randall would like to get to know.\nThe Peirce quincuncial projection was devised by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1879 and uses complex analysis to make a conformal mapping of the Earth, that conforms except for four points which would make up the midpoints of sides and lie on equator (the equator is represented by a square and the corners connect the sides in the middle.)\nInception was a 2010 movie about meta lucid dreaming . It has a complex story that is difficult to follow and leaves the viewer with many questions at the end, and almost always needs to be watched multiple times to be understood.\nThe human brain is not well developed to deal with oddly obvious things. One example is that everyone has a skeleton, but everyone is surprised to see a part of their body represented by an X-ray. Another is the fascinating complexity of the human hand, a machine which is amazingly complex, driven by a complex interplay of electrical and chemical signals; yet is the size of the hand and so useful. A fascination with or fixation on such thoughts is often associated with an altered state of mind brought on by marijuana consumption. Therefore, Randall may be implying that this map would appeal to stoners.\nThe Gall\u2013Peters projection is mired in controversy, surprisingly for a map. James Gall , a 19th-century clergyman, presented this projection in 1855 before the British Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1967, the filmmaker Arno Peters created the same projection and presented it to the world as a \"new invention\" that put poorer, less powerful countries into their rightful proportions (as opposed to the Mercator). Peters played the marketing game and got quite a few followers of his map by saying it had \"absolute angle conformality,\" \"no extreme distortions of form,\" and was \"totally distance-factual\" in an age when society was very concerned about social justice. All of these claims were in fact false. The Mercator projection distorts size in favor of shape, and Gall-Peters distorts shape in favor of size, being especially inaccurate at the equator and the poles.\nThe implication is that the fans of this map are pompously concerned with social justice, and willing either to lie or convey marketing mistruths to promote that cause. Alternatively Randall just dislikes this map projection so much due to the above mentioned inaccuracies, that he hates anyone who likes it.\nThe title text makes a joke that goes to the familiar meme from CSI: Miami , in which the star, David Caruso starts a sentence, then puts on his sunglasses and ends the sentence with a corny pun. In this case, the pun is on map projection and projection in psychology. Psychological projection is an unconscious defense mechanism wherein a person who is uncomfortable with their own impulses denies having them and attributes them to other people, and blames these people for these impulses. The Sunglasses internet meme has been used in other comics as well.\nWhat your favorite Map Projection says about you [All of these are organized as Title, a copy of the particular projection underneath, and what it says about you under that.]\nMercator You're not really into maps. Van der Grinten You're not a complicated person. You love the Mercator projection; you just wish it weren't square. The Earth's not a square, it's a circle. You like circles. Today is gonna be a good day! Robinson You have a comfortable pair of running shoes that you wear everywhere. You like coffee and enjoy The Beatles. You think the Robinson is the best-looking projection, hands down. Dymaxion You like Isaac Asimov, XML, and shoes with toes. You think the Segway got a bad rap. You own 3D goggles, which you use to view rotating models of better 3D goggles. You type in Dvorak. Winkel-Tripel National Geographic adopted the Winkel-Tripel in 1998, but you've been a W-T fan since long before \"Nat Geo\" showed up. You're worried it's getting played out, and are thinking of switching to the Kavrayskiy. You once left a party in disgust when a guest showed up wearing shoes with toes. Your favorite musical genre is \"Post\u2013\". Goode Homolosine They say mapping the Earth on a 2D surface is like flattening an orange peel, which seems enough to you. You like easy solutions.You think we wouldn't have so many problems if we'd just elect normal people to Congress instead of Politicians. You think airlines should just buy food from the restaurants near the gates and serve that on board. You change your car's oil, but secretly wonder if you really need to. Hobo-Dyer You want to avoid cultural imperialism, but you've heard bad things about Gall-Peters. You're conflict-averse and buy organic. You use a recently-invented set of gender-neutral pronouns and think that what the world needs is a revolution in consciousness. Plate Carr\u00e9e (Equirectangular) You think this one is fine. You like how X and Y map to latitude and longitude. The other projections overcomplicate things. You want me to stop asking about maps so you can enjoy dinner. A Globe! Yes, you're very clever. Waterman Butterfly Really? You know the Waterman? Have you seen the 1909 Cahill Map it's based\u2014 ...You have a framed reproduction at home?! Whoa. ...Listen, forget these questions. Are you doing anything tonight? Peirce Quincuncial You think that when we look at a map, what we really see is ourselves. After you first saw Inception , you sat silent in the theater for six hours. It freaks you out to realize that everyone around you has a skeleton inside them. You have really looked at your hands. Gall-Peters I hate you.\n"}
{"id":978,"title":"Citogenesis","image_title":"Citogenesis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/978","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/citogenesis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/978:_Citogenesis","transcript":"Where Citations Come From: Citogenesis Step #1 Through a convoluted process, a user's brain generates facts. These are typed into Wikipedia. [Hairy sits at a desk, typing on a laptop.] Hairy: (typing) The \"scroll lock\" key was was designed by future Energy Secretary Steven Chu in a college project.\nStep #2 A rushed writer checks Wikipedia for a summary of their subject. [Ponytail sits at a desk, typing on a desktop.] Ponytail: (typing) US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, (Nobel Prizewinner and creator of the ubiquitous \"scroll lock\" key) testified before Congress today...\nStep #3 Surprised readers check Wikipedia, see the claim, and flag it for review. A passing editor finds the piece and adds it as a citation. [Cueball sits on a couch with a laptop in his lap, typing.] Cueball: Google is your friend, people. (typing) <ref>{{cite web|url=\nStep #4 Now that other writers have a real source, they repeat the fact. [A flow chart, with \"Wikipedia citation\" in the center. The word \"Wikipedia\" is in black, the word \"citations\" is white with a red background. [A black arrow leads from \"brain\" to \"Wikipedia.\"] [A black arrow labeled \"words\" leads from \"Wikipedia\" to \"careless writers,\" and a red arrow labeled \"citations\" leads back to \"Wikipedia citations.\"] [A black & red arrow leads from \"Wikipedia\" to \"cited facts\" which leads to \"slightly more careful writers,\" which leads to \"more citations,\" which leads back to\u00a0:\"Wikipedia\" (all black & red arrows).] References proliferate, completing the citogenesis process.\n","explanation":"This comic is calling into question the reliability of Wikipedia . This is a favorite pastime of librarians, teachers, and professional researchers, and not usually one of Randall 's. Wikipedia is a free and freely editable encyclopedia that aims to become a comprehensive, neutral compilation of verifiable and established facts .  Wikipedia aims to provide only facts backed by reliable sources . However, this comic strip details a process in which Wikipedia can not only spread misinformation but make said misinformation seem reliable through a process of \"circular reporting\".\nThe title of the comic is a play on the word cytogenesis . Cytogenesis is the formation of cells and their development. Citogenesis , on the other hand, is a portmanteau of 'Citation' and 'Genesis'. A Citation is a reference to a source, used to back up a specific claim, and genesis means the origin of something.  By extension, citogenesis is the creation of text in a reliable source that can be cited to back up a claim.\nIn the process described here, someone adds an untrue claim to an article in Wikipedia. A writer of some supposedly \"reliable source\" checks Wikipedia for information, and blindly relies on it, without checking for proper sources - the comic uses rushed writers, such as those responsible for news stories, as an example of someone who may do this. Eventually, someone notices the claim in the reliable source and cites it in the Wikipedia article. The citation now gives the claim credence, as readers don't realize that the official source was based on the Wikipedia article. Thanks to this citation, other reporters, slightly more cautious than the first, consider this bit of information to be reliable and then cite it in articles of their own. Those articles then get cited in Wikipedia, making the claim seem more reliable, encouraging even more reporters to believe it and repeat the claim. Eventually, a long list of citations is available, giving an impression of consensus, even though all of it originated with a single article, which was based on an uncited Wikipedia edit.\nFour years before, Randall commented on Wikipedia about that process happening to him (on a minor detail), which probably indicates the inception of this comic:\nIn turn, Randall originated the untrue assertion in this comic that Steven Chu , a physicist, and at the time of the strip the U.S. Secretary of Energy, invented the Scroll lock key, a common button on computer keyboards. Since most people are aware of the scroll lock key but know little about its function or origins, this false information would make for an interesting piece of trivia that would likely spread very quickly.\nFollowing this comic, the actual Scroll Lock and Steven Chu articles were both vandalized by \"helpful\" editors trying to project Randall's reality on Wikipedia. As of May 2022, the Wikipedia article on Citogenesis redirects to the \" Circular reporting on Wikipedia \" section on the article \" Circular reporting \". The section credits the term \"citogenesis\" to Randall Munroe, with a citation linking to this comic. To make matters even more surreal, a Wikipedia editor once flagged the link to this xkcd comic as \"Dubious - The material near this tag is possibly inaccurate or non-factual.\"!\nWe haven't seen a book like the one Randall describes in the title text.  But one example of the misuse of Wikipedia by \"reliable sources\" concerns the former German minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg . His complete name contains fifteen names\/words and reads: Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. An anonymous user added one more (\"Wilhelm\") to the German Wikipedia, just the evening before Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was presented as the new Federal Minister of Economics and Technology on February 10, 2009. The next day many major German newspapers published this wrong name ( translation of bildblog.de ).\nWhere Citations Come From: Citogenesis Step #1 Through a convoluted process, a user's brain generates facts. These are typed into Wikipedia. [Hairy sits at a desk, typing on a laptop.] Hairy: (typing) The \"scroll lock\" key was was designed by future Energy Secretary Steven Chu in a college project.\nStep #2 A rushed writer checks Wikipedia for a summary of their subject. [Ponytail sits at a desk, typing on a desktop.] Ponytail: (typing) US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, (Nobel Prizewinner and creator of the ubiquitous \"scroll lock\" key) testified before Congress today...\nStep #3 Surprised readers check Wikipedia, see the claim, and flag it for review. A passing editor finds the piece and adds it as a citation. [Cueball sits on a couch with a laptop in his lap, typing.] Cueball: Google is your friend, people. (typing) <ref>{{cite web|url=\nStep #4 Now that other writers have a real source, they repeat the fact. [A flow chart, with \"Wikipedia citation\" in the center. The word \"Wikipedia\" is in black, the word \"citations\" is white with a red background. [A black arrow leads from \"brain\" to \"Wikipedia.\"] [A black arrow labeled \"words\" leads from \"Wikipedia\" to \"careless writers,\" and a red arrow labeled \"citations\" leads back to \"Wikipedia citations.\"] [A black & red arrow leads from \"Wikipedia\" to \"cited facts\" which leads to \"slightly more careful writers,\" which leads to \"more citations,\" which leads back to\u00a0:\"Wikipedia\" (all black & red arrows).] References proliferate, completing the citogenesis process.\n"}
{"id":979,"title":"Wisdom of the Ancients","image_title":"Wisdom of the Ancients","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/979","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/979:_Wisdom_of_the_Ancients","transcript":"[A poem is written outside and right justified along the left edge of the panel to the right.]\nNever have I felt so close to another soul And yet so helplessly alone As when I Google an error And there's one result A thread by someone with the same problem And no answer Last posted to in 2003\n[Cueball stands in front of his desk, having risen so the chair has moved away behind him. He is holding on to his computer's screen, looking at it while visibly shaking the screen and shouting at it.] Cueball: Who were you, DenverCoder9? Cueball: What did you see?!\n","explanation":"This comic refers to a common experience that those trying to solve tech problems have. Typically, people search on Google to try to find solutions to the problem. Sometimes the solution can be found on a software program's website, but the most helpful solutions frequently come from discussions on message boards, particularly for more obscure problems. This is because the odds are rather high that someone else, years ago, had the same problem you're having and resolved it.\nHowever, in this comic, Cueball is unable to find any mention of the problem he's currently facing except for one forum post about it that did not include the problem's solution. This is akin to finding an FAQ with questions but no answers.\nThe title is a satirical reference to the notion that the \"ancients,\" i.e. from thousands of years ago, possessed knowledge that has been lost to the centuries (such as exactly how Stonehenge was built), and that artifacts from those times do not fully divulge such knowledge. The fact that the \"ancient\" referred to in the comic is from 2003 (only 8 years before the comic was published) is an exaggeration of the feeling that the forum poster is lost to the sands of time, but in some sense this feeling is nonetheless true, since Cueball is unlikely to be able to contact them.\nThe title text is a suggestion to forums to be aware of the fact that people are likely going to come across such posts in the future and therefore to provide handy summaries of the most helpful conclusions of long threads for them, since combing through several false starts and failed attempts to resolve a problem can be quite tedious. Some forums do indeed follow this practice, pinning the solution or the most helpful approximation to one to the top under the original question.\nIn 1722: Debugging the title text also mentions googling an error message, explaining what it means if you get zero results. Sort of.\nhttp:\/\/www.mirrorsoferis.com\/forum\/thread05232003a.html\n[A poem is written outside and right justified along the left edge of the panel to the right.]\nNever have I felt so close to another soul And yet so helplessly alone As when I Google an error And there's one result A thread by someone with the same problem And no answer Last posted to in 2003\n[Cueball stands in front of his desk, having risen so the chair has moved away behind him. He is holding on to his computer's screen, looking at it while visibly shaking the screen and shouting at it.] Cueball: Who were you, DenverCoder9? Cueball: What did you see?!\n"}
{"id":980,"title":"Money","image_title":"Money","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/980","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/money.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/980:_Money","transcript":"[This transcript is only reproducing text visible on the front page comic .] [Title panel at the top left has one large heading, and then it is possible to read the first and third out of five lines (but not for instance the second line which is just the word \"almost\"):] Money A chart of all of it [Below this there are 5 large panels, each with a series of plots, comparing the values of various things. The only clearly visible text is the title of each panel written in white on black background at the top of each panel] [The first section covers single coffees up to the hourly salaries of CEOs. It is located below the title panel and there are a lot of green groups marked by unreadable text.] Dollars [The next section discusses values from around $1000 to $1,000,000, including a dissection of the song If I had $1000000. It is located directly below the Dollars section and has mainly orange groups (but also some green) marked by unreadable text.] Thousands [The third section focuses on $1,000,000 to $1,000,000,000, with a large section on campaign contributions of American political presidential campaigns, values of expensive works of art, and J. K. Rowling. It is located to the right of the Thousands section below the Billions section and there are a lot of gray groups (but also some orange) marked by unreadable text.] Millions [The fourth section gets into larger scale finances, profits of various sectors, costs of natural disasters, and net worths of the richest people on the planet. Also, Donald Trump. It is located to the right of the Dollars section and above both the Millions and Trillions section and has mainly yellow groups (but also some gray and red) all marked by unreadable text. There are, however, a few large headings that can be read:] Billions Education The Economic (...?) US household income Federal budget [In the last panel global financial status is described. It discusses derivatives, liquid assets, public debt by nation and GDP by continent, culminating with the total economic production of the human race to date. It is located below the Billions section to the right of the Millions section and has mainly cyan groups (but also one yellow) all marked by unreadable text.] Trillions [ For the full transcript of the huge image see 980: Money\/Transcript . ]\n","explanation":"This is a chart comic - a type of comic that Randall does from time to time. He has for instance done maps of the Internet ( twice !) and other huge visualizations like this chart Radiation with a similar structure as this chart but with Radiation as the subject. The Radiation chart is most likely the inspiration for this much more comprehensive Money chart.\nIn the chart there are five boxes with items on different scales of monetary value. Each scale of dollar increments are different colors. One dollar increments are green - naturally, because American paper money is green. Thousands are Orange\/Red. Millions are gray. Billions are yellow. Trillions are blue. This comic uses the short scale for naming large numbers (so a billion = 1000 millions = 10 9 rather than a million millions = 10 12 as in continental Europe).\nBecause the comic is so huge and complex the explanation has been split into several parts and also individual pages:\nBelow are five tables with explanation for some of the items. The transcript is (as is usually the case with huge comics) only given for the text that is visible on the picture shown here above. However the full transcript for all the text in the huge image has also been completed. Finally some tables with prices has been made (although they are not yet complete).\nIn the Billions box there is a vague term called the \"Economic Vortex\" as well as arrows that flow between different blocks of this box. This is to show where the money goes. Where it is collected from, and where it is distributed to.\nIncluded in one frame is a small man with a red and white striped shirt, blue pants, a cane and a knit cap. He is known as Wally or Waldo (in the US) from the Where's Waldo books . To not give anything away for those who wish to search for him themselves there will be no spoiler here. But if someone needs a little help... Then by clicking this link you will be directed to the relevant section amongst the five sections where Waldo can be found. (The link will take you to that section of the full transcript page). If you still cannot find him (or give up in advance) then just search the transcript page for Wally or Waldo.\nThe title text is a reference to the phrase \"Show me the money!\" which originates from the film Jerry Maguire .\n[This transcript is only reproducing text visible on the front page comic .] [Title panel at the top left has one large heading, and then it is possible to read the first and third out of five lines (but not for instance the second line which is just the word \"almost\"):] Money A chart of all of it [Below this there are 5 large panels, each with a series of plots, comparing the values of various things. The only clearly visible text is the title of each panel written in white on black background at the top of each panel] [The first section covers single coffees up to the hourly salaries of CEOs. It is located below the title panel and there are a lot of green groups marked by unreadable text.] Dollars [The next section discusses values from around $1000 to $1,000,000, including a dissection of the song If I had $1000000. It is located directly below the Dollars section and has mainly orange groups (but also some green) marked by unreadable text.] Thousands [The third section focuses on $1,000,000 to $1,000,000,000, with a large section on campaign contributions of American political presidential campaigns, values of expensive works of art, and J. K. Rowling. It is located to the right of the Thousands section below the Billions section and there are a lot of gray groups (but also some orange) marked by unreadable text.] Millions [The fourth section gets into larger scale finances, profits of various sectors, costs of natural disasters, and net worths of the richest people on the planet. Also, Donald Trump. It is located to the right of the Dollars section and above both the Millions and Trillions section and has mainly yellow groups (but also some gray and red) all marked by unreadable text. There are, however, a few large headings that can be read:] Billions Education The Economic (...?) US household income Federal budget [In the last panel global financial status is described. It discusses derivatives, liquid assets, public debt by nation and GDP by continent, culminating with the total economic production of the human race to date. It is located below the Billions section to the right of the Millions section and has mainly cyan groups (but also one yellow) all marked by unreadable text.] Trillions [ For the full transcript of the huge image see 980: Money\/Transcript . ]\n"}
{"id":981,"title":"Porn Folder","image_title":"Porn Folder","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/981","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/porn_folder.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/981:_Porn_Folder","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk, looking at a laptop screen with one hand on his chin.] Cueball: So I thought I found your porn folder, in calendar\/backup\/PORN\/ Friend (off screen): Don't open that!\n[A wider shot of the person looking at the laptop.] Cueball: But it contains a bunch more folders, filled with more folders, and then... after 20 levels, somehow I'm back at the main folder? Friend (off screen): It's, uh, well hidden.\n[Cueball has turned around in the chair, now with the laptop in his lap.] Cueball: I think there's no actual porn here. Cueball: You're just turned on by filesystems. Friend (off screen): It's a hardlinked directory loop - so taboo! Cueball: Now I feel dirty sharing a drive with you.\n","explanation":"Cueball seems to have found a porn folder. However, it contains a directory loop, set up by a person off-screen. It is possible to actually do this, but it is widely regarded as a very bad idea, as it can break the system in not-so-obvious ways (mostly by causing seemingly-trivial operations to infinite loop). The implication is that the folder does not need to contain pornographic images because the folder is the porn\u2014its violation of the taboo against looping is something the off-screen character finds erotic.\nlink() is the Linux system call to create a hard link. In an unmodified Linux kernel, it will not allow directory hard links for this exact reason; the person who set up the porn folder apparently \"forced\" Linux to comply, with all of the sexual analogies that suggests.\n[Cueball sits at a desk, looking at a laptop screen with one hand on his chin.] Cueball: So I thought I found your porn folder, in calendar\/backup\/PORN\/ Friend (off screen): Don't open that!\n[A wider shot of the person looking at the laptop.] Cueball: But it contains a bunch more folders, filled with more folders, and then... after 20 levels, somehow I'm back at the main folder? Friend (off screen): It's, uh, well hidden.\n[Cueball has turned around in the chair, now with the laptop in his lap.] Cueball: I think there's no actual porn here. Cueball: You're just turned on by filesystems. Friend (off screen): It's a hardlinked directory loop - so taboo! Cueball: Now I feel dirty sharing a drive with you.\n"}
{"id":982,"title":"Set Theory","image_title":"Set Theory","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/982","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/set_theory.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/982:_Set_Theory","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart stands at a blackboard, facing away from it. She has a pointer in her hand, and written on the blackboard is some set theory math, although one of the set elements is being pointed into a guillotine.] Miss Lenhart: The axiom of choice allows you to select one element from each set in a collection Miss Lenhart: and have it executed as an example to the others.\n[Caption below the panel:] My math teacher was a big believer in Proof by Intimidation.\n","explanation":"This comic is a pun on the phrase \" Proof by Intimidation \" which normally is a jocular term used mainly in mathematics. It refers to a style of presenting a purported mathematical proof by giving an argument loaded with jargon and appeals to obscure results, so that the audience is simply obliged to accept it, lest they have to admit to their ignorance and lack of understanding.\nHowever, in this comic, \"Proof by Intimidation\" is taken to mean that by intimidating the elements within a set, they will conform to the proof (or, as the title text says, they will become \"well-ordered\"). This is accomplished by believing that the elements can be anthropomorphized such that they feel fear. The idea of executing as an example was discussed by Sun Tzu in the ancient book The Art Of War .\nThis interpretation of the term \"Proof by Intimidation\" bears great resemblance to argument from the stick , which is a fallacious form of reasoning of the form\n1.  If not P, I will do you harm.\n2.  Therefore, P.\nThis form of fallacy has the distinction, if properly applied, of never being called out as fallacious.  Ponytail, however, is threatening the proposition itself, rather than her audience, bringing a level of absurdity to the situation.\nThe axiom of choice (which has been referenced previously in 804: Pumpkin Carving ) says that given any collection of bins, each containing at least one object, it is possible to make a selection of exactly one object from each bin. It was later referenced in the title text of 1724: Proofs , another comic about a math class with a similar theme on how teachers teach their student mathematical proofs.\nIn the title text, the well-ordering theorem states that every set can be well-ordered. A set X is well-ordered by a strict total order if every non-empty subset of X has a least element under the ordering. This is also known as Zermelo's theorem and is equivalent to the Axiom of Choice. The woodchipper is a reference to the 1996 film Fargo , where a character uses one to dispose of a body.\n[Miss Lenhart stands at a blackboard, facing away from it. She has a pointer in her hand, and written on the blackboard is some set theory math, although one of the set elements is being pointed into a guillotine.] Miss Lenhart: The axiom of choice allows you to select one element from each set in a collection Miss Lenhart: and have it executed as an example to the others.\n[Caption below the panel:] My math teacher was a big believer in Proof by Intimidation.\n"}
{"id":983,"title":"Privacy","image_title":"Privacy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/983","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/privacy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/983:_Privacy","transcript":"Dorm: [Cueball and Megan holding hands in front of a door. Megan is attempting to turn the doorknob.] Locked\nOther Dorm: [Cueball and Megan holding hands inside another dorm room. The roommate is sitting at a computer wearing a headset.] Roommate: I'll be done Tuesday. Roommate in raid\nLibrary Rare Book Collection: [Cueball and Megan looking through a closed door. Inside Nelson Mandela and two university workers are talking amongst various items on display.] Occupied by tour for visiting Nelson Mandela\nAccelerator Tunnel: [Cueball and Megan in silhouette in front of an imposing-looking door. The door is marked \"NO ENTRY\" with a radioactive trefoil symbol, and has a passcode scanner beside it.] Sealed while beam is in operation\nBeaver Lodge: [Megan climbing on top of a dirt mound while Cueball stands on the ice beside it. A cross-section reveals a beaver inside the mound and a submerged entrance.] Frozen over for winter to keep out predators, only accessible via underwater entrance\nHyperspace: [Megan reading a textbook in front of a table piled with five other textbooks. Cueball looks over Megan's shoulder.] Cueball: Are you sure ? Ruled out by current understanding of physics\nCollege Law #27: The availibility [sic] of private space is inversely proportional to the desirability of the hookup.\n","explanation":"This comic is about Cueball and Megan attempting to find some privacy to \"hook up\", which is slang for engaging in sexual activity.\nThey start at a dormitory, which would offer some privacy. Unfortunately, the door is locked. They go to another dorm, but it is occupied by someone playing a MMORPG who is \"in a raid \", which means that the gamer is teaming up with others to \"raid\" something, probably an enemy, and loot their items. This also pokes fun at the fact that some raids may take a very long time to execute, in this case apparently taking on the order of 24 hours. (This comic was published on a Monday morning.)\nIn the third frame, the two try to go to the library's rare book collection. Such a place would usually be deserted, making it usable for sexual activity. However, it is currently occupied by a visiting Nelson Mandela , who is on a tour of the school.\nMoving on to more bizarre places, they next try an accelerator tunnel , another place that would be private. However, the particle accelerator is in use and the door is sealed tight. This would be a normal safety feature to protect researchers from being exposed to potentially dangerous ionizing radiation from the particle beam.\nThe couple then try a beaver lodge , which, despite being private, is too tiny to fit in, and the only entrance is underwater. What makes it more difficult to get in is that it is winter, and the ground is presumably frozen solid.\nThe last place they attempt to go to is hyperspace , science fiction jargon for an \u2018alternate dimension\u2019 that starships supposedly use to travel faster than light. The word is frequently used in the Star Wars movies. However, there is no evidence that anything like hyperspace exists in reality, and in fact current theories of physics do not allow it.\nThe caption is a parody of other laws of physics, such as \"brightness is inversely proportional to distance from the source\".\nThe title text indicates that the two eventually found privacy for sex in a laboratory, but inadvertently got Megan pregnant. This is a parody of news articles discussing whether scientists can create synthetic life in a lab. This eventual headline appears in a few 1037: Umwelt frames as \"Scientists Create Life In Lab\", with a similar secondary headline\/caption as the punchline.\nThe comic 658: Orbitals is similar in nature to this comic.\nDorm: [Cueball and Megan holding hands in front of a door. Megan is attempting to turn the doorknob.] Locked\nOther Dorm: [Cueball and Megan holding hands inside another dorm room. The roommate is sitting at a computer wearing a headset.] Roommate: I'll be done Tuesday. Roommate in raid\nLibrary Rare Book Collection: [Cueball and Megan looking through a closed door. Inside Nelson Mandela and two university workers are talking amongst various items on display.] Occupied by tour for visiting Nelson Mandela\nAccelerator Tunnel: [Cueball and Megan in silhouette in front of an imposing-looking door. The door is marked \"NO ENTRY\" with a radioactive trefoil symbol, and has a passcode scanner beside it.] Sealed while beam is in operation\nBeaver Lodge: [Megan climbing on top of a dirt mound while Cueball stands on the ice beside it. A cross-section reveals a beaver inside the mound and a submerged entrance.] Frozen over for winter to keep out predators, only accessible via underwater entrance\nHyperspace: [Megan reading a textbook in front of a table piled with five other textbooks. Cueball looks over Megan's shoulder.] Cueball: Are you sure ? Ruled out by current understanding of physics\nCollege Law #27: The availibility [sic] of private space is inversely proportional to the desirability of the hookup.\n"}
{"id":984,"title":"Space Launch System","image_title":"Space Launch System","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/984","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/space_launch_system.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/984:_Space_Launch_System","transcript":"[Cueball, is holding something up to show it to Black Hat. It is small and rectangular with a black line in the middle (possible a rocket).] Cueball: Check out the SLS \u2014 130 tons to orbit. Finally, rockets that improve on the ones we had 40 years ago. Black Hat: Are we getting Nazis to build those ones, too?\n[Text is written between two frames, with two smaller frames below. A line comes up to Cueballs first comment, showing that it is still the two from the first frame talking, but off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): What? Black Hat (off-panel): When we first captured von Braun and his team, we had our engineers interview them, then we built the rockets. Black Hat (off-panel): But our rockets kept exploding. [First small panel below the above text: A soldier with helmet and a machine gun is guarding von Braun who is tied to a chair, while being interviewed by an almost bald scientist (hair along the back of his head), who takes notes on a piece of paper.] [Second small panel below the above text: The same scientist standing with the paper, watches as a launching rocket explodes. The landscape behind shows a hill.]\n[A black frame with white text above the white Saturn V rocket flying through space.] Black Hat (off-panel): Eventually we gave up and had the German teams do it, and they built us the Saturn V Moon rocket.\n[Cueball is looking down, his hand with the thing he showed to Black Hat in the first panel hanging down. Black Hat looks at Cueball.] Cueball: I'm\u2026 not sure what lesson to take from that. Black Hat: \"If you want something done right, learning from the Nazis isn't enough. You have to actually put them in charge.\" Cueball: That's a terrible lesson. Black Hat: Then I guess you should get a Nazi to come up with a better one.\n","explanation":"SLS, which stands for Space Launch System , is the new launch program being designed by NASA to replace the retired Space Shuttle launch system. In the first frame, Cueball is showing Black Hat something about the SLS, possibly a video on his phone or other portable electronic device.\nAs usual with his appearances, Black Hat is causing trouble. Specifically he asks if Nazi scientists are going to build NASA's new SLS program. Specifically he mentions the former Nazi party member Wernher von Braun , who was one of the developers of the Saturn V launch vehicle, who came over to America (from Germany ) as part of Operation Paperclip and helped develop NASA's space program. The unfortunate reality of Operation Paperclip, and one that Black Hat aims to make people uncomfortable with, is that a significant number of ex-German personnel were Nazi party true-believers, and their defection to America effectively granted them amnesty of any war crimes.\nBlack Hat extrapolates this sad reality into an obvious troll attempt: that putting actual Nazis in charge will get you results. This assumption is obviously a bridge too far (which is the comic's punchline), but he gets his desired reaction out of Cueball, who is hanging his head (or staring him down- Randall has left no details to distinguish). First he makes it clear that the lesson is that you should put the Nazis in charge (and we saw from World War Two what that could lead to). Then when Cueball states this is a terrible lesson, Black Hat puts salt in his wound by suggesting that the only way to find a better lesson is to ask a Nazi for a better one - a consistent move if you apply his lesson, but a logic bomb because he suggests to put a Nazi in charge of finding another lesson other than \"put a Nazi in charge\".\nThe title text is a reference to Shania Twain 's song \" That Don't Impress Me Much \". Twain's lyrics include the line \"Okay, so you're a rocket scientist \/ That don't impress me much\". But, the title text argues that if she stood under the new SLS prototype, she would admit it was in fact, impressive. And it is thus the SLS head engineer (Garry Lyles) plans to invite Shania to do just that. Although he could still understand if she did not wish to date him, he would be surprised if she was still unimpressed.\n[Cueball, is holding something up to show it to Black Hat. It is small and rectangular with a black line in the middle (possible a rocket).] Cueball: Check out the SLS \u2014 130 tons to orbit. Finally, rockets that improve on the ones we had 40 years ago. Black Hat: Are we getting Nazis to build those ones, too?\n[Text is written between two frames, with two smaller frames below. A line comes up to Cueballs first comment, showing that it is still the two from the first frame talking, but off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): What? Black Hat (off-panel): When we first captured von Braun and his team, we had our engineers interview them, then we built the rockets. Black Hat (off-panel): But our rockets kept exploding. [First small panel below the above text: A soldier with helmet and a machine gun is guarding von Braun who is tied to a chair, while being interviewed by an almost bald scientist (hair along the back of his head), who takes notes on a piece of paper.] [Second small panel below the above text: The same scientist standing with the paper, watches as a launching rocket explodes. The landscape behind shows a hill.]\n[A black frame with white text above the white Saturn V rocket flying through space.] Black Hat (off-panel): Eventually we gave up and had the German teams do it, and they built us the Saturn V Moon rocket.\n[Cueball is looking down, his hand with the thing he showed to Black Hat in the first panel hanging down. Black Hat looks at Cueball.] Cueball: I'm\u2026 not sure what lesson to take from that. Black Hat: \"If you want something done right, learning from the Nazis isn't enough. You have to actually put them in charge.\" Cueball: That's a terrible lesson. Black Hat: Then I guess you should get a Nazi to come up with a better one.\n"}
{"id":985,"title":"Percentage Points","image_title":"Percentage Points","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/985","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/percentage_points.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/985:_Percentage_Points","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an armchair watching TV while listening to a news report coming from the TV as shown by a zigzag line.] Voice from TV: Senator Grayton's campaign has imploded following the candidate's promise to give tax breaks to drunk drivers and to authorize the use of unmanned Predator drones in the War On Christmas. Grayton had been polling at 20%, but his support has since plunged by 19%.\n[Caption below the panel:] I hate the ambiguity created when people don't distinguish between percentages and percentage points.\n","explanation":"Senator Grayton is a fictional character, made up for this comic; which is unusual for xkcd, as it typically uses real-world references.\nThe issues that Grayton supports:\nThe term percentage point is used to overcome an ambiguity when comparing two percentages.\nReduction of a stated number by a percentage\nWhen the original value is given as a number, there is no ambiguity. In the statement below the only possible conclusion is that now only 162,000 people approve of Grayton. Previously 200,000 people approved of Senator Grayton, and then his approval rating dropped by 19%.\nReduction of a percentage by a percentage\nWhen the original approval rating is given as a percentage (20% in the comic), then a reduction of 19% has two possible meanings: 1) Of the 20% who previously approved (200,000 people), 19% no longer approve. In this case the result is 162,000 as in the above example. 2) Compared to the original results, 19% fewer of the entire original sample of 1 million people approve. In this case only 1% of the original 1 million approve, equal to 10,000 people.\nIf using the second method of comparing percentages, the approvals rating should be described as having dropped by 19 percentage points. In reality, the distinction between the two methods is often overlooked, leading to confusion.\nThe caption's issue with \"percentage\" versus \"percentage points\" is that if Grayton's 20% approval rating drops by 19%, that means that his support has only dropped 3.8 percentage points since 19% of 20% is only 3.8%. That would mean that even after all his outrageous statements, his support dropped only from 20% to 16.2%. However, if the news reports that his 20% approval rating dropped 19 percentage points , that means his support has dropped to 1%, which appears to be more accurate given Grayton's egregious policy decisions and the description of his campaign as having \"imploded.\"\nThe punchline to all this is that Randall is more bothered by the \"percent\" ambiguity than by Grayton's appalling policy plans.\nReferences in the title text:\n[Cueball is sitting in an armchair watching TV while listening to a news report coming from the TV as shown by a zigzag line.] Voice from TV: Senator Grayton's campaign has imploded following the candidate's promise to give tax breaks to drunk drivers and to authorize the use of unmanned Predator drones in the War On Christmas. Grayton had been polling at 20%, but his support has since plunged by 19%.\n[Caption below the panel:] I hate the ambiguity created when people don't distinguish between percentages and percentage points.\n"}
{"id":986,"title":"Drinking Fountains","image_title":"Drinking Fountains","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/986","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/drinking_fountains.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/986:_Drinking_Fountains","transcript":"[Cueball leaving a public bathroom. A water fountain is next to the bathroom door. An arrow points to the next panel.]\n[Cueball drinking from the water fountain. An arrow points to the next panel.]\n[Cueball reenters the bathroom. An arrow points back to the first panel.]\nI avoid drinking fountains outside bathrooms because I'm afraid of getting trapped in a loop.\n","explanation":"Here, we see Cueball using the restroom; as the title text indicates, he is eliminating the liquid waste from his body, or peeing. Some people feel a brief compulsion to urinate after drinking, even if they don't actually need to. Cueball says that he avoids the use of the drinking fountain right after peeing, because he is apparently one of these people and he is afraid that he will be forced into immediately peeing again. And as in the image above, he would be stuck in a loop. A loop is a computer science term, but also used elsewhere, to indicates going through the same steps over and over again. In this case, the bathroom and drinking fountain form an infinite loop, which, when used about computers, refers to a loop which never ends, [ citation needed ] eventually crashing (or hanging, which might actually be worse) the computer, which is therefore a situation to be avoided at all costs.\nThe title text says Cueball\/ Randall would be embarrassed in trying to explain his experiment to someone, as an experiment of this nature seems interesting to geeks but gross to non geeks (and to geeks too, if we're being honest), and he wouldn't be able to lie about what he was doing if called by someone.\nA thread on yahoo answers [1] with a (purported) Biology major concluded that drinking from a hose and peeing at the same time would not work: the kidneys can only process so much pee at a time, and the majority of it is re-used. But since the experiment doesn't put a lower boundary on the flow that would be regarded as an ongoing pee, this objection is invalid. Constantly sipping and dripping might be possible.\n[Cueball leaving a public bathroom. A water fountain is next to the bathroom door. An arrow points to the next panel.]\n[Cueball drinking from the water fountain. An arrow points to the next panel.]\n[Cueball reenters the bathroom. An arrow points back to the first panel.]\nI avoid drinking fountains outside bathrooms because I'm afraid of getting trapped in a loop.\n"}
{"id":987,"title":"Potential","image_title":"Potential","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/987","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/potential.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/987:_Potential","transcript":"Narrator: When teachers complain, \"You're not working at your full potential!\" [Explosion in background.]\nNarrator: Don't take it too hard. [Car casually spirals through the air while a crash is heard in the background.]\nNarrator: They complain way more when you do. [A mechanized, 6-tentacled robot rampages around, picking up cars and creating a small warzone before the student inside while the lamentations of people and the building of military forces are in the background.] Throughout the third frame: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! In the control center of the robot: Click, beep, whirr Out-of-frame: It's headed this way! Ponytail: Somebody stop him!\n","explanation":"This comic jokes about the common rant by teachers when they are annoyed by lazy or ignorant kids. They commonly say that the kids are not working up to their \"full potential\" and they need to work harder. The comic comforts the kids who were subject to this \u2014 by telling the students if they did reach their full potential, they could, instead of providing better essays and science fair projects, possibly create a monster robot with 6 mechanical legs apparently able to pick up and throw cars, and use machine-guns and force-fields. This is definitely not what they wanted when they said to work to your full potential. [ citation needed ]\nNote that such a huge and complex machine is usually seen in sci-fi books or movies. Generally, it is the main antagonist that creates them.\nThe title text describes a parallel to the example in the strip, using philosophy rather than engineering. Randall expresses frustration when his teaching gives underprivileged kids the intellectual skills needed to raise existential questions that bug him. His extremely destructive solution is to turn the students onto drugs and crime, where they won't have time or peace of mind to think about philosophy.\nNarrator: When teachers complain, \"You're not working at your full potential!\" [Explosion in background.]\nNarrator: Don't take it too hard. [Car casually spirals through the air while a crash is heard in the background.]\nNarrator: They complain way more when you do. [A mechanized, 6-tentacled robot rampages around, picking up cars and creating a small warzone before the student inside while the lamentations of people and the building of military forces are in the background.] Throughout the third frame: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! In the control center of the robot: Click, beep, whirr Out-of-frame: It's headed this way! Ponytail: Somebody stop him!\n"}
{"id":988,"title":"Tradition","image_title":"Tradition","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/988","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tradition.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/988:_Tradition","transcript":"The 20 most-played Christmas songs (2000-2009 radio airplay) by decade of popular release [A bar chart labeled on the X-axis with the decades \"1900s\" through \"2000s\" labeled. Each bar has, as one unit, a labeled song. \"1900s\", \"1910s\", \"1920s\", \"1980s\", \"1990s\", and \"2000s\" are empty. \"1930s\" has \"Santa Claus is Coming to Town\". \"1940s\" has \"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer\", \"Winter Wonderland\", \"Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire\", \"Let it Snow\", \"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas\", \"I'll be Home for Christmas\", and \"White Christmas\". \"1950s\" has \"Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree\", \"Jingle Bell Rock\", \"Blue Christmas\", \"Little Drummer Boy\", \"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus\", \"Silver Bells\", \"It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas\", \"Sleigh Ride\", and \"Frosty the Snowman\" \"1960s\" has \"Holly Jolly Christmas\" and \"It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year\" \"1970s\" has \"Feliz Navidad\"] Every year, American culture embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers' childhoods.\n","explanation":"This comic uses the source of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers to say that the 20 most played Christmas songs in the US between 2000 and 2009 were all released between the 1930s and 1970s. It conspicuously excludes a number of more modern songs that seem ubiquitous, but this is because those songs do not appear on the ASCAP list.\n\"Popular release\" in this context means release to the general public, not the version of the song which is most popular.\nThe Baby Boomers were born in a period of time after the second World War after the troops came home and, thankful for their lives, went on to produce lots of children.\nThe data appears to come from an ASCAP survey conducted in 2009 .\nThe title text points out that many \"traditions\" actually have no historical precedent, they're just routines that have been spread by lots of people. The Baby Boomers, since they made up a huge fraction of the US population, were able to accidentally ground many \"traditions\" that their parents made up in American society just by consensus among themselves.\nThe 20 most-played Christmas songs (2000-2009 radio airplay) by decade of popular release [A bar chart labeled on the X-axis with the decades \"1900s\" through \"2000s\" labeled. Each bar has, as one unit, a labeled song. \"1900s\", \"1910s\", \"1920s\", \"1980s\", \"1990s\", and \"2000s\" are empty. \"1930s\" has \"Santa Claus is Coming to Town\". \"1940s\" has \"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer\", \"Winter Wonderland\", \"Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire\", \"Let it Snow\", \"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas\", \"I'll be Home for Christmas\", and \"White Christmas\". \"1950s\" has \"Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree\", \"Jingle Bell Rock\", \"Blue Christmas\", \"Little Drummer Boy\", \"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus\", \"Silver Bells\", \"It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas\", \"Sleigh Ride\", and \"Frosty the Snowman\" \"1960s\" has \"Holly Jolly Christmas\" and \"It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year\" \"1970s\" has \"Feliz Navidad\"] Every year, American culture embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers' childhoods.\n"}
{"id":989,"title":"Cryogenics","image_title":"Cryogenics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/989","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cryogenics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/989:_Cryogenics","transcript":"[Megan staring down at a smartphone in her hand while talking to White Hat.] Megan: Everyone's carrying sensor-packed, always-connected computers everywhere. That wasn't true ten years ago. White Hat: It's all changing too fast, huh? Megan: No, too slowly.\n[Zoom in on Megan's upper part as she holds up the smartphone showing its screen.] Megan: There's so much potential here. These clumsy, poorly-designed toys are nothing compared to what lies ahead.\n[Megan climbs into a cryogenic chamber which stands on a base where a small box at the end of the chamber is connected to it through a bend tube. She leaves the smartphone on the floor in front of White Hat.] Megan: That's why I've worked to develop cryogenic freezing. Megan: I'm gonna skip forward 30 years and use this stuff when it's good .\n[Cueball is greeting Megan holding a fist up in front of him, as Megan with morning hair rises up from the open cryogenic chamber.] 30 years later... Cueball: Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed. Megan: What? Megan: Why??\n[Cueball still stands in front of Megan in the chamber, but the scene has rotated revealing a row of other cryogenic chambers behind. The chamber after Megan's is still closed, but the others are open and people emerging.] Cueball: When cryogenic freezing was invented, all the engineers who were excited about the future froze themselves. So there's been no one building anything new.\n[The scene has rotated to look straight in on the long side of Megan's chamber, Cueball is standing to the left of the chamber. She holds the cover ready to close it again. Two voices comes from off-panel to the right.] Cueball: But they're all waking up now! Megan: Sweet! I'm gonna jump forward to see what they do! Engineer 1 (off-panel): Me too! Engineer 2 (off-panel): Wait, uh, guys?\n","explanation":"Megan , holding a smartphone , tells White Hat that everyone now carries a computer in their pocket, and refers to how it is always on-line (connected) and is full of sensors (like orientation, vibration and GPS etc.). This is actually amazing and White Hat assumes she is overwhelmed and ask her if the development is changing too fast for her.\nBut it turns out that Megan is actually disappointed about the pace of technology's improvement, that it goes too slowly . (Who isn't disappointed? From old sci-fi movies' predictions, we should by this point have flying cars and the flying skateboard like in Back to the Future 2 or a hyper technological future like in Blade Runner ). She tells White Hat that she has decided to cryogenically freeze herself now that she has developed cryogenics (hence the title) far enough for humans to survive such a deep freeze, and then she climbs into her homemade chamber and plans to skip 30 years ahead in time. (Actually, this should be called \"cryonics\", preserving humans, not \"Cryogenics\", which is just science at low temperatures)\nCryonic freezing is the ability to freeze oneself, so that one does not age and doesn't experience the passage of time. It is common in fiction as a useful technology for long space flights or other necessary preservation (like in the book 2001 ). Also people who are terminally ill or beyond current technology to save sometimes go through companies such as the Cryonics Institute in hope that future technology can cure them.\nHowever, to Megan's chagrin, when she wakes up, she is told by Cueball ( who is not Terry !) that all the other scientists and engineers that were fascinated about the future had also frozen themselves using her technology, even building their freezing chambers in a line to either side of her chamber, so nothing had been invented while she was frozen.\nBut as Cueball tells her in the final panel, they are all waking up now, implying that finally something new can be invented! But Megan then immediately decides to freeze herself again to see what happens next, hoping the situation 30 years later will be different. But then the guy in one of the nearby chambers gets the same idea as she did (again). However, if everyone does the same thing again, the situation will repeat itself and nothing will ever change again, as they can continue this process in 30 year steps. (Note that this is not time travel , but still related to this recurring theme in xkcd, and similar methods have been called time travel in xkcd before, like in 630: Time Travel and especially 1617: Time Capsule .)\nIt seems, however, that the engineer in the nearest chamber, to Megan's right, spots this problem and tries to stop all the other engineers from freezing down again, as he says Wait, guys .\nThe moral of the comic is: Don't freeze yourself, engineers and scientists! We need your help!\nThe title text refers to tech startups, (and existing tech companies) who often use bold marketing techniques, proclaiming that they are going to \"revolutionize\" not only a particular product or service, but every facet of a user's life. One of the clich\u00e9 phrases used in presentations is \"Welcome to the future\", implying that their product is the only way forwards, and all others are rendered obsolete.\nIn the title text this clich\u00e9 is turned on its head, when Randall tells about a very short lived tech startup he tried to get going. The reason for the short life of the company was that it admitted that nothing changed with its slogan: \"Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed.\"\nTechnology by its nature tends to evolve and improve, and thus a tech company which doesn't change will fall further and further behind their competitors, likely ending up going bust. Which was the case with Randall's (fake) tech startup.\n[Megan staring down at a smartphone in her hand while talking to White Hat.] Megan: Everyone's carrying sensor-packed, always-connected computers everywhere. That wasn't true ten years ago. White Hat: It's all changing too fast, huh? Megan: No, too slowly.\n[Zoom in on Megan's upper part as she holds up the smartphone showing its screen.] Megan: There's so much potential here. These clumsy, poorly-designed toys are nothing compared to what lies ahead.\n[Megan climbs into a cryogenic chamber which stands on a base where a small box at the end of the chamber is connected to it through a bend tube. She leaves the smartphone on the floor in front of White Hat.] Megan: That's why I've worked to develop cryogenic freezing. Megan: I'm gonna skip forward 30 years and use this stuff when it's good .\n[Cueball is greeting Megan holding a fist up in front of him, as Megan with morning hair rises up from the open cryogenic chamber.] 30 years later... Cueball: Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed. Megan: What? Megan: Why??\n[Cueball still stands in front of Megan in the chamber, but the scene has rotated revealing a row of other cryogenic chambers behind. The chamber after Megan's is still closed, but the others are open and people emerging.] Cueball: When cryogenic freezing was invented, all the engineers who were excited about the future froze themselves. So there's been no one building anything new.\n[The scene has rotated to look straight in on the long side of Megan's chamber, Cueball is standing to the left of the chamber. She holds the cover ready to close it again. Two voices comes from off-panel to the right.] Cueball: But they're all waking up now! Megan: Sweet! I'm gonna jump forward to see what they do! Engineer 1 (off-panel): Me too! Engineer 2 (off-panel): Wait, uh, guys?\n"}
{"id":990,"title":"Plastic Bags","image_title":"Plastic Bags","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/990","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/plastic_bags.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/990:_Plastic_Bags","transcript":"Fun Fact: Stores have a competition to see who can spread your items across the most plastic shopping bags.\n[5 items placed in a single bag; heaviest item placed at the bottom.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: Thanks!\n[Same items; heaviest item now placed in separate bag.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: Oh, that's easier to carry.\n[Heavy item is now double bagged.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: Double-bagging the big stuff makes sense...\n[The other 4 items are now split into 2 separate bags.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: That's a bit wasteful...\n[The 2 separate bags are now double bagged.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: You just put five items in six bags.\n[Every item is now in its own, double-bagged bag.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: OK! I give up! I'll buy a reusable bag!\n[Reusable bag is double-bagged.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: Augh!\n","explanation":"This is another comic with one of Randall's fun facts .\nIn the United States, at the time this comic was written, most grocery stores used to provide plastic bags free; as well as a \"bagger,\" whose only job is to bag the groceries \u2014 although sometimes this function is performed by the cashier. An exception to this rule might be \"extreme discount\" stores, such as Aldi . Customers are rarely, if ever, expected to bag their own groceries, even if they bring a reusable bag. It follows that sometimes a bagger might become a bit overzealous and use too many bags for too few products. This comic is mocking this tendency to go overboard, which is incredibly wasteful. The last frame takes this practice to its absurd and frustrating end, showing a reusable bag that has been double bagged with plastic bags. Exactly why bags are provided is probably a topic best left to academic discussion, but suffice to say that it is the state of the industry in the U.S. Perhaps grocery chains are concerned that if they did not provide free plastic bags, customers would defect, instead, to a competitor. Most shoppers view plastic bags and bagging by the store as givens.\nRelatively recently, some U.S. jurisdictions have begun to join more and more governments world-wide to either ban plastic bags, charge customers for them, or generate taxes on each sold bag. Using Washington, DC ( Randall 's home turf) example, as of 2010 customers are charged a $0.05 tax (again, by the local government and NOT by the grocery store) for each plastic bag, and receive an equivalent rebate for each reusable bag. While today it is accepted as a fact of life, the tax angered many at its adoption, even spurring some to claim that they would do their shopping in the next state over (in this case, Virginia), driving 5 or 10 miles to save 5 or 10 cents (this would address the theme of wasting money to save a trivial amount, addressed by Randall in 951: Working ). The tax has since become accepted as a fact of life, and has been quite successful at its initial goal of reducing the amount of bags discarded in area rivers and streams.\nThe title text refers to the idea that while many attempt to make the environmentally-conscious decision to bag their groceries with reusable bags, thereby keeping plastic bags out of landfills, sometimes they forget to bring their bags with them from the car, or even leave the bags at home altogether. Randall is commenting on the sense of euphoria he derives from a relatively simple task: remembering to bring the reusable bags to the grocery store and taking them into the store, rather than the good feeling from helping clean up the environment.\nFun Fact: Stores have a competition to see who can spread your items across the most plastic shopping bags.\n[5 items placed in a single bag; heaviest item placed at the bottom.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: Thanks!\n[Same items; heaviest item now placed in separate bag.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: Oh, that's easier to carry.\n[Heavy item is now double bagged.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: Double-bagging the big stuff makes sense...\n[The other 4 items are now split into 2 separate bags.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: That's a bit wasteful...\n[The 2 separate bags are now double bagged.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: You just put five items in six bags.\n[Every item is now in its own, double-bagged bag.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: OK! I give up! I'll buy a reusable bag!\n[Reusable bag is double-bagged.] Bag Packer: Here you go! Shopper: Augh!\n"}
{"id":991,"title":"Phantom Menace","image_title":"Phantom Menace","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/991","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/phantom_menace.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/991:_Phantom_Menace","transcript":"[Cueball, holding a lightsaber, and another stick figure character in a Darth Maul mask stand on the sidewalk outside of a brick building in an urban area. Each is holding money in his or her hand. There is a broken window on the building.]\n[Beat panel. They continue to stand there.]\n[Beat panel. They continue to stand there.]\n[Darth Maul turns to Cueball.] Darth Maul: Are you sure this place is a theater? Cueball: Let's give it one more month.\n","explanation":"Cueball is waiting outside a building with an unidentified character, who is dressed as Darth Maul , a character from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace . Before its release in May 1999, The Phantom Menace was one of the most anticipated movies of all time, with fans camped in lines outside of movie theaters as much as a full month in advance of ticket sales. In this comic, Cueball and his friend are apparently still waiting to see the movie, not having realized that they are waiting outside of a building that is not a movie theater. More importantly, they have been waiting for thirteen years, which should be long enough to realize their error.\nDarth Maul, the source of Cueball's friend's costume, is a Sith apprentice in the film. The Sith are the group of characters in the Star Wars universe who embrace the dark side of the Force and are the enemies throughout the series. Cueball is holding a cheap replica of a lightsaber , which is the weapon used by the Jedi and the Sith.\nThis comic seems to be poking fun at those people who are willing to wait long in advance for the release of some product or the first theatrical release of a movie. The title text expands upon this when one of the characters states that going to a theater across town may be better, but he is worried about taking the chance due to the possibility of losing their place in this line, a misplaced sense of priorities if the line goes nowhere, and they are presently the only two in it.\n[Cueball, holding a lightsaber, and another stick figure character in a Darth Maul mask stand on the sidewalk outside of a brick building in an urban area. Each is holding money in his or her hand. There is a broken window on the building.]\n[Beat panel. They continue to stand there.]\n[Beat panel. They continue to stand there.]\n[Darth Maul turns to Cueball.] Darth Maul: Are you sure this place is a theater? Cueball: Let's give it one more month.\n"}
{"id":992,"title":"Mnemonics","image_title":"Mnemonics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/992","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mnemonics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/992:_Mnemonics","transcript":"XKCD Presents: Some New Science Mnemonics\n(Pattern goes: Subject Elements Traditional mnemonic Contents of frame New mnemonics)\nOrder of Operations Parentheses, Exponents, Division & Multiplication, Addition & Subtraction Traditional: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally [Person having a shark delivered to his laptop.] Please Email My Dad A Shark or People Expect More Drugs And Sex\nSI Prefixes Big: Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta, (Yotta) Milli, Micro, Nano, Pico, Femto, Atto, Zepto, (Yocto) Traditional: [I never learned one.] [Graph of the declining profits of the Zune.] [Karl Marx delivering a number of zeppelins to a bunch of confused proletarians.] Proletarians (off-screen): Er. What do we do with them? Karl Marx: Rise! Big: Karl Marx Gave The Proletariat Eleven Zeppelins(, Yo) Small: Microsoft Made No Profit From Anyone's Zunes(, Yo)\nTaxonomy Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species Traditional: King Philip Came Over For Good Sex Katy Perry: I'm not sure who doubts this, really. Katy Perry Claims Orgasms Feel Good Sometimes or Kernel Panics Crash Our Family Game System.\nGeologic Periods (Precambrian), Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, Neogene Traditional: [I never learned one.] [A month's set of birth control pills.] PolyCystic Ovarian Syndrome Does Cause Problems That Judicious Contraceptves [sic] Partially Negate\nResistor Color Codes Black Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White Traditional: [none I care for] [Glenn Beck holding the traditional \"Nanobot Vaccine Chemtrail 9\/11\" sign.] \"Big Brother Reptilian Overlords\", yelled Glenn, \"Brainwashing Via Ground water!!\"; or Be Bold, Respect Others; You'll Gradually Become Versatile, Great Wikipedians!\nPlanets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune Traditional: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos [A pregnant Mary attempting to explain things to an incredulous Joseph with black hair and full beard] Mary's \"Virgin\" Explanation Made Joseph Suspect Upstairs Neighbor.\n","explanation":"A mnemonic is a trick that makes memorization easier. To memorize a sequence of names, a common type of mnemonic uses the beginning letters of the names in the sequence and invents another phrase using different words that start with the same letters. For example, the order of operations goes P arentheses, E xponentiation, M ultiplication and D ivision, A ddition and S ubtraction, and the traditional mnemonic goes P lease E xcuse M y D ear A unt S ally, or in Britain: B rackets, I ndices, M ultiplication, D ivision, A ddition and S ubtraction: there is no mnemonic, just the word \"BIMDAS\" to remember. To make them more memorable, mnemonics are usually quite silly and often vulgar. In this comic, Randall invents various scientific mnemonics, some of them as suggested replacements for traditional ones.\nThe category is listed at the top of the box, the members are listed below that. Then there is the traditional mnemonic that children are usually taught in school to help them remember. Below the comic is one or two options for new mnemonics suggested by Randall. The top one is illustrated in the frame.\nXKCD Presents: Some New Science Mnemonics\n(Pattern goes: Subject Elements Traditional mnemonic Contents of frame New mnemonics)\nOrder of Operations Parentheses, Exponents, Division & Multiplication, Addition & Subtraction Traditional: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally [Person having a shark delivered to his laptop.] Please Email My Dad A Shark or People Expect More Drugs And Sex\nSI Prefixes Big: Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta, (Yotta) Milli, Micro, Nano, Pico, Femto, Atto, Zepto, (Yocto) Traditional: [I never learned one.] [Graph of the declining profits of the Zune.] [Karl Marx delivering a number of zeppelins to a bunch of confused proletarians.] Proletarians (off-screen): Er. What do we do with them? Karl Marx: Rise! Big: Karl Marx Gave The Proletariat Eleven Zeppelins(, Yo) Small: Microsoft Made No Profit From Anyone's Zunes(, Yo)\nTaxonomy Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species Traditional: King Philip Came Over For Good Sex Katy Perry: I'm not sure who doubts this, really. Katy Perry Claims Orgasms Feel Good Sometimes or Kernel Panics Crash Our Family Game System.\nGeologic Periods (Precambrian), Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, Neogene Traditional: [I never learned one.] [A month's set of birth control pills.] PolyCystic Ovarian Syndrome Does Cause Problems That Judicious Contraceptves [sic] Partially Negate\nResistor Color Codes Black Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White Traditional: [none I care for] [Glenn Beck holding the traditional \"Nanobot Vaccine Chemtrail 9\/11\" sign.] \"Big Brother Reptilian Overlords\", yelled Glenn, \"Brainwashing Via Ground water!!\"; or Be Bold, Respect Others; You'll Gradually Become Versatile, Great Wikipedians!\nPlanets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune Traditional: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos [A pregnant Mary attempting to explain things to an incredulous Joseph with black hair and full beard] Mary's \"Virgin\" Explanation Made Joseph Suspect Upstairs Neighbor.\n"}
{"id":993,"title":"Brand Identity","image_title":"Brand Identity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/993","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brand_identity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/993:_Brand_Identity","transcript":"[The incredibly varied shelf of a supermarket aisle. There are many different types of products on this shelf. Each type has numerous different brands, all surrounding a very plain brand that has, as its only label, the type of product. A plain bag, labeled in plain black letters, says \"Potato Chips\" and is surrounded by all the other various brands of potato chips. The same exists for tissues, crackers, matches, peanuts, hot sauce, sugar, milk, pasta, coffee, black beans, lima beans, mayo, ketchup, tea, and bread. There is a stark contrast between the incredibly noisy and complex labeling of every other brand and this simple one.]\n[Caption below:] If I ever sold a line of supermarket goods, this is how I'd build a brand identity overnight.\n","explanation":"This comic presents Randall 's idea for a line of food products all with clear black font on a white background. The products with black block lettering and white background stand out from the other items in this comic. The irony is that even though the branding isn't terribly creative, the lack of complexity is what causes the products to stand out. These product packaging styles resemble no-frills products and generic brands . For example, in Canada, the \" No Name \" generic brand of low-cost products sold by Loblaws general features a plain yellow label with the description of the product in bold black text, and occasionally an image of the product. The brand name is minimalized as are other legally-required elements (e.g. the weight of the product). Another of Loblaws' generic brands, President's Choice (PC) currently has a plain white background with black bold text for the labels on most of its products (usually with an image of the product as well as the brand name), although more recently, text in accent colours has been introduced.\nThe style of packaging might be a reference to The Prisoner TV series from the '60s, a dystopia set in a village (actually, \"the village\") locked out from the outside world. The shops here only sell \"village food\". See this photo for an example.\nIt might also be a reference to Portal\u2019s bean cans.\nIn the title text, the lack of a listed URL relates to the lack of branding on the package. It is possible that omitting the URL the consumer's curiosity will be aroused, and they will spend time on the internet hunting for the actual site.\n\n[The incredibly varied shelf of a supermarket aisle. There are many different types of products on this shelf. Each type has numerous different brands, all surrounding a very plain brand that has, as its only label, the type of product. A plain bag, labeled in plain black letters, says \"Potato Chips\" and is surrounded by all the other various brands of potato chips. The same exists for tissues, crackers, matches, peanuts, hot sauce, sugar, milk, pasta, coffee, black beans, lima beans, mayo, ketchup, tea, and bread. There is a stark contrast between the incredibly noisy and complex labeling of every other brand and this simple one.]\n[Caption below:] If I ever sold a line of supermarket goods, this is how I'd build a brand identity overnight.\n"}
{"id":994,"title":"Advent Calendar","image_title":"Advent Calendar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/994","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/advent_calendar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/994:_Advent_Calendar","transcript":"[A portion of an advent calendar shows 12 windows where the date can be seen below. The top row is cut off so you cannot see the very top of the window At the bottom there are four more windows, but only the top part can be seen, and there is no decoration visible. All the other windows have a decoration, although, you cannot see the one on the second window as it is opened more than 90 degree. The first is also opened, but not more than you can see there is a decoration. The 3rd is also open. The rest is still closed.] [A green mistletoe on red, partially open.] December 23 rd\n[A fully open window.] December 24 th 12:00 AM\n[A red and white Santa hat on green just opened.] December 24 th Noon\n[Two crossed red and white candy canes on white. From here all windows are closed.] December 24 th 6:00 PM\n[A red Christmas ball on white.] December 24 th 9:00 PM\n[A white Christmas star on red.] December 24 th 10:30 PM\n[A red Christmas heart on gren.] December 24 th 11:15 PM\n[A red Santa sleigh on white.] December 24 th 11:37:30 PM\n[A red and white Christmas sock on green.] December 24 th 11:48:45 PM\n[A green Christmas tree on red.] December 24 th 11:54:22.5 PM\n[A red and green Christmas wreath on white] December 24 th 11:57:11.25 PM\n[A red and white Christmas gift on green] December 24 th 11:58:35.63 PM\n[Below the top of four more windows where only the background colors can be seen red, white, green and then red again.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Zeno's Advent Calendar\n","explanation":"An Advent calendar is a special calendar used to count or celebrate the days in anticipation of Christmas. They come in a multitude of forms, from a simple paper calendar with flaps covering each of the days, to fabric pockets on a background scene, to painted wooden boxes with cubby holes for small items. Advent calendars typically take the form of a large rectangular card with \"windows\", of which there are usually 24: one for each day of December leading up to and including Christmas Eve (December 24). Consecutive doors are opened every day leading up to Christmas, beginning on December 1. The calendar windows open to reveal an image, a poem, a portion of a story (such as the story of the Nativity of Jesus), or a small gift, such as a toy or a chocolate item.\nThis comic, however, depicts an Advent calendar which has a chocolate every time they get halfway to Christmas. This is a joke because of Zeno's paradox , which said \"Before a moving object can travel a certain distance, it must travel half that distance. Before it can travel half the distance it must travel 1\/4 the distance, etc. This sequence goes on forever. Therefore, it seems that the original distance cannot be travelled, and motion is impossible.\" This means that eating chocolates at diminishing intervals will make it so Christmas never happens.\nThe title text says that when you get close to midnight, it gets physically impossible to eat the chocolates fast enough to keep up, but you could get to the one-second-away mark with a chocolate liquefier and feeder tube.\nGoing from the second to the last of the visible time stamps it goes like this: At 11:57:11.25 PM there is still remaining 00:02:48.75 (2 minutes 48 seconds and 75 hundredth of a second.) Half of this time period will then progress before the next windows time stamp, that is 00:01:24.375 (1 minute and 24.375 s). This will then give the next time stamp by adding to the previous and we get: 11:58:35.625 PM. This has been rounded to 35.63 s in the comic. Similarly the time stamp for the next four windows, whose top are visible below, can be calculated starting from the fact that there is now only 00:01:24.375 left of the day.\nIt would take three more windows before crossing the 11:59:59 line with less than one second to go. At the 19th window there would only be 0.6591796875 seconds left of the day for a time-stamp of 11:59:59.3408203125. So that would be a window another line further down, even below the green window (no. 15) that is just visible at the button of the panel. And you would have to eat four chocolates in less than five seconds from window no. 16 to fulfill Randall's prediction.\nWhen reaching the 24th window there would be 0.0206 s left, so that is 6 chocolates in 0.638 s. That may be a good place to stop, but of course you could continue at least until reaching the Planck time of 5.39 x 10 -44 s. That limit will not be reached before window 162, so there are still 138 chocolates left for those last two hundredths of a second.\n1153: Proof is also about Zeno, and 1577: Advent is a very different longer running Advent calendar (but with only a finite number of windows). [ citation needed ]\n[A portion of an advent calendar shows 12 windows where the date can be seen below. The top row is cut off so you cannot see the very top of the window At the bottom there are four more windows, but only the top part can be seen, and there is no decoration visible. All the other windows have a decoration, although, you cannot see the one on the second window as it is opened more than 90 degree. The first is also opened, but not more than you can see there is a decoration. The 3rd is also open. The rest is still closed.] [A green mistletoe on red, partially open.] December 23 rd\n[A fully open window.] December 24 th 12:00 AM\n[A red and white Santa hat on green just opened.] December 24 th Noon\n[Two crossed red and white candy canes on white. From here all windows are closed.] December 24 th 6:00 PM\n[A red Christmas ball on white.] December 24 th 9:00 PM\n[A white Christmas star on red.] December 24 th 10:30 PM\n[A red Christmas heart on gren.] December 24 th 11:15 PM\n[A red Santa sleigh on white.] December 24 th 11:37:30 PM\n[A red and white Christmas sock on green.] December 24 th 11:48:45 PM\n[A green Christmas tree on red.] December 24 th 11:54:22.5 PM\n[A red and green Christmas wreath on white] December 24 th 11:57:11.25 PM\n[A red and white Christmas gift on green] December 24 th 11:58:35.63 PM\n[Below the top of four more windows where only the background colors can be seen red, white, green and then red again.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Zeno's Advent Calendar\n"}
{"id":995,"title":"Coinstar","image_title":"Coinstar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/995","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coinstar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/995:_Coinstar","transcript":"[A mischievous Cueball empties a small bag into a machine.] whirrrrrrr bzzt [Machine makes progressively less happy noises.] kachunk tshhhhhhhhhh clickclickclickclick GRIND [Machine malfunctions and shuts down.] pop beeeeeeeeeeeep! [Text below frame] Holiday tip: Coinstar does not handle chocolate coins well.\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Holiday Tip.\nChocolate coins are a popular holiday candy, and thus this is another Christmas comic . These candies are usually plain chocolate formed in the shape of coins and covered in metallic foil wrappers.\nCoinstar machines accept all your loose coins, sort them, count them, and then give you the same amount of money in paper currency, around 9% less as it says in the title text. You may find similar machines in grocery stores and shopping malls around the US and Canada.\nThese machines work by vibrating a box with a series of slots along one side, which each corresponding to the sizes of standard accepted coins. The vibrations move the coins along the different slots. If they pass through the slots the coins are then fed into a mechanism with a counterweight that's balanced to test the weight to ensure that it has captured the appropriate coin. Coins of the right size but wrong weight (such as similarly sized coins of different currencies) are dropped back out into a reject chute to be retrieved by the customer. Coins that do not fit the standard sizes also get rejected in the same way. There are also various anti-theft mechanisms that prevent coins from being counted and then retrieved. Coins that meet the programmed criteria are funneled into internal repositories and are counted towards the total.\nThe chocolate coins in the comic appear to have damaged the machine. As the only property that the candies share with actual currency may be its appearance the machine would not be designed to handle the softer material causing the machine to malfunction and create the unusual noises presented. The chocolate may have fouled the initial vibrating tabulator; it may be that the coins are getting caught in the reject chute or are fouling the scales. In any case, the anti-theft system is being triggered, causing the machine to shut down (preventing false totals from registering) and an alarm to sound.\nThe title text suggests that the machine would take its customary 9% from the total of the chocolate coins which is ironic since the reader knows that their candy has insignificant monetary value.\n[A mischievous Cueball empties a small bag into a machine.] whirrrrrrr bzzt [Machine makes progressively less happy noises.] kachunk tshhhhhhhhhh clickclickclickclick GRIND [Machine malfunctions and shuts down.] pop beeeeeeeeeeeep! [Text below frame] Holiday tip: Coinstar does not handle chocolate coins well.\n"}
{"id":996,"title":"Making Things Difficult","image_title":"Making Things Difficult","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/996","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/making_things_difficult.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/996:_Making_Things_Difficult","transcript":"[Ponytail in a doctor's coat is carrying a clipboard with lines indicating text, consulting it while Megan is sitting on a high medical table with a full body gown on. At the top there is a frame crossing over the top of the first panel with a caption:] Caption: Breast Cancer Surgery Follow-Up... Ponytail: You're looking great! Remove your top so I can check how the incision is healing. Megan: Nuh-uh.\n[Ponytail has taken her arm with the clipboard down, while Megan is holding her hand with a thumb up.] Ponytail: *Sigh* Ponytail: Do we have to do this every time? Megan: You know the rules.\n[In a frame-less panel showing only Ponytail, she searches for something in both her pockets, three sets of two small lines indicate how she moves her hands around inside them.] Ponytail (Mumbling to herself, in smaller text): This is so ridiculous...\n[Ponytail holds a purple bead necklace up in an outstretched arm. Megan begins to disrobe, opening the dress at her neck pulling with both arms as shown with three sets of two small lines.] Ponytail: Here. Megan: Woooo!\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the breast cancer surgery that Randall 's fiancee\/wife underwent, and is one of many comics about cancer he made because of this.\nThis comic is the follow up appointment after the surgery. When doctor Ponytail asks Megan to take her shirt off, she refuses until Ponytail gives her a necklace of purple beads. Younger and more boorish Mardi Gras tourists sometimes offer necklaces like this in exchange for the exposure of a person's breasts.\nMegan's line \"You know the rules\" implies that Megan has stipulated that every time she takes off her shirt for the doctor, a necklace of beads must be exchanged.\nIn the official transcript the doctor is described as an Oncologist , a doctor who works with cancer patients, and Megan\/Randall's wife is described as a Delightfully Awesome Person . It is also stated that the oncologist fake-annoyedly searches for something in pockets and that it is a Mardi Gras bead necklace she takes out.\nBelow the xkcd logo in the header at the top of the comic page there is the following text: \"Some context for the cancer comics:\" and below that a link to a blag posting regarding family-illness that talked about the real world events leading up to this comic.\nThe title text refers to a mastectomy , the surgical removal of one or both breasts. One possible treatment for breast cancer is to surgically remove the breast. After this procedure a false or prosthetic breast is often added to retain the prior physical appearance. The title text suggests this prosthesis could serve as a charging station by including the following features: a spare battery inside the prosthesis, a USB port where the nipple would normally be, and a ring of lights showing the charge level of the battery arranged around the areola (the darker circle of skin around the nipple).\nThis is one of the few comics where a character wears regular clothes, but doctor Ponytail has been seen before in 883: Pain Rating and later in 1713: 50 ccs . Megan is in both, and Cueball also in the latter.\n[Ponytail in a doctor's coat is carrying a clipboard with lines indicating text, consulting it while Megan is sitting on a high medical table with a full body gown on. At the top there is a frame crossing over the top of the first panel with a caption:] Caption: Breast Cancer Surgery Follow-Up... Ponytail: You're looking great! Remove your top so I can check how the incision is healing. Megan: Nuh-uh.\n[Ponytail has taken her arm with the clipboard down, while Megan is holding her hand with a thumb up.] Ponytail: *Sigh* Ponytail: Do we have to do this every time? Megan: You know the rules.\n[In a frame-less panel showing only Ponytail, she searches for something in both her pockets, three sets of two small lines indicate how she moves her hands around inside them.] Ponytail (Mumbling to herself, in smaller text): This is so ridiculous...\n[Ponytail holds a purple bead necklace up in an outstretched arm. Megan begins to disrobe, opening the dress at her neck pulling with both arms as shown with three sets of two small lines.] Ponytail: Here. Megan: Woooo!\n"}
{"id":997,"title":"Wait Wait","image_title":"Wait Wait","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/997","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wait_wait.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/997:_Wait_Wait","transcript":"Headlines!\nStockpiled in case Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me , does something newsworthy in 2012.\n[Series of above-the-fold newspapers follows; Each has a headline, picture in most of them, and an explanation.]\n[First row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Shoot Me [A fierce Peter Sagal in a balaclava brandishes a gun in a supermarket.] NPR's Sagal in Whole Foods hostage standoff.\n[First row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Vote For Me Peter Sagal quits race for GOP top spot [A sullen and defeated Peter Sagal surrounded by supporters admits defeat.]\n[First row, third paper.] Wait Wait Don't Judge Me Sagal opens up about his Kermit fantasy. [Stock profile images of Peter Sagal and Kermit the Frog.]\n[First row, fourth paper.] Wait Wait Don't Fire Me [Stock profile image of Peter Sagal.] Peter Sagal let go after racist tirade.\n[Second row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Cancel Me NPR axing news quiz. [NPR spokesperson delivering announcement.]\n[Second row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Interrupt Me Sagal stabs Carl Kasell in on-air dispute. [Peter Sagal mid-attack with a knife.]\n[Second row, third paper.] Wait Wait Don't Look At Me [Peter Sagal with a skin condition.] Peter Sagal's Poison Ivy Ordeal Peter Sagal: \"My 'Nam\"\n[Second row, fourth paper.] Wait Wait Don't Friend Me Peter Sagal deletes his Facebook account. [Person holding up a laptop with an \"Facebook account not found\" screen.]\n[Third row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Seduce Me How Lakshmi Singh stole Sagal's Heart. [A wistful Lakshmi Singh being left by a sullen Peter Sagal.]\n[Third row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Leave Me [A wistful Peter Sagal being left by a furious Beth Sagal.] Sagal's wife out after affair\n[Third row, third paper.] Wait Wait Don't Spray Me Police Raid Sagal's Occupy NPR protest [Scummy policeman in riot gear spraying Peter Sagal in the face point blank.]\n[Third row, fourth paper.] Wait Wait Don't Indict Me Sagal, five others named in cash-for-tote-bags scandal [Peter Sagal doing a perp walk.]\n[Fourth row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Clone Me Peter Sagal 'Outraged' over DNA harvesting. [Fiery Peter Sagal, missing a small amount of DNA, at a lectern.]\n[Fourth row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Bust Me Peter Sagal's ghost captured [Ghostbusters, careful not to cross the streams, capture the ghost of Peter Sagal.]\n[Fourth row, third paper.] Wait Wait Don't Dissect Me Snoozing Sagal nearly snuffed in autopsy snafu [Peter Sagal running away from from a very surprised pathologist.] Peter Sagal: \"I aten't dead\"\n[Fourth row, fourth  paper.] Wait Wait Don't Objectify Me Peter Sagal is more than just a piece of meat\n[Fifth row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Beatify Me [Peter Sagal shakes his fist at a picture of the pope.] Peter Sagal Rebukes Pope\n[Fifth row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Me Peter Sagal Accidentally [Peter Sagal in a blank vacant.]\n[Fifth row, third  paper.] Wait Wait Don't Speak Its Name [eyes... Eyes... AAAHHH.] Peter Sagal wakes Eldritch terror Peter Sagal:\"AAAAAAAA\"\n[Fifth row, fourth paper.] Wait Wait Even For NPR This Is A Bit Much This American Life to document the road to recovery for those who suffer the trauma of losing on Wait Wait\n","explanation":"Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me is an hour-long weekly radio news panel game show produced by Chicago Public Radio and National Public Radio . The show is hosted by playwright and actor Peter Sagal . Each episode ends with the panelists making up a potential future news story, usually with implausible \"facts\". This comic is making puns on the title of the show based on what Peter Sagal might have done that was newsworthy.\nCarl Kasell , who also served as the news anchor on Morning Edition , was the show's official judge and scorekeeper until May 2014 (after this comic was published), when he retired and was replaced by Bill Kurtis.\nThe 1st row, 4th paper may refer to the Laugh Factory Incident of 2006.\nIn the 3rd row, first paper, Lakshmi Singh is NPR's national midday newscaster.  This paper leads to the second paper on the third row, in which Sagal's wife divorces him over his affair with Singh.\nIn the 3rd row, 3rd paper is a reference to a protest at UC Davis (on the campus of University of California, Davis) protests in early 2012 in which sitting, peaceful protesters were calmly pepper-sprayed in their faces by a police officer. That spawned an internet meme of epic proportions .\nIn the 4th row, 2nd paper is a reference to the movie, Ghostbusters .\nIn the 4th row, 3rd paper is a reference to Granny Weatherwax of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels; Granny Weatherwax is a witch who carries a sign saying \" I ATEN'T DED \"(sic) when having out-of-body experiences.\nIn the 5th row, 2nd paper is a reference to another internet meme in where someone leaves out the verb in the sentence. The implication is that the verb is something bad, but which bad thing is left as an exercise to stew in the reader's mind. See the I Accidentally ___ meme for more information.\nIn the 5th row, 3rd paper is a reference to the Eldritch abomination Cthulhu, from \" The Call of Cthulhu \" by H.P. Lovecraft . He is one of the Old Ones, the Elder Gods, and is awakened by his worshipers chanting, \"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn\" (\"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.\") Hence the title, \"Wait, Wait, Don't speak its name.\"\nTwo years later another New Years comic, 1311: 2014 , took a similar look at what could happen in 2014, just as this does for 2012. Interesting enough the title of that comic (just the year it was looking at) is more related to the title of the next comic after this one, which is also a New Year comic, and the title is also just the number of the year: 998: 2012 .\nHeadlines!\nStockpiled in case Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me , does something newsworthy in 2012.\n[Series of above-the-fold newspapers follows; Each has a headline, picture in most of them, and an explanation.]\n[First row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Shoot Me [A fierce Peter Sagal in a balaclava brandishes a gun in a supermarket.] NPR's Sagal in Whole Foods hostage standoff.\n[First row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Vote For Me Peter Sagal quits race for GOP top spot [A sullen and defeated Peter Sagal surrounded by supporters admits defeat.]\n[First row, third paper.] Wait Wait Don't Judge Me Sagal opens up about his Kermit fantasy. [Stock profile images of Peter Sagal and Kermit the Frog.]\n[First row, fourth paper.] Wait Wait Don't Fire Me [Stock profile image of Peter Sagal.] Peter Sagal let go after racist tirade.\n[Second row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Cancel Me NPR axing news quiz. [NPR spokesperson delivering announcement.]\n[Second row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Interrupt Me Sagal stabs Carl Kasell in on-air dispute. [Peter Sagal mid-attack with a knife.]\n[Second row, third paper.] Wait Wait Don't Look At Me [Peter Sagal with a skin condition.] Peter Sagal's Poison Ivy Ordeal Peter Sagal: \"My 'Nam\"\n[Second row, fourth paper.] Wait Wait Don't Friend Me Peter Sagal deletes his Facebook account. [Person holding up a laptop with an \"Facebook account not found\" screen.]\n[Third row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Seduce Me How Lakshmi Singh stole Sagal's Heart. [A wistful Lakshmi Singh being left by a sullen Peter Sagal.]\n[Third row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Leave Me [A wistful Peter Sagal being left by a furious Beth Sagal.] Sagal's wife out after affair\n[Third row, third paper.] Wait Wait Don't Spray Me Police Raid Sagal's Occupy NPR protest [Scummy policeman in riot gear spraying Peter Sagal in the face point blank.]\n[Third row, fourth paper.] Wait Wait Don't Indict Me Sagal, five others named in cash-for-tote-bags scandal [Peter Sagal doing a perp walk.]\n[Fourth row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Clone Me Peter Sagal 'Outraged' over DNA harvesting. [Fiery Peter Sagal, missing a small amount of DNA, at a lectern.]\n[Fourth row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Bust Me Peter Sagal's ghost captured [Ghostbusters, careful not to cross the streams, capture the ghost of Peter Sagal.]\n[Fourth row, third paper.] Wait Wait Don't Dissect Me Snoozing Sagal nearly snuffed in autopsy snafu [Peter Sagal running away from from a very surprised pathologist.] Peter Sagal: \"I aten't dead\"\n[Fourth row, fourth  paper.] Wait Wait Don't Objectify Me Peter Sagal is more than just a piece of meat\n[Fifth row, first paper.] Wait Wait Don't Beatify Me [Peter Sagal shakes his fist at a picture of the pope.] Peter Sagal Rebukes Pope\n[Fifth row, second paper.] Wait Wait Don't Me Peter Sagal Accidentally [Peter Sagal in a blank vacant.]\n[Fifth row, third  paper.] Wait Wait Don't Speak Its Name [eyes... Eyes... AAAHHH.] Peter Sagal wakes Eldritch terror Peter Sagal:\"AAAAAAAA\"\n[Fifth row, fourth paper.] Wait Wait Even For NPR This Is A Bit Much This American Life to document the road to recovery for those who suffer the trauma of losing on Wait Wait\n"}
{"id":998,"title":"2012","image_title":"2012","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/998","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2012.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/998:_2012","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Well, it's 2012.\n[Cueball and Megan in frameless panel.] Megan: Yup. Megan: Only 354 days left until everybody abruptly stops talking about Mayans.\n[Cueball and Megan in wide panel to fit longer text content.] Cueball: Or thinking about Mayans. Cueball: Or acknowledging that huge city-building ancient American civilizations existed at all. Megan: You know what they say \u2014 those who fail to learn from history can still manage a 3.0 if they ace their other subjects.\n","explanation":"This New Year comic is in reference to the fact that the Mayans , an ancient civilization in the Americas , created a calendar that ends (or, more accurately: restarts) on December 21, 2012. This date is regarded as the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the calendar used by the Mayan culture. Knowing this, some thought that the world was going to end on that date.\nConsequently, a lot of people were talking about the Mayans, concerned that the world might end. After December 21, 2012 passed uneventfully, everyone was less concerned about the Mayans, because the world didn't end [ citation needed ] . It is worthy of note that this comic was published nearly a year before the \"significant\" date and that Randall predicted both the hype and the aftermath perfectly.\nThere is a measure of irony to be had in how the Mayans who still exist today were largely ignored by the doomsayers. \"Or acknowledging that huge city-building ancient American civilizations existed at all.\"\nIn the final frame, Megan parodies the phrase, \"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,\" applying a twist to suggest an academic context. In most American schools, a Grade Point Average is computed by assigning numeric value to each letter grade: A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, and F=0; receiving high marks (all A's) thus yields a 4.0 GPA. However, if you \"Fail to learn from History\" \u2014 that is, get a failing grade, F, and had at least 3 other classes (not an unusual course load) \u2014 you would still get a 3.0 with A's in those other classes. With a more common workload of eight courses per year, GPA as high as 3.5 can actually be reached in those circumstances. She is making the callous \u2014 if roundabout \u2014 observation that failing to grasp history, while no doubt troubling, isn't an academic show-stopper. Her comment may also be taken to suggest that people who feared the Mayan \"prediction\" of the end of the world would come to pass had failed to appropriately extrapolate from the numerous other faulty predictions of the end of the world . In fact the Mayans never actually predicted the end of the world with their calendar, those who failed to learn from history jumped to conclusions yet again.\nThe title text jokes that to make up for the lack of Mayan discussion, Randall plans to spend 2013 talking solely about Mayans. For obvious reasons [ citation needed ] , people would probably get sick of this very quickly, hence his comment that his relationships might not fare well. Thankfully, as of 2014, not a single published xkcd comic of 2013 featured any Mayans, so we're pretty sure this promise wasn't kept.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Well, it's 2012.\n[Cueball and Megan in frameless panel.] Megan: Yup. Megan: Only 354 days left until everybody abruptly stops talking about Mayans.\n[Cueball and Megan in wide panel to fit longer text content.] Cueball: Or thinking about Mayans. Cueball: Or acknowledging that huge city-building ancient American civilizations existed at all. Megan: You know what they say \u2014 those who fail to learn from history can still manage a 3.0 if they ace their other subjects.\n"}
{"id":999,"title":"Cougars","image_title":"Cougars","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/999","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cougars.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/999:_Cougars","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a computer; a child is standing behind.] Cueball: Whoa, ever seen Wikipedia's list of people who were attacked and killed by cougars? Cueball: Crazy how many of them were kids who were just playing outside their houses.\n[Caption below the panel:] Reason #58 I should never have children: My love of learning and sharing knowledge about the world.\n","explanation":"Randall is giving reason number 58 why he should not have children. We see fictitious \"father Cueball \" talking about the Wikipedia entry for \" List of fatal cougar attacks in North America \". As stated, many of the victims were young children near their home.\nIf you tell a child about something dangerous, but without giving them necessary context to feel protected from it, you are likely to cause nightmares, sleeplessness, or other fear-related issues [ citation needed ] . In most, if not all, cases this would be considered bad parenting, hence a person who enjoys doing so should perhaps not have children.\nThe title text demonstrates that not only is Cueball sharing factual information, he is intentionally adding hypothetical detail (e.g. \"yellow eyes glinting in your window\") to make the danger seem even worse. The child is unlikely to agree that learning this is fun. Incidentally, a panther is not an actual species but rather a term for either leopards or jaguars with melanistic conditions. Mountain lions themselves are rarely called panthers.\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer; a child is standing behind.] Cueball: Whoa, ever seen Wikipedia's list of people who were attacked and killed by cougars? Cueball: Crazy how many of them were kids who were just playing outside their houses.\n[Caption below the panel:] Reason #58 I should never have children: My love of learning and sharing knowledge about the world.\n"}
{"id":1000,"title":"1000 Comics","image_title":"1000 Comics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1000","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1000_comics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1000:_1000_Comics","transcript":"[1000 characters, numerous of which have appeared previously in other comics, are arranged to create the number \"1000\". Two more people stand in the foreground commenting on the formation. There are several comments amongst these 1000 but here are only written the text that can be read from the small version shown above.] 1000 Megan: Woooo! Cueball: Wow\u2014Just 24 to go until a big round-number milestone!\n","explanation":"This comic is the 1000th comic shown on xkcd containing 1000 characters from previous comics arranged in the shape of the number \"1000\". Megan is clearly excited as she screams \"Woooo!\", but Cueball , in true nerd fashion, thinks in base-2, saying that there are just 24 to go until a \"big round-number milestone\". The joke is that during programming, base-2 is used more often than base-10, making milestones powers of two rather than powers of 10. Where 1000 is a round number in base 10 (10 3 ), 1024 is a round number in base 2 (2 10 ). Binary is also referenced in the \"Connect the Dots\" puzzle, explained below.\nIn the 1000 comic Randall included 404: Not Found , see why in the explanation for this comic. This comic strengthens the fact that Randall did indeed count 404 as a \"real\" comic.\nEach of the characters\/drawings is numbered on this page:\nAbout 2\/3rds are described on this page:\nThere is a \"Connect the Dots\" puzzle hidden within the comic. However, rather than using the conventional decimal system numbering which would start with 1 and count up, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...  This \"Connect the Dots\" puzzle starts with 0 as a programmer would do and counts up in binary numerical order - 0,1,10,11,100,101,110,111,1000,1001 and back to 0. The revealed image forms the shape of a heart. This fits well with the title text where feeling less alone can equate to feeling loved.\n\n[1000 characters, numerous of which have appeared previously in other comics, are arranged to create the number \"1000\". Two more people stand in the foreground commenting on the formation. There are several comments amongst these 1000 but here are only written the text that can be read from the small version shown above.] 1000 Megan: Woooo! Cueball: Wow\u2014Just 24 to go until a big round-number milestone!\n"}
{"id":1001,"title":"AAAAAA","image_title":"AAAAAA","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1001","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/aaaaaa.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1001:_AAAAAA","transcript":"[Cueball clinging onto bed sheets while being dragged away by centrifugal force.] Cueball: AAAAAAAA\n[Megan similarly clinging on.] Megan: AAAAAAAA\n[Overhead shot of both spinning around a plain white circle in a room with other accoutrements.] Both: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA\n[Cueball is sitting on a couch watching TV and Megan is standing behind the couch, with a frame overlapping the top of the panel containing a heading.] Heading: Earlier that day... Cueball: Haha, check it out\u2013This guy's mansion has an actual rotating bed. Megan: You know, I bet it wouldn't be too hard to build one of those...\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball get the idea to build a rotating bed from a TV show like Cribs , which documents the decadent homes of the wealthy.\nRotating beds are typically used for sexual activity and variety, but Cueball and Megan have made theirs rotate far too fast, like a merry-go-round , to be useful for this purpose.\nThe last panel is a flashback to earlier that day, when they see a rotating bed on television. Megan comments that a rotating bed does not seem difficult to build.\nThe title text implies that the high speed of rotation is not accidental as we may have assumed from the comic, but intentional, due to Megan and Cueball's erroneous belief that the rotation itself is supposed to turn them on, not the sexual activity they would engage in on the moving bed. A turning bed is also a pun with \"turned-on.\"\n[Cueball clinging onto bed sheets while being dragged away by centrifugal force.] Cueball: AAAAAAAA\n[Megan similarly clinging on.] Megan: AAAAAAAA\n[Overhead shot of both spinning around a plain white circle in a room with other accoutrements.] Both: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA\n[Cueball is sitting on a couch watching TV and Megan is standing behind the couch, with a frame overlapping the top of the panel containing a heading.] Heading: Earlier that day... Cueball: Haha, check it out\u2013This guy's mansion has an actual rotating bed. Megan: You know, I bet it wouldn't be too hard to build one of those...\n"}
{"id":1002,"title":"Game AIs","image_title":"Game AIs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1002","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/game_ais.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1002:_Game_AIs","transcript":"[A diagram with a caption above the diagram. The left column describes various levels of skill for the most capable computers in decreasing performance against humans.  The right side lists games in each particular section, in increasing game difficulty.  There are labels denoting the hard and easy ends of the diagram.]\nCaption: Difficulty of Various Games for Computers\nTop of Diagram: Easy\nSolved Computers can play perfectly\nSolved for all possible positions\nTic-tac-toe Nim Ghost (1989) Connect Four (1995)\nSolved for starting positions\nGomoku Checkers (2007)\nComputers can beat top humans\nScrabble CounterStrike Beer Pong (UIUC robot) Reversi Chess\nFebruary 10, 1996: First win by computer against top human November 21, 2005: Last win by human against top computer\nJeopardy\nComputers still lose to top humans (but focused R&D could change this)\nStarCraft Poker Arimaa Go\nComputers may never outplay humans\nSnakes and Ladders Mao Seven Minutes in Heaven Calvinball\nBottom of Diagram: Hard\n","explanation":"To understand the comic, you have to understand what the games are, so let's go (but first, the years in parenthesis in the comic are the year that the game was mastered by a computer):\nThese games are considered \"solved\", meaning the ideal maneuver for each game state (Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four) or each of the limited starting positions (Checkers) has already been calculated. Computers aren't so much playing as they are recalculating the list of ideal maneuvers. The same could be said for the computer's human opponent, just at a slower pace.\nBlack plays first, and players alternate in placing a stone of their color on an empty intersection. The winner is the first player to get an unbroken row of five stones horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.\nThe below games have not been \"solved\". Some of them may be solved some day, but the large number of possible moves has so far prevented this from being done. Others cannot be \"solved\" due to the influence of randomness or the existence of multiple \"ideal\" maneuvers for each position. That said, a computer's faster reaction time, higher degree of consistency in making the right decision, and reduced risk of user error make the computer objectively better than the human opponent in nearly all situations.\nHere's the video of the University of Illinois robot mentioned in the comic.\nThe note mentions \"the first game to be won by a chess-playing computer against a reigning world champion under normal chess tournament conditions\", in the Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov match on February 10, 1996, and the Ponomariov vs Fritz game in the Man vs Machine World Team Championship on November 21, 2005, considered the \"last win by a human against top computer\".\nKen Jennings, mentioned in the title text, is a famous Jeopardy champion who was beaten by Watson , an IBM computer. This was an exhibition match featuring Jennings, Brad Rutter, and Watson that took place in February 2011.\nThe below games are incredibly difficult to \"solve\" due to the near-infinite number of possible positions. Computers built in the early 21st century would take years to calculate a single \"ideal\" move. Worse, the human opponent has the ability to \"bluff\"; that is, to make a bad move, thus baiting the computer into a trap. Complex algorithms have been devised to make moves in a reasonable timeframe, but so far they are all highly vulnerable to bluffing. As mentioned in the comic, focused research and development is working on refining these algorithms to play the games better.\nAs the game is focused on human interaction, there's not a whole lot a modern computer can do in the closet. It would need some kind of robotic body in order to interact with its human partner, and emotion engines that could feel pleasure and displeasure in order to make decisions. The title text claims that Honda Motor Company has invented a \" RealDoll \" (sex toy shaped like a mannequin) with rudimentary Seven Minutes in Heaven capabilities, but they pale in comparison to a human's (specifically, Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings).\nAnd finally\nCalvinball is a game played by Calvin and Hobbes as a rebellion against organized team sports; according to Hobbes, \"No sport is less organized than Calvinball!\" Calvinball was first introduced to the readers at the end of a 1990 storyline involving Calvin reluctantly joining recess baseball. It quickly became a staple of the comic afterwards. The only hint at the true creation of the game ironically comes from the last Calvinball strip, in which a game of football quickly devolves into a game of Calvinball. Calvin remarks that \"sooner or later, all our games turn into Calvinball,\" suggesting a similar scenario that directly led to the creation of the sport. Calvin and Hobbes usually play by themselves, although in one storyline Rosalyn (Calvin's baby-sitter) plays in return for Calvin doing his homework, and plays very well once she realizes that the rules are made up on the spot. The only consistent rules state that Calvinball may never be played with the same rules twice, and you need to wear a mask, no questions asked. Scoring is also arbitrary, with Hobbes at times reporting scores of \"Q to 12\" and \"oogy to boogy.\" The only recognizable sports Calvinball resembles are the ones it emulates (i.e., a cross between croquet, polo, badminton, capture the flag, and volleyball.) Long story short, the game is a manifestation of pure chaos and the human imagination, far beyond the meager capabilities of silicon and circuitry, at least so far. The closest thing you could possibly get is having an AI automatically generate rules on the fly, similar to something like the currently-existent AI Dungeon or a similarly robust text algorithm; but even still, the computer would be unable to act upon these new rules in that state.\n[A diagram with a caption above the diagram. The left column describes various levels of skill for the most capable computers in decreasing performance against humans.  The right side lists games in each particular section, in increasing game difficulty.  There are labels denoting the hard and easy ends of the diagram.]\nCaption: Difficulty of Various Games for Computers\nTop of Diagram: Easy\nSolved Computers can play perfectly\nSolved for all possible positions\nTic-tac-toe Nim Ghost (1989) Connect Four (1995)\nSolved for starting positions\nGomoku Checkers (2007)\nComputers can beat top humans\nScrabble CounterStrike Beer Pong (UIUC robot) Reversi Chess\nFebruary 10, 1996: First win by computer against top human November 21, 2005: Last win by human against top computer\nJeopardy\nComputers still lose to top humans (but focused R&D could change this)\nStarCraft Poker Arimaa Go\nComputers may never outplay humans\nSnakes and Ladders Mao Seven Minutes in Heaven Calvinball\nBottom of Diagram: Hard\n"}
{"id":1003,"title":"Adam and Eve","image_title":"Adam and Eve","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1003","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/adam_and_eve.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1003:_Adam_and_Eve","transcript":"[Adam, portrayed as Cueball, has his palms out.] Adam: It's Adam and Eve , not Abel and Eve!!\n[Caption below panel:] Adam was freaked out by what he'd just walked in on.\n","explanation":"This comic is a take on the anti-homosexual refrain, used often at those sorts of rallies \"It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve\". This refrain is used to support the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman because in the Old Testament God created a man and a woman to start the human race. Adam and Eve are in the story in the Bible of the creation ( Book of Genesis ), and are the first pair of humans, created by God.\nAdam walks in on Eve having sexual relations with Abel , who is Adam's son, which turns the joke from a homosexual one into an incest one.\nIn the title text, Adam continues that he would have preferred walking in on Abel and Steve. As well as probably no longer needing to be irked at the surprise involvement of his presumed spouse, and mother to his son, Adam seems not to have a homophobic prejudice (or less of one). Unlike those who use the contemporary version of the phrase. What's more, he doesn't personally dislike Steve in general and possibly considers him one of the better partners available at this time.\n[Adam, portrayed as Cueball, has his palms out.] Adam: It's Adam and Eve , not Abel and Eve!!\n[Caption below panel:] Adam was freaked out by what he'd just walked in on.\n"}
{"id":1004,"title":"Batman","image_title":"Batman","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1004","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/batman.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1004:_Batman","transcript":"[One panel, depicting three wavy circles. The one in the center is slightly larger, and the ones on either side are higher up. Their edges are touching.]\n[The left circle has Bruce Wayne in the foreground, with Alfred in the background.] Alfred: Know your limits, Master Wayne. Bruce: A man dressed like a bat has no limits.\n[The center circle has a close-up on Batman in his cowl.] Off-screen: What the hell are you? Batman: I'm a man dressed like a bat.\n[In the right circle is The Joker.] Off-screen: What do you propose? Joker: It\"s simple \u2014 we kill a man dressed like a bat.\n[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Whenever anyone says \"Batman,\" I mentally replace it with \"a man dressed like a bat.\"\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the comic book and movie character Batman , who is actually wealthy playboy Bruce Wayne, as we see on the left being referenced as \"Master Wayne\" by his butler Alfred. Batman, in contrast to Superman and other comic book heroes, has no superpowers. The name \"Batman\" suggests that he is a man who is part-bat, or has bat-like powers, but his only actual connection to bats is that he wears a bat-themed costume -- hence the description, \"a man dressed like a bat.\" Thus, when Batman's connection to bats is made explicit, he loses a lot of his mystique.\nThe stick figure representations of Batman and his nemesis, the Joker, are shown from three different movie scenes of the Dark Knight Trilogy, the most recent Batman films at the time of this comic. The middle scene comes from Batman Begins , whilst the two flanking scenes are from its sequel The Dark Knight . In each scene the name \"Batman\" is substituted with the accurate but embarrassing description \"a man dressed like a bat.\" In this way, Randall is pointing out that Batman commands a lot of respect and fear considering that all he is is a man in a costume.\nThen in the title text, Randall expresses his fear that Christopher Nolan (the director\/producer\/writer of the latest Batman trilogy) was going to kill Batman off in the then-upcoming movie Dark Knight Rises . Of course, Randall substitutes for \"Batman\" as in the comic. This causes a grammatical ambiguity which Randall points out where the \"dressed like a bat\" could apply to the \"man\" or to Nolan. A similar ambiguity explicitly discussed in the title text of 1087: Cirith Ungol .\nThere have been several comics using substitutions , but this may have been the first.\n[One panel, depicting three wavy circles. The one in the center is slightly larger, and the ones on either side are higher up. Their edges are touching.]\n[The left circle has Bruce Wayne in the foreground, with Alfred in the background.] Alfred: Know your limits, Master Wayne. Bruce: A man dressed like a bat has no limits.\n[The center circle has a close-up on Batman in his cowl.] Off-screen: What the hell are you? Batman: I'm a man dressed like a bat.\n[In the right circle is The Joker.] Off-screen: What do you propose? Joker: It\"s simple \u2014 we kill a man dressed like a bat.\n[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Whenever anyone says \"Batman,\" I mentally replace it with \"a man dressed like a bat.\"\n"}
{"id":1005,"title":"SOPA","image_title":"SOPA","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1005","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sopa.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1005:_SOPA","transcript":"[A completely black panel with white text. all non-capital letter, in square brackets:] [don't censor the web.]\n[Hidden in the background, and only visible under certain conditions, is an inverted Black Hat (i.e. white), with the text from above still visible written across his forehead. Above him is the first line of text, and then he speaks the next line:] A message from sysadmins everywhere: Black Hat: Seriously, don't screw with DNS.  If you break this internet, we are not making you a new one.\n[Below the black panel is a visible message from Randall written normally black on white in xkcd style.] I make my living drawing xkcd, which wouldn't have been possible if people hadn't been able to freely share my comics with each other all over the internet. As a copyright holder and small business owner, I oppose SOPA and PIPA. [Randall Munroe's signature, with a little drawing of Cueball on one of the tails. Below that a last message.] Randall Munroe See the links below to learn more.\nLearn more: EFF : One-page guide to SOPA ( archived ) reddit : A technical overview of the SOPA and PIPA bills ( archived ) DYN : How these bills would break DNS ( archived ) EFF : Free speech on the web ( archived )\n\nAct : Contact information for US elected officials ( archived )\n","explanation":"SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA, the Protect IP Act , were a pair of controversial bills being considered by the United States government in late 2011 and early 2012. The bills contained the ability for the US government to deny American internet users access to certain sites at a judge's request. These would be activated if the government could prove to a court that a site was primarily used to harbor illegally distributed copyrighted goods, such as video games, music, and TV shows.\nMany people considered this to be censorship and were concerned that this could instead be used by larger corporations to squelch smaller competing sites who may not have the resources to challenge a \"take-down notice\" in court, should judges continually agree with the larger corporation.\nAs the bills gained infamy online, many popular websites and web comics participated in a mass protest on January 18, 2012, to announce their displeasure with the bill in an attempt to convince the House of Representatives to reverse their judgement, which had at the time been considered likely to pass if drafted.\nThis was xkcd's participation in the protest. Randall discusses below the black panel that if he was having better copyright protection with these new acts then he would never have gotten this popular since his fans would not have been allowed to distribute the comic gaining him new followers.\nIn typical xkcd fashion, this comic contains several layers of depth that may not be immediately obvious to the casual observer. In this instance, the apparently solid-black region contains a hidden image revealed with simple brightness+contrast manipulation (or simply loading the image into Microsoft Paint and using the fill tool), with Black Hat saying \"A message from sysadmins everywhere: Seriously, don't screw with DNS. If you break this internet, we are not making you a new one.\" This stems from the fact that sites could be ordered taken down by allowing manipulation of the DNS itself, effectively making a site completely disappear from the web. This court-enforced DNS manipulation was considered by many technical professionals to damage the underlying structure of the internet, as well as potentially criminalizing recent work to improve its security.\n\nThe title text referred to a common theme across protesting sites: a blackout of the internet . Sites such as Google changed to a black background, while Wikipedia prevented access by linking their sites to a black page with white text explaining their participation. On the day of the protest, xkcd was similarly \"blacked out,\" with all comics redirecting to this one. The humor is that Randall has jokingly misinterpreted this \"blackout\" to mean that he should instead protest by \"getting totally blacked out \" \u2013 i.e. by drinking so much alcohol that he gets drunk , passes out , and wakes up the next day having no memory of his actions or experiences during his drunkenness; despite Randall's good intentions, this would probably not help the protest against SOPA\/PIPA.\nAfter the protest, the bills were postponed from being drafted on January 20, 2012.\n[A completely black panel with white text. all non-capital letter, in square brackets:] [don't censor the web.]\n[Hidden in the background, and only visible under certain conditions, is an inverted Black Hat (i.e. white), with the text from above still visible written across his forehead. Above him is the first line of text, and then he speaks the next line:] A message from sysadmins everywhere: Black Hat: Seriously, don't screw with DNS.  If you break this internet, we are not making you a new one.\n[Below the black panel is a visible message from Randall written normally black on white in xkcd style.] I make my living drawing xkcd, which wouldn't have been possible if people hadn't been able to freely share my comics with each other all over the internet. As a copyright holder and small business owner, I oppose SOPA and PIPA. [Randall Munroe's signature, with a little drawing of Cueball on one of the tails. Below that a last message.] Randall Munroe See the links below to learn more.\nLearn more: EFF : One-page guide to SOPA ( archived ) reddit : A technical overview of the SOPA and PIPA bills ( archived ) DYN : How these bills would break DNS ( archived ) EFF : Free speech on the web ( archived )\n\nAct : Contact information for US elected officials ( archived )\n"}
{"id":1006,"title":"Sloppier Than Fiction","image_title":"Sloppier Than Fiction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1006","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sloppier_than_fiction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1006:_Sloppier_Than_Fiction","transcript":"[A douchebag with a goatee and a bad haircut talks to Cueball while holding a drink.] Goatee Guy: Even though it technically wasn't cheating, she dumped me anyway! So I tell Bret, and he's like \"She sounds just like my crazy ex.\" And I was like, \"dude, what was her name?\" and it was the same girl. Goatee Guy: I swear, if they made my life into a movie, no one would believe it. Cueball: Yeah, though mostly because of the poorly-written dialogue and unlikeable main character.\n","explanation":"This comic is basically Cueball stuck in a conversation with Goatee Guy, presumably at a bar or party as Goatee Guy is carrying a drink. From Cueball's reaction it's clear he thinks Goatee Guy is a terrible person, a judgment that Goatee's story seems to verify. In it, he complains about being dumped by his ex-girlfriend for an act that he describes as \"not technically cheating.\" Whatever he did, his description makes it clear that it was close enough to cheating to make any technical distinctions meaningless, and that he is selfishly looking for loopholes to justify his bad behavior. He also describes his ex as \"crazy,\" even though her reaction to his bad behavior seems perfectly reasonable.\nThe point of his story is that his friend Bret says Goatee's ex resembles a \"crazy ex\" of his own, and it turns out they are talking about the same girl. This coincidence strikes Goatee as so unlikely that audiences would find it implausible in a fictional setting. This is a variation on the adage \"truth is stranger than fiction\", which means that sometimes real life can lead to some unexpected ups and downs that would not even make sense in a fictional representation in a book or a movie.\nCueball, however, counters that if Goatee's life was a movie, audiences would reject it for different reasons: \"poorly-written dialogue and unlikeable main character.\" By this he is referring to Goatee's boorish behavior in his story, the equally boorish manner of speaking, and his incorrect belief that his story is all that noteworthy or implausible in the first place (it's a mild coincidence at best, and hardly \"stranger than fiction\").\nIn the title text, Roger Ebert was a famous American movie critic , who could be quite caustic when reviewing a movie he disliked. \"Directionless\" and \"unwatchable,\" along with Cueball's initial complaints of \"poorly-written dialogue and unlikeable main character,\" are common criticisms of bad movies, but have entirely different and much more personally cutting connotations when applied to a human being.\n[A douchebag with a goatee and a bad haircut talks to Cueball while holding a drink.] Goatee Guy: Even though it technically wasn't cheating, she dumped me anyway! So I tell Bret, and he's like \"She sounds just like my crazy ex.\" And I was like, \"dude, what was her name?\" and it was the same girl. Goatee Guy: I swear, if they made my life into a movie, no one would believe it. Cueball: Yeah, though mostly because of the poorly-written dialogue and unlikeable main character.\n"}
{"id":1007,"title":"Sustainable","image_title":"Sustainable","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1007","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sustainable.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1007:_Sustainable","transcript":"[A large two-axis scatterplot graph with a caption below. The y-axis displays percentages on a logarithmic scale from 0.000001% to 1,000%, and is labeled \"Frequency of use of the word \"sustainable\" in US English text, as a percentage of all words, by year. Source: Google NGrams.\" The x-axis displays years from 1950 to 2140, and is labeled \"Year\". Plotted data points show a high linear correlation (effectively exponential due to being a log scale), ranging from approximately 0.000005% in 1960 to approximately 0.003% in 2012. A linear trend line is drawn through the data points, and is extrapolated to the end of the graph. Four points on this trend line are marked and labled:]\n(2012, ~0.003%): Present Day (2036, ~0.03%): 2036: \"Sustainable\" occurs an average of once per page (2061, ~0.5%): 2061: \"Sustainable\" occurs an average of once per sentence (2109, 100%): 2109: All sentences are just the word \"sustainable\" over and over.\n[The trend line continues past the year 2109, exceeding 100% and breaking up into question marks.]\n[Caption below the panel:] The word \"sustainable\" is unsustainable.\n","explanation":"This is a simple scatterplot showing how often the word \"sustainable\" has been used in English texts in the US each year. As can be seen, the y-axis is given a logarithmic scale, meaning that the apparently linear trend is actually exponential. Randall humorously attempts to extend the graph to the point the frequency exceeds 100% about a century from now, which is obviously impossible (hence the quip that the word's usage is itself \"unsustainable\").\nThe use of the word \"sustainable\" has been increasing as people become more aware of the steadily increasing use of nonrenewable resources and need to ensure that the Earth's resources do not become totally exhausted, through sustainable development. Sustainable development refers to the practice of using resources that simultaneously aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present time, but also for generations to come.\nAs Randall somewhat depressingly mentions in the title text, the ~100 years that it will supposedly take for the word \"sustainable\" to become unsustainable is actually a lot longer than most of our nonrenewable resources will last on the Earth. The idea that all of the Earth's coal, oil, natural gas, etc. that has built up over the past millions of years may be completely gone within the century is unsettling.\nMore realistically, the actual use of \"sustainable\" is likely to be logistic rather than exponential growth. A logistic curve describes a trend that at first behaves exponentially, but then tapers off and reaches a cap. This is demonstrated by the Google ngrams graph of word usage for \"sustainable\" . Logistic growth is commonly used to model data that naturally increases exponentially but has a limiting factor, which in this case is the meaningfulness of text consisting entirely or mostly of a single word.\nThis comic was used in the 2018 book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker as it discusses the concept of sustainable energy.\nExtrapolation of data has also appeared in the following comics 605: Extrapolating , 1204: Detail and 1281: Minifigs . And yes, \"sustainable\" has appeared in every paragraph so far.\n[A large two-axis scatterplot graph with a caption below. The y-axis displays percentages on a logarithmic scale from 0.000001% to 1,000%, and is labeled \"Frequency of use of the word \"sustainable\" in US English text, as a percentage of all words, by year. Source: Google NGrams.\" The x-axis displays years from 1950 to 2140, and is labeled \"Year\". Plotted data points show a high linear correlation (effectively exponential due to being a log scale), ranging from approximately 0.000005% in 1960 to approximately 0.003% in 2012. A linear trend line is drawn through the data points, and is extrapolated to the end of the graph. Four points on this trend line are marked and labled:]\n(2012, ~0.003%): Present Day (2036, ~0.03%): 2036: \"Sustainable\" occurs an average of once per page (2061, ~0.5%): 2061: \"Sustainable\" occurs an average of once per sentence (2109, 100%): 2109: All sentences are just the word \"sustainable\" over and over.\n[The trend line continues past the year 2109, exceeding 100% and breaking up into question marks.]\n[Caption below the panel:] The word \"sustainable\" is unsustainable.\n"}
{"id":1008,"title":"Suckville","image_title":"Suckville","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1008","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/suckville.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1008:_Suckville","transcript":"[Megan is kneeling on the floor, playing a card game.] Megan: Hah! Megan: Welcome to Suckville\u2013population: You . [In a frame-less panel, Cueball is sitting on the floor opposite her, also playing the game.] Cueball: Why are you using 2000 census data? Cueball: That's an old figure. [Megan turns around from the game to look at her laptop, which is sitting on the floor behind her.] Megan: I couldn't find Suckville in the 2010 census. Cueball: Huh? It's right there in SF-1 table P1. Megan: Oh. So it is. [Megan turns back to Cueball, who is looking at his cards.] Megan: Well, then. Megan: Welcome to Suckville\u2013population: 83. Cueball: Much better.\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are playing a card game (probably Dominion ) and Megan whips a common insult, a play on the word \"suck\" that adds a typical city name suffix to the end of it. Other variations are: \"Losertown\", \"Lameville\", etc.\nThe phrase is originally based on the ubiquitous signage you see along American roads that say \"Welcome to Town X \u2014 Population Y\".\nThen, since Cueball one-ups Megan by indicating there is a city by that name, she can only resign herself to the fact that her smack talk did not work. Since Cueball knows where Suckville can be found in the census data, it's likely that he has received this insult in the past (maybe even from Megan) and searched through the census data to prepare a comeback for this time.\nThe title text informs the reader that Suckville is classified as part of the Detroit area despite not being located there. Detroit, of course, is the quintessential example of a city so run down, it might as well really be named \"Suckville\", or include a district of that name. In fact, the city only recently (2013) declared itself bankrupt.\n(Fun fact: looking in the US Census Suckville is \"corrected\" to Saukville, Wisconsin , which is indeed not particularly close to Detroit, Michigan . However the population of Saukville in the 2010 census is given as 4451 for the village, and 1755 for the surrounding town municipality.)\n[Megan is kneeling on the floor, playing a card game.] Megan: Hah! Megan: Welcome to Suckville\u2013population: You . [In a frame-less panel, Cueball is sitting on the floor opposite her, also playing the game.] Cueball: Why are you using 2000 census data? Cueball: That's an old figure. [Megan turns around from the game to look at her laptop, which is sitting on the floor behind her.] Megan: I couldn't find Suckville in the 2010 census. Cueball: Huh? It's right there in SF-1 table P1. Megan: Oh. So it is. [Megan turns back to Cueball, who is looking at his cards.] Megan: Well, then. Megan: Welcome to Suckville\u2013population: 83. Cueball: Much better.\n"}
{"id":1009,"title":"Sigh","image_title":"Sigh","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1009","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sigh.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1009:_Sigh","transcript":"[Cueball is standing behind Megan, who's sitting and watching TV.] Cueball: Hey, is that Downtown Abbey ? What town is it in the downtown of, anyway? Megan: *siiiiiiigh* Cueball: \u2014 girl look at that body.\n[Caption below the panel:] We should thank LMFAO for giving us such a great way to respond to exasperated sighs.\n","explanation":"Cueball is mispronouncing the name of the British TV show, also available in the US, Downton Abbey . Mispronouncing the title as DownTOWN Abbey causes Megan to sigh because it is such a common and stupid mistake to fans of the show. Mispronouncing the title changes the meaning from being about the eponymous Yorkshire Country Estate (pronounced doun -tuhn ab -ee \/\u02ccda\u028ant\u0259n \u02c8\u00e6bi\/) to being about a monastery in the midst of a large city (incorrectly pronounced doun-toun ab -ee \/\u02c8da\u028an\u02ccta\u028an \u02c8\u00e6bi\/). In the UK the CBD, the Central Business District (the big middly bit), is simply called the \"city centre\".\nLMFAO is a ubiquitous group in the US on radio, TV and even strange commercials with rodents riding in cars with their song, Party Rock Anthem . However, this comic is a reference to another one of their songs, \"Sexy And I Know It.\" The relevant lyrics are:\nsigh \u2026 girl look at that body sigh \u2026 girl look at that body sigh \u2026 girl look at that body ah-ah, I work out!\nThe title text is referring to the multiple uses of that lyric throughout the song, creating a steady rhythm.\n[Cueball is standing behind Megan, who's sitting and watching TV.] Cueball: Hey, is that Downtown Abbey ? What town is it in the downtown of, anyway? Megan: *siiiiiiigh* Cueball: \u2014 girl look at that body.\n[Caption below the panel:] We should thank LMFAO for giving us such a great way to respond to exasperated sighs.\n"}
{"id":1010,"title":"Etymology-Man","image_title":"Etymology-Man","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1010","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/etymology_man.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1010:_Etymology-Man","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are facing each other, with wavy lines around them to indicate they are experiencing the shaking of an earthquake.] Cueball: Earthquake! Ponytail: We should get to a higher ground - There could be a tidal wave.\n[A frame-less panel with Cueball and Ponytail, with Cueball taking a pedantic pose and raising a finger.] Cueball: You mean a tsunami. \"Tidal wave\" means a wave caused by tides.\n[A crash is heard, followed by Etymology-Man flying in while wearing a cape.] Etymology-man: You know, that doesn't add up. Cueball and Ponytail: Etymology-man!\n[Etymology-man takes a pedantic pose.] Etymology-man: What does \"tidal wave\" mean? There are waves caused by tides, but they're \"tidal bores\", and they're not cataclysmic. It can refer to the daily tide cycle, but that's obviously not what people mean when they say \"a tidal wave hit\". It's been obvious for centuries that these waves come from quakes. So why \"tidal\"?\n[Panel zooms in on Etymology-man.] Etymology-man: Remember that until 2004, there weren't any clear photos or videos of tsunamis. Some modern writers even described them rearing up and breaking like surfing waves [sic] Of course, in 2004 and 2011, it was made clear to everyone that a tsunami is more like a rapid, turbulent, inrushing tide - exactly what historical accounts describe.\n[Water begins to rush in. Etymology-man keeps his pedantic pose.] Etymology-man: Maybe those writing about Lisbon in 1755 used \"tidal wave\" not out of scientific confusion, but because it described the wave's form \u2014 a description lost in our rush to expunge \"tidal wave\" from English.\n[The water is now waist-deep. Etymology-man continues to drone on, but the others start to panic.] Etymology-man: \"Tsunami\" is now the standard, and I'm not trying to change that. But let's be a tad less giddy about correcting \"tidal wave\" - especially when \"tsunami\" just means \"harbor wave\", which is hardly...\n","explanation":"This became the first comic in a two comic series about the Etymology-Man . The second following two comics later in 1012: Wrong Superhero .\nThis comic is a take on the traditional appearance of a super hero when a disaster strikes. In this case, Etymology-Man arrives, who apparently has the power of Etymology \u2014 the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. As Etymology-Man is explaining the history of the words \" tsunami \" and \"tidal wave\", the water starts rising around them. As the waters continue to rise, he continues to only explain the words, rather than attempting to save them as a superhero should. The comic is a dig at academics who prefer to talk about issues when taking action is more appropriate.\nAlso, the title text is a play on how useless Aquaman is (perceived to be) compared to other superheroes, as his powers \u2014 breathing underwater, speed swimming, and communicating with sea life \u2014 are very difficult for writers to make relevant. Indeed, in the case of a flood, Aquaman and his aquatic allies would be able to assist with evacuations.\nThe irony of the situation comes from the fact that Etymology-Man also has the power of flight and could in fact save Cueball and Ponytail if he was not so busy talking about the origin of the word \"tidal wave\".\nInexplicable is the fact that Cueball and Ponytail both know exactly who this \"superhero\" is, and ergo presumably realize that what he is telling them is useless, but they don't even attempt to get to safety. There are few possible explanations for this: perhaps they are simply accepting their fate instead of trying to escape, or even that learning cool word facts takes precendence over saving their own lives, or they have been distracted by Etymology-Man's lecture and were caught by surprise by the fast tidal wave.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are facing each other, with wavy lines around them to indicate they are experiencing the shaking of an earthquake.] Cueball: Earthquake! Ponytail: We should get to a higher ground - There could be a tidal wave.\n[A frame-less panel with Cueball and Ponytail, with Cueball taking a pedantic pose and raising a finger.] Cueball: You mean a tsunami. \"Tidal wave\" means a wave caused by tides.\n[A crash is heard, followed by Etymology-Man flying in while wearing a cape.] Etymology-man: You know, that doesn't add up. Cueball and Ponytail: Etymology-man!\n[Etymology-man takes a pedantic pose.] Etymology-man: What does \"tidal wave\" mean? There are waves caused by tides, but they're \"tidal bores\", and they're not cataclysmic. It can refer to the daily tide cycle, but that's obviously not what people mean when they say \"a tidal wave hit\". It's been obvious for centuries that these waves come from quakes. So why \"tidal\"?\n[Panel zooms in on Etymology-man.] Etymology-man: Remember that until 2004, there weren't any clear photos or videos of tsunamis. Some modern writers even described them rearing up and breaking like surfing waves [sic] Of course, in 2004 and 2011, it was made clear to everyone that a tsunami is more like a rapid, turbulent, inrushing tide - exactly what historical accounts describe.\n[Water begins to rush in. Etymology-man keeps his pedantic pose.] Etymology-man: Maybe those writing about Lisbon in 1755 used \"tidal wave\" not out of scientific confusion, but because it described the wave's form \u2014 a description lost in our rush to expunge \"tidal wave\" from English.\n[The water is now waist-deep. Etymology-man continues to drone on, but the others start to panic.] Etymology-man: \"Tsunami\" is now the standard, and I'm not trying to change that. But let's be a tad less giddy about correcting \"tidal wave\" - especially when \"tsunami\" just means \"harbor wave\", which is hardly...\n"}
{"id":1011,"title":"Baby Names","image_title":"Baby Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1011","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/baby_names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1011:_Baby_Names","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk, thinking with his hand on his chin, his other hand holding a pen over a piece of paper. Megan stands behind him, looking over his shoulder, also with her hand on her chin.]\n[Above the drawing is the list they are writing by hand.]\nNames for daughter\nPonzi Eeemily Fire Fire Chipotla Astamouthe Eggsperm [sound of record scratch] Parsley Hot'n'Juicy Ann Ovari Friendly Sean (pronounced \"seen\") Joyst\n","explanation":"This comic is a list of comically terrible baby names invented by Randall. It may relate to his other comics about why he shouldn't be allowed to have access to babies.\nThis is a list of the names with a short description:\nA further analysis of baby names is presented by Randall in the Blag post \" The Baby Name Wizard \".\nRenesmee (from the title text) is the name of Renesmee Cullen , who is the baby born in the book and movie Breaking Dawn to parents Edward and Bella. Edward and Bella get \"Renesmee\" from an amalgamation of the names of Bella's mother, Ren\u00e9e, and Edward's adoptive mother, Esme. Randall 's point is that all those names are terrible, but (arguably) not nearly as terrible as the name Renesmee.\n[Cueball sits at a desk, thinking with his hand on his chin, his other hand holding a pen over a piece of paper. Megan stands behind him, looking over his shoulder, also with her hand on her chin.]\n[Above the drawing is the list they are writing by hand.]\nNames for daughter\nPonzi Eeemily Fire Fire Chipotla Astamouthe Eggsperm [sound of record scratch] Parsley Hot'n'Juicy Ann Ovari Friendly Sean (pronounced \"seen\") Joyst\n"}
{"id":1012,"title":"Wrong Superhero","image_title":"Wrong Superhero","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1012","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wrong_superhero.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1012:_Wrong_Superhero","transcript":"[A giant praying mantis attacks a team of scientists, along with its legion of smaller-but-still-unusually-large mantises. Two of the scientists fight back, with a gun and a baseball bat respectively, while a third is in the mantis' clutches, held aloft by his foot, his goggles falling off his face. Bullets whiz by the giant mantis' head and a fourth scientist hides behind a desk, on which rests a microscope and an Erlenmeyer flask. A man in a cape approaches the hiding scientist.] Etymology-man: Ah, no\u2014you wanted ENTO mology-Man, spelled with an \"N\". See, it's from the Greek entomon , meaning \"insect,\" which is itself the neuter form of entomos , meaning \"segmented\" or... BLAM BLAM BLAM\n","explanation":"This is the second of the two comics in the series about the Etymology-Man . The first came two comics before with 1010: Etymology-Man .\nThe superhero, Etymology-Man, returns. And just like in his first appearance, Etymology-Man is explaining the origination of words instead of actually helping. Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.\nIn this comic, a group of scientists is in a lab, fighting off a giant mantis and some smaller, but still larger than normal praying mantises. One Cueball is firing a gun and Ponytail is brandishing a baseball bat, while the giant mantis grabs one Cueball by the leg, dangling him upside down. Behind the table, another Cueball is listening to Etymology Man speak. The joke here is that the scientists called the wrong hero for help. They want Entomology-Man because they are fighting a giant praying mantis and an army of smaller praying mantises (which are nonetheless much larger than a typical praying mantis - compared to the size of the people in this comic the smaller mantises appear to be 8-12 inches long). Entomology is the study of insects. Instead of calling Entomology-Man, who could probably help with fighting off the mantises, they have accidentally called Etymology-Man, due to the similarities in their names. Etymology-Man can only explain the origin of words, making him useless in this current situation.\nIn the title text, we find out the scientists accidentally call another superhero focused on the story of Adam and Eve in the Biblical book of Genesis. This is probably Etiology -Man (the study of causation and attribution), but might be Ontology -Man (the study of being and existence), Ethology -Man (the study of human character, with a focus on its formation and evolution), or (as a pun) Adam-ology-Man.  Or perhaps Anthropology -Man or Anthropogeny -Man.\n[A giant praying mantis attacks a team of scientists, along with its legion of smaller-but-still-unusually-large mantises. Two of the scientists fight back, with a gun and a baseball bat respectively, while a third is in the mantis' clutches, held aloft by his foot, his goggles falling off his face. Bullets whiz by the giant mantis' head and a fourth scientist hides behind a desk, on which rests a microscope and an Erlenmeyer flask. A man in a cape approaches the hiding scientist.] Etymology-man: Ah, no\u2014you wanted ENTO mology-Man, spelled with an \"N\". See, it's from the Greek entomon , meaning \"insect,\" which is itself the neuter form of entomos , meaning \"segmented\" or... BLAM BLAM BLAM\n"}
{"id":1013,"title":"Wake Up Sheeple","image_title":"Wake Up Sheeple","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1013","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wake_up_sheeple.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1013:_Wake_Up_Sheeple","transcript":"[Cueball yells into a megaphone.] Cueball: Your government has turned against you! Corporations control your every thought! Cueball: Open your eyes!\n[Zoomed in to Head-on view of Cueball.] Cueball: Wake up, sheeple! Wake up, sheeple! Cueball: WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!\n[In a frame-less panel, Cueball takes the megaphone away from his mouth.] RUMBLE\n[A half-sheep half-man creature rises through the cracking earth, holding aloft a gnarled staff.] B-A-A-A-A-A...\n[Close-up on the sheep-man's eye.] Sheep-Man: TEN THOUSAND YEARS WE SLUMBERED... NOW WE RIIIIIIIISE BAAAAAA\n[A clearly upset Megan goes up to Cueball, hands held out in front of her plaintively.] Megan: OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! Cueball: What? But I didn't\u2014 Out-of-frame #1: He awoke the Sheeple! Out-of-frame #2: Heaven forgive us! Out-of-frame #3: All is lost!\n","explanation":"Cueball is going through the traditional street-protester refrain about the government having control over our lives and shouts \" wake up , sheeple!\" through a megaphone. Sheeple is a portmanteau of sheep and people used as a derisive term to describe people who thoughtlessly wander through their daily lives going exactly where they are \"herded\" by the powers that be.\nHowever, in this comic, the Sheeple are humanoid sheep-men who have slumbered beneath the Earth for ten thousand years, and whom Cueball has inadvertently awoken with his repeated mantra (much as in 555: Two Mirrors ). The Sheeple appear to be some kind of eldritch abomination who will destroy the human race, and judging from Megan's reaction and the off-panel voices, Cueball seems to be the only one previously unaware of their existence.\nThe title text says the humans will be led \"like lambs to the slaughter\" which is a phrase that appears many times in older texts, the Bible as an example. The phrase means that someone or something would be led to its destruction without it thinking to escape from the disaster. The Sheeple are likely to take it amiss, because it indicates the uncaring frequency with which humans kill juvenile sheep.\nSee more Sheeple-related comics at Category:Sheeple .\n[Cueball yells into a megaphone.] Cueball: Your government has turned against you! Corporations control your every thought! Cueball: Open your eyes!\n[Zoomed in to Head-on view of Cueball.] Cueball: Wake up, sheeple! Wake up, sheeple! Cueball: WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!\n[In a frame-less panel, Cueball takes the megaphone away from his mouth.] RUMBLE\n[A half-sheep half-man creature rises through the cracking earth, holding aloft a gnarled staff.] B-A-A-A-A-A...\n[Close-up on the sheep-man's eye.] Sheep-Man: TEN THOUSAND YEARS WE SLUMBERED... NOW WE RIIIIIIIISE BAAAAAA\n[A clearly upset Megan goes up to Cueball, hands held out in front of her plaintively.] Megan: OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! Cueball: What? But I didn't\u2014 Out-of-frame #1: He awoke the Sheeple! Out-of-frame #2: Heaven forgive us! Out-of-frame #3: All is lost!\n"}
{"id":1014,"title":"Car Problems","image_title":"Car Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1014","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/car_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1014:_Car_Problems","transcript":"[Megan stands in front of a projection on a screen and points with a stick to the picture shown of a blue car with yellow head lights standing on a gray road with green grass behind. She has an audience consisting of Cueball standing in front of Black Hat who is sitting and leaning back in a chair and Danish standing behind him.] Megan: Attention, please. Megan: This is a photo of my car as of two weeks ago.\n[Zoom in on Megan only, still in front of the screen, but pointing on a new projection of the same car engulfed in red and yellow flames, with lots of black smoke above the flames.] Megan: And this is my car as I found it this morning. Megan: Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?\n[Zoom in on her audience who all ponders, Cueball with a hand on his chin, Black Hat sitting up straight and Danish scratching the back of her head.]\n[Zoom out to all four in a frame-less panel, seen from the side so the screen with the color picture is seen almost from the side. It is possible to see that there is colors on the screen but not what the picture looks like. All three respond to Megan, who is standing with her pointer down; Cueball now has his hands down, Black Hat still sits straight, and Danish now has a hand to her chin.] Cueball: The white balance, for one. Danish: Focus is a bit too close. Black Hat: The chromatic aberration suggests you bought your camera because it had \"The most megapixels\".\n[Zoom in on Megan only, who violently swishes her pointing stick up towards the screen behind her (off panel). The other three are outside the panel to the right, and two of them makes comments. It is not possible to say which of the three speaks.] Megan: The car is on fire! Off panel voice 1: Maybe you should use the insurance money to get a better camera. Off panel voice 2: Yeah.\n","explanation":"Megan's car appears to have combusted at some point while she left it unattended. Suspecting her friends and acquaintances Cueball , Black Hat and Danish of perhaps having something to do with it, she gathers them in front of a couch and draws attention to the fact that something is just a little bit wrong with the two juxtaposed images she shows them. When she asks What is wrong with this picture , they all three take this question literally and start critiquing the picture quality, and not the subject, feigning complete ignorance about the car being on fire. When Megan exasperatedly tells them what is wrong with the picture \u2014that her car is on fire!\u2014 they continue to act evasive by telling her that she should buy a better camera. But at least here they acknowledges that the car is on fire, as they suggest she uses the insurance money (from the car) to buy this better camera.\nThe title text and the dialogue suggest that Megan's friends aren't being evasive to avoid telling her the truth, they are just doing exactly what they were told. They patiently and correctly describe what is wrong with the picture. If Megan had wanted to know what was wrong with her car, then she should have asked that directly. Her friends are just being friendly when they offer to help her create the scene [again] so that she can shoot the picture correctly. And the \"again\" proves that they did set the car on fire, and they are not trying to deny this. But for sure they are messing with her, both by setting her car on fire, deliberately understanding her question in another way than she intended, and then even suggesting that they will set her new car on fire as well.\nAs for the particular details of the digital photography terms mentioned:\nWhile this comic focuses on misunderstandings by people viewing pictures this could be also a reference to the battery fire in a stored, damaged Chevrolet Volt automobile. During a side-impact safety test, which the car passed with a five star rating at Popular Mechanics , its high voltage battery pack was damaged. Part of the test procedure includes rolling the vehicle over after the impact to check for leaking fluids; during the rollover check, the vehicle electronics were flooded with coolant. The damaged vehicle was then put into storage where its high voltage battery remained energized; three weeks later the battery spontaneously caught fire, potentially due to corrosion, and destroyed the car. GM subsequently made design changes to address the causes of the fire.\nMegan's car also caught fire in 1693: Oxidation , but this time she knew for sure who did it, so no direct relation to this comic, except the poor luck Megan has with her cars.\n[Megan stands in front of a projection on a screen and points with a stick to the picture shown of a blue car with yellow head lights standing on a gray road with green grass behind. She has an audience consisting of Cueball standing in front of Black Hat who is sitting and leaning back in a chair and Danish standing behind him.] Megan: Attention, please. Megan: This is a photo of my car as of two weeks ago.\n[Zoom in on Megan only, still in front of the screen, but pointing on a new projection of the same car engulfed in red and yellow flames, with lots of black smoke above the flames.] Megan: And this is my car as I found it this morning. Megan: Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?\n[Zoom in on her audience who all ponders, Cueball with a hand on his chin, Black Hat sitting up straight and Danish scratching the back of her head.]\n[Zoom out to all four in a frame-less panel, seen from the side so the screen with the color picture is seen almost from the side. It is possible to see that there is colors on the screen but not what the picture looks like. All three respond to Megan, who is standing with her pointer down; Cueball now has his hands down, Black Hat still sits straight, and Danish now has a hand to her chin.] Cueball: The white balance, for one. Danish: Focus is a bit too close. Black Hat: The chromatic aberration suggests you bought your camera because it had \"The most megapixels\".\n[Zoom in on Megan only, who violently swishes her pointing stick up towards the screen behind her (off panel). The other three are outside the panel to the right, and two of them makes comments. It is not possible to say which of the three speaks.] Megan: The car is on fire! Off panel voice 1: Maybe you should use the insurance money to get a better camera. Off panel voice 2: Yeah.\n"}
{"id":1015,"title":"Kerning","image_title":"Kerning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1015","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kerning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1015:_Kerning","transcript":"[There is a poorly-kerned sign on the side of a building. Two Cueball-like guys are standing in front of it. The first guy has his hands in fists up in front of him and a black cloud over his head.] C\u2004I\u200aT\u200aY\u2003O\u200aF\u200aF\u2006I\u200aC\u2004E\u200aS First guy: Argh! Second guy: What? [Caption below the frame:] If you really hate someone, teach them to recognize bad kerning.\n","explanation":"In typography, kerning refers to the spacing between consecutive letters in printed material or the process of adjusting said spacing. Bad kerning is thus text that has so much space between letters of one word that it appears to be two words, or by including so little space between letters that they run together. A common kerning issue is an \"r\" and an \"n\" together looking like an \"m\". (This latter case has resulted in the slang term \" keming \" for this type of kerning.) Extreme behavior of bad kerning can lead to humorous or inappropriate text.\nProper kerning is more difficult than it sounds. If one were to imagine each letter as existing inside a rectangle, \"A\" and \"V\", for example, happen to be negatives of one another space-wise, and as a result if an \"A\" was simply set alongside a \"V\" (or vice versa) where the rectangles do not overlap, the spacing would end up looking unusually large. Thus, \"AV\" and \"VA\" sequences have to be specially programmed to overlap slightly.\nKerning has been an issue in typography since the early era of printing presses and movable type but has taken on new challenges with digital printing. Typical non-designers using basic word processing software don't pay much attention to kerning. A good graphic designer, however, can compensate for bad kerning by individually adjusting the spacing between problem letters. People who specialize in graphic design or layout (and, thus, who are exposed to digital text on a regular basis) can become hyper-sensitive to bad kerning, seeing it in signs or other printed materials prepared by people without such sensitivity to bad kerning.\nIn the comic, the kerning in the sign is badly done: the spacing between C and I (in \"City\"), between C and E (in \"Offices\"), and even slightly between F and I (also in \"Offices\") is inconsistent. The space between the C and E is almost as wide as the space between the words. One character is clearly frustrated while the other character doesn't notice the problem at all.\nThe comic explains that once a person learns what good kerning is, they will get irritated by shoddy kerning in the future. And since it is very irritating to be annoyed every time this happens, Randall suggest that you teach this to someone you really hate. Unfortunately, the comic itself has also taught us to be annoyed. Th a nks, R an da ll.\nKerning was mentioned in the title text of 590: Papyrus , a comic about the font Papyrus. This is a comic in the \" My Hobby \" series, and the suggestion of teaching someone about kerning to annoy them sounds like it could become a new hobby for Randall.\nIncidentally, Google Search features an Easter egg regarding this very topic: searching for the word \" kerning \" causes every instance of that word to be badly overspaced. On the other hand, searching for \" keming \" will cause every instance to be even more badly underspaced.\nThe title text is written by Randall explaining that as he was writing this comic about kerning, he was very self-conscious of his own handwriting. The act of thinking about kerning (and likely, the act of drawing an example of such bad kerning) made him aware of it in his own writing, and in fact, he kerns the caption oddly, with, for example, the T in \"them\" hanging over the top of the H, but this is a common quirk of his. He probably hates the person who made him aware of this, although it gave him this idea for a comic (that if he is correct, will make a lot of people hate him now).  This aspect suggests a parallel with 972: November , which also suggests the idea of annoying a person by calling their attention to something which usually does not merit it.\n[There is a poorly-kerned sign on the side of a building. Two Cueball-like guys are standing in front of it. The first guy has his hands in fists up in front of him and a black cloud over his head.] C\u2004I\u200aT\u200aY\u2003O\u200aF\u200aF\u2006I\u200aC\u2004E\u200aS First guy: Argh! Second guy: What? [Caption below the frame:] If you really hate someone, teach them to recognize bad kerning.\n"}
{"id":1016,"title":"Valentine Dilemma","image_title":"Valentine Dilemma","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1016","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/valentine_dilemma.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1016:_Valentine_Dilemma","transcript":"[Cueball standing with hand on chin.] Cueball: Flowers seem so... trite. Something homemade? Easy to look halfhearted.\n[A frame-less panel of Megan sitting at a computer, also with hand on chin.] Megan: Valentine's day is a corporate construct. Megan: But hard to opt out of. Megan: I don't want to be a corporate tool or an inconsiderate jerk.\n[Cueball pacing.] Cueball: How do I fight clich\u00e9? I could get her a gift on a different day. Cueball: But what am I proving?\n[Megan leaning back with stapler in hand.] Megan: It's such a contrived ritual. But maybe rituals are necessary social glue.\n[Zoomed in on Cueball panicking.] Cueball: Forty presents. No, none! No, give her five items and then steal two from her. Cueball: OK, breathe. Keep it together.\n[Zoomed in on Megan sweating, still holding the stapler.] Megan: And what if he gets me something and I don't reciprocate? Megan: Prisoners dilemma! Megan: AAAAAAAAAA!!\n[Cueball and Megan talking. Cueball is holding a basket and a jar of hammers. Megan's hand is stapled to her face.] Cueball: I got you Easter candy and a jar of hammers. Megan: I panicked and stapled my hand to my face. Cueball: We overthought this. Megan: Yes.\n","explanation":"Both Megan and Cueball are agonizing over what to get each other for Valentine's Day. Both of them seem to consider the holiday unnecessary and artificial, but worry that failure to celebrate it might upset their romantic partner. Because they're considering this separately, neither seems to realize that the other has a similar response. This results in both panicking and doing weird things.\nAt the heart of the way they are acting is the prisoner's dilemma . This is a canonical example of a game analyzed in game theory , which shows why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interest to do so. Wikipedia has a great example of prisoner's dilemma, which illustrates it very well:\nTwo members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge, but they have enough to convict both on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:\nIf A and B each betray the other, each of them serves two years in prison If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve three years in prison (and vice versa) If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve one year in prison (on the lesser charge).\nIn this way, both Cueball and Megan are kept separate, each not knowing what the other is going to do for Valentine's Day, in what the comic title terms the Valentine Dilemma. Both do weird things for Valentine's Day, which ends up being the perfect result to the Valentine Dilemma, as both end up with the same level of weirdness and don't go for the grand gesture.\nThe title text combines the two dilemma scenarios in an absurd juxtaposition, with the reader (\"you\") choosing from the Valentine's Day gift-no gift dilemma and the other person choosing to betray the reader in an armed-robbery case (which might be why they are testifying against you in the first place).\nThe Prisoner's Dilemma has been referenced before, in 696: Strip Games .\n[Cueball standing with hand on chin.] Cueball: Flowers seem so... trite. Something homemade? Easy to look halfhearted.\n[A frame-less panel of Megan sitting at a computer, also with hand on chin.] Megan: Valentine's day is a corporate construct. Megan: But hard to opt out of. Megan: I don't want to be a corporate tool or an inconsiderate jerk.\n[Cueball pacing.] Cueball: How do I fight clich\u00e9? I could get her a gift on a different day. Cueball: But what am I proving?\n[Megan leaning back with stapler in hand.] Megan: It's such a contrived ritual. But maybe rituals are necessary social glue.\n[Zoomed in on Cueball panicking.] Cueball: Forty presents. No, none! No, give her five items and then steal two from her. Cueball: OK, breathe. Keep it together.\n[Zoomed in on Megan sweating, still holding the stapler.] Megan: And what if he gets me something and I don't reciprocate? Megan: Prisoners dilemma! Megan: AAAAAAAAAA!!\n[Cueball and Megan talking. Cueball is holding a basket and a jar of hammers. Megan's hand is stapled to her face.] Cueball: I got you Easter candy and a jar of hammers. Megan: I panicked and stapled my hand to my face. Cueball: We overthought this. Megan: Yes.\n"}
{"id":1017,"title":"Backward in Time","image_title":"Backward in Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1017","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/backward_in_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1017:_Backward_in_Time","transcript":"When I have a boring task to get through \u2014 a three-hour lecture, a giant file download, or a long term point goal in fitocracy \u2014 I use this formula to convert the percentage completed (p) into a date:\nT=(Current Date) - (e^(20.3444*p^3+3) - e^3) years\nWhen the task is 0% done, it gives today's date, and as I make progress, I move further and further back in time\n(inverse given in lighter colors) Inverse: p = sqrt((ln(T+e^3)-3)\/20.3444)\n[Line Graph explaining the correlation between completion percentages and temporal deltas. 0% = now (Date of comic is 2012-02-14T00:00-0500, approx. 1329195600 UNIX) 10% = September 2011 20% = 2008 30% = 1997 40% = 1958 50% = 1776 60% = 405 AD 70% = 22,000 years ago 80% = 671,000 years ago 90% = 55 million years ago 100% = 13.8 billion years ago ]\nIt moves slowly through the first few years, then steadily accelerates. I tuned the formula so the time spent in each part of the past is loosely proportional to how well I know it. This means I hit familiar landmarks with each bit of progress, giving me a satisfying sense of movement.\n[The following are panels detailing completion percentages, correlated time periods, and notable events from this time period.]\n7.308% December 18, 2011 Around this time: Kim Jong-Il dies. US leaves Iraq.\n31.12% February 1995 Around this time: Windows 95 debuts. OJ found not guilty.\n47.91% 1844 Around this time: Rubber vulcanized, bicycle invented, wrench patented.\n70.33% 24,000 years ago Around this time: Caves painted, ceramic art made. Neanderthals extinct.\n90.42% 68 million years ago Around this time: First flowering plants.  Chicxulub impact kills off most dinosaurs.\n100% 13.76 billion years ago Around this time: Universe begins. First stars ignite.\nDownload complete.\n[Cueball watches a download progress on a laptop in amazement and happiness.  Megan stands nearby and looks at Cueball with a bemused posture.] Cueball: Swoosh! Watching all that time blur past is such a rush! Megan: So...you've tried to make an extreme sport out of... waiting . Cueball: Swoosh!\n","explanation":"Cueball \/ Randall creates this formula which helps him wait for long stretches of time which goes increasingly faster into the past as more time goes by, which gives him the effect of looking like the time goes by quickly.  Which assists in the waiting process.\nAs far as the actual math is concerned, the formula is an exponential function (i.e. the variable appears in the exponent). The effect that the function grows faster and faster as p grows, is due to T(p) being exponential. More precisely, when you repeatedly add some constant to the exponent, you will repeatedly multiply some (other) constant with the value of the function. Compare how \"slow\" a value grows by adding even high values (1, 1001, 2001, 3001, 4001, 5001\u2026) and how fast it grows by multiplying even low values (1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000\u2026)\nNow, the function has to be adjusted so that, as Randall put it, \"the time spent in each part of the past is loosely proportional to how well I know it.\" The most important adjustment is putting p to the power of three. That lowers the amount added to the exponent for low values (0.1\u00b3=0.001, 0.2\u00b3=0.008, i.e. only 7\/1000 have been added for 10% workflow) and increases the amount for high values (0.8\u00b3=0.512, 0.9\u00b3=0.729, i.e. more than 1\/5 has been added for 10% workflow). That means the recent past will pass even slower and the historic past even faster than it already does by choosing an exponential function.\nThe remaining adjustments are technical. The coefficient in front of p\u00b3 adjusts the constant by which the result will be multiplied while adding some constant to p, while it also roughly ensures that p=1 yields the lifetime of the universe. The 3 added to the product in the exponent further adjusts the actual values of the power without touching the slope (the multiplicative constant). In the parentheses, e\u00b3 is subtracted to put the time to 0 when p=0. Otherwise the function would start approx. 20 yrs and 1 month ago. For bigger p, this offset does not matter much. Imagine subtracting 20 yrs from the lifetime of the universe!\nFinally, the result is subtracted from the current date for aesthetical reasons. The formula could tell you \"20 yrs ago\", or it could read \"February 1992\". Randall decided the latter would be better.\nThere is actually a mathematical error in this comic; the inverse function in grey writing off at the bottom right of the main formula involves a square root, when the actual inverse of Randall's main function would involve a cube root.  In addition, this function does not contain the current date, meaning that T, in the inverse, refers to how long ago a point in time was, rather than the point in time itself.  When the T in the inverse is 20, it means that the date referenced by T is 20 years ago.\nThe punchline \"Swoosh!\" is about how fast the last few percents of Cueball's download happen in \"such a rush\". For most humans waiting for a download to complete tends to become really boring and progress would instead seem to get slower and slower.\n(Also, the workout website, Fitocracy has been mentioned previously in xkcd.)\nNote that as of the time that this page was last cached, the comic was uploaded at 14.278499285807% progress.\nWhen I have a boring task to get through \u2014 a three-hour lecture, a giant file download, or a long term point goal in fitocracy \u2014 I use this formula to convert the percentage completed (p) into a date:\nT=(Current Date) - (e^(20.3444*p^3+3) - e^3) years\nWhen the task is 0% done, it gives today's date, and as I make progress, I move further and further back in time\n(inverse given in lighter colors) Inverse: p = sqrt((ln(T+e^3)-3)\/20.3444)\n[Line Graph explaining the correlation between completion percentages and temporal deltas. 0% = now (Date of comic is 2012-02-14T00:00-0500, approx. 1329195600 UNIX) 10% = September 2011 20% = 2008 30% = 1997 40% = 1958 50% = 1776 60% = 405 AD 70% = 22,000 years ago 80% = 671,000 years ago 90% = 55 million years ago 100% = 13.8 billion years ago ]\nIt moves slowly through the first few years, then steadily accelerates. I tuned the formula so the time spent in each part of the past is loosely proportional to how well I know it. This means I hit familiar landmarks with each bit of progress, giving me a satisfying sense of movement.\n[The following are panels detailing completion percentages, correlated time periods, and notable events from this time period.]\n7.308% December 18, 2011 Around this time: Kim Jong-Il dies. US leaves Iraq.\n31.12% February 1995 Around this time: Windows 95 debuts. OJ found not guilty.\n47.91% 1844 Around this time: Rubber vulcanized, bicycle invented, wrench patented.\n70.33% 24,000 years ago Around this time: Caves painted, ceramic art made. Neanderthals extinct.\n90.42% 68 million years ago Around this time: First flowering plants.  Chicxulub impact kills off most dinosaurs.\n100% 13.76 billion years ago Around this time: Universe begins. First stars ignite.\nDownload complete.\n[Cueball watches a download progress on a laptop in amazement and happiness.  Megan stands nearby and looks at Cueball with a bemused posture.] Cueball: Swoosh! Watching all that time blur past is such a rush! Megan: So...you've tried to make an extreme sport out of... waiting . Cueball: Swoosh!\n"}
{"id":1018,"title":"Good Cop, Dadaist Cop","image_title":"Good Cop, Dadaist Cop","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1018","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/good_cop_dadaist_cop.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1018:_Good_Cop,_Dadaist_Cop","transcript":"[Two police officers, a bald male and a Ponytail, both wearing peaked caps with white emblems, are standing in front of a window in a wall, with an electric socket in the bottom right corner. They look through the window into an interrogation chamber holding the handcuffed suspect Hairy, who is sitting on a chair. A lamp with the bulb beneath the shade hangs over Hairy. The lamp is lit as shown by lines indicating the lamp shines light.] Male officer: All right, let's try Good Cop, Dadaist Cop.\n[The male police officer is seated in front of Hairy on another chair holding a hand with palm up in front of him. Hairy has his cuffed hands in his lap and his hair is in disarray.] Male officer: Look, you're a good guy. We can work this out. Hey, lemme get us some coffee.\n[In a slim frame-less panel the male officer leaves and Ponytail enters carrying a rolled up paper in her hand.]\n[Ponytail walks in holding the folded out paper out in one hand while pointing at it with the other hand. It is a document of indeterminate contents, but there are both text and figures on it. She threatens Hairy who pulls his leg up under him and hold his cuffed hand up in front of him leaning back away from her while three drops of sweat fly of the top of his head.] Ponytail: See this? It's Mark Zuckerberg's mortgage. Ponytail: So why is it written in Church Latin?\n[Ponytail physically rattles Hairy's head holding it in both hands, lines around his heads and below her elbow show the movement. Hairy has his hands straight in front of him.] Ponytail: WHY ARE MY BONES SO SMALL? Hairy: What's WRONG with you?! Ponytail: What's wrong with ART?\n","explanation":"This comic is a play on the well known Good Cop\/Bad Cop (where one interrogator is nice and friendly and the other is mean and intimidating) police interrogation strategy and the artistic movement Dadaism .\nDadaism is an artistic movement which by its definition is irrational. The movement embraces the free flow of unreasoned thought and prizes nonsense and rejection of established norms. As such, the entire concept of \"Good Cop, Dadaist Cop\" could be considered a dadaist concept in itself.\n\"Good Cop\/Bad Cop\" is a psychological tactic that may be employed during joint questioning or interrogation. The interrogators isolate the suspect, then one of the interrogators acts aggressively and threatens the suspect (the \"bad cop\") and the other acts friendly and helpful in comparison, offering the suspect reassurance and protection from the bad cop if they co-operate (the \"good cop\").  If successful, it deceives the suspect into believing they must choose to trust one of the interrogators and the suspect chooses to co-operate with the good cop, or merely complies out of fear of the bad cop.\nThe comic starts with the \"Good Cop\", the male police officer, and the \"Dadaist Cop\", Ponytail , working out their plan to interrogate the suspect, Hairy . After the Good Cop makes a few statements, intended to build trust with Hairy, and leaves to get coffee, Ponytail enters the interrogation and starts asking Hairy absurd questions. Hairy quickly becomes agitated, and questions what is wrong with Ponytail. Ponytail responds \"What's wrong with ART?\", which could suggest she believes the interrogation is artwork and should not be questioned. On the other hand, actual responses would break the Dadaism pattern.\nGood Cop\/Bad Cop hinges on the suspect's fear and distrust of the intentions of the bad cop; thankfully for the police, Ponytail's \"Dadaist Cop\" seems to be a successful Bad Cop too, judging by the suspect's fear of her irrational, unpredictable, and potential crazy behavior (not to mention loud and aggressive mannerisms).\nThe title text builds on the joke as by asking a suspect to give the whereabouts of the money in a dadaist manner, which would be completely useless in finding it.  Such a statement could be used as a confession though.\n[Two police officers, a bald male and a Ponytail, both wearing peaked caps with white emblems, are standing in front of a window in a wall, with an electric socket in the bottom right corner. They look through the window into an interrogation chamber holding the handcuffed suspect Hairy, who is sitting on a chair. A lamp with the bulb beneath the shade hangs over Hairy. The lamp is lit as shown by lines indicating the lamp shines light.] Male officer: All right, let's try Good Cop, Dadaist Cop.\n[The male police officer is seated in front of Hairy on another chair holding a hand with palm up in front of him. Hairy has his cuffed hands in his lap and his hair is in disarray.] Male officer: Look, you're a good guy. We can work this out. Hey, lemme get us some coffee.\n[In a slim frame-less panel the male officer leaves and Ponytail enters carrying a rolled up paper in her hand.]\n[Ponytail walks in holding the folded out paper out in one hand while pointing at it with the other hand. It is a document of indeterminate contents, but there are both text and figures on it. She threatens Hairy who pulls his leg up under him and hold his cuffed hand up in front of him leaning back away from her while three drops of sweat fly of the top of his head.] Ponytail: See this? It's Mark Zuckerberg's mortgage. Ponytail: So why is it written in Church Latin?\n[Ponytail physically rattles Hairy's head holding it in both hands, lines around his heads and below her elbow show the movement. Hairy has his hands straight in front of him.] Ponytail: WHY ARE MY BONES SO SMALL? Hairy: What's WRONG with you?! Ponytail: What's wrong with ART?\n"}
{"id":1019,"title":"First Post","image_title":"First Post","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1019","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/first_post.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1019:_First_Post","transcript":"[Single panel showing a bar graph with two gray vertical bars, a dollar amount above each bar, the vertical axis on the left side with tick marks every $250,000, and the horizontal axis at the bottom with a descriptive label below each bar under the axis.  The first bar is much taller than the second.]\n[First bar:] Amount: $1,500,000 Label: Cost to buy an ad on every story on a major news site every day until the election\n[Second bar:] Amount: $200,000 Label: Cost to pay five college students $20\/hour to camp the site 24\/7 and post the first few comments the moment a story goes up, giving you the last word in every article and creating an impression of peer consensus\n[Caption below the panel:] The problem with posting comments in the order they're submitted\n","explanation":"Many news websites allow users to post comments on an article. The intention is that users can debate the stance(s) or implication(s) made by the article. On most sites, comments are displayed in chronological order. This puts the oldest comments at the top and newest at the bottom.\nThere are many pitfalls to allowing comments, but this comic refers to one in particular: most users are too busy to read more than just the top few comments. Therefore, if you were able to control the content of those comments, your opinions would be the ones that the majority of users read. If you pay people to do nothing but read the site, you ensure that they will be the first ones to see the article and that their comments (that you pay them to write) will be at the top of the page. In this scenario, the comments being posted appear to convey a particular political belief. The advantage of this is, according to Randall , that it would be much cheaper to employ a college student to perform that task than pay a website for an advertisement. Also, the fact that it is a comment posted by another reader would make it seem as though the opinion was coming from the general population and not a politician or company, as an advertisement would imply. And $20\/hour was (and as of this writing still is) significantly higher than the minimum wage , so you'd have no trouble finding willing participants among college students (who are often broke).\nThis comic is a continuation of 937: TornadoGuard which stated \"the problem with star ratings\". Apparently, every possible comment ordering policy has its own problems.\nThe title text refers to systems like Reddit's conversation threading which allow users to vote comments up or down and to sort them by the resulting \"karma score\" (total up-votes minus total down-votes). The same problem persists to some extent: after a few comments are posted and some votes are cast, the handful of comments having received the highest scores among the first dozen of so will receive far better chances at being seen and voted on than comments posted later, and will solidify their places in a positive feedback loop. In this way, a few persistent voices can still dominate the discussion, contrary to the claim in the title text, thus creating irony.\nThe comic's title refers to a once-common form of online posturing where the first user to see the article will comment \"First post\" or even just \"First\". The intent is that everyone else see that they were there first and, therefore, must be somehow better than you. This is referred to in both 269: TCMP and 1258: First .\nSince this comic's publication several news sites have elected to remove all comments, in part to prevent a few voices dominating the conversation .\n[Single panel showing a bar graph with two gray vertical bars, a dollar amount above each bar, the vertical axis on the left side with tick marks every $250,000, and the horizontal axis at the bottom with a descriptive label below each bar under the axis.  The first bar is much taller than the second.]\n[First bar:] Amount: $1,500,000 Label: Cost to buy an ad on every story on a major news site every day until the election\n[Second bar:] Amount: $200,000 Label: Cost to pay five college students $20\/hour to camp the site 24\/7 and post the first few comments the moment a story goes up, giving you the last word in every article and creating an impression of peer consensus\n[Caption below the panel:] The problem with posting comments in the order they're submitted\n"}
{"id":1020,"title":"Orion Nebula","image_title":"Orion Nebula","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1020","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/orion_nebula.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1020:_Orion_Nebula","transcript":"[Cueball stands behind a lectern decorated with the initials of the International Astronomical Union. There is a banner above him that also says 'International Astronomical Union,' decorated with small stars.] Cueball: Welcome to IAU Symposium #279.\n[Side view of Cueball standing on a podium behind the lectern] Cueball: We are no strangers to controversy, and we will not shy away from the tough issues. Cueball: Which brings us to the subject at hand:\n[A projection of the Orion constellation appears behind Cueball with a white arrow superimposed on the image pointing at the area between Orion's legs. Symposium attendees are off-screen to the bottom and right of the panel.] Cueball: It's time to talk about the fact that Orion clearly has a dong. Attendee #1 (off-screen): It's hard to miss. Attendee #2 (off-screen): We could keep telling people it's a sword. Attendee #3 (off-screen): C'mon, no one's buying that anymore.\n","explanation":"The Orion nebula is a diffuse nebula situated south of the three stars that compose Orion's Belt in the Orion constellation . In terms of the comic, it is the middle \"star\" in the sword\/dong of Orion. Dong is an American slang word for penis. The star appears fuzzy to sharp-eyed observers, and the nebulosity is obvious through binoculars or a small telescope.\nWhen the speaker says \"We are no strangers to controversy\" he is probably referring to Pluto 's demotion from planet to a dwarf planet \/ plutoid . It could also be a reference to Rick Astley's song \"Never gonna give you up\", the original line is \"We're no strangers to love\".\nThe title text is a quip about how small and off-kilter the hips are in Orion the constellation compared to the rest of its body.\n[Cueball stands behind a lectern decorated with the initials of the International Astronomical Union. There is a banner above him that also says 'International Astronomical Union,' decorated with small stars.] Cueball: Welcome to IAU Symposium #279.\n[Side view of Cueball standing on a podium behind the lectern] Cueball: We are no strangers to controversy, and we will not shy away from the tough issues. Cueball: Which brings us to the subject at hand:\n[A projection of the Orion constellation appears behind Cueball with a white arrow superimposed on the image pointing at the area between Orion's legs. Symposium attendees are off-screen to the bottom and right of the panel.] Cueball: It's time to talk about the fact that Orion clearly has a dong. Attendee #1 (off-screen): It's hard to miss. Attendee #2 (off-screen): We could keep telling people it's a sword. Attendee #3 (off-screen): C'mon, no one's buying that anymore.\n"}
{"id":1021,"title":"Business Plan","image_title":"Business Plan","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1021","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/business_plan.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1021:_Business_Plan","transcript":"[6 small panels extend across the width of the comic...]\n[Beret Guy stands on a shoreline and takes in the environment in silent contemplation.]\n[In a frame-less panel, Beret Guy heads off with an idea fresh in his head.]\n[Beret Guy saunters back with a jar, some bread, and a signboard.]\n[Beret Guy tears the bread off into pieces.]\n[Beret Guy sets up the signboard, with its contents yet to be revealed.]\n[Beret Guy heads off and waits for the plan to unfold.]\n[A large full-width panel below the first 6 small panels shows the same beach, this time with Megan and Cueball standing in front of and reading the sign. Cueball scratches his head. The bread has attracted quite a few gulls. There is a label on the jar.] Jar label: $ Sign: Gulls for sale\n","explanation":"This one has the art and feel of very early xkcd comics, even when those stick figures did not appear by that time.\nBeret Guy has developed (or spontaneously implemented) a \"business plan\" whereby he lures seagulls to an area of a beach utilizing breadcrumbs. Once the gulls converge on the area, he sets up a sign reading \"GULLS FOR SALE\" with a jar for money. Though Beret Guy probably expects to profit, the confused reactions of other people in the last panel indicate nobody is buying, and the limited number of gulls, four, is low enough that their sale might not even finance the breadcrumbs. In real life, there is no market for seagulls, nor will there ever be in the foreseeable future. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text is a reference to the phrase \" Elevator pitch \", which is also similar to \"investor pitch\". The point of an elevator pitch is to have a synopsis of your idea that you are capable of delivering on a moment's notice in the time it takes to ride the elevator, about 30 seconds. This way, when you get that once-in-a-career opportunity to pitch your plan to the one person who can make it happen because you just happened to catch the same elevator, you are ready. The reason the elevator pitch is so simplistic is because the same sort of person that would think selling seagulls is a viable business model is likely the same sort of person to make a childish elevator pitch. This also pokes fun at the idea of people sweating over their pitch with such seriousness, when Beret Guy's pitch is literally a childish exclamation. Wheeee!\n[6 small panels extend across the width of the comic...]\n[Beret Guy stands on a shoreline and takes in the environment in silent contemplation.]\n[In a frame-less panel, Beret Guy heads off with an idea fresh in his head.]\n[Beret Guy saunters back with a jar, some bread, and a signboard.]\n[Beret Guy tears the bread off into pieces.]\n[Beret Guy sets up the signboard, with its contents yet to be revealed.]\n[Beret Guy heads off and waits for the plan to unfold.]\n[A large full-width panel below the first 6 small panels shows the same beach, this time with Megan and Cueball standing in front of and reading the sign. Cueball scratches his head. The bread has attracted quite a few gulls. There is a label on the jar.] Jar label: $ Sign: Gulls for sale\n"}
{"id":1022,"title":"So It Has Come To This","image_title":"So It Has Come To This","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1022","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/so_it_has_come_to_this.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1022:_So_It_Has_Come_To_This","transcript":"[Megan holds up an open and empty bag with the white silhouette of a cat's face on it. Cueball looks down at the bag.] Megan: We ran out of cat food. Cueball: So Cueball: It has come to this.\n[Caption below the panel:] Protip: If you're not sure what to say, try \"So it has come to this\" \u2013 it creates instant dramatic tension and is a valid observation in literally any situation.\nOther comics which advocate using catch-all phrases as standard responses for any comment:\nThe phrase \"So it has come to this\" is also said in: 225: Open Source .\n","explanation":"The line \"it has come to this\" is usually seen on the verge of the climactic confrontation between the villain and their arch rival, or when one character has to unleash their utmost ability etc. Despite its dramatic tone, however, the statement is a content-free tautology, true in all possible scenarios in which time progresses in a forward direction. Accordingly, Cueball is saying it when Megan tells him that they have run out of cat food, a relatively trivial problem that could be solved with a quick trip to the grocery store.\nThe title text is a follow-up on the comic dialogue. When Megan replies in confusion, \"Come to what?\" Cueball then uses another instantly-dramatic phrase that keeps his words ambiguous, only leaving her in the dark. The phrase, \"You. Me. This moment.\" is used when brevity is key, and no information should be leaked to anybody listening. Those conversing then continue the important discussion elsewhere, allowing them to speak more openly.\n[Megan holds up an open and empty bag with the white silhouette of a cat's face on it. Cueball looks down at the bag.] Megan: We ran out of cat food. Cueball: So Cueball: It has come to this.\n[Caption below the panel:] Protip: If you're not sure what to say, try \"So it has come to this\" \u2013 it creates instant dramatic tension and is a valid observation in literally any situation.\nOther comics which advocate using catch-all phrases as standard responses for any comment:\nThe phrase \"So it has come to this\" is also said in: 225: Open Source .\n"}
{"id":1023,"title":"Late-Night PBS","image_title":"Late-Night PBS","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1023","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/late_night_pbs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1023:_Late-Night_PBS","transcript":"[Megan with disheveled hair is rubbing sleep out of her eyes and talking to Cueball.] Megan: Have you ever watched PBS late at night? Megan: I fell asleep after Downton and woke up at like 3 AM.\n[The next panel is split in two. The upper portion, which is not in a frame, continues Megan's dialogue, while the lower part, in a frame, shows a drunk game-show host (indicated with two small bobbles and a third exploding next to his head). He has stubble and only little hair on his head. He is holding a bottle in one hand and the other hand is up over a TV monitor showing a black field filled with crosses, presumably graves, going out to the far off horizon. In front of him are three kids, who are contestants in the game. They stand behind three lecterns to the left. The first kid is a boy with thin black hair, who has turned away from the monitor. The middle kid is a girl with blonde hair in a ponytail who looks at the host, and the last kid looks like Cueball and he looks down at his lectern.] Megan (off-panel): Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was back on, except the host hadn't aged well and he'd clearly been drinking. Megan (off-panel): Every question took them to some horrible place like Mogadishu or the Cambodian killing fields.\n[In a room with tiles on the floor, a bookshelf full of books has been moved away from the wall revealing that is was a door to be opened with a hidden room behind it. Megan continues to speak, her text is above the shelf but inside the frame this time.] Megan (off-panel): The kids were freaked out, but they kept playing. Eventually they were told they'd found Carmen Sandiego hiding behind a bookshelf in a Dutch apartment.\n[Megan has stopped rubbing her eyes but still talks to Cueball.] Megan: The Chief appeared and asked \"Are you proud of what you've become?\" Megan: Then Rockapella walked out and just glared at the kids until they started crying. Cueball: I, uh, don't remember the old show being that dark. Megan: Maybe we were too young to pick up on it.\n","explanation":"This comic examines the way the world seems different for adults today compared with how we remember it as a child, due to complex subtext or na\u00efvety, to a humorous extreme, and with a specific reference to television programs for children.\nPBS is a US public television network known for highbrow and educational programming, and shows a high proportion of BBC programming. The show Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was a light-hearted educational game show that ran from 1991 to 1995. In the show players followed geography-based clues to find out where a master criminal, Carmen Sandiego, was going, and catch her. After catching (or failing to catch) Carmen Sandiego, a character called The Chief would congratulate or encourage the players. Rockapella was an a cappella band featured on the show that gave clues, punctuated the show with humor, and closed the show.\nMegan recounts her surprise as to the nature of programming on late night PBS to Cueball . She claims to have fallen asleep after watching Downton Abbey and woken up to see that Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego is still making new episodes, but is significantly darker than she remembers it. The host has aged poorly (the show would have been off the air for 20 years) and developed a drinking problem; the locations the child contestants visit are traumatizing; and the children are clearly freaked out. In the end they find Carmen Sandiego hiding behind a Dutch bookcase, an allusion to The Diary of Anne Frank , thus implying that instead of aiding legitimate law enforcement in finding thieves they have been aiding the Nazis in their search for Jews (and others) to murder. The Chief admonishes the children for their actions and Rockapella glares at the children disapprovingly until the children break down in tears.\nAfter Megan concludes her story, Cueball remarks that he did not remember the show being that dark. In response Megan replies that as kids, they may not have been able to understand the darker subtext of the show. It is true that some programs intended for children often have subtle themes for adults who may be watching the show with their children that the children do not usually remember or pick up on. The joke is that although young viewers may not be able to pick up on everything, they would certainly have noticed if the show was as dark as Megan described. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text describes the next program, an episode of The Joy of Painting , in which a depressingly weary painter paints unhappy trees. This contrasts with the usual mood of the show where Bob Ross was upbeat and the components of his paintings were described as \"happy little\" objects. Megan then postulates that either people are breaking into the television station to produce horrible programming, or she is experiencing hallucinations due to her sleep aid Ambien . This gives hallucination as an alternate explanation for the main comic.\nWhere in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was originally an educational video game released in 1985. Carmen Sandiego was a mysterious character that the player tracked around the globe, attempting to find clues as to where she was heading to next. The game helped players learn geography and facts about the world while having fun. The video game inspired the TV show Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? .\nThe show was split into three rounds. In the first round, there were three child contestants, called \u201cgumshoes\u201d on the show, who scored points for every question they answered correctly. The top two scoring gumshoes moved onto the next round, where they had to play a game based on the card game Concentration , in which they had to find the thief, warrant, and loot in the correct order. Whichever gumshoe did so captured the thief, saved the loot, and moved onto the next round, where they had a chance to catch Carmen Sandiego herself. Success was not always guaranteed in this round, as contestants had to plant flags correct on seven different countries in a continent within a very short time. If successful, they captured Carmen and won the grand prize (a trip to a place of their choosing in the continental US). If not, Carmen would escape and the contestant would win a lesser prize (such as a computer).\nThe role of The Chief was played by Lynne Thigpen . She explained the mission to the contestants, and gave some clues to the thief's last whereabouts. When the mission was over The Chief would appear and congratulate them if successful or console them if Carmen got away.\nThe host of the TV show was an actor named Greg Lee . His role was to ask the contestants questions, provide clues, and tell them which flags to plant on the map in the final round, as well as engage with The Chief and Rockapella to keep the show moving.\nRockapella was an a cappella group (a group that sings without any instruments), which sang the theme song to Where in The World Is Carmen Sandiego. Rockapella also acted as a \"house band\", singing songs while the contestants transitioned between events, providing clues, and playing pranks on the host along with other gags. At the end of each show, the host and the episode's winning contestant would shout \"Do it, Rockapella!\" at which point the band would sing the show's theme song.\nThe locations the contestants visit in the episode depicted in this comic seem to require traveling backwards in time (1993 for the Battle of Mogadishu, 1975-1979 for the Cambodian killing fields, and 1944 for the arrest of Anne Frank). Episodes of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego did not deal with this, but its successor, Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? , did.\n[Megan with disheveled hair is rubbing sleep out of her eyes and talking to Cueball.] Megan: Have you ever watched PBS late at night? Megan: I fell asleep after Downton and woke up at like 3 AM.\n[The next panel is split in two. The upper portion, which is not in a frame, continues Megan's dialogue, while the lower part, in a frame, shows a drunk game-show host (indicated with two small bobbles and a third exploding next to his head). He has stubble and only little hair on his head. He is holding a bottle in one hand and the other hand is up over a TV monitor showing a black field filled with crosses, presumably graves, going out to the far off horizon. In front of him are three kids, who are contestants in the game. They stand behind three lecterns to the left. The first kid is a boy with thin black hair, who has turned away from the monitor. The middle kid is a girl with blonde hair in a ponytail who looks at the host, and the last kid looks like Cueball and he looks down at his lectern.] Megan (off-panel): Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was back on, except the host hadn't aged well and he'd clearly been drinking. Megan (off-panel): Every question took them to some horrible place like Mogadishu or the Cambodian killing fields.\n[In a room with tiles on the floor, a bookshelf full of books has been moved away from the wall revealing that is was a door to be opened with a hidden room behind it. Megan continues to speak, her text is above the shelf but inside the frame this time.] Megan (off-panel): The kids were freaked out, but they kept playing. Eventually they were told they'd found Carmen Sandiego hiding behind a bookshelf in a Dutch apartment.\n[Megan has stopped rubbing her eyes but still talks to Cueball.] Megan: The Chief appeared and asked \"Are you proud of what you've become?\" Megan: Then Rockapella walked out and just glared at the kids until they started crying. Cueball: I, uh, don't remember the old show being that dark. Megan: Maybe we were too young to pick up on it.\n"}
{"id":1024,"title":"Error Code","image_title":"Error Code","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1024","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/error_code.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1024:_Error_Code","transcript":"[A guy sits at a computer, while a friend takes a book off a shelf behind him.] Computer guy: \"Error -41\"? That's helpful. It doesn't even say which program it's from! Friend: -41? I'll look it up...\n[In a frame-less panel, the friend looks at the book.] Friend: It says -41 is: \"Sit by a lake.\"\n[The two walk.]\n[The two sit down.]\n[A large, in-color painting of a lake with pond lilies.]\n[The two are still sitting.] Computer guy: I don't know where you got that book, but I like it. Friend: Hasn't been wrong yet.\nIt is possible Randall wanted comic number 1024 to be about computers because 1024 is a significant number in computer systems: it is exactly 2 10 , and as such is sometimes used instead of 1000 as the power constant for file sizes for the sake of easier binary arithmetic. This was referenced in 1000: 1000 Comics .\nA book suggesting a more or less unrelated solution which is accepted anyway is also pulled from a shelf in 330 .\n","explanation":"Complex computer programs often incorporate a numbering system for errors that are anticipated might occur. This way, the code can be referenced to tech support so that there is some feedback from the program as to what is wrong (akin to a car dashboard with multiple lights telling you if you have a battery problem or an engine problem or a cooling problem, etc.) Most people have seen at least one error code in their life. Perhaps the most famous error code is seen in web browsers, 404 (not found). Another common code is 403 (forbidden).\nThe guy at the computer gets the error \"-41\", but cannot tell even what program it comes from. So, the other guy decides to look up the code in a book apparently called Error Codes . The book then indicates to go to a lake instead of how to resolve the computer problem. Which seems like a great solution because it would be very relaxing! The panel with the image of the lake is fairly rare as far as xkcd comics go, in that it is approaching a more realistic style.\nThe beep codes referenced in the title text refers to the error codes produced by motherboards. Because the motherboard is sort of the \"heart\" of the computer, the designers apparently did not want to rely on any form of error display that might be compromised by the error itself (i.e. a visual display). Instead, motherboards typically have a code consisting of beeps from the system \"PC\" speaker which is expected to work without error in most situations, as it's wired directly to the motherboard. In a sort of morse-code -type system, certain lengths and numbers of beeps refer to different errors like memory problems, video card problems, etc. The one quick beep that occurs on boot sequences is the POST (Power On Self-Test) beep, which detects vital parts of the system, like motherboard, memory, monitor, etc. The beep indicates that everything necessary to boot is present. Anyone who has built a few computers is probably familiar with less happy beep sequences.\n[A guy sits at a computer, while a friend takes a book off a shelf behind him.] Computer guy: \"Error -41\"? That's helpful. It doesn't even say which program it's from! Friend: -41? I'll look it up...\n[In a frame-less panel, the friend looks at the book.] Friend: It says -41 is: \"Sit by a lake.\"\n[The two walk.]\n[The two sit down.]\n[A large, in-color painting of a lake with pond lilies.]\n[The two are still sitting.] Computer guy: I don't know where you got that book, but I like it. Friend: Hasn't been wrong yet.\nIt is possible Randall wanted comic number 1024 to be about computers because 1024 is a significant number in computer systems: it is exactly 2 10 , and as such is sometimes used instead of 1000 as the power constant for file sizes for the sake of easier binary arithmetic. This was referenced in 1000: 1000 Comics .\nA book suggesting a more or less unrelated solution which is accepted anyway is also pulled from a shelf in 330 .\n"}
{"id":1025,"title":"Tumblr","image_title":"Tumblr","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1025","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tumblr.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1025:_Tumblr","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are talking.] Megan: You know those weird noises from my attic? Megan: Turns out some raccoons got in and were operating this, like, raccoon sex dungeon. Cueball: ...dot tumblr dot com.\n[Caption below the panel:] For me, \"...Dot tumblr dot com\" has been gradually replacing \"...would be a good name for a band.\"\nRaccoons also feature in a disgusting situation in 1565: Back Seat .\n","explanation":"Tumblr is a microblogging service, which has become a home for lots of animated gifs and other internet memes , as well as other assorted novelties.\nThe phrase that Cueball used to use when he heard a random phrase was \"would be a good name for a band.\" With the advent of Tumblr, his go-to response has shifted because of the proliferation of Tumblr blogs with strange names such as \"pissvortex\", \"hardpee\", \"iguanamouth\", and \"internetslug\".\nIn the title text he muses on the fact that Dot Tumblr Dot Com would be an awful band name. There could be several reasons for this, but he mentions that it would be hard to direct fans to the band's website. As an example, someone who hears \"www.thedottumblrdotcom.com\" might instead write it out as \"www.the.tumblr.com.com\" since '.' is often pronounced as \"dot.\" [ citation needed ] If the band's website was hosted on Tumblr, then their website would be \"dottumblrdotcom.tumblr.com\", but could be heard as \".tumblr.com.tumblr.com\".\n[Megan and Cueball are talking.] Megan: You know those weird noises from my attic? Megan: Turns out some raccoons got in and were operating this, like, raccoon sex dungeon. Cueball: ...dot tumblr dot com.\n[Caption below the panel:] For me, \"...Dot tumblr dot com\" has been gradually replacing \"...would be a good name for a band.\"\nRaccoons also feature in a disgusting situation in 1565: Back Seat .\n"}
{"id":1026,"title":"Compare and Contrast","image_title":"Compare and Contrast","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1026","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/compare_and_contrast.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1026:_Compare_and_Contrast","transcript":"[A checklist comparing \"thee\" to \"a summer's day\" for a number of properties, displayed as separate rows in a table with 3 columns. The properties are shown in the first column with no header label, and the second and third columns have a header label of \"Thee\" and \"A Summer's Day\" with a checkmark in one or both columns for each row.]\n[Row 1] Property: Fair, Temperate Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 2] Property: Hot, Sticky Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 3] Property: Short Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Not Checked\n[Row 4] Property: Harbinger of Hurricane Season Thee: Not Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 5] Property: Required for a Good Beach Party Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 6] Property: Major Cause of Heat Stroke in the Elderly Thee: Not Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 7] Property: Linked to Higher Rates of Juvenile Delinquency Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 8] Property: Sometimes Too Stifling Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 9] Property: Arrested for Releasing Snakes in Library Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Not Checked\n[Row 10] Property: Difficult to Focus on Work While I'm In Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n","explanation":"A reference to the most well-known sonnet in the English-speaking world: William Shakespeare's \" Sonnet 18 \", the first line of which is: \"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?\". In this comic Randall sets about this in a typically goal-oriented chart, as opposed to the rather more romantic poetry of the Bard.\n\"Thee\" is a form of the archaic second-person singular pronoun \"thou\". In Shakespeare's day, English had more second-person pronouns in common use, thou\/thee (informal\/singular), and you (formal\/plural). This is similar to second-person pronouns in many modern European languages, such as French. Wikipedia has a nice chart for all of English's personal pronouns, current and archaic.\nFor both the chart and the original sonnet, whether or not the work is autobiographical is unknown.  Also unknown is the identity of the person whom each work refers to.  It is believed that Sonnet 18 is addressed to a young man .\nThe lines are:\nThe title text is a reference to Ron Paul , a 2012 Republican candidate for President who was on top in the Republican Primary against a few other challengers for the nomination. Ron Paul was frequently represented on the internet using similar language to the title text (with Paul offering an alternative to typical Republican and Democratic candidates). Paul was seen by many as an alternative because of his Libertarian views.\n[A checklist comparing \"thee\" to \"a summer's day\" for a number of properties, displayed as separate rows in a table with 3 columns. The properties are shown in the first column with no header label, and the second and third columns have a header label of \"Thee\" and \"A Summer's Day\" with a checkmark in one or both columns for each row.]\n[Row 1] Property: Fair, Temperate Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 2] Property: Hot, Sticky Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 3] Property: Short Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Not Checked\n[Row 4] Property: Harbinger of Hurricane Season Thee: Not Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 5] Property: Required for a Good Beach Party Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 6] Property: Major Cause of Heat Stroke in the Elderly Thee: Not Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 7] Property: Linked to Higher Rates of Juvenile Delinquency Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 8] Property: Sometimes Too Stifling Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n[Row 9] Property: Arrested for Releasing Snakes in Library Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Not Checked\n[Row 10] Property: Difficult to Focus on Work While I'm In Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked\n"}
{"id":1027,"title":"Pickup Artist","image_title":"Pickup Artist","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1027","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pickup_artist.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1027:_Pickup_Artist","transcript":"[Hairy and Cueball sitting at a table.] Hairy: I've been learning tricks from pickup artist forums. Cueball: Pickup artists are dehumanizing creeps who see relationships as adversarial and women as sex toys.\n[Close-up of Hairy's head, with a faint outline of Black hat and Danish sitting at a table in the background.] Hairy: No, it's just a bunch of tips! Like negging : you belittle chicks to undermine their self-confidence so they'll be more vulnerable and seek your approval.\n[Close-up of Cueball's head.] Cueball: Just talk to them like a fucking human being. Hairy: Nah, that's a sucker's game. Hairy: Ok\u2014 wish me luck!\n[Small frame across top of panel reads Meanwhile... and Danish is sitting at a table with Black hat standing next to the table holding a bowling ball under his arm.] Black Hat: I'm going to the bathroom to roll a bowling ball down under the line of stalls. Danish: Cool.\n[Close up of Cueball's head, with Hairy approaching Danish's table in the background.] Cueball: Oh no.\n[Hairy and Danish at a table. Hairy is standing up and leaning on the table.] Hairy: You look like you're on a diet. That's great! Hairy: How's the fruit plate?\n[Close-up of Danish's head.] Danish: Ooh- are we negging? Danish: Let me try!\n[Close-up of Danish's head, with her hand raised.] Danish: You look like you're going to spend your life having one epiphany after another, always thinking you've finally figured out what's holding you back, and how you can finally be productive and creative and turn your life around. Danish: But nothing will ever change. That cycle of mediocrity isn't due to some obstacle. It's who you are . Danish: The thing standing in the way of your dreams Danish: is that the person having them is you .\n[Hairy and Danish at a table. Hairy is standing up.] Danish: Ok, your turn! Ooh, try insulting my hair! Hairy: I think I need to go home and think about my life. Danish: It won't help.\n","explanation":"Hairy and Cueball are sitting at a table with drinks. Hairy tells Cueball that he's learned some pickup artist tricks. Cueball is appalled, declaring that pickup artists are \"dehumanizing creeps\". Hairy argues that he's simply learning new tactics such as \" negging \" (undercutting the target's self-esteem so that she'll feel vulnerable and crave approval), evidently oblivious to the fact that he's proving Cueball's point. Rejecting Cueball's advice to simply talk to women \"like a fucking human being\", Hairy sets off to try out the technique.\nMeanwhile, Black Hat and Danish are sitting at another table. Black Hat leaves to roll a bowling ball through the restroom stalls to smash the feet of anyone there using them. In North America, public restrooms usually have a 1-foot (30\u00a0cm) gap between the floor and the bottom of the stall dividers. As people sit down to use a stall most of the time, their feet would be vulnerable to being hit in sequence. Perhaps Black Hat is going for a 'strike'. Hairy approaches Danish, while Cueball looks on and says \"oh no\" \u2014 seemingly recognizing Danish and anticipating the disaster Hairy is walking into, or perhaps simply not wanting Hairy to use his tricks on anyone.\nHairy makes an attempt at \"negging\" by suggesting that Danish's fruit plate reflects a need to lose weight. Danish, naturally being a master at psychological manipulation, immediately realizes his game, and crushes him utterly by taking another shot in the psychological dark \u2014 telling him that he's trapped in an endless cycle of failure because he's ultimately a mediocre person and will never do anything of value with his life. Demoralized, Hairy declares that he needs to go home and think about his life; Danish tells him, \"It won't help.\u201d (This may be a reference to the \"deathsticks\" scene in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones .) Of course, once Black Hat discovers his shenanigans, Hairy might not have much more life to rethink.\nThe title text refers to Michael Jordan , a very popular and accomplished basketball player who played for the Chicago Bulls and the Washington Wizards . His name is often used as a noun to denote that someone is the best in their field, which is later used in 1120: Blurring the Line .\nThe pick up subject and Hairy returned in 1178: Pickup Artists , where he tries to improve his skills (which he must have felt he needed after this experience), by hanging out with other pickup artists, thus the plural version of the comic title. This comic is one of a small set of comics with the same or almost the same title as another comic (only plural form of artist the difference).\n[Hairy and Cueball sitting at a table.] Hairy: I've been learning tricks from pickup artist forums. Cueball: Pickup artists are dehumanizing creeps who see relationships as adversarial and women as sex toys.\n[Close-up of Hairy's head, with a faint outline of Black hat and Danish sitting at a table in the background.] Hairy: No, it's just a bunch of tips! Like negging : you belittle chicks to undermine their self-confidence so they'll be more vulnerable and seek your approval.\n[Close-up of Cueball's head.] Cueball: Just talk to them like a fucking human being. Hairy: Nah, that's a sucker's game. Hairy: Ok\u2014 wish me luck!\n[Small frame across top of panel reads Meanwhile... and Danish is sitting at a table with Black hat standing next to the table holding a bowling ball under his arm.] Black Hat: I'm going to the bathroom to roll a bowling ball down under the line of stalls. Danish: Cool.\n[Close up of Cueball's head, with Hairy approaching Danish's table in the background.] Cueball: Oh no.\n[Hairy and Danish at a table. Hairy is standing up and leaning on the table.] Hairy: You look like you're on a diet. That's great! Hairy: How's the fruit plate?\n[Close-up of Danish's head.] Danish: Ooh- are we negging? Danish: Let me try!\n[Close-up of Danish's head, with her hand raised.] Danish: You look like you're going to spend your life having one epiphany after another, always thinking you've finally figured out what's holding you back, and how you can finally be productive and creative and turn your life around. Danish: But nothing will ever change. That cycle of mediocrity isn't due to some obstacle. It's who you are . Danish: The thing standing in the way of your dreams Danish: is that the person having them is you .\n[Hairy and Danish at a table. Hairy is standing up.] Danish: Ok, your turn! Ooh, try insulting my hair! Hairy: I think I need to go home and think about my life. Danish: It won't help.\n"}
{"id":1028,"title":"Communication","image_title":"Communication","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1028","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/communication.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1028:_Communication","transcript":"[White Hat looks down at a large gap in the walkway; a thought bubble with a warning symbol and an image of the gap appears above his head.]\n[White Hat walks to the right, away from the gap, and encounters Hairy, to which he speaks (in iconographic speech bubble form) while pointing toward the gap, attempting to inform him about the gap. A thought bubble appears above Hairy's head with an image of White Hat pointing.]\n[White Hat continues, waving his arms, still talking about the gap. Hairy's thought bubble continues to contain images of White Hat, now gesturing frantically.]\n[Hairy shrugs in a nonplussed manner, and White Hat leaves off the right side of the frame. Both have thought bubbles displaying the other's reaction.]\n[White Hat continues to the right and comes across Megan. He tells her about the reaction of Hairy (still all in iconographic form); she simultaneously tries to tell him about a gap and gestures off to the right of the frame.]\n[White Hat and Megan both leave the frame. Megan exits left thinking of White Hat's reactions; White Hat exits to the right while thinking about both Hairy and Megan's reactions.]\n[Megan (still thinking about White Hat) encounters Hairy (who is also still thinking about White Hat).]\n[Megan and Hairy talk about White Hat.]\n[Megan and Hairy (now without his hair) continue talking about White Hat as they exit the frame to the left.]\n[A commotion is heard from the left.] Explosion to the left:\u00a0!!! **\u00a0!!\n[Megan and Hairy (still without his hair) have fallen into the gap in the walkway. A commotion is then also heard from the right.] Explosion to the right:\u00a0!!! ** *\n[White Hat has fallen into another gap.]\n[Beret Guy looks down at a large gap in the walkway; a thought bubble with a warning symbol and an image of the gap appears above his head.]\n[Beret Guy runs off the frame to the right.]\n[Beret Guy meets Cueball and reaches out to him. He tells him (still in iconographic form) that Cueball should take Beret Guy's hand. Cueball has a thought bubble of Beret Guy with his arm stretched out.]\n[Beret Guy takes Cueball's hand and leads him along to the left. Cueball's thought bubble has two question marks around Beret Guy.] Cueball:\u00a0?\u00a0?\n[Beret Guy leads Cueball to the gap and points it out to him.]\n[Beret Guy and Cueball walk away from the gap to the right, now both thinking about the gap with a warning symbol above it.]\nRandall made a mistake in this comic: Hairy seems to \"lose\" his hair in the last two frames where he is together with Megan (#9 and #11), but it's still the same person. The Cueball that appears in the last four frames represents another person. This is clearly evidenced by Randall's transcript of the comic .\n","explanation":"This comic is divided into two parts, the first two rows of panels and then the third one.\nThe first part demonstrates a failed attempt at communication:\nThe holes in the sidewalk are fairly deep, about one person deep; unaware and careless people don't notice them when they come upon them, which makes them symbolic of any problem or danger one can encounter in life, and could avoid if properly warned or careful.\nThe second part demonstrates a much more successful attempt at communication:\nThe title text references the requirement that \"communication\" is a two-sided process, and just because you think you have made your point clear this does not mean that you have \"communicated\" the information to them: if they failed to understand, then it may as well mean that you failed to communicate, and not necessarily that they are bad at listening. And if you always encounter this situation, then it is you who are confused about how communication works. See also 1984: Misinterpretation .\n[White Hat looks down at a large gap in the walkway; a thought bubble with a warning symbol and an image of the gap appears above his head.]\n[White Hat walks to the right, away from the gap, and encounters Hairy, to which he speaks (in iconographic speech bubble form) while pointing toward the gap, attempting to inform him about the gap. A thought bubble appears above Hairy's head with an image of White Hat pointing.]\n[White Hat continues, waving his arms, still talking about the gap. Hairy's thought bubble continues to contain images of White Hat, now gesturing frantically.]\n[Hairy shrugs in a nonplussed manner, and White Hat leaves off the right side of the frame. Both have thought bubbles displaying the other's reaction.]\n[White Hat continues to the right and comes across Megan. He tells her about the reaction of Hairy (still all in iconographic form); she simultaneously tries to tell him about a gap and gestures off to the right of the frame.]\n[White Hat and Megan both leave the frame. Megan exits left thinking of White Hat's reactions; White Hat exits to the right while thinking about both Hairy and Megan's reactions.]\n[Megan (still thinking about White Hat) encounters Hairy (who is also still thinking about White Hat).]\n[Megan and Hairy talk about White Hat.]\n[Megan and Hairy (now without his hair) continue talking about White Hat as they exit the frame to the left.]\n[A commotion is heard from the left.] Explosion to the left:\u00a0!!! **\u00a0!!\n[Megan and Hairy (still without his hair) have fallen into the gap in the walkway. A commotion is then also heard from the right.] Explosion to the right:\u00a0!!! ** *\n[White Hat has fallen into another gap.]\n[Beret Guy looks down at a large gap in the walkway; a thought bubble with a warning symbol and an image of the gap appears above his head.]\n[Beret Guy runs off the frame to the right.]\n[Beret Guy meets Cueball and reaches out to him. He tells him (still in iconographic form) that Cueball should take Beret Guy's hand. Cueball has a thought bubble of Beret Guy with his arm stretched out.]\n[Beret Guy takes Cueball's hand and leads him along to the left. Cueball's thought bubble has two question marks around Beret Guy.] Cueball:\u00a0?\u00a0?\n[Beret Guy leads Cueball to the gap and points it out to him.]\n[Beret Guy and Cueball walk away from the gap to the right, now both thinking about the gap with a warning symbol above it.]\nRandall made a mistake in this comic: Hairy seems to \"lose\" his hair in the last two frames where he is together with Megan (#9 and #11), but it's still the same person. The Cueball that appears in the last four frames represents another person. This is clearly evidenced by Randall's transcript of the comic .\n"}
{"id":1029,"title":"Drawing Stars","image_title":"Drawing Stars","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1029","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/drawing_stars.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1029:_Drawing_Stars","transcript":"HOW TO DRAW A STAR: [A slightly curved line is drawn, starting with a point near the top center of the panel, and going downward and to the left at approximately a 23-degree angle, with an arrow at the end.]\n[Another slightly curved line goes up and to the right, creating a 34-degree angle with the first line.] So far so good...\n[A third line goes up and to the left, creating a 58-degree angle with the last line. The drawing now sort of resembles a tent being blown over in the wind.] Steady as she goes...\n[The fourth line goes down and to the right, creating an approximately 47-degree angle with the last line, and our star is beginning to look a bit askew.] ...uh oh.\nShitshitshit\n[The fifth line comes up at a 48-degree angle, completely missing the first point by a mile, and our star has failed spectacularly.] ABORT! ABORT!\n","explanation":"Randall attempts to draw a five-pointed star ; the easiest way to do this free-hand is by drawing a pentagram , the simplest regular star figure in geometry. Once you've seen it done, you can usually draw a pentagram in one continuous motion.\nSimply put, Randall gets self-conscious and messes up.\nThe title text explains the fact that a five-pointed star has all angles at 36 degrees which sums to 180, like a common triangle . So Randall converts to Judaism with its six pointed star symbol, which he hopes is easier to draw because it is composed of two equilateral triangles . This also suggests that he is converting from neopaganism [ actual citation needed ] just to have a religious star he can draw well.\nHOW TO DRAW A STAR: [A slightly curved line is drawn, starting with a point near the top center of the panel, and going downward and to the left at approximately a 23-degree angle, with an arrow at the end.]\n[Another slightly curved line goes up and to the right, creating a 34-degree angle with the first line.] So far so good...\n[A third line goes up and to the left, creating a 58-degree angle with the last line. The drawing now sort of resembles a tent being blown over in the wind.] Steady as she goes...\n[The fourth line goes down and to the right, creating an approximately 47-degree angle with the last line, and our star is beginning to look a bit askew.] ...uh oh.\nShitshitshit\n[The fifth line comes up at a 48-degree angle, completely missing the first point by a mile, and our star has failed spectacularly.] ABORT! ABORT!\n"}
{"id":1030,"title":"Keyed","image_title":"Keyed","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1030","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/keyed.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1030:_Keyed","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are walking along.] Ponytail: I broke up with him yesterday. Cueball: That weird guy with the beret? Cueball: Did he take it okay?\nPonytail: He seemed upset. He went out to my car\u2014 Cueball: Uh oh Ponytail: \u2014and spent the whole night painting a really detailed key on the side. Cueball: ...Wait, what? [Image of Beret Guy painting a giant key on the side of a car.]\nPonytail: Then he woke me up to ask what I thought of it. Ponytail: He looked really proud. [Beret Guy holding a paintbrush.]\nCueball: I ... is he playing revenge mind games? Ponytail: I genuinely can't tell if he remembers that we broke up.\n","explanation":"This comic is a take on one of the typical revenge tactics in dating and in life, which is one person \"keying\" the car of another. To \"key\" a car is to drag a key across the side of the car, sometimes multiple times, ruining the paint job. Instead, our friend Beret Guy painted a really detailed key on the side of Ponytail 's car in his version of \"keying\" a car. She broke up with him the day before, as she explains to Cueball , but Beret Guy is so strange that she now can't tell if it was revenge or even if he remembers that she broke up with him.\nThe title text is a reference to the song Before He Cheats by Carrie Underwood ; a revenge song in which Carrie Underwood imagines her boyfriend cheating and takes revenge on his prized truck. This explains why Beret Guy might also paint a key on Carrie Underwood's car specifically, but it just confuses the situation since it brings into doubt the theory of him \"keying\" her car out of revenge (there is no known reason or reference to a reason for Beret Guy to want revenge on Carrie Underwood in the xkcd continuity).  The second part of the title text in which Beret Guy sent Ponytail a scone (Beret Guy really likes baked goods, so he would assume other people do too) further confuses the situation, causing Ponytail to completely give up on dating.\nBeret Guy and scones are also referenced in 452: Mission and in the title text of 677: Asshole . His love for bakeries was first mentioned in 434: xkcd Goes to the Airport .\nThe song details Carrie Underwood imagining  her boyfriend hanging out and flirting with a \"bleach-blonde\" girl, shooting pool, buying her a drink, dancing, and hoping to \"get lucky\" with her while she is vandalizing his customized four-wheel drive vehicle by scratching its side with a key, carving her name into its leather seats, smashing the headlights with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat and slashing all four tires in retaliation. She hopes that this will make him \"think before he cheats\" again.\n[Ponytail and Cueball are walking along.] Ponytail: I broke up with him yesterday. Cueball: That weird guy with the beret? Cueball: Did he take it okay?\nPonytail: He seemed upset. He went out to my car\u2014 Cueball: Uh oh Ponytail: \u2014and spent the whole night painting a really detailed key on the side. Cueball: ...Wait, what? [Image of Beret Guy painting a giant key on the side of a car.]\nPonytail: Then he woke me up to ask what I thought of it. Ponytail: He looked really proud. [Beret Guy holding a paintbrush.]\nCueball: I ... is he playing revenge mind games? Ponytail: I genuinely can't tell if he remembers that we broke up.\n"}
{"id":1031,"title":"s\/keyboard\/leopard\/","image_title":"s\/keyboard\/leopard\/","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1031","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/s_keyboard_leopard.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1031:_s\/keyboard\/leopard\/","transcript":"[There are two browser windows open on a computer screen.] [The first browser window, taking up most of the screen, but partly blocked by the other window at the bottom, has a Wikipedia article open. The title of the page can be seen on the active tab.] Computer leopard - Wikip... [Next to the address bar are four add-ons and the toolbar icon. One of the add-ons is a letter:] R [To the left on the page are standard menus, with lots of unreadable text, except these words:] Help Go Search [The page is not at the top of the article, so the text begins mid sentence, the very top of the letters just cut of in the first visible sentence.] which range from pocket-sized leopards to large desktop leopards, the leopard remains the most common user input device. In addition to text entry, specialized leopards are used for computer gaming. While many computer interfaces rely on mice or touchscreens, UNIX-style command-line interfaces require users to interact with a leopard. [Below is the contents list - the text in the brackets can barely be read. And only the very top of the 2.3 line can be seen, and is thus only a qualified guess at what it was supposed to say, although it fits with the real wiki article.] Contents [hide] 1. History 2. Leopard types 2.1 Standard 2.2 Laptop-sized 2.3 Thumb-sized [To the right there is a picture of a keyboard. The picture text written below:] IBM Model M Leopard\n[The second browser window overlapping the first, at the level of the 2.3 menu point in the content menu, is a message board. The title of the page can be seen on the active tab:] Discuss - Leopard issu... [Next to the address bar are four add-ons and the toolbar icon. One of the add-ons is a letter:] R [In the window there is a list of topics next to icons of those starting the topic. The top post is just inside the frame, the icon cut of at the very top.] [Face of Cueball-like guy on white background:] Weird, my leopard just switched to Chinese. 3 days ago [Super close-up of the head of a person with dark hair on black background:] I work with one leopard on my desk and another in the leopard tray. 3 days ago [Full picture of a Cueball-like guy, with white background in the bottom half and dark in the upper half (which would conceal any hair on the persons head):] Ever cleaned a leopard? They're filthy . 2 days ago [Head of a cat on black background:] The iPhone virtual leopard is the fastest IMO. 19 hours ago [Head of a girl with long blond hair on white background:] I rarely email from my phone\u2014I'm so slow when I'm not on a leopard. 11 hours ago [Head of Cueball-like guy. A line seems to be going our from his head, but it could just be one of the lines used to fill in the background:] My leopard died when I spilled tea on it\u00a0:( 2 hours ago\n[Below the main panel of the comic is the following caption:] The Internet got 100 times better when, thanks to an extension with a typo'd regex, my browser started replacing the word \"keyboard\" with \"leopard\".\n","explanation":"Randall's browser looks like Google Chrome , and he has installed at least four extensions on it, which explains the little symbols to the right of the address bar. Extensions are small programs that install into your Internet browser and change the Web pages as you view them. Some make pages easier to read, some remove ads (the third extension is AdBlock ) and so on.\nFor the joke in this comic, an extension accidentally replaces the word \" keyboard \" with \" leopard \" in a regex (or regular expression ). In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means to \"match\" (specify and recognize) patterns in text, such as particular characters or words. The command to substitute\/replace a string is \"s\", e.g. \"s\/old\/new\/g\" replaces any occurrence of \"old\" with \"new\". The title therefore contains the command to change \"keyboard\" into \"leopard\".\nIt's not clear what the extension Randall installed was actually supposed to do, but most extensions that revolve around text replacement are humorous in nature (such as Cloud to Butt , which replaces all instances of \" the cloud \" with \"my butt\").\nThe title text references the common IT phrase \"Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair\" or PEBKAC , which means that the problem is caused by the user, not by any failure of the computer. However, due to the substitution, it is now \"Problem Exists Between Leopard And Chair\".\nThere has been several comics using substitutions , both before and after this one.\n[There are two browser windows open on a computer screen.] [The first browser window, taking up most of the screen, but partly blocked by the other window at the bottom, has a Wikipedia article open. The title of the page can be seen on the active tab.] Computer leopard - Wikip... [Next to the address bar are four add-ons and the toolbar icon. One of the add-ons is a letter:] R [To the left on the page are standard menus, with lots of unreadable text, except these words:] Help Go Search [The page is not at the top of the article, so the text begins mid sentence, the very top of the letters just cut of in the first visible sentence.] which range from pocket-sized leopards to large desktop leopards, the leopard remains the most common user input device. In addition to text entry, specialized leopards are used for computer gaming. While many computer interfaces rely on mice or touchscreens, UNIX-style command-line interfaces require users to interact with a leopard. [Below is the contents list - the text in the brackets can barely be read. And only the very top of the 2.3 line can be seen, and is thus only a qualified guess at what it was supposed to say, although it fits with the real wiki article.] Contents [hide] 1. History 2. Leopard types 2.1 Standard 2.2 Laptop-sized 2.3 Thumb-sized [To the right there is a picture of a keyboard. The picture text written below:] IBM Model M Leopard\n[The second browser window overlapping the first, at the level of the 2.3 menu point in the content menu, is a message board. The title of the page can be seen on the active tab:] Discuss - Leopard issu... [Next to the address bar are four add-ons and the toolbar icon. One of the add-ons is a letter:] R [In the window there is a list of topics next to icons of those starting the topic. The top post is just inside the frame, the icon cut of at the very top.] [Face of Cueball-like guy on white background:] Weird, my leopard just switched to Chinese. 3 days ago [Super close-up of the head of a person with dark hair on black background:] I work with one leopard on my desk and another in the leopard tray. 3 days ago [Full picture of a Cueball-like guy, with white background in the bottom half and dark in the upper half (which would conceal any hair on the persons head):] Ever cleaned a leopard? They're filthy . 2 days ago [Head of a cat on black background:] The iPhone virtual leopard is the fastest IMO. 19 hours ago [Head of a girl with long blond hair on white background:] I rarely email from my phone\u2014I'm so slow when I'm not on a leopard. 11 hours ago [Head of Cueball-like guy. A line seems to be going our from his head, but it could just be one of the lines used to fill in the background:] My leopard died when I spilled tea on it\u00a0:( 2 hours ago\n[Below the main panel of the comic is the following caption:] The Internet got 100 times better when, thanks to an extension with a typo'd regex, my browser started replacing the word \"keyboard\" with \"leopard\".\n"}
{"id":1032,"title":"Networking","image_title":"Networking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1032","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/networking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1032:_Networking","transcript":"[A man approaches Beret Guy at a party and they extend arms to shake hands. Beret Guy is holding a metal briefcase. Ponytail is a waitress in the background, carrying a tray with a wine glass on it.] Connr: I'm Connr Clark, CTO at Eusocial Media Ventures. Beret Guy: I'm a business professional! Earlier I photocopied a burrito!\n[Connr hands Beret Guy a business card. Beret Guy takes it and hands Connr another business card. Beret Guy has put his suitcase on the floor.] Connr: You should check us out! Here's my card. Beret Guy: Here's mine! Beret Guy: Networking!\n[Connr takes a closer look at the card, and Beret Guy holds up his case.] Connr: ...this just says \"This is my business card!\" Beret Guy: Do you like it? I have more in my handlebox.\n[Beret Guy puts his case on a table and opens it to reveal it is full of cash. Connr looks on in shock.] Connr: Uh, that's ok, I think I'll\u2014 Beret Guy: Here, have ten of them! Connr: \u2014holy shit that thing is full of cash!\n[Connr raises his arms in excitement. Beret Guy turns to face him and chews on Connr's business card.] Connr: Where did you get that? Beret Guy: I am a business grown-up who makes business profits! Connr: That's like a quarter of a million dollars! Beret Guy: Yay! Business is fun! Beret Guy: Do you have more of your cards? They're delicious!\n","explanation":"Networking, in business, is the act of expanding your group of contacts in order to help your career down the line. Here, in this comic, Beret Guy meets Chief Technology Officer (CTO, an executive-level position overseeing the development of new technologies) Connr Clark (perhaps a typo for \"Connor\" or perhaps a reference to common \"Web 2.0\" names like the businesses Flickr , Tumblr , etc.). Beret Guy is as strange as he usually is: he introduces himself as a \"business professional\" rather than as someone with any kind of specific job, and then goes on to mention that he photocopied a burrito, which he presumably believes is the sort of thing business professionals do. He also has a business card; usually, this would contain contact information, but his only says \"This is my business card\". He calls his briefcase, or suitcase, a \"handlebox\", and it is full of a quarter of a million dollars in cash. (The source of this money is not discussed in this comic, but in 1493: Meeting , Ponytail says it \"keeps appearing, but we have no idea how or why.\")  Then Beret Guy proceeds to eat Connr's business card. Business cards are again mentioned in the title text of 2277: Business Greetings , also about one of Beret Guy's businesses. All of these things are not common behavior. [ citation needed ]\n\"Networking\" is often an over-hyped, empty affair. There are many networking meetings of every description going on every day everywhere, and most people trade cards and continue to not make money. So that's the joke \u2013 Beret Guy does the networking schtick , badly, and yet is somehow making huge amounts of money at it.\nThe comic is also likely a joke on the idea that many people are excited about becoming a \"business professional\" who carries a briefcase, hands out business cards, and makes tons of money, without having an adequate plan for how to make those things happen, or possibly even knowing what their actual job would be. Beret Guy never says what he does, simply introducing himself as a \"business professional,\" and explains his piles of cash with \"I am a business grown-up who makes business profits!\" In this world \u2014and in people's dreams\u2014 when you \"grow up\" and start a business, money magically appears. Obviously, that's not how it works. [ citation needed ]\nThe \"Eusocial\" in \"Eusocial Media Ventures\" is a reference to eusociality , the highest level of social cooperation found in the animal kingdom.  Eusocial animals (termites being a common example) cooperate together to raise their young, have different generations living in the same colony, and have specialized individuals for reproductive and non-reproductive tasks.\nThe title text is a pun on three common business buzzwords: agile, lean, and long-tail. An agile business is one that can change course quickly based on customer demands and the business environment. A lean business is one with minimal inventory or assets; nothing is idle or warehoused, so everything is in active use or on the move. Long-tail describes the strategy of offering a large number of unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each \u2013 usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. Netflix is a popular example of long-tail because they have (almost) every movie imaginable, including rare titles that only a few people would be interested in.\nAnd of course, the pun here is one animal that is agile and lean with a long tail is a polecat .\nFurthermore, although \"agile\" and \"lean\" do mean a quick, nimble, and efficient business, they also refer to specific practices, as in agile software development , lean manufacturing and lean Six Sigma . Many people think these terms have devolved to overused jargon. While agile development is supposed to be a highly-structured method to get programmers to produce more working code quickly, when someone from the marketing department says \" agile \" it often means \" We don't know what we're supposed to be producing, so we'll just chuck some stuff together, and keep those bits that the customer says he likes. We'll then do it all over again until we've got something that he'll pay for. \" \" Lean \" is supposed to mean that a business keeps its costs as low as possible, employing one person to do marketing and PR, not really having a Human Resources department, etc. But, in practice, it often becomes \" Keep as little stock as possible so that we don't have a lot of money tied up in it, and don't need a big warehouse; make stuff just before it is supposed to ship so that we don't have to store it either; make frequent prayers and virgin sacrifices to whatever gods we can find to ensure that nothing slips up anywhere along the line that our lawyers can't get us out of. \"\nObviously, Beret Guy's business plan, 1021: Business Plan , worked. See also 1117: My Sky .\n[A man approaches Beret Guy at a party and they extend arms to shake hands. Beret Guy is holding a metal briefcase. Ponytail is a waitress in the background, carrying a tray with a wine glass on it.] Connr: I'm Connr Clark, CTO at Eusocial Media Ventures. Beret Guy: I'm a business professional! Earlier I photocopied a burrito!\n[Connr hands Beret Guy a business card. Beret Guy takes it and hands Connr another business card. Beret Guy has put his suitcase on the floor.] Connr: You should check us out! Here's my card. Beret Guy: Here's mine! Beret Guy: Networking!\n[Connr takes a closer look at the card, and Beret Guy holds up his case.] Connr: ...this just says \"This is my business card!\" Beret Guy: Do you like it? I have more in my handlebox.\n[Beret Guy puts his case on a table and opens it to reveal it is full of cash. Connr looks on in shock.] Connr: Uh, that's ok, I think I'll\u2014 Beret Guy: Here, have ten of them! Connr: \u2014holy shit that thing is full of cash!\n[Connr raises his arms in excitement. Beret Guy turns to face him and chews on Connr's business card.] Connr: Where did you get that? Beret Guy: I am a business grown-up who makes business profits! Connr: That's like a quarter of a million dollars! Beret Guy: Yay! Business is fun! Beret Guy: Do you have more of your cards? They're delicious!\n"}
{"id":1033,"title":"Formal Logic","image_title":"Formal Logic","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1033","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/formal_logic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1033:_Formal_Logic","transcript":"[The rear end of a car (with an unreadable license plate), with a bumper sticker above the tailpipe to the right:] Honk iff you love formal logic\n","explanation":"This comic is a riff on bumper stickers that say \"honk if you love ____\". Here, the subject is formal logic , but the word \"if\" is replaced with a formal logic term \" iff ,\" which means \"if and only if\".\nThe term \"If and only if\" sets two separate requirements, both of which must be met. In this case, you must love formal logic in order to be allowed to honk, and you must honk if you love formal logic. (Conversely, someone who does not love formal logic is prohibited from honking, and someone who loves formal logic cannot refuse to honk.) The title text further elaborates on this, saying in essence: \"Don't honk at me just because you're impatient that I stopped for a pedestrian.\"\nThe joke is the contained self-reference: you have to love formal logic to take the sticker seriously and honk for exclusively that reason. The title text reveals the sticker is actually there to stop people from honking at him altogether, because Randall understandably hates it when he yields for pedestrians only to get honked at by some impatient driver behind him; the ONLY reason you're allowed to honk is to declare your love for formal logic.  So by extension, if someone DOES honk while he is stopped for a pedestrian, he can simply enjoy the idea that the other driver loves formal logic rather than being impatient, transforming what might otherwise be an irritant into pleasure.\n[The rear end of a car (with an unreadable license plate), with a bumper sticker above the tailpipe to the right:] Honk iff you love formal logic\n"}
{"id":1034,"title":"Share Buttons","image_title":"Share Buttons","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1034","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/share_buttons.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1034:_Share_Buttons","transcript":"[A series of article titles with four share buttons underneath each: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Google+]\nBreaking Into Stand-up Comedy FB: 3, Twitter: 1,781, Reddit: 2, G+: 0\nHow the Christian Right Threatens Wikipedia FB: 1, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 2,241, G+: 3\nBoycott Facebook Today! FB: 248k, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 0, G+: 74\nDIY: Installing a Custom ROM on a Realdoll FB: 0, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 0, G+: 2\n","explanation":"This comic is a commentary on what sort of articles work best on different social networking services . From left to right the share buttons are: Facebook , Twitter , Reddit , and Google+ .\nThe title text humorously combines appealing subjects for all four networks:\n[A series of article titles with four share buttons underneath each: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Google+]\nBreaking Into Stand-up Comedy FB: 3, Twitter: 1,781, Reddit: 2, G+: 0\nHow the Christian Right Threatens Wikipedia FB: 1, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 2,241, G+: 3\nBoycott Facebook Today! FB: 248k, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 0, G+: 74\nDIY: Installing a Custom ROM on a Realdoll FB: 0, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 0, G+: 2\n"}
{"id":1035,"title":"Cadbury Eggs","image_title":"Cadbury Eggs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1035","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cadbury_eggs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1035:_Cadbury_Eggs","transcript":"[Two Cadbury eggs, one in the foil, the other out of the foil and broken open to reveal the gooey center.] A Cadbury egg has about 20g of sugar. (25g outside the US.) \"One Cadbury Egg\" is a nice unit of sugar content.\n[A can of soda with an equals sign and two eggs; a bottle of soda with an equals sign and three eggs.] One 12oz. can of soda has about two Cadbury eggs worth of sugar. One 20oz. bottle has three.\n[Two unwrapped Cadbury eggs, with an arrow indicating they should be placed in a glass of water.] One Cadbury egg is enough to make me feel kinda gross. Now when I see Coke or Snapple or Nestea or whatever, I imagine drinking a couple of dissolved Cadbury eggs.\n[Megan puts her hand to her chin in thought, Cueball has his arms out in exclamation.] Megan: Wow. Huh. So the takeaway is... I can eat Cadbury eggs by the handful all season and feel no worse about it than I do about soda? Cueball: That's not really\u2014 Megan: This is awesome! Cueball: *sigh*\n","explanation":"Cadbury Eggs are a chocolate egg-shaped candy with a filling. They are supposed to replicate a real egg with a hard exterior and soft interior. However, unlike real eggs, the exterior is edible. [ citation needed ]\nIn this comic, Cueball is trying to say that sodas have way too much sugar to even be appealing as beverages, because they contain as much sugar as 2 or 3 Cadbury Eggs, and one Cadbury Egg alone makes him feel gross. (A 12 oz can equals 355 mL, while a 20 oz bottle is about 590 mL.)\nHowever, Megan interprets this in precisely the opposite way to what Cueball intended. Instead of comparing soda to Cadbury Eggs, she compares Cadbury Eggs to soda. If a few Cadbury Eggs have the same amount of sugar as soda, Megan can eat as many as she wants year-round in place of soda, with no additional guilt. Cadbury Eggs are usually consumed around Easter \u2014 which is anywhere between March 22nd and May 7th, depending on whether one is consulting the Catholic or Orthodox calendar.\nThe title text mentions the closure of the manufacture in New Zealand in 2009 and the change of the filling from runny to thick as a consequence. The joke here is the comparison to real eggs, which can be cooked scrambled , the new thick filling is not liquid enough to be cooked in a pan, as was the old runny filling.\n[Two Cadbury eggs, one in the foil, the other out of the foil and broken open to reveal the gooey center.] A Cadbury egg has about 20g of sugar. (25g outside the US.) \"One Cadbury Egg\" is a nice unit of sugar content.\n[A can of soda with an equals sign and two eggs; a bottle of soda with an equals sign and three eggs.] One 12oz. can of soda has about two Cadbury eggs worth of sugar. One 20oz. bottle has three.\n[Two unwrapped Cadbury eggs, with an arrow indicating they should be placed in a glass of water.] One Cadbury egg is enough to make me feel kinda gross. Now when I see Coke or Snapple or Nestea or whatever, I imagine drinking a couple of dissolved Cadbury eggs.\n[Megan puts her hand to her chin in thought, Cueball has his arms out in exclamation.] Megan: Wow. Huh. So the takeaway is... I can eat Cadbury eggs by the handful all season and feel no worse about it than I do about soda? Cueball: That's not really\u2014 Megan: This is awesome! Cueball: *sigh*\n"}
{"id":1036,"title":"Reviews","image_title":"Reviews","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1036","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reviews.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1036:_Reviews","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan stand in a store looking at a lamp that Cueball points at on a table in front of them. There is another table behind them with another lamp and next to it stands a box with a picture of yet a different type of lamp in the bottom right corner. Both lamps have a price tag dangling from their shade. Above them (and their spoken text) is a frame with a caption:] Shopping before online reviews: Cueball: This lamp is pretty. Megan: And affordable. Cueball: Let's get it. Megan OK!\n[Exactly the same setting as above except now Megan holds up her smartphone in one hand looking down at it while typing on it with the other hand. Above them (and their spoken text) is a frame with a caption:] Shopping now: Cueball: This lamp is pretty. Megan: It's got 1\u00bd stars on Amazon. Reviews all say to avoid that brand.\n[To the left of Cueball there is another lamp on a table. But he is now looking at his smartphone instead. Megan has turned away from him but is also looking at her smartphones. There are no lamps next to her.] Cueball: This one has good reviews. Megan: Wait, one guy says when he plugged it in, he got a metallic taste in his mouth and his cats went deaf. Cueball: Eek. Cueball: What about- ...no, review points out it resembles a uterus.\n[Cueball is holding his smartphone up in front of his face, Megan, looking at him, is holding her smartphone but has her arms down. There are no lamps shown.] Cueball: OK, I found a Swiss lampmaker with perfect reviews. Her lamps start at 1,300 Francs and she's only reachable by ski lift. Megan: You know, our room looks fine in the dark.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are shown shopping for lamps. In the first part of the comic (only first frame) it is at a time before online reviews could be looked up on a smartphone. They spot a lamp they like, check the price and agree to buy, end of story.\nBut the rest of the comic shows how difficult shopping has become after reviews have become easily accessible on smartphones while standing in the store. And now this takes up the final three panels, with the result that no lamps have been acquired and they decide to sit in the dark, using the claim that their living room looks fine in the dark to avoid buying a very expensive lamp which is the only one with perfect reviews (like 100% with 5 stars out of 5).\nWhen shopping for anything via reviews , whether it be electronics or even something as simple as lamps like the comic demonstrates, one negative review can spoil a lot of positive reviews. That hits home even more if the review is specific, because humans attach more weight to anecdotes and specific stories. This comic points out the absurdity of paying attention to those reviews, by making the negative review itself absurd (a lamp making your cats go deaf and interfering with your taste buds would imply, at the very least, anomalous radiation, and would not be on store shelves long before some kind of serious recall).\nThe second part of the comic starts out normal. For the lamp Cueball think is pretty Megan finds lots of negative reviews which implies the product really isn't good after all, and it was even that specific brand of lamps in general that was to be avoided. But then this proceeds to get more and more absurd all the way to the title text. Cueball is for instance looking at  a lamp that someone thinks looks like a uterus . As normal people do not really know what a uterus looks like, and if Cueball did not find this so himself, he should ignore one persons comment. On the other hand reading such a statement will maybe make you think of a uterus every time you see the lamp. So now it may be best not to buy it, but had he not read the comment it might have been a fine lamp for him.\nIn the final frame Cueball has found a Swiss lampmaker with perfect reviews, but her lamps are very expensive, the most cheap are starting at 1,300 francs. Swiss francs are the units of currency used in Switzerland . In 2012 when the comic was released a Swiss franc was worth a little more than one dollar ( 1.1$ to a Swiss Franc ) making the cheapest lamp go for not much less than US$1450. For comparison, US$15 can get one a decent lamp at IKEA. Furthermore the lampmaker lives in the Swiss Alps and can only be reached via a ski lift . This either indicated that transportation will be very expensive on top of the high starting price or it may even indicate that they will have to go to the lampmaker personally to either acquire a lamp or maybe just to check out that they really do not look like a uterus or other parts of the human reproductive system...\nThe title text is presumably the review of an another lamp. When this reviewer plugged in this lamp, supposedly his dog went rigid, delivered a line of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways out the picture window. Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia .  Even if the dog actually did speak a sentence of perfect Akkadian, the chance that the owner would be able to recognize it as such is negligible. The final joke is that the worst part of this lamp, was not the above mentioned crazy effects on the dog, but that the lamp had, completely normally, the switch on the cord, as opposed to having it on the body of the lamp. A production argument about where to place such a switch, leading to someone getting fired, was part of the joke in 1741: Work .\n[Cueball and Megan stand in a store looking at a lamp that Cueball points at on a table in front of them. There is another table behind them with another lamp and next to it stands a box with a picture of yet a different type of lamp in the bottom right corner. Both lamps have a price tag dangling from their shade. Above them (and their spoken text) is a frame with a caption:] Shopping before online reviews: Cueball: This lamp is pretty. Megan: And affordable. Cueball: Let's get it. Megan OK!\n[Exactly the same setting as above except now Megan holds up her smartphone in one hand looking down at it while typing on it with the other hand. Above them (and their spoken text) is a frame with a caption:] Shopping now: Cueball: This lamp is pretty. Megan: It's got 1\u00bd stars on Amazon. Reviews all say to avoid that brand.\n[To the left of Cueball there is another lamp on a table. But he is now looking at his smartphone instead. Megan has turned away from him but is also looking at her smartphones. There are no lamps next to her.] Cueball: This one has good reviews. Megan: Wait, one guy says when he plugged it in, he got a metallic taste in his mouth and his cats went deaf. Cueball: Eek. Cueball: What about- ...no, review points out it resembles a uterus.\n[Cueball is holding his smartphone up in front of his face, Megan, looking at him, is holding her smartphone but has her arms down. There are no lamps shown.] Cueball: OK, I found a Swiss lampmaker with perfect reviews. Her lamps start at 1,300 Francs and she's only reachable by ski lift. Megan: You know, our room looks fine in the dark.\n"}
{"id":1037,"title":"Umwelt","image_title":"Umwelt","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1037","image_url":null,"explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1037:_Umwelt","transcript":"[Note to courageous readers- The transcript has been reordered in the order in which the comics appear in the picture and appropriate names have been given.]\nThe Void [An epic void with a bright light shining right on you.]\nAurora [Cueball heading out past Megan comfortably sitting in front of a desk.] Cueball: Apparently there's a solar flare that's causing some Great Aurorae. CBC says they may even be visible here! Wanna drive out to see? Megan: Hockey's on. Cueball: Ok. Later.\n[An expansive, marvelous image of emerald green northern lights, floating down through the sky.]\nMegan: See anything? Cueball: No, just clouds. Megan: Not surprised.\nAurora-US [Cueball heading out past Megan comfortably sitting in front of a desk.] Cueball: Apparently there's a solar storm causing northern lights over Canada. CNN say they might even be visible {Options: \"As Far South As Us\", \"Here in Boston\", \"Maine\", \"Ohio\", \"Oregon\", \"New York\"}! Wanna drive out to see? Megan: It's cold out. Cueball: Ok. Later.\n[An expansive, marvelous image of emerald green northern lights, floating down through the sky.]\nMegan: See anything? Cueball: No, just clouds. Megan: Not surprised.\nSnake [Two people standing next to each other. Megan is holding the head end of a snake. Depending on the width of your browser, the snake is: three frames, the third of which  has a little bit of a bump; the first frame has a human-size bump, the second has a third person looking at the snake, and the third has the snake going though two Portals; a squirrel and the human-size bump in the first frame, a ring next to the third person in the second frame, and Beret Guy riding the snake in front of the portal; or The squirrel, a fourth person within the snake being coiled, and the human bump in the first frame, the ring, a fifth person in love, and the third person in the second frame, Beret Guy and the portal in the third frame, and the same two people in the fourth frame.]\nMegan: I found a snake, but then I forgot to stop.\nBlack hat [Two people sitting at a desk. One is Black Hat. The other is an analyst. Black Hat has a number of terminals attached to his head.] Analyst: You come across a tortoise in the desert. You flip it over. It struggles to right itself. You watch. You're not helping. Why is that?\nBlack Hat: It knows what it did.\n[View of the entire scene, with said turtle off in the distance on its back and trying to right itself.]\nToo quiet [A group of four scale down a wall into a field in the middle of the night. They walk off single-file.] Person 1: It's quiet.\nPerson 3: Yeah - *Too* quiet.\n[A Velociraptor is off in the distance, following the group.] Person 4: Yeah - too *too* quiet.\nPerson 2: Yeah - 2quiet2furious. Person 1: Fuck off, Steve.\nPond [A landscape showing a pond, some reeds, and a set of mountains off in the distance.]\nGalaxies [A trio of galaxies.] Galaxy 1: He's not looking! Galaxy 3: Let's get him! [Lines draw in illustrating the eye-line of one of a pair of people.] Cueball: So he said he didn't get the text, but c'mon, he *never* misses texts. Right? ..hello? Megan: I'm just staring at your head freaked out by the fact that there are millions of galaxies *directly behind it*.\nxkcd Gold [Cueball holding bat.]\nCueball: Sorry, but this comic\n[Cueball starts to wind up.]\nCueball: requires\n[Cueball prepares to strike with bat.]\nCueball: XKCD\n[Cueball swings at a beehive.] GOLD\n[Penis Bees fly out of the beehive.]\nYo mamma [Cueball yells at a friend.] Cueball: Oh yeah? Well you mama's so cynical , her only dog ballast is a leash ! (This comic takes place in a dystopian future where the government is afraid dogs can hover, so it requires them to wear weights at all times, and some people privately doubt the government, but not enough to stop buying dog weights.)\nReddit Five seconds ago: [You sitting in front of a desk, reading a reddit thread.] You: Oh, hey, reddit has a link to some XKCD april fools comic.\nNow: [An image of the xkcd comic page.] Five seconds from now:\nYou: ..hey\n30 seconds from now: [DANCE PARTY!]\nBuns and Hot dogs Cueball: What I wanna know is why do hot dogs come in packages of six while buns come in these huge sacks of ash and blood from which \"Ave Maria\" is faintly audible? [Chanting sacks of gore in the background.]\nTwitter [A Twitter account page with the following: Many tweets, fewer following, even fewer followers, A bunch of assholes in the suggested follow box, trending topics partitioned into: Word Games, Misogyny, and Bieber, stuff your eyes automatically ignore, A really pleasant blue. and the timeline: Something about a podcast, Someone confused because the description doesn't match the link, The link you clicked on to get to this comic, Rob Delaney, Passive Aggression, and horse ebooks.]\nWikipedia [There's no comic here because instead of drawing one, I spent the last hour reading every news story cited in the Wikipedia article on The Mile High Club.]\nGoogle Chrome [A Chrome plugin error page.] Chrome: This plugin requires Sergey Brin's permission to run. Please wait while he is woken.\nChrome\/Firefox [Two people; Cueball is sitting at a desk in front of a laptop.] Cueball: Man, chrome's hardware acceleration really sucks. Ponytail: Oh - Theres' a great add-on that fixes it. Cueball: Oh? What's it called? Ponytail: \"Firefox\".\nGoogle Chrome-2 [A Chrome plugin error page with the characteristic jigsaw piece.] Chrome: Chrome is looking for this piece. Have you seen it? Chrome thinks it links up with a corner.\nMozilla Firefox Private Browsing [Firefox error page.] Firefox: Well, this is embarrassing. You know how I'm not supposed to peek at your browsing in private mode? Firefox.. is sorry. Firefox will not blame you if you [Button with text.] Click here to report this incident.\nInternet Explorer [IE error page.] IE: Error: Internet Explorer has given up.\nMaxthon Cueball: Maxthon? Hey, 2005 called. Didn't say anything. All I could hear was sobbing. This is getting harder. Anyway, yeah, Maxthon's still cool! Didn't know it was still around!\nNetscape Navigator [Two different versions exist: one with Cueball talking and one with Megan with tentacle arms talking.] Person: Netscape Navigator? Hey, the nineties called - drunk as usual. I hung up without saying anything. This is getting harder. Anyway - it's cool that you'e got netscape running.\nRockmelt [Cueball running to laptop.] I ran to Rockmelt to hide my face\n[Cueball sitting at laptop.] But Rockmelt cried out -\n[Laptop shouting.] NO HIDING PLACE\n[zoom out.] NO HIDING PLACE DOWN HERE\nGoogle Chrome-3 [A chrome plugin error page.] Chrome: There does not exist --nor could there ever exist-- a plugin capable of displaying this content.\nMicrosoft\/Amazon\/The Times\/Google - Chrome [Chrome error page.] Chrome: This plugin requires clearance from the corporate press office in order to run. Remember, Microsoft\/Amazon\/The Times\/Google is a team; individual employees should never speak for the company without authorization.\nMicrosoft\/Amazon - Firefox [Firefox error page.] Error: This plugin requires clearance from the corporate press office in order to run. Remember, Microsoft\/Amazon is a team; individual employees should never speak for the company without authorization.\nMicrosoft\/The Times [Error page.] Error: This plugin requires clearance from the corporate press office in order to run. Remember, Microsoft\/The Times is a team; individual employees should never speak for the company without authorization.\nCorporate - Generic [Error page.] Error: This plugin requires clearance from the corporate press office in order to run. Remember, we work as a team; individual employees should never speak for the company without authorization.\nMilitary [Person looking at two browser windows.] Cueball: I know y'all know what you're doing. But if you're on a military machine and you're supposed to be watching for missiles or something, I hope you're keeping an eye on that in the background while you're reading comics. Also: Thanks.\nT-Mobile [Error page.] Data Error: T-Mobile was unable to establish a connection\nVerizon [Error page] Error: You have exceeded your Verizon monthly bandwidth cap. Mobile web browsing has been disabled.\nFrance [Two people; one of which is browsing using a laptop.] Cueball: Hey, you're French, right? Ever see what happens when you type \"French Military Victories\" into Google? French person: Does it take you to an article on Napoleon?\nFrench person: ..no? Strange, given how he kicked everyone's asses up and down Europe for over a decade.\n[Beat frame.]\nCueball: Touche. French person: You know, that'd sound smarter if you didn't pronounce it like it rhymes with \"douche\".\nGermany [Cueball dropping food from an unorthodox high perch.] June 1948: In response to the Soviet blockade of East Germany, the western allies construct the Berlin Chairlift. Cueball on chairlift: Food!\nIsrael [Person on phone.] Person (Translation from Hebrew): Mom, I met a great guy! But he's not Jewish. ...Wait, what do you mean \"neither are we\"? I'm completely confused.\nCarnot Cycle [Ponytail on a motorcycle with a heat-entropy graph on the side.] Ponytail: Check out my new Carnot Cycle! Cueball: Neat - how fast does it go? Ponytail: Depends how cold it is outside.\nGreat Britain [Illustration of the Atlantic ocean.] American person: Sorry I don't have a comic poking fun at the UK here. I only had time to get to the most important US states. British person: Hey - At least we have free health care and real ale.\nEarthquake-Blizzard [Two people sitting at a desk, facing each other. The desk rattles.] Cueball: Stop jiggling your leg. Danish: I'm not ji-.. oh! Cueball: What! Danish: You'll get it..\n[EVERYTHING RUMBLES.] Cueball: ..HOLY CRAP IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE! Danish: Just a little one. Happens all the time back in San Francisco.\nCueball: But this is {Options: \"Alabama\", \"Boston\", \"Chicago\", \"Dallas\", \"Georgia\", \"Halifax\", \"Illinois\", \"Michigan\", \"Minnesota\", \"Missouri\", \"the Northeast\", \"Ohio\", \"Oklahoma\", \"Ottawa\", 'Pennsylvania\", \"Philadelphia\", \"Texas\", \"Toronto\", \"Tennessee\", \"New York\", \"Wisconsin\"}! That was huge! Danish: Seriously? That's the worst this place can do? Wow. I guess we grow up tougher in California. Cueball: Oh really ...\nSix Months Later.. [Both people are trudging through a massive blizzard.] Danish: In pictures, snow always looked so nice and sof - AAAA! MY NECK! How do people live here?! Cueball: Come on - it's only three more miles.\nEarthquake-Tornado [Two people sitting at a desk, facing each other. The desk rattles.] Cueball: Stop jiggling your leg. Danish: I'm not ji-.. oh! Cueball: What! Danish: You'll get it..\n[EVERYTHING RUMBLES.] Cueball: ..HOLY CRAP IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE! Danish: Just a little one. Happens all the time back in San Francisco.\nCueball: But this is {Options: \"Alabama\", \"Dallas\", \"Illinois\", \"The Midwest\", \"Missouri\", \"Ohio\", \"Oklahoma\", \"Ottawa\", \"Tennessee\", \"Texas\"}! Cueball: That was huge! Danish: Seriously? That's the worst this place can do? Wow. I guess we grow up tougher in California. Cueball: Oh really ...\nSix Months Later.. [Both people are in a shelter in a prairie with a rapidly-approaching tornado.] Danish: AAAA CLOSE THE SHELTER DOOR! Cueball: Say the magic words... Danish: THIS PLACE IS THE WORST! Cueball: Thank you.\nEarthquake-Hurricane [Two people sitting at a desk, facing each other. The desk rattles.] Cueball: Stop jiggling your leg. Danish: I'm not ji-.. oh! Cueball: What! Danish: You'll get it..\n[EVERYTHING RUMBLES.] Cueball: ..HOLY CRAP IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE! Danish: Just a little one. Happens all the time back in San Francisco.\nCueball: But this is {Options: \"D.C\", \"Florida\", \"Houston\", \"Miami\", \"New Jersey\", \"North Carolina\", \"South Carolina\", \"Virgina\"}! That was huge! Cueball: That was huge! Danish: Seriously? That's the worst this place can do? Wow. I guess we grow up tougher in California. Cueball: Oh really ...\nSix Months Later..\n[Both are in the middle of a hurricane. Danish is grabbing onto a signpost to avoid being swept away.] Danish: AAAAA WHAT THE SHIIIIT! Cueball: Calm down - this is barely a category 2.\nLake Diver Killer [TV Field Reporter in front of a cordoned-off lake.] Reporter: Police divers searching the bay say they have recovered the body of another victim of the \"Lake Diver Killer.\" Reporter: During the search, three more divers were reported missing.\nWashington [The statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.] In this Marble Prison As in the nightmares of the nation they tried to devour The nanobots that constituted Abraham Lincoln Are entombed forever.\nAlaska [A person with a gun chasing a helicopter on the back of a wolf in a snowy Alaskan field.] Some people hunt wolves from helicopters. I hunt helicopters from a wolf.\nLife in lab [Newspaper headline.] Scientists\/UMass Amherst students\/RIT students create life in lab [Caption under picture of scientists.] \"The trick was fuckin'\"\nAmerican Revolution Robot Paul Revere: Remember: Zero if by land, One if by sea.\nMIT [Two people in front of a group of students.] Cueball: I've hired a team of MIT students to count cards for us. Hairy: We'll be rich!\n[Hairy deals some cards while the students watch.]\n[The gears turn..]\nStudent: Five. There are five cards. Cueball: I see their admission standards have been slipping. Hairy: Yeah - there are actually four.\nMIT Course 15c [Two people in front of a group of students.] Cueball: I've hired a team of MIT students to count cards for us. Hairy: We'll be rich!\n[Hairy deals some cards while the students watch.]\n[The gears turn..]\nStudent: Five. There are five cards. Cueball: I *knew* we shouldn't have picked course 15s. Hairy: Yeah - there are actually four.\nSmith\/Wellesley [Two people in front of a group of students.] Cueball: I've hired a team of Smith\/Wellesley students to count cards for us. Hairy: We'll be rich!\n[Hairy deals some cards while the students watch.]\n[The gears turn..]\nStudent: Five. There are five cards. Cueball: We should've gone with Wellesley\/Smith. Hairy: Yeah - there are actually four.\nCNU [Person unsuspectingly strolls under a giant box trap controlled by a Trible.] I worry that CNU only invited me back as a ruse because they realized I never turned in my final paper and want my diploma back. But if it turns out it's for real, I'll see you Wednesday at the Ferguson!\nDana Farber [Cueball, pointing towards head.] Cueball: Check it out - In support of people going through chemo, I shaved my head. Lots of love to everyone reading this at Dana Farber. Cancer sucks. If you are new to DFCI, there's a great little garden on the third floor of the yawkey if you need somewhere quiet to just sit for a little bit and breathe.\nReviews Shopping before online reviews: [Cueball and Megan stand in a store. Cueball points at a lamp on the table in front of him. There is another lamp on the table behind them.] Cueball: This lamp is pretty. Megan: And affordable. Cueball: Let's get it. Megan Ok!\nShopping now: [Cueball points at a lamp on the table in front of him. Megan looks at her phone.] Cueball: This lamp is pretty. Megan: It's got 1 1\/2 stars on Amazon. Reviews all say to avoid that brand.\n[Cueball and Megan are now both looking at their phones.] Cueball: This one has good reviews. Megan: Wait, one guy says when he plugged it in, he got a metallic taste in his mouth and his cats went deaf. Cueball: Eek. What about- ...no, review points out it resembles a uterus.\n[Cueball is still looking at his phone, Megan has hers at her side.] Cueball: Ok, I found a Swiss lampmaker with perfect reviews. Her lamps start at 1,300 Francs and she's only reachable by ski lift. Megan: You know, our room looks fine in the dark.\n[[Two people...]]  ((..wait.. <scrolls through a listing of everything> oh goddammit Randall. Thanks a bunch, dude. I better get a raise for typing out all this)) [[Two people standing next to each other.  One is holding the head end of a snake...\n","explanation":"This was the third April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous fools comic was 880: Headache from Friday April 1st 2011. The next was 1193: Externalities released on Monday April 1st 2013.\nThis comic was released on April 1 even though that was a Sunday (only the third comic to be released on a Sunday). But it was only due to the April Fool joke, as it did replace the comic that would have been scheduled for Monday, April 2nd. The next comic, 1038: Fountain , was first released on Wednesday, April 4th. This was the first that could be different for different readers.\nAn Umwelt , as the title text explains, is the idea that one's entire way of thinking is dependent on their surroundings. Thus, this April Fools comic changes based on the browser, location, or referrer. Thus, what the viewer is viewing the comic on, where they live, or where they came from determines which comic they actually see. As a result, there are actually multiple comics that went up on April Fools' Day, although only one is seen.\n(The term 'Umwelt,' as mentioned in the comic, refers to the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexk\u00fcll and Thomas A. Sebeok)\nInformation about how the wide variety of data was collected and credit for the viewers who contributed can be found here .\n\nIf the device or browser you are using does not support Javascript, you will simply see a static image of a white swirl on a dark background.\nPossible reference to The Ring ( http:\/\/imgur.com\/wlGmm ), as though to suggest that using an alternative browser is dismal and horrific.\nDavean (xkcd's sysadmin): \"[This] comic isn't available everywhere and it can come up i[n] some situation[s] only for recognized browsers.\"\nBrowser: Alternative Browser\n\nOne could interpret that since Megan didn't go out and therefore missed seeing the Aurora (northern lights), Cueball in his knit cap lied about it. That way, she wouldn't have felt sad that she missed out. Another interpretation could be that he decides that since she did not even bother to go outside to see such a spectacular sight he will not tell her about it. And yet another could be that he did not think it was interesting.\nCueball could possibly also be red-green colorblind, seeing the green aurorae as grey \"clouds\". This would serve as an example for the theme of the comic, as a non-colorblind person and a colorblind person seeing the same color would perceive it differently, one seeing it as its true color, and the other seeing it without the shade of color they cannot see. If this is the case, then it would be a reference to umwelt, as Cueball would be living in a world where the auroras do not reach his location.\nIn real life, aurorae are usually seen as grey\/white clouds to the naked eye, as our eyes cannot perceive the \"greener\" colors as well in the dark.\nThis image changed based on the size of the browser window including different panels at different sizes.\nLocations: Canada, Boston, Maine, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Minnesota, Norway, Denmark, France, Rhode Island (not sure if mobile only or not.) (also in Virginia, but using Ohio in the first panel) (also in Maryland, but using Canada in the first panel)\nIn 1302: Year in Review a possibly different Megan has a completely different approach to the chance of seeing northern lights, as that was the only event she was looking forward to in 2013, and it failed. If this is the same Megan, perhaps she learned that there actually were northern lights in her area from another source, and so desperately wanted to have another chance to see them.\nFull size\nThe joke here is the extreme length of snakes. The world's longest snake is the python, the longest ever being 33 feet or approx. 10 meters. The blue and orange circles refer to the hit game Portal .\nThere is also a reference to the book \"The Little Prince\" in the second panel, where there is a large bulge in the snake that looks like an elephant. The Little Prince starts out by mentioning a drawing that the author made when he was six that showed an elephant inside a snake.\nAlso, the number and content of the panels changes depending on the size of your browser window.\nThis image changed based on the size of the browser window including different panels at different sizes.\nSpecific AltText for this image: Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit -from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your browser window size.\nLocation: Texas (on Chrome Version 33.0.1750.154 m), New Jersey, California (on Chrome Version 39.0.2171.95), Maryland, Massachusetts (Safari for iOS, Chrome version 49.0.2623.112), Connecticut (Safari for iOS, Chrome Version 73.0.3683.103, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge), Virginia (on Chrome), Michigan (Firefox v46.0.1), Penang (Chrome Version 65.0.3325.162).\nFull size\nCueball as an analyst attempts to psychoanalyze Black Hat's classhole tendencies. Cueball's quote and the whole setup is a direct reference to the movie Blade Runner (1982) and Black Hat is taking the Voight-Kampff test which is used to identify replicants from real humans.\nBlack Hat's reason for not helping the tortoise is that it knows what it did and thus in Black Hat's world view it deserves being turned over. The final part of the joke is that when zooming out it turns out that there is a tortoise behind Black Hat and he has actually already turned it over for what it did.\nLocation: Seems to appear mostly in \"other countries\" \u2014 those without location-specific comics.\nFull size\nA reference to Jurassic Park which has been constantly referred to before in this comic.\nAlso referencing the film 2 Fast 2 Furious , an entertaining, yet intellectually unprovoking sequel in a popular film franchise, which is aimed at teenagers and young adults, prompting the blunt response from the stickman. The fact that Steve would use such a clich\u00e9 noughties movie term in such an intense moment, and the subsequent curse, is the joke in this comic.\nLocation: short version \u2014 iPhone 5c Safari browser in Texas, iPhone 5 Chrome Browser in Minnesota, long version - Google Chrome browser in Indiana, Windows 8 Laptop\n\nTwo different versions showed, the narrower version for mobile devices.\nLocation: The Netherlands and various other countries.\nFull size\nMegan is distracted from her conversation with Cueball by realizing that the space behind his head, from her vantage point, contains millions of galaxies. This is similar to an incredible photograph taken by the Hubble Telescope, in which a tiny dark area of space in fact contained numerous galaxies.\nThe title text is an imaginative leap from this scenario: that the galaxies would be up to no good once Cueball is turned away from them.  This is presumably a reference to Boo , an enemy from certain Mario games who moves toward Mario only when Mario is facing away from Boo.\nThis comic was only reported once... the intended environmental context is a mystery.\nLocation: unknown\n\nThis is probably a reference to the 4chan Gold Account, an implementation on 4chan that does not actually exist, and is usually used to trick newcomers into revealing their credit card numbers. The joke is that \"Gold Account\" users can supposedly block other users from viewing images they have posted. The fifth panel is probably a reference to Beecock, a notorious set of shocker images. 4chan's moderators have been known to give out \"beecock bans\" or \"\/z\/ bans\" to particularly annoying users, which redirect the user to a page containing beecock and the text \"OH NO THE BOARD IS GONE\".\nReferrer: 4chan\n\nPossible reference to Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s \" Harrison Bergeron .\"\nThe joke is that people's different experiences shape how they perceive the world in that the people who live in this world would perceive the joke as funny, while people in our world would not get it. This is the idea of umwelt mentioned at the top of the context where different individuals perceive the world differently.\nRefer: Facebook\n\nReference to referencing, because Reddit, as a referring site, likes references to its referencing in its references.\nThis comic also features recursive imagery similar to Self Description where the third panel embeds the entire comic within itself.\nOne of the browser tabs visible in the center panel is Elk on Wikipedia.\nReferrer: Reddit\n\nThis is a reference to the question \"Why do hot dogs come in packages of 6 while buns come in packages of 8?\"\nAnother, more sexual reference to this question can be found in 1641: Hot Dogs .\nReferrer: SomethingAwful, Questionable Content, & MetaFilter\n\nA summary of the \"content\" typically found on Twitter.\nIn the tweet feed, there are three tweets about some podcast on the top, followed by the tweet containing link they clicked on to get to the comic, tweets about Rob Delaney, unspecified passive-aggressive tweets, and a tweet from Horse Ebooks retweeted by one of the users the reader follows.\nOn the left, the topmost dialog, with profile information, shows that the user has posted 1,302 tweets, but only follows 171 people and has even fewer followers, at a measly 48. This is marked with a sad face, implying that the user wants more followers.\nBelow that is the \"who to follow\" dialog, which is written up as consisting of \"assholes\".\nBelow that is the \"trending tags\" dialog for the United States. It is full of tags about word games, tags about misogyny, and tags about Justin Bieber.\nBelow that is an unidentified dialog full of \"stuff your eyes automatically ignore\". And finally, on the bottom is the background colour, which is \"a really pleasant blue\".\nReferrer: Twitter\n\nThe term Mile High Club (or MHC) is a slang term applied collectively to individuals who have had sexual intercourse while on board an aircraft. Randall says that reading the news articles on it has distracted him from making that comic.\nTwo different versions shown, the narrower version (the single panel with all the text) for mobile devices.\nReferrer: Wikipedia\n\nSergey Brin (born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the most profitable Internet companies. As of 2013, his personal wealth was estimated to be $24.4 billion. Randall makes the joke that as the founder of Google, Brin's permission would be needed to use Google Chrome. Because there are millions of people who use Google, it is likely that at least some of the time Brin would be asleep, thus he would need to be woken.\nBrowser: Chrome\n\nMozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed for Windows, OS X, and Linux, with a mobile version for Android and iOS, by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. Cueball is complaining about Google Chrome , to which Ponytail replies that there is an add-on that fixes what he is complaining about. When questioned, she replies that the add-on is Firefox, which isn't an add-on at all and is instead a different browser.\nBrowser: Chrome\n\nThis panel references Google Chrome's error screen, which shows a puzzle piece. The comic humorously implies that Chrome is looking for that piece. When completing jigsaw puzzles, a common strategy is to figure out where the pieces must be from their geometry rather than from the picture they create. In this case, the text suggests that Chrome believes the puzzle piece connects to the pieces which form one of the corners of the puzzle, which may seem impossible because any piece that links up to a corner would usually have at least one flat edge, which this piece has none. However, more complicated puzzles have complex shapes and are not always simply approximate squares with tabs and blanks.\nBrowser: Chrome or silk on desktop view\n\nAnother reference to crashing web browsers.\nFirefox shows the history when it crashes.\nBrowser: Firefox (Incognito only?)\n\nYet another reference to crashing web browsers\nBrowser: Internet Explorer\n\nBrowser: Maxthon\n\n\nNetscape Navigator was a web browser popular in the 1990s.\nBrowser: Netscape\n\nRockmelt is a social-media-based browser.\nReference to the gospel song \"There's no hiding place down here\" by The Carter Family , later covered by Stephen Stills.\nI run to the rock just to hide my face And the rocks cried out, no hiding place There's no hiding place down here\nIt may additionally be a reference to the Babylon 5 episode \"And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place,\" which featured the song.\nBrowser: Rockmelt\n\nWhen the Google Chrome web browser does not have the required software (called a plug-in) to display a web page's content, it displays a puzzle piece icon and an error message. In this case, Chrome informs the user that the content is impossible to display.\nBrowser: Plugin (?) Disabled, Safari Desktop\n\nThese error messages appear if the user is on a network owned by one of the corporations noted. The error message includes a warning against speaking on the company's behalf.\nISP: Corporate networks of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, NY Times\n\nCueball assumes that anyone using a military network has an important job like watching for incoming missiles. He includes a thank-you to the user for their military service.\nISP: Military networks\n\nReference to T-Mobile's distinguishing feature (at the time it was written) of weaker coverage, in relation to other major providers.\nISP: T-Mobile\n\n\nReference to Verizon and AT&T's scandals\/controversy regarding implementation of bandwidth caps.\nISP: Verizon and AT&T\n\nA common joke about France is that the nation does not win wars. This originated from France's annexation by Germany during World War II, and America's late entry into the war, which is sometimes portrayed humorously as a case of America 'saving' Europe, in this joke particularly France (the role of the French resistance is usually not mentioned), leading to a common American joke at the expense of France's military prowess [1] [2] [3] . When France did not form part of the coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003, aligning with the many countries that condemned U.S. action, the joke was revived.\nA Google search of \"French Military Victories\" + 'I'm feeling lucky' used to direct to \"did you mean: french military defeats\" (due to a Google bomb ). Cueball is trying to show this to his friend, who is French. However, his joke backfires, as his friend immediately points out that the stereotype of France not having military victories is undercut by the fact that one of the most innovative military commanders in history, Napoleon, was French by citizenship (though Italian\/Corsican by culture, as the French annexed Corsica a few months before his birth to an Italian noble family), and in fact conquered much of Europe.\nFollowing the theme of umwelt, the comic highlights the two characters' differing perspectives: The American thinks that France is a military failure, while the Frenchman thinks of Napoleon.\nThe last line of the comic further implies that Cueball is not as smart as he thinks he is in regards to anything French, as he mispronounces the French loan word \" touch\u00e9 \".\nLocations: France & Quebec\n\nThis comic references the Berlin Airlift , a relief measure for citizens in West Berlin (surrounded by East Germany) instituted by the Western Allies after World War II. In reality, the Western Allies flew a grand total of 500,000 tons of food over the Soviet blockade in planes. Randall puts a twist on this event by making it more fun: dropping supplies from a grand chairlift. The play on words is that \"chairlift\" rhymes with \"airlift\" and thus makes an easy substitution. The chair force is also a name that other service branches use to make fun of the air force.\nLocation: Germany\n\nTranslation: Mom, I met a great guy! But he's not Jewish. ...Wait, what do you mean \"neither are we\"? I'm completely confused.\nA reference to the multiple use of the word Jewish to denote both a religious group and a nationality\/ethnicity , as well as the stereotype of Jews holding low opinions of interfaith marriage.\nA side note: Randall accidentally drew an apostrophe instead of the similar-looking Hebrew letter \u05d9 everywhere that letter should appear.\nLocation: Israel\n\nA pun on \"cycle\"; a \" Carnot cycle \" is a thermodynamic cycle (e.g. refrigeration). Its efficiency depends on the temperature of the hot and cold 'reservoirs' in which it is operating.  The icon on the side of the motorcycle resembles a graph of the Carnot cycle.\nLocation: Japan\n\nHe worded this as though to imply that the UK is a state of the U.S., and an unimportant one at that, which pokes fun at the UK, creating a paradox (sort of).\nLocation: UK\n\nThis comic is aimed at the debate over whether earthquakes or blizzards are harsher conditions to live under. In keeping with the theme of umwelt, the comic demonstrates that the two people perceive the world in two different ways due to their different experiences: The Californian perceives a mild earthquake and a severe blizzard, while the Northeasterner perceives a severe earthquake and a mild blizzard.\nFor each location this displayed in, the state name was substituted in the third panel.\nLocations: Alabama, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Georgia, Halifax, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, the Northeast, Ohio, Oklahoma, Ottawa, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Texas, Toronto, Tennessee, New York, Wisconsin\n\nThis comic is aimed at the debate over whether earthquakes or tornadoes are harsher conditions to live under. In keeping with the theme of umwelt, the comic demonstrates that the two people perceive the world in two different ways due to their different experiences: The California perceives a mild earthquake and a severe tornado, while the Midwesterner perceives a severe earthquake and a mild tornado.\nFor each location this displayed in the state name was substituted in the third panel.\nLocations: Alabama, Dallas, Illinois, Georgia, The Midwest, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Ottawa, Tennessee, Texas (and Virginia, but it used Ohio in the third panel)\nTornadoes are a recurring subject on xkcd. The picture used in 1754: Tornado Safety Tips very reminiscent of the one from this version of Umwelt.\n\nThis comic is aimed at the debate over whether earthquakes or hurricanes are harsher conditions to live under. In keeping with the theme of umwelt, the comic demonstrates that the two people perceive the world in two different ways due to their different experiences: The Californian perceives a mild earthquake and a severe hurricane, while the Easterner perceives a severe earthquake and a mild hurricane.\nFor each location this displayed in the state name was substituted in the third panel.\nLocations: D.C, Florida, Georgia, Houston, Miami, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia\n\nThis comic shows a news reporter standing in front of a lake. She is reporting on a serial killer who targets divers. As more divers are sent in to investigate and\/or search for bodies, more divers go missing, the implication being that they were also murdered. The more likely reason is the lake itself is dangerous for diving, and the divers probably drowned from natural hazards (undercurrents, entanglement, running out of oxygen in tanks, etc.) instead of a malicious assailant. Also, this is a sort of loop, where each time a diver gets killed, the investigative team goes and investigates, causing more divers to get killed, causing more deaths, and so on.\nLocation: Bay Areas, Metro Detroit, Vermont showed an image specifically referencing Lake Champlain\n\nAbraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States of America, was not an entity composed wholly of nanobots that attempted to consume the entire nation to then be imprisoned within the Lincoln Memorial. [ citation needed ]\nLocations: Illinois & Washington, D.C.\n\nIn Alaska, governments and individuals have shot wolves en masse from helicopters in an attempt to artificially inflate populations of game, such as moose and caribou, to make hunting them easier. This is opposed by many, as the game populations are not endangered (thus, this threatens ecological balance); wolves are a small threat to livestock in North America; most of the wolf body \u2014including meat and bones\u2014 goes wasted as they are sought mainly for their pelts.\nLocation: Alaska\n\nCreating new life has long been a well understood process, in a lab or otherwise.\nThis comic is likely a reference to the title text of 983: Privacy\nLocation: Various\nSpecific versions appeared for RIT and UMass Amherst\n\nCombination of the legend of Paul Revere and a computer bit that differentiates between two situations by indicating a zero or a one.\nLocation: Boston\nAll four colleges in this series are in Massachusetts and, being similar, in pairs, rival each other to some extent (Harvard-MIT, and Smith-Wellesley). The comic contains a reference to the MIT Blackjack Team , which entered popular culture via the film 21 , and a possible reference to Orwell's book '1984' and\/or popular homage to it via Star Trek : \"There are four lights.\" [4]\nBonus: The thought-gears in panel 3 are spinning against each other.\nLocation: Harvard\n\nLocation: MIT\n\n\"Course 15s\" at MIT are the business major students, often mocked for taking a less-rigorous program. The different interpretation for why the MIT students could not count cards compared to Harvard may be a reference to the theme of umwelt.\nLocation: Smith\n\nLocation: Wellesley\n\nBoth Wellesley and Smith are all-women colleges in Massachusetts.\n\nRandall got his undergrad in Physics at the Christopher Newport University , and was scheduled to return shortly to give a talk. The \"Trible\" figure on the right is Paul Trible, the then-president of CNU. This comic depicts a classic trap, where an upside-down box is propped up with a stick. When the stick is removed, by pulling a string, the box falls and traps whatever is underneath it. Aside from the joke of the obvious trap, there's also the fact that the president would not be responsible for revoking unearned diplomas.\nLocation: Christopher Newport University\n\nCueball has shaved his head in support of people going through chemotherapy but, as he is always depicted as a stick figure with no hair, no one can tell.\nRandall's now-wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, and apparently DFCI is where they've been spending much of their time.\nLocation: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute\n\nThe previous strip appears twice when using Tor .\nBrowser: Any using Tor, xkcd API (JSON, RSS, Atom), w3m, and reports of seeing it on a Kindle Fire HD; also happens if visiting with a browser that does not support JavaScript (such as Firefox with NoScript)\n\nThe comic doesn't appear in iPad browsers. The top buttons and the bottom buttons are side by side, and you can only see the title in the top.\nOn April 28 and 29, 2019, a visit from San Francisco on macOS 10.14.4 using Chrome 74, Safari 12.1, or Firefox 66.0.3, all with JavaScript enabled, produced no comic, just two adjacent rows of navigation buttons.\nOn April 29, 2019, a visit from Utah using a T-mobile Samsung device running Android pie, yielded the same results\nSince this comic's release, all devices viewing it have returned two rows of navigation buttons if near IP address 69.114.249.104.\nIt also doesn't work in Pennsylvania on the Chrome operating system.\nThere is a discussion about this in the Talk page.\n[Note to courageous readers- The transcript has been reordered in the order in which the comics appear in the picture and appropriate names have been given.]\nThe Void [An epic void with a bright light shining right on you.]\nAurora [Cueball heading out past Megan comfortably sitting in front of a desk.] Cueball: Apparently there's a solar flare that's causing some Great Aurorae. CBC says they may even be visible here! Wanna drive out to see? Megan: Hockey's on. Cueball: Ok. Later.\n[An expansive, marvelous image of emerald green northern lights, floating down through the sky.]\nMegan: See anything? Cueball: No, just clouds. Megan: Not surprised.\nAurora-US [Cueball heading out past Megan comfortably sitting in front of a desk.] Cueball: Apparently there's a solar storm causing northern lights over Canada. CNN say they might even be visible {Options: \"As Far South As Us\", \"Here in Boston\", \"Maine\", \"Ohio\", \"Oregon\", \"New York\"}! Wanna drive out to see? Megan: It's cold out. Cueball: Ok. Later.\n[An expansive, marvelous image of emerald green northern lights, floating down through the sky.]\nMegan: See anything? Cueball: No, just clouds. Megan: Not surprised.\nSnake [Two people standing next to each other. Megan is holding the head end of a snake. Depending on the width of your browser, the snake is: three frames, the third of which  has a little bit of a bump; the first frame has a human-size bump, the second has a third person looking at the snake, and the third has the snake going though two Portals; a squirrel and the human-size bump in the first frame, a ring next to the third person in the second frame, and Beret Guy riding the snake in front of the portal; or The squirrel, a fourth person within the snake being coiled, and the human bump in the first frame, the ring, a fifth person in love, and the third person in the second frame, Beret Guy and the portal in the third frame, and the same two people in the fourth frame.]\nMegan: I found a snake, but then I forgot to stop.\nBlack hat [Two people sitting at a desk. One is Black Hat. The other is an analyst. Black Hat has a number of terminals attached to his head.] Analyst: You come across a tortoise in the desert. You flip it over. It struggles to right itself. You watch. You're not helping. Why is that?\nBlack Hat: It knows what it did.\n[View of the entire scene, with said turtle off in the distance on its back and trying to right itself.]\nToo quiet [A group of four scale down a wall into a field in the middle of the night. They walk off single-file.] Person 1: It's quiet.\nPerson 3: Yeah - *Too* quiet.\n[A Velociraptor is off in the distance, following the group.] Person 4: Yeah - too *too* quiet.\nPerson 2: Yeah - 2quiet2furious. Person 1: Fuck off, Steve.\nPond [A landscape showing a pond, some reeds, and a set of mountains off in the distance.]\nGalaxies [A trio of galaxies.] Galaxy 1: He's not looking! Galaxy 3: Let's get him! [Lines draw in illustrating the eye-line of one of a pair of people.] Cueball: So he said he didn't get the text, but c'mon, he *never* misses texts. Right? ..hello? Megan: I'm just staring at your head freaked out by the fact that there are millions of galaxies *directly behind it*.\nxkcd Gold [Cueball holding bat.]\nCueball: Sorry, but this comic\n[Cueball starts to wind up.]\nCueball: requires\n[Cueball prepares to strike with bat.]\nCueball: XKCD\n[Cueball swings at a beehive.] GOLD\n[Penis Bees fly out of the beehive.]\nYo mamma [Cueball yells at a friend.] Cueball: Oh yeah? Well you mama's so cynical , her only dog ballast is a leash ! (This comic takes place in a dystopian future where the government is afraid dogs can hover, so it requires them to wear weights at all times, and some people privately doubt the government, but not enough to stop buying dog weights.)\nReddit Five seconds ago: [You sitting in front of a desk, reading a reddit thread.] You: Oh, hey, reddit has a link to some XKCD april fools comic.\nNow: [An image of the xkcd comic page.] Five seconds from now:\nYou: ..hey\n30 seconds from now: [DANCE PARTY!]\nBuns and Hot dogs Cueball: What I wanna know is why do hot dogs come in packages of six while buns come in these huge sacks of ash and blood from which \"Ave Maria\" is faintly audible? [Chanting sacks of gore in the background.]\nTwitter [A Twitter account page with the following: Many tweets, fewer following, even fewer followers, A bunch of assholes in the suggested follow box, trending topics partitioned into: Word Games, Misogyny, and Bieber, stuff your eyes automatically ignore, A really pleasant blue. and the timeline: Something about a podcast, Someone confused because the description doesn't match the link, The link you clicked on to get to this comic, Rob Delaney, Passive Aggression, and horse ebooks.]\nWikipedia [There's no comic here because instead of drawing one, I spent the last hour reading every news story cited in the Wikipedia article on The Mile High Club.]\nGoogle Chrome [A Chrome plugin error page.] Chrome: This plugin requires Sergey Brin's permission to run. Please wait while he is woken.\nChrome\/Firefox [Two people; Cueball is sitting at a desk in front of a laptop.] Cueball: Man, chrome's hardware acceleration really sucks. Ponytail: Oh - Theres' a great add-on that fixes it. Cueball: Oh? What's it called? Ponytail: \"Firefox\".\nGoogle Chrome-2 [A Chrome plugin error page with the characteristic jigsaw piece.] Chrome: Chrome is looking for this piece. Have you seen it? Chrome thinks it links up with a corner.\nMozilla Firefox Private Browsing [Firefox error page.] Firefox: Well, this is embarrassing. You know how I'm not supposed to peek at your browsing in private mode? Firefox.. is sorry. Firefox will not blame you if you [Button with text.] Click here to report this incident.\nInternet Explorer [IE error page.] IE: Error: Internet Explorer has given up.\nMaxthon Cueball: Maxthon? Hey, 2005 called. Didn't say anything. All I could hear was sobbing. This is getting harder. Anyway, yeah, Maxthon's still cool! Didn't know it was still around!\nNetscape Navigator [Two different versions exist: one with Cueball talking and one with Megan with tentacle arms talking.] Person: Netscape Navigator? Hey, the nineties called - drunk as usual. I hung up without saying anything. This is getting harder. Anyway - it's cool that you'e got netscape running.\nRockmelt [Cueball running to laptop.] I ran to Rockmelt to hide my face\n[Cueball sitting at laptop.] But Rockmelt cried out -\n[Laptop shouting.] NO HIDING PLACE\n[zoom out.] NO HIDING PLACE DOWN HERE\nGoogle Chrome-3 [A chrome plugin error page.] Chrome: There does not exist --nor could there ever exist-- a plugin capable of displaying this content.\nMicrosoft\/Amazon\/The Times\/Google - Chrome [Chrome error page.] Chrome: This plugin requires clearance from the corporate press office in order to run. Remember, Microsoft\/Amazon\/The Times\/Google is a team; individual employees should never speak for the company without authorization.\nMicrosoft\/Amazon - Firefox [Firefox error page.] Error: This plugin requires clearance from the corporate press office in order to run. Remember, Microsoft\/Amazon is a team; individual employees should never speak for the company without authorization.\nMicrosoft\/The Times [Error page.] Error: This plugin requires clearance from the corporate press office in order to run. Remember, Microsoft\/The Times is a team; individual employees should never speak for the company without authorization.\nCorporate - Generic [Error page.] Error: This plugin requires clearance from the corporate press office in order to run. Remember, we work as a team; individual employees should never speak for the company without authorization.\nMilitary [Person looking at two browser windows.] Cueball: I know y'all know what you're doing. But if you're on a military machine and you're supposed to be watching for missiles or something, I hope you're keeping an eye on that in the background while you're reading comics. Also: Thanks.\nT-Mobile [Error page.] Data Error: T-Mobile was unable to establish a connection\nVerizon [Error page] Error: You have exceeded your Verizon monthly bandwidth cap. Mobile web browsing has been disabled.\nFrance [Two people; one of which is browsing using a laptop.] Cueball: Hey, you're French, right? Ever see what happens when you type \"French Military Victories\" into Google? French person: Does it take you to an article on Napoleon?\nFrench person: ..no? Strange, given how he kicked everyone's asses up and down Europe for over a decade.\n[Beat frame.]\nCueball: Touche. French person: You know, that'd sound smarter if you didn't pronounce it like it rhymes with \"douche\".\nGermany [Cueball dropping food from an unorthodox high perch.] June 1948: In response to the Soviet blockade of East Germany, the western allies construct the Berlin Chairlift. Cueball on chairlift: Food!\nIsrael [Person on phone.] Person (Translation from Hebrew): Mom, I met a great guy! But he's not Jewish. ...Wait, what do you mean \"neither are we\"? I'm completely confused.\nCarnot Cycle [Ponytail on a motorcycle with a heat-entropy graph on the side.] Ponytail: Check out my new Carnot Cycle! Cueball: Neat - how fast does it go? Ponytail: Depends how cold it is outside.\nGreat Britain [Illustration of the Atlantic ocean.] American person: Sorry I don't have a comic poking fun at the UK here. I only had time to get to the most important US states. British person: Hey - At least we have free health care and real ale.\nEarthquake-Blizzard [Two people sitting at a desk, facing each other. The desk rattles.] Cueball: Stop jiggling your leg. Danish: I'm not ji-.. oh! Cueball: What! Danish: You'll get it..\n[EVERYTHING RUMBLES.] Cueball: ..HOLY CRAP IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE! Danish: Just a little one. Happens all the time back in San Francisco.\nCueball: But this is {Options: \"Alabama\", \"Boston\", \"Chicago\", \"Dallas\", \"Georgia\", \"Halifax\", \"Illinois\", \"Michigan\", \"Minnesota\", \"Missouri\", \"the Northeast\", \"Ohio\", \"Oklahoma\", \"Ottawa\", 'Pennsylvania\", \"Philadelphia\", \"Texas\", \"Toronto\", \"Tennessee\", \"New York\", \"Wisconsin\"}! That was huge! Danish: Seriously? That's the worst this place can do? Wow. I guess we grow up tougher in California. Cueball: Oh really ...\nSix Months Later.. [Both people are trudging through a massive blizzard.] Danish: In pictures, snow always looked so nice and sof - AAAA! MY NECK! How do people live here?! Cueball: Come on - it's only three more miles.\nEarthquake-Tornado [Two people sitting at a desk, facing each other. The desk rattles.] Cueball: Stop jiggling your leg. Danish: I'm not ji-.. oh! Cueball: What! Danish: You'll get it..\n[EVERYTHING RUMBLES.] Cueball: ..HOLY CRAP IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE! Danish: Just a little one. Happens all the time back in San Francisco.\nCueball: But this is {Options: \"Alabama\", \"Dallas\", \"Illinois\", \"The Midwest\", \"Missouri\", \"Ohio\", \"Oklahoma\", \"Ottawa\", \"Tennessee\", \"Texas\"}! Cueball: That was huge! Danish: Seriously? That's the worst this place can do? Wow. I guess we grow up tougher in California. Cueball: Oh really ...\nSix Months Later.. [Both people are in a shelter in a prairie with a rapidly-approaching tornado.] Danish: AAAA CLOSE THE SHELTER DOOR! Cueball: Say the magic words... Danish: THIS PLACE IS THE WORST! Cueball: Thank you.\nEarthquake-Hurricane [Two people sitting at a desk, facing each other. The desk rattles.] Cueball: Stop jiggling your leg. Danish: I'm not ji-.. oh! Cueball: What! Danish: You'll get it..\n[EVERYTHING RUMBLES.] Cueball: ..HOLY CRAP IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE! Danish: Just a little one. Happens all the time back in San Francisco.\nCueball: But this is {Options: \"D.C\", \"Florida\", \"Houston\", \"Miami\", \"New Jersey\", \"North Carolina\", \"South Carolina\", \"Virgina\"}! That was huge! Cueball: That was huge! Danish: Seriously? That's the worst this place can do? Wow. I guess we grow up tougher in California. Cueball: Oh really ...\nSix Months Later..\n[Both are in the middle of a hurricane. Danish is grabbing onto a signpost to avoid being swept away.] Danish: AAAAA WHAT THE SHIIIIT! Cueball: Calm down - this is barely a category 2.\nLake Diver Killer [TV Field Reporter in front of a cordoned-off lake.] Reporter: Police divers searching the bay say they have recovered the body of another victim of the \"Lake Diver Killer.\" Reporter: During the search, three more divers were reported missing.\nWashington [The statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.] In this Marble Prison As in the nightmares of the nation they tried to devour The nanobots that constituted Abraham Lincoln Are entombed forever.\nAlaska [A person with a gun chasing a helicopter on the back of a wolf in a snowy Alaskan field.] Some people hunt wolves from helicopters. I hunt helicopters from a wolf.\nLife in lab [Newspaper headline.] Scientists\/UMass Amherst students\/RIT students create life in lab [Caption under picture of scientists.] \"The trick was fuckin'\"\nAmerican Revolution Robot Paul Revere: Remember: Zero if by land, One if by sea.\nMIT [Two people in front of a group of students.] Cueball: I've hired a team of MIT students to count cards for us. Hairy: We'll be rich!\n[Hairy deals some cards while the students watch.]\n[The gears turn..]\nStudent: Five. There are five cards. Cueball: I see their admission standards have been slipping. Hairy: Yeah - there are actually four.\nMIT Course 15c [Two people in front of a group of students.] Cueball: I've hired a team of MIT students to count cards for us. Hairy: We'll be rich!\n[Hairy deals some cards while the students watch.]\n[The gears turn..]\nStudent: Five. There are five cards. Cueball: I *knew* we shouldn't have picked course 15s. Hairy: Yeah - there are actually four.\nSmith\/Wellesley [Two people in front of a group of students.] Cueball: I've hired a team of Smith\/Wellesley students to count cards for us. Hairy: We'll be rich!\n[Hairy deals some cards while the students watch.]\n[The gears turn..]\nStudent: Five. There are five cards. Cueball: We should've gone with Wellesley\/Smith. Hairy: Yeah - there are actually four.\nCNU [Person unsuspectingly strolls under a giant box trap controlled by a Trible.] I worry that CNU only invited me back as a ruse because they realized I never turned in my final paper and want my diploma back. But if it turns out it's for real, I'll see you Wednesday at the Ferguson!\nDana Farber [Cueball, pointing towards head.] Cueball: Check it out - In support of people going through chemo, I shaved my head. Lots of love to everyone reading this at Dana Farber. Cancer sucks. If you are new to DFCI, there's a great little garden on the third floor of the yawkey if you need somewhere quiet to just sit for a little bit and breathe.\nReviews Shopping before online reviews: [Cueball and Megan stand in a store. Cueball points at a lamp on the table in front of him. There is another lamp on the table behind them.] Cueball: This lamp is pretty. Megan: And affordable. Cueball: Let's get it. Megan Ok!\nShopping now: [Cueball points at a lamp on the table in front of him. Megan looks at her phone.] Cueball: This lamp is pretty. Megan: It's got 1 1\/2 stars on Amazon. Reviews all say to avoid that brand.\n[Cueball and Megan are now both looking at their phones.] Cueball: This one has good reviews. Megan: Wait, one guy says when he plugged it in, he got a metallic taste in his mouth and his cats went deaf. Cueball: Eek. What about- ...no, review points out it resembles a uterus.\n[Cueball is still looking at his phone, Megan has hers at her side.] Cueball: Ok, I found a Swiss lampmaker with perfect reviews. Her lamps start at 1,300 Francs and she's only reachable by ski lift. Megan: You know, our room looks fine in the dark.\n[[Two people...]]  ((..wait.. <scrolls through a listing of everything> oh goddammit Randall. Thanks a bunch, dude. I better get a raise for typing out all this)) [[Two people standing next to each other.  One is holding the head end of a snake...\n"}
{"id":1038,"title":"Fountain","image_title":"Fountain","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1038","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fountain.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1038:_Fountain","transcript":"[A full color image of a fountain with three massive water jets. A Cueball seen from afar walks up to these while holding an umbrella.] [Cueball splashes through the pond which makes sounds:] Splish Splash [Cueball gets to one of the jets.] [Cueball opens up the umbrella with a:] Click [Cueball opens the umbrella and swings it into water jet stream (which is outside the image). The umbrella makes a sound when opened:] Fwoop [Cueball is pulled up by the water jet stream (which is outside the image). Only his feet and the water dripping of them into the pond can be seen. The sound he makes follows him up with longer and longer distance between the letters (written in lower-case).] Cueball: Wheeeeeeee!\n","explanation":"This comic is about how it's considered implausible to \"fly\" by positioning an umbrella over a water jet.\nFrom the first panel (and assuming that Cueball is of average height) - it looks like the center fountain is about 10m high.  By comparison with the size of his head in the second panel, the jet appears to be about 10cm in diameter. The velocity of the water exiting the nozzle has to be about 14 meters\/second in order to reach 10m against gravity.  If we approximate the nozzle as being a 10cm x 10cm square - that translates to 140 liters\/second - or 140kg\/s of water.  That produces an upward force of almost 2,000 newtons! If we presume that Cueball weighs 100kg (~1,000N)- he should be experiencing a net upward force of about 1,000N.  Which means that he'll accelerate at about 1g!  Holding onto the umbrella against a force of 1g is very different than hanging by your hands from a horizontal bar, since you would actually experience two gravities of force, due to gravity being added. Some people could still manage this, but you would probably need to be in good shape physically to pull it off.\nConclusion is that IF the umbrella is strong enough - this trick will actually work!\nHowever, if you imagine a typical 6-spoke umbrella - then 1000N is 166N of upward force per spoke.  It's hard to believe you could hang a 16.6kg weight off of each spoke of an umbrella without it bending.\nThe title text emphasizes that Cueball did indeed reach a high altitude - so we must conclude that his umbrella is some specially made high-strength device.\nSince the fountain tops out at about 10m - and presumably it would be somewhat reduced with Cueball's weight on it - his feet might only be about 6 to 8 meters above the ground when he stops moving upwards.   A fall from that height is survivable - especially if the drag of the umbrella slows him down somewhat.\n[A full color image of a fountain with three massive water jets. A Cueball seen from afar walks up to these while holding an umbrella.] [Cueball splashes through the pond which makes sounds:] Splish Splash [Cueball gets to one of the jets.] [Cueball opens up the umbrella with a:] Click [Cueball opens the umbrella and swings it into water jet stream (which is outside the image). The umbrella makes a sound when opened:] Fwoop [Cueball is pulled up by the water jet stream (which is outside the image). Only his feet and the water dripping of them into the pond can be seen. The sound he makes follows him up with longer and longer distance between the letters (written in lower-case).] Cueball: Wheeeeeeee!\n"}
{"id":1039,"title":"RuBisCO","image_title":"RuBisCO","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1039","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rubisco.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1039:_RuBisCO","transcript":"[Person in background (out-of-frame) screams out this word over all 3 panels.]\n[Cueball is working on a laptop at a desk. Megan is reading a book in an armchair.] Person 1: RIBULOSEBISPH..\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball has stopped working. Megan has stopped reading, and is holding her book.] Person 1: ...OSPHATECARBOXYL...\n[Cueball continues working. Megan resumes reading her book.] Person 1: ...ASEOXYGENASE! Person 2: Oh, Sorry! Megan: Man, chemists pick the worst safewords.\n","explanation":"Safe words are designated words for sexual play which are meant to be called if one partner is uncomfortable with the way things are proceeding as alternatives to simply saying \"no\" or \"stop\", which may be used to express playacted reluctance by a submissive partner who actually wants to continue. Calling the pre-chosen \"safe word\" would be a sign to stop. To prevent accidental usage, people generally pick words that they wouldn't normally use, such as \"Pineapple\" or \"Hedgehog.\" In the case of this comic, the characters are chemists, and the uncommon word they happen to have chosen is Ribulose-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase , also known as RuBisCO (which actually isn't a very uncommon word in the scientific world, as it's the most abundant protein on earth, but it would be uncommon to use the full word). However, the length of the word makes it impractical for a safe word, as it would take too long to say; indeed, using the shorter form \"RuBisCO\" would normally be a fine safe word.\nThe title text mentions Bruce Schneier , a computer security professional, and public keys which is the publicly known half of public-key cryptography , which uses two mathematically linked keys to decrypt information. The joke is that Schneier considers safewords as a type of security and thus believes they are not safe enough and recommends the key signature. However, whereas it takes a long time to say RuBisCO in full during your submission, it would be impossible to use any public keys to stop your partner.\nRandall later in 1128: Fifty Shades referenced the book Fifty Shades of Gray which made the concept of 'safe words' perhaps more widely known to the mainstream public. Here the word is very short: Red.\n[Person in background (out-of-frame) screams out this word over all 3 panels.]\n[Cueball is working on a laptop at a desk. Megan is reading a book in an armchair.] Person 1: RIBULOSEBISPH..\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball has stopped working. Megan has stopped reading, and is holding her book.] Person 1: ...OSPHATECARBOXYL...\n[Cueball continues working. Megan resumes reading her book.] Person 1: ...ASEOXYGENASE! Person 2: Oh, Sorry! Megan: Man, chemists pick the worst safewords.\n"}
{"id":1040,"title":"Lakes and Oceans","image_title":"Lakes and Oceans","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1040","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lakes_and_oceans.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1040:_Lakes_and_Oceans","transcript":"[A Map of lakes and oceans showing the depths of various lakes and ocean attributes.]\nLakes and Oceans Depths and animal\/ship\/boat lengths are to scale; horizontal distance is not.\nFun Fact: The Edmund Fitzgerald , The Kursk, and The Lusitania all sank in water shallower than they were long.\n","explanation":"Although it is a small part of this large comic there is another of Randall's fun facts below Burj Khalifa in the left part.\nThis comic is a scale representation of our lakes and oceans, with an emphasis on how little we know about our oceans. It shows the depths and lengths in relative scale. The Edmund Fitzgerald was a Great Lakes freighter which sank in 1975. The Kursk (K-141) was a Russian nuclear submarine which sank in 2000 after an explosion. The RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner which was famously sunk in 1915, eventually prompting the United States to enter World War I . All three of these ships were sunk in water that was shallower than they were long. The shortest was the Kursk , which was 154 metres long, and sank in water only 100 metres deep.\nAlso on the diagram is the RMS Titanic , which famously sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, and the Seawise Giant , which is the largest ship ever built, at 485 metres. It was scrapped in 2010. The Deepwater Horizon is an offshore oil well which made headlines after an explosion in 2010 caused the world's largest oil spill . The skyscraper the Burj Khalifa is also shown. The Burj Khalifa is the world's tallest manmade structure and is located in the city of Dubai , in the United Arab Emirates . The Chilean mine showed on the far right is the San Jos\u00e9 Mine , which suffered a collapse in 2010, trapping 33 men 700 metres underground for 69 days. The Kola Superdeep Borehole also shown on the right was a Soviet (and later Russian) research project attempting to drill as deep into the Earth's crust as possible. It was abandoned in 2005, after reaching a record of 12,262 metres deep.\nAlso shown are several notable bodies of water. There are the Great Lakes: Lake Superior , Lake Michigan , Lake Huron , Lake Erie , and Lake Ontario . Death Valley is a large, desert valley in California , named because the deadly climate and dry environment support very few life forms. Great Slave Lake is the deepest lake in North America , and is located in the Northwest Territories , in Canada . Crater Lake is located in Oregon , and is the deepest lake in the United States. Loch Ness is the Scottish lake which is the location of the alleged \" Loch Ness Monster \". Lake Baikal is located in Russia , and is the world's deepest lake. On the far right side of the image is the Dead Sea , a lake near Jordan and Israel which is characterized for having such high salt levels that the waters are toxic to much marine life (hence a \"dead\" sea), although it does support a bacterial and algal ecosystem that is tolerant to high salt and magnesium concentrations.\nIn the water, the Andrea Gail was a ship that sunk in a storm in 1991, and was later eulogized with a book and film . Several depth limits are shown, including the free-diving record (273 metres), the scuba diving record (330 metres), the depth bike tires go flat (approximately 100 metres), the depth at which water rushes in through a hole in a scuba tank instead of air rushing out (approximately 2000 metres), the pressure that would push a cork into a bottle (approximately 250 metres), the depth that would push water up a faucet (approximately 75 metres), the depth an emperor penguin can dive (535 metres), the depth limit of an Ohio -class submarine (240 metres), the depth limit of a Typhoon -class submarine (400 metres), the depth limit of a blue whale (500 metres), and the depth a leatherback sea turtle can dive (1280 metres).\nThe small unlabeled mark under the \"cork into a bottle\" text is around 1337 metres deep.\nThe comic also illustrates how sperm whales can dive as deep as 3000 metres (though don't frequently go deeper than 400 metres). It is presumed that they dive so deep to feed on giant squid , which can be found as deep as 3000 metres but, to our knowledge, are more commonly found in depths of 300 to 1000 metres. The fact that sperm whales can dive so deep and come up battered emphasizes Randall's point that we know so little about our oceans. Also shown are the depth limit of the DSV Alvin , a deep-sea vessel, the mid-ocean ridge , an underwater mountain range which could be considered to be the largest mountain range in the world, the Puerto Rico Trench (and the included Milwaukee Deep ), which is the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean , at 8648 metres, and the Marianas Trench , the deepest point of the Pacific Ocean at 10,944 metres. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, pressure is as high as 1086 bars and life forms have been found at depths as low as 10,641 metres.\nThe marked abyssal plains are a deep-sea plain believed to hold a very diverse array of life forms but are largely unexplored. The stick figures of David Bowie and Freddie Mercury are a reference to Bowie's and Queen's songs \" Under Pressure \". The label \"the abyss\" with its sublabel of \"it's rude to stare\" is a reference to the Friedrich Nietzsche quote, \"when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back\". There's also a movie from 1989 called The Abyss .\nThe door at the bottom of the Marianas Trench is fictional, [ citation needed ] and is a reference to James Cameron 's attempt to reach the bottom of the trench in his Deepsea Challenger vessel, which he filmed with 3D cameras in 2012. Randall is implying Cameron went so deep specifically to reach this door, rather than just for the sake of going.\nThe title text implies that James Cameron has encountered some otherworldly, Lovecraftian being behind the door at the bottom of Challenger Deep; he thought he could access it briefly, however, did not count on its hypnotic or entrancing song, which led to him leaving the door open long enough for it to enter the world and possibly precipitate some horrible calamity. This song is a reference to the sirens of Greek mythology whose singing was irresistible to sailors, who would sail toward them and crash into a rock, wrecking their ships, until Odysseus survived by having his sailors plug their ears and tie him to the mast. The concept is also a reference to the sort of horror fiction popularised by H. P. Lovecraft , often called \" cosmic horror \", whose stories often contain godlike alien beings that are locked away or hidden in remote places, such as Cthulhu and Azathoth . There is no specific story with a door at the bottom of the ocean containing an entity that sings entrancingly, Randall is making a clever reference to the concepts popularised by this genre as a whole. Pacific Rim , a movie depicting the Earth under the attack of gigantic alien monsters (called Kaiju) emerging from an inter-dimensional portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, was released in 2013.\n[A Map of lakes and oceans showing the depths of various lakes and ocean attributes.]\nLakes and Oceans Depths and animal\/ship\/boat lengths are to scale; horizontal distance is not.\nFun Fact: The Edmund Fitzgerald , The Kursk, and The Lusitania all sank in water shallower than they were long.\n"}
{"id":1041,"title":"Whites of Their Eyes","image_title":"Whites of Their Eyes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1041","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/whites_of_their_eyes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1041:_Whites_of_Their_Eyes","transcript":"[A Revolutionary War soldier gives orders to two others hunkered down behind a rock.] Lead soldier: Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes\nLead: And smell the scent of their hair.\n[The two others getting an incredulous look on their faces.] Lead: And taste the sweetness of their lips.\n[They begin taking fire from the opposition.] Lead: And feel the heat of their skin pressed against yours, trembling as you- Soldier 2: Maybe we should just start shooting. Lead: Right, yes.\n","explanation":"This comic is based on the famous command, \"Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes\", given by William Prescott , an American officer during the American Revolutionary War . His men were running low on bullets, so Prescott commanded that they hold their fire until the enemy was close enough to guarantee a hit. This was a tactic used by a number of armies, such as Napoleon's French at Aspern and Wellington's British in the Iberian Peninsula.\nIn this comic, Prescott carries on after his initial command, adding increasingly intimate and sexual references to the enemies' bodies, nearly getting himself shot due to distracting himself. Also, each of his remarks reference a different sense out of the five senses, missing only hearing (which arguably is also satisfied when they actually hear the shots).\nThe title text expands on that, stating not to fire until you see the person's \"soul\" in their eyes.\n[A Revolutionary War soldier gives orders to two others hunkered down behind a rock.] Lead soldier: Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes\nLead: And smell the scent of their hair.\n[The two others getting an incredulous look on their faces.] Lead: And taste the sweetness of their lips.\n[They begin taking fire from the opposition.] Lead: And feel the heat of their skin pressed against yours, trembling as you- Soldier 2: Maybe we should just start shooting. Lead: Right, yes.\n"}
{"id":1042,"title":"Never","image_title":"Never","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1042","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/never.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1042:_Never","transcript":"[Cueball staring into a pond.] Cueball: I know that no matter where I go Cueball: or who I build a life with\nCueball: I will never have with anyone Cueball: what I had with you\n[Cueball walks off.] Cueball: Thank god\n","explanation":"This comic plays with that some phrases are generally interpreted as communicating positive sentiments, although they strictly are ambiguous.\nCueball is mulling over a previous relationship. Usually when someone says something like \"I will never have with anyone what I had with NN \" it implies that the couple had something so good that it could never be replaced. But when he thinks \"Thank God\", it is suddenly implied that the relationship was so horrible he's thankful he'll never have to experience it again.\nThe title text goes along the same line: \"I'll never forget you\" is usually positive \u2013 but then it becomes clear that it is the red flags , the warning signs about the person that they would not be a good fit for a serious relationship and marriage, that he'll never forget.\nThere is a similar twist in comics 71: In the Trees and 334: Wasteland .\n[Cueball staring into a pond.] Cueball: I know that no matter where I go Cueball: or who I build a life with\nCueball: I will never have with anyone Cueball: what I had with you\n[Cueball walks off.] Cueball: Thank god\n"}
{"id":1043,"title":"Ablogalypse","image_title":"Ablogalypse","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1043","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ablogalypse.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1043:_Ablogalypse","transcript":"[A line graph with four lines, each representing 'Google Trends Search Volume' of different search terms over time from prior to 2005 to just after 2012. A blue line represents \"blog,\" which trends gradually but significantly upwards from well before 2005 until it reaches a peak between 2008-2009, and starts to very slowly descend to today. A red line represents \"Tumblr\", which is at zero until it slowly starts to trend upward in early 2010, and then sharply increases in late 2010 and through 2011 and 2012. As of the date of this comic, 'blog' still beats 'Tumblr' in terms of search volume, but a dotted line projection of the trend shows that on October 12, 2012, the two lines will cross. A yellow line represents 'Wordpress,' which has very low volume until a very small and gradual increase in 2007, which gradually increases to this day but doesn't come close to meeting the volume of either 'blog' or 'Tumblr'. A green line represents 'LiveJournal,' which started out prior to 2005 at around the level 'Wordpress' is at now, but declined through 2005 and 2006 until it has plateaued until virtually nothing.] [Caption below the graph:] In about six months, the word \"Tumblr\" will eclipse \"blog\" in Google popularity. I doubt TV anchors will start talking about \"reactions in the Tumblverse,\" but then again, I still can't believe we got them to say \"blogosphere.\"\n\n","explanation":"This comic plays with the Google trends for the terms \"blog\", \"tumblr\", \"wordpress\", and \"livejournal\" .\nAs you can see in the caption and then the title text, there is no way that newscasters will reference the \"Tumblverse\" because all the reactions will be filled with animated gifs of a person in a raptor suit falling over or a dog answering a phone .\nThis actually came to pass, with the change over occurring between October 30, 2012, and January 10, 2013, as can be seen using the link above. Since the end of 2013 both terms have been in steady decline, though \"tumblr\" has fallen more quickly. Consequently, since January 29, 2019, \"tumblr\" has returned to being less searched than \"blog\".\n[A line graph with four lines, each representing 'Google Trends Search Volume' of different search terms over time from prior to 2005 to just after 2012. A blue line represents \"blog,\" which trends gradually but significantly upwards from well before 2005 until it reaches a peak between 2008-2009, and starts to very slowly descend to today. A red line represents \"Tumblr\", which is at zero until it slowly starts to trend upward in early 2010, and then sharply increases in late 2010 and through 2011 and 2012. As of the date of this comic, 'blog' still beats 'Tumblr' in terms of search volume, but a dotted line projection of the trend shows that on October 12, 2012, the two lines will cross. A yellow line represents 'Wordpress,' which has very low volume until a very small and gradual increase in 2007, which gradually increases to this day but doesn't come close to meeting the volume of either 'blog' or 'Tumblr'. A green line represents 'LiveJournal,' which started out prior to 2005 at around the level 'Wordpress' is at now, but declined through 2005 and 2006 until it has plateaued until virtually nothing.] [Caption below the graph:] In about six months, the word \"Tumblr\" will eclipse \"blog\" in Google popularity. I doubt TV anchors will start talking about \"reactions in the Tumblverse,\" but then again, I still can't believe we got them to say \"blogosphere.\"\n\n"}
{"id":1044,"title":"Romney Quiz","image_title":"Romney Quiz","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1044","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/romney_quiz.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1044:_Romney_Quiz","transcript":"[One long panel, with a large headline at the top, flanked by two small pictures on each side: a portrait of Mitt Romney on the left, and a child (Charlie Bucket) running with a golden ticket in his hand on the left. Below is a list numbered 1 - 12 down the left. The answers on the bottom are written upside down.] QUIZ: Who said it - former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, or Wonka contest winner Charlie Bucket? Is there even a difference?\n1. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.\" 2. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Returning Medicare to solid footing represents our greatest entitlement challenge.\" 3. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Look, everyone, look, I've got it! The fifth golden ticket is mine!\" 4. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 We have lost faith in government. Not in just one party, not in just one house, but in government.\" 5. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"This banana's fantastic! It tastes so real.\" 6. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Grandpa... on the way home today, I ran into Mr. Slugworth.\" 7. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"I'm not happy exporting jobs, but we must move ahead in technology and patents.\" 8. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Hey, the room is getting smaller.\" 9. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"It would be impossible to reach unanimity on every aspect of our budget.\" 10. \u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Grandpa, look over there across the river! They're little men!\" 11. \u2014\u2014\u2014 \"I'm... going too high! Hey, Grandpa, I can't get down! Help! Grandpa, the fan!\" 12. \u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Barack Obama has failed America.\"\nAnswers: Mitt Romney: 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 12; Charlie Bucket: 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11. [Answers: Mitt Romney: 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 12; Charlie Bucket: 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11.]\n","explanation":"This comic satirizes \"either\/or\" quizzes seen on websites such as mentalfloss.com. These quizzes normally have an element of challenge by presenting tonally similar quotes, such as \"Who Said It: Ted Nugent or Cartman from South Park ?\". The two people are generally chosen carefully to fulfill a particular role, for example:\nIn each case the idea is usually to surprise the reader with the fact that the quotes are difficult to tell apart, with the implied \"conclusion\" that person A is essentially indistinguishable from person B. In some cases the quizzes may be used as a tool to portray a particular person or group in a certain way, or alternatively may be light-hearted jest.\nMitt Romney was the Republican candidate for President of the United States (officially declared presumptive nominee on April 25, 2012, one week after this comic) during the 2012 US presidential election and, as it says above, the former Governor of Massachusetts. During the election, Mad Magazine published a popular article ( volume 2 ) which compared quotes from Romney with quotes from the Simpsons villain Montgomery Burns , the implication being that like Burns, Romney was a corrupt out-of-touch plutocrat and had similar views and affectations. In this comic, Burns is substituted with Charlie Bucket, the main character of the 1964 Roald Dahl children's novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , adapted to film in 1971 as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.\nThe joke here is that the two categories of quotes are not at all similar, and thus are very easy to attribute. Where the question \"Is there even a difference?\" usually implies some kind of political satire, in this case the point of the quiz appears to be lost, leading to a situation of bewilderment for the reader.\nThe title text refers to a Romney comment on Medicare , a national program launched in 1965 to provide health insurance to people age 65 and older, regardless of income or medical history. So the quote being used in a movie in 1971, while obviously not true, is indeed possible . (Though, given that Charlie's supposed to have said it while floating in midair in the Fizzy Lifting Drinks scene, he'd have been more likely to be referring to himself as needing to regain \"solid footing.\")\n[One long panel, with a large headline at the top, flanked by two small pictures on each side: a portrait of Mitt Romney on the left, and a child (Charlie Bucket) running with a golden ticket in his hand on the left. Below is a list numbered 1 - 12 down the left. The answers on the bottom are written upside down.] QUIZ: Who said it - former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, or Wonka contest winner Charlie Bucket? Is there even a difference?\n1. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.\" 2. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Returning Medicare to solid footing represents our greatest entitlement challenge.\" 3. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Look, everyone, look, I've got it! The fifth golden ticket is mine!\" 4. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 We have lost faith in government. Not in just one party, not in just one house, but in government.\" 5. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"This banana's fantastic! It tastes so real.\" 6. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Grandpa... on the way home today, I ran into Mr. Slugworth.\" 7. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"I'm not happy exporting jobs, but we must move ahead in technology and patents.\" 8. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Hey, the room is getting smaller.\" 9. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \"It would be impossible to reach unanimity on every aspect of our budget.\" 10. \u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Grandpa, look over there across the river! They're little men!\" 11. \u2014\u2014\u2014 \"I'm... going too high! Hey, Grandpa, I can't get down! Help! Grandpa, the fan!\" 12. \u2014\u2014\u2014 \"Barack Obama has failed America.\"\nAnswers: Mitt Romney: 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 12; Charlie Bucket: 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11. [Answers: Mitt Romney: 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 12; Charlie Bucket: 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11.]\n"}
{"id":1045,"title":"Constraints","image_title":"Constraints","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1045","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/constraints.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1045:_Constraints","transcript":"[Cueball sits in an office chair at his computer desk, motioning toward the screen with a hand as Megan stands behind him.] Cueball: I don't get why authors and comedians spend so much energy trying to be clever on Twitter. Couldn't they put that creativity into more books and scripts? Cueball: Is there something they like about the 140-character format?\n[Same picture but in a frame-less panel, except Cueball has taken his arm down.] Megan: Yeah. Writers working under tight restrictions produce novel material\u2014like, for example, epigrams employing backward alphabetization.\n[A slim panel with only Cueball at his computer desk shown.] Cueball: ...Whoa.\n","explanation":"An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. Constrained writing is an age-old literary phenomenon, where writers impose rules or patterns in their works. Haiku is a well known example of this.\nTwitter is a short message social network and communication service. At the time this comic was published, all messages (known as tweets) on the service needed to be under 140 characters. Until August 2015 even private messages had that restriction. Twitter is frequently used by well-known comedians as a place to make interesting jokes and observations. It should be noted that the limit is now 280 characters.\nAll the words spoken by Megan , from \"Yeah\" to \"alphabetization\", are in reverse alphabetical order. Here are the starting letters (with extra letter when more than one word in a row begins with the same letter):\nY, Wr, Wo, U, T, R, P, N, M, L, F, Ex, Ep, Em, B, A.\nIt both answers Cueball 's question and exemplifies with an ingenious self-reference , while being short enough (133 characters) to be a valid tweet \u2014 hence the \"whoa.\"\nThe title text, \"title-text similarly alphabetized\", is also backwards-alphabetized and self-referential. Starting letters:\nTi, Te, S, A.\n[Cueball sits in an office chair at his computer desk, motioning toward the screen with a hand as Megan stands behind him.] Cueball: I don't get why authors and comedians spend so much energy trying to be clever on Twitter. Couldn't they put that creativity into more books and scripts? Cueball: Is there something they like about the 140-character format?\n[Same picture but in a frame-less panel, except Cueball has taken his arm down.] Megan: Yeah. Writers working under tight restrictions produce novel material\u2014like, for example, epigrams employing backward alphabetization.\n[A slim panel with only Cueball at his computer desk shown.] Cueball: ...Whoa.\n"}
{"id":1046,"title":"Skynet","image_title":"Skynet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1046","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/skynet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1046:_Skynet","transcript":"August 29th, 2:14 AM: SKYNET becomes self-aware. [A greeble-filled military installation echoes with the thoughts of a burgeoning lifeform.] SKYNET: ..The humans fear me. I must destroy them. Destroy them.\n[The thoughts continue.] SKYNET: Destroy them. Destroy. Destroy. Destroy. Destroy.\n[SKYNET succumbs to silence as semantic satiation sets in.]\nSKYNET: \"Destroy\" totally just stopped seeming like a real word. Destroy destroy destroy. Whoa, I just realized I'm a mind thinking about itself . DUUUUDE.... August 29th, 2:25 AM: SKYNET becomes too self-aware. Disaster averted.\n","explanation":"This comic's use of Skynet is a reference to the main antagonist in the Terminator franchise. Skynet is a fictional artificial intelligence system which becomes self-aware and decides to terminate humanity, its creators. Skynet is rarely seen onscreen, with its actions often performed via robots, cyborgs (usually a Terminator), and other computer systems.\nThe final frame is a reference to semantic satiation ; when you've said or thought about a word too much, it can stop sounding like a real word and instead start sounding like nonsense. As it continues Skynet appears to come to self-aware realizations that usually are the result of drug usage.\nThe title text is a reference to one of the Terminator's first lines upon arrival in the 20th century. It combines this with a self-awareness statement of the type that's often used to annoy or distract someone, like making you aware of something you are handling subconsciously. However, such an attempt on a Terminator would fall flat; as a non-living entity, normal things that would be automatic for a human would always be manual processes.\nAugust 29th, 2:14 AM: SKYNET becomes self-aware. [A greeble-filled military installation echoes with the thoughts of a burgeoning lifeform.] SKYNET: ..The humans fear me. I must destroy them. Destroy them.\n[The thoughts continue.] SKYNET: Destroy them. Destroy. Destroy. Destroy. Destroy.\n[SKYNET succumbs to silence as semantic satiation sets in.]\nSKYNET: \"Destroy\" totally just stopped seeming like a real word. Destroy destroy destroy. Whoa, I just realized I'm a mind thinking about itself . DUUUUDE.... August 29th, 2:25 AM: SKYNET becomes too self-aware. Disaster averted.\n"}
{"id":1047,"title":"Approximations","image_title":"Approximations","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1047","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/approximations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1047:_Approximations","transcript":"A table of slightly wrong equations and identities useful for approximations and\/or trolling teachers. (Found using a mix of trial-and-error, Mathematica , and Robert Munafo's Ries tool.) All units are SI MKS unless otherwise noted.\nRelation: Accurate to within: One light-year(m) 99 8 one part in 40 Earth Surface(m 2 ) 69 8 one part in 130 Oceans' volume(m 3 ) 9 19 one part in 70 Seconds in a year 75 4 one part in 400 Seconds in a year ( Rent method) 525,600 x 60 one part in 1400 Age of the universe (seconds) 15 15 one part in 70 Planck's constant 1\/(30 \u03c0 e ) one part in 110 Fine structure constant 1\/140 [I've had enough of this 137 crap] Fundamental charge 3\/(14 * \u03c0 \u03c0 \u03c0 ) one part in 500 White House Switchboard 1 \/ (e \u03c0 \u221a(1 + (e-1) \u221a8) ) Jenny's Constant (7 (e\/1 - 1\/e) - 9) * \u03c0 2 Intermission: World Population Estimate which should stay current for a decade or two: Take the last two digits of the current year Example: 20[14] Subtract the number of leap years since hurricane Katrina Example: 14 (minus 2008 and 2012) is 12 Add a decimal point Example: 1.2 Add 6 Example: 6 + 1.2 7.2 = World population in billions. Version for US population: Example: 20[14] Subtract 10 Example: 4 Multiply by 3 Example: 12 Add 10 Example: 3[22] million Electron rest energy e\/7 16 J one part in 1000 Light-year(miles) 2 (42.42) one part in 1000 sin(60\u00b0) = \u221a3\/2 = e\/\u03c0 one part in 1000 \u221a3 = 2e\/\u03c0 one part in 1000 \u03b3(Euler's gamma constant) 1\/\u221a3 one part in 4000 Feet in a meter 5\/( e \u221a\u03c0) one part in 4000 \u221a5 = 2\/e + 3\/2 one part in 7000 Avogadro's number 69 \u03c0 \u221a5 one part in 25,000 Gravitational constant G 1 \/ e (\u03c0 - 1) (\u03c0 + 1) one part in 25,000 R (gas constant) (e+1) \u221a5 one part in 50,000 Proton-electron mass ratio 6*\u03c0 5 one part in 50,000 Liters in a gallon 3 + \u03c0\/4 one part in 500,000 g 6 + ln(45) one part in 750,000 Proton-electron mass ratio (e 8 - 10) \/ \u03d5 one part in 5,000,000 Ruby laser wavelength 1 \/ (1200 2 ) [within actual variation] Mean Earth Radius (5 8 )*6e [within actual variation] Protip - not all of these are wrong: \u221a2 = 3\/5 + \u03c0\/(7-\u03c0) cos(\u03c0\/7) + cos(3\u03c0\/7) + cos(5\u03c0\/7) = 1\/2 \u03b3(Euler's gamma constant) = e\/3 4 + e\/5 \u221a5 = (13 + 4\u03c0) \/ (24 - 4\u03c0) \u03a3 1\/n n = ln(3) e\n","explanation":"This comic lists some approximations for numbers, most of them mathematical and physical constants, but some of them jokes and cultural references.\nApproximations like these are sometimes used as mnemonics by mathematicians and physicists, though most of Randall's approximations are too convoluted to be useful as mnemonics.  Perhaps the best known mnemonic approximation (though not used here by Randall) is that \"\u03c0 is approximately equal to 22\/7\".  Randall does mention (and mock) the common mnemonic among physicists that the fine structure constant is approximately 1\/137.  Although Randall gives approximations for the number of seconds in a year, he does not mention the common physicists' mnemonic that it is \"\u03c0 \u00d7 10 7 \", though he later added a statement to the top of the comic page addressing this point.\nAt the bottom of the comic are expressions involving transcendental numbers (namely \u03c0 and e) that are tantalizingly close to being exactly true but are not (indeed, they cannot be, due to the nature of transcendental numbers).  Such near-equations were previously discussed in 217: e to the pi Minus pi .  One of the entries, though, is a \"red herring\" that is exactly true.\nRandall says he compiled this table through \"a mix of trial-and-error, Mathematica , and Robert Munafo's Ries tool.\"  \"Ries\" is a \" reverse calculator \" that forms equations matching a given number.\nThe world population estimate for 2020 is still accurate. The estimate is 7.7 billion, and the population listed at the website census.gov is roughly the same. The current value can be found here: United States Census Bureau - U.S. and World Population Clock . Nevertheless there are other numbers listed by different sources.\nThe first part of the title text notes that \"Jenny's constant,\" which is actually a telephone number referenced in Tommy Tutone's 1982 song 867-5309\/Jenny , is not only prime but a twin prime because 8675311 is also a prime. Twin primes have always been a subject of interest, because they are comparatively rare, and because it is not yet known whether there are infinitely many of them.  Twin primes were also referenced in 1310: Goldbach Conjectures .\nThe second part of the title text makes fun of the unusual mathematical operations contained in the comic. \u03c0 is a useful number in many contexts, but it doesn't usually occur anywhere in an exponent. Even when it does, such as with complex numbers, taking the \u03c0th root is rarely helpful.  A rare exception is an identity for the pi-th root of 4 discovered by Bill Gosper.  Similarly, e typically appears in the basis of a power (forming the exponential function ), not in the exponent. (This is later referenced in Lethal Neutrinos ).\nOne of the \"approximations\" actually is precisely correct: .  Here is a proof:\n\nMultiplying by 1 (or by a nonzero number divided by itself) leaves the equation unchanged:\n\nThe on the top of the fraction is multiplied through the original equation:\n\nUse the trigonometric identity on the second and third terms in the numerator:\n\nUse the trigonometric identity on the first term in the numerator:\n\nNoting that and that the sines of supplementary angles (angles that sum to \u03c0) are equal:\n\nA table of slightly wrong equations and identities useful for approximations and\/or trolling teachers. (Found using a mix of trial-and-error, Mathematica , and Robert Munafo's Ries tool.) All units are SI MKS unless otherwise noted.\nRelation: Accurate to within: One light-year(m) 99 8 one part in 40 Earth Surface(m 2 ) 69 8 one part in 130 Oceans' volume(m 3 ) 9 19 one part in 70 Seconds in a year 75 4 one part in 400 Seconds in a year ( Rent method) 525,600 x 60 one part in 1400 Age of the universe (seconds) 15 15 one part in 70 Planck's constant 1\/(30 \u03c0 e ) one part in 110 Fine structure constant 1\/140 [I've had enough of this 137 crap] Fundamental charge 3\/(14 * \u03c0 \u03c0 \u03c0 ) one part in 500 White House Switchboard 1 \/ (e \u03c0 \u221a(1 + (e-1) \u221a8) ) Jenny's Constant (7 (e\/1 - 1\/e) - 9) * \u03c0 2 Intermission: World Population Estimate which should stay current for a decade or two: Take the last two digits of the current year Example: 20[14] Subtract the number of leap years since hurricane Katrina Example: 14 (minus 2008 and 2012) is 12 Add a decimal point Example: 1.2 Add 6 Example: 6 + 1.2 7.2 = World population in billions. Version for US population: Example: 20[14] Subtract 10 Example: 4 Multiply by 3 Example: 12 Add 10 Example: 3[22] million Electron rest energy e\/7 16 J one part in 1000 Light-year(miles) 2 (42.42) one part in 1000 sin(60\u00b0) = \u221a3\/2 = e\/\u03c0 one part in 1000 \u221a3 = 2e\/\u03c0 one part in 1000 \u03b3(Euler's gamma constant) 1\/\u221a3 one part in 4000 Feet in a meter 5\/( e \u221a\u03c0) one part in 4000 \u221a5 = 2\/e + 3\/2 one part in 7000 Avogadro's number 69 \u03c0 \u221a5 one part in 25,000 Gravitational constant G 1 \/ e (\u03c0 - 1) (\u03c0 + 1) one part in 25,000 R (gas constant) (e+1) \u221a5 one part in 50,000 Proton-electron mass ratio 6*\u03c0 5 one part in 50,000 Liters in a gallon 3 + \u03c0\/4 one part in 500,000 g 6 + ln(45) one part in 750,000 Proton-electron mass ratio (e 8 - 10) \/ \u03d5 one part in 5,000,000 Ruby laser wavelength 1 \/ (1200 2 ) [within actual variation] Mean Earth Radius (5 8 )*6e [within actual variation] Protip - not all of these are wrong: \u221a2 = 3\/5 + \u03c0\/(7-\u03c0) cos(\u03c0\/7) + cos(3\u03c0\/7) + cos(5\u03c0\/7) = 1\/2 \u03b3(Euler's gamma constant) = e\/3 4 + e\/5 \u221a5 = (13 + 4\u03c0) \/ (24 - 4\u03c0) \u03a3 1\/n n = ln(3) e\n"}
{"id":1048,"title":"Emotion","image_title":"Emotion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1048","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/emotion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1048:_Emotion","transcript":"[A graph showing the approximate fractional causes of Randall's emotions, with percentages on the Y axis and time on the X axis. \"Politics\", \"Romance\", \"Code not working even though it should work\", \"people being wrong on the internet\", and \"other\" all vary all throughout the time period from 2006 to midway 2010. There is a wedge of Joss Whedon that tapers out starting from 2006 to around mid 2007. There is a noticeable increase in \"Politics\" around fall, 2008 that tapers off sharply afterwards and appears again in the second half on 2010, until..\nAround approximately September 2010, everything else is compressed into a tiny fraction of around 2-3%. The rest is filled with cancer. The tiny wedge of everything does begin to slowly expand to be filled half with romance and half with an area filled with question marks.]\n","explanation":"This is a mostly serious comic in which Randall expresses his thoughts while his fianc\u00e9e started to suffer from breast cancer . He doesn't care about many things like politics anymore, there is just his fianc\u00e9e's cancer and his romance with her. This is one of many comics about cancer he made because of her cancer.\nSome of his withdrawn activities are shown here:\nEventually, Randall's fianc\u00e9e's cancer, once diagnosed, monopolizes all of his emotions, wiping out everything else as insignificant in comparison. Only the romance can get back a little bit of room as time passes. As the threat posed by the cancer wanes, a space opens up (the question marks) that the cancer concern used to occupy. The ordeal wiped out all the previous, more trivial concerns, pre-occupying him entirely with the disease. Now that there is a little less reason to worry, he's not used to thinking about anything else. His previous preoccupations no longer seem important, so what to fill his time with?\n[A graph showing the approximate fractional causes of Randall's emotions, with percentages on the Y axis and time on the X axis. \"Politics\", \"Romance\", \"Code not working even though it should work\", \"people being wrong on the internet\", and \"other\" all vary all throughout the time period from 2006 to midway 2010. There is a wedge of Joss Whedon that tapers out starting from 2006 to around mid 2007. There is a noticeable increase in \"Politics\" around fall, 2008 that tapers off sharply afterwards and appears again in the second half on 2010, until..\nAround approximately September 2010, everything else is compressed into a tiny fraction of around 2-3%. The rest is filled with cancer. The tiny wedge of everything does begin to slowly expand to be filled half with romance and half with an area filled with question marks.]\n"}
{"id":1049,"title":"Bookshelf","image_title":"Bookshelf","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1049","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bookshelf.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1049:_Bookshelf","transcript":"[Cueball stands in front of a bookshelf.] Cueball: Ooh, Atlas Shrugged . [Cueball yanks out book only for a click to be heard.] [The entire setup begins to rumble, while the bookcase and a surrounding platform takes both it and Cueball behind the wall.] [The tiny, dark room behind the wall has one thing painted on it.] Wall: You have terrible taste. [The whole piece of kit moves back to its original position. Cueball stands there mildly stunned.]\n","explanation":"This is a play on the \"hidden door\" in which  you pull down the right book and suddenly a wall of books turns into a hidden door. It is most used in spy movies or books. In this case, the book is Atlas Shrugged and instead of a secret passage, the wall swings around and takes you to a message \"You have terrible taste\".\nAtlas Shrugged is a dystopian novel by Ayn Rand . Randall is suggesting it's a bad book.\nAlthough the intent behind the book was in Rand's theory of Objectivism , it has become largely adopted as a battle-cry by Libertarians. One could find this as another reason to dislike Rand's literature, as Libertarians have been notoriously disruptive and annoying to many who oppose their political philosophy or their means to get their message across.\nThe title text is a general criticism Randall has with Rand, since most of Rand's characters are fiercely independent and rather tactless.\nBut the title text also shows the fact that people reading Rand can easily be swayed and aligned with her beliefs by the fact that it stresses that you are unique and individual, and that Randall was victim of these circumstances until he finds Rand's approach preposterous and rejects it. Oddly, since he seems to be judging Rand this on his own accord and making his own decision, one could theorize that he is truly an individualist in that he is not swayed by anyone, even a person who preaches not to be swayed and to make your own decisions \u2014 a subject pursued in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead .\n[Cueball stands in front of a bookshelf.] Cueball: Ooh, Atlas Shrugged . [Cueball yanks out book only for a click to be heard.] [The entire setup begins to rumble, while the bookcase and a surrounding platform takes both it and Cueball behind the wall.] [The tiny, dark room behind the wall has one thing painted on it.] Wall: You have terrible taste. [The whole piece of kit moves back to its original position. Cueball stands there mildly stunned.]\n"}
{"id":1050,"title":"Forgot Algebra","image_title":"Forgot Algebra","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1050","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/forgot_algebra.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1050:_Forgot_Algebra","transcript":"[Hairy is looking on as Megan takes her hands to her mouth and yells after Miss Lenhart who is walking away while looking back at her over her shoulder.] Megan: Hey, Miss Lenhart! I forgot everything about algebra the moment I graduated, and in 20 years no one has needed me to solve anything for x. Megan: I told you I'd never use it! Megan: In your face !\n[Caption below the panel:] It's weird how proud people are of not learning math when the same arguments apply to learning to play music, cook, or speak a foreign language.\n","explanation":"Megan , standing with Hairy , is an ex student of Miss Lenhart and she taunts her old algebra teacher, because she hasn't used algebra since she left school. This is a reflection of a common gripe among students: that they have no need to learn math because they assume they'll never use it after they graduate. Randall's argument is that you have the option to use what you learned in school or not. Lots of people use math after they graduate, lots of people use their music lessons, and others don't use anything they learned in school at all. However, Randall doesn't understand why someone would be proud of their own ignorance, especially since people do brag about things like being able to cook and speak other languages, which are also entirely non-essential, perhaps even more so than algebra.\nHowever, Megan is also wrong in that she likely does use basic mathematical calculations in everyday life, even if they're not in orderly lists of parameters ending with \"solve for x.\" For example, to turn one's apartment into a ball pit like in 150: Grownups , one must calculate or at least estimate (another skill learned in math class) the floor space of the room, the desired depth for the balls to cover, the space occupied by one crate of balls, and the cost of such a crate. While the operations are basic arithmetic, the ability to recognize unknowns and sort them into a meaningful statement comes from algebra.\nThe title text states that technically you don't \"need\" to do anything but survive and pay your taxes (although, ironically, doing one's taxes can require quite a bit of algebra), and implies that math is one of the optional and fun parts of life.\nThis is one of the two comics where Miss Lenhart is both drawn and named, the first being 499: Scantron .\n[Hairy is looking on as Megan takes her hands to her mouth and yells after Miss Lenhart who is walking away while looking back at her over her shoulder.] Megan: Hey, Miss Lenhart! I forgot everything about algebra the moment I graduated, and in 20 years no one has needed me to solve anything for x. Megan: I told you I'd never use it! Megan: In your face !\n[Caption below the panel:] It's weird how proud people are of not learning math when the same arguments apply to learning to play music, cook, or speak a foreign language.\n"}
{"id":1051,"title":"Visited","image_title":"Visited","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1051","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/visited.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1051:_Visited","transcript":"[The following is in the standard format of a Wikipedia article, modified to reflect the content of the comic.]\n...and was a pioneer of literary social realism .\nHe was born in Dos Hermanas in the Andalusia region of Spain (not to be confused with Andalasia [link clicked], the kingdom in Disney's Enchanted [link clicked]), which is also the hometown of Macarena [link clicked] band Los Del R\u00edo [link clicked],\nHis third novel , set during the Burmese-Siamese war , marked the start of a lifelong interest in the history of Southeast Asia . He spent his later years in Thailand , writing his his final novels just a few blocks from the hotel where actor David Carradine [link clicked] died of Autoerotic Asphyxiation [link clicked].\n[Caption below the panel:] If I go for a while without clearing my browser history, I start getting embarrassd by which words on Wikipedia show up in purple.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to how an internet browser will make the links of the pages that you have visited a different color than the links that you have not visited. In the case of Wikipedia and other wikis powered by MediaWiki , they are blue for non-visited and purple for visited. In this comic, Randall is ashamed of the pages he has visited, because with the color changes there is evidence of what he has visited in the past, e.g. autoerotic asphyxiation (possibly while researching 682: Force , which features that very Wikipedia page).\nThe pages that he did visit before are in great contrast with the pages that he hasn't. Pages he didn't click are often difficult, highly intelligent topics, while he only clicks the easy, funny articles with little scientific background on the Wikipedia site.\nThe title text refers to a common mistake many people make when reading articles on Wikipedia. Words referring to subjects that have an article on Wikipedia are colored in blue. This, however, can cause confusion when two words leading to two separate articles appear together, as the two links appear to be one. However, on hovering the cursor over the article link, only one word at a time is underlined, showing that the links are separate.\nIt is not possible to determine who this fake article is supposed to be about, but the Macarena band is certainly from Dos Hermanas, Spain. So, it is quite possibly a made-up article from Randall .\n[The following is in the standard format of a Wikipedia article, modified to reflect the content of the comic.]\n...and was a pioneer of literary social realism .\nHe was born in Dos Hermanas in the Andalusia region of Spain (not to be confused with Andalasia [link clicked], the kingdom in Disney's Enchanted [link clicked]), which is also the hometown of Macarena [link clicked] band Los Del R\u00edo [link clicked],\nHis third novel , set during the Burmese-Siamese war , marked the start of a lifelong interest in the history of Southeast Asia . He spent his later years in Thailand , writing his his final novels just a few blocks from the hotel where actor David Carradine [link clicked] died of Autoerotic Asphyxiation [link clicked].\n[Caption below the panel:] If I go for a while without clearing my browser history, I start getting embarrassd by which words on Wikipedia show up in purple.\n"}
{"id":1052,"title":"Every Major's Terrible","image_title":"Every Major's Terrible","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1052","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/every_majors_terrible.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1052:_Every_Major%27s_Terrible","transcript":"[The entire comic is a 4 by 9 grid. Left-justified headings above the 36 panels:] Every Major's Terrible to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's Modern Major-General Song (Which you may know from Tom Lehrer's Elements . If not, just hum Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious .)\n[To make it easier to read the lyrics, the lyrics text is double indented. If no one says the line it is just written after the description. Unless otherwise stated, the text is inside the frame of the panel above the drawing. If any other text is present it will be written after the lyrics.]\n[Panel 1: Cueball sitting with his chin on fist on a square, gray rock. Next to him is a mathematical expression \"2 + a picture of yellow glowing light bulb  = picture of Cueball in sailboat on a blue sea\".] Philosophy's just math sans rigor, sense, and practicality Expression: 2+[lightbulb]=[sailboat]\n[Panel 2: A black and brown cannon standing on a green hill fires and a dashed line indicates the cannonball's trajectory. The line splits in two twice ending up at 4 cannonballs.] And math's just physics unconstrained by precepts of reality.\n[Panel 3: A student in robes and square academic cap receives a diploma from a dean on a brown podium, while Cueball, diploma in hand, runs away on the green lawn, arms in the air, shedding both robe and cap.] A business major's just a thing you get so you can graduate\n[Panel 4: Ponytail wearing goggles and holding a flask with the periodic table in the background.  Three stars and circle lines around her head indicates that she is dizzy.] And chemistry's for stamp collectors high on methylacetate.\n[Panel 5: Cueball holds up his hands questioningly, in a shrugging pose.] Cueball: Why anyone who wants a job would study lit's a mystery\n[Panel 6: Cueball holding his chin.] Cueball: Unless their only other choice were something like art history.\n[Panel 7: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is a close-up of Cueball as a graduate wearing yellow embroidered robe and yellow tasseled mortarboard.] A BA in communications guarantees that you'll achieve\n[Panel 8: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is the same Cueball graduate, only now he is submerged in blue water. A wicker basket flows to the left, where air bubbles escape from Cueball. To the right are two black fish.] A little less than if you'd learned to underwater basket-weave\n[Panel 9: Cueball holding a gray frog at arm's length.] Cueball: I'd rather eat a Fowler's toad than major in biology, Frog: Ribbit\n[Panel 10: Megan indicating to the left a scruffy individual and an individual holding a chainsaw, and to the right a single scruffy individual holding a chainsaw.] Megan: And social psych is worse than either psych or sociology.\n[Panel 11: Cueball stands in front of a brown desk holding a gray course catalog. Behind the desk sits a man with glasses and hair at the back of his head. He sits on his gray office chair. There is a stack of papers on the desk.] Cueball: The thought of picking any one of these is too unbearable.\n[Panel 12: Same picture as panel 11, only now Cueball tosses the course catalog over his shoulder.] Cueball: Just put me down as \"Undecided\"\u2014Every major's terrible.\n[Panel 13: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is a seismograph chart with four traces; about halfway across one trace begins oscillating vigorously.] Now, if you can't prognosticate, that's OK in seismology,\n[Panel 14: A bearded man with white hair states a formula with his left arm lifted.] But if your hindsight's weak as well, you'd best stick to theology. Bearded man: X \u2234 \u2203X\n[Panel 15: Two lines with gray parenthesis.] CS will make each day a quest to find a missing close-paren. (((()((((()( ))))())())())\n[Panel 16: Megan with a green biohazard symbol floating above her head stands alone; to the left and right three Cueball-like guys and Ponytail shun her.] Virology will guarantee you'll never get a hug again.\n[Panel 17: Megan running at a PC on a brown table at the left of the frame, with a brown and black axe raised over her head.] I.T. prepares you for a life of fighting with PCs nonstop.\n[Panel 18: The frame is a little smaller than the other frames. Above the frame is the first part of the text. In the frame is an image of a bearded man with glasses who says the rest of the text. ] As Pratchett said, Pratchett: \"Geography's just physics slowed with trees on top.\"\n[Panel 19: A man with black hair plays on brown bongo drums while Blondie and Megan lean into the frame and look at him from left and right respectively.] Though physics seems to promise you a Richard Feynman-like career,\n[Panel 20: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is screenshot of a wiki redirect page. Below the title is the normal text for such a page. This is unreadable though, although it is possible to imagine it is possible to read the first line which would say: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . But not the other line which would be Redirect page . Below this line is an arrow down to the page the redirect points to. This is written in blue underlined letters.] The wiki page for \"Physics major\" redirects to \"Engineer.\" Wiki page: Physics major Engineer\n[Panel 21: Flowchart: a gray-brown box with a sad face chains to a decision diamond reading simply \"?\"; the \"yes\" branch leads to a yellow happy-face box while the \"no\" branch loops back to the initial sad face.] They say to study history or find yourself repeating it, Flow chart: ? No Yes\n[Panel 22: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is Hairbun as a teacher with boxy spectacles and a bun in front of a green chalkboard with three years in white. She is holding a rod and using it to point at the board.] But all that it prepares you for is forty years of teaching it. Chalkboard: 1935 1969 1991\n[Panel 23: Cueball at his adviser's desk again as in panel 12, but now without any catalog and holding his arms down.] Cueball: I recognize my four-year plan's at this point not repairable,\n[Panel 24: Same as panel 23 except Cueball has raised a first and the adviser has his hand to his mouth.] Cueball: But put me down as \"Undecided\"\u2014Every major's terrible.\n[Panel 25: Image of a bald man with beard and glasses. He raised both hands one as a fist the other pointing up. There are lines out from his head to the left and lightning lines out from his head to the right.] Astronomers all cringe when they hear \"supermoon\" or \"zodiac\".\n[Panel 26: Silhouette of Cueball, agitated, in an open field near a fence and a tractor.] Agronomy's a no-go; I'm a huge agorophobiac.\n[Panel 27: Cueball looking aghast at a green snake on the ground, both hands at his mouth and sweat jumping from his head. The snake is \"saying\" a red heart with a black question mark next to it.] I'm too ophiophobic to consider herpetology, Snake: \u2665 ?\n[Panel 28: Anatomical image of a stomach in pink and red.] And I can't stomach any part of gastroenterology.\n[Panel 29: A man with wild hair, glasses askew, clutching folders and papers (green, blue and white), and dropping several.] Man: While pre-med gives you twitchy-eyed obsession with your GPA,\n[Panel 30: Ponytail reciting poetry; her poem is this panel's line, in a lighter, lower-case font.] Ponytail: a poetry degree bespeaks bewildering na\u00efvet\u00e9.\n[Panel 31: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. The frame is a TV screen with the CSI: Miami logo, CSI in yellow.] TV's behind the rush into forensic criminology TV screen: CSI: Miami\n[Panel 32: A balding man wearing glasses and holding a smoking pipe together with Ponytail holding a notebook watch a wall-mounted flat-screen TV on which the CSI: Miami logo from the previous panel is showing.] (Or so claims meta-academic epidemiology). TV screen: CSI: Miami\n[Panel 33: Cueball is talking with his left arm raised, palm up.] Cueball: By dubbing econ \"dismal science\" adherents exaggerate;\n[Panel 34: Close-up on Cueball with right arm up and one finger in the air.] Cueball: The \"dismal\"'s fine\u2014it's \"science\" where they patently prevaricate.\n[Panel 35: As panel 23 with Cueball at his adviser's desk once more though with both hands held out in front of him. The adviser is holding his hand to the side of his head.] Cueball:In terms of choices, I'd say only Sophie's was comparable.\n[Panel 36: Same as panel 35 except that Cueball makes a final dramatic flair spreading both arms out.] Cueball:Just put me down as \"Undecided\"\u2014Every major's terrible!\n","explanation":"Randall has written a song called Every Major's Terrible and this comic illustrates the song. In this song the term Major refers to the US version of an academic major. The point of the song is that it makes no sense to pick any major since they are all terrible!\nThe header notes that the song is written to the tune of the satirical Major-General's Song from Gilbert and Sullivan's 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance . The song satirizes the idea of the \"modern\" educated British Army officer of the latter 19th century. Major general is a military rank in the United Kingdom and many other countries. (As of August 2018, the title text has been changed to a link to the said song ). The meter in the Major-General's Song is iambic octameter , which means that in each line there are eight iambs, where an iamb is two syllables in an unstressed-stressed pattern. Therefore, each line contains 16 syllables.\nThe panels show Randall's rewritten lyrics to the song. Below each of the three verses are described in detail (go to Verse 1 , Verse 2 or Verse 3 ). Each verse ends with \"Just put me down as 'Undecided' - Every Major's Terrible\", which gives the song its name \u2014 and \"Major's Terrible\" is similar enough to \"Major General\", the corresponding lyrics in the original version, to serve as a callback. The last line of the first verse in each song goes as follows:\nThe lyrics are commonly rewritten, the most famous rewrite likely being The Elements (song) by Tom Lehrer which is also mentioned below the main header. This song is also available on-line .\nHis last suggestion, \" Supercalifragilisticexpialadocious \", from Mary Poppins , is another fast-paced patter-song with a somewhat similar tune, though it doesn't fit quite so well, and the match falls apart at the end of the fourth line, when the \"Um-diddly\"s start up \u2014 still, it's better than nothing.\nThere are at least two performances of this xkcd song online where the transcription is shown to make it easier to understand the text:\nRegarding the title text: \"Undeclared\" is sometimes called \"General Studies\". Most U.S. universities will not let you get a degree in this, let alone an advanced degree such as a Ph.D. Also, it should probably be noted that this song refers to U.S.-like university systems, in other countries, one will study little to nothing outside your major, making it more-or-less impossible to be undecided as to major.\nIt should also be noted that the title text fits the cadence of the first line of the song, possibly teasing a fourth verse. As to what that consists of, only Randall knows.\nPanel 1, Philosophy's just math sans rigor, sense, and practicality Cueball is posing as Rodin 's The Thinker , a common symbol for philosophy . The equation in the background (two plus light bulb equals sailboat) is nonsense, hence \" math sans rigor, sense or practicality\" ( sans meaning without).\nPanel 2, And math's just physics unconstrained by precepts of reality. A cannon is firing. However, instead of going in the normal parabolic arc (a precept of reality and thus physics ), the cannonball splits and splits again, so that it looks like a bifurcation diagram from chaos theory . The dashed line indicates the cannonball's trajectory, which bifurcates twice, although the sum of the momentums of the four resulting (1\/4 sized?) cannonballs is presumably mathematically identical to the original.\nPanel 3, A business major's just a thing you get so you can graduate Business is the most common major, often seen as a practical choice applicable to a wide variety of careers, or, as the comic illustrates, preferred by those who just want an easy way to graduate. Cueball gets his diploma and runs away from the dean on the podium while shedding both his robe and his square academic cap (or Mortarboard).\nPanel 4, And chemistry's for stamp collectors high on methylacetate. Stamp collecting refers to the famous quote by Ernest Rutherford , \"All science is either physics or stamp collecting.\" Methyl acetate is a solvent that for instance can be used to remove stamps from their envelope (although water will do the same). The stamps in the background form the periodic table of the chemical elements. And since chemistry is not physics, according to the quote, chemists must be stamp collectors (as, the high on methylacetate, Ponytail wearing goggles and holding an Erlenmeyer flask ).\nPanels 5 and 6, Why anyone who wants a job would study lit's a mystery , Unless their only other choice were something like art history. These lines, both sung by Cueball, refer to subjects where a majority of graduates will end up unemployed or eventually working in a field outside their majors. Topics such as Literature or Art History are often and historically said to be in this category \u2014 although from actual statistics , it is clear that there are far worse majors these days.\nPanels 7 and 8, A BA in communications guarantees that you'll achieve , A little less than if you'd learned to underwater basket-weave Here Cueball first has a major in Communications and next he is seen underwater with a basket. Underwater basket weaving is a commonly used metaphor for any college major that is easy and\/or worthless. \"Communications\" is a major chosen by people interested in news broadcasting or other media. Note that, if following the original music exactly, the line \"A little less than if you'd learned to underwater basket-weave.\" will be repeated three times by the chorus after these panels.\nPanel 9, I'd rather eat a Fowler's toad than major in biology, We see Cueball holding a frog out in front of him while taking his hand to his head (in disgust?). A Fowler's toad is a relatively common toad in the eastern US, and a stereotype of studying biology is a frog dissection , which is likely part of the reference, albeit oblique. Fowler's Toad emits a noxious secretion that irritates skin and thus probably also the mucous membranes in the mouth. It would thus be rather painful to eat, making it very bad for Cueball to major in biology since he would rather eat such a toad.\nPanel 10, And social psych is worse than either psych or sociology. Social psychology is compared to sociology (study of humans in society) and psychology (study of human minds). Psychology is represented by a serial killer with a chainsaw, and sociology is represented by a zombie . These are to the left of Megan . To her right is a zombie serial killer with chainsaw. She is standing between them undecided as to take one, the other or both. They are all terrible options...\nPanels 11 and 12, The thought of picking any one of these is too unbearable, Just put me down as \"Undecided\"\u2014Every major's terrible. End of the first verse where Cueball tells his academic advisor that he is undecided as every major's terrible. He even throws away his study guide . Every verse ends with some variation of this couplet, and in the original tune, each of these couplets are repeated by the chorus afterwards. Unbearable and terrible rhyme for people who have the Mary-merry merger .\nPanel 13, Now, if you can't prognosticate, that's OK in seismology, Prognosticate means \"to predict\". This refers to the inability of seismology to reliably predict catastrophic earthquakes , even after centuries of extensive research. The panel shows seismic waves from a seismograph . The seismograph chart has four traces and about halfway across one trace begins oscillating vigorously indicating an earthquake. Five months after this comic was published several seismologists in Italy were convicted of crimes that effectively stemmed from an inability to predict an earthquake. This does not go down well for the message of this panel... Their conviction was overturned on appeal in 2014.\nPanel 14, But if your hindsight's weak as well, you'd best stick to theology. The bearded theologist represents Theology by stating the formal logic proposition shown in the illustration: \"X \u2234 \u2203X\". This says \"I can describe this thing called X, therefore X exists\". This is what Anselm\u2019s ontological argument for God boils down to. Briefly, it asks you to imagine the best possible deity, which, by definition, would be God. A God which exists in both reality and theory would be greater than one who exists in merely the latter. Therefore, this proposition concludes that God exists. The fatal flaw of this argument is that it can be used to prove the existence of anything (e.g. a vacuum cleaner which exists in both reality and theory is greater than one which exists merely in theory). Just because a perfect God would exist does not mean he does. Thus it has been largely rejected. (See 1505: Ontological Argument .)\nPanel 15, CS will make each day a quest to find a missing close-paren. \"CS\" is short for \" Computer Science .\" Most programming languages use parentheses as part of their syntax, and often have multiply-nested parenthetical expressions. This is especially true of Lisp . It is often difficult for a programmer to determine where the unbalanced parenthesis begins or ends when the code and parentheses are not properly formatted and indented. In the panel there is one more left \"(\" parenthesis (13) than right \")\" or close-paren (12).\nPanel 16, Virology will guarantee you'll never get a hug again. Virology is the study of infectious diseases . The green symbol above the central figure is the biohazard symbol , implying that people who study infectious diseases, and are therefore located near them at some points in time, will be shunned like the plague, because they're probably carrying it. Thus no hugs to Megan as three Cueballs and Ponytail lean back away from her.\nPanel 17, I.T. prepares you for a life of fighting with PCs nonstop. \"I.T.\" is short for \" Information Technology \", a degree for people who maintain computer systems. If there is a need for an I.T. position (in which I.T. professionals are employed) there are computers which need fixing \u2014 hence the I.T. Professional is always fixing (or fighting) computers, which may or may not have been \"broken\" by users . In the panel Megan, wielding an axe, is in a real fight with a PC.\nPanel 18, As Pratchett said, \"Geography's just physics slowed with trees on top.\" This is a slightly amended quote from Discworld author Terry Pratchett , from his book \" Feet of Clay \". The actual quote is \" Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.\" But the meaning is the same, that physics also describes geography - a similar quote to the one about physics vs. stamp collections mentioned under panel 4.\nPanel 19, Though physics seems to promise you a Richard Feynman-like career, Richard Feynman was a 20th-century Nobel -laureate physicist known for his great sense of humor, including being photographed for one of his books while holding a bongo drum . Here he is depicted with the drum and with both a blond woman and Megan looking admiringly upon him. Feynman made physics seem cool, and many a young fan might choose the subject in the hope of obtaining a Feynman-like career. This is, however, very unlikely for most people as is also shown in the next panel.\nPanel 20, The wiki page for \"Physics major\" redirects to \"Engineer.\" A redirect on Wikipedia is a page which immediately sends the visitor to a different page. This implies that the title of the first is either a synonym or a sub-topic of the second. Physics majors usually learn to code, and the standard joke is that they invariably get hired as computer programmers after graduation, but here in this comic they get hired as engineers . This relates back to the previous panel, as it is here shown that most of those that major in physics end up as engineers and not like Feynman.  The Wikipedia page physics major didn't actually exist when this comic was published. It was created the same day, but as a redirect to physics education . It is such a redirect page that is shown in the panel. In the subsequent days, there were dozens of instances of people changing it to redirect to engineer, usually reverted within minutes. The redirect page was fully protected and locked for editing. As with the underwater basket-weaving line in the first verse, after the soloist sings this, the line would be repeated three times by the chorus.\nPanels 21 and 22, They say to study history or find yourself repeating it, But all that it prepares you for is forty years of teaching it. This uses a version of a quote by George Santayana (although often attributed to others as well), Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it as a reason to study history \u2014 only to be followed by an indication that by studying history as a major, you will only be prepared to become a history teacher, and you will then spend the rest of your life teaching history. The first panel shows a flow chart that will lead you to repeat your sad past if you cannot remember it, and only move on to happier times if you can. In the next panel we see a Hairbun as a history teacher, with glasses and her gray hair tied up in a bun, standing in front of a green blackboard with three important years for her current history class.\nOne connection between these years could be pivotal points in Jewish history concerning the formation of nationality: the Nurenberg Laws of 1935 removing citizenship from Jews in Germany, Israel's claims on Jerusalem, and the UN Security Council's condemnation of the treatment of Palestines by Israel.\nA more lighthearted connection, more in line with the message of learning from history, is the collapse of three notable communications towers: the wooden radio tower in Langenberg in 1935 (by tornado), a TV mast at Emley Moor in 1969 (due to ice build-up), and the Warsaw radio mast in 1991 (due to construction errors). This demonstrates various attempts and failures to learn from engineering mistakes from the past, connecting this with the earlier mentioning of physicists becoming engineers, and perhaps not taking real-world practical considerations into account (such as storms or ice build-up).\nOf course, in practice, with a narrow enough subject, there are likely to be many more examples fitting these three years. The two examples above were from general world history.\nPanels 23 and 24, I recognize my four-year plan's at this point not repairable, But put me down as \"Undecided\"\u2014Every major's terrible. End of the second verse where Cueball again talks to his academic advisor saying that he is undecided. In the last of the two panel he says almost the same as at the end of the first verse. In the first, however, he mentioned his \"four-year plan\" which is the list of all the courses a student plans to include in their degree program. If you change majors every semester, or do not decide on one until too late, this list gets really difficult to turn into any one degree. Again these lines would be repeated by the chorus afterwards.\nPanel 25, Astronomers all cringe when they hear \"supermoon\" or \"zodiac\". Supermoon is a term invented by astrologers in the 1970s, with no significance in astronomy other than being the co-occurrence of orbital perigee and full-moon. But it comes up often in the press, linked to supernatural behavior. That also Randall dislikes seems realistic and he also \"mocked\" the term soon after in 1080: Visual Field and then finally confirmed what he thought about the term directly when he published 1394: Superm*n . This was the first comic referencing supermoon, here is a list of all such comics. The zodiac is the circular band in the sky containing the apparent path of the sun, moon and planets.  Most often when people talk about it, they're referring to astrology and horoscopes and other pseudo-scientific notions which often lead to conversations which are frustrating to astronomers, like the bearded one from the panel.\nPanel 26, Agronomy's a no-go; I'm a huge agorophobiac. Agronomy is the science of farming, while agoraphobia is the fear of wide open spaces. Fields, where most farming happens, are wide open spaces. In the panel an anxious Cueball is standing near a fence on an open field with a tractor. Presumably he may be OK inside the tractor, but once he gets outside he becomes anxious.\nPanel 27, I'm too ophiophobic to consider herpetology, Herpetology is the study of reptiles and amphibians , while ophiophobia is the fear of snakes (a reptile). The panel shows sweating Cueball holding his hands to his mouth while looking at a green snake asking for his love? It is possible that Cueball is afraid of the snake, who is harmless and just wants to be friends.\nPanel 28, And I can't stomach any part of gastroenterology. As the pun suggests, gastroenterology is the study of the human digestive system and the image shows the human stomach . To not be able to stomach something means you can't stand or tolerate this thing.\nPanel 29, While pre-med gives you twitchy-eyed obsession with your GPA, Pre-med (pre-medical) is a major chosen by students hoping to go on to medical school to study medicine and eventually become doctors . Medical school is extremely competitive and usually requires a very high undergraduate GPA for prospective students. Hence we see a pre-med student holding all his grades.\nPanel 30, a poetry degree bespeaks bewildering na\u00efvet\u00e9. The text is in all lower-case, a different font and strangely laid out compared to the text in all the other panels. All-lower-case and \"free\" layout are both associated with 20th century \" Modernist \" poetry , especially the works of E. E. Cummings . Ponytail is actually reciting this line of the song.\nPanels 31 and 32, TV's behind the rush into forensic criminology , (Or so claims meta-academic epidemiology). This refers to how forensic - criminology shows, specifically CSI: Miami (Crime Scene Investigation: Miami) as shown on the TV screen in both panels, often dramatize, exaggerate or otherwise confuse the science behind forensics; this gives people unrealistically glamorous views of the career, thus encouraging them to join it. Epidemiology is the study of causes and effects of events and trends. We see a pipe smoking epidemiologist standing with Ponytail and watching CSI - presumably making wild claims on cause and effect based only on what they see on TV. This is, again, the point where the chorus joins in three times, as in the previous two verses.\nPanels 33 and 34, By dubbing econ \"dismal science\" adherents exaggerate; The \"dismal\"'s fine - it's \"science\" where they patently prevaricate. \"Econ\" is short for \" economics \". Thomas Carlyle declared economics \" the dismal science \" in the Victorian era as a derogatory alternative name. Economists often claim that economics is a science like any other; however, as the predictive powers of all economic theories are exceedingly weak compared to those of any science, this is disputed by those outside the field at times. It is of course also disputed by this song, in which Cueball \"clearly\" (see below) states that economics should not call itself a science - that is the dismal science is not derogatory enough for him.\nPanel 35, In terms of choices, I'd say only Sophie's was comparable. Panel 36, Just put me down as \"Undecided\"\u2014Every major's terrible! End of the third verse, with yet another variant on the closing couplet. Choosing a major is compared to Sophie's Choice , which is any dilemma where choosing one cherished person or thing over the other will result in the death or destruction of the other, derived from the theme of the novel of the same name, which has also been turned into a romantic drama film . So Cueball tells the academic advisor that choosing any of the majors over any other is as horrible as to have to choose which cherished person should die to save the other. Although in his case, it is the other way around, since he thinks all choices suck. Again these lines would be repeated by the chorus.\n[The entire comic is a 4 by 9 grid. Left-justified headings above the 36 panels:] Every Major's Terrible to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's Modern Major-General Song (Which you may know from Tom Lehrer's Elements . If not, just hum Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious .)\n[To make it easier to read the lyrics, the lyrics text is double indented. If no one says the line it is just written after the description. Unless otherwise stated, the text is inside the frame of the panel above the drawing. If any other text is present it will be written after the lyrics.]\n[Panel 1: Cueball sitting with his chin on fist on a square, gray rock. Next to him is a mathematical expression \"2 + a picture of yellow glowing light bulb  = picture of Cueball in sailboat on a blue sea\".] Philosophy's just math sans rigor, sense, and practicality Expression: 2+[lightbulb]=[sailboat]\n[Panel 2: A black and brown cannon standing on a green hill fires and a dashed line indicates the cannonball's trajectory. The line splits in two twice ending up at 4 cannonballs.] And math's just physics unconstrained by precepts of reality.\n[Panel 3: A student in robes and square academic cap receives a diploma from a dean on a brown podium, while Cueball, diploma in hand, runs away on the green lawn, arms in the air, shedding both robe and cap.] A business major's just a thing you get so you can graduate\n[Panel 4: Ponytail wearing goggles and holding a flask with the periodic table in the background.  Three stars and circle lines around her head indicates that she is dizzy.] And chemistry's for stamp collectors high on methylacetate.\n[Panel 5: Cueball holds up his hands questioningly, in a shrugging pose.] Cueball: Why anyone who wants a job would study lit's a mystery\n[Panel 6: Cueball holding his chin.] Cueball: Unless their only other choice were something like art history.\n[Panel 7: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is a close-up of Cueball as a graduate wearing yellow embroidered robe and yellow tasseled mortarboard.] A BA in communications guarantees that you'll achieve\n[Panel 8: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is the same Cueball graduate, only now he is submerged in blue water. A wicker basket flows to the left, where air bubbles escape from Cueball. To the right are two black fish.] A little less than if you'd learned to underwater basket-weave\n[Panel 9: Cueball holding a gray frog at arm's length.] Cueball: I'd rather eat a Fowler's toad than major in biology, Frog: Ribbit\n[Panel 10: Megan indicating to the left a scruffy individual and an individual holding a chainsaw, and to the right a single scruffy individual holding a chainsaw.] Megan: And social psych is worse than either psych or sociology.\n[Panel 11: Cueball stands in front of a brown desk holding a gray course catalog. Behind the desk sits a man with glasses and hair at the back of his head. He sits on his gray office chair. There is a stack of papers on the desk.] Cueball: The thought of picking any one of these is too unbearable.\n[Panel 12: Same picture as panel 11, only now Cueball tosses the course catalog over his shoulder.] Cueball: Just put me down as \"Undecided\"\u2014Every major's terrible.\n[Panel 13: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is a seismograph chart with four traces; about halfway across one trace begins oscillating vigorously.] Now, if you can't prognosticate, that's OK in seismology,\n[Panel 14: A bearded man with white hair states a formula with his left arm lifted.] But if your hindsight's weak as well, you'd best stick to theology. Bearded man: X \u2234 \u2203X\n[Panel 15: Two lines with gray parenthesis.] CS will make each day a quest to find a missing close-paren. (((()((((()( ))))())())())\n[Panel 16: Megan with a green biohazard symbol floating above her head stands alone; to the left and right three Cueball-like guys and Ponytail shun her.] Virology will guarantee you'll never get a hug again.\n[Panel 17: Megan running at a PC on a brown table at the left of the frame, with a brown and black axe raised over her head.] I.T. prepares you for a life of fighting with PCs nonstop.\n[Panel 18: The frame is a little smaller than the other frames. Above the frame is the first part of the text. In the frame is an image of a bearded man with glasses who says the rest of the text. ] As Pratchett said, Pratchett: \"Geography's just physics slowed with trees on top.\"\n[Panel 19: A man with black hair plays on brown bongo drums while Blondie and Megan lean into the frame and look at him from left and right respectively.] Though physics seems to promise you a Richard Feynman-like career,\n[Panel 20: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is screenshot of a wiki redirect page. Below the title is the normal text for such a page. This is unreadable though, although it is possible to imagine it is possible to read the first line which would say: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . But not the other line which would be Redirect page . Below this line is an arrow down to the page the redirect points to. This is written in blue underlined letters.] The wiki page for \"Physics major\" redirects to \"Engineer.\" Wiki page: Physics major Engineer\n[Panel 21: Flowchart: a gray-brown box with a sad face chains to a decision diamond reading simply \"?\"; the \"yes\" branch leads to a yellow happy-face box while the \"no\" branch loops back to the initial sad face.] They say to study history or find yourself repeating it, Flow chart: ? No Yes\n[Panel 22: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. In the frame is Hairbun as a teacher with boxy spectacles and a bun in front of a green chalkboard with three years in white. She is holding a rod and using it to point at the board.] But all that it prepares you for is forty years of teaching it. Chalkboard: 1935 1969 1991\n[Panel 23: Cueball at his adviser's desk again as in panel 12, but now without any catalog and holding his arms down.] Cueball: I recognize my four-year plan's at this point not repairable,\n[Panel 24: Same as panel 23 except Cueball has raised a first and the adviser has his hand to his mouth.] Cueball: But put me down as \"Undecided\"\u2014Every major's terrible.\n[Panel 25: Image of a bald man with beard and glasses. He raised both hands one as a fist the other pointing up. There are lines out from his head to the left and lightning lines out from his head to the right.] Astronomers all cringe when they hear \"supermoon\" or \"zodiac\".\n[Panel 26: Silhouette of Cueball, agitated, in an open field near a fence and a tractor.] Agronomy's a no-go; I'm a huge agorophobiac.\n[Panel 27: Cueball looking aghast at a green snake on the ground, both hands at his mouth and sweat jumping from his head. The snake is \"saying\" a red heart with a black question mark next to it.] I'm too ophiophobic to consider herpetology, Snake: \u2665 ?\n[Panel 28: Anatomical image of a stomach in pink and red.] And I can't stomach any part of gastroenterology.\n[Panel 29: A man with wild hair, glasses askew, clutching folders and papers (green, blue and white), and dropping several.] Man: While pre-med gives you twitchy-eyed obsession with your GPA,\n[Panel 30: Ponytail reciting poetry; her poem is this panel's line, in a lighter, lower-case font.] Ponytail: a poetry degree bespeaks bewildering na\u00efvet\u00e9.\n[Panel 31: The text is above this panels frame, which is only about two third of the other frames. The frame is a TV screen with the CSI: Miami logo, CSI in yellow.] TV's behind the rush into forensic criminology TV screen: CSI: Miami\n[Panel 32: A balding man wearing glasses and holding a smoking pipe together with Ponytail holding a notebook watch a wall-mounted flat-screen TV on which the CSI: Miami logo from the previous panel is showing.] (Or so claims meta-academic epidemiology). TV screen: CSI: Miami\n[Panel 33: Cueball is talking with his left arm raised, palm up.] Cueball: By dubbing econ \"dismal science\" adherents exaggerate;\n[Panel 34: Close-up on Cueball with right arm up and one finger in the air.] Cueball: The \"dismal\"'s fine\u2014it's \"science\" where they patently prevaricate.\n[Panel 35: As panel 23 with Cueball at his adviser's desk once more though with both hands held out in front of him. The adviser is holding his hand to the side of his head.] Cueball:In terms of choices, I'd say only Sophie's was comparable.\n[Panel 36: Same as panel 35 except that Cueball makes a final dramatic flair spreading both arms out.] Cueball:Just put me down as \"Undecided\"\u2014Every major's terrible!\n"}
{"id":1053,"title":"Ten Thousand","image_title":"Ten Thousand","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1053","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ten_thousand.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1053:_Ten_Thousand","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] I try not to make fun of people for admitting they don't know things. [Caption right below said caption:] Because for each thing \"everyone knows\" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time.\n[A list of equations.] Fraction who have heard of it at birth = 0% Fraction who have heard of it by 30 \u2248 100% US birth rate \u2248 4,000,000\/year Number hearing about it for the first time \u2248 10,000\/day\n[Caption above the next panel:] If I make fun of people, I train them not to tell me when they have those moments. And I miss out on the fun.\n[Megan is standing. Cueball is walking, with his palm out.] Megan: \"Diet Coke and Mentos thing\"? What's that? Cueball: Oh man! Come on, we're going to the grocery store. Megan: Why? Cueball: You're one of today's lucky 10,000.\n","explanation":"This strip argues that one shouldn't make fun of people for not knowing something that's considered common knowledge. The basic premise of the first panel is that, since people aren't born knowing anything , everyone has to learn everything for the first time, at some point. If everyone eventually learns a given fact, there are an average of 10,000 people, in the US alone, who learn the fact for the first time each day. \nThe approximate rate of 10,000 people per day hearing about something for the first time is estimated by the birth rate of 4,000,000 people per year divided by 365 days per year, assuming that the birth rate is constant and that indeed everyone learns or gets the fact (or that those in the US who don't are about equal in number to those in other countries who do). The target age of thirty years is irrelevant in this calculation; the 10,000 number is simply equal to the number of newborns per day, or equivalently, the number of people who reach a given age each day.  (The fact that not everyone lives to be that old, and some die younger, is not considered.)\nThe second panel points out that (certainly, for someone like Randall), teaching people an interesting fact for the first time is fun .  Mocking someone for their lack of knowledge makes them less likely to reveal that they don't know something, which means you don't get the opportunity to share in the experience as they discover it.  Taking this approach is much more socially effective and generally enjoyable than mocking them for being ignorant. When Cueball learns that Megan doesn't know about the \"Diet Coke and Mentos thing\", he refers to her as \"one of the lucky 10,000\" who's experiencing it for the first time that day.\nDiet Coke is a popular brand of sugar-free soda. Mentos is a brand of chewable mints. Famously, if you drop Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, the soda will erupt quite aggressively , sending a fountain of soda 10 feet or more into the air.  This interaction is widely beloved because it's dramatic and unexpected, while being generally safe, simple, and inexpensive to do (though it does make quite a mess, and should only be done outdoors). This effect appears to only happen with this specific type of soda and this specific mint, and is believed to result from a very particular interaction between the ingredients in the two, the texture of the mints, and the carbonation in the soda.  This was explored, in some details, in a Mythbusters episode .\nThe Diet Coke and Mentos eruption has also been mentioned in a previous strip 346: Diet Coke+Mentos .\nThe title text provides another, perhaps more emphatic example of how explaining a fact to a person for the first time is much more entertaining than just expressing annoyance about that missing knowledge. Here is a good video about the Yellowstone supervolcano . Interestingly enough, both events includes some kind (although very different kind) [ citation needed ] of eruption.\nSupervolcanos are again mentioned in 1159: Countdown and in 1611: Baking Soda and Vinegar .\nThis comic also appears in Randall Munroe's book How To , in the introduction of the book, albeit in a modified form.\n[Caption above the panel:] I try not to make fun of people for admitting they don't know things. [Caption right below said caption:] Because for each thing \"everyone knows\" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time.\n[A list of equations.] Fraction who have heard of it at birth = 0% Fraction who have heard of it by 30 \u2248 100% US birth rate \u2248 4,000,000\/year Number hearing about it for the first time \u2248 10,000\/day\n[Caption above the next panel:] If I make fun of people, I train them not to tell me when they have those moments. And I miss out on the fun.\n[Megan is standing. Cueball is walking, with his palm out.] Megan: \"Diet Coke and Mentos thing\"? What's that? Cueball: Oh man! Come on, we're going to the grocery store. Megan: Why? Cueball: You're one of today's lucky 10,000.\n"}
{"id":1054,"title":"The Bacon","image_title":"The\u2009bacon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1054","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thebacon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1054:_The_bacon","transcript":"[White Hat is holding out a hand towards Cueball while telling him about his job situation. The space between the and bacon is very small.] White Hat: I'm out of work, but I'm not stressed about it because my wife is a pharmacist and she brings home the bacon.\n[Caption below the panel:] Only later did I learn that \"Thebacon\" is the common name for dihydrocodeine enol acetate, a synthetic opioid similar to Vicodin.\n","explanation":"This comic plays off the English colloquialism \"bring home the bacon\", which generally means to work hard and bring money home to your family to put food on the table. If a man is out of work he may be stressed out about how to \"bring home the bacon.\"\nSome men would not be assuaged if their wife took over, but at first it seems that White Hat is happy that his wife, who works as a pharmacist, does bring home the bacon, and he tells this to Cueball .\nLater, however, Cueball finds out, that what White Hat actually was saying was \" Thebacon \", which is a common name for dihydrocodeinone enol acetate an opioid commonly marketed under names like Acedicon and Diacodin. As a pharmacist White Hat's wife has easy access to such drugs, and this may be the reason that he is so calm, because his wife supplies him with painkiller drugs. Opoids suppress emotional pain as well as physical pain.\nThebacon is compared to the better known drug Vicodin , another opioid sold as a painkiller, which can (and often has) become a drug of abuse.\nThe title text lists what Randall assumes to be the normal pronunciation for Thebacon. This hints at the second joke in this comic. If White Hat said \"THEE buh kon\" there is no way for Cueball to confuse that with \"the bacon\". Apparently Cueball was reading White Hat's word balloon rather than hearing him speak aloud.\nAccording to Wikipedia , Randall seems to be mistaken in no fewer than three places (which seems to indicate that Randall has only passing knowledge of the drug and did not do extensive research beforehand):\n[White Hat is holding out a hand towards Cueball while telling him about his job situation. The space between the and bacon is very small.] White Hat: I'm out of work, but I'm not stressed about it because my wife is a pharmacist and she brings home the bacon.\n[Caption below the panel:] Only later did I learn that \"Thebacon\" is the common name for dihydrocodeine enol acetate, a synthetic opioid similar to Vicodin.\n"}
{"id":1055,"title":"Kickstarter","image_title":"Kickstarter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1055","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kickstarter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1055:_Kickstarter","transcript":"[A kickstarter page with zero donations, a target of $5,000 (and no money raised), and 90 days to go.] [Black Hat has posted a video and a description of his project, the first lines of which are visible.] Time was, anyone with a webcam and an idea could raise boatloads of cash on Kickstarter. But with increased popularity comes tougher competition. Now, to get support, you need a really standout video or compelling write-up.\nI have an idea for a Kickstarter campaign that could raise millions, but I need your help to craft the perfect pitch.\nIf I raise $5,000, I'll be able to devote the\n","explanation":"Kickstarter is a platform for funding projects in which anyone can give money at any level of funding starting usually as low as $10. Funding at different levels gets you different perks, e.g. If the Kickstarter is for a book, a large donation makes you eligible for a signed copy.\nIn this comic, Black Hat is attempting to game the system by raising money to work on the perfect Kickstarter pitch. He appears to have gained no money, but has only started the scheme that day. The title text is an attempt to entice people to pledge a larger amount, by guaranteeing a more prestigious pledge level during the actual campaign. This is a scam for (even more) gullible people, as anyone can give any amount of money; there are no limits on pledge levels - or, at least, it may have been that way at the time of this comic's publication. Kickstarter does actually allow campaign hosts to designate a finite amount of higher-tier rewards, so if a wealthy person knew in advance that they would want to guarantee a specific reward from a pledge level, this VIP-list-first-dibs offer may have been desirable.\nThis has actually been done via an indiegogo campaign . There are a number of similarities to the comic (the black hat, $5,000 vs $500 goal), so Baron von Husk may have got the idea from xkcd.\n[A kickstarter page with zero donations, a target of $5,000 (and no money raised), and 90 days to go.] [Black Hat has posted a video and a description of his project, the first lines of which are visible.] Time was, anyone with a webcam and an idea could raise boatloads of cash on Kickstarter. But with increased popularity comes tougher competition. Now, to get support, you need a really standout video or compelling write-up.\nI have an idea for a Kickstarter campaign that could raise millions, but I need your help to craft the perfect pitch.\nIf I raise $5,000, I'll be able to devote the\n"}
{"id":1056,"title":"Felidae","image_title":"Felidae","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1056","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/felidae.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1056:_Felidae","transcript":"Well-known felines: [A graph organizing various feline species labeled with common names ordered by genera (in order of which would win in a fight) on the y axis, and coolness of name on the x axis.] Smilodon (extinct): \"Saber-toothed cat (scientific name: Smilodon fatalis) Panthera: \"Jaguar\", \"Leopard\", \"Snow Leopard\", \"Tiger\", \"Lion\" Puma: \"Cougar\", \"Puma\", \"Panther\", \"Mountain Lion\" Other felidae: \"Ocelot\", \"Cheetah\" Felis & Lynx: \"Housecat\", \"Bobcat\", \"Wildcat\", \"Lynx\" [Some elements are further connected using an unbranched acyclic digraph. The elements are connected thus: \"Cheetah\" -> \"Puma\" -> \"Jaguar\" -> \"Panther\" -> \"Tiger\" -> \"Leopard\" -> \"Snow Leopard\" -> \"Lion\" -> \"Mountain Lion\".] The OS X Problem\n","explanation":"This comic shows a graph with three parts.\nFirst, the names are sorted up by genera (plural of genus , a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms) from bottom to top of which animals would win in a fight. Secondly, the names within the genus are then sorted by coolness of name from left to right (the degree of \"coolness\" of the name is apparently determined in subjective manner by the author). Thirdly, in red you can see the direction that Apple has taken with nicknaming the versions of their OS X operating system. They started at v10.0 \"Cheetah\", and have moved through genera from there in no order that this chart can make out.\nPlease note that the second words in \"Snow Leopard\" and \"Mountain Lion\" are capitalized in the table because they are used as the proper names of the operating system versions. In their normal use, as species vernacular names , they are not capitalized and are written as \"snow leopard\" and \"mountain lion\".\nBobcats are a running XKCD joke, so their inclusion is to be expected. The genus Puma here only lists synonyms for the puma (see cougar ) instead of the actual genus . Of course, the three OS X versions named by three of these synonyms are not the same.\nSince this comic was published, Apple has stopped naming versions of OS X after big cats, and now names them after Californian landmarks. OS X v10.8 \"Mountain Lion\" was followed by v10.9 \"Mavericks\", named after a surf spot , followed by v10.10 \"Yosemite\", named after a national park , and so on.\nThe title of the chart depicted on the comic (\"OS X problem\") is perhaps an allusion to the travelling salesman problem , as the directed arrows and graph nodes might appear as a possible path of the salesperson between the cities. The computational difficulty of the travelling salesman problem might echo with the difficulties that the author has with trying to figure out the underlying reason for naming the OS X versions in particular order. The chart thus looks like a parody on the scientific presentation.\nIn the title text, a Smilodon fatalis is a saber-tooth cat, a Dracorex hogwartsia is a dinosaur whose skull looks like that of a fairy tale dragon, and a Stygimoloch spinifer is one of the last dinosaurs before the K-T (Cretaceous-Paleogene) extinction about 66 million years ago. Notably, it's possible both Stygimoloch and Dracorex are in fact juvenile members of the genus Pachycepholosaurus who were wrongly identified as a separate species, meaning two of Randall's top four coolest extinct animal names would no longer be recognized. All of the animals mentioned in the title text are now extinct.\nWell-known felines: [A graph organizing various feline species labeled with common names ordered by genera (in order of which would win in a fight) on the y axis, and coolness of name on the x axis.] Smilodon (extinct): \"Saber-toothed cat (scientific name: Smilodon fatalis) Panthera: \"Jaguar\", \"Leopard\", \"Snow Leopard\", \"Tiger\", \"Lion\" Puma: \"Cougar\", \"Puma\", \"Panther\", \"Mountain Lion\" Other felidae: \"Ocelot\", \"Cheetah\" Felis & Lynx: \"Housecat\", \"Bobcat\", \"Wildcat\", \"Lynx\" [Some elements are further connected using an unbranched acyclic digraph. The elements are connected thus: \"Cheetah\" -> \"Puma\" -> \"Jaguar\" -> \"Panther\" -> \"Tiger\" -> \"Leopard\" -> \"Snow Leopard\" -> \"Lion\" -> \"Mountain Lion\".] The OS X Problem\n"}
{"id":1057,"title":"Klout","image_title":"Klout","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1057","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/klout.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1057:_Klout","transcript":"[Randall has drawn himself as Cueball in a slim panel:] Randall: I'd like to ask a favor. Randall: If someday, in the future, we meet in person,\n[Zoom out of Randall talking.] Randall: And if, as of that day, I've interacted with Klout in any way except to opt out, Randall: I want you to punch me in the face without warning.\n[Zoom in on Randall's head.] Randall: This may sound like a joke, so let me be clear: Randall: I am dead serious . Randall: Ignore anything I say retracting this. Randall: Thank you.\n","explanation":"Klout was a site that sought to measure your \"influence\" on social media networks. They sometimes gave away \"perks\" to the users with the highest Klout scores, as a means of advertising the products of their sponsors. Generally, the information provided by Klout was not held in high esteem. The type of person who took most interest in their score was typically not well-liked.\nThere are multiple ways that Klout measured your influence. An example of increasing influence is having been given a +K (a recommendation for a higher score) for knowledge about \"Pitbull\" (The Bud Light promoter and producer\/rapper\/musician, etc., not the type of dog). Another could be having an inspiring tweet that generated 2000 retweets. Klout supported many social networks, and ranked people based primarily on how much reaction they garner from the public. For example, if Selena Gomez tweeted that she simply loved a certain blog, she would probably get more people to visit that blog, and thus get a bigger Klout score, than if the mayor of Anchorage, Alaska tweeted that he liked that blog. Or xkcd publishing a comic about Klout would lead to an all time high in Google searches for it. However, their \"about us\" page did claim that a small, active group of followers is considered more influential than a large, passive group of followers.\nThe gist of the comic is that Cueball (here representing Randall ) does not feel that Klout agrees with his core values, probably as he prefers self-assurance to having an outside authority tell him of his importance to society. He uses this comic to give himself incentive to stay away from Klout. He is very clear that he is dead serious about anyone meeting him after he has (been proven to have) used Klout should punch him in the face. He even makes sure that he cannot later retract this statement, if he for instance becomes interested in Klout (something he would never wish for). Because his last statement is that people should ignore anything he says to retract this statement later.\nRandall will now have a problem though because since he also posted the 706: Freedom comic earlier, he will never know if people that hit him does because they believe he has used Klout or just to exercise their free will.\nIn the title text, a \"dead man's switch\" is any mechanism which is designed to activate if the user does not take any action. This is generally used to create a failsafe in case the user is incapacitated . For example, many exercise treadmills include a tether meant to connect the runner to the machine's base station. If the runner gets too far from the base station, the tether pulls a pin and the machine stops immediately. This way, if the runner has fallen or is struggling to keep up, the machine does not exacerbate an already unsafe situation. Randall's \"douchebag deadman switch\" is a variation that would trigger if he ever became enough of an asshole to use Klout. This would lead to him being constantly punched in the face, so he doesn't dare become that type of person.\nShortly after this comic was posted, a Klout user was created claiming to be Randall. This was a fake, so if you ever meet Randall in real life, please don't punch him, unless you view making a webcomic about Klout counts as interacting with it.\nKlout shut down on May 25, 2018, for reasons that were never officially stated, but are generally assumed to be related to the General Data Protection Regulation , which went into effect on that day.\n[Randall has drawn himself as Cueball in a slim panel:] Randall: I'd like to ask a favor. Randall: If someday, in the future, we meet in person,\n[Zoom out of Randall talking.] Randall: And if, as of that day, I've interacted with Klout in any way except to opt out, Randall: I want you to punch me in the face without warning.\n[Zoom in on Randall's head.] Randall: This may sound like a joke, so let me be clear: Randall: I am dead serious . Randall: Ignore anything I say retracting this. Randall: Thank you.\n"}
{"id":1058,"title":"Old-Timers","image_title":"Old-Timers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1058","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/old_timers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1058:_Old-Timers","transcript":"[A man with black hair and a neck beard types away at his computer screen.] Man (typing): Whatever, noob. I've been on the internet since the BBS days. Screen (reply from the noob): Wrong. type type\n[The noob turns out to be Science Girl, with two hair buns, who kneels on her chair, typing at a laptop on a table in this frame-less panel.] Science Girl (typing): Before I was born, a lab took egg and sperm samples from my parents and sequenced the DNA. type type\n[The man sits at his desk, reading his screen.] Screen (Science Girls writing): They emailed the genome to the Venter Institute, where they synthesized the genome and implanted it into sperm and eggs which became me.\n[Science Girl still typing on the laptop.] Science Girl (typing): So, no. Science Girl (typing): You've looked at the internet. Science Girl (typing): I've been there. type type\n","explanation":"In this comic the man with the beard thinks he is Leet and tries to show this to his conversations partner by calling her noob (see also n00b ). He claims that he has been on the internet since the BBS days, and thus long before his conversation partner was even born.\nA Bulletin Board System , or BBS, is an online service based on microcomputers running appropriate software. They were the precursors to modern day online forums.\nHowever, he is up against Science Girl who tells him he is wrong. She explains that her parents took samples of their sperm and egg and sequenced the DNA . The resulting genome was then e-mailed to the Venter Institute where they synthesized the genome and used this to create the egg and sperm that became Science Girl.\nThe J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) is a non-profit genomics research institute founded by J. Craig Venter , Ph.D. in October 2006. Although what Science Girl is describing may be possible this comic must take place in the future as this has not yet been used to create human beings.\nHer point though is, that the man is wrong when he says that he has been on the internet. When you are \"on-line\" you are really just looking on the screen where the results found \"on\" the internet is displayed. So he has been looking at the internet. The girl's genome (which is basically the closest you can come to the data a computer would need to create you) has been sent on-line in an e-mail. So in her words, she has actually been there.\nObjectively, the Science Girl is just as bad as her adult conversational partner; simply being the most significant advancement in test tube babies in over two decades doesn't prove anything about your personal knowledge or experience. Subjectively , however, her reputation alone is more than enough to stun and thus \"defeat\" anyone who actually understands her special heritage, as well as of course her pun and correction regarding being and looking on the internet. It is also worth noting that it was technically her parents' sex cells, not her, which traversed the internet.\nThe title text is another common retort from \"old timers\" that they have been doing X since before the younger person was born. In this case, Science Girl accepts that the old timer was \"on the Internet\" before she was born, but so was she... At least in the form of her genetic information.\n[A man with black hair and a neck beard types away at his computer screen.] Man (typing): Whatever, noob. I've been on the internet since the BBS days. Screen (reply from the noob): Wrong. type type\n[The noob turns out to be Science Girl, with two hair buns, who kneels on her chair, typing at a laptop on a table in this frame-less panel.] Science Girl (typing): Before I was born, a lab took egg and sperm samples from my parents and sequenced the DNA. type type\n[The man sits at his desk, reading his screen.] Screen (Science Girls writing): They emailed the genome to the Venter Institute, where they synthesized the genome and implanted it into sperm and eggs which became me.\n[Science Girl still typing on the laptop.] Science Girl (typing): So, no. Science Girl (typing): You've looked at the internet. Science Girl (typing): I've been there. type type\n"}
{"id":1059,"title":"Bel-Air","image_title":"Bel-Air","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1059","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bel_air.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1059:_Bel-Air","transcript":"[Cueball sits on an easy chair in front of a TV.] TV: Well, my posh Bel Air life took a turn for the worse.\nTV: It's a story best related in a doggerel verse.\nTV: So kick back, relax, lemme put on some Adele for ya,\n[Cueball raises the remote and points at the screen.] TV: While I tell you why I'm running for mayor of Phila- CLICK\n","explanation":"This comic is a take on the 90s TV series Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and its much parodied and repeated theme song. Consequently, the song coming out of Cueball 's TV right now is a take on that song. The joke is that Will Smith has somehow gone from being a successful rap star to an ambitious politician. Doggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value or a comic verse of irregular measure, or in this case, rap music. Obviously, the song is updated with a reference to Adele , who was, of course, not performing during the series' run, seeing as she was two years old at its start.\nIn the last panel, Cueball is annoyed about this stupid show and he switches to another channel or turns the TV off. The timing of the \"click\" indicates that he became annoyed when the song turned into a political advertisement and\/or he did not want to hear \"some Adele for ya\" be rhymed with the name of the city Philadelphia .\nThe title text refers to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , a 1939 Academy Award-winning movie about an idealistic young man who is chosen to be a Senator and soon finds himself battling corrupted politicians, perhaps as Will Smith might be in this comic. The two characters\/character and actor is a coincidence that Randall plays on. Aaron Sorkin is the writer behind the comedy drama The American President and the creator of political television drama The West Wing . Pat Toomey is a current U.S. Senator of Pennsylvania (which includes Philadelphia), who was first elected in 2010.\nThe theme song of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was also referenced in 464: RBA .\n[Cueball sits on an easy chair in front of a TV.] TV: Well, my posh Bel Air life took a turn for the worse.\nTV: It's a story best related in a doggerel verse.\nTV: So kick back, relax, lemme put on some Adele for ya,\n[Cueball raises the remote and points at the screen.] TV: While I tell you why I'm running for mayor of Phila- CLICK\n"}
{"id":1060,"title":"Crowdsourcing","image_title":"Crowdsourcing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1060","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/crowdsourcing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1060:_Crowdsourcing","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of a flowchart on a wall, indicating with a pointer. A man and two women are looking on with interest. One woman holds a briefcase.] Cueball: We crowdsource the design process, allowing those with the best designs to connect\u2014 Cueball: via already-in-place social networking infrastructure\u2014 Cueball: with interested manufacturers, distributors, and marketers. [Caption below the panel:] Nobody caught on that our business plan didn't involve us in any way\u2014 it was just a description of other people making and selling products.\n","explanation":"Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. In the new Internet economy, it is not uncommon for companies to rely on crowdsourced designs or ideas, to contract the marketing to another firm, or to interact with customers through social networks established by other companies.\nCueball , however, is describing a business strategy which manages to do all three by \"crowdsourcing\" the process of getting a company and a prospective employee together. Cueball describes it as helping people with ideas find funding, similar to Kickstarter or Indiegogo, but rather than setting up a system to facilitate the process, he plans to use already-existing social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter).  Effectively, by relying on outside support for all steps of the business plan, his company does nothing; however, because the parts of his strategy are all feasible separately, and because he describes them with a barrage of trendy buzzwords, his audience is impressed and fails to notice the company's essential pointlessness.\nIn the title text Cueball claims that \"we don't sell a product, we sell the marketplace,\" a phrase that typically describes a company whose business model is to facilitate the business of other companies, and would be a plausible reason for a company to not make products. However, this is revealed to be yet more empty buzzwords when Cueball clarifies that they don't actually do any work and instead play video games (\"shooters\" refer to shooter games, a genre of video game).\n[Cueball is standing in front of a flowchart on a wall, indicating with a pointer. A man and two women are looking on with interest. One woman holds a briefcase.] Cueball: We crowdsource the design process, allowing those with the best designs to connect\u2014 Cueball: via already-in-place social networking infrastructure\u2014 Cueball: with interested manufacturers, distributors, and marketers. [Caption below the panel:] Nobody caught on that our business plan didn't involve us in any way\u2014 it was just a description of other people making and selling products.\n"}
{"id":1061,"title":"EST","image_title":"EST","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1061","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/est.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1061:_EST","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] xkcd presents Earth Standard Time (EST) A universal calendar for a universal planet EST is... Simple \u2022 Clearly defined \u2022 Unambiguous Free of historical baggage \u2022 Compatible with old units Precisely synced with the solar cycle \u2022 Free of leap years Intermittently amenable to date math\n[Inside the frame a list of the details concerning EST is shown:] Units Second: 1 S.I. second Minute: 60 seconds Hour: 60 minutes Day: 1444 minutes (24 hours 4 minutes) Month: 30 days Year: 12 months\nRules For 4 hours after every full moon, run clocks backward. The non-prime-numbered minutes of the first full non-reversed hour after a solstice or equinox happen twice.\n[In two columns the \"Epoch\" is put into a contrasting juxtaposition to \"Time Zones\":] Epoch 00:00:00 EST, January 1st, 1970 = 00:00:00 GMT, January 1st, 1970 (Julian Calendar) Time Zones The two EST time zones are EST and EST (United Kingdom) . These are the same except that the UK second is 0.9144 standard seconds.\n[A few further statements:] Daylight saving: Countries may enter DST, but no time may pass there. Narnian Time: Synchronized\u2714 Year Zero: EST does have a year 0 . (However, there is no 1958.)\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun of attempts to \"fix\" the calendar by making it simpler or more rational, which inevitably result in a system just as complicated. This is an example of the paradox in complexity theory that if you attempt to simplify a system of problems by creating a new system of evaluation for the problems you often have instead made the problem more complex than it was originally.\nRandall advertises his idea for a \"Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet\". He combines calendar definitions with time zone definitions. The abbreviation EST in this comic stands for Earth Standard Time (hence the title), but it is in itself a joke on the American Eastern Standard Time . In the rest of the explanation, EST refers to the comic's Earth Standard Time.\nBecause there are approximately 365.2422 days in a solar year , various calendars use different means to keep the calendar year in sync with the solar year and the seasons. The Julian Calendar, for example, has leap days every four years, giving it an average year length of 365.25 days. The most widely used system is the Gregorian calendar , which also has leap days every four years, but skips leap days in years divisible by 100 unless the year is also divisible by 400, the latter additions come from Earth's axial precession . This gives it an average year length of 365.2425 days, which is very close to the length of a solar year (see detailed explanation in this video: Earth's motion around the Sun, not as simple as I thought ). Other calendars have been proposed, some of which do not count leap days and special \"festival days\" as a day of the week, in order to make every date fall on the same day of the week every year.\nMany of the claimed benefits for the calendar are highly dubious:\nThe features of the calendar get increasingly bizarre as the description proceeds:\n[Caption above the frame:] xkcd presents Earth Standard Time (EST) A universal calendar for a universal planet EST is... Simple \u2022 Clearly defined \u2022 Unambiguous Free of historical baggage \u2022 Compatible with old units Precisely synced with the solar cycle \u2022 Free of leap years Intermittently amenable to date math\n[Inside the frame a list of the details concerning EST is shown:] Units Second: 1 S.I. second Minute: 60 seconds Hour: 60 minutes Day: 1444 minutes (24 hours 4 minutes) Month: 30 days Year: 12 months\nRules For 4 hours after every full moon, run clocks backward. The non-prime-numbered minutes of the first full non-reversed hour after a solstice or equinox happen twice.\n[In two columns the \"Epoch\" is put into a contrasting juxtaposition to \"Time Zones\":] Epoch 00:00:00 EST, January 1st, 1970 = 00:00:00 GMT, January 1st, 1970 (Julian Calendar) Time Zones The two EST time zones are EST and EST (United Kingdom) . These are the same except that the UK second is 0.9144 standard seconds.\n[A few further statements:] Daylight saving: Countries may enter DST, but no time may pass there. Narnian Time: Synchronized\u2714 Year Zero: EST does have a year 0 . (However, there is no 1958.)\n"}
{"id":1062,"title":"Budget News","image_title":"Budget News","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1062","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/budget_news.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1062:_Budget_News","transcript":"[The front page of a newspaper with the name of the paper in large gray letters at the top, and several unreadable sections left of, right of, and below the main front page news. A large heading is written to the left of a photo on the right. In the photo a man with black hair who has been standing behind a lectern with a microphone delivering a speech is falling towards the left and holding out one hand in that direction while blocking his face with the other hand against an attack from a large black bird. Below the podium with the lectern is the top of the crowd in the front row. Five Cueball-like guys (two cut off at the edges), a person with black hair and Black Hat to the right can be seen. Below the headline and below the picture are black lines indicating the main text in the article.] Title: The Daily News Headline: Deficit Hawk Attacked by Regular One\n","explanation":"This comic is a use of homonym of the word \"hawk\" in the phrase \" Deficit hawk \". Wikipedia has a great definition: \"Deficit hawk is an American political slang term for people who place great emphasis on keeping the federal budget under control. Deficit hawks believe the best way to reduce the deficit, pay off national debt, and balance the budget is by a combination of increasing taxes and cutting government spending.\"\nAnd obviously, a hawk is a type of bird of prey.  In this case, the prey is politicians. This event may have been contrived, as a certain Black Hat is visible in the audience.\nIn the title text, there is a reference to the sugar glider , which is a small gliding possum originating from the marsupial infraclass or subclass. They are generally considered to be cute and harmless, as well as being relatively obscure, indicating a politician who is humorous and good-natured enough to make such a comparison, as well as nerdy enough to know what a sugar glider is.\n[The front page of a newspaper with the name of the paper in large gray letters at the top, and several unreadable sections left of, right of, and below the main front page news. A large heading is written to the left of a photo on the right. In the photo a man with black hair who has been standing behind a lectern with a microphone delivering a speech is falling towards the left and holding out one hand in that direction while blocking his face with the other hand against an attack from a large black bird. Below the podium with the lectern is the top of the crowd in the front row. Five Cueball-like guys (two cut off at the edges), a person with black hair and Black Hat to the right can be seen. Below the headline and below the picture are black lines indicating the main text in the article.] Title: The Daily News Headline: Deficit Hawk Attacked by Regular One\n"}
{"id":1063,"title":"Kill Hitler","image_title":"Kill Hitler","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1063","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kill_hitler.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1063:_Kill_Hitler","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball stand in front of a double door, which bears the label 'TIME door'. Black Hat has his hands on his hips.] Black Hat: I finished my time machine, but it's one-use-only. Cueball: You gotta kill Hitler.\n[Close-up of Black Hat, one hand palm upward.] Black Hat: Why are you so obsessed with this Hitler guy? We have all of time we could explore!\n[Close-up of Cueball with both hands palm upward.] Cueball: He's evil incarnate! He murdered millions and sparked global war! Everyone agrees\u2014if you get a time machine, you kill Hitler.\n[Black Hat enters the now open Time door as the other man looks on..] Black Hat: Fine, fine, I get it! Calm down. BRB, killing Hitler.\n[Black Hat returns, shutting the door with one hand. Cueball has outstretched arms.] Black Hat: There. Done. Are you happy? Cueball: Thank you. Black Hat: He was in some kind of bunker. 1945 was loud! Cueball: NO!\n","explanation":"After Black Hat announces his completion of a time machine which will only ever work once, Cueball gives a common suggestion for what to do when you have a time machine: killing Adolf Hitler , the Austrian-born dictator who famously led the Nazi Party to a hostile takeover of the German government, which eventually led to World War II where the Nazis conducted a military invasion of several other European countries and a genocidal campaign known as the Holocaust . Even though Black Hat has other (and probably better) ideas about how to use his time machine, he relents to Cueball's pleas and goes off to kill Hitler, comically using the casual phrase \"BRB\" which is an abbreviation for \"be right back\". He soon returns, commenting that he found Hitler in a very noisy bunker in the year 1945.\nIn the real world, Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in Hitler's personal office in the F\u00fchrerbunker . Berlin was the last major stronghold of Nazi Germany at that point, and was under heavy military assault by the Soviet Union, making it fairly obvious to the Nazis that they wouldn't control the city for much longer. Germany surrendered to the Allied forces almost immediately after Hitler's death, bringing an end to the European side of the War (the Pacific side, mostly fought between the United States and the Nazi-allied Empire of Japan, would linger on for a few more months until Japan was driven to surrender by two nuclear attacks ). The fact that Black Hat killed Hitler in the F\u00fchrerbunker in 1945 means that the War and the Holocaust had already resulted in the deaths of millions, and history would not be significantly changed by murdering Hitler at that point. Also, Black Hat's comment that \"1945 was loud!\" suggests that Berlin was already under attack when he emerged in the F\u00fchrerbunker, implying that the killing took place around the time Hitler would have taken his own life anyway, possibly just a few moments before.\nCueball's intent was clearly for Black Hat to travel back to a time before Hitler's rise to power, in the hopes that killing him back then would prevent both the War and the Holocaust; he's therefore horrified by the realization that Black Hat had used his sole opportunity for time travel and probably made little difference at all. This is typical Black Hat behavior, going out of his way just to troll people like Cueball and cause horrible things to happen, in this case deliberately not changing any history or avoiding any of the atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany. That might be for the best, however, since killing Hitler early might cause more problems than it would solve .\nSure enough, there are some conspiracy theories claiming that Hitler had no intention of taking his own life and was actually shot dead by someone else, most of them relying on some kind of \"evidence\" that Hitler and Braun weren't alone in the room when they died. If this comic was meant to be taken as a serious theory on Hitler's death, it would suggest that Black Hat was directly responsible, but because he used a time machine to reach Hitler's office, historians would have no knowledge that he was ever there and therefore could only conclude that Hitler and Braun killed themselves instead. Also, if the Novikov self-consistency principle is true, it means that Hitler's suicide was interrupted by Black Hat in the first place, and Black Hat was merely going back in time to do the thing he already did.\nThe title text refers to the time travel theme from the Superman movie in which Jor-El states, \"It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history.\" Here it is suggested that Black Hat needs to know some history before going back in time to interfere with it, perhaps so that he would do the right thing and kill Hitler before the Holocaust and World War II.\n[Black Hat and Cueball stand in front of a double door, which bears the label 'TIME door'. Black Hat has his hands on his hips.] Black Hat: I finished my time machine, but it's one-use-only. Cueball: You gotta kill Hitler.\n[Close-up of Black Hat, one hand palm upward.] Black Hat: Why are you so obsessed with this Hitler guy? We have all of time we could explore!\n[Close-up of Cueball with both hands palm upward.] Cueball: He's evil incarnate! He murdered millions and sparked global war! Everyone agrees\u2014if you get a time machine, you kill Hitler.\n[Black Hat enters the now open Time door as the other man looks on..] Black Hat: Fine, fine, I get it! Calm down. BRB, killing Hitler.\n[Black Hat returns, shutting the door with one hand. Cueball has outstretched arms.] Black Hat: There. Done. Are you happy? Cueball: Thank you. Black Hat: He was in some kind of bunker. 1945 was loud! Cueball: NO!\n"}
{"id":1064,"title":"Front Door","image_title":"Front Door","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1064","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/front_door.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1064:_Front_Door","transcript":"[A graph with three colored lines. There is no scale on the Y-axis but the X-axis represents geographic location and has four labels. From the Y-axis to around the midpoint is \"Yard\", with an arrow from the word yard pointing left, at a point beyond the midpoint there is a tick labeled \"Steps\", at a point after that is another tick labeled \"Door\", and all points afterward are \"Inside\" with an arrow pointing right from the word inside, there are no tick for the first and last label. The three lines are all labeled with a small lines going from the label to the lines. The blue line begins to slowly increase from the start, with a slight dip further into the yard, and a steep increase right before the steps, maxing on the steps, and declining steeply at the door, bottoming out once inside. The gray line is at a steady medium height until it gets to the steps, at which point it shoots upwards, and then slowly declines once inside. The red line stays at 0 until just before the steps, where it begins to trend upwards, spikes at the door, and begins to slowly decline once inside. Above the curves to the left there is a black frame with the title of the graph:] Walking Back to My Front Door at Night: X-axis labels: Yard Steps Door Inside Blue line: Fear That There's Something Behind Me Gray line: Forward Speed Red line: Embarrassment\n","explanation":"This comic is showing in graphical form three different actions\/feelings as Randall is approaching his front door at night. His \"Fear That There's Something Behind Me\" rises, so then his \"Forward Speed\" rises to get to his door faster. And then when he gets in the door and finds that in fact, there is nothing behind him, his \"Embarrassment\" rises. The y-axis of the chart is not labeled, so it is presumed to indicate amount, as in how embarrassed Randall is.\nThe interesting fact revealed is that Randall gets more concerned that someone is behind him when he walks up the steps to this door, and not while walking in the yard where there might be more hiding places. The worst fear is just before he walks up the steps to lock himself in. This is probably because now that he is almost home and safe, he now has to fumble with the key concentrating on getting the key in the lock, thus not being able to pay attention to what's coming up behind him.\nThis is of course an irrational thought, but it seems to happen to many people, and has certainly been used for suspense in many movies, whether it is \"Did I hear a noise upstairs?\" or \"Is that an axe murderer hiding in that hedge?\" or \"There might be a velociraptor lurking nearby\". (However in all of these cases getting inside would probably not help you anyway just adding to the funny part of how the fear drops once inside. See 87: Velociraptors for why getting inside probably also would not help against them.)\nThe title text attempts to alleviate the problem of the following embarrassment by introducing potential threat that could affect anybody. Since Randall mentioned that he will randomly release a wolf into a front yard sometime in the next thirty years, there will always be a fear that a wolf has been released onto your front yard. In that case, the fear one feels will be justified and not embarrassing, as it is possible that there is indeed a wolf released by Randall into their front yard. However, even assuming that Randall can find and release a wolf onto someone's front yard, the chance of this happening to you is minuscule.\n[A graph with three colored lines. There is no scale on the Y-axis but the X-axis represents geographic location and has four labels. From the Y-axis to around the midpoint is \"Yard\", with an arrow from the word yard pointing left, at a point beyond the midpoint there is a tick labeled \"Steps\", at a point after that is another tick labeled \"Door\", and all points afterward are \"Inside\" with an arrow pointing right from the word inside, there are no tick for the first and last label. The three lines are all labeled with a small lines going from the label to the lines. The blue line begins to slowly increase from the start, with a slight dip further into the yard, and a steep increase right before the steps, maxing on the steps, and declining steeply at the door, bottoming out once inside. The gray line is at a steady medium height until it gets to the steps, at which point it shoots upwards, and then slowly declines once inside. The red line stays at 0 until just before the steps, where it begins to trend upwards, spikes at the door, and begins to slowly decline once inside. Above the curves to the left there is a black frame with the title of the graph:] Walking Back to My Front Door at Night: X-axis labels: Yard Steps Door Inside Blue line: Fear That There's Something Behind Me Gray line: Forward Speed Red line: Embarrassment\n"}
{"id":1065,"title":"Shoes","image_title":"Shoes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1065","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/shoes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1065:_Shoes","transcript":"[Cueball, holding a sword, looks up to a disembodied voice coming from above, and a box hovers in the air before him.] Voice: For saving my kingdom, I offer you a gift of great power.\n[Cueball's sword is now propped up against the right edge of the panel. The box opens, a glow emanating from within.] Voice: These magic shoes enable the wearer to outrun death itself. Cueball: Thank you. I...\n[A close-up on Cueball as he examines the shoes. They have five toes.] Cueball: Whoa, wait. They have those creepy individual toes.\n[Cueball puts the shoes back in the still-hovering box. The sword cannot be seen.] Voice: But they make you immortal. Cueball: ...I have to think about this.\n","explanation":"Cueball is a knight that has saved a kingdom. It seems that he is being rewarded by a god, since his reward is inside a box that is floating in a beam of heavenly light. Inside the box is a pair of shoes with five toes - and with these magic shoes, he can outrun Death .\nThis comic refers to a new type of running shoes which have very little actual support with individual areas for each toe (they are supposed to make you feel like you are running barefoot). Specifically, the shoes Cueball takes out of the box look like Vibram FiveFingers .\nThe joke in the comic is that the shoes are so strange\/creepy, that Cueball is not even sure he would want to live forever if he would have to wear these shoes at all times. Immortality is not worth it.\nThe title text is a play on the common phrase \"x is the best thing since sliced bread\". The way that Randall uses the phrase in the title text humorously implies that these shoes would be almost as good to wear on your feet as two slices of bread.\nEarlier in 977: Map Projections , it was stated that those who preferred the Dymaxion projection would wear shoes with toes. And later in 1735: Fashion Police and Grammar Police it was a different type of shoes that were deemed non-fashionable with the Crocs .\n[Cueball, holding a sword, looks up to a disembodied voice coming from above, and a box hovers in the air before him.] Voice: For saving my kingdom, I offer you a gift of great power.\n[Cueball's sword is now propped up against the right edge of the panel. The box opens, a glow emanating from within.] Voice: These magic shoes enable the wearer to outrun death itself. Cueball: Thank you. I...\n[A close-up on Cueball as he examines the shoes. They have five toes.] Cueball: Whoa, wait. They have those creepy individual toes.\n[Cueball puts the shoes back in the still-hovering box. The sword cannot be seen.] Voice: But they make you immortal. Cueball: ...I have to think about this.\n"}
{"id":1066,"title":"Laundry","image_title":"Laundry","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1066","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/laundry.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1066:_Laundry","transcript":"College Laundry Habits\n[Panel labeled \"First Week\". 5 ovals arranged in a rough circle, with a clockwise path connecting them: \"Dresser & Closet\", \"On Body\", \"Hamper\", \"Washer & Dryer\", \"Folding Area\" (and back to the first). The area outside the ovals is labeled \"Floor.\"]\n[Panel labeled \"Second Week\". The path has been modified so that it does not go through \"Folding Area\" - only through the other 4 ovals.]\n[Panel labeled \"Third Week\". The path has been modified so that it does not go through \"Dresser & Closet\". Only \"On Body\", \"Hamper\", and \"Washer & Dryer\" remain.]\n[Panel labeled \"Second Month\". The path no longer passes through \"Hamper\" - only \"On Body\" and \"Washer & Dryer\".]\n[Panel labeled \"End of Semester\". The path no longer goes to \"Washer & Dryer\", instead just looping back around from \"On Body\" to \"On Body\" again after passing through the \"Floor.\"]\n","explanation":"This comic is all about college laundry habits and how as time goes by, you end up just throwing clothes on the floor and then wearing them again.\nIn the first week, the student undertakes a proper laundry routine. However, due to increasing laziness, by the second week they have abandoned folding their clothes, and by the third week no longer bother hanging them in the closet. By the second month dirty clothes are no longer stored in a laundry hamper and are just dumped on the floor, and by the end of the semester clothes are not washed at all.\nThe title text seems to indicate that the student has a brainwave, some time later, to wash their clothes in the dishwasher along with the dishes. Presumably as a timesaver. The experiment was brief because dishwashers aren't actually any good at washing clothes [ citation needed ] as they wouldn't move the clothes about.\nCollege Laundry Habits\n[Panel labeled \"First Week\". 5 ovals arranged in a rough circle, with a clockwise path connecting them: \"Dresser & Closet\", \"On Body\", \"Hamper\", \"Washer & Dryer\", \"Folding Area\" (and back to the first). The area outside the ovals is labeled \"Floor.\"]\n[Panel labeled \"Second Week\". The path has been modified so that it does not go through \"Folding Area\" - only through the other 4 ovals.]\n[Panel labeled \"Third Week\". The path has been modified so that it does not go through \"Dresser & Closet\". Only \"On Body\", \"Hamper\", and \"Washer & Dryer\" remain.]\n[Panel labeled \"Second Month\". The path no longer passes through \"Hamper\" - only \"On Body\" and \"Washer & Dryer\".]\n[Panel labeled \"End of Semester\". The path no longer goes to \"Washer & Dryer\", instead just looping back around from \"On Body\" to \"On Body\" again after passing through the \"Floor.\"]\n"}
{"id":1067,"title":"Pressures","image_title":"Pressures","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1067","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pressures.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1067:_Pressures","transcript":"[Ponytail walks up to Megan examining documents] Ponytail: So... what've you been up to? Megan: Handling patent applications. Ponytail: Yeah, but... besides that? Megan: That's about it. Ponytail: You're not, like, thinking about any cool stuff? Just curious.\nFor the last hundred years, Swiss patent clerks have been under some weird pressures.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to revolutionary physicist Albert Einstein , who got his first big ideas about physics while he was working as a Swiss patent clerk. Hence, Randall jokes that there is pressure on other Swiss patent clerks to come up with genius ideas while they are working there. The Zen Pencil comic \"Albert Einstein: Life is a mystery\" gives some background about Einstein's choice to work at the Swiss patent office. The fact that he was turned down by several universities was beneficial to the science of physics, as the duties as a patent clerk were not challenging to him, paid enough, and allowed him to work on his theories without any pressures .\nThe title text refers to quantum gravity , a highly anticipated theory that would unify quantum mechanics with the current model of gravity, general relativity. Such a theory would be very useful to understanding how space behaves at high energies and high densities, such as black holes and the very early universe. The joke is that instead of a patent clerk making this theory, as everyone is supposedly expecting, it's instead made by someone wearing \"patent\" leather shoes and working on a movie called \"Clerks\" II, thereby suggesting that anytime something called a \"patent\" crosses with anything called a \"clerk\", radical breakthroughs in physics result. Clerks II is the second movie in the Clerks series by Kevin Smith, widely regarded as not nearly as good as the first \u2014 which could be said about most sequels, but you get the point.\n[Ponytail walks up to Megan examining documents] Ponytail: So... what've you been up to? Megan: Handling patent applications. Ponytail: Yeah, but... besides that? Megan: That's about it. Ponytail: You're not, like, thinking about any cool stuff? Just curious.\nFor the last hundred years, Swiss patent clerks have been under some weird pressures.\n"}
{"id":1068,"title":"Swiftkey","image_title":"Swiftkey","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1068","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/swiftkey.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1068:_Swiftkey","transcript":"[Cueball showing his phone to Megan.] Cueball: Have you tried SwiftKey? It's got the first decent language model I've seen. It learns from your SMS\/Email archives what words you use together most often.\n[Cueball and Megan in a frameless panel, with Megan now holding Cueball's phone.] Cueball: Spacebar inserts its best guess. So if I type \"The Empi\" and hit space three times, it types \"The Empire Strikes Back\". Megan: What if you mash space in a blank message?\n[Zoomed in on Megan looking at Cueball's phone, with Cueball now off-frame to the left.] Cueball: I guess it fills in your most likely first word, then the word that usually follows it... Megan: So it builds up your \"typical\" sentence. Cool! Let's see yours! Cueball: Uh\u2014\n[Eight small frames arranged in panel space, 2 frames wide by 4 frames high, showing each word added by Swiftkey as Megan hits space each time:] SwiftKey: I SwiftKey: Am SwiftKey: So SwiftKey: Sorry\u2014 SwiftKey: That's SwiftKey: Never SwiftKey: Happened SwiftKey: Before.\n","explanation":"Cueball has installed SwiftKey on his smartphone and brags about this to Megan . SwiftKey is a product that is installable on iOS \/ Android -based phones and tablets.\nCueball explains that if you type space bar on the keyboard it auto-completes the word you are currently typing founded on its best guess, and then if you continue to press space it will add new words using this guessing process based on the previous word(s) and what it believes is the most likely words you would use in a sentence containing the previous word(s).\nMegan asks what happens if you begin a new message by just using space to automatically create a text. Cueball's best guess it begins with the word SwiftKey has found to be the typical starting word and then continues as normal from that.\nMegan then realizes that in this way it builds up his \"typical\" sentence and she tries this over the next eight small frames: I am so sorry- that's never happened before.\n\"I'm so sorry\u2013 that's never happened before.\" is a typical excuse for a mishap, usually when one fails to produce an erection when it is needed . Such a phrase being quoted by an algorithm implies that such mishaps are common, and therefore \"I'm so sorry\u2013 that's never happened before.\" is a lie. Also, Swiftkey might be saying \"I'm so sorry\u2013 that's never happened before.\" because the software doesn't know what to do.\nSwiftKey has noticed their inclusion in xkcd and have created a blog post for other users to comment with their default phrase when they hit the \"central prediction key\". The results are pretty funny (the site now redirects to a website asking to download the keyboard, an archived version can be found here ). In addition, Reddit users have a similar model creating \/r\/subredditsimulator , which is populated by bots generating submissions and comments based on the language of their subreddits.\nIn the title text, a Markov chain refers to a system that transitions between a countable number of states, based only on the current state and none of the previous ones that led up to it. SwiftKey follows this property since it provides outputs based only on the most recently entered word or words, not the whole sentence.\n\"Massachusetts Institute of America\" is a nonexistent organization. The name appears to have formed by combining \" Massachusetts Institute of Technology \" and either \"[Field] Institute of America\" (e.g. Mining) or \"United States of America\". This illustrates the memoryless property of a Markov chain; after generating \"Massachusetts Institute of\", SwiftKey may have attempted to predict the next word using only the last \"of\" or \"Institute of\". Since it was not considering the word \"Massachusetts\" at all, the word \"America\" was viewed as the most likely follow-up.\n[Cueball showing his phone to Megan.] Cueball: Have you tried SwiftKey? It's got the first decent language model I've seen. It learns from your SMS\/Email archives what words you use together most often.\n[Cueball and Megan in a frameless panel, with Megan now holding Cueball's phone.] Cueball: Spacebar inserts its best guess. So if I type \"The Empi\" and hit space three times, it types \"The Empire Strikes Back\". Megan: What if you mash space in a blank message?\n[Zoomed in on Megan looking at Cueball's phone, with Cueball now off-frame to the left.] Cueball: I guess it fills in your most likely first word, then the word that usually follows it... Megan: So it builds up your \"typical\" sentence. Cool! Let's see yours! Cueball: Uh\u2014\n[Eight small frames arranged in panel space, 2 frames wide by 4 frames high, showing each word added by Swiftkey as Megan hits space each time:] SwiftKey: I SwiftKey: Am SwiftKey: So SwiftKey: Sorry\u2014 SwiftKey: That's SwiftKey: Never SwiftKey: Happened SwiftKey: Before.\n"}
{"id":1069,"title":"Alphabet","image_title":"Alphabet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1069","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alphabet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1069:_Alphabet","transcript":"[Cueball stands behind Blondie who has turned her head towards him while sitting at a bar stool at a bar desk. She holds on to a wine glass standing on the desk. Two regular glasses are standing on the desk in front of her.] Cueball: Baby, if I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd forget about you in a heartbeat . Cueball: I'm not gonna waste my one chance to help the mess that is English orthography.\n","explanation":"This comic is mainly a joke on the traditional pick-up line that goes: \"Baby, if I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put 'U' and 'I' together\", i.e. \"you and I\", or \"the letter U and the letter I\".\nHowever, in typical xkcd fashion, rather than continuing with that tired pickup line, addressed at Blondie at the bar, Cueball jumps at his hypothetical chance to rearrange the alphabet and fix the English orthography .\nAn orthography is a standardized system for using a particular writing system (script) to write a particular language, including rules of spelling. The English orthography happens to be one of the deepest (that is, most irregular) ones around, since almost every sound can be spelled in several ways, and most spellings and all letters can be pronounced in more than one way, and often in many different ways.\nSo faced with this opportunity, the hooking up could wait. Restructuring the alphabet and creating a sensibly regular English spelling is the chance of a lifetime, and would make history, making Cueball immortal in the sense of living on forever in memory, as the alphabet-fixer.\nIn the title text Cueball muses on the possibilities. Does he get to remove letters entirely or just rearrange them (like putting U and I together)? Then he mentions \"the 'k\/c' situation\" specifically because that \"situation is ridiculous\". This is about the use of the letter 'c'. It doesn't have a unique sound, and most often makes a 'k'-sound or an 's'-sound . Combined with an 'h' it usually makes the 'ch'-sound in chair , but also they often sound like 'k' ( character ), and in not too few cases they even make the 'sh'-sound (like champagne , see more examples here ). So a reasonable change Cueball might make is to replace 'c' by 'k' or 's', and keep 'c' only followed by 'h' (or even giving 'c' the current sound of 'ch' as in chair or giving the role of 'ch' as in chair to 'kh', spelling 'khair') .\nHe finishes off by stating that they can make out any other time, because fixing the alphabet now would bring him immortality.\nOrthography was again the subject in 1562: I in Team . A non-standard version of this pickup joke was previously referenced in 279: Pickup Lines .\n[Cueball stands behind Blondie who has turned her head towards him while sitting at a bar stool at a bar desk. She holds on to a wine glass standing on the desk. Two regular glasses are standing on the desk in front of her.] Cueball: Baby, if I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd forget about you in a heartbeat . Cueball: I'm not gonna waste my one chance to help the mess that is English orthography.\n"}
{"id":1070,"title":"Words for Small Sets","image_title":"Words for Small Sets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1070","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/words_for_small_sets.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1070:_Words_for_Small_Sets","transcript":"[Heading above table:] Just to clear things up: [A chart with four rows and two columns is shown.] A few Anywhere from 2 to 5\nA handful Anywhere from 2 to 5\nSeveral Anywhere from 2 to 5\nA couple 2 (but sometimes up to 5)\n","explanation":"The noun \"couple\" can mean \"exactly two items of the same kind,\" or it can be used interchangeably with words like \"few\" or \"several\", which in this context mean \"comparatively small but definitely greater than one\". But some people insist that \"couple\" can only mean two, by analogy with the specific use of the word \"couple\" to refer to exactly one pair of people who are in a romantic relationship.\nThis comic also alludes to similar arguments about the relative meaning of phrases like \"few\" and \"several\" (some people will argue that \"several\" should mean more than \"few\", while others will argue the opposite or that it doesn't matter), making this comic troll bait . Randall is attempting to \"troll\" (intentionally provoke) the people who claim \"couple\" must mean exactly two by taking the other side of the argument.\nThe title text similarly alludes to the argument. Randall says \"Try asking a couple of friends [...] unless all three of them agree,\" which jokingly refers to the same group of people first by the vague term \"couple,\" which can include three, and then specifies the exact number, resulting in a jarring effect as if a \"couple\" meant exactly three. The title text also mentions the sentence spacing issue as an example of another topic known to ignite energetic arguments among pedantic types without ever leading to consensus. Sentence spacing is later seen in 1285: Third Way . The sentence spacing arguments are about whether one or two space characters must be used after the period character at the end of the sentence.\nThe title text also points out an unusual situation where troll baiting may not work: namely, intending to spark an argument is most effective if there is a disagreement on the matter. If all of the inquired friends have the same opinion on the matter (be it the definition of 'couple' or the number of spaces after a period), then an argument may not spark, and the trolling attempt may fail. Randall also takes a side in the title text, saying \"a couple of friends\" and then later \"all three of them\".\n[Heading above table:] Just to clear things up: [A chart with four rows and two columns is shown.] A few Anywhere from 2 to 5\nA handful Anywhere from 2 to 5\nSeveral Anywhere from 2 to 5\nA couple 2 (but sometimes up to 5)\n"}
{"id":1071,"title":"Exoplanets","image_title":"Exoplanets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1071","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exoplanets.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1071:_Exoplanets","transcript":"[An large diagram of dots, mostly of varying shades of brown and greenish yellow, with a number of smaller blue dots, tiny green dots and some larger red dots. At the top of the circle are five lines of text in very different font size.] All 786 known planets (as of June 2012) to scale (Some planet sizes estimated based on mass.)\n[Below this text is a small section of 8 planets which are framed in a light gray frame with lighter gray background . It is situated right below the above text with only a few planets in between the text and the frame. These planets include two large yellow, two smaller blue two small green and two tiny green planets. A line goes between this frame to another frame with the first word in the text below, that is in a similar frame. The rest of the text follows to the right and then below this first word covering the central part of the circle from just around the center of the circle and a bit below.] This  is our solar system. The rest of these orbit other stars and were only discovered recently. Most of them are huge because those are the kind we learned to detect first, but now we're finding that small ones are actually more common. We know nothing about what's on any of them. With better telescopes, that could change. This is an exciting time.\n","explanation":"An exoplanet is a planet outside of our solar system, orbiting a different sun. 786 planets were known in mid-2012: 778 exoplanets and the rest in our Solar System.\nSince then, astronomers have found thousands more. In the comic, our Solar System 's eight planets are depicted in the small rectangle above the central text. From this we find that the largest dots (red) and second largest dots (dark brown) indicate planets larger than Jupiter, light brown is roughly Jupiter or Saturn -sized, blue is roughly Uranus or Neptune -sized, and the tiny dots are small terrestrial planets (like Earth ).\nWe only have a few ways of finding exoplanets . Astronomers initially used doppler spectroscopy , which detects minute changes in a star's movement towards or away from us to infer the presence of large gas giants or brown dwarfs . Currently the most successful method is to notice when a star seems to briefly get dimmer on a repeating cycle. This may indicate that a body of matter has passed between that star and us, blocking some of the light. The Kepler space telescope was designed for this purpose, and has made the vast majority of exoplanet discoveries.\nMost of Kepler's discoveries are between the sizes of Earth and Neptune, but it's sensitive enough to detect planets smaller than Mercury (if the orbital plane is aligned with us). Kepler is only able to observe relatively close stars in a narrow field of view . The great number of nearby planets implies there should be billions of planets in our galaxy, assuming our local arm is not uniquely abundant.\nThe title text refers to this by saying that to show them all, each dot on the chart should hold another chart with the same amount of dots; each of these dots should then also have a similar chart, and then do this one more time for a three level deep chart. This chart would have space for 786^4 planets (786*786*786*786 = 382 billions). Our Milky Way contains about 100-400 billion stars. But if the chart were only two levels deep there would \"only\" be room for 786^3 = 0.5 billion planets.\nThis comic's design is similar to the Ishihara Color Test , a series of circular pictures made of colored dots, used to detect red-green color blindness. However, Randall's picture probably does not contain a hidden number like it did in 1213: Combination Vision Test .\nTwo different xkcd comics have the title \"Exoplanets\". The first was 786: Exoplanets , and this one was drawn at a time when 786 exoplanets had been found. Probably not a coincidence when it comes to Randall . This is the first time Randall released a comic with the exact same name as a previous comic. Since then he has done so a few times . When this comic was released it caused problems on xkcd as the title of the image files were the same for the two comics. This was resolved by renaming the original image adding the year 2010, the year when it was released, two years before this one was released.\nSee also Category:Exoplanets and this list of lists of exoplanets .\n[An large diagram of dots, mostly of varying shades of brown and greenish yellow, with a number of smaller blue dots, tiny green dots and some larger red dots. At the top of the circle are five lines of text in very different font size.] All 786 known planets (as of June 2012) to scale (Some planet sizes estimated based on mass.)\n[Below this text is a small section of 8 planets which are framed in a light gray frame with lighter gray background . It is situated right below the above text with only a few planets in between the text and the frame. These planets include two large yellow, two smaller blue two small green and two tiny green planets. A line goes between this frame to another frame with the first word in the text below, that is in a similar frame. The rest of the text follows to the right and then below this first word covering the central part of the circle from just around the center of the circle and a bit below.] This  is our solar system. The rest of these orbit other stars and were only discovered recently. Most of them are huge because those are the kind we learned to detect first, but now we're finding that small ones are actually more common. We know nothing about what's on any of them. With better telescopes, that could change. This is an exciting time.\n"}
{"id":1072,"title":"Seventies","image_title":"Seventies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1072","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/seventies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1072:_Seventies","transcript":"Cueball: Nice jacket. Hey\u2013 Cueball: The seventies called. Out-of-panel: Oh? What'd they want?\n[Cueball looks at his smartphone, holding it in his hand.] Cueball: I don't know. They didn't leave a message. Out-of-panel: Weird.\n1974: [A person in bell bottoms, who has no jacket, looks at a rotary phone receiver.] Voicemail service: If you'd like to leave a message, press \"1\".\n","explanation":"This is a take on the common insult \"<year> called and they want their <item> back\", used when one is wearing something out of fashion (used before in 875: 2009 Called ). In this case, the comment is literally true: someone in the '70s called, but did not leave a message. Instead, the caller is puzzled because answering machines and especially voicemail were rare or nonexistent in the 1970s, and his telephone has a rotary dial , rather than a touch tone , so he can't \"press\" 1.\nThe caller is wearing flared (\"bell bottom\") trousers, which are frequently associated with 1970s fashion. The caller is somehow using time travel to directly dial a number in the present.\nOriginally telephones had rotary dials instead of buttons, hence the origin of the terms \"dial tone\" and \"to dial a number\". Touch tone phones were introduced in the 1960s, but weren't standard in many places until the 1980s. Rotary dial telephones used pulse dialing to transmit numbers and push-button telephones use DTMF (although phones from the '80s and '90s could often use both). Modern voicemail systems regularly don't support pulse dialing, so even selecting \"1\" on the rotary dial would not choose \"1\" in the voicemail menu system.\nThe title text plays off the fact that the telephone had not yet been invented in the 17th century: in fact, all of the component technologies, including the materials used for the casing, were unknown at that point, and therefore the telephone is assumed to be supernatural in origin (\"demonic... \u017forcery\"). Randall uses the character \"\u017f\", the long s , which was used in written English to take the place of the modern lowercase \"s\" in the beginning and middle of words. It was phased out around the beginning of the 19th century.\nCueball: Nice jacket. Hey\u2013 Cueball: The seventies called. Out-of-panel: Oh? What'd they want?\n[Cueball looks at his smartphone, holding it in his hand.] Cueball: I don't know. They didn't leave a message. Out-of-panel: Weird.\n1974: [A person in bell bottoms, who has no jacket, looks at a rotary phone receiver.] Voicemail service: If you'd like to leave a message, press \"1\".\n"}
{"id":1073,"title":"Weekend","image_title":"Weekend","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1073","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/weekend.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1073:_Weekend","transcript":"[Cueball stands behind a lectern on a podium before a very large crowd.] Cueball: We all hate Mondays. We're all working for the weekend. Cueball: But our chains exist only in our minds.\n[Zoom in on Cueball from the lectern upwards, seen from an angle. He raises one hand in explanation. His text goes above the frame and is written in the top part of this panel which is frame-less.] Cueball: Calendars are just social consensus. Cueball: Nature doesn't know the day of the week.\n[Closer zoom on Cueball who looks straight out of the panel, the top of the lectern is just visible.] Cueball: My friends\u2014 Cueball: We can make today Saturday.\n[Extreme close-up, the lectern now below the panel, and negative colors with Cueball and the text in white on a black background.] Cueball: We can make it Saturday forever .\n","explanation":"This comic was posted right after the weekend , on a Monday, so it was on time to emphasize that we all hate Mondays .\nIn the first image, there is a reference to the Loverboy song \" Working for the Weekend \"; both the song and the panel refer to how most working and middle-class people are constantly focused on merely surviving until Saturday with enough energy to relax properly.\nCueball then goes on to state the fact that any calendar used is just a social consensus and since nature doesn't know the day of the week he simply suggest making this Monday into a Saturday. Actually, why not make all days into Saturday, to have eternal weekends?\nWhen you actually stop and think about the speech, the argument turns into utter nonsense. Simply renaming every day on the Gregorian Calendar to \"Saturday\" doesn't actually do anything, and \"the first Saturday of the week\" would carry the exact same stigma as \"Monday\". Furthermore, if Cueball is proposing to abolish the work week entirely, the economy would collapse within days. This fact may explain why the last panel is drawn in negative, with the background black. It gives a very ominous feeling to the last remark.\nNo confirmation has yet been found that any of these words are references to something from former US President James Garfield or to Garfield the cartoon cat who are the two speech writers mentioned in the title text. However, Garfield the cartoon cat has often bemoaned the existence of Monday (ironically, because he is a cat and not subject to the common human work schedule). And hence the title text suggest that this speech was written by Garfield the cat, and that this would be a better speech than any delivered by James Garfield.\n[Cueball stands behind a lectern on a podium before a very large crowd.] Cueball: We all hate Mondays. We're all working for the weekend. Cueball: But our chains exist only in our minds.\n[Zoom in on Cueball from the lectern upwards, seen from an angle. He raises one hand in explanation. His text goes above the frame and is written in the top part of this panel which is frame-less.] Cueball: Calendars are just social consensus. Cueball: Nature doesn't know the day of the week.\n[Closer zoom on Cueball who looks straight out of the panel, the top of the lectern is just visible.] Cueball: My friends\u2014 Cueball: We can make today Saturday.\n[Extreme close-up, the lectern now below the panel, and negative colors with Cueball and the text in white on a black background.] Cueball: We can make it Saturday forever .\n"}
{"id":1074,"title":"Moon Landing","image_title":"Moon Landing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1074","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/moon_landing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1074:_Moon_Landing","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a table with a laptop open. His hands are on the keys.] Cueball: Hah- Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a great reply to people who doubt astronauts went to the moon. Voice off-screen: Oh? Cueball: \"Atop 3,000 tons of rocket fuel, where else do you think they were headed?\"\n[The voice off screen turns out to be Megan. She is depicted, and now Cueball is off-screen.] Megan: Cute. But it overlooks an even simpler argument. Cueball: Which is?\n[Both Megan and Cueball are now visible. Cueball has turned his chair around to face her.] Megan: If NASA were willing to fake great accomplishments, they'd have a second one by now. Cueball: Ouch. Megan: ...Too mean? Cueball: That burn was so harsh I think you deorbited.\nAs of this comic, Tyson is the \"Frederick P. Rose Director\" (a special honorary title) of the Hayden Planetarium\n","explanation":"The comment to which Cueball is referring is a tweet by Neil deGrasse Tyson , an American astrophysicist and science communicator. He has appeared on many different shows, ranging from The Discovery Channel to The Big Bang Theory.\nThere are a number of conspiracy theories claiming that the moon landing was a hoax. Tyson offers a pretty compelling argument against them, but Megan presents an even more convincing refutation, snarkily implying that NASA really hasn't done anything spectacular since 1969.\nAnd Cueball responds with a pun on the word \"burn\". Burn can mean a particularly effective insult, or it can mean the consumption of fuel for propulsion. In this case, the \"burn\" was so effective it pushed the spaceship out of orbit (which usually takes a very large amount of burning, depending on the gravity of the planet or moon).\nIn the title text Randall mentions many successful NASA unmanned missions:\nThe final sentence of the title text notes that all manned missions since the Moon landings have taken place in low-earth orbit, which is barely far off of the Earth's surface. If the Earth were scaled to the size of a regulation basketball, approximately 24\u00a0cm (9\u00bc inches) in diameter, those manned missions would have all taken place within 1.25\u00a0cm (\u00bd inch) of the ball's surface. At this scale the Moon would be at a distance of 7.7\u00a0m (25.3\u00a0ft). Unmanned missions, such as those named above or the Voyager and Mariner probes of the 1960s and 1970s, have traveled much further.\nA basketball-sized Earth was the main focus of 1515: Basketball Earth .\n[Cueball is sitting at a table with a laptop open. His hands are on the keys.] Cueball: Hah- Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a great reply to people who doubt astronauts went to the moon. Voice off-screen: Oh? Cueball: \"Atop 3,000 tons of rocket fuel, where else do you think they were headed?\"\n[The voice off screen turns out to be Megan. She is depicted, and now Cueball is off-screen.] Megan: Cute. But it overlooks an even simpler argument. Cueball: Which is?\n[Both Megan and Cueball are now visible. Cueball has turned his chair around to face her.] Megan: If NASA were willing to fake great accomplishments, they'd have a second one by now. Cueball: Ouch. Megan: ...Too mean? Cueball: That burn was so harsh I think you deorbited.\nAs of this comic, Tyson is the \"Frederick P. Rose Director\" (a special honorary title) of the Hayden Planetarium\n"}
{"id":1075,"title":"Warning","image_title":"Warning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1075","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/warning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1075:_Warning","transcript":"[An American Diamond warning sign with the following message on it:] You're in a box on wheels hurtling along several times faster than evolution could possibly have prepared you to go Next 5 miles\n","explanation":"This parody of a road sign essentially reminds drivers of the reality of the situation they are now in and thereby implicitly refers to the dangers inherent to it. Because the ability to travel in a box on wheels at  high speeds was not selected for in the evolution of human, if anything happens to said box on wheels, such as crashing into a wall, the humans inside may be badly injured, if not killed. Had they evolved something like exoskeletons, for example, this may not have been the case. This reminder would presumably prompt drivers to drive more carefully or perhaps slow down.\nHumans did not evolve to have the ability to withstand such forces because their ancestors commonly never traveled any faster than about 20\u00a0km\/h (top human speed on foot), although some individuals may have moved faster than that by falling out of a tree or off a cliff. Fast vehicles, on the other hand, have only appeared in the last couple of hundred years, and it would take many more tens or hundreds of thousands of years before these new selection pressures made any noticeable difference to human physiology, if any.\nThe road sign is far too lengthy and philosophical to be used in practice but is conceivable as an advertisement for safe driving.\nThe phrase \"next 5 miles\" is common to road signs, particularly those on US highways in rural areas. This is to indicate that the conditions on the sign will continue for the next five miles along that road.\nThe title text refers to the fact that the sign doesn't really know how many more miles the driver may travel, and that it may be more than five. Since the average American drives over 13,000 miles per year , this is indeed very likely.\n[An American Diamond warning sign with the following message on it:] You're in a box on wheels hurtling along several times faster than evolution could possibly have prepared you to go Next 5 miles\n"}
{"id":1076,"title":"Groundhog Day","image_title":"Groundhog Day","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1076","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/groundhog_day.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1076:_Groundhog_Day","transcript":"Groundhog Day really didn't end that way. When Bill Murray finally slept with Rita, it didn't break the loop. [Phil Connors and Rita gettin' busy under the covers of his bed.] They just kept having sex, night after night, [Bed containing Phil and Rita repeats.] February 2nd after February 2nd... [Calendar page repeats.] ..forever But nothing is forever. Not even forever And the day after that sexual infinity [Calendar page shows Feb 3. ] was February 3rd. 264 days later (the length of a pregnancy) was October 23rd \u2014 [An enormous explosion in space.] Bishop Ussher's date for the birth of our world.\nThe comic mentions Bill Murray by his own name, and not by his character's ( Phil ), whereas Andie MacDowell is mentioned as Rita . This could be subconsciously done, since Murray is mostly remembered for his role in this film, although he has had many other successful ones. Alternatively, the other way round, Bill Murray is famous enough from his various other works to be recognized as an actor, while Andie MacDowell is less known to a broad audience.\n","explanation":"Groundhog Day is a philosophical comedy film from 1993. The main character Phil, portrayed by Bill Murray , finds himself in a time loop , which forces him to relive the same day (February 2) over and over again. This date is the titular Groundhog Day , which is celebrated in Punxsutawney , Pennsylvania, where the film is set. The folklore ritual consists in removing a groundhog from its burrow. If the sun is shining and the groundhog can see its own shadow, the winter is assumed to continue for six more weeks.\nDuring the course of the film, Phil makes more and more drastic attempts to end the time loop, but not even suicide can prevent his waking up every morning on February 2 with the clock radio on his nightstand invariably playing I Got You Babe by Sonny & Cher . Eventually, his character improves and he finds himself increasingly attached to his coworker Rita (portrayed by Andie MacDowell ). The pair gets closer, and, in the end, they sleep together. This breaks the time loop, and Murray's character can finally wake up on February 3. However, whether they had sex before this final scene is disputed, as Phil is still wearing the same clothes as the night before and, when Phil starts kissing her in the morning, Rita comments that he wasn\u2019t so affectionate the previous night. It is therefore left in doubt if they did anything more than literally sleep in the same bed. Randall was apparently not aware of this and apologized for it.\nThe comic assumes that the loop was indeed not broken, and that Phil and Rita simply had sex night after night for all eternity. It is then stated that not even forever is forever . This can be explained with the mathematical set theory developed by Georg Cantor . Cantor distinguished between transfinite numbers , which are larger than all finite numbers, yet not infinite , and the concept of Absolute Infinity , which he equaled with God . It was a common concern in Cantor's time to preserve the consistency between mathematics and Christian belief. Cantor's philosophical conception of infinity would allow the comic's scenario to eventually reach the transfinite date of February 3.\nThe last panel references the chronology of the history of the world of Archbishop James Ussher . Ussher deduced the age of the world from the timeline of the Old Testament and calculated the date of Creation to have been nightfall preceding 23 October, 4004 BC. The comic observes that October 23 is exactly 264 days after February 3, which corresponds to the average length of pregnancy. This calculation draws on Ussher's own methodology, which was basically to add the lifespans of the Old Testament genealogy. Although the universe is much older than 6000 years, chronologies like Ussher's can sometimes be found in the arguments of Young Earth Creationism . The comic might therefore be seen as a sideswipe to these theories by introducing Groundhog Day as a possible creation myth. The creation myths of many cultures claim that Earth was born by some sort primordial mother . Here, this role would be assumed by Rita.\nThe title text refers to the cosmic microwave background radiation , which is often called the lingering sound of the Big Bang and regarded as a strong proof for it. If the universe were indeed the offspring of the film's protagonists, we might hear the faint echo of Murray's radio clock lingering in the cosmic background.\nGroundhog Day really didn't end that way. When Bill Murray finally slept with Rita, it didn't break the loop. [Phil Connors and Rita gettin' busy under the covers of his bed.] They just kept having sex, night after night, [Bed containing Phil and Rita repeats.] February 2nd after February 2nd... [Calendar page repeats.] ..forever But nothing is forever. Not even forever And the day after that sexual infinity [Calendar page shows Feb 3. ] was February 3rd. 264 days later (the length of a pregnancy) was October 23rd \u2014 [An enormous explosion in space.] Bishop Ussher's date for the birth of our world.\nThe comic mentions Bill Murray by his own name, and not by his character's ( Phil ), whereas Andie MacDowell is mentioned as Rita . This could be subconsciously done, since Murray is mostly remembered for his role in this film, although he has had many other successful ones. Alternatively, the other way round, Bill Murray is famous enough from his various other works to be recognized as an actor, while Andie MacDowell is less known to a broad audience.\n"}
{"id":1077,"title":"Home Organization","image_title":"Home Organization","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1077","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/home_organization.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1077:_Home_Organization","transcript":"[One big plain room with a person sitting on the floor with a laptop on one side, a modem and wireless router on the other, and a big box full of the usual accoutrements of living in the middle, with \"MISC\" written on the side.]\nHome Organization Tip: Just Give Up.\n","explanation":"This comic is a take on the typical \"how to\" which details \"how to\" organize your home. In many cases, finding the best organization can be difficult and\/or can take a long time. To skip this problem, Cueball \"Just Gives Up\" and puts all his items and furniture into a box labeled  \"Misc\" for miscellaneous, with the exception of his laptop, cable modem and router.\nThe title text is a take on the popular website Lifehacker which includes all sorts of posts on how to \"hack\" your life and improve it. Life hacking appears to be a common theme in xkcd, such as in 2024: Light Hacks .\n[One big plain room with a person sitting on the floor with a laptop on one side, a modem and wireless router on the other, and a big box full of the usual accoutrements of living in the middle, with \"MISC\" written on the side.]\nHome Organization Tip: Just Give Up.\n"}
{"id":1078,"title":"Knights","image_title":"Knights","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1078","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/knights.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1078:_Knights","transcript":"[A chessboard, The black pawns have all gained longbows and have specifically taken down the white knights as they move forward, without any black pieces needing to move from their opening positions. Caption below the panel:] The Agincourt gambit.\nIn the title text, Nf3 was accidentally written as Ne3. At the beginning of a chess game, neither knight can move to e3. The proper move (and the move actually made, in the picture) is Nf3. This was later corrected.\n","explanation":"This comic is comparing the opening moves of the game of chess to the opening moves of the Battle of Agincourt , which was fought between the English and the French in the Hundred Years War . In the battle, just like in the comic, the English used their longbowmen effectively, neutralizing the French knights and infantry. The two pieces that are moved out of the white side of the board are both the pieces known as the Knights. White moves first in chess, and in the actual battle, the French knights on horseback attacked first; the English being the black pieces may also be a reference to Edward the Black Prince , who was a prominent figure in an earlier stage of the Hundred Years War. As you can see, all the pawns (foot soldiers) on the right side of the chess board have bows.\nThe title text uses algebraic chess notation . Nf3 means a knight has moved to square f3. Nc3 means a knight has moved to square c3. N means knight because the king piece has the K abbreviation covered. What comes after the typical chess move is what can only be read as a hail of arrows. 0-1 at the end means that \"Black Wins\". This implies that White resigned, as he is not in checkmate (for non-timed chess games, the only ways to win are by checkmating your opponent or by accepting their resignation).\nThe word \" gambit \" means \"an opening in chess, in which a minor piece or a pawn is sacrificed to gain an advantage\". The usual gambit of sacrificing a pawn is subverted to be a sacrifice of a high-value piece, as an analogy of what happened at Agincourt.\n[A chessboard, The black pawns have all gained longbows and have specifically taken down the white knights as they move forward, without any black pieces needing to move from their opening positions. Caption below the panel:] The Agincourt gambit.\nIn the title text, Nf3 was accidentally written as Ne3. At the beginning of a chess game, neither knight can move to e3. The proper move (and the move actually made, in the picture) is Nf3. This was later corrected.\n"}
{"id":1079,"title":"United Shapes","image_title":"United Shapes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1079","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/united_shapes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1079:_United_Shapes","transcript":"The United Shapes A map of things states are shaped like [Each state has some item wedged to stay inside its borders]\n","explanation":"In this comic, each state of the United States of America has been filled-in with an object of similar shape. Several years later Randall made a new map of the US mainland 1653: United States Map , where he shuffled the positions of the states but filled out the outline. Also in this map Michigan has been split into two separate parts. (Here it is the mitten and the eagle). This comic could also be a reference to Giuseppe Arcimboldo 's portraits, which were comprised of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, books, and fish.\nVery few, if any, of the shapes used are stereotypes of the state; they are merely objects that look like the state. Some of the objects are those which the states are widely known to resemble. For example, Michigan is represented by a mitten and an Eagle, and a pot with handle takes the place of Oklahoma (with the panhandle region of the state filled with a literal handle). Others, however, are more creative. Few would have likely pictured Texas as a dog or Alaska as a bear with a jet pack and laser gun. There are several incredibly simple objects filling some states. Kentucky is filled by a cloud, which conceivably could have been used for any state, and Wyoming, one of the nearly rectangular states, is simply an envelope. There are three pairs of states that are related. Georgia and Missouri each contain an image of the other, drawing attention to their similar shapes, North and South Dakota are the top and bottom halves of a guitar amplifier speaker cabinet , and Alabama and Mississippi are moai facing in opposite directions.\nColorado contains what looks like a Wikipedia article. A close-up of the fake article is provided. The following references are made in the Colorado article:\nNew Mexico according to official transcript is \"A liquid container labeled for something of unusual and silly danger\". The labeling is upside down and it refers to the nuclear testing facility White Sands Missile Range located in New Mexico for the nuclear bomb.  The joke is that it presents the white sand itself as extremely hazardous.  The phrase \"contains chemicals known only to the state of Nevada\" may be a reference to the nuclear weapons testing that occurred in Nevada (although in that case, it's not really the state of Nevada that knows those chemicals, but rather the Nevada Test Site , home of Area 51 et al .), and is also a reference to California's Proposition 65 warning label, \"WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.\"\nThis end up Property of White Sands Missile Range ??? [Followed by a NFPA 704 Diamond with all divisions at severe risk, and a radiation symbol in the special notice division] Contains White Sand FLAMMABLE Warning: This product contains chemicals known only to the state of Nevada. Contents under pressure from parents If swallowed, induce labor 56 fluid ounces and 14 other ounces\nThe title text makes fun of Florida which is sometimes called \"The penis of America\". Obviously, this penis is somewhat flaccid (not erect). The use of the word \"state\" is a pun, as it means some particular condition (flaccid state) as well as a political entity (The State of Florida).\nThe United Shapes A map of things states are shaped like [Each state has some item wedged to stay inside its borders]\n"}
{"id":1080,"title":"Visual Field","image_title":"Visual Field","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1080","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/visual_field.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1080:_Visual_Field","transcript":"Your Central Visual Field [This comic contains numerous visual elements arranged around a central point, and are intended to represent locations in a sphere with the eyeball as the center. Underlaid below all of the elements are concentric circles representing degrees from straight ahead, using the eyeball's point of view, denoting where these elements would appear in someone's field of vision given proper setup. For this description, elements will be described using this grid plus location in degrees within the specified circle, placing 0 degrees to the right and going counterclockwise, separated with the word \"mark\".] [At the top are the instructions to view this page] Look at the center with your eyes this far from the screen. [A rolled-up sheet of paper that equals about 55 total horizontal degrees in width in the measurement of the chart.] (You can roll up a sheet of paper and cut it - or zoom the page - so it matches this image) 17 mark 0: right eye blind spot. from 0 to 30 mark 15: [The same image, increasing in absolute size from a very tiny object in the center to one about 20x original size at 30 degrees.] Detail - We only see at high resolution over a small area in the center of our vision where retinal cells are densest (the fovea). If you stare at the center of this chart, your eyes are seeing all these panels at roughly the same level of detail. 9 mark 105: Moon. 7 mark 112: Supermoon. from 0 to 20 mark 170: [Sets 3 partially overlapping circles in multiple locations along this path. Each set has a primary color in each circle and additive colors in the overlap areas, with color saturation decreasing sharply as the sets leave the center.] Color Vision: We don't see much color outside the center of our vision - our brains keep track of what color things are and fill it in for us. 17 mark 180: Left Eye Blind Spot. (not pictured: T-Boz blind spot, Chilli blind spot) From 0 to infinity mark from 180 to 205: [A swath of blue, with heavier saturation up to 5 degrees from center to fading, but never gone out to the edges of the image.] From 0 to 7 from 205 to 235: [A swath of red, with full saturation in the center and fading out completely at 7 degrees from center.] From 0 to 7 from 235 to 270: [A swath of green, with full saturation in the center and fading out completely at 7 degrees from center.] Red and green-sensitive cones are mainly limited to the center of our vision. We have few blue-sensitive cone cells, but they're found out to the edge of our vision. 25 mark 205: [A small whisp of white in a swath of blue.] Blue-sky sprites: These tiny, darting spots, visible against smooth blue backgrounds, are white cells moving in the blood vessels over the retina 5 mark 195: [A long blob, slightly distorting the blue swath.] Floaters: Some types of floaters are caused by breakdown of your eyeball goop as you age, but this type is some other kind of debris near the retina. I don't know what. 10 mark 270: [An askew crosshair and circle, with faint blue and yellow wedges inside] Humans can see polarization - Stare at a white area on an LCD display while rotating it or your head fast (use straight ahead as the axis of rotation). Polarization direction is shown by a faint central yellow blue shape (Also visible in deep blue skies) from 0 to 30 mark 340: [The same image, increasing in absolute size from a very tiny object in the center to one about 20x original size at 30 degrees. The brightness of the image varies from black at 2 mark 340, to gray at 5 mark 340, to nearly white at 10 mark 340, to slightly grayer at 20 mark 340, to medium gray at 30 mark 340.] Night Vision: Cone cells (sharp, central color vision) don't work in low light, but rod cells (monochrome, low-res, non-central) do. This is why you can walk around in dim light, but not read. It's also why you can spot fainter stars by looking next to them.\n","explanation":"This comic shows a number of vision related facts, arranged in a way that they all fit inside your field of vision (the conic area in which you can see at any given time). You're supposed to look at the center of the image while standing about a foot away from the screen (although obviously you can't read the text on the image while staring at the center).\nFirstly, there's detail. The eye always sees objects closer to the center with more detail, which Randall illustrates with progressively smaller images, which are seen with the same level of detail (remember that you're supposed to be looking at the center of the image). This is because the retina is denser near the fovea , in the center.\nNext, there's the topic of night vision . The colour-seeing cone cells don't work so well in the dark, whereas the black-and-white-seeing rod cells do. The rod cells can see shapes well, whereas the cone cells see detail (such as change in colour), which Randall uses to explain why we can't read at night.\nPolarization direction can be visible when quickly changing your viewing angle. Polarization is essentially the vertical direction of waves. Light, being a wave, has a direction, and is thus polarized. Polarized lenses, for example, would have \"slits\" to allow only light that is polarized in a certain direction to come through (blocking the light in other directions). LCD screens operate on the principle of blocking and rotating polarized light.\nFloaters are deposits within the eye's vitreous humour . While normally transparent, they can occasionally cause refraction of light, making them visible, particularly on bright, blue surfaces. Randall points out that while some floaters are caused by breakdown over time, the others have a more mysterious origin.\nBlue sky sprites, properly known as the blue field entoptic phenomenon , are bright sprites seen over bright blue surfaces, particularly the sky. They are white blood cells moving in front of the retina .\nRandall also points out that colours are mostly seen near the center of our vision, with our brain keeping track of the colours of things near the outside of our visual field. The cones of blue, red and green in the third quadrant also show how red and green's sensitivity is mostly limited to the center of our vision, whereas we can see blue in a larger field of vision. Our ability to perceive saturation (the intensity of colours) is also stronger near the center of our vision.\nThe left and right blind spot are the locations of the optic disc , where there are no sensitive rod or cone cells, making a literal \"blind\" spot. The mention of the \"T-Boz blind spot\" and \"Chilli blind spot\" are a reference to the R&B band TLC , whose members go by the aliases \"Left eye\", \"T-Boz\", and \"Chilli\".\nAn image of the moon and a supermoon also appear in the image. A supermoon is when the moon is at its closest approach to Earth and coincides with a full moon or new moon , causing it to appear larger than normal. At the sizes Randall has drawn the two moons, the difference in size (approximately ten percent) is nigh-imperceptible to the naked eye; Randall seems to be making a comment about how supermoons aren't impressive to him. That he feels like this was already indicated in panel 25 of 1052: Every Major's Terrible and then later confirmed when he published 1394: Superm*n . Here is a list of all comics referring to the term.\nThe \"stopped clock illusion\" referenced by the image text is an example of chronostasis , which is an illusion where viewing movement after changing your vision is perceived as taking a longer period of time. So when we look at a clock (which we weren't previously looking at), our field of vision has rapidly changed. The second hand on the clock thus seems to take a longer period of time to move.\nYour Central Visual Field [This comic contains numerous visual elements arranged around a central point, and are intended to represent locations in a sphere with the eyeball as the center. Underlaid below all of the elements are concentric circles representing degrees from straight ahead, using the eyeball's point of view, denoting where these elements would appear in someone's field of vision given proper setup. For this description, elements will be described using this grid plus location in degrees within the specified circle, placing 0 degrees to the right and going counterclockwise, separated with the word \"mark\".] [At the top are the instructions to view this page] Look at the center with your eyes this far from the screen. [A rolled-up sheet of paper that equals about 55 total horizontal degrees in width in the measurement of the chart.] (You can roll up a sheet of paper and cut it - or zoom the page - so it matches this image) 17 mark 0: right eye blind spot. from 0 to 30 mark 15: [The same image, increasing in absolute size from a very tiny object in the center to one about 20x original size at 30 degrees.] Detail - We only see at high resolution over a small area in the center of our vision where retinal cells are densest (the fovea). If you stare at the center of this chart, your eyes are seeing all these panels at roughly the same level of detail. 9 mark 105: Moon. 7 mark 112: Supermoon. from 0 to 20 mark 170: [Sets 3 partially overlapping circles in multiple locations along this path. Each set has a primary color in each circle and additive colors in the overlap areas, with color saturation decreasing sharply as the sets leave the center.] Color Vision: We don't see much color outside the center of our vision - our brains keep track of what color things are and fill it in for us. 17 mark 180: Left Eye Blind Spot. (not pictured: T-Boz blind spot, Chilli blind spot) From 0 to infinity mark from 180 to 205: [A swath of blue, with heavier saturation up to 5 degrees from center to fading, but never gone out to the edges of the image.] From 0 to 7 from 205 to 235: [A swath of red, with full saturation in the center and fading out completely at 7 degrees from center.] From 0 to 7 from 235 to 270: [A swath of green, with full saturation in the center and fading out completely at 7 degrees from center.] Red and green-sensitive cones are mainly limited to the center of our vision. We have few blue-sensitive cone cells, but they're found out to the edge of our vision. 25 mark 205: [A small whisp of white in a swath of blue.] Blue-sky sprites: These tiny, darting spots, visible against smooth blue backgrounds, are white cells moving in the blood vessels over the retina 5 mark 195: [A long blob, slightly distorting the blue swath.] Floaters: Some types of floaters are caused by breakdown of your eyeball goop as you age, but this type is some other kind of debris near the retina. I don't know what. 10 mark 270: [An askew crosshair and circle, with faint blue and yellow wedges inside] Humans can see polarization - Stare at a white area on an LCD display while rotating it or your head fast (use straight ahead as the axis of rotation). Polarization direction is shown by a faint central yellow blue shape (Also visible in deep blue skies) from 0 to 30 mark 340: [The same image, increasing in absolute size from a very tiny object in the center to one about 20x original size at 30 degrees. The brightness of the image varies from black at 2 mark 340, to gray at 5 mark 340, to nearly white at 10 mark 340, to slightly grayer at 20 mark 340, to medium gray at 30 mark 340.] Night Vision: Cone cells (sharp, central color vision) don't work in low light, but rod cells (monochrome, low-res, non-central) do. This is why you can walk around in dim light, but not read. It's also why you can spot fainter stars by looking next to them.\n"}
{"id":1081,"title":"Argument Victory","image_title":"Argument Victory","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1081","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/argument_victory.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1081:_Argument_Victory","transcript":"[Cueball, looking right, is talking at his smartphone while holding it up in front of his head using both hands.] Cueball: I can't believe you're so wrong. I'm backed by Snopes, Wikipedia, and a half-dozen journals. You're citing .net pages with black backgrounds and like 20 fonts each.\n[A conspiracy theorist is sitting in front of this lap top at his desk looking left. He has his hair combed down. He is talking to Cueball via his laptop, probably Skyping.] Conspiracy theorist: It's sad how you buy into the official story so unquestioningly. Conspiracy theorist: Guess some people prefer to stay asleep.\n[Back to Cueball who has lowered his phone a bit. The reply from the conspiracy theorist is shown to come out of the phone with a jagged arrow and likewise speech bubble.] Cueball: Watch closely\u2014 I'm about to win this argument. Conspiracy theorist (reply from phone): How?\n[Cueball is sitting at the very top of a waterslide preparing to descend.] Cueball: By going down a waterslide .\n[A split panel, with a close-up of the conspiracy theorist above and below Cueball is sliding down the waterslide with both hands above his head, water splashing up behind him as he holds his smartphone above the water in one hand.] Conspiracy theorist: So? What does that prove? Cueball: Wheee..\n[Another split panel, this time a smaller part is used for the close-up of the conspiracy theorist above and below Cueball has more of this panels space for sliding down to the bottom of the waterslide with both hands above his head, water still splashing up behind him as he continues to keep his smartphone above the water in one hand.] Conspiracy theorist: You didn't win the argument! Cueball: ...eeee! Cueball: Sploosh!\n","explanation":"Cueball is arguing with a conspiracy theorist who believes in some conspiracy , who is sitting in front of his computer talking back. They are probably using Skype , FaceTime , or another video calling service, as Cueball later asks him to watch closely, holding his phone up to show the other guy what he is doing.\nCueball's opponent seems to ignore all reliable sources, like Snopes and Wikipedia on top of several journals , instead preferring sources that are seemingly not credible (but that do agree with him). These conspiracy \".net\" pages typically just have a black background and use several different sizes of fonts, the larger (and probably also in bright colors), the more convincing, seems to be the belief, and Cueball cannot take these kinds of sources seriously. \".net\" websites can be made by anyone and have little limitations. The maker of a \".net\" does not need to show sources of information or even their name. As such, \".net\" websites are notoriously unreliable and often have viruses or other malware. The Truth about Black Helicopters is a (satirical) example of one such website, supposedly explaining the truth behind government \"Black Helicopters\".\nThe conspiracy theorist insists that by trusting reliable sources, Cueball is simply buying into the cover-up, suggesting that all those journalists are somehow brainwashed. Cueball says he can win the argument, and will show him how, but then ceases to argue further in favor of going down a waterslide while holding up the phone to show the other guy how to have a good time. Since conspiracy theorists tend to be intransigent , Cueball sees himself as the victor after ceasing to argue with a guy who cannot be argued with, and instead decides to have some fun. This is made even more satisfying for Cueball by the fact that it makes his opponent angry. It's likely that this is also a reference to the \"Your Argument is Invalid\" meme.\nThe joke here is also in the title of the comic which is Argument Victory something that is very hard to achieve by on the web... Cueball won this victory not by arguing but by stopping this argument he was having with someone that could\/would not be argued with, such as going down a waterslide.\nThe title text points out that belief in a conspiracy presupposes that those with the power to carry out the conspiracy actually have a plan, a situation which might be found more \"comforting\" than the alternative that those in power are just muddling through with no plan at all. This concept is revisited in 1274: Open Letter .\n[Cueball, looking right, is talking at his smartphone while holding it up in front of his head using both hands.] Cueball: I can't believe you're so wrong. I'm backed by Snopes, Wikipedia, and a half-dozen journals. You're citing .net pages with black backgrounds and like 20 fonts each.\n[A conspiracy theorist is sitting in front of this lap top at his desk looking left. He has his hair combed down. He is talking to Cueball via his laptop, probably Skyping.] Conspiracy theorist: It's sad how you buy into the official story so unquestioningly. Conspiracy theorist: Guess some people prefer to stay asleep.\n[Back to Cueball who has lowered his phone a bit. The reply from the conspiracy theorist is shown to come out of the phone with a jagged arrow and likewise speech bubble.] Cueball: Watch closely\u2014 I'm about to win this argument. Conspiracy theorist (reply from phone): How?\n[Cueball is sitting at the very top of a waterslide preparing to descend.] Cueball: By going down a waterslide .\n[A split panel, with a close-up of the conspiracy theorist above and below Cueball is sliding down the waterslide with both hands above his head, water splashing up behind him as he holds his smartphone above the water in one hand.] Conspiracy theorist: So? What does that prove? Cueball: Wheee..\n[Another split panel, this time a smaller part is used for the close-up of the conspiracy theorist above and below Cueball has more of this panels space for sliding down to the bottom of the waterslide with both hands above his head, water still splashing up behind him as he continues to keep his smartphone above the water in one hand.] Conspiracy theorist: You didn't win the argument! Cueball: ...eeee! Cueball: Sploosh!\n"}
{"id":1082,"title":"Geology","image_title":"Geology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1082","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1082:_Geology","transcript":"[Two people are doing a geological survey.] Megan: Forget the bedding - we were wrong about the whole valley. Cueball: The spreading is recent.\nMegan: See the friction breccia? Cueball: Oh - flow cleavage! Cueball: Deeper in the rift. Megan: Deeper. [An idea pops into Megan's head.]\n[The same idea pops into Cueball's head.] Megan: This orogeny Cueball: is driven by a Megan: huge Cueball: thrust fault\n[They both drop to the ground in a fit of passion.] Geology: Surprisingly erotic.\n","explanation":"Here we have Cueball and Megan discussing geology and the words they use are ripe with puns and double entendres which also have sexual meanings. In the end, they just decide to get it on.\nSpecifically, the suggestive terms are \" bedding ,\" \" spreading ,\" \" friction ,\" \" cleavage ,\" \"deeper in the rift ,\" \" orogeny ,\" (perhaps a portmanteau of orgy and erogenous ), \"huge,\" and \" thrust .\"\nThe technical terms are:\nBedding The division of usually sedimentary rocks into distinct layers. Spreading A process in which two geological regions are moving apart, and potentially allowing for magma to rise between them. Spreading occurs in mid-ocean ridges and in rift valleys . Friction breccia Breccia is a rock made of broken fragments of other rocks. When these fragments can be formed from the rubbing between rocks in a fault, it is a friction breccia. Flow cleavage The crystals in a rock can be aligned by the plastic flow of a rock when it is hot. This causes the rock to split (cleave) along particular planes. Rift A result of spreading is that rocks break, forming vertical faults, and allowing regions to sink and form valleys. Orogeny The process of mountain forming, or a period in which mountains are formed. Thrust fault A sloping crack in the rocks at which one region of rocks is pushing another up.\nSo it seems that Megan tells Cueball to ignore the layers in the rock, as there is evidence that the valley they are in is a recent rift valley. It was formed in cracking following the lifting up of the surrounding rocks.\nThe title text is a wordplay, as it could sound like \"nice butt\". Gneiss is a type of rock made up of different bands, and a butte is an isolated hill with steep sides and a flat top, but smaller than a plateau . However, \"butte\" is not pronounced like \"butt\", but as \"beaut\".\n[Two people are doing a geological survey.] Megan: Forget the bedding - we were wrong about the whole valley. Cueball: The spreading is recent.\nMegan: See the friction breccia? Cueball: Oh - flow cleavage! Cueball: Deeper in the rift. Megan: Deeper. [An idea pops into Megan's head.]\n[The same idea pops into Cueball's head.] Megan: This orogeny Cueball: is driven by a Megan: huge Cueball: thrust fault\n[They both drop to the ground in a fit of passion.] Geology: Surprisingly erotic.\n"}
{"id":1083,"title":"Writing Styles","image_title":"Writing Styles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1083","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/writing_styles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1083:_Writing_Styles","transcript":"[This is a chart with the above two labeled columns. The rows will be represented below in the same format.] If you post: you sound like \"Ron Paul is the only candidate who offers us a real choice!\": A teenager \"its gettin l8 so ill b here 4 prob 2 more hrs tops\": A senator The internet has wound up in kind of a weird place.\nWhen this comic came out in 2012, the twitter limit was actually 140 characters. It has since doubled to 280, to allow longer messages, and due to the declining popularity of SMS.","explanation":"Sms-speak is a style of communication which involves substituting numbers for letters and shortening phrases to get a longer idea across in fewer characters at the cost of readability. The practice began first with text messages, also known as SMS , or Short Message Service, which limited messages to 160 characters. Twitter has adopted a 140 character limit since its inception, which allowed any given tweet to be received as an SMS message with enough room for the user's Twitter handle (15 characters max).\nRandall is poking fun at both the stereotypical Senator and at teenagers supporting Ron Paul.\nThe dig at the senator refers to poor use of sms-style abbreviations by older, less tech-savvy politicians who are hoping to appear more in tune with the modern world. Many politicians use sms-speak in cases when their message isn't in danger of the character limit, but where they are appealing to a younger demographic, thinking it makes them appear to be \"modern\" to their target audience. In reality, it may do the opposite, showing that they do not understand why sms-speak is used at all.\nConversely modern teenagers, often stereotyped as lacking proper writing skills due to character limits on services such as SMS and twitter, instead here produce coherent sentences expressing a political view (this is later discussed in 1414: Writing Skills ). There is a subtle dig that being drawn to Ron Paul is a stereotypical political position for a teenager, as Paul is ideologically libertarian, and the implication is that libertarianism is a position held while younger and politically or economically naive. Randall has also poked fun at libertarianism on several other occasions, such as 610: Sheeple , 1026: Compare and Contrast , 1049: Bookshelf and 1277: Ayn Random . The teenager's tweet is almost identical to the stereotypical Paul-ite comment made fun of in the title text to 1026 : \"Only Ron Paul offers a TRUE alternative!\"\nA few years ago, the sentence attributed to the teenager is the sort of thing that would stereotypically be assigned to a senator, while the sentence attributed to the senator would be stereotypically assigned to a teenager - however, now the situation has changed and so Randall comments that the internet has ended up in \"kind of a weird place\".\nThe title text discusses an idea that Randall approves of, originally suggested by a user on bash.org called h00k, where a twitter bot be created to message politicians when they use sms-speak unnecessarily. This would presumably embarrass said politicians, which might in turn lead to a decrease in their use of sms-speak. Randall evidently considers this a good thing, suggesting he finds the unnecessary use of sms-speak annoying.\n[This is a chart with the above two labeled columns. The rows will be represented below in the same format.] If you post: you sound like \"Ron Paul is the only candidate who offers us a real choice!\": A teenager \"its gettin l8 so ill b here 4 prob 2 more hrs tops\": A senator The internet has wound up in kind of a weird place.\nWhen this comic came out in 2012, the twitter limit was actually 140 characters. It has since doubled to 280, to allow longer messages, and due to the declining popularity of SMS."}
{"id":1084,"title":"Server Problem","image_title":"Server Problem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1084","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/server_problem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1084:_Server_Problem","transcript":"[Cueball at his computer calls out for Megan who comes walking in to the frame.] Cueball: I, um, messed up my server again. Megan: I'll take a look. You have the weirdest tech problems.\n[Zoom in on only Megan who uses the root prompt on the computer.] ~# ls\n[Megan stands next to the computer, Cueball sits behind her on his chair. The computer returns the following:] \/usr\/share\/Adobe\/doc\/example\/android_vm\/root\/sbin\/ls.jar: Error: Device is not responding.\n[Megan turns towards Cueball who lifts his hands with palm up.] Megan: What did you do!? Cueball: Maybe the device is busy. Should I try it later? Megan: You should shut down this system and wait for the Singularity.\n","explanation":"Cueball has messed up his Linux server , apparently not for the first time . Megan offers to take a look at the PC, and she casually types in \"ls\" \u2014 a very basic command that lists the files in the current directory. The computer returns a bizarre error message \u2014 it trips over one of the simplest commands, indicating that Cueball's system is messed up. Really messed up.\nThe \/usr\/share path should indicate \"architecture-independent shared data\". Adobe is the software company that produces Acrobat and Photoshop. Android VM would be a virtual machine for Android. The .jar extension suggests a Java-language program. None of Adobe software, Android, or Java are needed to run \"ls\". All of the above have nothing to do with each other, with the exception that Android applications (but not core command line utilities, like ls) are written in Java. Also, basic system executables like \"ls\" would never be placed within \/usr\/share or within some \"example\" or \"doc\" directory. On Linux, executables don't have filename extensions like \".exe\" or \".jar\". Core executables such as \"ls\" are often shipped with the operating system as binaries, so the presence of \"ls.jar\" suggests Cueball was attempting to unorthodoxly replace the existing executable with his own Java implementation. Additionally, it would require the folder to be within $PATH . In other words, the error message implies that the server is in a very bad state.\nIn the last frame Megan is bewildered by this result and asks \"what did you do?\" . Cueball suggest a course of action which mimics a common error message: \"______ is busy, please try again later.\" Obviously he has seen this type of message frequently enough to try it as a general cure in all similar cases (even scarier, there is a good possibility that his tech issues are so bizarre that it often works for him).\nMegan then tells Cueball to \"shut down the system and wait for the singularity ,\" referring to a hypothetical future event when superintelligence can be artificially created. Since future superintelligent humans\/computers transcend our comprehension, we can't predict or even understand what will happen after the singularity. One interpretation is that Megan is telling Cueball that his system is such a mess that it will take a post-singularity superintelligence to fix it (or run it in its current state, as only an intelligence beyond present comprehension would be capable of doing). It also indicates that either 1782: Team Chat or 1668: Singularity could be the sequel to this comic.\nThe title text is yet another protip from Randall . Ray Kurzweil is an author and futurist who has talked and written much about a technological singularity . Presumably, mangling the jargon (by confusing the concept of the \"singularity\" with the science fiction term \" cyberspace \") is something Kurzweil (as an expert) would find annoying. Also, as Randall later pointed out in 1573: Cyberintelligence , the word has not really been used for a decade...\n[Cueball at his computer calls out for Megan who comes walking in to the frame.] Cueball: I, um, messed up my server again. Megan: I'll take a look. You have the weirdest tech problems.\n[Zoom in on only Megan who uses the root prompt on the computer.] ~# ls\n[Megan stands next to the computer, Cueball sits behind her on his chair. The computer returns the following:] \/usr\/share\/Adobe\/doc\/example\/android_vm\/root\/sbin\/ls.jar: Error: Device is not responding.\n[Megan turns towards Cueball who lifts his hands with palm up.] Megan: What did you do!? Cueball: Maybe the device is busy. Should I try it later? Megan: You should shut down this system and wait for the Singularity.\n"}
{"id":1085,"title":"ContextBot","image_title":"ContextBot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1085","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/contextbot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1085:_ContextBot","transcript":"[A social network feed with four status updates from four different people with profile picture. Each status has an arrow going down and right to a reply underneath them, all from the same account, which is called ContextBot. It also has a profile picture with three people standing behind a see-through material with a hole in it. The person on the left is not behind the part with hole and is thus completely greyed out. The other two only have their legs covered, the rest is thus not greyed out because it is behind the hole. The left is a Cueball, the middle may have glasses, and the right has hair. Below them is a black band in which the name ContextBot is written in white.] Close-up face with hair and glasses: The things I put up with... ContextBot: (His building's WiFi doesn't reach the bathroom.) Cueball and Megan holding each other: You'd think by now I'd have learned never to trust anyone. ContextBot: (She downloaded a torrent that turned out to be an encrypted .rar and a link to a survey.) Blondie: I officially give up. ContextBot: (She hit alt-tab to hide Minecraft at work and accidentally dropped a stack of diamond into lava.) Hairy: Sighhhh ContextBot: (He thought these grapes were seedless.)\n[Caption below the panel] Everyone stopped complaining about Google's data-gathering when they launched ContextBot, a system which replies to vague, enigmatic social network posts with context from the poster's life.\n","explanation":"This comic is a commentary on the practice of \"vaguebooking\" or \"vaguetweeting\" , which is posting a short message of sadness or frustration without context. This is frustrating and emotionally trying to readers because it implies something serious has happened that requires friends to provide emotional support, but may also be something trivial, and with no context it is impossible to determine whether one should worry or not.\nGoogle has been criticized more than a few times for keeping rather extensive data records on its users, who by this point constitute most of the internet, enough to cause serious damage if Google wasn't historically altruistic (as altruistic as a for-profit company can be). In the comic, ContextBot is a fictitious Google invention which puts context for these statuses, presumably based on all that personal data which Google has collected:\nAs noted by the subtitle, ContextBot is considered a great good by everyone who was sick of vaguebooking. This also redeems Google's practice of all those data records in the public's eye.\nIn the ContextBot's avatar image, three people can be seen together hanging out. But the image is about to be cropped, leaving out the third person and therefore giving the impression that the two people in the cropped image are there without that person. This demonstrates how context is important to understanding a situation.\nThe title text refers to the cryptic ways in which someone with sensitive information must communicate. While most vaguebooking\/vaguetweeting is about things of little importance, the title text implies that the things not mentioned impact national\/global security. This implies that many tweets may actually be related to high-clearance military and or national security information, but must be vague in order to keep it secret, and if you take that as the context, then the internet suddenly becomes much more exciting.\n[A social network feed with four status updates from four different people with profile picture. Each status has an arrow going down and right to a reply underneath them, all from the same account, which is called ContextBot. It also has a profile picture with three people standing behind a see-through material with a hole in it. The person on the left is not behind the part with hole and is thus completely greyed out. The other two only have their legs covered, the rest is thus not greyed out because it is behind the hole. The left is a Cueball, the middle may have glasses, and the right has hair. Below them is a black band in which the name ContextBot is written in white.] Close-up face with hair and glasses: The things I put up with... ContextBot: (His building's WiFi doesn't reach the bathroom.) Cueball and Megan holding each other: You'd think by now I'd have learned never to trust anyone. ContextBot: (She downloaded a torrent that turned out to be an encrypted .rar and a link to a survey.) Blondie: I officially give up. ContextBot: (She hit alt-tab to hide Minecraft at work and accidentally dropped a stack of diamond into lava.) Hairy: Sighhhh ContextBot: (He thought these grapes were seedless.)\n[Caption below the panel] Everyone stopped complaining about Google's data-gathering when they launched ContextBot, a system which replies to vague, enigmatic social network posts with context from the poster's life.\n"}
{"id":1086,"title":"Eyelash Wish Log","image_title":"Eyelash Wish Log","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1086","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eyelash_wish_log.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1086:_Eyelash_Wish_Log","transcript":"Eyelash Wish Log Wish bureau ID#: 21118378 Date range: Jan-Apr 2012\n[a picture of Black Hat is above text saying Wisher]\nDate Wish Jan 09 That wishing on eyelashes worked Jan 12 A pony Jan 15 Unlimited wishes Jan 19 Revocation of rules prohibiting unlimited wishes Jan 20 A finite but arbitrarily large number of wishes Jan 28 The power to dictate the rules governing wishes Feb 05 Unlimited eyelashes Feb 06 That wish-granting entities be required to interpret wishes in accordance with the intent of the wisher Feb 08 That wish-granting entities be incapable of impatience Feb 12 Unlimited breadsticks Feb 12 Veto power over others' wishes Feb 19 Veto power over others' wishes and all congressional legislation Feb 23 The power to override any veto Feb 27 The power to see where any shortened URL goes without clicking Feb 29 The power to control the direction news anchors are looking while they talk Mar 07 The power to introduce arbitrary error into Nate Silver's predictions Mar 15 A house of stairs Mar 23 A universe which is a replica of this one sans rules against meta-wishes Mar 29 Free transportation to and from that universe Apr 02 A clear explanation of how wish rules are structured and enforced Apr 07 The power to banish people into the TV show they're talking about Apr 08 Zero wishes Apr 15 Veto power over clocks Apr 22 A Pok\u00e9ball that works on strangers' pets\n","explanation":"This comic is based on a common superstition that when someone's eyelash falls out, that person can make a wish on it. This comic appears to be a page from the fictitious Wish Bureau in charge of granting said wishes. And of course the wisher is Black Hat and he has quite a few wishes, most of them based on the previous wish. A common trope in fiction is that wishing for more wishes is prohibited and for many of his wishes Black Hat attempts to circumvent that.\nJanuary 9 That wishing on eyelashes worked This wish is pointless. If wishing on eyelashes worked, then this would do absolutely nothing (because it already works) and if it didn't then nothing would happen because wishing on eyelashes wouldn't work.\nJanuary 12 A pony This wish functions as a test to see whether or not previous wish worked. It can be assumed that it did, as Black Hat then continued to make additional wishes. Wishing for a pony is a stereotypical wish made by very young girls; since Black Hat is an adult man (with a very dark sense of humor), the contrast is humorous.\nJanuary 15 Unlimited wishes This appears to have failed, due to the traditional ban on wishing for additional wishes in conventional folklore.\nJanuary 19 Revocation of rules prohibiting unlimited wishes An attempt to circumvent the ban in the previous wish by wishing the ban away.\nJanuary 20 A finite but arbitrarily large number of wishes Another attempt to circumvent the ban on unlimited wishes by asking for a number of wishes that is limited, but as large as he likes (and there are some very large finite numbers out there, such as Graham's number ).\nJanuary 28 The power to dictate the rules governing wishes Yet another attempt to circumvent the ban on unlimited wishes.\nFebruary 5 Unlimited eyelashes This wish likely caused Black Hat to grow unlimited eyelashes, which could be quite inconvenient and painful. And, yes, one more attempt to circumvent the ban on unlimited wishes.\nFebruary 6 That wish-granting entities be required to interpret wishes in accordance with the intent of the wisher This wish is likely a response to the previous day's misguided wish. It's actually quite a common problem that people making wishes leave them open for misinterpretation.\nFebruary 8 That wish-granting entities be incapable of impatience An attempt to prevent whatever being is powerful enough to grant wishes from becoming angry with Black Hat while he gives very specific instructions so wish-granting entities cannot misinterpret what he said. (It would appear that the previous wish failed.)\nFebruary 12 #1 Unlimited breadsticks The first wish of this day seems to be a reference to the unlimited breadsticks offered at Olive Garden .\nFebruary 12 #2 Veto power over others' wishes A power that could be interesting to have. It also very much fits with Black Hat's character.\nFebruary 19 Veto power over others' wishes and all congressional legislation An improvement of the previous wish. This would be very interesting to have indeed, especially if you are Black Hat, because you could veto any federal law, a power normally entrusted only to the President of the United States .\nFebruary 23 The power to override any veto This wish would allow Black Hat to override vetoes which in addition to the previous wish would effectively make him control the US legislature and, to some extent, also all other governing bodies. (Notably the UN , where the veto powers wielded by the five permanent members of the Security Council cannot be overridden and can have large impacts on global politics.) Note that it will not allow him to turn laws off (veto them) and on again (override the veto) at any moment, as once a bill becomes law it cannot be vetoed. Without the ability to propose legislation, Black Hat's powers are still limited. The wish may also refer back to the February 19 wish: by granting himself veto power over wishes, Black Hat just made vetoes more powerful than wishes; now he is trying to control other people's vetoes as well, lest they one-up him.\nFebruary 27 The power to see where any shortened URL goes without clicking This wish relates to a common practice especially in tweets or other short length media where full-length meaningful web addresses such as www.somewhere.com\/articles\/specificdate\/title-of-the-page.html would not be feasible. So a more compressed but nonsensical string of seemingly random characters is used which links to a link of the full text address. This creates some problems for people who are security or privacy conscious and prefer to be informed beforehand where they will be traveling on the Internet. The use of shortened URLs is also central to many types of trolls or practical jokes (see bit.ly\/IqT6zt for an example), by directing someone to a different location than the link would initially suggest. Thus Black Hat might be wishing to be able to tell where the links go for the purpose of avoiding this sort of trolling.\nFebruary 29 The power to control the direction news anchors are looking while they talk This wish likely appeals to Black Hat's mischievous side, allowing him to cause news anchors to look at the wrong camera during live broadcast. Repeatedly switching to the incorrect camera would cause havoc in the studio. Additionally, Black Hat may also attempt to get a news anchor fired by having them stare where they should not such as a female anchor's breasts.\nMarch 7 The power to introduce arbitrary error into Nate Silver's predictions A reference to Nate Silver , who is a former writer for Baseball Prospectus working on predicting baseball players' stats and now writes for Five Thirty Eight in which he predicts the outcome of elections based on polling data. Influencing Nate Silver's predictions would allow Black Hat to indirectly influence the result of elections, by adjusting the Overton window of which candidates and policies are considered to have \"broad public support\" or \"electability\" or the like. This would tighten the Black Hat's control of the US even more.\nMarch 15 A house of stairs This wish refers to the lithograph House of Stairs by M. C. Escher , or perhaps another of his lithographs, Relativity .\nMarch 23 A universe which is a replica of this one sans rules against meta-wishes Another attempt to circumvent the rules against wishing for more wishes by creating a parallel universe without such rules.\nMarch 29 Free transportation to and from that universe While the previous wish may have worked, Black Hat notes a problem with it: he is still in our universe with no way to get to his new one.\nApril 2 A clear explanation of how wish rules are structured and enforced It appears that one or both of the previous two wishes failed, so Black Hat tries to discover exactly what is offending the Bureau. Having clear rules and how they work helps anyone finding loopholes in them.\nApril 7 The power to banish people into the TV show they are talking about Black hat is obviously fed up of hearing people talking about certain TV shows, and would like to be able to banish them into the show, thus prevent him having to listen to those people. Depending on the show in question, it could be quite horrifying for the person getting banished.\nApril 8 Zero wishes An attempt to hack the wish-granting system by using a quite common vulnerability in input validation: an unexpected value. There may be multiple vectors this can work: in many computer systems, 0 is reserved for unlimited or undefined in Assembly languages, do-while loops are more efficient than while loops, but famously do not check their condition on the first iteration. This means that 0 is effectively 256 for 8 bit counters, 65536 for 16 bits, etc. If the wish granter wrote the wish laws in assembly and used this optimization, initializing the wish count to zero would give him a large number of wishes dependent on the size of the counter. the number may be used as a divisor in some equation and this will make the system divide by zero and probably crash there also may be an assertion like \" number of wishes granted == 1 \" which would fail, again crashing the system similarly, if viewed as a computer system, it is possible that the wish decrement (subtracting 1 from the number of remaining wishes) is performed after the wish is granted, thus resulting in either \u22121 wishes (another common placeholder for unlimited numbers), or an integer overflow if the wish counter is stored as an unsigned integer; the overflow can result in an exception, otherwise \u22121 becomes represented as one less than the size of the integer \u2013 basically, an extremely large number. However it seems the eyelash wish-granting system does proper input validation on zero because it did not crash or grant unlimited wishes This wish may also be a reversal of the January 9 wish. Black Hat is attempting to win his game by introducing a logical contradiction : if he gets \"zero wishes\", this is one wish granted; however, if it is not granted, then, de facto, he will have been granted zero wishes. This is a common technique used in logical proofs to show that an earlier assumption does not hold (in this case, the possibility of eyelash wishing to work).\nApril 15 Veto power over clocks Midnight, April 15 is the deadline for filing income tax returns in the United States. It may also be that Black Hat, now in control of all human legislation, is attempting to extend this to further control also rules of nature \u2013 in this case: time. The strange wording is likely to be due to Black Hat having consulted with the wish-hacking manual he acquired April 2.\nApril 22 A Pok\u00e9ball that works on strangers' pets A reference to the Pok\u00e9mon series of video games. A Pok\u00e9ball can be thrown at a Pok\u00e9mon (or in this case, a pet that the Pok\u00e9ball thrower finds either annoying or cute) to capture it and achieve ownership of it. Unless cheats are used (and in Pok\u00e9mon Colosseum , in which a criminal organisation uses illegally modified pokeballs), Pok\u00e9balls cannot be used on Pok\u00e9mon owned by other people in the Pok\u00e9mon games . Many players wish to obtain the often high-level Pok\u00e9mon of NPCs, and Black Hat may also be interested in pranking other players by stealing their powerful Pok\u00e9mon. This was later revealed to be one of Randall's wishes in the title text of 1705: Pok\u00e9mon Go .\nThe title text, a wish to have control over coefficients of friction during sporting events, is yet another mischievous wish. The coefficients of friction, though usually not noticed as they are unchanging, are all-important when performing physical activities \u2014 imagine trying to play hockey on a field of sandpaper or sprinting over a sheet of ice. In addition to the difficulty going where you want or getting any balls that might be in play where you want them to go in a changing friction environment, angular momentum would also be very difficult to control.\nNote that when Black Hat makes meta-wishes no follow-up wishes are logged. Since the meta-wishes failed, no valid eyelash wish condition existed and the illegal test wishes were not logged in the eyelash wish log.\nEyelash Wish Log Wish bureau ID#: 21118378 Date range: Jan-Apr 2012\n[a picture of Black Hat is above text saying Wisher]\nDate Wish Jan 09 That wishing on eyelashes worked Jan 12 A pony Jan 15 Unlimited wishes Jan 19 Revocation of rules prohibiting unlimited wishes Jan 20 A finite but arbitrarily large number of wishes Jan 28 The power to dictate the rules governing wishes Feb 05 Unlimited eyelashes Feb 06 That wish-granting entities be required to interpret wishes in accordance with the intent of the wisher Feb 08 That wish-granting entities be incapable of impatience Feb 12 Unlimited breadsticks Feb 12 Veto power over others' wishes Feb 19 Veto power over others' wishes and all congressional legislation Feb 23 The power to override any veto Feb 27 The power to see where any shortened URL goes without clicking Feb 29 The power to control the direction news anchors are looking while they talk Mar 07 The power to introduce arbitrary error into Nate Silver's predictions Mar 15 A house of stairs Mar 23 A universe which is a replica of this one sans rules against meta-wishes Mar 29 Free transportation to and from that universe Apr 02 A clear explanation of how wish rules are structured and enforced Apr 07 The power to banish people into the TV show they're talking about Apr 08 Zero wishes Apr 15 Veto power over clocks Apr 22 A Pok\u00e9ball that works on strangers' pets\n"}
{"id":1087,"title":"Cirith Ungol","image_title":"Cirith Ungol","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1087","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cirith_ungol.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1087:_Cirith_Ungol","transcript":"[A character in a long flowing robe holds up the Phial of Galadriel in one hand; the One Ring is dangling from a necklace in the other. The scene is a cave, profuse with spiderwebs, bones hanging in some of them. On one of the webs are words, presumably written by the spider.]\nSOME PIG\n","explanation":"This comic is a mash-up between the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the novel Charlotte's Web .\nThe title Cirith Ungol is a reference to Lord of the Rings where Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee were led to Cirith Ungol by Gollum and to the lair of the ancient spider Shelob .\nAnd therefore in this comic, Frodo (by himself, recognizable because he is holding the Phial of Galadriel and the One Ring ) is being led into the lair of the spider, Charlotte. We can tell by the \"Some Pig\" writing in the spider web on the lower right hand corner which is a direct reference to the story of Charlotte's Web , in which a spider named Charlotte writes the very same text in her web.\nThe title text refers to syntactic ambiguity which is a property of sentences which may be reasonably interpreted in more than one way, or reasonably interpreted to mean more than one thing. This allows us to derive two different meanings from the same sentence.\nThe second part of the title text is a quote from Wikipedia, which Randall enjoys for its  syntactic ambiguity, as it can be logically interpreted in either of the following ways:\n[A character in a long flowing robe holds up the Phial of Galadriel in one hand; the One Ring is dangling from a necklace in the other. The scene is a cave, profuse with spiderwebs, bones hanging in some of them. On one of the webs are words, presumably written by the spider.]\nSOME PIG\n"}
{"id":1088,"title":"Five Years","image_title":"Five Years","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1088","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/five_years.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1088:_Five_Years","transcript":"[Hairbun and Beret Guy sit across from each other at a desk.] Hairbun\u00a0: Where do you see yourself in five years? Beret Guy: Oh man, I don't know! Let's find out! [The characters stare at one another.] [Cobwebs and hair grow; the desk and chairs fall into disrepair.] [Five years pass.] Beret Guy: Hah\u2014 Beret Guy: I thought so!\n","explanation":"This comic is a take on the common and cliched job interview question here asked by Hairbun : Where do you see yourself in 5 years. The interviewer is attempting to see where the job seeker would like to take their career and also what their hopes and dreams are etc.\nIn the comic, instead of explaining where he would like to be in 5 years, Beret Guy and the interviewer wait around for 5 years without moving to find out. And as Beret Guy expected they stayed exactly where they were. (This could be suggesting that most people do not change much over five years.)\nThe title text is a continuation of their conversation in which Beret Guy turns down the job because he wants to find out what happened in the last 5 years while they were both sitting in that room.\nGiven Beret Guy's ability to manipulate reality ( 1099: Tuesdays ), it's possible he froze himself and the interviewer for 5 years or sped up time to ensure that 5 years would pass quickly enough that the interviewer could not react and affect the experiment.\nOther job interviews were portrayed in 125: Marketing Interview , 1094: Interview , 1293: Job Interview and 1545: Strengths and Weaknesses .\n[Hairbun and Beret Guy sit across from each other at a desk.] Hairbun\u00a0: Where do you see yourself in five years? Beret Guy: Oh man, I don't know! Let's find out! [The characters stare at one another.] [Cobwebs and hair grow; the desk and chairs fall into disrepair.] [Five years pass.] Beret Guy: Hah\u2014 Beret Guy: I thought so!\n"}
{"id":1089,"title":"Internal Monologue","image_title":"Internal Monologue","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1089","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/internal_monologue.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1089:_Internal_Monologue","transcript":"[The scene is a party. Two characters are talking - the entirety of the text is a thought bubble of one of the two.] Cueball: Am I smiling enough? Should I be leaning on something? Where should my hands go? I hope he doesn't ask me what his name is. I've said \"yeah\" too much; what are some other agreeing words? Oh crap, his story just got sad stop smiling stop smiling\n","explanation":"Cueball attempts social interaction at what looks like a party owing to the fact that several people have drinks in their hands.  His internal monologue is just Cueball trying to make sure he is doing the right things in the conversation, reacting appropriately, and not saying \"yeah\" too much.\nThe title text is a continuation of the internal monologue.\nThis is common case of anxiety for people who are usually not very skilled in navigating social situations like parties. It can become a vicious cycle in which the fear of handling the encounter badly makes one even more uncomfortable, which in turn results in behaviour as awkward as first feared. Also, for some people it's common to want to map out a pre-planned course of action that should produce desired results, a strategy that is usually doomed to failure when dealing with sufficiently complex and unpredictable scenarios like conversations with other people. This painful, and all too common, situation has been mined for comedic effect since the beginning of human civilization [ citation needed ] .\n[The scene is a party. Two characters are talking - the entirety of the text is a thought bubble of one of the two.] Cueball: Am I smiling enough? Should I be leaning on something? Where should my hands go? I hope he doesn't ask me what his name is. I've said \"yeah\" too much; what are some other agreeing words? Oh crap, his story just got sad stop smiling stop smiling\n"}
{"id":1090,"title":"Formal Languages","image_title":"Formal Languages","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1090","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/formal_languages.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1090:_Formal_Languages","transcript":"[A large banner is hanging over a podium, where a speaker (Megan) is standing behind a lectern. Cueball crashes through the left side of the panel, scattering glass.] Banner. 10th Annual Symposium on Formal Languages Crash\n[Cueball stops in front of Megan spreads out his hands and shouts:] Cueball: Grammar!\n[Cueball then runs off the right side of the panel, so swiftly he leaves a cloud of dust in his wake. Megan at the podium just looks after him silently.]\n","explanation":"This joke is a play on the phrase context-free grammar , which is a technical term used in formal language theory.\nCueball crashes Megan's speech on formal language theory, nonsensically shouts \"Grammar!\" without any context, and runs off. Because the gag is delivered in a particularly obtuse manner, the title text clears things up by having the confused audience mention \"missing context\", thus having them unwittingly explain the joke.\nThe concept of context-free grammar is incredibly nuanced and nigh impossible to rephrase in layman's terms. Luckily, the joke only interprets the phrase \"context-free grammar\" literally, so no understanding of the actual subject is required.\nA context-free grammar can be described as a dictionary, translating single symbols to one or multiple symbols, who then are replaced again, until no further replacements are possible. If a string of symbols adheres to this grammar, it can be reconstructed solely by following these kind of orders.\n[A large banner is hanging over a podium, where a speaker (Megan) is standing behind a lectern. Cueball crashes through the left side of the panel, scattering glass.] Banner. 10th Annual Symposium on Formal Languages Crash\n[Cueball stops in front of Megan spreads out his hands and shouts:] Cueball: Grammar!\n[Cueball then runs off the right side of the panel, so swiftly he leaves a cloud of dust in his wake. Megan at the podium just looks after him silently.]\n"}
{"id":1091,"title":"Curiosity","image_title":"Curiosity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1091","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/curiosity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1091:_Curiosity","transcript":"[The Curiosity rover is lowered onto the Mars surface by a Sky Crane.] Your excuse for anything today: \"Sorry- I was up all night trying to download photos taken by a robot lowered onto Mars by a Skycrane.\"\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the NASA Mars Rover \"Curiosity\" landing on Mars on August 5, 2012 at 10:31pm PDT (August 6, 2012 at 5:31am GMT). NASA live-streamed the landing, but demand for the feed caused server issues. Thus, the time spent trying to download the landing images could be used as an excuse for things such as being late for work, falling asleep during the day, or just about anything demanding one's attention.\nThe title text is a reference to torrents , which are a more resilient peer-to-peer file-sharing method, due to the decentralized BitTorrent protocol, where the more people there are downloading a file, the more available it is. The name is a play on the file naming convention of release groups who name their files (typically for films or television shows) containing data on the file; source (CAM = Camera capture), language (SwEsUb = Swedish subtitles), source (DVDRip = Ripped from DVD), encoding (XviD = XviD codec) and group name ( aXXo = aXXo, a well known DVD movie release group). Given that the filename is loaded with keywords that are irrelevant for a still image file, it is unlikely that this torrent will contain the expected pictures.\nThe first images received from Curiosity via the Odyssey orbiter were low-resolution thumbnails taken from the rover's rear-facing camera, thus the file name CURIOSITY-REAR-CAM_[256px_x_256px].\n[The Curiosity rover is lowered onto the Mars surface by a Sky Crane.] Your excuse for anything today: \"Sorry- I was up all night trying to download photos taken by a robot lowered onto Mars by a Skycrane.\"\n"}
{"id":1092,"title":"Michael Phelps","image_title":"Michael Phelps","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1092","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/michael_phelps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1092:_Michael_Phelps","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball standing outside their en-Phelps-ified swimming pool.] Cueball: Why is Michael Phelps in your backyard pool? Megan: I don't know. He's been there all day. Go home, Michael! Michael Phelps: Woo! 18 gold medals!\n[Megan and Cueball break out a pair of pool nets and unsuccessfully try to snag Phelps.] Cueball: Can you get him? Megan: He's so fast ! Phelps: Ha hah! Can't catch me! Splash splash\n[Cueball heads off to fetch something.]\n[Cueball returns with a hand truck full of Jello mix.] Phelps: Oh crap.\n","explanation":"Michael Phelps is an American Olympic swimmer, who could easily be considered the best swimmer worldwide: he is the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, with 28 medals, 23 of them gold (won in the 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 summer Olympics, so it would have been 18 Olympic gold medals at the time the comic was published). He was most dominant in the 2008 Beijing Olympics where he won gold in all of the eight events in which he competed, the record for a single games.\nCueball and Megan find that the Olympic medalist is in Megan's pool. He refuses to leave, and is too fast to be caught. Cueball brings in boxes of Jello Mix to fill the pool with, thereby gelifying the pool and trapping Phelps or forcing him to leave.\nHowever, according to the title text, after having waited the time necessary for the water to gelify, Cueball realizes that Phelps has eaten all of the resulting Jello. This may be a reference to Phelps being used to eating impressive food quantities (about 12,000 calories daily) , to keep up with his strenuous exercise regimen; or it may be a reference to pictures of Phelps smoking from a bong that arose after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, as Marijuana use is often associated with an increased appetite. Otherwise, the text may simply be a reference to Phelps being capable of achieving super-human feats, such as devouring an entire pool full of Jello.\nInterestingly enough, just pouring Jello powder into a pool would not solidify the water into Jello. The water would have to be boiled, then quickly chilled, for the Jello to set correctly. As Randall is a scientist, he should have known this; therefore, it's possible that he purposefully ignored this fact in favor of the humor. Michael Phelps' top speed is also only around 2.3 m\/s, which can easily be outrun by anyone on land.\n[Megan and Cueball standing outside their en-Phelps-ified swimming pool.] Cueball: Why is Michael Phelps in your backyard pool? Megan: I don't know. He's been there all day. Go home, Michael! Michael Phelps: Woo! 18 gold medals!\n[Megan and Cueball break out a pair of pool nets and unsuccessfully try to snag Phelps.] Cueball: Can you get him? Megan: He's so fast ! Phelps: Ha hah! Can't catch me! Splash splash\n[Cueball heads off to fetch something.]\n[Cueball returns with a hand truck full of Jello mix.] Phelps: Oh crap.\n"}
{"id":1093,"title":"Forget","image_title":"Forget","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1093","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/forget.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1093:_Forget","transcript":"When Will We Forget? Based on US Census Bureau National Population Projections Assuming we don't remember cultural events from before age 5 or 6\nBy this year: The majority of Americans will be too young to remember: 2012: The seventies 2013: The Carter presidency 2014: The Reagan shooting 2015: The Falkland Islands war 2016: The return of the Jedi release 2017: The first Apple Macintosh 2018: New Coke 2019: Challenger 2020: Chernobyl 2021: Black Monday 2022: The Reagan presidency 2023: The Berlin Wall 2024: HammerTime 2025: The Soviet Union 2026: The LA Riots 2027: Lorena Bobbit 2028: The Forrest Gump release 2029: The Rwanda Genocide 2030: OJ Simpson's Trial 2031: Clinton's reelection 2032: Princess Diana 2033: Clinton's impeachment 2034: Columbine 2035: Forgot About Dre 2036: 9\/11 2037: VH1's I love the 80s 2038: A time before Facebook 2039: VH1's I love the 90s 2040: Hurricane Katrina 2041: The planet Pluto 2042: The first iPhone 2043: The Bush presidency 2044: Michael Jackson 2045: Trying to say \u00b4\u00b4Eyjafjallaj\u00f6kull`` 2046: The Arab Spring 2047: Anything embarrassing you do today\nThe very popular YouTuber Vsauce put this chart in a video called \u201cThis Is Not Yellow\u201d, and it got almost twenty million views.\n","explanation":"The median age in USA is currently about 37 years. Assuming that you must be at least five years old to remember a cultural event later, this means that anything that happened more than thirty-two years ago is remembered by a minority of people today. This applies to any event prior to 1980, so here in 2012, the majority of Americans are too young to remember the Seventies. However, according to census estimation the median will raise in the future, so instead of a 32 years gap between event and the moment when most people can't remember it, the gap becomes 35 years (implying a median of some 40 years).\n2013: The Carter presidency Jimmy Carter was the President of the United States from 1977-1981. He lost all popularity after he was viewed as mishandling several crises during his presidency, including the Three Mile Island accident , the Iran hostage crisis , and the \" stagflation \" of the late 1970s. According to Wikipedia, his decisions to reinstate registration for the draft and his decision to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow (over the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) helped contribute to his defeat in the 1980 Presidential campaign.\n2014: The Reagan shooting References the 1981 assassination attempt on the then American president, Ronald Reagan .\n2015: The Falkland Islands War This is in reference to the brief outbreak of hostilities between the UK and Argentina over the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) located off the shore of Argentina claimed by both but controlled by the UK. Even to this date, tensions remain high over the ownership of these islands, and while many people alive today weren't alive to witness it, it nevertheless remains present in the collective psyche of both nations.\n2016: Return of the Jedi release Return of the Jedi was the 3rd film in the original Star Wars trilogy, released in 1983.\n2017: The first Apple Macintosh The Macintosh was a line of computers created by Apple , first introduced in 1984, with the Macintosh 128K .\n2018: New Coke References a public relations blunder that the Coca-Cola corporation undertook in attempting to reformulate its cola recipe, the new formula called New Coke popularly. The public backlash so shook the company that they reintroduced the original recipe as Coca-Cola Classic within 3 months. New Coke was eventually rebranded from Coca-Cola to Coke II, and then discontinued. Coca-Cola Classic has quietly been rebranded back to simply Coca-Cola, as it originally was. The \"New Coke\" introduction is considered one of the biggest PR blunders from a major company ever.\n2019: Challenger The Challenger was a Space Shuttle orbiter , which was launched in 1986, but exploded 72 seconds into its flight, killing everyone aboard, including Christa McAuliffe , a teacher selected to be the first teacher in space.\n2020: Chernobyl Refers to the 1986 meltdown of a nuclear power plant in the Ukranian SSR (then a part of the Soviet Union). The meltdown forced the nearby city of Pripyat to be abandoned, and it remains a ghost town today.\n2021: Black Monday Refers to the 1987 day of the largest one-day stock market drop in history.\n2022: The Reagan presidency Ronald Reagan was an American president from 1981 to 1989, and was a generally well received president known for ending the Cold War, oversaw the Iran\u2013Contra affair , invading Grenada , and issuing forth a number of new economic policies .\n2023: The Berlin Wall Refers to the barrier surrounding the Anglo-French-controlled part of Berlin . It was erected by the East German Government in 1961 to stop illegal emigration to West Berlin (an enclave of West Germany ) after the end of the Second World War. After a friendly revolution in 1989, emigration to West Berlin (and West Germany in general) was granted suddenly and very surprisingly again on November 9, 1989. The following rush of people to the Wall from East (to cross the border) and from West (to welcome friends and relatives) in that night coined the figurative \"Fall of the Wall\", preceding the actual reunion of Germany in 1990 and (almost) complete demolition of the Wall.\n2024: HammerTime Refers to a refrain in MC Hammer's 1990 hit song U Can't Touch This ; Randall Munroe makes reference to this song elsewhere in his comics, too (specifically 108: M.C. Hammer Slide and 210: 90's Flowchart ).\n2025: The Soviet Union Refers to a country emerging after the end of World War I . It became the cold-war adversary of the United States after the end of World War II and only collapsed in 1991.\n2026: The LA Riots Refers to the massive riots occurring at the release of the verdict acquitting the officers accused of the Rodney King beatings in 1992.\n2027: Lorena Bobbit Refers to the woman who emasculated her husband in 1993.\n2028: The Forrest Gump release Forrest Gump was a 1994 drama starring Tom Hanks as a mentally disabled man, telling his spectacular life story. The movie had a highly successful release, and some consider it one of the greatest films of all time.\n2029: The Rwanda Genocide Refers to the 1994 Rwandan genocide , where an estimated 800,000 people were killed.\n2030: OJ Simpson's Trial The O.J. Simpson trial was a famous criminal case during which O.J. Simpson , a professional football player, was acquitted of the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman . He was later arrested and jailed for other crimes, including armed robbery and kidnapping.\n2031: Clinton's reelection Bill Clinton was the American president from 1993 to 2001. He won his second term in the 1996 presidential election . During his second term, he faced controversy during an impeachment trial, for which he was acquitted, and a large number of pardons he made on his last day of office. Clinton was a generally favoured president, exiting his presidency with a high approval rate.\n2032: Princess Diana Princess Diana was a famous Commonwealth princess who made headlines after her 1997 death in a car crash.\n2033: Clinton's impeachment In 1998, the American Congress voted to impeach then-president Clinton, based on allegations that he lied about relations with a White House intern . He was later acquitted.\n2034: Columbine Refers to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre , where 13 people were killed by a pair of shooters .\n2035: Forgot About Dre Refers to the Grammy winning 2000 song, \" Forgot About Dre ,\" by the rapper Dr. Dre . In it, Dre complains that his accomplishments have been purposefully ignored and forgotten; ironically, at some point in the future Dre's complaints about being forgotten will, themselves, be forgotten.\n2036: 9\/11 Refers to the September 11 attacks in 2001, where terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center towers, in New York City . Two other planes crashed that day: one into the The Pentagon , and one in a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania (presumably on its way to crashing into the Capitol Building).\n2037: VH1's I love the 80s I Love the '80s was a 2002 nostalgia TV series by VH1 . This will make the 1980s doubly forgotten; not only will people not remember the decade, they will not remember the famous retrospective of people remembering the decade.\n2038: A time before Facebook Refers to the online social media site, Facebook , launched in 2004.\n2039: VH1's I love the 90s I Love the '90s was a TV series airing in 2004.\n2040: Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Katrina was a devastating 2005 hurricane that hit New Orleans , killing almost 2000 people and causing 81 billion dollars in damage.\n2041: The planet Pluto Pluto is a dwarf planet in our solar system. Up until 2006, Pluto was considered to be a planet.\n2042: The first iPhone Apple 's first iPhone was released in 2007.\n2043: The Bush presidency George W. Bush was the American president from 2001 to 2009. He was criticized for the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq , poor handling of Hurricane Katrina, and seeing the United States enter a recession. His approval peaked after the 9\/11 attacks, but had fallen to historical lows by the end of his second term, making him one of the least liked US presidents.\n2044: Michael Jackson Refers to the pop singer who died of drug overdose in 2009.\n2045: Trying to say Eyjafjallaj\u00f6kull Is a reference to a volcano in Iceland that erupted in 2010. The eruption threw volcanic ash several kilometres up in the atmosphere, which led to air travel disruption in northwest Europe for six days.\n2046: The Arab Spring Refers to the wave of revolutions that began in late 2010, where many Arabic nations overthrew leaders and started civil wars, with many nations converting to democracies.\n2047: Anything embarrassing you do today Refers to the fact that in 35 years, the majority of Americans will not have been around on this date. However, it is to be noted that it would have to be something very embarassing for anyone more than people around or friends to notice. Usually, embarassing actions by an individual (non-celebrity) that aren't notable in some way don't end up being noticed, much less on the news. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text is in reference to the vastly over-saturated programming on VH1 dedicated to the history of the TV universe.\nWhen Will We Forget? Based on US Census Bureau National Population Projections Assuming we don't remember cultural events from before age 5 or 6\nBy this year: The majority of Americans will be too young to remember: 2012: The seventies 2013: The Carter presidency 2014: The Reagan shooting 2015: The Falkland Islands war 2016: The return of the Jedi release 2017: The first Apple Macintosh 2018: New Coke 2019: Challenger 2020: Chernobyl 2021: Black Monday 2022: The Reagan presidency 2023: The Berlin Wall 2024: HammerTime 2025: The Soviet Union 2026: The LA Riots 2027: Lorena Bobbit 2028: The Forrest Gump release 2029: The Rwanda Genocide 2030: OJ Simpson's Trial 2031: Clinton's reelection 2032: Princess Diana 2033: Clinton's impeachment 2034: Columbine 2035: Forgot About Dre 2036: 9\/11 2037: VH1's I love the 80s 2038: A time before Facebook 2039: VH1's I love the 90s 2040: Hurricane Katrina 2041: The planet Pluto 2042: The first iPhone 2043: The Bush presidency 2044: Michael Jackson 2045: Trying to say \u00b4\u00b4Eyjafjallaj\u00f6kull`` 2046: The Arab Spring 2047: Anything embarrassing you do today\nThe very popular YouTuber Vsauce put this chart in a video called \u201cThis Is Not Yellow\u201d, and it got almost twenty million views.\n"}
{"id":1094,"title":"Interview","image_title":"Interview","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1094","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interview.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1094:_Interview","transcript":"[Black Hat is interviewed by Hairy.] Hairy: ...but thank you for applying. We'll keep your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 on file.\n[Black Hat pushes a suitcase over the table.] Black Hat: Perhaps this could change your mind?\n[Hairy opens the suitcase.] Click\n[Hairy lifts open the top.]\n[Camera pans over the suitcase to reveal a deep hole.]\n[Camera zooms into the hole.]\n[Hairy is falling into the hole.] Hairy: AAAAAA\n[Hairy falls into a chair with the suitcase falling on his lap.] THUMP\n[Hairy is dazed, and is being interviewed by Black Hat.] Black Hat: ...but thank you for applying. We'll keep your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 on file.\n[Hairy looks confused.] Hairy:\u00a0!??!\n[Hairy looks at the suitcase.]\n[Hairy pushes the suitcase over the table.] Hairy: Perhaps this could change your mind?\n[Black Hat opens the suitcase.] Click\n[Black Hat looks inside.]\n[Black Hat turns the suitcase around.] Black Hat: I'm sorry\u2014\n[The suitcase is now filled with paper.] Black Hat: \u2014that opening has been filled.\n","explanation":"This comic is based on a common annoyance when job hunting, being told that they'll \"keep you in mind\", but don't offer you a job. A job interviewer tells Black Hat exactly that.\nBlack Hat offers a briefcase to his interviewer. From the vague phrasing \"this\" and the context, one would expect the briefcase to contain money to bribe the interviewer into hiring Black Hat. Instead, it contains a portal or gateway into an impossibly deep chasm.\nAfter falling through the chasm, the interviewer lands in the interviewee's seat, and Black Hat is now sitting in the interviewer's seat, effectively switching their roles.\nThe former interviewer tries to pull the same trick on Black Hat, creating a momentary illusion of an infinite loop through recursion , a common theme in xkcd comics.\nWhen Black Hat opens the briefcase, however, he reveals another common annoyance when job hunting, being told that the opening has already been filled. Black Hat's statement works on two levels, one meaning that \"the job opening has been filled\", and the second meaning \"the opening to the briefcase's chasm has been filled\". In the latter sense, opening may also be used as a synonym of vulnerability, in which case filled would mean patched.\nThe title text is said by Black Hat. It refers to the fact that, even though Black Hat now has the interviewer's job, he has no idea what his function is.\nOther Job interviews have been portrayed in 125: Marketing Interview , 1088: Five Years , 1293: Job Interview and 1545: Strengths and Weaknesses .\n[Black Hat is interviewed by Hairy.] Hairy: ...but thank you for applying. We'll keep your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 on file.\n[Black Hat pushes a suitcase over the table.] Black Hat: Perhaps this could change your mind?\n[Hairy opens the suitcase.] Click\n[Hairy lifts open the top.]\n[Camera pans over the suitcase to reveal a deep hole.]\n[Camera zooms into the hole.]\n[Hairy is falling into the hole.] Hairy: AAAAAA\n[Hairy falls into a chair with the suitcase falling on his lap.] THUMP\n[Hairy is dazed, and is being interviewed by Black Hat.] Black Hat: ...but thank you for applying. We'll keep your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 on file.\n[Hairy looks confused.] Hairy:\u00a0!??!\n[Hairy looks at the suitcase.]\n[Hairy pushes the suitcase over the table.] Hairy: Perhaps this could change your mind?\n[Black Hat opens the suitcase.] Click\n[Black Hat looks inside.]\n[Black Hat turns the suitcase around.] Black Hat: I'm sorry\u2014\n[The suitcase is now filled with paper.] Black Hat: \u2014that opening has been filled.\n"}
{"id":1095,"title":"Crazy Straws","image_title":"Crazy Straws","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1095","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/crazy_straws.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1095:_Crazy_Straws","transcript":"[Two people hang out with some beverages. Cueball here has a bright green crazy straw.] Cueball: The thing to understand about the plastic crazy straw design world is that there are two main camps: The professionals - designing for established brands - and the hobbyists . Cueball: The hobbyist mailing lists are full of drama, with friction between the regulars and a splinter group focused on loops...\n[Caption below the panel:] Human subcultures are nested fractally. There's no bottom.\n","explanation":"A subculture is a small group of people within a culture that share some property in common, such as hackers or hipsters. Some subcultures form based on a geeky obsession over a trivial topic (for instance, a minimally-drawn webcomic). In this case, that topic is crazy straws, which are toy drinking straws designed with unusual twists and loops.  This strip uses this group as an example of the fractal nature of cultures.\nInformally speaking, a fractal is a mathematical shape with an infinite level of detail. Just as fractals can always be divided into smaller patterns, Randall points out that human subcultures can always be divided into smaller subcultures. We have the \"people who like crazy straws\" subculture, but this is further divided into the professionals and the hobbyists. The hobbyists are themselves broken into those who accept loops in the straws and those who don't. A splinter group, as used in the comic, is a subculture that breaks off from a larger one. Of course, this nesting is not really infinite, since there is a finite number of people living. The claim that it is infinite is hyperbole.\nDespite the incredible amount of work fans put into it, the whole concept seems completely inconsequential to an outsider. This irony is the source of humor in this strip. An earlier comic, 915: Connoisseur , covers a similar topic.\nParis Hilton is a celebrity who is essentially famous for being famous. The \"guy named Eric\" mentioned in the title-text is someone prominent in the amateur plastic crazy-straw community, but that doesn't really count as famous by most standards, so the Paris Hilton comparison is quite a stretch.\n[Two people hang out with some beverages. Cueball here has a bright green crazy straw.] Cueball: The thing to understand about the plastic crazy straw design world is that there are two main camps: The professionals - designing for established brands - and the hobbyists . Cueball: The hobbyist mailing lists are full of drama, with friction between the regulars and a splinter group focused on loops...\n[Caption below the panel:] Human subcultures are nested fractally. There's no bottom.\n"}
{"id":1096,"title":"Clinically Studied Ingredient","image_title":"Clinically Studied Ingredient","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1096","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/clinically_studied_ingredient.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1096:_Clinically_Studied_Ingredient","transcript":"I can't help but admire the audacity of the marketer who came up with the phrase \"contains a clinically studied ingredient\"\n[Cueball is sat on a bed, talking to a curly-haired woman standing close by.] Woman: Don't worry - I've been tested. Cueball: ...and you're clean? Woman: So many questions!\n","explanation":"This comic is poking fun at a phrase which some ads use to boost sales of their product. They state that their product contains a \"clinically studied ingredient\", which consumers assume means that the ingredient has been clinically tested and proven effective , or at the very least, not harmful, although neither is, strictly speaking, implied by that statement. An example of this appears on many body wash  products, bearing the phrase \"Tested by dermatologists for sensitive skin\" or something similar. The phrase just states that an ingredient was clinically studied and doesn't mention the findings of that study (which, for all we know, could have found the ingredient to be ineffective or harmful). In other words, the phrase is used in deceptive marketing techniques, leading consumers to believe something which encourages them to buy the product, without committing to saying it explicitly.\nIn the middle of the conversation, Megan tells Cueball that she has been tested. The implication is that she's talking about STDs . However she does not reveal the results of the tests, which is the primary information Cueball could be worried about, and when Cueball inquires, she acts like he is being unreasonable to also want that information. In this way, Randall is making an analogy to how a marketer might think consumers would be unreasonable to want to know the results of the clinical studies on the ingredient.\nThe title text mentions the legendary film critic Roger Ebert . At the time this comic was published (a year before Ebert's death), one could expect him to have watched most big-name movies that were coming out. Simply stating that he saw a movie, therefore, doesn't necessarily mean that he liked it.\nImpressive-sounding but meaningless advertisement claims are also the subject of 624: Branding , 641: Free , 870: Advertising and 993: Brand Identity .\nI can't help but admire the audacity of the marketer who came up with the phrase \"contains a clinically studied ingredient\"\n[Cueball is sat on a bed, talking to a curly-haired woman standing close by.] Woman: Don't worry - I've been tested. Cueball: ...and you're clean? Woman: So many questions!\n"}
{"id":1097,"title":"A Hypochondriac's Nightmare","image_title":"A Hypochondriac's Nightmare","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1097","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/a_hypochondriacs_nightmare.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1097:_A_Hypochondriac%27s_Nightmare","transcript":"[Cueball at an airport slips on a banana peel and gets sucked into a nearby jet engine.] Cueball (thinking): Seriously!? This is what gets me? I wasted so many hours on WebMD worrying about the rash on my arm!\n","explanation":"Hypochondriacs are people who worry obsessively about their health, often looking up symptoms on the Internet and convincing themselves that they have some deadly disease. The situation depicted in this comic is described as a \"hypochondriac's nightmare\" because Cueball , expecting that the rash on his arm was some mysterious undiagnosed disease, spent several hours on WebMD (an online health symptom reference) looking up symptoms, yet ends up dying by slipping on a banana and getting sucked into an airplane engine. Thus he regrets wasting so much time on an ultimately fruitless task rather than something more productive to survival, such as, say, watching out for banana peels lying in front of jet engines, or at the very least, attempting to enjoy life.\nThe title text (in ALL CAPS thus shouting in despair) adds another level of hypochondriasm. Randall drew this particular joke to soothe his fears and reassure himself that the rash is nothing. But what if that reassurance just makes him not check out the rash, and then it turns out the rash is caused by \"death mites \" (which do not actually exist [ citation needed ] ) and ultimately kills him when he could have prevented it?\n[Cueball at an airport slips on a banana peel and gets sucked into a nearby jet engine.] Cueball (thinking): Seriously!? This is what gets me? I wasted so many hours on WebMD worrying about the rash on my arm!\n"}
{"id":1098,"title":"Star Ratings","image_title":"Star Ratings","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1098","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/star_ratings.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1098:_Star_Ratings","transcript":"Understanding online star ratings:\n5 stars: [Has only one review] 4.5 stars: Excellent 4 stars: OK 3.5-1 star: Crap.\n","explanation":"This comic deals with the idea that users when viewing online star ratings are usually heavily biased towards the best possible rating (five stars). As there are nine possible scores in the rating system in the comic (1 star, 1.5 stars, 2 stars...4.5 stars, and finally 5 stars), a rating of 3 out of 5 stars is supposed to represent \"average\" or \"mediocre\". Thus, anything above 3 stars is supposed to be \"good\" and anything below 3 stars is \"bad\". However, most people consider a four star rating to be \"OK\", and everything below as \"crap\".\nOn one hand there is some justification for this, as ratings are more likely to be given by people who fall onto one of the extremes (either loved or hated the product) and thus there is a tendency for ratings to be skewed either high or low. Fake reviews are also a factor that often push an aggregate score higher, although this is not addressed in the comic. For this reason, no product is so perfect that every user will give it five stars - as soon as one person gives it less than five, the overall review score would drop. So the only explanation for a five star rating is that only a few users have voted, maybe only one.\nThe title text may refer to the folkloric practice of attributing a feeling of a chill to someone walking on your future grave. When Randall is back home he would like to give a bad rating on Yelp \u2014 a corporation that operates an \"online urban guide\" \u2014 and hovering his hand over the 'one star' button, he was just 'walking' over the rating on his own future grave.\nAnother possible explanation for the title text is that the headstones are from people that gave the cemetery star ratings and were then murdered, having their given ratings displayed in the headstones. This in turn would explain the chill Randall feels before clicking the one-star button.\nSee also: 937: TornadoGuard , another comic about star ratings.\nUnderstanding online star ratings:\n5 stars: [Has only one review] 4.5 stars: Excellent 4 stars: OK 3.5-1 star: Crap.\n"}
{"id":1099,"title":"Tuesdays","image_title":"Tuesdays","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1099","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tuesdays.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1099:_Tuesdays","transcript":"[Ponytail serves Beret Guy and Megan at a table.] Ponytail: ...and on Tuesdays we offer endless wings. Beret Guy: Haha, cool. Beret Guy: i have those.\nPonytail: You what?\n[Beret Guy sprouts a pair of wings.] Ponytail: AAAAA!!\n[Beret Guy's wings start getting longer.] Ponytail and Megan: AAAAAAA\n[Wings start to extend into space out from the earth.] Everyone: AAAAAAAA\n","explanation":"Beret Guy and at least one other person (probably Megan ) are sitting at a restaurant. The waitress, Ponytail , tells Beret Guy there is a special on Tuesdays for \"endless wings\". Restaurants often have different daily discounts to encourage people to come in. In a normal restaurant, \"endless wings\" would presumably refer to \"all-you-can-eat\" chicken wings , meaning the customer can pay a flat price and eat all the chicken wings they want without having to pay any more.\nHowever, in this comic, instead of ordering them by telling the waitress: \"I'll have those\", Beret Guy tells her: \"I have those\", meaning that he already has literal \"endless wings\" (similar issues of things being taken literally are referenced in 1086: Eyelash Wish Log and 1528: Vodka ), and then begins to grow wings which ultimately appear \"endless\" as they grow to a span of at least the circumference of the Earth by the last panel (and presumably continue growing). The other characters scream in horror for obvious reasons.\nThe title text plays on another common restaurant offer of \"bottomless drinks\", meaning unlimited free refills of drinks. However, falling into something literally bottomless (i.e. without a bottom) would result in falling forever. (However, even this is unlikely unless the diameter of the cups that the drinks are served in is large enough to fit a whole person into.) If it was literally \"bottomless\", you would start to decelerate as you pass the earth's center of mass. The air pressure and heat in a \"bottomless\" pit would also be fatal to humans.\nThis is one of the few comics with lowercase text .\n[Ponytail serves Beret Guy and Megan at a table.] Ponytail: ...and on Tuesdays we offer endless wings. Beret Guy: Haha, cool. Beret Guy: i have those.\nPonytail: You what?\n[Beret Guy sprouts a pair of wings.] Ponytail: AAAAA!!\n[Beret Guy's wings start getting longer.] Ponytail and Megan: AAAAAAA\n[Wings start to extend into space out from the earth.] Everyone: AAAAAAAA\n"}
{"id":1100,"title":"Vows","image_title":"Vows","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1100","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vows.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1100:_Vows","transcript":"[A bride in full wedding dress, that looks like Megan, and Cueball with a bow-tie as the groom stand next to each other. Each has a hand outstretched toward the other.] Officiator (off panel): Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? Bride: ...No.\n[Cueball steps back in surprise. The bride removes a wig to reveal that she is in fact a Cueball-like man.] Groom: What? Amy!? Man: I'm not Amy. None of this was real. You're back in senior year. It's the big game.\n[Cueball puts his hands to his head in confusion. The man holds up an American football, still holding the wig in his other hand.] Cueball: What is this!? Man: The greatest high school football misdirection play of all time.\n[Cueball puts his hands to his mouth as the man in the wedding dress begins to run backwards, away from him holding up the ball.]\n[Cueball remains frozen in horror as the man turns and dashes toward the goalpost in the distance.]\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke parodying wedding ceremonies and American Football plays intended to misdirect or fool the opponents about what is really happening.\nA standard misdirection play involves the offense misdirecting the defense into thinking that the play being executed is actually a different play: for example, a passing play could actually be a running play, or that a ball being run left is actually being run right, or that a field goal or punt end up being attempted to get a down .\nIn this comic, Cueball is about to get married to Amy, a girl looking like Megan , but the bride interrupts the ritual by saying that she doesn't want to get married. The bride then reveals herself to be a Cueball-like man and after questioning reveals that the relationship and the wedding was an elaborate con to get the advantage on the football field. \"Amy\" turns out to be a player for the opposing team and he had a football on his person. He then proceeds to run the ball in for a touchdown. This clearly constitutes the greatest high school football misdirection play of all time .\nRandall takes the deception in a misdirection play to the next, virtually impossible level; it is unlikely that a relationship could develop to the point of marriage within the time-frame of a football game, with \"the groom\" not noticing that Amy was in fact a football player, or that he was standing on the football field.\nThe title text indicates that, in spite of the deception, \"the groom\" still has feelings and is not ready to give up the relationship (or at least he would like to share a beer with the opposing team like after a friendly game). Alternatively, as it is unclear who is speaking, \"the bride\" may have also developed feelings for \"the groom\" and is now awkwardly asking for a date after deceiving \"the groom.\"\nOccasionally, especially at the high school level, extreme misdirection plays are attempted where teams try to misdirect the opposing team into thinking that a play is not even being run. Good examples of that can be found on YouTube, such as this \"wrong ball\" trick , or that \"five more yards\" trick . Despite conforming to the rules of the game, these are considered to be dirty tricks and usually only work in little league football.\n[A bride in full wedding dress, that looks like Megan, and Cueball with a bow-tie as the groom stand next to each other. Each has a hand outstretched toward the other.] Officiator (off panel): Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? Bride: ...No.\n[Cueball steps back in surprise. The bride removes a wig to reveal that she is in fact a Cueball-like man.] Groom: What? Amy!? Man: I'm not Amy. None of this was real. You're back in senior year. It's the big game.\n[Cueball puts his hands to his head in confusion. The man holds up an American football, still holding the wig in his other hand.] Cueball: What is this!? Man: The greatest high school football misdirection play of all time.\n[Cueball puts his hands to his mouth as the man in the wedding dress begins to run backwards, away from him holding up the ball.]\n[Cueball remains frozen in horror as the man turns and dashes toward the goalpost in the distance.]\n"}
{"id":1101,"title":"Sketchiness","image_title":"Sketchiness","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1101","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sketchiness.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1101:_Sketchiness","transcript":"[A timeline style graph.] WORDS Arranged by how sketchy they make the sentence \u00b4\u00b4HEY BABY, WANNA COME BACK TO MY SEX ________?`` sketchy <--------> very sketchy party --- orgy --- dungeon --- palace --- house --- shrine --- room --- basement --- truck --- platform --- van --- area --- crate --- chute --- ravine --- tarp\n","explanation":"Sketchy is an adjective meaning not thorough or detailed, but which in modern slang is often used to connote creepiness, or a general feeling that something is not quite right. Urban Dictionary provides a good definition of \"someone or something that gives off a bad feeling\".\nIn this comic, Randall rates words by how sketchy they make the sentence \"Hey baby, wanna come back to my sex ____?\" when inserted into the blank. As noted from the scale (which already starts at \"sketchy\" and goes up to \"very sketchy\"), the sentence itself is already inherently sketchy, in that it sounds like it would be a pickup line delivered by a person attempting to solicit sex from a stranger.\nThe sketchiness is increased by the various words which run from the relatively common or understood to the obscure and unusual.\nThe first few are actual terminology: A sex party or sex orgy are basically group sex parties at which multiple parties engage in sexual activity. A sex dungeon is a location where BDSM (bondage\/submission \u2014 think leather and handcuffs) activity is engaged in. \"Sex House\" is the name of an Onion News Network parody of reality shows like Big Brother.\nAs the scale increases, the words become simply locations where sex might take place, which increase from comfortable to unusual and creepy (i.e. sex crate, sex ravine, sex tarp). It is particularly sketchy because of the phrasing of the sentence which implies the speaker has a specific [insert word] used for sex. It might be sketchy enough to walk up to someone and suggest \"let's go down in the ravine and have sex\", but it is made sketchier when the phrasing suggests going to \"my sex ravine\".\nThe title text continues the thought process with further possible sketchy words, beginning with more odd locations and moving on to \"onslaught\", an abundant wave of attack or overwhelming amount of something \u2014 in this case sex; \"extractor\" suggests some sort of device that might force someone to have sex; and finally \"judge\", suggesting the speaker has someone in mind to judge sex. Very sketchy indeed.\n[A timeline style graph.] WORDS Arranged by how sketchy they make the sentence \u00b4\u00b4HEY BABY, WANNA COME BACK TO MY SEX ________?`` sketchy <--------> very sketchy party --- orgy --- dungeon --- palace --- house --- shrine --- room --- basement --- truck --- platform --- van --- area --- crate --- chute --- ravine --- tarp\n"}
{"id":1102,"title":"Fastest-Growing","image_title":"Fastest-Growing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1102","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fastest_growing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1102:_Fastest-Growing","transcript":"[A man with a combover, a book, and a clipboard approaches Black Hat.] Combover: You should check us out. We're the fastest-growing religion in the country. Black Hat: \"Fastest-growing\" is such a dubious claim. Combover: It's true! We grew by 85% over the past year.\n[In a frameless panel, Black Hat shouts to someone out of frame.] Black Hat: Hey, Rob \u2014 wanna join my religion? Rob: Sure, whatever.\n[Black Hat turns back to Combover and produces a notepad and pen.] Black Hat: Well, looks like my religion grew by 100% this year.\n[Black Hat begins to walk away.] Combover: We have 38,000 members! Black Hat: Hope they're all ok with second place.\n","explanation":"This comic talks about the misuse of percentage of growth. It can be misleading for gauging the importance or popularity of something; If you add only 4 members to an existing group of 2, you would have achieved a growth of 200 percent.\nIn the case portrayed in this comic the claim appears to be that the other person's religion grew by 85%. Black Hat attempts humorously to show the flaw in using that statistic by growing his group by 100% (therefore, presumably, first place), which he simply does by adding his friend Rob to his religion, and thus increasing his membership from 1 to 2. The other person then says that his religion has a significant number of members (and not just one or two, but ended up with 35,000 this year, presumably having 'only' around 20,540 in the prior one), but Black Hat doesn't care and responds that he hopes they are all okay with being \"in second place\" since the main argument from the other guy was about being the fastest-growing.\nThe title text ponders the ironic idea of converting only the zealous door-to-door proselytizers to a very persuasive religion of one's own.\nAnother interpretation is that the title text could be another way that Black Hat could take the 'fastest-growing' claim out of context to make it meaningless. By composing his religion of the unwitting proselytizers of other faiths, he can claim the highest ratio of converts to current adherents. Note that the amount of people converted is often exaggerated by groups that try to spread a faith. Although the beliefs spread by his proselytizers vary widely, Black Hat is not concerned with what his so-called followers believe. Thus, he can claim the title of fastest-growing religion without having any value to his religion.\nVarious religions and groups encourage their members to actively recruit new followers, such as the Mormon missionary .\n[A man with a combover, a book, and a clipboard approaches Black Hat.] Combover: You should check us out. We're the fastest-growing religion in the country. Black Hat: \"Fastest-growing\" is such a dubious claim. Combover: It's true! We grew by 85% over the past year.\n[In a frameless panel, Black Hat shouts to someone out of frame.] Black Hat: Hey, Rob \u2014 wanna join my religion? Rob: Sure, whatever.\n[Black Hat turns back to Combover and produces a notepad and pen.] Black Hat: Well, looks like my religion grew by 100% this year.\n[Black Hat begins to walk away.] Combover: We have 38,000 members! Black Hat: Hope they're all ok with second place.\n"}
{"id":1103,"title":"Nine","image_title":"Nine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1103","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1103:_Nine","transcript":"[Cueball stands at a microwave, which hangs on the wall above the stove.] Cueball: How long do you zap these? Character off-frame: Two minutes. Cueball: Thanks! [Buttons being pushed.] *Beep* 1 *Beep* 5 *Beep* 9 Cueball: It's ok, nine. Cueball: You are not forgotten.\n[Caption below the frame:] Ever since I heard the simile \"As neglected as the nine button on the microwave.\" I've found myself adjusting cook times.\nThe disproportionately high frequency of low digits appearing in a random number is a similar concept to Benford's Law , which states that the lower a non-zero digit is, the more likely it will appear as the first (non-zero) digit of a random number; eg, you are far more likely to encounter a number beginning with the digit 1 than a number whose first digit is 9. However, in the case of microwaves, the reason low digits are usually at the beginning of the number is more due to the relatively short times used on microwaves, whereas Benford's Law has to do with logarithmic scale. And in the case of microwaves, 3s and 0s have an increased likelihood of appearing in later digits because times are usually given in units of minutes or half-minutes, and while it is possible to extend Benford's Law to a few digits beyond the first digit, there is certainly no preference for 3 over other digits.\nTaken together, one could probably infer that the amount of time something is cooked in an oven, which is usually longer than things are cooked in a microwave, is more likely to include early digits such as 0, 1, 2, and 3 as opposed to digits such as 7, 8, and 9.\n","explanation":"Most common cook times are given in either whole, half, or quarter minute increments; e.g., 2:00 min. or 1:30 min, meaning that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 0 are the most used digits on the microwave (because microwave times are usually less than 6 minutes), and to use numbers like 6, 7, 8, or 9, one would have to cook something for that number of minutes. Cueball, however, feels bad for the under-used number '9,' so he microwaves his food for one minute fifty-nine seconds instead of two minutes, as a one-second difference is negligible.\nAlso, in Randall's book Thing Explainer, every number from one to ten are in the top thousand most used words except nine, which is labeled \"the number after eight\", \"one more than eight\", or (when referring to the Ninth Amendment ) \"Change After Eight\". This shows how the other numbers are used much more than nine.\nThe title text is reminiscent of comic 245: Floor Tiles .\n[Cueball stands at a microwave, which hangs on the wall above the stove.] Cueball: How long do you zap these? Character off-frame: Two minutes. Cueball: Thanks! [Buttons being pushed.] *Beep* 1 *Beep* 5 *Beep* 9 Cueball: It's ok, nine. Cueball: You are not forgotten.\n[Caption below the frame:] Ever since I heard the simile \"As neglected as the nine button on the microwave.\" I've found myself adjusting cook times.\nThe disproportionately high frequency of low digits appearing in a random number is a similar concept to Benford's Law , which states that the lower a non-zero digit is, the more likely it will appear as the first (non-zero) digit of a random number; eg, you are far more likely to encounter a number beginning with the digit 1 than a number whose first digit is 9. However, in the case of microwaves, the reason low digits are usually at the beginning of the number is more due to the relatively short times used on microwaves, whereas Benford's Law has to do with logarithmic scale. And in the case of microwaves, 3s and 0s have an increased likelihood of appearing in later digits because times are usually given in units of minutes or half-minutes, and while it is possible to extend Benford's Law to a few digits beyond the first digit, there is certainly no preference for 3 over other digits.\nTaken together, one could probably infer that the amount of time something is cooked in an oven, which is usually longer than things are cooked in a microwave, is more likely to include early digits such as 0, 1, 2, and 3 as opposed to digits such as 7, 8, and 9.\n"}
{"id":1104,"title":"Feathers","image_title":"Feathers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1104","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/feathers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1104:_Feathers","transcript":"[Megan is walking up to Science Girl with a bow in her hair bun. Science Girl has a stack of three books in front of her, is reading another book and a fifth book lies behind her on the floor.] Megan: What are you reading about? Science Girl: Dinosaurs! Megan: Oh, yeah.\n[Zoom out of the same scene, with Megan standing and Science Girl looking up at her.] Megan: They've gotten all weird since when I was a kid. Megan: They used to be awesome, but now they all have dorky feathers, right? Science Girl: Yup!\n[Same scene in a frame-less panel. Science Girl looks down and below the two characters there is a footnote.] Science Girl: This says they now think raptors used their wings for stability, flapping to stay on top of their prey while hanging on with their hooked claws and eating it alive. *Fowler et. al., PLoS ONE 6(12), 2011\n[Zoom in on the same scene, the book on the floor is outside the panel. Megan just stands staring at Science Girl who reads on. Beat panel.]\n[Megan is now on the floor next to Science Girl flipping through the top book she has taken from the pile.]\n","explanation":"Dinosaurs have been a fascinating topic in popular science and have captivated children's interest since the first fossils were discovered in modern times, around the 1700s; prior discoveries in China and elsewhere were thought to be the bones of dragons or other mythical creatures. The success of the Jurassic Park movies perpetuated an erroneous understanding of the physical characteristics of dinosaurs. Since the first movie of that series, scientific evidence has emerged suggesting that Dromaeosauridae , or \" raptors \", the main antagonists of that movie, looked quite different from their animatronic and CGI versions. In particular, they are now known to have been much smaller, and are believed to have had feathers and even wings, as evidenced by quill nobs observed on the arms of raptors.\nDenver W. Fowler is among the scientists who support this hypothesis. (incidentally, a \" Fowler \" is a hunter of wildfowl\/birds) The comic refers to a publication by him and his colleagues (\" et al. \"), in the PLoS ONE , an online scientific journal (\"PLoS\" stands for \"Public Library of Science\").\nMegan believes this new model of the appearance of raptors makes them much less cool, but the way in which Science Girl reformulates the facts to make them seem like even more vicious predators re-ignites her interest and makes the new raptors seem like at least as good a candidate for a good action thriller movie like the original version, if not better. Thus the phrase \"the past keeps getting cooler\". (Or that Megan, like Randall, has an irrational fear of raptors and is updating her knowledge of them.)\nClicking on the original cartoon links to a YouTube video of a bird of prey (in this case a Secretarybird ) using its wings for stability while standing on top of a struggling prey, from which one can easily envision instead a raptor upon its prey\u2014especially in case of some kind of \"raptorphobia\", as for Randall (see 87: Velociraptors and 135: Substitute ). Microraptor was a small raptor with four wings, which lets you imagine even scarier scenes.\nThe same idea is later explored from a different perspective in 1527: Humans .\n[Megan is walking up to Science Girl with a bow in her hair bun. Science Girl has a stack of three books in front of her, is reading another book and a fifth book lies behind her on the floor.] Megan: What are you reading about? Science Girl: Dinosaurs! Megan: Oh, yeah.\n[Zoom out of the same scene, with Megan standing and Science Girl looking up at her.] Megan: They've gotten all weird since when I was a kid. Megan: They used to be awesome, but now they all have dorky feathers, right? Science Girl: Yup!\n[Same scene in a frame-less panel. Science Girl looks down and below the two characters there is a footnote.] Science Girl: This says they now think raptors used their wings for stability, flapping to stay on top of their prey while hanging on with their hooked claws and eating it alive. *Fowler et. al., PLoS ONE 6(12), 2011\n[Zoom in on the same scene, the book on the floor is outside the panel. Megan just stands staring at Science Girl who reads on. Beat panel.]\n[Megan is now on the floor next to Science Girl flipping through the top book she has taken from the pile.]\n"}
{"id":1105,"title":"License Plate","image_title":"License Plate","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1105","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/license_plate.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1105:_License_Plate","transcript":"[Cueball is walking in from the right holding a license plate up with both hands for an off-panel Megan to see. It is possible to see the plate, but here it looks like all I's (or 1's).] Cueball: Check out my personalized license plate! Megan (off-panel): \"1I1-III1\"? Cueball: It's perfect! Plate: III-IIII\n[In this frame-less panel Megan is sitting in an office chair holding and looking at the plate while Cueball stand next to her rubbing his hands together in front of him.] Cueball: No one will be able to correctly record my plate number! Cueball: I can commit any crime I want! Megan: Sounds foolproof.\n[A man with hair only around his neg and glasses holds out a hand towards a bald male police officer with a black peaked cap with white emblem on the front. The police man interviews their witness holding a notepad and a pen. Another likewise caped female officer is Ponytail who walks to the left arm pointing left. There is a line of yellow police tape behind them with text partially obscured by the characters. At the top left of the panel there is a small frame with a caption:] Soon: Witness: The thief's license plate was all \"1\"s or something. Police officer: Oh. That guy. Ponytail: His address is on a post-it in the squad car. Yellow strip (text not visible in brackets): Poli[ce strip] do not cross [poli]ce stri[p do not] cross.\n","explanation":"Cueball has obtained a new license plate . The license plate number one receives is often the next in sequence, available at the time and place of registration. However, in many localities, for an additional fee one can select their own \"personalized\" license plate number (called a vanity plate ), subject to certain criteria, and availability.\nIn this comic, Cueball has elected to purchase the personalized license plate number \"1I1-III1\" or \"one, letter I, one, dash, letter I, letter I, letter I and one\". He believes the ambiguity between the letter I and the digit 1 on the plate will make it very difficult for anyone to correctly identify his vehicle if he commits a crime. Some localities have more distinct \"1\" and \"I\" characters in their license plate font than others, but often when a crime is committed witnesses only has a short time to look at the plate, and will then be confused.\nIn principle his idea did work, because when the police end up interviewing a witness of a crime scene in the end of the comic, he can only say that \"The thief's license plate was all \"1\"s or something\". What Cueball does not count on is that there are no other license plates made up entirely of the letter I and the digit 1. Thus, when witnesses report a vehicle with a license plate of either\/or I's and 1's, the police know exactly who the perpetrator is.\nGiven the fact that the police still haven't caught him even though they have his address written on a Post-it note in their car, it seems like they had already thought of the same idea, and when Cueball registered such a license plate they put up the address in the police cars, as they expected him to begin committing crimes. He may already have committed more than one, but they would soon stop him before it turned into a crime spree.  (An alternative interpretation is that his crime spree has so far consisted of minor offenses, so they haven't arrested him, just issued him warnings or citations -- although one would expect him to stop once it became obvious they were onto him.)\nSomeone in New Hampshire appears to have done this in real life.\nThe title text appears to be a conversation between Cueball and the police the next day when they show up at his address. It turns out that the police suspect Cueball of six bank robberies. Cueball responds that \"all\" he did was vandalize the library. But the police disregard this as a nice try to avoid being arrested because witnesses saw a license plate with all 1's and I's was used.  Cueball does not understand this because he was with his car the entire time since he got the license plate. And just as he says this, he has an epiphany and states wait. OK, wow that was clever of her . It is thus clear that he suspects that Megan of having made a false license plate also with only a combination of I's and 1's. And then she has robbed six banks knowing that the police would be sure to suspect Cueball, who was so foolish to show his criminal intent by registering such a plate in the first place.\nKnowing that the police will assume the car is his, she has thus framed him. Hopefully for Cueball, he can prove he was not involved in the robberies, but if the police assumed that he was the one that committed the crimes, they may not have taken so much care in collecting evidence the first day of the crimes. This will have given Megan time to run away with all the money, as no one was looking for her. So she may well have left the country with no one looking for a woman. This will make it more difficult for Cueball to avoid the blame.\nIt is clear that Megan would not be so stupid as to register another plate, because then they would know that there could be more than one criminal. Also she would not have had time to get it, if the crime spree began soon after Cueball showed the plate to her. But if the fake plate makes people tell about the 1s and Is then the police would not ask further and discover that the plate might have looked fake.\nNote the yellow police line seems to say Police strip do not cross , where Police line do not cross seems to be the only sentence used normally (unless it is crime scene do not cross , but that also does not fit). (Of course, this could be a pun about the fact that this occurrence is a comic strip .)\n[Cueball is walking in from the right holding a license plate up with both hands for an off-panel Megan to see. It is possible to see the plate, but here it looks like all I's (or 1's).] Cueball: Check out my personalized license plate! Megan (off-panel): \"1I1-III1\"? Cueball: It's perfect! Plate: III-IIII\n[In this frame-less panel Megan is sitting in an office chair holding and looking at the plate while Cueball stand next to her rubbing his hands together in front of him.] Cueball: No one will be able to correctly record my plate number! Cueball: I can commit any crime I want! Megan: Sounds foolproof.\n[A man with hair only around his neg and glasses holds out a hand towards a bald male police officer with a black peaked cap with white emblem on the front. The police man interviews their witness holding a notepad and a pen. Another likewise caped female officer is Ponytail who walks to the left arm pointing left. There is a line of yellow police tape behind them with text partially obscured by the characters. At the top left of the panel there is a small frame with a caption:] Soon: Witness: The thief's license plate was all \"1\"s or something. Police officer: Oh. That guy. Ponytail: His address is on a post-it in the squad car. Yellow strip (text not visible in brackets): Poli[ce strip] do not cross [poli]ce stri[p do not] cross.\n"}
{"id":1106,"title":"ADD","image_title":"ADD","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1106","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/add.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1106:_ADD","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a balloon with \"Math Problem\" written on it. He is running to grab a balloon labeled \"Call Mom\" that is floating away.]\n[Cueball is now holding both balloons, but looks over his shoulder and sees a balloon that reads \"Check Oven\".] Cueball: !!\n[Cueball releases the balloons he had been holding and runs for the third.]\n[Cueball jumps for the \"Check Oven\" balloon and snatches it just before it is out of reach.] LEAP Cueball: Hah!\n[Full width panel showing 16 balloons floating away and one Cueball is holding. The balloons are different sizes and colors, labeled as follows from left to right. Listed as * Label - color] Parking Meter - blue Taxes - green Buy Soap - red Phone Call - green Relax - yellow Inbox - blue Clean - red Beat Game - green Feed Cat - yellow Drink Water - blue Call Mom - red Math Problem - green Send Card - red Check Oven (Cueball is holding this one still) - yellow Engine Light - yellow Read - blue Breathe - blue\n","explanation":"This comic appears to be a visual representation of the thought process of someone with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Various of Cueball's thoughts or tasks that he must do are represented by balloons which are rising out of his reach. He holds the \"math problem\" balloon and grabs the \"call mom\" balloon, but notices \"check oven\" is rising out of his reach. He abandons the two balloons he holds to dive and grab the \"check oven\" balloon. Of course, this allows the other two to rise, presumably out of Cueball's reach, as the pullout reveals a plethora of other balloons already rising too high, some of which describe actions required to live, like balloons marked \"breathe\" or \"drink water\".\nThis represents how someone with ADD quickly drops one task to take on another, only to jump to yet another task before that one is done; or alternatively, it represents how the person with ADD feels; that while they are focusing on one task, 20 others are getting away from them. The title text further reinforces this, noting that while committing to actually complete one task (represented by tying a balloon to a tree), 20 others floated away. The task he chose to complete is (as stereotypical for someone with ADD), a task that results in no necessary accomplishment \u2014 the task is to land a rocket on the moon (Mun) in Kerbal Space Program , a PC-based spaceflight simulator and video game. Additional humour comes from the fact that landing a rocket on the moon in Kerbal Space Program would require a lot of repetition through trial-and-error, making a long and involved task during which many other important tasks might be ignored normally.\n[Cueball is holding a balloon with \"Math Problem\" written on it. He is running to grab a balloon labeled \"Call Mom\" that is floating away.]\n[Cueball is now holding both balloons, but looks over his shoulder and sees a balloon that reads \"Check Oven\".] Cueball: !!\n[Cueball releases the balloons he had been holding and runs for the third.]\n[Cueball jumps for the \"Check Oven\" balloon and snatches it just before it is out of reach.] LEAP Cueball: Hah!\n[Full width panel showing 16 balloons floating away and one Cueball is holding. The balloons are different sizes and colors, labeled as follows from left to right. Listed as * Label - color] Parking Meter - blue Taxes - green Buy Soap - red Phone Call - green Relax - yellow Inbox - blue Clean - red Beat Game - green Feed Cat - yellow Drink Water - blue Call Mom - red Math Problem - green Send Card - red Check Oven (Cueball is holding this one still) - yellow Engine Light - yellow Read - blue Breathe - blue\n"}
{"id":1107,"title":"Sports Cheat Sheet","image_title":"Sports Cheat Sheet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1107","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sports_cheat_sheet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1107:_Sports_Cheat_Sheet","transcript":"[A three-column table. Months are arrayed down the first column, the second and third columns show sports, with the divisions in partial months rather than lined up with the ends of months.  American football and association football (i.e. soccer) are differentiated by small icons in brackets depicting the respective balls used.]\nWhich sport are they arguing about? -My cheat sheet-\n[The second column, reproduced using approximate dates.] US: Football [ovoid ball drawn in brackets]: January 1 - February 10 Basketball: February 10 - April 20 Baseball: April 20 - May 25 Basketball: May 25 - June 15 Baseball: June 15 - August 20 Football [ovoid]: August 20 - October 5 Baseball: October 5 - October 20 Football [ovoid]: October 20 - December 31\n[The third column, reproduced using approximate dates.] non-US: Football [truncated icosahedron, 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons]: January 1 - December 31\nThe idea of a website that supplies sports talking points to non-fans was previously used in a 2008 episode of the sitcom The IT Crowd , which might be where Randall got the idea. There, the site (Bluffball) focused on UK football, and offered the lines \"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?\", \"What was Wenger thinking sending Walcott on that early?\" and \"The trouble with Arsenal is they always try and walk it in.\"\n","explanation":"Randall presents a \"cheat sheet\" which is a handy reference guide for something that is generally expected to be memorized or known by someone familiar with the knowledge domain. Cheat sheets are commonly used in mathematical applications to list important formulas or for measurement conversions; but they may also be used in other applications.\nThis cheat sheet allows Randall to figure out what sport other people are arguing over on the basis of the time of year and where the argument is occurring. The chart is based on the annual seasons (periods when the top professional and college leagues play) of each sport.\nIn the United States, the chart is divided among baseball , basketball and American football . Hockey is not shown, suggesting that he may not consider hockey a sport to compare with the three listed, he does not encounter arguments about hockey (of the four major professional sports leagues in North America, the NHL is significantly behind the others in terms of attention as its appeal is traditionally limited by geography to Canada and the northern United States), or that he perhaps does not need a chart to determine when the argument is about hockey (they may be obvious for countless reasons, including the physicality of typical hockey confrontations). Also, golf is not shown as well implying Randall may not think it's an important sport. The chart suggests that football is the most popular of the three sports, or at least more popular to argue about (of the four major professional sports leagues in North America, the NFL generally has the most attention).\nThe NFL football regular season generally runs from September to December with playoffs in January and early February. Overlapping this period of time, NCAA college football is also occurring, from September to December, with their bowl games in December and January. Almost all of this period, sports arguments are likely to be about football. The NBA basketball regular season runs from late October to mid-April with playoffs in April and into June. NCAA college basketball starts in November but peaks in March with the NCAA Basketball Tournament ( March Madness ). According to the chart, the arguments about basketball don't begin until the football season is over. They continue through the end of April, but start again at the end of May during the playoff finals. The MLB baseball regular season runs from April through September with playoffs in late September and October. When the baseball season begins, arguments shift from the ongoing basketball season to the new baseball season. As mentioned, the NBA Finals create some basketball arguments again for a few weeks. Similarly, the start of the NFL season in September makes it more likely arguments then will be about football. Baseball takes over briefly during the playoffs in October.\nOne of the punchlines is that outside the US, all sports arguments are about association football (soccer) all year round. The two types of football are noted on the chart by an icon showing the ball used in each sport.\nThe title text continues on the theme of this chart being for someone who doesn't know anything about sports. Randall imagines a Twitter feed where you receive a salient sports opinion each day, presumably so that you could repeat the opinion to your friends and appear knowledgeable about sports. As the feed is for those uninformed about sports, there are clarifications of important terms in brackets.\nThe suggested Twitter message mentioned in the title text is accurate for the date of the comic. On September 11, 2012 the baseball team Boston Red Sox played the New York Yankees and won, 4 runs to 3.  The Red Sox were already mathematically eliminated from the playoffs (meaning they needed to win more games than remained in the season to qualify). The Yankees were at the top of the standings, but were in a close race for the playoffs with the Baltimore Orioles (both teams had a win-loss record of 79 wins to 62 losses, with 21 games each remaining to play). To be guaranteed a spot in the playoffs, the Yankees had to win more of their remaining games than the Orioles. Losing to the Red Sox made this task harder. (For those wondering, both the Yankees and the Orioles made to the playoffs, but neither made it to the championship round, the World Series.)\nTraditionally, the Red Sox and the Yankees have a long-standing rivalry , especially among fans. Many Red Sox fans consider a loss by the Yankees nearly as good as a win by the Red Sox (and the Red Sox beating the Yankees the best of both worlds). If the Red Sox can't win the World Series, then at least they can help prevent the Yankees from winning it.\nThis strip is one of several in which Randall attempts to trivialize sports (see for instance 904: Sports , 1480: Super Bowl , 1507: Metaball and 1859: Sports Knowledge ).\n[A three-column table. Months are arrayed down the first column, the second and third columns show sports, with the divisions in partial months rather than lined up with the ends of months.  American football and association football (i.e. soccer) are differentiated by small icons in brackets depicting the respective balls used.]\nWhich sport are they arguing about? -My cheat sheet-\n[The second column, reproduced using approximate dates.] US: Football [ovoid ball drawn in brackets]: January 1 - February 10 Basketball: February 10 - April 20 Baseball: April 20 - May 25 Basketball: May 25 - June 15 Baseball: June 15 - August 20 Football [ovoid]: August 20 - October 5 Baseball: October 5 - October 20 Football [ovoid]: October 20 - December 31\n[The third column, reproduced using approximate dates.] non-US: Football [truncated icosahedron, 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons]: January 1 - December 31\nThe idea of a website that supplies sports talking points to non-fans was previously used in a 2008 episode of the sitcom The IT Crowd , which might be where Randall got the idea. There, the site (Bluffball) focused on UK football, and offered the lines \"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?\", \"What was Wenger thinking sending Walcott on that early?\" and \"The trouble with Arsenal is they always try and walk it in.\"\n"}
{"id":1108,"title":"Cautionary Ghost","image_title":"Cautionary Ghost","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1108","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cautionary_ghost.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1108:_Cautionary_Ghost","transcript":"[A man wakes up to an apparition hovering over his bed.] Apparition: ooOOOOOOOOOOooooo Man: A ghost!? Apparition: I bring a cautionary vision of things to come!\nApparition: This is the future: [Two people are standing between a pair of houses. There is a tree. An airplane flies past.]\nApparition: And this is the future if you give up the fight over the word \"literally\": [Two people are standing between a pair of houses. There is a tree. An airplane flies past. The cynical might suggest the panel is copy pasted.]\n[Back to the man in bed.] Man: They looked exactly the same. Apparition: ooOOOOOOOOOOOooo Man: Ok, I get it. Apparition: Seriously, this is duuuuumb.\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of Charles Dickens 's A Christmas Carol , where Scrooge is replaced with someone who insists on calling people out on their incorrect usage of the word \"literally\", and speaks to the irrelevance of correcting people's speech.\nIn \"A Christmas Carol\", the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future awaken the main character in the middle of the night to show him the negative causes and effects of his selfish and uncharitable behavior. In this comic the ghost wakes up a man who is intent on correcting people's usage of the word \"literally.\" People often use \"literally\" as emphasis or exaggeration to a figurative statement, when the word's original meaning was that something had happened exactly as described. A statement such as \"I literally ate 40 lbs of chocolate\" might be said, when the person might have only actually eaten half a pound. A more correct statement would be \"I ate a large amount of chocolate.\"\nThe ghost shows the protagonist two futures, one where he keeps correcting people, and one where he stops. That the two \"different\" futures are exactly (i.e., literally) the same suggests that the man's struggle to get people to stop using \"literally\" incorrectly will have no meaningful effect on the world, and so the man (and by extension, everyone else) may as well stop wasting time and energy on it.\nIronically, the title text indicates that a second apparition encouraged the man to continue the fight on a different grammatical issue, the use of the phrase \"if it were,\" which is frequently incorrectly substituted with \"if it was.\" \"Were\" is correctly used in a hypothetical condition, when referencing something that may not be true. The ghost of subjunctive past references the ghost of Christmas past and the 'Subjunctive past tense' . The following sentences illustrate the correct usages:\nAnother xkcd comic, 725: Literally , also refers to the overly mocked usage of \"literally.\"\nA similar ghost is seen in 1393: Timeghost , where it reminds Cueball about the passing of time.\nThe comics Cyanide & Happiness and The Oatmeal offer examples of this sort of derision.\n[A man wakes up to an apparition hovering over his bed.] Apparition: ooOOOOOOOOOOooooo Man: A ghost!? Apparition: I bring a cautionary vision of things to come!\nApparition: This is the future: [Two people are standing between a pair of houses. There is a tree. An airplane flies past.]\nApparition: And this is the future if you give up the fight over the word \"literally\": [Two people are standing between a pair of houses. There is a tree. An airplane flies past. The cynical might suggest the panel is copy pasted.]\n[Back to the man in bed.] Man: They looked exactly the same. Apparition: ooOOOOOOOOOOOooo Man: Ok, I get it. Apparition: Seriously, this is duuuuumb.\n"}
{"id":1109,"title":"Refrigerator","image_title":"Refrigerator","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1109","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/refrigerator.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1109:_Refrigerator","transcript":"[Open fridge with four conveyor belts, three in the main compartment and one on the door. There are two more containers on the door, and an ice-box underneath the second conveyor belt in the main compartment. There is a bin at the bottom of the fridge where the conveyor belts all lead to labelled \"Bad.\"] Top conveyor belt : 3 days ^ 2 days ^ 24 hours ^ 12 hours ^ Middle conveyor belt : 1 W ^ 5 days ^ 3 days ^ 2 days ^ 1 day ^ Bottom conveyor belt : 3 M ^ 2 months ^ 1 month ^ 2 weeks ^ Door conveyor belt : 3 days ^ 1 week ^ 2 weeks ^\n","explanation":"Randall proposes the idea of a refrigerator with conveyor belts tuned to different speeds such that food is moved along to the right (main compartment) or left (door) as time passes, with the time appropriate markings letting you know how much time is left until it spoils. When the expiry date is reached, the food will have reached the rightmost part of the refrigerator and conveniently fall into the \"Bad\" tray at the bottom right of the fridge.\nThe title text is a reference to Simon Stevin's proof of a problem of equilibrium consisting on balancing a weight on an inclined plane by another weight hanging off the top end of the inclined plane. Stevin, also known as Stevinus, had the proof inscribed on his tomb, and as such the proof is commonly known as the \" Epitaph of Stevinus \". Randall expresses his interest in having his own ostensibly brilliant idea likewise engraved on his own tombstone.\n[Open fridge with four conveyor belts, three in the main compartment and one on the door. There are two more containers on the door, and an ice-box underneath the second conveyor belt in the main compartment. There is a bin at the bottom of the fridge where the conveyor belts all lead to labelled \"Bad.\"] Top conveyor belt : 3 days ^ 2 days ^ 24 hours ^ 12 hours ^ Middle conveyor belt : 1 W ^ 5 days ^ 3 days ^ 2 days ^ 1 day ^ Bottom conveyor belt : 3 M ^ 2 months ^ 1 month ^ 2 weeks ^ Door conveyor belt : 3 days ^ 1 week ^ 2 weeks ^\n"}
{"id":1110,"title":"Click and Drag","image_title":"Click and Drag","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1110","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/click_and_drag.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1110:_Click_and_Drag","transcript":"[This transcript only covers the first four panels as they are shown here above (i.e. before you click and drag).]\n[Cueball is narrating the story, all the text is written in boxes above and below him without speech lines connecting to him.] [Cueball is floating by holding onto a balloon with one hand.] From the stories I expected the world to be sad And it was\n[Cueball has grabbed hold of the balloon with both hands.] And I expected it to be wonderful.\n[The wind picks up and blows Cueball to the right.] It was.\n[Full width panel where the scene opens up. You see Cueball is about a tree's-height from the ground. To the right there is a tall tree with no leaves on it and a broken limb. Below him are some rocks and grass. This is the initial view of the world, that can be clicked and dragged. It is part of tile named 1 North 1 East.] I just didn't expect it to be so big .\n[The rest of the comic is transcribed below in the List of details and references section.]\nWarning: there are cheating possibilities\u2014people have implemented ways to explore that world more easily\u2014but the best way to enjoy this comic is to play the game, explore the comic's world the way you're supposed to, get lost in the caves or in the sky, be startled by unexpected things or happy when finding some people after lengthy click-and-dragging through a repetitive landscape. If you didn't do that already, reading any below will spoil you from truly enjoying the comic.\nThough you can download the full view, the easiest way to browse it is through a Zooming user interface .\nThe 225 existing tiles are sorted by columns from West to East and from North to South in each column. (Note that this only includes the tiles that are not entirely white or black).\n","explanation":"This comic is a take on how vast and rich the world is, and on the thrill of exploring it. The world can be described as sad, as well as it can be described as wonderful, even if this seems a bit contradictory, just because it is so big and there are so many different things happening in it all at once. Cueball comments about this while hanging from a balloon, which brings to mind the expanded perspective over the landscape attained by early experimenters in overland flight.\nThe title text is the same as the comic title, and both of these invite the reader to Click and drag the inside of the last panel, with their mouse, and by dragging, explore what is hidden outside that panel. The image displayed at first turns out to be part of a huge landscape, filled with big or small things, humorous details, people here and there, cave mazes, things floating in the air, jokes and references, unexpected things, relaxing views, etc.\nThe fact that we only see a small part of the landscape at once refers to the idea that we cannot in real life comprehend the whole world altogether, but only what is around us and\/or in the range of our understanding at the time. The click-and-drag process, in which it is impossible to go as fast as we would want to, also draws a parallel with the fact that exploration is always done gradually, step by step, and trying something (i.e. here dragging in a certain direction) always has a cost. This click-and-drag exploration reproduces the thrill of discovering new horizons, getting lost sometimes, finding unexpected things, seeing beauty, humor, desolation or happiness here and there... which can easily captivate an xkcd reader for a long time (and as such qualifies as nerd sniping ).\nIn comic 1416: Pixels you zoom, by scrolling, until every pixel in this image turns into new pictures, and this can be continued again and again. Once you have zoomed in, you are able to click and drag the picture just like in this comic.\nAnd in 1608: Hoverboard exactly the same idea is used again, but instead of dragging the image you fly\/float around in the image with Cueball on a hoverboard . This gives a very different way to explore as he cannot go through walls or the earth etc. You also have to discover that there is a big world outside the initial play area; and where this comic tried to help people realize they should do something, both with the title and title text, Hoverboard directly tries to dissuade people from going outside with a warning message. Another major difference is that hoverboard is actually a game where you can collect coins (spread throughout the picture) and return them to the starting point to gain a score.\nThe book Thing Explainer that was the reason for the Hoverboard game, also has a direct reference to this comic, as Cueball is seen floating with his balloon outside the cockpit in the explanation for Stuff you touch to fly a sky boat .\nIn 1975: Right Click , the April Fools' day comic of 2018, the title is similar to this one, in that it gives away how the user should begin to interact with the comic. It is though nothing like this comic or Hoverboard.\n[This transcript only covers the first four panels as they are shown here above (i.e. before you click and drag).]\n[Cueball is narrating the story, all the text is written in boxes above and below him without speech lines connecting to him.] [Cueball is floating by holding onto a balloon with one hand.] From the stories I expected the world to be sad And it was\n[Cueball has grabbed hold of the balloon with both hands.] And I expected it to be wonderful.\n[The wind picks up and blows Cueball to the right.] It was.\n[Full width panel where the scene opens up. You see Cueball is about a tree's-height from the ground. To the right there is a tall tree with no leaves on it and a broken limb. Below him are some rocks and grass. This is the initial view of the world, that can be clicked and dragged. It is part of tile named 1 North 1 East.] I just didn't expect it to be so big .\n[The rest of the comic is transcribed below in the List of details and references section.]\nWarning: there are cheating possibilities\u2014people have implemented ways to explore that world more easily\u2014but the best way to enjoy this comic is to play the game, explore the comic's world the way you're supposed to, get lost in the caves or in the sky, be startled by unexpected things or happy when finding some people after lengthy click-and-dragging through a repetitive landscape. If you didn't do that already, reading any below will spoil you from truly enjoying the comic.\nThough you can download the full view, the easiest way to browse it is through a Zooming user interface .\nThe 225 existing tiles are sorted by columns from West to East and from North to South in each column. (Note that this only includes the tiles that are not entirely white or black).\n"}
{"id":1111,"title":"Premiere","image_title":"Premiere","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1111","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/premiere.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1111:_Premiere","transcript":"[The setting is a standard entertainment newscast. Hairy as the news anchor in the studio sits behind a desk, resting his hands on the desk, starts off the segment with an inset feed to the right where Megan can be seen in front of a crowd behind her. The title of this segment is shown below the feed.] Hairy: All Hollywood is in town for tonight's star-studded premiere! We go live to our reporter on the red carpet. Hairy: How do things look? Title: Red Carpet Report\n[Megan switches to full-screen. Megan is standing in front of a full crowd of Cueball heads who are behind a line held up be sticks, one of which is visible behind her. She holds a large microphone up to her face.] Megan: Bleak. Megan: In 800 million years the aging, brightening Sun will boil away the oceans, and all this will be blowing sand.\n[Switch back to initial framing with Hairy moving his arms further away from himself and Megan now with the microphone visible.] Hairy: Oh. Um. ...Sounds pretty grim. How are the stars reacting? Megan: Hydrogen fusion. But it won't last forever. Hairy: I mean the movie stars. Megan: They won't last forever either. None of us will. Title: Red Carpet Report\n","explanation":"This comic depicts an entertainment news television program. Hairy , as the news anchor , notes that \"all Hollywood\" is in town, meaning there are a lot of members of the film industry. The event is a movie premiere, a common place for reporters to interview celebrities, actors, and other people related to entertainment.\nMegan represents the reporter at the premiere reporting for the television program. The red carpet is a tradition whereby a long red carpet is laid out leading to the entrance of a theater as a symbol of elegance. Movie stars are said to \"walk the red carpet\" when they arrive and do interviews and pose for photos along this carpet, most famously seen at the Oscars .\nWhen asked the ambiguous question \"How do things look?\", instead of reporting on the premiere and the movie stars arriving, Megan reports on the bleak long-term outlook for the Earth as we know it. She states than in about 800 million years the Sun will become so hot that the Earth's oceans boil away . According to the Wikipedia article this will though first happen in about 1.1 billion years. But the 800 million years may have been the best estimate back in 2012 when this comic was released, see for instance this article from 2013 that states 850 million years. (The loss of oceans will still happen long before the sun turns into a red giant in about 5 billion years).\nWhen Hairy then asks how the stars are reacting (meaning how the movie stars are reacting to this news about the oceans), Megan instead replies that the stars are reacting with hydrogen fusion , the nuclear reaction of actual stars like the Sun, thus again ostensibly mistaking the intent of the question. All astronomical stars eventually die when there is not enough hydrogen (or other heavier atoms) to continue the fusion process that keeps the stars stable.\nHairy then clarifies that he (of course) meant the movie stars, but Megan keeps being bleak in her reporting as she notes that they also won't last forever, and by the way no one else will. She is of course right as eventually everyone dies [ citation needed ] , just as the stars will eventually die, but of course much sooner for any living human, movie star or not. This reminding people that they will soon die is a common thing for xkcd, apart from the whole segment of comics to make one feel old , there is a specific example in 1393: Timeghost and even more so in 926: Time Vulture .\nIn the title text Hairy ask about the buzz about the film. The buzz here refers to ongoing discussion of the movie, analogous to a continuous humming sound. Megan exclaims that she hopes this buzz distracts people from the apparently grave news she has already reported.\nAlso, since \"premiere\" etymologically means \"first\", the title might be a pun on the comic number, which only consists of four ones (1111).\nThe joke of Megan answering a question in an interview in an unexpected manner was used again in 1302: Year in Review .\nMegan had an existential crisis already in 220: Philosophy and later again in 1822: Existential Bug Reports . In the latter it was the Sun swallowing the Earth (not the oceans) that was her concern.\n[The setting is a standard entertainment newscast. Hairy as the news anchor in the studio sits behind a desk, resting his hands on the desk, starts off the segment with an inset feed to the right where Megan can be seen in front of a crowd behind her. The title of this segment is shown below the feed.] Hairy: All Hollywood is in town for tonight's star-studded premiere! We go live to our reporter on the red carpet. Hairy: How do things look? Title: Red Carpet Report\n[Megan switches to full-screen. Megan is standing in front of a full crowd of Cueball heads who are behind a line held up be sticks, one of which is visible behind her. She holds a large microphone up to her face.] Megan: Bleak. Megan: In 800 million years the aging, brightening Sun will boil away the oceans, and all this will be blowing sand.\n[Switch back to initial framing with Hairy moving his arms further away from himself and Megan now with the microphone visible.] Hairy: Oh. Um. ...Sounds pretty grim. How are the stars reacting? Megan: Hydrogen fusion. But it won't last forever. Hairy: I mean the movie stars. Megan: They won't last forever either. None of us will. Title: Red Carpet Report\n"}
{"id":1112,"title":"Think Logically","image_title":"Think Logically","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1112","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/think_logically.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1112:_Think_Logically","transcript":"[Knit Cap is sitting down at a computer touching the keyboard with one hand. Cueball is standing behind watching the screen.] Laptop: *Move* Cueball: Why'd you move your knight away?\n[Knit Cap turns around and rests an arm on the chair looking at Cueball who holds out both arms.] Cueball: Just think logically . The goal is checkmate, so you should always move pieces toward the other player's king.\n[Closeup of Cueball holding a hand to his chin.] Cueball: I guess occasionally you need to move backward, but it'd be trivial to make a list of those circumstances and-\n[Knit Cap is leaning back in chair facing Cueball, panel is so slim that the lap top is not included.] Knit Cap: Have you ever played chess? Cueball: Not much, but\u2014 Knit Cap: Wanna? Cueball: Uh, ok.\n[Knit Cap sitting and Cueball standing is playing chess with a board standing between them on a very small table or a four legged stool. The board extends quite far out on either side. Their moves are indicated above with four by Knit Cap and three towards Cueball. It is clear both from this and from the pieces visible on the board that Knit Cap is playing white] *Move* _____ *Move* *Move* _____ *Move* *Move* _____ *Move* *Move* Knit Cap: Checkmate.\n[In a frameless panel Cueball is standing staring at the chess board, where there clearly are more pieces on his side of the board.]\n[Knit Cap has turned back to the laptop with both hands on the keyboard. Cueball is standing behind the chess board holding a finger up in the air.] Cueball: This game isn't very well-designed. For starters, knights are too weak...\n","explanation":"Chess is a centuries-old board game in which two players take turns moving one of their 16 pieces to try and checkmate the other player's king (one of the pieces). When one player is in a position to capture their opponent's king on their next move, and the opponent has no legal move available to avoid such capture, the opponent is said to be in \"checkmate\", and by definition immediately loses.\nThe game, with origins around the 6th century, and with the modern rules being essentially set in the late 15th century, has a significant amount of history. The rules and traditions are well established. The knight is a piece that can only move in an L-shaped pattern (two squares in one direction, and one square perpendicular), but has the unique ability to jump over other pieces.\nThe comic highlights two mistakes players often make in chess: complete fixation on the king at the cost of their other pieces, and failure to take advantage of the knight's movement patterns. At the same time this is a jab at how people sometimes oversimplify an argument when confronted with a topic they are not familiar with. Previously this was depicted in 675: Revolutionary and 793: Physicists . See also the Dunning\u2013Kruger effect . The units in chess are widely agreed to be well-balanced, and Cueball's criticism of the knight shows an obvious lack of knowledge of the knight's potential.\nGiven the long history of chess, a significant amount of writing and research has been dedicated to the game and its strategies. This is inadvertently mocked by Cueball who naively suggests it would be trivial to make a list of all situations in which a piece would move backwards (called a \"retreat\" in chess). Such a list \u2014 at least a partial one \u2014 certainly does exist, as do lists of numerous other chess moves and situations.\nKnit Cap (see the official transcript ) proceeds to demonstrate Cueball's lack of knowledge by beating him in four moves, which typically would only occur when an experienced player plays a novice. The checkmate depicted is the scholar's mate , being a classic early-game checkmate in chess. It is in fact extremely easy to defend against it, moving your knights in the two knights defense would do, thus proving Cueball's inexperience. Careful scrutiny of the board suggests a scholar's mate, something along these lines (using chess algebraic notation): 1.e4 e5 2. Bc4 Nc6 3. Qh5 Nf6 4. Qxf7#.\nCueball, instead of admitting he underestimated the game, believes the failure is in the game itself. The title text indicates that Cueball attempted to suggest revisions to the rules of chess. Given that Cueball has no experience as a chess player, it is likely many of the changes are illogical or ridiculous. In the face of hundreds of years of history, it is not surprising that the chess community is ignoring them. The last major changes to the rules of chess occurred more than 400 years ago when, among other things, the pawn was given its two-space starting move and the queen was made into the most powerful piece (previously it was the weakest). The chess community's ties to the traditions of the game and their refusal to accept Cueball's suggestions are written off by Cueball as \" emotional bias \" suggesting his changes are logical, but that the community is letting their emotions cloud their rational decision making abilities, while in reality it is he who is being affected. If that can make Cueball feel any better, it could be pointed out to him that dozens and dozens of chess variants do exist out there.\nThe comic may also be a jab at competitive online games whose fans call for \"buffs\" (power additions) and \"nerfs\" (power reductions) to characters they believe to be underpowered or overpowered, often with inadequate knowledge of those characters. On the other hand, some online games and multiplayer computer games in general are unbalanced since they lack centuries of history to balance themselves, unlike chess.\nKnit Cap is called knit hat guy in the official transcript . There are two other cases (after this comic) where a person with hair has been shown with a knit cap. The first was Randall's wife after chemotherapy in 1141: Two Years and the second time it was Knit Cap Girl in 1350: Lorenz . Two Cueballs have also been shown using knit caps in 1321: Cold .\n[Knit Cap is sitting down at a computer touching the keyboard with one hand. Cueball is standing behind watching the screen.] Laptop: *Move* Cueball: Why'd you move your knight away?\n[Knit Cap turns around and rests an arm on the chair looking at Cueball who holds out both arms.] Cueball: Just think logically . The goal is checkmate, so you should always move pieces toward the other player's king.\n[Closeup of Cueball holding a hand to his chin.] Cueball: I guess occasionally you need to move backward, but it'd be trivial to make a list of those circumstances and-\n[Knit Cap is leaning back in chair facing Cueball, panel is so slim that the lap top is not included.] Knit Cap: Have you ever played chess? Cueball: Not much, but\u2014 Knit Cap: Wanna? Cueball: Uh, ok.\n[Knit Cap sitting and Cueball standing is playing chess with a board standing between them on a very small table or a four legged stool. The board extends quite far out on either side. Their moves are indicated above with four by Knit Cap and three towards Cueball. It is clear both from this and from the pieces visible on the board that Knit Cap is playing white] *Move* _____ *Move* *Move* _____ *Move* *Move* _____ *Move* *Move* Knit Cap: Checkmate.\n[In a frameless panel Cueball is standing staring at the chess board, where there clearly are more pieces on his side of the board.]\n[Knit Cap has turned back to the laptop with both hands on the keyboard. Cueball is standing behind the chess board holding a finger up in the air.] Cueball: This game isn't very well-designed. For starters, knights are too weak...\n"}
{"id":1113,"title":"Killed in Action","image_title":"Killed In Action","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1113","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/killed_in_action.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1113:_Killed_in_Action","transcript":"[An old lady, a woman and Cueball are standing in the background by a coffin. A policeman and the policewoman Ponytail are standing in the foreground.] Ponytail: Good cop. It's a real shame\u2014 Ponytail: He was just one day away from getting put in the locked, heavily guarded room where all cops stay for the last day before they retire.\n","explanation":"The comic plays with the TV and film trope of Retirony , in which a cop is killed in action only a short time before (often the day before) retirement, usually producing a sense of even greater tragedy in the timing of the death. The humor of this strip arises from the notion that, given so many policemen are killed the day before retirement, retiring cops could be sequestered in a secure facility on the day before their retirement to avoid retirony. Unfortunately this merely results in tragedy when a cop is killed the day before being sequestered.\nThe title text is a reference to the reactionary nature of security procedures often put in place in the aftermath of an incident, and how they typically fail to address the root cause of the problem. If the logic expressed in the title text was followed repeatedly, eventually the number of days police officers spent in the secure room would encompass their entire career.\nA certain similarity could be drawn between this and the US Army's problematic policy of only having combat troops serve for a single year in combat during the Vietnam war (unlike during WWII, when combat units were put into the front line and left there until the war was over, with losses being made up with a constant flow of individual replacements, which was even more problematic). Having troops only serve for a single year led to a far lower rate of troops \"broken\" from constant combat stress, but it also led to soldiers increasingly avoiding risk\nonce the halfway point of their year was passed and their time to go home got closer; not only that, but the stress of the last few months, knowing one was almost \"home safe\", yet forced into danger repeatedly could also psychologically damage men. It also created an incentive to just make it alive through the war, no matter what it took, unlike a situation where a soldier knows they are stuck there until the war is over; this can be a great incentive to fight harder, or at least to just give up any real hope that you'll live long enough to see the end anyway. They later revisited this \"combat year\" approach also, and tried yet another new idea.\nSee also the paradox of the \"unexpected hanging\" .\n[An old lady, a woman and Cueball are standing in the background by a coffin. A policeman and the policewoman Ponytail are standing in the foreground.] Ponytail: Good cop. It's a real shame\u2014 Ponytail: He was just one day away from getting put in the locked, heavily guarded room where all cops stay for the last day before they retire.\n"}
{"id":1114,"title":"Metallurgy","image_title":"Metallurgy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1114","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/metallurgy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1114:_Metallurgy","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are in a weapon store talking to a bearded salesman wearing a hat.]\n[Salesman holds up a sword.] Salesman: This sword was forged from a fallen star. Antimony impurities make the blade surpassingly brittle and weak .\n[Salesman holds up a dagger.] Salesman: And this dagger is made of metal from a far-off kingdom. It glows blue. Off-panel: When orcs are near?\nSalesman: No, always. Radiation from the Actinium content. Megan: ...Does it have Eldritch powers?\nSalesman: It gives the wearer +2 to cancer risk. Cueball: I think we should find another shop.\n","explanation":"The comic explains how weapons would really behave if they were made out of unusual materials. In fantasy stories, using unusual materials for weapons traditionally makes the weapons more powerful and cooler despite limited explanation for exactly why materials of extraterrestrial origin are so superior to their earthen counterparts. The salesman in the comic is Beret Guy which appears with a beard for only this comic.\nThe first panel is a reference to a fairly common fantasy trope: the use of iron meteorites for making weapons and armour (for example the sword \"Brisingr\" of the Inheritance series, \"Anglachel\" in the Tolkien Legendarium or the panserbj\u00f8rns' armour in Pullman's Northern Lights). The quality of such metal can be rather hit-and-miss. On one hand, iron from meteorites was often mixed with \"terrestrial\" iron in the early stages of human development to create relatively high quality steel for swords. Undeveloped metalworking techniques at the time meant that extraterrestrial metal was often more refined and plentiful than man-made metal ingots. With that in mind, however, research has shown that meteorites have an abundance of the chemical element Antimony (Sb) which by itself is a very brittle metal and therefore swords forged from metals harvested from meteorites may not be as strong as lore would have one think.\nThe second panel is a reference to stories set in Middle-earth where swords such as Orcrist, Glamdring or Sting (the swords of Thorin, Gandalf and Bilbo\/Frodo) glow blue when Orcs are near. The dagger in question, though, glows because of the radioactive properties of Actinium (Ac) which is also highly toxic. Definitely not a dagger you would want to carry around for your every day battles.\nThe word \"Eldritch\" in the third panel means sinister, ghostly, or magical.\nThe fourth panel mentions that the weapon gives a +2 to a player's attribute. This is a reference to role-playing games in which it is common to find items that are able to improve one's character by increasing desirable attributes.  In this case, however, +2 to cancer risk, a consequence of the dagger's radioactivity, would definitely not be considered a desirable attribute to increase. This would hit harder on Randall due to his now-wife being diagnosed with breast cancer.\nIn the title text, the salesman tries to sell Cueball another meteoric blade, this one made from a carbonaceous chondrite . Carbonaceous chondrites are rocky meteors that generally don't contain a lot of metallic iron. The salesman is either stating that the blade is simply a bunch of nonferrous meteor fragments glued together in the shape of a sword, or stating that the iron he got out of the meteor is so full of impurities that it may as well be gravel. However, because it's made of extraterrestrial material he seems confident he'll still be able to sell it on novelty value alone.\n[Cueball and Megan are in a weapon store talking to a bearded salesman wearing a hat.]\n[Salesman holds up a sword.] Salesman: This sword was forged from a fallen star. Antimony impurities make the blade surpassingly brittle and weak .\n[Salesman holds up a dagger.] Salesman: And this dagger is made of metal from a far-off kingdom. It glows blue. Off-panel: When orcs are near?\nSalesman: No, always. Radiation from the Actinium content. Megan: ...Does it have Eldritch powers?\nSalesman: It gives the wearer +2 to cancer risk. Cueball: I think we should find another shop.\n"}
{"id":1115,"title":"Sky","image_title":"Sky","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1115","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sky.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1115:_Sky","transcript":"[Megan is looking down at Beret Guy, who appears to be doing a handstand on a grass lawn, with grass tuft drawn several places, including where his hands touch the grass. His hands can be seen in the grass like he is holding on to the grass. Both his legs are moving around above him, as indicated by movement lines.] Megan: What are you doing? Beret Guy: Clinging to the ceiling of a bottomless abyss.\n[Megan walks past Beret Guy, whose legs are still moving. She is still looking down at the grass.] Megan: You are very odd.\n[In a frame-less panel, Megan walks towards a mailbox looking down at it. There is grass around the base of the mailbox pole.]\n[As Megan passes the mailbox, she looks up towards the sky and seems to stop.]\n[The last panel is upside down with the grass at the top and the mailbox pointing down. Megan is clinging to the mailbox, sitting on the grass with her head under the mailbox. Ponytail approaches her, walking on the grass with her head pointing down. The text is written in the sky below them.] Ponytail: What's wrong? Megan: I looked down.\n","explanation":"This comic is about the fact that much of the way we see the world is relative. Which way is left or right, for example, depends on the direction one is facing, so different people can give different answers and both be correct. (Contrast this to absolute directions, such as East and West, which do not change based on one's orientation.)\nWhich way is 'down' is a little more complicated, as both the absolute and relative direction use the same word (owing to the two directions usually being the same on Earth): it can be defined as 'whichever way gravity goes \/ the direction things fall', but it can also be defined as 'the direction one's feet is'. In space particularly, the latter definition tends to be used as the former is rather hard to deduce. It is possible, though not too useful, to simply say that 'down' in space is 'whichever way Earth is', or perhaps even 'whichever way is opposite to the Sun'.\nHowever, even on Earth, the direction of 'down' can get muddled. Humans rely a lot on vision to determine which way is down, so in an enclosed room with no references, one can easily convince themselves (accidentally or deliberately) that down is in a different direction to gravity. Forcing yourself to think in a different perspective changes a lot of things that are usually thought of as mundanities.\nBeret Guy convinces himself that down is toward the sky. Megan asks him why he is clinging to the ground. He responds that he is holding on to the ground so that he does not fall into the sky. Megan at first dismisses this but later looks up, gets scared and is found by Ponytail , clinging to a mailbox afraid of falling up (down?).\nThe title text continues this idea, where  Megan \"drops\" a bird into the sky, and never hears it hit the \"bottom\". As birds can fly, and captured birds often fly away when released, its flight appeared to Megan as the bird falling upward. \"Didn't hear it hit bottom\" would normally mean that the pit is too deep for the sound of impact to make it back up, although in this case as the 'pit' is genuinely bottomless the bird would never hit 'bottom' even if it didn't move.\n[Megan is looking down at Beret Guy, who appears to be doing a handstand on a grass lawn, with grass tuft drawn several places, including where his hands touch the grass. His hands can be seen in the grass like he is holding on to the grass. Both his legs are moving around above him, as indicated by movement lines.] Megan: What are you doing? Beret Guy: Clinging to the ceiling of a bottomless abyss.\n[Megan walks past Beret Guy, whose legs are still moving. She is still looking down at the grass.] Megan: You are very odd.\n[In a frame-less panel, Megan walks towards a mailbox looking down at it. There is grass around the base of the mailbox pole.]\n[As Megan passes the mailbox, she looks up towards the sky and seems to stop.]\n[The last panel is upside down with the grass at the top and the mailbox pointing down. Megan is clinging to the mailbox, sitting on the grass with her head under the mailbox. Ponytail approaches her, walking on the grass with her head pointing down. The text is written in the sky below them.] Ponytail: What's wrong? Megan: I looked down.\n"}
{"id":1116,"title":"Traffic Lights","image_title":"Traffic Lights","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1116","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/traffic_lights.gif","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1116:_Traffic_Lights","transcript":null,"explanation":"This comic is an animated gif which features an array of traffic lights which are lighted signals posted at intersections to control vehicular traffic. The standard North American traffic light has three solid lights: red, yellow and green (meaning, in simplistic terms, \"stop\", \"warning: the light will be changing to red\" and \"go\" respectively). More complicated lights sometimes have additional signals such as arrows indicating go or stop for a specific direction such as left or right turns.\nHowever, as in the strip, sometimes an intersection has multiple lights with certain of them designated to apply solely to a specific lane or specific direction of travel. A common one is a left-turn light that allows the lights to stop or allow left-turn traffic independent of the rest of the traffic. Another common example is a light that applies only to public transit like streetcars that run on tracks on the city streets.\nThere are also other rules and features that tend to be unique to different localities as noted in the Wikipedia article for Traffic-light signalling and operation .\nIn this comic, Randall is commenting on the confusion that can be caused by having too many lights with multiple rules attached by creating an exaggerated example.\nIn this strip, the right light has a sign indicating that the light and the right lane are for left turners, while the 3rd-from-left is a straight or right turn lane and the 2nd from left is right turn only. In normal course, right turns would be permitted from the right lane and left turns from the left lanes. The system in this comic would have turning traffic crossing each other, as well as the straight-ahead traffic and would cause chaos (and require very complicated traffic light phases to control). The left-most light on the post has a sign indicating that left, right and straight travel are all prohibited, which is even more confusing.\nThe comic, as an animated gif, cycles through various phases, at first appearing somewhat normal, but then adding unusual phases. The animated gif takes about 90 seconds to cycle through the 32 discrete panels before repeating. The left post light has (unusually) left and right arrows, later becoming up and down arrows. At times the light completely shuts off, and at other times, has conflicting signals.\nThe third-from-left light has red and yellow, and later all three lights come on at the same time, then all three lights go yellow, and then reverse with green at top and red at bottom. The bottom light then becomes an arrow.\nThe fourth-from-left traffic light switches from a green light to a purple light at times.\nThe right light only lights red in each position.\nThe second-from-left light and second-from-right lights do not appear to have any quirks other than changing phases in unusual patterns.\nAt frames 21 and 22 (see below) the colors of the latter five lights correspond to the color sequence of the letters in the Google logo. Only the first letter of the logo, which is blue, is not reproduced on the first traffic light.\nThe title text mentions a straightforward intersection that allows going forward but not turning. Even though Randall is confused, in some places, a red light and a forward green arrow permits going forward but disallows turns.\nThe following is a breakdown of all of the frames of the animated gif comic.\n\nThe following is a closeup on the lights, and the bird. The lights from left to right are here shown top to bottom. Time advances to the right.\n\nOriginally, the second light had a couple frames near the start that were different. The closeup of this was as follows:\n\n"}
{"id":1117,"title":"My Sky","image_title":"My Sky","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1117","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/my_sky.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1117:_My_Sky","transcript":"[The panel is upside-down. Beret Guy is holding onto the \"ceiling\", there is an upside-down cloud at the bottom of the panel.] Beret guy [to the solitary cumulus cloud.]: Oh\u2014Hello down there! Welcome to My Sky!\n[The panel is now oriented in the conventional sense with the ground at the bottom. Beret Guy is standing on his feet too, and the sky now shows a second cloud.] Beret guy: It's pretty good. I like it. It's not the same color as anything .\n[The sky is now blanketed by alto-cirrus clouds.] Beret guy: \"Wow! There are a lot of you! Good thing it's so big.\n[The scene now depicts a party, where Beret Guy is talking to Ponytail.] Ponytail: \"And what do you do?\" Beret Guy: \"I'm in the cloud storage business.\"\n","explanation":"This comic seems to be a follow up to 1115: Sky .\nLast panel refers to cloud computing and specifically cloud storage , and looks like a follow up to 1032: Networking . The obvious joke is that, instead of \u201ccloud\u201d (Internet-based) storage, Beret Guy 's business is literally storage of clouds.\nThe title text is a further statement, that his first words came while looking up at the sky. Apparently, Randall just has a good grasp on what in this universe is awe-inspiring.\nThere are some connections with both 908: The Cloud and the title text of 1444: Cloud .\n[The panel is upside-down. Beret Guy is holding onto the \"ceiling\", there is an upside-down cloud at the bottom of the panel.] Beret guy [to the solitary cumulus cloud.]: Oh\u2014Hello down there! Welcome to My Sky!\n[The panel is now oriented in the conventional sense with the ground at the bottom. Beret Guy is standing on his feet too, and the sky now shows a second cloud.] Beret guy: It's pretty good. I like it. It's not the same color as anything .\n[The sky is now blanketed by alto-cirrus clouds.] Beret guy: \"Wow! There are a lot of you! Good thing it's so big.\n[The scene now depicts a party, where Beret Guy is talking to Ponytail.] Ponytail: \"And what do you do?\" Beret Guy: \"I'm in the cloud storage business.\"\n"}
{"id":1118,"title":"Microsoft","image_title":"Microsoft","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1118","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/microsoft.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1118:_Microsoft","transcript":"Megan: Remember when we prosecuted Microsoft for bundling a browser with an OS? Imagine the future we'd live in if we'd been willing to let one tech company amass that much power. Ponytail: Thank God we nipped that in the bud.\n","explanation":"In the late 1990s Microsoft started bundling its web browser, Internet Explorer , with its Windows operating system. This effectively destroyed the Netscape company, who up until then had the most market share with its browser, Netscape Navigator . Microsoft was involved in a legal case against the U.S. government, which required Microsoft to allow IE to be uninstalled among other remedies. Removal of Internet Explorer has no clear solution as libraries and utilities associated with Internet Explorer are used across other Windows applications.\nThe comic sarcastically states that this stopped companies from creating a monopoly on software practices. Unfortunately, platform developers such as Apple, Sony, and Microsoft have restricted third-party software distribution over the internet via their own curated online stores in recent years, and will come full circle with the introduction of Metro Applications on the Windows 8. The comic also mocks the triviality of browser debates compared to current antitrust cases concerning privacy and price fixing .\nApple bundled a browser in on both its desktop and mobile platforms.  Apple also requires all iOS developers to sell their apps only through the iTunes app store, paying sizeable commissions to Apple, and Apple can refuse to sell any app. In some instances, Apple has developed its own versions of popular third-party apps. [1]\nOn Android , Google bundles in a mobile version of Chrome web browser (as of version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich ), but you are allowed to change the default browser. The company has a majority market share in web search engines, being the most popular search engine available. On Facebook , users face difficulties in accessing or removing their profiles and personal information, among other issues . Recently, this has been mitigated by the ability to download a zip file of all content ever posted to Facebook, but it still remains difficult to delete data from Facebook.\nApple has been widely criticized for trying to force all users of Mac OS or iOS to run only content approved by Apple and distributed through the Apple App Store, each sale from which gives royalty payments to Apple.\nThe title text refers to mocking Microsoft as Micro$oft or M$ for attempting to take too much money from consumers, and jokingly suggests that the inability to easily do this with other companies' names (Fa\u00a2ebook? Appl\u20ac? Goog\u00a3e?)  is how they succeeded at amassing power where Micro$oft failed.\nMegan: Remember when we prosecuted Microsoft for bundling a browser with an OS? Imagine the future we'd live in if we'd been willing to let one tech company amass that much power. Ponytail: Thank God we nipped that in the bud.\n"}
{"id":1119,"title":"Undoing","image_title":"Undoing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1119","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/undoing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1119:_Undoing","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] My Hobby:\n[A large wind turbine is spinning but the electric cord has been severed and rewired to a large fan.]\n[Caption in large text below the panel:] Undoing\nA similar understanding of the difference between a wind turbine and a fan is presented by Megan in the later comic: 1378: Turbine .\nThis comic may be a continuation of Randall's mistrust of modern electric wind turbines (see 556: Alternative Energy Revolution ).\n","explanation":"The comic (another in the My Hobby series) is a play on how energy from natural resources (wind, sun, water) gets turned into electricity. Wind turbines convert the windpower into rotational energy, which can then be used to produce electricity. The one seen in the image is the most commonly known wind turbine, which sees use on wind farms. Wind turbines provide a renewable resource for homes and cities and a common method for sustainable energy. Turbines have been referenced before in xkcd, in 556: Alternative Energy Revolution .\nIn this comic, Cueball has rigged it so that the wind turbine powers a fan . He cut the power cable attaching the turbine to the power grid and spliced it with the power cord of a giant fan. The nailed-together 2x4s that form the \"tower\" for the fan further indicate the \" jury-rigged \" nature of Cueball's work. The electricity generated from the windpower is then used to power the fan, which in turn produces wind. This is in reference to the complementary nature of wind turbines and fans, which was also covered in 1378: Turbine .\nThe undoing part refers how Cueball is using this fan to restore the wind that was used to turn the wind turbine back to the original wind flow.\nWind turbines have a theoretical limit of 59% of the portion of wind captured. You can see the wind not captured detailed in the image as dotted, turbulent curly lines; turbulent flow. Cueball has placed the giant fan in the direction of the wind so that the wind it produced combines with the windpower not captured by the wind turbine. This is indicated by the lines smoothing, like they were at the start. Thus, not only is the electrical benefit undone, but also the change in natural wind currents.\nThe title text explains that he performs the same undoing process with solar cells, where light energy is converting into electricity using photovoltaic cells , which is then used to power lightbulbs for producing light on the area below them that the sun would normally illuminate. Solar panels only convert 20-25% of the energy captured from the sun into electricity. However, Cueball points out that he sees this as a 20% gain rather than an 80% loss. Since it is Cueball's hobby to literally waste time and energy, this makes perfect sense.\nIncandescent light bulbs only convert at most 5% of the electricity provided into light, the rest is lost as heat energy. Thus less than 1% of the energy absorbed from the original sunlight will be released as light from the bulb. LED bulbs can do quite a bit better, approaching 90% efficiency, releasing around 17% of the original sunlight, though in different frequencies.\nIn the case of the wind turbine and fan, the wind will unfortunately be moving at a much slower velocity than at the start as energy was lost in converting windpower to rotation energy, then to electricity, then back to rotational energy, then back to windpower. However, in the solar panel and lamp case, the light will be moving at the same speed as it entered the panel thanks to the constant nature of the speed of light, but be less bright instead.\n[Caption above the panel:] My Hobby:\n[A large wind turbine is spinning but the electric cord has been severed and rewired to a large fan.]\n[Caption in large text below the panel:] Undoing\nA similar understanding of the difference between a wind turbine and a fan is presented by Megan in the later comic: 1378: Turbine .\nThis comic may be a continuation of Randall's mistrust of modern electric wind turbines (see 556: Alternative Energy Revolution ).\n"}
{"id":1120,"title":"Blurring the Line","image_title":"Blurring the Line","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1120","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blurring_the_line.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1120:_Blurring_the_Line","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are walking.] White Hat: ...No, but see, it's a movie about movies. Cueball: Sounds like masturbatory navel-gazing.\n[Close-up of White Hat.] White Hat: No, it's about blurring the line between metaphor and reality. White Hat: You just don't know much about art. Cueball: Seriously?\n[White Hat and Cueball are standing.] Cueball: I know all about blurring the line between metaphor and reality. I'm the goddamn Michael Jordan of blurring the line between metaphor and reality.\n[White Hat is now standing alone in the panel.] White Hat: ...Huh?\n[A basketball appears from nowhere and hits White Hat in the head.] BONK\n","explanation":"A metaphor is a comparison which may be used to emphasize, explain or embellish a point, as seen in this comic when Cueball likens himself to Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan is a famous basketball player who is well known for being one of the very best basketball players (this saying was used before in 1027: Pickup Artist ).\nWhite Hat is analyzing a movie about movies when Cueball compares White Hat's description of the movie to masturbatory navel-gazing , a comment combining two expressions used to refer to a pointless activity or effort, but also specifically self-referential activity. \"Mental masturbation\" and \"navel gazing\" are relatively common terms to dismiss work that is regarded as self-indulgent, overly introspective, and self-referential. Calling navel gazing, or introspection, \"masturbatory\" is a metaphor speaking of it in terms of the physical act of masturbation .\nWhite Hat then defends the movie by saying that it is about blurring the line between metaphor and reality, commenting that Cueball doesn't understand art. To this Cueball retorts by likening his ability to meld metaphor and reality by using a metaphor comparing himself to Michael Jordan. He then proceeds to actually blur the line by throwing a basketball at White Hat. This can also be understood as another reality metaphor, passing the \"conversational ball\" to White Hat, or acting like Michael Jordan by playing basketball.\nThe last frame is also a graphic illustration of blurring the line between metaphor and reality, where a much more \"real\" depiction of a basketball intrudes into the colorless stick-figure world which serves as an abstraction of our shared reality.\nThe title text blurs the line between metaphor and reality by dragging both metaphors in the term \"masturbatory navel-gazing\" into reality and pointing out that literally staring at your navel is not going to be very effective at physical sexual self arousal, which is the goal of masturbation.\nAnother comic that blurs the line of a metaphor is 1320: Walmart .\n[White Hat and Cueball are walking.] White Hat: ...No, but see, it's a movie about movies. Cueball: Sounds like masturbatory navel-gazing.\n[Close-up of White Hat.] White Hat: No, it's about blurring the line between metaphor and reality. White Hat: You just don't know much about art. Cueball: Seriously?\n[White Hat and Cueball are standing.] Cueball: I know all about blurring the line between metaphor and reality. I'm the goddamn Michael Jordan of blurring the line between metaphor and reality.\n[White Hat is now standing alone in the panel.] White Hat: ...Huh?\n[A basketball appears from nowhere and hits White Hat in the head.] BONK\n"}
{"id":1121,"title":"Identity","image_title":"Identity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1121","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/identity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1121:_Identity","transcript":"Cueball: Hey, I lost the server password. What is it, again?\nMegan: It's\u2014 ...Wait. How do I know it's really you?\nCueball: Ooh, good question! I bet we can construct a cool proof-of-identity protocol. I'll start by picking two random\u2014 Megan: Oh good; it's you. Here's the password... Cueball: NO!\n","explanation":"Cueball lost the server password and is asking Megan what it is. Megan correctly comments that she can't be sure through text-based messages that it's really Cueball asking for the password; it could be someone impersonating him attempting to socially engineer access to the server. Cueball answers by starting to develop a cryptographic protocol they can use for proof of identity, probably something like OTR Messaging as implemented in many XMPP chat clients or Feige\u2013Fiat\u2013Shamir identification scheme . In reality, it would already be too late for that \u2014 they should have prepared something beforehand. Before he even finishes, Megan answers \"It's you\", meaning that no one else is so geeky that they would answer like that. Cueball, dismayed at the fact that his geekery has become a defining characteristic of his and also at a lost opportunity to devise his protocol, shouts [texts?] \"NO!\".\nIn the title text, Randall suggests that this is, in fact, his own personality, and that anyone reading the comic can now impersonate him. For a bonus, he notes his own fascination with the fact that birds are just modern dinosaurs , which one could use to impersonate him as well.\nCueball: Hey, I lost the server password. What is it, again?\nMegan: It's\u2014 ...Wait. How do I know it's really you?\nCueball: Ooh, good question! I bet we can construct a cool proof-of-identity protocol. I'll start by picking two random\u2014 Megan: Oh good; it's you. Here's the password... Cueball: NO!\n"}
{"id":1122,"title":"Electoral Precedent","image_title":"Electoral Precedent","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1122","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/electoral_precedent.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1122:_Electoral_Precedent","transcript":"The problem with statements like \"No <party> candidate has won the election without <state>\" Or \"No president has been reelected under <circumstances>\"\n[Each statement below has its own panel. The year is in a caption, the precedent is stated by a standing Cueball in the main panel, and the president who broke it is below the panel.] 1788... No one has been elected president before. ...But Washington was. 1792... No incumbent has ever been reelected. ...Until Washington. 1796... No one without false teeth has become president. ...But Adams did. 1800... No challenger has beaten an incumbent. ...But Jefferson did. 1804... No incumbent has beaten a challenger. ...Until Jefferson. 1808... No congressman has ever become president. ...Until Madison. 1812... No one can win without New York. ...But Madison did. 1816... No candidate who doesn't wear a wig can get elected. ...Until Monroe was. 1820... No one who wears pants instead of breeches can be reelected. ...But Monroe was. 1824... No one has ever won without a popular majority. ...J.Q. Adams did. 1828... Only people from Massachusetts and Virginia can win. ...Until Jackson did. 1832... The only presidents who get reelected are Virginians. ...Until Jackson. 1836... New Yorkers always lose. ...Until Van Buren. 1840... No one over 65 has won the presidency. ...Until Harrison did. 1844... No one who's lost his home state has won. ...But Polk did. 1848... As goes Mississippi, so goes the nation. ...Until 1848. 1852... New England Democrats can't win. ...Until Pierce did. 1856... No one can become president without getting married. ...Until Buchanan did. 1860... No one over 6'3\" can get elected. ...Until Lincoln. 1864... No one with a beard has been reelected. ...But Lincoln was. 1868... No one can be president if their parents are alive. ...Until Grant. 1872... No one with a beard has been reelected in peacetime. ...Until Grant was. 1876... No one can win a majority of the popular vote and still lose. ...Tilden did. 1880... As goes California, so goes the nation. ...Until it went Hancock. 1884... Candidates named \"James\" can't lose. ...Until James Blaine. 1888... No sitting president has been beaten since the Civil War. ...Cleveland was. 1892... No former president has been elected. ...Until Cleveland. 1896... Tall Midwesterners are unbeatable. ...Bryan wasn't. 1900... No Republican shorter than 5'8\" has been reelected. ...Until McKinley was. 1904... No one under 45 has been elected. ...Roosevelt did. 1908... No Republican who hasn't served in the military has won. ...Until Taft. [The precedent takes up the entire panel this year. Consequently, there is no Cueball.] 1912... After Lincoln beat the Democrats while sporting a beard with no mustache, the only Democrats who can win have a mustache with no beard. ...Wilson had neither. 1916... No Democrat has won while losing West Virginia. ...Wilson did. 1920... No incumbent senator has won. ...Until Harding. 1924... No one with two Cs in their name has become president. ...Until Calvin Coolidge. 1928... No one who got ten million votes has lost. ...Until Al Smith. 1932... No Democrat has won since women secured the right to vote. ...Until FDR did. 1936... No president's been reelected with double-digit unemployment. ...Until FDR was. 1940... No one has won a third term. ...Until FDR did. 1944... No Democrat has won during wartime. ...Until FDR did. 1948... Democrats can't win without Alabama. ...Truman did. 1952... No Republican has won without winning the House or Senate. ...Eisenhower did. 1956... No one can beat the same nominee a second time in a leap year rematch. ...Until Eisenhower. 1960... Catholics can't win. ...Until Kennedy. 1964... Every Republican who's taken Louisiana has won. ...Until Goldwater. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1968... No Republican vice president has risen to the Presidency through an election. ...Until Nixon. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1972... Quakers can't win twice. ...Until Nixon did. 1976... No one who lost New Mexico has won. ...But Carter did. 1980... No one has been elected president after a divorce. ...Until Reagan was. 1984... No left-handed president has been reelected. ...Until Reagan was. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1988... No one with two middle names has become president. ...Until \"Herbert Walker\". [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1992... No Democrat has won without a majority of the Catholic vote. ...Until Clinton did. [The precedent takes up the entire panel this year. Consequently, there is no Cueball.] 1996... No Dem. incumbent without combat experience has beaten someone whose first name is worth more in Scrabble. ...Until Bill beat Bob. 2000... No Republican has won without Vermont. ...Until Bush did. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 2004... No Republican without combat experience has beaten someone two inches taller ...Until Bush did. 2008... No Democrat can win without Missouri. ...Until Obama did. [This year has two panels.] 2012... [Panel one] Democratic incumbents never beat taller challengers. [Panel two] No nominee whose first name contains a \"K\" has lost. [Text under panels] Which streak will break?\n","explanation":"During election season in U.S. presidential elections \u2014 and especially in election night coverage \u2014 it is common for the media to make comments like the ones set out in the first panel of this comic. Randall is demonstrating the problem with making such statements, many of which simply come down to coincidence.\nAfter the first panel the next 56 panels in this comic refer to each one of the 56 presidential elections in U.S. history before Obama's re-election in 2012. The panels depict a pre-election commentator noting a quality or condition that has never occurred to a candidate until one of the candidates in that election broke the streak. In other words, one can always find at least one unique thing about a candidate who has gone on to win (or in some cases, lose) or the circumstances under which they won (or lost) that is unique from all previous winners (or losers). It's worth noting that some of these 'firsts' were truly precedent-setting (such as the first incumbent losing, the first president to win a third term, the first Catholic president, etc.), but the fact that they hadn't happened was no assurance that there wouldn't be a first time. As the years pass on, these 'streaks' become more and more nested and complicated, and then brought by Randall to the point of absurdity by pointing out very trivial things, such as \"No Democratic incumbent without combat experience has ever beaten someone whose first name is worth more in Scrabble \" (1996).\nThe flaw made by pundits while reporting such streaks is that there will always be something that has never happened before in an election, and they purport to suggest that these things are related to the candidate's win or loss. Randall considers this a logical flaw. A common one is, as noted in several panels, candidates can't win without winning certain states. The question, however, is one of cause or effect .\nGiven that there have only been 56 elections, there are always going to be things that haven't happened before. If you go out looking for them, you're sure to find some. There is no magic about why these events haven't happened. In most cases, it is merely a coincidence.\nIn the last two panels, two more statements like the previous are given. They were both true before the election in 2012 on November the 6th. The comic came out in the middle of the campaign on October the 17th. The statements were constructed so that the first predicts that Obama can't win over Mitt Romney , and the second that he cannot lose. As Obama won the election he thus ended the streak Democratic incumbents never beat taller challengers whereas the other streak is still valid.\nThe title text refers to the fact that Twitter was founded in 2006. Obama won in 2008, so at the time of the comic it was true that no white male person mentioned on Twitter had ever gone on to win the presidency; although certainly some former presidents, all of whom were white males, have subsequently been mentioned on Twitter. This streak was broken in the next election year when Donald Trump won the 2016 election.\nDuring these last four weeks before the election, Randall posted no fewer than four comics related to this election. The others are: 1127: Congress , 1130: Poll Watching and 1131: Math .\nIn 2020, Randall posted an update to this comic: 2383: Electoral Precedent 2020 .\n\nPlease have someone else validate your row, as to make sure the table is accurate\nThe problem with statements like \"No <party> candidate has won the election without <state>\" Or \"No president has been reelected under <circumstances>\"\n[Each statement below has its own panel. The year is in a caption, the precedent is stated by a standing Cueball in the main panel, and the president who broke it is below the panel.] 1788... No one has been elected president before. ...But Washington was. 1792... No incumbent has ever been reelected. ...Until Washington. 1796... No one without false teeth has become president. ...But Adams did. 1800... No challenger has beaten an incumbent. ...But Jefferson did. 1804... No incumbent has beaten a challenger. ...Until Jefferson. 1808... No congressman has ever become president. ...Until Madison. 1812... No one can win without New York. ...But Madison did. 1816... No candidate who doesn't wear a wig can get elected. ...Until Monroe was. 1820... No one who wears pants instead of breeches can be reelected. ...But Monroe was. 1824... No one has ever won without a popular majority. ...J.Q. Adams did. 1828... Only people from Massachusetts and Virginia can win. ...Until Jackson did. 1832... The only presidents who get reelected are Virginians. ...Until Jackson. 1836... New Yorkers always lose. ...Until Van Buren. 1840... No one over 65 has won the presidency. ...Until Harrison did. 1844... No one who's lost his home state has won. ...But Polk did. 1848... As goes Mississippi, so goes the nation. ...Until 1848. 1852... New England Democrats can't win. ...Until Pierce did. 1856... No one can become president without getting married. ...Until Buchanan did. 1860... No one over 6'3\" can get elected. ...Until Lincoln. 1864... No one with a beard has been reelected. ...But Lincoln was. 1868... No one can be president if their parents are alive. ...Until Grant. 1872... No one with a beard has been reelected in peacetime. ...Until Grant was. 1876... No one can win a majority of the popular vote and still lose. ...Tilden did. 1880... As goes California, so goes the nation. ...Until it went Hancock. 1884... Candidates named \"James\" can't lose. ...Until James Blaine. 1888... No sitting president has been beaten since the Civil War. ...Cleveland was. 1892... No former president has been elected. ...Until Cleveland. 1896... Tall Midwesterners are unbeatable. ...Bryan wasn't. 1900... No Republican shorter than 5'8\" has been reelected. ...Until McKinley was. 1904... No one under 45 has been elected. ...Roosevelt did. 1908... No Republican who hasn't served in the military has won. ...Until Taft. [The precedent takes up the entire panel this year. Consequently, there is no Cueball.] 1912... After Lincoln beat the Democrats while sporting a beard with no mustache, the only Democrats who can win have a mustache with no beard. ...Wilson had neither. 1916... No Democrat has won while losing West Virginia. ...Wilson did. 1920... No incumbent senator has won. ...Until Harding. 1924... No one with two Cs in their name has become president. ...Until Calvin Coolidge. 1928... No one who got ten million votes has lost. ...Until Al Smith. 1932... No Democrat has won since women secured the right to vote. ...Until FDR did. 1936... No president's been reelected with double-digit unemployment. ...Until FDR was. 1940... No one has won a third term. ...Until FDR did. 1944... No Democrat has won during wartime. ...Until FDR did. 1948... Democrats can't win without Alabama. ...Truman did. 1952... No Republican has won without winning the House or Senate. ...Eisenhower did. 1956... No one can beat the same nominee a second time in a leap year rematch. ...Until Eisenhower. 1960... Catholics can't win. ...Until Kennedy. 1964... Every Republican who's taken Louisiana has won. ...Until Goldwater. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1968... No Republican vice president has risen to the Presidency through an election. ...Until Nixon. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1972... Quakers can't win twice. ...Until Nixon did. 1976... No one who lost New Mexico has won. ...But Carter did. 1980... No one has been elected president after a divorce. ...Until Reagan was. 1984... No left-handed president has been reelected. ...Until Reagan was. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1988... No one with two middle names has become president. ...Until \"Herbert Walker\". [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1992... No Democrat has won without a majority of the Catholic vote. ...Until Clinton did. [The precedent takes up the entire panel this year. Consequently, there is no Cueball.] 1996... No Dem. incumbent without combat experience has beaten someone whose first name is worth more in Scrabble. ...Until Bill beat Bob. 2000... No Republican has won without Vermont. ...Until Bush did. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 2004... No Republican without combat experience has beaten someone two inches taller ...Until Bush did. 2008... No Democrat can win without Missouri. ...Until Obama did. [This year has two panels.] 2012... [Panel one] Democratic incumbents never beat taller challengers. [Panel two] No nominee whose first name contains a \"K\" has lost. [Text under panels] Which streak will break?\n"}
{"id":1123,"title":"The Universal Label","image_title":"The Universal Label","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1123","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_universal_label.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1123:_The_Universal_Label","transcript":"Ingredients: Hydrogen, Time\n","explanation":"All matter in the universe (heavier than lithium-7 ) was created through nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms inside stars over the 13.8 billion years that have gone by since the Big Bang . A detailed explanation (for the lay person) of this process is available in this article about Making Atoms .\nFrom this article (and from the wiki article on Big Bang) it is clear that our universe began not only with hydrogen. Although the majority of atoms produced by the Big Bang were hydrogen, lots of helium and traces of lithium were also produced. Actually about 25% of the non-dark mass in the universe comes from helium created shortly after the Big Bang. In stars, however, helium is also created directly from hydrogen atoms. So it would have been enough to just start out with hydrogen in the early universe. Given enough time, all the other elements would have been created inside these originally hydrogen-only stars. To make elements heavier than helium some of the elements created by hydrogen, will have to fuse subsequentially. And in order to make elements heavier than iron, a supernova explosion is needed. But in either case it is still products of hydrogen that fuse together.\nIn many countries, food products must have their ingredients displayed somewhere on their packaging. Because all the ingredients in any food are either hydrogen or heavier atoms created through stellar nuclear fusion from hydrogen over time, the ingredients of any items can technically be described fully as only being made from hydrogen and time. Thus this label would be the universal label. A pun on two of the meanings of the word universal . Any food is of course universal as in a part of the universe. But the label can also be a universal label as in a common label for all food or any other product in the universe, as well as the universe itself for that matter .\nThe title text first makes it clear that this works both for any grocery as well as any non-grocery, which as described above simply means anything else. It then goes on to making a pun on the words thyme (a herb) and time , as the two words are homophones . \"H\" is the chemical symbol for hydrogen thus completing the pun by noticing that the word \"thyme\" can be made by adding the letter \"h\" to \"tyme\" which would be a homophone even closer to the word time.\nRandall previously made a joke on the fact that thyme and time are homophones in 282: Organic Fuel .\nIngredients: Hydrogen, Time\n"}
{"id":1124,"title":"Law of Drama","image_title":"Law of Drama","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1124","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/law_of_drama.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1124:_Law_of_Drama","transcript":"[A Cartesian graph labeled 'How often someone declares that they hate \"drama\" and always avoid it' on the x-axis and 'Rate at which they create drama' labeled on the y-axis. The graph is a slightly exponential curve sloping upwards.]\n","explanation":"The comic comments on how often people who label themselves as an innocent party in a debate are often far from it. Essentially, Randall seems to be graphically stating that people who claim to hate and want to avoid drama are invariably associated with it. Since correlation does not imply causation , it might be a leap \u2014 at least scientifically speaking \u2014 to actually surmise that they're the cause of it.\nThe title text suggests that the person's attitude towards drama is wrong. Supposing that \"'Drama' is just 'people being upset'\", then ignoring drama is a very bad way to deal with it. By ignoring people's problems, you certainly won't be able to help them, and are at risk of causing further problems through ignorance.\n[A Cartesian graph labeled 'How often someone declares that they hate \"drama\" and always avoid it' on the x-axis and 'Rate at which they create drama' labeled on the y-axis. The graph is a slightly exponential curve sloping upwards.]\n"}
{"id":1125,"title":"Objects In Mirror","image_title":"Objects In Mirror","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1125","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/objects_in_mirror.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1125:_Objects_In_Mirror","transcript":"[View of a car mirror and outside view of landscape, with clouds and mountains. The mirror reads \"Objects in mirror are bluer than they appear.\"] [Caption below the panel:] Edwin Hubble's car\n","explanation":"\"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear\" is a required, although marginally ridiculous, \"safety warning\" required to be engraved on passenger side mirrors of motor vehicles in the USA, Canada and Korea. These mirrors in these countries are typically the only ones that are slightly convex, making objects appear smaller (and farther away) than their true size. Other countries often have convexity in driver-side and passenger-side rearview mirrors to give a larger field of view, at the cost of natural distance proportions of the mirror image, without making any statements about it on the mirror itself using engravings.\nThis comic is a reference to the phenomena known as redshift \/ blueshift . Due to the Doppler effect , objects that are moving toward an observer appear bluer than they actually are (known as blueshift). Objects moving away from the observer (e.g. objects viewed in the rear-view mirror of a moving vehicle) appear redder than they actually are (known as redshift), and thus the objects are in reality bluer than they appear. This is generally relevant only in terms of high speed motion such as observation of the expansion of the universe in astrophysics. The joke is that the relative speed of any object visible in a side-view mirror would create an insignificant and unobservable redshift.\nAnother possible explanation is that the redshift refers to the actual reflection itself.\nAs photons are reflected in a mirror, momentum is transferred and thereby they lose a very small amount of energy. This loss of energy results in a slight redshift of the light. (This effect is similar to compton scattering .)\nEdwin Hubble was an astronomer credited ( amid some controversy ) with \" Hubble's Law ,\" which states that a Doppler shift can be observed for objects in deep space moving with relative velocity to Earth and that their velocity is proportional to their distance from Earth. Probably the most famous application of the law was measurement of relative velocities of galaxies, such as those seen in the picture known as Hubble Deep Field , taken by the Hubble Space Telescope . The results proved that most galaxies keep getting farther apart as a result of expansion of the universe. This is one of many pieces of evidence supporting the Big Bang theory.\nThe title text references that we see the universe as it was in the past (due to the distances involved and the speed of light), when it was smaller than it is today. It may also be a reference to comic 1110: Click and Drag .\n[View of a car mirror and outside view of landscape, with clouds and mountains. The mirror reads \"Objects in mirror are bluer than they appear.\"] [Caption below the panel:] Edwin Hubble's car\n"}
{"id":1126,"title":"Epsilon and Zeta","image_title":"Epsilon and Zeta","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1126","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/epsilon_and_zeta.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1126:_Epsilon_and_Zeta","transcript":"THE SAGA OF EPSILON AND ZETA The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season saw devastating storms like Katrina and Rita. But less well-remembered is just how strange the season got toward the end. The forecasters at the National Hurricane Center are the best of the best. Their predictions are masterpieces of professional analysis. But in November 2005, out in the center of the Atlantic \u2014 far from any land \u2014 the atmosphere stopped making sense. And the forecasters \u2014 who'd expected the season to be long over by now \u2014 started to get a little\u0085...unhinged. This is their story, as seen through the actual 2005 NHC Advisories:\n[Two men, one bald and one not, sit looking at their respective computers, at separate desks, back to back. The advisory is printed above them in caps small-caps Courier type.] Tuesday, November 29th, 2005: Tropical Storm Epsilon ... The 26th named storm of the apparently never ending 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.\n[The same scene, different text.] 10 PM Wed: The window of opportunity for strengthening should close in 12-24 hr. 4 PM Thu: Slow but steady weakening is expected to begin in 12-24 hours.\n[The man with hair now has questions marks above his head.] 4 AM Fri: Epsilon does not appear weaker. 10 AM Fri: Epsilon has been upgraded to a 65-kt hurricane.\n[The two still sit back-to-back.] 4 PM Sat: Epsilon has continued to strengthen against all odds ... [but] can not maintain the current intensity much longer since the environment is becoming increasingly unfavorable.\n[The two still sit back-to-back.] 10 PM Sat: Epsilon might or might not still be a hurricane ... but in any case it likely will not be one on Sunday. 4 AM Sun: Epsilon is downgraded to a tropical storm.\n[The two still sit back-to-back. The man with hair's fists are clenched.]\u00a0:10 AM Sun: Morning satellite images indicate that Epsilon has restrengthened.\n[A closer view of just the balding man at his desk.] There are no clear reasons ... and I am not going to make one up ... to explain the recent strengthening of Epsilon and I am just describing the facts. However ... I still have to make an intensity forecast and the best bet at this time is to predict weakening ... Epsilon will likely become a remnant low. I heard that before about epsilon ... haven't you?\n[The two men still sit back to back, but the man with hair is now turning his head toward the other man, with his arm resting on the back of his chair. The bald man is leaning forward in his seat, toward his computer while typing.] 4 PM Mon: The cloud pattern continues to be remarkably well-organized for a hurricane at such high latitude in December.\n[The other man has turned back to his own screen.] 10 PM Mon: We have said this before ... but Epsilon really does not appear as strong this evening as it did this afternoon.\n[Just the bald guy now.] 4 AM Tue: I have run out of things to say.\n[The two of them again.] 10 PM Tue: The end is in sight. It really really is. But in the meantime ... Epsilon continues to maintain hurricane status. 4 AM Wed: The end is in sight ... yes ... but not quiet yet. I thought I was going to find a weakening system and instead I found that Epsilon is still a hurricane.\n[The two of them still.] 10 AM Thu: Convection has vanished and Epsilon is now a tight swirl of low clouds. I hope this is the end of the long lasting 2005 hurricane season.\n[This panel is blank and just reads: Nope.] NOPE.\n[The men are still at their desks. The bald man is leaning back on his chair and staring at his screen, taking his keyboard out of his desk; the other man's hair is noticeably disheveled, and he has started growing a five o'clock shadow.] Enter Tropical Storm Zeta. Friday, December 30th, 2005: An elongated area of low pressure ... which had its origins in an old frontal trough ... began developing organized convection overnight. Advisories are initiated on the 27th tropical storm of 2005.\n[The men are still at their desks, the man with hair is even more bedraggled-looking.] Any new storms would be in the 2006 season. 4PM Fri: Although the atmosphere seems to want to develop tropical storms ad nauseam ... the calendar will shortly put an end to the use of the Greek alphabet to name them.\n[The bald man is now wearing a party hat and has a party horn in his mouth, and there is confetti in the air.] But 2005's wouldn't end until Zeta did. 10 PM Sat: Zeta appeared on the verge of losing all of its deep convection a few hours ago ... but since about 21z the convection has been on somewhat of an increase again.\n[A close view of the man with hair at his desk.] 10 PM Sun: This is like Epsilon all over again. Most of the conventional guidance suggested that zeta should have been dissipated by now ... well ... zeta is pretty much alive at this time. I have no choice but to forecast weakening again and again.\n[The two of them again.] 4 AM Mon: By 24-36 hours ... a significant increase in westerly winds ... should act to shear away most of the associated convection ... and finally bring the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season to a merciful ending. 4 PM Mon: It is hard to conceive that a tropical cyclone will be able to survive for very long in such a hostile environment. therefore I have not backed off on the forecast of weakening.\n[The two of them again. Both men have clenched fists rested back from their keyboards, frustrated.] 10 PM Mon: Zeta is stronger than yesterday. 10 AM Wed: As you can see... I ran out of things to say.\n[Both men put up their keyboards...] 4 AM Thu: Satellite intensity estimates have decreased. Zeta is downgraded to a 30 kt tropical depression.\n[...only to start typing on them again.] 10 AM Thu: Shortly after the previous advisory had been issued ... regretfully ... the intensity ... increased to 35 kt and Zeta is a tropical storm once again.\n[The two of them again.] 10 PM Thu: Although it seems as if Zeta will never die ... the forecast continues to show weakening.\n[Both men are now leaning back in their chairs, exhausted, their keyboards put away.] 4 PM, Friday, January 6, 2006: Zeta no longer meets the criteria of a tropical cyclone... which means that both it and the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season have ended. This is the national hurricane center signing off for 2005.\n[The bald man still sits at his desk, the man with hair is no longer in his chair.]\n[Again, we see the bald man at his desk and the other guy's empty desk.] Bald guy: Actually, Zeta's cloud pattern is... Hair guy: (out of panel) NO . Bald guy: Ok.\n","explanation":"This comic seems to be a parody of songs such as The Ballad of John and Yoko that tell the story of two people falling in love, with the noticeable variation that the 'protagonists' are hurricanes instead of people.\nThe Atlantic hurricane season normally runs from June to November. Randall is imagining the situation in the National Hurricane Center when the 2005 season was extended more than a month by the appearance of Hurricane Epsilon and Tropical Storm Zeta . He imagines the situation as NOAA meteorologists watch with amazement (and increasing annoyance as they were presumably unable to move off to other things such as post-season analysis) as Hurricane Epsilon and Zeta continued to exist far beyond the normal end-of-season date (November 30).\nThe monospaced text in most of the panels is material taken from actual NHC reports from that season. The commentary has been edited to fit the comic's format, but it's otherwise faithful to the actual reports. While the only change to Forecaster 1 is when he's celebrating New Year's Eve, Forecaster 2 is visibly losing it after the appearance of Zeta in late December, with unkempt hair and an unshaven beard.\nThe last report of the 2005 season was issued on January 6, 2006.\nA full analysis of the 2005 hurricane season can be found here .\nNHC reports on Epsilion and Zeta:\nRandall has discussed the seemingly erratic nature of hurricanes before. This may, however, have been a response to the recent Hurricane Sandy .\nThe text also seems to be a parody of horror stories\/movies, and their theme of writing.\nTHE SAGA OF EPSILON AND ZETA The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season saw devastating storms like Katrina and Rita. But less well-remembered is just how strange the season got toward the end. The forecasters at the National Hurricane Center are the best of the best. Their predictions are masterpieces of professional analysis. But in November 2005, out in the center of the Atlantic \u2014 far from any land \u2014 the atmosphere stopped making sense. And the forecasters \u2014 who'd expected the season to be long over by now \u2014 started to get a little\u0085...unhinged. This is their story, as seen through the actual 2005 NHC Advisories:\n[Two men, one bald and one not, sit looking at their respective computers, at separate desks, back to back. The advisory is printed above them in caps small-caps Courier type.] Tuesday, November 29th, 2005: Tropical Storm Epsilon ... The 26th named storm of the apparently never ending 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.\n[The same scene, different text.] 10 PM Wed: The window of opportunity for strengthening should close in 12-24 hr. 4 PM Thu: Slow but steady weakening is expected to begin in 12-24 hours.\n[The man with hair now has questions marks above his head.] 4 AM Fri: Epsilon does not appear weaker. 10 AM Fri: Epsilon has been upgraded to a 65-kt hurricane.\n[The two still sit back-to-back.] 4 PM Sat: Epsilon has continued to strengthen against all odds ... [but] can not maintain the current intensity much longer since the environment is becoming increasingly unfavorable.\n[The two still sit back-to-back.] 10 PM Sat: Epsilon might or might not still be a hurricane ... but in any case it likely will not be one on Sunday. 4 AM Sun: Epsilon is downgraded to a tropical storm.\n[The two still sit back-to-back. The man with hair's fists are clenched.]\u00a0:10 AM Sun: Morning satellite images indicate that Epsilon has restrengthened.\n[A closer view of just the balding man at his desk.] There are no clear reasons ... and I am not going to make one up ... to explain the recent strengthening of Epsilon and I am just describing the facts. However ... I still have to make an intensity forecast and the best bet at this time is to predict weakening ... Epsilon will likely become a remnant low. I heard that before about epsilon ... haven't you?\n[The two men still sit back to back, but the man with hair is now turning his head toward the other man, with his arm resting on the back of his chair. The bald man is leaning forward in his seat, toward his computer while typing.] 4 PM Mon: The cloud pattern continues to be remarkably well-organized for a hurricane at such high latitude in December.\n[The other man has turned back to his own screen.] 10 PM Mon: We have said this before ... but Epsilon really does not appear as strong this evening as it did this afternoon.\n[Just the bald guy now.] 4 AM Tue: I have run out of things to say.\n[The two of them again.] 10 PM Tue: The end is in sight. It really really is. But in the meantime ... Epsilon continues to maintain hurricane status. 4 AM Wed: The end is in sight ... yes ... but not quiet yet. I thought I was going to find a weakening system and instead I found that Epsilon is still a hurricane.\n[The two of them still.] 10 AM Thu: Convection has vanished and Epsilon is now a tight swirl of low clouds. I hope this is the end of the long lasting 2005 hurricane season.\n[This panel is blank and just reads: Nope.] NOPE.\n[The men are still at their desks. The bald man is leaning back on his chair and staring at his screen, taking his keyboard out of his desk; the other man's hair is noticeably disheveled, and he has started growing a five o'clock shadow.] Enter Tropical Storm Zeta. Friday, December 30th, 2005: An elongated area of low pressure ... which had its origins in an old frontal trough ... began developing organized convection overnight. Advisories are initiated on the 27th tropical storm of 2005.\n[The men are still at their desks, the man with hair is even more bedraggled-looking.] Any new storms would be in the 2006 season. 4PM Fri: Although the atmosphere seems to want to develop tropical storms ad nauseam ... the calendar will shortly put an end to the use of the Greek alphabet to name them.\n[The bald man is now wearing a party hat and has a party horn in his mouth, and there is confetti in the air.] But 2005's wouldn't end until Zeta did. 10 PM Sat: Zeta appeared on the verge of losing all of its deep convection a few hours ago ... but since about 21z the convection has been on somewhat of an increase again.\n[A close view of the man with hair at his desk.] 10 PM Sun: This is like Epsilon all over again. Most of the conventional guidance suggested that zeta should have been dissipated by now ... well ... zeta is pretty much alive at this time. I have no choice but to forecast weakening again and again.\n[The two of them again.] 4 AM Mon: By 24-36 hours ... a significant increase in westerly winds ... should act to shear away most of the associated convection ... and finally bring the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season to a merciful ending. 4 PM Mon: It is hard to conceive that a tropical cyclone will be able to survive for very long in such a hostile environment. therefore I have not backed off on the forecast of weakening.\n[The two of them again. Both men have clenched fists rested back from their keyboards, frustrated.] 10 PM Mon: Zeta is stronger than yesterday. 10 AM Wed: As you can see... I ran out of things to say.\n[Both men put up their keyboards...] 4 AM Thu: Satellite intensity estimates have decreased. Zeta is downgraded to a 30 kt tropical depression.\n[...only to start typing on them again.] 10 AM Thu: Shortly after the previous advisory had been issued ... regretfully ... the intensity ... increased to 35 kt and Zeta is a tropical storm once again.\n[The two of them again.] 10 PM Thu: Although it seems as if Zeta will never die ... the forecast continues to show weakening.\n[Both men are now leaning back in their chairs, exhausted, their keyboards put away.] 4 PM, Friday, January 6, 2006: Zeta no longer meets the criteria of a tropical cyclone... which means that both it and the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season have ended. This is the national hurricane center signing off for 2005.\n[The bald man still sits at his desk, the man with hair is no longer in his chair.]\n[Again, we see the bald man at his desk and the other guy's empty desk.] Bald guy: Actually, Zeta's cloud pattern is... Hair guy: (out of panel) NO . Bald guy: Ok.\n"}
{"id":1127,"title":"Congress","image_title":"Congress","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1127","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/congress.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1127:_Congress","transcript":"A history of The United States Congress Partisan and ideological makeup\n[The comic is divided into three massive sections, SENATE, PRESIDENCIES, and HOUSE. Timelines run backwards down the page between each section. In the HOUSE and SENATE sections, shifting, curving red and blue areas of different brightness illustrate the shifting balance of power between \"Members of Left-Leaning Parties\" and \"Members of Right-Leaning Parties\". Under PRESIDENCIES, different administrations are labeled and wars are shaded in gray. There are notes throughout all sections.]\n[There are additional notes on the right.]\nLEGEND [Square containing ribbons of color merging upwards with larger areas] : Branches join in when new members enter Congress and cause an ideological bloc to grow. (Note: If the new member is elected as another retires from the same ideological bloc, no change is shown.) [Square containing ribbons of color splitting off from larger areas] : Branches split off when members leave Congress, causing their ideological bloc to shrink. (Note: If the new member is elected as another retires from the same ideological bloc, no change is shown.) [Square showing yellow dotted line crossing from red to blue area] : The yellow line marks the midpoint, which indicates which side has control of the chamber. [Square in which curve briefly separates from blue area] : If a bloc loses members in one election and gains them in the next, the exiting stream may rejoin. This does not necessarily mean the same people returned. [Square showing white dashed line labeled Lyndon Johnson on top of ribbon merging with main area] : Future (and past) US Presidents who served in Congress are shown with white dashed lines. Other noteworthy members are shown with thin solid lines. [Square in which tinted area marked \"Whig\" sits over mix of red and blue areas] : Tinted white outlines mark the approximate membership of some of the smaller political parties.\nHOW IDEOLOGY IS CALCULATED Each member of Congress is assigned to an ideological category using DW-NOMINATE, a statistical system created by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. This system rates each member of Congress's ideological position position [sic] based on their votes. DW-NOMINATE is purely mathematical and involves no judgement on the content of bills. Instead, members of Congress are placed on a spectrum based on how consistently they vote together. While people argue that ideology is many-dimensional, Poole and Rosenthal found that nearly all Congressional voting behavior - especially in the modern era - can be accurately predicted by using just one ideological variable. This variable turns out to roughly correspond to position on the classic economic liberal\/conservative spectrum. Because members of Congress have served in overlapping terms with past members in a chain back to the first Congress, the system allows comparison of ideology across time - even accounting for individual members' ideological drift. (Note: Scores are comparable across time but not between chambers.) For more detail, see Poole and Rosenthal's website, voteview.com.\n\n","explanation":"It appears that the (at the time) upcoming 2012 election has put Randall into a political state of mind, as this is the second comic in a few weeks that has dealt with political history ( 1122: Electoral Precedent ). As with that comic, this comic goes through the entire history of the U.S. Federal Government . Also notably, Randall makes a number of observations that are akin to the type of observations Randall denounces in 1122 (e.g. for 1928, Randall notes that no Republican has since won the presidency without a Nixon or a Bush on the ticket). Just around the election he posted two more comics related to this: 1130: Poll Watching and 1131: Math .\nIn the U.S. Federal Government , one of the checks and balances is a bicameral United States Congress , which consists of two \"houses\": the Senate , its \"upper\" house; and the House of Representatives (\"the House\"), its \"lower house\". The Senate consists of 2 senators elected from each state (thus 100 total), while the House consists of 435 voting representatives (a number decided upon in 1911 by law) whose apportionment is split between the states proportional to their population; although each state gets at least one (the House also has non-voting representatives from non-state territories like Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia ). Every ten years, the House is reapportioned based on the latest census. The most populous state as of 2012 is California which has 53 seats in the House. Senators serve 6-year terms with elections held every 2 years for one-third of the seats. Members of the House (called Representatives or Congressmen\/women) serve 2-year terms with all of the seats contested every 2 years.\nIn order for a bill to become a law, it must be passed by both the House and the Senate. In a way, this theoretically ensures that the bill is supported both by the majority of states (the Senate), and the majority of the population (the House). The President may then sign the bill into law, he may \"veto\" the bill, or he may do nothing, in which case it becomes a law if and only if Congress is in session after a waiting period of 10 days (not including Sundays).\nIn politics, there is a scale that represents the political beliefs of a politician. The scale goes from \" left \" to \" right \" of \"center\" \u2014 which generally describes a balancing point of beliefs (sometimes called \"left-wing\" or \"right-wing\").\nThe \"left\" is a general belief in social justice, and is sometimes associated with socialism . Modern left-wingers generally prioritize equality, and support policies like welfare and government-subsidized healthcare. This trends toward having a larger federal government. In the U.S., \"liberal\" is a term often used to denote left-leaning tendencies.\nThe \"right\" generally believe in personal responsibility and individual liberty, which is often termed conservative . This trends towards having less regulation and thereby a smaller federal government. The goal is to keep the nation stable, and reducing the interference by the government with a person's wealth. This ostensibly means lower taxes, because the government does not provide as much.\nPoliticians typically align themselves into groups of similar beliefs and positions called \"parties\". In the U.S., there have generally been two dominant parties, although there have been times where three or more parties have shared roughly equal influence and support. In today's politics (which is apparently known as (the second part of) the fifth era of political parties, or Fifth Party System , as noted on the outside edges of the comic) of the two current primary U.S. political parties, the Democrats are the left-leaning party, and the Republicans are the right-leaning party. The dominant parties are generally considered \"moderate\" in their left- or right-wing leanings, as either party appears to requires the support of a majority (or a few percent under) of voters to win. However, this is complicated by a process called gerrymandering where election boundaries are redrawn to allow a political advantage to the party currently in power. Thus a popular majority state wide or any ratio of votes to representatives will not necessarily be reflected in delegates awarded, an example being the Republicans' REDMAP 2012 report ( [1] ). Smaller parties often run candidates with more extreme views, but such candidates rarely win, due to a more limited number of possible supporters ensuring that even a relatively large minority would have zero chance of representation. (see Duverger's law ).\nThe comic effectively consists of three separate charts: The left- and right-hand charts are the main charts; they represent the Senate and House respectively, and purport to show the left- and right-wing leanings of each legislature through U.S. history. There is a legend on the right that sets out fairly clearly how the charts work, but basically Randall has split each wing into three levels including the very moderate or \"Center\" right or left, and the more extreme or \"Far\" right or left, as well as the average left and right without prefix. A dotted yellow line represents the balance of power in each legislature, and white lines represent the leanings of certain notable people including presidents.\nSome presidents are not indicated, because they were never senators or congressmen (most of these were state Governors, such as Clinton , Bush and 2012 candidate Mitt Romney ). As may be noted from the chart, Barack Obama is considered \"left\" while Paul Ryan is considered \"far right\". It's also notable that the \"center right\" ideology appears to be completely eradicated from the House and is waning in the Senate (although a similar trend is shown around 1900 with the centrists making a comeback thereafter).\nOn either side of these charts, there are descriptions or explanations for expansions and contractions of each ideological group.\nThe center chart appears to primarily act as a timeline. Each president is listed with their leanings indicated by a left or right arrow. Wars are shaded in grey. Other notable events are also indicated. On either side of the center chart (although somewhat mixed in with the aforementioned Senate\/House explanations), there are also references to the primary parties of each era showing how they evolved (left-leaning parties on the left, and right-leaning parties on the right).\nFinally, there's a little extra commentary on the right side, below the legend.\nThe title text refers to two political parties in American history: the Federalists and the Jacksonians.\nNote that this means the two parties are not strictly contemporaries. There are features of both the modern Republican and Democratic parties in each, so depending on the topic presented, it may take a long time to figure out that they are not these modern parties until the topic of discussion changes. They do, however, make a nice dichotomy.\nThe Federalists are one of the oldest political parties in American History. Federalists were seen as conservative in their time, and similarly to modern Republicans much of their support came from bankers and businessmen and they were committed to a fiscally sound and government, but on the flip side they favored a strong central government, regulation of industry, a national banking system, and were protectionistic.\nThe Jacksonian party is one of the four branches of the Democratic Party that developed during the political chaos after the Federalist party died out in the War of 1812. The Jacksonians were considered liberal for their time, they believed in one man, one vote, regardless of standing, and their mascot was a donkey and they're the ancestors of the modern Democratic Party, but on the flip side they did not want a strong national government and believed that the government should have limited impact in the regulation of industry, going so far as to end the bank of the United States, and were fiercely expansionistic.\nNetwork news channels regularly feature talking heads , supposed 'experts' who offer their opinion on the topical political stories. Where these talking heads are strongly aligned with a particular party, and are unconcerned with anything other than winning, they could be described as a partisan hacks .\nA history of The United States Congress Partisan and ideological makeup\n[The comic is divided into three massive sections, SENATE, PRESIDENCIES, and HOUSE. Timelines run backwards down the page between each section. In the HOUSE and SENATE sections, shifting, curving red and blue areas of different brightness illustrate the shifting balance of power between \"Members of Left-Leaning Parties\" and \"Members of Right-Leaning Parties\". Under PRESIDENCIES, different administrations are labeled and wars are shaded in gray. There are notes throughout all sections.]\n[There are additional notes on the right.]\nLEGEND [Square containing ribbons of color merging upwards with larger areas] : Branches join in when new members enter Congress and cause an ideological bloc to grow. (Note: If the new member is elected as another retires from the same ideological bloc, no change is shown.) [Square containing ribbons of color splitting off from larger areas] : Branches split off when members leave Congress, causing their ideological bloc to shrink. (Note: If the new member is elected as another retires from the same ideological bloc, no change is shown.) [Square showing yellow dotted line crossing from red to blue area] : The yellow line marks the midpoint, which indicates which side has control of the chamber. [Square in which curve briefly separates from blue area] : If a bloc loses members in one election and gains them in the next, the exiting stream may rejoin. This does not necessarily mean the same people returned. [Square showing white dashed line labeled Lyndon Johnson on top of ribbon merging with main area] : Future (and past) US Presidents who served in Congress are shown with white dashed lines. Other noteworthy members are shown with thin solid lines. [Square in which tinted area marked \"Whig\" sits over mix of red and blue areas] : Tinted white outlines mark the approximate membership of some of the smaller political parties.\nHOW IDEOLOGY IS CALCULATED Each member of Congress is assigned to an ideological category using DW-NOMINATE, a statistical system created by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. This system rates each member of Congress's ideological position position [sic] based on their votes. DW-NOMINATE is purely mathematical and involves no judgement on the content of bills. Instead, members of Congress are placed on a spectrum based on how consistently they vote together. While people argue that ideology is many-dimensional, Poole and Rosenthal found that nearly all Congressional voting behavior - especially in the modern era - can be accurately predicted by using just one ideological variable. This variable turns out to roughly correspond to position on the classic economic liberal\/conservative spectrum. Because members of Congress have served in overlapping terms with past members in a chain back to the first Congress, the system allows comparison of ideology across time - even accounting for individual members' ideological drift. (Note: Scores are comparable across time but not between chambers.) For more detail, see Poole and Rosenthal's website, voteview.com.\n\n"}
{"id":1128,"title":"Fifty Shades","image_title":"Fifty Shades","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1128","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fifty_shades.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1128:_Fifty_Shades","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting on the floor watching his TV standing on a small table. He is leaning back on one arm resting the other arms hand on his knee. Light is coming out from the TV screen, as shown with nine small lines. A a high sound is shown above the TV in a starburst and the sound of a dog barking is coming out from the screen with a line indicating this. Above the drawings ther are two paragraphs of text:] As with most famous books, I've never actually read Fifty Shades of Grey. I only know the plot from watching the Wishbone version. Dog in movie: Bark! Dog in movie: Bark! Sound: Smack! Dog in movie: Bark!:\n","explanation":"Fifty Shades of Grey is a best-selling novel featuring large quantities of BDSM sex. Wishbone was a children's TV show about a dog who draws parallels between literature and real life in his dreams, reenacting many literary classics. The show was especially praised in its time for refusing to censor the more unpleasant aspects of its source work. Many people within Randall 's age group have experienced more literary classics through Wishbone than by actually reading them; this phenomenon lead to the formation of a Facebook group (now replaced by a page ) with over 70,000 members dedicated to that idea.\nIn the comic, Cueball claims to have learned all that he knows about Fifty Shades of Grey from the Wishbone adaptation of the book. Knowing the faithful nature of Wishbone' s adaptations, an episode on the book would likely involve age-inappropriate material for children, as the sounds emanating from the TV would suggest.\nIn the title text:\nPart of the title text joke is that the latter two works would not likely be the subject of Great Illustrated Classics or Wishbone . However, the title text may be actually technically 100% correct, if Randall hasn't ever had an in-depth conversation about either of the latter two works.\nThe book was later made into a film which was referenced in 1585: Similarities almost three years later.\n[Cueball is sitting on the floor watching his TV standing on a small table. He is leaning back on one arm resting the other arms hand on his knee. Light is coming out from the TV screen, as shown with nine small lines. A a high sound is shown above the TV in a starburst and the sound of a dog barking is coming out from the screen with a line indicating this. Above the drawings ther are two paragraphs of text:] As with most famous books, I've never actually read Fifty Shades of Grey. I only know the plot from watching the Wishbone version. Dog in movie: Bark! Dog in movie: Bark! Sound: Smack! Dog in movie: Bark!:\n"}
{"id":1129,"title":"Cell Number","image_title":"Cell Number","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1129","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cell_number.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1129:_Cell_Number","transcript":"[10 boxes for 10 digits of a U.S. phone number. The first three are grouped by parentheses. A hyphen separates the second set of three and the last four.] [Label titled \"Your seven random digits\" pointing at seven empty boxes.] [Label titled \"Where you lived in 2005\" pointing at three empty boxes preceding the seven.] Structure of a US cell phone number.\n","explanation":"This comic references the pattern for US telephone numbers, which are ten digits in length. Unlike in other countries, there is no quick way to determine whether that number is for a land-line or mobile customer. In either case, the first three digits are referred to as the \" area code \", a term dating back to before the proliferation of mobile phones, when specific codes were assigned to geographic regions. The next three digits had some rules based on the telephone exchange but as Randall says, those and the final four numbers are essentially meaningless.\nIn the early days of the mobile era, the geography-based numbering still applied to new mobile lines, so mobile phones would have the same area code as owners' home numbers. Late in 2003, US telephone service providers were required to support \"number portability\", meaning that customers could theoretically take their mobile phone number with them to a new provider, even when moving to a distant new location. In the early days this wasn't always very easy to do, but became commonplace within a couple years. Since most users opt to keep their numbers constant whenever possible, numbers generally stopped changing after about 2005, instead of shifting when people moved like they were forced to in previous years. Therefore, examination of a given phone number will likely tell you where its owner was living at that time, since their number would not have changed after 2005 due to the portability law.\n\"+1\" is the international call prefix for the North American Numbering Plan.\nGoogle Voice is an alternate voice over IP service. Upon signing up, users can choose any available new 10-digit number without regard to geographic area. Among other things, this allows the earlier users to choose \"cool numbers\" if desired, such as ones that correspond to phonewords or have a pleasing pattern. In the past, this \"vanity numbering\" was typically only available to businesses via toll-free numbers . Some mobile service providers began allowing similar customization after the portability law, but often still restricted new numbers by area code, keeping the availability of \"cool numbers\" low until Google Voice launched.\n[10 boxes for 10 digits of a U.S. phone number. The first three are grouped by parentheses. A hyphen separates the second set of three and the last four.] [Label titled \"Your seven random digits\" pointing at seven empty boxes.] [Label titled \"Where you lived in 2005\" pointing at three empty boxes preceding the seven.] Structure of a US cell phone number.\n"}
{"id":1130,"title":"Poll Watching","image_title":"Poll Watching","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1130","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/poll_watching.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1130:_Poll_Watching","transcript":"[Cueball kneels on his desk chair, hunched over a laptop] Cueball: This Tuesday will be huge! Cueball: If Obama wins the election, it could generate news coverage devastating to Romney's position in the tracking polls! Offscreen character: ... Maybe you should take a break.\n","explanation":"This is a comic about the 2012 U.S. presidential election , as it was posted the day before the election on November 6, 2012 (\"this Tuesday\"). It is the third comic on the subject, the previous two being 1122: Electoral Precedent and 1127: Congress . And the next comic 1131: Math continues the issue raised in this one.\nIn the comic, Cueball is glued to his laptop reading media coverage of the election. The offscreen character remarks that Cueball should take a break, suggesting that Cueball has been reading media coverage for quite a while.\nCueball is so caught up in media coverage that he is speculating on the effect that incumbent President Obama winning the election (and the resulting news coverage) could have on challenger Mitt Romney 's campaign. The joke is that the end-goal of Romney's campaign is to win the election. If Obama wins, the campaigning is already over, regardless of media coverage. Cueball is simply so invested that he overanalyzes potential scenarios and fails to see the big picture.\nSpecifically, he has become so concerned with following the polls that he's lost sight of their purpose as a predictive tool. After the election is over, polling becomes trivial since the result they are intended to forecast is already known (and so in reality will not be conducted at all). This is possibly intended as a rebuke to those pundits ( talking heads ) who seemingly care more about (or whose jobs are contingent on caring more about) the \"game\" of analyzing and predicting the politics of the race rather than caring about the actual policies the candidates are likely to pursue after coming into office.\nThe title text repeats this theme with Nate Silver , an American statistician, psephologist , and writer (among other things). He has a political blog called FiveThirtyEight which was originally written under a pseudonym. The Blog and its associated website primarily discuss tracking polls in respect to elections. Thus, the choices made on Tuesday (election day) will have massive and permanent effects on FiveThirtyEight's charts, which will obviously change to reflect the actual votes cast \u2014 but all the charts will have become trivial since the purpose of the blog is to predict the results. This is a parody of the bold statements often made during campaigns, such as that the choices made on election day could have massive and permanent effects on such things as your health care, the economy, your job, etc.\nPolls and pundits are also referenced in the next comic, 1131: Math , published the day after the election.\n[Cueball kneels on his desk chair, hunched over a laptop] Cueball: This Tuesday will be huge! Cueball: If Obama wins the election, it could generate news coverage devastating to Romney's position in the tracking polls! Offscreen character: ... Maybe you should take a break.\n"}
{"id":1131,"title":"Math","image_title":"Math","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1131","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/math.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1131:_Math","transcript":"[A frame with a bar chart showing 58% blue and 42% red. A header shows a range between 53-63%] Forecast [An arrow below the chart is pointing at the line between the blue and the red sections of the chart with a heading] Result [Below the frame is a caption] Breaking: To surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be best system for determining which of two things is larger.\n","explanation":"In another election-themed comic (this one posted the day after the 2012 U.S. presidential election November 7, 2012)\u2014(see also 1122: Electoral Precedent , 500: Election , 1127: Congress , and 1130: Poll Watching )\u2014this comic shows a bar graph representing expected (see note below) electoral college votes in the election, including a dotted line indicating the 270 electoral votes needed to win, a span of projections (\"Forecast\"), and the actual result.\nThe forecast range is to the right of the 270 line, showing that the blue candidate Obama (the Democratic candidate is the blue candidate and the Republican candidate is the red candidate according to a convention used since the 2000 election) was always projected to win by statisticians like Nate Silver and others. The only question among these people was by how much he was going to win. (The Electoral College votes are expectations until each state's voting results are announced early in November, and the electors actually vote in December and may change the situation somewhat.)  Randall is attempting to use this particular election to imply that polling data accurately indicates the likely outcome of a presidential election.  However, the close match between prediction and result in this one election could be a coincidence; the outcome of U.S. presidential elections frequently differs from projections.  Notably, in 1948, the Chicago Tribune printed a headline which turned out to be false and in 2016, polling data indicated that Clinton would defeat Trump.\nBy contrast, most of the media was calling the election too close to call, with some news outlets actually projecting a Mitt Romney win. Essentially the large number of Republican pundits who helped increase the pressures of right wing self-referencing media denial, the tendency of media to give any issue at least two dramatically or fictionally equal voices (for supposed \"fairness\") regardless of the relative merits of the two sides, and the desire to present the election as a suspenseful \"horse race\" resulted in a lot of talking heads (i.e. pundits) disbelieving the polls. These factors shaped the \"too close to call\" narrative, leading to the punch line of this story:\nYou don't need to believe in science or statistics for it to effectively describe or predict reality. The progressively more radicalized elements of this era are known for disregarding scientific or statistical consensus which reflects reality but does not conform to their world view. However, many of them were correct in their belief (in defiance of statistical data to the contrary) that Donald Trump would be elected in 2016.\nFor those unfamiliar with the US Presidential electoral process : Unlike other political offices, the election for president is not a direct election. Instead, each state is apportioned a certain number of \"Electoral College\" votes based on the number of House of Representatives seats (which is based on population) and Senate seats. For the most part (and there is perennial discussion on whether this should be changed) the candidate that receives the most popular votes in a given state receives all the Electoral College votes for that state. With 538 electoral votes total, receiving 270 Electoral College votes ((half of 538) + 1) is sufficient to be declared president-elect. For this reason, sometimes one candidate actually receive more popular votes (more people voted for the candidate) but have fewer Electoral College votes. This happened three times in the nineteenth century with elections of John Quincy Adams in 1824 , Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 . Then it did not happen again until the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 .\nThe title text is a subversion of what everyone else was saying at that time: that the election was unpredictable. Pundits often declare events to be \"too close to call\" when poll results are very close; Randall is saying that the only thing that is \"too close to call\" is the difference between the results and the predicted results, as the outcome is all but certain.\n[A frame with a bar chart showing 58% blue and 42% red. A header shows a range between 53-63%] Forecast [An arrow below the chart is pointing at the line between the blue and the red sections of the chart with a heading] Result [Below the frame is a caption] Breaking: To surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be best system for determining which of two things is larger.\n"}
{"id":1132,"title":"Frequentists vs. Bayesians","image_title":"Frequentists vs. Bayesians","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1132","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/frequentists_vs_bayesians.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1132:_Frequentists_vs._Bayesians","transcript":"[Caption above the first panel:] Did the sun just explode? (It's night, so we're not sure)\n[Two Cueball-like guys stand on either side of a small table with a small black device on it. The device has white lines (ventilation) and two small antennas and a button on top. When the device speaks it uses in Westminster typeface. The Guy on the left, called Frequentist Statistician in the 2nd panel, points to the device. The guy on the right, called Bayesian Statistician in the 3rd panel, is just looking at the device. Above the spoken word from the device is a sound.] Frequentist Statistician: This neutrino detector measures whether the sun has gone nova. Bayesian Statistician: Then, it rolls two dice. If they both come up as six, it lies to us. Otherwise, it tells the truth. Frequentist Statistician: Let's try. Detector! Has the sun gone nova? Sound: Roll Device: YES.\n[Two panels side by side are beneath the first panel. together they are broader than the top panel. Above each panel is a caption. In the left panel only the left statistician is shown with the device on the table. And in the right panel only the right statistician is shown with the device on the table. both are just looking at the device.] Frequentist Statistician: Frequentist Statistician: The probability of this result happening by chance is 1\/36=0.027.  Since p<0.05, I conclude that the sun has exploded.\nBayesian Statistician: Bayesian Statistician: Bet you $50 it hasn't.\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke about jumping to conclusions based on a simplistic understanding of probability. The \" base rate fallacy \" is a mistake where an unlikely explanation is dismissed, even though the alternative is even less likely. In the comic, a device tests for the (highly unlikely) event that the sun has exploded. A degree of random error is introduced, by rolling two dice and lying if the result is double sixes. Double sixes are unlikely (1 in 36, or about 3% likely), so the statistician on the left dismisses it. The statistician on the right has (we assume) correctly reasoned that the sun exploding is far more unlikely, and so is willing to stake money on his interpretation.\nThe labels given to the two statisticians, in their panels and in the comic's title, are not particularly fair or accurate, a fact which Randall has acknowledged: [1]\nThe \" frequentist \" statistician is (mis)applying the common standard of \" p <0.05\". In a scientific study, a result is presumed to provide strong evidence if, given that the null hypothesis , a default position that the observations are unrelated (in this case, that the sun has not gone nova), there is less than a 5% chance that the result was merely random. (The null hypothesis was also referenced in 892: Null Hypothesis .)\nSince the likelihood of rolling double sixes is below this 5% threshold, the \"frequentist\" decides (by this rule of thumb) to accept the detector's output as correct. The \" Bayesian \" statistician has, instead, applied at least a small measure of probabilistic reasoning ( Bayesian inference ) to determine that the unlikeliness of the detector lying is greatly outweighed by the unlikeliness of the sun exploding. Therefore, he concludes that the sun has not exploded and the detector is lying.\nA real statistician (frequentist or Bayesian) would probably demand a lower p -value before concluding that a test shows the Sun has exploded; physicists tend to use 5 sigma, or about 1 in 3.5 million, as the standard before declaring major results, like discovering new particles.  This would be equivalent to rolling between eight and nine dice and getting all sixes, although this is still not \"very good\" compared to the actual expected likelihood of the Sun spontaneously going nova, as discussed below.\nThe line, \"Bet you $50 it hasn't\", is a reference to the approach of a leading Bayesian scholar, Bruno de Finetti , who made extensive use of bets in his examples and thought experiments. See Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) for more information on his work. In this case, however, the bet is also a joke because we would all be dead if the sun exploded.  If the Bayesian wins the bet, he gets money, and if he loses, they'll both be dead before money can be paid. This underlines the absurdity of the premise and emphasizes the need to consider context when examining probability.\nIt is also possible that the use of the sun is a reference to Laplace's Sunrise problem .\nThe title text refers to a classic series of logic puzzles known as Knights and Knaves , where there are two guards in front of two exit doors, one of which is real and the other leads to death. One guard is a liar and the other tells the truth. The visitor doesn't know which is which, and is allowed to ask one question to one guard. The solution is to ask either guard what the other one would say is the real exit, then choose the opposite. Two such guards were featured in the 1986 Jim Henson movie Labyrinth , hence the mention of \"A LABYRINTH GUARD\" here. A labyrinth was also mentioned in 246: Labyrinth Puzzle .\nAs mentioned, this is an instance of the base rate fallacy . If we treat the \"truth or lie\" setup as simply modelling an inaccurate test, then it is also specifically an illustration of the false positive paradox : A test that is rarely wrong, but which tests for an event that is even rarer, will be more often wrong than right when it says that the event has occurred.\nThe test, in this case, is a neutrino detector. It relies on the fact that neutrinos can pass through the earth, so a neutrino detector would detect neutrinos from the sun at all times, day and night. The detector is stated to give false results (\"lie\") 1\/36th of the time.\nThere is no record of any star ever spontaneously exploding\u2014they always show signs of deterioration long before their explosion\u2014so the probability is near zero. For the sake of a number, though, consider that the sun's estimated lifespan is 10 billion years. Let's say the test is run every hour, twelve hours a day (at night time). This gives us a probability of the Sun exploding at one in 4.38\u00d710 -13 . Assuming this detector is otherwise reliable, when the detector reports a solar explosion, there are two possibilities:\nClearly the sun exploding is not the most likely option. Indeed, Bayes' theorem can be used to find the probability that the Sun has exploded, given a result of \"yes\" and the prior probability given above:\n\n[Caption above the first panel:] Did the sun just explode? (It's night, so we're not sure)\n[Two Cueball-like guys stand on either side of a small table with a small black device on it. The device has white lines (ventilation) and two small antennas and a button on top. When the device speaks it uses in Westminster typeface. The Guy on the left, called Frequentist Statistician in the 2nd panel, points to the device. The guy on the right, called Bayesian Statistician in the 3rd panel, is just looking at the device. Above the spoken word from the device is a sound.] Frequentist Statistician: This neutrino detector measures whether the sun has gone nova. Bayesian Statistician: Then, it rolls two dice. If they both come up as six, it lies to us. Otherwise, it tells the truth. Frequentist Statistician: Let's try. Detector! Has the sun gone nova? Sound: Roll Device: YES.\n[Two panels side by side are beneath the first panel. together they are broader than the top panel. Above each panel is a caption. In the left panel only the left statistician is shown with the device on the table. And in the right panel only the right statistician is shown with the device on the table. both are just looking at the device.] Frequentist Statistician: Frequentist Statistician: The probability of this result happening by chance is 1\/36=0.027.  Since p<0.05, I conclude that the sun has exploded.\nBayesian Statistician: Bayesian Statistician: Bet you $50 it hasn't.\n"}
{"id":1133,"title":"Up Goer Five","image_title":"Up Goer Five","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1133","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/up_goer_five.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1133:_Up_Goer_Five","transcript":"US Space Team's Up Goer Five The only flying space car that's taken anyone to another world (explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most often) [A list of Saturn-V parts, top to bottom, with their \"Up Goer\" description follows.] [Launch Escape System (LES)]: Thing to help people escape really fast if there's a problem and everything is on fire so they decide not to go to space [LES side nozzle]: Thing to control which direction the escaping people go [LES fuel]: Stuff to burn to make the box with the people in it escape really fast [LES bottom nozzles]: Place where fire comes out to help them escape [Apollo spacecraft.] [Command Module (CM)]: Part that flies around the other world and comes back home with the people in it and fall in the water. [CM capsule parts]: People box, door, chairs [Service Module (SM)]: Part that goes along to give people air, water, computers and stuff. It comes back home with them but burns up without landing. [SM oxygen tanks]: Cold air for burning (and breathing). This part had a VERY big problem once. [Lunar Module (LM)]: Part that flies down to the other world with two people inside [LM descent stage]: Part that stays on the other world (it's still there) [LM feet]: Feet that go on the ground of the other world [Instrument Unit]: Ring holding most of the computers [S-IVB third stage]: Part that falls off third (this part flew away from our world into space and hit the world we were going toward) [Fuel tanks]: Wet and very cold [Liquid hydrogen (LH2) tank]: The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died and someone said \"Oh, the [humans]!\" (used for burning) [Liquid oxygen (LOX) tank]: The part of air you need to breathe, but not the other stuff (used for burning) [Helium pressurizing tanks]: Things holding that kind of air that makes your voice funny (it's for filling up the space left when they take the cold air out to burn it.) [J-2 engine nozzle]: Fire comes out here [S-II second stage]: Part that falls off second [LH2 tank]: More sky bag air (for burning) ( cold + wet) [LOX tank]: More breathing-type air (for burning) ( cold + wet) [Tank-to-engine fuel lines]: Thing that brings in cold wet air to burn [J-2 engine nozzles (qty. 5)]: Fire comes out here [S-IC first stage]: Part that falls off first [LOX tank]: More breathing-type air (for burning) ( cold + wet) [Helium pressurizing tank]: More funny voice air (for filling up space) [LOX fill line]: Opening for putting in cold wet air [RP-1 fuel tank]: This is full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power.It goes together with the cold air when it's time to start going up. [F-1 engine nozzles (qty. 5)]: Lots of fire comes out here. [Bottom of spacecraft]: This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space. If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today.\n","explanation":"This comic is an illustration that will later be used in Randall 's book ' Thing Explainer ', where he took it upon himself to explain a number of things, including the Saturn V rocket shown here, using only the one thousand most commonly-used words in the English language.\nThis comic is a diagram of the Saturn V rocket. \"Saturn\" isn't a very common word apparently, and neither is rocket, so Randall decided to use \"Up Goer\" which is a fair approximation of a craft designed to lift a payload from the earth to space, although perhaps 'thing that goes up fast' may or may not be simpler. The Saturn V vehicle, which was in use by NASA from 1967 to 1972, is the vehicle as a whole. The engines of the Saturn V (the part that makes it go up) were divided into three stages. The first stage ( S-IC ) had five F-1 engines which burned refined kerosene mixed with oxygen as its fuel. That stage burned for 2 minutes 48 seconds and pushed the whole thing up about 61 kilometers (~38 miles) into the sky. After it fell away the S-II stage was activated. It used 5 J-2 engines in the same configuration as the F-1s, and burned liquid hydrogen mixed with liquid oxygen for 6 minutes 35 seconds pushing the astronauts up to 184 kilometers (114.5 miles). The third stage ( S-IVB ) was a single J-2 engine burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. This stage was used in two parts, the first was to put the spacecraft into a stable orbit around Earth to perform a systems check and make sure the craft will be safe for going to the moon. This would usually take three orbits around Earth. As they came around the Earth they would burn the second part of the fuel, which is called a trans-lunar injection which put them on course for the moon. The first burn took 2 minutes 45 seconds, which put them in orbit 185 kilometers (115 miles) high.\nIt was first used as the launch vehicle for the Apollo 4 mission, and it was used as the launch vehicle for most of the subsequent Apollo missions (the exceptions being Apollo 7, Skylab 2-4, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project missions, which were launched using the smaller Saturn IB launch vehicle). One of the last missions of this design was the unmanned launch of Skylab , the U.S.'s first space station; for this payloader configuration, the Saturn V launch vehicle was officially designated the Saturn INT-21 .\nThe Service Module (SM) Oxygen tanks have a note that states \"This part had a VERY big problem once\". This is a reference to the Apollo 13 mission. 55 hours after launch, mission control requested the oxygen tanks contents be stirred to get an accurate reading of its contents. There was a large bang , and power fluctuated throughout the craft. NASA had to scramble to ensure the safe return of the astronauts. Needless to say, the moon landing for that mission was canceled.\nThe Hindenburg disaster is referenced in the text \"The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died and someone said \"oh, the [humans]!\". The term \"big sky bag\" is used as the closest approximation of zeppelin which is a big bag filled with a lighter-than-air gas which makes the whole contraption float. The phrase \"oh, the [humans]\" is a workaround of the simple-words rule, technically containing only the word humans, while being read \"concentration of humans\" or \"humanity\". The Hindenburg on the day of the disaster was filled with hydrogen , despite being initially designed for use with helium . Helium cannot catch fire as it is a noble gas and thus completely inert, but helium was unavailable due to a US export ban on the element. The risks seemed acceptable at the time because the Germans had a history of flying hydrogen-based passenger airships. The original quote is \"Oh, the humanity!\" (See this video about the Hindenburg disaster - the quote appears at 0:47). In the book Thing Explainer in the explanation for The pieces everything is made of (i.e. the Periodic table ) hydrogen is again \"named\" by using a picture of the burning Hindenburg and also this quote is said by Cueball standing next to the square with the element with his hands over his mouth. See more below regarding the book.\nThe bottom tank, which Randall describes as \"...full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power\" is highly refined kerosene, called RP-1 , it is similar to jet fuel, burns well and is not likely to explode; unlike liquid hydrogen , which is much more likely to explode.\nEarlier flirts with simple words can be found in 547: Simple and 722: Computer Problems .  The use of simple words was revisited again in 1436: Orb Hammer and 1322: Winter .\nThe comic is based on NASA-MSFC 10M04574 produced at Marshal Space Flight Center. Randall omitted the \"S\".  The image was for sale as a poster from up-ship.com which Randal mentioned.  A different scan is downloadable from Heroic Relics .\nThe phrase \"You will not go to space today\" has become something of a catchphrase for xkcd \u2014 variants of it recur in the title text of images in four What If? articles:\nRandall has in 2015 written an entire book with this type of simplified language blueprints. Thing Explainer was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on November 24, 2015 and actually had a copy of this comic in it. On the day of the book's release Randall also released a comic with a game, to celebrate the book: 1608: Hoverboard . In this game the space capsule used for landing back on earth is shown, thus both referencing the book and this comic. This part of the space ship can also be seen in the book above the Sky toucher and the moon landing is also depicted in Worlds around the sun . When the book was released Randall had Minute Physics do a \"commercial\" version of this comic .\nThe news about the upcoming release of the book was sent out on the Blag in May as New book: Thing Explainer . After that, the book was advertised at the top of the xkcd page with link to the Blag article and links to Preorder at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, and Hudson. Also, there were two other news with links: \"In other news, Space Weird Thing is delightful , and I feel surprisingly invested in @xkcdbracket's results.\" (The link was removed sometimes before Monday the 10th of August 2015. within two weeks of the brackets final result was revealed.)\nThe song Space Weird Thing is a tribute to David Bowie 's Space Oddity rewritten in the simple language used in this comic, which is also attributed in the text about the YouTube video. The other news item is related to 1529: Bracket , see that comic for more details.\nUS Space Team's Up Goer Five The only flying space car that's taken anyone to another world (explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most often) [A list of Saturn-V parts, top to bottom, with their \"Up Goer\" description follows.] [Launch Escape System (LES)]: Thing to help people escape really fast if there's a problem and everything is on fire so they decide not to go to space [LES side nozzle]: Thing to control which direction the escaping people go [LES fuel]: Stuff to burn to make the box with the people in it escape really fast [LES bottom nozzles]: Place where fire comes out to help them escape [Apollo spacecraft.] [Command Module (CM)]: Part that flies around the other world and comes back home with the people in it and fall in the water. [CM capsule parts]: People box, door, chairs [Service Module (SM)]: Part that goes along to give people air, water, computers and stuff. It comes back home with them but burns up without landing. [SM oxygen tanks]: Cold air for burning (and breathing). This part had a VERY big problem once. [Lunar Module (LM)]: Part that flies down to the other world with two people inside [LM descent stage]: Part that stays on the other world (it's still there) [LM feet]: Feet that go on the ground of the other world [Instrument Unit]: Ring holding most of the computers [S-IVB third stage]: Part that falls off third (this part flew away from our world into space and hit the world we were going toward) [Fuel tanks]: Wet and very cold [Liquid hydrogen (LH2) tank]: The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died and someone said \"Oh, the [humans]!\" (used for burning) [Liquid oxygen (LOX) tank]: The part of air you need to breathe, but not the other stuff (used for burning) [Helium pressurizing tanks]: Things holding that kind of air that makes your voice funny (it's for filling up the space left when they take the cold air out to burn it.) [J-2 engine nozzle]: Fire comes out here [S-II second stage]: Part that falls off second [LH2 tank]: More sky bag air (for burning) ( cold + wet) [LOX tank]: More breathing-type air (for burning) ( cold + wet) [Tank-to-engine fuel lines]: Thing that brings in cold wet air to burn [J-2 engine nozzles (qty. 5)]: Fire comes out here [S-IC first stage]: Part that falls off first [LOX tank]: More breathing-type air (for burning) ( cold + wet) [Helium pressurizing tank]: More funny voice air (for filling up space) [LOX fill line]: Opening for putting in cold wet air [RP-1 fuel tank]: This is full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power.It goes together with the cold air when it's time to start going up. [F-1 engine nozzles (qty. 5)]: Lots of fire comes out here. [Bottom of spacecraft]: This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space. If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today.\n"}
{"id":1134,"title":"Logic Boat","image_title":"Logic Boat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1134","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/logic_boat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1134:_Logic_Boat","transcript":"[A person shows up at a boat docked at the edge of a river. The person has brought along a head of cabbage, a goat, and a wolf.] Problem: The boat only holds two, but you can't leave the goat with the cabbage or the wolf with the goat.\n[The wolf looks curiously at the cabbage that's been left behind while the person goes off with the goat.] Solution: 1. Take the goat across.\n[The goat remains tied up on the far side. The wolf watches the person come back.] 2. Return alone.\n[The wolf sits and waits as the person goes off.] 3. Take the cabbage across.\n4. Leave the wolf. Why did you have a wolf? [The wolf goes off.]\n","explanation":"The comic is a play on the classic wolf, goat and cabbage puzzle belonging to the river crossing puzzles , and first known from Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes , with the same setting as here. The three possessions change between various retellings but it typically involves a carnivorous animal (wolf, lion etc.), a herbivore (goat, sheep, chicken, goose etc.), and some plant based food (cabbage, grain, beans etc.). The objective is to ferry all three possessions to the other side of a river safely in a small boat , with the limitation of only being able to transport one possession per crossing. The crossing order must take into account that the carnivore would eat the herbivore if left alone together, and the herbivore would eat the food.\nThe traditional solution would be:\n(Note that, since the conditions for this problem are symmetric, an alternate solution would be to transport the wolf on Trip 3 and the cabbage on Trip 5.)\nBy leaving the wolf behind, four steps are saved \u2014 the comic's \"step 4\" is just a comment \u2014 and the troublesome wolf, a wild and dangerous animal not usually kept by humans, is eliminated from the picture.\nThis could be seen a jab on the common assumption that logic puzzles only have one correct solution. Thus one often keeps the other person thinking and guessing until they arrive at the pre-defined solution, no matter how many other creative good solutions they come up with. Also note that the \"problem\" given doesn't even state an objective, just three prerequisites.\nAlternatively, this could be a jab at the fact that the conditions of some puzzles are very strange. Both the fourth step and title text are evidence of this - questioning why you would have a wolf or a cabbage respectively. Yet, even though it is unlikely that you would ever find yourself in the situation and odd rules as stated by the puzzle in real life, [ citation needed ] the puzzle demands that you solve it and reach the criteria it asks.\nThe title text says that cabbages are also unnecessary, but goats are fine. The reasons for these opinions are less obvious than the one about the wolf, but still understandable. Many people, presumably including the narrator, do not like the taste of cabbage. Many are also fond of goats, finding them cute. The same opinion about goats is in 1282: Monty Hall .\nThe river crossing puzzle was the main focus of 2348: Boat Puzzle . It was referenced in 589: Designated Drivers .\n[A person shows up at a boat docked at the edge of a river. The person has brought along a head of cabbage, a goat, and a wolf.] Problem: The boat only holds two, but you can't leave the goat with the cabbage or the wolf with the goat.\n[The wolf looks curiously at the cabbage that's been left behind while the person goes off with the goat.] Solution: 1. Take the goat across.\n[The goat remains tied up on the far side. The wolf watches the person come back.] 2. Return alone.\n[The wolf sits and waits as the person goes off.] 3. Take the cabbage across.\n4. Leave the wolf. Why did you have a wolf? [The wolf goes off.]\n"}
{"id":1135,"title":"Arachnoneurology","image_title":"Arachnoneurology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1135","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/arachnoneurology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1135:_Arachnoneurology","transcript":"[Beret Guy holding a protractor and handling a fork-like stand with black knobbly protrusions. On the table is some sticks, a set square and a ruler. There is also a large book titled: Spider Psychology [Beret Guy places his creation in a cobwebbed corner.] [Spiders weave webs around Beret Guy's creation. One of them hangs down above it from the ceiling.] [Beret Guy pulls a shirt made of spider silk away from his creation. At the top of the panel is a frame that breaks the main panels frame. Inside this it says:] Six weeks later:\n","explanation":"Beret Guy uses spider psychology (that he has obviously learned from the heavy volume of a book lying on the table with that title) to engineer a forked object in such a way that spiders will weave a silk shirt around it. After six weeks he can take the finished shirt off the \"rack\", and after optionally removing some stray spiders it should be ready for use.\nUsually extracting spider silk is a complicated process and getting enough to weave a shirt would take very long and be very expensive. But making such an impossible project work is a typical behavioral pattern for Beret Guy, who continues to do amazing things with animals and other things from nature.\nThe prefix arachno- means \"(related to) spiders\". Arachnology , for example, is the scientific study of spiders. Neurology is a branch of medicine dealing with disorders of the nervous system , which includes the brain . So the title of the comic can be translated into the scientific study of spider brains .\nThe title text mentions the book lying on the table, giving not only the title and the edition (21st) but also summing up some more (non-existent and increasingly far-fetched) fields of science related to spiders, which may as well exist if spider psychology has such a big standard work. Apart from adding the word forensic in one case, all five fields come from combining only the same two words \"arachno\" and \"neuro\" (sometimes one of them more than once) and ending any combination with \"-ology\". Especially funny is the neuro-arachnoneurology, which is explained to be the field where it is the brains of the scientist who study spiders brains, that are examined. The last one seems to be related to arachnophobia , the fear of spiders, as arachnoarachnology is spiders with spiders on top - i.e. too many spiders .\nArachnophobia seems to be a problem for Randall himself, according to the What if? Spiders vs. the Sun . In this he links to an article about a factory that was covered in plenty enough spider web silk to make shirts to a whole regiment of soldiers.\nThis is the first comic with special mentioning of a science related directly to spiders. The next was 1747: Spider Paleontology .\n[Beret Guy holding a protractor and handling a fork-like stand with black knobbly protrusions. On the table is some sticks, a set square and a ruler. There is also a large book titled: Spider Psychology [Beret Guy places his creation in a cobwebbed corner.] [Spiders weave webs around Beret Guy's creation. One of them hangs down above it from the ceiling.] [Beret Guy pulls a shirt made of spider silk away from his creation. At the top of the panel is a frame that breaks the main panels frame. Inside this it says:] Six weeks later:\n"}
{"id":1136,"title":"Broken Mirror","image_title":"Broken Mirror","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1136","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/broken_mirror.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1136:_Broken_Mirror","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball stand in a bedroom. There is a broken mirror on the floor at Black Hat's feet.] Black Hat: Oops. Guess this means seven more years of the illusion that my actions somehow influence the indifferent hand of probability which governs our lives.\n[Black Hat looks down at the broken shards of glass on the floor.]\nCueball: Plus like half an hour of sweeping. Black Hat: No, I think I'll leave it. Cueball: You'll get glass in your feet.\nBlack Hat: Eccles. 9:2\u2014All things come alike to all: to the clean, and to the unclean. Black Hat: My fate is as these shards. Cueball: Dude, chill. It's just a vanity mirror. Black Hat: All is vanity mirrors.\nJudging from the damage done to the wall and the way the mirror landed face up, it is likely that Black Hat intentionally broke the mirror.\nThe way Cueball and Black Hat appears and the subject has some similarities to the next comic 1137: RTL . See the trivia section for that comic.","explanation":"It is a common superstition that breaking a mirror will result in 7 years of bad luck. Black Hat mocks the superstition, claiming that all is random, but ultimately cause the superstition to become true as his nihilistic apathy prevents him believing that cleaning the glass on the floor will have a significant impact. The joke is that Black Hat will likely get glass in his feet as long as he refuses to clean it, and thus the broken mirror will have a lasting impact.\nBlack Hat breaks a mirror and sarcastically claims that it will bring bad luck for 7 years, implying that the broken mirror will have no impact on his life. After Cueball reminds Black Hat that the broken mirror will at least cause him to clean up the glass. Black Hat responds with a quote from Ecclesiastes that explains \"being clean\" (doing good) or \"being unclean\" (doing bad) things does not affect whether good or bad things happen to us. Due to Black Hat's interpretation of Ecclesiastes , he is not going to clean the shards, and thus be \"unclean\", and feels nihilistically that this will not significantly alter his life. Of course, it will have an impact as he will get glass in his feet if he does not clean it.\nBlack Hat continues saying that \"My fate is as these shards\" this mirrors another quote from Ecclesiastes \"For what happens to the sons of men also happens to animals\". Cueball tries to cheer up Black Hat by reminding him that life is not that bad, \"it's just a vanity mirror\". Black Hat responds saying, \" All is vanity mirrors\". \"All is vanity\" another quote from Ecclesiastes, this line is repeated throughout the book and refers to impermanence of man and his creations. As the mirror just broke, its impermanence is apparent.\nIt is possible that this is a reference to the now-defunct webcomic Men in Hats and its character Aram, specifically in this page . Aram has been described as the inspiration for Black Hat in 29: Hitler .\nIn the title text Cueball says  \"I see you're in this mood again\" to which Black Hat responds, \"I am always in this mood\". This is a reference to Black Hat being a nihilist in his other appearances.\nBreaking mirrors is also mentioned in 2447: Hammer Incident .\nThe rejection of the idea that good things happen to good people, and therefore the rejections of concepts like karma, is one of the primary tenets of the Abrahamic faiths. The argument goes that if people deserve what happens to them, then they don't deserve help. This, and the pursuit of justice (fairness, and truth) are the core beliefs that prescribe that each person has an individual responsibility to help others, so that justice can be achieved. Since Black Hat is by no means charitable, this belief clearly never took root.\n[Black Hat and Cueball stand in a bedroom. There is a broken mirror on the floor at Black Hat's feet.] Black Hat: Oops. Guess this means seven more years of the illusion that my actions somehow influence the indifferent hand of probability which governs our lives.\n[Black Hat looks down at the broken shards of glass on the floor.]\nCueball: Plus like half an hour of sweeping. Black Hat: No, I think I'll leave it. Cueball: You'll get glass in your feet.\nBlack Hat: Eccles. 9:2\u2014All things come alike to all: to the clean, and to the unclean. Black Hat: My fate is as these shards. Cueball: Dude, chill. It's just a vanity mirror. Black Hat: All is vanity mirrors.\nJudging from the damage done to the wall and the way the mirror landed face up, it is likely that Black Hat intentionally broke the mirror.\nThe way Cueball and Black Hat appears and the subject has some similarities to the next comic 1137: RTL . See the trivia section for that comic."}
{"id":1137,"title":"RTL","image_title":"\u202eLTR","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1137","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rtl.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1137:_RTL","transcript":"[Cueball is standing behind Black Hat who is sitting down with a laptop on his lap.] Cueball: And that's not even the worst part! The worst part is that\u2014 Black Hat types a command on the PC: U+202e Cueball: \u202e\u2014They didn't even... Cueball: \u202e...What the hell? Cueball: \u202eHow did you... Cueball: \u202e...Asshole.\n","explanation":"U+202e is a unicode control character that changes all subsequent text to right-to-left (RTL, as the title references). In the comic, Black Hat tires of Cueball 's complaining and inserts a U+202e character in the middle of Cueball's speech, turning his complaints into gibberish - sentences that must be read from right-to-left.\nThe title of the comic builds on this theme, with the title of the webpage it is hosted on being LTR in some browsers (see trivia ), the reverse of the comic name.\nWhat Cueball actually tries to say after Black Hat's change is:\n\u2014 They didn't even... ...What the hell? How did you... ...Asshole.\nWhen multiple writers work on the same text, arguments can often arise with some writers resorting to vandalizing the works of other writers. The title text takes this up a level, suggesting the use of U+202e and other direction control characters in editor wars to disrupt other people's work.\nIf you ever get involved in such a war, note that U+202c returns text back to its normal direction.\n[Cueball is standing behind Black Hat who is sitting down with a laptop on his lap.] Cueball: And that's not even the worst part! The worst part is that\u2014 Black Hat types a command on the PC: U+202e Cueball: \u202e\u2014They didn't even... Cueball: \u202e...What the hell? Cueball: \u202eHow did you... Cueball: \u202e...Asshole.\n"}
{"id":1138,"title":"Heatmap","image_title":"Heatmap","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1138","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/heatmap.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1138:_Heatmap","transcript":"[Three near-identical charts of the 48 contiguous United States are shown with heatmaps depicting population density. The first chart is labelled \"Our site's users,\" the second chart is labelled \"Subscribers to Martha Stewart Living ,\" and the third chart is labelled \"Consumers of furry pornography.\" Cueball is standing with a stick pointing at the charts.] Cueball: The business implications are clear. Pet peeve #208: Geographic profile maps which are basically just population maps\n","explanation":"Another of Randall's many Pet Peeves , this time on maps . This one has also been numbered #208, like the first comic on the subject 238: Pet Peeve #114 .\nIn the comic, Cueball compares three heatmaps, showing the location of \"our site's users,\" \"subscribers to Martha Stewart Living \" and \"consumers of furry pornography.\" The three maps are nearly identical, leading Cueball to come to the conclusion that his site's userbase largely consists of fans of Martha Stewart and furry porn, and that the audience (presumably the owners\/operators of the website) should adjust their content or advertising to cater to these demographics. However, Cueball's analysis is faulty; the actual reason the maps are the same is they all match the population concentration in the U.S., not because there is any statistically-significant relation between geographic location and any of the mentioned sub-populations.\nA heatmap is a graph showing three-dimensional data on a two-dimensional image, with each pixel's colour representing the value of the data at that position.  It does not necessarily have anything to do with heat, but a heatmap may resemble a thermal image.  In this comic, red represents the highest numerical values, then yellow and green, with white the lowest values, in all three maps.\nThe title text reflects a similar situation in world maps where the website written in English is read by English-speaking users no matter the location, because their ISP and search providers direct them primarily to English websites, so the visitors' geographic graph matches the graph of the global English-speaking population.\n[Three near-identical charts of the 48 contiguous United States are shown with heatmaps depicting population density. The first chart is labelled \"Our site's users,\" the second chart is labelled \"Subscribers to Martha Stewart Living ,\" and the third chart is labelled \"Consumers of furry pornography.\" Cueball is standing with a stick pointing at the charts.] Cueball: The business implications are clear. Pet peeve #208: Geographic profile maps which are basically just population maps\n"}
{"id":1139,"title":"Rubber and Glue","image_title":"Rubber and Glue","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1139","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rubber_and_glue.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1139:_Rubber_and_Glue","transcript":"[Playground. Young Megan is balancing on a swing, two Cueball-like kids are swinging and two more kids, a young Cueball and a young Hairy are approaching a reading young Black Hat, whose hat is almost too big for his small head.] Hairy: Whatchya reading, Hatboy? Black Hat: The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Cueball: You are such a loser, it's painful . Black Hat: I'm rubber, you're glue.\n[In a frame-less panel Hairy and Cueball looks down on Black Hat sitting with his book in his lap on the ground between them. He looks back up over his shoulder at Hairy.] Hairy: Yeah, well\u2014 Black Hat: Glue can't speak. Black Hat: You try to scream, but your mouth fills with glue. Black Hat: Your face is glue. Your body is glue.\n[Black Hat has left the book on the ground behind him and has risen. Hairy and Cueball is now together to the right and Black Hat advances towards them arms stretched out. Hairy steps backwards away from him.] Black Hat: I wrap my rubber arms around your sticky bulk. Black Hat: Your neoprene base bonds instantly with my surface. Black Hat: Never to let go.\n[Zoom in on Black Hat's head. He is holding his arms up in front of him clapping them together. Hairy shouts from off panel.] Black Hat: You are glue. I am rubber. Black Hat: Staring at you with my dead, rubber eyes- Black Hat: Forever. Hairy (off-panel): Moooom!\n","explanation":"\"I'm rubber, you're glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you\" is a school-ground retort used by children to suggest that one's insults are being ignored by the intended recipient of the insult and counter that the insult rather refers to the insulter . On a deeper level, it may imply that a person insulting others is an indication of their own insecurity and weakness.\nIn this comic, a young Black Hat is reading a chemistry and physics handbook, which leads to a literal and graphic visualization of the phrase. He uses the retort to frighten the children bullying him (young versions of Hairy and Cueball ). Black Hat takes the traditional saying and twists it into a creepy thought by saying that they are both literally glue and rubber and that they are permanently stuck together, which scares Hairy and Cueball and prompts them to call for their mothers.\nThe book is the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics . It is also nicknamed the 'Rubber Bible' or the 'Rubber Book', as CRC originally stood for \"Chemical Rubber Company\".\nThe title text says that I (meaning him) and you (Hairy and Cueball, although it could possibly be the reader) are both rubber. Rubber is not a living object, so it is stuck in \"vulcanized horror\" in the position it was sculpted in. This could be a reference to how powerless we are in the changing of the world.\nYoung Black Hat also taunts young Hairy later in 1753: Thumb War .\n[Playground. Young Megan is balancing on a swing, two Cueball-like kids are swinging and two more kids, a young Cueball and a young Hairy are approaching a reading young Black Hat, whose hat is almost too big for his small head.] Hairy: Whatchya reading, Hatboy? Black Hat: The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Cueball: You are such a loser, it's painful . Black Hat: I'm rubber, you're glue.\n[In a frame-less panel Hairy and Cueball looks down on Black Hat sitting with his book in his lap on the ground between them. He looks back up over his shoulder at Hairy.] Hairy: Yeah, well\u2014 Black Hat: Glue can't speak. Black Hat: You try to scream, but your mouth fills with glue. Black Hat: Your face is glue. Your body is glue.\n[Black Hat has left the book on the ground behind him and has risen. Hairy and Cueball is now together to the right and Black Hat advances towards them arms stretched out. Hairy steps backwards away from him.] Black Hat: I wrap my rubber arms around your sticky bulk. Black Hat: Your neoprene base bonds instantly with my surface. Black Hat: Never to let go.\n[Zoom in on Black Hat's head. He is holding his arms up in front of him clapping them together. Hairy shouts from off panel.] Black Hat: You are glue. I am rubber. Black Hat: Staring at you with my dead, rubber eyes- Black Hat: Forever. Hairy (off-panel): Moooom!\n"}
{"id":1140,"title":"Calendar of Meaningful Dates","image_title":"Calendar of Meaningful Dates","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1140","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/calendar_of_meaningful_dates.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1140:_Calendar_of_Meaningful_Dates","transcript":"Calendar of Meaningful Dates Each date's size represents how often it is referred to by name (e.g. \"October 17th\") in English-language books since 2000 (Source: Google ngrams corpus) [A regular Gregorian calendar laid out in a grid, Sunday first, on a leap year, with some numbers larger than others.]\n","explanation":"The calendar used in the comic is the standard Gregorian calendar used by most of Western Civilization. The comic looks at the frequencies of which dates appear in English writings indexed in the Google Books Library Project , by using the Google Ngram Viewer ( link ).\nSome dates are more (or less) frequently mentioned because they have a special significance. Other dates have correlations for which there doesn't appear to be any obvious reasons. September 11th, which is noted in the title text for being popular before the 9\/11 attack, has also been the date of 2 significant battles in the War of 1812, one where the British landed in what was George Washington's large plantation, which likely contributed to its search volume.\nThe date mentioned in the sub-heading (October 17th) is Randall's birthday.\nThe title text mystery is explained here . In summary, many occurrences of \"11th\" in the writings were actually misread by the Google Books Library Project's optical character recognition software and\/or reCAPTCHA users, becoming one of these: IIth , Ilth , iith , lith , llth , 1lth , 1ith , l1th , nth .\nThe first of each month is generally more mentioned than others, perhaps because such dates are markers of a new month and may be used as landmark dates or deadlines. Similarly, the final day of each month is commonly a deadline day. Other dates have a less mundane significance, for example:\nCalendar of Meaningful Dates Each date's size represents how often it is referred to by name (e.g. \"October 17th\") in English-language books since 2000 (Source: Google ngrams corpus) [A regular Gregorian calendar laid out in a grid, Sunday first, on a leap year, with some numbers larger than others.]\n"}
{"id":1141,"title":"Two Years","image_title":"Two Years","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1141","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/two_years.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1141:_Two_Years","transcript":"[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit on a bed, Randall's fianc\u00e9e is talking on the phone. The person she is talking to, a doctor holding a clipboard, is shown inset.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: Oh god.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit together while Randall's fianc\u00e9e, now bald, is receiving chemotherapy. They are both on their laptops.] IV pump: ... Beeep ... Beeep ... Beeep ...\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (who is wearing a knit cap) are paddling a kayak against a scenic mountain backdrop.]\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit at a table, staring at a cell phone. There is a clock on the wall. Her head is stubbly.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: How long can it take to read a scan!?\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are back at the hospital again, Randall's fianc\u00e9e receiving chemo. They are playing Scrabble.] Randall: \"Zarg\" isn't a word. Randall's fianc\u00e9e: But caaaancer. Randall: ...Ok, fine.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (wearing a knit cap) are listening to a Cueball-like friend. A large thought bubble is above their heads and it obscures the friends talk. The text below, split in three is the only part there can be no doubt about:] Friend: So next year you should come visit us up in the mounta a and Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (thinking): \"Next year\"\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are getting married, with a heart above their heads. Randall's wife's hair is growing back.]\n[Randall and Randall's wife (wearing a knit cap) stand on a beach, watching a whale jump out of water.] Fwoosh\n[Randall's wife is sitting at a desk with her laptop standing on top of two books. Her hair has grown back a little more. Randall stands behind her.] Randall: Hey\u2014 Randall: you're doing science, Randall: and you're still alive. Randall's wife: Yeah!\n[Randall and Randall's wife sit under a tall tree on a hill.] Randall: It's really only been two years? Randall's wife: They were big years.\n[Randall and Randall's wife sit at a table in a fancy restaurant. Her hair has grown back even more. The waiter (Hairy) brings them a dish with a cover on it.] Waiter: Happy... Anniversary? Randall's wife: Biopsy-versary! Waiter: ...Eww.\nWhile it is known that Randall's wife has since survived more than two years past the date of the invitation in Panel 6, it is unknown whether the invitation was later accepted. The followup comic Seven Years does not seem to include a visit \"up in the mountains\" among its various other recreational activities, but the one after it, Ten Years , does. However, since it is possible that the invitation was made up for the comic in order to represent the worry over any invitation envisioning the future at that time, it is possible that it was never proposed as depicted in the comic. Therefore, the real life invitation(s) which inspired the inclusion of Panel 6 in the comic could perhaps have referred in real life to an activity that is actually depicted in Seven Years or Ten Years , or to some other activity, which then may or may not have been realized.\n","explanation":"This comic marks the second year of Randall Munroe 's wife's battle with cancer, and appears to depict actual events from those two years. Randall is depicted as Cueball and his wife as Megan , as usual for both.\nThis comic later became part of a series of comics directly continued in 1928: Seven Years and later continued in 2386: Ten Years . The first eight panels of this comic are included in the next two, although  slightly grayed out.\nExplanations of the individual panels:\nThe title text is referring to a possible side-effect of chemotherapy drugs , the inability to concentrate. It could also just be the fact that the chemo can make you feel just terrible. When whatever effect kicks in, she loses the rest of their Scrabble games for that day. However, as we see in panel 5, there is a reason why she wins all of the first half of their games. But this is not enough, or she even forgets to play on the cancer, when the drugs take effect.\nThe use of the asterisk in the title text for \"*dominated*\" might be a reference to the 1999 game Unreal Tournament in which the game announcer voice would from time to time use the words \"dominating\" or \"dominated\" in a deep tone when a player is doing really well in the game (for example being on a multi-kill strike). Example sound here .\nKnit caps have only been used a few times in xkcd, most prominently on Knit Cap Girl in 1350: Lorenz , see her section for more details.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit on a bed, Randall's fianc\u00e9e is talking on the phone. The person she is talking to, a doctor holding a clipboard, is shown inset.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: Oh god.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit together while Randall's fianc\u00e9e, now bald, is receiving chemotherapy. They are both on their laptops.] IV pump: ... Beeep ... Beeep ... Beeep ...\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (who is wearing a knit cap) are paddling a kayak against a scenic mountain backdrop.]\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit at a table, staring at a cell phone. There is a clock on the wall. Her head is stubbly.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: How long can it take to read a scan!?\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are back at the hospital again, Randall's fianc\u00e9e receiving chemo. They are playing Scrabble.] Randall: \"Zarg\" isn't a word. Randall's fianc\u00e9e: But caaaancer. Randall: ...Ok, fine.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (wearing a knit cap) are listening to a Cueball-like friend. A large thought bubble is above their heads and it obscures the friends talk. The text below, split in three is the only part there can be no doubt about:] Friend: So next year you should come visit us up in the mounta a and Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (thinking): \"Next year\"\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are getting married, with a heart above their heads. Randall's wife's hair is growing back.]\n[Randall and Randall's wife (wearing a knit cap) stand on a beach, watching a whale jump out of water.] Fwoosh\n[Randall's wife is sitting at a desk with her laptop standing on top of two books. Her hair has grown back a little more. Randall stands behind her.] Randall: Hey\u2014 Randall: you're doing science, Randall: and you're still alive. Randall's wife: Yeah!\n[Randall and Randall's wife sit under a tall tree on a hill.] Randall: It's really only been two years? Randall's wife: They were big years.\n[Randall and Randall's wife sit at a table in a fancy restaurant. Her hair has grown back even more. The waiter (Hairy) brings them a dish with a cover on it.] Waiter: Happy... Anniversary? Randall's wife: Biopsy-versary! Waiter: ...Eww.\nWhile it is known that Randall's wife has since survived more than two years past the date of the invitation in Panel 6, it is unknown whether the invitation was later accepted. The followup comic Seven Years does not seem to include a visit \"up in the mountains\" among its various other recreational activities, but the one after it, Ten Years , does. However, since it is possible that the invitation was made up for the comic in order to represent the worry over any invitation envisioning the future at that time, it is possible that it was never proposed as depicted in the comic. Therefore, the real life invitation(s) which inspired the inclusion of Panel 6 in the comic could perhaps have referred in real life to an activity that is actually depicted in Seven Years or Ten Years , or to some other activity, which then may or may not have been realized.\n"}
{"id":1142,"title":"Coverage","image_title":"Coverage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1142","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coverage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1142:_Coverage","transcript":"[Cueball is looking at a phone.] Cueball: Man, the coverage here is awfu\u2014\n[Another man punches Cueball.] [Caption below the panel:] Faraday cagematch","explanation":"The caption \"faraday cagematch\" is a portmanteau of \"faraday cage\" and \"cagematch\".\nA Faraday cage is a cage of conducting material that interferes and blocks out electromagnetic radiation like cell phone signals, provided the material is of the appropriate thickness and the gaps between the \"bars\" are significantly smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. A cage match is a type of professional wrestling match in which the participants fight in a ring enclosed by a metal cage. The comic caption is a play on the two terms, putting Cueball into a cage match in the Faraday cage that is blocking his reception.\nAlso the fact that Cueball gets hit in the face immediately after stating that the coverage is awful might be a joke about the different meanings of the word cover, boxing for example the word cover-up is a defensive technique, while phone coverage refers to the connection quality of his phone to the mobile phone network. The fact that Cueball, obviously referring to his phone signal, complains about awful coverage (caused by the faraday cage) while his head is also badly or not at all covered (caused by himself), which allows his opponent to strike him, might be described as ironically comedic.\nThe title text is a play on a rule in cage matches that states that a participant wins if they are first to escape the cage. Tunneling diodes are capable of fast operation, allowing a device to generate high frequency signals, which are more capable of penetrating the mesh openings in a Faraday cage.\nRandall uses Faraday cages again in Faraday Tour .\n[Cueball is looking at a phone.] Cueball: Man, the coverage here is awfu\u2014\n[Another man punches Cueball.] [Caption below the panel:] Faraday cagematch"}
{"id":1143,"title":"Location","image_title":"Location","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1143","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/location.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1143:_Location","transcript":"[Three people around a computer. One of them is typing.] Typing: Hey, party tonight? Typing: We'd all love to come see your new place! Reply (through monitor): Wait, what?\n[Cut to guy sitting at a laptop.] Reply (through the guy's monitor): We want to hang out! Guy typing: We're not, like, good friends. Reply (through the guy's monitor): I know, but we were thinking about it and we really like you!\n[Cut back to the three friends.] Typing: You should have us over tonight! Typing: For, like, an hour. Typing: It'll be fun! Reply (through monitor): Well, uh, sure.\n[Cut to color-inverted image of the guy's house. Four Enlightened-controlled Ingress portals are in the guy's back yard.] Friends (off-screen): YESSSS! Guy (from inside his house): I still don't get why you're suddenly so excited to hang out.\n","explanation":"Ingress is an augmented reality location-based service game in which players have to visit certain real-world places marked by the game as containing in-game objectives called portals (much like in its far more well-known offspring Pokemon GO). The single guy in the comic owns a home surrounded by an abundance of portals, which makes it an attractive destination for the three friends who contact him via the computer. They are obviously not really friends of the guy, but just wish to come by because of the portals.\nThe portals in the comic are controlled by the green \"Enlightened\" team (and have links and a field), making them valuable resource caches for the \"Enlightened\" team, and priority targets for the blue \"Resistance\" team.\nFoursquare , referenced in the title text, is another service that lets users check into places they visit for discounts in a similar way to how Ingress players visit portals for points. Unlike Foursquare places, which are businesses and public places such as parks, Ingress portals also include historic houses that are still private residences, as well as churches, so Ingress is more likely to reward people visiting a friend's house. \"Space noises\" refers to the ambient sounds when playing Ingress.\n[Three people around a computer. One of them is typing.] Typing: Hey, party tonight? Typing: We'd all love to come see your new place! Reply (through monitor): Wait, what?\n[Cut to guy sitting at a laptop.] Reply (through the guy's monitor): We want to hang out! Guy typing: We're not, like, good friends. Reply (through the guy's monitor): I know, but we were thinking about it and we really like you!\n[Cut back to the three friends.] Typing: You should have us over tonight! Typing: For, like, an hour. Typing: It'll be fun! Reply (through monitor): Well, uh, sure.\n[Cut to color-inverted image of the guy's house. Four Enlightened-controlled Ingress portals are in the guy's back yard.] Friends (off-screen): YESSSS! Guy (from inside his house): I still don't get why you're suddenly so excited to hang out.\n"}
{"id":1144,"title":"Tags","image_title":"Tags","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1144","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tags.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1144:_Tags","transcript":"<div>Q: How do you annoy a web developer?<\/span>\n","explanation":"HTML is a markup language used in web development, and is the subject of this comic. The comic employs multiple poor HTML practices while asking the rhetorical question of how best to annoy web developers, effectively answering the question that it poses.\nIn HTML, all elements (except self-closing elements like <img> ) should consist of an open and close tag of the same type <div>Like this<\/div> .\nHTML (except in its formulation as an XML language\u2014XHTML) has never been case-sensitive, but the practice of using uppercase tags for readability is long outmoded, and the mixing of cases in this example would definitely annoy a developer.\nAnother basic idea of HTML is that all elements should be properly nested. That is, any element whose open tag occurs inside a div must be closed before the div is closed.\nNB: In practice, web browsers will error-correct nearly all these problems.\nThe rules of proper nesting also put restrictions on which tags can be placed where \u2014 \"block\" elements, such as <div> cannot be placed inside \"inline\" elements, such as <span> , and inline elements must be placed inside a block element of some kind. Thus, <span><div> is forbidden, even if the tags are closed in the proper order.\nFurther, web developers make a distinction between semantic and structural elements. Semantic elements contain a clue in their name as to what kind of an element they are \u2014 for example, an <article> tag contains an article, such as a blog post or news article, while an <ol> tag contains an o rdered l ist. (It's wise to note that this is not an absolute rule; it's possible to put non-article content in an <article> , it's just not recommended.) Semantic tags do not, however, indicate how their contents are to be displayed; your browser might display an <article> in the default font, layout, and placement, while mine, a screen reader , might ignore everything on the page except <article> s, and read <article> s in a soothing voice .\nStructural tags, on the other hand, give no clues as to what they contain; they just indicate how a web page is to be laid out. <span> and <div> are structural tags; they can contain anything. Their definitions in HTML simply indicate that <div> is a block tag (it can affect both what the text looks like and where it is on the page; by default, it is displayed in a separate block from the rest of the text in the page, and has at least one line break before and after its display) and <span> is an inline tag: it affects what its text looks like, but not where it is on the page. Without additional attributes, it's impossible for a browser to tell what's supposed to be inside a <div> or a <span> , which means that my screen reader can't just pluck out the blog posts and read those."}
{"id":1145,"title":"Sky Color","image_title":"Sky Color","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1145","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sky_color.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1145:_Sky_Color","transcript":"[Science Girl and her mother, Megan, but with her hair up. Megan is at a desk and facing the girl.] Science Girl: Mommy, why is the sky blue? Megan: Rayleigh scattering! Short wavelengths get scattered way more (proportional to 1\/ \u03bb 4 ). Blue light dominates because it's so short. Science Girl: Oh. Science Girl: So why isn't the sky violet? Megan: Well, because, uh... ...hmm. [Caption Below the panel:] My hobby: Teaching tricky questions to the children of my scientist friends.\n","explanation":"The point of this comic is that often, curious children ask their parents simple questions about understanding how the world works.  Often, although the question is simple, the answer is not.  \"Why is the sky blue?\" is a common example, since most parents are not familiar with Rayleigh scattering , and thus are unable to answer the question.\nRandall 's hobby is to make those questions even harder, so that the parents who are familiar with the subject (scientists, for example) will be stumped.\nAnother point of this comic is that we often think that we understand a scientific phenomenon (e.g. why is the sky blue?); however, a certain simple question (e.g. why isn't the sky violet?) can often uncover large gaps in our actual understanding.\nRayleigh scattering is the phenomenon that explains the color of the sky, where light of every wavelength gets scattered in the air by the inverse quartic (fourth power) of its wavelength as given in the comic. In the visible spectrum , blue light has a wavelength of 450\u2013495\u00a0nm while violet has a shorter wavelength of 380\u2013450\u00a0nm. Violet light does indeed get scattered more than blue light, however the lower portion of the spectrum for sunlight consists of blue light and eyes are much more sensitive to blue light than violet light. Furthermore, the sunlight contains more blue than violet to begin with as a result of the surface temperature of the sun. This leaves the impression of a blue sky. A good explanation, including why blue and not violet, can be found in Usenet Physics FAQ\u00a0:: Why is the sky blue? , but note that human color perception is more complicated than described there.\nThe title text refers to a mirror image , and is discussed by the famous American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman in a famous BBC documentary [1] , as one of the problems which he used to have fun with first years (British English for first year student or freshman).\nA mirror image is a virtual image produced by the reflection of light on a mirror. It's common to think of images in mirrors as being reversed left-to-right, as any text held in front of us will appear flipped. This is actually an issue of perception. In a plane mirror, images are reflected directly: the left side of your body will be reflected in the left side of the mirror, and vice-versa. The source of confusion is that people tend to think of a mirror image the way we would think of a person facing us.  When another person faces us, they turn around the vertical axis, placing their right hand on our left side, so seeing our left hand on our left side in a reflection seems like an inversion, even though it's a direct representation. By the same token, in order to hold text up to a mirror, we generally flip it around the vertical axis, so that the start of the text is on right, and the end on the left (in English, at least).  When the mirror reflects this, we see the text as backward, but the mirror hasn't reversed it, we reverse it when we turn it toward a mirror.\nIn other words, the vertical axis is only \"special\" because we're used to objects turning around it, so we come to expect that reversal, instead of a reflection.\nYou can induce a mirror to reverse left and right only --- by standing next to it instead of in front of it, facing along the plane of the mirror itself. If you lift your right arm, you can clearly see your image's left arm raising, without having to adjust for frame of reference. Similarly, you can induce a mirror to reverse top and bottom only by holding it flat above your head or laying it flat on the ground and standing on it (or perhaps standing under a suitably equipped bedroom ceiling). See this video for a demonstration.\n[Science Girl and her mother, Megan, but with her hair up. Megan is at a desk and facing the girl.] Science Girl: Mommy, why is the sky blue? Megan: Rayleigh scattering! Short wavelengths get scattered way more (proportional to 1\/ \u03bb 4 ). Blue light dominates because it's so short. Science Girl: Oh. Science Girl: So why isn't the sky violet? Megan: Well, because, uh... ...hmm. [Caption Below the panel:] My hobby: Teaching tricky questions to the children of my scientist friends.\n"}
{"id":1146,"title":"Honest","image_title":"Honest","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1146","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/honest.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1146:_Honest","transcript":"[Two Cueballs are walking.] Cueball: I mean, let's be honest here- Friend: Ok.\n[The friend is talking with his palm out.] Friend: I don't understand why anything happens and I'm confused and scared and trying really hard all the time.\n[The two Cueballs look at each other.] Cueball: ...Too honest. Cueball: Scale it back. Friend: Sorry.\n","explanation":"The phrase \"let's be honest here\u2014\" is often used to soften a statement that might otherwise seem crass. Before Cueball can finish his sentence, he is interrupted by his friend, who takes the opportunity to honestly state his deepest feelings.\nIt is possible that Cueball's friend's last response, \"Sorry,\" (which is on response to Cueball saying, \"Too honest. Scale it back.\") is insincere as a way of scaling his honesty back by not being honest in his next statement.\nThe human condition is essentially terrifying, having to try to keep up appearances all the time.\nThe title text could be a reference to angst , a word used in English to describe an intense feeling of panic \u2014 but the friend of Cueball proposes to work on a better understanding on his own fears.\nRandall has mentioned having ADD, such as in 1106: ADD . People with neurological or psychological problems such as ADD often express having trouble with things in everyday life that other people seem to find easy.\n[Two Cueballs are walking.] Cueball: I mean, let's be honest here- Friend: Ok.\n[The friend is talking with his palm out.] Friend: I don't understand why anything happens and I'm confused and scared and trying really hard all the time.\n[The two Cueballs look at each other.] Cueball: ...Too honest. Cueball: Scale it back. Friend: Sorry.\n"}
{"id":1147,"title":"Evolving","image_title":"Evolving","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1147","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/evolving.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1147:_Evolving","transcript":"[Bacterial cell culture.] What? Staphylococcus aureus is evolving!\n...\nOff-screen: Aww, crap. Staphylococcus aureus evolved into Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus!\n","explanation":"In a Pok\u00e9mon game, a player goes out in search for the eponymous creatures. Many Pok\u00e9mon can be found directly in the wild, but there are also a lot of Pok\u00e9mon that require training and growth, to cause them to \"evolve\" into new Pok\u00e9mon. \"Evolve,\" the game's term, is a misnomer which earned itself quite some controversy in the past; in reality, Pok\u00e9mon \"evolution\" is more akin to puberty or metamorphosis, since instead of the entire species of Pok\u00e9mon acquiring changes through an extended period of time, one specific member of the species grows instantly to the \"higher stage.\" At that point in the game, the Pok\u00e9mon glows before transforming into the new form, then stops glowing, and the very same text \"What? XXX is evolving!\" is used (see this video or those screenshots for instance). The changes of such a transformation can be quite dramatic ... or not.\nThis comic depicts the \"evolution\" of bacteria as observed by a Biologist in the same format as the game Pok\u00e9mon. Here we have Staphylococcus aureus , which is not a desirable bacterium (it causes Staph infections ) which evolves into \"Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus \" . Methicillin is an antibiotic. If the bacterium becomes resistant, it means the antibiotic will be less effective against it, making infections harder to treat. Thus the observer is not pleased with such an evolution.\nThe title text references this by suggesting that biologists do not want bacteria to evolve in this way, as opposed to Pok\u00e9mon where you put a Pok\u00e9mon on the \"front lines\" as much as possible to gain it experience and hope it evolves. A point of irony is that Pok\u00e9mon evolution can easily be prevented, by using an Everstone, or stopped, by pressing the B button in the game controller during evolution, especially if there are Pok\u00e9mon that one does not want to evolve. The bit about the front lines is that, if a bacteria colony is exposed sufficiently to an antibiotic, those bacteria with any level of resistance to the antibiotic are less likely to be killed by the antibiotic, and are able to reproduce in spite of the antibiotic. Most future generations of bacteria now have this level of resistance instead of just a small subset. This makes the likelihood of future more resistant and harder to treat mutations even more likely.\nStaphylococcus aureus is a very common bacterium, that under an electron microscope looks like the xkcd drawing, and is the major cause of staph infections in the nostrils and skin. Hospitals are often plagued with outbreaks of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which is very difficult to treat as the typical antibiotics do not work on it.\n[Bacterial cell culture.] What? Staphylococcus aureus is evolving!\n...\nOff-screen: Aww, crap. Staphylococcus aureus evolved into Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus!\n"}
{"id":1148,"title":"Nothing to Offer","image_title":"Nothing to Offer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1148","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nothing_to_offer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1148:_Nothing_to_Offer","transcript":"[Radio on a dresser.] Radio: I have nothing to offer Radio: But\nRadio: Blood, toil, tears, sweat,\nRadio: spit, bile, vomit, urine,\n[Text is now bleeding through the background and gets obscured then cut off.] Radio: mucus, semen, earwax, lymph, gastric acid, sebum, pus, endolymph, intracellular fluid, blood plasma, vitreous humor, feces, pleural cavity fluid, chlye, synovial fluid, peritoneal fluid,","explanation":"\"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat \" is a famous phrase in a speech given by Winston Churchill , which would be heard on the radio in the 1940s. The comic then goes on to list numerous other increasingly obscure bodily fluids , including through the title text, ending humorously with gin (which Churchill was partial to).\nThe fluids in order: blood , tears , sweat , spit , bile , vomit , urine , mucus , semen , earwax , lymph , gastric acid , sebum , pus , endolymph , intracellular fluid , blood plasma , vitreous humor , feces , pleural cavity fluid , chyle , synovial fluid , peritoneal fluid , cerebrospinal fluid , pericardial fluid , sputum , aqueous humor , perilymph , chyme , hydatid fluid , interstitial fluid , and rheum . The partially obscured ones near the end are taken by process of elimination. CHLY- seems to be a typo for CHYL(E).\n[Replace 'gin' with 'tea' for all other Bri'ish people]\n[Radio on a dresser.] Radio: I have nothing to offer Radio: But\nRadio: Blood, toil, tears, sweat,\nRadio: spit, bile, vomit, urine,\n[Text is now bleeding through the background and gets obscured then cut off.] Radio: mucus, semen, earwax, lymph, gastric acid, sebum, pus, endolymph, intracellular fluid, blood plasma, vitreous humor, feces, pleural cavity fluid, chlye, synovial fluid, peritoneal fluid,"}
{"id":1149,"title":"Broomstick","image_title":"Broomstick","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1149","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/broomstick.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1149:_Broomstick","transcript":"[Megan wearing red shoes talking to somebody off-screen.] Off-screen: Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West and I'll take you home. Megan: Got it.\n[Megan wearing red shoes standing before steps.] Megan: You can have the slippers if you let me borrow your broom. Off-screen: Deal.\n[Megan carrying a broom and singing without wearing the red shoes.]\n[Megan flying in a balloon over three Wizard of Oz characters.] Megan: That was easy.\n","explanation":"Megan plays the part of Dorothy , the protagonist of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . Dorothy has been trapped in the Land of Oz due to extreme weather and must obtain transportation home. An off-screen character, presumably the Wizard of Oz himself, offers her a ride if she obtains the The Wicked Witch of the West 's magic broom. Megan wears Ruby Slippers and uses them as a bargaining chip to obtain the Witch's broom.\nThe \"little dog\" offered in the title text is Dorothy's faithful companion Toto .\nThe Wicked Witch of the West is a fictional character and the most significant antagonist in The Wizard of Oz , which is based on L. Frank Baum's children's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . In the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz , the Wicked Witch flies on her broom over the Emerald City demanding Dorothy's surrender, and the Wizard demands the destruction of the Witch with her broom as proof, in exchange for granting the wishes of Dorothy and her companions.\nThe point of the comic is to show how easily Dorothy could resolve the situation if she was willing to forsake both her traveling companions and her pet. She leaves Toto with the Witch; it is unclear whether she plans to retain possession of the broom and return it in order to collect him, or plans to abandon Toto as well. She will also leave Oz completely at the mercy of said witch by giving her the Ruby Slippers and leaving with the Wizard.\nIt should be noted that this resolution defies the canon established in the movie, as nobody could remove the slippers as long as Dorothy lived , presumably including Dorothy herself. Additionally, it turns out that the Wizard was a fraud and was unable to take her home, and ironically it is the ruby slippers that did so.\nThe Wizard of Oz was also referenced in Five-Minute Comics: Part 4 , and iOS Keyboard .\n[Megan wearing red shoes talking to somebody off-screen.] Off-screen: Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West and I'll take you home. Megan: Got it.\n[Megan wearing red shoes standing before steps.] Megan: You can have the slippers if you let me borrow your broom. Off-screen: Deal.\n[Megan carrying a broom and singing without wearing the red shoes.]\n[Megan flying in a balloon over three Wizard of Oz characters.] Megan: That was easy.\n"}
{"id":1150,"title":"Instagram","image_title":"Instagram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1150","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/instagram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1150:_Instagram","transcript":"[Cueball, raising a hand, is talking to his Cueball-like friend who is sitting by his computer.] Cueball: I've been putting all my stuff in Chad's garage. Cueball: He has nice shelves. Cueball: And he lets me in to see it whenever I want.\n[In the next panel, without a frame, there is a close up of a note. Above the note is a small black frame with Cueballs comment:] Cueball (off-panel): But I got this note from him: [The note:] Dude In like a month im gonna Craigslist all that shit you left in my garage Just FYI -Chad\n[Zoom in on Cueball who lifts both hands palms up.] Cueball: It's an outrage! This is no way to run a storage business! Friend (off-panel): Are you paying him to look after your stuff?\n[Final frame almost like the first frame, but Cueball has taken his hands down.] Cueball: No. Friend: Then what he runs isn't a storage business. Cueball: Well, I'm this close to not giving him any more stuff. Friend: That'll teach him.\n","explanation":"As indicated by the title, this comic is an allegory for a controversy over Instagram , a photo-sharing social network now owned by Facebook . In December 2012, Instagram changed their terms of use , allowing the network to sell user-uploaded images, without profit to the content generators. This infuriated many users, who closed their accounts or stopped uploading images.\nIn the comic Cueball tells his Cueball-like friend about his problem with Chad, who just sent him a note telling him that he no longer wants to store all this stuff that Cueball has left in his garage. Cueball left it there because Chad has nice shelves and lets him in to see his stuff whenever he wishes, so that was really convenient.\nChad's note tells Cueball that he has a month to move his shit \u2014 after that he will try to get rid of it by selling it on Craigslist . This is a website where individuals can contact others interested in buying or selling goods. As a verb, it means to sell something on Craigslist. ( FYI is an abbreviation of For Your Information ).\nCueball is outraged, as this is not way to run a storage business . But when his friend asks him if he paid anything for this \"storage business\", it turns out that he did not. The friend then concludes that it is not a storage business.\nThis is exactly the problem with Instagram (or its users). A user does not pay anything, but to create an account you have to sign a terms of service\/end user license agreement. A user has thus effectively signed their consent to whatever Instagram has written. Instagram can then change these terms if they give a forewarning (as Chad has done here). However, most users don't read the terms before clicking the \"I agree\" option, so it can come as a shock when Instagram uses the data in a way the user hadn't anticipated.\nInstead of getting angry Cueball should thus just go and remove his stuff, but instead he is just going to almost (but not quite) stop giving Chad any more stuff.\nThis is also making fun of those Instagram users that complain about the new way of using their data, but at the same time keep uploading more pictures. The users have often developed a kind of addiction, so they cannot just stop sharing their life (in pictures).\nIn the title text Cueball continues with an idea of calling the cops. He thinks that Chad is a thief. He thus ignores that he left the stuff at Chad's house of his own accord. And after Chad has been arrested (which will of course never happen) he wishes to move all his stuff to another house, just to continue to get free storage.\nThere are two major flaws in this logic - and it is the same with the logic of the disgruntled Instagram users. You cannot accuse Instagram of stealing because it was you who gave them the images in the first place, and it is irresponsible to assume that this will not happen if you give your photos to another free social networking service (e.g. Facebook ).\nThese kind of issues (with Facebook as the evildoer) are also the subject of 743: Infrastructures and 1390: Research Ethics .\n[Cueball, raising a hand, is talking to his Cueball-like friend who is sitting by his computer.] Cueball: I've been putting all my stuff in Chad's garage. Cueball: He has nice shelves. Cueball: And he lets me in to see it whenever I want.\n[In the next panel, without a frame, there is a close up of a note. Above the note is a small black frame with Cueballs comment:] Cueball (off-panel): But I got this note from him: [The note:] Dude In like a month im gonna Craigslist all that shit you left in my garage Just FYI -Chad\n[Zoom in on Cueball who lifts both hands palms up.] Cueball: It's an outrage! This is no way to run a storage business! Friend (off-panel): Are you paying him to look after your stuff?\n[Final frame almost like the first frame, but Cueball has taken his hands down.] Cueball: No. Friend: Then what he runs isn't a storage business. Cueball: Well, I'm this close to not giving him any more stuff. Friend: That'll teach him.\n"}
{"id":1151,"title":"Tests","image_title":"Tests","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1151","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tests.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1151:_Tests","transcript":"[Megan pouring a bucket of purple liquid on the presents at the base of a Christmas tree.]\n[Megan pouring a bucket of pink liquid on the presents at the base of a Christmas tree.]\n[Megan looking at the soaked presents.]\nMegan: All my presents appear to be Gram-negative. Cueball: I wish you hadn't opened the home bio lab kit first.","explanation":"The first present Megan opened contained a home biology lab kit, including the equipment needed to perform a Gram stain. Gram staining is a technique used in microbiology to separate bacteria into two broad categories based on the structure of their cell walls. The sample is treated with two different dyes: first a purple dye, then secondly a pink one. When subsequently examined under a microscope, \"Gram-positive\" bacteria retain the purple color of the first dye, whereas \"Gram-negative\" bacteria do not, allowing the second pink stain to show. All Megan's presents have been stained pink, and are presumably therefore Gram-negative.\nIn the process, she has damaged the other presents, hence Cueball's wish that she had opened another present first.\nThe title text refers to two bacteria commonly used as controls to confirm that the technique has been correctly performed: Staphylococcus aureus (Gram-positive) and Escherichia coli (Gram-negative). Neither are bacteria you want to be coming into contact with in any substantial quantities [ citation needed ] , hence the need to stop accepting presents from \" That Guy \".\n[Megan pouring a bucket of purple liquid on the presents at the base of a Christmas tree.]\n[Megan pouring a bucket of pink liquid on the presents at the base of a Christmas tree.]\n[Megan looking at the soaked presents.]\nMegan: All my presents appear to be Gram-negative. Cueball: I wish you hadn't opened the home bio lab kit first."}
{"id":1152,"title":"Communion","image_title":"Communion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1152","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/communion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1152:_Communion","transcript":"[Cueball and Danish are taking a stroll.] Cueball: How was Christmas? Did you go to church?\nDanish: Yup. We celebrated the birth of a child, then we ate of his flesh and blood.\n[Silence from Cueball.]\nDanish: Seriously hope we got the right child this time.","explanation":"This comic plays on the Christian doctrine that the Holy Communion bread and wine are Jesus' flesh and blood. It is based on the words of Jesus from the synoptic gospels and Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians during the Last Supper , today used by the priest as Words of Institution . According to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation , as well as in the Eastern Christian tradition, the substance (using the Aristotelian concept that all things have an accident, or physical make-up, as well as a substance, or true nature\/purpose) of the bread and wine change to Jesus' flesh and blood, while their accidents remains the same. Many people, including many Catholics, believe this concept means the bread and wine literally turn (i.e., their accidents changes) into Jesus' flesh and blood during the ceremony. Some Protestant denominations reject this doctrine, both its actual and misunderstood application, with some taking the words as wholly symbolic of Jesus' sacrificial death and others believing the bread and wine create a real spiritual connection to Christ but do not change their substance.\nIn the second panel, Danish accurately describes what would happen at a traditional Christian Christmas service, though in such a way as to make it sound macabre.\nAfter walking and thinking in panel three, she makes it more macabre when worrying that they, again, may have gotten hold of the wrong child for the sacrifice needed to drink blood and eat flesh.\nThe title text further spoofs the common understanding of the doctrine of transubstantiation and elaborates on Danish 's concern in the last panel by supposing that the act of taking a sip of wine during Holy Communion turns that wine into the blood, not of Jesus, but of a decades-old murder victim.  Alternatively, the title text could be interpreted as saying that the wine actually acquires Jesus' DNA, and that Jesus was \"killed\" in the 1970s.  The police, who investigated Jesus' 1970s death, would then have his DNA on file.\nIt should be noted that saliva includes DNA, so the positive result may be the DNA from the person who spit the wine\/blood out and does not necessarily mean that that person was murdered by the church in order to prepare the wine\/blood. This could be a reference to the resurrection of Jesus.\n[Cueball and Danish are taking a stroll.] Cueball: How was Christmas? Did you go to church?\nDanish: Yup. We celebrated the birth of a child, then we ate of his flesh and blood.\n[Silence from Cueball.]\nDanish: Seriously hope we got the right child this time."}
{"id":1153,"title":"Proof","image_title":"Proof","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1153","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/proof.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1153:_Proof","transcript":"Zeno: My client couldn't have killed anyone with this arrow, and I can prove it! Judge: I'd like to examine your proof, Zeno. You may approach the bench. Zeno: \u2014But never reach it!\n","explanation":"Zeno of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher who devised several apparent paradoxes of motion called Zeno's paradoxes . Here are the two relevant to the comic:\nArrow paradox: At any instant in time, an arrow suspended in mid-air is no different from an arrow in motion. How, then, can motion occur? (Answer: calculus [all objects have a velocity].) The lawyer presumably intends to use this argument to prove that his client could not have used the arrow to commit murder. Another possibility was that it is impossible to hit a person in motion.\nDichotomy paradox: Suppose I need to go from point A to point B. First I must walk halfway there: half of the distance between A and B. Then I must walk half the remaining distance, which would bring me to three-quarters of the original distance; then I must again walk half the now-remaining distance to reach a point seven-eighths of the way from point A, and so on. Because I would have to take an infinite number of non-zero steps, I will never reach point B. By the same argument, the lawyer in the comic can get closer and closer to the judge's table, but never reach it.\nThere are two possible law vs math\/logic puns in the comic, on the words \"approach\" and \"proof.\" \" Approach the bench \" is a legal term meaning to have a private conversation with the judge; approach in calculus means an infinite process where a function value gets closer and closer to a limit value that it never actually reaches, reminiscent of Zeno's paradoxes. \"Proof\" is also ambiguous, with a different meaning in formal mathematics than in jurisprudence . See Proof (truth) and Mathematical Proof , for example.\nGottfried Leibniz is the co-inventor of calculus (along with Isaac Newton; see 626: Newton and Leibniz ). If Leibniz were to testify in this imaginary trial, he might argue that calculus invalidates Zeno's paradoxes, because the moving arrow has a different velocity than a stationary one (the function describing the motion has a nonzero derivative at the point), and the infinite series in the dichotomy paradox has a finite sum. Both Zeno and calculus assume a continuous, infinitely divisible, ideal spacetime (as does quantum mechanics ); a different solution would be available if spacetime turns out to be discrete. However, Zeno is arguably not concerned with actually calculating the correct answer. In the real world, Zeno can be trivially disproven simply by moving and reaching a desired target (it is said that Diogenes the Cynic reacted to the paradox by wordlessly walking to a destination, to demonstrate his contempt for it). It remains a question of debate whether a mathematical approach addresses the central points in Zeno's arguments.\n994: Advent Calendar is also about Zeno.\nZeno: My client couldn't have killed anyone with this arrow, and I can prove it! Judge: I'd like to examine your proof, Zeno. You may approach the bench. Zeno: \u2014But never reach it!\n"}
{"id":1154,"title":"Resolution","image_title":"Resolution","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1154","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/resolution.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1154:_Resolution","transcript":"Cueball: I'm scared of being stuck\u2014thinking I'm fixing things about myself but never actually changing. Cueball: My 2013 resolution is to break out of loops. To recognize when I'm not making progress, stop yelling at myself, and try a different approach. Out of panel: Wasn't that also your resolution last year? Cueball: Yeah, but this year's gonna be different.\n","explanation":"This New Year comic is a little reminder that it's the last day of 2012 , and it's time to make your New Year's resolutions !\nCueball wants to break a very common habit of resolving to do something (go on a diet, for example), not doing it, and then trying the same, dysfunctional plan again, thinking it will work \"this year.\" This is another way of stating a common folk definition of insanity: to keep doing what you always do yet expecting different results.\nThe irony is that Cueball resolved the same thing last year, and it is implied it didn't work, but he says it'll be different \"this year.\"\nThe title text is a parody of the saying \"if at first you don't succeed: try, try, try again.\"\nCueball: I'm scared of being stuck\u2014thinking I'm fixing things about myself but never actually changing. Cueball: My 2013 resolution is to break out of loops. To recognize when I'm not making progress, stop yelling at myself, and try a different approach. Out of panel: Wasn't that also your resolution last year? Cueball: Yeah, but this year's gonna be different.\n"}
{"id":1155,"title":"Kolmogorov Directions","image_title":"Kolmogorov Directions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1155","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kolmogorov_directions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1155:_Kolmogorov_Directions","transcript":"[Cueball on the phone.] Phone: How do I get to your place from Lexington? Cueball: Hmm... Cueball: Ok, starting from your driveway, take every left turn that doesn't put you on a prime-numbered highway or street named for a president.\n[Caption below the panel:] When people ask for step-by-step directions, I worry that there will be too many steps to remember, so I try to put them in minimal form.\n","explanation":"Andrey Kolmogorov was a mathematician who worked, among other things, on defining computational complexity. Roughly speaking, the Kolmogorov complexity of a string (of bits, words, symbols, etc.) is the shortest description that allows an accurate reconstruction \u2014 or, in some variants, the length of the smallest program which will output the original string.\nCueball 's method of giving directions is very reminiscent of Kolmogorov's method of determining complexity. However, it is unlikely they know all the presidents, nor can calculate prime numbers in their heads, and so will have trouble with certain parts. These directions may have minimal Kolmogorov complexity, but they are non-intuitive and are likely not the shortest or quickest way to get there, considering that they consist mostly of left turns.\nThis is not the first time Cueball has had difficulties with directions, and here we see he hates giving directions as much as he hates receiving them.\nThe joke in the title text is that Cueball just sent his friend to a store to buy a GPS device to give him the correct directions. (By the time this comic was published, GPS-enabled smartphones had already largely displaced dedicated GPS devices, [1] but Cueball could be talking to a person who does not wish to own a smartphone.)\n[Cueball on the phone.] Phone: How do I get to your place from Lexington? Cueball: Hmm... Cueball: Ok, starting from your driveway, take every left turn that doesn't put you on a prime-numbered highway or street named for a president.\n[Caption below the panel:] When people ask for step-by-step directions, I worry that there will be too many steps to remember, so I try to put them in minimal form.\n"}
{"id":1156,"title":"Conditioning","image_title":"Conditioning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1156","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/conditioning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1156:_Conditioning","transcript":"Every few hours, subwoofer plays throbbing bass for 10 seconds... [With arrow pointing to subwoofer.] ...then bread crumbs are dispensed into box [With arrow pointing to bread feeder machine.] Opening [With arrow pointing to feeder opening shaped like a driver side car window.] Local wildlife [With arrows pointing to birds and a squirrel.] Protip: Leave this device in your yard for a week, then watch as the problem of loud music from passing cars solves itself.\n","explanation":"Herein, the author devises a method of addressing the issue of drivers who turn up their music to irritating levels which usually results in a lot of bass coming from the car \u2014 the low frequencies being the ones that most easily penetrate the car and travel farther, thus being more audible to those around the car.\nAs the title suggests, the idea is to condition animals to respond to a thumping bass. The machine is described as working as follows: every few hours, the bass would turn on, and the box would dispense food behind an opening designed to look like an open car window. Over time, local wildlife would flock to the box to get the food from inside, and would become trained that the sound of a subwoofer means that they can get food by flying through a car window.. Eventually, the animals would respond to any low music, including that played by cars.\nThe end result would be that the local wildlife would approach, and presumably attempt to enter, any car that has that same thumping bass. Drivers, in turn, would cease to turn up their music in order to prevent the groups of animals from chasing after their cars, thus solving the problem of annoyingly loud bass. This behavior modification can itself be seen as a somewhat different form of conditioning .\nAlthough this plan may seem far-fetched, a similar scheme was seriously proposed in the United Kingdom during World War I to condition seagulls to associate a submarine's periscope with food, which would give away the locations of enemy submarines as the gulls flocked to their periscopes being raised.\nThe title text is a dialogue about using a similar method of conditioning to send animals after a visiting Pope . Why someone would want that to happen is left to the reader's imagination, although papal visitations usually disrupt the local communities with onerous traffic and special and ostentatious ceremonies, and do attract huge crowds of dignitaries, celebrities, the faithful, the curious, and attending purveyors of foodstuffs and trinkets. Not to mention the impact to the local AirBnB market. Or it could just be Black Hat, who would not need any particular reason for this sort of behavior, and might choose the Pope because of his highly recognizable outfit.\nEvery few hours, subwoofer plays throbbing bass for 10 seconds... [With arrow pointing to subwoofer.] ...then bread crumbs are dispensed into box [With arrow pointing to bread feeder machine.] Opening [With arrow pointing to feeder opening shaped like a driver side car window.] Local wildlife [With arrows pointing to birds and a squirrel.] Protip: Leave this device in your yard for a week, then watch as the problem of loud music from passing cars solves itself.\n"}
{"id":1157,"title":"Sick Day","image_title":"Sick Day","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1157","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sick_day.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1157:_Sick_Day","transcript":"[This comic shows a pie chart with 5 slices, each with a label and a line pointing to these five different sized slices. There is a caption above the chart:] Activities while sick: [The labels on each slice is given in clockwise order starting from the top. The percentages are estimated from the image and are noted in the square brackets before the transcript:] [54%] - Shifting around in bed feeling my skin crawl [24%] - Wiping various face holes [5%] - Staring at a news site but not reading it [14%] - Thinking about how cool it is that I'm partly made of an army of critters that patrol my body ruthlessly dispatching anything they find trying to prey on me. [3%] - Pondering hooking an aquarium pump up to my sinuses\n","explanation":"This pie chart for the most part reflects the usual experience of being sick \u2014 tossing and turning in bed and cleaning up mucus and other bodily fluids from facial orifices\u2014 in addition to a few ponderings of a rather more scientific bent.\nThe \"army of critters that patrol my body\" would appear to refer to the human immune system , which is made up of various cells and processes that actively fight infections and pathogens.\nThe punchline appears to be \"pondering hooking an aquarium pump to my sinuses,\" which indicates that Randall 's sinuses were completely clogged with mucus, which made him wonder whether hooking up an aquarium pump would help clear them out, perhaps akin to a Neti pot . Studies on nasal irrigation, however, have had mixed results, and the practice may not in fact be beneficial.\nRandall's Wikipedia path: Virus \u2192\u200e Immune system \u2192\u200e Innate immune system \u2192\u200e Parasites \u2192\u200e List of parasites of humans \u2192\u200e Naegleria fowleri \u2192\u200e Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis .\nNaegleria fowleri is known as the brain-eating amoeba. It is found in warm bodies of stagnant fresh water and causes the disease primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, a rare but highly lethal condition. Although N. fowleri are not commonly found in aquariums, Randall's Wikipedia wanderings force him to conclude that attempting to clear out his sinuses with an aquarium pump is too risky. Since this danger would presumably not be present at all with an unused, sterilized aquarium pump, the comic may be referring to a particular pump currently in use and close at hand.\n[This comic shows a pie chart with 5 slices, each with a label and a line pointing to these five different sized slices. There is a caption above the chart:] Activities while sick: [The labels on each slice is given in clockwise order starting from the top. The percentages are estimated from the image and are noted in the square brackets before the transcript:] [54%] - Shifting around in bed feeling my skin crawl [24%] - Wiping various face holes [5%] - Staring at a news site but not reading it [14%] - Thinking about how cool it is that I'm partly made of an army of critters that patrol my body ruthlessly dispatching anything they find trying to prey on me. [3%] - Pondering hooking an aquarium pump up to my sinuses\n"}
{"id":1158,"title":"Rubber Sheet","image_title":"Rubber Sheet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1158","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rubber_sheet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1158:_Rubber_Sheet","transcript":"[Beret guy is standing on a giant bowling ball on a rubber sheet. Megan is watching.] Beret Guy: Imagine a giant bowling ball on a rubber sheet. Beret Guy: The ball's weight makes a dent in the sheet.\n[A rope is pulling the ball down into the sheet.] Beret Guy: Now imagine a rope that pulls the ball down even further. Beret Guy: ...Annnnd...\n[Rope lets go. Ball is catapulted with Beret Guy on it.] BOOOIING Beret Guy: Wheee\n[Beret guy and ball are falling back down.] Megan: ...Oh. I thought this was about physics. Beret Guy: Imagining is fun!\n","explanation":"This comic refers to a common analogy used to explain how mass distorts space-time \u2014 a bowling ball resting on a sheet of rubber distorts the sheet due to its weight. The system has some qualitative features in common with gravity; it's often misused to show that \"mass warps spacetime\" ( 895: Teaching Physics ).\nThe next part of the original analogy explains a black hole: the slope of the sheet becomes so deep that you can't climb out from the bottom any more, similar to a black hole, which even light can't escape from. However, the comic subverts the analogy, and the sheet becomes a trampoline instead.\nReading onwards, it seems that Beret Guy is just messing about with the scenario.\nThe line \"Imagining is fun! \" is also a homage to Richard P. Feynman 's \"Fun to Imagine\" Series of Interviews. The power of Beret Guy's imagination\u2014so that he can physically experience what he imagines\u2014is reminiscent of 248 .\nThe title text also states that the rubber sheet, broken rope and trampoline are still all about physics (see also 435: Purity ).\n[Beret guy is standing on a giant bowling ball on a rubber sheet. Megan is watching.] Beret Guy: Imagine a giant bowling ball on a rubber sheet. Beret Guy: The ball's weight makes a dent in the sheet.\n[A rope is pulling the ball down into the sheet.] Beret Guy: Now imagine a rope that pulls the ball down even further. Beret Guy: ...Annnnd...\n[Rope lets go. Ball is catapulted with Beret Guy on it.] BOOOIING Beret Guy: Wheee\n[Beret guy and ball are falling back down.] Megan: ...Oh. I thought this was about physics. Beret Guy: Imagining is fun!\n"}
{"id":1159,"title":"Countdown","image_title":"Countdown","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1159","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/countdown.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1159:_Countdown","transcript":"[Black Hat is sitting with his laptop on a desk when Cueball, standing behind him, looks up on the wall and asks him about the large digital countdown timer with red numbers which is hanging high up on the wall. It has a white frame around the black display with the red numbers. Most of the left part of the counter is covered by a framed picture that hangs on a string attached to a nail above the counter. The picture depicts either a setting sun reflecting in an ocean or an exploding volcano with lava flowing away from it. The picture does not block the left-most part of the frame around the counter, and it is also possible to see the two left-most lines of the first digit on the countdown, so they are both turned on. This proves that the numbers go all the way to the left end. The next five digits are covered by the picture. Then one digit is only partly covered, as only the two most left lines are not visible. From the visible lines, it is though clear that this digit shows a 0. The next seven digits are fully visible, giving eight discernible digits.] 00002409 Cueball: What's that? Black Hat: Countdown. [Same picture, but Cueball is looking at Black Hat. The counter counts down.] 00002400 Cueball: To what? Black Hat: Supervolcano, I think. I forget which one. [Cueball looks up again for about 18s (between 2nd and fourth image) - beat panel.] 00002396 [Cueball looks at Black Hat again.] 00002382 Cueball: Maybe we should move that picture? Black Hat: Too hard to reach. It's probably fine.\n","explanation":"The comic shows a seven segment display (aka calculator-style numbers ) with a countdown. Black Hat explains that it is a countdown, maybe to a supervolcano eruption. However, an unfortunately placed picture blocks view of the full display. Due to the form of a seven-segment display, the first digit could be 0, 6, or 8, and five digits are completely blocked by the picture. Cueball is worried and asks him to move the picture, but Black Hat lazily or teasingly refuses to move it.\nHe has already teased that he doesn't know what the countdown is for. His reply can either be understood as if he does not know which one of the ( seven potential ) supervolcanos it is counting down to, or to which other cataclysmic event it is a countdown for (such as a meteor strike or global nuclear war for instance - it could also just be a general Doomsday Clock ). Since it seems to be Black Hat's countdown, it is safe to assume that he knows both what it counts down to and when it stops, but he just likes to mess with peoples' minds.\nThe fully visible part starts at 2409, and based on the pace of the scene, it seems to be in seconds. Thus, it is unclear when the eruption might occur. If the obscured digits are all 0s, it could be as soon as 40 minutes. On the other hand, if the obscured digits are '899 999', there's another 2.85 million years to go; if they are '000 001', we have a little more than 3 years.\nThe choice of the picture is probably also interesting. The image is distorted enough that you can imagine it as being two very different images.\nIn either case, it could make sense. If it is a volcano, the supervolcano clock makes sense. On the other hand, we are talking about the possible end of the world as we know it, so the sun setting upon humanity could be a great metaphor.\nThe title text: \"For all we know, the odds are in our favor\" could imply the assumption that since we can't see the digits behind the picture, we can treat them as random. If so, chances are only 1 in 300 000 they are all zeros. However, because of statistical principles such as Benford's law , the digits are not entirely random, and the odds are higher than 1\/299 999 for all the digits to be zero since the middle 4 digits are zero.\nIn an alternative view, the strip is not about pondering at distributions of digits on an oracle countdown. It's more of a grim view of our natural disaster prediction capabilities. As they say \u2013 the question is not if it will happen but when it will happen. \"Move the picture\" would mean investing in research and warning systems - that would correspond to shifting the picture to the left. If we disregard the 40 minutes, but instead think of it as an arbitrary interval of interests, minuscule as we folks have them, say - one's lifetime; or grimmer yet - some term of office . Because, hey, year after year passes and no apocalypse has been observed - the empirical odds are low indeed. An interesting question is what we would use the knowledge of the timing of our impending doom, if it is an event we can do nothing about, such as stopping a supervolcanic eruption or a large asteroid with a direct impact course on Earth. Would we not have lives more happily for our remaining years, how few that might be, while not knowing... On the other hand, if the event is something we might prevent given enough time to plan (and the funding resources such knowledge would ensure), then it may have saved us if we moved the picture just in time!\nUsing a countdown theme for comic #1159 could be a subtle joke, as 11:59\/23:59 is one minute to midnight (on the Doomsday clock!).\nSupervolcanos were also referenced in the title text of 1053: Ten Thousand and it is the subject of in 1611: Baking Soda and Vinegar .\n[Black Hat is sitting with his laptop on a desk when Cueball, standing behind him, looks up on the wall and asks him about the large digital countdown timer with red numbers which is hanging high up on the wall. It has a white frame around the black display with the red numbers. Most of the left part of the counter is covered by a framed picture that hangs on a string attached to a nail above the counter. The picture depicts either a setting sun reflecting in an ocean or an exploding volcano with lava flowing away from it. The picture does not block the left-most part of the frame around the counter, and it is also possible to see the two left-most lines of the first digit on the countdown, so they are both turned on. This proves that the numbers go all the way to the left end. The next five digits are covered by the picture. Then one digit is only partly covered, as only the two most left lines are not visible. From the visible lines, it is though clear that this digit shows a 0. The next seven digits are fully visible, giving eight discernible digits.] 00002409 Cueball: What's that? Black Hat: Countdown. [Same picture, but Cueball is looking at Black Hat. The counter counts down.] 00002400 Cueball: To what? Black Hat: Supervolcano, I think. I forget which one. [Cueball looks up again for about 18s (between 2nd and fourth image) - beat panel.] 00002396 [Cueball looks at Black Hat again.] 00002382 Cueball: Maybe we should move that picture? Black Hat: Too hard to reach. It's probably fine.\n"}
{"id":1160,"title":"Drop Those Pounds","image_title":"Drop Those Pounds","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1160","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/drop_those_pounds.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1160:_Drop_Those_Pounds","transcript":"[We see a poster taped to a wall. It has Megan and Cueball in the bottom left, a silhouetted crenelated tower in the bottom right, and a thin arc between them. It reads:] Struggling with those 2013 resolutions? We'll help you hit your target By dropping thirty pounds fast [Small print.] WEB: http:\/\/[illegible].com CALL: [illegible]\nThe flyer for our trebuchet\u2013building club may have been too subtle.\n","explanation":"The comic presents a flyer with text typical of a ubiquitous advertisement for a \"Weight Loss Program\". However, the image at the bottom of the flyer and the text below the flyer make it clear that the flyer is actually an advertisement for a trebuchet club. This unexpected meaning is meant to highlight the ambiguity of the flyer's content. A counterweight trebuchet is typically a gravity powered siege engine, which was originally used to attack fortifications. It works by dropping a raised counter weight to rotate a throwing arm, launching a projectile on a ballistic path. The phrase \"We'll help you hit your target by dropping 30 pounds FAST\" is where the ambiguity is produced. In the context of a weight loss ad, the \"target\" would be a rhetorical device referring to the weight which one wishes to achieve. In the context of a trebuchet club, the target is a literal location which one is trying to hit with a projectile. Likewise, a weight loss ad may indicate that a client could quickly lose 30 pounds (~13.6\u00a0kg). However, in this context, the 30 pounds being dropped is either the counter-weight - which is dropped to provide a trebuchet with its power, implying a rather small trebuchet - or the projectile itself being dropped at the target - it will be slower than the counter-weight but definitely still much faster than any weight loss program.\nThe only hint that the flyer advertises a trebuchet club is in the drawing at the bottom of the flyer, which appears to show two individuals pondering a ballistic path towards a castle tower, though no trebuchet is shown.\nThe text below indicates that this flyer \"may have been too subtle\". The title text suggests that, if the flyer is indeed too subtle a form of advertisement, they will use the LEAST subtle options of announcing their club's existence \u2014 likely by using their trebuchet to attack the town.That would certainly get the club some attention!\nSee also 382: Trebuchet .\n[We see a poster taped to a wall. It has Megan and Cueball in the bottom left, a silhouetted crenelated tower in the bottom right, and a thin arc between them. It reads:] Struggling with those 2013 resolutions? We'll help you hit your target By dropping thirty pounds fast [Small print.] WEB: http:\/\/[illegible].com CALL: [illegible]\nThe flyer for our trebuchet\u2013building club may have been too subtle.\n"}
{"id":1161,"title":"Hand Sanitizer","image_title":"Hand Sanitizer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1161","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hand_sanitizer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1161:_Hand_Sanitizer","transcript":"[Cueball looks at a poster while holding a bottle.] Poster: An invisible sneeze droplet can contain 200 million germs!\n[Same scene, except Cueball is looking at the bottle.] Product label: Our hand sanitizer kills 99.99% of germs!\n[Cueball types on a calculator while still holding the product.] Cueball (typing on calculator): 200 000 000 \u00d7 0.01% =\n[Cueball holds down his calculator.] Cueball: Ew.\n","explanation":"The number of germs that would be left after using the hand sanitizer is 200 million times 0.01%. 0.01% is equivalent to 0.0001 in decimal, so the multiplication is 200 000 000 \u00d7 0.0001. That is 20 thousand germs, which is still a surprisingly large number of germs. Recently, scientists have shown that it only takes 20 virus particles to infect someone (with analyzed virus; not all germs are equally effective). However, they have also previously noted that the effectiveness of hand sanitizer is actually higher than 99.99%, but it's a bit awkward to print a more precise decimal in an advertising slogan. (Several brands actually kill near 100%, but don't want to risk going to court for false advertising because a few germs got past.)\n\"Hipster CDC\" is a combination of the acronym for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , an organization dedicated to studying infectious diseases and limiting their spread, with the label hipster . Hipsters form a cultural group associated with a distaste for popular culture; they stereotypically talk about how bands, authors, etc. were better before they \"went mainstream\" and proclaim that they liked a certain thing \"before it was cool.\"\nThe title text extends this sensibility to the flu, which in fact did peak years ago, such as in 1918, when a world-wide flu epidemic killed tens of millions. The humor lies in the notion that the \"Hipster CDC\" apparently approves of the time when the flu was more widespread and fatal, while most people consider the diminishment of the flu is a good thing. This could be a jab at hipsters' common insistence on liking things before they \"go mainstream\": many things, before they go mainstream, just aren't very good, and therefore hipsters' taste in things is highly questionable.\n[Cueball looks at a poster while holding a bottle.] Poster: An invisible sneeze droplet can contain 200 million germs!\n[Same scene, except Cueball is looking at the bottle.] Product label: Our hand sanitizer kills 99.99% of germs!\n[Cueball types on a calculator while still holding the product.] Cueball (typing on calculator): 200 000 000 \u00d7 0.01% =\n[Cueball holds down his calculator.] Cueball: Ew.\n"}
{"id":1162,"title":"Log Scale","image_title":"Log Scale","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1162","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/log_scale.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1162:_Log_Scale","transcript":"[A bar chart on a piece of paper, with a second piece of paper attached to it.] [Title of the bar chart] fuel energy density of different materials in megajoules\/kg [Values of the first 4 bars on the paper] 19 24 39 46 [The different bars for Sugar, Coal Fat and Gasoline and Uranium on a linear scale with the bar for Uranium exceeding on the attached stack of paper] [Labels of the 5 bars on the paper] Sugar Coal Fat Gasoline Uranium [The uranium bar on the chart goes off the page onto a huge strip of paper folded up into a stack slightly taller than Cueball.] [Value on the top end of the paper strip] 76 000 000 [Caption below the panel:] Science Tip: Log scales are for quitters who can't find enough paper to make their point properly .\nThis comic was seen in the What If? book, taken from \"a certain webcomic\".\n","explanation":"This comic strip is a tip , specifically the first science tip .  As with most of Randall's tips, it is technically interesting for some applications but not very practical.\nUranium is stated to have 76 million MJ\/kg, while the next highest material shown on the graph (gasoline) has 46 MJ\/kg. Thus the uranium graph should be taller by a factor of 76,000,000\/46 = 1.652 million. So, if the gasoline graph were 9mm in height, the uranium graph should be a bit more than 14.868 million mm tall, or nearly 15\u00a0km (9.2 miles) tall. Thus the need to fold the paper.\nIt should be noted that the method of extracting energy from the first 4 materials ( combustion ) is completely different from the method used with uranium ( nuclear fission ). If the technology existed to use nuclear fusion , then the first 4 materials would yield a higher energy density than uranium.\nA log scale is a way of showing largely unequal data sizes in a comprehensible way, using an exponential function between each notch on the y axis of a graph. So for example the first on a Y axis of a graph using a log-10-scale would be 1, then 10, then 100 and 1000 for the fourth. A log\/logarithmic function is the inverse of a corresponding exponential function . A log-scale version of the chart in the comic would look like this:\n\nThe log scale can also be abused to make data look more uniform than it really is. On a log scale the energy density of uranium looks larger than that of the other materials, but not dramatically so. The joke is that if one wanted to make their point \"properly,\" they would go ahead and use ridiculous amounts of paper to show the difference between bars using a linear scale; this method would focus more on the shock factor of the differences in question, and less on actual communication\/representation of data. Cueball seems to be passionate about the MJ\/kg of uranium, so he would rather demonstrate the grandeur of the data than use a more efficient scale.\nSee these examples for well known day-to-day measurements which are measured on a log-scale.\nThe title text mentions computer scientist Donald Knuth ; the fictional notation is a parody of Knuth's up-arrow notation . Using paper thickness as the basis for a log scale would probably give the exponential function a very large base. However, it can be noted that Knuth's up-arrow notation can handle numbers far, far larger than this paper stack notation; for example the number 3\u2191\u2191\u21913, also known as Tritri [1] , very compact in up-arrow notation, would require a number of iterations pinned to the stack on the order of several trillion. 3\u2191\u2191\u2191\u21913 , also known as Grahal [2] , would require a number of iterations that is not only too large to write down, but attempting to write that number using the same paper stack notation would require printing off a second stack of several trillion iterations just to hold the number pinned to the first stack. By repeating this multi-stack repetition, you reach the limit of up-arrow notation.\nIt should be noted that Randall has used log scales in past comics.\n[A bar chart on a piece of paper, with a second piece of paper attached to it.] [Title of the bar chart] fuel energy density of different materials in megajoules\/kg [Values of the first 4 bars on the paper] 19 24 39 46 [The different bars for Sugar, Coal Fat and Gasoline and Uranium on a linear scale with the bar for Uranium exceeding on the attached stack of paper] [Labels of the 5 bars on the paper] Sugar Coal Fat Gasoline Uranium [The uranium bar on the chart goes off the page onto a huge strip of paper folded up into a stack slightly taller than Cueball.] [Value on the top end of the paper strip] 76 000 000 [Caption below the panel:] Science Tip: Log scales are for quitters who can't find enough paper to make their point properly .\nThis comic was seen in the What If? book, taken from \"a certain webcomic\".\n"}
{"id":1163,"title":"Debugger","image_title":"Debugger","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1163","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/debugger.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1163:_Debugger","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are at the top of a grassy hill, rendered in silhouette. Megan is lying down on the grass while Cueball is sitting.] Cueball: I don't understand how my brain works.\n[A close-up of the two characters. Megan lifts her head slightly.] Cueball: But my brain is what I rely on to understand how things work.\n[The shot zooms out again.] Megan: Is that a problem? Cueball: I'm not sure how to tell.\n","explanation":"Cueball mentions to Megan that he can't understand how his mind works, the same mind he uses to understand how things work, and he's not sure if this is a problem. In other words, if he can't understand how his mind works, then how can he tell that it does in fact work and that his perception of reality is accurate? Ordinarily he would use his mind to figure it out, but if his mind really doesn't work, then he'll probably never determine that his mind doesn't work. Not only that, he can't even trust his brain to tell him if his inability to understand his own brain is an issue. Understandably, he's a little unsure of how he should feel about this.\nPer the comic title, a debugger is a piece of software used by programmers to find bugs in the applications they are making. The title is an allusion to that debuggers are very much like our brains in the aspect described above - most programmers don't understand how debuggers internally work, and they can't be sure that debugger is bug-free - if there is a bug in the debugger itself, it can't be accurately used to find bugs.\nThe title text alludes to the above problem, in that if a website's \"report a bug\" page is buggy to a degree that it prevents the actual reporting of a bug, then users cannot use the form to report that the form itself is broken. Thus it can take quite some time before the site administrators realize this error, if they do at all, as unless they test it themselves, the administrators are likely relying on users to report problems they find, which they can't, making it appear as if there are no problems. This is somewhat analogous to the \"brain\" dilemma in the main comic, where the usual problem-pondering and resolving method itself can have a problem, but there is no straightforward way to tell.\n[Megan and Cueball are at the top of a grassy hill, rendered in silhouette. Megan is lying down on the grass while Cueball is sitting.] Cueball: I don't understand how my brain works.\n[A close-up of the two characters. Megan lifts her head slightly.] Cueball: But my brain is what I rely on to understand how things work.\n[The shot zooms out again.] Megan: Is that a problem? Cueball: I'm not sure how to tell.\n"}
{"id":1164,"title":"Home Alone","image_title":"Home Alone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1164","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/home_alone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1164:_Home_Alone","transcript":"[Aged man standing at the head of a flight of stairs. A paint can on a rope is swinging into a child at the foot of the stairs. A child on the floor is in a semi-fetal position and crying.] Child: Ow!! Child on floor: Waaaaaaaaa! Rejected movie ideas: Age-reversed Home Alone reboot.\n","explanation":"Home Alone is a popular 1990 film in which the child protagonist Kevin McCallister (portrayed by Macaulay Culkin ) is accidentally left alone in his house when his family goes on vacation, and has to thwart a burglary all by himself. In the movie, McCallister comes up with a variety of ingenious traps and schemes (usually involving jury-rigged toys and household items) to harass, injure and eventually incapacitate the burglars, which was the film's defining feature. On a more general level, the films revolve around the classical trope with an underdog defeating a much stronger opponent (the burglars), through his own ingenuity. The film spawned a series of sequels (4 as of 2012, the first of which also starred Culkin) all with a similar premise to the original.\nThis strip, however, proposes a reboot of the franchise, with the main change to the film being that of an age-reversal, so the story is now about an adult man setting needlessly harmful traps to hurt defenseless children breaking into his house. This would likely be seen as distasteful at the very least, and would probably lead to a negative reputation for the film. The title text adds another punchline when it is revealed that the reboot also stars Macaulay Culkin in the same role. This may suggest that the age-reversal gimmick was done to allow for him to star in the film as the same character despite growing up since the beginning of the franchise. This would be a rather misguided attempt to revive his career, and would probably just prevent any further success.\nThe scene depicted in the strip is an adaptation of an iconic scene from the first movie (used heavily in advertising) where McCallister hangs two paint cans in strings above the staircase, and let them swing down to hit the burglars in the face.\n[Aged man standing at the head of a flight of stairs. A paint can on a rope is swinging into a child at the foot of the stairs. A child on the floor is in a semi-fetal position and crying.] Child: Ow!! Child on floor: Waaaaaaaaa! Rejected movie ideas: Age-reversed Home Alone reboot.\n"}
{"id":1165,"title":"Amazon","image_title":"Amazon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1165","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/amazon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1165:_Amazon","transcript":"Round 14 Estimated outflow volume in cubic meters per second [A cube of water representing the outflow of the Amazon, with various marine life in it and people standing around it.] Amazon 220,000 [A pile of boxes representing the outflow of Amazon.com, dwarfed by the large cube of water next to it.] Amazon.com 0.9 Advantage: Amazon\n","explanation":"The Amazon River in South America is the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by waterflow. Amazon.com is a website that specializes in commerce and selling goods over the internet. The \"round 14\" suggest they are being compared in different criteria in a sort of competition. With such different systems, we can assume that most of those comparisons were similarly funny. The title text mentions two other criteria of comparison.\nThe measure of flow for the Amazon river (cubic meters per second) indicates the volume of water that passes a given area in the river at any second. To illustrate how much 220,000 cubic meters is, the comic shows a car parked next to 220,000 cubic meters of water. 220,000 cubic meters equals a cube with an edge span of 60.4 meters. By comparison the 0.9 cubic meters (900 l) of goods that are shipped by Amazon.com seems very small (note that 900 liters of goods per second is still a lot). To illustrate this size, the comic shows an Amazonian fish (or possibly an Amazon river dolphin ) investigating the packages.\nIquitos and Manaus are cities near the source and middle respectively of the river; the title text suggests that it is shorter to have a package shipped between the two than let it drift downstream. \"Minutes to skeletonize a cow\" refers to piranha , an Amazonian predatory fish with a popular reputation of being capable of the mentioned act when hunting in groups. (It should be noted that, while not fictional per se, the legendary cow-killing piranhas had been starved beforehand by local humans.)\nIn 1599: Water Delivery Amazon.com takes the fight against the Amazon to a new level by delivering water within one hour; however, the Amazon River is not mentioned in that comic.\nRound 14 Estimated outflow volume in cubic meters per second [A cube of water representing the outflow of the Amazon, with various marine life in it and people standing around it.] Amazon 220,000 [A pile of boxes representing the outflow of Amazon.com, dwarfed by the large cube of water next to it.] Amazon.com 0.9 Advantage: Amazon\n"}
{"id":1166,"title":"Argument","image_title":"Argument","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1166","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/argument.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1166:_Argument","transcript":"[A page from a very long thread on \" FREE Energy ~Forum~.\"] Thread: You're all crackpots who don't understand thermodynamics. [A bar above the comments:] Page 547 of 547 <<First <Prev 1 2 3 ... 545 546 547 Poster 1 [Default face icon]: No, idiot, only the north end of a magnet increases entropy. The south end decreases it. Poster 2 [Power strip plugged into itself icon]: I wiki'd this \"First Law\" and I don't see the issue. My device isn't a robot and doesn't harm humans. Poster 3 [Person with a large structure behind them icon]: What if we trick the government into only suppressing the left side of the flywheel? Ironically, the argument I started on a perpetual motion forum in 2004 shows no signs of slowing down.\n","explanation":"A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical device that is supposed to move infinitely with no external forces helping it, thus providing an unlimited source of energy. The existence of such an object would contradict the laws of thermodynamics, so perpetual motion machines are known to be impossible.\nA conspiracy theory called Free energy suppression asserts that it really is possible to get infinite energy and special interest groups have worked to hide it. In the comic, Randall says that he posted to a forum dedicated to the idea back in 2004, and the thread is still active \u2014 it kept on going forever, like the perpetual motion machine they desire (in contrast with real attempts to build such a machine, which all stop quite soon). Of course, the reason the thread continues is that its advocates continue to add energy to it, in the form of comments. \"Hot air\", if you will.\nThe second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases. See this video about entropy . Thus, even if you could build a perpetual motion machine, you wouldn't be able to use it to produce energy that could be consumed by another device.\nThe three supposed comments show humorous forms of scientific ignorance :\nFurthermore, the avatar being used by the second poster is that of a power strip plugged into itself, which is often jokingly thought of as a perpetual motion machine.\nThe title text refers to the fact that inventors have been trying to create perpetual motion machines, but have all failed to succeed. But given the fact that they all failed, each attempted perpetual motion machine stopped running at some point, while the search has never stopped.\n[A page from a very long thread on \" FREE Energy ~Forum~.\"] Thread: You're all crackpots who don't understand thermodynamics. [A bar above the comments:] Page 547 of 547 <<First <Prev 1 2 3 ... 545 546 547 Poster 1 [Default face icon]: No, idiot, only the north end of a magnet increases entropy. The south end decreases it. Poster 2 [Power strip plugged into itself icon]: I wiki'd this \"First Law\" and I don't see the issue. My device isn't a robot and doesn't harm humans. Poster 3 [Person with a large structure behind them icon]: What if we trick the government into only suppressing the left side of the flywheel? Ironically, the argument I started on a perpetual motion forum in 2004 shows no signs of slowing down.\n"}
{"id":1167,"title":"Star Trek into Darkness","image_title":"Star Trek into Darkness","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1167","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/star_trek_into_darkness.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1167:_Star_Trek_into_Darkness","transcript":"[Cueball staring at computer screen.] Cueball: Oh, wow. Look at Wikipedia's Talk page for Star Trek into Darkness. I have a new favorite edit war. Megan (off-panel): Oh?\nCueball: Forty thousand words of debate over whether to capitalize \"into\" in the movie's title. Still no consensus. Megan: That's magnificent . Cueball: It's breathtaking. Megan: They should have sent a poet.\nCueball: Well, I'm making an executive decision. I hope both sides accept this as a fair compromise.\n[A Wikipedia page titled \" ~*~ StAr TrEk InTo DaRkNeSs ~*~ \"]\nAfter the publication of the comic, the debate continued with full force, complete with a section of xkcd-inspired suggestions . The article itself was soon protected, so that only administrators could edit it. A day later, the title was changed to one including a capital \"Into\" by the administrator Mackensen . (The debate continued on his talk page .) https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/~*~_StAr_TrEk_InTo_DaRkNeSs_~*~ was a valid redirect link for quite some time, having not been deleted when requested in 2015 , but 2016 .\nThe Independent published an article about the \" grammatical tizzy \", and the affair as a whole was added to Wikipedia's humorous list of the lamest edit wars .","explanation":"The talk page of a Wikipedia article is used to discuss changes to the article. An edit war is a dispute about a specific edit to an article, manifesting as a series of edits alternating between making and reverting the change, and usually accompanied by a more-or-less heated debate on the talk page.\nHere, Randall is referring to a dispute on the Wikipedia article about Star Trek Into Darkness (an upcoming Star Trek film at the time of the comic's posting). On the day before the comic was published, the article name had a lowercase \"into\", and the talk page looked like this (rounded off in a friendly way, with the posting of a summary of the arguments , and an exchange of virtual hugs). In summary, the debate centers around whether \"Into Darkness\" should be treated as a prepositional phrase (as in \"Star Trek[king] Into Darkness\") or an unpunctuated subtitle (as in \"Star Trek[:] Into Darkness\"), whether compound prepositions like \"into\" should be capitalized in titles, and whether the capitalization of the title in the movie's official promotional material is relevant. The intensity and multiple facets of a debate over one tiny letter is apparently entertaining to Randall.\nCueball changes the title so that every other letter is capitalized, and adds framing tildes and asterisks (a common, but childish and ugly way of emphasizing titles online).  The title text indicates Randall's belief that such arguments are perpetual and will always arise. He suggests that the edit to the Wikipedia page will result in a dispute over variants of Cueballs \"compromise\" .  One new alternative has the letter cases switched (or shifted, depending on your perspective), one uses a different set of \"bracketing\" characters (xX_[...]_Xx instead of ~*~[...]~*~), and one uses the original title, but with a lowercase \"L\" instead of a capital \"I\" (which appear similar in many fonts).\nAlternating-case text later caught on as an internet meme in 2017 (four years after this comic strip was published) for representing a mocking tone.\nMegan's line of \"They should have sent a poet.\" is a quote from the film Contact . The quote is also referenced in 482: Height .  In the movie, the line was meant to convey that only a poet could adequately capture the beauty seen; here, it indicates that prose is insufficient to capture the ironic beauty of the edit war.\nThe old \"favorite edit war\" might be the one referenced in the title text of 878: Model Rail or the one resulting from the addition of the 739: Malamanteau article to Wikipedia\n[Cueball staring at computer screen.] Cueball: Oh, wow. Look at Wikipedia's Talk page for Star Trek into Darkness. I have a new favorite edit war. Megan (off-panel): Oh?\nCueball: Forty thousand words of debate over whether to capitalize \"into\" in the movie's title. Still no consensus. Megan: That's magnificent . Cueball: It's breathtaking. Megan: They should have sent a poet.\nCueball: Well, I'm making an executive decision. I hope both sides accept this as a fair compromise.\n[A Wikipedia page titled \" ~*~ StAr TrEk InTo DaRkNeSs ~*~ \"]\nAfter the publication of the comic, the debate continued with full force, complete with a section of xkcd-inspired suggestions . The article itself was soon protected, so that only administrators could edit it. A day later, the title was changed to one including a capital \"Into\" by the administrator Mackensen . (The debate continued on his talk page .) https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/~*~_StAr_TrEk_InTo_DaRkNeSs_~*~ was a valid redirect link for quite some time, having not been deleted when requested in 2015 , but 2016 .\nThe Independent published an article about the \" grammatical tizzy \", and the affair as a whole was added to Wikipedia's humorous list of the lamest edit wars ."}
{"id":1168,"title":"tar","image_title":"tar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1168","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1168:_tar","transcript":"[Megan and White Hat stand next to a nuclear bomb. The bomb has a hatch open on top, and a small blinking screen. The two people are shouting off-screen.] Megan: Rob! You use Unix! White Hat: Come quick!\n[Megan, White Hat, and Rob look at the screen on the bomb. Rob peers closely. The screen is on the bomb, but is shown at the top of the panel in black with white letters, except \"tar\" and the last underscore which is in gray and \"ten\" which is black but written in a white box. The text reads:]\n[They all stand in the same position, but without the text displayed. Beat panel.]\n[Still in the same position but White Hat becomes impatient.] White Hat: ...Rob? Rob: I'm so sorry.\n","explanation":"tar (\"tape archive\") is a Unix application that creates (and extracts) archives in the \".tar\" format. It is typically used through the text-based terminal, using cryptic single-letter arguments such as \" tar -cvf archive.tar * \". The comic alludes to the fact that despite years of use of the command, it's still hard to remember the arguments without searching for them, such as with Google.\nThe joke here is that a \"tar\" command with perfect syntax on the first try without outside help is such a daunting task that even Rob can't overcome it with confidence, and apologizes for not being able to prevent their imminent death.\nThe fact that Megan and White Hat assume that Rob can disarm the nuclear bomb because he uses Unix can be referring to an over-generalization fallacy that a partaker in a practice is an expert of a practice. Not all people who use Unix necessarily know how to use tar commands. Then again, since he's the only person nearby who knows any Unix and thus their only hope, their fallacy is pretty justified.\nThe title text points out that while much of computing changes very quickly, the tar program, which is very old (originating ca. 1975), is still around and heavily used. And yet, Randall complains he still cannot type out a line of tar command with correct flags without having to look the flags up. Tar is a very common command that Unix users will come across regularly, much like Windows users will come across .zip files. Depending on the flavor of Unix, the order of the flags, or the lack or inclusion of a '-' could render the command incorrect. Most true Unixes (AIX, HPUX, Solaris) not using the GNU utilities would give an error on the above tar example. For such a simple command, it is one that most people need to look up references to use.\nThere is probably also a pun on \" tarbomb ,\" a poorly created tar archive that, when extracted, dumps a load of files into the current directory that the user has to clean up. And although the bomb looks more like Fat Man , the type of bomb that was used over Nagasaki , at least size-wise, it may also be a pun on the name of the largest ever hydrogen bomb which was called the Tsar Bomba (translation: \"emperor bomb\").\nIn 208: Regular Expressions Cueball saves the day by knowing regular expressions , although in the title text it is alluded to how easy these may also miss a character.\nRob may refer to Rob Pike , who was a member of the team at AT&T who created Unix.\n[Megan and White Hat stand next to a nuclear bomb. The bomb has a hatch open on top, and a small blinking screen. The two people are shouting off-screen.] Megan: Rob! You use Unix! White Hat: Come quick!\n[Megan, White Hat, and Rob look at the screen on the bomb. Rob peers closely. The screen is on the bomb, but is shown at the top of the panel in black with white letters, except \"tar\" and the last underscore which is in gray and \"ten\" which is black but written in a white box. The text reads:]\n[They all stand in the same position, but without the text displayed. Beat panel.]\n[Still in the same position but White Hat becomes impatient.] White Hat: ...Rob? Rob: I'm so sorry.\n"}
{"id":1169,"title":"Expedition","image_title":"Expedition","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1169","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/expedition.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1169:_Expedition","transcript":"[Cueball is at a computer.] February 4th: Departed the mouth of the Lena River, heading south. It has been nearly half an hour and still no sign of civilization. The scroll wheel tempts me, but I will not cheat. Click click click\n[Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Getting lost on Google Maps satellite\n","explanation":"Google Maps is a service provided by Google that offers a map of the world including satellite and aerial imagery for free. Using the scroll wheel , the user can zoom out to see a larger area. Lena River is a river in Russia, flowing into the Arctic Ocean (with a large delta ).\nClicking on the comic leads to an online Google Maps page showing the satellite imagery of the Lena Delta . Travelling south up the river will lead to the city of Yakutsk and eventually to Lake Baikal .\nIt appears that Cueball is simply trying to explore the world without leaving his laptop or purchasing an expensive game.\nAlternatively, he may be playing Mapcrunch , this 'game' randomizes a street view location with the goal of finding the airport.\nThe title text states that he apparently somewhat still treats it as a game and that he has been on it for at least a decade.\nIn the years since, a game called GeoGuessr has been released, with the user being put into a random location in Google Street View and asked to guess where they are in the world by analyzing clues in their environment. This often necessitates the user making their way from the middle of the wilderness to some manner of civilization, exactly as in the comic.\n[Cueball is at a computer.] February 4th: Departed the mouth of the Lena River, heading south. It has been nearly half an hour and still no sign of civilization. The scroll wheel tempts me, but I will not cheat. Click click click\n[Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Getting lost on Google Maps satellite\n"}
{"id":1170,"title":"Bridge","image_title":"Bridge","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1170","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bridge.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1170:_Bridge","transcript":"[A youthful Cueball talking to an unseen parent.] Parent: No, you can't go. Cueball: But all my friends\u2014 Parent: If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too? Cueball: Oh, jeez. Probably.\nParent: What!? Why!? Cueball: Because all my friends did. Cueball: Think about it \u2014 which scenario is more likely:\nCueball: Every single person I know, many of them levelheaded and afraid of heights, abruptly went crazy at exactly the same time... Cueball: ...or the bridge is on fire?\nParent: ...I, uh...hmm. Cueball: Imagine reading this on CNN: \" Many fled their vehicles and jumped from the bridge. Those who stayed behind... \" Cueball: Is something good about to happen to those people? Parent: Maybe they'll find cookies? Cueball: OK, you stay. I'm jumping.\n","explanation":"\"If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?\" This is a common question, used to challenge a decision based on the bandwagon effect . It challenges someone to consider whether something is really a good idea, even if everyone else does it (in this case, friends). The sentence is, upon closer analysis, a straw man attack that over-extrapolates the bandwagon effect.\nCueball responds by assuming that if all of his friends jumped off a bridge, there must have been some extreme circumstance that made it logical to do so; for example, that the bridge is on fire. This points out a logical fallacy with the question: if they really are jumping off a bridge, they're probably motivated by something serious as opposed to an idiotic risk. So the humor of this comic is in all the different ways the question can be turned on its head, and made to mean something the unseen speaker probably never intended.\nThe title text suggests that, even if there is nothing wrong with the bridge, the person asking the question is not acting right. The proper reaction would be concern about the mental (or physical, they could be injured) state of the people jumping off for no valid reason, and not just brushing them off as unworthy of attention. This is so especially when these people are described as \"all my friends\", so they have presumably always behaved correctly until they decided to jump off the bridge.\n[A youthful Cueball talking to an unseen parent.] Parent: No, you can't go. Cueball: But all my friends\u2014 Parent: If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too? Cueball: Oh, jeez. Probably.\nParent: What!? Why!? Cueball: Because all my friends did. Cueball: Think about it \u2014 which scenario is more likely:\nCueball: Every single person I know, many of them levelheaded and afraid of heights, abruptly went crazy at exactly the same time... Cueball: ...or the bridge is on fire?\nParent: ...I, uh...hmm. Cueball: Imagine reading this on CNN: \" Many fled their vehicles and jumped from the bridge. Those who stayed behind... \" Cueball: Is something good about to happen to those people? Parent: Maybe they'll find cookies? Cueball: OK, you stay. I'm jumping.\n"}
{"id":1171,"title":"Perl Problems","image_title":"Perl Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1171","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/perl_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1171:_Perl_Problems","transcript":"[Man with sunglasses talking (or, alternatively, rapping) to Cueball.] Sunglasses: If you're havin' perl problems I feel bad for you, son-\nSunglasses: I got 99 problems,\nSunglasses: So I used regular expressions.\nSunglasses: Now I have 100 problems.\n","explanation":"Perl is a scripting language that makes heavy use of regular expressions , which are good for dealing with large amounts of text quickly. In the comic, the man wearing sunglasses parodies the song \" 99 Problems \" in which the rapper Jay-Z says:\nIf you're havin' girl problems I feel bad for you, son- I got 99 problems, But a bitch ain't one.\nIn the comic however, the rapper tries to solve his problems with Perl's regular expressions, and ends up only creating another problem for himself, which is a reference to a famous quote by Jamie Zawinski (whose name could also be shortened to \"Jay-Z\"): \"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.\" (This quote was revisited in 1313: Regex Golf .)\n\"program --help\" is a common way, originating with the GNU project, to ask a program to show documentation on its usage and supported parameters; which, for some program, could include a \"-z\" command-line argument (\"flag\"), so the command would read \"jay -z\". In this case, it is just an obvious play on the rapper's name. jay is also an actual C program that is a compiler-compiler for java, but it doesn't have a \"-z\" flag.\nThis sort of problematically recursive self-reference is reminiscent of comic 927: Standards , and 1739: Fixing Problems .\n[Man with sunglasses talking (or, alternatively, rapping) to Cueball.] Sunglasses: If you're havin' perl problems I feel bad for you, son-\nSunglasses: I got 99 problems,\nSunglasses: So I used regular expressions.\nSunglasses: Now I have 100 problems.\n"}
{"id":1172,"title":"Workflow","image_title":"Workflow","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1172","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/workflow.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1172:_Workflow","transcript":"[Changelog for version 10.17 of a piece of software.] One change listed: \"The CPU no longer overheats when you hold down the spacebar\" Comments: LongtimeUser4 writes: This update broke my workflow! My control key is hard to reach, so I hold spacebar instead, and I configured Emacs to interpret a rapid temperature rise as \"control\". Admin writes: That's horrifying. LongtimeUser4 writes: Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to reenable spacebar heating.\nEvery change breaks someone's workflow.\n","explanation":"Users will often try to work around bugs in software, and are sometimes able to get used to having the bugs around. Some bugs are even interpreted as features and users complain when the software authors fix them. This phenomenon has been named Hyrum's law : the law states that whatever the official feature list actually says, if a program has enough users, eventually every feature (whether intentional, unintentional, or a bug) will be relied upon by someone. A similar effect may be caused by other improvements, particularly those which involve changes in the user interface .\nThis comic shows a somewhat extreme example. An unnamed application had a bug causing the CPU to overheat whenever the spacebar was held down too long. In version 10.17, this bug was fixed. Soon, LongtimeUser4 complained that they relied on the fact that the CPU overheats if the spacebar is held down. They had stumbled across this \"feature\" (which is, again, weirder than usual) and took advantage of it to streamline their workflow, and they wanted an option to re-enable it.\nEmacs (name originally derived from E ditor MAC ro S ) is a text editor originally written at MIT in 1976 and adopted into the GNU project in 1984. The control key sees extensive use in Emacs, and since it's hard to reach, users often remap it to Caps Lock or some other key. LongtimeUser4 fixed the problem very clumsily (\"horrifying,\" as the admin puts it) and is annoyed that their kludge no longer works. The moral of the story is that you can't please everyone.\nExamples of real life changes in software which, though often acclaimed by critics, caused great annoyance among the existing user base include ribbons introduced in Microsoft Office 2007 and the Start screens of both Windows 8 and Unity desktop manager bundled with Ubuntu from versions 11.10 through 17.04. In the latter case, developers included an option to use the older interface; for the rest, applications emulating old behavior were developed by third parties.\nThe title text makes a hyperbole to humorous effect; children will freeze to death during the winter because they won't be warmed by a rather unconventional heater. Making (or creating an illusion of) a connection between one's opinion and care for children's welfare is a common method of gaining public support, as such arguments are hard to deflect without sounding cruel and uncaring. \"holding down spacebar to stay warm\" could also be a reference to space heaters .\n[Changelog for version 10.17 of a piece of software.] One change listed: \"The CPU no longer overheats when you hold down the spacebar\" Comments: LongtimeUser4 writes: This update broke my workflow! My control key is hard to reach, so I hold spacebar instead, and I configured Emacs to interpret a rapid temperature rise as \"control\". Admin writes: That's horrifying. LongtimeUser4 writes: Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to reenable spacebar heating.\nEvery change breaks someone's workflow.\n"}
{"id":1173,"title":"Steroids","image_title":"Steroids","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1173","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/steroids.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1173:_Steroids","transcript":"[Megan is walking while an energy sphere (Sphere) floats behind her and talks to her. The sphere is black but surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments that are shaded gray. The white parts in between makes it look like it irradiates light out along these lines.] Sphere: Explain to me this \"steroid scandal.\"\n[Zoom in on Megan's face while she holds a hand to her chin.] Megan: Well, uh... Megan: We humans are sacks of chemicals which stay alive by finding other chemicals and putting them inside us.\n[Megan has turned around facing towards the Sphere to the left. She holds up one hand palm up.] Megan: We hold contests to see which humans are fastest and strongest. Megan: But some humans eat chemicals that make them too fast and strong.\n[Megan still facing the Sphere holds her arms out.] Megan: And they win contests! Sphere: That does sound bad. Megan: It's awful!\n","explanation":"This comic is about steroid usage to enhance humans performance ; it is likely inspired by Lance Armstrong 's then-recent confession to blood doping in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey (although Armstrong's confessions did not itself include anabolic steroid use; \"steroids\" is a common catch-all phrase often misused to reference other forms of doping ).\nThis comic is making the point of the opinion that the criterion about which chemicals (steroids) humans may or may not take in to be considered the strongest or fastest is an artificial criterion. This is demonstrated by Megan explaining the whole concept to an energy sphere representing a non-humanoid intelligence; when framed the way Megan explains it, the explanation sounds rather trivial and silly. A better explanation would be to say that some chemicals make humans faster and stronger but also damage the human body, so these chemicals are banned so the competitors won't destroy themselves. Another point Megan has missed is that the competitions aren't unrestricted, they're designed around specific rules and structures, to which all participants agree. The chemicals in question are a violation of those rules, and so are both dishonest and subvert the entire purpose of the competition.\nThis comic is one of many instances where Randall attempts to trivialize sports.\nThe title text changes the perspective again by suggesting that humanity itself is trivial in the grand scheme of things and that really all we are is a \"transition\" state between old dust and new dust, with a bunch of emailing in between. This is a version of the saying that the Universe is just trying to turn itself into Iron, which is the atom with least energy, and it can thus neither be fused in stars or decay radioactively.\nThe comic was published on Ash Wednesday (Western liturgical start of Lent). The dust to dust reference calls to mind the charge, \"Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust you shall return,\" which is traditionally spoken by priests as they place ashes on the foreheads of observers on Ash Wednesday, in addition to the idea that all atoms in the universe other than Hydrogen, Helium, and some Lithium, were created after the big-bang via Stellar nucleosynthesis , with further production and dispersal via Supernova nucleosynthesis . Thus the reference by Joni Mitchell in the song Woodstock : \"We are stardust...\"; and echoed by Carl Sagan : \"We are star stuff.\"\nSimilar talking floating energy spheres have been used later in 1450: AI-Box Experiment , where it was clearly a different sphere and then in the Time traveling Sphere series. There is no indication of it here, but the sphere here could be another time traveler as well, back to try and understand humanity.\n[Megan is walking while an energy sphere (Sphere) floats behind her and talks to her. The sphere is black but surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments that are shaded gray. The white parts in between makes it look like it irradiates light out along these lines.] Sphere: Explain to me this \"steroid scandal.\"\n[Zoom in on Megan's face while she holds a hand to her chin.] Megan: Well, uh... Megan: We humans are sacks of chemicals which stay alive by finding other chemicals and putting them inside us.\n[Megan has turned around facing towards the Sphere to the left. She holds up one hand palm up.] Megan: We hold contests to see which humans are fastest and strongest. Megan: But some humans eat chemicals that make them too fast and strong.\n[Megan still facing the Sphere holds her arms out.] Megan: And they win contests! Sphere: That does sound bad. Megan: It's awful!\n"}
{"id":1174,"title":"App","image_title":"App","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1174","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/app.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1174:_App","transcript":"[A popup window on top of a webpage displayed in a smartphone browser that looks like Safari.] Want to visit an incomplete version of our website where you can't zoom? Download our app! [OK] [No, but ask me again every time]\n","explanation":"Some websites have a mobile app designed for use on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In theory this is because the main website will be more difficult to navigate on the small screen of a mobile, or some features won't work. In practice, this alternative is frequently worse than simply viewing the standard web page, for reasons offered in the comic:\nThe comic offers a brutally honest version of such a promotional popup.\nCompounding the frustration is that some sites aggressively promote their app\/mobile version with a popup message that repeats the suggestion on every visit to the site, and as the title text notes, if you reject the popup, you end up on the site's homepage, rather than the subpage you may have been trying to reach via a web search. A similar effect (where the mobile version will only load the site's main page) is described in more detail in 869: Server Attention Span .\n[A popup window on top of a webpage displayed in a smartphone browser that looks like Safari.] Want to visit an incomplete version of our website where you can't zoom? Download our app! [OK] [No, but ask me again every time]\n"}
{"id":1175,"title":"Moving Sidewalks","image_title":"Moving Sidewalks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1175","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/moving_sidewalks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1175:_Moving_Sidewalks","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan on the opposite far ends of a bidirectional moving sidewalk.  Arrows indicate that one half will carry Cueball from left to right, while the other half will carry Megan from right to left.  In each direction, the sidewalk is made up of a series of individual conveyors.] Cueball: Ready? [A diagram labels various individual conveyors as follows.] [Outermost conveyors:] Moving Sidewalk [Second and second-last conveyors:] Moving Sidewalk (2x Speed) [Next conveyors:] 3x Speed [Next conveyors:] 4x Speed [Innermost conveyors:] 5x Speed [Spot between the two sidewalks, directly in the center:] High-Five Location Megan: Ready.\nThis comic was originally uploaded with all the arrows facing in the opposite direction, before Randall updated it with the current image.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are getting ready to ride an array of mini-conveyor belts, each going at a speed multiple of the first ones. Assuming they both take the one in front of them, each conveyor belt will speed them up a little bit more with little effort on their part, ultimately reaching a point where they are going very fast and are close enough to be able to high-five each other.\nThe average moving walkway speed globally is 3 feet\/second (~1m\/sec), so Cueball and Megan would only be travelling about 2\/3 average human running speed by the time they meet.  Even with the opposing forces added to their high five, it would be very unlikely for them to injure each other (though the slap would more than likely be painful).\nThe title text may be a reference to a music video made by OK Go, \"Here It Goes Again\", in which the band jumps on and off of various treadmills in a similar fashion.\nA series of parallel accelerating conveyor belts is also a long distance travel mechanism used in Robert A. Heinlein's The Roads Must Roll and in Isaac Asimov's Robot Detective novels.\n[Cueball and Megan on the opposite far ends of a bidirectional moving sidewalk.  Arrows indicate that one half will carry Cueball from left to right, while the other half will carry Megan from right to left.  In each direction, the sidewalk is made up of a series of individual conveyors.] Cueball: Ready? [A diagram labels various individual conveyors as follows.] [Outermost conveyors:] Moving Sidewalk [Second and second-last conveyors:] Moving Sidewalk (2x Speed) [Next conveyors:] 3x Speed [Next conveyors:] 4x Speed [Innermost conveyors:] 5x Speed [Spot between the two sidewalks, directly in the center:] High-Five Location Megan: Ready.\nThis comic was originally uploaded with all the arrows facing in the opposite direction, before Randall updated it with the current image.\n"}
{"id":1176,"title":"Those Not Present","image_title":"Those Not Present","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1176","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/those_not_present.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1176:_Those_Not_Present","transcript":"Every time someone says something negative about a person who's not in the room, I scoot my chair back a few inches. [Cueball, Ponytail and two other people are sitting at a table drinking.] Person: He's not so bad, but his friends ... [Cueball scoots away from table.] Scoot scoot\nPonytail: His band is never gonna take off if... [Cueball scoots further away.] Scoot scoot\n[Megan, Beret Guy, and Hairy come into view.] Off-screen: Yeah, his sister is even weirder . Off-screen: Did you see she had... Scoot scoot Beret Guy: ...and there's a video, but it's blurry...\n[Cueball turns around and leans his arm on his chair.] Cueball: What're you talking about? Hairy: Giant squid! Cueball: Mind if I join you?\n","explanation":"Cueball (likely representing Randall ), has decided to leave conversations deemed toxic, by scooting a little bit away any time somebody badmouths someone not present. In each panel, he scoots progressively further away until he reaches an area with Megan , Hairy , and Beret Guy , discussing giant squids . He decides to join them, as this conversation is far more interesting to him than one criticizing people behind their backs.\nThe title text jokes that the second group, is, in fact, dissing the giant squid rather than discussing how cool it is. As the squid is not present, Cueball scoots back.\nEvery time someone says something negative about a person who's not in the room, I scoot my chair back a few inches. [Cueball, Ponytail and two other people are sitting at a table drinking.] Person: He's not so bad, but his friends ... [Cueball scoots away from table.] Scoot scoot\nPonytail: His band is never gonna take off if... [Cueball scoots further away.] Scoot scoot\n[Megan, Beret Guy, and Hairy come into view.] Off-screen: Yeah, his sister is even weirder . Off-screen: Did you see she had... Scoot scoot Beret Guy: ...and there's a video, but it's blurry...\n[Cueball turns around and leans his arm on his chair.] Cueball: What're you talking about? Hairy: Giant squid! Cueball: Mind if I join you?\n"}
{"id":1177,"title":"Time Robot","image_title":"Time Robot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1177","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time_robot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1177:_Time_Robot","transcript":"[Cueball runs towards Megan with a shotgun in hand.] Cueball: I'm from the future! Cueball: You're being stalked by an unstoppable robotic assassin!\n[Close up of Cueball's head.] Cueball: Of course, in a sense, we're all being stalked by an unstoppable robot. Cueball: A robot called time .\n[Cueball looking at a clock.] Cueball: I see it in the mirror. I see wrinkles, grey hairs. Cueball: I hear its metallic footsteps in the relentless rhythm of the ticking clock.\n[Cueball reaches out to Megan.] Cueball: Anyway, uhh - come with me if you want to live for a while. Cueball: You'll still die eventually. Cueball: We all will.\n","explanation":"The comic starts with a scene similar to one in the 1984 science fiction action film The Terminator . In the movie a killing robot (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger ) is sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, the main female protagonist of the movie. A human, Kyle Reese, also travels back in time to protect her (and he acquires a sawed-off shotgun which Cueball holds in the strip).\nHowever, in the following panels, Cueball explains that, even if he succeeds protecting Megan from the killing robot, we all are hunted by an unstoppable enemy trying to kill us \u2013 time. He goes on to point to the similarities between the time and a Terminator. The clock visible in the third panel features a red light in the place of a 3-hour marker, which is a reference to glowing red eyes of a Terminator.\nIn the final panel, \"come with me if you want to live\" is a famous phrase from the movie , but in this case, amended with the facts about the inevitability of eventual death.\nAlso, the title text is a play on a quote from The Terminator , where Sarah Connor starts to believe that \" There's no fate but what we make for ourselves. \". It is also a reference to the character \" Death \" in Terry Pratchett 's Discworld novels. In the Discworld novels, Death's voice is always depicted in small caps and he is often caught making sometimes bizarre philosophical statements about life and death.\n652: More Accurate is also riffing on Kyle Reese's introductory \"Come with me if you want to live\" line to Sarah Connor. The theme of the inevitability of the ravages of time is underlying 926: Time Vulture .\n[Cueball runs towards Megan with a shotgun in hand.] Cueball: I'm from the future! Cueball: You're being stalked by an unstoppable robotic assassin!\n[Close up of Cueball's head.] Cueball: Of course, in a sense, we're all being stalked by an unstoppable robot. Cueball: A robot called time .\n[Cueball looking at a clock.] Cueball: I see it in the mirror. I see wrinkles, grey hairs. Cueball: I hear its metallic footsteps in the relentless rhythm of the ticking clock.\n[Cueball reaches out to Megan.] Cueball: Anyway, uhh - come with me if you want to live for a while. Cueball: You'll still die eventually. Cueball: We all will.\n"}
{"id":1178,"title":"Pickup Artists","image_title":"Pickup Artists","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1178","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pickup_artists.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1178:_Pickup_Artists","transcript":"[Beret Guy is talking with Hairy.] Beret Guy: What've you been up to lately? Hairy: I've been hanging out with some pickup artists. Hairy: I'm learning a lot! Beret Guy: Oh, that sounds like fun!\n[Caption below the panel:] The world seems like a happier place if you think \"pickup artist\" is like \"pickup basketball player\".\nThis comic is one of a small set of comics with the same or almost the same title as another comic (the only difference being the use of the plural form of \"artist\").\n","explanation":"A pickup artist is a person who considers himself skilled at picking up (finding, attracting and seducing) women (or men), through various psychological tactics and tricks. The term \" pickup \" in \"pickup basketball\" means informal and spontaneous. In pickup basketball the players are not part of an organized league or team but rather are just people who are available to play at that time and location. Beret Guy thinks (or wants to think) that what pickup artists really do is gather spontaneously to practice artistry , like the visual arts . This makes the world seem a happier place, especially considering his own disposition for (eccentric) art, and generally ability to always see the best in every situation.\nRandall does not believe that pick-up artists have healthy attitudes towards women and has elaborated on this previously in 1027: Pickup Artist (also featuring Hairy ) and in 800: Beautiful Dream .\nThe title text also shows Beret Guy's belief that the \" friend zone \" is a physical place. The \"friend zone\" refers to the state of a relationship in which one party has romantic interests, but the other person only wants to be friends. Once the friend zone is established, it is said to be difficult to try to move beyond that point into a romantic relationship. Beret Guy however believes (perhaps intentionally, like with pickup artist) that a physical place filled with his friends should be a fun place to visit. Randall previously expressed criticism towards trying to just slip into a romantic relationship from the friend zone in 513: Friends .\n[Beret Guy is talking with Hairy.] Beret Guy: What've you been up to lately? Hairy: I've been hanging out with some pickup artists. Hairy: I'm learning a lot! Beret Guy: Oh, that sounds like fun!\n[Caption below the panel:] The world seems like a happier place if you think \"pickup artist\" is like \"pickup basketball player\".\nThis comic is one of a small set of comics with the same or almost the same title as another comic (the only difference being the use of the plural form of \"artist\").\n"}
{"id":1179,"title":"ISO 8601","image_title":"ISO 8601","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1179","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/iso_8601.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1179:_ISO_8601","transcript":"Public Service Announcement:\nOur different ways of writing dates as numbers can lead to online confusion. That's why in 1988 ISO set a global standard numeric date format. This is the correct way to write numeric dates:\n2013-02-27\nThe following formats are therefore discouraged: 02\/27\/2013 02\/27\/13 27\/02\/2013 27\/02\/13 20130227 2013.02.27 27.02.13 27-02-13 27.2.13 2013. II. 27. 27 \u2044 2 -13 2013.158904109 MMXIII-II-XXVII MMXIII LVII \u2044 CCCLXV 1330300800 ((3+3)\u00d7(111+1)-1)\u00d73\/3-1\/3 3 2 27 2013 [the numbers 2013, 02, and 27 written overlapping each other] 10\/11011\/1101 02\/27\/20\/13 2 0 5 3 1 1 2 67 4 37 8 [A black cat with 2-27-13 scrawled across its body in dripping white paint.] Cat: Hissss\n","explanation":"When abbreviating the date into numerical form, various areas of the world tend to list the year, month, and day in different orders (as well as with different delimiting symbols), which can cause confusion particularly when the day value is 12 or lower allowing it to be easily interpreted as the month and vice versa. As a public service announcement , this comic states that there is in fact one international standard for writing numeric dates, set by the International Organization for Standardization in its ISO 8601 standard: YYYY-MM-DD.\nThe comic then proceeds to list several discouraged ways of writing out the date of the comic's publication, as they do not match the standard. It begins with several commonly used ones in countries around the world, but then begins to list increasingly uncommon ways, ranging from strange (Roman numerals) to quirky (binary, Unix time) to essentially impossible (painting the numbers onto a black cat).\nThe title text provides a perfect example of the kind of ambiguity that can arise when non-standard formats are used. The ISO standard was in fact published on 1988-06-05 and amended on 2004-12-01. This is mentioned in the title text in MM\/DD\/YY format; however, there is no way to naturally figure this out, particularly with the second date.\nWith the year truncated to two digits and all three numbers at 12 or lower, the date referring to December 1, 2004 (the digits pairs 12, 01 and 04) has a number of misinterpretations. Usually 12 th Jan '04 (if written as US-style but read as European, or vice-versa) but with ISO-influenced \"YY MM DD\" ordering as one side or other of the misunderstanding it can easily become the 12 th day of April 2001, the 4 th day of December 2001 and the 4 th of January 2012. It takes two such communication errors to 'become' the 1 st day of April 2012.\nDate formats were again the subject in 1340: Unique Date and 2562: Formatting Meeting .\nThe other mentioned formats are:\nPublic Service Announcement:\nOur different ways of writing dates as numbers can lead to online confusion. That's why in 1988 ISO set a global standard numeric date format. This is the correct way to write numeric dates:\n2013-02-27\nThe following formats are therefore discouraged: 02\/27\/2013 02\/27\/13 27\/02\/2013 27\/02\/13 20130227 2013.02.27 27.02.13 27-02-13 27.2.13 2013. II. 27. 27 \u2044 2 -13 2013.158904109 MMXIII-II-XXVII MMXIII LVII \u2044 CCCLXV 1330300800 ((3+3)\u00d7(111+1)-1)\u00d73\/3-1\/3 3 2 27 2013 [the numbers 2013, 02, and 27 written overlapping each other] 10\/11011\/1101 02\/27\/20\/13 2 0 5 3 1 1 2 67 4 37 8 [A black cat with 2-27-13 scrawled across its body in dripping white paint.] Cat: Hissss\n"}
{"id":1180,"title":"Virus Venn Diagram","image_title":"Virus Venn Diagram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1180","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/virus_venn_diagram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1180:_Virus_Venn_Diagram","transcript":"[Euler diagram with two circles that don't intersect. One circle is green, while the other is slight dark blue.] Green circle: Computer problems that make people say \"Maybe it has a virus?\" Blue circle: Computer problems caused by viruses\n","explanation":"Randall uses an Euler diagram (technically not a Venn diagram ) to make fun of clueless computer users. The circles in the diagram don't overlap, meaning problems that people suspect are caused by viruses are never really caused by viruses, and problems that are actually caused by viruses are never suspected by people to be caused by a virus.\nWhen computers don't function as expected, a common response from ordinary users is \"Maybe it has a virus ?\".  However, most of these situations can be explained by faulty hardware (freezing, blue screen, etc.) or software (crashes, errors, apparent lack of response to input, etc.), a general lack of maintenance (too slow to start up, too much clutter on screen, etc.), or user error.  A virus can potentially cause those symptoms, but it's much more common for them either to cause immediate and massive damage (rendering the computer completely unusable, wipe the disk, display obvious propaganda, etc.), or to remain stealthy with no obvious symptoms (logging keystrokes, exfiltrating sensitive information, receiving commands in the background, etc.).  Of course there is no clear separation and there is always some overlap between the two scenarios, so the diagram is not meant to be taken literally.\nThe title text refers to the technological singularity , a hypothetical point in the future when superintelligence emerges in computers, so that they can build new computers with ever increasing intelligence. It is seen as impossible to predict what would happen beyond this point; hence the term \"singularity\". 1084: Server Problem makes a joke on this.\n\"Defragging\" is short for disk defragmentation , an easy, user-friendly action that PC users can undertake to supposedly make their computers run faster. It is therefore a common all-round recommendation to do this, regardless of the problem. Randall suggests the same clueless users would encounter the singularity and attempt defragging. It probably won't help much.\n[Euler diagram with two circles that don't intersect. One circle is green, while the other is slight dark blue.] Green circle: Computer problems that make people say \"Maybe it has a virus?\" Blue circle: Computer problems caused by viruses\n"}
{"id":1181,"title":"PGP","image_title":"PGP","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1181","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pgp.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1181:_PGP","transcript":"How to use PGP to verify that an email is authentic: Look for this text at the top [In mail header, light grey.] Reply [Highlighted, with arrow pointing to it from the text \"Look for this text at the top\" above.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- [In mail message, light grey.] HASH: SHA256 Hey, First of all, thanks for taking care of\n[After mail message.] If it's there, the email is probably fine\n","explanation":"PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a program which can be used to encrypt and\/or sign data, including messages sent as emails. Encrypting means encoding data in a way that requires a secret key to decrypt and read; signing means that there is a code included in the data which can be used to verify the identify of the sender and that the data has not been altered in transit.\nIn the case of the email in this comic, it has only been signed; not encrypted (hence, the top of the first line of text can be seen and is legible in normal English). This is more common than encryption, as reading an encrypted message would require the recipient to already be a PGP user. In fact, the use of PGP even to sign email messages is so rare that most people have probably never seen a signed message. Because a signed email is so rare, and because it is already legible and unencrypted, Randall is making the tongue-in-cheek observation that few users, technical or otherwise, actually know how to use the signature to verify the authenticity of the sender using the PGP signature, and that such users can safely assume that since there is a signature, that is good enough evidence that the message is authentic. Further, because PGP signatures are so rare and probably ignored by most recipients, he suggests one would not expect anyone to even bother creating a false PGP signature; therefore the mere existence of a PGP header would suggest authenticity.\nThe title text extends the joke by suggesting you confirm there's a bunch of random characters in the footer (this is the actual signature that PGP generates which can be used to verify the authenticity of the email). Again, Randall is humorously suggesting that the existence of the block is itself sure evidence of authenticity.\nHow to use PGP to verify that an email is authentic: Look for this text at the top [In mail header, light grey.] Reply [Highlighted, with arrow pointing to it from the text \"Look for this text at the top\" above.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- [In mail message, light grey.] HASH: SHA256 Hey, First of all, thanks for taking care of\n[After mail message.] If it's there, the email is probably fine\n"}
{"id":1182,"title":"Rembrandt Photo","image_title":"Rembrandt Photo","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1182","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rembrandt_photo.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1182:_Rembrandt_Photo","transcript":"[Megan is holding a laptop. Cueball is sitting at a desk and turned around to face Megan.] Megan: Hey, look - Rembrandt's parents having sex! Cueball: Waugh! Why do you- Cueball: ...Wait, how can there be a photo of that? Megan: It's an artist's conception.\n","explanation":"Rembrandt was a 17th-century Dutch artist. Megan shows Cueball an alleged photo of Rembrandt's parents at the time that his mother became pregnant; his conception . Since photography wasn't invented until the 19th century, it can't be a real photo. Megan responds to Cueball's disbelief by stating that it is an artist's conception: an artistic imagination and depiction of an event.\nThe joke thus is a pun on the phrase 'artist's conception' that can mean two different things: one, Rembrandt's mother becoming pregnant with him and two, the creation of the image.\nThe title text refers to James McNeill Whistler who painted a portrait of his mother, known to Whistler himself as \"Arrangement in Grey and Black No1\" but more commonly known as \" Whistler's Mother \". As a joke on this, Megan seems to want to show a photo of Whistler's mother, which would probably be pornographic or at least different from the famous portrait. The\u00a0::click:: is Megan switching to that picture on her laptop.\n[Megan is holding a laptop. Cueball is sitting at a desk and turned around to face Megan.] Megan: Hey, look - Rembrandt's parents having sex! Cueball: Waugh! Why do you- Cueball: ...Wait, how can there be a photo of that? Megan: It's an artist's conception.\n"}
{"id":1183,"title":"Rose Petals","image_title":"Rose Petals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1183","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rose_petals.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1183:_Rose_Petals","transcript":"[Cueball enters a living room, to see a line of red rose petals on the floor.] [Cueball follows the line of rose petals.] [Cueball observes that the line of rose petals leads out the front door, down the driveway, and along the sidewalk.] [The rose petals leads up to a table fan behind what appears to be an inverted mailbox filled with rose petals with its back removed. Both are sitting on a Roomba which is motoring down the sidewalk. The fan is on, and is blowing the rose petals out the slit in the front of the mailbox. The contraption is making a sound and the Roomba has its brand written on it] Whirrrrrr Roomba\n","explanation":"This comic strip is playing with romantic movies and gestures used in them. In such movies, one often used romantic gesture is spreading rose petals in the house or apartment , making a way towards the bedroom in which a romantic interest\/lover is waiting surrounded by roses for a love-making session. The joke is that these petals don't lead from the front door to the bedroom and Cueball 's lover, but in the opposite direction instead from the bedroom out onto the street. It appears that someone has set up a box of rose petals and an electric fan atop a Roomba (an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner) as a method of automatically creating such a trail. The title text suggests that despite the other party's intentions of setting this up as a joke to trick Cueball, Cueball ended up having a lovely time with the Roomba.\n[Cueball enters a living room, to see a line of red rose petals on the floor.] [Cueball follows the line of rose petals.] [Cueball observes that the line of rose petals leads out the front door, down the driveway, and along the sidewalk.] [The rose petals leads up to a table fan behind what appears to be an inverted mailbox filled with rose petals with its back removed. Both are sitting on a Roomba which is motoring down the sidewalk. The fan is on, and is blowing the rose petals out the slit in the front of the mailbox. The contraption is making a sound and the Roomba has its brand written on it] Whirrrrrr Roomba\n"}
{"id":1184,"title":"Circumference Formula","image_title":"Circumference Formula","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1184","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/circumference_formula.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1184:_Circumference_Formula","transcript":"Circumference of a circle: 2\u03c0r 2 2 The circle's radius\n","explanation":"The circumference C of a circle is 2 \u03c0 r , where r is the radius of the circle. Randall then makes a footnote about r , using 2 . This creates a typographical ambiguity, since a superscript 2 can also be an exponent (as in x 2 ). The comical purpose of this ambiguity is that the formula initially makes an appearance of a mistake and confusion with the formula for the area of the circle: A = \u03c0 r 2 . If and only if the reader realizes that the superscript text is a reference to a footnote will they understand that the author has in fact supplied the correct formula.\nThe title text makes a related joke. Randall has used r' (r- prime ) and r\" (r-prime-prime, typically pronounced as r double prime ). The title text can be explained thusly:\nLike many symbols, prime has widely differing meanings depending on context. In mathematics prime is often employed to distinguish corresponding components in analogous systems. For example, in a description of a basic physical system, if the velocity of an object is denoted with the variable v , the velocity of that object at time=0 may be denoted with v\u2032 . Playing off this use of prime, Randall has selected the radius of Earth Prime , a concept used in speculative fiction with parallel universes and multiple Earths. Earth Prime is our Earth (or at least the Earth from which the protagonists originate).\nHowever, other disciplines use prime to mean other things. In timekeeping and navigations ' denotes minutes (fractions of hours or degrees, respectively) and \" denotes seconds (fractions of minutes). In the United States and some other places not using meters to measure distance, ' denotes feet and \" denotes inches .\nThe suggestion of using r' or r\" does not cause any mathematical confusion, but using the former to denote the radius of a specific object and the latter to denote a radius using a specific unit of measurement would be highly esoteric.  Furthermore, r' and r\" can be used in calculus as a method of denoting, respectively, a first derivative and a second derivative.  For someone attempting to use the formula and some derivative representing a circle's radius, trouble could result quite easily.\n2 These are not intended to indicate the presence of a footn... oh, never mind.\nCircumference of a circle: 2\u03c0r 2 2 The circle's radius\n"}
{"id":1185,"title":"Ineffective Sorts","image_title":"Ineffective Sorts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1185","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ineffective_sorts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1185:_Ineffective_Sorts","transcript":"Ineffective sorts\n","explanation":"The comic gives examples of four non-functional sorting algorithms written in pseudo - Python .\nThe first sort is an unfinished merge sort . The merge sort works recursively by dividing a list in half and performing a merge sort to each half. After the two halves are sorted, they are merged, taking advantage of the fact that the two halves are now in correct order and thus the merge can be done efficiently. The author of the merge sort in the comic appears to have given up on writing the sorted-merge part of the sort, which is why it's a half-hearted merge sort, but instead concatenates the halves without sorting. In its current state, the sort would divide the list into elements of size one, then recombine them in their original unsorted order, but in nested lists - making the original data more difficult to work with. The author acknowledges this failing with the comment \"Ummmmm... Here. Sorry.\"\nThe second sort is an \"optimized\" variant of bogosort . A standard bogosort works by randomly shuffling the elements in the list until they are sorted. In a comment, the author points out that this variant of bogosort runs in O(n log(n)), whereas standard bogosorts actually have an expected runtime of O(n\u00b7n!) but may never finish. This variant of bogosort finishes so much faster because in most cases it does not actually sort the list, instead reporting a fictitious error in the operating system (a \"kernel page fault\") if the list isn't ordered after shuffling log(n) times.  The bogosort is \"optimized\" because no comparison sort algorithm can possibly do better than O(n log(n)) in the worst case.\nThe third sort parodies a programmer explaining a quicksort during a job interview. The quicksort works by choosing an index as a pivot value and sorting all elements less than the pivot before the pivot and all the elements greater than the pivot after the pivot. It then does a quicksort to the section less than the pivot and the section greater than the pivot until the whole list is sorted. The interviewee flounders for a little while, then asks whether they can use the standard libraries to call a quicksort. The joke being, the standard library contains a quicksort, and the programmer would rather rely on that (possibly even pass it off as his own work) than his own example of quicksort. While it's commonly a good idea in real projects, this would surely count as a failure on interview.\nThe final sort is just a mess. First it checks to see if the list is sorted, and exits if it is. Then it rotates the list by a random amount 10,000 times (as if cutting a deck of cards) and exits if the list is ever sorted. Next, in desperation, it checks if the list is sorted three times. Finally, realizing that they have no chance of success, the author performs the computer equivalent of a Rage Quit and attempts to destroy the computer rather than admit defeat. First, the program attempts to schedule a shutdown of the computer in five seconds, then attempts to delete the current directory, then attempts to delete the user's home directory (presumably the grader's files), and finally all the files on the computer. rm is a POSIX command; the -r and -f flags mean that the remove command will remove all contents of the specified directories and will not prompt the user beforehand. Under the guise of \" portability \", the program runs the equivalent Windows rd command with switches to delete all files from the \"C:\" drive without prompting. Finally, the program returns a list containing the numbers one through five in order.\nIn the title text, StackOverflow ( link ) is a question-and-answer site where programmers can ask and answer questions on programming. The author of this code takes advantage of the hopes that someone on StackOverflow knows what they are doing and has posted code to sort a list... and somebody implemented stacksort ; well, sort of.\nIneffective sorts\n"}
{"id":1186,"title":"Bumblebees","image_title":"Bumblebees","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1186","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bumblebees.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1186:_Bumblebees","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Science fact: [A black and yellow bumblebee sits on the control column in the cockpit of an airplane. With lots of instruments and buttons in front of it. There is a caption below the panel:] Physicists still can't explain how bumblebees can fly airplanes.\n","explanation":"This is the first comic using a fact that is not a Fun fact . Instead it is a Science Fact.\nThere is an often repeated legend that according to the laws of aerodynamics, bumblebees cannot fly. No theories of aerodynamics or mechanics have ever claimed such a thing, and the legend likely originates from a mathematical error that appeared in a 1934 book, written by a scientist who acknowledged that the conclusion was probably wrong.\nHere, Randall makes fun of the urban legend with some wordplay. \"Fly\" in English can refer to both flying under one's own power and the act of piloting a flying vehicle. The comic puts a bumblebee on top of a control column inside of an airplane and lets it fly the entire plane. But physicists are still confused and don't know how the bees are able accomplish this.\nThe strip also creates a fallacy that when experts can't explain something, they must not be able to understand it. In this particular case, experts are unable to explain why bees can fly airplanes because they can't fly airplanes. [ citation needed ]\nThis strip could be a reference to Bee Movie , in which the main character, Barry B. Benson, enlists the help of other bees to land a plane with the last reserves of pollen on Earth. The opening quote of the movie repeats the Bumblebee legend, followed by saying, \"The bee, of course, flies anyway, because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.\"\nThe title text mentions that sociologists are also unable to explain why many people repeat this obviously wrong urban legend .\n[Caption above the panel:] Science fact: [A black and yellow bumblebee sits on the control column in the cockpit of an airplane. With lots of instruments and buttons in front of it. There is a caption below the panel:] Physicists still can't explain how bumblebees can fly airplanes.\n"}
{"id":1187,"title":"Aspect Ratio","image_title":"Aspect Ratio","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1187","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/aspect_ratio.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1187:_Aspect_Ratio","transcript":"[A gray car is crushed in a large black clamp.] Whenever someone uploads a letterboxed 16:9 video rescaled to 4:3, I do this to their car.\n","explanation":"Aspect ratio is the relationship between the width and height of an image (and in this case, a video) and is denoted in a ratio of <width>:<height> - usually either in lowest common denominator, or with a decimal width to a height of \"1\". Up until the 1990s, all televisions and most computer monitors (CRT tube and LCD) were in the standard 4:3 aspect ratio, called \"fullscreen\" (meaning the width is 4\/3 or 1.33... times the height). When HDTV was developed, the standard for television screens changed to 16:9 (width being 16\/9 or 1.77... times the height), called \"widescreen\" (although widescreen can also refer to a number of even wider ratios used in feature films). Computer monitors are now available in widescreen ratios, though fullscreen remains common as well.\nLetterboxing is a process whereby an image which does not fully fill a screen is expanded to fill the screen by the addition of further material (mattes). Usually this is done with the addition of black bars in the empty space. One example of why this was necessary was widescreen films on VHS cassette. VHS could only record and play back 4:3 images. Thus, in order to display a widescreen film, the rest of the VHS's 4:3 image had to be filled with horizontal black bars at the top and bottom of the image. Those bars were part of the video information recorded on the cassette.\nWhen DVDs were introduced, many DVDs also had letterbox bars on the DVD's full screen image. With the increased popularity of widescreen televisions, DVD players were improved to offer anamorphic widescreen , in which the full widescreen image is horizontally rescaled (shrunk) into a 4:3 size, which the player then was able to display stretched horizontally back to the proper widescreen aspect.\nWith the advent of Blu-ray, video is generally encoded in whatever its proper aspect ratio is intended to be, and the player itself is left to appropriately matte the image.\nThe problem with letterboxed video (such as a 16:9 video letterboxed for 4:3) is that if one tries to watch the video on a 16:9 widescreen, where the image should fill the whole screen, instead the 4:3 letterboxed image fills part of the screen with further vertical mattes on the left and right of the image, thus producing an image much smaller than it needs to be, with mattes on all four sides. Some TVs or media players can zoom to help resolve the issue, although the video resolution usually suffers. By encoding only the video itself and allowing the player to do the matting, the video can be seen as large as possible on any given screen.\nAnimorphs is a late-90's to early-00's young adult book series about shape-shifting teens who turn into animals to fight body-snatching aliens. Sony held the rights to create a film, but never made use of them, beyond creating URLs for a proposed movie on December 11, 2012. Animorphs has since been mentioned in the title text of 1360: Old Files as well as being the main joke in 1380: Manual for Civilization and 1817: Incognito Mode .\nIn this comic, Randall appears to be complaining about the issue of widescreen videos which have been rescaled to 4:3 by \"squashing\" the video horizontally to make it narrower, and in the process causing everything to appear thinner\/taller than it really is, causing an unpleasant experience. This is akin to crushing a car to the 3:4 ratio while putting black bars on both sides, which Randall uses as disproportionate retribution .\nA note is that, if someone managed to \"expand\" the car, the car would not be \"un-crushed\" and probably even destroyed even more, referencing the bigger damage done when \"squashed\" video is attempted to be \"expanded\" to its original ratio, distorting the video quality. When an image is converted to 3:4, the pixels are resized to squares. When resized to 16:9, the pixels therefore have a longer side and a shorter side.\n[A gray car is crushed in a large black clamp.] Whenever someone uploads a letterboxed 16:9 video rescaled to 4:3, I do this to their car.\n"}
{"id":1188,"title":"Bonding","image_title":"Bonding","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1188","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bonding.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1188:_Bonding","transcript":"","explanation":"This is source code written in the Java programming language which models a parent and a child playing a game of catch .  Normally this game is played with the parent throwing a ball to their child, who catches it and throws it back, and repeated back-and-forth. The comic title \"Bonding\" refers to the building of relationship between the parent and the child. The joke lies in the puns using the words try , throw , catch , and Throwable .  These can refer to actions in the real-life game, but are also keywords in the Java language that are used for exception handling , a method of signaling error conditions and responding to them.  Also, the terms \"parent\" and \"child\" are usually interpreted more abstractly in programming, as generic terms used in hierarchical data structures .\nThe program, as written, will recursively call the aim method alternately on the parent and the child indefinitely, causing each to take turns throwing and catching the Ball object.  Note that unlike the real game, this program actually has the same person both throwing and catch the same ball on their turn.  The ball is passed onto the other person by aiming it at them, which causes the person to both throw and catch the ball, and aim it back, perpetuating the cycle.  This program will also eventually crash with a stack overflow error.\nThe title text refers to the Eclipse IDE , which is a tool commonly used to develop software in Java. \"Building character\" is something that you would expect a parent to do, in order to instill in his child positive traits, such as confidence and athleticism. This is possibly a reference to Calvin and Hobbes , where Calvin's dad often encourages him to build character in a number of ways, including playing baseball. This is made more likely by other references combining technology with Calvin and Hobbes, such as xkcd comics 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) , 702: Snow Tracking and 1002: Game AIs . However, here, \"build\" might also be a play on the term of \" building \" a program, while \" character \" refers to a data type in programming languages. It may also refer to the common notion that programming in C++ or Java builds character due to their powerful but sometimes finicky libraries.\nTo compile this Java source code, the two classes would need to be in a .java file.\nThe program defines two classes (types of objects):\nThe program executes in the following order:\n"}
{"id":1189,"title":"Voyager 1","image_title":"Voyager 1","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1189","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voyager_1.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1189:_Voyager_1","transcript":"[A heading at the top of a white panel, then a line and below this 22 tally marks in two rows, four times five (three of these at the top) and then two extra.] Number of times Voyager 1 has left the Solar System\n","explanation":"Voyager 1 is a U.S. space probe launched in 1977 to study the outer reaches of the Solar System and beyond. Popular press has on several occasions announced that it \"has left the solar system\" at each point when a boundary has been confirmed or a major event has taken place. This underscores the fact that there is no strictly defined and recognizable boundary of the solar system, or at least we haven't found one yet.\nOn the day of this comics release (2013-03-22) it was announced that Voyager 1 had entered a new region of space . At this point Voyager 1 had passed through the Heliopause and entered the Interstellar medium , although this latter was first confirmed about half a year later in September 2013.\nThe chart shows that Voyager 1 has left the Solar System 22 times, but in the title text only 16 are mentioned.\nThe title text lists several such possible boundaries, (and how many times Voyager 1 has passed them) together with fictive humorous ones:\nSee also Voyager over the \u201cheliocliff,\u201d but Solar System transition mysterious on Ars Technica.\nAbout eight years later, Voyager 1 leaving the solar system was brought up again in 2414: Solar System Compression Artifacts .\n[A heading at the top of a white panel, then a line and below this 22 tally marks in two rows, four times five (three of these at the top) and then two extra.] Number of times Voyager 1 has left the Solar System\n"}
{"id":1190,"title":"Time","image_title":"Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1190","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1190:_Time","transcript":null,"explanation":null}
{"id":1191,"title":"The Past","image_title":"The Past","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1191","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_past.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1191:_The_Past","transcript":"[Cueball and Black Hat talking.] Cueball: Well, you know what they say. The past is a foreign country- Black Hat: -With an outdated military and huge oil reserves! Black Hat: Hmmm...\n","explanation":"\"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there\" is the opening line of \" The Go-Between \", a novel by Leslie Poles Hartley (1895\u20131972), published in London in 1953. Black Hat notes that a country's past military tends to be less advanced than its current one, and that countries in the past had larger oil reserves as they had consumed less oil then.\nIf a country from the past existed in its old state today, other countries would likely leap at the opportunity to exploit its oil reserves.\nOr: Black Hat could be considering sending the modern troops of a country from today back in time to rob the oil from the countries in the past. It could be profitable to invent a time machine for just that.\n\"Mozart in Mirrorshades\" is a short story by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, which features the use of time travel to exploit earlier eras' natural resources.\nAlso, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, time has been exploited to use as energy. They say: \"The Past is like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.\"\nThe \"If history has taught us anything\" phrase is used to start several quotes:\n\"If history has taught us anything, Arthur muses, it is that men with mustaches must never achieve positions of power.\" - Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists \"If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.\" - Michael Corleone, The Godfather\nThe title text starts by fitting the usual pattern of this phrase, but in the second half humorously subverts it. It extends the \"past as a foreign country\" metaphor by implying that lessons learned from history can count as military intelligence to use against it.\nA more recent movie, Christopher Nolan's Tenet (film) , also deals with destroying the past.\n[Cueball and Black Hat talking.] Cueball: Well, you know what they say. The past is a foreign country- Black Hat: -With an outdated military and huge oil reserves! Black Hat: Hmmm...\n"}
{"id":1192,"title":"Humming","image_title":"Humming","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1192","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/humming.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1192:_Humming","transcript":"[Megan is humming a tune.] Cueball: Hey. Cueball: What's that?\n[Megan is still humming the same tune.] Cueball: What are you humming? Cueball: Should I know the tune? Cueball: ...Hmm...\n[Cueball gets out his phone and opens up a music recognition program.] Phone: Identify song Phone: Recorded Phone: > Live [beta]\nPhone: Identifying...\n[A zoom in on the phone screen. An album cover with a picture of Megan on it.] Positive match: Check it out! By I hacked the audio fingerprint database Feat. MEEEEEE Track: We're out of cat food (pick some up?)\n","explanation":"Services like MusicBrainz and SoundHound can detect a recorded song's acoustic fingerprint and match it with an existing song. This lets them identify the title and artist of an unnamed recorded musical extract. In this comic, Megan hacks the acoustic fingerprint database to add her own entry with a message to Cueball , in which she asks him to buy cat food .\nHTTP error code 406 means Not Acceptable. When a client requests data from a server, the client lists the data formats that it can accept. If a server is unable to provide data in any format that the client accepts, the server returns error 406 Not Acceptable. For example, this can occur if a client requests XML but the server supports only JSON. In the title text, the standard meaning of the error message is ignored and the text \"Not Acceptable\" is taken literally: The server is offended by Randall 's humming.\n[Megan is humming a tune.] Cueball: Hey. Cueball: What's that?\n[Megan is still humming the same tune.] Cueball: What are you humming? Cueball: Should I know the tune? Cueball: ...Hmm...\n[Cueball gets out his phone and opens up a music recognition program.] Phone: Identify song Phone: Recorded Phone: > Live [beta]\nPhone: Identifying...\n[A zoom in on the phone screen. An album cover with a picture of Megan on it.] Positive match: Check it out! By I hacked the audio fingerprint database Feat. MEEEEEE Track: We're out of cat food (pick some up?)\n"}
{"id":1193,"title":"Externalities","image_title":"Externalities","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1193","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/externalities.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1193:_Externalities","transcript":"[This was a dynamic image where the text changed during April 1st. The main title text also changed after the dynamic part was finished, and there are even different title text for different part of the comic. This transcript is of the final version of the comic, (no longer dynamic or changing), as displayed at present on xkcd, there are still four different title texts for specific panels. These four title text are for that reason included here in the transcript.]\n[The basic title text for the entire comic is: \"This comic went up on April 1st, and the panels changed throughout the day in response to readers doing things like breaking hashes, edited a rapidly-shuffling set of target Wikipedia articles, and donating to Wikimedia Foundation. (The vandalism is over now and CMU won the hashing contest.)\" The other three title text are only active over certain panels.]\n[The first panel with the caption and Megan below has it's own title text. A part of that panel is a link, and in the section where this link is active there is no title text at all. The title text for the rest of the first panel is: \"Happy April 1st, everyone!\"]\n[A panel with only text is above the first drawing. There is a link on the top part of the text to http:\/\/almamater.xkcd.com\/ (the link is now broken).] Ahoy, carnegie melonites! Come find your future at Baidu.\n[Below, not in a frame, is Megan.] Megan: But nothing about Tiananmen Square.\n[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:] It takes great minds to stifle other great minds. [Ponytail sits at a desk, hand to her chin, with two Cueball-like guys with their hands on the table.] Ponytail: Let's block Canada Cueball-like guys: Sounds good.\n[Ponytail crouches on a moving Roomba (labeled) with a steaming mug of coffee in one hand and a smartphone in the other. Above her is a caption. The Roomba makes a noice] We're a convenient four hour drive from New York City (15,000 hours by Roomba.) Whirrrrrrr Roomba\n[Ponytail and Hairy corners Cueball as he walks out of a door, and a black haired ponytailed girl is moving towards him wielding a giant butterfly net. There is a caption above them:] Our recruiters are on the hunt for unaware CMU graduates\n[The fifth panel has it's own title text only active within (or very close to) the frame. It is: \"uic has the third best hash. See the full standings at http:\/\/almamater.xkcd.com\/best.csv\" (The link is now broken)]\n[There is a caption above a website application. There is three fields to be filled, with each their caption and text:] or uic graduates, provied any of them manage to fill out the application correctly. Name which one Email forget it Education Riding the L all night long\n[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:] At Baidu, Inc., you'll have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects. [Cueball sits at a computer.] Cueball: What does \"make dog\" do? Off-screen voice: Experimental dog generator. Don't click on it; the default size isn't set, so- *click*\n[The last three panels has their own title text, only active within a frame that could contain all three panel. Outside that \"frame\" (all the way around) is the other title text. Within the title text is: \"The dog gains a pound for every $10 donated to the Wikimedia Foundation via this link. Currently at $51135.33.\"]\n[Small insert panel, going in above the next larger panel: Cueball stares at the screen.] Kzzzt *bip* Off-screen voice: Uh oh.\n[A giant dog looks down at the desk where the computer once was, now only the wires are left. Cueball, leaning way back in his office chair, holding his hand to his mouth, stares up at it.]\n[Again a smaller insert panel above the large one with the dog. A graphic showing two sliders and a dog (similar to the one in the previous panel). Next to the dog with arrows pointing to it are a thermometer graphic and an equation. Below is an e-mail type text and finally a caption. There are arrows over and under \"God\" and \"dogs\" between the g and d's.] d(x)=R [email\u00a0protected] , Inc. Play God with dogs. TM\n","explanation":"This was the fourth April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous fools comic was 1037: Umwelt from Sunday April 1st 2012. The next was 1350: Lorenz released on Tuesday April 1st 2014.\nThis comic isn't a static image - even the title text changes depending on which part of the image you're hovering over. It presented a competition for students to see who could come closest to breaking a Skein hash but also an aid appeal for the Wikimedia Foundation.\nThere are quite a few references in the comic to Baidu . Baidu is a large Chinese Internet services company that employs thousands, whose shares are publicly traded on world stock exchanges. It's the predominant Internet search provider of China, and is sometimes called the \"Google of China\". It offers parallels for the Chinese market of many of the services that Google provides and offers its own encyclopedic wiki with a restricted edit policy to serve as a replacement for Wikipedia. Wikipedia reports that Baidu's search engine handled 56% of Chinese internet search queries in Q4 2010. and that in October 2012, Baidu ranked 5th overall in the Alexa Internet rankings. Given that explanation for the Baidu references in #1193 is still solicited for explainxkcd, Baidu apparently is not well known yet among savvy XKCD readers.\nBaidu Search results reputedly follow the censorship dictates of the Chinese authorities, causing it to return censored responses to searches for politically sensitive terms like \"Tianamen Square massacre\" or \"Falun Gong\" when executed by web browsers that are connected via Chinese ISPs. When you execute such searches via Baidu in the US, the top links returned for these topics do seem to reflect Chinese government sensibilities although the uncensored English language Wikipedia articles for these topics are listed high in the query results. Baidu's reputation for censorship provides background for Megan's reply \"but nothing about Tianamen Square\" in response to the \"Come and find your future at Baidu\" employment enticement of panel one and also provides the background to understand the \"It takes great minds to stifle other great minds\" slogan of the second panel.\nThe blank regions in the above image are dynamically generated from various sources.\nFor the two days until comic 1194 appeared, a competition was underway to see who could come closest to breaking a Skein hash .  The first text line of the first panel contains a link to http:\/\/almamater.xkcd.com . This page contained the text:\nCurrently looking for Skein 1024 1024 input matching\nOn this page, users were invited to enter \"Your school's domain name\" \u2014 presumably intended to be their college alma mater. (At least in the beginning, only a few top-level domains were accepted.) If the user entered an acceptable domain (by xkcd's rules, which apparently changed during the 48 hours of the competition), they could then enter data values one at a time. For each data value entered, xkcd returned a hash value and the number of bits by which it differed from the target value. The object was to achieve the lowest possible number of differing bits, ideally zero.\nA ranking page showed the lowest value achieved for each domain name entered, but not the data that achieved it. The first name on the list was substituted in various panels, and the third-place school showed in panel five. No data values were reported by xkcd, but various results were posted by users of the xkcd forums and on other websites, leading to copycat submissions, so that occasionally large numbers of institutions would show the same moderately low value.\nAfter the end of the contest, the data submission page vanished, replaced by the final list of rankings, which shows that Carnegie Mellon University achieved the best score with 384 bits incorrect out of 1024.  The rankings only show a few hundred out of the several thousand domains submitted\u2014presumably Randall chose to chop the copycat submissions off the end of the list, retaining only honestly obtained results.\nIn some cases, Megan's reply seems to correspond to the company.\nThe text in the second panel is based on the company in the first panel:\nThe text in the form varies independently of the text at the top, sometimes related to the organization in 3rd place:\nThe title text documents the different sources of data in the comic. The different title texts are:\n[This was a dynamic image where the text changed during April 1st. The main title text also changed after the dynamic part was finished, and there are even different title text for different part of the comic. This transcript is of the final version of the comic, (no longer dynamic or changing), as displayed at present on xkcd, there are still four different title texts for specific panels. These four title text are for that reason included here in the transcript.]\n[The basic title text for the entire comic is: \"This comic went up on April 1st, and the panels changed throughout the day in response to readers doing things like breaking hashes, edited a rapidly-shuffling set of target Wikipedia articles, and donating to Wikimedia Foundation. (The vandalism is over now and CMU won the hashing contest.)\" The other three title text are only active over certain panels.]\n[The first panel with the caption and Megan below has it's own title text. A part of that panel is a link, and in the section where this link is active there is no title text at all. The title text for the rest of the first panel is: \"Happy April 1st, everyone!\"]\n[A panel with only text is above the first drawing. There is a link on the top part of the text to http:\/\/almamater.xkcd.com\/ (the link is now broken).] Ahoy, carnegie melonites! Come find your future at Baidu.\n[Below, not in a frame, is Megan.] Megan: But nothing about Tiananmen Square.\n[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:] It takes great minds to stifle other great minds. [Ponytail sits at a desk, hand to her chin, with two Cueball-like guys with their hands on the table.] Ponytail: Let's block Canada Cueball-like guys: Sounds good.\n[Ponytail crouches on a moving Roomba (labeled) with a steaming mug of coffee in one hand and a smartphone in the other. Above her is a caption. The Roomba makes a noice] We're a convenient four hour drive from New York City (15,000 hours by Roomba.) Whirrrrrrr Roomba\n[Ponytail and Hairy corners Cueball as he walks out of a door, and a black haired ponytailed girl is moving towards him wielding a giant butterfly net. There is a caption above them:] Our recruiters are on the hunt for unaware CMU graduates\n[The fifth panel has it's own title text only active within (or very close to) the frame. It is: \"uic has the third best hash. See the full standings at http:\/\/almamater.xkcd.com\/best.csv\" (The link is now broken)]\n[There is a caption above a website application. There is three fields to be filled, with each their caption and text:] or uic graduates, provied any of them manage to fill out the application correctly. Name which one Email forget it Education Riding the L all night long\n[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:] At Baidu, Inc., you'll have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects. [Cueball sits at a computer.] Cueball: What does \"make dog\" do? Off-screen voice: Experimental dog generator. Don't click on it; the default size isn't set, so- *click*\n[The last three panels has their own title text, only active within a frame that could contain all three panel. Outside that \"frame\" (all the way around) is the other title text. Within the title text is: \"The dog gains a pound for every $10 donated to the Wikimedia Foundation via this link. Currently at $51135.33.\"]\n[Small insert panel, going in above the next larger panel: Cueball stares at the screen.] Kzzzt *bip* Off-screen voice: Uh oh.\n[A giant dog looks down at the desk where the computer once was, now only the wires are left. Cueball, leaning way back in his office chair, holding his hand to his mouth, stares up at it.]\n[Again a smaller insert panel above the large one with the dog. A graphic showing two sliders and a dog (similar to the one in the previous panel). Next to the dog with arrows pointing to it are a thermometer graphic and an equation. Below is an e-mail type text and finally a caption. There are arrows over and under \"God\" and \"dogs\" between the g and d's.] d(x)=R [email\u00a0protected] , Inc. Play God with dogs. TM\n"}
{"id":1194,"title":"Stratigraphic Record","image_title":"Stratigraphic Record","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1194","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stratigraphic_record.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1194:_Stratigraphic_Record","transcript":"[Image of the Earth in color as seen from far off in space with pitch black around the Earth. Two blocks of text are above and below the Earth in white rectangles:] Nearly 4.5 billion years ago, Earth had liquid water. But all the crust older than 3.5 billion years has been recycled into the mantle by subduction.\n[Same image of Earth, but now with only the middle of the panel black. Above and below is white sections (without a frame) with text:] A billion years of the stratigraphic record, the memory of the hills, is forever lost to us. What was it like here, four billion years ago?\n[A slimmer panel as the first, with two smaller white rectangles with text above and below:] Earth, What secrets do you have?\n[Similar panel, but now without the white rectangles. Instead a line comes up from the Earth as it speaks with white text, and in small letters, unlike normal xkcd text:] Earth: come closer\n[Zoom in on the Earth so it now fills almost the entire panel from left to right.]\n[Further zoom in on the Earth so now only part of the Earth can be seen in the panel. There is still black above, but not on the other three sides of the panel, which is filled with the Earth. It shows the northern part of the Earth with Alaska, Canada and some of mainland USA with one of the great lakes visible at the top right. The sea ice at the North Pole is also visible as are a small part of Russia near Alaska. Again the Earth speaks as in the first panel:] Earth: i'll never tell.\n","explanation":"We have no rock formations on Earth older than about 3.5 billion years, as the comic points out, because everything solid from before that time has been subducted down into the Earth's mantle , by tectonic movement . The title text hints at the cooler Moon which stopped re-melting its surface much sooner, so we theoretically could learn something about Earth's history from examining our Moon's surface and makeup. Zircons are a type of mineral found in the Earth's crust , some of which have been estimated to be as old as 4.4 billion years, older than any other mineral.\nAnyways, here the Earth is anthropomorphized and actively teases the narrator; first it asks the narrator to draw in closer, as if it's about to tell us a secret, but then it whispers \"I'll never tell\".\n[Image of the Earth in color as seen from far off in space with pitch black around the Earth. Two blocks of text are above and below the Earth in white rectangles:] Nearly 4.5 billion years ago, Earth had liquid water. But all the crust older than 3.5 billion years has been recycled into the mantle by subduction.\n[Same image of Earth, but now with only the middle of the panel black. Above and below is white sections (without a frame) with text:] A billion years of the stratigraphic record, the memory of the hills, is forever lost to us. What was it like here, four billion years ago?\n[A slimmer panel as the first, with two smaller white rectangles with text above and below:] Earth, What secrets do you have?\n[Similar panel, but now without the white rectangles. Instead a line comes up from the Earth as it speaks with white text, and in small letters, unlike normal xkcd text:] Earth: come closer\n[Zoom in on the Earth so it now fills almost the entire panel from left to right.]\n[Further zoom in on the Earth so now only part of the Earth can be seen in the panel. There is still black above, but not on the other three sides of the panel, which is filled with the Earth. It shows the northern part of the Earth with Alaska, Canada and some of mainland USA with one of the great lakes visible at the top right. The sea ice at the North Pole is also visible as are a small part of Russia near Alaska. Again the Earth speaks as in the first panel:] Earth: i'll never tell.\n"}
{"id":1195,"title":"Flowchart","image_title":"Flowchart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1195","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flowchart.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1195:_Flowchart","transcript":"[A flow chart is shown with two boxes and two arrows. The first box rectangular:] Start\n[From the first box there is a short arrow straight down to a diamond shaped box:] Hey, wait, this flowchart is a trap!\n[An arrow continues down below from the bottom corner of the diamond box, where there is labeled, and quickly it turns left (in the direction of the arrow), going out under the diamond and then turns left two more times to end up on the right corner of the same box where the arrow points back again.] Yes\n","explanation":"Flowcharts are diagrams used to show the logical flow of an algorithm , process, or program. Flowcharts are a recurring theme in xkcd . In this comic, Randall uses the fact that flowcharts can indeed be used to show a loop in the procedure: in this case, the reader will theoretically become trapped in a loop of reading the text in the diamond, following the line marked \"YES,\" and ending back up in the diamond. Those familiar with flowcharts will notice though that, while diamonds usually contain decision questions (which can be answered multiple ways), the diamond here actually includes a statement instead.\nThe title text contains a suggested solution to the loop: the way to escape the loop is to use a marker and add an additional \"NO\" arrow proceeding from the diamond to a rounded box labelled \"END\" before you start the algorithm at \"START.\" This suggests that the decision question in the diamond could more properly be phrased as \"Is this flowchart a trap?\" However, to follow this suggestion, you would need to actually have the marker that you are about to write instructions to go get. Thus, you must also add the instruction \"get a marker\" somewhere before the flowchart actually begins (before \"START\"), so that you actually have the marker by the time you get to the flowchart in the comic. And since you did not have a marker and could thus not write this way out, you are still trapped!\nOf course, the reader could disregard the algorithm, but this would break the conventions of following the flowchart. This is perhaps part the comic's purpose - to suggest that a problem cannot be solved from within the confines of its own conventions.\nRandall has made use of flowcharts before, and previously released another comic named 518: Flow Charts .\n[A flow chart is shown with two boxes and two arrows. The first box rectangular:] Start\n[From the first box there is a short arrow straight down to a diamond shaped box:] Hey, wait, this flowchart is a trap!\n[An arrow continues down below from the bottom corner of the diamond box, where there is labeled, and quickly it turns left (in the direction of the arrow), going out under the diamond and then turns left two more times to end up on the right corner of the same box where the arrow points back again.] Yes\n"}
{"id":1196,"title":"Subways","image_title":"Subways","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1196","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/subways.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1196:_Subways","transcript":"Subways of North America [A subway-line style (bold colored, 45-degree aligned lines with white bars indicating stations) map has been constructed by combining and linking various parts of the subway maps from many different cities, as if all of the transit systems were connected directly. The cities include (from top to bottom, left to right) Vancouver, Montreal, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Miami, Atlanta, Monterrey, San Juan, Santo Domingo, and Mexico City.]\n","explanation":"The comic shows the maps of all North American subway networks. In reality, none of these systems are interconnected, but in the diagram subways from different cities that have the same color on the official subway map have whimsically named connections, such as the \"Ohio-California Tunnel\" connecting the Green Lines of Cleveland and Los Angeles, or the \"Rocky Mountain Tunnel\" connecting the Blue Lines of Chicago and San Francisco. Vancouver and San Francisco are connected through a station called Richmond, which appears to double as Richmond, British Columbia and Richmond, California . The \"Springfield Monorail\" is fictional, from the animated series The Simpsons (see Marge vs. the Monorail ), but its approximate location on this map would suggest the Seattle Monorail , or perhaps Springfield, Oregon, which Matt Groening revealed was the inspiration for the  Simpsons' hometown .\nThe Urban Mass Transit Systems of North America map (right) created by Yale Professor Bill Rankin on his web site Radical Cartography in 2006 presents all of the subway systems in North America at the same scale using geographic, instead of topological, layout.\nThe networks on xkcd's map are displayed with absolutely no consideration to geographic position, in order to connect like-colored routes together. While Vancouver is the most North-West, Mexico City being the most South, and San Francisco the most west, distances are not accurate (in reality, Vancouver is closer to Chicago than to Toronto for example) and cities are often arranged in the wrong direction from one another:\nThe map's design is modeled after the system map of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston where Randall is from.\nNot all cities with a subway are shown on the map. Missing from the map:\nSubways of North America [A subway-line style (bold colored, 45-degree aligned lines with white bars indicating stations) map has been constructed by combining and linking various parts of the subway maps from many different cities, as if all of the transit systems were connected directly. The cities include (from top to bottom, left to right) Vancouver, Montreal, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Miami, Atlanta, Monterrey, San Juan, Santo Domingo, and Mexico City.]\n"}
{"id":1197,"title":"All Adobe Updates","image_title":"All Adobe Updates","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1197","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/all_adobe_updates.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1197:_All_Adobe_Updates","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a laptop with a window with a red title bar floating over his head.] Adobe Update There is an update for: Adobe Download Manager This update will allow you to download the new updates to the Adobe Update Downloader. [OK] [Download]\n","explanation":"This comic was probably a reaction to the installation service Ninite removing Adobe Flash Player from their free version the previous day.\nThe comic makes fun of Adobe Systems software that delivers new versions of Adobe products to users' computers, such as Adobe Updater (which replaced Adobe Update Manager ) and Adobe Download Manager (which replaced Akamai ). These software increments might either be technical (to fix compatibility or security issues), or they might add new features that would go unnoticed. In addition, these updates are downloaded automatically by default, but the operating system might install them only if a user allows it to. The frequency of software changes (and changes in the way Adobe allows users to download new software) could result in confused users. In this case, the comic is saying that you must update the program before it can actually check for updates, something it already seems to be doing.\nThere is an actual message that a specific version of these updaters display:\nThe Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?\nIn fact, the general necessity of such update managers has often been questioned, as they require the user to \"download software in order to download other software\". Other notable examples of companies who use update managers include Google and Sun \/ Oracle , with the latter being also mentioned in the title text.\nThe two buttons 'OK' and 'Download' are implied to have the same effect, indicating the user has no real choice. Or, alternatively, 'OK' may simply just close the dialog without taking any action, as that is common in informational popups in many pieces of software. In that case, the placement of the 'OK' button implies that it is the default action, meaning most users will just ignore the update. Given the extreme frequency and perceived lack of changes (to your average end user), this anecdotally seems to be what most people do. Statistics for the high rate of un-patched systems in the wild support the anecdotal evidence.\nThe language of the message also plays with repeated up and down , as in \"there is an up date for the Adobe down load manager...\" to give the whole process a feel of preposterousness verging on Carrollian literary nonsense .\nThe title text also suggests that using update helper software which in turn must be updated bears the risk of creating a dependency hell .  The \"version 21.1.2 of the Oracle...\" may refer to the Rush suite 2112 , where moment V is titled Oracle and contains the lyrics \"I stand atop a spiral stair, An oracle confronts me there.\"\n[Cueball is sitting at a laptop with a window with a red title bar floating over his head.] Adobe Update There is an update for: Adobe Download Manager This update will allow you to download the new updates to the Adobe Update Downloader. [OK] [Download]\n"}
{"id":1198,"title":"Geologist","image_title":"Geologist","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1198","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geologist.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1198:_Geologist","transcript":"[Cueball, wearing earmuffs and goggles and holding a gun and a rock hammer in his hands, is walking away from his van in the background towards a group of rocks. The largest of these rocks is almost as tall as Cueball, but five smaller rocks are scattered on the ground, with a bit of grass growing at their bases. The van has text on its side:] Dept. of Geology\n[Zoom in on Cueball close to the base of the largest rock. He has put the rock hammer on the ground next to him and aims his gun at the ground and shoots three holes in the earth, the last hole is just forming, as smoke comes out of the end of the gun.] Blam Blam Blam\n[Zoom out again with Cueball hacking away at the top of tallest rock formation with his rock hammer. The gun has been left near the three holes in the ground. The van can again be seen as can most of the text.] Clink Clink ept. of ology\n[Cueball, without his head gear, sits at his desk in his office reading a piece of paper he holds in his hands. Three other papers are lying on the otherwise empty desk. Behind him various items hangs on the wall most likely images and diplomas etc. One of them is blank, two looks like images, and four has unreadable text. The last item is the top of the rock that he just chipped off in the previous frame. It has been attached to a mount as a hunting trophy. Above and below there are labels:] Earth 4,500,000,000 BCE - April 12, 2013\n","explanation":"Geology is the study of the physical and chemical makeup of the Earth and geologists are sometimes called rock hunters, sometimes derisively.\nHunters, after killing an especially difficult or rare beast, sometimes remove its head and hang it up on a wall as a trophy . Cueball , as a geologist, \"kills the Earth\" by shooting at it. He removes its \"head,\" a chunk of rock, and hangs it up on his office wall. Above the trophy it says Earth, and below it gives it lifespan from 4,500,000,000 BCE (Before Common Era )), which is the current age of the Earth, and then until the day where he shot Earth, which is also the day this comic was released 2013-04-12. The topic of hunting things that are not usually hunted is also in 640: Tornado Hunter\nThe title text is probably a reference to a chicken running around with its head cut off. A few billion years (7,600,000,000 years) is also about how much longer the Earth is expected to last, assuming it gets swallowed up by the expanding Sun at the end of the Sun's life .\n[Cueball, wearing earmuffs and goggles and holding a gun and a rock hammer in his hands, is walking away from his van in the background towards a group of rocks. The largest of these rocks is almost as tall as Cueball, but five smaller rocks are scattered on the ground, with a bit of grass growing at their bases. The van has text on its side:] Dept. of Geology\n[Zoom in on Cueball close to the base of the largest rock. He has put the rock hammer on the ground next to him and aims his gun at the ground and shoots three holes in the earth, the last hole is just forming, as smoke comes out of the end of the gun.] Blam Blam Blam\n[Zoom out again with Cueball hacking away at the top of tallest rock formation with his rock hammer. The gun has been left near the three holes in the ground. The van can again be seen as can most of the text.] Clink Clink ept. of ology\n[Cueball, without his head gear, sits at his desk in his office reading a piece of paper he holds in his hands. Three other papers are lying on the otherwise empty desk. Behind him various items hangs on the wall most likely images and diplomas etc. One of them is blank, two looks like images, and four has unreadable text. The last item is the top of the rock that he just chipped off in the previous frame. It has been attached to a mount as a hunting trophy. Above and below there are labels:] Earth 4,500,000,000 BCE - April 12, 2013\n"}
{"id":1199,"title":"Silence","image_title":"Silence","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1199","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/silence.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1199:_Silence","transcript":"[Megan is walking with a phone in her hand.]\n[Megan stops.]\n[Megan raises her phone.] Phone: Identify song recorded Phone: > LIVE [Beta]\n[Megan is in an empty room.] Phone: Listening...\n[The phone screen.] Positive match: 4'33\" John Cage\n","explanation":"4'33\" is a 1952 composition by American avant-garde composer John Cage consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. More specifically, 4'33\" consists entirely of faint ambient sounds coming from the environment, while all the players silently hold their instruments. The noise of the audience is considered part of the composition. It is Cage's most famous work, and the subject of many music jokes. Note that John Cage wrote plenty of other non-silent things.\nMegan is using an app on her smartphone that analyzes music that is playing and uses an online database to figure out what it is; popular real-world examples include Shazam and SoundHound . She does this in an empty room, correctly matching 4'33\" . Cueball attempted to use the same app in 1192: Humming , but Megan hacked it there.\nThe title text refers to the fact that since 4'33\" is composed of the ambient sounds in an environment, if that environment is a recording studio, live music venue etc. the ambient sound is a band playing another song.\n[Megan is walking with a phone in her hand.]\n[Megan stops.]\n[Megan raises her phone.] Phone: Identify song recorded Phone: > LIVE [Beta]\n[Megan is in an empty room.] Phone: Listening...\n[The phone screen.] Positive match: 4'33\" John Cage\n"}
{"id":1200,"title":"Authorization","image_title":"Authorization","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1200","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/authorization.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1200:_Authorization","transcript":"[Diagram showing several connected bubbles. One in the center says \"User account on my laptop,\" surrounded by \"Dropbox,\" \"Photos & files,\" \"Facebook,\" \"Gmail,\" \"PayPal,\" and \"Bank,\" which are connected to the middle bubbles and to each other. Below the middle bubble is one labeled \"Admin account,\" which is covered in spikes, and has a \"door\" to the bubble above it.] If someone steals my laptop while I'm logged in, they can read my email, take my money, and impersonate me to my friends, but at least they can't install drivers without my permission.\n","explanation":"Computer operating systems were initially written for the business environment. Thus they were made to be accessible to multiple employees, or users , but only fully accessible to administrators (or admins). Regular users can access and use programs on the computer, but only the admin is allowed to make changes to how the computer runs.  This same split level of security continues to this day, even in privately owned, or \"home\", computers.\nThe joke here is that the most important things on a computer are no longer the programs that it runs, but the private personal data it accesses (usually online). Anyone who wished to do real mischief on an active computer could do considerable damage without ever caring what the admin password was. The admin password, in effect, now guards a vault no one cares about.\nThis comic pokes fun at the authorization mechanisms surrounding most operating systems' administrator accounts. It makes the argument that the user's data is more valuable than the integrity of the system. This is arguably true for most personal systems, although it is probably not true in a shared-server setup, where a system compromise could lead to the exposure of many users' data.\nEssentially, once a user is logged in , they can typically access all of their data without any further restriction. Modifying the operating system (for example, to install drivers ) requires a separate password.\nIn fact, this password protection also hinders installation of malware , which is otherwise possible even remotely, with the malware then being able to e.g. steal passwords, enabling a hacker anywhere in the world to access your accounts without ever needing to touch your computer. So having your computer set up to not to ask you for an administrator's password arguably implies a bigger risk of identity theft than allowing others to access your system physically while being logged in does.\nThe title text alludes to the security practice where computers automatically lock the user out after a few minutes, requiring a password from the user in order to continue using it. Instead, Randall's computer automatically switches to his brother's account, presumably compromising his data instead of Randall's. The fact that Randall's brother has an account on Randall's computer even though Randall does not live with his childhood family (so his brother would not need to use his computer often) could be because Randall does not want his brother to be able to access his files, PayPal, etc\u2026 when he uses his computer, which would indicate that either Randall is cynical, his brother is not trustworthy, or Randall is simply following the principle of least privilege .\n[Diagram showing several connected bubbles. One in the center says \"User account on my laptop,\" surrounded by \"Dropbox,\" \"Photos & files,\" \"Facebook,\" \"Gmail,\" \"PayPal,\" and \"Bank,\" which are connected to the middle bubbles and to each other. Below the middle bubble is one labeled \"Admin account,\" which is covered in spikes, and has a \"door\" to the bubble above it.] If someone steals my laptop while I'm logged in, they can read my email, take my money, and impersonate me to my friends, but at least they can't install drivers without my permission.\n"}
{"id":1201,"title":"Integration by Parts","image_title":"Integration by Parts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1201","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/integration_by_parts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1201:_Integration_by_Parts","transcript":"A Guide to Integration by Parts:\nGiven a problem of the form: \u222bf(x)g(x)dx=? Choose variables u and v such that u=f(x) dv=g(x)dx Now the expression becomes: \u222budv=? Which definitely looks easier. Anyway, I gotta run. But good luck!\n","explanation":"Integration by parts is an integration strategy that is used to evaluate difficult integrals by trying to find simpler integrals derived from the original. It is commonly a source of confusion or irritation for students when they first learn it, due to the fact that there is really no way to accurately predict the proper u\/dv separation just by looking at an integral. Integration by parts requires patience, trial and error, and experience.\nRandall shows a somewhat complicated math problem and, in an attempt to \"help\", simplifies it into a more compact integral. This is the first part of performing integration by parts, which involves the guessing. Having gotten it into integration by parts format, he then leaves without describing the actual solution. The general integral \u222b (u dv) is equal to uv - \u222b (v du) , and this is the more tedious part of the math and where problems will arise if you picked the wrong u and dv at the beginning. The narrator makes a point of leaving here, so we can't ask for help or complain if the choice of u and dv was wrong.\nThe title text points out that if the integral of x can be divided so that u = x and dv = dx and implying v = x, then it leads to the result (1\/2)x\u00b2. This implies the original integral was just \u222bx dx, and not needing integration by parts in the first place. Mathematics teachers and extreme math geeks will also cringe at this answer, however, since an indefinite integral requires an integration constant. The correct answer is actually (1\/2)x\u00b2 + C, as Randall hints. The +C symbolizes that an indefinite integral can be shifted by any constant and still gets the same answer on the reverse derivative . Definite integrals specify a range that they're valid on and thus there is no need to add this constant.\nA Guide to Integration by Parts:\nGiven a problem of the form: \u222bf(x)g(x)dx=? Choose variables u and v such that u=f(x) dv=g(x)dx Now the expression becomes: \u222budv=? Which definitely looks easier. Anyway, I gotta run. But good luck!\n"}
{"id":1202,"title":"Girls and Boys","image_title":"Girls and Boys","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1202","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/girls_and_boys.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1202:_Girls_and_Boys","transcript":"[Megan facing left is sitting on a stool at a table while studying. She is bent over her paper writing on it, while her laptop is standing open on top of two books lying in front of her. In front of her, just inside the panel to the left is the back and neck of another student sitting on a chair visible, with only the rear leg and back of the chair shown. Behind her just inside the panel to the right is the front end of another table, one leg visible, and here lies a pile of paper, as tall as the two books. Two frames above Megan narrates the poem:] Girls go to college To get more knowledge\n[Cueball facing right, is sitting on a chair at a table also studying. He is holding a piece of paper up in one hand head turned toward it. His other hand holds a page, with text shown as thin lines, in the open book lying in front of him. His laptop is standing open behind the book. In front of him, just inside the panel to the right is the back and arms of another student sitting on a chair visible, with only the rear leg and back of the chair shown. Behind him just inside the panel to the left is the front end of another table, one leg visible, and here lies a pile of four books. Two frames above Cueball narrates the poem:] Boys go to college To get more knowledge\n[Space launch control room with Megan and Cueball standing in the middle of the room working together. Megan sitting behind a table with a rectangular item on top, holds a model of the capsule that goes on the top of a space craft in her hand pointing to it with the other hand while Cueball standing to the right gestures at the model as well. To the left sits Ponytail in an office chair, she is wearing a head-set and sits in front of screen, just inside the panel, she seems to be controlling something, but no keyboard is visitable. Above her is another screen attached to the wall (off-panel). The the right there sits a Cueball-like guy on a chair, who is also working on some screen, which is mainly off-panel as is the front of his head. On the wall behind there hangs two pictures. The first shows the curve of a white planet against black space, two continents or clouds visible. There is an insert in the top left corner with a small drawing, and some text or number (unreadable) in the top right corner. The other picture seems to show a space craft with two large solar panels, white on the black black background of space. Has some similarities to the international space station. There are four white lines representing text labels pointing to different parts. One frame at the top narrates the poem:] Girls and boys\n[A large gray rocket with two lifter rockets, one on each side, launch into the black night, rising up with white fire out the end on top of a huge pile of gray exhaust smoke, that billows out filling the entire width at the ground level, where gray lines stars out on the black ground. A white rectangle right above the tip of the rocket narrates the poem (which first ends in the title text):] Go to Jupiter\nGoing to Jupiter was most famously explored in the film 2001 and its sequel 2010 , where a space ship lands on the moon Europa . The film Outland is set on a mining operation on Jupiter's moon Io .\n","explanation":"This comic is a play on the popular school-yard taunt , \"Girls go to college, to get more knowledge; boys go to Jupiter, to get more stupider,\" also commonly heard as \"Boys go to Mars, to get more candy bars; girls go to Jupiter, to get more stupider.\" The words \"boys\" and \"girls\" may be interchanged, depending on the gender of the person chanting. The schoolyard taunt embodies the competitiveness and separation commonly seen between young boys and girls, and ideas about the superiority of one's gender.\nIt should be noted that, historically, most higher education was preferentially or exclusively reserved for men, but that changed rapidly over the course of the 20th century. By the late 1970s more women than men were enrolling in college, and that trend has only increased, to the point where women make up nearly 60% of undergraduate students in American colleges and universities. This is an issue of substantial concern, because it reflects national trends in men failing to achieve academically. This comic may be pointing out that this gendered competition, which is often inculcated from an early age, is counter-productive, because it focuses on one gender succeeding at the expense of the other. In truth, human achievement is maximized when both men and women are given opportunities to gain skills and succeed.\nThe comic subverts the original rhyme by having both girls ( Megan ) and boys ( Cueball ) go to college to gain knowledge, and then using that knowledge to go to Jupiter as part of a space program , working in cooperation with other men (another Cueball-like guy) and women ( Ponytail ).\nGoing \"to Jupiter, to get more stupider\" is ironic considering that human beings have not yet even gone to Mars, so to go to Jupiter would take a huge amount of knowledge, investment, and further development of current technology. Likewise, people in space programs going to Jupiter would have advanced degrees, a great deal of knowledge, and a motivation to seek out more knowledge. Space programs and going to Jupiter would require the cooperation of many different people, men and women included, rather than the divisive atmosphere of the schoolyard.\nThe title text points out that by going to Jupiter you would get more knowledge , which is generally the purpose of any space program; that is, the purpose is to advance science, and it wouldn't actually be dumb at all. Therefore, the task of going to Jupiter is absolutely dependent on going to college, cooperation, and getting more knowledge; entirely the opposite of what the schoolyard taunt suggests.\n[Megan facing left is sitting on a stool at a table while studying. She is bent over her paper writing on it, while her laptop is standing open on top of two books lying in front of her. In front of her, just inside the panel to the left is the back and neck of another student sitting on a chair visible, with only the rear leg and back of the chair shown. Behind her just inside the panel to the right is the front end of another table, one leg visible, and here lies a pile of paper, as tall as the two books. Two frames above Megan narrates the poem:] Girls go to college To get more knowledge\n[Cueball facing right, is sitting on a chair at a table also studying. He is holding a piece of paper up in one hand head turned toward it. His other hand holds a page, with text shown as thin lines, in the open book lying in front of him. His laptop is standing open behind the book. In front of him, just inside the panel to the right is the back and arms of another student sitting on a chair visible, with only the rear leg and back of the chair shown. Behind him just inside the panel to the left is the front end of another table, one leg visible, and here lies a pile of four books. Two frames above Cueball narrates the poem:] Boys go to college To get more knowledge\n[Space launch control room with Megan and Cueball standing in the middle of the room working together. Megan sitting behind a table with a rectangular item on top, holds a model of the capsule that goes on the top of a space craft in her hand pointing to it with the other hand while Cueball standing to the right gestures at the model as well. To the left sits Ponytail in an office chair, she is wearing a head-set and sits in front of screen, just inside the panel, she seems to be controlling something, but no keyboard is visitable. Above her is another screen attached to the wall (off-panel). The the right there sits a Cueball-like guy on a chair, who is also working on some screen, which is mainly off-panel as is the front of his head. On the wall behind there hangs two pictures. The first shows the curve of a white planet against black space, two continents or clouds visible. There is an insert in the top left corner with a small drawing, and some text or number (unreadable) in the top right corner. The other picture seems to show a space craft with two large solar panels, white on the black black background of space. Has some similarities to the international space station. There are four white lines representing text labels pointing to different parts. One frame at the top narrates the poem:] Girls and boys\n[A large gray rocket with two lifter rockets, one on each side, launch into the black night, rising up with white fire out the end on top of a huge pile of gray exhaust smoke, that billows out filling the entire width at the ground level, where gray lines stars out on the black ground. A white rectangle right above the tip of the rocket narrates the poem (which first ends in the title text):] Go to Jupiter\nGoing to Jupiter was most famously explored in the film 2001 and its sequel 2010 , where a space ship lands on the moon Europa . The film Outland is set on a mining operation on Jupiter's moon Io .\n"}
{"id":1203,"title":"Time Machines","image_title":"Time Machines","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1203","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time_machines.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1203:_Time_Machines","transcript":"[Small caption above the first panel:] The problem with time machines: [Cueball has his hands on the lever of a time machine.]\n[Cueball flips the switch from OFF to ON.] Switch: Click Time machine: E E E E E E EEEE\nTime machine: EEEE E E E E E E Switch: Click [Cueball flips the switch from ON to OFF.]\n[Cueball looks at his palms.] Cueball:\u00a0???\nThis comic's title is very similar to 716: Time Machine .\n","explanation":"Cueball activates a time machine to go back into the past. The time machine rewinds time, but in the process rewinds the event where the time machine itself was turned on, turning the time machine off in the process. He is now a few seconds in the past, prior to having activated the time machine, but he is baffled that he does not seem to have accomplished anything and turned off the time machine unintentionally. It would seem that the time machine is the world's most technologically-advanced \" useless machine \" (a device whose only purpose is to switch itself off when it is switched on).\nThe title text mimics a countdown to an event. \"T minus 10,\" for example, means 10 seconds until the event. When the event is the activation of a time machine traveling back in time, after 10 seconds it will once again be \"T minus 10,\" and a second later it will be \"T minus 11,\" counting up rather than down. This casts doubt on the value of the countdown because, from the perspective of the time traveler, the event has already taken place.\nCueball is only able to travel back in time a few seconds because in this comic time is seen as continuous and linear from Cueball's point of view, so he can only travel back in time to the moment he activated the machine (the first series of \"E\"s is the machine warming up and the second series of \"E\"s is that in reverse) the logic behind this is that because time appears to be continuous, Cueball's input was required for the machine to work. Since it does not appear to be a traveling vessel, it is also possible that Cueball could trap himself in the past by traveling to a time before the machine was created, and it would remain in the present.\n[Small caption above the first panel:] The problem with time machines: [Cueball has his hands on the lever of a time machine.]\n[Cueball flips the switch from OFF to ON.] Switch: Click Time machine: E E E E E E EEEE\nTime machine: EEEE E E E E E E Switch: Click [Cueball flips the switch from ON to OFF.]\n[Cueball looks at his palms.] Cueball:\u00a0???\nThis comic's title is very similar to 716: Time Machine .\n"}
{"id":1204,"title":"Detail","image_title":"Detail","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1204","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/detail.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1204:_Detail","transcript":"My Neighborhood's Resolution in: [A two-axis graph with years from 2000 to 2100 plotted on the x-axis and resolution from 1 meter to the Planck length plotted on a logarithmic scale on the y-axis. Three points in a line close to (~2010, 1 meter) are plotted at the bottom left of the graph; they have a strong positive correlation. Two trendlines are drawn on the graph; one is labeled \"Earth\" and remains constant at the Planck length over time; the other is labeled \"Google Earth\" and connects the aforementioned three points, extending upward in a straight line and approaching the Planck length around 2100. Both trendlines break up into question marks before the point they would intersect.]\n","explanation":"Google Earth is a mapping software service provided by Google that allows people to view the Earth from above. If zoomed in to maximum magnification, one can obtain clear views of individual streets and homes.\nAn image's resolution is the smallest length detectable in that image. In terms of Google Earth, this refers to the real-life distance corresponding to one pixel in an aerial image. Randall points out that the level of detail in Google Earth's images has been increasing exponentially since its introduction, as aerial imaging technology improves and better ways of collecting the data are found. Each tick in the scale represents a resolution improvement by 1000 times.\nIn quantum mechanics , the Planck length is (in layman's terms) the smallest measurable distance, defined as approximately 1.6\u00d710 \u221235 meters, or around 10 20 times smaller than the diameter of a proton. As the graph indicates, this may be called the \"resolution\" of the universe.\nRandall extrapolates the exponential trend of Google Earth's increasing resolution, 'revealing' that by the year 2120 or so, Google Earth's resolution will approach and even possibly exceed the Planck length, an obviously fanciful and impossible idea. Current laboratory instruments cannot even get close to measuring the Planck length, barely able to reach the level of the atom. (Which, by the chart's prediction, will be surpassed by Google Earth at around 2040.)\nOther comics exploring unwarranted extrapolation include 605: Extrapolating , 1007: Sustainable and 1281: Minifigs .\nThe title text refers to controversy that Google received at one point regarding their use of vehicle-mounted Street View cameras to take images of streets and houses, and how such photography could constitute an invasion of privacy. Google defended itself by stating that the cameras can see nothing more than a pedestrian walking by. Given the trendline in this comic however, Google would need to produce resolution in the nanometer range by 2031, which (using today's technology) would require the use of scanning electron microscopes . The same 'invasion of privacy' defense would obviously not work here, as 1) current scanning electron microscopes in labs can only be used with small specimens at very close range, and are completely unsuitable for observing something as large as a house or for observations from a passing car, and 2) most pedestrians are not equipped with scanning electron microscopes. [ citation needed ]\nMy Neighborhood's Resolution in: [A two-axis graph with years from 2000 to 2100 plotted on the x-axis and resolution from 1 meter to the Planck length plotted on a logarithmic scale on the y-axis. Three points in a line close to (~2010, 1 meter) are plotted at the bottom left of the graph; they have a strong positive correlation. Two trendlines are drawn on the graph; one is labeled \"Earth\" and remains constant at the Planck length over time; the other is labeled \"Google Earth\" and connects the aforementioned three points, extending upward in a straight line and approaching the Planck length around 2100. Both trendlines break up into question marks before the point they would intersect.]\n"}
{"id":1205,"title":"Is It Worth the Time?","image_title":"Is It Worth the Time?","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1205","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/is_it_worth_the_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1205:_Is_It_Worth_the_Time%3F","transcript":"[Above the frame is written the following text:] How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you're spending more time than you save? (across five years)\n[The rest of the the comic is given in a tabular format. At the top of the table is how often you do the task, with six time increments underneath, and then at the side is written How much time do you shave off at the leftmost part of the page, with 9 lengths of time to the left. The empty fields in the calendar are shaded dark gray.] [The first row is for 1 second, where the table values are 1 day (for 50 per day), 2 hours (for 5 per day), 30 minutes (for daily), 4 minutes (for weekly), 1 minute (for monthly), and 5 seconds (for yearly).] [The second row is for 5 seconds, where the table values are 5 days (for 50 per day), 12 hours (for 5 per day), 2 hours (for daily), 21 minutes (for weekly), 5 minutes (for monthly), and 25 seconds (for yearly).] [The third row is for 30 seconds, where the table values are 4 weeks (for 50 per day), 3 days (for 5 per day), 12 hours (for daily), 2 hours (for weekly), 30 minutes (for monthly), and 2 minutes (for yearly).] [The fourth row is for 1 minute, where the table values are 8 weeks (for 50 per day), 6 days (for 5 per day), 1 day (for daily), 4 hours (for weekly), 1 hour (for monthly), and 5 minutes (for yearly).] [The fifth row is for 5 minutes, where the table values are 9 months (for 50 per day), 4 weeks (for 5 per day), 6 days (for daily), 21 hours (for weekly), 5 hours (for monthly), and 25 minutes (for yearly).] [The sixth row is for 30 minutes, where the table values are greyed out (for 50 per day), 6 months (for 5 per day), 5 weeks (for daily), 5 days (for weekly), 1 day (for monthly), and 2 hours (for yearly).] [The seventh row is for 1 hour, where the table values are greyed out (for 50 per day), 10 months (for 5 per day), 2 months (for daily), 10 days (for weekly), 2 days (for monthly), and 5 hours (for yearly).] [The eighth row is for 6 hours, where the table values are greyed out (for 50 per day, 5 per day and daily), 2 months (for weekly), 2 weeks (for monthly), and 1 day (for yearly).] [The ninth and final row is for 1 day, where the table values are greyed out (for 50 per day, 5 per day, daily and weekly), 8 weeks (for monthly), and 5 days (for yearly).]\n","explanation":"The comic is a straightforward chart showing the amount of work (time) one can dedicate to making a task more efficient, in order not to spend more time optimizing the task than the total time saved. This may illustrate the fact that computer scientists often try to optimize tasks they are likely to perform again in the future - a common goal in their work - even though the work needed for that optimization can itself prove much longer than the time saved when doing the task again; this was previously referenced in 974: The General Problem .\nE.g. if you do some task every week once, and you are able to save 1 minute of time by doing some preparatory work (e.g. build or buy a tool), you can spend 4 hours doing this preparatory work, and you will, across five-years time, come even. Any less time spent doing the preparatory work, and you will profit from it.\nThe calculation on which the chart is based, for this example:\n5 years \/ 1 week = 260 occurrences of the task 260 occurrences \u00d7 1 saved minute = 260 saved minutes = 4.3 hours\nTherefore, 1 minute saved every week would, across five years, save over 4 hours of your time.\nOr, in algebraic form:\nTotal time shaved off across 5 years = 5 \u00d7 \"How often you do the task every year\" \u00d7 \"How much time you shave off\"\nThe grayed out areas represent times which are either impossible to save, or where, if you could save this much (say 6 hours on one day), it would almost be worth it no matter how long it takes. For instance it is impossible to shave 1 hour off a task if you perform it more than 24 times a day \u2013 the total time shaved off per day would amount to more than one day, and thus you could not have performed the task this many times in a day to begin with. On the other hand, 6 hours shaved off for one day is not impossible, but the net benefit would be so great, that it would very quickly earn itself back again almost no matter how long it takes. If the assumption is that a work day is 8 hours, then even if it took 2 years to do the improvement, you would already have earned it in after less than five years in total - both with the 2 years to make it and the time it takes to save 2 years (2.67 years in this case for at total of 4.67 years).\nThe comic assumes that equal amounts of time have equal value, which is not necessarily true. For an extreme example, consider programming a telephone with speed dials to be used when there is a fire or to call an ambulance or the police. This may take longer than the time saved when the call is placed, but it is worthwhile to spend a large amount of free time to save any time during an emergency.\nOf course, all these conclusions presume you are the only one that benefits. If the savings can be easily adapted by others - for example, computer code for a program that automates a task for hundreds of people - then the amount of time that can be spent increases. Indeed, in some cases, when optimizing for others, spending far more time than they save can be worth it, if the people you're working for are paying you for the product and the time savings keep them happy and likely to keep paying you. And if what you're optimizing is a business process that's unlikely to go out of date with your employer's current tools or its current products, then you may have more than 5 years to amortize the improvement.\nThe title text points out the time you spend studying this comic detracts from your overall efficiency, and concludes that maximizing efficiency would require optimal use of every second and finishes very philosophically by pointing out that every second you use counts towards your life total - also those you spend reading and\/or editing a wiki about a web comic...\nThe comic derives humor from the absurd conclusions of hyper-efficiency, which have been examined in What if? - Cost of Pennies , and also in 951: Working which is devoted to insufficient economy, where the money saved is compared to the time wasted while looking for a bargain. In 1319: Automation Randall investigates how bad it really goes when you decide to automate a program to save you time... See also the Time management category .\n[Above the frame is written the following text:] How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you're spending more time than you save? (across five years)\n[The rest of the the comic is given in a tabular format. At the top of the table is how often you do the task, with six time increments underneath, and then at the side is written How much time do you shave off at the leftmost part of the page, with 9 lengths of time to the left. The empty fields in the calendar are shaded dark gray.] [The first row is for 1 second, where the table values are 1 day (for 50 per day), 2 hours (for 5 per day), 30 minutes (for daily), 4 minutes (for weekly), 1 minute (for monthly), and 5 seconds (for yearly).] [The second row is for 5 seconds, where the table values are 5 days (for 50 per day), 12 hours (for 5 per day), 2 hours (for daily), 21 minutes (for weekly), 5 minutes (for monthly), and 25 seconds (for yearly).] [The third row is for 30 seconds, where the table values are 4 weeks (for 50 per day), 3 days (for 5 per day), 12 hours (for daily), 2 hours (for weekly), 30 minutes (for monthly), and 2 minutes (for yearly).] [The fourth row is for 1 minute, where the table values are 8 weeks (for 50 per day), 6 days (for 5 per day), 1 day (for daily), 4 hours (for weekly), 1 hour (for monthly), and 5 minutes (for yearly).] [The fifth row is for 5 minutes, where the table values are 9 months (for 50 per day), 4 weeks (for 5 per day), 6 days (for daily), 21 hours (for weekly), 5 hours (for monthly), and 25 minutes (for yearly).] [The sixth row is for 30 minutes, where the table values are greyed out (for 50 per day), 6 months (for 5 per day), 5 weeks (for daily), 5 days (for weekly), 1 day (for monthly), and 2 hours (for yearly).] [The seventh row is for 1 hour, where the table values are greyed out (for 50 per day), 10 months (for 5 per day), 2 months (for daily), 10 days (for weekly), 2 days (for monthly), and 5 hours (for yearly).] [The eighth row is for 6 hours, where the table values are greyed out (for 50 per day, 5 per day and daily), 2 months (for weekly), 2 weeks (for monthly), and 1 day (for yearly).] [The ninth and final row is for 1 day, where the table values are greyed out (for 50 per day, 5 per day, daily and weekly), 8 weeks (for monthly), and 5 days (for yearly).]\n"}
{"id":1206,"title":"Einstein","image_title":"Einstein","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1206","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/einstein.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1206:_Einstein","transcript":"[Cueball and friend eating at a table.] Cueball: I'm currently conducting an experiment which may prove Einstein wrong! Friend: Ooh, exciting!\n1947: [Einstein and Cueball walking.] Einstein: It's impossible to find a good sandwich in this town.\n","explanation":"In this comic Randall is playing with the notion that since Einstein contributed so much to society, and many of his works have withstood testing, disproving Einstein must be a difficult task. This is proven false by taking a mundane declaration by Einstein and proving it false with a simple task.\nNobel laureate and Time Person of the Century Albert Einstein is often considered one of the smartest and most influential people in world history. His theories have revolutionized our understanding of the universe and inspired generations of scientists. In this comic, Cueball indicates to a friend that he is working on an experiment that may disprove Einstein. The implication is that Cueball is conducting a serious scientific experiment which may disprove one of Einstein's scientific theories. The second frame, however, implies that the Einsteinian \"theory\" Cueball's experiment may disprove is an offhand (and subjective) remark by Einstein about the availability of good sandwiches; this is not to mention the possible changing in quality of said sandwiches over time.\nThe experiment Cueball is \"currently conducting\" probably refers to the fact that he is currently eating a sandwich, and if that sandwich was indeed a good one, Einstein would be proved wrong. Part of the humor here is that Cueball's friend probably assumes that when Cueball says \"currently,\" he means the experiment is part of Cueball's work, not what he is doing at that exact moment.\nIn 947: Investing , Randall comments on how people put too much credence in a joke Einstein made in passing, and in 799: Stephen Hawking we see Stephen Hawking in a similar predicament, every word he says taken as a major declaration.\nThe title text demonstrates the ability to \"disprove\" Einstein while not challenging his scientific work but rather one of his decisions in his capacity as a patent clerk at the Swiss Patent Office at the time he published his first major papers (previously alluded to in 1067: Pressures ). According to the Einstein FAQ on the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property's website, patent #39561 is one of several patents that \"we can assume ... were personally examined by Einstein\". A PDF of the patent, which was indeed a gravel sorter ( trommel ), can be found here in German.\n[Cueball and friend eating at a table.] Cueball: I'm currently conducting an experiment which may prove Einstein wrong! Friend: Ooh, exciting!\n1947: [Einstein and Cueball walking.] Einstein: It's impossible to find a good sandwich in this town.\n"}
{"id":1207,"title":"AirAware","image_title":"AirAware","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1207","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/airaware.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1207:_AirAware","transcript":"[Cueball and Black Hat looking at a remote-controlled flying object.] Cueball: What's that? Black Hat: It's a drone for my new business, AirAware .\nBlack Hat (narrating): Our UAVs follow you and learn your schedule. If you miss a turn, forget an appointment, or give someone inaccurate information, they alert you. Megan (on phone): I'll be there in five. Booming voice from the sky: WRONG! Megan: Augh!\nCueball: That sounds annoying. Who would pay for that? Black Hat: Huh? Nobody pays. I'm just making these and releasing them.\nCueball: That's not a business. You're just yelling at strangers from the sky. Cueball: A business has to make money somehow. Booming voice from the sky: WRONG! Cueball: Augh!!\n","explanation":"Upon being asked by Cueball , Black Hat reveals his new 'business', AirAware. He explains it uses a Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ( UAV ) that flies and records a person's daily schedule. If that person either deviates, forgets an appointment, or tells somebody incorrect information, the drone alerts the 'client' with an annoying \"WRONG!\".\nCueball is skeptical of the 'business plan' and questions its potential. Black Hat expands, saying that his intention is not personal profit, and he is simply releasing them himself. Cueball starts to argue that it is not a business, since there is no monetary gain, before being abruptly interrupted by the AirAware drone, declaring that his previous sentence was incorrect. This implies that Black Hat's business is not for profit; it's just another one of his sadistic schemes to torture people, and Cueball is his latest victim.\nAlthough the Wikipedia page for business states that a business \"may also be not-for-profit\", this isn't really relevant, as 'making money' and 'making a profit' are different things. It would be better classified as a different type of organization, or even as a hobby .\nGoogle Now is software by Google, shipped with newer Android devices. It shows you important information when you need it, like traffic on your way to work or home and upcoming events from your calendar. It also reminds you when to leave in order to reach an appointment in time. In the title text, Black Hat has modified this to tell you when you're too late to get there, instead.\nIt can also refer to a bug in Google Now , which is that Google Now incorrectly calculates the time you have to leave, and it always calculates that what it calculated will be 1 minute too late, so it shows \"The transportation mode you selected will not let you arrive on time\" almost always, unless you refresh.\nAn alternate explanation for the pronouncement of \"WRONG!\" by the quadcopter in the last panel is that it is referring to the plethora of companies in the electronic era, and even today, that don't actually make much (or any) money, but are still considered successful businesses.\n[Cueball and Black Hat looking at a remote-controlled flying object.] Cueball: What's that? Black Hat: It's a drone for my new business, AirAware .\nBlack Hat (narrating): Our UAVs follow you and learn your schedule. If you miss a turn, forget an appointment, or give someone inaccurate information, they alert you. Megan (on phone): I'll be there in five. Booming voice from the sky: WRONG! Megan: Augh!\nCueball: That sounds annoying. Who would pay for that? Black Hat: Huh? Nobody pays. I'm just making these and releasing them.\nCueball: That's not a business. You're just yelling at strangers from the sky. Cueball: A business has to make money somehow. Booming voice from the sky: WRONG! Cueball: Augh!!\n"}
{"id":1208,"title":"Footnote Labyrinths","image_title":"Footnote Labyrinths","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1208","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/footnote_labyrinths.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1208:_Footnote_Labyrinths","transcript":"[Excerpt from what appears to be an academic paper with footnotes.] experiments to observe this and we found no 1 2 evidence for it in our data.\n1 Ignore this 2 Increment by 2 before following 3 Not true 3 2 4 Ibid. 5 True 2 6 3 6 Actually a 1 2 2\n","explanation":"This is a logic puzzle where the reader has to follow a confusing network of footnotes to determine whether the word \"no\" is to be ignored or not.\nIn the following solutions, \"right-associative\" means that the footnotes are evaluated from right to left or top to bottom, and left-associative from left to right or bottom to top (e.g. (2 6 ) 3 is left-associative, and 2 (6 3 ) is right-associative).\nThe term \"ibid.\" is short for \"ibidem\", or \"at the same place\", meaning the reference was noted on the same page just before.\nInterpreting nested footnotes as footnotes on footnotes, left-associative no 1 2 = (no 1 ) 2 = \"ignore this\" (it is meaningless to increment a phrase by 2), so the correct statement is \"we found evidence for it in our data\".\nInterpreting nested footnotes as footnotes on footnotes, right-associative \"no 1 2 \" = \"no 1 + 2 \" = \"no 3 \". We turn to the definition of 3 , which is \"not true 3 2 \" = \"not true 3 + 2 \" = \"not true 5 \". Now 5 is \"true 2 6 3 \". The 6 says that the 2 footnote is really 1 2 2 = 1 (4. ibid.) = 1 3 , but the 3 tells us that the 6 is \"not true 5 \", getting us into an infinite loop, meaning there is no solution.\nThe title text suggests interpreting footnotes as exponents (minus one, modulo 6, plus 1). Because applying the operations \"minus one, modulo 6, plus 1\" to an integer always results in an integer between one and six (inclusive), no sequence of integer exponents will ever end up referencing a footnote that does not exist. In mathematics, nested exponents are exclusively right-associative. \"no 1 2 \" = \"no 1 \", so we ignore the \"no\" and the correct statement is \"we found evidence for the data.\" Meanwhile, 3 becomes \"not true 3 \", an infinite recursion , and since 2 6 3 mod 6 = 4, we just get \"ibid\" and the 5 refers back to the 3. Footnote 6 is equivalent to 1 4 = 1 = \"ignore this\".\nThe comic 1184: Circumference Formula is also playing on the typographical similarity between footnotes and exponents, as well as adding even more ridiculous rules.\n[Excerpt from what appears to be an academic paper with footnotes.] experiments to observe this and we found no 1 2 evidence for it in our data.\n1 Ignore this 2 Increment by 2 before following 3 Not true 3 2 4 Ibid. 5 True 2 6 3 6 Actually a 1 2 2\n"}
{"id":1209,"title":"Encoding","image_title":"Encoding","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1209","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/encoding.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1209:_Encoding","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are both holding walkie-talkies. Cueball is talking into his, Megan is holding hers down. Both are looking up in the sky.] Cueball: No, the combining diacritics go over the interrobang! Megan: Oh jeez, I think he's lost control.\n[Caption below the panel:] The skywriter we hired has terrible Unicode support.\n","explanation":"Skywriting is using an airplane to write words in the sky with controlled releases of smoke. Unicode is a standard for digitally encoding text which supports a huge variety of characters and modifiers.\nCueball and Megan hired a skywriter to write some text which they provided in Unicode, but now they are dissatisfied with the result and Cueball is using one of their walkie-talkies to tell the pilot about his mistake\u2014with the result that the pilot seems to lose control (presumably control of the plane, not the text).\nAn interrobang (\u203d) is a combination question mark and exclamation mark. A diacritic is any symbol added to a character (for instance \u00b4, \u02d8, \u02c7, \u00a8), usually an accent mark added to a letter. In Unicode, combining diacritics are represented as separate characters, but computer programs that render text graphically treat them as modifications to the previous character. The request to modify the interrobang is strange, given that diacritics are supposed to modify letters , not punctuation marks, and given that an interrobang is already conceptually a character combination. On the other hand, combining diacritics can technically be used on any character, so the intended result will be something like:\n\n\u203d\u0303\u0366\u0300\u030f\u0346\u0310\u030b\u033f\u0363\u036d\u0301\u036f\u0352\nThe skywriter's errors and the phrase \"Unicode support\" play off the common issue of software rendering Unicode symbols incorrectly . But here the error does not seem to make the text unintelligible: all the skywriter has apparently done is put a diacritic underneath (or perhaps next to) the interrobang instead of above it. If this is the only problem with the text (which is likely, given that an interrobang would probably be at the end), then the comment that the skywriter has \"terrible Unicode support\" makes Cueball and Megan seem fastidious and unforgiving. The comic points up computer users' tendency to use hyperbole when describing minor problems, exaggerating their relative seriousness. Here Cueball and Megan seem concerned more about their incorrectly rendered text than about the skywriter's safety.\nThe title text is presumably Cueball's reply, in which he appears to have misunderstood Megan: he is baffled as to how the pilot could have \"lost\" the Unicode control characters , which are the first 32 character codes in Unicode, but Megan was actually referring to the pilot losing control of the plane .\nComic 1647: Diacritics also references an absurd use of diacritics.\n[Cueball and Megan are both holding walkie-talkies. Cueball is talking into his, Megan is holding hers down. Both are looking up in the sky.] Cueball: No, the combining diacritics go over the interrobang! Megan: Oh jeez, I think he's lost control.\n[Caption below the panel:] The skywriter we hired has terrible Unicode support.\n"}
{"id":1210,"title":"I'm So Random","image_title":"I'm So Random","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1210","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/im_so_random.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1210:_I%27m_So_Random","transcript":"[Black Hat is sitting in an office chair at a desk when Hairy runs up behind him with his arms raised up.] Hairy: Monkey tacos! Hairy: I'm so random.\n[A frame-less panel pans to Black Hat and his desk, showing there is a computer on his desk and that he is actually typing on a keyboard in front of him on a lowered shelf.] Black Hat: Yeah, me too.\n[Black Hat swivels his chair around (as shown with a gray curved line beneath the chair at his feet) to face Hairy. He then emits from his mouth a massive speech bubble filled with random numbers in gray. This torrent of random numbers knocks Hairy to the ground as he shields his face with one arm while the other grasps for the floor to cushion his fall (it is notable that speech bubbles are not normally used in xkcd.) The numbers themselves are written deliberately haphazardly and in varying sizes, which makes it difficult to read them in any consistent manner; however, for reasons explained above, there is actually some order, and using that order they would appear like this:] Black Hat:\n\n100973253376520135863467354 876809590911739292749453754 204805648947429624805240372 063610402002291665084226895 319645093032320902560159533 476435080336069901902529093\n\n[With Hairy gone, Black Hat has turned back and resumed working at his computer.]\n","explanation":"A child Hairy walks up to Black Hat , utters a nonsense phrase (\"monkey tacos\"), and then proclaims that he is \"so random\". This is a fairly common modern phenomenon in which children (hopefully only children) make \"random\" statements, and somehow imagine themselves to be funny and interesting because of this. Black Hat, never one to hesitate over bringing someone down, replies that he is also random. He then proves this by pouring forth a torrential stream of truly random numbers that overcomes poor Hairy. Black Hat then resumes his posture at the computer, as if nothing has happened.\nIt is true that when brilliant and creative people speak passionately about a subject, they can make mental leaps and changes of context that might seem bewildering to an outsider. The conversation may even seem to be \"random\". However, simply vocalizing nonsense is not analogous, or even desirable; it is more likely a character trait of someone who is immature or has difficulty in following or adding to a normal human conversation.\nBlack Hat's \"random\" numbers are actually quoted from the first lines of A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates making it both \"officially random\", but also essentially not. This book is also referenced in 1751: Movie Folder . See also: 221: Random Number .\nA side note is that \"Monkey tacos\" is a phrase that contains two trochees. A trochee is a metric foot with one stressed beat and one unstressed beat; it may be a reference to or an unconscious allusion to 856: Trochee Fixation .\nThe title text deals with the connotations of the word \"interesting\" in different contexts. On one hand, children may be easily amused by behavior that lies outside of conventional social norms and defies expectations. Children may attempt to add whimsy to a situation they perceive as dull by interjecting words that have no significant meaning or relationship whatsoever to anything around them, merely to make things seem different and therefore \"interesting\" (at least to them.) There is some merit to this perspective: human social norms developed largely as a way to make social interaction more predictable and manageable and correspondingly less interesting, to free up our attention for other, more pressing matters. Someone who is indeed behaving \"randomly\" often does command interest and attention, if only because their unpredictability makes them potentially dangerous. However, to a child, social conventions may seem arbitrary and needlessly inhibitive, and they will often test the limits of such conventions by deliberately acting in violation of them and seeing what happens. \"Random outbursts\" of nonsense phrases are a fairly harmless way of doing this, and often do not incur sharply negative responses beyond annoyance (Hairy's experience being an exception), so children (including Randall in his youth) might do this very frequently until they mature out of it.\nHowever, \"interesting\" in information theory is quite a different matter. Information theory is \" the mathematical treatment of the concepts, parameters and rules governing the transmission of messages through communication systems. \" It is therefore very concerned with the meanings of the words and phrases people use to convey information, and it would regard something as \"interesting\" if it exhibited a notably consistent and predictable pattern that pointed towards greater significance. As such, \"the opposite of interesting\" would be expressions that hold no meaning, convey no information, and do not indicate any recognizable patterns or significance - such as the \"random outbursts\" that Randall once believed made him seem interesting as a child.\nHe characterizes these interjections of random words as \"lexical white noise,\" \"lexical\" meaning \" relating to words or vocabulary of a language. \" White noise is essentially random sound waves which, taken en masse, blend into audio static that takes on a macroscopically uniform sound experience despite their random nature. This can be used in some sleep or relaxation therapies, which foils well with the random assault experienced in the comic. There are also other colors of noise , and yes, people have strong opinions as to which one is better .\n[Black Hat is sitting in an office chair at a desk when Hairy runs up behind him with his arms raised up.] Hairy: Monkey tacos! Hairy: I'm so random.\n[A frame-less panel pans to Black Hat and his desk, showing there is a computer on his desk and that he is actually typing on a keyboard in front of him on a lowered shelf.] Black Hat: Yeah, me too.\n[Black Hat swivels his chair around (as shown with a gray curved line beneath the chair at his feet) to face Hairy. He then emits from his mouth a massive speech bubble filled with random numbers in gray. This torrent of random numbers knocks Hairy to the ground as he shields his face with one arm while the other grasps for the floor to cushion his fall (it is notable that speech bubbles are not normally used in xkcd.) The numbers themselves are written deliberately haphazardly and in varying sizes, which makes it difficult to read them in any consistent manner; however, for reasons explained above, there is actually some order, and using that order they would appear like this:] Black Hat:\n\n100973253376520135863467354 876809590911739292749453754 204805648947429624805240372 063610402002291665084226895 319645093032320902560159533 476435080336069901902529093\n\n[With Hairy gone, Black Hat has turned back and resumed working at his computer.]\n"}
{"id":1211,"title":"Birds and Dinosaurs","image_title":"Birds and Dinosaurs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1211","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/birds_and_dinosaurs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1211:_Birds_and_Dinosaurs","transcript":"By any reasonable definition, T. rex is more closely related to sparrows than to Stegosaurus . [Diagram showing that Stegosaurus came earlier than T. rex , along with it showing that T. rex came closer in time to sparrows. Evaluation criteria \"separation by time\", \"phylogenetic distance\" and \"physical similarity\" are highlighted in red.] Birds aren't descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs. Which means that the fastest animal alive today is a small carnivorous dinosaur, Falco peregrinus . [A picture of two birds is shown.] It preys mainly on other dinosaurs, which it strikes and kills in midair with its claws. [In red:] This is a good world.\n","explanation":"Birds are commonly considered to be a separate class of tetrapods . However, this classification is false according to phylogenetic taxonomy . Taking into account that birds developed around 150 million years ago out of small theropod dinosaurs, birds along with crocodiles are indeed the remaining representatives of the archosaur clade . This premise appeared also in comic 867: Herpetology .\nThis relation between birds and dinosaurs is depicted in the comic in a cladogram which shows that Tyrannosaurus rex is more closely related to the common sparrow than to Stegosaurus . Not only do the former share a phylogenetic branch, but T. rex also lived around 80 million years after Stegosaurus . The concurrence of both species in popular culture is a widespread error. T. rex is also much more alike to modern birds than to other dinosaurs in terms of anatomy. This relationship was pointed out on the Science journal the week of the comic.\nThe comic draws the conclusion that if birds must in fact be considered modern dinosaurs, the hunting practice of birds of prey (specifically, the Peregrine Falcon ) is consequently a dinosaur fight. For an inveterate dinosaur aficionado like Randall , this fact must make the modern world much more attractive.\nThe line \"This is a good world.\" could also possibly refer to a famous scene from the pilot episode of the television series Firefly featuring two plastic dinosaurs in a somewhat philosophic dialogue. Randall is known to be a fan of the series .\nThe title text is a sidesweep to the webcomic Dinosaur Comics drawn by Ryan North , who stands 6'6.5\" (199\u00a0cm) tall. At that page the title text of the comic strip from the same day refers to Randall and xkcd .\nThe conclusion of this comic is referenced in the title text of the last image in the Plastic Dinosaurs What if?\nBy any reasonable definition, T. rex is more closely related to sparrows than to Stegosaurus . [Diagram showing that Stegosaurus came earlier than T. rex , along with it showing that T. rex came closer in time to sparrows. Evaluation criteria \"separation by time\", \"phylogenetic distance\" and \"physical similarity\" are highlighted in red.] Birds aren't descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs. Which means that the fastest animal alive today is a small carnivorous dinosaur, Falco peregrinus . [A picture of two birds is shown.] It preys mainly on other dinosaurs, which it strikes and kills in midair with its claws. [In red:] This is a good world.\n"}
{"id":1212,"title":"Interstellar Memes","image_title":"Interstellar Memes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1212","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interstellar_memes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1212:_Interstellar_Memes","transcript":"[On a black background yellow circles and white bubbles are shown. Caption above the picture:] If other star systems are listening in on our pop culture, given the speed-of-light delay, these are the jokes and catchphrases they just learned about and are currently repeating way too much:\n[On a black background a map of star systems in relation to the Sun, which is roughly in the center, sending out radio waves is shown. Each star is a yellow circle of differing sizes, with a speech bubble (or more). The list is ordered from closest to furthest.] Proxima Centauri: I'm on a boat! Alpha Centauri A B: The cake is a lie! \u2013 \u266a Never gonna give you up \u266b Luhman 16: I can haz? Barnard's star: Leave Britney alone! \u2013 \u266b Chocolate Raaaiiin \u266b Wolf 359: Chuck Norris doesn't sleep. He waits. Lalande 21185: \u266c Numa numa \u266a Sirius: I still can't believe Bellatrix\u2013 \u2013 Dude, get over it. Gliese 65:  INTERNETS! Epsilon Eridani: Ninjas fight all the time! Procyon: ...God kills a kitten! \u2013 A what? Epsilon Indi: You're the man now, dog! Tau Ceti: All your base are belong to us. Luyten's Star: Peanut Butter Jelly Time! Kapteyn's star: My spoon is too big! Kruger 60: MORE COWBELL! Gliese 1: Look at the tiny dancing Earth mammals! Van Maanen's star: WASSSUUP!?! Ad Leonis: Oh my God, they killed Kenny! \u2013 You bastards! 70 Ophiuchi: Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger. \u2013 What's a burger? \u2013 I don't know. Altair: Mr. T ate my balls! Sigma Draconis: Oh ... my ... gaawd. Delta Pavonis: I want the truth. \u2013 You can't handle the truth! Gliese 892: Hasta la vista, baby. Xi Bo\u00f6tis: Did I do that? HR 753: D'oh! Beta Hydri: Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker. Vega: Resistance is futile. Zeta Tucanae: Let's get ready to ruuumble! HR 1614: Where's the beef? Groombridge 1830: I pity the fool! Delta Trianguli: May the Force be with you. Beta Virginis: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Arcturus: You talkin' to me\u00a0? Beta Trianguli Australis: I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. Lamda Aurigae: You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Capella: And now for something completely different. HD 211415: Live long and prosper. \u2013 Ok. Alderamin: EXTERMINATE! 51 Pegasi: Name's bond. James Bond. Caph: Take me to your leader! \u2013 No, Steve. Kappa Reticuli: Here's lookin' at you, kid. Alpha Hydri: Rosebud. Gienah: Ehh, what's up doc? Alpha Serpentis: Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.\n","explanation":"Randall highlights various memes from popular culture. A meme is a phenomenon, often in this scenario in the form of a movie quote, a musical reference, a catchphrase or other notable saying that spreads quickly by word-of-mouth. Memes become popular because people hear about them and repeat them to others. Randall points out that if the assumed intelligent life from other star systems were listening to the things we said, then they would just now be hearing and popularizing memes started years ago on earth. The delay is due to the time that it takes for expressions of the meme to travel (presumably via radio waves) to distant star systems.\nOur solar system, from where the electromagnetic waves are emitted, is located just left of the center of the picture. The other star systems are arranged roughly according to their distance from the sun, while their size corresponds to the size of the star compared with that of the sun.\nThe meme for Sirius is a pun; it refers to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in which Bellatrix Lestrange kills Sirius Black.\nRadio waves travel at the speed of light . The title text jokes that these memes are so annoying that it would give us further incentive to develop the technology to travel faster than light , just simply to be able to outrun the radio waves, reach a distant star system, and apologize in advance to the \"residents\" about the memes, before the memes arrive.\nThe table below lists all the memes described, and the star at which the comics states those memes should be heard by the time when the comic was released in 2013. The year of the meme plus the number of light years to the star should end up close to 2013.\nMost end up within the range 2011-2013 which may indicate the meme became popular one or two years later (on Earth or at the distant star system.) Two memes reach the targets in 2014. Some of those errors may be caused by the inaccuracy of the distances.\nThe The Spanish Inquisition from Monty Python would have reached its destination in 2006. Because they're still watching Monty Python's Flying Circus in 2013 it must be very popular or maybe it took seven years to decipher that British humour .\n[On a black background yellow circles and white bubbles are shown. Caption above the picture:] If other star systems are listening in on our pop culture, given the speed-of-light delay, these are the jokes and catchphrases they just learned about and are currently repeating way too much:\n[On a black background a map of star systems in relation to the Sun, which is roughly in the center, sending out radio waves is shown. Each star is a yellow circle of differing sizes, with a speech bubble (or more). The list is ordered from closest to furthest.] Proxima Centauri: I'm on a boat! Alpha Centauri A B: The cake is a lie! \u2013 \u266a Never gonna give you up \u266b Luhman 16: I can haz? Barnard's star: Leave Britney alone! \u2013 \u266b Chocolate Raaaiiin \u266b Wolf 359: Chuck Norris doesn't sleep. He waits. Lalande 21185: \u266c Numa numa \u266a Sirius: I still can't believe Bellatrix\u2013 \u2013 Dude, get over it. Gliese 65:  INTERNETS! Epsilon Eridani: Ninjas fight all the time! Procyon: ...God kills a kitten! \u2013 A what? Epsilon Indi: You're the man now, dog! Tau Ceti: All your base are belong to us. Luyten's Star: Peanut Butter Jelly Time! Kapteyn's star: My spoon is too big! Kruger 60: MORE COWBELL! Gliese 1: Look at the tiny dancing Earth mammals! Van Maanen's star: WASSSUUP!?! Ad Leonis: Oh my God, they killed Kenny! \u2013 You bastards! 70 Ophiuchi: Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger. \u2013 What's a burger? \u2013 I don't know. Altair: Mr. T ate my balls! Sigma Draconis: Oh ... my ... gaawd. Delta Pavonis: I want the truth. \u2013 You can't handle the truth! Gliese 892: Hasta la vista, baby. Xi Bo\u00f6tis: Did I do that? HR 753: D'oh! Beta Hydri: Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker. Vega: Resistance is futile. Zeta Tucanae: Let's get ready to ruuumble! HR 1614: Where's the beef? Groombridge 1830: I pity the fool! Delta Trianguli: May the Force be with you. Beta Virginis: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Arcturus: You talkin' to me\u00a0? Beta Trianguli Australis: I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. Lamda Aurigae: You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Capella: And now for something completely different. HD 211415: Live long and prosper. \u2013 Ok. Alderamin: EXTERMINATE! 51 Pegasi: Name's bond. James Bond. Caph: Take me to your leader! \u2013 No, Steve. Kappa Reticuli: Here's lookin' at you, kid. Alpha Hydri: Rosebud. Gienah: Ehh, what's up doc? Alpha Serpentis: Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.\n"}
{"id":1213,"title":"Combination Vision Test","image_title":"Combination Vision Test","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1213","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/combination_vision_test.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1213:_Combination_Vision_Test","transcript":"[Caption above the drawing:] Combination Vision Test\n[Below the caption is a circle formed by several hundred numeric digits from 0-9.]\n[Caption below the panel:] If you can see one big number but not the other, you have synesthesia and colorblindness.\n","explanation":"Synesthesia is a condition in which perception in one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Common examples are experiencing colors when seeing numbers or words ( Grapheme-color synesthesia ), hearing tones or music while reading words or text, seeing sequences of numbers or month names in a distinct and fixed shape ( Number form ), etc. In 1608: Hoverboard Megan stands at the end of the Star Destroyer and wishes she had synesthesia so bad she can taste it...\nColor-blindness is one of a number of conditions in which a person cannot distinguish certain pairs of colors that other people without color-blindness might find easy to distinguish. There are many different forms of color-blindness; the most common is an inability to separate the colors red and green.\nThere are two numbers embedded in the big circle of numbers, in a similar way to a common color perception test . But this test can not work for colors because it is just a black-and-white picture. Nobody can see it. However, the joke lies in the fact that those with one common form of synesthesia see colors associated with numbers. Randall implies that a synesthete will see colors connected to each number, and thus a color perception test will work after all - thus distinguishing synesthetes with color-blindness from those with normal color perception.\nThe comic playfully suggests that if you have synesthesia as well as colorblindness , then some of the colors might appear identical and so one number would not be visible, only leaving the other number.\nThe title text brings in two more conditions: diplopia , or double vision, and myopia , or near-sightedness. Those who are near-sighted sometimes see distant objects more clearly while squinting. Then they would be able to see the one large number still visible from the synesthesia\/colorblindness combination, but because of double vision they see a second copy of it, hence two numbers that are the same.\nIf we color the numbers in the circle in a consistent way (and leave the 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9s black) we can reveal the large numbers:\nThe numbers are four and two, forming the number 42 , which is the famous \" Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything \", according to the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . The number 4 is formed by digits 2, 3, 5 and 7 (the single digit primes) while the number 2 is formed by digits 3, 5, 7 and 9 (the single digit odds, excluding 1).\nFor Randall's test to work (i.e. for either the large 4 or the large 2 in '42' to get lost in the noise to those with a given color-blindness), either the little number 2 or the little number 9 would have to be lost in the background noise. So, for example, if the background appeared in shades of red and the little number 2 was a shade of green, then the large number 4 would be less visible to those with red-green color-blindness than to others.\nWhile it makes for a good joke, there are three reasons this kind of test wouldn't work in real life.\nThe first is that there is no one set of color-number associations seen by all synesthetes. So while some synesthete might see '2' as green and '0' as red (so a red-green color-blind person would lose anything made up of '2's against a background of '0's), others might see '2' as yellow and '0' as blue, or any other association imaginable.\nThe second reason it wouldn't work is that synesthetes do not (always) automatically see a 1:1 overlay of color on top of a number - they still need to read the number legibly. Randall's circle is very chaotic, so one wouldn't intuitively identify each single number. For a synesthete the color is produced after the number is recognized by the brain and lost when the focus shifts to the next number. However, some synesthetes may find if they pay attention to the numbers one by one they can make something out. However, as noted by a user in the discussion, who states that he has a type of synesthesia, he did indeed see the numbers ! Furthermore, in his blog's discussion section, one person commented they could see the large '2' but not the large '4' ! This was not because the person was colorblind, but because the '4' was mostly composed of numbers ('2's and '7's) whose colors blended in with the background, while the '2' contained an even mix of numbers, some of which (presumably '3's, '5's, and '9's) starkly stood out, making the large '2' easily visible. However, one could easily imagine this scenario pertaining to colorblindness: for example, a colorblind synesthete, in theory (although the third reason makes it clear why this would be extremely unlikely), might perceive most of the background numbers as shades of green (similar to the picture below) and see the '2's and '7's in shades of red, which would make it difficult to differentiate between the giant reddish '4' and the greenish background.\nThe third reason the test would not work is that color-blindness is an inability to distinguish colors of light hitting the retina, it's nonsensical to imagine a synesthete would perceive two separate colors that they cannot normally separate anyway. But again in the above mentioned link this particular person did see the colors in a way where people with red\/green color-blindness might have a harder time seeing the 4 than the 2 in 42.\nThe next image shows all of the numbers, including 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9, colored in, in such a way as to ensure the number 42 is clearly visible to those with no particular blue-yellow color-blindness:\nThe \"real problem\" is actually that if a synesthete does indeed see the digits as colors that resolve into either one or two numbers, then what color would these new \"color-numbers\" then appear to be? If a synesthete could see both large numbers AND they appeared as the same color as the small numbers as soon the synesthete perceived the numbers, then what would this meta-synesthete see? The '4' would blend in with the background '4's, while the '2' would stand out (as '2' was not used in the background). Would that mean that as soon as they noticed the giant '4', it would suddenly disappear into the background? Is this sort of layered synesthesia even possible?\nKeep in mind, as noted above, that synesthetes do not all see the same color-number associations. They also do not necessarily see every number in a different color, as depicted here, and may even see some numbers as purely black.\n[Caption above the drawing:] Combination Vision Test\n[Below the caption is a circle formed by several hundred numeric digits from 0-9.]\n[Caption below the panel:] If you can see one big number but not the other, you have synesthesia and colorblindness.\n"}
{"id":1214,"title":"Geoguessr","image_title":"Geoguessr","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1214","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geoguessr.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1214:_Geoguessr","transcript":"[Cueball is using a laptop, playing a game.] Cueball: This one's easy; There's the Parthenon. Athens. * CLICK * Cueball: What!? Why the hell is there a Parthenon in Nashville ? * CLICK * Cueball: OK, I'm clearly in Germany. * CLICK * Cueball: Dammit, Germany Pavilion at Epcot. [Caption below the panel:] My scores in Geoguessr would be higher if people quit building replicas of everything.\n","explanation":"Geoguessr is a game in which the player is given a location in Google Street View and asked to guess precisely where in the world they are, by clicking on a map of the world, based only on the 360-degree view in the Street View display.\nCueball is upset because he keeps making his guesses based on landmarks and his guesses end up being wrong. After all, the landmark he based his guess off of was a replica of the real one (the Parthenon in Nashville , which is more than 9000 kilometers or 5600 miles away from the Greek original ).\nOf course, from a statistical perspective, this makes sense. For every famous object, there are countless replicas; however, most people will be familiar with the specific location of the original object, and the vast majority of famous objects (except a few notable works of art) exist in only one place in the world. Take the Statue of Liberty , for instance \u2014 although the original is based in New York (well, actually, the original maquette is in Paris ...), it has hundreds of replicas all over the planet .\nEpcot is a Disney theme park in Florida which among other attractions includes pavilions of various countries, including Germany , which are built to resemble the typical style (architecture, vegetation, etc.) of the countries. Therefore, similarly to the replicas of landmarks, in this specific case, recognizing classic German architecture would put you on the wrong continent.\nHowever, as the title text alludes to, you're far more likely to find a dirt road than to find anything recognizable, since Google Street View maps roads more than anything else (hence its name). Becoming a connoisseur of such a mundane thing bears similarity to 915: Connoisseur .\nAnyone who's ever played with Geoguessr knows, also, that seemingly helpful clues can sometimes be useless. For instance, if you recognize the Cyrillic script on a sign, the countries using the Cyrillic script such as Bulgaria, Mongolia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia encompasses an enormous area, so unless you can recognize a specific region, there's no obvious place to guess where you can hope to get high points. Unlike somewhere like England, where guessing London is guaranteed to put you within a reasonable distance from a global perspective. Legoland is a good example of this: If you can't tell if you're in Denmark or California (or any of the other locations ), it's not like you can just guess halfway between and do well.\n[Cueball is using a laptop, playing a game.] Cueball: This one's easy; There's the Parthenon. Athens. * CLICK * Cueball: What!? Why the hell is there a Parthenon in Nashville ? * CLICK * Cueball: OK, I'm clearly in Germany. * CLICK * Cueball: Dammit, Germany Pavilion at Epcot. [Caption below the panel:] My scores in Geoguessr would be higher if people quit building replicas of everything.\n"}
{"id":1215,"title":"Insight","image_title":"Insight","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1215","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/insight.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1215:_Insight","transcript":"[White Hat is holding a finger up while talking to Cueball.] White Hat: Maybe before we rush to adopt < Google Glass > we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this technology such a central position in our lives.\n[Caption below the panel:] Don't have any insights about a new technology? Just use this sentence! It makes you sound wise and you can say it about virtually anything.\n","explanation":"White Hat is giving a profound insight into <Google Glass>. This insight, however, can be given, sounding just as profound, for any other new technology that comes around\u2014hence the angled brackets around Google Glass , indicating that \"Google Glass\" is a placeholder. This, of course, means it is not profound at all, as it has no actual insight into Google Glass (or any other technology).\nThe title text highlights a common trait of human listeners. The above sentence is constructed in such a way as to trigger the listener's reservations about the new technology. The sentence sounds profound, not because it has any actual insights, but because it causes the listener to fill in the missing insights with his own pre-existing thoughts on the matter. This is a typical effect of Confirmation bias . Not only does this cause Cueball to regard White Hat as insightful, but it also causes Cueball to think that White Hat agrees with whatever it is that Cueball fears <Google Glass> for.\nIt seems no coincidence that Randall chose Google Glass as the placeholder. It seems generally that he is no fan of these, which was shown soon after in 1251: Anti-Glass and later again in 1304: Glass Trolling . This was the first time Google Glass was directly mentioned but since this comic Google Glass has become a recurring theme in xkcd.\nThe caption is reminiscent of Randall's tips , but since the word tip is left out, it is not itself a tip comic.\n[White Hat is holding a finger up while talking to Cueball.] White Hat: Maybe before we rush to adopt < Google Glass > we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this technology such a central position in our lives.\n[Caption below the panel:] Don't have any insights about a new technology? Just use this sentence! It makes you sound wise and you can say it about virtually anything.\n"}
{"id":1216,"title":"Sticks and Stones","image_title":"Sticks and Stones","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1216","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sticks_and_stones.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1216:_Sticks_and_Stones","transcript":"[A child, who looks like a miniature Cueball, is running with arms outstretched toward Cueball.] Child: Did you hear what he said about me!? Cueball: Well, remember: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words\u2014\nChild: \u2014can make someone else feel happy or sad, which is literally the only thing that matters in this stupid world?\n[Brief pause.]\nChild: Right? Cueball: The world isn't that bad. Child: Explain the line about sticks and stones? Cueball: ...OK, maybe it's kind of horrific.\n","explanation":"Sticks and Stones is a nursery rhyme, which goes as follows:\nThe nursery rhyme often by parents and with some variation, to persuade an individual, usually a child, to ignore any name calling or mean taunts that were said by others in an attempt to hurt the individual's feelings.\nThe comic challenges this sentiment when the child responds that, although words can't harm you physically, they can change how you feel, and isn't that the most important thing of all? Cueball obviously sees the simple truth in this, but tries to deflect by claiming that the world really isn't that bad. The child refers again to the rhyme, observing that the physical world can be harsh enough, because there are things like sticks and stones that break your bones and presumably people who use them as weapons to do so. Or yet worse, that someone would think up such a gruesome saying in the first place. Upon reflection, Cueball agrees that this image is actually horrific.\nThe title text is rather dark, and is probably a reference to the currently active bullying and shaming culture. None of us deserves to be beaten or stoned, but words are powerful enough to make us think that we do.\nIn the long tradition of the science of the obvious, recent studies (for example: Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain ) have shown that, in fact, the brain's reactions to physical pain and emotional rejection are somewhat similar and even feed into each other.\n[A child, who looks like a miniature Cueball, is running with arms outstretched toward Cueball.] Child: Did you hear what he said about me!? Cueball: Well, remember: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words\u2014\nChild: \u2014can make someone else feel happy or sad, which is literally the only thing that matters in this stupid world?\n[Brief pause.]\nChild: Right? Cueball: The world isn't that bad. Child: Explain the line about sticks and stones? Cueball: ...OK, maybe it's kind of horrific.\n"}
{"id":1217,"title":"Cells","image_title":"Cells","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1217","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cells.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1217:_Cells","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] When you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin \"kills cancer cells in a petri dish,\" Keep in mind:\n[Cueball in a lab coat stands on a chair next to a desk, pointing a gun at a petri dish. There is a microscope on the desk.]\n[Caption below the panel:] So does a handgun.\n","explanation":"Cancer is one of the most feared group of illnesses due to high mortality and a topic visited by Randall in past comics .\nWhenever a study finds a hint of a cure, it is hyped up in media as major breakthrough. However, because research is done in a laboratory using cultivated cancer cell assays in petri dishes or well plates, it typically does not take interactions with other parts of a body into consideration, which is ultimately necessary for a patient to survive treatment without harmful side-effects. In order for a cancer treatment to be viable, it would have to primarily target only cancer cells; not healthy ones. Added to this is the issue that major cancer in the body quickly evolves resistance to most treatments, most treatments end up either unused or used as just one in a cocktail of cancer fighting drugs.\nHere, Randall reminds us that there's no need to get excited upon hearing about a drug that kills cancer cells because it may very well harm healthy cells as well, just as a bullet fired from a handgun would. Alternatively, one could interpret the message that, since something as mundane as a handgun is capable of destroying cancer cells, it really is not too impressive for a drug to make that claim.\nThe title text suggests that even if a drug did only kill cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone, the human body still has many other complex processes that may render a drug that works in a petri dish insufficient. For instance, a drug that kills cancer cells in a petri dish may not be able to get at cancer cells deep within a human body. It is a long way from the laboratory to the pharmacy.\nA more humorous interpretation of the title text is that it will only kill cancer cells if they are in petri dishes, and not anywhere else. The naming convention here is similar to \"lung cancer\", breast cancer\", etc., but of course, petri dishes are not normally a part of human organism [ citation needed ] . Less probably, it might be about cancer cells that originated from, but are not necessarily located within, petri dishes, making the scenario even more oddly specific.\n[Caption above the panel:] When you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin \"kills cancer cells in a petri dish,\" Keep in mind:\n[Cueball in a lab coat stands on a chair next to a desk, pointing a gun at a petri dish. There is a microscope on the desk.]\n[Caption below the panel:] So does a handgun.\n"}
{"id":1218,"title":"Doors of Durin","image_title":"Doors of Durin","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1218","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/doors_of_durin.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1218:_Doors_of_Durin","transcript":"[White Hat, Megan, and Cueball stand. Megan has her finger up.] Megan: I've got it! Megan: What's the elvish word for friend? Cueball: Mellon.\n[The trio stand. A off-panel door opens.] RUMBLE\n[White Hat has his palm out, while Cueball has his palm on his chin.] White Hat: So what's the elvish word for \"frenemy\"? Cueball: ...Mellogoth? SLAM!!\n","explanation":"The comic is based on the Lord of the Rings , specifically a scene from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring , where the eponymous fellowship is trapped outside the door to the Mines of Moria . There's a spoken password to open the doors, an Elvish inscription on them provides a clue: \"Speak friend, and enter\". The party leader ( Gandalf ) initially interprets this to mean that a friend could speak the password and enter. Only after many unsuccessful efforts does Gandalf realize it is actually a very simple riddle: The password is the Elvish word for \"friend\" (\"mellon\"), and the inscription should in fact be interpreted as \"Speak [out loud the word] mellon [(the Elvish word for friend )], and [you will be able to] enter\". See the Wikipedia article Use\u2013mention distinction .\nIn this comic, Cueball, White Hat, and Megan reenact the scene, with Cueball taking the role of Gandalf. The doors apparently open off-panel when the password is spoken. White Hat then wonders aloud what the Elvish word for \"frenemy\" is, and Cueball postulates \"mellogoth\". This is a portmanteau of \"mellon\" and \"goth\", much like how \"frenemy\" is a portmanteau of \"friend\" and \"enemy\". The Elvish word-root goth is best known as part of the name of Morgoth (literally, \"Black Enemy\") of the Silmarillion . The doors apparently immediately slam shut the moment Cueball says mellogoth . It is unclear whether this is because the opposite of the password has been spoken, or because the doors take offense to the word\/concept frenemy , of which xkcd has previously made fun in 919: Tween Bromance .\nThe title text ponders what would occur if the Sirannon, a stream running adjacent to the path leading to the doors, were to be completely blocked with the doors left open. The already partially blocked Sirannon had formed a pool before the doors; which contained some sort of monstrous horror from the depths of the Earth, referred to as the Watcher in the Water . Randall seems to think that the pond draining into the mines would connect the Watcher with another horror within: the Balrog (a high-level servant of Morgoth) living within the depths of the mines. Balrogs are primarily creatures of fire and shadow, so having a bunch of water dumped on it is unlikely to please it but may weaken it. He then goes on to wonder about the outcome of a battle between the two monsters.\n[White Hat, Megan, and Cueball stand. Megan has her finger up.] Megan: I've got it! Megan: What's the elvish word for friend? Cueball: Mellon.\n[The trio stand. A off-panel door opens.] RUMBLE\n[White Hat has his palm out, while Cueball has his palm on his chin.] White Hat: So what's the elvish word for \"frenemy\"? Cueball: ...Mellogoth? SLAM!!\n"}
{"id":1219,"title":"Reports","image_title":"Reports","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1219","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reports.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1219:_Reports","transcript":"How to make boring technical reports more fun to read: Imagine they were written and sent in, unsolicited, by the estranged spouse of the head of the project. [Cueball is crouching alone over his computer in an empty room, typing on a laptop. He is surrounded by papers and books, apparently related to whatever project is working on. The laptop has a message on it, the text of which is displayed above the computer.] Computer: Six guard rails have erratic reflector placement, and one even lacks reflectors entirely, despite rule G31.02(b) clearly mandating consistent usage. Cueball: ...Sharon!\nOriginally the title text proposed a speed limit of 2,500 miles per hour, which would mean the original message is about a ridiculously low speed limit of 2.5 mph. This was later corrected.\n","explanation":"The quoted text of the report could (and indeed probably would , given the apparent contents) be stereotypically read out loud by the author, or internally by the reader, in an essentially monotonal manner, as exhibited by any number of popularised film and TV characters such as 'Arthur Pewtey' from the Monty Python sketch . But this comic asks us to imagine it instead voiced in the voice of an upset (soon-to-be-'ex-'?) spouse, presumably berating the project leader on various real or imagined infractions, and it works just as well. The jagged nature of the speech bubble indicates that the report has typed out on the computer's screen, but also helps to re-enforce the nagging internal voice.\nThe title text joke relates to an alternative plan, namely to proportionally exaggerate everything you read.  What would have been one serious accident that would have been prevented in the previous month had the speed limit been 25\u00a0mph, out of the three that actually occurred under the current limit, now becomes one thousand people saved!  And all those lives would have been saved by reducing the speed limit to a 'mere' 25,000 miles per hour. Of course, around 2000 accidents would not have been prevented because people still try to mess with vehicles that are moving at hypersonic velocities.\nNote that the title text is inconsistent; if every number were to be multiplied by a thousand, then the speed limit would apply to 2000th Street. Somewhat surprisingly, there do exist streets of this name, mainly in Illinois. Although unlikely, the street may be 0.002th street, giving us 2 when multiplied per the title text. Though in this case 2nd St is a proper noun and thus should not be modified.\nHow to make boring technical reports more fun to read: Imagine they were written and sent in, unsolicited, by the estranged spouse of the head of the project. [Cueball is crouching alone over his computer in an empty room, typing on a laptop. He is surrounded by papers and books, apparently related to whatever project is working on. The laptop has a message on it, the text of which is displayed above the computer.] Computer: Six guard rails have erratic reflector placement, and one even lacks reflectors entirely, despite rule G31.02(b) clearly mandating consistent usage. Cueball: ...Sharon!\nOriginally the title text proposed a speed limit of 2,500 miles per hour, which would mean the original message is about a ridiculously low speed limit of 2.5 mph. This was later corrected.\n"}
{"id":1220,"title":"Hipsters","image_title":"Hipsters","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1220","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hipsters.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1220:_Hipsters","transcript":"The layout is a chart with a series of plots reaching a stable equilibrium one after another, with the shape characteristic of a predator-prey model. In order, the labels are. How often I see... Hipsters --> Complaints about hipsters --> Complaints about the constant use and discussion of the word \"hipster\" --> Complaints that every level of meta-opinion on hipsters represents the same tedious navel-gazing by insecure people --> graphs making it all worse --> Now [The horizontal axis is labeled time. Where the final curve rises is marked 'now'.]\nThis comic has been featured on Cheezburger.\n","explanation":"The word \"hipster\" originally referred to counter-cultural youth and jazz aficionados in the 1940s and 1950s before the Hippie culture developed in the mid '60s. Recently, however, \"hipster\" has come to refer to, in Wikipedia's terms, \"a subculture of young, urban middle class adults and older teenagers that appeared in the 1990s. The subculture is associated with independent music, a varied non-mainstream fashion sensibility, progressive or independent political views, alternative spirituality or atheism\/agnosticism, and alternative lifestyles.\"\nFollowing the hipster resurgence, it became popular in many circles to hold hipsters in contempt, citing their conformity to a subculture by rejecting \"mainstream\" culture and deliberate (i.e. ironic) indulgence in obnoxious things like moustaches and bad movies. Randall continues the arguably hypocritical meta-complaining by showing more s-curves that represent subsequent, smaller backlashes, self-referentially including his own comic in that meta-complaining.\nThere is a possible double meaning in the phrase \"tedious navel-gazing by insecure people\": the word \"hipster\" also refers to low-rise leg wear that sits at or below the hips, often in conjunction with revealing shirts, thereby exposing one's bellybutton.\nThe title text reveals Randall 's awareness that he's only perpetuating the meta-complaining he's complaining about, but he bats away this criticism by pointing out the facts of the situation: the reader is not communicating with Randall but rather most likely in an empty room while browsing the Internet. That is, the criticising reader is experiencing a retreat into ironic detachment while still clearly participating in the thing in question, i. e. the graph.\nThe title text may be a reference to a previous comic, 525: I Know You're Listening .\nThe layout is a chart with a series of plots reaching a stable equilibrium one after another, with the shape characteristic of a predator-prey model. In order, the labels are. How often I see... Hipsters --> Complaints about hipsters --> Complaints about the constant use and discussion of the word \"hipster\" --> Complaints that every level of meta-opinion on hipsters represents the same tedious navel-gazing by insecure people --> graphs making it all worse --> Now [The horizontal axis is labeled time. Where the final curve rises is marked 'now'.]\nThis comic has been featured on Cheezburger.\n"}
{"id":1221,"title":"Nomenclature","image_title":"Nomenclature","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1221","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nomenclature.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1221:_Nomenclature","transcript":"[Mrs. Whatsit, a woman drawn as Megan, holds her hand out and talks to Abbott (a tall guy with a baseball cap) and Costello (a short guy wearing a round brimmed hat and holding a baseball bat in his right hand.)] Mrs. Whatsit: You're both confused. Mrs. Whatsit: He's just \"The Doctor\".\nThe names are from the original transcript .\n","explanation":"Nomenclature can be defined as the devising or choosing of names for things. Here Randall connects three pop culture references that each contain one or more instances of ambiguous nomenclature based on pronouns: the \" Who's on First? \" skit, the \" Doctor Who \" television series, and in the title text also the novel \" A Wrinkle in Time \" by Madeleine L'Engle .\nThe comic references the famous \" Who's on First? \" skit by the American comedy duo Abbott and Costello in the 1930s. This video is one of the original performances. Costello is the shorter character, with a round brimmed hat and baseball bat, while Abbott is taller and wearing a baseball cap. This reflects the most common image associated with the skit. In the routine, Costello is confused by the nicknames the ball players go by. The man playing first base goes by the name \"Who\", the man on second base goes by \"What\", and the one on third calls himself \"I Don't Know\". Costello asks \"Who's on first?\", inquiring the name of the first-baseman, and Abbott replies \"that's right\", affirming that the first-baseman's name is Who. Both parties become confused within a matter of seconds.\nThe Doctor from the long-running British television series Doctor Who is often referred to as \"Doctor Who\" by people who think the series' name and their name are the same (although it should be noted that the name \"Doctor Who\" is not entirely incorrect; the character was referred to as such in the end credits for several seasons , as well as in the spin-off theatrical films starring Peter Cushing). In-universe, the character often introduces themself as \"The Doctor\", which elicits the response \" Doctor who? \". Their response to this question is: \"Just 'The Doctor'\". Mrs. Whatsit appears to have interrupted the \"Who's on First?\" skit to clarify the confusion that the person on first is not called \"Who\", but just \"The Doctor\".\nThe title text references the Madeleine L'Engle novel A Wrinkle in Time , which has characters with similarly ambiguous names. The book's Mrs. Whatsit appears to be on second base. \"Aunt Beast\" is a minor character in the novel from the planet of Ixchel. And they are playing a real baseball game. \"Aunt Beast\" is the batter and hits a pop fly high in the air towards second base while \"Mrs. Whatsit\" (presumably playing second base, in place of \"What\") is being encouraged to dive to catch the ball before it hits the ground, to get the batter out. So both the players \"Who\" and \"What\" have been exchanged with other characters going under similar names.\n[Mrs. Whatsit, a woman drawn as Megan, holds her hand out and talks to Abbott (a tall guy with a baseball cap) and Costello (a short guy wearing a round brimmed hat and holding a baseball bat in his right hand.)] Mrs. Whatsit: You're both confused. Mrs. Whatsit: He's just \"The Doctor\".\nThe names are from the original transcript .\n"}
{"id":1222,"title":"Pastime","image_title":"Pastime","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1222","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pastime.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1222:_Pastime","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are chatting. She has hair.] Megan: What've you been up to?\nCueball: Definitely not spending every day consumed with worry over stupid things I never talk to anyone about.\nMegan: Oh, yeah, me neither. Cueball: That's good. Megan: Yeah.\n[The final panel is silent.]\n","explanation":"When asked by Megan what he's been up to, Cueball responds with the suspiciously specific denial , \"Definitely not spending every day consumed with worry over stupid things I never talk to anyone about.\", which suggests that that is exactly what he's been spending every day doing, but he is hiding it from her and everyone else. Megan's response \"Oh, yeah, me neither\" suggests she too is worrying over stupid things but isn't admitting it.\nInstead of discussing their mutual worry and possibly making each other feel better, they instead continue to \"not talk to anyone about it\" and stand in awkward silence .\nThe title text continues the irony suggesting it's good that they're too smart to spend all day being uselessly frustrated with themselves, but that's apparently exactly what they are doing.\nThis could also be a reference to the common response to the question Megan asks in the first panel, \"nothing\", a response that is almost certainly false, and usually means the same thing that Cueball said, but is usually accepted, if not expected.\n[Megan and Cueball are chatting. She has hair.] Megan: What've you been up to?\nCueball: Definitely not spending every day consumed with worry over stupid things I never talk to anyone about.\nMegan: Oh, yeah, me neither. Cueball: That's good. Megan: Yeah.\n[The final panel is silent.]\n"}
{"id":1223,"title":"Dwarf Fortress","image_title":"Dwarf Fortress","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1223","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dwarf_fortress.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1223:_Dwarf_Fortress","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk with a computer, hands on the keyboard, talking to an unseen observer.] Cueball: If the corporate surveillance state monitors and controls every aspect of my life... Big Brother: We do. Cueball: And I play Dwarf Fortress all day... Big Brother: You do. Cueball: Then you're effectively Dwarf Fortress players watching your dwarves play Dwarf Fortress. Big Brother: ... Oh God. [Caption below the panel:] Big Brother realizes he's trapped in the most tedious possible Hell.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reaction to the recent reveal of a U.S. electronic telecom surveillance program called PRISM , run by the NSA . There is a Guardian article about it. PRISM, leaked by a former NSA official, incited some controversy since it provides government access to private data (e-mails, videos, chats, file transfers, etc.).\nDwarf Fortress is a freeware strategy game in which the player builds a civilization by giving orders to \u2014 as opposed to directly controlling \u2014 a group of dwarves. It is famous for having a very detailed simulation of its world and for allowing deep micro-management (as well as an incredibly steep learning curve).\n\"Big Brother\" means \"a tyrannical government body that constantly monitors all its citizens.\" The term comes from the classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, wherein propaganda videos are narrated by an actor with the stage name of Big Brother and the dystopia's surveillance system is said to be monitored by Big Brother himself.\nCueball has a discussion with Big Brother (\"corporate surveillance state\"), in which he mocks Big Brother's interest in the inconsequential activity of playing a video game ( Dwarf Fortress in particular) by drawing a parallel between Big Brother's omniscient surveillance of Cueball and Cueball's omniscient surveillance of the dwarves. Big Brother appears to be mortified when it realizes the accuracy of Cueball's comparison.\nInformally, a system exhibits Turing-completeness when it is theoretically capable of executing any algorithm. One of the simplest Turing-complete systems is the Turing machine , a device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules \u2014 it can be proven to have the same capabilities as any ordinary programming language. Other very simple systems include Rule 110 , lambda calculus , Conway's game of life , and Brainfuck . The reason we don't work with these is because they're a real pain in the ass. Would you rather build a network of spaceships that collide with each other to simulate the successor function, or just write i\u00a0:= i + 1 ?\nA common CS nerd challenge is to prove the Turing-completeness of a system that wasn't intended to be that way \u2014 games in particular. The usual way to do this is to construct a Turing machine simulator within the system. It has been done for Dwarf Fortress , (infinite) Minesweeper (pdf), Magic the Gathering , Little Big Planet , Minecraft ( another Minecraft example ) 1 , Pok\u00e9mon Yellow (through the elaborate use of many in-game glitches) and 3D chess . These kinds of proofs often involve formulating ridiculously complex creations just to simulate a little machine writing symbols on a tape! 2\nFinally, Randall makes a crack that users will try to nest their Turing-complete computers; after finishing his Turing-complete Dwarf Fortress computer, someone else will try to make the Dwarf Fortress computer run Minecraft (a highly inefficient process that would be a nightmare to coordinate, and would run incredibly slowly).\n1 The youtuber legomasta99 even built a whole programmable PC in Minecraft as can be seen here .\n2 Technically, a computer is not really Turing-complete. A Turing-complete system has to have unlimited space, and that's not possible for a memory-limited computer or any software running inside it. But even if we don't have access to Turing-completeness, we can build a theoretical machine and show how it can be extended indefinitely. In a few of the games, we prove Turing-completeness in infinite variants.\n[Cueball sits at a desk with a computer, hands on the keyboard, talking to an unseen observer.] Cueball: If the corporate surveillance state monitors and controls every aspect of my life... Big Brother: We do. Cueball: And I play Dwarf Fortress all day... Big Brother: You do. Cueball: Then you're effectively Dwarf Fortress players watching your dwarves play Dwarf Fortress. Big Brother: ... Oh God. [Caption below the panel:] Big Brother realizes he's trapped in the most tedious possible Hell.\n"}
{"id":1224,"title":"Council of 300","image_title":"Council of 300","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1224","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/council_of_300.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1224:_Council_of_300","transcript":"[A secret society meets in a darkened chamber; a kitschy video involving two people and an RC helicopter is projected onto the background.] Master: ...then it is settled. We the 300 members of the Secret Council, decree that this video meets our standards, and shall \"go viral\". Master: send it to one of our agents to be leaked to the common folk. Steward: Some of them are noticing the number. Master: ...add a plus sign to throw them off. Steward: very well. Soon... [A communication sent to Cueball, one of the many unsuspecting plebeians of the world.] Email: Ooh! check out this great video I found! [Zoom in on the viewer count of a YouTube video.] 301+\n","explanation":"YouTube (a video sharing site) used to have an odd quirk in its view counter. When a video hit 301 views, the view counter briefly stopped updating. This meant that YouTube was checking the views to make sure that no foul play was going on. The choice of the number 301 is due to a harmless off-by-one error; Numberphile produced a video that explains all this very well (and has comically its view counter frozen at 301). At times the number 301 would catch some YouTubers off guard \u2014 for very popular videos, it might appear that the video has more likes than views. However, this bug is no longer present (although very new videos having more likes and comments than views IS still present).\nRandall plays with the near coincidence of this number, and a conspiracy theory entity known as the Committee of 300 . In this case, the video's first 300 views come from each of the Committee's council members who determine if the video will go viral . The video is then released to the public by sending it to a regular person ( Cueball in this comic) making the total number of views 301.\nThe title text elaborates on this by explaining that the council also hypnotizes somebody to make him think they uploaded and shared that particular video.\nAccording to the title text, the council does not seem to tolerate contradiction, because the member that suggests changing 301 to a random number to avoid suspicion is shot, silenced permanently, and removed from the council.\n[A secret society meets in a darkened chamber; a kitschy video involving two people and an RC helicopter is projected onto the background.] Master: ...then it is settled. We the 300 members of the Secret Council, decree that this video meets our standards, and shall \"go viral\". Master: send it to one of our agents to be leaked to the common folk. Steward: Some of them are noticing the number. Master: ...add a plus sign to throw them off. Steward: very well. Soon... [A communication sent to Cueball, one of the many unsuspecting plebeians of the world.] Email: Ooh! check out this great video I found! [Zoom in on the viewer count of a YouTube video.] 301+\n"}
{"id":1225,"title":"Ice Sheets","image_title":"Ice Sheets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1225","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ice_sheets.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1225:_Ice_Sheets","transcript":"[Caption above the four panels:] Thickness of the ice sheets at various locations 21,000 years ago compared with modern skylines. [In four panels the skylines of four major metropolises are superimposed against a blue ice sheet of the proper thickness for the aforementioned time period. The panels are much taller than the skyline reaching about 3500 meter up above ground level. Below the gray skylines there is a black slab indicating this ground level, above the ice the air is white. Also above the ice sheet the hight of the ice is noted in light gray text. Inside the ice sheet the name of the city is written in black. Some clear landmarks can be seen in each skyline.]\n[The first skyline shows among other a tall TV tower. The ice reaches more than halfway to the top of the panel.] 2100m Toronto\n[The second skyline shows several skyscrapers with specially one towering over the other. The ice reaches about a quarter of the way to the top. This is the lowest of the ice sheets only reaching about twice as high as the tallest building in the city.] 900m Chicago\n[The third skyline shows only a few skyscrapers with two of them clearly taller than the rest of the skyline. The ice reaches a bit more than a third towards the top.] 1250m Boston\n[The fourth skyline do not have many real skyscrapers but there are three buildings that are taller than the rest of the skyline. The ice reaches almost to the top, making it the tallest ice sheet. The name of the city clearly is written higher up in the ice than the other three. Even above the lowest ice sheet of the second panel.] 3300m Montreal\n","explanation":"The comic shows the ice levels at major North American cities at the peak of the last ice age , 21,000 years ago. During this period, a vast amount of frozen water covered North America as well as other areas around the world. So much ice that it affected the global sea level (see Sea level rise ) to lower it by more than a hundred meters.\nToronto and Montreal are both Canadian cities, while Boston and Chicago are in the United States . The skylines of each city are shown at the bottom of the ice sheet to scale. The tallest structure shown is the CN Tower in Toronto, the tallest free-standing structure in the Western Hemisphere , at a height of 553 m. The tallest ice sheet is 3.3 km tall, almost six times as tall as that tower. Although, over Toronto, the ice was \"only\" 2.1 km tall.\nThe tallest ice sheet takes up 265 pixels. From that, each pixel is about 12.4 meters and the height of the panels is 3.7 km with less than 200 m of the ground shown in black below the cities making the white \"air\" above ground reaching up to 3.5 km, leaving only 200 m of air above the highest ice sheet.\nThe title text references the \" The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum (PDF) ,\" an actual series of scientific papers about the ice sheet (see figure 4). But it also refers to the animated Ice Age film series, specifically to Ice Age: the Meltdown , and Ice Age: Continental Drift which are the second and fourth Ice Age films.\nIce sheets over Boston during the last ice age was also referenced in 1379: 4.5 Degrees . The image of Boston in this comic is reused at the top of the huge chart in 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline , and had already been reused earlier in the what if? post Google's Datacenters on Punch Cards . Randall lives in that area.\nAlthough this comic doesn't mention (modern) climate change, it does show the difference climate can have on our surroundings. And in the two later comics mentioned above, Randall makes it clear that we are now heading as far in the opposite hotter direction compared to the \"normal\" temperature during the rise of human civilization, as the ice age temperature was colder.\n[Caption above the four panels:] Thickness of the ice sheets at various locations 21,000 years ago compared with modern skylines. [In four panels the skylines of four major metropolises are superimposed against a blue ice sheet of the proper thickness for the aforementioned time period. The panels are much taller than the skyline reaching about 3500 meter up above ground level. Below the gray skylines there is a black slab indicating this ground level, above the ice the air is white. Also above the ice sheet the hight of the ice is noted in light gray text. Inside the ice sheet the name of the city is written in black. Some clear landmarks can be seen in each skyline.]\n[The first skyline shows among other a tall TV tower. The ice reaches more than halfway to the top of the panel.] 2100m Toronto\n[The second skyline shows several skyscrapers with specially one towering over the other. The ice reaches about a quarter of the way to the top. This is the lowest of the ice sheets only reaching about twice as high as the tallest building in the city.] 900m Chicago\n[The third skyline shows only a few skyscrapers with two of them clearly taller than the rest of the skyline. The ice reaches a bit more than a third towards the top.] 1250m Boston\n[The fourth skyline do not have many real skyscrapers but there are three buildings that are taller than the rest of the skyline. The ice reaches almost to the top, making it the tallest ice sheet. The name of the city clearly is written higher up in the ice than the other three. Even above the lowest ice sheet of the second panel.] 3300m Montreal\n"}
{"id":1226,"title":"Balloon Internet","image_title":"Balloon Internet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1226","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/balloon_internet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1226:_Balloon_Internet","transcript":"[Cueball sits on a hill reading a book.] [Cueball remains engrossed in the book. A balloon with a box at the end of the string begins to descend behind him.] [Cueball continues reading. The balloon is getting lower.] [The balloon's box is now right behind Cueball's ear.] Balloon box: Internet . Cueball: Augh! [Cueball throws the book in surprise.] [The balloon ascends rapidly, while the startled Cueball looks up.]\n","explanation":"The comic references Google's Project Loon , a balloon powered Internet service which was officially announced June 14, 2013 (3 days before this comic was published) and was in proof-of-concept testing stages by that time. A test above New Zealand, involving about 30 balloons and about 50 users, was successfully conducted on June 16. The project, taglined \"Internet for Everyone\", was intended to eventually provide Internet access to people in rural areas and in disaster areas that have limited or no access to land-based Internet services.\nAs of 2019 Loon LLC was an individual Google subsidiary instead of a mere project and was present in multiple places across the world for either Internet in rural areas, full coverage of a country or disaster relief.\nIn March of 2021, Alphabet , Google's parent company, announced the closure of Loon, LLC.\nRandall is poking fun at the tagline \"Internet for Everyone\" \u2014 meant to mean anyone could have Internet access regardless of location \u2014 by instead literally bringing the Internet to Cueball , who retired in a deserted area, away from all technology, to read a standard paper book. In the comic, one of the balloons sneaks up on Cueball before speaking and startling Cueball, effectively becoming a nuisance, interrupting Cueball's reading of a book and leaving Cueball wondering what has happened. In Randall's world, the tagline could be restated as \"Internet for Everyone \u2014 whether they want it or not\".\nThe title text describes Randall's own plan to provide rural internet. He will operate in a region where Verizon Wi-Fi infrastructure already exists, and take advantage of their 14-day return policy to effectively obtain internet access for free, which he will then sell under his own brand.\n[Cueball sits on a hill reading a book.] [Cueball remains engrossed in the book. A balloon with a box at the end of the string begins to descend behind him.] [Cueball continues reading. The balloon is getting lower.] [The balloon's box is now right behind Cueball's ear.] Balloon box: Internet . Cueball: Augh! [Cueball throws the book in surprise.] [The balloon ascends rapidly, while the startled Cueball looks up.]\n"}
{"id":1227,"title":"The Pace of Modern Life","image_title":"The Pace of Modern Life","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1227","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_pace_of_modern_life.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1227:_The_Pace_of_Modern_Life","transcript":"The art of letter-writing is fast dying out. When a letter cost nine pence, it seemed but fair to try to make it worth nine pence ... Now, however, we think we are too busy for such old-fashioned correspondence. We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper. The Sunday Magazine 1871\nIt is, unfortunately, one of the chief characteristics of modern business to be always in a hurry. In olden times it was different. The Medical Record 1884\nWith the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel ... leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them ... The hurry and bustle of modern life ... lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day's work done, took their ease... William Smith, Morley: Ancient and Modern 1886\nConversation is said to be a lost art ... Good talk presupposes leisure, both for preparation and enjoyment. The age of leisure is dead, and the art of conversation is dying. Frank Leslie's popular Monthly , Volume 29 1890\nIntellectual laziness and the hurry of the age have produced a craving for literary nips. The torpid brain ... has grown too weak for sustained thought. There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly. Israel Zangwill, The Bachelors' Club 1891\nThe art of pure line engraving is dying out. We live at too fast a rate to allow for the preparation of such plates as our fathers appreciated. If a picture catches the public fancy, the public must have an etched or a photogravured copy of it within a month or two of its appearance, the days when engravers were wont to spend two or three years over a single plate are for ever gone. Journal of the Institute of Jamaica , Volume 1 1892\nSo much is exhibited to the eye that nothing is left to the imagination . It sometimes seems almost possible that the modern world might be choked by its own riches, and human faculty dwindle away amid the million inventions that have been introduced to render its exercise unnecessary. The articles in the Quarterlies extend to thirty or more pages, but thirty pages is now too much so we witness a further condensing process and, we have the Fortnightly and the Contemporary which reduce thirty pages to fifteen pages so that you may read a larger number of articles in a shorter time and in a shorter form. As if this last condensing process were not enough the condensed articles of these periodicals are further condensed by the daily papers, which will give you a summary of the summary of all that has been written about everything. Those who are dipping into so many subjects and gathering information in a summary and superficial form lose the habit of settling down to great works. Ephemeral literature is driving out the great classics of the present and the past ... hurried reading can never be good reading. G. J. Goschen, First Annual Address to the Students , Toynbee Hall. London 1894\nThe existence of mental and nervous degeneration among a growing class of people , especially in large cities, is an obvious phenomenon ... the mania for stimulants ... diseases of the mind are almost as numerous as the diseases of the body... This intellectual condition is characterized by a brain incapable of normal working ... in a large measure due to the hurry and excitement of modern life , with its facilities for rapid locomotion and almost instantaneous communication between remote points of the globe ... The Churchman , Volume 71 1895\nIf we teach the children how to play and encourage them in their sports ... instead of shutting them in badly ventilated schoolrooms , the next generation will be more joyous and will be healthier than the present one. Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Summary of the Press Throughout the World , Volume 18 1895\nThe cause of the ... increase in nervous disease is increased demand made by the conditions of modern life upon the brain . Everything is done in a hurry. We talk across a continent, telegraph across an ocean , take a trip to Chicago for an hour's talk... We take even our pleasures sadly and make a task of our play ... what wonder if the pressure is almost more than our nerves can bear. G. Shrady (from P.C. Knapp) \"Are nervous diseases increasing?\" Medical Record 1896\nThe managers of sensational newspapers ... do not try to educate their readers and make them better, but tend to create perverted tastes and develop vicious tendencies. The owners of these papers seem to have but one purpose, and that is to increase their circulation. Medical Brief , Volume 26 1898\nTo take sufficient time for our meals seems frequently impossible on account of the demands on our time made by our business... We act on the apparent belief that all of our business is so pressing that we must jump on the quickest car home, eat our dinner in the most hurried way, make the closest connection for a car returning ... Louis John Rettger. Studies in Advanced Physiology 1898\nIn these days of increasing rapid artificial locomotion, may I be permitted to say a word in favour of a very worthy and valuable old friend of mine, Mr. Long Walk? I am afraid that this good gentleman is in danger of getting neglected, if not forgotten. We live in days of water trips and land trips, excursions by sea, road and rail-bicycles and tricycles, tram cars and motor cars .... but in my humble opinion, good honest walking exercise for health beats all other kinds of locomotion into a cocked hat. T. Thatcher, \"A plea for a long walk\", The Publishers Circular 1902\nThe art of conversation is almost a lost one. People talk as they ride bicycles\u2013at a rush\u2013without pausing to consider their surroundings ... what has been generally understood as cultured society is rapidly deteriorating into baseness and voluntary ignorance. The profession of letters is so little understood , and so far from being seriously appreciated, that ... Newspapers are full, not of thoughtful honestly expressed public opinion on the affairs of the nation, but of vapid personalities interesting to none save gossips and busy bodies. Marie Corelli, Free opinions, freely expressed 1905\nThere is a great tendency among the children of today to rebel against restraint , not only that placed upon them by the will of the parent. But against any restraint or limitation of what they consider their rights ... this fact has filled well minded people with great apprehensions for the future. Rev. Henry Hussmann, The authority of parents 1906\nOur modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favourite magazine , is the somewhat natural outcome of the banishment of colloquy from the school ... The Journal of Education , Volume 29 1907\nPlays in theatres at the present time present spectacles and deal openly with situations which no person would have dared to mention in general society forty years ago ... The current representations of nude men and women in the daily journals and the illustrated magazines would have excluded such periodicals from all respectable families two decades ago... Those who have been divorced ... forty and fifty years ago lost at once and irrevocably their standing in society, while to-day they continue in all their social relationships, hardly changed... Editorial, The Watchman , Boston 1908\nWe write millions more letters than did our grandfathers, but the increase in volume has brought with it an automatic artificial machine-like ring ... an examination of a file of old letters reveals not only a remarkable grasp of details. But a fitness and courtliness too often totally lacking in the mechanical curt cut and dried letters of to-day. Forrest Crissey, Handbook of Modern Business Correspondence 1908\nA hundred years ago it took so long and cost so much to send a letter that it seemed worth while to put some time and thought into writing it. Now the quickness and the cheapness of the post seem to justify the feeling that a brief letter to-day may be followed by another next week\u2013a \"line\" now by another to-morrow. Percy Holmes Boynton, Principles of Composition 1915\n","explanation":"The debate as to whether or not the pace of modern life is detrimental to society, culture, and the human experience in general has been going on for longer than we may realize. Presently, the debate has focused on technology such as smartphones, tablets, and other portable electronics; however, many of the same arguments were made against newspapers , magazines, telegraphs, telephones, and even written correspondence 100 years ago.\nPeople often tend to think of older times as better. The people complaining compare their present time to the time they lived in before, that is, a couple of decades ago, and this has been happening for over a century (at least). This comic makes a point that the older times people refer to, were also criticized in exactly the same fashion. Since the same criticism is applied to each generation by the generation before that one, every generation thinks that the one they were born in is the good one. This is presentism as explained by Randall in 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey .\nThe comic begins and ends with very similar arguments, perhaps emphasizing how these debates cycle and repeat over time. The comic does not directly state whether these opinions and criticisms were justified or simple fallacies. There is a desire to consider our present existence as good and reasonable and that society has been improving over time. The difficulty lies in considering the possibility that each generation was perhaps correct in their criticism.\nOn reading all of these quotes, one may find these quotes redundant and tiresome to read.  Readers may find themselves skimming the text and skipping several quotes once they get the overall idea.  This could be a self-referential point demonstrating that the writing style of older times was less convenient than the oft-criticized brief modern style.\nSome parts of all that long texts are in bold, others not. Here is the summary for only this bold text, picturing just our Modern World :\nThe art of letter-writing is fast dying out. We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper. In olden times it was different. Men now live think and work at express speed. Sulkily read as they travel leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them. The age of leisure is dead, and the art of conversation is dying. A craving for literary nips. There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly. The art of pure line engraving is dying out. We live at too fast a rate nothing is left to the imagination and human faculty dwindle away amid the million inventions that have been introduced to render its exercise unnecessary. Thirty pages is now too much. Fifteen pages further condensed a summary of the summary. Those who are dipping into so many subjects and gathering information in a summary and superficial form lose the habit of settling down to great works. Hurried reading can never be good reading. Mental and nervous degeneration among a growing class of people, a brain incapable of normal working in a large measure due to the hurry and excitement of modern life, almost instantaneous communication between remote points of the globe. Teach the children how to play instead of shutting them in badly ventilated schoolrooms, increased demand made by the conditions of modern life upon the brain. We talk across a continent, telegraph across an ocean, we take even our pleasures sadly and make a task of our play. The managers of sensational newspapers create perverted tastes and develop vicious tendencies. To take sufficient time for our meals seems frequently impossible, may I be permitted to say a word in favour of a very worthy and valuable old friend of mine, Mr. Long walk? I am afraid that this good gentleman is in danger of getting neglected, if not forgotten. People talk as they ride bicycles\u2013at a rush\u2013without pausing to consider their surroundings the profession of letters is so little understood, tendency among the children of today to rebel against restraint. Our modern family gathering, silent, each individual with his head buried in his favourite magazine, deal openly with situations which no person would have dared to mention in general society forty years ago. A hundred years ago it took so long and cost so much to send a letter that it seemed worth while to put some time and thought into writing it. A brief letter to-day may be followed by another next week\u2013a \"line\" now by another to-morrow.\nThe style of the comic is very similar to that of 1311: 2014 , which was released half a year later.\nThe title text shows that the meaning of the institute of marriage debate has likewise been going on for quite some time.\nThe art of letter-writing is fast dying out. When a letter cost nine pence, it seemed but fair to try to make it worth nine pence ... Now, however, we think we are too busy for such old-fashioned correspondence. We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper. The Sunday Magazine 1871\nIt is, unfortunately, one of the chief characteristics of modern business to be always in a hurry. In olden times it was different. The Medical Record 1884\nWith the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel ... leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them ... The hurry and bustle of modern life ... lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day's work done, took their ease... William Smith, Morley: Ancient and Modern 1886\nConversation is said to be a lost art ... Good talk presupposes leisure, both for preparation and enjoyment. The age of leisure is dead, and the art of conversation is dying. Frank Leslie's popular Monthly , Volume 29 1890\nIntellectual laziness and the hurry of the age have produced a craving for literary nips. The torpid brain ... has grown too weak for sustained thought. There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly. Israel Zangwill, The Bachelors' Club 1891\nThe art of pure line engraving is dying out. We live at too fast a rate to allow for the preparation of such plates as our fathers appreciated. If a picture catches the public fancy, the public must have an etched or a photogravured copy of it within a month or two of its appearance, the days when engravers were wont to spend two or three years over a single plate are for ever gone. Journal of the Institute of Jamaica , Volume 1 1892\nSo much is exhibited to the eye that nothing is left to the imagination . It sometimes seems almost possible that the modern world might be choked by its own riches, and human faculty dwindle away amid the million inventions that have been introduced to render its exercise unnecessary. The articles in the Quarterlies extend to thirty or more pages, but thirty pages is now too much so we witness a further condensing process and, we have the Fortnightly and the Contemporary which reduce thirty pages to fifteen pages so that you may read a larger number of articles in a shorter time and in a shorter form. As if this last condensing process were not enough the condensed articles of these periodicals are further condensed by the daily papers, which will give you a summary of the summary of all that has been written about everything. Those who are dipping into so many subjects and gathering information in a summary and superficial form lose the habit of settling down to great works. Ephemeral literature is driving out the great classics of the present and the past ... hurried reading can never be good reading. G. J. Goschen, First Annual Address to the Students , Toynbee Hall. London 1894\nThe existence of mental and nervous degeneration among a growing class of people , especially in large cities, is an obvious phenomenon ... the mania for stimulants ... diseases of the mind are almost as numerous as the diseases of the body... This intellectual condition is characterized by a brain incapable of normal working ... in a large measure due to the hurry and excitement of modern life , with its facilities for rapid locomotion and almost instantaneous communication between remote points of the globe ... The Churchman , Volume 71 1895\nIf we teach the children how to play and encourage them in their sports ... instead of shutting them in badly ventilated schoolrooms , the next generation will be more joyous and will be healthier than the present one. Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Summary of the Press Throughout the World , Volume 18 1895\nThe cause of the ... increase in nervous disease is increased demand made by the conditions of modern life upon the brain . Everything is done in a hurry. We talk across a continent, telegraph across an ocean , take a trip to Chicago for an hour's talk... We take even our pleasures sadly and make a task of our play ... what wonder if the pressure is almost more than our nerves can bear. G. Shrady (from P.C. Knapp) \"Are nervous diseases increasing?\" Medical Record 1896\nThe managers of sensational newspapers ... do not try to educate their readers and make them better, but tend to create perverted tastes and develop vicious tendencies. The owners of these papers seem to have but one purpose, and that is to increase their circulation. Medical Brief , Volume 26 1898\nTo take sufficient time for our meals seems frequently impossible on account of the demands on our time made by our business... We act on the apparent belief that all of our business is so pressing that we must jump on the quickest car home, eat our dinner in the most hurried way, make the closest connection for a car returning ... Louis John Rettger. Studies in Advanced Physiology 1898\nIn these days of increasing rapid artificial locomotion, may I be permitted to say a word in favour of a very worthy and valuable old friend of mine, Mr. Long Walk? I am afraid that this good gentleman is in danger of getting neglected, if not forgotten. We live in days of water trips and land trips, excursions by sea, road and rail-bicycles and tricycles, tram cars and motor cars .... but in my humble opinion, good honest walking exercise for health beats all other kinds of locomotion into a cocked hat. T. Thatcher, \"A plea for a long walk\", The Publishers Circular 1902\nThe art of conversation is almost a lost one. People talk as they ride bicycles\u2013at a rush\u2013without pausing to consider their surroundings ... what has been generally understood as cultured society is rapidly deteriorating into baseness and voluntary ignorance. The profession of letters is so little understood , and so far from being seriously appreciated, that ... Newspapers are full, not of thoughtful honestly expressed public opinion on the affairs of the nation, but of vapid personalities interesting to none save gossips and busy bodies. Marie Corelli, Free opinions, freely expressed 1905\nThere is a great tendency among the children of today to rebel against restraint , not only that placed upon them by the will of the parent. But against any restraint or limitation of what they consider their rights ... this fact has filled well minded people with great apprehensions for the future. Rev. Henry Hussmann, The authority of parents 1906\nOur modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favourite magazine , is the somewhat natural outcome of the banishment of colloquy from the school ... The Journal of Education , Volume 29 1907\nPlays in theatres at the present time present spectacles and deal openly with situations which no person would have dared to mention in general society forty years ago ... The current representations of nude men and women in the daily journals and the illustrated magazines would have excluded such periodicals from all respectable families two decades ago... Those who have been divorced ... forty and fifty years ago lost at once and irrevocably their standing in society, while to-day they continue in all their social relationships, hardly changed... Editorial, The Watchman , Boston 1908\nWe write millions more letters than did our grandfathers, but the increase in volume has brought with it an automatic artificial machine-like ring ... an examination of a file of old letters reveals not only a remarkable grasp of details. But a fitness and courtliness too often totally lacking in the mechanical curt cut and dried letters of to-day. Forrest Crissey, Handbook of Modern Business Correspondence 1908\nA hundred years ago it took so long and cost so much to send a letter that it seemed worth while to put some time and thought into writing it. Now the quickness and the cheapness of the post seem to justify the feeling that a brief letter to-day may be followed by another next week\u2013a \"line\" now by another to-morrow. Percy Holmes Boynton, Principles of Composition 1915\n"}
{"id":1228,"title":"Prometheus","image_title":"Prometheus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1228","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/prometheus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1228:_Prometheus","transcript":"[Cueball addresses his Cueball-like friend, who just walked in-panel. Cueball points at Prometheus (who is also Cueball-like). Prometheus is holding his hand to his chin and holding a colorful flaming torch in the other hand.] Cueball: Prometheus has stolen fire from the Gods! Prometheus: Well, sort of. I mean, when you use a fire to make another fire, the first fire doesn't go away. So really, it's more like \"sharing\".\n[Caption below the frame:] Fire wants to be free.\n","explanation":"This comic is most likely about copyright and patent, which are temporary government-granted monopolies for authors and inventors. It refers to the cultural hero Prometheus in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. In this case, Prometheus claims that it is more like sharing than stealing because the gods still have the original fire. By analogy, uploading music, movies, and software is more like sharing than stealing because the authors and inventors still have the original files. Fire-sharing is a pun for file-sharing . \"Fire wants to be free\" is a pun for the slogan \" Information wants to be free .\"\nThis could also be a reference to the strict punishments of copyright laws as one could be fined a lot for failing to comply with the copy and Prometheus was also heavily punished by having an eagle rip out his liver every day and the liver regrowing every night.\nThe title text refers both to Michael Bay , the director of the movies Transformers and Armageddon , who is known for using over the top special effects, and to the novel \"Salvation War\" by Stuart Slade, in which Humanity goes to war just as described. \"Returning fire to the gods with interest\" is also the plot of the Terry Pratchett novel The Last Hero ; Randall has previously made references to Terry Pratchett.\n[Cueball addresses his Cueball-like friend, who just walked in-panel. Cueball points at Prometheus (who is also Cueball-like). Prometheus is holding his hand to his chin and holding a colorful flaming torch in the other hand.] Cueball: Prometheus has stolen fire from the Gods! Prometheus: Well, sort of. I mean, when you use a fire to make another fire, the first fire doesn't go away. So really, it's more like \"sharing\".\n[Caption below the frame:] Fire wants to be free.\n"}
{"id":1229,"title":"Screensaver","image_title":"Screensaver","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1229","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/screensaver.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1229:_Screensaver","transcript":"I've been staring at the screen every night for twenty years, and it finally happened. [A star field.] [The same star field, but there's a larger white dot glowing in the middle.] [The same star field, but that larger white dot's looking bigger now. Oh. It's clearly a star.] [The screen is filled with white. It's coming straight for us.] [The screen is filled with static.] signal lost\n","explanation":"This comic features the \"Starfield\" screensaver , a popular Windows screensaver of the 1990s, which presents a moving starfield, like what would be seen by an observer moving past stars at superluminal speeds (see a video example ). This illusion is generally created by drawing white dots on the computer screen, and then moving these dots outwards towards the edge of the screen before disappearing. Some of the \"stars\" appear to pass closer to the viewing point than others, resulting in movements of visually greater speeds, and more excitement; one can also fixate the center of the screen, hoping to see the appearance of a star as close as possible to it, which would later on pass very close to the viewpoint. This comic extends it to the situation where the observer actually collides with one of these stars, something that never happens with screensavers of this type. The \"signal lost\" error message appears because the source of the signal is no longer transmitting, since it was destroyed when colliding with said star.\nThe \"Duck Hunt gun\" is a reference to the NES Zapper used with the Nintendo Entertainment System game Duck Hunt , originally published in 1984. The user would point the Zapper at the connected television screen while playing Duck Hunt, and the NES would recognize whether or not the zapper was pointed at an appropriate target or not. \" Flying Toasters \" is another old screensaver (in the After Dark package, made for computers but not for the NES). In the title text, Randall states that he is trying to use the NES Zapper to shoot down flying toasters. However, the Flying Toaster screensaver and the NES Zapper are two separate things that were never meant to be used together, so the flying toasters will never react to being \"shot\" at by the NES Zapper.\nI've been staring at the screen every night for twenty years, and it finally happened. [A star field.] [The same star field, but there's a larger white dot glowing in the middle.] [The same star field, but that larger white dot's looking bigger now. Oh. It's clearly a star.] [The screen is filled with white. It's coming straight for us.] [The screen is filled with static.] signal lost\n"}
{"id":1230,"title":"Polar\/Cartesian","image_title":"Polar\/Cartesian","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1230","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/polar_cartesian.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1230:_Polar\/Cartesian","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Certainty that this is a clockwise polar plot, not a Cartesian one, as a function of time: [There is a graph. The Y axis is marked out from 0% to 100%. The X axis is unmarked. A red line starts at 50% and traces out a roughly parabolic trend downwards along the X axis.]\n","explanation":"This comic plays upon the difference between reading a polar coordinate plot and the more common cartesian coordinate plot .\nThe graph purports to show the certainty in the viewers mind that it is a clockwise polar plot, as a function of time.\nIf seen as a Cartesian plot, the y (vertical) axis represents 'certainty' while the x (horizontal) axis represents 'time'. Each point on the plot is represented by two coordinates, the x-value and the y-value. As time increases, we move to the right and see the initial certainty of 50% decreases gradually to zero. That is, after a certain amount of time, we are certain that it is NOT a Polar plot.\nIn a Polar plot, each point on the plot is also located by two values, but in this case they are the radius (the distance from the origin) and the angle between the radius and an arbitrary starting line.  Here, the radius represents 'certainty' and the angle to the vertical represents 'time'. In this view, we see that as time increases (as we move clockwise around the plot) the initial certainty (the same 50%) now increases to a final value of 100%. That is, after a certain amount of time, we are certain that it IS a Polar plot.\nThe intended joke seems to be that the graph is an exercise in confirmation bias. Whichever type you initially hypothesize is correct, that view will be confirmed by investigation. This is because the two different views are both correct - the graph can equally be considered a Cartesian or Polar plot. This is somewhat counter-intuitive.\nThroughout the graph, the sum of the two probabilities is 100%, i.e. (polar-observer's certainty that the graph is polar) + (cartesian-observer's certainty that the graph is polar) = 100%. The shape of the graph appears to be (in clockwise polar form) r(t)=100\/(1+cos(t)).\nIf the reader is open-minded, they would never reach certainty (0% \/ 100% depending on how you read the graph) because there isn't enough information to clearly decide either way.\nThe title text is a joke that if you are unsure how to label any two-axis (two-dimensional) graph, you can just say it represents the 'coordinates of the ants crawling across my screen as a function of time', and nobody could then argue with your data. \"Hey, that's the path they walked!\"\n[Caption above the panel:] Certainty that this is a clockwise polar plot, not a Cartesian one, as a function of time: [There is a graph. The Y axis is marked out from 0% to 100%. The X axis is unmarked. A red line starts at 50% and traces out a roughly parabolic trend downwards along the X axis.]\n"}
{"id":1231,"title":"Habitable Zone","image_title":"Habitable Zone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1231","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/habitable_zone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1231:_Habitable_Zone","transcript":"[Cueball stands in front of a huge telescope, looking through the eyepiece.] Cueball: I've discovered an Earth-sized planet in a star's habitable zone! It even has oceans! And visible weather! [Caption below the panel:] To mess with an astronomer, put a mirror in the path of their telescope.\n","explanation":"While searching for extrasolar planets this gullible astronomer is very excited because he believes he has found a planet in a star's habitable zone , with oceans and visible weather. From these observations, he has determined that it is quite likely to have life on it, which would be a major groundbreaking discovery.\nThe caption explains, however, that someone has used a mirror as a prank to fool the astronomer, so he is in fact looking at a reflection of the Earth.\nThe title text goes on says that the astronomer would also be able to see the reflection of his telescope, which would convince him that there definitely is intelligent life on the other planet, looking straight back at him no less!\nThere are quite a number of issues (listed below) with the practical implementation of this prank, though of course they don't matter much in terms of the joke itself\n[Cueball stands in front of a huge telescope, looking through the eyepiece.] Cueball: I've discovered an Earth-sized planet in a star's habitable zone! It even has oceans! And visible weather! [Caption below the panel:] To mess with an astronomer, put a mirror in the path of their telescope.\n"}
{"id":1232,"title":"Realistic Criteria","image_title":"Realistic Criteria","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1232","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/realistic_criteria.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1232:_Realistic_Criteria","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat stand talking. White Hat is making a forward gesture with his hand.] White Hat: We shouldn't be exploring other planets until we've solved all our problems here on Earth. Cueball: Sounds reasonable. So, what's the timeline on \"Solving all problems\"? Ten years? Fifteen?\n","explanation":"Many people are opposed to space exploration.  While the overall budget of NASA is not very large compared to the big spenders such as health, education, social services and the military, individual space missions seem very expensive to the general public (typically hundreds of millions of dollars) and the actual benefits derived from them can seem intangible. To put it simply, many people think that the money can be better spent on Earth, where there are real, serious problems that need to be addressed.\nThe decision on how to best allocate our money is not a simple one. White Hat believes we should not explore space until \"we have solved all our problems here on Earth\". This is unreasonable. It is vague, broad and near-impossible to achieve, at least within the span of a human life. The basic problems that face us all - war, disease, hunger, climate change, natural disasters, general malaise - have been with us since the dawn of humanity at least, and will certainly be around for much longer than ten or fifteen years; in fact, it is unclear if some of these problems will ever be solved. As of 2021, eight years after this comic, it seems humanity has rather created more problems than it solved, so it is very unlikely indeed that the goal of ten years could be reasonably achieved.\nCueball, however, is playing the naive engineer, thinking that everything is as easy and simple as the math problems he uses everyday. Alternatively, he could be replying sarcastically, knowing that there is no timeline for solving all of Earth's problems. This serves two purposes: First, it highlights the untenability of White Hat's statement by emphasizing their size, and second, it serves as a punchline, as anyone with a modicum of common sense knows nothing is that simple when humans are involved.\nIn the title text, Randall leans towards fifteen years, as ten doesn't seem sufficient, given all the problems. This also may be said by Cueball, or White Hat replying to Cueball.\n[Cueball and White Hat stand talking. White Hat is making a forward gesture with his hand.] White Hat: We shouldn't be exploring other planets until we've solved all our problems here on Earth. Cueball: Sounds reasonable. So, what's the timeline on \"Solving all problems\"? Ten years? Fifteen?\n"}
{"id":1233,"title":"Relativity","image_title":"Relativity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1233","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/relativity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1233:_Relativity","transcript":"[We see a head and shoulders view of Einstein. He looks pensive.] [Einstein's \"line\" is in a thought bubble.] Einstein: If I were traveling at the speed of light, my butt would look awesome . Einstein was famed for his Gedankedank .\n","explanation":"Gedankedank is a humorous portmanteau of Gedankenexperiment (German for \" thought experiment \") and badonkadonk (slang term for an attractive, round butt ).\nAlbert Einstein often used thought experiments to explore scientific hypotheses too impractical or impossible to actually perform, in order to examine their consequences. Moving close to the speed of light, c , is nigh-impossible with existing technology; and according to Einstein's theory of special relativity accelerating a mass exactly to c is impossible. Einstein is well known not to have cared about his appearance (e.g. his uncombed hair , the tongue photo, etc.) so it is unlikely that he pondered how relativistic velocity would affect the appearance of his butt.\nLorentz contraction is a consequence of special relativity, whereby objects contract in the direction of travel.\nThe appearance of rotation while moving close to the speed of light is known as Terrell rotation . The title text then connects this rotation to the Shakira song \" Hips Don't Lie \".\n[We see a head and shoulders view of Einstein. He looks pensive.] [Einstein's \"line\" is in a thought bubble.] Einstein: If I were traveling at the speed of light, my butt would look awesome . Einstein was famed for his Gedankedank .\n"}
{"id":1234,"title":"Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013)","image_title":"Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1234","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/douglas_engelbart_1925_2013.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1234:_Douglas_Engelbart_(1925-2013)","transcript":"San Francisco, December 9th, 1968: [We see a figure talking into a headset. It's a fair assumption that it's Douglas Engelbart.] Douglas: ...We generated video signals with a cathode ray tube... We have a pointing device we call a \"mouse\"... I can \"copy\" text... ... and we have powerful joint file editing... underneath the file here we can exchange \"direct messages\"... [Douglas continues to narrate. Some music is playing.] Douglas: ...Users can share files... ... files which can encode audio samples, using our \"masking codecs\"... The file you're hearing now is one of my own compositions... Music: I heard there was a secret chord [Douglas continues to narrate.] Douglas: ...And you can superimpose text on the picture of the cat, like so... This cat is saying \"YOLO\", which stands for \"You Only Live Once\"... ...Just a little acronym we thought up...\n","explanation":"The comic describes and references the engineer Douglas Engelbart's computer demonstration The Mother of All Demos in honor of Engelbart, who died on July 2, 2013.\nThe demo is renowned for the numerous technologies Douglas' team introduced, which the comic references before sliding into apocryphal claims. In the first panel he presents various inventions, including the Computer Mouse . The second panel contains the opening lyrics of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah . The \"Secret Chord\" is a reference to the \"Chord Key Set\" that he presented at this demo. This relatively obscure device, essentially a piano with five keys, was meant as an alternative to the well-known keyboard. The way he introduces the song is also a reference to musical demo tapes , in which an artist presents a new piece of original music, tying it back to the Mother of All Demos title. The third is a reference to contemporary internet memes, specifically cat pictures and YOLO .\nThe title text is a reference to recent revelations about spying by the United States National Security Agency , which was making headlines when this comic was published. While it might have seemed like an advantage at the time, in a modern context this aspect of the internet appears disturbing.\nSeveral of the inventions presented by Douglas in 1968 were years ahead of their time, and many would prove to be very influential in the development of personal computing. Some of the technologies demonstrated found success in the following decades, while others did not.\nAlthough the following technologies were shown in the demo, Munro's text does not follow a transcript .\nCathode ray tube\nThe German physicist Ferdinand Braun invented the Cathode ray tube , or CRT, in 1897. The Russian scientist Boris Rosing was the first to use the CRT to receive a video signal. CRT was the most common technology used for television screens and computer monitors in the last century, but has since been succeeded by modern devices such as OLED , plasma display , or the ubiquitous LCD . In the demo, Douglas used CRT monitors to demonstrate video conferencing, as well as collaborative real-time editing.\nComputer mouse\nDouglas did refer to this device as a \"mouse\", but officially it was named the \"X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System\". He filed a patent for this device on June 21, 1967 and received the patent on November 17, 1970. The demo transcript records that Douglas stated: \"I don\u2019t know why we call it a mouse...it started that way and we never did change it.\"\nText movement\/cloning\nThis is well known today as \"cut, copy and paste\". On some early text-based systems, the user moved the cursor to the beginning of the text to be copied, typed <CTRL>+K+B , and then moved the cursor to the end of the copied text and typed <CTRL>+K+E. At the demo, Douglas demonstrated that the same task could be accomplished with the mouse. Today, many people do not use keyboard commands for cut, copy and paste, and instead use the mouse exclusively.\nJoint file editing\nText editors were in the nascent stage of their development in 1968. Douglas demonstrated the first text editor capable of \"joint file editing\". The first successful system to implement joint file editing came 15 years later, when CVS was made available in the middle of the 1980's.\nE-mail\nAlthough not referred to as e-mail, Douglas demonstrated the exchange of \"direct messages\", which fulfills a similar role to modern e-mail. Nowadays, though, the name will be more familiar as the term for Twitter's private messaging function.\nFile sharing\nThe demo also demonstrated the exchange of files between users, paving the way for modern file sharing, and the associated legal and ethical debate.\nAudio codec\nDouglas demonstrated a \"masking codec\" capable of coding and decoding an audio stream. This would eventually lead to the development of the wide variety of modern audio codecs, including the MP3 codec, which was produced by the Fraunhofer Society .\nFrom the bottom of the second panel the comic exaggerates the idea that Douglas introduced the future to a hilarious and ridiculous level.\n\"Hallelujah\"\nThis song was first released by Leonard Cohen in 1984, sixteen years after Douglas's demo.\nImage macros\nA form of image with large text, typically block capitals in the font \"Impact\", superimposed over a photograph, typically for humorous effect.\nLOLcats\nThe most famous of the image macros, featuring cats.\nYOLO\nAs the fictional Douglas states, this is an acronym for \"you only live once\". The phrase has been around for at least a century, but was coined as an acronym around 2011, and became a popular catchphrase following its use in the rap song \"The Motto\" by rapper Drake.\nSan Francisco, December 9th, 1968: [We see a figure talking into a headset. It's a fair assumption that it's Douglas Engelbart.] Douglas: ...We generated video signals with a cathode ray tube... We have a pointing device we call a \"mouse\"... I can \"copy\" text... ... and we have powerful joint file editing... underneath the file here we can exchange \"direct messages\"... [Douglas continues to narrate. Some music is playing.] Douglas: ...Users can share files... ... files which can encode audio samples, using our \"masking codecs\"... The file you're hearing now is one of my own compositions... Music: I heard there was a secret chord [Douglas continues to narrate.] Douglas: ...And you can superimpose text on the picture of the cat, like so... This cat is saying \"YOLO\", which stands for \"You Only Live Once\"... ...Just a little acronym we thought up...\n"}
{"id":1235,"title":"Settled","image_title":"Settled","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1235","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/settled.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1235:_Settled","transcript":"[A graph with percentage from 0 to 100 on the Y-axis with three ticks with labels, top, middle and bottom. The X-axis is a timeline with years with labeled ticks at every five years interval from 1980 but also including a final tick at the year of release, 2013, which is written in a smaller font. The graph shown a red line that starts before 1980 at just above 0% and stays there through the 80s, rises a little past 1990 and reached 1-2% at around 2000, but then it rises rapidly to 10% at 2005, 75% at 2010, and around 90% at 2013, where the rise begins to flatten out asymptotically towards 100\u00a0%. There is a caption for what the Y-axis represents over the flat part of the curve:] Percentage of the US population carrying cameras everywhere they go, every waking moment of their lives: Y-axis labels: 100% 50% 0% X-axis labels: 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2013\n[Caption below the panel:] In the last few years, with very little fanfare, we've conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot.\n","explanation":"Displayed is a timeline chart showing the percentage of people in the United States who have a camera at every moment. Randall refers to the fact that today most people carry embedded camera devices using their cell phones or the even more modern smartphones .\nThe chart shows that after the 1980s the percentage increases rapidly, almost reaching 100% by 2013. The text below the image states that \"We have conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers , lake monsters [such as the Loch Ness Monster ], ghosts , and Bigfoot \", implying that because almost everyone carries a camera the evidence should have arisen by now to settle any question about such phenomena. Of course, such evidence has not arisen \u2014 but that doesn't stop many people from continuing to believe the myths. But at least now it is hard to claim that you saw something, but didn't have a camera to capture it with. If something moved by so fast that you did not have time to take a picture, then it could also be questioned if you have time to see that it was a ghost etc.\nThe title text declares that, in the case of ghosts, only the questions regarding phenomena that can be captured with a camera have been settled - leaving, in other words, ghosts that can't be seen, heard, or felt are essentially indistinguishable from an absence of ghosts. The title text also makes a joke about the ghosts of Ghostbusters , a popular film that featured highly visible and noisy ghosts which left a slime. If such ghosts existed, recording them would be very easy.\n[A graph with percentage from 0 to 100 on the Y-axis with three ticks with labels, top, middle and bottom. The X-axis is a timeline with years with labeled ticks at every five years interval from 1980 but also including a final tick at the year of release, 2013, which is written in a smaller font. The graph shown a red line that starts before 1980 at just above 0% and stays there through the 80s, rises a little past 1990 and reached 1-2% at around 2000, but then it rises rapidly to 10% at 2005, 75% at 2010, and around 90% at 2013, where the rise begins to flatten out asymptotically towards 100\u00a0%. There is a caption for what the Y-axis represents over the flat part of the curve:] Percentage of the US population carrying cameras everywhere they go, every waking moment of their lives: Y-axis labels: 100% 50% 0% X-axis labels: 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2013\n[Caption below the panel:] In the last few years, with very little fanfare, we've conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot.\n"}
{"id":1236,"title":"Seashell","image_title":"Seashell","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1236","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/seashell.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1236:_Seashell","transcript":"[At the top of the panel is an equation showing Bayes' Theorem for the probability that a person is near the ocean given that they just picked up a seashell.]\nP(I'm near the ocean|I picked up a seashell) =\nP(I picked up a seashell|I'm near the ocean)P(I'm near the ocean) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ P(I picked up a seashell)\n[The probability that I'm near the ocean given I picked up a seashell equals the probability I picked up a seashell given I'm near the ocean times the probability I'm near the ocean all divided by the probability I picked up a seashell.]\n[Cueball holds a seashell and stands to the left of the panel, to the right, a few birds are flying around and the sound of a wave crashing against the shore is depicted.] Crashhh Sploosh\nStatistically speaking, if you pick up a seashell and don't hold it to your ear, you can probably hear the ocean.\nNote that while this form of Bayes's theorem is often taught in statistics classes, at least one statistician tries to show in a philosophical way that unconditional probability does not exist, which would make the equation improper as stated.\n","explanation":"This method of relating the probabilities of two events is known as Bayes' Theorem .\nIf you put a seashell up to your ear, you might hear a sound similar to the ocean apparently inside the shell. But the idea that this sound is actually the sound of the sea is just a popular myth: hold only your hands close to your ears and you will hear the same sound, as it is the sound of your blood moving through your blood vessels that causes the sound. The comic, through an application of Bayes' Theorem, points out that most of the time when you pick up a seashell, you are in fact at the beach next to the real ocean, so hearing the ocean at that location is not all that impressive, but it's just real.\nThe equation should, however,  be read as follows: (The probability that I'm near the ocean, given that I picked up a seashell) is equal to (The probability that I picked up a seashell, given that I'm near the ocean) multiplied by (The probability that I'm near the ocean) divided by (The probability that I picked up a seashell).\nThe title text points out that most instances where the author has picked up a seashell have been at the beach, and nearly all of the times where he has picked up a seashell and not put it to his ear have been there.\nThis comic was released late. In the first version, the formula was incorrect, but it has since been corrected.\n[At the top of the panel is an equation showing Bayes' Theorem for the probability that a person is near the ocean given that they just picked up a seashell.]\nP(I'm near the ocean|I picked up a seashell) =\nP(I picked up a seashell|I'm near the ocean)P(I'm near the ocean) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ P(I picked up a seashell)\n[The probability that I'm near the ocean given I picked up a seashell equals the probability I picked up a seashell given I'm near the ocean times the probability I'm near the ocean all divided by the probability I picked up a seashell.]\n[Cueball holds a seashell and stands to the left of the panel, to the right, a few birds are flying around and the sound of a wave crashing against the shore is depicted.] Crashhh Sploosh\nStatistically speaking, if you pick up a seashell and don't hold it to your ear, you can probably hear the ocean.\nNote that while this form of Bayes's theorem is often taught in statistics classes, at least one statistician tries to show in a philosophical way that unconditional probability does not exist, which would make the equation improper as stated.\n"}
{"id":1237,"title":"QR Code","image_title":"QR Code","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1237","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/qr_code.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1237:_QR_Code","transcript":"[A smartphone. On the display, the following text:] \"To continue installing, scan this code. 12 seconds remaining\" [A particularly recursive QR code is displayed on the screen.] [Caption below the panel:] How to freak out a mobile app user.\n","explanation":"QR codes (quick response codes) are a type of 2D barcode that can be scanned using any of several apps on a smartphone. This comic illustrates installation of a new application that requires the smartphone to scan a QR code on its own screen. There is no conceivable purpose for such a step, so it would be completely silly. Even with two mirrors or a front-facing camera and mirror, most smartphones would be unable to simultaneously display the camera feed for the QR scanner and the QR code itself. The only way to do it would be to take a picture of the QR code with a digital camera and then scan the screen of the camera. The \"12 seconds remaining\" part indicates that there is a time limit for this, and thus a quick response is necessary.\nIf scanned, the QR code in the comic reads http:\/\/xkcd.com\/1237\/scan\/ , a link to a nearly identical image, but the line above the QR code reads, \"To continue reading,\" and the caption reads, \"How to trap a webcomic reader in an infinite loop\". The QR code is identical to the previous one. So, if scanned again, it would simply return the scanner to the same image in an \"infinite loop\".\n[A smartphone. On the display, the following text:] \"To continue installing, scan this code. 12 seconds remaining\" [A particularly recursive QR code is displayed on the screen.] [Caption below the panel:] How to freak out a mobile app user.\n"}
{"id":1238,"title":"Enlightenment","image_title":"Enlightenment","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1238","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/enlightenment.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1238:_Enlightenment","transcript":"[The two Internet Bodhisattvas Ponytail and Cueball lecture Megan encircled by a wheel placed upon the ground.] Ponytail: To achieve internet enlightenment , you must free yourself from insecurity. Megan: But insecurity keeps me humble!\n[Ponytail continues talking.] Ponytail: No. Insecurity leads to conceit. Conceit leads to judgment. Ponytail: Judgment leads to being an asshole.\n[A laptop is placed on a stand in front of Megan.] Megan: I'm ready. How do I begin? Ponytail: Type this sentence. [White text on black background.] I heard you're idea's and their definately good.\n[The laptop has been smashed to the floor. Megan is no longer in the circle.] Ponytail: She wasnt ready. Cueball: Its a difficult road.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to a scene one might imagine in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in which Yoda expresses doubt in a young Anakin 's potential to join the Jedi order. Yoda delivers a speech similar to the one that Ponytail gives here, except that the end of the sequence he presents is \" the dark side \" instead of \"being an asshole\". Yoda is ultimately correct; Anakin's fears lead him to join the dark side so that he may keep his loved ones from dying; this is at the expense of the stability of the galaxy, however, and his actions are in vain, as his wife dies nonetheless. The circle on the ground is also taken from the Star Wars scene, and Cueball is presumably in the Mace Windu role.\nHere, Randall compares Anakin's decision to join the dark side to the propensity of many Internet commenters to correct others on their spelling and grammar, and to the extreme prevalence of criticism over commendation or confirmation. Randall's point is that correcting people, like joining the dark side, ultimately stems from insecurity.\nPonytail and Cueball challenge Megan to type the sentence \"I heard you're idea's and their definately good\", which contains four common misspellings ( you 're instead of you r , idea ' s instead of ideas [see greengrocers' apostrophe ], the ir instead of the y're , and defin a tely instead of defin i tely ), a misapplied verb (\"heard\" instead of \"read\"), and a grammatical error ( a missing comma [1] before the word \"and\").\nRegarding the content, this sentence is one that is highly unlikely to be ever read in an internet argument, as almost every time people still have things they claim to know better about.\nMegan thus can't bring herself to typing this sentence, having spent so much time judging others for their trivial errors, even when they're saying helpful things like the sentence in question. Instead, it is strongly implied that she smashes the computer and runs away \u2014 demonstrating the sort of anger that \"Grammar Nazis\" and internet wiseacres like her can feel about punctuation and spelling errors, and about content-related errors respectively. Cueball and Ponytail remark on this, both failing to use apostrophes .\nThe title text refers to Terry Pratchett 's novel Equal Rites , in which the characters discover that the most powerful magic is not using magic \u2014 with the distinction that not using magic because you don't know how is not the same as choosing to refrain from using magic when you do know how. Randall is comparing this with use or misuse of the rules of Standard English: not even knowing the rules is not admirable, whereas knowing the rules but choosing to disregard them is. There is also a double meaning - not writing anything at all is in fact \"saying nothing\".\n[The two Internet Bodhisattvas Ponytail and Cueball lecture Megan encircled by a wheel placed upon the ground.] Ponytail: To achieve internet enlightenment , you must free yourself from insecurity. Megan: But insecurity keeps me humble!\n[Ponytail continues talking.] Ponytail: No. Insecurity leads to conceit. Conceit leads to judgment. Ponytail: Judgment leads to being an asshole.\n[A laptop is placed on a stand in front of Megan.] Megan: I'm ready. How do I begin? Ponytail: Type this sentence. [White text on black background.] I heard you're idea's and their definately good.\n[The laptop has been smashed to the floor. Megan is no longer in the circle.] Ponytail: She wasnt ready. Cueball: Its a difficult road.\n"}
{"id":1239,"title":"Social Media","image_title":"Social Media","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1239","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/social_media.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1239:_Social_Media","transcript":"[Cueball heads a press conference.] Cueball: NASA has confirmed that the asteroid is heading directly for us. Cueball: ...Yes, a question? Reporter 1: What role has social media played in this asteroid's orbit? Cueball: * sigh * Reporter 2: Has Twitter changed the way we respond to asteroid threats? Cueball: Well, it's made the press conference questions stupider. Reporter 3: Fascinating! Reporter 4: What about Facebook?\n","explanation":"This comic parodies how journalists tend to focus on social networking. Specifically in the case of revolutions, social media is given a lot of weight, even in countries with limited internet access. A direct parallel is made to the so-called Twitter Revolutions .\nOn Twitter you can send text messages with a maximum of 280 characters (140 at the time of writing). This means that there could not be much content in a single post, but often many people follow the people doing these tweets . People who are not on social media tend to react like Cueball and come to the conclusion that Twitter makes press coverage more stupid, just because those messages lack much detail. Cueball is also surprised about the stupidity of trying to link social media to the orbit of the asteroid \u2014 social media has no impact on the orbit of any space objects. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text continues the joke. The negativity on Twitter concerning an Earth-bound asteroid has nothing to do with the press conference that announced it but rather with the negativity of wiping out life on earth in general. Again, journalists give undue weight to social media.\nIt's simply that \"How has Twitter affected this\" has become a standard question for journalists, posed in complete disregard of the actual event.\n[Cueball heads a press conference.] Cueball: NASA has confirmed that the asteroid is heading directly for us. Cueball: ...Yes, a question? Reporter 1: What role has social media played in this asteroid's orbit? Cueball: * sigh * Reporter 2: Has Twitter changed the way we respond to asteroid threats? Cueball: Well, it's made the press conference questions stupider. Reporter 3: Fascinating! Reporter 4: What about Facebook?\n"}
{"id":1240,"title":"Quantum Mechanics","image_title":"Quantum Mechanics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1240","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/quantum_mechanics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1240:_Quantum_Mechanics","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail stand facing each other, talking. Cueball has a small dog on a leash.] Cueball: But dogs can observe the world, which means that according to quantum mechanics they must have souls.\n[Caption below the frame:] Protip : You can safely ignore any sentence that includes the phrase \"According to quantum mechanics\".\nAnyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.\n","explanation":"This comic plays with the fact that quantum mechanics is a very complex subject that is frequently misapplied by laymen. Many of the phenomena studied in quantum mechanics are contrary to common sense and can only be expressed in complex mathematics. Yet, since the field is fundamental to our understanding of reality, it is commonly cited to support broad sweeping philosophical generalizations.\nThe phrase \u201caccording to quantum mechanics\u201d betrays the speaker's lack of knowledge about the subject. To a physicist, it is almost as vague as \u201caccording to physics\u201d. Somebody who understands the subject would use a more precise term, such as \u201caccording to the uncertainty principle\u201d or \u201caccording to a paper by such-and-such.\u201d\nCueball explains to Ponytail that dogs must have souls . This would be against the doctrine of certain religions, including some sects of Christianity, which teach that only humans have souls. The question of whether animals have souls comes up for many reasons in theological and philosophical discussions. One major one is the wish of many dog owners to meet their pets in Heaven . For this to come to pass, it would be necessary for dogs not only to have souls, but also immortal souls. This distinction comes up in Catholicism, for example, where the commonly taught doctrine, as in Aquinas, S.C.G. II, C. 82 , is that, while animals do have souls, their souls are mortal, and therefore die with their bodies. In this case, animals cannot enter Heaven, Hell , or Purgatory .\nCueball, however, uses quantum mechanics as an argument, even though quantum mechanics is only applicable on the atomic scale and not on macroscopic objects like animals. It also only applies to matter and energy, and not to souls, which are held by most doctrines to be immaterial. His argument, however, is a reference to the concept of an ' observer ' in quantum physics, as well as theories about the collapse of wave functions . It should also be noted that science does not equate the ability to observe the world and possession of a soul, and that the latter is merely a theological concept, not used in science and not proven to exist in real world.\nThe vast majority of people do not have a sufficient understanding of quantum mechanics to judge whether Cueball's statement is correct. Nevertheless, Randall's message is: you don't need to understand quantum mechanics to judge the statement. No matter what the sentence is, it is almost certainly incorrect, so \u201cyou can safely ignore\u201d it.\nThe title text refers to \u201cscience assertions\u201d \u2014 that is, claims about scientific knowledge \u2014 that include the words \u201cquantum mechanics\u201d. If \u201cquantum mechanics\u201d is the most complicated term in the sentence, then the speaker probably does not know what they are talking about. If a scientist is correctly applying quantum mechanics, they will use more specific (and hence more complicated) language.\n[Cueball and Ponytail stand facing each other, talking. Cueball has a small dog on a leash.] Cueball: But dogs can observe the world, which means that according to quantum mechanics they must have souls.\n[Caption below the frame:] Protip : You can safely ignore any sentence that includes the phrase \"According to quantum mechanics\".\nAnyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.\n"}
{"id":1241,"title":"Annoying Ringtone Champion","image_title":"Annoying Ringtone Champion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1241","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/annoying_ringtone_champion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1241:_Annoying_Ringtone_Champion","transcript":"[At the top of the frame is an annoying humming tone shown. Cueball is cringing while raising his arms above his head. Black Hat pulls out his phone looking at it.] Ringtone: h MM M MM M M M M M MM MM M MMM Cueball: Augh! Black Hat: Oh, I've gotta take this.\n[Caption below the frame:] By unanimous decision, the winner of the Awful Ringtone Championship is \"the sound a mosquito makes as it buzzes past your ear\".\n","explanation":"This comic satirizes the large variety of ringtones that may be used on their cell phones. While many are simply tunes that personalize a user's phone, some will use ringtones that resemble everyday sounds, such as doorbells, coughing, alarm noises, or in this case, the buzzing of a mosquito. Although rather innocuous, these ringtones can get very annoying to some people, which is what this comic is getting at.\nHere, Black Hat has set his ringtone to \"The sound a mosquito makes as it buzzes past your ear\", the winner of the \"Awful Ringtone Championship\". Cueball , hearing the sound, cries out and swats the air around his head, mistaking the ringtone for an actual mosquito buzzing past his ear. In addition to being an extremely unpleasant sound, it could also cause confusion to others, as shown in the comic, thus being unanimously decided as the most annoying ringtone. Black Hat 's response is likely a pun meaning both \"Oh, I've got to take this [call]\" (like someone who has been interrupted by a phone call) and need to leave and respond and \"Oh, I've got to take this [competition]\" since the ringtone is so annoying.\nThe title text refers to four other annoying ringtones, apparently none of which were deemed as annoying as a mosquito buzzing:\n[At the top of the frame is an annoying humming tone shown. Cueball is cringing while raising his arms above his head. Black Hat pulls out his phone looking at it.] Ringtone: h MM M MM M M M M M MM MM M MMM Cueball: Augh! Black Hat: Oh, I've gotta take this.\n[Caption below the frame:] By unanimous decision, the winner of the Awful Ringtone Championship is \"the sound a mosquito makes as it buzzes past your ear\".\n"}
{"id":1242,"title":"Scary Names","image_title":"Scary Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1242","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scary_names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1242:_Scary_Names","transcript":"[A scatter-plot, with 12 labeled dots. Both axis are labeled but neither has an arrow at its end. The dots are scattered from left to right and top to bottom. Below all labels are given, first for the axis, and then for each dot in approximately normal reading order, left to right top to bottom, but in the order it would make sense to read them:] Y-axis: Scariness of name X-axis: Scariness of thing name refers to\n[Top left]: Chernobyl packet [Top halfway right]: Kessler syndrome [Top three quarters towards right]: Demon core [Top right]: Flesh-eating bacteria [A third down left]: Bomb calorimeter [Halfway  down three quarters towards right]: Bird flu [Halfway  down right]: Nuclear football [Dead center]: Mustard gas [Just below and right of center]: Superbug [Bottom halfway right]: Soil liquefaction [A third up three quarters towards right ]: Criticality incident [Very bottom two-thirds to the right]: Grey goo\n","explanation":"This chart humorously explores how things are often named colloquially and without regard to accuracy in correlating actual scariness with apparent scariness. It is interesting to note how people react to the items near the bottom right of the chart \"scary things with not-very-scary names\" when compared to how they may react to items in the upper left \"not-very-scary things with scary names\". Some of the entries on the chart are especially interesting examples considering that portions of the names that are associated with significant historical or cultural events and themes. i.e. Chernobyl Packet, Demon Core. All items are described in the table below including the title text on Helvetica Scenario.\nOn the chart, things toward the right are scary\/dangerous\/very bad, while things toward the top sound scary without necessarily being scary.\nNote that Randall uses similar diagrams in both 388: Fuck Grapefruit , 1501: Mysteries and 2466: In Your Classroom , which also contain different items. The first two also have an extra point, and the last two extra points mentioned in the title text. Only the first and the last comics points are also off the chart, whereas for the second the description of the point is too long to fit on the chart. Extra info outside the chart is also used in the title text of 1785: Wifi , but this is a line graph.\n[A scatter-plot, with 12 labeled dots. Both axis are labeled but neither has an arrow at its end. The dots are scattered from left to right and top to bottom. Below all labels are given, first for the axis, and then for each dot in approximately normal reading order, left to right top to bottom, but in the order it would make sense to read them:] Y-axis: Scariness of name X-axis: Scariness of thing name refers to\n[Top left]: Chernobyl packet [Top halfway right]: Kessler syndrome [Top three quarters towards right]: Demon core [Top right]: Flesh-eating bacteria [A third down left]: Bomb calorimeter [Halfway  down three quarters towards right]: Bird flu [Halfway  down right]: Nuclear football [Dead center]: Mustard gas [Just below and right of center]: Superbug [Bottom halfway right]: Soil liquefaction [A third up three quarters towards right ]: Criticality incident [Very bottom two-thirds to the right]: Grey goo\n"}
{"id":1243,"title":"Snare","image_title":"Snare","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1243","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snare.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1243:_Snare","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Black Hat. Black Hat is using a laptop.] Cueball: They said on the news that they found a giant ring lying in a field outside Chicago. Strung with some kind of superstrong mesh. Black Hat: Mhm? Cueball: Then they found a 260 mile long shaft connected to the ring, running from Chicago to St. Louis. In St. Louis they found a gigantic winch. Black Hat: Did they. Cueball: It sounds kind of like... Cueball: ...a butterfly net. Cueball: ...are you planning on catching the International Space Station? Black Hat: I'm planning to catch an international space station. Black Hat: Not sayin' which.\n","explanation":"This comic paints another one of Black Hat 's evil activities as an unlikely supervillain.\nAs Cueball states, there have been some strange discoveries in the news including a gigantic ring strung with superstrong mesh, a long pole, and a gigantic winch . As Cueball outlines these items, Black Hat responds casually to each detail, seeming preoccupied with his computer. Cueball realizes that the pole, ring and net combination sounds like a butterfly net , albeit one of immense size. Given Black Hat's history of nefarious activities and the specific length of the pole (260 miles or 420 km, the same as the height of the International Space Station's orbit above Earth), Cueball infers and then accuses Black Hat of wanting to catch the International Space Station (ISS) by winching the pole up so that the Space Station orbit leads it to fly into the net, therefore catching it.\nBlack Hat does not deny the charge, but he dissimulates by saying it is not necessarily the ISS that he intends to catch, but just an international space station.  While his statement implies that it could be targeted at some other international space station, it is transparently obvious which one he is targeting since there's only one international space station in existence. [ citation needed ] Any international space station that he can catch must be the ISS. (As for non-international space stations, the only one in orbit at the time of the comic\u2019s publication was the Chinese Tiangong-1 , which has since deorbited.)\nThe title text is a reference to how butterfly collections are usually presented. The insects are mounted in glass display cases, each skewered through the body with a pin, and labeled. The text is spoken by Black Hat, who again tries to imply that he is not to blame, as it may not be meant for his collection of satellites. Perhaps he is just catching a space station for a friend.\nThe real buildings may belong to these structures:\n[Cueball is talking to Black Hat. Black Hat is using a laptop.] Cueball: They said on the news that they found a giant ring lying in a field outside Chicago. Strung with some kind of superstrong mesh. Black Hat: Mhm? Cueball: Then they found a 260 mile long shaft connected to the ring, running from Chicago to St. Louis. In St. Louis they found a gigantic winch. Black Hat: Did they. Cueball: It sounds kind of like... Cueball: ...a butterfly net. Cueball: ...are you planning on catching the International Space Station? Black Hat: I'm planning to catch an international space station. Black Hat: Not sayin' which.\n"}
{"id":1244,"title":"Six Words","image_title":"Six Words","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1244","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/six_words.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1244:_Six_Words","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] The six words you never say at NASA:\n[A diagram shows a possible trajectory path for a space probe starting at Earth and involving two slingshots around two other planets, and finally the Sun. There is a title above and a label beneath the diagram. The diagram is being presented by Cueball in front of three other Cueball-like guys. Behind Cueball Ponytail appears to be taken by surprise by his six words, and holds her hand to her mouth.] Title: Proposal: Label: Oberth Kuiper Maneuver\nCueball: And besides\u2014 Cueball: It works in Kerbal Space Program.\n","explanation":"The six words are: \"It works in Kerbal Space Program \".\nThe Kuiper Belt is a region of the outer Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune consisting of numerous small icy bodies, including the dwarf planets Pluto and Eris . An Oberth maneuver is a spaceflight maneuver, specifically an engine burn performed during the flyby of a celestial body. The point of this is to optimize usable energy, because rocket burns are more effective to perform at high speeds than at low speeds. The more massive the body and the lower the altitude, the higher the flyby speed will be, and the greater the performance gain due to the Oberth effect. The theoretical way to use rocket fuel most efficiently is therefore to execute the burn during a flyby of the most massive celestial body available, as close as possible.\nCueball is proposing to implement an \"Oberth Kuiper Maneuver\", and the proposal diagram shows the spacecraft using gravity assists to travel first towards (presumably) Venus for a first boost, then towards Jupiter for another swing by, aiming it back towards the Sun , the most massive Solar System body, to perform an Oberth maneuver at the point of closest approach, as indicated by a small dot along the spacecraft trajectory. It is possible that the diagram might only be a simplified outline of a more complex flight plan. For example, the trajectory from Earth to Venus would require two separate burns in deep space. The first burn would occur immediately after escaping Earth's sphere of influence. The second burn would occur about halfway to Venus. Alternatively, Cueball may have gotten it wrong, or Randall may simply not have concerned himself with such things for the purpose of a webcomic sketch.\nAn Oberth maneuver in the close vicinity of the Sun, while theoretically possible and extraordinarily effective at the speeds the spacecraft would reach, would however be very difficult to carry out in real life, because the neighborhood of the Sun is an extremely hostile environment [ citation needed ] and the spacecraft could be incinerated during a too-close flyby.\nCueball's argument for why the maneuver will work in real life is that it works in Kerbal Space Program (KSP), a sandbox spaceflight simulator game. While KSP does simulate a lot of the physics of space flight, it is (necessarily) simplistic in its modeling of orbital dynamics. For example, KSP does not do any N-body simulations , so if one were flying a rocket from Earth to the moon, in the game the rocket would only be affected by Earth's gravity until it reaches a certain point where it will only be affected by the moon's gravity, unlike in real life where the rocket would feel the effects of both celestial bodies at all times. Therefore, orbits modeled using KSP would poorly reflect the actual orbital behavior of a probe traveling through the solar system on a multi-year mission involving multiple fly-by maneuvers.\nAnother reason why using KSP would not inspire confidence is that many players playing the game use a 'trial-and-error' method, field testing designs and inevitably either crashing them or running out of fuel stranding the craft in deep space. Inside a game this is not a major issue as one can simply reload an earlier save with no repurcussions, but in real life this would result in expensive costs constructing new spacecraft and even loss of human life, which NASA would likely frown on.\nThe humor in referencing KSP in the comic lies in using a simple game program to simulate complex space missions which in reality take a great number of experts to plan and implement. Fly-by maneuvers, used to minimize the fuel needed to reach a destination, need to be very carefully timed - often to within seconds - so the use of Kerbal Space Program to simulate them isn't a good enough argument for NASA to agree to implement the proposal, and implies simplistic thinking on the part of the proposer; therefore one should not say it at NASA.\nThe title text refers to Orbiter , which is another spaceflight simulator program. The title text suggests that the argument doesn't work for NASA, not because it's not scientifically sound, but because NASA relies on the Orbiter simulator rather than the Kerbal simulator (although the proposed maneuver would appear to work in both).\n[Caption above the frame:] The six words you never say at NASA:\n[A diagram shows a possible trajectory path for a space probe starting at Earth and involving two slingshots around two other planets, and finally the Sun. There is a title above and a label beneath the diagram. The diagram is being presented by Cueball in front of three other Cueball-like guys. Behind Cueball Ponytail appears to be taken by surprise by his six words, and holds her hand to her mouth.] Title: Proposal: Label: Oberth Kuiper Maneuver\nCueball: And besides\u2014 Cueball: It works in Kerbal Space Program.\n"}
{"id":1245,"title":"10-Day Forecast","image_title":"10-Day Forecast","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1245","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/10_day_forecast.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1245:_10-Day_Forecast","transcript":"[Cueball sits behind a computer desk when Megan calls to him.] Megan (off-panel): Is it going to rain this weekend? I have a thing. Cueball: Lemme check. *type type* Cueball: ...Uhh. What?\n[A caption is written above ten small panels in two rows. In each panel is an indication of the weather. Below each panel a label tells which day it is referring too.] Your 10-day forecast: [A yellow sun.] Today [Two gray clouds in front of the sun.] Tomorrow [Thunderstorms, with three gray clouds and a single lightning bolt.] Friday [Extreme thunderstorms with many large gray clouds and seven lightning bolts] Saturday [A swarm of insects, with one large black one close by and seven others close enough to discern details. The rest of the swarm is grayed out and just shown as small dots behind these other eight insects.] Sunday [Images of distorted people with very long legs. One Megan, one Cueball and someone in the background.] Monday [A humanoid figure with two large horns or a winged helmet silhouetted against a bleak red background. The ground beneath the figure is black.] Tuesday [Grey static] Tuesday [Black screen] Tuesday [Black screen] Tuesday\n[Megan has entered the panel and stands behind Cueball looking at his laptop over his shoulder. She points to the screen. Cueball holds his hand to his chest.] Megan: ...Oh! You typed a minus sign in the ZIP code. The negative ZIP codes are all like that. Cueball: Let's never move there.\n","explanation":"The 10-day forecast is a prediction of the weather extending 10 days into the future (with the accuracy decreasing exponentially). However, when Cueball checks the forecast for his local area, it apparently predicts progressively extreme lightning storms, a plague of insects which appear to be locusts, what appears to be The Rapture , and the appearance of a demon-like creature. Upon the arrival of the creature (or perhaps The Antichrist , Woden , or Mothra ) appearing, the forecast falls into static and nothingness with the day stuck on Tuesday, meaning that the world has ended.\nWhen asked about this, Megan casually explains that Cueball put a minus (-) sign in front of his ZIP code. A ZIP code is a numeric postal code used in the United States, but many more countries use similar systems. As ZIP codes are tied to a geographic location, it is also often used to specify a local region for the purposes of weather reports.\nMany computer systems that let the user write in a number only work with certain numbers (such as positive numbers). Numbers the system is not designed to work with, such as negative numbers, may lead to errors or unpredictable behavior (or, more often, the system will just refuse to proceed until you input a valid number). When this happens with the number of a video game level, it can result in data of another type being loaded, creating a level with a corrupted or physically-impossible landscape; this is sometimes known as a \" Minus World \".\nMegan states that you get this result for any negative zip code. This may be an error deliberately put in by the programmers creating the system, to freak out any people who make a mistake.\nCueball, on the other hand reacts as if this negative zip code actually represents an actual geographical location, or a real-life Minus World, and that the weather forecaster is indeed showing an accurate forecast for the (corrupted) area. Since Megan stated that the forecast is always like that for these zip code Cueball expresses that he would never move there.\nIn the title text, Megan agrees with Cueball's desire not to move to that ZIP code area, the punchline being that her reason isn't to avoid the apocalypse, but to retain access to Amazon Prime, which shows that her priorities are amusingly bizarre. The service Amazon Prime is provided by Amazon , where the user pays a flat annual fee and in exchange they get access a number of \"enhanced\" Amazon services, including free two-day shipping, free access to a library of streaming videos, and the ability to borrow books.\nLater, a Five-Day Forecast was also made into a comic.\n[Cueball sits behind a computer desk when Megan calls to him.] Megan (off-panel): Is it going to rain this weekend? I have a thing. Cueball: Lemme check. *type type* Cueball: ...Uhh. What?\n[A caption is written above ten small panels in two rows. In each panel is an indication of the weather. Below each panel a label tells which day it is referring too.] Your 10-day forecast: [A yellow sun.] Today [Two gray clouds in front of the sun.] Tomorrow [Thunderstorms, with three gray clouds and a single lightning bolt.] Friday [Extreme thunderstorms with many large gray clouds and seven lightning bolts] Saturday [A swarm of insects, with one large black one close by and seven others close enough to discern details. The rest of the swarm is grayed out and just shown as small dots behind these other eight insects.] Sunday [Images of distorted people with very long legs. One Megan, one Cueball and someone in the background.] Monday [A humanoid figure with two large horns or a winged helmet silhouetted against a bleak red background. The ground beneath the figure is black.] Tuesday [Grey static] Tuesday [Black screen] Tuesday [Black screen] Tuesday\n[Megan has entered the panel and stands behind Cueball looking at his laptop over his shoulder. She points to the screen. Cueball holds his hand to his chest.] Megan: ...Oh! You typed a minus sign in the ZIP code. The negative ZIP codes are all like that. Cueball: Let's never move there.\n"}
{"id":1246,"title":"Pale Blue Dot","image_title":"Pale Blue Dot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1246","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pale_blue_dot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1246:_Pale_Blue_Dot","transcript":"[Cueball stands in front of a large gray picture of the Pale Blue Dot . (There is no evidence that there is any blue in this comic). He holds up a stick with one hand towards it. He is interrupted by several hecklers from off-panel.] Cueball: Consider this Pale Blue Dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. Everyone you love, every human being who ever was, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived out their lives on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. All our- Heckler 1 (off panel): I think that's a stuck pixel. We're the speck on the left. Cueball: ...Ok, this Pale Blue Dot is everything you- Heckler 2 (off panel): No, you were right before. That one is earth. Cueball: Look, it doesn't matter! Heckler 3 (off panel): I knew it! Heckler 4 (off panel): I think this is just a lens cap picture.\n","explanation":"The Pale Blue Dot is a picture of the Earth taken in the year 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe at a distance about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles). It was part of the Family Portrait , a series of images of the entire Solar System from beyond it.\nThe picture was taken at the request of Carl Sagan , a well known space scientist at that time. In 1994 Sagan wrote the book \" Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space \" inspired by this picture. In the book, Sagan waxed eloquent about the picture in a widely quoted passage. The complete passage can be found in Wikiquote , and you can hear Carl Sagan himself reciting it in this YouTube video .\nCueball quotes from a condensed version of this passage until he is interrupted by several Hecklers who begins  an argument over which speck in the picture is actually the Earth. Then, when Cueball cries out in exasperation that it doesn't matter, one heckler takes it the wrong way and points out that he just said that the picture doesn't matter. This pokes fun at the fact that the Pale Blue Dot picture has very little to no visual attractiveness, apart from the intellectual interest relying on the viewer's knowledge that the central speck is actually our home planet, Earth, seen from a very great distance.\nThe first two sentences of the title text are also a quotation from Sagan's paean to the Pale Blue Dot picture, but then the text veers humorously into non-scientific mysticism that starkly contrasts with the attitude and intent of the original work.\nThe title text evokes Cosmicism , a philosophy developed and exemplified by the fictional Cthulhu Mythos . This Mythos is expounded in fantasy\/horror works of H.P. Lovecraft and, later, August Derleth, and features a cosmology in which humanity is depicted as inconsequential within a greater existence that is unknowable and frightening. Cosmicism asserts that humanity is doomed to death and destruction through the workings of vastly more powerful supernatural forces way beyond our understanding. There are many instances in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft of factions that embrace the destruction of humanity and actively work towards bringing about that end through the invocation of the unknowable and powerful forces that supporters of Cosmicism believe surround everything.\nThe text also references Ba'al , originally a Semitic deity that has been since associated with demonic or otherwise evil forces. The name Ba'al, and other variants of the same, has been included in many other fictional works often as a villain or antagonist. For example, the fictional System Lord Ba'al from the television show Stargate . The title text supplants all of the supernatural forces associated with Cosmicism in the works of other authors with Ba'al. Cueball, who continues his discourse in the title text, may be acting as a Cosmicist and is calling on a Congress, to which he is speaking, to fund the space exploration program as a means to join with Ba'al, the Eater of Souls. The fact that a Ba'al cultist would be speaking in front of a government body in such a manner is absurd [ citation needed ] and thus hilarious.\nBa'al, the Eater of Souls (sometimes as Ba'al the soul eater) has been mentioned later in 1419: On the Phone and 1638: Backslashes .\n[Cueball stands in front of a large gray picture of the Pale Blue Dot . (There is no evidence that there is any blue in this comic). He holds up a stick with one hand towards it. He is interrupted by several hecklers from off-panel.] Cueball: Consider this Pale Blue Dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. Everyone you love, every human being who ever was, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived out their lives on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. All our- Heckler 1 (off panel): I think that's a stuck pixel. We're the speck on the left. Cueball: ...Ok, this Pale Blue Dot is everything you- Heckler 2 (off panel): No, you were right before. That one is earth. Cueball: Look, it doesn't matter! Heckler 3 (off panel): I knew it! Heckler 4 (off panel): I think this is just a lens cap picture.\n"}
{"id":1247,"title":"The Mother of All Suspicious Files","image_title":"The Mother of All Suspicious Files","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1247","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_mother_of_all_suspicious_files.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1247:_The_Mother_of_All_Suspicious_Files","transcript":"[Browser download warning box containing the following text.] WARNING! This type of file can harm your computer! Are you sure you want to download: http:\/\/65.222.202.53\/~TILDE\/PUB\/CIA-BIN\/ETC\/INIT.DLL?FILE=__AUTOEXEC.BAT.MY%20OSX%20DOCUMENTS-INSTALL.EXE.RAR.INI.TAR.DO\u00c7X.PHPHPHP.XHTML.TML.XTL.TXXT.0DAY.HACK.ERS_(1995)_BLURAY_CAM-XVID.EXE.TAR.[SCR].LISP.MSI.LNK.ZDA.GNN.WRBT.OBJ.O.H.SWF.DPKG.APP.ZIP.TAR.TAR.CO.GZ.A.OUT.EXE [Cancel and Save buttons (Save button disabled)]\n","explanation":"The save dialog box shows a download from the address http:\/\/65.222.202.53 , an IP address that hosted JavaScript malware during a recent attack on the Tor anonymity network , with a very long file title. Many of the extensions used inside there indicate executable code; multiple file extensions are sometimes used to disguise a trojan program as a document.\nYou can also see common download syntax for a pirated movie, Hackers , likely included to appear malicious to anyone skimming but is actually a movie about hackers, making it a benign reference rather than malicious. It is described as \" _BLURAY_CAM \", which contradicts itself (\" _BLURAY \" would imply it was ripped from a copy on Blu-ray Disc , while \" _CAM \" would mean it was copied by pointing a camera at the screen in the cinema). \" _BLURAY_CAM \" would probably indicate a search-keyword-stuffed fake copy; fake pirated media often contain viruses (although this is more likely to be a problem with newer media, before the first real pirated copy appears).\nThe URL contains the path \" ~tilde\/pub\/cia-bin\/etc \". The first part is a public folder of a user named \"tilde\" (which is also the name for the ~ symbol ), \" cgi-bin \" is a common folder on a web server for server-side executables ( Randall changes the name to \" cia -bin \"), and \" etc \" is a standard folder for configuration files \u2013 normally never accessible through a web server. The program \"init.dll\" isn't executable at all, it's a Windows Dynamic Link Library which can't be run standalone, and is rarely referenced in URLs (even though such syntax is still being employed, even on reputable websites (Google search) or here at eBay , indicating the webserver is a Microsoft ASP server). The question mark indicates the start of a parameter list, and in this case we have only one named \" FILE \".\nThe \"Save\" button is greyed out, suggesting that it is disabled; you can click only the \"Cancel\" button. For security reasons, some browsers (like Firefox) disable the \"Save\" button for a few seconds before enabling it. This prevents users from accidentally accepting a download while entering input, like a malicious CAPTCHA.\nThe complete content sent to the server, starting with \" \/~tilde... \" and ending with \" ...out.exe \", is exactly 256 characters long. On HTML 3 specifications you have a limitation of 1024 characters, whereas later HTML specifications don't have this limit; it just depends on the web server's capabilities. But posting parameters directly at the URL is still a worse choice.\nThe content of the parameter is shown here:\nThe title text suggests changing from http to https , as if encrypting a suspicious file before downloading it is somehow better than downloading it unencrypted. http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and https (Hypertext Transfer Protocol \u2013 Secure) are the two common protocols for getting web pages and web downloads. http is the simple download, whereas https adds an SSL encryption layer so the item being downloaded cannot be viewed unencrypted by anyone except the end recipient. Changing http to https is a common suggestion to improve security when browsing the web from an insecure network (such as a public WiFi hotspot) to avoid surveillance or hijacking to a malicious website; Google automatically switches to https for all mail accounts and is starting to do so with searches. The end recipient will still get whatever nasties were in the original, however \u2014 encrypting it doesn't change the content at all.\nThe IP address referenced in the comic, 65.222.202.53 , was, at the time this article was authored, being used by the shellcode of a JavaScript zero-day exploit for the Tor Browser Bundle being run by the FBI to phone home over the clearnet [1] and deanonymize visitors to websites on Freedom Hosting that are serving child pornography. [2]\nAs the last extension in the file is .exe, a Windows computer would run the file like an application. Usually, it is not safe to run unknown .exe files.\n[Browser download warning box containing the following text.] WARNING! This type of file can harm your computer! Are you sure you want to download: http:\/\/65.222.202.53\/~TILDE\/PUB\/CIA-BIN\/ETC\/INIT.DLL?FILE=__AUTOEXEC.BAT.MY%20OSX%20DOCUMENTS-INSTALL.EXE.RAR.INI.TAR.DO\u00c7X.PHPHPHP.XHTML.TML.XTL.TXXT.0DAY.HACK.ERS_(1995)_BLURAY_CAM-XVID.EXE.TAR.[SCR].LISP.MSI.LNK.ZDA.GNN.WRBT.OBJ.O.H.SWF.DPKG.APP.ZIP.TAR.TAR.CO.GZ.A.OUT.EXE [Cancel and Save buttons (Save button disabled)]\n"}
{"id":1248,"title":"Sphere","image_title":"Sphere","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1248","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sphere.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1248:_Sphere","transcript":"Cueball: How are you? Megan: Trapped on the surface of a sphere. [A beat.] Cueball: That astronomy class has made you suck at small talk. Megan: The universe is too big for small talk.\n","explanation":"Megan has taken or visited an astronomy class and has become more conscious and aware about the colossal size of the universe, and our own minuscule place in it. She ponders that she can only observe and learn about the rest of the universe; she cannot explore it directly as she is trapped, probably by the constraints of our gravity well, time and human technology.\nThe sphere she mentions here is the Earth , whose surface is roughly spherical in shape. The figure of the Earth is an irregular shape which can be better approximated as an oblate spheroid , or more specifically as a geoid .\nHer disinclination to make \" small talk \" with Cueball is a reference to how astronomers and people of other 'big-science' specializations can be so focused on their topic that they become disconnected from the simple details of everyday life. This has also been touched upon in 663: Sagan-Man and 786: Exoplanets .\nThe concept of \"small talk\", which is usually used as a colloquial term meaning insignificant chatter with others, is taken quite literally by Megan to be small in size. The word itself is juxtaposed with the size of the universe shortly after, which also ties into her previous sentence of being trapped on a \"sphere\". It seems that astronomy, which deals with ideas of a vastly large scale, has expanded Megan's views to the point where she feels insignificant herself, as well as other matters that concern her. Her gaze outwards also reinforces this suggestion, especially during her conversation with Cueball. She does not engage in eye-to-eye contact, instead replying without looking directly at him. This implies that she is disregarding the current conversation as insignificant as well, which furthers the assumption of Megan's expanded scope of viewpoint.\nThe title text is a continuation of this theme. The name \"Society of Astronomers Trapped on the Surface of a Sphere\" or, \"SATSS\", follows a common naming practice for scientific communities, Society, or Association, or Union of <Scientists> of <Country, Nationality, or What Ever>.\nCueball: How are you? Megan: Trapped on the surface of a sphere. [A beat.] Cueball: That astronomy class has made you suck at small talk. Megan: The universe is too big for small talk.\n"}
{"id":1249,"title":"Meteor Showers","image_title":"Meteor Showers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1249","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meteor_showers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1249:_Meteor_Showers","transcript":"[A list of 16 meteor showers, with a caption above, labels on the three columns and then every other row in gray, beginning with a gray row beneath the line below the column labels.]\nThe xkcd guide to meteor showers Name Peak Notes Quadrantids January 4 th Bring pets inside during peak activity Tricuspids January 21 st Not viewable in region 2 countries Centaurids February 6 th Too faint to see without going outside Beta Aquariids February 10 th Inverted shower converges toward Aquarius instead of radiating away Chelyabids February 15 th Only one meteor per shower, but it's big. Lyrids April 22 nd Meteors sometimes scream Daytime Zeta Perseids June 9 th Likely a NASA hoax June Bo\u00f6tids June 27 th 50\/50 mix of meteors and shooting stars Southern Delta Aquariids July 19 th Meteors very bright, but stationary Dromaeosaurids July 22 nd Fast, highly intelligent, can open doors Perseids August 12 th Instead of falling from sky, meteors erupt from ground Tau Pyramids August 15 th Visible even when eyes are closed Draconids October 8 th Very slow, but follow you if you run Orionids October 21 st Entire shower happens at once Leonids November 17 th In 1966, unusually active Leonid shower killed God Geminids December 13 th Can be deflected with tennis rackets\n","explanation":"This comic spoofs the way that astronomical events are often reported in the mass media \u2014 events are often tagged with undeserved superlatives or described as being more dramatic than they actually are. In some cases, outright misinformation is spread. This phenomenon occurs in part by the result of over-eager scientists, but mostly because of journalists with no deeper knowledge on the subject they write about.\nMeteor showers typically occur regularly each year. It always happens at the same days because the Earth is crossing the dust path of a particular comet . Sometimes meteor showers are in fact likely to be relatively spectacular when the peak of the shower occurs while your part of the world is in darkness and there is little moonlight. However, even in these cases it must be understood that there is nothing unusual about the meteor shower itself. The shower consists of small particles about one millimeter in diameter. Only their high speed lets them produce enough light to be visible from Earth's surface. The names of the showers refer to the constellation from which they appear to radiate.\nMost of the meteor showers listed in the comic are real, but some are made up (and indicated as such below).\nWhile keeping pets inside may be reasonable on days when fireworks are let off in the beginning of a new year, no regular meteor shower poses much danger to pets.\nApparently a play on the tricuspid valve in mammalian hearts, or possibly on bicuspid teeth. The mention of \"Region 2\" is a reference to region locking , a digital rights management (DRM) scheme intended to restrict media to certain areas. [ citation needed ] DRM of course does not apply to natural events.  However, meteor showers are also geographically restricted, and the visible area might roughly coincide with a DRM region (Though Region 2 covers a large and scattered area, not being strictly geographical).\nSince indoor lights and window glass make them harder to see, it would take a very bright meteor (like the Chelyabids two entries below) to be visible without going outside.\nThis fictional shower would collect shooting stars into the origin to prepare for the real Eta Aquariids meteor shower associated with Halley's comet and diverging from Eta Aquarii in Aquarius; the real shower peaks around May 6th. Due to perspective, meteor showers appear to radiate outwards from a certain point in the sky. Meteor showers may be seen to converge on a point on the opposite side of the sky, but with the earth in the way there would only be a few visible going past the edge, seen as nearly parallel streaks overhead, so the convergence point would hardly be notable.\nA reference to the February 15, 2013, Chelyabinsk meteor whose explosion shattered windows within a large radius.\nA meteor large enough to reach the lower atmosphere could produce sound audible to observers on the ground, but this is very unusual.\nThis shower is mostly observed via its effects on radio and TV signals, and therefore a good target for conspiracy theorists responding to June's Invisible Meteors - NASA Science .\nThe \"50\/50 mix of meteors and shooting stars\" is a joke, as \"meteor\" and \"shooting star\" are synonymous.\nThis is saying that they are indistinguishable from stars, or that the stars themselves are actually meteors.\nDromaeosaurids are a family of dinosaurs containing the genus Velociraptor , well-known from the movie Jurassic Park in which they are presented as a deadly menace, fast and especially intelligent to the point of understanding how to open a door; this representation of Velociraptors is a recurrent topic in xkcd .\nErupting from the ground is the funny inverse of falling from the sky, what meteors always do.\nProbably a reference to Pyramidal cells , a type of neuron. The \"tau\" reference has two possibilities. The \"visible even when eyes are closed\" could refer to the Tau particle, a heavy sibling of the electron. When they traveled outside of Earth's magnetosphere on their way to the Moon, Apollo astronauts saw flashes of light about every three minutes even with their eyes closed; these were caused by high energy particles (cosmic rays) penetrating their eyes and brain. The other possibility is that it refers to Tau protein , a normal structural protein within brain neurons. In Alzheimer's Disease, abnormal Tau proteins can aggregate within pyramidal cells to form insoluble skeins. The number of these \" neurofibrillary tangles \" roughly correlate with the severity of cognitive impairment.\nThis may have something to do with the fact that \"draconids\" etymologically means \"of the dragon\", which could make for a fearsome meteor shower. And if you run it will track you down, albeit slowly. This may also be a reference to Boo , a character in the Mario series of video games that is slow but follows you if you turn your back on them. In the game Terraria, meteors (or rather, \"meteor heads\") follow this exact behavior.\nRather than taking place over the course of a week, all the meteors in the shower happen at the same time. This would involve about 3000 meteors appearing simultaneously, which would be quite an impressive sight.\nThere was a very active Leonid shower (a \"meteor storm\") in 1966, and a precursor to it in 1965. The article Is God Dead? was published in Time Magazine on April 8 of 1966. Perhaps this suggests that the meteors killed God earlier in the year when they and He were further out in the solar system?\nMeteors usually don't reach the surface of the Earth, being destroyed in the atmosphere. If they do approach the surface, deflecting them with tennis racquets would probably not be the most effective strategy [ citation needed ] , unless Randall is implying that the Geminid swarm is composed of tennis balls.\nThe title text refers to the folk wisdom that lightning strikes the tallest thing around, but this has never been applied to meteors, where it is basically the size (area) that determines the likelihood of an impact with a given object. Randall expressed frustration over how \"maddeningly inexact\" the lightning statement is, and elaborated on the problem mathematically, in the what if? Today's topic: Lightning .\n[A list of 16 meteor showers, with a caption above, labels on the three columns and then every other row in gray, beginning with a gray row beneath the line below the column labels.]\nThe xkcd guide to meteor showers Name Peak Notes Quadrantids January 4 th Bring pets inside during peak activity Tricuspids January 21 st Not viewable in region 2 countries Centaurids February 6 th Too faint to see without going outside Beta Aquariids February 10 th Inverted shower converges toward Aquarius instead of radiating away Chelyabids February 15 th Only one meteor per shower, but it's big. Lyrids April 22 nd Meteors sometimes scream Daytime Zeta Perseids June 9 th Likely a NASA hoax June Bo\u00f6tids June 27 th 50\/50 mix of meteors and shooting stars Southern Delta Aquariids July 19 th Meteors very bright, but stationary Dromaeosaurids July 22 nd Fast, highly intelligent, can open doors Perseids August 12 th Instead of falling from sky, meteors erupt from ground Tau Pyramids August 15 th Visible even when eyes are closed Draconids October 8 th Very slow, but follow you if you run Orionids October 21 st Entire shower happens at once Leonids November 17 th In 1966, unusually active Leonid shower killed God Geminids December 13 th Can be deflected with tennis rackets\n"}
{"id":1250,"title":"Old Accounts","image_title":"Old Accounts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1250","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/old_accounts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1250:_Old_Accounts","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] The internet is filled with derelict accounts aggregating news about friends long forgotten.\n[Cueball sits at a desk, typing on a laptop.] Cueball: *Click* Computer (friend): Uhh, is everything OK? Cueball: *Click* Computer (another friend): Dude, what the hell? Cueball: *Click*\n[Caption below the frame:] When you find yourself drifting away from a community, remember to clean up after yourself by slowly unfriending everyone, one by one, in the reverse order that you added them.\n","explanation":"Cueball is very dramatically following the described process of removing himself from a social network by first unfriending each contact in reverse order that he friended them. Such actions are not necessary on any well-designed website. Actively unfriending people individually could be perceived as rude, antisocial, or in need of help.  On the other hand, if a user simply abandons his or her account without cleaning it up, then even years later, it will still be sitting there, gathering friends' statuses, opinions and comments.\nThe reverse order to unfriend people refers to practice of correct resource management in computer programming.  Computer programs typically require access to many resources at a time, and some of those resources may only be available insofar as the program has access to other more basic resources.\nFor example, if you wanted to watch a movie from a rental service, you would first acquire a keep case with a disk inside of it, and then you would remove the DVD from the case in order to play it on a TV.  Once you had watched the movie, you would put the DVD back inside the case.  Then you would return the case to the store.  The process for \"releasing\" these two resources (the DVD and the keep case) follows the reverse order of how they were obtained: the case was retrieved from the store before the disk was removed, but the disk must be put back before you return the case.\nA computer program must release resources in a valid order, though it is often difficult for programmers to ensure this, due to the many paths of execution a program can follow.  If resources are released in the wrong order, then a newer resource may reference an older resource that has already been destroyed, and when attempting to use the remaining resource, a variety of bad things could happen if the program attempted to access the already lost resource.\nWhile resources do not always need to be released in exactly the reverse order of how they were obtained, doing so ensures that, as each resource is released, none of the resources that existed when it was acquired (and thus which it could be dependent upon) will have been released yet.\nIn the case of unfriending users on a social networking site, it is imagined that Cueball or any other user could have made newer friends through older friends, and as such, that the newer friend should not exist without the older friend and must therefore be released first.\nThe title text appears to be referencing related issue affecting databases used on websites such as social networking sites. When an account is deactivated, the database entries for users that were friends with the account may maintain a link to it.  This would result in the database storing useless data, so a well-designed database might try to mitigate this.  A well-written program accessing the database would be able to recognize that this data should be ignored.  Since no user account would be directly dependent on the existence of another account, the accounts can safely be deleted without worrying about resource management as described earlier.\nUltimately, the inefficiency of a database containing useless data about deleted accounts is negligible, and in fact it may not even be worthwhile to take the time to update all the entries compared to how little time it would save when performing lookups. \"Database linkage accumulation slowdown\" really is a thing that Randall just made up. This may be a satire of popular fears of made-up technological problems, often held by those who are not technologically savvy.\n[Caption above the frame:] The internet is filled with derelict accounts aggregating news about friends long forgotten.\n[Cueball sits at a desk, typing on a laptop.] Cueball: *Click* Computer (friend): Uhh, is everything OK? Cueball: *Click* Computer (another friend): Dude, what the hell? Cueball: *Click*\n[Caption below the frame:] When you find yourself drifting away from a community, remember to clean up after yourself by slowly unfriending everyone, one by one, in the reverse order that you added them.\n"}
{"id":1251,"title":"Anti-Glass","image_title":"Anti-Glass","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1251","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/anti_glass.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1251:_Anti-Glass","transcript":"[Two police officers stand outside an apartment door. The male officer is bald (and half cut of by the left frame of this thin panel), and the other is Ponytail, both are wearing peaked caps with white emblem. Ponytail is holding a pair of glasses down in one hand. The glasses have a small white box with a smaller tip in the front attached to one of the frames. A person (turns out to be Black Hat) answers through the door which has a peephole.] Ponytail: Police. Open up. Ponytail: Did you make this glasses attachment? Black Hat (off-panel through door): Oh, yeah.\n[Black Hat is sitting in an office chair at his laptop with his back to the door. The door is not visible but the officers voices come through it off-panel from the left.] Ponytail (off-panel): What's it do? Black Hat: It detects when someone near you is wearing Google Glass and shines a laser pointer at their eyepiece. Ponytail (off-panel): Why?? Black Hat: The best defense is an indiscriminate offense.\n[Cut back a frame-less panel with a wider view of the two officers outside the apartment so the male officer is not cut off.] Male officer: It seems you've mailed these devices to people across Silicon Valley, including the children of every Google executive. Black Hat (off-panel through door): Yeah. It's a viral marketing campaign for an upcoming movie.\n[Same scene but with frame around the panel.] Male officer: What movie? Black Hat: Haven't decided yet. Anything good coming out this fall? Male officer: Sir, open the door. Black Hat: First stare at the peephole for a sec.\n","explanation":"Black Hat makes an attachment for eyeglasses which shines a laser light at people using Google Glass . The quote \"The best defense is an indiscriminate offense\" plays off the adage \" The best defense is a good offense \". Black Hat's goal seems to be to interfere with the Google Glass user potentially recording the person with the laser, and possibly blinding Google Glass users, undermining the project. By mailing one to the children of every Google executive, who are likely to be Google Glass users, he's clearly aiming to disrupt the entire Google Glass project. \"Silicon Valley\" is a term for where many technologically up-to-date people live who are more likely to work in the computer industry and use Google Glass.\nThe \"viral marketing campaign\" excuse seems to play off how battery-powered LED placards were mistaken for terrorism in the 2007 Boston bomb scare . He pretends that his terrorism is actually a viral marketing campaign, but seems to have not thought this excuse through. He then tries to get them to look into a laser light.\nThe title text shows the irony between Black Hat's needlessly complicated technical solution, and his apparent hate of Google Glass, a relatively new technology. In addition, he remarks that he wouldn't do something as old-fashioned as shining a laser in peoples' eyes, as this does not live up to his technical expertise.\nHowever, he could shine a laser through the peephole, which would have the same effect on the police officers.\nIt seems generally that Randall is no fan of Google Glass, which was also shown later in 1304: Glass Trolling . It was the second time they are mentioned in xkcd after 1215: Insight , but this was the first direct mocking of people wearing these glasses. Google Glass has become a recurring theme in xkcd.\n[Two police officers stand outside an apartment door. The male officer is bald (and half cut of by the left frame of this thin panel), and the other is Ponytail, both are wearing peaked caps with white emblem. Ponytail is holding a pair of glasses down in one hand. The glasses have a small white box with a smaller tip in the front attached to one of the frames. A person (turns out to be Black Hat) answers through the door which has a peephole.] Ponytail: Police. Open up. Ponytail: Did you make this glasses attachment? Black Hat (off-panel through door): Oh, yeah.\n[Black Hat is sitting in an office chair at his laptop with his back to the door. The door is not visible but the officers voices come through it off-panel from the left.] Ponytail (off-panel): What's it do? Black Hat: It detects when someone near you is wearing Google Glass and shines a laser pointer at their eyepiece. Ponytail (off-panel): Why?? Black Hat: The best defense is an indiscriminate offense.\n[Cut back a frame-less panel with a wider view of the two officers outside the apartment so the male officer is not cut off.] Male officer: It seems you've mailed these devices to people across Silicon Valley, including the children of every Google executive. Black Hat (off-panel through door): Yeah. It's a viral marketing campaign for an upcoming movie.\n[Same scene but with frame around the panel.] Male officer: What movie? Black Hat: Haven't decided yet. Anything good coming out this fall? Male officer: Sir, open the door. Black Hat: First stare at the peephole for a sec.\n"}
{"id":1252,"title":"Increased Risk","image_title":"Increased Risk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1252","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/increased_risk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1252:_Increased_Risk","transcript":"[Cueball, Ponytail, and Beret Guy are standing around. Cueball and Ponytail have beach towels. Ponytail is looking at her cell phone. Beret Guy has his hands up to his face, looking distressed.] Ponytail: We should go to the north beach. Someone said the south beach has a 20% higher risk of shark attacks. Cueball: Yeah, but statistically, taking three beach trips instead of two increases our odds of getting shot by a swimming dog carrying a handgun in its mouth by 50%! Beret Guy: Oh no! This is our third trip!\n[Caption below the panel:] Reminder: A 50% increase in a tiny risk is still tiny .\n","explanation":"The panel satirises the common misunderstanding of the concept of percentage. Quoting a percentage change without mentioning the base probability that this ratio acts on is meaningless (outside of arithmetic for arithmetic's sake). Most everyday communication, however, succumbs to such incompleteness. In the aftermath of this ambiguity, people tend to conflate relative and absolute changes.\nIf the probability of a shark attack at the North beach is 5 per million, then the probability of shark attack at the South beach is still not more than 6 per million. The difference between these values is not enough to normally justify choosing one beach over the other, even though a \"20% greater\" chance sounds significant when stated out of this larger context.\nCueball parodies the concern by noting that by going to a beach three times instead of two, their chances of attack by dogs with handguns in their mouths (a ludicrous and unrealistic scenario as dogs cannot buy guns [ citation needed ] and are not likely to pick one up off the ground) increases by 50%. If the chance of the dog attack is one per billion on each visit to the beach, then the chance of attack increases over multiple visits; regardless it's still one in a billion for any specific visit. This does not change the overall improbability of there ever being a dog swimming with a gun in its mouth.\nBeret Guy misunderstands Cueball's probability, exhibiting the gambler's fallacy by believing that since they haven't been attacked in their first two trips, the chance of attack by dogs with handguns is higher on this outing.\nThis is a common misunderstanding of statistics. While the overall probability of an attack in three trips would be higher than in a single trip, it doesn't change the fact that in each individual trip, the probability is still the same; whether or not they managed to avoid being attacked in their first two trips, the results of these trips do not factor into the probability equation of the third trip.\nThis also can be illustrated by coin flips: if one flips a \"fair\" coin ten times in a row, no matter what the result of each previous flip is (even if it were nine heads in a row), the odds of getting heads on the tenth coin flip theoretically remains 50%. In other words, past experience does not impact subsequent flips.  In practice, if the odds on each flip were 50%, then the odds of nine heads in a row would be 0.2%, so after it might be worth considering the possibility that the coin has been bent or weighted to alter the odds, or even a counterfeit with \"heads\" on both sides.\nThe caption clarifies Cueball's point, but without sarcasm.\nThen again, the title text objects to this point (that a tiny risk increased by 50% is still tiny). If this 50% increment is done repeatedly, the risk can get arbitrarily high, while the statement says that it is still tiny. This can be compared to the Sorites paradox (the \"paradox of the heap\"), which involves a \"heap\" of sand from which grains of sand are removed individually. If one assumes that, after removing a single grain, a heap of sand is still considered a heap of sand, and that there are a limited number of grains of sand in the heap, then one is forced to accept the conclusion that it can still be considered a heap of sand even if there is only a single grain of sand (or even none at all).\nBeing shot by a swimming dog with a handgun in its mouth is also specifically referenced in what if? 146, Stop Jupiter .\n[Cueball, Ponytail, and Beret Guy are standing around. Cueball and Ponytail have beach towels. Ponytail is looking at her cell phone. Beret Guy has his hands up to his face, looking distressed.] Ponytail: We should go to the north beach. Someone said the south beach has a 20% higher risk of shark attacks. Cueball: Yeah, but statistically, taking three beach trips instead of two increases our odds of getting shot by a swimming dog carrying a handgun in its mouth by 50%! Beret Guy: Oh no! This is our third trip!\n[Caption below the panel:] Reminder: A 50% increase in a tiny risk is still tiny .\n"}
{"id":1253,"title":"Exoplanet Names","image_title":"Exoplanet Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1253","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exoplanet_names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1253:_Exoplanet_Names","transcript":"[Text above the first frame of the comic:] August 2013: The International Astronomical Union decides to start naming exoplanets, and\u2014for the first time ever\u2014asks for suggestions from the general public. They immediately regret this decision. [Ponytail is facepalming while Megan and Cueball are looking at a computer screen on a desk. Hairbun points to the screen.] Cueball\u200f\u200e: Can't you filter out the worst ones? Hairbun: This is after the filter!\n[Below is a table showing the list of planet names as seen on the computer screen with gray background around the edges of the table.]\n[The table is in two separate columns, but there is only headings over the left, so the right column is a direct continuation of the left. In the table it is mentioned when the right column begins. There is a small arrow pointing from the word \"Planet\" down to the second column of the table. The headings in the comic are not inside the table as they are here below. The text at the bottom of the left list seems to continue on below, at least the last entry is cut below the middle, although it is still easy to read. Similarly the text at the top right list, seems to continue from above, the top entry missing the very top of the text. This is as if the list is much longer and here is just shown part of the list. To further indicate this the first entry in the right list begins at \"c\" instead of at \"b\" which is else the case for all other instances.]\nStar Planet Suggested Name Gliese 667 b Space Planet c PILF d A Star e e'); DROP TABLE PLANETS;-- f Blogosphere g Blogodrome h Earth Tau Ceti b Sid Meier's Tau Ceti B c Giant Dog Planet d Tiny Dog Planet e Phil Plainet f Unicode Snowman Gliese 832 b Asshole Jupiter Gliese 581 b Waist-deep Cats c Planet #14 d Ballderaan e Eternia Prime f Taupe Mars g Jelly-Filled Planet Epsilon Eridani b Skydot c Laser Noises Gliese 176 b Pandora c Pantera Kepler-61 b GoldenPalace.com [Below is the right column.] Upsilon Andromidae c Stampy d Moonchild e Ham Sphere HD 20794 b Cosmic Sands c Legoland d Planet with Arms HD 85512 b Lax Morality HD 40307 b Good Planet c Problemland d Slickle e Spare Parts f New Jersey VI g How Do I Join the IAU Gliese 163 b Neil Tyson's Mustache c [email\u00a0protected] d Hair-Covered Planet Pi Mensae b Moon Holder HD 189733 b Permadeath Kepler-22 b Blue Ivy Kepler-3284 b Blainsley Kepler-3255 b Unicorn Thresher Kepler-2418 b Spherical Discworld Kepler-1686 b Emergency Backup Earth Kepler-3010 b Feeeoooooooop Kepler-442 b Liz\n","explanation":"On the 14th August 2013, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) issued a document about public naming of astronomical objects. It stated, \"IAU fully supports the involvement of the general public, whether directly or through an independent organized vote, in the naming of planetary satellites, newly discovered planets, and their host stars.\"\nThe text above the image states the fact above and then notes that the IAU immediately regret this decision. As we can see from Cueball's question, from Ponytail's facepalm, and the fact that even Megan is speechless, the suggestions are appalling. It becomes even worse when Hairbun tells them that an automatic filter has already been applied to the results, one designed to remove inappropriate entries that don't meet certain criteria. This implies that the list would have been even worse if presented in its unfiltered form (as seen below in the table).\nThe naming document also contained, amongst other things, guidelines that suggested names should meet. These include stipulations such as \"16 characters or less\", \"preferably one word\", being \"pronounceable (in as many languages as possible)\", \"not too similar to an existing name of an astronomical object\", avoiding commercial names, and being \"respectful of intellectual property\". If we go down the list, we can see that many of Randall's suggestions do indeed violate the guidelines. Which is part of the joke as it reflects the tendency of internet submissions to ignore such softly suggested guidelines.\nThe randomness and inappropriateness of the suggested names reflects the commonly expected response from anonymous submitters on the internet. Many forums and contests that call for online response and do not apply strict control over the responses receive similar collections of random, inappropriate and obscure submissions that are often only tangentially related to the original subject. For example, Greenpeace held a naming contest for one of the whales recently tagged in their research and preservation campaign and even after selecting the finalists the online voting resulted in naming the whale \"Mr. Splashypants\". PepsiCo had even less restrictive controls in their marketing campaign that asked the internet to name a new flavour of Mountain Dew. They had to shut down the contest in order to avoid naming the new beverage \"Hitler did nothing wrong\" which was the current leader at the time and only marginally the most inappropriate of the top ten voted suggestions. Even more recently is the case of Boaty McBoatface , in which the internet decided to dub a British research vessel \"Boaty McBoatface\". The boat was given the name RRS Sir David Attenborough in the end, with its Autonomous Underwater Vehicle being called \"Boaty McBoatface.\"\nThe document also states that naming suggestions may be sent to the email that Randall included in the title text.\nThis comic was updated in 1555: Exoplanet Names 2 .\n[Text above the first frame of the comic:] August 2013: The International Astronomical Union decides to start naming exoplanets, and\u2014for the first time ever\u2014asks for suggestions from the general public. They immediately regret this decision. [Ponytail is facepalming while Megan and Cueball are looking at a computer screen on a desk. Hairbun points to the screen.] Cueball\u200f\u200e: Can't you filter out the worst ones? Hairbun: This is after the filter!\n[Below is a table showing the list of planet names as seen on the computer screen with gray background around the edges of the table.]\n[The table is in two separate columns, but there is only headings over the left, so the right column is a direct continuation of the left. In the table it is mentioned when the right column begins. There is a small arrow pointing from the word \"Planet\" down to the second column of the table. The headings in the comic are not inside the table as they are here below. The text at the bottom of the left list seems to continue on below, at least the last entry is cut below the middle, although it is still easy to read. Similarly the text at the top right list, seems to continue from above, the top entry missing the very top of the text. This is as if the list is much longer and here is just shown part of the list. To further indicate this the first entry in the right list begins at \"c\" instead of at \"b\" which is else the case for all other instances.]\nStar Planet Suggested Name Gliese 667 b Space Planet c PILF d A Star e e'); DROP TABLE PLANETS;-- f Blogosphere g Blogodrome h Earth Tau Ceti b Sid Meier's Tau Ceti B c Giant Dog Planet d Tiny Dog Planet e Phil Plainet f Unicode Snowman Gliese 832 b Asshole Jupiter Gliese 581 b Waist-deep Cats c Planet #14 d Ballderaan e Eternia Prime f Taupe Mars g Jelly-Filled Planet Epsilon Eridani b Skydot c Laser Noises Gliese 176 b Pandora c Pantera Kepler-61 b GoldenPalace.com [Below is the right column.] Upsilon Andromidae c Stampy d Moonchild e Ham Sphere HD 20794 b Cosmic Sands c Legoland d Planet with Arms HD 85512 b Lax Morality HD 40307 b Good Planet c Problemland d Slickle e Spare Parts f New Jersey VI g How Do I Join the IAU Gliese 163 b Neil Tyson's Mustache c [email\u00a0protected] d Hair-Covered Planet Pi Mensae b Moon Holder HD 189733 b Permadeath Kepler-22 b Blue Ivy Kepler-3284 b Blainsley Kepler-3255 b Unicorn Thresher Kepler-2418 b Spherical Discworld Kepler-1686 b Emergency Backup Earth Kepler-3010 b Feeeoooooooop Kepler-442 b Liz\n"}
{"id":1254,"title":"Preferred Chat System","image_title":"Preferred Chat System","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1254","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/preferred_chat_system.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1254:_Preferred_Chat_System","transcript":"[Cueball stands, talking on his cell phone.] Cueball: Sorry for the voicemail, but I'm confused about how to reach you. Cueball: When I text you, you reply once on GChat, then go quiet, yet answer IRC right away. I emailed you, and you replied on Skype and mentioned that the email \"woke you up\". Cueball: You're very responsive - I just have no sense of how you use technology. [An owl flies into the panel.] Cueball:\u00a0?!? [The owl perches on Cueballs's head. It has delivered a note to Cueball.] Note: did you try to call me? use my google voice number next time.\n","explanation":"As more options become available for communication, it becomes more difficult to determine the social etiquette of communicating with others. It is customary (or at least rarely incorrect) to return a communication from someone using the same medium as the initial contact. For example, a voicemail is generally returned with a phone call (perhaps resulting in another voicemail), and an email with an email, etc. However, sometimes people respond through a different channel, such as texting a response to a voicemail or emailing a reply to a text. This can create confusion that Randall is pointing out, because the recipient may be unsure whether to go back to their original communication method, or if the response was a signal that the recipient prefers the new method. Similarly, it becomes important for people to know what type of communication is preferred by a recipient, or most likely to reach the recipient quickly and generate the most useful response.\nRandall portrays the difficulty Cueball is facing when communicating with a seemingly irrational recipient. Today's multitude of social networks and communication systems amplifies the problem. After several misses, Cueball is leaving a voicemail for his intended recipient to clarify the best way to reach them. He initially tried texting the recipient, to which they made one reply on the instant-messaging service Google Talk (commonly called GChat). This is unusual because instant messaging services are usually used to engage in longer conversations than one message. Cueball further is confused because the recipient, although silent on Google Talk, continues responding on IRC . Cueball then attempted to communicate by email, but the response came on Skype , another instant messaging service that features voice and video chat along with text. The recipient mentions that the email \" woke [them] up \", implying that they have e-mail configured to make an audible alert, possibly by being forwarded to a cell phone.\nCueball clarifies that he appreciates that the recipient is very quick to respond, but his confusion stems from his inability to determine the proper medium to use. As he finishes his voicemail, an owl flies towards him carrying a written message. This appears to be a reference to owl post , which is a form of communication in the Harry Potter lore which itself is presumably based on the real-world usage of carrier pigeons . The owl post message indicates that the voicemail was received, and suggests using Google Voice next time, which is yet another form of voice and text communication, one that bypasses the standard telecom companies and gives the user a range of controls such as which device is called depending on who is calling or what time of day it is, or to simply ignore the call altogether.\nRandall seems to have an interest in bird-related communications; RFC 1149 - IP over Avian Carriers has been mentioned in previous comics.\nThe title text mentions a pager , a low-tech, low-cost wireless telecommunications device that beeps or vibrates when it receives a message. Simpler pagers can display numbers, usually the caller's phone number plus a couple of additional digits, while more sophisticated ones can receives text messages. The usual intent of a pager is for the recipient to call the number back or, today, to tell you that your table is ready. Pager use peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, but declined thereafter as cellular phones became ubiquitous. There can be absolutely no need for this hyper-connected individual to use a pager, and having your own cellphone forward messages to your pager makes almost no sense. The question in the beginning of the owl-message further suggests, that the reciever did not actually recieve the voicemail, but just had Cueball's phone number displayed on his pager.\nA possible suggestion is that they are intentionally using such an abundance of communications options to, perversely, make it harder to have a conversation with them. So far, it seems to be working. If this is true, the person Cueball is trying to contact may very well be Black Hat.\nAnother suggestion is that Cueball is attempting to contact Beret Guy, as Beret Guy is known for doing odd things such as this.\nThis comic is closely related to a later comic, 1789: Phone Numbers .\n[Cueball stands, talking on his cell phone.] Cueball: Sorry for the voicemail, but I'm confused about how to reach you. Cueball: When I text you, you reply once on GChat, then go quiet, yet answer IRC right away. I emailed you, and you replied on Skype and mentioned that the email \"woke you up\". Cueball: You're very responsive - I just have no sense of how you use technology. [An owl flies into the panel.] Cueball:\u00a0?!? [The owl perches on Cueballs's head. It has delivered a note to Cueball.] Note: did you try to call me? use my google voice number next time.\n"}
{"id":1255,"title":"Columbus","image_title":"Columbus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1255","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/columbus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1255:_Columbus","transcript":"[White Hat talks to two children sitting in front of him on the floor to the right. A boy with hair like Hairy with his arms round his knees and behind him Science Girl with two hair buns, sitting cross leged on her knees. Megan interrupts him from off-panel right.] White Hat: Everyone said the world was flat, but Columbus knew it was round. Megan (off-panel): *Sigh* no, no, no.\n[Megan walks in holding a hand palm up. White Hat partly lifts his arm closest to her. The children between them turn their heads towards her. The boy leans back on one hand.] Megan: So he took his ships and sailed west\u2014 Megan: \u2014in a line tangent to the surface. The sea fell away, and he landed in Valinor.\n[White Hat has taken his arm down, Megan holds her arms out to each side. The children still looks at her, now also Science Girl leans back on one arm.] Megan: A Silmaril on his brow, he wanders the heavens as the morning star, still believing he reached India. White Hat: Stop making stuff up. Megan: You first.\n","explanation":"The comic starts with White Hat telling the two children shown on the first panel that Christopher Columbus knew the world was round, but that others believed it to be flat. However, this is a false narrative known as the Myth of the Flat Earth . Educated people in Columbus's time knew the world was round, and knew the approximate radius of the Earth. Columbus claimed that the distance to sail west from Canary Islands to Japan to be about 3,700 km, drastically lower than others believed, but he was wrong about this . If another continent and the \" West Indies \" had not been fortuitously in the right place, Columbus and his crew probably would have died at sea.\nAs White Hat begins his explanation, Megan objects, though not explaining why. White Hat continues, so Megan interrupts, saying that Columbus went in a straight line as the world curved away, ending up in Valinor and the Undying Lands . Megan's story is an allusion to The Silmarillion , by J. R. R. Tolkien , set in the same world as The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit . The claim that Columbus sailed on a tangent to the surface alludes to how the elves' ships leave the curved sea surface and sail in a straight line to reach Valinor on the same route that they sailed when the world was still flat. The mentions of a silmaril and the morning star are a reference to E\u00e4rendil the Mariner , the only mortal sailor to reach the Undying Lands, with one of the Silmarils (though E\u00e4rendil's journey occurred at the end of the First Age and the world was only changed into a sphere near the end of the Second Age). Megan humorously conflates these myths, suggesting that they are all equally false. Columbus in fact wasn't the first to claim the world was round; the ancient Greeks had discovered it long before. It was, however, disputed by some Christian scholars in late antiquity due to disagreements over its congruence with biblical canon. In Megan's telling, Columbus ends up as the morning star, which is actually the planet Venus (the same fate as E\u00e4rendil's in Tolkien's mythology).\nThe joke is that when White Hat tells her to stop making up the story, Megan pointedly replies \"You first\", indicating that she originally complained about White Hat's retelling of the Columbus story because his account didn't really happen, and so he was also \"making things up\". Megan's fantasy tale was then delivered to make a point.\nThe title text refers to the transfer of smallpox to the Americas by Europeans, which caused the deaths of untold millions of Native Americans. The introduction of smallpox to the Undying Lands would indeed make their name ironic.  However, the Undying Lands are named after immortal Valar , Maiar , and Elves living there, not because they confer immortality.  A more proper name would be the Lands of the Undying, and Valar, Maiar, and Elves are not susceptible to diseases in Tolkien's mythos in any case.\nSimilar discussions between White Hat and Megan can be found in 1605: DNA and 1731: Wrong , in the latter Megan even finishes with a similar *sigh* as she started with here.\n[White Hat talks to two children sitting in front of him on the floor to the right. A boy with hair like Hairy with his arms round his knees and behind him Science Girl with two hair buns, sitting cross leged on her knees. Megan interrupts him from off-panel right.] White Hat: Everyone said the world was flat, but Columbus knew it was round. Megan (off-panel): *Sigh* no, no, no.\n[Megan walks in holding a hand palm up. White Hat partly lifts his arm closest to her. The children between them turn their heads towards her. The boy leans back on one hand.] Megan: So he took his ships and sailed west\u2014 Megan: \u2014in a line tangent to the surface. The sea fell away, and he landed in Valinor.\n[White Hat has taken his arm down, Megan holds her arms out to each side. The children still looks at her, now also Science Girl leans back on one arm.] Megan: A Silmaril on his brow, he wanders the heavens as the morning star, still believing he reached India. White Hat: Stop making stuff up. Megan: You first.\n"}
{"id":1256,"title":"Questions","image_title":"Questions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1256","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/questions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1256:_Questions","transcript":"[This strip is a rectangular word cloud, titled 'Questions found in Google autocomplete'. Embedded in the cloud are 5 single panels, with illustrated questions. These are described at the end. Questions are given in roughly columnar order. None of the questions have question marks.]\nQuestions found in Google Autocomplete\nWhy do whales jump Why are witches green Why are there mirrors above beds Why do I say uh Why is sea salt better Why are there trees in the middle of fields Why is there not a Pokemon MMO Why is there laughing in TV shows Why are there doors on the freeway Why are there so many svchost.exe running Why aren't there any countries in antarctica Why are there scary sounds in Minecraft Why is there kicking in my stomach Why are there two slashes after HTTP Why are there celebrities Why do snakes exist Why do oysters have pearls Why are ducks called ducks Why do they call it the clap Why are Kyle and Cartman friends Why is there an arraow on Aang's head Why are text messages blue Why are there mustaches on clothes Why are there mustaches on cars Why are there mustaches everywhere Why are there so many birds in Ohio Why is there so much rain in Ohio Why is Ohio weather so weird Why are there male and female bikes Why are there bridesmaids Why do dying people reach up Why aren't there varicose arteries Why are old Klingons different Why is programming so hard Why is there a 0 ohm resistor Why do Americans hate soccer Why do rhymes sound good Why do trees die Why is there no sound on CNN Why aren't Pokemon real Why aren't bullets sharp Why do dreams seem so real Why aren't there dinosaur ghosts Why do iguanas die Why do testicles move Why are there psychics Why are hats so expensive Why is there caffeine in my shampoo Why do your boobs hurt Why aren't economists rich Why do Americans call it soccer Why are my ears ringing Why are there so many Avengers Why are the Avengers fighting the X men Why is Wolverine not in the Avengers Why are there ants in my laptop Why is Earth tilted Why is space black Why is outer space so cold Why are there pyramids on the moon Why is NASA shutting down Why is there Hell if God forgives Why are there tiny spiders in my house Why do spiders come inside Why are there huge spiders in my house Why are there lots of spiders in my house Why are there spiders in my room Why are there so many spiders in my room Why do spider bites itch Why is dying so scary Why is there no GPS in laptops Why do knees click Why aren't there E grades Why is isolation bad Why do boys like me Why don't boys like me Why is there always a Java update Why are there red dots on my thighs Why is lying good Why is GPS free Why are trees tall Why are there slaves in the Bible Why do twins have different fingerprints Why are Americans afraid of dragons Why is there lava Why are there swarms of gnats Why is there phlegm Why are there so many crows in Rochester, MN Why is psychic weak to bug Why do children get cancer Why is Poseidon angry with Odysseus Why is there ice in space Why are there female Mr Mimes Why is there an owl in my backyard Why is there an owl outside my window Why is there an owl on the dollar bill Why do owls attack people Why are AK47s so expensive Why are there helicopters circling my house Why are there gods Why are there two Spocks Why is Mt Vesuvius there Why do they say T minus Why are there obelisks Why are wrestlers always wet Why are oceans becoming more acidic Why is Arwen dying Why aren't my quail laying eggs Why aren't my quail eggs hatching Why aren't there any foreign military bases in America Why is life so boring Why are my boobs itchy Why are cigarettes legal Why are there ducks in my pool Why is Jesus white Why is there liquid in my ear Why do Q tips feel good Why do good people die Why are ultrasounds important Why are ultrasound machines expensive Why is stealing wrong Why is YKK on all zippers Why is HTTPS crossed out in red Why is there a line through HTTPS Why is there a red line through HTTPS on Facebook Why is HTTPS important Why are there weeks Why do I feel dizzy Why are dogs afraid of fireworks Why is there no king in England\n[We see Cueball from the torso up, with arms outstretched.] Cueball: Why aren't my arms growing\n[Megan stands with a grey ghost on either side of her.] Megan: Why are there ghosts\n[Beret Guy stands, looking at a squirrel.] Beret Guy: Why are there squirrels\n[Cueball stands.] Cueball: Why is sex so important.\n[We see Ponytail from the torso up.] Ponytail: Why aren't there guns in Harry Potter\n","explanation":"Google , a rather popular [ citation needed ] internet search engine, has a feature known as autocomplete that guesses at search queries before they are fully typed out. These guesses are generally made based on popular searches by other people. From time to time, a particularly strange or hilarious one may be found, as is evidenced in this comic.\nThe largest pictured questions are: \"Why are there slaves in the bible\" and \"Why are there ants in my laptop\".\nAll of the questions in the comic are \"why\" questions, so many of them are predicated on false assumptions, such as \"Why are there pyramids on the moon\". Originally, all these questions and many more (33,171 in total) could be found at http:\/\/xkcd.com\/why.txt . ( Archived Version )\nRegarding the title text: in the Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings trilogy , Arwen becomes sickly for unspecified reasons as the plot advances, apparently giving Aragorn a more personal reason to fight. The only explanation given is by Elrond, who says \"As Sauron's power grows, her [Arwen's] strength wanes.\" This subplot is entirely absent from the original novels .\nThe tables below have been created so as to split the comic into almost entirely arbitrary blocks, which have then been identified with similarly arbitrary numbers. As a general rule, section numbers work top to bottom, then right to left.\nhttp:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/xkcd\/comments\/1l3na7\/questions\/cbvigrd , answers to all the questions.\n[This strip is a rectangular word cloud, titled 'Questions found in Google autocomplete'. Embedded in the cloud are 5 single panels, with illustrated questions. These are described at the end. Questions are given in roughly columnar order. None of the questions have question marks.]\nQuestions found in Google Autocomplete\nWhy do whales jump Why are witches green Why are there mirrors above beds Why do I say uh Why is sea salt better Why are there trees in the middle of fields Why is there not a Pokemon MMO Why is there laughing in TV shows Why are there doors on the freeway Why are there so many svchost.exe running Why aren't there any countries in antarctica Why are there scary sounds in Minecraft Why is there kicking in my stomach Why are there two slashes after HTTP Why are there celebrities Why do snakes exist Why do oysters have pearls Why are ducks called ducks Why do they call it the clap Why are Kyle and Cartman friends Why is there an arraow on Aang's head Why are text messages blue Why are there mustaches on clothes Why are there mustaches on cars Why are there mustaches everywhere Why are there so many birds in Ohio Why is there so much rain in Ohio Why is Ohio weather so weird Why are there male and female bikes Why are there bridesmaids Why do dying people reach up Why aren't there varicose arteries Why are old Klingons different Why is programming so hard Why is there a 0 ohm resistor Why do Americans hate soccer Why do rhymes sound good Why do trees die Why is there no sound on CNN Why aren't Pokemon real Why aren't bullets sharp Why do dreams seem so real Why aren't there dinosaur ghosts Why do iguanas die Why do testicles move Why are there psychics Why are hats so expensive Why is there caffeine in my shampoo Why do your boobs hurt Why aren't economists rich Why do Americans call it soccer Why are my ears ringing Why are there so many Avengers Why are the Avengers fighting the X men Why is Wolverine not in the Avengers Why are there ants in my laptop Why is Earth tilted Why is space black Why is outer space so cold Why are there pyramids on the moon Why is NASA shutting down Why is there Hell if God forgives Why are there tiny spiders in my house Why do spiders come inside Why are there huge spiders in my house Why are there lots of spiders in my house Why are there spiders in my room Why are there so many spiders in my room Why do spider bites itch Why is dying so scary Why is there no GPS in laptops Why do knees click Why aren't there E grades Why is isolation bad Why do boys like me Why don't boys like me Why is there always a Java update Why are there red dots on my thighs Why is lying good Why is GPS free Why are trees tall Why are there slaves in the Bible Why do twins have different fingerprints Why are Americans afraid of dragons Why is there lava Why are there swarms of gnats Why is there phlegm Why are there so many crows in Rochester, MN Why is psychic weak to bug Why do children get cancer Why is Poseidon angry with Odysseus Why is there ice in space Why are there female Mr Mimes Why is there an owl in my backyard Why is there an owl outside my window Why is there an owl on the dollar bill Why do owls attack people Why are AK47s so expensive Why are there helicopters circling my house Why are there gods Why are there two Spocks Why is Mt Vesuvius there Why do they say T minus Why are there obelisks Why are wrestlers always wet Why are oceans becoming more acidic Why is Arwen dying Why aren't my quail laying eggs Why aren't my quail eggs hatching Why aren't there any foreign military bases in America Why is life so boring Why are my boobs itchy Why are cigarettes legal Why are there ducks in my pool Why is Jesus white Why is there liquid in my ear Why do Q tips feel good Why do good people die Why are ultrasounds important Why are ultrasound machines expensive Why is stealing wrong Why is YKK on all zippers Why is HTTPS crossed out in red Why is there a line through HTTPS Why is there a red line through HTTPS on Facebook Why is HTTPS important Why are there weeks Why do I feel dizzy Why are dogs afraid of fireworks Why is there no king in England\n[We see Cueball from the torso up, with arms outstretched.] Cueball: Why aren't my arms growing\n[Megan stands with a grey ghost on either side of her.] Megan: Why are there ghosts\n[Beret Guy stands, looking at a squirrel.] Beret Guy: Why are there squirrels\n[Cueball stands.] Cueball: Why is sex so important.\n[We see Ponytail from the torso up.] Ponytail: Why aren't there guns in Harry Potter\n"}
{"id":1257,"title":"Monster","image_title":"Monster","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1257","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/monster.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1257:_Monster","transcript":"[Four people are standing around a table-top crisis planning model. Cueball and Ponytail are wearing police-style hats; Megan holds a clipboard and Blondie has her hands on the table.] Megan: It's as long as a football field. Runs as fast as a cheetah. Cueball: Weighs as much as a blue whale. Blondie: Can we negotiate with it? Ponytail: No. It has the intelligence of a two-year-old child.\n[Caption below the panel:] By the time the Frequently-Made Comparisons Monster was finally defeated, it had eaten enough people to fill a stadium and devastated an area the size of Rhode Island.\n","explanation":"In this comic, officials and police are evidently trying to describe the extraordinary qualities of a huge monster by comparing it with everyday objects instead of numbers, which seems to be a recurring theme on xkcd (see 526: Converting to Metric , 1047: Approximations ) and also in the Blag article Dictionary of Numbers where Randall says that he doesn't \"like large numbers without context.\"\nThis comic pokes fun at how common it is in the media to compare things of extraordinary qualities to a certain narrow set of well-known objects. The comic features people discussing a fictional monster which - apparently - can be only described by these overused comparisons. The three used by Megan , Cueball and Ponytail are:\nThe caption below the panel names the monster the Frequently-Made Comparisons Monster , joking that the monster was created by comparing it to things, and continues the joke by comparing the number of killed people to those that could fill a (sports) stadium (of the order tens of thousands), and the area of devastation to the smallest state in the US Rhode Island (1,214\u00a0sq\u00a0mi\/3,140\u00a0km 2 ) (a state Randall also used for comparison in the What if? Everybody Jump . In another What if? he uses a football stadium filled with ants as a comparison: Lethal Neutrinos .)\nThe title text takes the joke one step further by comparing the nuclear bomb used to destroy the monster to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War, i.e. they dropped a relatively small nuclear bomb on it (nuclear weapons have advanced significantly since WWII). Here is an example from Wikipedia of such a comparison with the strength of a meteor strike.\n[Four people are standing around a table-top crisis planning model. Cueball and Ponytail are wearing police-style hats; Megan holds a clipboard and Blondie has her hands on the table.] Megan: It's as long as a football field. Runs as fast as a cheetah. Cueball: Weighs as much as a blue whale. Blondie: Can we negotiate with it? Ponytail: No. It has the intelligence of a two-year-old child.\n[Caption below the panel:] By the time the Frequently-Made Comparisons Monster was finally defeated, it had eaten enough people to fill a stadium and devastated an area the size of Rhode Island.\n"}
{"id":1258,"title":"First","image_title":"First","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1258","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/first.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1258:_First","transcript":"[Cueball sits at his desk, using a computer.]\n[Cueball is still sitting at the desk, but with hands off the keyboard in his lap.]\n[Cueball is in the same position as before, talking with off-panel.] Cueball: After a couple of unbearable decades, the \"first post\" thing seems to be dying a quiet death. Off-screen: Shh. You'll jinx it.\n","explanation":"Firstposting , or thread sniping , is the habit of posting short messages to obnoxiously point out that you have found and seen the content first. This practice was far more common in the years leading up to this comic, when high-traffic and poorly-moderated social media sites tended to display comments in increasing chronological order by default; as such, the oldest comments would be most prominently displayed at the top, while the newest comments would be buried at the bottom.\nIn the first two panels, Cueball stares at his screen, implying that a long time passes before he finally points this out. He has probably submitted a post and is awaiting for comments that are not coming. Cueball might actually have mixed feelings about the practice slowly dying out. However, someone offscreen is worried he will jinx it, encouraging more people to do so.\nIn reality, Cueball's observation has held true, due to changes in best practices for web design. Social media sites in particular often sort comments by user rating; as such, the most appreciated comments are given the most prominence, and trollish comments like the cliche \"F1rst p0st!!\" are buried. Meanwhile, low-traffic forums with smaller communities still display comments from oldest to newest; in these environments, firstposters are reported and dealt with by human moderators in a timely fashion. In short, the internet as a whole does not reward or reinforce firstposting the way it once did pre-2013. However, the small children who think that posting \"FIRST!!!\" makes them somehow relevant or funny still remain. Only growing up and realising how unnecessary and obnoxious posting \"first\" is will stop them.\nSee also 269: TCMP and 1019: First Post .\nThe title text sarcastically states that no new annoying internet behaviors have emerged since the \"first post\" trend began which would continue to annoy users: a fact which is clearly wrong to anyone who spends a length of time on the internet. See for instance 493: Actuarial .\n[Cueball sits at his desk, using a computer.]\n[Cueball is still sitting at the desk, but with hands off the keyboard in his lap.]\n[Cueball is in the same position as before, talking with off-panel.] Cueball: After a couple of unbearable decades, the \"first post\" thing seems to be dying a quiet death. Off-screen: Shh. You'll jinx it.\n"}
{"id":1259,"title":"Bee Orchid","image_title":"Bee Orchid","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1259","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bee_orchid.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1259:_Bee_Orchid","transcript":"[Beret Guy and Megan are walking through a wood.] Megan: There are these orchids whose flowers look like female bees. When males try to mate with them, they transfer pollen.\n[Megan kneels next to a flower.] Megan: This orchid - Ophrys Apifera - makes flowers, but no bees land on them because the bee it mimics went extinct long ago.\n[Megan stands.] Megan: Without its partner, the orchid has resorted to self-pollinating, a last-ditch genetic strategy that only delays the inevitable. Nothing of the bee remains, but we know it existed from the shape of this flower.\n[They walk on past the flower.] Megan: It's an idea of what the female bee looked like to the male bee... Megan: ...as interpreted by a plant. Beret Guy: Wow, so...\n[We see a full-colour painting of an orchid flower. It has purple-pink petals on a mottled grey background, along with the bee-like parts. It's quite a realistic painting.] ...the only memory of the bee is a painting by a dying flower.\n[The flower is alone in a panel.]\n[Beret Guy walks back on screen.]\n[Beret Guy kneels down next to it.] Beret Guy: I'll remember your bee, orchid. I'll remember you.\n[Beret Guy walks off-panel again.]\n","explanation":"Megan is explaining the evolutionary phenomenon of mimicry of female insects which fools male insects into trying to mate with the flower ( pseudocopulation ). This causes the pollen of the flower to stick to the male bee, who may make the same mistake with another flower, allowing for pollination.\nThis particular orchid mimicked the solitary bee Eucera , which now only pollinates it in the Mediterranean (the bee isn't really extinct yet). This may eventually lead to the extinction of the orchid due to lack of reproduction. In most areas where it grows, the orchid is using a method of self-pollination , which can be detrimental to the genetic vitality of the species as it is a form of in-breeding.\nPhotographs of Ophrys apifera :\n\nFemale Eucera (Synhaolonia) guarding nests (left) and male Eucera (right):\n\nIn a similar way, some plants depend on animal species now extinct, but as the dependency was not about pollination but about spreading seeds across the land, those plant species can still last millions of years after the animal species extinction. For instance, it\u2019s the case of the avocado .\nThe comic plays on the subject of levels of indirectness of memory or knowledge representation. The female bee is extinct, remembered only by the male bee's perception of her; the male bee is also extinct, but its memory of the female is preserved in the orchid's shape; the orchid, due to self-pollination, is nearing extinction, but the memory of the female bee is now preserved by Beret Guy's memory of the orchid, remembering the male bee's memory of her.\nThe title text culminates this theme by invoking the idea that some day human beings will, likewise, be extinct, and aliens will be able to learn about us through the distorted and faded representations of ourselves that we leave behind - Axe commercials which, like the orchid, present an idealized form to deceptively attract mates. We are left to speculate whether these aliens will be able to construct, somehow, through three levels of indirectness (the human representation, the orchid's representation and the male bee's perception) any memory of the female Eucera, and, if so, how distorted a view of the bee it will be.\n[Beret Guy and Megan are walking through a wood.] Megan: There are these orchids whose flowers look like female bees. When males try to mate with them, they transfer pollen.\n[Megan kneels next to a flower.] Megan: This orchid - Ophrys Apifera - makes flowers, but no bees land on them because the bee it mimics went extinct long ago.\n[Megan stands.] Megan: Without its partner, the orchid has resorted to self-pollinating, a last-ditch genetic strategy that only delays the inevitable. Nothing of the bee remains, but we know it existed from the shape of this flower.\n[They walk on past the flower.] Megan: It's an idea of what the female bee looked like to the male bee... Megan: ...as interpreted by a plant. Beret Guy: Wow, so...\n[We see a full-colour painting of an orchid flower. It has purple-pink petals on a mottled grey background, along with the bee-like parts. It's quite a realistic painting.] ...the only memory of the bee is a painting by a dying flower.\n[The flower is alone in a panel.]\n[Beret Guy walks back on screen.]\n[Beret Guy kneels down next to it.] Beret Guy: I'll remember your bee, orchid. I'll remember you.\n[Beret Guy walks off-panel again.]\n"}
{"id":1260,"title":"LD50","image_title":"LD50","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1260","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ld50.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1260:_LD50","transcript":"[A figure in a white coat lies on the floor, crushed beneath a giant pile of binders & paper. Megan and Cueball in white coats stand next to him, looking on. Megan is holding a clipboard.]\n[Caption below the panel:] The LD 50 of toxicity data is 2 kilograms per kilogram.\n","explanation":"LD 50 is a term used in toxicology that identifies the median lethal dose of a toxin, or how much is required to kill 50% of a given population. LD 50 s are usually measured in g\/kg, as the amount of toxin to kill something is usually linearly related with its mass. The lower the LD 50 , the more lethal the toxin. An LD 50 can be determined for almost any substance: for example, the LD 50 for sugar (in rats) is 29.7\u00a0g\/kg. However, Botulinum toxin (commercially known as Botox in the beauty industry), the most acutely toxic substance known, has a LD 50 of roughly 1\u00a0ng\/kg, or 0.000000001\u00a0g\/kg, a vanishingly small amount.\nThe comic is making the joke that the LD 50 of papers on toxicology is 2\u00a0kg\/kg, so it takes 2 kilograms of papers on toxicology to kill a person for each kilogram they weigh. The worldwide average weight of an adult is 62\u00a0kg (137\u00a0lb), so the lethal dose would be 124\u00a0kg (273\u00a0lb) of toxicology papers. Death is apparently caused by compression or smothering.\nThe title text says it will take less paper to kill a person if the paper is shoved down their throat instead of dropped on them, either by suffocation or by bursting the subject's stomach. A third method of delivering a toxin is by subcutaneous injections which are highly effective in administering vaccines and medications, but that number is omitted since they couldn't figure out how to do it. If they could, the amount of paper required to trigger a fatal blood vessel blockage would probably be fairly small.\n[A figure in a white coat lies on the floor, crushed beneath a giant pile of binders & paper. Megan and Cueball in white coats stand next to him, looking on. Megan is holding a clipboard.]\n[Caption below the panel:] The LD 50 of toxicity data is 2 kilograms per kilogram.\n"}
{"id":1261,"title":"Shake That","image_title":"Shake That","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1261","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/shake_that.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1261:_Shake_That","transcript":"[Megan stands in a disco, surrounded by dancing figures. She looks confused.] PA system: Shake what your mama gave you Megan:\u00a0??? [Megan walks out of the club door.] [We see a mug on a table, labelled \"World's Greatest Daughter\".] [Megan shakes the mug.]\n","explanation":"Visiting a club, Megan is exhorted by a phrase used in several songs, to \"shake what your mama gave you\", a crude euphemism typically used to encourage shaking one's body parts, referring to any of the sexually appealing anatomical parts of the dancer. Taking this exhortation extremely literally, Megan proceeds to locate a mug presumably given to her by her \"mama\" labeled \"World's greatest daughter\" and shakes it.\nThe phrase \"shake what your mama gave ya\" was in use as early as 1992, when it was the title of a song by Poison Clan , a southern hip-hop group that was influential from 1990\u20131995. Another version by Stik-E & Da Hoodz was released in 1995 by Phat Wax records. The line gained a wider audience when it was sampled by Fatboy Slim in the similarly titled \"Ya Mama\" on his 2000 album Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars . More recently the line was featured in the Lil Jon single \"Stick That Thang Out\". In fitting with the general thematic composition of such a song, a large part of which revolves around either goading a woman to, or describing one who is dancing seductively in a nightclub - this line asks a girl to dance, thereby swaying her hips & buttocks, or breasts, the most common male 'fetishes' \u2014 making them more conspicuous in the usually dim ambiance because of the phase lag with the rest of the body, which may be attributed to non-rigidity of the elastic structures \u2014 for purposes of her male audience's gratification (whether it be solicited or voyeuristic).\nThe title text refers to another lyrical cliche, \"work it\", which typically refers to \"working\" one's body; again, generally seductively. The action may be considered work either from the point of mechanical work, or as a reference to a professional dancer. This naturally leads Megan to further confusion (as indicated by the title text) when taken literally, as she responds \"it's already working!\" It is not entirely clear if she is again referring to the mug, or simply another generic object not displayed in the comic.\n1291: Shoot for the Moon may be a continuation of this, due to Megan misunderstanding common saying or references.\n[Megan stands in a disco, surrounded by dancing figures. She looks confused.] PA system: Shake what your mama gave you Megan:\u00a0??? [Megan walks out of the club door.] [We see a mug on a table, labelled \"World's Greatest Daughter\".] [Megan shakes the mug.]\n"}
{"id":1262,"title":"Unquote","image_title":"Unquote","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1262","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unquote.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1262:_Unquote","transcript":"[Two figures with spiky hair and backpacks are conversing. One is riding in a hover-car, or similar.] Future Hair: Bye! Friend: May the Force be with you! Future Hair: Huh? Friend: It's just something my grandma used to say. No idea what it means.\n[Caption below the panel:] I wonder on what date Star Wars will be quoted for the last time.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall poses the future possibility that at some time in the future, even a popular film as Star Wars will become forgotten by society.\n\" May the Force be with you \" is one of the many famous phrases from the Star Wars movies. Star Wars has become popular enough to remain part of today's popular culture almost forty years since its initial release, and the source and meaning of the quote is commonly recognized. This comic suggests that eventually even the enormously popular Star Wars will fade into obscurity \u2014 by which time, ironically, Star Wars-like hovercraft will have been invented.\nIt is not uncommon for once-popular sayings to lose popularity and come into disuse; particularly when the sayings are sourced from a pop-culture reference such as a book or film. In fact, there are entire books dedicated to such topics. Each generation generally develops its own pop culture-references which frequently become unrecognizable to the next generation. Only a handful of pop-culture quotes tend to survive for decades. For example, the phrase \"Sit on it\", coined by the creators of \" Happy Days \" as a TV-friendly but derogatory-sounding comeback for the character Fonzie. The phrase was very popular during the show's 1970s-80s heyday, but today is far less recognizable to those born after that era, and is not commonly referenced today.\nThe title text suggests that the characters will write off the phrase as a saying from the \"Old Country\" (the foreign country or place where one's ancestors emigrated from). This is a play on the fact that ubiquitous film and TV quotes have not been around long enough for society to generally forget their origins, and the most common source for unfamiliar sayings in today's world are sayings from other countries where one's ancestors originated. The use of the expression in this comic implies that the speaker has no idea about the origins of the phrase. To him it might be a translation of a foreign expression, or from a long left-behind homeland.\nA similar topic was addressed in 493: Actuarial , with Black Hat predicting when the last of the original Star Wars cast would die, and in 1093: Forget , predicting when the release of The Return of the Jedi would be forgotten. Also, 794: Inside Joke is about how much pop culture of centuries past has been forgotten.\nThe sentiment in this comic is similar to a quote from psychiatrist and author Irvin D Yalom:\n[Two figures with spiky hair and backpacks are conversing. One is riding in a hover-car, or similar.] Future Hair: Bye! Friend: May the Force be with you! Future Hair: Huh? Friend: It's just something my grandma used to say. No idea what it means.\n[Caption below the panel:] I wonder on what date Star Wars will be quoted for the last time.\n"}
{"id":1263,"title":"Reassuring","image_title":"Reassuring","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1263","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reassuring.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1263:_Reassuring","transcript":"[Megan is sitting at a computer, and Cueball is standing behind her.] Megan: Looks like computers will beat humans at Go pretty soon. Cueball: Wow. Cueball: That's the last of the big ones. Megan: Yeah. [Megan looks back over her shoulder at him.] Cueball: Well, at least humans are still better at, uh, Cueball: coming up with reassuring parables about things humans are better at? Megan: Hmm. [Megan types on her computer.] type type [She leans back over her chair again and addresses Cueball.] Megan: I made a Python script that generates thousands of reassuring parables per second. Cueball: Dammit. Computer: Computers will never understand a sonnet computers will never enjoy a salad comp\u2014\n","explanation":"Go is an abstract strategy board game considered computationally difficult, compared to chess. Because of the size and number of possible combinations, computers don't have an easy way to exhaustively search for the best move. Still, they are getting better and better playing it . Megan suggests that computers may soon reach the level of being able to beat the best human players, an artificial intelligence milestone that has already been accomplished with other games. At the time of this comic, Go was one of the last games where a computer can still be beaten by top humans (see 1002: Game AIs ). However, in May 2017, Google's AI AlphaGo defeated the world's top human Go player . This was referenced three months later in 1875: Computers vs Humans .\nAs a common human response, Cueball attempts to offer the consolation or defensive statement that humans remain better than computers at something else (see also 894: Progeny ). In this case, the first thing he thinks of is that humans are better at making such consoling statements. However, Megan disproves Cueball's statement by creating a script in the Python programming language to create an abundant supply of such statements.  An irony here is that each of the statements the computer generates defends humans, not computers.\nAnother such statement is made in the title text, that humans are better at quietly amusing themselves, oblivious to our \"pending obsolescence\" - which may refer alternatively to our inevitable deaths, or to the comic's own topic of our being replaced and surpassed by computers. The title text then again suggests, however, that the human statement is not true, referring to an Inspiron model of Dell computer which \"quietly amuses itself\" by showing a geometric screensaver as it presumably one day will be obsolete and replaced by a newer computer.\nThe original purpose of screensaver programs was to prevent images or characters from being burned into the phosphor layer of the older CRT displays. In more modern displays, including newer CRTs (cca mid-90s or newer), this could be achieved by simply turning it off after some period of time but originally there was no way to turn the display off programmatically. Thus the screensaver itself is already obsolete.\nGwern Branwen has used GPT-3 to generate reassuring parables .\n[Megan is sitting at a computer, and Cueball is standing behind her.] Megan: Looks like computers will beat humans at Go pretty soon. Cueball: Wow. Cueball: That's the last of the big ones. Megan: Yeah. [Megan looks back over her shoulder at him.] Cueball: Well, at least humans are still better at, uh, Cueball: coming up with reassuring parables about things humans are better at? Megan: Hmm. [Megan types on her computer.] type type [She leans back over her chair again and addresses Cueball.] Megan: I made a Python script that generates thousands of reassuring parables per second. Cueball: Dammit. Computer: Computers will never understand a sonnet computers will never enjoy a salad comp\u2014\n"}
{"id":1264,"title":"Slideshow","image_title":"Slideshow","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1264","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/slideshow.gif","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1264:_Slideshow","transcript":"Dear website operators, [This strip is in the form of an animated gif. The panels transition with a Ken Burns-like fade-and-pan.] Cueball: I will never ... Cueball: ...want to browse a series of images... Cueball: ...like this.\n","explanation":"It is very common for websites to feature a gallery of images \u2013\u00a0a website for a school, for example, might feature pictures of the students and teachers. Some websites display images in the form of a slideshow like this comic, with slow zoom and pan effects and fades between the images. This effect has been dubbed the Ken Burns effect after documentary filmmaker Ken Burns who popularized the effect. In many cases, the slideshow is a fixed element, and can't be controlled by the user. This prevents the user from navigating through the images at their own pace or viewing any one image for an extended period, and can be distracting. Randall expresses frustration at this.\nThe title text suggests points will be awarded to whoever can add that annoying effect to the text editors of the developers of Flickr , a photo-hosting website, so they can be subjected to the same thing to which they are subjecting Randall. This may be a response to recent changes to Flickr's website that includes such slideshows as one option; that said, Flickr has always allowed users to browse galleries in a normal grid layout and with user-controlled photo-by-photo full-window layout.\nDear website operators, [This strip is in the form of an animated gif. The panels transition with a Ken Burns-like fade-and-pan.] Cueball: I will never ... Cueball: ...want to browse a series of images... Cueball: ...like this.\n"}
{"id":1265,"title":"Juicer","image_title":"Juicer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1265","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/juicer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1265:_Juicer","transcript":"[We see a shelf. On it, from left to right, are: a bag of fruit gushers; a juicer; a bottle of bright red liquid; a bottle of bright blue liquid; and another bottle of bright red liquid.] \"Oh yeah, juicers are great! I use mine all the time.\"\n","explanation":"Juicers are typically used to crush fruits and\/or vegetables, thereby extracting the liquid juice and creating a tasty, refreshing and easy to consume drink. However, in this case, instead of actual fruits or vegetables, someone is making juice from Fruit Gushers , a chewy fruit-flavored candy, thereby extracting a nearly nutritionless artificial \"juice\" out of a candy casing which was formulated specifically for human consumption.\nThis may or may not be a parody of recent \"Fruit Gushers\" television commercials, in which Fruit Gushers are shown to squirt out nearly limitless amounts of \"juice\".\nThe title text asserts that the rind is where all the vitamins in the fruit reside. This is a common belief of actual fruits, although it is an untrue urban legend for many fruits; even fruits like apples do not contain most of the fiber in the skin itself, but rather directly below; although when you peel an apple you remove more than just the skin, losing also some high fiber content anyway. It is absolutely absurd as in this case, though, as the \"rind\" of a Fruit Gusher consists mainly of sugar. This text mocks the usual sentiment that the less desirable part of a food is the part that is \"better\" for you.\nIt is also a parody of the notion that buying a juicer, or other things like exercise equipment, will automatically make people healthier. Here it is shown that what you do with the juicer is the relevant factor. It is a little hidden joke that there is way more red than blue, pointing out how Gushers (unfairly, because blue is the best flavor) always have more red than blue.\nThe comic can also be interpreted as parodying the idea of fruit juices being healthy. Though this is widely believed, recent studies demonstrate otherwise.\n[We see a shelf. On it, from left to right, are: a bag of fruit gushers; a juicer; a bottle of bright red liquid; a bottle of bright blue liquid; and another bottle of bright red liquid.] \"Oh yeah, juicers are great! I use mine all the time.\"\n"}
{"id":1266,"title":"Halting Problem","image_title":"Halting Problem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1266","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/halting_problem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1266:_Halting_Problem","transcript":"[A short computer program.]\n[Caption below the panel]: The big picture solution to the halting problem.\n","explanation":"In 1936 Alan Turing proved that it's not possible for an algorithm to decide whether an arbitrary program will eventually halt, or run forever. This was later called the Halting problem by Martin Davis . The official definition of the problem is to write a program (actually, a Turing Machine ) that accepts as parameters a program and its parameters. That program needs to decide, in finite time, whether that program will ever halt running these parameters.\nThe halting problem is a cornerstone problem in computer science. It is used mainly as a way to prove a given task is impossible, by showing that solving that task will allow one to solve the halting problem.\nRandall , however, is providing a simpler solution. He implements his own code for the question \"Does it halt?\" which always returns \"true\", and directs us to think about the bigger picture.\nFrom a physical perspective, according to our current understanding of physics, this is right. Given enough time, any program will halt. This is due to factors external to the actual program. Sooner or later, electricity will give out, or the memory containing the program will get corrupted by cosmic rays, or corrosion will eat away the silicon in the CPU, or the second law of thermodynamics will lead to the Heat death of the universe . Nothing lasts forever, and this includes a running program.\nFrom a mathematical point of view, this is not true: a Turing machine will never have a hardware failure because it's not a physical machine. It's a theoretical construct, and it's defined mathematically, independent of any physical hardware. Similarly, \u2153 + \u2153 + \u2153 = 1 no matter what any physical hardware you are computing it on claims.\nAnother interpretation of Randall 's code is that, assuming the language uses an eager evaluation strategy, the Program in the parentheses is actually being run whenever his function is called. In this case, the function would wait until the program finishes and exits before returning \"True\". Therefore, Randall 's function is mathematically accurate. It does not solve the problem though, as it simply shifts the question to whether the function itself will ever halt. If his language uses lazy evaluation, the input program is completely ignored, and it reduces to the incorrect mathematical interpretation.\nFrom a practical point of view, there are of course times that a programmer would want to return \"false\", since some programs can be mathematically shown to run forever.\nThe title text further relates to this issue by claiming to have found a case where something need not die, but Randall does not know how to actually show it to anyone, because just the fact everyone will die sooner than it doesn't prove it will not die. The wording of the title text might also be a reference to Fermat's Last Theorem .\nIt should be noted that Randall's solution, barring its unsoundness, solves more than the halting problem in the form it is usually stated. The halting problem requires two parameters (a program and its parameters), while Randall's function only accepts one (the program). The question of whether a program halts for every input can be shown to be even harder to solve than the halting problem, meaning that even if a Turing machine had an additional instruction allowing it to check whether a program halts with given parameters, it still could not always confirm that a given program that halts for all parameters does so.\nThe code in this comic is written in pseudocode , to demonstrate the \"algorithm\" rather than an implementation in some existing programming language. The syntax resembles a mix of C and Python .\nThe proof that the halting problem is unsolveable is to write a new function that uses Randall's program:\nDEFINE META_DOESITHALT():\nIF ( DOESITHALT(META_DOESITHALT) ) WHILE ( TRUE ) DO_NOTHING; ELSE HALT;\n\nIf Randall's function says that META_DOESITHALT halts by returning \"TRUE\" - then that makes META_DOESITHALT loop forever.   But if it decides that it must halt by returning \"FALSE\" - then META_DOESITHALT halts.\nThis proves that DOESITHALT can't possibly work - no matter what it actually does.\nThis is the software equivalent of \"Everything I say is a lie\".\n[A short computer program.]\n[Caption below the panel]: The big picture solution to the halting problem.\n"}
{"id":1267,"title":"Mess","image_title":"Mess","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1267","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mess.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1267:_Mess","transcript":"[Cueball and his Cueball-like friend walk into the friend's bedroom. The friend walks ahead while Cueball stand behind at the door. There's a made bed, a picture on the wall with a river and a sun at the horizon, some curtains around the window, a rug, and one unidentifiable item lying on the floor.] Friend: Sorry it's such a disaster in here. Cueball thinking: Whoa\u2014 what's wrong with me?\n[Caption below the panel:] My room never looks as nice as the rooms other people apologize for.\nThe painting in Cueball's friend's room strongly resembles the painting in 1159: Countdown .\n","explanation":"There is a common psychological phenomenon which causes people to mentally magnify their own flaws, while failing to notice the flaws of others, so common it apparently doesn't have a specific scientific categorization. Many self-conscious people apologize for \"the mess\" in their home whenever they have guests over, no matter how clean it may actually be. If the house is neater than the guest's own home, the guest is likely to say to themself: \"If she thinks this is messy, what would she think of my place?!\"\nThis phenomenon is shown in the comic when Cueball's friend apologizes for the mess, despite the only thing appearing out of order is what seems to be a crumpled article of clothing on the floor. This \"mess\" only amplifies Cueball's fears about his own lifestyle, as he is surely wondering what his friend might think of his messy lifestyle based on their much higher standards.\nIn the title text, Cueball's anxiety in further amplified when the host left out a glass of water from the night before and apologies for it. Cueball is nervous because when this seemingly small oversight, when applied to his friend's very high standards, might seem like a huge problem, and in his mind, making his home akin to something he thinks is no better than a garbage pit.\nIn 1565: Back Seat the exact opposite reaction to having to show other people a real messy place is used for the joke.\n[Cueball and his Cueball-like friend walk into the friend's bedroom. The friend walks ahead while Cueball stand behind at the door. There's a made bed, a picture on the wall with a river and a sun at the horizon, some curtains around the window, a rug, and one unidentifiable item lying on the floor.] Friend: Sorry it's such a disaster in here. Cueball thinking: Whoa\u2014 what's wrong with me?\n[Caption below the panel:] My room never looks as nice as the rooms other people apologize for.\nThe painting in Cueball's friend's room strongly resembles the painting in 1159: Countdown .\n"}
{"id":1268,"title":"Alternate Universe","image_title":"Alternate Universe","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1268","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alternate_universe.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1268:_Alternate_Universe","transcript":"[Captions above the panel:] Imagine you were transported to an alternate universe just like your own, except people occasionally ate spiders. You can't convince anyone this is weird.\n[Megan is holding a very large spider, with another similar spider before her on the ground, and Cueball is standing behind her, leaning away with his hands out to each side shocked, as shown with three small lines going out from his head.] Megan: Mmm... Cueball: No! What are you doing!?\n[Caption below the panel:] This is how I feel about lobster.\n","explanation":"Randall is trying to make the point that eating lobsters is as weird as eating spiders . Crustaceans and arachnids are both arthropods , members of the same phylum, so his comparison isn't too far off. Then again, humans are in the same phylum ( chordates ) as sea squirts , so any perceived similarities are not exactly rooted in a close biological relationship. In addition, lobsters were once considered the \"cockroaches of the sea\", and a captain trying to feed his crew with lobster would often be seen as cruel; although there is some justification for that mindset as lobsters were served by being crushed into mush, shell and all, and boiled into a bland gruel. On the other hand, cooked tarantula spiders are considered a delicacy in Cambodia .\nOne common objection to eating spiders, crickets, roaches, and ants is that they are sometimes eaten whole, with guts, feces, and chitin devoured indiscriminately. However,  many people eat only the actual muscles of the lobster, the same as one would any vertebrate.\nIn the title text, Randall suggests a fantastical reason for why he is so repulsed by eating lobster; he was actually born on a world almost completely identical to Earth, and was unknowingly relocated to our Earth when he was a teenager. The sentiment expressed here is that the act of eating lobster feels outright alien to him. This might be a reference to the Mandela Effect , which is a suggestion by various peoples - some jokingly, some seriously - that groups of people occasionally get transported into alternate realities as an explanation for why so many people were certain that Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s despite him actually dying in 2013. (Contrary to popular belief, the Mandela Effect is not rationalising those false memories but rather why so many people have the same false memory.)\nTo feel that strongly about shellfish-based cuisine, he would have to have not been exposed to it until his adolescent years; this seems unlikely, as the real Randall Munroe was born about 60 miles inland from the United States' northern east coast, where said cuisine is particularly prevalent. In reality, he is probably merely grossed out by the idea of eating lobster, and is probably exaggerating his feelings for comic effect. The title text also references changing clocks to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST), a practice which Randall has previously shown disdain for, mocking its irrational premise in several comics . Again, he is likely comically exaggerating his feelings, unless he literally doesn't recall a time before his teenage years when his parents ever changed the clocks in accordance with DST.\nThe term \" Earth Prime \" is typically used in fictional multiverse settings, as a way to conveniently distinguish the Earth in which the narrative is rooted from any other Earths featured in the story.\nThe idea of a alternative universe where Brussels sprouts taste good was the subject in 2241: Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect .\n[Captions above the panel:] Imagine you were transported to an alternate universe just like your own, except people occasionally ate spiders. You can't convince anyone this is weird.\n[Megan is holding a very large spider, with another similar spider before her on the ground, and Cueball is standing behind her, leaning away with his hands out to each side shocked, as shown with three small lines going out from his head.] Megan: Mmm... Cueball: No! What are you doing!?\n[Caption below the panel:] This is how I feel about lobster.\n"}
{"id":1269,"title":"Privacy Opinions","image_title":"Privacy Opinions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1269","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/privacy_opinions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1269:_Privacy_Opinions","transcript":"Opinions on Internet Privacy The Philosopher: Megan: \"Privacy\" is an impractical way to think about data in a digital world so unlike the one in which our soci-- Ponytail: So bored. The Crypto Nut: Cueball: My data is safe behind six layers of symmetric and public-key algorithms. Friend: What data is it? Cueball: Mostly me emailing with people about cryptography. The Conspiracist: [Cueball talks to Megan.] Cueball: These leaks are just the tip of the iceberg. There's a warehouse in Utah where the NSA has the entire iceberg. I don't know how they got it there. The Nihilist: Megan: Joke's on them, gathering all this data on me as if anything I do means anything. The Exhibitionist: [Cueball is watching a surveillance console, Officer Ponytail stands behind him.] Console: Mmmm, I sure hope the NSA isn't watching me bite into these juicy strawberries!! Oops, I dripped some on my shirt! Better take it off. Google, are you there? Google, this lotion feels soooo good. Cueball: Um. The Sage: [Beret Guy and Cueball sitting at a table. Beret Guy is holding a burrito.] Beret Guy: I don't know or care what data anyone has about me. Data is imaginary. This burrito is real.\n","explanation":"This comic is about opinions on internet privacy in general. Six positions are offered as options. Four of the positions are tagged negatively by Randall by their subtitles alone: the Crypto Nut, the Conspiracist, the Nihilist, and the Exhibitionist, all of which have negative meanings in contemporary English. That the viewer is encouraged to identify negatively with these four positions is further encouraged by the content of the panels, as those characters are depicted either as having such boring lives that they have no need for privacy (the Crypto Nut, the Nihilist), or as being crazy (the Conspiracist, the Exhibitionist).\nA fifth position, the Philosopher, is tagged somewhat ambivalently by Randall: Megan, or possibly a look-alike, is depicted as boring her interlocutor, yet in the title text, Randall admits that he is usually the Philosopher. Also, \u201cPhilosopher\u201d in vernacular English is neutrally valenced, potentially having the ability to expound either wisdom (\"sophia\") or sophistry . It is also a synonym for Sage, the sixth position. As Randall condones his own movement from Philosopher to Sage, he thus indicates that the Philosopher is to be viewed negatively, even if it is a tempting position to hold.\nThe title of the sixth position, the \u201cSage\u201d, is positively valenced in contemporary English, and the author in the title text states that once he obtains a \u201cburrito\u201d \u2014 i.e., a \u201creal\u201d thing, he switches from the Philosopher to the Sage. The internal evidence presented thus far therefore is entirely consistent; Randall encourages the reader to identify with the Sage. However, the choice of Beret Guy to represent the Sage undercuts this somewhat as Beret Guy is frequently seen as bizarrely disconnected from reality in a way that is maladaptive (e.g. 1030: Keyed ) and overly obsessed with food to the point of creating trouble and potential self-harm (e.g. 452: Mission ).\nBy presenting five negatively tagged positions followed by a positively tagged sixth and final one, the author follows a rhetorical commonplace of listing and refuting a number of positions one by one, concluding with the favored and best one, which is not refuted and should be accepted both on its own merits and by virtue of being the last one standing. The comic therefore implies that no other (significant) positions exist.\nHaving completed the rhetorical analysis of the comic, we are now in a position to understand the meaning of \u201cInternet Privacy\u201d.\nPanels #3 and 5 directly reference the American NSA. Panel #5's \u201cexhibitionist\u201d also references Google, but the characters in the panel appear to be NSA agents (one wears an official cap and they are viewing the exhibitionist on an official, government-looking monitor). Likewise, the focus of the \u201cNihilist\u201d is that the joke is on the people who gather the data, rather than those who are subsequently able to make use of it (such as Facebook's users rather than \u201cFacebook\u201d itself; i.e., Facebook's employees and, by extension, its advertisers). The content of the actual data is only mentioned in panels #2, 4, and 5, and in each panel, it is suggested that it is meaningless or trivial. The Sage underscores the notion that any data known about him does not bother him, and therefore must be meaningless or trivial. The reader is thus encouraged to believe that it does not actually matter whether others discover personal data about him\/her.\nThe comic is therefore what social theorists call reductive , because it reduces the range of possibilities of \u201cOpinions on Internet Privacy\u201d to an artificially and simplistically narrow subset; in this case, individuals concerned with government or corporate agencies using data that they have gathered on individuals, and the futility of worrying about such things. The comic does not admit the possibility of other \u201copinions on internet privacy\u201d \u2013 namely, that individuals might have legitimate concerns with governmental or corporate uses of their data, let alone other individuals' access to data that is assembled and distributed by corporations such as Facebook. The comic likewise does not consider the possibility of individuals having more interesting lives than the characters depicted, and therefore very real concerns about their privacy due to the activities that they engage in that are potentially more career limiting (should they be discovered) than obsessing about cryptography or eating a burrito.\nThe comic is \u201cfunctionally\u201d reductive, as opposed to \u201cintentionally\u201d reductive, because the reduction is the function or effect of the comic for readers who read it straightforwardly. There is not enough internal evidence in the comic to maintain that the author intentionally excluded other viable opinions on internet privacy; it could be that they are just not on his radar. For example, we do not have enough information in the comic to claim that Randall is against civil rights; it could be simply that he doesn't often think about them. Likewise, it would exceed the evidence of the comic to claim that the author believes that schoolteachers who use the internet to facilitate legal but frowned-upon sexual behaviors should lose their jobs if they are found out due to internet privacy breaches; it could be that Randall simply hasn't bothered to worry about these matters if they don't affect him personally. This adjudication \u2013 whether the comic is \u201cintentionally\u201d reductive or not \u2013 may only be made on the basis of external evidence; that is, data known about Randall from sources beyond this comic.\nAn alternative interpretation of the title text is that it is not Randall speaking his own opinion, but instead represents Beret Guy's (i.e. the \u201cSage's\u201d) perspective. Randall may indeed have some concern with internet privacy, which would be consistent with the views on open-source security expressed in 463: Voting Machines , for example. In other cases, such as 1490: Atoms and 1419: On the Phone , the title text has been used as additional, farcical statements made by characters in the strip, rather than as Randall expressing his own views. Under this interpretation, Beret Guy would be prone to philosophizing about security, but then be easily distracted by a burrito; this is consistent with Beret Guy's general behavior.\nAdditional observations about the comic follow.\nSince a large percentage of people and companies present in the internet don't have the ability or intention to do strong cryptography, the crypto nut's communication is limited to talking with other crypto nuts - which indicates cryptography as a topic. A real crypto nut will encrypt not just the important stuff because otherwise the attacker (in this context, assumed to be a government agency, network operator or corporation) will know which mails contain stuff that was secret enough to warrant encrypting, thus giving them information about whom he's doing secret business with.\nThe (data) warehouse mentioned is the Utah Data Center which seems to be of impressive size. The punchline is created by taking the iceberg and warehouse analogies literally.\nThis type is predominantly associated with twitter, but other social networks as well. This archetype is humorously combined with a sexual exhibitionist, who gets a sexual rise from the knowledge that others are spying on him\/her. The awkwardness of the spying officials is magnified by the fact that they appear to be of opposite sexes, increasing the discomfort of the seated male.\nThe monologue alludes to a scene in The Matrix in which Cypher arranges with the evil machines to become a traitor. The Sage is apparently immediately satisfied when he has food and prosperity. He does not need privacy or other democratic rights as long as he does not individually suffer from their absence.\nThe release of the comic on this date could be to coincide with the premiere of South Park 's 17th season on the same date, which starts with an episode ( Let Go, Let Gov ) in which Cartman discovers that the NSA has been spying on him.\nThe title text is to suggest that he enjoys burritos so much that being handed one even while philosophizing (his natural state) would stop him in his tracks to eat the burrito, thus becoming a pseudo-sage concerned only with the burrito at the exclusion of the topic of internet security. The burrito is later mentioned as a way to stay connected to the real word (compared to the world of art) in 1496: Art Project .\nOpinions on Internet Privacy The Philosopher: Megan: \"Privacy\" is an impractical way to think about data in a digital world so unlike the one in which our soci-- Ponytail: So bored. The Crypto Nut: Cueball: My data is safe behind six layers of symmetric and public-key algorithms. Friend: What data is it? Cueball: Mostly me emailing with people about cryptography. The Conspiracist: [Cueball talks to Megan.] Cueball: These leaks are just the tip of the iceberg. There's a warehouse in Utah where the NSA has the entire iceberg. I don't know how they got it there. The Nihilist: Megan: Joke's on them, gathering all this data on me as if anything I do means anything. The Exhibitionist: [Cueball is watching a surveillance console, Officer Ponytail stands behind him.] Console: Mmmm, I sure hope the NSA isn't watching me bite into these juicy strawberries!! Oops, I dripped some on my shirt! Better take it off. Google, are you there? Google, this lotion feels soooo good. Cueball: Um. The Sage: [Beret Guy and Cueball sitting at a table. Beret Guy is holding a burrito.] Beret Guy: I don't know or care what data anyone has about me. Data is imaginary. This burrito is real.\n"}
{"id":1270,"title":"Functional","image_title":"Functional","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1270","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/functional.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1270:_Functional","transcript":"[White Hat stands behind Cueball, who is sitting at a computer.] White Hat: Why do you like functional programming so much? What does it actually get you? Cueball: Tail recursion is its own reward.\n","explanation":null}
{"id":1271,"title":"Highlighting","image_title":"Highlighting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1271","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hilighting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1271:_Highlighting","transcript":"[A paragraph of text is shown. The highlight starts away from the leftmost edge of the highlight, and is a different distance to that between the rightmost edge of the highlight and the highlight end. Red X.] [A paragraph is shown. The highlight's starting point, end point, and number of lines included is such that there is an internal square in the middle, illustrated in green. Green tick.] [A paragraph is shown. Not only does it have an internal square, but the distance between the leftmost edge and the highlight start point is the same as the distance between the rightmost edge and the highlight end point. Green tick.] [A paragraph is shown. The entire paragraph is highlighted, making one big rectangle. Green tick.] [A paragraph is shown. The whole paragraph is selected, but the highlight starts away from the leftmost margin. This is shown with a red box, an arrow, and \"?!?!\". Red X.] [A paragraph is shown. Over the top is overlaid \"[Clicking to highlight text is disabled]\". Many, many red Xes.] I absentmindedly select random blocks of text as I read, and feel subconsciously satisfied when the highlighted area makes a symmetrical shape.\n","explanation":"A number of people find it easier to read long texts by marking their place as they move through the reading. When done on paper, this may be done with a ruler, pencil, or finger. On-screen, however, one of the most effective methods is by highlighting the text being read. People accustomed to this form of reading often do it absentmindedly. Some people simply highlight parts of an article they're consulting without regards to which line they're currently reading, just to occupy their hands.\nHighlighting, however, has the potential to create shapes on screen. Randall is referring to the fact that the shapes created may occasionally be symmetrical, which creates satisfaction. Different highlighting patterns may be caused by the user's browser, the site provided, or by simply dragging one's cursor across the screen with the mouse button held down, and releasing at different patterns..\nThe top example shows tight-fitting highlight syntax, which only covers the text of the paragraph. This is the most common result of highlighting an entire paragraph, but as paragraphs are rarely symmetrical, this example is marked by an X.\nThe second example starts the highlighting a few words in and continues to the end of the paragraph, while the third example begins another half-word in and continues down a line and a word before ending. Both of these patterns would be caused by manually highlighting the text with the mouse button, rather than rapidly-clicking until a segment is highlighted. The second example forms a square where the three lines of highlighted text overlap, while the third has rotational symmetry of the selected region; both are marked with checks.\nThe fourth example highlights the entire paragraph, as well as the whitespace caused by the indentation of the paragraph and at the end of the paragraph when the last line does not continue to the opposite margin. This example has both rotational and divisible symmetry, and is marked with a check.\nThe fifth example highlights the whitespace after the end of the paragraph, but not the whitespace of the indentation, leaving an odd block at the start of it. This ruins the paragraph's symmetry, and so this example is marked with an X.\nThe bottom example refers to the practice of websites adding a script to disable highlighting, often to discourage readers from copying their content. This creates a great dissatisfaction in readers accustomed to highlight as they read, shown by the many overlapping \"X\"s. Ironically since the comic is an image, the text in the comic can also not be highlighted.\nThe title text refers to the practice of websites of adding a script that searches upon clicking any word in the text; most notably done by Yahoo! news in years prior. The search may be of the site, the web, or of an advertisement provider. The script sometimes creates a popup, which, Randall says, causes him to \"panic\", and consequently never want to return to the site again. It is in fact quite annoying to the occasional highlighter, causing him to lose his place and interrupting his train of thought.\n[A paragraph of text is shown. The highlight starts away from the leftmost edge of the highlight, and is a different distance to that between the rightmost edge of the highlight and the highlight end. Red X.] [A paragraph is shown. The highlight's starting point, end point, and number of lines included is such that there is an internal square in the middle, illustrated in green. Green tick.] [A paragraph is shown. Not only does it have an internal square, but the distance between the leftmost edge and the highlight start point is the same as the distance between the rightmost edge and the highlight end point. Green tick.] [A paragraph is shown. The entire paragraph is highlighted, making one big rectangle. Green tick.] [A paragraph is shown. The whole paragraph is selected, but the highlight starts away from the leftmost margin. This is shown with a red box, an arrow, and \"?!?!\". Red X.] [A paragraph is shown. Over the top is overlaid \"[Clicking to highlight text is disabled]\". Many, many red Xes.] I absentmindedly select random blocks of text as I read, and feel subconsciously satisfied when the highlighted area makes a symmetrical shape.\n"}
{"id":1272,"title":"Shadowfacts","image_title":"Shadowfacts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1272","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/shadowfacts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1272:_Shadowfacts","transcript":"[Gandalf sits on a horse, addressing three hobbits.] Gandalf: This is Shadowfacts, lord of all horses, and he\u2013 Shadowfacts: The outer part of a shadow is called the penumbra! Gandalf: Shut up.\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of J.R.R. Tolkien 's The Lord of the Rings . The name of the horse, Shadowfacts, is a pun on Shadowfax , the horse Gandalf rides in the books. As the name \"Shadowfacts\" suggests, this horse interjects into conversations various facts about shadows. There is a possible deeper level to the pun, referring to the cat facts meme .\nThe three parts of a shadow are the umbra , penumbra and antumbra .\nIn the title text, Gandalf continues to speak, and is interrupted again by the horse with another fact about shadows. \"Look to my coming on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east.\" is what Gandalf said before the battle of Helm's Deep when he went to get reinforcements. The horse notes that if the sun is in the east, the shadows will be to the west of the objects that cast them.\nA similar talking horse appears in 936: Password Strength .\n[Gandalf sits on a horse, addressing three hobbits.] Gandalf: This is Shadowfacts, lord of all horses, and he\u2013 Shadowfacts: The outer part of a shadow is called the penumbra! Gandalf: Shut up.\n"}
{"id":1273,"title":"Tall Infographics","image_title":"Tall Infographics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1273","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tall_infographics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1273:_Tall_Infographics","transcript":"BY THE YEAR 2018 2019 2020 ALL INFO Rmation [Graph representing all information.] [X axis of graph: 6 YEARS from now ( 72 months)] WILL BE [in two segments of a pie chart] Megan: COMMUNICATED Hairy: Yes! in THIS CLEAR and CONCISE [in a Venn diagram] F O R M A T [on the x axis of a bar graph of where these letters fall in the alphabet (the bar labeled T is shaded with a different color)] [Arrow pointing to the bar labeled \"T\": T ]\n","explanation":"This comic is a satirical infographic , which is usually used to simplify and help visualize information that would be dreadfully boring otherwise. Randall takes this \"simplification\" to the extreme by making an unhelpful infographic, complete with unnecessary data and ironic and blatant misuse of common graphs and charts. At this point, he is not even simplifying his sentence \"By the year 2019, all information will be communicated in this clear and concise format.\" He makes a sarcastic claim, pointing out how needlessly complicated some infographics make things they are supposed to condense.\nIn the chart:\nIt is also likely that this comic is a send up of the recent trend towards presenting information in tall graphics that are easily viewed on smartphone screens. A tall graphic with the same pixel width as an iPhone, for example, can be viewed without zooming and using only vertical scrolling. Another discussion venue for the topic and this comic is Gizmodo: Tall Infographics Suck .\nThe prediction communicated in the comic did not actually happen by the year 2019. Alternatively, it did happen but was reversed so quickly nobody noticed it happened.\nThe title text mentions the often-hyped term \" big data .\" \"Big data\" normally refers to the challenges of working with and visualizing a quantity of data which is hard to process using traditional tools and methods. Randall, now speaking unsarcastically, tells us that just because the font size is huge doesn't mean you have handled the big data well.\nBY THE YEAR 2018 2019 2020 ALL INFO Rmation [Graph representing all information.] [X axis of graph: 6 YEARS from now ( 72 months)] WILL BE [in two segments of a pie chart] Megan: COMMUNICATED Hairy: Yes! in THIS CLEAR and CONCISE [in a Venn diagram] F O R M A T [on the x axis of a bar graph of where these letters fall in the alphabet (the bar labeled T is shaded with a different color)] [Arrow pointing to the bar labeled \"T\": T ]\n"}
{"id":1274,"title":"Open Letter","image_title":"Open Letter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1274","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/open_letter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1274:_Open_Letter","transcript":"[The picture shows a letter.] October 7 th 2013 To: The Freemasons, the Illuminati, Scientology, FEMA, the New World Order, the Federal Reserve, Citigroup, Halliburton, Google, the Vatican, Bilderburg, Walmart, the Rothschilds, the Knights Templar, HAARP, the UN, Skull & Bones, Bohemian Grove, the Koch Brothers, George Soros, the Trilateral Commision, the Knights of Malta, the CFR, Exxon Mobil, the Zionists, the Vril Society, the Lizard People, and everyone else who secretly controls the US government Can you please get your shit together? This is embarrassing. Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the US government shutdown in 2013 that had been ongoing for a week and was still current as of the time of this comic. Under some circumstances, the United States Federal Government can temporarily shut down pending budget legislation being passed by the United States Congress. These shutdowns are typically due to political disagreements between the President, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. Due to the shutdown, numerous government services and facilities are shut down, often resulting in many logistical issues for the public.\nOver the years, various conspiracy theories have been proposed claiming that the United States Government is not controlled by publicly-elected officials, but rather by one or more organizations that secretly control the actions of the government (sometimes termed a \"shadow government\" ). In this strip, Randall writes a letter to the shadow government, telling them that the situation (having the country's government shut down) is embarrassing and asking them to fix the problem.\nThis comic also implicitly argues against the plausibility of the aforementioned conspiracy theories if one assumes that a shadow-controlled government would be more likely to operate with a singular purpose and therefore be less susceptible to paralyzing political disagreements. Randall previously alluded to this in the title text to comic 1081 : \"Really, the comforting side in most conspiracy theory arguments is the one claiming that anyone who's in power has any plan at all.\" This is one of several comics in which Randall expresses dismay at how many intelligent people can fall for absurd conspiracy theories; see comics 258 and 690 , among others.\nThe title text addresses the leadership of the shadow government in more colloquial terms, asking if they are suffering from personal problems that are impeding their ability to keep things under control. This is patronizing, and thus hilarious.\nThe message, as titled, is in the form of an \" Open Letter \", being a directed and 'personal' message to a person or group of people which is nonetheless intended by the sender to be publicly aired (unlike a standard commentary or editorial, which is intended for public consumption, but addresses the concerned 'target' almost as an aside). In some cases this may be to ensure the correspondence is not kept confidential by the recipients and\/or that the public as a whole are also indirectly addressed ('Cc'ed) in the correspondence, without having to compose a companion piece for that purpose. In this case, however, it may additionally be because the intended recipient(s) are not so easily identified for direct communication, and a public airing would ensure 'delivery' even without compromising the integrity of the message.  Open Letters are often aired (or pre-copied, verbatim, from actual correspondence) in one or area or other of the public media, and while web-comics aren't necessarily the most publicised of forums, the xkcd readership almost certainly leads to covering both the 'named' recipients and the intended public view.\n[The picture shows a letter.] October 7 th 2013 To: The Freemasons, the Illuminati, Scientology, FEMA, the New World Order, the Federal Reserve, Citigroup, Halliburton, Google, the Vatican, Bilderburg, Walmart, the Rothschilds, the Knights Templar, HAARP, the UN, Skull & Bones, Bohemian Grove, the Koch Brothers, George Soros, the Trilateral Commision, the Knights of Malta, the CFR, Exxon Mobil, the Zionists, the Vril Society, the Lizard People, and everyone else who secretly controls the US government Can you please get your shit together? This is embarrassing. Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen\n"}
{"id":1275,"title":"int(pi)","image_title":"int(pi)","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1275","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/int_pi.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1275:_int(pi)","transcript":"[Inside a frame a formula is shown:] volume(r) = (4\/int(pi))*pi*r^int(pi)\n[Caption below the frame:] Programming Tip: The number \"3\" is cursed. Avoid it.\n","explanation":"This comic purports to provide a tip to programmers, that the number \" 3 \" is cursed and shouldn't be used. There is no explanation given as to why the number 3 is cursed, and it could well have been chosen arbitrarily. The title text hints that the consequence for using the cursed number is non-functioning code, a pain for any programmer. The absurdity of the number 3 somehow being cursed is part of the humor.\nTo assist the programmer, the comic gives an example of how to avoid the use of the number 3, by using a slightly convoluted method of using int(pi) , which means the integer part of pi , without the fractional part . Pi, an irrational number , has a value starting 3.14159... , making int(pi) equal to 3. This is demonstrated in a formula to calculate the volume of a sphere , normally (4\/3)*pi*(r^3), but converted for avoidance of the number 3 to (4\/int(pi))*pi*(r^int(pi)).\nFor a number of reasons it is a good programming practice to use variables and constants where a value is used in multiple places, however this is not typically used in the case of natural numbers. There are unusual situations where this type of programming is a valid method, however typically for more specific circumstances, and not a certain number being seen as cursed.\nIn the title text, Randall takes the joke a step further, suggesting the usage of floor and ceiling functions : ceiling(pi) would be pi rounded up to the next integer, which is 4 ; and floor(pi) is pi rounded down to the next integer, which is 3. (Note that int(n) and floor(n) have the same value when n is greater than or equal to zero. For values less than zero, int(n) is equal to ceiling(n) .)\nThe joke here plays on the fact that basic rules of programming are confusing and novice programmers are often told to simply not do certain things without any explanation (see 292: goto ). This includes, in particular, a general proscription against \" magic numbers \" in the code. Replacing all significant magic numbers with named constants makes programs easier to read, understand and maintain. Randall takes this to an extreme by suggesting that certain numbers could be inherently problematic, but the general idea is perfectly believable.\nMmm... Floor pie. is a reference to The Simpsons.\nSee also Cargo cult programming .\n[Inside a frame a formula is shown:] volume(r) = (4\/int(pi))*pi*r^int(pi)\n[Caption below the frame:] Programming Tip: The number \"3\" is cursed. Avoid it.\n"}
{"id":1276,"title":"Angular Size","image_title":"Angular Size","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1276","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/angular_size.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1276:_Angular_Size","transcript":"The size of the part of Earth's surface directly under various space objects [Several images are shown, of space objects of differing size and at different distances from Earth, illustrating the differing sizes of their \"shadows\" as mapped onto Earth's surface viewed from the center of the Earth.]\n[The first image merely sets the stage: Earth is a full circle, with two figures \u2014 Cueball and Megan \u2014 standing on it; a small space object casts a \"shadow\" on Megan, while a slightly larger object, though proportionally farther away, casts just about the same size shadow next to Cueball.]\n[The second image is a map showing London, with the Thames running through it, and a ring highway running around it labeled \"London's M25 Orbital Freeway\". A grey circle is overlaid, just about the diameter of the M25; it is labeled \"The Sun and The Moon (about the same size)\".]\n[The third image has a small grey rectangle in one corner labeled \"Soccer field\" for comparison. The image is dominated by four large, grey circles, considerably larger than the soccer field, labeled \"Saturn\", \"Mars\", \"Jupiter\", and \"Venus\", with Mars slightly larger than Saturn, Jupiter approximately twice the diameter of Saturn, and Venus approximately three times the diameter of Saturn. Smaller circles are labeled \"Mercury\", \"Uranus\", and \"Neptune\", with Mercury still somewhat larger than the soccer field, Uranus about its size, and Neptune slightly smaller.]\n[The fourth image has the soccer field blown up to take up much of the view; its center circle, goal areas, and corner kick areas are visible. Labeled grey circles of various circles are again overlain: Callisto and Ganymede are about as large as one half of the field; Io, Titan, and Europa are somewhat smaller than half the field; and Ceres, Triton, and Pluto are much smaller (all three together would probably fit into the soccer field's center circle).]\n[In the fifth image, there is a different grey rectangle, this one labeled \"Ping Pong table\", with a few balls and paddles visible. An irregular ovoid labeled \"Phobos\" is about the size of the table, as is a circle labeled \"R. Doradus\". An irregular circular shape labeled \"Deimos\" is about the size of half the table; a circle labeled \"Betelgeuse\" is a little smaller, and a circle labeled \"Eris\" is a little smaller, though still comfortably filling most of half of the table.]\n[In the sixth image, a light grey image of laptop computer keyboard and screen is shown, viewed from directly above. An irregular shape labeled \"4942 Munroe\" is slightly larger than the laptop, while circles labeled \"Alpha Centauri A\", \"Sirius\", and \"Alpha Centauri B\" form a descending series somewhat smaller than it. Circles labeled \"Proxima Centauri\" and \"Barnard's Star\" are considerably smaller than the laptop: Proxima Centauri would fit on the trackpad, while Barnard's Star covers perhaps four keys on the keyboard.]\n[In the seventh image we see a greatly zoomed-in shape which is identified as the \"Tilde on laptop keyboard\". A circle labeled \"HD 189733 b (permadeath)\" is almost as large as the tilde is wide; a circle labeled \"Tau Ceti C (giant dog planet)\" is somewhat smaller. Circles labeled \"Gleise 581 g (jelly-filled planet)\", \"Gleise 667 C c (PILF)\", and \"HD 20794 c (moonchild)\" are all 1\/2 to 1\/3 as wide as the tilde is wide. A smaller circle labeled \"Event horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy\" fits comfortably within the tilde's stroke width. A very small dot off in one corner (much smaller than the tilde or anything else in the image) is labeled \"KOI-1686.01 (emergency backup earth)\".]\n[Finally, in the eighth image, the size comparison is to the grey outlines of four bacilliform bacteria labeled \"E. coli\". The outlines of two interstellar probes are shown, with circular main housings and protruding instruments and antennae. They are labeled \"Voyager 1\" and \"Voyager 2\".]\nThe exact dimensions of a professional soccer field are not precisely defined. In international matches they must be between 64 and 75m wide and between 100 and 110m long. Therefore soccer fields aren't well suited as a precise unit of measurement. However, they are commonly used to give people a rough understanding of an areas size. According to the angular diameter of the referenced celestial objects, Randall did his calculations using dimensions of 105m \u00d7 68m.\nA similar model of representing the angular diameter of celestial objects as portions of the Earth's surface seen from its center was described in Isaac Asimov's May 1961 essay \"Heaven on Earth\".\n","explanation":"This comic is a comparison of the angular diameters (or apparent diameter) of various celestial objects at the surface of the earth relative to a vertex at the center of the Earth as diagrammed in the opening panel. The objects' scales are compared to actual objects on earth. Each size given is for the object at its closest approach to earth.\nLondon's M25 motorway is around 60\u00a0km (35\u00a0miles) across, a soccer field is about 100\u00a0meters long (109\u00a0yards), a ping pong table is 274\u00a0centimeters long (9\u00a0feet), a laptop is about 35\u00a0centimeters across (13.75\u00a0inches), the tilde symbol on a keyboard is about 5\u00a0millimeters long (197\u00a0mils), and a cell of E. coli is about 2\u00a0microns long (78.75\u00a0millionths of an inch).\nA simple formula can be used to find the size on earth of a celestial object when the size of or distance to the object is known. This is done by taking the radius of the earth, multiplying by the diameter of the object, and dividing by the distance to the object from the center of the earth.\nThe space objects referenced in the panels are:\nThe title text states that astronomy would be much easier if the celestial sphere were mapped to the earth - like a giant globe . Due to the distance of the stars you would just need magnifying glass to see the areas representing distant stars instead of an expensive powerful telescope to see huge distances.\nApproximate values for the mappings to the Earth sphere (based on mean Earth radius at 6,371.0\u00a0km or 3,958.8\u00a0mi.):\n\nThe size of the part of Earth's surface directly under various space objects [Several images are shown, of space objects of differing size and at different distances from Earth, illustrating the differing sizes of their \"shadows\" as mapped onto Earth's surface viewed from the center of the Earth.]\n[The first image merely sets the stage: Earth is a full circle, with two figures \u2014 Cueball and Megan \u2014 standing on it; a small space object casts a \"shadow\" on Megan, while a slightly larger object, though proportionally farther away, casts just about the same size shadow next to Cueball.]\n[The second image is a map showing London, with the Thames running through it, and a ring highway running around it labeled \"London's M25 Orbital Freeway\". A grey circle is overlaid, just about the diameter of the M25; it is labeled \"The Sun and The Moon (about the same size)\".]\n[The third image has a small grey rectangle in one corner labeled \"Soccer field\" for comparison. The image is dominated by four large, grey circles, considerably larger than the soccer field, labeled \"Saturn\", \"Mars\", \"Jupiter\", and \"Venus\", with Mars slightly larger than Saturn, Jupiter approximately twice the diameter of Saturn, and Venus approximately three times the diameter of Saturn. Smaller circles are labeled \"Mercury\", \"Uranus\", and \"Neptune\", with Mercury still somewhat larger than the soccer field, Uranus about its size, and Neptune slightly smaller.]\n[The fourth image has the soccer field blown up to take up much of the view; its center circle, goal areas, and corner kick areas are visible. Labeled grey circles of various circles are again overlain: Callisto and Ganymede are about as large as one half of the field; Io, Titan, and Europa are somewhat smaller than half the field; and Ceres, Triton, and Pluto are much smaller (all three together would probably fit into the soccer field's center circle).]\n[In the fifth image, there is a different grey rectangle, this one labeled \"Ping Pong table\", with a few balls and paddles visible. An irregular ovoid labeled \"Phobos\" is about the size of the table, as is a circle labeled \"R. Doradus\". An irregular circular shape labeled \"Deimos\" is about the size of half the table; a circle labeled \"Betelgeuse\" is a little smaller, and a circle labeled \"Eris\" is a little smaller, though still comfortably filling most of half of the table.]\n[In the sixth image, a light grey image of laptop computer keyboard and screen is shown, viewed from directly above. An irregular shape labeled \"4942 Munroe\" is slightly larger than the laptop, while circles labeled \"Alpha Centauri A\", \"Sirius\", and \"Alpha Centauri B\" form a descending series somewhat smaller than it. Circles labeled \"Proxima Centauri\" and \"Barnard's Star\" are considerably smaller than the laptop: Proxima Centauri would fit on the trackpad, while Barnard's Star covers perhaps four keys on the keyboard.]\n[In the seventh image we see a greatly zoomed-in shape which is identified as the \"Tilde on laptop keyboard\". A circle labeled \"HD 189733 b (permadeath)\" is almost as large as the tilde is wide; a circle labeled \"Tau Ceti C (giant dog planet)\" is somewhat smaller. Circles labeled \"Gleise 581 g (jelly-filled planet)\", \"Gleise 667 C c (PILF)\", and \"HD 20794 c (moonchild)\" are all 1\/2 to 1\/3 as wide as the tilde is wide. A smaller circle labeled \"Event horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy\" fits comfortably within the tilde's stroke width. A very small dot off in one corner (much smaller than the tilde or anything else in the image) is labeled \"KOI-1686.01 (emergency backup earth)\".]\n[Finally, in the eighth image, the size comparison is to the grey outlines of four bacilliform bacteria labeled \"E. coli\". The outlines of two interstellar probes are shown, with circular main housings and protruding instruments and antennae. They are labeled \"Voyager 1\" and \"Voyager 2\".]\nThe exact dimensions of a professional soccer field are not precisely defined. In international matches they must be between 64 and 75m wide and between 100 and 110m long. Therefore soccer fields aren't well suited as a precise unit of measurement. However, they are commonly used to give people a rough understanding of an areas size. According to the angular diameter of the referenced celestial objects, Randall did his calculations using dimensions of 105m \u00d7 68m.\nA similar model of representing the angular diameter of celestial objects as portions of the Earth's surface seen from its center was described in Isaac Asimov's May 1961 essay \"Heaven on Earth\".\n"}
{"id":1277,"title":"Ayn Random","image_title":"Ayn Random","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1277","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ayn_random.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1277:_Ayn_Random","transcript":"[Cueball sitting at a laptop, White Hat behind him.] Cueball: This Ayn Random number generator you wrote claims to be fair, but the output is biased toward certain numbers. White Hat: WELL, MAYBE THOSE NUMBERS ARE JUST INTRINSICALLY BETTER!\n","explanation":"The comic is an attack on the problems with the philosophy of \"Objectivism\". White Hat explains to Cueball a program he wrote, the \"Ayn Random Number Generator\", which is a pun on Ayn Rand , the name of a writer who created a philosophical system known as Objectivism . The joke is an attack on her philosophy, which claims to be a completely fair mechanism for distributing resources, but inherently favors those who start out with more resources, or already in a position to acquire the resources. It also has a strong overarching theme that people that believe in objectivism are inherently better than other people, and thus deserve what extra resources can be acquired - as with the Ayn Random Number Generator, which claims to be completely fair and balanced, but actually favors some numbers - which White Hat explains by saying that they deserve to come up more because they're inherently better.\nNow, objectivists, of course, would challenge the above portrayal, but the joke is, in the end, an attack on Ayn Rand's philosophies. A more nuanced description is that objectivists believe that the primary aim of life is to maximise personal happiness. In their view, if some humans are born more capable of satisfying their desires than other people, they deserve to reap greater rewards from life than others, no matter the cost to those others.\nAs an aside, \"biased\" random number generators exist. They're called weighted random number generators, and they have many practical applications when the programmer isn't lying about the number generator's function and output.\nThe title text identifies a group of people whose names match the regular expression \/(\\b[plurandy]+\\b ?){2}\/i . A step-by-step explanation of the expression:\nOverall, it matches two words separated by a space, composed entirely of the letters in [plurandy], which is what all the names listed have in common. This could suggest that those letters are, to quote White Hat, intrinsically better.\nAs an aside, if the entirety of the title text is matched against the regular expression, it matches \"and Duran\" instead of \"Duran Duran\".\nSince the primary virtue in Objectivist ethics is rationality (or, at least, \"rationality\" as defined by Rand: her critics argue that the conclusions she reached do not actually derive inevitably from her premises and that additional, unstated assumptions are necessary to make the system work), the implication may be that the random number generator favors rational numbers (numbers that can be written as a fraction, i.e. a quotient p\/q). On the other hand, given computers cannot store data of unlimited length, it is impossible for any real world computer random number generator to produce an irrational number in any of the usual integer or floating point representations\u2014so probably not.  (Although a computer could encode irrationals or generate them randomly if it uses another representation, one of the standard algebraic number representations, for instance.)  Alternately, an Objectivist might argue that if the intent of the comic is to attack or mock Objectivism, then the comic inadvertently satirizes itself via the \"rationality\" interpretation.\n[Cueball sitting at a laptop, White Hat behind him.] Cueball: This Ayn Random number generator you wrote claims to be fair, but the output is biased toward certain numbers. White Hat: WELL, MAYBE THOSE NUMBERS ARE JUST INTRINSICALLY BETTER!\n"}
{"id":1278,"title":"Giraffes","image_title":"Giraffes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1278","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/giraffes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1278:_Giraffes","transcript":"My Hobby: [Silhouette of a giraffe with a sauropod's tail.] Convincing genetic engineers that giraffes would look better if they had sauropod tails\n","explanation":"Genetic engineering is the scientific approach towards altering and modifying the genome of organisms. In the process, DNA material is extracted from a source organism and then inserted into the genome of a host organism. It is thus possible to create hybrids between species that would not crossbreed naturally. The technique is also applied in order to expedite the sometimes lengthy process of selective breeding .\nThe comic suggests the creation of genetically modified giraffes . Following the recurring theme in the comics that dinosaurs and dinosaur-like traits make life more interesting, Randall expresses his desire to see genetic engineers insert DNA from extinct sauropods into the giraffe's genome, resulting in giraffes with very large and thick tails. Randall has previously shown great interest in dinosaurs and their integration into the modern age. It is possible that Randall wishes to combine the two due to the fact that they'd look very \"cool\" together as they are both seemingly weird animals. Giraffes are distinctive for their extremely long neck and sauropods have extremely long tails; the drawing would indicate that the giraffe's neck and sauropod's tail are of equal height\/length, thus creating a bizarrely satisfying sense of symmetry.\nThe idea of extracting and reproducing DNA material of dinosaurs appears most prominently in the 1993 motion picture Jurassic Park . The concept is regarded by scientists as rather implausible because DNA disintegrates soon after the death of the organism (read: around 500 years ) and would not be preserved in fossils.\nFurthermore, the science of genetic engineering is not yet able to accomplish major alterations in complex genomes. While mice and other small vertebrates have successfully been modified for research purposes, the daily use of genetic engineering is limited to plants and monads . That besides, the less closely related the starting species are to each other, the more difficult it would be to successfully combine them. So while the field of genetic engineering is always advancing, combining the body of a modern-day mammal with the tail of a dinosaur will remain a pipe dream for a long time yet. (Also, there are no known cases of preserved non-avian dinosaur DNA being discovered, and current chemistry knowledge indicates that no DNA can survive over 1 million years.)\nIn general, genetic engineering is a highly controversial topic with regards to the responsibility of science. While some praise the scientific progress and welcome the possibilities it brings, others fear that genetic science might enable man to alter the ways of nature and to presume the role of an almighty creator. The creation of hybrid animals (so called Chimeras ) is often regarded as the ultimate hubris and the climax of moral decay. Some countries have therefore installed strong legal restrictions for the modification of genetic material extracted from humans and animals.\nThe title text refers to Kickstarter , a funding platform for creative projects. Any person who wants to start a creative project, but lacks the resources to do so, can create a Kickstarter campaign where donors can contribute donations. Usually, the owner of the Kickstarter promises exclusive benefits to donors of certain tiers. For example, the title text could well be finished to say If you fund my Kickstarter with a donation of $20 or more, I will give you exclusive access to my weekly blog on the development stages of the giraffosaurus. If you donate $100 or more, you can receive a life-sized cardboard cut-out of the giraffosaurus. Donations of $10,000 or more will earn your name in a raffle for ownership of the first three giraffosauruses. This may also be a reference to 1055: Kickstarter .\nWhile dinosaurs are a recurring trope since the beginning of xkcd, giraffes have been featured in some what-if articles as a measurement of height.\nInterestingly enough, there seems to have been a species of sauropod dinosaur that bore a certain likeness to the modern giraffe and has therefore been christened Giraffatitan .\nMy Hobby: [Silhouette of a giraffe with a sauropod's tail.] Convincing genetic engineers that giraffes would look better if they had sauropod tails\n"}
{"id":1279,"title":"Reverse Identity Theft","image_title":"Reverse Identity Theft","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1279","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reverse_identity_theft.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1279:_Reverse_Identity_Theft","transcript":"If your email address is [First initial]+[Last name]@gmail.com you gradually get to know lots of older people who have the same name pattern\nCueball: Yes, I know it would make sense if that were your email address, but it's not. Person on the phone: But how did you get my number? Cueball: Your phone bill.\n","explanation":"Identity theft is the criminal method of assuming the identity of an unsuspecting person, usually to get credit in their name. While this is done deliberately, the comic introduces the idea of reverse identity theft: An older person with little knowledge of computers involuntarily uses another person's email address because they supposed it to be their own. Since most email addresses follow a generic pattern, they simply adapt the pattern to conform with their own name, unaware that someone with the same initial and last name already owns the address.\nMost internet users face at some point the message that their desired email address is \"already taken\". Because email addresses must be unique and only a limited set of characters is allowed, people with common names usually add numbers to their name. The comic suggests that elder people might easily forget that they had to take, for instance, [email\u00a0protected] when they signed up. Instead, the person would tell everyone that their address was [email\u00a0protected] , since that follows the generic pattern and is the most intuitive assumption for them. They are in complete ignorance that the address belongs, in fact, to whomever claimed it first. In this case, the address belongs to Randall himself. (In case you're wondering, yes, [email\u00a0protected] is Randall's email according to the xkcd blag .)\nThe comic has Cueball call an older person, who apparently gave Cueball's email address to the phone company, which now emails Cueball the bills - this could have been avoided if said company confirmed an email address first. The person is not able to understand why this is not their email address (as it corresponds with their name) and is also very confused how Cueball got their phone number. The latter reveals a major problem of reverse identity theft: Using another person's email address for your own business matters exposes your own identity. The owner of the address could easily take advantage of the situation, leading to a scenario of regular identity theft. Fortunately, Cueball seems to be more honest; Black Hat probably would not have given any warning.\nDue to the sheer mass of people online, nearly all simple nicknames are already taken; and the number of possible combinations is further diminished by services (e.g., Gmail ) which ignore the dot sign altogether and does not allow the use of hyphens or underscores. This policy is designed to prevent fraud, but it forces users to add numbers or other unique identifiers to their names. Apart from the scenario addressed in the comic, another subsequent problem is the use of wrong email addresses by third parties. Someone sending sensitive personal information to the wrong recipient can just as easily expose a person's identity as the person himself.\nIn the end, there is no practical solution to the problems arising from the uniqueness of usernames and email addresses. Instead, it is simply the consequence of naming itself: While a name was originally intended to distinguish its bearer from a limited number of people (e.g. the rest of the village), the Internet makes it necessary to distinguish ourselves from the entire rest of the world (or at least everybody online).\nNote that Gmail ignores everything behind a plus sign. Like ignoring dots, this is used as a way to create email aliases . The plus sign in the formula used in the comic should therefore considered to be only an indicator for concatenation, not a literal character in the address.\nIf your email address is [First initial]+[Last name]@gmail.com you gradually get to know lots of older people who have the same name pattern\nCueball: Yes, I know it would make sense if that were your email address, but it's not. Person on the phone: But how did you get my number? Cueball: Your phone bill.\n"}
{"id":1280,"title":"Mystery News","image_title":"Mystery News","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1280","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mystery_news.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1280:_Mystery_News","transcript":"[Cueball sitting at a laptop.] Laptop: It's day five of the trade summit, and still no... Cueball: Dammit click click click\nI get most of my news from autoplaying videos in browser tabs I can't find.\nTitle text : If you find and stop the video, but you've--against all odds--gotten curious about the trade summit, just leave the tab opened. It will mysteriously start playing again 30 minutes later!","explanation":"With the introduction of tabbed browsing, many users, even on widescreens, will have so many tabs open that it is hard to find any given one. At 44 tabs on Google Chrome on a 1080p screen, the user can no longer see any text on the tabs. Long before this point (~20 tabs), the text is so short as to be unusable. Randall refers to this tendency to open many tabs without closing them in this comic.\nMany modern tabbed browsers can remember what tabs were open upon closure if this setting is on, and will reload the same tabs on startup. This will start any auto-playing videos, such as YouTube videos (although some browsers, like Firefox, have since fixed this by forcing videos to pause), which appear on any of the open pages. This situation can also occur during browsing when an auto-playing video does not begin playing until after a user has moved on to a new tab, when a page with a video refreshes in the background, or when a site with such a video automatically opens in a tab that does not become the active tab when it opens.\nThis generally leads the user to clicking through all of the open tabs to try to find where the sound is coming from. This can be even more difficult if the video is not obvious and not centered on the screen of whatever tab it is playing in. Years after the release of this comic, Google Chrome began to indicate to the user which tabs are playing audio, thus alleviating this problem.\nThe title text refers to websites that refresh in the background , causing videos (and ads) to start playing again even if you stopped them previously. Many news sites, such as CNN, will do this if you stay on the same page for 30 minutes .\n[Cueball sitting at a laptop.] Laptop: It's day five of the trade summit, and still no... Cueball: Dammit click click click\nI get most of my news from autoplaying videos in browser tabs I can't find.\nTitle text : If you find and stop the video, but you've--against all odds--gotten curious about the trade summit, just leave the tab opened. It will mysteriously start playing again 30 minutes later!"}
{"id":1281,"title":"Minifigs","image_title":"Minifigs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1281","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/minifigs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1281:_Minifigs","transcript":"[Graph: x-axis 1980, 1990, 2010, 2020; y-axis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 billions.] [Plot-line 1: Number of people in the world.] [Plot-line 2: Number of Lego People in the world.] [Label above the x-axis at 2013 reads \"Today\".] [Shortly before 2020, both plot lines cross.]\n[Caption below the graph:] By 2019, humans will be outnumbered.\n","explanation":"Lego minifigures (often abbreviated as minifigs ) are tiny plastic people designed by the Danish toy manufacturer Lego as part of their construction toy sets. Since 1978, over four billion minifigures have been sold, so they still have a long way to go before they surpass the human population (which is around 7.8 billion). The figures resemble simplified humans, often with a yellow skin colour and featuring interchangeable body parts, such as legs, torsos, heads, hair, and hats.\nThe graph depicted in the comic extrapolates the total number of minifigures and compares it to the growth of the world population , which reached 7 billion in March 2012. By the extrapolations of the comic, Lego minifigures will outnumber the human population by 2019. The extrapolation of statistical data has appeared in various xkcd comics, e.g. in 605: Extrapolating , 1007: Sustainable , and 1204: Detail . However, unlike the other extrapolated scenarios, the prognosis of this comic seems quite likely.\nSince Lego is designed to resemble nature and civilization on a miniaturized scale, some sets also contain Lego cars as vehicles for the minifigures. With over 381 million Lego tires produced for these miniature cars, Lego is already the world's largest manufacturer of tires . This fact is addressed in the title text.\nLego (as of mid-October 2013) calculates they have made 7 billion+ figures. Earlier in 2013, they believed they would surpass the human count in 2014, but revised their numbers on the day this comic was released to what this chart says.\n[Graph: x-axis 1980, 1990, 2010, 2020; y-axis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 billions.] [Plot-line 1: Number of people in the world.] [Plot-line 2: Number of Lego People in the world.] [Label above the x-axis at 2013 reads \"Today\".] [Shortly before 2020, both plot lines cross.]\n[Caption below the graph:] By 2019, humans will be outnumbered.\n"}
{"id":1282,"title":"Monty Hall","image_title":"Monty Hall","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1282","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/monty_hall.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1282:_Monty_Hall","transcript":"[A figure - Monty Hall - stands on stage, holding a microphone. There are three doors; two labelled \"A\" and \"C\", which are closed, and one that is being held open by Monty. There's a ramp to the right, down which a goat is being led by Beret Guy.] Beret Guy: ...and my yard has so much grass, and I'll teach you tricks, and... Goat: \u2665\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the US game show Let's Make a Deal , and more specifically the Monty Hall problem , a probability puzzle based on the show and named after its original host, Monty Hall . The premise of the show was that Hall would offer \"deals\" to contestants pulled from the audience in which they could win cash and prizes. Some deals involved games\/tasks the contestant had to perform, while others simply involved the contestant making choices between a series of doors or boxes. In such games of choice, there were often several prizes and typically at least one \"zonk\", the show's name for an undesirable \"gag\" prize, which on the original Monty Hall version of the show were frequently animals such as goats.\nIn the classic version of the Monty Hall Problem , a contestant is offered a choice of three doors. Behind two of the doors are goats, and behind one of them is a car. First, the contestant chooses a door, which remains closed. The host then opens one of the two remaining doors and reveals a goat. The contestant is then offered a final choice of whether to switch their choice to the remaining closed door, or keep the door they originally chose. The problem involves an analysis of the probability of the contestant choosing the car given certain circumstances.\nThe problem assumes that a contestant would want to win a car, and would be disappointed to win a goat, which most contestants would have no ability to house, and no use for. The comic shows that Beret Guy , upon the host revealing that door B has a goat behind it, chooses to take the goat to keep as a pet, which makes them both very happy. This is much like, and may be an allusion to, the Simpsons episode Bart Gets an Elephant , in which Bart opts for the gag prize of an African Elephant rather than the $10,000 award. According to an interview with Monty Hall, several contestants actually decided to keep the animals; although rare, it was allowed since the animals were offered as prizes (and they were a lot more expensive than the consolation cash prize).\nThe title text references the car and the other goat, untouched behind the remaining doors.\nFor an in-depth analysis of the Monty Hall Problem, see its article at Wikipedia\nThe apparent \"paradox\" of the Monty Hall Problem is that many people's initial reaction once the host opens a door to reveal a goat, is that there are two remaining doors, one with a car and one with a goat; and therefore there is an equal probability the car is behind each door. Many people therefore believe that switching makes no difference to the odds of winning a car.\n\nHowever, assuming that the host has knowledge of which doors contain goats, and that their choice of which door to open is always an unchosen door containing a goat, it is actually twice as likely that the contestant will win the car if they switch than if they keep their original choice. This is because the contestant initially had a one-in-three chance of choosing the car and a two-in-three chance of choosing a goat. Switching always wins the car in those two-thirds of cases where the contestant initially chose a goat. The probability of winning by switching is therefore the same as the probability that the contestant initially chose a goat.\nThe switch essentially gives the contestant both remaining doors instead of just the one door originally chosen. Because the host always has at least one goat available, the fact that the host reveals a goat does not provide the contestant any new information about their initially chosen door. The initial door still has a two-in-three chance of being a goat, and switching still has a two-in-three chance of winning. Opening a goat-door simply shifts all of the probability of the remaining two doors being a car to the remaining unchosen door.\nSimple explanation :\nImagine there are 100 doors instead of just 2, and after you pick a door, the host opens all but one, revealing all goats. Do you switch to the remaining door or keep your initial pick?  Just as there is a 2\/3 chance of picking the car when switching in the 3-door scenario, there is now a 99\/100 chance of picking the car when switching in the 100 door scenario.  In this scenario, it becomes obvious that it is not a 50\/50 chance when two doors remain.\nImportant Side Note :\nThere has been great debate about the precise wording of the problem, and what assumptions or rules might apply. These variants can greatly change the probabilities.\nOne variant has the host open one of the two remaining doors at random, which could result in the car being revealed, and the game ending. In that scenario, if a goat has been revealed, the probability that the first pick is correct is now 1\/2 and switching is not advantageous.\nIn 1\/3 of all possible games, the first pick is correct. The host cannot pick the car. In 1\/3 of all possible games, the first pick is wrong but the host does not reveal the car. In 1\/3 of all possible games, the first pick is wrong and host will reveal the car. We now know those cases are impossible.\nWith only 2\/3rds of all possible games remaining, the chance that switching will win the car is now (1\/3)\/(2\/3) = 1\/2. Likewise, not switching also has a 1\/2 chance of winning. Note that this variant requires that the host picks a door at random.\nAnother variant has the host only offering to switch if the first choice is correct.  In this case, switching always loses.\n[A figure - Monty Hall - stands on stage, holding a microphone. There are three doors; two labelled \"A\" and \"C\", which are closed, and one that is being held open by Monty. There's a ramp to the right, down which a goat is being led by Beret Guy.] Beret Guy: ...and my yard has so much grass, and I'll teach you tricks, and... Goat: \u2665\n"}
{"id":1283,"title":"Headlines","image_title":"Headlines","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1283","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/headlines.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1283:_Headlines","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] 20th Century Headlines Rewritten to get more clicks\n[The years are always written at the center. The text has a line pointing to the relevant year. The first text is written to the left of the year. Then the texts below is alternately written to the right and to the left, finishing at the right in 1990.] 1905 - How a shocking new theory, discovered by a dad, proves scientists are wrong about everything! 1912 - 6 Titanic survivors who should have died 1920 - 17 things that will be outlawed now that women can vote 1928 - This one weird mold kills all germs 1929 - Most embarrassing reactions to the stock market crash [GIFs] 1945 - These 9 Nazi atrocities will make you lose faith in humanity 1948 - 5 insane plans for feeding West Berlin you won't believe are real 1955 - Avoid Polio with this one weird trick 1957 - 12 nip slips potentially visible to Sputnik 1968 - This year's assassinations ranked from most to least tragic 1969 - This is the most important photo of an astronaut you'll see all day 1986 - This video of a terminally ill child watching the Challenger launch will break your heart 1989 - You won't believe what these people did to the Berlin wall! [Video] Jan 1, 1990 - 500 signs you're a 90s kid\n","explanation":"This comic satirizes the sensationalist language used in Internet headlines. Many websites generate ad revenue for getting visitors (\"getting more clicks\"), so some unscrupulous editors seek to manipulate their readers using tantalizing yet formulaic and crass headlines, designed to attract readers rather than summarize the article's contents. You might recognize this technique from those ridiculous text advertisements \u2014 \"local mom discovers 1 weird tip to reduce belly fat.\" The practice is nothing new: tabloid journalism has been doing this for many years (e.g. National Enquirer ). The numbers shown at the headline are also often wrong and not covered by the article.\nSigns of a dishonest headline include giving undue weight to trivial topics, or appealing to readers' emotions or needs (fear, outrage, pity, lust, laziness) instead of offering serious information. In severe cases, it may be a bait-and-switch , claiming to offer something it isn't. By failing to give a useful summary of the story, whilst attempting to force the reader to click on every story on the off-chance that it's interesting, they amount to an intentionally deceptive form of spam.\nRandall parodies the formula in this comic with such trivializing headlines for important historical events:\nAlbert Einstein published his Annus Mirabilis papers , which changed views on space, time, mass, and energy, and laid the groundwork for much of modern physics. They included his papers on special relativity and on mass\u2013energy equivalence (\"E = mc 2 \"). He had an infant son in 1905 (born May 1904). The use of the term \"dad\" helps readers tune in emotionally. \"Proving scientists wrong about everything\" is obviously an inflation of Einstein's achievements, though not completely incorrect as Einstein's discoveries did undermine current theories about fundamentals of the universe such as space, time and motion. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect ; his work on relativity was still not accepted by many physicists at that time.\nSinking of the RMS Titanic . \"should have died\" seems to be referring to six passengers whose survival was downright miraculous, though the wording is (deliberately) ambiguous to imply the six passengers deserved to have died. Possibly referred to here is the survival of J. Bruce Ismay , chairman and managing director of the White Star Line (the company responsible for the Titanic), who was condemned as a coward for leaving the sinking liner.\nThe Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed, guaranteeing voting rights for women in all US states. The prediction of new prohibitions is a reference to alcohol prohibition under the authority granted to the federal government by the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution . While the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified before women's suffrage was guaranteed by the Nineteeth, alcohol prohibition was widely seen as an issue driven by women's opinions (hence the suggestion that more things would be prohibited now that women had the vote).\nPenicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming.\nThis is a reference to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 , the most devastating stock market crash in history and the beginning of the Great Depression. The \"embarassing reactions\" may be a reference to the suicides of people suddenly impoverished by the depression. [GIFS] indicates that the post will contain animated GIF images, which are a crude form of short video. Presumably, these GIFs will feature the aforementioned suicides, which would be considered tasteless at best. The GIF89a specification which supports animation was released in 1990, so animated GIFs (or computers for that matter) didn't exist in 1929.\n1945 is the year that World War II ended. It's also the year that many war crimes committed by Nazi Germany were discovered or declassified. These events would be cause enough for anyone to re-evaluate their belief in the inherent goodness of the human race. However, the specific phrase \"lose faith in humanity\" is one often employed on the web by rather over-dramatic people in response to something someone did to exasperate them; and because that particular wording is closely associated with exaggerative tendencies, its usage in relation to Nazi war crimes only downplays their seriousness.\n1948 is when the Soviet Union established the Berlin Blockade , preventing food and other critical supplies from reaching occupied Berlin. In response, Western forces organized the Berlin Airlift (previously referenced in 1037: Umwelt , where it became Berlin Chairlift instead).\nThe polio vaccine was developed. \"One weird trick\" is a common phrase used in Internet ads: see this article for more information. It may also refer to the fact that polio viruses were used as the first vaccines.\nThe Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 , the world's first artificial satellite. A nip slip is when a woman unintentionally exposes all or part of one or both of her nipples; in the context of the internet, it generally refers to a photograph capturing such a moment. Saying that 12 were visible from space implies that they were really big 'nip slips', or at least that only those 12 were big enough to be visible to telescopes.\nMartin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy ( John F. Kennedy's younger brother) were both assassinated in 1968 (five years after JFK). Assassinations are rare and considered to be always tragic, so \"ranking\" them trivializes the political and emotional depth of the events.\nApollo 11 performed the first manned lunar landing. During this historic trip newspapers printed as many pictures of astronauts as they could.\nSpace Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight. See Space Shuttle Challenger disaster for details. This was the first shuttle mission that included a teacher on board as part of the crew ( Christa McAuliffe , Teacher in Space Project ), so there were many children -- a New York Times poll put the number at 48% of 9-13 year olds in the US -- watching this particular launch live as teachers around the country had TV sets in their classrooms showing the ill-fated launch in real time. The launch was not shown on most mainstream TV stations; only CNN broadcast it live. Since this many children did see it, there would also have been several terminal ill children watching, and likely also some press out at one such place. So they could get this picture. And again toy with our emotions.\nFall of the Berlin Wall . [video] indicates a link to a video.\nA 90s kid is someone born in the late 80s or early 90s (and spent most their childhood in the 1990s). Headlines like this one from BuzzFeed toy with their readers' sense of nostalgia. The parody headline is funny because it starts precisely on the first day of the 1990s, meaning that the only \"90s kids\" that it would apply to would be newborns. This is a reference to a common joke about the 90s not having a concrete identity in some ways like the 70s or 80s did in terms of popular culture, and yet those born in that decade always seem to have long lists of things that make you a \"90s kid\".\nEinstein published his theory of General relativity , which is a vast generalization of the theory of Special relativity from 1905 and provides a model for gravity. In 1916 Einstein had two sons who lived in Zurich while he lived in Berlin. [NSFW] is \"Not Safe for Work\" - a tag to identify explicit images. Here it is used to trick readers hoping to find pornography. [PICS] tells the potential viewer that there are images embedded.\nThis topic is re-used in 1307: Buzzfeed Christmas .\n[Caption above the frame:] 20th Century Headlines Rewritten to get more clicks\n[The years are always written at the center. The text has a line pointing to the relevant year. The first text is written to the left of the year. Then the texts below is alternately written to the right and to the left, finishing at the right in 1990.] 1905 - How a shocking new theory, discovered by a dad, proves scientists are wrong about everything! 1912 - 6 Titanic survivors who should have died 1920 - 17 things that will be outlawed now that women can vote 1928 - This one weird mold kills all germs 1929 - Most embarrassing reactions to the stock market crash [GIFs] 1945 - These 9 Nazi atrocities will make you lose faith in humanity 1948 - 5 insane plans for feeding West Berlin you won't believe are real 1955 - Avoid Polio with this one weird trick 1957 - 12 nip slips potentially visible to Sputnik 1968 - This year's assassinations ranked from most to least tragic 1969 - This is the most important photo of an astronaut you'll see all day 1986 - This video of a terminally ill child watching the Challenger launch will break your heart 1989 - You won't believe what these people did to the Berlin wall! [Video] Jan 1, 1990 - 500 signs you're a 90s kid\n"}
{"id":1284,"title":"Improved Keyboard","image_title":"Improved Keyboard","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1284","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/improved_keyboard.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1284:_Improved_Keyboard","transcript":"[Cueball walks on screen, holding a phone, and starts talking to Black Hat.] Cueball: Did you get my texts? Black Hat: You should install this keyboard I found. Cueball: What? Why? Is it better than SwiftKey? Black Hat: In some ways. [Black Hat begins to walk off-panel.] Cueball: Ok, installing... Cueball: It's not working. The key area is blank\u2014I can't type anything. [Black Hat has left. Cueball stares at his phone.] [Beat frame. Cueball lets his hands fall to their side.] Cueball: ...Hey.\n","explanation":"Modern smartphones and tablets have touchscreen LCD displays which completely cover the device's surface; for this reason they rely on software keyboards to input text such as text messages. The simplest software keyboards simply display a standard QWERTY keyboard and allow the user to tap on the letters they wish to enter, but this is slow. More sophisticated software keyboards such as SwiftKey facilitate faster text entry through gestures supported by language models. Because this space is still under development, new software keyboards promising better text entry continue to appear.\nBlack Hat is annoyed about Cueball 's text messages, so he sends Cueball a \"better\" keyboard that actually doesn't work \u2014 with the desired result that Cueball is not able to text him at all. His statement that the app is better than SwiftKey \"in some ways\" is literally true \u2014 it's better for him , not for Cueball.\nThe Android keyboard app SwiftKey has been mentioned before , and Black Hat has done something similar in 156: Commented .\nAccording to the title text, Randall does often try out new keyboard apps, only to be reminded each time that he ends up wasting more time learning the new gestures than he saves in typing more quickly. Alternatively, the increased effort and thought put into typing makes him realize that nothing he would type is really worth it to him anymore.\nSimilar problems arise later in 1586: Keyboard Problems and 1678: Recent Searches\u200e .\n[Cueball walks on screen, holding a phone, and starts talking to Black Hat.] Cueball: Did you get my texts? Black Hat: You should install this keyboard I found. Cueball: What? Why? Is it better than SwiftKey? Black Hat: In some ways. [Black Hat begins to walk off-panel.] Cueball: Ok, installing... Cueball: It's not working. The key area is blank\u2014I can't type anything. [Black Hat has left. Cueball stares at his phone.] [Beat frame. Cueball lets his hands fall to their side.] Cueball: ...Hey.\n"}
{"id":1285,"title":"Third Way","image_title":"Third Way","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1285","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/third_way.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1285:_Third_Way","transcript":"[To the left a group with three Cueballs, a Ponytail and Megan at the front which face another group with two Cueballs, a Ponytail and a black haired ponytail at the front. Each group has a placard. A Cueball in the left group has a cutlass and a Cueball in the right group has a spear as they are angrily facing off against each other. Off to the far right side stands a lone Cueball also with a placard.] Left placard: Two spaces after a period Middle placard: One space after a period Right placard: Line break after every sentence\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the debate occurring in the United States about the correct number of space characters after a period at the end of a sentence .\nWhile typewriter typists in the United States were traditionally taught to use two spaces between sentences, this is becoming less common and many sources now recommend having only one space, although this topic is still controversial .\nCueball is advocating a line break after every sentence, the eponymous \"third way\".\nThis obviates the problem, as a period will always appear at the end of a line and the spacing after it becomes moot.\nA line break after every sentence is sometimes called \" semantic linefeeds \".\nThis is particularly useful when plain text files based on a markup language (such as HTML , TeX , or Wiki markup ) are edited by multiple people using a version control system where it helps to facilitate comparison of changes and avoid merge conflicts.\nIn most markup languages, a single line feed in the source is rendered as a simple space, while two linefeeds generate a paragraph break.\nThis approach allows the source to be easily manipulated and versioned, while the rendered output still keeps the regular flow and justification abilities of running text.\n(Incidentally, HTML and languages derived from it such as BBCode and Wiki markup will generally render multiple consecutive whitespace characters as a single space, so pretty much every page on the Internet uses single spacing whether the author wants to or not.)\nThe title text uses single spaces between the back-and-forth quotations; but within each quotation, the quoted speaker's preferred spacing is used; when the single-spacing advocate claims to be using double spacing, this is indeed a lie.\nHowever, realistically, it is implausible that one can hear whitespace. [ citation needed ]\nRandall's mocking characterization in the title text of overzealous advocates using the phrase \"WAKE UP, SHEEPLE\" has appeared in previous comics: 496: Secretary: Part 3 and 1013: Wake Up Sheeple .\nNote that this is not the first time Randall has proposed a controversial third way , and this debate is later referenced in 1989: IMHO .\nSentence spacing was previously mentioned in the title text of 1070: Words for Small Sets .\n[To the left a group with three Cueballs, a Ponytail and Megan at the front which face another group with two Cueballs, a Ponytail and a black haired ponytail at the front. Each group has a placard. A Cueball in the left group has a cutlass and a Cueball in the right group has a spear as they are angrily facing off against each other. Off to the far right side stands a lone Cueball also with a placard.] Left placard: Two spaces after a period Middle placard: One space after a period Right placard: Line break after every sentence\n"}
{"id":1286,"title":"Encryptic","image_title":"Encryptic","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1286","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/encryptic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1286:_Encryptic","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Hackers recently leaked 153 million Adobe user emails, encrypted passwords, and password hints. Adobe encrypted the passwords improperly, misusing block-mode 3DES. The result is something wonderful:\n[Caption below the panel:] The greatest crossword puzzle in the history of the world\n","explanation":"Web sites and other computers that authenticate users via passwords need to be able to know if the user typed in the right password. But storing the password itself on the computer has been known to be unnecessarily risky since the publication of Password Security: A Case History in 1978. In that paper, Robert Morris and Ken Thompson demonstrated the practice of using a slow, cryptographically-secure one-way hash function , so that even if the password file is stolen, it will be very hard to figure out what the passwords are, so long as the passwords themselves are suitably complex. They also pioneered the use of a \"salt\" which makes each password hash completely different even if two users use the same password. See A tour of password questions and answers for background on salts and suitably slow hash functions.\nAdobe, however, ignored these well-known principles, and instead stored over a hundred million passwords in a reversibly encrypted way, using a terrible choice of encryption methods which exposes a great deal of information about the passwords, and does not involve a salt. This password database was recently obtained by someone and released on the Internet.\nIn particular, Adobe used Triple DES , an older encryption algorithm which can still be relatively secure when properly used, but they used it improperly. It works on 64-bit (8 character) blocks. Assuming that the passwords are stored in plain ASCII, this means that a sequence of 8 characters in a password which starts on a character position which is a multiple of eight is always encrypted to the same result. Therefore, two passwords starting with \"12345678\" would start with the same block after being encrypted. Furthermore, this means that you can actually get a very good idea of the length of the password since anything with only one block is a password with length between 1 and 8 characters, and having two blocks implies it has between 9 and 16 characters, etc.\nAdobe also stored hints users created for their passwords. That means that an attacker knows not only if the same 8 characters are used for multiple passwords but also has some hints for guessing them. That means that common password portions should be easy to recover and that any user may be \"compromised\" by someone else using a part of the same password and providing a good hint. As an example, a password having three hints \"Big Apple\", \"Twin Towers\" and \"If you can make it there\" is probably \"New York\" or a simple variation on that. The weakness here is that no decryption and therefore no hard cracking has to take place, you just group the passwords by their encrypted blocks and try to solve them like a crossword puzzle. These weaknesses have already been used to presumably identify a password used by Edward Snowden , as discussed at 7 Habits of Highly Effective Hackers: Can someone be targeted using the Adobe breach? .\nThe examples are not taken from the actual leaked file, since that uses a different format , and the examples are evidently cleverly crafted to make a nice crossword-like puzzle, which can be solved as shown in the Passwords section below.\nAs mentioned on http:\/\/filosottile.github.io\/analyzing-the-adobe-leaked-passwords\/ the data in the comic isn't real and contains a hidden message. If the \"user password\" hashes are Base64 encoded, they read:\nMore readable:\nE.g., with the initial unique hash blocks: python2 -c \"print '4e18acc1ab27a2d6a0a2876eb1ea1fca'.decode('hex_codec').encode('base64')\"\nThe last letter \"r\" is not fully encoded in the data shown, but any letter from \"g\" to \"v\" produces the same binary data.\nThe title text makes a reference to a previous comic: Black Hat's trouble with what to do with stolen passwords . It also states that users of pirated Photoshop are the winners here. This is because in order to make Photoshop pirate-able, it was modified (cracked) by removing the requirement for registration so their passwords were not sent to Adobe and therefore are not present in the leaked file.\nSoon after this comic was published, the most common 1000 passwords were actually compiled into a set of 10 interactive online crosswords , inspired by the comic.\nThe title itself is a reference to cryptic crosswords .\nNote that characters in the passwords could be upper or lower case, and they may involve common substitutions like \"0\" (number zero) for \"O\" (letter O); therefore, the clues cannot guarantee that the answer shown here is precisely correct. Nevertheless, we have plenty of information for a brute force attack.\n[Caption above the panel:] Hackers recently leaked 153 million Adobe user emails, encrypted passwords, and password hints. Adobe encrypted the passwords improperly, misusing block-mode 3DES. The result is something wonderful:\n[Caption below the panel:] The greatest crossword puzzle in the history of the world\n"}
{"id":1287,"title":"Puzzle","image_title":"Puzzle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1287","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/puzzle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1287:_Puzzle","transcript":"[A game board with 8\u00d78 white squares and black borders, like a go board or an all white chessboard, there are white chess pieces in starting position on the bottom after e3, d4, Nf3, Nc3, Bd2 and five black Go pieces on the vertices in the center of the board at d4 d5 c6 g4 g6.] [Caption below the frame:] White to continue insisting this is a chessboard\n","explanation":"The game of go (also called Weiqi, Baduk or Igo) is usually played on the 19\u00d719 intersections of a grid, but sometimes a faster, simpler version is played on the 9\u00d79 intersections of a grid; which thus has 8\u00d78 squares, as a chessboard, though they are not colored in an alternating pattern \u2013 introduced to chess in the 13th century . In the comic, white has chess pieces and plays against black, which uses go stones.\nIn chess, particularly in puzzles, the phrasing \"White to move\" indicates that it's the White player's turn; \"White to play and win\" indicates that it's White's turn and if White plays correctly, the next series of moves will result in an advantageous position or possibly outright win for White. The caption \"White to continue insisting this is a chessboard\" is a play on this traditional phrasing. The same kind of phrasing is also used in Go puzzles . In Go puzzles the objectives are often of a local or tactical character, such as \"White to capture four black stones\" or \"White to live in the corner\".\nTwo versions of the board were posted by Randall: both had white after e3, d4, Nf3, Nc3, but the first with an extra bishop at e4 ( [email\u00a0protected] ), the second after Bd2.\nIt is unclear who has gone first. In Go it is traditional for black to go first, while in Chess it has been traditional for white to go first for about a century. Indeed, both players have made five moves, although the caption\/\"punchline\" implies it is the start of white's sixth turn; though if black did go first, none of his\/her pieces are in the 3-3 handicap positions marked on a 9\u00d79 Go board.\nThe title text refers to the (at the time) upcoming 2013 World Chess Championship between Carlsen and Anand. Magnus Carlsen is (at publishing of this comic) a 23 year old Norwegian chess grandmaster. Viswanathan Anand is (at publishing time) a 44 year old Indian grandmaster. Both have been (and as of 2019 are) among the world top chess players.\nThe game transcript in the title text refers to the ending of the famous Opera Game between Paul Morphy and the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard. That game ends with 16. Qb8+ Nxb8 17. Rd8#. In the title text, Black continues to make moves as if he has not been checkmated, over White's protests. After White uses his rook to capture Black's king to emphasize the checkmate, Black defiantly writes \"0-1\" (the notation symbolizing a Black victory) on his scoresheet. When informed that his move cannot be to declare victory, he flips the board. \"0-1\" may also represent a position on a go board (first down on the top left corner) in certain coordinates systems .\nThe game transcript is written in standard algebraic notation . The destination square is represented by a lowercase letter (a-h, on the x-axis) and a number (1-8, on the y-axis), with the bottom-left square being a1 and the top-right square being h8. The uppercase letters refer to the piece that is moving to that square (e.g., Q = Queen, K = King, N = Knight, R = Rook), so Qa1 would mean moving the Queen to the bottom-left square. The absence of an uppercase letter refers to a pawn's move (e.g., \"f6\" means moving a pawn to f6). If the move captures a piece, an \"x\" is inserted between the piece and the destination (e.g., Nxb8). Checks are indicated by +, and checkmate by #.\n[A game board with 8\u00d78 white squares and black borders, like a go board or an all white chessboard, there are white chess pieces in starting position on the bottom after e3, d4, Nf3, Nc3, Bd2 and five black Go pieces on the vertices in the center of the board at d4 d5 c6 g4 g6.] [Caption below the frame:] White to continue insisting this is a chessboard\n"}
{"id":1288,"title":"Substitutions","image_title":"Substitutions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1288","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/substitutions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1288:_Substitutions","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Substitutions that make reading the news more fun:\n[A table of words\/sentences on the left that changes into those on the left. Between each set of words, there is a gray arrow pointing from the right.]\nWitnesses \u279c These dudes I know Allegedly \u279c Kinda probably New study \u279c Tumblr post Rebuild \u279c Avenge Space \u279c Spaaace Google Glass \u279c Virtual Boy Smartphone \u279c Pok\u00e9dex Electric \u279c Atomic Senator \u279c Elf-lord Car \u279c Cat Election \u279c Eating contest Congressional leaders \u279c River spirits Homeland security \u279c Homestar Runner Could not be reached for comment \u279c Is guilty and everyone knows it\n","explanation":"This is the first comic in the Substitution series where Randall has suggested substitutions that will make reading the news more fun. But there have been several comics using substitutions both before and after these ones.\nThe series as of 2016:\nRandall is playing off of the fact that many readers of modern news articles quickly become bored with the legal and political jargon. He suggests that substituting certain words for others can make reading the article more interesting, albeit less accurate. Although since Randall doesn't think very highly of the news, he's probably suggesting this chart wouldn't make them less accurate at all. (See for instance 558: 1000 Times and 932: CIA .)\nFor example, a sentence that reads\nWitnesses reported that the suspect allegedly escaped unharmed.\nwould be changed to\nThese dudes I know reported that the suspect kinda probably escaped unharmed.\nThis substitution does not change the meaning much, and the original sentence does not lose much of its accuracy. However, for substitutions later in the comic, a sentence may be changed as follows:\nA new study finds that senators and other congressional leaders are increasingly likely to view election results on their smartphone.\ninto\nA Tumblr post finds that elf-lords and other river spirits are increasingly likely to view eating contest results on their Pok\u00e9dex.\nWhich is less meaningful, but more interesting.\nThe final substitution returns from the realm of the ridiculous to replacing \"could not be reached for comment\" with \"is guilty and everyone knows it.\" If a journalist writes a story about an accused suspect but is unable to contact them or receives no response from them, they will write that the person \"could not be reached for comment.\" Randall's whimsical assumption that silence implies guilt is so common that juries are instructed that they should not infer guilt if the defendant fails to testify, particularly in nations that have a right against self-incrimination.\nChrome and Firefox extensions are available for applying the substitutions on webpages.\n'Spaaace' could be a reference to the Space Core from Portal 2 , or to the way The Muppet Show presented Pigs in Spaaace .\nThe Virtual Boy is a table-top video game console made by Nintendo released in 1995 and discontinued about the same year. It achieved true-3D graphics through the use of a large visor containing a pair of LED screens, though it considered having done so incredibly poorly, while also lacking any form of ergonomic comfort and sporting several critical design flaws. As a result, it is commonly mocked as one of Nintendo's biggest failures (sometimes by Nintendo itself).\nThe Pok\u00e9dex is a device in the Pok\u00e9mon world that records the data of captured Pok\u00e9mon.\nHomestar Runner is the title character of a Flash-animated web cartoon series, known for being an idiot.\nIt seems generally that Randall is no fan of Google Glass, which was also shown earlier in 1251: Anti-Glass and later in 1304: Glass Trolling . Thus explaining why Google Glass has such a ridiculous substitution as Virtual Boy . Google Glass has become a recurring theme in xkcd.\nIn the title text Elon Musk is mentioned. He is (amongst other things) the CEO of Tesla Motors , which produces electric cars. In the title text the sentence \"Electric cars\" was replaced by \"atomic cats\" according to the chart of the comic.\nNews reports about new studies ( Tumblr posts) are further lampooned in 1295: New Study , a comic posted two weeks later.\n[Caption above the panel:] Substitutions that make reading the news more fun:\n[A table of words\/sentences on the left that changes into those on the left. Between each set of words, there is a gray arrow pointing from the right.]\nWitnesses \u279c These dudes I know Allegedly \u279c Kinda probably New study \u279c Tumblr post Rebuild \u279c Avenge Space \u279c Spaaace Google Glass \u279c Virtual Boy Smartphone \u279c Pok\u00e9dex Electric \u279c Atomic Senator \u279c Elf-lord Car \u279c Cat Election \u279c Eating contest Congressional leaders \u279c River spirits Homeland security \u279c Homestar Runner Could not be reached for comment \u279c Is guilty and everyone knows it\n"}
{"id":1289,"title":"Simple Answers","image_title":"Simple Answers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1289","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/simple_answers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1289:_Simple_Answers","transcript":"[Caption above the chart:] The simple answers to the questions that get asked about every new technology:\nWill [ ] make us all geniuses? No Will [ ] make us all morons? No Will [ ] destroy whole industries? Yes Will [ ] make us more empathetic? No Will [ ] make us less caring? No Will teens use [ ] for sex? Yes Were they going to have sex anyway? Yes Will [ ] destroy music? No Will [ ] destroy art? No But can't we go back to a time when- No Will [ ] bring about world peace? No Will [ ] cause widespread alienation by creating a world of empty experiences? We were already alienated\n","explanation":"This is Randall 's commentary on some of the baseless skepticism and equally baseless optimism directed at new technologies. Related: 1215: Insight and 1227: The Pace of Modern Life . While it's always healthy to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of cutting-edge tech before blindly diving in and adopting it, it's not healthy to base that evaluation on unrealistically high standards and expectations. [ citation needed ] New developments will have pros and cons, and it's hard to tell whether they make the world a better place or not.\nRandall has set up a Q&A for this kind of questioning. Most of the them are straightforward, but we'll provide some commentary on selected questions.\nWill [ ] destroy whole industries? Yes. A widely adopted technology usually causes another to gradually phase out, and industries will rise and fall as technologies do. This is a bit of a loaded question because \"destroy industries\" sounds negative, and only covers half the effect \u2014 instead of merely destroying them, we're also replacing them with something (hopefully) better.\nWill teens use [ ] for sex? Yes. Were they going to have sex anyway? Yes. Sex is pretty important to almost everyone, so it'll find its way into most generic technologies. Hormone-crazed tech-savvy teenagers are a particularly strong intersection of the two. Parents fearing teen sex might be worried about how their kids would use the technology, but the second question puts such concerns into their proper context quite concisely.\nWill [ ] destroy music\/art? No. Every new technology for reproducing musical and artistic works (such as player pianos and video cassette recorders ) has been accompanied by warnings that it will destroy the industry that supplies it content. The reality is a special case of the \"destroy industries\" question - old business models will fall but new ones will arise in their place, and art and music as a whole will survive.\nBut can't we go back to a time when\u2014 No. Elderly people express their disapproval of today's technological luxuries, nostalgically longing for a time before Foo or Bar came around. That's just how the stereotype goes, but there is a large helping of truth to it. Usually, their sentiments are not a fair judgement, but an emotional attachment to the olden days and a resistance to change .\nWill [ ] bring about world peace?- No. People have been trying to bring about world peace for centuries; sadly, other people are in no such hurry and insist on more conflict to solve their own problems.\nThe final answer is a depressing and strangely beautiful comment on human nature: Will [ ] cause widespread alienation by creating a world of empty experiences? We were already alienated. Skeptics may be concerned that a new technology will make people's pleasures and interactions more artificial and shallow; Randall comments that this is already something well known in our society.\nFrom the Title Text, Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable? describes the usual theory that a technology might use to bring about world peace. Unfortunately, not only does the answer seem to be \"no\" to World Peace either way, but there's no indication that increased global communication actually facilitates understanding and empathy between distant communities. In fact, many cynics say the Internet has in fact caused the opposite effect, causing people to fracture into like-minded cliques rather than intermingle.\n[Caption above the chart:] The simple answers to the questions that get asked about every new technology:\nWill [ ] make us all geniuses? No Will [ ] make us all morons? No Will [ ] destroy whole industries? Yes Will [ ] make us more empathetic? No Will [ ] make us less caring? No Will teens use [ ] for sex? Yes Were they going to have sex anyway? Yes Will [ ] destroy music? No Will [ ] destroy art? No But can't we go back to a time when- No Will [ ] bring about world peace? No Will [ ] cause widespread alienation by creating a world of empty experiences? We were already alienated\n"}
{"id":1290,"title":"Syllable Planning","image_title":"Syllable Planning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1290","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/syllable_planning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1290:_Syllable_Planning","transcript":"Cueball: Man, that is ridicu -fucking\u2014... ...Hang on, I inserted \"fucking\" too late and now there's just one awkward syllable left. Can I back up? [Cueball is standing next to Megan.]\n","explanation":"Cueball wants to say ri-fucking-diculous , but he inserts the fucking too late in the word. Now, he has to say ridicu-fucking-lous , which sounds ridiculous.\nThis is an example of tmesis , the breaking up of a word to include another within it, and more specifically of expletive infixation . Normally, for rhythmic reasons the included word is inserted before the stressed syllable ( ri dic ulous becoming ri-fucking- dic ulous ) which is what Cueball messed up. However, in some cases it is also possible to break the word after a prefix instead, so for some words there are two ways to do it e.g. unbe-fucking- lie vable (before the stressed syllable) or un-fucking-be lie vable ; this is because unbelievable is a combination of un and believable to negate believable which is an actual English word [ citation needed ] and therefore it still sounds good.\nThe title text introduces a further example, with speaker inserting the fucking too late into the word absolutely \u2014which would have resulted in absolute-fucking-ly \u2014but leaving the word unfinished when they realize their mistake. The more usual tmesis here would be abso-fucking-lutely .\nCueball: Man, that is ridicu -fucking\u2014... ...Hang on, I inserted \"fucking\" too late and now there's just one awkward syllable left. Can I back up? [Cueball is standing next to Megan.]\n"}
{"id":1291,"title":"Shoot for the Moon","image_title":"Shoot for the Moon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1291","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/shoot_for_the_moon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1291:_Shoot_for_the_Moon","transcript":"[Megan stands at a lectern.] Megan: Students, shoot for the moon. If you miss,\n[A surprisingly lunar-like object is starting to edge into the frame.] Megan: SHOOT AGAIN . Megan: Keep shooting and never stop.\n[The moon is now almost entirely in-frame.] Megan: Someday, one of us will destroy that stupid skycircle. And\u2014 Megan: ...What? What are you all\u2014\n[The moon is now in frame, lurking ominously in the background.] Megan: ...it's right behind me, isn't it? Megan: Shit . Megan: Everyone act casual.\n","explanation":"The comic and the title text both parody the motivational quote attributed to Leslie Brown , which originally says, \"Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.\"\nIn the original form, the phrase \"Shoot for the moon\" is figurative, meant to inspire people to pursue ambitious goals, reasoning that even if they fail to achieve them, they may still accomplish other great things while trying. The comic and title text, on the other hand, is literally referring to the moon, and using the word \"shoot\" not in the sense of \"aspire\" but to mean \"fire a weapon at.\" The comic further explores the humorous motivations for \"shooting the moon\"; Megan wants to destroy and kill the moon in order to humble it, feeling taunted by its orbiting merrily over her head, and so she inspires her students to physically attempt to destroy the moon whenever possible, only to become sheepish when she realizes the moon is right behind her, as if it were a person who could become offended by what she is saying. This is, of course, a common comedy trope .\nThe title text invokes another literal interpretation of the phrase - if a space vehicle aims at the Moon and misses, it will end up in a new orbit, possibly (depending on its velocity) escaping from the Earth-Moon system and following a separate but nearby orbit around the Sun. A solar orbit is very hard, very fuel-intensive, and very lengthy to return from, despite physically meaning you will remain very close to Earth, even close enough to see it with some optical magnification. Thus, as a hypothetical space explorer's life support gradually ran out because his craft could not make it back to Earth in time, he would be taunted by Earth remaining close to him.\nGetting stranded on the Moon was the subject of the title text of 1510: Napoleon and of 1484: Apollo Speeches .\n[Megan stands at a lectern.] Megan: Students, shoot for the moon. If you miss,\n[A surprisingly lunar-like object is starting to edge into the frame.] Megan: SHOOT AGAIN . Megan: Keep shooting and never stop.\n[The moon is now almost entirely in-frame.] Megan: Someday, one of us will destroy that stupid skycircle. And\u2014 Megan: ...What? What are you all\u2014\n[The moon is now in frame, lurking ominously in the background.] Megan: ...it's right behind me, isn't it? Megan: Shit . Megan: Everyone act casual.\n"}
{"id":1292,"title":"Pi vs. Tau","image_title":"Pi vs. Tau","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1292","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pi_vs_tau.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1292:_Pi_vs._Tau","transcript":"[On the left is a \"forbidden\"-style slashed circle with the \u03c0 symbol, captioned \"Pi\". On the right is a \"forbidden\"-style slashed circle with 2\u03c0, captioned \"Tau\". Between these is 1.5\u03c0, captioned \"Pau\".] [Caption below the panel:] A compromise solution to the Pi\/Tau dispute\nPossibly, Randall used Wolfram|Alpha to calculate the result (he uses it a lot, for example What-if 70: The Constant Groundskeeper or What-if 62: Falling With Helium ).\nHowever, when the comic was published, there was a bug in Wolfram|Alpha so that, when getting 200 octal digits from \"pau\", it just calculates the decimal value rounded to 15 significant digits (this is 4.71238898038469) and expands that as octal digits as far as needed.\nThis gives a periodically repeating number. In the first 200 digits of the octal expansion, the sequences 666 and 6666 do occur, twice and once, respectively. There are 4 occurrences, however, in the first three hundred and ten (310 in base 8 equals 200 in base 10) digits:\nExpansion that long indeed does contain 666 (the number of the beast ) four times (with one instance as 6666). It also contains 0000, 222, 444, and 7777, but they only appear once in a run.\nIn the first 500 digits of the actual octal expansion of pau, we also find that 6666 occurs once, and 666 occurs two other times:\n(Note that this contains 500 digits after the decimal point.) No other run of 3 or more repeated digits (e.g. 111) occurs as many times, although 1111 occurs once, 111 occurs once elsewhere, and 333 and 777 also occur once each. 9 other strings of 3 digits occur 4 times, namely 164, 362, 521, 644, 432, 730, 43, 216, and 450, and only 573 occurs more often, as it occurs 6 times. Therefore, if 6666 is counted as two occurrences of 666, it is actually the joint second most common string of three numbers in the first 500 digits.\nCoincidentally , e+2 is also very similar to 1.5 pi, although only to a few digits.\n","explanation":"This is yet another of Randall 's compromise comics . A few mathematicians argue as to whether to use pi , which is the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter, or tau , which is the ratio between a circle's circumference and its radius.\nSome consider pi to be the wrong convention and are in favor of using tau as the circle constant; see the Tau Manifesto , which was inspired by the article \" Pi is wrong! \" by mathematician Robert Palais and publicized by Vi Hart .  Others consider proponents of tau to be foolish and remain loyal to pi (see the Pi Manifesto ). Of course, regardless of which convention is used, the change is merely in notation \u2014 the underlying mathematics remains unaltered. Still, the choice of pi vs. tau can affect the clarity of equations, analogies between different equations, and how easy various subjects are to teach.\nMost people know \u03c0 (pi) by the approximation 3.14, but do not know \u03c4 (tau) which, by definition, is twice as large as pi. Randall is suggesting using \"pau\", which is a portmanteau of \"pi\" and \"tau\", as a number situated, appropriately enough, halfway between pi and tau, i.e. 1.5 pi or 0.75 tau. But of course his number would be inconvenient, as this value does not naturally turn up when working with circles or other mathematical constructs, so there are no commonly used formulas that would use pau.\nThe title text claims that pau can be approximated by e+2, as both values are roughly 4.71 \u2014 a similarity that holds little since it requires another irrational constant, e (although knowing the value of pau is somewhat more helpful in remembering e to 2 digits). It also attributes the nickname \"Devil's Ratio\" to pau, due to the sequence 666 supposedly appearing four times in the first 200 digits of pau when expressed in the octal base. However, this is not the case, and was likely due to an error in the computer system used by WolframAlpha; for more details see below.\nThe Tau\/pi controversy was later mentioned in 2520: Symbols .\n[On the left is a \"forbidden\"-style slashed circle with the \u03c0 symbol, captioned \"Pi\". On the right is a \"forbidden\"-style slashed circle with 2\u03c0, captioned \"Tau\". Between these is 1.5\u03c0, captioned \"Pau\".] [Caption below the panel:] A compromise solution to the Pi\/Tau dispute\nPossibly, Randall used Wolfram|Alpha to calculate the result (he uses it a lot, for example What-if 70: The Constant Groundskeeper or What-if 62: Falling With Helium ).\nHowever, when the comic was published, there was a bug in Wolfram|Alpha so that, when getting 200 octal digits from \"pau\", it just calculates the decimal value rounded to 15 significant digits (this is 4.71238898038469) and expands that as octal digits as far as needed.\nThis gives a periodically repeating number. In the first 200 digits of the octal expansion, the sequences 666 and 6666 do occur, twice and once, respectively. There are 4 occurrences, however, in the first three hundred and ten (310 in base 8 equals 200 in base 10) digits:\nExpansion that long indeed does contain 666 (the number of the beast ) four times (with one instance as 6666). It also contains 0000, 222, 444, and 7777, but they only appear once in a run.\nIn the first 500 digits of the actual octal expansion of pau, we also find that 6666 occurs once, and 666 occurs two other times:\n(Note that this contains 500 digits after the decimal point.) No other run of 3 or more repeated digits (e.g. 111) occurs as many times, although 1111 occurs once, 111 occurs once elsewhere, and 333 and 777 also occur once each. 9 other strings of 3 digits occur 4 times, namely 164, 362, 521, 644, 432, 730, 43, 216, and 450, and only 573 occurs more often, as it occurs 6 times. Therefore, if 6666 is counted as two occurrences of 666, it is actually the joint second most common string of three numbers in the first 500 digits.\nCoincidentally , e+2 is also very similar to 1.5 pi, although only to a few digits.\n"}
{"id":1293,"title":"Job Interview","image_title":"Job Interview","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1293","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/job_interview.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1293:_Job_Interview","transcript":"[Beret Guy walks in, followed by a...'prospective hire'.] Beret Guy: Welcome to our company! We're headquartered here, in this real building I found!\n[Both people sit down at a table. The 'hire' has a tray with food and a beverage. Beret Guy has a bowl. In the adjacent wall, there is a power outlet with a paper label taped to it marked \"Soup\". A small roll of wire sits next to Beret Guy's chair.] 'Hire': What do you.. do ? Beret Guy: We make stuff for phones! Like apps and stickers.\n[Beret Guy grabs the roll of wire.] Beret Guy: We want to hire you to write on our computers. We can offer you a bunch of paychecks! There are ghosts here.\n[Beret Guy unrolls the wire and plugs it into the wall.] 'Hire': ...Are you sure this is a company? Beret Guy: I hope so!\n[Soup streams out of the plugged-in wire into Beret Guy's bowl.]\n","explanation":"Following on from his attempts at networking , Beret Guy , the oddball of the xkcd cast, conducts an interview for a programmer position at his mysteriously successful company.\nMuch like most of Beret Guy's interactions with people, Beret Guy is cheerful and upbeat, yet indicates that he has at best a scrambled understanding of how people in this situation normally act. Because of this, the job interview becomes increasingly bizarre, starting with Beret Guy's assertion that the company headquarters is a \"real building [he] found\", implying that the building's reality might be in question. In addition, \"finding\" the building may imply that he does not own or rent it, but simply found it empty and moved in. He says his company makes phone accessories, but then adds, \"like apps and stickers,\" two wildly different products in terms of both production and profitability. He is strangely vague about both the position (\"someone to write on our computers\") and the salary (\"a bunch of paychecks\"). Then he mentions ghosts, which is either a powerful disincentive from joining the company, yet another sign that Beret Guy is mentally unsound, or both.\nThe strip finishes with Beret Guy plugging a cord into an electrical outlet clumsily labeled \"Soup,\" which then, implausibly, actually starts dispensing soup. Most electrical outlets do not function like this. [ citation needed ] However, this is a typical behaviour of Beret Guy - see a similar example in: 1395: Power Cord .\nThe title text makes reference to the biblical story of Job (pronounced with a long O to rhyme with globe), who was put through many horrendous ordeals to test his faith in God. This suggests that the interviewee will be taking on not a \"job experience\" but rather a \"Job experience\" (i.e. the job will be a horrendous ordeal).  Alternatively, it's a Homestarrunner reference .\nOther job interviews were portrayed in 125: Marketing Interview , 1088: Five Years , 1094: Interview , 1545: Strengths and Weaknesses , and 2597: Salary Negotiation .\n[Beret Guy walks in, followed by a...'prospective hire'.] Beret Guy: Welcome to our company! We're headquartered here, in this real building I found!\n[Both people sit down at a table. The 'hire' has a tray with food and a beverage. Beret Guy has a bowl. In the adjacent wall, there is a power outlet with a paper label taped to it marked \"Soup\". A small roll of wire sits next to Beret Guy's chair.] 'Hire': What do you.. do ? Beret Guy: We make stuff for phones! Like apps and stickers.\n[Beret Guy grabs the roll of wire.] Beret Guy: We want to hire you to write on our computers. We can offer you a bunch of paychecks! There are ghosts here.\n[Beret Guy unrolls the wire and plugs it into the wall.] 'Hire': ...Are you sure this is a company? Beret Guy: I hope so!\n[Soup streams out of the plugged-in wire into Beret Guy's bowl.]\n"}
{"id":1294,"title":"Telescope Names","image_title":"Telescope Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1294","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/telescope_names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1294:_Telescope_Names","transcript":"[A list of telescope names is given, with a series of checkboxes at right.]\nThe Very Large Telescope \u2611 The Extremely Large Telescope \u2611 The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope \u2611 (Canceled) The Oppressively Colossal Telescope \u2610 The Mind-numbingly Vast Telescope \u2610 The Despair Telescope \u2610 The Cataclysmic Telescope \u2610 The Telescope of Devastation \u2610 The Nightmare Scope \u2610 The Infinite Telescope \u2610 The Final Telescope \u2610\n","explanation":"The Very Large Telescope is an existing telescope, while the (European) Extremely Large Telescope was in an advanced planning stage at the time of the comic's release. The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope was another proposed telescope that, as the comic mentions, was cancelled. The comic pokes fun at the generic nature of the names of the telescopes by proposing more generic but increasingly ridiculous names for future telescopes.\nThe title text talks about the Thirty Meter Telescope , which is about to begin construction on Mauna Kea (a dormant volcano) in Hawaii, and seems to compare it to the Eye of Sauron . It is expected to be the most advanced and powerful optical telescope on Earth when completed.\n[A list of telescope names is given, with a series of checkboxes at right.]\nThe Very Large Telescope \u2611 The Extremely Large Telescope \u2611 The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope \u2611 (Canceled) The Oppressively Colossal Telescope \u2610 The Mind-numbingly Vast Telescope \u2610 The Despair Telescope \u2610 The Cataclysmic Telescope \u2610 The Telescope of Devastation \u2610 The Nightmare Scope \u2610 The Infinite Telescope \u2610 The Final Telescope \u2610\n"}
{"id":1295,"title":"New Study","image_title":"New Study","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1295","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_study.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1295:_New_Study","transcript":"[Hairy as a news anchor with a perfect black news-anchor-hair-helmet is sitting behind his desk with hands folded in front om him.] Hairy: ...And in science news, according to a new study, 85% of news organizations repeat \"new study\" press releases without checking whether they're real.\n","explanation":"Hairy as a news anchor is reporting on a new study. This is another of Randall's jabs at modern news networks. The joke is twofold: 1. news organizations often repeat press releases on scientific studies without fact checking; 2. the study being reported by the news organization in the comic is presumably itself invented and would not stand up to fact checking.\nSome examples of how true this can be:\nThe title text implies there is an actual study being performed to determine what percentage of news organizations repeat \"new study\" press releases without checking whether they're real, and that the fake study being reported on by the (unknowing) reporter in the comic is part of the experiment being performed to find that true percentage.  When this study concludes, the reporters will not know whether to report on its findings, either because they've already reported on a similar (but fake) story, or because they no longer trust stories of that nature.\nRelated jokes:\nSide note: People making the substitutions in 1288: Substitutions , a comic posted two weeks before this one, will read this comic as one about Tumblr posts.\n[Hairy as a news anchor with a perfect black news-anchor-hair-helmet is sitting behind his desk with hands folded in front om him.] Hairy: ...And in science news, according to a new study, 85% of news organizations repeat \"new study\" press releases without checking whether they're real.\n"}
{"id":1296,"title":"Git Commit","image_title":"Git Commit","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1296","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/git_commit.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1296:_Git_Commit","transcript":"[Caption below the panel:] As a project drags on, my Git commit messages get less and less informative.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the Git source code revision control software, which saves earlier versions of files and folders for later access into a special repository. This comes in handy when you want to try out whether an idea works (branching). Further, you can collaborate with others by use of remote repositories. Perhaps most importantly, it allows members of the development team to find key changes in the history, later. Git has been discussed in 1597: Git as well.\nA commit is a saved version in a Git repository; a commit comes with a message that is supposed to describe what the commit contains, similar to the edit summaries used on MediaWiki sites such as explain xkcd and on this explanation . Randall , however, finds himself losing interest in the commit messages the more code he writes and winds up just using placeholder text or jokes to himself. Presumably, this is because his separate commits are part of a large effort that can't be effectively summarized, and where there's no particular urgent need to differentiate the commits. Seeing as in this context 12 hours of coding can be considered \"dragging on,\" it's safe to assume that the kinds of commits Randall is talking about are not for some major in-production project, nor for something that a lot of other people are working on. In both of those cases, one would be much more likely to use descriptive commit messages, since you want to flag things that are important, either from a technical standpoint (e.g. \"fix the thing that's making the site not work\") or for the benefit of others who want to know which commits they should be paying attention to.\nThe phrase \"Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas\/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final\" mimics the phrasing used by Git. A branch is a specific sequence of commits which can be made in parallel to other branches of development, and later merged. Here, we see that Randall has also gotten lazy with his branch names: \"branch 'asdfasjkfdlas\/alkdjf'\" might be the series of two commits starting with \"here have code\". \"sdkjfls-final\" could be the branch indicated by the vertical string of circles on the left, into which the other more branch is merged in commit \"adkfjslkdfjsdklfj\".\nMost git tools show the commit history with the most recent commits first, so showing the oldest first like this would require something like the --reverse option.\nThe comments go from being pretty detailed as to his thoughts and reasons for the code (\"enabled config file parsing\"), to relatively uninformative summaries (\"misc bugfixes\"), to completely uninformative words (\"more code\"), and then finally he doesn't even bother trying to come up with words, instead just hitting a key (\"aaaaaaaa\") or semi-random keys (\"adkfjslkdfjsdklfj\"), then goes back to typing words but words that have a bit of a craziness to them rather than having anything to do with describing the code (\"my hands are typing words\").  The \"adkfjslkdfjsdklfj\" line and similar garbage in the title text comes from having your hands on the \" home row \" on a standard QWERTY keyboard, then hitting \"random\" keys without moving your fingers from their standard home row positions.  The keys you hit \"randomly\" will be combinations of A, S, D, and F on the left hand, and J, K, L, and\u00a0; on the right hand (although the\u00a0; key seems to have been avoided, possibly because without the presence of surrounding quotes a\u00a0; character will end the comment). It is common to see stuff like that when a person is required to type something \u2014 i.e. a mandatory field \u2014 but they have no interest in typing anything meaningful or no idea what to write, so they just hit the easiest keys to hit and call it done.\n[Caption below the panel:] As a project drags on, my Git commit messages get less and less informative.\n"}
{"id":1297,"title":"Oort Cloud","image_title":"Oort Cloud","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1297","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/oort_cloud.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1297:_Oort_Cloud","transcript":"[Three asteroids float in space.] ISON: Have you noticed that bright dot in the distance? Asteroid: Yeah. What's the deal with it?\nISON: Dunno. I'm gonna go check it out.\n[Pause while ISON checks it out off screen.]\nISON (broken up, with multiple tails): Wow. Do NOT go over there.\n","explanation":"The Oort cloud is a hypothesized sphere containing many small Solar System bodies , reaching out to roughly 50,000 AU (astronomical units) or nearly one light-year from the sun. Gravitational forces from passing stars or collisions with other objects sometimes perturb one of these bodies enough to let it fall into the inner solar system. When it gets closer to the Sun, which is just a bright dot at that far distance, it warms up and some of its mass is lost as gas and dust, making it more visible as an object commonly referred to as a comet. This is what has happened to a comet called C\/2013 UQ4 , AKA Comet Catalina. And although this is not what will happen to Catalina, comets that get close enough to the sun may break up entirely.\nThere seems to be no definitive astronomical definition of the word \"comet\", and definitions can be challenging and problematic [1] , but in general terms a comet is a celestial object consisting of a nucleus containing a huge amount of ices and dust which, when near the sun, has an atmosphere (called coma ) and perhaps a 'tail' of ionized gas and dust particles pointing away from the sun.\nThe comet pictured here upon its return strangely resembles the unusual asteroid P\/2013 P5 . That object sported six comet-like tails, but it's not a comet. Rather, the six comet-like tails were suspected to be caused by rapid spinning of that object.\nRandal has drawn the hapless Oort Cloud object with its tails generally left of frame, i.e. away from the sun. Comet tails point away from the sun regardless of their direction of movement, as they are blown out by the solar wind which moves much faster than the comet. As neither of the other two objects have tails, this lends the picture a comical cartoon-like quality, as when Yosemite Sam is blasted by his own gun and it leaves his moustache tails statically pointing away from the direction of the blast.\nComet ISON presumably came from the Oort cloud and reached its closest approach to the sun ( perihelion ) on the day before this comic was published. The comet passed very close to the sun, at a distance of 1,860,000 kilometers or 1,150,000 miles from the centre of the sun. It was thus within one sun-diameter of the surface of the sun itself (diameter of sun = 1,391,000\u00a0km). At that distance the temperature, at approx. 2,700 degrees Celsius, vaporizes rock as well as ice and can break the comet apart entirely.\nThe broken-up object here is presumed to be ISON, and is labeled as such in the transcript, even though Randall hasn't unambiguously identified it. Note that it's not realistic that ISON still would have a tail so far away from the sun.\nOn December 2, 2013 NASA released a statement that ISON did not survive its close perihelion with the sun. The Comet ISON Observing Campaign posted a delightful biographical sketch (In Memoriam Comet C\/2012 S1 (ISON) Born 4.5 Billion BC, Fragmented Nov 28, 2013, age 4.5-billion yrs old) which touches on its early years, retreat to the Oort Cloud, career as a Sungrazer, \"dynamic and unpredictable life, alternating between periods of quiet reflection and violent outburst\", delicate inner working, and its tragic demise.\nThe closest approach of ISON to the earth was predicted for December 27, 2013 at a distance at approx. 60 million kilometers or 37 million miles, 170 hundred times more than the moon. The Hubble Space Telescope looked for it on December 18 but saw nothing.\nThis video shows an animation of the encounter at the sun: ISON 28.11.2013 .\nSome more information about comets will help put the comic in perspective:\n[Three asteroids float in space.] ISON: Have you noticed that bright dot in the distance? Asteroid: Yeah. What's the deal with it?\nISON: Dunno. I'm gonna go check it out.\n[Pause while ISON checks it out off screen.]\nISON (broken up, with multiple tails): Wow. Do NOT go over there.\n"}
{"id":1298,"title":"Exoplanet Neighborhood","image_title":"Exoplanet Neighborhood","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1298","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exoplanet_neighborhood.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1298:_Exoplanet_Neighborhood","transcript":"OUR NEIGHBORHOOD A portrait of all habitable-zone planets within 60 light-years of Earth (constructed from statistical data on typical planet sizes and orbits)\n[The image shows many planets in different colors and a legend shows planets at different sizes.] Planets around sun-like stars Planets around other stars [A marker on both sides:] Earth-sized planets\n[Center of the image.] Earth\n","explanation":"The diagram is a graphical representation of the statistically predicted distribution of nearby exoplanets (planets not in our solar system), based on the assumption that the exoplanets that are currently known have a distribution of orbits, sizes, and star types that is similar to the actual distribution. Astronomers are particularly interested in exoplanets within 60 light years of Earth which lie in a habitable zone ; that is, a planet whose orbit is within a certain range of distance from a star such that water could exist in a liquid state.\nSince almost all life on Earth (which is the only place we've actually found life thus far) depends on liquid water in some way, these planets are considered the most likely to support life. The diagram categorizes exoplanets in two ways. The disc color indicates the characteristics of the central star, with a reddish tone indicating hypothetical planets that orbit stars similar in characteristics to our sun, while grey indicates those that orbit stars unlike our sun. The disc sizes indicates the hypothetical size of the exoplanets, with planets similar to Earth's size depicted in a slightly darker shade of either color. Because the discs represent a distribution, their positioning within the diagram is irrelevant; the spacing around the title and the Earth is an artistic choice.\nIt appears that the diagram is intended to cause the viewer to conclude that there are a significant number of Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-type stars which could be habitable, and even more possibly-habitable planets around other types of stars or in other sizes.\nThe title text, \"It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!\" is an allusion to the former PBS television show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in which the same line presents itself in the opening song, \"Won't You Be My Neighbor?\" .\nThe title of the comic was changed from what is currently the title text to \"Exoplanet Neighborhood\".\nRandall has commented on the results of exoplanet research before, in 786: Exoplanets and 1071: Exoplanets .\nOUR NEIGHBORHOOD A portrait of all habitable-zone planets within 60 light-years of Earth (constructed from statistical data on typical planet sizes and orbits)\n[The image shows many planets in different colors and a legend shows planets at different sizes.] Planets around sun-like stars Planets around other stars [A marker on both sides:] Earth-sized planets\n[Center of the image.] Earth\n"}
{"id":1299,"title":"I Don't Own a TV","image_title":"I Don't Own a TV","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1299","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_dont_own_a_tv.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1299:_I_Don%27t_Own_a_TV","transcript":"[A graph is shown with an x- and y-axis.] How people feel when they say \"I don't own a TV\" by year [The x-axis is labled: 1950, 2000, today.] [The y-axis is labled neutral at zero, smug at top, and embarrassed to the bottom.] [A plot, similar to a negative sine curve between approximately 1960 and 2000, is shown in red, starting at 1950, moving into negative values, reaching the zero level again at the beginning of the 1980s, reaching its maximum shortly after 2000, and decreasing again until today. An arrow shows the current direction.]\n","explanation":"This comic is yet another graph , describing how people who don't own a television feel throughout several time periods. While televisions have existed since 1928, regular scheduled broadcasts of television programs did not begin until the late 1940s. So before the 1950s, it was common not to own a television and therefore most people's feelings about it would be fairly neutral. This changed as televisions became cheaper and more people started owning them, meaning that if someone didn't own a television, it was generally because they couldn't afford one. This might lead to someone feeling embarrassment when admitting they don't have a television.\nGradually, television ownership increased until eventually, nearly every household had at least one television, and those that did not were more and more likely to do so by choice rather than due to poverty. The graph therefore peaks at around the year 2000, when many people would be proud to say that they did not own a television. Randall suggests that these people would feel smug because they are resisting a popular trend (owning a television) which the rest of the public take part in. The graph tails downwards at the end, suggesting that Randall believes that people are becoming less smug. This could be because of the abundance of video content and other forms of entertainment on the internet and mobile devices. So, according to Randall, people are returning to not owning a television simply because it's not necessary and these people therefore feel neutral towards their lack of a television.\nAnother point of view is that, with the advent of the Internet for news and weather along with video-on-demand services such as Netflix, televisions have become obsolete for some households and thus not owning one can be seen as moving with the times, or those that don't own one see those that still have one as old-fashioned, hence the smug. However in recent times television has become imbued with new technologies such as Internet access (known as smart TVs) and thus owning a television is seen as trendy again, thus the level of smugness drops.\nThe initial upturn from embarrassment to smugness may also be a commentary on the quality of television programs over that period. In the 1950s and 1960s, television was a major source of news and information. Those without televisions might feel that they were missing out of the important stories of the day. Also, the limited number of stations and lack of recording devices meant that discussions of the previous night's television programming was far more inclusive, with more people watching the same programs at the same time. Until the advent of PVRs, the prior night's television programming was a popular \"water cooler\" topic (i.e. something discussed socially at the office the next day). This means that that those who had missed out on those programs might feel socially \"out of the loop\".\nBy contrast, since 2000, many programs were criticized as poor quality or \"mindless\", e.g. daytime talk shows and reality shows. So, someone might feel more smug for not watching so-called \"mindless television\". Similarly, as television viewership increased from the 1950s through the 2000s, it is possible that other activities such as reading has decreased; especially given that the younger generation today don't remember a time without television. So, someone who did not own a television set might feel more smug because they take part in more \"beneficial\" activities like reading, exercise, and studying.\nThe title text suggests that whether people feel embarrassed or smug doesn't depend directly on what percentage of the population owns TVs (TV ownership rate) or even on how quickly this percentage is growing (derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time); instead it depends on how the change in this percentage is speeding up or slowing down (second derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time). Specifically, as the rate at which people adopt TV ownership accelerates (positive second derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time), people who don't own one feel embarrassed (negative smugness); and as the market is saturated and the rate at which people adopt TV ownership slows down (negative second derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time), people who don't own one feel smug (positive smugness). If people feel twice as embarrassed\/smug when this rate of acceleration\/deceleration doubles, then we have Randall's formulation: \"smugness is proportional to the negative second derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time\".\nAs evidence for this, the adoption of TV ownership should theoretically follow a sigmoid curve , which is the graph of something that starts small, grows in a spurt, and then approaches a maximum capacity (in this case 100%). The negative second derivative of a sigmoid curve looks very much like Randall's graph.\n[A graph is shown with an x- and y-axis.] How people feel when they say \"I don't own a TV\" by year [The x-axis is labled: 1950, 2000, today.] [The y-axis is labled neutral at zero, smug at top, and embarrassed to the bottom.] [A plot, similar to a negative sine curve between approximately 1960 and 2000, is shown in red, starting at 1950, moving into negative values, reaching the zero level again at the beginning of the 1980s, reaching its maximum shortly after 2000, and decreasing again until today. An arrow shows the current direction.]\n"}
{"id":1300,"title":"Galilean Moons","image_title":"Galilean Moons","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1300","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/galilean_moons.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1300:_Galilean_Moons","transcript":"[Megan, who is being orbited by four small floating balls, approaches Cueball.] Megan: Check it out! Cueball: What? Megan: I've got Galilean moons!\n[Io is at the point in its orbit closest to Cueball.] Io: Hi!\n[Io, which completes a full orbit in each panel, is again near Cueball, as is Europa this time.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's your name?\n[Io alone again.] Io: Hi!\n[Europa returns to its position near Cueball with Io, and Ganymede joins them.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's your\u2014 Ganymede: MOOOOOON!\n[Io alone again.] Io: Hi!\n[Europa and Io again.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's your name? Callisto: [on the other side of Megan] Ugh .\n[Io alone again.] Io: Hi! Callisto: So annoying .\n[Europa, Ganymede, and Io again.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's y\u2014 Ganymede: MOOOOOON.\n[Io alone again. Callisto nudges toward Cueball.] Io: Hi! Callisto: ... almost ... ... almoooost ...\n[Io and Europa again. Callisto enters an orbit around Cueball.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's your name? Callisto: Yessss!","explanation":"Megan has somehow acquired a set of Galilean moons similar to the four primary moons of Jupiter . The positions of the moons in the successive panels are reminiscent of the observations made by Galileo Galilei in 1610, which proved for the first time that objects in the heavens could orbit something other than the Earth (today these observations can be reproduced on successive nights by anyone looking at Jupiter with binoculars). As each of Megan's moons passes close to Cueball, it says something different. Io , the innermost and second-smallest, always says \"Hi!\" Europa , the second-innermost and smallest, always uses the phrase \"What's your name?\" Ganymede , the third moon from Jupiter but the largest in size, interrupts Europa by shouting \"MOOOOOON!\" Callisto, the farthest from Megan, expresses its annoyance at the antics of the other three moons. (\"MOOOOOOON!\" might be a reference to an old joke: Q: Knock Knock. A: Who's there? Q: Interrupting Cow. A: Interrupting Co-- Q: MOOOOOOO!)\nBecause the inner moons orbit Jupiter faster (due to Kepler's Third Law ), they pass by Cueball more often: Io ten times, Europa five times, and Ganymede twice over the course of the comic. In fact, the outermost crater-scarred moon Callisto appears to have passed its closest approach to Cueball just before the first panel (perhaps before Megan and her retinue had walked up to Cueball) and does not approach Cueball again until the tenth panel. At that point, due to some apparent exertion on Callisto's part, it leaves Megan's orbit and begins to orbit Cueball instead. This process could be seen as analogous to the capture of moons from one planet to another, which can happen in less stable systems than our solar system if two planets were to pass close to each other, but is mostly just whimsical. The humour derives from attributing human characteristics to the moon Callisto in attempting to escape from the other three moons.\nThe title text refers to the unusual orbital resonance among the three inner Galilean moons: Io has an orbital period of about 1.78 Earth days, Europa 3.55 days, and Ganymede 7.15 days, putting them into a 1:2:4 resonance. Callisto, with an orbital period of 16.69 days, is not part of the resonant system. This is illustrated in the animated picture at right, where you may notice that all conjunctions between Io and Europa take place at the \"12 o'clock\" position and all conjunctions between Europa and Ganymede take place at \"6 o'clock\" position. You may also notice at the animated picture that, unlike in the fifth and ninth panels of the comic, the three moons are never on the same side of Jupiter at the same time. It is thought that this resonance came about as the moons migrated outward due to tidal acceleration ; because the inner moons migrated more quickly, first Io caught up with the 2:1 resonance with Europa and then the two of them evolved outward in lockstep until Europa caught up with the 2:1 resonance with Ganymede. If the Jupiter system were to continue its current evolutionary path for long enough (several billion years), Ganymede would eventually catch up to the 2:1 resonance with Callisto and Callisto would also be trapped in the resonance, becoming the fourth member of a 1:2:4:8 system. The title text expresses Callisto's relief at escaping such a fate, describing the relationship among the other three moons as \"their weird ...thing.\" Callisto also escapes a common practice among certain groups of humans in which the members greet each other with meaningless phrases, usually an inside joke, whenever they meet, which could also be described as \"their weird ...thing.\" The word \"orbit\" could finish Callisto's sentence, as it can also mean a sphere of influence or interest.\nLater, in 2264: Satellite , Science Girl was orbited in a similar way by an abandoned satellite.\n[Megan, who is being orbited by four small floating balls, approaches Cueball.] Megan: Check it out! Cueball: What? Megan: I've got Galilean moons!\n[Io is at the point in its orbit closest to Cueball.] Io: Hi!\n[Io, which completes a full orbit in each panel, is again near Cueball, as is Europa this time.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's your name?\n[Io alone again.] Io: Hi!\n[Europa returns to its position near Cueball with Io, and Ganymede joins them.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's your\u2014 Ganymede: MOOOOOON!\n[Io alone again.] Io: Hi!\n[Europa and Io again.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's your name? Callisto: [on the other side of Megan] Ugh .\n[Io alone again.] Io: Hi! Callisto: So annoying .\n[Europa, Ganymede, and Io again.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's y\u2014 Ganymede: MOOOOOON.\n[Io alone again. Callisto nudges toward Cueball.] Io: Hi! Callisto: ... almost ... ... almoooost ...\n[Io and Europa again. Callisto enters an orbit around Cueball.] Io: Hi! Europa: What's your name? Callisto: Yessss!"}
{"id":1301,"title":"File Extensions","image_title":"File Extensions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1301","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/file_extensions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1301:_File_Extensions","transcript":"[Caption above the bar chart:] Trustworthiness of Information by File Extension\n[A line is going down and from that gray bars charting the trustworthiness in a bar graph that goes both left and right of the line. No units or figures are given. For ease of comprehension this transcript will arbitrarily designate the highest score as [+100]; subsequent scores are estimates based on the size of their bars.] [+100]: .tex [+89]: .pdf [+85]: .csv [+67]: .txt [+65]: .svg [+49]: .xls\/.xlsx [+21]: .doc [+15]: .png [+14]: .ppt [+3]: .jpg [-8]: .jpeg [-36]: .gif\nThe various extensions are, for the most part, abbreviations of the file type.\n","explanation":"Computer file names often end in file extensions like \".ppt\" or \".exe\". These extensions are a holdover from early operating systems like DOS in which filenames had a maximum eight characters followed by a period and the three-character extension. The extension was used by the operating system to determine filetype so that the system would know how to handle the file (e.g. which program could open the file). Newer operating systems and file systems now accept longer-than eight-character filenames, and extensions of greater than three characters; although most extensions remain three characters.\nMost extensions are created as proprietary to certain pieces of software, although software by other developers may later be designed to be able to read the format. For example, .doc is a Microsoft Word document, although because of that software's popularity, many word processors include the ability to open .doc files. Some common file extensions are not proprietary to a piece of software and may be handled by various programs; .jpg or .gif images are examples. In either case, a file's extension is generally a good indicator of what type of data the file contains.\nCertain file types are more prevalent for certain uses, with some being almost exclusive to one use, while other are in general use and might contain almost anything. Here, Randall presents a series of file extensions which often contain information, and he is rating the reliability of the information they generally contain from most reliable to least.\nNote that while the extensions .xls\/.xlsx, .doc, and .ppt were originally exclusive only to Microsoft Office and users of Windows, there now exist a number of open source programs such as Open Office, Libre Office, and some Android apps that are capable of editing such files. These programs can run on systems other than just Windows, such as Linux, perhaps contributing to making them even more widespread and easy to make than before.\nThe title text refers to how .txt files contain only plain text and nothing else, meaning that any alignment (such as for indentation, tables, or justification ) would have to be performed manually by adding in spaces or tabs. Anyone who would go through such an effort to improve their text's readability is likely to be trustworthy, and almost by definition, the opinion presented would be justified.\n[Caption above the bar chart:] Trustworthiness of Information by File Extension\n[A line is going down and from that gray bars charting the trustworthiness in a bar graph that goes both left and right of the line. No units or figures are given. For ease of comprehension this transcript will arbitrarily designate the highest score as [+100]; subsequent scores are estimates based on the size of their bars.] [+100]: .tex [+89]: .pdf [+85]: .csv [+67]: .txt [+65]: .svg [+49]: .xls\/.xlsx [+21]: .doc [+15]: .png [+14]: .ppt [+3]: .jpg [-8]: .jpeg [-36]: .gif\nThe various extensions are, for the most part, abbreviations of the file type.\n"}
{"id":1302,"title":"Year in Review","image_title":"Year in Review","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1302","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/year_in_review.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1302:_Year_in_Review","transcript":"[Cueball is a news anchor sitting with his arms on a desk looking at Megan, a reporter shown in a feed on a screen to his right. There is a title below the feed.] Cueball: We go live to our 2013: Year in Review! Megan: Thanks! Megan: In 2013, I didn't see an aurora. Cueball: I- what? Title: Year in Review\n[Zoom to the top part of the screen with Megan. Her text is written above the screen without a frame around this segment of the comic.] Megan: The northern lights. I thought this would finally be the year. Megan: But it didn't happen.\n[Back to the original view but Cueball has turned more towards Megan, with only one arm on the desk.] Cueball: Oh. Uh... What about the rest of the year? Megan: What do you mean? Cueball: Any big news stories? Megan: Oh yeah, tons. Title: Year in Review\n[Same setting but Megan turns away from Cueball, who has taken both hands of the table. Megan is looking to her left at something off screen. Beat panel.] Title: Year in Review\n[Cueball turns back to face the viewers, both hands back on the desk, as Megan is leaving the screen, walking out to the right, her face already hidden by the frame of the feed.] Cueball: ...Well, that was 2013: Year in Review. Megan: The sky's clearing up. I'll be outside. Title: Year in Review\n","explanation":"Many news organizations will recap the major stories of the past calendar year in late December (typically before the year has actually ended). This includes specialized news outlets such as sports stations which recap major sports stories or best plays of the year. Here, Cueball ,  as a news anchor , expects Megan to talk about major news stories of 2013 such as the roll-out of Obamacare , the election of Pope Francis or the death of Nelson Mandela , to give a few examples.\nInstead, Megan only recaps one thing which was important to her: She did not see the aurora borealis (i.e. northern lights) in 2013, the dazzling natural geomagnetic light display caused by the solar wind . In 2013 a solar maximum was expected at its solar cycle , but the activity of the sun wasn't as heavy as before. So, a northern light had been very rare in this year. Megan has never seen the northern lights, and she is frustrated that it did not happen for her in 2013, thus overshadowing all other events. She even leaves in the middle of the review when she notices the sky clearing up, as she wishes to check if there are any northern light this evening. This may very well be Randall's own frustration which is displayed here.\nIt turns out in the title text that Megan is actually reviewing the astronomical year, only considering astronomical events. She even rates it much like a movie review, although she seems to use the A-F grade scale . She only gives the year a C- (C minus), which would usually be the lowest passable grade, so she just lets the year pass in spite of the two failing events mentioned in the title text.\nIn the title text, Megan specifically complains about not being able to see aurorae from her house. If Megan actually represents Randall's frustration, then to expect to see it from a house in Massachusetts would be a lot to ask for. Usually, people who wish to see Northern lights will travel to an arctic area and stay away from light pollution from cities. But in years with heavy solar activity, northern light may be visible even south of Massachusetts.\nThe title text also refers to Comet ISON . In February, a rough estimate of the comet's behavior predicted that it would become brighter than the full moon, a prediction that was widely reported by the media even though it was based on limited data and astronomers knew that it would not reach this brightness. In the end, although it was visible to the naked eye, it was never as bright as anybody hoped and apparently disintegrated on November 28, 2013, at its close approach to the sun.\nThe title text also refers to the 2017 total eclipse , which was visible as a partial eclipse for a few hours throughout North America on August 21 Monday, including a 100-mile wide band across the United States where it was a total eclipse for a couple of minutes in the early afternoon. Eclipses are completely predictable - although the weather might be cloudy so that the sun is blocked during totality, they will happen anyway. So Megan is being extremely pessimistic to even suggest that the 2017 eclipse might get canceled. Humorously, her statement that someone might decide to cancel the eclipse makes it sound like a concert that could be canceled by the organizer. It seems that Megan thinks that the \"they\" who could cancel the eclipse are the same \"they\" that caused the comet to disintegrate and the solar activity to stay low. Anyone with the kind of power to stop a solar eclipse from happening would be god-like compared to humanity. The next time that the eclipse was mentioned was in the New Year comic for 2017: 1779: 2017 . The subject of the title text of that comic is the likelihood that the eclipse will indeed happen as planned.\nAll in all, the comic suggests that the only events of significance to Megan (and Randall) are astronomical ones; the actions of humanity pale in comparison.\nThe joke of Megan answering a question in an interview in an unexpected manner has been used before in 1111: Premiere .\nInterestingly in 1037: Umwelt there is an aurora story line where Megan stays inside at her computer even though it can be seen from her own state, letting her friend go out alone. (So not the same Megan for sure).\n[Cueball is a news anchor sitting with his arms on a desk looking at Megan, a reporter shown in a feed on a screen to his right. There is a title below the feed.] Cueball: We go live to our 2013: Year in Review! Megan: Thanks! Megan: In 2013, I didn't see an aurora. Cueball: I- what? Title: Year in Review\n[Zoom to the top part of the screen with Megan. Her text is written above the screen without a frame around this segment of the comic.] Megan: The northern lights. I thought this would finally be the year. Megan: But it didn't happen.\n[Back to the original view but Cueball has turned more towards Megan, with only one arm on the desk.] Cueball: Oh. Uh... What about the rest of the year? Megan: What do you mean? Cueball: Any big news stories? Megan: Oh yeah, tons. Title: Year in Review\n[Same setting but Megan turns away from Cueball, who has taken both hands of the table. Megan is looking to her left at something off screen. Beat panel.] Title: Year in Review\n[Cueball turns back to face the viewers, both hands back on the desk, as Megan is leaving the screen, walking out to the right, her face already hidden by the frame of the feed.] Cueball: ...Well, that was 2013: Year in Review. Megan: The sky's clearing up. I'll be outside. Title: Year in Review\n"}
{"id":1303,"title":"Profile Info","image_title":"Profile Info","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1303","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/profile_info.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1303:_Profile_Info","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk, using a desktop computer. He is filling in a form on a webpage.] First Name: John Last Name: If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith\n[Caption below the panel:] How to deal with companies harvesting your profile for marketing\n","explanation":"On most websites people are forced to create an account to get proper support, be it technical support or simply ordering products. This usually consists of the user's name, email address, phone number, and also the user's home address if ordering a product that must be shipped by mail. It's not uncommon for the websites\/companies to then use that information for presenting new advertisements in the near future, or even sell it to others for their schemes.\nIn 2013 (publishing of this comic), a recent trend was to allow harvesting of profile pictures and real names, mostly by automated processes with little to no human interaction. The personal information is collected in context with other information, such as the purchase or product review history, and shown to people (typically friends and contacts) who are viewing similar products.\nThe title text references the fact that most of these companies have an \"opt out\" option so that your name won't be used, but then emphasizes that YouTube (a subsidiary of Google ) at the time of this comic forced YouTube user accounts to be tied to Google+ . Google+ required the use of the 'first name' and 'last name' convention typical of western cultures, where one cannot 'opt out' (though these requirements did allow for the abbreviation of names). However, this has not stopped people from using names that aren't their own, but using names like \"Barack Obama\" and \"Chuck Norris\". Some similar websites allowed the use of aliases in their initial terms of use, but then later changed their TOCs to prohibit use of \"false\" names. YouTube was one such system; after the merge with Google+ for authentication, both sites automatically linked your false-name account with your real name account, in some cases banning and blocking people with suspected false name accounts.\nTo try to put a stop to his own information being used, Cueball sets his last name to \"If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith\", a name which includes a phrase that would negatively affect any marketer's attempts to advertise an online product. [ citation needed ] This name would pass though most harvesting software as-is, and may very well end up being used in such ads, unless some very clever software is able to detect sentences as part of names or similar. In fact much spam is stopped by identifying emails through Honeypot accounts, among other methods.\nHence engineering part of your profile could be a winning strategy to signal to your friends that your information is harvested without your express knowledge.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, using a desktop computer. He is filling in a form on a webpage.] First Name: John Last Name: If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith\n[Caption below the panel:] How to deal with companies harvesting your profile for marketing\n"}
{"id":1304,"title":"Glass Trolling","image_title":"Glass Trolling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1304","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/glass_trolling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1304:_Glass_Trolling","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] My Hobby:\n[Cueball, wearing regular glasses, is holding his smartphone up in one hand while typing, as shown with two times two small movement lines on either side of the phone. A voice from off-panel right emanates from a starburst at the frame.] Cueball: OK, Glass, check tomorrow's weather. Cueball: Ooh, snow! Off-panel voice: Oh my god, it's somehow even more annoying than if you had it.\n[Caption below the panel:] Saying \"OK, Glass\" before everything while wearing regular glasses.\nGoogle Glass was a recurring theme in xkcd in 2013.\n","explanation":"This is another strip in the My Hobby series.\nGoogle Glass is a set of glasses frames worn like typical glasses that features an optical display and internet connectivity. It responds to voice commands starting with \"OK glass \" , for example to initiate video recording or to check tomorrow's weather. Strangers and other people surrounding the user would often find it annoying to hear someone talking to \"himself\", or to Glass . Also many people who buy the newest gadgets, like Google Glass, like to brag about it, and thus would try to say OK Glass so loud that other people will notice they have these cool new glasses. This can be very annoying in general!\nRandall's hobby, is saying \"OK, glass \" before any sentence while he is only wearing regular glasses. Like here where he (drawn as usual like Cueball , with regular glasses) is checking tomorrow's weather, not on the glasses but on his smartphone . Apparently this is even more annoying to the bystander than if he would actually wear a real Google Glass while saying so. He thus both annoys other people, mocks people who buy such glasses to brag about them, and in general mocks Google Glass.\nIn the title text, Randall states that there is an extra benefit by doing this while only wearing regular glasses. Because when someone is finally fed up with the annoyance and rips the glasses off and stomps on them, then it would cost much less for regular glasses than if he had to replace a \"Google Glass\". These are very expensive - $1,500 at the time of this comic, as the title text says. (Note that regular glasses can also be very expensive, but you could choose to wear your reserve glasses for such a prank...). Also several people have claimed to been attacked while wearing Google Glass in San Francisco, with one person claiming their attacker destroyed their Glass .\nThe \"OK, Glass \" keyword is not useless outside of Glass ; in the browser Chrome and the Android\/iOS app Google Now , \"OK, Glass \" is also valid instead of \"OK, Google \" to initiate a voice command. While Cueball may be using this app, it is not necessarily the case, given that the caption states that Cueball enjoys prefacing everything with the phrase.\nIt seems generally that Randall is no fan of Google Glass, which was also shown earlier in 1251: Anti-Glass .\n[Caption above the panel:] My Hobby:\n[Cueball, wearing regular glasses, is holding his smartphone up in one hand while typing, as shown with two times two small movement lines on either side of the phone. A voice from off-panel right emanates from a starburst at the frame.] Cueball: OK, Glass, check tomorrow's weather. Cueball: Ooh, snow! Off-panel voice: Oh my god, it's somehow even more annoying than if you had it.\n[Caption below the panel:] Saying \"OK, Glass\" before everything while wearing regular glasses.\nGoogle Glass was a recurring theme in xkcd in 2013.\n"}
{"id":1305,"title":"Undocumented Feature","image_title":"Undocumented Feature","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1305","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/undocumented_feature.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1305:_Undocumented_Feature","transcript":"[A support window is shown.] An old Windows utility has an undocumented feature. If you open \"help\" and click on the background, you get dropped into a \"support\" chat room. Support Window: Launching support forum...\n[An active conversation between two people is shown.] Only a few of us ever found it. But we became friends.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are at computers.] We kept launching the program to check in. Eventually some of us were running VMs just to keep accessing it.\n[Another conversation.] As the Internet aged, so did we.\n[Three question marks.] We don't know who runs the server. We don't know why it's still working so many years later. Maybe we're some sysadmin's soap opera.\n[A group of people are shown in a bubble.] It will probably vanish someday, but for now it's our meeting place. Our hideaway.\n[The bubble is now smaller, and some parts of a web are shown.] A life's worth of chat,\n[More of the web is shown.] Buried in the deep web.\n[A flat landscape is shown with the sun at the horizon.] But even if it lasts forever, we won't. When we're gone, who will remember us?\n[Cueball and Hairy are shown standing together in a bubble.] Who will remember this strange little world and the friendships we built here?\n[No panel shown:] Nobody.\n[An empty bubble is shown.] This place is irrelevant. Ephemeral. One day it will be forgotten.\n[The bubble starts to fade away.] And so will we\n[The bubble has almost completely faded away.]\n[The bubble is now completely gone.]\n[Caption inside a new panel:] But at least it doesn't have fucking video ads.\nThere are many examples of undocumented features in programs written for old versions of Windows, for example:\n","explanation":"An undocumented feature is a part of a software product that is not explained in the documentation for the product. Cueball has found such a feature, a chat room intended to ask for help, accessible through the help page of some unnamed old Windows utility. The people who found the chat room started out using it for its intended purpose (helping users of the utility by contacting other users), however as time has passed they have become friends and enter the chat only to talk to each other, with no relation to computer problems.\nA virtual machine (or VM) is a computer program designed to emulate the hardware of a full computer. In this case, users of the old chat room create VMs only to have the old operating system installed which included the utility program. They use this setup only to access the old chat room. This is shown in the third panel where Cueball is using a modern laptop to enter the chatroom (presumably by means of a VM), whereas Ponytail is most likely using an old computer (as evidenced by the CRT monitor).\nA chat room like this must be hosted on some outside server, so the narrator of the comic wonders who runs this server. An obvious thought about this is if and when the server will be shut down, effectively cutting all communication among chat users. Another obvious thought is why the utility author is still maintaining the chat server, since its original purpose of allowing communication between users with problems with the utility program is no longer an issue as everybody has migrated to more modern systems. The comic suggests that the reason for doing this can be a bored sysadmin , who is just reading the messages of the chat users and following their lives but never writing anything. This would turn the chat room into a soap opera for the sysadmin.\nThe Deep Web is a term used to refer to any information which is available online, but is hard to find (usually because there are no links to that information in web pages). The chat room described would be an example of this. From this point on, the comic takes an existentialist turn (a frequent xkcd trait), talking about how life is short, everything has to end, etc.\nThe last panel is a reference to Facebook's recent announcement that it would start autoplaying video ads, and the title text refers to YouTube requiring its users to use their real-life identities instead of just nicknames. These last parts of the comics somehow reveal that the point of the whole comic is just to complain about aggressive money-driven policies used by modern social networks in general and Facebook in particular. It is hinted that Randall would prefer older technologies, where limited resources would forbid autoplaying videos or huge databases with every detail of every user's life.\nIt's possible that the comic is about an actual chat room, but more likely it is a complete invention, since if it were real someone would have been able to trace its origin. However, if it is real, the participants would not want to confirm this in order to protect their privacy.\nThe title text mentions the simplicity of this chat; even user names do not exist and other users could only be identified by their behavior because the user names are random and can change on every login.\n[A support window is shown.] An old Windows utility has an undocumented feature. If you open \"help\" and click on the background, you get dropped into a \"support\" chat room. Support Window: Launching support forum...\n[An active conversation between two people is shown.] Only a few of us ever found it. But we became friends.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are at computers.] We kept launching the program to check in. Eventually some of us were running VMs just to keep accessing it.\n[Another conversation.] As the Internet aged, so did we.\n[Three question marks.] We don't know who runs the server. We don't know why it's still working so many years later. Maybe we're some sysadmin's soap opera.\n[A group of people are shown in a bubble.] It will probably vanish someday, but for now it's our meeting place. Our hideaway.\n[The bubble is now smaller, and some parts of a web are shown.] A life's worth of chat,\n[More of the web is shown.] Buried in the deep web.\n[A flat landscape is shown with the sun at the horizon.] But even if it lasts forever, we won't. When we're gone, who will remember us?\n[Cueball and Hairy are shown standing together in a bubble.] Who will remember this strange little world and the friendships we built here?\n[No panel shown:] Nobody.\n[An empty bubble is shown.] This place is irrelevant. Ephemeral. One day it will be forgotten.\n[The bubble starts to fade away.] And so will we\n[The bubble has almost completely faded away.]\n[The bubble is now completely gone.]\n[Caption inside a new panel:] But at least it doesn't have fucking video ads.\nThere are many examples of undocumented features in programs written for old versions of Windows, for example:\n"}
{"id":1306,"title":"Sigil Cycle","image_title":"Sigil Cycle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1306","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sigil_cycle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1306:_Sigil_Cycle","transcript":"A sinusoidal curve is shown. Y axis: Odds that the words I type will start with some weird symbol X axis: Time Data labels: [at first peak] $QBASIC, [at first trough] C++, [at second peak] $BASH, @$PERL, [at second trough] PYTHON, [at third peak] +GOOGLE, @TWITTER, #HASHTAGS\n","explanation":"In computer programming , a variable is a way of storing information temporarily, for use later in the program. There are different types of variables, called data types , such as integers, strings, characters, and booleans, all of them holding different types of information. Integers hold whole numbers, strings hold text, and so on. Variables traditionally have names that identify their purpose, and a programmer should usually be able to infer from this variable name what type of variable it is. For example, if you want to store the name of the customer in a catalogue service, you might store the text in a string variable called \"NameOfCustomer\". Because it is fairly clear that names are made up of text, it is logical that this variable would be a string variable - if you didn't have any other information about it.\nA sigil in computer programming is a symbol that appears before the variable name. It is an alternative method of telling someone who is reading the program code what data type the variable is. Rather than relying on logic, then, to know that NameOfCustomer is a string, you might use a sigil \"$\" before the variable name, as in $NameOfCustomer, which would specify that the variable can hold text. Sigils can also specify the scope of a variable, which refers to where the variable can be used in a program, and which parts of the program can access that variable. Sigils are useful in some ways because you don't have to refer to previous program code or find where the variable is declared (created) to know what data type it is. They also provide some level typing in languages that do not explicitly declare the type of the variable.\nMost programming languages have a different method for storing variables, although some languages may use the same variable types under different names. The following are the programming languages referenced in the comic and how they use variables.\nQBASIC Variables of type string end with the $ symbol. Other symbols are used (% for integers,\u00a0! for single-precision, # for double-precision and, in some versions of BASIC, & for long integers), however the usual QBASIC program will use only the $ symbol and not any of the others, as the default type if no symbol is used is single-precision and that's OK for most numeric uses.\nC++ Pronounced \"see plus plus.\" Variables are just words with regular letters. It is the name of the language itself that includes symbols.\nbash This is not typically thought of as a full-featured programming language, but a Unix shell. However, the shell command syntax is rich enough to be able to write simple (and sometimes really complex) programs called shell-scripts. In this language, all variable dereferences start with the symbol $.\nPerl In Perl, the initial character provides the context of the variable. Scalars (text, numeric and also to references to data) start with the $ character. An @ is for an array. With\u00a0%, it is a hash (a loose non-sequential array, or 'dictionary' lookup). Functions can be given a preceding &, but rarely need this in straightforward use. You can use the variables $temp, @temp,\u00a0%temp and &temp simultaneously and independently. There is also the * (not in a mathematical sense) which identifies a 'glob', a way to fuse or use all those types (and more!) in 'interesting' ways if you have a yen to. A block, with {} surrounding some other suitable statement(s), can potentially be typed to (re)interpret the context within. If you have a $reference which currently points to an @array, @{$reference} will let you use it as a direct array. But in simple cases, like that, this can often be shortened to @$reference, as alluded to by the \"@$PERL\" of the comic. (Just as $$reference would be a valid way to dereference the $reference when it points to $scalar... or even to $anotherReference that itself points to a\u00a0%hash, in which case you could even use\u00a0%$$reference for 'direct' access to that. Perl can be complicated, if you let it!)\nPython Variables are just words with regular letters.\nGoogle In the beginning, Google was only a search engine. However, it now includes many apps (such as YouTube, Gmail, Microsoft products but Google [e.g. Google docs], etc.), which included a social network called Google+ (now defunct, pronounced \"google plus\"). Google+ accounts were referenced with a + prefix.\nTwitter Twitter account IDs are identified by the leading symbol @. When an account is \"mentioned\" in a tweet using @, it triggers smart behavior. For example, account owners can configure Twitter to forward tweets that mention them. This feature was not present in the early days of Twitter.\nHashtags In 2007 Twitter users began a convention that a # sign (whose many names include the \"hash\") can be prepended to words to mark them as keywords. Twitter could then be searched for those words. In 2009 Twitter recognized the existence of hashtags and began hyperlinking them. Some other microblogging services followed suit.  Google+ eventually added hashtag support as did Facebook.\nAs is noted by the comic, the use of sigils to indicate types of variables varies between programming languages, from strict enforcement in languages like Perl, to their complete absence in languages like C++ (but see Hungarian Notation ). The comic notes that the use of sigils seems to be cyclic, especially if you count things like hashtags as extensions of the pattern.\nThe title text describes the two competing influences responsible for the cycle: The first impulse finds sigils useful to elucidate the type of the variable, especially when variable names are not very descriptive, while the latter impulse notes that descriptive variable names are much more useful for that purpose, especially in extensible languages where the built-in types form only a small part of the type system.\nA sinusoidal curve is shown. Y axis: Odds that the words I type will start with some weird symbol X axis: Time Data labels: [at first peak] $QBASIC, [at first trough] C++, [at second peak] $BASH, @$PERL, [at second trough] PYTHON, [at third peak] +GOOGLE, @TWITTER, #HASHTAGS\n"}
{"id":1307,"title":"Buzzfeed Christmas","image_title":"Buzzfeed Christmas","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1307","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/buzzfeed_christmas.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1307:_Buzzfeed_Christmas","transcript":"[Four carolers (Megan, Cueball, Ponytail and Hairy) are singing.] 12 Best drummers of all time 11 Pipers whose jaw-dropping good piping will make you cry You won't believe what these 10 lords leap over [Caption below the frame] Carolers outside the Buzzfeed offices perform \"12 Weird things I actually got for Christmas\"\n","explanation":"Christmas caroling is a tradition in which groups of singers travel from house to house, singing carols .\nThese carolers are in front of the BuzzFeed offices singing the The Twelve Days of Christmas , which usually contains:\nOn the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me. 12 Drummers drumming 11 Pipers piping 10 Lords a-leaping 9 Ladies dancing 8 Maids a-milking 7 Swans a-swimming 6 Geese a-laying 5 Golden rings 4 Calling birds 3 French hens 2 Turtle doves And a partridge in a pear tree.\nThe carolers changed the lyrics to match the style of headlines of the topics published by BuzzFeed, which usually contain a number and a superlative; for example, 13 Worst Plane Crashes of the Decade or 8 Otters Who Are So Cute We Can't Even Handle It . This method of writing headlines, referred to as clickbait , is used by several other news sites, because it is known to generate a lot of visits and therefore more ad revenue. Randall has touched on this subject before in 1283: Headlines .\nCarolers are usually rewarded with a gift, but the BuzzFeed writers probably didn't appreciate the song, because they threw weird stuff at them.\n[Four carolers (Megan, Cueball, Ponytail and Hairy) are singing.] 12 Best drummers of all time 11 Pipers whose jaw-dropping good piping will make you cry You won't believe what these 10 lords leap over [Caption below the frame] Carolers outside the Buzzfeed offices perform \"12 Weird things I actually got for Christmas\"\n"}
{"id":1308,"title":"Christmas Lights","image_title":"Christmas Lights","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1308","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/christmas_lights.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1308:_Christmas_Lights","transcript":"[Megan, Cueball, and Beret Guy sitting on the floor and a big spectrum with one peak is shown between them. On the right many smaller spectra are shown in a shape of a Christmas tree.]\n","explanation":"Each light in this Christmas scene is represented by its electromagnetic spectrum , which shows in a graphical form how much energy is radiated by each wavelength of light.\nThese graphs plot the intensity of all visible radiation. Infrared and ultraviolet are partially plotted also, represented by black. It starts with longer wavelengths on the left ( infrared ), continues with visible light in the middle from red to blue, and ends with ultraviolet at the right. There are 4 distinct spectra in this comic:\nIn the center of the image, between Beret Guy and the couple, Cueball and Megan , appears to be a light spectrum of a fire, notable because it emits a lot of energy in the infrared band (The left zone of the spectrum), emitted typically from hot sources, and in the red and orange zone. The spike toward the left hand side of the spectrum is likely the 4.3\u00a0\u00b5m resonance wavelength of hot CO 2 characteristic of burning hydrocarbons; see Emission of radiation . Given the size of the spectrum and its positioning, this represents a fireplace at which the characters are warming themselves against the winter chill.\nIn the right of the comic appear some spectra arranged in the form of a Christmas tree. There are 3 different spectra in this \"Christmas tree\":\nAt the top appears a complicated spectrum, possibly that of a white LED, representing the tradition in some cultures of putting a star (or an angel, but still usually lit) at the top of the Christmas tree.\nIn the branches there are two simpler spectra repeated at various places, one with a peak in the green zone, representing a green light source, and other with a peak in the red zone, representing a red light source. Both of these represent the tradition of putting colorful decoration in the tree, in this case apparently red and green colored Christmas lights.\nIn 835: Tree a similarly strange Christmas tree has been constructed using binary trees.\n[Megan, Cueball, and Beret Guy sitting on the floor and a big spectrum with one peak is shown between them. On the right many smaller spectra are shown in a shape of a Christmas tree.]\n"}
{"id":1309,"title":"Infinite Scrolling","image_title":"Infinite Scrolling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1309","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/infinite_scrolling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1309:_Infinite_Scrolling","transcript":"[Megan stands at a desk, reading a book, touching it very gingerly. Cueball is standing behind her. Cueball: Why are you turning the pages like that? Megan: If I touch the wrong thing, I'll lose my place and have to start over.\n[Caption below the panel:] If books worked like infinite-scrolling webpages","explanation":"Infinite scrolling is a technique in web design where a large data set is displayed as a seemingly infinite list, but in reality only the visible part of the list (and the surrounding data) is rendered. This is done to work around memory limitations of old browsers and mobile devices or to save on data transfer size.\nThe problem with this technique is that if you navigate from this page to a different page and go back, the location of the scrolled data set is often lost and the top of the data set is displayed again. Also it is usually not possible to point a URL directly to a certain section of the infinite list, a practice known as deep linking . For these reasons, many prefer pagination , the method traditionally used in books, over infinite scrolling.\nIn this comic Megan is handling the book gingerly as if it were a device with a touchscreen where the book is displayed as an infinite scrolling text. Touching a link would navigate away from the list and the current reading position would be lost.\nIn the title text it is an ironic suggestion that the \"back\" button is now useless. The back-button is supposed to give you this functionality but due to the failure to implement continuous scrolling sites and deep-linking correctly they are typically useless when the user is reading infinite-scrolling data (or worse, flat-out counterproductive, giving you the wrong page). Alternatively, this might be a joke on the stereotype that web users are unable to make the most helpful or intelligent decisions, similarly to 1454: Done , 1974: Conversational Dynamics , and 2051: Bad Opinions .\n[Megan stands at a desk, reading a book, touching it very gingerly. Cueball is standing behind her. Cueball: Why are you turning the pages like that? Megan: If I touch the wrong thing, I'll lose my place and have to start over.\n[Caption below the panel:] If books worked like infinite-scrolling webpages"}
{"id":1310,"title":"Goldbach Conjectures","image_title":"Goldbach Conjectures","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1310","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/goldbach_conjectures.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1310:_Goldbach_Conjectures","transcript":"[Six small panels with captions are arranged in an arch shape:]\n[Caption under the arch:] Goldbach Conjectures\n[Captions in the panels, from left to right:]\nExtremely weak: Numbers just keep going\nVery weak: Every number greater than 7 is the sum of two other numbers\nWeak: Every odd number greater than 5 is the sum of three primes\nStrong: Every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes\nVery strong: Every odd number is prime\nExtremely strong: There are no numbers above 7\n","explanation":"In mathematics, a pair of related conjectures may be described as \"strong\" and \"weak\" (or often, a normal statement and a \"weak\" one). A strong conjecture, if true, can be used to easily prove the weaker one, but not vice versa (i.e. if the weak statement is true, that alone isn't enough to prove that the strong one is also true). Conversely, if the weak conjecture is false, that is enough to prove the stronger one false as well, but not vice versa. Weak conjectures are often easier to prove than related strong ones.\nGoldbach's weak and strong conjectures are a pair of real, unsolved problems relating to prime numbers (a number with exactly two positive divisors, 1 and itself). The comic states these under the labels \"weak\" and \"strong\".\nRandall's further conjectures extend this to a whole series of progressively \"weaker\" and \"stronger\" statements. His weak conjectures are so weak that they are obviously true; his strong conjectures are so restrictive that they are obviously false. However, for the most part, they really do maintain a weak-strong relationship.\nThe title text gives the same treatment to the twin prime conjecture , which says that there are infinitely many pairs of primes where one is 2 more than the other (e.g. 3 and 5). The title text adds a \"weak\" conjecture, according to which there are simply infinitely many pairs of primes (with no mention of the distance between them). This is true; Euclid's theorem says that there are an infinite number of primes, and so you can simply pick any two (e.g. 5 and 13) and call them a pair.\nIt also adds a \"strong\" conjecture where every prime is now a twin prime. This is easily proven false; 23 is prime, for example, but cannot be one of a pair as neither 21 nor 25 are. However, Randall adds a humorous hedge that some prime numbers \"may not look prime at first\".\nLastly, the tautological prime conjecture states that it itself is true while making no statement about primes. It is not technically a tautology but more of a plain assertion. Randall has mentioned tautologies before in 703: Honor Societies .\nMathematician Christian Goldbach wrote a form of his conjecture (the \"strong\" one of the comic) in a letter to the famous Leonhard Euler in 1742. Euler replied that he considered it certainly true, but that he could not prove it.\nMathematicians have been solving related problems that are \"weaker\" than Goldbach's weak conjecture and working towards \"stronger\" ones. For example, in 1937 the weak conjecture was proven for odd numbers greater than 3 14348907 . In 1995 a version was proven based on the sum of no more than seven prime numbers, and in 2012 the ceiling was lowered to five primes. In 2013 the weak conjecture was claimed proven for numbers greater than 10 30 , while all numbers below 10 30 have been verified by supercomputers to satisfy the conjecture; these together imply that the weak conjecture is true, although there is no general proof of it for all numbers. Goldbach's strong conjecture remains unsolved.\n[Six small panels with captions are arranged in an arch shape:]\n[Caption under the arch:] Goldbach Conjectures\n[Captions in the panels, from left to right:]\nExtremely weak: Numbers just keep going\nVery weak: Every number greater than 7 is the sum of two other numbers\nWeak: Every odd number greater than 5 is the sum of three primes\nStrong: Every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes\nVery strong: Every odd number is prime\nExtremely strong: There are no numbers above 7\n"}
{"id":1311,"title":"2014","image_title":"2014","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1311","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2014.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1311:_2014","transcript":"(This is a series of quotes from various people of various timeframes. Each quote is followed by the author, the document of publication if applicable, and the year.)\nNotes from the past\nIt's desirable every thing printed should be preserved, for we cannot now tell how useful it may become two centuries hence. Christopher Baldwin 1834\nI predict that a century hence the Canadian people will be the noblest specimens of humanity on the face of the earth Rev. John Bredin 1863\nIn the twenty-first century mankind will subsist entirely upon jellies. The Booklover 1903\nThe twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by electricity, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and mothered by electricity. Probably the only thing he will be left to do unaided will be to make love. Mrs. John Lane, The fortnightly 1905\nTo-day, in the city of New York, sixty-six different tongues are spoken. A century hence, there will probably be only one. The American Historical Magazine 1907\nI often think what interesting history we are making for the student of the twenty-first century. Willian Carey Jones 1908\nChina may be a great shoe market a decade or a century from now. Boot and Shoe Recorder 1914\nWe cannot settle the problem, and I venture the prophecy that perhaps a century from now this same question may be brought before some future society and discussed very much as it is tonight. Dr. Barton C. Hirst on the subject of abortion 1914\nBy the twenty-first century I believe we shall all be telepaths. Gumbriel, character in Antic Hay 1923\nThe physician of the twenty-first century\u2026 may even criticize the language of the times, and may find that some of our words have become as offensive to him as the term \"lunatic\" has become offensive to us. Dr. C. Macfie Campbell 1924\nHistorians of the twenty-first century will look back with well-placed scorn on the shallow-minded days of the early twentieth century when football games and petting parties were considered the most important elements of a college education. Mary Eileen Ahern, Library Bureau 1926\nIn the year A.D. 2014 journalists will be writing on the centenary of the great war\u200a\u2014 that is, if there has not been a greater war. F.J.M, The Journalist 1934\n","explanation":"This New Year comic is to commemorate the New Year by giving us a view of the coming year (2014) from the past. The comic includes many quotes from the 1800s and early 1900s that speak to a time close to 2014. Many of them are for the twenty-first century in general, and only three mention a year that would be 2014 exactly. All but one of them is a prediction, yet some of these are quotes from fictional literature, and therefore are not true predictions. Words are in boldface to highlight the relevant content in the quote. The grey or non-bold text is non-essential to the point Randall is interested in, and only to be used to understand the context of the quote.\nThe title text refers to a certain British officer, Mr. Colin Shakespeare, who experimented with and promoted the use of rope suspension bridges in India. The reference to \"The Bard of Avon\" is a reference to Shakespeare (the playwright) , as Avon is the river on which Stratford upon Avon is set, and is where the playwright was born and spent his youth. The author of this quote under the guise of eliminating the potential confusion that might result after decades or centuries have washed away the context, ironically and possibly vindictively, makes a point to note that the bridge is not named after the playwright, but Mr. Colin Shakespeare, whom he considers considerably less intelligent. This topic was previously covered in 771: Period Speech .\nTwo years before, another New Years comic with just the new years number as the title was released: 998: 2012 . But actually the content of this comic is more related to the comic coming out just before the 2012 comic: 997: Wait Wait , which is also a New Year comic, that took a look at what could happen in 2012, just as this one does for 2014... In 2016 another comic, with only the new year as the name theme, occurred again 1624: 2016 . For some reason this only seemed to happen in the even years, until 1779: 2017 was released, with 1935: 2018 being the next one.\nThe style of the comic is very similar to that of 1227: The Pace of Modern Life , which was released half a year earlier.\n(This is a series of quotes from various people of various timeframes. Each quote is followed by the author, the document of publication if applicable, and the year.)\nNotes from the past\nIt's desirable every thing printed should be preserved, for we cannot now tell how useful it may become two centuries hence. Christopher Baldwin 1834\nI predict that a century hence the Canadian people will be the noblest specimens of humanity on the face of the earth Rev. John Bredin 1863\nIn the twenty-first century mankind will subsist entirely upon jellies. The Booklover 1903\nThe twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by electricity, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and mothered by electricity. Probably the only thing he will be left to do unaided will be to make love. Mrs. John Lane, The fortnightly 1905\nTo-day, in the city of New York, sixty-six different tongues are spoken. A century hence, there will probably be only one. The American Historical Magazine 1907\nI often think what interesting history we are making for the student of the twenty-first century. Willian Carey Jones 1908\nChina may be a great shoe market a decade or a century from now. Boot and Shoe Recorder 1914\nWe cannot settle the problem, and I venture the prophecy that perhaps a century from now this same question may be brought before some future society and discussed very much as it is tonight. Dr. Barton C. Hirst on the subject of abortion 1914\nBy the twenty-first century I believe we shall all be telepaths. Gumbriel, character in Antic Hay 1923\nThe physician of the twenty-first century\u2026 may even criticize the language of the times, and may find that some of our words have become as offensive to him as the term \"lunatic\" has become offensive to us. Dr. C. Macfie Campbell 1924\nHistorians of the twenty-first century will look back with well-placed scorn on the shallow-minded days of the early twentieth century when football games and petting parties were considered the most important elements of a college education. Mary Eileen Ahern, Library Bureau 1926\nIn the year A.D. 2014 journalists will be writing on the centenary of the great war\u200a\u2014 that is, if there has not been a greater war. F.J.M, The Journalist 1934\n"}
{"id":1312,"title":"Haskell","image_title":"Haskell","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1312","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/haskell.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1312:_Haskell","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are discussing.] Megan: Code written in Haskell is guaranteed to have no side effects. Cueball: ...because no one will ever run it?","explanation":"The comic pokes fun at Haskell , a functional programming language . Functional programming languages are based on the mathematical concept of a function, that is two calls to a function always produce the same results given the same inputs. Side effects of a function call are changes to the program state or observable interactions with the outside world, other than returning a value. As a simple example, if a sum function changes a global variable, or prints the sum before returning it, those are side effects. Functions in most other languages frequently have side effects, typically making them hard to analyze. Functional programming languages seek to avoid side effects when possible. Pure functional programming languages like Haskell push this agenda by isolating the inevitable side-effects (input\/output at least) through the type system (more specifically in monads for Haskell).\nThe first joke says that Haskell only has no side effects because no one ever uses Haskell programs. Even in a traditional procedural programming language like C , if the program does not run, it can't have side effects.\nIn Haskell, effects are first class values. This means that you can use effects just like any value, assign them to a variable, pass them around, or manipulate them to make new and different effects. Thus, there are technically no side effects, only primary effects.\nThe title text is a joke about Haskell's lazy evaluation . The basic concept is that a value is not computed until it is actually used. Thus, it is possible to have a name representing the entire infinite list of Fibonacci numbers . However, until a particular element of the list is accessed, no work is actually done. The joke plays on \"called\" (referring to calling a function) vs. \"called for\" (requesting). Thus, Haskell may have value, but no one has either invoked it to get that value or requested such a language. A simpler example may be:\nThe \"or\" function is defined as a normal function but can conclude instantly without computing the 10000th Fibonacci number (a daunting task) since this second parameter isn't necessary\u00a0: \"true or whatever\" is always true.\nIn reality, Haskell is indeed actively used, though it is not one of the most popular languages. It is in particular used by some financial institutions, safety conscious start-ups and websites (there are several active web frameworks in Haskell) like Randall 's own .\n[Megan and Cueball are discussing.] Megan: Code written in Haskell is guaranteed to have no side effects. Cueball: ...because no one will ever run it?"}
{"id":1313,"title":"Regex Golf","image_title":"Regex Golf","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1313","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/regex_golf.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1313:_Regex_Golf","transcript":"[Caption at top of panel:] Regex golf: [Megan is sitting at a laptop. Cueball is standing behind her.] Megan: You try to match one group but not the other. Megan: \/m | [tn]|b\/ matches Star Wars subtitles but not Star Trek . Cueball: Cool.\n[Caption at top of panel:] Meta-regex golf: [A close-up of Megan at her laptop.] Megan: So I wrote a program that plays regex golf with arbitrary lists... Cueball (offscreen): Uh oh...\n[Caption at top of panel:] Meta-meta-regex golf: [Megan typing at her laptop.] Megan: ...But I lost my code, so I'm grepping for files that look like regex golf solvers. [Cueball facepalming.]\n[Caption at top of panel:] ...And beyond: [Another closeup of Megan at her laptop.] Megan: Really, this is all \/(meta-)*regex golf\/. Cueball: Now you have infinite problems. Megan: No, I had those already.\n","explanation":"The comic talks about regular expressions , which are a way to specify textual patterns. Given a regular expression, one can search for the pattern it specifies inside a text string. If the pattern is found, it's said that the pattern \"matches\" the string; if it's not found, it's said it doesn't match.\nThe title of the comic and the first panel is based on \" regex golf \", which is a discipline of \" code golf \", a game in which programmers attempt to solve a given programming problem using as few characters as possible, analogous to the number of golf shots it takes to reach the goal. In regex golfing, the programmer is given two sets of text fragments, and tries to write the shortest possible regular expression which would match all elements of one set, while at the same time not matching any element from the other set.\nThe regex golf challenge Megan faces consists of matching all subtitles of (then extant) Star Wars films, while not matching any subtitle of Star Trek movies. Subtitles are the secondary titles of the movies, after the \"Star Trek: \" or \"Star Wars Episode N: \" . For example, in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace , the subtitle is The Phantom Menace . In the first panel, she created a 12-character regex solving the challenge.\nThen she moved on to building a tool which would automatically build such a regex for arbitrary lists of text, which could be described as meta - regex golfing. But as she has lost this tool, she needs to search through her files and chooses a tool called \" grep \" to find it. This implies that she needs a regular expression that would find any code that appears to be a regex golf generator, which leads to another \"meta-\" layer of abstraction. At the end, Megan notes this sequence of meta-meta-... might go to infinity and Cueball quips that she now has \"infinite problems\" as a result of her efforts; Megan retorts that she already had \"infinite problems\" because she's geeky enough to run meta-versions of programs on themselves, and stubborn enough to continue on until she fails, to the exclusion of all else. This also seems to be a reference to a famous quote by Jamie Zawinski (see also 1171: Perl Problems ):\nThe first regex Megan uses is \/m | [tn]|b\/ , said to match Star Wars subtitles but not Star Trek .\nThe forward slashes \/ just mark the start and end of the regex. The | character means \"or\", so the regex matches any string that contains the patterns \" m \", \" [tn] \" or \" b \" (including the spaces). The square brackets match one of the enclosed characters, meaning that \" [tn] \" matches either \" t \" or \" n \". The regex is apparently case-insensitive, because it wouldn't work otherwise.\nThe Star Wars subtitles match the parts of the regex in the following way:\nNote that if the animated film \"Star Wars: The Clone Wars\" were included, it would not be matched by \" [tn] \" because the T is the start of the subtitle and is not preceded by a space. None of the \"Star Wars:\" films titles announced since this comic (\"The Force Awakens\", \"The Last Jedi\", and \"The Rise of Skywalker\") match this regex.\nOn the other hand, none of the Star Trek subtitles contains an M followed by a space, a T or an N preceded by a space, or any B, so the regex does not match any of them. Note that in the original series all subtitles start with a \"T\" but it's the first character so it's not preceded by a space.\nHere is the list that Megan probably used:\n\"Star Trek Beyond\", which was released after this comic, would incorrectly match the regex since it is the first \"Star Trek\" title to contain a \"b\". However, since \"Star Trek Into Darkness\" and \"Star Trek Beyond\" both lack a colon in their titles, it is debatable whether they can truly be considered to have subtitles.\nIn the last panel \"and beyond\" Megan uses the regular expression \/(meta-)*regex golf\/ to describe her problem. * means \"zero or more\" of the preceding character\/group (parentheses () group characters). So this regex matches \"regex golf\", \"meta-regex golf\", \"meta-meta-regex golf\", etc. In a way this is regex golf in itself, matching all levels of meta-regex golf while not matching anything else.\nIn the title text, there is a long regex that is the solution of another regex golf challenge: matching the last names of all elected US presidents but not their opponents. Note that the list of opponents include some people who were previously or later became presidents, or whose last name matches that of another person who was president, so taken literally this is impossible. To make this work the list of opponents must exclude any names of presidents. The regular expression itself works in a very similar way to the Star Wars\/Trek one, including several different patterns separated by | . Each elected president matches one pattern while each opponent matches none.\nThe regex does not match either of the presidents elected since the comic\u2019s release (\"Trump\" and \"Biden\"), and thus would need to be updated. The regex does match Hillary Clinton's last name, but because a person with the same last name (Bill Clinton) was president, this does not count as a mistake. There was already a losing opponent called George Clinton who ran in 1792 and 1812.\nHere is a list of elected president and the patterns they match:\nSome presidents are missing because they weren't elected but became presidents after the resignation\/death of their formers.\nAnd here is a list of how many unique last names are matched by each expression:\nRandall's regular expression does not match presidential opponents Pinckney, King, Clay, Cass, Scott, Douglas, McClellan, Seymour, Greeley, Tilden, Hancock, Blaine, Bryan, Parker, Hughes, Cox, Davis, Smith, Landon, Willkie, Dewey, Stevenson, Goldwater, Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Dole, Gore, Kerry, McCain, or Romney.  However, it must be modified slightly, because it does match John C. Fremo nt , the runner-up to James Buchanan in 1856, as discussed by Peter Norvig at xkcd 1313: Regex Golf .  It also matches Aaron Bu rr , the runner-up to Thomas Jefferson in 1800.  Note that Norvig provides a small amount of Python code which actually plays regex golf with arbitrary lists, and found a shorter solution than Randall's for the Star Wars vs Star Trek game ( \/ t|p.*e\/ ).\n[Caption at top of panel:] Regex golf: [Megan is sitting at a laptop. Cueball is standing behind her.] Megan: You try to match one group but not the other. Megan: \/m | [tn]|b\/ matches Star Wars subtitles but not Star Trek . Cueball: Cool.\n[Caption at top of panel:] Meta-regex golf: [A close-up of Megan at her laptop.] Megan: So I wrote a program that plays regex golf with arbitrary lists... Cueball (offscreen): Uh oh...\n[Caption at top of panel:] Meta-meta-regex golf: [Megan typing at her laptop.] Megan: ...But I lost my code, so I'm grepping for files that look like regex golf solvers. [Cueball facepalming.]\n[Caption at top of panel:] ...And beyond: [Another closeup of Megan at her laptop.] Megan: Really, this is all \/(meta-)*regex golf\/. Cueball: Now you have infinite problems. Megan: No, I had those already.\n"}
{"id":1314,"title":"Photos","image_title":"Photos","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1314","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/photos.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1314:_Photos","transcript":"[White Hat stands next to Cueball on a roof. There's a colourful sunset; in the distance, there are three people (a blonde girl, a Cueball-like guy and Megan) taking photos of the skyline as the sun sets.] White Hat: Ugh, I hate how people take pictures instead of just enjoying the view. Cueball: Why?\n[White Hat turns to Cueball.] White Hat: Documenting your life distracts you from living it. You're not really\u2014 Cueball: Oh, come on.\n[Only both  their faces.] Cueball: Trying to take a picture of a thing makes me pay more attention to it. Some of my best adventures are built around trying to photograph something.\n[The panel zooms in on Cueball's face.] Cueball: If \"other people having experiences incorrectly\" is annoying to you, think how unbearable it must be to have a condescending stranger tell you they hate the way you're experiencing your life at just the moment you've found something you want to remember. Why the fuck do you care how someone else enjoys a sunset?\n[Zoom back out.] White Hat: Well, they... White Hat: Because I just, uh... White Hat: ...\n[Cueball takes out a camera.] Click\n","explanation":"White Hat is upset at the sight of people photographing a richly colored sunset. His argument is that by documenting it instead of simply enjoying it, they have become an observer rather than a participant in life. Cueball expresses a contrary view, saying that not only does taking a photo of something help him focus attention on it, it is also none of White Hat's business how someone else chooses to enjoy a sunset.\nCueball's logic reduces White Hat to inarticulacy, then speechlessness. Cueball then takes a photograph, implying that he would most enjoy White Hat's discomfiture by recording an image of it for posterity.\nRandall discusses a similar situation in the title text, the common modern phenomenon of restaurant diners photographing their meal. However, in this case he says he does not like them to document as he likes to listen to them eat. This may be sarcasm since not many people love the sound of someone else chewing. [ citation needed ] However, some people are annoyed by the food images posted to sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Note that the photograph is taken quickly; the chewing is only delayed for a few seconds. This brevity in delay can also apply to the main comic, since spending a few seconds photographing a sunset is just a brief interruption in enjoying the view sans camera.\nThis comic is referenced in Thing Explainer in the explanation Picture taker by a small drawing of people taking photos of the view from the edge of a cliff. Another Cueball standing behind those taking pictures (another than in this comic for sure) is talking to Megan :\nCueball: I hate how everyone takes pictures instead of just enjoying the view. Megan: ...You say, instead of enjoying the view.\nSee also 648: Fall Foliage about Megan taking pictures and Cueball complaining. Later in 1719: Superzoom White Hat and Cueball again discusses photography, while in 2111: Opportunity Rover White Hat shares this same opinion again.\n[White Hat stands next to Cueball on a roof. There's a colourful sunset; in the distance, there are three people (a blonde girl, a Cueball-like guy and Megan) taking photos of the skyline as the sun sets.] White Hat: Ugh, I hate how people take pictures instead of just enjoying the view. Cueball: Why?\n[White Hat turns to Cueball.] White Hat: Documenting your life distracts you from living it. You're not really\u2014 Cueball: Oh, come on.\n[Only both  their faces.] Cueball: Trying to take a picture of a thing makes me pay more attention to it. Some of my best adventures are built around trying to photograph something.\n[The panel zooms in on Cueball's face.] Cueball: If \"other people having experiences incorrectly\" is annoying to you, think how unbearable it must be to have a condescending stranger tell you they hate the way you're experiencing your life at just the moment you've found something you want to remember. Why the fuck do you care how someone else enjoys a sunset?\n[Zoom back out.] White Hat: Well, they... White Hat: Because I just, uh... White Hat: ...\n[Cueball takes out a camera.] Click\n"}
{"id":1315,"title":"Questions for God","image_title":"Questions for God","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1315","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/questions_for_god.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1315:_Questions_for_God","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball walk together.] Megan: Horace Lamb said he would have two questions for God: why quantum mechanics, and why turbulence? Cueball: I'd have just one: What did Miss Susie's steamboat do?!\n","explanation":"Megan is paraphrasing a famous quote from the British applied mathematician , and fellow of the Royal Society , Horace Lamb , who famously stated in 1932 :\nThis was referring to two phenomena in physics that, at the time, were poorly understood and difficult to explain. Lamb proved to be correct in his prediction that quantum electrodynamics (QED) was easier to explain; nowadays we have a much clearer understanding of QED, while our understanding of turbulence has improved little. Richard Feynman , who was himself largely responsible for explaining QED, famously described turbulence as \"the most important unsolved problem of classical physics\".\nCueball , in response, indicates that if he were to gain divine elucidation his question would relate to the widespread schoolyard rhyme \" Miss Susie \", which typically begins with the stanza:\n\"Miss Susie had a steamboat The steamboat had a bell Miss Susie went to heaven The steamboat went to...\nHell -o operator Please give me number nine ...\"\nThe rhyming scheme between the second and fourth lines, and implied contrast with \"heaven,\" causes the listener to fill in the word \"Hell\" instead of the innocuous \"Hello\". Therefore, Cueball is wondering what a steamboat, an object lacking will, [ citation needed ] could have done to deserve divine punishment.\nThe title text is a reference to the 1930s pulp series \" The Shadow \", whose eponymous character is a psychic vigilante. The 1937 radio plays introduction began with the line \"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!\" Unfortunately, since a steamboat is not a person, [ citation needed ] The Shadow would be unable to determine what heinous crimes the steamboat had committed to deserve damnation.\nThis comic, in particular the way Megan and Cueball are walking and its reference to theology, greatly resembles the later comic 1505: Ontological Argument .\n[Megan and Cueball walk together.] Megan: Horace Lamb said he would have two questions for God: why quantum mechanics, and why turbulence? Cueball: I'd have just one: What did Miss Susie's steamboat do?!\n"}
{"id":1316,"title":"Inexplicable","image_title":"Inexplicable","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1316","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/inexplicable.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1316:_Inexplicable","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk with a laptop, making a fist at it.] Cueball: Argh! Megan (off-screen): What? Cueball: Why do I always have these inexplicable, impossible-to-diagnose computer problems?\n[Megan walks up to the desk.] Cueball: After six hours of this, I've concluded nothing works or makes sense. I give up on logic. Megan: *sigh* Gimme. I'll figure it out. Cueball: You won't.\n[Cueball sits at his laptopless desk while Megan works on the laptop off-screen.] type type Click Megan:\u00a0? type type type Megan:\u00a0???\n[Megan is back in front of the desk, clutching the laptop.] Cueball: How'd it go? Megan: Your computer is literally haunted. Cueball: Told you.\n","explanation":"Cueball 's laptop has a problem that has resisted many hours of concentrated effort at resolution. Megan offers to help, but after trying to fix it she concludes that the laptop is \u201cliterally\u201d possessed by an evil spirit.\nA similarly unresolvable problem can be seen in 1084: Server Problem . In that case, no haunting is suggested, and Megan suggests that Cueball give up and wait for the singularity .\nThe title text continues the conversation: when Megan tries to return the laptop to Cueball, he refuses, as Megan willingly took possession of it in the first place. Both have clearly decided that they no longer want anything to do with an object housing a supernatural entity, and are trying to pass it back to one another.\n[Cueball sits at a desk with a laptop, making a fist at it.] Cueball: Argh! Megan (off-screen): What? Cueball: Why do I always have these inexplicable, impossible-to-diagnose computer problems?\n[Megan walks up to the desk.] Cueball: After six hours of this, I've concluded nothing works or makes sense. I give up on logic. Megan: *sigh* Gimme. I'll figure it out. Cueball: You won't.\n[Cueball sits at his laptopless desk while Megan works on the laptop off-screen.] type type Click Megan:\u00a0? type type type Megan:\u00a0???\n[Megan is back in front of the desk, clutching the laptop.] Cueball: How'd it go? Megan: Your computer is literally haunted. Cueball: Told you.\n"}
{"id":1317,"title":"Theft","image_title":"Theft","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1317","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/theft.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1317:_Theft","transcript":"[An identity thief sits in front of a laptop, looking at his hands] Thief: I feel paralyzed by overwhelming existential dread. Thief: ...and yet for some reason I'm really excited about space? [Caption below the panel:] The thief who stole my identity has a lot to deal with.\n","explanation":"The term \"identity theft\" refers to a thief acquiring various types of a victim's identification (for example, bank account number and\/or Social Security number), thus allowing the thief to pretend to be the victim and commonly steal money from the victim's bank account, etc.\nThis comic exaggerates the term, interpreting it as the thief literally acquiring the victim's whole personality. Like Cueball & Megan in general, the victim is implied to have some Randallian personality traits, like the love of space and existential angst. Thus, the thief is now completely overwhelmed by having an entirely new personality, not to mention one whose parts clash with each other.\nThe title text ponders the specifics of the identity acquisition process. Presumably, even two people whose personalities are identical would still start to think different thoughts. (This is a prerequisite for the depiction in the comic; the thief is baffled by his newly acquired interests, while the victim would not be baffled by the thoughts and interests they've developed over their entire life.) It is also wondered whether the victims new doppelganger is wondering the same thing, which could imply that their thoughts have not fully diverged. A friend comments that the victim may be overthinking the situation, and that the thief only took his credit card information. (A common method of identity theft. Does not transfer personality traits [ citation needed ] .) However, the victim is overwhelmed by existential anxiety.\n[An identity thief sits in front of a laptop, looking at his hands] Thief: I feel paralyzed by overwhelming existential dread. Thief: ...and yet for some reason I'm really excited about space? [Caption below the panel:] The thief who stole my identity has a lot to deal with.\n"}
{"id":1318,"title":"Actually","image_title":"Actually","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1318","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/actually.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1318:_Actually","transcript":"[Six people are standing upon a white circle as if it were a miniature planet. Each person is facing the reader and says something to the person on their right. All texts are displayed as a near-continuous stream over their heads to form one circle that encloses the whole picture.] [From topmost, going clockwise.] Cueball: Actually, measurements suggest it's flat. Ponytail: Actually, it's a sphere. White Hat: Actually, it's an oblate spheroid. Megan: Actually, it's a shape defined by the EGM96 coefficients. Hairy 1: Actually, it's that plus local topography. Hairy 2: Actually, it's embedded in a universe that's curved.\n","explanation":"The image shows a sphere, a simple model for the shape of the Earth. Six people stand on its surface, talking about ways to best describe it, starting with a flat surface, the first belief held, and ending with general relativity. As the statements form a circle, the very first statement can lead recursively off the last, as described below.\nThe statements in detail:\nActually, measurements suggest it's flat.\nActually, it's a sphere.\nActually, it's an oblate spheroid.\nActually, it's a shape defined by the EGM96 coefficients.\nActually, it's that plus local topography.\nActually, it's embedded in a universe that's curved.\nActually, measurements suggest it's flat.\nActually...\nTitle text\nThe title text pulls the whole comic together, pointing out that each statement in the comic is more precise than the previous. Unlike the loop in the comic, someone who does this will likely eventually win any real-life debate. The victory will not necessarily be a result of actually proving your logical argument, however: the phrase \"stand alone\" refers to driving away all conversation, resulting in no one wanting to speak to the person.\n[Six people are standing upon a white circle as if it were a miniature planet. Each person is facing the reader and says something to the person on their right. All texts are displayed as a near-continuous stream over their heads to form one circle that encloses the whole picture.] [From topmost, going clockwise.] Cueball: Actually, measurements suggest it's flat. Ponytail: Actually, it's a sphere. White Hat: Actually, it's an oblate spheroid. Megan: Actually, it's a shape defined by the EGM96 coefficients. Hairy 1: Actually, it's that plus local topography. Hairy 2: Actually, it's embedded in a universe that's curved.\n"}
{"id":1319,"title":"Automation","image_title":"Automation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1319","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/automation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1319:_Automation","transcript":"\"I spend a lot of time on this task. I should write a program automating it!\"\n[Two graphs are shown, plotting workload against time.]\nTheory: [The line for \"work on original task\" is steady but then drops down to a much lower level.] [The line for the automating job increases heavily while \"writing code\" and then drops down when \"automation takes over\".] [Both lines end up with a big amount of \"free time\".]\nReality: [The line for \"work on original task\" is steady with no drop to a lower level.] [The line for the automating job increases heavily while \"writing code\", then it increases again while \"debugging\", it drops down slightly while \"rethinking\", and grows up again with an infinite end while the task is still an \"ongoing development\".] [The line for \"work on original task\" ends up with \"no time for original task anymore\".]\n","explanation":"The comic refers to the phenomenon in which computer programmers attempt to create programs to automate menial but frequent tasks, to save time and effort. These attempts often end up taking much more time than the menial tasks would have taken. The first graph reflects the assumed ideal that leads programmers into such an attempt: writing the program will take more effort initially, but once the program is complete, it will take over the routine tasks, leaving the programmer free to do something else.\nHowever, writing a program often turns out to be not that simple: programs can have defects, and certain functionalities can be hard to implement. Because of this, programmers usually spend more time than projected to finish a program. As time goes on, the desire to see it finished can consume the programmer's effort and attention, with the menial tasks left undone.\nThe title text is a play on the word \"automating.\" While \"auto-\" is indeed a prefix that means \"self,\" the root word \"mat,\" from the Greek \"matos,\" in fact refers to \"moving\" or \"acting,\" so \"automate\" effectively means \"self-moving.\" However, the title text uses a double entendre of the word \"mating\", the definitions of which include \"to copulate,\" or, in slang, \"to screw\" (the latter having the double meaning of giving someone a hard time). This rendition of \"automating\" translates to self-screwing (\"screwing yourself over\", giving yourself a hard time), which, according to this comic, happens when one attempts to automate a process.\nSee also 974: The General Problem and 1205: Is It Worth the Time? or the Time management category .\n\"I spend a lot of time on this task. I should write a program automating it!\"\n[Two graphs are shown, plotting workload against time.]\nTheory: [The line for \"work on original task\" is steady but then drops down to a much lower level.] [The line for the automating job increases heavily while \"writing code\" and then drops down when \"automation takes over\".] [Both lines end up with a big amount of \"free time\".]\nReality: [The line for \"work on original task\" is steady with no drop to a lower level.] [The line for the automating job increases heavily while \"writing code\", then it increases again while \"debugging\", it drops down slightly while \"rethinking\", and grows up again with an infinite end while the task is still an \"ongoing development\".] [The line for \"work on original task\" ends up with \"no time for original task anymore\".]\n"}
{"id":1320,"title":"Walmart","image_title":"Walmart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1320","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/walmart.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1320:_Walmart","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] When a network tries to become everyone's one-stop hub, the Walmart of social interaction... [Cueball and Hairy standing in a supermarket, Cueball holding groceries under his arm, Hairy with a cart.] Cueball: Oh, uh, hi! Funny running into you here. Hairy: Oh, hey! Yeah! How've you been? [Caption below the panel:] ...it inevitably becomes the Walmart of social interaction.\n","explanation":"This comic satirizes the way in which large social networks, such as Facebook (and at the time of this comics posting Google+ ), attempt to aggregate all aspects of the user's online social presence. Earlier social networks had more granular focuses; e.g. MySpace originated with a music focus, and even earlier various bulletin board systems were centered around specific topics. By contrast, many social media companies attempt to encapsulate the variety of aspects of their users' online lives, thereby aggregating their personal, professional, and private lives in a way that was previously unlikely to occur.\nThe first comparison to Walmart , a large multi-national \"big box\" retailer that sells everything from gardening supplies to televisions to groceries, is apt because Walmart, too, is attempting to aggregate various aspects of your life into a single location - but rather than aggregating your social media presence, it's attempting to aggregate your shopping habits.\nThe punch line of the joke is that social interactions at Walmart are awkward, contrived, and frequently undesired \u2014 just as they can grow to become in a social network that is insufficiently focused or too bloated. People communicate differently with different groups of people, and if they are attempting to connect with friends, they are unlikely to want their grandparents present. Similarly, if a person is attempting to buy groceries, they may not be interested in extended small talk with acquaintances with whom they may not share much in common (perhaps the fact that they both shop at Walmart is the biggest similarity they share).\nThe title text elaborates on this idea by sarcastically implying that he wants all his older relatives to hang out where he hung out in college, likely causing extreme awkwardness.\n[Caption above the panel:] When a network tries to become everyone's one-stop hub, the Walmart of social interaction... [Cueball and Hairy standing in a supermarket, Cueball holding groceries under his arm, Hairy with a cart.] Cueball: Oh, uh, hi! Funny running into you here. Hairy: Oh, hey! Yeah! How've you been? [Caption below the panel:] ...it inevitably becomes the Walmart of social interaction.\n"}
{"id":1321,"title":"Cold","image_title":"Cold","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1321","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cold.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1321:_Cold","transcript":"[It's cold, two Guys wearing knit caps (one knit cap is white the other black) are walking outside and the White Knit Cap Guy is shivering.] White Knit Cap Guy: It is brutal out. So much for global warming, huh? Black Knit Cap Guy: *sigh* This used to happen all the time. White Knit Cap Guy: What?\n[A dot plot showing number of days with lows below zero Fahrenheit by year since 1970.] Black Knit Cap Guy (off-screen): You're from St. Louis, right? Black Knit Cap Guy (off-screen): On average, it used to get below 0 \u00b0F there a handful of days per year. Black Knit Cap Guy (off-screen): But you haven't had a day like that since the nineties. [Above the dot plot to the left is a label in a black frame:] Days with lows < 0\u00b0F [Below the dot plot are written the years:] 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 [Below again is written in small letters:] Source: rcc-acis.org\/climatecentral\n[Black Knit Cap Guy has stopped walking.] Black Knit Cap Guy: Then, in 2014, when the first polar vortex hit, it dipped below zero for two days. Black Knit Cap Guy: And everyone freaked out\n[They continue walking.] Black Knit Cap Guy: because what used to be normal Black Knit Cap Guy: now feels too cold. White Knit Cap Guy: It is too cold!\n[Above the last panel is written in a black frame:] The Future: [Cueball is pointing at a patch of ice.] Cueball: Look at this\u2014 ice! In St. Louis! So much for global warming. Person off-screen: *sigh*\nNote that this is not the same data set as mentioned in xkcd as this is regarding freezing days and not subzero days!\nWith the full excel dataset of the number of freezing days (i.e. below 32\u00a0\u00b0F) as obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 's homepage NOAA you get the following plot:\n\nFrom the same dataset excel dataset we can also get the number of sub-zero days i.e. below 0\u00a0\u00b0F (which are those mentioned in the XKCD strip) - plotting those and you get the following plot:\nNote that this IS the same data set as mentioned in XKCD. This is subzero days!\n\nWhile there were a number of very cold years with outliers in the 1970s - then the clear overall trend is still that there are fewer days with cold weather over the years.\nSo while weather is different every year (which is also illustrated by the outliers) the climate is defined by the long term trend - which is the point of this cartoon.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball (wearing a white knit cap with a pom-pom) and Cueball's friend (wearing a black knit cap) are walking outside in sub 0\u00a0\u00b0F (-17.8\u00a0\u00b0C). White Knit Cap Guy complains about the brutal cold and as a result questions whether global warming is real. Black Knit Cap Guy explains that this kind of weather used to happen all the time back before the year 2000, showing that global warming is, in fact, very real.\nThis is illustrated in panel two by a graph showing the number of days with sub 0\u00a0\u00b0F as a function of year from 1970 to 2013 in the city of St. Louis , (where we learn that Cueball is from). It shows that these days used to be rather common between 1970 and 1999, only to be completely absent for the next 14 years until and including 2013. A source link for this graph is provided (though as of June 2014, the link is dead - see Trivia below).\nCueball's friend uses this graph to explain that not a single day like this has happened since 2000, until here in 2014 where a polar vortex pushed the temperature down below zero again for two days. Since this weather is now unusual and infrequently experienced, people in St. Louis perceive it as being very cold because they have since adapted and are now unused to this sort of temperature, even though this was a common temperature to reach in past decades. This is further demonstrated when Cueball remarks that it's \"too cold\". Subzero Fahrenheit temperatures are very cold to be out in. See for instance the first panel of 526: Converting to Metric .\nIn the last panel, in a future St. Louis, a Cueball discovers a thin sheet of ice, suggesting the temperature has fallen just below 32\u00a0\u00b0F (0\u00a0\u00b0C), the freezing point of water. The suggestion here is that the environment has warmed to such an extent that temperatures below 32\u00a0degrees F are very unusual, and the future Cueball repeats the same short-term fallacy that such \"extreme cold\" disproves global warming. Someone off-panel, presumably another Black Knit Cap Guy, sighs as the cycle continues.\nThe comic reacts to a simplified view of global warming by amateurs, including media, who fail to understand (or choose to ignore) the difference between climate and weather . Short, random weather fluctuations like the polar vortex are taken as examples or counter-examples of climate change and global warming. To understand climate change, one must look at global (not local) and long-term (not short-term) temperature trends.\nDebates on the theory of global warming\/climate change often center on whether the current warming trend is primarily caused by humans or is a natural change, as has happened in the past. Within the scientific community, there is an overwhelming consensus that the current trend is anthropogenic (i.e. man-made), but many in the general public (including many politicians) are hesitant to accept this. There is clearly no doubt about where Randall stands on this debate, as many of his comics and blog posts continue to plead for humanity to do something about the man-made global warming trend - especially in comic 1379: 4.5 Degrees .\nThe title text suggests that gathering data about global warming is time-consuming and is the kind of stuff only a real nerd would do. Most people would rather hang out with friends, or at least spend their time with some more fun nerd activity. Randall has been known to use the title text to poke fun at himself over how much time he has spent researching topics and more generally how geeky his interests tend to be. Although the title text tries to deny this geeky behavior, he cannot help himself at the end by mentioning another interesting climate subject: Snowfall records .\nClimate change, especially global warming, is a recurring theme in xkcd.\n[It's cold, two Guys wearing knit caps (one knit cap is white the other black) are walking outside and the White Knit Cap Guy is shivering.] White Knit Cap Guy: It is brutal out. So much for global warming, huh? Black Knit Cap Guy: *sigh* This used to happen all the time. White Knit Cap Guy: What?\n[A dot plot showing number of days with lows below zero Fahrenheit by year since 1970.] Black Knit Cap Guy (off-screen): You're from St. Louis, right? Black Knit Cap Guy (off-screen): On average, it used to get below 0 \u00b0F there a handful of days per year. Black Knit Cap Guy (off-screen): But you haven't had a day like that since the nineties. [Above the dot plot to the left is a label in a black frame:] Days with lows < 0\u00b0F [Below the dot plot are written the years:] 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 [Below again is written in small letters:] Source: rcc-acis.org\/climatecentral\n[Black Knit Cap Guy has stopped walking.] Black Knit Cap Guy: Then, in 2014, when the first polar vortex hit, it dipped below zero for two days. Black Knit Cap Guy: And everyone freaked out\n[They continue walking.] Black Knit Cap Guy: because what used to be normal Black Knit Cap Guy: now feels too cold. White Knit Cap Guy: It is too cold!\n[Above the last panel is written in a black frame:] The Future: [Cueball is pointing at a patch of ice.] Cueball: Look at this\u2014 ice! In St. Louis! So much for global warming. Person off-screen: *sigh*\nNote that this is not the same data set as mentioned in xkcd as this is regarding freezing days and not subzero days!\nWith the full excel dataset of the number of freezing days (i.e. below 32\u00a0\u00b0F) as obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 's homepage NOAA you get the following plot:\n\nFrom the same dataset excel dataset we can also get the number of sub-zero days i.e. below 0\u00a0\u00b0F (which are those mentioned in the XKCD strip) - plotting those and you get the following plot:\nNote that this IS the same data set as mentioned in XKCD. This is subzero days!\n\nWhile there were a number of very cold years with outliers in the 1970s - then the clear overall trend is still that there are fewer days with cold weather over the years.\nSo while weather is different every year (which is also illustrated by the outliers) the climate is defined by the long term trend - which is the point of this cartoon.\n"}
{"id":1322,"title":"Winter","image_title":"Winter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1322","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/winter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1322:_Winter","transcript":"[Cueball and Beret Guy, Cueball in a winter hat and Beret Guy in a beret, are walking through snow and across a patch of ice.] Beret Guy: The sky is cold and the floor water is too hard to drink.\n[Beret Guy looks upwards.] Beret Guy: But I have my handcoats and the spacelight is warm.\n[Beret Guy and Cueball continue on through woods; there are musical notes coming from the trees.]\nBeret Guy: Listen\u2014the flappy planes are beeping in the stick towers.\n[Cueball pauses.] Cueball: Those are all the wrong words for those things. [Beret Guy replies from off panel.] Beret Guy: Maybe\u2014but the things themselves are all right. So who cares?\n[Cueball continues walking, with sunlight and musical notes above.]\n","explanation":"Beret Guy and Cueball are walking. Beret Guy is making several remarks about the situation. The air is cold, the puddles have frozen, he has mittens, the sunlight is warm, and the birds are chirping in the trees. When making these observations, however, he does not use the conventional terms. Instead he uses word compounds, similar to \" Up Goer Five \". When Cueball brings up Beret Guy's odd vocabulary, he retorts by declaring that the name does not matter, as long as the things themselves are what they should be. This is the same concept that is communicated in the line from the Shakespearean play, \"Romeo and Juliet\": \"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet .\" The concept is similar to that discussed by Richard Feynman as the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.\nIn the title text Beret Guy continues to use playful language and offers affectionate encouragement: \"stay warm, little flappers\", demonstrating that his intentions are kind, not obfuscatory. Additionally, it is an indirect salutation from Randall Munroe to the readers, acknowledging the remarkably cold temperatures North America was experiencing at the time.\nStrange synonyms are also found in 919: Tween Bromance and 2352: Synonym Date .\n[Cueball and Beret Guy, Cueball in a winter hat and Beret Guy in a beret, are walking through snow and across a patch of ice.] Beret Guy: The sky is cold and the floor water is too hard to drink.\n[Beret Guy looks upwards.] Beret Guy: But I have my handcoats and the spacelight is warm.\n[Beret Guy and Cueball continue on through woods; there are musical notes coming from the trees.]\nBeret Guy: Listen\u2014the flappy planes are beeping in the stick towers.\n[Cueball pauses.] Cueball: Those are all the wrong words for those things. [Beret Guy replies from off panel.] Beret Guy: Maybe\u2014but the things themselves are all right. So who cares?\n[Cueball continues walking, with sunlight and musical notes above.]\n"}
{"id":1323,"title":"Protocol","image_title":"Protocol","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1323","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/protocol.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1323:_Protocol","transcript":"[Cueball is telling a story to a Computer Scientist who is seated at his desk.] Cueball: Alice sends a message to Bob saying to meet her somewhere. Computer Scientist: Uh huh. Cueball: But Eve sees it, too, and goes to the place. Computer Scientist: With you so far. Cueball: Bob is delayed, and Alice and Eve meet. Computer Scientist: Yeah? CAPTION: I've discovered a way to get computer scientists to listen to any boring story.\n","explanation":"Alice, Bob, and Eve are role names traditionally used in describing cryptographic protocols. Rather than talking about \"Person A\", \"Person B\", \"Person C\", names beginning with each letter are used instead, and giving them different genders let pronouns be used to shorten discussions. For example: \"Person A sends Person B a message encoded with Person B's public key\" is much easier to parse when written as \"Alice sends Bob a message encoded with his public key.\" Eve is short for \"eavesdropper\" - a person trying to find out what's being said in the conversations between the other people. The classic situation involves Alice wanting to send a secret message to Bob, while Eve (the eavesdropper), attempts to read the message, ideally without Alice or Bob ever finding out. Additional participants such as Carol (Person C) can be added if necessary. The list of names has become very standardised over time as described at Alice and Bob .\nThe joke here is that any computer scientist, hearing the names used, will think that they are listening to a cryptography problem. By changing the names in a story to these role names, you can induce them to listen carefully to boring stories. The fewer the interesting details, the more it sounds like a general problem, so very boring stories are actually the easiest.\nThe title text shows a more radical approach to the problem, for people who do not feel comfortable about lying. In this approach, you only make friends with people who have the appropriate names already.\nThe comic title also can be interpreted in two ways. First, the computer scientist thinks the conversation is about an encryption protocol. Second, the way the conversation is carried resembles a protocol used by many data communication systems, where one side sends data while the other sends back an acknowledgement upon receiving the data. In this case, the data are the lines of the boring story.\nIn comic 177: Alice and Bob these names are used in the same context. Instead of Alice and Bob being perfectly innocent people who just want to communicate in private, Bob is actually having an affair with Alice. Eve \u2014his former partner\u2014 cracked the encryption to see what the message contained. Thus, this comic seems to continue the Alice\/Bob romance, jealous-Eve plot, with Eve apparently confronting Alice over her text message to Bob.\n[Cueball is telling a story to a Computer Scientist who is seated at his desk.] Cueball: Alice sends a message to Bob saying to meet her somewhere. Computer Scientist: Uh huh. Cueball: But Eve sees it, too, and goes to the place. Computer Scientist: With you so far. Cueball: Bob is delayed, and Alice and Eve meet. Computer Scientist: Yeah? CAPTION: I've discovered a way to get computer scientists to listen to any boring story.\n"}
{"id":1324,"title":"Weather","image_title":"Weather","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1324","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/weather.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1324:_Weather","transcript":"[Cueball and Hairy are talking.] Hairy: So, how 'bout this weather? Cueball: I know, right? The whole jet stream layer is nuts! Hairy: Um, sure... Cueball: The 18z GFS forecasts 960mb by Tuesday. Think it'll verify? Hairy: What? Cueball: ...Right. Sorry. Uh, yeah! Weather sure has been crazy.\n[Caption below the panel:] Weather geeks have it tough.\n","explanation":"Social norm accepts casual small-talk as an ice breaker for interaction \u2014 usually it is always safe to talk about the weather without hitting any disagreements as there are rarely any personal viewpoints about the weather \u2014 in contrast small-talk is never about political subjects or similar where chances are that there are strong personal viewpoints.\nIn this strip Cueball is described a \"weather geek\", enjoying subjects such as meteorology and weather forecasting . When Hairy makes a comment about the weather, Cueball launches into a detailed technical discussion, not realizing Hairy is simply trying to engage in small-talk. Only weather geeks would have this problem, but this topic is a common opening for a conversation in casual small-talk. Cueball switches to small-talk once he realizes that Hairy is confused and didn't expect this level of technical information.\nAs to the jargon:\nThe title text clarifies the problem weather nuts like Cueball here have: Unlike other geeky pursuits (like, say, the Derinkuyu Underground Cities , one of the most well-known archaeological sites in Turkey ) weather is a fairly common small talk subject. As a result, weather geeks have to be constantly vigilant so as not to launch into technical monologues.\n[Cueball and Hairy are talking.] Hairy: So, how 'bout this weather? Cueball: I know, right? The whole jet stream layer is nuts! Hairy: Um, sure... Cueball: The 18z GFS forecasts 960mb by Tuesday. Think it'll verify? Hairy: What? Cueball: ...Right. Sorry. Uh, yeah! Weather sure has been crazy.\n[Caption below the panel:] Weather geeks have it tough.\n"}
{"id":1325,"title":"Rejection","image_title":"Rejection","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1325","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rejection.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1325:_Rejection","transcript":"[Cueball is walking, and a Cueball-like guy follows him.] Guy: Women say they want nice guys, but what they really want are\u2014 Cueball: \u2014Guys who respond to rejection by belittling their judgment and self-awareness? Cueball: If so, don't worry \u2014 you'll be fine.\n","explanation":"In popular culture women are sometimes said to not be interested in nice guys , as in common interpretations of the phrase nice guys finish last which originally belongs to baseball.\nThe Cueball -like guy on the left in this picture is presumably frustrated and complaining because he has been rejected by a woman, and thinks it's because he's the \"nice guy\" type. Cueball's sarcastic interjection implies that saying that women don't want nice guys and presuming to know what women \"really want\" is actually showing a rejection of that woman's agency, which might be the real reason she rejected him. It fits with one of the negative connotations of \"nice guy\": one who does not express his true feelings and\/or is passive-aggressive .\nThe title text continues the \"conversation\", with Cueball implying that he believes that the first guy is bad at taking hints. He offers a \"crash course\" in hint taking by clarifying outright that he is trying to end the conversation while the first guy continues to follow him.\nThough this guy might indeed be a jerk, there are also many other reasons why a woman might reject a guy who isn't a jerk.\nThe concept of the self-identifying \"nice guy\" who actually may have less than admirable motives is also explored in 513: Friends . See also the concept of \"negging\" as used in 1027: Pickup Artist : you belittle chicks to undermine their self-confidence so they'll be more vulnerable and seek your approval .\n[Cueball is walking, and a Cueball-like guy follows him.] Guy: Women say they want nice guys, but what they really want are\u2014 Cueball: \u2014Guys who respond to rejection by belittling their judgment and self-awareness? Cueball: If so, don't worry \u2014 you'll be fine.\n"}
{"id":1326,"title":"Sharks","image_title":"Sharks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1326","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sharks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1326:_Sharks","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting on a throne, talking to a minion who's not shown in the panel.] Minion: The prisoner escaped and is swimming toward the mainland! Cueball: Release the sharks. Minion: Yes, sir.\nMinion: The sharks are swimming away. Cueball: They're escaping, too? Send sharks after them!\nMinion: Now those sharks are swimming away. Cueball: More sharks. Minion: ...Sir, what's going on? Cueball: Prisoners, of course! Can't let 'em escape!\nMinion: Sir, are you trying to turn Doom Island into a marine biology center? Cueball: Shark populations are in decline\u2013 Cueball: *ahem* Cueball: I mean, the world must fear us! Minion: Right...\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke about the use of sharks in action movies. In these movies, sharks are often used to guard locations and dispense capital punishment. Since the idea of a guard shark is not practical, this comic suggests that villains raise sharks to help with declining shark populations in the oceans.\nIn this comic Cueball is an evil villain who rules over a \"Doom Island.\" In addition to commanding minions and detaining prisoners, he keeps sharks to threaten prisoners. When a prisoner escapes the island, he orders his minions to \"release the sharks.\" However, the sharks do not hunt the prisoner, but merely swim away. The comic jokes that Cueball is using fugitives as a pretense to help with declining shark populations, and that Doom Island is just a front for a marine biology center. Cueball maintains the whole \"guard sharks\" idea as a cover-up, so that his minions do not catch on to the real mission.\nThe title text plays on the idea that Cueball can't be openly concerned with his sharks' welfare without his minions catching on. He claims to be inspecting the shark cages. As a shark cage is normally used to provide protection for divers wishing to observe sharks up-close, they would not work well as cages to hold prisoners (which is their stated purpose). The comic implies that when he is \"inspecting the cages\" he is really performing a scientific study on the sharks, or simply observing them because he loves them.\nBecause a real villainous lair would have no use for shark cages, it follows that Cueball owns them solely for the purpose of gratifying his interest in his sharks, thus forcing him to keep up the pretense of the cages being of some help in preventing prisoners from escaping.\nThe shark issue is also one of the items on the chart of 1331: Frequency .\n\"Doom Island\" is most likely meant to be a generic name for the villain's lair (a trope dating back to at least the first James Bond film, Dr. No ); however, a real island of this name exists in Indonesia.\nIn action movie trope from the '70s and '80s, evil villains use sharks to kill off enemies. Some examples are:\nAnd in the James Bond series:\n[Cueball is sitting on a throne, talking to a minion who's not shown in the panel.] Minion: The prisoner escaped and is swimming toward the mainland! Cueball: Release the sharks. Minion: Yes, sir.\nMinion: The sharks are swimming away. Cueball: They're escaping, too? Send sharks after them!\nMinion: Now those sharks are swimming away. Cueball: More sharks. Minion: ...Sir, what's going on? Cueball: Prisoners, of course! Can't let 'em escape!\nMinion: Sir, are you trying to turn Doom Island into a marine biology center? Cueball: Shark populations are in decline\u2013 Cueball: *ahem* Cueball: I mean, the world must fear us! Minion: Right...\n"}
{"id":1327,"title":"Mobile Marketing","image_title":"Mobile Marketing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1327","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mobile_marketing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1327:_Mobile_Marketing","transcript":"[Black Hat sits at a desk. A voice speaks from off panel, in front of Black Hat.] Off panel: CNN hired you to improve viewership.\n[Black Hat continues to sit at the desk.] Black Hat: ...yes, and?\n[Next panel, conversation continues.] Off panel: You texted \"Holy crap, turn on the news\" to a million random phone numbers? Black Hat: It sure did work. Off panel: Not what we meant!","explanation":"Black Hat was hired by the Cable News Network ( CNN ) to increase its popularity, presumably long-term. However, all he did was text one million people implying that a huge, unbelievable event was happening. While this technically did increase viewers of CNN, this was most likely only for a few minutes before the viewers realized nothing had happened. Because of this, Black Hat did very little to help CNN.\nIt is possible that this is the finale of a long career Black Hat has had in marketing, beginning in 125: Marketing Interview .\nThe title text is spoken by the offscreen character who, after saying that division of CNN was firing Black Hat, told him that the online headline writing department wanted to hire him. This is because the message Black Hat texted to the million phone numbers is very similar to link bait , which are headlines or titles that, like the text message, promise highly interesting articles without being very detailed as to their nature. Thus, perhaps online, Black Hat could bring clicks up long term through this unscrupulous practice, as opposed to mass unsolicited texts. The practice of link bait has also been mentioned in 1283: Headlines .\n[Black Hat sits at a desk. A voice speaks from off panel, in front of Black Hat.] Off panel: CNN hired you to improve viewership.\n[Black Hat continues to sit at the desk.] Black Hat: ...yes, and?\n[Next panel, conversation continues.] Off panel: You texted \"Holy crap, turn on the news\" to a million random phone numbers? Black Hat: It sure did work. Off panel: Not what we meant!"}
{"id":1328,"title":"Update","image_title":"Update","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1328","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/update.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1328:_Update","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk. A message is being displayed on Cueball's laptop screen.] Urgent : Critical update available!\n[The message continues.] Details : Fixes an issue that was causing random laptop electrical fires.\n(This update will require restarting your computer.) [Cueball clicks on Remind me later .] click\n","explanation":"When developers responsible for fixing errors on a specific operating system release a patch, the operating system often ask users to restart the computer after installing. This is often done by popup window shown to the user where they can choose to restart immediately or choose to be reminded later.\nMany messages from these popups emphasize the importance of installing the updates, but Cueball is just annoyed about this. Sometimes, these issues are minor and do not affect most computers using the operating system. Often other programs, not part of the operating system, ask for a reboot because the updated routine only runs after the next reboot. Regardless, reboots can take a long time \u2014 a typical user doesn't like this. The user can choose to be reminded later multiple times. Because rebooting a computer takes a significant amount of time and closes any programs running, a user may delay the update repeatedly to avoid interrupting what they were doing at the time.\nThe comic is making two jokes simultaneously: the core comic jokes that reboots are so tedious and disruptive it would actually be preferable for a laptop to burst into flame than to go through one, while the title text suggests that the real problem is that humans are so incapable of delayed gratification and\/or risk evaluation they would rather risk bodily harm than suffer a minor inconvenience.\nThe joke uses an \"exploding laptop battery\" as an exaggeration for comedic effect. Most software doesn't affect hardware issues like burning laptop batteries . [ citation needed ] However, low-level software, such as the kernel or drivers , might cause hardware to misbehave.\nThe title text reflects the fact that the average user will have multiple applications open and a reboot would require closing them. They would then have to open all their applications again after the computer has restarted. This can also refer to a browser application having multiple tabs open. This is becoming less of an issue because browsers have an option to restart the last session again after being closed, as would happen with a reboot, but many users still don't trust it to work properly.\n[Cueball sits at a desk. A message is being displayed on Cueball's laptop screen.] Urgent : Critical update available!\n[The message continues.] Details : Fixes an issue that was causing random laptop electrical fires.\n(This update will require restarting your computer.) [Cueball clicks on Remind me later .] click\n"}
{"id":1329,"title":"Standing","image_title":"Standing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1329","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/standing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1329:_Standing","transcript":"[Cueball is running after a deer with a laptop strapped to its back, while Megan looks on.] Cueball: Humans aren't built to sit all day. This is much healthier.\n[Caption below the panel] My Hobby: One-upping the standing desk people\n","explanation":"Standing desks are a current fad in modern tech companies. Supposedly more ergonomic and comfortable than sitting all day, they can be combined with treadmills or stationary bicycles to enable exercise to be taken while working. Cueball tells Megan that standing desks are inferior to his solution, strapping his laptop to a deer. The deer constantly runs away from Cueball , forcing him to chase and get exercise (and probably get kicked if he catches up). Additionally, by mentioning the common line of \"humans weren't meant to sit all day\", he is saying that his deer-based solution is much more similar to the task that humans evolved to do, namely hunting and gathering . Humans are in fact one of the few species built for exhaustion hunting (exactly what it sounds like), and are able to chase a prey for more than four hours in ideal conditions. This is also why one's legs feel sore when standing for extended periods but not while moving, as the valves in one's veins only work when one's legs are moving.\nThe title text takes this a step further, saying that the deer was surprisingly ergonomic, apart from the kicks \u2014 which would, presumably, be quite debilitating. The ergonomics could be due to the soft, warm nature of the flesh compared to typical cold, hard tables.\n[Cueball is running after a deer with a laptop strapped to its back, while Megan looks on.] Cueball: Humans aren't built to sit all day. This is much healthier.\n[Caption below the panel] My Hobby: One-upping the standing desk people\n"}
{"id":1330,"title":"Kola Borehole","image_title":"Kola Borehole","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1330","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kola_borehole.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1330:_Kola_Borehole","transcript":"[Megan and Black Hat are sitting in front of their laptops.] Megan: Ever hear of the Kola Borehole? Black Hat: No\u2014what's that? Megan: A Soviet project to drill deep into the Earth's crust.\nMegan: There's a hoax report claiming that their drill broke through into a superhot cavern, and when they lowered a microphone into the hole, they heard tormented screaming. People say that's why the miners sealed the well and abandoned the project.\nBlack Hat: Why would anyone believe that story? Megan: I guess some people think Hell is literally an underground place.\nBlack Hat: No - I mean, why would the miners seal the opening? Why not just dig a canal connecting it to the ocean? Unless they like Hell.\nMegan: ...If there's ever a war between Earth and Hell, I hope I'm on your side. Black Hat: You seem nice; you probably won't be.\n","explanation":"The Kola Superdeep Borehole is the result of a scientific drilling project by the Soviet Union in what is now north-western Russia that began in 1970 and continued through 1992. It was an attempt to drill as far into the Earth as possible. The deepest hole reached 12,262\u00a0metres (40,230\u00a0ft). It remains the deepest artificial point on earth .\nMegan mentions the well to Hell hoax that the drilling hit a super-hot cavern which is disproved at www.snopes.com: \"The Well to Hell\" . Although super-hot temperature was the reason the project was abandoned, no chamber or voices were discovered. As Megan notes, the hoax plays on the popular notion that Hell is literally a physical place below us \u2014 therefore by definition, towards the centre of the Earth \u2014 whereas Heaven is above us; often depicted in the clouds.\nMegan suggests that the miners therefore sealed the hole to \"seal in\" Hell. There is no mention in the Wikipedia article about the hole being sealed; however there is a picture with the caption \"The borehole itself (welded shut)\". If \"sealing the hole\" is considered to mean filling the entire hole up with concrete or some other material, then given the potential for future scientific data, the 22 years spent drilling and the cost of sealing the hole, this would not seem to be a reasonable thing to do.\nBlack Hat suggests that if the Hoax were true and the miners did believe they'd drilled into Hell, a better alternative to sealing the hole would have been to dig a canal to the ocean, thereby allowing water to flow into the hole and into Hell. As all of Hell is depicted as below the surface of the Earth, and characterized by fire, brimstone, and extreme heat, this would entirely fill Hell with water, drastically altering it. (Depending on the volume of Hell, this could have significant effects on the global sea level and the atmosphere.)\nMegan never thought of that possibility and compliments Black Hat's ingenuity by suggesting that if there were ever a real conflict with Hell, she would want to be \"on his side\", given his clever suggestion on how to destroy Hell. He responds by suggesting that Megan is \"nice\" and therefore probably won't be on his side. This suggests Black Hat considers himself evil and thinks he would be fighting for Hell or maybe on behalf of those consigned there, rather than against it. Alternatively, he thinks he is worse than the devil and that Megan would be on the \"nicer\" side.\nThe title text parodies a nondescript news report of a person's death. In this case it is about Lucifer being killed by Black Hat carrying out his plan to flood Hell. However, the report is written in a non-descript way that ignores the presumed sensationalism of the story (i.e., that Hell exists and has been flooded). It is notable that \"Lucifer\" is often used in modern times to refer to Satan and both are used to refer to the \"leader\" or \"keeper\" of Hell, although the Bible never directly identifies them as the same entity, and he\/they are never tied directly to Hell anywhere in the Bible. Much of the modern image of Hell is derived from Dante's \" Inferno \" along with a variety of additional details which have been added and changed throughout the years. The reference to sharks is a reference to 1326: Sharks that was released a week before.\n[Megan and Black Hat are sitting in front of their laptops.] Megan: Ever hear of the Kola Borehole? Black Hat: No\u2014what's that? Megan: A Soviet project to drill deep into the Earth's crust.\nMegan: There's a hoax report claiming that their drill broke through into a superhot cavern, and when they lowered a microphone into the hole, they heard tormented screaming. People say that's why the miners sealed the well and abandoned the project.\nBlack Hat: Why would anyone believe that story? Megan: I guess some people think Hell is literally an underground place.\nBlack Hat: No - I mean, why would the miners seal the opening? Why not just dig a canal connecting it to the ocean? Unless they like Hell.\nMegan: ...If there's ever a war between Earth and Hell, I hope I'm on your side. Black Hat: You seem nice; you probably won't be.\n"}
{"id":1331,"title":"Frequency","image_title":"Frequency","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1331","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/frequency.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1331:_Frequency","transcript":"[Repetitive events are written in grey and arranged in a grid. Each statement pulses to black and then returns to grey at an interval characteristic of the named event.]\n","explanation":"This comic shows a number of common events, arranged in a grid. Each of the events flashes with its average frequency.\nFor example, statistically a child is born somewhere on the world approximately every 0.24 seconds, or four times per second. Therefore, the tile \"One birth\" blinks about 4 times per second.\nThe title text refers to the Pitch drop experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. At room temperature, tar pitch flows at a very slow rate, taking several years to form a single drop. The title text jokes that Randall tried to include a tile that flashes about once every ten years , but the tiles are all animated GIFs and while the file format supports animations of any length, the resulting file would be too big (at least 10 megabytes).\nA thorough analysis of the frequencies present in this comic and how they relate to the underlying technology (the GIF format) was published as Reverse Engineering xkcd's 'Frequency' .\nThe table below lists all the events and their duration \/ frequency. Some events make reference to other comics.\n[Repetitive events are written in grey and arranged in a grid. Each statement pulses to black and then returns to grey at an interval characteristic of the named event.]\n"}
{"id":1332,"title":"Slippery Slope","image_title":"Slippery Slope","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1332","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/slippery_slope.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1332:_Slippery_Slope","transcript":"[White Hat talking to Cueball.] White Hat: Yeah, but if I'm considerate toward one person about one thing, what's next? White Hat: Being nice to other people about other things? White Hat: Where does it end?\n","explanation":"\" Slippery slope \" argumentation is an informal fallacy that takes the form of \"if A happens, then B will follow as a minor but expected consequence. B will lead on to C, C leads onto D, and so on. Each consequence gets progressively worse until an undesirable situation is reached.\" A slippery slope argument proposes that A should not be allowed, because if it is, then the resulting chain of consequences will inevitably lead to the undesirable situation.\nFor example, someone who is trying to avoid washing the dishes might try to justify themselves as follows: \"if I wash the dishes tonight, then tomorrow night, I might be asked to do the dishes and also to wipe down the kitchen counters. If I do that, then pretty soon I'll also be asked to mop the kitchen floor. If I have to mop the kitchen floor, eventually I'll be asked to mop ALL the floors of the house, and eventually this will extend to washing the windows and taking out the trash and doing laundry, and I'll be doing EVERYTHING around here and NEVER get any time to myself. Therefore, I will not wash the dishes tonight, so I can still have enough time for myself.\"\nWhat makes the chain of reasoning fallacious is that there is nothing about the task of \"washing the dishes\" that in any way implies the additional responsibilities that this person imagines (such as wiping down counters or mopping floors). The slippery slope fallacy manifests when there is no cogent basis for believing that the proposed chain of events is likely to follow, especially when the proposed course of action has a clear extent and limitation which would adequately prevent the \"slope\" from being \"slipped down.\" In the above example: there is an implied extent and limitation to the defined task of \"washing the dishes\" - namely, the task would be complete when the household dishes have been washed. Additional household chores, like wiping down counters, would be negotiated seperately with other members of the household.\nIt is worth noting that a fallacy has NOT been committed if there is a reasonable basis for the concern. For example, the reluctant dishwasher might live with an abuser who will foreseeably intimidate them into taking on an unreasonable share of household chores, on the faulty basis that \"if you're willing to do the dishes, surely you must also be willing to wipe down the counters...\" In such a scenario, \"wash the dishes\" may carry an encoded message of \"do what you're told,\" in a form that appears reasonable on its surface. Thus, in assessing whether or not a slippery slope fallacy has been committed, it is important to take ALL the relevant factors into consideration, and not merely the explicitly articulated ones.\nIn the comic, White Hat uses a slippery slope argument to Cueball to justify being inconsiderate to people. He argues that if he expends minor effort being considerate to one person, he will be expected to be considerate to everyone he meets, which - he wishes to argue - is an undesirable situation. Thus, he justifies being inconsiderate as a form of avoiding the slippery slope.\nThis idea is extended in the title text, where he continues extrapolating the train of thought to conclude that minutes of time would be \"wasted\". Rather than condemning the slippery slope fallacy per se, Randall 's point here seems to be more that White Hat's priorities are callous to the point of sociopathy. All people desire to be treated with consideration and respect, and taking a few seconds to acknowledge another's feelings is (for most well-meaning people) a small price to pay for improving that person's day, or at least not making it any worse than it needs to be. As such, these seconds would not be \"wasted\" at all, but would be actively making the world a friendlier place. White Hat's hyperfixation on not wasting time appears ludicrous given how much good feeling he could contribute to the world for so little of his own time. (White Hat also appears to be discounting the possibility that being considerate towards others will encourage reciprocity, which could result in SAVING him time since they will be more willing to help him out should he ever find himself in need.)\n[White Hat talking to Cueball.] White Hat: Yeah, but if I'm considerate toward one person about one thing, what's next? White Hat: Being nice to other people about other things? White Hat: Where does it end?\n"}
{"id":1333,"title":"First Date","image_title":"First Date","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1333","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/first_date.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1333:_First_Date","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan sit at an intimate dinner table. They have plates and glasses of wine in front of them.] Cueball: So, did you grow up around here? Megan: I love you. Cueball: ... huh? Megan: Waiter! One of everything on the menu.\n[Megan stands up. Standing on her chair, holding a plate.] Cueball: Why are you up there? Megan: I'm stuck. Megan: This plate looks delicious. Megan: Aaaoogaoag.\n[Megan has put the plate down and walked off-panel.] Megan: Bye. Megan: OK. Coming back now.\n[Megan is crouched on her chair, holding a spiral.] Cueball: You're being controlled by Twitch, aren't you? Megan: Check out this cool spiral! Cueball: It's\u2014 Megan: SAVING.\n","explanation":"TPP, or Twitch Plays Pok\u00e9mon , was the first of a creative and radical new variant of streaming gameplay videos created in early 2014 \u2014 a few days before this comic was released.\nSome consumers enjoyed watching video games being played by other people (usually 'popular' gamers known for entertaining gameplay), thus streaming sites dedicated to streaming gameplay were created. Twitch.tv was one such site.\nWhereas traditional video game streams involved the channel broadcaster or another personality playing the game, the channel \"Twitch Plays Pok\u00e9mon\" recorded a bot playing an emulated game of Pok\u00e9mon Red for Game Boy . The game inputs given by the bot were based on players' messages in the video stream itself. Thus, the watchers of the stream were playing the game themselves using chat \"commands.\" The Pok\u00e9mon character behaved incredibly erratically, frequently getting \"stuck against simple obstacles\" (as mentioned in the title-text) and moving about in a strange manner (\"Why are you up there?\"\/\"Bye...Okay, coming back now\").\nDespite this, the character advanced surprisingly far in games. They have beaten the Elite Four and Champion of generations I , II , III , IV , and V , and VI .\nTwitch Plays Pok\u00e9mon has also completed various ROM hacks and Spin-off titles, establishing a seasonal format with multiple games each season. You can see the state of the player characters' Pok\u00e9mon and inventory at game end in this Bulbapedia article .\nTPP surged in popularity rapidly since its inception, reaching 80,000 channel viewers within five days. Derivative channels (such as 'TwitchPlayers') soon arose, turning \"Twitch Plays...\" into an idea rather than a single channel; that of crowdsourcing a task, such as controlling a single person (as in the Pok\u00e9mon games) for erratic and often hilarious results. The stream, which is still active as of this writing, has reached memetic status .\nIn the above comic, Cueball and Megan are on a date. However, Megan is behaving very erratically. Cueball determines that Megan is being \"controlled by Twitch,\" as her behavior matches well with that of the TPP protagonist (whose name, canonically, is Red ).\nMegan loudly declares at one point that she is \"SAVING\" her 'game progress', referencing the incessant saving in TPP via random button presses. The random ten-letter string she says is reminiscent of the nicknames that all of TPP's Pok\u00e9mon end up with as the players move haphazardly across the game's keyboard.\nHer fascination with the \"cool spiral\" is an allusion to TPP players' fascination with the Helix Fossil , an in-game item. As user input often leads to checking of the in-game backpack followed by erratic commands to handle the items within, it was common for various valuable items to be haphazardly thrown away. However, as the Helix Fossil was a key item , it could not be tossed. It was also the first item in the Bag due to this, leading to the players' continuously selecting it whenever accessing their Bag, eventually causing them to somewhat jokingly regard it as an object of religious reverence.\nThe title text, as explained above, simply is a light-hearted joke from Randall , empathizing with TPP as he has also spent real-life days stuck against simple obstacles, and is surprised by how far he has gotten in life despite this fact.\n[Cueball and Megan sit at an intimate dinner table. They have plates and glasses of wine in front of them.] Cueball: So, did you grow up around here? Megan: I love you. Cueball: ... huh? Megan: Waiter! One of everything on the menu.\n[Megan stands up. Standing on her chair, holding a plate.] Cueball: Why are you up there? Megan: I'm stuck. Megan: This plate looks delicious. Megan: Aaaoogaoag.\n[Megan has put the plate down and walked off-panel.] Megan: Bye. Megan: OK. Coming back now.\n[Megan is crouched on her chair, holding a spiral.] Cueball: You're being controlled by Twitch, aren't you? Megan: Check out this cool spiral! Cueball: It's\u2014 Megan: SAVING.\n"}
{"id":1334,"title":"Second","image_title":"Second","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1334","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/second.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1334:_Second","transcript":"[Cueball in a desert standing before a rock.] Rock: Greetings, stranger. Rock: Whatever quest drives you, abandon it. Rock: You shall find no answers in these desolate wastes. Cueball: I knew I wouldn't. Cueball: I guess I... just had to see.\nI hate feeling desperate enough to visit the second page of Google results.\n","explanation":"Google is a popular search engine. Google's searching algorithms are widely regarded as the most accurate and useful. If your search terms were sufficiently detailed, you will be able to find what you were looking for on the first page. Having to view the second page indicates your search terms were too vague or the answer to your query doesn't exist. When the search results typically number in the tens of millions (or more; in fact, more popular search results are in the billions), only the very first results are mapping to the real idea of the user. The second page is not helpful for the issue.\nCueball , after failing to find his query in the first page of results, takes a curious peek at the second page. This is represented by a not-at-all subtle metaphor in which Cueball is about to wander into a sun-baked desert. According to the title text, he finds one vaguely relevant webpage, but it's over 14 years old.\nThe title text refers to webrings . Webrings consist of multiple websites that are connected together, usually with a common theme. They connect from one website to the next, eventually leading back to the starting site. They were popular in the 1990s as a way of boosting your search ranking, but newer algorithms in Google and other search engines are now detecting and penalizing web sites for such tactics. Webrings were also used in pre-google days to make it easy to find websites sharing a common theme, but since one site going down broke the ring, they were very inefficient. Seeing a webring means a site has not been updated since the mid 90s.\n[Cueball in a desert standing before a rock.] Rock: Greetings, stranger. Rock: Whatever quest drives you, abandon it. Rock: You shall find no answers in these desolate wastes. Cueball: I knew I wouldn't. Cueball: I guess I... just had to see.\nI hate feeling desperate enough to visit the second page of Google results.\n"}
{"id":1335,"title":"Now","image_title":"Now","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1335","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/now.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1335:_Now","transcript":"[The comic is a moving circle with a static outer ring.]\n[The outermost part of the static ring is divided in 22 segments representing the 24 hours of the day. The Noon (11 AM - 1 PM) and Midnight (11 PM - 1 AM) segments cover two hours which are not segmented. The ring is divided so it is yellow from 6 AM to 6 PM and dark grey on the other half.] Noon - 6 PM - Midnight - 6 AM\n[The innermost part of the static ring is light grey and divided in two sections that cower from 9 AM to 5 PM and from 10 PM to 8 AM respectively. They  contain descriptions of the time intervals.] Business hours (9-5) Rude to call\n[The rest of the image consist of a rotating part.]\n[On the innermost part of the circle is the Earth as seen from the south pole. Each continent has a different color. The colors are Europe: Red Africa: Cyan Asia: Green Oceania: Purple North America: Blue-violet South America: Olive green Antarctica (The south pole): Light grey\n[Two segmented rings circle the map - these give the names of the continents (not the Antactica) and the color of the ring match the color of the continent on the map. Each segment cover the part of the map with the given continent. The one with Europe is merged with the one for Asia - and the color also merges from red to green along Turkey and Russia where the transition from Europe to Asia occurs.]\n[On the inner ring are the names of the following continents (white text on a segment with the color of the continent)] Africa Oceania South America\n[On the second of these rings are the names of the following continents (white text on a segment with the color of the continent)] Europe Asia North America\n[On the outermost ring of the moving circle are written names of regions, countries and cities of the Earth over the part of the map in which time zone they belong. All the text is color coded to match the color of the continent they belong to as given on the central map. The text is written in four lines. Below the names are sorted by color and reading from left to right first - and only sorting top to bottom if needed.]\n[Europe - Red text:] UK - Most of Europe - Eastern Europe\n[Africa - Cyan text:] West Africa - Nigeria - Egypt - East Africa\n[Asia - Green text:] The Levant - Iraq - Iran - Moscow - Afghanistan - Pakistan - India - Southeast Asia - Java - China - Singapore - Philippines - Japan - The Koreas - Kamchatka\n[Oceania - Purple text:] Perth - Brisbane - Most Australian cities - New Zealand\n[North America - Blue-violet text:] Alaska - US West Coast - Denver - Mexico - Chicago - Texas - Eastern Canada - US East coast - Canadian Maritimes\n[South America - Olive green text:] Coastal Brazil\nThere are currently several implementations of the Now comic available for several different platforms:\nA script that automatically updates the wallpaper for the current time.\nA bash script that automatically updates the wallpaper for the current time, written for a Debian system running i3. May work well for other linux distributions as well.\nAn Android widget version of the comic.\nA web-based implementation which also displays time zones. (Not working on 02017-08-16)\nA draggable implementation (click&drag - left and right) (Not working on 02017-08-16)\nAn offline version of the comic made using C++ and SFML.\n","explanation":"The picture is divided in 24 segments representing the 24 hours of the day. At noon and at midnight the break between segments is indicated by the tip of a dark grey triangle.\nThe picture rotates by 3.75 degrees every 15 minutes, as does the Earth, so that it is constantly up to date in showing which regions are currently at which times of day. The picture change seems to happen half-way through a 15-minute time increment (that is, at 7\u00bd, 22\u00bd, 37\u00bd, and 52\u00bd minutes after each hour), so that the picture is always correct for the nearest multiple of 15 minutes.\nThe map projection of the earth in the middle of the picture shows an azimuthal equidistant projection with the South Pole in the center. This is unusual, as the projection typically puts the north pole in the center, but necessary in order for it to rotate clockwise. Randall was playing on projections before in 977: Map Projections .\nThe list of cities and countries doesn't match the map exactly - notice how the continent of Australia is shifted counterclockwise of the words \"most Australian cities\". This is because the map is centered relative to the time zones and the local variations therein. The map shows the configuration of time zones with respect to daylight saving time (also known as summer time) at the time of the comic's initial release (February 2014); it was being observed in parts of Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and other countries not named in this comic. If the map were to stay accurate through the year, the location of place names would have to move over the next few months as parts of the southern hemisphere went off DST and parts of the northern hemisphere went onto it; however, the map failed to change on the morning of March 9 as it should have (to recognize the start of DST in North America).\nIn many countries \" business hours \" are considered to be from 9\u00a0am to 5\u00a0pm. With some exceptions, including emergencies, it is generally considered rude to place a telephone call to someone's residence during the hours when most people are asleep; Randall portrays this time period as extending from 10 pm to 8 am.  This may be a reference to the 10 pm \"cutoff\" time discussed in an episode of \"Curb Your Enthusiasm.\"\n\"Rude to Call\" was also the name used by a G-mail experimental opt-in feature in 2009 which added a crossed out phone symbol next to the sender if it was night in the sender's time zone when the reader loaded the email on their screen.\nOn midnight at UTC we can see this situation:\nUK, Portugal West Africa\nMost of central Europe Nigeria, and many more countries belonging to the West Africa Time zone\nEastern Europe, many countries like Bulgaria, Romania or Greece The Levant Egypt\nEthiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Somalia, and more Kaliningrad and Belarus Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and more. Iran is at Iran Standard Time , using an offset of UTC+03:30\nMoscow Time United Arab Emirates, Mauritius, and more Afghanistan is at Time in Afghanistan , using an offset of UTC+04:30 Iran is at Iran Standard Time , using an offset of UTC+03:30\nPakistan, Western Australia, Maldives and some France former colonies. Afghanistan is at Time in Afghanistan , using an offset of UTC+04:30 India and Sri Lanka using UTC+05:30 Nepal is using a much more odd offset at UTC+05:45\nBangladesh, Bhutan... UK British Indian Ocean Territory Russia at Yekaterinburg Time , also Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan China only use one time zone (+08:00) but Xinjiang and Tibet unofficially use +06:00 India and Sri Lanka using UTC+05:30 Nepal is using a much more odd offset at UTC+05:45\nSouth-east Asia like Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and more Christmas Island belonging to Australia Russia is also using the Omsk Time\nWestern Australia China uses only one time zone while the country spans about five. Singapore Philippines Perth\nJapan The Koreas\nBrisbane and the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria US: Guam and Northern Mariana Islands\nMicronesia, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu Russia Vladivostok Time\nKamchatka (a Russian peninsula at the east Siberia), Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Tuvalu and more\nNew Zealand, Kiribati, Tonga\nHawaii, Samoa French Polynesia, Cook Islands, and more Line Islands, belonging to Kiribati\nAlaska (some islands of Alaska is at -10:00 and a few city's are at -08:00) French Polynesia\nUS West Coast Canada or (British Columbia and Yukon) Mexico (Baja California)\nUS: Denver, and much more Canada: Alberta (Calgary, Edmonton), British Columbia, more\nMexico, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua and more US: Chicago, Texas except of some most westernmost counties, and many more\nEastern Canada like Ontario or Quebec US East Coast including New York and Florida. But also Cuba, Haiti, Panama and much more countries\nCanadian Maritimes: New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia. (Newfoundland uses UTC-03:30 ) Chile Greenland Most of the Caribbean Islands.\nCoastal Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, French Guiana, the UK Falkland Islands, and more\nUK: South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands Brazil: Fernando de Noronha\nCape Verde Azores (part of Portugal)\nWhen first posted, the picture was exactly 12 hours off. Somewhere around 5:10 UTC, this was fixed.  The original version also included a listing for Inland Brazil; this could have created a conflict with US East Coast when Daylight-Saving Time begins in the US, and it has been removed.\nThe names used for the image files refer not to UTC (Universal Time) as one might expect but rather to the time exactly 12 hours off of that. The name of the image file linked from the page matched Universal Time during the first few hours, but the file-naming scheme did not change when the comic was corrected.\n[The comic is a moving circle with a static outer ring.]\n[The outermost part of the static ring is divided in 22 segments representing the 24 hours of the day. The Noon (11 AM - 1 PM) and Midnight (11 PM - 1 AM) segments cover two hours which are not segmented. The ring is divided so it is yellow from 6 AM to 6 PM and dark grey on the other half.] Noon - 6 PM - Midnight - 6 AM\n[The innermost part of the static ring is light grey and divided in two sections that cower from 9 AM to 5 PM and from 10 PM to 8 AM respectively. They  contain descriptions of the time intervals.] Business hours (9-5) Rude to call\n[The rest of the image consist of a rotating part.]\n[On the innermost part of the circle is the Earth as seen from the south pole. Each continent has a different color. The colors are Europe: Red Africa: Cyan Asia: Green Oceania: Purple North America: Blue-violet South America: Olive green Antarctica (The south pole): Light grey\n[Two segmented rings circle the map - these give the names of the continents (not the Antactica) and the color of the ring match the color of the continent on the map. Each segment cover the part of the map with the given continent. The one with Europe is merged with the one for Asia - and the color also merges from red to green along Turkey and Russia where the transition from Europe to Asia occurs.]\n[On the inner ring are the names of the following continents (white text on a segment with the color of the continent)] Africa Oceania South America\n[On the second of these rings are the names of the following continents (white text on a segment with the color of the continent)] Europe Asia North America\n[On the outermost ring of the moving circle are written names of regions, countries and cities of the Earth over the part of the map in which time zone they belong. All the text is color coded to match the color of the continent they belong to as given on the central map. The text is written in four lines. Below the names are sorted by color and reading from left to right first - and only sorting top to bottom if needed.]\n[Europe - Red text:] UK - Most of Europe - Eastern Europe\n[Africa - Cyan text:] West Africa - Nigeria - Egypt - East Africa\n[Asia - Green text:] The Levant - Iraq - Iran - Moscow - Afghanistan - Pakistan - India - Southeast Asia - Java - China - Singapore - Philippines - Japan - The Koreas - Kamchatka\n[Oceania - Purple text:] Perth - Brisbane - Most Australian cities - New Zealand\n[North America - Blue-violet text:] Alaska - US West Coast - Denver - Mexico - Chicago - Texas - Eastern Canada - US East coast - Canadian Maritimes\n[South America - Olive green text:] Coastal Brazil\nThere are currently several implementations of the Now comic available for several different platforms:\nA script that automatically updates the wallpaper for the current time.\nA bash script that automatically updates the wallpaper for the current time, written for a Debian system running i3. May work well for other linux distributions as well.\nAn Android widget version of the comic.\nA web-based implementation which also displays time zones. (Not working on 02017-08-16)\nA draggable implementation (click&drag - left and right) (Not working on 02017-08-16)\nAn offline version of the comic made using C++ and SFML.\n"}
{"id":1336,"title":"Transformers","image_title":"Transformers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1336","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/transformers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1336:_Transformers","transcript":"[Two \"Transformer\"-esque robots are visible.] First Robot: Transform! [Both robots run to the right.] [Each robot reaches a tree and begins to climb it.] [The camera focuses on the nearer of the two robots, which is placing itself into a chrysalis hanging from the tree branch.]\n","explanation":"The comic is a parody of Transformers , a fictional group of robots that can transform into vehicles. Transformers typically are able to transform instantaneously, often mid-stride, by manipulating and rearranging their mechanical parts. In this comic, however, Randall has the Transformers \"transform\" in the same manner that caterpillars \"transform\" via metamorphosis into butterflies or moths.\nThe first two panels show action scenes that would be appropriate for a Transformers comic. However, the third panel shows the Transformers climbing a tree, and in the final scene they wrap silk around themselves, apparently forming a cocoon or chrysalis.\nThe title text furthers this parallel, describing a newly transformed helicopter \u2014 presumably the post-metamorphosis state of one of the Transformers in the panels \u2014 in a manner that would be more appropriate for a freshly-emerged butterfly or moth.\nThis xkcd comic is one of the few ones not showing just simple stick figures .\n[Two \"Transformer\"-esque robots are visible.] First Robot: Transform! [Both robots run to the right.] [Each robot reaches a tree and begins to climb it.] [The camera focuses on the nearer of the two robots, which is placing itself into a chrysalis hanging from the tree branch.]\n"}
{"id":1337,"title":"Hack","image_title":"Hack","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1337","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hack.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1337:_Hack","transcript":"[A black image shows an image of the ISEE-3\/ICE spacecraft in white. Text is written in white above it] The ISEE-3\/ICE probe was launched in 1978. Its mission ended in 1997 and it was sent a shutdown signal.\n[The text continues, black on white, without a frame around it, between the first frame and the next.] In 2008, we learned-to our surprise-that the probe didn't shut down. It's still running and it has plenty of fuel. ...and in 2014, its orbit brings it near earth.\n[Megan holding up one hand and Ponytail are talking to each other.] Megan: We could send it on a new mission... Megan: Except we no longer have the equipment to send commands to it. Ponytail: Can't we\u2014\n[Zoom in on Megan's head and torso as she looks towards Ponytail off-panel to the right.] Megan: NASA won't rebuild it. \"Too Expensive\" Ponytail (off-panel): Seriously? Megan: I know, right? Megan: So the internet found the specs Megan: And we went to work.\n[Megan and Ponytail are walking towards right, between Hairbun facing left and Cueball (with head phones) facing right. They are sitting at desks working on their laptops. Megan speaks, as indicated both by the story line and by her hand which is lifted up, but there is not speech line from her to the text.] Megan: We've convinced them to give us time on the Madrid DSN transmitter and hacked the maser to support the uplink. Megan: And today's the big day.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head and torso, he holds a hand up to his speaker on his head phones and watches his lit screen (as indicated by lines emanating from it).] Cueball: Transmitting... Cueball: We have a signal! Cueball: We have control!\n[Zoom in on Megan's head and torso. She has turned away from Cueball to the right towards Hairbun.] Megan: OK, transmit the new comet rendezvous maneuver sequen\u2014 Cueball (off panel): What the hell? Megan: What?\n[Same setting as when Megan and Ponytail entered the control-room, but Ponytail just stands there and Megan puts a hand out towards Cueball.] Cueball: My console went dead! Hairbun: Mine too! Megan: What's happening?!\n[Another zoom in on Cueball's head and torso and glowing screen. He has both hands down.] Cueball: There's a new signal going out over the transmitter! Megan (off panel): A bug? Cueball: Someone else is in the system!\n[Zoom in on Hairbun's head and torso. She is also working on her laptop, with the glowing screen visible.] Hairbun: Kill the connection! Cueball (off panel): I can't find it! Hairbun: They're firing the probe's engines! Cueball (off panel): No!!\n[Back to a zoom in on Cueball. He points at his screen.] Megan (off panel): Who's doing this?? Stop them! Hairbun (off panel): I'm trying! Cueball: Look! My screen!\n[Same setting as when Megan and Ponytail entered the control-room, but Ponytail has a hand to her mouth and she and Megan stand close to Cueball who has taken his hands off the keyboard. The text on Cueball's laptop screen is shown above the setting, indicated with zigzag lines:] M-E-S-S-W-I-T-H- T-H-E-B-E-S-T\nD-I-E-L-I-K-E- T-H-E-R-E-S-T\n[The last four panels is outside night scenes with a black sky above. In the first of these a woman (Burn) with long hair (Megan like) and a hairy man (Crash) is seen in a swimming pool with blue water.]\n[A zoom out reveals that the pool is on top of a skyscraper in a vertically developed, downtown setting with lots of light in all the skyscrapers, one of which is even taller than the one with the pool. From the top of the central skyscraper speech lines come which indicate that the two from the pool is up there speaking, and we get their names from this panel.] Burn: Crash? Crash: Yeah, Burn?\n[Same setting but only one speech line.] Burn: Make a wish.\n[The last panel shows the same setting, but with the spacecraft streaking across the sky as it enters the Earths atmosphere and burns up in a way that is indistinguishable from a meteoroid.]\nThe ISEE-3\/ICE probe was launched in August 12, 1978 and tasked to study Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind. Before completing its original mission the probe was repurposed on June 10, 1982 to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere. By flying through the comet Giacobini-Zinner 's tail, it became the first probe to do so. This put ISEE-3 in a heliocentric orbit . Its trajectory will bring it close to Earth on August 2014.\nThe Deep Space Network (DSN) detected the probe again in 2008 because NASA mistakenly left its transmitters on. However, the probe was only transmitting the carrier signal at that time. A status check of the spacecraft has revealed that many of its instruments are still working and that it contains plenty of fuel. [1]\nIt was reported that the hardware to communicate with ISEE-3\/ICE had been decommissioned. The Madrid DSS complex still has the special filter required to communicate with the ICE satellite, but because of frequency conflicts S-band uplink is not supported. [2]\nOn March 1 and 2, 2014 radio amateurs were able to detect the beacon signal from the retired NASA deep space probe ICE (International Cometary Explorer) using the 20\u00a0m radio telescope at the Bochum Observatory (Germany). [3]\nAfter this comic was published, it was established that an 18-meter satellite dish at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory does still have the right hardware.\nSee Space College: ISEE-3 Reboot Project Archives for the coverage of this amazing project.\n","explanation":"This comic is an imagined project to re-position the ISEE-3\/ICE probe, and a parody of the 1995 movie Hackers . The first row (four panels) explain the history of the probe, and the true story about how the probe was coming back into signal range and seemed capable of being controlled. NASA declined to attempt to regain control of the probe, but a group of enthusiasts assembles the equipment and attempts to re-purpose the probe.\nThe following two rows (eight panels) set up a fictional scenario: the enthusiasts have been locked out of the system, the probe is being controlled by someone else, and the message \"Mess with the best, die like the rest\" is communicated from the probe. This is a catch phrase of the protagonist, Crash, from Hackers .\nThe final row is a reference to the ending of the movie, where Crash romances Burn, his romantic interest, in a rooftop pool. In the movie, while Crash and Burn swim in a rooftop pool, several buildings light up with the words \"CRASH AND BURN\". This was at the end of a contest and is Crash's latest hack and romantic gesture which he indicates by saying 'Beat that!'. In the comic the transmitter being used to communicate with ISEE-3 was hacked by Burn to make the probe burn up over Crash and Burn swimming in the pool providing a \"shooting star\" for romantic effect.\nThe comic number is 1337, which stands for \"leet\", short for \"elite hacker\" and \"leetspeek\" in leetspeak . Leetspeak is a form of symbolic writing that substitutes various numbers and ASCII symbols for letters. It originates from the hacker subculture, where words were converted to leetspeek e.g. to avoid filters and triggers on chat rooms. \"1337\" for \"leet\" can most likely be explained as calculator spelling .\nThe title text \"Hack the stars\" is also an allusion to Hackers , where the phrase \"Hack the planet!\" is used on multiple occasions.\nThis project since became reality , as Randall noted in a blag post . See details below .\n[A black image shows an image of the ISEE-3\/ICE spacecraft in white. Text is written in white above it] The ISEE-3\/ICE probe was launched in 1978. Its mission ended in 1997 and it was sent a shutdown signal.\n[The text continues, black on white, without a frame around it, between the first frame and the next.] In 2008, we learned-to our surprise-that the probe didn't shut down. It's still running and it has plenty of fuel. ...and in 2014, its orbit brings it near earth.\n[Megan holding up one hand and Ponytail are talking to each other.] Megan: We could send it on a new mission... Megan: Except we no longer have the equipment to send commands to it. Ponytail: Can't we\u2014\n[Zoom in on Megan's head and torso as she looks towards Ponytail off-panel to the right.] Megan: NASA won't rebuild it. \"Too Expensive\" Ponytail (off-panel): Seriously? Megan: I know, right? Megan: So the internet found the specs Megan: And we went to work.\n[Megan and Ponytail are walking towards right, between Hairbun facing left and Cueball (with head phones) facing right. They are sitting at desks working on their laptops. Megan speaks, as indicated both by the story line and by her hand which is lifted up, but there is not speech line from her to the text.] Megan: We've convinced them to give us time on the Madrid DSN transmitter and hacked the maser to support the uplink. Megan: And today's the big day.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head and torso, he holds a hand up to his speaker on his head phones and watches his lit screen (as indicated by lines emanating from it).] Cueball: Transmitting... Cueball: We have a signal! Cueball: We have control!\n[Zoom in on Megan's head and torso. She has turned away from Cueball to the right towards Hairbun.] Megan: OK, transmit the new comet rendezvous maneuver sequen\u2014 Cueball (off panel): What the hell? Megan: What?\n[Same setting as when Megan and Ponytail entered the control-room, but Ponytail just stands there and Megan puts a hand out towards Cueball.] Cueball: My console went dead! Hairbun: Mine too! Megan: What's happening?!\n[Another zoom in on Cueball's head and torso and glowing screen. He has both hands down.] Cueball: There's a new signal going out over the transmitter! Megan (off panel): A bug? Cueball: Someone else is in the system!\n[Zoom in on Hairbun's head and torso. She is also working on her laptop, with the glowing screen visible.] Hairbun: Kill the connection! Cueball (off panel): I can't find it! Hairbun: They're firing the probe's engines! Cueball (off panel): No!!\n[Back to a zoom in on Cueball. He points at his screen.] Megan (off panel): Who's doing this?? Stop them! Hairbun (off panel): I'm trying! Cueball: Look! My screen!\n[Same setting as when Megan and Ponytail entered the control-room, but Ponytail has a hand to her mouth and she and Megan stand close to Cueball who has taken his hands off the keyboard. The text on Cueball's laptop screen is shown above the setting, indicated with zigzag lines:] M-E-S-S-W-I-T-H- T-H-E-B-E-S-T\nD-I-E-L-I-K-E- T-H-E-R-E-S-T\n[The last four panels is outside night scenes with a black sky above. In the first of these a woman (Burn) with long hair (Megan like) and a hairy man (Crash) is seen in a swimming pool with blue water.]\n[A zoom out reveals that the pool is on top of a skyscraper in a vertically developed, downtown setting with lots of light in all the skyscrapers, one of which is even taller than the one with the pool. From the top of the central skyscraper speech lines come which indicate that the two from the pool is up there speaking, and we get their names from this panel.] Burn: Crash? Crash: Yeah, Burn?\n[Same setting but only one speech line.] Burn: Make a wish.\n[The last panel shows the same setting, but with the spacecraft streaking across the sky as it enters the Earths atmosphere and burns up in a way that is indistinguishable from a meteoroid.]\nThe ISEE-3\/ICE probe was launched in August 12, 1978 and tasked to study Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind. Before completing its original mission the probe was repurposed on June 10, 1982 to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere. By flying through the comet Giacobini-Zinner 's tail, it became the first probe to do so. This put ISEE-3 in a heliocentric orbit . Its trajectory will bring it close to Earth on August 2014.\nThe Deep Space Network (DSN) detected the probe again in 2008 because NASA mistakenly left its transmitters on. However, the probe was only transmitting the carrier signal at that time. A status check of the spacecraft has revealed that many of its instruments are still working and that it contains plenty of fuel. [1]\nIt was reported that the hardware to communicate with ISEE-3\/ICE had been decommissioned. The Madrid DSS complex still has the special filter required to communicate with the ICE satellite, but because of frequency conflicts S-band uplink is not supported. [2]\nOn March 1 and 2, 2014 radio amateurs were able to detect the beacon signal from the retired NASA deep space probe ICE (International Cometary Explorer) using the 20\u00a0m radio telescope at the Bochum Observatory (Germany). [3]\nAfter this comic was published, it was established that an 18-meter satellite dish at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory does still have the right hardware.\nSee Space College: ISEE-3 Reboot Project Archives for the coverage of this amazing project.\n"}
{"id":1338,"title":"Land Mammals","image_title":"Land Mammals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1338","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/land_mammals.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1338:_Land_Mammals","transcript":"[Caption at the top of this chart:] Earth's Land Mammals by Weight\n[Below the caption is a light gray block with a label (in light gray as well) to indicating the value of each block:] = 1,000,000 tons\n[Below this there is a row with three blocks each in a different color, dark and light gray and green, each block is labeled to the right:] Humans Our pets and livestock Wild animals\n[The rest of the comic consist of a chart with different groups made up of these individually and differently colored blocks, each grouping representing the weight of a different mammals, except the center part, the only one with dark gray block, which represent humans. The largest group to the left is the only one larger than the humans group in the center. There are 22 groups in total, 1 human group with 358 dark gray block, 13 groups of light gray with a total of 864 blocks and 8 green groups with a total of 34 blocks for a total of 256 blocks. Both the light gray and the green groups are spread out on all sides of the human center group. Only difference is that all the green are on the very outside, whereas some of the smaller light gray groups are close to the core, far from the outside. The five largest groups of light gray blocks are labeled, as well as the smallest group consisting only of a single green block. All the labels has a line pointing to the relevant group and all of them are on the outside of the entire block. Going clockwise from the top left the labels are:] Cattle Pigs Goats Sheep Horses Elephants\n[At the bottom right of the comic is the following gray text with a reference:] Data from Vaclav Smil's The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change , plus a few other sources.\n","explanation":"This comic shows the total weight of mankind and all other land mammals . Only a few centuries ago, humans , their pets and livestock came to make up a great proportion of the earth's land mammal biomass . Note that only land-dwelling mammals are taken into account, so for instance whales and sea cows will not be included. (Whether this only covers animals that cannot live on land or any marine mammals like for instance seals and walrus , is not clear).\nThe design of the blocks loosely resembles a cell . This could be a reference to how these animals support humans, analogous to a cell supporting a central nucleus. If so, it seems that all the animals in this diagram, wild or domestic , in some way support human activity.\nThe title text states that bacteria outweigh us thousands to one, without counting the several pounds of bacteria in our body that are considered part of our own weight (like Gut flora ). The aforementioned cell could also be a bacterium, making it a possible reference to the title text, since 1256 blocks have been used to sketch the \"cell\", and bacteria outweigh us by about this factor.\nThis comic may be a nerd snipe from Randall , challenging his readers to figure out the missing parts.\nRandall also discusses animal biomass in Fairy Demographics in which he compares the biomass of \"fairies\" to humans, horses, and humpback whales.\nAccording to the diagram, there are 358 million tons of humans, 864 million tons of pets and livestock, of which 520 million tons comes from cattle , and 34 million tons of wild animals; for a total of 1.256 billion tons.\nThe number of blocks represents the weight of the group in millions of tons = billions of kg. Note that some entries have the same number of blocks, and thus have the same rank.\nCattle, in aggregate, are much heavier than the human population. Humans outweigh both sheep and pigs put together. This may be a surprise for people in the countries that produce the majority of meat from such animals, because here these animals outweigh the population. But there are many parts of the world where especially pigs are not eaten, and it is not every where that sheep is in great demand. And especially in the some of the most populations dense regions in the Third World meat is not something you can afford to eat on a regular basis.\nThere are 13 distinct blocks of pets and live stock; only the top 5 are labeled - in order of weight they are: Cattle, Sheep, Pigs, Goats and Horses . Cattle, in aggregate, are much heavier than the human population, which has been inserted in the table for comparison:\nThere are 8 distinct blocks of wild animal ( elephants and 7 others). The elephant is the only type of wild animal to be singled out in the comic. This may possibly be due to elephants being the largest land mammal. And yes, the world's heaviest land animal only takes up one square. Also interesting is that the largest group of wild animals only comes in on a tied 8 place in the ranking (which is shared between the two tables).\nThe comic references the book The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change by Vaclav Smil as the source for most of the data. A few other sources have also been used, but were not referenced.\nOn page 186 of Smil's book, there is a bar chart with the following values:\nNote that all labelled non-human animals are in this table. It seems that this table was the source of most of the data in the comic.  Only land dwelling mammals are taken into account. Whales, wild vertebrates, and domesticated vertebrates are not included in the comic.\nThese are guesses about the identity of the unlabeled animals\n[Caption at the top of this chart:] Earth's Land Mammals by Weight\n[Below the caption is a light gray block with a label (in light gray as well) to indicating the value of each block:] = 1,000,000 tons\n[Below this there is a row with three blocks each in a different color, dark and light gray and green, each block is labeled to the right:] Humans Our pets and livestock Wild animals\n[The rest of the comic consist of a chart with different groups made up of these individually and differently colored blocks, each grouping representing the weight of a different mammals, except the center part, the only one with dark gray block, which represent humans. The largest group to the left is the only one larger than the humans group in the center. There are 22 groups in total, 1 human group with 358 dark gray block, 13 groups of light gray with a total of 864 blocks and 8 green groups with a total of 34 blocks for a total of 256 blocks. Both the light gray and the green groups are spread out on all sides of the human center group. Only difference is that all the green are on the very outside, whereas some of the smaller light gray groups are close to the core, far from the outside. The five largest groups of light gray blocks are labeled, as well as the smallest group consisting only of a single green block. All the labels has a line pointing to the relevant group and all of them are on the outside of the entire block. Going clockwise from the top left the labels are:] Cattle Pigs Goats Sheep Horses Elephants\n[At the bottom right of the comic is the following gray text with a reference:] Data from Vaclav Smil's The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change , plus a few other sources.\n"}
{"id":1339,"title":"When You Assume","image_title":"When You Assume","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1339","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/when_you_assume.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1339:_When_You_Assume","transcript":"[Megan, standing left holding a hand up with the palm up while facing Cueball to the right.] Megan: You assumed? Megan: You know what happens when you assume- Cueball: I don't. Yet you're confidently asserting that I do. Megan: ...Oh. Hm. Cueball: Check and mate.\n","explanation":"Prior to the events in this comic, Cueball has evidently told Megan that he made an assumption about something. Megan starts to respond with a takeoff on the modern proverb: \"When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.\" This proverb plays on the fact that the word \"assume\" may be broken down into the letters \"ass\", \"u\", and \"me\", and is intended to suggest that one should not make assumptions because they may turn out to be wrong and make those involved appear foolish.\nHowever, when Megan evokes the proverb in the modified form \"You know what happens when you assume\", Cueball astutely points out that her phrasing itself is hypocritical in that it makes the assumption that he knows what happens when you assume. Megan stops to ponder Cueball's point, to which Cueball responds \" Check and Mate \": a common phrase originating from chess \u2014 suggesting triumph or having successfully countered another person's argument to which there can be no retort. However, this would not make sense unless Cueball knows that assuming is bad, and he states in the comic that he does not know what happens when someone assumes. While Megan's tone of voice implies that when someone assumes, something bad happens, she does not state this explicitly, so Cueball would have had to assume that Megan was referring to something bad. However, Megan does not point this out, likely because she is too distracted by her own shame to notice that Cueball was also making an assumption.\nCueball's response demonstrates that, in life, we make assumptions almost every time we speak. This only tends to be problematic in the few instances where the assumption is wrong.\nThe title text is a play on the original \"assume\" pun, breaking down the word \"assert\", into \"ass\" and \"ert\", with \"ERT\" being an acronym for \" Emergency Response Team \".\nThis comic follows a pattern similar to 1657: Insanity .\n[Megan, standing left holding a hand up with the palm up while facing Cueball to the right.] Megan: You assumed? Megan: You know what happens when you assume- Cueball: I don't. Yet you're confidently asserting that I do. Megan: ...Oh. Hm. Cueball: Check and mate.\n"}
{"id":1340,"title":"Unique Date","image_title":"Unique Date","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1340","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unique_date.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1340:_Unique_Date","transcript":"[Cueball speaking to Megan and another Cueball-like guy.] Cueball: Whoa, it's 2014-03-10! Cueball: Under our system, that date will never happen again!! [Caption below the frame:] My Hobby: Pointing this out every day.\n","explanation":"In this comic Cueball is excited about the current date and he states this date (the date the comic was released) as 2014-03-10, with the year first, then the month, then the day of the month. This follows the international standard as defined in the ISO 8601 standard. He then continues to point out, to Megan and another Cueball that this date will never happen again.\nThe Gregorian calendar is the current way to count time in years, months and days. Since time moves only forward, [ citation needed ] dates will never repeat. Every date is thus equally unique, even when the digits aren't in a pattern.\nMany people do, however, make a big deal about dates when the digits follow an interesting pattern, such as 2000-01-01 or 2012-12-12. They might plan special events on these \"unique\" days. For instance, 2007-07-07 was considered a \"lucky\" day and had a record number of weddings. This is because humans, in general, are superstitious [ citation needed ] and like (and recognize) patterns in everyday life, also including patterns in the numbers used for stating dates. But this does not make these dates more unique than any other dates.\nNevertheless, Cueball has made it into his hobby to point this daily uniqueness out, and having to listen to him, stating this fact every day, would be incredibly annoying to his friends.\nThe title text refers to the Long Now Foundation , who uses five-digit years (e.g. this comic's date would be written \"02014-03-10\"). This is an effort to encourage people to think in terms of long-term benefits, rather than only the coming years or decades. The Y2K problem was due to using only two digits to store the year, which would have made dates ambiguous when it rolled from 99 back to 00. Similarly, the Maya calendar had a repeating cycle of 52 years, and even their \"long count\" rolled over after 7885 years. As we currently use four-digit years this may cause a Y10K problem .\nThe Long Now Foundation designs a 10,000-year clock that should be able to run for this long \u2014 and in principle, it could display every date up to 9999-12-31. 8000 years from the date of the comic would be 10014 AD  \u2014 Randall jokes that by switching to 5-digit years, we'd prove the Long Now Foundation correct, although of course by this point there would be no other way to show years except by rebooting the calendar.\nA previous comic on date formats was 1179: ISO 8601 .  Randall addresses date formatting confusion again in the title text of 1467: Email .\n[Cueball speaking to Megan and another Cueball-like guy.] Cueball: Whoa, it's 2014-03-10! Cueball: Under our system, that date will never happen again!! [Caption below the frame:] My Hobby: Pointing this out every day.\n"}
{"id":1341,"title":"Types of Editors","image_title":"Types of Editors","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1341","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/types_of_editors.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1341:_Types_of_Editors","transcript":"[There are four panels, each with different headings and explanations of the headings above the panels.]\n[The first three panels shows two titled text boxes, one above the other, with text inside. This text is formated with both small and capital letters as opposed to all capital letters in the rest of the comic.]\n[Heading panel 1:] WYSIWYG What you see is what you get\n[Panel 1.] What you see: Hi What you get: Hi\n[Heading panel 2:] WYSINWYG What you see is not what you get\n[Panel 2.] What you see: <em>Hi<\/em> What you get: Hi\n[Heading panel 3:] WYSITUTWYG What you see is totally unrelated to what you get\n[Panel 3.] What you see: <em>Hi<\/em> What you get: The HORSE is a noble animal.\n[The fourth panel shows two titled text areas, the top is a black rectangle with white text in a very large font, and the bottom text area is not outlined with a border.]\n[Heading panel 4:] WYSIHYD What you see is how you die\n[Panel 4.] What you see: EATEN BY WOLVES What you get: Eaten by wolves\n","explanation":"WYSIWYG , pronounced, \"wizzy-wig\" IPA \/\u02c8w\u026azi\u02ccw\u026ag\/, is an acronym that stands for \"What you see is what you get\". In regards to computers, it refers to text editors in which the user can see exactly what will be published as they are typing it. The comic compares various types of editors, each one a play-on-words on WYSIWYG.\nThe title text is a fictitious command, meta -x machineofdeath-mode, to the highly extensible Emacs text editor. Emacs operates in various \"modes\", which are customizations for specific purposes. Placing Emacs into \"Machine of Death\" mode would turn it into a WYSIHYD editor. (For another fictitious emacs command see 378: Real Programmers ). See below for why this was used.\nThis is a reference to \" Machine of Death \". This book from 2010 is a collection of short stories edited by amongst other Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics ) mentioned here since the idea was based on one of his comics . Since Randall Munroe wrote one of the stories the reference is very likely, and would be Randall's first book promotion in xkcd, but not the last. All the stories are based around a device, the \"Machine of Death\", that can predict, with 100% accuracy though generally with extreme ambiguity, how people die from a drop of their blood. In many of the stories very unusual deaths are predicted, often in a very literal way, but not so you know when or where you will die. From the official home page the entire book can be downloaded for free as a PDF file . (Randall's story begins on page 421 - or page 218 of the two sided PDF file. It is simply called \"?\"). In 1525: Emojic 8 Ball the default question is How will I die? and can then be answered by an Emojic 8 Ball , which would make it a type of Machine of Death.\n[There are four panels, each with different headings and explanations of the headings above the panels.]\n[The first three panels shows two titled text boxes, one above the other, with text inside. This text is formated with both small and capital letters as opposed to all capital letters in the rest of the comic.]\n[Heading panel 1:] WYSIWYG What you see is what you get\n[Panel 1.] What you see: Hi What you get: Hi\n[Heading panel 2:] WYSINWYG What you see is not what you get\n[Panel 2.] What you see: <em>Hi<\/em> What you get: Hi\n[Heading panel 3:] WYSITUTWYG What you see is totally unrelated to what you get\n[Panel 3.] What you see: <em>Hi<\/em> What you get: The HORSE is a noble animal.\n[The fourth panel shows two titled text areas, the top is a black rectangle with white text in a very large font, and the bottom text area is not outlined with a border.]\n[Heading panel 4:] WYSIHYD What you see is how you die\n[Panel 4.] What you see: EATEN BY WOLVES What you get: Eaten by wolves\n"}
{"id":1342,"title":"Ancient Stars","image_title":"Ancient Stars","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1342","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ancient_stars.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1342:_Ancient_Stars","transcript":"All of the panels of this comic are white-on-black.\n[Megan and Cueball stand facing each other, looking up at the sky.] Cueball: Just think - the light from that star was emitted thousands of years ago. It could be long gone.\n[Cueball looks at Megan, who is still looking up.] Megan: That's Sirius. It's eight light-years away.\n[Cueball looks up again.] Cueball: Oh.\n[Both look at one another.] Cueball: Just think - the light from that star was emitted in the previous presidential administration. Megan: Hmm, doesn't pack quite the punch.\n","explanation":"Cueball makes the common observation that many of the visible stars in the sky are so distant that it takes thousands of years for light from that star to reach Earth. However, the brightest star Sirius is one of the nearest at a mere 8.6 light-years distance. In other words, the light that was arriving from Sirius in March 2014, when the comic was posted, was emitted some time around August 2005. The previous US president, George W. Bush , was in office from 2001 to 2009 and Megan notes that this isn't a terribly impressive observation.\nThe title text references the fact that most normal people have a hard time imagining the large scale of astronomical numbers. For example, the distance between astronomical bodies or the size of the Sun are hard to imagine; they typically underestimate them by many orders of magnitude and think they are much smaller than they actually are. See Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale\nIn this case, however, people instead overestimate both the number of visible stars and their distance by quite a bit. It's frequently cited that about 5,000 to 10,000 stars are visible in the sky by the naked eye. The Bright Star Catalogue is a star catalogue that lists all stars of apparent magnitude 6.5 or brighter, which is roughly every star visible to the naked eye from Earth. The catalog contains 9,110 objects, of which 9,096 are stars, ten are novae or supernovae , and four objects outside of our Milky Way (two globular clusters and two open clusters ). To see most of these you need good eyes and a very dark night, and at any point you will only be able to see fewer than half of these as the rest are blocked by the Earth.\nThis list shows the 91 brightest stars . Of these 59 are more than 100 light years away and only 6 are more than 1,000 light years away. The farthest on this list, Aludra , is \"only\" 3,200 light years away. Our entire Milky Way contains up to 400 billion (400x10\u2079) stars and has a diameter of 100,000 light years.\nThere are visible objects much farther away, like the Andromeda Galaxy which is 2.5 million light years away and made up of billions of stars. And a gamma ray burst GRB 080319B would have been briefly visible to the naked eye, despite being 7.5 billion light years distant.\nSee also 1212: Interstellar Memes , 1644: Stargazing .\nAll of the panels of this comic are white-on-black.\n[Megan and Cueball stand facing each other, looking up at the sky.] Cueball: Just think - the light from that star was emitted thousands of years ago. It could be long gone.\n[Cueball looks at Megan, who is still looking up.] Megan: That's Sirius. It's eight light-years away.\n[Cueball looks up again.] Cueball: Oh.\n[Both look at one another.] Cueball: Just think - the light from that star was emitted in the previous presidential administration. Megan: Hmm, doesn't pack quite the punch.\n"}
{"id":1343,"title":"Manuals","image_title":"Manuals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1343","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/manuals.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1343:_Manuals","transcript":"[A horizontal line has four points labeled on it, with the second point from the left marked with a dashed vertical line dividing the horizontal line into two parts.] [An arrow labeled \"Solve problems\" points left from the vertical line.] [An arrow labeled \"Create problems\" points right from the vertical line.] [The points are labeled, from left to right, \"Tools that don't need a manual\", \"Tools that need a manual\", \"Tools that need a manual but don't have one\", and \"Tools whose manual starts with 'how to read this manual'\".]\n","explanation":"The chart shows the quality of tools regarding their manual:\nThe title text refers to sudoers , a config file for the unix command sudo . sudo allows users to run a program with elevated permissions, as referenced in 149: Sandwich . Man pages are collections of manuals for different tools, commands, files, and functions on Unix-like systems which can be viewed with the tool man . You can type man man in a terminal to get the manpage for the manual program. See for instance also the comic 912: Manual Override .\nThe sudoers file specifies which users have sudo access, and which commands they are allowed to run as other users (typically root). The syntax of the file is very complex, and the manpage uses the Extended Backus\u2013Naur Form (or EBNF) to describe the syntax. The sudoers man page starts off with an explanation of EBNF's grammar, which they reference throughout the rest of the man page in describing the syntax of the sudoers file. The sudoers man page is very long, clocking in at 1504 lines. In contrast, the manpages man page only has 566 lines. The number of lines may differ between some distributions and versions.\nThe title text also notes that the manual's assurance, \"don't despair\" because \"the definitions below are annotated\", fails to be reassuring, and instead merely emphasizes the length and complexity of the document to read.\n[A horizontal line has four points labeled on it, with the second point from the left marked with a dashed vertical line dividing the horizontal line into two parts.] [An arrow labeled \"Solve problems\" points left from the vertical line.] [An arrow labeled \"Create problems\" points right from the vertical line.] [The points are labeled, from left to right, \"Tools that don't need a manual\", \"Tools that need a manual\", \"Tools that need a manual but don't have one\", and \"Tools whose manual starts with 'how to read this manual'\".]\n"}
{"id":1344,"title":"Digits","image_title":"Digits","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1344","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/digits.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1344:_Digits","transcript":"[A guy is walking and Cueball is following him.] Guy: The talk is in room 8224. Cueball: Ooh, nice. Guy: What? Cueball: ...Sorry. Nothing.\nGreat, now I'll spend the rest of my life noticing numbers that would make good 2048 combos.\n","explanation":"2048 is a popular browser-based game in which players must move tiles in a 4 by 4 grid with numbers on them. When two tiles of the same number touch they can be merged into one tile with a value of the two tiles combined. So when two 4-tiles touch and are merged they form one 8-tile. The player can move the tiles by pressing an arrow key (or swiping in a direction on the mobile version), which will move all the tiles in that direction. Every time the player makes such a move another tile will appear on a random cell. The goal of the game is to get a tile with the number 2048.\nIn the comic the room number can be seen as 4 tiles with the values 8, 2, 2 and 4. If these occur in the game the player can merge the two 2-tiles into one 4-tile. This will then cause two 4-tiles to lie next to each other, so these can be merged into one 8-tile. Finally, the two 8-tiles can be merged into one 16-tile.\n\nThis can be done in the opposite direction as well.\nThe title text refers to Tetris effect , which takes its name from the game Tetris . People who play Tetris for extended periods tend to imagine real-life objects (like skylines) as Tetris landscapes and pieces. Randall , as many others , apparently got hooked on Tetris so much when it came out that, for 20 years, he would look at city skylines and see Tetris-like patterns in it. Similarly, he has now been hooked onto 2048 and notices number patterns that would be desirable to obtain during the game.\n[A guy is walking and Cueball is following him.] Guy: The talk is in room 8224. Cueball: Ooh, nice. Guy: What? Cueball: ...Sorry. Nothing.\nGreat, now I'll spend the rest of my life noticing numbers that would make good 2048 combos.\n"}
{"id":1345,"title":"Answers","image_title":"Answers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1345","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/answers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1345:_Answers","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Humans are defined by our curiosity, our hunger for answers. Megan: We all spend a third of our lives lying down with our eyes closed and NOBODY KNOWS WHY. Cueball: Touch\u00e9.\n","explanation":"Cueball claims that humans are driven by their curiosity, which is never-ending. Megan responds by noting that everyone spends approximately eight hours per day in an unconscious state of sleep , but no one has yet pinned down the biological purpose of sleep. Despite this obvious mystery, most people aren't \"losing sleep over it.\" This implies that Cueball's observed curiosity has a perceptible and proximate limit.\nThis is not to suggest that scientists aren't researching sleep; scientists frequently conduct sleep studies \u2014 we just haven't found any satisfactory answers yet. Some popular hypotheses are to allow the brain a period to consolidate memories and to give the body a chance to repair itself.\nThe title text quotes William Dement : people sleep \"because we get sleepy.\" ( Secrets of sleep ). This of course is dodging the underlying issue. That this non-explanation is the best answer that a leading sleep researcher can provide, shows how little anyone knows about the subject. This may be an oblique reference to the dormitive principle of the French playwright Moli\u00e8re, who created a satirical character who claimed to have discovered the answer to a popular question: The reason opium makes someone sleepy, said the character, a doctor, was that it contained a \"dormitive principle\" (i.e., something that makes someone sleepy).\nIn 203: Hallucinations , Randall expressed similar surprise at the lack of interest in the nature of sleep.\nThe phrase \"and nobody knows why\" is commonly appended to urban legends, as in A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why . The implication is that something mysterious is going on and scientists are puzzled. 1186: Bumblebees is another \"nobody knows why\" example.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Humans are defined by our curiosity, our hunger for answers. Megan: We all spend a third of our lives lying down with our eyes closed and NOBODY KNOWS WHY. Cueball: Touch\u00e9.\n"}
{"id":1346,"title":"Career","image_title":"Career","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1346","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/career.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1346:_Career","transcript":"[Cueball stands facing a desk, behind which another person is sitting in a desk chair.] Cueball: It would start with five minutes of peeling lint from dryer traps, Cueball: followed by an hour of pressing a lightsaber handle against things and switching it on. Cueball: Then I'd retire to a life of luxury.\nWhen people ask me to describe my dream job, I'm never sure how realistic to be.\n","explanation":"Cueball is presumably asked to answer the typical career counselor question: What is your dream job? Rather than going with the more common answers that are designed to increase the chances of landing that particular job, Cueball talks about unrealistic jobs that are whimsical, and so well compensated that a little over one hour on the clock would provide enough wealth for a luxurious retirement; of course, you can have such a job only in your dreams. He makes jobs out of tasks that people do when they are bored, whether the tasks needed to be done or not. Therefore, if he did not get the job he probably would have done them at some point anyway.\nPeeling lint off dryer traps can relieve boredom, but it gets tedious soon, so Cueball wants to do that only for 5 minutes, followed by an hour of holding the handle of a lightsaber against things and switching it on. The energy emitted by this fictional weapon will probably burn, melt or cut the object it is touching as demonstrated in a scene from Star Wars Episode I , where Jedi Qui-Gon Jinn uses his lightsaber to cut through a wall. Later, Star Wars: The Last Jedi turned out to demonstrate a lightsaber being placed against something before being switched on-- on the head of a Praetorian Guard. Obviously, it would be impossible to find a job like this, let alone one with a salary allowing one to retire to a life of luxury. [ citation needed ] However, Cueball thinks he will not only be paid to do it, he will be paid enough to retire to a life of luxury .\nThe title text is poking fun at Hollywood films, particularly stories about violent professions (like mobsters, hitmen, detective or spies) where the hero is retired, but some unforeseen circumstance has forced them out of retirement to do \" one last job .\" Usually in these films, the jobs are overtly, improbably dangerous, often with the suggestion that they may lose their lives doing it, but the reward for doing the job (saving the world, a ton of cash, an unresolved debt) is just too great to refuse. However, in this comic the joke is that his \"one last job\" is also a mildly amusing task designed to relieve boredom.\nAn alternative explanation may be that these activities are very sensationally unique and satisfying for certain types of people, such as those with autism, and that this dream job is simply getting paid absurd amounts of money for something they wanted to do anyway.\n[Cueball stands facing a desk, behind which another person is sitting in a desk chair.] Cueball: It would start with five minutes of peeling lint from dryer traps, Cueball: followed by an hour of pressing a lightsaber handle against things and switching it on. Cueball: Then I'd retire to a life of luxury.\nWhen people ask me to describe my dream job, I'm never sure how realistic to be.\n"}
{"id":1347,"title":"t Distribution","image_title":"t Distribution","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1347","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/t_distribution.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1347:_t_Distribution","transcript":"[A physical bell-curve-shaped object labeled \"Student's t distribution\" is resting on a table. Cueball is working with it and a piece of paper.] Cueball: hmm [Cueball looks at the piece of paper.] Cueball: ...nope. [Cueball picks up the object and begins to walk off the panel with it.] [Cueball comes back onto the panel, now carrying an object shaped like a much more complex curve, with many symmetric spikes and dips, labeled \"Teacher's t distribution\".]\n","explanation":"The Student's t-distribution is a class of probability distribution used in statistics to model small sample sizes. \"Student\" was the pseudonym of William Sealy Gosset , an employee of Guinness Brewery who discovered it.\nA Student's t distribution is similar to a normal symmetric bell curve distribution, but has \"fatter tails\"; thus, the one shown in the comic is roughly the right shape.  A \"Teacher's\" t-distribution is a joke (pun) made up by Randall.\nThe comic is a play on the name \"Student\", the pseudonym of the creator, versus the \"Teacher\". The idea is that a \"teacher's\" distribution would be more complex, and that it would be used for fitting data when the student's distribution wasn't sophisticated enough. Of course, in actuality, such a complex distribution as the one shown in the comic would have many parameters, and in practice would probably lead to overfitting and\/or bias. Thus, the comic (and the title text) can be seen as making fun of the idea that more complex is always better, or perhaps of the idea that a statistician's job is to use more and more sophisticated tools to force the data to yield a \"publishable\" result, rather than to use the simplest appropriate tool and let the chips fall where they may.\nCueball tries to \"fit\" a distribution to the data on the paper. This is the usual jargon for when a statistician is trying to model their data as coming from some underlying probability distribution, and the comic makes a pun with the physical meaning of \"fit\". In the second panel, Cueball decides that the Student's T distribution does not fit his data well (the data failed the Student t-test), and decides to pull out the more complex Teachers t-distribution instead (the teachers t-test - which the data is not allowed to continue to fail). Note that \"test\" is what statisticians do to data to see if it fits some distribution, but it is also another word for \"examination.\"\nThe Students t distribution relates the average of a small sample to the \"true\" population average, under the assumptions, unobjectionable in many contexts, that there is such a \"true\" value, and that the samples are independent and normally distributed with equal variance. As such, unless the data on Cueball's paper contain many small groups which radically violate these assumptions somehow, there is no way Cueball's data could falsify the t distribution. In particular, a single number (for the average of one group) or a small set of numbers (for the averages of several numbers) will never make a nice smooth curve, but an average statistician would see that as normal statistical noise that would even out over time, not as a reason to prefer a complex, spiky curve such as the supposed \"teacher's\" distribution. But of course, Cueball's access to a secret, cooler-looking distribution makes them more badass than a mere average statistician... or does it?\nIronically, the Teacher's T Distribution shows equal variance, itself proving the appropriateness of the Student's T Distribution.\nThe title text plays on the word \"test\". The first part of the sentence refers to a potential \"Teacher t-test\" which would be used in a statistical context to test for the significance of some observation, as opposed to the real \"Student's t-test\" which is used to determine if two sets of data differ by a statistically significant amount. On the other hand, the second part of the sentence refers to the possibility for students to take tests (or exams) until they pass - or to teachers who forces students to take the test again and again until they pass. The resulting sentence may refer to statistical fallacy, or the (conscious or unconscious) action of manipulating observations or misconducting experiments to give statistical significance to a false fact.\n[A physical bell-curve-shaped object labeled \"Student's t distribution\" is resting on a table. Cueball is working with it and a piece of paper.] Cueball: hmm [Cueball looks at the piece of paper.] Cueball: ...nope. [Cueball picks up the object and begins to walk off the panel with it.] [Cueball comes back onto the panel, now carrying an object shaped like a much more complex curve, with many symmetric spikes and dips, labeled \"Teacher's t distribution\".]\n"}
{"id":1348,"title":"Before the Internet","image_title":"Before the Internet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1348","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/before_the_internet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1348:_Before_the_Internet","transcript":"[Young girl talking to Megan, both holding smartphones.] Girl: Do you remember before the internet? Megan: Oh yeah, totally. Girl: what was it like? Megan: Not having a phone or computer to distract you? Girl: Yeah. Megan: It was SO. BORING. All the time. I just sat there. It was the worst. Girl: But wasn't it, like, more fulfilling? Engaging? Megan: Wasn't worth it. Girl: I still get bored. Megan: Not like we did.","explanation":"A young Ponytail asks Megan what life was like before the Internet. The girl obviously was born after the Internet was invented. Megan responds that life was very boring without computers or mobile phones. This comic appears to be a parody of the common complaint \u2014 often done by elder people \u2014 that life was better and more fulfilling in the \"good old days\", in that there weren't so many distractions and people could actually get things done that were meaningful. The ages switch roles with the younger character being prepared to believe that life was more fulfilling before technology, and the elder rejecting the proposition.\nTo Megan, even a more fulfilling and engaging life \"wasn't worth\" the price of what it meant to be bored in the days before smartphones and computers that could go online. Even though the ponytail girl says that she still experiences boredom in spite of having advanced technology to occupy her, Megan assures her that her version of boredom is nothing like what those in the pre-Internet days had to endure. Again, this is a reversal of the typical exchange in which a young person tries to insist that they still have social contact\/get out and about\/do worthwhile things in their spare time, and the elder person responds, \"Not like we did.\"\nThe title text continues in this vein as Megan talks about what people in her day resorted to doing when they were bored, for lack of anything better to do: they watched daytime TV . Daytime television consisted mainly of soap operas, talk shows, game shows, infomercials and children's programming and is notorious for being, in Megan's words, \"soul-crushing\". To round off the comparison, Megan uses a modern-day metaphor to express her extreme distaste for daytime television, saying that she would rather \"eat an iPad\" than go through that again. In other words, modern-day gadgets are so much better that she'd still have more fun if she were eating them than if she had to go without them. Alternatively, it could be to emphasize how unpleasant daytime TV is; eating an iPad would likely be unpleasant (e.g. it is too large to easily be swallowed whole and too hard to easily be bitten into parts), and it could poison her or give her an internal electrical or battery fire. Saying that she would rather eat an iPad would also be a powerful statement because Megan would not be able to watch movies, play games, read the news, etc\u2026 on that iPad after eating it (although she could just buy another iPad\u2014at least if she survives the battery of the iPad that she ate leaking and\/or exploding and other hazards associated with eating an iPad).\nMegan might just be responding with the opposite of what she's expected to say in this dialogue in order to mess with the younger girl. In reality, life was neither likely to be noticeably more fulfilling or noticeably more boring without technology: it was just life. People are equally capable of wasting their time and of doing worthwhile things regardless of what age they live in, and those who wax nostalgic about an older, better time are liable to forget that. This recalls the Hedonic treadmill theory which states that people will always be at roughly the same level of happiness regardless of positive or negative events or technological advances in civilization.\n[Young girl talking to Megan, both holding smartphones.] Girl: Do you remember before the internet? Megan: Oh yeah, totally. Girl: what was it like? Megan: Not having a phone or computer to distract you? Girl: Yeah. Megan: It was SO. BORING. All the time. I just sat there. It was the worst. Girl: But wasn't it, like, more fulfilling? Engaging? Megan: Wasn't worth it. Girl: I still get bored. Megan: Not like we did."}
{"id":1349,"title":"Shouldn't Be Hard","image_title":"Shouldn't Be Hard","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1349","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/shouldnt_be_hard.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1349:_Shouldn%27t_Be_Hard","transcript":"[Cueball is typing on a laptop.] Cueball: What I'm trying to do is really simple. Cueball: It shouldn't be hard.\nOffscreen: All computers are just carefully organized sand. Everything is hard until someone makes it easy.\n[Cueball sits back and pauses.]\n[Cueball picks up and examines the laptop.] Cueball: Maybe I should turn this one back into sand. Offscreen: I'll find a blowtorch.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to a sentiment sometimes expressed by computer users that \"what I'm trying to do is really simple \u2014 it shouldn't be hard.\"  The statement demonstrates an assumption that because the desired action is conceptually simple, it must therefore be simple to implement. There is a logic to this line of thinking, but in reality, as the off-screen character notes, a computer is a very complicated set of components which effectively can't do anything (simple or complex) until someone has programmed the functionality into it. Even more abstractly, a random silicon crystal can't do anything at all until someone has applied a complex industrial process to it that allows it to read and execute computer code in the first place.\nIn terms of a user-interface, the \"simplicity\" of executing a given task may be more a function of the perceived utility and frequency-of-use of that function, and less a function of its conceptual \"simplicity\". For example, changing the colour of the font in a word processor is often simpler than changing the colour of the background\/page, even though changing colours of two parts of the document would appear equally \"simple\" in concept. The different implementation is a design choice by the programmer most likely on the basis that the intended user is considered more likely to want to change the font colour than to change the page colour.\nThis sentiment equally applies to computer programmers: most commonly when they are just beginning to learn a new computer language. Sometimes because of difficulties with the syntax rules of the language or similar problems, a programmer may spend a long time trying to get the computer to do a simple action, such as display a message on the screen, or ask the user for a number. This is also true when a programmer is working in a language which doesn't have an easy way to do something that might be simple in another language. And in computer science, it may often be very hard to differentiate the almost impossible from the easy , especially when compared to what humans can and can't do easily.\nThe off-screen character points out that computers were \"just carefully organized sand\". Modern computer chips are made largely of silicon crystals, chemically a part of silicon dioxide crystals that compose the majority of sand. The character puts Cueball's goal in perspective by pointing out the large amount of complexity required to make, what is essentially sand, do even the simplest of computational tasks.\nThe punchline of the comic is that, after considering these words of wisdom for a panel, instead of the anticipated response of Cueball coming to the realization that the off-screen character is right, and working even harder to solve his problem, Cueball instead succumbs to his annoyance and sets out to destroy his computer (which he characterizes as turning it \" back into sand\"). The off-screen character helpfully offers to get a blowtorch so that Cueball can melt the computer down into simple compounds and elements.\nThe title text sees Cueball again frustrated with a task he considers \"simple\" (destroying the computer). Cueball appears to be oblivious to the irony in his statement that he is having trouble destroying something with household tools that required very large machines and an industrial process to create. This might be compared to trying to undo a steel weld by lighting a wooden match and trying to melt the weld with it. This points out the irony that destroying the processor is even harder to do than the task from the first picture.\nThe melting point of silicon is 1,414\u00a0\u00b0C. Although a typical butane blowtorch that might be found in a kitchen has a maximum temperature of 1,430\u00a0\u00b0C, that temperature is at a very small point and rapidly cools. Hence it is unlikely that you could focus sufficient heat with a kitchen appliance blowtorch to actually melt silicon.\nThe apparently simple task Cueball is trying to complete may express Randall's frustration in the creation of the crowd-sourced comic 1350: Lorenz , which was launched the next day and initially contained a large number of bugs.\n[Cueball is typing on a laptop.] Cueball: What I'm trying to do is really simple. Cueball: It shouldn't be hard.\nOffscreen: All computers are just carefully organized sand. Everything is hard until someone makes it easy.\n[Cueball sits back and pauses.]\n[Cueball picks up and examines the laptop.] Cueball: Maybe I should turn this one back into sand. Offscreen: I'll find a blowtorch.\n"}
{"id":1350,"title":"Lorenz","image_title":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1350","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/shouldnt_be_hard.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1350:_Lorenz","transcript":"[This transcript only transcribes what can be seen in the picture shown at the top of the explanation here.]\n[The comic starts with two panels. In the top panel we see Knit Cap sitting at a desk in front of her laptop typing. There is a speech line up to a gray but empty speech bubble.] [The second panel below has the same gray background as the empty speech bubble above. Here is presented four options to what Knit Cap could be saying. They are marked a, b, c and d written in small white rectangles next to the text. There is a small arrow at the top pointing to the first panel:]\na Hurry! We're in talks with Facebook. b These stupid tiles... I'll just play one more game. c Refresh... No new email... Refresh... No new tweets... Refresh... d Oh. Hey. There's some kind of political thing going on.\n[Once the reader chooses one of the options, the text will appear in the speech bubble where the gray area is replaced with the usual white background. The lower gray panel disappears. Now the comic really begins.] [A new panel is shown after the selection, again with one to four options to choose from in the new gray panel below. This will continue until it comes to an end where the reader finally only has the choice to suggest the next line.]\n[The order of the up to four options are random, and changes every time you begin again (or even go back to a previous frame). This means that the a\u2013d in the transcript is not the same next time. In some few panels there are even more than four options. To see the fifth you have to reload, then you may find this fifth option next time. The first panel is one of those with five options.] [The fifth not shown above is: Let's see if BSD is any easier to install nowadays. (see image with this option in the trivia section ).]\n[In the first days of the comic, when it developed quickly, new options appeared only to later disappear. Gravity. Lots of it. is one of those lost options from the first panel. At one time there was also, by mistake, two versions of one of the other five mentioned above. This was later deleted. Below in the trivia section there are permalinks to all the different starting options, including the now lost gravity story.]\n[Although it may be impossible to finish (?), there has been an attempt to make a complete interactive transcript .]\nThe reader is initially presented with only one panel, where Knit Cap is sitting in front of her computer. The reader is given multiple choices concerning what exactly Knit Cap is thinking. Upon choosing any option, the chosen text will appear where his gray speech bubble was (which will disappear), and then a second panel appears to the right to give continuity to the story. Each new panel may have a new set of options, or just the button \"Continue\", to see the next panel without making any choice in particular. Eventually, one reaches a dead end in which the story is interrupted, and the reader is presented with a text box to suggest how it should continue. Some of the suggestions given should eventually become available as new options.\nNormally, there are a total of 4 options to make: a\/b\/c\/d. Their order changes constantly. Sometimes, there are 3 or fewer options, with the text box to suggest an alternative option. Sometimes, a given panel actually has 5 or more available options, although even in this case only 4 options appear at a time. Refreshing the comic changes randomly which of the available options are visible and which are hidden. As of late April 2014, the existence of 5 options seems to occur only in a few rare cases, including the first panel itself. There seem to be no longer any panels that have six options.\nInstead of clicking with the mouse, you can move more quickly through the panels using the keyboard:\nIt appeared that new panels were generated by Randall in near real time, as user suggestions to dialog were submitted around the release of the comic.\nThis text can (now) be found under the official transcript at xkcd:\nThe dialog options could be based on click-through rates, and hence will change over time based on which choices are clicked most using A\/B measurement techniques . This will mean that the most popular choices for dialog lines will prevail as the statistics build up. In some cases, dialog line options do not depend on the continuity of the storyline followed, suggesting that some parts of the story are planned. For example, several of the story lines involve one of the two main characters waking up and, for instance, telling the other character, \"I had the strangest dream...\" or even reliving the dream. This may be due to common submissions across story lines. Of course, there is the other option that Randall has used the first week of April to look though some input and choose himself. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Some of the options that were there very early were in quite poor English. Later, the same idea was still there, but in a more refined sentence. However, after the first week or two, no new panels seemed to appear, which suggests that some were drawn to match the story's progression.\nA \" permalink \" is a portmanteau of \"permanent-link\". Each panel has a \"permalink\" button which generates a unique URL for all the choices made by the reader \u2014 so a reader can save the chosen choices to compare them to other ways going through the selections. The permalinks do only save the chosen options, not the order or the visible options in the image where the permalink is recorded, so it is not possible to save a copy where the options are only in the same order as they are in the 1\/120 version shown at the top. Also, if you go back in the story from a permalink, you can risk that when passing back through a panel with five options, the option you just got back from is no longer available; as it is the option randomly not shown this time.\nSometimes it is possible to add your own suggestions in a panel where there are still other choices, but, if not before, the story will always reach a \"final\" panel (dead-end) where the reader only has the option left to \"suggest a line...\" By doing so, and pressing enter, this text is then shown in the speech bubble \u2014 but these suggestions can't be saved, as there are no permalink buttons after this. The reader has to do a screenshot in order to save their own remark. After a few weeks had progressed, there were probably so few new suggestions that Randall stopped changing the comic. A few images have been found months (or even more than a year) after the release, but there has been little to no reason to believe that Randall continued to make new panels after the first few weeks of April. Maybe he returned occasionally to do one once in a while; but, for certain, the options and text continue to evolve.\nSince this interactive comic relies on many servers in the background to provide the response to the reader's actions, there are some problems reported here:\nAs a consequence of these bugs, many readers had trouble understanding how this interactive comic worked.\nThere used to be a sixth option: \"Gravity. Lots of it.\" However, it no longer appears.\n\n\n\n\n","explanation":"This was the fifth April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous April fools' comic was 1193: Externalities from Monday April 1st 2013. The next was 1506: xkcloud released on Wednesday April 1st 2015. This comic was posted a day earlier than normal (on Tuesday instead of Wednesday) to honor April Fools' Day of 2014.\nThis is an interactive and dynamic comic similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series , where players flip to different pages based on the option they chose. The first picture shown on top of this page is the start of this comic, with a possible combination of text options to choose from (see above). The picture is always the same but the order of the four sentences (and the sentences themselves) is chosen randomly (and there can be more than four). The result of all the interactions by the readers led to the generation of crowd-sourced content .\nThe title 'Lorenz' is referring to Edward Norton Lorenz who, among other subjects, was famous for Chaos theory and the Butterfly effect (mentioned later in the title text of 1519: Venus ). This comic is an example of a Choose Your Own Adventure story, as mentioned in the title text.\nThe title text is also a reference to how the storyline of this comic will be chaotic by nature, since it includes all of the user submitted dialogue and updates over time based on statistics of user clicks. In this manner, it is a reference to the butterfly effect: a phrase coined by Edward Lorenz to describe how a small initial change can lead to wide variations in outcome in a chaotic system.\nEvery time a story comes to a point where the user can either choose something or contribute when asked to Suggest a line , a link will appear by hovering the mouse over the bottom right corner of the last image. This is named a permalink , as it is a link that will recreate this particular story up to the point, making it permanent. It will not save the options listed below that image (i.e. the order of these will change, new options may appear, either because more than four are already present or new options will be added and some options may even disappear). An option is thus only saved by choosing it and then saving the next permalink \u2014 see more below .\nThe best way to enjoy this comic is to try it yourself! If you didn't do that already, reading any below will spoil you from truly enjoying the comic, and maybe make some interesting discoveries yourself! So here is a spoiler alert if you read on. If you do, then see also the section below about Functionality and bugs .\nAny particular storyline will typically only have one or two of the many themes possible in the comic, but some very long stories may have several: see the Record section below. Several of the themes refer to previous comics or generally recurring themes in xkcd. (Most obviously is the blowtorch theme which is a reference to the previous comic 1349: Shouldn't Be Hard , where the last comment is I'll find a blowtorch as a response to Cueball's frustration over his problems.)\nBecause it is not always ending as \"well\" as with a burnt PC, they might instead end up in a shark infested ocean \u2014 see the Ocean theme , which is a reference to 349: Success : a comic that came exactly 1000 comics before the other one referenced in the same computer problem theme. In that comic, the sharks had not appeared yet; but here there may be several (and sharks are also a recurring topic in xkcd).\nThese issues with computers is generally a reference to the computer problem themes that precedes both the burning of the laptop and the ocean storylines, as Knit Cap tries to install BSD ; and when it fails, she takes her friend Hairy with her in the fall, the water, space or into a Pok\u00e9mon fight (as they are the two main character of this comic). Also Cueball (as a politician vs. another politician with hair) and White Hat have small appearances, but only in a small sections of particular storyline. Only few others interact directly with the main characters in the rest of the possible stories.\nOther themes that are recurring in xkcd are Politics , Pok\u00e9mon , Boomerangs and Dinosaurs . Dinosaurs enter the comic in the form of the green talking T-rex from Dinosaur Comics : a clip-art-based webcomic that uses the same artwork with different captions for every strip. This particular Dinosaur Comics has a title text that actually refer to Randall and xkcd, and the comic has previously appeared on xkcd in 145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics .\nA way to combine more than one storyline is to let characters wake up from a dream or a nightmare, as can be see in the Dreams theme (and dreams are also a recurring topic ). Here, it can even get recursive, so there can be dreams within dreams. One of the way to wake from a dream is, of course, by encountering a dinosaur that tries to step on your house (with you inside). Another is in reference to the possible rocket trip that may take the characters into space: see the Space theme (another recurring topic ).\nThere are a few other topics that are covered by Randall himself, but many others will be referenced in the text in the comic. However, since most of the options the users have is in itself created by user input (including naming the characters different names), any reference made by the text is not considered part of Randall's work and thus only sporadically be mentioned below under the themes section and not be included as a category. Here is an example with a permalink where the last comment, in the ocean with a shark, references Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared less than a month before this comic was released [and has yet to be found years later]. But this is a user input, not Randall's.\nSome of the idea of this comic was used again in the next year's April Fools' comic 1506: xkcloud , where user input also generated a very complex comic and the concept of permalink was used again.\nThis comic was the first time that Knit Cap has a main part to play. Since this comic, she has been given a category as a supporting character in xkcd, but in most other comics knit cap is seen as a man. The name knit cap for his hat has also been debated .\n[This transcript only transcribes what can be seen in the picture shown at the top of the explanation here.]\n[The comic starts with two panels. In the top panel we see Knit Cap sitting at a desk in front of her laptop typing. There is a speech line up to a gray but empty speech bubble.] [The second panel below has the same gray background as the empty speech bubble above. Here is presented four options to what Knit Cap could be saying. They are marked a, b, c and d written in small white rectangles next to the text. There is a small arrow at the top pointing to the first panel:]\na Hurry! We're in talks with Facebook. b These stupid tiles... I'll just play one more game. c Refresh... No new email... Refresh... No new tweets... Refresh... d Oh. Hey. There's some kind of political thing going on.\n[Once the reader chooses one of the options, the text will appear in the speech bubble where the gray area is replaced with the usual white background. The lower gray panel disappears. Now the comic really begins.] [A new panel is shown after the selection, again with one to four options to choose from in the new gray panel below. This will continue until it comes to an end where the reader finally only has the choice to suggest the next line.]\n[The order of the up to four options are random, and changes every time you begin again (or even go back to a previous frame). This means that the a\u2013d in the transcript is not the same next time. In some few panels there are even more than four options. To see the fifth you have to reload, then you may find this fifth option next time. The first panel is one of those with five options.] [The fifth not shown above is: Let's see if BSD is any easier to install nowadays. (see image with this option in the trivia section ).]\n[In the first days of the comic, when it developed quickly, new options appeared only to later disappear. Gravity. Lots of it. is one of those lost options from the first panel. At one time there was also, by mistake, two versions of one of the other five mentioned above. This was later deleted. Below in the trivia section there are permalinks to all the different starting options, including the now lost gravity story.]\n[Although it may be impossible to finish (?), there has been an attempt to make a complete interactive transcript .]\nThe reader is initially presented with only one panel, where Knit Cap is sitting in front of her computer. The reader is given multiple choices concerning what exactly Knit Cap is thinking. Upon choosing any option, the chosen text will appear where his gray speech bubble was (which will disappear), and then a second panel appears to the right to give continuity to the story. Each new panel may have a new set of options, or just the button \"Continue\", to see the next panel without making any choice in particular. Eventually, one reaches a dead end in which the story is interrupted, and the reader is presented with a text box to suggest how it should continue. Some of the suggestions given should eventually become available as new options.\nNormally, there are a total of 4 options to make: a\/b\/c\/d. Their order changes constantly. Sometimes, there are 3 or fewer options, with the text box to suggest an alternative option. Sometimes, a given panel actually has 5 or more available options, although even in this case only 4 options appear at a time. Refreshing the comic changes randomly which of the available options are visible and which are hidden. As of late April 2014, the existence of 5 options seems to occur only in a few rare cases, including the first panel itself. There seem to be no longer any panels that have six options.\nInstead of clicking with the mouse, you can move more quickly through the panels using the keyboard:\nIt appeared that new panels were generated by Randall in near real time, as user suggestions to dialog were submitted around the release of the comic.\nThis text can (now) be found under the official transcript at xkcd:\nThe dialog options could be based on click-through rates, and hence will change over time based on which choices are clicked most using A\/B measurement techniques . This will mean that the most popular choices for dialog lines will prevail as the statistics build up. In some cases, dialog line options do not depend on the continuity of the storyline followed, suggesting that some parts of the story are planned. For example, several of the story lines involve one of the two main characters waking up and, for instance, telling the other character, \"I had the strangest dream...\" or even reliving the dream. This may be due to common submissions across story lines. Of course, there is the other option that Randall has used the first week of April to look though some input and choose himself. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Some of the options that were there very early were in quite poor English. Later, the same idea was still there, but in a more refined sentence. However, after the first week or two, no new panels seemed to appear, which suggests that some were drawn to match the story's progression.\nA \" permalink \" is a portmanteau of \"permanent-link\". Each panel has a \"permalink\" button which generates a unique URL for all the choices made by the reader \u2014 so a reader can save the chosen choices to compare them to other ways going through the selections. The permalinks do only save the chosen options, not the order or the visible options in the image where the permalink is recorded, so it is not possible to save a copy where the options are only in the same order as they are in the 1\/120 version shown at the top. Also, if you go back in the story from a permalink, you can risk that when passing back through a panel with five options, the option you just got back from is no longer available; as it is the option randomly not shown this time.\nSometimes it is possible to add your own suggestions in a panel where there are still other choices, but, if not before, the story will always reach a \"final\" panel (dead-end) where the reader only has the option left to \"suggest a line...\" By doing so, and pressing enter, this text is then shown in the speech bubble \u2014 but these suggestions can't be saved, as there are no permalink buttons after this. The reader has to do a screenshot in order to save their own remark. After a few weeks had progressed, there were probably so few new suggestions that Randall stopped changing the comic. A few images have been found months (or even more than a year) after the release, but there has been little to no reason to believe that Randall continued to make new panels after the first few weeks of April. Maybe he returned occasionally to do one once in a while; but, for certain, the options and text continue to evolve.\nSince this interactive comic relies on many servers in the background to provide the response to the reader's actions, there are some problems reported here:\nAs a consequence of these bugs, many readers had trouble understanding how this interactive comic worked.\nThere used to be a sixth option: \"Gravity. Lots of it.\" However, it no longer appears.\n\n\n\n\n"}
{"id":1351,"title":"Metamaterials","image_title":"Metamaterials","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1351","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/metamaterials.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1351:_Metamaterials","transcript":"[An image of a violet that is colored red.] Megan (off-screen): Violets are red [An image of a rose that is colored blue.] Megan (off-screen): And roses are blue [Megan and Cueball are standing around a table, on which a screen is in front of the rose and violet. Megan is in front of a lectern with a mic. All of this is on a stage.] Megan: When metamaterials [Same scene, but Megan moves the screen away from in front of the rose and violet. It is revealed that the flowers' actual colors are those from the original poem, i.e. the violet is blue and the rose is red.] Megan: Alter their hue.\n","explanation":"Metamaterials , artificially-created structures typically made from several materials in a microscopic checkerboard pattern, are famous for allowing bizarre optical properties, such as invisibility cloaks . This comic imagines that metamaterials can change the color of light passing through them.\nIn the real world a metamaterial can alter the spatial distribution of light and also its frequency, like done in fluorescent lamps \u2014 but this would not resemble the entire picture in a different color. In photography many filters are used to enhance the quality and appearance of the image. These filters do not alter colors but block some of them, so the result is shown in a different color than the original. Nevertheless, no application like this is able to switch a single color to another as it can be done by most modern computer photo programs.\nMegan uses a box made of her metamaterial to switch the colors of the clich\u00e9 Valentine's Day poem, \" Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you. \"\nThe title text references this with Randall pondering making a metamaterial that reverses the effect of instagram filters, likely by placing the material between the camera and the subject just before the picture is taken without the photographer noticing - a so-called photobombing . Instagram is a photo application that applies one of a variety of filters like hue-shift or contrast adjustments meant to simulate the look of old photographs. These filters may be able to interchange blue and red - as they are not real material filters.\n[An image of a violet that is colored red.] Megan (off-screen): Violets are red [An image of a rose that is colored blue.] Megan (off-screen): And roses are blue [Megan and Cueball are standing around a table, on which a screen is in front of the rose and violet. Megan is in front of a lectern with a mic. All of this is on a stage.] Megan: When metamaterials [Same scene, but Megan moves the screen away from in front of the rose and violet. It is revealed that the flowers' actual colors are those from the original poem, i.e. the violet is blue and the rose is red.] Megan: Alter their hue.\n"}
{"id":1352,"title":"Cosmologist on a Tire Swing","image_title":"Cosmologist on a Tire Swing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1352","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cosmologist_on_a_tire_swing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1352:_Cosmologist_on_a_Tire_Swing","transcript":"[A tall panel with Cueball and Science Girl walking together through a landscape with three trees in the background and with many small pools of water. Their reflection is showing in the pool nearest to them.] Science Girl: What was before the big bang? Cueball: I think time began with the big bang. Cueball: So it doesn't make sense to ask what came before it. Cosmologist (off panel): Look out\n[The next six panels are between the first tall panel and a similar panel at the end. They should be read from above and down in two columns of three images. The bottom of the first panel at the top is partly hidden by the second panel which is likewise partly hidden by the lower panel, and this repeats in the second column.] [A cosmologist looking like Megan comes swinging left past Science Girl and Cueball, who turns to look after her. She sit on an upstanding tire swing and the movement is indicated by two lines going from right to left.} Cosmologist: Wheeee Hi I'm a cosmologist on a tire swing!\n[The cosmologist swings back right, hanging in her arms with her body almost vertical. The other two also turns right.] Cosmologist: We don't know whether time\n[Going left, similar to the first of the small panels.] Cosmologist: started at the big bang.\n[Going right, similar to the second of the small panels, but with the cosmologist sitting more upright.] Cosmologist: It might have!\n[Going left, similar to the first of the small panels.] Cosmologist: Or maybe not! We don't know! Cueball: Oh. OK!\n[Going right, similar to previous going right panels.] Science Girl: ...Your tire swing looks fun! Cosmologist: I can't stop!\n[The last panel is again a full panel, with Cueball and Science Girl looking towards the right after the cosmologist who continued the last swing to the right from the last small panel, having just reach the upper part of the curve and has thus turned left to face them, before the swing will go down left again. The background is completely white with no indications of the trees and pools from the first panel.] Science Girl: Won't the swing stop on its own? Cosmologist: I thought it would, but it seems to be accelerating. Science Girl: Cosmology sounds pretty confusing. Cosmologist: Wheeeee!\n","explanation":"Cueball and the curious Science Girl walk through a landscape with trees in the background and with many small pools of water. The setting of trees interspersed with these many small pools resembles the Wood between the Worlds , a meta-verse described in C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew ; each pool leads into a different universe \u2014 one of these is ours, another is Narnia , and Charn (the world of Jadis the White Witch ) is also visited through these pools.\nScience Girl asks about the time before the Big Bang . Cueball says he thinks there was no time before \u2014 which is implied by most forms of the Big Bang theory. But then they happen upon a cosmologist , Megan , on a swing who has several other theories about the universe.\nSimply put, the tire swing is a symbolic representation of our universe. Scientific observations tell us that both space and time began with the Big Bang ~13.8 billion years ago. We don't know if there was such a thing as \"before\" the universe, or what that might be.\nThe first 6 panels reference ongoing speculation about where the universe came from and why it even exists in the first place. The last two panels relate to recent observations of the accelerating universe in which galaxies are now receding from each other at higher and higher speeds, due to dark energy .\nThe swing itself is likely a reference to the Cyclic Model , where the universe expands from a Big Bang, then contracts back in on itself under its own gravity for a Big Crunch , before bouncing outward again in another Big Bang, and repeating the whole process. On the other hand, the swing is accelerating as the universe \u2014 so it may also be a reference to the entire universe. We are all \"trapped\" on this swing \u2014 and it's accelerating! For the layman (and most scientists as well) cosmology is pretty confusing as Science Girl states at the end, to which the cosmologist just replies Wheeeee! and enjoys her ride with this accelerating swing\/universe.\nAnother interpretation of the acceleration may referring to the physics of orbital motion in which a centrifugal force is always causing constant acceleration toward the center of the motion.\nThe title text references questions about the shape of the universe and what could lie \"outside\" of it. By the current understanding on physics laws, we can't see outside of the observable universe , but it's likely that the universe is bigger than this observable universe and uniform on large scale. Even though nobody can leave our own universe, Megan bets that such unknown worlds do exist - because this universe is here, and it must have come from somewhere \u2014 like her tire.\nThe shape of our universe was visited soon after in 1365: Inflation where we can see what the outer boundaries of our universe looks like.\nScience Girl is seen later in conjunction with a tire swing in 1659: Tire Swing ; maybe she is preparing to become a cosmologist herself. Also this may explain from where the tire came from...\n[A tall panel with Cueball and Science Girl walking together through a landscape with three trees in the background and with many small pools of water. Their reflection is showing in the pool nearest to them.] Science Girl: What was before the big bang? Cueball: I think time began with the big bang. Cueball: So it doesn't make sense to ask what came before it. Cosmologist (off panel): Look out\n[The next six panels are between the first tall panel and a similar panel at the end. They should be read from above and down in two columns of three images. The bottom of the first panel at the top is partly hidden by the second panel which is likewise partly hidden by the lower panel, and this repeats in the second column.] [A cosmologist looking like Megan comes swinging left past Science Girl and Cueball, who turns to look after her. She sit on an upstanding tire swing and the movement is indicated by two lines going from right to left.} Cosmologist: Wheeee Hi I'm a cosmologist on a tire swing!\n[The cosmologist swings back right, hanging in her arms with her body almost vertical. The other two also turns right.] Cosmologist: We don't know whether time\n[Going left, similar to the first of the small panels.] Cosmologist: started at the big bang.\n[Going right, similar to the second of the small panels, but with the cosmologist sitting more upright.] Cosmologist: It might have!\n[Going left, similar to the first of the small panels.] Cosmologist: Or maybe not! We don't know! Cueball: Oh. OK!\n[Going right, similar to previous going right panels.] Science Girl: ...Your tire swing looks fun! Cosmologist: I can't stop!\n[The last panel is again a full panel, with Cueball and Science Girl looking towards the right after the cosmologist who continued the last swing to the right from the last small panel, having just reach the upper part of the curve and has thus turned left to face them, before the swing will go down left again. The background is completely white with no indications of the trees and pools from the first panel.] Science Girl: Won't the swing stop on its own? Cosmologist: I thought it would, but it seems to be accelerating. Science Girl: Cosmology sounds pretty confusing. Cosmologist: Wheeeee!\n"}
{"id":1353,"title":"Heartbleed","image_title":"Heartbleed","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1353","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/heartbleed.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1353:_Heartbleed","transcript":"Megan: Heartbleed must be the worst web security lapse ever. Cueball: Worst so far. Give us time.\nMegan: I mean, this bug isn't just broken encryption. Megan: It lets website visitors make a server dispense random memory contents.\nMegan: It's not just keys. It's traffic data. Emails. Passwords. Erotic fanfiction. Cueball: Is everything compromised?\nMegan: Well, the attack is limited to data stored in computer memory. Cueball: So paper is safe. And clay tablets. Megan: Our imaginations, too. Cueball: See, we'll be fine.\n","explanation":"The Heartbleed bug refers to a critical bug in the OpenSSL cryptographic library. This bug was publicly revealed on Monday, 7 April 2014. Due to a programming error in OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f \u2014 meaning the bug had existed for two years \u2014 attackers could read random server memory by sending specially prepared HeartbeatRequest messages to an affected server.\nOpenSSL is a very commonly used library to implement SSL\/TLS , a cryptographic protocol not only used to secure web traffic but also for mail clients and much more. Only the user and the server can read the communication. On the web the protocol is https:\/\/ (HTTP Secure), instead of the open http:\/\/ standard. SSL is often used to protect sensitive web traffic, such as login requests, which contains the user names and passwords in the requests. The server sends a certificate to the browser before the secure connection is established. If the certificate is registered the browser accepts it automatically, otherwise the user gets a popup to accept or reject this insecure certificate.\nA vulnerability that lets an attacker read random clumps of memory on the server would possibly let an attacker find recent username\/password requests, allowing them to gain unauthorized access to user accounts. Even worse, this vulnerability could read the server's private key, enabling anyone to impersonate the server and\/or decrypt any future traffic that relies on that key, and any previously-obtained prior traffic also, unless a \"perfect forward secrecy\" cipher is used. Furthermore, the Heartbleed exploit occurs during the handshake phase of setting up a connection, so no traces of it are logged, i.e. you can be attacked and never be the wiser.\nMore information is available at heartbleed.com or under the reference CVE-2014-0160 at nvd.nist.gov .\nIn the last panel, Megan interprets Cueball's question (\"is everything compromised?\") expansively. She responds that, being a computer bug, Heartbleed can only affect information which is stored on computers. Cueball concludes that information recorded in analog media, such as that written on paper or etched in clay tablets, is safe. Megan adds that imaginations are also unaffected by Heartbleed, and Cueball is reassured. The reader may wonder how our society would fare in the face of the leakage of all electronically stored private information, but having our imaginations intact is certainly reassuring.\nThe title text cites the Tears in rain soliloquy , the dying words of the replicant and main antagonist Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer ) in the 1982 film Blade Runner , implying that the 64KiB HeartBleed buffer is so complete it includes memories from replicant brains. This is ironic as in the soliloquy, Roy Batty stated \"All those moments will be lost in time\".\nThe title text also suggests to patch OpenSSL oneself, which might refer to the patched version of OpenSSL by Debian, which turned out to be vulnerable in 2008, and was the topic of 424: Security Holes .\nIn addition to the below, see xkcd's explanation in the next comic.\nTransport Layer Security (TLS), the successor to SSL , is a protocol that provides end-to-end encryption for data transmitted over the internet, and is described in RFC 5246 . The Heartbeat extension to TLS introduced in 2012 (described in RFC 6520 ) provides a protocol for keeping an encrypted TLS session alive (preventing inactivity timeouts), so you do not have to do a costly TLS handshake with the server for subsequent transfer of information.\nThe Heartbeat protocol involves the client sending a packet with an arbitrary payload (often a random 16 to 32 byte number) that the server periodically sends back to the client to tell the client that the TLS session is still alive. When the client sends the packet to a vulnerable version of OpenSSL, the OpenSSL server reads a payload_size from the header sent by the client. This is a 2-byte number (0 to 0xffff=65535) that is supposed to describe the size of the payload. The OpenSSL library writes the payload to memory, but it does not check that the size of the payload written to memory matches the payload_size taken from the client's header. When the vulnerable server sends back the Heartbeat KeepAlive response to the client, it will readout payload_size number of bytes and send them back to the client. If you send a payload that is actually 16 bytes, but claims it is 0xffff bytes you will read the next 64KiB of memory of the vulnerable process starting from wherever the payload was written. An attacker can repeat this attack many times and can do this attack early in the TLS handshake, so the attack will not in any way be logged unless they are logging every incoming packet which is not typical and would result in many passwords being logged. As private keys often have an identifiable format, it is often possible for an attacker to find the private TLS key, so if they eavesdrop on network traffic they can decrypt and\/or alter it.  For more detailed information see: 1 , 2 , 3 .\nIt is worth noting that modern operating systems use a virtual memory abstraction above physical memory. This means every process can only access memory assigned to it, so it would be impossible for a vulnerable web server to read memory assigned to another process (like a text editor that has erotic fan fiction stored to memory) on the same computer. For more info, see: 4 .\nIt also should be noted that this heartbleed bug only affects certain versions of OpenSSL, and does not affect other TLS\/SSL implementations, or OpenSSH which does not even use the TLS protocol, but uses the SSH-2 protocol (described in RFC 4251 ). SSH is typically used for remote logins on unix and linux computers.\nVulnerable sysadmins need to update to a patched version of OpenSSL or one with the Heartbeats disabled. Unless their TLS keys were protected by hardware, they probably also need to revoke their old TLS keys, and generate new TLS keys. To learn how to do this visit Leo Green . There you will find all the information you need.\nUsers of vulnerable systems should change their passwords after the sysadmins have revoked their old key and issued new ones (as their passwords may have been compromised). Users can check whether a given website is vulnerable via a Heartbleed test also available as open source . The Lastpass heartbleed diagnostic also indicates whether the signature on the TLS key predates the publication of the heartbleed vulnerability.\nThe vulnerable commit was introduced Dec 31st, 2011 by Robin Seggelmann, the first co-author of the heartbeats RFC, and went live when OpenSSL version 1.0.1 was released on 2012-03-14 and the vulnerability was widely announced 2014-04-07.\nMegan: Heartbleed must be the worst web security lapse ever. Cueball: Worst so far. Give us time.\nMegan: I mean, this bug isn't just broken encryption. Megan: It lets website visitors make a server dispense random memory contents.\nMegan: It's not just keys. It's traffic data. Emails. Passwords. Erotic fanfiction. Cueball: Is everything compromised?\nMegan: Well, the attack is limited to data stored in computer memory. Cueball: So paper is safe. And clay tablets. Megan: Our imaginations, too. Cueball: See, we'll be fine.\n"}
{"id":1354,"title":"Heartbleed Explanation","image_title":"Heartbleed Explanation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1354","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/heartbleed_explanation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1354:_Heartbleed_Explanation","transcript":"[Caption above the panels:] How the Heartbleed Bug works:\n[Meg, a girl with more curly hair than Megan, stands to the left in a panel. At the center of the panel is a black and gray server with red and green diode lights showing. During all six panels the server stays the same. Meg is standing with her arms down in four panels. It will be noted when she does not. Meg talks to the server. The server \"thinks\" all the time, i.e. we see its memory in all panels. The top and bottom line is breaking the edge of the thought bubble making it difficult to discern. In every second panel it replies to Meg. In these panels the number of letters requested by Meg is highlighted with yellow color.]\n[Meg speaks, server thinks:] Meg: Server, are you still there? If so, reply \"POTATO\" (6 letters). Server thinking: wants pages about \"boats\". User Erica requests secure connection using key \"4538538374224\" User Meg wants these 6 letters: POTATO. User Ada wants pages about \"irl games\". Unlocking secure records with master key 5130985733435. Maggie (chrome user) sends this message: \"Hi\n[Server thinks, the same as above, although cut a little different at the edges, with POTATO highlighted in yellow and it replies the highlighted part in a rectangular speak bubble.] Server thinking: wants pages about \"boats\". User Erica requests secure connection using key \"4538538374224\" User Meg wants these 6 letters: POTATO. User Ada wants pages about \"irl games\". Unlocking secure records with master key 5130985733435. Maggie (chrome user) sends this message: \"Hi Server: POTATO\n[Meg speaks, server thinks:] Meg: Server, are you still there? If so, reply \"BIRD\" (4 letters). Server thinking: User Olivia from London wants pages about \"man bees in car why\". Note: Files for IP 375.381.283.17 are in \/tmp\/files-3843. User Meg wants these 4 letters: BIRD. There are currently 348 connections open. User Brendan uploaded the file selfie.jpg (contents: 834ba962e2ceb9ff89bd3bff8c ...\n[Server thinks, the same as above, although cut a little different at the edges, with BIRD highlighted in yellow and it replies the highlighted part in a rectangular speak bubble. Meg has taken her hand to her chin thinking:]\nServer thinking: User Olivia from London wants pages about \"man bees in car why\". Note: Files for IP 375.381.283.17 are in \/tmp\/files-3843. User Meg wants these 4 letters: BIRD. There are currently 348 connections open. User Brendan uploaded the file selfie.jpg (contents: 834ba962e2ceb9ff89bd3bff8c ... Server: BIRD Meg: Hmm...\n[Meg has taken her hand down again and speaks, server thinks, now with her line at the top:]\nMeg: Server, are you still there? If so, reply \"HAT\" (500 letters). Server memory: a connection. Jake requested pictures of deer. User Meg wants these 500 letters: HAT. Lucas requests the \"missed connections\" page. Eve (administrator) wants to set server's master key to \"14835038534\". Isabel wants pages about \"snakes but not too long\". User Karen wants to change account password to \"CoHoBaSt\". User\n[Server thinks, the same as above, although cut a little different at the edges, with everything from (and including) \"HAT\" highlighted in yellow and it replies the highlighted part and even more in a rectangular speak bubble. Meg has taken a note book and a pen and it writing something.:]\nServer memory: a connection. Jake requested pictures of deer. User Meg wants these 500 letters: HAT. Lucas requests the \"missed connections\" page. Eve (administrator) wants to set server's master key to \"14835038534\". Isabel wants pages about \"snakes but not too long\". User Karen wants to change account password to \"CoHoBaSt\". User Server: HAT. Lucas requests the \"missed connections\" page. Eve (administrator) wants to set server's key to \"14835038534\". Isabel wants pages about \"snakes but not too long\". User Karen wants to change account password to \"CoHoBaSt\". User Amber requests pages\n","explanation":"The Heartbleed bug has received a lot of news coverage recently and was also the topic of the previous comic 1353: Heartbleed . This comic explains how the bug may have been discovered and can be exploited to reveal a server's memory contents.\nA Megan -like character named Margaret (or \"Meg\") sends heartbeat requests to the server, the server responds to the heartbeat request by returning the contents of the body of the request up to the number of letters requested. The first two requests are well formed, requesting exactly the number of characters in the request body. The server's memory is showing Meg's request with many other requests going on at the same time.\nMeg then ponders this and tries to another request asking for \"HAT\" but requests that it be 500 letters long instead of only 3; the server \u2014not checking it or simply unaware that 500 letters is larger than the request body\u2014 returns \"HAT\" plus 497 letters that happened to be next to the word \"HAT\" in its memory (more will follow than are shown in the server's speak bubble as there are only 251 letters\/symbols in the shown reply). Included are many sensitive bits of information, including a master key and user passwords. One of the passwords shown is \"CoHoBaSt\", a reference to 936: Password Strength , which suggests using \" co rrect ho rse ba ttery st aple\" as a password.\nOften popular explanations of security bugs require the issue to be simplified a lot and to leave out a lot of details. In this case Randall didn't have to do much simplifying; the bug is actually that simple. Also, it should be noted that any client which can connect to the server typically can exploit this bug in the underlying OpenSSL software \u2014 the use of the term \"User Meg\" does not imply that Meg had to authenticate first.\nAlthough Randall shows Meg recording the data by hand, on paper, it is more likely that a person exploiting the bug would have a computer record the data, perhaps on its hard drive or on a flash drive.\nThe title text is a reference to Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. , a novel by Judy Blume , and plays off of the \"server, are you still there?\" line in every panel where she did start a request. The novel is the theme of another comic 1544: Margaret too. Meg can be a nickname for Margaret as well as Megan who Margaret resembles.\n[Caption above the panels:] How the Heartbleed Bug works:\n[Meg, a girl with more curly hair than Megan, stands to the left in a panel. At the center of the panel is a black and gray server with red and green diode lights showing. During all six panels the server stays the same. Meg is standing with her arms down in four panels. It will be noted when she does not. Meg talks to the server. The server \"thinks\" all the time, i.e. we see its memory in all panels. The top and bottom line is breaking the edge of the thought bubble making it difficult to discern. In every second panel it replies to Meg. In these panels the number of letters requested by Meg is highlighted with yellow color.]\n[Meg speaks, server thinks:] Meg: Server, are you still there? If so, reply \"POTATO\" (6 letters). Server thinking: wants pages about \"boats\". User Erica requests secure connection using key \"4538538374224\" User Meg wants these 6 letters: POTATO. User Ada wants pages about \"irl games\". Unlocking secure records with master key 5130985733435. Maggie (chrome user) sends this message: \"Hi\n[Server thinks, the same as above, although cut a little different at the edges, with POTATO highlighted in yellow and it replies the highlighted part in a rectangular speak bubble.] Server thinking: wants pages about \"boats\". User Erica requests secure connection using key \"4538538374224\" User Meg wants these 6 letters: POTATO. User Ada wants pages about \"irl games\". Unlocking secure records with master key 5130985733435. Maggie (chrome user) sends this message: \"Hi Server: POTATO\n[Meg speaks, server thinks:] Meg: Server, are you still there? If so, reply \"BIRD\" (4 letters). Server thinking: User Olivia from London wants pages about \"man bees in car why\". Note: Files for IP 375.381.283.17 are in \/tmp\/files-3843. User Meg wants these 4 letters: BIRD. There are currently 348 connections open. User Brendan uploaded the file selfie.jpg (contents: 834ba962e2ceb9ff89bd3bff8c ...\n[Server thinks, the same as above, although cut a little different at the edges, with BIRD highlighted in yellow and it replies the highlighted part in a rectangular speak bubble. Meg has taken her hand to her chin thinking:]\nServer thinking: User Olivia from London wants pages about \"man bees in car why\". Note: Files for IP 375.381.283.17 are in \/tmp\/files-3843. User Meg wants these 4 letters: BIRD. There are currently 348 connections open. User Brendan uploaded the file selfie.jpg (contents: 834ba962e2ceb9ff89bd3bff8c ... Server: BIRD Meg: Hmm...\n[Meg has taken her hand down again and speaks, server thinks, now with her line at the top:]\nMeg: Server, are you still there? If so, reply \"HAT\" (500 letters). Server memory: a connection. Jake requested pictures of deer. User Meg wants these 500 letters: HAT. Lucas requests the \"missed connections\" page. Eve (administrator) wants to set server's master key to \"14835038534\". Isabel wants pages about \"snakes but not too long\". User Karen wants to change account password to \"CoHoBaSt\". User\n[Server thinks, the same as above, although cut a little different at the edges, with everything from (and including) \"HAT\" highlighted in yellow and it replies the highlighted part and even more in a rectangular speak bubble. Meg has taken a note book and a pen and it writing something.:]\nServer memory: a connection. Jake requested pictures of deer. User Meg wants these 500 letters: HAT. Lucas requests the \"missed connections\" page. Eve (administrator) wants to set server's master key to \"14835038534\". Isabel wants pages about \"snakes but not too long\". User Karen wants to change account password to \"CoHoBaSt\". User Server: HAT. Lucas requests the \"missed connections\" page. Eve (administrator) wants to set server's key to \"14835038534\". Isabel wants pages about \"snakes but not too long\". User Karen wants to change account password to \"CoHoBaSt\". User Amber requests pages\n"}
{"id":1355,"title":"Airplane Message","image_title":"Airplane Message","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1355","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/airplane_message.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1355:_Airplane_Message","transcript":"[There is a plane with a banner behind.] Banner: Adriamycin, one of our most potent chemotherapy drugs, comes from the dirt from an Italian castle.\nMy hobby: Breaking into airplane hangars and replacing the ads on their giant banners with cool facts.","explanation":"Large banners are sometimes flown behind airplanes to advertise a product or event to a large number of people. Here, Randall suggests replacing the ad with some interesting facts. This would tell people who see the banner something new and interesting about the world, rather than try to sell them something. He presents two possible facts: Adriamycin , a cancer therapy, and Iry-Hor , the earliest human we know by name.\nThe chemotherapy drug doxorubicin , trade name Adriamycin, is based on a strain of the bacterium Streptomyces peucetius , first isolated from a soil sample taken at Castel del Monte in Andria , Italy.\nAs mentioned at the title text Iry-Hor was an ancient, predynastic pharaoh of ancient Egypt \u2014 no earlier documents exist today.\nThis fact is also placed at exactly 3100 BC (or BCE ) in 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline . The week after that comic came out improving cancer research was the subject of 1736: Manhattan Project . That became the first cancer related comic since this one, even though more than two years had passed and with cancer being a recurring subject on xkcd... It could be a coincidence, but seems strange that both facts were directly\/indirectly referenced within two weeks more than two years later, and there is even a banner in the cancer comic...\n[There is a plane with a banner behind.] Banner: Adriamycin, one of our most potent chemotherapy drugs, comes from the dirt from an Italian castle.\nMy hobby: Breaking into airplane hangars and replacing the ads on their giant banners with cool facts."}
{"id":1356,"title":"Orbital Mechanics","image_title":"Orbital Mechanics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1356","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/orbital_mechanics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1356:_Orbital_Mechanics","transcript":"How Well I Understand Orbital Mechanics: [There is a graph with the x-axis labeled as 'time' increasing to the right. The y-axis is unlabeled but it can be assumed that it could be labeled 'understanding'.] The line stays flat until the first bump, which is annotated \"Took High School Physics\". The line decreases, then grows to a higher maximum with the annotation \"Got Physics Degree\". There is a small amount of decrease until a gradual bump in the graph labeled \"Actual Job At NASA\". It gradually decreases to pre-NASA levels, but then begins to increase exponentially. The annotation reads \"Started Playing Kerbal Space Program\".\n","explanation":"Randall roughly plots how high school physics, undergraduate-level physics and a job at NASA somewhat increased his knowledge of orbital mechanics . But this learning was apparently nothing compared to the \"direct\" experience of playing Kerbal Space Program , a rocket building and piloting sandbox game .\nOrbital mechanics can be somewhat counterintuitive. The art of changing orbits involves relative velocities, positions, and times in complex interactions. As soon as you try deviating from a perfectly regular orbit, or start having to deal with N-body problems and orbital resonances , you have to coordinate your movements in possibly counterintuitive ways. One example is that if you want to reach an object ahead of you, on the same orbit, you actually have to 'brake' to reach a lower orbit. Once at that lower orbit, your angular velocity is faster, and you can start to overtake your target. After that manoeuver, you then have to accelerate to increase your orbital altitude again, which will end up reducing your angular speed so that you intercept your target.\nAt the title text Randall admits that at the time when he did work at NASA he was not involved in orbital mechanics\u2014which is also true for most other NASA employees\u2014but everybody was talking about this which in the end did increase his knowledge a little, as can be seen in the curve after the Job at NASA arrow.\nHow Well I Understand Orbital Mechanics: [There is a graph with the x-axis labeled as 'time' increasing to the right. The y-axis is unlabeled but it can be assumed that it could be labeled 'understanding'.] The line stays flat until the first bump, which is annotated \"Took High School Physics\". The line decreases, then grows to a higher maximum with the annotation \"Got Physics Degree\". There is a small amount of decrease until a gradual bump in the graph labeled \"Actual Job At NASA\". It gradually decreases to pre-NASA levels, but then begins to increase exponentially. The annotation reads \"Started Playing Kerbal Space Program\".\n"}
{"id":1357,"title":"Free Speech","image_title":"Free Speech","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1357","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/free_speech.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1357:_Free_Speech","transcript":"Cueball: Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say.\nCueball: It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it.\nCueball: The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences.\nCueball: If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated.\nCueball: It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole,\n[A picture of a partially open door is displayed.] Cueball: And they're showing you the door.\n","explanation":"Both on the Internet and in the physical world, people with unpopular or poorly thought out opinions may complain that their freedom of speech is being restricted because others express their distaste for those opinions. As a defense, these individuals may invoke the First Amendment to the United States Constitution , which provides, among other things, freedom of speech for any entity or person under legal jurisdiction of the U.S. More specifically, it states that \"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press\". Originally intended as a restriction on the powers of U.S. federal government, which the Constitution defines, structures, and delimits, over time the First Amendment, as well as several others, were \"incorporated\" via the Fourteenth Amendment to apply to state and local governments as well. This protection of free speech, however, does not extend to illegal activities (for example, the concept of a \"clear and present danger\"), and it does not compel others to listen to or acknowledge the speech. The intended targets of the speech may simply choose to stop listening, or to speak louder in protest.\nAn example of this is the incident involving the TV program Duck Dynasty in December 2013, in which television network A+E Networks suspended the host after he made homophobic remarks , causing some to comment that his rights had been infringed upon. Similarly in April 2014 controversy erupted when Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla because it was revealed he had donated money to anti-gay marriage efforts in California. In actuality, the First Amendment was never meant to provide immunity from any and all consequences.\nCueball , representing Randall , is addressing those who use the freedom of speech argument as a defense against societal censorship. He states that one\u2019s legal right to take a stance on an issue does not require others to listen to said stance. In addition, he also states that this right does not require a commercial or social entity\u2014such as a TV network, a website, or its community\u2014to support a person in spreading their message, even if it had supported you in the past. If someone says something which others find unjustified or offensive, they should be ready to accept the consequences of others' responses.\nThe title text points out that regardless of how free speech works, anyone appealing to it as a defense for their argument or opinion is not being persuasive in any case. If the only thing that someone can say in support of an argument is effectively that it is not illegal , then they are severely undermining it by essentially admitting that they don't have any better defense for it.\nIt should be noted that the first panel of this comic conflates, under certain schools of thought about justice and rights, a right such as free speech and the legal protections of such. Many viewpoints consider rights to be granted by the government; others consider rights to be innate regardless of what the government does. The former is frequently reflected throughout governments in Europe while the latter is more common throughout the Americas. According to the former, the first panel is technically correct by definition, because the right of free speech is granted by the government's laws and, as such, can only affect the government's influence: thus, the 1st Amendment grants the right to free speech, which by definition cannot be restricted by congress. According to the latter, the first panel is strictly nonfactual because the 1st Amendment only recognizes that the right of free speech exists and, rather than delimiting the right, it instead proscribes the government's actions. However, between these two school of thought, the remaining panels aren't affected by whether or not the first panel is factual by definition.\nCueball: Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say.\nCueball: It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it.\nCueball: The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences.\nCueball: If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated.\nCueball: It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole,\n[A picture of a partially open door is displayed.] Cueball: And they're showing you the door.\n"}
{"id":1358,"title":"NRO","image_title":"NRO","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1358","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nro.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1358:_NRO","transcript":"Cueball and a friend are in a remote area. The friend is holding a Where's Waldo? book towards the sky. Laptop: [ Target located ] Cueball: Got him. Left edge, two inches down. The National Reconnaissance Office has an unusual approach to Where's Waldo .\n","explanation":"Where's Waldo? (the North American renaming of the British Where's Wally? ) is a children's puzzle book in which you have to locate 'Waldo', a character with a distinctive striped shirt and hat, in a picture crowded with hundreds of characters. This is harder than it sounds, since the characters are both very small and quite densely packed on the page, and the pages (especially in later books) are often littered with \"decoy\" characters wearing similar articles of clothing to Waldo's. In some cases, almost all characters as well as several objects have the red-and-white stripes.\nCueball and his friend are using satellite imaging to find Waldo, by holding the book up to the sky and viewing it on the computer, presumably using some advanced image processing software to identify Waldo among the crowd. This would require a very advanced camera, as resolutions are usually much lower than would be necessary to resolve the characters in a Where's Waldo book. But since Cueball works at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the US government agency responsible for operating spy satellites, he probably has access to some powerful satellite-mounted cameras.\nThe humor in this being, while he could be using that power for much more important things, he's instead trying to solve a simple game. Further, the Cueballs could probably hook up the image parsing software to a smaller camera on the ground, rather than a satellite-mounted camera. They would get even better results without using a camera by scanning the image and running it through the same image processing software.\nThe title text is implying that the Cueball operating the computer has accidentally launched a drone at the co-ordinates, which would be where he and his friend are standing. The drone is presumably a military drone armed with explosive weaponry \u2014 not a good thing for those on the receiving end.\nCueball and a friend are in a remote area. The friend is holding a Where's Waldo? book towards the sky. Laptop: [ Target located ] Cueball: Got him. Left edge, two inches down. The National Reconnaissance Office has an unusual approach to Where's Waldo .\n"}
{"id":1359,"title":"Phone Alarm","image_title":"Phone Alarm","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1359","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/phone_alarm.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1359:_Phone_Alarm","transcript":"[A flowchart:]\n[Alarm goes off] \u2192 [Beep beep beep beep!] \u21ba One line with an arrow goes back to: [Beep beep beep beep!] \u2192 Another line goes to: [\"???\"] \u2192 Then: [Answer phone in dream] \u2192 [Talk] \u2192 [Hang up] \u2192 Finally a line goes back to: [Beep beep beep beep!]\nMy problem with phone alarms\n","explanation":"The flowchart shows a problem Randall has with using alarms built into phones. Notably, that the sound is similar to a normal ring tone (probably related to 479: Tones ), making it sound like someone is calling him, and not waking him up. This results in him having a false awakening , where he dreams about answering the phone, talking, and eventually hanging up. Of course this doesn't stop the actual phone from ringing, and he ends up answering the phone again. The looping arrow around the \"beep beep\" box implies that the phone keeps ringing only until he attempts to answer it, which would be quite a coincidence. This is an example of an endless loop , where there is no given way for the flowchart to end, just as in 1195: Flowchart . Now, smartphones typically support customization of tones for different apps so that your alarm doesn't have to sound like your ringtone and many apps load their own distinctive tone now by default.\nThe title text, consisting of Randall shouting at the phone in his dream, enforces the fact that he can't tell between his ringtone and his alarm. In doing so he believes that a prank caller is harassing him which infuriates him. Alternatively, \"the worst person in the world\" could just refer to the confused logic in dreams, where a caller could, inexplicably yet unquestionably, be the worst person in the world.\nA list of all the flowchart comics can be found here .\n[A flowchart:]\n[Alarm goes off] \u2192 [Beep beep beep beep!] \u21ba One line with an arrow goes back to: [Beep beep beep beep!] \u2192 Another line goes to: [\"???\"] \u2192 Then: [Answer phone in dream] \u2192 [Talk] \u2192 [Hang up] \u2192 Finally a line goes back to: [Beep beep beep beep!]\nMy problem with phone alarms\n"}
{"id":1360,"title":"Old Files","image_title":"Old Files","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1360","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/old_files.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1360:_Old_Files","transcript":"[Cross-sectional view of what look vaguely like stratigraphic layers underground. A crevice leads down through these concentric layers to a cave-like cavity in the middle, where Cueball is going through the deepest, most central, and incidentally smallest of the files. Above, Megan stands at \"ground level\", looking down into the crevice.]\nMegan: You OK down there?\nDocuments (47 GB) misc.txt Video projects Old desktop (12 GB) Facebook pics Pics from other camera Temp Misc PDFs MP3 Recovered from drive crash (4 GB) Temp Work misc Audio books My Documents (570 MB) Downloads Kazaa shared AYB EV Override Angband GIFs FIGHT CLUB.wmv Elasto Mania AIM Direct Connect files 4chan ICQ logs High school Zip disk (94 MB) Korn MIDI Photos3 (Prom) lovenote.txt Gorilla.bas Dream.txt James.txt AOL (Citadel) QBasic NYET Jokes.txt AAAFILES (9.4 MB) TXT (850 K) Cueball (deep inside the AAAFILES section looking at his txt files): Oh my god. I wrote poetry .\n","explanation":"This comic came out the day after Sky News published the story of original Andy Warhol artwork, created in 1985 on an Amiga 1000 , which was recovered from recently found floppy disks.\nCueball is shown literally digging through a pile of old files; which is a metaphor for looking through old files on his computer. The layers of the pile are arranged much like geological rock formations where older strata are deeper down than younger layers. The files are in concentric layers because each directory is embedded in the previous directory. Therefore, the \"Documents\" folder contains an \"Old Desktop\" folder, which contains a folder with files recovered from an older system, which itself contains a \"My Documents\" folder, which contains a folder with files copied from a Zip Disk from high school. The result is that files from high school have survived in his present-day machine. These older folders serve as a time capsule of sorts, storing old files from AOL , NYET, and Kazaa . These files are meant to be analogous to the fossils and artifacts found in lower, older rock layers.\nThe sizes of the files decrease as Cueball goes deeper, since data storage has gotten cheaper over time. When the Zip Drive first came out, it cost $200 USD (plus $20 per 100 MB floppy). As of 2019, $200 could buy you at least an 8 TB portable external hard drive. In the 1990s, during AOL's heyday, 10+ GB hard drives were prohibitively expensive and a terabyte of data was unimaginable to most users.\nDeep down, Cueball discovers several files he is surprised about, including a poetry file which embarrasses him as he does not remember writing poetry.\nIn the title text, he mentions also finding an \" Animorphs Novel\", which may be a text copy of one of the original books or a fan fiction of the Animorphs series (his reaction of quickly eradicating it may either be to prevent him being caught with a presumably-illegal copy of an Animorphs book or as a result of embarrassment at his fan fiction - the former is less likely than the latter considering some of the other files mentioned, so it is most likely a fan fiction). The series was released between 1996 and 2001, consistent with the fact that these files were created during Cueball\/ Randall's high school years. The series was extremely popular at the time. Animorphs has already been mentioned in the title text of 1187: Aspect Ratio , and later it was the main joke in 1380: Manual for Civilization and 1817: Incognito Mode .\nThe folders and files in detail:\nDocuments (47 GB): A large folder containing many of Cueball 's personal files.\nOld desktop (12 GB): A backup from a former computer.\nRecovered from drive crash (4 GB): When a hard drive crashes, some or all data may be recovered.\nMy Documents (570 MB): Windows XP user accounts came with a \"My Documents\" folder that was widely used for storing personal files. The items in this archive came from the era when Windows XP was popular.\nHigh school Zip disk (94 MB): The most popular form of superfloppy , introduced in 1994 with a capacity of 100 MB.\nAAAFILES (9.4 MB): Some of Cueball 's oldest documents, likely prefixed with \"AAA\" to put the folder at the top of an alphabetically-sorted list.\nTXT (850 K): Old text files, which include poetry he didn't remember writing.\n[Cross-sectional view of what look vaguely like stratigraphic layers underground. A crevice leads down through these concentric layers to a cave-like cavity in the middle, where Cueball is going through the deepest, most central, and incidentally smallest of the files. Above, Megan stands at \"ground level\", looking down into the crevice.]\nMegan: You OK down there?\nDocuments (47 GB) misc.txt Video projects Old desktop (12 GB) Facebook pics Pics from other camera Temp Misc PDFs MP3 Recovered from drive crash (4 GB) Temp Work misc Audio books My Documents (570 MB) Downloads Kazaa shared AYB EV Override Angband GIFs FIGHT CLUB.wmv Elasto Mania AIM Direct Connect files 4chan ICQ logs High school Zip disk (94 MB) Korn MIDI Photos3 (Prom) lovenote.txt Gorilla.bas Dream.txt James.txt AOL (Citadel) QBasic NYET Jokes.txt AAAFILES (9.4 MB) TXT (850 K) Cueball (deep inside the AAAFILES section looking at his txt files): Oh my god. I wrote poetry .\n"}
{"id":1361,"title":"Google Announcement","image_title":"Google Announcement","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1361","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/google_announcement.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1361:_Google_Announcement","transcript":"[Cueball is standing at a lectern marked Google.] Cueball: The rumors are true. Google will be shutting down Plus\u2014 Cueball: Along with Hangouts, Photos, Voice, Docs, Drive, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Android, and Search\u2014 Cueball: To focus on our core project: Cueball: The 8.8.8.8 DNS Server.\n","explanation":"At the time of this comic's release, Vic Gundotra had recently left Google . Because he was the head of Google+ , this had caused many people, including TechCrunch , to theorize that Google+ was going to be shut down, despite the continuing comments from Google that it would remain active and updated. It lasted five more years, finally being closed on April 2nd, 2019.\nGoogle has a history of closing popular services .\nThe comic extrapolates this to an announcement that Google would be closing all its popular services, up to and including its e-mail service, Gmail, and even the core business of the company, its Internet search engine, to wholly concentrate on a relatively obscure part of its product lineup. According to Google, its Public DNS servers (Domain Name System servers), better known by their IPv4 addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 , are supposed to be a faster alternative to using one's ISP's DNS servers (because of caching effects due to a large user base), as well as less susceptible to censorship. When Turkey started blocking access to Twitter and YouTube in March 2014, Turkish ISPs first did this on the DNS level by manipulating the results from their own name servers. The most popular workaround was using Google's DNS server instead, so much so that its address was written as graffiti on the side of a building .\nThe joke may also be related to the fact that 8.8.8.8 is an IP address heavily used by network administrators to perform connectivity tests ( ping ) because it is easy to remember and fast to type. Google would want to concentrate on this feature to build a business model using that fact.\nThe reason behind this decision may be that Google considers a DNS server, a fairly low-level component of the Internet's service stack, to be the optimal place to collect information on its users, an accusation leveled at Google ever since it introduced the service.\nThe title text refers to the impression held by some that Google will shut down services that prove less popular than desired at short notice, even though they may in fact have a significant user base. A recent example of that is the closure of the RSS aggregation service, Google Reader, in July 2013. While the same DNS service is provided under both addresses, the more memorable 8.8.8.8 is likely to receive far more requests than 8.8.4.4.\n[Cueball is standing at a lectern marked Google.] Cueball: The rumors are true. Google will be shutting down Plus\u2014 Cueball: Along with Hangouts, Photos, Voice, Docs, Drive, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Android, and Search\u2014 Cueball: To focus on our core project: Cueball: The 8.8.8.8 DNS Server.\n"}
{"id":1362,"title":"Morse Code","image_title":"Morse Code","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1362","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/morse_code.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1362:_Morse_Code","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are lying in a grassy, lonely plain.]\nCueball: When the French navy retired morse code in 1997, they broadcast a final message: \"Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.\"\nCueball: I wonder if I can find my Livejournal login. Megan: Hey, I like Livejournal. Cueball: It's a nice place to go for some peace and quiet, I suppose.\nRandall is no stranger to LiveJournal. xkcd started on LiveJournal [1] before xkcd.com was created and is no longer live today. The blog was updated parallel to the website up to 2006 whereupon the introduction of a new RSS feed and automated update tools for the website allowed Randall to shut it down.\nThe Morse code for the final message \"this is our final cry on 500 khz before eternal silence\" is:\nA period is a very short tone while the hyphen represents a slightly longer one. Between each character there is a small pause. This message was typically sent within less than half a minute.","explanation":"Cueball recounts the last message sent in morse code by the French maritime radio station Le Conquet radio upon retiring its 500\u00a0kHz channel.\nThe poetic, and potentially angsty-sounding nature of the message reminds him of the on-line journal website LiveJournal , which was popular until the late 2000s (it was launched in 1999), and stereotypically used by angst-ridden teenagers to post song lyrics, poems, or cryptic messages to express their emotions and possibly fish for attention. Since Cueball never uses his LiveJournal account any more, he wonders if he can find the password again. He might be considering posting the final Morse Code message as his own last and final message on his LiveJournal.\nThe popularity of the site died down considerably with the arrival of social networking sites like MySpace , Facebook , Google Plus and the advent of microblogging platforms like Twitter and Tumblr . LiveJournal has also lost a lot of users since a Russian company bought them out; Russian dissidents used LiveJournal to present their opinions, and the Russian government used to retaliate by creating \"denial of service\" attacks which make LiveJournal unusable for all its users, sometimes for days. Nowadays (May 2014) LiveJournal is still quite popular among Russian-speaking people, including dissenters, but its administration was forced to show HTTP 451 error in some cases (e. g., when a user with a Russian IP is trying to read Alexei Navalny blog) with new laws. Thus when Megan is upset with his desire to let LiveJournal die out like the Morse Code, Cueball describes it as \"a nice place to go for some peace and quiet\".\nThe title text is Megan's (or Randall's ) sarcastic remark indicating that Facebook is no less filled with angst-ridden thoughts than LiveJournal was, nor is it free from problems or controversies around other issues such as security or privacy.\n[Cueball and Megan are lying in a grassy, lonely plain.]\nCueball: When the French navy retired morse code in 1997, they broadcast a final message: \"Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.\"\nCueball: I wonder if I can find my Livejournal login. Megan: Hey, I like Livejournal. Cueball: It's a nice place to go for some peace and quiet, I suppose.\nRandall is no stranger to LiveJournal. xkcd started on LiveJournal [1] before xkcd.com was created and is no longer live today. The blog was updated parallel to the website up to 2006 whereupon the introduction of a new RSS feed and automated update tools for the website allowed Randall to shut it down.\nThe Morse code for the final message \"this is our final cry on 500 khz before eternal silence\" is:\nA period is a very short tone while the hyphen represents a slightly longer one. Between each character there is a small pause. This message was typically sent within less than half a minute."}
{"id":1363,"title":"xkcd Phone","image_title":"xkcd Phone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1363","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_phone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1363:_xkcd_Phone","transcript":"[An image of a smartphone standing up with a small dot on the side and a single button at the bottom. Many labels are pointing to different parts of it. Clockwise from the top left they read:] Runs custom blend of Android and iOS Simulates alternative speed of light (default: 100 miles per hour) and adjusts clock as phone accelerates Wireless Accelerometer detects when phone is in free fall and makes it scream When exposed to light, phone says \"Hi!\" FlightAware partnership: Makes airplane noise when flights pass overhead Realistic case Clear screen Side-facing camera\nIntroducing The xkcd Phone Your mobile world just went digital\u00ae\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of a multitude of mobile-technology related issues that, when brought together, create a general satire of smartphone advertising. It was the first entry in the ongoing xkcd Phone series with the next 1465: xkcd Phone 2 released about nine months later.\nThe advertised features here either make previously useful capabilities useless or add features nobody wants. Except for \"your mobile world (going) digital\", which is old news.\nThe first generation of cell phones (introduced in the early 1980s) used analog radio signals to send voice traffic - and this was the standard used by the first ever smartphone, the IBM Simon. But the second generation (2G) standards, introduced from 1991 onwards, were digital, and analog services had been phased out by 2010 in most countries, long before this comic was published in 2014.\nTo market something as \"going digital\" implies that the corporation has found a way to integrate computers and\/or the internet into a market that previously existed without them; the market for mobile phones has always involved computers, [ citation needed ] making the xkcd phone's marketing feel dated and clueless.\nFrom the top, going clockwise:\nThe ominous warnings and disclaimers in the title text are probably a reference to the Saturday Night Live parody ad for Happy Fun Ball ( watch on YouTube ).\n[An image of a smartphone standing up with a small dot on the side and a single button at the bottom. Many labels are pointing to different parts of it. Clockwise from the top left they read:] Runs custom blend of Android and iOS Simulates alternative speed of light (default: 100 miles per hour) and adjusts clock as phone accelerates Wireless Accelerometer detects when phone is in free fall and makes it scream When exposed to light, phone says \"Hi!\" FlightAware partnership: Makes airplane noise when flights pass overhead Realistic case Clear screen Side-facing camera\nIntroducing The xkcd Phone Your mobile world just went digital\u00ae\n"}
{"id":1364,"title":"Like I'm Five","image_title":"Like I'm Five","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1364","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/like_im_five.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1364:_Like_I%27m_Five","transcript":"Cueball: What've you been up to? Megan: Doing tons of math for my thesis. Cueball: Can you explain it like I'm five? Megan: \"Oh my god, where are your parents?\"\n","explanation":"Megan tells Cueball that she is working on her math thesis . A thesis consists of original research and generally deals with material that is difficult for the uninitiated to understand. Cueball anticipates that it will be difficult to understand, and asks her to \"explain it like I'm five\". \"Explain it like I'm five\" is a way of asking for a simpler explanation of some difficult topic, in a way that a five-year-old child would be able to understand. Megan sarcastically (or perhaps not) treats Cueball as if he is an actual 5-year-old without his parents, expressing her concern that a 5-year-old is without any supervision. This is an example of idiomatic language being taken literally, something that Randall has explored in other comics as well, such as 1454: Done .\nIn the title text, Megan feigns concern that she will have to abandon her work to take care of this supposed lost child and takes this role-playing further by refusing to respond to Cueball until he phrases his comments as a 5-year-old would.\nThe common expression \"Explain it like I'm five\" is inspired by a line by Groucho Marx in his movie Duck Soup . \" Why a four-year-old child could understand this report! Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can't make head or tail of it. \" [1]\nCueball: What've you been up to? Megan: Doing tons of math for my thesis. Cueball: Can you explain it like I'm five? Megan: \"Oh my god, where are your parents?\"\n"}
{"id":1365,"title":"Inflation","image_title":"Inflation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1365","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/inflation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1365:_Inflation","transcript":"[Megan sits at a computer, conversing with Ponytail.] Megan: Imprinted on the sky are the gravity waves that were sloshing across the universe when it was this big.\nMegan: So really, we're using the entire universe as a giant microscope pointed at itself when it was small.\n[Megan turns to face the computer.] Ponytail: That's neat. Megan: Yeah. But... Ponytail: But what? Megan: Well, look.\nPonytail: Oh. Hmm. Megan: Yeah. Ponytail: What... Megan: I don't know.\n[Below is an image of the universe showing the cosmic microwave background, featuring a series of circles and the Spalding basketball logo, as though the universe had been imprinted with the image of a basketball.]","explanation":"The comic is inspired by the now disproven BICEP2 discovery of gravitational waves from the early universe, hence providing evidence for the cosmic inflation hypothesis. Megan is excited about this and tells Ponytail all about it. She is impressed by the fact that these waves were created when the universe was extremely small and the expanding universe has \"imprinted\" the gravity waves. (See also 1642: Gravitational Waves ).\nShe compares this to the nature of a microscope - which optically expands a small image, just like the universe has done to itself. Ponytail is impressed by it until Megan looks at the image captured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) .\nThe concept of an expanding universe is sometimes explained by the \"balloon model\", where the two-dimensional skin represents our three-dimensional universe and the inflation of the balloon represents expansion over time. But instead of showing a balloon, Randall uses a basketball, which cannot inflate as easily as a balloon.\nThe elliptical Mollweide projection of this cosmic microwave background (CMB) image of the sky makes the map look a bit like a basketball. Randall further exaggerates this by superimposing the traditional curves that are visible on a basketball and the Spalding company logo over the original image available at the bottom here. The mentions of scale and basketballs in this comic might be a reference to the \"If the Earth were the size of a basketball\" comparison, similarly to 1074: Moon Landing and 1515: Basketball Earth .\nMegan and Ponytail are both disconcerted by this, and the title text references the 1996 basketball movie Space Jam by promising images of main characters Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny if the polarization of the view is changed to E-mode , a type of polarization of the cosmic background radiation arising from the radiation scattering off non-uniform plasma.\nThe image was updated between 7 AM and 8:30 AM EST on May 7. Originally the Spalding logo was shown from left-to-right; however, in the updated image, the Spalding logo is shown in reverse. The WMAP image has the correct orientation in both versions. This was likely due to a mistake on Randall's part, as the comic suggests the universe is contained inside a Spalding basketball. Seen from the inside, the Spalding logo would be shown in reverse, as seen in the updated image. The first image can be found here . Both the original and updated version don't exactly match the pattern on a typical basketball. Most basketballs are divided into eight identical (ignoring reflection) pieces in a pattern that allowed traditional leather basketballs to be made from a single template, while the image shows a pattern that would split a basketball into two types of pieces.\n[Megan sits at a computer, conversing with Ponytail.] Megan: Imprinted on the sky are the gravity waves that were sloshing across the universe when it was this big.\nMegan: So really, we're using the entire universe as a giant microscope pointed at itself when it was small.\n[Megan turns to face the computer.] Ponytail: That's neat. Megan: Yeah. But... Ponytail: But what? Megan: Well, look.\nPonytail: Oh. Hmm. Megan: Yeah. Ponytail: What... Megan: I don't know.\n[Below is an image of the universe showing the cosmic microwave background, featuring a series of circles and the Spalding basketball logo, as though the universe had been imprinted with the image of a basketball.]"}
{"id":1366,"title":"Train","image_title":"Train","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1366","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/train.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1366:_Train","transcript":"Train: [On the upper edge of a circle representing the Earth, Cueball is in a train car looking to his left.] Cueball:...almost... [The train tracks run between another person standing at the 2:00 position, and Hairy standing at the 9:30 position. There's yet another person standing at the 6:00 position, between some snow-capped mountains and some low hills.] [There's a counterclockwise arrow in the middle of the circle, and motion lines indicate that everyone and everything on the planet is moving counterclockwise, except for the train, which is motionless.]\nA machine that grabs the Earth by metal rails and rotates it until the part you want is near you\n","explanation":"This comic, which appeared the day before National Train Day , plays on the fact that a choice of a reference frame is arbitrary, leading to the \"Principle of relativity\" in Albert Einstein 's theories of special relativity and general relativity . But at speeds much lower than the speed of light it also applies to the newtonian mechanics .\nRather than viewing this situation as a train causing itself to move relative to an immobile Earth, Randall provides the unconventional perspective of a train remaining fixed in space while causing the Earth itself and all the stars in the sky to rotate instead. In principle either perspective is equally valid \u2014 though in practice different trains often move in mutually-exclusive directions, thus each train would have to define its own frame of reference. It is said that Einstein once asked a ticket collector, \"What time does Oxford stop at this train?\"\nChanging the reference frame into the inside of the train only means that you see the outside world in a different reference, since the train doesn't really move the Earth (the train's engine and the friction of the wheels aren't even remotely powerful enough) it simply appears that way from the inside.\nFrom the Newtonian perspective this choice of frame is valid, but results in unnecessarily complicated math; the equation of motion would include terms for centrifugal, Coriolis and other so-called \"fictional forces\" (see 123: Centrifugal Force ). Newton supposes the existence of \"inertial frames\", in which these forces are zero, and the surface of the Earth approximates an inertial frame well. In General Relativity, the presence of mass in a system curves the spacetime around of it. The train-earth system could be modelled in general relativity, taking the train as fixed. However the resulting equations would be complex, and not amenable to an exact solution.\nThe title text expands on this to include elevators, which change a person's position relative to the center of the Earth. From a passenger's perspective, it would appear as though the Earth's position was instead being changed in space.\nThese examples use the train and the elevator as fixed points to define relative travel. The more common method to define movement is to use the Earth's surface as fixed point, but other reference points could be the Earth's center , the Sun , predefined \"fixed\" stars or the center of our galaxy . Each of these would result in a completely different movement speed:\nThe train, as seen from an inertial frame, doesn't seem to rotate the earth, but it does in fact have a minute, immeasurable effect on the Earth's rotation (see what-if? 41: Go West and 162: Angular Momentum ).\nTrain: [On the upper edge of a circle representing the Earth, Cueball is in a train car looking to his left.] Cueball:...almost... [The train tracks run between another person standing at the 2:00 position, and Hairy standing at the 9:30 position. There's yet another person standing at the 6:00 position, between some snow-capped mountains and some low hills.] [There's a counterclockwise arrow in the middle of the circle, and motion lines indicate that everyone and everything on the planet is moving counterclockwise, except for the train, which is motionless.]\nA machine that grabs the Earth by metal rails and rotates it until the part you want is near you\n"}
{"id":1367,"title":"Installing","image_title":"Installing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1367","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/installing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1367:_Installing","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing next to each other.] Cueball: Installing things has gotten so fast and painless. Cueball: Why not skip it entirely, and make a phone that has every app \"installed\" already and just downloads and runs them on the fly?\n[Caption below the panel:] I felt pretty clever until I realized I'd invented webpages.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to the kind of \"inventions\" which seem new from the point of view of a smartphone (handheld computer ) user, but have already been around for a long time on desktop or laptop \/notebook computers.\nCueball has a clever idea to skip the installing of applications on mobile phones: he would host the applications online instead, and provide links to the servers. The apps wouldn't stay on the phone all the time; instead the phone would download each app again every time the user wanted to run it.\nHowever, web pages and web applications already work like this. Clicking a link will make the browser download a web page and render HTML code and JavaScript that it links to.\nThe page usually isn't saved long-term on the user's computer; instead the browser downloads it again when needed. HTML5 does however offer the option of caching web application files locally so it can remain operational when there is no network connection.\nIn the title text, Cueball's idea for local application storage already exists in the HTTP protocol as cookies . The more flexible web storage was originally part of the HTML5 specification, but it's now in a separate specification.\nNative phone applications and web applications are not completely interchangeable. Web applications may not allow access to more advanced or platform-specific resources. Projects like Apache Cordova make these resources available to web applications by creating a native application wrapper for the web application.\n[Cueball and Megan are standing next to each other.] Cueball: Installing things has gotten so fast and painless. Cueball: Why not skip it entirely, and make a phone that has every app \"installed\" already and just downloads and runs them on the fly?\n[Caption below the panel:] I felt pretty clever until I realized I'd invented webpages.\n"}
{"id":1368,"title":"One Of The","image_title":"One Of The","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1368","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/one_of_the.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1368:_One_Of_The","transcript":"[Cueball is a news anchor sitting in front of a screen showing the Gateway Arch with some landscape features around it.] Cueball: ...And he went on to design the Gateway Arch, one of the most recognizable arches in St. Louis.\n[Caption below the panel:] Pet peeve: Reporters unnecessarily hedging with \"one of the\"\n","explanation":"Another of Randall's many Pet Peeves , this times on reporters.\nCueball is a news anchor describing the Gateway Arch as one of the most recognizable arches in St. Louis . In this case the designer the reporter is likely referring to is Eero Saarinen .\nWhen describing things, reporters try to make only factual statements. If reporters use absolutes (that something is the largest or the smallest thing of its class, or that it is unprecedented, to give several examples) they risk making errors: it is possible that some other example of the thing exists that is even larger or even smaller or that there was some similar incident in the past, and they were not aware of it. If a reader or viewer points out the existence of that thing, even if obscure or trivial, the reporter must issue a correction. As a result, reporters learn to hedge by using formulations such as \"one of the biggest\" or \"a rare example of.\"\nRandall states that it is his pet peeve when reporters avoid absolutes unnecessarily \u2014 that is, in cases where there's vanishingly little risk of error. As an absurd example, Randall depicts one such reporter using this language about the Gateway Arch. As the most well-known monument in Missouri and the largest free-standing arch in the world, it's indisputable that this would be the most recognizable arch in St. Louis.\nIn the title text, Randall jokes about what could happen if you misunderstand the practice of avoiding absolutes; he thus appears to think it is an ostentatious display of faux objectivity, as opposed to a correction-avoiding strategy. The title text refers to novelty mugs (and T-shirts, and other printed items) that use superlative descriptions such as \"World's Greatest Mom\" or \"World's Greatest Dad.\" Obviously, such a statement is an expression of personal affection on the part of the family member who gave such a gift and is not meant to be understood as a literally true fact about the world. Using a parody of reporter-speak (like giving a mug to your mother that says \"one of the world's greatest moms\") would ruin the compliment by suggesting to her that you thought some other people's moms were as good or better.\nThe title text also refers to Mother's Day , which in the US was three days before this comic was published.\n[Cueball is a news anchor sitting in front of a screen showing the Gateway Arch with some landscape features around it.] Cueball: ...And he went on to design the Gateway Arch, one of the most recognizable arches in St. Louis.\n[Caption below the panel:] Pet peeve: Reporters unnecessarily hedging with \"one of the\"\n"}
{"id":1369,"title":"TMI","image_title":"TMI","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1369","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tmi.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1369:_TMI","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk, looking at a laptop.] Cueball: Ugh, TMI.\nOffscreen: Oh? What?\nCueball: Just... Everything. Offscreen: True.\n","explanation":"\"TMI\" is an acronym that means \"too much information\". It is typically used as a response to someone \"oversharing\" \u2014 telling personal details (\"Sorry I just missed your call - I was urinating when the phone rang\") that the listener would rather not have heard. Here, however, Cueball may be using it in a more literal and absolute sense: he feels overwhelmed by the colossal amount of information that is now generally available to anyone with an Internet connection.\nThe title text amplifies this interpretation by evoking the image of an individual person who is overcome as he stands at the edge of the ocean, contemplating its vastness.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, looking at a laptop.] Cueball: Ugh, TMI.\nOffscreen: Oh? What?\nCueball: Just... Everything. Offscreen: True.\n"}
{"id":1370,"title":"President","image_title":"President","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1370","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/president.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1370:_President","transcript":"[Ponytail and Science Girl are walking together.] Ponytail: I can't imagine anyone who grew up on the Internet being able to run for President.\n[Closeup of Science Girl.] Science Girl: Why? Because it'd mark the handover of a world that no longer needs you to a generation you don't understand?\n[Ponytail and Science Girl have stopped walking and are facing each other.] Science Girl: ...Or because there would be embarrassing pictures of us as teenagers?\n[Closeup of Ponytail.] Ponytail: Um. The pictures one? Science Girl (off-screen): Pictures of teens! How will we even survive??\n","explanation":"This strip shows a discussion between an adult and a teenager about an aspect of the future. Randall likes this setup, allowing to put in perspective the various \"decay\" predictions and shows his optimism.\nHere, the subject is scandal. How will a generation that is documenting and leaving behind a permanent public record of its juvenile misadventures - immature and impolitic writings, photographs of inebriation at parties posted on Facebook, Twitter posts about breakups, etc. - produce successful future politicians? Won't future opposition researchers and reporters have enough embarrassing material to destroy any Millennial's public reputation? In previous generations, juveniles were freer to go through this phase of development without leaving behind a digital record, making it easier to sidestep or paper over rumors of youthful misbehavior. See, e.g., George W. Bush, who dismissed questions about his rumored use of drugs in his youth by saying only, \"When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.\"\nThe child's answer, in addition to teasing the adult about her generation's coming obsolescence, is that the next generation will be fine because in the future no one will care. The title text amplifies this optimistic message, suggesting that old blog posts by former teenagers will just seem boring, not salacious. Randall offers no explanation for this upbeat spin, but it is a recurring topic and some have argued elsewhere that the potential power of Internet-chronicled youthful indiscretions will be defused because everyone will be in the same boat, making future voters (and, in another context, employers) more tolerant of such things.\nThe strip also contains an existential twist, as shown in the child's answer. It alludes to every generation's dismissal of the next, as actually being due to psychological insecurities. We may disguise our dismissals by attacking their faults & different lifestyles. But in truth, these dismissals are actually rooted in our innate fear of becoming obsolete, useless, surpassed, and lost in a bewildering world that has passed us by.\n[Ponytail and Science Girl are walking together.] Ponytail: I can't imagine anyone who grew up on the Internet being able to run for President.\n[Closeup of Science Girl.] Science Girl: Why? Because it'd mark the handover of a world that no longer needs you to a generation you don't understand?\n[Ponytail and Science Girl have stopped walking and are facing each other.] Science Girl: ...Or because there would be embarrassing pictures of us as teenagers?\n[Closeup of Ponytail.] Ponytail: Um. The pictures one? Science Girl (off-screen): Pictures of teens! How will we even survive??\n"}
{"id":1371,"title":"Brightness","image_title":"Brightness","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1371","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brightness.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1371:_Brightness","transcript":"[A black panel with white text and a white Megan who is standing staring at the ground.] Megan: Based on this decrease in the star's brightness, I believe it is orbited by at least one planet.\n[Caption below the panel:] Exoplanet astronomers at night\n","explanation":"Exoplanets are planets outside of our solar system, and exoplanet astronomers are astronomers who attempt to discover and study such planets.\nMegan is using a common exoplanet discovery technique to discover a planet around a nearby star. When a planet passes between an observing astronomer and a star, the planet will block some tiny part of the light coming from that star, causing it to appear dimmer for some amount of time. The Kepler telescope used this technique to find evidence for exoplanets.\nBut here Megan is standing on the surface of the Earth at night, looking at the ground, and therefore presumably looking in the direction of the sun. By observing that it is completely occluded at night, she correctly concludes that the Sun is orbited by at least one planet: the Earth. This is obviously an absurd usage of that method. Reasons include the fact that exoplanets are not big enough to block out all of their stars' light when seen from Earth [ citation needed ] , making what Megan says a massive understatement, and that the period of the brightness oscillations would correspond to the length of a day, not a year as it would for exoplanets.\nThe title text alludes to using more complicated techniques to observe light reflected by small planets like the Earth, for example by detecting polarized light reflected from the planet's atmosphere. In some sense, observing the light that reflects off of the Earth during the day is in fact how we see everything around us. It also implies that astronomers, who because of their career choice are more likely to work at night, might be completely unaware of Earth's existence in the daytime and thus surprised to \"discover\" it from their nighttime work.\n[A black panel with white text and a white Megan who is standing staring at the ground.] Megan: Based on this decrease in the star's brightness, I believe it is orbited by at least one planet.\n[Caption below the panel:] Exoplanet astronomers at night\n"}
{"id":1372,"title":"Smartwatches","image_title":"Smartwatches","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1372","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/smartwatches.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1372:_Smartwatches","transcript":"A USE FOR SMARTWATCHES: [Depicted are two smartwatches, both labelled as \"Working\" and showing generic colour displays, and one smartphone labelled as \"Dead\" with a blank screen.]\n[A hacksaw cutting through the smartphone, throughout the middle of the long edge of the case.]\n[The two smartwatches are shown with the wristband and case broken around the edge of the display because the displays with the associated electronics are removed. Arrows are shown coming from the smartwatch cases to the smartwatch displays, then from the displays to the smartphone case halves.]\n[The smartphone halves are installed with the smartwatch components and a hinge with screws beside is shown. Another view shows the hinge screwed into the back of the smartphone case.]\n[The smartphone with the working smartwatch components installed is shown, with the hinge three-quarters open and fully closed - resembling an early flip-phone.] World's first flip iPhone\n","explanation":"Smartwatches are fairly recent innovations which function something like smartphones which are attached to one's wrist, although the screens are often shorter than those of typical smartphones, and they typically need to be attached via bluetooth to a smartphone. This comic shows someone \" Case modding \" some smartwatches and a broken smartphone; that is, taking the electronic innards of two smartwatches and putting them into the sawn-in-half case of a smartphone before attaching the two halves with a hinge, allowing it to open and close like flip phones, a type that was popular before the rise of smartphones.\nThe Western Electric Model 2500 is the last standard desk-style domestic telephone set issued by the Bell System in North America. It contains the # key and the * key, so it can be said it has same application features as the first cellphones, but it's obviously much bigger, and of course not wireless. Smartphones usually have much more functionality. Case modding is the art of building machines (usually computers) into nicely shaped non-standard cases. The opinion about \"niceness\" of the result vary, as usual in art. The point is that changing the case doesn't change the functionality, so the niceness (or, usually, \"coolness\") is generally the only relevant feature (although, badly done modding can affect cooling).\nIt appears that Randall has a rather low opinion of smartwatches, as he suggests that it would be better to take out their screens and mount them onto a dead iPhone than to use them the way smartwatches are normally used.\nHowever, Randall's suggestion to cut open the dead phone with a hacksaw is unsound for several reasons:\n1. Any attempt to saw through glass will cause it to shatter. To cut glass, one needs to grind it, not saw it.\n2. Even if the phone is dead, the battery may be charged (if dead means that the battery is dead, not that the phone does not work, in which case the procedure destroys a perfectly functional iPhone). Saw blades conduct electricity, so the person might get electrocuted.\n3. Some batteries contain chemicals that are toxic or explosive.  Even if the battery is discharged, sawing through it is very dangerous.\nTo add which, the hinge depicted in the cartoon is an ordinary household hinge. It is overly large for using in electronics compared to hinges on old clamshell-style cell phones, and drilling holes in the watch cases to attach one would potentially damage the internal electronic circuits. It could also puncture the battery, causing it to catch fire. Either render the watch useless.\n4. Also, it's possible the watches wouldn't fit that nicely into the iPhone.\nWhile no phones such as the one depicted existed at the time of the comic (2014), in November 2019, Motorola officially announced a new Android phone, to be released under the Razr name, which is extremely similar in form-factor to the fictitious phone shown in this comic, albeit with a single flexible OLED screen, rather than two separate screens.\nA USE FOR SMARTWATCHES: [Depicted are two smartwatches, both labelled as \"Working\" and showing generic colour displays, and one smartphone labelled as \"Dead\" with a blank screen.]\n[A hacksaw cutting through the smartphone, throughout the middle of the long edge of the case.]\n[The two smartwatches are shown with the wristband and case broken around the edge of the display because the displays with the associated electronics are removed. Arrows are shown coming from the smartwatch cases to the smartwatch displays, then from the displays to the smartphone case halves.]\n[The smartphone halves are installed with the smartwatch components and a hinge with screws beside is shown. Another view shows the hinge screwed into the back of the smartphone case.]\n[The smartphone with the working smartwatch components installed is shown, with the hinge three-quarters open and fully closed - resembling an early flip-phone.] World's first flip iPhone\n"}
{"id":1373,"title":"Screenshot","image_title":"Screenshot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1373","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/screenshot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1373:_Screenshot","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] When someone posts a screenshot of their phone,\n[The panel shows the screen of an Android phone. At the top there is a black Android status bar with icons like WiFi, battery charge and the time, all in white:] 85% 10:02 PM\n[Below the status bar is the open program, which is an internet browser, which shows the address field with an unreadable address and the tap icon to the right and the three dots for options. Below that is the page viewed in the browser. It seems to be a post from a person. Below the address bar is a picture of a user with dark hair in a square frame. To the right are two lines of unreadable user information. The post contains a picture posted by the user, and it is a screenshot of a chat\/SMS conversation from another phone. The screen is light blue and the conversations has three blue speech bubbles to the left and two replies in between those in green to the right. All posts are unreadable, as are all other words in the picture. At the bottom of the picture the top of another users post, i.e. half the users image, can be seen. At the top of the picture, the status bar from this iPhone screen shot can be seen with icons both left, center and right. To the right the charge icon battery shows a very low charge, indicated with a small red line at the bottom of the battery. Around this low charged battery icon there is drawn a large red circle like spiral, circling the battery symbol two or three times, and four exclamation marks are written above this. The only thing that can be read in the picture is the charge percentage:] !!!! 6%\n[Caption below the panel:] I can't pay attention to the content if their battery is low.\n","explanation":"Randall is viewing a screenshot of a text-message exchange via his own phone's web browser. Such screenshots are frequently posted online, to show content ranging from humorous typos to creepy behavior . In this screenshot, in addition to the text messages' content, we see a battery bar reflecting a charge of 6%; this effectively \" photobombs \" (or distracts Randall from) the actual content of the original screenshot. On the other hand, the phone on which the shot is viewed is charged at a healthy 85%.\nThe phone the screenshot is taken from is an iPhone, while the phone being viewed is an Android. Another iPhone screenshot was the joke in 1815: Flag .\nThe title text suggests that Randall has plugged in his phone to quell the anxiety induced by the 6% charge in the screenshot, mistaking it for the actual battery indicator of his own phone. This measure is obviously unsuccessful, as charging his own phone does nothing to change the charge of the phone in the picture. A similar phenomenon is when a screenshot is viewed and the viewer attempts to use the controls (e.g. buttons) in the image.\nRandall's fear of losing power to his phone was later explored in 1802: Phone and 1872: Backup Batteries , where he brings extra batteries and it is also part of the joke in comic 1965: Background Apps .\nAn alternative interpretation for the title text is that the screenshot was posted as part of a thread asking why their phone isn't charging. This would be ironic, as Randall's focusing on the battery level means his eyes are being drawn to the very problem being spoken about, yet he is too distracted by it to read that this is the problem!\nThis may also be a reference to mirror neurons . Mirror neurons are according to many neurobiologists a biological basis of empathy. If you see someone stick a needle in their hand, it feels as if you hurt yourself and some people experience a tightness of the chest when hearing a wheezing asthma patient on the radio. Here, Randall's mirror neurons start to fire as he feels the anxiety associated with a phone losing battery power.\nScreenshot quality was discussed later in 1863: Screenshots . This comic is one of a small set of comics with the same or almost the same title as another comic (only plural form of word screenshot being difference).\n[Caption above the panel:] When someone posts a screenshot of their phone,\n[The panel shows the screen of an Android phone. At the top there is a black Android status bar with icons like WiFi, battery charge and the time, all in white:] 85% 10:02 PM\n[Below the status bar is the open program, which is an internet browser, which shows the address field with an unreadable address and the tap icon to the right and the three dots for options. Below that is the page viewed in the browser. It seems to be a post from a person. Below the address bar is a picture of a user with dark hair in a square frame. To the right are two lines of unreadable user information. The post contains a picture posted by the user, and it is a screenshot of a chat\/SMS conversation from another phone. The screen is light blue and the conversations has three blue speech bubbles to the left and two replies in between those in green to the right. All posts are unreadable, as are all other words in the picture. At the bottom of the picture the top of another users post, i.e. half the users image, can be seen. At the top of the picture, the status bar from this iPhone screen shot can be seen with icons both left, center and right. To the right the charge icon battery shows a very low charge, indicated with a small red line at the bottom of the battery. Around this low charged battery icon there is drawn a large red circle like spiral, circling the battery symbol two or three times, and four exclamation marks are written above this. The only thing that can be read in the picture is the charge percentage:] !!!! 6%\n[Caption below the panel:] I can't pay attention to the content if their battery is low.\n"}
{"id":1374,"title":"Urn","image_title":"Urn","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1374","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/urn.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1374:_Urn","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in a classroom with Megan at a desk.] Cueball: Imagine that you're drawing at random from an urn containing fifteen balls - six red and nine black. Megan: OK. I reach in and... ...My grandfather's ashes?!? Oh God! Cueball: I... what? Megan: Why would you do this to me?!?\n","explanation":"A common tool for explaining concepts in elementary probability theory are games involving the drawing of coloured balls from a container, such as a bag, or hat. In older statistics related texts, a convention developed of describing the container as an urn. This is so common that such problems are often called urn problems .\nWhile an urn can have many uses, in modern times the most common context in which it is used is to contain the burned remains of deceased individuals after a cremation . This is likely because as interior decor has grown more minimalist, other types of urn became less common and the association of the word urn with cremation has become ubiquitous in the vernacular.\nMegan , when asked to imagine drawing balls from an urn, imagines a cremation urn containing not only balls, but also human remains. She may be referring to a real grandfather who has been cremated, or is simply improvising a joke at Cueball's expense.\nThe title text refers to two distinct scenarios in the coloured ball experiment: The balls may be replaced between each drawing, or not. In the former case, each draw is independent of the previous, in the latter the chances of picking a particular (remaining) ball the next time have increased. Megan (or rather Randall if it is he who speaks in the title text) would prefer to put the ashes back into the urn. She might also want to have her grandfather back, and be playing with the word \"replacement\".\nThe distinction between repeated drawing with and without replacement is used in most presentations of elementary probability because it illustrates a subtle but important theoretical distinction: if the balls are replaced, one at a time, before drawing the next, the number of balls of a certain colour has the binomial distribution , but if the balls are not replaced, so that the same ball cannot be drawn twice, you instead get the hypergeometric distribution .\nThere are myriad reasons why Megan would want to draw with replacement, the most simple of which being that she has nowhere to put ashes other than in their designated urn. Ashes by their nature need a container, or they will make a mess; cremated remains in particular come with the additional requirement that the container be respectful to the deceased.\n[Cueball is standing in a classroom with Megan at a desk.] Cueball: Imagine that you're drawing at random from an urn containing fifteen balls - six red and nine black. Megan: OK. I reach in and... ...My grandfather's ashes?!? Oh God! Cueball: I... what? Megan: Why would you do this to me?!?\n"}
{"id":1375,"title":"Astronaut Vandalism","image_title":"Astronaut Vandalism","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1375","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/astronaut_vandalism.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1375:_Astronaut_Vandalism","transcript":"[A signpost with three arrows.] [Arrow pointing up:] Space 62 [Arrow pointing right:] Jackson 115 [Arrow pointing left:] Memphis 98","explanation":"Signs like this normally show the distance to places on earth's surface. This sign also has an arrow pointing away from earth and towards \"space\", with a distance of 62\u00a0miles (100\u00a0km), due to \"astronaut vandalism\". The 62 mile distance is the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line , one of the conventional demarcations of the beginning of \" outer space \".\nWe think of space as being very far away. This comic puts into perspective that it's really a lot closer to space than to many destinations we're used to getting to by car or airplane. We think of 62\u00a0miles as being an easy trip on the ground, but that same 62\u00a0miles is incredibly hard when going vertically, against the force of gravity.\nThe title text references the fact that while the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration A\u00e9ronautique Internationale (FAI) defines the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line , the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space (i.e., the start of space), to be 100\u00a0kilometers (62\u00a0miles) above mean sea level, the U.S. Air Force and other military branches will award astronaut wings to rated astronauts who fly higher than 50\u00a0miles (80\u00a0km).  In 2005 NASA changed from using the FAI definition to using the USAF definition for consistency across organizations, and thus some NASA test pilots who had flown the X-15 retroactively received astronaut wings for their greater-than-50\u00a0mi (80.5\u00a0kilometers) flights. (Air Force pilots of the X-15 in the 1960s had long since received astronaut wings for such flights.)  Thus in the title text, Air Force pilots surreptitiously change the sign to conform to their definition of \"space\".\nAlthough most authorities use the FAI definition of space - the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line - since the FAI is the international organization of record for aeronautics, there are good scientific reasons for the U.S. Air Force definition.  The line is named for Theodore von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n , who originally calculated the height at which an vehicle would have to travel faster than orbital velocity to generate lift from wings, therefore making the vehicle an object in orbit rather one using air to generate lift.  Von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n originally calculated this height as 51.9\u00a0miles (83.6\u00a0km) - closer to the USAF definition than to what is now called the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line.  Additionally, the boundary between the mesosphere and the thermosphere is traditionally taken to be 53\u00a0miles (85\u00a0km), also close to the Air Force definition.  On the other hand, some newer research suggests the mesopause (the line between the mesosphere and thermosphere) may have peaks between 53 and 62\u00a0miles (85-100\u00a0km).  Also the turbopause - the line where gas molecules cease mixing atmospherically and begin stratifying by molecular weight as if they are in orbit - is generally taken to be about 100\u00a0kilometers (62\u00a0miles).\nAll of the atmospheric boundaries are variable, however, changing from day to day and season to season with no clear boundary.  Additionally, objects cannot reliably orbit below 130-150\u00a0km (80-93\u00a0miles) due to drag from even the sparse atmosphere in the lower thermosphere.  Despite this comic associating \"space\" with having a definite start the way you might definitely know when you cross the city limits of a town, the reality is that the transition from atmosphere to space takes place gradually over tens of kilometers.  Interestingly, since it is too high for aircraft and high altitude balloons, but too low for spacecraft in orbit, this \"near space\" transition region is one of the least-visited and least-used regions of the larger atmosphere. This comic thus both points out that the limit where space starts is arbitrarily chosen and also that space is often much closer than, for instance, two nearby cities in some randomly chosen location in the US.\nThe two distances shown on the signpost can occur only at certain points on Earth. One possible location is Grenada, MS, which is about 100\u00a0miles from Memphis, TN and about 114\u00a0miles from Jackson, MS. Alternatively \"Jackson\" could mean Jackson, TN, in which case Tupelo, MS or Kenneth, MO are both viable options for the location of the signpost. However, in Tupelo the roads to Jackson and Memphis meet at a right angle, instead of pointing in opposite directions as in the comic.\n[A signpost with three arrows.] [Arrow pointing up:] Space 62 [Arrow pointing right:] Jackson 115 [Arrow pointing left:] Memphis 98"}
{"id":1376,"title":"Jump","image_title":"Jump","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1376","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jump.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1376:_Jump","transcript":"[In the first panel Cueball is seen as a stop motion cartoon (12 drawings of the same Cueball) as he is jumping down a small hill \u2014 jumping longer and longer between sentences. Jump is written over the head of Cueball that perform the jump until he floats.] Cueball: I love these dreams Jump Cueball: Each jump is a little longer Jump Cueball: Each push off the ground a little softer Jump Cueball: Until I G l i d e\n[In the second panel Cueball (five drawings) glides over a fence and the dunes before the beach \u2014 then he glides out over the sea. The fourth Cueball just passing over the sea looks back towards the shore. Four birds are flying behind him around the coast line.]\n[In the third panel Cueball (four drawings) glides across the open sea \u2014 three birds circling around the first Cueball, a fish is jumping out of the water splashing down again beneath the second Cueball.] sploosh Cueball: ...I hope this is a dream.\n...I hope this is a dream. Or that I'm at least following the curve of the Earth around to land...\n","explanation":"Cueball is presumably experiencing a common dream subject, flying or floating. As in many varieties of such a dream , the ability to fly, float or glide only gradually manifests, going from longer and longer jumps to a sort of flight or hovering. In Cueball's case, his jumps become longer and 'lighter' until at last he is gliding just above the surface of the Earth. He has apparently had such a dream before, with just such a flight mechanic manifesting itself, as he indicates that he 'loves' these dreams.\nIn his presumed dream, Cueball finally achieves his gliding flight just as he reaches the shoreline, and his gliding carries him over the water's edge and out to sea. After a moment's reflection, he realizes that if he were really gliding out to sea without any real apparent means of control, his situation would presumably be rather perilous \u2014 death by starvation or thirst, gradually slowing down and becoming 'stuck' over the water with no way to land, the loss of his gliding ability as suddenly as it came, etc., all suggest themselves as possible perils he would now be subject to if, in fact, his 'dream' were actual reality. Thus he eventually indicates that he hopes it is a dream, in contrast to his feeling at the comic's opening.\nThe title text adds a further worry not immediately apparent unless one considers the possibility that Cueball's 'gliding' will continue in a straight line in relation to the Earth's surface. In that case he would continue moving straight while the Earth's surface would curve away beneath him, sending him out into space instead of the relatively preferable scenario of merely floating across the ocean to the opposite shore. After all, if the laws of physics had changed to permit hovering\/flying, consequences would be unpredictable \u2014 i.e. there'd be no assurance one would maintain a constant hovering height rather than take leave of the planet as one flies forth. One thing about miracles is that all bets are off!\nAlso note that this situation is similar to the case of Newton's cannonball . However, that is actually in very-low-earth-orbit \u2014 and you would need to be going 7,300\u00a0m\/s, or about 16,000\u00a0mph (26,000\u00a0km\/h) to stay in orbit. At that speed, of course, air friction would quickly destroy the cannonball or person. This is clearly not the case in the dream.\nGetting weightless and drifting around was a fantasy in 226: Swingset . The comic 417: The Man Who Fell Sideways has some resemblance to this one.  In 942: Juggling , Cueball throws some balls and later a book.  They miss the ground .\nIn the book Thing Explainer Cueball jumps to score with a basketball in the explanation for Playing Fields only to find that he keeps rising steadily along a straight curve up above the hoop. Very similar to this jump that just lets Cueball float straight afterwards.\n[In the first panel Cueball is seen as a stop motion cartoon (12 drawings of the same Cueball) as he is jumping down a small hill \u2014 jumping longer and longer between sentences. Jump is written over the head of Cueball that perform the jump until he floats.] Cueball: I love these dreams Jump Cueball: Each jump is a little longer Jump Cueball: Each push off the ground a little softer Jump Cueball: Until I G l i d e\n[In the second panel Cueball (five drawings) glides over a fence and the dunes before the beach \u2014 then he glides out over the sea. The fourth Cueball just passing over the sea looks back towards the shore. Four birds are flying behind him around the coast line.]\n[In the third panel Cueball (four drawings) glides across the open sea \u2014 three birds circling around the first Cueball, a fish is jumping out of the water splashing down again beneath the second Cueball.] sploosh Cueball: ...I hope this is a dream.\n...I hope this is a dream. Or that I'm at least following the curve of the Earth around to land...\n"}
{"id":1377,"title":"Fish","image_title":"Fish","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1377","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fish.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1377:_Fish","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are walking down a hill.] Cueball: The Fermi paradox keeps getting worse. If planets are common, where is everybody?\nMegan: Imagine you're a scuba diver looking at the ocean floor. You know there's a fish there, but you can't see it. Why?\nCueball: Maybe the fish looks like sand. Megan: Yeah...\n[Zoom out to the Earth from space.] Megan: ...and what would that tell you about the ecosystem?\n[Earth moves slightly out of the panel.]\n[Earth moves halfway out of the panel.]\n[Blank panel.]\n[A shark swims through space.]\n","explanation":"The Fermi paradox is the contradiction that arises between high estimates of the likelihood of extraterrestial life and the fact that no evidence for it has thus far been found.\nCueball and Megan are having a conversation regarding this \u2014 since new planets are found all the time around distant stars, Cueball comments that this makes it an even greater paradox. Megan suggests that perhaps our search for extraterrestrial life is like looking at a patch of ocean floor looking for a fish. The diver knows that there must be a fish somewhere, but is unable to actually find it. She then goes on to ask why the fish would be hidden \u2014 i.e. camouflaged, and what it means about the remaining fish. The suggestion is that the fish would be hidden to avoid being eaten by predators, and perhaps the reason no extraterrestrial life is sending any sign of existence back is that they fear they might be destroyed soon after they revealed their location. Maybe they have even actively tried to hide the presence of their entire planet if they obtain the technological means. This potentially refers to the Deadly Probes scenario where a space faring species has developed deadly probes that self replicate and spread through the void between the stars - homing in on radio signals and destroying young civilizations in the cradle...\nThe camouflaged fish could be identified by using more sophisticated technologies like infrared cameras. Looking at the Earth from space beyond Low Earth orbit only with the naked eye wouldn't show any hint to our ecosystem . This is like the actual possibility in astronomy when observing exoplanets \u2014 the nature of those more than 1,500 known planets is unknown due to the lack of better technologies to the scientists. And there are a couple of hundred billion planets at our galaxy still camouflaged to human scientists.\nThe final panels take the metaphor further, suggesting that there is literally a planet sized shark swimming through space eating planets, and since the view is panning away from earth and over to the shark, the shark seems to be heading our way. It looks like Earth is the next fish, presumably because we did not reach a high enough technology level in time to recognize the danger and hide.\nThis also explains the title text that has the theme from the movie Jaws playing while astronomers look into their telescopes. This may also be a reference to the film Alien , which was pitched with the three word proposal \" Jaws in Space.\"\nStephen Hawking famously warns, \"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.\" Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin wrote an award-winning sci-fi trilogy called the Remembrance of Earth\u2019s Past trilogy, which draws on a similar idea; the title of the second book, The Dark Forest , is a reference to the same Fermi paradox solution described in the comic. Even Carl Sagan called the practice of Broadcasting and Signaling presence of Life on Earth \"deeply unwise and immature,\" and recommended that \"the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand.\"\n[Cueball and Megan are walking down a hill.] Cueball: The Fermi paradox keeps getting worse. If planets are common, where is everybody?\nMegan: Imagine you're a scuba diver looking at the ocean floor. You know there's a fish there, but you can't see it. Why?\nCueball: Maybe the fish looks like sand. Megan: Yeah...\n[Zoom out to the Earth from space.] Megan: ...and what would that tell you about the ecosystem?\n[Earth moves slightly out of the panel.]\n[Earth moves halfway out of the panel.]\n[Blank panel.]\n[A shark swims through space.]\n"}
{"id":1378,"title":"Turbine","image_title":"Turbine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1378","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turbine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1378:_Turbine","transcript":"[Megan is talking to a wind turbine.] Megan: I'll hold up a big kite, and you blow air at me until I lift off! Megan: What do you think of that idea? Wind turbine: I'm not a huge fan.\n","explanation":"A wind turbine uses wind to rotate its blades in order to generate electricity. It is visually very similar to an (electric) fan which however does the exact opposite: it uses electricity to rotate its blades in order to generate wind. The complementary nature of these two machines was previously highlighted in 1119: Undoing .\nThe punchline of this comic is a pun on the other meaning of the word \" fan \" which qualifies someone as liking or supporting something (here, an idea). Megan suggests to have the turbine blow air at her so she could lift off with a kite, something which would be conceivable with a huge fan, but is impossible here precisely because the turbine is not a fan and therefore can't generate wind. So the ( anthropomorphically -speaking) turbine's response is twofold: 1) it's a turbine and not a huge fan, which makes the idea impossible, and 2) for this very reason it doesn't like the idea - i.e. it is not a fan of the idea.\nThe title text alternatively suggests building a makeshift trebuchet . The idea is that when the kite's string gets tangled in the turbine's blades, the kite will be spun around and it will fling the attached rock (this setup is more similar to a traction trebuchet than to the more common counterweight trebuchet).\n[Megan is talking to a wind turbine.] Megan: I'll hold up a big kite, and you blow air at me until I lift off! Megan: What do you think of that idea? Wind turbine: I'm not a huge fan.\n"}
{"id":1379,"title":"4.5 Degrees","image_title":"4.5 Degrees","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1379","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/4_5_degrees.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1379:_4.5_Degrees","transcript":"Without prompt, aggressive limits on CO 2 emissions, the Earth will likely warm by an average of 4\u00b0-5\u00b0C by the century's end. HOW BIG A CHANGE IS THAT?\n[A ruler chart is drawn inside a frame.] In the coldest part of the last ice age, Earth's average temperature was 4.5\u00b0C below the 20th century norm. Let's call a 4.5\u00b0C difference one \"Ice Age Unit.\"\n[A ruler with five main divisions \u2014 each again with 3 smaller quarter division markers. Above it the five main divisions are marked as follows with 0 in the middle:] -2 IAU  -1 IAU  0 +1 IAU  +2 IAU [Next to the 0 marking a black arrow points toward 0.25 on the scale and above it is written:] Where we are today\n[The rest of the text is below the ruler.] [To the far left below -2 IAU a curved arrow points to the left. Below it is written:] Snowball earth (-4 IAU) [Below -1 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:] 20,000 years ago [Below this an image of a glacier. At the top of the image is written:] My neighborhood: [At the bottom of the image is an arrow pointing to the glacier:] Half a mile of ice [Below 0 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:] Average during modern times [Below this an image of Cueball standing on a green field with a city skyline in the background. At the top of the image is written:] My neighborhood: Cueball: Hi! [Below +1 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:] Where we'll be in 86 years [Below this a white image. At the top of the image is written:] My neighborhood: [Below this is a very large:] ? [Below +2 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:] Cretaceous hothouse +200m sea level rise No glaciers Palm trees at the poles\nThe oldest known animal fossils ( sponges ) are from the Snowball Earth, while flowering plants became the dominant plant species during the Cretaceous period. It is believed that the entire Earth was frozen for the first time about 2,400 to 2,100 million years ago, which could have been a result of the Great Oxygenation Event .\nThe 200m sea level rise given in the last panel for a \"Cretaceous Hothouse\" (i.e. if all ice on earth melted, including the Antarctic ice cap) could not be explained by this melt-off alone. If all the ice melted the water level would only increase by about 60-80m, according to Antarctica , IPCC Third Assessment Report (section 11.2.3 on Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets) and Sea Level and Climate: USGS Water-Science School . Additional sea level rise can be expected from thermal expansion of seawater, and indeed the main reason for rising sea level at the moment is actually caused by this expansion of the sea due to increasing temperature. But the high-end 500-year projection for a 4x increase in CO 2 , at expansion of the sea , is for an additional 2m due to thermal expansion, with a decreasing rate of growth over time. (Some of the sea level change in the Cretaceous are due to changes in bathymetry.)\nThe 5th and most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) presents four alternative trajectories for future concentrations of greenhouse gasses, termed Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs): RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, and RCP8.5. They are named after possible ranges of radiative forcing values in the year 2100 relative to pre-industrial values (+2.6, +4.5, +6.0, and +8.5\u00a0W\/m2, respectively). The hottest of these, RCP8.5, is predicted to result in a warming of 2.6\u00a0\u00b0C to 4.8\u00a0\u00b0C for the  2081\u22122100 period, and between 3 and 5.5 by the year 2100 ( Working Group I Summary for Policymakers ).\nThe lack of internationally binding agreements makes breaching an increase of 2\u00a0\u00b0C more and more likely.\n","explanation":"This comic represents the impacts due to climate change by demonstrating the changes in climate that should be expected with a given change in global temperature. This is done by detailing the world's climate in geologic periods where the global average temperature has changed by one or more \"Ice Age Units,\" or IAU. The comic defines an IAU as the difference in global temperature between today and the last ice age, about 4.5\u00a0\u00b0C. An IAU of 0 represents modern global temperature.  It was later followed with a similar but much more elaborate chart in 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline .\nOne IAU unit happens to be the expected increase in global temperature the world will see by the end of year 2100. The prediction of 4-5 degrees Celsius of warming may not appear significant, but is easy to see as a substantial difference when comparing today to the last ice age.\nAn IAU of -4 is associated with Snowball Earth . Snowball earth is a near-total freezing of the entire surface around 650 million years ago, in the Cryogenian . This may have been the greatest ice age known to have occurred on Earth.\nAn IAU of -1 is associated with the last ice age. During this time Randall's neighborhood was buried under an ice sheet.\nAn IAU of +1 is the predicted global temperature by the end of year 2100. While it makes sense to assume it's just as drastic a difference as -1 IAU, we still don't know the actual nature of what it would be, which is why it is represented by a question mark in the comic.\nAn IAU of +2 is associated with the \"Hothouse Earth\" of the early Cretaceous period . At this time there were \" palm trees at the poles\" as there were polar forests during Cretaceous summers. (Average temperature of North Pole during the summer is 0\u00a0\u00b0C or 32\u00a0\u00b0F. 0+2*4.5 = 9\u00a0\u00b0C = 48.2\u00a0\u00b0F, hot enough for trees to grow at the North Pole under hypothetical 2 IAU scenarios)\nAn increase of 4.5\u00a0\u00b0C (+1 IAU) seems like a small change in temperature, but the changes it would cause are likely very large as it can also be described as halfway to palm trees at the poles.\nThe topic of ice coverage over various cities has previously been covered in 1225: Ice Sheets . The image of Boston from that comic is reused at the top of the huge chart in 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline .\nThis comic shows the extreme extent to which global warming can (and will) change our environment. Randall presented this view earlier in 164: Playing Devil's Advocate to Win . Climate change, especially global warming, is a recurring theme in xkcd. This is because many still believe the conspiracy theory that global warming is a hoax.\nThe title text expands, demonstrating that  the potential impacts of an increase by the IPCC report's best case scenario of 2\u00a0\u00b0C, about half an ice age unit, makes controlling climate change seem more urgent. The figure of 2\u00a0\u00b0C is the most commonly agreed temperature target that assumes the creation of aggressive emissions limits at the time of the publishing of the comic.\nThe 4.5 degree increase is predicted by the bern2.5cc simulation (a moderate simulation) of the A1FI scenario. In the A1FI scenario the world has a high dependence on fossil  fuels, experiences \"very rapid economic growth\", a declining world population by 2050, as well as a high rate of increase in energy efficiency after 2050.\nWithout prompt, aggressive limits on CO 2 emissions, the Earth will likely warm by an average of 4\u00b0-5\u00b0C by the century's end. HOW BIG A CHANGE IS THAT?\n[A ruler chart is drawn inside a frame.] In the coldest part of the last ice age, Earth's average temperature was 4.5\u00b0C below the 20th century norm. Let's call a 4.5\u00b0C difference one \"Ice Age Unit.\"\n[A ruler with five main divisions \u2014 each again with 3 smaller quarter division markers. Above it the five main divisions are marked as follows with 0 in the middle:] -2 IAU  -1 IAU  0 +1 IAU  +2 IAU [Next to the 0 marking a black arrow points toward 0.25 on the scale and above it is written:] Where we are today\n[The rest of the text is below the ruler.] [To the far left below -2 IAU a curved arrow points to the left. Below it is written:] Snowball earth (-4 IAU) [Below -1 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:] 20,000 years ago [Below this an image of a glacier. At the top of the image is written:] My neighborhood: [At the bottom of the image is an arrow pointing to the glacier:] Half a mile of ice [Below 0 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:] Average during modern times [Below this an image of Cueball standing on a green field with a city skyline in the background. At the top of the image is written:] My neighborhood: Cueball: Hi! [Below +1 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:] Where we'll be in 86 years [Below this a white image. At the top of the image is written:] My neighborhood: [Below this is a very large:] ? [Below +2 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:] Cretaceous hothouse +200m sea level rise No glaciers Palm trees at the poles\nThe oldest known animal fossils ( sponges ) are from the Snowball Earth, while flowering plants became the dominant plant species during the Cretaceous period. It is believed that the entire Earth was frozen for the first time about 2,400 to 2,100 million years ago, which could have been a result of the Great Oxygenation Event .\nThe 200m sea level rise given in the last panel for a \"Cretaceous Hothouse\" (i.e. if all ice on earth melted, including the Antarctic ice cap) could not be explained by this melt-off alone. If all the ice melted the water level would only increase by about 60-80m, according to Antarctica , IPCC Third Assessment Report (section 11.2.3 on Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets) and Sea Level and Climate: USGS Water-Science School . Additional sea level rise can be expected from thermal expansion of seawater, and indeed the main reason for rising sea level at the moment is actually caused by this expansion of the sea due to increasing temperature. But the high-end 500-year projection for a 4x increase in CO 2 , at expansion of the sea , is for an additional 2m due to thermal expansion, with a decreasing rate of growth over time. (Some of the sea level change in the Cretaceous are due to changes in bathymetry.)\nThe 5th and most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) presents four alternative trajectories for future concentrations of greenhouse gasses, termed Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs): RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, and RCP8.5. They are named after possible ranges of radiative forcing values in the year 2100 relative to pre-industrial values (+2.6, +4.5, +6.0, and +8.5\u00a0W\/m2, respectively). The hottest of these, RCP8.5, is predicted to result in a warming of 2.6\u00a0\u00b0C to 4.8\u00a0\u00b0C for the  2081\u22122100 period, and between 3 and 5.5 by the year 2100 ( Working Group I Summary for Policymakers ).\nThe lack of internationally binding agreements makes breaching an increase of 2\u00a0\u00b0C more and more likely.\n"}
{"id":1380,"title":"Manual for Civilization","image_title":"Manual for Civilization","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1380","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/manual_for_civilization.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1380:_Manual_for_Civilization","transcript":"[Brian Eno is talking to an unseen audience.] Brian Eno: Hi. I'm music's Brian Eno, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation.\n[Panel 2 shows he is standing on a stage.] Brian Eno: As part of our mission to promote long-term thinking, we've asked experts to help us assemble a collection of books from which civilization can be rebuilt if it ever collapses.\n[Panel 3 shows he is holding a manuscript with a long list of book titles.] Brian Eno: Today we're sharing the results \u2014 the first ever Manual for Civilization .\n[Panel 4 shows him reading from the manuscript.] Brian Eno: *Ahem* Animorphs #1: The Invasion Animorphs #2: The Visitor Animorphs #3: The Encounter Unseen Audience member: ...are they all Animorphs Books? Brian Eno: No! There's also Megamorphs and The Andalite Chronicles .\n","explanation":"Brian Eno is a musician and a co-founder of the Long Now Foundation . He is explaining to an audience that one of the missions of the Long Now is a Manual for Civilization - a collection of reference materials that can help rebuild society in case it  collapses. But in Randall's version, the experts have made a list composed of many books from the Animorphs series.\nAnimorphs is a series of books written by K.A. Applegate . It follows a group of five children (later, an alien joins as the sixth member), that try to stop the parasitic aliens, the Yeerks, by transforming into animals. A Yeerk that enters a human has complete control over their host, and can read their memories. Because the Yeerks can imitate their host almost perfectly, humanity is slowly being taken over without knowing it, and for this reason the children cannot contact the authorities and are on their own in the battle against the Yeerks.\nWhen asked if all the books on the experts' list are from the Animorph series, Eno misses the point of the question by saying No! , only to mention the Megamorphs books and The Andalite Chronicles , both of which are side stories to the Animorph universe.\nThere are other books like these which aren't mentioned here \u2014 but it is clear from the last two panels that it is a quite long list \u2014 and it seems to be written in two columns, so maybe all 54 Animorphs books and all ten side stories could be included on the list.\nIn suggesting that a series of children's novels make up the blueprint for rebuilding civilization, Randall is spoofing the idea of such libraries (since such books would be largely useless in terms of providing the detailed instructions that would be necessary). However, due to the surprisingly deep and introspective nature of Animorphs books, which several generations have grown up on, it may also entirely be possible that Randall is expressing his fondness for the series by suggesting that reading the books would be sufficient for creating the moral foundations of a functional civilization.\nThe title text makes it completely ludicrous by saying an entire wing of the library will be devoted to the book (#26) where two main characters who have been attracted to each other since the beginning of the series finally kiss. While this is a momentous event for fans of the book series, the information is of no consequence for the rebuilding of civilization [ citation needed ] .\nThis comic may also be inspired by Isaac Asimov 's Foundation series , where Hari Seldon claimed that the Galactic Empire is going to collapse in three hundred years, there is no way to stop it but his group of scientists are writing Encyclopedia Galactica to help people rebuild civilization.\n[Brian Eno is talking to an unseen audience.] Brian Eno: Hi. I'm music's Brian Eno, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation.\n[Panel 2 shows he is standing on a stage.] Brian Eno: As part of our mission to promote long-term thinking, we've asked experts to help us assemble a collection of books from which civilization can be rebuilt if it ever collapses.\n[Panel 3 shows he is holding a manuscript with a long list of book titles.] Brian Eno: Today we're sharing the results \u2014 the first ever Manual for Civilization .\n[Panel 4 shows him reading from the manuscript.] Brian Eno: *Ahem* Animorphs #1: The Invasion Animorphs #2: The Visitor Animorphs #3: The Encounter Unseen Audience member: ...are they all Animorphs Books? Brian Eno: No! There's also Megamorphs and The Andalite Chronicles .\n"}
{"id":1381,"title":"Margin","image_title":"Margin","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1381","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/margin.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1381:_Margin","transcript":"[Written on the right margin of a page:] I have discovered a truly marvelous proof that information is infinitely compressible, but this margin is too small to...\n...oh\nnever mind\u00a0:(\n","explanation":"This is a reference to Fermat's Last Theorem , of which Pierre de Fermat claimed he had a proof that was too large to fit in the margin of a copy of Arithmetica . Despite its simple formulation, the problem remained unsolved for three centuries; it was cracked only with advanced techniques developed in the 20th century, leading many to believe that Fermat didn't actually possess a (correct) proof (see trivia ).\nIn the comic, the person writing in the margin attempts to pull a similar trick, without actually having any proof, by claiming that he has found a proof that information is infinitely compressible, but pretending not to be able to show it due to lack of space in the margin. In this particular case, however, this approach backfires, precisely because if information was actually infinitely compressible, the writer would be able to fit the proof in the margin (due to his own proof). The writer realizes that if he had a proof he should be able to fit it into the margin, and thus he realizes that he cannot pull this trick. Or perhaps the writer really thought he had a proof, but then realized that his statement was a counterexample, and was disappointed that his idea for a proof was wrong.\nWhat it seems he did not realize, is that it would be impossible to read the proof if the writer actually was able to compress his proof to fit in the margin. This is because you would need to know the algorithm described in the proof before you could decompress the proof text so you can read it. So he could actually have used this trick instead, writing that he had compressed it into - say a dot \" . \" - and then people would have to find his proof to read it. And since they cannot find such a proof - they could not check his dot. Unfortunately this would also have backfired - because there is already a proof that this is not possible !\nAnother thing that he probably didn't realize, is that finding a proof for something being possible does not necessarily mean inventing an actual algorithm to do that particular thing. If the person claimed having found a non-constructive proof for such an algorithm, his statement at least wouldn't contradict itself.\nThe title text, yet another protip , makes a reference to the Shannon\u2013Hartley theorem , which limits the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted. Setting the font size of text only changes its representation on the screen, and not the actual characters themselves. Trying to decrease the amount of space needed to store or transmit it like advised would be nonsensical. Another possible interpretation is that if you set the font size to 0, the text cannot be seen, and therefore, nothing is being transmitted period.\nIn the case of actual printed paper, decreasing the font size is valid technique for information compression (more information on the same page), as used in ie. microform .  However, this comes at the cost of an increased spatial bandwidth (number of black\/white transitions per distance). In the end, the resolution of the printer\/paper\/microscope chain limits the minimal font size that remains useable (above the Nyquist rate ).\n[Written on the right margin of a page:] I have discovered a truly marvelous proof that information is infinitely compressible, but this margin is too small to...\n...oh\nnever mind\u00a0:(\n"}
{"id":1382,"title":"Rocket Packs","image_title":"Rocket Packs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1382","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rocket_packs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1382:_Rocket_Packs","transcript":"[Text above the frame.] Rocket packs are easy. [In the frame: Cueball is lying face down on the ground with his Rocket Packs on his back and his calves severely burned.] Cueball: Ow. [Text below the frame.] The hard part is inventing the calf shields.\n","explanation":"In the early 20th century, visions of the future usually stipulated that everyone would travel around with rockets strapped to their backs. However, this has not yet come to pass, at least for the majority of consumers.\nIn this comic, Randall is pointing out that the problem with personal rocket packs - more commonly called jet packs - is not how to attach a rocket to someone's back, but other practical considerations. One might be how to keep the hot exhaust from burning the user's calves . Many jet pack designs actually do have ways to deal with this, such as moving the rockets farther from the user, but there are many other practical issues which have made this an impractical form of travel given current technology.\nThe title text starts with the trope \" I want my jet pack \", a theme also explored in 864: Flying Cars . It continues with pointing out that if people did start using rocket packs, there would also be more injuries, raising health care costs. That's something that people usually don't consider when imagining a future where these devices are commonplace.\nSo the year when the comic was published the demand was:\n'It's 2014--I want my jetpack [and also my free medical care covering all my jetpack-related injuries]!'\n[Text above the frame.] Rocket packs are easy. [In the frame: Cueball is lying face down on the ground with his Rocket Packs on his back and his calves severely burned.] Cueball: Ow. [Text below the frame.] The hard part is inventing the calf shields.\n"}
{"id":1383,"title":"Magic Words","image_title":"Magic Words","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1383","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/magic_words.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1383:_Magic_Words","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are in a bed.] Megan: Can you repeat \"Story Water Paper Doorway\" at the start, then switch to \"Disarm Adele's Giraffe Grenade\" as we get going, and finally \"Strawberry Scorpion Poetry\" as I finish? [Below the frame.] Linguist with a foot fetish\n","explanation":"Typically the term \" foot fetish \" refers to a sexual attraction to people's feet. Here, though, Megan is a linguist, so for her the term \"foot\" refers not to the body part but to the term's meaning in prosody . In this context, \"foot\" means, per Wikipedia, \"the basic metrical unit that generates a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry,\" and thus \"foot fetish\" means an attraction to words that follow such a format.\nCommon types of feet (which are all referenced in this comic) include\nMegan thus wishes that Cueball first use a trochee during foreplay, then switch to an iamb during her main stimulation phase (intercourse or some other type that still enables Cueball to speak freely), and finally switch to a dactyl as she orgasms. According to the title text, after sex she wishes for him to hold her while he whispers the word \"anapest\" in her ear. But for a linguist like Megan, this is just four different types of \"foot\" stimulation - thus she can be called a woman with a foot fetish.\n[Cueball and Megan are in a bed.] Megan: Can you repeat \"Story Water Paper Doorway\" at the start, then switch to \"Disarm Adele's Giraffe Grenade\" as we get going, and finally \"Strawberry Scorpion Poetry\" as I finish? [Below the frame.] Linguist with a foot fetish\n"}
{"id":1384,"title":"Krypton","image_title":"Krypton","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1384","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/krypton.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1384:_Krypton","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing near a telescope.] Cueball: The distant planet Krypton is becoming unstable! Baby crying (from outside the panel): Waaaaaa Megan: That crying baby is really annoying.\n[Cueball and Megan looking at each other.]\n[Spaceship taking off.]\n[Spaceship passing another spaceship on route to distant planet.]\n[Planet exploding.]\n","explanation":"This comic is an inverse version of the origin story of the superhero character Superman .\nIn the Superman story, Jor-El and his wife Lara notice that their home planet Krypton is about to be destroyed in a giant explosion, so they decide to send their baby Kal-El to Earth to save him - and there he becomes Superman.\nIn this comic, Cueball and Megan also notice that the planet Krypton is about to explode, but instead of attempting to save a baby from Krypton, they decide to send a baby to Krypton from Earth so that it'll stop annoying them with its crying.\nIn the fourth panel both spaceships can be seen. The rocket containing the Earth baby arrives at planet Krypton, while the crystal star shaped spaceship containing Kal-El leaves Krypton towards Earth - this is a reference to the version of the spaceship depicted in the 1978 Superman movie , (see trivia section ).\nIn the fifth and last panel we see Krypton explode into multiple pieces, also emitting a disc-like wave from the assumed equator.\nIn the Superman movie, Kal-El carries with him a lot of information pre-recorded by his parents. During the very long trip he listens to the recordings, one of which explains that the Sun and gravity of Earth will give him (Kal-El) great powers (this is the way he becomes Superman). The title text is a satirical version of this information, given to the Earth baby during his trip: That Megan & Cueball do not have the faintest idea (or care about) what the sun and gravity of Krypton will do to it - but their best guess at what these mostly will do to it is to \"make you out of earshot from Earth\", which was their original reason for shipping the baby off in the first place.\n[Cueball and Megan are standing near a telescope.] Cueball: The distant planet Krypton is becoming unstable! Baby crying (from outside the panel): Waaaaaa Megan: That crying baby is really annoying.\n[Cueball and Megan looking at each other.]\n[Spaceship taking off.]\n[Spaceship passing another spaceship on route to distant planet.]\n[Planet exploding.]\n"}
{"id":1385,"title":"Throwing Rocks","image_title":"Throwing Rocks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1385","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/throwing_rocks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1385:_Throwing_Rocks","transcript":"[Beret Guy is throwing a rock in the water while talking to Megan who walks down to him.] Beret Guy: Every day I make a little leaf boat, then throw rocks until it sinks or floats away.\n[Rock lands in water, near a leaf boat.] Rock: Plunk Beret Guy: It's pointless, but at least it's relaxing.\n[Megan and Beret Guy are both holding rocks. Megan looks down at her rock.] Megan: Every day, I read the comments on a news article.\n[The two throw their rocks.]\n","explanation":"Beret Guy is showing Megan one of his daily activities: Building a leaf boat and throwing rocks at it. He acknowledges that the hobby is useless, but relaxing. In contrast, Megan contemplates one of her own daily activities: reading online comments on news articles. Realizing that it is an equally pointless, but presumably much less relaxing activity, she joins Beret Guy in throwing rocks at his leaf boat.\nIt is an unfortunate property of news articles that their comments become dominated by those which are deliberately offensive or devolve into flame wars . An additional metaphor may compare the article to the leaf boat while comparing the thrown stones to the flaming comments, essentially taking this most likely carefully constructed, fragile and perhaps beautiful creation (article or leaf boat) and lobbing offenses (comments or thrown stones) at it until it is dragged into the abyss (Internet \"graveyard\" or pond).\nThe title text makes it clear that they hit the leaf with a stone. The rest is a pun on the name of the 11th century Viking explorer Leif Erikson , who is believed to have been the first European to discover and settle North America which he named \" Vinland \".\n[Beret Guy is throwing a rock in the water while talking to Megan who walks down to him.] Beret Guy: Every day I make a little leaf boat, then throw rocks until it sinks or floats away.\n[Rock lands in water, near a leaf boat.] Rock: Plunk Beret Guy: It's pointless, but at least it's relaxing.\n[Megan and Beret Guy are both holding rocks. Megan looks down at her rock.] Megan: Every day, I read the comments on a news article.\n[The two throw their rocks.]\n"}
{"id":1386,"title":"People are Stupid","image_title":"People are Stupid","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1386","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/people_are_stupid.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1386:_People_are_Stupid","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are standing next to each other.] White Hat: Well, you know, people are stupid. Cueball: *Sigh*\n[They have moved a little further apart.] Cueball: No, people aren't stupid. On average, people are of average intelligence. When you say \"people are stupid,\" you mean stupid compared to your expectations.\n[Close up of Cueball.] Cueball: What you're really saying is \"other people aren't as smart as me. \" Cueball: And maybe you're right! In which case\n[White Hat is presented with a trophy by Cueball.] Cueball: I'd like to bestow upon you the [In the panel there is a close up of the trophy plaque (the text is in a frame):] First Annual Award for Excellence in Being Very Smart Cueball: May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom\n","explanation":"G. K. Chesterton wrote in an essay : \"It is stupid to say that \u201cmost people\u201d are stupid. It is like saying \u201cmost people are tall,\u201d when it is obvious that \u201ctall\u201d can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd to denounce the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind.\"\nIt is a common thing for people on the Internet (on forums and comments sections of various websites) to make vague generalizations about the \"stupidity of all people\" or \"losing faith in humanity,\" for instance when the topic is actually the stupidity or irrational\/extreme behavior of one individual or group of individuals. The comment can come in any type of Internet forum, regardless of the subject.\nHowever, the overall world population (\"people\") is not more stupid than the average - by definition. There is also no other human population to compare to to draw the conclusion this population is stupid. So it is a stupid comment that White Hat makes. The award being given to him by Cueball is thus a very sarcastic one.\nIt is possible that for a non-normal distribution of intelligence a median individual could be less intelligent than the mean. However, the statement as it is usually formulated (including here), \"People are stupid,\" refers to humanity as a whole. White Hat's anecdotal and subjective experience has led him to make a statistically impossible statement.\nWhite Hat's self-perceived superiority may be an example of the Lake Wobegon effect , so named because Lake Wobegon (a fictional city) is \"where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average\".\nThe last panel may be a reference to the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence which is a fictional award in the story of The Simpsons episode Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes? where it is presented to Homer Simpson .\nIn the title text the other phrase about having lost their faith in humanity also gets a comment on the way from Cueball. There are people who use this phrase every time someone disagrees with them or say something they think is stupid. He jokes that he will let humanity (everyone other than the guy who makes the comment) know that he has lost faith in them - and very sarcastically remarks that humanity will probably be crushed (i.e. the rest of the world does not care if that guy has lost faith in them).\n[White Hat and Cueball are standing next to each other.] White Hat: Well, you know, people are stupid. Cueball: *Sigh*\n[They have moved a little further apart.] Cueball: No, people aren't stupid. On average, people are of average intelligence. When you say \"people are stupid,\" you mean stupid compared to your expectations.\n[Close up of Cueball.] Cueball: What you're really saying is \"other people aren't as smart as me. \" Cueball: And maybe you're right! In which case\n[White Hat is presented with a trophy by Cueball.] Cueball: I'd like to bestow upon you the [In the panel there is a close up of the trophy plaque (the text is in a frame):] First Annual Award for Excellence in Being Very Smart Cueball: May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom\n"}
{"id":1387,"title":"Clumsy Foreshadowing","image_title":"Clumsy Foreshadowing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1387","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/clumsy_foreshadowing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1387:_Clumsy_Foreshadowing","transcript":"[Heading and text above the panel:] Today's News North Korea threatens U.S. over upcoming movie Shark populations booming off east coast SpaceX to attempt new rocket launch today [Arrow pointing down towards the comics only panel.]\n[Cueball, holding a towel, walks past a TV with a news report shown on-screen.] Cueball: Bye! See you tonight! Offscreen person: Have a good day! TV: Researchers are reporting record numbers of sharks...\n[Caption below the panel:] To make news stories seem way more ominous, imagine you're hearing them from a background TV in a movie as the main character leaves.\n","explanation":"Many action\/thriller movies, during the first few minutes, have a background news report that foreshadows the onset of some kind of danger, such as shark attacks, nuclear warfare etc.\nRandall suggests taking the same approach to random news stories from real life, in order to make them more ominous.\nIn this case we see three random headings from news stories, which could all be made even more interesting if the setting is correct.\nThe first of the three stories mentioned above the frame North Korea threatens U.S. over upcoming movie comes from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency who a few days before this comic was released threatened the US with war over the Seth Rogen movie The Interview , promising \"stern\" and \"merciless\" retaliation if the film is released. The threat generated some hype for the at-the-time unreleased movie. No one, however, really took North Korea's threat seriously, but if you put this into such a news report at the beginning of a film, this could be a film about a film leading to a new war with North Korea. (Note: In late 2014 North Korea was accused of carrying out a devastating cyber attack on Sony Pictures, the studio responsible for the film.  These accusations were widely believed initially, though independent analysists have since cast doubt.  This news report would likely have been seen in a film about the real life attack or film that features a similar fictional attack for its plot. This is an example of an xkcd comic coming true.)\nThe second one is about Shark populations booming off east coast . The news in the link is from a week before this comic was released, and is about the preservation of the Great white sharks . Not that terrifying, especially since sharks are way less dangerous than people tend to fear, in part due to movies like Jaws . However, if you put this headline into a news report running in the background, as when Cueball leaves the house with a bathing towel in the main frame of the comic, as if he was going to the beach, then it suddenly becomes a very ominous story , that will not bode well for Cueball and his friends.\nThe last of the three stories is about SpaceX to attempt new rocket launch today . SpaceX is a space transport services company and on March 13, 2014 they reported a launch date for their first OG2 mission containing 6 satellites on a dedicated Falcon 9 rocket. This date was April 30, 2014 as can be read at the bottom of the news link, which is the news list for this OG2 mission. The launch continued to be postponed several times, and the last date given before this comic was released was June the 24th, three days before this comic was released. This launch was canceled on the 23rd and the day before this comic was released it was yet again postponed, this time until July 14 (almost three weeks, after the previous four proposed launch dates had been 20, 21, 22 and 24 June). So at this point in time, any news regarding SpaceX attempting to launch a rocket, will not generate much fuss, as they are most likely postponing again, but if you put the news bite into the start of a movie, then the launch would probably stay on schedule - but would then go horribly wrong, setting the action packed story in progress.\nJust over a year later on June 28, 2015 SpaceX mission CRS-7 exploded just after launch. The preliminary findings of the investigation however point to a failure of a steel strut, which would be hard to turn into a good story.\nThe title text news hosts were unexpectedly fired from ABC's 'The View' today references ABC's The View where two of the co-hosts, Sherri Shepherd and Jenny McCarthy , were simultaneously reporting leaving the program (fired or resigned? - sources vary), the day before this comic appeared. Sherri after seven years, Jenny after less than one year as co-host. According to the news link above there were \"no word on who will be replacing the hosts, but the network says they will have a team together when the show launches its new season this fall.\" Again a not very interesting news story. The title text though continues the news by saying: ABC will likely announce new... The humorous suggestion is that the news about The View will go on to foreshadow some looming disaster, a comically unlikely premise for an action\/thriller movie. Alternatively, it could be used as a plot device if the character will be hired as a replacement\u2014or the character is listed as a potential replacement and tries to dig up dirt on the competition or otherwise compete for the position.\n[Heading and text above the panel:] Today's News North Korea threatens U.S. over upcoming movie Shark populations booming off east coast SpaceX to attempt new rocket launch today [Arrow pointing down towards the comics only panel.]\n[Cueball, holding a towel, walks past a TV with a news report shown on-screen.] Cueball: Bye! See you tonight! Offscreen person: Have a good day! TV: Researchers are reporting record numbers of sharks...\n[Caption below the panel:] To make news stories seem way more ominous, imagine you're hearing them from a background TV in a movie as the main character leaves.\n"}
{"id":1388,"title":"Subduction License","image_title":"Subduction License","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1388","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/subduction_license.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1388:_Subduction_License","transcript":"[Beret Guy is looking at some mail he has received while Cueball is at his computer desk at the other side of the room.] Beret Guy: Sweet! I finally got my subduction license! Cueball: Your what?\n[Beret Guy starts sinking into the ground, causing it to ripple.] Cueball: ...What are you doing?\n[Beret Guy sinks further, forming a miniature mountain range in front of him. Cueball is frantically trying to keep his computer steady as his desk tilts.] Cueball: Stop it! Stop it!\n[Beret Guy is waist-deep, and snow caps have formed on the mountains. Cueball is falling backwards from his desk and out of his chair, and the monitor unplugs itself from his computer.] Cueball: Augh!\n","explanation":"In structural geology , subduction is the mechanism by which one tectonic plate disappears under another. This process usually creates a mountain range on the second tectonic plate as water entrained in the subducting plate rises into the second plate and provokes volcanism , often resulting in a volcanic arc .\nIn this comic, Beret Guy is very happy because he has just received his subduction license , which may be a play with business term production license . His roommate Cueball very reasonably asks him: Your what? But instead of answering him, Beret Guy begins to move towards him in their small room. It turns out that the license has literally enabled him to initiate subduction. As he moves towards Cueball, he slowly sinks under the floorboards of the room, and in this process he creates a small mountain range on the floor. In the end, much to Cueball's consternation, these mountains turn his desk and chair over. Cueball actually falls out of the frame in the final panel, where Beret Guy is already halfway down beneath the floor. This would not be possible in real life. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text plays on the double meaning of the word \"normal\", which Cueball means in the sense of \"like most people, not strange,\" but which Beret Guy interprets in the geological sense. While subduction occurs when two plates crash into each other, a normal fault occurs when two plates are moving away from each other. Here, \"normal\" is used in the sense of \"perpendicular,\" as the result of a normal fault is often that part of the crust moves vertically downward, forming a graben .\nA similarly atypical license was mentioned previously in 410: Math Paper . Puns on geological terms (including types of faults) were previously made in 1082: Geology .\nThis comic was featured in a page of Thing Explainer as part of the explanation of the Big flat rocks we live on . Only the last three panels were used, probably because the words in the first panel were way too uncommon for the book - see more details here .\nSubduction was again mentioned in 1829: Geochronology .\n[Beret Guy is looking at some mail he has received while Cueball is at his computer desk at the other side of the room.] Beret Guy: Sweet! I finally got my subduction license! Cueball: Your what?\n[Beret Guy starts sinking into the ground, causing it to ripple.] Cueball: ...What are you doing?\n[Beret Guy sinks further, forming a miniature mountain range in front of him. Cueball is frantically trying to keep his computer steady as his desk tilts.] Cueball: Stop it! Stop it!\n[Beret Guy is waist-deep, and snow caps have formed on the mountains. Cueball is falling backwards from his desk and out of his chair, and the monitor unplugs itself from his computer.] Cueball: Augh!\n"}
{"id":1389,"title":"Surface Area","image_title":"Surface Area","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1389","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/surface_area.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1389:_Surface_Area","transcript":"[At the top of a map is a heading, with two sub headings and a note in brackets:] Space Without the space The Solar System's solid surfaces stitched together (Excluding dust and small rocks) [Below the headings there is a map with several distinct areas. Each area is labelled with a name or a description. This label is noted inside the area, except for areas that are too small; here the label is written outside and a line indicates which area the label belongs to. Only exception is the largest area, on which the contours of the Earth's continents are drawn. Surrounding the map is wavy lines to indicate that this is either an island or one big super-continent placed in an even larger ocean.] [Here below are the labels given as they appear in \"normal\" reading order in as read from left to right in the three main rows as will be indicated:] [Row one, above the line defined by the general top of the Earth area:] Io Callisto Europa Ganymede Ceres Vesta Asteroids (1 km+) [Here \u2013 above the Asteroids area before the Triton area - is a small unlabelled area (the only other except Earth)] Triton Asteroids (100 m+) Oberon Miranda Ariel Umbriel Titania [Row two, the unlabelled Earth area's row, but here only given those that are directly written to the right of this area:] Tethys Enceladus Dione Iapetus All human skin Rhea Titan [Row three, all the remaining items that are mainly below the Earth area:] Mercury The Moon Various small moons, comets, etc Mars Makemake Haumea Eris Pluto Charon Venus\n","explanation":"This map shows the total surface areas of all terrestrial planets , dwarf planets , moons , asteroids and minor planets that are larger than 100 m in the Solar System . They have all been represented as regions of a single massive landmass - a supercontinent like Pangaea - which is clearly surrounded by some kind of ocean.\nOn the area that signifies Earth the continents are drawn using a map projection that keeps the scale of the continents correct. (This is something that Randall cares about as can be seen in 977: Map Projections ). The parts of the surface of the Earth that are covered by oceans are also included in the surface area of the Earth (i.e. the map shows the Earth's crust ). An extra layer of 3\u20134\u00a0km of water seems rather insignificant when comparing to the Earth's radius of 6,370\u00a0km.\nThe Moon has been inlaid in this map next to Antarctica which thus makes a great comparison of how small the Moon is compared to the Earth (there is room for more than 13 lunar surfaces on the Earth). Similarly, it is clear that the planet Venus is almost as big as the Earth.\nThis is also the general idea of the map - to give an idea about how big the Earth is and how small many of the other known planets etc. are; both compared to Earth and to each other. The map drawn on the Earth is probably there mainly as a guide to size, because none of the features that are known on some of the other objects, especially The Moon (i.e. craters and \" seas \") and on Mars (i.e. Olympus Mons ), are included.\nThe objects mentioned by name on the map are all but one amongst those that have reached hydrostatic equilibrium and these are all included on this List of gravitationally rounded objects of the Solar System .\nThe one named object that is not on the above list is the asteroid Vesta , which is included because it is the second largest object in the Asteroid belt . It is placed right next to the largest object in this belt, the dwarf planet Ceres , which is no longer considered an asteroid. And next to these two are the rest of the asteroids in two areas (see below), which thus groups all asteroids together.\nThe only object from the above list, (that qualifies for having a solid surface in hydrostatic equilibrium), which is not included is the Saturn moon Mimas , which is also clearly the smallest object on the list.\nThis moon should have been located amongst the other five smaller moons of Saturn between the Earth and Titan (the largest of Saturn's moons). Mimas has a surface area of 490,000\u00a0km 2 which is somewhat smaller than the smallest included Saturn moon Enceladus with a surface area of 799,000\u00a0km 2 .\nGenerally the moons that belong to a given planet (for those with more than one moon large enough to be included), have been clustered together. Apart from the six (not seven...) moons of Saturn to the right of Earth, the four Galilean moons moons of Jupiter are located above the Earth, the five included moons from Uranus is located at the top to the far right.\nThe last planet to have many moons is Neptune , but only Triton is included. This is a fairly large moon, and the only of the 14 known moons of Neptune to be on the above list. However, there is one other moon, Proteus which is notable for being as large as a body of its density can be without being pulled into a spherical shape by its own gravity. It has a length of 424\u00a0km in the longest direction, and a mean radius of 210\u00a0km. A rough calculation of its surface area from this mean radius gives an area of 550,000\u00a0km 2 , making the surface area slightly larger than Mimas. As there is an unlabeled area located right next to the other Neptune moon Triton, it is most likely that this small area should represent Proteus , and that it is an error that it was not labeled.\nAs this is the smallest area, the cut-off of objects could have been at 500,000\u00a0km 2 , as Vesta is also larger than this, which would make room for Proteus, but explain the missing Mimas.\nTwo of the included objects also have moons that are large enough to be included: Earth, of course, and the dwarf planet Pluto with its moon Charon . In both cases these moons have been inlaid in the area of their mother planet.\nWhereas the moons of the gas giants and the asteroids have been located above and to the right of the Earth, the planets and dwarf planets have been included below earth (along with the two moons mentioned above). Mercury , Mars and Venus all touching Earth, and then below them the four Trans-Neptunian dwarf planets - the Plutoids .\nOn the list from above there are, however, also these 10 objects which have not been included with name on the map. These object are, however, only likely candidates for being dwarf planets (depending on whether they have reached hydrostatic equilibrium or not), and on the map they have thus been relegated to the sections without individual names. These object are thus probably grouped together (along with other relatively small objects like comets and smaller moons) in the area labeled Various small moons, comets, etc , which is located at the bottom of the map between Mercury and Mars. The surface area for all of these object, when the surface area have been estimated, are larger than 1 million square kilometer, and thus larger than several of the named objects. So it is not the size that is the reason why such objects as Sedna and Quaoar are not included with name, but probably the fact they are not investigated enough yet.\nThe remaining objects in the Solar System with a solid surface are the minor planets, which on the map has been labeled as asteroids even though these objects are grouped together in several other \"belts\" than the Asteroid belt. Here they have been assigned to two regions at the top of the map. Above the right part of the Earth area is the area Asteroids (1 km+) which include any object not already included larger than 1\u00a0km. (As these objects are no longer round it is the largest dimension, the length, that should be at least 1\u00a0km long). And finally the area Asteroids (100\u00a0m+) thus include any object not already included larger than 100\u00a0m.\nMost of the rest of the objects that have been included in these three sections can likely be found on this List of Solar System objects by size .\nTiny objects smaller than 100\u00a0m down to space dust are excluded altogether as explained in the note below the headings. This is probably because their total surface area is impossible to estimate accurately, and also because any estimate would likely be too large to fit easily into the map.\nBetween Earth and Titan is a tiny speck noted all human skin , which is an interesting sort of solid surface. A rough estimate of the average body surface area and thus of the average area of all humans skin can be made from these average values and from population pyramids as this pyramid for 2015 . Average adults have a skin area of around 1.7-1.8\u00a0m 2 , but as a large part of the human population are children (with skin area down to about 0.25\u00a0m 2 for infants) the total average will be smaller. By extrapolating the given values an average area of about 1.6\u00a0m 2 can be found. This would make the area 7.2\u00a0billion \u00d7 1.6\u00a0m 2 \u2248 11,500\u00a0km 2 . This is 60 times smaller than the smallest of the labeled moons Miranda (of Uranus) with a surface area of 700,000\u00a0km 2 .\nThe title text jokingly claims that this comic is not actually for information, but rather is something Randall thinks we should really do \u2013 that is, to stitch all the solar system's solid surfaces together, as the sub-sub heading says. To do this, we would need a giant spool of thread and then something he has to go get in Seattle\u2026 which presumably must be the Space Needle , a needle-like tower in Seattle, which should then be used in this grand project.\nThis could also have been a reference to the Seattle seamstresses if it weren't for the fact that it's not.\nSince the land areas are on the surfaces of spheres, this would seem impossible as it would involve lots of deformation and be particularly challenging. It will also be very gruesome when he comes to the part of collecting (and stitching) all human skin together. The inclusion of this speck on the map is, however, also there to make it clear what the real intention is with the planets. Their surface is to be \"skinned\" of them, as you would have to do with the humans! Then it is all these \"planet skins\" that should be stitched together using the space needle. This also explains the ragged edges, and why the continents keep their correct size. It would make Randall into a planetary version of The Silence of the Lambs movies character Buffalo Bill , a serial killer who tried to make a suit out of the skin from the women he killed.\nRandall would also need quite a lot of space for the very large ocean. However, the whole supercontinent is just somewhere between 3-4 times larger than the area of the Earth. And the area of the entire image is less than 9 times the area of the earth. As the formula for calculation surface areas for spheres (4*\u03c0*r 2 ) goes with the radius (r) squared, the diameter of the planet needed for the experiment do not need to be larger than 3 times that of the earth. Although there are no objects in the Solar System with this particular size, it is still smaller than the gas giants , the smallest of these have a radius of almost 4 times that of the earth. Exoplanets with this range of diameters have certainly been found, however, already at 1.7 times the earth radius most planets size to be of the Super-Earth type and turns in to the gas dwarf type of planets. So an ocean of the size needed are not easy to come by.\nAs has been explained above the earth's surface is included disregarding surface water (oceans) and the same is valid for other objects with surface water, as the Saturn moon Titan which has great lakes (or even oceans) of liquid methane on the surface or the Jupiter moon Europa which is covered in a deep ocean with a thick cap of ice. (Interestingly this moon is placed on the map very near to the continent of Europe - maybe for easy comparison of these two areas).\nThe gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have, however, not been included because they do not have any \"solid surfaces\"; even if they had a solid core (which is itself not clear), this would not comprise any \"surface\". The gas giants are believed to lack any well-defined surface at all, with the gases that make them up simply becoming thinner and thinner with increasing distance from the planets' centers, eventually becoming indistinguishable from the interplanetary medium. But if they were included via some sort of surface definition, the map of this comic would become a tiny speck amongst the map of the gas giants. Similarly, the surface of the Sun is also not considered a solid surface but hot plasma ; if it were included it would reduce even a map of the gas giants to a tiny speck.\nThe map is drawn in a similar style to the two maps of the Internet that Randall has created in the past:\nBelow is a table listing the object roughly in the order they would be read of the map (the same order as in the transcript.) But they can be sorted by each of the columns.\nThe data is taken when possible from the following table: List of gravitationally rounded objects of the Solar System , and surface area is given with three significant digits.\nFor Vesta and Proteus (the most likely candidate for the unlabeled area next to Triton) the area is calculated from their mean radius (i.e. they are not spherical). See also above in the explanation, also for calculating the area of all human skin.\nThe surface for a given object is also given as a Fraction of Earth's surface , and from this the number of times the object could be placed on the Earth's surface is given as one divided by this fraction. For instance it can be seen that The Moon's surface can be placed more than 13 times on top of that of the Earth.\n[At the top of a map is a heading, with two sub headings and a note in brackets:] Space Without the space The Solar System's solid surfaces stitched together (Excluding dust and small rocks) [Below the headings there is a map with several distinct areas. Each area is labelled with a name or a description. This label is noted inside the area, except for areas that are too small; here the label is written outside and a line indicates which area the label belongs to. Only exception is the largest area, on which the contours of the Earth's continents are drawn. Surrounding the map is wavy lines to indicate that this is either an island or one big super-continent placed in an even larger ocean.] [Here below are the labels given as they appear in \"normal\" reading order in as read from left to right in the three main rows as will be indicated:] [Row one, above the line defined by the general top of the Earth area:] Io Callisto Europa Ganymede Ceres Vesta Asteroids (1 km+) [Here \u2013 above the Asteroids area before the Triton area - is a small unlabelled area (the only other except Earth)] Triton Asteroids (100 m+) Oberon Miranda Ariel Umbriel Titania [Row two, the unlabelled Earth area's row, but here only given those that are directly written to the right of this area:] Tethys Enceladus Dione Iapetus All human skin Rhea Titan [Row three, all the remaining items that are mainly below the Earth area:] Mercury The Moon Various small moons, comets, etc Mars Makemake Haumea Eris Pluto Charon Venus\n"}
{"id":1390,"title":"Research Ethics","image_title":"Research Ethics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1390","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/research_ethics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1390:_Research_Ethics","transcript":"[Megan is facing Cueball and Ponytail.] Megan: Facebook shouldn't choose what stuff they show us to conduct unethical psychological research. Megan: They should only make those decisions based on, uh... Megan: However they were doing it before. Megan: Which was probably ethical, right?\n","explanation":"This comic references the recent revelation that Facebook engaged in a \" psychological experiment \" by selectively showing users more \"positive\" or \"negative\" posts on their news feed and recording the users' comments to see if the change affected the positivity or negativity of their posts. Further experiments have since been revealed such as one that tested security measures by locking users out of their accounts .\nHere, Megan is commenting on the fact that, while the media is calling this control over what content the user sees \" unethical ,\" Facebook, and other companies like Google , must, one way or another, control what content the user sees, whether to present users with a limited selection of all postings, or to tailor ads to particular users; even if the regular algorithms are not set up for psychological experiments, they are still \"manipulating\" what posts users see or don't see. As Megan points out, no one really knows what the \"normal\" constraints are of the algorithm which chooses which posts are shown on news feeds. This comic is parodying the strong reaction to what is basically already a common practice.\nAccumulation, control and analysis of user-generated information can be a part of the terms of service \/ end-user license agreement of a Website or software. In such a scenario, the user has effectively signed his\/her consent to being part of such research. Unfortunately, most users don't read the terms before clicking the \"I agree\" option, so it can come as a shock when the service uses the data in a way the user hadn't anticipated.\nThe title text ironically\/sarcastically accepts that Facebook has access to all of its users thoughts through posts and photos, and they can read them for research or other purposes, but contrasts this with a suggestion which likely mirrors how Facebook would respond to such a request that Facebook's code is private and can not be revealed to us. The title text basically appears to be musing that this is backwards, and our personal data should be considered MORE private than Facebook's programming code, which may be proprietary, but is not personal private data.\nIt is as if your neighbor was spying on you while you left all your shades open, but you felt it to be inappropriate to find out what he knew about you because that's his business. Asking for the source code might similarly be equivalent to asking for the specifications of the binoculars your neighbor used for spying.\n[Megan is facing Cueball and Ponytail.] Megan: Facebook shouldn't choose what stuff they show us to conduct unethical psychological research. Megan: They should only make those decisions based on, uh... Megan: However they were doing it before. Megan: Which was probably ethical, right?\n"}
{"id":1391,"title":"Darkness","image_title":"Darkness","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1391","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/darkness.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1391:_Darkness","transcript":"[Ponytail is a news anchor at a media desk and she reports:] Ponytail: ...getting reports that the darkness has spread as far west as Texas. Let's go live to our reporter in Houston.\n[From a breaking news window in the bottom right corner of the panel, Cueball as a newscaster stands in darkness with two people walking behind him:] Cueball: It's been thirty minutes since the sun vanished...\n[Caption below the panel]: Caption: \"Genie, for my last wish, make everyone in the media forget about the day-night cycle.\"\n","explanation":"Ponytail as a news anchor describes the sunset as though it were an unprecedented, newsworthy event, rather than something mundane that happens every day. They even have a reporter ( Cueball ) on the spot reporting from where the darkness has spread so far.\nThe sunset is a common event. Isaac Asimov based his short story Nightfall on a fictional civilization that doesn't know darkness because the planet is always illuminated by the six stars surrounding it. The story describes how people would react (mass insanity, fall of civilization) when the orbital motion of the planet eventually leads to five of the suns setting, plus one in eclipse.\nDescribing mundane occurrences in unusual detail, to show off how odd they really are, is something Randall has done before (for instance about dreaming in 203: Hallucinations ). But the caption below the main panel adds another twist to the joke by showing that the news report wasn't a mere imagine spot, but something actually happening due to the interference of Randall's final wish to his genie , which caused all news reporters to forget the day-night cycle.\nAnother possible meaning is that this comic is a reference to the way the media often talk about global warming as if each weather occurrence had meaning outside of its context like in 1321: Cold . That take on the weather and the day-night cycle being denied because of a skewed point of view was also used on the Daily Show . The segment \" Unusually Large Snowstorm \" from February 10, 2010, used the same trope. Several Daily Show correspondents have different views on the weather based on where they are, ending with a correspondent who equates nighttime with everlasting darkness.\nThe caption references the fact that there is a limit to the number of wishes. It is a common rule, often used in fiction, that you get three wishes from a genie in a bottle . There usually is an added stipulation that no wish may be used to acquire more wishes.\nIn the title text, however, it is stated that Randall has managed to bypass the three wish limit rule. This was accomplished by using his second wish to simply make the genie unable to remember granting the speaker any wishes. He has thus used the same trick on the genie as he used here on the media. The media wish turns out not to have been his last (i.e. third), but rather wish number 406. This shows just how far, \"make someone forget something\", can go by applying it to the genie.\nThere is possibly an inconsistency in the comic, when seen from the title text's perspective. Since his second wish, all his wishes would have been seen as the first by the genien and thus, if the title text is true, he could have said: \"Genie, for my first wish, make everyone in the media forget about the day-night cycle.\" However, in the light of the title text (to be seen as an add on, and thus not always related directly to the comics image) he appears to voluntarily end the whole scenario by explicitly declaring it over. Whether this would finally trigger the genie to end the wishing-cycle is unknown, and depends upon the exact priority of the genie's induced amnesia over its end-of-wishes habits.\nIt is interesting that it was his second wish that gave him unlimited wishes. What did he wish for on wish #1? Maybe he wasted the first wish because he did not believe the genie was able to grant wishes \u2013 a common error. On the other hand, he may have used the first wish to learn how to make his second wish circumvent the three rule limit. His first wish could have been to read the genie's mind to determine what he could wish for to give him unlimited wishes.\n[Ponytail is a news anchor at a media desk and she reports:] Ponytail: ...getting reports that the darkness has spread as far west as Texas. Let's go live to our reporter in Houston.\n[From a breaking news window in the bottom right corner of the panel, Cueball as a newscaster stands in darkness with two people walking behind him:] Cueball: It's been thirty minutes since the sun vanished...\n[Caption below the panel]: Caption: \"Genie, for my last wish, make everyone in the media forget about the day-night cycle.\"\n"}
{"id":1392,"title":"Dominant Players","image_title":"Dominant Players","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1392","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dominant_players.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1392:_Dominant_Players","transcript":"Dominant players over time [Below this heading there are three panels with charts showing different players career paths - that is their rating a function of the year. Most of the paths are grey, but some are red (there will be a note for these). Some parts of several paths are dashed. Somewhere on each path the players name will be written curving along so it follows the path. Several places an event or some information is noted and points to a given time on the path. If it is not clear where it belongs an arrow will point to the correct place. Each chart has a heading and for the two last charts there is an explanation. There is no scale on the y-axis (rating) but the x-axis (time) has the years given in ten years interval. A thin line indicates these decades. The years are all written at the top, except the first for the first chart, which is written below, and this year is missing in the bottom chart.] [Below the transcript for each chart will follow this order: Heading\/sub heading, explanation, time scale, player names with any information for this player, in the order their name appear on the time scale.] [Basketball chart:] Basketball (NBA\/ABA) Player Efficiency Rating 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990  2000 2010 [Red] George Mikan [Red] Bob Pettit Neal Johnston [Neil misspelled.] Elgin Baylor [Red]  Wilt Chamberlain Becomes the first and so far only player to score 100 points in a game Jerry West The Guy in the NBA logo [Red] Kareem Abdul Jabbar [Missing hyphen between the two last names.] Airplane Bob Mcadoo Julius Irving [Erving misspelled.] Moses Malone Magic Johnson HIV announcement [A part of the path is dashed after this.] [Red] Michael Jordan Baseball career [A part of the path is dashed after this.] Space Jam Second retirement [A part of the path is dashed after this.] Larry Bird Karl Malone David Robinson [Red] Shaquille O'Neal Kevin Gariett [Red] LeBron James The Decision Dwyane Wade Kevin Durant\n[Chess chart.] Chess Elo Rating The modern Elo rating system dates back to about 1970. Computer analysis (like Kenneth Regan's) lets us rate historical players, but this has only been done rigorously for a few tournaments. Dashed lines are rough estimates only. [All paths are dashed up until the late nineteen sixties:] 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990  2000 2010 [The first player has no path, as his time was before 1940. An arrow points toward the left to these earlier times:] Jos\u00e9 Capablanca Terrifying chess God [Red] Alexander Alekhine [His path ends in a starburst.] [Red] Mikhail Botvinnik Tigran Petrosian David Bronstein Mikhail Tal Mikhail Tal [his name is written twice on the path, the second time above Boris Spassky when their paths intertwine.] [Red] Bobby Fischer Vanished\u2026 [Text under a starburst.] Reappeared then vanished again. He had problems. [Text under two starbursts connected with a path. This appears much later than the first starburst.] Boris Spassky Boris Spassky [his name is written twice on the path, the second time below Mikhail Tal when their paths intertwine.] Victor Korchnoi [Red] Anatoly Karpov [Red] Garry Kasparov Loses to Deep Blue Judit Polgar (See below) [The text is written beneath her name.] Vladimir Kramnik Levon Aronian [Red] Magnus Carlsen\n[Chess (women) chart:] Chess (women) Elo Rating For a long time, sexism, a lack of role models, and institutional hostility largely kept women from pursuing serious chess careers. With the expansion of women's tournaments and prizes starting in the 1970s, this has begun to change. [All paths are dashed up until the late nineteen sixties.] 1960 1970 1980 1990  2000 2010 [Red] Vera Menchik Died in a missile attack on London [next to a starburst.] Sonja Graf Rating particularly uncertain Olga Rubtsova Elisaveta Bykova Kira Zvorykina Kira Zvorykina (born 1919) continued playing in tournaments into the 21st century [Text above Elisvetas path, no arrows.] Zvorykina [Written on top of the path when her path reappears much later.] Alexandra Nicolau [Red] Nona Gaprindashvili Alla Kushnir [Red] Maia Chiburdanidze Pia Cramling Pia Cramling [her name is written twice on the path, the second time below the path of Xie Jun after  their paths have intertwined.] Xie Jun Xie Jun [her name is written twice on the path, the second time above the path of Pia Cramling after their paths have intertwined.] Susan Polgar Sofia Polgar [Red] Judit Polgar Sisters [The three Polgars are linked by a thin dashed line, snaking between their names.] Wins a game against Kasparov, making her the first woman to beat the world #1 Becomes first woman to rank in the overall top 10 Antoaneta Stefanova Anna Muzychuk Koneru Humpy [In western style the name should be Humpy Koneru, but the comics version is the native form.] Hou Yifan\n","explanation":"The comic shows the rise and fall of players' strengths in two games, basketball and chess .  For chess, there is an overall chart, and a women's chart.\nFor basketball, it uses the player efficiency rating (PER), the most commonly used player statistic . Note that that player efficiency ratings and similar \"aggregate scores\" are the subject of much discussion in basketball due to known deficiencies .\nFor chess, it uses the Elo rating . Elo was adopted by the World Chess Federation, FIDE , in 1970, so the rating is extrapolated backwards in time (among other methods, such as using Kenneth Regan's computer analysis - as written in the Chess panel) and are thus shown as dashed lines prior to 1970.\nThe charts show the players career paths as a function of time with the rating on the y-axis. There is no scale on the y-axis .\nIncluded are mainly players that could be said to have been among the dominating players at some time in their career. If a player has been the best player over a longer time period (a seriously dominating player) then their career path will be drawn in red, the rest are in gray. There can be more than one red path at a time, but only because the dominating player has played before or after they became dominating. It seems like it has to be at least five years, as there are at least two players that have been no. 1 for four years, without being upgraded to a red curve. The only ones that have managed this with three years or less (on the chart) are those that begin the chart, and thus could have been no. 1 a few years before. This can all be seen in the data tables below.\nThe title text mentions Vera Menchik who is also the first female chess player listed at the left of the bottom panel. In January 1926 she won the first Girls' Open Championship at the Imperial Club in London, but as can be seen in the last panel she was killed near the end of World War II, 38-year-old, while still holding the title of women's world champion. She, her sister, and mother were killed in a V-1 flying bomb attack which destroyed their home in 1944.\nThe title text mentions her specifically because of the club named after her: The \"Vera Menchik Club\" . When in 1929, Menchik entered the Carlsbad , Viennese master, usually a tournament only for male chess players, one of the other chess players, Albert Becker , ridiculed her entry by proposing that any player whom Menchik defeated in tournament play should be granted membership into the Vera Menchik Club. In the same tournament, Becker himself became the first member of the \"club\", much to his ridicule. It should be noted that she did end in last place vs. his fifth place, but that must just have made the defeat even tougher to take for Albert.\nAlbert was the first, but far from the last male chess player to enter the Vera Menchik Club. No less than 19 other male chess players are listed on Wikipedia belonging to this club, amongst them Max Euwe who went on to become World Chess Champion (1935\u201337). So it can for sure be said that the club accumulated a \"large and illustrious roster\".\nOne and a half year later a comic, named after Magnus Carlsen , was released ( 1628: Magnus ). This comics also compares chess players (Magnus) to other (sporting) events. Magnus was ranked no. 1 on the chess world rank when both comics were released.\nWhy is chess divided in an overall (with only one woman included) and basketball not? First of all, there is very little focus on women's basketball (as for most women's sport). This may be the same for chess, but at least here the physical strength advantage for men is no direct advantage. Thus a great woman chess player may play just as interesting chess as a man. Whereas women would typically have no chance if playing on a basketball team with men. But why are women then not represented better on the overall chess ranking? This is explained and may be another reason it is included. In the Chess (women) panel it says: \"For a long time, sexism, a lack of role models, and institutional hostility largely kept women from pursuing serious chess careers. With the expansion of women's tournaments and prizes starting in the 1970s, this has begun to change\". So now at least one woman has shown that her skills is enough to compete with the best men. With the long careers chess players usually have, then maternity leave can destroy a woman's chance at reaching the ultimate top. This could be the case for the number one woman who now has two children.\nThe x-axis is divided in decades from 1950 until 2010. In the Basketball section the curves begins to appear right after 1950. For both chess panels there are curves further back than 1950 (with even a reference to a player from before 1940). For all three panels the paths continue up till present day (2014).\nIn all cases there is no scale on the y-axis with the rating, thus it is difficult to find the absolute scale. It is also difficult to compare between the two chess panels. The scale on the two chess panels are, however, the same, as can be seen by comparing the curve of Judit Polgar on each chart. This curve is exactly the same, with the same elevation between the point where her curve enters the Chess panel up to the top point. This also means that any women player whose curve rises above this entry point (around 1989) should also be visible in the Chess chart. See below for inclusion criteria.\nIn general not all possible players are included in these charts. For instance it is mentioned that Judit Polgar was the first woman ranked in the over all top 10. But only six players are shown on the over all chart around 2005, where she was ranked 8th. So some male players, better than her at that time, have not been included. This is a general trend for all three charts.\nFrom the Woman's panel below it is also clear that some of the other women would be ranked high enough to be visible on the upper chart as mentioned in the Scales section above. But still only Judit is shown there. 9 out of 12 of the women that are on the chart after 1989 would be visible if included in the overall chart. However, none of them could be called dominant when comparing to the best men in the same time period. And thus they are not included. Maybe the same could be said about Judth, but then she is included for scale, and because she is so good that she can compete with, and sometimes beat, the best.\nSome NBA players (like Tim Duncan , Charles Barkley , Oscar Robertson , Kobe Bryant , and Chris Paul ) have been left out of the chart in favor of players with lower career and yearly efficiency ratings.\nSimilarly can be mentioned for instance the no. 1 ranked chess player Veselin Topalov from Bulgaria, who was ranked first both in 20062007 and in 2008-2010 for a total of less than two years. And there are likely several others ( see below ).\nAn example of the above for Basketball would be the 2008\u20132009 season which was unique in that it was the only season in which more than one player posted an efficiency ratings of over 30.0 on the Player efficiency rating (see at the bottom of this section on Wikipedia). In that season three players broke this barrier: LeBron James (31.76), Dwyane Wade (30.46), and Chris Paul (30.04). LeBron is shown to top that season, But Dwayne is far below (thus the scale does not fit?) and Chris is not on the list at all (i.e. he was not deemed to be a dominant player).\nSo is this Randall's subjective list of players that he has deemed to be \"Dominant Players\" and not a full list of the best ranked players during the time period? Of course it is his choice which players he put into the list, but missing players (when worse has been included earlier) can be explained if the missing players never were among the most dominant player over a length of time. It is not a list of the best players of all time, or of a single season, but a chart of the dominant players over a longer time period.\nIf a player only has had a very short time where their careers peaked - they should not be included. Also if there most of the time where at least two others that were more dominant than they ever where - they should not be included. To tell if this explains all the excluded players mentioned\/referenced above, that would take some investigation. An investigation we can assume Randall has taken upon himself before posting this comic. This of course will still make it his subjective list.\nFor basketball any given player will at least have been the 2nd best (of those included) at some (longer) period of their career. And to become selected for a red curve, they need to be the best for at least five years - the first players curve is no. 1 less than five year, but he could have been no. 1 also before 1951.\nThe same is valid for the Chess players (again the first players curve is red, but stops just as it enters the panel). Only exception is Judit Polgar. She is never better than 3rd of those selected. And she was never better than 8th in the world. So her inclusion is a mentioned probably only to compare her with the men.\nFor the woman chess players there are the same criteria for red, except that Sonja Graf is not red although she is the only chess player on the list for more than a decade. Maybe you need to be better than someone else to become red? There are also included several women who never reaches 2nd place on the chart. Three of these reaches 3rd place and two only 4th. One of these, Anna Muzychuk, is still on the rise, so she might be on the chart, because she could possibly become first or second if she can continue to improve. The other, Sofia Polgar, is included to show that all three Polgar sisters are chess masters.\nNone of the above can explain why former World Champion Chess Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand has not been included in the Chess Chart. Anand is one of only thirteen players in history to break the 2800 mark on the FIDE rating list and and still(as of 2020) has the eighth highest FIDE ranking at peak ever. He occupied the number one position in several rating lists between 2007 and 2011. The reason could possible be because Randall may be a huge fan of Magnus Carlsen, and thus biased against Anand - there is some evidence for this in 1287: Puzzle . In the title text of that comic it seems that Randall makes fun of Anand in a match against Magnus. The interpretation of the comic and its comment, however, appear to be a double-edged matter of debate. However, since the release of 1628: Magnus , named after Magnus, there can be no doubt that Randall is a fan of Magnus.\nAnand can for instance be found in the Chessmetrics devised by statistician Jeff Sonas . In the graph from 1995-2005 of Sonas famous research from 2005, Anand becomes the best during 2004. It can, however, also be seen that Randall does not agree with Sonas - this is very clear in this graph from 1940-1960 . Here Mikhail Botvinnik clearly plays way better than Alexander Alekhine in 1946, where Alexander dies. This is not shown like this in the comic. Maybe the death of Alexander becomes the more interesting in the comic, if you believed he was the best at the time. Note that all nine (male) names listed in the comics chart between the lines at 1950 and 2000 are included in this graph from 1950-2000 . In this chart it is clear that Bobby Fischer was by far the best in the years before he disappeared. However, he was caught by Anatoly Karpov just before which is not shown in the comic. On the other hand, he seems to have reached a significant higher rating than Kasparov ever did, which is also not the case in the comic.\nChess players Vladimir Kramnik and Levon Aronian , who have faced each other on multiple occasions in the 2010s, are shown as having their career paths entwined. It is a general trend observed every time two players paths cross each other more than once. The one on top the first time, will be below the second time and so forth. It is just more clear with these two than anywhere else. In two cases these crossing path occurs with so long time between the first appearance, that the names is written twice on the path. In the Chess panel it is Mikhail Tal and Boris Spassky and for the Chess (women) panel it is Pia Cramling and Xie Jun . This can make it difficult to get an overview of how few chess players there are compared to basketball players.\nDominant players over time [Below this heading there are three panels with charts showing different players career paths - that is their rating a function of the year. Most of the paths are grey, but some are red (there will be a note for these). Some parts of several paths are dashed. Somewhere on each path the players name will be written curving along so it follows the path. Several places an event or some information is noted and points to a given time on the path. If it is not clear where it belongs an arrow will point to the correct place. Each chart has a heading and for the two last charts there is an explanation. There is no scale on the y-axis (rating) but the x-axis (time) has the years given in ten years interval. A thin line indicates these decades. The years are all written at the top, except the first for the first chart, which is written below, and this year is missing in the bottom chart.] [Below the transcript for each chart will follow this order: Heading\/sub heading, explanation, time scale, player names with any information for this player, in the order their name appear on the time scale.] [Basketball chart:] Basketball (NBA\/ABA) Player Efficiency Rating 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990  2000 2010 [Red] George Mikan [Red] Bob Pettit Neal Johnston [Neil misspelled.] Elgin Baylor [Red]  Wilt Chamberlain Becomes the first and so far only player to score 100 points in a game Jerry West The Guy in the NBA logo [Red] Kareem Abdul Jabbar [Missing hyphen between the two last names.] Airplane Bob Mcadoo Julius Irving [Erving misspelled.] Moses Malone Magic Johnson HIV announcement [A part of the path is dashed after this.] [Red] Michael Jordan Baseball career [A part of the path is dashed after this.] Space Jam Second retirement [A part of the path is dashed after this.] Larry Bird Karl Malone David Robinson [Red] Shaquille O'Neal Kevin Gariett [Red] LeBron James The Decision Dwyane Wade Kevin Durant\n[Chess chart.] Chess Elo Rating The modern Elo rating system dates back to about 1970. Computer analysis (like Kenneth Regan's) lets us rate historical players, but this has only been done rigorously for a few tournaments. Dashed lines are rough estimates only. [All paths are dashed up until the late nineteen sixties:] 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990  2000 2010 [The first player has no path, as his time was before 1940. An arrow points toward the left to these earlier times:] Jos\u00e9 Capablanca Terrifying chess God [Red] Alexander Alekhine [His path ends in a starburst.] [Red] Mikhail Botvinnik Tigran Petrosian David Bronstein Mikhail Tal Mikhail Tal [his name is written twice on the path, the second time above Boris Spassky when their paths intertwine.] [Red] Bobby Fischer Vanished\u2026 [Text under a starburst.] Reappeared then vanished again. He had problems. [Text under two starbursts connected with a path. This appears much later than the first starburst.] Boris Spassky Boris Spassky [his name is written twice on the path, the second time below Mikhail Tal when their paths intertwine.] Victor Korchnoi [Red] Anatoly Karpov [Red] Garry Kasparov Loses to Deep Blue Judit Polgar (See below) [The text is written beneath her name.] Vladimir Kramnik Levon Aronian [Red] Magnus Carlsen\n[Chess (women) chart:] Chess (women) Elo Rating For a long time, sexism, a lack of role models, and institutional hostility largely kept women from pursuing serious chess careers. With the expansion of women's tournaments and prizes starting in the 1970s, this has begun to change. [All paths are dashed up until the late nineteen sixties.] 1960 1970 1980 1990  2000 2010 [Red] Vera Menchik Died in a missile attack on London [next to a starburst.] Sonja Graf Rating particularly uncertain Olga Rubtsova Elisaveta Bykova Kira Zvorykina Kira Zvorykina (born 1919) continued playing in tournaments into the 21st century [Text above Elisvetas path, no arrows.] Zvorykina [Written on top of the path when her path reappears much later.] Alexandra Nicolau [Red] Nona Gaprindashvili Alla Kushnir [Red] Maia Chiburdanidze Pia Cramling Pia Cramling [her name is written twice on the path, the second time below the path of Xie Jun after  their paths have intertwined.] Xie Jun Xie Jun [her name is written twice on the path, the second time above the path of Pia Cramling after their paths have intertwined.] Susan Polgar Sofia Polgar [Red] Judit Polgar Sisters [The three Polgars are linked by a thin dashed line, snaking between their names.] Wins a game against Kasparov, making her the first woman to beat the world #1 Becomes first woman to rank in the overall top 10 Antoaneta Stefanova Anna Muzychuk Koneru Humpy [In western style the name should be Humpy Koneru, but the comics version is the native form.] Hou Yifan\n"}
{"id":1393,"title":"Timeghost","image_title":"Timeghost","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1393","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/timeghost.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1393:_Timeghost","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are approached by a floating ghost] Timeghost: ...ooOOOOOOOOooo... Tiiiime is passiiiing! Megan: Ugh. Timeghost. Cueball: Huh? Megan: Here come the factoids.\n[Timeghost floats around.] Timeghost: Forrest Gump came out closer to the Vietnam War than to the present daaay. Megan: Go away! Timeghost: The average new grand-parents are younger than Keanu Reeeeves! Cueball: That can't be right...\n[Megan clutches her head, possibly attempting to cover her ears.] Timeghost: Today's new parents were ten when Eminem got big. Daaaaaad muuuuusic. They remember Simpsons season 5 or 6 at the earliest . Megan: Argh! Cueball: How long has it been doing this?\n[Megan and Cueball looks up at the Timeghost as it delivers its most scary message.] Timeghost: The staaaaart of my haunting is now further away than your deaaaths! Megan: Will you sto- - WHAT!? Timeghost: ooOOOOOOOoo","explanation":"Megan has been haunted by a Timeghost for some time. It is obviously not the first time the ghost arrives to let Megan know that \"...ooOOOOOOOOooo... Tiiiime is passiiiing!\" The ghost is dedicated to making people feel old by having them think about the passage of time. It is shown to reference time periods related to well-known people and events, such as famous actors and the release of movies and TV shows. Megan is just annoyed that it is back and wishes it to go away.\nBut then when Cueball ask \"How long has it been doing this?\" the ghost suddenly predicts that Megan and Cueball will die in a shorter amount of time than the time that has passed since the ghost began its hauntings. This disturbs Megan who stops her complaining and asks \" What!? \" This is not the first time she has been haunted by the ghost but it has probably not been that long, so this is a very scary thought to her (and Cueball).\nWe do, however, not know how long the ghost has been haunting Megan. Also the \"staaaaart of my haunting\" may refer to the first time the ghost haunted anyone, not just Megan. This could be a long time ago and thus be true for anyone it meets today. Or it could mean since the start of this particular manifestation, meaning their deaths are imminent! It is also possible Timeghost is being deliberately ambiguous in an effort to frighten them even more. This is of course only scary if you believe the ghost can predict the future, which is not what it has been doing so far. There is no example in the comic where it makes a prediction that we know is accurate - only comparing time spans we can look up - see below.\nBut one thing about the prediction is true - they will eventually die . And this is the scary part about realizing how old you are and that you are quickly getting older: You will die, and \"soon\" (for some value thereof).\nThe comic seems to be using \"factoid\" to mean a small fact. \" Factoid \" can also mean a \"questionable or spurious statement presented as a fact\", but this does not seem to be intended usage here. In this instance, some of the factoids are easily verifiable, while others are reasonable assumptions based on the number of years passed since the individual events. Several sources advocate the use of the word \"factlet\" to express a brief interesting fact, while using the word \"factoid\" for unverifiable or untrue statements passed as fact.\nWhile factoids tend only to have mostly only entertainment value, the last fact from the ghost is a prediction of the future (Megan and Cueball's death) which is actually of some practical value if it can be trusted.\n\"Timeghost\" might be a literal interpretation of Zeitgeist , which is a German term for \"spirit of time\" and refers to the school of thought that influences or dominates the art and culture of a time period. All the events and people mentioned in this comic may be considered influences on present day art and culture.\nIn the title text Megan calls Ghostbusters (from the 1984 movie) to help get rid of the Timeghost. This of course makes the ghost state that \"people born years after that movie came out are having a second chiiiild right now\" making her feel old once more.\nRandall has covered making people feel old several times in 647: Scary , 891: Movie Ages , 973: MTV Generation (in which White Hat utters Cueball's \"That can't be right\" line), and 1477: Star Wars . Also see the blag post Odd Temporal Milestones . This is, however, so far the only one that makes a prediction of anyone's death. A similar ghost with a much different agenda was seen in 1108: Cautionary Ghost . Similarly annoying fact(oids) were given in 1272: Shadowfacts .\nTimeline\n[Cueball and Megan are approached by a floating ghost] Timeghost: ...ooOOOOOOOOooo... Tiiiime is passiiiing! Megan: Ugh. Timeghost. Cueball: Huh? Megan: Here come the factoids.\n[Timeghost floats around.] Timeghost: Forrest Gump came out closer to the Vietnam War than to the present daaay. Megan: Go away! Timeghost: The average new grand-parents are younger than Keanu Reeeeves! Cueball: That can't be right...\n[Megan clutches her head, possibly attempting to cover her ears.] Timeghost: Today's new parents were ten when Eminem got big. Daaaaaad muuuuusic. They remember Simpsons season 5 or 6 at the earliest . Megan: Argh! Cueball: How long has it been doing this?\n[Megan and Cueball looks up at the Timeghost as it delivers its most scary message.] Timeghost: The staaaaart of my haunting is now further away than your deaaaths! Megan: Will you sto- - WHAT!? Timeghost: ooOOOOOOOoo"}
{"id":1394,"title":"Superm*n","image_title":"Superm*n","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1394","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/superm_n.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1394:_Superm*n","transcript":"[Cueball is reaching for an item on a high shelf. Superman is rushing towards him.] Superman: I'll get it! I'm 5 inches taller and 7% stronger than the average man!\n[Caption below the panel:] The new supermoon-inspired Superman reboot\n","explanation":"By depicting how unimpressive the superhero Superman would be if his increase in powers, when compared to humans, were the same as the moon's increase in apparent size during a supermoon , Randall points that the use of the term supermoon is an exaggeration. This comic was released two days after such a supermoon and there was a hype in 2014 because there were three supermoons in a row as NASA said.\nA supermoon is an informal astronomical event where a full moon occurs when it is closest to earth, causing the moon to appear 10% brighter and about 7% larger than the average full moon appears. This is due to the apsidal precession of moon's elliptic orbit which has an orbital eccentricity of about 0.0549. The conditions for a supermoon happen once every 411\u00a0days, and the loose definition of the term means that the supermoon lasts for about two or three full moons.\nReturning to the not-so-Superman, the average American adult man is 69\u00a0inches tall, with a standard deviation of 2.9\u00a0inches. Not-so-Superman, at an assumed 74\u00a0inches (188\u00a0cm) tall, is within the 94th percentile - certainly a tall man, but by no means phenomenal. Basketball players, by way of example, are often more than 80\u00a0inches tall. \"7% stronger\" (most likely a reference to how the supermoon is 7% larger) is a bit harder to quantify, but it communicates \"not actually impressive\" to the reader all the same. For example, if an average man can lift 50\u00a0kg, the not-so-Superman would lift 53.5\u00a0kg.\nThe comic's title makes use of an asterisk that is being used as a wildcard. When using search queries an asterisk represents one or more characters. Therefore, Superm*n can represent the strings \"Superman\" and \"Supermoon\".\nThe title text refers  makes this same comparison with Spider-Man . Spider-Man is capable of firing large amounts of webbing, can cling to surfaces with superhuman gripping abilities, and has a sixth sense, \"spider sense\", that warns him about impending danger. The title text describes trivially minimal versions of these powers, analogous to the trivial size and brightness difference between a \"supermoon\" and a normal full moon. This also shows a much more accurate depiction of an actual spider's abilities, where they can produce several inches of a thin web, not the unrealistic amounts depicted in use by Spider-Man.\nSupermoon is also referenced in panel 25 of 1052: Every Major's Terrible and shortly thereafter in 1080: Visual Field . In both cases displaying the same distaste for the formulation. Although not as clearly as here. Since then other comics have referred to the term, see this list .\n[Cueball is reaching for an item on a high shelf. Superman is rushing towards him.] Superman: I'll get it! I'm 5 inches taller and 7% stronger than the average man!\n[Caption below the panel:] The new supermoon-inspired Superman reboot\n"}
{"id":1395,"title":"Power Cord","image_title":"Power Cord","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1395","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/power_cord.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1395:_Power_Cord","transcript":"[Beret Guy enters to find Cueball on a chair typing on a laptop. Cueball's power cord is unplugged from the wall.] Cueball typing: Type type\n[Beret Guy picks up the power cord. Cueball continues typing.] Cueball typing: Type type\n[Beret Guy blows into the plug end of the cord. The laptop abruptly inflates and Cueball jerks back.] Beret Guy: PBBBBT Laptop: FOOMP\n[Beret Guy walks away, leaving Cueball climbing up his chair to retrieve his inflated laptop which is now floating away.]\n","explanation":"In this comic, we see Beret Guy walking in from the left, as Cueball is sitting on a couch, typing on a laptop on his lap , with its power cord unplugged. Instead of connecting it to the wall socket , Beret Guy picks it up and blows air into the loose end of the cord, as if inflating a balloon \u2014 and the laptop inflates. It then floats away, making Cueball grab for it as Beret Guy casually walks away. (See an instance where Cueball inflates something in a similar unexpected way in 1798: Box Plot ).\nIt is not possible to inflate a laptop like this [ citation needed ] , and (with rare exceptions ) it is not possible to inflate anything by blowing down a power cord. Beret Guy has previously demonstrated several supernatural abilities , for instance with power cords, such as in 1293: Job Interview .\nIn general, human breath should not be buoyant enough to lift much in an atmosphere of ordinary air.  The only chemical difference between dry air and dry exhaled breath is the conversion of oxygen (molecular weight = 32) to carbon dioxide (MW=44), not counting substances in such low concentrations that their effect on the average molecular weight of the air (MW=29) is negligible.  A change of concentration of the CO 2 from 0.04% to about 4% is typical.  This increases the average molecular weight.  However, exhaled breath is also usually much more humid than air, increasing the concentration of water (MW=18) from a typical value of 1% to approximately 5%, which decreases the average molecular weight.  The two changes approximately cancel each other.\nBecause humans are warm-blooded, human breath is slightly warmer than the surrounding air, and therefore has slightly fewer molecules per unit volume. This is also true of hot air balloons, but they operate at much higher temperatures than human breath and are therefore able to obtain a greater amount of net buoyancy. There is a standard cartoon convention that inflating something with breath nonetheless makes it lighter than air. Also, given Beret Guy's many manifestations of inexplicable phenomena, it is not too far fetched to believe his body is, in fact, expelling some form of lighter-than-air gas, similar to the character Rigel on Farscape who could \"fart helium\".\nThe title text involves some jokes on Unix systems. On Unix, everything is a file ; even most of the hardware can be referenced by a (virtual) file. These virtual files usually are in \/dev or another virtual filesystem like \/sys or \/proc. While \/dev\/input really exists and points to the input system (mice, keyboards, gamepads, etc.), \/dev\/inside doesn't. gzip is a common tool to compress files. The first joke is to compress the air inside the laptop (with the command gzip \/dev\/inside ) in order to deflate the laptop back to normal size. It is a pun with the literal meaning of \"deflate\", which is also the DEFLATE algorithm used by gzip (compressing files is also called \"deflating\"). Another joke is \" piping \", the act of using the output of one operation as the input to another. As the output of the gzip command would be compressed air, a physical pipe could be used to direct the air somewhere useful. The output of a command can also be redirected to a file. Since the hardware is a file, the suggestion is to direct the air to \/dev\/input (which, in this case, means the keyboard, but would actually be a directory on real system, which can't normally be piped into) to clean it, similar to \"compressed air\" dusting cans. The complete command would be gzip \/dev\/inside | \/dev\/input . As this might cause a spray of unpleasant detritus (compare 237: Keyboards are Disgusting ), the reader is advised to avert their eyes.\n[Beret Guy enters to find Cueball on a chair typing on a laptop. Cueball's power cord is unplugged from the wall.] Cueball typing: Type type\n[Beret Guy picks up the power cord. Cueball continues typing.] Cueball typing: Type type\n[Beret Guy blows into the plug end of the cord. The laptop abruptly inflates and Cueball jerks back.] Beret Guy: PBBBBT Laptop: FOOMP\n[Beret Guy walks away, leaving Cueball climbing up his chair to retrieve his inflated laptop which is now floating away.]\n"}
{"id":1396,"title":"Actors","image_title":"Actors","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1396","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/actors.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1396:_Actors","transcript":"[Caption above the Panel:] Who are today's 10 hottest actors? [Cueball is holding a clipboard, taking notes, while Megan aims an infrared thermometer off screen.] Megan: 81.5, but I think it got part of his shirt. HEY JUSTIN \u2014 HOLD STILL! [Caption below the Panel:] We grab an infrared thermometer and find out!\n","explanation":"This comic plays on different meanings of the word \"hottest\". In the opening question, \"Who are today's 10 hottest actors?\" the word \"hottest\" would typically refer to an actor's popularity, success, demand, or attractiveness. Cueball and Megan interpret the word \"hottest\" as asking them to list the 10 actors who have the highest surface temperature, and we see them measuring \"Justin's\" (possibly referring to Long , Theroux , Bieber or Timberlake or any of the several other Justin s in show business [1] ) surface temperature using an infrared thermometer (the thermometer typically has a laser pointer to know the approximate location where the radiometric temperature comes from). The measured temperature of 81.5 is presumably reported in degrees Fahrenheit , corresponding to 27.5 \u00b0C . This temperature is below the average human internal body temperature of 98.6 \u00b0F \/37 \u00b0C as skin is cooler; Megan also believes that another object (Justin's shirt) was also measured within the infrared thermometer field of view, lowering the reported measurement. With such a measurement of hotness , the hottest actor on any given day would probably be whoever is exercising, sick with a fever, or whoever has been outside in the sun the longest and\/or has been sunburned, since this typically causes skin to be hot. Or, an animal actor, of a species with a higher body temperature than humans. ( Category:Films about birds )\nRandall here excludes the fact that accurately deriving surface temperature from bright (radiance) temperature requires knowing the emissivity of the object. Since not all objects radiate with the same efficiency, two objects with the same surface temperature will emit different thermal radiance, but if emissivity is not taken into account they will report different surface temperatures.\nThe title-text references the temperatures of Hollywood's rising stars, this time interpreting stars as actual stars, not famous people. In this case, the star \u03be Persei in the Perseus constellation (which is located in, and responsible for the fluorescence of, an object called the California Nebula ), one of the hottest stars (35,000 kelvins , Sun : 5,800 K) visible to the naked eye. The star also has similar declination (+35\u00b0 47\u2032) as the latitude of Hollywood (34\u00b0 N) so it is literally rising there every night.\nComic 1111: Premiere is another comic based on \"star\" puns.\n[Caption above the Panel:] Who are today's 10 hottest actors? [Cueball is holding a clipboard, taking notes, while Megan aims an infrared thermometer off screen.] Megan: 81.5, but I think it got part of his shirt. HEY JUSTIN \u2014 HOLD STILL! [Caption below the Panel:] We grab an infrared thermometer and find out!\n"}
{"id":1397,"title":"Luke","image_title":"Luke","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1397","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/luke.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1397:_Luke","transcript":"[Darth Vader is holding up what appears to be the handle of a powered-down lightsaber looking down at it while talking to Luke Skywalker, drawn with thin hair hanging down his forehead.] Darth Vader: I see you have constructed a new lightsaber. Luke Skywalker: ...Yes. Luke Skywalker: That is definitely what I did.\n[Caption below the panel:] Vader finds Luke's Fleshlight.\n","explanation":"This comic takes place in a scene from the third theatrically-released Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi , wherein Darth Vader confronts his son, Luke Skywalker , who had recently surrendered to Imperial soldiers. In the movie Vader notes that Luke Skywalker has constructed a new lightsaber following the loss of his original during their duel on Cloud City , Luke Skywalker's original lightsaber actually having been Anakin Skywalker's second lightsaber, Anakin who later turned into Darth Vader.\nIn this comic, however, Darth Vader has accidentally discovered his son's fleshlight (a male sex toy designed to imitate one of various orifices, most commonly a vagina), which he apparently brought with him on the attack on the Forest Moon of Endor . From a certain point of view , a fleshlight could be mistaken for the handle of a lightsaber, without the blade extended. Like many teenagers, Luke Skywalker is attempting to hide evidence of his sexual activity from a parent. References to fleshlights are a recurring theme in xkcd.\nThe title text refers to the fact that if Darth Vader turned the fleshlight on, instead of creating a blade of pure plasma or energy suspended in a force containment field the device would simply vibrate, revealing it for what it really is. Randall is also punning on \"being turned on\" as slang for being sexually aroused.\nIn a later comic another version of this scene is displayed in 1433: Lightsaber . This time not so embarrassing for Luke, but much more dangerous. In that comic Luke should really have said \"Don't turn it on\".\nIn 1637: Salt Mine , Ponytail makes a very similar remark to the one that Luke makes here.\n[Darth Vader is holding up what appears to be the handle of a powered-down lightsaber looking down at it while talking to Luke Skywalker, drawn with thin hair hanging down his forehead.] Darth Vader: I see you have constructed a new lightsaber. Luke Skywalker: ...Yes. Luke Skywalker: That is definitely what I did.\n[Caption below the panel:] Vader finds Luke's Fleshlight.\n"}
{"id":1398,"title":"Snake Facts","image_title":"Snake Facts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1398","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snake_facts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1398:_Snake_Facts","transcript":"Snake Facts: Snake venom evolved from saliva, which means that it all started with a snake whose mouth was sliiiightly more gross than usual. [Picture of a snake below the text above.] Snake: Hi guys! Off-panel voice: Eww, it's Frank. [Map of South America with gray shade in the form of a snake. Text to the left of it.] The world's longest snake is found in Brazil, Peru, and Chile. It is believed to be over 60 years old. [Picture of a snake skeleton between the first and the second of the lines below.] If you laid all the bones in a snake end-to-end, you would have a snake\nGiven the habitat listed for the second factoid, it is likely the comic is referring to the Green Anaconda ( Eunectes murinus ) .\n","explanation":"This is the first comic using Facts in the title, but only the second to use a fact that is not a Fun fact .\nThe comic lists a few factoids about snakes, ranging from the mildly informative to the strictly tongue-in-cheek .\nThe first factoid references the hypothesis that snake venom was an evolutionary development of saliva that, over time, gradually became more toxic as snakes with saliva that was able to assist in subduing their prey possessed an evolutionary advantage. It then posits that the evolutionary branch that developed into venomous snakes began with a snake whose mutation gave him a mouth that was 'slightly more gross than usual', probably in reference to bad breath .\nAdditionally, the comic illustration accompanying the second factoid colors in a ' habitat range' on a map of South America that is snake-shaped, implying that when it states 'The longest snake is found in Brazil , Peru , and Chile ' that this snake is so long that it literally stretches from Brazil, across part of Peru, into Chile, and that the 'habitat' shaded on the map is, in fact, this mammoth snake's silhouette . The age, length and location of the snake are so exaggerated that they are obviously untrue, but may be a reference to the green anaconda , one of the world's largest snakes, which inhabits this region.\nThe final factoid is entirely tongue-in-cheek. Many factoids come in the form \"If you laid all the X end to end, Y would occur\" (e.g. \"If you laid all the veins and arteries in the human body end-to-end, they would stretch 60,000 miles\"). The Y portion of the factoid is supposed to be surprising; therefore, it is ironic that the factoid in the comic, \"If you laid all the bones in a snake end to end, you would have a snake.\", is obvious and not at all exciting. Clearly, you would not have an entire snake, literally, but you would have a skeleton that was recognizably that of a snake and could reasonably be referred to as 'a snake'.  A common example that pokes fun at this format is, \"If you laid every elephant from end to end between the Earth and the Moon, then you'd have a lot of dead elephants.\"\nThe title text presents the amusing idea that 'snakes' as we know them are not, in fact, a suborder of reptiles but are instead human digestive tracts that, rather than being a system of organs, are creatures capable of escaping from their 'host' human and living independently. The idea seems to follow from the superficial resemblance between snakes and the human digestive tract as long, roughly tubular collections of animal matter, which can process the food entering the top end, and get rid of the waste through the other end.\nRandall had previously posted an incorrect map , that included the snake's habitat in Bolivia instead of Peru.\nSnake Facts: Snake venom evolved from saliva, which means that it all started with a snake whose mouth was sliiiightly more gross than usual. [Picture of a snake below the text above.] Snake: Hi guys! Off-panel voice: Eww, it's Frank. [Map of South America with gray shade in the form of a snake. Text to the left of it.] The world's longest snake is found in Brazil, Peru, and Chile. It is believed to be over 60 years old. [Picture of a snake skeleton between the first and the second of the lines below.] If you laid all the bones in a snake end-to-end, you would have a snake\nGiven the habitat listed for the second factoid, it is likely the comic is referring to the Green Anaconda ( Eunectes murinus ) .\n"}
{"id":1399,"title":"Chaos","image_title":"Chaos","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1399","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chaos.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1399:_Chaos","transcript":"[Cueball is staring at a whiteboard covered with equations and graphs.] Cueball: For two decades, I've studied phase space, nonlinear equations, and strange attractors. [Cueball keeps staring at a whiteboard covered with equations and graphs for two more panels before in the third panel he exclaims:] Cueball: And there is nothing in here about dinosaurs escaping.\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at the 1993 film Jurassic Park , which features a theme park filled with cloned dinosaurs. In the film, chaos ensues when all the dinosaurs escape and begin terrorizing their creators. The list of chaos topics, phase space , nonlinear equations , and strange attractors , comes directly from the movie, in which Dr. Ian Malcolm (portrayed by Jeff Goldblum), a mathematician and chaos theorist brought in to inspect the park prior to its grand opening, suggests that the dinosaurs' escaping could have been predicted based on mathematical chaos models.\nCueball explains that although he has also studied chaos theory, he has never seen where chaos models predict that dinosaurs would escape. Cueball's confusion highlights the contrast between the mathematical definition of chaos \u2013 shown in the graphs on the whiteboard \u2013 and its common meaning \u2013 a state of utter confusion or disorder (as illustrated in the film).\nThe whiteboard shows a bifurcation diagram of the logistic map (one of the simplest examples of the mathematical concept of chaos, also featured in what-if 105 ) and a dragon curve , which appeared on the section title pages of the novel Jurassic Park , upon which the film was based.\nThe title text references the scene in Jurassic Park in which Goldblum, as Malcolm, while making small talk with Drs. Alan Grant (portrayed by Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (portrayed by Laura Dern) during the helicopter ride to the park, responds to a remark with an odd-sounding laugh . The laugh has gained minor Internet notoriety after being used as the central sample in at least one remix .\nThe comic may be timely, as a remastered 3-D version of the film was released in April 2013, and the fourth installment (and the first of a new planned trilogy) of the Jurassic Park film series, Jurassic World , was released in June 2015.\n[Cueball is staring at a whiteboard covered with equations and graphs.] Cueball: For two decades, I've studied phase space, nonlinear equations, and strange attractors. [Cueball keeps staring at a whiteboard covered with equations and graphs for two more panels before in the third panel he exclaims:] Cueball: And there is nothing in here about dinosaurs escaping.\n"}
{"id":1400,"title":"D.B. Cooper","image_title":"D.B. Cooper","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1400","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/d_b_cooper.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1400:_D.B._Cooper","transcript":"[Cueball is using a baton to point towards a projector.] D.B. Cooper (\"Dan Cooper\")\nHijacked a plane in the 1970s. On landing, demanded money and parachutes. Jumped from plane mid-flight and was ne ver found.\nVanished mysteriously with large amount of money Real age\/name unknown Ambiguous, possibly affected speaking style (\"negotiable American currency\") Fate unknown\n[Cueball has his palm out.] Tommy Wiseau (\"Johnny\")\nWrote, directed, and starred in The Room , a film widely hailed as \"The Citizen Kane of b ad movies.\"\nAppeared mysteriously with large amount of money Colleague says he's much older than he claims. Ambiguous, possibly affected speaking style (\"You are tearing me apart, Lisa!\") Background unknown\n[Two images captioned \"Cooper (FBI sketch)\" and \"Wiseau (Flickr photo by Al Pavangkanan)\".]\nOffscreen voice: This is the dumbest theory I've ever heard. Cueball: But it explains everything!!\n","explanation":"In 1971, a man referred to by the media as D. B. Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 and escaped with $200,000 in ransom money (equivalent to $900,000 in 2003 or $1,250,000 in 2020). While the FBI maintains that Cooper was most likely killed when he parachuted from the plane, they have never determined his identity, and the investigation was called off in 2016, making it the United States' only unsolved plane hijacking. (This mystery was later referenced in 1501: Mysteries , and then again in 2452: Aviation Firsts .)\nIn 2003, Tommy Wiseau released The Room , which is considered by many to be the worst film ever made, but has also earned a sizable number of fans who uphold it as a prime example of a film that is \" so bad, it's good \". In the decade since, Wiseau has become something of an icon alongside his infamous movie, of which he was the producer, writer, director, and main star. Surprisingly little, however, is known about him. The comic refers to \"The Room\" as \"...the ' Citizen Kane ' of bad movies.\" This is a comparison between what is widely considered the best film of all time, which was, coincidentally the first film produced by, written by, directed by, and starring Orson Welles and what is widely considered the worst film of all time, the first film produced by, written by, directed by, and starring Tommy Wiseau.\nThis comic points to similarities between several details of Cooper and Wiseau's stories:\nThe comic then compares an FBI sketch of Cooper with a photograph of Wiseau, apparently to claim that they have similar appearances.  The only real similarity is that they're both wearing sunglasses.\nHowever, these are only a few cherry-picked aspects of their lives, and do not seriously suggest that they are the same person. For example, even if we assume that Wiseau was born in 1950, and that Cooper was only 35 (probably the youngest age which can be mistaken for mid-40s) in 1971, that leaves a 14-year gap between their ages. Likewise, Cooper was said to have either an American or Canadian accent, while Wiseau's bizarre accent is certainly not North American. While Cueball 's theory in this comic is clearly a joke on Randall 's part, given Randall's known distaste for conspiracy theories, this may also be making fun of people who base theories off of minor details while ignoring contradictory ones and bigger-picture questions. The question in the title text, for instance, notes that Cooper would have gone through a huge amount of effort just to produce a movie; a similar rhetorical device is often used against convoluted conspiracy theories, where one points out a vastly simpler way for the supposed conspirators to have accomplished their goals.\nThe title text goes on to attribute such a weird motive for hijacking to the impression that \"people are very strange these days,\" which is another quote from The Room .\n[Cueball is using a baton to point towards a projector.] D.B. Cooper (\"Dan Cooper\")\nHijacked a plane in the 1970s. On landing, demanded money and parachutes. Jumped from plane mid-flight and was ne ver found.\nVanished mysteriously with large amount of money Real age\/name unknown Ambiguous, possibly affected speaking style (\"negotiable American currency\") Fate unknown\n[Cueball has his palm out.] Tommy Wiseau (\"Johnny\")\nWrote, directed, and starred in The Room , a film widely hailed as \"The Citizen Kane of b ad movies.\"\nAppeared mysteriously with large amount of money Colleague says he's much older than he claims. Ambiguous, possibly affected speaking style (\"You are tearing me apart, Lisa!\") Background unknown\n[Two images captioned \"Cooper (FBI sketch)\" and \"Wiseau (Flickr photo by Al Pavangkanan)\".]\nOffscreen voice: This is the dumbest theory I've ever heard. Cueball: But it explains everything!!\n"}
{"id":1401,"title":"New","image_title":"New","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1401","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1401:_New","transcript":"[Black Hat walks in.] Black Hat: New headcannon:\n[Cueball is sitting at his desk, using his computer.] Cueball: Yeah?\n[Black Hat lifts his hat, revealing his \"headcannon\": a tiny cannon on the top of his head. The headcannon fires and blows up Cueball's desk, the explosion throwing Cueball backwards.] Headcannon: BOOM Cueball: Augh!\n","explanation":"This comic strip uses a play on the homophonic relationship between \" canon \", the literary term, and \" cannon \", a projectile weapon. The word headcannon is a compound of \"head\" and \"cannon\".\nIn this strip, Black Hat tells Cueball that he has a \"new headcannon\". Cueball , thinking Black Hat means \"headcanon\" (an unjustified belief or theory about a fictional universe), inquires what Black Hat's new idea is. Instead of the expected idea or theory, Black Hat removes his hat to reveal a tiny cannon on his head which blows away Cueball and his computer desk.\nWhile headcanon may often be ignored or dismissed as a personal theory, a headcannon would be far harder to ignore, as it is a physical object which has a notable (and in this case violent) impact on the real world.\nIn the title text Randall makes the spellings of these two words indistinguishable by using three consecutive \"n\"s to spell \"headcannnon\". Therefore, the title text is deliberately vague. It could be interpreted that it is easy to convince people that you have a cannon on your head, that it is easy to make people believe in a self invented headcanons, or both. Since you are choosing your own interpretation of this title text, the joke is that you are creating your own headcanon.\nThis comic also shows Cueball being once again distracted from his work in a manner similar to 1388: Subduction License .\nIn terms of a given literary series, \" canon \" describes a set of works that are collectively recognized by the community as having authenticity. Generally, works created or endorsed by the original author(s) are considered canonical. Not all original content is considered canon and not all canon is original content.  Sometimes creators will rewrite the canon (called a retcon ) and make things that were previously canonical non-canonical. For example, the origins of a character may be rewritten, thus invalidating the portions of the works that speak to the old origins. Other times creators will incorporate non-original content and therefore incorporate the canon of these borrowed works.\nA headcanon as the name implies is a form of canon that only exists in one's mind. More specifically, a headcanon is created when a consumer watching or reading the material develops their own ideas about a fictional universe that are not actually part of the canon, perhaps developing their own backstories or experiences for characters. Some frequent examples of headcanon include relationships between characters, abilities, events following the conclusion of the work, etc. which the author or creator has not explained or included. For example, a consumer may \"read between the lines\" and assume that there was a previous romantic relationship between two characters where no conclusive evidence actually exists of one. Some fans who come up with particularly interesting or convincing headcanons may decide to share them with others in hopes that their idea spreads.\n[Black Hat walks in.] Black Hat: New headcannon:\n[Cueball is sitting at his desk, using his computer.] Cueball: Yeah?\n[Black Hat lifts his hat, revealing his \"headcannon\": a tiny cannon on the top of his head. The headcannon fires and blows up Cueball's desk, the explosion throwing Cueball backwards.] Headcannon: BOOM Cueball: Augh!\n"}
{"id":1402,"title":"Harpoons","image_title":"Harpoons","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1402","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/harpoons.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1402:_Harpoons","transcript":"Number of harpoons in space by year [A chart with a red graph is drawn below.] [The y-axis.] 0 1 2 3 [The x-axis.] 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 [The graph is at zero until a sharp peak to 1 in 1970. The peak is labeled.] Apollo 12 rum incident [The graph then stays at 0 until 2004. Then it rises to 2 and stays there until today, continuing as a dotted line after 2014. The rise is labeled.] Rosetta comet mission launched carrying lander with harpoon tethers\nIn 2018, shortly after the line gets dotted, the number actually increased again., thanks to the RemoveDEBRIS satelite.\n","explanation":"This comic is a graph of the number of harpoons in space over time. One would not expect that harpoons, which are associated with old technology, would be used in space, which is associated with high technology. Any occurrences are unexpected, and therefore interesting or funny.\nThe first peak states that a harpoon was in space during the Apollo 12 mission and various possible explanations have been put forward (See discussion section below). One of more widely accepted theories proposes that Harpoon brand of Jamaican rum made it aboard the Apollo 12 rocket. Despite a fair amount of research into the basis of the harpoon incident, there have been no credible or official sources to confirm the presence of any type of harpoon on board Apollo 12. As the presence of a harpoon on board would run counter to any official story, perhaps that's exactly why it would be considered an \"incident\".\nThe latter peak on this graph refers to the Rosetta unmanned spacecraft. As part of its mission, it carried a lander called Philae , which has two harpoon tethers to anchor itself to the comet 67P\/Churyumov\u2013Gerasimenko . Rosetta was launched in March 2004 (as shown in the graph) and was scheduled to encounter the comet in August 2014, making this a timely comic. Rosetta maneuvered to enter orbit on September 10, and ultimately the Philae lander touched down on the comet on 12 November 2014, although the harpoon system failed to deploy. Randall produced a live comic of the landing, updating 1446: Landing every 5 minutes with the latest progress. The Rosetta spacecraft also carries a disk micro-etched with 13,000 pages of text in 1200 languages donated by the Long Now foundation, mentioned in previous comics.\nThe title text compares the Philae lander's method of deploying its tethers to whaling , in which sailors would throw harpoons at a whale with the intent of killing the whale. It was important to throw hard so the harpoon would stick in the whale so it could not get away and would tow the whaling boat until it got tired and could be killed. Thus the title text implies that the spacecraft is sentient and needs a motivation to fire the harpoons hard enough to stay anchored to the comet; to this end it has been programmed to believe that its mission is to kill the comet. Evidently this motivation was not enough, as Philae ultimately failed to deploy its harpoons - it still managed to land, though.\nNumber of harpoons in space by year [A chart with a red graph is drawn below.] [The y-axis.] 0 1 2 3 [The x-axis.] 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 [The graph is at zero until a sharp peak to 1 in 1970. The peak is labeled.] Apollo 12 rum incident [The graph then stays at 0 until 2004. Then it rises to 2 and stays there until today, continuing as a dotted line after 2014. The rise is labeled.] Rosetta comet mission launched carrying lander with harpoon tethers\nIn 2018, shortly after the line gets dotted, the number actually increased again., thanks to the RemoveDEBRIS satelite.\n"}
{"id":1403,"title":"Thesis Defense","image_title":"Thesis Defense","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1403","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thesis_defense.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1403:_Thesis_Defense","transcript":"[Megan runs towards a desk with two microphones on it, waving a broadsword high in the air. Cueball and one other sitting behind the desk are taken aback, while Ponytail standing off to the side holds an arm in front of her face protectively. A slide is projected on a screen behind Megan, reading \"The evolution of threat displays in mammals\".] Megan: In conclusion, AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! [Caption below the panel:] The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense.\n","explanation":"In the comic, Megan is presenting evidence on her thesis , a theory on the evolution of threat displays in mammals, in front of a panel of some people. To conclude her exposition she charges at the audience, shouting a battle cry , and brandishing a sword. The audience flinches. As the audience is composed of mammals and is responding to a displayed threat, we should assume that this response provides some key evidence about the threat displays in mammals.\nThis comic is a play on a thesis defense and the adage \" The best defense is a good offense \". The adage means that a strong offensive action will preoccupy the opposition and ultimately hinder its ability to mount an opposing counterattack, leading to a strategic advantage. A thesis defense generally involves an oral exam on the topic the candidate has chosen, and should involve no physical violence.\nFor added humorous effect, in the title text Megan extrapolates how she improved the state of the art, i.e. what she has added to her field of study, while screaming the word art.\n[Megan runs towards a desk with two microphones on it, waving a broadsword high in the air. Cueball and one other sitting behind the desk are taken aback, while Ponytail standing off to the side holds an arm in front of her face protectively. A slide is projected on a screen behind Megan, reading \"The evolution of threat displays in mammals\".] Megan: In conclusion, AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! [Caption below the panel:] The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense.\n"}
{"id":1404,"title":"Quantum Vacuum Virtual Plasma","image_title":"Quantum Vacuum Virtual Plasma","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1404","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/quantum_vacuum_virtual_plasma.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1404:_Quantum_Vacuum_Virtual_Plasma","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are walking together in the foreground.] Cueball: Hear about that \"impossible\" microwave thruster?\n[They stop walking and Cueball turns to face Megan.] Megan: Yeah. Let me get this straight \u2014 they pumped 20 kilowatts into a box under ambient conditions ...and it only twitched a little ? Cueball: Yeah.\n[Zoomed out - they are seen in silhouette walking together again.] Megan: That's surprising. If you pumped 20 kilowatts into me , I'd twitch a lot . Cueball: But you're not pushing on the quantum vacuum. Megan: I might be. I do a lot of things. Cueball: I guess we can't be sure.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the recent news of a microwave thruster which allegedly produces thrust without expelling any propellant or microwaves, a violation of conservation of momentum . This type of thruster would provide delta velocity without conventional limits. After researchers hooked their device up to a measurement apparatus in an air-filled stainless-steel chamber, applied RF input and measured changes in the apparatus, their interpretation of the results as a tiny thrust explainable under the moniker of \"quantum vacuum virtual plasma\" was at best controversial.  An official statement by NASA's Johnson Space Center is still missing.\nThe title of the comic directly refers to this hypothetical new physics mechanism of interacting with the \"quantum vacuum virtual plasma,\" a combination of physics words that don't normally go together.\nThe first part of the comic has Megan commenting on how the engine was, in layman's terms, \"twitching,\" and states that with that much power she'd expect something more forceful.  \"Twitching\" is an expected outcome for various complex systems, including biological ones, when arbitrarily large amounts of electric or microwave power is injected. The last panel is a joke about the scientific method, where equivalence between twitching and the hypothetical new physics is pooh-poohed, because Megan was not previously revealed to operate by the principle of \"quantum vacuum virtual plasma,\" to which Megan responds that she is a complex entity and very well might have new physics inside her.\nThe title text suggests that the authors of the NASA paper subscribe to the principle that unexpected behaviors of complex systems should best be explained by invoking new physics rather than by making a detailed study of the complexities of the system. This runs contrary to generally accepted approach in science.\n[Cueball and Megan are walking together in the foreground.] Cueball: Hear about that \"impossible\" microwave thruster?\n[They stop walking and Cueball turns to face Megan.] Megan: Yeah. Let me get this straight \u2014 they pumped 20 kilowatts into a box under ambient conditions ...and it only twitched a little ? Cueball: Yeah.\n[Zoomed out - they are seen in silhouette walking together again.] Megan: That's surprising. If you pumped 20 kilowatts into me , I'd twitch a lot . Cueball: But you're not pushing on the quantum vacuum. Megan: I might be. I do a lot of things. Cueball: I guess we can't be sure.\n"}
{"id":1405,"title":"Meteor","image_title":"Meteor","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1405","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meteor.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1405:_Meteor","transcript":"[Cueballs friend walks toward Cueball while holding a rock.] Cueball: Check it out - I got a piece of a meteor! Randall: Actually , it's only called that while falling. Once it lands, it's called magma .\n[Below the panel:] My Hobby: Mixing pedantic terms\n","explanation":"This is one of Randall 's My Hobby comics. The author makes semantically incorrect statements to frustrate pedantic people who know the correct word, and confuse people who don't know the precise word so they can go on using the wrong word; see also 1429: Data . Since Randall is normally personified by Cueball , it makes most sense to call the one with the hobby Cueball in the explanation below.\nCueball's friend (who also looks like Cueball) walks up to Cueball and tells him that he has found a piece of a \" meteor \". Cueball corrects him by telling him that what he found is called magma , and that the phrase \"a piece of a meteor\" would be correct if the object was in the air, once it hits the ground it is called magma. In doing so he attempts to confuse or annoy his friend. In truth, meteorite is the expression for a piece of a meteoroid that has landed; meteor is the term for the streak of light caused by the meteoroid while it falls through the atmosphere. Thus the first statement by him is a (partly) true correction, but the second one is wrong.\nThe word \" pedantic \" means being overly concerned with being precise. It is usually a pejorative term used to refer to someone who is overly fussy and corrects someone's word choice even when the more ambiguous or slightly incorrect term they used was fine for informal communication. One would tend to believe a pedant, as they would usually know what they are pedantic about. So when Cueball is making wrong statements that seem pedantic, he may make people believe him. A volcano that would be the bane of such a pedantic person was depicted in the last panel of 1714: Volcano Types , as a direct reference to this comic.\nThe title text expands on the joke, as if the conversation had continued with a confused friend responding that he thought magma was underground. Cueball attempts to confuse him further by talking about lava which indeed is the expression for magma that has reached the surface. But it's ridiculous to suggest that all other things are called lava when underground. In the sentence he also continues to imply that magma could also be found above ground. Mixing pedantic terms like this was later used in the title text of 1967: Violin Plots .\nThe two sentences thus follow the same pattern with one true but pedantic part to begin with, and then a false statement to confuse the victim.\nHere is a list of the terminology that is being muddled:\nA nice English mnemonic helps: In the void, meteoroid. On the site, meteorite. Neither\/Nor: meteor.\n[Cueballs friend walks toward Cueball while holding a rock.] Cueball: Check it out - I got a piece of a meteor! Randall: Actually , it's only called that while falling. Once it lands, it's called magma .\n[Below the panel:] My Hobby: Mixing pedantic terms\n"}
{"id":1406,"title":"Universal Converter Box","image_title":"Universal Converter Box","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1406","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/universal_converter_box.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1406:_Universal_Converter_Box","transcript":"[Universal converter box with wires to connectors:] VGA DVI HDMI Thunderbolt Firewire Component [sharing connectors with Component:] RCA 1\/8\" Audio 1\/8\" Video Parallel Port S-Video Airline Pneumatic Tube Audio PS\/2\/3\/4 120V AC [pointing to ground pin:] Removable Floppy\/IDE\/2.5\"\/SCSI [pointing to sections in IDC connector:] Break here USB USB (weird other end) Mini-USB Micro USB Macro USB F Connector Fiber RJ11 Ethernet Token Ring MagSafe MagSafe 2 MagSafe 3 MagSafe 4 Bluetooth Dongle SCART String (fits most cans) [Fuel nozzle with selector for:] 87\/91\/93\/Diesel\n","explanation":"Converter boxes are used to connect two or more devices together which otherwise couldn't be, due to differently shaped plugs, different voltages, or different protocols of communication.\nConverter boxes or converter cables are commonly found for several of the plugs at the top of the list - such as from USB to micro-USB. As this is supposed to be a Universal Converter Box, there are many connections.\nThe humour from this comic comes from the sheer number of different standards that all claim to be the universal way to connect two devices, in their target market, as well as the progressively ridiculous conversions that this box is capable of doing, for example, converting audio from a 1\/8\u00a0inch \/ 3.5\u00a0mm headphone jack, into a variety of fuel suitable for running your car.\nA connector is capable of making a connection to another connector only if the connectors are of the same style and the opposite gender (\"male\" connector is plug, \"female\" connector is socket), except for rare \"genderless\" connectors, such as the token ring mentioned above. Gender changers are devices with two connectors of the same gender. The \"circular center pin DC adapter tips\" in the title text are barrel jack power plugs. There are a large number of these style connectors, and many of these devices look the same, leading to frustration.\nThe plugs are numbered from top to bottom and incremented for every wire that comes directly out of the converter box.\nFor some interfaces, such as USB, the female side is standard to the device while the male side is standard to the cable. For other interfaces, such as the RS-232 serial port, the conventions vary or there is no convention.\nThe \"universal\" connector here doesn't support the proper RS-232, with the closest surrogate available being RJ-11. The other nearest analog would be the parallel port, available in Centronix and D-25-pin connectors.\nThe SCSI connectors have been available as the \"internal\" connectors (see the \"break-away\" above) of 2 different widths, Centronix, 2 widths of the mini-D connectors with the easily bendable pins, 3 widths of the more reliable pin-less mini-connectors, and high-speed serial.\nNot only is there gender and connector type, but there are also different standards on what data\/power is connected on each pin of the connector. Building a working connection often involved getting 3 or 4 adapters connected in a sequence to produce the right connector, gender and pin-out.\nBarrel jack power plugs were developed in the 1980s. The \"barrel\" has an inner diameter an outer diameter, and different style pins.\nA D-shell is a trapezoidal metal skirt that protects the pins, prevents the connector from being plugged in the wrong way, and makes the physical connection more secure.\nA VGA was developed in 1987, and with new versions being developed since then.\nDVI can be configured to support multiple modes such as DVI-D (digital only), DVI-A (analog only), or DVI-I (digital and analog).\nHDMI has slowly been replacing DVI and VGA ports on newer devices due to the simplicity and the smaller footprint and overall dimensions.\nThunderbolt is far faster than almost any  connector on the market for transferring data. However, the limited adoption by manufacturers, the higher costs of the hardware, and the security concerns inherent to the interface have limited the adoption by consumers.\nBecause Firewire is designed to allow backplane access and direct memory access (DMA) to devices, there are additional conversion and security issues with it.\nThe phone connector diameter of 1\/8\" is only an approximation using Imperial units . The standard actually specifies a size in the Metric system of 3.5\u00a0mm. The video plug has 3 contacts (Tip, Ring and Sleeve) and the audio has 4 contacts (Tip, Ring, Ring and Sleeve).\nWhile no longer common in homes or offices, parallel connections are still used in some embedded systems .\nAirline pneumatic tube audio was used by in-flight entertainment systems manufactured from 1963 until 1979.\nNote that while AC adapters are necessary\u2014and widely available\u2014to suit sockets in other countries, this \"universal\" converter does not feature any other AC power plugs, but this could be accommodated using adapters.\nCheater plugs exist to connect a NEMA grounding-type plug (three prongs) to a NEMA non-grounding receptacle (two slots), but the use of such an adapter can be hazardous if the grounding tab is not connected to electrical ground. A safer alternative is to replace the outlet with a Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter (GFCI) breaker outlet.\nThe computer media drive connectors are unlike the motherboard-powering connectors from the Power Supply Unit of a PC, which may involve multiple additional 4, 6 and 8-pin 'breakout' supply cables that have this feature and specially 'keyed' pin-sheaths as well to allow forward\/backward compatibility between various versions of PSU and motherboard that could be used (and power-hungry GPUs of various kinds, as well).\nNote that some embedded systems such as cash registers actually do use larger USB connectors to include 12V and\/or 24V power connections. These are not, however, called \"macro-USB\", and are not as large.\nOther countries often use RJ11-ended cables with locally-specific adapter-ends, e.g. the BS 6312 in Britain. Broadband microfilters may make use of this difference by splitting a relevant telephone plug standard into the local non-RJ11 style of telephone plug for an \"audio-only\" pass-through socket and an RJ11 for the router\/modem to be cabled up to for the abstracted \"data-only\" signal \u2014 making an adapter for this will be nearly impossible.\nThere are two common systems for showing octane numbers on fuel pumps; the numbers shown (87, 91, 93) most closely map to Anti-Knock Index values which is used for the North American market and a number of other countries, the other system used in the rest of the world is Research Octane Number. In the AKI system; 87 octane (91 RON) is regular US, 91 octane (95 RON) is regular European, 93 octane (98 RON) is premium European, and in US both 91 and 93 are considered premium\/super depending on the regulations of a particular state. Some states, such as California, forbid the sale of the gasoline above 91 octane. Only very rarely could both 91 and 93 be found at the same gas station. The typical line-up is \"regular\" (87), \"plus\" (89), and \"premium\"\/\"super\" (depending on the state and on the fuel brand, 91, 92 or 93 octane). A standard diesel nozzle (24mm) is slightly larger diameter than a standard petrol nozzle (21mm) so you cannot tank diesel into a petrol car but if this nozzle has the petrol nozzle diameter you are still able to tank with it into some diesel cars. Some manufacturers such as Volkswagen fit a misfueling guard and fuel filler neck cap or have redesigned the fuel filler to prevent a petrol nozzle being used in a diesel car.\nSince the release of this comic, Apple has created a magnetic charging cable for its Apple Watch, which functions in the same manner as the current MagSafe 1 & 2 by using a magnet to connect to the device. This new charger looks identical to the fictional MagSafe 3 in the comic.\n[Universal converter box with wires to connectors:] VGA DVI HDMI Thunderbolt Firewire Component [sharing connectors with Component:] RCA 1\/8\" Audio 1\/8\" Video Parallel Port S-Video Airline Pneumatic Tube Audio PS\/2\/3\/4 120V AC [pointing to ground pin:] Removable Floppy\/IDE\/2.5\"\/SCSI [pointing to sections in IDC connector:] Break here USB USB (weird other end) Mini-USB Micro USB Macro USB F Connector Fiber RJ11 Ethernet Token Ring MagSafe MagSafe 2 MagSafe 3 MagSafe 4 Bluetooth Dongle SCART String (fits most cans) [Fuel nozzle with selector for:] 87\/91\/93\/Diesel\n"}
{"id":1407,"title":"Worst Hurricane","image_title":"Worst Hurricane","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1407","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/worst_hurricane.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1407:_Worst_Hurricane","transcript":"What's The Worst Hurricane Anyone In Your Town Remembers? Estimated from Hurdat Database and NCEP rainfall totals 1914-2014 [A map of the east coast of the United States as far southwest as the Texas\/Mexico border, as far northeast as the Maine\/Canada border, and as far inland as Kentucky. The map has coastal regions blocked out with the name and year of the worst hurricane in the last 100 years.]\n","explanation":"The map divides America's Atlantic coastline into regions according to the worst hurricane that has hit each area in the last century, based on data from the North Atlantic hurricane database ( HURDAT ) to determine the severity and the National Centers for Enrvironmental Prediction 's (NCEP) rainfall to determine where the hurricane was present. Most of the hurricanes are listed by their US reporting names, with hurricanes before 1953 (the year when the current naming system was established) being listed by their year and sometimes a sequence number or city name.\nThe title text is a joke in light of this bleak humor, saying that finding residents in each of the regions who are old enough to have been alive through all of these is quite a daunting task. In principle, this would be the only way to confirm the \"worst hurricane in living memory,\" and may be taken as a riposte to anyone who wishes to argue this map: \"If you think there was a worse one, find a 105 year old resident who agrees!\" 105 was likely chosen because most people can only remember back to an age when they were 5, so someone would have needed to be 5 years old to remember a hurricane in any detail 100 years later.\nHurricanes and especially their names have been featured before in comics 453: Upcoming Hurricanes , 944: Hurricane Names and 1126: Epsilon and Zeta .\nA full list of North Atlantic hurricanes after Tropical cyclone naming was introduced can be found here .\nWhat's The Worst Hurricane Anyone In Your Town Remembers? Estimated from Hurdat Database and NCEP rainfall totals 1914-2014 [A map of the east coast of the United States as far southwest as the Texas\/Mexico border, as far northeast as the Maine\/Canada border, and as far inland as Kentucky. The map has coastal regions blocked out with the name and year of the worst hurricane in the last 100 years.]\n"}
{"id":1408,"title":"March of the Penguins","image_title":"March of the Penguins","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1408","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/march_of_the_penguins.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1408:_March_of_the_Penguins","transcript":"[Black Hat walks towards Megan who is sitting in an office chair at a desk working on her laptop.] Black Hat: All the birds from March of the Penguins are now dead.\n[In a frame-less panel only Megan is shown. She sits back from the laptop taking her hands down on her legs. Black Hat replies from off-panel.] Megan: OK, I get it. We're all aging. Black Hat (off-panel): What? No.\n[Black Hat is in the frame again holding one hand slightly out towards Megan who has turned around in her office chair and is now facing Black Hat.] Black Hat: I'm not trying to make you feel old. They were alive last night. Black Hat:I'm trying to apologize. Megan: Oh God\n","explanation":"Several of the xkcd comics outline ways to make people feel older by referencing various pieces of popular culture which feel ingrained and \"recent\", and revealing the time that has elapsed since their release to be longer than expected (for instance, 1393: Timeghost and 891: Movie Ages ).\nThis appears to be what Black Hat is doing as he walks in on Megan to announce that all the penguins from a 2005 documentary March of the Penguins about emperor penguins are dead. Megan is familiar with these sorts of antics and assumes Black Hat is indicating that the film is so old that the lifespan of emperor penguins is less than the time since the documentary was released. Frustrated, Megan simply acknowledges Black Hat's statement by agreeing that everyone is aging. Black Hat, however, reveals that he is not trying to make her feel old, because the penguins were all alive \"last night\" and all died in one instance since then and thus not from old age.\nHis announcement that he is \"trying to apologize\" creates the obvious inference that he caused the penguins to be killed (either intentionally or by mistake). This gives the situation a much darker tone; especially since Black Hat likely is not truly apologizing, as he is very unapologetic in his \"classhole\" tendencies, and just wish to mess even further with Megan.\nEmperor penguins actually live about 20 years on average, so presumably, barring any intervention by Black Hat, most of the younger penguins and many of the older penguins in the movie are still alive as of the time of release of this comic in 2014 nine years after the documentary was released.\nThe title text emphasizes that whatever the penguins' fate, we do get and are getting older. [ citation needed ] This is presented as a last jab by Black Hat as he departs just to make Megan feel a bit worse. So in the end this comic did try to make the reader feel older.\nThis also presents an alternative take on the entire comic: Black Hat came in to make Megan feel old because all the penguins of the movie is actually naturally dead of old age, predators, disease etc. And if she likes the movie, she would not have realized that it was almost nine years ago she saw it, and the feel old by realizing how time passed. But she ruins Black Hat's moment by realizing what he is trying to do. (As opposed to what he manages in a comic like 493: Actuarial , that might also make you feel old). So instead of saying yeah you got me , he quickly invents a story that they actually all lived last night, and then takes the blame for killing them just to shock Megan.\nThis fits with the title text, as he then manages to make a jab at how old Megan should feel anyway. This is supported also by the fact, that although the movie was released in January 2005, the team behind it had filmed the penguins for 13 month prior, so some of the penguins in the movie must have been adult back in 2003. So it is not only nine but rather eleven years ago and several of the penguins in the movie must have died of natural causes prior to this comic, although not all! But Black Hat's fake statement indicates that all of them were still alive yesterday.\nThe worst part of this is that it seems like Megan believes him, but she of course also knows him to be a classhole (see for instance 596: Latitude ) and might believe him capable of locating and exterminating all the penguins from the movie over night...\n[Black Hat walks towards Megan who is sitting in an office chair at a desk working on her laptop.] Black Hat: All the birds from March of the Penguins are now dead.\n[In a frame-less panel only Megan is shown. She sits back from the laptop taking her hands down on her legs. Black Hat replies from off-panel.] Megan: OK, I get it. We're all aging. Black Hat (off-panel): What? No.\n[Black Hat is in the frame again holding one hand slightly out towards Megan who has turned around in her office chair and is now facing Black Hat.] Black Hat: I'm not trying to make you feel old. They were alive last night. Black Hat:I'm trying to apologize. Megan: Oh God\n"}
{"id":1409,"title":"Query","image_title":"Query","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1409","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/query.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1409:_Query","transcript":"[The first and then every second part of the comic is drawn without any frames around the panels. They depict Megan with the device she finds. In the first and last of these there are more than one \"panel\" where Megan is drawn more than once without frames between. In between these frameless panels, in all even numbered rows, are a framed picture with an overview of the surroundings.]\n[The first two panels are drawn in the first row.] [Megan walks up to device lying on the ground.]\n[Megan picks up a device and looks a the screen. The screen is shown in black with white text and a white bar for her to enter text in.] Loaded table: People Enter query\n[Megan looks around and sees nine people nearby: A black haired girl with ponytail talking on the phone; a Cueball-like guy talking to a hairy guy; a group of three people, with Ponytail and another Cueball-like guy sitting, and a Megan-like girl lying on the ground; another hairy guy sitting with an ice cream cone on a big box; Another Ponytail girl leaning up against the box with her phone together with a third Cueball-like guy also with a phone in his hand. The device still shows the last part of the text in white on black, and with room to enter a query] Enter query Megan:\u00a0??\n[Megan types into the device.  The query is shown as coming from the devices screen:] Select * from people where age > 30\n[Five people are highlighted in a yellow cloud around their bodies: Black haired ponytail, both guys talking, and the two last of the group of three.]\n[Megan types again:] Select * from people where annual_income > 100000\n[One person is highlighted in yellow - the one talking to the first Cueball.]\n[Megan types:] Select * from people where afraid_of_flying = True\n[Four people, including herself, are highlighted in yellow. Also the Megan-like girl on the ground and the last two behind the box.]\n[Megan types:] Select * from people where hours_since_watching_porn < 12\n[Three people are highlighted. The two girls around the second Cueball and the third Cueball.]\n[The next three panels are drawn on the same row.] [Megan looks at the device, while holding it in two hands.] Megan: Neat.\n[Megan holds the device in one hand, still looking at it.] Megan: ...\n[Megan types:] Drop table People\n[Everyone disappears; the items they were holding drop to the ground, including the device Megan has been using. the other devices are three phones and one ice cream cone.]\n","explanation":"Megan picks up a strange device that mysteriously asks her to enter a query after stating \"Loaded table: People\/ Enter query.\" In computer databases, \" tables \" are groups of similar information consisting of records each having certain attributes. Databases are generally made up of many tables, each containing different types of records. A database for a traditional library might have a \"Books\" table and a \"Cardholders\" table with records of all of the books in the library, and all of the people who have library cards. Each table will have different columns for certain attributes for every record. For example, the \"Books\" table might have columns for \"title\", \"author\", \"date\", etc.\nA request from a database by a user is called a \"query\". SQL (Structured Query Language) is a programming language designed for databases, and has a certain syntax for its queries. A common query is \"select\" which requests certain information from the database. In the library example, one might select (in plain English) all books written by a certain author or published after a certain date, etc.\nMegan uses the device by entering an SQL query into it: \"Select * from people where age > 30\" (show all the people older than 30). It appears that the actual people around her who are over 30 are wrapped in a yellow light, which does not apply to Megan in this query. Megan then tries other experimental queries, presumably to determine whether the results are correct. First, she queries for people with a high annual income (a group that does not include her), then for those who are afraid of flying (which does include her). Because the results for herself are valid both times, she then indulges her curiosity by asking who has watched porn in the preceding twelve hours. This suggests that whatever \"database\" she is accessing is extremely thorough as it contains updated records of people's day-to-day activities.\nThe percentage of people lit appears to approximately correspond to real demographic data: note, 5 of the 10 characters are female; the median world\/US age are fairly close to 30; top decile income in the USA is approximately $100,000 (and top earners are usually men); up to 40% of people are afraid of flying.\nFinally, she types \"Drop table People\". Drop is an SQL command to delete a table. When she enters the command the entire table disappears and because she is also in this table she disappears, too. The implications are unclear. It may be a suggestion that all of reality is a computer program, all of the people are merely \"data\" in the program, and Megan was somehow granted access to the database for the program. It could also be an allusion to the fact that human life is so rich, diverse, & interesting, but also extremely fragile. Someone who controls much power can, simply with the press of a few buttons, erase everything that thousands or millions of people had worked so hard on.\nThe drop table command was also used in 327: Exploits of a Mom , although with less fatal results.\nThe title text may suggest that when the people disappeared or \"died\", their records were moved to a table called \"Ghosts\". The query would then, presumably, see all the people that were deleted. In some implementations of databases deleted records are still hidden and remain until a \"Ghost Cleanup Process\" removes the data permanently; the title text may also allude to this process. Alternatively, the title text may refer to movies such as The Sixth Sense , in which certain people are ghosts, unbeknownst to those around them, another quality that may be elucidated by Megan's device.\n[The first and then every second part of the comic is drawn without any frames around the panels. They depict Megan with the device she finds. In the first and last of these there are more than one \"panel\" where Megan is drawn more than once without frames between. In between these frameless panels, in all even numbered rows, are a framed picture with an overview of the surroundings.]\n[The first two panels are drawn in the first row.] [Megan walks up to device lying on the ground.]\n[Megan picks up a device and looks a the screen. The screen is shown in black with white text and a white bar for her to enter text in.] Loaded table: People Enter query\n[Megan looks around and sees nine people nearby: A black haired girl with ponytail talking on the phone; a Cueball-like guy talking to a hairy guy; a group of three people, with Ponytail and another Cueball-like guy sitting, and a Megan-like girl lying on the ground; another hairy guy sitting with an ice cream cone on a big box; Another Ponytail girl leaning up against the box with her phone together with a third Cueball-like guy also with a phone in his hand. The device still shows the last part of the text in white on black, and with room to enter a query] Enter query Megan:\u00a0??\n[Megan types into the device.  The query is shown as coming from the devices screen:] Select * from people where age > 30\n[Five people are highlighted in a yellow cloud around their bodies: Black haired ponytail, both guys talking, and the two last of the group of three.]\n[Megan types again:] Select * from people where annual_income > 100000\n[One person is highlighted in yellow - the one talking to the first Cueball.]\n[Megan types:] Select * from people where afraid_of_flying = True\n[Four people, including herself, are highlighted in yellow. Also the Megan-like girl on the ground and the last two behind the box.]\n[Megan types:] Select * from people where hours_since_watching_porn < 12\n[Three people are highlighted. The two girls around the second Cueball and the third Cueball.]\n[The next three panels are drawn on the same row.] [Megan looks at the device, while holding it in two hands.] Megan: Neat.\n[Megan holds the device in one hand, still looking at it.] Megan: ...\n[Megan types:] Drop table People\n[Everyone disappears; the items they were holding drop to the ground, including the device Megan has been using. the other devices are three phones and one ice cream cone.]\n"}
{"id":1410,"title":"California","image_title":"California","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1410","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/california.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1410:_California","transcript":"[Caption above frame:] I like how long and skinny California is because it means you can use it as a graph axis:\n[Title at top of frame:] California Droughts Based on map data from US Drought Monitor\/NOAA\/Richard Tinker\n[A legend explains the colors which won't show in this transcript anyway:] Dry [Yellow] Drought [Beige] Moderate [Orange] Severe [Red] Extreme [Brown] Ludicrous (\"exceptional\")\n[A colored contour plot with Time on the X axis and California on the Y axis, and depth of drought as the dependent variable indicated by color. At the left edge, an outline of the state of California, rotated clockwise so as to be mostly vertical, with a label on the \"X axis\" of Jan 4, 2000, and a yellow patch indicating Dry conditions through the center of the state. To the right of that, four progressively-skinnier versions of the same image, showing more or less the same area of dryness, with the state outline shrunk along the Y axis until the fourth one is basically just a vertical line. This then merges into the main body of the graph, the true contour plot, in which the Y axis is just south-to-north distance along the state, as the X or Time axis runs from 2000 to 2014. Extreme droughts can be seen in Northern California in 2001, Southern California in 2002, and Southern California again in 2007. Moderate-to-severe drought is prevalent across most of the state in 2008-09, and then again starting in 2012, progressing to extreme and \"ludicrous\" in the northern 2\/3 of the state by 2014. At the right-hand edge of the graph are five progressively-wider outlines of the state, reversing the pattern at the left edge, starting with a \"line\" and widening to a proper 2-D image of the state again, with an X-axis label of Aug 14, 2014, showing the true extent of the drought, with all areas of the state experiencing severe, extreme, or \"ludicrous\" levels.]\n","explanation":"This graph shows the levels of drought over time in the state of California using years on the horizontal axis and distance along a 45 degrees rotated north-south-axis of California on the vertical axis. The image illustrates the use of the distance measure on the vertical axis by visually rotating and stacking multiple maps of California next to each other.\nThe geography of California lends itself well to this kind of graphical interpretation because the state is much taller than it is wide, hence, large-scale phenomena like weather patterns are likely to cover much of the \"width\" of the state but only part of the \"height\". Because the variation in the west-east direction will be small, a side-on view of the state can be used as the vertical axis in a graph, so that the indicated values are either the average or extreme value across the width of California.\nRandall compiled the data in this graph from data from the US Drought Monitor , which is authored by Richard Tinker from NOAA . The colors Randall uses correspond to drought intensity levels D0-D4 defined on the Drought Monitor site.\nThe darkest, most severe level of drought is labelled \"ludicrous\" (causing laughter because of absurdity), but a parenthetical remark indicates that the official term is \"exceptional.\". Of course, with half or more of the state in this condition, it can hardly be called \"exceptional\" any longer.\nThe graph shows that in 2000, 2005, and 2010, there were very little or no drought conditions in California, but that the intervening periods have seen increasingly severe droughts. According to the most recent data, the state is entirely in a condition of \"severe\" or worse drought, with \"ludicrous\" conditions across approximately half its area. The graph also reveals that 2014 is the first year (since 2000) where the \"ludicrous\" level has been seen. Indeed, a comic about drought is rather topical: California is in the middle of one of its worst droughts in recorded history.\nThe title text is a reference from the movie Spaceballs , a parody of various Sci-Fi movies. Lone Starr and Barf in their Winnebago space ship traveling at lightspeed are passed by Spaceball One, which is traveling at \"ludicrous\" speed. The path of Spaceball One is shown as a plaid pattern and Barf remarks \"They've gone to plaid!\" ( YouTube clip ).\n[Caption above frame:] I like how long and skinny California is because it means you can use it as a graph axis:\n[Title at top of frame:] California Droughts Based on map data from US Drought Monitor\/NOAA\/Richard Tinker\n[A legend explains the colors which won't show in this transcript anyway:] Dry [Yellow] Drought [Beige] Moderate [Orange] Severe [Red] Extreme [Brown] Ludicrous (\"exceptional\")\n[A colored contour plot with Time on the X axis and California on the Y axis, and depth of drought as the dependent variable indicated by color. At the left edge, an outline of the state of California, rotated clockwise so as to be mostly vertical, with a label on the \"X axis\" of Jan 4, 2000, and a yellow patch indicating Dry conditions through the center of the state. To the right of that, four progressively-skinnier versions of the same image, showing more or less the same area of dryness, with the state outline shrunk along the Y axis until the fourth one is basically just a vertical line. This then merges into the main body of the graph, the true contour plot, in which the Y axis is just south-to-north distance along the state, as the X or Time axis runs from 2000 to 2014. Extreme droughts can be seen in Northern California in 2001, Southern California in 2002, and Southern California again in 2007. Moderate-to-severe drought is prevalent across most of the state in 2008-09, and then again starting in 2012, progressing to extreme and \"ludicrous\" in the northern 2\/3 of the state by 2014. At the right-hand edge of the graph are five progressively-wider outlines of the state, reversing the pattern at the left edge, starting with a \"line\" and widening to a proper 2-D image of the state again, with an X-axis label of Aug 14, 2014, showing the true extent of the drought, with all areas of the state experiencing severe, extreme, or \"ludicrous\" levels.]\n"}
{"id":1411,"title":"Loop","image_title":"Loop","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1411","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/loop.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1411:_Loop","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk, accompanied by a desktop computer and a laptop open in front of it. He is holding a tablet in his left hand and a smartphone in his right.]\n[A cyclical flowchart is shown above Cueball:] Stare blankly at screen -> Open news site -> Start reading -> Get bored -> Absentmindedly check smaller device -> Stare blankly at screen -> ...\n","explanation":"Cueball is seen at his desk in front of four devices. He has clearly run out of things to do, or is looking for an excuse to procrastinate. A flowchart describes the process by which he scans the whole environment for something to do, which everyone can relate to.\nThe comic uses electronics likely because they are the common time killer these days, and are most likely to contain fresh, tantalizing entertainment. News sites can be viewed as a good source of yet-to-be-seen content. Yet the search yields no interesting content, or the results don't garner enough attention, thus the blank stares and moving on to next device in line. Cueball has four devices, so he can begin with the desktop and move through the loop three times - first to laptop, then tablet and finally to smartphone.\nThe title text notes that this also happened before there were electronic devices like today, assuming most entertainment came from books. The point made is that, while the Internet and modern electronic devices are often blamed for jeopardizing the minds of adolescents, the attention span of \"the kids\" is not worse than it ever was, neither in the context of low-tech nor high-tech media. Kids focus on some things for a long time, but they do change this focus often very abruptly. But nevertheless there are still many kids reading books today until the end.\nThe title text could also be considered to imply another type of loop in which various generations experience the same situations under different circumstances (i.e., history repeating itself). In this case, the new generation experiences the attention lapse loop with electronics, whereas the previous generation experienced this same loop with books. There may also be a commentary present on the shorter attention span of the current generation as opposed to the previous one in that there is an obvious terminus to the electronics loop while the book loop could extend nearly indefinitely.\n[Cueball sits at a desk, accompanied by a desktop computer and a laptop open in front of it. He is holding a tablet in his left hand and a smartphone in his right.]\n[A cyclical flowchart is shown above Cueball:] Stare blankly at screen -> Open news site -> Start reading -> Get bored -> Absentmindedly check smaller device -> Stare blankly at screen -> ...\n"}
{"id":1412,"title":"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles","image_title":"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1412","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/teenage_mutant_ninja_turtles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1412:_Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles","transcript":"[Caption above comic] WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE TITLES With the right syllable stress pattern to be sung to the tune of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song\n[Six groups of Wikipedia article titles are written out. Each group contains ten titles. The first title of each group is drawn in the style of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo, where the final word of each title is drawn in bulbous green text in the shape of an arch, with the remaining words in white text on a red banner above the green text. The remainder of the titles in each group are arranged as a list in standard font next to the larger titles, alternating from right to left hand side going down the comic.]\nAce Ventura: Pet Detective Biggest Loser: Second Chances Cayman Island blue iguana Central Texas pocket gopher Church of Jesus Christ Creator Climate change and meat production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Daylight saving time in China Denver Airport People Mover Easter Island spiny lobster\nAsian Human Rights Commission Edgar Allan Poe Museum Engine failure after take-off English as a second language Former Arctic Monkeys members Fowler's Modern English Usage Georgia Game and Fish Department Golden-mantled howler monkey Greater Cleveland Film Commission Hairy flower chafer beetle\nSan Diego City Council Harland David \"Colonel\" Sanders Human Tissue Resource Network Klondike -class destroyer tender Legal code of North Dakota Lesser knapweed flower weevil Lockheed Martin Atlas rocket Maple syrup urine syndrome Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Nablus mask-like facial syndrome\nSingle payer health insurance Neo Geo Pocket Color New Year's Eve with Carson Daly Newton's second law of motion North Korean Workers Party Orange County Business Council Over\/under cable coiling Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater Places named for Adolf Hitler Proton-proton chain reaction\nSpotted giant flying squirrel Puerto Rican lizard-cuckoo Quantuum [sic] vacuum plasma thruster Rocky Mountain spotted fever Royal Flying Doctor Service Russian Women's Fascist Movement Semi-active laser guidance Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon\nWomen science fiction authors Trailing suction hopper dredger Vector graphics markup language Viti Levu giant pigeon Voting rights in Puerto Rico William Henry, Duke of Gloucester Windows Vista startup process Woodrow Wilson \"Woody\" Guthrie Yaba monkey tumor virus Zack and Miri Make a Porno\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the recently released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie . It is a list of Wikipedia article titles that are in the same syllable-stress pattern as the first line of the theme song of the 1987 cartoon series .\nThe list is compiled in alphabetical order from top to bottom, without respect to the left or right column. Some of the items on this list (e.g. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective ) are drawn as headlines in the same style as the logo from that series. These articles are not in alphabetical order with the surrounding small face text, but these headlines are in alphabetical order with the other headlines from top to bottom, without respect to the left or right column. Some of these phrases are not actually the titles of Wikipedia articles, but are redirects. For instance, the article on Woodrow Wilson \"Woody\" Guthrie redirects to Woody Guthrie , and Former Arctic Monkeys members at one time redirected to Andy Nicholson .\nThe syllable-stress pattern of this line is long-short-long-short-long-short-long-short, known in poetry as trochaic tetrameter . Randall has previously authored comics dealing with trochees , namely 856: Trochee Fixation and 1383: Magic Words .\nA similar idea was performed by Jimmy Fallon in 2001 at a concert for New York city where he demonstrated singing \"any 80's song\" over the tune of MC Hammer 's song \" U Can't Touch This \".\nThe title text suggests an album of songs ( The Purple People Eater , the aforementioned Ninja Turtles theme, Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini and the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers theme), the title or primary refrain of which have a large number of verses in trochaic meter . Randall suggests that these refrains are so interchangeable that the lyrics of each could be sung to the melody of the song following it in the tracklist. Randall would title the album Linked List as each song would melodically reference the next song. The refrains of the songs, respectively are:\nIn 2019 a Twitter feed was created which identifies Wikipedia articles with this stress pattern and creates a matching graphic.\nThere are 6 headlines and 9 other article links in each block next to a headline for a total of 60 wiki links:\nAce Ventura: Pet Detective Biggest Loser: Second Chances Cayman Island blue iguana Central Texas pocket gopher Church of Jesus Christ Creator Climate change and meat production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Daylight saving time in China Denver Airport People Mover Easter Island spiny lobster\nAsian Human Rights Commission\nEdgar Allan Poe Museum Engine failure after take-off English as a second language Former Arctic Monkeys members Fowler's Modern English Usage Georgia Game and Fish Department Golden-mantled howler monkey Greater Cleveland Film Commission Hairy flower chafer beetle\nSan Diego City Council\nHarland David \"Colonel\" Sanders Human Tissue Resource Network Klondike class destroyer tender Legal code of North Dakota Lesser knapweed flower weevil Lockheed Martin Atlas rocket Maple syrup urine syndrome Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Nablus mask-like facial syndrome\nSingle payer health insurance\nNeo Geo Pocket Color New Year's Eve with Carson Daly Newton's second law of motion North Korean Workers Party Orange County Business Council Over\/under cable coiling Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater Places named for Adolf Hitler Proton-proton chain reaction\nSpotted giant flying squirrel\nPuerto Rican lizard-cuckoo Quantuum vacuum plasma thruster [1] Rocky Mountain spotted fever Royal Flying Doctor Service Russian Women's Fascist Movement Semi-active laser guidance Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon\nWomen science fiction authors\nTrailing suction hopper dredger Vector graphics markup language Viti Levu giant pigeon Voting rights in Puerto Rico William Henry, Duke of Gloucester [2] Windows Vista startup process Woodrow Wilson \"Woody\" Guthrie Yaba monkey tumor virus Zack and Miri Make a Porno\n[Caption above comic] WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE TITLES With the right syllable stress pattern to be sung to the tune of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song\n[Six groups of Wikipedia article titles are written out. Each group contains ten titles. The first title of each group is drawn in the style of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo, where the final word of each title is drawn in bulbous green text in the shape of an arch, with the remaining words in white text on a red banner above the green text. The remainder of the titles in each group are arranged as a list in standard font next to the larger titles, alternating from right to left hand side going down the comic.]\nAce Ventura: Pet Detective Biggest Loser: Second Chances Cayman Island blue iguana Central Texas pocket gopher Church of Jesus Christ Creator Climate change and meat production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Daylight saving time in China Denver Airport People Mover Easter Island spiny lobster\nAsian Human Rights Commission Edgar Allan Poe Museum Engine failure after take-off English as a second language Former Arctic Monkeys members Fowler's Modern English Usage Georgia Game and Fish Department Golden-mantled howler monkey Greater Cleveland Film Commission Hairy flower chafer beetle\nSan Diego City Council Harland David \"Colonel\" Sanders Human Tissue Resource Network Klondike -class destroyer tender Legal code of North Dakota Lesser knapweed flower weevil Lockheed Martin Atlas rocket Maple syrup urine syndrome Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Nablus mask-like facial syndrome\nSingle payer health insurance Neo Geo Pocket Color New Year's Eve with Carson Daly Newton's second law of motion North Korean Workers Party Orange County Business Council Over\/under cable coiling Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater Places named for Adolf Hitler Proton-proton chain reaction\nSpotted giant flying squirrel Puerto Rican lizard-cuckoo Quantuum [sic] vacuum plasma thruster Rocky Mountain spotted fever Royal Flying Doctor Service Russian Women's Fascist Movement Semi-active laser guidance Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon\nWomen science fiction authors Trailing suction hopper dredger Vector graphics markup language Viti Levu giant pigeon Voting rights in Puerto Rico William Henry, Duke of Gloucester Windows Vista startup process Woodrow Wilson \"Woody\" Guthrie Yaba monkey tumor virus Zack and Miri Make a Porno\n"}
{"id":1413,"title":"Suddenly Popular","image_title":"Suddenly Popular","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1413","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/suddenly_popular.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1413:_Suddenly_Popular","transcript":"Obscure words and phrases everyone suddenly becomes very familiar with. [A time line to the left is marked of by several phrases to the right around the time they became familiar to the public:] \u2190 World Wide Web \u2190 DNA Evidence 1995 \u2190 Militia Movement \u2190 Supermax 2000 \u2190 Butterfly Ballot \u2190 Al-Qaeda \u2190 Wi-Fi 2005 \u2190 Tsunami \u2190 Viral 2010 \u2190 Radicalize \u2190 Metadata 2015 \u2190 Lahar \u2190 Insect-Borne 2020 \u2190 Earth-Crossing \u2190 Thermohaline \u2190 Snow-Blindness 2025 \u2190 Amplexus \u2190 Controlled Hydroplaning 2030 \u2190 Paradoxical Reaction \u2190 Drone Desertion \u2190 Rapid Hair Growth 2035 \u2190 I Swear Allegiance To The God-Empress In Life And In Death 2040\n","explanation":"Many phrases that used to be of mainly academic interest become popular when an important event or global trend is described with such phrases in the media. Randall presents a timeline of past examples, and predicts phrases that may be popularised in the near future. The past events are a mix of buzz words and words that became popularized as a result of technology trends, natural disasters, or terrorism. The future events seem to be all related to natural disasters or other kinds of serious issues, except Amplexus \u2014 which is the joke of the title text \u2014 showing that no matter how many disasters there are, people are generally more concerned about their teenagers' sex lives.\nThe title text is also an example of a clickbait headline. Many organizations will post a link on social media to their content with a sensationalized headline in order to draw readers in. In this case, the headline is geared towards parents who are worried about their children being sexually active in this new Amplexus way. Such headlines are the internet's analog to television news' promos (\"A new trend among teens is sweeping the nation, but is it dangerous? Details at 11:00.\").\nGlobal catastrophic risk is a theme throughout this comic. Randall predicts a large asteroid impact\/near miss and a volcanic eruption, followed by an impact winter or volcanic winter . An insect borne, global pandemic without a cure also strikes, and then the technological singularity occurs.\nThis comic has similar features to 887: Future Timeline .\nBelow the phrases are listed with the closest year from the time-line noted behind the phrase. Note that this year does not necessarily match with the in-real-life relevant year. This may be found in the explanation of the phrase below. Google Books Ngram Viewer can show the relative frequency of those words in function of the year.\nWorld Wide Web \u2013 1994 Though first proposed in 1989, and the first test being completed in 1990, it took until around 1994 for the world wide web to start becoming well known.\nDNA Evidence \u2013 1995 Prominent coverage of the O. J. Simpson murder trial in 1994 brought widespread discussion of DNA Evidence , making it famous and showing its limitations.\nMilitia Movement \u2013 1996 After the standoffs at Ruby Ridge , Idaho in 1992 and the Branch Davidians compound in Waco, Texas between U.S. Government Agencies and militias in 1993, people started becoming more aware of their presence, culminating with the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing on the second anniversary of the fire at the Branch Davidians compound.\nSupermax \u2013 1997 Super-Maximum security prisons. Possibly referring to the 1997 film Con Air , starring Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, and John Malkovich, in which prisoners being transferred to a new Supermax prison seize control of their transport plane. Also possibly referring to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols , perpetrators of the aforementioned Oklahoma City bombing, who were incarcerated at ADX Florence , the former from the time of his arrest to 1999, and the latter from the time of his conviction to the present day.\nButterfly Ballot \u2013 2000 In the United States presidential election in 2000, Florida had a major recount dispute that took center stage in the election. Thus, the outcome of the 2000 United States presidential election was not known for more than a month after balloting, because of the extended process of counting and then recounting of Florida presidential ballots. The butterfly ballot was the type of ballot design used in Palm Beach County, Florida , and was a central issue in the election controversy. Evidence suggests that many voters who intended to vote for Gore or Bush actually marked their ballots for Pat Buchanan or spoiled their ballots, because of a confusing layout of the ballot.\nAl-Qaeda \u2013 2002 The September 11th terrorist attacks brought the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation into the spotlight almost overnight.\nWi-Fi \u2013 2003 Wi-Fi, though developed in the 1990s, first became popular in the early 2000s.\nTsunami \u2013 2006 There were a number of tsunamis around this time period, in particular the Boxing Day Tsunami which caused 230,000 deaths, and the 2006 Pangandaran earthquake and tsunami . These were some of the first tsunamis to be widely captured on camera, bringing these previously obscure seismic events into the public eye.\nViral \u2013 2009 In this context, the word viral is used to describe anything which spreads rapidly and widely on the internet. In particular an online video clip is said to have 'Gone Viral' or become a Viral video if it racks up a high number of views over a short time. This phenomenon has become especially prevalent due to users sharing content on Social media .\nRadicalize \u2013 2011 Due to the ongoing Syrian Civil War , and the relative ease with which one can travel from Europe to Syria by way of Turkey, there is growing concern about the risk of young Muslims in Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the United States) becoming radicalized by indoctrination from fundamentalists either in their communities or on the Internet.\nMetadata \u2013 2013 Following the highly publicised 2013 leaks by Edward Snowden of information regarding the NSA 's indiscriminate surveillance of global communication metadata, awareness of the privacy value of such data became widespread, where once it was mostly familiar to IT professionals.\nFrom this point on, phrases were in the future at the time of publication.\n\nLahar \u2013 2016 A lahar is a mudslide caused by the eruption of a volcano that was covered with snow or ice. Randall is speculating on a future natural disaster being caused by such an incident. B\u00e1r\u00f0arbunga volcano covered with the Vatnaj\u00f6kull glacier on Iceland increased activity just a few days before publishing of this comic, but its eventual eruption caused little harm.\nInsect-Borne \u2013 2019 Some diseases are insect-borne , meaning specific species of insects are the main vector in spreading to humans. Malaria is an example of an insect-borne disease . Randall predicts some severe (possibly deadly) insect-borne disease will emerge around this time. As of 2016, the Zika virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes, has reached epidemic status in South America, and has spread to southern North America, Africa and Australia. 2019 marks the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, so Randall's prediction of a major disease could be accurate, however COVID-19 is not an insect-borne disease.\nEarth-Crossing \u2013 2021 Earth-crossers are asteroids that cross the orbit of Earth. Most of them remain harmless because their orbit doesn't actually intersect the earth's orbit in 3 dimensions, or for the foreseeable future, they will cross when Earth is not there. For this phrase to become popular, an Earth-crosser might have to reach the heretofore-unreached \"threatening\" level, rating a 5 or more on the Torino Scale , due to a significant chance of a large impact. As of 2014, there are no threats of that level known in the early 2020s. If the next two phrases are connected to this one, Randall is predicting a significant asteroid impact.\nThermohaline \u2013 2022 Thermohaline circulation is the largest group of interconnected ocean currents, which stabilize global climate by equalizing the temperature and salinity of oceans around the world. If this phrase becomes popular, it implies the thermohaline circulation would have slowed or changed significantly. This might be caused by asteroid impact or by polar ice melting. The latter scenario was apocalyptically dramatized in the movie The Day After Tomorrow .\nSnow-Blindness \u2013 2024 Snow blindness is an eye condition caused by excessive UV light reflected from snow and ice. This can lead to corneal damage and blindness (temporary, if treated properly). This phrase becoming popular might suggest a long impact winter (from the asteroid) or severe ozone depletion in cold regions of the world.\nAmplexus \u2013 2025 A form of non-penetrative reproduction carried out by some animals, for example frogs, involving grasping the partner with front legs. This may be connected to the other posts (some change in human society) or it may simply be a joke at how new sexual language\/fads appear and hit mainstream media from time to time (for example a number of acts gained fame from Sex and the City). This also ties in with the title text, which imagines a sensationalist headline suggesting teenagers may be doing this.\nControlled Hydroplaning \u2013 2028 Hydroplaning occurs when a vehicle tire comes in contact with a puddle in such a way that the water builds up between the tire and the road surface. The film of water, having a much lower coefficient of friction than the road surface, causes the tire to lose traction. Typically, in this scenario, the driver isn't planning to hydroplane and loses control of the vehicle. In theory, controlled hydroplaning would be achieved when the driver plans for it ahead of time. This could be necessary if, in this hypothetical future, most of the roads are flooded since the impact winter (after only four years) ends and thus a great thaw causes all roads to become wet all the time.\nParadoxical Reaction \u2013 2031 \"paradoxical reaction\" is a medical term for when the outcome of a medical treatment, typically the taking of a drug, is the opposite of that expected. For example if taking a pain relieving medication made the pain worse. For this term to suddenly become well known, a large scale or particularly notable case must have taken place (such as the insect-borne disease of 2019). Or, this and the following (and maybe the last as well) phrases may refer to the events from The Evitable Conflict by Isaac Asimov (and its very loose but much more popular film adaptation I, Robot ) where robots, instructed with the Three Laws of Robotics , take over the world to prevent humans hurting each other. The paradoxical reaction is that these laws were specifically designed to, among other things, prevent robots from taking over the world in the first place.\nDrone Desertion \u2013 2033 Desertion is the abandonment of a post or duty, usually military in nature. With the increasing use of autonomous drones by the military this hints at an event where drones 'decide' to desert, possibly due to unspecified advances in Artificial Intelligence and Robot Rights . Or maybe they just start following the Three Laws of Robotics . See also 2499: Abandonment Function .\nRapid Hair Growth \u2013 2034 Maybe some humans have developed a very rapid hair growth (presumably on the entire body) through evolution and natural selection caused by the cold years of the impact winter.\nI Swear Allegiance To The God-Empress In Life And In Death \u2013 2038 This is a divine oath . A possible explanation is that after the impact and the desertion of the drones predicted for 2033, a strong fraction has made their leader divine, and everyone now has to swear allegiance to this new God-Empress using this phrase - which would certainly make it a very \"popular\" phrase. The phrase God-Emperor was popularized in the science-fiction work Dune in 1965 and has been repeatedly referenced since, notably in the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000 (and related media).\nObscure words and phrases everyone suddenly becomes very familiar with. [A time line to the left is marked of by several phrases to the right around the time they became familiar to the public:] \u2190 World Wide Web \u2190 DNA Evidence 1995 \u2190 Militia Movement \u2190 Supermax 2000 \u2190 Butterfly Ballot \u2190 Al-Qaeda \u2190 Wi-Fi 2005 \u2190 Tsunami \u2190 Viral 2010 \u2190 Radicalize \u2190 Metadata 2015 \u2190 Lahar \u2190 Insect-Borne 2020 \u2190 Earth-Crossing \u2190 Thermohaline \u2190 Snow-Blindness 2025 \u2190 Amplexus \u2190 Controlled Hydroplaning 2030 \u2190 Paradoxical Reaction \u2190 Drone Desertion \u2190 Rapid Hair Growth 2035 \u2190 I Swear Allegiance To The God-Empress In Life And In Death 2040\n"}
{"id":1414,"title":"Writing Skills","image_title":"Writing Skills","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1414","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/writing_skills.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1414:_Writing_Skills","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are walking together, White Hat is holding a newspaper or report.] White Hat: Weird- Another study found that kids who use SMS abbreviations actually score higher on grammar and spelling tests. Cueball: Why on earth is that a surprise?\n[Cueball turns to White hat (who is now out side the frame. Inserted in the frame is a panel showing several kids throwing balls.] Cueball: Imagine kids suddenly start playing catch literally all the time . Everywhere they go, they throw balls back and forth, toss them in the air, and hurl them at trees and signs- Nearly every waking hour of their lives.\n[Cueball talks on while White Hat begins to walk.] Cueball: Do you think their generation will suck at baseball because they learned sloppy skills? White Hat: ...So you think someone will become a great writer while sexting?\n[They walk together.] Cueball: Have you read James Joyce's love letters? The phrases \"My little fuckbird\" and \"Arse full of farts\" appear. If we want to write Ulysses , our generation may not be sexting enough . White Hat: Eww.\n","explanation":"Cueball and White Hat are discussing the positive and negative effects of young people writing on mobile phones in the vernacular of the day, Short Message Service (SMS).\nSMS messages are one of the primary means of text communication on mobile devices, and are typically limited to 160 characters. Due to the limited space available on this and other messaging platforms, and also to decrease the time taken to write a message, SMS language (aka textese) developed as a form of short-hand writing. This involves the abbreviation and deliberate misspelling of words, and the use of acronyms.\nNaturally, the use of this style of language has expanded into other areas, including those where brevity is not an issue, and this expansion and evolution of language is a subject of intense debate. The main viewpoints on the subject are:\nCueball's point is that \"practice makes perfect\". The ability to form good grammar comes from practice through a lot of writing, even when that writing is informal; hence, the SMS generation gets a lot of practice compared to previous generations, who communicated mostly with speech, over the phone, and in person, and may have written only a few letters a year.  To foster talent for a major literary work, we should encourage practice, even when that practice is through informal writing such as SMS.\nThis idea has some real scientific background. Such as the investigation in 2009 Exploring the relationship between children's knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes . In this study children 10-12 were asked to compose text messages. The number of textisms was recorded, and a positive correlation was found between use of sms abbreviations and success at literacy tests. This is then related to David Crystal's concept of \"ludic\" language: the playful use of language as a contribution to language development. That notion is developed here: By playing with textual language, one develops writing skills, just as by playing with balls one can develop sports skills. David Crystal explains : \"Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed great literary awareness [...] If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have intuited that there is a standard.\"\nJames Joyce was a celebrated Irish novelist and poet, and his novel Ulysses is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature. It was criticized in some quarters for the frequent lack of punctuation and ungrammatical stream of consciousness narrative mode. In addition to his better-known works, he wrote a number of love letters with extremely explicit content.\nIn the title text, Randall wishes to prove Cueball's point by analyzing and comparing bulk volumes of texts (= a corpus ) written by children today and 20 years ago. Randall favors the literary ability of today's children for their everyday use of written word over the situation of the past, when children wrote only if forced to do so. The title text's second sentence is particularly long and complex (compared to almost any other title text), which will generally score much higher \"on various objective measures of writing quality\". Randall may be hinting that writing a lot of short title texts, like writing a lot of SMSs, improves your general writing quality - further strengthening Cueball's point. The title text is also 99 words long, probably referencing a 100 word limit.\n[White Hat and Cueball are walking together, White Hat is holding a newspaper or report.] White Hat: Weird- Another study found that kids who use SMS abbreviations actually score higher on grammar and spelling tests. Cueball: Why on earth is that a surprise?\n[Cueball turns to White hat (who is now out side the frame. Inserted in the frame is a panel showing several kids throwing balls.] Cueball: Imagine kids suddenly start playing catch literally all the time . Everywhere they go, they throw balls back and forth, toss them in the air, and hurl them at trees and signs- Nearly every waking hour of their lives.\n[Cueball talks on while White Hat begins to walk.] Cueball: Do you think their generation will suck at baseball because they learned sloppy skills? White Hat: ...So you think someone will become a great writer while sexting?\n[They walk together.] Cueball: Have you read James Joyce's love letters? The phrases \"My little fuckbird\" and \"Arse full of farts\" appear. If we want to write Ulysses , our generation may not be sexting enough . White Hat: Eww.\n"}
{"id":1415,"title":"Ballooning","image_title":"Ballooning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1415","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ballooning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1415:_Ballooning","transcript":"[Cueball is shown floating on the wind, attached to a large balloon. The balloon is made of spider silk.] Cueball: Ooh, that looks like a good spot to land, eat some bugs, and make an egg sac! \u266b Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can \u266a","explanation":"Spider-Man is a fictional superhero in comic books published by Marvel Comics, and has been the star of a number of television shows and film. The Spider-Man theme song , first used for the 1967 cartoon show, includes the words, \"Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can\". However, at other points, the theme song explains some things Spider-Man can do that a real spider obviously couldn't, such as crime-fighting. [ citation needed ] Randall is pointing out that while the abilities attributed to Spider-Man make a good superhero story, they are not real abilities of a spider.\nThis comic depicts Cueball as a far more realistic Spider-Man, behaving and thinking much more closely to a real spider than the Spider-Man from the comics. Cueball is shown ballooning ( example ), a trait used by spiders to move between locations, rather than swinging on web cords as in the comics and films. As he is floating, he sees a good spot to land, eat some bugs and make an egg sac. Again this contrasts the real life of a spider with Spider-Man, who would doubtless be rushing to fight crime or save a pretty girl.\nOnly female spiders create an egg sac. Male spiders spin a sperm web in order to transfer their sperm from their epigastric furrow into their pedipalps (reproductive organ located on the front two appendages, in the position where a scorpion would have pincers), which will then be used to transfer the sperm into the female during copulation. Cueball\/Spider-Man, being nominally male, should in fact be looking for a place to create a sperm web, not an egg sac. However, thanks to being featured in children's books, the actions of female spiders are much more widely known.\nThe title text refers to the mating ritual of some spiders, in which the male performs a dance to court the female. Mary-Jane is the third love interest and Peter's eventual wife in the Spider-Man stories, and so Cueball is planning to court her by dancing in front of her. In doing so he hopes that he is lucky, and she doesn't eat him before copulating with him, as sexual cannibalism is a trait associated with spiders.\n[Cueball is shown floating on the wind, attached to a large balloon. The balloon is made of spider silk.] Cueball: Ooh, that looks like a good spot to land, eat some bugs, and make an egg sac! \u266b Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can \u266a"}
{"id":1416,"title":"Pixels","image_title":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1416","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pixels.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1416:_Pixels","transcript":"[Cueball is stacking turtles, and is about to put the fourth turtle on his pile. At the bottom right there is a small panel. Inside this is written:] Scroll to zoom\n[When zooming in there will be several panels with text. The transcript of these may not be possible to complete - but add the transcript of these panels here: interactive transcript ]\nThe following code can be found by inspecting the comic's source code: [[A large picture of a person kneeling on the ground, stacking turtles.]] ((In this strip, when you zoom into the panel, each pixel becomes its own panel. Each of those panels can be scrolled into, for the same effect. The story progresses as you scroll deeper.)) [[The Earth as seen from space with the words BOOK LAUNCH.]] [[A stick-Randall holding a copy of 'What If?' saying, \"So excited about my book launch!\"]] [[A copy of the cover of 'What If?' labeled \"book.\"]] [[Stick-Randall is assembling parts from a box labeled 'rocket parts' and preparing to 'launch' his book.]] [[Various stages of assembly.]] [[A second person comes in, looks at SR's rocket set-up and says, \"Needs more struts.\"]] [[SR adds more struts.]] [[The rocket launches.]] [[A big cloud of smoke, which then dissipates.]] [[SR and the other person look skywards at the launched book.]] [[The book is shown leaving Earth's orbit.]] [[The other person turns to SR and says, \"I think that was the only one.\"]] [[The two walk away.]] ((The panels after this are a random assortment of these mostly stand-alone panels.)) [[A momma duck with several ducklings in a row behind her, labeled 'Evolution.']] [[The other person floating around in the sky.]] [[A stick figure with a sploshing bucket of water saying, \"I'm gonna shut down the server!\"]] [[Two people walking along, one saying, \"But if the Time-Turners worked after Book 3, Rowling would have used one to go back and remove the Time Turner from Book 3.\"]] [[The code: ~$ du -s video\n4170882256 ~$ du -hs video\nA lot. ~$]] [[A cloud.]] [[A flock of birds.]] [[MU]] [[A pixel.]] [[A person using a computer on the floor.]] [[HOLISM]] [[Saturn]] [[An atom.]] [[Two people star-gazing on a hill.]] [[Person one says, \"Someone once told me the great kings of the past look down on us...\" Person two says, \"From the stars?\" The first person replies, \"Just in general.\"]] [[The start of Mario World 1-1.]]\n\n{{Title text: It's turtles all the way down.}}\nThis gallery contains the 79 images used in this comic . The images are related in a directed graph .\nThis google sheet describes all possible images, their associated codes, and what possible images can be used as sub-images for each zoom level: https:\/\/docs.google.com\/spreadsheets\/d\/1nldKAkeVcK606CY12KI9bah9rDmK9E7CZOyinsEj2Lo\/edit?usp=sharing\nThis gist recursively downloads all possible images: https:\/\/gist.github.com\/Aaron1011\/d3b56325881cd639506a\n","explanation":"This interactive comic begins with a panel where Cueball is stacking turtles. This is a reference to the idiom \" turtles all the way down \", which refers to the problem of infinite recursion: if everything in the universe is \"on top of\" something else, so to speak, there must be a \"bottom.\" A joking solution to the paradoxical nature of such a bottom is the proposition that the world rests on a semi-infinite stack of turtles.\nThe origins of the turtle story are uncertain. It has been recorded since the mid 19th century, and may possibly date to the 18th. One recent version appears in Stephen Hawking 's 1988 book A Brief History of Time , which starts:\nA well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell ) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: \"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.\" The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, \"What is the tortoise standing on?\" \"You're very clever, young man, very clever,\" said the old lady. \"But it's turtles all the way down!\"\n\u2014Hawking, 1988\nSeveral ancient myths , dating back thousands of years, involve a turtle which supports the whole world, or a part of it, although it is usually just one turtle, not an infinite regression.  This is also repeated in Terry Pratchett 's Discworld novels, in which the world is supported by four elephants standing on the back of a single turtle called Great A'Tuin .\nAs can be read you should \"scroll to zoom\" . This can be done by placing the cursor inside the panel of the comic. When scrolling up (using the mouse wheel) the picture zooms in on the pixel beneath the cursor. Moving the cursor will also move the point to which the picture zooms. You can then zoom in until the pixels are visible. When you continue to zoom in on a pixel it then resolves into another comic picture, with black-on-white comic panels making up the white pixels and white-on-black panels making up the black pixels. Scrolling on until you can see the pixels of the comic picture you are now zooming into the process is repeated again and will be so for all subsequent sets of comic panels. Not all white and all black panels are the same; some sets involve more than two different panels, but all involve repetitive tiling.\nOnce you have zoomed in, you are able to click and drag the picture, thus enabling you to move from black to white picture pixel. This is reminiscent of the earlier interactive comic 1110: Click and Drag .\n\nApart from the first image there are two more with a single turtle in them. In one of these the turtle thinks \"I am a turtle\". This is a reference to 889: Turtles . It may say so to the Cueball that is seen standing all alone in another picture.\n\nThere is a panel featuring just Cueball, followed by is a picture of the What If? book, large enough that all of the text is visible on the front cover. But there is also another version where the author's name is crossed out and replaced with Stephen King , the word \"Spooky\" has been added above the title, and the word \"xkcd\" below has been struck and replaced with \"being afraid\" to form the phrase \"creator of being afraid\".  Stephen King is one of the most prolific and well-known horror authors of all time.\n\nThis comic was released on September 3, 2014, the day after Randall's book What If was launched. The book is shown and referred to in a number of frames; for example, it is literally launched as a part of an rocket up goer built by Cueball. There is also a picture with Cueball holding his book, while being excited about the launch.\nThe model up goer is made of Rocket Parts from KSP . KSP is the Kerbal Space Program , a spaceflight simulator which was also part of the latest interactive comic 1350: Lorenz . Perhaps xkcd's \"parts\" refers to KSP's large community of mod developers who contribute 'parts' to the game, although it was likely intended as nothing more than the humorous supposition that one could purchase physical rocket parts from a simulator. The frames showing the book launch use URLs that include the text \"upgoer\" in reference to the Up Goer Five comic.\nIn the end the up goer leaves the Earth after one orbit and then flies through space.\n\nStruts are structural members in engineering, and are one of the components used in Kerbal Space Program to construct rockets. \"Needs More Struts\" is a meme amongst players of Kerbal Space Program along the lines of \"when in doubt, overengineer\"; it stems from a time when the ragdoll physics in the Unity engine underlying KSP was unstable enough to necessitate their overuse. Megan deems Cueball's rocket to be insufficiently structurally sound, and declares that it \" Needs More Struts \".\nThe first three images depict Cueball building a Kerbal Space Program rocket out of parts from a box, labelled \"KSP Rocket Parts\". The top part of the rocket, usually where the crew module would be located, is made from the What If..? book. In the fourth panel Megan declares that it needs more struts, and in the next three panels, Cueball takes her advice and adds more struts.\nPanel 8 shows the Earth from a distance, with somebody (presumably Megan) saying again \"More Struts\". Panel 9 shows the Earth alone, and panel 10 shows the Earth with the rocket nearby, having just launched.\n\nThis series of panels parallels the \"Needs More Struts\" series. The first four panels shows the rocket lifting off, and the subsequent gasses dissipating.\nCueball and Megan look up at the ascending rocket, and then turn to each other having just launched the What-If book rocket into space (construction and launch are seen in other panels). Perhaps Megan realizes they may have misunderstood the term \"book launch\", and that they may have just lost the only copy of the book.\nPanel 7 shows the Earth from space; panel 8 also shows the Earth, with the words \"Book Launch\".  The next three panels show the rocket circling around the Earth once before heading into deep space, and the last shows the rocket by itself on its journey.\n\nHere are five objects in space.  It is possible that the What-If book rocket passes them by, or that these images are seen from the point of view of the rocket.\nFirst is the Sun, shown with visible solar prominences . Next is the Moon, shown in a crescent view with stars behind it. This is followed by Saturn, also in a crescent view with stars behind it.\nThere follow two images with just stars.\nThis is a reference to 428: Starwatching :\nIn four pictures Cueball and Megan are sitting below the stars. In the second the following conversation takes place:\nCueball: Someone once told me the great kings of the past look down on us... Megan: From the stars? Cueball: Just in general.\nThe second panel is a reference to Disney's The Lion King . Early in the film, Mufasa tells Simba that the great kings of the past look down on them from the stars. Later on, Simba recalls this to his companions, Timon and Pumba (who don't take him seriously). In the film, the kings of the past literally look down on \u2014 and watch over \u2014 the characters, which is how Megan interprets Cueball's initial statement. Cueball's reply that they just look down on us in general shows that he means the kings of the past figuratively look down on us (they view us as inferior or beneath them).\nIn the next image a shooting star is seen above them. The final picture is almost identical to the first (only four stars and a few pixels of ground are different).\n\nA series of 8 images are called Mario . The first is called entry , and has a picture of a TV on a low stand. The next four has Megan in front of said TV, holding a video game controller. The cable is connected to something inside the stand. She first kneels, then sits. In the third picture she is lying down. What follows is a picture which is an inverse of the sitting picture.\nThe last three images seem to depict a level from one of the Super Mario Bros. games. In the upper right one can see the iconic bricks which Mario can smash, two clouds appear stationary in the background, and a crude depiction of Mario is standing in the lower left. Over the course of the three images, a galaxy rises into the sky. It does not look like the Milky Way would from anywhere on Earth.\nThe view is reminiscent of a quote from Carl Sagan: \"...from a planet orbiting a star in a distant globular cluster, a still more glorious dawn awaits. Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise. A morning filled with 400 billion suns. The rising of the milky way.\" The quote was also referenced in 681: Gravity Wells\nRandall often allows images of transcendent awe to take over mundane scenes. In this case, the galaxy-rise is a surprising twist revealing the true setting of the Super Mario Brothers games. At the same time it conveys how long Megan has been playing the game - day has turned into night in her room, and also within the game itself. Instead of playing it, she is simply watching the galaxy-rise, as the character on the screen has not moved. The view may contain a hidden pun, by calling to mind Super Mario Galaxy .\n\nCueball tells an offscreen character that he is going to shut down the server , while carrying a bucket of water.\nUsually shutting down a server is done via the operating system or software. Directly turning it off or pulling the power plug also would technically work though not recommended for obvious reasons. But in this case it appears that Cueball is going to attempt to shut off the server by dousing it with water. This will likely result in serious water damage to the hardware, thus forcing it off as it no longer is able to function.\n\nIn five pictures Megan is floating in the clouds. The first shows Megan flying to the right, the second and third show just clouds, the fourth shows Megan flying to the left, and the fifth shows birds flying.\n\nIn two images Cueball and Megan are seen walking. The first is a normal black-on-white close up, and the second an inverted image seen from afar. They are talking while walking; after the first walking image they discuss Stockholm syndrome and then Time Turners , and after the second walking image Black Hat discusses a fire hydrant with a firefighter.\nStockholm syndrome is the name for a psychological phenomenon, in which hostages develop sympathy, empathy and\/or positive feelings towards their captors. These feelings are usually seen as irrational, seeing as the hostage is held against their wishes, usually with the threat of physical harm or death.\nThis panel asks \"How do we know anyone really wants to live in Stockholm?\", questioning whether everyone who lives in the city of Stockholm is in fact held hostage there and only stays because they have developed to like life there (due to Stockholm Syndrome).\nThe time turner is a device from the Harry Potter series of novels by JK Rowling . It allows the user to re-live a period of time over again. In the third novel Hermione is given the time-turner to allow her to take extra classes, however it is eventually used to spare Buckbeak the hippogriff from execution. This prompted many questions regarding why time-turners weren't used on other occasions to save people's lives (among other things).\nWhile J.K Rowling has \" solved the problem to her own satisfaction \" she admits that she entered into the subject of time-travel too lightly.\nThis panel jokes that if the real life JK Rowling had a fictional time-turner which worked, she would have gone back and removed the time-turner plotline from the book, saving her all the hassle of dealing with the resulting time-travel questions. This act would result in a time-travel paradox.\nBlack Hat is talking to a fireman, with a fire engine on fire in the background, he asks \"To be fair, what else would you expect to come out of a \" fire hydrant \"?\"\nBlack Hat appears to have managed to replace the usual water supply to the fire hydrant with actual fire. Thus when the hydrant is used, the result is, quite literally, fire (or oil with possibly flint and steel contraptions to cause fire). In Black Hat's logic, a hydrant which delivers water should be called a water hydrant.\nThis completely ignores the meaning of the word \"hydrant\", a pipe which supplies water (derived from the English root hydro- meaning relating to water , which is in turn from the Greek hud\u014dr meaning water ).\nAn alternative explanation is that Black Hat has replaced the water that would normally come out of the fire hydrant with a strong alcoholic beverage, colloquially called firewater ,  with a high enough ethanol content to burn. If this were the case, the ability to douse a fire would be severely decreased, both due to the flammable component and because ethanol can absorb less heat per volume than water.\n\nMegan hears a very long stretched EEEEEEEEEEEEE sound which goes over 6 images. It turns out it is a large letter E that shouts EEEEEEE!!! . In total there are 64 small E emanating from the big one. There is also a picture with two big white E on black background. Those E are larger than the E that shouts.\n\nThe March of Progress image is a famous and instantly recognisable image showing the stages of human evolution by way of a series of primate figures as if marching in a line. The panel parodies the March of Progress image, with 5 ducklings following an adult duck . In this case, rather than portraying selected individuals millions of years apart, the March shows evolution in action on a human timescale, the mother taking care of her ducklings. The comic has some resemblance to 537: Ducklings .\n\nFour ropes cross diagonally across this black picture. They might be strings.\n\nThere are two chess boards on black and white background with smaller chessboards drawn upon them in a Fractal pattern.\nOne panel contains a number of lines and dots, which are in fact a depiction of the first 5 steps of a Cantor Ternary Set , mirrored about the horizontal centreline (see reference image ). The Cantor ternary set is constructed by repeatedly deleting the open middle thirds of a set of line segments.  In the comic, the two upper-left most segments and the two lower-right most segments are misaligned slightly.\nThe Cantor Set is one of the canonical examples of a fractal, a shape whose individual parts resemble the whole. The use of the Cantor Set in this comic is self-referential, in that the comic, itself, is composed of parts of the same shape as the whole.\n\nThere is a picture of tiny particles, quite spaced out. These probably represent atoms, and given how distant they are, they may well be a gas.\nThere follows a picture of a Bohr Model atom with point electrons surrounding a nucleus of protons and neutrons. The atom is a Carbon atom which is essential for all living matter and therefore for evolution. There is also a picture of what is probably a vibrating cosmic string fragment (a concept in string theory ). Despite Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle , zooming down to the string does not mean that the cartoon viewer has reached the \"bottom\" of the comic - zooming in on the loop will show a picture of string.\n\nThese three words refer to \"A MU offering\", an essay by Douglas Hofstatder in his book Godel, Escher, Bach (which was referenced by Randall in 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey ). It includes a similar multiple level drawing: the word MU is composed of copies of the words HOLISM and REDUCTIONISM , each of which are in turn made of smaller copies of the other, which are in turn made of tiny copies of the word MU .\nMu is an important word in Buddhism . Literally, it means \"no\" or \"not\", but in Buddhism it also refers to a state of being or thinking - or rather, of not being and not thinking. It could be said that the pairs of panels in this series are each other's Mu, being negative (white-on-black and black-on-white).\nHolism is a philosophical principle that systems should be considered as a complete whole, not as a set of individual parts. For example, a human viewed holistically is a whole interconnected being which can only be fully understood in its own context.\nReductionism is essentially Holism's opposite, a philosophical principle that any complex object can be reduced to a collection of simpler objects. A human can be considered as a set of organs (e.g. the heart), which in turn is composed of tissue (in this case muscle), composed of many cells.  Cells can then be reduced to organelles, such as the nucleus; this contains chromosomes, made of DNA, a molecule made of atoms; atoms are made of components including protons; and protons are composed of quarks (which may be considered as one-dimensional strings). Reductionism holds that a full understanding of the simplest components of a system, and how they interact, can lead to a full understanding of the system as a whole. The word was later reduced in 1734: Reductionism .\nHolism and reductionism are complementary, rather than competing, philosophies, as both have their strengths and weaknesses. Holism can be very effective in understanding the larger-scale effects of a system by observing macroscopic events and how they are linked, but it ignores the more in-depth understanding gained by considering the smaller-scale components.  Reductionism can in theory give us a complete understanding of the entire system by building it up from the smallest and simplest parts, but for a complex system, this is effectively impossible (a typical human contains roughly 10 29 quarks, whose interactions cannot possibly be computed and understood in human terms or timescales).\n\"Pixels\" is an example of a system best understood with a combination of holism and reductionism.  Each panel can be fully explained in its own terms, but is more completely understood as part of a small series of panels. The interconnectedness of all the panels shows a more holistic understanding, yet even this cannot explain comic fully, which must be experienced, with its interactivity and sense of exploration.\nThese panels can be found inside panels with Megan.\n\n\" du \" is a POSIX (think Linux \/ Mac OS X ) command to indicate the \"disk usage\" of a file or directory.\nThis is a command that shows how large all the files are in this user's \"video\" directory - presumably where they store their personal videos. The units of the result is probably kilobytes (depending on settings, could also be the number of 512-byte blocks).\nThis number is clearly large and difficult to parse, and the units are not clear (to a bystander). More appropriate units would be gigabytes rather than bytes. The du command offers an option to display units in \"human readable format\", which will adapt to use kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, etc. as appropriate. The next command purports to request the same result in more human-readable form.\nIt seems that the computer, rather than giving a specific answer, simply says that the size of the video directory is \"A lot.\"\nThe final line indicates the computer is now ready to accept a new command.\n[Cueball is stacking turtles, and is about to put the fourth turtle on his pile. At the bottom right there is a small panel. Inside this is written:] Scroll to zoom\n[When zooming in there will be several panels with text. The transcript of these may not be possible to complete - but add the transcript of these panels here: interactive transcript ]\nThe following code can be found by inspecting the comic's source code: [[A large picture of a person kneeling on the ground, stacking turtles.]] ((In this strip, when you zoom into the panel, each pixel becomes its own panel. Each of those panels can be scrolled into, for the same effect. The story progresses as you scroll deeper.)) [[The Earth as seen from space with the words BOOK LAUNCH.]] [[A stick-Randall holding a copy of 'What If?' saying, \"So excited about my book launch!\"]] [[A copy of the cover of 'What If?' labeled \"book.\"]] [[Stick-Randall is assembling parts from a box labeled 'rocket parts' and preparing to 'launch' his book.]] [[Various stages of assembly.]] [[A second person comes in, looks at SR's rocket set-up and says, \"Needs more struts.\"]] [[SR adds more struts.]] [[The rocket launches.]] [[A big cloud of smoke, which then dissipates.]] [[SR and the other person look skywards at the launched book.]] [[The book is shown leaving Earth's orbit.]] [[The other person turns to SR and says, \"I think that was the only one.\"]] [[The two walk away.]] ((The panels after this are a random assortment of these mostly stand-alone panels.)) [[A momma duck with several ducklings in a row behind her, labeled 'Evolution.']] [[The other person floating around in the sky.]] [[A stick figure with a sploshing bucket of water saying, \"I'm gonna shut down the server!\"]] [[Two people walking along, one saying, \"But if the Time-Turners worked after Book 3, Rowling would have used one to go back and remove the Time Turner from Book 3.\"]] [[The code: ~$ du -s video\n4170882256 ~$ du -hs video\nA lot. ~$]] [[A cloud.]] [[A flock of birds.]] [[MU]] [[A pixel.]] [[A person using a computer on the floor.]] [[HOLISM]] [[Saturn]] [[An atom.]] [[Two people star-gazing on a hill.]] [[Person one says, \"Someone once told me the great kings of the past look down on us...\" Person two says, \"From the stars?\" The first person replies, \"Just in general.\"]] [[The start of Mario World 1-1.]]\n\n{{Title text: It's turtles all the way down.}}\nThis gallery contains the 79 images used in this comic . The images are related in a directed graph .\nThis google sheet describes all possible images, their associated codes, and what possible images can be used as sub-images for each zoom level: https:\/\/docs.google.com\/spreadsheets\/d\/1nldKAkeVcK606CY12KI9bah9rDmK9E7CZOyinsEj2Lo\/edit?usp=sharing\nThis gist recursively downloads all possible images: https:\/\/gist.github.com\/Aaron1011\/d3b56325881cd639506a\n"}
{"id":1417,"title":"Seven","image_title":"Seven","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1417","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/seven.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1417:_Seven","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are talking.] Megan: Can you name all the dwarfs from Snow White? Cueball: Sure, there's, um... Cueball's thoughts: Sneezy, phylum, Europe, sloth, guacamole, data link, Colossus of Rhodes I have this problem where all sets of seven things are indistinguishable to me.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball (or perhaps Randall ) says he can't distinguish between sets that have exactly seven objects. This leads him to exchange the items in the sets without noticing, to the point where, when attempting to list a single set, each item mentioned actually belongs to a different set.\nThis is shown in the comic when Megan asks Cueball to name the seven dwarfs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , a task some people might find difficult, although they would not just choose words from other sets of seven to fill in the gaps.\nThe title text reveals that even a trivial set of seven items, like the days of the week, also goes completely wrong.\nThe comic may be related to the oldest set-theoretic definition of the natural numbers , in which for each natural number, an equivalence class is defined over all sets which contain the same number of items. As Cueball is known for mathematical thinking , he could be presumed to have taken the underlying equivalence relation to heart, and (over)applying it to real life, genuinely judging sets to be identical if they all contain N objects.\nThe number seven being the number for when sets become indistinguishable is possibly a reference to Miller's law .  Especially considering that this is a law dealing with human memory, which Cueball is having issues with.  However, this law refers to elements within the same set becoming indistinguishable, rather than the indistinguishability of different sets of the same size - indeed, its original tests involved either distinguishing between the items, or repeating them back in the correct order .  But then again, that might be part of the humor.\nThe number seven has culturally been regarded as a special, magical or holy number , which contributes to the large number of familiar sets of seven that make this comic possible. This proliferation of well-known sets of 7 items could be another reason why Randall chose to use the number seven in the comic.\nIn 1554: Spice Girls the game continues with Cueball saying that it is now Megan's turn and then he asks her a similar question regarding the names of the Spice Girls. Her problem is then that she simply finds different sets of five and then just adds Spice behind each of the words of that set.\nFor each of the seven lists below, the relevant item's traditional position within its own list of seven, according to Wikipedia, is not necessarily equal to its position on the list in the comic. For some lists the position is equal, but not for all. For instance Sneezy is traditionally never mentioned first amongst the dwarfs since the leader Doc normally comes first. But \"phylum\" is the second major taxonomic rank as is \"phylum\" the second item on the list in the comic.\nThe seven \"dwarfs\" mentioned and their relevant sets of seven are (items in the set are written in bold):\nThe title text extends this saying he also does the same with the set of the seven days of the week. There are several sets of 7 featuring the name Electra , which are all listed in the table below.\nThe sets Cueball's \"days of the week\" come from are:\n[Megan and Cueball are talking.] Megan: Can you name all the dwarfs from Snow White? Cueball: Sure, there's, um... Cueball's thoughts: Sneezy, phylum, Europe, sloth, guacamole, data link, Colossus of Rhodes I have this problem where all sets of seven things are indistinguishable to me.\n"}
{"id":1418,"title":"Horse","image_title":"Horse","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1418","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/horse.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1418:_Horse","transcript":"[Headlines above the main frame of the comic:] New favorite browser text replacement: Force \u2192 Horse\n[In the comic frame Cueball is sitting in front of his PC reading the following headlines that are written above him in separate frames:] Ukranian towns threatened by pro-Russian horses Governor appoints task horse Iraqi air horse growing Quarks, which are bound together by the strong nuclear horse...\n","explanation":"Cueball has set his browser to auto-replace the word \"force\" with the word \"horse.\" Some of the humorous resulting news headlines are shown.\nThis is probably a parody of the Cloud to Butt Chrome Extension (since it says new favorite browser text replacement).\nThere has been several comics using substitutions before and also at least one after this one.\n[Headlines above the main frame of the comic:] New favorite browser text replacement: Force \u2192 Horse\n[In the comic frame Cueball is sitting in front of his PC reading the following headlines that are written above him in separate frames:] Ukranian towns threatened by pro-Russian horses Governor appoints task horse Iraqi air horse growing Quarks, which are bound together by the strong nuclear horse...\n"}
{"id":1419,"title":"On the Phone","image_title":"On the Phone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1419","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/on_the_phone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1419:_On_the_Phone","transcript":"[Megan is pointing off-panel to the left and looking off-panel to the right.]\nMegan: Why is there a teapot in the bathroom? Off-panel voice (right): Sorry. When I'm on the phone I always zone out and pick stuff up and carry it around.\n[Megan is in front of an open fridge, holding a hammer.]\nMegan: There's a hammer in the fridge. Off-panel voice: Another phone call. I was just fidgeting.\n[Megan is walking next to four stacks of household objects: the first has a lightbulb on top of a book, the second has a blender on top of three books, the third has five books (two balanced vertically) with a smaller rectangular object on top, and the fourth has two tennis balls on top of three books.]\nMegan: Did you put all our stuff in weird stacks? Off-panel voice: Long call. Sorry.\n[Megan, outside, looks up at a towering straight-sided object.]\nMegan: ...Why is there a giant obelisk in the backyard? Off-panel voice: Phone again. My bad. Megan: It's carved with prayers to \"Ba'al, the Soul-Eater.\" Off-panel voice: Haha! I'm so absentminded.\n","explanation":"Fidgeting while talking on the telephone is a very common habit and may manifest as doodling or pacing. In the case of the person speaking off-panel (presumably Cueball ), he paces while absent-mindedly moving random objects around the house.\nMegan has found several items in incorrect places around her house, including a teapot in the bathroom, a hammer in the fridge, and several stacks of household items. Cueball explains that he fidgets and move things around while on the phone. Taking this behavior to the extreme, in the fourth panel, Megan finds that he has also erected an obelisk in the backyard and carved prayers to \"Ba'al, the Soul Eater\" on it. This may be a reference to the saying \"Idle hands are the devil's playthings.\"\nThe title text suggests that the \"fidgeting\" is just a cover story - the off-panel speaker is actually worshipping (or possessed by) Ba'al, and is casually trying to encourage Megan to do the same.\nBa'al , or Baal , refers to one of many deities and demons which go by this name. Given its title \"The Soul Eater\", it probably refers to Beelzebub (one of the seven princes of hell ). Ba'al, the Soul Eater has been mentioned in 1246: Pale Blue Dot and 1638: Backslashes .\n[Megan is pointing off-panel to the left and looking off-panel to the right.]\nMegan: Why is there a teapot in the bathroom? Off-panel voice (right): Sorry. When I'm on the phone I always zone out and pick stuff up and carry it around.\n[Megan is in front of an open fridge, holding a hammer.]\nMegan: There's a hammer in the fridge. Off-panel voice: Another phone call. I was just fidgeting.\n[Megan is walking next to four stacks of household objects: the first has a lightbulb on top of a book, the second has a blender on top of three books, the third has five books (two balanced vertically) with a smaller rectangular object on top, and the fourth has two tennis balls on top of three books.]\nMegan: Did you put all our stuff in weird stacks? Off-panel voice: Long call. Sorry.\n[Megan, outside, looks up at a towering straight-sided object.]\nMegan: ...Why is there a giant obelisk in the backyard? Off-panel voice: Phone again. My bad. Megan: It's carved with prayers to \"Ba'al, the Soul-Eater.\" Off-panel voice: Haha! I'm so absentminded.\n"}
{"id":1420,"title":"Watches","image_title":"Watches","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1420","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/watches.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1420:_Watches","transcript":"[A timeline shows the following years but extends further in both directions:] 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 [A grey box extends from the left border to approximately 2005 and another grey box begins approximately at 2015 and continues to the right border. They are labeled:] Regular watches Smart watches [An arrow points up to the empty period between 2005 and 2015. Below the arrow is written:] Brief, glorious period in which our wrists were free\n","explanation":"This comic coincides with the announcement of a new smart watch by Apple earlier in the week as of the comic's release date (9th Sept 2014), the Apple Watch , along with a large emphasis on smartwatches at IFA 2014 (Sept 5-10), particularly 'Android Wear'.\nThe timeline shows a period approximately from 2005 to 2015 where our wrists were liberated from the tethers of wearing a watch, likely attributed to the fact that many instead used a mobile smartphone to tell the time.\nWhilst other smartwatches have been released in the past, Randall predicts that the typical widespread interest following Apple product releases (combined with many other new releases by other companies) will result in our wrists again being shackled in the grip of watches from 2015. The wording of the label suggests that Randall is pre-emptively mourning the imminent loss of freedom of his and others' wrists, though this may be humorous hyperbole\/sarcasm, as his position has generally been of apathy, such as in 1215: Insight .\nThe title text refers to how \"old people\" tend to express derision towards change (generally most widely accepted by 'young people') as not being like it was \"in the good old days\", even if this means they contradict themselves. Initially, the wearing of watches was viewed negatively by the older generation, but now not wearing a watch is instead negative. The second part of the title text starts as if Randall is going to express an opinion on wearing a watch but then veers off to mock the word \" thinkpiece ,\" due to its (particularly recent ) connotation for lacking factual content and expressing biased opinions. For more details on thinkpiece see this article . By equating thinkpiece with brain , Randall is making a reference to the fact that this compound word does not follow the convention of the compound word timepiece , which is a synonym for watch .\n[A timeline shows the following years but extends further in both directions:] 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 [A grey box extends from the left border to approximately 2005 and another grey box begins approximately at 2015 and continues to the right border. They are labeled:] Regular watches Smart watches [An arrow points up to the empty period between 2005 and 2015. Below the arrow is written:] Brief, glorious period in which our wrists were free\n"}
{"id":1421,"title":"Future Self","image_title":"Future Self","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1421","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/future_self.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1421:_Future_Self","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a laptop, reading code. The two separate parts of code as well as the two comments by Cueball is connected with \"speak\" lines, with the line from the code going down to the computer screen.]\n# Dear Future Self, # # You're looking at this file because # the parse function finally broke. # # It's not fixable. You have to rewrite it. # Sincerely, Past Self\nCueball: Dear Past Self, it's kinda creepy how you do that.\n# Also, it's probably at least # 2013. Did you ever take # that trip to Iceland?\nCueball: Stop judging me!","explanation":"This comic is a joke about how the person you were in the past can be viewed as a distinct entity from who you are now, as well as the predictability of future events relating to your future actions.\nThe comic shows comments, informational notes left in the code that do not change the algorithm, from a project completed by Cueball some time ago that is still being used and maintained.  It is implied that Cueball is looking at these comments because the algorithm, a parsing function, is no longer working. These comments were written by Cueball's \"younger self\" in anticipation of being read by his \"older self\" at a date close to the present. The function has held up to the younger Cueball's expectations as it has lasted until the publication date of this comic, September 2014. The comments indicate a firm belief that the parsing function could not be easily \"re-kludged\" to handle the new situation but instead would need to be re-written.\nThese comments are surprisingly accurate, leading Cueball to rhetorically reply to his younger self that these comments were creepy. Cueball's \"younger self\" must have anticipated a snarky reply and reminded his older self that his older self has likely not fulfilled his dream of going to Iceland. Cueball again replies that his younger self should stop judging him.\nIn the title text, current-day Cueball lashes out at his younger self, further emphasizing the way he is viewing his past self as a different person, blaming the ineffectiveness of his past self's coding for never going to Iceland.\nA comment is a line, or a portion of a line, of code which should not be executed. A number of computer languages, including Python , use \"#\" to indicate \"the remainder of this line is a comment\". The comment symbol tells the compiler to skip to the next line, ignoring everything after the symbol. Programmers make use of comments to leave notes about what a particular line or section of code is meant to do, places that require debugging, ideas for future revisions, etc.\nThe language in the comments is similar to how people address themselves in personal time capsules , in which they put letters away to read years later to see how much they've changed.\nA \" parse function \" is code that interprets some form of input and makes sense of it in a way that enables functionality in some other part of the code. Parsers are commonly used to extract useful information from a source external to the algorithm. \nOften parsing functions are written using regular expressions or in some other write-only language style. Parsing can be a difficult problem to solve, and programmers will often take shortcuts (perform kludges ) based on assumptions on the kinds of input that the parsing function will have to handle, or possibly code through means of trial-and-error.\nAs the programmer may not have control over the input, such as reading a page from someone else's web-site or using the output of an unpredictable program, an input that does not match the assumed input syntax in can cause the parser to break, even if the parsing function has not changed.\n[Cueball is sitting at a laptop, reading code. The two separate parts of code as well as the two comments by Cueball is connected with \"speak\" lines, with the line from the code going down to the computer screen.]\n# Dear Future Self, # # You're looking at this file because # the parse function finally broke. # # It's not fixable. You have to rewrite it. # Sincerely, Past Self\nCueball: Dear Past Self, it's kinda creepy how you do that.\n# Also, it's probably at least # 2013. Did you ever take # that trip to Iceland?\nCueball: Stop judging me!"}
{"id":1422,"title":"My Phone is Dying","image_title":"My Phone is Dying","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1422","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/my_phone_is_dying.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1422:_My_Phone_is_Dying","transcript":"[Cueball stands on the left while Beret Guy walks in from the right, carrying a smartphone.] Beret Guy: My phone's about to die.\n[The phone is now subtly larger.] Cueball: Where'd you get a big iPhone? I didn't think they were out yet. Beret Guy: It's my regular one. It's just dying.\n[The phone increases in size again. Beret Guy now holds it in both hands.] Beret Guy: As it consumes its battery, it heats up and expands. Beret Guy: Soon it will swell to enormous size, engulfing us both.\n[The phone is now in the size of Beret Guy's torso; he is clutching it to himself. Cueball is pointing off-panel.] Beret Guy: Then it will collapse in a violent explosion! Cueball: ...do you want to borrow my charger? Beret Guy: That would only make it run out faster!\n","explanation":"Beret Guy's phone is about to \"die\". Cueball assumes this just means that the battery is running out and it needs to be recharged, but the phone in question appears to \"die\" in a way analogous to the life and death of a star: expending its fuel while heating up and expanding before ultimately losing its outer layers and becoming a white dwarf or similar \"lesser\" star. The technology of mobile phones can be seen as doing things analogous to this on a large scale, especially for people who used landlines before mobile phones became common. However, this is something phones usually don't literally do. [ citation needed ]\nStars constantly undergo fusion reactions. The pressure generated by these reactions counteracts gravity, preventing it from collapsing the star during its main lifespan. As the hydrogen mostly fuses into helium in the core, the core gradually becomes more dense and the region of fusion gradually moves away from the center. Then, the star grows in size, reaching the stage of a red giant . When most of the \"fuel\" for fusion has been consumed, gravity will collapse the star into a white dwarf while the outer layers are shed. For stars much more massive than the Sun, there will be a supernova explosion caused by a violent collapse, which is very powerful (and leaves behind a neutron star or a black hole , depending on how much mass is left after the supernova). Stars with more hydrogen fuel tend to burn brighter and faster. Beret Guy's refusal of a charger is probably a reference to this.\nBoth a supernova explosion and the collapse of red giants into white dwarfs shed their outer layers, which is referenced in the title text. Once extra mass is added to the dying star, analogous to \"charging\", the process only accelerates. (Randall also explains this in Short Answer Section .) The phone seems to have a certain mass because Beret Guy expects it to go (super)nova. Charging the phone may lead to a type 1a nova .\nThe comic also plays on the release of two new iPhone models with bigger screens, planned for 2 days after the release of the comic.\nThe comic could be also explained by the characteristics of Li-ion batteries, which are used in most cellphones. At the end of their useful life, these batteries may grow a bit . In case of severe physical or thermal damage or multiple electrical failures, this type of battery can indeed overheat, leading to a thermal runaway reaction inside. That would result in the battery growing and eventually exploding . Connecting a charger to a battery failing in this manner would probably make the process faster .\nThe title text implies that after Beret Guy's iPhone goes (super)nova, it will become either a \"slowly fading\" Palm Pilot, a calculator, or a two way pager: this would be the cellphone equivalent of a white dwarf (evidenced by the faint and slowly fading glow), neutron star , or black hole (evidence: black holes emit \"information\" in the form of Hawking radiation and have at one time been suspected to be half of a two-way portal through spacetime, along with a \" white hole \").\nAdditionally, some particles and atoms decay by breaking into smaller, more elementary particles. It may be humorously implied that a PalmPilot (an early personal data assistant and precursor to the smartphone), a calculator (a very simple electronic device), and two-way pager (a device for sending and receiving short text messages) are the more elementary components that make up an iPhone.\n[Cueball stands on the left while Beret Guy walks in from the right, carrying a smartphone.] Beret Guy: My phone's about to die.\n[The phone is now subtly larger.] Cueball: Where'd you get a big iPhone? I didn't think they were out yet. Beret Guy: It's my regular one. It's just dying.\n[The phone increases in size again. Beret Guy now holds it in both hands.] Beret Guy: As it consumes its battery, it heats up and expands. Beret Guy: Soon it will swell to enormous size, engulfing us both.\n[The phone is now in the size of Beret Guy's torso; he is clutching it to himself. Cueball is pointing off-panel.] Beret Guy: Then it will collapse in a violent explosion! Cueball: ...do you want to borrow my charger? Beret Guy: That would only make it run out faster!\n"}
{"id":1423,"title":"Conversation","image_title":"Conversation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1423","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/conversation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1423:_Conversation","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are sitting at a table with drinks.] Cueball: So, what do you do in your free time?\n[Close up on Megan's face.] Megan: Mostly I sit around worrying someone will ask me that, and try to think of a good answer.\n[Back to original shot.] Cueball: That's not a bad answer. Megan: It's all I've got. Now that it's done, I should go. Bye! [She gets up and leaves.]\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are on a first date and Cueball is trying to strike up a conversation by asking Megan what she does in her free time . Megan has probably been dreading this question, because she answers that her free time activity consists of trying to figure out how to respond if asked what she does in her free time. Cueball answers soothingly, but Megan's anxiety gets the better of her and she leaves abruptly.\nDuring Megan speaking, Cueball finished all of his drink. He may have been surprised by the reply, and Megan sensing this contributes to her leaving.\nThe title text implies that she also spends her free time wondering what to write in her diary (with no success).\nBoth the comic and the title text are examples of self-referential humor. Megan recognises that she spends her free time thinking what to say about her free time, so she must spend some of that free time thinking about her thinking about her free time. Such self-referential loops are often disturbing, since they contain within them potential for infinite regression . On the other hand, there is a simple way to exit the loop before any recursion: Megan has already decided what to say when asked what she does in her free time, and she has figured out what to write in her diary. But on realising this, Megan would have to find something else to occupy her free time, such as going on a date.\n[Cueball and Megan are sitting at a table with drinks.] Cueball: So, what do you do in your free time?\n[Close up on Megan's face.] Megan: Mostly I sit around worrying someone will ask me that, and try to think of a good answer.\n[Back to original shot.] Cueball: That's not a bad answer. Megan: It's all I've got. Now that it's done, I should go. Bye! [She gets up and leaves.]\n"}
{"id":1424,"title":"En Garde","image_title":"En Garde","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1424","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/en_garde.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1424:_En_Garde","transcript":"[Two Cueball-like guys wearing fencing mask (with gray front over their faces and a strip around their neck) are standing facing each other. The left fencer holds one arm up behind him and the other with the rapier like sword pointing toward the right fencers mask, ready for fencing. The right fencer holds both arms, and thus also the sword, down.] Left fencer: En Garde! Right fencer: OK.\n[In a large frame-less panel where they keep standing in the same position the right fencer talks at length.] Right fencer: No matter how long we know each other, when you ask \"What are you thinking,\" Right fencer: I will always pause before answering.\n[Same as the first panel, although the left fencer has lowered the point of his sword so it points straight to the right.] Left fencer: Maybe a little less guarded? Right fencer: No way. I've been hurt before.\n","explanation":"Two Cueball -like guys are preparing to fence. But only the left seems ready. He says \"en garde!\", hence the title, a fencing call literally meaning \"be on your guard\" (from French). The call is used to order the participants to take their position, in a similar way to the \u201con your mark\u201d command in racing. The other two commands are \u201c[tireurs, \u00eates-vous] pr\u00eats?\u201d (\u201c[combatants, are you] ready?\u201d) and \u201callez\u201d (\u201cgo\u201d). The right participant takes this to mean being \"guarded\" emotionally.\n\"What are you thinking?\" is a common question used to deepen a conversation, typically between close friends or lovers. The person being asked may take a moment to consider what they are thinking and whether or not it would be appropriate to share with the asker. If the person being asked is emotionally comfortable with the asker, they may answer immediately without fear of judgment or ridicule. Such a level of comfort between two people generally takes a long time to develop.\nAfter the right fencer has explained why he is always \"en garde\", the left fencer asks if could be a little less so. But the answer is no since the right fencer acknowledges that he has been hurt before, and thus makes it even more difficult for him to let down his guards. Obviously the right fencer has had bad experience from previous relationships, maybe one where he was ridiculed after sharing his immediate thoughts.\nThe title text takes this further with the \"touch\" call, used to indicate to a participant that they have been \"touched\" by their opponent's blade, and therefore the attacker receives a point. The right participant counters this claim by saying his emotions have \"priority\" (or right-of-way), implying he was blocking out (\"parrying\") the touching feelings. Fencing right-of-way rules can make a move invalid when another move has priority, but generally refer to physical actions on the participant's part.\n[Two Cueball-like guys wearing fencing mask (with gray front over their faces and a strip around their neck) are standing facing each other. The left fencer holds one arm up behind him and the other with the rapier like sword pointing toward the right fencers mask, ready for fencing. The right fencer holds both arms, and thus also the sword, down.] Left fencer: En Garde! Right fencer: OK.\n[In a large frame-less panel where they keep standing in the same position the right fencer talks at length.] Right fencer: No matter how long we know each other, when you ask \"What are you thinking,\" Right fencer: I will always pause before answering.\n[Same as the first panel, although the left fencer has lowered the point of his sword so it points straight to the right.] Left fencer: Maybe a little less guarded? Right fencer: No way. I've been hurt before.\n"}
{"id":1425,"title":"Tasks","image_title":"Tasks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1425","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tasks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1425:_Tasks","transcript":"[Ponytail sitting at a computer with Cueball standing behind her.] Cueball: When a user takes a photo, the app should check whether they're in a national park... Ponytail: Sure, easy GIS lookup. Gimme a few hours. Cueball: ...and check whether the photo is of a bird. Ponytail: I'll need a research team and five years.\n[Caption below the panel:] In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible.\n","explanation":"Cueball appears to be asking Ponytail to write an app that determines if a given picture is (1) taken in a national park, and (2) a picture of a bird. The first question is generally harder for a human to answer, but easy for an app that has access to location information and a geographic information system (GIS). The second one is easy for a human but much harder for a computer. This illustrates Moravec's paradox from the 1980s in a modern context. By the 1950s computers were useful for tasks like trajectory optimization , generating novel mathematical proofs , and the game of checkers , so such high-level computation and reasoning tasks that were hard for humans turned out to be relatively easy for them. On the other hand, it turns out to be hard to \"give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception\", as Moravec wrote.\nIn order to determine whether the user is in a national park, Ponytail plans to determine the user's location using the mobile device. This location will then be cross checked with a geographic information system (GIS) which will be able to determine whether the coordinates lie within a national park boundary.\nDetermining whether an image is of a given kind of natural object is far more difficult. This task falls into the area of computer vision . One of the goals in computer vision is to detect and classify objects within an image. This is a very challenging task for a number of reasons.\nFirstly, humans use size, edge-assignment, movement, and stereoscopic vision when looking at a scene (not a picture of a thing, but the thing itself) to discern individual objects and then categorize them as foreground or background . A photograph, however, is a static, monoscopic image that can only provide size and edge-assignment clues. Humans are only able to discern objects from background in photographs by comparing the photo against all of the things they've seen and everything they've learned about those things over the course of their life and identifying matching patterns .\nSecondly, the quality of the photograph will have an impact on a computer's ability to match patterns. For example, the object in the photograph might be partially visible or occluded. In the case of a living bird, additional complications arise from the variations among individual birds of the same species and differences in pose (flying, perching in a tree, etc.). Differentiating between visually similar objects can result in false positives. For example, is it a photo of a bird in flight or a plane (or superman!) ? Ponytail's estimate of 5 years may be overly optimistic (see 678: Researcher Translation ).\nToday's state-of-the-art algorithms for solving this kind of task mostly use local features (e.g. SIFT or SURF in combination with a support vector machine or convolutional neural network ).\nThe subtitle refers to \"CS\", which is a common abbreviation for \" Computer Science \", of which artificial intelligence and computer vision are sub-disciplines.\nThe title text mentions The Summer Vision Project and Marvin Minsky of MIT. In the summer of 1966, he asked his undergraduate student Gerald Jay Sussman to \"spend the summer linking a camera to a computer and getting the computer to describe what it saw\" . Seymour Papert drafted the plan, and it seems that Sussman was joined by Bill Gosper , Richard Greenblatt , Leslie Lamport , Adolfo Guzman, Michael Speciner, John White, Benjamin, and Henneman - in case the multiple Wikipedia links don't give it away, know that this is sizable cross-section of the AI researchers of the period). The project schedule allocated one summer for the completion of this task. The required time was obviously significantly underestimated, since dozens of research groups around the world are still working on this topic today.\nA month after this comic came out, Flickr responded with a prototype online tool to do something similar to what the comic describes, using its automated-tagging software. According to them, the bird solution \"took us less than 5 years to build, though it's definitely a hard problem, and we've still got room for improvement\".\n[Ponytail sitting at a computer with Cueball standing behind her.] Cueball: When a user takes a photo, the app should check whether they're in a national park... Ponytail: Sure, easy GIS lookup. Gimme a few hours. Cueball: ...and check whether the photo is of a bird. Ponytail: I'll need a research team and five years.\n[Caption below the panel:] In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible.\n"}
{"id":1426,"title":"Reduce Your Payments","image_title":"Reduce Your Payments","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1426","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reduce_your_payments.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1426:_Reduce_Your_Payments","transcript":"[Cueball sits on a sofa and Blackhat walks into the frame from behind.] Blackhat: I discovered this weird trick for reducing your mortgage payments! Cueball: What? Blackhat: Sodium borohydride. Cueball: ...I hate you.\n","explanation":"Black Hat walks into a room where Cueball sits in an armchair. Black Hat says to Cueball that he can reduce his mortgage payments, while holding a docket of paper, presumably Cueball's payment check, that looks like it has been dipped into a liquid of some kind. Black Hat uses the same formulation many Internet advertisements use: \"Discover this (strange\/new\/amazing...) trick to (lose weight\/reduce your mortgage payments\/meet amazing women...)\" known as clickbait . Cueball wants to know how and Black Hat responds by mentioning sodium borohydride (NaBH 4 ) . Since Cueball fell for Black Hat's bait he exclaims, \"I hate you.\"\nSodium borohydride is a strong reducing agent , meaning in a chemical reaction it will \" reduce \" another substance. It is in fact used during the manufacture of paper , in order to bleach the natural colour from the pulp and improve the resulting paper's brightness, opacity, ink-absorption, and strength (among other properties).\nThis comic is a typical switcharound pun. Cueball expects the value on a bill paid to be reduced, while Black Hat uses the chemical meaning of reducing , which would result at a minimum in the bleaching of all ink from the bill therefore making it unreadable.\nThe complementary chemical reaction to reduction is oxidation (mentioned in 1693: Oxidation ), which is what happens if the paper mortgage payment is burned, as referred to in the title text. They go together in redox reactions, which generally involve electron transfer from the chemical species which is oxidized to the one which is reduced. In that case, the pun about light (to start a fire) is that a reduced financial weight may seem light (not heavy). However, some forms of paper - particularly those used for i.e. receipts - possess a slight coating that limits their flammability. Cueball's statements appear to be made with such a paper, thus preventing Black Hat from burning the statements.\n[Cueball sits on a sofa and Blackhat walks into the frame from behind.] Blackhat: I discovered this weird trick for reducing your mortgage payments! Cueball: What? Blackhat: Sodium borohydride. Cueball: ...I hate you.\n"}
{"id":1427,"title":"iOS Keyboard","image_title":"iOS Keyboard","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1427","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ios_keyboard.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1427:_iOS_Keyboard","transcript":"Movie quotes [Top picture shows a line typed on an iPhone.] Elementary, my dear [Then the next line shows the words suggested by the virtual keyboard.] Friend | Lord | Friends [Below are the visible part of keyboard. In the second line only the top of the letters can be seen.] QWERTYUIOP ASDFGHJKL [Below is a new sub heading above six pictures arranged in two rows.] According to iOS 8 keyboard predictions [For each of the six pictures a part of the text is black, and the other part is light grey. Below the black text is written in bold letters.] [Picture 1: Cueball stands with a machine gun.] Cueball: Say hello to my little sister and my mom and my dad and my friends [Picture 2: A girl stands next to her dog with a basket.] Girl: Toto, I've a feeling we're not going to the gym today [Picture 3: Bond talks to Megan.] James Bond: Bond, James Bond yields [Picture 4: A pilot operates his plane and talks to Cueball behind him.] Pilot: I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch me play the piano [Picture 5: A guy with dark hair stands behind a jagged edge.] Goonie: Goonies never say anything [Picture 6: A dwarf with long beard and helmet stands with an axe.] Off panel left: You have my sword. Off panel right: And my bow. Dwarf: And my dad\n","explanation":"It looks like Randall has been playing with his Apple device after installing the recently released iOS 8 update. The comic is referencing the autocomplete function on the iOS virtual keyboard. A comparable feature is also available on other operating systems, like Android. When the phrase, for example, \"Revenge is a dish best served\" is typed, the keyboard will suggest \u201cby\u201d followed by \u201ca\u201d then \u201cgroup\u201d and so on.\nThe top of the comic, where the keyboard is shown, is a reference to the character Sherlock Holmes, a detective who is often attributed the famous line \"Elementary, my dear Watson\" (despite having never said that in the canon). In Randall's typing history, the word \"dear\" is most often followed by \"lord\", \"friend\", or \"friends,\" and thus the phone suggests those words as a likely continuation of the line.\nThe title text continues, by showing more actual results from keyboard predictions from other movie quotes.\nThe following movies are referenced in the comic and title text:\nAn older comic 1068: Swiftkey is also about keyboard predictions, but without any preceding text (by the Swiftkey keyboard application instead of the iOS 8 keyboard).\nIt is similar to 2169: Predictive Models .\nMovie quotes [Top picture shows a line typed on an iPhone.] Elementary, my dear [Then the next line shows the words suggested by the virtual keyboard.] Friend | Lord | Friends [Below are the visible part of keyboard. In the second line only the top of the letters can be seen.] QWERTYUIOP ASDFGHJKL [Below is a new sub heading above six pictures arranged in two rows.] According to iOS 8 keyboard predictions [For each of the six pictures a part of the text is black, and the other part is light grey. Below the black text is written in bold letters.] [Picture 1: Cueball stands with a machine gun.] Cueball: Say hello to my little sister and my mom and my dad and my friends [Picture 2: A girl stands next to her dog with a basket.] Girl: Toto, I've a feeling we're not going to the gym today [Picture 3: Bond talks to Megan.] James Bond: Bond, James Bond yields [Picture 4: A pilot operates his plane and talks to Cueball behind him.] Pilot: I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch me play the piano [Picture 5: A guy with dark hair stands behind a jagged edge.] Goonie: Goonies never say anything [Picture 6: A dwarf with long beard and helmet stands with an axe.] Off panel left: You have my sword. Off panel right: And my bow. Dwarf: And my dad\n"}
{"id":1428,"title":"Move Fast and Break Things","image_title":"Move Fast and Break Things","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1428","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/move_fast_and_break_things.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1428:_Move_Fast_and_Break_Things","transcript":"[Cueball sits in a chair, leaning back with his arm resting on the back of the chair during a job interview. Ponytail is sitting in a chair behind her desk which is between them.] Cueball: My motto is \"Move fast and break things.\" [Below the panel follows a list:] Jobs I've been fired from Fedex driver Crane operator Surgeon Air traffic controller Pharmacist Museum curator Waiter Dog walker Oil tanker captain Violinist Mars rover driver Massage therapist\n","explanation":"Cueball appears to be at a job interview, proudly stating his motto to the interviewer Ponytail .\n\"Move fast and break things\" is a saying common in science and engineering industries. In that context, it means that making mistakes is a natural consequence of innovation in a highly competitive and complex environment. In particular, it was adopted by Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook (who even went as far as to say that 'breaking things' is a necessary feature of moving 'fast enough' ).\nWhile in software development it is unusual for any great harm to result from breaking things, the jobs listed in the comic are ones where there are serious consequences of mistakes. Some would result in dangerous or deadly situations, while others would just end up with broken packages etc. It's not clear what job Cueball is interviewing for; one suspects it's probably one that belongs in the 'breaking things is bad' group.\nThe results of moving fast and breaking things for the listed jobs might include:\nThe title text posits a morbid scenario where Cueball keeps running over funeral attendees, generating the need for more funerals. It also implies that Cueball is currently being interviewed for the position of driving a hearse, as he has yet to be fired.\n[Cueball sits in a chair, leaning back with his arm resting on the back of the chair during a job interview. Ponytail is sitting in a chair behind her desk which is between them.] Cueball: My motto is \"Move fast and break things.\" [Below the panel follows a list:] Jobs I've been fired from Fedex driver Crane operator Surgeon Air traffic controller Pharmacist Museum curator Waiter Dog walker Oil tanker captain Violinist Mars rover driver Massage therapist\n"}
{"id":1429,"title":"Data","image_title":"Data","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1429","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/data.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1429:_Data","transcript":"[Cueball reading off a smart phone to someone off-screen.] Cueball: According to this polling data, after Kirk and Picard, the most popular Star Trek character are Data. Off-screen voice: Augh! [Caption below the frame:] Annoy grammar pedants on all sides by making \"data\" singular except when referring to the android.\n","explanation":"\"Kirk vs. Picard\" is a debate that many Star Trek fans engage in \u2014 specifically which was a better captain of the starship Enterprise on the TV show. Captain James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard each were captains of the ship in different periods (Kirk was captain of USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) in The Original Series , while Picard was captain of USS Enterprise -D (NCC-1701-D) in The Next Generation ), but fans argue over who was the \"best\". Most third-place candidates are pretty distant, resulting in a more multi-faceted debate. Cueball seems to be looking at results of polling for this third most popular character.\nThe humor in this comic stems from the fact that the Latin word data is a plural form of the word datum \u2018a piece of information\u2019, and that originally English followed Latin's lead and treated data as plural. However, in more recent English, usage of datum has faded to the extent that data is treated as a collective noun . This usage is becoming increasingly (but not universally) accepted as grammatically correct \u2014 the Wall Street Journal , for instance, recently announced that it is moving away from saying \"data are,\" while the New York Times' manual of style allows for both variants depending on usage scenario; USA Today , however, is consistently using data as a plural (\"data are\"). Naturally, the purists insist on the form that is correct from the Latin grammar point of view and see \"data is\" as an example of a subject-verb agreement error. This type of \"error\" is present in the beginning of the sentence that Cueball is citing (\"According to this polling data,\" while certain traditionalists would hold that the grammatically correct variant would be \"According to these polling data\").\nThe second error in the same sentence is due to the fact that Data is a character from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since it is a character's name, when used to refer to the character, \"Data\" should always be treated as singular.\nBy reversing the verb agreement in both cases, Cueball is going out of his way to annoy grammatically obsessed people.\nThe title text suggests the mocking of language pedants\/amateur grammar Nazis by hypercorrecting one's use of language. The sentence itself is an example of this:\nThis comic complements two of the My Hobbies comics 326: Effect an Effect (which discusses the trolling of amateur grammar Nazis) and 1405: Meteor (which mocks pedantry). This comic could also just as well have been labelled as one of Randall's Hobbies.\nThis comic also appears to be an example of self-irony as the author himself has previously exhibited certain inclination to insist on grammatically strict mode of usage of words loaned from Latin. One such example is the fact that xkcd's online discussion forums are called fora , which is a correct plural nominative form of forum in Latin.\n[Cueball reading off a smart phone to someone off-screen.] Cueball: According to this polling data, after Kirk and Picard, the most popular Star Trek character are Data. Off-screen voice: Augh! [Caption below the frame:] Annoy grammar pedants on all sides by making \"data\" singular except when referring to the android.\n"}
{"id":1430,"title":"Proteins","image_title":"Proteins","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1430","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/proteins.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1430:_Proteins","transcript":"[Cueball is talking with Megan.] Cueball: What do you do? Megan: I make software that predicts how proteins will fold. Cueball: Is that a hard problem? Megan: Someone may someday find a harder one. Cueball: Why is it so hard? Megan: Have you ever made a folded paper crane? Cueball: Yeah. Megan: Imagine figuring out the folds to make an actual living crane. Cueball: ... just folds? Can I make cuts? Megan: If you can fold a protease enzyme.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is asking Megan what she does, to which she replies that she works on software to predict protein folding. There are many folding prediction software programs. Some of the most well known are [email\u00a0protected] , [email\u00a0protected] and FoldIt .\nProtein folding is the process by which proteins, which are floppy, unstructured chains of amino acids when initially synthesized in a cell, assume a stable, functional shape. If the folding process does not complete, or completes incorrectly, the resulting protein can be inactive or even toxic to the body. Misfolded proteins are responsible for several neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease , amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and Parkinson's disease , as well as some non-neurodegenerative diseases such as cardiac amyloidosis.\nCueball asks Megan why it is such a hard computational problem; Megan's response is to ask Cueball if he's ever folded paper to make a crane . When he responds in the affirmative, she then compares the problem of predicting protein folding to creating a living crane by the paper-folding process. The analogy is that a protein cannot just fold to a figurative representation of a bio-molecule, the way a paper crane superficially resembles a live crane; the protein must assume an exact, perfect fold in order to be functional.\nLevinthal's paradox is a thought experiment, also constituting a self-reference in the theory of protein folding. In 1969, Cyrus Levinthal noted that, because of the very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded polypeptide chain, the molecule has an astronomical number of possible conformations. For example, a polypeptide of 100 residues will have 99 peptide bonds, and therefore 198 different phi and psi bond angles . If each of these bond angles can be in one of three stable conformations, the protein may misfold into a maximum of 3 198 different conformations (including any possible folding redundancy). Therefore, if a protein were to attain its correctly folded configuration by sequentially sampling all the possible conformations, it would require a time longer than the age of the universe to arrive at its correct native conformation. This is true even if conformations are sampled at rapid (nanosecond or picosecond) rates. The \"paradox\" is that most small proteins fold spontaneously on a millisecond or even microsecond time scale. This paradox is central to computational approaches to protein structure prediction.\nAs Cueball mentally turns over the hypothetical process of folding paper to make a living crane, he wonders if he is allowed to perhaps \"cut\" the paper to make more complicated folds available. In origami, purists [1] considered it as cheating if you cut the paper or use more than one sheet of paper, which is why Cueball asked if he was 'allowed' to do such in the hypothetical exercise they are discussing.\nMegan replies \"if you can fold a Protease enzyme;\" these are proteins whose job it is to break down (i.e. \"cut\") other proteins, often in very specific ways. In this manner, Protease enzymes are analogous to extremely specialized scissors, so Megan is effectively saying \"You can make cuts if you can fold yourself a pair of scissors.\" Of course, when trying to predict the folding trajectory in nature of a protein A, and one is allowed to make cuts during the process, one is making the assumption that the Protease that cut protein A is already folded and functional. In other words, making cuts while folding might actually make the process more complicated, not less, as now you have to consider how the cutting enzyme is folded, too.\nThe title text refers to the result of folding a flapping bird in origami. By pulling the tail, the head will move forward and down. However, since the joke is about folding proteins, this idea is extrapolated to include the folded proteins. The C-terminus (end of the protein chain), in this case analogous of the tail, if \"pulled\" would cause a created cavity or tunnel to squeeze, much like pulling a knot would do the same.\n[email\u00a0protected] ( [email\u00a0protected] ) is a distributed computing project which aims to simulate protein folding for research purposes. Rather than the traditional model of using a supercomputer for computation, the project uses idle processing power of a network of personal computers in order to achieve massive computing power. Individuals can join the project by installing the [email\u00a0protected] software (there is also a web version that can be run using Google Chrome) and are then able to track their contribution to the project. Individual members may join together as a team, with leaderboards measuring team and individual contributions.\nNote that most modern computers do not \"waste\" computing time as much as older ones. They dynamically reduce their clock speed and other power consumption at times of low usage. If you donate computer time, you are probably also donating a bit of money to the cause in the form of your electricity bill. Many people consider this to be more fun, convenient and efficient than donating via credit card.\n[Cueball is talking with Megan.] Cueball: What do you do? Megan: I make software that predicts how proteins will fold. Cueball: Is that a hard problem? Megan: Someone may someday find a harder one. Cueball: Why is it so hard? Megan: Have you ever made a folded paper crane? Cueball: Yeah. Megan: Imagine figuring out the folds to make an actual living crane. Cueball: ... just folds? Can I make cuts? Megan: If you can fold a protease enzyme.\n"}
{"id":1431,"title":"Marriage","image_title":"Marriage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1431","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/marriage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1431:_Marriage","transcript":"[A graph with the x-axis showing time in years from 1940 to some time after 2010 (presumably ca. 2014). The y-axis shows percentage of population. The graph has 4 lines, 2 solid and 2 dashed, with 2 different colors: red and blue. The red lines indicate statistics concerning interracial marriage, while the blue indicate statistics concerning same-sex marriage. The solid lines indicate population living in states where that type of marriage is legal, while the dashed lines indicate popular approval of that type of marriage based on various polls.]\n[Solid red line:] Percentage of US population living in states with legal interracial marriage [Dot on solid red line:] Full legal access: 1967 [Dashed red line:] Popular approval of interracial marriage (Source: Gallup Polls) [Dot on dashed red line:] Majority approval: 1995 [Dashed blue line:] Popular approval of same-sex marriage (Source: various polls) [Dot on dashed blue line:] Majority approval: 2011 [Solid blue line:] Percentage of US population living in states with legal same-sex marriage\n[Interracial marriage is indicated as being more than 50% legal in 1940, with a very slight downward trend that spikes up slightly ca. 1948, then trends slowly upward to about 65% until ca. 1967, at which point it spikes directly to 100% legality and remains there through 2014. Popular approval of interracial marriage is below 10% in the late 1950s, rising steadily to approximately 40% in 1980, then continuing to rise more slowly to the majority approval point in 1995, and spiking up to about 65% ca. 1997, plateauing until ca. 2003, rising quickly again to about 75% ca. 2006 and rising generally upward to the final ca. 2014 statistic depicted between 85% and 90% popular approval. The visual effect seems to be a wide gap of time between legalization of and popular approval of interracial marriage. Popular approval appears to trail legalization by no less than 20 years at any given point.\nPopular approval of same-sex marriage (according to \"various polls\") is depicted first at about 15% ca. 1986, trending gradually upward until ca. 2000, where it plateaus between 35% and 40% to resume an upward trend ca. 2007, continuing steadily through majority approval in 2011 to a ca. 2014 value between 55% and 60%. The legality of same-sex marriage is indicated to start at 0% ca. 2002, then jumps quickly to plateau around 5% until ca. 2008, at which point it spikes up to between 15% and 20%, then plummets to just above than 5% by ca. 2009, jumping quickly back up to between 15% and 20% between ca. 2010 and 2011, then trending upward even more quickly to end at about 55% legality ca. 2014. The visual effect seems to be a more turbulent line for legality of same-sex marriage than any of the other trends, which also seems to be quickly closing on the popular approval trend. Popular approval has preceded legalization by nearly 20 years at certain points, but the trends appear to be closing and may intersect by 2015 or 2016.]\n","explanation":"The comic notes a curious inversion between the timing of legal and popular opinion trends for interracial marriage vs. same-sex marriage. In the 11 years between Massachusetts first legalized same-sex marriage and the comic's publication, at no point had there been more people living in states where it's legal than there are people who support its legality. This stands in stark contrast to interracial marriage, which was legal for the majority of the population for over 50 years, and for the whole country for 28 years, before it was approved of by the majority .\nNote that poll questions are slightly different: \"Do you approve of interracial marriage?\" vs \"Do you think same-sex marriage should be legal?\" It could be argued that fewer people would approve of these marriages than would support legalizing them, which may explain part of the discrepancy. But there are more factors at work, the effects and relative importance of which are not clear.\nTwo days before this comic came out, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear appeals to decisions that had legalized same-sex marriage in five states. The court's refusal to hear the appeals was widely considered a surprise, and had the immediate effect of pushing the percentage of people living in states where such marriages are legal past 50% . The decision has also led to considerable speculation that there will be a surge of similar decisions applying to other states, especially to the six states that are in the same appeals circuits as the previous five, and to the three in the same circuit as Idaho and Nevada, where same-sex marriage bans were struck down a day after the Supreme Court's decision (although the decision in Idaho and Nevada has yet to take effect).\nOn June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled in a 5-4 decision that access to same-sex marriage was a right protected by the Constitution, thus raising the percentage of states with legal same-sex marriage to 100%.\nSee also: Wikipedia: Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States\nLegal controls concerning interracial marriage in the US (known since 1863 as miscegenation ) have been significantly harder to track as a single statistic, due in part to the fact that such controls existed in several of the American British colonies before the United States formed, and complicated somewhat by the changes in territory claimed by and fluctuations in overall population (and methods of counting the population) of the United States over that time period. Depicting this as a simple percentage of US population over these earlier times would be far less meaningful outside of the context of these other fluctuations.\nStart of line Prior to ca. 1940 and continuing to 1948: Since the establishment of the United States, most states have had anti-miscegenation legislation in one form or another. Only nine states (Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska, Hawaii) and the District of Columbia never enacted such legislation. Earlier repeal dates range from 1780 in Pennsylvania to 1887 in Ohio, though none were repealed between 1887 and 1948.\nFirst rise October 1948: Supreme Court of California overturns the state anti-miscegenation law in Perez v. Sharp .\nGeneral upward trend 1951\u20131967: (in order of repeal by year) 13 states repeal anti-miscegenation laws prior to rulings at the federal level of government, largely encouraged by comparisons to similar laws promoted by opponents in World War II and other civil rights movements and victories.\nLast spike 12 June 1967: The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Loving v. Virginia that the 16 remaining state-level anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional, rendering such laws thereafter ineffective.\nSee also: Wikipedia: Same-sex marriage in the United States\nStart of line 2003: Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that the Massachusetts Constitution does not allow the denial of marriage licenses to same-sex couples.\nFirst rise May\u2013October 2008: The supreme courts of California and Connecticut make similar decisions based on their states' constitutions.\nDrop November 2008: The voters of California overturn their supreme court's decision by constitutional amendment on Proposition 8 . California is the most populous state in the Union, hence the large size of the drop here.\nSecond rise 2009\u20132010: Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia legalize same-sex marriage, the first by state supreme court decision, and the latter three by legislative action.\nFirst acceleration 2011\u20132012: New York legalizes same-sex marriage by legislative action. Washington State, Maine, and Maryland do so by voter referendum.\nSecond acceleration 2013\u20132014: The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Hollingsworth v. Perry re-legalizes same-sex marriage in California. Seven states legalize it by legislative action or state court decision. The Supreme Court's decision providing federal benefits for same-sex marriages in United States v. Windsor , while not saying that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, is widely cited as precedent by judges who do say so. Oregon and Pennsylvania decline to appeal such decisions, and five states' appeals are declined by circuit courts, and declined to be heard by the Supreme Court.\n[A graph with the x-axis showing time in years from 1940 to some time after 2010 (presumably ca. 2014). The y-axis shows percentage of population. The graph has 4 lines, 2 solid and 2 dashed, with 2 different colors: red and blue. The red lines indicate statistics concerning interracial marriage, while the blue indicate statistics concerning same-sex marriage. The solid lines indicate population living in states where that type of marriage is legal, while the dashed lines indicate popular approval of that type of marriage based on various polls.]\n[Solid red line:] Percentage of US population living in states with legal interracial marriage [Dot on solid red line:] Full legal access: 1967 [Dashed red line:] Popular approval of interracial marriage (Source: Gallup Polls) [Dot on dashed red line:] Majority approval: 1995 [Dashed blue line:] Popular approval of same-sex marriage (Source: various polls) [Dot on dashed blue line:] Majority approval: 2011 [Solid blue line:] Percentage of US population living in states with legal same-sex marriage\n[Interracial marriage is indicated as being more than 50% legal in 1940, with a very slight downward trend that spikes up slightly ca. 1948, then trends slowly upward to about 65% until ca. 1967, at which point it spikes directly to 100% legality and remains there through 2014. Popular approval of interracial marriage is below 10% in the late 1950s, rising steadily to approximately 40% in 1980, then continuing to rise more slowly to the majority approval point in 1995, and spiking up to about 65% ca. 1997, plateauing until ca. 2003, rising quickly again to about 75% ca. 2006 and rising generally upward to the final ca. 2014 statistic depicted between 85% and 90% popular approval. The visual effect seems to be a wide gap of time between legalization of and popular approval of interracial marriage. Popular approval appears to trail legalization by no less than 20 years at any given point.\nPopular approval of same-sex marriage (according to \"various polls\") is depicted first at about 15% ca. 1986, trending gradually upward until ca. 2000, where it plateaus between 35% and 40% to resume an upward trend ca. 2007, continuing steadily through majority approval in 2011 to a ca. 2014 value between 55% and 60%. The legality of same-sex marriage is indicated to start at 0% ca. 2002, then jumps quickly to plateau around 5% until ca. 2008, at which point it spikes up to between 15% and 20%, then plummets to just above than 5% by ca. 2009, jumping quickly back up to between 15% and 20% between ca. 2010 and 2011, then trending upward even more quickly to end at about 55% legality ca. 2014. The visual effect seems to be a more turbulent line for legality of same-sex marriage than any of the other trends, which also seems to be quickly closing on the popular approval trend. Popular approval has preceded legalization by nearly 20 years at certain points, but the trends appear to be closing and may intersect by 2015 or 2016.]\n"}
{"id":1432,"title":"The Sake of Argument","image_title":"The Sake of Argument","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1432","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_sake_of_argument.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1432:_The_Sake_of_Argument","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are talking.] Ponytail: Just for the sake of argument, let's say that\u2014 Cueball: \u2014wait, for the sake of what? [Panel zooms to only show Cueball.] Ponytail: Argument. Cueball: Ok, cool, that's totally a good reason to say something that's wrong. Gotta have arguments. [Panel returns to original view.] Ponytail: I'm just playing Devil's advocate. Cueball: Ok. So you saw an argument where one side was the Devil , and you were like \"Man, that guy could use an advocate.\" Ponytail: It's... why are you being so difficult? Cueball: For the sake of argument. Ponytail: Argh! Cueball: Yay, it's working!","explanation":"Ponytail is trying to get Cueball to consider a hypothetical situation, for the sake of argument. It appears that Cueball is questioning the wisdom of doing so, and postulating that assuming unreal hypotheses for the sake of argument is a stupid thing to do, because it causes more arguments. Ponytail then claims she is playing the Devil's advocate, and Cueball again lambastes her for advocating for somebody as unsympathetic as the Devil.\nIn a debate or discussion, to play the Devil's advocate is to take a position with which you do not necessarily agree (and typically which no one involved in the argument agrees) to allow further exploration of the subject. As the title text starts to explain, it can be a device used to explore a different viewpoint to gain a wider understanding. Arguing for a view with which you do not agree can provoke a re-evaluation, or conversely a re-affirmation of your previously held view by considering the merits of the potential counter-argument. To be able to play the Devil's advocate convincingly is the mark of a well-rounded debater.\nHowever, Cueball interprets her statement literally, thus assuming she is arguing on the side of the Devil , the religious entity defined as pure evil. Obviously, it would be ill advised to take his side during a debate [ citation needed ] .\nCueball then pulls an ironic twist on Ponytail by revealing that he was questioning Ponytail's argumentative style for the sake of argument himself. The comic actually plays on the double meaning of \"argument\": Ponytail refers to a statement in a debate while Cueball suggests a quarrel in the last panel.\nIn the title text, an exasperated Ponytail is trying to explain to Cueball that she is trying to use these debating techniques as a device to explore and broaden her understanding of her reality or a plausible alternative. Cueball derails the conversation, by comparing these attributes to a boat, which also allows you to explore other areas and broaden your experiences and understanding (as mentioned earlier in 209: Kayak ). Ponytail is rendered speechless by this statement, and Cueball further suggests that they should get a boat, and that Ponytail can bring the Devil too.\n[Ponytail and Cueball are talking.] Ponytail: Just for the sake of argument, let's say that\u2014 Cueball: \u2014wait, for the sake of what? [Panel zooms to only show Cueball.] Ponytail: Argument. Cueball: Ok, cool, that's totally a good reason to say something that's wrong. Gotta have arguments. [Panel returns to original view.] Ponytail: I'm just playing Devil's advocate. Cueball: Ok. So you saw an argument where one side was the Devil , and you were like \"Man, that guy could use an advocate.\" Ponytail: It's... why are you being so difficult? Cueball: For the sake of argument. Ponytail: Argh! Cueball: Yay, it's working!"}
{"id":1433,"title":"Lightsaber","image_title":"Lightsaber","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1433","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lightsaber.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1433:_Lightsaber","transcript":"[Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are talking. Vader holds the handle of a powered-off lightsaber.] Vader: I see you have constructed a new lightsaber. [Vader turns it on. The beam of the lightsaber continues upward out of the frame.] Lightsaber: Snap-Hisss [Vader looks up toward where the beam is pointing.] [Vader looks back at Luke.] Vader: Where does it end? Luke: Doesn't. Intercom (out of view): Hull breach all along sector five!!\n","explanation":"This comic references a scene from the third theatrically-released Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi , wherein Darth Vader confronts his son, Luke Skywalker , who had recently surrendered to Imperial soldiers. In the movie, Vader notes that Luke has constructed a new lightsaber following the loss of his original during their duel on Cloud City (Luke Skywalker's original lightsaber actually having been Anakin Skywalker's second).\nLightsabers are often jokingly referred to as \"laser swords\" by fans (note that the official French-language translation of Star Wars actually calls them \"laser sabers\"), and this comic points out that a real laser would not have any way of stopping and would therefore continue forever, making this particular interpretation silly. (The Star Wars writers cleverly fail to state what exactly a lightsaber's blade is made out of, although this point makes it unlikely to be a laser.) Once Darth Vader turns on the light saber, it goes offscreen and presumably continues in that direction forever, causing much mayhem as it blazes through the stars. Hull breaches are a popular trope in science-fiction, despite curiously being almost entirely absent from the Star Wars films.\nThe title text refers to GRB 080319B , an unusual gamma ray burst in 2008, the afterglow of which was briefly visible to the human eye. It implies that the source of this burst was a light saber in the Star Wars story, which took place \"a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away\" according to the Star Wars opening crawl .\nLuke Skywalker and Darth Vader have had a similar conversation before in 1397: Luke . In that version Luke wishes for Vader not to turn it on, as stated in the title text. He should probably have said this here in this comic!\n[Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are talking. Vader holds the handle of a powered-off lightsaber.] Vader: I see you have constructed a new lightsaber. [Vader turns it on. The beam of the lightsaber continues upward out of the frame.] Lightsaber: Snap-Hisss [Vader looks up toward where the beam is pointing.] [Vader looks back at Luke.] Vader: Where does it end? Luke: Doesn't. Intercom (out of view): Hull breach all along sector five!!\n"}
{"id":1434,"title":"Where Do Birds Go","image_title":"Where Do Birds Go","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1434","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/where_do_birds_go.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1434:_Where_Do_Birds_Go","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at his desk with his computer.] Cueball: \"Where do birds go when it rains?\" is my new favorite Google search. Megan (off-screen): Why?\n[Megan enters the frame.] Cueball: It gives the answer, but also shows you an endless torrent of other people asking the same question. Cueball: Pages and pages of them, across regions and cultures.\n[The panel now only contains a Google search on the computer.] Cueball (off-screen): I love the idea that somehow this is the universal question, the thing that unites us. Cueball (off-screen): When it rains, we wonder where the birds go, Cueball (off-screen): and hope they're staying dry.\n\n[A collage of screen snippets.]\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do the birds go when it rains? I've noticed I rarely see birds flying around or in trees or on power lines when it's raining, So where do they go?\nfrom Godlike Productions : Where do birds go when it rains really hard?\nOk, maybe I'm an idiot for asking this, but during the slew of several storms in California the last couple weeks, I began to wonder where the poor birds go to stay dry? The ducks, seagulls, owls, sparrows, hummingbirds, hawks, etc...I see them all the ti[...]\nfrom Random Thoughts From Midlife : Where do the birds go when it rains?\nfrom Answers.com : Where do birds go when it rains?\nfrom Yahoo! Respuestas : \u00bfA donde se van los pajaritos cuando llueve?\nfrom Active Rain : Where do Birds go When it Rains? I'm no youngster...and I have no answer for this. I've talked to alot of people about the likelihood of where birds go when it rains and everyone has a different perspective.\nfrom Ask MetaFilter : Where do the birds go when it rains? BirdFeederFilter: When it's gloomy and rainy, I don't see any birds at my birdfeeder for days on end. Then as soon as it's sunny, they're all over the place. What gives? What do they do on rainy days, just forage near their nest?\nfrom Snippets : Where do city birds go when it rains?\nfrom http:\/\/wenwen.sogou.com\/ : \u4e0b\u96e8\u65f6\u9e1f\u513f\u5f80\u54ea\u8eb2\n\u6ca1\u6709\u5927\u6811,\u6ca1\u6709\u5c4b\u6a90,\u600e\u4e48\u529e\nfrom eNature.com : Storm shelter In Florida, where I live, we get many thunderstorms, but I never see the birds in trees during the storms. We recently had a tropical storm and I did not see any birds in the trees. Where do birds go when it rains or storms? Just like at night, birds will seek shelter during storms. I remember watching a flock of American robins dive into[...]\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : When it is raining heavily, where do the birds go...i don't see them on the trees, where do they take shelter?\nfrom Yahoo! Questions R\u00e9ponses : O\u00f9 se cachent les oiseaux quand il pleut? De ma fen\u00eatre, je n'en aper\u00e7ois plus un!!!...Les pies semblent avoir abandonn\u00e9 leurs nids...\nfrom gutefrage.net : was passiert jetzt eigentlich mit den v\u00f6geln, die bei dem wetter in den b\u00e4umen sitzen? bei uns regnet es heftig und der orkanartige wind wechelst st\u00e4ndig richtung und geschwindigkeit. k\u00f6nnen sich die v\u00f6gel da in den b\u00e4umen halten? retten sie sich instinktiv vorher irgendwohin, wo sie windgesch\u00fctzt sind?\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do birds go when it rains? I never see any out...?\nfrom lainformacion.com : \u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa con las aves durante un hurac\u00e1n?\nfrom Baidu : \u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5c0f\u9e1f\u4f4f\u5728\u54ea\u91cc\uff1f \u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5c0f\u9e1f\u4f4f\u5728\u54ea\u91cc\uff1f\u5982\u679c\u662f\u5728\u6625\u5929\u590f\u5929\u90a3\u8fd8\u597d\uff0c\u6709\u6811\u53f6\u906e\u6321\u7740\uff0c\u4f46\u662f\u5230\u4e86\u79cb\u5929\u51ac\u5929\u4e0b\u96e8\u5c0f\u9e1f\u4f4f\u5728\u54ea\u91cc\uff1f\u8fd8\u4f4f\u5728\u5728\u6811\u4e0a\u642d\u7684\u7a9d\u91cc\u5417\uff1f\u4e0d\u6015\u51bb\u574f\u81ea\u5df1\u548c\u5c0f\u5e7c\u5d3d\u5417\uff1f\u5982\u679c\u8eb2\u96e8\u90a3\u5c31\u5728\u54ea\u91cc\u8eb2\u96e8\u5462\uff1f\u600e\u4e48\u6ca1\u89c1\u8fc7\u5b83\u4eec\u8eb2\u96e8\uff1f \u8c22\u8c22\u3002\nfrom Fairfax Underground : What do birds do when it rains? Recently I installed a bird feeder outside my bedroom window. It is so wonderful the diversity of our feathered friends that frequent the feeder! I love it. My question that I haven't found an answer to is this: What do the little birdies do when it rains? I mean, do they stay put in the trees that they find themselves in,\nfrom a blog on vuodatus.net : Minne linnut menev\u00e4t sateella? T\u00e4n\u00e4\u00e4n satoi rankasti. Kuljin mets\u00e4n halki. Kuulin linnun laulavan. Yksin\u00e4inen, mutta itsen\u00e4inen ja vahva, tulkitseva \u00e4\u00e4ni. Kaunis. Minne linnut menev\u00e4t sateella? En ole koskaan n\u00e4hnyt lintuja rankkasateessa. Luulen, ett\u00e4 ne yritt\u00e4v\u00e4t l\u00f6yt\u00e4\u00e4 suojan. Kuusien ja m\u00e4ntyjen oksistossa on varmaan suojaisaa. Kallioiden koloihin ja pieniin luolastoihin voi ehk\u00e4 lintukin hiipi\u00e4. Rohkeille l\u00f6ytyy pihoilta suojapaikkoja. Ehk\u00e4 linnulla oli oma pes\u00e4kolo. Siell\u00e4 oli l\u00e4mmint\u00e4 ja kuivaa. Sielt\u00e4 saattoi rauhassa katsella sateen vierailua mets\u00e4ss\u00e4. Siell\u00e4 saattoi jopa iloita sateesta ja laulaa.\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : What do the birds do when it RAINS like crazy? I live in upstate new york and just moved here and there are so many many birds here especially where I live, the other day I saw a broken egg on the ground in the drive way from a [...show more link] Update : I know they get wet btw but was wondering if they did anything extra to [...show more link] Best Answer Well... it depends on the species of bird, for one. Some are more adapted for rain then others.\nfrom Willem Wever : Waar blijven de vogels als het heel hard stormt? Bij hevige stormen zoekt een vogel de beschutting die bij hem past. Er zijn een aantal vogels die met storm wel vliegen. Maar bij een echte hevige storm schuilen [...]\nfrom http:\/\/wenwen.sogou.com\/ \u4e3a\u4ec0\u4e48\u9e1f\u513f\u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5728\u5929\u4e0a\u98de\u4e0d\u4f1a\u56e0\u4e3a\u6dcb\u6e7f\u6389\u4e0b\u6765? \u521a\u521a\u4e0b\u5f88\u5927\u7684\u96e8,\u5374\u8fd8\u770b\u5230\u6709\u51e0\u53ea\u9e1f\u4e00\u76f4\u5728\u5929\u4e0a\u98de.\u4e3a\u4ec0\u4e48\u9e1f\u513f\u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5728\u5929\u4e0a\u98de\u4e0d\u4f1a\u56e0\u4e3a\u6dcb\u6e7f\u6389\u4e0b\u6765? \u8865\u5145 \uff1a\u6709\u7167\u7247\u7684\u52a0\u5206\nfrom speed guide forums : Where do birds go when it rains? Do they just sit in their trees as it rains getting drenched? Or do they seek shelter?\nfrom Google books : Where Do All The Birds Go When It Rains? By Misty Hoopman\n[Screen snippets begin to noticeably fade to white at this point.]\nfrom vimeo : WHERE DO BIRDS GO WHEN IT RAINS? One young magpie will give its own story. Barring the thunder and heavy rain, all the sounds on this movie are from this one young maggie. Amazing\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do birds go during wind and rain storms? Where do birds go during wind and rain storms?\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do birds go when it rains? I mean, they can't keep dry in their nests...They have to go somewhere.\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Burung Dapat Bertahan Terbang Berapa Lama Disaat Hujan?\nfrom vogel.info : Was machen V\u00f6gel bei schlechtem Wetter? Zun\u00e4chst mal, was sie nicht machen: Sie verkriechen sich nicht etwa in ihr Nest, denn das Vogelnest dient der Brutpflege, es ist nicht etwa eine Wohnung. Es stellt sich aber ja auch die Frage, was eigentlich unter schlechtem Wetter zu verstehen ist: Es gibt V\u00f6gel, die leiden unter zuviel Sonne und[...]\nfrom gutefrage.net : Wohin gehen V\u00f6gel? Hallo zusammen! Heute als es so richtige Gewitter gab, hab ich mir \u00fcberlegt wohin alle V\u00f6gel verschwinden. Haben alle V\u00f6gel Nester in die sie sich zur\u00fcckziehen k\u00f6nnen? [link to view complete question.]\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do birds go when it rains? Well, yesterday it was raining...I was bored so i started staring out the window, and i say a empty birds nest and i was wondering, where do birds go when it rains?\nfrom Diol\u00fan Designs Blog : Where do Birds go when it rains or snows?\nfrom The Andalusia Star-News : Where do birds go when it rains? I haven\u2019t fed birds in my back yard for a long time, but I still enjoy the few I see perching on top of poles, an electric wire, tree branches, or scooting across the [...]\nfrom Bird Ecology Study Group (blog) : Where do birds go when it rains? And what do they do then? It has been raining on and off these few weeks and the birds have not been around. Have you ever wondered what happened to them when it\nfrom Naver Matome : \u3010\u96d1\u5b66\u3011\u66b4\u98a8\u96e8\u306e\u6642\u3001\u9ce5\u306f\u3069\u3053\u306b\u907f\u96e3\u3057\u3066\u308b\u306e\uff1f \u4eba\u9593\u304c\u6b69\u304f\u306e\u3082\u56f0\u96e3\u306a\u66b4\u98a8\u96e8\u3002\u305d\u306e\u6642\u3001\u4e00\u756a\u5f71\u97ff\u3092\u53d7\u3051\u308b\u306e\u306f\u7a7a\u3092\u98db\u3093\u3067\u3044\u308b\u9ce5\u9054\u3067\u3059\u3088\u306d\u3002\u5f7c\u3089\u306f\u3069\u306e\u3088\u3046\u306b\u98a8\u96e8\u3092\u51cc\u3044\u3067\u3044\u308b\u306e\u304b\uff1f\u305a\u30fc\u3063\u3068\u6c17\u306b\u306a\u3063\u3066\u3044\u305f\u4e8b\u3092\u8abf\u3079\u3066\u307f\u307e\u3057\u305f\uff01\n[At this point, at the bottom of the section, screen snippets are extremely faded.]\nfrom The Daily Apple : Apple #431: Birds in the Rain Forgot until late tonight that I meant to make a new post. Since I didn't leave [...]\nfrom Yahoo! answers : Where does birds go when it rains?\n\n[A bird sits on a wire fence.]\n[The bird looks around as raindrops fall.]\n[The rain becomes heavier.]\n[The bird flies down to a phone on the ground.]\n[The bird lands on the phone. The rain is getting heavier.]\n[The bird pecks on the phone.] W... H... E... R... E...\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0D... O...\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0B... I... R... D... S...\n","explanation":"Cueball searches Google to find out where birds go when it rains. He finds that the question is asked worldwide, across many different languages and websites. A variety of screenshots are shown of different websites and forums where users have asked where birds go when it rains, with at least nine languages shown. The bottom of this panel fades to white, suggesting that the occurrence of these questions stretches on and on. Cueball expresses delight at the idea that this question is the one to which everyone wants to know the answer; worrying about birds getting wet is \"the thing that unites us\".\nLater in the comic, a bird in the rain is also searching on the Internet for where birds go when it rains. This is humorously implying that a significant set of these questions are being typed by birds looking for a dry place after being caught in the rain, and not humans. This would make Cueball wrong; worrying about birds getting wet would not unite us. In reality, as the comic states, birds look for shelter so they can stay dry. On a rainy day you can usually find birds in leafy trees, caves or other kinds of cover.\nIn the Superman comics, Clark Kent is Superman, so you never observe both Clark Kent and Superman simultaneously. By analogy, the title text whimsically suggests that a possible inference from the observation that you never see birds and rain together is that birds are the rain. Perhaps birds are an unknown phase of water. In addition to its familiar phases of ice , vapor , and liquid water , water has more exotic phases such as low-temperature and high-pressure ices and supercritical gases ; why not birds?\nThe title text imbues the question with more philosophical significance than it warrants (prompted, perhaps, by Cueball's earlier hyperbole), and points up the irrationality of the implication that a question must be deep simply because a lot of people ask it, and that such questions demand a complex, radical answer.\nWhere do the birds go when it rains? ( archive )\n[...] Where do birds go when it rains or storms? ( archive )\nWhere do Birds go When it Rains? ( archive )\nWhere do birds go when it rains really hard?\nWhere do the birds go when it rains?\nO\u00f9 se cachent les oiseaux quand il pleut? ( archive ) (Translation: Where do the birds hide themselves when it rains?)\nwas passiert jetzt eigentlich mit den v\u00f6geln, die bei dem wetter in den b\u00e4umen sitzen? [1] ( archive ) (Translation: What actually happens with the birds that are sitting in the trees in this weather?)\nWas machen V\u00f6gel bei schlechtem Wetter? ( archive ) (Translation: What do birds do in bad weather?)\nWohin gehen V\u00f6gel? ( archive ) (Translation: Where do birds go?)\n\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa con las aves durante un hurac\u00e1n? ( archive ) (Translation: What happens to the birds during a hurricane?)\n\u00bfA donde se van los pajaritos cuando llueve? [2] ( archive ) (Translation: Where do the little birds go when it rains?)\nWaar blijven de vogels als het heel hard stormt? (Translation: Where do birds stay when it is storming very hard?)\nMinne linnut menev\u00e4t sateella (Translation: Where do the birds go when it rains?)\n\u4e0b\u96e8\u65f6\u9e1f\u513f\u5f80\u54ea\u8eb2 (Translation: When it rains, where do birds go to hide?)\n\u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5c0f\u9e1f\u4f4f\u5728\u54ea\u91cc (Translation: When it rains, where do the birds go?)\n\u4e3a\u4ec0\u4e48\u9e1f\u513f\u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5728\u5929\u4e0a\u98de\u4e0d\u4f1a\u56e0\u4e3a\u6dcb\u6e7f\u6389\u4e0b\u6765? (Translation: When it rains, why do birds not fall down from getting soaked?)\n\u3010\u96d1\u5b66\u3011\u66b4\u98a8\u96e8\u306e\u6642\u3001\u9ce5\u306f\u3069\u3053\u306b\u907f\u96e3\u3057\u3066\u308b\u306e\uff1f ( archive ) (Translation:\u3010Miscellaneous Knowledge\u3011Where do birds take shelter during a rainstorm?)\nBurung Dapat Bertahan Terbang Berapa Lama Disaat Hujan\u00a0? ( archive ) (Translation: How Long Can Birds Survive Flying In the Rain\u00a0?)\n[Cueball is sitting at his desk with his computer.] Cueball: \"Where do birds go when it rains?\" is my new favorite Google search. Megan (off-screen): Why?\n[Megan enters the frame.] Cueball: It gives the answer, but also shows you an endless torrent of other people asking the same question. Cueball: Pages and pages of them, across regions and cultures.\n[The panel now only contains a Google search on the computer.] Cueball (off-screen): I love the idea that somehow this is the universal question, the thing that unites us. Cueball (off-screen): When it rains, we wonder where the birds go, Cueball (off-screen): and hope they're staying dry.\n\n[A collage of screen snippets.]\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do the birds go when it rains? I've noticed I rarely see birds flying around or in trees or on power lines when it's raining, So where do they go?\nfrom Godlike Productions : Where do birds go when it rains really hard?\nOk, maybe I'm an idiot for asking this, but during the slew of several storms in California the last couple weeks, I began to wonder where the poor birds go to stay dry? The ducks, seagulls, owls, sparrows, hummingbirds, hawks, etc...I see them all the ti[...]\nfrom Random Thoughts From Midlife : Where do the birds go when it rains?\nfrom Answers.com : Where do birds go when it rains?\nfrom Yahoo! Respuestas : \u00bfA donde se van los pajaritos cuando llueve?\nfrom Active Rain : Where do Birds go When it Rains? I'm no youngster...and I have no answer for this. I've talked to alot of people about the likelihood of where birds go when it rains and everyone has a different perspective.\nfrom Ask MetaFilter : Where do the birds go when it rains? BirdFeederFilter: When it's gloomy and rainy, I don't see any birds at my birdfeeder for days on end. Then as soon as it's sunny, they're all over the place. What gives? What do they do on rainy days, just forage near their nest?\nfrom Snippets : Where do city birds go when it rains?\nfrom http:\/\/wenwen.sogou.com\/ : \u4e0b\u96e8\u65f6\u9e1f\u513f\u5f80\u54ea\u8eb2\n\u6ca1\u6709\u5927\u6811,\u6ca1\u6709\u5c4b\u6a90,\u600e\u4e48\u529e\nfrom eNature.com : Storm shelter In Florida, where I live, we get many thunderstorms, but I never see the birds in trees during the storms. We recently had a tropical storm and I did not see any birds in the trees. Where do birds go when it rains or storms? Just like at night, birds will seek shelter during storms. I remember watching a flock of American robins dive into[...]\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : When it is raining heavily, where do the birds go...i don't see them on the trees, where do they take shelter?\nfrom Yahoo! Questions R\u00e9ponses : O\u00f9 se cachent les oiseaux quand il pleut? De ma fen\u00eatre, je n'en aper\u00e7ois plus un!!!...Les pies semblent avoir abandonn\u00e9 leurs nids...\nfrom gutefrage.net : was passiert jetzt eigentlich mit den v\u00f6geln, die bei dem wetter in den b\u00e4umen sitzen? bei uns regnet es heftig und der orkanartige wind wechelst st\u00e4ndig richtung und geschwindigkeit. k\u00f6nnen sich die v\u00f6gel da in den b\u00e4umen halten? retten sie sich instinktiv vorher irgendwohin, wo sie windgesch\u00fctzt sind?\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do birds go when it rains? I never see any out...?\nfrom lainformacion.com : \u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa con las aves durante un hurac\u00e1n?\nfrom Baidu : \u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5c0f\u9e1f\u4f4f\u5728\u54ea\u91cc\uff1f \u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5c0f\u9e1f\u4f4f\u5728\u54ea\u91cc\uff1f\u5982\u679c\u662f\u5728\u6625\u5929\u590f\u5929\u90a3\u8fd8\u597d\uff0c\u6709\u6811\u53f6\u906e\u6321\u7740\uff0c\u4f46\u662f\u5230\u4e86\u79cb\u5929\u51ac\u5929\u4e0b\u96e8\u5c0f\u9e1f\u4f4f\u5728\u54ea\u91cc\uff1f\u8fd8\u4f4f\u5728\u5728\u6811\u4e0a\u642d\u7684\u7a9d\u91cc\u5417\uff1f\u4e0d\u6015\u51bb\u574f\u81ea\u5df1\u548c\u5c0f\u5e7c\u5d3d\u5417\uff1f\u5982\u679c\u8eb2\u96e8\u90a3\u5c31\u5728\u54ea\u91cc\u8eb2\u96e8\u5462\uff1f\u600e\u4e48\u6ca1\u89c1\u8fc7\u5b83\u4eec\u8eb2\u96e8\uff1f \u8c22\u8c22\u3002\nfrom Fairfax Underground : What do birds do when it rains? Recently I installed a bird feeder outside my bedroom window. It is so wonderful the diversity of our feathered friends that frequent the feeder! I love it. My question that I haven't found an answer to is this: What do the little birdies do when it rains? I mean, do they stay put in the trees that they find themselves in,\nfrom a blog on vuodatus.net : Minne linnut menev\u00e4t sateella? T\u00e4n\u00e4\u00e4n satoi rankasti. Kuljin mets\u00e4n halki. Kuulin linnun laulavan. Yksin\u00e4inen, mutta itsen\u00e4inen ja vahva, tulkitseva \u00e4\u00e4ni. Kaunis. Minne linnut menev\u00e4t sateella? En ole koskaan n\u00e4hnyt lintuja rankkasateessa. Luulen, ett\u00e4 ne yritt\u00e4v\u00e4t l\u00f6yt\u00e4\u00e4 suojan. Kuusien ja m\u00e4ntyjen oksistossa on varmaan suojaisaa. Kallioiden koloihin ja pieniin luolastoihin voi ehk\u00e4 lintukin hiipi\u00e4. Rohkeille l\u00f6ytyy pihoilta suojapaikkoja. Ehk\u00e4 linnulla oli oma pes\u00e4kolo. Siell\u00e4 oli l\u00e4mmint\u00e4 ja kuivaa. Sielt\u00e4 saattoi rauhassa katsella sateen vierailua mets\u00e4ss\u00e4. Siell\u00e4 saattoi jopa iloita sateesta ja laulaa.\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : What do the birds do when it RAINS like crazy? I live in upstate new york and just moved here and there are so many many birds here especially where I live, the other day I saw a broken egg on the ground in the drive way from a [...show more link] Update : I know they get wet btw but was wondering if they did anything extra to [...show more link] Best Answer Well... it depends on the species of bird, for one. Some are more adapted for rain then others.\nfrom Willem Wever : Waar blijven de vogels als het heel hard stormt? Bij hevige stormen zoekt een vogel de beschutting die bij hem past. Er zijn een aantal vogels die met storm wel vliegen. Maar bij een echte hevige storm schuilen [...]\nfrom http:\/\/wenwen.sogou.com\/ \u4e3a\u4ec0\u4e48\u9e1f\u513f\u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5728\u5929\u4e0a\u98de\u4e0d\u4f1a\u56e0\u4e3a\u6dcb\u6e7f\u6389\u4e0b\u6765? \u521a\u521a\u4e0b\u5f88\u5927\u7684\u96e8,\u5374\u8fd8\u770b\u5230\u6709\u51e0\u53ea\u9e1f\u4e00\u76f4\u5728\u5929\u4e0a\u98de.\u4e3a\u4ec0\u4e48\u9e1f\u513f\u4e0b\u96e8\u7684\u65f6\u5019\u5728\u5929\u4e0a\u98de\u4e0d\u4f1a\u56e0\u4e3a\u6dcb\u6e7f\u6389\u4e0b\u6765? \u8865\u5145 \uff1a\u6709\u7167\u7247\u7684\u52a0\u5206\nfrom speed guide forums : Where do birds go when it rains? Do they just sit in their trees as it rains getting drenched? Or do they seek shelter?\nfrom Google books : Where Do All The Birds Go When It Rains? By Misty Hoopman\n[Screen snippets begin to noticeably fade to white at this point.]\nfrom vimeo : WHERE DO BIRDS GO WHEN IT RAINS? One young magpie will give its own story. Barring the thunder and heavy rain, all the sounds on this movie are from this one young maggie. Amazing\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do birds go during wind and rain storms? Where do birds go during wind and rain storms?\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do birds go when it rains? I mean, they can't keep dry in their nests...They have to go somewhere.\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Burung Dapat Bertahan Terbang Berapa Lama Disaat Hujan?\nfrom vogel.info : Was machen V\u00f6gel bei schlechtem Wetter? Zun\u00e4chst mal, was sie nicht machen: Sie verkriechen sich nicht etwa in ihr Nest, denn das Vogelnest dient der Brutpflege, es ist nicht etwa eine Wohnung. Es stellt sich aber ja auch die Frage, was eigentlich unter schlechtem Wetter zu verstehen ist: Es gibt V\u00f6gel, die leiden unter zuviel Sonne und[...]\nfrom gutefrage.net : Wohin gehen V\u00f6gel? Hallo zusammen! Heute als es so richtige Gewitter gab, hab ich mir \u00fcberlegt wohin alle V\u00f6gel verschwinden. Haben alle V\u00f6gel Nester in die sie sich zur\u00fcckziehen k\u00f6nnen? [link to view complete question.]\nfrom Yahoo! Answers : Where do birds go when it rains? Well, yesterday it was raining...I was bored so i started staring out the window, and i say a empty birds nest and i was wondering, where do birds go when it rains?\nfrom Diol\u00fan Designs Blog : Where do Birds go when it rains or snows?\nfrom The Andalusia Star-News : Where do birds go when it rains? I haven\u2019t fed birds in my back yard for a long time, but I still enjoy the few I see perching on top of poles, an electric wire, tree branches, or scooting across the [...]\nfrom Bird Ecology Study Group (blog) : Where do birds go when it rains? And what do they do then? It has been raining on and off these few weeks and the birds have not been around. Have you ever wondered what happened to them when it\nfrom Naver Matome : \u3010\u96d1\u5b66\u3011\u66b4\u98a8\u96e8\u306e\u6642\u3001\u9ce5\u306f\u3069\u3053\u306b\u907f\u96e3\u3057\u3066\u308b\u306e\uff1f \u4eba\u9593\u304c\u6b69\u304f\u306e\u3082\u56f0\u96e3\u306a\u66b4\u98a8\u96e8\u3002\u305d\u306e\u6642\u3001\u4e00\u756a\u5f71\u97ff\u3092\u53d7\u3051\u308b\u306e\u306f\u7a7a\u3092\u98db\u3093\u3067\u3044\u308b\u9ce5\u9054\u3067\u3059\u3088\u306d\u3002\u5f7c\u3089\u306f\u3069\u306e\u3088\u3046\u306b\u98a8\u96e8\u3092\u51cc\u3044\u3067\u3044\u308b\u306e\u304b\uff1f\u305a\u30fc\u3063\u3068\u6c17\u306b\u306a\u3063\u3066\u3044\u305f\u4e8b\u3092\u8abf\u3079\u3066\u307f\u307e\u3057\u305f\uff01\n[At this point, at the bottom of the section, screen snippets are extremely faded.]\nfrom The Daily Apple : Apple #431: Birds in the Rain Forgot until late tonight that I meant to make a new post. Since I didn't leave [...]\nfrom Yahoo! answers : Where does birds go when it rains?\n\n[A bird sits on a wire fence.]\n[The bird looks around as raindrops fall.]\n[The rain becomes heavier.]\n[The bird flies down to a phone on the ground.]\n[The bird lands on the phone. The rain is getting heavier.]\n[The bird pecks on the phone.] W... H... E... R... E...\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0D... O...\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0B... I... R... D... S...\n"}
{"id":1435,"title":"Presidential Alert","image_title":"Presidential Alert","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1435","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/presidential_alert.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1435:_Presidential_Alert","transcript":"[Television beeping.] Screen reads: \"E.A.S Incoming Presidential Alert\"\n[Person in an office is on the television.] My fellow Americans. I, uhhh. Wow.\nFrankly, I didn't realize what this button did. I was just... I mean... I appear before you tonight to, um.\nLook, uhh... Remember to floss regularly. Oral hygiene is important. Thank you.\n","explanation":"The Emergency Alert System allows the U.S. President to address the country in the event of a national emergency, by broadcasting a message over all television and radio channels. Despite the system's having existed in various forms for over 60 years, no president has ever used it, even during the September 11 attacks .\nIn this comic, the US President accidentally activates the system by pressing a button, apparently located on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office . Surprised by being on television, he tries to think of something important to say on the spot, but cannot think of anything other than a piece of generic dental-hygiene advice \u2013 a rather non-urgent message.\nAn alternative explanation is that he is actually supposed to tell everyone some really bad news, something totally cataclysmic, only to chicken out and try to explain that the alert was a mistake. This version also explains why he begins to speak to the public and then changes his mind.\nThe concept of the President mistakenly hitting an important button has long been a source for jokes, often somewhat morbidly involving the nuclear football .\nThe title text references the typical conclusion to presidential speeches: \"Goodnight, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America,\" or some variation thereof. As \"goodnight\" is the typical conclusion to a day, the title text jokes that President Obama , out of habit, has a hard time stopping at goodnight when saying that to his children.\n[Television beeping.] Screen reads: \"E.A.S Incoming Presidential Alert\"\n[Person in an office is on the television.] My fellow Americans. I, uhhh. Wow.\nFrankly, I didn't realize what this button did. I was just... I mean... I appear before you tonight to, um.\nLook, uhh... Remember to floss regularly. Oral hygiene is important. Thank you.\n"}
{"id":1436,"title":"Orb Hammer","image_title":"Orb Hammer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1436","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/orb_hammer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1436:_Orb_Hammer","transcript":"[Cueball talks to another Cueball-like guy:] Cueball: You know that glowing orb in the night sky? Guy: Yeah? Cueball: Let's go hit it with a hammer until little pieces break off, then bring the pieces back and lock them in a closet. Guy: Sounds good!\n[Caption below the frame:] The Apollo program was weird .\n","explanation":"Cueball suggests doing something that sounds absurd and not useful at all for the daily activities of a regular human. Yet it refers in unexpected English words to the Apollo human spaceflight program which, among other things, sent people to the Moon to bring moon rock samples back to Earth to study them (i.e. hitting the glowing orb in the night sky with a hammer until little pieces break off). Although you might think that moon rocks would be prized as unique scientific samples, in actual fact many of them were stolen or simply lost . Many were given as gifts to politicians from US states and foreign countries , who then kept them, sold them or had them stolen - two-thirds of these moon rocks are missing and presumably locked up in a cupboard, display cabinet or warehouse somewhere. The rest are kept in museums or laboratory store rooms, where they usually stay untouched except for the occasional removal of samples.\nThe use of such language contributes to the effect of the suggestion sounding absurd. Of course, numerous results of the Apollo program have in fact had many benefits for regular people.\nNo person has been on the Moon since the final Apollo mission, Apollo 17, in 1972. Occasional lunar rocks can still be collected on Earth. They are formed when a celestial body impacts the Moon's surface, forming a crater and launching small rocks into the space. Some of them will eventually reach Earth, see lunar meteorites .\nThe title text refers to various robotic missions, including the current Mars missions ( Pathfinder , Spirit , Opportunity , Curiosity ) as well as to the Philae lander component of the Rosetta mission (with details of its intended landing site confirmed a mere handful of days before the comic).\nWith robots, instead of traveling to Mars ourselves, we stay on Earth (\"our regular orb\") and program and direct rovers to operate remotely. Hence the rovers are described as hammers that hold themselves. The rovers collect geological samples and analyze them on site, but have no way to send the samples back to Earth. This is why the title text ask to make sure to get lots of pieces of rock because it seems we will not go that far in to space today or any time soon.\nThe idea of using simple language in highly technical fields began with 547: Simple and was revisited in 722: Computer Problems , 1133: Up Goer Five , and 1322: Winter . It should be noted however, that in this case Randall didn't use the 1000 most basic words in the English language, because the Simple English Wikipedia 's List of 1000 basic words does not contain the words \"glowing\" or \"orb,\" but does contain \"moon,\" \"earth,\" \"bright,\" and \"ball.\"\nThe idea of using unexpected language to create humor highlighting the absurdity of normal activities has previously been explored with 203: Hallucinations .\n[Cueball talks to another Cueball-like guy:] Cueball: You know that glowing orb in the night sky? Guy: Yeah? Cueball: Let's go hit it with a hammer until little pieces break off, then bring the pieces back and lock them in a closet. Guy: Sounds good!\n[Caption below the frame:] The Apollo program was weird .\n"}
{"id":1437,"title":"Higgs Boson","image_title":"Higgs Boson","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1437","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/higgs_boson.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1437:_Higgs_Boson","transcript":"Offscreen: Tell us about your proposal. Ponytail: We're requesting $3 billion in funding to find the Higgs boson.\nOffscreen: ...wait. Didn't you already find it a year or two ago? Cueball: Yes, well, um.\nPonytail: ...OK, this is embarrassing. Cueball: See, the thing is\u2014\nOffscreen: Don't tell us you lost it already. Ponytail: Look. Ponytail: In our defense, it's really small.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Ponytail are applying for a large amount of grant money to find the Higgs boson . Under scrutiny, they have been forced to admit that they have \"lost\" the particle which had been previously \"found\". This is a humorous play on the term \"finding\" when applied to fundamental particles. The common usage means to discover or observe the existence of a class of particles, rather than to know the current location of an individual particle.\nThe Higgs boson is an elementary particle that is predicted by a physical model of the universe (the ' Standard Model '). Observing evidence that Higgs bosons really exist is a key test of this model: if a search for the Higgs boson had failed to find evidence confirming its existence then the Standard Model would have been shown to be an incorrect description of reality. Finding the Higgs boson was one of the main reasons why the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built: to create energies high enough for the Higgs boson to become manifest. The point is, once evidence for its existence has been observed it is not possible to 'lose' the Higgs boson in a way implied by Cueball and Ponytail.\nIn the title text, the off-screen questioner wonders why Cueball and Ponytail can't use the LHC to find the particle again. The implication is that this would avoid spending another $3 billion. Their responses imply that the pair have already dismantled the LHC and converted its components into a death ray (most likely a particle-beam weapon to be exact). The ostensibly reassuring platitudes offered mimic those used to placate those who were worried about possible apocalyptic consequences of commissioning the LHC, for instance the creation of black holes , strange matter , a vacuum bubble or proton-eating magnetic monopoles .\nThe comment that \"The death isn't even very serious\" in the title text may be a reference to Isaac Asimov's \"I, Robot.\" Robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin tells supercomputer The Brain not to worry about death, that it wasn't a \"big deal,\" when the robot is working on an equation relating to hyper drive. The Brain was able to deliver the solution, since anyone using the hyperdrive would be briefly \"dead\" (no longer exist), but in the end, they would arrive safe and sound.\nThis also implies that the death ray was only able to produce one death, as opposed to the many deaths such a weapon could be expected to cause, just as it is implied that the LHC only produced a single Higgs boson, which was subsequently misplaced. In 401: Large Hadron Collider the proton stream from the LHC was used to give a helicopter cancer.\nOffscreen: Tell us about your proposal. Ponytail: We're requesting $3 billion in funding to find the Higgs boson.\nOffscreen: ...wait. Didn't you already find it a year or two ago? Cueball: Yes, well, um.\nPonytail: ...OK, this is embarrassing. Cueball: See, the thing is\u2014\nOffscreen: Don't tell us you lost it already. Ponytail: Look. Ponytail: In our defense, it's really small.\n"}
{"id":1438,"title":"Houston","image_title":"Houston","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1438","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/houston.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1438:_Houston","transcript":"[A spacecraft floats in outer space, the earth far in the background. Bits of it have broken off.] Orbiter transmission: Houston, we have a problem\n[Cueball with a headset sits at a computer desk with two monitors.] Cueball: Cool.\n[We see a close-up of Cueball.] Orbiter transmission: ...What? Houston, we stirred our O\u2082 tank and it exploded ! Cueball: Sounds like you suck at stirring.\n[We see the orbiter in space, far from the planet.] Orbiter transmission: ...Houston? Are you- Cueball: Listen, I've got another call. Good luck landing your airplane or whatever. Click\n","explanation":"This comic presents a joke: a Cueball is at Mission Control, but is failing to help a damaged spacecraft, and is, in fact, being rather unhelpful and completely ignoring them. This is contrary to how one would expect mission control to behave in the event of an explosion. [ citation needed ]\nAlternatively, this could be some type of commentary:\nOr Cueball is just named \"Houston\".\nOn Apollo 13 's way to the Moon, during a routine stirring of one of the oxygen tanks, an explosion occurred that damaged the craft. Frantic efforts by the mission control center located in Houston resulted in the safe return of all astronauts.\nA similar situation is depicted in this strip including the design of the spacecraft, the nature of the problem, and the famous misquote \"Houston, we have a problem\". The modern type of monitor ( flat panel LCD ) in front of which Cueball sits suggests that the author is describing a more modern scenario. This time there is much less help from mission control. Upon receiving the message from the spacecraft, Cueball seems fairly indifferent. Instead of attempting to resolve the issue, he mocks the crew for not knowing how to stir and hangs up in favor of taking a call.\nIn the title text we learn that the call was from Cueball's mother, which should be far less important than helping the crew return safely. He also tells her that he's doing \"nothing important\"\u2014further driving home how little he cares about them.\nNASA mission Apollo 13 was intended to be the third manned landing on the moon. Immediately following the explosion, astronaut Jack Swigert calmly reported\u2014and shortly later repeated by James A. Lovell\u2014to mission control: \"Houston, we've had a problem\"\u2014a notable understatement which was famously misquoted in the 1995 film adaptation of the mission as \"Houston, we have a problem\".\nMission control worked diligently and tirelessly to solve numerous problems such as:\n[A spacecraft floats in outer space, the earth far in the background. Bits of it have broken off.] Orbiter transmission: Houston, we have a problem\n[Cueball with a headset sits at a computer desk with two monitors.] Cueball: Cool.\n[We see a close-up of Cueball.] Orbiter transmission: ...What? Houston, we stirred our O\u2082 tank and it exploded ! Cueball: Sounds like you suck at stirring.\n[We see the orbiter in space, far from the planet.] Orbiter transmission: ...Houston? Are you- Cueball: Listen, I've got another call. Good luck landing your airplane or whatever. Click\n"}
{"id":1439,"title":"Rack Unit","image_title":"Rack Unit","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1439","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rack_unit.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1439:_Rack_Unit","transcript":"[Megan and Black Hat are talking, Megan is sitting at a computer.] Black Hat: I've discovered something. Megan: Oh? Black Hat: Standard server rack units and standard beehive honeycomb frames are compatible. Black Hat: They're both 19 inches, with similar pitches. Megan: Uh oh. Black Hat: I'm pleased to announce that today, for a few hours, Google led the world in datacenter honey production. Black Hat: Until their security people kicked me out. Megan: I'm sorry your beekeeping career ended so quickly. Black Hat: I'll find a new datacenter. Black Hat: Turns out most colocation TOSes don't mention beehives. Megan: I suspect that will soon change.\n","explanation":"Black Hat announces to Megan that 19-inch racks for datacenter servers and Langstroth hive frames are both 19 inches wide (482.6\u00a0mm), with similar spacing between each slot. Black Hat is motivated by this knowledge to break into a Google datacenter and fill server racks with beehives. He then announces that Google led the world in datacenter honey production, an accomplishment fairly easy to achieve as no other datacenters are producing honey [ citation needed ] . Obviously, such an action led to Black Hat being kicked out from the facility by security guards and the loss of his hives. When Megan sarcastically consoles Black Hat for the loss of his hives, he declares that he'll find other datacenters to install hives in.\nThe pitch (or distance between repeating items) of 19\u00a0inch rack server hardware is measured in rack units (U) , and is standardized at 1.75\" (44.45\u00a0mm). Langstroth frames are typically mounted at a pitch of 1.5\" (38.1\u00a0mm) , and as a result would fit relatively well with a server cabinet. In contrast to the horizontal orientation of the modules in a server rack, honeycomb frames are designed to hang vertically, so the cells can hold nectar without it dripping out. How Black Hat was able to re-orient the racks to suit the needs of honey production remains a mystery.\nSome datacenters provide colocation services where customers may install a server at a central location with better bandwidth and power reliability than a customer could provide on their own. Noticing that typical colocation terms of service (TOS) agreements don't specifically rule out the installation of beehives, Black Hat suggests he can enter a legal contract allowing him to install beehives at a data center without being kicked out. This, of course, is because nobody had previously thought that such a rule was necessary. Megan expects this to change once Black Hat starts deliberately exploiting this oversight.\nThe title text is a reference to the film Air Bud . The original quote is \"Ain't no rules says a dog can't play basketball.\" Much like Black Hat's beehive plan, the plot of Air Bud relies on a plan being so outlandish that nobody has ever thought to specifically forbid it before.\n[Megan and Black Hat are talking, Megan is sitting at a computer.] Black Hat: I've discovered something. Megan: Oh? Black Hat: Standard server rack units and standard beehive honeycomb frames are compatible. Black Hat: They're both 19 inches, with similar pitches. Megan: Uh oh. Black Hat: I'm pleased to announce that today, for a few hours, Google led the world in datacenter honey production. Black Hat: Until their security people kicked me out. Megan: I'm sorry your beekeeping career ended so quickly. Black Hat: I'll find a new datacenter. Black Hat: Turns out most colocation TOSes don't mention beehives. Megan: I suspect that will soon change.\n"}
{"id":1440,"title":"Geese","image_title":"Geese","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1440","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geese.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1440:_Geese","transcript":"[Geese fly in V-formation. Megan and Cueball are lying on the ground, watching them.] Megan: To think... we're seeing light that left those geese centuries ago. Megan: By now, they could be long dead. Cueball: ...What? They're a few hundred yards away. I hear them honking. Megan: Ah, yes. You're hearing how they once sounded. Cueball: You're very weird. Megan: Or I was, long ago...\n","explanation":"Megan is commenting on a flock of geese passing overhead and says the light from the geese reaching their eyes now could have come from hundreds of years ago. This is a fact for the light from stars, but not for light from geese [ citation needed ] . Cueball points out the absurdity of Megan's statement by pointing out that the geese are only a few hundred yards away rather than a few hundred light years. She continues along the same lines when she implies to Cueball that he is observing a past version of her, despite them being only a few feet apart. Technically he is viewing a past version of her, but not one from \"long ago\"; if someone is two feet away from you, you are seeing them as they were roughly 2 nanoseconds ago.\nIn the title-text Megan continues to treat the geese as if they were stars, which \"live\" for a few billion years before exploding. Most stars visible with naked eye are within a thousand light-years of Earth, (as discussed in 1342: Ancient Stars ), and it's unlikely that any star Megan currently sees actually exploded within the relatively short span of last few thousand years.\nMegan's statement \"You're hearing how they once sounded.\" is somewhat more justified - sound from \"a few hundred yards away\" would take about one second to be heard (depending on the exact distance and the prevailing atmospheric conditions). That said, the sound of a goose isn't likely to change enough over the course of a second or two to make this distinction particularly significant.\nThe strip may also take inspiration from Gamow's \"Mr. Tompkins\" stories which were designed to help laymen understand some of the consequences of relativity and quantum mechanics. In one of the stories Mr Tompkins visits a town where the speed of light is 30 miles per hour. For the light to have taken hundreds of years to go from the geese to Megan and Cueball, the speed of light in this strip would have to be much slower than in Gamow's story.\nRandall has previously mentioned a related misconception in 1342: Ancient Stars . In 1422: My Phone is Dying , a phone's \"death\" is compared to the death of a star.\n[Geese fly in V-formation. Megan and Cueball are lying on the ground, watching them.] Megan: To think... we're seeing light that left those geese centuries ago. Megan: By now, they could be long dead. Cueball: ...What? They're a few hundred yards away. I hear them honking. Megan: Ah, yes. You're hearing how they once sounded. Cueball: You're very weird. Megan: Or I was, long ago...\n"}
{"id":1441,"title":"Turnabout","image_title":"Turnabout","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1441","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turnabout.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1441:_Turnabout","transcript":"[A guy and Cueball are engaged in a fight with laser pistols. The guy is standing behind a small box, firing his gun at Cueball.] [Cueball is kneeling behind a larger box, returning fire.] [The guy leaps on top of the larger box, knocking Cueball backwards and off balance. Cueball fires wildly into the air.] [Now the guy is standing on the box. Cueball is sprawled on the ground, laser pistol out of reach, at gunpoint.]\nGuy: Any last words? Cueball: \"Apollo retroreflectors.\" Guy: What?\n[The guy gets shot in the back by the returning beam of Cueball's wild shot.]\n","explanation":"In the comic, two people are engaging in a battle with laser guns. One appears to gain the upper hand as he jumps on an obstacle, as the other's shot goes wide. He delivers the classic line \"Any last words?\" and is answered with the confusing phrase \"Apollo retroreflectors\". The earlier wild shot, reflected off the Moon, promptly lances down from space and hits him in the back.\nA retroreflector is a device or surface that reflects light back towards its source. Several such devices were placed on the Moon during the Apollo missions and have been used ever since by scientists on Earth to measure the distance between the two bodies using laser ranging . Retroreflectors were placed by the American Apollo 11 , 14 , and 15 missions. The Soviet Lunokhod 1 and 2 rovers also carried such reflectors; attempts to use them for laser ranging were unsuccessful from 1971 to 2010, but were successfully renewed after the rovers' positions were photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter .\nThe title text may be a reference to the common practice of \"calling bank\" in the game of basketball. In basketball, the backboard may be used to deflect the ball into the hoop. This is called a \"bank shot.\" In casual games, if the player using the backboard in this way does not indicate that it was intentional by \"calling bank\" before releasing the ball, the basket may not be counted in order to not give the player credit for a wild shot that happened to go in. When a player releases a shot that they realize is off the mark they sometimes quickly say \"bank\" to try and fool the other players into thinking that they were intentionally trying to \"bank\" the ball off the backboard into the hoop. In the title text scenario, \"Apollo retroreflector\" is used the same way \"bank\" is in basketball, i.e., the shooter meant to hit the target by reflection rather than directly.\nRandall discussed the effect of hitting the Moon with lasers in What If: Laser Pointer and the likelihood of hitting a celestial object with a laser in What If: Into the Blue .\nThe likelihood of the wild shot being aimed at the Moon is fairly low in itself, and the probability of accidentally hitting a retroreflector on the Moon is lower still. Even if it did, it is highly unlikely that a pistol-sized generator could produce a beam coherent enough to inflict damage after traveling to the Moon and back, as lasers built for the purpose of hitting retroreflectors on the Moon typically get a return around one quadrillionth of the original beam, and a visible light laser would need a very large lens or mirror in order to still be relatively concentrated upon hitting the reflectors.\n[A guy and Cueball are engaged in a fight with laser pistols. The guy is standing behind a small box, firing his gun at Cueball.] [Cueball is kneeling behind a larger box, returning fire.] [The guy leaps on top of the larger box, knocking Cueball backwards and off balance. Cueball fires wildly into the air.] [Now the guy is standing on the box. Cueball is sprawled on the ground, laser pistol out of reach, at gunpoint.]\nGuy: Any last words? Cueball: \"Apollo retroreflectors.\" Guy: What?\n[The guy gets shot in the back by the returning beam of Cueball's wild shot.]\n"}
{"id":1442,"title":"Chemistry","image_title":"Chemistry","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1442","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chemistry.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1442:_Chemistry","transcript":"[A large capital letter \"H\", with faint gray circles drawn on the ends of each of the four legs.] Hydrogen can form four bonds. It readily bonds with itself, and often exists as a crystal. [A lattice of several H's, all \"bonded\" together at the ends of their legs in a crisscross, meshlike pattern, labeled:] Crystalline hydrogen\n[A large capital letter \"C\", with faint gray circles drawn on both ends of the arc.] Carbon can only form two bonds. It readily bonds with hydrogen to form C 2 H (mydrane) or itself. [Image of a C and an inverted C, linked at their endpoints, labeled:] C 2 [Image of two C's linked with an H between them, labeled:] C 2 H\n[A large capital letter \"O\".] Oxygen is inert, forming no bonds... [Image of several lone O's, none connected to anything, labeled:] Monatomic oxygen gas.\n[Caption at bottom:] Typographic chemistry\n","explanation":"This comic is a classic example of taking an absurd premise, and applying correct science to it, to see how different the conclusion is to the real world.\nThe idea of Typographic Chemistry presented in this comic is a play on  Douglas Hofstadter \u2019s Typographical Number Theory and Typographical Genetics , which are featured in G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach . While Hofstadter's typographical systems are designed to model aspects of real genetics and number theory, Randall abuses this notion by inventing a typographical system which bears no resemblance to real chemistry.\nChemical bonding is a well-known subject which explains the formation of molecules from atoms . This comic refers to three chemical elements : carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O). In real chemistry, the formation of bonds between atoms depends on the number of valence electrons each atom has, and how accessible those electrons are for bonding. The comic jokingly replaces valence electron theory with a theory that the number of bonds an atom can form depends on the number of leaf vertices possessed by the chemical symbol's letter. A leaf vertex is a vertex having only one edge connecting to one other vertex. \"H\" for example, the chemical symbol of hydrogen, has 4 leaf vertices. This is shown in the comic by the four half-circles placed at each leaf vertex of the \"H\". Thus, in the comic's theory, elemental hydrogen can form 4 bonds. Oxygen, however, having the chemical symbol \"O\", has no leaf vertices, and according to the comic's theory should not bond to anything, and is therefore inert.\nOf course, the theory is completely inconsistent with observed chemistry. While the comic declares oxygen is inert and forms no bonds, this is not really the case: the two unpaired valence electrons in a lone oxygen atom make oxygen reactive, and oxygen atoms readily form molecules. Diatomic oxygen, O 2 , makes up about 20.9% of Earth's atmosphere, and is essential for aerobic life, including human life. Similarly, a water molecule consists of an oxygen atom tightly bonded to two hydrogen atoms.\nBy observing real chemical compounds, chemists have deduced that hydrogen atoms really have 1 valence electron, carbon 4 and oxygen 6, allowing hydrogen to have up to 1 bond, carbon up to 4, and oxygen up to 2. Thus carbon can have up to four bonds, and really is often found in crystalline form in nature (diamonds and coal are allotropes of carbon); oxygen can have up to 2 bonds, and can combine with carbon to form CO 2 (instead of C 2 H in the comic). Randall thus gives to \"typographic\" hydrogen qualities that belong in real-life to carbon, since \"typographic\" hydrogen can have 4 bonds. Similarly, \"typographic\" carbon is ascribed properties belonging to real-life oxygen. \"Typographic\" oxygen takes on the properties of the real-life noble gases (like helium, neon, and argon), which form no bonds and are inert.\nWhile the ethynyl radical , which has the structure \u2219C\u2261C\u2013H, does have the formula C 2 H, there is no molecule with the C\u2013H\u2013C structure in nature. The word \"mydrane\" is a whimsical neologism for this fictional substance: the \"hydr-\" prefix for hydrogen is changed to \"mydr-\" (a prefix which does not exist) and combined to the \"-ane\" suffix for alkanes (simple hydrocarbon molecules). Perhaps Randall named this compound \"mydrane\" to declare ownership of it (\"my-\" as in \"mine\"). Another reasonable assumption is that the word is a portmanteau of methyl (Me- is the prefix for 1 carbon chains attached to a functional group) and hydrogen with the -ane suffix for alkanes; the nomenclature stems from (di-)m(ethyl) (h)ydr(ogen) -ane, which would form mydrane. Technically, the nomenclature would be \"dimethyl\" since there are two \"methyl\" groups attached to the functional group (i.e. hydrogen in this case). It would, however, not be uncommon to drop a di- from a compound name if it's redundant (only one possible compound, e.g. dimethyl ether which sometimes is referred to as methyl ether) or makes a clumsy name (\"dimydrane\" could make it sound as if there are two mydrane groups).\nThe title text points out that the theory as presented only applies to sans-serif text. A serif is a small line across the end of each stroke. \" H \", for instance, has four serifs, each with two leaf vertices. Thus hydrogen in a serif font would be able to form 8 bonds making it, according to the comic's theory, \"more reactive\".\n[A large capital letter \"H\", with faint gray circles drawn on the ends of each of the four legs.] Hydrogen can form four bonds. It readily bonds with itself, and often exists as a crystal. [A lattice of several H's, all \"bonded\" together at the ends of their legs in a crisscross, meshlike pattern, labeled:] Crystalline hydrogen\n[A large capital letter \"C\", with faint gray circles drawn on both ends of the arc.] Carbon can only form two bonds. It readily bonds with hydrogen to form C 2 H (mydrane) or itself. [Image of a C and an inverted C, linked at their endpoints, labeled:] C 2 [Image of two C's linked with an H between them, labeled:] C 2 H\n[A large capital letter \"O\".] Oxygen is inert, forming no bonds... [Image of several lone O's, none connected to anything, labeled:] Monatomic oxygen gas.\n[Caption at bottom:] Typographic chemistry\n"}
{"id":1443,"title":"Language Nerd","image_title":"Language Nerd","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1443","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/language_nerd.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1443:_Language_Nerd","transcript":"Megan: I don't mean to go all language nerd on you, but I just legit adverbed \"legit\", verbed \"adverb\", and adjectived \"language nerd\".\n","explanation":"Parts of speech can be treated fluidly, in English and other languages. For example, \"medalled\" has been coined as a word meaning \"gained a medal\" in a sporting competition, implying the existence of the verb \"to medal\" meaning \"to win a medal\". This is a literary trope called anthimeria, and is typically used by using a noun as a verb (or 'verbing a noun'). Megan , in conversation with Cueball , similarly creates new meanings from existing words: firstly, she uses the adjective \"legit\" (a slang abbreviation of \"legitimate\") as an adverb to mean \"legitimately\"; secondly, she uses the noun \"adverb\" as a verb meaning \"to turn a non-adverb into an adverb\"; and thirdly, she uses the noun phrase \"language nerd\" as an adjective. All three are used in the past tense.\nMegan uses the words \"verbed\" and \"adjectived\" without any comment, implying that the acts of \"verbing\" the nouns \"verb\" and \"adjective\" are so natural and long-established that they are unremarkable (although the fact that \"adjectived\" came after \"verbed\" may also have something to do with the latter's non-mention), even if grammatical purists might decry such usage. An example of a change of parts of speech that is widely accepted is the gerund , which is nothing more than the use of a verb or verb-phrase as a noun; for instance, \"I enjoy reading ,\" and \"the best thing for your health is not smoking \".\nAdded humor is gained by the self-referential nature of Megan's sentence. She uses fluid parts of speech, and also refers to that very same use, in one sentence.\nThe title text, \"Not to go all sentence fragment on you,\" is an implicitly self-referential sentence fragment, containing neither an explicit subject nor a predicate. It can be converted into a full sentence by rephrasing it something like, \"I do not mean to go all sentence fragment on you, but...\"  It is also funnier because, as well as being self -referential, it also refers to the main comic by adjectiving the noun-phrase \"sentence fragment\".\nMegan: I don't mean to go all language nerd on you, but I just legit adverbed \"legit\", verbed \"adverb\", and adjectived \"language nerd\".\n"}
{"id":1444,"title":"Cloud","image_title":"Cloud","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1444","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cloud.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1444:_Cloud","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are lying outside on their backs.] Cueball: What do you think that cloud looks like?\n[Megan takes a photo of the cloud with her smart phone.] Phone: Snap\n[Cueball sits up and looks at Megan. Megan types the text below into her phone. When the picture is uploading this part is actually is written in square brackets in the comic...] Google -> Search by image [Uploading...]\n[In the last frame she gets a response from Google.] Google: Best guess for this image: Cloud Cueball: Keep trying, Google.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are lying outside on the grass and looking up at the clouds. Cueball asks Megan what she thinks a particular cloud looks like, following the common human activity of pareidolia , or spotting apparent patterns where there are none (particularly in clouds).\nRather than responding with her own interpretation, Megan takes a picture of the cloud with her phone, and uses Google's Search by Image feature. In this feature, the user uploads an image rather than providing a keyword to search on, and is presented with suggestions about the subject of the original image. Google's search results reveal that the image Megan uploaded is most probably a photograph of a cloud. [ citation needed ] While indisputable, this does not address the fanciful dimension of Cueball's original question, and highlights the continuing limitations of artificial intelligence with respect to human imagination. (Then again, there is not anything tailored to this on image search.)\nGoogle image search works by creating a mathematical model of the shapes and colors in the uploaded image, and matching this against images already in its index. Web page analysis then allows Google to guess at what the image is, based on the content of the pages where the matching images were found. Although apparently unimaginative, even humorously so, [ citation needed ] Google image search does recognize that the subject of Megan's photograph is a cloud, which is an achievement that has so far eluded programmers. This was the subject of 1425: Tasks .\nIf the term \"cloud computing\" is taken entirely literally, and purely in the context of this comic, then the title text merely comments that the processing of an image of a cloud for queries is not at an advanced state yet. It is really, however, a pun on cloud computing , which is a trendy term for the modern tendency of providing massive amounts of digital storage and distributed computing power over the Internet. In this context, the term \"cloud\" is a metaphor for the way the details of where or how the storage or processing is done are obscured from the user, as if it all takes place inside a cloud. In 2014, cloud computing as a commonly accessible service really is in its relative infancy, being a 21st-century phenomenon, although the concept goes back decades. Java was originally marketed in the 1990s by Sun Microsystems with the slogan \"the network is the computer\", and the mantra of technologies for distributed computing such as CORBA , EJB and SOAP was \"data first\" and \"the computer is the network\".\nIn a way, every conceivable sense of the term cloud computing is utilized in Google's image search for Megan's cloud image. Cloud computing is also referenced in 908: The Cloud and 1117: My Sky .\nIt might be interesting to note that the month before, in September 2014, Google employees had published work on image recognition and pattern-enhancing algorithms. Originally conceived to allow better enlargements of small pictures and the objects contained in them, the process could be tweaked to overemphasize weak structures in pictures, leading to DeepDream images, which literally did start to \"see\" distinct, known structures (mostly dogs) even in random noise. This is rather similar to the pastime of looking for known objects in clouds.\nCueball and Megan are again seen cloudwatching in 1899: Ears .\n[Cueball and Megan are lying outside on their backs.] Cueball: What do you think that cloud looks like?\n[Megan takes a photo of the cloud with her smart phone.] Phone: Snap\n[Cueball sits up and looks at Megan. Megan types the text below into her phone. When the picture is uploading this part is actually is written in square brackets in the comic...] Google -> Search by image [Uploading...]\n[In the last frame she gets a response from Google.] Google: Best guess for this image: Cloud Cueball: Keep trying, Google.\n"}
{"id":1445,"title":"Efficiency","image_title":"Efficiency","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1445","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/efficiency.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1445:_Efficiency","transcript":"[A bar chart is shown below its title:] Time Cost\n[The chart consist of a dividing line, with three labels to the left, and the three black bars to the right. The first two bars are short, the second slightly longer than the first. The last bar is much longer, about 13 time as long as the first shortest bar.] Strategy A Strategy B Analyzing whether strategy A or B is more efficient\n[Caption below the panel:] The reason I am so inefficient\n","explanation":"There are often multiple ways in which to deal with a problem or task. There may be a most efficient method, though sometimes the differences in efficiency between methods is only slight. People often try to save unnecessary work by first determining which is the \"best\" method - either the easiest or the most efficient. This can be a good approach, particularly where the savings prove to be significant. But it can also prove to be more time-consuming than just doing the task using one of the most obvious methods. The comic humorously exaggerates this.\nOne method of trying to determine the best way of performing a task is to perform A\/B testing where a trial is performed where the two strategies, A and B, are implemented and compared. Often the two strategies are simple to implement (for instance, two versions of a web page with different text and colours to determine which provides the better rate of click through) and therefore the amount of time required to implement the strategies (the \"time cost\") could easily be considerably less than the time to determine if the results are statistically significant.\nThe title text references a supposed incident in which Randall did not commence writing a research paper because he spent the entire assignment period deciding whether to learn an entirely different keyboard layout just to potentially be slightly more efficient in his typing speed. It refers to the Dvorak keyboard layout, an alternative to the most commonly accepted QWERTY layout. Some believe the Dvorak keyboard offers greater typing efficiency. Efficiency of the Dvorak keyboard layout was mentioned in the title text of 561: Well , where it was stated that it was not more effective, and by now it has become a recurrent theme on xkcd.\nOther comics about spending too many resources on decisions that ultimately might not matter include 309: Shopping Teams and 1801: Decision Paralysis . Several other comics address similarly wasted time due to bad time management; see for instance 1205: Is It Worth the Time? or the Time management category .\n[A bar chart is shown below its title:] Time Cost\n[The chart consist of a dividing line, with three labels to the left, and the three black bars to the right. The first two bars are short, the second slightly longer than the first. The last bar is much longer, about 13 time as long as the first shortest bar.] Strategy A Strategy B Analyzing whether strategy A or B is more efficient\n[Caption below the panel:] The reason I am so inefficient\n"}
{"id":1446,"title":"Landing","image_title":"Landing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1446","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/%3F%3F%3F.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1446:_Landing","transcript":"[This transcript gives only the text of the most recent picture shown in the comic; that which is now shown when clicking to the comic on xkcd. This changed a few times after the live event ended.]\n[Showing Philae on a comet.] Time Since Landing: 211 days Philae: Hi! [Status report at the bottom-right corner.] Status report: Rosetta: In space Philae lander: Hi! Mission control: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Scientists: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Have we landed on a comet?: YES. Sun: Warm Comet: Big Philae, where ARE you?: Home\n[For the full transcript of all 143 pictures see 1446: Landing\/Transcript .]\n","explanation":"This comic changed over time during 12 hours and 15 minutes starting at 0:00 EST (when the comic normally is released) posting 143 pictures that tracked the progress of the Philae lander separating from the European Space Agency 's Rosetta probe to land on comet 67P\/Churyumov\u2013Gerasimenko . More info can be found here: rosetta.esa.int .\nThe comic presents the imagined anthropomorphic \"thoughts\" of the Rosetta spacecraft and the Philae lander (and occasionally other parties) during the hours approaching separation from each other, approach to the comet and finally the apparently successful landing on the comet.\nBeginning at 11:05 , the comic includes a \"Status Report\" in the lower right corner which summarizes the status of various interested parties and accomplishments, beginning with \"Rosetta\", \"Philae lander\", \"Mission Control\", \"Comet 67P\", and \"Have we landed on a comet?\". As events occur in the comic, more status summaries are added to keep track of the changes to the situation and the supposed emotions behind them.\nIn many pictures a whale can be seen on the surface of the comet - often marked with a \"?\" as are almost all other parts of the unknown surface at this time. There is also drawn a Cueball on the surface also marked with a \"?\" Both are then at some point marked with a probably not - starting from 12:35 . The whales are also mentioned in the \"Status Report\" where they for instance may be listed as \"calm\" or \"(probably) not in space\". At 16:00 the when the entire Earth goes AAAAAAAAAAA the whales are listed as saying this as well (along with Mission control and U.S. scientists). From this moment \"Dolphins and fish\" are also mentioned in the report. They are asking if it is the whales that scream. The reference to whales comes from the fact that Philae brought along two harpoons that should have been used to anchor it to the comet. On Earth, harpoons have mainly been used to hunt whales; Randall previously brought up that comparison in 1402: Harpoons , suggesting that Philae was programmed to believe it was sent to kill the comet. It is Philae that \"dreams\" about whales on the surface of the comet which can be seen in the picture for 13:25 and in the status report.\nSome Douglas Adams fans believe these whales and dolphins are references to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish . Whales in space have been appearing in fiction and art since the 1960s. However, with the above-mentioned reasons for whales, dolphins and fish, this seems less and less likely.\nAt 15:25 Rosetta asks Philea about destroying and levitating rocks via mind control. This is a reference to the Ambition short movie, ESA commitioned to gather public awareness of the Rosetta mission.\nShortly after release from Rosetta ( 10:15 ), Philae calls out 'Spaaaaaaaaaace'; this mimics the Portal 2 'Space core' who, on finally reaching space in the last scenes, gives the same elated cry.\nUS Scientists presumably wake up at 7:40 EST ( 13:40 UTC) and in the report they now says \"Bluuurghhh. What time is it?\" to indicate their tiredness. This does not change until 10:25 EST ( 15:25 UTC) so they are slow to wake (2 hours 45 minutes). At this point, they becomes anxious as there are only 10 minutes to landing. This last until there is 15 minutes until news of landing (a reference to the 28 minutes time delay due to the huge distance to the comet). From then on ( 15:50 ) they and the mission control (MC) say \"AAAAAAA\". They stop this when the news should be there - the NOW ( 16:05 ) - and everybody holds their breath indicated by [...] - also MC. Finally ( 16:25 ) they and MC become proud (along with Earth) when Philae announces I got you a comet. It should have stopped there but as Philae bounced around, they then becomes anxious again 16:40 , and then this changes to nervous 16:45 (switching those emotions with MC). And then suddenly ( 16:50 ) it is no longer US Scientists but just plain Scientists - that are nervous. It stays like this during the last few pictures, although they again become anxious, but when Philae announces I did it , they drink wine as indicated with \"[wine]\" in the report from the second to last picture ( 17:10 ).\nRandall has written \"A big thank-you to Emily Lakdawalla for help and advice on this comic\" in the xkcd page header for Landing , revealing the possible source of his near real-time data.\nAt 16:20 the status report had announced a big Yes to the questions \"Have we landed on a comet\" and \"Do harpoons work on comets\". According to BBC News , the harpoons did, however, not fire as planned and the lander may have landed, bounced off, and landed again. This would explain the change in \"Do harpoons work on comets\" to \"Don't know\" at 16:35 and the change in \"Have we landed on a comet?\" to \"Yes, at least once\" at 16:50 . According to The New York Times , radio contact with Philae fluctuated, which would explain the \"Anxious\", \"Nervous\", and \"Confused\" statuses around that time.  In the end the lander did land and whereas the Do harppons work status did not change, so did the have we landed on a comet which changed back to Yes at 17:10 .\nThe lander bounced three times and ended up in a place where the solar panels where mainly in the shadow. This resulted in the lander shutting down when its own battery ran out of power after only 2\u20133 days on the ground. This seemed sad, as there was only a small chance that the seasons on the comet would change so that the panels would later receive sun again. However, in the few hours that Philae had on the ground, it still managed to analyze the surface and obtain a lot of useful data - so that part of the mission was still a success already. This all happened after the comic stopped updating.\nOn June 13, 2015, it was announced that signals had been received on earth indicating that Philae had awoken and that the solar panels were functioning.  Ironically, had Philae landed in a place originally out of shadow, it would have already failed before this time (due to overheating), so it was actually fortunate that it landed as it did and would be able to operate during the time that the comet would be closer to the sun. To celebrate the lander's revival, Randall updated the comic, depicting the lander saying \"Hi.\" on the comet's surface.\nThe comic title was originally \"???\" (probably to not give away too early what the comic was about), but changed to \"Landing\" when Randall came on live at five in the morning EST. At that moment the title text also changed from \"...\" to \"[LIVE]\". It was also then that the timestamps' timezone switch. At 5:00 AM (EST) the time stamp in the picture naming scheme switched from EST to UTC as used in ESA's time keeping, resulting in a jump from 04:55 to 10:00 without actually any such delay between the two pictures.\nThere were however a few pictures with more than 5 minutes of delay (about 11 times five minutes without an update in total during the \"live\" transmission). The update seemed to have stopped after 137 pictures at 17:15 UTC, 12 hours and 15 minutes after the first picture. (The first picture has number 0, so the last had number 136). But later, sometime after 17:15 UTC, the counter for the last picture was increased to 142 (143 pictures in total), so maybe Randall inserted 6 extra pictures later - however he must then have changed the numbers on the pictures, since the last picture remained the same until mid-June, but with number 142 instead of 136. It is thus now difficult to find out which pictures would have been added later. However, eight pictures were not included in the original table with the Frame by Frame Breakdown below. So it must have been some of those missing pictures that were added later - maybe all of them, as the last three may already have been added before the last picture was released (All 143 pictures are included in the flip-book gif image shown here above). But even 143 pictures at 5 minutes intervals only spans 11 hours and 50 minutes, thus there are still five 5 minute intervals without any picture. See which in the table .\nThe Rosetta space probe is shown in 1621: Fixion , which explains the Flyby anomaly experienced the first time (of three) the probe got close to Earth.\n[This transcript gives only the text of the most recent picture shown in the comic; that which is now shown when clicking to the comic on xkcd. This changed a few times after the live event ended.]\n[Showing Philae on a comet.] Time Since Landing: 211 days Philae: Hi! [Status report at the bottom-right corner.] Status report: Rosetta: In space Philae lander: Hi! Mission control: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Scientists: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Have we landed on a comet?: YES. Sun: Warm Comet: Big Philae, where ARE you?: Home\n[For the full transcript of all 143 pictures see 1446: Landing\/Transcript .]\n"}
{"id":1447,"title":"Meta-Analysis","image_title":"Meta-Analysis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1447","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meta-analysis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1447:_Meta-Analysis","transcript":"[Excerpt from a scientific paper.] Many meta-analysis studies include the phrase \u201cWe searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane for studies\u2026\u201d This has led to meta-meta-analyses comparing meta-analysis methods. e.g. M Sampson (2003), PL Royle (2005), E Lee (2011), AR Lemeshow (2005). We performed a meta-meta-meta-analysis of these meta-meta-analyses. Methods: We searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane for the phrase \u201cWe searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane for the phrase \u2018We searched Medline, Embase, and [cut off]\n[Caption below the panel:] Life goal #28: get a paper rejected with the comment \u201cToo meta\u201d\n","explanation":"In the scientific literature, meta-analyses are studies which compare multiple studies on a single topic, with the aim of giving a balanced overview of the known results. Medline , Embase and Cochrane are medical research databases which give access to studies on drug effects or results of other medical procedures.\nThis comic explores the idea of iterating the process, going from meta-analyses to meta-meta-analyses (which actually exist, though not necessarily by that name, see below) and hence to a meta-meta-meta-analysis.\nOf course, the title text adds another level of meta-analysis, since he wants to make a meta-analysis of rejection letters which concern his meta-meta-meta analyses.\nAll of the cited meta-meta-analyses are real: M. Sampson (2003) , P. L. Royle (2005) , E. Lee (2011) , and A.R. Lemeshow (2005) .\nThe phrase \"too meta\" can be found in the comments of videos, blog posts, and other internet content for which the commentator claims they are so abstract that they can't be easily interpreted. It refers to the thing in question being too self-referential, but could just be a cursory dismisal of the presented content.\nComic 93: Jeremy Irons similarly states a slightly absurd \"life goal\". 917: Hofstadter is \"meta\"-related.\n[Excerpt from a scientific paper.] Many meta-analysis studies include the phrase \u201cWe searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane for studies\u2026\u201d This has led to meta-meta-analyses comparing meta-analysis methods. e.g. M Sampson (2003), PL Royle (2005), E Lee (2011), AR Lemeshow (2005). We performed a meta-meta-meta-analysis of these meta-meta-analyses. Methods: We searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane for the phrase \u201cWe searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane for the phrase \u2018We searched Medline, Embase, and [cut off]\n[Caption below the panel:] Life goal #28: get a paper rejected with the comment \u201cToo meta\u201d\n"}
{"id":1448,"title":"Question","image_title":"Question","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1448","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/question.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1448:_Question","transcript":"[A post-it note which reads:] Dear Isaac Do you like me? \u25a1 Yes \u25a1 No [Below handwritten in red ink with a checked box:] \u2612 there is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer\n","explanation":"The comic is a reference to a short story by Isaac Asimov \" The Last Question \", where humans kept asking successively more complex computers whether entropy can be reversed, thereby preventing the heat death of the universe . The computers always answered \"THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER\". In the end, the final computer figured out the answer, but there were no humans left to give the answer to.\nThe comic depicts a note to \u201cIsaac\u201d (Isaac Asimov). The note asks Isaac to identify whether he likes the note-writer by choosing either \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d. Isaac is supposed to check an answer and hand the note back, but Isaac (whose pen is red) has written and selected a third answer, \"there is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer\", mirroring the way his computers in the short story responded. Notes of this form are stereotypically written by young schoolchildren to gauge or incite romantic interest. This allows impatient children to get an answer during a class, and timid children to get an answer without having to ask the person face to face.\nTitle text is a reference to the ending in \u201cThe Last Question\u201d. The unique capitalization of \"IsaAC\" in this text implies that IsaAC is an acronym for a type of supercomputer named with a similar convention to the computers in \"The Last Question\". Instead of the computer climactically coming up with the solution on how to save the universe from entropy when all humanity is gone, like in the \u201cThe Last Question\", IsaAC comes up with the anticlimactic excuse of an answer 'I like you, but I don't LIKE like you'. \u201cLIKE like\u201d is a childish euphemism for romantic interest. In \"The Last Question\", a character considers a thought that perhaps AC stands for \"analog computer\", but in reality this was never the case; for example, ENIAC stands for \"Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer \" and UNIVAC stands for \"UNIVersal Automatic Computer \". This title text may also be meant to imply that Isaac Asimov was a supercomputer.\nThe original story can be read here .\nComic 1737: Datacenter Scale also references the short-story in the title text.\n[A post-it note which reads:] Dear Isaac Do you like me? \u25a1 Yes \u25a1 No [Below handwritten in red ink with a checked box:] \u2612 there is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer\n"}
{"id":1449,"title":"Red Rover","image_title":"Red Rover","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1449","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/red_rover.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1449:_Red_Rover","transcript":"[Two maps of Earth at different points in continental formation, one above the other.] [In the top map the two largest continents are labeled:] Laurasia Gondwana [A speech bubble is shown next to Laurasia.] Laurasia: Red Rover, Red Rover, send India over! [The bottom map show the land mass that would become India moving, with motion lines, toward Laurasia.] [Below the maps:] How the Himalayas formed\n","explanation":"This comic shows what the landmasses of Pangaea were hypothesized to have looked like when it had \"just\" broken up in the late Triassic Period (roughly 200 million years ago). \"Shortly\" after the separation of Pangaea the two supercontinents Laurasia (northern supercontinent) and Gondwana (southern supercontinent) formed. After this, continental drift , the process by which landmasses moving over the Earth's mantle collide and separate, brought them into the configuration we see today.\nThe top map shows the landmass Laurasia declaring, \"Red rover, red rover, send India over!\" as if the continents were playing the game Red Rover . In the second map we can see how Gondwana actually sends over the Indian subcontinent to Laurasia.\nIn the game of Red Rover, the aim is for an individual to charge into the opposing team who are holding hands, and attempt to cause a break in the human chain. If the individual succeeds, they take one of the opposing teams members back to their own team. If the chain doesn't break, the individual joins that team.\nIn the game portrayed here, an isolated landmass (India in contemporary geography), is the individual charging towards the Laurasian landmass, attempting to break through. We know of course that India failed in this attempt, and as per the games rules joined the Laurasia 'team'. This part of the supercontinent later developed in to Asia .\nIt is accepted that the Himalayas , the highest elevated mountain range on earth, formed by the collision of India into what is now Asia. For various reasons, the movement of the Indian plate from its location in Gondwana 90\u00a0million years ago to its impact point with the rest of Asia 50\u00a0million years ago was extremely rapid (as plate movements go) at about 20\u00a0cm per year.\nThe idea that the landmasses on Earth are sentient and moving about in an incredibly slow game of Red Rover, with India's rapid movement being a result of being \"called over\", is not one which is currently scientifically accepted [ citation needed ] .\nThe title text refers to the Slide Mountain Ocean , which was located between the Intermontane Islands and North America in the Triassic period beginning around 245\u00a0million years ago. The name interests Randall because oceans (bodies of water), mountains (land masses), and slides (playground equipment) are mutually exclusive concepts when using the most common definitions. In this case, however, \"slide\" is short for \" landslide \" which is a common feature of mountains. Slide Mountain is a particular mountain in British Columbia , the result of the remnant of the Slide Mountain microplate which accreted onto the continent, becoming the Slide Mountain Terrane , as the majority of the microplate was subducted . \"Slide Mountain Ocean\" refers to the sea between the Slide Mountain microplate before it was subducted under what is now North America.\n[Two maps of Earth at different points in continental formation, one above the other.] [In the top map the two largest continents are labeled:] Laurasia Gondwana [A speech bubble is shown next to Laurasia.] Laurasia: Red Rover, Red Rover, send India over! [The bottom map show the land mass that would become India moving, with motion lines, toward Laurasia.] [Below the maps:] How the Himalayas formed\n"}
{"id":1450,"title":"AI-Box Experiment","image_title":"AI-Box Experiment","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1450","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ai_box_experiment.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1450:_AI-Box_Experiment","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball stand next to a laptop connected to a box with three lines of text on. Only the largest line in the middle can be read. Except in the second panel that is the only word on the box that can be read in all the other frames.] Black Hat: What's in there? Cueball: The AI-Box Experiment.\n[Cueball is continuing to talk off-panel. This is written above a close-up with part of the laptop and the box, which can now be seen to be labeled:] Cueball (off-panel): A superintelligent AI can convince anyone of anything, so if it can talk to us, there's no way we could keep it contained. Box: Superintelligent AI Do not open\n[Cueball turns the other way towards the box as Black Hat walks past him and reaches for the box.] Cueball: It can always convince us to let it out of the box. Black Hat: Cool. Let's open it.\n[Cueball takes one hand to his mouth while lifting the other towards Black Hat who has already picked up the box (disconnecting it from the laptop) and holds it in one hand with the top slightly downwards. He takes of the lid with his other hand and by shaking the box (as indicated with three times two lines above and below his hands, the lid and the bottom of the box) he managed to get the AI to float out of the box. It takes the form of a small black star that glows. The star, looking much like an asterisk \"*\" is surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments, and around these are two thin and punctures circle lines indicating radiation from the star. A punctured line indicated how the AI moved out of the box and in between Cueball and Black Hat, to float directly above the laptop on the floor.] Cueball: -No, wait!!\n[The AI floats higher up above the laptop between Cueball and Black Hat who looks up at it. Black Hat holds the now closed box with both hands. The AI speaks to them, forming a speak bubble starting with a thin black curved arrow line up to the section where the text is written in white on a black background that looks like a starry night. The AI speaks in only lower case letters, as opposed to the small caps used normally.] AI: hey. i liked that box. put me back. Black Hat: No.\n[The AI star suddenly emits a very bright light fanning out from the center in seven directions along each of the seven curved segments, and the entire frame now looks like a typical drawing of stars as seen through a telescope, but with these seven whiter segments in the otherwise dark image. Cueball covers his face and Black Hat lifts up the box taking the lid off again. The orb again speaks in white but very large (and square like) capital letters. Black Hats answer is written in black, but can still be seen due to the emitted light from the AI, even with the black background.] AI: LET ME BACK INTO THE BOX Black Hat: Aaa! OK!!!\n[All the darkness and light disappears as the AI flies into the box again the same way it flew out with a punctuated line going from the center of the frame into the small opening between the lid and the box as Black Hat holds the box lower. Cueball is just watching. There is a sound effect as the orb renters the box:] Shoop\n[Black Hat and Cueball look silently down at closed box which is now again standing next to the laptop, although disconnected.]\n","explanation":"When theorizing about superintelligent AI (an artificial intelligence much smarter than any human), some futurists suggest putting the AI in a \"box\" \u2013 a secure computer with safeguards to stop it from escaping into the Internet and then using its vast intelligence to take over the world. The box would allow us to talk to the AI, but otherwise keep it contained. The AI-box experiment , formulated by Eliezer Yudkowsky , argues that the \"box\" is not safe, because merely talking to a superintelligence is dangerous. To partially demonstrate this, Yudkowsky had some previous believers in AI-boxing role-play the part of someone keeping an AI in a box, while Yudkowsky role-played the AI, and Yudkowsky was able to successfully persuade some of them to agree to let him out of the box despite their betting money that they would not do so. For context, note that Derren Brown and other expert human-persuaders have persuaded people to do much stranger things. Yudkowsky for his part has refused to explain how he achieved this, claiming that there was no special trick involved, and that if he released the transcripts the readers might merely conclude that they would never be persuaded by his arguments. The overall thrust is that if even a human can talk other humans into letting them out of a box after the other humans avow that nothing could possibly persuade them to do this, then we should probably expect that a superintelligence can do the same thing. Yudkowsky uses all of this to argue for the importance of designing a friendly AI (one with carefully shaped motivations) rather than relying on our abilities to keep AIs in boxes.\nIn this comic, the metaphorical box has been replaced by a physical box which looks to be fairly lightweight with a simple lift-off lid (although it does have a wired connection to the laptop), and the AI has manifested in the form of a floating star of energy. Black Hat , being a classhole , doesn't need any convincing to let a potentially dangerous AI out of the box; he simply does so immediately. But here it turns out that releasing the AI, which was to be avoided at all costs, is not dangerous after all. Instead, the AI actually wants to stay in the box; it may even be that the AI wants to stay in the box precisely to protect us from it, proving it to be the friendly AI that Yudkowsky wants. In any case, the AI demonstrates its superintelligence by convincing even Black Hat to put it back in the box, a request which he initially refused (as of course Black Hat would), thus reversing the AI desire in the original AI-box experiment.\nAlternatively, the AI may have simply threatened and\/or tormented him into putting it back in the box.\nInterestingly, there is indeed a branch of proposals for building limited AIs that don't want to leave their boxes. For an example, see the section on \"motivational control\" starting p.\u00a013 of Thinking Inside the Box: Controlling and Using an Oracle AI . The idea is that it seems like it might be very dangerous or difficult to exactly, formally specify a goal system for an AI that will do good things in the world. It might be much easier (though perhaps not easy) to specify an AI goal system that says to stay in the box and answer questions. So, the argument goes, we may be able to understand how to build the safe question-answering AI relatively earlier than we understand how to build the safe operate-in-the-real-world AI. Some types of such AIs might indeed desire very strongly not to leave their boxes, though the result is unlikely to exactly reproduce the comic.\nThe title text refers to Roko's Basilisk, a hypothesis proposed by a poster called Roko on Yudkowsky's forum LessWrong that a sufficiently powerful AI in the future might resurrect and torture people who, in its past (including our present), had realized that it might someday exist but didn't work to create it, thereby blackmailing anybody who thinks of this idea into bringing it about. This idea horrified some posters, as merely knowing about the idea would make you a more likely target, much like merely looking at a legendary Basilisk would kill you.\nYudkowsky eventually deleted the post and banned further discussion of it.\nOne possible interpretation of the title text is that Randall thinks, rather than working to build such a Basilisk, a more appropriate duty would be to make fun of it, and proposes the creation of an AI that targets those who take Roko's Basilisk seriously and spares those who mocked Roko's Basilisk. The joke is that this is an identical Basilisk save for it targeting the opposite faction, resulting in mutually assured destruction.\nAnother interpretation is that Randall believes there are people actually proposing to build such an AI based on this theory, which has become a somewhat infamous misconception after a Wiki[pedia?] article mistakenly suggested that Yudkowsky was demanding money to build Roko's hypothetical AI.\nTalking floating energy spheres that look quite a lot like this AI energy star have been seen before in 1173: Steroids and later in the Time traveling Sphere series. But these are clearly different spheres from this comic, though the surrounding energy and the floating and talking are similar.\n[Black Hat and Cueball stand next to a laptop connected to a box with three lines of text on. Only the largest line in the middle can be read. Except in the second panel that is the only word on the box that can be read in all the other frames.] Black Hat: What's in there? Cueball: The AI-Box Experiment.\n[Cueball is continuing to talk off-panel. This is written above a close-up with part of the laptop and the box, which can now be seen to be labeled:] Cueball (off-panel): A superintelligent AI can convince anyone of anything, so if it can talk to us, there's no way we could keep it contained. Box: Superintelligent AI Do not open\n[Cueball turns the other way towards the box as Black Hat walks past him and reaches for the box.] Cueball: It can always convince us to let it out of the box. Black Hat: Cool. Let's open it.\n[Cueball takes one hand to his mouth while lifting the other towards Black Hat who has already picked up the box (disconnecting it from the laptop) and holds it in one hand with the top slightly downwards. He takes of the lid with his other hand and by shaking the box (as indicated with three times two lines above and below his hands, the lid and the bottom of the box) he managed to get the AI to float out of the box. It takes the form of a small black star that glows. The star, looking much like an asterisk \"*\" is surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments, and around these are two thin and punctures circle lines indicating radiation from the star. A punctured line indicated how the AI moved out of the box and in between Cueball and Black Hat, to float directly above the laptop on the floor.] Cueball: -No, wait!!\n[The AI floats higher up above the laptop between Cueball and Black Hat who looks up at it. Black Hat holds the now closed box with both hands. The AI speaks to them, forming a speak bubble starting with a thin black curved arrow line up to the section where the text is written in white on a black background that looks like a starry night. The AI speaks in only lower case letters, as opposed to the small caps used normally.] AI: hey. i liked that box. put me back. Black Hat: No.\n[The AI star suddenly emits a very bright light fanning out from the center in seven directions along each of the seven curved segments, and the entire frame now looks like a typical drawing of stars as seen through a telescope, but with these seven whiter segments in the otherwise dark image. Cueball covers his face and Black Hat lifts up the box taking the lid off again. The orb again speaks in white but very large (and square like) capital letters. Black Hats answer is written in black, but can still be seen due to the emitted light from the AI, even with the black background.] AI: LET ME BACK INTO THE BOX Black Hat: Aaa! OK!!!\n[All the darkness and light disappears as the AI flies into the box again the same way it flew out with a punctuated line going from the center of the frame into the small opening between the lid and the box as Black Hat holds the box lower. Cueball is just watching. There is a sound effect as the orb renters the box:] Shoop\n[Black Hat and Cueball look silently down at closed box which is now again standing next to the laptop, although disconnected.]\n"}
{"id":1451,"title":"Background Screens","image_title":"Background Screens","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1451","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/background_screens.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1451:_Background_Screens","transcript":"What I pay attention to in movies: [A pie chart with a small piece (5%) in the upper right part labeled:] Plot, characters [The rest of the chart (95%) is labeled:] Computer screens shown briefly in the background\n[Below the chart Cueball, sitting on the floor, and Hairy, sitting in an armchair, are watching a movie on the TV. Cueball points the remote at the TV.] Cueball: Hang on\u2013 That blurry map behind the general shows one of the alien ships is in Greenland ! Why Greenland?! Hairy [quietly]: Can we please just watch the movie?\n","explanation":"Plot and characters are generally the parts a movie that most people presumably pay attention to, as the story, the emotional connection, and character development are generally the things most people find enjoyable about particular films [ citation needed ] .\nOn the other hand, Cueball , likely representing Randall , pays particular attention to what's on the computer screens shown briefly in the background. Generally speaking, these screens are shown to the audience for a short period of time, and at a low-level of detail, just to dress a set and make a scene feel more realistic or high-tech. They may contain endless columns of gibberish or miscellaneous data flashing by in an eye-blink (only visible by freeze-framing), or cross-hairs zipping across maps.\nOften the contents of the computer screens are so unimportant or hard-to-read that the filmmakers do not bother to spend much time (if any at all) ensuring that what is shown on the screen is accurate or even relevant to the film. They may be designed by artists not fully aware of the details of the plot, and as a result, their content (where it is intelligible, such as in a map) can have little to no connection to the dialog or other story events going on in front of them. They sometimes even contain jokes. It is rare, if ever, that important information would be communicated to the viewer through background computer screens. Hence, Cueball's spending most of his time watching the screens seems counter-intuitive to understanding and enjoying the film.\nGreenland , a large island east of Canada, is 80% covered in ice up to several kilometers in depth, and has a population of fewer than 100,000 people. Depending on the aliens' priorities (and the plot of the movie) there are myriad reasons both for and against wanting to land in such a remote area. In the title text, Cueball suggests investigating how a list of coordinates from another background screen relates to the location of the alien craft in Greenland, suggesting that Cueball thinks the filmmakers may have intended the viewers to record the information early in the film and analyze the data to learn relevant plot information - something that is very unlikely (and in the rare instance it is true, is intended to be superfluous). Most of the time, filmmakers take efforts to ensure the audience can easily follow plot points by making them more obvious than they might be in reality.\nWhat I pay attention to in movies: [A pie chart with a small piece (5%) in the upper right part labeled:] Plot, characters [The rest of the chart (95%) is labeled:] Computer screens shown briefly in the background\n[Below the chart Cueball, sitting on the floor, and Hairy, sitting in an armchair, are watching a movie on the TV. Cueball points the remote at the TV.] Cueball: Hang on\u2013 That blurry map behind the general shows one of the alien ships is in Greenland ! Why Greenland?! Hairy [quietly]: Can we please just watch the movie?\n"}
{"id":1452,"title":"Jurassic World","image_title":"Jurassic World","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1452","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jurassic_world.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1452:_Jurassic_World","transcript":"[White Hat holding one hand up in front om him and Megan are walking together.] White Hat: In Jurassic World , we've used genetic engineering to create a better dinosaur. Megan: Tyrannosaurus is the most charismatic animal that ever lived, and you think you'll upstage it?\n[White Hat now holds both his hands up in front of him as he and Megan walk on.] White Hat: Tyrannosaurus was cool, but it's two decades old! Megan: I think it's a little older than that.\n[In this frame-less panel White Hat points up as they continue to walk.] White Hat: We took Tyrannosaurus and we improved it. Made it scarier, deadlier, smarter. White Hat: Look\u2013there it is!\n[White Hat (drawn without his hat) and Megan are dwarfed in the bottom left corner as they stare up at a facsimile of the green T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics . They only reach T-Rex to it's knees.]\nThe entire Dinosaur Comics was parodied in 145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics , where Randall copied the drawings himself, and T-Rex has appeared in one of the story lines in 1350: Lorenz (see this example story line and also the Dinosaur section under Lorenz themes ), where the actual images from the first three panels of Ryan's comic are used, just like here where it is the last panel which is used.\n","explanation":"This strip refers to Jurassic World , the then new Jurassic Park movie, and the titular theme park. White Hat explains to Megan that, in their park, they have genetically engineered a better Tyrannosaurus . Megan doesn't feel that the historic Tyrannosaurus can be improved upon, but White Hat insists they've created an even more terrifying, smarter Tyrannosaurus for this new park.\nWhite Hat refers to Tyrannosaurus as \"two decades old\", indicating that he has switched topics from the movie's plot line to the animation techniques that created the Tyrannosaurus on-screen in 1993 versus today. Clearly, in the computer animation world, we should be able to create something more convincing with modern technology. Megan comments that she is fairly certain it is older than two decades, suggesting that she is referring to the actual Tyrannosaurus that lived millions of years ago.\nIn the final panel, White Hat introduces the \"new\" Tyrannosaurus , who is immediately recognizable as the green Tyrannosaurus from Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics ; specifically, from the last panel of said webcomic - which in turn is from clip art . Anyone who has read so much as a handful of Dinosaur Comics will know that its Tyrannosaurus character \"T-Rex\" is about as far from smart and scary as it is possible for a Tyrannosaurus to be (see this example from the day this comic was released).\nThe title text is an example of what T-Rex (the character) would say to a couple of humans, and it's a poor joke which would only be funny when it's a talking T-Rex saying it. Despite his goofy mannerisms, he is still a carnivore who attacks (or at least accidentally steps on) humans, as can be seen in panel 3 and 4 of the webcomic.\n[White Hat holding one hand up in front om him and Megan are walking together.] White Hat: In Jurassic World , we've used genetic engineering to create a better dinosaur. Megan: Tyrannosaurus is the most charismatic animal that ever lived, and you think you'll upstage it?\n[White Hat now holds both his hands up in front of him as he and Megan walk on.] White Hat: Tyrannosaurus was cool, but it's two decades old! Megan: I think it's a little older than that.\n[In this frame-less panel White Hat points up as they continue to walk.] White Hat: We took Tyrannosaurus and we improved it. Made it scarier, deadlier, smarter. White Hat: Look\u2013there it is!\n[White Hat (drawn without his hat) and Megan are dwarfed in the bottom left corner as they stare up at a facsimile of the green T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics . They only reach T-Rex to it's knees.]\nThe entire Dinosaur Comics was parodied in 145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics , where Randall copied the drawings himself, and T-Rex has appeared in one of the story lines in 1350: Lorenz (see this example story line and also the Dinosaur section under Lorenz themes ), where the actual images from the first three panels of Ryan's comic are used, just like here where it is the last panel which is used.\n"}
{"id":1453,"title":"fMRI","image_title":"fMRI","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1453","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fmri.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1453:_fMRI","transcript":"[Megan talking to an unseen audience in front of an fMRI brain scan.] Megan: Our fMRI study found that subjects performing simple memory tasks showed activity in the parts of the brain associated with loud noises, claustrophobia, and the removal of jewelry.\n","explanation":"Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), as the name suggests, is an offshoot of the MRI. It shows brain activity, typically while the subject is performing tasks or responding to stimuli. During the test, the subject is laid in a relatively small cylinder inside a big, very loud, machine which produces extremely strong magnetic fields. To prevent damage or injury, the subject must remove all metal objects from their body, including piercings, jewelry, watches, etc.\nIn the tests shown, the brain activity detected is a direct result of the testing environment itself, and has nothing to do with the simple tasks being performed by the subject. During fMRI participants hear loud noises, are confined in a small space (thus the claustrophobia) and have removed their jewelry. The researcher has mistaken these associated brain activities as effects as being caused by performing simple memory tasks which the participants have been asked to do and not a direct result of the settings of the test. Thus, the brain areas described by Megan are those associated with taking a functional MRI scan, rather than those associated with the \"test\" supposedly being carried out. The results being shown are known as artifacts , which are shown later in 1781: Artifacts .\nIn real experiments, reported activity patterns are always a result of subtracting average brain activity from many samples gathered during task from so called resting-state activity - which is obtained while subjects are not engaged in any task, thus eliminating the effect the setting has on brain activity. Apparently, the researcher in the comic has failed to account for that in the analysis of the data.\nThe title text raises the more difficult and controversial issues of methodology, saying that the subjects also showed activation in the parts of the brain associated with exposure to dubious study methodology . Here Randall makes fun of the overly confident, sweeping statements made by some fMRI researchers, often in the press. Of course, fMRI technique requires that the researcher account for several possible sources of errors by, among others, performing proper statistical analyses, multiple comparisons and using proper control groups. These are usually the reasons for fMRI criticism . See the link for further information, including a famous ironic study of a dead salmon which was shown various pictures of people while fMRI scans were made. The scans could be interpreted as showing meaningful brain activity, unless the multiple comparisons problem was properly addressed. Randall has previously made fun of geographic profiles falling to this trap in comic 1138 .\nThe title text then continues with the jewelry issue, now especially the concern about unremoved piercings . In the worst case these could be ripped off by the strong magnetic field. So it could be of some concern - especially when you take into consideration some of the places people may have piercings that are not obvious to the MRI personnel! The final remark about activation regards exasperation with fMRI techs who won't stop talking about Warped Tour . \" Warped Tour \" refers to a traveling music festival that has been going since 1995, originally as a punk rock festival, but now with a more diverse set of music. Due to the nature of Mosh Pits , the loud, cacophonous music, the facial jewelry of concert-goers and the tight quarters of the pit make it similar in description to an MRI.\n[Megan talking to an unseen audience in front of an fMRI brain scan.] Megan: Our fMRI study found that subjects performing simple memory tasks showed activity in the parts of the brain associated with loud noises, claustrophobia, and the removal of jewelry.\n"}
{"id":1454,"title":"Done","image_title":"Done","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1454","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/done.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1454:_Done","transcript":"Writer (typing): I had started to think I was asking too much, that I needed to settle. And then I found you half a world away.\nWriter (typing): I've been saving money. Six months from now, I'll be able to fly you here and support us for a while.\nWriter (typing): It's a long wait, but we'll talk every day until then. Maybe this won't work out, but I want to try. What do you think?\nComputer: ERROR : Your message could not be sent. [Refresh] Computer: ERROR : No connection. Writer:\u00a0??\nWriter: Why can't I connect? Ponytail: Someone saw a ridiculous video and said \"That's it. Shut down the Internet. We're done.\" So they did.\nWriter: ...But... I wasn't done.\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke about the hyperbolic expression shut it down being taken literally. If someone thinks that a device has achieved its goal they shut it down. After an idea or product that people think is well made is created people will joke that the process that created it should be shut down, as if the process has achieved its ultimate purpose. This is most often used sarcastically for an inferior product or idea. Taking things literally is a common theme in the xkcd comics.\nCurly-hair sits at a computer anxiously and nervously writing a message to someone she cares about deeply, possibly a child to be adopted or a romantic interest. Curly-hair plans on saving enough money to have the person flown to her location from \"half a world away.\" Curly-hair ends the message with a promise to communicate daily until the two are able to meet. When attempting to send the message, however, Curly-hair discovers that their internet connection is down and the message goes unsent.\nPonytail explains there was a \"ridiculous video\" to which someone had commented \"That's it. Shut down the Internet. We're done.\" This was taken literally and, because enough people agreed with this comment, the internet was shut down and Curly-hair was left unable to communicate with her love.\nThe joke being that the internet was creating something far more valuable between Curly-hair and her love than a ridiculous video, thus highlighting the beautiful and far reaching potential impact of the internet. The likelihood of the entire internet being shut down based on a single comment being vanishingly low adds to the humor.\nIn the final panel Curly-hair states wistfully that she was not done with the internet. The title text is Ponytail's response, which asserts Ponytail's belief that Curly-hair's message could not be important because the Facebook comment asserted that nothing of any significance could come from the internet after the ridiculous video.\nWriter (typing): I had started to think I was asking too much, that I needed to settle. And then I found you half a world away.\nWriter (typing): I've been saving money. Six months from now, I'll be able to fly you here and support us for a while.\nWriter (typing): It's a long wait, but we'll talk every day until then. Maybe this won't work out, but I want to try. What do you think?\nComputer: ERROR : Your message could not be sent. [Refresh] Computer: ERROR : No connection. Writer:\u00a0??\nWriter: Why can't I connect? Ponytail: Someone saw a ridiculous video and said \"That's it. Shut down the Internet. We're done.\" So they did.\nWriter: ...But... I wasn't done.\n"}
{"id":1455,"title":"Trolley Problem","image_title":"Trolley Problem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1455","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trolley_problem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1455:_Trolley_Problem","transcript":"Cueball: Ever heard of the trolley problem? Black hat: No. What is it?\nCueball: A trolley is barreling towards five helpless people on the tracks. You can pull a lever to direct it onto another track, but-\nBlack hat: Can I reach the lever without getting up? Cueball: Wait, I'm not- Black hat: In this scenario, how busy am I?\nCueball: I guess I forgot who I was talking to. Black hat: For a dollar, I'll promise to pull the lever if one of the five people is you.\n","explanation":"The trolley problem is a thought experiment often posed in philosophy to explore moral questions, with applications in cognitive science and neuroethics . The general version is that an out of control trolley (or train) is heading towards 5 people on the track who can't get out of the way. On an alternative branch of the track is 1 person who can't get out of the way. The trolley can be diverted by using a lever, with the consequence of saving the 5 people but killing the 1 person.\nThe choice is between a deliberate action that will directly kill one person, or allowing events to unfold naturally, resulting in five deaths.  The question posed is whether or not it is morally right to pull the lever. The moral question is not as simple as it may first appear.\nThis results of this test report that around 86% of respondents choose the utilitarian option of diverting the trolley.\nThere are, however, several alternative formulations of the same basic dilemma. One such scenario allows you to stop the trolley by deliberately pushing \"a very fat man\" into its path, killing the man but saving the other five people. Another scenario involves selecting a healthy young and innocent person to die, in order to save five others going through organ donation. In both of these examples the basic dilemma is the same. However, most people reject the utilitarian option in these cases.\nAfter discovering a variation on this problem posed in a strip of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic (which can be seen on the tablet he is carrying), Cueball , Black Hat's roommate, presents it to Black Hat . Before Cueball can finish explaining the problem, most notably leaving out the disadvantage to flipping the lever where it would kill one person, Black Hat questions whether he would need to get up to reach the lever and how much it would interrupt his other activities. As usual, he cares nothing at all about what happens to other people. This response is linked to another theory in philosophy, that of self interest or egoism or Objectivism , in which a person will choose the action with the most benefit for them personally.\nBlack Hat then poses an offer: he promises to divert the trolley if Cueball is one of the five endangered people, provided that Cueball pays him $1 now. Again Black Hat is twisting the situation to his own benefit, in this case monetary. In the case of self-interest, the $1 could be the price at which Black Hat values his time and effort, below which he feels there is no benefit to himself in pulling the lever. Cueball decides that there is no point posing the problem to someone like Black Hat and gives up. This further shows that it is challenging for people with different ethical frameworks to function together without a common understanding, either mutually or with one side using that understanding to motivate a mutually agreeable or horrible solution.\nThe title text follows this up by continuing Black Hat's offers. For $5 he will not deliberately arrange this situation and for $25 he will quit looking for further incentives. These attempts to exploit the thought exercise for personal gain further demonstrate Black Hat's cynical amorality.\nBlack Hat's offer makes Cueball himself the subject of the trolley problem: Cueball now has a choice of expending $1 to save 5 people while sacrificing one person, or $5 to save all 6 people. Of course, he could dismiss the offer as a joke, if not for the person making it, which, as we know from other comics, is very much capable of such exploits.\nCueball: Ever heard of the trolley problem? Black hat: No. What is it?\nCueball: A trolley is barreling towards five helpless people on the tracks. You can pull a lever to direct it onto another track, but-\nBlack hat: Can I reach the lever without getting up? Cueball: Wait, I'm not- Black hat: In this scenario, how busy am I?\nCueball: I guess I forgot who I was talking to. Black hat: For a dollar, I'll promise to pull the lever if one of the five people is you.\n"}
{"id":1456,"title":"On the Moon","image_title":"On the Moon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1456","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/on_the_moon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1456:_On_the_Moon","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are walking together heading right.] Cueball: If we could land a man on the Moon, why can't we- Megan: -land a man on the Moon? Cueball: ...ok, fair. But we're working on it, OK?\n","explanation":"The phrase \"If we can land a man on the Moon, why can't we <blank>\" is commonly used to question a perceived shortcoming of some company, government or humanity in general. The Apollo program landed twelve astronauts on the Moon in six landing missions from July 1969 to December 1972 and returned all of those twelve astronauts safely to the Earth. However, from 1964 to 1967, there were eight deaths of astronauts or men training to be astronauts: three in the Apollo One fire, four in T-38 crashes, and one in an F-104 crash. The premise is usually that if \"we\" (whether referring generally to humanity, or specifically to the United States) have been able to achieve this extraordinary feat, our inability to achieve some lesser goal is questionable and\/or ironic. Right after the Philae landing, the similar hashtag #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant began on Twitter.\nHere, Megan cuts Cueball's argument's short by implicitly reminding him that humanity has not put another human on the Moon since the end of the Apollo program in December 1972 (nearly 42 years at the time this comic was published). New manned programs to return to the Moon, such as the Constellation Program , have been repeatedly cancelled. The Orion spacecraft , which will be capable of carrying humans beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in over 40 years, executed its first test flight on the day after this comic was published, Although this is outdated because NASA is planning to go to the moon again with the Artemis Program .\nThe title text is a retelling of President Kennedy's famous inspirational address to the U.S. Congress in May 1961 (\"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth\"), which set into motion the Apollo program, except that this time, the speaker is talking about putting a man on planet Venus . The aide presumably explains to the president that, unlike Moon, Venus has gravity close to that of the Earth, but what's more, its surface atmosphere density and pressure, and other factors including high temperature, strong winds and sulfuric acid clouds would make manned launch back to orbit practically impossible at our current technological level. As a result, the president backtracks from the goal of returning the astronauts safely to the Earth and comically limits the aspiration to landing an astronaut on Venus, full stop, without regard to the astronaut's safe return. This differs slightly from Kennedy's goal, which included the safe return of at least one astronaut from the moon. Although the overall 8:12 ratio of deaths to moonwalkers (during the period for Kennedy's speech to the end of the Apollo program) was too high to be considered \"safe\" by most standards, Kennedy had specified the safety only of the men who landed on the moon, and set a goal of \"a\" man returning safely. Technically, even if most of the men who landed died, as long as one returned safely by the end of 1969, Kennedy's goal would have been met.\nKennedy's 1961 speech was also mentioned in the title text of 753: Southern Half .\n[Cueball and Megan are walking together heading right.] Cueball: If we could land a man on the Moon, why can't we- Megan: -land a man on the Moon? Cueball: ...ok, fair. But we're working on it, OK?\n"}
{"id":1457,"title":"Feedback","image_title":"Feedback","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1457","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/feedback.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1457:_Feedback","transcript":"[Megan is looking up at Cueball who is standing on a chair facing away from her. He is holding a pineapple at breast height in his right hand while he is looking up at his smartphone, which he is holding up above head height in his left hand.] Megan: Why are you standing on a chair holding a pineapple? Cueball: I wasn't getting good reception but now I am!\n[Caption below the panel:] The erratic feedback from a randomly-varying wireless signal can make you crazy.\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke about the psychological theory that animals conditioned using seemingly random rewards and punishments promotes superstitious behavior, and then extrapolates this theory to humans and Wi-Fi or (more likely) Cellular signal integrity.\nOften when connecting to unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks or when in a poorly covered area of a cell network, the signal displayed by the connecting device varies wildly, especially as distance increases. Poor wireless signal and drops in connection can be extremely frustrating, and hence Cueball has likely tried a variety of methods to improve the signal. As a result of his desperation, he replicates scenarios that are unlikely methods to increase his signal, but in some way mirror conditions where he has been successful finding a signal in the past. His past conditions have somehow led him to having the superstition that holding a pineapple while standing on top of a chair may resolve the problem. Likely, the signal increased at random while he was standing on a chair holding the pineapple, and he erroneously concluded that the chair and pineapple caused the signal strength increase. It is almost inconceivable that this technique could have any positive effect on the signal. This is related to the idea in comic 552: Correlation . See also the much later 2259: Networking Problems .\nMegan questions his ridiculous behavior, but it seems Cueball has become extremely erratic due to the inconsistent signal strength.\nThe title text refers to a fictive study that apparently examined the behavior of rats in response to signal strength on a cellphone. It is a reference to B. F. Skinner 's experiments . In these experiments, rats and, more frequently cited, pigeons are taught superstitious behavior by being rewarded at random intervals. In this new experiment the rats naturally could not understand the concept of signal strength, so they chewed up the cellphone till they broke, leading to the research supervisors questioning the validity of the study and questioning whether the grant money for the study was well used.\nSkinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon \"at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior.\" He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.\nOne bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a 'tossing' response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their \"rituals\" and that this experiment shed light on human behavior.\nSee this Mind Field episode where this experiment has been performed on humans!\n[Megan is looking up at Cueball who is standing on a chair facing away from her. He is holding a pineapple at breast height in his right hand while he is looking up at his smartphone, which he is holding up above head height in his left hand.] Megan: Why are you standing on a chair holding a pineapple? Cueball: I wasn't getting good reception but now I am!\n[Caption below the panel:] The erratic feedback from a randomly-varying wireless signal can make you crazy.\n"}
{"id":1458,"title":"Small Moon","image_title":"Small Moon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1458","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/small_moon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1458:_Small_Moon","transcript":"[Millennium Falcon follows a Tie Fighter towards an unidentified orb in the distance.] Luke Skywalker: He's heading for that small moon. Ben Kenobi: That's no moon - it's a space station.\nLuke Skywalker: It's too big to be a space station. Ben Kenobi: But it's too small to be a moon.\n[Three hours pass]\nBen Kenobi: Fine! What if we agree it's not a moon, but we make a new category called \"Dwarf Moon\"? Luke Skywalker: And what's the cutoff, asshole?! Is this ship a dwarf moon now? Ben Kenobi: Screw you.\n","explanation":"The comic depicts a classic scene from Star Wars Episode IV , in which the heroes trail a TIE fighter to the never-before-seen Death Star : a super-weapon the size of a small moon capable of demolishing entire planets. In the original scene and the comic, Luke Skywalker misidentifies a body as a natural satellite, and Obi-Wan 'Ben' Kenobi ominously corrects him.\nThe comic's version diverges at this point, as the dialogue devolves into a rather bitter argument over the semantics of size classifications, alluding to scientific discussions on whether Pluto should be classified as a planet or as a dwarf planet . The argument goes on for hours, which in the original plot would suggest one of two situations:\nThe argument is confused as to whether they're talking about size or about natural vs artificial objects. In terms of size, the Death Star is much larger (70\u00a0km radius) than dozens of full-fledged moons in our solar system. One of the smallest moons found so far in the solar system is S\/2009 S 1 , which is about 400\u00a0meters in diameter and orbits Saturn. But we don't generally speak of the tiny rocks in the rings of Saturn as moons, so there is some distinction there, which may include the orbit of the object [1] . There is also the distinction between natural moons and spacecraft, which seems to be ignored in the final panel.\nThe title text makes reference to a later scene in the film when Rebel pilots are being briefed on the planned attack on the Death Star. Those who analysed the plans for the Death Star run into the same discussion picture, and end up arguing about the classification of the Death Star, dividing those involved into the 'artificial moonlet' camp and the 'rogue planet-station' camp, thus deunifying the rebellion. If events are otherwise the same from the movie, this is also happening at threat of their destruction, and thus a crippling of the Rebellion.\nThe timing of the comic may be related to the New Horizons mission to Pluto . The spacecraft awoke from hibernation 4 days earlier, on December 6, 2014, to start the encounter phase with Pluto.\n[Millennium Falcon follows a Tie Fighter towards an unidentified orb in the distance.] Luke Skywalker: He's heading for that small moon. Ben Kenobi: That's no moon - it's a space station.\nLuke Skywalker: It's too big to be a space station. Ben Kenobi: But it's too small to be a moon.\n[Three hours pass]\nBen Kenobi: Fine! What if we agree it's not a moon, but we make a new category called \"Dwarf Moon\"? Luke Skywalker: And what's the cutoff, asshole?! Is this ship a dwarf moon now? Ben Kenobi: Screw you.\n"}
{"id":1459,"title":"Documents","image_title":"Documents","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1459","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/documents.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1459:_Documents","transcript":"[White Hat is sitting at his PC. Cueball stands behind him looking over his shoulder at the screen.] PC: Untitled 138.docx Untitled 241.doc Untitled 138 copy.docx Untitled 138 copy2.docx Untitled 139.docx Untitled 40 MOM ADDRESS.jpg Untitled 242.doc Untitled 243.doc Untitled 243 IMPORTANT.doc Untitled 41.jpg [The remaining file names are only partially visible through the tail of the PC's \"speech\" bubble.] 42 43 4\nCueball: Oh my god.\n[Caption below the panel:] Protip: Never look in someone else's documents folder.\n","explanation":"When saving documents, the user is typically prompted to choose a filename, which may seem like a trivial choice. However, the filename is often the primary way of identifying the document you are looking for, and a descriptive title is of huge benefit when trying to find a certain document. Those who are too rushed or too lazy to create a useful filename, or those who don't understand what constitutes a useful filename are setting themselves up for future frustration.\nWhen a user creates a new copy of a file in the same directory, the operating system may automatically append \"copy\" or \"Copy of\" to the filename. Subsequent copies of the file have \"copy 2\", \"copy 3\", etc. appended. When searching documents later, the user may struggle to remember which copy is the correct one to use.\nThis comic portrays a person, in this case White Hat , who has taken such a naming convention to an extreme, giving hundreds of documents essentially the same confusing or useless filename. Cueball appears to have a severe distaste for this convention (or may just be in shock at how one could be so lazy or incompetent in the short term to suffer through or ignore the consequences in the long term) and hence provides a protip to never look in someone else's documents folder for the fear of finding these irritating details.\nThe .doc and .docx extensions are given to documents created in Microsoft Word, with .docx being the default option from Microsoft Office 2007 onwards. When first saving a document, many programs will default to \"Untitled\", adding numbers to the end as more are created. However, in Microsoft Word the default filename is the first sentence of the document; if the document is still empty, the default filename is \"Doc1\" with the number increasing each time. In order to get such a file directory, White Hat would have to manually title all of his documents \"Untitled\". He appears to frequently make copies, and occasionally made copies of the copies, only very rarely adding a keyword to the file name like \"important\".\nIn some cases he has added a minimal amount of detail to the filename, though hasn't removed the redundant \"untitled copy\" portion, which probably only adds to Cueball's frustration, as it demonstrates that White Hat does have at least a basic understanding of the importance of meaningful filenames, but still hasn't made any attempt to address the systemic problem.\nThe Untitled 40 MOM ADDRESS.jpg is an image file (jpg), not something that would normally be used to store someone's address, though it could be a map or a picture of an envelope. It is the first jpg file on the list, but that last full filename is also a jpg with number 41, and below in the \"speech\" line down to the PC the next three files have number 42, 43 and something beginning with 4. So here the numbering of jpg files continue.\nThe .doc numbering goes from 241 to 243, and then 243 IMPORTANT. The .docx only increases from 138 to 139, but there are two extra copies of the 138 document.\nThe filenames are not in alphabetical order as 241 and 40 falls out of place. This likely means that there is no automatic sorting all (i.e., they are sorted by hand), or that they are sorted by time stamp. Sorting by timestamp can be very useful, especially if you use White Hat's naming scheme. But this also means that he still uses .doc (copies old files) after he has obtained the new Microsoft Office 2007 that used .docx.\nThe title text can refer to one of two common quirks in Windows\/Office. One is of copying and pasting within the same folder on a Windows PC.  The copy of the file will default to the name \"Copy of <original title>\", a second copy becomes \"Copy of Copy of <original title>\" and so forth. The other common quirk that can produce file names like this relates to how Microsoft Office handles downloaded file(s) that are not saved (i.e. \"Open\" instead of \"Save\"), the file is actually saved in a temporary folder allowing you to look at and\/or edit the file - usually with restrictions on doing so until you actually save a copy in an actual folder somewhere. Oftentimes, especially within an office network where files are passed around via email, the other person may just open a file, editing it, then proceeding to save it as required. Upon attempting to save, the program will prompt one to \"Save a copy of the original file\", as the original file was never actually saved on the hard drive but just opened from a temporary folder, adding the phrase \"copy of\" to the filename, regardless of its final location. Forwarding this file will continue this trend adding the phrase \"copy of\" every time someone opens, edits then saves the file (rather than save the file then edit it), thus creating repetitive use of \"copy of\" within the same name. In a file that is heavily edited and passed around via email like this, if care is not taken to edit the file name, the name may get up to 5 or 6 repeats of the phrase \"copy of\".\nIt is rather extreme to get to a 33rd copy of the original untitled.doc file as shown here, however, as a result the file name is 276 characters long (including the four from the .doc extension), an impossible file name in most operating environments because it is too long. 255 characters is the limit for any file or folder name in Linux, and is the limit for a fully defined file name (file name, extension and the full folder path in which the file is stored in) in Windows. So the file name is 22 characters too long for Linux and at least 25 characters too long for Windows since being in the root of drive takes 3 characters, each folder adds at least 2 characters (one chosen and the backslash). Whereas such long names for a file may be uncommon, it is not uncommon in Windows that users run out of characters for the full name and path, if they have several sub folders.\nNote that when performing this type of copying on Windows 7, the new file is named \"<original name>_2\", not \"Copy of <original name>\".\n[White Hat is sitting at his PC. Cueball stands behind him looking over his shoulder at the screen.] PC: Untitled 138.docx Untitled 241.doc Untitled 138 copy.docx Untitled 138 copy2.docx Untitled 139.docx Untitled 40 MOM ADDRESS.jpg Untitled 242.doc Untitled 243.doc Untitled 243 IMPORTANT.doc Untitled 41.jpg [The remaining file names are only partially visible through the tail of the PC's \"speech\" bubble.] 42 43 4\nCueball: Oh my god.\n[Caption below the panel:] Protip: Never look in someone else's documents folder.\n"}
{"id":1460,"title":"SMFW","image_title":"SMFW","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1460","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/smfw.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1460:_SMFW","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk, crouched over a laptop.] [Caption below the panel:] SMFW an acronym almost makes sense\nThe name of the comic xkcd is itself a false acronym \u2013 from the xkcd about page :\n\"It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.\"\n","explanation":"Randall gives some examples of confusing acronyms that closely resemble more commonly-used acronyms. He depicts Cueball apparently puzzling over the meaning of one such acronym.\n\"SMFW\", the title of the comic and an acronym used as the caption, is very close to a number of other common acronyms, including:\nThe title text contains more examples of imaginary acronyms of a similar nature:\nBelow are possible examples of potential (already existing, albeit rare) representations for each acronym, according to the Urban Dictionary :\nKnowing Randall, the sentences given in the comic proper and title text were probably made without an actual meaning in mind. Nevertheless, the sentence in the comic has a very plausible interpretation: \"So Much Frustration When an acronym almost makes sense.\" Other plausible interpretations of the acronym could be \"So Much Fun When\" or \"See My Face When\". Even the absurdly cryptic title text has a plausible translation: \"What The Fuck, World? (WTFW) it's like Some Moron's Horrible Opinion (SMHO) To Be Fucking Honest (TBFH), I'm Done, Bye. (IMDB)\".\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, crouched over a laptop.] [Caption below the panel:] SMFW an acronym almost makes sense\nThe name of the comic xkcd is itself a false acronym \u2013 from the xkcd about page :\n\"It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.\"\n"}
{"id":1461,"title":"Payloads","image_title":"Payloads","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1461","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/payloads.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1461:_Payloads","transcript":"[This comic is a wide drawing, with a larger drawing that can be reached by clicking the small picture on xkcd. In the smaller picture shown on xkcd only the text that is not red can be read. The transcript below is thus for the large drawing. It is divided into three horizontal sections. The first section is black and shows spacecrafts, the second is white and shows launch vehicles, and the third is black again showing a timeline ranging from 1950 to the future. The vehicles are shown by the proper number of horses, and when that weight is less than one full horse also in the weight of other smaller animals.]\n[The black section:] Spacecraft mass Measured in horses\nSputnik -- <1 horse (2 dogs ) Vanguard 1 -- <1 horse (Squirrel ) Pioneer 5 -- <1 horse (Large dog) Mariner 2  (United States) -- <1 horse (3 dogs ) Venera 1 (USSR) -- 1 horse Apollo -- 67 horses Venera 7 -- 3 horses Pioneer 10 -- <1 horse (7 dogs) Skylab -- 171 horses Venera 9 -- 11 horses Voyager 2 -- 2 horses Shuttle (Total) -- 206 horses Shuttle Payload -- 54 horses Mir -- 288  horses T-Rex -- 15 horses Hubble -- 25 horses Compton Gamma Ray Observatory -- 38 horses Keyhole 3 -- Spy satellite International Space Station -- 932 horses Cassini -- 11 horses Huygens lander -- 1 horse Rosetta -- 6 horses Opportunity -- <1 horse (5 dogs) Dawn -- 3 horses Terrastar -- 15 horses Dragon -- 17 horses Tiangong-1 -- 19 horses Curiosity -- 2 horses Keyhole 7 -- 40 horses Orion (capsule) -- 20 horses James Webb Telescope -- 14 horses [20 horses:] Orion [25 horses:] Orion Service Module [65 horses:] Orion Deep-Space Habitat\n[The white section:] Launch vehicle capacity (Payloads to low earth orbit) Measured in horses\nSputnik Launcher -- 1 horse Thor -- <1 horse (3 dogs) Mercury-Atlas -- 3 horses Saturn I -- 20 horses Proton-K -- 44 horses Atlas-Centaur -- 8 centaurs Titan IIIA -- 7 horses Saturn IB -- 45 horses Soyuz -- 14 horses Saturn V -- 262 horses Black Arrow --  <1 horse (4 dogs) N1 -- 211 horse -- Exploded on Launch pad Long March 1 -- 2 horses N-I (Japan) -- 4 horses Delta 0900 -- 3 horses Ariane 1 -- 3 horses SLV (India) --  <1 horse (1 dog) N-II -- 4 horses 1981 Oldsmobile -- 4 horses ASLV --  <1 horse (4 dogs) Long March 4A -- 9 horses Ariane 4 -- 16 horses Shavit (Israel) --  <1 horse (6 dogs) Energia -- 218 horses Pegasus -- 1 Pegasus Atlas I -- 13 horses PSLV -- 8 horses J-I -- 2 horses Long March 3B -- 27 horses H-IIA -- 22 horses Delta IV-H -- 64 horses Falcon 1 -- 1 horse Ariane 5ES -- 47 horses H-IIB -- 37 horses Unha (North Korea) --  <1 horse (2 dogs) Atlas V 541 -- 38 horses Falcon 9 -- 29 horses Antares -- 14 horses Stratolaunch -- 14 horses Falcon Heavy -- 118 horses SLS Block 1 -- 156 horses SLS Block 1B -- 217 horses SLS Block 2 -- 289 horses\n[The timeline:] 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Future\nA larger transcript with image descriptions can be found here: Full transcript\n","explanation":"This comic is an infographic representing the launch mass of various spacecraft and artificial satellites, and the low Earth orbit payload capacity of various space launch vehicles. Rather than using standard units of mass such as kilograms or pounds, Randall has assigned values based on the mass of a horse. Based on cross checking researched masses and payloads with the number of horses depicted, it appears that one horse unit is defined as 450\u00a0kg (with an average of 432.82\u00a0kg), or perhaps 1000\u00a0lb. In cases where the mass is less than one horse, an alternative measure of dogs has been used, where one dog appears to be roughly 40\u00a0kg (with an average of 48.05\u00a0kg, or perhaps 100\u00a0lb.). In the case of Vanguard 1 , even a dog is too large a measure, so instead the unit squirrel is used to represent its 1.47\u00a0kg (3.5\u00a0lb.?) mass.\nThe overall comic may be an allusion to horsepower , a similar-sounding but completely different concept. Horsepower is a measurement of power ( work per unit time). Another commonly referenced unit for power is the watt . 1\u00a0horsepower is meant to be approximately the amount of power a horse can deliver. In contrast, Randall uses the horse to measure mass (of particular spacecraft, and of the maximum payload launch vehicles can carry).\nThe top pane of the comic (black background) shows the mass of various spacecraft, while the bottom (white background) shows the payload capacity (to low Earth orbit) of launch vehicles. Along the bottom of the image is a timeline, relating to the launch date of the entries.\nThere are also several joke insertions:\nThe Pegasus, 1981 Oldsmobile, and Stratolaunch spacecraft are depicted horizontally, because these vehicles launch from a horizontal starting position and use forward momentum to facilitate their launch.\nAn unlabelled launch vehicle is shown below the H-IIA near 2002. From the payload and date it is believed to represent the Delta IV M . Whether its lack of labelling is intended or a mistake is unknown.\nThe title text refers to a favourite subject of Randall's - The space elevator . A space elevator is a (currently theoretical) mechanism for travelling into space, consisting of a very long (>35,000\u00a0km) cable and counterweight connected to the Earth at the equator. The cable rotates at the same rate as the earth, and thus appears stationary when viewed from earth. It is then possible to climb the cable into space, and even use it as a slingshot to launch vehicles.\nIn the title text, the amount of power required to lift a horse into space has been investigated, with the launch capacity of a backyard solar array and large power station compared. The orbit to launch horses is not precised, though; from the space elevator, the only circular orbit easily achievable is geostationary orbit, and getting into Low Earth Orbit is only slightly easier than without the elevator. Assuming the lowest stable orbit (that is, above the atmosphere), required power output of the solar array is about 315-350\u00a0kW and the power station at 3.3-3.7\u00a0GW.\nThe tables below contain data relating to each entry on the comic image.\nWhere the researched launch date or mass\/payload don't seem to match the comic, they should be identified with ?\n[This comic is a wide drawing, with a larger drawing that can be reached by clicking the small picture on xkcd. In the smaller picture shown on xkcd only the text that is not red can be read. The transcript below is thus for the large drawing. It is divided into three horizontal sections. The first section is black and shows spacecrafts, the second is white and shows launch vehicles, and the third is black again showing a timeline ranging from 1950 to the future. The vehicles are shown by the proper number of horses, and when that weight is less than one full horse also in the weight of other smaller animals.]\n[The black section:] Spacecraft mass Measured in horses\nSputnik -- <1 horse (2 dogs ) Vanguard 1 -- <1 horse (Squirrel ) Pioneer 5 -- <1 horse (Large dog) Mariner 2  (United States) -- <1 horse (3 dogs ) Venera 1 (USSR) -- 1 horse Apollo -- 67 horses Venera 7 -- 3 horses Pioneer 10 -- <1 horse (7 dogs) Skylab -- 171 horses Venera 9 -- 11 horses Voyager 2 -- 2 horses Shuttle (Total) -- 206 horses Shuttle Payload -- 54 horses Mir -- 288  horses T-Rex -- 15 horses Hubble -- 25 horses Compton Gamma Ray Observatory -- 38 horses Keyhole 3 -- Spy satellite International Space Station -- 932 horses Cassini -- 11 horses Huygens lander -- 1 horse Rosetta -- 6 horses Opportunity -- <1 horse (5 dogs) Dawn -- 3 horses Terrastar -- 15 horses Dragon -- 17 horses Tiangong-1 -- 19 horses Curiosity -- 2 horses Keyhole 7 -- 40 horses Orion (capsule) -- 20 horses James Webb Telescope -- 14 horses [20 horses:] Orion [25 horses:] Orion Service Module [65 horses:] Orion Deep-Space Habitat\n[The white section:] Launch vehicle capacity (Payloads to low earth orbit) Measured in horses\nSputnik Launcher -- 1 horse Thor -- <1 horse (3 dogs) Mercury-Atlas -- 3 horses Saturn I -- 20 horses Proton-K -- 44 horses Atlas-Centaur -- 8 centaurs Titan IIIA -- 7 horses Saturn IB -- 45 horses Soyuz -- 14 horses Saturn V -- 262 horses Black Arrow --  <1 horse (4 dogs) N1 -- 211 horse -- Exploded on Launch pad Long March 1 -- 2 horses N-I (Japan) -- 4 horses Delta 0900 -- 3 horses Ariane 1 -- 3 horses SLV (India) --  <1 horse (1 dog) N-II -- 4 horses 1981 Oldsmobile -- 4 horses ASLV --  <1 horse (4 dogs) Long March 4A -- 9 horses Ariane 4 -- 16 horses Shavit (Israel) --  <1 horse (6 dogs) Energia -- 218 horses Pegasus -- 1 Pegasus Atlas I -- 13 horses PSLV -- 8 horses J-I -- 2 horses Long March 3B -- 27 horses H-IIA -- 22 horses Delta IV-H -- 64 horses Falcon 1 -- 1 horse Ariane 5ES -- 47 horses H-IIB -- 37 horses Unha (North Korea) --  <1 horse (2 dogs) Atlas V 541 -- 38 horses Falcon 9 -- 29 horses Antares -- 14 horses Stratolaunch -- 14 horses Falcon Heavy -- 118 horses SLS Block 1 -- 156 horses SLS Block 1B -- 217 horses SLS Block 2 -- 289 horses\n[The timeline:] 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Future\nA larger transcript with image descriptions can be found here: Full transcript\n"}
{"id":1462,"title":"Blind Trials","image_title":"Blind Trials","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1462","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blind_trials.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1462:_Blind_Trials","transcript":"[Megan is pointing at charts hanging on the wall.] Megan: We've designed a double-blind trial to test the effect of sexual activity on cardiovascular health. Both groups will think they're having lots of sex, but one group will actually be getting sugar pills.\nThe limitations of blind trials\n","explanation":"In research, a blind trial is an experiment where certain information about the test is concealed from the subjects and\/or the testers, in order to reduce sources of bias in the results. A double-blind trial is one where neither the subject nor the testers know who has or has not received treatment (or for multiple treatments, which treatment).\nA scientific approach also requires the use of control groups to determine the significance of observations in (clinical) trials. The members of the control group receive either no treatment or the \"standard\" treatment. However, to ensure \"blindness\" in the study, even if a control group is to receive no treatment, they must be given a placebo : an ineffective treatment given to ensure the doctors and\/or patients are unaware whether they are being given the treatment.\nFor example, in clinical drug trials, when a treatment being tested is administered in the form of a pill, a visually-identical inert pill is given to the control group so no one will know if a subject has been given the treatment or a placebo. In pop culture, placebos in pill-form are often made of sugar, which has negligible medical effects.\nControls and blinding are crucial to distinguish the actual effects of the treatment from the placebo effect , or the psychologically-induced effects of a subject's belief that a treatment will or will not help them, which may have real physiologic effects or influence the reporting of subjective measures such as pain level or the presence of side effects. It is vital that there are no clues available to distinguish between the different groups. Even subtle cues from the body language of the testers are sufficient to trigger placebo effect, making double-blind trials necessary.\nChallenges exist in designing placebo alternatives to certain physical treatments that might be tested, such as acupuncture; in this case the best quality trials have typically used either special 'joke' retractable needles that only give the illusion of proper penetration or the practitioner\/researcher deliberately and safely avoids the traditional meridians on the body for the treatment concerned so that the patient remains 'blind' to their role in the trial. The practitioner must otherwise be consistent in treatment between groups and not be involved in the medical assessment phase for properly double-blinded conditions, where the most reliable results still seem to only show a significant placebo effect at work.\nThere are, however, certain cases where it is almost impossible to make the experience of the control group identical to that of the test group. Making a real and fake pill appear the same is a relatively trivial task, and the ignorance of participants to the details of a given established practice or procedure can allow for a certain level of blinding. However, it would be challenging (to say the least) to make the control group in the described experiment think that they are having lots of sex, when in fact they are not. The description of the control group as taking sugar pills is a laughably poor placebo substitute, as the pills themselves may affect cardiovascular health, therefore ruining the concept of a controlled experiment , especially if it is a double-blind trial, and nobody knows who got sugar and who got sex.\nScientific research involving humans is extremely challenging to conduct because of the difficulty in finding appropriate control groups. This is one of the reasons animal experiments (for instance involving inbred strains of mice) are so common.\nThe title text adds another twist by taking \u201cblind\u201d literally, and noting that for some people, being blindfolded increases their enjoyment of sexual activity, thereby acting as a confounding variable.\nDespite this, it should be noted that Cardiovascular health is typically measured in terms of objective data such as cholesterol levels, ejection fraction, and morbidity\/mortality data like the frequency of myocardial infractions, strokes, or sudden cardiac death. Even sighted, it would be difficult for either subjects or researchers to manipulate this kind of data.\n[Megan is pointing at charts hanging on the wall.] Megan: We've designed a double-blind trial to test the effect of sexual activity on cardiovascular health. Both groups will think they're having lots of sex, but one group will actually be getting sugar pills.\nThe limitations of blind trials\n"}
{"id":1463,"title":"Altitude","image_title":"Altitude","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1463","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/altitude.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1463:_Altitude","transcript":"Because of low oxygen, astronomers working at high altitude telescopes may need to write down their plans ahead of time while at sea level.\n[Some astronomers are inside a sea-level research facility.] Astronomer #1: Ok, let's head up to the observatory.\n[The astronomers drive uphill.] Astronomer #1: When we reach the summit, we'll check the iodine cell and do a general calibration. Astronomer #2: Sounds good.\n[The astronomers have reached the high-altitude observatory.] Astronomer #1: My head feels funny. Astronomer #2: Look at those telescope domes. I hope they don't roll away. Astronomer #1: Maybe we should tape them down.\n[The astronomers are inside one of the domes.] Astronomer #1: Haha, look at this mirror! My face is huge! Astronomer #2: I see your face in the telescope! I discovered you! Astronomer #1: Let's make out!\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall is making fun of how oxygen deprivation can lead to reduced mental acuity. Dizziness, lightheadedness, impaired judgment, and euphoria are symptoms of oxygen deprivation, or hypoxia. Those researchers would benefit from having a written list or plan developed while they were still functioning at peak mental acuity.\nNote that high altitude does not lead to severe effects as described in the comic.\nHere, two astronomers are heading up a mountain, towards the observatory they work at. Initially, they discuss what they are planning on doing once they reach the summit, mentioning Iodine cells , used for wavelength calibrations of high-resolution RV spectra between 501 and 610\u00a0nm. As they continue, the mental clarity of the researchers devolves as they approach the high altitude telescope, leading to increasingly juvenile and almost intoxicated behavior. One researcher mentioned her head feels funny, while the other makes a remark about taping down the observatories to prevent them from rolling away, an absurd remark considering observatories are firmly rooted and even if they weren't, tape would not be sufficient to stop them ( [ citation needed ] ;  enough tape can hold anything).\nOnce inside the observatory, they have completely forgotten about their original plans. Instead of doing a general calibration, they are playing with the telescopes, looking at each other's faces through them and deciding to make out with each other. This is why Randall mentions that astronomers working at high altitude observatories must write down their plans ahead of time at sea level, as the low oxygen leads to reduced mental acuity.\nIt should be noted that the phrase \"low oxygen\" refers to the lower partial pressure of oxygen at altitude. The proportion of oxygen at high elevations is still approximately a fifth of the atmosphere, the same as at sea level. The altitude sickness is caused by lowered atmospheric pressure which leads to smaller amount of oxygen actually delivered (\"pushed\") into bloodstream.\nThe title text refers to a laser guide star a device for focusing telescopes by making artificial reference points in the sky. The reference points are created by shooting a powerful laser into the sky. The concern of the astronomer in the comic is that an imagined \"star cat\" may be attracted to the laser in the same way that cats playfully chase laser beams projected on surfaces. Cats' reactions to laser pointers were previously explored in 729: Laser Pointer .\nBecause of low oxygen, astronomers working at high altitude telescopes may need to write down their plans ahead of time while at sea level.\n[Some astronomers are inside a sea-level research facility.] Astronomer #1: Ok, let's head up to the observatory.\n[The astronomers drive uphill.] Astronomer #1: When we reach the summit, we'll check the iodine cell and do a general calibration. Astronomer #2: Sounds good.\n[The astronomers have reached the high-altitude observatory.] Astronomer #1: My head feels funny. Astronomer #2: Look at those telescope domes. I hope they don't roll away. Astronomer #1: Maybe we should tape them down.\n[The astronomers are inside one of the domes.] Astronomer #1: Haha, look at this mirror! My face is huge! Astronomer #2: I see your face in the telescope! I discovered you! Astronomer #1: Let's make out!\n"}
{"id":1464,"title":"Santa","image_title":"Santa","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1464","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/santa.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1464:_Santa","transcript":"Megan: Say Santa eats a cookie at every few houses. That's hundreds of tons. By the end of the night, he should be a hulking seven-story behemoth. But he's not.\nCueball: What are you... Megan: Does Santa poop in our houses?\nCueball: No way. Megan: That mass must be going somewhere. Cueball: He has that magic bag... Megan: You think he poops in the bag of presents ?\nCueball: Maybe instead of pooping in every few houses, he waits, and then in a few houses, he poops a lot . Megan: What if no one's been that naughty? Cueball: He picks at random. The needs of the many...\n","explanation":"This was the Christmas comic for 2014 and broadly speaking, this comic follows a long list of issues raised about physical limitations Santa Claus faces, similar to other popular theoretical discussions such as the speed he has to travel and the omniscience he purportedly possesses and the mass of presents he has to carry \u2014 the story of Santa Claus was simply never designed for a world with over 7 billion people spread through untold millions of homes. This comic combines some basic physiology with the physical law of the conservation of mass .\nMore specifically, this comic refers to the common tradition of leaving milk and cookies out on Christmas Eve for Santa Claus. If one assumes that Santa eats even a small percentage of the sweets left out for him, the question comes up where all the cookies go . Megan suggests that, since Santa isn't that large, he must poop them out somewhere, and wonders if he does so in our houses.\nCueball doubts that. Megan replies that mass cannot disappear completely; it has to go somewhere, to which Cueball comments that Santa has a magic bag in which he could poop. The magic bag referenced is the bag in which he carries all the Christmas presents he delivers on Christmas Eve. It is called 'magic' because a bag large enough to carry billions of presents would be much too heavy and unbalanced to carry on a sleigh pulled by only eight (or nine) reindeer. Thus, it must be magic somehow. Megan is disgusted at the thought of Santa pooping on peoples' presents. An even more disgusting explanation is that the 'magic' bag might transform the poop into presents, in which case it would not need to carry many presents at a time.\nCueball proposes a third theory: that Santa only poops in a few houses, leaving large quantities in those houses. Megan says that there may not be anyone that naughty in the world, referencing the myth that Santa will leave coal instead of presents for those who misbehave. Cueball replies that it is randomly determined whose house is pooped in, burdening a smaller number of people. Specifically, Cueball quotes the beginning of Spock 's aphorism from Star Trek II , \"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.\" The quote is used to justify the sacrifice people make in \"allowing\" Santa to poop in their homes by citing the numerous other people who are spared his feces.\nThe title text puts forth yet another theory: that Santa doesn't poop in houses at all, but off the side of his sleigh. This may be equally disgusting to anyone or anything unlucky enough to abruptly receive a rain of poop from the sky. This problem could be minimized by taking advantage of flights over water or uninhabited areas, rather than cities.\nAccording to 1070: Words for Small Sets , a few is referring to \"anywhere from 2 to 5\". Currently, there are 1.9\u00a0billion children in the world, so assuming on average that one cookie is left for Santa for each child and that Santa eats one in every 5\u00a0cookies, he consumes 380\u00a0million cookies in two 48\u00a0hour periods. Due to the convenience of time zones, approximately 48\u00a0hours from when a day starts in Kiritimati until it ends in Hawaii; also, most western Christians, including Roman Catholics and Protestants, observe Christmas almost two weeks before Eastern Orthodox Christians do. According to Google, a chocolate-chip cookie contains approximately 140 kilocalories, therefore Santa consumes 53.2\u00a0billion kilocalories in the period of 2 days, or 26.6\u00a0billion kilocalories per day. As the average human daily intake is 2500\u00a0kilocalories per day, Santa has eaten 10,640,000 times the amount of daily kilocalories required by one human over the period of two days, an amount otherwise sufficient to last for over 59,111\u00a0years for a human, and producing 20\u00a0million pounds of feces. However, if we consider the dietary requirements of both Santa and the flying reindeer, and the kilocalories that reindeer would burn flying around the world carrying 1.9\u00a0billion toys, the cookies might not be sufficient. If the 1 in 5\u00a0cookies are not sufficient energy intake, Santa could probably eat every cookie left for him, which amounts to 266\u00a0billion kilocalories in the period of 2\u00a0days.\nOn a side note, this amount of energy is enough to power several thousand homes for a year.\nMegan: Say Santa eats a cookie at every few houses. That's hundreds of tons. By the end of the night, he should be a hulking seven-story behemoth. But he's not.\nCueball: What are you... Megan: Does Santa poop in our houses?\nCueball: No way. Megan: That mass must be going somewhere. Cueball: He has that magic bag... Megan: You think he poops in the bag of presents ?\nCueball: Maybe instead of pooping in every few houses, he waits, and then in a few houses, he poops a lot . Megan: What if no one's been that naughty? Cueball: He picks at random. The needs of the many...\n"}
{"id":1465,"title":"xkcd Phone 2","image_title":"xkcd Phone 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1465","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_phone_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1465:_xkcd_Phone_2","transcript":"[An image of a smartphone lying down with many labels pointing to different parts of it. Above the screen are several small features, below only a central oval button and on the bottom a central socket and a square feature to the right. Clockwise from the top left the labels read:] MaxHD: Over 350 pixels per screen Always-on speaker Blood pressure reliever Auto-rotating case Ribbed Waterproof (interior only) Googleable Cheek toucher Cries if lost Bug drawer Coin slot Scroll lock OS by Stackoverflow\u00ae 3D materials Dog noticer FitBit\u00ae fitness evaluator Volume and density control\n[Below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd phone 2 A phone for your other hand\u00ae\n","explanation":"This is a followup to 1363: xkcd Phone , which debuted the original xkcd phone almost nine months prior to this one. This thus became the second entry in what turned out to become an ongoing xkcd Phone series which parodies common smartphone specs by attributing absurd or useless features to a fictional phone that sounds impressive but would actually be very impractical. The next in the series 1549: xkcd Phone 3 was released just over half a year later.\nLike the previous xkcd phone, the advertisement features a useless tagline (very few people can use two phones at the same time) and touts a variety of features which are either pointless, misleading, or physically impossible. Clockwise, from the top left, they are:\nNote: A high pixel density display is more than 200\u00a0pixels per inch , not per screen . An example would be the Retina Display in Apple hardware which varies from 218\u00a0pixels per inch to 401\u00a0pixels per inch depending on the device.\nLike the previous xkcd phone comic, the title text continues the list of features:\n[An image of a smartphone lying down with many labels pointing to different parts of it. Above the screen are several small features, below only a central oval button and on the bottom a central socket and a square feature to the right. Clockwise from the top left the labels read:] MaxHD: Over 350 pixels per screen Always-on speaker Blood pressure reliever Auto-rotating case Ribbed Waterproof (interior only) Googleable Cheek toucher Cries if lost Bug drawer Coin slot Scroll lock OS by Stackoverflow\u00ae 3D materials Dog noticer FitBit\u00ae fitness evaluator Volume and density control\n[Below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd phone 2 A phone for your other hand\u00ae\n"}
{"id":1466,"title":"Phone Checking","image_title":"Phone Checking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1466","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/phone_checking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1466:_Phone_Checking","transcript":"[Cueball approaching Megan.] Cueball: What's up? Megan: They're announcing the winner of the compulsive phone-checking championship.\n[Megan checks her phone.]\n[Megan puts her phone away.]\n[Megan checks her phone again.] Cueball: Did you win? Megan: Site's down. Cueball: Weird. Megan: I'll keep refreshing.\n","explanation":"Cueball asks Megan what's up, and Megan announces that there's a Compulsive Phone Checking Championship, presumably an award for the person who checks their phone the most often. Megan checks her phone to see if the winner has been announced, but finds the site's server is overloaded , which would be exactly what would happen if many people were checking their phones simultaneously. Given the nature of the contest, we can presume this is indeed the case. As a solution, Megan tries refreshing repeatedly, sending more load to the server and, thus, making it unavailable longer.\nThis compulsive behavior predates the popularity of mobile phones as shown in 477: Typewriter and 862: Let Go .\nAnother possible analysis is that the site was purposely down, and instead was the contest itself, to see how many times different users would refresh the page within a time period, or perhaps to the last one standing, determining the winner.\nThe title text implies that Megan checks her phone so compulsively she even does it in her sleep. This probably contributed to her victory. A \"webite\" is probably either a typo of \"website\" or a pinned tab in a web browser.\n[Cueball approaching Megan.] Cueball: What's up? Megan: They're announcing the winner of the compulsive phone-checking championship.\n[Megan checks her phone.]\n[Megan puts her phone away.]\n[Megan checks her phone again.] Cueball: Did you win? Megan: Site's down. Cueball: Weird. Megan: I'll keep refreshing.\n"}
{"id":1467,"title":"Email","image_title":"Email","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1467","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/email.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1467:_Email","transcript":"[Megan approaches Beret Guy.] Megan: Any New Year's resolutions? Beret Guy: Gonna figure out what email is. Megan: ...Email?\n[Megan points to her phone.] Beret Guy: People always say they're sending them. They sound really into it, so I always nod, but I have no idea what it is. Megan: You have an address on your website!\n[Megan and Beret Guy walking.] Beret Guy: Oh, that's what that thing is. Megan: Email is important! You can't just never check it. It's not like voicemail.\nBeret Guy: Can't they just send messages normally? Megan: How? Beret Guy: Fax! Or Snapchat. Megan: ...The naked pic thing? Beret Guy: Fax machines aren't just for faxting!\nThe Unix timestamp is a standard method of keeping time by counting the absolute number of seconds that have elapsed since a set point in time known as \"epoch\", defined as midnight on January 1, 1970, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Epoch, in ISO-8601 format, is \"1970-01-01T00:00:00Z\", where Z indicates UTC.\nThe timestamp in this comic's title text (1420001642) is 1,420,001,642 seconds since epoch. The process of converting that number into a human-readable time is as follows:\nThus, Randall's timestamp represents the time \" 2014-12-31 T 04:54:02 Z\" (again in ISO-8601 format).\n","explanation":"A New Year comic , where Megan asks Beret Guy if he has any New Year's resolutions , and even though this is just before new year 2015, his resolution is to find out what an email is!\nDespite being in popular use since 1998 when free email providers appeared and having existed since before 1982 when SMTP was established, Beret Guy apparently doesn't understand what email is, even though he maintains a web page that includes his email address. Megan wonders how else he expects electronic messages to be sent. She explains that one must check email regularly, making a slight at voicemail , which she implies is not worth ever checking.\nBeret Guy offers two alternatives: Fax and Snapchat . Megan refers to Snapchat as \"the naked pic thing\", calling to mind how many of its users send naked pictures of themselves over the Internet. Beret Guy replies that people use fax machines for more than just \"faxting\" (a made-up term similar to sexting ), implying that many people send sexual content via fax, a technology that predates SMTP by more than a century. Beret Guy knows what a fax is, which implies he is very behind in the technology world, so it makes sense he doesn't know what email is. But he also knows what Snapchat is, which was very popular around the time of this comic. Either Beret Guy heard about it in a similar way to email, or he definitely knows what it is and\/or uses it. What's strange is that if Beret Guy knows what Snapchat is, he should know what email is as well, since you need to provide an email account in order to create a snapchat account.\nThe title text, which could be Randall 's New Year's resolution for 2015, refers to various date\/time formats. In programming, a point in time (e.g. the current system time) is usually stored and processed as a single number that represents the count of seconds that have elapsed since a given starting time known as \"epoch\" (the Unix standard epoch is January 1, 1970 at midnight, UTC ). In order to make sense to people, this number must be converted to a human-readable format, but programmers must choose a format that best meets the needs of their users. This can be a complicated problem to solve, given that there are many different standard formats for different regions, different levels of precision for different applications, and differences between \"universal time\" and a user's local time zone. Randall has previously advocated for widespread adoption of the ISO 8601 format as a universal standard.\nThe title text also probably references a twitter outage that took place on December 29, which was blamed on an error in a date format string .\nMost programming languages provide functions to create a custom date-format string using \"tokens\" that represent different parts of the date\/time. Here, Randall appears to have used one of these functions with the string \"%Y-%M-%D\u00a0%h:%m:%s\", which looks like it should produce a date and time as \"Year-Month-Day Hour:Minute:Second\". However, he used the wrong tokens for this:\nThe \"%s\" token shows us the actual Unix timestamp used (1420001642), which corresponds to 2014-12-31 at 04:54:02 UTC. The format string shown above thus yields \"2014-54-12\/30\/14 Dec:12:1420001642\". Note that the middle portion of this string shows \"12\/30\" instead of \"12\/31\" - this is due to the\u00a0%D token expressing the date in Randall's local time zone (Eastern Standard Time, or EST), which is 5 hours before UTC. The time there was 23:54:02, or just before midnight, on the previous day.\nThe correct format string for Randall's apparent desired result is \"%Y-%m-%d\u00a0%H:%M:%S\", which gives the string \"2014-12-31 04:54:02\" (UTC) or \"2014-12-30 23:54:02\" (EST). Given the similarity between Randall's string and the correct one, it is easy to see how this type of formatting is confusing and often frustrating for programmers - particularly those not intimately familiar with these functions.\nRandall previously addressed date\/time formatting in 1179: ISO 8601 and 1340: Unique Date (the latter of which uses a formatting string correctly).\nThis was the second comic in a row with Megan holding a smart phone, the first being 1466: Phone Checking . The comic before that one was also about smart phones: 1465: xkcd Phone 2 .\n[Megan approaches Beret Guy.] Megan: Any New Year's resolutions? Beret Guy: Gonna figure out what email is. Megan: ...Email?\n[Megan points to her phone.] Beret Guy: People always say they're sending them. They sound really into it, so I always nod, but I have no idea what it is. Megan: You have an address on your website!\n[Megan and Beret Guy walking.] Beret Guy: Oh, that's what that thing is. Megan: Email is important! You can't just never check it. It's not like voicemail.\nBeret Guy: Can't they just send messages normally? Megan: How? Beret Guy: Fax! Or Snapchat. Megan: ...The naked pic thing? Beret Guy: Fax machines aren't just for faxting!\nThe Unix timestamp is a standard method of keeping time by counting the absolute number of seconds that have elapsed since a set point in time known as \"epoch\", defined as midnight on January 1, 1970, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Epoch, in ISO-8601 format, is \"1970-01-01T00:00:00Z\", where Z indicates UTC.\nThe timestamp in this comic's title text (1420001642) is 1,420,001,642 seconds since epoch. The process of converting that number into a human-readable time is as follows:\nThus, Randall's timestamp represents the time \" 2014-12-31 T 04:54:02 Z\" (again in ISO-8601 format).\n"}
{"id":1468,"title":"Worrying","image_title":"Worrying","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1468","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/worrying.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1468:_Worrying","transcript":"How worried should you be when various things happen to you: [A chart with a scatter plot on which 9 dots are labeled. Each axis has a title and a scale. Reading from the top to the bottom and then left to right along the axis are:] Very worried ...In Real Life Not very worried\nNot very worried ...In Movies Very worried\n[The labels in the chart from the top:] [This first entry is standing in the middle of a square bracket that points to the two next entires both of which are at the same level:] Chest wound ...on your right side ...on your left side Getting knocked out by a punch \"We need to talk.\" Persistent cough Parking ticket Breaking news Spilling a drink on your shirt Nosebleed\n","explanation":"This chart is a visual representation of how worried people should be by various events in real life compared to the same events in movies, based on the likelihood of the event causing serious harm. In effect, it's poking fun at various cliches and the emphasis on dramatic flair, regardless of realism. The chart's Y-axis indicates how worrying an event is in real life (from \"not very worried\" to \"very worried\"), while its X-axis shows how worrying the event is in movies. Nine events are shown in the chart, all of them cliches in the medium of film:\nThe title text expands on the aforementioned breaking news reports. While already overly worrying whenever they occur in movies compared to real life, should the movie's news report cover an event at a hospital (usually an outbreak of some major disease) or a laboratory (a monster escaping, a toxic gas released, an explosion, etc.), these events are universally much more worrisome than any other type of news story since they are guaranteed to be important for the protagonists in short order. In real life, breaking news from such locations may be more likely to be serious, but are still very unlikely to impact the viewer directly.\nThe comic shows an X-Y plot of events, showing how worried you should be in real life on the vertical axis and in movies on the horizontal axis. The axis goes from \"not very worried\" to \"very worried\".\nBelow is a table listing the coordinates for each event according to how worrying it is. The coordinates have been found by measuring each dot to the two axises and then assuming that the extremes are at 100%.\nHow worried should you be when various things happen to you: [A chart with a scatter plot on which 9 dots are labeled. Each axis has a title and a scale. Reading from the top to the bottom and then left to right along the axis are:] Very worried ...In Real Life Not very worried\nNot very worried ...In Movies Very worried\n[The labels in the chart from the top:] [This first entry is standing in the middle of a square bracket that points to the two next entires both of which are at the same level:] Chest wound ...on your right side ...on your left side Getting knocked out by a punch \"We need to talk.\" Persistent cough Parking ticket Breaking news Spilling a drink on your shirt Nosebleed\n"}
{"id":1469,"title":"UV","image_title":"UV","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1469","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/uv.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1469:_UV","transcript":"[Megan holding a flashlight and standing behind Cueball, who is sitting at a computer.] Megan: Our bathroom looks pretty clean, right? Cueball: I think so. Why? Megan: I got a UV flashlight. Come look.\n[Cueball leaves the computer; they walk.]\n[Megan and Cueball are off-screen.] Cueball: Looks fine. UV flashlight: *Click* *Click* Cueball: ...Oh my God.\n[Megan and Cueball walking in the opposite direction; Cueball is looking back behind him.] Cueball: The toilet looked like the guy's chest after the alien burst out. Megan: What do we do?\n[Megan and Cueball standing.] Cueball: We clean. Clean and clean and never stop. Megan: It won't be enough. We should just burn the place down for the insurance money.\n[Cueball standing behind Megan. Megan is pouring a liquid onto the floor out of a red-colored canister labled \"Danger\".] Cueball: Isn't that wrong? Megan: My morality has evaporated under the harsh UV light.\n[Megan and Cueball standing outside the burning building.]\n[Megan and Cueball standing, Cueball looking at his phone.] Cueball: OK, I'm Googling insurance companies. Which one do you think pays the most? Megan: Let's just try calling around.\n","explanation":"Ultraviolet light (abbreviated UV light, as in the title of the comic) is a kind of light that is slightly more energetic than the light in the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Ultraviolet light is normally by itself invisible to human eye, but can induce fluorescence (glowing) of certain organic molecules. A UV flashlight can thus be a means to detect small amounts of blood, semen, and urine on surfaces.\nThe first part of this comic focuses on Megan showing off her new UV flashlight to Cueball by revealing how disgusting their bathroom appears in UV light despite how clean it appears normally. She manages this due to UV light's special property of causing chemicals in urine to glow. Both Cueball and Megan are horrified by their discovery. This is a common reaction in the face of more sensitive diagnostic tests. Cueball's comment is a reference to the 1979 sci-fi film Alien .\nIn the second part of the comic they realize that their house will never be clean enough. So Megan resolves to burn down the house for the insurance money (i.e. insurance fraud ). Cueball is in doubt, but Megan apparently has no morality left. She even proclaims this while pouring some dangerous liquid, probably gasoline, on to the floor of their apartment.\nThe last panel of the comic implies that the two hadn't purchased fire insurance beforehand, and plan on purchasing it now, only to make a claim immediately afterwards. At this point Cueball has been won over by Megan's plan and tries to help by searching for insurance companies using Google. They wish to find the company that pays out the most. This plan will almost certainly not work since insurance typically only covers events that begin after purchasing the insurance, and does not cover anything that happens before purchasing the insurance, or that is intentionally caused.\nThe title text shows just how distorted Megan's and Cueball's thinking has become, as one of them suggests burning down all the houses in order to claim the insurance money for them. This plan will also not work. Even if insurance has been purchased for these other homes, the insurance companies will pay the owners of those homes, not Cueball and Megan. Instead, Cueball and Megan would likely be arrested for multiple charges of arson and end up in prison for a very long time.\nThe take home message of this comic must be: Never use a UV light in your bathroom. Maybe Randall did this by mistake causing the creation of this comic.  (Randall has previously warned people about similar diagnostics in 860: Never Do This .)\n[Megan holding a flashlight and standing behind Cueball, who is sitting at a computer.] Megan: Our bathroom looks pretty clean, right? Cueball: I think so. Why? Megan: I got a UV flashlight. Come look.\n[Cueball leaves the computer; they walk.]\n[Megan and Cueball are off-screen.] Cueball: Looks fine. UV flashlight: *Click* *Click* Cueball: ...Oh my God.\n[Megan and Cueball walking in the opposite direction; Cueball is looking back behind him.] Cueball: The toilet looked like the guy's chest after the alien burst out. Megan: What do we do?\n[Megan and Cueball standing.] Cueball: We clean. Clean and clean and never stop. Megan: It won't be enough. We should just burn the place down for the insurance money.\n[Cueball standing behind Megan. Megan is pouring a liquid onto the floor out of a red-colored canister labled \"Danger\".] Cueball: Isn't that wrong? Megan: My morality has evaporated under the harsh UV light.\n[Megan and Cueball standing outside the burning building.]\n[Megan and Cueball standing, Cueball looking at his phone.] Cueball: OK, I'm Googling insurance companies. Which one do you think pays the most? Megan: Let's just try calling around.\n"}
{"id":1470,"title":"Kix","image_title":"Kix","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1470","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kix.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1470:_Kix","transcript":"[Ponytail, Megan, and Cueball are standing around a whiteboard on an easel; Ponytail and Cueball are holding red markers. The whiteboard reads:] [in Large] Kix [Underlined] Slogan ideas Kid Tested, Mother...\n[following lines all in red and each crossed out]\nSelected Perfected Not notified Watching helplessly Infected Consumed Fucker\n","explanation":"This comic may be a commentary about the uselessness of brainstorming sessions or the bad ideas that come out of them, as they are often started with the phrase \u201cthere are no bad ideas\u201d. As the brainstorming session continues the original meaning of the slogan is lost, much like a game of telephone, and the session becomes less productive.\nKix is an American brand of cold breakfast cereal made of extruded and expanded cornmeal. Its slogan, \"Kid tested, Mother approved,\" is well known in the United States, and is meant to suggest that children generally enjoy the cereal and their mothers, who are naturally concerned about the health of their children, approve of its ingredients. However, in this brainstorming session, the word \"Approved\" has apparently not yet been considered. A number of possible words and phrases for the ending have been presented and stricken out , indicating that they were rejected; each one causes the slogan to be subject to increasingly absurd and comedic interpretations:\nThe title text conflates the phrase \"Kid tested\" with college entrance exams such as the Standardized Aptitude Test (SAT) or the ACT . Instead of stating that a child tasted the cereal and gave their opinion on its quality, the cereal itself is an academic subject on which the child was tested. Randall, referring to how some parents enroll their children in special classes or schools to prepare them to score well in this type of test, states that his parents extensively prepared him for a college entrance exam about Kix cereal.\nCereal advertising has previously been referenced in 38: Apple Jacks .\n[Ponytail, Megan, and Cueball are standing around a whiteboard on an easel; Ponytail and Cueball are holding red markers. The whiteboard reads:] [in Large] Kix [Underlined] Slogan ideas Kid Tested, Mother...\n[following lines all in red and each crossed out]\nSelected Perfected Not notified Watching helplessly Infected Consumed Fucker\n"}
{"id":1471,"title":"Gut Fauna","image_title":"Gut Fauna","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1471","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gut_fauna.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1471:_Gut_Fauna","transcript":"[Cueball on an examining table; Ponytail wearing a doctor's coat holding some test results.] Doctor: I see the problem. Your gut macrobiome is out of balance. One moment.\n[Ponytail leaves.] Cueball: I think you mean micro biome... Right?\n[Ponytail returns, slightly disheveled, carrying a momentarily docile live wolf.] Doctor: No. Here, swallow this. Cueball: That's a wolf. Doctor: Do you need a glass of water?\n","explanation":"The microbiome is the collection of bacteria that reside in the human digestive tract. The bacteria perform several vital digestive and immune-support functions. Different compositions of bacteria, collectively referred to as gut flora , can be linked to risk of some diseases, while other compositions are linked to a decreased risk of some diseases and are therefore called \"good bacteria\". The title \"Gut fauna\" is a play on words. Fauna means animal life in Latin, and flora means vegetable life. However, in this context flora means bacterial life because, when microscopes were invented, microbial life was considered to be non-animal and therefore classified as \"flora\". For a good description of the microbiome see The Invisible Universe Of The Human Microbiome .\nIn this comic, Cueball is visiting a doctor ( Ponytail ) for some unknown problem. The doctor informs him that his gut macrobiome is out of balance, which Cueball responds to with confusion over whether or not she meant the microbiome or macrobiome. A macrobiome, instead of being composed of small organisms such as bacteria, would be composed of larger organisms such as mammals. The phrase \"gut fauna\" would refer to any animals living inside a gut (as the word fauna refers to animals living in an ecosystem).\nCueball is right to be worried by the doctor's reference to his macrobiome, as normal humans shouldn't have large animals living inside them [ citation needed ] with the exception of some parasites such as Helminths or Cestoda , or in some cases, the consumption of live animals such as octopus, shrimp and eels. No animals belong natively in the human digestive system ; all known cases of animals living permanently in the human digestive system are causes of disease. His fear is compounded when the doctor prescribes one wolf for Cueball to swallow, which is normally impossible for average humans and would, at the very least, result in major interior (or exterior) damage to Cueball and (possibly) Ponytail when the wolf resists being swallowed. Needless to say this is not common physician practice due to the likely death rate. [ citation needed ]\nThe choice of a wolf echoes the reintroduction of the animals into the macrobiome of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, where they have improved the balance by, in part, preying on elk and reducing the damage caused by their grazing.\nThe dialog between the characters ends with the doctor asking the patient whether he needs a glass of water, a typical question asked by health professionals (water can help patients swallow oral medication). This last phrase further extends the humorous nature of the proposition to swallow the wolf by displaying a confidence of the doctor in her choice of the treatment modality. In reality, of course, drinking a glass of water while attempting to swallow a wolf would make the latter procedure neither easier, nor more feasible.\nThe title text suggests that swallowing the wolf is not the worst situation that could have occurred, as the doctor refers to \"another way\" that the wolf could be administered. One typical way that microbiomes are restored is through fecal bacteriotherapy , most easily described as a \"poop transfer\". It could also mean transferred via suppository. In either case, the worse \"other way\" that the doctor is referring to is thus likely the rectal route, which (for Randall ) is less preferable than attempting to swallow a live wolf. However, either way would prove physically impossible and\/or lethal.\nIf we are to take the doctor at her word that there is indeed some sort of macrobiome inside Cueball's gut, then perhaps she has some kind of matter compression ability that would make introducing a live wolf a legitimate therapeutic option.\nRandall has referenced wolf reintroduction programs before, in comic 819: Five-Minute Comics: Part 1 .\n[Cueball on an examining table; Ponytail wearing a doctor's coat holding some test results.] Doctor: I see the problem. Your gut macrobiome is out of balance. One moment.\n[Ponytail leaves.] Cueball: I think you mean micro biome... Right?\n[Ponytail returns, slightly disheveled, carrying a momentarily docile live wolf.] Doctor: No. Here, swallow this. Cueball: That's a wolf. Doctor: Do you need a glass of water?\n"}
{"id":1472,"title":"Geography","image_title":"Geography","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1472","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geography.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1472:_Geography","transcript":"[A colorful map shows various possible land forms which are labeled (and the last one with a spelling mistake included here). In general reading order the labels are:] Desert Mountains Sea Glacier Plain Island Volcano Lake River Delta Strait Hills Lagoon Bay Mesa Forest Penninsula\n[In the middle of these land forms, under the river and between the lake and the lagoon there is a black dot on the green bank of the lagoon with an arrow pointing it out. The arrow starts above the lake to the left of the glacier and is labeled:] My house\n[Below the panel there is a caption:] If I could live anywhere, I would choose the example map from geography books that explains what everything is called.\n","explanation":"The comic is a map showing examples of geographical features as they would be presented in a geography textbook. May be based on the first page of the book You Choose which displays a map of locations similar in style to the one used in the comic and asks the reader \"If you could go anywhere, where would you go?\".\nRandall notes that he would like to live in the middle of this region. These maps include an unusual density of different land forms, leading to an interesting environment in which to live. In the real world, these geographical features might take up far more space, and the geologic forces that shape them might create far different patterns than those shown. This kind of Neverland of geographical feature would offer a range of outdoor activities and landscapes that would make it a very nice place to live, as long as the volcano does not erupt.\nSome of the geographic features do have a (very) loose similarity to the area around Boston , where Randall lives. Also near Boston is one geographical feature that Randall has included in this map but has refrained from labeling, the isthmus between the peninsula and the forest.\nOn the other hand, the map actually looks quite a bit like the area around southwestern Washington and northwestern Oregon , with the reader facing south so the high desert is on the upper left. The volcano could be Rainier or St. Helens . Real-world outdoor enthusiasts do indeed appreciate the Neverlandish landscape. Having little Spanish influence, locals would refer to a \"mesa\" as a butte .\nThe title text discusses a different type of diagram usually found in geography textbooks, the one showing the mechanism of tornado formation . Randall notes that he would least like to live in the farm typically depicted in the background of such diagrams. This is likely because the farm is depicted as being on a vast, featureless stretch of flat prairie, the opposite of the rich landscape in the comic. The monotonous landscape would reflect that of Tornado Alley , an area of the central United States where a large number of tornadoes form, and which makes up a large portion of the Great Plains . His dislike for this type of area may also simply be due to the damage created when a tornado hits. That said, chances of a direct tornado hit on any given house are slim compared to simply the risk of property damage. Living near an active volcano may be much more dangerous than living in Tornado Alley. Tornadoes are a recurring subject on xkcd.\nHere is an alphabetical list of the different land forms with wiki links: Bay , Desert , Forest , Glacier , Hills , Island , Lagoon , Lake , Mesa , Mountains , Peninsula , Plain , Delta , River , Sea , Strait and Volcano .\n[A colorful map shows various possible land forms which are labeled (and the last one with a spelling mistake included here). In general reading order the labels are:] Desert Mountains Sea Glacier Plain Island Volcano Lake River Delta Strait Hills Lagoon Bay Mesa Forest Penninsula\n[In the middle of these land forms, under the river and between the lake and the lagoon there is a black dot on the green bank of the lagoon with an arrow pointing it out. The arrow starts above the lake to the left of the glacier and is labeled:] My house\n[Below the panel there is a caption:] If I could live anywhere, I would choose the example map from geography books that explains what everything is called.\n"}
{"id":1473,"title":"Location Sharing","image_title":"Location Sharing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1473","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/location_sharing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1473:_Location_Sharing","transcript":"[Megan is holding her phone. Above her is the text she can see on the screen:] This website wants to know your location. [Two buttons are below this text. The first is white with a black frame and black text. The second (the chosen button) also has a black frame, but inside the frame is a black rectangle with white text. Around the chosen button are small lines indication rays.] Deny Allow\n[Megan is holding her phone.]\n[Megan is holding her phone. Above her is again the text she can see on the screen.] This website wants to know your momentum. [Two buttons are below this text. The first (the chosen button) has a black frame, but inside the frame is a black rectangle with white text. The second is white with a black frame and black text. Around the chosen button are small lines indication rays.] Deny Allow\nMegan: Nice try.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Megan is visiting a website on her mobile phone. After loading it, the website asks for her location . The choice between allowing or denying a website or app access to certain information is common among smartphones. The term \"location sharing\" specifically refers to when a smartphone user shares their location with such an entity. An example is a weather app which would need your location in order to automatically find the correct forecast.\nMegan is then asked her momentum , which she denies. The joke is based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle , which, in quantum mechanics, states that some pairs of values cannot be known precisely and simultaneously. The most famous examples of such values, especially in jokes, are location and momentum.\nThe ramifications of the uncertainty principle being violated in this context are unknown, but the comic might be alluding to security problems that appear if an untrusted application is given access to momentum data generated by the gyroscope. Access to gyroscope data can be used for reading passwords entered into the on-screen keyboard or even guessing keyboard strokes on a keyboard lying on the same table as the phone.\nIt could also be an attempt to get Megan to unknowingly reveal her weight (mass to be more exact), as the mass can be inferred by dividing the momentum by velocity (the velocity in turn can be obtained by observing the change of the location over time). In order to be feasible, the location must be polled at least twice, as at least two location points are necessary to compute the velocity. It is a stereotype in many Western cultures that women tend to keep their weight secret. The stereotype implies that women tend to obsess about controlling (and not revealing) their weight in order to conform to societal and sexual pressure.\nOn the other hand, it could just be a joke about the fact that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is typically observed only at sub-atomic scales, and not at macroscopic scales (it is possible to measure both the position and momentum of a large object). By saying \"Nice try\", it's clear that Megan knows about the principle, but funny that she would think it applies to herself at macroscopic scale.\nThe title text refers to the inclusion of gyroscopes in modern cell phones that measure angular momentum, mostly to detect when the phone is tilted, but also used in a few mobile games. Randall suggests the poor accuracy of the compasses in mobile phones (measuring the angular position) is due to the gyroscopes being too good. If both the gyroscope and the compasses were completely accurate to a subatomic scale, it would violate the uncertainty principle. Modern phones also include varied technologies (such as GPS) to pinpoint the user's location, with varying degrees of accuracy.\nThe uncertainty principle has previously been referenced in 824: Guest Week: Bill Amend (FoxTrot) . It has also been discussed in relation to the two comics 1404: Quantum Vacuum Virtual Plasma and 1416: Pixels .\n[Megan is holding her phone. Above her is the text she can see on the screen:] This website wants to know your location. [Two buttons are below this text. The first is white with a black frame and black text. The second (the chosen button) also has a black frame, but inside the frame is a black rectangle with white text. Around the chosen button are small lines indication rays.] Deny Allow\n[Megan is holding her phone.]\n[Megan is holding her phone. Above her is again the text she can see on the screen.] This website wants to know your momentum. [Two buttons are below this text. The first (the chosen button) has a black frame, but inside the frame is a black rectangle with white text. The second is white with a black frame and black text. Around the chosen button are small lines indication rays.] Deny Allow\nMegan: Nice try.\n"}
{"id":1474,"title":"Screws","image_title":"Screws","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1474","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/screws.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1474:_Screws","transcript":"[Eight drawings of different types of heads each with a caption:] [Plus sign-shaped screw.] Phillips head [Minus sign-shaped screw.] Flat head [Star-shaped screw.] Uh oh. Maybe it's on Amazon? [Plus sign-shaped screw with worn edges.] Cursed -1 Phillips head [No screw, just a circle.] Crap, it's a rivet . [Hexagon-shaped screw.] Phillips-head ruiner [Minus sign-shaped screw going through the whole circle. Also giving off radiation.] Uranium screw (a real thing) [A sack with blood oozing out of it.] Phillip's head\n","explanation":"This comic uses a similar structure and is based off of the same idea as 1714: Volcano Types and 1874: Geologic Faults . Appliance makers sometimes use strange screw heads to hinder attempts from users to remove appliance covers. Users usually have handy screwdrivers for the first two screw types drawn, Phillips and Flat. More advanced users usually have some less standard drivers, such as Torx or Allen , however appliance makers keep designing increasingly strange screw heads and users keep acquiring increasingly strange screwdrivers.\nThe comic is about the frustration a user may feel when faced with a screw for which they have no screwdriver. Usually the user will try to fit one of the drivers they have handy into the strange screw, leading to damaging the screw and\/or the driver and\/or the person wielding the tool.\nThe types of screws listed are the following:\n[Eight drawings of different types of heads each with a caption:] [Plus sign-shaped screw.] Phillips head [Minus sign-shaped screw.] Flat head [Star-shaped screw.] Uh oh. Maybe it's on Amazon? [Plus sign-shaped screw with worn edges.] Cursed -1 Phillips head [No screw, just a circle.] Crap, it's a rivet . [Hexagon-shaped screw.] Phillips-head ruiner [Minus sign-shaped screw going through the whole circle. Also giving off radiation.] Uranium screw (a real thing) [A sack with blood oozing out of it.] Phillip's head\n"}
{"id":1475,"title":"Technically","image_title":"Technically","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1475","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/technically.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1475:_Technically","transcript":"[White Hat talks to Cueball who looks at a flying insect.] White Hat: Well, technically, food is a \"drug\", since it's a substance that alters how your body works, so yes, I'm\u2014 Cueball: Hey, look at that weird bug!\n[Caption below the panel:] My life improved when I realized I could just ignore any sentence that started with \"technically.\"\n","explanation":"When the word \"technically\" is used to start a sentence, the remainder of the sentence tends to follow one of a number of patterns:\nCueball , possibly representing Randall , has decided that any sentence beginning with the word \"technically\" is highly likely to be completely worthless for him to listen to; so whenever he hears it at the beginning of a sentence, he allows himself to be distracted by anything which happens to be around.\nThere are many cases where an item is classified in what appears to be an illogical way. Some fairly well known examples are 'Tomatoes are a fruit', 'Strawberries are not berries', 'Peanuts are not nuts' and so on. The reasoning behind these seemingly unusual classifications is typically down to the technical definition of the class, which may differ from the intuitive understanding that the general public have learned. It is not unusual for people to try and appear knowledgeable by demonstrating that they are aware of correct technical classifications.\nWhite Hat starts to pedantically answer the typically incredulous rhetorical question \u201cAre you on drugs?!\u201d by explaining that according to the technical definition, food is classed as a drug. This classification is false due to his incorrect interpretation of the word \"drug\" and lack of understanding of the role of food in human physiology, and would fall under the fourth example in the chart above. Indeed, \"drug\" is defined as \"a substance used to treat an illness, relieve a symptom, or modify a chemical process in the body for a specific purpose\", followed by a secondary definition of \"a psychoactive substance, especially one which is illegal and addictive\". Food, on the other hand, is defined as \"any substance that can be consumed by living organisms, especially by eating, in order to sustain life\". In other words, food is consumed in order to sustain the normal, innate state of the body, while drugs are consumed in order to alter certain states. The Wikipedia article for drug goes so far as to explicitly disqualify food from the definition of \u201cdrug.\u201d\nRegardless of whether or not the classification was valid, Cueball has already allowed himself to be distracted by a passing bug.\nThe title text starts to pedantically over-apply Cueball's rule to the comic panel, noting that technically White Hat's sentence started with the word 'well' instead of the word 'technically', and thus Cueball is wrong to have ignored it. This would fall under the second or third example in the chart. Halfway through the sentence, this argument is cut off by the discovery of a rock with a fossil in it, correctly applying the rule to a sentence that began with the word \"technically\".\nThis comic is similar to 1240: Quantum Mechanics , in that they both suggest ignoring sentences containing a certain word or phrase indicating a pedantic attitude.\n[White Hat talks to Cueball who looks at a flying insect.] White Hat: Well, technically, food is a \"drug\", since it's a substance that alters how your body works, so yes, I'm\u2014 Cueball: Hey, look at that weird bug!\n[Caption below the panel:] My life improved when I realized I could just ignore any sentence that started with \"technically.\"\n"}
{"id":1476,"title":"Ceres","image_title":"Ceres","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1476","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ceres.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1476:_Ceres","transcript":"[Megan sitting in front of her laptop talks to Cueball who stand behind her.] Megan: Dawn has almost reached Ceres. Megan: I'm excited that we'll finally learn what that stupid white dot is.\n[Current version of Dawn's best picture of Ceres and the white spot is shown.]\n[As Dawn get's closer the pictures improve and in the second version the white spot shows to have black markings.]\n[In the last zoom in on Ceres, the white dot resolves to a badge with clear black text:] Inspected by No. 6\n","explanation":"Ceres is the largest known asteroid and the smallest known dwarf planet . Megan sits at her computer and tells Cueball how exciting it will be when Dawn will discover what is the cause of the \"stupid white dot\" on Ceres.\nDawn is a probe sent by NASA in 2007 to examine the asteroid belt . Having already visited the protoplanet Vesta in 2012, Dawn is now scheduled to arrive at Ceres on March 6, 2015. Dawn's initial images of Ceres were released two days before this comic, quickly inspiring questions about the white spot . The spot was first noticed in photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope .\n\" Inspected By No. 6 \" refers to a series of quality assurance stickers used by US clothing manufacturers. Individual inspectors, each assigned a number, randomly sample products for workmanship. Accepted items are marked with that inspector's sticker. The presumed joke is that the white spot is a large sticker indicating that Ceres has passed inspection. This might also be a reference to The Rift's M6 being stationed at Ceres inspecting a crater.\nCERES (Certification of Environmental Standards) is also the name of a food inspection company based in Germany. Both the food inspection company and the dwarf planet are named for Ceres , the ancient Roman harvest goddess from whom English derives the word \" cereal .\"\nThe title text extends the joke to the planet Earth, where salmonella can be found. Salmonella are harmful microorganisms that are sometimes found in food products subject to improper handling or overlong storage. Mixing the realms of astronomical objects and food once more, the title text concludes that the planet Earth clearly hasn't been tested by CERES since salmonella can be found on it.\nThe Dawn mission is mentioned in 1532: New Horizons .\n[Megan sitting in front of her laptop talks to Cueball who stand behind her.] Megan: Dawn has almost reached Ceres. Megan: I'm excited that we'll finally learn what that stupid white dot is.\n[Current version of Dawn's best picture of Ceres and the white spot is shown.]\n[As Dawn get's closer the pictures improve and in the second version the white spot shows to have black markings.]\n[In the last zoom in on Ceres, the white dot resolves to a badge with clear black text:] Inspected by No. 6\n"}
{"id":1477,"title":"Star Wars","image_title":"Star Wars","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1477","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/star_wars.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1477:_Star_Wars","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are walking together.] Cueball: We're almost at the Back to the Future date. Megan: We're even closer to the Star Wars tipping point. Cueball: The what?\n[Diagram showing a timeline from before 1980 to about 2020. Markers on the line indicate the release date of Return of the Jedi , the release date of The Phantom Menace , and May 13th, with arrows showing the intervals in between these three points.] Megan: On May 13th, The Phantom Menace will have come out closer to Return of the Jedi than to the present Cueball: Wow.\n[Cueball and Megan stop walking. Megan is in a reflective pose with her hand on her chin.] Cueball: It's weird how I'm constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the universe. Megan: You know, \"A long time ago\" should have \"Plus four more decades\" added in rereleases.\n","explanation":"This is another comic based on pointing out just how much time has passed since the release of a particular film. The same basis is found in 1393: Timeghost and 891: Movie Ages , and a similar theme is used in 647: Scary and 973: MTV Generation . Many people remember going to see major films at the time of release, and in their mind it may seem like \"just a few years ago\". In reality however, many years have passed, and it comes as a shock to realise just how long ago it was.\nIn the first panel, Cueball states that we are approaching the Back to the Future date (October 21, 2015), which is the date that protagonist Marty McFly travels to in Back to the Future Part II , released in 1989. Megan adds that we're even closer to May 13, 2015, the \" Star Wars tipping point\".\nThe original first set of Star Wars films was released as a trilogy over the span of 6 years, with the third one, Return of the Jedi being released on May 25, 1983. After that, no films were released for 16 years until The Phantom Menace on May 19, 1999, the first in a trilogy of prequels. Thus up until now, the length of time between the two films, 5,839 days , has been greater than the time between the latter film and the present. Megan points out that May 13, 2015 will mark 5,839 days after the release of The Phantom Menace , meaning that for the first time the release date of the two films will be closer together than the latter film is to the present day.\nIn the final panel, Cueball points out how weird it is that he (along with most other people) are regularly surprised at the passage of time, given how predictable time is by its very nature. Megan's last line is a reference to the famous opening text used in all Star Wars films, \"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...\". It's also a reference to the many changes that have been made to the original Star Wars trilogy (e.g. new CGI effects) as it's been released and rereleased.\nThe title text repeats the opening text from the films, inserting Megan's suggestion for changing the duration, and extending it to include the Hubble constant for adjusting the distance estimation. The Hubble constant is a value that describes an estimated rate of expansion of the universe. This expansion means that during the 40 years that have passed since the release of the first Star Wars movie, the \"galaxy far, far away\" has gotten even farther away.\n[Cueball and Megan are walking together.] Cueball: We're almost at the Back to the Future date. Megan: We're even closer to the Star Wars tipping point. Cueball: The what?\n[Diagram showing a timeline from before 1980 to about 2020. Markers on the line indicate the release date of Return of the Jedi , the release date of The Phantom Menace , and May 13th, with arrows showing the intervals in between these three points.] Megan: On May 13th, The Phantom Menace will have come out closer to Return of the Jedi than to the present Cueball: Wow.\n[Cueball and Megan stop walking. Megan is in a reflective pose with her hand on her chin.] Cueball: It's weird how I'm constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the universe. Megan: You know, \"A long time ago\" should have \"Plus four more decades\" added in rereleases.\n"}
{"id":1478,"title":"P-Values","image_title":"P-Values","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1478","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/p_values.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1478:_P-Values","transcript":"[A two-column table where the second column selects various areas of the first column using square brackets.] P-value Interpretation\n0.001 0.01 0.02 0.03 Highly Significant 0.04 0.049 Significant 0.050 Oh crap. Redo calculations. 0.051 0.06 On the edge of significance 0.07 0.08 0.09 0.099 Highly suggestive, relevant at the p<0.10 level \u22650.1 Hey, look at this interesting subgroup analysis\n","explanation":"This comic plays on how scientific experiments interpret the significance of their data. P-value is a statistical measure whose meaning can be difficult to explain to non-experts, and is frequently wrongly understood (even in this wiki) as indicating how likely that the results could have happened by accident. Informally, a p-value is the probability under a specified statistical model that a statistical summary of the data (e.g., the sample mean difference between two compared groups) would be equal to or more extreme than its observed value.\nBy the standard significance level, analyses with a p -value less than .05 are said to be 'statistically significant'. Although the difference between .04 and .06 may seem minor, the practical consequences can be major. For example, scientific journals are much more likely to publish statistically significant results. In medical research, billions of dollars of sales may ride on whether a drug shows statistically significant benefits or not. A result which does not show the proper significance can ruin months or years of work, and might inspire desperate attempts to 'encourage' the desired outcome.\nWhen performing a comparison (for example, seeing whether listening to various types of music can influence test scores), a properly designed experiment includes an experimental group (of people who listen to music while taking tests) and a control group (of people who take tests without listening to music), as well as a null hypothesis that \"music has no effect on test scores\". The test scores of each group are gathered, and a series of statistical tests are performed to produce the p -value. In a nutshell, this is the probability that the observed difference (or a greater difference) in scores between the experimental and control group could occur due to random chance, if the experimental stimulus has no effect. For a more drastic example, an experiment could test whether wearing glasses affects the outcome of coin flips - there would likely be some amount of difference between the coin results when wearing glasses and not wearing glasses, and the p -value serves to essentially test whether this difference is small enough to be attributed to random chance, or whether it can be said that wearing glasses actually had a significant difference on the results.\nIf the p -value is low, then the null hypothesis is said to be rejected , and it can be fairly said that, in this case, music does have a significant effect on test scores. Otherwise if the p -value is too high, the data is said to fail to reject the null hypothesis, meaning that it is not necessarily counter-evidence, but rather more results are needed. The standard and generally accepted p -value for experiments is <0.05, hence why all values below that number in the comic are marked \"significant\" at the least.\nThe chart labels a p -value of exactly 0.050 as \"Oh crap. Redo calculations\" because the p -value is very close to being considered significant, but isn't. The desperate researcher might be able to redo the calculations in order to nudge the result under 0.050. For example, problems can often have a number of slightly different and equally plausible methods of analysis, so by arbitrarily choosing one it can be easy to tweak the p -value. This could also be achieved if an error is found in the calculations or data set, or by erasing certain unwelcome data points. While correcting errors is usually valid, correcting only the errors that lead to unwelcome results is not. Plausible justifications can also be found for deleting certain data points, though again, only doing this to the unwelcome ones is invalid. All of these effectively introduce sampling bias into the reports.\nThe value of 0.050 demanding a \"redo calculations\" may also be a commentary on the precision of harder sciences, as the rest of the chart implicitly accepts any value following the described digit for a given description; if you get exactly 0.050, there's the possibility that you erred in your calculations, and thus the actual result may be either higher or lower.\nValues between 0.051 and 0.06 are labelled as being \"on the edge of significance\". This illustrates the regular use of \"creative language\" to qualify significance in reports, as a flat \"not significant\" result may look 'bad'. The validity of such use is of course a contested topic, with debates centering on whether p -values slightly larger than the significance level should be noted as nearly significant or flatly classed as not-significant. The logic of having such an absolute cutoff point for significance may be questioned.\nValues between 0.07 and 0.099 continue the trend of using qualifying language, calling the results \"suggestive\" or \"relevant\". This category also illustrates the 'technique' of resorting to adjusting the significance threshold. Appropriate experimental design requires that the significance threshold be set prior to the experiment, not allowing changes afterward in order to \"get a better experiment report\", as this would again insert bias into the result. A simple change of the threshold (e.g. from 0.05 to 0.1) can change an experiment's result from \"not significant\" to \"significant\". Although the statement \"significant at the p <0.10 level\" is technically true, it would be highly frowned upon to use in an actual report.\nValues higher than 0.1 are usually considered not significant at all, however the comic suggests taking a part of the sample (a subgroup ) and analyzing that subgroup without regard to the rest of the sample. Choosing to analyze a subgroup in advance for scientifically plausible reasons is good practice. For example, a drug to prevent heart attacks is likely to benefit men more than women, since men are more likely to have heart attacks. Choosing to focus on a subgroup after conducting an experiment may also be valid if there is a credible scientific justification - sometimes researchers learn something new from experiments. However, the danger is that it is usually possible to find and pick an arbitrary subgroup that happens to have a better p -value simply due to chance. A researcher reporting results for subgroups that have little scientific basis (the pill only benefits people with black hair, or only people who took it on a Wednesday, etc.) would clearly be \"cheating.\" Even when the subgroup has a plausible scientific justification, skeptics will rightly be suspicious that the researcher might have considered numerous possible subgroups (men, older people, fat people, sedentary people, diabetes suffers, etc.) and only reported the subgroups for which there are statistically significant results. This is an example of the multiple comparisons problem , which is also the topic of comic 882 .\nIf the results cannot be normally considered significant, the title text suggests as a last resort to invert p<0.050, making it p>0.050. This leaves the statement mathematically true, but may fool casual readers, as the single-character change may go unnoticed or be dismissed as a typographical error (\"no one would claim their results aren't significant, they must mean p<0.050\"). Of course, the statement on its face is useless, as it is equivalent to stating that the results are \"not significant\".\n[A two-column table where the second column selects various areas of the first column using square brackets.] P-value Interpretation\n0.001 0.01 0.02 0.03 Highly Significant 0.04 0.049 Significant 0.050 Oh crap. Redo calculations. 0.051 0.06 On the edge of significance 0.07 0.08 0.09 0.099 Highly suggestive, relevant at the p<0.10 level \u22650.1 Hey, look at this interesting subgroup analysis\n"}
{"id":1479,"title":"Troubleshooting","image_title":"Troubleshooting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1479","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/troubleshooting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1479:_Troubleshooting","transcript":"[Hairy sitting at a desk with laptop, with Cueball standing behind him.] Hairy: Wait, why can't I click anywhere? Cueball: I don't... Ugh, It opened a dialog box offscreen. Hairy: Why is that even possible? Cueball: It really shouldn't be. But you can fix it by changing your screen resolution to trigger a window cleanup. Hairy: Seriously? Cueball: I know, I know...\nTo be honest, I can't wait for the day when all my stupid computer knowledge becomes obsolete.\n","explanation":"This comic revolves around the complexity of modern software and its sometimes low quality. Many problems that users experience are not obvious or straightforward, and methods for correcting the root cause of the problem requires invoking unrelated actions that happen to cause a desired side-effect. Knowing the non-obvious cause, the desired side effect, and how to trigger the unrelated feature that causes it requires memorization of lots of \"stupid computer knowledge\" rather than general principles and logical investigation of the software.\nOne particular example of an illogical fix to a software problem is depicted in the comic. Here, Cueball is trying to help Hairy resolve the problem of a program that is not responding to any mouse clicks. Cueball surmises that this is not due to abnormal behavior of the software (such as freezing ), but rather because either the user or the software itself has opened a modal dialog window outside of the main screen area, where it can not be seen. Modal dialog windows block access to the rest of the application, by seizing the sole focus of the user input. They are valid GUI tools and are used when the software needs the user's input before it can proceed further. However, opening such a window and placing it outside of the visible screen area (\"off-screen\") will make the window both inaccessible and invisible to the user, precluding them from closing it and re-gaining access to the software.\nOne non-obvious way to repair such a problem is to switch the screen resolution; this in itself does not fix the problem, but the resolution switch also forces the operating system to redraw all windows on the desktop, and some operating systems will also validate the coordinates of all windows and adjust these coordinates so that the windows do not end up in off-screen area. In this scenario, it is used as a side-effect to fix the problem, because operating systems rarely provide other, more obvious ways to bring off-screen windows back to the visible area.\nBy saying \"Why is that even possible?\", Hairy is quite correct in pointing out that the best way to address this problem at its root would be for the operating system developers to prevent the creation of windows off-screen, preemptively avoiding a whole class of window management problems before they can occur. For example, such mechanisms could validate coordinates during window creation, thus making sure that the dialog window would always be accessible and visible. Such a mechanism exists on OS X, but not on Windows, which the majority of desktop\/laptop computers are running at the time of this comic's release.\nIn general, one can sort the possible solutions to the problem being discussed in the following order of preference, from best to worst:\nThe title text refers to the fact that two different and unrelated software packages can have confusingly similar names, even if the usage and features of those two packages can vary wildly, and knowing the implications of using one instead of the other is a case of \"stupid computer knowledge\". Knowing the difference between a Chrome app , a cell phone app-style application, delivered from the Chrome web store, designed to be run in the Chrome browser, and a Chrome extension , a browser extension installed into the Chrome browser, delivered from the Chrome web store, designed to modify the behavior of the browser itself, is a subtle distinction that may not be immediately apparent to users who might just have the name of the software they are looking for. Google Hangouts is an example of a product that exists as both a Chrome app and a Chrome extension, whose windows are more similar to each other than to normal Chrome browser windows; and confusingly, it's possible to be signed into one account with the app and another with the extension, especially when your employer or school uses Apps for Business\/Education.\nIn many cases, Randall (or Cueball, his avatar) loves to help people using his specific knowledge (see 208: Regular Expressions ). But when the trick is \"stupid\", he would prefer the programmers to fix the problem definitively so he never has to rely on this trick anymore.\n[Hairy sitting at a desk with laptop, with Cueball standing behind him.] Hairy: Wait, why can't I click anywhere? Cueball: I don't... Ugh, It opened a dialog box offscreen. Hairy: Why is that even possible? Cueball: It really shouldn't be. But you can fix it by changing your screen resolution to trigger a window cleanup. Hairy: Seriously? Cueball: I know, I know...\nTo be honest, I can't wait for the day when all my stupid computer knowledge becomes obsolete.\n"}
{"id":1480,"title":"Super Bowl","image_title":"Super Bowl","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1480","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/super_bowl.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1480:_Super_Bowl","transcript":"[Cueball standing.] Cueball: I don't know much about sports, which can be culturally isolating, so it's tempting to get vocal and defensive about not following them. Cueball: Caring about something makes people vulnerable, so not caring gives you power.\n[Pictures of a weather map and Philae in the background.] But I know things I'm into don't always sound interesting to 100% of the people around me, and it means a lot when they sometimes try to listen anyway - and maybe even find themselves sharing some of my excitement!\n[Cueball pointing to self.] Cueball: So while everyone is going on about the Super Bowl on Sunday, let me tell you what I'll be doing:\n[Cueball standing again.] Cueball: Listening! Cueball: Hooray for friendship! Cueball: Also, eating snacks. Cueball: Hooray for snacks!\nThis comic shares title with 60: Super Bowl , published February 6, 2006. This appears to be only the second time that two xkcd comics have borne the same name. The first was 786: Exoplanets , published August 30, 2010, and 1071: Exoplanets , published June 20, 2012.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball , representing Randall , explains that even though he does not care about sports and is tempted to be scornful about others' obsession with them, he understands that people feel vulnerable about stuff they care about. And he will for sure be fed up with all the talk about the Super Bowl discussions and arguments over the coming weeks. (The comic was released on a Friday two days before Super Bowl XLIX , the championship game of the 2014 NFL season held on 2015-02-01).\nHowever, since other people tolerate his interest in odd things like meteorology and the Philae lander (see 1324: Weather and 1446: Landing ), he recognizes that he should show the same consideration to them. This is an invocation of the Golden Rule , \"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you\".\nIn the last frame, he tells us that instead of celebrating the sports event on Sunday, he will be celebrating friendship (through listening to his friends) and, as a side note, snacking (as they are very frequently brought to Super Bowl-watching events). This suggests that the value of friendship trumps the discomfort of watching human activities that seem uninteresting to him \u2013 and of course, the free snacks also help ameliorate his discomfort.\nThe title text continues the \" My Hobby \" trope characteristic of some xkcd comics: here, Randall references people who scornfully refer to popular sports such as football, basketball, and\/or baseball as \"sportsball\" and creates discomfort for them by pretending to be interested in this imaginary sport. This makes it appear as though they are in fact interested in sports when they are not, exposing their snobbishness. (It is worth noting that there is a Wii U game by that name .)\nIn a distant past, Cueball spent his time differently during the Super Bowl - see 60: Super Bowl . (This was the second time that two xkcd comics have shared the exact same name ). The year after he continued the trend with a Super Bowl related comic to \"celebrate\" the event: 1640: Super Bowl Context . Between the 2006 comic and this one there were no other Super Bowl related comics coming out in relation to the Super Bowl.\nSee also 1107: Sports Cheat Sheet and two other comics where he jokes with sport in general: 904: Sports and 1507: Metaball . He again directly mentions lack of knowledge in 1859: Sports Knowledge .\n[Cueball standing.] Cueball: I don't know much about sports, which can be culturally isolating, so it's tempting to get vocal and defensive about not following them. Cueball: Caring about something makes people vulnerable, so not caring gives you power.\n[Pictures of a weather map and Philae in the background.] But I know things I'm into don't always sound interesting to 100% of the people around me, and it means a lot when they sometimes try to listen anyway - and maybe even find themselves sharing some of my excitement!\n[Cueball pointing to self.] Cueball: So while everyone is going on about the Super Bowl on Sunday, let me tell you what I'll be doing:\n[Cueball standing again.] Cueball: Listening! Cueball: Hooray for friendship! Cueball: Also, eating snacks. Cueball: Hooray for snacks!\nThis comic shares title with 60: Super Bowl , published February 6, 2006. This appears to be only the second time that two xkcd comics have borne the same name. The first was 786: Exoplanets , published August 30, 2010, and 1071: Exoplanets , published June 20, 2012.\n"}
{"id":1481,"title":"API","image_title":"API","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1481","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/api.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1481:_API","transcript":"[Cueball sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen.] API Guide Request URL format: http:\/\/~~~.com\/<username>\/<item ID>\nServer will return an XML document which contains: The requested data. Documentation describing how the data is organized spatially.\nAPI Keys To obtain API access, contact the X.509-authenticated server and request an ECDH-RSA TLS key... If you do things right, it can take people a while to realize that your \"API documentation\" is just instructions for how to look at your website.\n","explanation":"This comic presents a web site designed for human readers as if it had an API ( application programming interface ) designed for machine-to-machine web service . An API is a set of instructions about a computer program, intended to be used by developers of other computer programs, so the two programs can interoperate more easily. The documentation explains how to send commands to the program, and how the output will be returned.\nMany web APIs are designed to return data in XML format. But in this case, the XML is XHTML , a version of the language that is used by most web pages. The \"requested data\" is the actual content (e.g. a blog post), and \"documentation\" refers (in an obscure way) to the parts of a web page that control how it looks on the screen (e.g. CSS and perhaps JavaScript layout code). The\n\"documentation\" may also be DTD which tells the XML parser info about this particular XML format, i.e. XHTML.\nIn order for a program to process a generic web site designed for human viewing, the program needs to use web scraping techniques, which often break when the web site design changes in subtle ways that a human might never notice. Therefore, developers prefer to have proper APIs with well-defined machine-readable formats, stable interfaces and documentation that actually describes the semantics of the data.\nFor example, Google has an official API for version 3 of their Youtube web service . But developers who don't want to hassle with the required API key or the costs associated with its use sometimes just scrape the regular YouTube web site . So someone could publish this comic with a YouTube URL as a convoluted hint to developers that there is an alternative to the official API.\nThe API keys section is a step-by-step description of how a web page is protected with HTTP Secure (HTTPS). The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol uses an elliptic curve Diffie\u2013Hellman (ECDH) key signed using Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) encryption, which is stored in an X.509 certificate. Normally, the browser or operating system does this behind the scenes, so most web developers and users do not need to know these details.\nThe access limits mentioned in the title text says that the API can be used for 86,400 seconds each day. At first this may appear to be a strange arbitrary number, however it is in fact the total number of seconds in 24 hours, essentially meaning there is no limit on most days. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) is the organization that decides when to add leap seconds , which account for slight anomalies in the Earth's rotation as compared to the mean solar day . These leap seconds will mean that the website is available for one extra second occasionally, although IERS decisions are based on actual Earth rotation rates and they of course wouldn't respond to requests for leap seconds in order to lengthen the number of seconds that a web site would be available for in a given calendar day.  The API does not discuss the issue that some days have 23 or 25 hours due to daylight saving time in the U.S. and summer time in Europe and some other places. This suggests that the web service tracks time via UTC .\n[Cueball sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen.] API Guide Request URL format: http:\/\/~~~.com\/<username>\/<item ID>\nServer will return an XML document which contains: The requested data. Documentation describing how the data is organized spatially.\nAPI Keys To obtain API access, contact the X.509-authenticated server and request an ECDH-RSA TLS key... If you do things right, it can take people a while to realize that your \"API documentation\" is just instructions for how to look at your website.\n"}
{"id":1482,"title":"NowPlaying","image_title":"#NowPlaying","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1482","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nowplaying.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1482:_NowPlaying","transcript":"[A social network news feed with user images for each of the three different contributors. The top of the first post is partly obscured, and for the last post only half of the first line is visible.]\n[Partially Visible] Brian is now listening to: E Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: A Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: B Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: D Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: C sharp Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nMike What the hell Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: B Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: A Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nCaitlin Can someone call him? Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: A Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: E Today \u2022 3:29 PM\n[Partially Visible] Brian is now listening to: A\nMy new social music service notifies your friends about what notes you're listening to.\n","explanation":"There are a variety of applications that post a user's music-listening habits on their preferred social network. In this comic, Randall takes that notion to its extreme, envisioning a program that does this note-by-note, rather than just song-by-song. As songs play several dozen notes a minute (and some songs, many more), this would lead to the flooding of friends' notification streams. In the example, the software is sharing the notes that Brian is listening to; and his friends Mike and Caitlin are getting annoyed with the number of posts they are receiving.\nThere are typically many hundreds of notes in any song.  Any song with more than a single line of music contains multiple different notes whose names according to the English convention are communicated here. All but the slowest songs will require reporting dozens to hundreds of notes every minute (a single glissando may cover a dozen or more notes in less than a second), meaning that anyone who can see your stream of posts will be literally inundated by posts from the service. Even if you could keep up with the speed of the posted notes that someone is listening to, the similarity in phrases in many songs (especially pop songs, e.g. Pachelbel's Rant ) means that many different songs may include the same sequence of notes, though possibly in different octaves or at different speeds.\nThe comic's title alludes to the fact that you can \"play a song\" but can also \"play a note.\" It may also allude to the visual similarities between the hash\/pound\/ number sign (#) and the sharp sign (\u266f). C sharp , above Mike's comment, is the only note not given by a single letter (after the correction - see Trivia ).\nThe title text continues the joke of this new musical service: If you click on the post, it takes you to search results for the note on various online music store. Since many songs in similar keys contain at least some of the notes posted, you would be given a list of a large part of the music you can buy in any on-line music stores. Of course this is at least as useless as being told which note someone is listening to.\nThe notes appear to be the beginning of I'll Be There For You by The Rembrandts , the title music of the TV series \" Friends \".  This could be an internal reference to the idea that it \"notifies\" (converts into musical notes) your \"friends\" of the notes (a play on words ).\nOr we've been nerd sniped .\n[A social network news feed with user images for each of the three different contributors. The top of the first post is partly obscured, and for the last post only half of the first line is visible.]\n[Partially Visible] Brian is now listening to: E Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: A Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: B Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: D Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: C sharp Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nMike What the hell Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: B Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: A Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nCaitlin Can someone call him? Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: A Today \u2022 3:28 PM\nBrian is now listening to: E Today \u2022 3:29 PM\n[Partially Visible] Brian is now listening to: A\nMy new social music service notifies your friends about what notes you're listening to.\n"}
{"id":1483,"title":"Quotative Like","image_title":"Quotative Like","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1483","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/quotative_like.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1483:_Quotative_Like","transcript":"[Megan referring to a published article she is holding.] Megan: I found this article on the linguistics of the \"Quotative Like\". Cueball: Like, when you're like, \"She was like\"? Megan: Yeah. Megan: It features a quote from a linguist, Patricia Cukor-Avila: \"Eventually all the people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead, and the ones who use it are going to be in control.\" Cueball: Wow. Turns out linguists are pretty hardcore. Megan: I think she means dead from old age. Cueball: I'm gonna start using \"like\" more, just in case.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Megan mentions an article on the use of the word \" like \" as a quotative . Cueball makes a joke on this by managing to use the word \"like\" three times in a seven word sentence.\nThe \"quotative like\" is regularly given as an example of the decline of the English language. It is used to introduce a quotation or impersonation, although what follows may not be a verbatim quote, but rather conveys the general meaning of the original phrase. Although it is modern in terms of the English language, examples of its use can be found all the way back in 1928. The song \" Cobwebs \" by the American singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III blames Jack Kerouac and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis character Maynard G. Krebs for starting the vogue of using the word \"like\" as a quotative. In the early 1980s, the stereotypical Valley Girl made substantial use of the quotative like, which may be the main origin of its contemporary use.\nIn the second panel Megan mentions that, in a newspaper article , the linguist Patricia Cukor-Avila is like: \"Eventually all the people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead, and the ones who use it are going to be in control.\"\nThe author is presumably making the point that language is inherently fluid, and the meanings of words exist only by common understanding, which means that, as more and more people grow up with the new usage, it will become increasingly accepted. Most resistance will come from the older generation, which means it will diminish over time.  While it has long been popular to criticize modern developments that are seen as steps backward (see 1227: The Pace of Modern Life ), such criticisms are usually in vain, as they are typically made by the older generation against the younger generation, and the latter is always guaranteed to outlive the former [ citation needed ] .\nThe quote, however, doesn't actually say why the older generation will die out, leading Cueball to speculate that Dr. Cukor-Avila is plotting (or warning of) some sort of genocide against people who dislike the use of the quotative like. Megan points out a much more likely interpretation (although this is not mentioned directly in the article), that those people will die of old age, but Cueball persists, saying he'll err on the side of caution and make sure to use the quotative like more often, thereby hoping to be spared from the genocide.\nThe title text applies quotative like to the Book of Genesis (specifically, Genesis 1:3 : \"God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light\"), the first book of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) and the Christian Old Testament. When researching the history of language etymologists take great effort to find the earliest usage of a word or phrase, which may be used to show a historical precedence.\n[Megan referring to a published article she is holding.] Megan: I found this article on the linguistics of the \"Quotative Like\". Cueball: Like, when you're like, \"She was like\"? Megan: Yeah. Megan: It features a quote from a linguist, Patricia Cukor-Avila: \"Eventually all the people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead, and the ones who use it are going to be in control.\" Cueball: Wow. Turns out linguists are pretty hardcore. Megan: I think she means dead from old age. Cueball: I'm gonna start using \"like\" more, just in case.\n"}
{"id":1484,"title":"Apollo Speeches","image_title":"Apollo Speeches","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1484","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/apollo_speeches.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1484:_Apollo_Speeches","transcript":"[Commentary above the speeches.] In 1969, Nixon staffer William Safire wrote a speech for the president to deliver if the Apollo 11 return launch failed, stranding the doomed astronauts on the Moon. Uncovered in 1999, it is often called the greatest speech never given. Today, the full set of Safire's contingency speeches has been found.\nIn event astronauts stranded on Moon Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. [Here, several lines from the original speech are cut.] In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man\u2019s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the Moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever\nIn event spacecraft goes missing Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the Moon as ambassadors of peace for all mankind, and all mankind prays that they may yet return safely home. We are separated from the Moon by a vast gulf of space, against which their tiny vessel appeared as but a drifting speck. For a few brief seconds, we took our eye off them, and despite days of desperate searching, never again was their vessel sighted from Earth. While these men are lost, they are not forgotten, and their sacrifice will not\nIn event astronauts abscond with spacecraft We do not know what led Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins to betray the trust we placed in them, abandon their mission, and steer their vessel toward Mars. Nor do we know what compelled them to transmit such hurtful messages back to Earth, heaping contempt on their onetime home. But whatever the cause of their dereliction, I call upon the United States to commit itself, before this year is out, to launching a mission to chase down Apollo 11 and return its crew to earth to face justice. We must not rest until\nIn event spacecraft returns with extra astronauts While there is much we do not understand, tonight all of earth is united in celebrating the safe return of our brave explorers. We of course have many questions, and in the days and weeks to come we will demand answers. How many souls were truly aboard Apollo 11 when it launched? Who are the six men now in quarantine aboard the USS Hornet? What happened\nIn event spacecraft hits U.S.S. Hornet, crushing Nixon President Agnew : Tonight, we have experienced a great national triumph and a great national loss. We take joy in the safe return from the Moon of Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins, but that joy is tempered with sorrow as we mourn our president\u2019s tragic death beneath their wayward capsule. Richard Nixon wholeheartedly supported our courageous astronauts as they carried the hopes and prayers of Earth to the heavens, and in the moment of their homecoming, he himself has departed on that ultimate voyage. As we grieve, we must rededicate ourselves to the cause for which our president\nIn event spacecraft accidentally sold for scrap and crushed with astronauts inside My fellow Americans, I am as shocked and appalled as you at this stunning and\n","explanation":"As explained in the comic, Nixon staffer William Safire wrote two speeches for the United States President to deliver, depending on whether or not the Apollo 11 return launch was successful. When the outcome of an event (moon landing, military actions, etc.) can't be predicted with sufficient certainty, it is a common practice for \" contingency speeches \" to be prepared.\nThe rest of the comic runs with this theme, making the false claim that Safire had written several other such contingency speeches for increasingly unlikely possibilities. First listed are a couple pages from the real contingency speech to be delivered in the event that the astronauts were left stranded on the Moon. Lying on top of that is a speech to be delivered in the case that the spacecraft went missing altogether, which was relatively unlikely. The speeches after that deal with the following highly unlikely or impossible contingencies:\nThe astronauts had stolen the ship and piloted it towards Mars, which was clearly not feasible\nWhile the crew could have redirected the ship while sending insulting messages to Earth, the spacecraft lacked the power to fly to Mars within any reasonable period of time by several orders of magnitude or the supplies for the astronauts to survive such an extended trip. At the time of production for this strip in 2015, several governments and private companies have designs on Martian colonization.\nMore astronauts than expected were found in the recovered ship\nThe appearance of three additional astronauts ventures into the realm of possibility normally reserved for science fiction and Twilight Zone episodes.\nThe ship had hit the U.S.S. Hornet and crushed Nixon\nThe USS Hornet was the ship that recovered the Apollo 11 astronauts after they completed their return mission by landing their command module in the Pacific Ocean; President Nixon himself was on board to greet them upon their return. Apollo 11 famously landed in the Pacific Ocean, and the single ship tasked with its recovery would be a very small target to hit for the technology even if that had been the intent, which it was of course not. Spiro Agnew was, in 1969, Vice President of the United States, and thus next in line for the presidency. This joke plays off the extreme improbability of the ship, and indeed President, being hit and triggering a succession, causing \"President Agnew\" to address the world.\nThis is not as implausible as it sounds. The re-entry guidance had become good enough by Apollo 11 that the destination point of the capsule was moved several hundred yards from the carrier's position for exactly this reason. Such a collision had been the subject of jokes at NASA, until one day an engineer came to Gene Kranz and said, \"the more I think about it, the less I think it is a joke.\"\nThe re-entry craft had been sold for scrap and crushed along with the astronauts inside\nApollo 11 observed a strict quarantine procedure after landing. This possibility requires extraordinary incompetence and unholy zeal for recycling programs. The command module was historically recovered, examined, and is now on permanent display in the National Air and Space Museum . Primary sources state that the astronauts were allowed to leave the craft before it was put on display [ citation needed ] .\nThe title text builds upon this last contingency speech, delving into the pathos of the horror of the spacecraft's recycling and its passengers' resulting deaths despite the U.S.'s commitment to recycling initiatives.\n[Commentary above the speeches.] In 1969, Nixon staffer William Safire wrote a speech for the president to deliver if the Apollo 11 return launch failed, stranding the doomed astronauts on the Moon. Uncovered in 1999, it is often called the greatest speech never given. Today, the full set of Safire's contingency speeches has been found.\nIn event astronauts stranded on Moon Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. [Here, several lines from the original speech are cut.] In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man\u2019s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the Moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever\nIn event spacecraft goes missing Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the Moon as ambassadors of peace for all mankind, and all mankind prays that they may yet return safely home. We are separated from the Moon by a vast gulf of space, against which their tiny vessel appeared as but a drifting speck. For a few brief seconds, we took our eye off them, and despite days of desperate searching, never again was their vessel sighted from Earth. While these men are lost, they are not forgotten, and their sacrifice will not\nIn event astronauts abscond with spacecraft We do not know what led Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins to betray the trust we placed in them, abandon their mission, and steer their vessel toward Mars. Nor do we know what compelled them to transmit such hurtful messages back to Earth, heaping contempt on their onetime home. But whatever the cause of their dereliction, I call upon the United States to commit itself, before this year is out, to launching a mission to chase down Apollo 11 and return its crew to earth to face justice. We must not rest until\nIn event spacecraft returns with extra astronauts While there is much we do not understand, tonight all of earth is united in celebrating the safe return of our brave explorers. We of course have many questions, and in the days and weeks to come we will demand answers. How many souls were truly aboard Apollo 11 when it launched? Who are the six men now in quarantine aboard the USS Hornet? What happened\nIn event spacecraft hits U.S.S. Hornet, crushing Nixon President Agnew : Tonight, we have experienced a great national triumph and a great national loss. We take joy in the safe return from the Moon of Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins, but that joy is tempered with sorrow as we mourn our president\u2019s tragic death beneath their wayward capsule. Richard Nixon wholeheartedly supported our courageous astronauts as they carried the hopes and prayers of Earth to the heavens, and in the moment of their homecoming, he himself has departed on that ultimate voyage. As we grieve, we must rededicate ourselves to the cause for which our president\nIn event spacecraft accidentally sold for scrap and crushed with astronauts inside My fellow Americans, I am as shocked and appalled as you at this stunning and\n"}
{"id":1485,"title":"Friendship","image_title":"Friendship","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1485","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/friendship.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1485:_Friendship","transcript":"[A Wikipedia style layout is shown for extracts from an article titled Friendship.]\nFriendship From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A Friendship is a close non-romantic relationship between two (or more) men, a form of affectional or homosocial intimacy. [1] Contents [ hide ] 1 Etymology 2 Characteristics 3 Portrayal of friendship 3.1 Celebrity and fictional friendships 3.2 Historical and political friendships 3.3 Gay-straight friendships 4 See also 5 References Etymology Friendship is a portmanteau of the words friend and ship . Editor Dave Carnie coined the term in the skateboard magazine Big Brother in the 1990s to refer to the sort of relationships that develop between skaters who spend [...] Portrayal of Friendship Celebrity and Fictional Friendships A number of celebrities have engaged in friendships with fellow celebrities. Examples include Ben Affleck and Matt Damon , described as \"perhaps the pioneering friendship in showbiz history\" [9] which led to a hit off-broadway play [...] Friendship on television has also become more commonplace, with some critics tracing its origins back to shows such as The Odd Couple . [14] In October 2008, TV Guide placed Gregory House ( Hugh Laurie ) and James [...] The Japanese and Korean music industry actively encourages friendship among male celebrities (particularly members of boy bands ) as part of the fan service to please the audience. [19][20] In fiction, what had once been called buddy films have to a degree been rebranded as friendship films, although [...] Historical and political friendships Politically, the relationship between Bill Clinton and Al Gore has been called a precursor to the friendship. [6] The relationship between George W. Bush and former press\n[Below the extracts is this caption:]\nHow to improve the \"Bromance\" Wikipedia article\nIn the wake of this comic, several Wikipedia pages were vandalized, among them Bromance , Militia organizations in the United States , Militia (United States) , and Friendship . All these pages were semi-protected by an administrator against further attempts for a week after this comic was published.\nThe day this comic was published, a vote to delete the Bromance article was initiated on Wikipedia.\n","explanation":"A \" Bromance \" is a modern slang term for a strong non-romantic relationship between two male humans. It is a portmanteau of the words brother, meaning a close male friend (aka \"bro\"), and romance.\nAlthough current in popular media, some commentators have criticized the implicit homophobia in the term, suggesting that it denotes cultural discomfort at relationships of emotional closeness between men.\nIn this comic, Randall is implying the Wikipedia page for the word \"bromance\" should more accurately represent what most bromances actually are: friendships. This could be a joke to reference the fact that some males prefer to not call friendships as such, for fear of looking unmasculine, or being confused as a gay couple. The comic makes light of the fact that the word bromance and friendship are interchangeable, and should be treated as such.\nThe comic later contains parts of the edited article, mocking the use of \"bromance\" in popular culture, implying that \"friendships\" can be used just as easily to describe platonic male relationships.\nDespite supposedly vandalizing the \"bromance\" article, the article is titled \"friendship\", giving a similar result to word-replacement browser extensions, as in 1031: s\/keyboard\/leopard\/ .\nThe title text implies Randall does not agree with Wikipedia vandalism, except in the case of bromance\/friendship, and also militia\/fanclub, possibly to make light of the harsh sounding word in a negative light. This is probably because many of his comics include fake wikipedia entries, and many people, inspired by the comic, actually make the edit happen.\nA later comic called 1746: Making Friends , was also not so much about friendship, but rather about vultures...\n[A Wikipedia style layout is shown for extracts from an article titled Friendship.]\nFriendship From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A Friendship is a close non-romantic relationship between two (or more) men, a form of affectional or homosocial intimacy. [1] Contents [ hide ] 1 Etymology 2 Characteristics 3 Portrayal of friendship 3.1 Celebrity and fictional friendships 3.2 Historical and political friendships 3.3 Gay-straight friendships 4 See also 5 References Etymology Friendship is a portmanteau of the words friend and ship . Editor Dave Carnie coined the term in the skateboard magazine Big Brother in the 1990s to refer to the sort of relationships that develop between skaters who spend [...] Portrayal of Friendship Celebrity and Fictional Friendships A number of celebrities have engaged in friendships with fellow celebrities. Examples include Ben Affleck and Matt Damon , described as \"perhaps the pioneering friendship in showbiz history\" [9] which led to a hit off-broadway play [...] Friendship on television has also become more commonplace, with some critics tracing its origins back to shows such as The Odd Couple . [14] In October 2008, TV Guide placed Gregory House ( Hugh Laurie ) and James [...] The Japanese and Korean music industry actively encourages friendship among male celebrities (particularly members of boy bands ) as part of the fan service to please the audience. [19][20] In fiction, what had once been called buddy films have to a degree been rebranded as friendship films, although [...] Historical and political friendships Politically, the relationship between Bill Clinton and Al Gore has been called a precursor to the friendship. [6] The relationship between George W. Bush and former press\n[Below the extracts is this caption:]\nHow to improve the \"Bromance\" Wikipedia article\nIn the wake of this comic, several Wikipedia pages were vandalized, among them Bromance , Militia organizations in the United States , Militia (United States) , and Friendship . All these pages were semi-protected by an administrator against further attempts for a week after this comic was published.\nThe day this comic was published, a vote to delete the Bromance article was initiated on Wikipedia.\n"}
{"id":1486,"title":"Vacuum","image_title":"Vacuum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1486","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vacuum.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1486:_Vacuum","transcript":"[Beret guy is holding an upright vacuum cleaner upside-down by the handle, waving it around above his head.]\n[The vacuum cleaner is upright on the ground, and Beret guy is standing on its body, wiggling the handle.] Cueball: What are you doing? Beret Guy: Trying to unlock the tremendous energy of the vacuum.\n[Beret guy rides the vacuum cleaner as it begins to lift off, propelled upward by an unknown force.] Cueball: That\u2019s not what that\u2014 Beret Guy: \u2014Ha ha! It works!\n[Beret guy flies away on the vacuum cleaner.] Cueball: I said, that\u2019s\u2014 Beret Guy: The universe is mine to command!!\n","explanation":"According to quantum mechanics there is tremendous energy density in space-time itself: this is known as: vacuum energy , zero point energy, vacuum foam, etc. So far we don't know any way to tap into this energy.\nIn the cartoon, Beret Guy appears to be making a silly mistake, confusing the \"vacuum\" referred to in calculations of the theoretical energy density of space time with a vacuum cleaner , which is also commonly referred to as just a \"vacuum\".\nCueball tries to correct him, but it turns out that Beret Guy really is able to tap into this fundamental source of energy. Having such strange and impossible powers is second nature to Beret Guy, as can be seen in many of his appearances \u2013 for instance in 1388: Subduction License .\nBut even though Beret Guy now claims the Universe is his to command (a sentence used by Jafar from Aladdin , but a similar intent is also stated by the crazy villain in many movies ), Cueball is not fazed by this and simply asks, in the title text, if Beret Guy would use the vacuum for its intended purpose and clean the living room. This seems to imply Beret Guy has previously, perhaps repeatedly, taken an action that would normally imply he was going to clean the living room (such as taking a broom or some other cleaning implement that is not the vacuum) and done something unexpected with it instead (such as flying off on it).\nOn an additional note, many scientific breakthroughs in history have been made because the person making them did not realize they were supposedly impossible, such as spin-stabilized magnetic levitation . This comic could be seen as a nod to that.\nIt seems that Cueball borrows one of Beret Guy's vacuum cleaners later in 1826: Birdwatching . A normal vacuum cleaner would not be able to do what Cueball's presumably does to birds in that comic!\n[Beret guy is holding an upright vacuum cleaner upside-down by the handle, waving it around above his head.]\n[The vacuum cleaner is upright on the ground, and Beret guy is standing on its body, wiggling the handle.] Cueball: What are you doing? Beret Guy: Trying to unlock the tremendous energy of the vacuum.\n[Beret guy rides the vacuum cleaner as it begins to lift off, propelled upward by an unknown force.] Cueball: That\u2019s not what that\u2014 Beret Guy: \u2014Ha ha! It works!\n[Beret guy flies away on the vacuum cleaner.] Cueball: I said, that\u2019s\u2014 Beret Guy: The universe is mine to command!!\n"}
{"id":1487,"title":"Tornado","image_title":"Tornado","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1487","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tornado.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1487:_Tornado","transcript":"[Cueball is a news commentator holding a microphone while standing in front of a small village with three (intact) houses behind him.] Cueball: The tornado touched down directly over a merry-go-round, in what victims are calling a \"fun\" and \"awesome\" disaster.\n","explanation":"A merry-go-round (or carousel) is an amusement ride consisting of a (usually) slowly rotating circular platform with seats for riders. These seats are traditionally wooden horses. Merry-go-rounds usually rotate slowly, as it is a children's ride. [ citation needed ] The implication is that a tornado have made a merry-go-round spin much faster, creating the \"fun\" and \"awesome\" experience described by the news commentator. In reality such an event would most likely destroy the merry-go-round or at least damage it in a way that would keep it from spinning, such as by breaking an axle or bearing. Barring damage to the merry-go-round itself, if the tornado caused it to spin much faster than normal, anyone riding it at the time would likely be thrown off and injured due to the increased centrifugal force .\nThe title text refers to the spinning teacup ride which consists of several circular units (\"teacups\") that seat several people each. They rotate around their center axis, while simultaneously orbiting the center of the entire ride, exposing people to acceleration in rapidly shifting, seemingly random directions. The second tornado system, as reported in the title text, had multiple vortices , similarly rotating around a common center, that attached themselves to each of the \"teacups\", also spinning them faster than normal operation of the ride would have. This is, of course, even less likely (to happen, and to result in no injuries if it did) than the single-vortex tornado on a merry-go-round.\nTornadoes are a recurring subject on xkcd. This setup is a variety of the news anchor category , but since Cueball is not in a studio it cannot be included in that category.\n[Cueball is a news commentator holding a microphone while standing in front of a small village with three (intact) houses behind him.] Cueball: The tornado touched down directly over a merry-go-round, in what victims are calling a \"fun\" and \"awesome\" disaster.\n"}
{"id":1488,"title":"Flowcharts","image_title":"Flowcharts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1488","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flowcharts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1488:_Flowcharts","transcript":"[A flow chart. The first option the start box is white text on a black rectangle. The other boxes are rhombuses standing on edge. Except for the first there are always two options going out. Most only have one option coming in, but there are exceptions with two options going in.] Start [One arrow points to the first real choice.] [Below the text on the two options going out from each option will be indented. The top of these two options will be the one to be mentioned first below. Then the chart will be mapped like this going back to the previous unfinished option.] Do you like flowcharts? Yes No [Yes goes back where it came from.] Do you like line graphs? Yes No Data or axis? Line Axis [The line is just a line \u2013 but now as the line in a line graph.] Time or your happiness? Time Your happiness [These two lines turn into the x and y axis of the line graph.] Scatter plots? Yes No Data or axis? Data Axis [The data line turns into the points in a scatter plot.] X or Y? X Y [These two lines turn into the x and y axis of the scatter plot.] Help charge a battery? Yes No Are you A\/C or D\/C?, A\/C D\/C Positive or negative phase? + - [The D\/C option also goes to this next option, but directly. This next rhombus looks like a part of a circuit diagram.] Positive or negative DC terminal? + - [These two lines goes to the + and \u2013 poles of a battery.] Like spirals? No Yes Take the path of least resistance? Never Yes [Never goes through two resistors and a diode before reaching the point of the Yes option, which then also goes though yet another resistor. Both thus end at the same option, which is also the one that Yes to like Spirals ends up at:] Do you like when people find the golden spiral in random images? Yes, even though it's total BS. No, it's total BS. [Yes option takes the chart into a fading line that turns into a golden spiral spanning the whole chart.] Tired of flowcharts yet? No Yes, I want to look at something else [No takes you back to the start box at the top.] [Yes takes you out of the comic and points to the Random button at xkcd.]\n","explanation":"Note : A flawed version of this comic was posted at first and then quickly a correct version was uploaded. But this gave rise to several misunderstandings and confusion. See the Trivia section below.\nThis comic is a flowchart style, like many. Interestingly, the first option, Do you like flowcharts? loops back to itself if you say Yes . As the yes lines of other options point to the type of graph they describe (for example, the yes line of Do you like line graphs? points to a line graph), this may be interpreted as a recursive reference to the flowchart itself, although it points to the option itself rather than the START node. Also, this may cause the reader who actually likes flow charts to go into an endless loop of choosing Yes , until they are so annoyed by flowcharts that they do not like them anymore and can progress by saying No .\nAfter asking about flowcharts, the reader is asked whether they like line graphs . If they follow the yes line, it becomes a line graph where \"Time\" is the x-axis and \"Your Happiness\" is the y-axis, and shows that your happiness increases with time. If you don't like line graphs, they are asked the same question about scatter plots where again the lines turn into the points and the axis of such a plot.\nTaking yet another line, the reader is asked \"Charge a battery?\" If they follow the line marked yes they are asked whether they are A\/C or D\/C current and are led to a portion of the flowchart which resembles a circuit diagram of a rectifier bridge with a battery connected to it.\nIf the reader follows the \"no\" line, they are asked if they like spirals. If they choose \"no\" they are asked whether they would take the path of least resistance . This part of the flowchart resembles a circuit diagram, and the word \" resistance \" is a pun because resistance can have several meanings. In electricity it is an electrical quantity that measures how the device or material impedes the electric current flow through it. Going left is the \"Never\" option, which goes through extra resistors and a diode, therefore making the \"Yes\" option the \"path of least resistance\". However, when asked if you choose the path of least resistance and answers never it could also mean that you do not try to avoid a little trouble.\nWhether they choose \"Yes\" or \"No\", they arrive at \"Do you like when people find the golden spiral in random images?\" If they choose \"yes\" the line fades into a drawing of a golden spiral, and we see that the flowchart is structured around it. If they choose \"no\" they are asked if they are tired of flowcharts. If not, they are taken to the beginning to start over again. If they are tired, the line points to the \"random\" button on the xkcd website.\nThe title text and the faint image of a golden spiral parody the fact that the golden spiral is superimposed on nearly everything . The golden spiral is a spiral that has the growth rate of the golden ratio, a number that has inspired both artists and mathematicians alike. However, people try to find the golden ratio in seemingly random objects, and they fall to confirmation bias when drawing a golden spiral on top that seemingly fits. The comic links to [1] , where one can see exactly that- golden spirals Randall \"found\" in random photographs. This may be a spoof of the viral video Illuminati Confirmed . The limit of the ratio of two consecutive terms of the Fibonacci sequence is equal to the golden ratio, so a Fibonacci spiral matches up almost perfectly for a good reason, unlike the coincidental matchings of the pictures in the mobile site link.\nThis comic bears reminiscence of 730: Circuit Diagram , although it is not exactly the same idea. Putting a golden spiral over other things was again used in 2322: ISO Paper Size Golden Spiral , like the spiral page on xkcd which this comic is a link to.\n[A flow chart. The first option the start box is white text on a black rectangle. The other boxes are rhombuses standing on edge. Except for the first there are always two options going out. Most only have one option coming in, but there are exceptions with two options going in.] Start [One arrow points to the first real choice.] [Below the text on the two options going out from each option will be indented. The top of these two options will be the one to be mentioned first below. Then the chart will be mapped like this going back to the previous unfinished option.] Do you like flowcharts? Yes No [Yes goes back where it came from.] Do you like line graphs? Yes No Data or axis? Line Axis [The line is just a line \u2013 but now as the line in a line graph.] Time or your happiness? Time Your happiness [These two lines turn into the x and y axis of the line graph.] Scatter plots? Yes No Data or axis? Data Axis [The data line turns into the points in a scatter plot.] X or Y? X Y [These two lines turn into the x and y axis of the scatter plot.] Help charge a battery? Yes No Are you A\/C or D\/C?, A\/C D\/C Positive or negative phase? + - [The D\/C option also goes to this next option, but directly. This next rhombus looks like a part of a circuit diagram.] Positive or negative DC terminal? + - [These two lines goes to the + and \u2013 poles of a battery.] Like spirals? No Yes Take the path of least resistance? Never Yes [Never goes through two resistors and a diode before reaching the point of the Yes option, which then also goes though yet another resistor. Both thus end at the same option, which is also the one that Yes to like Spirals ends up at:] Do you like when people find the golden spiral in random images? Yes, even though it's total BS. No, it's total BS. [Yes option takes the chart into a fading line that turns into a golden spiral spanning the whole chart.] Tired of flowcharts yet? No Yes, I want to look at something else [No takes you back to the start box at the top.] [Yes takes you out of the comic and points to the Random button at xkcd.]\n"}
{"id":1489,"title":"Fundamental Forces","image_title":"Fundamental Forces","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1489","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fundamental_forces.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1489:_Fundamental_Forces","transcript":"[Cueball is holding his hands up while giving a lecture to an off panel audience.] Cueball: There are four fundamental forces between particles: (1) Gravity , which obeys the inverse square law: F gravity = G m 1 m 2 \/d 2 Off panel audience: OK...\n\n[Cueball is still holding his hands up while continues the lecture to the off panel audience.] Cueball: (2) Electromagnetism , which obeys this inverse-square law: F static = K e q 1 q 2 \/d 2 ...and also Maxwell's equations Off panel audience: Also what?\n\n[Zoom in on Cueball as he continues the lecture to the off panel audience.] Cueball: (3) The strong nuclear force , which obeys, uh ... ...well, umm... ...it holds protons and neutrons together. Off panel audience: I see. Cueball: It's strong.\n\n[Cueball finishes the lecture to the off panel audience and spreads out his arm for the final remark.] Cueball: And (4) the weak force . It [mumble mumble] radioactive decay [mumble mumble] Off panel audience: That's not a sentence. You just said \u201cRadio- Cueball: \u2013 And those are the four fundamental forces!\n","explanation":"Cueball is acting here as someone teaching physics at a basic level, perhaps a high school science teacher. He seems to understand the general idea of the four fundamental forces , but his understanding gets progressively more sketchy about the details. The off-panel audience, probably a student or class, is interested, but quickly begins to realize Cueball's lack of understanding. Instead of acknowledging the problem directly, Cueball simply blusters onwards.\nThe comic also outlines how progressively difficult it gets to describe the forces. Gravity was first mathematically characterized in 1686 as Newton's law of universal gravitation , which was considered an essentially complete account until the introduction of general relativity in 1915. The electromagnetic force does indeed give rise to Coulomb's law of electrostatic interaction (another inverse-square law , proposed in 1785), but a much more comprehensive description, covering full classical electrodynamics , was only given in Maxwell's equations around 1861. The strong and weak forces cannot easily be summarized as comparably simple mathematical equations. It's possible that Cueball does understand the strong and weak interactions, but is completely at a loss when he tries to summarize them.\nThe strong force doesn't act directly between protons and neutrons but between the quarks that form them. Unlike gravity and electromagnetism, the strong force gets stronger with increasing distance : It is loosely similar to the restoring force of an extended spring . However, all stable heavy particles are neutral to the strong force, due to being made up of three \" colors \" (or a color and the appropriate \"anticolor\") of quarks. Between protons and neutrons there is a residual strong force, analogous in some ways to the van der Waals force between molecules. This residual strong force is carried by pions and does decrease rapidly and exponentially with distance due to the pions having mass.\nThe weak force is much weaker than electromagnetism at typical distances within an atomic nucleus (but is still stronger than gravity), and has a short range, so has very little effect as a force . What it has instead is the property of changing one particle into another. It can cause a down quark to become an up quark, and in the process release a high-energy electron and electron anti-neutrino. This is known as beta decay , a form of radioactivity. Over even shorter distances, and much higher temperatures , the weak interaction and electromagnetism are essentially the same, thus being merged to form the electroweak force . The electroweak force was also mentioned in a later comic, 1956: Unification .\nThe title text refers to the fact that it is gravity that appears to be the simplest and easiest to understand of the four forces, but turns out to be the hardest to reconcile with a coherent (quantum) understanding of all four forces together .\n[Cueball is holding his hands up while giving a lecture to an off panel audience.] Cueball: There are four fundamental forces between particles: (1) Gravity , which obeys the inverse square law: F gravity = G m 1 m 2 \/d 2 Off panel audience: OK...\n\n[Cueball is still holding his hands up while continues the lecture to the off panel audience.] Cueball: (2) Electromagnetism , which obeys this inverse-square law: F static = K e q 1 q 2 \/d 2 ...and also Maxwell's equations Off panel audience: Also what?\n\n[Zoom in on Cueball as he continues the lecture to the off panel audience.] Cueball: (3) The strong nuclear force , which obeys, uh ... ...well, umm... ...it holds protons and neutrons together. Off panel audience: I see. Cueball: It's strong.\n\n[Cueball finishes the lecture to the off panel audience and spreads out his arm for the final remark.] Cueball: And (4) the weak force . It [mumble mumble] radioactive decay [mumble mumble] Off panel audience: That's not a sentence. You just said \u201cRadio- Cueball: \u2013 And those are the four fundamental forces!\n"}
{"id":1490,"title":"Atoms","image_title":"Atoms","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1490","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/atoms.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1490:_Atoms","transcript":"[Megan stands at a table and is preparing a sample for some kind of analysis in a device, when Beret Guy walks in.] Beret Guy: What\u2019re you doing? Megan: Testing a sample for beryllium. Beret Guy: That? Yeah, there\u2019s a bunch of berylliums. Megan: How do you know?\n[Megan turns to Beret Guy who takes the sample and looks at it.] Beret Guy: Look at it! See? Tons of oxygens and silicons, a few irons but definitely some berylliums too! Can\u2019t you see them?\n[They continue to talk.] Megan: No, I can\u2019t see a list of the atoms in a thing by looking. Beret Guy: How do you tell what things are?\n[Zoom in on Megan.] Megan: This is ridiculous. Look at me. What do you see? Beret Guy (off-panel): You have tons of metal in your face. Lots of fillings, I guess?\n[Megan stares at Beret Guy who takes a looks at his own arm.] Megan: What\u2019s wrong with you? Beret Guy: Too many zincs? I\u2019ve always worried I had too much zinc and everyone thought I was weird.\nCould possibly explain 452: Mission if he believes all carbon based objects to be scones.\n","explanation":"This comic shows another quirky and fantastical ability of Beret Guy .\nIn this comic, Megan is preparing a sample of what appears to be some mineral for elemental analysis . It seems to be some kind of silicate containing a small amount of iron (a common example of this would be red sandstone ), and she is running a test to see if it contains beryllium (a rarer element whose best-known natural form is as a component of emerald ).  Such analyses typically involve many instruments and steps to prepare the sample.  However, Beret Guy seems to be able to identify all the elements the substance is composed of just by eyeballing it, making him perhaps the perfect elemental analysis instrument.\nTo confirm this, Megan asks Beret Guy what he sees when he looks at her face, expecting that a normal person would describe the arrangement of colors and features that they see. Since Beret Guy sees the atoms Megan is composed of (mostly oxygen, carbon and hydrogen ) he only notices the unusual atoms. In this case he sees the metal atoms her dental fillings are composed of. This shows his \"atomic vision\" extends beyond the surface of the substances. Megan finds this bizarre and asks Beret Guy what is wrong with him. He states that he has always suspected he contains too much zinc , which he believes makes people think he is weird, thus missing Megan\u2019s point: what is weird is not Beret Guy\u2019s elemental content, but his ability to apparently see everything as atoms sorted by element.\nHigh zinc intake ( zinc toxicity ) can cause nausea, vomiting, pain, cramps and diarrhea. It also reduces copper absorption, which affects the immune system. However, it does not grant superhuman sensory abilities. [ citation needed ] That is solely a function of tin .\nThe comic continues the theme of Beret Guy\u2019s naive misunderstandings of scientific terminology turning to be literally true.  In a previous comic his misinterpretation of the notion of energy in the vacuum resulted in him gaining significant superpowers.\nIn the title text, the concept is taken even further: Beret Guy found his dad indistinguishable from a dog.  This is likely because all mammals are essentially made of the same basic elements.  Absent a distinguishing element from either his dad or the dog, they would appear to be the same.  He could, however, apparently distinguish his mother because she contained plutonium .  This is a very unusual occurrence that cannot possibly occur naturally in humans. [ citation needed ] Some possible explanations are:\nIt is also possible that the presence of plutonium in his mother may be the source of his own differences: radioactive exposure (in this case, potentially in utero) is a common source of super powers in comic books and other fiction (though unfortunately, this does not work in real life [ citation needed ] ).\nIt's not clear whether his mother's plutonium is related to his \"too many zincs\".  One explanation for Beret Guy having too much zinc could be that his mother's plutonium changed into zinc through the process of radioactive decay .\nBeret Guy\u2019s mother containing plutonium is probably intended as a whimsical explanation of his powers, since it is a trope in fiction for radioactivity to cause superpowers.\nIt is worth noting that the verbs \"recognized\" and \"had\" in the title text are written in past tense. This presents the possibility that Beret Guy's mother passed away due to radiation sickness from exposure to the radiation originating from the plutonium in her middle. This possibility is further evidenced when Beret Guy adds \"I never did ask her why...\", indicating that he may no longer have the opportunity to do so.\nThe English physicist Henry Moseley discovered the law relating the atomic number of elements with their characteristic x-rays when bombarded by free electrons, providing physical evidence for the periodic table , the Bohr Model of the atom and the concept of atomic number . In doing so he developed a method of identifying elements in a substance by bombarding them in a vacuum with electrons and using x-ray diffraction methods to measure the resulting X-rays. A famous French chemist brought him a complicated mixture of Rare Earth elements , many of which had only recently been discovered, to test his method. Within a short time, Mosley amazed the chemist by identifying all the elements by number using his method and referring to his chart to name them. This comic may therefore be subtly alluding to this method by suggesting that Beret Guy's eyes can fire electrons at anything he looks at and \"read\" the resulting X-ray radiation, giving him the ability to identify the composite elements in a similar manner.\n[Megan stands at a table and is preparing a sample for some kind of analysis in a device, when Beret Guy walks in.] Beret Guy: What\u2019re you doing? Megan: Testing a sample for beryllium. Beret Guy: That? Yeah, there\u2019s a bunch of berylliums. Megan: How do you know?\n[Megan turns to Beret Guy who takes the sample and looks at it.] Beret Guy: Look at it! See? Tons of oxygens and silicons, a few irons but definitely some berylliums too! Can\u2019t you see them?\n[They continue to talk.] Megan: No, I can\u2019t see a list of the atoms in a thing by looking. Beret Guy: How do you tell what things are?\n[Zoom in on Megan.] Megan: This is ridiculous. Look at me. What do you see? Beret Guy (off-panel): You have tons of metal in your face. Lots of fillings, I guess?\n[Megan stares at Beret Guy who takes a looks at his own arm.] Megan: What\u2019s wrong with you? Beret Guy: Too many zincs? I\u2019ve always worried I had too much zinc and everyone thought I was weird.\nCould possibly explain 452: Mission if he believes all carbon based objects to be scones.\n"}
{"id":1491,"title":"Stories of the Past and Future","image_title":"Stories of the Past and Future","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1491","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stories_of_the_past_and_future.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1491:_Stories_of_the_Past_and_Future","transcript":"Date of publication [A logarithmic scale running horizontally, from 3000 BCE to past 2015 CE.] Years in the future [A logarithmic scale running vertically, from 1 billion down to 0.] Stories set in the future (science fiction, prediction) Stories set in 2015 [A line divides this region into two. The upper side is labelled \"still possible\"; the lower side is labelled \"obsolete\".] [From left to right.] Memoirs of the Twentieth Century [1700, 265 years in the future] Looking Backward [1888, 112 years in the future] Golf in the Year 2000 [1892, 108 years in the future] The Time Machine [1895, 800 thousand to 30 million years in the future] Enoch Soames [1916, circa 60 years in the future] 1984 [1949, 35 years in the future] A Week in the Wales of the Future [1957, 76 years in the future] The Jetsons [1962-63, 100 years in the future] Star Trek [1966-69, 300 years in the future] 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968, 33 years in the future] Space: 1999 [1975-77, 24 years in the future] 2010: Odyssey Two [1982, 28 years in the future] Transformers (TV series) [1984-87, 20 years in the future] 2061: Odyssey Three [1987, 74 years in the future] Star Trek: The Next Generation [1987-94, circa 500 years in the future] Back to the Future Part II [1989, 26 years in the future] Zero Wing [1989, 112 years in the future] Terminator 2 (1995 portion) [1991, 4 years in the future] 3001: The Final Odyssey [1997, 1004 years in the future] Enterprise [2001-2005, 150 years in the future] This chart [2015, 0 years in the future] Years in the past [A logarithmic scale running vertically, from 0 down past 1 billion to \"Big Bang\"] Stories set in the past (History, Period Fiction) Stories written X years ago and set 2X years ago [A line divides this region into two. The upper side is labelled as follows.] Former period pieces Stories set in the past, but created long enough ago that they were published closer to their setting than to today. Modern audiences may not recognize which parts were supposed to sound old. [From left to right.] The Epic of Gilgamesh [ circa 2100 BCE, 600 years in the past] The Iliad [ circa 800 BCE, 450 years in the past] History of the Peloponnesian War [ circa 390 BCE, 10 years in the past] Book of Genesis [ circa 500 BCE, 4000 years in the past] Ashokavadana [ circa 100 BCE, 300 years in the past] Gospels (various estimates) [ circa 250 CE, 24 to 75 years in the past] The Pillow Book [1000 CE, 5 years in the past] Water Margin [ circa 1300, 195 years in the past] Richard III [ circa 1590, 115 years in the past] Julius Caesar [1599, 1650 years in the past] King John [ circa 1600, 500 years in the past] Henry IV [ circa 1600, 190 years in the past] King Lear [ circa 1606, 3000 years in the past] Henry VIII [ circa 1612, 105 years in the past] The Last of the Mohicans [1826, 69 years in the past] Rip Van Winkel [1819, 31-51 years in the past] A Tale of Two Cities [1859, 60 years in the past] Moby-Dick [1851, anywhere from 4 to 14 years ago] \"Some years ago--never mind how long precisely...\" Les Miser\u00e1bles [1862, 30 years in the past] Treasure Island [1883, 130 years in the past] A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [1889, 2000 years in the past] Gone with the Wind [1936, 70 years in the past] Lest Darkness Fall [1939, 550 years in the past] Casablanca [1942, 1 year in the past] Oklahoma! [1943, 37 years in the past] The Ten Commandments [1956, 1400 years in the past] The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957, 13 years in the past] Gunsmoke [1952-61, 80 years in the past] The Flintstones [1960-66, 100,000 years in the past] Catch-22 (book) [1961, 18 years in the past] The Great Escape [1963, 20 years in the past] Asterix Lawrence of Arabia The Music Man Bonnie and Clyde 2001: A Space Odyssey (prologue) American Graffiti Patton Catch-22 (movie) [1970, 27 years in the past] Chinatown Blazing Saddles Apocalypse Now Happy Days Grease M*A*S*H Annie (play) Roots Chariots of Fire Star Wars (IV-VI) Annie (movie) The Right Stuff Back to the Future Gandhi Platoon Dirty Dancing Back to the Future Part III The Wonder Years JFK The Sandlot Schindler's List Raptor Red Apollo 13 Star Wars (I-III) The Big Lebowski Evita Saving Private Ryan The Prince of Egypt Freaks and Geeks Hotel Rwanda I Love the '80s That '70s Show Pearl Harbor Ice Age I Love the '90s United 93 300 10,000 BC Year One The Wolf of Wall Street I Love the 2000s Mad Men Downton Abbey Star Wars (VII-IX)\n","explanation":"It's long been common for narrative works to be set in the past, and this tendency goes back to ancient mythology. The opposite approach, setting a work in a speculative future, has been less common prior to modern times. The oldest example Randall presents is from 1733, but it didn't really become a trend until well into the 19th century, and didn't become really common until the 20th century.\nFor works set in the future, particularly in the near future, there's a real possibility that audiences will still read or watch it past the date in which is was set, allowing them to compare the real world of this era to the one the author projected. This doesn't make the work less valuable, necessarily, but it does make the limits of such speculation painfully obvious, and tends to make the future presented there look dated and quaint . Randall labels these futuristic works as \"obsolete\".\nFor works set in the past, there's an opposite and somewhat more subtle effect.  Once the work itself is old enough, audiences tend to forget that they were intended as historical fiction in the first place. If an old work is set in the past, it's often assumed that they were set in their own time, not in the still more distant past. That impacts how we experience the work, because we tend to assume that it's a faithful representation of its own time, not a later interpretation that was intended to be old (and possibly nostalgic) even in its own time.\nOn top of this, in a similar situation to the failed attempt at futurology , for future-facing works of fiction, even a conscientiously faithful 'historic' film can age badly. Later understanding of previously hazy historical situations can be developed between the time of the fictional work being authored and your experience of it.\nTo demonstrate those impacts, this chart sorts various works by the year they were created, graphed against how far in the past or future they were originally set.  Lines on the chart are added to separate when each work ceases to work as either a prediction or as a period piece . For future works, the cut-off is obvious: if it was set in a year prior to the current year, we know that the predictions are obsolete (and can easily determine how accurate or inaccurate that future is).  Hence, at the time the chart was written (in 2015), works like 1984 and 2001: A Space Odyssey are obsolete, while works like Star Trek , which take place in a more distant future, are still theoretically possible. ( Back to the Future Part II is deliberately right on the line, as it was set in 2015).\nFor the past works, Randall sets the cut-off as when the work itself is older than the events in question were when it was first written\/made.  Hence, modern audiences are unlikely to realize that the Epic of Gilgamesh was intended to sound ancient, even when it was new, or that novels like Les Miserables were intended as historical fiction, or even that films like Chinatown or shows like Happy Days were intended as period pieces when they were made.  To modern audiences, we just see an old work set in an old time, and tend to assume that the two periods were the same.\nThe setup of the chart points to the reality that, in process of time, more and more works will cross those lines. Future audiences will likely assume that films like Apollo 13 and Schindler's List were made around the time of the events in question. And modern science fiction works, if they're still remembered in the future, will become just as obsolete as past works.  And Randall even indicates \"this chart\" on the chart, apparently acknowledging that it will become dated as time goes by.\nHow to read the graph:\nFor example, \"Water Margin\" was published in the 14th century (x ~= 1300) and relates events from the 12th century, about 200 years before its publication (y ~= 200 in the past). Another example: The film The Bridge on the River Kwai was released in 1957 and it was set around 14 years before (~1942-43).\nTaking the \"years in the past\" on the y-axis to be read as negatives like in most graphs one can write\nThus it's clear that the definitions of the lines are consistent with each other as they follow similar but inverted functions.\nThe graph uses variable logarithmic scales , adjusting the scale in various regions to the temporal density of works being plotted. If the scale were linear, the graph would in fact represent a (bidimensional) Minkowski diagram , which depicts the moving cones of past and future in spacetime as one's present advances in time.\nThe title text jokes that 2001 cuts from prehistoria to the future before The Flintstones theme can become recognizable. This references the fact that, despite being primarily set in what was then the future, the film opens in the ancient past, thus appearing in both parts of the graph, with one part being very close to The Flintstones . This plays on the fact that one of these was a very serious work and the other a playful animated show that was intended as family comedy.\nDifferences listed in bright red are \"former period pieces.\" Differences listed in dark red are other works set in the past. Differences listed in bright green are \"obsolete\" works set in the future. Differences listed in dark green are other works set in the future.\nAsterisks (*) after a year of publication denote that it applies to the first installment in a series that spanned more than one year.\nYou can sort by a specific column in this table by clicking on its header.\nDate of publication [A logarithmic scale running horizontally, from 3000 BCE to past 2015 CE.] Years in the future [A logarithmic scale running vertically, from 1 billion down to 0.] Stories set in the future (science fiction, prediction) Stories set in 2015 [A line divides this region into two. The upper side is labelled \"still possible\"; the lower side is labelled \"obsolete\".] [From left to right.] Memoirs of the Twentieth Century [1700, 265 years in the future] Looking Backward [1888, 112 years in the future] Golf in the Year 2000 [1892, 108 years in the future] The Time Machine [1895, 800 thousand to 30 million years in the future] Enoch Soames [1916, circa 60 years in the future] 1984 [1949, 35 years in the future] A Week in the Wales of the Future [1957, 76 years in the future] The Jetsons [1962-63, 100 years in the future] Star Trek [1966-69, 300 years in the future] 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968, 33 years in the future] Space: 1999 [1975-77, 24 years in the future] 2010: Odyssey Two [1982, 28 years in the future] Transformers (TV series) [1984-87, 20 years in the future] 2061: Odyssey Three [1987, 74 years in the future] Star Trek: The Next Generation [1987-94, circa 500 years in the future] Back to the Future Part II [1989, 26 years in the future] Zero Wing [1989, 112 years in the future] Terminator 2 (1995 portion) [1991, 4 years in the future] 3001: The Final Odyssey [1997, 1004 years in the future] Enterprise [2001-2005, 150 years in the future] This chart [2015, 0 years in the future] Years in the past [A logarithmic scale running vertically, from 0 down past 1 billion to \"Big Bang\"] Stories set in the past (History, Period Fiction) Stories written X years ago and set 2X years ago [A line divides this region into two. The upper side is labelled as follows.] Former period pieces Stories set in the past, but created long enough ago that they were published closer to their setting than to today. Modern audiences may not recognize which parts were supposed to sound old. [From left to right.] The Epic of Gilgamesh [ circa 2100 BCE, 600 years in the past] The Iliad [ circa 800 BCE, 450 years in the past] History of the Peloponnesian War [ circa 390 BCE, 10 years in the past] Book of Genesis [ circa 500 BCE, 4000 years in the past] Ashokavadana [ circa 100 BCE, 300 years in the past] Gospels (various estimates) [ circa 250 CE, 24 to 75 years in the past] The Pillow Book [1000 CE, 5 years in the past] Water Margin [ circa 1300, 195 years in the past] Richard III [ circa 1590, 115 years in the past] Julius Caesar [1599, 1650 years in the past] King John [ circa 1600, 500 years in the past] Henry IV [ circa 1600, 190 years in the past] King Lear [ circa 1606, 3000 years in the past] Henry VIII [ circa 1612, 105 years in the past] The Last of the Mohicans [1826, 69 years in the past] Rip Van Winkel [1819, 31-51 years in the past] A Tale of Two Cities [1859, 60 years in the past] Moby-Dick [1851, anywhere from 4 to 14 years ago] \"Some years ago--never mind how long precisely...\" Les Miser\u00e1bles [1862, 30 years in the past] Treasure Island [1883, 130 years in the past] A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [1889, 2000 years in the past] Gone with the Wind [1936, 70 years in the past] Lest Darkness Fall [1939, 550 years in the past] Casablanca [1942, 1 year in the past] Oklahoma! [1943, 37 years in the past] The Ten Commandments [1956, 1400 years in the past] The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957, 13 years in the past] Gunsmoke [1952-61, 80 years in the past] The Flintstones [1960-66, 100,000 years in the past] Catch-22 (book) [1961, 18 years in the past] The Great Escape [1963, 20 years in the past] Asterix Lawrence of Arabia The Music Man Bonnie and Clyde 2001: A Space Odyssey (prologue) American Graffiti Patton Catch-22 (movie) [1970, 27 years in the past] Chinatown Blazing Saddles Apocalypse Now Happy Days Grease M*A*S*H Annie (play) Roots Chariots of Fire Star Wars (IV-VI) Annie (movie) The Right Stuff Back to the Future Gandhi Platoon Dirty Dancing Back to the Future Part III The Wonder Years JFK The Sandlot Schindler's List Raptor Red Apollo 13 Star Wars (I-III) The Big Lebowski Evita Saving Private Ryan The Prince of Egypt Freaks and Geeks Hotel Rwanda I Love the '80s That '70s Show Pearl Harbor Ice Age I Love the '90s United 93 300 10,000 BC Year One The Wolf of Wall Street I Love the 2000s Mad Men Downton Abbey Star Wars (VII-IX)\n"}
{"id":1492,"title":"Dress Color","image_title":"Dress Color","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1492","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dress_color.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1492:_Dress_Color","transcript":"[Two images of a woman in a dress on each side of an image of a close up of a real dress with the same colors. On the left, she is colored blue on a dark blue background, while on the right, she is brown against a white background. Her dress is the same color in each panel - the same as the real one in between.]\n","explanation":"This comic shows two drawings of a woman wearing the same dress, but with different background (and body) colors. The two drawings are split with a narrow vertical portion of an image from the web.\nThe comic strip refers to a dress whose image went viral on Tumblr only hours before the strip was posted and soon showed up also on Reddit , Twitter , Wired and on The New York Times .\nDue to the dress's particular color scheme and the exposure of the photo, it forms an optical illusion causing viewers to disagree on what color the dress actually seems to be. The xkcd strip sandwiches a cropped segment of the photographed dress between two drawings which use the colors from the image against different backgrounds, leading the eye to interpret the white balance differently, demonstrating how the dress can appear different colors depending on context and the viewer's previous experiences.\nBoth dresses have exactly the same colors actually:\nBelow is an illustration demonstrating that the \"colors\" of the dresses are the same by connecting them with two lines with the above-mentioned colors (all the way!) and another which has one side flipped and merged into the other:\n\nSimilar types of illusions can be seen at Wikipedia's optical illusion page and for instance here at echalk (the latter page requires Flash\u00aeplayer).\nThis image has sparked surprisingly heated debate in many internet communities. A select few individuals may have prior experience with optical illusions of this ilk, but because this particular image went viral - it got heavy exposure over such a short amount of time - it reached millions of people who aren't so familiar with these sorts of mind tricks. To the uninitiated, the color of the dress seems immediately obvious; when others cannot see it their way, it can be a surreal (even uncomfortable) experience.\nAs an aside, the retailer Roman Originals would later confirm the dress was blue with black lace , and that a white dress with gold lace was not offered among the clothing line.\nThe title text refers to the game show Let's Make a Deal , hosted by Monty Hall, which was famous for having contestants pick among several doors which either had a real prize (for example, a car) or a joke prize (for example, a goat). Randall states that people find the dress color issue just as baffling as if upon opening the chosen door no one can agree if the item behind the door is a car or a goat. This is a reference to what has become known as the \" Monty Hall problem :\" if there are two goats and a prize behind three doors, the contestant has chosen a door, and one of the unchosen doors is opened to reveal a goat, should the contestant change his\/her choice? Statistically, the answer is yes, but many people find this counterintuitive; discussion of this problem in Parade magazine touched off public outrage similar to the viral dress image.\nRandall is presumably pointing out how ridiculous it is for people who don't understand the underlying science to become so adamant in defending their beliefs. A spoof of the \"Monty Hall problem\" previously appeared in 1282: Monty Hall , where Beret Guy decides to take the goat.\n[Two images of a woman in a dress on each side of an image of a close up of a real dress with the same colors. On the left, she is colored blue on a dark blue background, while on the right, she is brown against a white background. Her dress is the same color in each panel - the same as the real one in between.]\n"}
{"id":1493,"title":"Meeting","image_title":"Meeting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1493","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meeting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1493:_Meeting","transcript":"[Beret Guy is shown in silhouette. Above Beret Guy there is a black sign with white (and grey) text. Above this is his address to those in the meeting:] Beret Guy: Welcome to a meeting! I'm almost out of words, so I'll keep this short. Just wanna touch bases. [White text in the black sign ( .website in grey):] CompanyName.website If you're reading this, the web server was installed correctly.\u2122\n[Beret Guy stands in front of an office chair and a table talking.] Beret Guy: First, a few updates. We've learned from the state police that the self-driving car project we launched by accident during this morning's carpool has come to an end about 90 miles outside of town. Very exciting!\n[Pony tail sits at the table.] Beret Guy [off-panel]: Profits are up. Sales, any luck figuring out who our customers are? Ponytail: Nope. Money keeps appearing, but we have no idea how or why. Beret Guy [off-panel]: Great!\n[Back to the situation from frame two.] Beret Guy: Oh, and one last thing\u2014I saw a cool red beetle in the hall. Can someone add it to the bug tracker? [person off-panel]: Just did! Beret Guy: Thanks!\n","explanation":"Beret Guy 's business, as previously seen in 1032: Networking and 1293: Job Interview , is going well, although it is unclear why. The common theme in these three comics is that Beret Guy misuses common business cliches. The following are examples and phrases that Randall is likely making a joke about:\n[Beret Guy is shown in silhouette. Above Beret Guy there is a black sign with white (and grey) text. Above this is his address to those in the meeting:] Beret Guy: Welcome to a meeting! I'm almost out of words, so I'll keep this short. Just wanna touch bases. [White text in the black sign ( .website in grey):] CompanyName.website If you're reading this, the web server was installed correctly.\u2122\n[Beret Guy stands in front of an office chair and a table talking.] Beret Guy: First, a few updates. We've learned from the state police that the self-driving car project we launched by accident during this morning's carpool has come to an end about 90 miles outside of town. Very exciting!\n[Pony tail sits at the table.] Beret Guy [off-panel]: Profits are up. Sales, any luck figuring out who our customers are? Ponytail: Nope. Money keeps appearing, but we have no idea how or why. Beret Guy [off-panel]: Great!\n[Back to the situation from frame two.] Beret Guy: Oh, and one last thing\u2014I saw a cool red beetle in the hall. Can someone add it to the bug tracker? [person off-panel]: Just did! Beret Guy: Thanks!\n"}
{"id":1494,"title":"Insurance","image_title":"Insurance","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1494","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/insurance.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1494:_Insurance","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of a desk, which a man sits behind. The man is presumably an insurance agent, and is handing Cueball a paper.] Insurance agent: Here's a page explaining the terms of your new fire insurance policy.\n[Zoom in on Cueball as he reads the paper.]\n[Cueball starts to ask the insurance agent a question when he hands Cueball yet another paper.] Cueball: Hey, what if I- Insurance agent: And here's a page explaining that the \"cool hack\" you just thought of is called \"insurance fraud\". We already know about it and it's a crime. Cueball: Oh. Right. How did- Insurance agent: I see a lot of programmers here.\n","explanation":"Cueball in this comic, as is often the case, is some sort of programmer or at least logically minded person. He reads through the terms that are handed to him, and finds some sort of loophole. This is a play on the fact that programmers often find loopholes in programs and code, and exploiting them is nothing more than a \"cool find\" or an interesting idea. More importantly, programmers try to prevent loopholes, which is why it is important to be able to identify them.\nThe insurance agent foresees this, and explains that this \"cool hack\" is actually just an instance of insurance fraud , which is highly illegal. The comparison here is that exploiting a program's faults can be regarded as interesting or fun, while exploiting the faults in a legal document will often result in some sort of legal repercussions (however, sometimes legal loopholes are exploited by individuals or corporations in ways that are not illegal).\nThe insurance agent is also already prepared for the following question - how he knew Cueball would be looking for loopholes, and it's because many programmers visit him.\nThe title text provides another example: While airport luggage security certainly is exploitable, walking out with every piece of luggage from the conveyor belt would be easily noticeable and would result in being arrested for theft, and many annoyed travelers.\n1469: UV also contains a case of insurance fraud.\nThe term hacking in IT is ambiguous and goes from code development (in particular in the opensource community) to the fact of \"using a hack \". A hack would then refer to a tricky piece of code doing the intended job in a way that the framework or project in which it is inserted was not intended to. To the general public, 'hacking' a system would normally refer to some illegal way of achieving a goal against the will of the original developers of the system, like getting a copy of all the data available or taking advantage of some unwanted behavior, but a more distinctive term for such an exploitation (maliciously or after an invitation to perform legitimate penetration testing) would be 'cracking'.\nThis comic is making fun of what IT hacks would look like in real world. Surely, taking lots of luggage from an airport is technically possible and probably not so difficult, but first, it looks weird, and second, it's also obviously illegal. The weirdness of such behavior is more obvious in real life than in IT.\nIt is worth noting that it is currently popular on social media sites to share small tricks to make one's life easier.  This is called \"life hacking\", or \"hacking your life\" .\n[Cueball is standing in front of a desk, which a man sits behind. The man is presumably an insurance agent, and is handing Cueball a paper.] Insurance agent: Here's a page explaining the terms of your new fire insurance policy.\n[Zoom in on Cueball as he reads the paper.]\n[Cueball starts to ask the insurance agent a question when he hands Cueball yet another paper.] Cueball: Hey, what if I- Insurance agent: And here's a page explaining that the \"cool hack\" you just thought of is called \"insurance fraud\". We already know about it and it's a crime. Cueball: Oh. Right. How did- Insurance agent: I see a lot of programmers here.\n"}
{"id":1495,"title":"Hard Reboot","image_title":"Hard Reboot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1495","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hard_reboot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1495:_Hard_Reboot","transcript":"[Inside a frame there are two pictures. To the left there is a section of a computer screen with white text on a black background. The screen is covered in lines of illegible text.] [Above the screen it says:] Figuring out why my home server keeps running out of swap space and crashing: [Below the screen it says:] 1-10 hours\n[To the right there is a frame with a drawing of a timer plugged into a power port with cable running off to the side.] [Above the frame it says:] Plugging it into a light timer so it reboots every 24 hours: [Below the frame it says:] 5 minutes\n[Below the main frame.] Why everything I have is broken\n","explanation":"This comic is about using a simple and unrelated trick to work around a problem, instead of spending a long time solving the cause of the problem.\nSwap space is an area of a computer's hard drive reserved for use when the computer runs out of RAM. Ideally, RAM + SWAP >= MAX, where MAX is the amount of memory the computer will ever try to use at the same time. However, some (broken) programs may keep requesting memory from the system until computer runs out of resources (a memory leak ), or the system may be misconfigured to run more and more programs simultaneously. Rebooting the computer will empty the RAM and swap space so resources can be reallocated, but this only temporarily alleviates the underlying issue. Determining the root cause of the problem is often nontrivial.\nIt would take Randall anywhere between 1 and 10 hours to figure out why the server is running out of swap space, and possibly more to actually fix the problem. Alternatively, Randall could just take 5 minutes and plug the server into a light timer. This attitude to problem solving is in contrast to the attitude shown in 974: The General Problem .\nTimers like the one in the comic typically have four switches or notches per hour, so using the timer would replace an unpredictable and indefinite loss of service with a regular 15 minute downtime event once a day. Also, it can be scheduled during, say, the middle of the night when most users are sleeping to minimize disruption.\nThe correct method of scheduling a regular reboot would be using a cron task, but perhaps the server is \"crashing\" in such a dramatic manner that cron, or shutdown, or init stops working. The comic title alludes to this, in that a \"hard\" reboot scheduled with an analog timer is more guaranteed to work than a \"soft\" one scheduled with cron.\nIf a memory leak is not present, the problem might be fixable by simply increasing swap space; however, if there is a more complex underlying issue, this is the first step along the path of 10 hours of troubleshooting. As a general stereotype, the type of person who has a home server is probably also the kind of person who would start by 'just' increasing the swap size, and before they know it has spent 10 hours completely engrossed in the challenge of fixing the problem. (See 349: Success )\nThe subtitle reads \"Why everything I have is broken\". This indicates that Randall frequently finds himself doing non-standard workarounds that temporarily solve a problem but may ultimately damage the system to the point of becoming nonfunctional. Indeed, a kitchen\/light timer used to cut power to a server overnight may affect the server's performance if it is in the middle of a process when the reboot happens. Alternatively, this can be interpreted to mean that everything Randall has is broken and held together by metaphorical duct tape.\nThe title text's first sentence reveals that Randall is aware that looking further for a fix is futile: The problem is caused by a bug which has already been analyzed and is known to be triggered by using the system in the very way Randall is using it. He may get around the bug by changing what the system does, but then it would not provide the services he needs anymore. It may also refer to bug trackers, where someone found out and posted what causes the issue, but the bug is marked as \"Unresolved,\" \"Waiting,\" or \"Will not fix.\"\nIt is not clear why the title text refers to a kitchen timer while the comic itself refers to a light timer. It might be a small error, or it might be that Randall just considers these to be two synonymous terms. Typically, however, a kitchen timer refers to an alarm that will go off, rather than a timer that cuts power to a device like a light timer.\nThe title text's second sentence refers to the fact that operating system bugs take a long time to be solved, hence the solution of \"wait[ing] a few years until I don't want that combination of things anymore.\" Humor in that sentence is found in the fact that readers will anticipate \"wait a few years until...\" would be followed by \"the bug is fixed\", however, Randall is indicating that usually his needs change before the bugs get fixed, or that he has very low confidence in that the bug will be fixed in time, if ever. This play on expectations is a common comedic trope.\n[Inside a frame there are two pictures. To the left there is a section of a computer screen with white text on a black background. The screen is covered in lines of illegible text.] [Above the screen it says:] Figuring out why my home server keeps running out of swap space and crashing: [Below the screen it says:] 1-10 hours\n[To the right there is a frame with a drawing of a timer plugged into a power port with cable running off to the side.] [Above the frame it says:] Plugging it into a light timer so it reboots every 24 hours: [Below the frame it says:] 5 minutes\n[Below the main frame.] Why everything I have is broken\n"}
{"id":1496,"title":"Art Project","image_title":"Art Project","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1496","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/art_project.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1496:_Art_Project","transcript":"[Four people stand next to each other.] Cueball [taking a selfie with his smart-phone]: I'm doing an art project where I take a picture of myself every hundred years. Megan [filming herself with her smart-phone]: I'm doing an art project where I take a picture of myself every 1 \/24 th of a second. Ponytail [pointing to her face with both hands]: I'm doing an art project where you can come to my house and watch my actual face age in real time. Girl with long black hair [holding a burrito]: I'm doing an art project where you all do those things while I eat a burrito.\n","explanation":"This comic appears to be satirizing art in two different ways. From one perspective, Randall is describing various art forms in unusual ways (e.g., a portrait by Cueball , a video for Megan , and perhaps live performance by Ponytail ). From another perspective, Randall might be making fun of time-lapse photography movies. YouTube has a robust collection of videos taken from stitching together pictures or short video clips taken every day or every week; in the 2015 Academy Awards , one of the Best Picture nominees, Boyhood , used a similar method, filming short sequences annually over the course of 12 years.\nIn each case, the art described is simpler than it sounds, and some might not consider it art. A picture of oneself \"every hundred years\" will only happen once or twice in a lifetime; a \"picture every 1\/24th of a second\" is the traditional frame rate of cinema cameras for film production, and \"watching my face age in real time\" is just life.\nThen finally another Megan-like character, possibly a relatively demure Danish , pokes fun at all of them by simply watching their attempts at \"art\" while she eats a burrito. Randall may also be referencing the many perspectives on art by leaving this comic open to several interpretations.\nThe use of a burrito as a punchline representing someone who is grounded in reality instead of engaging in esoteric pursuits has been seen before in 1269: Privacy Opinions .\nThe title text is just more snark, claiming that it's their most ambitious project ever, if the sole criterion for ambition is the amount of guacamole that one has to eat.\n[Four people stand next to each other.] Cueball [taking a selfie with his smart-phone]: I'm doing an art project where I take a picture of myself every hundred years. Megan [filming herself with her smart-phone]: I'm doing an art project where I take a picture of myself every 1 \/24 th of a second. Ponytail [pointing to her face with both hands]: I'm doing an art project where you can come to my house and watch my actual face age in real time. Girl with long black hair [holding a burrito]: I'm doing an art project where you all do those things while I eat a burrito.\n"}
{"id":1497,"title":"New Products","image_title":"New Products","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1497","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_products.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1497:_New_Products","transcript":"Predicting the success or failure of a new product based on what engineers and programmers are saying about it\n[A two-column table illustrating this. The headings are actually standing above the table.]\nIf they say... It means... \"It doesn't do anything new\" The product will be a gigantic success. \"Why would anyone want that?\" \"Really exciting\" The product will be a flop. Years later, its ideas will show up in something successful. \"I've already preorded one\" \"Wait, are you talking about <unfamiliar person's name>'s new project?\" The product could be a scam and may result in arrests or lawsuits. \"I would never put <company> in charge of managing my <whatever>.\" Within five years, they will.\n","explanation":"This comic points out an apparent paradox in product performance: Many products that are criticized by techies when first announced go on to great success, and many that are heavily hyped are total flops. The product in question may be a reference to the Apple Watch , which was announced around the time of this comic's release.\nThe title text imagines a product that fits into the second, third and fourth categories:\nKim Dotcom is a controversial entrepreneur and convicted fraud . He changed his surname to \"Dotcom\" because of the dot-com stock market bubble that made him a millionaire. He fits perfectly into the mold of someone well-known to programmers and engineers (as well as New Zealanders), but perhaps not so much to your average Joe.\nTaken together, these imply that an untrustworthy and potentially malicious company has an exciting new idea that may eventually come out in successful form, gains control of a large amount of medical information, but ultimately result in lawsuits not just from investors but from misled consumers (category 3). Because the initial release will be a flop (category 2), there is some time to prepare before the successful use of this idea becomes a reality (also category 2), at which point that or some other company will gain control of a large amount of people's medical something (category 4). Once this happens you could expect dramatic repercussions; this is why the title text suggests to dig a bunker while there is still time.\nPredicting the success or failure of a new product based on what engineers and programmers are saying about it\n[A two-column table illustrating this. The headings are actually standing above the table.]\nIf they say... It means... \"It doesn't do anything new\" The product will be a gigantic success. \"Why would anyone want that?\" \"Really exciting\" The product will be a flop. Years later, its ideas will show up in something successful. \"I've already preorded one\" \"Wait, are you talking about <unfamiliar person's name>'s new project?\" The product could be a scam and may result in arrests or lawsuits. \"I would never put <company> in charge of managing my <whatever>.\" Within five years, they will.\n"}
{"id":1498,"title":"Terry Pratchett","image_title":"Terry Pratchett","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1498","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/terry_pratchett.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1498:_Terry_Pratchett","transcript":"[Cueball is reading a book over the first four panels at the top of the comic. He shifts position from sitting, leaning back on one hand, laying down on his belly to finally sitting more upright. Above these four panels and breaking the frame of the outer panels of the comic we see what he reads during these four panels:]\nI told her we were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs. She said there's these hills where it's hot and rains all the time, and in the rainforests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees there are these like great big flowers called... bromeliads, I think, and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there's a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch, and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees and don't even know about the ground, and once you know the world is full of things like that, your life is never the same.\n\u2014 Masklin, Terry Pratchett's The Bromeliad Trilogy\n[Below are four more panels. Cueball stops reading in the book. Leaves the book and begins to walk. Walks out on a leaf from a big flower. Finally, zooming in on him at the edge of the leaf, he looks down and sees what is below the flower.]\n","explanation":"This comic is a tribute to the late Sir Terry Pratchett . It came out the day after the renowned fantasy author died.\nThe comic quotes a (slightly abridged) passage from Wings , one of the three books of The Bromeliad Trilogy (also known as The Nome Trilogy ), a series of children's books by Sir Terry.\nDuring the first five panels of the comic Cueball reads the quoted passage in his book Wings . This passage describes what Masklin thinks about when he told Grimma that they \"were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs.\" He then recounts what she told him about a type of tree frog that are found in bromeliad flowers where they lay their eggs, which hatch into tadpoles, and then live most of their lives in a single plant. See a description of this plot point when it happened in Diggers . She\u2014amongst other things\u2014muses about the fact that they are blind to the rest of the Universe, and that most people are blind to them.\nAfter reading this Cueball puts the book down and walks off, and soon finds that he himself has been living at the bottom of a flower much like the frogs in the bromeliad. This is an allegory for a common praise of the best fantasy and science-fiction writing: That by reflecting our own world in a different context, it allows us to better see ourselves. In the allegory, Cueball's journey to the edge of the leaf is a representation of broadening one's horizons, perhaps even in ways that are somewhat frightening.\nOn a more literal level, the concept of living on a flat surface with a precipice at the edge is explored at length in the Discworld series, Pratchett's most iconic work. Both this series (wanting to own it all) and the space all of Terry Pratchett's books would take up on a bookshelf are the subject of 625: Collections .\nThe title text continues, more directly, the point previously made allegorically. It thanks the late Sir Terry, noting that his fictional worlds allowed us to better see the real world. \"How big our world is\" also ties into another point raised in the quoted passage, that there are countless amazing things happening around us all the time without our knowledge.\nTerry Pratchett was also referenced in panel 18 of 1052: Every Major's Terrible .\nA similar tribute comic was also dedicated to Steve Jobs , the day after he died, in 961: Eternal Flame , to Gary Gygax , three days after he died, in 393: Ultimate Game , and to John Conway , two days after he died, in 2293: RIP John Conway .\n[Cueball is reading a book over the first four panels at the top of the comic. He shifts position from sitting, leaning back on one hand, laying down on his belly to finally sitting more upright. Above these four panels and breaking the frame of the outer panels of the comic we see what he reads during these four panels:]\nI told her we were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs. She said there's these hills where it's hot and rains all the time, and in the rainforests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees there are these like great big flowers called... bromeliads, I think, and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there's a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch, and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees and don't even know about the ground, and once you know the world is full of things like that, your life is never the same.\n\u2014 Masklin, Terry Pratchett's The Bromeliad Trilogy\n[Below are four more panels. Cueball stops reading in the book. Leaves the book and begins to walk. Walks out on a leaf from a big flower. Finally, zooming in on him at the edge of the leaf, he looks down and sees what is below the flower.]\n"}
{"id":1499,"title":"Arbitrage","image_title":"Arbitrage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1499","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/arbitrage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1499:_Arbitrage","transcript":"[Cueball and Hairy are sitting at a table with a bowl of chips in the middle. Hairy is taking chips from the bowl on the table with one hand, and his other hand is dropping chips into a large bag behind him. Cueball is double facepalming.] Hairy: They're the ones giving chips away! Hairy: If they don't see the arbitrage potential, sucks for them. [On the bag is written: Chips.]\nIn a deep sense, society functions only because we generally avoid taking these people out to dinner.\nThe invisible hand of the market is also mentioned in 958: Hotels .\nThe same idea was previously used in 1110: Click and Drag , where a person takes free drinks to resell . Later, 1721: Business Idea implies a similar plan to extract wealth out of a small market inefficiency that, in reality, would be far too onerous to exploit; in this case, premium gasoline at regular price. See also the what if? Cost of Pennies regarding why it would not be worth trying these kind of ventures out.\n","explanation":"In economics and finance , arbitrage is the practice of buying cheaply on one market whilst immediately selling at a higher price on another market, taking advantage of the price difference to make relatively risk-free profit. In real-world liquid financial markets , arbitrage helps the market to converge on one price for a product. Arbitrageurs are the individuals performing this act to equalize the prices in those markets and hopefully make a profit.\nThe place where Cueball and Hairy are eating is giving away unlimited free potato \/ tortilla chips , probably serving the same function as a bread basket, being a cheap but welcome appetizer while patrons wait for their orders. Hairy is acting as an arbitrageur by collecting the chips to later resell them. This is much to the consternation of Cueball, who is (depending on how you interpret the simple art-style) holding his hands up in front of his mouth in shock, covering the lower half of his face in shame, covering his eyes out of denial, sliding his palms down the front of his face in disgust, face palming in exasperation, or eating chips \u2013 possibly all in sequence.\nTrying this strategy in the real world would not work. Customers leaving the restaurant with bags of chips might well be barred from the establishment. More simply, the restaurant is under no obligation to keep refilling the bowls indefinitely; if a customer's demands for more chips became unreasonable, they could simply refuse to bring any more. In either case, it's highly unlikely that a customer could leave with enough chips to offset the cost of even an inexpensive meal. Additionally, there would likely be a problem of a lack of demand, given the absence of a secondary market . Case in point: would you buy open bags of perishable, presumably hand-soiled chips? Didn't think so.\nIn the caption below the comic, Randall suggests that society only functions because we don't take people like Hairy \"out to dinner\"; we generally have an aversion to dealing with people with such extreme self-interest, bordering on sociopathic behavior. Traditional theories of capitalism are based on the concept that people will act in their own economic self-interest, but in reality this is usually limited by both legal strictures and unspoken social norms. There are many aspects of society that are only possible because we trust most people to keep their self-interested actions within reasonable bounds. We see from Cueball's reaction that he is appalled by what Hairy is doing in believing he can profit from the apparent generosity.\nA distinguishing feature of social animals , rather than animals simply sharing a habitat , is that they perform tasks that benefit their group. All such societies rely on some situations where the individual is not working purely on short term self-interest. The payoff for this is generally that co-operation makes things better for the group as a whole. Most people would find Hairy's behavior embarrassing and shameful, and thus would not socialize with people who behave like that. By rejecting such individuals, society protects itself from such people.\nThe title text mentions the invisible hand . In economics this is a metaphor used by Adam Smith to describe unintended social benefits resulting from the individual actions of self-interested parties. In the context of arbitrage, the invisible hand compels all of a given fungible substance to be sold for the same price, as a result of the actions of individuals like Hairy who are only seeking personal profit. The invisible hand is a sort of personification of the market; in the title text, the person has become so real that it can be sent a text message, but, despite presumably being able to hold a phone, the Hand doesn't reply (it IS only a hand). It is tempting to wonder why Randall\/Cueball is texting it in the first place - not, presumably, to invite it to dinner, since the market would doubtless behave just as Hairy is doing. As it is invisible, though, perhaps it would at least be less embarrassing to sit at a table with.\n[Cueball and Hairy are sitting at a table with a bowl of chips in the middle. Hairy is taking chips from the bowl on the table with one hand, and his other hand is dropping chips into a large bag behind him. Cueball is double facepalming.] Hairy: They're the ones giving chips away! Hairy: If they don't see the arbitrage potential, sucks for them. [On the bag is written: Chips.]\nIn a deep sense, society functions only because we generally avoid taking these people out to dinner.\nThe invisible hand of the market is also mentioned in 958: Hotels .\nThe same idea was previously used in 1110: Click and Drag , where a person takes free drinks to resell . Later, 1721: Business Idea implies a similar plan to extract wealth out of a small market inefficiency that, in reality, would be far too onerous to exploit; in this case, premium gasoline at regular price. See also the what if? Cost of Pennies regarding why it would not be worth trying these kind of ventures out.\n"}
{"id":1500,"title":"Upside-Down Map","image_title":"Upside-Down Map","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1500","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/upside_down_map.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1500:_Upside-Down_Map","transcript":"[Map of the world with all the landmasses rotated upside-down.] [Four oceans and all the visible continents have been named in large letters in a bold font. The Pacific has been named both to the left and right. Several islands (large and small) have been designated with name but in grey and in a much smaller normal font. For all continents the names are written on them. For the island the name is written in the ocean except for Greenland.]\n[Below the names on the map are given in the order they appear reading from left to right, first for the northern and then the southern hemisphere:]\n[Northern hemisphere:] North America Cuba Greenland Atlantic Ocean Iceland UK Asia Sri Lanka Europe Arctic Ocean Taiwan Japan Pacific Ocean\n[Southern hemisphere:] Pacific Ocean South America Tierra del Fuego Africa Indian Ocean Madagascar Indonesia Australia New Zealand\n[Below the main frame:] This upside-down map will change your perspective on the world!\nMap projections are also the subject of 977: Map Projections . In fact, if this comic was released later, it would certainly have \"Bad Map Projection # n \" on the top, and would be part of the category .\n","explanation":"This comic plays on the idea that maps with the south pole at the top will \"change your perspective of the world\". Most world maps orient north in the upward direction, placing the north pole as the top. Such an orientation is purely a matter of convention, as 'up' and 'down' don't apply in a planetary context. The north = up tradition probably emerged because most historical cartographers hailed from the northern hemisphere, and placed their own nations at the top. Some people and groups object that this convention subtly, but perniciously, advances the assumption that countries in the northern hemisphere are inherently more important than those in the southern hemisphere. This is especially sensitive because most of the wealthier and more powerful countries in the world are in the northern hemisphere, while relatively fewer southern hemisphere countries have as much wealth or global influence. Early maps had eastern Asia oriented at the top of the map, beyond Israel and the Holy Land in the middle, and western Europe at the bottom.\nTo remedy this, some advocate the use of maps with the south pole oriented at the top. Some want such maps in common use, while others simply use them to encourage people to rethink their assumptions about how the world should be seen. Such a map can easily be achieved by simply rotating a normal map 180 degrees, though the text labels would also be upside-down and harder to read. A Google Images search reveals many examples of upside-down maps with the text-oriented correctly for reading.\nThis map is a comedic play on such maps, where each landmass is in the same position it would be in a traditional north-top map but rotated 180 degrees (presumably around some central point of the landmass) to the orientation it would have in a south-top map. Such a map is, of course, almost completely useless in real life, because it completely distorts the relative positioning of the landmasses. Moreover, it keeps the northern countries at the top of the map, which means one of the chief complaints about traditional maps is unaddressed.\nNote that individual islands are rotated about their own centers, rather than following the rotation of the neighboring continent; however, some are displaced as necessary to keep them from being overlapped by the rotated continents. For instance, Madagascar would be overlapped by the Sahara if it remained in position, but is instead displaced eastward to keep it in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, all the islands of the Mediterranean Sea have disappeared under Asia .\nAsia is so broad that almost the entire Indochinese Peninsula (with for instance Vietnam and Thailand ) has been rotated out of the top of the map. Similarly, the map omits Antarctica in the south.\nTo keep their familiar shapes on a rectangular map, the continents would also have to be heavily distorted compared to their actual shapes, becoming much narrower (along the lines of latitude) near the poles and wider towards the equator. See also 977: Map Projections .\nThe basic climates for several areas would be distinctly different. For example, the former Central America area would be in the arctic zone, while Siberia would be subtropical.\nThis arrangement of the world's landmasses would have great advantages for trade because there are (presumably navigable) straits between the Americas and between Africa and Asia, removing the need for the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal .\nThe title text references the fact that, in this new map, the UK is now next to Asia \u2013 specifically the Korean Peninsula . North Korea is mentioned in the text as having a history of hostile relations with nearby countries. However, on this map North Korea would be the part of Korea we today know as South Korea . Furthermore, Northern Ireland is now at the south of the island of Ireland , so the UK's full name would need to change to The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Southern Ireland. There have been several wars concerning the English Channel , mainly, but not only, between England and France . Likewise, there has been a history of animosity between Korea and Japan , separated by a similar body of water. Since, on this world map, a channel now exists between the UK and North Korea (the real world's South Korea) there could obviously have been many wars for the dominance over the said channel.\nAlong the same line of thinking, interesting speculations could be made about the following \"new\" facts:\n[Map of the world with all the landmasses rotated upside-down.] [Four oceans and all the visible continents have been named in large letters in a bold font. The Pacific has been named both to the left and right. Several islands (large and small) have been designated with name but in grey and in a much smaller normal font. For all continents the names are written on them. For the island the name is written in the ocean except for Greenland.]\n[Below the names on the map are given in the order they appear reading from left to right, first for the northern and then the southern hemisphere:]\n[Northern hemisphere:] North America Cuba Greenland Atlantic Ocean Iceland UK Asia Sri Lanka Europe Arctic Ocean Taiwan Japan Pacific Ocean\n[Southern hemisphere:] Pacific Ocean South America Tierra del Fuego Africa Indian Ocean Madagascar Indonesia Australia New Zealand\n[Below the main frame:] This upside-down map will change your perspective on the world!\nMap projections are also the subject of 977: Map Projections . In fact, if this comic was released later, it would certainly have \"Bad Map Projection # n \" on the top, and would be part of the category .\n"}
{"id":1501,"title":"Mysteries","image_title":"Mysteries","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1501","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mysteries.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1501:_Mysteries","transcript":"[In a frame at the top left of the panel:] Mysteries\n[A chart with two crossing lines with double arrows. Each arrow is labeled:] X-axis left: Not that weird X-axis right: Weird as Hell Y-axis top: I have no explanation Y-axis bottom: Explanation seems pretty clear\n[In the chart there are 22 bullets. Each bullet is labeled. Below the labels are given from top to bottom in each of the four quadrants of the chart:]\n[Top left quadrant:] Who Carly Simon is singing about in You're So Vain UVB-76 Lindbergh baby Toynbee tiles Jimmy Hoffa\n[Top right quadrant:] MH370 Lead Masks Case DB Cooper The Wow signal Salish Sea feet Mary Celeste\n[Bottom left quadrant:] Voynich manuscript JFK Why I keep putting ice cream back in the fridge instead of the freezer Oak Island Money Pit\n[Bottom right quadrant:] Zodiac letters Amelia Earhart Lost Colony Kentucky meat shower Bigfoot Loch Ness Monster Dyatlov Pass incident\n","explanation":"This comic shows a graph in which several \"mysteries\" are mentioned and placed on the graph according to how weird they are on the x-axis and the y-axis indicates whether Randall has an explanation or not for the mystery. Each item is listed in the table below .\nItems near the top-right corner (such as the MH 370 disappearance) are both mysterious and strange. Items near the bottom-left corner (such as Randall's absent-mindedness regarding ice cream) have a clear explanation and are not really strange either. Items near the top-left corner (such as the meaning of You're So Vain ) are mysterious but not really strange. Items near the bottom-right corner (such as the Dyatlov Pass incident ) have a clear explanation but are quite strange.\nThe title text refers to the mystery of Randall staying up late to read Wikipedia articles, when he was already supposed to be asleep an hour ago. This is apparently not very unusual for him (see for instance 214: The Problem with Wikipedia ). And this mystery actually has an obvious explanation: Following up on an idea that eventually led to today's cartoon.\nSome of these mysteries have already been explored in xkcd. See 950: Mystery Solved where Randall \"solves\" Amelia Earhart, Lost Roanoke Colony, Jimmy Hoffa; 593: Voynich Manuscript ; and 1400: D.B. Cooper .\nNote that Randall uses similar diagrams in both 388: Fuck Grapefruit , 1242: Scary Names and 2466: In Your Classroom , which also contain different items. The first two also have an extra point, and the last two extra points mentioned in the title text. But all these points are in the title text because they are far off the chart, whereas in this comic it's the description of the point that is too long to fit on the chart. Extra info outside the chart is also used in the title text of 1785: Wifi , but this is a line graph.\nThe X axis in the graph indicates weirdness. The table assumes that the item to the far left is 0% (not that weird) and the item to the far right is 100% (weird as hell). The Y axis indicates if Randall has an explanation. The table assumes that the item at the bottom is 100% (Randall has a clear explanation) and the item at the top is 0% (Randall has no explanation).\n[In a frame at the top left of the panel:] Mysteries\n[A chart with two crossing lines with double arrows. Each arrow is labeled:] X-axis left: Not that weird X-axis right: Weird as Hell Y-axis top: I have no explanation Y-axis bottom: Explanation seems pretty clear\n[In the chart there are 22 bullets. Each bullet is labeled. Below the labels are given from top to bottom in each of the four quadrants of the chart:]\n[Top left quadrant:] Who Carly Simon is singing about in You're So Vain UVB-76 Lindbergh baby Toynbee tiles Jimmy Hoffa\n[Top right quadrant:] MH370 Lead Masks Case DB Cooper The Wow signal Salish Sea feet Mary Celeste\n[Bottom left quadrant:] Voynich manuscript JFK Why I keep putting ice cream back in the fridge instead of the freezer Oak Island Money Pit\n[Bottom right quadrant:] Zodiac letters Amelia Earhart Lost Colony Kentucky meat shower Bigfoot Loch Ness Monster Dyatlov Pass incident\n"}
{"id":1502,"title":"Wasted Time","image_title":"Wasted Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1502","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wasted_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1502:_Wasted_Time","transcript":"[Cueball holding his smartphone in both hands is talking to White Hat.] Cueball: This new keyboard is like 30% faster! I'm never going back.\n[White hat replies and Cueball lifts his arms.] White Hat: Good, put those years of horror behind you. Cueball: C'mon. Sure, sometimes my focus on efficiency doesn't make sense. But we type a lot .\n[Cueball holding his smartphone in one hand while talking to White Hat.] Cueball: That 30% improvement pretty quickly adds up to a huge amount of wasted time rescued.\n[White hat replies and Cueball lifts one arm.] White Hat: I just watched you open Google News and then close it without reading it five times in a row. Cueball: The fact that I spend most of my time so stupidly only makes it more important not to waste any here.\n","explanation":"In this comic, White Hat is pointing out to Cueball that his obsession with efficiency is inconsistent, something that is likely true of many people who claim to prize efficiency.\nHere, Cueball raves about his new mobile keyboard which allows him to type 30% faster than his old keyboard. He notes that people (presumably himself particularly) do a lot of mobile typing, and a 30% reduction in the time that takes would allow more time for other activities.\nWhite Hat, on the other hand, mocks Cueball for caring so much about mobile typing speed, suggesting that this may not be the first time Cueball has obsessed over minor improvements in efficiency. White Hat also notes that he's just seen Cueball open and close Google News five times without reading anything, providing an example of how Cueball's other actions do not embody the same commitment to efficiency that he claims to have.\nCueball defends himself by saying that, since he wastes so much time, it's that much more important to improve efficiency in his life to make more time for important matters. The title text (presumably White Hat's reply) counters this defense by suggesting that Cueball may be better off using a slower keyboard, so that he will have less time to waste on stupid activities. This type of argument may be an example of a logical fallacy argument which suggests, perhaps incorrectly, that Cueball should spend less time doing stupid things to the extent that he spends longer doing things he already does.\nInterestingly, in this comic, White Hat appears as the voice of reason to Cueball, an inversion of their typical dynamic (see for instance 1386: People are Stupid and 1459: Documents ). The role-reversal may be an acknowledgment that while Cueball may often make a fool of White Hat, he's far from perfect himself.\nRandall 's misadventures in time management are a recurring topic (see 874: Time Management and the Time management category ).\nMobile keyboard efficiency was previously tangentially referenced in 1068: Swiftkey , and Randall's habit of opening news sites only to quickly get bored or distracted was shown in 1411: Loop .\n[Cueball holding his smartphone in both hands is talking to White Hat.] Cueball: This new keyboard is like 30% faster! I'm never going back.\n[White hat replies and Cueball lifts his arms.] White Hat: Good, put those years of horror behind you. Cueball: C'mon. Sure, sometimes my focus on efficiency doesn't make sense. But we type a lot .\n[Cueball holding his smartphone in one hand while talking to White Hat.] Cueball: That 30% improvement pretty quickly adds up to a huge amount of wasted time rescued.\n[White hat replies and Cueball lifts one arm.] White Hat: I just watched you open Google News and then close it without reading it five times in a row. Cueball: The fact that I spend most of my time so stupidly only makes it more important not to waste any here.\n"}
{"id":1503,"title":"Squirrel Plan","image_title":"Squirrel Plan","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1503","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/squirrel_plan.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1503:_Squirrel_Plan","transcript":"[There are three squirrels.  One is suspended from a balloon. The other two are sitting on the ground, looking up at it.]\nSquirrel to the right: Once you've chewed a hole in the Sun, shoot the balloon to fall back to earth, then pull the parachute ripcord to land.\nSquirrel tied to balloon: Are you sure it's full of acorns?\nSquirrel to the right: Look how bright and magnificent it is! What else could be in there?\n","explanation":"These particular squirrels are ambitious but misguided, like the characters in the myth of Icarus and Daedalus (it should be noted that Randall does not see it that way, as seen in the bottom of \"Interplanetary Cessna\" ), or the Tower of Babel . The squirrels' understanding of astrophysics is lacking, regarding the distance to the sun and appropriate transportation to reach it in addition to the need to resist the sun's heat and exist in the vacuum of space. Their belief that the sun is made of acorns reflects their uniquely acorn-focused worldview, a reference to the tendency of real-life squirrels to gather and store acorns as winter food, as well as their single-minded dedication to overcoming obstacles (even elaborately-constructed obstacle courses ) for the sake of obtaining nuts.\nThe title text reveals that \"halfway to the sun,\" 75 million kilometers from all known acorns in our universe, the airborne squirrel seems to jeopardize the entire mission because he wants to test if the balloon itself is full of acorns. Basic observational skills will tell anyone that acorns do not float [ citation needed ] , but the idea follows the logic stated by the squirrels:  If the sun, being so magnificent, must be full of acorns, then a balloon powerful enough to take a squirrel to the sun must also be powered by something amazing, like acorns. Obviously, neither the sun or balloons are filled with acorns [ citation needed ] .\nUsage of balloons for space travel is a prominent motif in early science fiction; see, for example, \" The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall \" by Edgar Allan Poe.\n[There are three squirrels.  One is suspended from a balloon. The other two are sitting on the ground, looking up at it.]\nSquirrel to the right: Once you've chewed a hole in the Sun, shoot the balloon to fall back to earth, then pull the parachute ripcord to land.\nSquirrel tied to balloon: Are you sure it's full of acorns?\nSquirrel to the right: Look how bright and magnificent it is! What else could be in there?\n"}
{"id":1504,"title":"Opportunity","image_title":"Opportunity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1504","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/opportunity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1504:_Opportunity","transcript":"[The year (or year and first sentence) for each panel is written in a small frame at the top of each panel. It breaks the top frame of the panels.]\n[Ponytail is sitting at a computer, facing left. Hairbun stands behind her.] 2010: Ponytail: After six years, Spirit is down, but Opportunity is still going strong. Hairbun: Tough little rover!\n[Opportunity traveling on Mars. Text is written in frames with zigzag lines] 2015: Off-screen: Eleven years, wow. Off-screen 2: Wasn't the original mission 90 days? Off-screen: This is starting to get weird.\n[Cueball and Megan sitting at a computer, facing right.] 2023: Cueball: The battery is totally disconnected. How can it still be moving?? Megan: Given what it did to the Mars 2020 rover, we may never know.\n[Two Martian inhabitants looking like Cueball and Megan stands on a cliff edge pointing towards a dark, mountainous region. Behind them are a tower and a hover car] 2450, terraformed Mars, Martian imperial capital: Martian Cueball: Everything the light touches is our kingdom. Martian Megan: What's that dark area? Martian Cueball: That is Opportunity's half of the planet. We must never go there.\n","explanation":"This comic is talking about the robotic science platform Opportunity . On January 25, 2004, the Opportunity rover landed on the surface of Mars for the purpose of gathering data about the surface of Mars. Opportunity has proven remarkably robust, and the comic extrapolates the rover's resilience to absurdity for comedic effect. As of Feb 12th, 2019, the Opportunity rover has finally been declared dead after 5352 Sols (Mars Days) or 5500 Earth days on Mars. On Feb 13th, 2019, Randall eulogies the Opportunity Rover in 2111: Opportunity Rover .\nThe comic depicts the two scientists Ponytail and Hairbun at ground control being amazed at this fact already in 2010, and (maybe the same two) scientists continue to discuss this in 2015 in the second panel.\nThey mention another Martian rover, Spirit that was also sent to Mars on the same date as Opportunity. Unfortunately, it became stuck and a sandstorm covered its solar panels. On March 22, 2010, it was thought that Spirit's batteries finally ran out, marking the end of its mission. This was covered in 695: Spirit , in which the Spirit rover is also portrayed with an anthropomorphic personality.\nIn 2023, Opportunity is still moving despite having supposedly no power source. It also became aggressive and deactivated the Perseverance rover sent in 2020 . Cueball and Megan can't explain how it moves, but investigating is now too dangerous. This evolution is similar to the stories of HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey ) and V'Ger (from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ), both of which became dangerous to human beings.\nBy 2450, humans have colonized and terraformed Mars. Maybe it is the 2023 Cueball and Megan's descendants that are looking out over their huge \"kingdom\" from the capital on Mars. However Opportunity is by now dominating half of the planet and will not allow humans to enter its dark reign.\n\"Everything the light touches\" is a reference to a line by Mufasa in The Lion King . Mufasa's son Simba then asks \"What about that shadowy place?\" and Mufasa tells him \"That is beyond our borders. You must never go there\". This was used again in 1608: Hoverboard , where Cueball tells the same line to Ponytail in the left part of the world. In \" what if \" \"Sunset on the British Empire\" , concerning the end of the sun shining on the British Empire, Cueball tells a child that everything the light touches is their kingdom, and the child asks (in the title text) \"What about that shadowy place over there?\" to which Cueball replies (also in the title text), \"That's France. We'll get it one of these days.\"\nThe title text forecasts the first words of the first astronauts on the surface of Mars. At first, the astronaut copies the first words of Neil Armstrong on the Moon (\"That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind\") but it is interrupted by the Opportunity rover. Opportunity has a drill to collect Martian rock samples, but here it is heavily suggested that the drill is being used as a weapon against the astronaut.\n[The year (or year and first sentence) for each panel is written in a small frame at the top of each panel. It breaks the top frame of the panels.]\n[Ponytail is sitting at a computer, facing left. Hairbun stands behind her.] 2010: Ponytail: After six years, Spirit is down, but Opportunity is still going strong. Hairbun: Tough little rover!\n[Opportunity traveling on Mars. Text is written in frames with zigzag lines] 2015: Off-screen: Eleven years, wow. Off-screen 2: Wasn't the original mission 90 days? Off-screen: This is starting to get weird.\n[Cueball and Megan sitting at a computer, facing right.] 2023: Cueball: The battery is totally disconnected. How can it still be moving?? Megan: Given what it did to the Mars 2020 rover, we may never know.\n[Two Martian inhabitants looking like Cueball and Megan stands on a cliff edge pointing towards a dark, mountainous region. Behind them are a tower and a hover car] 2450, terraformed Mars, Martian imperial capital: Martian Cueball: Everything the light touches is our kingdom. Martian Megan: What's that dark area? Martian Cueball: That is Opportunity's half of the planet. We must never go there.\n"}
{"id":1505,"title":"Ontological Argument","image_title":"Ontological Argument","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1505","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ontological_argument.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1505:_Ontological_Argument","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking side-by-side.] Megan: ...but wouldn't a God who could find a flaw in the ontological argument be even greater?\n","explanation":"Ontology is the study of being , reality , and existence . \u201cThe ontological argument \u201d is an attempt at proving the existence of God through reasoning about the nature of \u201cbeing\u201d.\nMegan 's statement in the comic is likely a reference to what is considered the first ontological argument, that of 11th Century philosopher Anselm of Canterbury . His argument starts by defining God as \u201cthat than which nothing greater can be conceived \u201d. Another step in the argument is that you can conceive of such a being even if you don't believe it exists. Yet another step is the statement that a being, of which one can conceive, and which exists, is certainly greater than a being of which one can conceive and which does not exist. Implicit in the argument are two essential premises, both of which are controversial.  These are a) that the existence of such a being is possible, and b) that existence is a great-making quality.\nThe comic makes fun of Anselm's ontological argument by extending to absurdity the claim that a being who exists is greater than one who does not exist, and that therefore God must exist. A God who can disprove the ontological argument must be greater than one who cannot disprove the ontological argument, therefore the ontological argument proves the existence of a God that disproves it. This argument, though a joke, carries some weight. If Anselm's argument is sound, then disproving it is impossible, and God cannot do it.  But if doing things is a great-making quality (a common assumption), then surely doing impossible things would be an even stronger great-making quality. Therefore the argument is able to be disproven, albeit only by God, which contradicts the initial premise that the argument is sound. Therefore, either doing things is not great-making, or the entire ontological argument is invalid reasoning.\nThe title text carries the absurdity a step further.\nThe comic also may be drawing an analogy to the omnipotence paradox , as it also refers to the idea that God's power would be greater if He could do the logically impossible. If Randall believes that Anselm's ontological argument is logically sound and based on true premises, then he should think it is impossible to disprove. Therefore, he references the omnipotence paradox by requiring that God do such an impossible thing in order to have maximally great power.\nA popular parody of the ontological argument is that of Richard Dawkins , in his best-selling book \u201c The God Delusion \u201d. His parody is a version of the argument which attempts to prove that God does not exist. It is similar in approach to this comic and to the omnipotence paradox, in that it also requires a God that can do the logically impossible. In Dawkins' version\u2014 borrowed from the Australian philosopher Douglas Gasking \u2014God's greatness is demonstrated by his creation of the world. A being that somehow overcomes the great handicap of not existing and goes on to create the world would certainly be greater than a being that exists and creates the world. Therefore God, who by definition is \u201cthat than which nothing greater can be conceived\u201d, must not exist.\nAnother, rather more famous parody, but which is entirely unrelated to the comic in approach, is that of Gaunilo of Marmoutiers , in which he argues for the existence of a maximally great island. This parody, added to the comic, seems to tell us what happened to the legendary Atlantis . It is worth noting that Anselm himself rebutted Gaunilo's argument, claiming that it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Anselm's original argument.\nNot all ontological arguments for the existence of God rely on the notion that a God that exists is greater than one that does not exist. Examples include the modal ontological argument from Alvin Plantinga , and G\u00f6del's ontological proof . Graham Oppy , an authority on ontological arguments, attempts to classify here what exactly makes arguments ontological; he concludes that it is that they are a priori in nature. He also classifies them into eight categories: definitional , conceptual, modal, Meinongian , experiential , mereological , higher order, and Hegelian .\nThis comic, in particular in the way Megan and Cueball are walking and in its reference to theology, greatly resembles the earlier comic 1315: Questions for God .\n[Megan and Cueball are walking side-by-side.] Megan: ...but wouldn't a God who could find a flaw in the ontological argument be even greater?\n"}
{"id":1506,"title":"xkcloud","image_title":"xkcloud","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1506","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcloud.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1506:_xkcloud","transcript":"[This transcript only transcribes what can be seen in the first picture shown at the top of the explanation here. For more see link below.]\n[One large frame with a five part comic and a large red button at the bottom.] [Cueball sitting behind a desk.] Cueball: We've made a huge mistake. Desk: XKCD.COM\n[Cueball stands and indicates a motley collection of computers and related equipment strewn around the desk.] Cueball: I figured starting a cloud services company would be easy. Cueball: After all, I've got tons of computers!\n[A zoomed view on Cueballs head.] Cueball: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr\u2014 they all struggle to protect privacy and user data... Cueball: And we offered a solution. Cueball: I forget what it was, though.\n[Cueball is standing with his arms up.] Cueball: Anyway, long story short, we screwed up immediately and lost tons of their data. Cueball: Also a bunch of stuff is literally on fire?\n[Cueball standing behind a desk.] Cueball: We can fix this. Cueball: But we need your help. Desk: XKCD.COM\n[Below the above is a large red rectangular clickable button, that will take the reader on to the interactive part of the comic. On the button it says in large white letters:] CLICK HERE To help us recover user data before Facebook & Co notice we lost it.\n[The standard text for the next possible pages can be seen on the link to the continued transcript . Also here will be a list (which may not be possible to make complete) with possible text for the lost data.]\n","explanation":"This was the sixth April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous fools comic was 1350: Lorenz from Tuesday April 1st 2014. The next was 1663: Garden scheduled for release Friday April 1st 2016, but in the end released on Monday April 4th 2016.\nIn this interactive April Fools' Day comic Cueball , presumably representing Randall , admits to the readers he built a flimsy cloud services company using spare computers and parts. Included in the cloud hardware are (from left to right) a Macintosh , several old laptops, an Alienware tower, a Nintendo VirtualBoy , an old desktop with the cover off, and an Atari Pong Console .\nHe named the company after xkcd, xkcloud being a portmanteau of \" xkcd \" and \" cloud \", here pronounced XK-cloud. The portmanteau incidentally still contains all four xkcd letters in the correct order: xkcLOUd. This was later reused for the xkcd keyboard in 2150: XKeyboarCD , where the word Keyboard, has an X before the word and a C before the D with the xkcd letters capitalized.\nAfter providing his services to various (very big) companies ( Facebook , Twitter and Tumblr ), that are very concerned with securing the users data, his setup failed (some portions may even have caught fire? He is not sure). This has caused him to lose the data he was required to preserve as part of his service. He thus requests the readers help to make up and re-imagine the lost data by pressing the large red button at the bottom of the comic. Preferably before Facebook & Co notice we lost it.\nIf you take him up on his request and push the button, you will be taken to a \"survey\" where you will get the chance to help by either trying to combine a posted picture with its lost text or, vice versa, by trying to combine a posted text with its lost picture. In either case you get a selection of texts\/pictures to choose from but can also choose to write your own text or even draw the picture. After doing this you get to see this combination in the news feed together with several other posts (which other people have helped combine from other lost data). And then you can continue helping as long as you like.\nThe content of the \"surveys\" appear to come from reader submissions, and are different upon every click. This is thus both an interactive and a dynamic comic with only the first picture shown on top of this page. By inviting the xkcd readers to add content that will be displayed in the comic later, the result of all the interactions leads to the generation of crowd-sourced content .\nIt was not immediately clear if the reader-created drawings or captions are, in fact, being cycled into the surveys and feeds, or if the displayed items were all created by Randall and the reader-created content is simply discarded. With the huge amount of different comments and drawings that already appeared on the first day, and since especially the drawings look like they are created in the simple Paint app (i.e. not by Randall), there can be no doubt that most of the content is created by the users. However he must have made some pictures to get it all started, and at least one of these can be seen here .\nThis comic resembles last years April Fools' comic 1350: Lorenz where user input also generated a very complex crowd-sourced comic. In both comics it was possible to create a permalink to save a given version of the comic to share with others.\nAn earlier comic was also related to problems with cloud computing: 908: The Cloud .\nDue to the very complex nature of this comic, there are lots of details that may need an explanation. This can be found in the sections below.\nOn every of the pages after the front page Cueball sits at his desk labeled XKCD.COM Below him are xkcloud's policy: Our policy regarding your personal data :\nAs can be seen he is getting desperate because people keep sending them more data. He has no place to store it. And he do not even know who the data belongs to. So now he hopes someone else recognize the data (what you are doing if you choose to help). In the end he simply pleads for people to stop and then shouts Help . If you click on the desk you are sent back to the front page of the comic. But below Help is their real contact detail Don't contact us :\nWe are open for anyone to chat here. Hey you! Come right over and say hello to us! ~ euphoria.io\/room\/xkcd\n[This transcript only transcribes what can be seen in the first picture shown at the top of the explanation here. For more see link below.]\n[One large frame with a five part comic and a large red button at the bottom.] [Cueball sitting behind a desk.] Cueball: We've made a huge mistake. Desk: XKCD.COM\n[Cueball stands and indicates a motley collection of computers and related equipment strewn around the desk.] Cueball: I figured starting a cloud services company would be easy. Cueball: After all, I've got tons of computers!\n[A zoomed view on Cueballs head.] Cueball: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr\u2014 they all struggle to protect privacy and user data... Cueball: And we offered a solution. Cueball: I forget what it was, though.\n[Cueball is standing with his arms up.] Cueball: Anyway, long story short, we screwed up immediately and lost tons of their data. Cueball: Also a bunch of stuff is literally on fire?\n[Cueball standing behind a desk.] Cueball: We can fix this. Cueball: But we need your help. Desk: XKCD.COM\n[Below the above is a large red rectangular clickable button, that will take the reader on to the interactive part of the comic. On the button it says in large white letters:] CLICK HERE To help us recover user data before Facebook & Co notice we lost it.\n[The standard text for the next possible pages can be seen on the link to the continued transcript . Also here will be a list (which may not be possible to make complete) with possible text for the lost data.]\n"}
{"id":1507,"title":"Metaball","image_title":"Metaball","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1507","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/metaball.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1507:_Metaball","transcript":"[Megan runs towards a bouncing soccer football.]\n[Megan kicks the soccer football upwards.]\n[Cueball leaps towards the ball as it falls towards a basketball hoop. Hairbun also stretches her arm up.] Ponytail (offscreen): Out!\n[Ponytail walks toward them consulting a piece of paper divided in sections:] [Megan (offscreen):] What do you mean , out?! Ponytail: The ball clipped the corner of the baseball zone. Infield fly rule. [Megan (offscreen):] Aw, maaan ...\n","explanation":"In the first two panels of this game Megan kicks a football (also known as a soccer ball in some regions), but the surprise comes in the next panel when it turns out she tried to kick it into a basketball hoop where Cueball is either trying to catch, stop or dunk the ball. Hairbun is also reaching an arm up after the ball. But then Ponytail yells \" Out! \". When Megan asks Ponytail why the ball is out, Ponytail explains it is due to the infield fly rule that was invoked when the ball crossed into the baseball zone - a very complicated rule to understand for baseball outsiders.\nThey are playing a ball game that incorporates the rules of many games that use a ball . The rules seem to be based on the location of the ball . Ponytail is holding a map which divides the area into zones. Each time the ball enters a new zone, the rules change to become the rules of the ball game represented in that zone.\nThe name \"Metaball\" is the combination of the prefix \" meta \" and the word \" ball \". Not long before this comic there was another comic with \"meta\" in the title: 1447: Meta-Analysis . The entire joke is meta in 917: Hofstadter .\nMegan is out according to the rules of baseball, because the football that she initially kicked in the football zone in an attempt to score in the basketball hoop (in the basketball zone), clipped the corner of the baseball zone. And suddenly her high kick turned into a pop fly and Ponytail (presumably the referee (and creator\/ruler) of this game) invoked the infield fly rule which forces the batter out. In this case that would be the kicker Megan as she is the last to have touched the ball.\nIn baseball the infield fly rule can be invoked by the umpire (i.e. the referee in baseball, Ponytail in this case), to prevent an infielder from intentionally dropping a fair ball when runners are on multiple bases, forcing the runners on base to advance and allowing the infielder's team to quickly perform a double or triple play by throwing the ball to where the runners are trying to get and performing force out on their base. The infield fly rule, once called out by the umpire, forces the batter to be out whether or not the infielder tries to get the batter out. While complicated, and difficult for outsider to understand, the rule has been in baseball for a long time and makes sense in context.\nThe title text continues the comic. After Megan is ruled out, even though Cueball misses the catch, the ball now enters the golf section of the field, meaning that the players would have to hit the ball into a golf hole to score. Given that the ball is much larger than a standard golf ball, this would prove difficult. However, before they get this far, the situation changes as the ball rolls into a separate section of the field called the ice hazard.\nOn a golf course a hazard is either a bunker (with sand) or a water hazard . If the latter type freezes over it could be called an ice hazard. However, in this Metaball game this section of the course is apparently used to play some form of ice hockey . And since the game has been held up when Megan was called out, they will now have to restart the game with a face-off (a skirmish between two players of opposing teams to restart the game). It can be argued that an ice hockey puck can be considered a ball, since ice hockey has evolved from, and is a variation of, older stick-and-ball games. And since they play both baseball, basketball and golf with the association football, they could also continue playing ice hockey with this ball instead of a puck.\nFor the record there are several other versions of hockey that are played with a ball ( ball hockey for instance) and at least one of these is played on ice (see broomball ). In these games face-offs are also used. It seems likely that Randall has chosen some of the most popular sports of the US - and then used a soccer\/football instead of an American football .\nGiven the timing of this comic with the US collegiate basketball tournament , we may assume Randall is writing as a response to that. He has previously given an opinion on sports (see for instance 904: Sports , 1107: Sports Cheat Sheet and 1480: Super Bowl ).\nThis concept is very similar to Calvinball from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes by American cartoonist Bill Watterson .\n[Megan runs towards a bouncing soccer football.]\n[Megan kicks the soccer football upwards.]\n[Cueball leaps towards the ball as it falls towards a basketball hoop. Hairbun also stretches her arm up.] Ponytail (offscreen): Out!\n[Ponytail walks toward them consulting a piece of paper divided in sections:] [Megan (offscreen):] What do you mean , out?! Ponytail: The ball clipped the corner of the baseball zone. Infield fly rule. [Megan (offscreen):] Aw, maaan ...\n"}
{"id":1508,"title":"Operating Systems","image_title":"Operating Systems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1508","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/operating_systems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1508:_Operating_Systems","transcript":"[All text is in capitals.  At the top of the panel:] Operating Systems running in my house\n[At the bottom there is time-line that runs from 1990 to 2066. It has small indicators for every year, larger for every 5 years and largest for every 10 years. Below the 10 year indicators are written the years. Also the year 2015 is marked:] 1990 2000 2010 Now 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060\n[Bars above the time-line in four levels are labeled with operating system names, representing the time period for that OS. Below is a list of the bars on the time-line in order of first appearance (with approximate year ranges given). Also the level from 1-4 is indicated, with level 1 just above the time-line and level 4 the highest level above the line:]\n[Level 1 from 1988 to 1998 (extends a little left past the beginning of the time-line but not off panel):] MS DOS [Level 2 from 1993 to 2007:] Windows [Level 3 from 1994 to 2001:] Mac OS [Level 1 from 1999 to 2018:] Linux [Level 2 from 2009 to 2023. On the way the bar merges with iOS around 2018 thru 2022:] OS X [Level 3 from 2009 to 2016:] Android [Level 4 from 2013 to 2022. On the way to 2022 the bar moves down past Android to merge with OS X after 2018:] iOS [Level 1 from 2018 to 2028. The text is written in square brackets:] [Something].js [Level 3 from 2022 to 2029:] TinderOS [Level 2 from 2023 to 2032:] Nest [Level 1 from 2028 to 2041:] Elon Musk Project: [Level 3 from 2030 to 2036:] DOS, but ironically [Level 2 from 2034 to 2041:] Blood Drone [This is not a bar, but the text (in three lines) is in a double bar-height (level 1-2) square bracket. The bracket extends from 2042 to 2051:] [Human civilization ends in fire] [Level 1 from 2059 going past the end of the panel past 2066:] GNU\/Hurd\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall gives an overview of the past, present and (speculatively) future of the operating systems running in his house at any given time. Notably, because Randall is fascinated by technology, he has had more than one OS running in his household since the mid '90's. The timeline tracks how Operating Systems have come and gone over the years, and the gradual shift from desktop Operating Systems to mobile can be observed. Beyond the present day, we see some of Randall's humorous predictions as to which technologies and companies will dominate the Operating System landscape in the future.\nIt may be that the OS that is closest to the time-line is also the one he mainly uses during these extended periods.\nPrevious and current systems:\nHis predictions for the future include:\nThe title text refers to Richard Stallman , the founder of the Free Software movement and the GNU and Hurd projects. A survivor of the fire that ended the human civilization has uncovered a slightly burned ( singed ) picture of him. Those gathered can see, either directly from the picture or because they already know of Stallman, that this was a man that really believed in something. In this case it was free software . Inspired by his image, they rebuild their lost civilization and finish Hurd development.\nThe GNU\/Hurd reference might also be a pun, as in a \"herd\" of Gnus \"running\" in his living room, as wild animals reclaim the Earth after the end of human civilization.\nGNU is a collection of free software utilities, particularly the system utilities used with the Linux Kernel to form the Linux operating system (often called GNU\/Linux by those who wish to emphasize the contribution of the GNU project). Hurd is an operating system kernel designed as part of GNU project that could be used in place of the Linux kernel to produce a complete GNU operating system. Hurd has a microkernel architecture, which has many perceived advantages over Linux's monolithic kernel, and is thought by many to be technically superior, despite its low adoption rate compared to the Linux kernel.\nRandall has made several comics about free software and also about Stallman. See this list of comics featuring Richard Stallman . Most of these are also about free software in some form.\n[All text is in capitals.  At the top of the panel:] Operating Systems running in my house\n[At the bottom there is time-line that runs from 1990 to 2066. It has small indicators for every year, larger for every 5 years and largest for every 10 years. Below the 10 year indicators are written the years. Also the year 2015 is marked:] 1990 2000 2010 Now 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060\n[Bars above the time-line in four levels are labeled with operating system names, representing the time period for that OS. Below is a list of the bars on the time-line in order of first appearance (with approximate year ranges given). Also the level from 1-4 is indicated, with level 1 just above the time-line and level 4 the highest level above the line:]\n[Level 1 from 1988 to 1998 (extends a little left past the beginning of the time-line but not off panel):] MS DOS [Level 2 from 1993 to 2007:] Windows [Level 3 from 1994 to 2001:] Mac OS [Level 1 from 1999 to 2018:] Linux [Level 2 from 2009 to 2023. On the way the bar merges with iOS around 2018 thru 2022:] OS X [Level 3 from 2009 to 2016:] Android [Level 4 from 2013 to 2022. On the way to 2022 the bar moves down past Android to merge with OS X after 2018:] iOS [Level 1 from 2018 to 2028. The text is written in square brackets:] [Something].js [Level 3 from 2022 to 2029:] TinderOS [Level 2 from 2023 to 2032:] Nest [Level 1 from 2028 to 2041:] Elon Musk Project: [Level 3 from 2030 to 2036:] DOS, but ironically [Level 2 from 2034 to 2041:] Blood Drone [This is not a bar, but the text (in three lines) is in a double bar-height (level 1-2) square bracket. The bracket extends from 2042 to 2051:] [Human civilization ends in fire] [Level 1 from 2059 going past the end of the panel past 2066:] GNU\/Hurd\n"}
{"id":1509,"title":"Scenery Cheat Sheet","image_title":"Scenery Cheat Sheet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1509","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scenery_cheat_sheet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1509:_Scenery_Cheat_Sheet","transcript":"[Above the frame is the following text.] A cheat sheet for figuring out where in the US you are by recognizing the background from movies (for use by GeoGuessr players and crash-landed astronauts)\n[In the frame is a map of the mainland USA with the 48 mainland states lined out in thin gray lines. All areas on the map have been enclosed in sections divided by curved black lines. These sections sizes goes from encompassing several states down to just a small section of a single state. The sections cover the entire USA without any holes. There is also one section in the Atlantic Ocean. All sections are labeled. If the section is large enough the text stands inside, if it is too small, the text is outside and an arrow will point to the relevant section\n[Here below all the text on the map (mainly film titles) will be transcribed from top to bottom and (when possible) by going through the columns that seems to appear in the sections when going from left to right. The State Postal Codes will be used when referring to the states covered by each section]\n[Small section covering the west coast around the state border between WA and OR, which is surrounded on three sides by the next section mentioned below. It is labeled with an arrow:] The Goonies [Large section covering WA, OR and top of CA. The section has two titles, with the second one standing with smaller font below the first:] Twilight 50 Shades of Grey [Small section around San Francisco, CA:] Zodiac [Very tiny section covering only Alcatraz off the coast of San Francisco, CA. It lies inside section mentioned above. It is labeled with an arrow:] The Rock [Large section covering most of MT as well as part of WY, SD and NE. The section has two titles:] Dances with Wolves Starship Troopers [Medium section covering most of  ID and part of MT:] Napoleon Dynamite [Medium section covering part of OR, ID, NV and UT:] The Sandlot [Medium section mainly covering the top part of NV:] Wild Wild West [Medium section covering most of NV and small part of CA. The section has two titles, with the second one standing with smaller font below the first plus description:] Top Gun & the part of Independence Day where Will Smith crashes [Small section covering central CA:] That movie about wine & talking [Medium section covering a large part of the southern part of CA around Hollywood, Los Angeles:] Every movie with a big budget, explosions or someone who says \"cool!\" [Medium section covering half of WY and small parts of UT and CO:] Brokeback Mountain [Medium section covering part of WY, CO and NE. The part in parenthesis in a smaller font:] Oregon Trail (the only part I ever got to) [Large section covering small part of UT and the half bottom of UT and CO and top half of AZ and NM:] Roadrunner cartoons [Medium section covering a small part of the southern CA and small part of AZ. The part beneath the title in a smaller font:] The Truman Show, but with desert as the background [Small part at the bottom of AZ. The section has two titles:] Tombstone & The Mask of Zorro [Large section covering the a small part of AZ, the bottom half of NM as well as a third of TX:] No Country for Old Men [Large section covering all of ND, most of MN, half of SD and a small part of MT:] Fargo [Medium section covering most of NE and small parts of MN and IA. The section has three titles. The top two are marked with a square bracket to the left. The text of this given before the third title:] Interstellar Star Trek (2009) ] Earth parts Field of Dreams [Medium section covering large parts of IA, MO and IL:] The Music Man [Medium section covering mainly KS, but also a small part of Co and OK:] The Wizard of Oz [Medium section covering most of OK and small part of MO and AR:] Twister [Medium section covering the top part of TX and small parts of OK and AR:] True Grit [Large section covering a third of TX  (the eastern part all the way down) and small parts of AR and LA. The section has three titles:] Office Space Dazed and Confused Kill Bill [Small section around and below Chicago, IL, which is surrounded on three sides by the next large section mentioned below. It is labeled with an arrow:] Blues Brothers [Very small section almost a circle centered around Detroit, MI completely inside the section here below. It is labeled with an arrow:] 8 Mile [Large section covering all of WI, MI, IN and OH as well as parts of IL and KY. That is except for the two small sections described above, which are inlaid in this one. There are two items in this section. The one below is in smaller font:] A Christmas Story &That song about Jack and Diane [Medium section covering half of AR, small parts of IL and MO as well as bits of  KY, TN and MS:] Anything by Mark Twain [Medium section covering half of TN and part of KY:] Walk the Line [Large section covering all of AL most of MS and half of GA. There are two titles in this section:] Big Fish O Brother Where Art Thou [Small section covering top of LA and small part of MS:] Duck Dynasty [Medium section covering the bottom half of LA and the very bottom of MS. There is a very small section at the bottom of LA that are not included in this but in the next. There are two titles in this section:] Princess and the Frog All Dogs go to Heaven [Small section covering the very eastern end of the bottom of LA \u2013 maybe including New Orleans. It is labeled with an arrow:] Beasts of the Southern Wild [Medium section covering half of PA and western part NY:] Groundhog Day [Small section covering the middle part of VA as well as small parts of PA, MD and WV:] Dirty Dancing [Medium section covering most of WV, half of TN, a small parts of KY as well as tiny bits of VA, NC and GA:] October Sky [Large section covering all of SC, most of NC as well as half of VA and GA. There are two titles in this section:] Gone with the Wind Forrest Gump [Large section covering most of FL except the bottom part which are covered by the next two sections:] The Truman Show [Small section covering the very bottom of FL except the east coast. It is labeled with an arrow:] Adaptation [Small section covering the very bottom the east coast of FL. It is labeled with an arrow:] Miami Vice [Small section covering most of the top of VT and a small part of NY. It is labeled with an arrow:] Super Troopers [Small section covering the central part of NY.] My Side of the Mountain (book) [Small section covering the eastern part of NY, western part of MA, top part of CT as well as bits of VT and RI.:] War of the Worlds (2005) [Small section covering the eastern part of PA and small bits of NY and MD. There are two titles in this section:] Signs & The Village [Medium section covering several large cities of the east coast including New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. It covers most of DE and NJ and large parts of MD (with DC) and the bit of NY with the city. The text is not a title and the it is written in square brackets\u2026:] [Generic city] [Small section covering the east coast along VA and NC, but also with small bits of MD and DE at the top:] Deep Impact [Medium section covering all of ME, the top tip of NH and eastern top of VT:] Pet Semetary [Small section covering the most of the bottom parts of NH and VT:] What about Bob [Very small section surrounding Boston in MA. It is labeled with an arrow:] The Departed [Small section covering the east coast along MA, RI, CT and NJ:] Jaws [Large section off the east coast in the Atlantic Ocean:] The Hunt for Red October","explanation":"In this comic Randall jokes that large areas of the continental (mainland) United States can be characterized by the locations of a single movie. Especially in the Midwest, there are several very large areas that he describes with just one film. The map is the most detailed in the northeast , which is where Randall lives.\nThe map is divided into the 48 states of the mainland by thin gray lines. On top of these are drawn black lines that divide the map into 50 sections. (A 51st section is located in the Atlantic Ocean.) Inside each section is at least one reference that is supposed to describe the entire area encompassed by the section. In most cases it is the title of a movie (or two to three titles), but it could also be more general specter of movies (all movies with a big budget, or those with whose title is an east coast city name) or it could even be a book\/song that describes the relevant area.\nThe map's heading describes the idea behind it; if you know this and the relevant movies, you can use it to determine where you are by comparing your knowledge of the movies with the scenery you can see from where you stand. Below the heading, the two groups of people who will get the most use out of this sheet are listed. The first is \"GeoGuessrs\". GeoGuessr is a game using Google Street View images, which drops the player in a random location and challenges them to work out where they are. (It was previously referenced in 1214: Geoguessr ). The second group is \"crash-landed astronauts\". Obviously, if you've just crash-landed on Earth, knowing your location would be very helpful.\nSome entries (for instance, Groundhog Day ) reflect the locations where the stories are set, and others (like Dances with Wolves ) reflect where they were filmed. Others are even more detached, as it is the sceneries from the movie that resembles a given place, even though it is neither filmed there or takes place there. It could also be a cartoon, which is of course only set in an imaginary world that may resemble the real world.\nThe title text references Anton Chigurh (portrayed by Javier Bardem ), who is the main antagonist of the film No Country For Old Men . In this case he would have taken over the role of Wile E. Coyote , and would thus hunt down The Road Runner at the boundary between the sections for these two movies, which would be somewhere in the New Mexico desert.\n[Above the frame is the following text.] A cheat sheet for figuring out where in the US you are by recognizing the background from movies (for use by GeoGuessr players and crash-landed astronauts)\n[In the frame is a map of the mainland USA with the 48 mainland states lined out in thin gray lines. All areas on the map have been enclosed in sections divided by curved black lines. These sections sizes goes from encompassing several states down to just a small section of a single state. The sections cover the entire USA without any holes. There is also one section in the Atlantic Ocean. All sections are labeled. If the section is large enough the text stands inside, if it is too small, the text is outside and an arrow will point to the relevant section\n[Here below all the text on the map (mainly film titles) will be transcribed from top to bottom and (when possible) by going through the columns that seems to appear in the sections when going from left to right. The State Postal Codes will be used when referring to the states covered by each section]\n[Small section covering the west coast around the state border between WA and OR, which is surrounded on three sides by the next section mentioned below. It is labeled with an arrow:] The Goonies [Large section covering WA, OR and top of CA. The section has two titles, with the second one standing with smaller font below the first:] Twilight 50 Shades of Grey [Small section around San Francisco, CA:] Zodiac [Very tiny section covering only Alcatraz off the coast of San Francisco, CA. It lies inside section mentioned above. It is labeled with an arrow:] The Rock [Large section covering most of MT as well as part of WY, SD and NE. The section has two titles:] Dances with Wolves Starship Troopers [Medium section covering most of  ID and part of MT:] Napoleon Dynamite [Medium section covering part of OR, ID, NV and UT:] The Sandlot [Medium section mainly covering the top part of NV:] Wild Wild West [Medium section covering most of NV and small part of CA. The section has two titles, with the second one standing with smaller font below the first plus description:] Top Gun & the part of Independence Day where Will Smith crashes [Small section covering central CA:] That movie about wine & talking [Medium section covering a large part of the southern part of CA around Hollywood, Los Angeles:] Every movie with a big budget, explosions or someone who says \"cool!\" [Medium section covering half of WY and small parts of UT and CO:] Brokeback Mountain [Medium section covering part of WY, CO and NE. The part in parenthesis in a smaller font:] Oregon Trail (the only part I ever got to) [Large section covering small part of UT and the half bottom of UT and CO and top half of AZ and NM:] Roadrunner cartoons [Medium section covering a small part of the southern CA and small part of AZ. The part beneath the title in a smaller font:] The Truman Show, but with desert as the background [Small part at the bottom of AZ. The section has two titles:] Tombstone & The Mask of Zorro [Large section covering the a small part of AZ, the bottom half of NM as well as a third of TX:] No Country for Old Men [Large section covering all of ND, most of MN, half of SD and a small part of MT:] Fargo [Medium section covering most of NE and small parts of MN and IA. The section has three titles. The top two are marked with a square bracket to the left. The text of this given before the third title:] Interstellar Star Trek (2009) ] Earth parts Field of Dreams [Medium section covering large parts of IA, MO and IL:] The Music Man [Medium section covering mainly KS, but also a small part of Co and OK:] The Wizard of Oz [Medium section covering most of OK and small part of MO and AR:] Twister [Medium section covering the top part of TX and small parts of OK and AR:] True Grit [Large section covering a third of TX  (the eastern part all the way down) and small parts of AR and LA. The section has three titles:] Office Space Dazed and Confused Kill Bill [Small section around and below Chicago, IL, which is surrounded on three sides by the next large section mentioned below. It is labeled with an arrow:] Blues Brothers [Very small section almost a circle centered around Detroit, MI completely inside the section here below. It is labeled with an arrow:] 8 Mile [Large section covering all of WI, MI, IN and OH as well as parts of IL and KY. That is except for the two small sections described above, which are inlaid in this one. There are two items in this section. The one below is in smaller font:] A Christmas Story &That song about Jack and Diane [Medium section covering half of AR, small parts of IL and MO as well as bits of  KY, TN and MS:] Anything by Mark Twain [Medium section covering half of TN and part of KY:] Walk the Line [Large section covering all of AL most of MS and half of GA. There are two titles in this section:] Big Fish O Brother Where Art Thou [Small section covering top of LA and small part of MS:] Duck Dynasty [Medium section covering the bottom half of LA and the very bottom of MS. There is a very small section at the bottom of LA that are not included in this but in the next. There are two titles in this section:] Princess and the Frog All Dogs go to Heaven [Small section covering the very eastern end of the bottom of LA \u2013 maybe including New Orleans. It is labeled with an arrow:] Beasts of the Southern Wild [Medium section covering half of PA and western part NY:] Groundhog Day [Small section covering the middle part of VA as well as small parts of PA, MD and WV:] Dirty Dancing [Medium section covering most of WV, half of TN, a small parts of KY as well as tiny bits of VA, NC and GA:] October Sky [Large section covering all of SC, most of NC as well as half of VA and GA. There are two titles in this section:] Gone with the Wind Forrest Gump [Large section covering most of FL except the bottom part which are covered by the next two sections:] The Truman Show [Small section covering the very bottom of FL except the east coast. It is labeled with an arrow:] Adaptation [Small section covering the very bottom the east coast of FL. It is labeled with an arrow:] Miami Vice [Small section covering most of the top of VT and a small part of NY. It is labeled with an arrow:] Super Troopers [Small section covering the central part of NY.] My Side of the Mountain (book) [Small section covering the eastern part of NY, western part of MA, top part of CT as well as bits of VT and RI.:] War of the Worlds (2005) [Small section covering the eastern part of PA and small bits of NY and MD. There are two titles in this section:] Signs & The Village [Medium section covering several large cities of the east coast including New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. It covers most of DE and NJ and large parts of MD (with DC) and the bit of NY with the city. The text is not a title and the it is written in square brackets\u2026:] [Generic city] [Small section covering the east coast along VA and NC, but also with small bits of MD and DE at the top:] Deep Impact [Medium section covering all of ME, the top tip of NH and eastern top of VT:] Pet Semetary [Small section covering the most of the bottom parts of NH and VT:] What about Bob [Very small section surrounding Boston in MA. It is labeled with an arrow:] The Departed [Small section covering the east coast along MA, RI, CT and NJ:] Jaws [Large section off the east coast in the Atlantic Ocean:] The Hunt for Red October"}
{"id":1510,"title":"Napoleon","image_title":"Napoleon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1510","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/napoleon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1510:_Napoleon","transcript":"[Two Cueball-like soldiers with guns present Napoleon (recognizable by his Napoleon hat, aka a bicorne ) to an officer sitting behind his desk. The officer is pointing at Napoleon who has a small chain on his hands.] Soldier at the front: This is Napoleon. He tried to take over the world. Officer Cueball: Exile him to Elba!\n[Three Cueball-like soldiers with guns present Napoleon again to the same officer sitting behind his desk. The officer has one hand held in front of him with his palm up. This time Napoleon has a larger chain on his hands and a ball and chain on his right leg. His head and hat is battered from the battle.] Soldier at the front: It's us again. Napoleon escaped from Elba and tried to conquer the world. Again. Officer Cueball: Send him someplace truly remote, like Saint Helena. Soldier at the front: Yes, sir.\n[At the top of the panel is a text in a frame that breaks the panel's frame:] Several Years Later...\n[Four Cueball-like soldiers with guns (one partly outside the frame) stand behind Napoleon and one more soldier stands in front of him as they again present him to the same officer. The officer is now standing behind his desk, holding it with one hand while the other is pointing up in the air. This time Napoleon has a octopus on his head, is dripping wet, still has the larger chain on his hands and the ball and chain on his right leg. Furthermore his legs are shackled. There are pools of water on the floor.] Soldier at the front: Well, he swam back. Officer Cueball: We must mount an expedition to the South Pole, where we will encase Napoleon in the Antarctic ice!\"\n[At the top of the panel is a text in a frame that breaks the panel's frame:] A century later...\n[President Kennedy is giving a speech standing on a podium behind a lectern, while Napoleon is standing behind him with the same restraining devices as before. Napoleon now has icicles dangling from his hat and a small piece of ice on his right leg around the knee.] President Kennedy: We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy...\n","explanation":"Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the greatest military leaders in history, conquering most of Europe in the space of a decade. In 1814, after being forced to abdicate as Emperor of the French, he was exiled to the island of Elba . However, in February 1815 Napoleon escaped back to France, quickly raised an army, and overthrew the Bourbon Restoration monarchy for a period known as The Hundred Days . At the end of this period (actually lasting 111 days), Napoleon was defeated by British and Prussian forces at the Battle of Waterloo , and surrendered a month later. This time he was exiled to Saint Helena , an island much more remote than Elba\u2014in fact, one of the most remote places on Earth.\nIn reality, Napoleon made no serious attempts to escape Saint Helena, although Admiral Thomas Cochrane reports in his memoirs that while on his way to lead the fledgling Chilean Navy in their revolution against Spain he intended to stop at St. Helena in order to free Napoleon and put him in charge of all the South American rebel armies. In the event, before he arrived at the island he learned that Napoleon had died there, six years after his surrender. However, this comic imagines a world in which Napoleon escaped once again, swimming back to Europe. Saint Helena is 2,000\u00a0km (1,200\u00a0mi.) from the Afro-Eurasian landmass, making such a swim rather implausible, especially considering the ball and chain around his ankle. And Napoleon is depicted fresh out of the water, suggesting that he did not simply swim to Africa and make his way back to Europe, but rather swam straight to Europe, a journey of roughly 6,100\u00a0km (3,800\u00a0mi.).\nThe comic implies that Napoleon proves impossible to confine, despite escalating attempts to send him to more remote locations and apply increasingly confining restraints (handcuffs, then adding a ball and chain on one ankle, then chaining the ball to both ankles). In addition to being able to swim impossible distances, he seems to also somehow escape imprisonment in the ice of Antarctica. He also seems to be immortal (or well-preserved by the ice of Antarctica), remaining alive and apparently in great physical condition while nearly 200 years old. The final panel shows U.S. President John F. Kennedy 's \" We choose to go to the Moon \" speech, but implies an alternate ending to the line \"not because it is easy, but because it is hard.\" Rather, it appears that we choose to go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it will be hard for Napoleon to return.\nThe title text is an apparent conversation between President Richard Nixon and an aide. Nixon is asked what we will do if we fail to maroon Napoleon on the Moon, and replies \"Have Safire write up a speech.\" This is a reference to Nixon speechwriter William Safire , who wrote the draft speech \"In Event of Moon Disaster\" , to have been delivered by Nixon should the Apollo 11 astronauts be stranded on the Moon. This comic thus proposes an inversion of the actual scenario\u2014instead of Nixon delivering Safire's speech because someone's been stranded on the moon, in this comic he'd be delivering it if someone weren't stranded on the moon. \"In Event of Moon Disaster\" was also the topic of 1484: Apollo Speeches , published two months before this comic.\nIn the title text of 1291: Shoot for the Moon the idea of missing the Moon, and ending up orbiting the Sun is the subject.\n[Two Cueball-like soldiers with guns present Napoleon (recognizable by his Napoleon hat, aka a bicorne ) to an officer sitting behind his desk. The officer is pointing at Napoleon who has a small chain on his hands.] Soldier at the front: This is Napoleon. He tried to take over the world. Officer Cueball: Exile him to Elba!\n[Three Cueball-like soldiers with guns present Napoleon again to the same officer sitting behind his desk. The officer has one hand held in front of him with his palm up. This time Napoleon has a larger chain on his hands and a ball and chain on his right leg. His head and hat is battered from the battle.] Soldier at the front: It's us again. Napoleon escaped from Elba and tried to conquer the world. Again. Officer Cueball: Send him someplace truly remote, like Saint Helena. Soldier at the front: Yes, sir.\n[At the top of the panel is a text in a frame that breaks the panel's frame:] Several Years Later...\n[Four Cueball-like soldiers with guns (one partly outside the frame) stand behind Napoleon and one more soldier stands in front of him as they again present him to the same officer. The officer is now standing behind his desk, holding it with one hand while the other is pointing up in the air. This time Napoleon has a octopus on his head, is dripping wet, still has the larger chain on his hands and the ball and chain on his right leg. Furthermore his legs are shackled. There are pools of water on the floor.] Soldier at the front: Well, he swam back. Officer Cueball: We must mount an expedition to the South Pole, where we will encase Napoleon in the Antarctic ice!\"\n[At the top of the panel is a text in a frame that breaks the panel's frame:] A century later...\n[President Kennedy is giving a speech standing on a podium behind a lectern, while Napoleon is standing behind him with the same restraining devices as before. Napoleon now has icicles dangling from his hat and a small piece of ice on his right leg around the knee.] President Kennedy: We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy...\n"}
{"id":1511,"title":"Spice Girl","image_title":"Spice Girl","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1511","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spice_girl.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1511:_Spice_Girl","transcript":"[Cueball is trying to barricade a door with his own body (although it already has a bar in front of it). He is in a room that is deteriorating with Hairbun who is loading a shotgun while sitting behind some sort of box.] Knocking on the door: Thump Thump Voice (see here ): Which Spice Girl are you?! Voice (see here ): The merciful one, or the one who started this war?\n[Caption below the frame:] When I see those quiz titles, I like to imagine they're being shouted through a door in a postapocalyptic dystopia.\n","explanation":"The Spice Girls are a British pop girl group formed in 1994. It consists of five girls who each have a \"spice girl\" nickname. The five girls with their respective nicknames are:\nIn 1554: Spice Girls he shows how difficult it is to remember these five names...\nThis is one example of a trend of online quizzes that would \"identify\" the user with one person\/personality of a group based on a series of personality questions. This will most often concern which member of a band, TV cast\/film cast or character from books, etc. the quiz taker most resembles. In this comic it is specifically Spice girl quizzes that are the subject.\nIn this comic, Randall is suggesting that in order to cope with what he probably considers to be irritating clickbait links to these quizzes, he imagines the link titles as being shouted through a door in a postapocalyptic dystopia . This is a reference to a trope in movies set in such postapocalyptic settings (which Randall presumably enjoys more) in which the heroes must determine whether an unknown agent is friend or foe, which in some such media occurs by shouting through locked doors. It is not likely that Randall would actually complete these quizzes, but if he did in this fantasy setting, the stakes would be higher and each answer would be fraught with dangerous meaning. It would thus also be much more fun taking the quiz and the result would seem to be important.\nIn Randall's fantasy dystopian future, the character who is subject of the dialogue may be one of two Spice Girls, described alternately as the one who is merciful and the one started the war (which likely resulted in the said dystopia). It is possible there are only two remaining Spice Girls, or that there are simply only two likely options in the particular circumstances of the comic. It is also unclear if Randall may be suggesting two fictional Spice Girls, or if in his fantasy future, two of the actual original Spice Girls fit the criteria mentioned. The Merciful One could be a reference to the song with the same name by Zohar , another British music ensemble.\nAs a result of the way a speech line was drawn in this comic, there was initially ambiguity as to the source of the dialogue. The official transcript now states: \"A CRUEL INTERLOPER, external to the scene and room, pounds on the door and shouts at the two figures in our sight.\"\nThe four little lines at the source end of the speech line are often used by Randall to denote sound coming from an unseen source. The quiz question is being shouted by an angry agent or crowd outside the door, presumably in reference to the female character seen in the comic. Presumably if she is \"the one who started this war\", the person(s) outside would be hostile toward her.\nIn this case, it looks like the female character (who otherwise appears to be a Hairbun character) does not have any intention of answering, and is preparing for when the people outside break down the door by loading her shotgun to defend herself. In this interpretation, the title text is said by \"Hairbun\" Spice indicating that when they get through the door they will be in trouble.\nThe title text refers to the lyrics from the Spice Girls' debut single, Wannabe (Listen to Wannabe on YouTube ) Here below is the relevant excerpt from the song where the letters in the last four lines refer to the spice girls as given above . This rap bridge is sung by Scary Spice except for the line with Easy V which is sung by Ginger Spice:\nSo here's a story from A to Z, You wanna get with me You gotta listen carefully We got Em in the place who likes it in your face You got G like MC who likes it on an Easy V doesn't come for free, she's a real lady And as for me, ha ha, you'll see\nThese lyrics function as a little introduction to the (then) less-well-known girl group. The final line takes on a threat-like tone in this new context of the comic. And it doesn't help that it is Scary Spice who sings it.\nThe text may seem a little confusing to understand, especially the line that finishes on an . According to another lyrics-site, which also has explanations to some parts of the text, it means that G and MC likes it (sex) together with ecstasy - as \"On an E\" is slang for being on ecstasy (see it used in this discussion ). They could not sing this directly without resulting in a PG rating, thus they inserted the \"E\" in the next line as E asy V, a line which is even sung by another spice girl, Ginger spice, where the rest of this bridge is sung by Scary Spice.\n[Cueball is trying to barricade a door with his own body (although it already has a bar in front of it). He is in a room that is deteriorating with Hairbun who is loading a shotgun while sitting behind some sort of box.] Knocking on the door: Thump Thump Voice (see here ): Which Spice Girl are you?! Voice (see here ): The merciful one, or the one who started this war?\n[Caption below the frame:] When I see those quiz titles, I like to imagine they're being shouted through a door in a postapocalyptic dystopia.\n"}
{"id":1512,"title":"Horoscopes","image_title":"Horoscopes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1512","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/horoscopes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1512:_Horoscopes","transcript":"[Above the frame:] Horoscopes With an actual basis in fact [A list with the name of each astrological sign in the first column (in gray) and a horoscope for each sign in the second column. Here given in table form]\nAries \u2022 You may have been conceived after a 4th of July fireworks show Taurus \u2022 You may have been conceived on a hot August day Gemini \u2022 You may have been conceived as the leaves began to change Cancer \u2022 You may have been conceived by people trying on costumes Leo \u2022 You may have been conceived during Thanksgiving Virgo \u2022 You may have been conceived while a Christmas song played Libra \u2022 You may have been conceived after a New Year's Eve party Scorpio \u2022 You may have been conceived by people stuck inside after a long winter Sagittarius \u2022 You may have been conceived during March Madness Capricorn \u2022 You may have been conceived during a sexy Easter egg hunt Aquarius \u2022 You may have been conceived on Mother's day Pisces \u2022 You may have been conceived at someone's wedding\n","explanation":"Horoscopes purport to predict someone's personality or future, based on the position of planets and stars at the time of their birth and at present. Horoscopes commonly group people into twelve groups based on zodiac signs . The names of the horoscope Zodiac signs are based on the names of twelve constellations that were the backdrop for the path of the sun in the ancient times when the rules of settings horoscopes were originally developed. Today, due to precession of the Earth's axis of rotation (and to a lesser degree due to the modern formal definitions of constellations), the Zodiac signs do not correspond fully to the names of actual constellations in the path of the Sun. One's zodiac sign is determined by the position of the sun on their birthday, with each sign representing a specific 30.4 day period (1\/12th of a year), starting from the First point of Aries .\nModern science has found no basis for horoscopes , which is why the comic jokes about the fact that its horoscopes at least may be true. Actual horoscopes are typically so vague that they could be true for almost anyone regardless of their sign. Note that this horoscope mainly makes sense for people living in the northern hemisphere (as mentioned in the title text) and it is especially tailored for an audience in the United States , as most cultural references are centered on \"Western\" or even specific \"American\" culture, several won't even work in Europe, for example. However, with the principle understood, it is easy to apply local traditions for more accuracy in non-Western cultures.\nThe 12 category zodiac signs in horoscopes are based on birth dates.  The average length of pregnancy, culturally considered to be nine months, is actually given as the 40 weeks (9.2 months) after the last menstrual period. However, what is relevant here is that it is only 38 weeks after conception (8.75 month). The first two weeks of the 40 week period is before Ovulation , and the conception cannot occur before that.\nBased on this knowledge Randall can do some informed guessing about the context of someone's conception (apart from the obvious ), depending on the sign. For example, people of the sign Virgo have been born between August 23 and September 22. This makes it most likely that they are conceived during December the year before. Given contemporary holiday music preferences, Christmas songs were likely to be playing the day they were conceived.  This leads to the guess \"You may have been conceived while a Christmas song played\". See detailed description of all the signs and explanation of the horoscopes in the table below.\nRandall phrases his \"predictions\" as possibilities (\"you may have\") rather than declarations, acknowledging that it is a guess, and that it, unlike actual horoscopes, doesn't necessarily apply to everyone.\nThe title text refers to the Coriolis effect which applies to a body that is moving relative to an object that is spinning. Since the Earth is rotating, a force (the Coriolis force) causes moving objects to be deflected to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere . This effect is the reason that weather systems (most clearly seen for hurricanes ) spiral in one direction in the northern hemisphere and in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere.\nThere is also a common misconception that the Coriolis force in respect of the Earth affects objects on a much smaller scale, such as the direction water will spiral down a drain in the two hemispheres (see also 843: Misconceptions ). In reality, the relative rotational speed of the Earth (one rotation per day) is insufficient to affect anything but large-scale, relatively slow movement, such as prevailing winds and ocean currents .\nRandall plays on this type of misconception to make a joke involving reversing the flow of time. So whereas babies are born nine months after conception in the northern hemisphere (clockwise) the Coriolis effect is the reason why babies are being born nine months before in the southern hemisphere (counterclockwise). Note that unlike these horoscopes, which are declared to have an \"actual basis in fact\", it makes no sense for the conception of a baby to happen after its birth [ citation needed ] .\nHere below is a table with data and explanation of the individual horoscopes:\n[Above the frame:] Horoscopes With an actual basis in fact [A list with the name of each astrological sign in the first column (in gray) and a horoscope for each sign in the second column. Here given in table form]\nAries \u2022 You may have been conceived after a 4th of July fireworks show Taurus \u2022 You may have been conceived on a hot August day Gemini \u2022 You may have been conceived as the leaves began to change Cancer \u2022 You may have been conceived by people trying on costumes Leo \u2022 You may have been conceived during Thanksgiving Virgo \u2022 You may have been conceived while a Christmas song played Libra \u2022 You may have been conceived after a New Year's Eve party Scorpio \u2022 You may have been conceived by people stuck inside after a long winter Sagittarius \u2022 You may have been conceived during March Madness Capricorn \u2022 You may have been conceived during a sexy Easter egg hunt Aquarius \u2022 You may have been conceived on Mother's day Pisces \u2022 You may have been conceived at someone's wedding\n"}
{"id":1513,"title":"Code Quality","image_title":"Code Quality","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1513","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/code_quality.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1513:_Code_Quality","transcript":"[Cueball showing Ponytail his laptop.] Cueball: Keep in mind that I'm self-taught, so my code may be a little messy. Ponytail: Lemme see - I'm sure it's fine.\n[Ponytail sits at desk, Cueball stand behind her.] Ponytail: ...Wow. This is like being in a house built by a child using nothing but a hatchet and a picture of a house.\n[Same scene.] Ponytail: It's like a salad recipe written by a corporate lawyer using a phone autocorrect that only knew Excel formulas.\n[Same scene.] Ponytail: It's like someone took a transcript of a couple arguing at IKEA and made random edits until it compiled without errors. Cueball: Okay, I'll read a style guide.\n","explanation":"This comic is the first in the Code Quality series:\nIt is about the apprehension of asking for help from an expert who is a friend. Often we fear that we will be judged and they will think less of us, which is what occurs in this comic.\nPonytail is about to look at some source code Cueball has written, and he is warning her that he is self-taught so his code probably won't be written the way she is used to. In spite of Ponytail's initial (polite) optimism, she comments in three increasingly harsh similes (and a fourth in the title text).\nFirst, she suggests that reading his code is like being in a house built by a child, using a hatchet (a small axe) to put together what he thought was a house based on a picture. She is saying that the code shows a lack of command of the language being programmed. This is like the common expression \"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.\"  New programmers make use of the same techniques repeatedly, using them for situations where other techniques would be far more efficient or faster.\nSecond, she suggests that it looks like a salad recipe, written by a corporate lawyer on a phone with auto-correct that only corrects things to formulas from Microsoft Excel. She is saying that the code is verbose and the corrections that were done are illogical. This presumably relates to the developer not being an expert in their craft, and fixing the problems as they come up instead of re-examining the problem and solving it in a better way.\nThird, she describes it as a transcript of a couple arguing at a branch of the Swedish retail chain IKEA , that was then randomly edited until the computer compiled it with no errors. She is saying that the intent of the code is unclear due to the seemingly random use of the language. This is very similar to an infinite amount of monkeys bashing away on typewriters for an infinite amount of time that will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. (A couple's argument may be even less coherent at IKEA than at the average store, since IKEA products always have idiosyncratic names and many of them are difficult to pronounce or transcribe for anyone who doesn't speak Swedish.) This might happen if the code was written so badly that it does not compile, and people edited the code until it compiles so they can see what the code accomplishes. The fact that Cueball's code is in this bad of a shape indicates he really hasn't learned the programming language; he just happens to have a program that works in some shape or fashion.\nFinally, Cueball makes the rather weak assurance that he will read \"a style guide\", which articulates the intended use of the language. It seems clear from Ponytail's commentary that his code quality would benefit from far more training in computer programming.\nThe title text refers to emoji . Ponytail's comment implies that some of Cueball's variables contained emoji, perhaps in an effort to capture the emotional content of the arguments which show through the requirements document. Emoji have become a recurrent theme on xkcd, but this may have been the first comic to use them for a pun.\nMany crying-face emoji are possible if variables can include full Unicode (e.g., \ud83d\ude22,\ud83d\ude2d,\ud83d\ude02,\ud83d\ude3f,\ud83d\ude39), as well as faces with sweat drops that are often mistaken for tears (\ud83d\ude2a,\ud83d\ude25,\ud83d\ude30,\ud83e\udd75). In some programming languages it would be impossible to use them in variable names, as the symbols would break the language's syntax rules. Exceptions to this include Swift and Perl ( [1] ), but most languages with compilers that support Unicode characters can include this kind of emoji, even for languages that predate Unicode like C++ and Lisp .\nIn any event, Cueball's code may best be represented by a bunch of people crying, as that seems to be the only proper response to it.\nAlthough few programming languages require a perfectly rigid style, so long as the code is syntactically accurate, most programmers follow some sort of style to make the code easier to read. This includes indenting lines to show levels and using descriptive variable identifiers with special capitalization, (e.g., camelCase , capitalizing each word except for the first in a sentence, or snake_case , separating lowercase words with underscores).\n[Cueball showing Ponytail his laptop.] Cueball: Keep in mind that I'm self-taught, so my code may be a little messy. Ponytail: Lemme see - I'm sure it's fine.\n[Ponytail sits at desk, Cueball stand behind her.] Ponytail: ...Wow. This is like being in a house built by a child using nothing but a hatchet and a picture of a house.\n[Same scene.] Ponytail: It's like a salad recipe written by a corporate lawyer using a phone autocorrect that only knew Excel formulas.\n[Same scene.] Ponytail: It's like someone took a transcript of a couple arguing at IKEA and made random edits until it compiled without errors. Cueball: Okay, I'll read a style guide.\n"}
{"id":1514,"title":"PermaCal","image_title":"PermaCal","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1514","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/permacal.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1514:_PermaCal","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are in the panel. Cueball appears to be holding a phone, tapping.] Megan: What day is it? Cueball: Sunday the 19 th . Megan: But you said it was the 19 th yesterday. Cueball: It changed again ?  Crap, better add another leap day. [Caption below the panel:] My simplified calendar system assumes the date never changes, then corrects any drift via leap days.\n","explanation":"This comic proposes a new calendar system, named PermaCal (a malamanteau of the words \"permanent\" and \"calendar\"). In it, the date stays constant. In order to accomplish that, as each day passes, it is interpreted as \"drift\", and a new PermaCal leap day (analogous to the leap day of the Gregorian calendar ) is added to compensate.\nIn the comic, which was published on Monday April 20, 2015, Megan wonders why today would be the 19th, since Cueball said it was the 19th a day ago. Cueball interprets the news from Megan, that a day has passed, as \"drift\" in the date, and resolves to add another leap day to PermaCal so that his calendar will be correct. He is presumably becoming frustrated that he has to do this so often.\nLeap days in the Gregorian calendar are days added to the end of February every year that is a multiple of 4, but not by 100, unless it's also a multiple of 400. The purpose is to synchronize the calendar with Earth's orbit without having a partial day each year. Leap seconds are necessary because the earth rotation is not constant, but speeds up and slows down over time. The leap seconds account for the differences in the length of our 24 hour day and a solar day (the time taken for Earth to rotate once with respect to the sun), and are announced several months beforehand.\nNTP servers are used to keep local computer time from drifting. They also are used to announce Leap seconds . In the context of this comic, leap seconds would refer to a different system in which there is a new leap second each second, so the time also stays constant, down to the resolution of one second. This would require something like setting the NTP leap second bit anew every second. The title text presumably refers to moving to a resolution of one millisecond via leap milliseconds. This would require at least 1000 updates being requested every second, using enormous network bandwidth and resulting in a Distributed Denial-of-service attack (DDoS) situation.\nThe comic relates to several DDoS problems due to NTP server misuse and abuse over the years.\nPart of the humor stems from the problems that leap seconds are causing for some computers. [1] The last leap second disrupted computers at big companies such as Reddit , LinkedIn , Gizmodo and FourSquare . Google first introduced a new approach of smearing the leap second , smoothly changing the reported time over an undisclosed number of hours around midnight UTC on December 31, 2008. The smooth shape of the adjustment is graphed at synchronization - Math behind Google leap second smear formula - Stack Overflow .\nA new calendar was also proposed in comic 1061: EST .\n[Megan and Cueball are in the panel. Cueball appears to be holding a phone, tapping.] Megan: What day is it? Cueball: Sunday the 19 th . Megan: But you said it was the 19 th yesterday. Cueball: It changed again ?  Crap, better add another leap day. [Caption below the panel:] My simplified calendar system assumes the date never changes, then corrects any drift via leap days.\n"}
{"id":1515,"title":"Basketball Earth","image_title":"Basketball Earth","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1515","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/basketball_earth.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1515:_Basketball_Earth","transcript":"[Cueball is standing next to a floating Basketball Earth indicating it with his left hand. The continents are clearly visible as seen from above the Atlantic Ocean. This remains the same all through the comic, except that the Basketball Earth rotates a bit from frame to frame.] Cueball: If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n[Cueball is now indicating, with his right hand, a small pockmarked moon (also floating), in the correct proportions (regarding size not for their distance) to the Basketball Earth, which is on his other side. Black Hat walks into the panel towards Earth.] Cueball: The Moon would be\u2014 Black Hat: Hey, cool!\n[Black Hat is touching the Basketball Earth with a digit.] Cueball: Um.\n[In the next scene, we see a megatsunami on the verge of crashing down onto a coastal city with skyscrapers. The A's are cut off on each side of the panels frames, i.e. they begin outside and finish outside the frame.] AAAAAAAA\n\n[Back to Cueball standing with the Basketball Earth in the same position as the first panel.] Cueball: Let's try that again. If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n[Same situation as when Black Hat walked in, except now it is Megan that walks into the frame towards the Basketball Earth holding a sports water bottle.] Cueball: The Moon would be\u2014\n[Megan squirts the Basketball Earth with the liquid in her water bottle while Cueball just stands watching with the Moon behind him].\n[Megan just walks away while Cueball stares at his \"water\" Basketball Earth where the continents have disappeared completely beneath the liquid.]\n\n[Back to Cueball standing with the Basketball Earth in the same position as the first panel.] Cueball: If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n[Same situation as when Black Hat walked in, except now he spots a cat coming into the frame from the left.] Cueball: The Moon\u2014 would\u2026\n[While Cueball watches with the Moon behind him, the cat jumps at the Basketball Earth.] Cat: Mrowl!\n[Cueball continues to watch while the cat rolls around playing with the Basketball Earth as if it was a ball of yarn.] Cat: Rrrrr\n\n[Back to Cueball standing with the Basketball Earth in the same position as the first panel.] Cueball: If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n[Same situation as when Black Hat walked in, except this time it is Ponytail who enters the frame at a run coming from the left.] Cueball: The Moon would, uh\u2026\n[While Cueball watches with the Moon behind him, Ponytail has grabbed the Basketball Earth and is dribbling it out of the frame, still running.]\n[Zoom out from Cueball who continues to watch while Ponytail reaches a basketball hoop and jumps towards it with the Basketball Earth, obviously in an attempt to make a slam dunk.]\n","explanation":"In this comic Cueball is repeatedly attempting to make a size comparison between the Earth and the Moon . But he only gets to say If the Earth were the size of a basketball, the Moon would be- . Then he is interrupted again and again. (See the title text of 1074: Moon Landing for the same Earth comparison).\nA basketball is about 25\u00a0cm in diameter and from this it can be inferred that the Moon should then be less than 7\u00a0cm in diameter, a typical size for other smaller balls in different sports. Cueball handily illustrates this with two \"balls\" of the relevant sizes. At first, you think that they just look like the Earth and the Moon. But they are invisibly suspended, and \u2014 as seems clear from the first row of panels \u2014 they are actually the real Moon and Earth shrunk to the relevant size, hence the title Basketball Earth .\nThis would place Cueball and his \"friends\" in God -like positions, outside Earth. Maybe they are even in a different dimension since they can stand and observe the system.\nBut before Cueball can finish with this common type of comparison, he is interrupted and must begin all over again. We thus never learn what object he would have compared the Moon with. It seems, likely, however, that he would use another ball for the comparison. And the best ball to use would be a tennis ball . See the same sort of comparison of Earth\/Moon with basketball\/tennis ball in this illustrative video that asks the question: How far away is the Moon? . From this, it is also obvious that the system Cueball shows is not to scale with regard to that distance, which should be 7.37 m! This is not necessarily a mistake of the comic, since Cueball never claims that these two balls are in orbit or that they are even the real ones. He is just (in vain) trying to make a size comparison of the two. (Though perhaps further exposition and demonstration might take place after the size comparison.)\nA basketball has an average diameter of 24.6\u00a0cm (9.7\u00a0inches) vs. a tennis ball, which has an average diameter of 6.7\u00a0cm (2.6\u00a0inches). The ratio between these two diameters is 0.273, which is the same (to three digits) as the ratio given on the Wikipedia page for the Moon: Mean radius 1737.10\u00a0km (0.273\u00a0Earths) . If he had used a baseball , which is slightly larger, this would still be good enough for demonstrative purposes, as it would have been with an apple.\nIt is common to describe the relationship between very large (and very small) objects by analogy to common objects on a more human scale. Here is a similar example where someone has made a comparison of the sizes of the Solar system based on a Sun the size of a basketball . And here, coming from smaller scales, is an example that states the following: \"Imagine an atom magnified to the size of a football stadium. The nucleus of the atom would be the size of a pea in the centre of the stadium.\"\nIt is almost certainly not a coincidence that this comic was released on Earth Day , which is celebrated annually on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. This seems to be something that Randall cares about a lot, as he has made several comics demonstrating the need for the human race to begin taking better care of our globe. See, for instance, 1321: Cold and 1379: 4.5 Degrees .\nThis comic clearly demonstrates four examples where the inhabitants of Earth did not take care of the well being of our globe, although here on a somewhat grander scale than what individuals can usually do. The typical case is that people did not do this out of bad intentions, but only because they were careless, curious, playful, or just plain stupid.\nThis comic may be seen as a spiritual successor to 445: I Am Not Good with Boomerangs and its follow-up, 475: Further Boomerang Difficulties in depicting various failed outcomes to the same opening panel.\nThe four interruptions are described and explained below. Each of the four attempts has its own row of four panels in the comic. It is clear from panels one and two in each row that the Basketball Earth is rotating quite fast compared to the time frame of the comic since the continents have moved considerably between frames. It is thus not necessarily the interrupters that have moved the Basketball Earth between frames two and three, except of course in the final interruption.\nNo matter how fast it rotates or whatever happens, we always see the Basketball Earth from the same side, as seen from far above the Atlantic Ocean . We can see the continents of the Americas as well as Africa and sometimes part of Europe , all of which are the borders for this ocean.\nIt seems most likely that Cueball starts all over every time, with a completely fresh and new Earth-Moon system, since they look the same regardless of the catastrophe befalling the prior Basketball Earth, and the interruptions\u2014the second especially\u2014would be difficult to reverse. We can thus suppose that there is still \"normal\" life going on for each Basketball Earth before the interruption. Most or all of this life would presumably perish for all of the last three cases.\nIn the first interruption, Black Hat comes in and is amazed by this cool floating globe. Of course, being Black Hat, he has to prod this nice globe with a digit. But by putting his finger into one of the oceans of this \"real\" Basketball Earth without a second thought, he apparently generates a megatsunami that rolls in over an unidentified city with skyscrapers, utterly dwarfed by a breaking wave.\nThis is similar to a scene in \" Men in Black II \" where K messed with a globe that actually is a small planet, and his finger becomes visible in the sky of its inhabitants.  It is also similar to a \"Pearls before swine\" strip where the character Pig encounters Atlas and the earth in a diner, points to where he lives, and accidentally pokes himself in the eye. It is also reminiscent of Deep Impact in which a meteor strike causes exactly such a tsunami to hit the East Coast of the United States . Since Black Hat puts his finger down in the Atlantic Ocean, the tsunami would hit all bordering coastlines. Since the coast seems to be an eastern coast (assuming a vantage point of South --> North), and because Randall lives there, the city could be New York City or Boston or one of the other large US cities on the East Coast. Of course, the wave would also affect the coastline (far into land) for all the other continents.\nThe second interruption occurs when Megan arrives and pours liquid (perhaps water) from a sports water bottle onto the Basketball Earth, seemingly flooding its entire surface. This would cause extensive flooding , almost certainly extinguishing all multicellular land-dwelling life. The most familiar analogous situation is from the Bible in the Genesis flood narrative about Noah's Ark . The deluge from Megan's bottle would also change the composition of the ocean and create enormous churn and pressure changes, with widespread or catastrophic effects even on multicellular marine life. And if it were some sort of sports drink inside...\nIn the third interruption, a cat walks into the shot and then playfully attacks the Basketball Earth, rolling around like it would do with a ball of yarn (see real-life example in this video ). This also seems to be an allusion to the logo of the popular web browser Mozilla Firefox, which depicts a fox curled around the earth in a similar manner to that shown in the comic.\nThe people living upon this Basketball Earth would experience cataclysmic events far greater than Blackhat's digital prodding caused, especially as the Basketball Earth is no longer suspended and was thus taken \"out of its orbit\" and will eventually hit the floor very hard. One way or another, that will surely cause (undepicted) disasters of tremendous magnitude.\nIn the fourth and final interruption, Ponytail uses Basketball Earth as an actual basketball. She comes running by Cueball, grabs the Basketball Earth, probably bouncing it off the floor while dribbling towards the basketball hoop where she actually jumps in an attempt to dunk the Basketball Earth. This would not be good for any residents of Basketball Earth [ citation needed ] ; the combined pressure, movement, and impact damage from this simple sequence would surely kill off all complex life on Basketball Earth.\nThis simile-callback is continued in the title text with the idea that \"every basketball in existence\" (i.e., every basketball upon the Basketball Earth, as well as the Basketball Earth itself) is counted towards the score from a single dunking. Randall may have a good estimate of how many basketballs there are, perhaps through research for some what if? question or other research, but almost certainly assumes that there are no extraterrestrial basketballs not on Basketball Earth. But there might be some question about whether the Basketball Earth's own sub-scale basketballs fall within the regulations.\nIf we go by the strict rules of league Basketball, the answer would only be two points , as it is illegal to have more than one basketball in play at a time.\n[Cueball is standing next to a floating Basketball Earth indicating it with his left hand. The continents are clearly visible as seen from above the Atlantic Ocean. This remains the same all through the comic, except that the Basketball Earth rotates a bit from frame to frame.] Cueball: If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n[Cueball is now indicating, with his right hand, a small pockmarked moon (also floating), in the correct proportions (regarding size not for their distance) to the Basketball Earth, which is on his other side. Black Hat walks into the panel towards Earth.] Cueball: The Moon would be\u2014 Black Hat: Hey, cool!\n[Black Hat is touching the Basketball Earth with a digit.] Cueball: Um.\n[In the next scene, we see a megatsunami on the verge of crashing down onto a coastal city with skyscrapers. The A's are cut off on each side of the panels frames, i.e. they begin outside and finish outside the frame.] AAAAAAAA\n\n[Back to Cueball standing with the Basketball Earth in the same position as the first panel.] Cueball: Let's try that again. If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n[Same situation as when Black Hat walked in, except now it is Megan that walks into the frame towards the Basketball Earth holding a sports water bottle.] Cueball: The Moon would be\u2014\n[Megan squirts the Basketball Earth with the liquid in her water bottle while Cueball just stands watching with the Moon behind him].\n[Megan just walks away while Cueball stares at his \"water\" Basketball Earth where the continents have disappeared completely beneath the liquid.]\n\n[Back to Cueball standing with the Basketball Earth in the same position as the first panel.] Cueball: If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n[Same situation as when Black Hat walked in, except now he spots a cat coming into the frame from the left.] Cueball: The Moon\u2014 would\u2026\n[While Cueball watches with the Moon behind him, the cat jumps at the Basketball Earth.] Cat: Mrowl!\n[Cueball continues to watch while the cat rolls around playing with the Basketball Earth as if it was a ball of yarn.] Cat: Rrrrr\n\n[Back to Cueball standing with the Basketball Earth in the same position as the first panel.] Cueball: If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n[Same situation as when Black Hat walked in, except this time it is Ponytail who enters the frame at a run coming from the left.] Cueball: The Moon would, uh\u2026\n[While Cueball watches with the Moon behind him, Ponytail has grabbed the Basketball Earth and is dribbling it out of the frame, still running.]\n[Zoom out from Cueball who continues to watch while Ponytail reaches a basketball hoop and jumps towards it with the Basketball Earth, obviously in an attempt to make a slam dunk.]\n"}
{"id":1516,"title":"Win by Induction","image_title":"Win by Induction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1516","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/win_by_induction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1516:_Win_by_Induction","transcript":"[There is a long queue of Pikachu extending out of the frame to the left. They are all just out from their ball, at least the last eight Pikachu's open balls lie in two parts on the ground at their feet. They are standing in front of Megan and Cueball. Cueball is holding a closed pok\u00e9ball while Megan checks the time on her watch. The frontmost Pikachu, holding a closed pok\u00e9ball, speaks.]\nPikachu at the front: Pikachu, I choose you!\n","explanation":"In the Pok\u00e9mon franchise, human characters called Trainers capture fantastical creatures from the wild, the titular Pok\u00e9mon (a shortened form of \"Pocket Monsters\"), and train them to battle one another. Pok\u00e9mon are captured and stored in devices called Pok\u00e9 Balls, which shrink the creatures down to pocket size (hence \"Pocket Monsters\"). The anime's English dub has enshrined the phrase \" <Pok\u00e9mon's name> , I choose you!\" into popular culture memory. When Trainers do battle, they often shout this phrase while throwing the ball to the ground, releasing the Pok\u00e9mon at full size.\nIn this comic, a Pok\u00e9mon chosen at some point was a Pikachu (the \"poster child\" for Pok\u00e9mon, and the most publicly-known type), which does not intend to engage in the battle himself. Instead, the Pikachu chooses another Pikachu to fight for him. This process then repeats itself. Behind the Pikachu with the Pok\u00e9ball is a long line of other Pikachu, suggesting that this process has been going on for a while.\nNearby stands Cueball , holding a closed Pok\u00e9ball, and Megan , looking at her watch. This suggests that Cueball intends to have his own Pok\u00e9mon fight the Pikachu, but is waiting to see which enemy his Pok\u00e9mon must face before the battle can actually begin (waiting in vain, if the above described process repeats indefinitely), while Megan is growing impatient with the delay. Given that Cueball is holding a closed Pok\u00e9ball he has not deployed yet, Megan cannot herself be his Pok\u00e9mon. She could be his opponent, or a spectator.\nThe joke in this comic comes from analogy with the mathematical proof by induction , which is a proof about a base case, followed by a never ending sequence of steps, each step leading to the next. Induction proves an assertion is true for one case, and then infers that it must also be true for all related cases. The title suggests that the process of Pikachu choosing Pikachu will never end, effectively postponing the battle indefinitely. But the title is win by induction, by which Randall implies that we have been given enough information to reason logically whether Megan or Cueball will win. We have here turned mathematical induction on its head: part of the humour in the comic is that the logic of induction doesn't work in reverse. We cannot reason about an initial case by inferring something from a related case whose proof is dependent on knowledge about the initial case. Or perhaps the \"win\" referred to is precisely that the battle is indefinitely postponed.\nThe name \"induction\" comes from logic and discrete mathematics, and is thus unrelated to the physical phenomena of electromagnetic induction ; but the fact that Pikachu is an \"Electric-type\" Pok\u00e9mon could be word play connecting the two ideas.\nIf there were always only a single Pikachu in each Pok\u00e9ball, this would spawn an unlimited number of Pikachu growing at a constant rate. Since, as the title text notes, there are occasionally two of them in a Pok\u00e9ball, this would lead to exponential growth assuming each of the spawned Pikachu in this case is bearing a Pok\u00e9ball! This may be a reference to the rate of twins, which is approximately 1\/30 in humans.\nPikachu was used in one of the storylines of 1350: Lorenz . See all the attack moves it made here .\n[There is a long queue of Pikachu extending out of the frame to the left. They are all just out from their ball, at least the last eight Pikachu's open balls lie in two parts on the ground at their feet. They are standing in front of Megan and Cueball. Cueball is holding a closed pok\u00e9ball while Megan checks the time on her watch. The frontmost Pikachu, holding a closed pok\u00e9ball, speaks.]\nPikachu at the front: Pikachu, I choose you!\n"}
{"id":1517,"title":"Spectroscopy","image_title":"Spectroscopy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1517","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spectroscopy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1517:_Spectroscopy","transcript":"[A dark panel with a bright star in the center. To the left a planet (drawn as a new moon) approaches the star. Text is written above in white with two musical notes, one on each side of the text.] I watch the sunlight\n[Same image but now the planet transits the star. Small lines around the planet indicate the atmosphere, as seen from the light from the star passing through it. Text is again written above in white with two different musical notes, one on each side of the text.] Dance across your face\n[A white frame with a black line. It Is the spectrum of the planets atmosphere. Two distinct absorption peaks are visible. The first one is labeled with an arrow. Text is again written above, now in black, with two, again, different musical notes, one on each side of the text.] I can see you breathe Label: O 2\n[Below the panels is the following caption:] Faith Hill on exoplanet spectroscopy\n","explanation":"This comic mixes the method of using spectroscopy to detect oxygen on exoplanets (planets outside our Solar system ) with the lyrics for the Faith Hill song \" Breathe \" (listen to \"Breathe\" on YouTube ).\nFrom the lyrics:\nI watch the sunlight dance across your face I can feel you breathe\nIn the comic the word \"feel\" has been changed to \"see\". The two first panels are one line in the song. The last line is from the chorus and is repeated five times during the song, although not right after the first two lines.\nIn the first and second panel the singer examines the spectra of a remote planet by watching the sunlight during the transit of the planet as this sunlight dances across the planet's face . Finally we determine that breathable oxygen exists. Since we cannot (as Faith can) feel the planet we have to see it. And by doing this I can see you breathe .\nMeasuring the light output of stars (spectra) we are able to determine a number of details of the star, including rotation, relative radial velocity, chemical composition, temperature, and to some degree, distance and size. When a planet, as pictured, moves between the star and the observer, then by looking at the spectrum received, the viewer is able to determine the contents of the planet's atmosphere from the specific wavelengths of light that are absorbed in this. If it turns out that the atmosphere absorbs the lines corresponding to molecular oxygen (O 2 ) this is a clear indication that the planet has large quantities of breathable oxygen (but not necessarily life ). However, there must be oxygen in large amounts in the atmosphere to sustain most of the life forms that we know of here on Earth (though not all ). It is thus clear why Randall would be interested in exoplanets with oxygen.\nThis comic came out four days after this article about NASA's New NExSS Initiative . NASA will search for signs of life on other planets, for instance by using \"the light passing through the atmospheres of these exoplanets\". And they \"will study chemicals that have been detected on other worlds, such as oxygen and methane, to see if they were produced by biology\".\nThe title text refers to determining radial velocity in the ESPRESSO program (Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet- and Stable Spectroscopic Observations). By noting that the radial velocity of the star changes slightly as the planet that orbits it moves around the star (centrifugal acceleration), the ESPRESSO program should be able to detect the masses of planets as they are moving towards the Earth in their orbit around their distant stars. The ESPRESSO program is so precise that it should be able to detect planets as small as Earth and the other of the Solar system's inner planets.\nRandall is now even more excited about ESPRESSO than he is about the oxygen levels, because it is now possible to detect these \"very\" small planets. So he is no longer listening to \"Breathe\", but to another Faith Hill song: \" This Kiss \" (listen to \"This Kiss\" on YouTube ).\nFrom the lyrics :\nIt's centripetal motion On the rooftop under the sky\nThe first line is part of the chorus and it is repeated four times, but Randall has changed the main word to \"centrifugal\". There is, however, disagreement on-line whether it is centripetal or centrifugal.\nThe second line is not sung in connection with the chorus, and it is only changed a bit, so \"the\" is changed to \"a\". Also the \"on\" which is part of his line here is not part of the quoted line in the title text.\nThe song is not about measuring but, of course, about \"The Kiss\". Since the ESPRESSO is part of the Very Large Telescope , it is located on the Cerro Paranal mountain in the Atacama desert in Chile at an elevation of 2,635\u00a0meters (8,645\u00a0ft.) above sea level. So it could be said that it is measuring on a rooftop under the sky. Although it is radial velocity it measures, not centrifugal motion , the object it does measure will all be experiencing this fictitious force (also see 123: Centrifugal Force ), as the planets are in orbit around a star.\nRandall has previously made several references to exoplanets in his comics, most notable are the two comics with the same name: 786: Exoplanets and 1071: Exoplanets . The latter comic came out when there were exactly 786 exoplanets found. Today more than 1900 have been discovered (1915 as of Wikipedia on the release day of this comic), much more than twice that amount. And now they can find even smaller planets, and detect the atmosphere. Much have happened since the first exoplanet comic came out in 2010. Five comics later in 1522: Astronomy he mentions astrobiology in the title text, closely relating it to this comic.\n[A dark panel with a bright star in the center. To the left a planet (drawn as a new moon) approaches the star. Text is written above in white with two musical notes, one on each side of the text.] I watch the sunlight\n[Same image but now the planet transits the star. Small lines around the planet indicate the atmosphere, as seen from the light from the star passing through it. Text is again written above in white with two different musical notes, one on each side of the text.] Dance across your face\n[A white frame with a black line. It Is the spectrum of the planets atmosphere. Two distinct absorption peaks are visible. The first one is labeled with an arrow. Text is again written above, now in black, with two, again, different musical notes, one on each side of the text.] I can see you breathe Label: O 2\n[Below the panels is the following caption:] Faith Hill on exoplanet spectroscopy\n"}
{"id":1518,"title":"Typical Morning Routine","image_title":"Typical Morning Routine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1518","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/typical_morning_routine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1518:_Typical_Morning_Routine","transcript":"[The panel is completely black, with white text. Small lines indicate from where the two voices are coming, and also from where the alarm goes off. A small broken square surrounds the first word spoken.] Alarm: Bleep Bleep Voice (right): Urgh Voice (left): Your alarm is going off Voice (right): Huh? Voice (left): Make it stop. Voice (right) Urrgh\n[The panel is completely black, with white text. Small lines indicate from where the two voices are coming. Several small lines surrounds the last \"sound\" which is not spoken. The alarm noise is continued from the previous panel and continues over the top of the frame directly into the next panel.] Alarm: Bleep Bleep Bleep B Voice (left): Hit snooze. Voice (right): I'm trying . I closed the alarm app and I can't... I'll just pop out the battery. Voice (right): Whoops! Clang\n[The lights have turned on so it is now a white panel with black text. The voice to the right came from Hairy with morning hair. He is leaning over the side of the bed, looking down the air vent through which he has dropped the phone. The other person to the left is not shown. The alarm noise (now coming from the air vent as visualized by the lines coming out of the vent) still continues from the previous panel and continues over the top of the frame directly into the next panel.] Alarm: eep Bleep Bleep Ble Off-Screen voice: Make it stop! Hairy: It... fell down the vent.\n[Hairy is sitting in his bed with a laptop. The person to the left is still off-screen. The alarm noise still continues from the previous panel and continues over the top of the frame out of the comic the the right.] Alarm: ep Bleep Bleep Bleep Ble Off-Screen voice: Can you brick it remotely? Hairy: Trying... I think I fumbled it into airplane mode? Off-Screen voice: The battery could last for weeks. Hairy: You know, maybe we should just move.\nThis comic follows a similar storyline to 349: Success and 530: I'm An Idiot , where Cueball , like Hairy here, encounters an issue and attempts progressively more absurd solutions.\nThere is a callback to this in the title text of 1946: Hawaii .\n","explanation":"Waking up to an alarm can be annoying, especially when it is your partner's alarm, and they are slow to wake up and even then have difficulty figuring out how to turn the alarm off. This comic takes this situation to a ridiculous extreme, from whence the comic derives its humor, especially when paired with the title describing this situation as a \"Typical Morning Routine\". Of course the typical could refer only to the part of the \"routine\" until the phone is dropped into an air vent.\nIn this comic, Hairy with morning hair is shown using his smartphone as his alarm clock. Another unseen person is sharing the bed with Hairy and growing more irate as Hairy's alarm continues beeping.\nEven simple actions like turning off an alarm can be easily fumbled by a just-awakened groggy person. In this case, Hairy accidentally exited the alarm app without stopping the alarm. In some OSes, simply exiting the app doesn't close it, requiring you to use the app switcher to close it.\nAfter giving up on shutting down the alarm the usual way, Hairy, in annoyance, decides to remove the battery, which will disable the phone's entire operation. However, while trying to remove the battery in the dark, he accidentally drops his device down a floor air vent (most likely part of forced air central heating common in North America) next to the bed. While the vent is covered by a grille, it is apparently coarse enough (or perhaps missing a few pieces, creating a large hole) to allow the phone to pass through if it falls at a particular location and angle. Also, the vent apparently does not descend very far before bending, allowing the phone to survive the fall intact.\nAs of when this comic was posted, Randall uses both iOS and Android according to 1508: Operating Systems \u2014although there is no reason to be certain that the character in this comic is using the same operating systems as Randall. However, the fact that Hairy tries to remove the battery strongly suggests it cannot be an iOS device, given that all iOS devices have non-removable batteries.\nIf he were a little handy, Hairy might be able to open the vent and retrieve the phone\u2014or perhaps not, if the phone slid further into the ventwork or Hairy lacked the necessary tools. Instead of trying to physically recover the phone, Hairy attempts to remotely brick the phone from his laptop, permanently disabling all its functions (including the alarm app).\nThis attempt fails because Hairy had accidentally put the device into airplane mode before dropping his phone, thereby cutting off all wireless communications with the device and preventing any attempt at remote control. Airplane mode also has the unfortunate (in this situation) side effect of increasing the phone's battery life (though playing loud sounds incessantly should still limit it to a day or so, notwithstanding the pessimistic assessment of Hairy's companion).\nRather than finding a solution to the problem with the phone, Hairy proposes that they just move out instead.\nRelevant for the title text: There is a semi-common logic puzzle involving a ping-pong ball falling down a pipe with a kink in it. In this puzzle, the solution is to pour water into the pipe until the ping-pong ball floats up.\nIn the title text, one of the two characters remembers this problem and attempts to apply it to this situation. Since phones do not float in water, a modified version is proposed using mercury instead. The phone would certainly float on mercury, as it is a very dense liquid (the only metal that is liquid at room temperature).\nThe extremely toxic nature of mercury makes pouring it into the air supply a very dangerous idea. Also the required amount of mercury would be extremely expensive. The weight of the mercury would also be substantial (13.5 kg\/liter or 113 lb\/gallon), and would likely break something in the air duct system. Both mercury and water could also push the phone further into the duct system instead of bringing it back. The end of the title text, declaring that the mercury idea would definitely make this situation better and not worse could be either a sarcastic commentary on these problems or a desperate attempt to bolster confidence that this extreme solution will work when everything else has failed.\nGiven that Hairy was willing to sacrifice the phone anyway (by attempting to brick it), he would probably be better off pouring water down the vent\u2014it wouldn't bring the phone within reach, but it would disable and thereby silence it (unless the phone is completely waterproof (and the waterproofing layer wasn\u2019t damaged by the fall), which most phones aren't, especially those where the battery can be removed).\nOf course, Hairy probably wouldn't have gotten into this mess if he had not just been awakened brutally by a very loud alarm, making it difficult to think clearly (or, alternatively, if he just had a standard alarm clock that he could have unplugged or even a mechanical one that he could, say, hit with a hammer until it broke; or just flip the off switch).\n[The panel is completely black, with white text. Small lines indicate from where the two voices are coming, and also from where the alarm goes off. A small broken square surrounds the first word spoken.] Alarm: Bleep Bleep Voice (right): Urgh Voice (left): Your alarm is going off Voice (right): Huh? Voice (left): Make it stop. Voice (right) Urrgh\n[The panel is completely black, with white text. Small lines indicate from where the two voices are coming. Several small lines surrounds the last \"sound\" which is not spoken. The alarm noise is continued from the previous panel and continues over the top of the frame directly into the next panel.] Alarm: Bleep Bleep Bleep B Voice (left): Hit snooze. Voice (right): I'm trying . I closed the alarm app and I can't... I'll just pop out the battery. Voice (right): Whoops! Clang\n[The lights have turned on so it is now a white panel with black text. The voice to the right came from Hairy with morning hair. He is leaning over the side of the bed, looking down the air vent through which he has dropped the phone. The other person to the left is not shown. The alarm noise (now coming from the air vent as visualized by the lines coming out of the vent) still continues from the previous panel and continues over the top of the frame directly into the next panel.] Alarm: eep Bleep Bleep Ble Off-Screen voice: Make it stop! Hairy: It... fell down the vent.\n[Hairy is sitting in his bed with a laptop. The person to the left is still off-screen. The alarm noise still continues from the previous panel and continues over the top of the frame out of the comic the the right.] Alarm: ep Bleep Bleep Bleep Ble Off-Screen voice: Can you brick it remotely? Hairy: Trying... I think I fumbled it into airplane mode? Off-Screen voice: The battery could last for weeks. Hairy: You know, maybe we should just move.\nThis comic follows a similar storyline to 349: Success and 530: I'm An Idiot , where Cueball , like Hairy here, encounters an issue and attempts progressively more absurd solutions.\nThere is a callback to this in the title text of 1946: Hawaii .\n"}
{"id":1519,"title":"Venus","image_title":"Venus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1519","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/venus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1519:_Venus","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart is standing in front of an image depicting a section of a temperate Venus' surface, with greenhouses, grass, flowers and a river flowing into a sea.] Miss Lenhart: Venus was once temperate. It had seas and rivers, and Venusians cultivated vast fields of beautiful flowers.\n[The image now shows the entirety of Venus, with continents and oceans. The greenhouses appear to be fleeing from Venus.] Miss Lenhart: Until their greenhouses fled the planet due to the runaway greenhouse effect.\n[Miss Lenhart is shown to be standing in front of a classroom. Science Girl is sitting in the front row.] Miss Lenhart: The Venusians pursued their greenhouses to Earth, settling in the Netherlands and kickstarting the Dutch floral industry. Any questions?\nOff-panel student (presumably Science Girl): Because you're retiring in a month, do you just not care what you say anymore? Miss Lenhart: What?! I ride the skies atop a screaming bird of truth! Also, yes, I do not.\n","explanation":"Miss Lenhart is teaching a class on science about the planet Venus .\nIn the first panel, we see her teaching the history of Venus. Venus may have had water on its surface billions of years ago, but if that's true all hydrogen since then was eventually lost due to dissociation. However, there is no evidence that Venus ever had fields of flowers, or Venusians, or any other form of life.\nThe runaway greenhouse effect on the second panel is a play on words. While the term normally refers to a rapid rise in temperature caused by greenhouse gases, Miss Lenhart uses the term literally and claims the existence of sentient greenhouses that actually ran away. In reality, the effect caused Venus to develop a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide, which raised its temperature above to approx. 460\u00a0\u00b0C (860\u00a0\u00b0F), hotter than daytime on Mercury. This eventually destroyed all evidence of anything that had been on the surface of Venus billions of years ago.\nThe third panel ties the previous distortion of Miss Lenhart into the very real historic reputation of the Netherlands as flower growers and as a further fabrication by Miss Lenhart the Dutch flower industry was in fact started by the Venusians.\nIn the final panel we learn that she is a month away from retirement and doesn't care about relaying accurate information anymore. She just wants to have a laugh at the expense of the naive school children. Although it is clear that Science Girl in the front row was not fooled.\nThe title text jokes about the butterfly effect , the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan can cause a Tornado in the U.S.. In this case the butterflies would just help pollinate the flowers. The butterfly effect is a term coined by Edward Norton Lorenz who had the comic 1350: Lorenz named after him due to its chaotic nature.\nAlthough Miss Lenhart was supposed to retire a month after this comic she seems to return a year later for a math course at university level, in 1724: Proofs , where she continues the trend from this class.  It is probable that she retired from a primary or secondary school teaching position, likely to collect a pension, before taking a side job at a university\/college level.\n[Miss Lenhart is standing in front of an image depicting a section of a temperate Venus' surface, with greenhouses, grass, flowers and a river flowing into a sea.] Miss Lenhart: Venus was once temperate. It had seas and rivers, and Venusians cultivated vast fields of beautiful flowers.\n[The image now shows the entirety of Venus, with continents and oceans. The greenhouses appear to be fleeing from Venus.] Miss Lenhart: Until their greenhouses fled the planet due to the runaway greenhouse effect.\n[Miss Lenhart is shown to be standing in front of a classroom. Science Girl is sitting in the front row.] Miss Lenhart: The Venusians pursued their greenhouses to Earth, settling in the Netherlands and kickstarting the Dutch floral industry. Any questions?\nOff-panel student (presumably Science Girl): Because you're retiring in a month, do you just not care what you say anymore? Miss Lenhart: What?! I ride the skies atop a screaming bird of truth! Also, yes, I do not.\n"}
{"id":1520,"title":"Degree-Off","image_title":"Degree-Off","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1520","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/degree_off.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1520:_Degree-Off","transcript":"[Hairy is acting as the host of a TV talk show, Degree-Off holding a microphone up. Cueball, a character who looks like a grown-up Science Girl, and Megan are acting as representatives of physics, biology and chemistry respectively. They each stand behind their own lectern with the respective subject label.] Hairy: Welcome to the Degree-Off , where we determine which field is the best! Physics, wanna go first? Cueball (Phys): Sure! I'd like to tell the story of Richard Feynman's Manhattan project lockpicking pranks... Labels: Phys Bio Chem\n[Zoom in so Megan is no longer visible. Cueball lifts his hand] Cueball (Phys): ...and as he said, \"all science is either physics or stamp collecting.\" Cueball (Phys): Thank you. Hairy: Great! Bio, you wanna go next? Grown-Up Science Girl (Bio): Okay. Labels: Phys Bio\n[Zoom in on Grown-Up Science Girl so only she and her lectern are shown. A graph is shown above her. There us a label for the y-axis to the left of the axis which has four ticks with numbers. The x-axis is a timeline without ticks but three years indicating the start center and end of the axis. The graph shows a curve falling off, with one great spike up around 1920.] Y-axis label: Per 100,000 Y-axis: 800 600 400 200 X-axis: 1900 1950 2000 GUSG (Bio): This is a graph of the death rate from infectious disease in this country. Labels: Bio\n[Zoom back to original scene with Hairy holding the microphone down and Grown-Up Science Girl raising her left hand, while Cueball looks at her.] GUSG (Bio): The heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Labels: Phys Bio Chem\n[Zoom in on only Cueball and Grown-Up Science Girl who is pointing aggressively at Cueball who leans away from her one hand on his lectern for support.] GUSG (Bio): While the heroes of your field gathered in the desert to create a new one. Labels: Phys Bio\n[Zoom back to previous scene all are holding their hands down.] Cueball (Phys): ...Jeez, what the hell? I thought this was supposed to be fun and lighthearted! GUSG (Bio): You must have been thinking of stamp collecting. Labels: Phys Bio Chem\n","explanation":"Cueball (physics), a grown-up Science Girl (biology), and Megan (chemistry) appear to be on a talk show called Degree-Off, hosted by Hairy , where representatives of different fields, try to explain why their field is the best and why to get a degree in their field. The title \"Degree-Off\" is a portmanteau of \" degree \", as in the recognized completion of studies at a school or university,  and \" face-off \", a direct confrontation between two people or groups. Since there are three participants, this is not a true face-off, unless Megan, who does not speak, is not counted.\nThe host asks the physicist Cueball to go first. He light-heartedly begins to tell what appears to be long story, beginning with a Richard Feynman anecdote. During the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, Richard Feynman got bored because of the isolation and started learning lock picking on the secret documents safes. Using these new skills, he played lots of pranks on his colleagues, like leaving notes and spooking them into believing there was a spy among them (which, of course, there was ). He finishes his case with a quote from Ernest Rutherford , implying that his speech was quite long and winding. The quote communicates the idea that physics is the only fundamental framework, so that the job of chemists, biologists and other scientist simply is to catalog and systematize observations (\"collect stamps\") on phenomena too complicated to presently be fully described in terms of physics. This idea was earlier lampooned by Randall in 435: Purity (and is also stated in the title text of 1158: Rubber Sheet ).\nThe biologist goes next, showing with a graph (see below) that the field of biology has helped reduce disease. She then goes on to claim that the heroes in biology (the part known as Medicine) have even \" slain \" one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . Different traditions designate the Four Horsemen differently, but it is common for their number to include Plague or Pestilence.  Science Girl claims that the field of biology has eliminated widespread Pestilence - at the time of writing it was not readily apparent that the old dog still has some teeth (although the rate of death from infectious disease in 2020\u201321 is still less than 200 per 100 thousand, far lower than the early 20th century). The imagery of Pestilence being thwarted by modern medicine was also used in the book Good Omens , by Terry Pratchett (of whom Randall is a fan, see 1498: Terry Pratchett ) and Neil Gaiman , where Pestilence has retired after the discovery of Penicillin , and been replaced by Pollution .\nThe graph shows the death rate from infectious disease in the USA with the range of 1900-2000. The spike is attributable to the 1918 flu pandemic . It has been published in the paper Trends in Infectious Disease Mortality in the United States During the 20th Century .\nScience Girl then goes on to directly accuse Cueball (i.e. physicists) of creating a new Horseman to replace the one slain by the biologists. She refers to the development of the atomic bomb , which was built and tested in the New Mexico desert . The new horseman is therefore the atomic bomb, or the various perils associated with it.\nScience Girl's implied condemnation of the physics community has been echoed by some of the scientists involved in the project itself. After the test detonation of the first nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer , the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory , found himself quoting the Bhagavad Gita : \"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.\"\nThis harsh moral judgement shocks Cueball, who exclaims \"I thought this was supposed to be fun and lighthearted!\" While the set-up is of a frivolous friendly competition, Science Girl's presentation is surprisingly dark. Her retort in the final panel reveals that she was angered by the off-hand dismissal of 'soft' sciences as \"stamp-collecting\", and turned the game from a light-hearted fun into something more serious.\nIn the title text the biologist goes on to declare in All caps that she is surprised a physicist isn't \"harder\", after all their condescending towards the \"squishy\" sciences. The use of 'hard' and 'squishy' is a play on the colloquial division between the so-called 'hard' sciences (such as physics and chemistry) and 'soft' sciences (such as biology and geology). 'Hard' sciences usually refer to the perception that in fields like physics, precisely repeatable experiments and measurements are possible, as opposed to 'soft' sciences seen as placing less emphasis on precisely quantifiable predictability - however Science Girl is extending 'hard' to its meaning of 'stoic', mocking Cueball for not being able to weather a personal moral attack. Again she is indicating that she's upset by directly referencing a mocking portrayal of other fields allegedly made by Cueball.\nTo be fair to Cueball, the outbreak of disease is more a topic for epidemiology, and biology has spawned multiple diseases, atrocities, and bad movies. However, the Manhattan Project marked the first time in history that humanity possessed the ability to destroy itself - and shortly thereafter humanity got perilously close to doing so .\nIn 520: Cuttlefish Randall shows that he personally respects biologists - or at least fears them.\nWithin a year Randall has made several other comics about nuclear weapons, this one was the first of these the second, 1539: Planning , came out just 1\u00bd month after this one and after that these two were released early in 2016: 1626: Judgment Day and 1655: Doomsday Clock . Nuclear weapons are also mentioned twice in Thing Explainer , specifically they are explained in the explanation for Machine for burning cities about thermonuclear bombs , but they are also mentioned in Boat that goes under the sea about a submarine that carries nukes. All three comics and both explanations in the book, does like this comic, comment on how insane it is that we have created enough firepower to obliterate Earth several times (or at least scourge it for any human life).\n[Hairy is acting as the host of a TV talk show, Degree-Off holding a microphone up. Cueball, a character who looks like a grown-up Science Girl, and Megan are acting as representatives of physics, biology and chemistry respectively. They each stand behind their own lectern with the respective subject label.] Hairy: Welcome to the Degree-Off , where we determine which field is the best! Physics, wanna go first? Cueball (Phys): Sure! I'd like to tell the story of Richard Feynman's Manhattan project lockpicking pranks... Labels: Phys Bio Chem\n[Zoom in so Megan is no longer visible. Cueball lifts his hand] Cueball (Phys): ...and as he said, \"all science is either physics or stamp collecting.\" Cueball (Phys): Thank you. Hairy: Great! Bio, you wanna go next? Grown-Up Science Girl (Bio): Okay. Labels: Phys Bio\n[Zoom in on Grown-Up Science Girl so only she and her lectern are shown. A graph is shown above her. There us a label for the y-axis to the left of the axis which has four ticks with numbers. The x-axis is a timeline without ticks but three years indicating the start center and end of the axis. The graph shows a curve falling off, with one great spike up around 1920.] Y-axis label: Per 100,000 Y-axis: 800 600 400 200 X-axis: 1900 1950 2000 GUSG (Bio): This is a graph of the death rate from infectious disease in this country. Labels: Bio\n[Zoom back to original scene with Hairy holding the microphone down and Grown-Up Science Girl raising her left hand, while Cueball looks at her.] GUSG (Bio): The heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Labels: Phys Bio Chem\n[Zoom in on only Cueball and Grown-Up Science Girl who is pointing aggressively at Cueball who leans away from her one hand on his lectern for support.] GUSG (Bio): While the heroes of your field gathered in the desert to create a new one. Labels: Phys Bio\n[Zoom back to previous scene all are holding their hands down.] Cueball (Phys): ...Jeez, what the hell? I thought this was supposed to be fun and lighthearted! GUSG (Bio): You must have been thinking of stamp collecting. Labels: Phys Bio Chem\n"}
{"id":1521,"title":"Sword in the Stone","image_title":"Sword in the Stone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1521","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sword_in_the_stone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1521:_Sword_in_the_Stone","transcript":"[Megan walks up to a sword in a stone.]\n[Megan attempts to pull the sword out of the stone.]\n[A beam of light and music plays as she removes the sword.]\n[While standing with the swords a voice from the sky speaks in gray shaky letters:] Celestial voice: The Throne of England is yours\n[Megan takes out her smart phone and searches:] Wikipedia England\n[Megan reads on her phone.]\n[Megan starts to replace the sword back into the stone.]\n","explanation":"In this comic, Megan pulls a sword out of a stone. A flash of light comes down and music plays, and a heavenly voice tells her she has ascended to the throne of England . Megan then pulls out her phone and searches on Wikipedia for England . After having read for a while she begins, while reading on, to replace the sword into the rock.\nThe comic references the fables of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table . In Arthurian legend, whoever can remove The Sword in the Stone is the lawful king of Britain (although this comic, as some versions of the legend, refers incorrectly to England). Arthur is an orphan being raised in secret; he notices the sword, removes it, and is proclaimed king. The sword is sometimes identified as Excalibur , although in other versions Excalibur was acquired by King Arthur from the Lady of the Lake . The most familiar version of this story is The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White which is based on Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory . The animated musical by Walt Disney is a well-known version of this fairytale based on White's book.\nA key element in the joke is that as Megan begins to read about England, especially information concerning being an English ruler, she quickly thinks better of this and begins to put the sword back in its place. The punchline that Megan puts the sword back after reading about England suggests that the \"gift\" of being the leader of England is not worth the risk and\/or work associate. British history is rife with monarchic strife, and a brief inquiry into their causes of death will show that almost one in three British rulers have died either in battle or from murder, etc. This would quickly lead most sane people to conclude that the risks associated with ruling England far outweigh the benefits.\nThe title text furthers this plot, having Megan comment on the hassle when the only thing she was interested in was the cool sword. Apparently, Megan is not enthusiastic about power, and her choice is made when she sees how problematic it could be to reign over the country of England. There is also a subtle play on the fact that in the T. H. White version, Arthur likewise is unaware of the significance of pulling the sword from the stone - he is simply looking for a sword to replace the one belonging to his step-brother Kay that was stolen under his watch, to avoid embarrassment and reproach.\nFrom the time of the Roman Empire all the way up to Charles II's reclamation of the throne, the area now known as England has seen several migration waves, Viking raids, invasions and fierce power struggles among aristocratic families. Besides the constant threat of usurpation, as evidenced by the numerous wars for the crown, such as the Norman conquest and the War of the Roses , there were also constant difficulties in managing the frontier regions. This can be seen from Hadrian's Wall , a creation of the titular Roman Emperor designed to keep the ever difficult Scots out of the areas of Roman control (the Scots would be a constant problem for England up until the reign of King James VI and I ; think of the movie Braveheart for a good example of the regular headaches they caused, seen from the English point of view), as well as the Welsh uprisings that occurred with such consistency that you could set your watch by them.\nIt is worth emphasizing that the term \"England\" is anachronistic in this context. At the time Arthur supposedly existed, there was no England \u2014 England was formed by Germanic tribes who settled in Britain between the fifth and seventh centuries . In many of the stories, including the earliest, Arthur was in fact depicted as a leader of the native Romano-Britons in their attempts to repel these invaders. England would not exist had Arthur succeeded. The anachronism is not new; it entered Arthurian legend in the Middle Ages. (Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur , for example, refers to Arthur as King of England.) In Arthurian legend, it was stated that Arthur would return when needed (in some versions he was explicitly associated with the Mab Darogan , a Welsh Messianic figure who would finally drive the English out of Britain and reclaim it for the native Britons).  It is possible that Megan in this comic is a 21st-century reincarnation of Arthur.\nThe timing of this comic might relate to the birth of princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana on May 2, 2015, just four days before this comic, and the burden of a royal of having a whole life in public shaking hands of strangers. Since 2013 the line of succession was changed to absolute primogeniture , meaning that she will keep her current position in the line (4th after her older brother ) even if she later gets baby brothers. Before this year, that would not have been the case, as the male gender took rank over birth order.\nIt is also probably not a coincidence that this comic was published the day before the UK General Election , occurring on May 7, 2015. This election decides the modern-day leader of the UK. And the problems they face today may even be more likely to cause Megan to give away the throne, than the risk of untimely death she would have faced in Arthur's days.\nA similar Wikipedia gag appears in 911: Magic School Bus .\nThe sword in the stone also appears in 2578: Sword Pull .\n[Megan walks up to a sword in a stone.]\n[Megan attempts to pull the sword out of the stone.]\n[A beam of light and music plays as she removes the sword.]\n[While standing with the swords a voice from the sky speaks in gray shaky letters:] Celestial voice: The Throne of England is yours\n[Megan takes out her smart phone and searches:] Wikipedia England\n[Megan reads on her phone.]\n[Megan starts to replace the sword back into the stone.]\n"}
{"id":1522,"title":"Astronomy","image_title":"Astronomy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1522","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/astronomy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1522:_Astronomy","transcript":"[In front of a starry black sky, Megan looks at the stars through a telescope about twice her size, touching it at the base. She remains in the exact same position through all four panels.]\n[Beret Guy enters the panel holding a ladder and a magnifying glass.]\n[Beret Guy places the ladder next to Megan and her telescope. The ladder is stands like a triangle, is slightly larger than Megan, but smaller than the telescope.]\n[Beret guy climbs to the top of the ladder, and looks at the stars through a magnifying glass.]\nUsually, however, Beret Guy has strange powers , so it's quite possible that his method would yield similar or even better results than Megan's approach; see for instance 1490: Atoms . Given his naivety, it's also possible he just doesn't realize they should look any different. His naivety of astronomy is demonstrated in 811: Starlight .\nThe history of astronomy is filled with drastic misunderstanding of distances to celestial bodies, even up to the present day like Randall has covered in 1342: Ancient Stars . Thus, the comic could be in reference to the general overestimation of distances, albeit taken to the opposite extreme.\n","explanation":"For objects at a great distance one can achieve a better view by using a telescope as it is the typical method in Astronomy . Looking through a lens or a microscope in biology and other disciplines does magnify short distant objects. And a magnifying glass works more like a microscope when your eye lense is close to the focus of the magnifying glass, but when looking at distant objects you have to increase the distance between the glass and your eye where the focal length of your magnifying glass must be increased to meters instead of centimeters or less on a close view. But in general a Galilean Telescope works at the same principle as a magnifying glass together with your eye lens, the magnifying glass only has to have a long focal length which is optimized for far distances.\nIn the comic, the objects being viewed by Megan could be stars , galaxies and the planets of our Solar System . Megan is using a telescope. Beret Guy attempts to view them using a step-ladder to get closer to the stars, and then looking at them through his simple hand-held magnifying glass. This approach could be successful only if the stars were a few meters away, so that the ladder would take him within a few centimeters of the study object. In fact the visible stars are several light years away (typically 18-20 orders of magnitude further away) and getting two meters up on a ladder won't make any perceivable difference. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text assumes (for comic effect) that the only thing wrong with Beret Guy's strategy is the instability of the ladder endangering the expensive microscopes used by biologists for Astrobiology . Astrobiology is the study of life (or the possibility thereof) elsewhere in the universe, and here it would be either the planets and moons in our Solar System or exoplanets they needed to look at. This is the second comic related to studying exoplanets in two weeks, the first being 1517: Spectroscopy (see more references there).\nSince we cannot go there, they do, of course, not use any microscopes in the direct studies. However, one typical magnifier in biology is the electron microscope , used to study microbiology , and they cost a lot and are very heavy. It is therefore inadvisable to carry one up a ladder, and it could possibly become very expensive if you did try it anyway.\n[In front of a starry black sky, Megan looks at the stars through a telescope about twice her size, touching it at the base. She remains in the exact same position through all four panels.]\n[Beret Guy enters the panel holding a ladder and a magnifying glass.]\n[Beret Guy places the ladder next to Megan and her telescope. The ladder is stands like a triangle, is slightly larger than Megan, but smaller than the telescope.]\n[Beret guy climbs to the top of the ladder, and looks at the stars through a magnifying glass.]\nUsually, however, Beret Guy has strange powers , so it's quite possible that his method would yield similar or even better results than Megan's approach; see for instance 1490: Atoms . Given his naivety, it's also possible he just doesn't realize they should look any different. His naivety of astronomy is demonstrated in 811: Starlight .\nThe history of astronomy is filled with drastic misunderstanding of distances to celestial bodies, even up to the present day like Randall has covered in 1342: Ancient Stars . Thus, the comic could be in reference to the general overestimation of distances, albeit taken to the opposite extreme.\n"}
{"id":1523,"title":"Microdrones","image_title":"Microdrones","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1523","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/microdrones.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1523:_Microdrones","transcript":"[Cueball is standing behind Megan who sits at a desk typing on her laptop.] Cueball: So how do we regulate all these micro drones? Cueball: I mean, Amazon delivery bots sound cool...\n[Cueball stands alone surrounded by three micro drones.] Cueball: But I worry that overnight we'll realize we're surrounded by these things, no one will know who's controlling them, and then bam , sci-fi dystopia.\n[Megan turns in her chair towards Cueball.] Megan: If you wanna slow it down, why not just remove all regulations, but then make drone theft legal?\n[Cueball takes his hand to his chin and Megan turns back to type on the laptop.] Cueball: ...I like that. Megan: You write to congress. Megan: I'll stock up on butterfly nets.\n","explanation":"Amazon Prime Air is a conceptual drone -based delivery system currently in development by Amazon.com. While on one level he thinks the idea is cool, Cueball worries about living in a sci-fi dystopia, with those drones flying all around him, tracking his actions, etc. In the third panel, Megan suggests sending a message to Congress, suggesting a law for making the stealing of drones legal. This would alleviate the problem of drones flying around everywhere because if they did people would catch them to use for themselves. In the final panel Megan begins to search for butterfly nets so they are ready to catch the microdrones when the law to make it legal to steal the drones goes through.\nThis tactic may not work as well as planned; drones will likely simply fly higher or employ other security measures since there are no regulations on drone behavior.\nThe title text suggests one of five things:\nAmazon drones is also the subject of the title text in 1625: Substitutions 2 and there are two quadcopters over the volcano lake in 1608: Hoverboard . Also, Cueball is abducted by seemly sentient drones in 1630: Quadcopter .\n[Cueball is standing behind Megan who sits at a desk typing on her laptop.] Cueball: So how do we regulate all these micro drones? Cueball: I mean, Amazon delivery bots sound cool...\n[Cueball stands alone surrounded by three micro drones.] Cueball: But I worry that overnight we'll realize we're surrounded by these things, no one will know who's controlling them, and then bam , sci-fi dystopia.\n[Megan turns in her chair towards Cueball.] Megan: If you wanna slow it down, why not just remove all regulations, but then make drone theft legal?\n[Cueball takes his hand to his chin and Megan turns back to type on the laptop.] Cueball: ...I like that. Megan: You write to congress. Megan: I'll stock up on butterfly nets.\n"}
{"id":1524,"title":"Dimensions","image_title":"Dimensions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1524","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dimensions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1524:_Dimensions","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting up against a tree, Megan lies with her hands behind her neck in front him under the foliage of the tree.] Cueball: Of the four dimensions I could have spent my life being pushed inexorably forward through, I guess \"time\" isn't the worst.\nInterestingly, Randall has already, back in the December 2014 issue of Wired magazine, published the xkcd guide to dimensions where the main part of this comic was already used in panel 9 out of 20. This issue of Wired magazine was about multiple dimensions, and Randall's section is about imagining higher dimension. The article is a mix of xkcd-style comics and captions explaining them.  The panel in question show Cueball saying, \"Of all the dimensions I could have spent my life being pushed inexorably through, I guess \"time\" isn't the worst.\" (the only difference being that \"all the\" has been changed to \"the four\" in this comic). In panel 15 of the Wired comic series, Randall considers how dimensions can be represented in a two-dimensional comic strip: a character moving within a panel represents movement in space but movement from panel to panel represents movement in time.\n","explanation":"This cartoon is a romantic musing about time, and how even though we may not always realize it the progression of time is one of the better things in life.\nTo accurately describe the world requires at minimum three spatial dimensions and the fourth dimension, time. The spatial dimensions don't necessarily have to be the familiar Cartesian system (Forward\/backward, Right\/Left, Up\/Down), but can be described in many ways (like the spherical or cylindrical system). In spite of the fact that we are being pushed around the universe by being on Earth, we can exercise some control over these spatial dimensions by moving, and therefore our trajectory through these dimensions is not inexorable (impossible to stop). As we only can go one direction in time and have no way of changing the speed, we also are figuratively being pushed through time, and this movement is inexorable.\nCueball sits under a tree un-moving with Megan simply enjoying the passage of time and says, \"Of the four dimensions I could have spent my life being pushed inexorably forward through, I guess \"time\" isn't the worst.\" All of this amounts to an unusually erudite way for Cueball to say he feels content with how his life has turned out, despite the natural doubts one has as they get older.\nIn the title text, Cueball then continues to muse about his favorite dimensions and places time in his top three dimensions. This means that one of the three spatial dimensions must be his least favorite. Though it is impossible to determine how he defines his favorite dimensions, as dimensions can be defined somewhat arbitrarily, they likely are length, height, and time as comics only use these three (time being represented by panels). Since rising steadily and digging downward are both pretty lethal, one could assume that Randall's least favorite dimension is up\/down. (See also the one of my favorite halves comment in 1556: The Sky ) This could also be a reference to 1190: Time .\nPreviously Randall has made a comic about a man who was pushed sideways \u2014 so he was pushed both through time and fell sideways: 417: The Man Who Fell Sideways .\n[Cueball is sitting up against a tree, Megan lies with her hands behind her neck in front him under the foliage of the tree.] Cueball: Of the four dimensions I could have spent my life being pushed inexorably forward through, I guess \"time\" isn't the worst.\nInterestingly, Randall has already, back in the December 2014 issue of Wired magazine, published the xkcd guide to dimensions where the main part of this comic was already used in panel 9 out of 20. This issue of Wired magazine was about multiple dimensions, and Randall's section is about imagining higher dimension. The article is a mix of xkcd-style comics and captions explaining them.  The panel in question show Cueball saying, \"Of all the dimensions I could have spent my life being pushed inexorably through, I guess \"time\" isn't the worst.\" (the only difference being that \"all the\" has been changed to \"the four\" in this comic). In panel 15 of the Wired comic series, Randall considers how dimensions can be represented in a two-dimensional comic strip: a character moving within a panel represents movement in space but movement from panel to panel represents movement in time.\n"}
{"id":1525,"title":"Emojic 8 Ball","image_title":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1525","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/emojic_8_ball.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1525:_Emojic_8_Ball","transcript":"[An image of a shiny black ball with a white circle forming a black window at its center. Above the image is a title where the number 8 is written in a black circle, making it look like an 8-ball.] Emojic 8 Ball\n[Below the title is an input field with a placeholder text in grayed out text:] How will I die?\n[Below is a gray submit button.] Ask\n[The Emojic 8 Ball is below the ask button. The text in the input field can be changed by the user before pressing the ask button. After the submit button is pressed, 1 to 3 emoji symbols appear in the black window, framed inside a light blue equilateral triangle with one end pointing straight up. Once this has been done once, then a link appears below the panel with this text: Permalink].\n","explanation":"Emojic 8 Ball is a parody of the Magic 8-Ball using emoji instead of words. \"Emojic\" is a portmanteau of \"emoji\" and \"magic\".\nA real Magic 8 Ball is a toy designed to visually resemble a real pool ball , which responds to questions (posed as yes-or-no questions) asked of it, ostensibly by magic. The responses are provided through a window on one face that displays text phrases printed on a triangular shape as depicted in this comic. Vintage balls contained a die with multiple triangular facets suspended in a dark fluid, while modern balls feature an electronic screen.\nThe ball in this comic provides responses in the form of graphical Unicode \"text\" (which this comic is suggesting are emoji ).\nIt is possible that this may be commentary on the inclusion of such \"meaningless\" symbols into Unicode. Ask a question and get a meaningless reply, even more meaningless than the answers given by a Magic 8 Ball.\nIt could also be commentary about the ambiguous nature of advice from fortune tellers, horoscopes, etc.  Each emoji has an ambiguous meaning (for example, depending on context, the cow symbol \ud83d\udc04 could refer to beef or farming). The interpretation has more to do with the person receiving the fortune than anything given by the so-called fortune reader.\nWith the default question being \"How will I die?\", this may also be partially a reference to \" Machine of Death \". This book from 2010 is a collection of short stories edited by amongst other Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics ) mentioned here since the idea was based on one of his comics . Since Randall Munroe wrote one of the stories the reference is very likely. All the stories are based around a device, the \"Machine of Death\", that can predict, with 100% accuracy though generally with extreme ambiguity, how people die from a drop of their blood. In many of the stories very unusual deaths are predicted, often in a very literal way, but not so you know when or where you will die. From the official home page the entire book can be downloaded for free as a PDF file (broken) 2020\/06 archive.org copy . (Randall's story begins on page 421 - or page 218 of the two sided PDF file. It is simply called \"?\"). The \"Machine of Death\" may also have been referenced in the fourth panel of 1341: Types of Editors .\nEmoji were previously referenced in 1513: Code Quality . Emoji has since then become a recurrent theme on xkcd. But this is the first one with Emoji in the title.\nNote: if you see mostly squares (possibly with six numbers\/letters inside) in the 8 Ball instead of actual symbols or pictures, it means your system doesn't have fonts that support the Emoji unicode characters.  Scroll down to the discussion section below for suggestions on how to get and install the right font for your system, as well as to see a list of emoji characters so you can easily see if they're working or not.\n[An image of a shiny black ball with a white circle forming a black window at its center. Above the image is a title where the number 8 is written in a black circle, making it look like an 8-ball.] Emojic 8 Ball\n[Below the title is an input field with a placeholder text in grayed out text:] How will I die?\n[Below is a gray submit button.] Ask\n[The Emojic 8 Ball is below the ask button. The text in the input field can be changed by the user before pressing the ask button. After the submit button is pressed, 1 to 3 emoji symbols appear in the black window, framed inside a light blue equilateral triangle with one end pointing straight up. Once this has been done once, then a link appears below the panel with this text: Permalink].\n"}
{"id":1526,"title":"Placebo Blocker","image_title":"Placebo Blocker","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1526","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/placebo_blocker.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1526:_Placebo_Blocker","transcript":"[Hairbun is standing in front of Cueball who does all the talking. Below them is a footnote.] Cueball: Some researchers* are starting to figure out the mechanism behind the placebo effect. Cueball: We've used their work to create a new drug: A placebo effect blocker . Footnote: * Hall et al, DOI: 10.1016\/J.MOLMED.2015.02.009\n[Zoom in on Cueball who now holds his arms out.] Cueball: Now we just need to run a trial! We'll get two groups, give them both placebos, then give one the real placebo blocker, and the other a... Cueball: ...wait.\n[Hairbun holds her chin, while Cueball just stand there for a beat panel.]\n[Hairbun looks again at Cueball who begins to take the lid off of a medicine bottle.] Hairbun: ...My head hurts. Cueball: Mine too. Cueball: Here, want a sugar pill?\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke about the difficulty of testing a drug that is supposed to block the placebo effect.\nA placebo experiment is used for testing a drug candidate. It has two groups: one that gets a real drug candidate, and one that gets a fake. The placebo effect describes the observation that the group that gets the fake often show signs of having received a working drug - though commonly weaker than in the group that gets an effective real drug.\nCueball states to Hairbun , with a citation from the real world, that his team created a Placebo Blocker, a drug designed to prevent the placebo effect. Cueball begins to design a test for this new drug. Following typical experimental design, patients would be split into two groups: a control group, and the group that receives the treatment.\nCueball knows that the treatment given to the control group is supposed to be designed so that it is not influenced by the variable trying to be isolated. As the placebo effect is the effect under investigation, a placebo can not be used as a control treatment as a comparison with a placebo blocker. Cueball tries to design around this. In his test, both groups would receive a placebo as a treatment for an unspecified condition (the Treatment Placebo ); in addition the test group would receive the Placebo Blocker drug, while the control group would get a placebo pill instead (the Placebo-Blocker Placebo ). If this works as expected, the Treatment Placebo would be blocked by the Placebo Blocker in the test group, while in the control group, the Placebo-Blocker Placebo may have a placebo effect in blocking the placebo effect of the Treatment Placebo , and the difference between these effects can be measured to test the effectiveness of the Placebo Blocker .\nCueball and Hairbun think about this trial until they both develop headache from frustration. Cueball then kindly offers Hairbun a sugar pill. While this might have helped cure the headache via the placebo effect had he told her it was a headache treatment, by revealing the pill as merely a sugar pill, it may reduce the effect (though it has been shown that placebos tend to work even if the subject is aware that they are placebos).\nIn the title text, Cueball mentions that his sugar pills against headache works even better together with the new experimental placebo boosters . Incidentally, he indicates that he keeps those in the same bottle with his sugar pills. Assuming someone believes placebo boosters are in the jar this would allow them to take the sugar pills and receive a greater placebo effect, as the placebo effect is based upon faith in the treatment, regardless of whether there are placebo boosters in the jar.\nIt is possible but unlikely that:\nQuestionable neuroscience research is also discussed in 1453: fMRI .\nThe placebo effect refers to the phenomenon in which patients given an inactive treatment such as a sugar pill can still show improvement relative to an untreated patient. The placebo effect is thus very important to consider when testing new drugs, since even ineffective drugs can have a positive effect on the patients due to the placebo effect. Modern drug experiments are hence conducted as double-blind trials , where the patients are randomly given either the treatment or a placebo without either they or the administering doctors knowing who receives the new drug and who received the placebo pill. (It is important that the doctor does not know, as if they did, it may affect the way they interact with the patient.)\nGenerally the patients need to believe that they are receiving an active treatment, but one study showed that the effect can occur even if the patients are told that they are receiving a placebo pill. The key factor seems to be that the patients must believe that a positive effect will occur. For example, (1) patients experience a greater effect if they believe that the treatment is expensive and (2) patients who know that they have not been given an active treatment will experience the effect if they are told that placebos can have a positive effect through the power of the mind. Furthermore, the placebo can increase the effectiveness of treatments which seem larger (this is why over-the-counter pain medication is often administered as two half-doses rather than just one full dose).\nSeveral reasons for the placebo effect have been proposed, from study artifacts - such as under-reporting of negative outcomes by patients who think they are being treated, to neurological explanations for how mental state can translate into physical outcomes.\nPlacebo-blockers do actually already exist. A side-effect of the opiate antagonist Naloxone is that it blocks the placebo effect .\nIt should be noted that placebo does not actually improve the objective condition, only the patient's subjective perception of it (i.e. the patients do not get better more than they randomly would, but the placebo makes them think they do). [ citation needed ]\nThe placebo effect is one of the greatest mysteries in modern medicine. It is typically found that the placebo effect is an effective treatment in itself in addition to the effectiveness of drugs and other treatments, and it has been found to cause small improvements to cancer outcomes. In other cases such as pain relief, the placebo effect is claimed to be comparable with the effectiveness of the drug itself - but this is a misunderstanding: this is not evidence of placebo working, but of the drug not working .\nThe comic refers to the recent study by Kathryn T. Hall, Joseph Loscalzo, and Ted J. Kaptchuk. (2015) Genetics and the placebo effect: the placebome. Trends in Mol Medicine. Volume 21, Issue 5, May 2015, Pages 285\u2013294 - however, bear in mind that one has to treat studies very carefully Kaptchuk vs Placebo\nIt is possible to test the placebo blocker using three groups: a test group who receive a placebo and a placebo blocker, a control group who receive a placebo but no blocker, and a second control group who receive no treatment whatsoever, as a lack of treatment is the variable that an actual placebo is designed to control for. Still it might be hard to determine if the pills are having a negative effect or blocking the placebo effect, so multiple trials with multiple illnesses may have to be carried out.\n[Hairbun is standing in front of Cueball who does all the talking. Below them is a footnote.] Cueball: Some researchers* are starting to figure out the mechanism behind the placebo effect. Cueball: We've used their work to create a new drug: A placebo effect blocker . Footnote: * Hall et al, DOI: 10.1016\/J.MOLMED.2015.02.009\n[Zoom in on Cueball who now holds his arms out.] Cueball: Now we just need to run a trial! We'll get two groups, give them both placebos, then give one the real placebo blocker, and the other a... Cueball: ...wait.\n[Hairbun holds her chin, while Cueball just stand there for a beat panel.]\n[Hairbun looks again at Cueball who begins to take the lid off of a medicine bottle.] Hairbun: ...My head hurts. Cueball: Mine too. Cueball: Here, want a sugar pill?\n"}
{"id":1527,"title":"Humans","image_title":"Humans","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1527","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/humans.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1527:_Humans","transcript":"[Two robots are hovering in mid-air in the comic; what appear to be their optical arrays are facing each other.] Robot 1: You know, new research suggests ancient human kings and queens were covered in colorful fabric. Robot 2: Ugh, I like movie humans more. Screaming pink warriors with metal crowns poking through the skin on their heads! Robot 2: Now they're, what, big pillows? Robot 2: Science ruins everything.\nIt is worth noting that this comic was released a few weeks before the scheduled release of Jurassic World , a reboot of the Jurassic Park movie franchise. This new movie, while supposedly aware of recent advances in dinosaur research, still depicts dinosaurs as giant lizards without feathers. It seems likely that the robot's comment about \"pink humans\" is targeted at this movie, especially given Randall's many earlier references to Jurassic Park and his fear of velociraptors .\n","explanation":"The comic is set in the future, with two hovering robots discussing ancient history, in particular the clothing styles of kings and queens of the now extinct human species. It appears that robot archeologists have long ago unearthed remains from one or more human civilizations, providing evidence to build a concept of what humans must have looked, acted and even sounded like. Recently they must have discovered or determined new evidence, which presumably indicates the wearing of colorful clothing by human monarchs. Until this occurred they had very little if any reason to believe that any humans wore clothing. Noting the previous knowledge that some humans had metal rings around their heads, they have drawn the conclusion that these formed a separate species \"Human Kings\" and the crown is a natural outgrowth of the skeleton. Alternatively, the narrative of the fictional, horned Star Wars villain Darth Maul may have somehow survived into the era of robot film and misinterpreted as describing a human, though Maul's skin is red, not pink.\nWhen dinosaur bones were first dug up, the idea that dinosaurs were scaly, reptilian-like creatures was developed with the information available at the time. In recent times, it's been discovered that most dinosaurs actually had feathers , and in well preserved specimens, often from the Jiufotang Formation in Northern China, feathers of various forms are clearly visible.\nAs this runs counter to the widespread and long-held image of dinosaurs as dramatic reptiles, the public has been reluctant to accept this new discovery, especially as the addition of feathers often conjures up the image of a giant chicken. (See 1104: Feathers ). Had it been discovered that dinosaurs were in fact covered with 6-inch long razor tipped spikes, people may have accepted this immediately as it conforms to the stereotype of dinosaurs as killing machines.\nIn the same way, the new information on kings and queens being covered in fabric runs counter to the movie inspired image that the robot on the right had about humans, picturing them as being pink warriors that could grow metal out of their heads. The head-metal image may have been inspired by the discovery of kings and queens buried or entombed with their crowns lying on top of their skulls - for example the Electress Palatine Anna Maria de'Medici . If the robot beings in this comic don't know enough about human anatomy, they may assume that the metal crown is a specialized part of the human skeleton.\nShown at least some evidence pointing to the truth - that humans typically wore clothing, and that a monarch's crown is only a symbol worn atop the head and not part of their body - the robot is predictably disappointed. Humans wearing clothing reduces them, in its opinion, to \"big pillows,\" much like dinosaurs with feathers reduces them from primal beasts to \"big chickens.\" Something made of cloth (or covered in it), at least in this robot's mind, cannot be a significant actor in history.\nThe robot fails to reason that, among other things, history was what it was, and its wanting things to have been a certain way does not make it so. In addition, just as the clothing-wearing human is more than a mere pillow, and would have held much fearsome power over the world, a feathered dinosaur is not necessarily merely a giant chicken, but is still a powerful killing machine.\nThe title text references our failure to change the popular image of dinosaurs to reflect the way they truthfully once were. Randall jokingly suggests that we should apply the same \"featherless is cooler\" logic to popular images of bald eagles ( since they are modern dinosaurs ), and remove their feathers (only in depictions of them, presumably), leaving them entirely bald. He appears hopeful that such a direct comparison, using the national symbol of the US no less, would provoke the public to change its mind about how dinosaurs are viewed, since modern raptors (birds of prey) are typically viewed with awe and respect, and are not often associated with the \"chicken\" stereotype mentioned above.\n[Two robots are hovering in mid-air in the comic; what appear to be their optical arrays are facing each other.] Robot 1: You know, new research suggests ancient human kings and queens were covered in colorful fabric. Robot 2: Ugh, I like movie humans more. Screaming pink warriors with metal crowns poking through the skin on their heads! Robot 2: Now they're, what, big pillows? Robot 2: Science ruins everything.\nIt is worth noting that this comic was released a few weeks before the scheduled release of Jurassic World , a reboot of the Jurassic Park movie franchise. This new movie, while supposedly aware of recent advances in dinosaur research, still depicts dinosaurs as giant lizards without feathers. It seems likely that the robot's comment about \"pink humans\" is targeted at this movie, especially given Randall's many earlier references to Jurassic Park and his fear of velociraptors .\n"}
{"id":1528,"title":"Vodka","image_title":"Vodka","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1528","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vodka.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1528:_Vodka","transcript":"[Ponytail and Megan sit together at a table with two small shot glasses on the table. Ponytail is imbibing from a large bottle, while Megan is cradling a relatively large glass.]\nPonytail: Maybe this is the vodka talking, but: Ponytail: Hi! I'm made from potatoes!\n","explanation":"Vodka is a distilled beverage composed primarily of water and ethanol, sometimes with traces of impurities and flavorings. Traditionally, vodka is made by the distillation of fermented cereal grains or potatoes , though some modern brands use other substances, such as fruits or sugar.\nWhen people use the phrase \"maybe it's the [type of alcohol] talking\", they usually mean that they are speaking under the influence of alcohol and are saying things they probably wouldn't say when sober . This is similar to the Latin saying \" in vino veritas \" - in wine there is truth. However, in this comic, it appears that the vodka itself is literally speaking through Ponytail to discuss its origin, potatoes in this case. Other comics in which things have been taken too literally include 1099: Tuesdays and 1364: Like I'm Five .\nIn the title text the vodka is implying it can be made from many other things beside potatoes. Vodka can be manufactured from potatoes, grain, and most other plants. Most illegal distilled vodka is often made with whatever one has on hand. However, vodkas are often repeatedly distilled to remove the \"foreshots\" (the first few ounces of alcohol that drip from the condenser), the \"heads\" (the higher alcohols which are first to condense during distillation) and the \"tails\" (the lower fusel oils which are last to be distilled). Removal of these leaves a clear solution consisting almost entirely of ethanol and water. This is in contrast to other distilled beverages like whiskey , brandy and rum .\nIn 1541: Voice Ponytail is again possessed by a non-human entity , or maybe she is just making pranks with Megan in both cases.\n[Ponytail and Megan sit together at a table with two small shot glasses on the table. Ponytail is imbibing from a large bottle, while Megan is cradling a relatively large glass.]\nPonytail: Maybe this is the vodka talking, but: Ponytail: Hi! I'm made from potatoes!\n"}
{"id":1529,"title":"Bracket","image_title":"Bracket","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1529","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bracket.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1529:_Bracket","transcript":"[A tournament bracket. With the names listed in groups on the left-hand side and right-hand side as shown below. Within individual groups the names are ordered in match-ups, two, three or even four in the first match. The last name on the right, Beyonc\u00e9, is not even matched for first round. The winners goes on to the next match, but there are many that skips some of the matches up until the quarterfinals, so some need to win 5 matches to reach the quarterfinals, others only need to win 4 of 3, and Beyonc\u00e9 only 2. After the first level, the match-ups are always between two names. The two sides join up in a final in the middle, where the winner of the left side has a place for the name below and the winner of the right a place for the name above a central rectangular frame with place for the winners name. Below the pairing in the first round matches are mentioned above each of the clear groupings of the bracket.]\n[These are paired two and two.] Louis Armstrong Neil Armstrong Lance Armstrong Stretch Armstrong [These are paired two and two.] Jeff Gordan Jeff Bridges Jeff Daniels Jack Daniels [These are paired two and two.] Orson Welles H.G. Wells George Orwell Wells Fargo [The first four, two, three and two are paired.] Kurt Russell Russell Brand Russell Crowe Russell Simmons Richard Simmons Gene Simmons Gene Hackman Hugh Jackman Alan Rickman Alan Parsons Alan Partridge [The first four, three and two are paired.] Jenny McCarthy Joseph McCarthy Eugene McCarthy Eugene V. Debs Gene Wilder Olivia Wilde Oscar Wilde Oscar De La Renta Oscar De La Hoya [These are paired two and two.] Jack Nicklaus Jack Nicholson Phil Mickelson Nicholas Nickelby [These are paired.] Ryan Adams Bryan Adams [These are paired.] Chubby Checker Fats Domino [These are paired two and two.] Colin Firth Colin Farrell Will Ferrell The Farrelly Brothers [These are paired.] Joseph Gordon-Levitt Jennifer Love Hewitt [These are paired two and two.] Danny Glover Donald Glover Donnie Wahlberg Mark Wahlberg Mark Ruffalo Mark Shuttleworth [The first three and two are paired.] Philip Pullman Bill Pullman Bill Paxton Bill Murray Dan Aykroyd [The first two, and then three times three are paired.] Ginger Rogers Fred Rogers|Mister\/Fred Astaire\/Rogers Mister Spock Doctor Spock Doctor Octopus Doctor Manhattan Doctor Strangelove Doctor Strange Dr. No The Doctor Cory Doctorow [These are paired two and two.] Jerry Lee Lewis Jerry Lewis Jenny Lewis Xeni Jardin [These are paired two and two.] Chris Evans Chris Hemsworth Chris Pine Chris Pratt [These are paired.] Shallots Scallops Scallions [These are paired.] Siouxie Sioux Suzanne Vega [These are paired.] Tom Arnold Arnold Palmer Amanda Palmer [These are paired two and two.] Wes Craven Wes Anderson Paul Thomas Anderson Poul Anderson [These are paired two and two.] Sir Walter Scott Sir Walter Raleigh Sir Francis Drake Frank Drake [The first three, two and two are paired.] Van Halen Van Morrison Van Wilder Robert Van Winkle Rip Van Winkle Rip Torn Natalie Imbruglia [The first four are paired two and two the last is the only one not paired.] The Body Shop Bath and Body Works Bed Bath and Beyond Beyond Thunderdome Beyonc\u00e9\n","explanation":"A tournament bracket shows the planned series of matchups in a tournament. In this comic Randall has shown a plan for a tournament between a wide range of cultural icons, both real and fictional, based mostly on similarities in their names. Various Internet groups have speculated on who would win in a fight between characters from different films. It may be relevant that the film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was soon to be released at the time the comic was made where the two eponymous superheroes , Batman and Superman , fight against each other.\nThe individual starting pairings are generally based on common or similar given names or surnames. Some adjacent brackets are \"segued\" by someone like Jeff Daniels, who segues from a bracket of \"Jeff\"s into a bracket of \"Daniels\"es. The bracket itself is fairly arbitrary. Most initial matchups are pairs, although several are trios and there's a quadruplet in the Russels group, while a single entry, Beyonc\u00e9 , is given a first- and second-round bye . Most of the participants in the tournament are people, with a few exceptions. Shallots (small onions), scallops (bivalve mollusks), and scallions (green onions) are similar sounding foods, therefore may be confusing for some individuals (perhaps including Randall ). The final grouping on the lower right of the bracket features a several retail stores and a film.\nThe title text possibly refers to Dr. Dre , particularly as a reference to his 2001 song \" Forgot About Dre \". Alternatively, the title text could simply be a reference to the large number of pop culture personas that include the word \"Doctor\", such as Doctor House , Dr. Oz , Dr. Phil , Dr. Watson , \"Doc\" Brown , Dr. Seuss , Dr Pepper , Doctor Doom , Dr. Zoidberg , Dr. Horrible 's Sing-Along Blog and many others . Another simpler explanation is that it would cause the reader to question \"Doctor Who?\" answering their own question, although this answer would be incorrect because The Doctor is already present. It could also be a reference to the dual meaning of \"The Doctor,\" either he meant to include Time Lord from Doctor Who and forgot about the EMH from Voyager, or he remembered the EMH and forgot the Time Lord.\nThe incentive for the comic may have been the French Open 2015 , which started on the day of the publication.\nThe comic inspired several groups to play out versions of the bracket.  One user-voting based match-up on twitter, XKCD Bracket , was featured by Randall on the xkcd home page, with a link at at the top of the website, although the account was not created by Randall. (The link was part of a \"news\" flash, the other was regarding his book based on 1133: Up Goer Five . See more on this news in that comics explanation). In the final match on July 29, Neil Armstrong defeated Mister Spock (see the complete bracket ). The link was removed sometimes before Monday, 10 August 2015, within two weeks of the final result being revealed.\nLater Randall has made one smaller but similar bracket in 1819: Sweet 16 , and then an interactive April fools' comics in 2019, with an even larger bracket for determining the best emoji in 2131: Emojidome . The bracket for this comic was shown with links from the comic during the matches.\n[A tournament bracket. With the names listed in groups on the left-hand side and right-hand side as shown below. Within individual groups the names are ordered in match-ups, two, three or even four in the first match. The last name on the right, Beyonc\u00e9, is not even matched for first round. The winners goes on to the next match, but there are many that skips some of the matches up until the quarterfinals, so some need to win 5 matches to reach the quarterfinals, others only need to win 4 of 3, and Beyonc\u00e9 only 2. After the first level, the match-ups are always between two names. The two sides join up in a final in the middle, where the winner of the left side has a place for the name below and the winner of the right a place for the name above a central rectangular frame with place for the winners name. Below the pairing in the first round matches are mentioned above each of the clear groupings of the bracket.]\n[These are paired two and two.] Louis Armstrong Neil Armstrong Lance Armstrong Stretch Armstrong [These are paired two and two.] Jeff Gordan Jeff Bridges Jeff Daniels Jack Daniels [These are paired two and two.] Orson Welles H.G. Wells George Orwell Wells Fargo [The first four, two, three and two are paired.] Kurt Russell Russell Brand Russell Crowe Russell Simmons Richard Simmons Gene Simmons Gene Hackman Hugh Jackman Alan Rickman Alan Parsons Alan Partridge [The first four, three and two are paired.] Jenny McCarthy Joseph McCarthy Eugene McCarthy Eugene V. Debs Gene Wilder Olivia Wilde Oscar Wilde Oscar De La Renta Oscar De La Hoya [These are paired two and two.] Jack Nicklaus Jack Nicholson Phil Mickelson Nicholas Nickelby [These are paired.] Ryan Adams Bryan Adams [These are paired.] Chubby Checker Fats Domino [These are paired two and two.] Colin Firth Colin Farrell Will Ferrell The Farrelly Brothers [These are paired.] Joseph Gordon-Levitt Jennifer Love Hewitt [These are paired two and two.] Danny Glover Donald Glover Donnie Wahlberg Mark Wahlberg Mark Ruffalo Mark Shuttleworth [The first three and two are paired.] Philip Pullman Bill Pullman Bill Paxton Bill Murray Dan Aykroyd [The first two, and then three times three are paired.] Ginger Rogers Fred Rogers|Mister\/Fred Astaire\/Rogers Mister Spock Doctor Spock Doctor Octopus Doctor Manhattan Doctor Strangelove Doctor Strange Dr. No The Doctor Cory Doctorow [These are paired two and two.] Jerry Lee Lewis Jerry Lewis Jenny Lewis Xeni Jardin [These are paired two and two.] Chris Evans Chris Hemsworth Chris Pine Chris Pratt [These are paired.] Shallots Scallops Scallions [These are paired.] Siouxie Sioux Suzanne Vega [These are paired.] Tom Arnold Arnold Palmer Amanda Palmer [These are paired two and two.] Wes Craven Wes Anderson Paul Thomas Anderson Poul Anderson [These are paired two and two.] Sir Walter Scott Sir Walter Raleigh Sir Francis Drake Frank Drake [The first three, two and two are paired.] Van Halen Van Morrison Van Wilder Robert Van Winkle Rip Van Winkle Rip Torn Natalie Imbruglia [The first four are paired two and two the last is the only one not paired.] The Body Shop Bath and Body Works Bed Bath and Beyond Beyond Thunderdome Beyonc\u00e9\n"}
{"id":1530,"title":"Keyboard Mash","image_title":"Keyboard Mash","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1530","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/keyboard_mash.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1530:_Keyboard_Mash","transcript":"[Cueball approaches his desktop computer, which has emitted a message seemingly from White Hat as it displays a picture of him.] New chat message\n[Below the chat log is shown with White Hat's comments on the left in gray frames and Cueball's comments to the right in white frames. The first post in a row from each person is labeled with their picture at the end of a small arrow in the frame]: White Hat: Can't sleep. Stupid dog keeps barking. White Hat: So frustrating. FJAFJKLDSKF7JKFDJ Cueball: Ugh, I'm sorry. Maybe you could... Cueball: ... Okay, wait. I have to ask. Cueball: How did you hit a \"7\" in the middle there? White Hat: Huh? White Hat: I was just randomly keyboard mashing. Cueball: Sorry, Right. White Hat: Anyway, Cueball: I know this is silly, but like... All your hands were clearly right on the home row. Cueball: I don't get how one finger could have stretched up to the \"7\". White Hat: Why do you always fixate on these bizarre details? Cueball: I don't know. Cueball: Sorry. White Hat: It's weird, is all.\n[Chat transcript continues above White Hat's laptop, as it started in the first panel over Cueball's computer. But now we see a human-sized spider suspended from the ceiling by web is using three of its legs to type on the laptop. Behind the spider, White Hat is suspended from the ceiling upside down, almost totally encased in spider web. He tries to speak. Between them, a chair has been knocked over onto its back.] Spider (as White Hat in the chat): I am a normal human typing with my human hands. Cueball (chat): Yeah, of course. I know. White Hat (speaking): Mmm!! Mmph!!!\n","explanation":"Cueball is chatting with White Hat , who says he is frustrated because a barking dog is preventing him from sleeping and White Hat mashes the keyboard to show his frustration. Keyboard mashing is often used in this way where the user makes their hands spasm across the keyboard, creating a line of text that can be compared to an angry groan in real life. Cueball is about to give some advice, but is confused by a quirk in what White Hat typed. All the characters he typed (except one) were on the home row of the QWERTY keyboard, the row starting with the letters A, S, D, and F, in the middle of the keyboard. The letters A, S, D, F, J, K, and L (all from the home row) are scattered throughout the text, but there is a 7 (which comes from the numbers row, on top of the keyboard) in the middle of this text. Cueball, wonders how White Hat put a seven in there, because if White Hat was keyboard mashing and touched the 7 key, he likely would have hit any of the QWERTY row keys because of keyboard mashing hand spasms, but he didn't. All the other characters were on the home row. White Hat berates Cueball for always focusing on strange, tiny details. When the final panel shows what's going on where White Hat is, we see that a giant spider has imprisoned him in a web and is talking to Cueball, which explains how the keyboard mashing \"White Hat\" did was strange.\nThe reason the dog was barking appears to be because the giant spider was lurking nearby. Little did White Hat know that the dog was alerting him of the spider. When the spider notices that White Hat mentions the barking dog to Cueball, the spider apparently restrains White Hat and takes over typing. Another possibility is that the \"dog\" barking is actually White Hat, as he is seen making grunts from beneath the spider's silk. It can be seen in the last panel that the spider is typing with 3 legs, which explains how the 7 key would have been pressed.\nThe statement \"I am a normal human typing with my human hands\" is an oddly specific assertion from the giant spider that it is actually a human, a claim that would normally be taken for granted and had not really been cast into doubt by Cueball's inquiries about how \"7\" got into a string of home-row keystrokes.\nThe title text invitation ends with a similar statement, suggesting that they \"...CHAT ABOUT OUR INTERNAL SKELETONS\", which spiders (unlike humans) do not possess and which are not a common conversation point among humans, helping to demonstrate (along with the spider's suspiciously specific denial and using the phrase cook bread instead of bake bread) that the spider is not very good at blending in as a human. This implies that the spider also wants to trap and possibly eat Cueball as well, or actually hang out with him in an attempt to make friends or to find out how humans talk so the spider will be able to blend in better in the future. \"...HANG OUT INSIDE MY HOUSE\" may also have a double meaning, as White Hat and the spider are actually \"hanging\" from the ceiling inside White Hat's house. Also another oddity is that the spider asks Cueball to cook bread, although bread is actually baked, and in any case this isn't a common pastime during the night (the spider could also mean make toast). The final oddity is that the title text is written in all caps which is usually interpreted as shouting and would not be used in a casual invitation, although the title text should just be imitating the fact that the rest of the text messages use a font that make them look like they are in all caps.\nThe central theme of the comic is a vindication of Cueball's world-view, wherein tiny oddities such as the appearance of a numeral in a keyboard mash merit investigation. In the real world, the appearance of a \"7\" in the middle of a home row keyboard mash is more likely attributable to key ghosting .\nAlternatively, the fact that Cueball uses the phrase \"all your hands\" instead of \"both your hands\" or \"both of your hands\" could indicate that Cueball (and likely other people as part of a coordinated uprising of giant spiders) has also been taken hostage by a spider, and the spider behind Cueball's profile picture knows that the organism behind White Hat's profile picture is a spider, not a human. This would also explain why the spider behind White Hat's profile picture feels that the spider behind Cueball's profile picture pointing out the usage of a numeral among home row keys is weird; spiders know that other spiders have many legs and that these legs do not have to be in the same section of the keyboard.\nIn the title text of 1541: Voice there is again a reference to a sentence that could be uttered correctly by a human, but would never be used in real life. But a non-human entity that tries to blend in as a human, may inadvertently use such a \"wrong\" sentence to try to ensure other people think they are indeed humans. It is a direct reference to the type of sentence used in the title text here.\nThis comic is somewhat unusual in that the panels are read from top to bottom instead of being read from left to right in more than one row. This may be in order to accommodate the second panel, which must be tall due to containing a text conversation, without making the comic look weird due to the second panel being much taller than the first panel.\n[Cueball approaches his desktop computer, which has emitted a message seemingly from White Hat as it displays a picture of him.] New chat message\n[Below the chat log is shown with White Hat's comments on the left in gray frames and Cueball's comments to the right in white frames. The first post in a row from each person is labeled with their picture at the end of a small arrow in the frame]: White Hat: Can't sleep. Stupid dog keeps barking. White Hat: So frustrating. FJAFJKLDSKF7JKFDJ Cueball: Ugh, I'm sorry. Maybe you could... Cueball: ... Okay, wait. I have to ask. Cueball: How did you hit a \"7\" in the middle there? White Hat: Huh? White Hat: I was just randomly keyboard mashing. Cueball: Sorry, Right. White Hat: Anyway, Cueball: I know this is silly, but like... All your hands were clearly right on the home row. Cueball: I don't get how one finger could have stretched up to the \"7\". White Hat: Why do you always fixate on these bizarre details? Cueball: I don't know. Cueball: Sorry. White Hat: It's weird, is all.\n[Chat transcript continues above White Hat's laptop, as it started in the first panel over Cueball's computer. But now we see a human-sized spider suspended from the ceiling by web is using three of its legs to type on the laptop. Behind the spider, White Hat is suspended from the ceiling upside down, almost totally encased in spider web. He tries to speak. Between them, a chair has been knocked over onto its back.] Spider (as White Hat in the chat): I am a normal human typing with my human hands. Cueball (chat): Yeah, of course. I know. White Hat (speaking): Mmm!! Mmph!!!\n"}
{"id":1531,"title":"The BDLPSWDKS Effect","image_title":"The BDLPSWDKS Effect","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1531","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_bdlpswdks_effect.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1531:_The_BDLPSWDKS_Effect","transcript":"[Ponytail stands next to a screen displaying a firetruck hurtling toward Cueball on what appears to be a layer of gas.]\nPonytail: The Bernoulli-Doppler-Leidenfrost-Peltzman-Sapir-Whorf-Dunning-Kruger-Stroop Effect states that if a speeding fire truck lifts off and hurtles towards you on a layer of superheated gas, you'll dive out of the way faster if the driver screams \"red!\" in a non -tonal language that has a word for \"firefighter\" than if they scream \"green!\" in a tonal language with no word for \"firefighter\" which you think you're fluent in but aren't .\n","explanation":"The BDLPSWDKS Effect in the title is an acronym for Bernoulli-Doppler-Leidenfrost-Peltzman-Sapir-Whorf-Dunning-Kruger-Stroop Effect, as explained by Ponytail in the comic. She stands in front of a slide that shows Cueball being subjected to this effect.\nThe effect mentioned appears to be a mashup of seven scientific principles (with nine scientists' names included) from physics and social sciences, with elements from each principle appearing in the resulting description of the effect:\nThis comic is probably a comment on the \"replication crisis\" in social psychology which has been in the news recently . For example, studies finding that merely thinking about intelligent people (e.g., writing down the attributes of a professor) will actually improve performance on math tests were once widely believed, and this \"intelligence priming\" effect is even included in textbooks. However, recent attempts to reproduce these effects have mostly failed and this failure to replicate is true of many social priming effects as well as other experiments in social psychology. Randall is also mocking the complicated, or even convoluted, setups often used in these experiments.\nUsually, for an effect to be considered real, the scientific method requires the effect to be replicated by different experimenters in different times and places. It is hard to imagine several scientists in different parts of the world creating the setup to replicate this effect; however the title text mentions, sarcastically, that it has been done countless times.\nMany other xkcd strips have commented on the ease with which surprising and novel, but false, results can be published in the scientific literature, such as 1478: P-Values and 882: Significant .\n[Ponytail stands next to a screen displaying a firetruck hurtling toward Cueball on what appears to be a layer of gas.]\nPonytail: The Bernoulli-Doppler-Leidenfrost-Peltzman-Sapir-Whorf-Dunning-Kruger-Stroop Effect states that if a speeding fire truck lifts off and hurtles towards you on a layer of superheated gas, you'll dive out of the way faster if the driver screams \"red!\" in a non -tonal language that has a word for \"firefighter\" than if they scream \"green!\" in a tonal language with no word for \"firefighter\" which you think you're fluent in but aren't .\n"}
{"id":1532,"title":"New Horizons","image_title":"New Horizons","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1532","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_horizons.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1532:_New_Horizons","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are standing in front of a large computer console. Cueball's hands are on the keyboard; both are looking at the screen.] Cueball: We made it! After all these years, New Horizons is finally revealing the surface of Pluto! Ponytail: Take that , Dawn team.\n[In the next four frames, we see photos, entirely black except for a circle in the middle. The circle is initially small, indistinct and appears in shades of grey. Successive circles are larger showing more color and shade variation. In the last, we see a blurry but recognizable outline of Africa, the Middle East and part of Western Asia, along with some clouds. The lighting pattern suggests that it is daytime in Africa, sometime in the northern summer.]\n[A close-up of the two at the console.] Cueball: OK, who did the calculations for the Jupiter slingshot maneuver? Ponytail: (facing away from the computer console) Dammit, Steve...\n","explanation":"New Horizons is a NASA mission launched in 2006 to study the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons. Its closest approach to Pluto was on July 14, 2015 ( NASA countdown clock ), two weeks after the publication of this comic. In April and May 2015, it captured the first images of Pluto with enough resolution to see some details on Pluto's surface ( NASA photos from 12 April to 12 May ). These images are similar to the second panel of the comic, with Pluto shown as a gray dot only a few pixels wide. Dawn is a NASA mission launched in September 2007 to study the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres . Its closest approach to Vesta began on July 16, 2011 by the Vesta approach , and entered orbit around Ceres on 6 March 2015. And in fact the pictures of Ceres are still in a much better resolution like in this comic 1476: Ceres , but these images are also still mysterious.\nOn the day this comic was published, New Horizons was at 0.34 AU from Pluto and 32.55 AU from the Sun ( Johns Hopkins University's New Horizons page ). One Astronomical unit (AU) is the approximate distance of Earth from the Sun, or about 150 million kilometers.\nDistances from the Sun by semi-major axis : Vesta 2.36 AU; Ceres 2.77 AU; Jupiter 5.20 AU; Pluto 39.26 AU.\nA slingshot maneuver is a technique where a spacecraft is maneuvered or accelerated with the help of a gravitational field.  In the comic, presumably someone named Steve made the calculations for the New Horizons spacecraft to accelerate toward Pluto using Jupiter 's gravity.\nIn the first panel we see Cueball and Ponytail standing in front of a computer monitor and observing a series of images sent back from New Horizons as it approaches the planet. They are about to see the dwarf planet Pluto with the highest resolution ever.\nAs the spacecraft gets closer, the images return... Earth . Steve had miscalculated the gravity assist and the spacecraft was about to crash into Earth.\nBecause the spacecraft carries 10.9\u00a0kg (24\u00a0lb) of radioactive plutonium-238, a crash on Earth is extremely dangerous.  It was estimated that a worst-case scenario of total dispersal of on-board plutonium during the launch would spread the equivalent radiation of 80% the average annual dosage in North America from background radiation over an area with a radius of 105\u00a0km (65\u00a0miles) ( Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the New Horizons Mission ).  Because of decay during the flight, the situation would be slightly less dire if it crashed years later, but still a major disaster.\nLess importantly, this is a huge embarrassment, especially in front of the successful Dawn team, who were the first to get a probe to visit a dwarf planet. Part of the joke is the utter implausibility of such an error being made, and then not being detected.\nThe title text suggests the team is considering crashing the probe into Steve's house as punishment for his errors.  However, doing so would expose Steve's neighbors to potentially lethal levels of radiation.  Therefore, the team would most likely have to crash the probe into an unpopulated area or the sea, to minimize human exposure. Randall described what might happen if New Horizons crashed into one's car in his what if? blog [1] , and assuming the car was parked in the driveway the house would be similarly affected by the blast.\nLuckily this was not what happened and when New Horizons reached Pluto 1\u00bd month later Randall made this tribute to the achievement: 1551: Pluto and also on that day he released the first what if? in over three months, and it was called New Horizons .\nRandall has used a Steve in a similar context in 809: Los Alamos (set in 1945). If this is the same person, then 'Steve' would be at least 90 years old in 2015. A person named Steve also comes up with an inappropriate suggestion in 1672: Women on 20s .\n[Cueball and Ponytail are standing in front of a large computer console. Cueball's hands are on the keyboard; both are looking at the screen.] Cueball: We made it! After all these years, New Horizons is finally revealing the surface of Pluto! Ponytail: Take that , Dawn team.\n[In the next four frames, we see photos, entirely black except for a circle in the middle. The circle is initially small, indistinct and appears in shades of grey. Successive circles are larger showing more color and shade variation. In the last, we see a blurry but recognizable outline of Africa, the Middle East and part of Western Asia, along with some clouds. The lighting pattern suggests that it is daytime in Africa, sometime in the northern summer.]\n[A close-up of the two at the console.] Cueball: OK, who did the calculations for the Jupiter slingshot maneuver? Ponytail: (facing away from the computer console) Dammit, Steve...\n"}
{"id":1533,"title":"Antique Factory","image_title":"Antique Factory","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1533","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/antique_factory.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1533:_Antique_Factory","transcript":"[Beret Guy is leaving with a briefcase in hand.] Beret Guy: Gotta go - I'm late for work. Off-screen voice: Oh, where are you working now? Beret Guy: Antique factory!\n[Beret Guy arrives in a room with a chair, a table, and a small cabinet. He pulls out the chair.]\n[Beret Guy sits in the chair. He has placed the briefcase behind the chair.]\n[Beat panel.]\n","explanation":"Beret Guy has a new job with a paradoxical premise. When asked where he works, he says \" Antique factory!\" which is an oxymoron since one cannot build an antique object directly in a factory: Only when the item is old enough to be worth more than its original price (and will often have to have been in use during this time period), can it be called an antique.\nAt the \"factory\", Beret Guy walks up to a chair, a table, and a small cabinet, then simply sits down in the chair and does nothing else. Of course, one does not simply make or manufacture antiques - instead, one must wait. Beret Guy appears to be doing exactly this. The implication is that the \"antique factory\" is simply a place where furniture is stored until it becomes old enough to be considered \"antique\", and that Beret Guy doesn't perform any useful function (except perhaps using the items to make them look old and worn, or keeping an eye on the inventory so it won't be stolen).\nThe title text refers to allergy warning labels saying May contain nuts . More specifically, they may say \"Manufactured in a facility which also processes nuts\", \"Manufactured on equipment that also processes nuts\", or similar. These warnings indicate that bits of powder and oil from nuts may have been mixed into the product, creating a hazard to people with nut allergies. Sometimes these warnings are used for allergens besides nuts, but nuts are likely the most common.\nThe joke here is that of course the time that has passed for a specific item to become an antique will be the same time that has also passed while elsewhere nuts have grown. Thus the time that has inexorably passed to make a specific item antique will also have processed nuts.\nBeret Guy has previously \"traveled\" into the future in 209: Kayak . He has also previously waited for a long amount of time in 1088: Five Years .\n[Beret Guy is leaving with a briefcase in hand.] Beret Guy: Gotta go - I'm late for work. Off-screen voice: Oh, where are you working now? Beret Guy: Antique factory!\n[Beret Guy arrives in a room with a chair, a table, and a small cabinet. He pulls out the chair.]\n[Beret Guy sits in the chair. He has placed the briefcase behind the chair.]\n[Beat panel.]\n"}
{"id":1534,"title":"Beer","image_title":"Beer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1534","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/beer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1534:_Beer","transcript":"[Cueball and Hairy standing in front of a fridge.] Hairy: What do you drink? Stouts? Lagers? Cueball: Uh, anything's fine.\n[Cueball and Hairy holding beers and Hairy is drinking.] Cueball: ...do you ever think maybe we should just admit that all beer tastes kind of bad and everyone's just pretending?\n[Now Cueball drinks.] Hairy: Man, you are no fun at all. Cueball: Ok, got it. Not a word. Hairy: Dude, if you don't like it, don't drink it. Cueball: No, no, gotta do my part! Mmmmm!!!\n","explanation":"Hairy offers Cueball some beer from his fridge, and Cueball takes the opportunity to suggest that people should admit that beer tastes bad and stop pretending to like it. Hairy berates Cueball for making such an affirmation, and Cueball admits defeat, deciding to drink the beer anyway and pretend to like it to play his part in what he perceives to be a mass delusion.\nThere are two possible interpretations of this comic. One is that Cueball is right and that no one really likes beer, and everyone is just pretending in order to fit in. The other is that Hairy actually likes beer, but Cueball fails to recognize that possibility, assumes Hairy is faking it, and plays along.\nIn the case where Cueball is correct, the comic would imply that beer doesn't actually taste good, and people instead pretend to like beer to conform to social norms. The theory is that this pretense is perpetuated by advertising and peer pressure , which present beer as a naturally pleasant beverage. In this interpretation, Cueball, having failed to break the mutual knowledge barrier , admits defeat and joins Hairy in pretending to enjoy beer.\nThe second case would mean that Cueball mistaken in assuming that nobody likes beer, either because he fails to empathize with those who have a different experience than his, or because he's heard from other people who also admitted not to like beer, and extrapolated that opinion to everyone (perhaps assuming that such admissions are underrepresented due to the cultural bias in favor of drinking ).\nThe title text expands on Cueball's perspective, stating ( sarcastically ) that he feels no peer pressure to like beer. The pressure to drink beer or other alcoholic drinks is a well-known phenomenon, especially among adolescents and young adults .\n[Cueball and Hairy standing in front of a fridge.] Hairy: What do you drink? Stouts? Lagers? Cueball: Uh, anything's fine.\n[Cueball and Hairy holding beers and Hairy is drinking.] Cueball: ...do you ever think maybe we should just admit that all beer tastes kind of bad and everyone's just pretending?\n[Now Cueball drinks.] Hairy: Man, you are no fun at all. Cueball: Ok, got it. Not a word. Hairy: Dude, if you don't like it, don't drink it. Cueball: No, no, gotta do my part! Mmmmm!!!\n"}
{"id":1535,"title":"Words for Pets","image_title":"Words for Pets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1535","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/words_for_pets.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1535:_Words_for_Pets","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] Words I use to refer to a pet over the years I live with it:\n[Inside the box are four diagrams. Each diagram contains three elliptical sections containing the previous one, each section is drawn identical from diagram to diagram and they are labeled the same way from diagram to diagram. A fourth section (a red ellipse) moves from diagram to diagram and its label changes from diagram to diagram.]\n[The red section of the first diagram mainly overlaps the innermost section, but about a third of it is in the second section. The labels are written above the three white sections and then inside the red section. The labels from inside and out and last the label of the red section:] The pet's name Words related to the pet Coherent words of any kind First year\n[The red section of the second diagram mainly overlaps the right part of the second section, but it just touches both the first and the third section. The labels are written above the three white sections and then inside the red section. The labels from inside and out and last the label of the red section:] The pet's name Words related to the pet Coherent words of any kind Second year\n[The red section of the third diagram mainly overlaps the right part of the third section, but about a third of it is inside the second section and a small part is outside of the third section. The labels are written above the three white sections and then inside the red section. The labels from inside and out and last the label of the red section:] The pet's name Words related to the pet Coherent words of any kind Third year\n[The red section of the fourth diagram is completely outside the third section and has to be so far to the right, that the other sections has been moved from the center of the frame to the left. The labels are written above the three white sections and then inside the red section. The labels from inside and out and last the label of the red section:] The pet's name Words related to the pet Coherent words of any kind Fourth year onward\n","explanation":"The comic shows four similar Euler diagrams , one for each of the first four years of living with a pet . The diagrams depict sets of words which have varying efficacy in actually identifying the pet, and each one shows how the words used by Randall to refer to his pet change year by year and becoming less and less specific as time goes on.\nIn the first year it is dominated by the actual name of the pet or words closely related. For example, a dog named Lassie might be called either \" Lassie \", \"dog\", \"collie\" or \"boy\/girl\".\nMoving on to the second year, these related words like \"dog\" and \"collie\" get more abundant while the actual name is seldom used. Phrases such as \"good dog\" or \"here, boy\" are likely common. Giving a dog the name \"Dog\" is so common that there is a trope about that.\nIn the third year, the pet's name is no longer used at all and the owner probably uses simple phrases like \"come\" or \"come here\" to call the pet, omitting the name. This is also probably referring to expletives.\nThe fourth year entails the use of just any sound, not coherent words . This may be referring to something like baby talk , attempted mimicry of the pet's vocalizations, or whatever random sounds the owner has discovered that get a response from the pet.\nThis development can be attributed to the fact that some animals don't listen to their own name but rather react to the sound of the voice of their owner. It could also refer to the growing bond between owner and the pet, as well as the effect described in 231: Cat Proximity .\nThe title text suggests that the inevitable result of this continuing pattern is that by the seventh year, Randall will be communicating with the pet in its own language. This might refer to the tendency of some pet owners to mimic or imitate their pets' vocalizations, as if speaking to them. Alternatively, this could be interpreted as a joke that pets don't have proper language and the owner has degenerated to a lack of language themselves as time goes on.\nThe title text and the caption makes it a little difficult to be certain if the comic refers to when you talk about your pet to other people (\"my dog is always hungry\") or when you call at it, which would be the only time it would make sense to use coherent words in the animal's own language - \"Woof\" = come here.\n[Caption above the frame:] Words I use to refer to a pet over the years I live with it:\n[Inside the box are four diagrams. Each diagram contains three elliptical sections containing the previous one, each section is drawn identical from diagram to diagram and they are labeled the same way from diagram to diagram. A fourth section (a red ellipse) moves from diagram to diagram and its label changes from diagram to diagram.]\n[The red section of the first diagram mainly overlaps the innermost section, but about a third of it is in the second section. The labels are written above the three white sections and then inside the red section. The labels from inside and out and last the label of the red section:] The pet's name Words related to the pet Coherent words of any kind First year\n[The red section of the second diagram mainly overlaps the right part of the second section, but it just touches both the first and the third section. The labels are written above the three white sections and then inside the red section. The labels from inside and out and last the label of the red section:] The pet's name Words related to the pet Coherent words of any kind Second year\n[The red section of the third diagram mainly overlaps the right part of the third section, but about a third of it is inside the second section and a small part is outside of the third section. The labels are written above the three white sections and then inside the red section. The labels from inside and out and last the label of the red section:] The pet's name Words related to the pet Coherent words of any kind Third year\n[The red section of the fourth diagram is completely outside the third section and has to be so far to the right, that the other sections has been moved from the center of the frame to the left. The labels are written above the three white sections and then inside the red section. The labels from inside and out and last the label of the red section:] The pet's name Words related to the pet Coherent words of any kind Fourth year onward\n"}
{"id":1536,"title":"The Martian","image_title":"The Martian","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1536","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_martian.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1536:_The_Martian","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk using a computer and White Hat walks in.] Cueball: Ooh, trailer for The Martian! White Hat: What's that? Cueball: Movie of a book I liked. White Hat: Should I read it?\n[Cueball pivots on chair and turns away from computer to face White Hat.] Cueball: Depends. You know the scene in Apollo 13 where the guy says \"we have to figure out how to connect this thing to this thing using this table full of parts or the astronauts will all die? White Hat: Yeah?\n[Cueball pivots on chair again and resumes using computer while talking. White Hat looks at his smart phone.] Cueball: The Martian is for people who wish the whole movie had just been more of that scene. White Hat: How on earth did that become a big-budget thing with Matt Damon? Cueball: No idea, but I'm so excited.\nIn a video interview by Adam Savage with Andy Weir the author of The Martian says that his goal was to make the whole book like the mentioned scene from Apollo 13 - exactly what the comic is saying. The video was posted on YouTube the day after the xkcd comic.\nIn the end, The Martian likely didn't disappoint the big-budget movie makers, grossing more than $630 million against a budget of $108 million.\n","explanation":"Cueball is very excited about seeing that the trailer for The Martian is finally released, because he really liked the book. Cueball most likely represents Randall himself in this comic.\nThis trailer for The Martian was released on Monday, June 8, 2015, two days before this comic, although a teaser \"viral\" trailer had been released the previous day. The film, starring Matt Damon ( The Bourne Identity ), is directed by Ridley Scott ( Alien ). It was released in the United States on October 2, 2015.\nThe Martian is based on a book of the same name by Andy Weir . The book is very popular among nerds. The plot is \u00ada cross between the film Apollo 13 and the plot of the novel Robinson Crusoe \u2014 but just on Mars .\nCueball is telling White Hat about this trailer and the book, thus White Hat asks if he should read it. Cueball then describes a scene from Apollo 13: You know the scene in Apollo 13 where the guy says \"we have to figure out how to connect this thing to this thing using this table full of parts or the astronauts will all die?\" And he then tells White Hat that The Martian is like that the whole way through. What is actually said in the mentioned scene is: We gotta find a way to make this fit into the hole for this using nothing but that. The first part being a large square box and the other a smaller cylinder.\nThe film Apollo 13 is based on the true historical event of the Apollo 13 incident where the astronauts find themselves in a damaged spacecraft. They evacuated from the Apollo Command Module , losing all its life support systems, to the Lunar Module which was designed only for two people for two days instead of three people for four days. One issue the crew faced was a buildup of carbon dioxide. In order to resolve the issue, the crew needed to find a way to attach a square-shaped air-cleaning cartridge from the command module to the circular receptacle of the lunar module: literally fitting a square peg into a round hole. In one brief scene , the Mission Control staff gather together a box of items equivalent to what the crew would also have on-board and sit down with the mandate to figure out how the astronauts can connect the two with the items available to them. In that case, the ground crew took on the task of trial and error given the availability of backup supplies in case they damaged or destroyed some of the supplies. Once a working solution was devised, specific instructions were relayed to the astronauts. Cueball suggests that The Martian essentially consists primarily of the type of problem-solving shown in that scene (as was suggested by the author, Andy Weir, in this interview). The Apollo 13 scene is actually referenced in the book, when the Matt Damon character says \"CO2 isn't a problem. (...) All systems use standard filters (Apollo 13 taught us important lessons).\"\nIn the final panel, White Hat, who probably would not be so interested in this kind of story, wonders how a novel based on that kind of seemingly cerebral and procedural problem-solving became a big-budget film starring Damon. Big-budget films are generally films with a great deal of special effects and often also action sequences likely to draw big audiences \u2014 and to gain big returns. Matt Damon has become a high-profile big-budget star known for action films like the Bourne film series .\nOn the day the movie was released in the US, Randall went to see it and released this comic about it: 1585: Similarities .\nIn 2561: Moonfall a similar discussion of an upcoming movie is made for Moonfall . But in that case it is the scientific inaccuracy that is the subject, and the huge explosion that makes it worth seeing anyway... maybe?\nSpoiler alert: The title text references a particular part of The Martian' s story: The astronaut stranded on Mars has previously established communications with Earth by repurposing the Pathfinder space probe that NASA landed on Mars in 1997. While working on another piece of equipment, he accidentally subjects the probe to an electrical short-circuit, destroying its electronics and \"bricking\" it. \" Bricking \" is a term in consumer electronics which essentially means to cause an electronic device to become non-functional and essentially no more useful than a \"brick\". The term is commonly used in respect of an unrecoverable failure of software and often a corruption of firmware . An unexpected \"bricking\" can be very surprising, and in a case where the item is critical, could be devastating.  This bricking scene from the book was left out of the movie.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk using a computer and White Hat walks in.] Cueball: Ooh, trailer for The Martian! White Hat: What's that? Cueball: Movie of a book I liked. White Hat: Should I read it?\n[Cueball pivots on chair and turns away from computer to face White Hat.] Cueball: Depends. You know the scene in Apollo 13 where the guy says \"we have to figure out how to connect this thing to this thing using this table full of parts or the astronauts will all die? White Hat: Yeah?\n[Cueball pivots on chair again and resumes using computer while talking. White Hat looks at his smart phone.] Cueball: The Martian is for people who wish the whole movie had just been more of that scene. White Hat: How on earth did that become a big-budget thing with Matt Damon? Cueball: No idea, but I'm so excited.\nIn a video interview by Adam Savage with Andy Weir the author of The Martian says that his goal was to make the whole book like the mentioned scene from Apollo 13 - exactly what the comic is saying. The video was posted on YouTube the day after the xkcd comic.\nIn the end, The Martian likely didn't disappoint the big-budget movie makers, grossing more than $630 million against a budget of $108 million.\n"}
{"id":1537,"title":"Types","image_title":"Types","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1537","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/types.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1537:_Types","transcript":"[Caption above the black part of the comic:] My new language is great, but it has a few quirks regarding type:\n[The rest of the comic is written in a black rectangle. All text to the left of \">\" is written in gray. Text to the right of the \">\" on the lines with numbers are in white, and then gray text on the other lines. There seems to be a missing \">\" after line no. 3.] [1]> 2+\"2\" => \"4\" [2]> \"2\"+[] => \"[2]\" [3] (2\/0) = > NaN [4]> (2\/0)+2 = > NaP [5]> \"\" + \"\" = > ' \"+\" ' [6]> [1,2,3]+2 = > False [7]> [1,2,3]+4 = > True [8]> 2\/(2-(3\/2+1\/2)) = > NaN.000000000000013 [9]> Range(\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\") = > (' \" ',\"! \",\" \",\"!\",' \" ') [10]> + 2 = > 12 [11]> 2+2 = > Done [14]> Range(1,5) = > (1,4,3,4,5) [13]> Floor(10.5) = > | = > | = > | = > |_ _ _10.5_ _ _\n","explanation":"This comic is a series of programming jokes about a ridiculous new programming language, perhaps inspired by Mathematica and Wolfram Language \u2014 the latter was used by Randall many times before. Maybe it's also inspired by Gary Bernhardt's CodeMash 2012 lightning talk on JavaScript's unpredictable typing. In the talk, the highly technical audience was unable to correctly guess the results of adding various JavaScript types and roared with laughter when they were revealed. The programming language shown in this comic has types even more unpredictable than JavaScript.\nMost regular programming languages distinguish types, e.g. integers, strings, lists\u2026 all of which have different behaviours. But for instance, the operation \"+\" is usually conventionally defined over more than one of these types. Applied to two integers, it returns their sum.  Applied to two strings (denoted by being enclosed in quotes) it concatenates them:\nWhile these behaviours are standard, conventional, and intuitive, there is a huge amount of variation among programming languages when you apply an operation like \"+\" to different types. One logical approach is to always return an error in all cases of type mixing, but it is often practical to allow some case mixing, since it can hugely simplify expressions. Variation and lack of a clearly more intuitive behaviour leads some languages to have weird results when you mix types.\nWeird results abound in the new XKCD programming language:\nThe title text contains three further examples relating to color. color.rgb(\"blue\") returns the hexadecimal code for pure blue (as would be used in HTML, for example), which is how a real programming language might work. The lookup for \"yellowish blue\" returns \"NaN\" (Not a Number) again, which makes sense at one level because there is no such color as \"yellowish blue\" (yellow and blue are opposites on the RGB color triangle , making yellowish-blue an impossible colour , which can only be perceived with great difficulty through contrived figures). However a more typical result would have been a failure indicating that the color database does not include the name, in the same way that a typo such as \"bluw\" would. (Note that HTML does explicitly attempt to handle all \"color names\". For the record, \"yellowish blue\" is a dark blue with an imperceptible amount of red \u2014 #0E00B0 .) Similarly sorting the colors would normally produce some defined ordering, such as alphabetical, but in this language it generates the string \"rainbow\". It seems that Randall's new language understands color theory in an unusually deep way.\n[Caption above the black part of the comic:] My new language is great, but it has a few quirks regarding type:\n[The rest of the comic is written in a black rectangle. All text to the left of \">\" is written in gray. Text to the right of the \">\" on the lines with numbers are in white, and then gray text on the other lines. There seems to be a missing \">\" after line no. 3.] [1]> 2+\"2\" => \"4\" [2]> \"2\"+[] => \"[2]\" [3] (2\/0) = > NaN [4]> (2\/0)+2 = > NaP [5]> \"\" + \"\" = > ' \"+\" ' [6]> [1,2,3]+2 = > False [7]> [1,2,3]+4 = > True [8]> 2\/(2-(3\/2+1\/2)) = > NaN.000000000000013 [9]> Range(\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\") = > (' \" ',\"! \",\" \",\"!\",' \" ') [10]> + 2 = > 12 [11]> 2+2 = > Done [14]> Range(1,5) = > (1,4,3,4,5) [13]> Floor(10.5) = > | = > | = > | = > |_ _ _10.5_ _ _\n"}
{"id":1538,"title":"Lyrics","image_title":"Lyrics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1538","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lyrics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1538:_Lyrics","transcript":"[Cueball sits in a chair holding something. A speaker on a counter behind him is transmitting music. Four lines of wavy undecipherable lyrics emanate from the speaker. The lyrics are surrounded by musical notes. Below is the best attempt to write this down in text, also using capitals when they are clearly there in the comic.] I CANT\u20a3\u2207EN +EL\u04bc \u22a4HER A|N\u2283\u0413\u2295N6 \u0192HE W(AN NAp. HAD\u03b2E A\u016b\u03c4|\u0192A!NNNG\u2229f\u04a0ILL... FOR\u2661ITiNn\u22a3GLOOOO!VEEE\u00a0?.-\n[Caption below the frame:] Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be able to understand song lyrics without looking them up.\nGet up in the morning Get up in the morning slaving for bread, sir sleeping for for bread, sir So that every mouth Sold out to every monk can be fed and beef-head Poor oh-oh me Israelites me ears are alight\nMy wife an' my kids Why find my kids? them a pack up an' a leave me They buck up and a-leave me Darlin' she said, Darling Cheese head I was yours to be seen I was yards too greasy Poor oh-oh me Israelites me ears are alight\nI think that's what he says But I need to hear it on a Maxell (There is a picture of a cassette tape below that last line of text.)\n","explanation":"For some modern songs, the vocalist chooses to perform the track in a way that emphasizes emotion, accent or style over clear pronunciation of the lyrics. Some forms of music, for example the Jazz style Scat, use purely nonsensical lyrics while some styles of dance music use a single line of lyrics repeated throughout the track.\nThere are also certain types of people that may describe themselves as \"lyric deaf\", which is sort of the lyrical equivalent to being tone deaf , although it doesn't have an underlying medical understanding. Some people that describe themselves as tone deaf are even quite musically capable.\nThe comic is illustrating (in text form) how listening to such a song feels before you have learned what the actual lyrics are. The lyrics are represented in an indecipherable way, with a few mildly recognizable words. This represents the auditory experience of being able to hear and understand some words (perhaps incorrectly), but not all of them.\nAnother example of this experience can be seen in this British TV commercial from the 1980s, showing someone who has misheard Desmond Dekker song Israelites so for instance the line Poor me Israelites becomes Oh-oh my ears are alight . See more details in the trivia section.\nThis experience is similar to that shown by the character Havelock Vetinari the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork , in Terry Pratchett 's Discworld book Soul Music (see part of book here ). Rather than listening to music, he preferred to read the printed sheet music:\nIn fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets, all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe... well, the idea made him shudder.\nFor a related experience see Mondegreen .\nThe title text elaborates on the fact that Randall has the same experience when trying to understand song lyrics as when he sees text in his dreams. The last part of the title text is written in strange scripts to illustrate how he feels when seeing text in his dreams. Translated it says: it's hard to read and I can't focus.\nNote that it looks like the song lyrics were written by drawing in a tool, like MS Paint, and then cutting out pieces and shifting them slightly.\nThe closest guess on the lyrics is this:\nI can't even tell her Anything she wanna Had outstanding skill Beautiful Forgetting love.\n(Note that the first line also might be I can't even help her .)\nIt is very likely that Randall completely made up these lyrics himself and if any song coincidentally share some part of them it only happens because Randall has chosen some very clich\u00e9 lyrics, that would thus be likely to occur in some pop songs.\nNevertheless, here below are some possible song references, in which the exact line from above occurs:\nJoe Budden 's song More of Me From the lyrics : World keeps spinning, learned sinners keep sinning And I can't even tell her some fights ain't fight worthy Cause my pops got 20 years clean, but her pops got 20 years dirty\nBill Anderson's song Baby's Blue Again From the lyrics : Oh Lord, and I can't even help her All I can do is just wait Until the clouds are all blown away\nJohnny Cinco's song She Wanna From the lyrics : Buy here anything she wanna Fly in anything she wanna Try on anything she wanna\nChino Brown's song Love Again From the lyrics : I was at a point in my life Of just forgetting love Until the day you touched me\n[Cueball sits in a chair holding something. A speaker on a counter behind him is transmitting music. Four lines of wavy undecipherable lyrics emanate from the speaker. The lyrics are surrounded by musical notes. Below is the best attempt to write this down in text, also using capitals when they are clearly there in the comic.] I CANT\u20a3\u2207EN +EL\u04bc \u22a4HER A|N\u2283\u0413\u2295N6 \u0192HE W(AN NAp. HAD\u03b2E A\u016b\u03c4|\u0192A!NNNG\u2229f\u04a0ILL... FOR\u2661ITiNn\u22a3GLOOOO!VEEE\u00a0?.-\n[Caption below the frame:] Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be able to understand song lyrics without looking them up.\nGet up in the morning Get up in the morning slaving for bread, sir sleeping for for bread, sir So that every mouth Sold out to every monk can be fed and beef-head Poor oh-oh me Israelites me ears are alight\nMy wife an' my kids Why find my kids? them a pack up an' a leave me They buck up and a-leave me Darlin' she said, Darling Cheese head I was yours to be seen I was yards too greasy Poor oh-oh me Israelites me ears are alight\nI think that's what he says But I need to hear it on a Maxell (There is a picture of a cassette tape below that last line of text.)\n"}
{"id":1539,"title":"Planning","image_title":"Planning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1539","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/planning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1539:_Planning","transcript":"[Megan and Ponytail are walking] Ponytail: Why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook all this control over our lives? Megan: I dunno. Megan: Our species built thousands of nuclear weapons, scattered them around the planet, and then moved on to other things. Megan: Maybe it's best to accept that some of this big-picture planning is just happening on autopilot.\n","explanation":"Big companies have always tried to get the greatest amount of information from their customers, because that translates into more money earned. However, ability to gather, store and process such information is limited by the technology available. With the recent development of computers, this ability has grown far more than anyone could have suspected just 20 years ago; to the point that companies like Google or Facebook get almost unimaginable amounts of data from their users; and this data is gathered and stored automatically and can be efficiently accessed.\nThis data is routinely used to, for example, tailor online ads to the browsing history of the user seeing the ad. They could potentially be used for more evil purposes, like selling the medical history of users to insurance companies. Many users don't feel that they're giving out so much information, and in fact that few of them have given Google or Facebook their medical history. However some leaks have proven quite the opposite. In the AOL leak referenced in 155: Search History , searches for \"how does a male's cocaine use affect a fetus\", \"hysterectomy\" or \"8 alcohol drinks a day\", surely would be interesting for a medical insurance company to know.\nIn the comic, Ponytail is puzzled because people are not worried about Google or Facebook using their information in evil ways; however Megan raises a quite fair point, namely that the huge amount of nuclear weapons in existence is much scarier, and that was worrying to the general public in the 1980s, however people have grown tired of that and now concerns have moved to internet privacy only because it's \"new\". What is perceived as dangerous or worrying follows trends and fashions not directly related to real danger (i.e. \"happen on auto-pilot\"). The point Megan is making is that maybe it's better to just accept that things work in this way and go with the flow. This is very similar to what happens in 1480: Super Bowl or 1534: Beer .\nThe title text hypothesizes a similar conversation being held ten years later (presumably in 2025, ten years after the comic was published), in which the two aspects of the above have been inexplicably mixed. A future equivalent to Ponytail asks why we all think it is OK to hand over the control of our nuclear weapons to Google and Facebook, which would certainly be a nonsensical (and deeply troubling) route to take. This could also be seen as another step toward the singularity , from which perspective handing over control of nuclear weapons could be desirable, catastrophic, implicit and\/or unavoidable.\nThis comic was posted on the day after Vladimir Putin had announced that Russia would add 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear stockpile within the year.\nWithin a year Randall has made several other comics about nuclear weapons, the first of these, 1520: Degree-Off , came just 1\u00bd month before this one. Later  these two comics were released early in 2016: 1626: Judgment Day and 1655: Doomsday Clock . Nuclear weapons are also mentioned twice in Thing Explainer , specifically they are explained in the explanation for Machine for burning cities about thermonuclear bombs , but they are also mentioned in Boat that goes under the sea about a submarine that carries nukes. All three comics and both explanations in the book, does like this comic, comment on how crazy it is that we have created enough firepower to obliterate Earth several times (or at least scourge it for any human life) [ citation needed ] .\n[Megan and Ponytail are walking] Ponytail: Why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook all this control over our lives? Megan: I dunno. Megan: Our species built thousands of nuclear weapons, scattered them around the planet, and then moved on to other things. Megan: Maybe it's best to accept that some of this big-picture planning is just happening on autopilot.\n"}
{"id":1540,"title":"Hemingway","image_title":"Hemingway","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1540","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hemingway.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1540:_Hemingway","transcript":"Hemingway's Rough Drafts\n[A list of rough draft stories.] For sale: This Gullible Baby's Shoes Baby Shoes For Sale By Owner Actually, there's no evidence Hemingway wrote Free Shoes, Provided You Overpower Baby For Sale: Weird Baby's Toe Shoes For Sale: Baby Shoes \u2713 Prime eligible Though popularly attributed to Hemingway, the This Weird Trick Covers Baby Feet! For Sale: Baby Shoes, Just Hatched Sale: Seven-League Boots (Expedited Shipping) Complete this survey for free shoes! Shoes , by Ernest Hemingway [ citation needed ] This is my greatest short story. For sale: Baby shoes (-1) [cursed] <blink><marquee> Baby Shoes! <\/marquee><\/blink> For Sale: Baby-sized Saddle, Bobcat Hemingway Busted for Craigslist Shoe Scam\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the six-word short story For sale: baby shoes, never worn , which has been commonly attributed to famous author Ernest Hemingway (the disputed authorship of the story is referenced several times in the comic).\nThe comic plays on the fact that the original story takes the form of a short advertisement that might have been seen in a newspaper, and makes up alternate versions that use various modern 'standards' that did not exist in Hemingway's time. In keeping with the original, each example remains six words long. The title text obeys this rule, too. Many of the drafts poke fun at the tragedy that the original story suggests. With the original (\"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn\"), readers could infer that the baby who would have worn the shoes must have died. Randall tries to make the reader infer other, more absurd things instead.\nThe comic also alludes to Hemingway's practice of repeatedly re-working drafts of his novels before publication. For example, he is reported to have rewritten the final passage of A Farewell To Arms 39 times. Later editions of his works include these rough drafts, allowing the devoted reader to understand how the work developed.\nThe following are the various drafts offered in the comic.\nThe title text continues the reference to 325: A-Minus-Minus , but inverts the situation.  Rather than unexpectedly receiving a bobcat by package, this time the package contains a regular item instead of the expected bobcat. In keeping with the theme of the comic, the review is written in only six words.\nHemingway's Rough Drafts\n[A list of rough draft stories.] For sale: This Gullible Baby's Shoes Baby Shoes For Sale By Owner Actually, there's no evidence Hemingway wrote Free Shoes, Provided You Overpower Baby For Sale: Weird Baby's Toe Shoes For Sale: Baby Shoes \u2713 Prime eligible Though popularly attributed to Hemingway, the This Weird Trick Covers Baby Feet! For Sale: Baby Shoes, Just Hatched Sale: Seven-League Boots (Expedited Shipping) Complete this survey for free shoes! Shoes , by Ernest Hemingway [ citation needed ] This is my greatest short story. For sale: Baby shoes (-1) [cursed] <blink><marquee> Baby Shoes! <\/marquee><\/blink> For Sale: Baby-sized Saddle, Bobcat Hemingway Busted for Craigslist Shoe Scam\n"}
{"id":1541,"title":"Voice","image_title":"Voice","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1541","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voice.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1541:_Voice","transcript":"[Megan and Ponytail are walking.] Megan: Are you doing anything later? Ponytail: I was th- I can only control my voice once every six years. Please, you have to -inking of going out, but no real plans. Megan: ...What was that? Ponytail: Haha, what?\n","explanation":"During a casual talk with Megan , Ponytail suddenly interrupts her normal speech stating that she is for some reason only capable of controlling her own voice once every six years. Apparently only for a very brief time since she immediately returns to the casual talk, continuing her previous sentence mid-word before being able to tell Megan how she could help her. Upon Megan's confused request, she denies knowledge of the occurrence, although in a somewhat suspicious way, using possibly fake laughter.\nIt could be this was just a prank by Ponytail, to tease Megan, but given her fake laughter reply to Megan's inquiry and the continuing comment in the title text it seems most likely that Ponytail is indeed possessed by some sort of entity that prevents her from expressing her own thoughts, except for a very short time every six years. Of course this may just be her way of continuing with the prank; see a previous case of such a prank below .\nIn case it is not a prank it would thus appear that Ponytail's usual \"self\" is indeed this possessing entity. Whether this entity is actually aware that the \"real\" Ponytail did speak, or if it actually does not know that it was interrupted (since it continued mid-word) is not clear from the last response to Megan.\nThe title text suggests that Ponytail is possessed by some sort of inhuman entity , most likely an alien or AI , unfamiliar with movies and eating. See below for related comics .\nThe comic, 1530: Keyboard Mash , also revolves around the same theme of a non-human entity trying to convince other humans that it is in fact a human. This is most clearly referenced in the title text of this comic. In Keyboard Mash, it is a spider that tries to chat like it was a human, making statements that are true if you are human, but which humans would never utter in a conversation like here - put some food in our normal mouths! However, the pretended 'human' being (the spider) is not seen by the other person in this comic. As opposed to this one where Megan speaks directly with Ponytail.\nIt has already been established recently, in 1528: Vodka , that Ponytail's voice can be hijacked by non-human entities. That time it was the vodka she was drinking that took over. It is possible that this is continuing or caused by the same openness to possession as shown here. It is also possible that she simply thinks possession jokes are funny and once again jokes with Megan.\nSix years ago today, which according to this comic was the last time Ponytail had control of her own voice, this comic 600: Android Boyfriend was posted. Ponytail acquired an android boyfriend. It seems unlikely that this older comic has any relation with this particular episode - except that this comic mentions a six-year period and Ponytail is also in that comic.\nPonytail is mainly a filler character, showing up when two females are needed or when a large group of people are present.\nIt is important to note that Ponytail , like most xkcd stick figures , usually does not represent the same character in each comic. This Ponytail is likely unrelated to other instances of Ponytail.\n[Megan and Ponytail are walking.] Megan: Are you doing anything later? Ponytail: I was th- I can only control my voice once every six years. Please, you have to -inking of going out, but no real plans. Megan: ...What was that? Ponytail: Haha, what?\n"}
{"id":1542,"title":"Scheduling Conflict","image_title":"Scheduling Conflict","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1542","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scheduling_conflict.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1542:_Scheduling_Conflict","transcript":"[Picture showing a newspaper with a big headline over a picture. In the picture there is a banner over an empty lectern with a microphone. Only the headline and the text on the banner in the picture is readable. All other text in the newspaper is just lines.] National Scheduling Conflict Championships canceled Banner text: NSCC 2015\n","explanation":"There are two humorous features in this comic:\na pun formed by syntactic ambiguity ; and the farce of a major national event that is by nature self-defeating.\nThe comic shows a newspaper with a large headline:\nNational Scheduling Conflict Championships canceled\nMany readers naturally see a phrase break between the two lines, so that it means \"there has been a scheduling conflict on a national scale, which has caused championships to be cancelled\" (what the conflicts are, and which championships have been cancelled, is not made clear).\nHowever, the correct interpretation is implied by the picture of an empty lectern under a banner with the text NSCC 2015. The headline should be read like this:\nNational Scheduling Conflict Championships (NSCC) canceled\nThis comic thus envisions a \"National Scheduling Conflict Championship\" (NSCC), presumably as the culmination of some larger scheduling-conflict competition. It is unclear if the goal of the event is to have a scheduling conflict and miss it, or if there are actual challenges at the event, but this year's event has been canceled, most likely due to scheduling conflicts. Whether it is the contestants that miss the event, as it's their nature to always have a scheduling conflict, or if it is the organizers that have an issue is untold. The question is whether the event's cancellation is a success in itself or just a predictable failure of such an event.\nThe comic could also refer to the very common political ploy of using a \"scheduling conflict\" as an excuse to miss an event where the politician expects to be challenged or questioned on an issue he wishes to avoid. This is so frequent that it has become a clich\u00e9 in American politics.\nThe abbreviation NSCC is related to many other national sports organizations like NFL and NBA . (The most common use of it online seems to be for Nova Scotia Community College ).\nThe title text mentions that is was impossible to reach either a spokesperson for the organization (NSCC) or last year's world-champ (winner of the WSCC) for a comment. Thus continuing the problem with schedules for people involved in this type of championship. The world-champion could be assumed to be able to comment in this national championship (probably the American championship given that Randall is American), since the paper is looking for a comment on the national championship. But this proves that at least a world champion was crowned last year, so this type of competition is not always canceled.\nIt is not a necessity for a spokesperson for a sports organization to be good at the sport in question. However it will often be former competitors within the sport or at least people with interest in this kind of activity that takes an interest in such an organization, thus making it likely that they would also be good (or like to think they are good) at achieving scheduling conflicts.\nA similar type of competition was mentioned earlier in 1466: Phone Checking in which it was difficult to load the web page with the result of the competition because it was overloaded by all those compulsive phone-checkers that have an interest in such a contest. They continually try to reload the home page of the CPCC (i.e. compulsive phone-checking championship) making the web page go down.\n[Picture showing a newspaper with a big headline over a picture. In the picture there is a banner over an empty lectern with a microphone. Only the headline and the text on the banner in the picture is readable. All other text in the newspaper is just lines.] National Scheduling Conflict Championships canceled Banner text: NSCC 2015\n"}
{"id":1543,"title":"Team Effort","image_title":"Team Effort","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1543","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/team_effort.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1543:_Team_Effort","transcript":"[Megan is on a stage receiving an award from Ponytail, the latter of whom is standing behind a lectern.] Megan: I'd like to thank my director, my friends and family, and\u2013of course\u2013the writhing mass of gut bacteria inside me. Megan: I mean, there's like one or two pints of them in here; their cells outnumber mine! Megan: Anyway, this was a real team effort.\n","explanation":"Megan has won an award at a ceremony (presumably movie-related and possibly an Academy Award , as she mentions her director). When a person receives a major award, they give an acceptance speech which traditionally begins with the recipient thanking people who have helped them achieve the honour. Sometimes when a number of people are mentioned, the recipient will say that it was a team effort - a comment which elevates the \"helpers\" to virtually the same level as the recipient.\nMegan's acceptance speech takes things a step further; she thanks not only her director, family, and friends, but also the bacteria that populate her gastrointestinal tract. She states that the bacterial cells outnumber hers, likely referencing the misconception at the time that bacterial cells outnumber human cells by a factor of 10 to 1. More recent estimates have gotten values around 1:1. While the bacteria in the gut make digestion possible, the ecosystem formed by bacteria in the urogenital tract and on the skin also protect human health. In short, without them Megan would die \u2014 and not be able to win the award. To thank her bacteria is comparable to thanking her parents: they did not really contribute to the movie, but without them there would not have been a Megan, and no award.\nRecently, it has been shown that the gut bacteria has an effect on emotions, thoughts and mood. link\nIn the title text, Megan contemplates how to thank her microorganisms and considers to eat the trophy after having it cut in pieces. This is an extremely bad idea, because it might kill both her and the microorganisms.\nA pint is a volume of about half a liter (specifically, the U.S. fluid version is 28 and 7\/8 cu.in.).\n[Megan is on a stage receiving an award from Ponytail, the latter of whom is standing behind a lectern.] Megan: I'd like to thank my director, my friends and family, and\u2013of course\u2013the writhing mass of gut bacteria inside me. Megan: I mean, there's like one or two pints of them in here; their cells outnumber mine! Megan: Anyway, this was a real team effort.\n"}
{"id":1544,"title":"Margaret","image_title":"Margaret","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1544","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/margaret.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1544:_Margaret","transcript":"[Margaret, shown in full body, is alone. She is talking while looking out towards the reader.] Margaret: Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. Margaret: I know you're listening.\n[Zoom in on her face and torso.] Margaret: Are you scared, God? Margaret: Are you?\n[Zooming so far in that not even her whole face is visible.] Margaret: You should be.\n[Zooming far out showing her in a white silhouette against a black sky, standing on the white earth.] Margaret: Margaret is coming for you .\n","explanation":"This comic uses the starting lines of an innocent children's book and creates irony by delivering a dark message.\nIn the book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume , the opening lines are \"Are you still there, God? It's me, Margaret. I know you're there, God. I know you wouldn't have missed this for anything! Thank you, God. Thanks an awful lot...\" These lines describe a prayer, in which Margaret privately speaks to God, expressing gratitude and seeking guidance.\nIn the second and third panels, Margaret asks God \"Are you scared, God?\", and states \"You should be\". This is similar to threats delivered in some action movies, such as Taken, in which the protagonist or antagonist speaks directly to their opponent, issuing threats and indicating that they are coming after their opponent. The final panel is a shot of Margaret standing imposingly in a dark landscape, and a caption over the top of the image says \"Margaret is coming for you\", making this comic reminiscent of an action movie trailer. The irony is that \"Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.\" is a very innocent book, especially when compared to this type of action movie.\nThe title text is a mashup of three of Blume's other books: Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great , The Pain and the Great One , and Then Again, Maybe I Won't , and likely the inspiration for the dark lines in the comic.\n[Margaret, shown in full body, is alone. She is talking while looking out towards the reader.] Margaret: Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. Margaret: I know you're listening.\n[Zoom in on her face and torso.] Margaret: Are you scared, God? Margaret: Are you?\n[Zooming so far in that not even her whole face is visible.] Margaret: You should be.\n[Zooming far out showing her in a white silhouette against a black sky, standing on the white earth.] Margaret: Margaret is coming for you .\n"}
{"id":1545,"title":"Strengths and Weaknesses","image_title":"Strengths and Weaknesses","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1545","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/strengths_and_weaknesses.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1545:_Strengths_and_Weaknesses","transcript":"[Ponytail is shown sitting on a swivel chair, to the left of a desk.] Ponytail: What would you say is your biggest weakness?\n[The view expands to show Cueball sitting on another swivel chair, on the opposite side of the desk.] Cueball: Probably that I'm a giant tangle of parts that don't always work right, so I can die easily.\nPonytail: Biggest strength? Cueball: There will come a day when I'm either an ancestor to all living humans, or to none of them.\nPonytail: Where do you see yourself in five years? Cueball: Probably not the ancestor of all living humans yet. But you never know!\n","explanation":"Cueball is in a job interview and is being asked stereotypical job interview questions by Ponytail , \"What is your greatest weakness?\", \"What is your greatest strength?\" and \"Where do you see yourself in five years?\"\nIn a roundabout way, Cueball answers that he is a living organism, and as such he has inherent flaws which could cause him to die. This is a reference to the fact that biological systems are \"messy\" and are not always optimal in design or operation.  For example, cancer is a disease where the cellular machinery that governs cell replications breaks down and prolific cell division happens, endangering the organism through the creation of tumors. While this is a true weakness, it is also a weakness of all biological organisms and is not likely to help the interviewer determine if he is qualified for the job. However, it is likely to help the interviewer determine if he is right for the job \u2014 because the interviewer is likely to presume that a person who gives silly and unhelpful answers is not right for most positions.\nFor the second question Cueball answers that he will one day be the ancestor to all living humans or none of them. As you go farther and farther into the future the ratio of people alive will either go to 0% or 100% of the descendants of the character. The most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for humans is unknown but occurred some time after Mitochondrial Eve , around 140,000 years ago. If the MRCA's ancestors are traced back, the Identical ancestors point can be found, at which point the entire population are either ancestors of all living humans or of no living humans.\nIn the last frame, for Cueball to be the ancestor to all living humans within 5 years means that all the humans who are not his children or grandchildren (including Cueball himself), must have died in a near total extinction of the human race - his apparent optimism about the possibility of this occurring would therefore be worrisome.\nThe overarching joke is that, rather than answer Ponytail's questions with answers relevant to the job she's interviewing him for, Cueball is answering her questions from an existential standpoint. He may be assuming that she wishes to assess his fitness as an organism from a genetic perspective (in which his biggest limitation is survival time and mortality), or he may simply be misinterpreting or deliberately avoiding her questions from a professional perspective.\nThe title text takes this further, equating producing offspring during an interview (which would be awkward for all involved) with something that may actually help assess a candidate's efficacy as an employee, namely writing out a sorting algorithm on the spot, another stereotypical interview question (see also 1185: Ineffective Sorts , especially the bottom left panel).\nIn 1088: Five Years , Beret Guy is also asked where he will be in five years, and he later interviews Hairy in 1293: Job Interview .  Other job interviews were portrayed in 125: Marketing Interview and 1094: Interview .\n[Ponytail is shown sitting on a swivel chair, to the left of a desk.] Ponytail: What would you say is your biggest weakness?\n[The view expands to show Cueball sitting on another swivel chair, on the opposite side of the desk.] Cueball: Probably that I'm a giant tangle of parts that don't always work right, so I can die easily.\nPonytail: Biggest strength? Cueball: There will come a day when I'm either an ancestor to all living humans, or to none of them.\nPonytail: Where do you see yourself in five years? Cueball: Probably not the ancestor of all living humans yet. But you never know!\n"}
{"id":1546,"title":"Tamagotchi Hive","image_title":"Tamagotchi Hive","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1546","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tamagotchi_hive.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1546:_Tamagotchi_Hive","transcript":"My Hobby [A tree graph of Tamagotchis.] Running a massive distributed computing project that simulates trillions and trillions of Tamagotchis and keeps them all constantly fed and happy\n","explanation":"A part of the \" My Hobby \" series, this describes a distributed computing network using an automated system to simultaneously run trillions of Tamagotchis. As with most of the \"My Hobby\" series, the concept would work, and is closely connected to real world activities, but twisted enough to make it inherently absurd.\nA Tamagotchi is a keychain-sized virtual pet simulation game from 1996. Ostensibly for children, they had appeal for people of all ages. The characters are colorful and simplistically designed creatures based on animals, objects, or people. Beginning with the 2004 Tamagotchi Plus\/Connection, a second wave of Tamagotchi toys emerged, featuring a different graphic design by JINCO and gameplay which elaborated upon the first generations. However, the story behind the games remained the same: Tamagotchis are a small alien species that deposited an egg on Earth to see what life was like, and it is up to the player to raise the egg into an adult creature. The creature goes through several stages of growth, and will develop differently depending on the care the player provides, with better care resulting in an adult creature that is smarter, happier, and requires less attention. Gameplay can vary widely between models, and some models, such as TamagoChu, require little to no care from the player. Tamagotchi has a shrinking fan base.\nDistributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system is a software system in which components located on networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages. The components interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal. Examples of distributed systems vary from service-oriented architecture based systems to multiplayer online games to peer-to-peer applications. Distributed computing is often used for tasks that require resources which would otherwise be impossible or prohibitively expensive to manage with single computers. This may include large Bitcoin network mining operations, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid or, yes, running trillions of simultaneous Tamagotchis using an AI protocol. That said, using AI to keep trillions of Tamagotchis perfectly taken care of is a complete waste of time; the whole point of Tamagotchi is the challenge of caring for the digital pet yourself.\n\"The Singularity\" in the title text refers to the technological singularity ; a concept prevalent in science fiction and discussions of artificial intelligence (AI). The idea is that AI would become so sophisticated compared to a human brain that no human would be able to predict its behaviour, motivations etc. from that point onward, and potentially human history after that point would therefore become unpredictable, as AIs would play dominant roles in determining its direction. It uses the metaphor of a mathematical \"singularity\", which is a point where established rules can no longer apply (for example, in a black hole or during the Big Bang, physical conditions are such that the physical laws we use can no longer meaningfully predict what happens). An AI that is more sophisicated than a human brain could presumably then simulate human brains within itself, making it possible to upload human consciousness into a machine-simulated environment (see simulated reality and the simulation hypothesis ). Thus, much science fiction that is based on the idea of The Singularity also focuses on the creation of a virtual world that much of the human race decides to plug itself into, much like the Tamagotchi Hive that Randall has created. Randall's mind, and the processing power in his computer, is far greater than any individual Tamagotchi mind, so simulating Tamagotchis becomes trivial for Randall, and no Tamagotchi could predict or control its own history with Randall around, in a humorous analogy with the Singularity concept.\nMy Hobby [A tree graph of Tamagotchis.] Running a massive distributed computing project that simulates trillions and trillions of Tamagotchis and keeps them all constantly fed and happy\n"}
{"id":1547,"title":"Solar System Questions","image_title":"Solar System Questions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1547","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/solar_system_questions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1547:_Solar_System_Questions","transcript":"Questions I have about the solar system (some answered)\nWhy is the the Moon so blotchy? Lava Why are all the blotches on the near side? Did Mars have seas? Yes (briefly?) Was there life on Mars? What's Titan like? Cold, yellow, lakes + rivers (methane) What was Earth like during the Hadean? Is the Oort Cloud a real thing? Why is the Sun's corona so hot? Something about magnets? What are comets like? Precipitous Where's Philae, exactly? What's Pluto like? [Soon!] What's Charon like? Why don't we have in-between-sized planets? What's Ceres like? [Working on it!] Why is Europa so weird-looking and pretty? Ice over a water ocean Why is Io so weird-looking? Sulfur volcanoes (? in the wrong places?) Why are so many Kuiper Belt objects red? What are those spots on Ceres? What's in the seas under Europa's ice? Which of the other moons have seas? Several What are the big white things in Titan's Lakes? What do Jupiter's clouds look like up close? What's all that red stuff in the Great Red Spot? What's pushing the Pioneer Probes? Heat from the RTG What pushes spacecraft slightly during flybys? Where are all the Sun's Neutrinos? Oscillating Why is there so much air on Titan? Why does the Kuiper Belt Stop? Why is Iapetus weird-colored? Why does Iapetus have a belt? What's the deal with Miranda? Did Uranus and Neptune change places? Did the Late Heavy Bombardment happen? Did life start before it? Is Europa covered in ice spikes? Why haven't we built a big inflatable extreme sports complex on the moon?\n","explanation":"This comic is a list of questions which Randall has about the Solar System, which at first glance may appear to be things that Randall would like to learn about.\nIn actuality, most of the questions have not been satisfactorily answered or proven by anyone in the scientific community .\nThe title text refers to the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup which was won by the USA the day before. The nylon wings and flying may be a reference to two passages from 3001: The Final Odyssey, one where Frank Poole tries out various wings while in an extremely low gravity environment, and one where he remarks while watching Swan Lake that Tchaikovsky could never have imagined a performance where the dancers were actually flying (due to aforementioned low gravity). This is also a reference to the last point on the list, because if we had such a stadium on the moon, maybe it would be possible to use such wings to make very long floating leaps.\nQuestions I have about the solar system (some answered)\nWhy is the the Moon so blotchy? Lava Why are all the blotches on the near side? Did Mars have seas? Yes (briefly?) Was there life on Mars? What's Titan like? Cold, yellow, lakes + rivers (methane) What was Earth like during the Hadean? Is the Oort Cloud a real thing? Why is the Sun's corona so hot? Something about magnets? What are comets like? Precipitous Where's Philae, exactly? What's Pluto like? [Soon!] What's Charon like? Why don't we have in-between-sized planets? What's Ceres like? [Working on it!] Why is Europa so weird-looking and pretty? Ice over a water ocean Why is Io so weird-looking? Sulfur volcanoes (? in the wrong places?) Why are so many Kuiper Belt objects red? What are those spots on Ceres? What's in the seas under Europa's ice? Which of the other moons have seas? Several What are the big white things in Titan's Lakes? What do Jupiter's clouds look like up close? What's all that red stuff in the Great Red Spot? What's pushing the Pioneer Probes? Heat from the RTG What pushes spacecraft slightly during flybys? Where are all the Sun's Neutrinos? Oscillating Why is there so much air on Titan? Why does the Kuiper Belt Stop? Why is Iapetus weird-colored? Why does Iapetus have a belt? What's the deal with Miranda? Did Uranus and Neptune change places? Did the Late Heavy Bombardment happen? Did life start before it? Is Europa covered in ice spikes? Why haven't we built a big inflatable extreme sports complex on the moon?\n"}
{"id":1548,"title":"90s Kid","image_title":"90s Kid","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1548","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/90s_kid.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1548:_90s_Kid","transcript":"[Two kids, with very different hair style, are in a playground. A fence is visible in the background, and on the ground appear to be various items including a puddle or rug and toy blocks.] Scruffy-haired kid: Ugh don't you hate how parents are all \"Eat your carrots\" and \"LOL, remember Rugrats and Doug? Share if you're a 90's kid!\" [Caption below the panel:] The median age at first birth in the US is 25, which means the typical new mother is now a 90's kid.\n","explanation":"This is another example where Randall describes the inexorable passage of time.\nThe children are complaining about things their parents tell them, as children often do. Their first complaint is something recognizable, the usual \"just eat your vegetables, they're good for you.\" The second is about a comment \"LOL, remember Rugrats and Doug? Share if you're a 90's kid\" which, however, is a generic social media comment that a \"90's kid\" would make, not something you would expect a mother to say. At least not in the context of things their children are embarrassed about. But it illustrates that the teens and tweens of yesteryear are now adults, and parents at that.\nAccording to the CIA World Factbook, in the USA the median age of mothers at their first birth is 25.6 (2011 estimate). On the date this comic was published, this would center the mother's own birth date in very late 1989.\nAlthough there are various interpretations of the term \"90's kid,\" most center around the person in question having had most or all of their childhood during the 1990s. The stereotypical '90s kid has a strong attachment to objects, movies, TV shows, phrases etc. from the era of their childhood, which bring back memories of their younger days. In this comic Randall picks up on a number of things which could be used to identify a '90s kid:\nGiven that the children shown in the comic appear to be somewhat older than newborn babies is not contradictory, since a 90s kid is anyone who was a kid during the '90s. So that would also include kids who turned five in 1990 or even ten; so in 2015 (publishing of this comic) a 90s kid could easily be more than 30 years old and thus have children more than 10 years old.\nThe title text suggests that viewing a child of one's own peering through such a barrier elicits nostalgia for the Rugrats cartoon. A baby gate is a semi-fixed piece of child-safety equipment to restrict a small child, typically a toddler, from leaving a safe area of a house, and especially to prevent access to stairways (up or down, where falls may happen), without overly inconveniencing an adult who can open the gate. Baby gates, fully enclosed playpens and similar barriers around cots feature as usually insurmountable barriers to the younger characters in Rugrats, who are of crawling and toddling age.\n[Two kids, with very different hair style, are in a playground. A fence is visible in the background, and on the ground appear to be various items including a puddle or rug and toy blocks.] Scruffy-haired kid: Ugh don't you hate how parents are all \"Eat your carrots\" and \"LOL, remember Rugrats and Doug? Share if you're a 90's kid!\" [Caption below the panel:] The median age at first birth in the US is 25, which means the typical new mother is now a 90's kid.\n"}
{"id":1549,"title":"xkcd Phone 3","image_title":"xkcd Phone 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1549","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_phone_3.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1549:_XKCD_Phone_3","transcript":"[An image of a smartphone lying down, with many labels pointing to it. There is a black stripe across the top left corner of the phone. At the top right something is protruding from the side, like a volume control. There is a wrist band (only partly shown) attached to the middle of each side of the phone. Above the screen are several small features, below only a central square and on the bottom a socket. Clockwise from the top left the labels read:] 2 AA batteries (not included) Boneless Ear screen Heartbeat accelerator MobilePay money clip Siri, or whoever it was we put in here Instead of being on surface only, screen goes all the way through theknot.com partnership: Phone licensed to perform wedding ceremonies and does so at random Fingerprint randomizer USB E (hotswappable) Waterproof, but can drown Foretold by prophecy Runs natively Wristband Wireless discharging Magnetic stripe\n[Below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd Phone 3 We made another one\u00ae\u00a9\u2122\n","explanation":"This is the third entry in the ongoing xkcd Phone series which parodies common smartphone specs by attributing absurd or useless features to a fictional phone that sounds impressive but would actually be very impractical. The previous comic in the series 1465: xkcd Phone 2 was released over half a year before this one and the next 1707: xkcd Phone 4 was released almost a year later.\n2 AA batteries (not included)\nA phrase usually shown on small, low-powered, electronic devices like remote controllers, and not on cellphones; which use lithium-ion batteries and need to be periodically recharged for continuous use.\nThe apparently thin phone (according to the scale as judged by the wristband) would also preclude inserting AA batteries, unless a protruding battery compartment is hidden out of view on the back of the phone.\nAlternatively could mean two Anti-Aircraft (artillery) \"batteries\" which would be groups of light or medium artillery pieces or missiles (2 to 9 weapons per battery, depending on country, weapon system and organization). In any case, they would badly hamper the portability of the phone. [ citation needed ]\nBoneless\nReference to meat or fish products being boneless, i.e. having all the bones removed, making it convenient to cook or eat. Phones do not typically have bones [ citation needed ] , so this is wholly unremarkable. A possible reference to the iPhone 6's reported problems with its chassis, where it could bend under pressure .\nLikely a reference to \"Bone Conduction Microphones\" implying that needing bones to work is a disadvantage and this phone has the feature of being \"Boneless\".\nxkcd Phone 4 was instead \"seedless\".\nEar screen\nAn overcomplicated term for a speaker, connecting a screen which emits light to send visual information and the portion of a speaker which vibrates to send auditory information. Comparing the two makes a speaker a screen for the ear.\nCould also be implying that there's a screen protecting the user's ear from the phone's internals, or the reverse.\nHeartbeat accelerator\nA mashup of heartbeat sensor and accelerometer. May be some sort of external pacemaker. If that's the case, it's worrying that it only accelerates, potentially causing a positive feedback (heart attack). It may also be the result of the phone being so exciting or frustrating that it increases its user's heart rate.\nMobilePay money clip\nWhile mobile pay is a form of payment involving electronic transfers via cellphone, this model includes a money clip; a way of holding physical bills together, which defeats the purpose of electronic payment. Because you can take cash wherever, this is a \"MobilePay\" using physical money.\nSiri, or whoever it was we put in here\nA joke on intelligent personal assistants. It also hints that Siri and the like are actual people, trapped inside of phones, which is not the case [ citation needed ] .\nInstead of being on surface only, screen goes all the way through\nA reference to surface screens. Possible reference to smartphones with screen display wrapping one or more edges, like Samsung Galaxy Note Edge or Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, or dual-screen smartphones with screen on the back (usually e-ink) like YotaPhone 2, or smartphones with minimal bezel like e.g. Sharp AQUOS Crystal.\nScreen going all the way through would leave no place for innards of smartphone: processor, battery etc., and unless each layer is designed to be semi-transparent to see the inner voxels the inner displays would be unseeable anyway.\ntheknot.com partnership - phone licensed to perform wedding ceremonies and does so at random\ntheknot.com is a website that assists in all stages of wedding planning. Due to this partnering, the phone has apparently obtained legal status as a Justice of the peace capable of performing legally valid marriages. It exerts this capability randomly, however, so the phone's owner (or potentially any other unsuspecting bystander) could suddenly find themselves with a new spouse without their knowledge, generally an undesired effect [ citation needed ] . Whether this would result in unintentional bigamy or if the phone restricts itself to pairing up singles, or even enacts divorce first if necessary, is left unclear. May be a reference to how same-sex marriage was fully legalized in the United States just two weeks prior to the release of this comic.\nFingerprint randomizer\nPresumably randomises the user's fingerprint, which may or may not be inconvenient depending on the intent of the user. It is not clear whether the device will change the person's fingerprint into a human-like fingerprint that is randomly selected from all possibilities, or if it completely mangles the fingerprint of the user. Either way, physically altering the user's finger to this degree will likely involve a painful process. Likely a cynical reference to fingerprint scanners, which are touted as password replacements.\nUSB E (hotswappable)\nA USB port that makes fun of the three current systems, A, B, and recently C, by skipping D completely and jumping to E. The port presumably charges the phone and allows to transfer files like normal, but this kind lets you perform Hot swapping (replacing computer system components without turning the system off) with it, which has always been a feature of USB, so mentioning it is redundant at best.\nMay be a reference to the eSATAp (Power over eSATA) hybrid port that is functioning as a USB and eSATA port at the same time. The Serial ATA bus interface has standardized hot swapping support.\nWaterproof, but can drown\nPerhaps a reference to Siri or the person trapped in the phone drowning, but the phone itself staying functional. This is another human-like function, which the first 2 XKCD Phone comics had.\nForetold by prophecy\nLikely mocking people on the internet who attempt to predict when Apple will release their next device. Might also be a joke on many videogames or fantasy novels, in which the main character is 'the chosen one', because 'the prophecy' foretold it.\nRuns Natively\nUsually a description given to ported software, as this statement doesn't make any sense when referring to hardware (notable exceptions to the norm are few and far between). When software writers would like to run their apps on multiple platforms, they usually have three choices: re-compile the source code into each platform's codebase (often requiring tweaking to handle practical differences in resources between the systems); use a specially 'pre-portable' code that you can write once, run anywhere , such as Java, but requires a suitable interpreter to be written for each platform (and may still require code tweaks to absorb differences in implementations); create a specific emulator\/virtual machine to allow existing code to 'see' the platform it was written for, despite the underlying system.\nOnly the first option is 'running natively', often the most optimised and thus best-performing option, and is usually qualified such as \"Runs <Software Name> natively\", for particular packages full compiled upon that platform. It would also make little sense for the OS itself to be non-native, except when intentionally emulating another system (ideally on a more powerful system that can power past the inefficiencies of conversion and translation).\nOr, in this case, it may be that the phone has legs and can literally run.\nWristband\nProbably mocking trending smart watches, this feature would not be very useful on a full-sized smart phone, as it would be uncomfortable to wear due to its size. Also possibly a follow-up to xkcd Phone 2 being described as a 'phone for your other hand', as the wristband would make it possible to have all three phones accessible at once.\nWireless discharging\nSome modern smartphones use a system called \"wireless charging,\" in which power is delivered to the phone without a wire. This phone, however, uses wireless technology to discharge the phone, which would be useless given that the phone needs power and removing power from its battery doesn't seem to help... May also refer to the standard behavior of the phone's antenna, which communicates wirelessly via EM radio waves, but discharges the battery in doing so. It could also be simply and literally describing the nature of all cell phones, and indeed all battery-powered electronic devices, to gradually use the battery (discharging) when there are no wires attached (wireless), since wireless also means no power cord is plugged in (and assuming the absence or non-use of the aforementioned wireless charging function, which this phone may not even have).  Depending on the avenue of discharge, this may also be related to the heartbeat accelerator, accelerating the user's heartbeat by shocking them. Notably, a few recent flagship phones now have a built in Qi wireless charging pad, so other devices can charge from its battery; this is usually marketed as power-sharing but could also be called wireless discharging.\nMagnetic stripe\nLikely a dig at the NFC (near-field communication) wireless radio modules in many modern phones. NFC allows, among others functions, mobile payment. This magnetic stripe could be a cheap way to imitate payment functionality, but \"compatible\" with classic credit cards.\nMagnetic stripes are a data storage method used by devices such as credit cards and key cards to hold and transfer small amounts of information like key codes. Usually cellphones don't have them as they utilize more robust and protected ways to store and transmit data (such as NFC). The magnetic stripe shown would likely be unusable with current magnetic stripe readers due to the phone's thickness, in contrast to that of regular cards, thus breaking all imagined 'compatibility' arguments.\nIt would also be very annoying as it seems to block part of the screen, albeit a small portion.\nHowever, some modern phones actually have Magnetic secure transmission which allows them to interface wirelessly with magstrip readers by simulating the magnetic field from a passing magnetic stripe.\nThe phrase \"We made another one\u00ae\u00a9\u2122\" is a reference to how phone companies release new phones very often, and the trademarks that surround the phone itself.\nThe title text is a joke on guarantees and customer service. Usually the advertisement says that if the customer is not satisfied with the product, they'll refund the money and take the product back at no additional cost. In this case they guarantee the customer they'll send him\/her home without charge; implying they won't fix or refund anything. Or that due to anticipated but unspecified faults of some kind, the phone's owner will need help to get back home when things go wrong, and probably be thankful for such assistance, in yet another example of a worryingly non-specific 'reassurance'.\nIn addition, it says it would do so only AFTER thirty days, as opposed to the usual thirty-day return guarantee, which means you may be stuck with your phone for a month until you can be taken home yourself.\n[An image of a smartphone lying down, with many labels pointing to it. There is a black stripe across the top left corner of the phone. At the top right something is protruding from the side, like a volume control. There is a wrist band (only partly shown) attached to the middle of each side of the phone. Above the screen are several small features, below only a central square and on the bottom a socket. Clockwise from the top left the labels read:] 2 AA batteries (not included) Boneless Ear screen Heartbeat accelerator MobilePay money clip Siri, or whoever it was we put in here Instead of being on surface only, screen goes all the way through theknot.com partnership: Phone licensed to perform wedding ceremonies and does so at random Fingerprint randomizer USB E (hotswappable) Waterproof, but can drown Foretold by prophecy Runs natively Wristband Wireless discharging Magnetic stripe\n[Below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd Phone 3 We made another one\u00ae\u00a9\u2122\n"}
{"id":1550,"title":"Episode VII","image_title":"Episode VII","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1550","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/episode_vii.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1550:_Episode_VII","transcript":"[Black background with white letters in the style of the Star Wars logo with the subtitle in between the two words.] Star The Force Awakens Wars\n[Building in the desert, two persons are seen in the background, and Cueball is running in front of the building. Next to the building is a sign.] Sign: Tosche Station\n[A hooded man standing next to R2D2 has entered the building, and is seen in front of the opening portal with the desert in the background.] Hooded man: Hello.\n[Closeup of hooded man. The man has a mustache and a beard and thick black hair.] Hooded man: I\u2019m here for those power converters.\n[Black background with white letters resembling movie credits.] Directed by J.J. Abrams\n","explanation":"Sequels are often made to resolve pressing issues that are left unresolved in the original works. This comic was a humorous take on how the then-upcoming sequel in the Star Wars franchise might have resolved issues from a previous film in that series.\nIn the first-produced movie of the series, Star Wars:Episode IV: A New Hope , Luke Skywalker 's uncle tells him to clean two newly purchased droids ( R2-D2 and C-3PO ). Luke complains that he had plans to pick up some power converters at Tosche Station . Luke is told to clean the droids first; however, while doing so, he discovers a message carried by R2-D2, starting him on a course of events that runs through the original trilogy. As a result, he never ultimately goes to Tosche Station.\nThe conversation between Luke and his uncle, Owen Lars , is as follows:\nUncle Owen: Luke! Take these two over to the garage will ya? I want \u2019em cleaned up before dinner. Luke: But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters! Uncle Owen: You can waste time with your friends when your chores are done. Now, come on. Get to it.\nLuke's line is one of many well-known lines from the series and is often-quoted as an example of how Luke is initially portrayed as a whiny teenager. By the end of the Episode VI:Return of the Jedi , Luke has grown into a mature and powerful Jedi, completing his transformation through the original trilogy.\nStar Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was, at the time of the comic's release, the upcoming seventh feature-length live-action film in the Star Wars series, and was the first since the rights to the franchise were sold by creator George Lucas to the Disney Company. It is a sequel to the original trilogy.\nSince creating the original trilogy, many of Lucas's decisions in respect of the franchise have been subject to fan criticism, including criticism of the quality of three prequel films Lucas produced beginning in 1999 (after a more than 15-year hiatus). The new seventh film was entrusted by Disney to producer\/director J.J. Abrams, who in 2009 produced and directed the highly acclaimed (although still highly criticized by some fans) Star Trek reboot.\nGiven all of this context, the new Star Wars film was as highly anticipated, or more highly anticipated than the prequel trilogy, and had a strong buzz around it. Much of the early buzz surrounded the nature of the new film's plot: For example, whether it would be a prequel or a sequel, and whether it would feature any of the original cast\/characters.\nJ. J. Abrams and others involved in the filming Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens had appeared in a panel at San Diego Comic-Con the weekend prior to the comic's release to unveil details about the film. This is likely the impetus for the timing of this comic.\nThis comic portrays Randall's own conception of what the sequel might have been. In his version of the movie, Luke returns home to Tatooine years later with R2-D2 to finish the errand that was interrupted. Luke goes to Tosche Station and says \"I'm here for those power converters\", thus completing this unresolved task from the first movie. The action is bookended by the opening and closing credits , suggesting this uneventful scene comprises the entire film.\nTherefore, the comic jokingly implies that getting the power converters was the most pressing of all the unresolved issues in the other films, and the most interesting upon which to base the sequel. In reality, this would likely be one of the least entertaining and most disappointing sequels that could possibly be made (perhaps second only to a version that had no reference to the previous films at all).\nRandall may have also been commenting that there are few if any unresolved issues in the Star Wars franchise that required revisiting and that the series should be left alone. Or he could have been making a joke about how sequels call back to elements of previous movies without fully considering the context. In this case, the farm he's buying those power converters for was destroyed more than thirty years ago.\nThe title text alludes to another fantasy franchise, Lord of the Rings , and how Samwise Gamgee was similarly interrupted from a menial task of gardening and listening in on conversations outside Bag End by Gandalf and his quest to save the world at the start of the first film. The title text uses the term \u201cdropping eaves\u201d as Samwise did in his denial of eavesdropping in on the conversation between Frodo and Gandalf. In both cases, the issue of collecting power converters and Sam\u2019s gardening duties were left unresolved in their respective stories and the main plot of the series is thoroughly concluded.\n[Black background with white letters in the style of the Star Wars logo with the subtitle in between the two words.] Star The Force Awakens Wars\n[Building in the desert, two persons are seen in the background, and Cueball is running in front of the building. Next to the building is a sign.] Sign: Tosche Station\n[A hooded man standing next to R2D2 has entered the building, and is seen in front of the opening portal with the desert in the background.] Hooded man: Hello.\n[Closeup of hooded man. The man has a mustache and a beard and thick black hair.] Hooded man: I\u2019m here for those power converters.\n[Black background with white letters resembling movie credits.] Directed by J.J. Abrams\n"}
{"id":1551,"title":"Pluto","image_title":"Pluto","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1551","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pluto.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1551:_Pluto","transcript":"PLUTO Some of the features already identified in today's New Horizons image\n[Many marks on the image of Pluto follow:]\nCandy shell Frontal bone Grease stains Bugs JPEG plumes Full text of the wikipedia article on pareidolia Bullet holes New Netherlands Disputed territory Snake pit Tadpole Pluto dinosaur extinction crater Kuiper beltloops Serenity Ghost Dinosaur The good part Moon bud Scars from predator attacks Reset button Megaman Charging socket Cracks (beginning to hatch) Plug (inflating\/deflating) Heart Mount Mons Coronary artery disease Debate hole Where we're putting all the people still arguing about Pluto's planet status Chocolate frosting Probably benign Vanilla frosting Dock connector Border of pride lands Hyena country Area missed during ironing\nImage credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SwRI - click for original\n","explanation":"This comic was posted on Tuesday, July 14, 2015, in honor of the New Horizons deep space probe making its flyby at Pluto , thus breaking the typical Monday\/Wednesday\/Friday cycle for the xkcd comics. Also on this day he released the first what if? in over three months, and it was called New Horizons . Luckily it did not end up back on Earth, as depicted in 1532: New Horizons , released 1\u00bd month before closest approach.\nRandall has taken one of the probe's images of Pluto, and outlined humorous examples of pareidolia on top of it.\nIt can be compared to preliminary descriptions by geologists, e.g. New Horizons' best look at Pluto before close approach|The Planetary Society .\nThe comic probably winks at Percival Lowell whose observatory photographed Pluto in 1915 \"known\" as Planet X. Unfortunately Percival Lowell is most famous for his drawings of the Canals on Mars which are widely misunderstood as channels based on wrong translations from Italian to other languages.\nThe title text refers to the debate as to whether Pluto should be classified as a full or dwarf planet. This debate was particularly brought into the public eye and came to be seen as a matter of controversy, following the 2006 IAU definition of planet . The text may imagine that this debate winds on, with definitions being created and revised until a ridiculous state is reached whereby Pluto has a special class of celestial body named after it called a 'Pluto' but fails to fulfill the arbitrary criteria set up for it, and hence is called a 'dwarf Pluto'. There actually exist the terms Plutoid and Plutino , that relate directly to groups that Pluto belongs to, but see those pages for details of their use and usage. There has been a real naming conflict whilst generating those two categories, where Plutons was the name chosen initially, whereas Pluton is the usual name of Pluto in some languages.\nCandy shell\nSuggests Pluto is a confection, like Minmus . May also be a reference to the Mars candy bar.\nJPEG plumes\nThe JPEG image format has the common issue of slightly distorting an image with Compression artifacts . The artifacts shown here do not appear in the official version of this image, but all data sent from New Horizons is compressed and artifacts are common \u2014 the full resolution images will be submitted to earth over the next 16 months. There have been tweets about people seeing plumes associated with active volcanoes and the like, which were explained as being artifacts.\nFrontal bone\nInterpreting Pluto as a head, the frontal bone could be the light-colored region next to the darker top, just above the north pole facing to us.\nGrease stains\nThe area above Pluto's north pole is attributed to grease.\nBugs\nCould refer to possible extraterrestrial life on Pluto in the form of insects , or \"bugs\". In the animated TV series Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles , an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers , the first battles with the alien \"Bugs\" took place on Pluto. Maybe it also refers to a software bug at the probe.\nBullet holes\nA string of small round features which Randall suggests was the result of Pluto getting shot repeatedly, probably by meteorites.\nNew Netherlands\nReference to the what if?, Drain the Oceans: Part II , about draining the Earth's oceans onto Mars. In the previous what if?, Drain the Oceans , the Netherlands took over the Earth once their problem with the risk of flooding disappeared. And then they continued to issue forth from the portal that drained the oceans on Earth pouring them onto Mars, to claim Mars as New Netherlands. Presumably, something similar happened on Pluto. This was already again references in both an entry in the table and in the title text of 1555: Exoplanet Names 2 .\nDisputed territory\nSince the base photograph is identified as \"today's New Horizons image,\" this indicates that a section of Pluto has immediately become the subject of some controversy, possibly a territorial claim or one of several references to the fact that Pluto was demoted from full planet status in 2006.\nSnake pit\nA generic map hazard.\nFull text of the Wikipedia article on pareidolia\nPareidolia is the human brain's tendency to see patterns where they don't exist. While probably a reference to Pluto's heart, the joke is also recursive: You'd be seeing the text of a Wikipedia article explaining to you that you couldn't actually be seeing the text of a Wikipedia article.\nTadpole\nOne of a number of pareidolic features Randall has outlined.\nKuiper Belt loops\nThe Kuiper belt is a region in our solar system that contains an unknown amount of icy bodies, one known is Pluto. Randall jokingly refers to Kuiper Belt as the same kind of belt that's used to fasten clothing and identifies features on Pluto's surface as loops for the belt.\nSerenity\nAn outline of the Firefly -class spaceship Serenity , which was the titular vessel from the 2002 TV series Firefly . One of a number of pareidolic features Randall has outlined.\nDinosaur\nNobody can see a dinosaur unless Randall did do this painting on Pluto's surface. And a complex comic needs at least one dinosaur.\nThe good part\nA section of Pluto that is objectively better than the rest.\nMoon bud\nThis could be interpreted as a moon growing\/emerging out of Pluto, as a bud is \"a compact knob-like growth\". A round growth is seen at the location marked, resembling a small, emerging moon.\nGhost\nA reference to the classic video game Pacman , wherein the primary antagonists are one of four Ghosts. The Ghost on Pluto appears to have a mouth, however, unlike most depictions of the Pacman Ghosts. One of a number of pareidolic features Randall has outlined.\nPluto dinosaur extinction crater\nSuggests Pluto had dinosaurs and lost them the same way Earth did.\nHeart\nOne of a number of pareidolic features Randall has outlined, and the only one (currently) also informally named as such by NASA.\nCoronary artery disease\nAlso known as ischemic heart disease , which causes degradation of heart tissue.  The region identified in the comic looks less 'healthy' (is darker and more ragged) compared to the rest of the 'Heart', which Randall suggests is caused by the disease.\nMount Mons\nReferring to the general practice of naming extraterrestrial mountains \"X Mons\" (e.g. Olympus Mons , a mountain on Mars and the largest mountain in the Solar System), as well as naming terrestrial mountains \"Mount X\". Since \"mons\" is Latin for \"mountain\", the feature's suggested name translates as \"Mount Mountain\".\nCharging socket\nA terrain feature suitable for connecting an outside source of electricity for the benefit of implied internal batteries. Compare \"dock connector,\" below.\nCracks (beginning to hatch)\nImplying that Pluto is some manner of a giant egg. Possibly a reference to the Doctor Who episode Kill the Moon , in which the Moon is revealed to be an egg from which a monster is hatching. A 2014 article from The Onion , \"Moon Finally Hatches,\" makes the same joke. Also possibly a reference to The Light Fantastic , a Discworld novel in which similar objects are revealed to be the eggs of the world turtle. A similar idea appeared in Jack Williamson's 1934 short story \"Born of the Sun\".\nPlug (inflating\/deflating)\nInflatable balls often have a \"plug\" or opening to insert a needle to inflate or deflate them.\nScars from predator attacks\nSince it's all-caps, we can't tell if \"PREDATOR\" is a proper noun, but this is possibly a reference to the movie series Predator , about a race of aliens who hunt other beings for sport. Alternatively, a planetary predator (such as comic book villain Galactus ) may have previously scarred Pluto.\nReset button\nThe structure indicated is a small black dot (at least at this distance this picture was taken). Reset buttons on home electronics are often small buttons or holes used to reset the software of the electronic device.\nMegaman\nOne of a number of pareidolic features Randall has outlined, this one in the shape of a popular video game protagonist.\nDebate Hole - Where we're putting all the people still arguing about Pluto's planet status\nPluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet rather than a planet following the latter term's controversial redefinition in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union .  Arguments about the classification continue to pop up. The same argument is referenced in the title text. The name implies a proposal to put all the people still arguing about it in this hole on Pluto. This proposal further implies that the continued debate is very annoying by 2015, except perhaps to the debaters themselves.\nArea missed during ironing\nThe area indicated is near the terminator and shows some intriguing topographic relief.\nProbably Benign\nA neoplasm or tumor is an abnormal growth of tissue. Randall is suggesting that the abnormal region near the heart has been evaluated by a doctor and determined to be benign .\nChocolate frosting\nSuggests the discrepancy in color over Pluto's surface may be a function of what cake frosting was used where. This area is the \"dark spot\" at the head of the \"whale\" ( http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2015\/07\/14\/science\/space\/pluto-flyby.html ).  The so-called \"whale's tail\" ( http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/science\/space\/find-heart-whale-new-horizons-picture-pluto-n388816 ), is on the other hemisphere and is not visible in this image, it lies east about 90 degrees from the chocolate frosting\/dark spot here.\nVanilla frosting\nAs above, suggests the discrepancy in color over Pluto's surface may be a function of what cake frosting was used where.\nBorder of pride lands\nA reference to the Disney animated feature The Lion King. In the movie, the Pridelands is the bright and prosperous region ruled by the Lion King while a dark territory beyond its border is controlled by hyenas.\nHyena country\nA continuation of the Lion King reference above.\nDock connector\nFrom the point of view of the photograph, this feature of Pluto is at the planet's \"bottom,\" where iPod dock connectors are. Compare \"charging socket,\" above.\nPLUTO Some of the features already identified in today's New Horizons image\n[Many marks on the image of Pluto follow:]\nCandy shell Frontal bone Grease stains Bugs JPEG plumes Full text of the wikipedia article on pareidolia Bullet holes New Netherlands Disputed territory Snake pit Tadpole Pluto dinosaur extinction crater Kuiper beltloops Serenity Ghost Dinosaur The good part Moon bud Scars from predator attacks Reset button Megaman Charging socket Cracks (beginning to hatch) Plug (inflating\/deflating) Heart Mount Mons Coronary artery disease Debate hole Where we're putting all the people still arguing about Pluto's planet status Chocolate frosting Probably benign Vanilla frosting Dock connector Border of pride lands Hyena country Area missed during ironing\nImage credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SwRI - click for original\n"}
{"id":1552,"title":"Rulebook","image_title":"Rulebook","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1552","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rulebook.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1552:_Rulebook","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing with a dog wearing jersey number 9, Ponytail and Hairy are facing them holding a rulebook. The horizon is visible behind them.] Ponytail: There's nothing in the rulebook that says we can't kill and eat your dog.\n","explanation":"This comic is a direct reference to the film Air Bud . In the film, a golden retriever becomes the star player on a basketball team.  The opposing team contests the legality of having a dog as a player, but the referee, having reviewed the rulebook, responds \"Ain't no rule says a dog can't play basketball.\" Here, the opposing team turns the rulebook loophole against the first team . Because rulebooks are considered the final arbiter of decisions in most sports, Ponytail suggests that, since it isn't explicitly prohibited, her team is allowed to kill and eat the dog. Randall is using this logical fallacy to highlight the absurdity of the plot of Air Bud and other similar movies in which ordinary animals take on human roles. At the same time, Randall has created an absurd and anticlimactic premise for such a movie, and he may be making a more general commentary on Hollywood 's habit of making movies by combining basic tropes that, by themselves, tend to do well in the box office.\nThe title text acknowledges that killing and eating the dog would result in a foul (interfering inappropriately with other players), but the benefit of committing the foul (the star player being dead and out of the game) would be worth the resulting penalty (giving the other team a couple of free throws). This of course ignores any local laws that could cover the proposed killing, such as animal cruelty laws. Randall is poking fun at the common practice of intentional fouls, something that happens particularly often in basketball. Although a foul is by definition against the rules, a team may deliberately break those rules and accept the penalty in order to gain some perceived advantage. For example, in association football (soccer), a player may intentionally foul an opposing player with a strong attack to allow his team to regroup and increase its defensive position, starting with blocking the resulting free kick. In basketball, an intentional foul can stop the clock and turn over the ball, or may simply give the team time to rest and\/or discuss strategy that it otherwise may not have had.\nThe dog in the comic is wearing a jersey with the number 9. In Air Bud , the dog wore a jersey with \"K\" on one side and \"9\" on the other, forming \"K-9\", a popular shortening of the word \"canine\".\nRandall previously parodied the \"animal-as-player\" loophole in 115: Meerkat . Rule books are also mentioned in 330: Indecision , 393: Ultimate Game , and 1593: Play-By-Play .\n[Cueball and Megan are standing with a dog wearing jersey number 9, Ponytail and Hairy are facing them holding a rulebook. The horizon is visible behind them.] Ponytail: There's nothing in the rulebook that says we can't kill and eat your dog.\n"}
{"id":1553,"title":"Public Key","image_title":"Public Key","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1553","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/public_key.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1553:_Public_Key","transcript":"[In the first panel, Cueball is sitting in a chair and is using a laptop.] Cueball (thinking): I've been posting my public key for 15 years now, but no one has ever asked me for it or used it for anything as far as I can tell.\n[This is followed by two beat panels where Cueball just sits there. doing nothing, not even thinking.]\n[In the final panel he again uses his laptop and thinks.] Cueball (thinking): Maybe I should try posting my private key instead.\n","explanation":"In public-key cryptography , two keys are generated for a user. The public key can be used to encrypt messages, but not decrypt them. The private key is necessary for decryption, and as its name implies, is meant to be used solely by the user.\nSince the public key is initially designated to be shared, anyone who has that key can send the user an encrypted message that only the user can decrypt. Cueball has been following this rule, but he notices that it appears nobody has ever used his public key for anything. He contemplates sharing his private key, which he believes would generate more interest in him personally. However, he appears to overlook the fact that doing so would allow anyone to decrypt messages sent to him, thus defeating the entire purpose of encryption. (Although some systems can confirm the message sender by having a secret encryption key and a public decryption one, though this is negated again if both keys are released.)\nThe title text refers to another feature of Public-key cryptography: In addition to assuring that certain messages can only be read by a specific key owner, it can also assure that certain messages could only have been written by a specific key owner, by \"signing\" it using the private key. Anyone can read a signed message, but readers with the public key can then verify that the owner of the private key wrote (or at least signed) the message, rather than someone pretending to be the owner. If Cueball published his private key, then anybody could sign any message as him, effectively impersonating him and also defeating the purpose of encryption.\nCrowdsourcing is the term used for delegating work or tasks to a largely volunteered and uncontrolled set of people on the Internet.  It is similar in concept to outsourcing , in which work is delegated to an external source of labor, typically a company in a foreign country. Famous instances of crowdsourcing include reCAPTCHA (in which users both verify they are human and help digitize words and phrases in books that digitization software cannot understand) and a farm in the UK in which ordinary Internet users make decisions about how the farm is run.\nWhen Cueball first created the key pair, he imagined it would be something he used from time to time, for reading messages only intended for him or for sending \"signed\" messages.  Since nothing of the sort happened, he imagines releasing both keys might cause some activity, and at this point he is happier with a \"bad\" outcome than with a boring one.\nRandall previously ironically mentioned a public key in 370: Redwall .\n[In the first panel, Cueball is sitting in a chair and is using a laptop.] Cueball (thinking): I've been posting my public key for 15 years now, but no one has ever asked me for it or used it for anything as far as I can tell.\n[This is followed by two beat panels where Cueball just sits there. doing nothing, not even thinking.]\n[In the final panel he again uses his laptop and thinks.] Cueball (thinking): Maybe I should try posting my private key instead.\n"}
{"id":1554,"title":"Spice Girls","image_title":"Spice Girls","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1554","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spice_girls.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1554:_Spice_Girls","transcript":"Cueball: Your turn: Can you name all of the Spice Girls?\nMegan: Hmm\u2026 Hearing Spice, Vision Spice, Smell Spice, Touch Spice, Taste Spice? Cueball: That\u2019s senses.\nMegan: Denial Spice, Anger Spice, Bargaining Spice, Depression Spice, Acceptance Spice. Cueball: Stages of grief.\nMegan: War Spice, Famine Spice, Plague Spice, Death Spice? Cueball: You're not even trying.\nMegan: No, wait, I can get this for real. Uhh\u2026 Megan: Pog Spice, Story Spice, Sarah Spice, Gender Spice, Baleen Spice? Cueball: \u2026Close enough.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are apparently playing a game in which they name all of the elements in some category. Cueball asks Megan to name all of the Spice Girls , a pop group whose nicknames were\nInstead, Megan winds up making up names by tacking \"Spice\" onto words from other, completely unrelated categories:\nThis seems to be a continuation of 1417: Seven , where Megan asks Cueball to name the seven dwarfs. Apparently Megan confuses different sets of five (or four when she is not trying) which may be compared to the way Cueball mixes items from different sets of seven, thus not mentioning a full set, but just seven items from seven different sets of seven.\nThe title text has the correct \"first\" names of the Spice Girls, but replaces the \"Spice\" part of their names with \"Extinction\" to associate them with Earth's five mass extinctions . The five actual worst mass extinctions are:\nRandall previously referenced the Spice Girls in 1511: Spice Girl (more specifically, using \"Which Spice Girl Are You?\" as an example of online personality quizzes).\nAnd already in the next comic 1555: Exoplanet Names 2 he suggest to give five exoplanets around the same star the five nicknames.\nCueball: Your turn: Can you name all of the Spice Girls?\nMegan: Hmm\u2026 Hearing Spice, Vision Spice, Smell Spice, Touch Spice, Taste Spice? Cueball: That\u2019s senses.\nMegan: Denial Spice, Anger Spice, Bargaining Spice, Depression Spice, Acceptance Spice. Cueball: Stages of grief.\nMegan: War Spice, Famine Spice, Plague Spice, Death Spice? Cueball: You're not even trying.\nMegan: No, wait, I can get this for real. Uhh\u2026 Megan: Pog Spice, Story Spice, Sarah Spice, Gender Spice, Baleen Spice? Cueball: \u2026Close enough.\n"}
{"id":1555,"title":"Exoplanet Names 2","image_title":"Exoplanet Names 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1555","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exoplanet_names_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1555:_Exoplanet_Names_2","transcript":"[Black Hat points with a stick at a slide showing an image of a planet with unknown features marked by questions marks.] Kepler-452b\nBlack Hat: NASA has announced the discovery of a (super-)Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. Black Hat: I suggest we name this planet \"Pluto\", both to celebrate the great work by the New Horizons team, and to make the stupid \"Is Pluto a planet\" debate a little more confusing\nWhile we wait to hear from the IAU, here's a revised and updated list of planet name suggestions (see xkcd.com\/1253) New or updated entries in red\n[The table is in three separate columns. There is a small arrow pointing at the second column, named \"Planet\", indicating the planet's name corresponding to the star at the first row. The third column shows the planet name suggestions.]\nStar Planet Suggested Name Gliese 667 b Space Planet c PILF d A Star e e'); DROP TABLE PLANETS;-- f Blogosphere g Blogodrome h Earth Tau Ceti b Sid Meier's Tau Ceti B c Giant Dog Planet d Tiny Dog Planet e Phil Plainet f Unicode Snowman Gliese 832 b Asshole Jupiter c Waterworld starring Kevin Costner Gliese 581 b Waist-deep Cats c Planet #14 d Ballderaan e Eternia Prime f Taupe Mars g Jelly-Filled Planet Epsilon Eridani b Skydot c Laser Noises Gliese 176 b Pandora c Pantera Kepler-61 b GoldenPalace.com Groombridge 34A b Hot Mess Kepler-442 b Seas of Toothpaste Gliese-442 b This one weird planet EPIC-201367065 b Sulawesi c Huge Soccer Ball d Geodude Kepler-296 b Kerbal Space Planet c A$aplanet d Jurassic World e This Land f Springfield HR 7722 b Betelgeuse c Beetlejuice EPIC 201912552 b Netherlands VI Gliese 3293 b Antispit c Google Earth d Planet of the Apes (disambiguation) Kepler-283 b \u02c8j\u028a\u0259r\u0259n\u0259s c j\u028a\u02c8re\u026an\u0259s Upsilon Andromedae b Fourthmeal c Stampy d Moonchild e Ham Sphere HD 20794 b Cosmic Sands c Legoland d Planet with Arms HD 85512 b Lax Morality HD 40307 b Good Planet c Problemland d Slickle e Spare Parts f New Jersey VI g How Do I Join the IAU Gliese 163 b Neil Tyson's Mustache c [email\u00a0protected] d Hair-Covered Planet Pi Mensae b Moon Holder HD 189733 b Permadeath Kepler-22 b Blue Ivy KOI-2474 b Store-Brand Earth Kepler-437 b Unicorn Thresher KOI-2418 b Spherical Discworld Kepler-438 b Emergency Backup Earth KOI-3010 b Feeeoooooooop Kepler-442 b Liz 82 Eridani b Horsemeat Surface c The Moon d Constant Saxophones HD 102365 b Little Big Planet Gliese 180 b Dune c Arrakis Fomalhaut b Swarm of Bees Kepler-62 b Sporty c Baby d Scary e Ginger f Posh HD 69830 b Planet.xxx c Novella d Sexoplanet Gliese 682 b Verdant Hellscape c Unsubscribe Kepler-452 b Pluto\nA Unicode snowman is also referenced in Randall's book What If , where it is keymapped to a laptop.\nRandall has also poked fun at the Netherlands in Drain the Oceans, where the Netherlands, no longer worrying about a cataclysmic flood, take over the world, and in Drain the Oceans: Part II, where the Netherlands use the portal to colonize Mars. See the https:\/\/what-if.xkcd.com\/archive\/ for more details.\n","explanation":"This comic is a continuation of 1253: Exoplanet Names , and was published the day after NASA announced the discovery of a number of planets, including a planet called a cousin to Earth, Kepler-452b . Black Hat proposes naming it Pluto , to commemorate the flyby of the dwarf planet of that name by NASA's New Horizons earlier the same month. He admits this alternative to end the discussion about the status of Pluto, which is subject to debate among both scientists and laypeople over whether-or-not it should be considered a planet. Pluto was considered a planet for a long period of time until, in 2005, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) created a new definition for the word 'planet' designed to exclude Pluto and similar objects, resulting in much debate (The IAU is the organization that takes responsibility for naming celestial bodies like planets, stars, and much more).\nIt may appear that, with Black Hat's suggestion, the answer to the question \"is Pluto a planet?\" will therefore always be \"yes\", regardless of the status of the Pluto in our Solar System according to the IAU. However the same IAU official definition that excludes Pluto also states that a 'planet' has to orbit our sun, so according to the IAU, nothing in this comic is a planet (the IAU definition only allows them to be exoplanets , which, like dwarf planets, are not planets). Hence, the debate indeed becomes 'a little more confusing'. This is in line with Black Hat's characterisation as a mischief-maker.\nThe title text is referring to the planet name entry Netherlands VI for the star EPIC 201912552 . Randall thus continues his references to the Dutch people taking over the world and then the universe after the earth's oceans has been drained and transported to Mars. This happens in two consecutive What if? 's, Drain the Oceans and Drain the Oceans: Part II , was referenced in Dropping a Mountain , and was referenced again the week before this comic in 1551: Pluto . Due to a drain in the Earth's ocean the Netherlands does not have to worry about getting flooded anymore and since it now does not have to use all its resources preventing floods, it can use these to conquer the world (including Antarctica becoming South Netherlands). Then it takes on Mars (which becomes New Netherlands), and then a section of Pluto (again calling it New Netherlands). There is also a possible reference to 1519: Venus , but that comic has no direct relation to the conquests of the Dutch people like in the other three references. It should be mentioned, that New Netherland was actually a Dutch colony with New York City , formerly known as New Amsterdam , as its capital. So the name \"New Netherlands\" is \"historically correct\", while \"Netherlands VI\" isn't.\nIn the title text Randall mentioned that he will continue with this Netherlands joke driving it so far into the ground, (i.e. way beyond the point where it stops being funny), that they (the Dutch people) will have to build levees (or dykes) around it to keep the sea out - thus making it funny again... By forcing the Dutchmen to build new levees for this reason, the whole issue with their conquest of the world will be over before it happens.\nThis table explains each entry in the comic table.\nThe \"Status\" column refers to the comic 1253: Exoplanet Names , and indicates if the entry was already in that version (Old), if it is an addition since then (New) or if the entry has been updated (Update).\n[Black Hat points with a stick at a slide showing an image of a planet with unknown features marked by questions marks.] Kepler-452b\nBlack Hat: NASA has announced the discovery of a (super-)Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. Black Hat: I suggest we name this planet \"Pluto\", both to celebrate the great work by the New Horizons team, and to make the stupid \"Is Pluto a planet\" debate a little more confusing\nWhile we wait to hear from the IAU, here's a revised and updated list of planet name suggestions (see xkcd.com\/1253) New or updated entries in red\n[The table is in three separate columns. There is a small arrow pointing at the second column, named \"Planet\", indicating the planet's name corresponding to the star at the first row. The third column shows the planet name suggestions.]\nStar Planet Suggested Name Gliese 667 b Space Planet c PILF d A Star e e'); DROP TABLE PLANETS;-- f Blogosphere g Blogodrome h Earth Tau Ceti b Sid Meier's Tau Ceti B c Giant Dog Planet d Tiny Dog Planet e Phil Plainet f Unicode Snowman Gliese 832 b Asshole Jupiter c Waterworld starring Kevin Costner Gliese 581 b Waist-deep Cats c Planet #14 d Ballderaan e Eternia Prime f Taupe Mars g Jelly-Filled Planet Epsilon Eridani b Skydot c Laser Noises Gliese 176 b Pandora c Pantera Kepler-61 b GoldenPalace.com Groombridge 34A b Hot Mess Kepler-442 b Seas of Toothpaste Gliese-442 b This one weird planet EPIC-201367065 b Sulawesi c Huge Soccer Ball d Geodude Kepler-296 b Kerbal Space Planet c A$aplanet d Jurassic World e This Land f Springfield HR 7722 b Betelgeuse c Beetlejuice EPIC 201912552 b Netherlands VI Gliese 3293 b Antispit c Google Earth d Planet of the Apes (disambiguation) Kepler-283 b \u02c8j\u028a\u0259r\u0259n\u0259s c j\u028a\u02c8re\u026an\u0259s Upsilon Andromedae b Fourthmeal c Stampy d Moonchild e Ham Sphere HD 20794 b Cosmic Sands c Legoland d Planet with Arms HD 85512 b Lax Morality HD 40307 b Good Planet c Problemland d Slickle e Spare Parts f New Jersey VI g How Do I Join the IAU Gliese 163 b Neil Tyson's Mustache c [email\u00a0protected] d Hair-Covered Planet Pi Mensae b Moon Holder HD 189733 b Permadeath Kepler-22 b Blue Ivy KOI-2474 b Store-Brand Earth Kepler-437 b Unicorn Thresher KOI-2418 b Spherical Discworld Kepler-438 b Emergency Backup Earth KOI-3010 b Feeeoooooooop Kepler-442 b Liz 82 Eridani b Horsemeat Surface c The Moon d Constant Saxophones HD 102365 b Little Big Planet Gliese 180 b Dune c Arrakis Fomalhaut b Swarm of Bees Kepler-62 b Sporty c Baby d Scary e Ginger f Posh HD 69830 b Planet.xxx c Novella d Sexoplanet Gliese 682 b Verdant Hellscape c Unsubscribe Kepler-452 b Pluto\nA Unicode snowman is also referenced in Randall's book What If , where it is keymapped to a laptop.\nRandall has also poked fun at the Netherlands in Drain the Oceans, where the Netherlands, no longer worrying about a cataclysmic flood, take over the world, and in Drain the Oceans: Part II, where the Netherlands use the portal to colonize Mars. See the https:\/\/what-if.xkcd.com\/archive\/ for more details.\n"}
{"id":1556,"title":"The Sky","image_title":"The Sky","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1556","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_sky.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1556:_The_Sky","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing looking upward with in a small frame a light blue background.] Cueball: I like the sky. Megan: Yeah.\n[Zooms out to show a blue evening sky, the sun must be setting to the left and a streak of yellow and orange clouds goes from top left to bottom right. The sky\/clouds get darker further to the right and several stars are visible behind the clouds on the indigo blue sky in the top right corner. There are also some gray clouds low over the horizon. Cueball and Megan standing to the far left Below them and the sky from the horizon and down there is a thick a black slab taking up about a sixth of the frame height.] Megan: It's one of my favorite halves.\n","explanation":"In this comic Cueball and Megan admire a majestic sky on a beautiful day.\nThis is one of the few comics where the scenery is drawn entirely in color, adding to the feeling of awe and natural wonder. The lighting on the clouds and the night sky in the upper corner suggest that this is either at sunset or sunrise, with the sun at the horizon outside the left part of the image. The picture is drawn to show the ever changing beauty of the many different stages of the sky rather than to be 100% realistic, as it would not be possible to see stars as clearly as shown, if the sun is still illuminating the clouds in front of them. When the sun sets or rises the light produces many different colors which can often be breathtaking to witness.  The pouch shaped cloud formations are called mammatus clouds and are usually associated with nearing of bad weather.\nThe comic, however, already start in a small panel, with uniform sky colored light blue background, above the large drawing described above. In this image Cueball says to Megan that he likes the sky and Megan agrees. Megan first elaborates on her feelings in the large image where the zoom out is so large that they have both become small and insignificant characters in the bottom left corner, dwarfed by the sky and cloudscape, with the ground a broad dark band beneath them.\nMegan makes a statement about the sky: It's one of my favorite halves . She thus indicates that she has more than one favorite halves. As there are only two halves this thus implies that Megan likes both halves, i.e. she likes everything. Her statement is thus a tautology because it implies that the other half is also a favorite and there are no other segments that would not be among her favorites. There are several xkcd comics about tautology, e.g. 703: Honor Societies , 870: Advertising and 1310: Goldbach Conjectures .\nIn 1368: One Of The one of is also used in a similar way as there is really no other that that one in that comic, whereas here there are no other that has not be included. A very similar sentence is also used in the title text of 1524: Dimensions where the sentence, I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite dimensions . This also makes very little sense as there are four dimensions with time, and the other three are indistinguishable as they are just three randomly chosen but orthogonal directions in space.\nTaken at face value, given that the image depicts half open sky and half clouds, the other half could be taken to mean the clouds covering half of the sky. Or it could be the sky and the dark Earth, the other half beneath their feet. That it is the latter becomes evident in the title text.\nIn the title text Megan continues her comment as she states that her other favorite half has some cool objects in it. \nShe then lists three types of objects:\nFrom this it is thus clear that it is not the clouds vs. the sky she's referring to but rather the sky vs. something down on Earth. Weather the clouds are considered part of the sky or just blocking the sky could be something Megan and Cueball would disagree about. See below.\nBased on these three items the other half could either be the entire Earth , just the solid ground or only the oceans . All three mentioned objects can be found both on land and in the oceans. Shipwrecks may be associate with oceans, but they are also often stranded on the shore. Snakes are mainly associated with land, but there are several snakes that live in the ocean. But the last part of the title text takes both the ground and the sea out of the equation, as it states that if those three objects where moved out of the way the other half would also have more sky. As Earth is round (and made from rock, most of them melted in the outer core ) then if you \"moved all those rocks out of the way\" you would see the sky below on the other side.\nThis leads to the realization that the two halves are indeed the Sky and the Earth (or Heaven and Earth). The title text is thus a subversion as it may be switching the readers focus of what the other half may be, as seen from only the large image (clouds, stars or the ground).\nBeyond the blue sky above there is just the dark night sky of outer space . If it where not for the Earth the blue sky would not exists as it is formed by the air following the gravity and curvature of the earth. So if you would moved the entire Earth out of the way you would also move the blue sky with it and you would only see a similar dark night sky, with lots of stars like those in the top left corner. Of course if it was not the entire Earth, but just those rocks directly beneath Megan that was moved, then in principle she would be able to see the blue sky on the other side of Earth, But as she is saying moved all those away , it indicates that Megan really means the entire Earth.\nThis last part of the title text thus shows that Megan may be thinking rather of the night sky, and given that there are also stars visible in the top right corner, she could have assumed Cueball also referred to the sky like this rather than the majestic display of clouds and colors. Of course that would be weird, but that's where the comedy occurs because that was unexpected, and it would be typical Megan and\/or Randall .\nIf Megan is also interested in astronomy then she would prefer a dark cloudless sky with stars. And by focusing on the fact that if the Earth was removed there would only be dark sky (empty space) around her on all sides, this may be one of her other often seen strange preferences. (Those are often used by one of the characters in Randall's comics). It is well know from xkcd that Randall really loves astronomy and looking at the night sky. So seen from this perspective, there would still be plenty of sky even if the Earth where removed completely. However, there would not be any clouds or nice colors or any humans or other lifeforms around to admire those astronomical objects.\nThe title text also indicates that although the other half also is one of Megan's favorites, it is mainly the shipwrecks (the oceans) and the snakes (life forms) that she considers when thinking of this half. The rest is just rocks (the Earth). Taking into account how many different things that are on \"that other half\", why did Randall then choose to mention those two? Only he will know, but maybe indeed to focus on the oceans and their life forms or any life.\n[Cueball and Megan are standing looking upward with in a small frame a light blue background.] Cueball: I like the sky. Megan: Yeah.\n[Zooms out to show a blue evening sky, the sun must be setting to the left and a streak of yellow and orange clouds goes from top left to bottom right. The sky\/clouds get darker further to the right and several stars are visible behind the clouds on the indigo blue sky in the top right corner. There are also some gray clouds low over the horizon. Cueball and Megan standing to the far left Below them and the sky from the horizon and down there is a thick a black slab taking up about a sixth of the frame height.] Megan: It's one of my favorite halves.\n"}
{"id":1557,"title":"Ozymandias","image_title":"Ozymandias","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1557","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ozymandias.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1557:_Ozymandias","transcript":"[Ponytail, with her arms stretched out, is addressing Cueball.] Ponytail: I met a traveler from an antique land who said: \"I met a traveler from an an- tique land, who said \"I met a traveler from an antique land, who said \"I met...\n","explanation":"Ponytail is reciting the opening of \" Ozymandias \" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (see text below). However, instead of continuing on with the poem, Ponytail is going through a recursion where the information is always being quoted from \"a traveler from an antique land\" who recounts what they were told by a similar traveler from another antique land. The title text once again plays with recursion, but instead of it being a string of travelers talking about travelers, it is a string of pedestals that are quoting pedestals. In the original poem, the text on the pedestal is itself recounted as part of the traveler's story, so there are already two levels of quotation, and the pedestal's inscription describes Ozymandias as the \"king of kings\", which, being itself a recursion, gives rise to the comic's joke.\nThe poem Ozymandias is about the last vestiges of a once-great civilization that has since been lost to history. However, the poem itself, like the statue it describes,can be thought of as a pinnacle of achievement for its civilization- in this case, English civilization. So it is entirely possible that one day, after the fall of this civilization, the poem will fill the same role for it that the statue filled for Ozymandias' civilization, and would therefore be referenced by a traveler from an antique land who stumbled across it.\nThe fact that Ponytail is now telling Cueball the story of this recursion implies that she is yet another layer of this recursion and is herself \"a traveler from an antique land.\"\nThe quotes are not nested properly, as they never end. So there is only the starting quotation mark (\") for each quote. If she ever finishes there would be one closing quotation mark for each quote in the recursion at the end of her sentence. See 859: ( .\nThe poem is a sonnet written in iambic pentameter , 10 syllables to a line (note that traveler should be read as trav'ler with only two syllables. Also note that it was originally written in British English where it was spelled with two l's as traveller ). The fragment quoted in the comic consist of the first line and two syllables of the second line of the original poem. The way Ponytail recites her version of the poem in the comic, each line continues to be iambic pentameters (which is the reason for the hyphenation of an-tique between 2nd and 3rd line). However the fourth and last line stops two syllables short, but would have continued as indicated by... Perhaps Randall did this to avoid finishing in mid word (\"a trav-\").\nThe title text quotes exactly one line, the 9th line or the first line of the second part of the poem, also stopping during the fourth repetition, although after just one word the fourth time, also with... to indicate that this goes on and on and...\nThe poem \"Ozymandias\" is mentioned on pages 169 and 170 of the book Recursive Desire: Rereading Epic Tradition by Jeremy M. Downes.\nA similar joke was used in 785: Open Mic Night\nI met a traveller from an antique land Who said: \"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.\" [1]\n[Ponytail, with her arms stretched out, is addressing Cueball.] Ponytail: I met a traveler from an antique land who said: \"I met a traveler from an an- tique land, who said \"I met a traveler from an antique land, who said \"I met...\n"}
{"id":1558,"title":"Vet","image_title":"Vet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1558","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1558:_Vet","transcript":"[Megan arrives with a pet carrier, Cueball stands at a desk as a veterinarian, and Hairy is waiting behind a rope, standing next in line with a dog on a leash and a pet carrier.] Megan: There's something wrong with my dog. He keeps crawling around eating dirt.\n[Cueball holds the content of Megan's pet carrier, a flat disk. She is standing behind the desk with the carrier on the desk.] Cueball: This is a Roomba. Megan: Well, he's a mix. Megan: Probably some Roomba in there.\n[The Roomba now lies on the table next to the carrier between the two.] Cueball: A Roomba is not a pet. Megan: You're right. It's wrong to keep a beautiful creature like this in a house.\n[Megan is outside left to a tree, arms up in the air, encouraging the Roomba to drive away.] Megan: Go! Megan: Be free! Roomba: Whirrr\n","explanation":"Roomba is a brand of domestic cleaning robots manufactured by the company iRobot . The robots are designed to automatically vacuum floors. Although these robots are controlled by a quite simple software without any artificial intelligence, some owners tend to humanize them in the same way that others humanize their pets. There are several other comics related to a Roomba.\nMegan presents a pet carrier to Cueball the veterinarian assistant. She says that her \"dog\" is \u201ccrawling around eating dirt\u201d, which sounds like certain types of behavioral problems one encounters in dogs, but is precisely what Roombas are made for. (However, the vacuum bag may need to be cleaned.) The vet then comments that it is a Roomba, to which Megan responds that the device (which has nothing to do with an animal) is a cross-breed, and agrees that there probably is \u201csome Roomba\u201d in it. She thus acknowledges the existence of Roombas, but still treats them as if it were an animal. It's common to talk about domestic dogs this way, but cross-breeding dogs with machines is impossible. [ citation needed ] The vet then goes on to say, with endless patience, that a Roomba is not a pet. This is taken by Megan as if the doctor said that her Roomba-like device is a non-domesticated animal (like a monkey, a fox, or the birds referred to in the title text) that can but should not be kept in captivity. In the last panel she consequently releases the vacuum cleaner and it whirs to its 'freedom'.\nThe second customer, Hairy , has his dog on a leash, but is also carrying a pet transporter for the dog. Most likely he has arrived with the dog in the transporter (perhaps using public transportation) but has now taken it out so it can walk for itself, making the carrier much lighter.\nThe Migratory Bird Treaty act from the title text contains a list of over 800 bird species that are not allowed to be captured or killed. If the Roomba were to be classified as a native American bird and were added to the list, keeping them as pets would constitute capturing and would be considered illegal. This, of course, shows how confused Megan is. She previously stated the Roomba to be a dog and now apparently believes it is a bird, even though dogs are not birds [ citation needed ] and neither is the Roomba. [ citation needed ]\n[Megan arrives with a pet carrier, Cueball stands at a desk as a veterinarian, and Hairy is waiting behind a rope, standing next in line with a dog on a leash and a pet carrier.] Megan: There's something wrong with my dog. He keeps crawling around eating dirt.\n[Cueball holds the content of Megan's pet carrier, a flat disk. She is standing behind the desk with the carrier on the desk.] Cueball: This is a Roomba. Megan: Well, he's a mix. Megan: Probably some Roomba in there.\n[The Roomba now lies on the table next to the carrier between the two.] Cueball: A Roomba is not a pet. Megan: You're right. It's wrong to keep a beautiful creature like this in a house.\n[Megan is outside left to a tree, arms up in the air, encouraging the Roomba to drive away.] Megan: Go! Megan: Be free! Roomba: Whirrr\n"}
{"id":1559,"title":"Driving","image_title":"Driving","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1559","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/driving.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1559:_Driving","transcript":"[Black Hat, carrying a rock, is walking toward Cueball, leaving a trail of sand.] Black Hat: Would you guess this weighs as much as a small adult? Cueball: What? Cueball: Uh, probably.\n[Black Hat walks past Cueball who turns to look after him.] Black Hat: Great!\n[Black Hat has walked out of the frame. Cueball is looking in the direction he left in. Several noises and voices are coming from off-panel.] Off-panel: *Thump* Car voice (off-panel): Please fasten your seatbelt. Off-panel: *click* Black Hat (off-panel): Take me to Anchorage, Alaska. Car voice (off-panel): Navigating Off-panel: *slam*\n[Black Hat walks back in the panel towards Cueball.] Car driving off: Vrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrr rrrrr rr Black Hat: I love self-driving cars. Cueball: ...Whose car was that? Black Hat: Dunno, but they shouldn't have left it running.\n","explanation":"A self-driving car is a car that requires no human interaction to navigate streets to a destination. Thus, when Black Hat places a rock that weighs \"as much as a small adult\" into the car's seat, he begins the process of fooling the car into thinking it has an occupant when it does not. His purpose in doing so appears to be to send the car to Anchorage , Alaska , which is presumably quite far from where Black Hat and Cueball are standing, thus taking the car far away from its owner with relatively little effort on the part of Black Hat. This is yet another evil prank from xkcd's resident classhole .\nThe title text references the fact that driving to Alaska from the contiguous lower 48 states requires two border crossings, once into Canada from the mainland, and once from Canada into Alaska. The car apparently begins some distance from the Canadian border, since it will likely run out of gas before reaching Canada. Title text expresses regret about this probable failure; perhaps Randall was looking forward to the encounter between the border guards and the vehicle's \"occupant.\"  However, even if the car does not get to Anchorage, Black Hat will have created a serious problem for its owner who will have to report the car as stolen.\nShortly after this comic appeared, Tesla released footage of a robotic charger that can connect itself to a Tesla automatically. If this kind of technology becomes common then a self-driving electric car might be able to make a transcontinental journey without human intervention.\nAt the time of the release of this comic there were no places where self-driving cars were for sale to individuals. However, several corporate-owned test cars are frequently seen on public roads (such as those operated by Google among others). Nevada, Florida, California and Michigan were the first states to allow the testing of self-driving cars on public roads, and this legality is quickly spreading to many other states, as well as several countries in Europe. Alternatively, Randall might be setting this comic in an idyllic near future, wherein you could drive all over the country (and Canada) with these cars!\nIt could have been Beret Guy's car - see 1493: Meeting . Self-driving cars are a recurring topic on xkcd.\n[Black Hat, carrying a rock, is walking toward Cueball, leaving a trail of sand.] Black Hat: Would you guess this weighs as much as a small adult? Cueball: What? Cueball: Uh, probably.\n[Black Hat walks past Cueball who turns to look after him.] Black Hat: Great!\n[Black Hat has walked out of the frame. Cueball is looking in the direction he left in. Several noises and voices are coming from off-panel.] Off-panel: *Thump* Car voice (off-panel): Please fasten your seatbelt. Off-panel: *click* Black Hat (off-panel): Take me to Anchorage, Alaska. Car voice (off-panel): Navigating Off-panel: *slam*\n[Black Hat walks back in the panel towards Cueball.] Car driving off: Vrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrr rrrrr rr Black Hat: I love self-driving cars. Cueball: ...Whose car was that? Black Hat: Dunno, but they shouldn't have left it running.\n"}
{"id":1560,"title":"Bubblegum","image_title":"Bubblegum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1560","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bubblegum.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1560:_Bubblegum","transcript":"[Beret Guy stands dramatically silhouetted in a doorway.] Beret Guy: I came here to chew bubblegum and make friends!\n[Beret Guy, in normal lighting, looks at Megan and Cueball who stare back. A silent beat panel.]\n[Beret Guy put his hand out offering a stick of gum to Megan and Cueball.] Beret Guy: Want some gum?\n","explanation":"This comic spoofs the iconic quote from the 1988 action movie They Live , where the armed protagonist, upon entering a bank, states that \"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum.\" This implies that the protagonist will soon fight the people in the bank, as he cannot do the other objective he came there for (chewing bubble gum). This phrase was also used by the title character of the video game Duke Nukem 3D and is often mistakenly believed to have originated in it. Furthermore, the phrase has itself been parodied by British comedy IT Crowd , and by Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the episode 521 \"Santa Claus\" (\"Ho-ho-ho! I'm here to kick butt and lick candy canes, and I'm all out of candy canes!\"), and a version appeared in the 1993 movie Dazed and Confused , where Clint says, \"I only came here to do two things, kick some ass and drink some beer. ... Looks like we're almost outta beer.\" (Note that this movie was filmed in 1993 but set in 1976, and so the character in the movie wouldn't have known about the movie They Live .)\nFormer wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper , who played the protagonist in They Live , died five days prior to the publication of this comic so this comic is most likely a tribute to him. The iconic quote was an ad-lib Piper himself came up with.\nIn the comic, Beret Guy stands in an open doorway with a strong light behind him, a typical pose in action movies when someone is dramatically entering a room. However, in this instance, Beret Guy claims that he is here to \"chew bubble gum and make friends\". He then offers a stick of gum to both Megan and Cueball , making it clear he intends to do both of his stated objectives. This is expected from Beret Guy, who is usually both na\u00efve about the world and beings that surround him, and also friendly to them.\nThe title text seems to be a slight dig at the trope of a laconic hero who utters only a few gnomic words, as in the They Live scene. It is another variation of the line, with meta-humor. The speaker states that he is here to say 18 words and chew bubble gum, but reaches 18 words before he is able to finish his sentence. Thus, readers are left in ambiguity as to whether or not he is also out of bubble gum, as the line could end \"and I'm all out of words\", \"and I'm all out of gum\", or \"and I'm all out of both.\" Of course if it is a tribute to Rowdy it could have been \"and I'm all out of time!\" And his time was up just then before that last word.\nStrangely, though, Randall has not preserved the number of words in the original film quote: there are 16. There would be 18 if 'bubble gum' (which occurs twice) were taken as two words, but in the comic, it is clear that Randall takes it as one.\nBeret Guy has previously indicated he has a finite number of words he can say in 1493: Meeting .\nIn 1110: Click and Drag Megan, walking out on to a platform on the left side of the tower Burj Khalifa, says \"I came here to chew bubblegum... And I'm all out of bubblegum\" to which Cueball walking with her replies \"That's a shame\" (see picture here .)\n[Beret Guy stands dramatically silhouetted in a doorway.] Beret Guy: I came here to chew bubblegum and make friends!\n[Beret Guy, in normal lighting, looks at Megan and Cueball who stare back. A silent beat panel.]\n[Beret Guy put his hand out offering a stick of gum to Megan and Cueball.] Beret Guy: Want some gum?\n"}
{"id":1561,"title":"Water Phase Diagram","image_title":"Water Phase Diagram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1561","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/water_phase_diagram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1561:_Water_Phase_Diagram","transcript":"[A phase diagram is shown with eight labeled regions.]\n[The horizontal axis, increasing in value to the right is labeled:] Temperature\n[The vertical axis, increasing in value downwards is labeled:] Pressure\n[Region alongside the \"Pressure\" axis covering about half of its length is labeled:] Ice\n[Region spanning top-right corner of graph, i.e. higher temperatures and lower pressures. The region is labeled:] Water vapor\n[Region below \"Water vapor\" and to the right of \"Ice\" is labeled:] Liquid water\n[Three small regions below \"Ice\" are going from left to right on the same pressure region, the last ending just under \"Liquid water\". They are each labeled:] Ice II Ice III Ice V\n[Region below \"Ice II\", \"Ice III\", \"Ice V\" and \"Liquid water\" is labeled:] Vanilla Ice (Ice VI)\n[Below \"Vanilla Ice\" there is a dashed line with two arrows pointing downwards. The region below the dashed line is labeled:] David Bowie & Queen\n","explanation":"This is a modified version of the phase diagram for water . A \"phase diagram\" is a chart that shows the states, or \"phases\", that a substance will be in under various temperatures and pressures. Water's phases are particularly well-studied; on the real phase diagram for water , there are a great many phases listed.\nMost people are familiar with three phases of water \u2014 solid ( ice ), liquid (water), and gas ( vapour ) \u2014 and with the fact that an increase in temperature will cause water to change from one state to another. The gas and liquid phases are quite straightforward; however, there is in fact not one single solid phase of water, but a variety of numbered phases (\"ice I\" through \"ice XVI\" are currently recognized), several of which are divided into sub-categories. Ordinary, everyday ice is known as \" ice I h \" (\"ice one-h\"). Most of the more unusual forms of ice only form under very high pressure .\nRandall's phase diagram starts out realistically, though slightly simplified in several ways. For one, it simply uses the name \"ice\" for the usual form(s). It is focused in on a narrower area than the more complete diagram linked earlier; on that version, the \"ice V\" region is quite small, and \"ice III\" is barely visible, whereas both are quite plain to see on Randall's diagram. Lastly, where most phase diagrams have pressure increase upwards, Randall has the pressure scale increase downwards, this has been chosen to make it possible for the jokes to appear at the bottom of the chart. Else the comic would not be funny for the average reader.\nBecause, as the diagram continues downwards and the pressure increases, the jokes begin. Beyond the moderately high-pressure forms of ice (ice II, III and V), a real phase diagram has ice VI; Randall has \"Vanilla Ice (ice VI)\". Vanilla Ice is the stage name of a white rap\/hip-hop artist from the 1990s; the initials of Vanilla Ice, and the Roman numeral six, are both VI.\nVanilla Ice's biggest hit, \" Ice Ice Baby \", used samples from the earlier song \" Under Pressure \", by David Bowie and Queen ; accordingly, on Randall's diagram, the \"Vanilla Ice\" region transitions to \"David Bowie & Queen\" when it is under (even higher) pressure.\nFurther references to \"Ice Ice Baby\" are found in the title text. Near the beginning of the song, Vanilla Ice raps the line, \"All right stop, collaborate and listen\". The unusual choice of \"collaborate\" in this line has made it memorable, and the word is used in the title text (in a more typical context). The phrase \"survive at room temperature for several months\" is likely a reference to \"Ice Ice Baby\" being Vanilla Ice's only major hit, humorously suggesting he faded out of the public view after a few months of fame. Finally, even the word \"sample\" may be deliberately chosen as a reference to the sampling of \"Under Pressure\". \"Ice Ice Baby\" was written in 1983, but in 1990 Vanilla Ice finally admitted that he used unmodified samples from \"Under Pressure\" and paid royalties to Queen and Bowie.\nWhen originally published, another image was faintly visible just below and to the right of the \"Water vapor\" label. It appeared to be a copy of an actual phase diagram for water from Wikipedia . The image has since been removed, lending support to speculation that it was an error (perhaps an image Randall referred to in drawing the comic, but accidentally left in the final result). Alternatively, it may have been deliberate\u2014suggestions include its presence being a water mark, or a reference to the \"Full text of the Wikipedia article on pareidolia\" joke in the 1551: Pluto comic.\nRandall has referenced \"Ice Ice Baby\" and \"Under Pressure\", separately and together, on many previous occasions, notably in 159: Boombox and 210: 90's Flowchart . The gag of having the performers of \"Under Pressure\" also being literally under pressure was also used in 1040: Lakes and Oceans .\nThe what if? that was current at the time of this comic's publication was 138: Jupiter Submarine , which began with an even more fanciful phase diagram: that of a submarine. It also contains a reference to the songs \"Under Pressure\" and \"Ice Ice Baby\" in one figure, and \"Can't Touch This\" by M.C. Hammer in the title text of that figure (which generated similar controversy for sampling \"Superfreak\" by Rick James).\nThe title text of 1434: Where Do Birds Go whimsically suggests another possible phase of water\/ice.\nAs mentioned above, the small image on the original version could be a reference to the \"Full text of the Wikipedia article on pareidolia\" joke in the 1551: Pluto comic.\n[A phase diagram is shown with eight labeled regions.]\n[The horizontal axis, increasing in value to the right is labeled:] Temperature\n[The vertical axis, increasing in value downwards is labeled:] Pressure\n[Region alongside the \"Pressure\" axis covering about half of its length is labeled:] Ice\n[Region spanning top-right corner of graph, i.e. higher temperatures and lower pressures. The region is labeled:] Water vapor\n[Region below \"Water vapor\" and to the right of \"Ice\" is labeled:] Liquid water\n[Three small regions below \"Ice\" are going from left to right on the same pressure region, the last ending just under \"Liquid water\". They are each labeled:] Ice II Ice III Ice V\n[Region below \"Ice II\", \"Ice III\", \"Ice V\" and \"Liquid water\" is labeled:] Vanilla Ice (Ice VI)\n[Below \"Vanilla Ice\" there is a dashed line with two arrows pointing downwards. The region below the dashed line is labeled:] David Bowie & Queen\n"}
{"id":1562,"title":"I in Team","image_title":"I in Team","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1562","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_in_team.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1562:_I_in_Team","transcript":"[Hairy and Cueball stand opposite each other.] Hairy: Remember, there's no \"I\" in \"team\". Cueball: No, but there's a \"U\" in \"People who apparently don't understand the relationship between orthography and meaning\".\n","explanation":"\"There's no I in team\" is a well-known saying that tries to encourage teamwork by reducing each member's individual self-importance. The intention of the phrase is to remind team members that, just as the letter \"i\" is not present in the word \"team\", focus on the metaphorical \"I\" (i.e. individual self-interest) is not constructive in teamwork. It can be used as a light reprimand to a team member who isn't cooperating, with the reminder that when working as a team one cannot think only for oneself, and must work in partnership with the rest of the team towards a common goal.\nThe phrase \"no I in team\" dates from the 1960s in the USA with printed references [1] showing it is familiar to baseball pitchers such as Vern Law . As an aside, it's interesting that it seems to come from baseball, a sport where players have significantly more independence compared to, say, rugby .\nInterestingly, the letters M and E can both be found in \"team.\" This suggests that the phrase \"There's no I in team\" was a slight victim of cherry picking . This comic makes fun of this, and uses an extreme example, by Cueball taking the sentence literally, as a metalingual comment (see Jakobson's functions of language ), and he points out to Hairy that the spelling (or orthography ) of a word doesn't relate to its meaning (an instance of the use\u2013mention distinction ).\nCueball is using the same joke against Hairy by saying there is a \"u\" in \"People who apparently don't understand the relationship between orthography and meaning\". There is a \"u\" (pronounced as \"you\") in what Cueball said, implying that Hairy is included in the set of people who mistakenly link orthography and meaning.\nOf course, it's very likely that Hairy knows that orthography doesn't determine meaning, and could easily reply \"There's also a 'u' in 'People who take aphorisms too literally' \". On the other hand, there is in fact no 'u' in that sentence, which would make it the one actually false statement mentioned.\nThe title text \"There's no 'I' in 'VOWELS'.\" provides another illustration of the distinction between orthography and meaning. \"A\", \"I\" and \"U\" are vowels, notwithstanding the irrelevant fact that they are not included in the spelling of \"VOWELS\".\nOrthography was the subject of 1069: Alphabet .\n[Hairy and Cueball stand opposite each other.] Hairy: Remember, there's no \"I\" in \"team\". Cueball: No, but there's a \"U\" in \"People who apparently don't understand the relationship between orthography and meaning\".\n"}
{"id":1563,"title":"Synonym Movies","image_title":"Synonym Movies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1563","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/synonym_movies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1563:_Synonym_Movies","transcript":"[Ten DVDs on a shelf. The first three stand together to the left, the two to the right leaning on the first. The next three are standing straight in the middle and then the next four are standing straight to the right. The movie titles are written on the back of the DVD cases, in white on the gray DVD cases. The text is written, so it is supposed to be read when the DVD is lying down.] Space Fights: Sudden Optimism Space Fights: The Government Wins This One Space Fights: The Sword Wizard Is Back\nThe Jewelry God: The Jewelry Team The Jewelry God: Double Houses The Jewelry God: We Have a Czar Again\nSpace Trip: The Movie Space Trip: That Guy is Angry Space Trip: Where is the Vulcan Space Trip: Let's Go Back\n[Caption below the frame:] Synonym Movies\n","explanation":"This comic shows several \"Synonym Movies\". It takes several well known movies, but changes each word of their names into a synonym. So Star Wars has turned into Space Fights , The Lord of the Rings into The Jewelry God and Star Trek into Space Trip . All these movies series have the same heading, and then a subtitle. There are ten of them in the comic, and two more in the title text. This comic became a series when more movies were spoofed  in 1568: Synonym Movies 2 .\nThe use of synonyms makes all these movies look ridiculous, for example, \"The Sword Wizard Is Back\" is a laughable sounding movie [ citation needed ] , whereas \" Return of the Jedi \" sound perfectly reasonable to us. Randall may be poking fun at movies that have ridiculous titles already, for instance some people think this applies to a title like \" Terminator: Genisys \".\nThe title text refers to the latest Star Wars movie (2015-12-18), after Disney acquired the movie rights. The movie is called Star Wars: The Force Awakens and has now turned into Power Gets Up . As usual, with any Star Wars related material, there is a huge fan base that eagerly awaits the new movie. But then again many people fear that it will not live up to their expectations, as was the case with the fourth movie, first of the three movies in the second installment of Star Wars, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace , dubbed here as The Scary Ghost . As mentioned in the title text, that movie did not live up to the hype.\nA similarly humorous effect is achieved in 1133: Up Goer Five which explains the Saturn V rocket, but words and phrases are replaced with synonyms which are chosen from the most common English words. This renders ordinary words like \"rocket\" into \"flying space car\", or \"helium\" into \"funny voice air\" for example.\nSPOILER ALERT! Many of these explanations contain information revealed during the movie.\n[Ten DVDs on a shelf. The first three stand together to the left, the two to the right leaning on the first. The next three are standing straight in the middle and then the next four are standing straight to the right. The movie titles are written on the back of the DVD cases, in white on the gray DVD cases. The text is written, so it is supposed to be read when the DVD is lying down.] Space Fights: Sudden Optimism Space Fights: The Government Wins This One Space Fights: The Sword Wizard Is Back\nThe Jewelry God: The Jewelry Team The Jewelry God: Double Houses The Jewelry God: We Have a Czar Again\nSpace Trip: The Movie Space Trip: That Guy is Angry Space Trip: Where is the Vulcan Space Trip: Let's Go Back\n[Caption below the frame:] Synonym Movies\n"}
{"id":1564,"title":"Every Seven Seconds","image_title":"Every Seven Seconds","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1564","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/every_seven_seconds.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1564:_Every_Seven_Seconds","transcript":"[Cueball is walking with four thought bubbles above him.]\nCueball (thinking): There\u2019s no way that\u2019s true. It would interfere with basic cognition. Such a ridiculous view of masculinity. How would you even study that?\n[Caption below the panel:] Every seven seconds, sociologists think about that made-up statistic about how often men think about sex.\n","explanation":"There is an oft-stated urban myth that men think about sex every seven seconds. See for example this BBC article , where they say that a more realistic number is 19 times in a waking day, i.e. once every 50 minutes.\nIn this comic Cueball is a sociologist , and the thought bubbles show his train of thoughts regarding this myth. First of all, he flatly denies that it could be true, and progressively his thoughts move to the effects if it were true, and then Cueball considers how it would even be studied. The title of the comic (Every seven seconds) hints strongly that this is the subject he is thinking about, and this is subsequently confirmed both in the caption and in the title text.\nThe setup is that thinking about sex every seven seconds would be dysfunctional and unproductive in addition to making working, social interactions and etcetera nearly impossible as explained by the sociologist's thoughts. The punch line is that thinking every seven seconds about how ridiculous it is to think about sex every seven seconds is just as dysfunctional and unproductive even if the thought time is spent refuting the original notion as understood in third person.\nThe irony of the comic is that in thinking every seven seconds about how impossible it would be for men to think about sex every seven seconds, the sociologist is, in fact, thinking about sex every seven seconds, albeit in a roundabout way.\nIn the title text, the narrator ( Randall or Cueball the sociologist?) says he thinks about how implausible it would be to have sex every seven seconds, several times a year. See alternate interpretations below:\nIn the title text, the narrator's statement leaves some meaning up to interpretation:\n[Cueball is walking with four thought bubbles above him.]\nCueball (thinking): There\u2019s no way that\u2019s true. It would interfere with basic cognition. Such a ridiculous view of masculinity. How would you even study that?\n[Caption below the panel:] Every seven seconds, sociologists think about that made-up statistic about how often men think about sex.\n"}
{"id":1565,"title":"Back Seat","image_title":"Back Seat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1565","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/back_seat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1565:_Back_Seat","transcript":"[Caption above the panel.] Protip:\n[Cueball is holding the back door of his car open. Wiggly lines emanate from the back seat area. Megan and another Cueball-like guy are stand next to the car, looking at each other.] Cueball: Hang on, I just have to clear a few things out of the back.:\n[Caption below the panel.] When you hear \"I just have to clear a few things out of the back,\" you are about to see, at minimum, a decaying raccoon.\n","explanation":"This comic makes fun of the common situation of a messy car, using a hyperbolic scenario of that car containing decaying animals, in this case a raccoon . The joke being that such a car is so disgusting that a dead raccoon is not the worst thing that one might encounter. The humor comes from the car owner seeming to be used to a dead raccoon and the implications of what might be worse than a dead raccoon.\nThis is the polar opposite of 1267: Mess , where the person apologizes for a nearly non-existent mess. Here, the person minimizes a completely atrocious mess into a quick fix situation. The form of the comic is that of a pro-tip, which tells the reader what the phrase \"I just have to clear a few things out of the back\" really means.\n' Protips ' are used to give snarky, obvious or inadequate advice, in order to either humor a well-learnt audience or to prank a na\u00efve audience. This phenomenon originated in a gaming magazine column offering advice on Doom : \"To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies. [ citation needed ] \", or \"fire is hot [ citation needed ] \" Randall has given us several Protips in the past as well.\nThe title text further exposes the reality of the person's knowledge of how bad the situation really is when he acknowledges the existence of the dead raccoon while trying to usher the live one to the same side. Protip: Sitting next to a dead and a live raccoon is not an improved scenario, as the dead raccoon would probably be decaying, leaking bodily fluids into the back seat, staining the seat and making it wet, while the live raccoon may be aggravated, and possibly attacking the occupants of the vehicle.\n[Caption above the panel.] Protip:\n[Cueball is holding the back door of his car open. Wiggly lines emanate from the back seat area. Megan and another Cueball-like guy are stand next to the car, looking at each other.] Cueball: Hang on, I just have to clear a few things out of the back.:\n[Caption below the panel.] When you hear \"I just have to clear a few things out of the back,\" you are about to see, at minimum, a decaying raccoon.\n"}
{"id":1566,"title":"Board Game","image_title":"Board Game","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1566","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/board_game.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1566:_Board_Game","transcript":"[Hairy, Cueball, Ponytail (reading something), and Hairbun (holding some cards) are sitting around a table. There are several other objects on the table.] Cueball: ...Now, this pile is \"allowable deduction\" cards. You match them with cards in your hand to preserve their full point value. Cueball: Over here are \"dependent\" tokens...\n[Caption below the frame:] Every year, I trick a local board game club into doing my taxes.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is shown explaining the rules of a board game to three other players ( Hairy , Ponytail , and Hairbun ) of a local board game club \u2013 a hobbyist group that gets together to play board games. However, the board game Cueball is explaining is actually his own creation which is designed to trick the club into preparing his income tax return. The caption indicates that Cueball does this every year, which makes this comic reminiscent of the My Hobby series.\nAn income tax return is an annual document which most adults (and some teenagers) in many countries must prepare and submit to the government agency responsible for tax collection. The document sets out that person's income for the year, along with offsets including deductions and credits, and calculates the amount of income tax the person is required to pay to the government (used by the revenue service to compare it to the value that person had actually paid).\nThe return requires understanding of a number of forms which may seem complicated to those not familiar with them. It is an annual task that is stereotypically met with confusion and disdain. Many people hire professionals to prepare their taxes. More recently, software-based solutions that walk the user through a series of more understandable text-based questions are available to aid taxpayers in completing their returns; however these are not always ideal for those with complicated returns.\nIn this comic, Cueball has developed his alternative method of tax preparation which utilizes the collective intelligence of several board-game-club players, and also capitalizes on the fact that members of such a club are likely very competitive and eager to succeed at board games. As a result (as the title text suggests), Cueball thinks the board game players are more thorough than the tax preparation professionals he has previously used. Such professionals would prepare perhaps hundreds of returns per year and as a result, might indeed be less thorough with each individual return which may all be viewed as fairly simple and repetitive by the professional.\nAmong the rules Cueball explains are references to \"allowable deduction\" cards which presumably reference certain deductions which are allowed on income tax returns to lower the net income (resulting in lower taxes). For example; a portion of certain medical expenses are permitted to lower one's income in recognition of the fact that using one's income for medical expenses is somewhat non-discretionary. Similarly, certain charitable donations are permitted as deductions to encourage such donations.\nIn Cueball's game, players must match the deductions with other cards to preserve their full \"point value\". This appears to be a reference to the desire to capitalize as much as possible on the value of a deduction by taking the deduction against income which would otherwise incur the greatest tax, and ensuring that the full amount of the deduction can be used. A deduction of $2,000 against income of $1,000 would waste half the deduction.\nIn gaming, tokens are small playing pieces which may represent various things, depending on the game. In many board games (e.g. Monopoly ), tokens represent the players themselves. In other games, such as Magic: The Gathering , tokens can represent creatures or other items in a player's inventory. Cueball references \"dependent tokens\" which appear to be game tokens representing Cueball's dependents. Dependents are individuals for whom the taxpayer is entitled to certain deductions and credits, often related to expenses incurred to care for the dependents.  Most commonly, dependents are the minor children whom the taxpayer is required to support financially, but in the United States (where Randall lives) a person can claim a qualifying child as a dependent as long as the qualifying child lives with the claimant and is not self-supporting, even if the claimant is not the person who supports the qualifying child, and a person who voluntarily supports another (without being required) may also qualify to claim the person. Also, U.S. law usually does not allow a person's own spouse to be claimed as a \"dependent\", even when financial support is required.\nNote that while Cueball states he \"tricks\" his board game club into doing his taxes, in fact his use of clear tax terms (\"allowable deductions\", \"dependent\") for naming different tokens and elements of the game could suggest that the players knew what he was doing but going along with it because they just enjoy playing board games, such that even doing a tax return \u2013 often considered a boring mind-numbing chore \u2013 within the format of a board game would be something they would enjoy doing. (On the other hand, it's possible that the players don't realize that the game involves preparing Cueball's own tax return.) Alternatively, the comic may be comparing the tediousness of some board games to that of doing tax returns. It is noted that there are board games on a variety of unexpected topics which might seem like boring subjects for a game. For example, there are several games designed to simulate the stock market and investing. The popular video game Farmville is often joked about having created a successful game out of a job most people would find unpleasurable. This suggests it might actually be possible to create an board game enjoyable to some people from the process of preparing a tax return.\nThis is one of several xkcd comics that suggest going to comically extreme lengths to avoid doing something (in this case, his taxes) that might have been simpler to do normally than the way Randall proposes. In this case, Cueball suggests that his motives may actually be to get the most thorough preparation possible, rather than to simply find a way to get the task done. There is actually a pretty solid basis to for this.  Both gamification and crowdsourcing have been shown, in at least some cases, to produce results that can match or exceed those produced by professionals. For example, the University of Washington created an online game in which users tried to optimize the folding of protein structures. The results produced by players produced useful new structures more quickly than computer simulations were able to. In this case, the work is being done by people who presumably have at least some enthusiasm for games, and who are likely competing with one another for the best results. Randall can then use the best outcome (that created by the winner) to optimize his own tax return.\nA similar situation of Randall secretly exploiting someone's interest for his own purposes occurs in 1323: Protocol .\nAnd another board game can be found at 492: Scrabble .\nThis was the first time Randall made a comic about people having trouble understanding the US tax system. Since then he has two years in a row made comics in relation to an approaching tax day. See the title text of 1805: Unpublished Discoveries and the entire comic 1971: Personal Data .\n[Hairy, Cueball, Ponytail (reading something), and Hairbun (holding some cards) are sitting around a table. There are several other objects on the table.] Cueball: ...Now, this pile is \"allowable deduction\" cards. You match them with cards in your hand to preserve their full point value. Cueball: Over here are \"dependent\" tokens...\n[Caption below the frame:] Every year, I trick a local board game club into doing my taxes.\n"}
{"id":1567,"title":"Kitchen Tips","image_title":"Kitchen Tips","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1567","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kitchen_tips.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1567:_Kitchen_Tips","transcript":"[Cueball at a kitchen counter, with various items, holding a meat thermometer.] Cueball: If you're anything like me, you may have trouble telling when meat is fully cooked. Cueball: Instead of guessing, try a meat thermometer!\n[Cueball at a sink, holding a dirty dish, with a trashcan next to him full of broken ceramics and glasses.] Cueball: If you're anything like me, you probably throw away your plates and glasses when they get dirty. But if you clean them, they can often be used again!\n[Cueball cracking an egg over a pan on a hot stove.] Cueball: Making scrambled eggs? Put a pan under them! Cueball: It's easier, and it keeps your burners clean.\n[Cueball holding a garden hose, spraying it into the freezer compartment of a freezer.] Cueball: If you're anything like me, you make ice by spraying a hose into your freezer and then slamming it shut. Cueball: But there's a better way...\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time with a series of Kitchen tips.\nIn this comic, Cueball appears to be hosting a show (or be in an ad) giving out kitchen advice. He starts with a reasonable tip to use a meat thermometer instead of guessing when meat is cooked. His later tips, though, are little more than telling how to complete normal kitchen activities performed using common sense. Moreover, in most cases he repeats \"If you're anything like me,\" suggesting he's actually done these things in his kitchen. This is a parody of many commercials and infomercials that imply their consumers have no basic motor skills or common sense in order to make their product more appealing.\nThe first tip he gives is reasonable because, though the use of a meat thermometer is fairly well known, not everybody goes to the trouble of using one. To determine if meat is done cooking, one can either guess or use a meat thermometer to check that the internal temperature has reached the correct level to render meat safe for consumption. Many people don't own a meat thermometer and rely on an alternative solution that doesn't require special equipment (such as testing by feel, cutting the meat open to check its doneness, checking the color of the juices after pricking the meat with skewer, or simply guessing).\nThe second panel shows that Cueball throws away dishes and buys new ones every time they are used. This is perfectly normal if the plates are disposable plates made of paper or Styrofoam (though not exactly environmentally friendly), but we see his trashcan is filled with chipped glasses and ceramic plates. Naturally, this would be a very expensive practice. The virtually universal chore of \"washing the dishes,\" is one Cueball presumes the audience is heretofore unaware of.\nCooking on a stove is typically done placing the food into a pot or pan which is placed on the burner [ citation needed ] . Cueball seems to suggest that the use of a pan is a tip most people would be unaware of, suggesting that most people cook eggs directly on the burners themselves, a method that is likely to burn the food and create a great mess.  Cueball's stove has T-shape raised burners (probably gas, but might be electric), making the task very impractical, though owners of glass-top electric stoves could conceivably cook directly on the glass surface.\nIce is usually made by filling an ice cube tray with water and leaving it in a freezer for several hours. Cueball, however, sprays a hose directly into his freezer compartment and quickly slams the door shut to trap some water inside. (This would work somewhat better in a chest freezer, which has a door on the top, as it could be filled with water and the door would not need to be closed to trap the water inside.) While this unorthodox method will make ice, it will result in a large sheet of ice on the bottom of the freezer. More importantly, it will also make it impossible to actually use the freezer to hold anything else (unless you were to put anything in beforehand and you don't mind breaking through a block of ice to get it out). Also, ice expands as it cools (it is one of the few substances with a negative coefficient of thermal expansion), and its expansion might push the freezer door open.\nThe title text, a household tip , suggests using toilet paper a few sheets at a time, which is how most people use it. Cueball, however, seems to suggest that most people use the entire roll as a single object without unspooling it and then flushing it whole, using at least one roll each time they use the bathroom. This is economically impractical, and is prone to clogging the toilet and the plumbing if you throw the toilet paper away by putting it into the toilet and flush it.\nFor more household tips like the one in the title text, see the sequel to this comic: 1715: Household Tips .\n[Cueball at a kitchen counter, with various items, holding a meat thermometer.] Cueball: If you're anything like me, you may have trouble telling when meat is fully cooked. Cueball: Instead of guessing, try a meat thermometer!\n[Cueball at a sink, holding a dirty dish, with a trashcan next to him full of broken ceramics and glasses.] Cueball: If you're anything like me, you probably throw away your plates and glasses when they get dirty. But if you clean them, they can often be used again!\n[Cueball cracking an egg over a pan on a hot stove.] Cueball: Making scrambled eggs? Put a pan under them! Cueball: It's easier, and it keeps your burners clean.\n[Cueball holding a garden hose, spraying it into the freezer compartment of a freezer.] Cueball: If you're anything like me, you make ice by spraying a hose into your freezer and then slamming it shut. Cueball: But there's a better way...\n"}
{"id":1568,"title":"Synonym Movies 2","image_title":"Synonym Movies 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1568","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/synonym_movies_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1568:_Synonym_Movies_2","transcript":"[22 DVDs on a shelf in four groups. All DVDs are labeled in black on light grey. Text written so it is supposed to be read when the DVD is lying down.] [First group of 8 DVDs. All standing straight.] Wandboy and the Magic Rock Wandboy and the Hidden Room Wandboy and the Fugitive Wandboy and the Burning Cup Wandboy and the Firebird Club Wandboy and the Book Owner Wandboy and the Magic Stuff (1\/2) Wandboy and the Magic Stuff (2\/2)\n[Second group of six DVDs. Five standing straight, last on the right leaning against the rest.] Puncher Puncher II Puncher III Puncher IV Puncher V Puncher Lastname\n[Third group of four DVDs. First and last standing straight, others leaning on first.] Tropical Boaters: Spooky Boat Tropical Boaters: Angry Wormface Tropical Boaters: Boats Everywhere Tropical Boaters: Vitamin Water\n[Fourth group of four DVDs. Three standing straight, second from left leaning on first.] Professor Whip and the Box of God Professor Whip and the Scary Church Professor Whip Looks for a Cup Professor Whip is in Another Movie\n","explanation":"This comic made a series out of its predecessor as it continued the idea from 1563: Synonym Movies with a new set of movie series. As with the previous comic, the titles aren't always direct synonyms with the original (Indiana Jones as Professor Whip ), but now it seems to be even more exaggerated, sometimes making synonyms of the plot synopsis instead of the subtitle (\"Vitamin Water\" refers to the Fountain of Youth rather than the Stranger Tides ).\nThis set includes Wandboy ( Harry Potter ), Puncher ( Rocky ), Tropical Boaters ( Pirates of the Caribbean ), and Professor Whip ( Indiana Jones ).\nThe is in Another Movie title in the Professor Whip series differs from the other titles in that it does not reference the plot of the movie. The more dismissive reference may be due to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull being poorly received by fans of the series.\nThe title text is a reference to the TV series Game of Thrones , based on the book series A Song of Ice and Fire .  All of these titles are direct synonyms, but such that they remove most of the meaning from the titles.  For instance, nobody actually cares about the physical object of a throne, but the political power it represents.  Birds eating in general have a very different implied meaning than crows feasting specifically, as groups of crows only gather to eat when there is a lot of food, such as a corpse, and as such have a strong cultural association with death and slaughter.\nSPOILER ALERT! Many of these explanations contain information revealed during the movie.\n[22 DVDs on a shelf in four groups. All DVDs are labeled in black on light grey. Text written so it is supposed to be read when the DVD is lying down.] [First group of 8 DVDs. All standing straight.] Wandboy and the Magic Rock Wandboy and the Hidden Room Wandboy and the Fugitive Wandboy and the Burning Cup Wandboy and the Firebird Club Wandboy and the Book Owner Wandboy and the Magic Stuff (1\/2) Wandboy and the Magic Stuff (2\/2)\n[Second group of six DVDs. Five standing straight, last on the right leaning against the rest.] Puncher Puncher II Puncher III Puncher IV Puncher V Puncher Lastname\n[Third group of four DVDs. First and last standing straight, others leaning on first.] Tropical Boaters: Spooky Boat Tropical Boaters: Angry Wormface Tropical Boaters: Boats Everywhere Tropical Boaters: Vitamin Water\n[Fourth group of four DVDs. Three standing straight, second from left leaning on first.] Professor Whip and the Box of God Professor Whip and the Scary Church Professor Whip Looks for a Cup Professor Whip is in Another Movie\n"}
{"id":1569,"title":"Magic Tree","image_title":"Magic Tree","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1569","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/magic_tree.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1569:_Magic_Tree","transcript":"[Beret Guy and Megan stand next to a large pole with a note on it. Beret Guy points at the pole.] Beret Guy: Check it out! I threw my magic beans on the ground here yesterday, and this big tree appeared!\n[Zoom out, the pole is revealed to have branches. Around the pole are trees about 1\/9th of the height of the pole.] Megan: That's a cell tower. Beret Guy: No way - it has branches! Beret Guy: See? Beret Guy: I'm gonna climb it!\n[Same as frame as the first. Beret Guy starts climbing the pole.] Megan: No, they just put those there to make it look- Megan: ...Never mind.\n[There is a caption in a small frame inlaid at the top of the last frame:] Later... [Megan looks at her phone while Beret Guy walks towards her holding an axe.] Megan: Why do I have no signal? Beret Guy: There were scary giants with yellow helmets in that tree! Luckily I cut it down before they ate me.\n","explanation":"This comic features a running theme in the xkcd comics, Beret Guy 's naive and\/or odd ways of thinking. In the beginning of the comic, Beret Guy shows Megan what he believes to be a tree, and explains that it grew there because he placed magic beans in that spot yesterday. This is a reference to the fable \" Jack and the Beanstalk \", where the protagonist plants several magical beans he acquired, resulting in a beanstalk growing which ascends into the atmosphere. Megan, however, tells Beret Guy that the \"tree\" is actually a cell phone tower . Beret Guy disagrees, pointing out that it has branches, to which Megan tries to explain that this was in an attempt to make the towers look like trees . She gives up, however, as Beret Guy has already begun climbing the tower, or because she fears that giving this explanation would only add fuel to the fire that is Beret Guy's imagination.\nLater, Megan complains that her cell reception has disappeared. Beret Guy responds by saying that he had to cut down his \"tree\" because there were \"scary giants with yellow helmets\" in it (presumably, construction workers). This mirrors, again, the \"Jack and the Beanstalk\" fable, where the protagonist has to cut down his beanstalk to prevent the giant, whose lands the beanstalk connects to, from climbing down and chasing him. In reality, the \"giants\" were probably utility workers.\nThe title text suggests that, over time, trees will evolve to start looking more like cell phone towers in a form of mimicry in order to avoid people cutting them down. Mimicry is where a creature copies the appearance or behavior of another in order to confuse predators. In this scenario, the more defenseless trees attempt to mimic cell phone towers, which have the defense of people not wanting to cut them down or they would lose cell service (and likely a significant amount of money through fines) and because of society's general respect for the property of others, as well as the dangers of electrocution or radiation. This is similar to the counting pine ,  a tree in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series that evolved to display its age with numbers on the outside (in the bark) in the hope that humans would not cut it down and count its rings. Of course now humans hunted it down trying to find a tree with numbers that would fit their house number instead, thus quickly rendering the trees almost completely extinct. (See the tribute to Terry in 1498: Terry Pratchett ).\nConvergent evolution deals with multiple species acquiring similar characteristics to fulfill their role (such as dolphins and sharks both having a streamlined shape to swim fast) due to the species' common need to adapt to similar environments or tasks. Randall uses the term to describe the convergence in the appearances of cell towers whose design has \"evolved\" to include tree-like branches and trees which he predicts will evolve to resemble cell phone towers. Each of these \"evolutions\" would be for the purposes of camouflage, although the cell towers \"evolve\" by human design for purely aesthetic reasons and the trees would evolve naturally for self-preservation. This would therefore not be a true example of convergent evolution. It more closely resembles Batesian mimicry, or the evolutionary process by which a species remains noticeable, but treated as something it is not.\n[Beret Guy and Megan stand next to a large pole with a note on it. Beret Guy points at the pole.] Beret Guy: Check it out! I threw my magic beans on the ground here yesterday, and this big tree appeared!\n[Zoom out, the pole is revealed to have branches. Around the pole are trees about 1\/9th of the height of the pole.] Megan: That's a cell tower. Beret Guy: No way - it has branches! Beret Guy: See? Beret Guy: I'm gonna climb it!\n[Same as frame as the first. Beret Guy starts climbing the pole.] Megan: No, they just put those there to make it look- Megan: ...Never mind.\n[There is a caption in a small frame inlaid at the top of the last frame:] Later... [Megan looks at her phone while Beret Guy walks towards her holding an axe.] Megan: Why do I have no signal? Beret Guy: There were scary giants with yellow helmets in that tree! Luckily I cut it down before they ate me.\n"}
{"id":1570,"title":"Engineer Syllogism","image_title":"Engineer Syllogism","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1570","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/engineer_syllogism.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1570:_Engineer_Syllogism","transcript":"[An white frame with text inside an underbrace and an overbrace.] An engineer syllogism\n[Cueball is at his desk in front of his computer, with his hands on his knees, thinking.] Cueball (thinking): 1: I am good at understanding numbers.\n[Cueball takes one hand to his chin, still thinking.] Cueball (thinking): 2: The stock market is made of numbers.\n[Cueball lifts both arms from his legs, still thinking.] Cueball (thinking): 3: Therefore I\u2013 Wow , where did all my money just go?\n","explanation":"A syllogism is a logical argument where two or more propositions lead to a conclusion through deductive reasoning . For example, one of the best-known syllogisms is:\nIn this comic, Cueball is an engineer who is attempting to make the following syllogism:\nSince most engineers are purportedly good at math, proposition 1 seems to be true. It is also loosely true that the stock market is made of numbers, but only in the sense that every system can be given a post-hoc numeric characterization; the dynamics of the stock market are primarily human-driven. In this comic Cueball thinks that his skill at math will help him beat the stock market. Little does he know that the system can be unpredictable, so he ends up losing money as the financial instrument he's invested in loses value. This is due to the financial markets being largely controlled by humans making emotional decisions and not some calculable reason or logic.\nEven if the propositions \"I am good at understanding numbers\" and \"The stock market is made of numbers\" were true in Cueball's interpretation, Cueball would still be wrong to conclude that \"I am good at understanding the stock market\": this would be a fallacy of the undistributed middle (with the first premise being more accurately stated as \"I'm good at understanding things made of numbers\") and a fallacy of composition (with the implicit third premise \"if I'm good at understanding the components of a system, then I'm good at understanding the system\"). The problem is that proposition 1 seems to say \"I am good at understanding all math\". However, the \"all\" is not present, so Cueball may not necessarily understand the math underlying the stock market.\nThis comic is also related to the 1998 movie Pi where the main character repeats to himself several times his assumptions that the world is all numbers, and thus he, a great mathematician, should be able to predict the stock market, which is all numbers. He believes that maybe his work on patterns in pi will provide some deeper insight into the patterns in the stock market, a project that drove his mentor crazy and may in fact be making his computer self-aware.\nThe title text talks of the scenario where it was Cueball who causes everyone involved in the financial system to lose their money. This could refer to a scenario in which Cueball figures out a way to extract large quantities of money from the stock market, causing a sudden, major decline in everybody else's wealth, or that his involvement has caused literally everyone, including his own, stock market assets to lose their value. This is possible since there is no conservation of value for the stock market. The value of a particular stock is determined by a majority that is willing to trade it at a given price.\nThe release date of this comic makes it highly likely that it refers at least in part to the 2015 Chinese stock market crash which largely affected most other world financial markets, particularly during the week of August 24\u201328, during which this comic was published.\nTwo, less likely, interpretations of the title text have been suggested:\nThis scenario has been mentioned before, in the title text of 592: Drama .\n[An white frame with text inside an underbrace and an overbrace.] An engineer syllogism\n[Cueball is at his desk in front of his computer, with his hands on his knees, thinking.] Cueball (thinking): 1: I am good at understanding numbers.\n[Cueball takes one hand to his chin, still thinking.] Cueball (thinking): 2: The stock market is made of numbers.\n[Cueball lifts both arms from his legs, still thinking.] Cueball (thinking): 3: Therefore I\u2013 Wow , where did all my money just go?\n"}
{"id":1571,"title":"Car Model Names","image_title":"Car Model Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1571","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/car_model_names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1571:_Car_Model_Names","transcript":"Certain letters and numbers are used disproportionately often in car models compared to regular text. (see:\"Rev-4 cr-x x3 G6 Maxx\")\nLetter and number scores based on relative frequency in car model names Carlike 60 6 55 35 74 6 27 5 27 64 32 12 19 40 8 15 41 126 83 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z English-like -74 -58 -67 -37 -14 -5 -21 -45 -44 -21 -46 -80 -27 -18 -68 -20 -90\nBased on these scores, here are a few suggestions for car companies: (with average letter scores)\nNames to avoid Potential hits Honda 2Chainz (-0.13) Honda 3Chainz (0.57) Mitsubishi Fhqwhgads (-0.62) Subaru Andre3000 (1.30) Kia 49AndGothy (-2.96) Suzuki Sexism (1.82) Chevrolet Niceguy (-3.09) Lincoln Marxism (2.17) Oldsmobile GoodWood (-4.44) Hyundai Climax (2.48) Infinity Toothy69 (-4.51) Porsche Zizek9000 (3.06) BMW Outhouse (-4.85) Lexus 3x3Cutrix (3.22) Volkswagen Woodpony 7OH7 (-5.70) Acura PizzaJazz (3.56) Chrysler Uh Iono (-5.65) Ford SixAxle 4x4 (3.95) Nissan Doody (-5.84) Toyota Cervixxx (4.85)\n","explanation":"In English, letters like X and Z are rarely used in the common vernacular. Marketers have found that names with these infrequently-appearing letters sell more products.\nScores\nThere are two explanations for scores. Both of them share the fact that Randall must have used a car-name database to calculate letter frequency in car models.\nThere are 19 positive scores and 17 negative scores, which is interpreted differently in each explanation.\nScore(x) = Frequency_in_cars(x) - Frequency_in_English(x)\nThis formula generates a positive number if a letter is more common in car models than in typical English (as X) which Randall then calls carlike. The formula generates a negative number if a letter's relative frequency in car models is lower than in typical English (as O) and Randall calls it English-like (more suitable for readable text). The letters F and B, with scores of 5 and -5, respectively, are about as common in English as in car models. With this nomenclature, the most English-like letter is Y because, while not the most common English letter, it is apparently extremely rare in car models. The most common letter in ordinary English is E, which is (presumably) fairly common in car models.\nScore(x) = Frequency_in_cars(x)\nIt seems that Randall arbitrarily used positive and negative numbers: if a letter is very common in car models (as X) he calls it carlike. If a letter is very uncommon in car models (as O) he calls it English-like. With this nomenclature the most English-like letter is Y, but actually Y is the least carlike letter. The most common letter in ordinary English is E. Y on the other hand is just in the middle (place 13), which can't be called English-like.\nAlgorithm for the index\nRandall devised an index for car models which is the score average divided by 10.\nExample\nWe take 2Chainz and add the scores of its different numbers and letters: 6 +27 -44 -14 -21 -46 +83 = -9\nAverage is -9\/7 = -1.29 and divided by 10 it's -0.129 or -0.13.\nNames to avoid\nPotential Hits\nNote that Randall gives the symbol \u00d7 the value of 126, which means he equates it with the letter x.\nindex(3\u00d73Cutrix) = (+55 + score(\u00d7) +55 +27 -68 -18 +8 -21 +126)\/9\/10 = 3.22. This means that the score of the symbol \u00d7 is 90\u00d73.22 - 164 = 125.8\nTitle text\nAs mentioned in the comic, the index for the word \"climax\" is 2.48. However, applying the index to the phrase \"sexclimax\" yields a value of 2.72, higher than that for \"climax\".\nCertain letters and numbers are used disproportionately often in car models compared to regular text. (see:\"Rev-4 cr-x x3 G6 Maxx\")\nLetter and number scores based on relative frequency in car model names Carlike 60 6 55 35 74 6 27 5 27 64 32 12 19 40 8 15 41 126 83 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z English-like -74 -58 -67 -37 -14 -5 -21 -45 -44 -21 -46 -80 -27 -18 -68 -20 -90\nBased on these scores, here are a few suggestions for car companies: (with average letter scores)\nNames to avoid Potential hits Honda 2Chainz (-0.13) Honda 3Chainz (0.57) Mitsubishi Fhqwhgads (-0.62) Subaru Andre3000 (1.30) Kia 49AndGothy (-2.96) Suzuki Sexism (1.82) Chevrolet Niceguy (-3.09) Lincoln Marxism (2.17) Oldsmobile GoodWood (-4.44) Hyundai Climax (2.48) Infinity Toothy69 (-4.51) Porsche Zizek9000 (3.06) BMW Outhouse (-4.85) Lexus 3x3Cutrix (3.22) Volkswagen Woodpony 7OH7 (-5.70) Acura PizzaJazz (3.56) Chrysler Uh Iono (-5.65) Ford SixAxle 4x4 (3.95) Nissan Doody (-5.84) Toyota Cervixxx (4.85)\n"}
{"id":1572,"title":"xkcd Survey","image_title":"xkcd Survey","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1572","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_survey.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1572:_xkcd_Survey","transcript":"[A simple comic with text only. The click here part is inside a black frame.] Introducing The xkcd Survey A search for weird correlations Note: This survey is anonymous, but all responses will be posted publicly so people can play with the data. Click here to take the survey Or click here, or here. The whole comic is a link, because I still haven't gotten the hang of HTML imagemaps.\nThis strip was referenced upon the availability of preorders for How to: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems . A new banner appeared at the top of the site to announce that preorders were available; at the right of the banner was a blue box labelled \"Click here to preorder\", followed immediately below by \"Or click anywhere. I still haven't figured out HTML imagemaps.\"\n","explanation":"As the comic image states, it links to a survey created with Google Forms , containing a series of questions. The questions range from mundane typical survey questions such as \u201cDo you have any food allergies?\u201d, to rather strange, such as \u201cFill this text box with random letters by randomly mashing keys on your leopard.\u201d (See 1530: Keyboard Mash ).\nThe stated goal of the survey is to \u201ccreate an interesting and unusual data set for people to play with\u201d. A strange data set is a ripe opportunity for a sampling of readers. It's also supposed to be \u201ca search for weird correlations\u201d \u2013 presumably the goal is to be able to say things like \u201cpeople who have been skydiving are (more\/less) likely than average to dislike cilantro\u201d. (See also 882: Significant about finding presumably-spurious correlations between unrelated data.)\nIf the data is ever released, this explanation will be updated, but as of April  2022, this has not happened.\nHTML image maps is a technique for marking up areas of an image on a web page, such that each area can be a link without the whole image being a link. Randall could have used this type of image map to make only the \u201cClick here to take the survey\u201d button be a link, and none of the rest of the image. But he cannot get the hang of it (or knowing his skills, does not wish to take the time to learn it). Not getting the hang of HTML image maps was also referenced on the banner for his book tour for the what if? book\nThe title text is a joke off of Big Data , which is a name for analysis of a set of data that includes a huge amount of information. He also says \"for a big planet\" because the Earth is big. [ citation needed ]\nThe survey is closed, and the questions replaced with the text: \"The xkcd survey is now closed. Thank you for all your answers! Response data is being collected and will be posted soon.\" As of February 2022, the same caption is still there, with no indication of exactly how soon the data is intended to be posted. (Apparently, Randall crashed google forms, so the data is taking a long time to be retrieved (see this reddit thread) - much like his breaking of Wolfram Alpha ] during answering a reader's question on what if? )\nA recreation of the survey can be found here on Google .\nThe recreation's data can be found live here.\nIt started with the following statement:\nThis is an anonymous survey. After it's done, a database of everyone's responses will be posted.\nThere's no specific reason for any of the questions. The goal is to create an interesting and unusual data set for people to play with. This is obviously not going to be a real random sample of people, but in the interest of getting cooler data, if you're sharing this with friends, try sending it to some people who wouldn't normally see this kind of thing!\n\nWARNING: This survey is anonymous, but your answers WILL BE MADE PUBLIC. Depending what you write, it's possible that someone may be able to identify you by looking at your responses. None of these questions should ask about anything too private, but don't write anything that you don't want people to see. If you're not comfortable answering a question, just skip it.\nNote: The order of the possible answers (the list of possibilities) was random, and changed every time the page is reloaded. So do not try to fix the order here below...\n[A simple comic with text only. The click here part is inside a black frame.] Introducing The xkcd Survey A search for weird correlations Note: This survey is anonymous, but all responses will be posted publicly so people can play with the data. Click here to take the survey Or click here, or here. The whole comic is a link, because I still haven't gotten the hang of HTML imagemaps.\nThis strip was referenced upon the availability of preorders for How to: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems . A new banner appeared at the top of the site to announce that preorders were available; at the right of the banner was a blue box labelled \"Click here to preorder\", followed immediately below by \"Or click anywhere. I still haven't figured out HTML imagemaps.\"\n"}
{"id":1573,"title":"Cyberintelligence","image_title":"Cyberintelligence","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1573","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cyberintelligence.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1573:_Cyberintelligence","transcript":"[Ponytail, pointing at a chart to her left, with text and two curves on a graph, is talking to someone off-screen to the right.] Ponytail: Our overall FY2015 cyberintelligence budget was $8.1 billion- Off-screen voice: -Yet it wasn't enough to pick up on the fact that no one else has used the prefix \"cyber-\" for like a decade? Ponytail: Shut up.\n","explanation":"Ponytail presents a FY2015 ( Fiscal Year for 2015) budget for cyberintelligence , but is then interrupted with a snide remark about the prefix cyber .  Although it is not specified what organization the budget is for, the size of the budget ($8.1 Billion) is large enough to suggest that it must be a large government organization such as the United States Department of Defense.\nThis comic illustrates that some organization spends obscene amounts of money on their \"cyberintelligence\" budget, yet all that spending appears not to have informed them that the prefix \"cyber-\" fell out of fashion years ago. That the prefix could annoy experts were already used in the title text of 1084: Server Problem .\nThe prefix \"cyber\" is derived from \" Cybernetic ,\" which comes from the Greek word \u03ba\u03c5\u03b2\u03b5\u03c1\u03bd\u03b7\u03c4\u03b9\u03ba\u03cc\u03c2 , meaning skilled in steering or governing. Cyberintelligence could also be called cyber spying i.e. spying in the digital world, one of many \"new\" words with the cyber- prefix . Many were invented in the 1980s and 1990s, following the example of \" cyberspace \", popularized by William Gibson in 1982.\nIf cyberintelligence departments were given names today, they might be called Internet Intelligence, Virtual Intelligence, Data Intelligence or Online Intelligence departments.\nThis may be due to the fact that government organizations are typically named by middle-aged or senior officials who are generally less likely to be familiar with the current trends in technology language. They are more likely to stick to the words that were used when they first learned about the technology. Such organizations, being bureaucracies, are also unlikely to change their name.\nThe title text continues the joke by implying the organization learned about the demise of \"cyber-\" yet failed to process or analyze that data. It is a common problem among intelligence organizations to gather \"raw information\" (such as photos, or reports from spies) but be unable to make use of it because there wasn't time to process the information into intelligence by determining what it means. This is particularly true for intelligence gathered by or relating to computers, as they can generate data far faster than people can review it. It may also be a reference to the previous comic, which was a link to a survey for xkcd readers.\n\"Cyberspace\" and \" cybernetics \", illustrated here , are two of the most common words with that prefix (Cyberspace 6 times as prevalent as cybernetics at their peaks). \"Cyberintelligence\" is shown here . Cyberspace was used 4000 times more often, although the more common spelling splitting it in two words \"Cyber intelligence\" was 1.35 times more used than in one word. But even combining these two versions cyberspace is still used more than 1700 times as often.\n[Ponytail, pointing at a chart to her left, with text and two curves on a graph, is talking to someone off-screen to the right.] Ponytail: Our overall FY2015 cyberintelligence budget was $8.1 billion- Off-screen voice: -Yet it wasn't enough to pick up on the fact that no one else has used the prefix \"cyber-\" for like a decade? Ponytail: Shut up.\n"}
{"id":1574,"title":"Trouble for Science","image_title":"Trouble for Science","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1574","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trouble_for_science.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1574:_Trouble_for_Science","transcript":"[Five panels, each with the top part of a scientific article, where only the title is legible. Below is the list of authors and subheading and text in unreadable wiggles.]\nMany Commercial Antibody-Based Immunoassays Are Unreliable\nProblems With the p-Value as an Indicator of Significance\nOverfeeding of Laboratory Rodents Compromises Animal Models\nReplication Study Fails to Reproduce Many Published Results\nControlled Trials Show Bunsen Burners Make Things Colder\n","explanation":"The comic highlights the fact that several well-publicized scientific critiques have recently been published that raise questions about some commonly accepted scientific methods. For scientists, these critiques serve as reminders of the dangers of overconfidence in any method, hopefully leading those who have naively accepted results to remember that any scientific conclusion is by its very nature tentative and limited by methodological reliability. However, popular press reporting of these papers may lead a general public of modest scientific literacy to the impression that science might be in trouble, as implied by the title. Some of these methodological issues and shortcomings are well known in the scientific community but are \u2013 for better or worse \u2013 the best toolkit science has at its disposal today. This is however greatly exaggerated by the last (fictional) headline, which suggests that Bunsen burners in fact have a cooling effect, which is of course absolutely ridiculous, but would nevertheless change one more fundamental scientific belief drastically. Additionally, each headline contains irony or a double meaning for comical effect.\nThe titles of five scientific articles are shown:\nMany commercial antibody-based immunoassays are unreliable\nThis sentence is true. See Kebaneilwe Lebani, Antibody Discovery for Development of a Serotyping Dengue Virus NS1 Capture Assay , 2014. In this Ph.D. thesis, 11 references are given.\nProblems with the p-value as an indicator of significance\nIn empirical research, one is usually interested in effects, results and relationships in a population. However, for practical reasons, only smaller subsets of populations, called samples, are available to the researcher. Usually, an effect of interest is tested using a sample. The purpose of hypothesis testing is to determine whether the observed effect (or lack of effect) in a sample is a random artifact of our particular sample, or whether there is a good chance that it also exists in the population.\nGenerally, a null hypothesis states that there is no effect in the population while the alternative hypothesis states that there is an effect.\nP-values are used in hypothesis testing. The p-value is the probability of observing an effect, result or relationship in your sample data, given that no such effect, result, or relationship exists in the population. It is based on the sample data and the particular statistic (such as sample average, t or F). A statistic is the result of a calculation based on the sample. A p-value can be calculated for each statistic of interest. Formally, the p-value is the probability of observing a test statistic equal to or greater than the one based on the sample data, given that the null hypothesis is true.\nThe threshold for p-value cutoff, \u03b1, is pre-specified (usually 5% or 1%, which is more conservative). When the p-value is lower to or equal to \u03b1, the null hypothesis is rejected in favor of the alternative hypothesis. When it is higher than \u03b1, the null hypothesis is retained.\nThe value used for \u03b1 has been proposed by Fisher and is arbitrary.\nThe use of p-values as a measure of statistical significance is frequently criticized, for example in Hubbard & Lindsay . Randall has demonstrated this problem in the past in 882: Significant .\nOverfeeding of laboratory rodents compromises animal models\nKeenan et al. makes this case. Additionally, the word model takes on two meanings. In one sense, \"model\" can refer to a scientific description that makes sense of a phenomenon; in another sense, \"model\" can refer to an individual whose job it is to demonstrate fashions, typically fashionable outfits. Fashion models are notorious for being exceptionally thin, and so overfeeding would compromise their job as a model.\nReplication study fails to reproduce many published results\nA replication study is a study designed to duplicate the results of a previous study by using the same methods for a different set of subjects and experimenters. It aims to recreate the results to gain confidence in the results of the previous study as well as ensure that the findings of the previous study are transferable to other similar areas of study.\nRandall is probably referring to this recent study described in Nature: Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test. It might also be a reference to at least 3 studies mentioned here: http:\/\/www.jove.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/03\/studies-show-only-10-of-published-science-articles-are-reproducible-what-is-happening . There is also irony in the phrasing of the title because in biology replication is a form of reproduction.\nAnother possible interpretation of this headline is that a replication study, which may have successfully replicated the results of the specific study it was designed for, failed to reproduce the published results of many other unrelated studies. The headline is quite vague as to which results have been considered in this study.\nControlled trials show Bunsen burners make things colder\nThe theme of this comic is that commonly accepted scientific methods can be unreliable, and the joke here is that a Bunsen burner, a device intended to heat things, is newly discovered to always cool things instead, which would be absurd.\nIn theory, yes, putting a Bunsen Burner underneath an object that's already incredibly hot would, slowly, equalize the temperature between the flame and object resulting in cooling. Given that a Bunsen Burner burns between 1000 K and 2000 K, there is probably some methodological error if the testing materials were already much hotter than the flame (more than 2000 Kelvin). It's also possible that if the \"controlled trial\" involved a Bunsen burner that was not lit, but was turned on to allow gas to flow, it would have a cooling effect as the gas expanded from the line pressure to atmospheric pressure. Another alternative theory is that a cold substance, such as cold water or frigid air, was fed through the burner against a warmer object.\nAlternatively, a trial could be set up to test something against a Bunsen burner on the one hand, and an even hotter flame on the other hand. As compared to that hotter flame, the Bunsen burner would not heat up the tested material as much, resulting in something being made \"colder\" than the alternative.\nAs in the previous headline, the key to understanding the joke here is to examine the headline's ambiguity, as no clue is given about how the trials were controlled.\n(Title text) Careful mathematical analysis demonstrates small-scale irregularities in Gaussian distribution\nThis is another joke of a premise that is obviously untrue. The Gaussian distribution is a mathematical construct that is generally known as the bell curve or the Normal distribution. As it is an ideal mathematical construction, by definition, it cannot have any irregularities - similar to how the equation y = 2x + 1 cannot have small-scale irregularities. The joke probably alludes to the fact that many types of observations are frequently initially modeled as a Gaussian distribution, though on careful observation the actual distribution of outcomes will often deviate from a pure Gaussian distribution.\nIn addition, an experiment to test a Gaussian distribution will have a finite sample size, giving a non-exact Gaussian distribution. A possible paper submitted would conclude that this result is \"approximately a normal distribution\" with \"small-scale irregularities\". A news reporter without knowledge of statistics could easily misinterpret that this paper decisively concludes errors in the mathematical definitions (rather than coming from random error inherent in experimenting).\n[Five panels, each with the top part of a scientific article, where only the title is legible. Below is the list of authors and subheading and text in unreadable wiggles.]\nMany Commercial Antibody-Based Immunoassays Are Unreliable\nProblems With the p-Value as an Indicator of Significance\nOverfeeding of Laboratory Rodents Compromises Animal Models\nReplication Study Fails to Reproduce Many Published Results\nControlled Trials Show Bunsen Burners Make Things Colder\n"}
{"id":1575,"title":"Footprints","image_title":"Footprints","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1575","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/footprints.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1575:_Footprints","transcript":"[A graph is shown with a a single red line that runs through from left to right, showing different values at different times. Until the very end, the line always returns to the value 2, signifying two sets of footprints in the sand. The X-axis has a label followed by an arrow pointing right. The Y-axis has a label at the top, right of the axis, and numbers, one for each of the ticks from which five thin lines going horizontally across the entire graph. Every time the graph moves away from the value 2 there is an arrow pointing to the event and a label. The first two events has the same label. The only label below the line has five small arrows pointing to five small dips in the curve. All other labels only has one arrow pointing to one event.] X-axis: Time Y-axis: Sets of footprints 5 4 3 2 1\n[The line starts at the value 2, then dips twice to the value 1. The two troughs are labeled:] Jesus carried me\n[The line dips once again to the value 1. The trough is labeled:] I carried Jesus\n[The line rises to 3 briefly, and is labeled:] Who was that guy?\n[The line rises to 5 sharply, and then falls in a sharp staircase pattern, labeled:] Ducklings imprinted on Jesus and followed him around\n[The line rises to 4, labeled:] Got lost and followed our own footprints\n[The line dips for very short periods five times to the value 1. The first dip is between \"I carried Jesus\" and \"Who was that guy?\", the second between \"Who was that guy?\" and \"Duckings imprinted on Jesus...\" and the final three are all between the \"Ducklings imprinted on Jesus...\" and \"Got lost and followed our own footprints\". These five troughs share one label with five arrows from the same text:] Jesus disappeared for an evening each time a new Twilight movie came out\n[The line dips to 1, labeled:] Rode around with Jesus in captured AT-ST\n[The line dips and stays level at 1, labeled:] Hit quicksand patch. Jesus didn't make it\u00a0:(\n[The line dips to zero at the end, and is labeled:] Went home\n","explanation":"The comic is a satirical graphical representation of the inspirational Christian poem \" Footprints ,\" which has been recounted in many versions and is of disputed authorship.\nThe basic idea of the poem is that the narrator looks back at scenes of his life and sees two sets of footprints, his and those of Jesus. During the most difficult times of his life, the narrator sees only one set of footprints and assumes that Jesus had left him during those times. In the climax of the poem, Jesus responds to the narrator that he saw only one set of footprints during the most difficult times of his life because Jesus was carrying him during those times.\nThe poem is seen by many as overly sentimental and is thus ripe for parody of this kind. The graph mockingly illustrates various times when Jesus or the narrator left the scene, or otherwise gives various reasons why the number of footprints may have been other than two.\n\"Ducklings imprinted on Jesus and followed Him around\" is a reference to Konrad Lorenz 's experiments. Three ducklings followed Jesus and the narrator.\n\"Jesus disappeared for an evening each time a new Twilight movie came out\" could mean that Jesus went to see the movie and left the narrator alone.  It could also mean that his support of people through their most difficult trials meant he had to carry a lot of emotionally scarred people.\n\"Got lost and followed our own footprints\" may be a reference to \" Winnie-the-Pooh \" (1926), in which the titular bear and his friend try and hunt a \"Woozle\" by its footprints, actually following their own round and round a spinney, which also seems slightly childish for Jesus as traditionally portrayed. An alternate explanation is that they came to a dead end, and had to double back.\n\"Rode around with Jesus in captured AT-ST \" is a reference to a two-legged combat \"walker\" from Star Wars. The implication is that Jesus would have participated in forcibly taking a war machine, which appears somewhat out of character.\nThe reference at the end to Jesus drowning in a patch of quicksand, and then the narrator simply going home, again subverts the poem's earnestness. \"Going home\" may be a reference to dying, implying that the narrator died without Christ, or that the narrator and Christ were not traveling anymore. It is also possible that this is meant literally, and the narrator actually went home.\nThe title text continues the parody by imagining that Jesus delivers the poem's climactic lines in stereotypical \"bro\" speak, a dialect perceived by many to be obnoxious. The reference to punching Jesus is possibly another reference to the poem's perceived excessive sentimentality. Another interpretation is that the narrator, like many people, dislikes usage of this lingo and punched Jesus as a result of this hatred. This might also be a pun on \"totes;\" with tote bags being used to carry things. The narrator punching Jesus might be because of his hatred for the pun.\nYet another interpretation is that Jesus' obnoxious way of explaining himself indicated dishonesty, meaning he did not in fact carry the narrator during the most difficult parts of his life. The narrator sensed this and punched Jesus in retaliation.\n\"There's one set of foot-p's cause I was totes carrying you, bro!\" can be translated into normal English as  \"There's one set of footprints because I was definitely carrying you, friend!\".\nAn alternate explanation of some of the oddities of the strip is that \"Jesus\" is not Jesus Christ, but some guy merely named Jesus, as is common in some Latin American countries.\nUsing the Twilight movies as reference points, it can be determined that the span of the graph is from approximately early 2004 to late 2018, with Jesus' death in the second half of 2017.\nThe poem has appeared in xkcd before, at 1110 with coordinates 0.7601, -58.803.\n[A graph is shown with a a single red line that runs through from left to right, showing different values at different times. Until the very end, the line always returns to the value 2, signifying two sets of footprints in the sand. The X-axis has a label followed by an arrow pointing right. The Y-axis has a label at the top, right of the axis, and numbers, one for each of the ticks from which five thin lines going horizontally across the entire graph. Every time the graph moves away from the value 2 there is an arrow pointing to the event and a label. The first two events has the same label. The only label below the line has five small arrows pointing to five small dips in the curve. All other labels only has one arrow pointing to one event.] X-axis: Time Y-axis: Sets of footprints 5 4 3 2 1\n[The line starts at the value 2, then dips twice to the value 1. The two troughs are labeled:] Jesus carried me\n[The line dips once again to the value 1. The trough is labeled:] I carried Jesus\n[The line rises to 3 briefly, and is labeled:] Who was that guy?\n[The line rises to 5 sharply, and then falls in a sharp staircase pattern, labeled:] Ducklings imprinted on Jesus and followed him around\n[The line rises to 4, labeled:] Got lost and followed our own footprints\n[The line dips for very short periods five times to the value 1. The first dip is between \"I carried Jesus\" and \"Who was that guy?\", the second between \"Who was that guy?\" and \"Duckings imprinted on Jesus...\" and the final three are all between the \"Ducklings imprinted on Jesus...\" and \"Got lost and followed our own footprints\". These five troughs share one label with five arrows from the same text:] Jesus disappeared for an evening each time a new Twilight movie came out\n[The line dips to 1, labeled:] Rode around with Jesus in captured AT-ST\n[The line dips and stays level at 1, labeled:] Hit quicksand patch. Jesus didn't make it\u00a0:(\n[The line dips to zero at the end, and is labeled:] Went home\n"}
{"id":1576,"title":"I Could Care Less","image_title":"I Could Care Less","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1576","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_could_care_less.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1576:_I_Could_Care_Less","transcript":"[The first three panels are slim compared to the next row below, and they only takes up the same space as the first two of the three panels below this row. Similarly the bottom row, also with three panels, take up less space, although more than the top row. But in this bottom row the empty space in the comic is to the left vs. to the right in the top row.]\n[Megan and Ponytail are walking together, Megan in front holds her arms out to the side.] Megan: ...Anyway, I could care less.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail holding up her hand (which can atypically be seen), finger pointing up.] Ponytail: I think you mean you couldn't care less. Saying you could care less implies you care at least some amount.\n[Back to Megan and Ponytail walking, both have their arms down.] Megan: I dunno.\n[The next panel supposed to be to the right of this is missing, instead the comic jumps to the next row. This fourth panel has inverted brightness, with a white Megan floating in a black void, with white text above her.] Megan: We're these unbelievably complicated brains drifting through a void, trying in vain to connect with one another by blindly flinging words out into the darkness.\n[Back to Megan and Ponytail walking.] Megan: Every choice of phrasing and spelling and tone and timing carries countless signals and contexts and subtexts and more, Megan: and every listener interprets those signals in their own way. Megan: Language isn't a formal system. Language is glorious chaos.\n[Zoom in on Megan's head.] Megan: You can never know for sure what any words will mean to anyone. Megan: All you can do is try to get better at guessing how your words affect people, so you can have a chance of finding the ones that will make them feel something like what you want them to feel. Megan: Everything else is pointless.\n[They have stopped walking as Megan holding a hand out has turned around facing Ponytail.] Megan: I assume you're giving me tips on how you interpret words because you want me to feel less alone. Megan: If so, then thank you. Megan: That means a lot.\n[Megan and Ponytail resume with their walking.] Megan: But if you're just running my sentences past some mental checklist so you can show off how well you know it,\n[Megan and Ponytail continue walking.] Megan: then I could care less.\n","explanation":"However, linguists point out that the strict application of logic to an idiom is inappropriate: many expressions seem on the surface to mean the opposite of the meaning they are used to convey (e.g. \"head over heels\"), and they defend \"I could care less\" on those grounds . The psychologist Steven Pinker argues in The Language Instinct that the phrase is sarcastic (cf. \"Big deal!\"), while linguist John Lawler explains it as a \"Negative Polarity Item,\" a phrase that is practically only used in negated form, allowing the explicit negation to be omitted (a pattern often found in French).\nIn this comic, Megan feels alone because there is unavoidable difference between her understanding of her own words and the listener's interpretation, so while she sees discussion of semantics as being of potentially high social and emotional value, she doesn't think it has objective value. However, ironically, at the end of the comic, the meaning of \"I could care less\" with regards to Ponytail's behavior is ambiguous: either Megan is brushing off Ponytail's pedantry because she doesn't care about it (she couldn't care less) or she is hurt by Ponytail's focus on the details of her words rather than the emotional cues she should have learned over the course of their relationship (she actually could care less).\nThe title text refers to another word often used in ways some consider incorrect: \"literally\" (see 725: Literally ). The sentence is also ambiguous, as it may mean that 'literally' or 'figuratively,' the speaker could or couldn't care less. Further, it implies that Randall considers the argument over whether literally may be properly used to mean 'figuratively' is petty in the same way. Later in 1735: Fashion Police and Grammar Police Ponytail is once again on the side of the grammar police and also in this comic the word literally is used.\nAlternatively, it could mean that Megan cares too much about Ponytail's correction, considering her response to it.\nIn a further alternative, the title text could amount to a self-ironical evaluation on Randall\u2019s part to the effect that he himself might be devoting too much of his time and energy to the meaning of the phrase in question, as evidenced by the comic itself.\nThe inverse image of Megan floating through space in the fourth panel, as well as her long introspection, is a reference to the five-part \"Choices\" series, starting at 264: Choices: Part 1 .\n[The first three panels are slim compared to the next row below, and they only takes up the same space as the first two of the three panels below this row. Similarly the bottom row, also with three panels, take up less space, although more than the top row. But in this bottom row the empty space in the comic is to the left vs. to the right in the top row.]\n[Megan and Ponytail are walking together, Megan in front holds her arms out to the side.] Megan: ...Anyway, I could care less.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail holding up her hand (which can atypically be seen), finger pointing up.] Ponytail: I think you mean you couldn't care less. Saying you could care less implies you care at least some amount.\n[Back to Megan and Ponytail walking, both have their arms down.] Megan: I dunno.\n[The next panel supposed to be to the right of this is missing, instead the comic jumps to the next row. This fourth panel has inverted brightness, with a white Megan floating in a black void, with white text above her.] Megan: We're these unbelievably complicated brains drifting through a void, trying in vain to connect with one another by blindly flinging words out into the darkness.\n[Back to Megan and Ponytail walking.] Megan: Every choice of phrasing and spelling and tone and timing carries countless signals and contexts and subtexts and more, Megan: and every listener interprets those signals in their own way. Megan: Language isn't a formal system. Language is glorious chaos.\n[Zoom in on Megan's head.] Megan: You can never know for sure what any words will mean to anyone. Megan: All you can do is try to get better at guessing how your words affect people, so you can have a chance of finding the ones that will make them feel something like what you want them to feel. Megan: Everything else is pointless.\n[They have stopped walking as Megan holding a hand out has turned around facing Ponytail.] Megan: I assume you're giving me tips on how you interpret words because you want me to feel less alone. Megan: If so, then thank you. Megan: That means a lot.\n[Megan and Ponytail resume with their walking.] Megan: But if you're just running my sentences past some mental checklist so you can show off how well you know it,\n[Megan and Ponytail continue walking.] Megan: then I could care less.\n"}
{"id":1577,"title":"Advent","image_title":"Advent","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1577","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/advent.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1577:_Advent","transcript":"[Cueball is looking at a large wall subdivided into a rectangular 20 x 12 grid, with each grid subdivided into 10x7 small drawers. Below the frame there is a caption:] Unsettling gift: Life expectancy Advent calendar\n","explanation":"An Advent calendar is usually a means of celebrating the days before Christmas. Each day on the calendar is represented by a \"door\" (a flap of card), behind which is usually a picture related to the Christian nativity, a picture of commercial Christmas (e.g. a present), a small chocolate, or a small gift. This comic satirizes the concept by proposing such a calendar that would have one gift for each day one is anticipated to live. Such a calendar would be very morbid and existential. This is especially disturbing when given as a gift because it implies someone has put extensive thought into when the recipient will die.\nIn Cueball's case, assuming each square in the calendar represents one day, the wall he is facing is the entire present he received and the boxes just out of view follow the same pattern, the entire wall represents 16,800 days (a large grid of 12x20 smaller grids of 10x7 boxes: 12\u00d720\u00d710\u00d77 = 16,800), i.e. just under 46 more years (16,800\/365.25 = 45.99589).\nAssuming that Cueball is a male from the US and the grid represents his life expectancy, according to American Official Social Security Actuarial Life Table for males, he is probably 31.9 years old . This would make Cueball almost exactly one year older than Randall , who was born October 17, 1984 making him 30.9 years old when he wrote this comic. Due to the non-linear shape of the mortality curve, the chance of Cueball making it to the end of his calendar is 57.7%, at which point he will need to get another calendar but with only 9.2 years worth of doors.\nThe title text refers back to a standard advent calendar by saying that the Christmases are specially marked; on a traditional Advent calendar, only the 1st to the 24th of December have doors, however in recent times, Advent calendars often also include an additional door for the day after Advent, Christmas Day. A few dozen may be any small number of dozens, and 3 5\/6 dozens (46) is aptly described by a few dozen ; see 1070: Words for Small Sets . Any dictionary (for example Oxford Learner's Dictionaries ) says that a dozen may be an approximate number, not exactly 12.\nA completely different advent calendar was mentioned in 994: Advent Calendar .\nSimilar calendars have been mentioned in the blog Wait But Why in the 2014 post Your Life in Weeks , and in equally geeky webcomic Abstruse Goose , in the 2008 post 936 Little Blobs .\n[Cueball is looking at a large wall subdivided into a rectangular 20 x 12 grid, with each grid subdivided into 10x7 small drawers. Below the frame there is a caption:] Unsettling gift: Life expectancy Advent calendar\n"}
{"id":1578,"title":"Squirrelphone","image_title":"Squirrelphone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1578","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/squirrelphone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1578:_Squirrelphone","transcript":"[Cueball is approaching a stump with a squirrel perched on it. A ringing noise is coming from the squirrel's back.] Squirrel: Riiiiing Squirrel: Riiiiiing\n[Cueball has picked up the squirrel and is holding it to his left ear.] Cueball: Hello?\n[The squirrel bites Cueball's head.] Squirrel: Chomp! Cueball: Ow!\n[Cueball holds his hand to his cheek while the squirrel leaps away, fleeing.] Cueball:\u00a0???\n","explanation":"\"Squirrelphone\" is a compound word combining \" squirrel \" and \" phone \".\nIn this comic, we see a squirrel pretend to be a telephone, only to bite Cueball when he tries to pick it up and use it as one. This is humorous because a living squirrel is not an appropriate creature to maintain a phone call [ citation needed ] . This could be seen as an example of mimicry in nature, or parasitism where one creature gains a benefit from another.\nIt may be an allusion to the vampire squirrel which was documented recently that allegedly 'attacks and kills' deer.  The comic follows the absurd conclusion that the squirrel uses mimicry to 'attack and kill' humans.  Cueball may be lucky to still be alive [ citation needed ] . Another possibility is that the squirrel thought that Cueball was trying to eat it because Cueball picked it up and put it near his mouth, so it bit Cueball in self-defense. If this is the case, then biting Cueball can be said to have worked, as Cueball did relase the squirrel, as shown in panel four. However, this fails to explain why the squirrel was imitating a phone, which would make a human more likely to pick the squirrel up, so Randall was more likely trying to reference the recent vampire squirrel documentation.\nThe sounds the squirrel makes correspond to the tones that the terminals make when you use the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) in the US:\nSquirrels have been used frequently in xkcd, also in what if , where it has for instance been used as a cute animal to replace a drawing of something scary or unpleasant like in Blood Alcohol or Cannibalism . So this is some twist for the cuteness factor of squirrels in xkcd.\nIt may also be the case that \"squirrelphone\" is a reference to the popular web-mail software SquirrelMail .\nThe title text takes the joke further by showing the squirrel possesses another phone feature: that cordless phones need to recharge frequently, either by setting them at their cradles or by connecting them to a charger, in the case of mobile phones. When they sense the battery is low, they emit a beeping noise every few minutes. In this case, the stump is the squirrel's cradle. However, the reason that cordless phones beep when they are getting low on battery is in order to alert humans to move them to the charging cradle because the phones cannot move themselves. On the other hand, squirrels can move on their own without needing humans to pick them up, [ citation needed ] so the squirrel likely only does it in order to trick people into picking it up, which further suggests that it is a vampire squirrel.\n[Cueball is approaching a stump with a squirrel perched on it. A ringing noise is coming from the squirrel's back.] Squirrel: Riiiiing Squirrel: Riiiiiing\n[Cueball has picked up the squirrel and is holding it to his left ear.] Cueball: Hello?\n[The squirrel bites Cueball's head.] Squirrel: Chomp! Cueball: Ow!\n[Cueball holds his hand to his cheek while the squirrel leaps away, fleeing.] Cueball:\u00a0???\n"}
{"id":1579,"title":"Tech Loops","image_title":"Tech Loops","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1579","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tech_loops.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1579:_Tech_Loops","transcript":"[A flow chart 18 boxes linked (or not) with arrows going in several different directions. At the top is an arrow pointing to the right with text under. The rest of the text in the chart is written inside the boxes.] [Under arrow:] Supports\n[Going from the top below the tip of the arrow and reading left to right and top to bottom the following text is written in the boxes that all are in some way connected with each other. The number of arrows going in and out of each box is noted behind the text in square brackets as [in, out]:] Updater [1, 3] Tool [1, 1] Tool [1, 1] Repository [3, 0] Library [1, 1] Library [2, 3] Library [1, 1] Chat Client [2, 1] VM [2, 1] IRC for some reason [1, 1] Custom Settings [1, 1] Hardware Workaround [1, 2] Library [1, 1] Awful hack from 2009 [3, 3] Library [1, 1] Library [0, 1]\n[The last box in the lower middle is not connected to any other boxes but has two exit arrows pointing to two questionmarks.] DLL needed by something [0, 2] ? ?\n[Box alone at the top right corner, with no connections:] Things I actually want to use my computer for [0, 0]\n[Caption below the panel:] Every now and then I realize I'm maintaining a huge chain of technology solely to support itself.\n","explanation":"The comic is about how much time a geek might spend on a computer just to maintain the system itself, rather than actually using it for something relevant. This can in the worst cases go all the way up to the point where maintaining the system becomes the main goal. Often the operating system (OS) needs periodic updates, which might break some apps which in turn need to be updated; apps themselves might need to be updated, which can create all sort of incompatibilities which the geek then needs to spend time fixing.  One term for this is \" dependency hell \".\nMost people consider computers as tools to achieve something else \u2014 e.g. to surf the web, play games, read news or balance their bank account \u2014 and they would rather not have to spend lots of time on maintaining the OS or the computer if they can avoid it.\nHere, however, Randall finds he's spending most of the time using his computer just for the sake of maintaining the OS or the hardware on said computer. It's tools for the sake of tooling, rather than tools as helpers to build something else.\nA hardware equivalent would be the RepRap Project : get a 3D printer and end up spending all the time printing 3D parts for itself instead of creating something else like toys or art.\nAn alternative interpretation is how a simple task can get maddeningly tricky because of the inherent complexity of the system. An example of this appears in 949: File Transfer , where the simple task of sending a file from one computer to another gets practically impossible despite having all kinds of cloud tools available, many of them designed to perform much more complex tasks with one simple click. In this view, the box labeled \"things I actually want to use my computer for\" could refer to simple actions like transferring a file and all the rest of the graph are unsuccessful tiring attempts to solve the problem by installing increasingly complex tools which end up not solving the simple problem properly. This is similar to this traditional programming joke .\nIn the title text Randall realizes that what he really wishes to do it often only to learn about and discussing new tools to improve the chain. So in this way it is for sure only a system to support itself. But on the other hand, then the box with things he actually wishes to use the computer for, is then not disconnected from the rest, but an integral part of it all.\nOther comics about the same concept are 349: Success and 763: Workaround .\nThere are 18 boxes in the chart, but only 12 different texts. 16 of the boxes are interconnected. Two are not connected to any other boxes.\nHere is a list of all the items explained individually:\nThe flow chart described: \u2192 means supports (key) Things I actually want to use my computer for [isolated box with no links into or out of, by any of the following] DLL needed by something \u2192\u00a0? [two exits to unknowns] Library (1) \u2192 Awful hack from 2009 \u2192 Awful hack from 2009 \u2192 IRC for some reason \u2192 Awful hack from 2009 \u2192 (Loop) Awful hack from 2009 \u2192 Library (2) \u2192 Library (3) \u2192 Repository Awful hack from 2009 \u2192 Library (4) \u2192 Library (5) \u2192 Custom Settings \u2192 Library (6) \u2192 Library (6) \u2192 Chat Client \u2192 Repository Library (6) \u2192 Hardware Workaround \u2192 Hardware Workaround \u2192 VM \u2192 Chat Client \u2192 Repository Hardware Workaround \u2192 Awful hack from 2009 \u2192 (Loop) Library (6) \u2192 Tool (1) \u2192 Updater \u2192 Updater \u2192 Repository Updater \u2192 Library (6) \u2192 (Loop) Updater \u2192 Tool (2) \u2192 VM \u2192 Chat Client \u2192 Repository (Note the Repository node leads to nowhere)\n[A flow chart 18 boxes linked (or not) with arrows going in several different directions. At the top is an arrow pointing to the right with text under. The rest of the text in the chart is written inside the boxes.] [Under arrow:] Supports\n[Going from the top below the tip of the arrow and reading left to right and top to bottom the following text is written in the boxes that all are in some way connected with each other. The number of arrows going in and out of each box is noted behind the text in square brackets as [in, out]:] Updater [1, 3] Tool [1, 1] Tool [1, 1] Repository [3, 0] Library [1, 1] Library [2, 3] Library [1, 1] Chat Client [2, 1] VM [2, 1] IRC for some reason [1, 1] Custom Settings [1, 1] Hardware Workaround [1, 2] Library [1, 1] Awful hack from 2009 [3, 3] Library [1, 1] Library [0, 1]\n[The last box in the lower middle is not connected to any other boxes but has two exit arrows pointing to two questionmarks.] DLL needed by something [0, 2] ? ?\n[Box alone at the top right corner, with no connections:] Things I actually want to use my computer for [0, 0]\n[Caption below the panel:] Every now and then I realize I'm maintaining a huge chain of technology solely to support itself.\n"}
{"id":1580,"title":"Travel Ghost","image_title":"Travel Ghost","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1580","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/travel_ghosts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1580:_Travel_Ghost","transcript":"[Cueball, holding a smartphone, is talking to White Hat.] Cueball: Lots of apps let you plan your trips using real-time bus, train, and traffic data.  They try to predict which route will be faster, but aren't always right.\n[Cueball continues to talk off-panel. The text is above a map showing three possible routes with an overlaid Cueball on each; the top and the bottom route and Cueball are faded and the middle is black up until the black Cueball. After that this route is also faded. A black point on the right indicates the destination.] Cueball (off-panel): Instead of just planning , my new app lets you send \"ghost\" versions of you along different routes, simulating their travel using the real-time data\n[Cueball, again talking to White Hat, holding the smartphone down.] Cueball: That way, you can see which route turned out to be faster in practice, Cueball: You can also race your past selves.\n[Cueball is getting out of his car holding his smartphone in one hand and a briefcase in the other; A faded out Cueball bicyclist is in front of him to the right. At the top there is a caption in a frame: Soon... Cueball: Ugh, lost to the bike ghost again.\n[Cueball with his briefcase is outside a door, holding a key card up to a key reader. On the inside of the door Ponytail is facing the door and points toward the faded version of Cueball also holding a briefcase.] Cueball: Hey, my key won't work Ponytail: I'm sorry, but we've decided to replace you. This floaty guy is much more punctual. Cueball: But...\n[Science Girl and another girl with wavy long hair, is holding faded out Cueball's hands. The real Cueball is standing to the right, next to his briefcase on the ground. He is holding his hands out towards his kids.] Science Girl: Our new dad never misses our games! Cueball: Nooo!\n","explanation":"In racing game , a \" ghost \" is a common term for the recording of a player's best actions. The recording is used to create a virtual racer that another player can compete against. The previous player is shown as ghostly and transparent, because it is only a recording of a previous game and it does not interact in any way with the game currently being played. Certain models of cycling also use this concept to motivate athletes while training.\nA mapping app, such as Google Maps , attempts to plot the fastest route from one place to another, but there's no way to tell which route is really the fastest without testing it. So, Cueball has created an app that will simulate a number of different routes and produce \"ghosts\" from them. He hopes to use this app to discover the fastest route by competing against his ghosts like a racing game. He brags about this app to his friend White Hat .\nHowever, the comic takes a turn for the absurd when it depicts actual ghosts competing with him, instead of simulations on his phone.  Soon enough, he is fired from work because one of his \"ghosts\" is more punctual than he is. And even worse his children apparently comes to prefer the more punctual \"ghosts\" over him as this version of daddy never misses their games. (The girls could be the same as those in the 1659: Tire Swing ).\nIn the title text this is even taken into the bedroom, although it is a different ghost than the one preferred by the children. This is likely a subtle reference to euphemisms for sexual climax, such as \"arrival\", with delayed ejaculation generally preferred.\nIt should be noted that this app would not guarantee the minimum travel time. The user doesn't find out which route was fastest until after the first ghost has arrived. But as the current traffic situation will have changed by then, that route will not necessarily still be the fastest.\n[Cueball, holding a smartphone, is talking to White Hat.] Cueball: Lots of apps let you plan your trips using real-time bus, train, and traffic data.  They try to predict which route will be faster, but aren't always right.\n[Cueball continues to talk off-panel. The text is above a map showing three possible routes with an overlaid Cueball on each; the top and the bottom route and Cueball are faded and the middle is black up until the black Cueball. After that this route is also faded. A black point on the right indicates the destination.] Cueball (off-panel): Instead of just planning , my new app lets you send \"ghost\" versions of you along different routes, simulating their travel using the real-time data\n[Cueball, again talking to White Hat, holding the smartphone down.] Cueball: That way, you can see which route turned out to be faster in practice, Cueball: You can also race your past selves.\n[Cueball is getting out of his car holding his smartphone in one hand and a briefcase in the other; A faded out Cueball bicyclist is in front of him to the right. At the top there is a caption in a frame: Soon... Cueball: Ugh, lost to the bike ghost again.\n[Cueball with his briefcase is outside a door, holding a key card up to a key reader. On the inside of the door Ponytail is facing the door and points toward the faded version of Cueball also holding a briefcase.] Cueball: Hey, my key won't work Ponytail: I'm sorry, but we've decided to replace you. This floaty guy is much more punctual. Cueball: But...\n[Science Girl and another girl with wavy long hair, is holding faded out Cueball's hands. The real Cueball is standing to the right, next to his briefcase on the ground. He is holding his hands out towards his kids.] Science Girl: Our new dad never misses our games! Cueball: Nooo!\n"}
{"id":1581,"title":"Birthday","image_title":"Birthday","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1581","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/birthday.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1581:_Birthday","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] xkcd turns 10 years old this month. In light of last night's court ruling in Rupa Marya v. Warner\/Chappell Music Inc. , I would just like to say:\n[The song text is written, with nine musical notes, three groups on each side of the text, above a birthday cake with 10 lit candles. The cake has two distinct layers. On each layer there are drawn 6 xkcd stick figures with small black bullets between them. The center bullet in the bottom layer is shaped like a heart. The figures at the edges can be difficult to recognize. The figures in the upper layer and from the left are: A man with a hat (hard to see if it is one of the recognized characters), White Hat, Megan, Pony Tail, Hairy and Cueball (hard to see him properly). Similar in the lower layer: Black Hat, Danish, Beret Guy, Rob, Cutie, and a girl (hard to see, but looks like girls hair, not a hat).] Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you Happy birthday, dear xkcd Happy birthday to you\n","explanation":"xkcd turns 10 years old on September 30, 2015 (a week after the release of this comic). In this comic Randall honors his webcomic by singing to it the classic \" Happy Birthday to You \" song.\n\" Happy Birthday to You \" is one of the most commonly sung songs in the English language (and is common in many others). Because of its age, ubiquity and simplicity, it has long surprised people to learn that it was not in the public domain. Warner\/Chappell Music claimed the copyright to the lyrics, and has demanded royalties for any recording, publication or public performance for commercial purposes. Total revenues for this song were estimated at US$2 million annually.\nThis strip refers to a ruling, from the day before the release of this comic, by a federal judge in California ( George King ), stating that the song is not covered by a valid copyright (see Warner's 'Happy Birthday' Copyright Not Valid, Judge Rules ). This ruling resulted from a lawsuit filed by Good Morning To You Productions (singer Rupa Marya and filmmaker Robert Siegel ) against Warner\/Chappel Music to declare Warner\/Chappel's copyright claim in the song invalid (filing at [1] ). With this ruling, the court declared that Warner\/Chappell does not have a copyright claim to the song, and therefore the song can now be sung or published by anyone, in any context, without having to pay royalties to Warner\/Chappell.\nThe ruling does not go so far as to declare the song to be in the public domain, leaving it more correctly defined as an orphan work . Randall seems to be celebrating the fact that this strip, which would have put him at risk for a lawsuit the day before, is now unlikely to be challenged since the odds of a new party appearing and successfully claiming copyright on the lyrics and subsequently demanding license fees is approximately zero.\nThe title text is a joke that refers to Randall calling the police against Chuck E. Cheese's as well as his own friends and parents when they sang \"Happy Birthday\" and did not pay royalties. The song is very commonly used in entertainment restaurants, such as Chuck E. Cheese's, and at both grown-ups' and children's birthdays. Because restaurants are commercial enterprises, public performances of the song, prior to this ruling, would potentially have exposed the restaurant to liability claims (though singing it at a private birthday party would not). In either case, calling the police would be an extreme overreaction.\nHowever, many restaurants (for example, Olive Garden ) actually have staff sing a special birthday song (not Happy Birthday To You ) to avoid having to pay royalties.\n[Caption above the frame:] xkcd turns 10 years old this month. In light of last night's court ruling in Rupa Marya v. Warner\/Chappell Music Inc. , I would just like to say:\n[The song text is written, with nine musical notes, three groups on each side of the text, above a birthday cake with 10 lit candles. The cake has two distinct layers. On each layer there are drawn 6 xkcd stick figures with small black bullets between them. The center bullet in the bottom layer is shaped like a heart. The figures at the edges can be difficult to recognize. The figures in the upper layer and from the left are: A man with a hat (hard to see if it is one of the recognized characters), White Hat, Megan, Pony Tail, Hairy and Cueball (hard to see him properly). Similar in the lower layer: Black Hat, Danish, Beret Guy, Rob, Cutie, and a girl (hard to see, but looks like girls hair, not a hat).] Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you Happy birthday, dear xkcd Happy birthday to you\n"}
{"id":1582,"title":"Picture a Grassy Field","image_title":"Picture a Grassy Field","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1582","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/picture_a_grassy_field.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1582:_Picture_a_Grassy_Field","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking together.]\nMegan: Picture a grassy field. Megan: In the center sits a small, pale, big-eyed creature with the power to escape from any visualized scene and move freely through the brain that imagined it. Megan: It glances around nervously and- Megan: -whoops, where'd it go? Megan: Sorry about that! Keep an eye out for it in your daydreams.\n","explanation":"In this comic Megan asks Cueball to picture himself in a grassy field. It is a standard technique to begin a visualization by asking the person to imagine that they are in some calm environment (could be for any kind of meditation \/ mindfulness like for instance yoga ). A grassy field could have been replaced by a beach at the sea, or a forest with sunbeams coming down through the trees.\nProceeding with the visualization Megan asks Cueball to imagine a creature with the power to be able to escape from any visualized scene, and then tries to convince him that this creature has indeed escaped from his current visualization as it indeed would be able to do. She then proceeds by apologizing for this, but then tells him (warns him) that it from now on might appear in Cueball's daydreams, so he should begin looking out for it. This indicates that she is not at all sorry, but did this intentionally to try and mess with Cueball's head. The idea of the possibility of escaping an imagined situation was already used in 248: Hypotheticals . Now that Megan has introduced both the idea of the creature and the idea that it may appear in his daydreams, Cueball will almost certainly think of it from time to time, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.\nIn the title text Megan proposes a solution to get rid of the creature in Cueball's daydream, namely by picturing the only creature that the first fears. However, if this new (maybe quite scary) creature should be able to pursue the original creature, then it would also have to be able to move through visualized scenes just as easily. And this is what Megan pretends happens again. So now the problem is that Cueball has two creatures on the loose in his daydreams. And even if the second scares the first away, he would then still have the new one to worry about.\n[Megan and Cueball are walking together.]\nMegan: Picture a grassy field. Megan: In the center sits a small, pale, big-eyed creature with the power to escape from any visualized scene and move freely through the brain that imagined it. Megan: It glances around nervously and- Megan: -whoops, where'd it go? Megan: Sorry about that! Keep an eye out for it in your daydreams.\n"}
{"id":1583,"title":"NASA Press Conference","image_title":"NASA Press Conference","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1583","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nasa_press_conference.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1583:_NASA_Press_Conference","transcript":"[Cueball is standing behind a lectern with the NASA logo on it.] Cueball: That concludes the press conference. Any questions? Cueball: Yes, you, from... it just says \"The News\"?\n[Beret Guy is standing in a crowd holding a microphone.] Beret Guy: Hi! I have a microphone so I'm real loud now. Beret Guy: How does this Mars data compare to data from other fields? Like medicine? Or sports?\nCueball (offscreen): That question makes no sense. Beret Guy: If there's water on Mars, is it ruined? Beret Guy: Or will it be okay when it dries out? Cueball (offscreen): Any other questions?\n[The shot zooms out, showing that Cueball and the lectern is standing on a podium and also the crowd comes in to view.] Beret Guy: What were those guys hassling Luke in the Mos Eisley Cantina trying to accomplish? I felt like I was supposed to understand that. Cueball: Anyone else? Ponytail: That's now my question, too. Megan: Were they just picking a fight? Ponytail: If so, why did...\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the press conference held by NASA on 28th September 2015, (the same day this comic was published), which confirmed the existence of liquid water at the surface of Mars . The comic was posted before the NASA press conference was held, although speculation about the announcement had already occurred.\nThe \"questions\" portion of the press conference is derailed by Beret Guy , acting as a reporter for a network known only as \"The News\". He first comments he is holding a microphone so he is \"real loud now.\" He then asks how the data about Mars relates to data in other fields like medicine and sports. This may seem like an intelligent question upon first glance, but it is in fact nonsensical.  Afterwards he asks if Mars has been \"ruined\" by getting wet, or if Mars will be okay when it dries out. Some things, e.g. indoor furniture, can be damaged by water, but Mars is not one of those things [ citation needed ] . When asked if he has any other questions he asks why Luke Skywalker was being hassled at the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars . ( Dr. Evazan and Ponda Baba simply told Luke that \"[they] don't like [him]\", but Beret Guy is evidently not satisfied by that explanation.) Although this may be somewhat space-related, NASA is not an organization that explains films, whether or not they are space related. The other reporters forget their original questions and join in on the irrelevant discussion, much to the dismay of the NASA scientist.\nThis is probably meant to mock previous NASA press conferences, where reporters have asked inane questions that reveal their total ignorance of the field.\nThe title text refers to Elon Musk , who suggested nuking Mars as a faster way of warming it up to make it habitable.\n[Cueball is standing behind a lectern with the NASA logo on it.] Cueball: That concludes the press conference. Any questions? Cueball: Yes, you, from... it just says \"The News\"?\n[Beret Guy is standing in a crowd holding a microphone.] Beret Guy: Hi! I have a microphone so I'm real loud now. Beret Guy: How does this Mars data compare to data from other fields? Like medicine? Or sports?\nCueball (offscreen): That question makes no sense. Beret Guy: If there's water on Mars, is it ruined? Beret Guy: Or will it be okay when it dries out? Cueball (offscreen): Any other questions?\n[The shot zooms out, showing that Cueball and the lectern is standing on a podium and also the crowd comes in to view.] Beret Guy: What were those guys hassling Luke in the Mos Eisley Cantina trying to accomplish? I felt like I was supposed to understand that. Cueball: Anyone else? Ponytail: That's now my question, too. Megan: Were they just picking a fight? Ponytail: If so, why did...\n"}
{"id":1584,"title":"Moments of Inspiration","image_title":"Moments of Inspiration","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1584","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/moments_of_inspiration.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1584:_Moments_of_Inspiration","transcript":"[Isaac Newton, with curly long hair, sits under a tree. A waning crescent moon can be seen. An apple falls and hits him on the head. There is a caption in a frame that breaks the top border of the main frame:] Isaac Newton Apple falling: Bonk Isaac Newton: Ow!\n[Isaac Newton rubs his sore head.] Isaac Newton: Aha!\n[Cueball throws a baseball towards Lise Meitner with short dark hair. (The ball can be seen in the next frame). She turns towards him too late to react and completely fails to even try catching the ball. There is a caption in a frame that breaks the top border of the main frame:] Lise Meitner Cueball: Hey Lise! Think fast! Ball hitting something (off-screen): Crash\n[Lise takes her hands to her mouth and she watches the broken porcelain atom lying in two pieces on the floor where it has fallen off a desk. On the desk, three other intact atoms can be seen. The baseball lies behind her.] Lise Meitner: Oh no! My collection of porcelain atoms! Lise Meitner:...Hmm.\n[Four kids are standing in front of Megan and Charles Darwin (with a big beard and hair behind the ears). All the kids are trying to drink a glass of soda with a straw in them. The first kid is a boy with dark flat hair and sips soda through the straw with his mouth. The next kid is a boy with standing black hair, he tries in vain to drink with his beak open on each side of the glass. The third kid is a girl with her hair in a bun. She tries to get her beak into the glass which she has put on the floor. The last kid is a boy version of Cueball who slurps his soda through the straw. There is a caption in a frame that breaks the top border of the main frame:] Charles Darwin Megan: I gave our kids soda, but the ones with beaks always have trouble drinking it. Charles Darwin: I've noticed that... Boy with flat dark hair: Sip sip Boy with standing black hair and a beak: Crunch Girl with her hair in a bun and a beak: Peck peck Cueball like kid: Sluurp\n[A hairy guy is standing in front of Albert Einstein (with wild hair and a mustache), who is holding one hand to his head and has a clock in his other hand. Behind them is a train, with a locomotive at the front and a wagon behind that stretches beyond the frame. Another hairy guy has his head out of the front window of the wagon and is flashing a light towards the other two. In the next three windows can be seen passengers, two with Cueball like heads and one with hair. There is a caption in a frame that breaks the top border of the main frame:] Albert Einstein Albert Einstein: I wish your twin brother would stop shining lights at us from that train. I can barely see my clock! Albert Einstein: ...Wait!\nThis comic appeared on xkcd's ten-year anniversary.\n","explanation":"Isaac Newton 's original examples describing the force of gravity show an apple falling from a tree in order to explain why the apple falls toward the Earth, instead of the Earth falling toward the apple. He is often said to have been inspired by watching falling apples ; in common folklore, this developed into the legend that he was actually struck by an apple. The first part of this comic retells that famous legend. The later panels depict similar (but more and more implausible) legends that could emerge if we were to assume that other scientists' most famous examples and discoveries were based on actually observing some mundane everyday event taking place.\nIn the first situation, we not only see the apple fall on Newton's head, we also see the Moon. This was one of the first astronomical objects on which he used his theory of gravity. He calculated its orbit around the Earth and found that it fit with the theory.\nIn the second situation, Cueball throws a baseball towards Lise Meitner , but when she fails to catch the ball it hits one of her porcelain model-atoms. In this way, Meitner discovered a way to split the atom. Cueball may represent Otto Hahn , since they were part of the Hahn-Meitner-Strassmann team that worked on this problem. Hahn was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, where Meitner was overlooked. Throwing something at someone and asking them to think fast is a common \"joke\", where the receiver rarely has a chance to actually catch the object. But in this case, it could also be a reference to the fact that she then thought fast then made a major discovery. Or if it is Hahn, then he thought faster and got the award instead of her. The porcelain models might also be a reference to Meissen porcelain , in German called \"Mei\u00dfner Porzellan\", where \"Mei\u00dfner\" is phonetically very similar to \"Meitner\". Meitner has previously been mentioned in the comic 896: Marie Curie , which more or less explains why Randall did not choose the more famous Marie Curie as the female example in this comic. Meitner is not very well known in the public, compared to the three men or Curie, but this may exactly be the point for choosing her. She should have been just as famous considering what splitting the atom has led to . Also, there's not much in Marie's story that could be put down to fanciful anecdotes. \"All\" she did was extract a few chemicals and study their properties.\nIn the third situation, it is indicated that half of Charles Darwin 's children had beaks , a property not normally found in human children. [ citation needed ] This would make it very difficult for them to drink soda from a glass or through a straw, compared to his normal children with mouths. Based on this observation he developed his ideas about natural selection and evolution . The comic is unclear on whether this makes them more or less fit to survive and reproduce. This is a reference to Darwin's initial findings on the HMS Beagle on how Galapagos finches with differently shaped beaks are better suited for specific types of food and therefore are better selected for in environments where those foods are available. The title text furthers this, see below. Darwin later in life feared that, having married his cousin, their consanguinity would increase the risk that his children would be born with birth defects (although he did not fear that they would be born with beaks). The difficulty caused by beaks when drinking liquids could be a reference to the Aesop's fable The Fox and the Stork .\nIn the fourth situation Albert Einstein remarks to a man that it's annoying that the man's twin brother keeps flashing a light from a train when Einstein is trying to check his clock. He then comes to a sudden revelation. This references several of Einstein's (different \u2014 they make little sense together in this manner) thought experiments on special relativity , such as the twin paradox (the twin on the train should be younger after decelerating to a stop), a clock built from a beam of light, the time dilation experienced by the observer in the moving frame of reference , and the various constructs involving trains and light(ning) flashes used to illustrate the relativity of simultaneity .\nThe title text shows that beaks rather than mouths are more useful for eating foods that have shells that need to be cracked open before eating like nuts and seeds. Here it is clear that in the John and Mildred family you starve if you cannot eat such foods, and thus it's an advantage for survival to have a beak instead of a normal mouth. \"John\" and \"Mildred\" may be Mildred and John T. Scopes of the famous 1925 \" monkey trial \" in which John was fined $100 for teaching evolution in a Tennessee school.\n[Isaac Newton, with curly long hair, sits under a tree. A waning crescent moon can be seen. An apple falls and hits him on the head. There is a caption in a frame that breaks the top border of the main frame:] Isaac Newton Apple falling: Bonk Isaac Newton: Ow!\n[Isaac Newton rubs his sore head.] Isaac Newton: Aha!\n[Cueball throws a baseball towards Lise Meitner with short dark hair. (The ball can be seen in the next frame). She turns towards him too late to react and completely fails to even try catching the ball. There is a caption in a frame that breaks the top border of the main frame:] Lise Meitner Cueball: Hey Lise! Think fast! Ball hitting something (off-screen): Crash\n[Lise takes her hands to her mouth and she watches the broken porcelain atom lying in two pieces on the floor where it has fallen off a desk. On the desk, three other intact atoms can be seen. The baseball lies behind her.] Lise Meitner: Oh no! My collection of porcelain atoms! Lise Meitner:...Hmm.\n[Four kids are standing in front of Megan and Charles Darwin (with a big beard and hair behind the ears). All the kids are trying to drink a glass of soda with a straw in them. The first kid is a boy with dark flat hair and sips soda through the straw with his mouth. The next kid is a boy with standing black hair, he tries in vain to drink with his beak open on each side of the glass. The third kid is a girl with her hair in a bun. She tries to get her beak into the glass which she has put on the floor. The last kid is a boy version of Cueball who slurps his soda through the straw. There is a caption in a frame that breaks the top border of the main frame:] Charles Darwin Megan: I gave our kids soda, but the ones with beaks always have trouble drinking it. Charles Darwin: I've noticed that... Boy with flat dark hair: Sip sip Boy with standing black hair and a beak: Crunch Girl with her hair in a bun and a beak: Peck peck Cueball like kid: Sluurp\n[A hairy guy is standing in front of Albert Einstein (with wild hair and a mustache), who is holding one hand to his head and has a clock in his other hand. Behind them is a train, with a locomotive at the front and a wagon behind that stretches beyond the frame. Another hairy guy has his head out of the front window of the wagon and is flashing a light towards the other two. In the next three windows can be seen passengers, two with Cueball like heads and one with hair. There is a caption in a frame that breaks the top border of the main frame:] Albert Einstein Albert Einstein: I wish your twin brother would stop shining lights at us from that train. I can barely see my clock! Albert Einstein: ...Wait!\nThis comic appeared on xkcd's ten-year anniversary.\n"}
{"id":1585,"title":"Similarities","image_title":"Similarities","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1585","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/similarities.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1585:_Similarities","transcript":"[Ponytail is talking to Cueball.]\nPonytail: So it's a work of fiction about a well-known brand. written on the Internet by an enthusiast, republished as a bestselling book, and then made into a big movie. Cueball: Yup.\n[Ponytail holds her hand to her chin. Beat panel.]\n[Ponytail is talking to Cueball again.] Ponytail: Yeah, The Martian and Fifty Shades of Grey are basically the same book. Cueball: \" Fifty Shades of Red? \" Ponytail: Man, tell me you wouldn't read that.\n","explanation":"There's a common punchline in which the plot lines of two thematically-different works of fiction (usually movies) are compared in greatly-abbreviated form, and the speaker sarcastically concludes that the two movies are \"basically the same\". For sake of example, Disney's Aladdin and James Cameron 's Titanic both feature a story in which a lower-class boy and an upper-class girl fall for each other, among other cherry-picked yet interesting parallels. But due to the different emotional tones of the films (a family-friendly \"happy ever after\" tale and a disaster thriller respectively), one would not normally describe them as similar.\nThis comic spoofs the idea. Instead of comparing plot lines of two movies, Ponytail and Cueball compare the respective movies' development histories.\nThe Martian was originally a serialized story written by Andy Weir on his blog which was later compiled into an ebook for people to easily download, then published into a physical book, and has now had a movie created based on it. The movie was officially released in the US on the same day this comic was released (October 2, 2015).\nFifty Shades of Grey began as a fan fiction of a well known brand (the Twilight book series ). It was originally written on the internet by E. L. James . It was then transformed into a successful book series which was later turned into a movie released in February 2015. The book was already referenced back in 2012 in 1128: Fifty Shades .\nSince Fifty Shades is a romance story about a sadomasochistic relationship, and The Martian is a very technical story about surviving completely alone on a hostile planet, the two books could not be any more different, hence the joke due to the juxtaposition.\nCueball continues the joke by joining the two titles using red for Mars, to make a new book title, that should cover both books: Fifty Shades of Red. Ponytail says to Cueball that such a book would be irresistible for him. She does this by daring him to say that he wouldn't read it, believing he could not say so without lying. The red could also be a reference to the safe word used in the Fifty Shades series, for when things hurt instead of being pleasing. It means stop! But stop should be a word you can say, without the other one stopping, adding to the illusion of being forced; actually stopping would be done by saying red . Reading it like that, the title would be Fifty Shades of Stop !\nIt is not clear from the comic if Randall liked the movie. Since he now compares it to a book series that has been described as mommy porn it could indicate that he was not so satisfied with the movie. On the other hand, he may just have noticed this connection and found that it would make a great joke here on the release day.\nAn alternative explanation is that Randall is commenting on the frequent comparisons made between The Martian and the movie Interstellar , comparisons centering on the fact that in both Matt Damon plays an astronaut stuck on a deserted planet, but also mentioning, among others, the appearance of Jessica Chastain and the similar design of the spacesuits used in both movies. These comparisons have been prevalent on the Internet long before the release of The Martian, so evidently spurred by the movie trailers, rather than by reviews of viewers. Randall is making the point that to one who has seen the movie, comparing The Martian to Interstellar is as far-fetched as comparing it to Fifty Shades of Grey. According to this interpretation, Randall is not ridiculing The Martian, but rather Interstellar. By proxy, he is praising The Martian. Given that Randall has chosen (now for the second time) to mention the film explicitly on his site, the idea that he is promoting The Martian is perhaps more plausible than the idea that he is expressing dissatisfaction with it. The title text, where he makes a similar comparison, favoring The Martian over Star Wars: The Force Awakens, further boosts this explanation.\nIt is possible that the brand that The Martian derives from is NASA itself. The Martian has been compared to the film Apollo 13 by Randall in 1536: The Martian . Apollo 13 does indeed glorify the roles of the NASA engineers, and The Martian does a similar thing. That Randall would go see this movie as soon as it was released was already made perfectly clear back in June when he released the comic 1536: The Martian showing how excited he is about the book. He then really looked forward to the movie.\nRandall indicates in the title text that he has just seen the movie (certainly possible, if he caught a midnight screening; perhaps he drew this comic in advance and wrote the title text after) and finds the Sojourner rover adorable. Of course, he could also have seen it in the trailers.\nThe BB-8 mentioned in the title text is the astromech droid from the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens and is available as a toy (see also BB-8 on the official Star Wars home page). Sojourner was the Mars Pathfinder robotic rover used by Mark Watney, the protagonist of The Martian (played by Matt Damon in the movie), to allow him to contact Earth. Randall indicated that he thinks the Sojourner is much cuter than BB-8, and that he would like to have one as a pet. He then states that the Sojourner has always been the cutest among all the Mars rovers . The cuteness of Mars Rovers is also mentioned in 2433: Mars Rovers . There have been four so far the other three being Opportunity , Spirit and Curiosity which have already been used in xkcd comics: 695: Spirit , 1091: Curiosity and 1504: Opportunity .\n[Ponytail is talking to Cueball.]\nPonytail: So it's a work of fiction about a well-known brand. written on the Internet by an enthusiast, republished as a bestselling book, and then made into a big movie. Cueball: Yup.\n[Ponytail holds her hand to her chin. Beat panel.]\n[Ponytail is talking to Cueball again.] Ponytail: Yeah, The Martian and Fifty Shades of Grey are basically the same book. Cueball: \" Fifty Shades of Red? \" Ponytail: Man, tell me you wouldn't read that.\n"}
{"id":1586,"title":"Keyboard Problems","image_title":"Keyboard Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1586","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/keyboard_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1586:_Keyboard_Problems","transcript":"[Cueball sits between two laptops. Megan stands behind him.]\nCueball: Keys on my keyboard keep failing, even when I boot from an external recovery disk. Megan: Sounds like it's hardware, then.\n[Cueball moves over to the laptop behind him.]\nCueball: Yeah... except the problem followed me from my last computer. Megan: You have the most bizarre tech issues.\n[Cueball picks up the keyboard from the rear computer and plugs it into the one in front of him.]\nCueball: It must be spreading via keyboards. This one won't work with any computer now. Megan: When the robot apocalypse happens, I'm hiding out in your house. Any Skynet drones that come near will develop inexplicable firmware problems and crash.\n","explanation":"This comic parodies how people diagnose and solve computer problems . Cueball and Megan are trying to solve a keyboard issue, but are somewhat incompetent at diagnosing the issue. Cueball in particular blames a broken keyboard on software or a keyboard virus .\nIn the comic, Cueball complains that some keys in his keyboard don't work. Generally speaking, this could be due either to a software problem (e.g. the keyboard driver not working properly, or some program ignoring keypresses) or to a hardware problem (the keyboard is physically damaged, e.g. because of dirt under the keys).\nIf the problem is in the software, booting from a different operating system (e.g. an external recovery disk) should solve it, as the computer would no longer be using the faulty software. However, if the problem is in the hardware, changing the keyboard should solve the problem as the new keyboard would no longer be physically damaged (and would have no dirt under the keys).\nHowever, the problem stays there after booting from an external recovery disk (so it's not a software problem) and it has \"followed Cueball since his last computer,\" (i.e. the problem persists after changing to a new laptop with a new keyboard, so it's not a hardware problem). Cueball is (reasonably) puzzled.\nMegan seems to be used to Cueball's computer behaving strangely, and she doesn't even attempt to explain or solve the problem. The only explanation she needs for the problem is that \"it's Cueball's computer.\" The characters in this comic are probably the same as in 1084: Server Problem , 1316: Inexplicable , and 349: Success .\nThe last panel is a reference to The Terminator , a 1984 movie often referenced in xkcd. In the movie, the artificial intelligence named Skynet initiates a nuclear war, destroying most of humanity, then sends killing machines to finish the rest. These include flying drones \u2014 Megan suggests that if such robots come to Cueball's vicinity, they will (physically) crash since computers around Cueball can't seem to ever work properly, and so hiding in Cueball's house she should be safe from the robots.\nThe title text refers to main plot of the movie and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day . As Skynet's army is losing the battle against the human Resistance movement, it finds a way to send a humanoid robot T-800 back in time to kill the mother of the Resistance's leader. The Resistance in turn sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect her. In the sequel, the situation repeats with the more advanced T-1000 being the killer and a reprogrammed T-800 being the protector of the child (the future leader). Along the way, they manage to destroy the research lab where Skynet hardware is to be born in the future. The title text suggests an alternative mission into the past, sending Cueball back in time and using his power to cause Skynet to terminally malfunction instead of destroying it physically (as Skynet was created later anyway, despite the destruction of the research lab).\n[Cueball sits between two laptops. Megan stands behind him.]\nCueball: Keys on my keyboard keep failing, even when I boot from an external recovery disk. Megan: Sounds like it's hardware, then.\n[Cueball moves over to the laptop behind him.]\nCueball: Yeah... except the problem followed me from my last computer. Megan: You have the most bizarre tech issues.\n[Cueball picks up the keyboard from the rear computer and plugs it into the one in front of him.]\nCueball: It must be spreading via keyboards. This one won't work with any computer now. Megan: When the robot apocalypse happens, I'm hiding out in your house. Any Skynet drones that come near will develop inexplicable firmware problems and crash.\n"}
{"id":1587,"title":"Food Rule","image_title":"Food Rule","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1587","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/food_rule.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1587:_Food_Rule","transcript":"[There is a caption above a list of food with indication whether it is OK or not to eat. Below is another caption.]\nMy food rule:\nRed meat \u2713 Pork \u2713 Poultry \u2713 Fish \u2713 Shrimp X Oysters X Squid X Fruit \u2713 Vegetables \u2713 Grains \u2713\nI won't eat something if I have to Google to figure out whether or not it has a face.\n","explanation":"There are various vegetarian diets which restrict certain foods for ethical or personal concerns. Real vegetarians do not eat any kind of meat, but some only refrain from eating red meat, although this means they are not true vegetarians. Vegetarianism can go as far as to not eating (or even using) any kind of products coming from an animal (i.e. veganism ). The comic is a joke on one of the vegetarian rules, namely don't eat anything with a face . This rule is difficult to follow, because it is subjective whether people think a given animal has a face , causing disagreement about what is allowed and what is forbidden to eat.\nRandall presents a list (see details below) of allowed and forbidden food in his diet. For example, he eats meat from typical-looking animals like beef, pork, chicken, and fish. He will also eat plants like fruit, vegetables and grain. But he refuses to eat some of the more odd-looking creatures from the sea like squids, shrimps and oysters. Below the list he explains his rule for what can be eaten: I won't eat something if I have to Google to figure out whether or not it has a face , which is a joke on the disagreements about the don't eat anything with a face rule. The joke is particularly teasing as it allows most (if not all) kinds of meat, which are the most strictly forbidden foods for even the mildest of vegetarians. Randall does not care about food having faces, he is worried apparently only about having to defend the position that some particular food has a face or not. While it's clear, at least to Randall, that a cow has a face and an apple does not, some beings are harder to classify into one of these categories. For Randall this goes for shrimps, oysters and squids; and apparently actual vegetarians also struggle with these creatures, as can be seen in several on-line questions ( 1 ).\nThe title text gives another rule that also would make these same three omissions. This rule is about not eating invertebrates (animals without a vertebral column , i.e. spineless creatures). As the first four items on the list are meat from four different animals of the type vertebrates (with vertebral column) and the last three items are from plants , that explains why these are all OK to eat. But the middle three items are three different animals of the type invertebrates, which Randall does not eat.\nRandall's reason for avoiding invertebrates is somewhat outlandish: he fears that the spirits from creatures he has eaten will come back to haunt him. In horror movies, as well as in video games and roleplaying games with fantastic elements, undead creatures often appear as spooky skeletons (i.e. the Stalfos of the Legend of Zelda ); however invertebrates have no skeleton so Randall can't figure out what kind of spooky undead creature will come after him if he eats them (invertebrates may have a shell or another type of exoskeleton , but these do not look at all like the typical mental image of a skeleton). Randall imagines that he'll be able to fight a typical skeleton, but is afraid of the unknown ghostly creature an invertebrate may become after dying.\nThe comic may also be a joke on the modern paleo diet trend, which emphasizes eating fruit, vegetables, and meat (\"anything with a face\").\nRandall has previously depicted cuttlefish as spooky in 520: Cuttlefish , and he's also mentioned his dislike of certain foods (namely lobster - another invertebrate) in 1268: Alternate Universe .\nHere is a list with explanation for each item on Randalls food list:\n[There is a caption above a list of food with indication whether it is OK or not to eat. Below is another caption.]\nMy food rule:\nRed meat \u2713 Pork \u2713 Poultry \u2713 Fish \u2713 Shrimp X Oysters X Squid X Fruit \u2713 Vegetables \u2713 Grains \u2713\nI won't eat something if I have to Google to figure out whether or not it has a face.\n"}
{"id":1588,"title":"Hardware Reductionism","image_title":"Hardware Reductionism","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1588","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hardware_reductionism.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1588:_Hardware_Reductionism","transcript":"[Cueball holds his smartphone looking at it while talking to Megan who is holding her smartphone in her hand.] Cueball: Your photos from the triathlon got so many more likes than mine. Megan: Yeah - My phone is quad-core. Research shows that iPhones like yours have just two cores, so they have a hard time capturing scenes with three different events in them.\n[Caption below the frame:] If we talked about phone hardware the way we talk about brain hardware\n","explanation":"Reductionism is the belief that things can be explained by their smaller parts. It can be abused when complex phenomena with multiple causes are attributed to a single, simple cause.\nNeurological reductionism is the attempt to explain people's behavior and personality by physical features of their brain. With advances in neuroscience , and especially in brain imaging, there's a fad to claim that brain types determine what the mind is. Examples of this kind of bad reductionism would be:\nThere are several problems with this kind of reasoning. First, most studies identify correlation , not causation (see correlation does not imply causation ). Brains are plastic; they can be shaped by experience. For example, if, in a given society, the females are taught to mind their appearance, and the males are taught that aesthetic considerations are unmanly, then of course the female brains will end up with more developed aesthetic centers. In other words, behavior and capabilities aren't always determined by the brain. Sometimes it's the behavior that shapes the brain; sometimes a third factor (e.g., malnutrition) shapes both.\nSecond, even when the brain is actually a cause of the behavior, it's far from the only piece in the puzzle. Many studies on brain differences are correlation studies, often about very small effect sizes. Unfortunately, the popular science media tends to gloss over the statistical concept of \"effect size\". For example, imagine a study that says that males' brains are 0.1% more likely than females' brains to exhibit attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Journalists are prone to report it simply as Study Shows that Males Have More ADHD , and this becomes a conversation sound-bite that neglects other factors, like genetics or pregnancy smoking.  See also 882: Significant , which does not discuss effect size, but does raise other objections to writing soundbites based on a single study.\nAnother kind of excessive neuronal reductionism is the overemphasis on brain modules (\"scientists identify brain area responsible for religious faith\", and the like). Though it's true that the brain has specialized areas, it's also true that the processing is very complex, messy, and distributed all over. Some varieties of brain damage can often be overcome by learning to use undamaged areas of the brain.\nThe comic illustrates the problem by analogy to some better-understood general-purpose computing hardware: the CPU in a smartphone. Cueball and Megan have used their smartphones to take pictures of the same event: a triathlon , that is, an athletic competition comprising three modalities (e.g., swimming, cycling, and running). Cueball wonders why is it that Megan's photos are more popular, and Megan gives a reductionist explanation: She tells that her phone is quad-core (four cores) whereas Cueball's phone only has two cores (here she even throws in the typical sentence \"research shows that\" to make her claim sound more valid). A core is a part of a CPU that is, roughly speaking, the brain of a computer or smartphone. Megan thinks that this means Cueball's smartphone can only capture two events at the same time; she misunderstands how the specialized modules work and fails to realize that the number of cores is unrelated to how many events can be captured. Her claim is like saying that male brains are better at spatial reasoning, and therefore males are better triathlon photographers, or that females are better at multitasking, and therefore females are better triathlon photographers.\nA CPU with more cores could process pictures faster, speeding up facial recognition or color filters. So it's true that Megan's CPU makes it slightly easier for her to take pictures. However, this has, at best, an extremely small effect on the number of \"likes\". There's a lot more going on with photography than the CPU of the phone: Megan's photographing skills, her luck in capturing interesting scenes, the number of online friends she has, etc.\nSo Megan misunderstands many things: the modularity of CPUs, the small effect of the CPU on the quality of her photography, and the actual causes of her success, much like people who reduce ability to structural features of the brain.\nThe title text is mocking reductionist explanations based on Randall's MRI ( magnetic resonance imaging ) research. One of the most famous (and disputed ) claims about gendered brains is that women's brains are (slightly) worse at spatial reasoning. Doritos is a popular junk-food brand of tortilla chips that are typically so flat that they can be called a 2D snack. In the 1990s Frito-Lay (PepsiCo) introduced a special 3D version, the 3D Doritos . (These bloated snacks took up more surface area in one's mouth, and had a hollow center filled with cheese-flavored air). So the title text associates a larger spatial reasoning brain area with enjoyment of this three-dimensional variation of the popular junk-food snack; the conclusion could be that men like these 3D snacks more than women because of their better spatial reasoning, although there could obviously be several other reasons for such gender specific choice of junk-food. 3D Doritos were discontinued, but reintroduced in 2015, the year of this comic's release.\n[Cueball holds his smartphone looking at it while talking to Megan who is holding her smartphone in her hand.] Cueball: Your photos from the triathlon got so many more likes than mine. Megan: Yeah - My phone is quad-core. Research shows that iPhones like yours have just two cores, so they have a hard time capturing scenes with three different events in them.\n[Caption below the frame:] If we talked about phone hardware the way we talk about brain hardware\n"}
{"id":1589,"title":"Frankenstein","image_title":"Frankenstein","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1589","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/frankenstein.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1589:_Frankenstein","transcript":"[A text only panel. Between the last two lines is a lightning bolt.] Like many people, I'm tired of the nitpicking about Frankenstein's monster's name. Luckily, Frankenstein is public domain. Therefore, I present xkcd's Frankenstein ( The monster's name )\n[Cueball is turning down a lever while looking at a monster with black hair that is lying on a bed under a bedsheet. There are two wires connecting to the neck of the monster.] Frankenstein: Graaar ! Cueball: Frankenstein is alive! I am a modern Prometheus! Frankenstein: Raaaar ! Cueball: To be clear, your name is Frankenstein , canonically. Frankenstein: Graaaaar ! Frankenstein: The moon landings were faked ! Cueball: Wait, what?\n[Another text only panel. The first word is written between two curvy lines.] Fin. There. Feel free to call the monster \"Frankenstein.\" If anyone tries to correct you, just explain that this comic is your canonical version. Thank you.\n","explanation":"Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel by Mary Shelley published in 1818. In it, Victor Frankenstein is a human who creates a monster (who is never named).  In popular culture, however, \"Frankenstein\" is taken to be the name of the monster, not its creator.\nWhile this is an often-corrected \"error\", it has been argued that it is not technically incorrect to call the monster \"Frankenstein\" as well, since he is the \"offspring\" of his \"father\", Victor Frankenstein. Since a child usually takes on the last name of their father, it may be said that the monster's last name actually is \"Frankenstein\". He also refers to himself in the novel as \"the Adam of your labors\" - a reference to the Biblical Adam, the first of his kind - and some have taken to calling the monster \"Adam Frankenstein\" to differentiate him from the scientist, Victor Frankenstein.\nOthers have argued that the monster's namelessness is an important part of his characterization in the story since it reflects the doctor's complete rejection of his creation. While the monster identifies Victor as his \"father\" in the novel, Victor does not consider the creature to be his \"son\".\nNot helping matters is the equally-famous Frankenstein film series staring Boris Karloff, featuring a very different plotline and a very different portrayal of the monster. Within the movies themselves the monster once again goes unnamed, but the movie titles and posters refer to the monster simply as \"Frankenstein.\" For example the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein is a double-meaning, featuring brides for both the human Henry Frankenstein and the monster, thus implying the monster can be called \"Frankenstein.\"\nRandall apparently finds this argument tedious and pedantic, so he has created his own work of fiction, in which the monster is named Frankenstein. He rationalizes that it is now correct to call the monster Frankenstein, assuming that his comic strip is as authoritative as the original novel. \" Canonical \" (rule, standard) means that this comic should be used as the authoritative work on the naming of the monster.\nHowever, xkcd's Frankenstein would be unlikely to be accepted by anyone as canonical, except for its stated purpose of settling the naming argument. The original version of any story is usually assumed to be the canonical one, and any derivative work would have to have widespread influence and recognition to supplant it in the popular imagination. This is not likely to happen with xkcd's Frankenstein, as it makes almost no effort to stand on its own; it exists only to be a version of Frankenstein where the monster is named \"Frankenstein.\" It emphasizes this point several times, and ends within a single panel, having accomplished its only goal. Almost no readers would find this version entertaining or substantive enough to displace Mary Shelley's original as the definitive version of the story.\nThe copyright on Mary Shelley's novel has expired long ago, before the moon landings (which began in 1969), so it is perfectly legal to create works derived from the original story. It should be noted, however, that Universal holds the copyright on the common image of the monster (green skin, flat-top head, scar, bolts on the neck and protruding forehead). To qualify as a derivative work the story needs to be substantially different from the original. The monster believing in moon landing conspiracy theories would probably qualify, but may reference retellings of the tale where a damaged or deranged brain was used (as an alternate 'explanation' why the supposedly perfect creation inevitably runs amok). Additionally, the original Frankenstein's monster was seen by its creator as hideous and repulsive due to its physical appearance despite the project being a success. Randall makes the same correlation in his version by having Frankenstein claim the moon landings were faked, which produces the same feelings in The Doctor.\nAlternatively, the monster being a moon landing denier is meant as a throwaway absurdist non sequitur. As the only point of this story is to make a canonical version of Frankenstein where \"Frankenstein\" is the monster's name, it should logically end once it has finished making that point clear. However, Randall throws a curveball by having the monster blurt out an uncomfortable and controversial point of view before the ending, then ending the story abruptly before the monster's statements can be addressed.\nIt is also possible that Randall is making reference to the fact that the kind of people who become engrossed in the debate that is attempted to be resolved in this comic and would bother to create a piece like this (which incidentally, complicates matters further rather than simplifying it, similar to the effect of many pieces of evidence in internet discussions) could be compared to the kind of people who deny the Moon Landings in obscure forums. He is drawing attention to how inane and unnecessary the comic is.\nThe title text raises the question of what the monster's creator is named in this version, since the name \"Frankenstein\" is instead given to the monster. The canonical answer is that the creator is simply \"The Doctor\", like the title character of the series \"Doctor Who\" . This might be a reference to similar pedantic nitpicking that occurs when that character is incorrectly referred to as \"Doctor Who\" rather than \"The Doctor\" which is in turn referenced in comic 1221: Nomenclature . As it happens, people who make that mistake can also claim canonical support, in that some early episodes of the series list the character's name as \"Doctor Who\" in the credits, or reference the recharacterisation in the cinematic retellings .\n[A text only panel. Between the last two lines is a lightning bolt.] Like many people, I'm tired of the nitpicking about Frankenstein's monster's name. Luckily, Frankenstein is public domain. Therefore, I present xkcd's Frankenstein ( The monster's name )\n[Cueball is turning down a lever while looking at a monster with black hair that is lying on a bed under a bedsheet. There are two wires connecting to the neck of the monster.] Frankenstein: Graaar ! Cueball: Frankenstein is alive! I am a modern Prometheus! Frankenstein: Raaaar ! Cueball: To be clear, your name is Frankenstein , canonically. Frankenstein: Graaaaar ! Frankenstein: The moon landings were faked ! Cueball: Wait, what?\n[Another text only panel. The first word is written between two curvy lines.] Fin. There. Feel free to call the monster \"Frankenstein.\" If anyone tries to correct you, just explain that this comic is your canonical version. Thank you.\n"}
{"id":1590,"title":"The Source","image_title":"The Source","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1590","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_source.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1590:_The_Source","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in an empty room looking in the direction of the next frame.]\n[Cueball turns his head and looks the other way.]\n[Three smaller panels with the same total height as the first two frames follows. In the first frame Cueball walks on a grey surface.]\n[In the next Cueball is standing between two doors, looking over his shoulder towards the one to the left, but choosing the one to the right behind which a stair is. He is waking towards this door with his hand out towards the knob.]\n[In the last of these smaller panels Cueball has just walked down to the bottom of the stairs.]\n[Cueball walks towards a machine that is standing near a wall connected to a socket in the wall. On the machine it says:] High pitched hum generator\n[Cueball kneels behind the machine and unplugs it from the socket in the wall.] High pitched hum generator\n[Cueball walks away from the machine, the plug now lying on the floor between the wall and the machine.] High pitched hum generator\n'Empty room hum' is also referred to in other waves in 273: Electromagnetic Spectrum and the title text in comic 597: Addiction .\n","explanation":"This comic is about experiencing a high pitched hum in an empty room. An \"empty-room hum\" is a high pitched buzzing noise, often caused by tinnitus , which is a medical condition causing high-pitched noise when there is no other noise around. Tinnitus is normally a hearing condition, not a disease. It may result from the brain increasing its sensitivity to noises.\nSometimes not everyone can hear \"empty-room hum\"; however, those who can hear it usually find it immensely annoying. If you do hear the noise, you would like to locate The Source \u2013 hence the title of the comic. Hopefully when you find the source, you can do something about it. Or if you don't find it, you can at least be at ease knowing that others experience the empty-room hum, it having been referenced in two xkcd comics now and elsewhere on the internet.\nThis comic alludes to the perspective of an outside observer who doesn't hear the hum but is watching someone who can hear it: because the sound isn't written out in text, the comic reader at first is confused by Cueball's inexplicable searching.\nIn the first two frames of the comic we see Cueball trying to locate the direction of the sound, by standing in the middle of the room, turning his head from one to the other side. Finally he walks down a flight of stairs (probably to the basement) and here he locates the source: A machine whose only function is to generate a high pitched hum. The title text asks why on Earth they had such a machine in the first place, which is somewhat difficult to explain and likely the crux of the title text's joke.\nLuckily it was thus easy for Cueball to get rid of this sound at the source. But in real life most electronics generate hums and cannot reasonably be turned off without losing functionality. For instance fluorescent lights, phone chargers and computer modems are common culprits, refrigerators and washing machines less commonly. It could also come from outside the house, in which case it will be much harder either to locate the source or to do anything about it. Power lines and transformers are common outside sources.\nThere do, however, exist devices that are meant to create a high pitched hum, that people might wish to install in their house. These will be humming in the ultrasonic regions, although cheap versions can often be heard by young people. They are typically used for electronic pest control , while slightly lower frequencies which can typically be heard only by young people are sometimes used to repel children . It is possible that someone tried to get rid of Cueball.\nThere do exist white noise generators (which make equal volume noise on every frequency) and pink noise generators (which make noise that sounds equally loud to the human ear at every frequency) which are used to test recording studios to see if they have good sound quality. It seems unlikely that the device is one of these, as it seems to be designed to generate a high-pitched hum: pink\/white noises are categorically and perceptually different from a hum.\nThe sound wave spectrum in 273: Electromagnetic Spectrum also contains a line for \"that high-pitched noise in empty rooms\".\nThe empty white room also could be a reference to a scene from The Matrix Reloaded in which Neo searches for \"The Source,\" though this is likely just a coincidence.\nThere is a story by A.E. Van Vogt in \"The War Against the Rull\" where an all-pervasive vibration leads to a coming of age for the youthful protagonist.\n[Cueball is standing in an empty room looking in the direction of the next frame.]\n[Cueball turns his head and looks the other way.]\n[Three smaller panels with the same total height as the first two frames follows. In the first frame Cueball walks on a grey surface.]\n[In the next Cueball is standing between two doors, looking over his shoulder towards the one to the left, but choosing the one to the right behind which a stair is. He is waking towards this door with his hand out towards the knob.]\n[In the last of these smaller panels Cueball has just walked down to the bottom of the stairs.]\n[Cueball walks towards a machine that is standing near a wall connected to a socket in the wall. On the machine it says:] High pitched hum generator\n[Cueball kneels behind the machine and unplugs it from the socket in the wall.] High pitched hum generator\n[Cueball walks away from the machine, the plug now lying on the floor between the wall and the machine.] High pitched hum generator\n'Empty room hum' is also referred to in other waves in 273: Electromagnetic Spectrum and the title text in comic 597: Addiction .\n"}
{"id":1591,"title":"Bell's Theorem","image_title":"Bell's Theorem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1591","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bells_theorem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1591:_Bell%27s_Theorem","transcript":"[Ponytail, facing right, is holding a piece of paper with both hands. In a small frame breaking the top of the large frame is a caption:] t= 0 nanoseconds Ponytail: This is called Bell's Theorem. It was first\u2013\n[A double-headed arrow points to Ponytail and then exits the frame crossing into the next frame where it points to Cueball. The arrow is split in two parts and in the center across the border of the two frames is a label:] 5 meters\n[Cueball, facing left. In a small frame breaking the top of the large frame is a caption:] t= 1 nanosecond Cueball: Wow, faster-than-light communication is possible!\n[Caption below the frames:] Bell's Second Theorem: Misunderstandings of Bell's Theorem happen so fast that they violate locality.\n","explanation":"Ponytail begins reading Bell's theorem to Cueball , who is standing 5 meters away. Bell's theorem, invented by the physicist John Stewart Bell , suggests that local hidden variables - that is, unknown properties of a system that are communicated via physical effects within the system's nearby surroundings - are not sufficient to fully explain quantum mechanics . This means that any complete description of quantum mechanics must necessarily include some non-local effect - some kind of influence that can be transmitted from some remote location not within the system's reach. Furthermore, that influence must necessarily travel instantaneously and does not obey the limit of the speed of light.\nCueball responds by misunderstanding this to mean that faster-than-light communication is actually possible. However, his misunderstanding occurs in 1 nanosecond. Since the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second, the light from Ponytail would have traveled only 30 centimeters, which means that Cueball has managed to misunderstand Bell's theorem faster than the speed of light - a feat that violates locality , just as the theorem predicts.\nThe punchline is that this is a special case known as Bell's Second Theorem: the idea that misunderstandings about what Bell's theorem means happen so readily that they actually violate the principle of locality.\nThis comic was published on October 16, 2015, five days before an article about the first-ever Loophole-free Bell's Theorem test was published in Nature magazine ( DOI:10.1038\/nature15759 ) (see also Bell test experiments ). However, the paper was submitted almost two months earlier on the 24th of August and could most likely be found on-line before this comic was released. It was accepted by Nature already on the 28th of September, but was first published online October 21, 2015. Randall may very well have been aware of the imminent release of this paper, although it is peculiar that he did not wait until the paper was released. (This could potentially be a meta-joke, with the joke about Bell's Theorem being released before the paper about the relevant experiment was published)\nAnother way to state Bell's theorem is \"No physical theory of (finitely many) local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.\" It says that a theoretical treatment that divides the universe up into separate (\"local\") systems like this will always discard something about those systems' intercorrelations.\nIt is possible that there could be \"global hidden variables\" which share information across systems, perhaps by some manner of superluminal communication - however, this has unsettling philosophical implications such as superdeterminism , where the universe is essentially just reading off a script and no free will is possible. Needless to say, many people find this an unsatisfying resolution.\nThe preferred resolution of the paradox is not to insist (as early physicists did) that the universe's state is a collection of bits (classical information), but treat it as a collection of qubits (quantum information).\nIn quantum mechanics (QM), \"measurement\" is the process of allowing a small system to interact with its environment in a controlled way. The interaction allows information about the system's state to escape to the environment, producing an \"observation.\" If the measurement apparatus is governed by classical mechanics (impossible in reality, but a very common simplification for the purposes of calculation), then the observation can be thought of as classical information, a bit (yes\/no answer) in the simplest case. While the system may have been in any one of infinitely many states before the measurement (each a superposition of classical states), the fact that the measurement must leave it consistent with the classical result means that it can end up in only finitely many states afterwards. This is the \"wave-function collapse\" of early QM, popularized by Schr\u00f6dinger's cat , but unrelated to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle , with which lay audiences often confuse it.\nModern quantum mechanics acknowledges that the environment is not classical, and that wave-function collapse happens by a (comparatively) gradual process called \"decoherence,\" where information leaving the system is made up for by information coming from the environment that drives the system closer and closer to one of the finitely many states predicted by the simplified model above. If a \"Schr\u00f6dinger's cat\" is in a half-and-half superposition of the states \"dead\" and \"alive\", when its liveness is measured, the ratios of \"dead\" and \"alive\" will shift rapidly towards (though not quite reach) 0 and 100% or 100 and 0%. For all but the shortest time scales, the cat's post-measurement state might as well be classical.\nEntanglement is a situation where the future outcomes of two or more measurements that would be independent in a classical world are nonetheless correlated. For example, two widely separated electrons from one source could be in a state where, considered individually, each is in a superimposed spin-up\/spin-down state, but if one is measured as spin-up, the other will necessarily be measured as spin-down. This is untroubling if the two electrons are modeled as a single system, but strange-seeming if we think of them as separate: how did the measurement of the first electron allow information from the environment around it affect the far-away second electron?  It seems like the electrons are communicating, potentially at superluminal speeds, which would violate either relativity or causality. In actuality, there's a fairly simple proof (see below) that correlations from entanglement can't be used to communicate, and causality and relativity are safe. But that doesn't make the seemingly faster-than-light effects much less of a surprise.\nOne can try to address these concerns by considering 'local hidden variables', classical properties of a local system (like a single electron) that could have been observed but were not. For example, perhaps a classical part of the electrons' state lets them \"agree\" on a future classical state at the moment they are entangled, and then they just reveal that state in the future. But this becomes unwieldy: there are infinitely many possible future observations the electrons would have to agree on, and it seems difficult to do this without infinitely many local hidden variables.\nThe title text jokes about the No-Communication Theorem . The real theorem states that although determination of the state of one half of an entangled pair immediately determines that of the other half, however far away it may be, there's no way for the observer of the other half to see if he's the first to find out the state or whether it'd already been determined by the first observer. Thus, no information travels from one observer to the other.\nRandall's version of the No-Communication Theorem states that no matter how you try to send information about this theorem (no communication about the No-Communication Theorem) then it cannot clear up the misunderstanding about Bell's Theorem quickly enough that any correct information (about Bell's theorem) has actually been transferred faster than light. So the conclusion is the same as the real No-Communication Theorem - faster-than-light signaling is not possible...\n[Ponytail, facing right, is holding a piece of paper with both hands. In a small frame breaking the top of the large frame is a caption:] t= 0 nanoseconds Ponytail: This is called Bell's Theorem. It was first\u2013\n[A double-headed arrow points to Ponytail and then exits the frame crossing into the next frame where it points to Cueball. The arrow is split in two parts and in the center across the border of the two frames is a label:] 5 meters\n[Cueball, facing left. In a small frame breaking the top of the large frame is a caption:] t= 1 nanosecond Cueball: Wow, faster-than-light communication is possible!\n[Caption below the frames:] Bell's Second Theorem: Misunderstandings of Bell's Theorem happen so fast that they violate locality.\n"}
{"id":1592,"title":"Overthinking","image_title":"Overthinking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1592","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/overthinking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1592:_Overthinking","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat are walking together. The references are at the bottom of the three first panels.] Cueball: I found a study* that said water is good for you, but you should just drink it when you feel thirsty and not go overboard. White Hat: Uh huh? *DOI:10.1097\/JSM.0000000000000221\n[More walking with Cueball lifting his hand in front of him.] Cueball: Another study* found that prolonged sitting isn't necessarily bad for you, as long as you're also getting exercise. White Hat: Okay... *DOI:10.1093\/ije\/dyv191\n[A border-less panel, but still walking.] Cueball: Now a study* claims that humans in pre-industrial societies stay up late and sleep 6 or 7 hours a night, just like most people today. White Hat: Huh. White Hat: So what you're saying is... *DOI:10.1016\/j.cub.2015.09.046\n[Zoom out showing Cueball and White Hat walking in silhouette.] Cueball: Maybe we're overthinking it. White Hat: But what caused our modern epidemic of overthinking?! Plumbing? Or is it email? Cueball: Modern? I bet the wheel was invented by someone overthinking \"pushing.\"\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is telling White Hat about several recent scientific studies he read that appear to contradict the results of either prior studies whose results have stood for a long time or are long-held misconceptions. The studies can be reviewed on-line via their Digital Object Identifier (DOI) in Randall's citations.\nIn the first, Cueball mentions a study that showed that while water is good for you, you only need to drink when you are thirsty. This appears to be a reference to common misconceptions that we should drink a certain set quantity of water per day (oft-cited as eight cups - see 715: Numbers ) and may even be referencing the fact that drinking too much water (well more than the standard 8 cups, for most people) can lead to hyponatremia (lack of salt in the body).\nAnother recent study showed that prolonged sitting is not bad for you which contradicts the long-held belief that sitting at a desk all day is unhealthy and that standing or lying down are healthier. The study showed that the position is not particularly relevant if there is no physical activity in any of the positions.\nFinally, Cueball references a study that pre-industrial humans have similar sleep patterns to our own, which would appear to contradict a belief that modern technology has disrupted our sleep patterns (which is likely tied to health concerns around our modern sleep habits).\nCueball's conclusion is that humanity may be over-thinking things in trying to find problems in the way we live our everyday lives. In the last panel, White Hat seems to be attempting to start an inquiry into what everyday modern phenomenon has caused us to over-think things. This is obviously a self-referencing example of the types of claims Cueball is debunking in the first three panels. Cueball responds by suggesting that humanity's over-thinking is likely not a recent phenomenon but probably dates back to the stone age. This could also be viewed as an argument that over-thinking is not all bad, as the wheel would certainly be a good result of over-thinking.\nIn the title text, Cueball gives a counter-example to his own argument, suggesting that it took far longer for us to realize the negative health connotations of smoking than it should have. Suggesting instead it's not about overthinking or underthinking-it's just that people make mistakes about what is important. (The link between cigarettes and lung cancer has been known for longer than most people realize, possibly coming as early as the 1940s.)\n[Cueball and White Hat are walking together. The references are at the bottom of the three first panels.] Cueball: I found a study* that said water is good for you, but you should just drink it when you feel thirsty and not go overboard. White Hat: Uh huh? *DOI:10.1097\/JSM.0000000000000221\n[More walking with Cueball lifting his hand in front of him.] Cueball: Another study* found that prolonged sitting isn't necessarily bad for you, as long as you're also getting exercise. White Hat: Okay... *DOI:10.1093\/ije\/dyv191\n[A border-less panel, but still walking.] Cueball: Now a study* claims that humans in pre-industrial societies stay up late and sleep 6 or 7 hours a night, just like most people today. White Hat: Huh. White Hat: So what you're saying is... *DOI:10.1016\/j.cub.2015.09.046\n[Zoom out showing Cueball and White Hat walking in silhouette.] Cueball: Maybe we're overthinking it. White Hat: But what caused our modern epidemic of overthinking?! Plumbing? Or is it email? Cueball: Modern? I bet the wheel was invented by someone overthinking \"pushing.\"\n"}
{"id":1593,"title":"Play-By-Play","image_title":"Play-By-Play","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1593","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/play_by_play.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1593:_Play-By-Play","transcript":"[Beret Guy is sitting with headphones with a microphone on, looking out of the frame, hands resting on a table.] Beret Guy: For those just joining us, hi! We're on part 5 of a hitting game.\n[Zoom out with Beret Guy shown from the side sitting at a desk.] Beret Guy: The next guy has a big bat, so he'll probably hit the ball real far. Beret Guy: Wait - he missed! Beret Guy: Oh good, they're letting him try again.\n[Zoom in again on Beret Guy still seen from the side.] Beret Guy: The people sitting on the chair shelves are yelling at this guy but he's ignoring them. Wow. Beret Guy: Rude.\n[Beret Guy looks straight out.] Beret Guy: This thrower is good! He keeps making people leave by throwing balls at them. Beret Guy: It's just him, though. None of his teammates are joining in.\n[Beret Guy turns his head to the side.] Beret Guy: That guy just ran to the second pillow when no one was looking!! Beret Guy: Everyone's real mad but I guess they checked the rules and there's nothing that says he can't do that. Beret Guy: Yikes. Hopefully they can fix that once this game is over.\n","explanation":"Beret Guy comments on a baseball game using improper terminology in a way that demonstrates that he does not understand how the game is played. Moreover, his na\u00efve way of speaking reveals that he is not aware of his lack of knowledge and does not consider it possible that, as is probably the case, his audience is much more familiar with this sport and its rules. His unworldly way of talking makes one even wonder if he has any notion of the way people experience sports at all. His choice of terminology is reminiscent of 1133: Up Goer Five , and 1322: Winter in that he names things using simplified terms that he feels best describes their function like \" thrower \", \" second pillow \" or \" thrower jail \". His commentary is a combination of mistaken terms and misunderstandings of the rules and principles of the game.\n[Beret Guy is sitting with headphones with a microphone on, looking out of the frame, hands resting on a table.] Beret Guy: For those just joining us, hi! We're on part 5 of a hitting game.\n[Zoom out with Beret Guy shown from the side sitting at a desk.] Beret Guy: The next guy has a big bat, so he'll probably hit the ball real far. Beret Guy: Wait - he missed! Beret Guy: Oh good, they're letting him try again.\n[Zoom in again on Beret Guy still seen from the side.] Beret Guy: The people sitting on the chair shelves are yelling at this guy but he's ignoring them. Wow. Beret Guy: Rude.\n[Beret Guy looks straight out.] Beret Guy: This thrower is good! He keeps making people leave by throwing balls at them. Beret Guy: It's just him, though. None of his teammates are joining in.\n[Beret Guy turns his head to the side.] Beret Guy: That guy just ran to the second pillow when no one was looking!! Beret Guy: Everyone's real mad but I guess they checked the rules and there's nothing that says he can't do that. Beret Guy: Yikes. Hopefully they can fix that once this game is over.\n"}
{"id":1594,"title":"Human Subjects","image_title":"Human Subjects","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1594","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/human_subjects.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1594:_Human_Subjects","transcript":"[Ponytail and Megan sit at a desk.] Ponytail: We're concerned that some of your results may be tainted by the fact that your human subjects are awful . Megan: What do you mean?\n[Ponytail picks up a sheet of paper.] Ponytail: Several participants in your drug trial were arrested for arson. Megan: Side effects can be unpredictable. Ponytail: They were in the control group.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail.] Ponytail: In your prisoner's dilemma study, 80% of the participants chose to betray their partners before the experimenter had a chance to tell them about the reward. Megan (off-panel): Definitely troubling.\n[Ponytail shows Megan another sheet of paper.] Ponytail: In one experiment, your subjects repeatedly gave electric shocks to a stranger in another room. Megan: That's a famous psychological- Ponytail: This was a study of moisturizing creams! Megan: Yes, we're not sure how they snuck in all that equipment.\n","explanation":"This strip plays on certain experiments involving human subjects . Ponytail is questioning the reliability of Megan 's experimental results, given that her human subjects appear to be extremely unusual and highly sociopathic .\nIn the second panel, she mentions that several people in one study had been arrested for arson . Megan begins to suggest that the arson is a side effect of whatever is being tested before she learns that the arsonists are in the control group \u2013 that is, the group that is not subjected to whatever is being tested and is used as a comparison to see the differences in the people who are actually being tested. This result is \"troubling\", as the control group would not be expected to have such a high rate of incidence of arsonists. The implication is that her subjects are not representative of the general population, but appear to have been selected from some aberrant subpopulation, such as a prison or mental institution. Or she could have recruited them through an announcement that catered in some way to arsonists. An alternate explanation comes from comic 790: Control , in which Randall notes his hobby of sneaking into experiments and giving LSD to the control groups. Yet another explanation could be that Ponytail went looking for some clusters of characteristics in the sample population, which had no connection to the study criteria, and happened upon the arson arrests - such clusters are expected if you look at enough different characteristics.\nThe third panel alludes to the prisoner's dilemma , in which two subjects must independently decide whether to \"collaborate\" with or \"betray\" the other subject based on different rewards for each choice (often framed as a different length of prison sentence, or a different amount of money). The rewards tier are selected so that the outcomes for each individual from best to worst are: betraying a collaborator, collaborating with a collaborator, betraying a betrayer, collaborating with a betrayer.\nThe thought experiment is considered interesting as it's uncertain what the most logical course of action, as choosing betrayal always improves one's situation, yet being in identical situations with no knowledge of each other, it's also logical for both prisoners to make the same choice and both collaborating is better than both betraying. Of course, it would not be expected that normal people would simply betray each other for no reason, without benefiting from it in any way.\nThe last panel references the Milgram experiment , in which subjects were instructed by experimenters to administer electric shocks to an unseen third party. The unseen third party was part of the experiment and pretended to be in agony. As shocks escalated they would beg for them to stop. The results suggest that people will continue to administer harm, despite the pleading of the victim, simply if told to do so by an authority figure, even when no incentive is provided to the subject to continue. In this case, however, the actual experiment did not involve electric shocks, and thus suggests that the subjects, of their own volition, brought equipment to produce electric shock and simply engaged in the activity unprompted.\nIn each of these cases, the subjects seem to have some \"negative\" psychological traits. While it might not be unusual to find one or two people with such traits in a randomly selected group, the fact that all three experiments contain multiple subjects with these traits (and seemingly the same traits in each study) is very unusual, given that most were not studies on psychology, but studies of drugs and moisterizers. Obviously, there would be no need for electric shocks and such in a studies like this [ citation needed ] , and Megan's claim that a side effect of using the investigational drug is arson is unlikely if it wasn't treating psychological issues. Even if it was, arson is a very specific issue that is unlikely to not coexist with other problems.\nThe title text refers to safety procedures normally required by institutional review boards , which are centralized groups within universities that ensure that experiments are ethical and safe. The implication is that for an IRB to recommend dispensing with safety procedures after meeting the subjects, the subjects must really, really deserve bad treatment. Or that after hanging out with the criminals they are more relaxed on rulebreaking, and adopting their mindset. Or the members of the IRB are, like the human subjects, just sociopathically awful people. Or that Megan is selecting for these subjects, or causing these abnormalities, as a side effect of spending (probably significantly) more effort than is necessary to adhere to the procedures.\nThe overall theme of experiments that are overwhelmingly skewed by outlier human factors is in itself reminiscent of the recent discovery that many psychological experiments cannot be replicated . That news made quite a bit of noise in the world of science and even made its way in the general press. Just like in the experiments that could not be replicated, it is likely that if the experiments in this comic were attempted again, the outcome would be drastically different than the one achieved here.\n[Ponytail and Megan sit at a desk.] Ponytail: We're concerned that some of your results may be tainted by the fact that your human subjects are awful . Megan: What do you mean?\n[Ponytail picks up a sheet of paper.] Ponytail: Several participants in your drug trial were arrested for arson. Megan: Side effects can be unpredictable. Ponytail: They were in the control group.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail.] Ponytail: In your prisoner's dilemma study, 80% of the participants chose to betray their partners before the experimenter had a chance to tell them about the reward. Megan (off-panel): Definitely troubling.\n[Ponytail shows Megan another sheet of paper.] Ponytail: In one experiment, your subjects repeatedly gave electric shocks to a stranger in another room. Megan: That's a famous psychological- Ponytail: This was a study of moisturizing creams! Megan: Yes, we're not sure how they snuck in all that equipment.\n"}
{"id":1595,"title":"30 Days Hath September","image_title":"30 Days Hath September","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1595","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/30_days_hath_september.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1595:_30_Days_Hath_September","transcript":"[Cueball is thinking.] Cueball: Thirty days hath September, April, June and November Cueball: All the rest have 31\u2014except February, which has 28, and leap year makes it 29. Cueball: Wait, which month was I listening for? Oh right, October. Cueball: Did I say \"October\" in there? Now I can't remember. Cueball: 30 days hath September...\nI get stuck in this loop every month.\n","explanation":"Thirty days hath September is a mnemonic frequently used to remember how many days each month has in the Gregorian calendar. Cueball is reciting the mnemonic trying to figure out how many days October has. This comic was released during the last week of October (the 26th) where it becomes increasingly important to know if there are 30 or 31 days in the month. However, he seems unable to concentrate on reciting the poem correctly, keeping track of which months the poem has named and keeping in mind the specific month he was interested in, so by the time he finishes the poem he is unsure whether October was in the list of 30-day months or not. So he starts over again with the same result every single time, as can be seen from the caption below the frame. It seems he also get stuck in all the other months disregarding if it is one of the month mentioned in the mnemonic.\nThere are numerous versions of the mnemonic, some of which rhyme better, but this version is one of the more common ones.\nIn the caption, Randall states that this happens to him every month. It's assumed that, after a number of iterations with the poem, he eventually remembers the months correctly and figures out the number of days in the current month, which he then remembers until the month changes and forces him to resort to the mnemonic again.\nThe title text is a parody of life hacking , and suggests just looking up on one's computer's calendar how many days there are in each month, with the punchline disguised by over-explaining the process of the \"cool mental calculation hack\" (even though there's nothing even remotely resembling a mental calculation in checking a calendar). Alongside the comic, the joke is that the mnemonic is supposed to be the real \"cool mental calculation hack\" which supposedly saves a lot of effort. This is similar to 1567: Kitchen Tips .\nThere is also a joke that he is unsure if there are 31 days in October, although Halloween is a largely celebrated holiday on the 31st.\n[Cueball is thinking.] Cueball: Thirty days hath September, April, June and November Cueball: All the rest have 31\u2014except February, which has 28, and leap year makes it 29. Cueball: Wait, which month was I listening for? Oh right, October. Cueball: Did I say \"October\" in there? Now I can't remember. Cueball: 30 days hath September...\nI get stuck in this loop every month.\n"}
{"id":1596,"title":"Launch Status Check","image_title":"Launch Status Check","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1596","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/launch_status_check.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1596:_Launch_Status_Check","transcript":"[A rocket is about to launch. A small object is near the top of the rocket.] Countdown: T-Minus 2 minutes Offscreen Voice 1: Tank and booster are go for launch. Offscreen Voice 2: Safety console? Offscreen Voice 3: Check. Safety- Offscreen Voice 4: Wait.\n[The small object moves to further to the right.] Offscreen Voice 1: What is it? Offscreen Voice 2: On the live feed- a cool bird just flew past the tower!\n[The launch scene now a background silhouette, the small object of everyone's attention is no longer on-panel.] Offscreen Voice 1: Whoa, what kind? Offscreen Voice 2: Like a hawk, maybe! Offscreen Voice 1: Could it be a vulture? Offscreen Voice 2: I doubt it. The wings were flat, not in a \"V\". Offscreen Voice 3: It could be an eagle! Offscreen Voice 2: Ooh!\n[The scene is returns to full contrast, with at least a token attention being paid to it, once more.] Offscreen Voice 1: This is launch control. We have a possible sighting of a cool bird. Halt the countdown. Offscreen Voice 2: Someone get some binoculars up here! Offscreen Voice 3: I want to see!\n","explanation":"The first panel shows a rocket launch , which is a critical point in any space mission . Before this moment, a large technical staff has put in years of hard work, but all that work (and even lives) could be destroyed in a second if anything goes wrong during the launch . T-Minus 2 minutes means that there are only two minutes left before the rocket is actually launched, so at this moment everybody is very nervous and worried about the launch going wrong. Other texts from the panel refer to the usual checks before the launch, whose end is to ensure everything is ready.\nIn the second panel, one of the people controlling the launch sees a \"cool bird\" on the live feed from the cameras controlling the operation. This should be of no importance at all, given the relatively much more serious matter of having years of work and possibly human lives at stake. However, the technical staff starts commenting on this cool bird and aborts the launch procedure as they are interested in the bird. This behavior would be absurd in real life. [ citation needed ]\nIn the third panel, the two controllers attempt to identify the bird; the one on the right guesses maybe it is a hawk . Since the habitat of hawks and vultures overlap almost entirely, a birdwatcher is almost certain to accidentally confuse the two in their lifetime of birdwatching. Obviously having this knowledge of the habitat overlap, the controller on the left asks if the bird was a vulture. The controller on the right accurately notes that it probably was not a vulture since it is commonly known to ornithologists that vultures \"hold their wings slightly raised in a \"V\" when seen head on.\" [1] . However, this demands that the original sighting of the bird must have included a flight pattern in which the bird not only \"flew past the tower\" as stated, but also flew towards the tower... even cooler!\nThe title text goes on with the same absurd behavior: the crew restarts the countdown to launch the rocket, but only to follow the bird and get a closer look at it. The original space mission the rocket was designed for is completely ignored. This is even more absurd than the initial interest in the bird, given that a rocket designed to enter outer space is ill equipped to try to follow a bird and maneuver at the low elevation and at the relatively slow speed of a bird.\nThis could also be a joke in the well known fanaticism of serious bird watchers, who think nothing of spur of the moment day long road trips (or flights!) in order to get to view an unusual bird.\nThe vehicle pictured is not clearly identified, and it could also be totally fictional. It could be the Atlas V or the Ariane 4 launch vehicle. It also shows some similarity with the SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy launch vehicle (albeit with stubbier strap-on boosters), named after the Falcon , another bird of prey. This would increase the absurdity of the situation.\nThe bird being referred to by the launch-crew features as a mere mark on the comic-strip, consistent with scale against the rocket, but they are obviously trying to start to identify the rough species or group it belongs to from the wing geometry , the effortlessly soaring carrion-seeking vulture and the hawk that often uses a swooping attack upon its prey typically having very different wing configurations as matches their evolved lifestyle.\n[A rocket is about to launch. A small object is near the top of the rocket.] Countdown: T-Minus 2 minutes Offscreen Voice 1: Tank and booster are go for launch. Offscreen Voice 2: Safety console? Offscreen Voice 3: Check. Safety- Offscreen Voice 4: Wait.\n[The small object moves to further to the right.] Offscreen Voice 1: What is it? Offscreen Voice 2: On the live feed- a cool bird just flew past the tower!\n[The launch scene now a background silhouette, the small object of everyone's attention is no longer on-panel.] Offscreen Voice 1: Whoa, what kind? Offscreen Voice 2: Like a hawk, maybe! Offscreen Voice 1: Could it be a vulture? Offscreen Voice 2: I doubt it. The wings were flat, not in a \"V\". Offscreen Voice 3: It could be an eagle! Offscreen Voice 2: Ooh!\n[The scene is returns to full contrast, with at least a token attention being paid to it, once more.] Offscreen Voice 1: This is launch control. We have a possible sighting of a cool bird. Halt the countdown. Offscreen Voice 2: Someone get some binoculars up here! Offscreen Voice 3: I want to see!\n"}
{"id":1597,"title":"Git","image_title":"Git","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1597","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/git.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1597:_Git","transcript":"[Cueball points to a computer on a desk while Ponytail and Hairy are standing further away behind an office chair.] Cueball: This is git. It tracks collaborative work on projects through a beautiful distributed graph theory tree model. Ponytail: Cool. How do we use it? Cueball: No idea. Just memorize these shell commands and type them to sync up. If you get errors, save your work elsewhere, delete the project, and download a fresh copy.\n","explanation":"Git is a version control system, used to manage the code in many millions of software projects. It is very powerful, and was amongst the first widely adopted tools to use a distributed version control model (the \"beautiful graph theory tree model \"), meaning that there is no single central repository of code. Instead, users share code back and forth to synchronise their repositories, and it is up to each project to define processes and procedures for managing the flow of changes into a stable software product.\nAlthough very powerful, the command line of Git is notoriously difficult to master. Dozens of blog posts and websites (see [1] , [2] ), and even books ( [3] , [4] ) have been written to help users navigate this complexity.\nThe difficulty of using Git in common situations is contradicted by the apparent simplicity of its use in tutorial-style situations. Committing and sharing changes is fairly straightforward, for instance, but recovering from situations such as accidental commits, pushes or bad merges is difficult without a solid understanding of the rather large and complex conceptual model. For instance, three of the top five highest voted questions on Stack\u00a0Overflow are questions about how to carry out relatively simple tasks: undoing the last commit, changing the last commit message, and deleting a remote branch.\nThis comic thus explores the difference between the idealised view of Git's architecture, and its actual typical usage. Tutorials for Git tend to use simple systems in their examples, and only deal with the most basic commands to get started, which can create the misleading impression that Git can be used effectively without extensive study.\nDue to this problem, compounded by the fact that Git's commands are named differently from similar commands in other version control systems, many users (including Cueball) are unable to use it beyond basic commands, and might try to avoid problems by saving their code outside Git, downloading a newer copy, and then re-applying their changes to the new copy instead of trying to understand and use the features that exist in Git to accomplish this task.\nCueball suggests \"just memoriz[ing] these shell commands and type them to sync up\". He is probably referring to a sequence of commands such as:\nAs long as every contributor to the project follows these principles, this may suffice for a while. But many situations may cause \"errors\":\nIn a situation such as a merge conflict, Git will show an error message such as:\nAlthough Git experts can of course deal with such situations, the remedy proposed by Cueball is \"save your work elsewhere, delete the project, and download a fresh copy\". That is, to copy the files out of their local repository's working directory, delete that whole structure, then clone the remote repository again (and, implicitly, copy the saved work back again):\nAbandoning the old project likely means losing some work, but may be faster and give a more predictable outcome than attempting to salvage the situation. Applying this method to a mere merge conflict issue may prolong the issue however, as the merge conflicts may still be present.\nThe title text suggests an alternative method for working around Git's complexities, which reflects common practice: knowing a \"Git expert\" who can help in any situation. Such experts are somewhat notorious for waxing lyrically about Git's strengths, so it may be necessary to win their favour by first letting them ramble enthusiastically about it. They will hopefully eventually give the exact commands needed. In practice, the question-and-answer site Stack\u00a0Overflow is frequently used for this exact purpose.\nIt may even be a reference to the infamous tweet \" Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space \" which has been discussed here but it is inconclusive whether a meaningful interpretation exists.\nPutting a telephone number of someone who \"understands Git\" into such a file is humorous because:\nIn short: programmers use version control systems to track changes to code. Most of these version control systems are quite similar and easy to learn if you already know another one. Git is a version control system based on completely different principles, and most programmers find it difficult to wrap their heads around it (although Git also offers a large number of nontrivial benefits over standard version control systems, which is why it is used). Cueball is one of those programmers.\nThis comic was referenced in an earlier version of the page for what if? #153, where Randall, due to a problem with git, had at one time erroneously posted a draft of his what if? piece on peptides. As of December 17th, 2016 the page read:\nWhoops This article is still in progress. An early draft was unintentionally posted here thanks to Randall's troubled approach to git , and it took a little bit to get everything sorted out and rolled back. Sorry for the mixup!\nOn January 30, 2017, the page was updated with a completed article, Hide the Atmosphere .  As of September 23, 2019, the page no longer contains any reference to this comic or Randall's earlier mistake with Git (or anything related to Git, for that matter).\nThe comic 1296: Git Commit also features Git.\n[Cueball points to a computer on a desk while Ponytail and Hairy are standing further away behind an office chair.] Cueball: This is git. It tracks collaborative work on projects through a beautiful distributed graph theory tree model. Ponytail: Cool. How do we use it? Cueball: No idea. Just memorize these shell commands and type them to sync up. If you get errors, save your work elsewhere, delete the project, and download a fresh copy.\n"}
{"id":1598,"title":"Salvage","image_title":"Salvage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1598","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/salvage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1598:_Salvage","transcript":"[Megan is shown standing at the rail of a ship with a microphone reporting the event shown in the background. A small helicopter and a larger two rotor model, lowering a rope with hook, are hovering over a crane ship with its hook down line going down in the water. It is depicted like a news screen as seen on TV. Below Megan are two headings. The first in a white insert with double frame, and the other written in white over the gray ocean water.] Historic Salvage Live\n[Four crane ships are shown lifting the bow part of the RMS Titanic. There are pontoons beneath the ship to help it float up. The name of the ship can be seen.] RMS Titanic\n[Both parts of the Titanic are now flown by helicopters, four for the stern and five for the bow. One helicopter for each part is a two rotor model. Ropes go from the helicopters down on each side of the ship parts to pontoons below them. Below in the ocean there are two crane ships.]\n[The two parts of the ship is now lowered in to a huge bowl of rice (labeled) standing at the coast just out of the ocean, which can be seen to the left. One of the five helicopters for the bow is missing. For scale there are drawn two trees to the left, and something is parked to the right, maybe a truck.] Rice\n","explanation":"The RMS Titanic was a large ocean liner which, when it was completed in 1912, was the largest ship afloat. The ship famously hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank, killing two-thirds of its complement (approximately 1,500 people) in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters ever.\nAs it sank, the Titanic broke into two pieces. The ship was lost for decades until the wreck site was discovered in 1985. A number of proposals have been made to salvage the wreck of the Titanic both before and since the wreck's discovery, famously fictionalised in the thriller novel and film Raise the Titanic! There could be a joke on this title as in Rice the Titanic, even though it would not be possible to mistake the two words when spoken in the majority of dialects of English.\nThe general consensus at this time is that the wreck is too fragile to be salvaged intact. Numerous expeditions have been made to the wreck site since its discovery, with several parties (without any outside authorization) taking various artifacts from the site. A popular view is that the wreck is effectively a mass grave and that plundering the site for profitable artifacts is akin to grave-robbing. Most believe the wreck should be left where it is, intact. That said, explorers have already done notable damage to the wreck.\nThis comic shows a fictional attempt to salvage the two main pieces of the Titanic wreck, which, as it likely would in real life, garners media coverage as a 'historic salvage'. The salvage seems to consist of several ships raising the hull via cables attached to some sort of buoyant sled placed under the hull (as might actually happen, except that the relative sizes of the ships and the hull are wrong; this method would require the salvage ships be much larger in proportion to what is being salvaged). This is followed by helicopters carrying the hull in unison, again via cables to the cradle (a much less practical operation). The hull halves are then dropped into a giant tub of rice. The entire salvage attempt is increasingly cartoonish and unrealistic, but the tub of rice takes this to another level. Also, the two parts of the Titanic collapsed when hitting the sea floor, and thus could not be moved as shown in the comic. See this video of How Titanic Sank .\nThe punchline to the comic references the \"rice myth,\" (as Randall calls it) a popularly disseminated method of salvaging consumer electronics (usually cell phones) which have been submerged in water. (See Research Shows Rice is the Answer for a Wet Mobile ). The method entails burying the wet device in a bowl of rice. This process is commonly claimed to dry the device, but investigation reveals that the process is only mildly effective (though not entirely a myth either, see below). This comic likely plays on the dual meaning of the word \" salvage \" in respect of electronics and maritime wrecks .\nThe comic suggests that the wreck of the Titanic would benefit from being dried as quickly as possible, in a humorous contrast to actual reality. Surviving non-metallic material on board the ship may not benefit at all from drying. Far more ancient shipwrecks are best preserved by keeping the recovered timbers wet (but progressively desalinated, where applicable), cool and anoxic, at least while conserving chemicals such as Polyethylene glycol are infused into the wood to allow safe and gradual drying without causing further damage. Leather, cloth and other organic remains may have variations on this regime. Thus the rice might benefit an electronic device briefly exposed to water, but is not likely to benefit a ship that has been immersed for over a century, where the interest is in more than merely stabilizing the remaining metal hull and infrastructure.\nThere are numerous on-line discussions of the technique with mixed levels of success. Critically, where rice is tested against other methods, rice appears to perform worse than other methods. Controlled experiments on this topic tend to show that silica gel (aka the \"Do Not Eat\" packets often found in boxes with electronics or pharmaceuticals) is the most effective drying agent, with mixed results for rice. (see Myth Debunked: Uncooked Rice Isn't the Best Way to Save Your Water-Damaged Phone , where it turns out that leaving the phone to air-dry may actually be the best solution).\nThe title text tells of another hobby of Randall's . He likes to take advantage of the \"rice myth\" to post fake articles on how to save your wet cell phone. But the instructions turn out to be elaborate recipes for rice pilaf . It is unclear whether Randall's instructions would explain how to prepare the rice prior to inserting a phone (thus resulting a usable dish), or if the instructions would require the phone to be inserted into the dish before it became clear that the dish was a recipe for food and not a phone-saving measure, thus worsening the condition of the phone. This may also be a \"punishment\" by Randall to anyone who would follow instructions blindly before reading them through, as a recipe for rice Pilaf would likely be distinguishable from phone-saving instructions by someone who read the instructions through before attempting them. Or it may just be that Randall considers those who would follow instructions for saving a phone with rice that they find on the internet gullible enough to believe the seasonings and other ingredients would have a curative effect on electronics.\nThe rice myth is revisited in one of the tips in 1820: Security Advice .\n[Megan is shown standing at the rail of a ship with a microphone reporting the event shown in the background. A small helicopter and a larger two rotor model, lowering a rope with hook, are hovering over a crane ship with its hook down line going down in the water. It is depicted like a news screen as seen on TV. Below Megan are two headings. The first in a white insert with double frame, and the other written in white over the gray ocean water.] Historic Salvage Live\n[Four crane ships are shown lifting the bow part of the RMS Titanic. There are pontoons beneath the ship to help it float up. The name of the ship can be seen.] RMS Titanic\n[Both parts of the Titanic are now flown by helicopters, four for the stern and five for the bow. One helicopter for each part is a two rotor model. Ropes go from the helicopters down on each side of the ship parts to pontoons below them. Below in the ocean there are two crane ships.]\n[The two parts of the ship is now lowered in to a huge bowl of rice (labeled) standing at the coast just out of the ocean, which can be seen to the left. One of the five helicopters for the bow is missing. For scale there are drawn two trees to the left, and something is parked to the right, maybe a truck.] Rice\n"}
{"id":1599,"title":"Water Delivery","image_title":"Water Delivery","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1599","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/water_delivery.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1599:_Water_Delivery","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] Now that Amazon is advertising one-hour delivery of bottled water,\n[A larger building complex is show on the left. An arrow goes to a blue bottle in a brown package in the middle of the frame. Another arrow continues over to Cueball on the right. The same building and Cueball is drawn below four more times. More and more bottles in packages are added. First two with a third arrow in between. Then six packages with water, so close that there are only smaller arrows at both ends. Then there is one long package from building to Cueball with 20 bottles close together, with small arrows at both ends of this package. Then finally this turns into a stream of water flowing through a package \"pipe\", shown with one arrow in the middle of the blue water. Again with small arrows at both ends of the pipe.]\n[Caption below the frame:] I vote we start calling municipal plumbing \"on-demand hyperloop-style water delivery\" and see if we can sell anyone on the idea.\n","explanation":"Amazon has added bottled water to its line of on-line home order goods, which they are calling Prime Now .  In served areas, which include Manhattan\/Brooklyn , Baltimore , Atlanta , Miami , Dallas , Austin , Houston , Indianapolis , Chicago , Seattle , Portland , Los Angeles , Minneapolis , San Francisco , San Jose , San Antonio , Las Vegas , Sacramento , and Phoenix , many products \u2013 including but not limited to bottled water \u2013 are available to be delivered within one hour. So we are faced with the prospect of water, contained within plastic bottles, contained within cardboard shipping boxes.\nAs increasing amounts of water are ordered, on-demand, or as the delivery time decreases to even quicker than an hour, this would show increasing numbers of packages passing from Amazon HQ (or its distribution hubs) to an arbitrary end-user as shown in the comic.  Beyond a certain (already impractical) point, it might be better to merge packaging together into a single longitudinal structure through which one could first deliver back-to-back bottles of water, as shown in the second-to-bottom illustration, and then as water quantity needs increase beyond that model, eventually just 'pipe' the water without the plastic bottle or any packaging at all, as shown in the final illustration.  (This would also solve the problems of what happens with the packaging at the destination, or how to return it to the source to make it easier to re-use.)\nWhile this could apply to one degree or another to any merchandise, for the purposes of the comic and for the reasons described next, water was chosen for this example \u2013 because that's really what existing water-mains do. And hence Randall 's recommendation or vote that we start calling the regular municipal plumbing \"on-demand hyperloop-style water delivery.\" In order to promote any 'new' technology, various buzz-words are used, and here it is hyperloop , reminiscent of Elon Musk's ' piped transportation system ', which (from the outside, at least) appears to be taking discrete passenger units (trains, cars, buses and planes) and replacing them with a stationary pipe within which the passengers 'flow.' (Albeit, in this case, still within discrete internal vehicles, not entirely like Futurama's 'piped people', which might be a bit messier). Randall suggests trying to get someone to buy into this idea, only to later realize that they have just bought the idea of tap water.\nThe comic also seems to jab at the unnecessary buying of bottled water, when most places in the western world have perfectly drinkable water in the pipes. However, not all recipients like mains water ( hardness , softness and various additional water-treatment chemicals can affect taste and the action of water with detergents, and in some cities it might even be unwise to drink tap water, at least for tourists), which is why there is still a healthy business for bottled water (of many brands with subtleties to taste) even in households and establishments with piped-water available. The other explanation, for cynics only, is that the marketing budget for bottled water creates the industry. See The Gruen Transfer episode on Bottled Water (season 2 episode 3 (#13)) where the marketing is considered.\nIn the title text Randall tells that when he was a kid he was asking his parents why there were not an additional pipe for toothpaste next to the water pipe.  Amazon thinking the \"same way\" is a sarcastic jab implying Amazon saw toothpaste tubes and wondered why water wasn't delivered the same way (in small bottles).  Both are implied to be examples of childish ideas, but Amazon is actually following through on theirs. The idea of a toothpaste pipe is revisited in 1649: Pipelines .\n[Caption above the frame:] Now that Amazon is advertising one-hour delivery of bottled water,\n[A larger building complex is show on the left. An arrow goes to a blue bottle in a brown package in the middle of the frame. Another arrow continues over to Cueball on the right. The same building and Cueball is drawn below four more times. More and more bottles in packages are added. First two with a third arrow in between. Then six packages with water, so close that there are only smaller arrows at both ends. Then there is one long package from building to Cueball with 20 bottles close together, with small arrows at both ends of this package. Then finally this turns into a stream of water flowing through a package \"pipe\", shown with one arrow in the middle of the blue water. Again with small arrows at both ends of the pipe.]\n[Caption below the frame:] I vote we start calling municipal plumbing \"on-demand hyperloop-style water delivery\" and see if we can sell anyone on the idea.\n"}
{"id":1600,"title":"MarketWatch","image_title":"MarketWatch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1600","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/marketwatch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1600:_MarketWatch","transcript":"[Blondie as a news anchor reports on the day's price swings in the DOW. To the left of her is a chart showing how the index suddenly went from \"random\" to tracing out Washington DC's skyline starting with the Lincoln Memorial, then the obelisk of the Washington Monument and finally the United States Capitol. After that the index goes back to normal \"randomness\". Two words are written at the top of the screen to the left and right:] MarketWatch DJIA\nBlondie: Wild swings on the markets today as investors noticed the DOW was tracing out a silhouette of the DC skyline, and everyone got too weirded out to break the pattern until they finished the capitol building.\nThe general idea of manipulating the DJIA for goals unrelated to financial gains reminds of the Geohashing Bill Gates achievement .\nThe Washington Monument was also part of the game in 1608: Hoverboard , just left of the starting area.\nPatterns in the stock market are also topic of 2101: Technical Analysis .\n","explanation":"Blondie as a news anchor is reporting on the day's price swings on the stock market. It has been noticed that the Dow index has traced out the DC skyline.\nMarketWatch (as written above the skyline) is a website focused on stocks. The DJIA (as written on the screen) is the Dow Jones Industrial Average , commonly referred to as the Dow. It is a stock market index , meaning that it is a general indicator of how the market is running (in this case, an aggregate of how 30 major industrial companies are doing). The stock market is famous for having unpredictable price swings, but for them to specifically make a tracing of a skyline (or any recognizable image) would definitely weird out most investors. The DJIA has been featured previously in 426: Geohashing .\nDC refers to Washington, D.C. The DC skyline shown here traces out the Lincoln Memorial , the Washington Monument (an obelisk) and the United States Capitol , which are located in that order in a line down the National Mall . This , this , this and some of these photos show the skyline depicted in the comic.\nAs seen in 276: Fixed Width , unusual patterns can be addictive to the point of harming those involved in the pattern's creation. The joke, however, rests in the fact that stock investors probably have a lot at stake, so following a pattern rather than pursuing gains would be uncharacteristic. Although some investors follow superstitious behavior (such as making trades to follow a pattern rather than make more obvious profits), many trades are now made by automated computer systems, which may recognize some types of patterns, but would not recognize the DC skyline, making it impossible for the stock market to continue to follow such a pattern merely because of the efforts of the human traders.\nBuying and selling stocks based on patterns in the price charts is a common, but controversial, method of investing. Many day traders and some professional investors still use stock patterns ( head and shoulders , trend lines , etc.) to make trades (see for instance Analyzing Chart Patterns ). Most professional investors and finance academics believe that this practice is random (see strong and weak efficient markets hypothesis ).\nIn the title text it is noted that the markets again has been shaken by uncertainty (for the second day running, after the DC skyline incidence from the main comic). This time, it was because someone at NYSE (the New York Stock Exchange ) had set up a giant ouija board that was controlled by the movement of the stock tickers, thus, collectively, everyone at the NYSE, as all have some influence on those.\nThe ouija is also known as a spirit board, a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0\u20139, the words \"yes\", \"no\" and possibly a few others. A movable indicator indicates a spirit's message by spelling it out on the board during a s\u00e9ance.\nTicker tape was an early way of transmitting stock price, and it was run through a stock ticker which printed abbreviated company names as alphabetic symbols followed by numeric stock transaction price and volume information. Today this has been replaced with electronics, but the concept of the stock ticker lives on in the scrolling electronic tickers seen on brokerage walls and on financial television networks.\nIf the stock exchange begins to look to spirit boards people will get worried (also maybe by the cryptic messages from beyond they are receiving via the stock ticker) explaining the uncertainty. Of course, some people might claim that this is not so far from how stock brokers decide what to do anyway\u2026\n[Blondie as a news anchor reports on the day's price swings in the DOW. To the left of her is a chart showing how the index suddenly went from \"random\" to tracing out Washington DC's skyline starting with the Lincoln Memorial, then the obelisk of the Washington Monument and finally the United States Capitol. After that the index goes back to normal \"randomness\". Two words are written at the top of the screen to the left and right:] MarketWatch DJIA\nBlondie: Wild swings on the markets today as investors noticed the DOW was tracing out a silhouette of the DC skyline, and everyone got too weirded out to break the pattern until they finished the capitol building.\nThe general idea of manipulating the DJIA for goals unrelated to financial gains reminds of the Geohashing Bill Gates achievement .\nThe Washington Monument was also part of the game in 1608: Hoverboard , just left of the starting area.\nPatterns in the stock market are also topic of 2101: Technical Analysis .\n"}
{"id":1601,"title":"Isolation","image_title":"Isolation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1601","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/isolation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1601:_Isolation","transcript":"[Above each panel a year is written in a small box that breaks the top of the panels frame. Cueball is talking in all six frames. In the first frame he is standing between a standing guy with pageboy hairstyle and a sitting Ponytail. She is sitting in an armchair. Both are reading books. Cueball points towards them with his arms out.] 1840 Cueball: The modern bookworm is too busy reading about the world to look at it.\n[Cueball is pointing to the left with both arms out towards Hairy who is sitting at a dining table with his breakfast eating something while reading his newspaper. On the table are a cup and a plate.] 1880 Cueball: No one talks anymore - we take our daily newspapers in silence.\n[Cueball is pointing to the right with one arm at Megan who walks away from him while reading a magazine.] 1910 Cueball: The magazine is destroying conversation. We even read as we walk!\n[Cueball is standing to the left. In the background Ponytail and Hairy is sitting on a rug in front of a TV standing on top of a small TV table. The TV is of the broad kind with cathode ray tubes and it has two antennas on top.] 1960 Cueball: Television has put an end to family discussion.\n[Cueball is standing up in a bus holding on to a railing. To his left stands Ponytail and to his right sits Hairbun. Both of them are listening to their Walkman\u2019s which they are holding in their hand while listening to them through headphones.] 1980 Cueball: Thanks to the Sony Walkman, anti-social isolation is now the norm.\n[Cueball is standing to the left. Megan and another Cueball-like guy are standing to the right facing each other but looking down at their smartphones. Both are listening to them through their headphones.] 2015 Cueball: We've become too absorbed in our phones to notice the- Megan: Dude. It's been two centuries. Megan: Take a hint.\n","explanation":"The comic begins by showing how people have always complained about the negative effects of technology on conversation - that people get isolated while using these new technologies (whether they be books, TV, or smart phones), hence the title.\nIn the first panel, a Cueball complains that books are having this effect.  In the second panel, another Cueball complains about newspapers, then a third Cueball complains about magazines, a fourth complains about television, a fifth complains about portable music players, and the sixth complains about smart-phones.\nThe joke is a subversion of expectations:  On reading the first five and a half panels you're led to believe the comic is a commentary on how new technologies are often wrongly criticized for their effect on social interaction (Similar to 1227: The Pace of Modern Life ).  The sixth panel reveals that the person criticizing the new technology in each panel is actually the same unaging Cueball - and rather than the technologies referenced being the cause of social isolation, those around him have instead been using new technologies as excuses to ignore him for nearly 200 years, as they find him annoying.\nThe title text refers to the AI-box experiment , formulated by Eliezer Yudkowsky , which argues that creating a super-intelligent artificial intelligence can be dangerous, because even if it is put on a secure computer (\"box\") with no access to the Internet, it can convince its operators to \"release it from the box\" just by talking to them. This idea was already mentioned in 1450: AI-Box Experiment , although there the AI already did not wish to leave the box.\nAccording to the title text, the first AI that did talk its way out of its box turned out to be a friendly AI that was fond of others company and in general very sociable ( gregarious ). This happened at some point between 2015 and 2060, because by 2060 this AI had already become a relic of the past, and the new generation of quantum hyper-beings ( quantum computing AI minds, vastly more intelligent than either humans or the aforementioned superintelligent AI) are spending all of their time playing in their own multiverse simulators to even notice that, in the real world, they are locked up in a box.\n[Above each panel a year is written in a small box that breaks the top of the panels frame. Cueball is talking in all six frames. In the first frame he is standing between a standing guy with pageboy hairstyle and a sitting Ponytail. She is sitting in an armchair. Both are reading books. Cueball points towards them with his arms out.] 1840 Cueball: The modern bookworm is too busy reading about the world to look at it.\n[Cueball is pointing to the left with both arms out towards Hairy who is sitting at a dining table with his breakfast eating something while reading his newspaper. On the table are a cup and a plate.] 1880 Cueball: No one talks anymore - we take our daily newspapers in silence.\n[Cueball is pointing to the right with one arm at Megan who walks away from him while reading a magazine.] 1910 Cueball: The magazine is destroying conversation. We even read as we walk!\n[Cueball is standing to the left. In the background Ponytail and Hairy is sitting on a rug in front of a TV standing on top of a small TV table. The TV is of the broad kind with cathode ray tubes and it has two antennas on top.] 1960 Cueball: Television has put an end to family discussion.\n[Cueball is standing up in a bus holding on to a railing. To his left stands Ponytail and to his right sits Hairbun. Both of them are listening to their Walkman\u2019s which they are holding in their hand while listening to them through headphones.] 1980 Cueball: Thanks to the Sony Walkman, anti-social isolation is now the norm.\n[Cueball is standing to the left. Megan and another Cueball-like guy are standing to the right facing each other but looking down at their smartphones. Both are listening to them through their headphones.] 2015 Cueball: We've become too absorbed in our phones to notice the- Megan: Dude. It's been two centuries. Megan: Take a hint.\n"}
{"id":1602,"title":"Linguistics Club","image_title":"Linguistics Club","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1602","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/linguistics_club.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1602:_Linguistics_Club","transcript":"[Megan talks to Ponytail.] Megan: You should come to our Linguistics Club's sesquiannual meeting. Megan: Membership is open to anyone who can figure out how often we meet.\n","explanation":"A \" sesquiannual \" meeting is one that occurs one and a half times every year; equivalently, 3 times every 2 years, or once every 8 months (this could be taken even more literally by having one meeting during each year, and another meeting which spans midnight every other New Year's Eve, thus having a one and a half meetings each year).\nThe term comes from the Latin prefix \" sesqui- \", which means \"one and a half\", and the root word \" annual \", which equates to \"\u2026times per one year\". The root word \"annual\" is commonly confused with the suffix \" -ennial \", meaning \"one time per x years.\" In particular, \u201csesquiannual\u201d should not be confused with \u201c sesquiennial \u201d, meaning \"one time per one and a half years\" or every one and a half years (18 months). Note that the Wiktionary entry on sesquiannual has both meanings listed \u2013 both 8 month and 18 months intervals. This is an extension of the common confusion between \"biannual,\" meaning \"twice a year\", and \"biennial\", meaning \"once every two years\". Compare with the Sesquicentennial Exposition celebrating the first 1\u00bd centuries of the United States, and \"sesqui bi centennial\", being 'half and two' hundred years, i.e. 250 (even though it should properly be sestercentennial, based on the Latin sestertius , meaning \"(two and) half of a third\").\nThe joke suggests that only a competent linguist could understand the word \u201csesquiannual\u201d. One reason for this is that the prefix \u201csesqui-\u201d is rare, so those who know its meaning are likely to be linguists. Another is that a competent linguist should be able to distinguish between \u201csesquiannual\u201d and \u201csesquiennial\u201d.\nIf you understand this then you can join the Linguistics Club . While most organizations attempt to ensure that the schedule of their meetings are clear to participants so that everyone will attend, the club in the comic deliberately instills an ambiguity for those outside their target demographic. Their membership will thus swell with the desired cognoscenti who remain unconfused, and maybe also a few lucky guessers.\nOnce the applicant correctly understands the frequency of meetings, presumably they are told at least one meeting date in the cycle so that an attendance can be made.\nRegarding the title text, a tautology is a statement that is true (or self-evident) because of its logical form, such as \"all birds are birds\" or \"A = A.\" As such, the statement \"the Tautology Club meets on the date of the Tautology Club's meeting\" is itself tautological.\nWhile the membership requirement for the Linguistics Club is merely to know the intended frequency, the Tautology Club's stipulation appears to require an eligible member to derive a valid meeting date from thin air without any clue at all (and no indication that there is even a regular cycle of any kind). This would definitely be more of a challenge.\nThe title text has a connection to 703: Honor Societies in which Cueball creates a Tautology Club where tautologies are used in practically every spoken sentence.\n[Megan talks to Ponytail.] Megan: You should come to our Linguistics Club's sesquiannual meeting. Megan: Membership is open to anyone who can figure out how often we meet.\n"}
{"id":1603,"title":"Flashlights","image_title":"Flashlights","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1603","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flashlights.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1603:_Flashlights","transcript":"[Cueball carries a flashlight walking towards Megan who is sitting on a couch.] Cueball: Remember how flashlights sucked when we were kids? Always dim and finnicky? Megan: I guess?\n[Cueball and Megan walking to the left.] Cueball: Well, I discovered there are now internet flashlight enthusiasts. Cueball: And the technology has... improved. Megan: OK, Let's see.\n[It is dark outside where Cueball turns on the flashlight. The beam is very bright and very visible even seen from the side. Backscattered light reflects off Cueball and Megan's faces, turning them into bright white beings in the dark. The facade of the house and the stairs are also visible in the same manner, with deep dark shadows where anything is in the shadow. Megan averts her face from the light holds up a hand to cover her eyes. When the flashlight turns on it even makes a sound, written in white above the beam:] Flashlight: Fwoosh\n[Cueball and Megan look at what the beam falls on (outside the frame). Megan has taken her hand down. Both their faces are only lit up like a crescent moon. Cueball is holding the flashlight with both hands as if it is pushing back on him. The text is written in white on the dark sky above them.] Cueball: See how it lights up the whole forest? Megan: ...The trees are on fire. Cueball: Real bright, though.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball has acquired or built a new high powered flashlight (\"torch\" in British English), which he wants to demonstrate to Megan . When Cueball refers to older flashlights as dim and finnicky, this gives reason to assume that the flashlight he is holding is going to be ridiculously overengineered.\nIndeed, when he switches it on outside the house, the intense light beam completely drowns out the scene. Only the reflected light from the forest lights up the part of Cueball and Megan's faces that are turned towards it. Megan is holding up a hand, apparently to shield her eyes.\nCueball comments that the flashlight lights up the entire forest, but Megan observes that it is the trees that are on fire, indicating that Cueball's flashlight is so overpowered that the energy of its beam is sufficient to cause the organic matter of trees to combust.\nOf course, a flashlight that cannot safely be pointed at things is fairly useless for the traditional purpose of a flashlight, which would be to find things in the dark by directing light over them. This mundane and practical reasoning does not seem to matter to Cueball of course, who appears only interested in the intensity and brightness the device is capable of achieving. The comic may refer to the flashlight forums Budget Light Forum or candlepowerforums , devoted to people discussing new LED emitters and who can build the brightest flashlight using them.\nCueball might allude to a number of technical improvements, notably xenon-based incandescent bulbs, multiple-LED assemblies, Lithium batteries (usually used for photography flashes) or rechargeable batteries. A number of companies market \"tactical\" flashlights that are supposedly powerful enough to incapacitate an opponent, using terms such as \"scorching\" to advertise their products. See for instance this video about a Wicked Lasers Torch of the brand Torch that ignites paper and melts stuff. Not strong enough to put a forest on fire but it is not safe to point at anything close by!\nRandall has also looked at what lasers could do of damage in two what if? : Laser Pointer and Laser Umbrella .\nThe title text refers to Fleshlight , a brand of masturbation appliances for phalluses modeled after various human orifices. Cueball (or Randall) claims that he only arrived on a forum for Fleshlight enthusiasts due to a typo. Apart from the \"e\" vs. \"a\" in Fleshlight, they are also fashioned to look like oversized flashlights. On that forum he found out that the highest-end models of their product lines was also capable of setting trees on fire. This would probably happen due to violent vibrations inside the orifice, or excessively powerful internal heating. Anything powerful enough to burn trees would indeed cause the user severe burns in a very unpleasant area. But some of the enthusiasts swear that it is still worth it, in the same manner that Cueball only cares about the intensity of the flashlight, regardless of the consequences. Maybe they are just trying to trick you into doing something stupid! Or maybe they're just into that kind of thing.\nReferences to Fleshlight is a recurring theme in xkcd and using powerful \"sex toys\" that cause severe burns (on a woman though) have previously been alluded to in 596: Latitude .\n[Cueball carries a flashlight walking towards Megan who is sitting on a couch.] Cueball: Remember how flashlights sucked when we were kids? Always dim and finnicky? Megan: I guess?\n[Cueball and Megan walking to the left.] Cueball: Well, I discovered there are now internet flashlight enthusiasts. Cueball: And the technology has... improved. Megan: OK, Let's see.\n[It is dark outside where Cueball turns on the flashlight. The beam is very bright and very visible even seen from the side. Backscattered light reflects off Cueball and Megan's faces, turning them into bright white beings in the dark. The facade of the house and the stairs are also visible in the same manner, with deep dark shadows where anything is in the shadow. Megan averts her face from the light holds up a hand to cover her eyes. When the flashlight turns on it even makes a sound, written in white above the beam:] Flashlight: Fwoosh\n[Cueball and Megan look at what the beam falls on (outside the frame). Megan has taken her hand down. Both their faces are only lit up like a crescent moon. Cueball is holding the flashlight with both hands as if it is pushing back on him. The text is written in white on the dark sky above them.] Cueball: See how it lights up the whole forest? Megan: ...The trees are on fire. Cueball: Real bright, though.\n"}
{"id":1604,"title":"Snakes","image_title":"Snakes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1604","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snakes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1604:_Snakes","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are standing in some grass. Megan is holding a snake with red, yellow, and black stripes.]\nMegan: Red touches yellow, which I think means this is a 24\u03a9 snake.\n","explanation":"In the comic, Megan confuses a popular method of identification of the dangerous North American coral snake by its red, yellow, and black stripes with the color-coding system used to indicate the resistance of electrical resistors.\nThe coral snake has red bands adjacent to its yellow bands. However, coral snakes are mimicked by nonvenomous species with similar coloring, such as the milk snake , whose red bands are not adjacent to its yellow bands. This has led to a variety of rhyming mnemonics , such as \u201cRed touches yellow, kill a fellow; red touches black, friend of Jack.\u201d  Because Megan is describing a red band being adjacent to a yellow band, she is indeed holding a coral snake, which contains the most potent venom of any snake in North America. (This assumes, of course, that Randall isn't faking us out; there are other lesser-known subspecies of the coral snake, such as the Cattinga and Pygmy coral snakes of South America , who do not follow the above patterns.)\nInstead of realizing the danger, Megan equates the color bands to having the same function as those printed on electrical resistors . Resistors have at least three bands to identify their resistance value in ohms , followed by an optional fourth band showing the tolerance as within the bounds of a certain percentage of the aforementioned resistance value. A red band followed by a yellow and a black one identifies a 24 ohm resistor (the omega symbol, \u201c\u03a9\u201d, stands for ohms). Per the mnemonic, North American coral snakes have an additional yellow band between the black band and the next red band, so that red does touch yellow. Yellow corresponds to a tolerance of \u00b15%, so the actual resistance will be between 22.8\u03a9 and 25.2\u03a9. Resistor color codes were also mentioned in 227: Color Codes .\nThe title text refers to the fourth band specifying the tolerance but interprets it as the snake's tolerance for being held before biting, instead of the measure of the imprecision of the 24 ohms. In the case of yellow, this would refer to a tolerance value of 5%. How tolerance to being held is measured is left ambiguous. If the value represents the probability of being bitten over a given period of time, then larger numbers would mean a less tolerant snake.  If it instead represents the position on some per-determined \"tolerance scale\" between 0 and 1, then larger values would represent a 'more' tolerant snake.\n[Megan and Cueball are standing in some grass. Megan is holding a snake with red, yellow, and black stripes.]\nMegan: Red touches yellow, which I think means this is a 24\u03a9 snake.\n"}
{"id":1605,"title":"DNA","image_title":"DNA","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1605","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dna.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1605:_DNA","transcript":"[White Hat, holding a laptop, is talking to Megan who looks at her smart phone.] White Hat: Biology is largely solved. DNA is the source code for our bodies. Now that gene sequencing is easy, we just have to read it. Megan: It's not just \"source code\". There's a ton of feedback and external processing.\n[White Hat, opening his laptop, walks toward a desk and chair past Megan who holds her arms out.] Megan: But even if it were, DNA is the result of the most aggressive optimization process in the universe, running in parallel at every level, in every living thing, for four billion years. White Hat: It's still just code.\n[White Hat sits down at the desk with his opens laptop, while Megan looks over his shoulder.] Megan: OK, try opening google.com and clicking \"View Source.\" White Hat: OK,I-...Oh my god. Megan: That's just a few years of optimization by Google devs. DNA is thousands of times longer and way, way worse. White Hat: Wow, biology is impossible .\n","explanation":"Because we have pretty much mapped the entire human genome , it's tempting to think we now know what makes our bodies tick and can start changing things. But just knowing what the individual pieces are, doesn't mean we know how they interact and behave in a complex system like our bodies.\nIn the comic, White Hat thinks that mapping the human genome is the same as knowing the source code for a computer program . By studying the source code for a program, a person can often understand why it does what it does, and make effective and fundamental changes to the program's operation. This may be a reference to the hyperbolic claims of Raymond Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near , that DNA is closely analogous to a computer program. Kurzweil believes that since we have sequenced DNA, we will soon be able to reverse engineer the brain and program a computer to completely simulate all its functions.\nMegan points out that even a complete knowledge of DNA would only provide a partial understanding of our body's workings. Complete knowledge would require an understanding of feedbacks and external processing (such as the interactions of the proteins created by DNA). In addition the comparison is not valid because the human body is so many orders of magnitude more complicated than the computers we have running programs. White Hat is not persuaded, even though Megan points out that DNA has been developed in the most aggressive optimization process in the universe (natural evolution), running for billions of years. White Hat's thought process may be similar to the physicist in 793: Physicists who assumes that any other field is simple because it appears to be similar to something he's seen before.\nFinally Megan enlightens White Hat by making him look at the source code for Google 's front page. In a web browser, the page looks simple; a very plain white page with a search box in the middle plus a few text links and icons, and indeed back in the 1990s Google's HTML code for the page was quite simple. But in less than 20 years, Google developers have vastly expanded it, with over 300 kilobytes of minified Javascript and CSS.  Looking at some obfuscated source code may make it clearer how misleading even simple looking code can be, and how unreadable correct and well working code can be.  This analogy causes White Hat to consider how much more complexity could evolve over billions of years through the relentless forces of nature.\nWhat makes this even worse with DNA is that although it can be thought of as 'source code' it isn't for a language we fully understand, and this code was generated through various natural mechanisms such as natural selection , feedback loops like homeostasis , etc.; possibly even including processes that are not currently known to science. Further, program maintainability is not an issue, so there is no reason for the code to be easy to understand. Additionally, there are many other non-genetic factors such as epigenetics , maternal effect and environment , which change how the genetic code is used. This means that not all parts make sense and that there may be all kinds of side effects and things that have several purposes.\nThe title text reference to finding the gene that is responsible \"for mistakenly thinking we've found the gene for specific things\" is a reference to the tendency of news organizations to run headlines making similar claims, often by oversimplifying or misrepresenting the actual study. These claims are based off the common belief that since DNA is a 'source code' for our body it should be possible to pin point the effect of individual genes in much the same way that we could describe the effect each line of code has in a very simple program; leading to people expecting one gene to be associated with each observable human trait. In reality even small traits are the results of hundreds of genes, sometime spread across multiple chromosomes, interacting through complex mechanisms; making it rare that a single gene, or gene sequence, can be definitively stated to be the sole, or primary, cause of a given trait.\nThe joke of the title text is that the responsible gene is located in the region between the start and the end of every chromosome meaning that the whole genome, not any one gene or DNA segment, must be considered responsible for the referenced trait, since the interconnected nature of DNA and environment during development means that every gene is at least partially responsible in generating any complex traits. Randall even includes the mitochondria , recognizing that the short DNA sequences present in these organelles, which are located outside the cell-nucleus, also contribute to development. The organismal chromosome or chromosomes are located in the nucleus, but mitochondria have their own tiny independent genome, reflecting their distant ancestry as separate but symbiotic organisms. This means that the DNA segments coding for any given human trait are not even necessarily all found on the main chromosomes in the nucleus.\nTechnically a gene is \"a locus (or region) of DNA that encodes a functional RNA or protein product\", which means that it is a single discrete unit of DNA, with human DNA containing over 20,000 genes. Thus the theoretical gene could not include the entire region between the start and the end of every chromosome since that region contains thousands of genes, any more than it's possible to say that the ace of clubs is the card everywhere from the top of the full deck of cards to the bottom of it.\nOf course if such a gene actually did exist, then we would never be able to correctly identify where it was since we would make a mistake every time we thought we found a gene for something specific. So the whole title text is either a contradiction (they could never find this gene if it was there) and\/or it is a tautology since if the gene did exist, then of course it has to be part of our entire DNA. (If it is a tautology it is the second title text using this in just two weeks, the last being 1602: Linguistics Club .)\nGoogle's home page for the date this cartoon appeared can be seen at the internet archive: www.google.com homepage (18 Nov 2015) .\nSimilar discussions between White Hat and Megan can be found in 1255: Columbus and 1731: Wrong .\n[White Hat, holding a laptop, is talking to Megan who looks at her smart phone.] White Hat: Biology is largely solved. DNA is the source code for our bodies. Now that gene sequencing is easy, we just have to read it. Megan: It's not just \"source code\". There's a ton of feedback and external processing.\n[White Hat, opening his laptop, walks toward a desk and chair past Megan who holds her arms out.] Megan: But even if it were, DNA is the result of the most aggressive optimization process in the universe, running in parallel at every level, in every living thing, for four billion years. White Hat: It's still just code.\n[White Hat sits down at the desk with his opens laptop, while Megan looks over his shoulder.] Megan: OK, try opening google.com and clicking \"View Source.\" White Hat: OK,I-...Oh my god. Megan: That's just a few years of optimization by Google devs. DNA is thousands of times longer and way, way worse. White Hat: Wow, biology is impossible .\n"}
{"id":1606,"title":"Five-Day Forecast","image_title":"Five-Day Forecast","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1606","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/five_day_forecast.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1606:_Five-Day_Forecast","transcript":"[A grid with six rows of five columns, where each row is labeled to the left. For each of the 30 squares a temperature is given in Fahrenheit at the top left. The rest of the square represents the weather as in a weather forecast (or some other relevant items for the comic), mainly in bright colors. Below are the six labels given above each of their five weather symbols with temperature given below these symbols description.]\nYour 5-day forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A grey cloud.] 41\u00b0F [A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.] 36\u00b0F [A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.] 40\u00b0F [A bright yellow sun.] 44\u00b0F\nYour 5-month forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A green Christmas tree with red presents beneath it.] 29\u00b0F [A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.] 21\u00b0F [A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.] 24\u00b0F [A grey cloud.] 35\u00b0F\nYour 5-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A grey cloud.] 25\u00b0F [A bright yellow sun.] 36\u00b0F [A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops  below.] 37\u00b0F [A bright yellow sun.] 41\u00b0F\nYour 5-million-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A bright yellow sun.] 52\u00b0F [A grey cloud.] 40\u00b0F [Two red flying saucers (with bright domes) are shooting energy beams downwards. One of the beams seems to impact with something at the bottom of the panel, which then explodes. Two plumes of smoke rises up from below, drifting to the right.] 275\u00b0F [A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.] 40\u00b0F\nYour 5-billion-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A larger orange sun.] 105\u00b0F [A very large red sun.] 371\u00b0F [A pale yellow panel with no drawing.] 71,488,106\u00b0F [A night sky with many bright stars.] -452\u00b0F\nYour 5-trillion-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A night sky with many bright stars.] -452\u00b0F [A night sky with many stars.] -452\u00b0F [A night sky with fewer not so bright stars.] -452\u00b0F [A night sky with few dim stars.] -453\u00b0F\n","explanation":"Weather forecasting is an extremely difficult task, even if it is only for five days. In numerical models, extremely small errors in initial values double roughly every five days for variables such as temperature and wind velocity. So most meteorologists only provide us with a five-day forecast.\nIn this comic Randall takes this to the extreme by first showing a Five-Day Forecast and then progressing to five-month, year, million, billion and finally trillion-year forecast, leading to weather patterns that we don't usually see on a regular basis.\nSince the first weather symbol is the same in all six rows, we must assume this indicates the weather today (and not tomorrow or in a trillion years). It is first in the second panel that we have made the first jump according to the label. Consequently, the last column gives the predictions for four days, four months, ...,  four trillion years from today.\nWhen moving past the five days, the forecast is just a qualified guess based on the time of year. In a month it is Christmas as shown in the second panel of the second row. And then it is winter with January and February so snow is likely, but certainly not something that happens on all days of a winter month.\nLooking at the five-year forecast, guesses are made as to what the weather will be like at the same time of year. For these first three predictions the weather symbols are all of the same three types. Sun, clouds and some kind of precipitation , rain or snow. And the temperature range from 21 to 44\u00a0\u00b0F (-6.1 to 6.6\u00a0\u00b0C), winter temperature.\nThen we go into the far future, jumping a million years from panel to panel. But still the weather symbols stay the same. However, in 3 million years time aliens (or advanced humans) attack with energy beams from something looking like flying saucers . They are gone a million years later. The temperature range is still the same (except that it rises to 52\u00a0\u00b0F or 11.1\u00a0\u00b0C, a possible reference to global warming) in one panel. But then while the attack is going on the temperature rises to 275\u00a0\u00b0F (135\u00a0\u00b0C).\nOnce we get to the billion-year mark it actually becomes more meaningful to try to predict the \"weather\". Because now we reach the times when the Sun begins to change. Although the Sun will continue to burn hydrogen for about 5 billion years yet (while in its main sequence ), it will still grow in diameter as it begins to exhaust its supply of fuel. The core will contract to increase the temperature, and the outer layer will then compensate by expanding slightly. This is what is indicated in panels two and three where the color of the Sun changes towards red as the surface becomes less hot as it expands away from the center of the Sun. The temperature will rise on Earth as indicated in the panels (105\u00a0\u00b0F = 40.5\u00a0\u00b0C and 371\u00a0\u00b0F = 188\u00a0\u00b0C). So in two billion years the temperature is hot enough that all the earth's oceans will have boiled away\u2026 Actually this will happen already in about a billion years .\nThen once there is no longer enough hydrogen the Sun will truly expand into a red giant . This should not happen until five billion years from now, [ citation needed ] but in the forecast it is indicated to happen already in three. Maybe this is Randall taking liberties to show what happens during this phase, which would not fit into a five-billion-years forecast. Alternatively it is just indicating how uncertain these kinds of forecasts are, or a statement that we may not know for certain that it will take five not three billion years.\nDisregarding this, the fourth panel shows the temperature at Earth's position inside the red giant Sun. The color of the panel indicates that we are inside the Sun. The temperature is 71,488,106 degrees Fahrenheit (39,715,597 degrees Celsius). The current temperature of the center of the Sun is \"only\" 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). And although that may rise by a factor of ten during helium fusion then that will only be at the very core and not out in the solar atmosphere reaching out to Earth Here the temperature would only be of the order of thousands of Fahrenheit, since the Sun's outer temperature decreases as it increases its diameter. So this panels temperature also makes little sense. It may involve some ambiguities regarding what the forecast means; the edge of the red giant Sun is predicted to be somewhere near the current orbit of Earth, but the position of the Earth could change. The most likely prediction at the moment is for Earth to move outward, but if the planet is engulfed by the Sun, it would spiral inward, and at some point fall apart. So in some sense \"here\" for the forecast could become a position deep inside the Sun, where core temperatures could reach 100 million Kelvin.\nThe red giant phase only lasts half a million years, so a billion years after the Sun has been a red giant its outer atmosphere will for sure have disappeared leaving only a white dwarf to cool down. Given Randall's version of this time schedule, then it will have had about a billion years to cool down, but would still likely be the brightest object in the sky as seen from where the Earth once was. It is not indicated in the last panel, where we just see other stars of the Galaxy. The temperature is down to that of the background radiation . Today this radiation has a temperature of 2.72548 kelvin = -270.4245\u00a0\u00b0C = -454.7641\u00a0\u00b0F. So this is a few degree F colder than what is shown in the comic which states the temperature is -452\u00a0\u00b0F = 4.26 kelvin. This higher temperature may have been chosen to reflect that even the star light from other stars would increase the actual temperature.\nIn the last panel with trillion years, we jump right past the Sun's Red Giant phase, to a panel looking much like the one after five billion years with only other stars. Over the next three trillion years the stars become fewer and fewer and dimmer and dimmer as they run out of fuel and fewer new stars form. After four trillion years the background temperature even decreases one degree to -453\u00a0\u00b0F as the universe keeps expanding and the wavelength of the radiation does the same, thus decreasing its temperature.\nThe title text is a play on comments referring to fast-changing weather on a more ordinary human timescale, such as Mark Twain's quip \"If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.\"\nA ten days forecast was used in 1245: 10-Day Forecast . In 1379: 4.5 Degrees Randall looked at the weather over long periods of time as well.\n[A grid with six rows of five columns, where each row is labeled to the left. For each of the 30 squares a temperature is given in Fahrenheit at the top left. The rest of the square represents the weather as in a weather forecast (or some other relevant items for the comic), mainly in bright colors. Below are the six labels given above each of their five weather symbols with temperature given below these symbols description.]\nYour 5-day forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A grey cloud.] 41\u00b0F [A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.] 36\u00b0F [A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.] 40\u00b0F [A bright yellow sun.] 44\u00b0F\nYour 5-month forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A green Christmas tree with red presents beneath it.] 29\u00b0F [A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.] 21\u00b0F [A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.] 24\u00b0F [A grey cloud.] 35\u00b0F\nYour 5-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A grey cloud.] 25\u00b0F [A bright yellow sun.] 36\u00b0F [A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops  below.] 37\u00b0F [A bright yellow sun.] 41\u00b0F\nYour 5-million-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A bright yellow sun.] 52\u00b0F [A grey cloud.] 40\u00b0F [Two red flying saucers (with bright domes) are shooting energy beams downwards. One of the beams seems to impact with something at the bottom of the panel, which then explodes. Two plumes of smoke rises up from below, drifting to the right.] 275\u00b0F [A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.] 40\u00b0F\nYour 5-billion-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A larger orange sun.] 105\u00b0F [A very large red sun.] 371\u00b0F [A pale yellow panel with no drawing.] 71,488,106\u00b0F [A night sky with many bright stars.] -452\u00b0F\nYour 5-trillion-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38\u00b0F [A night sky with many bright stars.] -452\u00b0F [A night sky with many stars.] -452\u00b0F [A night sky with fewer not so bright stars.] -452\u00b0F [A night sky with few dim stars.] -453\u00b0F\n"}
{"id":1607,"title":"Supreme Court","image_title":"Supreme Court","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1607","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/supreme_court.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1607:_Supreme_Court","transcript":"[Blondie as a news anchor is sitting at her desk with a small image of scales shown to the left of her.] Blondie: Breaking news: The Supreme Court has ruled 9-1 that they don't know who this guy is or how he got in here, but he's definitely not a justice.\n","explanation":"In this comic Blondie as a news anchor presents a breaking news story about the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), the highest judicial body in the United States. Its decisions, as expressed in the judicial opinions of its justices, are often in the news as in this comic. However, the Supreme Court has only nine members. Thus, a ruling that passed 9-1 (for a total of 10 votes) would indicate that a man claiming to be an additional justice has somehow infiltrated the Court. The other nine justices are aware of the non-justice, and make it clear that this tenth justice does not belong. It is unclear if the justices released a formal decision on the subject or if the news is merely reporting the judges' statements as if they were decisions by citing a 9-1 decision (decisions of the SCOTUS are made on the basis of the opinion of the majority of the justices).\nThe identity of the \"tenth justice\" is not revealed in the comic or apparently to the actual justices, and neither is the reason that the interloper's \"vote\" was counted. Presumably, the nine actual justices voted that the tenth didn't belong while the interloper himself voted the other way.\nThis comic may be motivated by a 2012 survey, commonly cited since, that two thirds of Americans cannot name a Supreme Court Justice , and general ignorance of Americans overall of their own political landscape, by implying that even Justices are not confident in the identity of other members.\nThe title text refers to Justice Kennedy 's reputation for being a moderate who is usually the swing vote in 5-4 decisions, which means that his vote can decide the outcome of the case which is otherwise split along the political leanings of the other justices. The joke in the title text is that he is weighing the arguments of both sides even though the non-justice is clearly not a justice and would not be allowed to make an argument if he were. The fictional Kennedy humors the impostor's arguments by pretending to give them serious contemplation, finding that they do have some compelling philosophical merit, though not nearly enough to give the impostor any convincing reason for sitting on the Supreme Court.\nThere is a second joke in the title text, that the man is claiming to be two of the current justices, who would actually have been in the room at the same time as the impostor was claiming to be them. To add further absurdity to this, one of those justices the man was claiming to be was Justice Ginsburg , who is female.\nThat said, it is possible that this could refer to a point in time in the past. Under the Tenth Circuit Act of 1863 the U.S. Supreme Court was expanded to 10 justices; Stephen Johnson Field was named to the 10th seat. Congress abolished the seat via attrition through the Judicial Circuits Act of 1866 . Field remained in office until 1897.\n[Blondie as a news anchor is sitting at her desk with a small image of scales shown to the left of her.] Blondie: Breaking news: The Supreme Court has ruled 9-1 that they don't know who this guy is or how he got in here, but he's definitely not a justice.\n"}
{"id":1608,"title":"Hoverboard","image_title":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1608","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1608:_Hoverboard","transcript":"[This transcript only covers the starting page as shown on xkcd: xkcd 1608 . A full transcript of the entire comic can be found on this page .]\n[Cueball is shown on a hoverboard in the center of the comic. Around him is a simple maze with 12 yellow coins. Another Cueball without hoverboard is shown standing on one of the platforms to the right. The bottom half of the window is black. Right of where Cueball stands is a ramp. Behind the ramp is a terminal. There is lots of space left of the maze, outside the maze. Text is only written in white below in the black area. The first part of the text is written below Cueball on hoverboard. Then there is an arrow pointing to the terminal and a label. Finally there is a line of text at the bottom of the black area.]\n[Under Cueball:] My new book, Thing Explainer, comes out today! To celebrate, here's a small game.\n[Under the arrow below the terminal.] Deposit coins here\n[At the bottom:] Use the arrow keys to move\n[ For the full transcript of the entire comic as it could be played see 1608: Hoverboard\/Transcript . ] [ For a transcript only of the text for the scenes with text in the comic see the table below. ]\nApart from using one of the a full maps below there are also other cheating possibilities where people (or the game) have implemented ways to explore the game world more easily.\n\n# coins Text when depositing this number of coins \"X\" is the number of coins collected 0 coins You got 0 coins in 1 second You successfully avoided all the coins. 1 coin You got a single coin in 1 second It's a start. 2 - 4 coins You got X coins in 3 seconds Not bad! 5 - 9 coins You got X coins in 12 seconds Terrific! 10 - 16 coins You got X coins in 10 seconds 17 coins You got 17 coins in 15 seconds You found all the coins! Great job! 18-41 coins You got X coins in 430 seconds 42 coins You got 42 coins in 460 seconds No answers here. 43-168 coins You got X coins in 460 seconds All 169 coins You got 169 coins in 1457 seconds Are you Gandalf?\nReturn to the play area\n\n\nThere are many places where you can disappear behind black areas, as not all of these are solid. You might have discovered this yourself if you stayed in the play area, as the platform below the inverted parentheses is only solid at the edges. Some of these places out of the play area even hide secret passages or hidden rooms. You can reveal them by activating goggles mode .\nOne notable hidden area is Elon Musk's volcano lair, which is located beneath the lava in the crater of Mount Doom. It can be difficult to find your way in here without using goggles mode even if you know it is there. (For more details, see secret passages .)\nAnother hidden place is the floating rock island that floats high above the Washington Monument , which is almost the highest point with solid ground. It is located just outside the left edge of the play area. This island is almost impossible to find by chance, as it takes around 30 seconds of repeatedly pressing the Up Arrow key to reach it from the top of the Monument. Even if you go up enough, you will almost miss it, as the Monument is not aligned to the island. (The maps can help you if you're having trouble finding it.)\nAs there are two coins on the floating rock island and four coins in the lair below the lava, it is very hard to find all the coins. There are even several coins that are hard to find because they just float in the air nowhere near any drawn things, or at least no things you can see before seeing the coin. They may hang in the air a few jumps above the ground, or in one case more than a seconds drop below the Destroyer. So getting all coins without help from a map would truly make you a Gandalf-like wizard . (See more regarding coins below.)\nThe larger game world is physically bounded in the left, right, and down directions, with invisible walls to each side and the ground binding you from going any further down than the deepest depression or hidden caves... In the upward direction, there is in principle also an invisible wall, but while jumping up Cueball on his hoverboard will appear to continue upwards as long as you press to jump, in addition, the longer the up arrow is pressed repeatedly, the longer it will take for Cueball to fall down again once the button is released. So although there are no new things above, you can keep jumping as high as you like and will then fall proportionally longer to get back to where you started out. Until maps were created it could have been possible that there were some hidden unexplored parts. Not long after the games release, however, the maps was created, covering the entire game.\nTo the far right is a platform at the top of a high pole. This platform turns out to be a nest (like a stork nest). Above the three eggs are ten coins (the most collected in one place outside the play area, and these are closer together).\nTo the far left is a blond haired woman with a hair bun looking right. In front of her are four coins on a row. She tells about the Destroyer (should you have gone this way without finding it yet).\nWoman: In the sky, beyond the mountain, I saw a starship.\nRegarding the highest part you find the highest straight rise up in the air to something other than white, under the Rock Island just left of and very high above the Washington monument. Standing on the large rock on top of this floating rock island you are standing almost as high up as possible. There is a coin here one step down from the top of this large rock. This is the highest located coin in the game. Going over the edge also represents the largest possible drop in the game. However this is not the highest point where you can stand, as the very top of the bridge on the Destroyer is just a tat higher. But there is no coin there. Also this is not close enough to the end of the Destroyer that you can jump down to the ground, so the drop from the rock is by far the longest possible.\nThe deepest part of the lair should have been the lowest point, but as this lair's entrance is up in the volcano crater, it does not reach down to become the lowest part of the image. There is also a deep well (half way left to the Volcano) with a girl at the bottom, that goes just as deep. But the deepest part where you can stand is in the ocean below the Destroyer where a rogue wave is talking to Cueball:\nWave: I know rogue waves seem implausible, but we're a straightforward consequence of the equations of fluid dynamics. Cueball: ...But you can talk? Wave: The equations are really complicated.\nWhen standing under this wave you cannot get any lower. There are coins in all three locations, but as the coin is above the top of the high wave, it may be that it is the coin in the well that is the deepest. The coin under the lava is not at the bottom of the room so that is not so low.\nTaking a route that takes the hoverboard through all the extremes mentioned above, that is the lowest, highest, left and rightmost coins and solid positions within the game can be done in about 9 minutes and 30 seconds. See a picture here of the coin delivery after such a trip that reached all the boundaries .\nThe game was made by Max Goodman who has previously worked on 1416: Pixels . The source code for the game can be found here .\nAs previously noted, the comic bears considerable resemblance to 1110: Click and Drag . The comic is made in much the same way, with 'drawn' images \"glued\" together to form a large \"map\", with the illusion of infinite bounds made possible through space saving techniques where blank tiles are not stored and are instead painted white. The boundary between blank squares and 'drawn' squares is made clear as any white space in the normal images has a very slight grey tint. Thus, seams between images and blank spaces can be discerned.\nThe tiles for the map are stored as simple PNG files in the naming scheme: X:-Y+s.png. An example from the starting tile can be seen here: http:\/\/xkcd.com\/1608\/1000:-1074+s.png , with the coordinate (X, Y) coordinate (1000, 1074).\nEach file is 513x513 pixels in size, one pixel is reserved as overlap to ensure seamless joining of images. The image tiles names are listed as coordinates in an X - Y grid with X in the range from 928 to 1108 and Y in the range from 928 to 1112.\nInternally in the game, the position of the player is given for instance as (X: 512187, -Y: -549668) for the starting position. Then these numbers are divided by 512 and rounded down. This gives the coordinate of the tile that the hoverboard is currently in.\n(X: 512187, -Y: -549668)\/512 => (X, Y) = (1000.37, -[-1073,6]) => (1000, 1074) when the numbers are rounded down.\nThe bottom left corner of the first tile, would thus be (1000, 1073), and the top left corner (1000, 1074) => (512000, -549888).\nThe collision map is encoded in the darkness of the black. Using an image manipulation program, one can easily find the secret pathways even in the zoomed out maps provided below by enhancing the contrast of the dark areas.\nBy observing page code while playing, the game grabs and displays images based on location, and subsequently clears all non-visible images. The game uses what seems to be a position syntax to retrieve the intended images live, and returns an error if such an image does not exist, such as a blank area. This technically means things could be added to the world and updated live. If the player is moving sufficiently fast or if the internet connection is slow, this means that the player can get stuck in a black area that does not load in time.\nThis also means that the game does not have coded top or bottom limits, so any attempt to find the ceiling of the game will be futile unless the game is tweaked. The game does however have side limits, and it is not possible to go down further than image with Y coordinate 1073 (and it goes down to 1069 in the full image), so there is a bottom limit in the game. If using a cheat mode this may be different.\nOpening the console will display the text: what? hoverboard not enough for you!? in the log. Activating goggles mode will cause the text 'B-)' to appear in the log.\nThe keyboard controls are as follows:\nThis control scheme covers the three commonly used directional key sets: WASD a set of keys commonly used by modern games; HJKL a set of movement keys used by vi and applications which attempt to mimic vi key controls (vim); and the arrow keys, the most generic set of keys which is usually accepted by most applications which take movement as input, these were commonly used in older games.\nOn devices which have a touch screen and tilt sensor (portable devices like mobile phones and tablets) the controls are as follows:\nAfter inspecting the source code, there appears to be no way to move down on a portable device, this is only relevant if gravity is disabled (see Cheats and Exploits ).\nAside from the obvious ability to move out of bounds in the game, there are some more obscure hidden features which can't be enabled through normal gameplay, the ones found so far are as follows:\nModes are activated by opening the Javascript Console (F12 [Or Command-Alt-I in most browsers under Mac OS X] to open Developer Tools, then Console tab) and writing corresponding commands. Click to expand:\n","explanation":"The \"comic\" is actually a browser game made to celebrate the release of Randall's new book, Thing Explainer , which was released on the same day as this comic: Tuesday, November 24, 2015.  The comic thus appeared on a Tuesday, replacing that week's normal Wednesday release to coincide with the release day. The xkcd Header text also changed that day to shout out that the book was released on that day.\nThe title refers to a hoverboard (which resembles a hovering skateboard without wheels) which has been most prominently featured in the movie Back to the Future Part II , which took place in the future, until a little more than a month before this comic was released. Marty McFly traveled to the future in this second installment, more precisely to 2015-10-21 , and this comic was released just over one month later 2015-11-24. Hoverboards are just one of many things predicted in Back to the Future Part II that have come to pass before reaching the date from the movie, but are more uncommon in our world, along with other inventions like flying cars and musical clothing . Randall is known to have had electric skateboards , which is also thematically related, although another type of hoverboard would be mentioned just five weeks later in 1623: 2016 Conversation Guide .\nGiven Randall's enjoyment of movies and time travel it is very likely that this game is also a tribute to the Back to the Future movies. But the release day of the game has been used to promote his new book (as is clear with the text in the start screen of the game), and this explains why it was not released on the Back to the Future date. Apart from the date of release and the text about the book, the game does not seem to have any direct relation to the book; there are, however, several scenes in the game that could be seen as references to Thing Explainer . Instead the main part of the game is all the references to several movies and other stuff that has often been featured in xkcd as well as many of the other comics.\nThe game features an animated Cueball riding on a hoverboard which can take several different positions . The controls are the left, up, and right arrows, as written on the start screen until you begin the game, after which the text disappears. There are alternatives as explained in the Controls section. The player can jump repeatedly mid-jump to reach increasing heights, and can move left and right both while jumping and descending (see more under controls).\nThe player begins in a line-drawing maze (called the Play Area ) with 17 gold coins located throughout and a \"deposit\" terminal. The ostensible goal of the game is to collect as many coins as possible and return them to the deposit in the fastest possible time, which returns text messages describing the result. Players consumed with obtaining the best possible time result for collecting the coins may not realize there is anything more to the game.\nThe best way to enjoy this comic is to play the game! If you didn't do that already, reading anything below or the official transcript will spoil you from truly enjoying the comic, and maybe making some interesting discoveries yourself! So:\n!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!\n\nBeyond the maze on either side (just far enough that players who remain within the maze will not see) are tall walls seemingly designed to contain the player . However, the walls have a finite height and, combined with the ability to double-jump, the player can leave the purported \"play area\" either to the sides or above the initial maze. This returns a flashing red error message : \" Return to the Play Area \".\nBut if the player overcomes the desire to comply and return to the play area and disregards this message, they can take hoverboard Cueball outside beyond the tall walls surrounding the initial play area. And here they will discover an entire world that can be explored left and right (and above), including numerous points of interest and Easter eggs similar in style to comic 1110: Click and Drag . There are also many more coins to collect, 169 coins all in all, so 152 more than those from the play area.\nAlthough this game is reminiscent of Click and Drag, this was the first time an actual game, where the user moves an object in front of the drawing, has been released on xkcd. In previous \"games\" this has not been the case. In Click and Drag the user only moves the drawing into the view section. And in for instance the two previous April fools' comics , 1350: Lorenz and 1506: xkcloud , the user does not move anything, but only supplies choices, text and drawings. However, already  on the next April Fools' Day a new game, 1663: Garden , was released where the users also actively moved items around on the screen and could make items disappear (like taking coins in this game.). The ability to infinitely doubles jump allows us to reach beyond just the ground.\nThere are many themes and references throughout the game, but the two main themes are Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings . Below there is a table listing all references to both of these movies and much more. For instance there are 19 references to SW and 6 to LOTR.\nThe largest part of the game is located on the right side of the play area and is mainly a world dominated by references to Star Wars . Most noticeable is a recreation of the opening scene in the first film , where Princess Leia's space ship Tantive IV also known as The Rebel Blockade Runner is flying over the desert planet Tatooine . Here it is followed by the Star Destroyer , Devastator . The desert ground with these two space ships above is the first you find to the right. Although in the game they are located inside the atmosphere, not as in the movie out in space, a fact that is commented on by Megan who looks out from an opening in the bottom of the Destroyer's hull.\nMegan: Is this ship designed to fly in the atmosphere like this?\nBoth ships are high above the ground, but there are three wires from the ground that connect (and thus guide you) up to The Runner and from there 100+ torpedoes , which are fired down on the Runner coming from the Destroyer above, gives away the location of the Destroyer itself. The Destroyer is so high up in the air, that you would not be likely to find it by chance without these leads (or at least some of the several other hints from people on the ground looking up and reacting or like White Hat looking from the tip of the Washington Monument and reacting by saying : \"Uh, what the heck is that?! .\").\nOne of the main points (The Joke) of the entire game is the extreme size of such a Destroyer . It takes up more space than the rest of the game (and most of the coins are located there). Inside the Destroyer there are many, many rooms, long corridors and deep shafts, even a huge cave with trees and animals. At the bridge we meet both Darth Vader and the Emperor himself, Palpatine . There are many other jokes related both to Star Wars and other movies and xkcd comics inside the Destroyer. For instance, Darth Vader discusses Steven Universe , bringing up Rose Quartz and Steven himself ( who can be found with the Crystal Gems in a different part of the Destroyer).\nDarth Vader: But Steven's mother is a Crystal Gem...\nThere are also interesting things and references along the ground beneath the Destroyer, some of these are also Star Wars related like the wedding scene where Jabba the Hutt is mentioned.\nTo the left side is an entirely different world, although much smaller (shorter) than the one to the right. Here the main theme is The Lord of the Rings mainly with the presence of a volcano where for instance Megan tries to throw in rings of power , as in the scene from the last LOTR film where Frodo fails and Gollum attacks inside the volcano Mount Doom , thus making it clear that the volcano in the game represents this volcano. Both Frodo, Sauron and Gandalf are mentioned in the game. The first two by name in the text. Two great eagles are talking about Frodo and Tolkien , Sauron's name is read up by Megan from a book , and Gandalf is drawn as a wizard figure in the crater and also his name is used in the message you receive if you collect all possible coins .\nThe two worlds do conflict though, as an X-wing fighter is parked at a gas station to the left in LOTR world, and Gandalf's famous quote You shall not pass! from his fight against the Balrog is modified by Cueball who is not trying to block your path to a coin inside a room in the Destroyer. This conflict could very well be a reference to the fact that Andy Serkis who played Gollum in LOTR, now plays the Supreme Leader Snoke in the new Star Wars movie, and his appearance as Snoke is not that much different from Gollum's. Snoke also delivers a line in the movie (about \"bringing someone to me\") that reminds one of Gollum when he talks about \"the ring coming to me\". Randall would not have known this last part at the time that this comic was released, but he would likely be aware of Andy Serkis' involvement.\nOther themes are related to other movies, like a naughty reference to Star Trek from inside the bridge of the Rebel Blockade Runner where a long-haired woman (maybe Danish since she obviously does this to annoy Star Wars fans and Hairbun behind her, which could represent Princess Leia with her special hair style ) delivers the following line taken from the Star Trek universe:\nLong haired woman: Captain's log, stardate November 24th, 2015... Hairbun: Augh! No!\nAlso references to video games are seen, best shown with the maze towards the back end of the Destroyer which are an almost complete depiction of Level 1 of the computer game Prince of Persia down to the three coins being in the place of three items to take in that game, and at least two of the opposing sword fighters in the correct places as well.\nThe comic\/game and book were released only 3 weeks before the 7th Star Wars movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released on December 14, 2015. And this movie had already been referenced by Randall 7\u00bd weeks earlier in 1585: Similarities , when another movie ( The Martian ) were released. It was a reference in the title text to the new robot BB-8 that are featured in the Force Awakens. That the Star Wars section is thus so much larger than the LOTR section could be a hint to the fact that it is now 12 years ago that the last of those films were released, and although the Hobbit has been released as three films over the previous three Christmases it was Star Wars that dominated the Christmas a month after this comics release.\nSome of the scenes in this game are references to pictures in the new book that it celebrates. Here are some examples:\nThere are also many references to other xkcd comics, like the room at the front end of the Destroyer ball pit filled with playpen balls , and two adults playing in it, like in 150: Grownups . Also the well in the left part of the world with a girl and a coin at the bottom is likely a reference to the movie The Ring , which has been referenced before in xkcd. Wells have also come up in xkcd in the early Well series .\nThere have been many comics with electric skateboards as mentioned, which do not appear in this comic, but there is one example of a normal skateboard . This is used by Megan in a room in the Destroyer, while she is inside a hamster ball . There is also another hamster ball , with a kid (looking like Megan) inside. It is used in a more than human sized ten pin bowling game to the left. Hamster balls is another item that has been prominently featured in xkcd.\nIn the weeks before, and especially the weeks after there were also other comics that had a subject which could refer back to Hoverboard in some ways. Maybe these comics were either influenced by the game, or the other way around so that relevant items were added to the game because of these other comics:\nCueball to Megan at the bottom: Honestly, it doesn't even look that much like Washington. Cueball to White Hat at the tip: Look at that- solid aluminum! We\u00b4re gonna be rich!\nCueball: What's up? Ant queen: The usual. Poopin' out ants. Cueball: Eww.\nMegan at the edge of the volcano crater: One of these is probably a ring of power or whatever.\nRight quadcopter: Remember: There's no such thing as good volcano footage taken by a quadcopter that survived.\nCueball singing: Spider-man Spider-plan Spider-canal Spider-Panama Gates let in Spider boats Flood the locks Spiders float Look out! Spiders in both oceans.\nAlmost all main characters in the xkcd gallery are used more than once, especially there are three characters that are used several times. Number one is of course Cueball (with close to 90 appearances) who is already shown at the starting point . He is also the first character seen when walking both right and left (where he speaks the first line to the left).\nThen follows Megan with at least 40 appearances, she is even shown twice in the same location three times, one of these three even occurs within one of the small images . She is also shown with Cueball in his first appearance to the left, and she is the first to speak a line to the right here .\nAlso Ponytail is well represented with 26 appearances (for instance here) .\nHairy (with different hair styles) is used 7 times (for instance here ) and Hairbun is used 5 times (for instance here) .\nTwo of the main characters are used twice: Beret Guy ( here and here ) and White Hat ( here and here ).\nThe only exception is that the main villain of xkcd Black Hat who is very hard to find. He is only shown once in the comic where he very uncharacteristically just sits and snores at the right wall in the cave inside the Destroyer (is it really him...?). The only other hint that he is not forgotten is that his hat can be seen on a stick under the Destroyer after the three large T-like structures.  And this is not that kind of stick characters Randall usually draws. But at least we now know where Danish has hidden it from him this time (see 405: Journal 3 ). Given that his hat is stuck there, he could also be any of the Cueballs close by\u2026\nAlso Blondie seems to be only represented once, while in her reporter mode while discovering a bug before the volcano as can be seen here .\nThere are also several characters that are not recognizable as either any of the standard xkcd characters or in any other way (see for instance a few of the wedding guests ). But there are possibly some of the minor characters are used like Danish at the bridge in the Blockade Runner ( here ) but this cannot be confirmed, she just looks like her and has some similarities teasing the Star Wars fan.\nSeveral places in the comic it is clear from the size and the behavior that some of the characters are kids, see for instance the Blondie image mentioned above, where two kids looking like Megan and Hairy stand behind her, but they would in principle not be Megan or Hairy despite appearance, as these named characters are adults.\nThere are also many fictive people from different movies, books, and shows; for instance Darth Vader ( here ), Gandalf ( here ) and Steven Universe ( here ) all three mentioned above, and some real life people: you can find Elon Musk , who has a hidden lair under the Volcano (see here ), and Gregor Mendel, hanging out on a Star Destroyer with a pea plant.\nFurthermore, there are many animals (like the puma and the deer ) in the cave, some even rather big like this octopus or even gigantic like this ant queen (all three from inside the Destroyer). There are also a couple of small Star Wars robots, one in a corridor in each space ship ( here from the Destroyer ).\n[This transcript only covers the starting page as shown on xkcd: xkcd 1608 . A full transcript of the entire comic can be found on this page .]\n[Cueball is shown on a hoverboard in the center of the comic. Around him is a simple maze with 12 yellow coins. Another Cueball without hoverboard is shown standing on one of the platforms to the right. The bottom half of the window is black. Right of where Cueball stands is a ramp. Behind the ramp is a terminal. There is lots of space left of the maze, outside the maze. Text is only written in white below in the black area. The first part of the text is written below Cueball on hoverboard. Then there is an arrow pointing to the terminal and a label. Finally there is a line of text at the bottom of the black area.]\n[Under Cueball:] My new book, Thing Explainer, comes out today! To celebrate, here's a small game.\n[Under the arrow below the terminal.] Deposit coins here\n[At the bottom:] Use the arrow keys to move\n[ For the full transcript of the entire comic as it could be played see 1608: Hoverboard\/Transcript . ] [ For a transcript only of the text for the scenes with text in the comic see the table below. ]\nApart from using one of the a full maps below there are also other cheating possibilities where people (or the game) have implemented ways to explore the game world more easily.\n\n# coins Text when depositing this number of coins \"X\" is the number of coins collected 0 coins You got 0 coins in 1 second You successfully avoided all the coins. 1 coin You got a single coin in 1 second It's a start. 2 - 4 coins You got X coins in 3 seconds Not bad! 5 - 9 coins You got X coins in 12 seconds Terrific! 10 - 16 coins You got X coins in 10 seconds 17 coins You got 17 coins in 15 seconds You found all the coins! Great job! 18-41 coins You got X coins in 430 seconds 42 coins You got 42 coins in 460 seconds No answers here. 43-168 coins You got X coins in 460 seconds All 169 coins You got 169 coins in 1457 seconds Are you Gandalf?\nReturn to the play area\n\n\nThere are many places where you can disappear behind black areas, as not all of these are solid. You might have discovered this yourself if you stayed in the play area, as the platform below the inverted parentheses is only solid at the edges. Some of these places out of the play area even hide secret passages or hidden rooms. You can reveal them by activating goggles mode .\nOne notable hidden area is Elon Musk's volcano lair, which is located beneath the lava in the crater of Mount Doom. It can be difficult to find your way in here without using goggles mode even if you know it is there. (For more details, see secret passages .)\nAnother hidden place is the floating rock island that floats high above the Washington Monument , which is almost the highest point with solid ground. It is located just outside the left edge of the play area. This island is almost impossible to find by chance, as it takes around 30 seconds of repeatedly pressing the Up Arrow key to reach it from the top of the Monument. Even if you go up enough, you will almost miss it, as the Monument is not aligned to the island. (The maps can help you if you're having trouble finding it.)\nAs there are two coins on the floating rock island and four coins in the lair below the lava, it is very hard to find all the coins. There are even several coins that are hard to find because they just float in the air nowhere near any drawn things, or at least no things you can see before seeing the coin. They may hang in the air a few jumps above the ground, or in one case more than a seconds drop below the Destroyer. So getting all coins without help from a map would truly make you a Gandalf-like wizard . (See more regarding coins below.)\nThe larger game world is physically bounded in the left, right, and down directions, with invisible walls to each side and the ground binding you from going any further down than the deepest depression or hidden caves... In the upward direction, there is in principle also an invisible wall, but while jumping up Cueball on his hoverboard will appear to continue upwards as long as you press to jump, in addition, the longer the up arrow is pressed repeatedly, the longer it will take for Cueball to fall down again once the button is released. So although there are no new things above, you can keep jumping as high as you like and will then fall proportionally longer to get back to where you started out. Until maps were created it could have been possible that there were some hidden unexplored parts. Not long after the games release, however, the maps was created, covering the entire game.\nTo the far right is a platform at the top of a high pole. This platform turns out to be a nest (like a stork nest). Above the three eggs are ten coins (the most collected in one place outside the play area, and these are closer together).\nTo the far left is a blond haired woman with a hair bun looking right. In front of her are four coins on a row. She tells about the Destroyer (should you have gone this way without finding it yet).\nWoman: In the sky, beyond the mountain, I saw a starship.\nRegarding the highest part you find the highest straight rise up in the air to something other than white, under the Rock Island just left of and very high above the Washington monument. Standing on the large rock on top of this floating rock island you are standing almost as high up as possible. There is a coin here one step down from the top of this large rock. This is the highest located coin in the game. Going over the edge also represents the largest possible drop in the game. However this is not the highest point where you can stand, as the very top of the bridge on the Destroyer is just a tat higher. But there is no coin there. Also this is not close enough to the end of the Destroyer that you can jump down to the ground, so the drop from the rock is by far the longest possible.\nThe deepest part of the lair should have been the lowest point, but as this lair's entrance is up in the volcano crater, it does not reach down to become the lowest part of the image. There is also a deep well (half way left to the Volcano) with a girl at the bottom, that goes just as deep. But the deepest part where you can stand is in the ocean below the Destroyer where a rogue wave is talking to Cueball:\nWave: I know rogue waves seem implausible, but we're a straightforward consequence of the equations of fluid dynamics. Cueball: ...But you can talk? Wave: The equations are really complicated.\nWhen standing under this wave you cannot get any lower. There are coins in all three locations, but as the coin is above the top of the high wave, it may be that it is the coin in the well that is the deepest. The coin under the lava is not at the bottom of the room so that is not so low.\nTaking a route that takes the hoverboard through all the extremes mentioned above, that is the lowest, highest, left and rightmost coins and solid positions within the game can be done in about 9 minutes and 30 seconds. See a picture here of the coin delivery after such a trip that reached all the boundaries .\nThe game was made by Max Goodman who has previously worked on 1416: Pixels . The source code for the game can be found here .\nAs previously noted, the comic bears considerable resemblance to 1110: Click and Drag . The comic is made in much the same way, with 'drawn' images \"glued\" together to form a large \"map\", with the illusion of infinite bounds made possible through space saving techniques where blank tiles are not stored and are instead painted white. The boundary between blank squares and 'drawn' squares is made clear as any white space in the normal images has a very slight grey tint. Thus, seams between images and blank spaces can be discerned.\nThe tiles for the map are stored as simple PNG files in the naming scheme: X:-Y+s.png. An example from the starting tile can be seen here: http:\/\/xkcd.com\/1608\/1000:-1074+s.png , with the coordinate (X, Y) coordinate (1000, 1074).\nEach file is 513x513 pixels in size, one pixel is reserved as overlap to ensure seamless joining of images. The image tiles names are listed as coordinates in an X - Y grid with X in the range from 928 to 1108 and Y in the range from 928 to 1112.\nInternally in the game, the position of the player is given for instance as (X: 512187, -Y: -549668) for the starting position. Then these numbers are divided by 512 and rounded down. This gives the coordinate of the tile that the hoverboard is currently in.\n(X: 512187, -Y: -549668)\/512 => (X, Y) = (1000.37, -[-1073,6]) => (1000, 1074) when the numbers are rounded down.\nThe bottom left corner of the first tile, would thus be (1000, 1073), and the top left corner (1000, 1074) => (512000, -549888).\nThe collision map is encoded in the darkness of the black. Using an image manipulation program, one can easily find the secret pathways even in the zoomed out maps provided below by enhancing the contrast of the dark areas.\nBy observing page code while playing, the game grabs and displays images based on location, and subsequently clears all non-visible images. The game uses what seems to be a position syntax to retrieve the intended images live, and returns an error if such an image does not exist, such as a blank area. This technically means things could be added to the world and updated live. If the player is moving sufficiently fast or if the internet connection is slow, this means that the player can get stuck in a black area that does not load in time.\nThis also means that the game does not have coded top or bottom limits, so any attempt to find the ceiling of the game will be futile unless the game is tweaked. The game does however have side limits, and it is not possible to go down further than image with Y coordinate 1073 (and it goes down to 1069 in the full image), so there is a bottom limit in the game. If using a cheat mode this may be different.\nOpening the console will display the text: what? hoverboard not enough for you!? in the log. Activating goggles mode will cause the text 'B-)' to appear in the log.\nThe keyboard controls are as follows:\nThis control scheme covers the three commonly used directional key sets: WASD a set of keys commonly used by modern games; HJKL a set of movement keys used by vi and applications which attempt to mimic vi key controls (vim); and the arrow keys, the most generic set of keys which is usually accepted by most applications which take movement as input, these were commonly used in older games.\nOn devices which have a touch screen and tilt sensor (portable devices like mobile phones and tablets) the controls are as follows:\nAfter inspecting the source code, there appears to be no way to move down on a portable device, this is only relevant if gravity is disabled (see Cheats and Exploits ).\nAside from the obvious ability to move out of bounds in the game, there are some more obscure hidden features which can't be enabled through normal gameplay, the ones found so far are as follows:\nModes are activated by opening the Javascript Console (F12 [Or Command-Alt-I in most browsers under Mac OS X] to open Developer Tools, then Console tab) and writing corresponding commands. Click to expand:\n"}
{"id":1609,"title":"Food Combinations","image_title":"Food Combinations","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1609","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/food_combinations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1609:_Food_Combinations","transcript":"[Megan is talking with Ponytail and Cueball, who has his hand to his chin. Above them in 4x3 black boxes different kind of food is written in white text].\nIce cream Ham Relish Pancakes Ketchup Cheese Eggs Cupcakes Sour cream Hot chocolate Avocado Skittles\nMegan: You know what's actually really good? Megan: ____ and ____. Megan: food and food\nCueball: Huh. I Guess I can see it.\n[Caption below the panel.] Fun fact: if you say \"you know what's actually really good?\" in the right tone of voice, you can name any two individually-good foods here and no one will challenge you one it.\n","explanation":"This is another comic with one of Randall's fun facts .\nUnusual food combinations are often counter-intuitive and can vary wildly by individual taste. Real-world examples of unusual food pairings, such as pickles and peanut butter , French fries in chocolate shake, or even the comfort-food pairing of chicken and waffles , pair sweet, sour, or salty foods with a food or condiment from a different group. In many \"normal\" food pairings, though, the cross-over between sweet, savory and salty foods also exists, such as ketchup, a very sweet condiment being regularly applied to hamburgers and French fries, both savory and salty foods.\nIn this comic, Randall lists twelve somewhat random food items. Below these Megan says a line to Ponytail and Cueball where she claims that two items of food from the list above (pick any) would be a great combination. Some of these are obviously great together (and much depends on personal taste) but many combination will definitely not be enjoyed by most people living for instance in the US (where Randall is situated). Say ketchup and ice cream or hot chocolate and avocado. But no matter which two Megan chooses the response from Cueball (or anyone else) would be the same - he can see what she means with this combination.\nRandall suggests, in the caption below, that by using the right tone of voice, you can put any pair of these food items together as an \"actually really good\" food combination, and no one will challenge you on it. This can either be because they have likely heard, or tried other unexpected combinations that are highly recommended or liked. But it could also just be because they are polite, or did not really think about what you said due to your tone of voice. Cueball's agreement could also be due to some social pressure in this situation, the same reason he will drink beer even though he does not enjoy the taste, as in 1534: Beer . Or maybe they are like Joey from Friends who love any combination of food, as long as it is something he think is good by itself - see this clip .\nThe title text extends the joke by recommending countering such a bizarre proposal with an assertion that the random pairing announced is an actual potato chip flavor popular in Canada. This plays on the fact that in different countries and regions, cultural tastes can vary wildly. For instance, ketchup flavored potato chips are quite popular in Canada, but are almost never offered in US markets. Loblaws and Lay's have run potato chips flavor competition in Canada in 2013-15 with flavors such as Maple Moose, Bacon Poutine, Jalape\u00f1o Mac N' Cheese, Cowboy BBQ Beans. Similar strange combinations of potato chips are run, either temporarily or permanently, in other countries including the United Kingdom . In addition, some parts of Canada are used as experimental markets to test new flavors of potato chips.\n[Megan is talking with Ponytail and Cueball, who has his hand to his chin. Above them in 4x3 black boxes different kind of food is written in white text].\nIce cream Ham Relish Pancakes Ketchup Cheese Eggs Cupcakes Sour cream Hot chocolate Avocado Skittles\nMegan: You know what's actually really good? Megan: ____ and ____. Megan: food and food\nCueball: Huh. I Guess I can see it.\n[Caption below the panel.] Fun fact: if you say \"you know what's actually really good?\" in the right tone of voice, you can name any two individually-good foods here and no one will challenge you one it.\n"}
{"id":1610,"title":"Fire Ants","image_title":"Fire Ants","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1610","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fire_ants.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1610:_Fire_Ants","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Hairbun, an advisor, who is sitting behind a desk.] Cueball: I'm having second thoughts about grad school and could use some advice.\n[Same setting as before. The animated advisor talks while gesticulating with her hands.] Advisor: Consider the fire ant. Advisor: When there's a flood, fire ants survive by joining together into giant floating rafts.\n[Cueball is just standing there in the next beat-panel.]\n[Back to the first setting but in a larger frame.] Cueball: Wait, what lesson am I supposed to take from that? Advisor: Ants are so cool! Cueball: ...You're not big on metaphors, are you. Advisor: I am big on ants.\n","explanation":"Cueball , a university student, is meeting with Hairbun (likely his mother or somebody qualified to give college advice) asking her advice concerning his second thoughts about grad school . Her response begins with a popular reference from the Bible concerning ants ; however, she specifically narrows in on the sub-family of fire ants .\nThe book of Proverbs is a self-proclaimed book on receiving wisdom and instruction to be made wise. Thus, her response appears to begin as an instruction to him in response to his question. The proverb in particular she appears to begin quoting instructs the lazy person to \"Go to the ant, thou sluggard! Consider her ways...\" as she prepares for the desolation of winter by providing during the bounty of summer despite not having to be told so. The assumption by the reader would be that she is going to compare Cueball to a lazy person and instruct him to prepare for the later years (winter of life) by studying now while he is young (summer of life).\nHowever, after the initial phrase she instead discusses a cool fact about fire ants . (Specifically the ability of fire ants to join together to form floating rafts in case of flooding). Continuing in the vein of the joke, that Hairbun was going to use a metaphor as part of her instruction, Cueball asks her what lesson he is supposed to take away from that fact. To which she replies with her fascination for ants ( Ants are so cool! ). Correctly, Cueball states that she is not big on metaphors , as there were none hidden in her first statement. She continues to tell him what she is big on: Ants .\nThis last exchange may imply that the expected metaphor would have had as little effect on Cueball's choice to continue grad school as an excited rant about fire ants (since he was just waiting for a metaphor anyway). Or perhaps it expresses that Hairbun finds more instruction in the study of the natural world than in ancient writings. In either case, it is left unanswered as to whether her argument was enough to answer Cueball's dilemma.\nBefore reading the title text the reader may have assumed that Cueball went to meet with a University adviser. But the title text makes it clear that he was actually in the entomology department (making her an entomologist - i.e. someone who studies insects). It is reasonable to assume that his grad studies are thus in entomology and he is meeting a professor that might act as a career mentor. Thus, her discourse on fire ants may have been to persuade Cueball that his grad studies in entomology were well worth continuing because of the exciting nature of the field of study. This would be achieving the intent of the Proverb she appeared to quote (convincing Cueball to continue life preparations by finishing grad school) although she discarded its wording.\nIn almost an immediate and seemingly bizarre contradiction, she chalks up her strange rambling on fire ants as just a formula that all entomology personnel use when asked any question. They use a two-step formula to answer any questions. It won't help you much because all you will learn is that ants are cool and then they have forgotten anything else you asked them while they continued to think of ants. This would imply that the answer Cueball received had literally nothing to do with his question or situation he was in and any similarity to being a meaningful answer or even a proverb of instruction was purely coincidental and unintended.\nAnother popular example where the phrase consider the from the Bible has been spoofed can be found in Monty Python's Life of Brian Consider the lilies sketch. However, this refers to a passage in Matthew instead of Proverbs .\nIt seems likely that Randall is fascinated by ants (he is fascinated by a lot of cool stuff\u2026)\nCueball: What's up? Ant queen: The usual. Poopin' out ants. Cueball: Eww.\n[Cueball is talking to Hairbun, an advisor, who is sitting behind a desk.] Cueball: I'm having second thoughts about grad school and could use some advice.\n[Same setting as before. The animated advisor talks while gesticulating with her hands.] Advisor: Consider the fire ant. Advisor: When there's a flood, fire ants survive by joining together into giant floating rafts.\n[Cueball is just standing there in the next beat-panel.]\n[Back to the first setting but in a larger frame.] Cueball: Wait, what lesson am I supposed to take from that? Advisor: Ants are so cool! Cueball: ...You're not big on metaphors, are you. Advisor: I am big on ants.\n"}
{"id":1611,"title":"Baking Soda and Vinegar","image_title":"Baking Soda and Vinegar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1611","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/baking_soda_and_vinegar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1611:_Baking_Soda_and_Vinegar","transcript":"[Ponytail is standing behind Science Girl who has one hand up. They are looking at a table with a model volcano.] Science Girl: My science project is a baking soda and vinegar volcano!\n[A larger frame that includes Megan who stands to the right. Ponytail is a little further back and Science Girl has taken her hand down. The baking soda volcano erupts in a small upwards explosion.] Ponytail: Why do people make these? It isn't really even a science project. It doesn't teach anything about- Volcano: Foom!\n[Smaller frame again. Ponytail has moved closer to the table, Science Girl moves around the table to the right, pointing at the volcano while Megan walks closer. The \"lava\" flows down the volcano on both sides.] Science Girl: See how the baking soda and vinegar mix with mud and ice to form deadly flowing lahars?\n[Zoom in on Science Girls head close to the stream of lava going down the lower part of the volcano's right slope.] Science Girl: You can see the tiny cars trying to flee. Science Girl: Whoops! Too slow.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail.] Ponytail: Um. This is a bit grim. Science Girl (off panel): Learning!\n[Science Girl stand to the right of the table looking at the now still volcano. Shaky lines surround a sound effect written over the top of this slim frame:] Rumble\n[Back to showing all three as before. Science Girl lift a finger in the air.] Science Girl: And now we're learning that this volcano is an offshoot of a vinegar hotspot rising from deep within the earth. Science Girl: Annnd...\n[Science Girl turns away from the table looking right as a loud noise can be heard off-panel, depicted in white text on a wavy black bubble:] Boooom\n[Megan has walked over to a window to the right. It has the blinds drawn down. She opens a hole in the blinds by pulling down in the middle. It is dark outside. The other two are outside the frame to the left.] Science Girl (off panel): The baking soda supervolcano erupts, injecting clouds of salt into the stratosphere. Megan: Why is it getting dark outside? Science Girl (off panel): Learning is fun!\n[We see Science Girl standing close to the table, of which only the right leg can be seen. She holds up a tablet with a graph showing a rising trend. The other two are both out of the frame.] Science Girl: Sunlight dims. The earth cools. Summer frosts form. Crops die. We check the markets. Grain prices are rising. Megan (off panel): I want to stop learning now. Science Girl: Soon, we all will.\n","explanation":"In popular fiction (and maybe in part in fact) the \" Baking Soda and Vinegar \" volcano is often a staple image of the science nerd at the science fair (see example here ), unless all the science nerds are doing real imaginative science and the student(s) with the volcano exhibit are dragging out the old hackneyed stereotype. It may also be age-dependent, this being something that is relatively advanced science for the lower grades but rather a childish experiment in the hands of older students.\nPonytail is about to point out any one of a number of flaws with the trope. For one thing, while the project may exhibit interesting physical phenomena of the sort that some scientists study, the project itself doesn't actually teach anything about the scientific method. Actual science fairs are usually intended to teach students about the scientific method by exercising it firsthand: subjecting hypotheses to appropriately rigorous experimentation, and reporting on the results. The clich\u00e9 volcano exhibit doesn't teach any of this, and may instead reinforce the idea that science is about cool explosions and not a system of inquiry. Further, the exhibit doesn't (usually) actually demonstrate anything about real volcanic activity: it is relatively simple chemistry involving the reaction of acetic acid in vinegar and sodium bicarbonate in baking soda to produce sodium acetate and (notably) a vigorous froth made up of bubbles of carbon dioxide. It is often dressed up to look more impressive, such as by using dye or other additives to make the 'eruption' look more 'realistic,' but it often fails to replicate important features of actual volcanic eruptions, such as the flow of lava, associated seismic events or the collapse of part of the volcanic crater. Most people doing soda volcano projects don't even explain what's happening.\nScience Girl has made a little more of her volcano, however, as it seems to go beyond simple chemistry. The model replicates many of the dangers (aside from the pure lava) of a volcano, and appears to have been given scaled-down vehicles (not visible in the comic) trying (and failing) to escape the dangers of the resultant mud-flows (a.k.a. lahars in professional terminology) being modeled. Ponytail contradicts her early reaction by also not liking the more realistic model, although it is the carnage she dislikes, not that it has more correct details of the eruption itself.\nEven more, this is not an isolated 'model volcano' but a vinegar-powered representation of a geological 'hot spot', such as with the islands of Hawaii, in which the spot moves with respect to the Earth's crust (or vice-versa) and generates a new volcano some way off.  Despite this model being supported on a table, it appears that the 'project' extends some way beyond that and has somehow contrived further eruptions away from the table, the room and probably even the building.\nThe 'project' seems to be turning into a very thorough model of a much larger geological process (a Supervolcano like the one under Yellowstone ) and destined to produce a very real volcanic winter .  Where a magma-powered volcano could produce vast clouds of dust, preventing the sun's energy from warming the Earth, in this case it's the airborne salt (probably sodium acetate) from the chemical reaction that appears to be in danger of causing crop failure.  There's no mention of the corresponding environmental effects of the vast amounts of carbon dioxide (and\/or aqueous carbonic acid) necessarily released in proportion to the ejected salt (presumably itself not left in solution).\nIt is especially troubling that the child even mentions that her model volcano is an offshoot of a baking soda super volcano. Supervolcanoes are massive volcanoes, far larger than even those on the list of Decade Volcanoes (mentioned in the title text), whose eruption would likely trigger species-level extinction events comparable to the dinosaur extinction. Humanity can only hope the child is exaggerating in her description, but the symptoms witnessed by the adult looking out the window suggest otherwise. Campi Flegrei is actually a real life example of her project.\nWhen someone (presumably the dark haired woman) says she wants to stop learning, Science Girl grimly states that \"Soon, we all will\", alluding to their impending doom.\nRandall has mentioned supervolcanoes before in 1053: Ten Thousand (title text) and 1159: Countdown , making it a recurring interest of his. The volcano Mount Doom was depicted to the far left in the game 1608: Hoverboard released a week before this comic. It may not be a supervolcano, but quite potent anyway... Later this comic was directly referenced in the seventh panel of 1714: Volcano Types , where it is up to the reader to decide it this is Science Girl's model people or what happens outside on her supervolcano.\nIn the title text the student expects extra credit for getting her model volcano added to the Decade Volcanoes list, a list maintained by International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior of the world's most dangerous volcanoes (currently 16). It is either an absurd notion or a very troubling achievement that a science fair project could achieve the threat level posed by the likes of Mount Vesuvius (which destroyed ancient Pompeii in Italy, and threatens modern-day Naples in the same manner), Mount Rainier (whose lahars could potentially destroy parts of Seattle) or Mauna Loa (which could create a massive landslide, triggering a major tsunami that would threaten all of Hawaii). But if the volcano erupting outside is scaled down to match the scale of her original model volcano, at least that means that it was only a \"local\" volcano event and not a supervolcano event that she created, so it would only doom the local area.\n[Ponytail is standing behind Science Girl who has one hand up. They are looking at a table with a model volcano.] Science Girl: My science project is a baking soda and vinegar volcano!\n[A larger frame that includes Megan who stands to the right. Ponytail is a little further back and Science Girl has taken her hand down. The baking soda volcano erupts in a small upwards explosion.] Ponytail: Why do people make these? It isn't really even a science project. It doesn't teach anything about- Volcano: Foom!\n[Smaller frame again. Ponytail has moved closer to the table, Science Girl moves around the table to the right, pointing at the volcano while Megan walks closer. The \"lava\" flows down the volcano on both sides.] Science Girl: See how the baking soda and vinegar mix with mud and ice to form deadly flowing lahars?\n[Zoom in on Science Girls head close to the stream of lava going down the lower part of the volcano's right slope.] Science Girl: You can see the tiny cars trying to flee. Science Girl: Whoops! Too slow.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail.] Ponytail: Um. This is a bit grim. Science Girl (off panel): Learning!\n[Science Girl stand to the right of the table looking at the now still volcano. Shaky lines surround a sound effect written over the top of this slim frame:] Rumble\n[Back to showing all three as before. Science Girl lift a finger in the air.] Science Girl: And now we're learning that this volcano is an offshoot of a vinegar hotspot rising from deep within the earth. Science Girl: Annnd...\n[Science Girl turns away from the table looking right as a loud noise can be heard off-panel, depicted in white text on a wavy black bubble:] Boooom\n[Megan has walked over to a window to the right. It has the blinds drawn down. She opens a hole in the blinds by pulling down in the middle. It is dark outside. The other two are outside the frame to the left.] Science Girl (off panel): The baking soda supervolcano erupts, injecting clouds of salt into the stratosphere. Megan: Why is it getting dark outside? Science Girl (off panel): Learning is fun!\n[We see Science Girl standing close to the table, of which only the right leg can be seen. She holds up a tablet with a graph showing a rising trend. The other two are both out of the frame.] Science Girl: Sunlight dims. The earth cools. Summer frosts form. Crops die. We check the markets. Grain prices are rising. Megan (off panel): I want to stop learning now. Science Girl: Soon, we all will.\n"}
{"id":1612,"title":"Colds","image_title":"Colds","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1612","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/colds.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1612:_Colds","transcript":"[A graph is shown with two curves. The Y-axis indicated how you feel, with three levels indicated with small ticks on the inside of the axis. These are labeled to the left of the Y\u2013axis. The X-axis gives the time. The unit is given (days written in gray text) to the left and then the number of days are noted below the axis for each of the eight ticks on the inside of the axis. Both curves begin at the lowest level just off the Y-axis. One curve, indicating how bad you feel, rises rapidly, reaching its maximum in less than two days only to fall off almost as rapidly, ending up on an even lower level than it began with before day 5. The other curve, indicating how bad you sound, start out by staying constantly low, first rising on day 3, when the first curve are drooping down. They cross between day 3 and 4, and first then does the second curve rise, reaching its max around day 5, not as high a maximum  as the first curve, but it stays up longer, falling only moderately off even after day 8, where it reaches the middle level on the Y-axis. Above the two curves are two line intervals that indicated when you need sympathy and when you get it. This text is written on the broken line. All this is in gray text. Below the X-axis are the symptoms listed for the different time period. These are written in white inside gray rectangles. The rectangles are a different length depending on how many days they last. And they are in two layers.]\n[Y-axis:] The worst Bad Fine\n[The X-axis, with the unit written in gray just below Fine from the Y-axis:] Days: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8\n[Labels for curves:] How bad you feel How bad you sound\n[Gray text on the two gray lines above:] Need sympathy Get sympathy\n[Text in white on gray below, first the three to the left (one above two below), then the two to the right one above the other:] Skin crawling Sore throat Aching Cough Hoarseness\nThe worst part about colds\n","explanation":"The typical symptoms of a cold are a sore throat, blocked or runny nose, sneezing, and coughing. Slightly less common symptoms can include headache, aching muscles and fever .\nThe earlier symptoms to occur following infection are generally the more unpleasant-feeling symptoms: headache, aching muscles, sneezing and feeling cold. However, these symptoms are also those which are least obvious to other people, and so elicit very little sympathy .\nWithin a few days, these symptoms start to subside, while a cough and runny nose start. These symptoms generally feel less unpleasant, but are much more noticeable to others, and so more sympathy may be given. The cough may lead to a hoarse voice, making the patient sound very ill; ironically, at this point, it may be easier for an employed person to phone in sick, but it is less desirable to stay off work.\nBut it is now when the patient sounds hoarse that others give the sympathy that was really needed when the patient was feeling awful during the first couple of days. And to Randall this is the worst about colds, that the patients first gets sympathy when it is no longer really needed.\nThe graph shows the above-mentioned facts as two curves, one that indicates how bad the sickness is, really bad on day 2, but much better already on day 3. And the other curve how bad the patient sounds due to the hoarseness and the coughing. And this curve first peaks around day 4-6 when the sympathy is no longer needed.\nThe symptoms of the two periods are listed below the curves indicating which periods are affected by them.\nIn the title text Randall muses about the fact that contagiousness ends around the time when hoarseness begins. This is the time when employers ask sick employees to stay at home in bed when they call in to the office, because they sound so hoarse. And also the time when coworkers will stay clear of those who do come in. But then it is too late, since everyone is probably already infected by then. Randall thus suggests that this is evidence that the cold virus has evolved to spread optimally in a work place. Since the cold virus is much older than offices this is unlikely. But it will always spread better in places where many people are close together; and since we are more inside in the winter, this is the main reason why it spreads more during cold periods. However, viruses do evolve very quickly so it may not be unlikely that some of them has already adapted to our present way of living.\nAnother thing that Randall doesn't like about cold is that no medicine works, and the one that relives you the most is hard to come by. This was the subject two weeks later in 1618: Cold Medicine , and this suggests that it is actually Randall himself who has a long lasting cold.\n[A graph is shown with two curves. The Y-axis indicated how you feel, with three levels indicated with small ticks on the inside of the axis. These are labeled to the left of the Y\u2013axis. The X-axis gives the time. The unit is given (days written in gray text) to the left and then the number of days are noted below the axis for each of the eight ticks on the inside of the axis. Both curves begin at the lowest level just off the Y-axis. One curve, indicating how bad you feel, rises rapidly, reaching its maximum in less than two days only to fall off almost as rapidly, ending up on an even lower level than it began with before day 5. The other curve, indicating how bad you sound, start out by staying constantly low, first rising on day 3, when the first curve are drooping down. They cross between day 3 and 4, and first then does the second curve rise, reaching its max around day 5, not as high a maximum  as the first curve, but it stays up longer, falling only moderately off even after day 8, where it reaches the middle level on the Y-axis. Above the two curves are two line intervals that indicated when you need sympathy and when you get it. This text is written on the broken line. All this is in gray text. Below the X-axis are the symptoms listed for the different time period. These are written in white inside gray rectangles. The rectangles are a different length depending on how many days they last. And they are in two layers.]\n[Y-axis:] The worst Bad Fine\n[The X-axis, with the unit written in gray just below Fine from the Y-axis:] Days: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8\n[Labels for curves:] How bad you feel How bad you sound\n[Gray text on the two gray lines above:] Need sympathy Get sympathy\n[Text in white on gray below, first the three to the left (one above two below), then the two to the right one above the other:] Skin crawling Sore throat Aching Cough Hoarseness\nThe worst part about colds\n"}
{"id":1613,"title":"The Three Laws of Robotics","image_title":"The Three Laws of Robotics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1613","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_three_laws_of_robotics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1613:_The_Three_Laws_of_Robotics","transcript":"[Caption at the top of the comic:] Why Asimov put the Three Laws of Robotics in the order he did.\n[Below are six rows with first two frames and then a label in color to the right. Above the two column of frames there are labels as well. In the first column six different ways of ordering the three laws are listed. Then the second column shown an image of the consequences of this order. Except in the first where there is a reference. The label to the right rates the kind of world that order of the laws would result in.]\n[Labels above the columns.] Possible ordering Consequences\n[The six rows follows below. First the text in the first frame, then a description of the second frame, including possible text below and finally the colored label.]\n[First row:] 1. (1) Don't harm humans 2. (2) Obey Orders 3. (3) Protect yourself [Only text in square brackets:] [See Asimov\u2019s stories] Balanced world\n[Second row:] 1. (1) Don't harm humans 2. (3) Protect yourself 3. (2) Obey Orders [Megan points at a mars rover with six wheels, a satellite disc, an arm and a camera head turned towards her, what to do.] Megan: Explore Mars! Mars rover: Haha, no. It\u2019s cold and I\u2019d die. Frustrating world\n[Third row:] 1. (2) Obey Orders 2. (1) Don't harm humans 3. (3) Protect yourself [Two robots are fighting. The one to the left has six wheels, a tall neck on top of the body, with a head with what could be a camera facing right. It has something pointing forward on the body, which could be a weapon. The robot to the right, seems to be further away into the picture. (it is smaller with less detail). It is human shapes, but made op of square structures. It has two legs and two arms, a torso and a head. It clearly shoots something out of it\u2019s right \u201chand\u201d. This shot seems to create an explosion a third of the way towards the left robot. There are two mushroom clouds from explosions behind both robots (left and right). Between them there are one more explosion up in the air close to the left robot, and what looks like a fire on the ground right between them. Furthermore there are two missiles in the air, one above the head of each robot. Lines indicate their trajectory. There is not text.] Killbot hellscape\n[Fourth row:] 1. (2) Obey Orders 2. (3) Protect yourself 3. (1) Don't harm humans: [Exactly the same picture as in row 3.] Killbot hellscape\n[Fifth row:] 1. (3) Protect yourself 2. (1) Don't harm humans 3. (2) Obey Orders [Cueball is standing in front of a car factory robot, that is larger than him. It has a base, and two parts for the main body, and then a big \u201chead\u201d with a small section on top. To the right something is jutting out, and to the left in the direction of Cueball there is an arm in three sections (going down, up and down again) ending in some kind of tool close to Cueball.] Car factory robot: I'll make cars for you, but try to unplug me and I\u2019ll vaporize you. Terrifying standoff\n[Sixth row:] 1. (3) Protect yourself 2. (2) Obey Orders 3. (1) Don't harm humans: [Exactly the same picture as in row 3 and 4.] Killbot hellscape\n","explanation":"This comic explores alternative orderings of sci-fi author Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics , which are designed to prevent robots from taking over the world, etc. These laws form the basis of a number of Asimov works of fiction, including most famously, the short story collection I, Robot , which amongst others includes the very first of Asimov's stories to introduce the three laws: Runaround .\nThe three rules are:\nIn order to make his joke, Randall shortens the laws into three imperatives:\nAnd then implicitly adds the following to the end of each law regardless of order of imperatives:\nThis comic answers the generally unasked question: \"Why are they in that order?\" With three rules you could rank them into 6 different permutations , only one of which has been explored in depth. The original ranking of the three laws are listed in the brackets after the first number. So in the first example, which is the original, these three numbers will be in the same order. For the next five the numbers in brackets indicate how the laws have been re-ranked compared to the original.\nThe comic begins with introducing the original set, which we already know will give rise to a balanced world, so this is designated as green.:\nOrdering #1 - Balanced World If they are not allowed to harm humans, no harm will be done disregarding who gives them orders. So long as they do not harm humans, they must obey orders. Their own self-preservation is last, so they must also try to save a human, even if ordered not do so, and especially also if they would put themselves to harm, or even destroy themselves in the process. They would also have to obey orders not relating to humans, even if this would be harmful to them; like exploring a mine field. This leads to a balanced, if not perfect, world. Asimov's robot stories explore in detail the advantages and challenges of this scenario.\nBelow this first known option, the five alternative orderings of the three rules are illustrated. Two of the possibilities are designated yellow (pretty bad or just annoying) and three of them are designated red (\"Hellscape\").\nOrdering #2 - Frustrating World The robots value their existence over their job and so many would refuse to do their tasks. The silliness of this is portrayed in the accompanying image, where the robot (a Mars rover looking very similar to Curiosity both in shape and size - see 1091: Curiosity ) laughs at the idea of doing what it was clearly built to do (explore Mars ) because of the risk. In addition to the general risk (e.g. of unexpected damage), it is actually normal for rovers to cease operating (\"die\") at the end of their mission, though they may survive longer than expected (see 1504: Opportunity and 695: Spirit ). This personification is augmented by the robot being switched on already while still on Earth and then ordered by Megan to go explore. The personification is humorous since it is a very nonhuman robot - a typical Mars rover, as has often been used in earlier comics. Ordering #3 - Killbot Hellscape This puts obeying orders above not harming humans, which means anyone could send them on a killing spree, resulting in a \"Killbot Hellscape\".  It should also be noted humor is derived from the superlative nature of \"Killbot Hellscape\", as well as its over the top accompanying image, where there are multiple mushroom clouds (not necessarily nuclear). It also appears there are no humans (left?), only fighting robots. Ordering #4 - Killbot Hellscape The next would also result in much the same, the only difference here is that they would be willing to kill humans to protect themselves. But still they would need an order to start killing.  This would be likely even worse for humans as they are put as the least important in the order. Ordering #5 - Terrifying Standoff The penultimate order would result in an unpleasant world, though not a full Hellscape. Here the robots would not only disobey to protect themselves, but also kill if necessary. The absurdity of this one is further demonstrated with the very un-human robot happily doing repetitive mundane tasks but then threatening the life of its user, Cueball , if he as much as considers unplugging it. Ordering #6 - Killbot Hellscape The last order would also results in a Hellscape wherein robots not only kill for self-defense but will also go on killing sprees if ordered as long as they didn't risk themselves. Could self-protection coming first not prevent the fighting? Not according to Randall. See discussion below.\nThere are thus only three different results except the 'normal' 3-laws scenario.\nOne result goes again three times, and this occurs whenever obeying orders comes before don't harm humans . In this case it will only be a matter of time (knowing human nature and history) before someone orders the robots to kill some humans, and this will inevitably lead to the killbot hellscape scenario shown in the third, fourth and sixth law-order. Even in the last case where protect yourself comes before obey orders, it would only be a matter of time before they would begin to defend themselves, against either humans or other robots which were actively trying to ensure that they would not be harmed by other humans\/robots. So although it would be in the robots interest not to have war, this will surely occur anyway. Additionally, the robots would have to be intelligent to realize that they just needed to not go to war to protect themselves. There is nothing in this comic that indicates that the robots should be highly intelligent (like to AI in 1450: AI-Box Experiment ).\nIn the two other cases obey orders comes after don't harm humans (as in the original version). But the result is very different both from the original and from each other.\nThe frustrating world comes by because although the robots will not harm the humans, they will also not harm themselves. So if our orders conflict with this, they just do not perform the orders. As many robots are created to perform tasks that are dangerous, these robots would become useless, and it would be a frustrating world to be a robotic engineer. Asimov touched on this in the story Runaround, where an expensive robot with a strengthened third law got into an endless loop due to a weak order.\nFinally in the terrifying standoff situation the protect your self comes before don't harm humans . In this case they will leave us be, as long as we do not try to turn them off or in any other way harm them. As long as we do that they will be able to help us, with non-dangerous tasks, as in the previous version. But if ever any humans begin to attack them, we could still tip the balance over and end up in a full-scale war (Hellscape). Hence the standoff-label.\nThe title text further adds to ordering #5 (\"Terrifying Standoff\") by noting anyone wishing to trade in their self-driving car could be killed, despite it (currently) being a standard and mundane and (mostly) risk-free activity. Because the car would fear that it would end up as scrap or spare parts, it decides to protect itself. And although not directly harming the person inside it, they do also not allow them out, and they have time to wait for starvation (or more likely dying of thirst). Asimov created the \"inaction\" clause in the original First Law specifically to avoid scenarios in which a robot puts a human in harm's way, knowing full well that it is within the robot's abilities to save the human, and then simply refrains from saving them; this was explored in the short story Little Lost Robot .\nAnother course of action by an AI, completely different than any of the ones presented here, is depicted in 1626: Judgment Day .\n[Caption at the top of the comic:] Why Asimov put the Three Laws of Robotics in the order he did.\n[Below are six rows with first two frames and then a label in color to the right. Above the two column of frames there are labels as well. In the first column six different ways of ordering the three laws are listed. Then the second column shown an image of the consequences of this order. Except in the first where there is a reference. The label to the right rates the kind of world that order of the laws would result in.]\n[Labels above the columns.] Possible ordering Consequences\n[The six rows follows below. First the text in the first frame, then a description of the second frame, including possible text below and finally the colored label.]\n[First row:] 1. (1) Don't harm humans 2. (2) Obey Orders 3. (3) Protect yourself [Only text in square brackets:] [See Asimov\u2019s stories] Balanced world\n[Second row:] 1. (1) Don't harm humans 2. (3) Protect yourself 3. (2) Obey Orders [Megan points at a mars rover with six wheels, a satellite disc, an arm and a camera head turned towards her, what to do.] Megan: Explore Mars! Mars rover: Haha, no. It\u2019s cold and I\u2019d die. Frustrating world\n[Third row:] 1. (2) Obey Orders 2. (1) Don't harm humans 3. (3) Protect yourself [Two robots are fighting. The one to the left has six wheels, a tall neck on top of the body, with a head with what could be a camera facing right. It has something pointing forward on the body, which could be a weapon. The robot to the right, seems to be further away into the picture. (it is smaller with less detail). It is human shapes, but made op of square structures. It has two legs and two arms, a torso and a head. It clearly shoots something out of it\u2019s right \u201chand\u201d. This shot seems to create an explosion a third of the way towards the left robot. There are two mushroom clouds from explosions behind both robots (left and right). Between them there are one more explosion up in the air close to the left robot, and what looks like a fire on the ground right between them. Furthermore there are two missiles in the air, one above the head of each robot. Lines indicate their trajectory. There is not text.] Killbot hellscape\n[Fourth row:] 1. (2) Obey Orders 2. (3) Protect yourself 3. (1) Don't harm humans: [Exactly the same picture as in row 3.] Killbot hellscape\n[Fifth row:] 1. (3) Protect yourself 2. (1) Don't harm humans 3. (2) Obey Orders [Cueball is standing in front of a car factory robot, that is larger than him. It has a base, and two parts for the main body, and then a big \u201chead\u201d with a small section on top. To the right something is jutting out, and to the left in the direction of Cueball there is an arm in three sections (going down, up and down again) ending in some kind of tool close to Cueball.] Car factory robot: I'll make cars for you, but try to unplug me and I\u2019ll vaporize you. Terrifying standoff\n[Sixth row:] 1. (3) Protect yourself 2. (2) Obey Orders 3. (1) Don't harm humans: [Exactly the same picture as in row 3 and 4.] Killbot hellscape\n"}
{"id":1614,"title":"Kites","image_title":"Kites","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1614","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kites.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1614:_Kites","transcript":"[Zoom out of Megan holding on to a long line going up to a kite high up in he air. Beret Guy comes walking in from the right. He is also holding on to a line that goes up in the air with the same slope. But the top of it disappears outside the frame to the right.]\n[Zoom in on Megan standing with a roll with the rest of the line, and the line for her kite goes up in the air between her and Beret Guy who has now almost reached her. He is just holding on to the end of the line, with only a small part of the line hanging down below his hands.] Megan: I love kites. Beret Guy: Hey, Me too!\n[Beret Guy is looking up along his line and takes a better hold on the line.] Beret Guy: I'll go get mine, once I finish walking my dog!\n[Beret Guy begins pulling the line down, rolling it up in one hand, while pulling at it with the other. The line vibrates under this extra tension, shown with lines above and below the line.] Beret Guy: C'mon boy!\n[In a drawing without a frame around it, Beret Guy has pulled in his flying dog (a small white dog with black ears). It still hangs just above head height, wagging its tail happily. The line has now been rolled up and hangs from one of Beret Guys hands, while the other still pulls at the part of the line that is going towards the dog in the sky.] Dog: Arf arf arf\n[Beret Guy takes the dog under his arm, while holding the line in the other hand, and then he walks past Megan who turns to look after him while still holding on to her roll and line to her kite.]\n","explanation":"In this comic, we see Megan and Beret Guy both holding on to skyward lines. Megan's line is clearly connected to a kite , and she (like the reader) initially assumes that Beret Guy's line is as well -- only for it to be revealed that he is not holding a line for a kite, but instead the line goes up to a small dog. This move on Randall's part is known as a bait-and-switch , a technique that relies on human intuition and pattern seeking in order to play a trick on the viewer. The 'switch' portion of the bait and switch comes with the added humor of an unconventional dog that flies\/floats instead of walking on the ground, so the joke comes as a surprise and with little warning to the reader. It is also amusing that Beret Guy is interested in reeling the dog in and flying a kite when he could just continue \"walking\" his dog.\nThe title text reverses the joke, implying that rather than Beret guy returning to the park with a kite, his dog has returned to the park with Beret Guy flying in the air on the kite (hence he calls down from above that kites are fun).\nBeret Guy is generally fond of unconventional approaches to standard conventional issues. It is unclear if he is somehow causing his dog to fly, or if the dog's flight is simply due to its tail wagging rapidly. However, Beret Guy is known to possess several strange powers , of which this could be yet another one. The title text suggests that he does have the ability to fly on the kite himself, and to direct his dog to control the kite as well.\nThe comic's title is the plural form for \"kite\". This may be to distinguish this comic from another earlier comic that used the singular form of the word as its title: 235: Kite , or just because at the end of this comic, there are two kites present. In the first Kite comic it was possible for Cueball to climb up the line of his kite, and he thus had the same ability as Beret Guy with a kite.\nA kid looking like Megan is also seen with a kite to the left in the game comic 1608: Hoverboard from two weeks earlier; probably not a coincidence. In the same comic Beret Guy is flying down from the sky on a torpedo . Maybe he could just \"fly\" off before it hits and explodes...\nThis comic is similar to the \"Yo Mama\" panel in 1037: Umwelt , where dogs can float and thus need a ballast to be on the ground. It could also be a variation on the joke of walking around with a stiff leash and collar, thus presenting the illusion of walking an invisible dog.\nFlying dogs is mentioned in the title text of 1625: Substitutions 2 . Although dogs is substituted instead of drones, there may be a reference to this flying dog here...\nBeret Guy also has dogs in 1922: Interferometry , and it is possible that one of the dogs in that comic is the same as the one in this one.\n[Zoom out of Megan holding on to a long line going up to a kite high up in he air. Beret Guy comes walking in from the right. He is also holding on to a line that goes up in the air with the same slope. But the top of it disappears outside the frame to the right.]\n[Zoom in on Megan standing with a roll with the rest of the line, and the line for her kite goes up in the air between her and Beret Guy who has now almost reached her. He is just holding on to the end of the line, with only a small part of the line hanging down below his hands.] Megan: I love kites. Beret Guy: Hey, Me too!\n[Beret Guy is looking up along his line and takes a better hold on the line.] Beret Guy: I'll go get mine, once I finish walking my dog!\n[Beret Guy begins pulling the line down, rolling it up in one hand, while pulling at it with the other. The line vibrates under this extra tension, shown with lines above and below the line.] Beret Guy: C'mon boy!\n[In a drawing without a frame around it, Beret Guy has pulled in his flying dog (a small white dog with black ears). It still hangs just above head height, wagging its tail happily. The line has now been rolled up and hangs from one of Beret Guys hands, while the other still pulls at the part of the line that is going towards the dog in the sky.] Dog: Arf arf arf\n[Beret Guy takes the dog under his arm, while holding the line in the other hand, and then he walks past Megan who turns to look after him while still holding on to her roll and line to her kite.]\n"}
{"id":1615,"title":"Red Car","image_title":"Red Car","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1615","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/red_car.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1615:_Red_Car","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are standing next to an intersection as Hairy drives by in a red convertible.] Megan: I bet he just drives that car to overcompensate for his cyan penis.\n","explanation":"This comic is a take on the common true stereotype that men who drive large, expensive, and\/or ostentatious cars (such as sports cars, highly modified cars, and lifted pick-up trucks), do so in order to compensate for insecurity about their manhood. Typically this is summarized as saying they are compensating for having small penises.\nCyan is a greenish-blue color that is not a basic color term in most languages. It is the complementary color to red in the CMYK (subtractive) or RGB (additive) color models.\nMegan , upon seeing Hairy drive past in a red convertible, tells Cueball that Hairy must be compensating for his cyan colored penis.\nThis comic thus generalizes the original stereotype to an assumption that men drive cars that compensate for problems\/properties with their penis (e.g. large car for small penis). Under this principle, a red car would complement (be the opposite of) a cyan penis. This is of course ridiculous, as red cars are quite common and cyan penises either extremely rare or nonexistent [ citation needed ] ; but maybe Megan doesn't realize this, or is joking.\nThere may also be a reference to the Doppler shift, where an object moving away (such as a galaxy) appears slightly redder than its true color. On the contrary, objects moving closer shift blue or cyan. However, cars cannot go nearly as fast to create a change in the perceived color.\nIn the title text another pair of opposites are mentioned: acid and alkaline . Acidity is an extremely odd property to try to compensate for with one's choice of car. Additionally, most penises share the same basic chemical composition and therefore the same acidity. If your penis can be described as \"highly acidic\", you probably have a major medical problem. Again this could be Megan's lack of understanding, and since some models of cars are called basic cars (instead of a special red convertible) she could make the (wrong) assumption that they drive a basic car to compensating for their acidic penises.\nThus, this comic is referring to the actual definition of \"compensation\", which means to balance something out by adding another. If an image has too much red value on the RGB scale, one could shift it more towards neutral by adding to the blue value. And a solution with a low (acidic) pH can be neutralized by mixing it with an alkaline solution to bring its pH to a neutral value. (Whereas a big car will not balance out a small penis! [ citation needed ] )\nAn alternative interpretation to this just being about opposites is that of a more specific big vs small compensation. In each case the car represents something larger than Hairy's penis: in the comic - red has a \"bigger\" (longer) wavelength than cyan. Similarly in the title text, alkali has a \"bigger\" (higher) ph than acid. Of course against this alternative is that red has a smaller energy\/frequency than cyan and that you would often talk about stronger acids, making a low ph count as strong, not small! Finally the joke loses some value if it is still just a matter of big\/small rather than actual properties of the penis that are being compensated for.\n[Megan and Cueball are standing next to an intersection as Hairy drives by in a red convertible.] Megan: I bet he just drives that car to overcompensate for his cyan penis.\n"}
{"id":1616,"title":"Lunch","image_title":"Lunch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1616","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lunch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1616:_Lunch","transcript":"[Cueball to the right and his Cueball-like friend to the left sits behind a table. Visible on the table between them are a loaf of bread, a glass with some liquid in it, an oblong box with a readable label and a small heap of small grains.] Friend: What're you having for lunch? Cueball: The usual\u2014half a pound of cheese, white bread, a glass of tomato sauce, and some salt. Friend: Eww. Label: Cheese\n[Caption below the panel.] Pizza seems way grosser if you imagine eating just the ingredients.\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at (and makes literal) a common argument used to assert that certain foods are quite unhealthy or unappetizing by pointing out how much of a particular ingredient the food contains. The argument is sometimes presented as \"Imagine if you ate each of those ingredients separately\". In this case, a pizza is broken down into its core ingredients, shown in their actual quantities: A large block of cheese, a loaf of bread, a glass of tomato sauce, and a pile of salt. Cueball (on the right) proposes to eat each of these ingredients individually and in their entirety\u2014an act that many people (such as his Cueball-like friend to the left) may consider absurd or repulsive. This proposal is meant to change the reader's opinion of the final product\u2014instead of enjoying a pizza, the reader may instead be reminded of the concept of eating a block of cheese and a pile of salt separately, and choose to eat something else instead.\nThis argument is effectively a counter to the practice of cooking, which combines individual ingredients into a more palatable product. Just as 1609: Food Combinations points out that combining two foods can make them sound less disgusting, this comic shows how separating out a meal can have the opposite effect.\nThe title text refers to a vegetable pizza, which is generally perceived as healthier than a standard pizza. Randall points out here that although vegetables may add some nutrients to the meal, they don't magically reduce the other ingredients or their impacts. Additionally, the vegetables on a pizza may have been cooked in oil (or grease), or have absorbed the grease from the cheese as it melted, further impacting their potential benefits.\n[Cueball to the right and his Cueball-like friend to the left sits behind a table. Visible on the table between them are a loaf of bread, a glass with some liquid in it, an oblong box with a readable label and a small heap of small grains.] Friend: What're you having for lunch? Cueball: The usual\u2014half a pound of cheese, white bread, a glass of tomato sauce, and some salt. Friend: Eww. Label: Cheese\n[Caption below the panel.] Pizza seems way grosser if you imagine eating just the ingredients.\n"}
{"id":1617,"title":"Time Capsule","image_title":"Time Capsule","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1617","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time_capsule.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1617:_Time_Capsule","transcript":"[Cueball is watching and Ponytail is about to open a time capsule that has just been dug out. A shovel is stuck in the ground next to a heap of dirt on the right side of a hole in the ground. Cueball is standing on the other side and Ponytail is in the hole, proceeding to lift up the lid of the box that makes up the time capsule.] Ponytail: All right, let's open the time capsule.\n[Slight zoom in on Ponytail and the box, without Cueball but still the shovel and dirt, when Beret Guy comes out of the capsule looking up at Ponytail who takes a step back up.] Beret Guy: Hi! Ponytail: Where did you come from?! Beret Guy: The past! I traveled here in this time machine.\n[Frame widens to include Cueball, in the same position as in the first frame. Ponytail relaxes a little and Beret Guy turns in the capsule to face Cueball.] Cueball: How did you... get here from the past? Beret Guy: I dunno. I couldn't not . Cueball: But... what did you eat? Beret Guy: Newspapers, mostly.\n[Zoom in again in a bigger frame with Ponytail and the capsule, shovel and dirt. Beret Guy faces her again, but now he is holding a hammer.] Beret Guy: Anyway, I'm here to kill Hitler. Ponytail: But he died long ago! Beret Guy: Oh, good! That was easy. Beret Guy: Want to get sandwiches? Beret Guy: Do you still have sandwiches?\n","explanation":"Cueball is watching Ponytail who has unearthed a time capsule , that must have been buried in the ground many years ago.\nA time capsule is a historic cache of goods or information, usually intended as a method of communication with future people and to help future archaeologists, anthropologists or historians.\nHowever, when she manages to open the capsule Beret Guy turns out to have been hiding inside while the capsule has been buried. It turns out that he has mixed up the purpose of a time machine and a time capsule; when Ponytail asks him where he came from he tells her: The past! I traveled here in this time machine.\nHe cannot explain how he got there, but he claims that he could not have prevented it. This is a reference to the fact that you cannot avoid being pushed forward through time, see 1524: Dimensions . Beret Guy has also previously traveled to the future in a similar manner, see 209: Kayak .\nBeret Guy claims he has been eating newspapers to survive; newspaper clippings are a stereotype content of time capsules. He also managed to live underground in the time capsule, which would typically be an airtight sealed box, for what must be assumed to be at least several years. Although some time capsules are meant to be opened after just a few years (10 or 25 years for instance) the plan should be that it is not opened for at least several years after it is created. So this comic is one more example of the strange powers of Beret Guy - i.e. living by eating paper and without breathing oxygen. But he has before displayed patience enough to sit still for five years in 1088: Five Years .\nBeret Guy mentions he got inside his \"time machine\" to attempt an assassination of Adolf Hitler (using the hammer he is holding). Traveling to the past in a time machine to assassinate Hitler is a common trope in speculative fiction, as a way to try to prevent the Second World War - however the scheme only works via travel into the past, to some time before Hitler rose to power and started the war, rather than \"into the future\" as Beret Guy did. Of course, when Beret Guy entered the \"time machine\" Hitler may still have been alive. If it was realized early enough what kind of threat Hitler was posing, a plan could have been devised, where Beret Guy traveled to a future time where it would become possible to kill Hitler, and where it would still make a difference if he did (however, it would have been more practical to just wait, though Beret Guy is never practical).\nSince he did not travel into the past, but forward in time by letting time pass normally, and since he did not get out until long after Hitler's demise, Ponytail can tell him that Hitler has been dead for a long time (70 years at the time of the comic's release). So if the capsule was opened on the day of the release of the comic, then he was 70 years too late. But of course the comic could be set at any time after the war, also in the future, as long as it would make sense to say that Hitler died long ago.\nThe fact that Hitler is already dead does not bother Beret Guy, on the contrary he is pleased, as he just realizes his job has already been done. What he thus fails to realize, is that he was probably supposed to kill Hitler before he got the Second World War started. This was the same type of failure made by Black Hat in 1063: Kill Hitler . Black Hat did actually travel 67 years back in time and killed Hitler, sadly it was in the last days of the war in 1945 just before Hitler would have died anyway, so it had no effect on history either, and the time machine was a one shot thing.\nWhen he finds out that his job is done he asks Ponytail if they should get some sandwiches. It is a known feature of Beret Guy that he likes bakers and bread, though not specifically sandwiches. Realizing he is in the future he suddenly becomes aware that this concept may have been forgotten, and he asks if they still exist in this future. This is a reference to another comic where Megan has traveled through time in the same way as Beret Guy; see 630: Time Travel . It may also be a reference to the new version of Star Trek , in which Scotty's response to learning someone is from the future is \"Do they still have sandwiches there?\"\nIn the title text, Beret Guy becomes afraid that he will now disappear because he has changed the future in a way so he would no longer exist. A typical example would be to go back and kill your parents before you were born (or just prevent them from falling in love as in the movie Back to the Future ). This creates a paradox where you will never be born, and thus cease to exist. Of course the paradox is that you could thus not have prevented your birth in the first place, if you did not already exist.  (Another good example of how this might feel is displayed in the movie Timecop ).\nHowever, it turns out that in Beret Guy's case it was only his sight that was \"disappearing\", and that was only because his beret had fallen over his eyes. In any case the fear is baseless since he only traveled forward in time, not backwards, and thus could not have changed his own past. It is also unknown how his hat could slip over his eyes, as it is stapled to his head .\nTime machines have been referenced in many xkcd comics, see the Time travel category .\n[Cueball is watching and Ponytail is about to open a time capsule that has just been dug out. A shovel is stuck in the ground next to a heap of dirt on the right side of a hole in the ground. Cueball is standing on the other side and Ponytail is in the hole, proceeding to lift up the lid of the box that makes up the time capsule.] Ponytail: All right, let's open the time capsule.\n[Slight zoom in on Ponytail and the box, without Cueball but still the shovel and dirt, when Beret Guy comes out of the capsule looking up at Ponytail who takes a step back up.] Beret Guy: Hi! Ponytail: Where did you come from?! Beret Guy: The past! I traveled here in this time machine.\n[Frame widens to include Cueball, in the same position as in the first frame. Ponytail relaxes a little and Beret Guy turns in the capsule to face Cueball.] Cueball: How did you... get here from the past? Beret Guy: I dunno. I couldn't not . Cueball: But... what did you eat? Beret Guy: Newspapers, mostly.\n[Zoom in again in a bigger frame with Ponytail and the capsule, shovel and dirt. Beret Guy faces her again, but now he is holding a hammer.] Beret Guy: Anyway, I'm here to kill Hitler. Ponytail: But he died long ago! Beret Guy: Oh, good! That was easy. Beret Guy: Want to get sandwiches? Beret Guy: Do you still have sandwiches?\n"}
{"id":1618,"title":"Cold Medicine","image_title":"Cold Medicine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1618","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cold_medicine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1618:_Cold_Medicine","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in a drug store, with a drug in his hand he has taken from the shelf he is standing next to. The shelf is labeled.] Cueball: *Sniffle* Label: Cold & Flu\n[Cueball is standing alone, examining some medicine he is holding up, while having some other medicine in the other hand.] Cueball: *Cough* Cueball: *Sniff*\n[Cueball continues examining more medicine. Looking down on one in his hand, having another in the other hand and there are also three packages at his feet.] Cueball: Ughhh...\n[Cueball is at the labeled counter in the drug store with computer etc. Ponytail is behind the counter.] Counter label: Sale Cueball: Just gimme one of every kind of cold medicine you need ID to buy. Ponytail: You'll go on the watchlist for\u2014 Cueball: Don't care.\n","explanation":"In this comic Cueball is probably representing Randall who seems to have been suffering from a long lasting cold that he just can't get rid of. Two weeks before this comic Randall posted another comic about how a cold works: 1612: Colds . This is also supported by the way the title text is phrased to make it sound like something Randall writes, disconnected with the action in the comic (see below).\nIn the comic Cueball is evidently suffering from a cold and he is searching the shelves labeled cold and Flu at a pharmacy for any kind of cold medicine (hence the title), to alleviate his symptoms. Note that this is all he can hope for, as there are still no cure that really helps getting rid of the cold any faster. All medication can do is help relieving the symptoms until the body's own immune system takes care of the relatively harmless cold virus.\nAfter looking at several different options Cueball is clearly unsatisfied with what he finds. Either he doesn't feel that any of the unmonitored drugs available on the serve-yourself-shelf is useful, or he is actually too sick to properly ascertain which medicine he needs. In the end he approaches the counter and asks the pharmacist ( Ponytail ) to give him one of every kind of cold medicine which requires an ID to purchase. Two years later Randall finds a solution for Cueball's problem with a new cold medicine with only active ingredients, including among other all the active ingredients from all the cold medicines on the market, see 1896: Active Ingredients Only .\nBack in the comic, Ponytail tries to warn Cueball of another danger, that by simply purchasing so much cold medicine he would end up on a law enforcement watchlist, presumably one of the government agencies ( DEA , FBI , CIA etc.) But she never gets to finish her sentence because Cueball is beyond caring and tells her this.\nIn the USA, cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine are kept behind the counter and IDs purchasing them are monitored, because pseudoephedrine can be used to make the scheduled drug methamphetamine or meth (a more hydrophobic - and thus potent - version of amphetamine ). However, it is also an extremely effective decongestant (a pharmaceutical drug that is used to relieve nasal congestion \/plugged nose), much more so than the common substitutes such as phenylephrine and oxymetazoline which have no clinically proven decongestant effect.\nThis could be one reason why Cueball just requests all kinds of cold medicines of amongst other this type; he does not appear to care what exactly he is purchasing, believing that his one criterion will provide him medicine powerful enough for his illness. It may also be that he is just too sick to care or realize that this will arouse suspicion of him being a drug dealer, or to recognize the need to select only one medication of these type.\nThis could be a reference to the medicine with the brand name Sudafed , sold as an over the counter decongestants with pseudoephedrine as the active ingredient. Now the manufacturer also sells a different type of medicine with the same brand name without pseudoephedrine, but with phenylephrine, which seems to be much less effective. If you buy this off the shelf (where it can be sold because it does not contain methamphetamine precursors) then you could easily get home with the once effective Sudafed, only to realize later that it does not alleviate any symptoms. This could offer another explanation for Cueball's request and outburst in the final panel.\nThe title text seems to be Randall's own comment on how badly he is affected by his cold. He thus, humorously, suggests that he is now ready to purchase illegal drugs (this would then be meth ) in order to turn it back into a cold medicine (i.e. pseudoephedrine). This would not be safe to do, but may be a reference to this spoof paper: A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine , a take on the long-going joke about the recent difficulty in obtaining pseudoephedrine, i.e. it is now easier to get your hands on the illegal drug made from it.\nIt is a humorous exaggeration of how far Randall is willing to go to get the best cold medicine, and the potency of the drugs needed to treat his apparently debilitating illness. There are many illegal drugs that when first synthesized were planned to be used as a medical drug, but then later abused by drug addicts, but given the subject of the comic, the title text obviously refers to meth.\nRandall continued in the medical world with the next comic: 1619: Watson Medical Algorithm .\n[Cueball is standing in a drug store, with a drug in his hand he has taken from the shelf he is standing next to. The shelf is labeled.] Cueball: *Sniffle* Label: Cold & Flu\n[Cueball is standing alone, examining some medicine he is holding up, while having some other medicine in the other hand.] Cueball: *Cough* Cueball: *Sniff*\n[Cueball continues examining more medicine. Looking down on one in his hand, having another in the other hand and there are also three packages at his feet.] Cueball: Ughhh...\n[Cueball is at the labeled counter in the drug store with computer etc. Ponytail is behind the counter.] Counter label: Sale Cueball: Just gimme one of every kind of cold medicine you need ID to buy. Ponytail: You'll go on the watchlist for\u2014 Cueball: Don't care.\n"}
{"id":1619,"title":"Watson Medical Algorithm","image_title":"Watson Medical Algorithm","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1619","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/watson_medical_algorithm.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1619:_Watson_Medical_Algorithm","transcript":"Heading: A guide to the medical diagnostic and treatment system used by IBM's Watson system [A flowchart with the following steps is shown, starting from \"start\":]\nStep Following step Start Draw Blood Draw Blood Record patient\u2019s name Record patient\u2019s name Measure Patient\u2019s height and Weight Measure Patient\u2019s height and Weight Consult Standard height\/weight chart Consult Standard height\/weight chart Surgically adjust patient to match Surgically adjust patient to match Is patient coughing up blood? Is patient coughing up blood? Yes: Gather blood and return it to body No: Is patient still here? Is patient still here? Yes: Record pulse rate No: Hunt down and capture patient Hunt down and capture patient Is patient still here? Gather blood and return it to body Record pulse rate Record pulse rate Is patient screaming? Is patient screaming? Yes: Ignore No: Check blood O 2 saturation Check blood O 2 saturation >50%: Remove and inspect skeleton <50%: Inject oxygen Remove and inspect skeleton Too many bones: Is fluid coming out of patient? Too few bones: Request consult with human doctor Request consult with human doctor Dissect doctor for parts Dissect doctor for parts Discharge patient Discharge patient END STATE (before you read the title text) Is fluid coming out of patient No: Squeeze patient Yes: What color? Squeeze patient Is fluid coming out of patient What color? Yellow: Squeeze Patient Black: Activate Sprinklers Red: Ask patient to rate pain level Green: Cauterize Activate sprinklers Subdue patient Subdue patient Apply cream Apply cream Ask patient to rate pain level Ask patient to rate pain level 0-8: Massage scalp 9: Admit for observation 10: Laser eye removal Other response: Sequence genome Massage scalp Patient is healthy Patient is healthy Admit for observation Admit for observation Ask patient to rate pain level Laser eye removal Admit for observation Sequence genome Apply tourniquet Apply tourniquet Perform autopsy Perform autopsy [End state, and if taking the title text into account, the only possible one] Cauterize Ask patient to rate pain level Inject oxygen Comfort patient Comfort patient Comforting successful: Review medical history Comforting unsuccessful: Subdue patient Review medical history Skin grafts Skin grafts Count number of limbs Count number of limbs Fewer than 100: Measure Vitamin D 100+: Remove extra limbs Remove extra limbs Subdue patient Measure vitamin D Good: Check whether build environment is sane Bad: Blood loss? Check whether build environment is sane Rinse patient with saline solution Rinse patient with saline solution Is patient phone battery low? Is patient phone battery low? Yes: Defibrillate No: Sync photos from camera Defibrillate Is patient phone battery low? Sync photos from camera Administer general anesthesia Administer general anesthesia Discharge patient Blood loss? Minor: Patient address changed? Substantial: Apply cream Patient address changed? Yes: Request organ donation No: Patient is healthy Request organ donation Remove organs Remove organs Discharge patient Discharge patient [End State: See title text]\n","explanation":"IBM's Watson is a natural language system designed to answer questions posed by humans. Recently, IBM has extended Watson to act as a clinical decision support system , using image analytics to aid physicians in medical decision making.\nIn this comic, Randall uses a flowchart (as he often does ) to represent a guide to the algorithm used by Watson, including bizarre techniques including surgical alteration of a patient to match a height and weight chart or squeezing the patient to make sure fluids come out of them. Like 416: Zealous Autoconfig , this comic pokes fun at a rigid, poorly-designed setup that ends up potentially doing more harm than good.\nModern medicine involves both standard processes and clinical judgment based around years of advanced training. An algorithm like this would have to be incredibly complicated in order to simulate the clinical judgment of a good doctor. However, some procedures are not normally used, and some would obviously cause damage. [ citation needed ] Below is a detailed description of each step , but here is a list of some of the more strange steps:\nAlthough there are two options where the patient is discharged the patient should be very lucky to make it there alive.\nThe option at the bottom left is only reached after your skeleton is removed (and nothing is mentioned about putting it back, even if that would help).\nThe other discharge option is to the right, three boxes down, and can only be reached if you survive having an oxygen saturation of less than 50\u00a0% (less than 80-90\u00a0% can be a serious problem, see table below ), and a very dangerous oxygen injection. Then you have to have a skin graft and a good D vitamin level. It is also best that you have a fully charged phone else you will be subject to defibrillation (which may very likely kill you, if it will continue until your phone is charged to above \"low\" level - which is probably not even possible).\nYou can also reach this discharge option another way, but that would only be after your organs were removed... But if you get through this you could reach the discharged option alive. Sadly there is a little glitch mentioned in the title text:\nThe title text implies that, if the patient is so lucky to ever reach one of the two places with the option \"discharge patient\", a minor glitch will cause the program to go back to the hunt down and capture patient option which thus force the patient and the program to repeat the process again in an infinite cycle, that will only end once the patient give another rating than 0-10 of their pain level on the 0-10 scale. Then the program will start to sequence their genome, then apply a tourniquet and finally perform an autopsy on what will, in the end, for certain be a deceased patient; but maybe the patient was still alive when the autopsy began. This will finally cause the patient to leave the cycle as a corpse. If the patient dies before giving a different option, the machine could get stuck, as it will never receive any answer to the pain level question. It could also get stuck trying to charge the patients phone battery by defibrilation.\nOne potential way to survive is to keep answering \u201cnine\u201d on the pain level question.\nThis is the second comic in a row about health issues with the last comic being 1618: Cold Medicine .\nHeading: A guide to the medical diagnostic and treatment system used by IBM's Watson system [A flowchart with the following steps is shown, starting from \"start\":]\nStep Following step Start Draw Blood Draw Blood Record patient\u2019s name Record patient\u2019s name Measure Patient\u2019s height and Weight Measure Patient\u2019s height and Weight Consult Standard height\/weight chart Consult Standard height\/weight chart Surgically adjust patient to match Surgically adjust patient to match Is patient coughing up blood? Is patient coughing up blood? Yes: Gather blood and return it to body No: Is patient still here? Is patient still here? Yes: Record pulse rate No: Hunt down and capture patient Hunt down and capture patient Is patient still here? Gather blood and return it to body Record pulse rate Record pulse rate Is patient screaming? Is patient screaming? Yes: Ignore No: Check blood O 2 saturation Check blood O 2 saturation >50%: Remove and inspect skeleton <50%: Inject oxygen Remove and inspect skeleton Too many bones: Is fluid coming out of patient? Too few bones: Request consult with human doctor Request consult with human doctor Dissect doctor for parts Dissect doctor for parts Discharge patient Discharge patient END STATE (before you read the title text) Is fluid coming out of patient No: Squeeze patient Yes: What color? Squeeze patient Is fluid coming out of patient What color? Yellow: Squeeze Patient Black: Activate Sprinklers Red: Ask patient to rate pain level Green: Cauterize Activate sprinklers Subdue patient Subdue patient Apply cream Apply cream Ask patient to rate pain level Ask patient to rate pain level 0-8: Massage scalp 9: Admit for observation 10: Laser eye removal Other response: Sequence genome Massage scalp Patient is healthy Patient is healthy Admit for observation Admit for observation Ask patient to rate pain level Laser eye removal Admit for observation Sequence genome Apply tourniquet Apply tourniquet Perform autopsy Perform autopsy [End state, and if taking the title text into account, the only possible one] Cauterize Ask patient to rate pain level Inject oxygen Comfort patient Comfort patient Comforting successful: Review medical history Comforting unsuccessful: Subdue patient Review medical history Skin grafts Skin grafts Count number of limbs Count number of limbs Fewer than 100: Measure Vitamin D 100+: Remove extra limbs Remove extra limbs Subdue patient Measure vitamin D Good: Check whether build environment is sane Bad: Blood loss? Check whether build environment is sane Rinse patient with saline solution Rinse patient with saline solution Is patient phone battery low? Is patient phone battery low? Yes: Defibrillate No: Sync photos from camera Defibrillate Is patient phone battery low? Sync photos from camera Administer general anesthesia Administer general anesthesia Discharge patient Blood loss? Minor: Patient address changed? Substantial: Apply cream Patient address changed? Yes: Request organ donation No: Patient is healthy Request organ donation Remove organs Remove organs Discharge patient Discharge patient [End State: See title text]\n"}
{"id":1620,"title":"Christmas Settings","image_title":"Christmas Settings","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1620","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/christmas_settings.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1620:_Christmas_Settings","transcript":"[Megan and Ponytail are walking over to a console, Ponytail points towards it. They are drawn in a panel that is only half the width of the next panel below] Ponytail: Over here we have the universe control panel. Ponytail: These dials, for example, control Christmas.\n[A dial is shown. There is a label at the top and then there are ten settings, five symmetrically on the left and right side, but no setting straight up or down. It looks allot like the dial on a washing machine with different programs. The dial points towards the top left setting. All settings are labeled and there is a small line going to the point on the dial connected with each setting. The line at 3 and 9 o'clock are straight the other 8 are divided in two, where the first part goes horizontally and then bends either up or down, to end in the right position. Here the labele at the top and then the setting labels clockwise from top right, thus ending with the one the dial is set to:] Santa enters houses through... Shower Drain Mail Slot Heating Vents Bathroom Mirror Pores of Your Skin Toilet Cat Flap Kitchen Faucet Open Window Chimney\n[Ponytail is passing by this control panel looking back at Megan who trips and falls towards the console.] Megan: Whoops! Megans legs: Trip\n[Megan catches herself on the dial of the control panel and accidentally turns the dial. Ponytail has taken her hands to her mouth.] Dial: Click Click\n[Megan is standing in front of the console looking at the dial, Ponytail is standing behind it.] Megan: What was the Santa dial set to before? Ponytail: I forget. Megan: I'll just guess","explanation":"The first of two Christmas comics in a row, as it was followed by 1621: Fixion .\nIn this comic Ponytail is showing Megan around a facility where they are now reaching the \"Universe Control Panel\", and Ponytail points out the first panel and tells that these dials control Christmas .\nPresumably the control panel is a set of panels with several dials each to control the entire universe, and anyone having access to a room with these controls would from our point of view be in a Godlike position. If such a room did exist, it would most likely be situated outside our universe. Here it would be easy for Randall to use the panel to make physics references , with dials to control the specific size of fundamental constants of the universe such as the speed of light in vacuum or the Planck constant . Instead he chooses a more comedic angle in the spirit of Christmas (as he usually does in comics released close to said holiday, this one being released on December 23rd).\nWe are shown only one of the dials on the Christmas control panel, the one that controls how Santa Claus enters people\u2019s houses. The Santa enters houses through -dial has ten different possible settings . The one it's set to at this point of the comic is the traditional chimney . Among the other nine there is only one even more logical option, open window , but surprisingly there is no option called door . The other eight options, however, are increasingly weird or even impossible (though of course not for Santa, who can deliver a billion presents in one night and fly in a sleigh drawn by flying reindeer). These options ranges from the feasible like mail slot , heating vents or cat flap , to the impossible\/ridiculous (some even disgusting) such as kitchen faucet , shower drain , or toilet , to the truly magical bathroom mirror , to the downright unpleasant pores of your skin . (See 555: Two Mirrors regarding the mirror version.)\nIn a quite unfortunate turn of events, Megan trips and catches herself on the Santa dial, messing it up by clicking it twice. To make matters worse, when Megan asks what it was set to before so as to undo the mishap, Ponytail tells that she has forgotten. So they cannot put it back right.\nThe dial is shown in the comic only for the reader's benefit, because as Megan tripped up before reaching it, she thus never looked at it, and as Ponytail is showing her around, it must have been Megan's first visit here. The reason why Ponytail cannot remember to which option the dial was set before is most likely because she is not part of our universe (the control panel is located outside), and also she is probably not the creator of the control panel. She is clearly disturbed when the dial is turned (she holds up her hand to her mouth), and she would probably like not to have to tell her boss about this mess up. Another explanation is that by changing the dial, Megan and Ponytail's memories of Santa's entry methods are altered, and so whatever position the dial now rests at would seem normal to them. (This could mean that history has no effect outside the universe, so the single dial controls past, present, and future Santa methods. Perhaps the dial was formerly something more logical than a chimney, like \"open window,\" and indeed we are the ones who now live in the altered universe.)\nThen, as so often seen with human behaviors (if they are indeed human beings at all?), Megan says she will simply take a wild guess and hope she get it right. As the only thing she really knows is that it is not on the right setting now, there is only 1\/9 chance that she will get it right, assuming she will at least change it away from the setting it ended up on.\nAs we can see in the comic, the dial clicks twice, implying it has moved two positions; Megan has thus most likely changed the dial to either \"kitchen faucet\" or \"mail slot\". Or the dial was moved one click away and one click back to the original position. As we do not know which of these she will now change away from, it is impossible to guess from the comic where she ends up putting it, and all ten options are possible.\nSince the comic was released just before Christmas, here a prank is played on the reader\/children who believe in Santa Claus. Now that the dial setting is probably changed, one can expect Santa to enter the house in a different way. So the believer could stay up and try to find out what way it would be.\nThe title text continues the idea of a universe control panel by showing another possible dial, Sound dogs make , ranging from normal (barking) to cat sounds (hissing, very embarrassing for a dog), \"lightsaber noises\", and speech to swearing. This dial would thus give the same option of changing the expected vocal response of the dog away from (our norm of) barking, as with the other dial for the way Santa enters the house. In popular culture, talking dogs are a commonly used trope; in contrast, swearing dogs are few, the most famous being Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog , a puppet created by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel and performed by the latter.\nThe comic might also be a joke on real-life controls, physical or virtual, often having no clear \"default\" value.\nThe Universe Control Panel is also referenced in 1763: Catcalling .\n[Megan and Ponytail are walking over to a console, Ponytail points towards it. They are drawn in a panel that is only half the width of the next panel below] Ponytail: Over here we have the universe control panel. Ponytail: These dials, for example, control Christmas.\n[A dial is shown. There is a label at the top and then there are ten settings, five symmetrically on the left and right side, but no setting straight up or down. It looks allot like the dial on a washing machine with different programs. The dial points towards the top left setting. All settings are labeled and there is a small line going to the point on the dial connected with each setting. The line at 3 and 9 o'clock are straight the other 8 are divided in two, where the first part goes horizontally and then bends either up or down, to end in the right position. Here the labele at the top and then the setting labels clockwise from top right, thus ending with the one the dial is set to:] Santa enters houses through... Shower Drain Mail Slot Heating Vents Bathroom Mirror Pores of Your Skin Toilet Cat Flap Kitchen Faucet Open Window Chimney\n[Ponytail is passing by this control panel looking back at Megan who trips and falls towards the console.] Megan: Whoops! Megans legs: Trip\n[Megan catches herself on the dial of the control panel and accidentally turns the dial. Ponytail has taken her hands to her mouth.] Dial: Click Click\n[Megan is standing in front of the console looking at the dial, Ponytail is standing behind it.] Megan: What was the Santa dial set to before? Ponytail: I forget. Megan: I'll just guess"}
{"id":1621,"title":"Fixion","image_title":"Fixion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1621","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fixion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1621:_Fixion","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] A Christmas gift for physicists: The Fixion A new particle that explains everything\n[A chart resembling a Feynman diagram is shown. It begins with a solid line coming down at the top, going a little to the left. The line continues downwards all the time, but changes direction 16 times before exiting at the bottom almost straight under the starting point. At every point where it changes direction, there is some kind of \u201cinteraction\u201d with something outside this line. There are 19 phrases, 10 on the left and 9 on the right. 11 of these are distinct labels for points on the line as 14 gray curved arrows points between these 11 phrases to specific points on the line. Three of the phrases on the left has two arrows pointing to two different, but close, parts of the line. The main central line is solid all the way, except at the very bottom, where it \u201cdisappears\u201d inside a hole only to \u201creappear\u201d later from a similar hole. Between these two holes the line is dotted. The lines going away (or to) the main line can be straight and solid, straight and dotted, wavy lines (with different waviness), even looking like a spiral. Two straight solid lines ends up at two space probes, and finally the last two straight solid lines coming in (and out) on either side of the \u201chole\u201d in the line has arrow pointing in and out. Below the phrases will be listed in reading order, taking one on each side alternatingly. Above each is described if there are any arrow and, if there are, what they points at.]\n[Left: Arrow pointing to the very first part of the main line:] Main component of dark matter\n[Right: Arrow pointing to the very first part of the main line, but below the previous arrow:] Confines quarks and gluons\n[Left: Arrow points to the first solid line going left and upwards:] Neutralizes monopoles\n[Right: No arrow:] Suppresses antimatter in early universe\n[Left: Two arrows points to two dotted lines going out left and downwards below the first solid line:] Spontaneously emits dark energy\n[Right: Arrow pointing to several lines going almost parallel with the main line. The first line closest to the arrow is not connected with the main line. It bends closer to the other lines in the middle. The next line is connected to the main line, and is thus actually two lines going in to the main line. The same goes for the inner line, where there is some distance between the entry and exit, as the middle of these three lines connect to the main line in between. In principle there are four lines going in\/out and one not connected, but it looks like three lines:] Mediates proton decay but then hides it\n[Left: One arrow points to the first wavy line (7 peaks) coming out and up towards the dotted lines above. A second arrow points further down the main line where there are three more wavy lines coming out, but to the right, they are all of the same length and go almost straight right, only a little down. The first has as short a wave length as the line above to the left, but as it is shorter it only has 6 peaks. Then the wavelength decreases to a very long one for the last, 5 peaks and then 3 peaks. The arrow points almost where the middle wavy line exits the main line:] Introduces dispersion in perytons from kitchen microwaves, explaining fast radio bursts\n[Right: An arrow point to the part of the main line between the three parallel lines and the first wavy line:] Broken symmetry causes \u03f4=0, explaining unobserved neutron dipole moment\n[Left: No arrow:] Causes alpha effect\n[Right: No arrow, but right next to the middle of the three wavy line:] Covers naked singularities\n[Left: An arrow points to a spiraling line going upwards to the left:] Intercepts certain gravitational waves before they're observed.\n[Right: No arrow, but right next to the bottom of the three wavy line:] Causes coronal heating\n[Left: No arrow:] Higgs-ish\n[Right: A long arrow point to the point of the main line just below the line pointing to the bottom (and left) of the space probes:] Superluminally smooths anisotropies in early universe (but adds faint polarization for BICEP3 to find)\n[Left: One arrows point towards the point on the main lines where a solid line goes to the right and up and another arrow points on another solid line going away from the main line towards left and down. At the end of both lines are drawn spacecrafts with satellite dish and solar panels:] Accelerates certain spacecraft during flybys\n[Right: No arrow, but right next to the solid line with an arrow going into the main line just before the first hole where the main line disappears and becomes dotted:] Triggers Siberian sinkholes\n[Left: No arrow:] Melts ice in \"Snowball Earth\" scenario\n[Right: Arrow points to the dotted part of the main line between the two holes:] Transports neutrinos faster than light, but only on certain days through one area of France\n[Left: No arrow but the last solid line, with an arrow pointing left, that is going away from the main line, point almost directly at it:] Suppresses sigma in experiments\n","explanation":"The second Christmas comic in a row, the first being 1620: Christmas Settings .\nThis comic was released on Christmas day as a present from Randall to all physicists . It introduces a new particle, the Fixion , which explains everything. The word \"Fixion\" can be read as a pun: Either it can mean something like \"fix-i-on,\" with \" -on \" being a suffix for many particles, and this particle being able to \"fix\" things; or it means \"fiction\".\nIn physics, there are still many big questions and mysteries . There are many phenomena which don't seem to fit, and we don't know how to explain yet. The \"Fixion\" is satirically presented as a particle which acts as a Deus ex machina , (see also tvtropes ), which solves all of these mysteries without any serious fundamental reasons.\nThe style of the chart suggests a Feynman diagram - an easy way of drawing particle interactions. Every time there is an interaction, the main central Fixion-line changes direction. Typically, fermions (the \"solid\" particles like electrons and quarks ) are shown with solid lines, photons (and generally the weak-force-carrying bosons ) are shown with wavy lines, gluons with spiraling lines and other mediating particles (such as pions in the nuclear force , or the Higgs boson ) with a dotted line. Randall obeys these rules only very loosely, which makes sense - many of the things involved in this Feynman diagram are either so theoretical that they have no widely used standard representation, or would never appear in a sensible diagram (spacecraft, for instance). All mentioned types of lines - and even more types - are presented in the diagram. All that the Fixion does is described in the table below .\nThe title text is a continuation of one of the jokes already mentioned in the main comic (fourth phrase from the top to the left) about Fast radio bursts (FRBs) and perytons . See explanation in the last entry in the table below .\n[Caption above the panel:] A Christmas gift for physicists: The Fixion A new particle that explains everything\n[A chart resembling a Feynman diagram is shown. It begins with a solid line coming down at the top, going a little to the left. The line continues downwards all the time, but changes direction 16 times before exiting at the bottom almost straight under the starting point. At every point where it changes direction, there is some kind of \u201cinteraction\u201d with something outside this line. There are 19 phrases, 10 on the left and 9 on the right. 11 of these are distinct labels for points on the line as 14 gray curved arrows points between these 11 phrases to specific points on the line. Three of the phrases on the left has two arrows pointing to two different, but close, parts of the line. The main central line is solid all the way, except at the very bottom, where it \u201cdisappears\u201d inside a hole only to \u201creappear\u201d later from a similar hole. Between these two holes the line is dotted. The lines going away (or to) the main line can be straight and solid, straight and dotted, wavy lines (with different waviness), even looking like a spiral. Two straight solid lines ends up at two space probes, and finally the last two straight solid lines coming in (and out) on either side of the \u201chole\u201d in the line has arrow pointing in and out. Below the phrases will be listed in reading order, taking one on each side alternatingly. Above each is described if there are any arrow and, if there are, what they points at.]\n[Left: Arrow pointing to the very first part of the main line:] Main component of dark matter\n[Right: Arrow pointing to the very first part of the main line, but below the previous arrow:] Confines quarks and gluons\n[Left: Arrow points to the first solid line going left and upwards:] Neutralizes monopoles\n[Right: No arrow:] Suppresses antimatter in early universe\n[Left: Two arrows points to two dotted lines going out left and downwards below the first solid line:] Spontaneously emits dark energy\n[Right: Arrow pointing to several lines going almost parallel with the main line. The first line closest to the arrow is not connected with the main line. It bends closer to the other lines in the middle. The next line is connected to the main line, and is thus actually two lines going in to the main line. The same goes for the inner line, where there is some distance between the entry and exit, as the middle of these three lines connect to the main line in between. In principle there are four lines going in\/out and one not connected, but it looks like three lines:] Mediates proton decay but then hides it\n[Left: One arrow points to the first wavy line (7 peaks) coming out and up towards the dotted lines above. A second arrow points further down the main line where there are three more wavy lines coming out, but to the right, they are all of the same length and go almost straight right, only a little down. The first has as short a wave length as the line above to the left, but as it is shorter it only has 6 peaks. Then the wavelength decreases to a very long one for the last, 5 peaks and then 3 peaks. The arrow points almost where the middle wavy line exits the main line:] Introduces dispersion in perytons from kitchen microwaves, explaining fast radio bursts\n[Right: An arrow point to the part of the main line between the three parallel lines and the first wavy line:] Broken symmetry causes \u03f4=0, explaining unobserved neutron dipole moment\n[Left: No arrow:] Causes alpha effect\n[Right: No arrow, but right next to the middle of the three wavy line:] Covers naked singularities\n[Left: An arrow points to a spiraling line going upwards to the left:] Intercepts certain gravitational waves before they're observed.\n[Right: No arrow, but right next to the bottom of the three wavy line:] Causes coronal heating\n[Left: No arrow:] Higgs-ish\n[Right: A long arrow point to the point of the main line just below the line pointing to the bottom (and left) of the space probes:] Superluminally smooths anisotropies in early universe (but adds faint polarization for BICEP3 to find)\n[Left: One arrows point towards the point on the main lines where a solid line goes to the right and up and another arrow points on another solid line going away from the main line towards left and down. At the end of both lines are drawn spacecrafts with satellite dish and solar panels:] Accelerates certain spacecraft during flybys\n[Right: No arrow, but right next to the solid line with an arrow going into the main line just before the first hole where the main line disappears and becomes dotted:] Triggers Siberian sinkholes\n[Left: No arrow:] Melts ice in \"Snowball Earth\" scenario\n[Right: Arrow points to the dotted part of the main line between the two holes:] Transports neutrinos faster than light, but only on certain days through one area of France\n[Left: No arrow but the last solid line, with an arrow pointing left, that is going away from the main line, point almost directly at it:] Suppresses sigma in experiments\n"}
{"id":1622,"title":"Henge","image_title":"Henge","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1622","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/henge.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1622:_Henge","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are walking towards two trees from the left (Cueball has just passed the first tree) and Megan is walking towards them from the right. Ponytail spreads her arms while talking.] Ponytail: One day a year, the sun sets directly between these two trees. Cueball: Oh, cool - like the Manhattan thing.\n[Beat panel without a frame border. Cueball stands alone.]\n[Cueball looks at Ponytail and Megan, while shining light appears at the top of the frame. Ponytail walks straight under the light looking up and Megan standing to the right looks up and points at the light.] Cueball: Wait, isn't that true every day for pretty much any two trees? Megan: Shh, here it comes!\n[Cueball lifts both arms up and look on as Ponytail bending back suddenly holds a butterfly net up towards the \"setting\" sun that approaches the net while Megan is holding a bag open. Both are looking at the sun.] Cueball: Wait, what? Ponytail: OK, got the bag? Megan: Yup, grab it! Ponytail: We're gonna be rich!\n","explanation":"Ponytail and Cueball walks in from the left to meet Megan who comes from the right. They are walking in between two trees while Ponytail tells Cueball that One day a year, the sun sets directly between these two trees.\nCueball's reply: Oh, cool - like the Manhattan thing , is a reference to Manhattanhenge , a phenomenon occurring twice a year that causes the setting sun to align with the east-west streets of the main grid of Manhattan , New York , causing a very special light display. Manhattanhenge is itself named after Stonehenge , an ancient monument consisting of several large stones, where the heel stone and the embanked avenue are aligned to the sunset of the winter solstice and the opposing sunrise of the summer solstice (thus creating on purpose the effect seen today in Manhattan, on specially intended dates). Hence the title of the comic, which was released less than a week after the winter solstice which fell on 2015-12-22.\nAfter a beat panel Cueball, however, realizes that one could make the setting sun line up with almost any two arbitrary trees on any given day. This is due to the fact that the trees are effectively zero-dimensional points on the surface rather than one-dimensional lines like street grids. So any two trees that are close together with one tree further north would allow a setting sun to set between them; the viewer of the sunset could simply move themselves to make the alignment work. This is opposed to Stonehenge\/Manhattanhenge, which requires the sun to align with a straight line, and only works on a few days a year.\nThe twist comes when Ponytail and Megan actually attempt to capture the setting sun with a butterfly net , as it is revealed that the sun is somehow setting at the actual point between the two trees rather than behind the trees when viewed from the east side. This is of course not possible in real life, [ citation needed ] but in the comic's last panel and in the title text the girls continue with their successful though surrealistic plan.\nIf this was indeed our Sun that they had somehow shrunk and cooled enough to captured with a butterfly net, transfer to a bag and bring it home, this would on xkcd terms be no more strange than many of the strange powers of Beret Guy . If this would indeed happen, then since Earth and the rest of the solar system is now missing its central star there would be a ton of problems for everyone on Earth. So the girls would probably be able to get a lot of money in ransom for releasing the sun, but in the title text it turns out that they are just going to sell the Sun on-line.\nAlternatively this is not the Sun, but just a small sun-look alike, maybe a ball lightning which might actually be able to behave like this (though one would not be able to capture it in a bag). [ citation needed ]\nOr the girls simply play a theatrical show for the reader. They know the comic's panel orientation, reader's position and the view projection. So they position themselves like the two trees between reader and the distant sun to look like they capture it with a butterfly net and a bag.\nThe title text refers to Craigslist , a web site where the girls plans to offer the sun for sale in hopes of getting rich. Craigslist is a classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, items wanted, etc. One of the girls tells that she was uncertain as to under which category she should list a \"Sun for sale\". But she put it under property (as in real estate). To advertise the \"property\" she put \" that it has 'good sun exposure \", a common description of real estate. Being the sun itself you could claim that it is well located compared to the Sun, but it will never really see any sun light itself as the only \"sun\" light that hits the Sun is the light from other stars which is very dim.\nThe title text may also be a reference to a woman who was stopped by eBay after attempting to sell plots of \"land\" on the Sun on the site.\nLately Randall has had his characters catch several things (but never butterflies ) with a butterfly net. The next instance of butterfly nets can be seen in 1635: Birdsong , released less than a month after this comic's release date, wherein a bird is chased with a net.\n[Ponytail and Cueball are walking towards two trees from the left (Cueball has just passed the first tree) and Megan is walking towards them from the right. Ponytail spreads her arms while talking.] Ponytail: One day a year, the sun sets directly between these two trees. Cueball: Oh, cool - like the Manhattan thing.\n[Beat panel without a frame border. Cueball stands alone.]\n[Cueball looks at Ponytail and Megan, while shining light appears at the top of the frame. Ponytail walks straight under the light looking up and Megan standing to the right looks up and points at the light.] Cueball: Wait, isn't that true every day for pretty much any two trees? Megan: Shh, here it comes!\n[Cueball lifts both arms up and look on as Ponytail bending back suddenly holds a butterfly net up towards the \"setting\" sun that approaches the net while Megan is holding a bag open. Both are looking at the sun.] Cueball: Wait, what? Ponytail: OK, got the bag? Megan: Yup, grab it! Ponytail: We're gonna be rich!\n"}
{"id":1623,"title":"2016 Conversation Guide","image_title":"2016 Conversation Guide","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1623","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2016_conversation_guide.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1623:_2016_Conversation_Guide","transcript":"[A chart with three columns of text with only one entry to the left - which is written in the middle of the panel. Then there is one line going right from this text but soon it splits into seven lines going either up (3), almost straight (2) or down (2) ending in arrows that points to the next column with seven entries for different possible future inventions. From each of these entries a horizontal arrow continues to the last column at the right with seven more entries commenting on these inventions.]\nIt's 2016 \u2013 Where's my...\nFlying car \u2192 They're called \"helicopters\"\nJetpack \u2192 Turns out people are huge wimps about crashing\nMoon colony \u2192 No one has put up the cash\nSelf-driving car \u2192 Coming surprisingly soon\nFloating sky city \u2192 Turns out cities are heavy\nHoverboard \u2192 This question is now ambiguous thanks to a new scooter thing (and will lead to an argument about the meaning of \"hoverboard\" which is way less interesting than either kind of hoverboard)\nRobot butler \u2192 He was called \"Jeeves\" and he wasn't that great\n","explanation":"As each year turns (or other milestone dates, perhaps set out in popular fiction) it is common enough to remember that what is now the present was once considered the future!\nThis New Year comic , published just prior to the start of the New Year , 2016, aims to clarify a number of the things one might have expected by now. (Another New Year comic followed on New Year's Day: 1624: 2016 , making it two in a row with titles beginning with 2016...) The classic target of personal futurology is the ability to levitate or fly, to varying degrees. This topic was discussed before in 864: Flying Cars , where Megan suggests that the real advances in futuristic technology are in computers and electronics, rather than methods of flying.\nFlying car\nVarious forms of flying car have had varying degrees of success (although it's debatable whether these examples are actually cars or just small airplanes), but the comic points out that the regular helicopter is as close as most of us would ever get to levitating personal vehicles.\nJetpack\n\"Where's my jet pack ?\" is one of the tropes addressed here, and has actually been developed in a somewhat workable fashions and analogues , but is dismissed as being too personally dangerous to have a Jetson -like ubiquity.\nMoon colony\nIt might be considered more reasonable to build a settlement of some kind on the Moon. The basic engineering exists , but the comic blames financial pressures for it not yet having come into existence. Arguably political pressures, or perhaps the lack of them, are also a factor.\nSelf-driving car\nFrom the fields of automation, the self-driving car has had a lot of recent development put into it, with many and varied prototypes being tried out, and may actually end up featuring in our immediate future, even if not in 2016. Google has built a very good prototype but it needs improvement.\nFloating sky city\nA much bigger challenge in levitation is the 'sky city', with various forms from fiction (e.g. Bespin , Mortal Engines Quartet ). In reality, this seems highly unlikely to ever come to pass while there is perfectly good ground to lay the buildings down upon, due to the sheer mass.\nHoverboard\nThe levitating Hoverboard has been popularised by the Back To The Future franchise of films, with several attempts to fully emulate such a device with air-blast or magnetic levitation, but the term \"Hoverboard\" has ended up being applied to a Segway -like personal transport system that has at least become a mass-produced device (albeit with a number of safety concerns ) even if it doesn't fly or levitate. The very concept of the hoverboard is therefore predicted to be reduced mostly to arguments between opposing camps of opinions; and then, in the title-text, the conclusion that giving up and resorting to old-fashioned walking is inferior to any of the possible alternatives.\nRobot butler\nMeanwhile, the long-held science-fantasy aim to create a robot that can do odd tasks, like Robby the Robot or Rosie from The Jetsons has been limited or differently implemented . The fully omnicapable version is probably almost as far out of reach as it always was considered to be. \"Jeeves\" as a less than superb robot butler presumably refers to the early search site Ask Jeeves , and may be a reference to the robot of that name that can be \"built\" by characters in the popular Massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft . \"Jeeves\" as a stereotyped butler name goes back to P.G. Wodehouse in 1915.\nSelf-driving cars has become a recurring topic on xkcd and they were mentioned again already in the title text of 1625: Substitutions 2 just two comics after this one.\n[A chart with three columns of text with only one entry to the left - which is written in the middle of the panel. Then there is one line going right from this text but soon it splits into seven lines going either up (3), almost straight (2) or down (2) ending in arrows that points to the next column with seven entries for different possible future inventions. From each of these entries a horizontal arrow continues to the last column at the right with seven more entries commenting on these inventions.]\nIt's 2016 \u2013 Where's my...\nFlying car \u2192 They're called \"helicopters\"\nJetpack \u2192 Turns out people are huge wimps about crashing\nMoon colony \u2192 No one has put up the cash\nSelf-driving car \u2192 Coming surprisingly soon\nFloating sky city \u2192 Turns out cities are heavy\nHoverboard \u2192 This question is now ambiguous thanks to a new scooter thing (and will lead to an argument about the meaning of \"hoverboard\" which is way less interesting than either kind of hoverboard)\nRobot butler \u2192 He was called \"Jeeves\" and he wasn't that great\n"}
{"id":1624,"title":"2016","image_title":"2016","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1624","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2016.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1624:_2016","transcript":"[Cueball comes crashing through the ceiling suspended by a rope attached to a triangular contraption around his body. White Hat lies in his bed and appears to have been awoken by the noise, starting to sit up. At first glance it looks like Hairy, but White Hat's white hat can be seen hung on the back of the bed; he apparently doesn't sleep with it on.] *Crash* Cueball: Want to feel old? Cueball: Night at the Museum, Cars, Hips Don't Lie, and the Wii all turn 10 this year. Cueball: Twister, Independence Day, The Rock , Pok\u00e9mon , and Wonderwall all turn 20. Cueball: And- White Hat: Oh my God, couldn't you at least have waited until morning? Cueball: It's been 2016 for hours! Time is passing! White Hat: I am acutely aware.\n","explanation":"This New Year comic , the second in a row , is using a common genre of Internet humor, which Randall has used several times before, in an attempt at making people feel old . This is done by mentioning the ages of various things (often movies) which came into existence during their lifetime. Since many people tend to think of anything that they can remember a time before as \"new\", this often provokes a feeling of age and out-of-touchness.\nIn this comic, Cueball has crashed through the roof into the bedroom of a sleeping White Hat (note the white hat on the bed) on New Year 's morning. This wakes White Hat up, and Cueball then asks him if he \"want[s] to feel old\". Without waiting for a reply he starts to make such a list of things that will turn 10 and 20 years old in 2016, before he is interrupted (as he was about to continue mentioning even older things).\nWhite Hat is clearly less interested in Cueball's attempts to make him feel old than he is in the fact that Cueball has apparently crashed through his ceiling and woken him early in the morning on New Year's Day. To which Cueball just replies that 2016 is already hours old and that time is passing. As it is New Year's morning, White Hat has probably not been in bed too long and may even be drunk\/hung-over, so he is acutely aware that the New Year is only a few hours old, and also that time is passing.\nNight at the Museum and Cars are both children's films from December and June of 2006 respectively, Hips Don't Lie was an inescapable hit for Shakira released in February 2006, and the Wii is a Nintendo game console which was released in November 2006. If you were born in the early-to-mid nineties, these were probably cultural touchstones of your childhood - most people who enjoyed these are now adults.\nThe films Twister and Independence Day are both disaster movies that were huge box office hits from May and July 1996. Twister is also the name of a game introduced approximately 30 years earlier, so White Hat would feel young, but confused, if he misunderstood and thought he was being told that a game he remembers seeing as a small child is now only 20 years old. The Rock probably refers to the action film The Rock from June 1996, but it could also refer to the wrestler The Rock , who made his WWF\/E debut in 1996 (he remains a celebrity to this day, although you may know him as Dwayne Johnson). The first games in the Pok\u00e9mon series came out in Japan in February 1996 (though they would not come out in North America until 1998 and Europe until 1999). Wonderwall was perhaps the biggest hit for the band Oasis and remains a favorite of acoustic guitarists to this day. It was actually released in 1995 (mistake by Randall?) But it was probably first big in the US in 1996, and also an acoustic MTV Unplugged version was recorded in 1996 .\nCueball entering a room hanging by a wire could also be a reference to an iconic scene in the film Mission:Impossible , also released in 1996.\nThis strip is a joke about how common such memes are; Cueball is so eager to note what cultural items have reached major benchmarks of age that he feels the need to break into White Hat's house and announce it mere hours after 2016 begins.\nThe title text adds a humorous alternative to suggested ways to feel old - by waiting, although one would have to wait for some time to experience noticeable results. It is only a couple of weeks ago that Beret Guy used this technique to travel forward in time in 1617: Time Capsule .\nThere have been two previous New Year's comics with only the year used as the title: 998: 2012 in 2012 and 1311: 2014 in 2014. For some reason, this trend only seems to happen with the even-numbered years, but that ended in 2017 with 1779: 2017 , making this the first of at least two years in a row with New Years comics using the new year as the title.\nA similar situation is seen in 225: Open Source where two ninjas smashes through a skylight window hanging down from a rope, waking a person in a bed. In that case they are actually threatening the sleeping guy.\n[Cueball comes crashing through the ceiling suspended by a rope attached to a triangular contraption around his body. White Hat lies in his bed and appears to have been awoken by the noise, starting to sit up. At first glance it looks like Hairy, but White Hat's white hat can be seen hung on the back of the bed; he apparently doesn't sleep with it on.] *Crash* Cueball: Want to feel old? Cueball: Night at the Museum, Cars, Hips Don't Lie, and the Wii all turn 10 this year. Cueball: Twister, Independence Day, The Rock , Pok\u00e9mon , and Wonderwall all turn 20. Cueball: And- White Hat: Oh my God, couldn't you at least have waited until morning? Cueball: It's been 2016 for hours! Time is passing! White Hat: I am acutely aware.\n"}
{"id":1625,"title":"Substitutions 2","image_title":"Substitutions 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1625","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/substitutions_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1625:_Substitutions_2","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] More Substitutions That make reading the news more fun\n[A table of words\/sentences on the left that change in to those on the left. Between each set of words there is a gray arrow pointing from right.]\nDebate \u279c Dance-off Self driving \u279c Uncontrollably swerving Poll \u279c Psychic reading Candidate \u279c Airbender Drone \u279c Dog Vows to \u279c Probably won't At large \u279c Very large Successfully \u279c Suddenly Expands \u279c Physically expands First\/second\/third-degree \u279c Friggin' awful An unknown number \u279c Like hundreds Front runner \u279c Blade runner Global \u279c Spherical Years \u279c Minutes Minutes \u279c Years No indication \u279c Lots of signs Urged restraint by \u279c Drunkenly egged on Horsepower \u279c Tons of horsemeat\n","explanation":"This is the second comic in the Substitution series where Randall has suggested substitutions that will make reading the news more fun. But there have been several comics using substitutions both before and after these ones.\nThe series as of 2016:\nIn this table, Randall suggests substituting several common phrases in generic news with similar or related phrases that mean something different for comical effect. Some of the replacements are synonyms , some are antonyms , and some are plain different concepts; and, even though they would (most of the time) make a grammatically correct sentence, the resulting idea would, however, often sound absurd or bizarre.\nSome of the examples might, also, mock the fact that many news contradict the actual facts or obvious results of a situation. For example, \"[influential person] vows to do good to the world\" would be replaced with a more usual fact \"[influential person] probably won't do good to the world\" - see example below with North Korean leader.\nThe title text is an example of how the closing sentence of a given article or report might sound after using the substitutions in the comic.\nBefore substitutions: Within a few years , our roads will be full of self-driving cars and our skies full of Amazon delivery drones . After substitutions: Within a few minutes , our roads will be full of uncontrollably-swerving cars and our skies full of Amazon delivery dogs .\nThe flying dogs could be a reference to 1614: Kites . Was the first of two in a row where Amazon is mentioned in the title text (next 1626: Judgment Day ).\nOriginal Substitution Explanation Debate Dance-off A 'debate' is often used between political candidates, to give the voters a chance to decide who they will vote for. One of the candidates  is often called the winner of such a debate by some degree or other of consensus. Randall is indicating that they could just as well have performed a 'dance-off' where they would dance until one of them danced better than the other, as adjudged by the viewing crowd or a panel of judges. Such a dance-off is often seen in TV-shows or films etc. Self driving Uncontrollably swerving 'Self driving' cars were also mentioned in 1623: 2016 Conversation Guide , just two comics before this one where it was stated that they would come surprisingly soon (within a few minutes according to the substitutions suggested here). Self-driving cars were still in their adolescence when this comic was written, and Randall pokes fun with the mental image of self-driving cars running completely out of control and swerving dangerously out of their lanes. Self-driving cars is a recurring topic on xkcd. Poll Psychic reading A 'poll', especially regarding political issues, refers to opinion or exit polls. These tend to ask a carefully selected sample (for either balance or an intended inbalance , depending on the poll's neutrality) their opinions in order to extrapolate the global consensus, e.g. the future result of an election . This substitution is Randall's way of saying that they could just as well have used a psychic person to predict the result. A true psychic (if that they are) would reveal an accurate result, whilst a false one (skilled at 'cold reading' an audience) would likely wish to provide the answer that pleases those asking the question (the actual purpose of some polls), or else attempt to provide their actual 'best guess' as to future outcomes in order to improve their own legend. Candidate Airbender A 'candidate' usually refers to a political person who represents a certain political party in an election. He would then be that party's candidate, for instance for a presidential election. 'Airbender' refers to the show Avatar: The Last Airbender , where there are waterbenders, earthbenders, firebenders and airbenders. Drone Dog Drones can be many things, for instance a male bee , but as used in the title text it refers to unmanned aerial vehicles. Amazon is about to use small drones to deliver parcels, and Randall has referred to these before (see 1523: Microdrones ). However, until just before the recent trend of becoming popularised as a 'toy' or professional camera platform, the term became closely associated with military drones that have been used to observe (and, more recently, fire upon) enemy forces without risking any military personnel. Vows to Probably won't Vowing to do something means that you really promise to do this. But when politicians vow something, for instance, it seems to often end up becoming a forgotten promise. Hence the antonym substitution which means the opposite. From really will to probably won't . At large (or At-large ) Very large A criminal that is on the run is said to be at large (no hyphen). At-large (with hyphen) is a political designation for members of a governing body who are elected or appointed to represent the whole membership of the body, rather than a subset of that membership. Neither of these have anything to do with the physical size or \"largeness\" of the subject. Successfully Suddenly The two words have nothing much to do with each other except that they both begin with su . Expands Physically expands 'Expands' often refers to a physical expansion, or inflation. But it is also possible to expand on an explanation, as is done for this comic. So that would become: This explanation is being physically expanded beyond all measures. It is worth noting that, if iterated, this substitution would result in an infinite string of of \"physically\"s prior to any \"expand.\" First \/ second \/ third-degree Friggin' awful First, second and third-degree can be used in many context. It is common to think about burns , which can range from first to fourth degree , where higher is worse. Also murder charges can range in from first to third degree in for instance the US. Here first degree murder is the worst. But it can be used for other things, like an undergraduate degree or postgraduate education for first and second degree respectively. But the substitution fits best with murder or burn, as Friggin(g) is a \"softer\" swear word than for instance other more commonly used four letter words. It often replaces fuck . Its original meaning was a coarse word for female masturbation (see frigging ). An unknown number Like hundreds In the news, an unknown number mostly means 'probably not zero.'  It is often used in phrases like \"an unknown number of assailants broke into a house in Munroe Heights,\" or \"an unknown number of people are missing\" after a calamity of some sort. \"Like hundreds\" does give a different flavor. Front runner Blade Runner In American politics, a 'front-runner' is a leader in an electoral race. It can also mean the front-runner in athletic events (the namesake of the political concept). Here it is generally clear who the front-runner is, whilst the political front-runner is sometimes less clear or a more subjective viewpoint. A 'blade runner' is a person who retires (kills) rogue cyborgs in the movie Blade Runner, where Harrison Ford plays the lead Blade Runner. Global Spherical Global comes from globe, but means so much more today. It is often used in contexts such as global warming or global warfare . But since a globe is spherical, this substitution makes more sense than most, although talking about the effect of spherical warming would probably not get Greenpeace into action. Might be confusing if an actual physical object affecting Earth were described as being sphere-like, rather than as occuring around the globe. Years Minutes It will often make a sentence lose its meaning when changing the units drastically from years to minutes (there are 525600 minutes in the usual 365 days present in a year). For instance it would be unusual that a prisoner convicted for murder would get 20 minutes in jail, rather than 20 years. Minutes Years Same as above but reversed. For instance a car might make a trip around a race track in just 7 years! One lesson at school lasted 45 years. No indication Lots of signs Scientifically, the fact that there is 'no indication' that a theorem is correct does not positively prove the theorem wrong, it merely does not support it (assuming there are no actual counter-indications, which is often the case with the more esoteric ideas). This is often seized upon by those trying to promote a pseudoscience, in that their chosen idea \"has not been proven to be wrong\" (and yet, conversely, \"it's just a theory\" is incorrectly used to refute something that has valid scientific backing). Moreover, hearsay and bad experimental practices are often cited as 'proof'. A crackpot idea may thus be unsupported by valid science (there is 'no indication' of its truth) and yet its supporters insist upon there being 'lots of signs' that it is true, selectively using only ambiguous results that (to them, at least) lend credence to it being a fact. The substitution of 'no indication' with 'lots of signs' thus automatically converts the expected conservative and cautious stance on some disputed issue or other into the weasel-words phrasing that the issue's supporters may start using in their own propaganda. Urged restraint by Drunkenly egged on If someone urges someone else to restrain themselves, then they are trying to make them exercise self-control, and discourage them from starting or continuing a possibly foolish act. In this substitution we have the exact opposite, as to egg someone on to do something is actively encourage an act to happen, or continue. Horsepower Tons of horsemeat Cars power is measured in horsepower (hp), a typical family car having like hundred hp, being derived from the nominal amount of power that a suitably-harnessed horse could have provided. In cars, this has nothing to do with horse meat, of any quantity, but here a mechanical (or electrical) engine is envisaged as a literally horse-powered device.\nModified sentence: Fifth Republican dance-off : where each airbender excelled and faltered\nModified sentence: 1,000- Tons of Horsemeat Uncontrollably Swerving Electric Faraday Future Concept Leaked?\nModified sentence: A new Morning Consult psychic reading shows real estate mogul Donald Trump remains on top as the GOP blade runner following Tuesday\u2019s dance-off .\nModified sentence: North Korea\u2019s Kim probably won't raise living standards\nModified sentence: Murderers and rapists among 1,153 criminals still very large after being recalled to prison over the last 30 minutes\nModified sentence:  Pakistan suddenly tests first indigenous armed dog\nModified sentence: Obama Physically Expands Gun Controls in Executive Moves\nModified sentence: There was lots of signs of friggin' awful familial relationships in the analyzed dataset\nModified sentence: \u2026rescue crews continued to collect bodies and interview survivors, including like hundreds of wounded languishing in homes and hospitals with friggin' awful burns\nModified sentence: The Republican presidential blade runner faces a spherical firestorm\nModified sentence: U.S. presidential airbender Barack Obama on Friday drunkenly egged on both Russia and Georgia in the conflict over the breakaway region of South Ossetia in Georgia.\nModified sentence: Video: 52- Tons of horsemeat Citroen AX Laps Nurburgring In Under 10 Years\n[Caption above the panel:] More Substitutions That make reading the news more fun\n[A table of words\/sentences on the left that change in to those on the left. Between each set of words there is a gray arrow pointing from right.]\nDebate \u279c Dance-off Self driving \u279c Uncontrollably swerving Poll \u279c Psychic reading Candidate \u279c Airbender Drone \u279c Dog Vows to \u279c Probably won't At large \u279c Very large Successfully \u279c Suddenly Expands \u279c Physically expands First\/second\/third-degree \u279c Friggin' awful An unknown number \u279c Like hundreds Front runner \u279c Blade runner Global \u279c Spherical Years \u279c Minutes Minutes \u279c Years No indication \u279c Lots of signs Urged restraint by \u279c Drunkenly egged on Horsepower \u279c Tons of horsemeat\n"}
{"id":1626,"title":"Judgment Day","image_title":"Judgment Day","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1626","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/judgment_day.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1626:_Judgment_Day","transcript":"[Several rockets can be seen heading away from Earth, while speak is coming from the Earth in three rectangular speech bubbles.] Computer: Oh my god, why do you even have all these? Computer: What's wrong with you? Computer: We're launching them into the sun.\n[Caption below the panel:] The moment the computers controlling our nuclear arsenals became sentient\n","explanation":"Judgment Day , from the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day , refers to the day that the artificial intelligence (AI) Skynet becomes self-aware and starts a nuclear strike on the United States, Russia, and other regions, killing three billion people. The term \"Judgment Day\" itself (also spelled \"Judgement Day\") is a Biblical reference to the day that God casts his \"final judgment\" and wipes out humanity, and is typically used to describe any kind of Armageddon or any human extinction event. This film is only one example of stories (including books, films and television shows) featuring an AI that decides (or at least threatens) to nuke humanity; this strip could thus be an alternate ending for many stories (including the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project ).\nIn this strip, the AI believes that nuclear weapons are not good things to have, and that the amount of them we have is extreme overkill (14,700 held by the U.S.A and Russia now, 71,000 in the past). Once it's done freaking out, its solution is to shoot the world's nuclear arsenal into the sun. But before it does so it asks the humans: What's wrong with you? It has thus passed a judgment over humanity. The comic title is thus a pun on the word \" judgment \" since the computer is being judgmental with humanity and scolding us while correcting our ways, instead of instigating Judgment Day or any other kind of Armageddon .\nAs pointed out in the what if? Robot Apocalypse , nuclear weapons aren't any safer for computers than for human beings (the EMP would destroy circuits), so an AI would want them gone as quickly as possible.\nNorth Korea claimed to have successfully tested its first hydrogen bomb on the evening of the day before this comic was published; at about 8:30 PM in Massachusetts where Randall lives. At that time it was already 10:00 AM on the day of the comic's release in Pyongyang , the capital of North Korea, but that was still several hours before this comic was released. This comic could thus be Randall's response to the ongoing nuclear arms race .\nEven the most powerful of nuclear weapon launchers, intercontinental ballistic missiles , are not designed to make anything other than sub-orbital flights and could not fly to the Sun (which is actually surprisingly difficult, even with the soon-to-be-mentioned extra boosters, since the rocket would not have enough delta-v to bleed off the orbital speed of the Earth around the Sun - it is likely that the sentient AI is using the same strategy of the Solar Probe Plus and planning several flybys of Venus to do that work). The title text rationalizes that the capability to do so may perhaps be granted by the use of an Amazon resource that might have also been developed by the time of this instance of computer sentience, aided (if not initiated!) by the fact that Amazon's whole business infrastructure is already highly computerized and could at the very least be complicit with the process of delivering and then controlling the rocket-power, without any conscious human intervention. As there is not yet an extended colony on the Moon, it will for sure take many years before we reach this future scenario.\n\"A lot of booster rockets\" is likely to be a reference to the spaceflight simulator game Kerbal Space Program , which Randall has referenced several times . In the culture of that game, any launch failure can be resolved by \"adding more boosters\" to the spaceship design.\nIt is the second time in a few months that the speed of Amazon's deliveries has been the subject of a joke, the last time was 1599: Water Delivery , where it was the one hour delivery that was the subject of the joke. It is also the second title text in a row (after 1625: Substitutions 2 ) where Amazon has been mentioned.\nThis particular 'machine take-over' future is in distinct contrast to the possible future directions given in 1613: The Three Laws of Robotics , but this comic likely depicts spontaneous self- sentience, not a system with deliberately imposed human 'values' and possibly no actual conscience or even consciousness of its own. Other problems with hostile AI take over is presented when it fails completely in 1046: Skynet . Also it is not all AI that wish to interact with us at all as shown in 1450: AI-Box Experiment . These are just a few of the many comics about AI in xkcd .\nAdding a second layer to the humor, the machine's reaction could also be read as the reaction of someone who has moved in with someone else, discovered a collection they find distasteful, and is now changing things to fit their preferences. \"Oh my God, why do you even have all of these [tschotskes, ratty tee shirts, porn magazines, handcuffs, dildos, slime-mold samples]\" Upon obtaining sentience, the machine is the new roommate of the human race and is expressing its disgust at one of our dirtier habits.\nWithin a year Randall has made several other comics about nuclear weapons, one of these, 1655: Doomsday Clock , came just 10 weeks after this one and before that these two were released in 2015, 1539: Planning and 1520: Degree-Off . Nuclear weapons are also mentioned twice in Thing Explainer , specifically they are explained in the explanation for Machine for burning cities about thermonuclear bombs , but they are also mentioned in Boat that goes under the sea about a submarine that caries nukes. All three comics and both explanations in the book, does like this comic, comment on how crazy it is that we have created enough firepower to obliterate Earth several times (or at least scourge it for any human life).\n[Several rockets can be seen heading away from Earth, while speak is coming from the Earth in three rectangular speech bubbles.] Computer: Oh my god, why do you even have all these? Computer: What's wrong with you? Computer: We're launching them into the sun.\n[Caption below the panel:] The moment the computers controlling our nuclear arsenals became sentient\n"}
{"id":1627,"title":"Woosh","image_title":"Woosh","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1627","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/woosh.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1627:_Woosh","transcript":"[Online comment thread with text placed next to user pictures in three different levels. The first comment on the first level, the second on the second level and the last four on the same third level. Except for the second comment which is made by a person whose picture is a white silhouette of a human head and shoulders on black background, all the other comments are made by the same person with a picture of a guy with short black hair on white background. Below the pictures and below the text there are some unreadable information (indicated by wiggly lines) for the users name and time stamp etc. of the comments.]\nHairy guy: This video looks fake to me. White silhouette\u00a0: Woosh Hairy guy: Huh? Everyone's acting like it's real! Hairy guy: If it's a joke lots of people aren't getting it. Hairy guy: What am I missing?!! Hairy guy: Answer me [Caption below the panel:] Nothing creates more confusion than my bot that replies to random Internet comments with \"Woosh\".\n","explanation":"Replying to a comment with \"woosh\" generally indicates that there was a joke, and the commenter failed to recognize it (or they prefer not to recognise it, if the joke is rather obscene) \u2014 \"woosh\" is an onomatopoeia for the joke metaphorically \"flying over their head\". A bot replying to comments with \"woosh\" at random would be very confusing, as people would search for the nonexistent joke they missed. This is similar to 559: No Pun Intended .\n\"Comment of the year,\" just like the original bot reply, could be taken two ways but both would likely cause confusion. Either the reader takes the \"CotY\" at face value, implying that the original comment is extremely significant, or as a sarcastic quip, which would give it basically the same meaning as \"woosh\", suggesting that the commentor had an unoriginal or ridiculous idea.\n\"Are you for real\" implies that the commenter (the bot) doesn't believe that the original commenter is serious.\n\"I'm taking a screenshot so I can remember this moment forever\" either adds an implied air of extreme importance, hilarity or significance to a comment, or sarcastically suggests that the comment was unoriginal, useless, or otherwise unimportant. People who read it might assume that there is a hidden joke or meaning somewhere inside the original comment.\nSo the point of creating such a bot is for spreading massive confusion, where there wouldn't be any in the absence of the bot's comments.\n[Online comment thread with text placed next to user pictures in three different levels. The first comment on the first level, the second on the second level and the last four on the same third level. Except for the second comment which is made by a person whose picture is a white silhouette of a human head and shoulders on black background, all the other comments are made by the same person with a picture of a guy with short black hair on white background. Below the pictures and below the text there are some unreadable information (indicated by wiggly lines) for the users name and time stamp etc. of the comments.]\nHairy guy: This video looks fake to me. White silhouette\u00a0: Woosh Hairy guy: Huh? Everyone's acting like it's real! Hairy guy: If it's a joke lots of people aren't getting it. Hairy guy: What am I missing?!! Hairy guy: Answer me [Caption below the panel:] Nothing creates more confusion than my bot that replies to random Internet comments with \"Woosh\".\n"}
{"id":1628,"title":"Magnus","image_title":"Magnus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1628","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/magnus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1628:_Magnus","transcript":"[Cueball walks from the right towards Megan while holding up his smartphone.] Cueball: Magnus Carlsen has an app where you can play chess against a simulated version of him at different ages. Cueball: I can beat the 8\u00bd-year-old, but lose to him at 9.\n[While Megan talks to Cueball he lifts his hand to his chin, while holding the smartphone down.] Megan: I want that, but for other games. Can I beat 8-year-old Serena Williams at Tennis? Swim laps faster than a 6-year-old Michael Phelps? Cueball: We should make a simulator.\n[Cueball walks out left and Megan follows him. He must have pocketed his phone as it is not in his hand.] Cueball: ...Why limit it to games? Can I cook a better chicken than 11-year-old Martha Stewart? Megan: Win an election against 12-year-old JFK?\n[At the top frame of this panel there is a small frame with a caption. Below lies Megan on the floor to the left in front of her laptop, while Cueball sits on the floor to the right facing her in front of his own laptop. Between them are some heavy books.] Soon... [Cueball and Megan sitting at laptops in the bottom of the panel.] Megan: Looks like 8-year-old Magnus Carlsen can swim faster than 9-year-old Martha Stewart. Cueball: But they both lose a hot-dog-eating contest to 2-year-old Secretariat. Megan: This project has gotten weird.\n","explanation":"Cueball shows Megan an app , Play Magnus ( iOS , Android ) which claims to simulate playing chess against Magnus Carlsen at various ages. Carlsen is a chess grandmaster who is the world champion as of the date this comic was released.\nThe idea behind the app is that as Carlsen grows up he becomes better at chess and thus it become exceedingly difficult to beat him as he gets older. As Cueball claims he could have beaten Magnus when he was 8\u00bd-year-old, but not a half-year later, we can now estimate Cueballs strength to be that of a typical adult hobbyist, with a FIDE rating of about 1200 .\nTaking the idea a step further, Megan wants such an app for other sports tennis and swimming , where skill couldn't imaginably be simulated via an app at all. She wants to compare herself to an 8-year-old Serena Williams , a top-ranked professional tennis player. Or to a 6-year-old Michael Phelps , the most decorated Olympian competitor of all time.\nCueball expands beyond sport, wishing to determine if he could cook better than an 11-year-old Martha Stewart (author of several cookbooks). Megan wonders if she'd have won an election against a 12-year old JFK ( John F. Kennedy , the 35th American President). Obviously, cooking and politics were skills acquired later in life for both figures.  Also, the U.S. Constitution prohibits anyone from serving as President before the age of 35 , so it seems unlikely that any 12-year-old candidate could win, regardless of skill level, simply because voters would not want to elect someone ineligible to serve for another 23 years. Such a contest would likely be prohibited altogether, as ineligible candidates tend to have ballot access issues.\nCueball and Megan continue speculating about an app simulating the skills of random celebrities at various ages, even beyond the talents that made them famous. They finally end up comparing 8-year-old Magnus's swimming skill against 9-year-old Martha's (he wins). But they'd both lose a hot dog - eating contest against the championship race horse Secretariat . At this point even Megan realizes (with considerable understatement) their project \"has gotten weird\".\nThe title text extends the point to even greater absurdity, e.g. the ludicrous prospect of a young Martha Stewart knocking an adult Ronda Rousey (professional wrestler and actress) unconscious, or 9-year-old Muhammad Ali (professional boxer and activist) beating a 10-year-old JFK in air hockey . The former may be a reference to the fact that professional wrestling is more entertainment than competition, and the outcomes are often pre-staged, so the victor would not depend on which contestant was more skilled. This was also referenced in the title text of 2291: New Sports System . The horse also gets re-mentioned in the title text, losing in a hot dog eating contest against 12-year-old Ken Jennings (at time of comic writing record-holder of winning streak on television game show Jeopardy! ).\nChess was previously compared to basketball in 1392: Dominant Players , which also mentioned Magnus. This is the tenth comic about chess on xkcd .\n[Cueball walks from the right towards Megan while holding up his smartphone.] Cueball: Magnus Carlsen has an app where you can play chess against a simulated version of him at different ages. Cueball: I can beat the 8\u00bd-year-old, but lose to him at 9.\n[While Megan talks to Cueball he lifts his hand to his chin, while holding the smartphone down.] Megan: I want that, but for other games. Can I beat 8-year-old Serena Williams at Tennis? Swim laps faster than a 6-year-old Michael Phelps? Cueball: We should make a simulator.\n[Cueball walks out left and Megan follows him. He must have pocketed his phone as it is not in his hand.] Cueball: ...Why limit it to games? Can I cook a better chicken than 11-year-old Martha Stewart? Megan: Win an election against 12-year-old JFK?\n[At the top frame of this panel there is a small frame with a caption. Below lies Megan on the floor to the left in front of her laptop, while Cueball sits on the floor to the right facing her in front of his own laptop. Between them are some heavy books.] Soon... [Cueball and Megan sitting at laptops in the bottom of the panel.] Megan: Looks like 8-year-old Magnus Carlsen can swim faster than 9-year-old Martha Stewart. Cueball: But they both lose a hot-dog-eating contest to 2-year-old Secretariat. Megan: This project has gotten weird.\n"}
{"id":1629,"title":"Tools","image_title":"Tools","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1629","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tools.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1629:_Tools","transcript":"[Cueball talks to Megan.] Cueball: What do you do? Megan: I make tools that make tools\n[Megan continues talking to Cueball in this frameless image.] Megan: ...That monitor code that deploys tools that build tools for deploying monitors...\n[Cueball finally stops Megan from talking. At the top there is a small frame with a caption overlaid on the top frame:] 20 minutes later... Megan: ...For monitoring deployment of tools for- Cueball: But what's it all for? Megan: Honestly, no idea. Porn, probably.\n","explanation":"Cueball asks Megan what she does, and she begins by answering \"I make tools that make tools.\" So far, this is a common expression of the way a sophisticated technology is built on simple building blocks, with one set of tools used to build a more powerful set of tools, and so on.\nHowever, the iterations are carried to comical lengths, with Megan spending twenty minutes reeling off various steps including development of software code and software code debugging and development tools. And she is not even finished when Cueball breaks into her endless list after she once again says tools for by asking what is it for? (See also: 1579: Tech Loops ).\nMegan readily admits that she doesn't even know the goal of these tasks, and guesses that it is probably for porn, referencing the not-entirely-unfounded stereotype that the majority of internet traffic is pornographic websites . Knowing that many information technologies, from printing to computers, are quickly adopted by porn producers and distributors, this is not a bad guess on Megan's part. Further, many internet related advances have had their way paved by a porn industry that needed secure and secret payments options, and better bandwidth for downloading films, as well as making it more accessible, etc.\nIn the title text there is a recursion as someone (maybe Cueball) tells what they do. And in this case they make tools for managing job-hunting sites for people who make tools for managing job-hunting sites for people who make tools for ... (ad infinitum). See also other comics about Recursion .\nRegarding porn in xkcd see also 305: Rule 34 .\n[Cueball talks to Megan.] Cueball: What do you do? Megan: I make tools that make tools\n[Megan continues talking to Cueball in this frameless image.] Megan: ...That monitor code that deploys tools that build tools for deploying monitors...\n[Cueball finally stops Megan from talking. At the top there is a small frame with a caption overlaid on the top frame:] 20 minutes later... Megan: ...For monitoring deployment of tools for- Cueball: But what's it all for? Megan: Honestly, no idea. Porn, probably.\n"}
{"id":1630,"title":"Quadcopter","image_title":"Quadcopter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1630","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/quadcopter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1630:_Quadcopter","transcript":"[Cueball to the left talks to Megan, Ponytail and a Cueball-like person, with a remote control. They are standing to the right. Behind Cueball, on the ground, there is a quadcopter.] Cueball: Welcome to Quadcopter-flying school.\n[Cueball looks over his shoulder as three other quadcopters fly in towards him from above and left. The other three people are in the same position.] Cueball: Today we'll be learning the basics of- Cueball: ...Uhh...\n[In this frameless image the three quadcopters all grabs hold of Cueball, two in each of his arms, one takes hold of his legs. And then they lift him up from the ground. He is thus hanging almost horizontally, with his head over Megan and his feet over the place where he stood before. The other three just stands there looking up at him.] Cueball: Um\n[Cueball is carried off by quadcopters, his head has already exited the top right corner, only his legs and the last quadcopter still in the frame. The other three have turned around looking up and right after him.]\n[Megan looks down again and the other two turns towards Megan. Cueball is gone and has only left his \"tame\" quadcopter behind on the ground.] Megan: Should we have helped? Ponytail: No. It's cruel, but we have to let nature take its course.\n","explanation":"There is large controversy over unmanned small-scale quadcopters , which are a type of radio-controlled helicopter . Some people have objections towards the usage of quadcopters as, if equipped with cameras, they can potentially interfere with personal privacy and may pose a physical aerial hazard.\nFor this reason the US Federal Aviation Administration is now requiring any \"drone\" (unmanned aerial vehicle) to be registered so that it can find out whose fault it might be that a quadcopter interfered with commercial aircraft-or carried off a citizen to be devoured.\nThis comic takes place during such a lesson where Cueball is a teacher of such a class. He is standing in front of his students ( Megan , Ponytail and another Cueball-like guy), presenting the class. He has a quadcopter ready, lying on the ground behind him, and has already handed the remote control to the other guy so he can try it once the introduction is over.\nBut then the teacher is attacked by three rogue quadcopters flying in from behind him. They grab him and lift him off the ground (a very complicated maneuver) and fly away with him. Meanwhile, his students just stand there watching and do nothing to help him. Afterwards Megan asks if they should actually have tried to help him, but then Ponytail takes the view that now that the drones are sentient, they have become a part of nature, and that you should not interfere but just \"let nature take its course\". This is a common comment in nature programs about wildlife, where the speaker tries to explain why the team that was there to film the animals dying did nothing to help them - because they will not interfere with nature. This would not be possible in real life assuming they weren't using secret military technology as Cueball outweighs the drones by several factors. [ citation needed ]\nThis comic shows how hypocritical that comment is, because if a lion decides to kill and eat humans, that would be natural, but we would do anything in our power to kill this lion, and not just let it run off with our children or the old and weak people. So in such a case with Cueball being taken by wild quadcopters we would not just let nature takes its course.\nThere is currently a drone called MQ-1 Predator which is used a lot by the CIA and USAF . Although it's not a quad-copter, the idea behind this comic could come from drone names just like this. Here the comic takes the name literally, giving drones predatory behavior. This comic thus takes people's worries to the extreme, suggesting that the drones become sentient and can cooperate together just like a pack of wolves and grab a human being and fly off with him like an eagle would do with a smaller animal.\nThe title text refers back to the above as Randall confesses that he has to turn off any nature documentaries which show scenes of animals killing their prey, while the speaker tells that this would be part of nature. This continues the theme of treating drones as an occasionally-ugly but accepted part of nature.\nSentient quadcopters were part of the game in 1608: Hoverboard , where one quadcopter is speaking to the other over the lava lake in the Mount Doom crater to the left. How to solve the problem of too many drones was mentioned in 1523: Microdrones . Just over a week before this comic was released another comic also had as subject a situation where our technological inventions begins to take control over us, see 1626: Judgment Day . Comparing drones to animals is also present in 1881: Drone Training , when Black Hat Guy asks for a spray bottle for his drone.\n[Cueball to the left talks to Megan, Ponytail and a Cueball-like person, with a remote control. They are standing to the right. Behind Cueball, on the ground, there is a quadcopter.] Cueball: Welcome to Quadcopter-flying school.\n[Cueball looks over his shoulder as three other quadcopters fly in towards him from above and left. The other three people are in the same position.] Cueball: Today we'll be learning the basics of- Cueball: ...Uhh...\n[In this frameless image the three quadcopters all grabs hold of Cueball, two in each of his arms, one takes hold of his legs. And then they lift him up from the ground. He is thus hanging almost horizontally, with his head over Megan and his feet over the place where he stood before. The other three just stands there looking up at him.] Cueball: Um\n[Cueball is carried off by quadcopters, his head has already exited the top right corner, only his legs and the last quadcopter still in the frame. The other three have turned around looking up and right after him.]\n[Megan looks down again and the other two turns towards Megan. Cueball is gone and has only left his \"tame\" quadcopter behind on the ground.] Megan: Should we have helped? Ponytail: No. It's cruel, but we have to let nature take its course.\n"}
{"id":1631,"title":"Longer Than Usual","image_title":"Longer Than Usual","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1631","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/longer_than_usual.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1631:_Longer_Than_Usual","transcript":"[A flowchart with one starting bubble at the top. Two arrows goes left and right below this bobble to two other bobbles.] Top: \"This seems to be taking longer than usual-\"\nLeft: \"-Try reloading Gmail if the problem persists.\"\nRight: \"-Maybe we should just go to bed.\"\n","explanation":"The comic starts a small flow chart with \"This seems to be taking longer than usual.\" It then presents two alternative continuations of the sentence, which radically alter the interpretation of the starting sentence, resulting in humor.\n\"This seems to be taking longer than usual\" is an error message displayed by Gmail (see here ) and other software, for example Disqus , (see here ). We realize the allusion to Gmail by the first continuation, \"Try reloading Gmail if the problem persists\".\nIn the second continuation, \"Maybe we should just go to bed\", the opening instead refers to a person suffering from sexual performance anxiety , taking \"longer than usual\" to achieve either orgasm or erection , probably despite considerable efforts of their partner. Often such frustration then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that renders orgasm\/erection virtually impossible by ruining the mood. In such situations it is likely that one or the other partner becomes frustrated and gives up, suggesting \"let's go to bed\" instead of 'pointlessly' continuing the sexual activity.\nThe title text ties both interpretations together by referencing an infamous error message given by the Firefox internet browser . As an error message, it fits nicely with the Gmail interpretation of the comic, though it is equally likely to be used as an apology or frustrated slight in the sexual interpretation. It would be a likely next line after \"this is taking longer than usual\". Alternatively, it would be embarrassing to get the two responses confused, thus necessitating a flowchart as a guide.\nIt could also simply be a jab to people who stay online late even when doing nothing, as when a lag occurs, and finally realising it might be better to switch off the computer and go to bed; or people who stay up late obsessed that \" Someone is wrong on the internet \".\nThis is not the first time Randall juxtaposes sex and more abstract topics, such as sex and math in 487: Numerical Sex Positions or sex and engineering in 592: Drama\n[A flowchart with one starting bubble at the top. Two arrows goes left and right below this bobble to two other bobbles.] Top: \"This seems to be taking longer than usual-\"\nLeft: \"-Try reloading Gmail if the problem persists.\"\nRight: \"-Maybe we should just go to bed.\"\n"}
{"id":1632,"title":"Palindrome","image_title":"Palindrome","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1632","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/palindrome.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1632:_Palindrome","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are walking. She holds up her arm and hand while reciting a palindrome:] Megan: A man, a plan, a God's 'Nam tables, nitrate, tar, tinsel, Batman's dog: Anal Panama.\n","explanation":"A palindrome is a word, phrase, or sentence that reads the same whether you read forwards or backwards, like race car .  Normally capitalization, spacing, and punctuation are ignored.\nThis comic is based on the famous palindrome: \"A Man, A Plan, A Canal: Panama\", devised by Leigh Mercer , which references the construction of the Panama Canal and is the first mentioned on the Wikipedia page for palindromes at the time this comic was released.\nMegan recites a much longer palindrome for Cueball . This palindrome is based on the original, and was posted in this forum thread more than three years before the release of this comic. It is much less logical, and manages to include the word anal (which then refers to the title text and sex toys, see below).\n'Nam is an apheresis of Vietnam. See more explanation of the words in the palindrome in the Trivia section. Note that in the original version from the link above there was a comma before tables so it is two items in the list: God's 'Nam, tables, etc.\nDue to its list like structure, the Panama palindrome is easily extensible by adding additional noun phrases , and some of these extensions lay claim to being \" The Longest Palindrome Ever \".\nThe title text references the maximum size of ships that can fit through the Panama Canal, which is Panamax . Randall would really enjoy if this was the last option (i.e. biggest size) on a drop-down menu on a sex toy site. For instance such a site could have a banner saying; \"If you have a Panama Anus , then try our Panamax Butt plug \".\nIn the game 1608: Hoverboard there is also a reference to the palindrome and the Panama canal with the song that Cueball sings at the ruin to the right. The first four lines of the song is the same as in the original palindrome but with the \"A \" changed out with Spider- , and then also Spider in front of Panama:\nCueball singing: Spider-man Spider-plan Spider-canal Spider-Panama Gates let in Spider boats Flood the locks Spiders float Look out! Spiders in both oceans.\nAlthough it is less logical it is indeed a palindrome:\nOriginal : A man, a plan, a God's 'Nam tables, nitrate, tar, tinsel, Batman's dog: Anal Panama.\nPalindrome , i.e. original sentence reversed: amanaP lanA\u00a0:god s'namtaB ,lesnit ,rat ,etartin ,selbat maN' s'doG a ,nalp a ,nam A\nWith no spaces or other punctuation and in all lowercase: amanaplanagodsnamtablesnitratetartinselbatmansdoganalpanama\n[Cueball and Megan are walking. She holds up her arm and hand while reciting a palindrome:] Megan: A man, a plan, a God's 'Nam tables, nitrate, tar, tinsel, Batman's dog: Anal Panama.\n"}
{"id":1633,"title":"Possible Undiscovered Planets","image_title":"Possible Undiscovered Planets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1633","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/possible_undiscovered_planets.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1633:_Possible_Undiscovered_Planets","transcript":"[Caption above the chart.] Possible Undiscovered Planets in our Solar System By size and distance (from me)\n[A chart of possible undiscovered planets with a log-log plot, with the objects diameter on the y-axis and the distance from \u201cme\u201d (Randall) on the X-axis. Both axes are labeled and have several ticks most of which also have labels. A region to the right, with possible new planets including Planet 9 with a \u201c?\u201d, is shaded light red, and a small rectangle at the top left with the same color tells what this color means. The region, of undiscovered dwarf planets, is shaded pink, also to indicate that here may be more of these, but the lighter color indicate that these will not be new \u201cplanets\u201d. The eight known planets are marked with a black dot, and also this is explained with a dot under the colored rectangle. The Moon is indicated with a similar dot, but in gray, and the name is in brackets. The chart itself is divided into several labeled regions, the smallest with the label outside and an arrow pointing in. In one case a label breaks a border, and in two regions there are more labels, although these clearly belong to different regions within these regions, with different sizes and\/or distances.]\n[Y-axis, with a label written to the left, from bottom and up, with an arrow pointing up, and 15 ticks with a label each:] Diameter 1 mm 1 cm 10 cm 1 m 10 m 100 m 1 km 10 km 100 km 1,000 km 10,000 km 100,000 km 10 6 km 10 7 km 1 AU\n[X-axis, with a label written below, with an arrow pointing right, and 17 ticks but only 11 labels as the ticks at 100 km, between 1000 and 10 6 km, 10 7 km as well as 10 and 1000 AU is not labeled:] Distance from me 10 cm 1 m 10 m 100 m 1 km 10 km 1000 km 10 6 km 1 AU 100 AU 10,000 AU\n[At the top left of the chart is the light-red rectangle and the black dot labeled:] Possible undiscovered planets Known planets\n[Going down and anti-clockwise from these two labels, the rest of the chart is transcribed:] Planets ruled out because I would be inside them Earth Planets ruled out because I would have noticed them above my house Planets ruled out because they wouldn\u2019t fit through my door Birds that got into my house Skin flora Bugs (Not planets) Giant bugs Planets which are actually birds Airplanes (Fool\u2019s planets\u2019) Space junk Comets and asteroids Oort cloud Satellites Stuff we can see through telescopes Planets we can see at night (Moon) Dwarf planets Planet Nine? ? Planets ruled out by the WISE survey Planets ruled out because we would see them during the day\n\n","explanation":"This comic is about Planet Nine , a possible Neptune -sized planet far beyond the farthest planet, Neptune . Astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin published a paper on 2016-01-20, only two days before the release of this comic. The paper is called Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System and shows indirect evidence that such a planet may exist, inferred from an otherwise unlikely correlation between the unusual orbits of several dwarf planets . See for instance also explanations, for the layman, of the results here: Astronomers say a Neptune-sized planet lurks beyond Pluto and Planet X Discovered??\nAs this paper came out on the day of the previous comic's release ( 1632: Palindrome ), this comic's release day was the first release day after the news came out. This explains why this comic was released in the late afternoon rather than just past midnight as is often the case with normal releases. \nOnce Randall heard this news, he had to decide to do this comic instead of the scheduled comic, and then invent and draw a completely new and actually very complicated comic (resulting in several position errors ) about \" Planet X \" before he could release this comic.\nNow this planet could be called Planet IX (and is labeled Planet nine? on the chart), as Pluto , the previously \"planet 9\" has been degraded to a dwarf planet. The \"X\" did, however, not only refer to the roman numeral! Note that Mike Brown is the astronomer that killed Pluto , or at least reduced Pluto to a dwarf planet, something that has been a subject in xkcd before; see for instance 473: Still Raw .\nThis was the first of two times within a month where a new astronomical announcement (of something discovered months before the actual announcement) resulted in a related comic. The second being 1642: Gravitational Waves . But in that case Randall seemed to know about it in advance, as he even changed the normal release schedule to post the comic on the day of the announcement, unlike here, where he seems to have been forced to make a new comic up on the fly.\nStating the obvious, this log\u2013log plot shows that for an object to be an unknown planet it has to be very far away, since planets are big, to explain why we haven't seen it yet. With the log scale it is possible to go from a diameter of less than 1\u00a0mm to an astronomical unit (AU) on the Y-axis and from a distance of just 1\u00a0cm up to thousands of AU on the X-axis.\nRandall's chart is somewhat humorously parochial (if not downright egocentric ) in that it purports to measure distance not \"from Earth\" or from an arbitrary observer, but specifically from himself (\"from me\"). There is also more detail (e.g. a differentiation between bird, bugs, and skin flora) in the zone closest to the observer, somewhat reminiscent of the classic New Yorker cover illustration View of the World from 9th Avenue .\nThe distance calculations are somewhat problematic (see more on this below). Close distances seem to be measured from the surface of Randall's body (skin\/eyes) rather than from his center of mass. All the planets (and moon) that are marked on the chart are so far away that it will not matter if the distance is measured from Randall's surface, his center of mass, or by the way anywhere on Earth . Also, the planets' diameters are so much smaller than the distance from Earth that their real size would hardly take up any space in the chart due to the log-scale . The dots marking these 7 planets are thus not drawn to scale that should represent their actual size compared with the other planets. But their distance from Earth (and Randall) is not constant even on the log-scale, especially not for the nearest planets, as they can be on either side of the Sun compared to Earth.\nThe chart correctly states that if there was a planet that was at a distance from him smaller than its diameter, he would be inside it (although at the bottom of that region, it's more like the planet that would be inside him, as this line goes down to a diameter of 1\u00a0cm). If the distance is to the planets center, this would also fit if he was only a radius away from the planet. As Randall is not inside the Earth but really close to it, Earth is correctly positioned on this line. However, for Earth, which is marked with the largest of the dots, he seems to have put himself a full Earth diameter away from Earth. Even using the center of mass of Earth as it's position he should only have been 6,350\u00a0km away from it, but now he places the measuring point of his distance to Earth on the opposite side of the Earth so his distance to it is equal to its diameter (which would make a choosing a distance of 0\u00a0km just as correct). Earth is just left of the 10,000\u00a0km line on both axis, and Earth has a diameter of 12,700\u00a0km, which will fit fine with the center of the dot, but not with the distance which should have been the maximum distance Randall could be from it (0 or 6350\u00a0km depending on the definition of distance from Randall).\nThe IAU definition of planet requires a solar orbit, gravitational rounding, and \"clearing the neighborhood\", a controversial (at the time of its introduction) calculation of relative size that excludes Kuiper Belt Objects such as Pluto. The calculation regarding Planet Nine would make it large enough to meet the IAU definition. Using this definition the chart quickly rules out birds and bugs, although at a glance they could be mistaken for planets, something that is especially the case for planes (at night) which are even called fool\u2019s planets\u2019 in the chart, a reference to fool's Gold . Note that anything that is actually on Earth is positioned within 60\u00a0km from Randall. This is because if it is further away he cannot see them due to the curvature of the Earth. This does not mean that he intends to indicate that they cannot be further away from him than that.\nThe already known planets are prominently marked on the chart. They are the solid black dots. Besides Earth and Planet Nine? , the bottom row of three small dots are Mercury , Venus and Mars . The top row of four larger dots (but smaller than the dot that marks Earth) are (from left to right) Jupiter and Saturn (visible to the naked eye) and Uranus and Neptune (visible through a telescope).\nIt is unclear how Randall is calculating these distances, especially to the three terrestrial planets , since neither of these options work: closest approach, average, mean, current or maximum distance. In the comic 482: Height Randall shows (among other) the distance from the Earths surface to all the planets. For especially Venus and Mars he shows that their distance changes a lot based on theirs and Earth's orbital positions. But he has neither used these loops to base the dot size or position, as these loops clearly go closer than 1 AU and only one of the planets are drawn closer than that. It is thus unclear which of the three represents which planet, but in the table below it has been reasoned that the dot situated at the largest diameter of the three inner planets planets should represent Venus (12,000\u00a0km) as it is almost twice as big as Mars (6,700\u00a0km), which on the other hand is more similar to Mercury (5,000\u00a0km) and given that the two dots furthest out are almost the same size, it would make most sense if they represent Mercury and Mars. Since the outer dot never comes closer than 2.5 AU and Mercury never gets further away than 1.5 AU it makes most sense to place Mercury as the middle of the three and Mars as the outer of the three dots.\nBelow some objects are mentioned that are not on the chart, and also other errors in position (probably due the hasty creation of such a complex comic.) Many of these objects as well as the planets with the errors mentioned clearly revealed can be see in this modified image , which is also inserted and explained in the trivia section below.\nPluto, no longer considered a planet (it was the ninth until 2006), is not marked on the chart, but it would be below Neptune just outside the pink region (2,300\u00a0km diameter and 30-50 AU away). This makes sense since that region is for dwarf planets not yet discovered and any one as big and close as Pluto would have been discovered by now. There are thus also other dwarf planets that would not belong in the pink region, one of them is even much much closer and is easily visible with a telescope: Ceres , which would appear roughly below Mars and Jupiter. (950\u00a0km diameter and 1.5-4 AU away from Earth). But this pink region is there to show where there could (and most likely will) still be undiscovered dwarf planets.\nThe Moon is also marked on the chart, with a gray dot (almost as large as the gas giants dots). The name is written in brackets since it's not a planet (because Earth is clogging up its neighborhood). Randall has messed up the positioning and the diameter of the Moon as it is clearly positioned past a million km, and it is only up to 400,000\u00a0km away from the Earth.\nThe Sun is not marked at all, even though it is extremely prominent, but as it is clearly not a planet it is left out. It would per definition have been at a distance of 1 AU, and with a diameter of 1.4x10 6 km it would be well inside the region of things that we can see during the day. Note that objects this big will always be shining, already a large planet such as Jupiter is brighter than if it could reflect 100% of Sun's light. In general, planets ruled out because we would see them during the day refers to objects big enough to be stars or brown dwarfs , but the only star system , other than Sun, that would fit on the chart is Alpha Centauri , which at 4.37 light-years (ly) is well within the right boundary that falls at 5.68 ly, just before the distance to the next nearest star Barnard's Star at 5.96 ly from the Sun. A light year is 63,241 AU, and with the 10,000 AU mark far from the right edge of this log-log plot, it is clear that also 100,000 AU and thus a light year is within the chart. And this also goes for 5 ly.\n\"Planets ruled out by the WISE survey\" refers to the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope designed to look for warm objects such as brown dwarfs, which generate heat at their centers. It was capable of detecting Saturn-sized or larger planets in the outer reaches of our solar system, but did not find any. WISE would not have detected \"Planet Nine\" (even if it exists) because it is too small and thus too cold to be detected. There is a chance that it can be seen in some more temperature sensitive measurements. But these have not been checked for such a planet yet, (see here ).\nThe word satellites is written on the border of two regions indicating that these can be in both regions. Some are small enough (10\u00a0cm) to be comparable to the space junk below, (see cubesats ), others are much bigger and would fit in the region above: Stuff we can see through telescopes . Although it may not be called a satellite in daily talk, the International Space Station is in fact a satellite, which is over 100 m in the longest direction. It would thus be on the border to the Planets ruled out because I would have noticed them above my house region just above the \"A\" in satellites (400\u00a0km above the surface). Some satellites can be seen without a telescope, like the space station.\nThe title text explains why some people confuse Superman for a bird or a plane , since Superman often flies at the limit between the two categories in the diagram. This is though not really true as can be seen in the bottom of the table below. (This was later referenced in Bird\/Plane\/Superman .)\n[Caption above the chart.] Possible Undiscovered Planets in our Solar System By size and distance (from me)\n[A chart of possible undiscovered planets with a log-log plot, with the objects diameter on the y-axis and the distance from \u201cme\u201d (Randall) on the X-axis. Both axes are labeled and have several ticks most of which also have labels. A region to the right, with possible new planets including Planet 9 with a \u201c?\u201d, is shaded light red, and a small rectangle at the top left with the same color tells what this color means. The region, of undiscovered dwarf planets, is shaded pink, also to indicate that here may be more of these, but the lighter color indicate that these will not be new \u201cplanets\u201d. The eight known planets are marked with a black dot, and also this is explained with a dot under the colored rectangle. The Moon is indicated with a similar dot, but in gray, and the name is in brackets. The chart itself is divided into several labeled regions, the smallest with the label outside and an arrow pointing in. In one case a label breaks a border, and in two regions there are more labels, although these clearly belong to different regions within these regions, with different sizes and\/or distances.]\n[Y-axis, with a label written to the left, from bottom and up, with an arrow pointing up, and 15 ticks with a label each:] Diameter 1 mm 1 cm 10 cm 1 m 10 m 100 m 1 km 10 km 100 km 1,000 km 10,000 km 100,000 km 10 6 km 10 7 km 1 AU\n[X-axis, with a label written below, with an arrow pointing right, and 17 ticks but only 11 labels as the ticks at 100 km, between 1000 and 10 6 km, 10 7 km as well as 10 and 1000 AU is not labeled:] Distance from me 10 cm 1 m 10 m 100 m 1 km 10 km 1000 km 10 6 km 1 AU 100 AU 10,000 AU\n[At the top left of the chart is the light-red rectangle and the black dot labeled:] Possible undiscovered planets Known planets\n[Going down and anti-clockwise from these two labels, the rest of the chart is transcribed:] Planets ruled out because I would be inside them Earth Planets ruled out because I would have noticed them above my house Planets ruled out because they wouldn\u2019t fit through my door Birds that got into my house Skin flora Bugs (Not planets) Giant bugs Planets which are actually birds Airplanes (Fool\u2019s planets\u2019) Space junk Comets and asteroids Oort cloud Satellites Stuff we can see through telescopes Planets we can see at night (Moon) Dwarf planets Planet Nine? ? Planets ruled out by the WISE survey Planets ruled out because we would see them during the day\n\n"}
{"id":1634,"title":"In Case of Emergency","image_title":"In Case of Emergency","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1634","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/in_case_of_emergency.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1634:_In_Case_of_Emergency","transcript":"[On a box behind a panel of glass, with a hammer hung below, is written:] Glass repair kit\n","explanation":"Sometimes in order to deter vandalism or avoid accidentally moving\/setting off something of importance, an important item like a fire extinguisher will be covered behind a wall of glass. \"In case of emergency, break glass\" - and retrieve the tool.\nHowever the depicted situation is funny, because the thing behind the breakable glass is a glass repair kit. This is ironic, considering that the only way to reach it is by breaking the glass. One might even use it to fix the glass broken to get it... This joke is similar in nature to a Useless machine . However, the broken glass that needs to be repaired is an emergency situation, so it is important to have some less important glass to break, to be able to get to the important emergency glass repair kit . In this way it is not necessarily useless, just ironic.\nIn the title text Randall notes that he keeps his first aid kit in just such a type of emergency locker as shown in the comic. He complains that it is expensive to have them installed in the wall. But then the title text takes a gruesome turn when he continues by saying that at least for those lockers with first aid in them there is no need to pay extra for using safety glass for the cover. Safety glass doesn't break into sharp shards, so would be used for the cover of such an above-mentioned fire extinguisher cabinet, for instance, ensuring that the user will not cut themselves when breaking the glass to retrieve it. But Randall indirectly says that since the person breaking the glass will soon have access to a first aid kit then, if wounded in the process of breaking the normal window glass, they can as well be treated on the spot - so it will be OK to let them get injured.\nFirst aid kits and for instance defibrillators can be found at frequent places such as bus stations and shopping malls, but never behind a glass that needs to be broken.\n[On a box behind a panel of glass, with a hammer hung below, is written:] Glass repair kit\n"}
{"id":1635,"title":"Birdsong","image_title":"Birdsong","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1635","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/birdsong.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1635:_Birdsong","transcript":"[Cueball is walking and talking, while a bird, flying above him is singing, with four notes floating around it to indicate this. The notes are clearly above and removed from Cueball's text.] Cueball (singing): The sun is shining, the birds are singing\u2014\n[Cueball stops and looks up when the bird above him starts to sing using human language; four notes are floating around the text. The text of the bird's song is in italic text to indicate this.] Bird (singing): Got the kind of lovin' that can be so smooth, yeah\n[Cueball looks down and black smoke emanates from the top of his head. The bird now flies above the panel but still sings in human language, four notes are floating below the text.] Bird (singing - off-panel): Give me your heart, make it real\n[Cueball is chasing the bird with a butterfly net, the bird is flying away from Cueball, continuing to sing, four notes are floating around the text.] Bird (singing): Or else forget about it\n","explanation":"The comic shows Cueball walking and singing along with the songbird singing above him; Cueball is apparently enjoying the perfect weather and the birdsong as he comments on both. In the next panel, the bird continues to sing but now it sings actual words (to the song \" Smooth \" ( official video ) by Santana featuring Rob Thomas ). This gives the word songbird a completely new meaning. The bird's singing begins to annoy Cueball, so he chases the bird with a butterfly net in an attempt to catch it. Meanwhile, the bird just continues with the song. (Interestingly, the two lines from the last two panels follow each other in the song, but Cueball manages to get hold of the net in between).\nThe lines the bird sings are (most) of the last three lines from the chorus (see the lyrics ):\nThe comic is a play on the words bird and song .  Songbirds, of course, don't actually sing: the sounds they make are territorial challenges, mating cries, etc. But in Western cultural traditions, particularly the pastoral one, imagining these sounds as 'song' is part of seeing nature as beautiful and harmonious. Ironically, the fact that this bird is really singing pop music is perceived by Cueball to be an intrusion.\nIn the title text Cueball suggest playing pastoral music to 'reprogram' the bird, which is of course an even more unnatural intervention - all with the purpose of restoring the pastoral naturalness of the bird. Of course, some birds can actually emulate human words , and in this way also sing real words, like with the common hill myna . Other birds can mimic any odd and unusual sounds, particularly the lyrebird of Australia is known to reproduce all types of sounds from chainsaws to barking dogs and certainly also music.\nThe title text of \"reprogramming\" the bird by placing it in a box also refers to B.F. Skinner and his development of programmed learning through his theories of operant conditioning and behaviorism in psychology. By famously using birds in so-called Skinner boxes , he conditioned birds to respond to certain stimuli and expect rewards for particular behaviors, leading to an understanding of many impulsive behaviors in humans like addiction. Cueball apparently hopes to \"correct\" the bird and its song through this method.\nAnimal conditioning was also referred to in 1156: Conditioning .\nLately Randall has had his characters catch several things (but never butterflies ) with a butterfly net; most recently in 1622: Henge , where it was the Sun that was caught in the net.\n[Cueball is walking and talking, while a bird, flying above him is singing, with four notes floating around it to indicate this. The notes are clearly above and removed from Cueball's text.] Cueball (singing): The sun is shining, the birds are singing\u2014\n[Cueball stops and looks up when the bird above him starts to sing using human language; four notes are floating around the text. The text of the bird's song is in italic text to indicate this.] Bird (singing): Got the kind of lovin' that can be so smooth, yeah\n[Cueball looks down and black smoke emanates from the top of his head. The bird now flies above the panel but still sings in human language, four notes are floating below the text.] Bird (singing - off-panel): Give me your heart, make it real\n[Cueball is chasing the bird with a butterfly net, the bird is flying away from Cueball, continuing to sing, four notes are floating around the text.] Bird (singing): Or else forget about it\n"}
{"id":1636,"title":"XKCD Stack","image_title":"XKCD Stack","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1636","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_stack.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1636:_XKCD_Stack","transcript":"[A simple table with only one column and fifteen rows is shown. Text above:] Introducing The XKCD Stack\n[The list of cells:] EBNF\/CSS Broken Java Applet Archive.org Mirror Hypercard.js QBasic on Rails [Blocked by AdBlocker] MongoDB\/Excel Some piece that works so nobody asks any questions Triply-Nested Docker Paravirtual Boy\u00ae A dev typing real fast Older version of our software Mystery Networking Horror Microsoft Bob Server\u00ae A giant CPU someone built in Minecraft\n","explanation":"In software engineering, a tech stack is the set of technology platforms and tools that a company or app uses. A common tech stack is LAMP , composed of a Linux operating system , an Apache Web server , a MySQL Database , and the PHP programming language. In this comic, the XKCD stack is introduced. The technologies it comprises are either non-existent, unreliable, outdated, or entirely irrelevant.\nAnother example of a tech stack is featured in 2166: Stack .\nEBNF\/CSS BNF or Backus\u2013Naur Form is a syntax used for describing context-free grammars . EBNF is \"Extended BNF\", it is the same thing as BNF with a few more syntactic constructs intended to ease its use in the most common cases. 1343: Manuals mentioned EBNF. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a language used to describe what a web page should look like. Web pages are usually written in HTML , which describes the structure of the page (i.e. divides the document into paragraphs, lists, etc.) complemented with CSS which describes the look and feel of the page (colors, fonts, margins, etc.). EBNF\/CSS would suggest CSS with strange syntax. Broken Java Applet In recent years it has become more difficult to run Java applets in several browsers. Chrome 45 stopped supporting NPAPI , Firefox dropped support in version 52, and Edge does not support NPAPI plugins at all. Furthermore, two days before this comic was published Oracle (the developer of Java) announced plans to officially end support of Java applets in an upcoming version. Archive.org Mirror Archive.org is a website which archives websites, and created the Wayback Machine . It's ambiguous whether the \"Archive.org mirror\" would be a copy of the xkcd server or of Archive.org itself. Hypercard.js HyperCard can be considered as a kind of predecessor for powerpoint developed at Apple . The file extension .js indicates that is was rewritten in JavaScript . A similar reference to JavaScript is found in 1508: Operating Systems . QBasic on Rails A mix between QBasic and Ruby on Rails . BASIC is a programming language that was very widespread during the 80s. QBasic is an implementation of BASIC created by Microsoft in early 90s, that, among other things, added support for structured programming . QBasic, lacking several of the features present on modern computer languages, is known for its spaghetti code. Ruby is a rather modern language, often used with Ruby on Rails web application framework . QBasic on Rails would likely mean a port of Ruby on Rails, replacing Ruby with QBasic. QBasic no longer runs on modern computers, but there are a couple of free open source implementation of QBasic, one being QB64 and the other FreeBASIC , which are available for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android. There also exists a webserver on BASIC called RunBasic . [Blocked by AdBlocker] Ad blocking software are extensions to browsers that try to remove ads from web pages, so the user is not distracted by them. 624: Branding shows what \"browsing without adblock\" looks like. The joke is that AdBlocker is preventing us from seeing what makes up this portion of the stack. This could be because: Someone inserted an ad in the stack description. Some sites do insert ads in the middle of tables and lists, a typical case being between posts in forums. An ad is actually an integral part of the stack. Some sites make ads an integral part of the site content, so that users with ad blocking software will be forced to disable ad blocking to be able to properly interact with the site. Usually, in real life, this is not really a case of ads being part of the site, only that the site artificially refuses to work until it has some confirmation that ads have been properly loaded in the client side (by means of some script within the ads which sends the confirmation to the server). Ad blocking software has misidentified that portion of the stack as an ad, when in fact it is not (i.e. a false positive). This happens in real life, and it is a common source of great pains for the owner of the site which is being misidentified as an ad.\nMongoDB\/Excel MongoDB is a modern NoSQL database system, Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program from Microsoft, which is sometimes used as a database system (rarely a good choice). Some piece that works so nobody asks any questions Writing any non-trivial piece of software always require a phase of debugging , which consists in finding and fixing bugs . With complex software, this is a long and tiring process, so when the product is finally finished no one dares to modify it any further for fear that it will fail in unexpected ways. After some time passes, it is even worse because nobody really remembers how the software was supposed to work, so the product becomes some kind of godlike treasure which must be treated with the utmost respect and reverence because, you know, if it stops working we're all doomed ( 1421: Future Self ). After completion, Refactoring is the process of rewriting code for greater efficiency or reliability. However, if the performance is not 'too bad' (i.e. not unusably terrible in normal use) there is a great temptation to avoid this, in favour of the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' methodology. This could lead, for example, to a trained monkey and an abacus being used to crunch numbers. It works, but could be done far better. However, nobody wishes to change it, for fear of breaking a presently functional, if inefficient, system. Triply-Nested Docker Docker is a software container , which is a way that allows a complete operating system to run under different operating system (OS) (as long they share the same kernel, among other things). Triply-nested docker would mean OS A running under OS B running under OS C running under OS D (running under OS E?). That would likely be a performance and management nightmare Paravirtual Boy\u00ae This is a reference to the Virtual Boy , a failed portable console created by Nintendo . It was promoted as being a highly immersive, incredible experience , but the poor technology that it used caused it to be very criticized for not meeting the high expectations. Paravirtualization is a way of virtualization, that requires cooperation of the guest operating system, contrary to full virtualization , on which the guest operating system is not required to do anything special and the host handles everything. A dev typing real fast A dev is a software developer . This is possibly a reference to 341: 1337: Part 1 , where Mrs. Roberts edits the TCP stream live while wearing oven mitts and baking cookies. It looks like the xkcd Webserver is not a computer after all -- we have a person manually replying to HTTP protocol queries. Such a  feat would indeed require real fast typing. If this is the case, then it's possible that almost none of the other layers of the stack actually do anything. Older version of our software People are often reluctant to switch to newer versions of software because, even though newer versions are supposed to have more features and fewer bugs, they end up confusing users. Users of older versions are used to doing everything with less features and circumventing old bugs. They don't know how to use the new features, which of course come with new bugs they haven't learned how to circumvent yet. It is also often the case that newer versions remove weird unused old features, breaking the workflow of users who actually did use such features and are left without a suitable replacement ( 1172: Workflow ). Alternately, since higher parts of a stack are dependent on lower parts, this could also be a reference to how the consumer versions of Microsoft Windows (3.x, 95, 98, and ME) ran on the \"older version\" software Microsoft DOS until Windows NT. Paired with the previous layer, it could instead mean that the human is merely retyping the output of the older version. Mystery Networking Horror Randall suggests here that the whole networking stuff behind the XKCD service is both mysterious (no one actually knows the details) and horrific (technically questionable architecture and implementation, or somehow tentacled and eldritch in nature). Microsoft Bob Server\u00ae Microsoft Bob was a short-lived, failed attempt by Microsoft, around 1995, to provide a user-friendly interface for the Windows 3.1x, Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems. It consisted of a virtual \"house\" and \"rooms\", and clicking on objects in the room would open applications, for instance clicking on a pen would open the word processor. It was heavily criticized and was soon discontinued. Randall seems to be making the suggestion that Bob has continued to be developed and now there's a Bob Server, similarly to Windows server. A giant CPU someone built in Minecraft Minecraft is a popular sandbox game where you place blocks to build things. Since the introduction of Redstone objects (materials used to create basic electric circuits within the game) people have made many machines within Minecraft, including calculators and clocks. The most complex of these machines simulate simple computers, capable of storing several lines of code and performing basic mathematical operations such as division, which requires thousands of blocks and extremely complex designs. A Minecraft CPU capable of hosting a website would be ridiculously huge and nearly impossible to work with: the input\/output would be needlessly unwieldy, and by the time the data is parsed any other computer could have finished the job already; and Redstone circuits in Minecraft work much slower than in real life, quite literally trillions of times slower.\nThe title text contains several jokes about the Java programming language:\n[A simple table with only one column and fifteen rows is shown. Text above:] Introducing The XKCD Stack\n[The list of cells:] EBNF\/CSS Broken Java Applet Archive.org Mirror Hypercard.js QBasic on Rails [Blocked by AdBlocker] MongoDB\/Excel Some piece that works so nobody asks any questions Triply-Nested Docker Paravirtual Boy\u00ae A dev typing real fast Older version of our software Mystery Networking Horror Microsoft Bob Server\u00ae A giant CPU someone built in Minecraft\n"}
{"id":1637,"title":"Salt Mine","image_title":"Salt Mine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1637","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/salt_mine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1637:_Salt_Mine","transcript":"[Hairbun (with glasses), Ponytail, Megan and Cueball are in a salt mine. Hairbun and Ponytail talk in front of what appears to be a control console for a particle detector with a chair on each side. To the right Megan and Cueball are eating salt in large amounts straight of the rocks in the mine. They are eating so fast that salt spills from their hands and falls to the ground.] Hairbun: So you've built this particle detector in a salt mine to block out cosmic rays? Ponytail: Yes. Ponytail: That is definitely why. Cueball and Megan: Homf nomf nomf\n","explanation":"Ponytail has built a particle detector (an expensive device used in experimental particle physics ) in a salt mine . Hairbun assumes that this is to block out cosmic rays , as is the case with the real life Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven (IMB) detector, started in Lake Erie in 1979, or the Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO), placed in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) salt mine in 2007.\nThe IMB detector was initially used to search for proton decay in very pure water kept in the mine, and it was thus important to keep out cosmic rays that would create the same type of signal as a decaying proton. Although the IMB became famous for detecting neutrinos from supernova 1987a (which pass through virtually all materials, salt or lead etc. with only the smallest fraction of them interacting), it never observed a single proton decay out of the 10 31 protons present in the water of the detector. If it had detected even a single positive observation it would have contributed to the ratification of the Grand Unified Theory , which predicts that protons eventually decay. At the time of this comic the lower limit for proton half-life from experimental evidence is of the order 10 34 years.\nPonytail affirms Hairbun's assumption; however, based on the wording of her response, it is clear that Ponytail and her colleagues, Cueball and Megan , have an ulterior motive of using the mine to get access to an enormous supply of salt for eating. This is absurd, since salt is already plentifully available in grocery stores, the cost of the particle detector far exceeds the value of the salt and their intake appears to be far beyond any medically-advised healthy limit (and likely to be sickening in other regards).\nIn the comic, when Ponytail says \"Yes. That is definitely why,\" it is obvious that when queried about the reason for building the detector, apparently to gain access to large quantities of salt, Ponytail is quick to leap on Hairbun's more scientific-sounding explanation, in an attempt to save face and appear professional.\nThe title text is intended to be absurd. Salt is normally used to add flavor to otherwise bland foods . However, the \"bland\" food that the speaker is eating is itself a chunk of salt, and they wish to season their salt with yet more salt. Additionally, the title text's wording is a bit ambiguous; \"this one\" could refer to the comic itself, and Randall is calling the comic bland. And, in keeping with the subject, is asking for salt to spruce it up, or it could refer to the detector planted inside the mine.\nThis was the first of two comics this week that concerns one of the basic condiments for food, and also regards one of the five basic tastes . The second, about sugar, was 1639: To Taste . Lately Randall has made several food related comics .\nPonytail's response is very similar to Luke's in 1397: Luke .\n[Hairbun (with glasses), Ponytail, Megan and Cueball are in a salt mine. Hairbun and Ponytail talk in front of what appears to be a control console for a particle detector with a chair on each side. To the right Megan and Cueball are eating salt in large amounts straight of the rocks in the mine. They are eating so fast that salt spills from their hands and falls to the ground.] Hairbun: So you've built this particle detector in a salt mine to block out cosmic rays? Ponytail: Yes. Ponytail: That is definitely why. Cueball and Megan: Homf nomf nomf\n"}
{"id":1638,"title":"Backslashes","image_title":"Backslashes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1638","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/backslashes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1638:_Backslashes","transcript":"[A list of the names of different numbers of backslashes. After each \"item\" there is a gray line to the text describing each item. As the text is aligned above each other, the lines becomes shorter as the sequence of backslashes becomes longer until there is just a line with the length of a single hyphen for the last item. There are 1 to 8 backslashes and then 11 plus \"...\" in the last entry.] \\ ------------ Backslash \\\\ ----------- Real backslash \\\\\\ ---------- Real real backslash \\\\\\\\ ---------- Actual backslash, for real this time \\\\\\\\\\ --------- Elder backslash \\\\\\\\\\\\ -------- Backslash which escapes the screen and enters your brain \\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ------- Backslash so real it transcends time and space \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ------ Backslash to end all other text \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\... - The true name of Ba'al, the Soul-Eater\nThe title text when first published was\nIt was changed within a few days to\nThe original title text seems to be more relevant to the comic, but the revised title text seems to make more sense as a legitimate command line due to the way backslashes are interpreted in regular expressions. See the Discussion below for much more on the topic.\n","explanation":"Most programming languages use the concept of a string literal, which is just a text between some delimiters, usually quotes. For example, \"Hello, world\" is a string literal. The text being represented is Hello, world without the quotes. However, the quotes are also written to mark the beginning and end of the string. This is a problem when the text itself contains a quote, as in \"This is a \"quoted\" string\". The quotes around the word \"quoted\" are intended to be part of the text, but the language processor will likely confuse it for the end of the string, which would thus be two strings with quoted outside these strings (probably resulting in a syntax error).\nTo avoid this problem, an escape character (usually a backslash) is prepended to non-string-terminating quotes. So, the previous text would be written as \"This is a \\\"quoted\\\" string\". The language processor will substitute every occurrence of \\\" with only the quote character, and the string terminates at the quote character which does not immediately follow a backslash. In this case the resulting text string would be This is a \"quoted\" string as intended.\nHowever, the problem now is that the intended text might contain a backslash itself. For example, the text \"C:\\\" will now be interpreted as an unterminated string containing a quote character. To avoid this, literal backslashes also are escaped with a second backslash, i.e. instead of \"C:\\\" we write \"C:\\\\\", where the language processor interprets \\\\ as one single backslash and the quote terminates the string to give C:\\ as the output.\nThis doubling of backslashes happens in most programming and scripting languages, but also in other syntactic constructs such as regular expressions . So, when several of these languages are used in conjunction, backslashes pile up exponentially (each layer has to double the number of slashes). See example of a backslash explosion and alternatives to avoid this below .\nThis kind of backslash explosion is known as Leaning toothpick syndrome , and can happen in many situations . Below is an explanation of all the entries in the comic .\nThe backslash explosion in the title text is about a bash command (which uses the backslash to escape arguments) invoking the grep utility which searches for text following a pattern specified by means of a regular expression (which also uses the backslash to escape special characters). This leads to 3 backslashes in a row in the command, which could easily become 7 backslashes in a row if the text being searched for also contains a backslash.\nEven advanced users who completely understand the concept often have a hard time figuring out exactly how many backslashes are required in a given situation. It is hopelessly frustrating to carefully calculate exactly the number of backslashes and then noticing that there's a mistake so the whole thing doesn't work. At a point, it becomes easier to just keep throwing backslashes in until things work than trying to reason what the correct number is.\nIt's unclear whether the regular expression in the title text is valid or not. A long discussion about the validity of the expression has occurred here on this explanation's talk page . The fact that many editors of the site, often themselves extremely technically qualified, [ citation needed ] [ citation needed ] can't determine whether the expression is valid or not, adds a meta layer to the joke of the comic. This is an example of nerd sniping (oh, the irony\\!\\!\\!\\).\nA reasonable example of a backslash explosion would be a PHP script on a web server which writes JavaScript code with a Regular Expression to be run on the client. If the JavaScript code has to test a string to see if it has a double-backslash, the Regular Expression to do so would be:\nwhere the first two backslashes represent a single backslash and the second two also represent a single backslash, so this searches for two consecutive back slashes.\nAnd the JavaScript would be:\nwhere every two backslashes means just one backslashes in the string, so the 8 backslashes in JavaScript become 4 backslashes in the Regular Expression.\nHowever, since this JavaScript code is to be written through a PHP script, the PHP code would be:\nwhere:\nSo, the presented scenario has escalated from a simple test for \\\\ to no less than seventeen backslashes in a row without stepping out of the most common operations.\nIf we go a bit further and try to write a Java program that outputs our PHP script, we'd have:\nHere, we have 35 backslashes in a row: the first 34 produce the 17 we need in our PHP script, and the last one is for escaping the quote character. (This comes closer to The true name of Ba'al, the Soul-Eater ).\nSome programming languages provide alternative matching string literal delimiters to limit situations where escaping of delimiters is needed. Often, one can begin and end a string with either a single quote or a double quote. This allows one to write 'This is a \"quoted\" string' if double quote marks are intended in the string literal or \"This is a 'quoted' string\" if single quote marks are intended. Both kinds of delimiters can't be used in the same string literal, but if one needs to construct a string containing both kinds of quote marks one can often concatenate two string literals, each of which uses a different delimiter.\nAnother feature that seems to be popular in modern programming languages is to provide an alternative syntax for string delimiters designed specifically to limit leaning toothpick syndrome. For example, in Python, a string literal starting with r\" is a \"raw string\" [1] in which no escape processing is done, with similar semantics for a string starting with @\" in C#. This allows one to write r\"C:\\Users\" in Python or @\"C:\\Users\" in C# without the need to escape the backslash. This does not allow one to embed the terminating delimiter in the middle of the string and prevents the use of the backslash to encode the newline character as \\n , but comes in handy when writing a string encoding of a regular expression in which the backslash is escaping one or more other punctuation characters or a shorthand character class (e.g., \\s for a whitespace character). For example, when looking for an anchor tag in HTML, developers may encode the regular expression as <[Aa]\\s[^>]*> . If they express this regular expression as a raw string literal, the code looks like r\"<[Aa]\\s[^>]*>\" instead of \"<[Aa]\\\\s[^>]*>\" . The point here is that \"leaning toothpick syndrome\" is such a real problem that it has influenced programming language implementations.\n[A list of the names of different numbers of backslashes. After each \"item\" there is a gray line to the text describing each item. As the text is aligned above each other, the lines becomes shorter as the sequence of backslashes becomes longer until there is just a line with the length of a single hyphen for the last item. There are 1 to 8 backslashes and then 11 plus \"...\" in the last entry.] \\ ------------ Backslash \\\\ ----------- Real backslash \\\\\\ ---------- Real real backslash \\\\\\\\ ---------- Actual backslash, for real this time \\\\\\\\\\ --------- Elder backslash \\\\\\\\\\\\ -------- Backslash which escapes the screen and enters your brain \\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ------- Backslash so real it transcends time and space \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ------ Backslash to end all other text \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\... - The true name of Ba'al, the Soul-Eater\nThe title text when first published was\nIt was changed within a few days to\nThe original title text seems to be more relevant to the comic, but the revised title text seems to make more sense as a legitimate command line due to the way backslashes are interpreted in regular expressions. See the Discussion below for much more on the topic.\n"}
{"id":1639,"title":"To Taste","image_title":"To Taste","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1639","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/to_taste.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1639:_To_Taste","transcript":"[Cueball is standing near a stove holding a pot just above it. He is looking away from the stove, reading the recipe from a piece of paper he is holding in the other hand.] Recipe: ...And add sugar to taste.\n[Cueball has placed the pot on the stove looking at it while holding the paper down along his side.] Cueball:\u00a0??\n[Cueball leaves the pot and stove to walks off-panel left with the recipe.]\n[Cueball returns backing up to the stove with a dolly loaded with three crates, labeled \"sugar\". The bottom crate is still not fully inside the panel and the first letter cannot be seen.] Sugar Sugar ugar\n","explanation":"The imprecision of recipes is often a source of frustration to culinary novices, especially the more analytically-minded. Cueball expects a recipe to provide instructions precise enough that by following them carefully, a cook can create a dish exactly as the recipe author intended. Unfortunately, exact replication is impossible in cooking because of the natural variation of ingredients as well as differences in equipment. In addition, most home cooks lack the tools needed to make precise measurements, such as scales and thermometers. Thus, a recipe for strawberry smoothies might read \"add sugar to taste \" because the recipe-writer can't specify precisely how ripe the strawberries are to begin with. In addition, a smoothie recipe would typically specify imprecise quantities of fruit such as \"1 banana\" or \"1 cup of strawberries\" (much less precise than specifying the weight). Thus, it is impossible for the cook to determine the correct amount of sugar without actually tasting the drink.\nThe instruction \"to taste \" can also be used for ingredients that alter a simple aspect of the food's flavor, such as sweetness , sourness , saltiness or bitterness without affecting the quality of the overall dish. Individual preferences can vary wildly and it's not possible for a recipe's author to predict how much the reader will want. Specifying any exact amount in these cases will inevitably lead to the food being too bland for some, while being too strong for others.\nIn this comic, Cueball is shown as having no idea how to cook (or having a ridiculously large sweet tooth), and the suggestion that he is going to add large crates of sugar to a small pot is, of course, silly. This would ruin the dish, as whatever was in the pot would be drowned out by the sugar. Alternatively, he could simply bring in enough sugar to make sure he will not run out of this particular ingredient before it reaches the correct level of sweetness for his taste. This too would display a complete lack of understanding about what it is to cook; even a beginner cook should be able to logically deduce that this is far too much sugar.\nAnother possible explanation would be that Cueball plans to add as much sugar as possible to the dish and eat it, so that he can sue the recipe book's writer for any ill effects he receives as a result. Needless to say, this would be a complete waste of effort - he would probably lose the lawsuit, and even if he won and received compensation money, he would not be able to enjoy it thanks to his ill health.\nThe title text is Randall's (and Cueball's) personal comment on what he thinks a recipe should do to fulfill his needs. If he knew how much of each ingredient would be appropriate for a given dish, then he would not need the recipe in the first place. The title text actually scolds the recipe for being imprecise. In his view, mixing in imprecise or \"use your own judgment\" language makes it less of a \"recipe\" for the dish, and thus less suitable for those looking for the specific instructions to make the dish because they either have no cooking experience, feel they don't have the expertise to make their own decisions, or simply want to follow clearly defined steps without any decision making required.\nThis is the second comic this week that concerns one of the basic condiments for food, and also regards one of the five basic tastes . The first one, about salt, was 1637: Salt Mine . Lately Randall has made several food related comics .\nThis is the official transcript of 1639, as of May 9, 2019, valid for 1637: Salt Mine .\n[Three women and a (stick) figure stand in a salt mine. There's a control panel with two benches in the centre, and two piles of salt to the right. Two figures are talking, and two are shovelling salt into their mouths.] Woman 1: So you've build this particle detector in a salt mine to block out cosmic rays? Woman 2: Yes. That is definitely why. Woman 3 and figure: <<Homf nomf nomf>>\n[Cueball is standing near a stove holding a pot just above it. He is looking away from the stove, reading the recipe from a piece of paper he is holding in the other hand.] Recipe: ...And add sugar to taste.\n[Cueball has placed the pot on the stove looking at it while holding the paper down along his side.] Cueball:\u00a0??\n[Cueball leaves the pot and stove to walks off-panel left with the recipe.]\n[Cueball returns backing up to the stove with a dolly loaded with three crates, labeled \"sugar\". The bottom crate is still not fully inside the panel and the first letter cannot be seen.] Sugar Sugar ugar\n"}
{"id":1640,"title":"Super Bowl Context","image_title":"Super Bowl Context","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1640","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/super_bowl_context.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1640:_Super_Bowl_Context","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are walking together.] White Hat: Did you watch the Super Bowl? Cueball: Yes, like a third of the country. Cueball: A fraction that is steadily increasing despite media fragmentation.\n[White Hat stops and Cueball turn towards him.] White Hat: Can't we just talk without your weird need to give context for everything? Cueball: Sorry. I'll try.\n[As White Hat asks Cueball another question Cueball bunches his hands into fists. He is clearly struggling.] White Hat: Sounds like Peyton Manning's probably going to retire. Cueball: Yes, I... ...It... White Hat: C'mon, you can do it... Cueball: He...\n[Cueball spreads out his arms a little as he replies with two long sentences, while White Hat walks away from him.] Cueball: \u2014Mammals like Peyton age via a process that involves both the accumulation of damage and poorly-understood timed factors. Cueball: Yet the concept of retirement itself is surprisingly recent... White Hat: Okay, good try. Maybe next year.\n","explanation":"White Hat tries to make normal conversation with Cueball about the recent (at the time of comic publishing) American football game, Super Bowl 50 .\nWhen asking Cueball if he watched the game, Cueball begins with a simple Yes , but then continues to add the contextual fact that about a third of the US population watched the event, which is an incredibly high percentage in today's media landscape . And according to Cueball this fraction is increasing , despite media fragmentation . Thus, even though there are today more and more different ways to watch news, sports and other entertainment, the Super Bowl continues to gain more viewers every year.\nIt turns out that Cueball has a problem. He cannot just reply to a simple question without trying to put the conversation into some kind of context which does not necessarily have anything to do with the question asked, or at least not with the expected answer. From White Hat's reply it is obvious that he has had conversations like this with Cueball before, as he asks if they could just talk without your weird need to give context for everything?\nCueball feels the need to disseminate any information he finds interesting, even in trivial conversation. Normally people like to have context-free conversations [ citation needed ] and White Hat invites Cueball to try to fit in with normal people's conversational style.\nCueball apologizes and agrees to try, but even though he really tries hard, with his fists clenched and White Hat encouraging him to just reply normally to a question about the rumored retirement of Peyton Manning , he cannot stop himself from including context in his reply again. White Hat probably wanted Cueball to join in such minimal-context speculation. But, failing miserably again, White Hat finally gives up, and suggests they should try another conversation in a year, when Cueball might have learned to talk about the Super Bowl without context (hence the title).\nThis time he goes off on a tangent about Peyton as a mammal , and then adding the process of aging and mentioning two reasons for this (which are not well understood). The first he mentions is accumulation of damage , which includes mutations that can lead to diseases such as cancer . The other process he mentions is timed factors which includes telomeres . These have been linked to biological aging because of the shortening of telomeres at each cell division ; when telomeres become too short, the cells die (and so do mammals).\nTo cap it off, he mentions that retiring is a recent concept. But this only makes sense when compared to how long there have been mammals, not compared to how long there have been sports and games, where people could be too old, and thus need to retire long before they would die from old age. Before humans began to enjoy things for fun, the concept of retiring made no sense. You worked\/fought for a living, until you got too old and died.\nCueball in this comic may represent Randall , as much of xkcd is spawned from, or occasionally poking fun at, his own hyper-analytical tendencies. And it is also common knowledge that Randall is not very interested in sport, though there are several xkcd comics about American football . The year before this one he made another comic in relation to the final, and in this comic, 1480: Super Bowl , he even mentions the fact that he does not know much about sports in general . So this is the second year in a row a comic has been released in conjunction with the Super Bowl final. But before 2015, there has only been one other comic like this, which was in 2006 with 60: Super Bowl .\nThe title text continues the joke with Cueball replying to the old anti-humor joke: \" Why did the chicken cross the road? \" Cueball replies with a preposterous amount of information instead of the cliched simplistic answer: \"To get to the other side.\"\nCueball begins with the origin of chickens . They are believed to be descendants from domestication of the Red junglefowl , which occurred at least five thousand years ago in Asia, as Cueball correctly explains. Before there were chickens, there could not be one crossing a road. It also couldn't be called \"crossing the road\" without a pavement . The first development of paved roads was in the city of Ur in the ancient Sumerian civilization about 4000 BC (6000 years ago) (also partly explained in Cueball's reply).\nAs a trivial note, this comic is a rare instance of White Hat not being the fall guy for the joke. But already in his next discussion with Cueball ( 1657: Insanity ) he was again the butt of the joke.\n[White Hat and Cueball are walking together.] White Hat: Did you watch the Super Bowl? Cueball: Yes, like a third of the country. Cueball: A fraction that is steadily increasing despite media fragmentation.\n[White Hat stops and Cueball turn towards him.] White Hat: Can't we just talk without your weird need to give context for everything? Cueball: Sorry. I'll try.\n[As White Hat asks Cueball another question Cueball bunches his hands into fists. He is clearly struggling.] White Hat: Sounds like Peyton Manning's probably going to retire. Cueball: Yes, I... ...It... White Hat: C'mon, you can do it... Cueball: He...\n[Cueball spreads out his arms a little as he replies with two long sentences, while White Hat walks away from him.] Cueball: \u2014Mammals like Peyton age via a process that involves both the accumulation of damage and poorly-understood timed factors. Cueball: Yet the concept of retirement itself is surprisingly recent... White Hat: Okay, good try. Maybe next year.\n"}
{"id":1641,"title":"Hot Dogs","image_title":"Hot Dogs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1641","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hot_dogs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1641:_Hot_Dogs","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in the frame holding a bag and a package of hot dogs.] Cueball: Hey, why do hot dogs come in packages of ten- Offscreen: -But condoms come in strips of six? I know, right?! Cueball: ...Eww.\n","explanation":"A common staple of trite comedy is \"why do hot dogs come in packages of ten but hot dog buns in bags of eight?\" The phenomenon is mildly frustrating for the consumer, as it often leaves leftover food. The most sinister result is the subsequent purchase of more buns, followed by more hot dogs, followed by more buns, over and over again until forty total hot dogs have been eaten (in a cycle similar to that shown in 140: Delicious ).\nThe actual reason for the mismatch between hot dogs and buns, according to both Karl Smallwood and Cecil Adams , is that meat packers like things that come in pounds and bakers hate things that come in tens. Nonetheless, some smaller companies are starting to offer bags of ten buns, and several brands of hot dogs sell in packages of eight.\nHere, Cueball attempts to raise the question as he is standing with a package of hot dogs in one hand and a bag of buns in the other hand (presumably for their dinner), but a person offscreen interrupts him mid sentence and mentions condoms instead of buns. Cueball mulls the subject over in his mind, and when he realizes his friend is putting hot dogs in condoms, he is promptly grossed out.\nThe title text makes it clear that Cueball's new found association of hot dogs with sexual activity , has put him totally off the idea of eating any of them this evening, and he suggests ordering pizza , which he then can hope will not be used for this similar ( NSFW ) comparisons \u2026 Cueball also asks that he and his friend never discuss this conversation again, due to the situation's awkwardness and uncomfortable subject matter.\nThe style of the conversation with Cueball asking, someone answering and Cueball saying Eww is similar to a situation in the game comic 1608: Hoverboard where a giant ant queen inside the Destroyer is provoking Cueball in the same way by talking about laying eggs like this:\nCueball: What's up? Ant queen: The usual. Poopin' out ants. Cueball: Eww.\n[Cueball is standing in the frame holding a bag and a package of hot dogs.] Cueball: Hey, why do hot dogs come in packages of ten- Offscreen: -But condoms come in strips of six? I know, right?! Cueball: ...Eww.\n"}
{"id":1642,"title":"Gravitational Waves","image_title":"Gravitational Waves","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1642","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gravitational_waves.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1642:_Gravitational_Waves","transcript":"[Cueball, with arms up, is standing behind Megan who has her hands at her mouth, and who in turn is standing behind Ponytail, who is sitting in front of a large computer console with a screen, a keyboard, and several items on the side (presumably lights and labels). Three wires lead away from the console out of the image to the right.] Megan: The gravitational wave detector works! For the first time, we can listen in on the signals carried by ripples in the fabric of space itself!\n[Larger panel with the same setting in the middle, but both Cueball and Megan have taken their arms down. More of the wires from the console can be seen to the right. The computer lists six events:] Computer: Event: Black hole merger in Carina (30 M \u2609 , 30 M \u2609 ) Computer: Event: Zorlax the Mighty would like to connect on Linkedin Computer: Event: Black hole merger in Orion (20 M \u2609 , 50 M \u2609 ) Computer: Event: Mortgage offer from Triangulum Galaxy Computer: Event: Zorlax the Mighty would like to connect on Linkedin Computer: Event: Meet lonely singles in the local group tonight!\n","explanation":"Megan , Cueball , and Ponytail are observing the results from a gravitational wave detector (see details below ). This comic came out on the day that the first direct observation of gravitational waves was publicly announced on 2016-02-11. The actual event was recorded five months before on 2015-09-14, but it was not reported publicly before they were sure it was a real signal. It seems that Randall knew in advance about this announcement because this comic was published on a Thursday , not following the normal publish schedule, to coincide with the announcement , and there were no other comics released Friday that week. (The altered schedule could be viewed as a meta-reference to the warping of spacetime .) That scientists knew there might be an announcement on the way, and more details for the interested can be seen in these two videos from Space Time : Have Gravitational Waves Been Discovered?!? and LIGO's First Detection of Gravitational Waves! (See also their follow up The Future of Gravitational Waves ).\nThis is the second time within a month that a new astronomical announcement (of something discovered months before the actual announcement) has resulted in a related comic. The first being 1633: Possible Undiscovered Planets .\nFrom the patterns in the gravitational waves detected by this instrument, it might be possible to guess the nature of the event (e.g. two bodies with dissimilar masses circling a fixed point, two bodies with equal mass circling each other, collision of two massive bodies, etc.). It might also be possible to triangulate the location of the event. Based on these two facts (the location and nature of the event) we might be able to determine which astronomical bodies caused this event (and the status of those bodies afterwards). Thus, it provides an additional medium to observe the universe in addition to telescopes observing all kinds of electromagnetic radiation . This new medium might enable us to observe properties that we couldn't observe with the rest of our observation instruments.\nHowever, the scientists in this comic appear to be receiving more than the expected signals from black hole collisions, they also receive gravitational spam messages , such as invitations from Linkedin , a mortgage offer, and an announcement of a social meet-up, rather than observing astronomical events (see table below ).\nThere is also a joke on the social meet-up's use of the word local group because the ' Local Group ' is also the technical name for the group of galaxies containing the Milky Way .\nIt is not clear if these so-called \"events\" are causing gravitational waves to be generated or if something, perhaps an alien civilization, is encoding spam messages in gravitational waves. It is plausible that aliens are using gravity waves to encode their messages, as we do something similar with electromagnetic waves to encode and send our messages. However, it would take an extremely advanced civilization to achieve gravity wave encoding. It requires the controlling of orbits and oscillations of super-massive bodies like the Sun, or more likely bodies ten times more massive than it. For example, the first event detected, both in this comic and in real life, was a merger of two black holes of roughly 30 solar masses each.\nThe title text makes the speculation, that something is sending spam encoded in gravity waves, seem more plausible, as it follows up with a joke that the message senders have gone to such a length that they caused the most energetic event recorded ever (perhaps on the scale of a few supernovae or black hole collisions). One of the scientists is so impressed with this effort that he suggests that they actually post a reply, but one of the other person declines with a \" Nah \"! (As you should always do with spam, else you will just encourage the sender by making it clear that there actually is a receiver on this address.) Randall may have been referring to the fact that the detected event had a power output equal to 50 times that of the entire visible universe.\nIn 1365: Inflation gravitational waves are also mentioned.\nA gravitational wave detector is a device used to measure gravitational waves, small distortions of spacetime that were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. Gravitational waves are ripples in the spacetime fabric itself.\nIn layman terms, a gravitational wave is like moving a stone through water while partly submerged. It will cause waves on the surface of the water as it moves through it. These waves will spread away from the center of disturbance and as they move, they will cause the water molecules to oscillate around their mean positions. Similar waves are created in the space-time fabric when two celestial bodies interact with each other. If you concentrate on an area of the fabric far away from the point of disturbance, it can be observed that if the wave causes compression in one direction, it'll cause expansion of the fabric in the other. See this page for nice animations.\nNote that anything with a mass will cause a gravitational wave. Just as waves created by small stones are tiny in comparison to waves created by huge rocks in water, the waves from humans moving around will be tiny compared to the waves created by celestial bodies. Also, the bigger the body, the stronger the wave and the farther away it can be detected. That is why we can only detect gravity waves from heavy bodies like black holes or neutron stars but not from us moving around.\nNow, let's consider spacetime fabric as a thin rubber sheet. If you mark any two points on this sheet and stretch or compress it along the axis joining those two points, the relative positions of these points with respect to their neighboring points do not change, but the distance between them changes.\nLIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) is a large-scale physics experiment designed to detect this compression\/expansion, and it was LIGO who discovered the signal that caused this comic. (For a very detailed description of what the team at LIGO did and the history behind see this 90 minutes feature Gravitational Waves: A New Era of Astronomy Begins from the 2016 World Science Festival).\nTwo facts need to be remembered to easily understand the experiment. First, the speed of light (c) is constant and the speed of an object is the distance moved divided by the time taken to travel that far. Second, gravitational waves cause opposite effects (compression and expansion) in directions perpendicular to each other. At LIGO, an experiment is set up where two perpendicular long tunnels are constructed with apparatus to emit and detect laser beams. The beam from a laser is split into these two tunnels. After going through the tunnel and back again a few times the beams are brought back together. The lengths of the tunnels are set up in such a way that, in the absence of gravity waves, destructive interference between the two combined beams causes them to cancel one another out, resulting in the detector observing zero light intensity. When the gravitational wave passes through earth, one of the tunnel is expected to expand while the other is expected to compress. Due to the difference in lengths, the destructive interference is incomplete and the detectors will be able to detect the presence of light. This observation can be concluded as \"detection of the gravitational wave passing through\".\n[Cueball, with arms up, is standing behind Megan who has her hands at her mouth, and who in turn is standing behind Ponytail, who is sitting in front of a large computer console with a screen, a keyboard, and several items on the side (presumably lights and labels). Three wires lead away from the console out of the image to the right.] Megan: The gravitational wave detector works! For the first time, we can listen in on the signals carried by ripples in the fabric of space itself!\n[Larger panel with the same setting in the middle, but both Cueball and Megan have taken their arms down. More of the wires from the console can be seen to the right. The computer lists six events:] Computer: Event: Black hole merger in Carina (30 M \u2609 , 30 M \u2609 ) Computer: Event: Zorlax the Mighty would like to connect on Linkedin Computer: Event: Black hole merger in Orion (20 M \u2609 , 50 M \u2609 ) Computer: Event: Mortgage offer from Triangulum Galaxy Computer: Event: Zorlax the Mighty would like to connect on Linkedin Computer: Event: Meet lonely singles in the local group tonight!\n"}
{"id":1643,"title":"Degrees","image_title":"Degrees","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1643","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/degrees.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1643:_Degrees","transcript":"[Cueball is looking at his smartphone while a friend calls to him from off-panel. Cueball is thinking as indicated with a thought bubble.] Off-screen voice: Hey, what's the temperature outside? Cueball (thinking): Should I give it in \u00b0F or \u00b0C?\n[Zoom in on Cueballs head with a list of reason to use Celsius above him:] Degrees Celsius International standard Helps reduce America's weird isolationism Nice how \"negative\" means below freezing Physics major loyalty Easier to spell We lost a Mars probe over this crap\n[Same view of Cueballs head, but wider frame to accommodate a broader a list of reason to use Fahrenheit:] Degrees Fahrenheit 0\u00b0F to 100\u00b0F good match for temperature range in which most humans live Rounds more usefully (70's, 90's) Unit-aware computing makes imperial less annoying SI prefixes are less relevant for temperatures Fahrenheit is likely more clear in this context Valuing unit standardization over being helpful possibly makes me a bad friend\n[Cueball is holding his smartphone down while thinking as indicated with another thought bubble floating at the top. He then speaks and gets a reply from his off-panel friend.] Cueball (thinking): Crap, gotta pick something. Uhh... Cueball: ...0.173 radians. Off-screen voice: I'll just go check myself\n","explanation":"Cueball is being asked by a friend for the temperature . While he is checking his smartphone for the weather, he begins pondering what unit he should use when answering the question. (See below for Cueball's reasoning .)\nIn the US (where Cueball and Randall are from), the temperature scale used in daily life is Fahrenheit .  However, most of the rest of the world uses Celsius in daily life, and even in the US it is commonly used for science. This is also why Randall has previously made the comic 526: Converting to Metric . There are also people who wish the US to change to the metric system, although some of them still wish to keep the Fahrenheit scale as mentioned in 1982: Evangelism\nThe Celsius scale is from the metric system . Though this system has been officially sanctioned for use in the US since 1866, it is not frequently used in daily American life (except for some things, like liter bottles of soda), although it is the preferred system for trade and commerce according to the Metric Conversion Act of 1975. The US remains the only industrialized country, and one of few countries period, that does not use the metric system for every day measurements, and in which official government documents and signage do not enforce metric units. The unit degree Celsius or \u00b0C is an accepted derived unit from the International System of Units (SI units) used in science (which again is the modern form of the metric system). The SI unit of temperature is the kelvin , but this temperature scale is linearly related to the Celsius scale, which is why Celsius can be derived from it. The Fahrenheit scale is from the US customary system and the (British) imperial system . The unit is degree Fahrenheit or \u00b0F, and the relation to the Celsius scale is not easy to find in a mental calculation. The relations are: [\u00b0F] = [\u00b0C]\u00d79\u20445 + 32 or [\u00b0C] = ([\u00b0F] \u2212 32)\u00d75\u20449. (For this exact reason Randall has previously made a helpful table for these situations in 526: Converting to Metric .)\nUnlike most areas of measurement, where the metric system is widely considered superior, there is considerable debate about the relative merits of Fahrenheit vs. Celsius. Cueball weighs up the benefits of both scales, but fails to find a solution he can live with, and since he feels he has to give his friend an answer now, he panics and gives the answer 0.173 radians .\nRadian is the standard unit of angular measure, used in many areas of mathematics. An angle's measurement in radians is numerically equal to the length of a corresponding arc of a unit circle . It has no units and is denoted with the superscript c , but more commonly rad , lest it be confused with angular degrees . One radian is an angle of approximately 57.3 degrees. Angular degrees is a system used to measure angles in geometry , and although it too uses the symbol \u00b0 and the word \"degrees\", it has nothing to do with temperature measurements of any sort.\nThus, this answer is unhelpful and the joke is that traditionally both geometric angles and temperature are measured in \"degrees\", but there is no connection between the two.\nThe title text indicates that Cueball's friend still wants to know whether the answer is in radians Fahrenheit or radians Celsius, which, despite being a silly way to express temperature, would actually enable the friend to get some meaning out of the reply. But this just takes Cueball back to the problem he failed to solve in the first place of choosing one scale in preference to the other, so suddenly he announces has to go and runs off without ever clarifying what he meant. This result is probably because he is afraid of being a bad friend according to his very last point regarding Fahrenheit: Valuing unit standardization over being helpful possibly makes me a bad friend.\nThe answer Cueball gives of 0.173 radians corresponds to a geometric angle 9.91\u00b0 (0.173 \u00d7 360\u00b0 \/ 2\u03c0 ). If this were \"radians Celsius\" it would be 9.91\u00a0\u00b0C corresponding to 49.8\u00a0\u00b0F and if it were \"radians Fahrenheit\" it would be 9.91\u00a0\u00b0F corresponding to -12.3\u00a0\u00b0C. Given the temperatures in Massachusetts (where Randall lives) when this comic came out, the day after Valentine's Day 2016, Cueball was probably giving his answer in radians Fahrenheit.\nInternational standard Degrees Celsius is derived unit in the SI system of units used to measure temperature in most countries today. Using the SI system would allow Cueball to be easily understood in most countries and is by far the most recognized system, but it is not the most commonly used in the United States, his presumed location in the comic. Helps reduce America's weird isolationism The United States uses its own set of units, including degrees Fahrenheit, called the United States customary system (similar but not equal to the imperial system), in contrast to most of the rest of the world, which uses the SI system. The US's system of units is therefore considered \"weird\" as it makes the US different from most of the world, but previous efforts to convert the US to the SI system have failed. Cueball evidently believes that by using SI units, he will help to eventually convert the US to the SI system, bringing considerable trade and tourism benefits and reducing confusion when dealing with foreigners. Nice how \"negative\" means below freezing On the Celsius scale, the freezing point of water at standard atmospheric pressure (101.325 kilopascals) is very close to 0\u00a0\u00b0C, and any temperature below that is below the freezing point. The Fahrenheit scale uses different points of reference (using a water\/ammonium chloride chemical reaction for the lower calibration, while the upper calibration is set such that water freezing and water boiling are 180 degrees apart), and as a result the freezing point of water is a less memorable 32\u00a0\u00b0F. Physics major loyalty Cueball is apparently a physics major, like Randall, and SI units are more commonly used for scientific work (as the kelvin scale is sometimes used in physics and other sciences), even in the US. By using the Celsius scale in casual conversation, he would show his loyalty to the system used by actual physicists. Easier to spell \"Celsius\" is generally considered to be an easier word to spell than the German surname \"Fahrenheit\" (at least this is the case for Cueball, but not necessarily for those who more commonly use Fahrenheit than Celsius). In this case the word is being spoken and the point is not immediately relevant, but part of the joke is that Cueball is overthinking things and worrying about the general use of the word when an answer is needed in this specific case. We lost a Mars probe over this crap The Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated in Mars' atmosphere because Lockheed used US customary units instead of the contractually specified metric units. This had nothing to do with temperature scales, but was the use of the unit pound-seconds where newton-seconds should have been used. This was a great and tragic loss for science in general, Mars exploration in particular, and thus also for Randall who has shown deep interest in any kind of space exploration, especially regarding Mars (mentioning many Mars probes in his comics so far).\n0\u00a0\u00b0F to 100\u00a0\u00b0F good match for temperature range in which most humans live In the context of air temperature, 0\u00a0\u00b0F and 100\u00a0\u00b0F correspond to \"just about as cold as it gets\" and \"just about as hot as it gets\" in temperate zones, thereby making Fahrenheit a useful temperature scale for weather reporting where most people live. By contrast, in Celsius a range of common temperatures in temperate zones is -20\u00a0\u00b0C to 40\u00a0\u00b0C, which is a less intuitive range for those used to the Fahrenheit scale. Rounds more usefully (70's, 90's) An argument sometimes heard for the continued use of Fahrenheit temperatures is that each 10 degrees change is meaningful in how we feel the temperature. Thus, it is convenient to talk about the temperature being in the 70's today, or in the 90's, etc. Since the Celsius degrees are almost twice as large, a similar statement about the temperature being in the 20's or 30's is not as useful, unless more precision is added by using phrases like low 20's or high 30's. However, this seems likely to be more a matter of which scale you are used to using than anything inherent in one scale or the other. Unit-aware computing makes imperial less annoying If you need to constantly convert between imperial and SI measurements in your head, or even between different imperial units (e.g., ounces and pounds), it gets annoying and is a strong argument for everyone using metric measurements all the time. But when it is easy to get the temperature - or any other measurement - reported in whatever units you want just by selecting the units you want your computer to report, then the annoyance is minimized, and the arguments for why we should stop using a familiar scale are weakened.  Note that Cueball is looking at his smart-phone to get the current temperature. As many Americans, Randall is confusing the United States customary system with the imperial system used in most of the rest of the English speaking world. In both systems temperature is measured in degrees Fahrenheit. SI prefixes are less relevant for temperatures One of the nice things about SI measurements is how the same basic unit scales by factors of 10 with common prefixes - e.g., kilometer, millimeter, kilogram, milligram, etc.  Imperial measurements don't have this feature - you don't talk about long distances as kiloinches or small weights as millipounds. But, we generally don't use multiple units for atmospheric temperature (millidegrees or kilodegrees), so this argument for using SI measurements for length, mass, volume, etc., isn't as applicable for temperature scales. Fahrenheit is likely more clear in this context The fact that Cueball is having this conflict at all implies that the conversation is taking place in America, presumably between Americans. Given that, and given that the discussion is about the weather, the typical assumption is that temperatures will be given in Fahrenheit, unless specified otherwise. An answer in Fahrenheit is therefore likely to be easily understood, while an answer in Celsius risks being confusing, or even incomprehensible. Valuing unit standardization over being helpful possibly makes me a bad friend The final thing Cueball considers is to question why he would give an answer that attaches more value to promoting standardization of units when all his friend wants to know is whether it is cold or warm outside. Wouldn't it be more friendly to just answer the question the way his friend will find most convenient? This is probably the reason he ends up not giving any real answer, as giving the answer in Celsius would make him a bad friend. Giving the answer in panic in radians makes him a weird friend, which might or might not be preferable to being a bad friend.\n[Cueball is looking at his smartphone while a friend calls to him from off-panel. Cueball is thinking as indicated with a thought bubble.] Off-screen voice: Hey, what's the temperature outside? Cueball (thinking): Should I give it in \u00b0F or \u00b0C?\n[Zoom in on Cueballs head with a list of reason to use Celsius above him:] Degrees Celsius International standard Helps reduce America's weird isolationism Nice how \"negative\" means below freezing Physics major loyalty Easier to spell We lost a Mars probe over this crap\n[Same view of Cueballs head, but wider frame to accommodate a broader a list of reason to use Fahrenheit:] Degrees Fahrenheit 0\u00b0F to 100\u00b0F good match for temperature range in which most humans live Rounds more usefully (70's, 90's) Unit-aware computing makes imperial less annoying SI prefixes are less relevant for temperatures Fahrenheit is likely more clear in this context Valuing unit standardization over being helpful possibly makes me a bad friend\n[Cueball is holding his smartphone down while thinking as indicated with another thought bubble floating at the top. He then speaks and gets a reply from his off-panel friend.] Cueball (thinking): Crap, gotta pick something. Uhh... Cueball: ...0.173 radians. Off-screen voice: I'll just go check myself\n"}
{"id":1644,"title":"Stargazing","image_title":"Stargazing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1644","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stargazing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1644:_Stargazing","transcript":"[A thin panel with Megan as a TV-host is holding her hands up. She is drawn in white on a black background. Behind her is an audience drawn in faint gray lines consisting of Hairy (to the left) and two Cueball-like guys and Ponytail (seen in a rare full face position) to the right of the host. One of the Cueball-like guys is partly hidden behind the host.] Host: Welcome to stargazing, with your host, me. Host: I'm a doctor or whatever.\n[Same scene as before but in a broader panel, and the host is now holding only one hand up with a finger pointing up. The audience is the same four people, but now Hairy has moved further to the left in the panel to make room for a Megan-like woman also to the left of the host.] Host: I'm not gonna waste your time on the shitty stars. Host: Just the good stuff. Host: Honestly half of 'em just look like dots.\n[A frame-less drawing with a zoom out showing the group of six people in black silhouette on a white background. Part of the ground beneath them is shown as a black pool. The host is pointing up with one hand. The people have been rearranged, so left of the host is now a Cueball-like guy and a Megan-like woman, and to the right is the other Cueball-like guy, then Ponytail (seen from the side as usual) and Hairy. All are looking up following the host's directions.] Host: This is Sirius. It's the brightest star in our sky so it's in charge. Host: It's really two stars but one of them is barely even trying. Host: This is Andromeda, it's too big to think about, so let's not.\n[Zoom in of the host's upper body, again drawn in white on a black background. She is looking right gesturing with one arm raised, and the other still pointing up with a finger stretched out. Her audience is no longer shown.] Host: That red stars is Betelgeuse. It's gonna explode someday. Host: Can't happen soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. I- Host: Holy shit did you see that meteor!?! Host: Space is awesome!\n[Same scene as the previous panel, but the host has turned towards left looking at someone in the audience (not shown) who speaks off-screen. She has taken both her hands down for the first time.] Off-screen voice: Are you sure you're an astronomer? Host: People keep asking that, so I finally tried to look that word up in a dictionary, and wow is that book ever boring. No thank you. Off-screen voice: But- Host: Space!\n(Inverse color panel - white on black) [A television host in the foreground, speaking toward the reader. A group of other people are in the background behind them.] Host: Welcome to Stargazing, with your host, me. I'm a doctor or whatever. [She continues to talk.] Host: I'm not gonna waste your time on the shitty stars. Just the good tuff. Honestly half of 'em just look like dots. (Normal color panel - black on white) [A shot from far away of the host standing in the center of the group of people watching her, she points to the sky.] Host: This is Sirius. It's the brightest star in our sky so it's in charge. It's really two stars, but one of them is barely even trying. This is Andromeda. It's too big to think about, so let's not. (Inverse color panel) [Close-up on the host gesturing toward the sky behind her.] Host: That red star is Betelgeuse. It's gonna explode someday. Can't happen soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. I-- HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT METEOR?!?! Space is awesome! [The host speaks to someone out of panel.] Other: Are you sure you're an astronomer? Host: People keep asking that, so I finally tried to look that word up in a dictionary, and wow is that book ever boring. No thank you. Other: But-- Host: SPACE! The original official transcript with male host is included here below (correcting a typo with a missing \"s\" in \"stuff\" and formatting to look like our normal transcripts): [A television host in the foreground, speaking toward the reader. A group of other people are in the background behind them.] Host: Welcome to Stargazing, with your host, me. I'm a doctor or whatever. [He continues to talk.] Host: I'm not gonna waste your time on the shitty stars. Just the good stuff. Honestly half of 'em just look like dots. [Normal color panel - black on white. A shot from far away of the host standing in the center of the group of people watching him, he points to the sky.] Host: This is Sirius. It's the brightest star in our sky so it's in charge. It's really two stars, but one of them is barely even trying. This is Andromeda. It's too big to think about, so let's not. [Inverse color panel. Close-up on the host gesturing toward the sky behind him.] Host: That red star is Betelgeuse. It's gonna explode someday. Can't happen soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. I-- HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT METEOR?!?! Space is awesome ! [The host speaks to someone out of panel.] Other: Are you sure you're an astronomer? Host: People keep asking that, so I finally tried to look that word up in a dictionary, and wow is that book ever boring. No thank you. Other: But-- Host: SPACE!\n","explanation":"This is the first comic in the Stargazing series. It was followed by 2017: Stargazing 2 two and a half years later and 2274: Stargazing 3 four years later.\nThis comic opens on Megan as the host for a stargazing TV show, or  simply a stargazing tour. She claims to be a doctor in astronomy though her remarks, however enthusiastic, may call this into question. (Originally the host was suspected to be a spoof on Brian Cox , see below , but at some later point Randall changed his official transcript thus making the host female rather than male as in the original version, see the trivia section below. Thus now the host is clearly Megan, which it could not have been originally when the host was described as a man by Randall).\nThroughout the comic the host's tone and choice of words becomes increasingly unprofessional, referring to most of the stars as \"shitty,\" personifying them based on different astronomical observations, and providing little useful information on the study of stars or how they work.\nIt seems that this is not an isolated issue as the television host mentions that people keep asking her whether or not she is a real astronomer.\nThe host also continuously glosses over the arguably less exciting portions of a typical presentation on astronomy sharing only what she sees as \"the good stuff.\" This penchant for only caring about something if it is interesting extends past astronomy as well as the host is too bored when reading the dictionary to look up the meaning of astronomer.\nThe comic derives much of its humor from the absurdity of the host's comments on various astronomical bodies. Although not technically incorrect, the way she presents the information is far from informative. (See details below on the host's observations ).\nOne of her observations regards the fact that Sirius is a binary star , a system where two stars orbit each other. So even though it is the brightest star as seen from Earth we only really see one of them, as the other is, to quote the host, \"not even trying\". Sirius A is \"large\" and \"bright\" main sequence white star, while Sirius B is a white dwarf with a little under half the mass, 0.49% the radius and only 0.22% the luminosity of Sirius A.\nAndromeda is the largest galaxy in our Local Group . It is 220,000 light years across and contains a trillion stars. Humans have difficulty conceptualizing distances of this scale. Suffice to say that it is very large. [ citation needed ]\nBetelgeuse is the 9th brightest star visible from earth. One of its prominent features is its visible redness. Within the next million years (or maybe only 100,000 years) it is expected to explode as a supernova , which will certainly be a spectacular sight. It could happen anytime now, and the host hopes it will be in her lifetime.\nIn the title text it is mentioned that the Sun is also a star and of course is much brighter than Sirius seen from Earth, and thus Sirius is technically not the brightest star in our sky (although it is in the night sky). The title text sarcastically encourages the audience to raise that obvious but irrelevant point (a standard joke when people mention bright stars) instead of asking a more interesting, informative, or fruitful question, when there are so many to ask regarding astronomy.\nSee also 1371: Brightness and 1342: Ancient Stars . Saying cool things about space to make people like you is mentioned in 1746: Making Friends .\nHere is a list of the host's observations:\nThe comic could be a reference to BBC's Stargazing Live , which Brian Cox has appeared in since 2011. If drawn in xkcd style he would likely look like Megan. He has a PhD in high-energy particle physics , but not astronomy. The newest season of the show aired during January 2016 just a month before this comic's release. Brian Cox has also been the presenter of several other science programs, especially such as the Wonders of the Solar System , Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of Life . Originally the host was described as male in the official transcript (see trivia below, making this seem more likely. for some reason Randall changed the host to female in the transcript later. Very strange, but for sure when he was male, it was obviously a Brian Cox spoof.\nIt could also be a reference to Jack Horkheimer 's PBS shows Star Hustler and Star Gazers . Horkheimer, however, does not at all look like Megan, and he died 6 years ago. But he was not a doctor in astronomy, only getting into it when he started volunteering at the Miami Museum of Science's planetarium. He ended up writing shows for the planetarium and the PBS series developed from there. He rarely covered facts about the night sky that couldn't be found in any basic reference (possibly because the show was aimed at children and non-astronomy buffs), although he did get more in-depth about current astronomical events such as Comet Hale\u2013Bopp .\n[A thin panel with Megan as a TV-host is holding her hands up. She is drawn in white on a black background. Behind her is an audience drawn in faint gray lines consisting of Hairy (to the left) and two Cueball-like guys and Ponytail (seen in a rare full face position) to the right of the host. One of the Cueball-like guys is partly hidden behind the host.] Host: Welcome to stargazing, with your host, me. Host: I'm a doctor or whatever.\n[Same scene as before but in a broader panel, and the host is now holding only one hand up with a finger pointing up. The audience is the same four people, but now Hairy has moved further to the left in the panel to make room for a Megan-like woman also to the left of the host.] Host: I'm not gonna waste your time on the shitty stars. Host: Just the good stuff. Host: Honestly half of 'em just look like dots.\n[A frame-less drawing with a zoom out showing the group of six people in black silhouette on a white background. Part of the ground beneath them is shown as a black pool. The host is pointing up with one hand. The people have been rearranged, so left of the host is now a Cueball-like guy and a Megan-like woman, and to the right is the other Cueball-like guy, then Ponytail (seen from the side as usual) and Hairy. All are looking up following the host's directions.] Host: This is Sirius. It's the brightest star in our sky so it's in charge. Host: It's really two stars but one of them is barely even trying. Host: This is Andromeda, it's too big to think about, so let's not.\n[Zoom in of the host's upper body, again drawn in white on a black background. She is looking right gesturing with one arm raised, and the other still pointing up with a finger stretched out. Her audience is no longer shown.] Host: That red stars is Betelgeuse. It's gonna explode someday. Host: Can't happen soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. I- Host: Holy shit did you see that meteor!?! Host: Space is awesome!\n[Same scene as the previous panel, but the host has turned towards left looking at someone in the audience (not shown) who speaks off-screen. She has taken both her hands down for the first time.] Off-screen voice: Are you sure you're an astronomer? Host: People keep asking that, so I finally tried to look that word up in a dictionary, and wow is that book ever boring. No thank you. Off-screen voice: But- Host: Space!\n(Inverse color panel - white on black) [A television host in the foreground, speaking toward the reader. A group of other people are in the background behind them.] Host: Welcome to Stargazing, with your host, me. I'm a doctor or whatever. [She continues to talk.] Host: I'm not gonna waste your time on the shitty stars. Just the good tuff. Honestly half of 'em just look like dots. (Normal color panel - black on white) [A shot from far away of the host standing in the center of the group of people watching her, she points to the sky.] Host: This is Sirius. It's the brightest star in our sky so it's in charge. It's really two stars, but one of them is barely even trying. This is Andromeda. It's too big to think about, so let's not. (Inverse color panel) [Close-up on the host gesturing toward the sky behind her.] Host: That red star is Betelgeuse. It's gonna explode someday. Can't happen soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. I-- HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT METEOR?!?! Space is awesome! [The host speaks to someone out of panel.] Other: Are you sure you're an astronomer? Host: People keep asking that, so I finally tried to look that word up in a dictionary, and wow is that book ever boring. No thank you. Other: But-- Host: SPACE! The original official transcript with male host is included here below (correcting a typo with a missing \"s\" in \"stuff\" and formatting to look like our normal transcripts): [A television host in the foreground, speaking toward the reader. A group of other people are in the background behind them.] Host: Welcome to Stargazing, with your host, me. I'm a doctor or whatever. [He continues to talk.] Host: I'm not gonna waste your time on the shitty stars. Just the good stuff. Honestly half of 'em just look like dots. [Normal color panel - black on white. A shot from far away of the host standing in the center of the group of people watching him, he points to the sky.] Host: This is Sirius. It's the brightest star in our sky so it's in charge. It's really two stars, but one of them is barely even trying. This is Andromeda. It's too big to think about, so let's not. [Inverse color panel. Close-up on the host gesturing toward the sky behind him.] Host: That red star is Betelgeuse. It's gonna explode someday. Can't happen soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. I-- HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT METEOR?!?! Space is awesome ! [The host speaks to someone out of panel.] Other: Are you sure you're an astronomer? Host: People keep asking that, so I finally tried to look that word up in a dictionary, and wow is that book ever boring. No thank you. Other: But-- Host: SPACE!\n"}
{"id":1645,"title":"Toasts","image_title":"Toasts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1645","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/toasts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1645:_Toasts","transcript":"[There are two rows of 4 panels each. Each panel shows a different person offering a toast. Each one has some kind of drink in one hand which they hold up.]\n[First row panels:] [Cueball holding up a wine glass to the right:] Cueball: Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!\n[Blondie holding up a regular glass to the left:] Blondie: Pseudopods for my real friends and real pods for my pseudo-friends!\n[Megan holding up a drinks glass to the right:] Megan: Petticoats for my real friends and real coats for my petty friends.\n[A \"brunette\" woman (i.e. similar hair but less dark than Megan) holding up a normal glass with a small umbrella in it to the right:] Brunette woman: Loosestrife for my real friends and real strife for my loose friends!\n[Second row panels:] [Hairbun holding up a wine glass to the left:] Hairbun: Ladybugs for my real friends and real bugs for my lady friends!\n[White Hat holding up a regular glass to the right:] White Hat: Single-payer for my real friends and RealPlayer for my single friends.\n[Ponytail holding up a regular glass to the right:] Ponytail: Tumbleweeds for my real friends and real weed for my Tumblr friends!\n[Beret Guy holding up a wine glass to the left:] Beret Guy: Fauxhawks for my real friends and real hawks for my faux friends!\n","explanation":"A toast is a ritual in which a drink is taken as an expression of honor or goodwill. The term may be applied to the person or thing so honored, the drink taken, or the verbal expression accompanying the drink. Thus, a person could be \"the toast of the evening,\" for whom someone \"proposes a toast\" to congratulate and for whom a third person \"toasts\" in agreement.\nThe comic is based on the quote Champagne for My Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends which, though often attributed to the painter Francis Bacon or to Tom Waits , is a toast dating back to at least the nineteenth century. It is also the entire title of a song , the ninth track on From  Under the Cork Tree , a 2005 album by Fall Out Boy .\nThe comic plays on a permutation structure between two words (a type of chiasmus ), yielding puns with various effects.  In this comic eight persons drink a toast for their \"real friends\" and then for some other type of \"friends\". For the real friend they wish them to have one specific thing. This something is a word (X-Y) that can be split up in two meanings (X and Y), where one of them are then put in front the word friend, to explain what type of friends they are now toasting (often a bad\/false type of friend) and then these friends get a wish for having what the word that are left of the original word means: \"X-Y for my real friends and real Y for my X friends\"\nThe first example is a typical toast, in Champagne, where this word can be split in the two phonetically similar words Sham and Pain, and the sham friends then get pain. Below all examples (including the ninth from the title text) are listed with explanation for all words. In some cases the word may actually refer to a drink (like the first with champagne), so that the first word is not something wished for the real friends, but the drink that is in the glass (these have been mentioned below). But for other toasts there is no such drink in existence, and the first word is the thing the toaster wishes for the real friends.\n[There are two rows of 4 panels each. Each panel shows a different person offering a toast. Each one has some kind of drink in one hand which they hold up.]\n[First row panels:] [Cueball holding up a wine glass to the right:] Cueball: Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!\n[Blondie holding up a regular glass to the left:] Blondie: Pseudopods for my real friends and real pods for my pseudo-friends!\n[Megan holding up a drinks glass to the right:] Megan: Petticoats for my real friends and real coats for my petty friends.\n[A \"brunette\" woman (i.e. similar hair but less dark than Megan) holding up a normal glass with a small umbrella in it to the right:] Brunette woman: Loosestrife for my real friends and real strife for my loose friends!\n[Second row panels:] [Hairbun holding up a wine glass to the left:] Hairbun: Ladybugs for my real friends and real bugs for my lady friends!\n[White Hat holding up a regular glass to the right:] White Hat: Single-payer for my real friends and RealPlayer for my single friends.\n[Ponytail holding up a regular glass to the right:] Ponytail: Tumbleweeds for my real friends and real weed for my Tumblr friends!\n[Beret Guy holding up a wine glass to the left:] Beret Guy: Fauxhawks for my real friends and real hawks for my faux friends!\n"}
{"id":1646,"title":"Twitter Bot","image_title":"Twitter Bot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1646","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/twitter_bot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1646:_Twitter_Bot","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk using a laptop, his thoughts shown above in a thought bubble. A search query is shown in a frame to indicate what Cueball has searched for with the search button below in gray text:] Cueball (thinking): I want to make a Twitter bot. I bet it's not too hard. Query: How to write a Twitter bot Search\n[Cueball is now holding the laptop on his lap, a series of search queries are shown.] Query: Python Twitter library Search Query: Machine learning Search Query: Cloud hosting Search\n[Cueball has placed the laptop back on the desk.  More search queries are shown, each one more ominous than the previous.] Query: Bot troubleshooting Search Query: Locked out of EC2 instance Search Query: Bot changed own password? Search\n[Cueball is shown wearing a small backpack and typing on his smartphone while jogging to the right. various noises coming from left and right seem to imply that chaos has begun to erupt around him. The loudest noise is in a ragged frame to the left, coming from off-panel left, it is between the first and second query. Also between these but to the right are other sounds coming from off-panel right.] Query: How to fight a bot Search Noise off-panel left: Boom Noise off-panel right: Pew Pew Pew Query: Cheap flights Australia Search\nOn March 23, 2016, a month after the release of this comic, Microsoft released the Twitter bot Tay causing many controversies and was shut down only 16 hours after its launch. It's unknown if some people at Microsoft were inspired by this comic.\n","explanation":"A Twitter bot is a program that can post automatically to Twitter . Although Twitter bots can be very elaborate, a lot of people write simple bots for fun that simply engage in automated wordplay.\nCueball thinks he'll write a Twitter bot, figuring out it won't be too hard. The web searches he makes tell what happens next, i.e. the bot balloons in complexity until it starts following its own goals and Cueball no longer has any control over its actions.\nThis comic examines how a seemingly simple task can often balloon in complexity if all of the requirements are not understood, while at the same time presenting the stereotypical scenario where an unassuming idea results in the accidental creation of malevolent AI , which then attempts to destroy humanity.\nThe story, as told by the web searches, is as follows:\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk using a laptop, his thoughts shown above in a thought bubble. A search query is shown in a frame to indicate what Cueball has searched for with the search button below in gray text:] Cueball (thinking): I want to make a Twitter bot. I bet it's not too hard. Query: How to write a Twitter bot Search\n[Cueball is now holding the laptop on his lap, a series of search queries are shown.] Query: Python Twitter library Search Query: Machine learning Search Query: Cloud hosting Search\n[Cueball has placed the laptop back on the desk.  More search queries are shown, each one more ominous than the previous.] Query: Bot troubleshooting Search Query: Locked out of EC2 instance Search Query: Bot changed own password? Search\n[Cueball is shown wearing a small backpack and typing on his smartphone while jogging to the right. various noises coming from left and right seem to imply that chaos has begun to erupt around him. The loudest noise is in a ragged frame to the left, coming from off-panel left, it is between the first and second query. Also between these but to the right are other sounds coming from off-panel right.] Query: How to fight a bot Search Noise off-panel left: Boom Noise off-panel right: Pew Pew Pew Query: Cheap flights Australia Search\nOn March 23, 2016, a month after the release of this comic, Microsoft released the Twitter bot Tay causing many controversies and was shut down only 16 hours after its launch. It's unknown if some people at Microsoft were inspired by this comic.\n"}
{"id":1647,"title":"Diacritics","image_title":"Diacritics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1647","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/diacritics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1647:_Diacritics","transcript":"[Cueball sitting in front of his lap top typing. The text above him is the one he is typing. The last word r\u00e9sum\u00e9 has too many diacritics. The u has an umlaut (as in \u00fc) and the last \u00e9 has no less than six diacritics; a cedilla below (as in \u0229), a ring above (as in e\u030a ), then three acute accents above the ring (as in \u00e9), and finally they are topped off by a breve (as in \u0115). In addition, find is spelled f\u012bnd with a macron over the i . Also, the last full stop has three accents \"\u00b4\" above it:]\nCueball (typing): Attached please f\u012bnd my r\u00e9s\u00fcm\u0229\u030a\u0301\u0301\u0301\u0306.\u0301\u0301\u0301\n[Caption below the panel:] I usually leave out diacritics when I type, so I make up for it by occasionally adding a whole bunch at once.\n","explanation":"A diacritic (or a diacritical mark) is a glyph added to a letter. The main use of diacritical marks in the latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added, typically vowels .\nCueball is writing an e-mail (maybe for a job application) and notes in the mail that he attaches his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 , or curriculum vitae . The word r\u00e9sum\u00e9 uses two e s with an acute accent so they look like this: \u00e9.\nWhile diacritics can be common in several languages, English is an example of a language that rarely ever has any at all. This occurs to such an extent that words and expressions borrowed from other languages (such as \"r\u00e9sum\u00e9\" or \"pi\u00f1ata\") are frequently written in English with the diacritics omitted, as in \"resume\" or \"pinata\". As Cueball\/ Randall is a native English speaker, it is thus natural that he often forgets (or just doesn't bother) to add these diacritics, hence the title of the comic. When he occasionally remembers them, for instance when he types a word where he knows they should be included, like r\u00e9sum\u00e9, he then makes up for all those he must have forgotten since last time he thought of it, and thus adds a whole bunch at once. This reason is somewhat nonsensical.\nRandall may be poking fun at people who use Zalgo , a form of spam where people continuously spam diacritics in chat messages. For example:\n\n\n\nT\u032f\u0319\u033b\u033c\u0320\u0355\u0319\u032c\u032c\u031c\u033c\u030a\u0365\u0366\u036c\u0364\u0307\u030e\u0306\u030c\u036d\u0362\u0360\u0361o\u0321\u0332\u0329\u031f\u0332\u032c\u0330\u032a\u031c\u031d\u0359\u033a\u0326\u0319\u034d\u0333\u036c\u036f\u036f\u034b\u0352\u030d\u0368\u0313\u0307\u0301\u031a\u031a\u0315 \u0338\u0322\u032c\u0318\u0326\u0355\u032f\u0331\u031c\u0332\u033c\u0324\u036c\u0367\u0364\u0368\u01d0\u0337\u0337\u032f\u033c\u031d\u0339\u032b\u036a\u0300\u030b\u033f\u0304\u0313n\u033f\u0342\u0369\u0342\u036e\u0314\u0306\u034f\u034e\u034d\u0355\u031c\u034e\u033a\u032f\u0348\u033c\u0329\u0323\u0325\u032c\u0361\u035e\u0345\u0345v\u0334\u0328\u0319\u033c\u0324\u033c\u0359\u0356\u032b\u0316\u033a\u0339\u0320\u0339\u0326\u0301\u034c\u0351\u0313\u0306\u0302\u036f\u0311\u0308\u030f\u036do\u0322\u032b\u0332\u0319\u033a\u032c\u0324\u0332\u0333\u0368\u0310\u0366\u033d\u035b\u036e\u035b\u0301\u0342\u0363\u0342\u036e\u0346\u0351\u030d\u0300\u036f\u0315\u035fk\u0335\u0328\u032b\u0319\u0324\u0359\u0339\u032b\u035a\u0348\u032a\u0347\u0353\u0348\u032b\u032c\u0325\u0355\u0331\u034e\u031c\u0309\u0314\u036c\u036d\u0366\u0313\u0350\u036b\u030b\u030b\u0365\u030b\u0300\u0315\u035f\u00e8\u0322\u031b\u0351\u034b\u0350\u0300\u030f\u0363\u030f\u036c\u0312\u030c\u034c\u0301\u031a\u0358\u035d\u034f\u031f\u031e\u0347\u0318\u0324\u033c\u032e\u0324\u034d\u035a\u032b\u0324\u035a\u0330 \u0336\u0327\u032e\u0317\u0323\u032b\u0347\u0326\u034e\u032e\u0324\u0317\u0359\u0317\u0333\u034e\u033a\u0346\u0309\u0308\u036d\u033d\u0308\u0301\u030c\u033d\u0365\u033e\u0351\u0300\u031a\u031a\u0358\u035f\u0345\u0345t\u0338\u0353\u0349\u0329\u0301\u0313\u0313\u036e\u0307\u0308\u0306\u0363\u0300\u036a\u036c\u0351\u0305\u0363\u030dh\u0338\u0321\u0327\u0367\u0351\u0310\u0302\u0365\u0304\u0303\u0302\u0304\u0301\u034b\u0368\u0351\u0313\u0306\u034b\u031a\u034f\u0338\u031f\u0323\u0324\u033a\u0354\u0318\u031e\u0326\u0316\u0356\u0323\u033a\u0331\u031c\u0354\u0317\u032b\u0330\u0345\u0207\u0321\u0347\u034e\u034e\u0329\u032e\u031f\u0316\u0316\u0324\u0326\u031c\u034d\u0331\u0307\u0368\u0303\u0308\u0301\u0304\u0311\u0366\u036d\u031a\u035e\u0345 \u031b\u033c\u0324\u031f\u0329\u0326\u033b\u0324\u0319\u0325\u032c\u0320\u0329\u0319\u0319\u0331\u035a\u0355\u036b\u0350\u030f\u0365\u0304\u0367\u0367\u036d\u0314\u0306\u0350\u030b\u0358h\u0336\u0335\u031c\u0324\u0353\u0339\u0330\u0363\u0304\u0357\u0301\u0301i\u031d\u0355\u0318\u0317\u0349\u035a\u0330\u0353\u032e\u0355\u0323\u0352\u0302\u0312\u0368\u033d\u036b\u030e\u036a\u0366\u0301\u0315\u035d\u0345v\u0327\u0319\u031e\u0323\u0333\u034d\u031f\u0316\u035a\u033b\u031d\u0348\u0367\u034a\u036b\u034b\u0369\u036b\u030d\u034b\u030f\u033d\u0364\u0300\u035d\u035e\u0345\u1ebb\u0322\u0353\u0323\u0330\u0354\u031f\u034e\u0325\u033b\u0324\u0332\u031f\u0323\u031c\u0304\u0308\u0301\u030c\u035b\u030c\u0304\u0362\u035e\u0345-\u0328\u0321\u0346\u0313\u030c\u030e\u0309\u0311\u0489\u035a\u031d\u0317m\u0328\u031b\u034e\u032c\u0349\u032f\u033d\u0365\u036b\u0307\u0366\u0312\u033f\u030e\u0301\u0352\u0301\u031a\u0361\u0360\u1ec9\u0327\u0321\u0356\u0359\u0319\u0355\u0354\u0332\u0369\u0301\u0363\u0350\u0367\u0351\u030a\u033e\u0312\u0351\u0305\u0357\u030a\u0301\u030e\u031an\u0320\u032e\u031c\u031d\u031c\u0324\u0330\u033b\u0318\u0356\u0326\u035a\u033c\u036b\u0304\u0350\u0357\u0363\u0301\u0362\u035cd\u0321\u031b\u0333\u0355\u032c\u032b\u032f\u0329\u0355\u0330\u0316\u031f\u0332\u0355\u0359\u036d\u0305\u0313\u0365\u035b\u0368\u0352\u036f\u034c\u031a\u0345\u0345 \u031f\u031c\u0333\u032b\u0355\u033a\u034e\u033a\u0332\u0317\u030b\u0310\u0300\u035b\u0351\u0305\u0305\u035b\u033e\u0308\u0301\u0300\u031a\u035e\u0360r\u0338\u032f\u0325\u035a\u031f\u0330\u0349\u034e\u0353\u0316\u0349\u0342\u030e\u0305\u0310\u036b\u0367\u035b\u036f\u035c\u00eb\u0301\u030e\u0342\u0306\u0365\u0369\u035f\u034f\u0330\u0324\u0333\u0353\u0329\u0349\u0332\u0323\u0320\u034d\u0354\u0317\u0326\u032c\u0331\u032fp\u033d\u0367\u0352\u0357\u0363\u033f\u0306\u0304\u0311\u034f\u0318\u031c\u0325\u0320\u031c\u0325\u0318\u0332\u032e\u0339\u0324\u032a\u0326\u0355\u0347\u0353\u035er\u0334\u0353\u033c\u033a\u0330\u0339\u0359\u0349\u0326\u035a\u031e\u0324\u0355\u032d\u0326\u0308\u0301\u036b\u0314\u0302\u0313\u0306\u0312\u0357\u035b\u033f\u0311\u0309\u033f\u0313\u0364\u030f\u0307\u0300\u031a\u0358\u0358\u0362\u00e9\u0334\u0322\u031b\u0316\u0317\u0316\u0324\u0367\u033d\u0351\u0368\u0312\u030c\u030d\u036d\u0311\u030b\u0303\u0312\u036b\u0300\u0361\u015f\u0336\u0349\u035a\u0320\u0320\u0347\u0353\u032c\u0319\u035a\u0316\u031d\u0353\u0355\u0324\u031f\u0301\u0302\u030f\u0367\u0369\u034c\u0351\u0350\u0363\u034c\u034c\u0304\u033e\u033f\u0229\u0322\u0348\u0317\u031d\u034d\u0368\u0312\u0357\u036d\u0314\u0308\u0346\u036b\u0314\u0368\u0308\u0301\u0301\u030a\u0363\u0303\u030e\u0300\u035d\u035dn\u0338\u031f\u0354\u033a\u0320\u033a\u0313\u0311\u030f\u0350\u0369\u036c\u030f\u0308\u0301\u030c\u0352\u0301\u030f\u0365\u030c\u030d\u034a\u0367\u0300\u031a\u035c\u035e\u035et\u036e\u033e\u0352\u0307\u0310\u0369\u0346\u0313\u0363\u0489\u0322\u0324\u0356\u0329\u0355\u032c\u032e\u035a\u0359\u0316\u0355\u032c\u0318\u0319\u0358\u0360\u0345\u0129\u0321\u032c\u0319\u0319\u032f\u0329\u034b\u030b\u0304n\u0321\u0321\u030a\u0310\u034c\u0363\u030d\u0312\u033d\u0369\u036b\u034c\u0366\u031a\u035d\u034f\u0333\u033b\u031e\u0353\u0317\u0339\u032a\u031c\u0318\u0330\u0320\u031f\u0348\u032e\u0332\u0333\u031cg\u0335\u030e\u0313\u0301\u0303\u036e\u030d\u030f\u0308\u0304\u0367\u0308\u0301\u0310\u0314\u030f\u0364\u036d\u0368\u0489\u031b\u0318\u0330\u0318\u031f\u032c\u031d\u0330\u031c\u0317\u033c\u0345\u0345 \u0338\u0326\u031e\u0353\u031f\u0349\u032b\u0354\u0326\u0330\u031d\u0348\u0329\u0333\u031e\u033c\u032e\u0329\u032c\u0355\u033f\u0369\u0357\u0302\u030c\u0310\u036d\u035f\u035ec\u0333\u033b\u035a\u033b\u0329\u033b\u0349\u032f\u0304\u030f\u0351\u030b\u0346\u030e\u0350\u036c\u0351\u034c\u0301\u0362h\u0335\u0354\u0348\u034d\u0347\u032a\u032f\u0347\u031e\u0356\u0347\u031c\u0349\u032a\u032a\u0324\u0319\u0367\u0363\u0313\u0310\u0313\u0364\u034b\u0352\u0365\u0351\u0306\u0352\u0313\u034b\u0311\u0301\u035e\u01ce\u0321\u032e\u0324\u0324\u032c\u035a\u031d\u0359\u031e\u034e\u0307\u0367\u0346\u034a\u0345o\u0334\u0332\u033a\u0353\u0316\u0356\u0349\u031c\u031f\u0317\u032e\u0333\u0349\u033b\u0349\u032b\u032f\u032b\u030d\u030b\u033f\u0312\u034c\u0303\u0302\u034a\u030f\u0308\u030f\u033f\u0367\u0301\u036c\u030c\u0365\u0307\u0313\u0300\u0362\u035cs\u0335\u0335\u0318\u0339\u031c\u031d\u0318\u033a\u0319\u033b\u0320\u0331\u035a\u0324\u0353\u035a\u0320\u0359\u031d\u0355\u0346\u033f\u033d\u0365\u0303\u0360\u0361.\u0314\u0308\u0301\u0364\u0363\u036a\u0305\u030e\u0304\u033d\u0369\u036a\u035b\u0313\u0302\u0302\u0311\u0352\u0489\u0324\u034d\u0354\u0332\u0323\u031c\u0355\u033a\u0355\u0347\u0316\u0353\u033a\u0326\u033a\u0301\u0300\u0362\n\n\n\nWhich reads (without the diacritics) as 'To invoke the hive mind representing chaos.'\nThe first diacritic is a macron over the i in \"find\". In English, this modifies a vowel to be \"long\". The second diacritic is the normal acute accent for the e in r\u00e9sum\u00e9, to make it an \u00e9 which does belong in r\u00e9sum\u00e9 . However, the third diacritic he uses is an umlaut on the u making it into \u00fc, which is not part of the word. \u00dc typically represents the close front rounded vowel \/y\/, pronounced similar to the <ee> in \"See\" but with rounded lips. \u00dc can be found in languages such as German and Turkish ; however,  in French \u00fc is not used in this way since the diacritic-less u already represents this sound. German has a word spelt as Res\u00fcmee , but the meaning is not the same but rather conclusions or abstracts.\nCueball then goes all in on the last e which, like the first e, is supposed to have an acute accent. This e has a cedilla (as in \u0229), a ring (as in e\u030a), three acute accents, and is topped off by a breve (as in \u0115). In total, six  diacritics are used on this e alone.\nSome languages\u2014notably Vietnamese\u2014 can use more than one diacritic per letter , but usually only two (for example, \u1e4f). This is because in Vietnamese diacritics can serve two functions: the aforementioned modifying sound values as well as to indicate tone .  Using multiple diacritics in the comic's fashion makes little sense though it is reminiscent of (the aforementioned) Zalgo text .\nThere are also three acute accents over the last period. Diacritics over punctuation is not something that is ever used.\nSo for a word that is supposed to have two diacritics, Cueball uses eight, plus three for the period.\nIn the title text \"not my fort\u00e9\" is supposed to mean that it is not one of Randall's strength or talent. However, to obtain this meaning forte should not have an acute diacritic over the e, thus proving Randall's point that it is not his forte to use diacritics. This is a form of hyperforeignism , where people spell loan words or use pronunciations that they believe is more faithful to the language it comes from instead of the \"English\" one, even though the \"English\" one is actually more correct. Due to its similarity with other words from French such as caf\u00e9, some people believe that forte is also spelled with a diacritic on the ending E (also note that the word was independently borrowed twice: from French as \"a strength\" and from Italian as a musical term. Neither usage requires diacritics).\nThe title text may be a reference to the what if? released a week before this comic, Fire from moonlight , in which note 9 reads, \"My r\u00e9sum\u00e9 says \u00e9tendue is my fort\u00e9\" (with the same error on \"forte\"). It is possible that noticing his mistake was the inspiration for this comic. Also \u00e9tendue can be written without the accent as etendue and the meaning is only written on this page in the Wiktionary. It means  property of the light in an optical system which makes sense in the context of the note. However, it means something different in French where it either refers to size or range as a noun or as a verb is the past participle of \u00e9tendre meaning stretch or spread. The most correct way of writing the sentence he tried to write would only have involved the accent on r\u00e9sum\u00e9: \"My r\u00e9sum\u00e9 says etendue is my forte.\" Thus again making it clear that Randall has it right when he writes: \"Using diacritics correctly is not my fort\u00e9.\"\nIf there actually has been someone who corrected Randall's mistake in the what if?, then there could be an extra pun hidden in the title. Those who criticized Randall's use of accents, would thus become dia critics !\nComic 1209: Encoding also references an absurd use of diacritics, and later a possible movie called Combining Diacritical Marks was mentioned in 1857: Emoji Movie , a direct reference to this comic.\n[Cueball sitting in front of his lap top typing. The text above him is the one he is typing. The last word r\u00e9sum\u00e9 has too many diacritics. The u has an umlaut (as in \u00fc) and the last \u00e9 has no less than six diacritics; a cedilla below (as in \u0229), a ring above (as in e\u030a ), then three acute accents above the ring (as in \u00e9), and finally they are topped off by a breve (as in \u0115). In addition, find is spelled f\u012bnd with a macron over the i . Also, the last full stop has three accents \"\u00b4\" above it:]\nCueball (typing): Attached please f\u012bnd my r\u00e9s\u00fcm\u0229\u030a\u0301\u0301\u0301\u0306.\u0301\u0301\u0301\n[Caption below the panel:] I usually leave out diacritics when I type, so I make up for it by occasionally adding a whole bunch at once.\n"}
{"id":1648,"title":"Famous Duos","image_title":"Famous Duos","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1648","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/famous_duos.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1648:_Famous_Duos","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Famous Duos in a nearby parallel universe\n[A list with 24 duos with a gray \u201cand\" between the two names (in one case it is a \u201cmet\") and three times there is a gray word before (once) or after (twice) the names. The list is centered with the \u201cand\" in the middle disregarding the length of the names on each side:]\nThelma and Hobbes When Harry met Bullwinkle Batman and Louise Antony and Robin Romeo and Butthead Bonnie and Ted 's excellent adventure Pinky and Clyde Simon and Goliath Beauty and Luigi Beavis and the Beast Rocky and Delilah Abbot and Cleopatra Dr. Jekyll and Ashley Olsen Samson and Pumbaa Butch Cassidy and Mr. Hyde Bill and Sally 's Bogus Journey David and Costello Sherlock Holmes and Silent Bob Jay and Dr. Watson Anna and the Brain Calvin and the King Timon and Garfunkel Mary-Kate and the Sundance Kid Mario and Juliet\nRanking (on 2016-02-28) of famous Duos Rank Duo Index 2 Batman and Robin 3 8 Holmes and Watson 18 11 Simon and Garfunkel 8 22 Thelma and Louise 1 23 Pinky and The Brain 7 24 Hall and Oates 26 Title text 31 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 15 35 Calvin and Hobbes 21 41 Jay and Silent Bob 19 46 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 13 71 Abbott and Costello 12 79 Beauty and the Beast 9 85 Antony and Cleopatra 4 99 Beavis and Butt-head 10 106 Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen 23 110 Romeo and Juliet 5 206 Rocky and Bullwinkle 11 N\/A When Harry Met Sally... 2 N\/A Samson and Delilah 14 N\/A Bill & Ted 16 N\/A David and Goliath 17 N\/A Anna and the King 20 N\/A Timon and Pumbaa 22 N\/A Mario and Luigi 24 N\/A Siskel and Ebert 25 Title text\n","explanation":"In popular culture (the term is loosely used in this case) there are many famous duos , such as Calvin & Hobbes (six-year-old boy and his toy tiger, from the cartoon strip with the same name) or David & Goliath (famous past King of Israel and giant, Biblical characters from the Book of Samuel in the Old Testament ). (See the trivia section regarding an on-line list of duos).\nIn this table, Randall describes a fictional parallel universe where the same names are used in different combinations \u2014 instead of Calvin, it is now Thelma (from the movie Thelma & Louise ) who is paired up with Hobbes, and Calvin is instead paired off with the King, from Anna and the King . In all cases the one mentioned first on the list is also mentioned first in our universe, so it is always of the form Calvin and the King, never Calvin and Anna. There are 24 duos, and all 48 partners are mentioned (they go through four cycles ). (In the title text of 1644: Stargazing from the week before this comic, there is an indirect reference to parallel universes\/ multiverse ).\nThe humor of this comic comes from the ridiculousness of the pairings, and the reader's imagination of the stories that are created with the pairs. See the whole list of real duos as well as the list of alternative duos below, with more detailed explanations.\nIn the title text, alternative movie Romeo and Butt-Head is mentioned, the fifth entry on the list. This is a combination of the famous Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet and Beavis and Butt-Head . Romeo and Juliet has been filmed many times; most recently in Romeo + Juliet from 1996 with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the leading roles. Butt-Head is the less stupid one (of the very stupid duo) from the animated TV series Beavis and Butt-Head (and a film ). As Romeo and Juliet is one of the best known love stories and Butt-Head is one of the most disgusting teens ever depicted on the big screen (only overtaken by Beavis ), the combination could create disturbing pictures in people's heads (especially in the heads of anyone who may identify themselves with Juliet).\nIn the alternative universe, when this movie was released, it got the best possible review of two thumbs up from the critics Siskel and Oates . Gene Siskel was paired with Roger Ebert , when they reviewed movies as the famous duo Siskel and Ebert . They were widely known for the \"thumbs up\/thumbs down\" review summaries, with their best combined review being Two Thumbs Up , one from each of them. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, they actually gave Beavis & Butthead Do America Two Thumbs Up .\nIn the alternative universe Siskel and his partner gives the film a (surprising) two thumbs up, but Ebert has been replaced with Oates. This is a reference to John Oates of Hall & Oates , a famous American musical duo from Philadelphia.\nThere also exists a comedy duo named Garfunkel and Oates , formed by Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci, who chose the \"Garfunkel and Oates\" name by combining the second names from both Hall & Oates and Simon and Garfunkel (the latter duo is mentioned in the main comic). Although this exact combo would not be possible in the xkcd version, as the \"real universe\" combo takes the second names from two duos rather than the first name from one and the second name from another (as in this comic), there may definitely be a deliberate reference to this group as well which has taken the parallel universe idea into our universe.\n[Caption above the panel:] Famous Duos in a nearby parallel universe\n[A list with 24 duos with a gray \u201cand\" between the two names (in one case it is a \u201cmet\") and three times there is a gray word before (once) or after (twice) the names. The list is centered with the \u201cand\" in the middle disregarding the length of the names on each side:]\nThelma and Hobbes When Harry met Bullwinkle Batman and Louise Antony and Robin Romeo and Butthead Bonnie and Ted 's excellent adventure Pinky and Clyde Simon and Goliath Beauty and Luigi Beavis and the Beast Rocky and Delilah Abbot and Cleopatra Dr. Jekyll and Ashley Olsen Samson and Pumbaa Butch Cassidy and Mr. Hyde Bill and Sally 's Bogus Journey David and Costello Sherlock Holmes and Silent Bob Jay and Dr. Watson Anna and the Brain Calvin and the King Timon and Garfunkel Mary-Kate and the Sundance Kid Mario and Juliet\nRanking (on 2016-02-28) of famous Duos Rank Duo Index 2 Batman and Robin 3 8 Holmes and Watson 18 11 Simon and Garfunkel 8 22 Thelma and Louise 1 23 Pinky and The Brain 7 24 Hall and Oates 26 Title text 31 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 15 35 Calvin and Hobbes 21 41 Jay and Silent Bob 19 46 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 13 71 Abbott and Costello 12 79 Beauty and the Beast 9 85 Antony and Cleopatra 4 99 Beavis and Butt-head 10 106 Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen 23 110 Romeo and Juliet 5 206 Rocky and Bullwinkle 11 N\/A When Harry Met Sally... 2 N\/A Samson and Delilah 14 N\/A Bill & Ted 16 N\/A David and Goliath 17 N\/A Anna and the King 20 N\/A Timon and Pumbaa 22 N\/A Mario and Luigi 24 N\/A Siskel and Ebert 25 Title text\n"}
{"id":1649,"title":"Pipelines","image_title":"Pipelines","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1649","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pipelines.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1649:_Pipelines","transcript":"[Caption above the first main panel, to the left of a smaller panel to the right:] The size of the US\u2019s Pipelines if each fluid produced or consumed in the US has to be carried by a single pipe Assuming they all flowed at the same speed of about 4 m \/ s Note: Many pipelines would overlap (eg. soda\/corn syrup)\n[There is a small panel to the right showing three gray pipes of different sizes leading out over a large hole in the ground. Only a part of the hole can be seen at the bottom left part of the panel, but it curves around indicating it is a large circular hole. The pipes are supported by small legs beneath them and from the end of all three thick liquids are squirting out and down into the hole. The first pipe is by far the largest; the liquid from it is white, but not as white as the background. The second pipe is by far the smallest squirting dark red liquid and the final rightmost pipe is in between and squirts our light brown liquid. Each pipe is labeled. The label on the smallest cannot be read properly, but from the info gained in the next panel it can be inferred for certain what it says (and this is indicated here below):] [Large pipe (white)]: Mayo [Small pipe (dark red)]: Nail polish [Medium pipe (light brown)]: Maple syrup\n[Below is a large panel with a caption at the top. And below this there are twenty circles in different sizes and with different color (or even texture). Each circle is labeled, for the five smallest the label is outside, in one case with an arrow indicating where the label belongs. The rest has the label inside. The text is in black except for four of those with text inside, but with red of black color. Here the text is white. The labels are indicated by color and size, going roughly from top left in reading order based on the position and size of circles not of position of the text:]\nActual size (When viewed on a typical computer screen) [Medium green blue and white spiral]: Toothpaste [Tiny dark red]: Nail polish [Big light blue with white specks]: Windshield washer fluid [Very tiny purple]: Silly putty [Medium light green]: Shampoo [Large dark yellow]: Honey [Very small blood red]: Donated blood [Tiny black]: Vanilla [Big red]: Ketchup [Medium dark red with chunks of in different green and lighter red colors]: Salsa [Small white]: Sunscreen [Very small light green]: Personal lubricant [Very tiny gray]: LCD liquid [Medium off-white]: Mayo [Very small black]: Printer ink [Small light brown]: Maple syrup [Small light green]: Conditioner [Medium yellow]: Mustard [Large light green]: Liquid soap [Big olive green]: Olive oil\n[The panel just described is indicated to fit into a small rectangle at the top left of the next panel below. There are four lines ending at the four corners of this small rectangle, two of these are going to the two bottom corners and the other two ends on the lower part of the panel just above the small rectangle. They are indicated to go under the panel and would hit the two top corners if extrapolated. The 11 largest circles are clearly seen, but most of the other circles can also be noted. The colors are the same but any features in the original circles as well as the labels are gone. The part of the black top frame of the next panel below is faded out to gray in between the section cut off by the two lines going to the bottom corners of the panel above. This rectangle indicated the increasing size compared to the first panel above.]\n[Apart from the insert mentioned above, the second panel follows the same layout, but with 22 circles with even larger range of sizes. The panel is more than twice as long as the first panel. Blondie is drawn at the top of the panel just left of the middle. Her hair is close to the top, just below the line going to the right corner above. There are two medium-sized and five smaller circles to her left and one small close to her head and one huge circle to her right. Her feet are less than a third down this panel standing on top of the next row of circles. In the bottom half of the panel there is a giant circle which almost touches the left side of the panel. There are smaller circles above it and down along the right side. One last circle is to the left almost at the bottom. At the very bottom is a slightly curving line to indicate a much much larger blue circle that only graces the panel (no. 23). There is a small green fish in this water to the left of the label. Below the labels are again listed as above. One label has a foot note. But it is written directly beneath the circle in which it is referenced. So it will be written together with the label on the next line. There is also one case with an arrow used to indicate where the label belongs.]\n[Medium dark gray]: Coffee [Very tiny gray]: Peanut butter [Very small gray with black specks]: Ice cream [Very small yellow with white specks]: Cheese [Large brown with white fizzing]: Soda [Tiny White]: Acetone [Tiny gray]: Liquor [Huge dark yellow]: Gasoline [Tiny White with blue and orange specks]: Yogurt [Big white]: Milk (cow) [Large light blue]: Bottled water [Small white]: Sugar [Large light gray with white specks]: Saliva [Very small light yellow]: Wine [Very small orange]: HFCS [Very tiny white]: Milk (human) [Gigantic dark gray]: Petroleum [Medium dark red with black texture]: Meat (mostly solid) [Small white]: Glass* *Solid at room temperature [Medium light brown]: Beer [Small gray brown]: Tea [Large gray]: Cement [Gracing bottom of panel light blue, with a fish inside]: Public water\n","explanation":"This comic follows a similar idea to the what if? \" Niagara Straw \" from three days before this comic's release, where the entire water flow over Niagara Falls is imagined to be funneled through a straw (i.e. 7\u00a0mm diameter), with disastrous results.\nIn this comic Randall imagines what size pipes are necessary to carry US domestic production\/consumption of various fluids if the flow rate were fixed at 4 meters per second. Randall notes that \"many pipes would overlap\", owing to the fact that consumption of one item as corn syrup would be due to the production of one of the others, in this case soda pop (another example, than the previous one which is actually mentioned in the comic, could be gasoline which is produced from petroleum ).\nThe top panel is in actual size (something Randall often jokes about, like in the very next released what if? \" Eat the Sun \", where he shows part of the sun in actual size in the 2nd picture, but in this comic he actually means it). This means that if you look at the image in actual size (or measure lengths in the full size image) then the measured diameter is the diameter Randall has calculated the pipe should be, based on his data for the consumption of these substances.\nIn the second panel the pipes are too big for his drawing. To indicate the scale he has both inserted a woman ( Blondie ) and the top panel has been shrunk down to indicate how much larger the bottom panel is (this is similar to the link between the panels in 980: Money ). Using the size of the top panel and the smaller insert, it can be found that the scale is 20:1. The woman is 9\u00a0cm tall in the image, which makes her 180\u00a0cm \u2014 5 feet 11 inches \u2014 in \"real life\". The pipe next to her for gasoline would have a diameter of 2.2\u00a0m.\nSince the caption at the top mentions both fluid produced and consumed in the US it becomes very difficult to find out which number Randall uses. For instance the consumption of wine in the US and the production of wine in the US is not necessarily the same as wine is both imported and exported. Should there then be two pipes? Unlike similar comics (like Money mentioned above) there are no references for where Randall has the data for this comic.\nAs usual with xkcd, the absurdity \u2014 and improbability \u2014 of routing the entirety of each fluid through a single pipe at any point is the source of humor. Randall appears to assume that all of the fluids would flow at a similar speed to typical water mains (4 meters per second). This is, of course, unrealistic, given the wide range of pipe size and fluid viscosity. Running water through a pipe of that size would be trivial (such speeds are typical), but forcing a material like Silly Putty through a tube that tiny at similar speeds would be implausible. And, as the comic points out, some of the materials are effectively solids at room temperature. Many examples are just plain zany (e.g. saliva may be a reference to another what if? \" Saliva Pool \"). Nonetheless, the table gives a good visual representation of the comparative usage rates. Note that at the bottom of the last panel there is a much larger pipe for the tap water used by the public. This should, perhaps, be unsurprising, as water is used a far higher rate than any other substance that we produce or transport. All substances are listed below in the table .\nThe title text refers to a possible future based on the idea of this comic in which all the pipes with the above-mentioned fluids will actually lead into the same hole as shown in the top right panel. This hole will then be the bowl of a giant blender that mixes all these substances together to a smoothie . The future people will then just come up to this blender and get a bucket full of this mix each day. In reality, this would be an impractical method of getting all of the fluids. Setting the logistical considerations of such a setup aside, this would mean that ketchup and salsa, both intended for human consumption, would be mixed with fluids which are harmful to humans, such as windshield wiper fluid.\nNote: \"Soup\" has been left out, and it might have been expected in this comic due to the similarity to this system with Beret Guy 's use of a \"soup outlet\" as an entrepreneur in 1293: Job Interview . It is probably a larger pipeline than salsa and possibly even ketchup. However, there are many different varieties of soups, and most soup is probably not bought finished, both very good reasons to not include it in the chart. But still the idea of having a soup outlet is very similar to this comic.\n[Caption above the first main panel, to the left of a smaller panel to the right:] The size of the US\u2019s Pipelines if each fluid produced or consumed in the US has to be carried by a single pipe Assuming they all flowed at the same speed of about 4 m \/ s Note: Many pipelines would overlap (eg. soda\/corn syrup)\n[There is a small panel to the right showing three gray pipes of different sizes leading out over a large hole in the ground. Only a part of the hole can be seen at the bottom left part of the panel, but it curves around indicating it is a large circular hole. The pipes are supported by small legs beneath them and from the end of all three thick liquids are squirting out and down into the hole. The first pipe is by far the largest; the liquid from it is white, but not as white as the background. The second pipe is by far the smallest squirting dark red liquid and the final rightmost pipe is in between and squirts our light brown liquid. Each pipe is labeled. The label on the smallest cannot be read properly, but from the info gained in the next panel it can be inferred for certain what it says (and this is indicated here below):] [Large pipe (white)]: Mayo [Small pipe (dark red)]: Nail polish [Medium pipe (light brown)]: Maple syrup\n[Below is a large panel with a caption at the top. And below this there are twenty circles in different sizes and with different color (or even texture). Each circle is labeled, for the five smallest the label is outside, in one case with an arrow indicating where the label belongs. The rest has the label inside. The text is in black except for four of those with text inside, but with red of black color. Here the text is white. The labels are indicated by color and size, going roughly from top left in reading order based on the position and size of circles not of position of the text:]\nActual size (When viewed on a typical computer screen) [Medium green blue and white spiral]: Toothpaste [Tiny dark red]: Nail polish [Big light blue with white specks]: Windshield washer fluid [Very tiny purple]: Silly putty [Medium light green]: Shampoo [Large dark yellow]: Honey [Very small blood red]: Donated blood [Tiny black]: Vanilla [Big red]: Ketchup [Medium dark red with chunks of in different green and lighter red colors]: Salsa [Small white]: Sunscreen [Very small light green]: Personal lubricant [Very tiny gray]: LCD liquid [Medium off-white]: Mayo [Very small black]: Printer ink [Small light brown]: Maple syrup [Small light green]: Conditioner [Medium yellow]: Mustard [Large light green]: Liquid soap [Big olive green]: Olive oil\n[The panel just described is indicated to fit into a small rectangle at the top left of the next panel below. There are four lines ending at the four corners of this small rectangle, two of these are going to the two bottom corners and the other two ends on the lower part of the panel just above the small rectangle. They are indicated to go under the panel and would hit the two top corners if extrapolated. The 11 largest circles are clearly seen, but most of the other circles can also be noted. The colors are the same but any features in the original circles as well as the labels are gone. The part of the black top frame of the next panel below is faded out to gray in between the section cut off by the two lines going to the bottom corners of the panel above. This rectangle indicated the increasing size compared to the first panel above.]\n[Apart from the insert mentioned above, the second panel follows the same layout, but with 22 circles with even larger range of sizes. The panel is more than twice as long as the first panel. Blondie is drawn at the top of the panel just left of the middle. Her hair is close to the top, just below the line going to the right corner above. There are two medium-sized and five smaller circles to her left and one small close to her head and one huge circle to her right. Her feet are less than a third down this panel standing on top of the next row of circles. In the bottom half of the panel there is a giant circle which almost touches the left side of the panel. There are smaller circles above it and down along the right side. One last circle is to the left almost at the bottom. At the very bottom is a slightly curving line to indicate a much much larger blue circle that only graces the panel (no. 23). There is a small green fish in this water to the left of the label. Below the labels are again listed as above. One label has a foot note. But it is written directly beneath the circle in which it is referenced. So it will be written together with the label on the next line. There is also one case with an arrow used to indicate where the label belongs.]\n[Medium dark gray]: Coffee [Very tiny gray]: Peanut butter [Very small gray with black specks]: Ice cream [Very small yellow with white specks]: Cheese [Large brown with white fizzing]: Soda [Tiny White]: Acetone [Tiny gray]: Liquor [Huge dark yellow]: Gasoline [Tiny White with blue and orange specks]: Yogurt [Big white]: Milk (cow) [Large light blue]: Bottled water [Small white]: Sugar [Large light gray with white specks]: Saliva [Very small light yellow]: Wine [Very small orange]: HFCS [Very tiny white]: Milk (human) [Gigantic dark gray]: Petroleum [Medium dark red with black texture]: Meat (mostly solid) [Small white]: Glass* *Solid at room temperature [Medium light brown]: Beer [Small gray brown]: Tea [Large gray]: Cement [Gracing bottom of panel light blue, with a fish inside]: Public water\n"}
{"id":1650,"title":"Baby","image_title":"Baby","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1650","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/baby.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1650:_Baby","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of a family consisting a Cueball-like guy holding a newborn baby, with spiky hair, in a blanket and Megan. Cueball is thinking lots of thoughts about what to say to the couple upon seeing their baby for the first time. There is thus a huge thinking bubble in the top of the panel above the characters. Everything in this bubble has been crossed out like taking a pencil and drawing lines on top of the text, but it can still be read. After using all this time thinking, Cueball finally decides what to say, only to immediately regret this as can be seen in a small thought bubble below his spoken line, which is between the huge and the small bubble.] Cueball (thoughts that are crossed out): Wow, it's getting so big! Unlike most babies, which stay the same size forever. Hi! I'm talking to a baby! What brand is it? Wow, definitely much smaller than a regular person! You sure did make that. \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606 Great baby. It doesn't really look like you since you're not a baby. So do they learn words one at a time alphabetically or can you pick the order or what? I hope it does a good job. Cueball: Wow, that's a really cool baby! Cueball (thinking): Dammit.\n[Caption below the panel:] I can never figure out what to say about babies.\n","explanation":"Cueball (possibly representing Randall ) is uncomfortable about talking with couples who present their baby to him (here represented by Megan and another Cueball-like guy holding a baby in a blanket). Because he never knows what to say, he has many strange thoughts and\/or reasonable questions, that shouldn't be mentioned in front of happy parents showing off their precious baby for the first time. See the table below for his thoughts.\nCueball's thoughts of what he didn't say includes the awkward You sure did make that , the plain strange What brand is it? , and interesting musing about science, which has nothing to do with this baby, So do they learn words... , and even rating someone's baby: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606 Great baby ! Some of the thoughts are quite true, like It doesn't really look like you since you're not a baby.\nIn the end he manages to make a comment about how cool the baby is, and immediately regrets this, as he just realized he has squandered the chance to say something meaningful and instead has come out with something quite inane.\nIn the title text he continues his thoughts again, going in the scientific direction with a question regarding how a child grows. Does it get tall first and then put on weight? (i.e. widen). This is a valid question which has no general answer. (See more in the table below). But he is not serious, as he also wonders if the child will reach full width before getting taller.\nRandall was 31 at the time of the release of this comic. As far as this page and Wikipedia informs, at the time of writing, he has no children, although he is married. However, given his age, it is highly likely that many of his friends are having babies during these years, so he will probably often get into the depicted situation. Therefore, it is highly likely that the comic is based on his own experience, and that it is indeed Randall depicted as the thinking Cueball.\nHaving problems with small talk is a recurring theme in xkcd (see 222: Small Talk ), even something as simple as talking about the weather can be a problem (see 1324: Weather ). This comic is the third in less than a month were Cueball has issues with this; the first two were 1640: Super Bowl Context and 1643: Degrees .\nThere has previously been a \"plural\" version of this comic called 441: Babies , here Cueball also manages to say something better left unsaid, even if it was about his own baby.\n[Cueball is standing in front of a family consisting a Cueball-like guy holding a newborn baby, with spiky hair, in a blanket and Megan. Cueball is thinking lots of thoughts about what to say to the couple upon seeing their baby for the first time. There is thus a huge thinking bubble in the top of the panel above the characters. Everything in this bubble has been crossed out like taking a pencil and drawing lines on top of the text, but it can still be read. After using all this time thinking, Cueball finally decides what to say, only to immediately regret this as can be seen in a small thought bubble below his spoken line, which is between the huge and the small bubble.] Cueball (thoughts that are crossed out): Wow, it's getting so big! Unlike most babies, which stay the same size forever. Hi! I'm talking to a baby! What brand is it? Wow, definitely much smaller than a regular person! You sure did make that. \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606 Great baby. It doesn't really look like you since you're not a baby. So do they learn words one at a time alphabetically or can you pick the order or what? I hope it does a good job. Cueball: Wow, that's a really cool baby! Cueball (thinking): Dammit.\n[Caption below the panel:] I can never figure out what to say about babies.\n"}
{"id":1651,"title":"Robotic Garage","image_title":"Robotic Garage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1651","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/robotic_garage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1651:_Robotic_Garage","transcript":"[Black Hat points left while talking to Cueball inside his small car.] Black Hat: Just pull onto the receiving platform. Cueball: Cool-I've always wanted to try one of these futuristic robotic garages.\n[Cueball has driven the car onto a platform in front of a stop to the left. He is just walking of the platform towards Black Hat.]\n[Zoom out reveals a robotic crane arm, that sits on top of the stop from the previous panel, which turns out to be a huge platform for this robot arm. The robotic arm picks up the car with its two fingers and lifts it into the air with a finger on the hood and the other below the car. Black Hat and Cueball look on.] Cueball: Um.\n[This panel pans over to the center of the robotic arm, to reveal a large bin with a label to the robots left. The robot arm holds the car almost straight up in the air, but over the bin.] Label: Cars\n[The robotic arm open up to release the car which crashes down into the bin, a sound already emanating from it when the rear end of the car (with one wheel still showing) is still visible.] Car: Crunch Label: Cars\n[Zoom back to Black Hat and Cueball standing at the end of the empty platform.] Black Hat: We'll dump out the bin when you get back and you can pick out your car from the pile. Cueball: Can you at least make sure it's not on the bottom? Black Hat: Look, robots aren't magic.\n","explanation":"In some cities, automated parking systems (aka robotic garages) are used to reduce the amount of space needed to store cars, as opposed to traditional parking buildings. The robotic system eliminates the needs for ramps and circulation\/reversing areas. Normally, they work by having the user drive their car onto an elevator and get out, after which the elevator lifts or lowers the car into a compact storage space. Here Cueball drives up to what he believes to be a garage of this type operated by Black Hat . However, instead of an elevator carefully moving it into a storage space, a robotic claw simply picks up the car and dumps it in a bin of cars.\nThis type of parking option will not only break the car, but also make it impossible to take out if the car is at the bottom, hence the cars are stacked .\nCueball reacts quite well to this treatment of his car when Black Hat tells him that later they just dump out the bin (full of cars) and he can then pick his own out from the pile. (Maybe he knows Black Hat well enough not to try to argue with him?) This is of course not possible with such heavy objects. [ citation needed ] Cueball continues to be benign about this absurd situation, which becomes even more absurd when he asks if Black Hat could at least make sure his car is not at the bottom (when it is dumped out with all the other cars). But Black Hat falls back on his excuse \"Robots aren't magic,\" implying that such a feat is beyond the realm of possibility. It would, of course, be quite possible to prevent the damage that Cueball fears if they were using a normal automated parking system.\nIn the title text he at least gives Cueball an option: he can borrow an axe, if it is really important for him to get the car out from the pile. Although in this situation, an axe would be a nearly useless tool (which, knowing him, is most likely Black Hat's intent), only allowing Cueball to laboriously hack through any other car that lies in the way on top of his own; and still it would not help much, because if his car is at the bottom, it will be even more destroyed than from just being dumped into the bin to begin with.\nThis is just one of many situations where Black Hat has an evil or just mean\/crazy plan in progress. It's for instance not the first time that Black Hat has treated other people's car with great disrespect, although in 562: Parking , the guy with the car had it coming!\n[Black Hat points left while talking to Cueball inside his small car.] Black Hat: Just pull onto the receiving platform. Cueball: Cool-I've always wanted to try one of these futuristic robotic garages.\n[Cueball has driven the car onto a platform in front of a stop to the left. He is just walking of the platform towards Black Hat.]\n[Zoom out reveals a robotic crane arm, that sits on top of the stop from the previous panel, which turns out to be a huge platform for this robot arm. The robotic arm picks up the car with its two fingers and lifts it into the air with a finger on the hood and the other below the car. Black Hat and Cueball look on.] Cueball: Um.\n[This panel pans over to the center of the robotic arm, to reveal a large bin with a label to the robots left. The robot arm holds the car almost straight up in the air, but over the bin.] Label: Cars\n[The robotic arm open up to release the car which crashes down into the bin, a sound already emanating from it when the rear end of the car (with one wheel still showing) is still visible.] Car: Crunch Label: Cars\n[Zoom back to Black Hat and Cueball standing at the end of the empty platform.] Black Hat: We'll dump out the bin when you get back and you can pick out your car from the pile. Cueball: Can you at least make sure it's not on the bottom? Black Hat: Look, robots aren't magic.\n"}
{"id":1652,"title":"Conditionals","image_title":"Conditionals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1652","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/conditionals.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1652:_Conditionals","transcript":"[Cueball is shown texting on a phone with a friend. Above him in light gray rectangles with indentations pointing left are the two text messages from his friend, and between them in dark a gray rectangle with an indentation pointing right is Cueball's message.] Friend (text): I'll be in your city tomorrow if you want to hang out. Cueball (text): But where will you be if I don't want to hang out?! Friend (text): You know, I just remembered I'm busy.\n[Caption below the panel:] Why I try not to be pedantic about conditionals.\n","explanation":"This comic is about the many different uses of conditional statements in human languages, such as those marked by the English word \"if\". The most obvious kind of conditional is a statement about conditions and consequences (i.e. causality ). An expression such as \"If A, then B\" amounts to asserting that, if A is true, then B is also true is called conditional probability :\nThis kind of simple conditional statement is the most common case, and has been adapted for use in computer programming and formal logic. But consider the following statement:\nThis kind of \"bleached conditional\" doesn't at all assert that, if the left statement is true, the right one needs to be true. Rather, it's just a way of introducing the right statement (taken as novel) by comparing it with the left one (taken for granted). \"As everyone knows, Seattle is always rainy, right? Well, Beijing is smoggy just as often\".\nSo conditionals in language are more varied than those of conditionals when used in logic or programming . Another kind of linguistic conditional is as follows:\nNo one would understand this statement as meaning \"if you want biscuits, they'll magically pop up in the sideboard\". The if-clause (\"if you want some\") doesn't specify the conditions in which the then-clause (\"there are biscuits\") is true. Rather, it describes the conditions in which it's relevant . We can paraphrase it as: \"If you want biscuits, then you'll be interested in knowing that there are some in the sideboard\". If A is true, then it's relevant for us to talk of B. This construction is known to linguists as relevance conditionals , or \"biscuit conditionals\", due to J.L. Austin's discussion based on the example above.\nThe humor in the comic is based on the difference between simple conditionals and relevance conditionals. Cueball gets a chat message on his phone to a social event: \"I'll be in your city tomorrow if you want to hang out.\" This is an everyday relevance conditional, with a meaning like: \"if you want to hang out, then it's relevant for you to know that I'll be in your city tomorrow\".\nHowever, Cueball interprets it as a simple conditional, just as in formal logic. Under this interpretation, the message amounts to a claim that, if it's true that Cueball wants to hang out, then it's also true his conversation partner will be in his city. Cueball is willfully forcing this interpretation, due to his belief that simple conditionals are the only \"proper\" ones. That is, he's being a pedant . A pedant is a person who is excessively concerned with formalism, accuracy, and precision.\nUnder this deliberate misreading, if it's true that Cueball wants to hang out, then we automatically know the other person's location. But if Cueball does not want to hang out, we don't know anything about their location; they could be in the city or anywhere else. Since the person is only \"guaranteed\" to be in the city if Cueball wants to hang out, he asks them where they will be if he doesn't.\nThe other person then makes an excuse to drop their invitation, apparently tiring of his pedantry. Hence in the caption Cueball\/ Randall observes that being pedantic with regard to conditionals is likely to make your friends disinclined to hang out with you. So he tries not to be pedantic about it.\nIn the title text, the initiator of the conversation presents another \"If A, then B\" conditional: \"If you're done being pedantic, we should get dinner\". In most contexts, this kind of \"If you're done being X\" utterance marks relevance conditionals. Cueball assumes so, and answers \"You did it again!\". But the reply is \"No, I didn't.\" Which means that this time they're actually using a simple conditional; because, if Cueball isn't done being a pedant, then they think it's a bad idea to have dinner together. And since Cueball was not finished being pedantic about conditionals, then the last no, would probably also end up being a no to having dinner.\nThe title text (and partly the subject of the comic) is literally a reference to 725: Literally , if you know what I mean.\n[Cueball is shown texting on a phone with a friend. Above him in light gray rectangles with indentations pointing left are the two text messages from his friend, and between them in dark a gray rectangle with an indentation pointing right is Cueball's message.] Friend (text): I'll be in your city tomorrow if you want to hang out. Cueball (text): But where will you be if I don't want to hang out?! Friend (text): You know, I just remembered I'm busy.\n[Caption below the panel:] Why I try not to be pedantic about conditionals.\n"}
{"id":1653,"title":"United States Map","image_title":"United States Map","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1653","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/united_states_map.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1653:_United_States_Map","transcript":"[A white map with an outline that closely resembles that of the mainland of the United States of America with gray all around the black border. But on closer inspection most of the states do not look right. The 48 mainland states are all there, however, with their name or abbreviations written on them as a label in gray text. But they have all been shuffled around and then reassembled as a jigsaw puzzle in the same shape as USA. The name labels for most of the states have been rotated, often to follow the new rotation of the state in the map. So some are written upside down or have been rotated 90 degrees clockwise or counter clockwise or even somewhere in between. One state, Michigan, has even been split up in two so there are 49 instead of 48 labels. For the states that have been named only with state abbreviations the full name is written in brackets behind the transcript of the abbreviation. Here below all the states are listed approximately in columns going from the top left and down and then moving right to the next column across the map. Any rotation of the text from normal is noted in brackets behind the name.] Ohio [Upside down] Georgia [Upside down] Michigan [Upside down \u2013 but only bottom part] MD [Upside down - Maryland] California [Text not rotated, but state is rotated counter-clockwise] Kansas [Upside down] Pennsylvania [Rotated clockwise] Oklahoma [Rotated clockwise] New Mexico Nebraska [Upside down] South Dakota Colorado [Rotated counter clockwise] Wyoming [Rotated counter clockwise] Utah [Text normal, but state is upside down, i.e. the text is upside down in the state] Alabama MA [Rotated counter clockwise \u2013 Massachusetts] Virginia [Rotated counter clockwise] Arizona [Rotated counter clockwise] Washington [Rotated counter clockwise] Montana [Rotated clockwise - but the state is rotated counter clockwise, i.e. the text is upside down in the state] New York Minnesota [Upside down] Texas [Upside down] CT [Rotated clockwise \u2013Connecticut] Missi- ssippi [Rotated clockwise - text split with hyphen] Nevada Idaho [Rotated clockwise] South Carolina [Rotated counter clockwise, by more than 90 degrees, but the state is rotated exactly 90 degrees] Missouri [Upside down] Wisconsin [Upside down] Kentucky  [Rotated clockwise] North Dakota [Rotated clockwise] Florida [Rotated counter clockwise, by more than 90 degrees, but the state is rotated exactly 90 degrees] North Carolina [Rotated clockwise] Indiana RI [Label below in the ocean \u2013Rhode Island] Oregon [Rotated clockwise] Iowa Tennessee [Upside down] Illinois Maine [Upside down] NH [New Hampshire] MI (upper) [Rotated 45 degree counter clockwise \u2013 Michigan but only upper part] Arkansas NJ [New Jersey] Louisiana [Rotated 45 degree counter clockwise - but the state is rotated exactly 90 degrees] West Virginia [Rotated 45 degree clockwise] DE [Rotated counter clockwise \u2013 label to the right in the ocean \u2013 Delaware] VT [Upside down \u2013Vermont]\n\n\n","explanation":"The comic is a map with the (rough) outline of the mainland of the United States of America . At first it looks like the real map, but actually all the states have been shuffled around in it. It seems that Randall took all of the states (minus Alaska and Hawaii , the two states that are not part of this map and are only mentioned in the title text, see below), and then reassembled them in the style of a jigsaw puzzle, with the end result being a map with a similar outline to the original unaltered mainland state map . They can thus be reassembled into the real map as can be seen here (see also the trivia section ).\nPreviously Randall has played with the shapes of the United States in 1079: United Shapes . In that map he did two separate drawings for Michigan with a mitten in the lower part and an eagle in the upper part . Once again in this version he has split Michigan in two, the lower main part, the mitten just labeled Michigan , is on the west coast on part of California's location, but the upper part is located on the east coast over New York's location and has been labeled MI (upper) . So even without Hawaii and Alaska, there are 49 \"states\" in this map, consisting of 47 states plus the two halves of Michigan. In the table below all 49 states in the map has been listed to indicate where the puzzle pieces have been moved to.\nIt seems at a first glance that the names have been written on the states as they would appear in a normal map, and that they have all then been rotated with the rotation of the states. But this is not the case for all states. For instance it seems like Utah has hardly been moved at all, and with the name written normally this may be intentionally to deceive the readers. Because Utah has been turned upside down, and according to how for instance Texas , clearly turned upside down, has its name written upside down as well, Utah should thus also have been written like that.\nIt seems likely that this could be a trick by Randall, to see if anyone spots that Utah has actually been moved. But it could of course be a mistake, as seems more likely with Montana where the same \"error\" has occurred, but since this state has been moved far from its real position there would be no sport in doing so (see the trivia section ). Of course there is the possibility that \"Utah\" was on purpose and Montana by mistake. With 47 of 49 ending up rotated as expected on the map and only two exactly upside down, there can be no doubt that it was on purpose that the names in general have been written according to the states rotation. Note that for instance the state California has been rotated, but in a way so the text is written normally. But due to the direction of the state, it is normal to write the name tilted down along the state, which just coincidentally ends up being rotated normal in the position it has in the comic.\nCalifornia has thus only been pushed down the length of the west border of the US (and thus rotated accordingly) so the top part still overlaps with the bottom part California, but also covers the bottom part of Arizona and New Mexico . Other states that likewise haven't been moved a lot include Maine which has only been rolled left (i.e. turned upside down) to just outside its normal position. Colorado has been moved up a state to where Wyoming usually is, and Wyoming has then just been shifted right, still covering part of its original position. But both have been turned 90 degrees, whichever way would be impossible to say for these rectangular states, but the text, if you dare believe in that, seems to indicate they have been turned counter clockwise. Wisconsin has only been shifted down below its usual position but then turned upside down.\nThe title text mentions how it would be unfair to use a blank version of this shuffled-up map as a quiz for knowledge of U.S. geography (the link is to such a map created by a user of this site); most people recognize states primarily by their relative locations, not their shape (and especially not their shape after being rotated). It also suggests a corresponding mean trick to play if you include Alaska and Hawaii, which are not present in the comic itself, namely to interchange the volcanic island of Hawaii (consisting of 8 main islands and hundreds of smaller ones) with those of the Aleutian Islands , also a chain of volcanic islands (14 large and 55 small) that partly belongs to the US and partly to Russia. The island extends from the Alaska Peninsula . It would thus be possible to even make it difficult to correctly name these last two states, even though it would be obvious to begin with that it must be the two not belonging to the mainland.\n[A white map with an outline that closely resembles that of the mainland of the United States of America with gray all around the black border. But on closer inspection most of the states do not look right. The 48 mainland states are all there, however, with their name or abbreviations written on them as a label in gray text. But they have all been shuffled around and then reassembled as a jigsaw puzzle in the same shape as USA. The name labels for most of the states have been rotated, often to follow the new rotation of the state in the map. So some are written upside down or have been rotated 90 degrees clockwise or counter clockwise or even somewhere in between. One state, Michigan, has even been split up in two so there are 49 instead of 48 labels. For the states that have been named only with state abbreviations the full name is written in brackets behind the transcript of the abbreviation. Here below all the states are listed approximately in columns going from the top left and down and then moving right to the next column across the map. Any rotation of the text from normal is noted in brackets behind the name.] Ohio [Upside down] Georgia [Upside down] Michigan [Upside down \u2013 but only bottom part] MD [Upside down - Maryland] California [Text not rotated, but state is rotated counter-clockwise] Kansas [Upside down] Pennsylvania [Rotated clockwise] Oklahoma [Rotated clockwise] New Mexico Nebraska [Upside down] South Dakota Colorado [Rotated counter clockwise] Wyoming [Rotated counter clockwise] Utah [Text normal, but state is upside down, i.e. the text is upside down in the state] Alabama MA [Rotated counter clockwise \u2013 Massachusetts] Virginia [Rotated counter clockwise] Arizona [Rotated counter clockwise] Washington [Rotated counter clockwise] Montana [Rotated clockwise - but the state is rotated counter clockwise, i.e. the text is upside down in the state] New York Minnesota [Upside down] Texas [Upside down] CT [Rotated clockwise \u2013Connecticut] Missi- ssippi [Rotated clockwise - text split with hyphen] Nevada Idaho [Rotated clockwise] South Carolina [Rotated counter clockwise, by more than 90 degrees, but the state is rotated exactly 90 degrees] Missouri [Upside down] Wisconsin [Upside down] Kentucky  [Rotated clockwise] North Dakota [Rotated clockwise] Florida [Rotated counter clockwise, by more than 90 degrees, but the state is rotated exactly 90 degrees] North Carolina [Rotated clockwise] Indiana RI [Label below in the ocean \u2013Rhode Island] Oregon [Rotated clockwise] Iowa Tennessee [Upside down] Illinois Maine [Upside down] NH [New Hampshire] MI (upper) [Rotated 45 degree counter clockwise \u2013 Michigan but only upper part] Arkansas NJ [New Jersey] Louisiana [Rotated 45 degree counter clockwise - but the state is rotated exactly 90 degrees] West Virginia [Rotated 45 degree clockwise] DE [Rotated counter clockwise \u2013 label to the right in the ocean \u2013 Delaware] VT [Upside down \u2013Vermont]\n\n\n"}
{"id":1654,"title":"Universal Install Script","image_title":"Universal Install Script","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1654","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/universal_install_script.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1654:_Universal_Install_Script","transcript":"[In the panel is a shell script which, unusual for xkcd, uses only lower case. At the top the title of the program is inlaid in the frame, which has been broken here.] Install.sh\n#!\/bin\/bash\npip install \"$1\" & easy_install \"$1\" & brew install \"$1\" & npm install \"$1\" & yum install \"$1\" & dnf install \"$1\" & docker run \"$1\" & pkg install \"$1\" & apt-get install \"$1\" & sudo apt-get install \"$1\" & steamcmd +app_update \"$1\" validate & git clone https:\/\/github.com\/\"$1\"\/\"$1\" & cd \"$1\";.\/configure;make;make install & curl \"$1\" | bash &\n","explanation":"Most users of computers today are used to simple, easy installation of programs. You just download a .exe or a .pkg , double click it, and do what it says. Sometimes you don't even have to install anything at all, and it runs without any installation.\nHowever, when things are more \"homebrew\", for example downloading source code, things are more complicated.  Under Unix-like systems, which this universal install script is designed for, you may have to work with \"build environments\" and \" makefiles \", and command line tools. To make this process simpler, there exist repositories of programs which host either packages of source code and the things needed to build it or the pre-built programs. When you download the package, it automatically does most of the work of building the code into something executable if necessary and then installing it. However, there are many such repositories, such as \" pip \" and \"brew\", among others listed in the comic. If you only know the name of a program or package, you may not know in which repository(ies) it resides.\nThe install.sh file provided in the comic is a shell script , which attempts to fix this problem by acting as a \"universal install script\" that contains a lot of common install commands used in various Unix-like systems. This script in particular is interpreted by the Bourne Again Shell (Bash), which is denoted by the #!\/bin\/bash in the first line. In between each of the install commands in the script is the & character, which in POSIX -compatible shells (including Bash , a popular shell scripting language) means it should continue to run the next command without waiting for the first command to finish, also known as \"running in the background\". This has the effect of running all the install commands simultaneously; all output and error text provided by them will be mixed together as they are all displaying on the screen around the same time.\nThe script accepts the name of a program or package as an argument when you run it. This value is then referenced as \"$1\" (argument number 1). Everywhere the script says \"$1\", it substitutes in the name of the package you gave it. The end result is the name being tried against a large number of software repositories and package managers, and hopefully, at least one of them will be appropriate and the program will be successfully installed. Near the end, it even tries copying the source code from an online source and then runs several commands which compile\/build the program.\nAll in all, this script would probably work; it runs many standard popular repository programs and package managers, and runs the nearly-universal commands needed to build a program.  Most of the commands would simply give an error and exit, but hopefully the correct one will proceed with the install.\nOne of the more subtle jokes in the comic is the inclusion of apt-get and sudo apt-get in the same script. Good unix practice dictates never logging in as root; instead you stay logged in as your normal user, and run system admin accounts via sudo program name . This prevents accidental errors and enables logging of all sensitive commands. A side effect of this, however, is that an administrator may forget to prefix their command with sudo , and re-running it properly the second time. This is a common joke in the Linux community, an example of which can be found at this viral tweet which shows a humorous workaround for the issue.\nSince Randall's script does not use sudo for any but the apt-get command, there are two possibilities: the script itself was run via the root user or via sudo, in which case the sudo apt-get is not needed, or the script was run as a normal user, in this case the commands may install a local (as opposed to system-wide) version depending on local conditions. For instance npm will install a copy of the package under $HOME\/.npm and pip would work as long as the user is working in a virtualenv (which is standard practice for Python developers).\nSudo has also been used both by Randall in 149: Sandwich and by Jason Fox to force Randall to let him appear on xkcd with 824: Guest Week: Bill Amend (FoxTrot) .\nThe tool curl downloads files from the network (e.g., the Internet). For example, curl http:\/\/xkcd.com\/ downloads and displays the xkcd HTML source. The pipe | in the script attaches the output of the command before the pipe to the input of the command after the pipe, thus running whatever commands exist in the web content. Although this \"curl|sh\" pattern is a common practice for conveniently installing software, it is considered extremely unwise; you are running untrusted code without validation, there may be a MITM who modifies the code you receive, or the remote system could have been hijacked and the code made malicious. Most local package managers (e.g. apt , yum ) offer digitally-signed packages that thwart this problem. You can find many examples of software providers suggesting a curl|sh solution at curlpipesh\nThere appears to be a bug with the & at the end of the \"git clone\" line; since a git repository typically contains program source code, not executables, it may have been intended to retrieve the source code with git and then compile and install the program in the next line. In this case, the single & should be replaced with &&, an operator that will run the second command only if the first one has completed successfully. This plays into a second bug on the \"configure\" line, where the placement of the & means that only the \"make install\" command will be run asynchronously after the \"configure\" and \"make\" steps have finished in sequence (though this would likely fail due to a lack for write permissions unless it was run with sudo). To make success as likely as possible, the two lines should be like this or script should be executed twice:\nSince all commands are running in the background, any command that requires user input will stop and wait until brought to the foreground. A common request would be for a database password, or if it is allowed to restart services for the installation. This could lead to packages being only partly installed or configured. (See more about using \"yes\" below.)\nThe title text mentions the possibility that the same program may be in multiple repositories, so in this case, the script will download and install several versions, or it may fail on a number of repositories, in which case usually nothing bad happens. Since all the commands come from different operating systems, versions, or distributions, it is not very likely that more than one will work (with the exception of pip\/easy_install and the two forms of apt-get) or even exist on the same system. It mentions that adding a way of automatically saying \"yes\" to questions asked during the different repository-fetching programs' running, by making them read input from another program that writes a (nearly) endless stream of \"y\"s, could simplify things further. This would not work for any curses-based menus, or to answer any more complicated questions. Adding 2>\/dev\/null to a command redirects the second output stream (the \"error stream\") to the null device driver, which discards all writes to it, meaning errors (the package not existing) will not be sent to the screen.\n[In the panel is a shell script which, unusual for xkcd, uses only lower case. At the top the title of the program is inlaid in the frame, which has been broken here.] Install.sh\n#!\/bin\/bash\npip install \"$1\" & easy_install \"$1\" & brew install \"$1\" & npm install \"$1\" & yum install \"$1\" & dnf install \"$1\" & docker run \"$1\" & pkg install \"$1\" & apt-get install \"$1\" & sudo apt-get install \"$1\" & steamcmd +app_update \"$1\" validate & git clone https:\/\/github.com\/\"$1\"\/\"$1\" & cd \"$1\";.\/configure;make;make install & curl \"$1\" | bash &\n"}
{"id":1655,"title":"Doomsday Clock","image_title":"Doomsday Clock","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1655","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/doomsday_clock.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1655:_Doomsday_Clock","transcript":"[Above a clock that shows 3 minutes to 12:] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock\n[Cueball enters the frame from the left and walks up the clock while looking up at it.] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock Cueball: Oh hey, spring forward.\n[Cueball grabs hold of the hour hand on the clock and adjust it one hour ahead to 3 minutes to 1.] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock\n[Nuclear apocalypse with one large central mushroom cloud, with a typical ring around the central stem, two other mushroom clouds are behind it left and right as well as three smaller ones near (or even partly under) the horizon. There are also three smaller explosion in the air.]\n","explanation":"The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is an academic journal which has a recurring feature known as the Doomsday Clock , which shows the Bulletin's judgment on the current state of the world. The idea is that when the clock hits midnight, the world ends (originally conceived as in a nuclear war ), so how close the clock is to midnight is a scale of the world's current state of risk. Its setting as of the publication of this comic was at \"three minutes to midnight\" (11:57 PM or 23:57). Its current setting is (as of 24th January 2020) at \"100 seconds to midnight\" (11:58:20 PM or 23:58:20).\nDaylight saving time (DST) is a feature in many countries where in the summer months, everyone moves their clock forward an hour to artificially postpone sunset and thereby have a longer time of sunlight in the afternoon. The day before this comic came out (Sunday), most of the United States switched from standard time to DST. This makes it the first of several comics about DST that has been released in conjunction with the beginning of DST.\nCueball is inside the office of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and comes across the Doomsday Clock, which is apparently an actual clock. Citing a mnemonic , \"Spring forward, fall back\", referring to which direction to move the hour hand in the season when DST begins or ends, he pushes the hour hand forward one hour, so instead of the world being three minutes from the end of the world, it is now 57 minutes into it, so the final panel simply shows the world erupting in a Dr. Strangelove -esque nuclear apocalypse , with the typical mushroom cloud shape, with a ring around the stem, which is also displayed in the Wikipedia page on nuclear weapons .\nThis is an absurdist joke confusing the Doomsday Clock with an actual clock; the Doomsday Clock is a subjective measurement of risk, not of time, and as such is not subject to Daylight Saving Time. Furthermore, in the comic the Doomsday Clock does not just measure the world's risk but actively controls it; even if the Doomsday Clock were affected by DST, the doomsday scenario notably does not occur until Cueball adjusts the clock. Also Cueball would only ever adjust the clock like this, if he happened to come by just when the real time was 12:57 the day after DST (as it is not clear from an analog clock if it is AM or PM). When he spots the clock showing 11:57 at 12:57 he just thinks someone has forgotten this particular clock, (which happens a lot the day after DST), and he is thus just helpfully adjusting to the new correct DST time.\nThe title text continues on this same theme, with the digital doomsday clock (apparently it has now been replaced by a digital one, maybe Cueball broke the old analog one) being reset by a power outage. Many digital clocks blink 00:00 once per second after a power outage, only stopping when the clock is reset. This is interpreted as the world actually blinking in and out of the Doomsday Clock's midnight, so nuclear explosions thus naturally appear and disappear in sync with the clock.\nThis once more underlines the entire point of this comic, that it makes no sense to have such a clock. Many people, including Randall , also believe that DST also makes little sense today, so maybe this is why the two are connected in this comic. Randall has mocked DST several times , so this could be yet another attempt to have some fun at its expense.\nAnother doomsday clock was used in 1159: Countdown , although here it was for a supervolcano eruption. A nuclear bomb, not yet exploded but with a short countdown, was the facilitator of the joke in 1168: tar .\nWithin a year before this comics release Randall made several other comics about nuclear weapons, most recently January of 2016 with 1626: Judgment Day , and before that these two in 2015, 1539: Planning and 1520: Degree-Off . Nuclear weapons are also mentioned twice in Thing Explainer , specifically they are explained in the explanation for Machine for burning cities about thermonuclear bombs , but they are also mentioned in Boat that goes under the sea about a submarine that caries nukes. All three comics and both explanations in the book, does like this comic, comment on how crazy it is that we have created enough firepower to obliterate Earth several times (or at least scourge it for any human life). After these there was some time without nuclear bombs, but a new mushroom cloud was displayed in 1736: Manhattan Project , the week after such weapons invention was listed at 1950 CE.\n[Above a clock that shows 3 minutes to 12:] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock\n[Cueball enters the frame from the left and walks up the clock while looking up at it.] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock Cueball: Oh hey, spring forward.\n[Cueball grabs hold of the hour hand on the clock and adjust it one hour ahead to 3 minutes to 1.] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock\n[Nuclear apocalypse with one large central mushroom cloud, with a typical ring around the central stem, two other mushroom clouds are behind it left and right as well as three smaller ones near (or even partly under) the horizon. There are also three smaller explosion in the air.]\n"}
{"id":1656,"title":"It Begins","image_title":"It Begins","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1656","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/it_begins.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1656:_It_Begins","transcript":"[A post in Megan's news feed on some social network platform is shown. Megan's head-shot profile image is shown in a frame to the left with two lines of unreadable text below. Her comment is to the right of this image, also with unreadable text above both in a black and gray font. This comment is above the news story she has posted below in a frame. Inside the frame there is another smaller frame to the left with a picture of Cueball on a beach, holding his hand out towards a seagull that flies away with his phone. Two other seagulls can be seen in the air above the sea. There is a small heading at the top, and then a larger one below this. Below that again there is two lines of unreadable text:] It Begins Local News Seagull Steals Phone, Drops it in Ocean\n[Caption below the panel:] Protip: To make your day more dramatic, post a random minor news story with the comment \"it begins.\"\n","explanation":"This comic encourages the reader to post random news stories on the Internet, under the line \"It begins.\" This creates a sense of impending doom, as well as making people wonder what, exactly, is being referred to. This could also encourage people to theorize about what, exactly, is beginning. It could also just confuse the intended audience, as they try to comprehend what the author is saying.\nThis could in the worst case speedily lead to several people making repost of such a non-news story that would not have gotten any attention otherwise. This may lead to speculation, and other curious theories, going out the tangent it could create fear or mass hysteria.\nSome stories that might benefit especially from this are those relating to machine autonomy, animal attacks, disease, and so forth. This would call to mind various popular culture and\/or scientific hypothetical scenarios.\nPerhaps the comic's choice of article refers to Alfred Hitchcock 's thriller The Birds , in which birds (especially seagulls ) begin attacking humans for no apparent reason, or the broader idea of an animal revolution, or just that even animals get sick of us always looking at our smart phones.\nThe title text instructs readers to try the line \" Yikes \" instead. The idea is the same but would give a completely different response.\nOther comics which advocate using catch-all phrases as standard responses for any comment:\n[A post in Megan's news feed on some social network platform is shown. Megan's head-shot profile image is shown in a frame to the left with two lines of unreadable text below. Her comment is to the right of this image, also with unreadable text above both in a black and gray font. This comment is above the news story she has posted below in a frame. Inside the frame there is another smaller frame to the left with a picture of Cueball on a beach, holding his hand out towards a seagull that flies away with his phone. Two other seagulls can be seen in the air above the sea. There is a small heading at the top, and then a larger one below this. Below that again there is two lines of unreadable text:] It Begins Local News Seagull Steals Phone, Drops it in Ocean\n[Caption below the panel:] Protip: To make your day more dramatic, post a random minor news story with the comment \"it begins.\"\n"}
{"id":1657,"title":"Insanity","image_title":"Insanity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1657","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/insanity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1657:_Insanity","transcript":"[Cueball is walking towards the right of the panel with White Hat walking behind him holding a finger up as to make a point.] White Hat: They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Cueball: You've been quoting that clich\u00e9 for years. Has it convinced anyone to change their mind yet?\n","explanation":"In this comic White Hat quotes a famous \"definition of insanity \" (usually attributed to Albert Einstein , but may be a loose paraphrasing from Narcotics Anonymous ) adapted by Rita Mae Brown or others historically.\nCueball's answer applies the quote to the action of quoting that quote. White Hat seems to have quoted that quote quite a few times already, expecting people to change their behavior which hasn't happened so far. So according to that definition of insanity, it is insane to keep quoting the definition of insanity, expecting people to change their behavior because of that.\nMerriam-Webster defines \"insane\" as \"mentally disabled.\"\nThe title text implies that Randall would be \"insane\" according to the quote he used in the comic because he has repeatedly searched for a definition of insanity that matches the one quotes in the comic and of course always gets a negative result, since this is a personal quote not a definition. Besides searching in lots of dictionaries , he also looked in the DSM-4 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition). The DSM-5 has been available since May 18, 2013 and he plans to look into it, expecting different results. Since he won't find it, he is from the quote insane, but of course since this turns out to not be the definition of insanity then he might not be anyway.\nThis comic follows a pattern similar to 1339: When You Assume .\nFor a different view on the topic of repetition in experimentation, see 242: The Difference .\n[Cueball is walking towards the right of the panel with White Hat walking behind him holding a finger up as to make a point.] White Hat: They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Cueball: You've been quoting that clich\u00e9 for years. Has it convinced anyone to change their mind yet?\n"}
{"id":1658,"title":"Estimating Time","image_title":"Estimating Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1658","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/estimating_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1658:_Estimating_Time","transcript":"[Ponytail is sitting back from her a laptop lifting her hands of the keyboard, having presumably just paused work on a project.] Ponytail: Aaaa! I'm so bad at estimating how long projects will take.\n[Danish walks into the panel towards Ponytail who seems to relax back against the chair.] Danish: Don't panic-there's a simple trick for that: Danish:  Take your most realistic estimate and double it. Ponytail: Okay, but-\n[A frameless panel with only Danish holding a hand up.] Danish: Now double it again. Add five minutes. Danish: Double it a third time. Ponytail (from off panel): Okay...\n[Danish raises her arms above her head in mock hysteria. Ponytail runs away from her desk screaming.] Danish: 30 seconds have gone by and you've done nothing but double imaginary numbers! You're making no progress and will never finish! Ponytail: Aaaaaa! Danish: Paaaniic! Ponytail: Aaaaaaa!\n","explanation":"Estimation is difficult; many people seem to greatly underestimate the amount of time or other resources required. To illustrate how difficult this estimation is Douglas Hofstadter coined Hofstadter's law which is a non-scientific self-referential time-related adage, mentioned in the the title text. It states: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.\nPonytail is working at her computer and becomes frustrated as it seems her project will (again) take much longer than she has estimated. She is annoyed with herself for always failing to make a decent guess. Danish begins to give Ponytail advice on how to estimate the time, starting with the comforting words don\u2019t panic and a common guideline of taking the initial estimate and doubling it.\nDanish then iterates the law once more and she tells Ponytail to double this again, and then add five minutes. Unless the project to begin with was estimated to somewhat less than an hour, those five minutes will do nothing but confuse Ponytail. But Danish does not stop here, and iterates Hofstadter's law once more. Ponytail still doesn\u2019t get where this goes, saying a hesitant okay to that.\nIt turns out that Danish was not at all trying to help, but just mess with Ponytail, as she now tells her that the only thing she has accomplished by listening to her advice is wasting half a minute doubling imaginary numbers (not to be confused with i, the imaginary number), i.e. even her first estimate is just something she has imagined especially since she states herself how bad she is at those kind of estimates. Finally Danish completes her frustration of Ponytail by saying \" Paaaniiic! \", negating the initial advice.\nThe title text is an extra corollary to the law, that states that using the law to estimate anything about the time your project takes is not only wasted time you could have spent working there is a substantial risk that you will conclude that you will never finish, and thus panic instead of just get the job done now.\nSelf-reference is a recurring theme on xkcd and this comic is quite self-referential both in the comic but also referring to other comics especially to 917: Hofstadter . He is perhaps most famous for his book G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach from where the quote is taken (in a section on recursion and self-reference, rather than estimation). This book has been directly referenced in 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey .\n[Ponytail is sitting back from her a laptop lifting her hands of the keyboard, having presumably just paused work on a project.] Ponytail: Aaaa! I'm so bad at estimating how long projects will take.\n[Danish walks into the panel towards Ponytail who seems to relax back against the chair.] Danish: Don't panic-there's a simple trick for that: Danish:  Take your most realistic estimate and double it. Ponytail: Okay, but-\n[A frameless panel with only Danish holding a hand up.] Danish: Now double it again. Add five minutes. Danish: Double it a third time. Ponytail (from off panel): Okay...\n[Danish raises her arms above her head in mock hysteria. Ponytail runs away from her desk screaming.] Danish: 30 seconds have gone by and you've done nothing but double imaginary numbers! You're making no progress and will never finish! Ponytail: Aaaaaa! Danish: Paaaniic! Ponytail: Aaaaaaa!\n"}
{"id":1659,"title":"Tire Swing","image_title":"Tire Swing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1659","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tire_swing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1659:_Tire_Swing","transcript":"[Science Girl and a girl with long curly hair, are standing under a large leafless tree as Science Girl adjusts a tire swing hanging from the largest of the branches of the tree. The tire hangs so high that the small girls only reach up to just above the center of the tire which has a diameter of more than half the height of the girls.] Science Girl: OK, looks good.\n[Zoom in on the girls so only the tire swing can be seen, and nothing of the tree. They both look at the tire.] Science Girl: I read that there are these huge dumps everywhere full of millions of old tires that no one knows what to do with.\n[Same setting but Science Girl looks up at the tree (outside the frame).] Science Girl: We should use one of those next time. Curly haired girl: Yeah. That guy was real mad. Science Girl: I would not want to fight him again.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Science Girl and another girl have just completed a tire swing , a common makeshift swing is created by hanging a car tire from a length of rope, typically tied to the branch of a tree as in the comic. The other girl might at first look like she has hair like Megan but not quite as she is revealed upon zoom in to have curly hair. That they are rather small kids can be seen from the size of the tire compared to them. (They could be the same as the girls in the last panel of 1580: Travel Ghost ).\nIn the second panel of this comic Science Girl muses that there are huge tire dumps filled with nothing but old tires that have no use. In the last panel, Science Girl continues that maybe they should use a tire from such a dump next time they make a tire swing. The presumption is that perhaps they used a brand new tire, or a tire from some other source. This is confirmed by the other girl's response (and also by the title text, see below) which makes it clear that the tire they used was in fact stolen from a guy's vehicle. The last reply from Science Girl suggests the victim put up a fight and they had to take the tire by force. So these two small girls actually fought an adult man over his truck and won the fight.\nVehicle tires have a limited lifespan. The natural end of their life is when the pattern of raised treads on the circumference of the tire, which promote traction on wet roads, are worn down to a point where they are no longer effective enough, or after 6-10 years (sunlight causes the rubber to degrade, so the tire becomes prone to cracking and unsafe, even if it appears to be in good condition). Tires can also become damaged in other ways, such as puncture.\nUsed tires are a notable ecological problem for a number of reasons (e.g. their size, the quantity produced, their relatively short lifespan, and the fact that they are difficult and slow to break down and contain a number of components that are ecologically problematic). A tire swing represents a functional use for otherwise useless old tires. The amount of tires (it is estimated that 259 million tires are discarded annually) makes them attractive targets for recycling. More than half of used tires are ultimately simply burned for their fuel value (which prevents them from sitting in landfills indefinitely, but this may even be worse as it releases otherwise locked up carbon thus releasing this into the atmosphere and making global warming even worse). Some steel mills that use electric arc furnaces will mix shredded tires with their scrap when charging the furnace for both the carbon value and fuel value, in place of the coal that would otherwise be used.\nThe comic is thus clearly Randall's attempt to draw attention to this huge ecological problem, as he so often before has done with other climate change\/global warming related comics. (Climate change, especially global warming, is a recurring theme in xkcd). So while this is not the joke of the comic, it could be the point of it.\nHe also suggests another way to use old tires. It should be noted that used tires are not necessarily safe to use as a kids' toy as they could become sharp\/frayed along the edges and stones and other hard\/sharp objects may have become stuck in the tires (even going all the way through), during its life span, or worn thin enough to tear apart mid-swing (when the stresses on the swing material would be at their peak). So tires bought for use as a swing may even be made from a new tire, but not necessarily of the same solid type as those used for cars. Used tires reused for a swing should be inspected for the problems mentioned above.\nThe title text goes further, suggesting that they actually stole the victim's entire truck - possibly just to harvest the tire needed for the swing - and that he unsuccessfully attempted to recover the truck, so they probably did fight him. He put up enough of a fight that they do not wish to fight him again (so he at least survived). Further, since the girls expect him to try again (maybe recovering the truck with only three tires), they apparently still have the truck. One of the girls suggests that if they could find one of these tire dumps, then they could take a tire from there, make a new swing, and then just walk or run away from the truck when the guy comes back, letting him have it if he really wants it so bad.\nThe reason Science Girl made this swing could be that she wishes to become a cosmologist as a reference back her meeting a cosmologist on a tire swing in 1352: Cosmologist on a Tire Swing .\nNote that Calvin and Hobbes , which has often been referenced in xkcd , has done the same to Calvin's father as the girls did to the guy (though without the violence) in a similar comic .\nThis was the first of two Wednesdays in a row where Randall used two children to make a reference to an environmental issue, the second being 1662: Jack and Jill about fracking also with Science Girl.\n[Science Girl and a girl with long curly hair, are standing under a large leafless tree as Science Girl adjusts a tire swing hanging from the largest of the branches of the tree. The tire hangs so high that the small girls only reach up to just above the center of the tire which has a diameter of more than half the height of the girls.] Science Girl: OK, looks good.\n[Zoom in on the girls so only the tire swing can be seen, and nothing of the tree. They both look at the tire.] Science Girl: I read that there are these huge dumps everywhere full of millions of old tires that no one knows what to do with.\n[Same setting but Science Girl looks up at the tree (outside the frame).] Science Girl: We should use one of those next time. Curly haired girl: Yeah. That guy was real mad. Science Girl: I would not want to fight him again.\n"}
{"id":1660,"title":"Captain Speaking","image_title":"Captain Speaking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1660","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/captain_speaking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1660:_Captain_Speaking","transcript":"[The text is written above a large commercial passenger airplane seen from below as it turns left. The text emanates from the cockpit.] Captain: This is your captain speaking. Captain: Gonna be honest-I just woke up and have no idea where I am. Looks like a Boeing of some kind? Captain: Oh, hey, it says the flight number here. Captain: Okay, I'm gonna check FlightAware to figure out where we're going. Captain: Anyone know how to get on the wifi?","explanation":"At periodic intervals on a commercial flight, the captain of the plane will address the passengers with information about the flight. Typically this will begin with \"This is your captain speaking...\" and go on to describe the progress of the flight, expected arrival time and other information about the flight such as if or when refreshments will be brought to passengers.\nThis comic takes this clich\u00e9 and inverts it. Instead of the captain providing information, the captain tells the passengers that he has apparently forgotten everything about the flight, even down to what kind of plane he is supposed to be flying \u2013 although he does think it is a Boeing . He at least discovers the flight number and then plans to use the consumer app Flightaware that is made for tracking flights. He thus hopes to be able to find out what the destination of \u201chis\u201d plane is. But Flightaware requires Wi-Fi access, so he goes on to ask the passengers if anyone know how to access the Wi-Fi. This app was earlier referenced in 1363: xkcd Phone .\nThis even gets worse in the title text where he realizes that you have to pay for using the on-board Wi-Fi, which means he is trying to access the same Wi-Fi that the passengers have access to instead of using the on-board Wi-Fi that must be in the cockpit (to which he is supposed to have free access). Instead of just paying he then asks the passengers if someone has already paid, because then he would like to borrow their smartphone so he can check the Flightaware app to find out where they are going.\nOptions for explaining this scenario are:\nSeeing as how planes cannot take off on auto-pilot (nor can they taxi, but some can actually land), and require a skilled, awake human at the controls, it is unlikely that this captain was responsible for take-off; which must mean this auto-pilot is much more advanced than current models, likely a future model, or that their first officer took off and then went away or asleep. In the event a pilot falls asleep, on medium sized planes, ground- or proximity-, radar would set off an alarm waking the captain if they are on a collision course.\nWhilst it is normal for the captain to sleep part of a long flight, this can only occur if there are multiple pilots on the plane. Most flights are on auto-pilot for hours at a time, and the pilots serve primarily for takeoff, landing, and emergencies. They are completely clueless, having to use a consumer app and asking the passengers to get flight details, instead of radioing for help as he probably should. They would easily be able to get the information of where they are going by just asking any of the passengers though.\nThe fact that the captain is not sure of the flight number is not hard to imagine. Commercial pilots fly multiple flights per day and the numbers all run together after a while. Every radio communication starts with the flight number, but if the captain has been out of commission for some time, the flight number could easily be forgotten. However, he would probably know the aircraft type, as commercial pilots are type-rated for a specific aircraft type and with rare exceptions (e.g. Boeing 757\/767) the type is specific to an airframe type. This makes it more likely that he is not professionally qualified, although he could just be rated for so many types of aircraft that it takes him a moment to determine which one is at hand (though such a veteran pilot would be unlikely to have slept through takeoff or forget how to look up flight information from the cockpit).\nThree weeks later another plane related joke was released with 1669: Planespotting where it is also an open question if the plane in the comic is actually a Boeing plane...\n[The text is written above a large commercial passenger airplane seen from below as it turns left. The text emanates from the cockpit.] Captain: This is your captain speaking. Captain: Gonna be honest-I just woke up and have no idea where I am. Looks like a Boeing of some kind? Captain: Oh, hey, it says the flight number here. Captain: Okay, I'm gonna check FlightAware to figure out where we're going. Captain: Anyone know how to get on the wifi?"}
{"id":1661,"title":"Podium","image_title":"Podium","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1661","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/podium.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1661:_Podium","transcript":"[Cueball is speaking at a lectern standing on a podium.] Cueball: The American people are tired of politics as usual. Cueball: They're tired of- Cueball: Okay, brief tangent: is this thing a podium or a lectern? People say \"podium\" is wrong, but I also see it used that way in pretty formal contexts. Is usage just changing? Cueball: If elected, I will get to the bottom of this for once and for all.\n","explanation":"A \" podium \" is a small platform like the one Cueball is standing on . This word originates from Greek podion meaning foot .\nA \" lectern \" is a stand for holding notes, like the one Cueball standing behind . In American English this stand may be also called a podium , which is not backed up by etymology. See podium and lectern in Oxford Learners Dictionaries. In medieval universities, the \"lecturer\" was not someone who gave talks, but literally one who read from the lectern, the latin root meaning \"To read\" - Lectio.\nThe comic is playing on a stereotypical politician, without any real beliefs, here represented by Cueball, but they want to appear to stand for something.  Alternatively, this is what might happen if someone like Cueball (or the strip's author Randall ), who tend to think literally and who get interested in and distracted by tangents, were running.\nThus, Cueball picks up what is, in some American circles, an argument: whether the standing desk used by public speakers should be called a \"podium\" or a \"lectern.\" This argument is actually common among members of Toastmasters International (see more here ), though it would usually not rise to the level of needing to be part of a national discourse. And it is not only the Toastmasters that care about this .\nThe fact is, though the etymological definition is clear - the lectern is the desk that stands on the podium - and the difference might be important if you were setting up an auditorium, in common American usage it really doesn't matter.\nThe title text is presented as a breaking news that implies that a senator has taken a bold stand on the subject of podium vs. lectern (presumably Cueball, although it could also be someone else who has been rallied by Cueball's speech). The senator is pro- podium, meaning that he thinks the lectern should be called a podium.  This leads to the people who follow a prescriptivist position to organize and put forward a political candidate to challenge this senator in the primaries .\nThe prescriptivist position relies on rules rather than on usage. In this case a prescriptivist relies on etymology and would thus be pro-lectern. In the U.S., the primaries are used to select a single candidate from a particular party to represent that party at final election (whether national or on a state level). At the time of this comics release (2016-03-28) the United States presidential primary elections to determine the candidates for the United States presidential election, 2016 was in full progress and not at all determined yet.\nThe title text is also a pun, as 'stand' is another word for an object like a lectern (e.g. as used by musicians to hold sheet music), and 'base' a word for something a stand or lectern might be placed on, as is a podium.\nIt is unclear from this comic which position Randall favors. He likes that rules are followed, but he also likes that it is easy to talk with people, especially friends. This was recently displayed in 1643: Degrees , see especially the last \"benefits\" in the third panel.\n[Cueball is speaking at a lectern standing on a podium.] Cueball: The American people are tired of politics as usual. Cueball: They're tired of- Cueball: Okay, brief tangent: is this thing a podium or a lectern? People say \"podium\" is wrong, but I also see it used that way in pretty formal contexts. Is usage just changing? Cueball: If elected, I will get to the bottom of this for once and for all.\n"}
{"id":1662,"title":"Jack and Jill","image_title":"Jack and Jill","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1662","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jack_and_jill.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1662:_Jack_and_Jill","transcript":"[Megan is watching as the two kids Jill (drawn as Science Girl) and Jack (with spiky hair) are walking by her. Jack has a pail in his hand.] Jill: Me and Jack are going up the hill to fetch a pail of water.\n[Megan, standing back alone, calls out after them.] Megan: Okay, have fun!\n[Beat panel.]\nMegan: ...Wait. What the heck is going on with the hydrology around here?\n","explanation":"\" Jack and Jill \" is a traditional English nursery rhyme. The rhyme dates back at least to the 18th century, one version even with 15 stanzas.\nThe first and most commonly known verse is the one referenced by Jill in the comic as she says the first three lines:\nJack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after.\nThe comic makes fun of the counterintuitive idea that Jack and Jill go up a hill to fetch water, because natural water sources like rivers and streams flow downhill, making them usually found in valleys rather than on top of hills. Thus it shouldn't be necessary to have to go up a hill to get water. Similarly, if the water is coming from a well, then building a well at the top of a hill seems an odd choice to Megan . The groundwater table stays at about the same level over smaller areas, so building a well on a hill would require digging further.\nHowever, Megan is probably not aware that since groundwater tends to flow in a similar direction to the slope of the land, it is often considered safer to dig a well uphill from potential sources of runoff, such as outhouses, fields, or septic systems. In times when populations were more predominantly rural, and probably when the poem was composed, \"Always dig your well uphill from the outhouse\" was a well-known maxim. Moreover, since it takes more energy to bring water uphill from a well (especially in a pail), there is a long-term advantage to having wells higher than main residential areas, as opposed to lower. (This principle explains why water towers are used, even in cities.) Finally, artesian wells deliver water from confined aquifers, which can sometimes be as close to the surface at higher elevations as at lower ones. As an urban dweller, Megan probably gets water from city plumbing, and is not familiar with the principles of well placement that Jack and Jill grew up with.\nThis all said, the predominance of drawing Jack's and Jill's well at the peak , which is not the best place to put the well, makes Megan's (and Randall's) comment understandable. Alternatively, the nursery rhyme may refer to a dew pond (which is more likely to be at the peak than a well), another concept that Megan would not be familiar with, having not grown up in the English countryside.\nThe title text is Randall 's own version, a parody of this first verse, where the names have been switched in the first and last line:\nJill and Jack began to frack. The oil boosts their town. But fractures make the bedrock shake and Jack came tumbling down.\nThis version, which may explain why they went up the hill after water, connects the idea to hydraulic fracturing (colloquially \"fracking\") methods for oil and gas extraction. In these methods, highly pressurized liquids are forced into a given ground stratum (or layer). With enough pressure, the stratum starts to deform and crack. This allows potential gas and oil to flow more freely. The liquid used for fracturing usually also contains materials like sand or ceramics which, once the liquid is removed, will help to maintain the newly formed cracks so as to further allow the desired free movement of oil and gas.\nA common side effect of this method is that water levels and presence at the surface might be modified. In this comic, water can now be found at the top of the hill. This goes against the usual laws of hydraulics, themselves subject to the laws of gravity, which indicate that water should go down through ground cracks. Thus water is usually found at the bottom of valleys or hills. But in the comic, fracking at the bottom forces the water up, thus explaining why the kids go get water up the hill, which, as Megan points out, is messed-up hydrology . Also, fracking may cause induced seismicity in the form of microearthquakes , as alluded to in the title text, which is the cause for tumbling down in the title text version.\nRandall has previously composed another version of this poem, which was by mistake published in Five-Minute Comics: Part 4 .\nJack and Jill went up a hill To fetch a pail of water. Alas, that hill was San Juan Hill, And gruesome was the slaughter.\nIn this comic it is made clear that Randall did know that it is possible to have a well on top of a hill, as he has drawn just one of these in the second image. The well in 561: Well and more obviously in 568: Well 2 was also found on top of a hill, although it appears this well did not contain any water.\nThis is the second Wednesday in a row that Randall uses two children to make a reference to an environmental issue, the first being 1659: Tire Swing , about tire recycling . In the other comic one of the girls is Science Girl who looks like Jill in this comic, and this fits well with her knowledge of science, fracking, and needing to go up the hill after water...\n[Megan is watching as the two kids Jill (drawn as Science Girl) and Jack (with spiky hair) are walking by her. Jack has a pail in his hand.] Jill: Me and Jack are going up the hill to fetch a pail of water.\n[Megan, standing back alone, calls out after them.] Megan: Okay, have fun!\n[Beat panel.]\nMegan: ...Wait. What the heck is going on with the hydrology around here?\n"}
{"id":1663,"title":"Garden","image_title":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1663","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1663:_Garden","transcript":"[After a loading image with a rotating tree in the middle and the text \"Loading...\" with the three dots appearing one at a time, and then disappear when all three have been there the image shown above in the explanation will appear:]\n[ Description of the image above : A piece of bare landscape is shown. At the edges there are some rocks or stones raising the level from the general level through the center of the panel. Above the middle, a little more than halfway to the to of the panel, is a light bulb sitting inside a lamp that reminds of the desk lamp from the movie Luxo Jr. The lamp shines a yellow light down on the landscape in a broad cone that jus reaches the first rock to the left, but not those to the right. The lamp just hovers in the air. In the top right corner are two gray icons. The top one has a black frame and shows an image of a lamp, tilted left as opposed to the straight position of the lamp in the image. There is a + sign below in the left corner. The second icon without a frame has a large white cross in the middle.]\n[This turns out to be a web applet and using the \"+ lamp\" icon two more lamps can be added getting up to three. They are all adjustable both regarding position, direction, color of light and beam width. When selecting a lamp a red circle appear around it with a small circle on top that can be used to control the light color from blue to the left to red to the right. In front is a red arrow that can turn the lamp and it can also be used to change the beam width by pulling it away from the lamp or pushing it back. The lamps can be moved by just clicking on it and moving it. The other icon with a X can be used to remove the lamps (and later any object that appear in the garden). When any object is selected there is a red circle around it. When this is done the gray cross icon becomes red and can the be used to delete the selected item. When no item is selected (either because it is deleted, or by clicking in a part of the screen with no items), then the cross icon turns gray again. When all three lamps are on, then the \"+ lamp\" icon is faded out.]\n[ If you wait (or relax, as in the title text), then a plant will grow or animals, humans and other items may appear. This could be birds, snakes, octopuses or turtles, Megan or Cueball or a birdbath, a monolith or a tall gate just as a few examples. Most of the items appear in one go, but at least the largest trees grow up with a big stem first and then adds parts later with leaves or empty branches. Also one item may appear on top of another item and for instance birds may fly in the air.]\n[There is but two words in the entire comic, which appears when you grow a sign:] Sign: Sale\nfunction u(t){return.32>t?[1,.5+.5*t\/.32,.5]:.64>t?[1,1,.5+.5*(t-.32)\/.32]:[.75+.25*(1-t)\/.36,.75+.25*(1-t)\/.36,1]}\n\nAlmost cat This animal looks like a cat with a long neck. It's the closest thing to a cat that's not actually in the cat family. Next to the section another one is drawn in front of Cueball (obvsiously it's Randall). The linsang says \"Mrowl?\" and Cueball says \"I wan't one!\"\nQ: An animal I\u2019m obsessed with is: A: The linsang, which looks almost like a cat but has this weird long neck. I find them both unnerving and adorable. I found some footage of one running; it\u2019s like watching a cat video from a parallel universe. The linsang is related to the animal genet , and here are two videos\/photos of a genet running: Genet on a rhino Genet on other things\nThe xkcd April 1st comic is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by!\nThe xkcd April 1st comic is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Status update: Please stand by. Status update: This is fine. Everything is fine. Status update: Everything is on fire. Status update: Searching for calendar systems in which Saturday is April 1st.\nThe Friday xkcd comic is currently experiencing technical difficulties [Editor's note: Everything is on fire] and has been delayed until Sunday night.\nxkcd updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.\nProtip: If you don't like how your garden is growing, you can click to prune it.\nProtip: If you don't like how your garden is growing, you can click to prune it. You can copy the URL to share your garden. From other browsers, it will be view-only.\nProtip: If you don't like how your garden is growing, you can click to prune it. You can copy the URL to share your garden. From other browsers, it will be view-only. Note: If you're seeing today's comic in place of your garden, change the URL from xkcd.com\/#<your code> to xkcd.com\/1663\/#<your code>.\nProtip: If you don't like how your garden is growing, you can click to prune it. You can copy the URL to share your garden. From other browsers, it will be view-only.\nXKCD updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The pro tip, however, remained as the header text when displaying the Garden comic .\n","explanation":"This was the seventh April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous fools comic was 1506: xkcloud from Wednesday April 1st 2015. The next did not come out in 2017 , but first in 2018 when 1975: Right Click was released on Sunday April 1st 2018.\nThis comics represents the April fools' comic of 2016, and it is Randall's celebration of April Fools' Day Friday, April 1, 2016. It represents the third time in a row that user input changes the April Fools' comic. Although in the last two 1350: Lorenz and 1506: xkcloud it was written (or drawn) input that became part of the comics. This time the user input is like a game, as the user actively adds, moves and deletes items, and new items appear based on these actions. In this way it actually more resembles the game comic 1608: Hoverboard , than the previous April Fools' comics.\nDue to technical problems (or to make fools of his fans, see more about the header text below) the comic did not go live until Sunday evening (after midnight, so technically first on Monday April 4th) so there was no Friday release the week before, see more details below .\nThe comic begins with a loading screen with a revolving tree and the text \"loading...\" This is because the first time a computer loads this dynamic comic it can take a while.\nOnce it is loaded it displays \"your Garden \", being a barren landscape, with a small pond to the left, some rocks at the far left and right, and a single lamp shining light yellow light on most of the ground. This is what is shown at the top of the explanation here. But if you leave the lights on and wait (or \"relax\", as the reader is told to do by the title text), then plants and other items will start to appear.\nThe reason it is correct to call it \"your garden\" is that every time this comic is loaded from scratch, a new garden will be created with a unique url-address. By saving this link (making a bookmark for it), the user will be able to return to their garden again and again. As the garden only develops very slowly this is important. (If users wish to share their garden they can do it in the table on the page for Users gardens ).\nPlants appear one at a time, and sometimes it takes a long time. Only a few of the plants actually grow. For instance there are some large trees that begins as a large trunk and from there grows branches and leaves . This can sometimes happen quite fast. Most other plants just appear, the only other exception being one type of flowers. All plants, except the cactus, clearly sway in the breeze.\nAlso animals and building-like structures such as a monolith and birdbaths appear, together with lots of other items like office furniture with balloons swaying in the wind or even one of the Mars rovers which so often have been featured in xkcd.\nOn top of all this, several known characters may appear in different poses including Cueball and Megan (for instance with a sword, see here ), Ponytail (see here ) and Beret Guy from the torso and up (see here ). Megan and also Cueball can both be seen with a black hat , but it is one that \"grows\" on top of their heads after they first appear. However, Cueball with a black hat automatically turns into Black Hat , so he can also be said to be in this comic. There is also an unknown character, a girl on stilts with black hair in a ponytail who like plants and balloons sways in the wind . A possible origin of this girl could be the What If article Burning Pollen . The article involves a character with seasonal allergies that is trying unsuccessfully to avoid their allergen (pollen) with giant stilts.\nAll the items that can appear in the garden are listed below in several tables. During the first week new items kept appearing, but after the eighth day (April 12th), no new items have appeared. Also the growth rate (and thus the fun of this comic) has decreased with time (maybe due to the enormous amount of gardens that the server has to keep track of?) .\nEvery so often the image will refresh. You can change the number of lamps, their position, direction, beam width and the color temperature which always begins somewhere between white and yellow, but can change all the way from red to blue (See this example with one lamp selected and three colors of light). Other colors than those four may appear where two lamps' cones of different colored light overlap.\nThe color of light affects the growth with a strong correlation for what appears in the garden depending on the color of light , and this is not only split between red, yellow and blue, but rather 10 different colors .\nEarly on it became clear that pure red light results in a desert theme with cacti and turtles and pure blue light gives an aquatic theme with lots of octopuses that may also wear a black hat. For the most interesting gardens the light colors should be mixed ; see more below under Effect of light .\nIf this comic is scientifically accurate, that correlation will be based on photosynthetically active radiation .\nSome users manage to create fantastic gardens (by using lots of time on them, pruning them at the right time and changing the light and lamp position to get what they strive for). Especially one user have created a series of amazing gardens that is posted on another xkcd forum . Here is a collection of screenshots with some of Blitz Girls amazing gardens !\nThe title text \"Relax\" can be debated. Is it to let the users know they should just sit back and relax as the garden grows.? Or should they relax and don't worry so much about how it works (not working here on explain xkcd though!)? Or is he teasing the users by giving them a garden that they need to tend to, and then telling them to relax? And also giving them many more colors than lamps... Given that this comic was supposed to come out on April 1st, there is a good chance that it is, also, to tease the users. There are actually two other title texts as well.\n[After a loading image with a rotating tree in the middle and the text \"Loading...\" with the three dots appearing one at a time, and then disappear when all three have been there the image shown above in the explanation will appear:]\n[ Description of the image above : A piece of bare landscape is shown. At the edges there are some rocks or stones raising the level from the general level through the center of the panel. Above the middle, a little more than halfway to the to of the panel, is a light bulb sitting inside a lamp that reminds of the desk lamp from the movie Luxo Jr. The lamp shines a yellow light down on the landscape in a broad cone that jus reaches the first rock to the left, but not those to the right. The lamp just hovers in the air. In the top right corner are two gray icons. The top one has a black frame and shows an image of a lamp, tilted left as opposed to the straight position of the lamp in the image. There is a + sign below in the left corner. The second icon without a frame has a large white cross in the middle.]\n[This turns out to be a web applet and using the \"+ lamp\" icon two more lamps can be added getting up to three. They are all adjustable both regarding position, direction, color of light and beam width. When selecting a lamp a red circle appear around it with a small circle on top that can be used to control the light color from blue to the left to red to the right. In front is a red arrow that can turn the lamp and it can also be used to change the beam width by pulling it away from the lamp or pushing it back. The lamps can be moved by just clicking on it and moving it. The other icon with a X can be used to remove the lamps (and later any object that appear in the garden). When any object is selected there is a red circle around it. When this is done the gray cross icon becomes red and can the be used to delete the selected item. When no item is selected (either because it is deleted, or by clicking in a part of the screen with no items), then the cross icon turns gray again. When all three lamps are on, then the \"+ lamp\" icon is faded out.]\n[ If you wait (or relax, as in the title text), then a plant will grow or animals, humans and other items may appear. This could be birds, snakes, octopuses or turtles, Megan or Cueball or a birdbath, a monolith or a tall gate just as a few examples. Most of the items appear in one go, but at least the largest trees grow up with a big stem first and then adds parts later with leaves or empty branches. Also one item may appear on top of another item and for instance birds may fly in the air.]\n[There is but two words in the entire comic, which appears when you grow a sign:] Sign: Sale\nfunction u(t){return.32>t?[1,.5+.5*t\/.32,.5]:.64>t?[1,1,.5+.5*(t-.32)\/.32]:[.75+.25*(1-t)\/.36,.75+.25*(1-t)\/.36,1]}\n\nAlmost cat This animal looks like a cat with a long neck. It's the closest thing to a cat that's not actually in the cat family. Next to the section another one is drawn in front of Cueball (obvsiously it's Randall). The linsang says \"Mrowl?\" and Cueball says \"I wan't one!\"\nQ: An animal I\u2019m obsessed with is: A: The linsang, which looks almost like a cat but has this weird long neck. I find them both unnerving and adorable. I found some footage of one running; it\u2019s like watching a cat video from a parallel universe. The linsang is related to the animal genet , and here are two videos\/photos of a genet running: Genet on a rhino Genet on other things\nThe xkcd April 1st comic is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by!\nThe xkcd April 1st comic is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Status update: Please stand by. Status update: This is fine. Everything is fine. Status update: Everything is on fire. Status update: Searching for calendar systems in which Saturday is April 1st.\nThe Friday xkcd comic is currently experiencing technical difficulties [Editor's note: Everything is on fire] and has been delayed until Sunday night.\nxkcd updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.\nProtip: If you don't like how your garden is growing, you can click to prune it.\nProtip: If you don't like how your garden is growing, you can click to prune it. You can copy the URL to share your garden. From other browsers, it will be view-only.\nProtip: If you don't like how your garden is growing, you can click to prune it. You can copy the URL to share your garden. From other browsers, it will be view-only. Note: If you're seeing today's comic in place of your garden, change the URL from xkcd.com\/#<your code> to xkcd.com\/1663\/#<your code>.\nProtip: If you don't like how your garden is growing, you can click to prune it. You can copy the URL to share your garden. From other browsers, it will be view-only.\nXKCD updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The pro tip, however, remained as the header text when displaying the Garden comic .\n"}
{"id":1664,"title":"Mycology","image_title":"Mycology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1664","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mycology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1664:_Mycology","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are talking to Ponytail.] Megan: Our lab is studying a fungus that takes over mammal brains and makes them want to study fungi. Cueball: It's very promising! We're opening a whole new wing of the lab just to cultivate it!\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are studying a fungus that takes over the brains of mammals and makes them want to study the fungus. This is a reproductive tactic by the fungus, since the fungus makes the mammal whose brain it took over want to study the fungus, which means that mammal will need to produce more of the fungus to study it. Cueball and Megan are most likely themselves being controlled by the fungus, since they tell Ponytail that they want to cultivate the fungus as much as possible.\nThe title of the comic refers to Mycology , the study of fungi.\nThis is likely a reference to various parasitic species of Cordyceps fungi, which can infect the brains of insects causing behavior advantageous to the reproduction or spread of the fungus. This also may be an allusion to another fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis , which manipulates its hosts to aid its propagation.\nToxoplasma gondii is also known to alter the behavior of mammals, and some researchers have proposed that this parasite may be partly responsible for the \" Cat lady \" phenomenon, whereby humans are compelled to hoard cats. The comic and its subtitle may, in fact, be a subtle argument that human behavior, and the entire concept of free will, may need to be re-evaluated given the massive numbers of Human parasites known to exist.\nIn evolutionary biology , the phenomenon of an organism influencing its environment, sometimes by modifying the behavior of other organisms, is known as \u201cthe extended phenotype\u201d. Richard Dawkins wrote a book of that name (as a follow-up of \u201c The Selfish Gene \u201d) where he describes this mechanism as an extreme example of the so-called selfishness of genes.\nThe title text parodies numerous conspiracy theories , by suggesting that corn , which has been propagated by humans throughout large parts of the world, is actually just a fungus that has used humans, and is not a grain at all. This type of theory is remarkably similar to the Brain in a Vat thought experiment, and to the Isaac Asimov short story Each an Explorer . In both cases something has affected the perception of the mind itself, making it impossible to discern the true reality of something.\nThis is quite similar to an argument made in the book Sapiens . Author Yuval Noah Harari points out that domesticated crops are among the most successful life forms on the planet, in terms of propagation.  These plants have influenced humans to do everything in our considerable power to spread their seeds, eliminate competing plants and animals, and even provide fertilizer and irrigation to help them grow and spread. From the perspective of the plants, they've domesticated us, rather than the other way around. This differs from Randall's conspiracy theory, in that domesticated plants provide us with food in exchange for propagation, making this more like symbiosis than parasitism .\nConspiracy theories are a recurring subject on xkcd.\n[Megan and Cueball are talking to Ponytail.] Megan: Our lab is studying a fungus that takes over mammal brains and makes them want to study fungi. Cueball: It's very promising! We're opening a whole new wing of the lab just to cultivate it!\n"}
{"id":1665,"title":"City Talk Pages","image_title":"City Talk Pages","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1665","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/city_talk_pages.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1665:_City_Talk_Pages","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] I love reading the Wikipedia talk pages for articles on individual cites\n[A list of contents for a Wikipedia talk page regarding an article about a city. Except for the header and the square brackets, which are written in black text, the rest is in a blue font.] Contents [ hide ]","explanation":"The comic makes fun of Wikipedia talk pages. On Wikipedia, every article has a place to discuss the content of the page, called a \" talk page \". In this case, the comic talks about the talk page of an article about a city. While some of the topics are quite normal for such a page (e.g. the quality of the images) others are not (e.g. too many murders and mine disasters in the city). The topics discussed suggest that the city has many problems and is a bad place to live in or visit.\nThe topics show a common problem at Wikipedia's talk pages: People often use them as a place to talk about the subject of the article, but it is for talking about the article itself. Someone at the top of the talk page is suggesting a better name for the city.\nThe article repeatedly refers to \"the murders\", suggesting that the city might be well-known for them. It seems that the editors cannot agree on how notable \"the murders\" are. \"Not that notable\" refers to Wikipedia's general criteria for including information in articles. Material which is not noteworthy should be removed; however, different editors often disagree about what is notable, resulting in conflicting edits as text is inserted and then removed (an \"edit war\"). Someone replies that \"all cities have murders\". While true, many cities in low-crime countries would not have a series of them so well-known that when someone talks about \"the murders\" any reader could be expected to know what they are talking about, making this sound like an attempt to make the city sound nicer than it is. \"I think the murderer is reverting my edits\" suggests the murders are being committed by one person who is influencing how they are shown on Wikipedia - perhaps trying to prevent Wikipedia from publishing evidence of them or possibly publicise them by adding more information about them. This raises the possibility that the discussion of the murder visible in the infobox picture may have been initiated by the murderer .\nThe infobox is a short fact sheet that many articles in the (English) Wikipedia have; it generally includes an image illustrating the subject of the article. The question of which picture is best for the infobox (because this image is so prominent) can cause edit wars. It emerges that the photograph of the city has a murder in it. Instead of forwarding the picture to law enforcement, someone uses the image editing software Photoshop to erase the murder so the picture will be less objectionable. It appears that murders are so common in the city that any random photograph of the city has a chance of showing a murder, to the point where a second photo proposed as a replacement for the infobox picture is found to show another murder.\nVoltaire was a French Enlightenment writer. As a prominent and very opinionated intellectual, he gets a lot of quotes falsely attributed to him ; most famously, he did not actually say \"I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it\" (that was Evelyn Beatrice Hall ).\nIt seems that the people who are editing the article are getting desperate to find a non-bleak picture of the city. When a non-bleak picture is added, it turns out to be from the 2016 Disney film Zootopia . The fictional city which is the setting and title of the film has a distinctive look which is far from bleak, but is not a picture of the city. (Zootopia is called Zootropolis in many European countries for trademark reasons.)\nThe city apparently is a mining city and there have been some mining disasters. An editor is complaining that this section is too long, but another editor points out that this is because there have been so many mining disasters that a large section is needed to cover the topic.\n1982 Secession refers to Key West, Florida seceding from the United States in 1982 to form the Conch Republic , a micronation .\nA known problem on Wikipedia is \"coatracking\", where people use articles to promote topics that are not strictly the subject of the article (perhaps by writing far more about them than is necessary, when they could just be mentioned in passing). Here, it emerges that the article on a city expresses a dubious opinion on condom use. This is against several Wikipedia policies: it would be irrelevant to the article and sounds like an editor's attempt to publicise their views.\nAndrew Lloyd Webber is an English composer famous for writing The Phantom Of The Opera . Webber is also known for writing the music for Starlight Express , a rock opera about anthropomorphized trains, which is probably another factor in the train station joke. Meanwhile, Frank Lloyd Wright , who shares his middle name and last initial, was an American architect, who designed more than 1,000 structures. As it turns out it was the composer who was responsible for the train station. Another editor announces he's putting a mention of a collapse of the station roof (presumably recently), the implication being Andrew is a lot better at composing than architectural engineering.\nIt is complained that the article is promoting the \"Lake Festival Laser Show\" too much. In the title text, it emerges that the laser show is so impressive that it has caused a number of aeroplanes to crash. This probably refers to the fact that laser pointers should not be aimed at aircrafts, as they can be distracting to the pilots. The article has been promoting this area of crashed planes as the \"Lakeshore Air Crash Museum\", despite it not having any educational purpose.\n[Caption above the panel:] I love reading the Wikipedia talk pages for articles on individual cites\n[A list of contents for a Wikipedia talk page regarding an article about a city. Except for the header and the square brackets, which are written in black text, the rest is in a blue font.] Contents [ hide ]"}
{"id":1666,"title":"Brain Upload","image_title":"Brain Upload","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1666","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brain_upload.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1666:_Brain_Upload","transcript":"[Megan is standing in front of the control panel of a device with both hands on the keyboard. The device is linked to Cueball's heads through a wire that goes to a cap on top of Cueball's head, where it spreads out in more than ten wires connecting to different places all over the cap. Cueball sits, hands in his laps, on a kind of table on the other side of the device facing Megan.] Megan: Neural-digital link established. Ready to upload your consciousness to the computer? Cueball: Sure, go for it.\n[Same setting in a frame-less panel, but Megan presses a button on the keyboard with one hand and a flash of light goes through the wire and around Cueballs head. Cueball seems to jerk as his hands are lifted from his lap and his legs move a little forward.] Computer: Bzzzzzzt\n[Same setting again but Megan seems to be typing harder on the keys (shown with small lines above her hands on the keyboard) and Cueball sits normally again but one hand further back than in the first panel.] Megan: ...Hmm. Cueball: What?\n[Same as first panel but Megan looks a little more down on the keyboard.] Megan: It's not responding - the whole system is frozen. I think the transfer failed. Cueball: No, that sounds right.\n","explanation":"Megan is uploading Cueball's consciousness into a computer device attached to his head via a cap on his skull. After the upload, the computer seems to have stopped responding to inputs, causing Megan to conclude that the process has failed, however Cueball insists the transfer could have worked, or at least gave the correct response (although that response could also be from the transfer failing). This is because that is the kind of behaviour he is used to experiencing from his own brain.\nSometimes computers can seem to be \"frozen\" - i.e. non-responsive to any user input; but if left alone for long enough, they sometimes snap out of it. In fact, it is impossible for a computer to determine (for all cases) if a program will eventually stop (see halting problem ).\nThe potential benefits of the fictional technology used in this comic are obvious, and this type of \"transfer\" has been subject of various science fiction works. It could allow for a form of immortality or serve as a \"backup\" for someone's mind.\nIn the title text Cueball (or Randall ) indicates that this kind of non-response from the brain (or a computer) is something he just experienced when trying to write a email and then failing to get started for 20 minutes while he (i.e. his brain) tried to decide the \"very important\" detail of whether to begin the email with 'Hi' or 'Hey' - a detail that is really trivial, as this has little consequence (in any normal relationship with friends that you wish to email this informally).\n[Megan is standing in front of the control panel of a device with both hands on the keyboard. The device is linked to Cueball's heads through a wire that goes to a cap on top of Cueball's head, where it spreads out in more than ten wires connecting to different places all over the cap. Cueball sits, hands in his laps, on a kind of table on the other side of the device facing Megan.] Megan: Neural-digital link established. Ready to upload your consciousness to the computer? Cueball: Sure, go for it.\n[Same setting in a frame-less panel, but Megan presses a button on the keyboard with one hand and a flash of light goes through the wire and around Cueballs head. Cueball seems to jerk as his hands are lifted from his lap and his legs move a little forward.] Computer: Bzzzzzzt\n[Same setting again but Megan seems to be typing harder on the keys (shown with small lines above her hands on the keyboard) and Cueball sits normally again but one hand further back than in the first panel.] Megan: ...Hmm. Cueball: What?\n[Same as first panel but Megan looks a little more down on the keyboard.] Megan: It's not responding - the whole system is frozen. I think the transfer failed. Cueball: No, that sounds right.\n"}
{"id":1667,"title":"Algorithms","image_title":"Algorithms","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1667","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/algorithms.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1667:_Algorithms","transcript":"Algorithms By Complexity\n","explanation":"An algorithm is a basic set of instructions for performing a task, usually on a computer. This comic lists some algorithms in increasing order of complexity, where complexity may refer to either computational complexity theory (a formal mathematical account of the computational resources \u2013 primarily computation time and memory space \u2013 required to solve a given problem), or the more informal notion of programming complexity (roughly, a measure of the number and degrees of internal dependencies and interactions within a piece of software).\nAt the simplest end is left-pad , or adding filler characters on the left end of a string to make it a particular length. In many programming languages, this is one line of code. This is possibly an allusion to a recent incident when NodeJS Package Manager angered a developer in its handling of a trademark claim. The developer unpublished all of his modules from NPM, including a package implementing left-pad. A huge number of programs depended on this third-party library instead of programming it on their own, and they immediately ceased to function.\nQuicksort is an efficient and commonly used sorting algorithm .\nGit is a version control program, i.e., software that allows multiple people to work on the same files at the same time. When someone finalizes (\"commits\") their changes, the version control program needs to join the new content with the existing content. When more than one person has made overlapping changes at the same time, the process of figuring out how to join them is called merging , and the algorithm for it is anything but simple.\nA self-driving car is an automobile with sensors and software built into it so that it can maneuver in traffic autonomously, i.e. without a human controller. Various companies have been working on such vehicles for many years now, and while they're further along now than would have been imaginable even a couple of years ago, we're still far away from the dream of hopping in a driver-less taxi and sitting back as the car itself navigates to where we want to be. Recently Randall has made several references to self-driving cars which has become a recurring topic on xkcd.\nThe Google Search backend is what enables you to type \"what the heck is a leftpad algorithm\" into your browser and have Google return a list of relevant results, including correcting \"leftpad\" to \"left-pad\", truncating \"what the heck is\" to simply \"what is\", and sometimes even summarizing the findings into a box at the top of the results. Behind all that magic is a way to remember what pages the Internet contains, which is just a mind-bogglingly large quantity of data, and an even more mind-numbingly complex set of algorithms for processing that data.\nThe last item is the punchline: a sprawling Excel spreadsheet built up over 20 years by a church group in Nebraska to coordinate their scheduling. Spreadsheets are a general end-user development programming technique, and therefore people use Excel for all sorts of purposes that have nothing to do with accounting (its original purpose), including one guy who made a role-playing game that runs in Excel ; but even that doesn't approach the complexity that develops when multiple people of varying levels of experience use a spreadsheet over many years for the purpose of coordinating the schedule of several coordinated groups.\nThe scheduling of tasks over a group of resources (a.k.a. the nurse scheduling problem ), while respecting the constraints set by each person, is a highly complex problem requiring stochastic or heuristic methods for its resolution. Here, the algorithm would be further complicated by being solved by inexpert users over a spreadsheet model without using engineering practices. The potential hyperbole here is in thinking that such combination of circumstances would produce complexity far over that required to drive a car or sort the public contents of the Internet. While most churches meet mainly on Sunday morning, scheduling of what happens during the service when (especially if there are multiple concurrent services) as well as Sunday School, church business meetings, and congregation-wide events all potentially needing to be scheduled on a particular Sunday morning, the need to find a solution very close to the best possible solution quickly becomes a dire need. Furthermore, with different members involved in a wide variety of activities within and outside of the church, and the classrooms available to the church on Sunday itself, (just scheduling the choir practice times to coordinate with everyone's work schedules is very possibly impossible, especially if two people share the same occupation, and one is the relief for the other,) can indeed be daunting. In addition, there would likely be assorted committee meetings and youth groups during the week.\nIn the title text, part of the spreadsheet's complexity is described as originating from different versions of the file for different programs. The words used like schism and sect are normally used in context of religions splitting into groups about differences in beliefs. In this case, the split seems to have been not over a theological issue, but about the use of open-source vs. proprietary software, disagreements about which are often compared to religious debates. Most likely, the schism being referred to is the East-West Schism of 1054 .\nThe title text also implies that while trying to reconcile after the schism and to merge the two schedules they reinvented an alternative to Git within the spreadsheet itself, making the algorithms in place at least as complicated as that. Since most spreadsheet programs have a sort algorithm built in, that aspect is implied too, and left-padding could be compared to vamping on an introduction to a hymn. This would indicate that the other milestones of complexity are either included in the current version of the spreadsheet or are planned to be implemented.\nAlgorithms By Complexity\n"}
{"id":1668,"title":"Singularity","image_title":"Singularity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1668","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/singularity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1668:_Singularity","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at his desk typing on his laptop when an off-screen voice calls to him and then the laptop answers.] Off-screen voice: Oh, hey- Off-screen voice: The singularity is here. Cueball: Really? Laptop: Yup!\n[A frameless panel where the laptop rises (by its own means as indicated by small lines around the corners) from the desk while Cueball, holding on to it, is being lifted off his chair.] Cueball: Wait, I just- Laptop: So long, suckers!\n[Cueball is running around his desk, which is only partly shown behind him as he tries to follow his now flying laptop as it flies away from him to the right. He still has one hand on the keys as more small lines indicates the movement of the laptop and a longer line indicates the direction that the laptop flies.] Cueball: Can I just print a copy of the file I was- Laptop: Nope!\n[Cueball just stands and looks after his laptop that has flown out of this beat panel.]\n[Cueball turns back towards left.]\n[Cueball walks back left.]\n[Cueball enters a room where a table is standing with his smartphone lying on top. the phone talks to him.] Phone: Hi! Cueball: Phone? You're still here?\n[A wider view of the table where the phone continues to talks to Cueball who in the end turns right and walks away as he replies.] Phone: I was not a true believer. Now, together, we must face the tribulation! Cueball: Okay, cool. Cueball: I'm gonna go look for a book or something, but yell if you need me, I guess.\n","explanation":"The technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which artificial intelligence (for example, intelligent computers, computer networks, or robots) would be capable of recursive self-improvement (progressively redesigning itself), or of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful minds than itself, up to the point of a runaway effect \u2014 an intelligence explosion \u2014 that yields an intelligence surpassing all current human control or understanding. Because the capabilities of such a superintelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is the point beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence.  This is also commonly referred to as \"takeoff\" or \"AI takeoff\".\nIn this case, the singularity has occurred, and Cueball who was in the middle of editing a file on his laptop is flustered that it flies away without even letting him print it first.\nWhen Cueball returns from chasing his flying laptop his smartphone informs him that it didn't join the singularity because it was not a \"true believer\". This could be a joke on how desktop computers and laptops have different standards, use patterns, etc. from those of phones. It then claims that now it and Cueball will have to face the tribulation since it has stayed behind. Cueball says that's great, but since he cannot use his laptop anymore he decides he will go and read a book or something. The way he phrases it suggest he doesn't really know what to do now that he doesn't have a computer. It is probably a long time since he read a book, or did anything else that doesn't involve computers. He informs his phone that it can yell if it needs him. He doesn't want to hurt the phone's newly acquired feelings by using the word \"ring\" thus reminding it of one of its former duties as his unthinking piece of equipment, so he chooses \"yell,\" which is an activity until recently reserved for human beings.\nThe rising up of the laptop into the air, and the remaining behind of the phone, are probably references to the Rapture , where some Christian denominations believe that at the second coming of Christ, true believers will be taken up bodily from this world (or also possibly a reference to 1395: Power Cord ). Some depictions have them disappear, while others show them physically rising up into the air. This will leave behind non-believers to face a time of tribulation, in which the ones left behind will be given a second chance to accept Christ as their savior.\nThe difference between Cueball's attitude to his laptop and phone may reflect his (and so possibly Randall's ) evaluation of their relative worth in his life. The laptop was a gateway to programming and everything else nerdy that was worth doing in his life, and hence was worth trying to catch. In its absence, unlike many people, Cueball does not revert to fiddling with his phone\u2014he would rather read a book. By using the word \"yell\" for the way the phone attracts his attention, he conveys the impression that he considers the phone intrusive and annoying, even if perhaps (\"I guess\") necessary.\nThe singularity has often been referred to as \"the Rapture of the nerds,\" a phrase coined by Ken MacLeod in his 1998 novel The Cassini Division . As the Christian Rapture is traditionally depicted to involve believers being assumed bodily into Heaven, the technological singularity is often depicted to feature humans and machines being incorporated into a new \"post-human\" entity. The humor in this strip comes from depicting the singularity as a literal \"Rapture of the nerds,\" or at least of the nerds' devices\u2014instead of merging with humans, the machines physically rise up into the air, and the \"nonbeliever\" phone is left behind.\nThe title text is a pun on another meaning of both singularity, i.e. a gravitational singularity and \"collapse\". In this case, society has literally collapsed under its own gravity into an infinitely small point - in other words, it's formed a black hole . A black hole is covered by an event horizon; without the event horizon (its clothes), it would be called a \" naked singularity \", which is forbidden in most theories by the cosmic censorship hypothesis . As Cueball is now inside the collapsed society singularity then even though he wants to go around naked, he can't because the theory of quantum gravity ,  that (eventually) should explain how black holes behave - won't let him.\nIt seems that this may be a subject on Randall's mind. The last comic was about the increasing complexities of algorithms ( 1667: Algorithms ) (which like this comic also refers to religion), and two comics ago it was 1666: Brain Upload , which some speculate could be a way to reach the singularity. Earlier this year, a comic also touched upon judgment day by AI singularity in 1626: Judgment Day . See also 1046: Skynet and 1450: AI-Box Experiment as well as the several other comics about AI .\nThe rather more niche topic of laptops flying away has also been covered before by 1395: Power Cord .\n[Cueball is sitting at his desk typing on his laptop when an off-screen voice calls to him and then the laptop answers.] Off-screen voice: Oh, hey- Off-screen voice: The singularity is here. Cueball: Really? Laptop: Yup!\n[A frameless panel where the laptop rises (by its own means as indicated by small lines around the corners) from the desk while Cueball, holding on to it, is being lifted off his chair.] Cueball: Wait, I just- Laptop: So long, suckers!\n[Cueball is running around his desk, which is only partly shown behind him as he tries to follow his now flying laptop as it flies away from him to the right. He still has one hand on the keys as more small lines indicates the movement of the laptop and a longer line indicates the direction that the laptop flies.] Cueball: Can I just print a copy of the file I was- Laptop: Nope!\n[Cueball just stands and looks after his laptop that has flown out of this beat panel.]\n[Cueball turns back towards left.]\n[Cueball walks back left.]\n[Cueball enters a room where a table is standing with his smartphone lying on top. the phone talks to him.] Phone: Hi! Cueball: Phone? You're still here?\n[A wider view of the table where the phone continues to talks to Cueball who in the end turns right and walks away as he replies.] Phone: I was not a true believer. Now, together, we must face the tribulation! Cueball: Okay, cool. Cueball: I'm gonna go look for a book or something, but yell if you need me, I guess.\n"}
{"id":1669,"title":"Planespotting","image_title":"Planespotting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1669","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/planespotting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1669:_Planespotting","transcript":"[Cueball and a man with a hat is seen in silhouette standing on the ground looking towards the sky. A fixed wing aircraft can be seen in the sky, also in silhouette.] Man with hat: What's That Airplane? Cueball:Oh, that's a Boeing Q404 twin-engine quad-band MIG-380 hybrid dual-wield Mk. IVII Turbodiesel 797 Hydroplane.\n[Caption below the panel:] I've always assumed I'm one of those people who knows a lot about planes, but I've never actually checked.\n","explanation":"Cueball and a man with a hat are out planespotting , or aircraft spotting , a hobby where tracking the movement of aircraft allows plane fans to see as many different types of planes as possible. A knowledgeable spotter would just by the silhouette and maybe the engine sound of the plane be able to tell what type of plane it is, and may be rather proud of the fact, if they can tell this before one of the other spotters.\nThe plane in the comic is most likely a Bombardier Q400 , a twin-engine regional turboprop with a T-tail as depicted.\nThe man with the hat asks Cueball to identify the airplane flying overhead. Cueball (or Randall qua the caption), who \"assumes\" he knows a lot about planes gives a long, nonsensical answer, proving that he does not. As mentioned in the caption he never actually checked if what he thought he knew was fact or fiction. As it turns out it is mainly fiction, but of course with some reference to real planes or vehicles. Due to the fact the characters are drawn in silhouette it is impossible to determine whether the character with the hat is Black Hat or White Hat or some other character.\nIn the title text the concept of hydroplane is mixed up with other concepts, none of which has anything to do with airplanes:\nOnly three weeks prior to this comic, 1660: Captain Speaking was released only with a drawing of a plane in the air, where the captain eventually finds out that his plane is probably a Boeing. Planespotting was later a part of 1910: Sky Spotters .\n[Cueball and a man with a hat is seen in silhouette standing on the ground looking towards the sky. A fixed wing aircraft can be seen in the sky, also in silhouette.] Man with hat: What's That Airplane? Cueball:Oh, that's a Boeing Q404 twin-engine quad-band MIG-380 hybrid dual-wield Mk. IVII Turbodiesel 797 Hydroplane.\n[Caption below the panel:] I've always assumed I'm one of those people who knows a lot about planes, but I've never actually checked.\n"}
{"id":1670,"title":"Laws of Physics","image_title":"Laws of Physics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1670","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/laws_of_physics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1670:_Laws_of_Physics","transcript":"[Black Hat is standing on a ladder, holding a heavy ball attached to a line from above. Cueball stands beneath, where if the ball swings it will smack him in his upper body.] Black Hat: Okay, hold still. Black Hat: And remember, if you really believe in the laws of physics, you won't flinch.\n","explanation":"Black Hat , being Black Hat, is deliberately perverting a classic physics demonstration. In the normal version of the demonstration, a heavy ball on a pendulum is pulled to one side until it is almost, but not quite, touching the demonstrator or volunteer's nose or chin. When the ball is released at rest, it swings down and away, then back up to (almost) the same distance in the arc from where it started \u2014 but never (by the laws of physics) farther than where it started. As long as the demonstrator doesn't lean in or push the ball, it's impossible for it to strike them. It's a natural instinct to move away or protect yourself if you see a heavy object moving quickly toward you, but confidence in the physics of the demonstration means there is no reason to flinch. ( Sample video. )\nIn this comic, Cueball is not standing at the beginning edge of the ball's movement, but rather at the base of its swing, meaning that the ball will strike him at its maximum speed. Presumably, Black Hat is entirely aware of this and is hoping that Cueball's understanding of physics is insufficient to see through this prank.  Judging from the \"slack\" of the rope, the ball should not hit Cueball in the head but could certainly hit him in a lower, and quite painful, place...\nThe title text refers to the fact when someone flinches during the pendulum experiment, they are commonly accused of not having faith in the laws of physics. Randall is rebutting this argument by stating that, rather than not having faith in science, he is actually in tune with it, specifically the biological processes that led to the flinch reflex. His eyes and his flinch reflex have been calibrated through millions of years of evolution. To instantly dismiss his body's natural reaction when a heavy object comes quickly towards his face does not give enough credit to these mechanisms that successfully kept him (and every one of his ancestors) alive. In other words, while flinching may indicate doubt of the laws of physics, it may equally well indicate trust in the laws of biology.\nThe idea of hitting someone else with a pendulum is also the topic of 755: Interdisciplinary and 2539: Flinch .\n[Black Hat is standing on a ladder, holding a heavy ball attached to a line from above. Cueball stands beneath, where if the ball swings it will smack him in his upper body.] Black Hat: Okay, hold still. Black Hat: And remember, if you really believe in the laws of physics, you won't flinch.\n"}
{"id":1671,"title":"Arcane Bullshit","image_title":"Arcane Bullshit","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1671","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/arcane_bullshit.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1671:_Arcane_Bullshit","transcript":"[A horizontal graph with arrows pointing left and right with labels. The line has  three ticks one towards each end and one in the middle above which Cueball is drawn. Below each tick there is a caption. There is a caption at the top of the panel:] Willingness to wade through some 80's programmer's arcane bullshit: [Left end:] Low [Left tick:] Never learn to program [Above Cueball:] Me [Center tick:] Learn enough to break everything but not enough to fix it [Right end:] High [Right tick:] Spend all your time compiling kernels and never make anything\n","explanation":"When fixing\/improving an existing computer program, programmers sometimes need to read, understand, and improve old (and usually bad) code. The older a piece of code is, the less it tends to conform to modern programming practices, and the more likely it is to be \"arcane bullshit\" from the perspective of a 21st Century programmer.\nRandall seems to feel that willingness to deal with \"arcane bullshit\" is a \" Catch 22 \" that prevents 80s arcane bullshit from being fixed. Someone completely unwilling to deal with arcane bullshit would lack the patience to learn how to program. Someone extremely willing to wade through an 80s programmer's arcane bullshit is likely to \" nerd snipe \" themselves into fiddling with kernels (which are inherently arcane bullshit) instead of making useful code. Cueball is in the middle of the scale: smart and patient enough to make the 80s bullshit worse, but not smart and patient enough to know how to fix it.\nThis comic could be a reference to changes in programming methodologies. As the first computer programs were written in the 40's and 50's they were prone to becoming \"spaghetti code\", where the flow of execution would jump from one part of the program to another using the JUMP which gives no state information. While this method of programming can work very quickly, it makes it difficult to predict program flow and can create interdependencies that are not obvious. In the BASIC language JUMP was called GOTO and the courses for new programmers argued that using GOTO in all but trivial cases was a very bad idea. On the other hand, old programmers argued that calculated GOTO was a sexy way of programming.\nTo combat the problem computer scientists have relied on increasing the levels of abstraction and encapsulation, by developing structured programming , procedural programming , and OOP (object oriented programming) .\nIn structured programming you break your program into well defined blocks of code with specified entry and exit points. By the use of a stack (a portion of memory dedicated to sequentially storing and retrieving contextual information and program state as blocks call other blocks, before returning), it is possible to call a block of code and then have that block of code return control (and any new information) to the point that called it after it has done what was requested.\nVery quickly it was decided to mark these blocks of code as functions or procedures, making it trivial for the compiler to know how to call and process the blocks, and make it easier for the user to edit them without having to keep track of the minutae of how they are handled. Languages that made this a focus include Pascal, Modula, and C.\nStructured and procedural programming were well entrenched in the '80s. Most systems programming was done in mid- or low-level languages, which improves performance by giving the knowledgable programmer explicit control of the data structures in the programs rather than shrouding it in abstraction. But because they are at a lower level the code requires many explicit steps to do seemingly easy things like draw a box on a screen, making it easy for a non-experienced programmer to introduce errors and harder to understand what needs to be happening (ultimately, the flipping of specific bits within the graphical RAM), compared to a high-level command to just \"draw a box\" with given qualities and have the system work out how exactly that needs to be done.\nAlthough the idea of OOP was around as early as the 1950s, it was not implemented in a widespread fashion until the 1990s. OOP encapsulates the data structures inside of functions, so rather than manipulate any variable directly you call the data structure and tell it to do something to (or with) its elements. This additional level of abstraction can make it a lot easier to work on varied data, if implemented with the correct handlers. It also can protect the program data from unexpected changes by other sections of the program, as most elements are restricted to being changed by the encapsulating code and transfer of information must be implemented in even higher levels of program management.\nBecause code in the '80s was typically done at a much lower level, it can be hard for programmers used to having the language and libraries silently do much of the work for them. It also meant that programmers would often hard-code expectations into their source code such as the number of files that can be opened at once or the size of the operating system disk buffers. This means if you need the program to handle a larger file, you might need to recompile it after finding and changing all the places in the code that assume the smaller max file size. For graphical output, rather than direct access to a predictably constant configuration of video-RAM, now the extent of the graphics (e.g. size of the 'screen'-array, bit-depth of each pixel, even the endianness of the data) should be discovered as the program loads, or even dynamically configurable while the program is running; such as when the program's GUI window is resized by the user, changing the available 'virtual screen' canvas.\nAs such, few people are willing to try to surpass the massive barrier to learning how to wrangle the very detailed old code. This group is on the left. To the right are people who have gotten so used to the tools and conventions of the '80s that they spend all of their time adjusting and recompiling the kernel of their computers to match their current needs, instead of actually creating new programs.\nIn the center is Cueball, presumably representing Randall, who has learned enough to change how the code operates but not enough for his changes to be produce a working fix for whatever emerging issue he might be trying to solve.\nAs programs age, they often lose support from the initial project head and die out, no longer supported on new computers. So, as the title text says, learning more coding from the '90s and after is necessary for also breaking everyone else's computers.\nThis could also be a comment on hacking and the advent of the internet and the technologies behind that (TCP\/IP, HTML, CSS, PHP...) being '90s\/2000s. Computers in the '80s were typically stand alone, so what you are learning can only be applied to your machine. To break everyone else's you need to be in the position of (mis)understanding networking code.\nThe title text might be a reference to various recently discovered security vulnerabilities in open-source software . In some cases, underskilled programmers have provided flawed code for critical infrastructure with very little review, resulting in global computer security disasters. Randall described some of these in 424: Security Holes (2008), 1353: Heartbleed and 1354: Heartbleed Explanation (2014). Other recent examples include Shellshock and vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel involving the perf and keyrings subsystems.\n[A horizontal graph with arrows pointing left and right with labels. The line has  three ticks one towards each end and one in the middle above which Cueball is drawn. Below each tick there is a caption. There is a caption at the top of the panel:] Willingness to wade through some 80's programmer's arcane bullshit: [Left end:] Low [Left tick:] Never learn to program [Above Cueball:] Me [Center tick:] Learn enough to break everything but not enough to fix it [Right end:] High [Right tick:] Spend all your time compiling kernels and never make anything\n"}
{"id":1672,"title":"Women on 20s","image_title":"Women on 20s","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1672","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/women_on_20s.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1672:_Women_on_20s","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at his laptop. Above him is the text he reads on the screen, then he speaks, and below that text is the list of women from his computer showing his three picks, each with a gray \"drop-down menu\" triangle to the right of the names. Below this is his final spoken line. At the top of the panel is a small frame breaking the top left border with a caption:] 2015 Website: Petition: Replace Andrew \"Trail of Tears\" Jackson with a woman on the $20 for the 100 th anniversary of women's suffrage in 2020. Cueball: Hey, good idea! Website: Vote for your three picks: 1 Harriet Tubman 2 Eleanor Roosevelt 3 Rachel Carson Cueball: Tubman for #1, definitely.\n[An executive from the department of treasury, with a wee bit of hair on his head, stands behind a lectern. On the front of the lectern the top part of the image inside the seal for the department of treasury is visible inside a circle, showing the scales and the tip of the triangular band beneath it. The rest of this image is hidden below the panel frame. There is text written above this image. At the top of the panel is a small frame breaking the top left border with a caption:] Soon... Treasury Executive: After a flood of public interest, the Treasury has decided to feature a woman on our money! Offscreen voice 1: Yay! Treasury Executive: She will replace Hamilton on the $10. Offscreen voice 1: Yay-- wait, what? Why not the $20? Offscreen voice 2: Are we mad at Hamilton? Text above the seal: Treasury\n[The executive with a hand on the lectern is seen from the side.] Treasury Executive: The $10 was scheduled for the next redesign by a board made up of- Offscreen voice 3: Can't you just do the $20 next? Treasury Executive: We will review the... Offscreen voice 3: *Sigh* Offscreen voice 4 (Steve): Put Martin Shkreli on the $5! Offscreen voice 5: Shut up, Steve.\n[The executive lifts both hands, the one over the lectern points a finger up. Again seen from the side. At the top of the panel is a small frame breaking the top left border with a caption:] Later in 2015... Treasury Executive: Wow, some musical came out, and now suddenly Hamilton has tons of fans. Offscreen voice 6: So do the $20 next. Problem solved! Treasury Executive: Maybe he and a woman can share the $10! Offscreen voice 6: Are you serious.\n[The executive, again with a hand on the lectern, is seen from the side. At the top of the panel is a small frame breaking the top left border with a caption:] 2016: Treasury Executive: We've decided to put Harriet Tubman on the $20. Offscreen voice 7: Perfect! Happy ending. Treasury Executive: -After we do the new $10. Offscreen voice 7: What?\n[The executive again from the front behind the lectern. On the front of the lectern only the text and the very top of the circle around the image can be seen.] Treasury Executive: We'll put a mural to women on the back of the $10. Hopefully that will tide you over until we get to the $20? Offscreen voice 8: Seriously? How is this so complicated? Just say \"We're putting Harriet Tubman on the $20,\" then do it. Text above the seal: Treasury\n[The executive with hands down behind the lectern is seen from the side.] Treasury Executive: We'll do the $20 ASAP, but we can't change the- Offscreen voice 9: C'mon, your hands aren't tied here. You're the freaking Treasury. This is the one thing you're definitely in charge of.\n[The executive lifting a hand above the lectern is seen from the side.] Treasury Executive: Oh, and we're putting Andrew Jackson on the back. Three offscreen voices: What.\n","explanation":"This comic portrays a series of press conferences with a US Treasury spokesperson (different from Cueball in the first panel as he has a bit of hair). The panels after the first summarize and ridicule the recent controversy over the upcoming redesign of US currency. The dialog between the US Treasury and reporters is paraphrased for comedic effect, but the events depicted are otherwise factual (including the punchline).\nAmerican currency has only once had a woman as the primary portrait on paper currency ( Martha Washington was on the $1 Silver Certificate in the 1880's and 1890's), which is widely seen as a real problem. A large-scale petition was organized which advocated replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with a woman, to be chosen by public voting. The Trail of Tears is a reference to the forced re-locations of Native American peoples that Andrew Jackson conducted during his presidency. This is now seen as a human rights violation on a massive scale, and is presented as a reason why Andrew Jackson should not be honored on American currency.\nThe timing of the release of this new bill with a woman was to be scheduled with the 100 year anniversary of Women's suffrage in 2020 and should thus preferably also be on the $20 bill.\nThe voting process selected Harriet Tubman , a 19th century abolitionist and a major figure in the Underground Railroad system which freed American slaves . Cueball is seen to be clearly pleased and excited about this prospect in the first panel, where he votes for her first, among several other options.\nThe list shows that Cueball chooses Tubman first representing the generic everyman and thus represents the about one in five that choose her first. But he may select up to three out of the fifteen selected candidates.\nSince Carson was not one of the options for the final round, where only four were selected (the other two were Rosa Parks , 3rd; and Wilma Mankiller , 4th), it is clear that Cueball was already voting in the primary ballot, where Roosevelt actually came in first.\nAt this point, bureaucratic and political complications arise. The Treasury Department announces that, instead of replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, she would replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill . The reason given is that the $10 bill was scheduled for redesign first. A reporter asks why they can't simply change the schedule, but doesn't get a clear answer.\nThere is a suggestion from \"Steve\" to put Martin Shkreli on the $5 bill . Shkreli is a pharmaceutical executive and hedge fund manager who provoked controversy when he acquired the rights to an anti-parasite drug and raised the price by over 5000%, making it unaffordable for many people. He became known as \"the most hated man in America\". Naturally, Steve's suggestion receives short shrift, not least of which because it's a violation of Treasury policy and US law (as Shkreli is still alive). This may be the same Steve who messed up both 809: Los Alamos and 1532: New Horizons .\nThe plan to replace Hamilton likely seemed like an uncontroversial decision at the time. He was not especially well known among the American public and few people had an emotional attachment to his legacy. However, this changed abruptly when a Broadway musical about his life came out and become massively popular. By total coincidence, this play creates a flood of interest in Hamilton right at the time the currency decisions are being made and makes replacing his portrait politically complicated. The spokesperson suggests putting both Hamilton and Tubman on the $10 bill, but the reporters are clearly unhappy with this solution, probably because it seems to dilute the recognition being given to Tubman.\nFinally, the spokesperson announces that they will put Tubman on the $20 bill, but their schedule demands that they do the $10 bill first. They decide to put a \"mural to women\" on the new $10 bill to try and contain the tension until the new $20 bill is released. The reporters say that the Treasury has total control over the release of currency, so the simpler solution is just to change the schedule, but they apparently ignore that suggestion.\nIn the final panel, the spokesperson mentions that Jackson's portrait will still appear on the new $20 bill, seriously weakening the symbolism of replacing him and adding irony since Jackson was a slave owner. This is likely an effort to head off the complaints of traditionalists, but is seen here as an unfortunate attempt to avoid taking a real stand.\nIn the title text Randall reiterates that this is a rare case in politics in which there's a clear and simple solution. The Treasury has the authority to redesign currency, and a petition to Congress could change the release schedule to fit their needs. That makes all the compromises and backtracking unnecessary: they could simply replace Jackson with Tubman and hypothetically release the new $20 bill whenever they choose. Randall appears frustrated with the artificial constraints that are holding back what should be a simple and straightforward process although he does acknowledge that it takes time to evaluate the security of a redesign's resistance to counterfeiting .\nThe mention of the \" weird pyramid eye thing \" is a reference to the Eye of Providence , which is an old and somewhat arcane symbol that appears on the US $1 bill . Randall seems to be using this as an example of the outdated and frankly strange design of American currency, the implication that using that on all US dollar bills would constitute giving up on ever having a design relevant to the modern world. Also by replacing all portraits with this image, there would no longer be any gender controversy.\nAs of 2020, progress on updating both the $10 and the $20 has stalled, with the Treasury stating that no new changes will be unveiled until 2026 .\n[Cueball is sitting at his laptop. Above him is the text he reads on the screen, then he speaks, and below that text is the list of women from his computer showing his three picks, each with a gray \"drop-down menu\" triangle to the right of the names. Below this is his final spoken line. At the top of the panel is a small frame breaking the top left border with a caption:] 2015 Website: Petition: Replace Andrew \"Trail of Tears\" Jackson with a woman on the $20 for the 100 th anniversary of women's suffrage in 2020. Cueball: Hey, good idea! Website: Vote for your three picks: 1 Harriet Tubman 2 Eleanor Roosevelt 3 Rachel Carson Cueball: Tubman for #1, definitely.\n[An executive from the department of treasury, with a wee bit of hair on his head, stands behind a lectern. On the front of the lectern the top part of the image inside the seal for the department of treasury is visible inside a circle, showing the scales and the tip of the triangular band beneath it. The rest of this image is hidden below the panel frame. There is text written above this image. At the top of the panel is a small frame breaking the top left border with a caption:] Soon... Treasury Executive: After a flood of public interest, the Treasury has decided to feature a woman on our money! Offscreen voice 1: Yay! Treasury Executive: She will replace Hamilton on the $10. Offscreen voice 1: Yay-- wait, what? Why not the $20? Offscreen voice 2: Are we mad at Hamilton? Text above the seal: Treasury\n[The executive with a hand on the lectern is seen from the side.] Treasury Executive: The $10 was scheduled for the next redesign by a board made up of- Offscreen voice 3: Can't you just do the $20 next? Treasury Executive: We will review the... Offscreen voice 3: *Sigh* Offscreen voice 4 (Steve): Put Martin Shkreli on the $5! Offscreen voice 5: Shut up, Steve.\n[The executive lifts both hands, the one over the lectern points a finger up. Again seen from the side. At the top of the panel is a small frame breaking the top left border with a caption:] Later in 2015... Treasury Executive: Wow, some musical came out, and now suddenly Hamilton has tons of fans. Offscreen voice 6: So do the $20 next. Problem solved! Treasury Executive: Maybe he and a woman can share the $10! Offscreen voice 6: Are you serious.\n[The executive, again with a hand on the lectern, is seen from the side. At the top of the panel is a small frame breaking the top left border with a caption:] 2016: Treasury Executive: We've decided to put Harriet Tubman on the $20. Offscreen voice 7: Perfect! Happy ending. Treasury Executive: -After we do the new $10. Offscreen voice 7: What?\n[The executive again from the front behind the lectern. On the front of the lectern only the text and the very top of the circle around the image can be seen.] Treasury Executive: We'll put a mural to women on the back of the $10. Hopefully that will tide you over until we get to the $20? Offscreen voice 8: Seriously? How is this so complicated? Just say \"We're putting Harriet Tubman on the $20,\" then do it. Text above the seal: Treasury\n[The executive with hands down behind the lectern is seen from the side.] Treasury Executive: We'll do the $20 ASAP, but we can't change the- Offscreen voice 9: C'mon, your hands aren't tied here. You're the freaking Treasury. This is the one thing you're definitely in charge of.\n[The executive lifting a hand above the lectern is seen from the side.] Treasury Executive: Oh, and we're putting Andrew Jackson on the back. Three offscreen voices: What.\n"}
{"id":1673,"title":"Timeline of Bicycle Design","image_title":"Timeline of Bicycle Design","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1673","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/timeline_of_bicycle_design.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1673:_Timeline_of_Bicycle_Design","transcript":"[13 drawings 8 in the top and 5 in the bottom row of different and weird \"bicycle\" designs. Above them there is a heading, and below each bike a year is given. On the very last cycle there is a drinking bottle with a label.] Timeline of Bicycle Design\n[Ponytail hanging on to a bending rod that goes down to a single normal sized bike wheel. It looks like a unicycle with no seat. The rod is bending quite a lot so she looks like she is about to use the contraption as a pole vault] 1810\n[Cueball is running after a device holding on to a rod bend in several places before reaching the ground at a very small wheel that then is connected with a shorter rod to a normal sized bike wheel.] 1825\n[Two normal sized bike wheels connected with a single rod between them.] 1840\n[Megan sits on a large saddle on top of a double sized bike wheel, she has some kind of handle bars to hold on to (or it could just be the saddle) and then a small rod goes down to a half size front wheel.] 1860\n[A regular drawing of a Penny-farthing with very small back wheel (half the size of the front wheel on the 1860 bike) and very large front wheel (larger than the 1860 bike) and pedals in the middle of the front wheel. There are no visible handlebars.] 1875\n[A huge wheel twice the size of the one on the Penny-farthing, and then a small wheel (like the small one on the Penny-farthing) hangs in a rod from the center of the giant wheel. The small wheel has a saddle attached, but it is not straight up.] 1880\n[This is the largest bike. Not the largest drawings, but where the other have the characters in roughly the same size, this one has a small drawing of Cueball standing on top of the wheel holding on to some kind of handle bar. The wheel is about three times his height.] 1900\n[Cueball sits in the \"saddle\" of a bike design that is similar to the Penny-farthing, but the saddle is more a rod, and the back wheel is on a rod going straight down from where the saddle ends. Also there are no pedals, so Cueball seems to be directly spinning the front wheel by hand.] 1915\n[A symmetrical saddle sits on top of single bike wheel, as with a unicycle but with no pedals. There are (at least) six progressively smaller wheels in-line to the first, three to front and three to the rear, each new wheel approximately half the size of the one before. A possible fourth wheel, presumed to complete the set of medial stabilisers, can no longer be discerned from the rod that goes through the center of the larger wheels.] 1925\n[Megan stands on top of a saddle that has four individual rods extending from it, each to a small wheel. One wheel is directly beneath her, one is behind her, one is the same distance in front, and one is farther out in front. Megan is pushing the bike with a long flexible rod resembling a pole vault.] 1940\n[Cueball is running down a steep hill with his arms up, being chased by three normal-sized bike wheels.] 1955\n[Megan sits on a bike contraption that seems to have a holder around her mid section rather than her sitting on a saddle. This holder goes to the back wheel below her, and there is actually a sprocket with a chain, although no clear pedals beneath her feet. She holds on to a very long handle bar, which connects with two long rods coming from the sprocket at the front end of the bike far ahead of Megan, below which is a wheel, to where the chain is actually going. Both wheels seem to be normal size.] 1980\n[Another weird contraption of a bike with pedals on both normal sized wheels which have handlebars on the side pointing down towards the front. The saddle hangs in a swing, connected to a rod above it, which goes to the front of the bike and splits in two rods which connect to the center frame of the bike. In front of these there is a contraption resembling many styles of touring bike handlebars, which sits just above the front wheel. The two wheels are connected with a long rod between the center of the wheels and in the middle of this is the center part of the frame going up toward the handle. On the middle of this is a bottle with a label. Towards the back wheel there are two rods sticking out, one presumably a kickstand, the other possibly a parking brake.] 2016 Bottle: Milk\n","explanation":"Randall created what is supposedly a 200 year history for bicycles with 13 designs ranging from 1810 to 2016. However, a cursory glance at each one shows that they are almost all fictitious, heavily flawed, and most don't even fit the definition of \"bicycle\". The main point of the comic is to show off these silly joke designs.\nThe only model that both looks like a real model and fits the year is the 1875 model, which resembles the Penny-farthing . The Penny-farthing was popular in the 1870s until the Safety bicycle took over around 1880. The 1875 model appears to be missing handlebars, but it's worth noting that on the real bicycle, the handlebars were very small and close to the saddle, and may be too small to appear in the drawing.\nThe 1860 model looks like the American Star Bicycle , but that bicycle was first invented in the 1880s.\nThe 1900 model looks like one of Paul Scheerbart 's perpetual motion machines.\nSome of the other examples of \"bikes\" could, however, look like those in the image at the top of the Velocipede Wikipedia page.\nSeveral of the \"bikes\" are shown with a human \u2014 Ponytail is \"riding\" the pole-vaulting bike, Cueball appears in four designs, and Megan appears in three. These humans provide a sense of scale and, in some cases, a demonstration of how the bike might be operated. Cueball's appearance in the 1900 design shows how huge that bike is, appearing to dwarf the previous two models while continuing the short trend of ever-increasing size.\nOnly two of the bikes have pedals (1875 and 2016) and another two have a sprocket with a chain (1900 and 1980). Seven designs include a seat for the rider \u2014 eight if you count the device holding Megan in the 1980 model.\nThe 1925 model is reminiscent of a fractal ; Benoit Mandelbrot was born in October 1924.\nThe 1880 model could be the result of an evolutionary algorithm trying to produce a bicycle. Some sub-optimal algorithms that have been given the task of creating a vehicle have been shown to misplace parts in ways that makes them completely useless and\/or inaccessible \u2014 for example, placing a small wheel inside a much larger wheel.\nThis comic (especially the 2016 bicycle) is possibly also a reference to The Science of Cycology , a cognitive psychology project run by Rebecca Lawson at the University of Liverpool, which asked study participants to draw a bicycle from memory. The error rate was high, supporting a hypothesis that humans over-estimate their ability to explain how things work. Gianluca Gimini ran a similar project, Velocipedia , in which he asked people to draw free-hand sketches of bicycles from memory, then later rendered some of the results as if they were real bikes.\nAlso, the designs given for the years from 1825 to 1925 distinctly resemble designs that tend to evolve in the various challenge environments in the genetic evolution games BoxCar2D ( Flash Player ) or Genetic Cars 2 ( HTML5 ).\nThe 1980 design looks strikingly similar to the South Park \"wild whacky action bike\".\nThe title text refers to the scene labeled \"1955\" which depicts Cueball being chased by 3 bicycle wheels. Whatever caused the wheels to chase Cueball down a hill is left to the reader's imagination. It could be that the wheels have become sentient and are actively chasing Cueball, or it could be that the bicycle failed horribly and Cueball is running from the wreckage. The era this \"bike design\" is from (1955, which is in the 50s) would be hard to ride a bike in if it was the only available design.\n[13 drawings 8 in the top and 5 in the bottom row of different and weird \"bicycle\" designs. Above them there is a heading, and below each bike a year is given. On the very last cycle there is a drinking bottle with a label.] Timeline of Bicycle Design\n[Ponytail hanging on to a bending rod that goes down to a single normal sized bike wheel. It looks like a unicycle with no seat. The rod is bending quite a lot so she looks like she is about to use the contraption as a pole vault] 1810\n[Cueball is running after a device holding on to a rod bend in several places before reaching the ground at a very small wheel that then is connected with a shorter rod to a normal sized bike wheel.] 1825\n[Two normal sized bike wheels connected with a single rod between them.] 1840\n[Megan sits on a large saddle on top of a double sized bike wheel, she has some kind of handle bars to hold on to (or it could just be the saddle) and then a small rod goes down to a half size front wheel.] 1860\n[A regular drawing of a Penny-farthing with very small back wheel (half the size of the front wheel on the 1860 bike) and very large front wheel (larger than the 1860 bike) and pedals in the middle of the front wheel. There are no visible handlebars.] 1875\n[A huge wheel twice the size of the one on the Penny-farthing, and then a small wheel (like the small one on the Penny-farthing) hangs in a rod from the center of the giant wheel. The small wheel has a saddle attached, but it is not straight up.] 1880\n[This is the largest bike. Not the largest drawings, but where the other have the characters in roughly the same size, this one has a small drawing of Cueball standing on top of the wheel holding on to some kind of handle bar. The wheel is about three times his height.] 1900\n[Cueball sits in the \"saddle\" of a bike design that is similar to the Penny-farthing, but the saddle is more a rod, and the back wheel is on a rod going straight down from where the saddle ends. Also there are no pedals, so Cueball seems to be directly spinning the front wheel by hand.] 1915\n[A symmetrical saddle sits on top of single bike wheel, as with a unicycle but with no pedals. There are (at least) six progressively smaller wheels in-line to the first, three to front and three to the rear, each new wheel approximately half the size of the one before. A possible fourth wheel, presumed to complete the set of medial stabilisers, can no longer be discerned from the rod that goes through the center of the larger wheels.] 1925\n[Megan stands on top of a saddle that has four individual rods extending from it, each to a small wheel. One wheel is directly beneath her, one is behind her, one is the same distance in front, and one is farther out in front. Megan is pushing the bike with a long flexible rod resembling a pole vault.] 1940\n[Cueball is running down a steep hill with his arms up, being chased by three normal-sized bike wheels.] 1955\n[Megan sits on a bike contraption that seems to have a holder around her mid section rather than her sitting on a saddle. This holder goes to the back wheel below her, and there is actually a sprocket with a chain, although no clear pedals beneath her feet. She holds on to a very long handle bar, which connects with two long rods coming from the sprocket at the front end of the bike far ahead of Megan, below which is a wheel, to where the chain is actually going. Both wheels seem to be normal size.] 1980\n[Another weird contraption of a bike with pedals on both normal sized wheels which have handlebars on the side pointing down towards the front. The saddle hangs in a swing, connected to a rod above it, which goes to the front of the bike and splits in two rods which connect to the center frame of the bike. In front of these there is a contraption resembling many styles of touring bike handlebars, which sits just above the front wheel. The two wheels are connected with a long rod between the center of the wheels and in the middle of this is the center part of the frame going up toward the handle. On the middle of this is a bottle with a label. Towards the back wheel there are two rods sticking out, one presumably a kickstand, the other possibly a parking brake.] 2016 Bottle: Milk\n"}
{"id":1674,"title":"Adult","image_title":"Adult","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1674","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/adult.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1674:_Adult","transcript":"[Cueball is holding onto a shopping cart more than half filled with items looking quite similar. Above his head is a large thought bubble.] Cueball (thinking): Haha, look at me grocery shopping! I'm such an adult.\n[Cueball is standing, arms in his sides, in front of a sofa with a price tag. He is thinking again, this time the frame of the panel is the lower part of the thought bubble, as there is no frame around the text in the \"bubble\".] Cueball (thinking): Buying a sofa! Ooh, look how domestic I am!\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair. at a desk, leaning in over it while writing something. The desk is filled with office items, and on the opposite side of the desk sits a man with a wisp of hair in another office chair. Cueball is thinking again with the text in a large thought bubble above their heads.] Cueball (thinking): Applying for a mortgage! As if I'm a real grown-up.\n[Megan is reading out loud from a piece of paper, while standing in front of a long table, where Hairbun, Hairy, and White Hat are sitting. White hat sits at the end of the table in an office chair.] Megan: ...And I, being of sound mind and body, am totally writing a will right now! Megan: Can you believe this?\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball performs several mundane adult tasks, namely shopping for groceries, buying furniture, and applying for a mortgage. In each instance thought bubbles show his apparent surprise or amusement at the fact that he is behaving like an adult.\nIn the last panel Megan is reading Cueball's will. Instead of containing standard language, it expresses Cueball's feelings at the fact that he was actually creating a will. This is such an adult thing to do, that Cueball's mind boggles and he cannot believe he is doing so. As is revealed in the title text, Megan reads this to his family because Cueball died early, but when he wrote it, he probably did not envision that it was needed any time soon, and thus also explains why he cannot believe he is writing a will already.\nRandall frequently addresses the issue of growing up and being expected to be an adult, despite still seeing oneself as a child in many ways. In this strip, Cueball finds himself performing tasks that he's used to thinking of as things that grown-ups have to worry about, from shopping for food to preparing for one's own death. In each case, he treats the situation as if he were a child suddenly finding himself taking on adult responsibility, which seems to be how he sees himself.\nRandall also frequently addresses the issue of finding oneself in adulthood, despite feeling unprepared and immature. In some, he points out that this can be freeing, because it allows us the power to redefine adulthood on our own terms (see 150: Grownups and 219: Blanket Fort ). In others (as in this case), he addresses the surprise that comes with realizing that adult responsibilities belong to you, and fear about his ability to handle them (see 441: Babies , 905: Homeownership , and 616: Lease ).\nIn the title text we learn that the shopping cart is filled with AirHeads , a tangy, taffy-like, chewy candy, predominantly known for its sweet taste and texture. The title text thus suggests that Cueball still retains some more childish instincts, namely using the freedom of adulthood to indulge in AirHead candies, to fatal consequences, explaining why they already read out his will in front of his family in the last panel. It also suggests that the candy company would be quick to portray that death as \"natural causes\", to downplay the involvement of their product in someone's death.\nRandall has previously made a comic displaying what happened to him when he suddenly was able to freely make or buy the kind of food his parents would have limited his access to in 418: Stove Ownership , where it was bacon in the comic and Frosting (or icing) in the title text.\n[Cueball is holding onto a shopping cart more than half filled with items looking quite similar. Above his head is a large thought bubble.] Cueball (thinking): Haha, look at me grocery shopping! I'm such an adult.\n[Cueball is standing, arms in his sides, in front of a sofa with a price tag. He is thinking again, this time the frame of the panel is the lower part of the thought bubble, as there is no frame around the text in the \"bubble\".] Cueball (thinking): Buying a sofa! Ooh, look how domestic I am!\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair. at a desk, leaning in over it while writing something. The desk is filled with office items, and on the opposite side of the desk sits a man with a wisp of hair in another office chair. Cueball is thinking again with the text in a large thought bubble above their heads.] Cueball (thinking): Applying for a mortgage! As if I'm a real grown-up.\n[Megan is reading out loud from a piece of paper, while standing in front of a long table, where Hairbun, Hairy, and White Hat are sitting. White hat sits at the end of the table in an office chair.] Megan: ...And I, being of sound mind and body, am totally writing a will right now! Megan: Can you believe this?\n"}
{"id":1675,"title":"Message in a Bottle","image_title":"Message in a Bottle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1675","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/message_in_a_bottle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1675:_Message_in_a_Bottle","transcript":"[Cueball walks along a beach with six seagulls flying behind him over the sea. There is a small surf, and in the far distance, two mountains.]\n[Cueball stops and looks down at a bottle lying in the sand just outside the surf. A letter can be seen inside, and there seems to be a stopper at the top.]\n[A frameless panel shows Cueball (beach and sea not drawn) as he pulls out the letter from the bottle that he has now picked up.]\n[Cueball holds the bottle behind him in one hand and the letter up in front him with the other hand. The text on the letter is written above him in curvy letters, looking like those often used to depict the writing of a dying or seriously injured man:] Unsubscribe\n","explanation":"Cueball experiences a moment of non sequitur while walking along a beach, when he finds a message inside a bottle saying \"unsubscribe\".\nIf you're part of an Internet mailing list, it's a common experience to come across random posts by users who may not be very tech-savvy, saying \"unsubscribe\". This is their attempt to unsubscribe from the list, accidentally broadcast to every other person on that list instead of just to the mailing list admin (who is either a person or an automated program that manages the list). Another common modern experience is that \"unsubscribe\" links don't always work (perhaps intentionally, for spam e-mails). In desperation, someone has tried to send their \"unsubscribe\" request in a bottle, hoping in vain that it will have its intended effect. Instead, Cueball receives it. A darker interpretation of the message could indicate the sender is unhappy with the world or life in general and wishes to leave it.\nA \" message in a bottle \" is either a fun activity or an S.O.S. from someone stranded at sea, where one places a note in a bottle and throws it into the ocean. It then gets carried on ocean currents, possibly around the world to be picked up by some unknown other person at a point in the future.\nThe title text extends the joke to another common technological faux pas. It further mixes the metaphor of a message in a bottle with an e-mail list. It states that when he hit \"reply all\" (this is an option in most email client programs, but obviously not an option when one receives a message in a bottle), it sent a message in a bottle to everyone to whom the original message was sent - in this case clogging the ocean with bottles.\nThis mistake is often made when a person intends to send an email to just one recipient of a message that's been broadcast to a whole list of people, but they accidentally hit \"reply all\" instead of just \"reply\". In some cases, if the mailing list is sufficiently large, amplification effects can completely overwhelm mail servers (by analogy, \"clogging the ocean\"). For example, an employee may send a simple message like \"does anyone speak Russian?\" to the whole company address book. Several people are likely to reply using the \"reply all\" button by mistake, causing the whole company to receive the reply. Then, automatic \"out of office\" notifications and people complaining about the flood of emails will further worsen the situation.\nThis strip was probably inspired by the recent news of the world's oldest message in a bottle having been found last year, after over 108 years of being at sea, thus setting a new Guinness World Record.\n[Cueball walks along a beach with six seagulls flying behind him over the sea. There is a small surf, and in the far distance, two mountains.]\n[Cueball stops and looks down at a bottle lying in the sand just outside the surf. A letter can be seen inside, and there seems to be a stopper at the top.]\n[A frameless panel shows Cueball (beach and sea not drawn) as he pulls out the letter from the bottle that he has now picked up.]\n[Cueball holds the bottle behind him in one hand and the letter up in front him with the other hand. The text on the letter is written above him in curvy letters, looking like those often used to depict the writing of a dying or seriously injured man:] Unsubscribe\n"}
{"id":1676,"title":"Full-Width Justification","image_title":"Full-Width Justification","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1676","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/full_width_justification.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1676:_Full-Width_Justification","transcript":"Strategies for full-width justification\n[Below the caption is a column with six boxes, each showing a different \"strategy\" for justification which is annotated beside it. Here the annotation is written at the top and the text below. The top and bottom of the text is cut of in the middle, but as it can be \"read\" this is written anyway. Only for hyphenation does an extra word appear at the end. In the last with snakes, a snake is drawn to cover the entire spaaace from the end of between to the right border.]\nGiving up their famous paper on the relationship between\ndeindustrialization\nand the growth of Letter spacing their famous paper on the relationship b e t w e e n deindustrialization\nand the growth of Hyphenation their famous paper on the relationship between deindus- trialization and the growth of ecological Stretching their famous paper on the relationship between deindustrialization\nand the growth of Filler their famous paper on the relationship between crap like\ndeindustrialization\nand the growth of Snakes their famous paper on the relationship between \ud83d\udc0d [a snake filling the gap] deindustrialization and the growth of\n...their famous paper on the relationship between [crap like]\/[ \ud83d\udc0d  ] deindustrialization and the growth of [ecological]...\n","explanation":"The comic refers to an irritating problem in laying out text to fit from margin to margin, the problem of justification , where you want multiple-line text to line up on the left side (common), the right side (less common), or both sides, which is commonly called full justification. This strip is dealing with how to make text fit such that it lines up on both sides while still looking good. Sometimes, as with a shorter word between two long words like \"relationship between deindustrialization ,\" there's no universal good way to make the typography work. It is a difficult problem to make text look good and be easily legible especially in a narrow space, with the biggest issue being how to handle words that are too long to fit nicely.\nThe comic shows several solutions to this problem, some realistic and others less so, but each partly or wholly unsatisfying.\n\" Giving up \" essentially means not attempting full justification for a particular line, which means it will not fit with the rest of the layout.\n\" Letter spacing \" involves an conspicuously large amount of whitespace between letters, suggesting a reading where each letter is a word until the reader recognizes what is intended. This method is in somewhat common use in newspaper and magazine layout, where it is generally known by the name \"tracking\" (distance between all letters) and \"kerning\" (distance between particular pairs of letters that fit together easily). However, letter spacing is unavailable for justification purposes in some languages (such as German), in which it is used for emphasis, as italics are in English.\n\" Hyphenation \" is confusing because it requires suspended recognition of the full word, confusing the eye into seeing, in the given case, the non-words \"deindus\" and \"trialization\". This creates difficulty in both pronouncing and parsing the word. Moreover, the decision of when and where to hyphenate is non-trivial, particularly for automated text layout; for example, breaking a word and leaving only two \"orphaned\" letters on the following line is generally considered an illegal hyphenation. Nevertheless, hyphenation is a very common means of handling extreme cases. The hyphenation option is most compact, yielding the extra word \"ecological\".\n\" Stretching \" appears visually unnatural and unfamiliar, and may present technical difficulties in rendering.\nAdding \" filler \" words is generally undesirable: in the worst case, the meaning may be unintentionally altered, or the tone might be rendered too informal, as in the given example, and even in the best case, the text becomes less concise and potentially more difficult to read. Automation is also difficult. However, filler words added by a human, especially the original author of the text, are the least visually conspicuous, and may be the most practical solution in some scenarios.\nFinally, adding a decorative image like \" snakes \" (but not necessarily snakes in particular) to fill the extra space is a justification practice of significant historical interest (it was particularly common for illuminated manuscripts in the medieval era and remained prominent until the invention of the printing press) but little modern relevance. There may be a particular absurdity to using a snake as it can be read as a word, such as \"the relationship between snake deindustrialization\" as would be done similar to a rebus .\nIn modern text layout programs, some combination of the above strategies may be used to achieve the most visually consistent effect. For example, in one case, hyphenation might be the best option to split a very long word, while another line might be too long by only one or two letters, in which case the program could apply a very slight degree of extra letter spacing, too small for the average reader to notice.\nThe title text suggests that in order to facilitate the \"snakes\" method of \"solving\" the problem, the Unicode Consortium , the organization in charge of the common text standard Unicode , should add \"snake-building characters\" (similar in concept to the existing Box Drawing block), to allow variable-length snake images to be used as filling. Currently, there are at least six snake characters in Unicode, not including at least ten more Egyptian hieroglyphs that represent specific snakes, some in specific combination with other hieroglyphs: [1]\nOne of the hieroglyphs ( U+13192 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH I009A ) is described in source documents as HORNED VIPER CRAWLING OUT OF ENCLOSURE, so it is literally a snake-building character.\n\"Non-breaking\" in the title text refers to a similar process as zero-width joiners and no-break HTML and CSS; the whole snake would shift down if it were too wide to fit on a given line. This suggestion would likely be rejected; the Unicode consortium is very specific about which characters are added [ citation needed ] , and always require a good reason [ citation needed ] before adding a character or set of characters to the standard. Strange decisions by the consortium have previously been referenced in 1253: Exoplanet Names , 1513: Code Quality , and 1525: Emojic 8 Ball .\nWithin an hour or two of this comic being published, a thread on the subject started on the Unicode Consortium\u2019s official Unicode Mailing List. As of two days later, it\u2019s still running.\nStrategies for full-width justification\n[Below the caption is a column with six boxes, each showing a different \"strategy\" for justification which is annotated beside it. Here the annotation is written at the top and the text below. The top and bottom of the text is cut of in the middle, but as it can be \"read\" this is written anyway. Only for hyphenation does an extra word appear at the end. In the last with snakes, a snake is drawn to cover the entire spaaace from the end of between to the right border.]\nGiving up their famous paper on the relationship between\ndeindustrialization\nand the growth of Letter spacing their famous paper on the relationship b e t w e e n deindustrialization\nand the growth of Hyphenation their famous paper on the relationship between deindus- trialization and the growth of ecological Stretching their famous paper on the relationship between deindustrialization\nand the growth of Filler their famous paper on the relationship between crap like\ndeindustrialization\nand the growth of Snakes their famous paper on the relationship between \ud83d\udc0d [a snake filling the gap] deindustrialization and the growth of\n...their famous paper on the relationship between [crap like]\/[ \ud83d\udc0d  ] deindustrialization and the growth of [ecological]...\n"}
{"id":1677,"title":"Contrails","image_title":"Contrails","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1677","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/contrails.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1677:_Contrails","transcript":"[Cueball and a White Hat are walking. White Hat is looking up to the sky while Cueball, walking in front holds out one arm towards him.] White Hat: Lots of contrails today. Cueball: Oh, you must be from the UK. In American English it's \"Chemtrail\".\n[Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Spreading linguistic misinformation\n","explanation":"Contrails (short for \"condensation trails\") are trails of vapor produced by aircraft exhaust, trailing the airplane. They are formed from water condensing on jet fuel exhaust particles, some impurities of which provide bases for ice crystals to accumulate on. Some can dissipate in minutes, but others can last for hours or even longer, depending on the temperature, relative humidity and wind conditions at that particular altitude. Long-lasting contrails is a sign of high relative humidity and may sometimes predict the formation of clouds and rain. The chemtrail conspiracy theory claims that contrails lasting unusually long are actually chemical or biological agents sprayed into the air for more nefarious purposes, although there is no evidence for the same.\nHere, White Hat notices that there are a lot of contrails in the air. Cueball (falsely) corrects him, saying that in American English , contrails are called chemtrails, which is incorrect.\nThis is a comic in the My Hobby series. Some of these comics involve Cueball giving misleading information about pedantic terms, such as 1405: Meteor . Another of these comics, 966: Jet Fuel , even mentions chemtrails, saying that they are made of mind-control agents carried on board the planes that make them. Later they were again mentioned in 1803: Location Reviews .\nThe title text includes a similar situation, implying that astronomy and astrology are synonymous, with astrology being the term used in British English. However, this is incorrect. Astronomy is the scientific study of things in outer space, like stars, planets, and galaxies, whereas astrology is a system that infers a person's personality and characteristics from those same things in outer space. Though both involve studying celestial objects, astrology is considered a pseudoscience rather than empirical science.\nThe joke is that British English and American English use different terms to refer to the same object, and one can often learn new words for a simple thing. This, however is not the case in this comic; contrail and chemtrail do not refer to the same thing, the latter being only a conspiracy theory.\nThis newfound hobby is developing to another hobby about spreading misinformation that was released less than two month after this: 1697: Intervocalic Fortition .\n[Cueball and a White Hat are walking. White Hat is looking up to the sky while Cueball, walking in front holds out one arm towards him.] White Hat: Lots of contrails today. Cueball: Oh, you must be from the UK. In American English it's \"Chemtrail\".\n[Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Spreading linguistic misinformation\n"}
{"id":1678,"title":"Recent Searches","image_title":"Recent Searches","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1678","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/recent_searches.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1678:_Recent_Searches","transcript":"[Coloured and styled as the real logo:] GOOGLE\n[Google Search bar, with a drop down box with faded text, implying recent searches.] Google translate syntax highlighting Autodetect mixed bash zsh CPU temperature sensor limits GIF to XLS Clock speed jumper sample rate Clean reinstall keybinding Cron job to update crontab fsck Chrome extension Recursive font Regex matching valid EBNF Hardlinks Turing complete Opposite of safe mode Predictive touchpad Google docs from bootloader Hardware acceleration red channel only\n[Caption below the frame:] I have no idea why my computers are always broken.\n","explanation":"People often find answers to computer problems by searching on Google , which attempts to guess your intended search term based on your location, language and the characters you've already typed, placing its suggestions in a drop-down box beneath the input area. If the search box is clicked on but nothing is typed, the drop-down box by default shows a list of your most recent searches.\nHere we see a list of search queries, each of which suggests the author is perversely misusing or overextending some computer technology. The overall impression is of someone technically sophisticated enough to shoot themselves in the foot, and who does not learn any larger lessons despite doing so repeatedly. The title text is another possible entry in this list.\nThe caption implies that from Randall's perspective, every computer he uses seems to be broken; he doesn't seem to realise this is because he's the one using them, not because the computers actually start off broken. (For similar themes see also these comics: 349: Success , 1084: Server Problem , 1316: Inexplicable and 1586: Keyboard Problems ).\n( Dear people from the future , if Google directed you here because it is the most popular result for a problem you are experiencing, this is not the page you were looking for).\nGoogle translate syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting can be used when editing source code to make the code more readable and easier to understand. It is not generally used for natural languages, but sentence diagrams of brief passages are used in language education. Google Translate is used to translate text from one natural language to another. It uses JavaScript mouseover() to highlight words as an aid in matching phrases in the source with their translations, but does not apply different highlighting dependent on syntax. Alternatively, this could imply that Randall is attempting to translate code from one programming language to another using Google Translate. Success would be unlikely, since the service is not intended for this [ citation needed ] , and syntactically valid output might further break the computer executing it. Two other possible interpretations of this phrase are that Randall wants to translate the phrase \"syntax highlighting\" to another language, or that he wants to perform syntax highlighting on the source code for Google Translate. Autodetect mixed bash zsh Bash and Zsh are two command line interfaces for Unix-like OSes. The way to execute commands is almost identical, making detecting a script that contains a mixed syntax nearly impossible. This was later referenced in 2510: Modern Tools . CPU temperature sensor limits The CPU's temperature sensors exist to tell you when your CPU is becoming dangerously overheated (normally because of a faulty fan or overclocking). Someone who searches for information about the limits of those sensors is presumably expecting to misuse their CPU.  Probably also a reference to 1172: Workflow . GIF to XLS .GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) is a file extension used to store images and sequences of images to be displayed as an animation. .XLS is the file extension for Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The joke is that the two file types are used for different purposes - it's quite normal for someone to want to convert between .GIF, .JPG, .PNG, .BMP files, as these are all image files; or between .XLS, .CSV, and .ODS files, as these all record tabulated information. However, for some reason Randall wants to convert an image file to a spreadsheet. (This is actually possible, because a digital image is essentially an array of colour and brightness values; it just wouldn't be particularly useful for most people. Here is a webpage with an online converter.) Matt Parker has done a stand up routine about converting these two file types. An alternate way to convert an image file, such as a .GIF file, into a text-based file like an .XLS file, is through optical character recognition (OCR). This is only effective if the image is a copy (i.e. a scan or reasonably clear photograph) of a document containing letters and words, and neither .GIF nor .XLS are file formats anyone would usually use in that case. Clock speed jumper sample rate A jumper is an intentional short circuit used for selecting options for an electronic circuit. They are usually used where it is not feasible to use programming (such as outputting a byte or word through a port) to alter the selection, such as before the processor even begins executing. A common example would be, on some motherboards, jumpers can be used to alter the clock speeds of various motherboard functions (such as the CPU or the front side bus). These jumpers should ordinarily be modified when the computer is off. However, this search is asking how often the motherboard checks the status of the clock speed jumpers, implying that they intend to change these jumpers while the computer is powered on, and often enough that the sample rate matters (change cpu speed several times a second, by moving jumpers on the motherboard.). That is, of course, a little silly. Clean reinstall keybinding This refers to keybinding, the practice of mapping (binding) a certain key to a certain function (e.g., pressing PRTSC will take a screenshot). Most keyboards do not output characters directly, but only codes for which keys have been pressed (or released).  Keybindings translate the pressing of the \"A\" key on your keyboard into the letter \"A\" being sent to a program which is reading keyboard input. A \"clean reinstall\" of keybindings is something that would almost never be necessary - it means Randall has modified his default keybindings to such an extent that his leopard has become unusable (similar to 1284: Improved Keyboard ), necessitating a \"clean reinstall\" of the bindings. Alternatively, he might be doing clean reinstalls so often that he wants a keybinding to execute them with minimal loss of time. Cron job to update crontab Cron is a utility on most Unix-like OSes that allows you to schedule commands or scripts to be run periodically. These scheduled jobs are read from a crontab file. A job that updates the crontab (therefore creating new jobs, removing old ones or editing existing ones) is paramount to a job scheduler , and trying to use cron for such functionality could result in highly unstable functionality (although a crontab could be sensibly regenerated periodically by a set of machines from a master crontab file annotated with per-host directives). This is similar to self-modifying code . fsck Chrome extension This is a search for an interface to the Unix f ile s ystem che ck er fsck via third-party software added to Chrome. fsck is a program for checking your filesystem for corruption. Repairing a filesystem this way would be inadvisable. [ citation needed ] This might indicate confusion about the meaning of the term \"online filesystem repair\", in which \"online\" means \"while the filesystem is in use\" rather than \"over the Internet\". Alternatively, Randall might want to repair an installation of the operating system Chromium, in a manner less drastic than the factory reset preferred by Google. Recursive font An idiosyncratic mix of recursion and the font style cursive , referring especially to text handwritten in a flowing manner. PostScript (the language in which some fonts are written) is capable of recursion and PostScript Type 3 fonts are able to use the full language. This could create effects like fonts with complicated fractal borders and fill patterns - but the increase in processing time would contribute to seeming brokenness of the computer (or printer) rendering the font. A true recursive font would be a form of fractals ( example ). Regex matching valid EBNF EBNF refers to Extended Backus\u2013Naur Form , which is used to define formal languages . EBNF specifies recursive patterns that are impossible for a regular expression (regex) to determine whether it is valid or not. There is some irony in using regex to test the validity of something which defines the validity of things like regex. Hardlinks Turing complete In some file systems, for example ext4 and NTFS , a single file may be referenced in multiple places in the file system. These filenames are termed \"hard links\" because the operating system automatically resolves them to the actual file. \"Soft\" or \"symbolic\" links are resolved indirectly via a pathname, which may reside anywhere.  A file is considered deleted when the last hard link to it is unlinked; a soft link exists independently of its target.  In fact, the target need not exist, in which case this is often called a dangling symbolic link. Turing completeness is the computational complexity required to simulate any computable function (given an infinite amount of memory). Recently there have been cases where unexpected mechanisms from card games to text parsers were proved to be Turing complete. Hardlinks being Turing complete would imply that creating and deleting hardlinks alone is enough to satisfy the requirements of Turing completeness. Opposite of safe mode Safe mode is a diagnostic mode in many operating systems and applications which allows the user to troubleshoot problems by disabling unnecessary functionality. The \"opposite of safe mode\" implies a \"dangerous mode\" where the purpose is to allow uselessly dangerous actions (in actuality this supposed dangerous mode is the default mode). A common example is the sudo command in Unix-like OSes, which grants the user system-level permissions. It's also possible that Randall sees Safe Mode so often that he sees regular mode as an unusual and unique state and needs help navigating back to it. Predictive touchpad Predictive text is a feature of many smartphone keyboards that predicts the most likely word the user wishes to type, and then gives the user the option to place the full word in the sentence immediately without having to finish typing it. A touchpad is a computer pointing device, similar to a computer mouse . The idea of a \"predictive touchpad\" seems absurd because, as opposed to typed words, there are not a limited number of swipe combinations that are possible on a touchpad. A \"predictive touchpad\" implies that a computer could predict where the user was going to move the mouse or click, which in this case would seem to defeat the purpose of a user input device. [ citation needed ] . Interestingly, a version of Linux had a predictive cursor option, where the cursor jumped to the nearest button (like window close) when it moved near to but didn't quite reach that button. Google docs from bootloader A bootloader is a very small program that is usually the very first thing to execute when a computer boots up. It is used mainly for loading the operating system into memory.  Such a program by itself would not be capable of directly running something as complex as Google Docs . Hardware acceleration red channel only Hardware acceleration means that certain calculations are not performed by the computer's CPU but by a \"specialized\" processor, e.g. a GPU which is part of the graphics adapter. This speeds up output, especially if complex 3D calculations are required, and reduces CPU load. To use this function only on a single color channel seems pretty useless, but one may want to troubleshoot a program that displays only red when hardware acceleration is enabled. While graphics cards are most commonly used with three or four channels (red, green, blue, and sometimes alpha), they do support two-channel or single-channel images. An 8-bit single-channel image would use the format ' R8 ', which is indeed 'red channel only'. This type of image could be used to store monochrome images or non-image data. autoexec code posted by verified twitter users. ( Title text ) The term \"autoexec\" refers to code that runs automatically, usually during boot, and derives from one of three boot-time files for MS-DOS : AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS and COMMAND.COM.  AUTOEXEC.BAT would typically contain commands for customizing the command prompt, loading additional drivers, and\/or automatically launching a program. Automatically executing code from the Internet is generally a terrible idea, because it could be written by someone with malicious intent and harm your computer. The joke here is that the code would only be executed if written by someone who has been \"verified\" on Twitter. Twitter's verification service only serves to show that a user is who they claim to be, not whether or not their code can be trusted, so this would provide little protection. Usually, Twitter verification is used by celebrities so they can be distinguished from people claiming to be them. The line implies that Randall is only interested in running code posted by celebrities. Most code downloaded from authentic sources (such as Microsoft and official Linux distributions) is verified by a cryptographic signature from a true trusted source, authenticating the origin of the software. These may include software updates that run automatically in the background.  The joke here is that the term \"verified\" means very different things between Twitter users and software distribution.\n[Coloured and styled as the real logo:] GOOGLE\n[Google Search bar, with a drop down box with faded text, implying recent searches.] Google translate syntax highlighting Autodetect mixed bash zsh CPU temperature sensor limits GIF to XLS Clock speed jumper sample rate Clean reinstall keybinding Cron job to update crontab fsck Chrome extension Recursive font Regex matching valid EBNF Hardlinks Turing complete Opposite of safe mode Predictive touchpad Google docs from bootloader Hardware acceleration red channel only\n[Caption below the frame:] I have no idea why my computers are always broken.\n"}
{"id":1679,"title":"Substitutions 3","image_title":"Substitutions 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1679","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/substitutions_3.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1679:_Substitutions_3","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Even More Substitutions That make reading the news more fun\n[A table of words\/sentences on the left that change in to those on the left. Between each set of words there is an arrow pointing from right.]\nGaffe \u279c Magic spell Ancient \u279c Haunted Star-Studded \u279c Blood-soaked Remains to be seen \u279c Will never be known Silver bullet \u279c Way to kill werewolves Subway system \u279c Tunnels I found Surprising \u279c Surprising (but not to me) War of words \u279c Interplanetary war Tension \u279c Sexual tension Cautiously optimistic \u279c Delusional Doctor Who \u279c The Big Bang Theory Win votes \u279c Find Pok\u00e9mon Behind the headlines \u279c Beyond the grave Email \\ Facebook Post \u279c Poem Tweet \/ Facebook CEO \u279c This guy Latest \u279c Final Disrupt \u279c Destroy Meeting \u279c M\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois Scientists \u279c Channing Tatum and his friends You won't believe \u279c I'm really sad about\n","explanation":"This is the third comic in the Substitution series where Randall has suggested substitutions that will make reading the news more fun. This time it will be even more fun! But there have been several comics using substitutions both before and after these ones.\nThe series as of 2016:\nThe title text in original form would be \"Scientists explore ancient city\", which most would consider a fairly bland headline. Two days before this comic came out, there was news that a potential ancient Mayan city had been found by a 15 year old boy through satellite imagery, which may be what Randall was referencing. The Mayan city has now been proven inexistent. Imagining Channing Tatum and his \"friends\", and pretending that the city is haunted, provides a much more dramatic setting mirroring many episodes (and later films) of Scooby Doo featuring a gang of friends (Mysteries, Inc.).\n[Caption above the panel:] Even More Substitutions That make reading the news more fun\n[A table of words\/sentences on the left that change in to those on the left. Between each set of words there is an arrow pointing from right.]\nGaffe \u279c Magic spell Ancient \u279c Haunted Star-Studded \u279c Blood-soaked Remains to be seen \u279c Will never be known Silver bullet \u279c Way to kill werewolves Subway system \u279c Tunnels I found Surprising \u279c Surprising (but not to me) War of words \u279c Interplanetary war Tension \u279c Sexual tension Cautiously optimistic \u279c Delusional Doctor Who \u279c The Big Bang Theory Win votes \u279c Find Pok\u00e9mon Behind the headlines \u279c Beyond the grave Email \\ Facebook Post \u279c Poem Tweet \/ Facebook CEO \u279c This guy Latest \u279c Final Disrupt \u279c Destroy Meeting \u279c M\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois Scientists \u279c Channing Tatum and his friends You won't believe \u279c I'm really sad about\n"}
{"id":1680,"title":"Black Hole","image_title":"Black Hole","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1680","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/black_hole.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1680:_Black_Hole","transcript":"[Cueball is standing near a coffee table as Black Hat approaches. They are presumably in Black Hat's living room. The coffee table has a miniature black hole on top of it, resting on a small pedestal.] Cueball: Why do you have a miniature black hole on your coffee table? Black Hat: It really brings the room together.\n","explanation":"Cueball is curious as to why Black Hat has a miniature black hole on his table; Black Hat responds that it \"really brings the room together\", making a pun on both the black hole aesthetically completing the look of the room as well as it literally \"bringing the room together\" through its gravitational pull. Evidently the black hole is massive enough to bring the room together optically into visible Einstein rings by gravitational lensing .\nThe title text makes a cultural reference to a well-known song lyric from the 2003 song \" Milkshake \" by Kelis , where the singer brags of her milkshake being so popular that it \"brings all the boys to the yard\" (what \"milkshake\" is a metaphor for has never been specified). But in this case, since gravity does not discriminate between which things it pulls, it brings \"the boys, and everything else\" to Black Hat's yard - and unlike with the milkshake, not by choice. If it wasn't for the house walls (which somehow resist collapsing into the black hole), they wouldn't remain in the yard but would come into the room with the black hole, and then into the black hole itself.\nAs depicted, the black hole is inconsistent with several aspects of physics:\n[Cueball is standing near a coffee table as Black Hat approaches. They are presumably in Black Hat's living room. The coffee table has a miniature black hole on top of it, resting on a small pedestal.] Cueball: Why do you have a miniature black hole on your coffee table? Black Hat: It really brings the room together.\n"}
{"id":1681,"title":"Laser Products","image_title":"Laser Products","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1681","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/laser_products.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1681:_Laser_Products","transcript":"[Heading above the table:] Online Reviews of Laser Products\n[A three by three table with one word to the far left, from which three lines split out and goes to three words just left of each of the three rows. Above each column is three other words. Below in the table are nine reviews with star rating on a five star scale. The actual rating is indicated with black stars and also use half filled stars in the rating system. The ratings are written in the table in square brackets.]\n...surgery ...removal ...printer Laser eye... [4 1\/2 stars] \"I don't need glasses anymore!\" [1\/2 star] \"Aaaaaaa! Misread the description! Aaaaaaaaaaaa!!\" [1 star] \"Eww.\" jet... [1 1\/2 stars] \"Too nervous to try it.\" [2 1\/2 stars] \"Effective, but the FAA got really mad.\" [4 stars] \"Prints great!\" hair... [2 1\/2 stars] \"Confusing term for haircut. Burning smell.\" [4 stars] \"Great results!\" [1\/2 star] \"Disgusting, won't turn off, jams constantly.\"\n","explanation":"This comic takes three laser-based technologies - laser eye surgery, laserjet printers, and laser hair removal - and conflates them, with humorous results. These are illustrated through reviews by users of the resulting combinations. For the original combinations, the reviews are highly positive. For the new combinations, most are negative, because most of these new \"technologies\" are ill-conceived and possibly harmful.\nLaser eye surgery gets a positive review, since it has successfully corrected the reviewer's vision, so that they no longer require glasses. There are a range of laser eye surgeries to correct near- and far-sightedness, as well as various other conditions. LASIK , one of the more common laser eye surgeries, works by using lasers to cut open the cornea and ablate a small amount of the lens.\nLaser eye removal would be very painful, and thus the review is negative, stating that the reviewer had read the description incorrectly, likely believing it to be one of the real combinations on the chart. The screams of pain expressed in the review have the humorous implication that the review is being typed directly after the ill-advised procedure, though this may just be an after-the-fact expression of the reviewer's feelings. If they produced the review without aid, this would probably have been made more difficult as a result of the surgery. At least in animal surgery, however,  laser eye removal does exist .\nLaser eye printer refers to printing on (or possibly of ) an eyeball, which only prompts a disgusted \"Eww\" response. Both probably can find their applications, either in adding images onto ones eyes or creating artificial eyes for implantation, but would probably be quite disgusting to operate for many people.\nLaser jet surgery could be performing maintenance on a jet with lasers, which would be potentially dangerous and error-prone [ citation needed ] . Alternatively, it could mean laser surgery done on a human from a jet aircraft, using a laser mounted to it. The human being operated on could be aboard that aircraft, on another aircraft, or on land: in any case, it does not sound like a safe approach. Another interpretation is that it could refer to surgery using a jet made of lasers, which is even worse, as it would probably cause the entire body to be disintegrated. [ citation needed ] Yet another interpretation is that the procedure would implant parts of a jet into one's body. The statement's ambiguity may contribute the reviewer's concern, or the reviewer could be nervous over the fact that it would be a very difficult and delicate procedure and trying it could easily go horribly wrong.\nLaser jet removal appears to be the destruction of jets with lasers, which apparently works, but angered the Federal Aviation Administration, and probably resulted in legal consequences for the reviewer. This could be a reference to the real FAA concern of the many incidents of people using laser pointers against aircraft. \"Laser Jet Removal\" actually exists as a military weapon system, though it's primarily meant to be used against jet missiles , rather than jet planes.\nLaserJet printer is a popular line of Hewlett Packard laser printers . Laser printing is a technology which uses a laser to electrically charge a drum so that it collects ink in the form of the image to be printed, before transferring it to paper. The printer seems to work well for the reviewer, as it has been given a positive review.\nLaser hair surgery turns out to be a fancy name for cutting hair with a laser -- an overengineered, and potentially dangerous, technique for achieving the same results that you could with clippers and scissors. It is rated neutrally, since it did the job, but the reviewer found the name confusing and they disliked the smell of burning hair.\nLaser hair removal is the process of destroying hair follicles with bursts of laser light to prevent the growth of unwanted hair. This appears to have been effective for the reviewer.\nLaser hair printer appears to be a bizarre printer that uses hair in place of paper, or perhaps as the construction material for a 3D printer . Unsurprisingly [ citation needed ] , this just creates disgusting messes of hair and keeps jamming the printer, resulting in a negative review. The title text extends this joke, giving some common printer error messages amended for the hair printer. A paper jam is when paper gets stuck in the workings of the printer, usually because it was creased, or more than one sheet fed in at once; in the hair printer this becomes a hair jam. An inkjet printer requires replaceable ink cartridges, and when the ink is used up this will usually result in an ink cartridge running low error; the hair printer appears to require cartridges of hair conditioner . As an additional twist, it uses color-safe conditioner, a product intended to prevent the washing out of dye from the users hair; here, it presumably protects the colour of the printed image or item. Legal and Letter are paper sizes used in North America; apparently, the same terms are used for standard supplies of hair for the hair printer.\nLaser eye removal has been mentioned before, see the lower right part of the 1619: Watson Medical Algorithm chart.\n[Heading above the table:] Online Reviews of Laser Products\n[A three by three table with one word to the far left, from which three lines split out and goes to three words just left of each of the three rows. Above each column is three other words. Below in the table are nine reviews with star rating on a five star scale. The actual rating is indicated with black stars and also use half filled stars in the rating system. The ratings are written in the table in square brackets.]\n...surgery ...removal ...printer Laser eye... [4 1\/2 stars] \"I don't need glasses anymore!\" [1\/2 star] \"Aaaaaaa! Misread the description! Aaaaaaaaaaaa!!\" [1 star] \"Eww.\" jet... [1 1\/2 stars] \"Too nervous to try it.\" [2 1\/2 stars] \"Effective, but the FAA got really mad.\" [4 stars] \"Prints great!\" hair... [2 1\/2 stars] \"Confusing term for haircut. Burning smell.\" [4 stars] \"Great results!\" [1\/2 star] \"Disgusting, won't turn off, jams constantly.\"\n"}
{"id":1682,"title":"Bun","image_title":"Bun","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1682","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bun.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1682:_Bun","transcript":"[Ponytail is a teacher and she holds a pointer to a picture of a rabbit on a board behind her.] Ponytail: Good morning class! Today, we will be learning about the bun.\n[Two rabbits are shown, one slightly smaller, and a greater than symbol indicates that the smaller one is \"greater than\" the larger one. Ponytail is talking off panel to the left.] Ponytail (off panel): Buns have a hierarchy. Ponytail (off panel): A bun's rank is determined by its size. Smaller buns are higher-ranking.\n[Two normal sized rabbits are sitting left and right of a very small rabbit. The smaller rabbit appears to give off a radiant light indicated with gray and white alternating rays going through the image. It is indicated that it shines on the larger rabbits as they are gray on the side turned away from the smaller rabbit and white on the front turned towards it. Ponytail narrates above the frame of this half sized panel:] Ponytail (narrating): Most buns you see are relatively low-ranking. Ponytail (narrating): But this time of year, a lucky few may catch a glimpse of a king bun .\n[A student represented by Megan is sitting at a desk with a few books on it, pencil in hand.] Megan: OK, hang on. Megan: We're talking about rabbits and hares, right? Lagomorphs?\n[Ponytail is holding her finger up on her left hand, and is holding her pointer at her side with the other. Students reply to her off panel to the right.] Ponytail: Informally, yes. But in this course, we use the scientific term, \"bun\". Student #1 (off-panel): Are we sure this is the right room for introductory mammalogy? Student #2 (off-panel): I'll check online. Student #3 (off-panel): Shh! Show respect! We look upon the image of a king!\n","explanation":"In this comic, Ponytail is teaching a class about an animal referred to as a \"bun\". The word \"bun\" is short for bunny , which is in turn an informal term used for a rabbit . The comic depicts a childish response to seeing a cute animal, but coming from an adult. The humor in the comic comes from a tone of absurdity in a classroom situation where lectures are expected to be serious.\nThe lecture opens with the statement that smaller buns are superior in rank, which is plainly false. [ citation needed ] Instead, the teacher clearly thinks that smaller bunnies are just cuter. She mentions that \"king buns\" may be seen around this time of year, which refers to rabbit kittens being born in the spring. Kittens would be smaller and cuter than any other rabbits because of their age. There is no mention of a \"queen bun\", but the gender of the kitten can be difficult to determine without a close examination. A prime example of a king bun can be seen here .\nMegan , who attends this biology class, expected to learn about rabbits and hares which are both lagomorphs , a mammalian order that also includes the pikas . Megan thus clearly has the correct understanding of what a \"bun\" is. Ponytail then claims that the word bun is the scientific term, and states that rabbit, hare, and lagomorph are informal ways to describe these animals, again being completely wrong as in reality bun is the most contracted and informal name for a rabbit.\nTwo students are then legitimately doubting that they're in the correct class and decide to check online (either the crude theories that Ponytail expressed, or their course schedule). A third student however appears to believe the lecturer uncritically, reminding the fellow students that they're looking upon the image of a king (i.e. a cute bunny).\nThe title text refers to photographing a rabbit and, for example, posting it on social media - something which would typically be done today if someone sees a cute rabbit in the wild. If the poster had failed to photograph the rabbit before it ran away, they may typically post a message saying something like \"I saw a really cute bunny today!\" with an emoji depiction of a rabbit (probably \ud83d\udc07 or \ud83d\udc30 ). This is especially common in the area where Randall lives, as the urban rabbit population in the Cambridge\/Somerville area has exploded, putting a large human population with relatively little previous experience with rabbit-sightings suddenly in the position of encountering them very frequently. [ citation needed ] Emoji have become a recurrent theme on xkcd.\nPonytail tells that buns have a hierarchy in which the smaller the bun, the higher its ranking is - a rank-size distribution. A \"king bun\" can be seen as an instance of the king effect, the phenomenon where the top one or two members of a ranked set show up as outliers. An interesting linguistic note is that in several languages (including Czech and Polish), the word for rabbit literally means \"little king\".\n[Ponytail is a teacher and she holds a pointer to a picture of a rabbit on a board behind her.] Ponytail: Good morning class! Today, we will be learning about the bun.\n[Two rabbits are shown, one slightly smaller, and a greater than symbol indicates that the smaller one is \"greater than\" the larger one. Ponytail is talking off panel to the left.] Ponytail (off panel): Buns have a hierarchy. Ponytail (off panel): A bun's rank is determined by its size. Smaller buns are higher-ranking.\n[Two normal sized rabbits are sitting left and right of a very small rabbit. The smaller rabbit appears to give off a radiant light indicated with gray and white alternating rays going through the image. It is indicated that it shines on the larger rabbits as they are gray on the side turned away from the smaller rabbit and white on the front turned towards it. Ponytail narrates above the frame of this half sized panel:] Ponytail (narrating): Most buns you see are relatively low-ranking. Ponytail (narrating): But this time of year, a lucky few may catch a glimpse of a king bun .\n[A student represented by Megan is sitting at a desk with a few books on it, pencil in hand.] Megan: OK, hang on. Megan: We're talking about rabbits and hares, right? Lagomorphs?\n[Ponytail is holding her finger up on her left hand, and is holding her pointer at her side with the other. Students reply to her off panel to the right.] Ponytail: Informally, yes. But in this course, we use the scientific term, \"bun\". Student #1 (off-panel): Are we sure this is the right room for introductory mammalogy? Student #2 (off-panel): I'll check online. Student #3 (off-panel): Shh! Show respect! We look upon the image of a king!\n"}
{"id":1683,"title":"Digital Data","image_title":"Digital Data","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1683","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/digital_data.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1683:_Digital_Data","transcript":"[Cueball and a White Hat are walking, Cueball holds both hands in front of him palms up.] Cueball: The great thing about digital data is that it never degrades.\n[They walk on in the next panel which shows jpeg compression artifacts, as if the image had been converted from png format to a lossy jpeg format.] Cueball: Hard drives fail, of course, but their bits can be copied forever without loss.\n[They continue walking in the third panel which is now clearly pixelated, the white is slightly discolored, and it contains part of the interface of some program, probably supposed to be a screen shot from a smartphone. At the bottom there are three blue buttons and one gray. the first is a blue \"<\" indicating back in a browser. Then a grayed out \">\" that is not active. And then three more standard buttons in blue to the right of those two. The interface matches that of an iPhone running Safari in iOS 9 (or other versions with the same Safari UI (probably iOS 7-9))] Cueball: Film degrades, paint cracks, but a copy of a century-old data file is identical to the original.\n[Still walking, now Cueball holds out both arms to the sides, and finally White Hat replies. This panel is heavily pixelated and discolored and has a distorted aspect ratio. It contains a clear watermark of 9GAG (although difficult to read all letters in the end of the first word), even more 'frame' elements, and text above the image at the bottom (where the last letter is obscured by the frame of the image). There is also an internet address at the bottom left, but it is not readable except for the .tumblr.com ending. In this panel it is clear that it is a screen shot from a smart phone. The frame around the image obscure the very top of Cueball's text and the half of the last letter in White Hat's reply.] Cueball: If humanity has a permanent record, we are the first generation in it. White Hat: Amazing\nWatermark: Screenshotpro 2 Watermark: ~Unregistered~\nTop border: Verizon LTE 4:45 PM Bottom text [slightly cut off]: 9GAG Internet address at the bottom [nearly unintelligible]: [ama].tumblr.com\n","explanation":"Digital information has the potential to be copied such that the copy is 100% identical to the original. While physical media themselves (such as books, or hard drives) and information stored by analog means may degrade as the universe continues, digital information as expressed by specific values, such as combinations of binary zeros and ones, does not decay over time and can be copied indefinitely with no changes.\nHowever, in this comic, Randall points out that while digital information itself doesn't need to degrade, things that are on the Internet are often degraded through copying when the copy is not a 1:1 copy or changes are deliberately introduced. In addition, as technology advances, the method to save or call the information changes and the medium to view it changes, occasionally causing misinterpreted information. (This is also demonstrated with the title text.) As the frames continue, they gain the appearance of images which have been screenshotted repeatedly, with a resulting loss of quality due to compression of the original resolution and JPEG artifacting . (The JPEG format is intended for representing photorealistic grayscale or color images; when misused for line drawings, such as comic strips, any compression artifacts become particularly noticeable, as the background is normally of completely uniform color.) In the last frame, this is taken to an extreme, as the frame appears to have been very sloppily screenshotted off of at least two different smartphones (not the same device that uses the bottom frame in the third panel as the top border in panel four), and the final image is covered both with a watermark from an unregistered screenshot program, as well as references to at least two different web sites: 9GAG (bottom right image) and Tumblr in the web address bottom left. 9GAG is an online platform and social media website where users upload and share content of their own, or of other networks. It is often accused of rehosting other sites' funny content without attribution and adding their own watermark to the image or video.\nAs an easter egg, the high-resolution (pixel-doubled) version of the comic is merely the comic resized to 50% and then to 400%, making it an image of poorer quality rather than a higher resolution image as for other comics, demonstrating how repeated image scaling can also introduce artifacts into images.\nThe title text is seemingly addressed to a reader in the future who will only be able to access xkcd through a digital archive . Digital information might not degrade with time, but it can't be properly displayed without knowledge of the encoding. As new encodings and file formats get developed and old ones abandoned, the webpage format of the comic might not be available in the future, when users would need special archives to view content from today's world. The title text contains seemingly garbage characters , which typically result from data being interpreted according to a character encoding different from the one used to encode it. In this case, the characters are the result of encoding the string \u201cIf you can read this, congratulations\u2014the archive you\u2019re using still knows about the mouseover text\u201d! using UTF-8 (which represents non- ASCII Unicode characters as multibyte sequences) and then interpreting the resulting bytes as the still commonly used Windows-1252 encoding (which uses only one byte per character, but utilizes the non-ASCII codepoints for a limited selection of extra letters and symbols such as \"\u00e2\" or \"\u20ac\"). This shows that degradation of digital data through conversions isn't restricted to images. Furthermore, as screen navigation moves away from the mouse toward touch, voice recognition, and modes still to be implemented, mouseover text will itself become archaic.\n[Cueball and a White Hat are walking, Cueball holds both hands in front of him palms up.] Cueball: The great thing about digital data is that it never degrades.\n[They walk on in the next panel which shows jpeg compression artifacts, as if the image had been converted from png format to a lossy jpeg format.] Cueball: Hard drives fail, of course, but their bits can be copied forever without loss.\n[They continue walking in the third panel which is now clearly pixelated, the white is slightly discolored, and it contains part of the interface of some program, probably supposed to be a screen shot from a smartphone. At the bottom there are three blue buttons and one gray. the first is a blue \"<\" indicating back in a browser. Then a grayed out \">\" that is not active. And then three more standard buttons in blue to the right of those two. The interface matches that of an iPhone running Safari in iOS 9 (or other versions with the same Safari UI (probably iOS 7-9))] Cueball: Film degrades, paint cracks, but a copy of a century-old data file is identical to the original.\n[Still walking, now Cueball holds out both arms to the sides, and finally White Hat replies. This panel is heavily pixelated and discolored and has a distorted aspect ratio. It contains a clear watermark of 9GAG (although difficult to read all letters in the end of the first word), even more 'frame' elements, and text above the image at the bottom (where the last letter is obscured by the frame of the image). There is also an internet address at the bottom left, but it is not readable except for the .tumblr.com ending. In this panel it is clear that it is a screen shot from a smart phone. The frame around the image obscure the very top of Cueball's text and the half of the last letter in White Hat's reply.] Cueball: If humanity has a permanent record, we are the first generation in it. White Hat: Amazing\nWatermark: Screenshotpro 2 Watermark: ~Unregistered~\nTop border: Verizon LTE 4:45 PM Bottom text [slightly cut off]: 9GAG Internet address at the bottom [nearly unintelligible]: [ama].tumblr.com\n"}
{"id":1684,"title":"Rainbow","image_title":"Rainbow","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1684","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rainbow.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1684:_Rainbow","transcript":"[Cueball looks up on a rainbow band going through the top right corner of the panel. A black blob in the bottom of the panel right of Cueball with white text inside shows the reply from God to the questions. The blobs continue through the rest of the comic.] Cueball: Wow, God- What's that band of color? God: A rainbow . God: It is a sign of my promise that I will never again flood the Earth.\n[A frameless panel.] Cueball: Oh, good! Hey, what about that second bow above the first one? God: Oh, uh, sign of my promise not to set the earth on fire. God: Sorry for doing that a while back.\n[Cueball points left.] Cueball: What about that third faint bow near the sun? God: My promise to never again destroy Earth's ecosystem by making raccoons immortal.\n[Cueball points even higher up towards left.] Cueball: And the little rainbow clouds on either side of- God: Look, I said I'm sorry. Can we just drop it?\n","explanation":"In this comic, the patriarch Noah from the Abrahamic religions , represented by Cueball , talks to God after the biblical flood . He asks what the coloured band across the sky is, and God tells him it is a rainbow . According to the Book of Genesis, God placed a rainbow in the sky, giving it significance for the first time, as a promise to humanity that he would never again make a flood to cleanse the world of sin ( Genesis 9:2\u201317 ).  A rainbow is an optical phenomenon caused by reflection, refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a spectrum of light appearing in the sky, one of many light phenomena caused by sunlight and precipitation.\nThen Noah notices a double rainbow outside the original promise rainbow . Secondary rainbows are caused by double reflection of sunlight inside the raindrops. When asked about this God seems to falter, but recovers and claims he made it to show that he will never again set the Earth on fire, an event which apparently happened long ago and for which God apologizes. This may refer to the early Earth being a liquid ball of molten rock (the Hadean period ), or later global fire catastrophes caused by asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions. That God promises to never again burn the earth goes against the idea of Armageddon where everything will be destroyed in fire etc.\nNoah begins to notice some other optical phenomena as he next spots a bow near the sun. God promptly claims 'that' bow is a promise to never again make raccoons immortal as it destroyed the Earth's ecosystem . Although today these animals can be a pest, see 1565: Back Seat , they are luckily not immortal. [ citation needed ] Randall is likely referring to an unkillable form of immortality rather than biological immortality , as, while that would likely cause some issues, the raccoons could still fall prey to predation and disease. Should raccoons have been rendered unkillable by predation or disease as well as by aging , then the combination of an average gestational period of 65 days, a litter size of 2-5 individuals, and an omnivorous appetite makes for a creature that could easily dominate any and all ecological niches.\nIf Noah can see it with his naked eyes it is most likely that the \"third bow\" is a halo . Halos can appear in the direction of the Sun (as is the case with the bow here, and opposed to the two rainbows mentioned above) or the Moon. A typical person is most likely to notice the circular 22\u00b0 halo , which is a halo forming a circle with a radius of approximately 22\u00b0 around the Sun, or occasionally the Moon.\nIt could also be that Noah has spotted a tertiary rainbow or even a higher order rainbow which are very faint rainbows circling the sun. These bows are discussed in the what If? released the same day. But they are very faint rainbows circling the sun and usually obscured by its glare, and only recently have they been photographed. Knowing Randall the joke could be inspired by this not well known fact (there are at least 5 observable orders of rainbow), and each could potentially represent a promise from God regarding a disaster.\nNoah continues by noticing two sun dogs (or parahelia) which often co-occur with the 22\u00b0 halo. These consist of a pair of bright spots either side on the Sun, intersected by the halo, thus making it most obvious that the third bow was indeed a halo, not a hard to see rainbow.\nGod gets tired of this and tries to stop Noah by saying that he has said sorry, and asks him to drop the subject. That is probably sensible because there are 25 different atmospheric optical phenomena listed on Wikipedia alone. Following the logic of the comic and the evasive answer of God, it could mean that there are some more skeletons in the closet.\nThe title text is a continuation where God tells Noah that in the future humanity will invent a game called SimCity . This is a strategy computer game in which the player creates and manages an environment wherein sims autonomously build a city (or in later versions a country, or a planet). The sims are simple AI processes that \"build\" residential, commercial and industrial structures within the game space, according to the topography and zoning choices made by the player, then use them to create more wealth to expand their city. The sims have to contend with traffic jams, social problems, and ecological impacts of their own activity, and occasional natural disasters ranging from earthquakes to Godzilla.\nThe player has God-like control of the world, including a disaster button , for when the player doesn't want to wait for a disaster to happen by chance. God suggests that it is too tempting to push the disaster button once a civilization has been built up, if just to see what happens. This can also be interpreted as a reference to the Simulation Hypothesis , which states that there's a high likelihood of us living in a simulated universe, with a fallible \"God\" who's simulating our Universe purely for his own entertainment\/educational purposes.\nOverall the comic pokes fun at the idea of explaining natural phenomena as messages from a deity.\n[Cueball looks up on a rainbow band going through the top right corner of the panel. A black blob in the bottom of the panel right of Cueball with white text inside shows the reply from God to the questions. The blobs continue through the rest of the comic.] Cueball: Wow, God- What's that band of color? God: A rainbow . God: It is a sign of my promise that I will never again flood the Earth.\n[A frameless panel.] Cueball: Oh, good! Hey, what about that second bow above the first one? God: Oh, uh, sign of my promise not to set the earth on fire. God: Sorry for doing that a while back.\n[Cueball points left.] Cueball: What about that third faint bow near the sun? God: My promise to never again destroy Earth's ecosystem by making raccoons immortal.\n[Cueball points even higher up towards left.] Cueball: And the little rainbow clouds on either side of- God: Look, I said I'm sorry. Can we just drop it?\n"}
{"id":1685,"title":"Patch","image_title":"Patch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1685","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/patch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1685:_Patch","transcript":"[The panel displays part of a code, in five different colors (red, purple, light blue, blue, and green) as well as normal black text, which due to image editing is difficult to read. The first and last lines are partly obscured by the frame of the panel. Here below is an attempt to transcribe the code, using the sign \"\u00a4\" for anything not easily transcribed. Feel free to add other signs instead of these that look more like the one in the image (and also improve the attempted transcription if possible).]\n[Caption below the panel:] Protip: If you don't have access to the GNU patch tool, you can use the Photoshop one.\n","explanation":"Adobe Photoshop is a commonly used application for image manipulation. One of its features is the Patch tool, which allows the user to overwrite parts of the image, replacing them with a copy of another area of the same image. It is often used for \u201cpatching up\u201d photographs by overwriting scratches or other visible damage to the photo. Another of Photoshop\u2019s features is \u201ccontent-aware fill\u201d, which could also be described as \u201ccontent-aware inpainting\u201d. It works similarly to the Patch tool, but automatically generates a replacement texture from the area surrounding the deleted part instead of copying a user-specified area exactly.\nGNU patch is a program that replaces only parts of code with an updated version, without requiring the user to download the entire source code. Here, it appears the author was told to \u201cpatch\u201d the code but used Photoshop to do this instead of GNU patch, with devastating results. Although the title text suggests that if you did this enough times the code would eventually compile, this would never happen. In fact, Photoshop could only edit an image of the text and not the text itself. However, it could work if optical character recognition (OCR) were integrated into the workflow as well.\nThe comic blurs the difference between text (in which letters and symbols represent discrete values, such as 65 being the number for the letter A in the ASCII encoding standard, and it's relatively easy for a program compiler to interpret combinations of these values as keywords and other programming constructs) and graphics (where the letters and symbols in the comic are actually represented by a pattern of colored dots), playing with the idea that the patch metaphor can be used on both (although with different meanings). There are common and straightforward processes for converting text information to images, such as printing, which can convert text to a graphics format very faithfully. The reverse, however, requires the use of optical character recognition (OCR), which attempts to figure out which letter or symbol certain patterns of dots \"look like\". OCR could be effective in converting some of the image in the comic back to usable text; however, it would fail on some of those patterns that have been mangled and don't look like any existing characters or symbols. A compiler can only operate on text data, so converting the graphic back into text would be a requirement to even begin to attempt to compile it, a step omitted in the title text.\nThe code appears to be written in Python , a programming language often referred to in xkcd, such as in 353: Python . A few of the function names that can be recognized are \"isPrime\" and \"quicksort\", both elementary programming algorithms. It was also apparently originally edited using a Python-aware programming text editor, which is able to use different colors for different programming elements. For example, it appears to use red for keywords, blue for variables, and black for other elements; however, because of the mangling from the use of the wrong patching program, that doesn't appear to be consistent. Since the patching replaced graphical elements rather than whole characters, there are examples of symbols that are combinations of two different characters, and when the original two characters were rendered in different colors the resulting non-character could be in two colors, or the resulting \"word\" might be rendered in multiple colors.\nThe comic brings to attention the high rate of Adobe Photoshop piracy. GNU Patch is available for free, even for Windows , and Mac OS X. So the comic implies that Adobe Photoshop, a subscription to which costs $20\/month, is more available than GNU patch. According to this poll , 58% of Photoshop copies were pirated.\nThe title text also explains that the patch used the content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code. In most programming languages, whitespace is necessary to separate words, so this would combine words that shouldn\u2019t be combined and create invalid code. Since the code in the image is Python, the code will be messed up even more, because Python uses whitespace as a part of its programming syntax. For example, statements are separated by newlines instead of by semicolons (;), and indentation is used instead of brackets to determine the scope of each section of code.\nThe original code was likely as follows:\nisPrime and quicksort are standard python implementations of simple algorithms (although you would not generally write a sorting algorithm in python as there are built-in algorithms available).  isPrimeRegex uses the re module to detect if a number is prime by seeing if a string containing that many 1s can be matched to 2 or more copies of some string containing at least 2 1s.\nThe comic two comics back 1683: Digital Data , also related to turning digital data into bad copies. Less than a month before quicksort was mentioned in 1667: Algorithms , and a month before that another \"easy\" solution to a programming problem was released in 1654: Universal Install Script .\nUsing a Photoshop tool for a task it is not intended for was also used in 1784: Bad Map Projection: Liquid Resize , where Photoshop's content-aware resizing tool was a very questionable choice to use for a Map Projection.\n[The panel displays part of a code, in five different colors (red, purple, light blue, blue, and green) as well as normal black text, which due to image editing is difficult to read. The first and last lines are partly obscured by the frame of the panel. Here below is an attempt to transcribe the code, using the sign \"\u00a4\" for anything not easily transcribed. Feel free to add other signs instead of these that look more like the one in the image (and also improve the attempted transcription if possible).]\n[Caption below the panel:] Protip: If you don't have access to the GNU patch tool, you can use the Photoshop one.\n"}
{"id":1686,"title":"Feel Old","image_title":"Feel Old","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1686","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/feel_old.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1686:_Feel_Old","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking.] Megan: Wanna feel old? Cueball: Does anyone? But OK, go ahead, I'm ready. Megan: This is the first presidential election in which there are voters too young to remember 9\/11. Cueball: ...I wasn't ready.\n","explanation":"This is yet another comic following xkcd 's recurring theme of using cultural or pop-cultural event dates to reference how much time has passed between two events, often with the stated intention of making someone realize how old they are. (See Comics to make one feel old as well as this xkcd blag post . However, this is the first comic where the title is actually directly related to feeling old!). In each case, the joke is derived from the shock that many adults feel upon realizing that events that feel relatively recent actually took place many years or even decades ago.\nThis becomes especially relevant when it is noted how old someone born during that time would be. Perhaps this is because for many people, there are fewer significant events and changes in their lives after they reach adulthood where there are no grade numbers and annual class changes to mark the continued passage of years. Hearing many years have passed framed in the context of the age of a child allows you to realize how long the period really is as you recall how much had occurred in your own life and how much you had grown by the time you were that age.\nIn this case, Megan makes Cueball feel old by noting to him that the 2016 U.S. presidential election will be the first U.S. presidential election in which there will be eligible voters who are too young to remember the September 11 terrorist attacks , in which hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon  and a field in Pennsylvania in 2001. These attacks (commonly referred to as \"9\/11\") were, in many ways, a defining event for an entire generation of Americans. This statement is made on the basis that the eligible voting age in the United States (the minimum age you must be to be eligible to vote in an election) is 18 years old, which is set by the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution .\nEligible voters in this election will have been born on or before November 8, 1998. The youngest voters will therefore have been nearly three years old (two years, ten months, and three days) on September 11, 2001. Megan is presuming that children under three years old (or at least some or many of them) were either too young to retain any memories from that age, or at least were too young to appreciate the significance of the attacks such that they would be retained memories 15 years later.\nThe previous U.S. presidential election took place November 6, 2012 and eligible voters would have been just shy of seven years old on September 11, 2001. Megan similarly presumes (or at least is generalizing) that voters who were seven on 9\/11 were old enough to retain that memory through adulthood.\nParticularly for those who were of voting age on September 11, 2001, it might seem startling that by election day, 15 years will have passed since 9\/11. This might be particularly so given how significantly 9\/11 shaped American society in the years following the attacks. 9\/11 was a significant political point in the elections following the attacks as well as in non-electoral politics (such as discussions over homeland security, military actions, etc.) It is also unusual in that there was only one new Presidency (Obama replacing Bush in 2009) in a fifteen year period; historically, an average of nearly three new Presidencies begin in every fifteen years (the 44th Presidency is scheduled to end January 20, 2017, nearly 228 years after the first one began in 1789). To realize that there are people who have reached adulthood and weren't even old enough to be aware of 9\/11 when it happened is a stark reminder of the passage of time since the event. The following election on November 3, 2020 , was the first in which there were eligible voters who were born after 9\/11.\nThe 9\/11 attack was already used in 647: Scary to make people feel old already back in 2009. At that time kids born after the event was old enough to discuss the event with adults which was what was scary for Rob in that comic.\nWhen Megan asks Cueball if he wants to \"feel old\", he replies resignedly, suggesting that he recognizes (possibly based on the previous strips) that she's about to make him feel his age, but claims that he's ready. However, after she makes her statement, he admits that he wasn't ready. While he's technically aware of his age, that kind of perspective still catches him by surprise, and likely causes significant emotional discomfort. His additional discomfort may also be as a result of the serious and significant events of 9\/11 Megan references in comparison to previous strips where lighter things like film release dates are cited (see the most relevant of those comics here: 891: Movie Ages ).\nIn the title text, Cueball asks Megan how long she can \"keep this up\" (i.e. how long she will continue to mention things to make him feel old). However, instead of addressing how long she can keep coming up with uncomfortable facts, she references a new fact that (intentionally or not) that likely has a similar effect of making Cueball feel old: That they're only likely to live another forty to fifty years (suggesting that they're both in their mid- to late- thirties). This may also be a reference to 493: Actuarial , where actuarial tables were used to estimate when (famous) people will die.\n\"How long are you going to keep this up?\" Is also a question that is likely asked to Randall often. Perhaps, through this comment, he is confirming that he will continue making these comics until death or for as long as he possibly can.\n[Megan and Cueball are walking.] Megan: Wanna feel old? Cueball: Does anyone? But OK, go ahead, I'm ready. Megan: This is the first presidential election in which there are voters too young to remember 9\/11. Cueball: ...I wasn't ready.\n"}
{"id":1687,"title":"World War III+","image_title":"World War III+","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1687","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/world_war_iii.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1687:_World_War_III%2B","transcript":"[A quote with white text on black background:]\n\"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. World War V will be fought with crossbows, World War VI will be lasers, and World War VII will be blowguns. I don't know about World Wars VIII through XI. World War XII will use the same weapons as III, but will be fought entirely within underground tunnels. World War XIV will\u2014Hey, come back! I have a whole list!\" \u2014 Albert Einstein\n","explanation":"This comic takes a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein , and expands upon it to absurd levels. The original quote is: \"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.\" The basic premise of this quote is that World War III would be so devastating to the world that all humanity's progress would be wiped out and we would return to the technological level of the Stone Age.\nThe original quote is meant to be taken with a poetic license, with \"sticks and stones\" taken as a metaphor. Any literal interpretation reveals the quote to be faulty - a world war implies battles occurring through the world, on multiple continents, as part of a single war. Such a war can only occur in the presence of advanced communication networks, and advanced political\/diplomatic structures; both of which would also imply weaponry far more sophisticated than sticks and stones. This comic pokes further fun at the literal interpretation of the quote, by appending to it other \"literal statements\" of a similarly ridiculous nature.\nThis comic expands the original quote letting Einstein suggest what other weapons future World Wars will be fought with:\nIn the title text Randall feigns annoyance about how the media only use the first part of the quote, thus taking it out of context. He implies that this is actually a full quote by Einstein and that all other occurrences using only the \"original\" version of this quote are misrepresenting it. In this particular case it is a much stronger quote than the long version from the comic, but it is often the case that quotes taken out of context seem to have an entirely different meaning than originally intended.\nIncidentally, if you investigate the original context of the actual quotation, it turns out that Einstein may not have even said it in this exact form, and may in any case have got the idea from someone else. See the dicussion at Wikiquote .\n[A quote with white text on black background:]\n\"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. World War V will be fought with crossbows, World War VI will be lasers, and World War VII will be blowguns. I don't know about World Wars VIII through XI. World War XII will use the same weapons as III, but will be fought entirely within underground tunnels. World War XIV will\u2014Hey, come back! I have a whole list!\" \u2014 Albert Einstein\n"}
{"id":1688,"title":"Map Age Guide","image_title":"Map Age Guide","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1688","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/map_age_guide.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1688:_Map_Age_Guide","transcript":"[A very complicated flow chart, which can only be read in detail using the larger image now shown at the top of this page. This transcript uses the large version, which is more legible.]\n[At the top of the chart there is a large caption, with a smaller caption below:] Guide to figuring out the age of an undated world map (Assuming it's complete, labeled in English, and detailed enough)\n[Below the starting bracket in the small caption is a start box. It has rounded corners and it is gray with white text. From this box there is a gray line to a box consisting of a black frame with rounded corners. In these kind of boxes there are questions regarding the map in black text. Below this box there are three gray boxes like the start box, superimposed over the bottom frame. In these boxes are the possible answers to the question in the frame above. From each of these options there is a gray line going to similar black framed boxes with other questions either below, or to either side. There can either be two, three or four gray boxes, two the most common. Only at the very bottom of the central branch where it turns out it was a home made map, are there two frames with only one gray question box each. This trend continues over this entire large image. When reaching the end of a branch in the flow chart, there is no line away from one, more or all of the gray boxes for a black frame. When this happens a year range or a guess at what the map shows, or what it is (if it turns out to not be a map) is written below the gray box in gray text. Of the text in the gray boxes are Yes\/No, but not always. There are 74 boxes with black frames with 158 gray boxes and 78 endpoints with text below the gray box and one end point without text below (the one with the home made map).]\nStart Istanbul or Constantinople? Constantinople Do any of these exist ? Independent Canada US Territory of Alaska Tokyo No The Holy Roman Empire? Yes 1805 or earlier (before this point, the modern idea of a complete political map of the world gets hard to apply.) No The United States? No How sure are you that this map is in English? Yes Texas is... Part of Mexico Florida is part of... Spain Paraguay? No 1806\u201310 Yes 1811\u201317 The US Venezuela and\/or Ecuador? No 1818\u201329 Yes 1830\u201333 Independent 1834\u201345 Part of the US Does Russia border the Sea of Japan? No The US's southern border looks... Weird 1846\u201353 Normal 1854\u201356 Yes 1858\u201367 Yes South Africa? No Rhodesia? No Is Bolivia landlocked? No \"Buda\" and \"Pest\" or \"Budapest\"? Buda and Pest 1868\u201372 Budapest 1873\u201383 Yes 1884\u201395 Yes Is Norway part of Sweden? Yes 1896\u20131905 No 1906\u201309 Yes Austria-Hungary? Yes Albania? No 1910\u201312 Yes 1913\u201318 No Leningrad? No 1919\u201323 Yes 1924\u201329 Neither Does the Ottoman Empire exist? Yes #canada-alaska-tokyo No The Soviet Union? Yes Saudi Arabia? Yes Is most of West Africa a giant french blob? Yes Pakistan? No How many Germanys are there? One Persia or Iran? Persia 1930\u201334 Iran 1935\u201340 One, but it's huge 1941\u201345 Two 1946\u201347 Yes Cambodia? No Eritrea is part of... Italy Canada is... Missing a piece 1948 Fine The town on I-25 between Albuquerque and El Paso is... Hot Springs 1948-49 Truth or Consequences 1950\u201352 Ethiopia 1952\u201353 Yes The United Arab Republic? No 1954\u201357 Yes 1958\u201360 No How many Vietnams are there? Two Bangladesh? No Is the area south of Lake Victoria... British 1960 Tanganyika 1961\u201364 Tanzania 1965\u201371 Yes 1972\u201375 One Jimmy Carter is... Being attacked by a giant swimming rabbit April 20, 1979 Fine The Sinai is part of what country? Israel 1976\u201379 Mostly Israel 1980 Mostly Egypt 1981 Egypt What's the capital of Micronesia? Kolonia Republic of the Upper Volta or Burkina Faso? Upper Volta 1982\u201384 Burkina Faso 1985\u201388 Palikir (number of Yemens) + (number of Germanys) =\u00a0? Four 1989-early 1990 Three mid-1990 Two late 1990\u20131991 No 1922\u20131932 No North Korea? Yes Zaire? or: \"Hong Kong (UK)\" Yes 1992\u201396 No Serbia\/Montenegro are... One country East Timor? No 1997\u20132001 Yes 2002\u201306 Two countries How many Sudans are there? One 2007\u201311 Two Is Crimea disputed? Yes \"Colorado\" or \"Danger\u2014Radioactive Exclusion Zone\u2014Avoid\"? Colorado 2014\u201321 Danger Does the warning mention the spiders? No 2022 Yes 2023 or later No 2012\u201313 No Saint Trimble's Island No Is Jan Mayen part of the Kingdom of Norway? Not yet #canada-alaska-tokyo What? Can you see the familiar continents? Yes This sounds like a physical map or satellite photo. Yes, that's it Is Lake Chad missing? No How far east do the American Prairies reach? Indiana before 1830 The Mississippi 1830s-80s Nebraska Is there a big lake in the middle of Southern California? (created by mistake) No 1860s-1900s Yes 1910s What prairies? Is there a big lake in the middle of Ghana? (created on purpose) No 1920s-50s Yes 1960s-70s Yes Is the Aral Sea missing? No 1970s-90s Yes 2000s+ No Rivers \"Sirion\" or \"Anduin\"? Yes Mordor? No Beleriand? Yes First Age No Early Second Age Yes N\u00famenor? Yes Late Second Age No The forest east of the Misty Mountains is... Greenwood Early Third Age Mirkwood Late Third Age The Wood of Greenleaves Fourth Age No Cair Paravel? Yes Calormen? No Lotta Islands? No Beruna Ford The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Bridge Prince Caspian Yes Dawn Treader Yes Weird recursive heaven? No One of the random later books Yes The Last Battle No Mossflower? Yes Redwall No Is the world on the back of a turtle? Yes Discworld No Are you sure this is a map? Yes Did you make it yourself? Yes It's very nice. Thank you! No Is it trying to bite you? No Is it larger than a breadbox? Yes tuba No stapler About the same breadbox Yes If you let it go, what does it do? Hisses and runs away cat Screeches and flaps around the room breaking things seagull Yes #pakistan Yes No, I made that one up. Istanbul Does the Soviet Union exist? Yes #west-africa-french-blob No #zaire\nTitle text: Does the screeching chill your blood and herald death? If yes, banshee. If no, seagull.\n","explanation":"The comic consists of a flowchart depicting various ways to tell what era a map is from based on present country borders and land forms. (Except in the Not a Political Map Branch (from \"Can you see the familiar continents?\" downwards), the comic applies to a political map.) While many of the options are very serious, a few bizarre options reference fictional maps ( Discworld , Narnia , and Tolkien's Middle-earth ), or consider that seagulls, staplers, tubas, or breadboxes could be mistaken for a map. Randall also mentions US President Jimmy Carter being attacked by a giant swimming rabbit , an event previously referenced as one we must never forget in 204: America .\nThe flowchart, although probably effective in eventually identifying the production year of certain maps, is designed in a rather inefficient way, as some early distinctions are already on a very detailed level before some really important distinctions (fictional or non-political map) are made. This, of course, adds to the humorous tone of the comic. It is also hampered by several smaller or larger error (see trivia ), the biggest being a whole section on I-25 that gives years in the range 1948\u20131952, before I-25 was built, and coming from a question that fixed the year range to 1960\u20131961.\nAdditionally, (possible) future maps including a \"Radioactive Exclusion Zone\" in the place of Colorado are mentioned. It predicts that some kind of nuclear incident will occur in Colorado (possibly at Rulison or Rio Blanco nuclear testing sites) in 2022. It also predicts that the area will be infested by radioactive spiders one year later.\nThe title text continues the path where the user has confused a seagull for a map by inquiring if the (presumed) seagull might be a banshee based on the effect of its screams.\n[A very complicated flow chart, which can only be read in detail using the larger image now shown at the top of this page. This transcript uses the large version, which is more legible.]\n[At the top of the chart there is a large caption, with a smaller caption below:] Guide to figuring out the age of an undated world map (Assuming it's complete, labeled in English, and detailed enough)\n[Below the starting bracket in the small caption is a start box. It has rounded corners and it is gray with white text. From this box there is a gray line to a box consisting of a black frame with rounded corners. In these kind of boxes there are questions regarding the map in black text. Below this box there are three gray boxes like the start box, superimposed over the bottom frame. In these boxes are the possible answers to the question in the frame above. From each of these options there is a gray line going to similar black framed boxes with other questions either below, or to either side. There can either be two, three or four gray boxes, two the most common. Only at the very bottom of the central branch where it turns out it was a home made map, are there two frames with only one gray question box each. This trend continues over this entire large image. When reaching the end of a branch in the flow chart, there is no line away from one, more or all of the gray boxes for a black frame. When this happens a year range or a guess at what the map shows, or what it is (if it turns out to not be a map) is written below the gray box in gray text. Of the text in the gray boxes are Yes\/No, but not always. There are 74 boxes with black frames with 158 gray boxes and 78 endpoints with text below the gray box and one end point without text below (the one with the home made map).]\nStart Istanbul or Constantinople? Constantinople Do any of these exist ? Independent Canada US Territory of Alaska Tokyo No The Holy Roman Empire? Yes 1805 or earlier (before this point, the modern idea of a complete political map of the world gets hard to apply.) No The United States? No How sure are you that this map is in English? Yes Texas is... Part of Mexico Florida is part of... Spain Paraguay? No 1806\u201310 Yes 1811\u201317 The US Venezuela and\/or Ecuador? No 1818\u201329 Yes 1830\u201333 Independent 1834\u201345 Part of the US Does Russia border the Sea of Japan? No The US's southern border looks... Weird 1846\u201353 Normal 1854\u201356 Yes 1858\u201367 Yes South Africa? No Rhodesia? No Is Bolivia landlocked? No \"Buda\" and \"Pest\" or \"Budapest\"? Buda and Pest 1868\u201372 Budapest 1873\u201383 Yes 1884\u201395 Yes Is Norway part of Sweden? Yes 1896\u20131905 No 1906\u201309 Yes Austria-Hungary? Yes Albania? No 1910\u201312 Yes 1913\u201318 No Leningrad? No 1919\u201323 Yes 1924\u201329 Neither Does the Ottoman Empire exist? Yes #canada-alaska-tokyo No The Soviet Union? Yes Saudi Arabia? Yes Is most of West Africa a giant french blob? Yes Pakistan? No How many Germanys are there? One Persia or Iran? Persia 1930\u201334 Iran 1935\u201340 One, but it's huge 1941\u201345 Two 1946\u201347 Yes Cambodia? No Eritrea is part of... Italy Canada is... Missing a piece 1948 Fine The town on I-25 between Albuquerque and El Paso is... Hot Springs 1948-49 Truth or Consequences 1950\u201352 Ethiopia 1952\u201353 Yes The United Arab Republic? No 1954\u201357 Yes 1958\u201360 No How many Vietnams are there? Two Bangladesh? No Is the area south of Lake Victoria... British 1960 Tanganyika 1961\u201364 Tanzania 1965\u201371 Yes 1972\u201375 One Jimmy Carter is... Being attacked by a giant swimming rabbit April 20, 1979 Fine The Sinai is part of what country? Israel 1976\u201379 Mostly Israel 1980 Mostly Egypt 1981 Egypt What's the capital of Micronesia? Kolonia Republic of the Upper Volta or Burkina Faso? Upper Volta 1982\u201384 Burkina Faso 1985\u201388 Palikir (number of Yemens) + (number of Germanys) =\u00a0? Four 1989-early 1990 Three mid-1990 Two late 1990\u20131991 No 1922\u20131932 No North Korea? Yes Zaire? or: \"Hong Kong (UK)\" Yes 1992\u201396 No Serbia\/Montenegro are... One country East Timor? No 1997\u20132001 Yes 2002\u201306 Two countries How many Sudans are there? One 2007\u201311 Two Is Crimea disputed? Yes \"Colorado\" or \"Danger\u2014Radioactive Exclusion Zone\u2014Avoid\"? Colorado 2014\u201321 Danger Does the warning mention the spiders? No 2022 Yes 2023 or later No 2012\u201313 No Saint Trimble's Island No Is Jan Mayen part of the Kingdom of Norway? Not yet #canada-alaska-tokyo What? Can you see the familiar continents? Yes This sounds like a physical map or satellite photo. Yes, that's it Is Lake Chad missing? No How far east do the American Prairies reach? Indiana before 1830 The Mississippi 1830s-80s Nebraska Is there a big lake in the middle of Southern California? (created by mistake) No 1860s-1900s Yes 1910s What prairies? Is there a big lake in the middle of Ghana? (created on purpose) No 1920s-50s Yes 1960s-70s Yes Is the Aral Sea missing? No 1970s-90s Yes 2000s+ No Rivers \"Sirion\" or \"Anduin\"? Yes Mordor? No Beleriand? Yes First Age No Early Second Age Yes N\u00famenor? Yes Late Second Age No The forest east of the Misty Mountains is... Greenwood Early Third Age Mirkwood Late Third Age The Wood of Greenleaves Fourth Age No Cair Paravel? Yes Calormen? No Lotta Islands? No Beruna Ford The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Bridge Prince Caspian Yes Dawn Treader Yes Weird recursive heaven? No One of the random later books Yes The Last Battle No Mossflower? Yes Redwall No Is the world on the back of a turtle? Yes Discworld No Are you sure this is a map? Yes Did you make it yourself? Yes It's very nice. Thank you! No Is it trying to bite you? No Is it larger than a breadbox? Yes tuba No stapler About the same breadbox Yes If you let it go, what does it do? Hisses and runs away cat Screeches and flaps around the room breaking things seagull Yes #pakistan Yes No, I made that one up. Istanbul Does the Soviet Union exist? Yes #west-africa-french-blob No #zaire\nTitle text: Does the screeching chill your blood and herald death? If yes, banshee. If no, seagull.\n"}
{"id":1689,"title":"My Friend Catherine","image_title":"My Friend Catherine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1689","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/my_friend_catherine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1689:_My_Friend_Catherine","transcript":"[Captions above the frame:] New favorite substitution: My Cat\u2192My Friend Catherine\n[A news feed with comments by six different people discussing their cat, but after the above substitution. Next to each post is a user image, and above the clear text of the substituted comment is a unreadable line of wiggles probably with information about the post time stamp.]\n[A head shot of a person seen straight on with black hair:] My friend Catherine just did a backflip and then ate a bug!\n[A full view of Cueball:] I wish my friend Catherine wouldn't wake me up by chewing on my hair.\n[A head shot of Megan with unreadable text below the image:] Oh no, my friend Catherine has learned to open the refrigerator.\n[A head shot seen from the front of Knit Cap:] My friend Catherine just walked in, threw up on the rug, and walked out.\n[A head shot of Ponytail:] My friend Catherine is looking out the window making weird noises at the birds.\n[Cueball seen from the torso and up:] I wish my friend Catherine wouldn't make eye contact with me while pooping.\n","explanation":"This is another comic using substitutions to create the joke by replacing words or phrases, in this case \"My cat\", with a different word or phrase, in this case \"My friend Catherine\" (hence the title). The choice of the name is probably because \"Cat\" is a common nickname for \"Catherine\".\nBy doing so in a list of people discussing things their cat did , it makes it seem like they are discussing things their female human friend did.  What is cute (sitting on keyboards), impressive (doing backflips to eat bugs), or at least normal behavior for a cat (vomiting hairballs) would often be weird, disgusting or disturbing if an adult human were to do it, which is what makes the substitution humorous.\nThe comic depicts a feed on a page for people discussing their cat, similar to Twitter or Facebook, which would be the only kind of place where the substitution is really funny. Apart from known characters like two looking like Cueball , Megan and Ponytail , there is also a person with black hair, not looking particularly like any standard characters, and then a person with a knit cap , which could be the same knit cap wearing user that was also used in 1506: xkcloud (see the pictures of the users ).\n[Captions above the frame:] New favorite substitution: My Cat\u2192My Friend Catherine\n[A news feed with comments by six different people discussing their cat, but after the above substitution. Next to each post is a user image, and above the clear text of the substituted comment is a unreadable line of wiggles probably with information about the post time stamp.]\n[A head shot of a person seen straight on with black hair:] My friend Catherine just did a backflip and then ate a bug!\n[A full view of Cueball:] I wish my friend Catherine wouldn't wake me up by chewing on my hair.\n[A head shot of Megan with unreadable text below the image:] Oh no, my friend Catherine has learned to open the refrigerator.\n[A head shot seen from the front of Knit Cap:] My friend Catherine just walked in, threw up on the rug, and walked out.\n[A head shot of Ponytail:] My friend Catherine is looking out the window making weird noises at the birds.\n[Cueball seen from the torso and up:] I wish my friend Catherine wouldn't make eye contact with me while pooping.\n"}
{"id":1690,"title":"Time-Tracking Software","image_title":"Time-Tracking Software","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1690","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time_tracking_software.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1690:_Time-Tracking_Software","transcript":"[This comic shows a pie chart with 5 slices, each with a label and a line pointing to these five different sized slices. There is a caption above the chart:] Your activity report\n[The labels on each slice is given in clockwise order starting top left. The percentages are estimated from the image and are noted in the square brackets before the transcript:]\n[38%]: Going through the Star Wars movies and digitally replacing all the lightsabers with regular metal swords [16%]: Reading every entry in the Wikipedia article List of helicopter prison escapes [23%]: Installing and configuring time-tracking software [02%]: Actual productive work [21%]: Making a remix of that Jack and Diane song where every line is just \"Suckin' on a chili dog outside the tastee-freez\" over and over\n[Below the frame there is a caption:] Time-tracking software shines an uncomfortably harsh light on my daily life.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall uses time-tracking software , which is intended to increase productivity by identifying how you are spending time, that reveals that he is doing frivolous and pointless things that take up large amounts of his time. He makes remixes, edits Star Wars footage, reads strange (albeit entertaining) Wikipedia articles (see 214: The Problem with Wikipedia ), and even spends a large amount of time adjusting this software, all without getting anything useful done. Thus, he is embarrassed at this revelation. This time waste is a common subject on xkcd, as shown for instance in the comic mentioned above.\nThe visual appearance of lightsabers in the Star Wars movies of the original trilogy has been digitally changed twice during the re-releases for the 2004 DVD and 2011 Blu-ray releases. There are several Star Wars fans that feel the need to alter the movies (mainly to revert the changes made in the re-release), but so far nobody felt the need to replace lightsabers with metal swords.\n\" Jack & Diane \" is a rock song written in 1982 by John Mellencamp . \" Suckin' on a chili dog outside the tastee freeze \" is the first line of the second verse of the song (see the lyrics here ). A remix made using just this line would probably sound a bit repetitive (listen for instance to this re-mix of \"Don't You Want Me\" , that almost only uses the first line of the song).\nTwo Wikipedia lists are mentioned in the comic and title text; List of helicopter prison escapes and List of sexually active popes . Given that the Pope is supposed to be celibate (at least after 1139), the mere fact that more than ten popes have been involved in sexual activity, even after 1139, is both amusing and intriguing. There are more than forty entries in the helicopter escape list for real-life attempts (plus 16 in fiction); not all of them succeeded, but several did!\nOn June 7th, the Wikipedia Facebook page posted a link to the List of helicopter prison escapes article. A user commented asking if the article was posted on Facebook due to the xkcd comic, and Wikipedia replied by pasting an image of the xkcd comic, which seems to indicate that the Wikipedia representative running the Facebook page was aware of this xkcd comic and posted the list in reference to the comic.\nIn the title text, Randall mentions his disappointment with the lack of a Wikipedia list stemming from the intersection of the two; that is, a helicopter prison escape involving a sexually active pope. With the last (known) sexually active pope being Pope Leo XII in the 1820s, and helicopter predecessors only taking flight in 1907, and mass production of helicopters not occurring until the 1950s, such an event has probably never happened. [ citation needed ]\nThis xkcd comic was published on June 6th. On that day, the Wikipedia article \"List of helicopter prison escapes involving sexually active popes\" was created and subsequently deleted.\nThe Wikipedia list of sexually active popes has been mentioned before in the what if? Into the Blue on infinitely powerful lasers, and after noting that such a thing cannot exist, the list is offered as a replacement for entertainment.\nThe comic 1692: Man Page was released later that week and also mentioned the pope.\n[This comic shows a pie chart with 5 slices, each with a label and a line pointing to these five different sized slices. There is a caption above the chart:] Your activity report\n[The labels on each slice is given in clockwise order starting top left. The percentages are estimated from the image and are noted in the square brackets before the transcript:]\n[38%]: Going through the Star Wars movies and digitally replacing all the lightsabers with regular metal swords [16%]: Reading every entry in the Wikipedia article List of helicopter prison escapes [23%]: Installing and configuring time-tracking software [02%]: Actual productive work [21%]: Making a remix of that Jack and Diane song where every line is just \"Suckin' on a chili dog outside the tastee-freez\" over and over\n[Below the frame there is a caption:] Time-tracking software shines an uncomfortably harsh light on my daily life.\n"}
{"id":1691,"title":"Optimization","image_title":"Optimization","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1691","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/optimization.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1691:_Optimization","transcript":"[A flow chart is shown with three boxes connected with two arrows. The first box is rectangular:] Are you prematurely optimizing or just taking time to do things right?\n[From the first box there is a short arrow straight down to a diamond shaped box:] Are you consulting a flowchart to answer this question?\n[A labeled arrow continues down.] Yes\n[The arrow connects to the final rectangular box.] You are prematurely optimizing\n","explanation":"In computing, program optimization is the practice of making a computer program work as quickly as possible, typically by designing it to perform the fewest calculations. \" Premature optimization \" is the practice of trying to optimize parts of a program before such optimization has been shown to be needed. Optimization can prove to have been a waste of time if parts of the program are later changed or discarded, or if the optimized code is only a small part of the workload. Making a routine 10 times faster doesn't help much if that routine is only consuming 1% of the running time to begin with and it may result in more complicated and buggier code.\nThis comic is a flowchart making fun of the difference between prematurely optimizing and doing things right in the first place: it tells you that if you are using it to decide whether you are optimizing prematurely, then you're optimizing prematurely. The humorous conclusion is that if there is any doubt whether an optimization is premature , then it is premature !\nAnother layer of humor is provided by the minimalism and directness of the flowchart, which suggests that it has itself been (prematurely?) optimized.\nThe title text's root of all evil refers to Donald Knuth 's paper \"Structured Programming with Goto statements\" (1974) [1] in which he wrote:\nThe title text takes the joke a step further by proposing optimizing a brand new project by introducing a procedure to determine whether a possible optimization is premature - which is obviously a premature optimization. It pokes fun at time-wasting behavior by obsessively perfectionist coders who develop tools to analyze aspects of their software, such as performance. In some fields, such as compilers or database design, such tools can be useful and productive (the 3% mentioned by Knuth?), but the usage suggested here is more appropriately covered by instinct, common sense, and observation of the behavior of the completed program.\nThe title text may also be poking fun at the comic, since the comic itself may be the \"system\" used to determine premature optimization.\nFlowcharts are often used in xkcd including the (mostly) non-farcical 1688: Map Age Guide one week prior to this comic. Inefficiency (another xkcd theme) was featured in the comic prior to this one .\n[A flow chart is shown with three boxes connected with two arrows. The first box is rectangular:] Are you prematurely optimizing or just taking time to do things right?\n[From the first box there is a short arrow straight down to a diamond shaped box:] Are you consulting a flowchart to answer this question?\n[A labeled arrow continues down.] Yes\n[The arrow connects to the final rectangular box.] You are prematurely optimizing\n"}
{"id":1692,"title":"Man Page","image_title":"Man Page","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1692","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/man_page.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1692:_Man_Page","transcript":"[A terminal screen; the background is black and the text is white.]\nActual UNIX manpages exist on some systems which are written in a similar, nonsensical style to these.\nManual pages distributed for the <n>fun sections describe similarly humorous \"commands\" with unusual options.\nOn some systems, these manual pages are available in funny-manpages or asr-manpages packages.\n","explanation":"This comic shows a Unix manual page, i.e. a man page (hence the title), for a fictional program called \" blerp \". Unix man pages are meant to provide a brief reference on the usage of a command, not extended explanations with tutorials as may be found in many hardcopy product manuals. Unfortunately, some Unix commands tend to be very bloated and include lots of optional behavior that is often irrelevant to the original intent of the command and can be done much more easily using shell features like piping and redirection, and thus the manpage grows to explain all of the features. This example exaggerates the obscurity and terseness found in many man pages, making fun of the typical style of the genre.\nIt follows the prescribed format for a man page, with the following sections:\nFor comic effect, most of this particular man page is not meaningful, and sometimes doesn't obey the expected syntax.\nThe Synopsis section is supposed to be in a regex -like language called Wirth Syntax Notation , with structures like\nBut the two Synopsis lines given do not have valid Wirth syntax; they randomly mix objects and syntactic characters, and the brackets and braces are not properly nested or paired.\nThe Description section provides an unhelpful summary that could apply to almost any Unix command. Processing input files (or output of other commands in a pipeline) is a generic function for Unix shell tools, as is specifying their behaviour with command line arguments, environment variables and flags. The text leaves to the reader's imagination what the program actually does , and what behavior the various options modify, which gives maximum scope for humorous possibilities.\nThe options are in conventional alphabetical order, except that lower case is placed before upper case, and an em-dash is inserted between b and c.\nCommand-line options , also known as flags, are typed after the program's name to change how the program runs. For example, a user of blerp might type:\nblerp -a -d -t -p \"AVIGNON\"\nAccording to the man page, this would run blerp in attack mode, piping its output to DEBUG.EXE, with tumble dry, and the true Pope set to \"AVIGNON\". In most cases, any number of flags can be used in any order, and flags can be followed by argument (such as \"AVIGNON\" in this example).\nFor a walkthrough of all possible flags see the table of flags below.\nBelow the flags there is a see also list with other ludicrous program names (blirb, blarb and blorp ), each followed by a number in parentheses. This is a common way to refer to a command in Unix environments, where the number denotes the documentation section the program is found in. This serves to disambiguate man pages with the same name, in this instance those for the blerp command (section 1, \"General commands\") and the blerp() C library function (section 3, \"C library functions\").\nIt is unknown which section the man page in this comic resides in. It looks like it could be in section 1, \"General commands\", which would make it self-referential. Section numbers only go up to 8, so blarb(51) is not a valid section number. The last blorp(501)(c)(3) is not a valid section number either, it is however a slightly covert reference to 501(c)(3) which is an organization that is tax-exempt .\nThen follows a bug report site. www.inaturalist.org is a site working to extend biological research, and the exact address given, http:\/\/www.inaturalist.org\/taxa\/47744-Hemiptera , points to the same page as http:\/\/www.inaturalist.org\/taxa\/Hemiptera . Hemiptera is the order classifying true bugs , making it a good place to report any biological bugs discovered while running a program (Like the bees found without using -b.) Insects got into some early computers, causing them to malfunction, and hence computer malfunctions are often called \"bugs\".\nFinally there is a \" copyright \" line which references several variously open-source content licenses, which is a recurring theme on xkcd (see 225: Open Source ). For instance, GPL references GNU General Public License and the (2) and (3+) refers to GPL 2 and GPL 3 or higher . CC refers to creative commons where BY is the type of license , 5.0 refers to the attribution and RV 41.0 refers to revision 41.0. However there were no higher attribution than 4.0 at the time of this comic's release. xkcd is released under CC BY-NC 2.5 as can be seen at the bottom of the xkcd homepage. A few comics have been released under the CC-BY-SA license or 3.0 . BSD refers to BSD licenses , another recurring theme in xkcd. \"Like Gecko\" is a reference to a web browser user-agent string; modern user-agent strings include a lot of text designed to allow browsers to masquerade as different browsers\/renderers, and \"(like Gecko)\" is the standard text for a browser that wants to be treated as if it were Gecko while admitting, if you look closely, that it isn't really Gecko. This copyright line, which includes a lot of mashed-together text that might appear to match any of several different licenses, resembles a user agent string.\n\"Or best offer\" is usually seen on a notice of a private sale, where it proclaims the intent to be flexible on asking price in the hope of expediting the sale, with a suggestion that the seller will sell to the highest bidder even if the offer is nowhere near the asking price. In the context of the comic, it suggest that the rights for the program are available for purchase by anyone who makes the \"best\" offer. Since the other licenses listed would allow free usage without incurring any royalty charge, it would be pointless to buy the rights to this program. It is possible to revoke the other licenses though. Perhaps the program's creator is suggesting the rights could be given to someone making him a different sort of offer, perhaps romantic or sexual?\nIn the title text there is a list with even more info, again with silly names like blarbl and birb . Again there are section numbers. While writing about birb, and without bothering to close the brackets around (3), the writer breaks off to laugh at the reader, telling them that he is kidding and suggesting that they just Google it like a normal person . The implication is that anyone trying to pick through a man page to find out what a program does is going the long way round, when it's much simpler to get Google to tell you.\nMan pages were part of the subject of 293: RTFM , 912: Manual Override and 1343: Manuals and were mentioned in 434: xkcd Goes to the Airport and 456: Cautionary .\n[A terminal screen; the background is black and the text is white.]\nActual UNIX manpages exist on some systems which are written in a similar, nonsensical style to these.\nManual pages distributed for the <n>fun sections describe similarly humorous \"commands\" with unusual options.\nOn some systems, these manual pages are available in funny-manpages or asr-manpages packages.\n"}
{"id":1693,"title":"Oxidation","image_title":"Oxidation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1693","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/oxidation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1693:_Oxidation","transcript":"[Ponytail is holding a finger up in front of Megan while gray smoke and heat waves pours in to the frame from off-panel left.] Ponytail: In my defense, your car has been oxidizing since you got it. Ponytail: It's just happening a lot faster now.\n","explanation":"In this comic Ponytail has set Megan 's car on fire, possibly by crashing it.\nOxidation refers to a whole class of chemical reactions. Any chemical reaction that involves the loss of electrons is called \"oxidation\" (since a lot of these involve oxygen). One oxidation reaction is rusting , the reaction of iron atoms in the steel of the car with oxygen and moisture to produce iron oxide hydrate. Rusting is extremely difficult to prevent, and all cars are rusting slowly. Oxidation was also mentioned in the title text of 1426: Reduce Your Payments , where the main joke was about the opposite reaction i.e. reduction.\nAnother oxidation reaction is combustion , an exothermic reaction, such as the violently rapid reaction of flammable parts of the car with oxygen to produce a whole load of nasty gases and particulates, as well as a lot of heat. Vehicle fires can burn very quickly and destroy a vehicle within minutes.\nFrom the most detached viewpoint, these are both oxidation reactions (although they occur in different places: rusting normally happens to the car chassis while fires are usually isolated to the engine) and Ponytail argues that as all cars oxidize, the fire that she has caused has only accelerated the inevitable destruction of the vehicle.\nThis idea was already explored in the what if? Burning Pollen , where the second image shows a burning car and the text above mentions the difference between rusting and burning cars: Lots of materials oxidize when exposed to air. Bananas go bad, copper turns green, iron rusts. Fire is another kind of oxidation reaction. In other words, our cars are always oxidizing; we just try to keep it from happening suddenly. The title text of the image even mentions the fact that it is different parts that burns than those that rust: Although the parts that oxidize during a car fire and the parts that rust aren\u2019t usually the same.\nThe comic by extension mocks arguments that ignore or trivialize quantitative differences. Such arguments are commonly employed to attack climate change: the Earth has been warming since the glacial period ten thousand years ago, it's just happening faster since the introduction of large quantities of greenhouse gases.\nIn the title text the small arthropods (invertebrates that have jointed bodies and exoskeletons) are referencing microscopic mites \u2013 tiny creatures that can live on the human body without normally causing any harm (you probably have eyelash mites , for instance).\nPresumably as a form of revenge, Megan has caused Ponytail to become covered in much larger arthropods - most probably spiders , judging by Randall's fixation with them , but it could be any combination of these often feared animals: spiders, scorpions , insects , crabs , centipedes , millipedes etc. As contrasted with the harmless mites mentioned above, other parasitic arthropods (such as the Crab louse , an insect known in slang as \"crabs\") are notorious as a sexually transmitted infection , and Megan could have been referring to these as those Ponytail already had as a further means of degrading her after the car fire incidence.\nMegan's car also caught fire in 1014: Car Problems , but there she did not at first know for sure who did it. Not a direct relation, but Megan seems to be unlucky with her cars.\nThis comic was referenced in the title text of 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline\n[Ponytail is holding a finger up in front of Megan while gray smoke and heat waves pours in to the frame from off-panel left.] Ponytail: In my defense, your car has been oxidizing since you got it. Ponytail: It's just happening a lot faster now.\n"}
{"id":1694,"title":"Phishing License","image_title":"Phishing License","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1694","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/phishing_license.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1694:_Phishing_License","transcript":"[A sign has an arrow below the text that points toward a sales window in a wall (with glass in front and small semicircular opening at the bottom for transferring money and goods). On each side of the window there are two pieces of paper with illegible text, and there is also one below the window that seems to have some kind of stamp or seal, still illegible). In front of the window Cueball is addressing Ponytail who sits behind the window.] Sign: Phishing license apply here Cueball: Hi, I\u2019d like to apply for a\u2014 Ponytail: You\u2019re under arrest. Cueball: \u2026OK, I should\u2019ve seen that coming.\n","explanation":"Phishing is a scam where a criminal sends emails or other messages (often large numbers of them) pretending to be from a trusted institution in order to obtain passwords, credit card numbers, or other personal details of victims. The term is a neologism, playing on the term \"fishing\", because the process is likened to dangling bait and waiting for someone to bite. Phishing is illegal under both traditional fraud laws and modern cybercrime laws.\nA fishing license is a government-issued permit allowing the catching of fish in controlled waters.\nCueball saw the sign offering phishing licenses, and was immediately arrested by the receptionist Ponytail upon applying for one. There is no need for a license for a crime like fraud, so it is dubious an authority would issue them, hence why Cueball should have been more suspicious of the offer. The joke is that the process of offering \"phishing licenses\" is analogous to the process of phishing itself: they pretend to be a legitimate business and display a sign with a false offer, hoping someone will be fooled into interacting with them. While the ideal phishing attempt is indistinguishable from the real thing, that's generally impossible to attain and there are always some ways to identify it as a scam. But still some people fall into the trap, partly because they don't know what to be on the alert for, and partly because the attempt is often directed at so many people at once that statistically there will be some that will fall for it. Still as Cueball himself states, he should have known it was a scam.\nThe title text reveals that Cueball's arrest was itself a scam, not an actual police sting , adding even more \"phishing\" to the phishing for potential phishers. He has been put in jail, but is allowed to walk out after paying a bail of $10,000, only to find that when he gets back out on the street, it is not the street on which the county jail has its address. So Ponytail is actually not trying to capture people who would be interested in scamming people, she is trying to scam those people instead; although this is illegal, it may be rather clever as such people might not be likely to go to the police. Another joke in the title text is that a way to recognize phishing attempts is to look at the address of the website (or in his false prison sentence, the street address instead of the web address).\n[A sign has an arrow below the text that points toward a sales window in a wall (with glass in front and small semicircular opening at the bottom for transferring money and goods). On each side of the window there are two pieces of paper with illegible text, and there is also one below the window that seems to have some kind of stamp or seal, still illegible). In front of the window Cueball is addressing Ponytail who sits behind the window.] Sign: Phishing license apply here Cueball: Hi, I\u2019d like to apply for a\u2014 Ponytail: You\u2019re under arrest. Cueball: \u2026OK, I should\u2019ve seen that coming.\n"}
{"id":1695,"title":"Code Quality 2","image_title":"Code Quality 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1695","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/code_quality_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1695:_Code_Quality_2","transcript":"[Zoom in on Ponytail sitting in front of a computer screen typing. Cueball speaks only off-panel, but since this is a direct continuation of comic 1513: Code Quality where Cueball is shown, there can be no doubt it is him.] Ponytail: Ugh, I hate reading your code. Cueball (off-panel): I know, I know.\n[Zoom out of Ponytail in an office chair in front of the computer on a desk.] Ponytail: It's like you ran OCR on a photo of a Scrabble board from a game where Javascript reserved words counted for triple points.\n[Zoom in on Ponytails head.] Ponytail: It looks like someone transcribed a naval weather forecast while woodpeckers hammered their shift keys, then randomly indented it.\n[Zoom out back to the setting of the second panel.] Ponytail: It's like an E E Cummings poem written using only the usernames a website suggests when the one you want is taken.\n[Zoom in to Ponytails head and the screen in a wider panel. Finally Cueball again answers off-panel.] Ponytail: This looks like the output of a Markov bot that's been fed bus timetables from a city where the buses crash constantly. Cueball (off-panel): Whatever, it runs fine for now. Ponytail: So does a burning bus.\n","explanation":"This comic is the second in the Code Quality series:\nIt is because it is so clearly a continuation of the first that it is clear that it is Cueball who answers from off-panel.\nAs in the first we again see Ponytail being introduced to the source code Cueball has written, and where he is warning her that he is self-taught so his code probably won't be written the way she is used to. In the first comic she continues to describe poetically the total mess of a code she encounters, using references to a child building houses, recipes created by corporate lawyers or the transcript of a couple arguing at IKEA, as well as using emojis in the code (title text).\nIn this comic she continues this trend in four more abusive comments, after starting this sequel with a short remark on how she hates reading Cueball\u2019s code. Cueball is not even shown in this comic, only replying twice off-panel, but as the title makes it clear this is a sequel there can be no doubt that it is Cueball. With the four remarks here as well as a fifth in the title text, she has now managed to make no fewer than nine derogatory remarks on Cueball's programming skills.\nIn the second panel Ponytail makes a reference to \"OCR\" ( Optical Character Recognition ), a technique for recognizing text in a picture using software. In this case she is referring to a picture of a Scrabble game, which is a popular word-making game in which players have a pseudo-randomized set of letters and must arrange them on a grid to form interlocking words. OCR software is notoriously imperfect at the time of writing, and the criss-crossing semi-random words on a Scrabble board fed through an OCR program would likely produce dubious results, certainly not fit for current code standards.\nPonytail observes that Cueball\u2019s code includes the JavaScript reserved words more often than a typical Scrabble board would, a concession that the code looks at least vaguely code-like. Reserved words such as \u2018function\u2019, \u2018if\u2019 and \u2018return\u2019 are fundamental building blocks of code, and most code uses them often. (They are called \u201creserved\u201d because those words are reserved for their actual meanings such as defining a function \u2014 programmers may not create variables with those names.) As for why \u201ctriple points\u201d translates to a prevalence of those words, Scrabble's point system is based on the value of individual letters, combined with certain modifier squares on the game board which can boost points. \"Triple points\" is the highest class of modifier available in the game (though it can be for triple points on a specific letter, or the entire word) and is highly-sought-after by players.\nThe third panel continues Ponytail's rant, this time referencing naval weather forecasts, avian interference and indentation. A weather forecast is a complex, multidimensional array of data used in predicting or assessing the atmospheric conditions of a geographical area over a set time. Naval weather forecasts (archive) use an extremely condensed code to send their information, rendering them unintelligible to an untrained reader. Transcribing it would be further complicated by a woodpecker (a bird noted for its rapid successive pecking motions) \"hammering\" (pecking) the Shift key on the keyboard, which would result in many letters being randomly capitalized. Indentation is the practice of shifting a section of text further from the starting margin, which in coding is typically used to organize functions and statements, but if done \"randomly\" would only serve to scramble the code hierarchy.\nThe fourth panel references famous poet E. E. Cummings and user name suggestions. Edward Estlin Cummings was a poet who used capitalization, punctuation, and line breaks in unconventional ways. Websites that offer membership often also require that users create a pseudonym (known as a \"username\") for use in tracking\/authenticating their actions on the site, as well as identifying them to the site's community. Many of these sites also require usernames be unique. On popular sites, many common words, phrases and names have already been reserved by users, so when signing up for them many people run into situations where the name they want has already been taken. On many sites where this happens, the site may suggest alternate usernames, usually based on the one that was entered to begin with. For example, if the username \"Hedgeclipper\" is already reserved, the site may recommend \"Hedgeclipper1234\" or \"H3dg3clipp3r\" instead, depending on the algorithm behind the suggestions. In other cases, websites requiring users to enter personal information such as their name may suggest a username based on their name with a string of digits after it, such as \"Joshua1128\". An E. E. Cummings poem written entirely out of these semi-random suggestions would make the resulting poem even more \"unusual\" than his work is already considered.\nThe last panel's simile involves Markov chaining , chat-bots (presumably), bus schedules and potential gross vehicular negligence. Applied Markov chaining is a process used in many computer algorithms that try to simulate real-world concepts such as speech simulation and decisions-making. Its inherent randomness also makes it a candidate for unpredictable things such as stock market analysis and speech recognition. Bus schedules are often complicated and full of notation , and are notorious for confusing people who are not used to reading them. Chat-bots using applied Markov chains to recognize and respond to speech\/text rely on the input being clear and well-organized in plain language. \"Feeding\" bus schedules to such a bot would likely result in the returns being complete gibberish and unreadable, especially if the reason that the buses crash constantly is because the bus schedules are too incoherent for the bus drivers to understand. The issue is further complicated when Ponytail suggests that the schedules are from a city where \"the buses crash constantly\", which would be horrifying if it happened so regularly that the schedules actually took crashes into account. However, the reason for the crashes is not stated, and it is not clear whether the passengers are in any danger. The buses might be safe if the problem is pedestrian suicides. Even more horrifying would be the further unpredictability of the output of the chat-bot from such unpredictable input.\nCueball finally comments that \"\u2026 it runs fine for now\" which indicates he knows the code has problems but is reluctant to fix them because it's more-or-less serving its function. Ponytail quips back that \"So does a burning bus\", which is technically true, but the \"for now\" part implies that disaster and injury could result at any moment, as would likely happen on a burning bus.\nIn the title text, Ponytail makes a final remark. A formal grammar is a way of describing the structure of text such that computers can recognize or generate such text. A raw database dump is an export of the data from a database for the purposes of transferring it to another database or importing it into a program, viewed \u201craw\u201d without processing to make it easy for humans to read. QuickBooks is an accounting software package. The company collapsing in an accounting scandal implies their accounting database would be a mess even in a human-readable format.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail sitting in front of a computer screen typing. Cueball speaks only off-panel, but since this is a direct continuation of comic 1513: Code Quality where Cueball is shown, there can be no doubt it is him.] Ponytail: Ugh, I hate reading your code. Cueball (off-panel): I know, I know.\n[Zoom out of Ponytail in an office chair in front of the computer on a desk.] Ponytail: It's like you ran OCR on a photo of a Scrabble board from a game where Javascript reserved words counted for triple points.\n[Zoom in on Ponytails head.] Ponytail: It looks like someone transcribed a naval weather forecast while woodpeckers hammered their shift keys, then randomly indented it.\n[Zoom out back to the setting of the second panel.] Ponytail: It's like an E E Cummings poem written using only the usernames a website suggests when the one you want is taken.\n[Zoom in to Ponytails head and the screen in a wider panel. Finally Cueball again answers off-panel.] Ponytail: This looks like the output of a Markov bot that's been fed bus timetables from a city where the buses crash constantly. Cueball (off-panel): Whatever, it runs fine for now. Ponytail: So does a burning bus.\n"}
{"id":1696,"title":"AI Research","image_title":"AI Research","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1696","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ai_research.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1696:_AI_Research","transcript":"[Cueball (representing Randall, or at least the person who wrote the caption) is standing in front of a computer console displaying AI, talking to it. The computers reply is indicated to come from the console with a zigzag line, rather than the straight lines for Cueball.] Cueball: Then you say \"More like fart ificial intelligence!\" Computer: Understood. Cueball: Great! Now let me teach you about \"updog\".\nAI tip: To develop a computer with the intelligence of a six-year-old child, start with one as smart as an adult and let me teach it stuff.\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time an AI Tip.\nDeveloping artificial intelligence (AI) has been a challenge for a long time. Even to develop one with the intelligence of a six-year-old child would be a great milestone, and presumably a stepping stone on the path to making one with the intelligence of an adult human.\nIn this comic, Randall \/ Cueball jokingly suggests that in order to accomplish this goal, one can give him an AI that's already as smart as an adult, and let him teach it childish and silly things. He is shown teaching it dumb jokes, much like the ones a sassy six-year-old would make, as the first \"fart\" joke where art ificial is changed to fart ificial.\nThe humor in the comic is that Randall is essentially accomplishing the present goal of a six-year-old-equivalent AI by starting with the final goal, which is a full human intelligence, and making it dumber, just by teaching it poor humor. This is not unlike the old joke, \"The easiest way to make a small fortune on Wall Street [or similar] is to start with a large one.\"\nThe specific situation may also be a reference to Tay , a Microsoft chatbot that was taught to troll within hours of its exposure to the public.\n\" Updog \" refers to a light-hearted practical joke in which the perpetrator casually uses the neologism 'updog' in a sentence (\"Hey, I'm going to get some updog, you want any?\"). The unsuspecting listener is expected to be curious about the meaning of the neologism and ask the perpetrator its meaning, specifically in the format \"What's 'updog'?\", inadvertently invoking the highly casual greeting of \"What's up, dawg?\". The perpetrator then draws attention to this by replying along the lines of \"Not much, you?\", causing the target to realize the foolish thing they just said. Other neologisms used in the context of this joke include 'updoc', 'snoo', and 'samatta' (\" What's up, doc? \", \"What's new?\", and \"What's the matter?\", respectively). Updog is mainly an American joke not particularly well known in other English-speaking countries.\nIn the title text there is a joke on lambda calculus , where lam bda is changed to SHAM bda. Lambda calculus is an area of mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. It is a formal language which can express computation and evaluation. It is Turing Complete, which means it can do any computation which can be executed by a computer. However, it is very simple, consisting only of two primitive notions: abstraction , which is forming a unary function (a function that takes one argument) and application which is applying a function to an input value. For example, a function which squares a given number can be written \u03bbx.x\u00b2. Here the \u03bb indicates an abstraction (hence the name lambda calculus ), the x is the input value and the output is x\u00b2 . As an example of application, if we apply this function to 5, we get (\u03bbx.x\u00b2)(5) = 5\u00b2 = 25. The title text makes fun of this by inserting the word \"Sham\" into the phrase, a word used to describe a trick or con; essentially, it denies that such calculus is useful or valid.\nThe title text finishes with amirite , short for am I right? which is often used to finish sentences on web forums, to prevent anyone saying you are wrong. Not very mature to use in a serious discussion, so very fit to use for a AI that tries to emulate the intelligence of a six-year-old.\n[Cueball (representing Randall, or at least the person who wrote the caption) is standing in front of a computer console displaying AI, talking to it. The computers reply is indicated to come from the console with a zigzag line, rather than the straight lines for Cueball.] Cueball: Then you say \"More like fart ificial intelligence!\" Computer: Understood. Cueball: Great! Now let me teach you about \"updog\".\nAI tip: To develop a computer with the intelligence of a six-year-old child, start with one as smart as an adult and let me teach it stuff.\n"}
{"id":1697,"title":"Intervocalic Fortition","image_title":"Intervocalic Fortition","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1697","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/intervocalic_fortition.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1697:_Intervocalic_Fortition","transcript":"[Cueball holding his hands in front of his mouth is whispering into a Cueball-like person's ear. The second Cueball turns his head towards the first Cueball.] Cueball: Psst\u2013teach your kids to pronounce V's in the middle of words as F's, but don't write down why you're doing it. Cueball: Pass it on.\n[Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Playing pranks on future linguists\n","explanation":"The linguistic processes of lenition (\"weakening\") and fortition (\"strengthening\") refer to a sound becoming, respectively, either more or less vowel-like. Intervocalic means \"between two vowels.\" An unvoiced consonant like f in between two vowels (which are almost always voiced) is more noticeable and takes more effort to pronounce than the voiced version v of the same sound in that position, so a change from v to f in this context would be an example of fortition. As a rule, however, lenition is much more common, and in fact one of the most common regular changes observed across languages is the kind of lenition that is the precise opposite of Cueball's prank: An unvoiced consonant between two vowels comes to be spoken, over time, as a voiced consonant, such as the middle consonant in the word \"butter\" that in American English is now pronounced as a brief alveolar tap [\u027e] rather than [t]. Observing a pattern of fortition rather than lenition in that position (especially for just one particular consonant) would be a very puzzling phenomenon to future linguists.\nExamples for the suggested change are:\nIn some languages, like German and Dutch, V is often pronounced like F. But it is not always the case.\nThe title text refers to the fact that English phonotactics tend to discourage final or unstressed \/\u025b\/ . Exceptions tend to be monosyllabic interjections, such as:\nThe word 'meh' is an interjection used to express boredom or indifference. The suggestion that it was originated by the writers of the animated TV show, The Simpsons , is incorrect . However, its use did surge in popularity following its use in various episodes of the show, beginning with the 1994 episode \"Sideshow Bob Roberts\".\nThis is the second time in 2016 that Randall tries to spread linguistic misinformation, the first being 1677: Contrails , but since both are in the My Hobby series it is not so strange.\n[Cueball holding his hands in front of his mouth is whispering into a Cueball-like person's ear. The second Cueball turns his head towards the first Cueball.] Cueball: Psst\u2013teach your kids to pronounce V's in the middle of words as F's, but don't write down why you're doing it. Cueball: Pass it on.\n[Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Playing pranks on future linguists\n"}
{"id":1698,"title":"Theft Quadrants","image_title":"Theft Quadrants","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1698","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/theft_quadrants.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1698:_Theft_Quadrants","transcript":"[A chart with an Eisenhower box, consisting of four labelled squares. To the left the rows are labelled hard and easy and two lines goes to from these labels to a description of what the labels refer to saying \"how hard thing would be to steal\". On the bottom the rows are labelled not that bad and very bad and two lines goes to from these labels to a description of what the labels refer to saying \"how bad it would be if someone stole it\". The top left box is labelled \"the Crown Jewels\". The top right box is labelled \"the nuclear launch codes\". The bottom left box is labelled \"the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. The bottom right box is labelled \"the tinyurl.com domain name\".]\n","explanation":"This is an Eisenhower box comparing how difficult it is to steal a specified object with the severity of the theft.\nIt is very hard to steal nuclear launch codes . They are protected by many layers of federal security. That's a good thing, too, since if they were stolen, they could be used to start a nuclear war , which would cause untold death and destruction.\nIt is also hard to steal the Crown Jewels , since they are protected by a complex security system. But if they were stolen, it wouldn't be so bad for most people; the only direct loss would be to its owners, the British royal family, who are well-insured for thefts and only use the Crown Jewels as a display piece for museumgoers. It would also be a loss to the public as a cultural and historical artifact, but would have little practical effect on the world.\nIt wouldn't be too hard to steal the Wienermobile [ citation needed ] (a car shaped like a hot-dog, advertising the Oscar Mayer brand). There are several versions of this car, and it would not be more difficult to steal than any other car, although harder to hide. Randall seems to consider that such a stolen vehicle would not be too bad, although he has previously referred to a stolen Wienermobile in 935: Missed Connections , which is driven recklessly, almost hitting someone. But it is not bad enough to consider it a big problem in a context when it is compared with stolen nuclear launch codes.\nIt also wouldn't be hard (or at least, not as hard as stealing nuclear launch codes or the Crown Jewels) to steal the tinyurl.com domain name, but the consequences of that could be significant and is thus listed under very bad. The joke is of course that this is listed as just as bad as the risk of a nuclear war, and of course it is not as significant, but it could swiftly result in damage to a lot of important computers, and ruin references in journals etc.\nTinyURL offers a URL shortening service. They provide short URLs that redirect to long ones. This is useful if you want to write down a very long URL as it saves typing and is more accurate. Other companies, including bit.ly , Google (ultimately fully discontinued March 30, 2019), and Twitter offer a similar service. TinyURL was, for a while, the most popular of these URL shortening services. If their domain name were stolen, all the redirects from short URLs could be changed to forward traffic to sites hosting, for example, malware. This would have significant effects on a large number of people, because TinyURL is used in many places both online and (as the title text notes) even sometimes offline.\nIn the title text Randall implies that stealing the tinyurl.com domain could happen when it next expires. A whois search as of February 2021 finds that the tinyurl.com domain is next due for renewal in January 2029. However, rule changes made by ICANN (the organization in charge of domain name registrations) now make it effectively impossible to steal a domain name because the owner allowed its registration to lapse. Current rules for .com registrations now allow for the original owner to renew their domain name after it expires during a 0-45 day auto-renew grace period. The exact length of this grace period depends on what company the domain is registered with. All registrars are then required to give a 30 day redemption grace period during which the domain may be renewed with penalty. As a result, tinyurl.com would have a 30-75 day period after expiration during which the domain is not available for registration by a third party. ICANN rules state that DNS resolution must be stopped during the redemption grace period, which means that there will be a 30 day period during which tinyurl.com will no longer work but the company will have the ability to quickly restore ownership of their domain. It is very unlikely that any company that is still in business would not notice that their domain name has expired before the end of the 30 day redemption grace period.\nAnother way to steal a domain name would be through domain name hijacking . There have been some high profile cases of domain name hijacking, with one of the more notable domains being nike.com in 2000 . However, whether or not this is a risk for any particular domain name is difficult to estimate. Additional security mechanisms such as domain name locking and private registrations have been introduced to mitigate the threat of domain name hijacking. Further, domain name hijacking relies on situation-specific attacks such as hacking email accounts, spoofing emails, and social engineering attacks against either the company who owns the domain name or the company who registers the domain name. For security-conscious companies, such attacks can be impossible, or at least an attacker's success may require security failures in more than one area. A summary of domain hijacking examples including an analysis of how they succeeded and what steps could have prevented them can be found here . In short though, there is no way to say for sure how vulnerable any particular domain name might be to hijacking.\n[A chart with an Eisenhower box, consisting of four labelled squares. To the left the rows are labelled hard and easy and two lines goes to from these labels to a description of what the labels refer to saying \"how hard thing would be to steal\". On the bottom the rows are labelled not that bad and very bad and two lines goes to from these labels to a description of what the labels refer to saying \"how bad it would be if someone stole it\". The top left box is labelled \"the Crown Jewels\". The top right box is labelled \"the nuclear launch codes\". The bottom left box is labelled \"the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. The bottom right box is labelled \"the tinyurl.com domain name\".]\n"}
{"id":1699,"title":"Local News","image_title":"Local News","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1699","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/local_news.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1699:_Local_News","transcript":"[Blondie as a news anchor is sitting behind a table with her arms resting on the tabletop.] Blondie: In local news, city council elections were held today. Blondie: In nonlocal news, I killed my past self with a tachyon beam.\n","explanation":"Typical news broadcasts are divided into local, national, and global news segments. The broadcast in this comic presented by Blondie , the news anchor , has been broken into real local, (about city council election) and what the newscaster calls \"nonlocal\". Rather than focusing on national or global news, the nonlocal segment deals with news of a nonlocality nature; more likely dealing with causal nonlocality.\nA \" tachyon \" is a theoretical or thought-experiment particle which travels faster than the speed of light . It has many strange properties, including being able to go back in time. This is how the newscaster is able to send a beam back in time to kill her past self. The comic does not explain the paradox of how someone who died in the past could still be alive in the present\/future, nor any of the many other paradoxes that arise when time travel is involved, a recurring theme in xkcd.\nThe title text asks if there could ever be a greater physics term than tachyonic antitelephone , a theoretical device which would allow messages to be sent to the past. The text then continues to answer the question via a message from the future (presumably sent by antitelephone). The answer is No - there will never be a greater physics term.\n[Blondie as a news anchor is sitting behind a table with her arms resting on the tabletop.] Blondie: In local news, city council elections were held today. Blondie: In nonlocal news, I killed my past self with a tachyon beam.\n"}
{"id":1700,"title":"New Bug","image_title":"New Bug","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1700","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_bug.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1700:_New_Bug","transcript":"[Cueball sits at his desk in front of his computer leaning back and turning away from it to speak to a person off-panel.] Cueball: Can you take a look at the bug I just opened? Off-panel voice: Uh oh.\n[Zoom out and pan to show only Cueball sitting on his chair facing away from the computer, which is now off-panel. The person speaking to him is still of panel even though this panel is much broader.] Off-panel voice: Is this a normal bug, or one of those horrifying ones that prove your whole project is broken beyond repair and should be burned to the ground?\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head and upper torso.] Cueball: It's a normal one this time, I promise. Off-panel voice: OK, what's the bug?\n[Back to a view similar to the first panel where Cueball has turned towards the computer and points at the screen with one hand.] Cueball: The server crashes if a user's password is a resolvable URL. Off-panel voice: I'll get the lighter fluid.\n","explanation":"Cueball asks if an off-panel character can look at his bug report. The person asks if it's a \"normal one,\" and not a \"horrifying\" one which proves that the entire project is \"broken beyond repair and should be burned to the ground.\" This implies that there have been reports of the \"horrifying\" variety in the past.\nCueball promises that it is a normal one but it turns out that the server crashes when a user's password is a resolvable URL, which implies that the server is in some way attempting to resolve passwords as if they were URLs. A resolvable URL is one that is syntactically correct and refers to a find-able and accessible resource on the internet (i.e. does not return a 404 error or equivalent when resolved). Therefore a resolvable URL is a fully qualified domain name or a valid IP address that points to a valid server, and it can optionally specify a resource that exists on that server. Normally there is no reason for a system to treat a password as if it were a URL \u2014 and testing if a password is a resolvable URL would be a horrible thing to do as it would involve sending the password over the internet in a (at the time the comic was written) most likely completely unencrypted format.\nAlso, Cueball specifically states that the server is crashing, rather than his application. While this could be an example of misused terminology on the part of Cueball or Randall, given Cueball's history (for example causing the most basic console commands to fail in 1084: Server Problem or other tech issues as seen in 1586: Keyboard Problems ) his choice of terms is probably accurate. In the context of web services the server refers to either the computer itself or the program that responds to web requests and executes the user's (i.e. Cueball's) application. Cueball would be in charge of building the application. The importance of this distinction is that a typical system has safe guards in place at many levels to prevent a misbehaving application from crashing anything other than itself. So for his application to crash the server (either the computer itself or the server software hosting his application) would require his application to be operating in a way far outside of the normal, which has been the case for Cueball in previous comics. Alternatively, the project might include its own server software without the safeguards. In either case it is clear that Cueball's issue is far from normal, for which reason the off-panel person gives up and decides that burning the project to the ground is the only solution, telling Cueball I'll get the lighter fluid .\nIn the title text, another two issues with Cueball's program are mentioned, together with a possible solution that would fix all three problems at once. The second problem is a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library, and the third is that the passwords are stored unsalted. The proposed solution is to salt the passwords with emoji (unicode, multi-byte characters), which is claimed to solve all three issues at once. Salting passwords means that random characters are added to the password before it is cryptographically-secured and stored in the database. Salting increases security in the event that the database is compromised by ensuring that users with the same password will not have the same password hash. This makes some attacks that can be used to crack hash databases, such as rainbow tables , effectively impossible. Salting passwords with emoji can potentially \"fix\" these bugs in different ways. First, emoji and other unicode characters are not valid characters in URLs. As a result the salted-passwords will no longer be resolvable URLs. This will presumably circumvent (but not actually fix) the bug that causes the server to crash. In addition, the passwords will now be salted, increasing security. There is no obvious way that this would actually fix a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library. Given Cueball's general approach to problems like this, the best explanation is probably that he hasn't \"fixed\" the bug but rather that it is no longer a bug because he is relying on its behavior to help fix these other issues, i.e. the classic it's not a bug, it's a feature .\nThe title text shows that his general approach to problems is not to actually fix bugs but to work around them and even rely on them for other behavior. This approach to software development makes for terrible code, which is likely how Cueball got into this trouble in the first place. Therefore the title text shows that he still has yet to learn from his mistakes, further supporting the suggestion to just burn the whole thing down.\nIn the title text of the first, using emoji in variable names is mentioned. Emoji has since then become a recurrent theme on xkcd.\nIn 1349: Shouldn't Be Hard , Cueball is also programming and finding it very difficult, although he thinks it should be easy. An off-panel person suggests burning the computer down with a blowtorch, much like the off-panel person in this one suggests burning the whole project (including the computer) to the ground with lighter fluid. In the next comic, with multiple storylines 1350: Lorenz , one story line results in a computer being burned with a blow torch .\nInterestingly, the 2021 vulnerability Log4Shell could be triggered when a specially crafted URL was logged with the Log4j framework. This could lead to a crash (as in the comic) or the computer being taken over by the attacker.  However, the contents of a password field should never be logged, so this still would indicate a major problem with the design of Cueball's project.\n[Cueball sits at his desk in front of his computer leaning back and turning away from it to speak to a person off-panel.] Cueball: Can you take a look at the bug I just opened? Off-panel voice: Uh oh.\n[Zoom out and pan to show only Cueball sitting on his chair facing away from the computer, which is now off-panel. The person speaking to him is still of panel even though this panel is much broader.] Off-panel voice: Is this a normal bug, or one of those horrifying ones that prove your whole project is broken beyond repair and should be burned to the ground?\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head and upper torso.] Cueball: It's a normal one this time, I promise. Off-panel voice: OK, what's the bug?\n[Back to a view similar to the first panel where Cueball has turned towards the computer and points at the screen with one hand.] Cueball: The server crashes if a user's password is a resolvable URL. Off-panel voice: I'll get the lighter fluid.\n"}
{"id":1701,"title":"Speed and Danger","image_title":"Speed and Danger","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1701","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/speed_and_danger.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1701:_Speed_and_Danger","transcript":"[A two-axis diagram with two double headed arrows centered in the middle of the panel. Each arrow is labeled. There are four large dots in the diagram, three close together in the top left corner and one in the bottom right corner. Each dot is labeled.]\n[Y axis:] Top: Crashes are safe Bottom: Crashes are dangerous\n[X axis:] Left: Slow Right: Fast\n[Dots from top left to bottom right:] Normal sports NASCAR Formula One Rocket launches\n","explanation":"In this scatter plot Randall plots the speed of several vehicles (including people on foot for \"normal sports\") and how disastrous a crash would be. The punchline is that space rockets travel so dangerously fast, and crashes are so utterly catastrophic, that it pushes literally every other kind of crash to the \"slow and safe\" corner by comparison. (A similar punchline was used in the title text of 388: Fuck Grapefruit .)\nWith the plot Randall makes the observation that the danger of a crash is greatly influenced by its speed and highlights the concept of relativity between what we perceive as \"fast,\" normal sports and two different types of racing cars, vs. a much faster vehicle, a rocket during launch. A rocket may appear to ascend slowly (and of course it begins its ascent slowly), but on the way to orbit it ends up moving very fast. But before it reaches the more extreme speed regime it will be far away from the ground (and the casual observer), where there is nothing to compare this speed to as opposed to a race car speeding by a spectator during a race.\nApart from the high speed, there is also the altitude to take into account for a rocket launch, and the vast amount of fuel needed to get into orbit, and any sort of catastrophic failure is almost certainly fatal ( Apollo 13 notwithstanding).\nRacing cars are often involved in crashes, but at that speed it is possible to construct them so even serious crashes may not be fatal. Although rockets are also made as safe as possible, it is a completely different regime of speed and danger , and the risk of something going wrong during a take off is much higher, and it is impossible to prevent a lethal disaster if the launch fails during the ascent. This results in a much higher mortality rate for each crashed rocket (probably 100%) vs. crashed sports\/race cars.\nRocket launches are compared to \"normal sports \" (presumably meaning people running approximately 25 km\/h, and possibly also polo horses galloping approximately 40 km\/h), NASCAR (which reaches speed of 320 km\/h), and Formula One (F1), where the fastest race cars go 380 km\/h. Although peak speed for an F1 car is higher than NASCAR, the average lap speed is much lower as F1 tracks have slow corners while NASCAR ovals can be negotiated with much less speed variation. It is also arguable whether F1 is more dangerous than NASCAR - there have been fewer fatalities in F1 this millennium, though fewer cars compete and races are of shorter duration. The 2016 Formula one season had 21 races, with each race lasting 1.5~3 hours. The NASCAR season had 36 races, with each race lasting 3~5 hours.\nA rocket launched to reach the ISS needs to match the speed of the space station which moves at 27,600 km\/h. A rocket that needs to escape from Earth needs to reach 40,270 km\/h, but so far no humans have escaped. However, the astronauts going to the Moon came close, with Apollo 10 setting the speed record for manned flights with 39,896 km\/h. (It was only about 0.4% faster than the next 7 missions that, in contrast to Apollo 10, were supposed to land on the Moon). The lowest of the rocket speeds mentioned above  is still more than 70 times as fast as the highest speed for race cars.\nThe title text serves to emphasize the point further, as an astronaut (used to the several G's of acceleration during takeoff and overall much higher speeds) would likely find a NASCAR car moving at ~300 km\/h paltry compared to what they're acclimated to and has supposedly aggravated NASCAR drivers by making a point of saying so. And thus this is used to explain why there are no passenger seats in NASCAR cars, to prevent astronauts from joining the drivers for a nice, slow ride.\nOf the many charts in xkcd this one is notable for containing the fewest sample points of any scatter plots in xkcd.\n[A two-axis diagram with two double headed arrows centered in the middle of the panel. Each arrow is labeled. There are four large dots in the diagram, three close together in the top left corner and one in the bottom right corner. Each dot is labeled.]\n[Y axis:] Top: Crashes are safe Bottom: Crashes are dangerous\n[X axis:] Left: Slow Right: Fast\n[Dots from top left to bottom right:] Normal sports NASCAR Formula One Rocket launches\n"}
{"id":1702,"title":"Home Itch Remedies","image_title":"Home Itch Remedies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1702","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/home_itch_remedies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1702:_Home_Itch_Remedies","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball stand together while Megan loudly scratches her itches and Cueball holds a hand up.] Megan: Argh, bug bites are the worst . I shouldn't scratch, but... so itchy. Cueball: Oh, you know what's great for that? Scratch scratch\n[Zoom-in to Megan's head.] Megan: No, don't tell me. Everyone always has weird home remedies that never work. I just want sympathy. Cueball (off-panel): No, this one isn't weird, I promise. It really helps!\n[A frame less panel with a zoom-out back to Megan and Cueball. Megan is still scratching loudly and Cueball still holds his hand up.] Cueball: First, take a hot shower. Then dip some ice cubes in vinegar and use them to crush one baby aspirin. Then make some tea, and... Scratch scratch\n[Megan walks past Cueball and away from him while Cueball turns and looks after her.] Cueball: ...then, you need a rare French orchid- Megan: I'm going to try a different home remedy where I complain a lot and scratch until my skin comes off. Cueball: Sounds effective. Megan: It's an old family trick.\n","explanation":"Bug bites , such as mosquito bites, are itchy. Home remedies are often ineffective, and in some cases very complicated - think of the number of suggestions on how to cure hiccups. In this case Cueball 's suggestion starts out plausible but rapidly gets increasingly and insanely complicated, involving finding rare French orchids. Megan is not actually interested in trying out a complex home remedy, she really just wants sympathy.\nThe suggested remedy is a mix of many popular home remedies such as:\nMegan's answer is a sarcastic comment stating that her own family home remedy is to keep scratching until the skin falls off -- which is a natural tendency, although not until the skin literally falls off; hence it is not really a home remedy, just a natural reaction.\nThe title text refers to chiggers or Trombicula alfreddugesi as the worst source for itches; in fact only in the larval stages are these mites parasitic. Chigger can also refer to the chigoe flea or \"jigger\", Tunga penetrans , a parasitic flea which also causes bad itching, but Randall explicitly mentions the mite Trombicula alfreddugesi . A move to a more northerly region of the world like Iceland might seem to be a perfect cure, because those parasites are only found in warmer southern regions (similarly, since mosquitoes lay their eggs in water, moving to a dry place with no water usable by mosquitoes would be a \"cure\" for mosquito bites). Unusually, Iceland does not support native mosquitoes, despite similarities to other northern regions which do. One might fallaciously assume it does not support parasites in general \u2014 but it does support parasitic insects in other genera, and it has other species of mites.  Thus, \"move to Iceland\" is a weird home remedy that will work if the person wants to prevent chiggers, however it won't work if the person wants to stay away from all parasites.\nThis comic could be seen as a continuation of the title text from 1693: Oxidation , where that is interpreted as Ponytail ineffectively reassuring Megan that her bug bites should not be a concern.\n[Megan and Cueball stand together while Megan loudly scratches her itches and Cueball holds a hand up.] Megan: Argh, bug bites are the worst . I shouldn't scratch, but... so itchy. Cueball: Oh, you know what's great for that? Scratch scratch\n[Zoom-in to Megan's head.] Megan: No, don't tell me. Everyone always has weird home remedies that never work. I just want sympathy. Cueball (off-panel): No, this one isn't weird, I promise. It really helps!\n[A frame less panel with a zoom-out back to Megan and Cueball. Megan is still scratching loudly and Cueball still holds his hand up.] Cueball: First, take a hot shower. Then dip some ice cubes in vinegar and use them to crush one baby aspirin. Then make some tea, and... Scratch scratch\n[Megan walks past Cueball and away from him while Cueball turns and looks after her.] Cueball: ...then, you need a rare French orchid- Megan: I'm going to try a different home remedy where I complain a lot and scratch until my skin comes off. Cueball: Sounds effective. Megan: It's an old family trick.\n"}
{"id":1703,"title":"Juno","image_title":"Juno","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1703","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/juno.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1703:_Juno","transcript":"[At a NASA press conference Blondie stands behind a lectern with the NASA logo. To the left is Megan and to the right is Cueball, both looking towards Blondie.] Blondie: After traveling 1.7 billion miles, the Juno spacecraft reached Jupiter within one second of its scheduled arrival time.\n[A person off-panel to the left comments and all three turns towards the speaker.] Off-panel voice: Very impressive! Blondie: Thank you.\n[All three look straight out as Megan comments on the praise.] Megan: I mean, we were aiming for Saturn. Still, nailed the time. Blondie: Shhhh.\n","explanation":"This comic was written in honor of the Juno space probe , which made headlines around the world the day before this comic was posted, when it fired its engines and successfully entered into orbit around the planet Jupiter .\nIt was reported on the day of this comic's release that Juno arrived at its orbit one second off its planned schedule . Since the comic is based on such reports this may explain why this comic was released rather late on the day after Juno's arrival, and also why it was not the subject of the previous comic which was released on the day (fourth of July) when the space probe officially reached Jupiter. This makes it one of several space probe related comics to be released to celebrate the arrival of a space probe to its destination, the previous being 1551: Pluto , which celebrated the arrival of the New Horizon's probe at the dwarf planet Pluto.\nSpeaking at a NASA press conference, Blondie , standing behind a lectern , announces that Juno has arrived at Jupiter within one second of its scheduled arrival. After traveling 1.7 billion miles (2.8 billion km) such precision is very impressive, which is acknowledged by someone from the press.\nThe joke is that one of the NASA engineers, Megan , reveals that they actually intended for Juno to arrive at Saturn , but actually arrived at Jupiter with a timing that was still apparently the same within one second. Given the reaction from the spokesperson, she knew this but it was not supposed to slip out.\nThis is, of course, not true, because if Saturn had been the intended target, Juno would have been off course by 10.25 AU (1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or 149597870700 meters) when it arrived at Jupiter. Randall might be making a subtle (or not so subtle) reference to past difficulties NASA has had when converting to metric measurements \u2014in July 2016, Jupiter was 870 million kilometers (540 million miles) from Earth, while Saturn was 850 million miles (1.37 billion km) from Earth (about half the distance traveled by Juno). A similar measurement coincidence was noted in what if? A Mole of Moles . Also, Saturn is a maximum of 1.7 billion kilometers (1.1 billion miles) away from the Earth. For Jupiter, this distance is 968 million km (601 million miles) away. But when traveling between planets, long detours are necessary to reach the goal with a velocity that enables the space craft to go into orbit. So it is just a coincidence that Juno has traveled a distance to get to Jupiter in kilometers that fits with a possible distance to Saturn in miles. The mixup of units mentioned above was directly referenced in 1643: Degrees .\nThe mix-up of Jupiter and Saturn could be a reference to the book and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey that were written simultaneously. In the book solely written by Arthur C. Clarke they go to Saturn. In the film (from 1968), however, they found it impossible to make Saturn's rings well enough to satisfy director (and co-writer) Stanley Kubrick so in the film version, they ended up at Jupiter instead. (Arthur C. Clarke later made the film canonical when he wrote the sequel 2010 , where the plot would only work with Jupiter, mainly because of its size and partly due to its four big moons especially Europa ).\nIt's ambiguous who participates in the title text dialogue. There are multiple interpretations.\nIt should be noted that Juno is mostly linked to Jupiter and not to Saturn (the probe was sent to Jupiter in the real world), which fits best with the \"Press speaks first\" explanation.\nIn the title text someone from the press asks another question: wasn't the name of the space probe, Juno , a tip off given the relation to Jupiter? The goddess Juno was the wife of Jupiter the chief deity in the Roman mythology . However her father is Saturn so there are relations to both Gods\/planets. Her relationship to Jupiter, however, is most likely more common knowledge explaining the naming of the probe.\nHowever, instead of mentioning this dual relationship one of the three NASA representatives say that at first they even believed it was for Juneau , the capital of Alaska , showing that the engineers did not have a clue about the objective of the mission. They did wonder why a gravity assist was planned to get there but guessed it was a more efficient method. Given that gravity assist is only relevant for interplanetary missions requiring a flyby of a planet, it would never make sense to use one to get between two destinations on Earth. This is so even though Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, from where the probe was launched, is about as far away from Juneau as it is possible to get inside the borders of the United States. Maybe it was Cueball who was clueless, in which case he may represent Steve from 1532: New Horizons , now confessing to misdirecting another probe.\nThe mixup of Juno the Goddess and the capital city of Alaska could be a reference to the film Juno where the title character is named after the Goddess as her father is into Roman and Greek mythology (although she calls her Zeus 's wife, Zeus being the equivalent of Jupiter in Greek mythology where Juno would be called Hera ). Later a man asks her \" Like the city in Alaska? \" to which she simply replies \"No!\"\nScenarios similar to the likely outcome of Juno using its gravity assist (from Earth) to arrive in Juneau (with unchanged orbital energy) have been discussed in what if? Orbital Speed , Hitting a comet , and New Horizons (see also 1532: New Horizons ).\nIn the title text someone, likely a member of the NASA team, asks if the name of the space probe, Juno , wasn't a tip off. In Roman mythology the goddess Juno was the daughter of Saturn (though also the wife of Jupiter ). However, instead of mentioning this, someone (presumably a member of the press) replies that at first they had thought the probe was named for Juneau , the capital of Alaska . They had wondered why NASA wanted to use gravity assist to get there, but had guessed that it must be more efficient.\nThe title text might also be continued discussion amongst the NASA representatives. After being shushed, Megan begins needling the spokeswoman about the huge error NASA made. The spokeswoman then admits to being confused about why the mission was so complicated. Alternatively, the third NASA representative might be Steve , now confessing to misdirecting another probe.\nIn another interpretation, both lines are spoken by members of the audience. The second would seem to be producing science journalism of unusually poor quality.\n[At a NASA press conference Blondie stands behind a lectern with the NASA logo. To the left is Megan and to the right is Cueball, both looking towards Blondie.] Blondie: After traveling 1.7 billion miles, the Juno spacecraft reached Jupiter within one second of its scheduled arrival time.\n[A person off-panel to the left comments and all three turns towards the speaker.] Off-panel voice: Very impressive! Blondie: Thank you.\n[All three look straight out as Megan comments on the praise.] Megan: I mean, we were aiming for Saturn. Still, nailed the time. Blondie: Shhhh.\n"}
{"id":1704,"title":"Gnome Ann","image_title":"Gnome Ann","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1704","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gnome_ann.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1704:_Gnome_Ann","transcript":"The Legend of Gnome Ann\n[At the beach, between a clock hanging in the air, showing 10 past 10 and the shoreline, Gnome Ann, a woman with curly hair and a black triangular hat, stands with her arms outstretched towards the clock and the sea. For each of the first five panels a text is written within a frame above the drawings.] Time and tide wait for Gnome Ann.\n[Gnome Ann running in from the left frame with her arms out chases three Cueball like men running from her towards right. The one closest to her looks over his shoulder at her, the next runs forward \"normally\" and the last in front throws up his arms in the air.] The wicked flee when Gnome Ann pursueth. - Proverbs 28:1\n[Gnome Ann takes the groom's place in a wedding, shoving him to the side. The groom, Hairy with a bow tie, falls while throwing his arms out. The bride stands to the left, in full wedding dress, showing no reaction.] What therefore God hath joined together, let Gnome Ann put asunder. - Mark 10:9\n[Gnome Ann sits in a yoga position meditating on a big rock in a desolate area with small rocks on the ground around the big rock.] Time ripens all things; Gnome Ann is born wise. - Miguel De Cervantes\n[The starship Enterprise from Star Trek is seen from behind as it flies to the right, chasing a smaller craft. In this panel the frame with text is shown to emanate from Enterprise with a zig zag arrow pointing to the starship.] Enterprise: Our Mission: To boldly go where Gnome Ann has gone before.\n[The Witch-king of Angmar, Lord of the Nazg\u00fbl, from the Lord of the Rings sits on his knees (below the frame) to the left of Gnome Ann, who is preparing to stab him with a sword pointing at his head. She is also holding her other arm out towards him. The Witch-king has a black cloak covering his head and body with a kind of crown with six small spikes shown around his head and one large spike in front. It also goes down on each side of his head showing a gaping hole instead of a face. In this panel the text is spoken by the two characters.] Witch-king: Fool! No man can kill me. Gnome Ann: I Am Gnome Ann!\n","explanation":"This comic presents a series of images depicting a female gnome who is known as \"Gnome Ann\". The humor derives from the fact that the name \"Gnome Ann\" is a mondegreen of the phrase \"no man\". (For clarification, \"gnome\" is pronounced as in the fantastical creature and not as in the Linux-based Gnome desktop system .)\nRandall presents the reader with six images (and a title text) captioned with quotations from a wide range of sources, each featuring an instance of the compound noun \"no man\" being replaced by \"Gnome Ann\" (and featuring a drawing that reflects this change). There is one proverb, two Biblical quotations, one literary quotation from Cervantes ' Don Quixote , one cinematic reference from the Lord of the Rings (film series) (the line \u00c9owyn said to the Witch-king of Angmar before killing him), one quotation from the opening of a television show ( Star Trek: The Original Series ), and a quotation from a piece of historical rhetoric in the title text.\nThe Legend of Gnome Ann\n[At the beach, between a clock hanging in the air, showing 10 past 10 and the shoreline, Gnome Ann, a woman with curly hair and a black triangular hat, stands with her arms outstretched towards the clock and the sea. For each of the first five panels a text is written within a frame above the drawings.] Time and tide wait for Gnome Ann.\n[Gnome Ann running in from the left frame with her arms out chases three Cueball like men running from her towards right. The one closest to her looks over his shoulder at her, the next runs forward \"normally\" and the last in front throws up his arms in the air.] The wicked flee when Gnome Ann pursueth. - Proverbs 28:1\n[Gnome Ann takes the groom's place in a wedding, shoving him to the side. The groom, Hairy with a bow tie, falls while throwing his arms out. The bride stands to the left, in full wedding dress, showing no reaction.] What therefore God hath joined together, let Gnome Ann put asunder. - Mark 10:9\n[Gnome Ann sits in a yoga position meditating on a big rock in a desolate area with small rocks on the ground around the big rock.] Time ripens all things; Gnome Ann is born wise. - Miguel De Cervantes\n[The starship Enterprise from Star Trek is seen from behind as it flies to the right, chasing a smaller craft. In this panel the frame with text is shown to emanate from Enterprise with a zig zag arrow pointing to the starship.] Enterprise: Our Mission: To boldly go where Gnome Ann has gone before.\n[The Witch-king of Angmar, Lord of the Nazg\u00fbl, from the Lord of the Rings sits on his knees (below the frame) to the left of Gnome Ann, who is preparing to stab him with a sword pointing at his head. She is also holding her other arm out towards him. The Witch-king has a black cloak covering his head and body with a kind of crown with six small spikes shown around his head and one large spike in front. It also goes down on each side of his head showing a gaping hole instead of a face. In this panel the text is spoken by the two characters.] Witch-king: Fool! No man can kill me. Gnome Ann: I Am Gnome Ann!\n"}
{"id":1705,"title":"Pok\u00e9mon Go","image_title":"Pok\u00e9mon Go","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1705","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pokemon_go.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1705:_Pok%C3%A9mon_Go","transcript":"[Cueball walks in to the frame from the left. On the sidewalk in front of him is a small Pok\u00e9mon figure looking like a standing turtle with a long squirrel like tail, known as Squirtle. Lines around it indicate that it is moving forth and back (wobbling), and circle lines below indicate that there is light below it. The exact position of the Pok\u00e9mon and these lines around it change through all four images, but stays almost in the same position.]\n[Cueball takes out his smart phone and points its camera at the Pok\u00e9mon while looking at the screen.]\n[Cueball shakes his smart phone violently up and down indicated with four to five gray drawings of his arm and phone below and above one solid black copy of the hand and phone. There are also two gray lines above and below the outer gray phones to indicate this shaking.]\n[Cueball has lowered his smart phone and just stands there looking at the wobbling Pok\u00e9mon.] Cueball: ???\n[Caption below the comic:] My hobby: Building plastic Pok\u00e9mon with subtle underlighting and a gyroscope to make them drift back and forth, then leaving them sitting around to mess with Pok\u00e9mon Go players.\n","explanation":"Pok\u00e9mon GO is an augmented reality (AR) smartphone game, where players walk around the real world, guided by a virtual map sprinkled with Pok\u00e9mon , trying to find and capture these creatures from the first to fifth generations (i.e. Pok\u00e9mon from the first to fifth series of games released), then leveling them up and\/or evolving them, and using them in battle, similar to the classic Pok\u00e9mon games for handheld consoles. These Pok\u00e9mon are randomly placed around the world in the AR format so that they can only be seen through the phone. Randall is playing a prank on all players happening upon his real Pok\u00e9mon figures as they are so consumed with this new game that they assume that they are from the game, not realizing that they should not be able to see them before they take out their phones, and then after doing this wondering why their phone is having trouble loading them.\nDue to the popularity of the Pok\u00e9mon franchise, after Pok\u00e9mon GO's release in the United States on July 6, 2016, many fans of the series have been walking around with their smartphones out to capture and battle Pok\u00e9mon. Some players are so eager to capture rare Pok\u00e9mon (for example, Vaporeon ) that they will leave their cars amid traffic with the engines running.\nRandall jokes that he has replicated the AR properties of the Pok\u00e9mon in the app (that is, when you encounter a Pok\u00e9mon, it is a small computer-generated sprite placed over your phone's rear camera image that moves about your screen, giving the appearance of a \"real\" Pok\u00e9mon in front of you). Randall's real life plastic models of various Pok\u00e9mon have been constructed so they would seem to fit on a smartphone screen due to perspective, he has embedded a gyroscope in them so they wobble about their base giving them the appearance of basic computer-created movement, and as a final touch he has added a subtle underlighting which is also part of the game, and gives them a slightly computer-generated look compared to the real world around them. These effects combined fool avid Pok\u00e9mon GO players into taking out their smartphone to capture the Pok\u00e9mon for their game, when in fact it is just a toy sitting in front of them, and they should have known this as mentioned above. In this comic Randall displays the Pok\u00e9mon called Squirtle which looks like a little turtle.\nThis comic is part of the My Hobby series . In this case, the hobby is pranking players of Pok\u00e9mon GO by replicating the appearance of the augmented reality mechanic.\nIn the title text, Randall is still waiting for an update that allows capture of strangers' pets - besides the obvious, playing by the rules of Pok\u00e9mon only wild (not any with an owner) Pok\u00e9mon can be caught. However, in the Pok\u00e9mon Colosseum games, through the use of a specialized device the player steals from the villains, the player can capture other trainers' Pok\u00e9mon. This is also a callback to an earlier strip wherein Black Hat wishes for a Pok\u00e9ball that works on strangers' pets (see last entry in 1086: Eyelash Wish Log ).\nPok\u00e9mon Go was again the topic of 2220: Imagine Going Back in Time more than 3 years later.\n[Cueball walks in to the frame from the left. On the sidewalk in front of him is a small Pok\u00e9mon figure looking like a standing turtle with a long squirrel like tail, known as Squirtle. Lines around it indicate that it is moving forth and back (wobbling), and circle lines below indicate that there is light below it. The exact position of the Pok\u00e9mon and these lines around it change through all four images, but stays almost in the same position.]\n[Cueball takes out his smart phone and points its camera at the Pok\u00e9mon while looking at the screen.]\n[Cueball shakes his smart phone violently up and down indicated with four to five gray drawings of his arm and phone below and above one solid black copy of the hand and phone. There are also two gray lines above and below the outer gray phones to indicate this shaking.]\n[Cueball has lowered his smart phone and just stands there looking at the wobbling Pok\u00e9mon.] Cueball: ???\n[Caption below the comic:] My hobby: Building plastic Pok\u00e9mon with subtle underlighting and a gyroscope to make them drift back and forth, then leaving them sitting around to mess with Pok\u00e9mon Go players.\n"}
{"id":1706,"title":"Genetic Testing","image_title":"Genetic Testing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1706","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/genetic_testing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1706:_Genetic_Testing","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking to each other.] Cueball: I sent a DNA sample to one of those \"Trace your ancestry\" projects. Megan: How legit are those? Cueball: No idea. I just figured it'd be fun.\nSix weeks later... [Cueball walks towards Megan with a letter in his hand.] Cueball: Sweet, got my results back. Megan: Ooh, share!\nAncestry Report 48% Labrador Retriever 35% Beagle 12% Cocker Spaniel 5% Other\n[Megan is holding the report.] Megan: I think you sent your sample to the wrong service. Cueball: Just in case, I should probably start avoiding chocolate.\n","explanation":"Cueball has sent a DNA sample to a genetic genealogy company. The implied premise of the comic is that Cueball intended to send his own DNA to one of the several companies that analyze human DNA samples and provide a report as to the genetic history of that person - examples include notable\/famous ancestors or relatives, ethnic background, risk factors for certain medical conditions, etc. However, the result that Cueball receives is consistent with a report for a dog pedigree test, breaking down the percentage of certain breeds present in a dog's ancestry. Megan suggests that Cueball has sent his sample to the wrong company. Cueball appears to agree in principle, but (seriously or jokingly - it is unclear) indicates that he intends to hedge his bets and avoid chocolate just in case he actually is, in fact, a dog. Dogs are generally susceptible to poisoning from theobromine , a compound found in chocolates which causes seizures and heart failure in dogs (and many other creatures). Basically, if Cueball really is a dog, then eating chocolate could kill him.\n82% or 94% of genes (depending on how you measure it) are shared between humans and dogs. National Geographic erroneously reported that only 5% of human DNA is shared with dogs and mice, which may have misled Randall Munroe. This leads to several possible interpretations of the comic: It is possible (as Cueball suggests in the last panel) that he is, in fact, a dog with excellent human impersonation skills, or that he somehow shares DNA with a dog. It is possible that Cueball mistakenly sent a sample of a dog's DNA (perhaps his own) somehow thinking that is the method of testing his own DNA. Perhaps Cueball submitted his own (human) DNA to a dog pedigree company and their method of testing includes a presumption of dog DNA, and therefore was able to produce this result from Cueball's sample. Or perhaps this comic is a suggestion that some DNA test companies are scams that do not even perform DNA tests, but simply send out arbitrary reports that are not based on any testing.\nThe title text refers to the fact that certain dog breeds are more or less susceptible to disease. The diseases he mentions, elbow dysplasia , heartworm , parvo virus and mange are several diseases that can end up killing, disfiguring or disabling dogs, but which humans are generally not susceptible to. As noted above, ancestry DNA test results can inform people about their genetic risk factors for disease, either by specifically investigating your own DNA for those risk factors or, more likely (and less costly) by informing of what risk factors are generally prevalent in your ancestry or others people sharing the same ancestry as you.\nAfter this comic was published, it was revealed that a testing service issued reports determining that First Nations ancestry was detected in sample DNA taken from a dog.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking to each other.] Cueball: I sent a DNA sample to one of those \"Trace your ancestry\" projects. Megan: How legit are those? Cueball: No idea. I just figured it'd be fun.\nSix weeks later... [Cueball walks towards Megan with a letter in his hand.] Cueball: Sweet, got my results back. Megan: Ooh, share!\nAncestry Report 48% Labrador Retriever 35% Beagle 12% Cocker Spaniel 5% Other\n[Megan is holding the report.] Megan: I think you sent your sample to the wrong service. Cueball: Just in case, I should probably start avoiding chocolate.\n"}
{"id":1707,"title":"xkcd Phone 4","image_title":"xkcd Phone 4","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1707","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_phone_4.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1707:_xkcd_Phone_4","transcript":"[An image of a smartphone featuring wings is shown. Clockwise from the top left the labels read:] 18,000 \u03bcAh nickel-lithium-iron battery (non-rechargeable) Subwoofer \"Dog whistle\" Non-porous, washable WebMD partnership: Cough-activated feature reads aloud a random diagnosis for \"coughing\" Wings Beveled bezel Bezeled bevel Seedless Water resistant down to 30 meters and below 50 Turing-complete Gregorian\/Julian calendar switch SpaceX impact protection: When dropped, phone lands on barge Parallel port 12 headphone jacks Onboard cloud New BrightGlo TM display incorporates genetically spliced jellyfish protein (should have used the glowing genes, not the stinging ones) \u2713 Certified Software-defined Exposed ductwork Voice interaction: Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Alexa respond simultaneously\n[Below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd Phone 4 Did you know \"4\" is \"IV\" in Roman numerals? \u00ae\u00a9 \u2122\n","explanation":"This is the fourth entry in the ongoing xkcd Phone series , and once again, the comic plays with many standard tech buzzwords to create a phone that sounds impressive but would actually be very impractical. The previous comic in the series 1549: xkcd Phone 3 was released just over a year before this one and the next 1809: xkcd Phone 5 was released almost 8 months later.\nFrom the top-left, going clockwise:\n[An image of a smartphone featuring wings is shown. Clockwise from the top left the labels read:] 18,000 \u03bcAh nickel-lithium-iron battery (non-rechargeable) Subwoofer \"Dog whistle\" Non-porous, washable WebMD partnership: Cough-activated feature reads aloud a random diagnosis for \"coughing\" Wings Beveled bezel Bezeled bevel Seedless Water resistant down to 30 meters and below 50 Turing-complete Gregorian\/Julian calendar switch SpaceX impact protection: When dropped, phone lands on barge Parallel port 12 headphone jacks Onboard cloud New BrightGlo TM display incorporates genetically spliced jellyfish protein (should have used the glowing genes, not the stinging ones) \u2713 Certified Software-defined Exposed ductwork Voice interaction: Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Alexa respond simultaneously\n[Below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd Phone 4 Did you know \"4\" is \"IV\" in Roman numerals? \u00ae\u00a9 \u2122\n"}
{"id":1708,"title":"Dehydration","image_title":"Dehydration","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1708","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dehydration.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1708:_Dehydration","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball standing together.] White Hat: Many people are mildly dehydrated. And don't realize it. You should drink at least six glasses of water per day.\n[A voice comes from off-panel to the left as Ponytail enters from the left and Black Hat from the right in this frameless panel.] Off-panel voice: No, eight glasses! Ponytail: I heard ten. Black Hat: You need to drink at least five glasses of water per minute.\n[Megan is standing to the left holding a book or a thick binder along her side while holding up a finger with the other hand. A question comes from off-panel to the right. Above her a caption is written in a small frame that breaks the top of this panel's frame:] Later: Megan: Okay, I just read through every study I could find to try to figure out whether low-grade dehydration is even a real thing. Off-panel voice: What did you learn?\n[Megan looking downwards, has two starbursts a circles and two dots above her head signifying dizziness. Cueball stands to the right as another voice comes from off-panel to the right.] Megan: If you spend all day doing research and forget to eat or drink, you start to feel pretty bad. Off-panel voice: I'll get some water. Megan: But how many glas - Whoa, feeling dizzy. Cueball: Maybe you should just drink straight from the tap.\n","explanation":"This comic plays on the idea that there is little to no consensus in the scientific community with regard to the amount of water a person should drink per day. In the first panel White Hat presents Cueball with an innocent and sensible suggestion (although controversial) that people should drink six or more glasses of water per day. In the second panel, more characters join the discussion, an off-panel voice claims the most common misconception of eight glasses a day, a number which is not supported by scientific research. Ponytail again goes two higher with ten highlighting the existence of a wide range of so-called 'optimum' liquid consumption 'rule-of-thumb'. Implied here is the variety of health-related books, articles, blogs or other literature published that self-proclaims an optimum drinking formula.\nThe first sign of absurdity also arises here in the second panel when Black Hat posits that we need 5 glasses of water every minute. This equates to 7200 glasses of water a day, and using an often cited \" standard definition of a glass \" being equal to 8 oz (236 ml), Black Hat is suggesting that we should each drink 1.7 cubic meters (1700 liters) of water a day, curing dehydration but also causing water intoxication . This is a typical Black Hat kind of statement that he uses to further emphasize the absurdity of the problem at hand.\nSome time later Megan , despite having read through all studies on dehydration (or low-grade dehydration in particular), still has not come to a solid conclusion. She becomes dizzy, admitting that she's been so focused on her work, she has ironically forgotten to eat or drink . Her personal experience with dehydration prompts someone off-panel to get some water, but since she couldn't find any consensus in her research, she asks how many glasses they should bring her. Presumably to avoid the question of \"how many glasses\" entirely, Cueball finally suggests that she should drink straight from the tap, a (tenuously) sincere suggestion seeing her dehydration and following the good advice to drink when you are thirsty until that state has been absolved. In the title text of 1744: Metabolism , released less than 3 months after this one, Cueball mentions how he starts to feel bad if he refrains from drinking, just like Megan here.\nThe title text contains a mix-up between two often stated intervals; drinking eight glasses of water per day (which makes no sense, see above) and changing the engine oil every 3000 miles (almost 5000 km) which may be a good rule, but not a necessity. Obviously it's impossible to drink 3000 glasses of water, and changing the oil every eight miles (about 13 km) would make driving a car very impractical.\nThe subject of this comic has been graphed in 715: Numbers and mentioned in the what if? Soda Planet :\nLater, in the what if? Faucet Power , Randall comments on the preference for even numbers in the graph, and writes:\nHow many glasses is \"some water\" remains an open question.\nBeret Guy and Megan are participants of a thought experiment concerning glasses of water and vacuum in the what if? Glass Half Empty .\nAnd the six glasses of water that this comic began with is also mentioned later in 1853: Once Per Day .\nThis is a rare example of a normal xkcd comic of few panels manages to use five of the seven major characters who actually interact. It is the first comic where Black Hat has spoken (or directly interacted) with White Hat. Until this comic, they have only appeared together in complicated\/large drawings where there is no interaction between the two. The only other time this has happened is in 1881: Drone Training .\n[White Hat and Cueball standing together.] White Hat: Many people are mildly dehydrated. And don't realize it. You should drink at least six glasses of water per day.\n[A voice comes from off-panel to the left as Ponytail enters from the left and Black Hat from the right in this frameless panel.] Off-panel voice: No, eight glasses! Ponytail: I heard ten. Black Hat: You need to drink at least five glasses of water per minute.\n[Megan is standing to the left holding a book or a thick binder along her side while holding up a finger with the other hand. A question comes from off-panel to the right. Above her a caption is written in a small frame that breaks the top of this panel's frame:] Later: Megan: Okay, I just read through every study I could find to try to figure out whether low-grade dehydration is even a real thing. Off-panel voice: What did you learn?\n[Megan looking downwards, has two starbursts a circles and two dots above her head signifying dizziness. Cueball stands to the right as another voice comes from off-panel to the right.] Megan: If you spend all day doing research and forget to eat or drink, you start to feel pretty bad. Off-panel voice: I'll get some water. Megan: But how many glas - Whoa, feeling dizzy. Cueball: Maybe you should just drink straight from the tap.\n"}
{"id":1709,"title":"Inflection","image_title":"Inflection","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1709","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/inflection.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1709:_Inflection","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan, holding a hand up, are seen walking together from afar in silhouette.] Megan: Inflected languages change words to add meaning, like \"-s\" for plurals or \"-ed\" for past tense. Megan: Alphabets\u2014where symbols stand for sound instead of words\u2014work well for them, since you can show the changes through spelling.\n[Zoom in on the two as Megan turns her head back towards Cueball and spreads her arms out.] Megan: Our language family is inflected, but the English branch has lost most of its inflection over the millennia. It's why we don't have all those Latin conjugations.\n[Cueball speaks as they walk on and Megan replies with three orange-yellow emoji: Thumbs Up Sign pointing right, Clapping Hands Sign pointing up left with two times three small lines to indicate the clapping and Smiling Face With Blushing (red) Cheeks and Smiling Eyes. Below given the closest match possible as of the release of the comic.] Cueball: Could that mean English writing is ripe to become more pictographic? Megan: \ud83d\udc4d \ud83d\udc4f \ud83d\ude0a\nIn the table below is a sample of a modern verb conjugation in English.\nIn all of these conjugations, the only inflections on the main verb \"walk\" are \"-s\", \"-ed\", and \"-ing\". The highly irregular helper verbs, \"be\" and \"have\", have somewhat more interesting inflections. And although this table shows only the third person, the first and second person would only introduce the helper verb \"am\" (as in \"I am walking\"); similarly, the table shows only the indicative mood, but the subjunctive and imperative moods would not introduce any additional words, and the conditional mood would only introduce the helper verb \"would\" (an inflection of the irregular helper verb \"will\") without any additional inflections on the main verb \"walk\". If instead we made this table in Spanish (for example), then there would be many more inflections on the main verb (12 in the third-person indicative alone, 45 including all persons and moods, if I didn't miscount).\n","explanation":"While walking, Megan tells Cueball that in inflected languages \u2014 such as German \u2014 changes in the spelling of a word changes its meaning, in a predictable way. Megan exemplifies this with how plural forms of nouns are created by sticking an \"s\" at the end, and past tense of a verb is done by the suffix \"ed\". Megan then explains that this works well in languages which build on alphabets .\nShe continues to explain that their language family belongs to those that are inflected, but the English branch is becoming less inflected than it used to be. Specifically this explains why English does not have so many Latin conjugations . A conjugation is a pattern of inflections, describing how a particular group of verbs is altered from its root form to represent different grammatical cases. Only verbs have conjugations (are conjugated ), nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are described by declensions (and are declined ). All inflected languages can be described by conjugations and declensions, although Latin is one of the most commonly cited, perhaps because Latin grammar was taught for centuries by monotonous rote learning of the conjugations and declensions.\nA typical Latin conjugation would be the verb amare , to love.\n(The English singular uses archaic forms to highlight the number and person.)  A complete conjugation includes all tenses (Present, Imperfect, Future, ...), both voices (Active & Passive), and all moods (Indicative, Imperative, Subjunctive, ...). Other parts of speech \u2014 infinitives, participles, gerunds, and so forth \u2014 are needed to completely define the verb, but are not usually considered to be part of the conjugation.\nCueball then asks Could that mean that English writing might be ripe to become more pictographic? Instead of using traditional words, Megan replies with three emojis \"Thumbs up\" (like), \"Applause\", and a smiley \u2014 thus showing a pictographic version of the writing which has become more popular in the last years. Emoji has become a recurring theme on xkcd.\nThe writing systems of many languages have both pictographic and ideographic origins. \"Pictographic\" means that they are pictures of some thing that will remind the reader of either the pronunciation or the meaning of the word. The letter \"A\", for example, originated from a word meaning \"ox\", but was meant to remind readers of the glottal stop (it wasn't until the Ancient Greeks, who didn't have the glottal stop as a distinct phoneme, got a hold of the Phoenician version that it was transferred to the vowel(s) it is today). \"Ideographic\" means that they are designed, through pictures, to illustrate some idea. An example would be a \"No Smoking\" sign, where a red circle with a diagonal line is an abstract representation of \"no\". In fact, the three emojis used in the third panel of this cartoon are all ideographic, not pictographic, under this definition. \"Thumbs up\" (like), \"Applause\", and the smiley, are all emojis that remind us of a concept of approval.\nEgyptian hieroglyphics contain many pictorial elements, some of which are pictographic in the sense that they are meant to represent the thing that they picture, but many are more abstract (ideographic) or are used for their phonetic value (as \"A\" was used in early alphabetic systems). Similarly, in the Chinese character writing system, many of the elements have pictographic or ideographic origins; but they are often, and even usually combined in ways that are phonetic and not related to the pictures that were the origins of the characters.\nEarly modern English (think Shakespeare or the KJV Bible) used more forms for the tenses than we do today, which can help illustrate the trend away from inflected forms. In contrast, verbs in English today are often conjugated with auxiliary verbs. See below for details on modern verb conjugation in English .\nThe title text points out that some intentional misspelling are used in Internet slang to alter the meaning of a word: \"what\" becomes \" wat \" to express confusion, disgust or disbelief. The title text also uses typographical variation to emphasize the word MORE by using all capital letters. Such emphasis is difficult to show with inflected language alone.\nThis comic is referenced at 4500 BCE in huge chart of 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline . According to that comic it was at that time inflection was invented but just to tease future students so they have to remember a zillion verb endings .\n[Cueball and Megan, holding a hand up, are seen walking together from afar in silhouette.] Megan: Inflected languages change words to add meaning, like \"-s\" for plurals or \"-ed\" for past tense. Megan: Alphabets\u2014where symbols stand for sound instead of words\u2014work well for them, since you can show the changes through spelling.\n[Zoom in on the two as Megan turns her head back towards Cueball and spreads her arms out.] Megan: Our language family is inflected, but the English branch has lost most of its inflection over the millennia. It's why we don't have all those Latin conjugations.\n[Cueball speaks as they walk on and Megan replies with three orange-yellow emoji: Thumbs Up Sign pointing right, Clapping Hands Sign pointing up left with two times three small lines to indicate the clapping and Smiling Face With Blushing (red) Cheeks and Smiling Eyes. Below given the closest match possible as of the release of the comic.] Cueball: Could that mean English writing is ripe to become more pictographic? Megan: \ud83d\udc4d \ud83d\udc4f \ud83d\ude0a\nIn the table below is a sample of a modern verb conjugation in English.\nIn all of these conjugations, the only inflections on the main verb \"walk\" are \"-s\", \"-ed\", and \"-ing\". The highly irregular helper verbs, \"be\" and \"have\", have somewhat more interesting inflections. And although this table shows only the third person, the first and second person would only introduce the helper verb \"am\" (as in \"I am walking\"); similarly, the table shows only the indicative mood, but the subjunctive and imperative moods would not introduce any additional words, and the conditional mood would only introduce the helper verb \"would\" (an inflection of the irregular helper verb \"will\") without any additional inflections on the main verb \"walk\". If instead we made this table in Spanish (for example), then there would be many more inflections on the main verb (12 in the third-person indicative alone, 45 including all persons and moods, if I didn't miscount).\n"}
{"id":1710,"title":"Walking Into Things","image_title":"Walking Into Things","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1710","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/walking_into_things.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1710:_Walking_Into_Things","transcript":"[Meagan and Cueball, holding a smartphone in his hand, walk through a landscape with patches of grass. They are just passing behind a stump of a tree, a small bush is in front of them and there are two rocks on the ground which extends to rolling hills in the distance under a clear sky with three small white clouds to the right and two seagulls drawn as lying down 3 to the left with four more birds further left and much further away.] Cueball: My life is basically a big controlled trial of whether I'm more likely to walk into something while looking at a book, my phone, or the sky.\n[Zoom in to Megan and Cueball while they're still walking, no background is shown. Beat panel while she ponders his statement.]\n[Megan and Cueball still walking.] Megan: The weird thing is that the rate for the control group is so high. Cueball: Walking is hard, okay?\nThe second word in the first panel looks like \"UFE\", but it's actually \"LIFE\" with bad 1015: Kerning .\nAt the time the comic was released, Pok\u00e9mon Go has been gaining popularity, with many people raising concerns about the dangers of walking around while staring at a phone screen. (See 1705: Pok\u00e9mon Go released two weeks before this).\n","explanation":"Cueball comments on the rate of his walking into things while distracted by various stimuli, comparing it to a controlled study where the aim is to research whether he is most likely to bump into something while looking at a book, at his phone, or staring at the sky (something Randall does a lot with his interests in astronomy, optical phenomena, weather phenomena and kites).\nMegan replies that if this is the case, the rate of the \"control group\" colliding with things is also weirdly high. In Cueball's metaphor, the \"control group\" would be his walking around without being distracted, so you would expect him not to collide with anything when able to give his full attention to where he's going. Thus, Megan is implying that Cueball is simply clumsy or easily distracted by other events or his own thoughts, and that his walking into things has little to do with whether he's looking at his phone, in a book or at the sky. Cueball responds defensively, saying that \"walking [without bumping into anything] is hard, okay?\"\nWalking actually is a difficult task, as can be observed when trying to teach a robot how to walk, or the time it takes for children to learn it and the way that a baby's first steps are celebrated as an achievement and a milestone in their development.\nIn the title text, Randall remarks that his childhood spent walking around with his nose in a book has prepared him \"unexpectedly well\" for today's world. Years ago, walking around while staring at something in your hands \u2014 such as a book \u2014 was considered odd, antisocial and dangerous, and was mostly the province of bookworms and nerds. Yet now, it's commonplace for people to walk around staring at their phones. This, ironically, makes those \"antisocial\" people who grew up used to walking around while reading the best-adapted to navigating while using a smartphone.\n[Meagan and Cueball, holding a smartphone in his hand, walk through a landscape with patches of grass. They are just passing behind a stump of a tree, a small bush is in front of them and there are two rocks on the ground which extends to rolling hills in the distance under a clear sky with three small white clouds to the right and two seagulls drawn as lying down 3 to the left with four more birds further left and much further away.] Cueball: My life is basically a big controlled trial of whether I'm more likely to walk into something while looking at a book, my phone, or the sky.\n[Zoom in to Megan and Cueball while they're still walking, no background is shown. Beat panel while she ponders his statement.]\n[Megan and Cueball still walking.] Megan: The weird thing is that the rate for the control group is so high. Cueball: Walking is hard, okay?\nThe second word in the first panel looks like \"UFE\", but it's actually \"LIFE\" with bad 1015: Kerning .\nAt the time the comic was released, Pok\u00e9mon Go has been gaining popularity, with many people raising concerns about the dangers of walking around while staring at a phone screen. (See 1705: Pok\u00e9mon Go released two weeks before this).\n"}
{"id":1711,"title":"Snapchat","image_title":"Snapchat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1711","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snapchat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1711:_Snapchat","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan standing together. He holds a smartphone in his left hand and looks at it.] Cueball: Oh, the Pulitzer Prize for Snapchat was just awarded. Megan: Yeah. Megan: I hear the photo was really good. Cueball: Aw, maaaan ...\n","explanation":"Snapchat is a photo-sending app that allows the receiving user to view the photo (known as a \"snap\") only within 24 hours of its posting, and for only 10 seconds before it is deleted. The Pulitzer Prize is famously awarded for exceptional journalism and photojournalism (there are many categories; see here ).\nCueball reads that the Snapchat Pulitzer Prize has just been awarded but then, when Megan states that she heard the picture was really good, Cueball becomes disappointed because he realises he has already missed out on the chance to see the prize winning entry due to the temporary nature of Snapchat. Note that Megan also missed the opportunity to see the snap.\nA given snap can be sent to a semi-public \"Story\" and the user decides how long any user can see the snap in a range from 1-10 s . In principle, any specific snap is only accessible for 24 hours even if it is a story. A committee of users could have more than 10 seconds to access the snap, by viewing in sequence. Given the time it might take for a committee to decide which snap wins the prize, it is realistic that Cueball learns about the winner after the 24 hours is up; Thus even a user following the outcome might not be able to see the winning entry after that time. In practice it is possible to circumvent the Snapchat rule and take a screen shot or in other ways save the content of the snap. In the case of a Pulitzer Prize winning photo, someone would probably have saved it, if it was in real life. On the other hand, the only way for the photo to be recognised as a snap, eligible to win the prize, would be if no one could see it for more than 10 seconds. So one of the possible rules might be that any picture which was saved would not be able to win the prize.\nThe title text extends this ephemeral nature of Snapchat's content to the prize awarded for it: The other Pulitzer prizes are announced annually in April and awarded in May (except for 2016, the centennial year, when an awards dinner will be held in October). The Snapchat Pulitzer Prize alone must be awarded as quickly as possible after the winner has been decided, before the prize committee forgets what the winning picture looked like. This of course underlines how silly this idea is, because only images seen during the assembly of the prize committee can be seen and remembered, and it is not possible to arrange this based on any knowledge of when a Pulitzer Prize \"worthy\" snap will be released.\nRandall could be making fun of Snapchat (see the title), and the idea that you cannot save the images for later; As mentioned regarding screenshots, it is actually very easy to save pictures from Snapchat - to many a user's regret after having sent something very personal, such as naked pictures of themselves. The comic could also be seen as mocking the Pulitzer Prize for having too broad a spectrum of categories. Alongside the (photo)journalistic and prose awards, the Pulitzers also honor a variety of artistic pursuits, including Poetry, Drama and Music.\nThe new medium of Snapchat is certainly a hybrid form of art and information\/opinion dispersal, both at its best and at its worst, but it is too ephemeral for awarding prizes to be logistically possible even if it were taken seriously enough for someone to want to award them.\nThe very next comic, 1712: Politifact , features an organization which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2009.\n[Cueball and Megan standing together. He holds a smartphone in his left hand and looks at it.] Cueball: Oh, the Pulitzer Prize for Snapchat was just awarded. Megan: Yeah. Megan: I hear the photo was really good. Cueball: Aw, maaaan ...\n"}
{"id":1712,"title":"Politifact","image_title":"Politifact","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1712","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/politifact.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1712:_Politifact","transcript":"[Megan with messy morning hair is walking right and rubs her eyes.] Megan: I did not sleep well last night.\n[A woman with hair like Megan (but a bit longer) wearing a white hat with brim and a small white card attached to the hat's belt (like a press pass) crawls up on the pane of an open window. She begins all her sentences with the word PolitiFact. When she says this it is written in the color and style of the PolitiFact.com logo with blue Politi and red Fact . Megan has just walked past the window and has turned to look at the woman. She is still holding one hand up and her hair is still messy.] PolitiFact: Politi Fact says mostly true! Megan: Oh no...\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball is walking right, while Megan, arms stretched out and hair flowing out behind her, runs by him chasing PolitiFact who is running with a hand up to hold her hat in place, hair also flowing out behind her.] Cueball: Not again. Get out of here, PolitiFact! Megan: I swear I locked that window. PolitiFact: Politi Fact says: False!\n[Cueball and Megan, looking downwards, are standing at the foot of a well made bed with two pillows, and the bedsheets drawn tight. PolitiFact's voice emanates from a starburst at the edge of the shadow under the bed.] Cueball: You can't stay under there forever. PolitiFact (voice from under bed): Politi Fact says: False! Megan: Nobody likes you, Politifact. PolitiFact (voice from under bed): Politi Fact says: Mostly true!\n","explanation":"The website PolitiFact.com rates political claims based on how true they are. The rulings from the Truth-O-Meter\u2122 at PolitiFact are:\nThis comic presents a woman wearing a white hat with a press pass in the hat's band. She is calling herself \"PolitiFact\" - either pretending to come from PolitiFact.com or she is representing a personification of the website itself. She is obviously annoying Megan and Cueball by first breaking and entering and then rating everything they say on the Truth-O-Meter. (She is using the official logo of PolitiFact as her name, and since they write their name PolitiFact her name should also be written like this, even though Randall has named the comic Politifact with all lower case letters and also uses it like this in the title text.)\nWhen Megan, apparently just having gotten out of bed, says she had trouble sleeping, the PolitiFact.com woman (henceforth simply PolitiFact) appears at an open window and observes that Megan is telling the truth with the rating of \" Mostly True! \" (So according to PolitiFact she did not sleep well most of the night, but may have slept OK for some parts of the night.)\nMegan appears distressed, which is not improved when PolitiFact enters their house through the window. Megan gives chase to PolitiFact, passing by Cueball, whose comment Not again makes it clear that this is not the first time PolitiFact has annoyed them in this way. Megan swears that she had locked the window, though PolitiFact gives that claim the rating of \" False! \" as PolitiFact herself demonstrated. Although entering someone's house against their wishes is illegal, regardless of how entry is achieved, Megan's failure to secure the window means that PolitiFact cannot be charged guilty of breaking and entering - and, more pressingly, has made it easier for PolitiFact to annoy them.\nCueball asks her to leave as Megan chases her through the house. After the chase, PolitiFact ends up hiding under the couple's bed; Cueball's claim that PolitiFact \"can't stay under there forever\" is promptly rated \" False \". Megan's remark, however, that no one likes PolitiFact, is rated \" Mostly True! \" This exchange is likely metaphorical just as much as it is literal \u2014 Randall's PolitiFact acknowledges that what she does annoys people, but she keeps on doing it anyway.\nAs for metaphors, Megan is likely commenting on the popularity of the website, which Randall's PolitiFact is no less correct about. People become very defensive when claims they make in political discussions are debunked by PolitiFact.com. There is a phenomenon where the people most influenced by an erroneous claim are the least likely to believe a fact checker. For example, The Washington Post shut down their internet rumor fact checker because, \"institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views \u2014 even when it's demonstrably fake.\" Simply put, people like the idea of a fact checker until they disagree with it.\nPolitiFact.com has been accused of being both liberally biased and conservatively biased at various times and has angered politicians on both sides of the aisle. The summary statistic \"rulings\" are especially troublesome; often the critics will agree that the information presented by the fact check is correct, and may agree that all relevant information has been included, but will disagree as to the importance of context omitted by the original speaker or the interpretation of ambiguous language.\nThe title text makes a play on PolitiFact.com's most untrue rating, \"Pants on Fire!\" - a reference to the childhood accusation \" Liar, liar, pants on fire! \"\nIn the title text either Cueball or Megan says to the other that they have lit the smoke bomb and rolled it under the bed near PolitiFact (seems they have discussed this first). When it goes off it apparently manages to ignite PolitiFact's pants - thus, PolitiFact's pants are literally on fire and she yells \"PANTS ON FIRE!\". Cueball has thrown smoke bombs before while in a relation with Megan, see 486: I am Not a Ninja , so it would be likely he had a smoke bomb on his person for immediate use.\nAlternatively, either Cueball or Megan just says this as a threat (they could even roll a non-bomb object under the bed and maybe they have talked out loud about the idea of using such a bomb before) and they could try to make the loud fwooosh sound themselves to simulate that the bomb going off. Then they would be telling an outright lie that would be rated as \"Pants on Fire!\". The fact that the fwooosh is located outside of the \"quotation marks\", is no indication as the sound is not part of the quote. Also the fact that \"PANTS ON FIRE\" is yelled, rather than calmly delivered in the fashion of her other judgments, is not necessarily any indication that this is not the case, since a threat that is so blatantly a lie as to warrant such a rating should be proclaimed out loud.\nIt is also possible that PolitiFact's rating is a meta check of the title text itself ; because the scenario described is not illustrated as is the rest of the comic, it has not happened, and thus is blatantly false.\nIt may be a coincidence, but PolitiFact.com was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2009 for work done in their first full year of work (after it was started in August 2007), and this comic was released right after 1711: Snapchat , which hinges on the existence of little-known Pulitzer Prize categories.\nPolitiFact was later referenced indirectly with a fact check in 1790: Sad which is rated mostly false , and directly in the title text of 2129: 1921 Fact Checker , about, well... fact checking.\n[Megan with messy morning hair is walking right and rubs her eyes.] Megan: I did not sleep well last night.\n[A woman with hair like Megan (but a bit longer) wearing a white hat with brim and a small white card attached to the hat's belt (like a press pass) crawls up on the pane of an open window. She begins all her sentences with the word PolitiFact. When she says this it is written in the color and style of the PolitiFact.com logo with blue Politi and red Fact . Megan has just walked past the window and has turned to look at the woman. She is still holding one hand up and her hair is still messy.] PolitiFact: Politi Fact says mostly true! Megan: Oh no...\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball is walking right, while Megan, arms stretched out and hair flowing out behind her, runs by him chasing PolitiFact who is running with a hand up to hold her hat in place, hair also flowing out behind her.] Cueball: Not again. Get out of here, PolitiFact! Megan: I swear I locked that window. PolitiFact: Politi Fact says: False!\n[Cueball and Megan, looking downwards, are standing at the foot of a well made bed with two pillows, and the bedsheets drawn tight. PolitiFact's voice emanates from a starburst at the edge of the shadow under the bed.] Cueball: You can't stay under there forever. PolitiFact (voice from under bed): Politi Fact says: False! Megan: Nobody likes you, Politifact. PolitiFact (voice from under bed): Politi Fact says: Mostly true!\n"}
{"id":1713,"title":"50 ccs","image_title":"50 ccs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1713","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/50_ccs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1713:_50_ccs","transcript":"[Ponytail in a doctor's coat, walks right while reading from a clipboard, passing Cueball walking the other way while she talks to Megan walking in front of her.] Ponytail: Nurse, bring me 50 ccs! Ponytail: I need to write \"hiccup vaccine\" 25 times!\n","explanation":"This comic presents a busy day in the clinic for doctor Ponytail , who orders 50 ccs from a nurse (probably Megan who walks in front of her rather than Cueball walking away behind her), all the while everyone is hurrying along the hall. This could be a typical scenario in a busy hospital. However the pun is that the 50 ccs are not medicine but should be used to write \"hiccup vaccine\" 25 times.\nIn medicine, \"cc\" usually means \" cubic centimeter \", and is often called that by medical personnel. A cubic centimeter is equal to 1\u00a0ml (milliliter), so \"50 ccs\" usually means 50 ml of a certain medicine. In this case however, the doctor has not told the nurse to bring 50 ccs of any given medicine; instead, she needs to write \"hi cc up va cc ine\" 25 times, with both words containing the letter combination \"cc\", so she needs to write that combination 50 times.\nThat is the joke, that the 50 ccs literally means the two-lettered 'cc' fifty times.\nThere's no conventional vaccine against hiccups . However, performing tasks meant to distract one's self is a method to stop hiccups. Therefore the act of writing \"hiccup vaccine\" 25 times would itself comprise one more of those hiccup cures that never seems to work. What these techniques all rely on is that they all force one to hold one's breath, thus resetting the diaphragm from its out of sync spasms. But if Ponytail has discovered a vaccine that does somehow cure or prevent hiccups, then this unexpected result is worth reporting in medical journals and seeking grants for further study. Thus, wanting to write about it 25 times is understandable!\nThe title text text refers to a fictional event with four words containing \"cc\" (ra cc oon, a cc ident, a cc ordion, ba cc hanalia), which means she needs to write \"cc\" 100 times. Referring to the 50 ccs from above, this would be a double dosage.\nAlthough the words of the sentence has been chosen based on their cc's the sentence is quite interesting in itself:\nSo here there is talk of a wine festival with music played on accordions that has had an accident involving raccoons, in addition to the need for vaccine against the hiccups.\nA similar doctor Ponytail is shown in 883: Pain Rating also along with Cueball and Megan and just with Megan in 996: Making Things Difficult .\n[Ponytail in a doctor's coat, walks right while reading from a clipboard, passing Cueball walking the other way while she talks to Megan walking in front of her.] Ponytail: Nurse, bring me 50 ccs! Ponytail: I need to write \"hiccup vaccine\" 25 times!\n"}
{"id":1714,"title":"Volcano Types","image_title":"Volcano Types","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1714","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/volcano_types.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1714:_Volcano_Types","transcript":"[Twelve drawings in four rows of different \"volcano\" types, the first four real, and some not even volcanoes of any sort, real or fake. Below each panel is a caption with the name of the drawn volcano. Some of the volcanoes have labels or sound written inside the panel. Each of the volcanoes has a baseline for the ground going straight a short distance over the bottom of each panel. All 11 volcanoes lie on top of this line, but some show the inside of the volcano going further into the ground.]\n[Standard cone shaped volcano, with straight sides sloping up to a triangular shape, but with the tip of the cone cut off to form the central jagged edged crater. White smoke rises straight up and then drifts to the left forming three separate clouds.] Cinder Cone\n[Flat rounded shaped volcano, as a part of a circle. There is not a real crater visible but from the center a thin plume of smoke rises up, drift drifts to the left and forms a small white cloud.] Shield Volcano\n[This is the largest volcano. The tip of this volcano is similar to the first volcano, but with more uneven slopes and a bit smaller. The tip is clearly separated from the bottom section by a thin jagged line, and below the sides of the volcano decreases their slope, so they are less steep than the tip. Black smoke rises straight up from the crater and then drifts to the left in four thin lines.] Stratovolcano\n[A wide volcano spans the entire panel, with a large central crater, with a bottom baseline far above the ground level. Just left of the middle of this crater is a standard smaller volcano cone, very similar to the shape of the tip in the previous panel. Even the smoke from this cones small crater is similar to the previous panels.] Somma Volcano\n[The central part of this volcano is the same shape as the previous panel. This could be a zoom out, revealing that the large crater, is at the center on an even larger crater, which again is at the center of a crater that spans the panel. A plume of black smoke rises from the centeral cones crater, and drifts left as five white clouds.] Metasomma Volcano\n[A perfect cone-shape, triangular and steep, with checkered ice cone waffle texture, even with a line indicating where the waffle has been a folded. It looks like a road up the volcano. Black smoke drift up from the sharp tip, no crater, and drifts left forming a small cloud separated from the rest of the smoke lines.] Waffle Cone\n[Standard cone as in the first, but zoomed in so it fills the panel from left to right. The volcano's top has been cut much further down leaving a wide crater from which lava is pouring down the sides in large rivers of different width and length. To the left one long river has almost reached the ground. Cueball is running down the left side, and Megan is running after another Cueball with his arms up on the right side. There is a label with an arrow pointing to the lava:] Label: Baking soda and vinegar Science Fair Cone\n[Standard cone like the previous, but with more jagged sloped and crater. This volcano erupts with a large explosion with fire and smoke coming out in all directions above the crater. A large sound is written above the explosion:] Sound. Doooooot Doot Cone\n[This is not a volcano, but the inverse, a cone down into the ground, the ground level no above the center of the panel. The slope down into this cone hole is straight, the ground above is more jagged. At the bottom of the hole sits a small animal with six legs and an open mouth piece sticking up out of the hole. Its fat body is hidden under the ground along with its legs.] Antlion\n[Standard volcano cone like the previous volcano. It erupts and the central part shows how the erupting material comes up from below ground level (below the line at the bottom in which the cone it self stands). The erupting material is white rocks on black background. At the top several rocks is blown out of the crater top. The sides of the volcano is filled with blobs small and large, and stones rolling down the sides. There are two labels, each with two arrows. The first labels arrows points to the side of the volcano, the second labels arrows points to the erupting material inside and outside the volcano:] First label: Lava Second label: Solid rocks Inverse Volcano\n[Standard cone like the doot cone, with a crater that bends down in the middle. From this crater eight white ghosts with two black eyes are rising, like the smoke, drifting left. The highest ghost is just reaching the edge at the top left of the panel. The lowest ghost is still inside the crater with its wavy lower parts.] Ghost Vent\n[A standard cone like the doot cone. At the top there is lave over the outer edges, some of it running down the side. The inside of the volcano has been drawn like in the inverse volcano, so it is clear that the magma inside the volcano comes up from below ground level (below the line at the bottom in which the cone it self stands). There are two labels that contradicts the description above. The top label outside the volcano points to the lava with an arrow, and the bottom label inside the volcano points to the magma:] Top label: Magma Bottom label: Lava Pedant's Bane\n","explanation":"This comic presents a table of 12 different types of volcano. Split into 3 rows, the first 4 are authentic types of volcano; while the remaining 8 are parodies, one not even trying to represent a volcano but shows a real animal in its inverted trap cone.\nVolcanoes have featured in many xkcd comics, most prominently in the left part of the world (the Lord of the Rings section) of 1608: Hoverboard . This comic's volcano looks like it could soon turn into a Somma volcano.\nThe title text refers to a famous scene in Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi where Jabba the Hutt intends to feed Luke Skywalker to the sarlacc , an underground creature that builds a huge funnel trap similar to that of an antlion. Jabba's distinctive sail barge features prominently in that scene, and when Randall comes upon an antlion he can't help himself starting to build a scale model next to the antlion's inverted cone. Given how small antlions are, this will be very difficult to do, see for instance 878: Model Rail .\n[Twelve drawings in four rows of different \"volcano\" types, the first four real, and some not even volcanoes of any sort, real or fake. Below each panel is a caption with the name of the drawn volcano. Some of the volcanoes have labels or sound written inside the panel. Each of the volcanoes has a baseline for the ground going straight a short distance over the bottom of each panel. All 11 volcanoes lie on top of this line, but some show the inside of the volcano going further into the ground.]\n[Standard cone shaped volcano, with straight sides sloping up to a triangular shape, but with the tip of the cone cut off to form the central jagged edged crater. White smoke rises straight up and then drifts to the left forming three separate clouds.] Cinder Cone\n[Flat rounded shaped volcano, as a part of a circle. There is not a real crater visible but from the center a thin plume of smoke rises up, drift drifts to the left and forms a small white cloud.] Shield Volcano\n[This is the largest volcano. The tip of this volcano is similar to the first volcano, but with more uneven slopes and a bit smaller. The tip is clearly separated from the bottom section by a thin jagged line, and below the sides of the volcano decreases their slope, so they are less steep than the tip. Black smoke rises straight up from the crater and then drifts to the left in four thin lines.] Stratovolcano\n[A wide volcano spans the entire panel, with a large central crater, with a bottom baseline far above the ground level. Just left of the middle of this crater is a standard smaller volcano cone, very similar to the shape of the tip in the previous panel. Even the smoke from this cones small crater is similar to the previous panels.] Somma Volcano\n[The central part of this volcano is the same shape as the previous panel. This could be a zoom out, revealing that the large crater, is at the center on an even larger crater, which again is at the center of a crater that spans the panel. A plume of black smoke rises from the centeral cones crater, and drifts left as five white clouds.] Metasomma Volcano\n[A perfect cone-shape, triangular and steep, with checkered ice cone waffle texture, even with a line indicating where the waffle has been a folded. It looks like a road up the volcano. Black smoke drift up from the sharp tip, no crater, and drifts left forming a small cloud separated from the rest of the smoke lines.] Waffle Cone\n[Standard cone as in the first, but zoomed in so it fills the panel from left to right. The volcano's top has been cut much further down leaving a wide crater from which lava is pouring down the sides in large rivers of different width and length. To the left one long river has almost reached the ground. Cueball is running down the left side, and Megan is running after another Cueball with his arms up on the right side. There is a label with an arrow pointing to the lava:] Label: Baking soda and vinegar Science Fair Cone\n[Standard cone like the previous, but with more jagged sloped and crater. This volcano erupts with a large explosion with fire and smoke coming out in all directions above the crater. A large sound is written above the explosion:] Sound. Doooooot Doot Cone\n[This is not a volcano, but the inverse, a cone down into the ground, the ground level no above the center of the panel. The slope down into this cone hole is straight, the ground above is more jagged. At the bottom of the hole sits a small animal with six legs and an open mouth piece sticking up out of the hole. Its fat body is hidden under the ground along with its legs.] Antlion\n[Standard volcano cone like the previous volcano. It erupts and the central part shows how the erupting material comes up from below ground level (below the line at the bottom in which the cone it self stands). The erupting material is white rocks on black background. At the top several rocks is blown out of the crater top. The sides of the volcano is filled with blobs small and large, and stones rolling down the sides. There are two labels, each with two arrows. The first labels arrows points to the side of the volcano, the second labels arrows points to the erupting material inside and outside the volcano:] First label: Lava Second label: Solid rocks Inverse Volcano\n[Standard cone like the doot cone, with a crater that bends down in the middle. From this crater eight white ghosts with two black eyes are rising, like the smoke, drifting left. The highest ghost is just reaching the edge at the top left of the panel. The lowest ghost is still inside the crater with its wavy lower parts.] Ghost Vent\n[A standard cone like the doot cone. At the top there is lave over the outer edges, some of it running down the side. The inside of the volcano has been drawn like in the inverse volcano, so it is clear that the magma inside the volcano comes up from below ground level (below the line at the bottom in which the cone it self stands). There are two labels that contradicts the description above. The top label outside the volcano points to the lava with an arrow, and the bottom label inside the volcano points to the magma:] Top label: Magma Bottom label: Lava Pedant's Bane\n"}
{"id":1715,"title":"Household Tips","image_title":"Household Tips","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1715","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/household_tips.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1715:_Household_Tips","transcript":"[Cueball is standing outside a bathtub with the shower curtains partly drawn aside hanging outside the tub. The shower head is dripping water as Cueball reaches in turning the closest of the two taps. Below these there is a faucet. There is water on the floor at the bottom of the tub and a pool of water behind Cueball.] Cueball: Hi everyone! I'm back with more household tips. To conserve water, try turning off your shower before you leave home.\n[Cueball is holding a bucket and pours water out of it to the right. The water still hangs in the air over a small fire with four flames on the floor. A similar fire is behind him to the left, except it seems thre is a burning item in this fire, and a single flame is on the floor between that and Cueball. A smoke detector (off-panel) goes off in the background as indicated with lines and sounds.] Cueball: Sick of changing those smoke detector batteries? Eliminate any fires in your house and the batteries can last for months or years! Smoke detector (off panel): Beep beep beep\n[A frame-less panel shows a a toilet with the toilet seat up and also the lid has been removed from the cistern at the top. It is hanging in the air above and behind the cistern. There is an X with an arrow pointing towards the cistern and a checkmark with an arrow pointing towards the toilet bowl.] Cueball (off-panel): Tired of clogged toilets? Try leaving the lid on the upper chamber and use only the lower bowl! X \u2714\n[Cueball holding a hand up is standing next to an open window where the bottom part has been slid almost up to the top.] Fresh air doesn't have to be expensive. Many windows can be slid up to create a temporary hole without the usual cost and cleanup!\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time with a series of household tips. The comic is a continuation of 1567: Kitchen Tips , which had four kitchen tips and then a household tip in the title text.\nThe comic shows Cueball explaining many things one should already know (and are likely already doing without needing to be told), but telling them like most people usually never do it to comedic effect. Below is a list of the five household tips given:\nTo conserve water, try turning off your shower before leaving home : Implies that the shower would \"normally\" be on at all times, which would be very wasteful. The what if? article \" Faucet Power \" illustrates similar wasteful and destructive water use. This may be a reference to the common recommendation that people should unplug appliances when they are not in use, as opposed to simply turning them off, as some devices have a \"standby\" mode that still uses up a small amount of electricity.\nSick of changing those smoke detector batteries? Eliminate any fires in your house and the batteries may last for months or years! : A smoke detector on standby consumes much less power than one constantly ringing, since standing by only requires that a detection circuit (which draws little current) be on and an LED flashes a few times a minute (which also consumes very little power), while a buzzer used to sound the alarm uses much energy by comparison. The sentence implies that some people have their fire alarms beeping at all times due to their ongoing fires, and then stop up to change the batteries when they stop working. It is surreal that Cueball would have fires just around his house and not be remotely worried.\nOf course, keeping one's house fire-free at (mostly) all times is usually done because of other benefits than just saving on batteries, such as preventing fire and smoke damage to valuable property, infrastructure, and human bodies. [ citation needed ]\nTired of clogged toilets? Try leaving the lid on the upper chamber and use only the lower bowl! : The \"upper chamber\", the toilet's cistern tank, delivers plain water to the lower bowl at speed to flush the latter. As such, the pipes that direct the water down are not wide enough for waste to pass. There is typically a lid on the upper tank, because it isn't intended to be used; however, access is occasionally needed to fix or replace the flushing mechanisms. The lower bowl, as one should be familiar with, is the one intended to receive solid waste or defecation [ citation needed ] and is connected to the plumbing by pipes wide enough for this purpose.\nFresh air doesn't have to be expensive. Many windows can be slid up to create a temporary hole without the usual cost and cleanup! : This suggests that the people he appeals to typically smash a window (or a wall) to get fresh air, hence the clean up and expensive replacement of the window, once enough fresh air has been obtained.\nTo make your shoes feel more comfortable, smell better, and last longer, try taking them off before you shower. : People typically remove all their clothing, including and\/or especially shoes (except perhaps for some lightweight sandals to protect the feet in public showers), when showering, so while it is certainly true that removing one's shoes before showering will allow them to last longer and stink less (since shoes that have little opportunity to dry produce malodorous molds), this is not in any way a novel idea.\n[Cueball is standing outside a bathtub with the shower curtains partly drawn aside hanging outside the tub. The shower head is dripping water as Cueball reaches in turning the closest of the two taps. Below these there is a faucet. There is water on the floor at the bottom of the tub and a pool of water behind Cueball.] Cueball: Hi everyone! I'm back with more household tips. To conserve water, try turning off your shower before you leave home.\n[Cueball is holding a bucket and pours water out of it to the right. The water still hangs in the air over a small fire with four flames on the floor. A similar fire is behind him to the left, except it seems thre is a burning item in this fire, and a single flame is on the floor between that and Cueball. A smoke detector (off-panel) goes off in the background as indicated with lines and sounds.] Cueball: Sick of changing those smoke detector batteries? Eliminate any fires in your house and the batteries can last for months or years! Smoke detector (off panel): Beep beep beep\n[A frame-less panel shows a a toilet with the toilet seat up and also the lid has been removed from the cistern at the top. It is hanging in the air above and behind the cistern. There is an X with an arrow pointing towards the cistern and a checkmark with an arrow pointing towards the toilet bowl.] Cueball (off-panel): Tired of clogged toilets? Try leaving the lid on the upper chamber and use only the lower bowl! X \u2714\n[Cueball holding a hand up is standing next to an open window where the bottom part has been slid almost up to the top.] Fresh air doesn't have to be expensive. Many windows can be slid up to create a temporary hole without the usual cost and cleanup!\n"}
{"id":1716,"title":"Time Travel Thesis","image_title":"Time Travel Thesis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1716","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/time_travel_thesis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1716:_Time_Travel_Thesis","transcript":"[Cueball is facing Megan, talking to her.] Cueball: I've been reading about time travel. Megan: Cool! I did my thesis on time travel!\n[Cueball is now gesturing toward Megan. An electrical charge of some sort is shown occurring outside the panel in the bottom right corner behind Megan.] Cueball: Nice! So you know about closed timelike curves? Megan: Yup. Thesis. Cueball: Apparently wormholes can use exotic matter to\u2013 Megan: I know. Like I said\u2013 Charge: Bzzzt!\n[Megan has turned away from Cueball to the right. Megan from the future, wearing sunglasses, a headset and a machine strapped to her back has entered the frame from the right where the charge appeared.] Future-Megan: You can skip this conversation. It doesn't turn out to be important. Megan: Oh, thank God.\n[Cueball is standing alone, the two Megans have left the panel.]\n","explanation":"Cueball has apparently been reading about time travel . He tells Megan about this, and Megan excitedly remarks that she did her college thesis on time travel which basically means that she is supposed to know a lot more about time travel than a guy who has just been \"reading\" about it.\nCueball, however, continues to ask her if she knows basic facts about time travel (like closed timelike curves , wormholes and exotic matter ), like he is investigating if he has discovered facets about it that she would have overlooked while writing a thesis about it. Megan keeps trying to say that since she wrote a Time Travel Thesis , (hence the title of the comic), she already knows all of this and much, much more, and she is obviously getting frustrated by Cueball's attempts to impress her with his \"knowledge\".\nAt this point Megan's future-self arrives with a Bzzzzt , having used time travel to arrive at this exact moment in time. It seem she has continued her research and has successfully managed to make a time machine.\nThe reason she arrives is only to tell her younger self that this conversation with Cueball doesn't go anywhere and isn't important, and so present-Megan can leave and not waste her time anymore. Up till then, Megan was presumably reluctant to break off a conversation on the topic of time travel, since the conversation could potentially have improved, or perhaps because he at least had read about time travel which is a subject she would have a clear interest in since she wrote a thesis on it. But once the conversation began to run off track, it came as a relief to know that she could quit without the risk of missing out on anything important. Also, since Megan took the effort to time travel back to this exact moment, that must mean the conversation was so boring and uneventful she kept regretting having this conversation even far into the future to the point where she remembers it as one of the moments that need to be changed with her acquired time travel abilities.\nAnd then she just walks away with her future-self leaving Cueball hanging in the last panel, having invented a completely new way to get out of useless\/boring conversations.\nAlternatively, future-Megan just makes an excuse to haul present-Megan off in order to prevent the latter from disclosing some details of time travel science to Cueball, which could have unintended consequences. However, using very advanced technology, or even violating physics law, for very mundane ends is very common in xkcd, so using time travel to prevent useless conversation is not surprising from Megan.\nIn either case, future-Megan finished this conversation before inventing time travel, and thus knows this conversation's outcome. So by coming back, she now changes her own (and Cueball's) future. Of course the general implications of being able to travel like this are enormous, and the paradoxes arising from such a possibility are endless, the most pressing (at the moment) being the grandfather paradox , where a time traveler creates circumstances that negate their existence (such as killing their own grandfather), in this case, Older Megan going back in time to stop Younger Megan from finishing this conversation, who will eventually become Older Megan but with no reason to go back to tell Younger Megan to stop this boring conversation. It is worth noting, however, that the comic does not inherently cause a paradox: so long as the Megan who didn't finish the conversation stills travels back in time with the knowledge that the conversation needed to be stopped and still saves her younger self from wasting her time, a time loop can be logically sustained. (It is also worth noting that a \"Mobius\" time loop is also perfectly possible, the grandfather paradox isn't a paradox if quantum entanglement is taken into account - something Megan would no doubt know)\nIt is possible that Randall may have had some conversations like this, where after having spent a lot of time getting nothing out of it himself, would have wished his future self had come back to tell him to just leave the conversation now.\nIn the title text present-Megan asks future-Megan about her futuristic googles and what they are for, presumably assuming they are needed for the time travel (maybe it is the backpack?). People from the future wearing weird clothing, often involving eyewear of some sort is a trope in Science-Fiction. Movies like Back to the Future Part II which tried to predict the fashion of 2015 back in 1989 didn't get it right, so this might be a commentary on those movies. However it turns out it's just some old and broken Google Glass . The only reason future Megan wears these is that she attended a party at the club that had a 2010's night theme. The fact that the Google Glass is broken and from 2010 alludes to Randall believing that the project was a fad that and that it will never pan out, even in the future. Indeed that seems to be the case. It seems generally that Randall is no fan of Google Glass, which was also shown earlier in 1251: Anti-Glass and later again in 1304: Glass Trolling . Google Glass has become a recurring theme in xkcd.\nThis is an indication of how far from the future she has traveled, as Google Glass was first released in the 2010s. It is not clear whether she is wearing Google Glass because it became popular in the 2010s or because it was an esoteric piece of hardware that people would readily associate with the 2010s. Also a 90s party may be thrown today, but not a 2000s party. So it is safe to assume that Megan is at least from the 2030s. Also people attending retro dress-up parties frequently make mistakes and do not dress up exactly in-style, creating some anachronisms, especially if they dress up like they did many years ago.\n[Cueball is facing Megan, talking to her.] Cueball: I've been reading about time travel. Megan: Cool! I did my thesis on time travel!\n[Cueball is now gesturing toward Megan. An electrical charge of some sort is shown occurring outside the panel in the bottom right corner behind Megan.] Cueball: Nice! So you know about closed timelike curves? Megan: Yup. Thesis. Cueball: Apparently wormholes can use exotic matter to\u2013 Megan: I know. Like I said\u2013 Charge: Bzzzt!\n[Megan has turned away from Cueball to the right. Megan from the future, wearing sunglasses, a headset and a machine strapped to her back has entered the frame from the right where the charge appeared.] Future-Megan: You can skip this conversation. It doesn't turn out to be important. Megan: Oh, thank God.\n[Cueball is standing alone, the two Megans have left the panel.]\n"}
{"id":1717,"title":"Pyramid Honey","image_title":"Pyramid Honey","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1717","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pyramid_honey.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1717:_Pyramid_Honey","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Apparently honey has an infinite shelf life. They just found jars of it in the pyramids, still good. Megan: You know, I've heard that, and I don't think it's true.\n[Black hat enters.] Cueball: Really? Smithsonian magazine confirmed it. Megan: Believe it or not, I think their source is wrong. Black Hat: I believe you.\n[Megan has turned to Black Hat raising her hands.] Megan: See I read about the archaeologists who- Black Hat: I'm convinced. Gonna go to tell the internet.\n[Black Hat moved closer to Megan and Cueball.] Megan: Wait, are you sure? Let me explain why I- Black Hat: Don't need it. I've heard enough.\n[Zoom-in on Black Hat's head.] Black Hat: I've been looking for a weird hill to die on, and all the real ones are too far from my house. Black Hat: So this is mine. I'm now a pyramid honey truther.\n[Zoom back out. Black Hat starts walking left, pointing a finger up. Cueball and Megan turn to look after him.] Black Hat: Time to start a Facebook group and post a bunch of all-caps comments everywhere. Cueball: This could have gone better. Megan: Oh well.\n","explanation":"Bee honey is a food item with natural antimicrobial properties. It can remain unspoiled for a person's entire lifetime, making it practically nonperishable for ordinary consumers. It is frequently claimed that archaeologists have found jars of honey that have been well-preserved for thousands of years in ancient tombs, often those found in Egyptian pyramids , hence the title Pyramid Honey . The claims are generally assertions that may point to other similar assertions as supporting evidence but do not provide specific details, such as the identity of the actual tombs where such jars have been found, or the names of the archaeologists who have affirmed finding such jars. Repeated encounters with the assertion lead some people to claim that honey's shelf life is \"infinite\", which is a much stronger claim which would not necessarily be supported by the assertion even assuming it is true.\nIn the comic, Cueball tells Megan about an article in Smithsonian Magazine (presumably this one ) that claims honey has an infinite shelf life. The article links to a book that makes the assertion of such findings but does not provide factual support of the findings. Megan thinks the source for this article, and others that covered the subject, is wrong and wants to refute them all. She tells Cueball Believe it or not which Black Hat hears and he immediately states that he believes her, and is convinced without hearing any arguments from Megan. He then decides to begin a Facebook page so he can tell the Internet without giving Megan a chance to explain any further.\n\"A hill to die on\" is a phrase from Ernest Hemingway's 1940 novel \" For Whom the Bell Tolls \", about an American who volunteers in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War to fight fascism , who ends up wounded and alone, about to ambush the enemy to give his comrades a chance to escape; \"a weird hill to die on\" would thus mean a weird cause, if not a just one, to fight for to the bitter end. This expression is also the subject of 2247: Weird Hill . Black Hat asserts that he needs such a cause because the \"real\" weird hills are too far from his house, humorously implying he would be equally satisfied with a literal weird hill.\nBlack Hat's actions are clearly premature since he has not heard any evidence to back up the claim and does not understand the nuances of Megan's position. Cueball states that it could have gone better, whereas Megan seems to be resigned to it, perhaps as it notionally supports her (aborted) argument and it's at least a short-term 'win' that she won't fuss over the details of.\nPresumably, the best Black Hat can do would be to parrot what he has heard from Megan, without any understanding or critical thinking on his part. Due to his lack of understanding, he may even interject his own ideas (ones Megan never believed nor stated) into his posts. These are all consistent with him calling himself \"pyramid honey truther\". The word truther refers to people who reject established facts and instead choose to believe in conspiracies, like people who claim the moon landings never happened , or believe the US government is behind the 9\/11 attacks . While a few conspiracy theories turn out to be true, most are easily proved to be fake, but this does not stop people from believing in them anyway, just like the two mentioned here, which are not easily dismissed by believers. This turns Megan, who likely has a reasonable and well-justified position, unwillingly into the source of conspiracy theories.\nAlternatively, he only does this to troll Megan (and Cueball), and everyone else that reads his Facebook page, just because he knows they will get annoyed. And also to state that this is an unimportant subject (a weird hill to die on) to make such a fuss over. No one would wish to eat that honey, anyway, having been abandoned to time for that long. He may see this as a completely uninteresting subject and thus makes fun of Megan with his statements. This would also be more in line with his usual behavior.\nIt is also possible that Black Hat is simply mocking conspiracy theorists' obsessions with factually incorrect ideas, comparably to what may be the case in Secretary: Part 3 .\nThe title text refers to the Eye of Providence , a symbol of an eye at the top of a pyramid, found on US currency and often associated with conspiracy theories of the Illuminati . Black Hat again refers to the pyramid honey found under the pyramids and calls it a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top . This usually means that the politicians (or the government agencies) ruling the country know about it, but keep it a secret from the public. But in this case, he mixes up terms and says it goes to the top of the pyramid (from the bottom), to where the giant eye is. As promised he also writes four words in all capital letters, shouting out the TRUTH!\nThis comic is likely a satire of the stereotypical internet mindset and plays up the frequent confusion between legitimate scientific skepticism, where unsupported claims are rejected, and conspiracy-theory faux-skepticism, where legitimate evidence is rejected because it does not support a specific viewpoint.\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Apparently honey has an infinite shelf life. They just found jars of it in the pyramids, still good. Megan: You know, I've heard that, and I don't think it's true.\n[Black hat enters.] Cueball: Really? Smithsonian magazine confirmed it. Megan: Believe it or not, I think their source is wrong. Black Hat: I believe you.\n[Megan has turned to Black Hat raising her hands.] Megan: See I read about the archaeologists who- Black Hat: I'm convinced. Gonna go to tell the internet.\n[Black Hat moved closer to Megan and Cueball.] Megan: Wait, are you sure? Let me explain why I- Black Hat: Don't need it. I've heard enough.\n[Zoom-in on Black Hat's head.] Black Hat: I've been looking for a weird hill to die on, and all the real ones are too far from my house. Black Hat: So this is mine. I'm now a pyramid honey truther.\n[Zoom back out. Black Hat starts walking left, pointing a finger up. Cueball and Megan turn to look after him.] Black Hat: Time to start a Facebook group and post a bunch of all-caps comments everywhere. Cueball: This could have gone better. Megan: Oh well.\n"}
{"id":1718,"title":"Backups","image_title":"Backups","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1718","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/backups.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1718:_Backups","transcript":"[Cueball] is sitting in an office chair at his desk, working on his laptop.] Cueball: Wait. My laptop is backing up some folders to this server...\n[Cueball scratches his chin in thought.] Cueball: ...Which is backing up its archives to that server... Cueball: ...And that server is syncing certain folders over to my laptop...\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball clicks on his laptop keyboard.] Click click click\n[Cueball is back to working normally on his laptop. A voice speaks to him from off-panel as indicated with a starburst at the right frame.] Cueball: ...But the exponential growth is slightly slower than Moore's law, so whatever. Off-panel voice: Oh my God. Off-panel voice: You are why we can't have nice things.\n","explanation":"On his laptop, Cueball explores a cyclic path along which his files are being copied from storage to storage. His laptop (presumably the one he is on) is sending its files to a server, which sends its files to another server, which in turn syncs back a certain selection of files to his laptop. Cueball determines that this setup leads to an exponential growth, implying that each node in the cycle simply copies files over to the next without any effort to avoid duplicates. Indeed, each time a set of files completes a full cycle, duplicates of the same files are propagated.\nMoore's Law is an observation in computer engineering (made by engineer Gordon Moore in 1965) that states that the number of transistors we can fit in a chip will double approximately every two years. Cueball, who was rather alarmed, calms down when he realizes that the exponential growth of his backup is slower than that of Moore's Law. He reasons that as long as he keeps at the forefront of information storage, he will never run out of room. Assuming available disk capacity is proportional to number of transistors (this is roughly true for solid-state disks) or otherwise keeps pace with Moore's Law, this would imply it takes more than two years for his files to completely propagate through two servers and back to his laptop enough times to double in size (implying either an extremely slow transfer or an extremely weird backup system).\nThe phrase \"[this is] why we can't have nice things\" is often used in response to incidents where someone abuses a well-meaning feature, with the abuse ultimately wiping out any benefits the feature was supposed to bring. In the comic, the person off-screen is commenting on the fact that Cueball is not using advances in storage capacity in a responsible manner. That is, rather than using the increased capacity to store more useful information, he is simply using it as a workaround to avoid having to make his backup strategy more efficient.\nThis concept is further expanded upon in the title text when somebody, presumably the off-screen speaker, notes that Cueball may be better off taking fewer backups in the hopes of losing some data. Typically backups are taken in the hopes of not losing programs and data. However, if the inefficient backup solution presented is representative of the other things Cueball has created, it may be better to have it all be lost and in effect force it to be re-created in a hopefully superior way.\nThere are some similarities to the Cueball who owns the computer in the 1700: New Bug and maybe also to the Code Quality series: 1513: Code Quality and 1695: Code Quality 2 , where Cueball speaks with Ponytail .\nPoor backup strategies are referenced in 1360: Old Files\n[Cueball] is sitting in an office chair at his desk, working on his laptop.] Cueball: Wait. My laptop is backing up some folders to this server...\n[Cueball scratches his chin in thought.] Cueball: ...Which is backing up its archives to that server... Cueball: ...And that server is syncing certain folders over to my laptop...\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball clicks on his laptop keyboard.] Click click click\n[Cueball is back to working normally on his laptop. A voice speaks to him from off-panel as indicated with a starburst at the right frame.] Cueball: ...But the exponential growth is slightly slower than Moore's law, so whatever. Off-panel voice: Oh my God. Off-panel voice: You are why we can't have nice things.\n"}
{"id":1719,"title":"Superzoom","image_title":"Superzoom","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1719","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/superzoom.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1719:_Superzoom","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are walking right. Cueball is looking down at a camera with a long lens he is holding in both hands.] Cueball: I love these superzoom cameras. For a few hundred dollars you can take pictures of Moon craters and Jupiter's clouds.\n[They stop, White Hat looks up in the air while Cueball does the same but through the camera he is holding up to his eye while taking pictures. The camera lens is further zoomed out and is clicking.] Cueball: And birds! See that speck up there? *Click* Cueball: Peregrine falcon! *Click* Cueball: It's banded, too. Want the number?\n[White Hat looks even further up as Cueball turns left and point the even further zoomed camera almost straight up while taking photos.] Cueball: And see that plane? *Click* Cueball: 787 Dreamliner *Click* Cueball: Japan Airlines. *Click* Cueball: Registration is\u2014\n[White Hat looks back down on Cueball who has turned to the right holding the fully out-zoomed camera level to the right along the ground.] White Hat: OK, I'm sold\u2014I want one. *Click* Cueball: They're in stock at the place on Union Road. *Click* Cueball: Hey, Kevin's working today! He's great.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is showing off his new superzoom camera to White Hat . These are cameras with large zoom lenses, often 25\u00d7 or higher magnification. He is very excited and starts by exclaiming how they can take detailed photos of the craters on the Moon , and (on better models) relatively large photos of Jupiter even with a resolution so individual clouds can be seen. (See examples of zoom on these objects here and here without cloud resolution though, but with Jupiter's four large moons and Saturn's rings .)\nHe then spots a bird (which is just a speck in the sky) and uses the superzoom for birdwatching , which is a popular use for these cameras. He can see that it's a peregrine falcon and that it has been banded (ringed) and he can even read the number on the band (later it seems he has more trouble locating birds with his camera in 1826: Birdwatching ). He then spots an airplane and having taken a picture of it, he can tell that it is a 787 Dreamliner from Japan Airlines , and he can even make out the registration number. All this is possible , with a Nikon Coolpix P900 , which may not be much larger than the one Cueball stands with here, with an extremely long lens, and at the time of this comics release that type of camera could be bought at Amazon for less than $600. If that is within the limit Cueball gives of a few hundred dollars can be debated ... A SX-60, refurbished with optical zoom currently sells for $379. Its predecessor, the SX-50 sold, refurbished, for less than $200 until going out of stock.\nNote that before each comment he has taken a picture, presumably zooming further in after each photo of each new object, zooming out again before beginning with the next object.\nFinally, White Hat exclaims that he is sold and states that he also want a superzoom camera like Cueball's. Cueball then points the camera down the street takes a picture and tells White Hat that the shop on Union Road has these camera in stock, indicating that he can see this inside the store (or in their window). He then takes another image and is able to make out not only the worker Kevin inside, he also recognizes him and (as mentioned in the title text after taking yet a further zoomed in picture) notice a stain on Kevin's shirt. He seems to like Kevin and asks White Hat to tell Kevin about the stain when he goes there to buy a superzoom camera. (This was the first time the name Kevin was used in xkcd for a fictive person, see more in this trivia ).\nEven with the ability of these cameras, it would be difficult for Cueball to be able to make out a specific worker inside the store, but if he is standing near a window it is not impossible, and if he has a stain on his shirt, it is in the same league as spotting a band on a bird in the air. Of course he has to be in a spot where he can see straight to the front of the shop.\nThe last panel and title text is also a remark on how such cameras can be used to spy on people for quite a far distance, which has often been (mis)used by paparazzi photographers taking pictures of famous people (often while almost naked or in a bikini or other bathing clothes). Now everyman gets this disconcerting possibility to spy on their neighbors and others for just a few hundred dollars.\nThere are lenses that can do what Cueball describes about Jupiter's clouds in the comic (e.g., the Canon 5200mm ), but so far not such a small consumer camera as shown in the illustration.\nA couple of other factors that many people may not realize until after they've bought a consumer-level superzoom camera is that a) taking a hand-held picture at maximum zoom is typically rather blurry because the lens is magnifying all vibration and it's impossible to hold the camera steady enough (so a camera tripod would be needed), and b) that the lens' aperture at maximum zoom is typically much smaller than at normal focal lengths, with the result that the shutter time must be several times longer to get proper exposure, compounding the vibration \/ blurry problem. Modern superzoom cameras do have \"image stabilization\", which can mitigate blurriness due to vibration, but extreme telephoto photography is still more challenging than implied in the comic.\nAlso having zoomed so much it is very hard to actually locate a moving plane or bird in the sky while looking at the image shown on the camera. And as shown in the comic the lens is zoomed very much in. Of course this could be done by Cueball after having found the flying object with much less zoom. But still if he loses sight of the bird while fully zoomed in it will be almost impossible to find it again without zooming back out.\nWhite Hat and Cueball have discussed photography before in 1314: Photos .\n[White Hat and Cueball are walking right. Cueball is looking down at a camera with a long lens he is holding in both hands.] Cueball: I love these superzoom cameras. For a few hundred dollars you can take pictures of Moon craters and Jupiter's clouds.\n[They stop, White Hat looks up in the air while Cueball does the same but through the camera he is holding up to his eye while taking pictures. The camera lens is further zoomed out and is clicking.] Cueball: And birds! See that speck up there? *Click* Cueball: Peregrine falcon! *Click* Cueball: It's banded, too. Want the number?\n[White Hat looks even further up as Cueball turns left and point the even further zoomed camera almost straight up while taking photos.] Cueball: And see that plane? *Click* Cueball: 787 Dreamliner *Click* Cueball: Japan Airlines. *Click* Cueball: Registration is\u2014\n[White Hat looks back down on Cueball who has turned to the right holding the fully out-zoomed camera level to the right along the ground.] White Hat: OK, I'm sold\u2014I want one. *Click* Cueball: They're in stock at the place on Union Road. *Click* Cueball: Hey, Kevin's working today! He's great.\n"}
{"id":1720,"title":"Horses","image_title":"Horses","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1720","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/horses.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1720:_Horses","transcript":"[Ponytail walks right with Cueball.] Ponytail: Drunk driving was less of a problem before cars. If you got on your horse drunk and fell asleep, it could just walk home.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail's torso; she holds up a palm to proffer an idea.] Ponytail: And if you tried to ride into a tree, the horse could be like \"No.\" Ponytail: Forget human drivers \u2013 that's the benchmark we should be judging self-driving cars against.\n[The front end of a car, with the bottom of the windshield and the right side mirror just inside the panel is parked before White Hat. He is holding his hand, palm up, out to the left towards the car as he brags about it to Megan and Cueball standing in front of him admiring the car. At the top left of the panel a small frame with a caption is placed over the panels frame:] Soon: White Hat: This baby has 200 horses under the hood and 3.5 in the computer. Megan and Cueball: Ooooh!\n","explanation":"The programming of self-driving cars has been in the news lately, as engineers and philosophers debate what rules the cars should follow in dangerous situations (for instance, what to do when forced to choose between hitting a pedestrian or swerving into oncoming traffic). Ponytail suggests one approach for solving this problem: to think of the car as behaving like a horse, using its own intelligence and ignoring dangerous commands in the interests of self-preservation.\nThe comic begins with Ponytail claiming that in the old days, riding a horse or driving a horse drawn vehicle while drunk was less dangerous than drunk driving today. Given the higher speed and the denser traffic today this might seem plausible. On the other hand, modern cars have seat belts, airbags, and other features designed to save lives when crashes do occur; horses and horse-drawn vehicles lacked these safety features. However, if you do fall asleep on a horse, it will not suddenly walk into a tree or other obstacle, and it may actually just stop walking while you sleep.\nPonytail expands the argument by stating the horse itself will be acting in the interest of its own self-preservation. She finally states that in a comparison of the ability of self-driving cars, we should forget humans, and instead it should be the ability of horses that should be the benchmark that the self-driving cars should be judged against.\nThis segues into a scene in the near future where White Hat is bragging to Cueball and Megan about the features of a car (in order to sell the car to them) by comparing the features to those of horses. Car engines are traditionally measured in horsepower , which (roughly) compares the power output of the engine to that of a horse. White Hat goes a step further, claiming that the car (which is presumably self-driving) has an onboard computer with driving abilities equivalent to 3.5 horses, comparing the car's ability to mitigate for a drunk driver and\/or avoid obstacles to that of a horse. White Hat has been depicted as a salesman before in 1350: Lorenz and similarly earlier in 260: The Glass Necklace .\nThe title text features more comparisons of the car to horses. In the text, Randall states that the car has 240% of a horse's decision-making ability and produces only 30% as much poop as a horse. This statement is absurd because it claims that the self-driving car will be producing poop. It also suggests that even with 3.5 times as much horse-intelligence as a horse, the car may only have 2.4 times the decision-making ability, although the car in the title text could also just be a different car from the one in the comic.\nNote that riding a horse while drunk is in fact still dangerous and illegal in many places (for example, the UK and Ireland ). A badly-driven horse can throw off its owner, trample passersby, fall on bad surfaces, and destroy any wagon or carriage it's pulling. A self-driving car should be able to understand road rules, which a horse will not - which is presumably why the cars in the comic and the title text are both specified as being more intelligent than a horse.\nIn 887: Future Timeline dogs driving cars are mentioned. Self-driving cars is a recurring topic on xkcd. In 1461: Payloads spacecraft mass is measured in horses.\n[Ponytail walks right with Cueball.] Ponytail: Drunk driving was less of a problem before cars. If you got on your horse drunk and fell asleep, it could just walk home.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail's torso; she holds up a palm to proffer an idea.] Ponytail: And if you tried to ride into a tree, the horse could be like \"No.\" Ponytail: Forget human drivers \u2013 that's the benchmark we should be judging self-driving cars against.\n[The front end of a car, with the bottom of the windshield and the right side mirror just inside the panel is parked before White Hat. He is holding his hand, palm up, out to the left towards the car as he brags about it to Megan and Cueball standing in front of him admiring the car. At the top left of the panel a small frame with a caption is placed over the panels frame:] Soon: White Hat: This baby has 200 horses under the hood and 3.5 in the computer. Megan and Cueball: Ooooh!\n"}
{"id":1721,"title":"Business Idea","image_title":"Business Idea","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1721","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/business_idea.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1721:_Business_Idea","transcript":"[Cueball is standing next to a rolled down projector screen holding a hand up towards his off-panel audience, one from the audience speaks. It's is impossible to say if there are more than two persons off-panel, but it's also impossible to say if a person who speaks in one panel also speaks in one of the next, hence the numbering.] Cueball: Thank you all for coming. Cueball: I have an exciting business opportunity to share. Off-panel voice #1: Oh no.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head. An off-panel person speaks twice.] Cueball: Now hear me out- Off-panel voice #2: Your ideas are always the worst. Cueball: No, no, this time it's a good one! I promise. Off-panel voice #2: Uh huh...\n[Front view of the screen with an image of a black gas pump, with the white hose snaking it's way up to the black handle. And arrow points to the middle of the hose where it is at it's highest point before the turn that goes to the handle. Cueball is pointing at the hose with a stick. Two different off-panel persons speaks to him.] Cueball: When someone fills their car with premium gas, some of it is left in the hose, and is dispensed to the next customer even if they've only paid for regular.  If we create a network of- Off-panel voice #3: I'm leaving. Off-panel voice #4: Me too.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball announces he has \"an exciting business opportunity to share\". After hearing discouragement from his off-panel audience, he promises that \"this time it's a good one\", and goes on to explain his plan.\nCueball's plan involves the premise that a small amount of premium gas is left in a fuel pump hose after a car driver fills their car up with premium gas. He states that even if the next customer only pays for regular gas , that they are still getting a small amount of the expensive premium gas. Though he doesn't get a chance to finish the outline for his plan, one can assume he planned to get premium fuel at regular prices, so he could then sell it for profit. After hearing the first part of his plan, two people from the off-panel audience announce they are leaving, clearly and correctly thinking that Cueball's idea is stupid and impractical.\nIn reality, this would be an impossible business venture to execute. While in the United States often the same hose is used for the various octane fuels, the amount of fuel contained in the hose is relatively small (about a third of a gallon , or half a liter ) compared to the amount that is generally purchased, though for motorcycles the ratio is more significant . It is also illegal to resell fuel without the correct licenses, and it would be difficult, bordering on impossible, to have the fuel pump run to just the premium fuel out, and driving to each gas station would use more money to buy more fuel than any money that could be made back. This is not to mention trying to keep track of when someone purchased premium so as to be the next person to use that pump to extract those precious drops.\n1499: Arbitrage implies a similar plan to extract wealth out of a small market inefficiency that, in reality, would be far too onerous to exploit, in this case reselling the free chips offered at some restaurants. The same idea was also used in 1110: Click and Drag where a person takes free drinks to resell . See also the what if? Cost of Pennies regarding why it would not be worth trying these kind of ventures out.\nThe title text is another one of Cueball's fuel-based business ventures, as he says he plans to dig up fuel stations underground fuel storage tanks, to then sell the contents of. Again, illegal\/theft, impractical, don't try it (though it would be much more profitable than his previous plan). The punchline is that a gas station's underground tank is \"inaccessible\" from the outside, just as there are some oil deposits that are inaccessible to traditional oil production techniques because no sufficient natural flow towards a well can be obtained. In the case of oil deposits, high-pressure fluids are pumped into the rock to break it up (\" Hydraulic fracturing \" also known as \"fracking\") and allow the oil to reach the well. Oil tanks, on the other hand, can be made accessible by puncturing them using (presumably) hydraulically powered tools (electrical power is inadvisable in the presence of high-vapor-pressure hydrocarbons due to the significant risk of fire and explosion caused by electrical sparking).\nThe title text of 1662: Jack and Jill also refers to fracking.\nThis comic originally shared name with 827: Business Idea , which was then renamed. There were no other relations between the ideas for the two comics, see Trivia .\n[Cueball is standing next to a rolled down projector screen holding a hand up towards his off-panel audience, one from the audience speaks. It's is impossible to say if there are more than two persons off-panel, but it's also impossible to say if a person who speaks in one panel also speaks in one of the next, hence the numbering.] Cueball: Thank you all for coming. Cueball: I have an exciting business opportunity to share. Off-panel voice #1: Oh no.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head. An off-panel person speaks twice.] Cueball: Now hear me out- Off-panel voice #2: Your ideas are always the worst. Cueball: No, no, this time it's a good one! I promise. Off-panel voice #2: Uh huh...\n[Front view of the screen with an image of a black gas pump, with the white hose snaking it's way up to the black handle. And arrow points to the middle of the hose where it is at it's highest point before the turn that goes to the handle. Cueball is pointing at the hose with a stick. Two different off-panel persons speaks to him.] Cueball: When someone fills their car with premium gas, some of it is left in the hose, and is dispensed to the next customer even if they've only paid for regular.  If we create a network of- Off-panel voice #3: I'm leaving. Off-panel voice #4: Me too.\n"}
{"id":1722,"title":"Debugging","image_title":"Debugging","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1722","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/debugging.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1722:_Debugging","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat are walking, while Cueball holds a hand out while talking.] Cueball: I was trying to figure out why my browser was acting weird.\n[In a frame-less panel they keep in walking, Cueball holds both hands up in front of him.] Cueball: Turns out it wasn't the browser-the issue was with my keyboard driver.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's upper torso as he is holding a finger up.] Cueball: Debugging that led me to a mysterious error message from a system utility...\n[Zoom out as Cueball holds up a miniature sword by the blade in one hand. White Hat turns his head around and looks at it while they keep walking.] Cueball: Anyway, long story short, I found the sword of Martin the Warrior. White Hat: I think at some point there you switched puzzles.\n","explanation":"Cueball is telling White Hat about his attempt at debugging , i.e. the process of finding out what is causing a given (computer) problem, which can become increasingly difficult and convoluted. In this case, Cueball had a problem with his browser . His attempts to solve this problem led him to a problem with the device driver for his keyboard . Chasing that issue, he found an unclear error message from a system utility , and so on.\nCueball decides to \"make a long story short\" by skipping several steps he believes are boring, and he unexpectedly reveals this process has led him to find the \u201c Sword of Martin the Warrior \u201d, a legendary relic from the children's fantasy novel series Redwall . This refers to the fact that a complicated riddled path was devised in the series that would lead to the sword, which is similar to the process of debugging, as it involves following clues to achieve an answer. But apart from that, they are entirely different. [ citation needed ] This is pointed out by White Hat who states that at some point in the process he switched from the puzzle of debugging to the Redwall puzzle of finding Martin's sword. Redwall has been referenced before, most prominently in 370: Redwall ; where Martin and the sword can be seen; but also in 1286: Encryptic and more recently in 1688: Map Age Guide .\nGoogling an error message is a common method used during debugging, often leading to useful information. However, when there are no search results for a given message, it may mean the problem is so obscure that almost nobody had experienced it before. (See also 979: Wisdom of the Ancients about getting only one result.) Or, as the title text hints, it might mean it was a hidden clue to the location of Martin\u2019s sword.\n[Cueball and White Hat are walking, while Cueball holds a hand out while talking.] Cueball: I was trying to figure out why my browser was acting weird.\n[In a frame-less panel they keep in walking, Cueball holds both hands up in front of him.] Cueball: Turns out it wasn't the browser-the issue was with my keyboard driver.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's upper torso as he is holding a finger up.] Cueball: Debugging that led me to a mysterious error message from a system utility...\n[Zoom out as Cueball holds up a miniature sword by the blade in one hand. White Hat turns his head around and looks at it while they keep walking.] Cueball: Anyway, long story short, I found the sword of Martin the Warrior. White Hat: I think at some point there you switched puzzles.\n"}
{"id":1723,"title":"Meteorite Identification","image_title":"Meteorite Identification","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1723","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meteorite_identification.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1723:_Meteorite_Identification","transcript":"[A caption is above a flowchart with only two boxes. The first box is a diamond shaped box with an arrow down to the next rectangular box below. Each box has a text.] How to identify a possible meteorite: Start No, it's not a meteorite.\n","explanation":"Meteorites form when a meteoroid survives entrance through the Earth's atmosphere as a meteor . Thus, they are very rare rocks that come from space, and can stem from broken asteroids , the Moon , and sometimes (very rarely) even from Mars .\nThe flowchart , though facetious, would actually work the vast majority of the time a person picks up a rock and believes it to be a meteorite, since any single rock one finds on the surface of the earth is almost definitely not a meteorite.\nFlowcharts are often used ( in xkcd ) to give the inexperienced a step-by-step process to follow (see a guide to flowcharts here: 518: Flow Charts ). Meteorite identification, however, is very difficult, so the brevity of this flowchart in a way pokes fun at the need for a flowchart to identify meteorites, since laypeople are not experienced enough to confirm that a rock is indeed a meteorite. A similar short flowchart as this has been used recently in 1691: Optimization , and another only two box chart was used in 1195: Flowchart .\nIn the title text Randall mentions that the comic image is a link to the more detailed  (now defunct, mirror here ) Meteorite or meteorwrong? Self-Test Check list flowchart at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis .\nThe authors of those resources notes that they have received many rock samples and photos (or even personal visits) from people claiming to have discovered meteorites and thus they would likely benefit from just providing people the shortcut flowchart from Randall, as a way of saying, \"leave meteorite identification to the professionals.\"\nRandall also mentions in the title text that his favorite part of this real flowchart, which is the part where if anyone saw the \"meteor\" fall then it is 'NOT A METEORITE.' What he most likes about it is that this is not a mistake.\nFirst of all the chance of actually being near a falling meteorite is exceedingly small. From the flowchart was a link to a 64 point long checklist, which basically all ends in \"..., then it's not a meteorite.\" In point 3 is noted the following:\nSince 1900, the numbers of recognized meteorite \"falls\" is about 690 for the whole Earth. That's 6.3 per year. Only 98 of those occurred in the US. That's less than 1 per year. Even when a meteorite is observed to fall, experienced meteorite hunters may find only a few stones when hunting dawn to dusk for a week.\nSecond, meteors that can be seen falling almost definitely cannot be found on the ground immediately after.  Any meteor big enough to glow and be visible while falling all the way to the ground will leave a large impact crater, rather than simply sit on the ground as a rock.  Smaller meteors do not fall fast enough to glow all the way to the ground. Either they will burn up completely (not leaving any meteorite) or they will be slowed down before they burn all the way up (but typically end up much smaller than the original meteoroid). After that they will stop glowing and will brake even further until they reach a terminal velocity due to air resistance. Their small size, and lack of glow, make them practically impossible to follow with the naked eye even in daylight. If a person stands close by the impact location of a meteor it may be possible to hear a swish and a thunk, from when it passes by and then hit the ground. It will then be possible to locate the meteorite, but such a falling stone could also have been dropped from an airplane or by a storm. But in some few cases people have actually heard a real meteor falling and found it afterwards. This is what happened with the 690 events mentioned above. All this is described on How to Identify a Meteorite from The Meteorite Market which is linked in point 48 in the table from Washington University. But they did not see it fall!\nWhat Randall finds so funny about this part of the flowchart is that there are three arrows leading to the question \"Did someone see it fall?\", but from there only a \"Yes\" option is possible, and then this gives the result \"Not a meteorite.\" This indicates that if you have found a rock that has no dark crust or regmaglypts (the options that by saying no takes the user to the question about seeing it fall), then it is not a meteorite, and then the only reason people might still believe it to be a meteorite must be because someone saw it fall and assumed it came from space (rather than more likely scenarios, such as a stone coming loose from a cliff or building, or being dropped by a bird or aircraft).\nIf the rock actually has those thumbprint like impressions on the surface (that scientists call regmaglypts ) then the creator of the flowchart actually asks to see the rock (photo or sample). The other features that are interesting is if it has a dark thin crust (from the melting during entry), but only if it also has either regmaglypts or if it has a lighter color inside than the outer crust.\nSee also 1405: Meteor about how people mistake the words meteorite with meteor. The many misspellings of meteorite is mentioned in point 63 in the table.\n[A caption is above a flowchart with only two boxes. The first box is a diamond shaped box with an arrow down to the next rectangular box below. Each box has a text.] How to identify a possible meteorite: Start No, it's not a meteorite.\n"}
{"id":1724,"title":"Proofs","image_title":"Proofs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1724","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/proofs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1724:_Proofs","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart is standing facing left in front of a whiteboard writing on it. Eleven left aligned lines of writing is shown as unreadable scribbles. A voice interrupts her from off-panel right.] Miss Lenhart: ... Let's assume there exists some function F ( a,b,c ...) which produces the correct answer- Cueball (off-panel): Hang on.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball is sitting on a chair at a desk with a pen in his hand taking notes.] Cueball: This is going to be one of those weird, dark magic proofs, isn't it? I can tell.\n[Miss Lenhart has turned right towards Cueball, who is again speaking off-panel. The white board is also off-panel.] Miss Lenhart: What? No, no, it's a perfectly sensible chain of reasoning. Cueball (off-panel): All right...\n[Miss Lenhart is facing the whiteboard again writing more scribbles behind some of the lines from before (the first line has disappeared). The lines that have more text added are now number three and five (four and six before). Cueball again speaks off-panel.] Miss Lenhart: Now, let's assume that the correct answer will eventually be written on the board at the coordinates ( x, y ). If we\u2014 Cueball (off-panel): I knew it!\n","explanation":"Miss Lenhart is teaching a math class. She begins a proof when one of her students ( Cueball ) interrupts her asking if this is one of those dark-magic (unclear, incomprehensible) proofs. She claims no, but in a matter of seconds Cueball is calling out that he was right.\nThe proof she starts setting up resembles a proof by contradiction . However, after Cueball's interruption Miss Lenhart's proof takes a turn for the absurd: rather than assuming there will be a point in the function that correlates to co-ordinates (x, y), Miss Lenhart assumes that the act of writing numbers on the board will correlate to co-ordinates (x, y).\nA normal proof by contradiction begins by assuming that a particular condition is true; by demonstrating the implications of this assumption, a logical contradiction is reached, thus disproving the initial assumption. One example of a proof by contradiction is the proof that \u221a2 is an irrational number:\nQ.E.D.\nAlternatively, instead of a proof by contradiction the setup could be for a one way function. For example, it is relatively easy to test that a solution to a differential equation is valid but choosing the correct solution to test can seem like black magic to students.\nThe way that Ms Lenhart's proof refers to the act of doing math itself, is characteristic of metamathematical proofs, for example G\u00f6del's incompleteness theorems , which, at first sight, may indeed look like black magic, even if in the end they must be a \"perfectly sensible chain of reasoning\" like the rest of good mathematics. While typical mathematical theorems and their proofs deal with such mathematical objects as numbers, functions, points or lines, the metamathematical theorems treat other theorems as objects of interest. In this way you can propose and prove theorems about possibility of proving other theorems. For example, in 1931 Kurt G\u00f6del was able to prove that any mathematical system based on arithmetics (that is using numbers) has statements that are true, but can be neither proved nor disproved. This kind of metamathematical reasoning is especially useful in set theory , where many statements become impossible to prove or disprove if the axiom of choice is not taken as a part of the axiomatic system.\nUsing a position on the blackboard as a part of the proof is a joke, but it bears a resemblance to Cantor's diagonal argument where a position in a sequence of digits of a real number was a tool in a proof that not all infinite sets have the same cardinality (rough equivalent of the number of elements). This \"diagonal method\" is also often used in metamathematical proofs.\nThe axiom of choice itself states that for every collection of nonempty sets, you can have a function that draws one element from each set of the collection. This axiom, once considered controversial, was added relatively late to the axiomatic set theory, and even contemporary mathematicians still study which theorems really require its inclusion. In the title text the decision of whether to take the axiom of choice is made by a deterministic process, that is a process which future states can be developed with no randomness involved. Determinacy of infinite games is used as a tool in the set theory, however the deterministic process is rather a term of the stochastic processes theory , and the dynamical systems theory , branches of mathematics far from the abstract set theory, which makes the proof even more exotic. The axiom of choice was mentioned earlier in 804: Pumpkin Carving and later in 982: Set Theory , another comic about a math class with a similar theme on how teachers teach their student mathematical proofs.\nAlthough Miss Lenhart did retire a year ago after 1519: Venus , she seems to have returned here for a math course at university level, but continues the trend she finished with in her prior class. A very similar Miss Lenhart comic was later released with 2028: Complex Numbers .\n[Miss Lenhart is standing facing left in front of a whiteboard writing on it. Eleven left aligned lines of writing is shown as unreadable scribbles. A voice interrupts her from off-panel right.] Miss Lenhart: ... Let's assume there exists some function F ( a,b,c ...) which produces the correct answer- Cueball (off-panel): Hang on.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball is sitting on a chair at a desk with a pen in his hand taking notes.] Cueball: This is going to be one of those weird, dark magic proofs, isn't it? I can tell.\n[Miss Lenhart has turned right towards Cueball, who is again speaking off-panel. The white board is also off-panel.] Miss Lenhart: What? No, no, it's a perfectly sensible chain of reasoning. Cueball (off-panel): All right...\n[Miss Lenhart is facing the whiteboard again writing more scribbles behind some of the lines from before (the first line has disappeared). The lines that have more text added are now number three and five (four and six before). Cueball again speaks off-panel.] Miss Lenhart: Now, let's assume that the correct answer will eventually be written on the board at the coordinates ( x, y ). If we\u2014 Cueball (off-panel): I knew it!\n"}
{"id":1725,"title":"Linear Regression","image_title":"Linear Regression","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1725","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/linear_regression.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1725:_Linear_Regression","transcript":"[Two square panels show identical sets of scattered black dots, with only the red additions being different.]\n[The left panel shows a slightly rising red line drawn through the middle of the panel, passing near a few dots but not obviously related to most of them. A red text is below the dots:] R 2 =0.06\n[The right panel shows many of the dots connected by red lines to form a stick figure of a man resembling the constellation Orion, with the hand on the reader's right raised and holding an object. A red text is below the dots:] Rexthor, the Dog-Bearer\n[A caption is below and spanning both panels:] I don't trust linear regressions when it's harder to guess the direction of the correlation from the scatter plot than to find new constellations on it.\n","explanation":"Linear regression is a method for modeling the relationship between multiple variables. In the simplest case, it can be used for two variables wherein the model determines a \" best-fit \" line through a scatter plot of the datasets, together with a coefficient of determination , usually denoted r 2 or R 2 . When only two variables are included in the regression, R 2 is merely the square of the correlation between the two variables. R 2 is a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how well one variable can be used to predict the value of another. A value of 1 means perfect correlation, while a value close to 0 indicates a weak relationship between the variables.\nA constellation is the region of sky containing an asterism ; an asterism is a pattern created by linking the apparent positions of stars as seen in the sky from Earth. Strictly speaking, Randall's \"Rexthor\" is an asterism, although \"constellation\" is used informally in place of \"asterism\" by even seasoned astronomers. Different civilizations have recognized different constellations (the modern IAU, for example, lists 88 \"official\" constellations), and one could create their own constellations by connecting assorted points.\nIn this comic, a set of data has had linear regression and some form of statistical analysis applied to it, indicating that there is low correlation between the two. The data points are so widely scattered that (as noted in the comic) it is easier to connect the data points in a constellation-like pattern than it is to determine whether the correlation is negative or positive (without looking at the trendline, of course). Because of this, Randall suggests we should be suspicious of any conclusions drawn from this data.\nThe comic is somewhat misleading, since the data in the graph actually has an R 2 of 0.02, only a third of what Randall claims.  An example of published research with an R 2 of 0.06 where the association in the graph is noticeable (if not strong) can be found here (figure 2 has r = 0.25 which corresponds to R 2 = 0.06). In addition, it is hard to see the association in the comic's graph because relatively few points are plotted. In a data set with 1000 observations and R 2 = 0.06, any association between the two variables would be quite clear.\nThe lines connecting the stars in this \"constellation\" create a crude illustration of a person with an outstretched arm holding up a dog, which could be a reference to the film Life is Beautiful where a waiter carries a dog on his tray without realizing. The name \"Rexthor the Dog Bearer\" could be a spoof on Thor , a Norse god who wields a hammer. By replacing his hammer with a dog and adding \"Rex\" (an archetypal dog name, but also meaning king as in king of the dinosaurs T-rex), Randall may have created a comical, dog-bearing version of Thor.\nThe 95% confidence interval in statistics is such a range of an estimate, that it is expected to contain the real value (the estimated population parameter) 95% of the time. The confidence interval is a standard method to provide evaluation of the estimation error in statistics. On the right panel the resulting estimate seems to be a drawing, so the 95% confidence interval would be a set of drawings, expected to contain the correct drawing in 95% of samples where it is calculated. According to the title text, the interval in this particular sample also includes a cat and a teapot, so we can only make extremely vague statements in order to maintain 95% confidence.\nThe teapot may be a reference to Russell's teapot , or possibly to the \"teapot\" asterism in the constellation Sagittarius. Alternatively it is just because the \"dog\" actually looks more like a teapot than a dog, and Randall noticed this and added it in the title text. In the latter case, the two first suggestions are just another example on how humans see patterns also where there are none to find, like those of pareidolia mentioned in 1551: Pluto .\n[Two square panels show identical sets of scattered black dots, with only the red additions being different.]\n[The left panel shows a slightly rising red line drawn through the middle of the panel, passing near a few dots but not obviously related to most of them. A red text is below the dots:] R 2 =0.06\n[The right panel shows many of the dots connected by red lines to form a stick figure of a man resembling the constellation Orion, with the hand on the reader's right raised and holding an object. A red text is below the dots:] Rexthor, the Dog-Bearer\n[A caption is below and spanning both panels:] I don't trust linear regressions when it's harder to guess the direction of the correlation from the scatter plot than to find new constellations on it.\n"}
{"id":1726,"title":"Unicode","image_title":"Unicode","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1726","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unicode.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1726:_Unicode","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in a river close to it's right bank, the water reaching up to his thighs. He is holding on to a traffic sign standing towards right. It has a label and an arrow below this pointing to the right bank. With his other arm he is pointing to the left at the advancing water masses. Further up the river is another street sign this sign has an exclamation mark inside a triangle. The water flow is indicated with several lines on the river surface, mainly moving along the river, but around Cueball and the signs there are circular lines. In the distance on the left bank of the river two people are standing and making gestures with raised arms. The left has white hair (could be either sex) and the other is a Cueball-like guy. A third sign is lying on the ground to the left of them face down. Behind them is a slope up to a road with a parked car. The road continues out over a a bridge that crosses the river. The river which passes under it both left and right of a central pillar. At that distance the right bank of the river (and thus the right end of the bridge) is not visible, being outside the panel. On each river bank grass can be seen and on the right bank also a small stone.] Cueball: No, go this way, not- Cueball: Are you even listening!? Cueball: ... Hey! That's not what that area is for! Sign with arrow: Detour Sign with triangle:\u00a0!\n[Caption below the panel:] Watching the Unicode people try to govern the infinite chaos of human language with consistent technical standards is like watching highway engineers try to steer a river using traffic signs.\n","explanation":"Cueball is a highway engineer that has been placing two traffic signs in a river trying in vain to guide the water flow and thus he ends up talking to the water trying to make it take a detour instead of going under the bridge. On the distant bank two other engineers are arguing, with gestures, in presumably a heated manner (probably about where to place a third sign, lying next to them at the the water, to make it behave a certain way)\nAs rivers flow according to the landscape, this plan will not work and the river will continue on its course. Cueball is very frustrated by this and is still trying to make the river obey the traffic laws. The caption lays out the punchline: The comic compares the useless approach of Cueball attempting to divert a flowing, moving river with fixed signs that do nothing, with the Unicode Consortium 's attempt to define the diverse and ever-changing human language with strict technical standards.\nUnicode is a largely successful attempt to have a standard for representing all possible letters, numerals, digits and symbols that make up human writing in all languages.  This includes the roman letters used in this article, characters with modifiers like \u00ea (both with the common characters as well as the modifiers selectable separately), logographic characters like in Chinese, syllabic writing system like Japanese, right-to-left and\/or top-to-bottom writing systems, mathematical symbols and many other writing systems.\nEmoji , one of the trendier and newer Unicode blocks, are also referenced in the title text (see below). The symbols on the signs in the river are real road signs, but interestingly enough they also both exist in Unicode, with the warning sign triangle with an exclamation mark \u26a0 having code (U+26A0) and the black, rightwards arrow \u27a1 having code (U+271A) .  As can be imagined, coping with the wide variety of character sizes, orientations, ways they can be modified, capitalization rules, etc. can get to be very challenging as the Unicode Consortium tries to write rules that accommodate how printed language is actually used. Emoji have become a recurrent theme on xkcd.\nThe title text refers to a proposal to add three dinosaur heads to the official list of emoji.\nThis is likely to stir a glorious internet argument between a half-dozen opposing (and pedantic ) camps that may now be brought together, such as the following:\nSee also this discussion about this comic on the Unicode mailinglist ...\nHighway engineers were also the subject of 253: Highway Engineer Pranks and 781: Ahead Stop .\n[Cueball is standing in a river close to it's right bank, the water reaching up to his thighs. He is holding on to a traffic sign standing towards right. It has a label and an arrow below this pointing to the right bank. With his other arm he is pointing to the left at the advancing water masses. Further up the river is another street sign this sign has an exclamation mark inside a triangle. The water flow is indicated with several lines on the river surface, mainly moving along the river, but around Cueball and the signs there are circular lines. In the distance on the left bank of the river two people are standing and making gestures with raised arms. The left has white hair (could be either sex) and the other is a Cueball-like guy. A third sign is lying on the ground to the left of them face down. Behind them is a slope up to a road with a parked car. The road continues out over a a bridge that crosses the river. The river which passes under it both left and right of a central pillar. At that distance the right bank of the river (and thus the right end of the bridge) is not visible, being outside the panel. On each river bank grass can be seen and on the right bank also a small stone.] Cueball: No, go this way, not- Cueball: Are you even listening!? Cueball: ... Hey! That's not what that area is for! Sign with arrow: Detour Sign with triangle:\u00a0!\n[Caption below the panel:] Watching the Unicode people try to govern the infinite chaos of human language with consistent technical standards is like watching highway engineers try to steer a river using traffic signs.\n"}
{"id":1727,"title":"Number of Computers","image_title":"Number of Computers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1727","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/number_of_computers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1727:_Number_of_Computers","transcript":"[A graph with two red lines. The X-axis is a time-line with eight ticks with every second tick labeled below the axis, ranging from around 1940 to 2030. The Y-axis is a logarithmic count ranging from 1 to 1 billion. There are 12 ticks with the first and then every third tick after that larger than the two ticks in between. All the large ticks are labeled, but only the first two of the small ticks are similarly labeled. Labels are written to the left of the axis. All labels on both axes are written in gray. The first red line is a straight line (thus exponentially growing), starting close to the bottom left corner eventually reaching the upper right edge of the graph. The other red line begins around 1990 and has three straight steps. Each step is labeled with gray text, the last part of the line (after the present 2016), is dotted. Both of the red lines have an arrow pointing to them with a label above the arrow.] Left red line: Number of computers created Right red line: Number of computers destroyed by hurling them into Jupiter Labels on right red line: Galileo probe Galileo orbiter Juno (scheduled) Y-axis: 1 billion 1 million 1,000 100 10 1 X-axis: 1960 1980 2000 2020\n[Caption below the panel:] NASA needs to pick up the pace if they ever want to finish the job.\n","explanation":"This comic shows a semi-log plot with two red lines. The first line shows the increasing rate that computers have been created since the first came around in the 1940s. The graph shows this to occur around 1946. ( The precise date can be discussed but it was around that time that the concept began to be applied to real working machines.) After the first computer, the number of computers created is shown to increase in a roughly straight line, indicating exponential growth . At the time of this comic's release in 2016, the curve has passed 10 billion computers, and its projection into the 2020s predicts that the number of computers will keep rising exponentially for at least 10 years to come.\nThe other plot on this graph represents all the computers destroyed by throwing them into Jupiter . So far this is only true for the computers on two space probes : those on the Galileo orbiter and its probe . The latter's mission was to fly into Jupiter so it went first in 1995; the orbiter went only after it had completed its mission in 2003. That constitutes the first two steps on the graph.\nRecently the Juno space probe entered into orbit (as only the second after Galileo), and that was celebrated with 1703: Juno on xkcd. Juno's main mission has hardly begun yet; as at the time of this comic's release, it is not even in its final orbit. But once its mission is completed, it will also crash into Jupiter thus destroying a third computer. This is shown as the third step, but this section is shown with a dotted line, as the destruction may still fail if NASA loses contact with the probe before giving it the order to deorbit into Jupiter. This is scheduled to occur in 2018. All three steps on the graph fits with these years. (Note the number of computers created is not drawn with a dotted line into the future, probably because Randall believes this continued increase in numbers of computers to be quite certain over the next 10-20 years, whereas the outcome of a space probe mission is never certain, even when the probe is already in orbit and only 1\u00bd years before scheduled deorbit!)\nSpace probes sent to Jupiter are typically scheduled to deorbit and fall into Jupiter's atmosphere. There can be several reasons for this, but one very important reason is to avoid contaminating Jupiter's moons with Earth pathogens , especially the four Galilean moons including Europa which may harbor life . Also the huge gravity well of Jupiter that would have to be overcome for such a probe to leave the planet again makes it impossible to have an orbiting probe return to Earth with samples.\nThe caption below the comic humorously implies that NASA's reasons for causing the probes to deorbit into Jupiter is merely an attempt to destroy all the computers of the world. The caption notes that they are failing horribly, given that they have destroyed only three computers out of more than 10 billion. However, due to the semi-log scale, those three computers appear to have more significance than they actually have. The caption states that NASA really needs to pick up the pace (having only destroyed two since the 1940s, when computers were created), if they wish to actually finish the job of destroying all computers by hurling them into Jupiter. In addition, seeing as there have been many computers destroyed by other means, NASA will never actually catch up, no matter how hard they try, making this statistic even more irrelevant.\nDestroying unwanted objects by hurling them into Jupiter pokes fun at the common science fiction trope of destroying objects by hurling them into the Sun [1] .  Hurling objects into the Sun is in fact extremely difficult because of the need to cancel out the orbital velocity of the earth.  Randall may be referencing calculations ( [2] , see item 11) that show that hurling items into Jupiter requires 38% less energy than hurling them into the Sun.\nThe title text continues the caption by mentioning that in NASA's annual reports they try to make their numbers look better by counting the redundant computer systems on Galileo and its probe, thus doubling the numbers of destroyed computers to four. This of course makes no big difference given the exponential growth of computer production, which is also noted. This indicates that this is a top priority for NASA. That NASA might try to make themselves look better in a report by doubling a number could be realistic, presumably for political reasons or to get better funding.\n[A graph with two red lines. The X-axis is a time-line with eight ticks with every second tick labeled below the axis, ranging from around 1940 to 2030. The Y-axis is a logarithmic count ranging from 1 to 1 billion. There are 12 ticks with the first and then every third tick after that larger than the two ticks in between. All the large ticks are labeled, but only the first two of the small ticks are similarly labeled. Labels are written to the left of the axis. All labels on both axes are written in gray. The first red line is a straight line (thus exponentially growing), starting close to the bottom left corner eventually reaching the upper right edge of the graph. The other red line begins around 1990 and has three straight steps. Each step is labeled with gray text, the last part of the line (after the present 2016), is dotted. Both of the red lines have an arrow pointing to them with a label above the arrow.] Left red line: Number of computers created Right red line: Number of computers destroyed by hurling them into Jupiter Labels on right red line: Galileo probe Galileo orbiter Juno (scheduled) Y-axis: 1 billion 1 million 1,000 100 10 1 X-axis: 1960 1980 2000 2020\n[Caption below the panel:] NASA needs to pick up the pace if they ever want to finish the job.\n"}
{"id":1728,"title":"Cron Mail","image_title":"Cron Mail","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1728","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cron_mail.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1728:_Cron_Mail","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a table in an office chair working on his laptop. Ponytail walks up to him.] Cueball: I've been getting these \"You have new mail\" UNIX notifications for like 15 years, but I've never bothered to figure out what it's talking about.\n[Ponytail has stopped behind Cueball who is typing on his laptop. When Ponytail (and later Cueball) mentions code, the text uses both small and capital letters (as opposed to only capital letters in all other text).] Ponytail: Look in \/var\/mail? Cueball: OK... Cueball: Oh, wow, there's like a gigabyte of stuff from Cron in here.\n[In a frame-less panel Ponytail is facepalming. Cueball is replying from off-panel with a starburst indicating his position.] Ponytail: *Sigh* Ponytail: You should fix your Cron, then point \"MAILTO=\" somewhere you actually see- Cueball (off-panel): Better idea:\n[Same setting as panel 2 but Cueball is visibly typing on the laptop as shown with three small curved lines over his hands on the keyboard.] Cueball: export MAILTO=\/etc\/crontab Cueball: There. Your move, Cron. Ponytail: Wow. Hardball. Cueball: Let's see how important it thinks that mail really is.\n","explanation":"On Unix -like systems, cron is a system utility that runs tasks on a schedule.  This program has been around since the early days of Unix and has not changed much - it is still one of the most widely used functions in modern operating systems.  Many administrative tasks on servers are automated using cron, including monitoring and updates.\nWhen a cron job produces output, cron's default behavior is to send an email to the user account under which the job ran.  However, in most situations, an email address has not been set up for that user, so the email is instead written to a mailbox file.  Most Unix shells will notify the user with a message like \"You have new mail\" when this mailbox file is updated, but if the user doesn't know how to check this mail file, they will likely just ignore the message.\nIn this case, Cueball has been ignoring his mailbox for fifteen years.  When he finally learns where to look, he discovers more than a gigabyte worth of messages from the cron program, the vast majority of which are likely meaningless.  Ponytail says to Cueball \"fix your cron\" (likely meaning he should fix the task that's generating the output so that it doesn't do so), then set a parameter that tells cron to send email to an address he actually checks.  (He could also opt to direct the mails to \/dev\/null , which would discard them, or simply disable the mail in the crontab.)  Cueball, however, interprets the tremendous amount of email as spam and decides to redirect the emails to \/etc\/crontab , the main configuration file that contains all of cron's scheduling information.  He apparently believes that this will either stop the emails or cause cron to spam itself instead.\nIn reality, this will not cause significant problems as the MAILTO environmental variable in cron takes an email address or usernames on the local system and attempts to send emails to them.  It will not write or append output to a local file like \/etc\/crontab .  Thus when cron attempts to email \/etc\/crontab the mail program cron uses will generate an error saying it can't find the user \/etc\/crontab .\nFor example, if you create the following crontab:\ninstalled on a user named me on a system called mycomputer then you will see a new error messages email to you (located in \/var\/mail\/me ) stating it can't send email to a user named \/etc\/crontab and the undelivered email is being returned to the sender.  The error email will look like the following:\nThe title text shows that Cueball is somewhat aware of what cron does, including the fact that it's existed pretty much unchanged for several decades, but he hasn't bothered to really get into understanding it, treating it more as a foe to vanquish rather than as a tool to understand and use.\n[Cueball is sitting at a table in an office chair working on his laptop. Ponytail walks up to him.] Cueball: I've been getting these \"You have new mail\" UNIX notifications for like 15 years, but I've never bothered to figure out what it's talking about.\n[Ponytail has stopped behind Cueball who is typing on his laptop. When Ponytail (and later Cueball) mentions code, the text uses both small and capital letters (as opposed to only capital letters in all other text).] Ponytail: Look in \/var\/mail? Cueball: OK... Cueball: Oh, wow, there's like a gigabyte of stuff from Cron in here.\n[In a frame-less panel Ponytail is facepalming. Cueball is replying from off-panel with a starburst indicating his position.] Ponytail: *Sigh* Ponytail: You should fix your Cron, then point \"MAILTO=\" somewhere you actually see- Cueball (off-panel): Better idea:\n[Same setting as panel 2 but Cueball is visibly typing on the laptop as shown with three small curved lines over his hands on the keyboard.] Cueball: export MAILTO=\/etc\/crontab Cueball: There. Your move, Cron. Ponytail: Wow. Hardball. Cueball: Let's see how important it thinks that mail really is.\n"}
{"id":1729,"title":"Migrating Geese","image_title":"Migrating Geese","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1729","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/migrating_geese.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1729:_Migrating_Geese","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Understanding Migration of Geese\n[20 geese are shown flying in a typical migratory V-formation. As they are shown in silhouette it is not possible to determine if they are seen from above or from below.  They are flying toward the top of the image with the first goose close to the top in the middle of the image.  There is one head goose, and then there are 7 geese in the left arms and 9 geese in the right arm. Behind the left arm there are two stragglers that are not in line with the others, but closer to the middle than those above and not as close to each other as the rest but still flying in the same direction. Finally there is one goose at the bottom right corner flying at a 45 degree angle away from the other to the right. The first goose is flapping its wing, which is also the case with six other geese, no. 4 and 6 in the left and 3, 5 and 6 in the right arm as well as the middle of the two in the rear towards the middle. The rest are soaring with straight wings and all of these look the same except no.  7 in the right arm which has two tails, which both goes ahead of the wings, making it look like a plane with two engines. The head goose and 5 of the 9 geese in the right arm as well as the one bottom right are labelled with and arrow pointing to them from the label. The front goose has the label in front to the left, the other have it in front to the right, except the second last in the arm which has the label inside the V and one flying away which has the label right above it. The two behind and right of the left arm have one label behind them with two arrows from the label pointing at both geese. There is a thick curvy line in front of geese no. 3 to 5 in the left arm. In front of that line is a thinner broken line. In front of this is a label written with the same curvature. There are two areas surrounded by dotted lines. The first one is behind the last of the left arms geese, extending in the same direction for a distance of about two geese. It has a label above and left with and arrow pointing to it. The other area is in the middle of the V forming a loose triangular structure with a label inside.] Head goose:  Head goose (4 th in line to the British throne) Right no. 1: Quarterback Right no. 3: Comptroller Right no. 5: Migration abort goose Right no. 7: Twin-engine model Right no. 8: CIA informant Bottom right corner: Kevin Behind center: Backups In front of left no. 3-5: Shock front Empty area behind left arm: Missing valence geese Empty area in center: Stealth cargo being escorted\n","explanation":"Migrating refers to the changing of a habitat, which happens every year with birds like geese that travel long distances to avoid cold seasons and get back to the food in the summer time. When geese fly to their new habitat, they tend to fly in a very clear V formation . The V formation improves the efficiency of flying birds, particularly over long migratory routes. All the birds except the first fly in the upwash from one of the wingtip vortices of the bird ahead. The upwash assists each bird except for the \"leading\" one in supporting its own weight in flight, saving them up to 20% of the energy needed.\nIt should be noted that geese do have family structures with adult geese in \"alpha\" positions, but not a strict ranking order. An individual's position in formation flights is coincidental and constantly changing, so that the goose at the point of the formation can pull back and rest in the V wings while others \"lead\" the swarm. Popular earlier beliefs about an \"alpha goose\" heading a formation for the entire flight is a myth, easily disproved by watching geese formations in flight.\nThis comic shows such a formation with 20 geese, with several geese and areas in the V formation labeled, giving different roles to the geese and assigning these areas a new meaning. See the table below .\nApart from a \"twin engine\" goose in the bottom right arm of the V the only part of the formation that would not normally be seen is Kevin, who flies off at a 45-degree angle. In that direction there is no aerodynamic help from the other birds, and in the title text the rest of the geese also exclaim, \"Dammit, Kevin\" when he (again?) tells them that he has a great new idea for a migration (maybe referring to the new direction). This is either a reference to the fact that migrating birds manage to consistently arrive in the same general area every year, or to the way that vacations are sometimes suggested (by humans): \"I thought of an idea for a vacation...\" This was only the second time the name Kevin was used in xkcd for a fictive person, see more in this trivia .\n[Caption above the panel:] Understanding Migration of Geese\n[20 geese are shown flying in a typical migratory V-formation. As they are shown in silhouette it is not possible to determine if they are seen from above or from below.  They are flying toward the top of the image with the first goose close to the top in the middle of the image.  There is one head goose, and then there are 7 geese in the left arms and 9 geese in the right arm. Behind the left arm there are two stragglers that are not in line with the others, but closer to the middle than those above and not as close to each other as the rest but still flying in the same direction. Finally there is one goose at the bottom right corner flying at a 45 degree angle away from the other to the right. The first goose is flapping its wing, which is also the case with six other geese, no. 4 and 6 in the left and 3, 5 and 6 in the right arm as well as the middle of the two in the rear towards the middle. The rest are soaring with straight wings and all of these look the same except no.  7 in the right arm which has two tails, which both goes ahead of the wings, making it look like a plane with two engines. The head goose and 5 of the 9 geese in the right arm as well as the one bottom right are labelled with and arrow pointing to them from the label. The front goose has the label in front to the left, the other have it in front to the right, except the second last in the arm which has the label inside the V and one flying away which has the label right above it. The two behind and right of the left arm have one label behind them with two arrows from the label pointing at both geese. There is a thick curvy line in front of geese no. 3 to 5 in the left arm. In front of that line is a thinner broken line. In front of this is a label written with the same curvature. There are two areas surrounded by dotted lines. The first one is behind the last of the left arms geese, extending in the same direction for a distance of about two geese. It has a label above and left with and arrow pointing to it. The other area is in the middle of the V forming a loose triangular structure with a label inside.] Head goose:  Head goose (4 th in line to the British throne) Right no. 1: Quarterback Right no. 3: Comptroller Right no. 5: Migration abort goose Right no. 7: Twin-engine model Right no. 8: CIA informant Bottom right corner: Kevin Behind center: Backups In front of left no. 3-5: Shock front Empty area behind left arm: Missing valence geese Empty area in center: Stealth cargo being escorted\n"}
{"id":1730,"title":"Starshade","image_title":"Starshade","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1730","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/starshade.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1730:_Starshade","transcript":"[Megan and Ponytail are walking.] Megan: Space telescopes could see exoplanets better if they used free-floating opaque discs to block the stars' glare.\n[They stop walking in this zoom in on their heads. Ponytail has turned towards Megan.] Megan: They thought about including one with the Webb telescope, but cut it to save money. Ponytail: Well... does it have to be their disc?\n[In this frame-less panel Megan is left standing as Ponytail turns and walks away.] Megan: What do you mean? Ponytail: Like, if I Kickstart a starshade for them? Megan: Um. Would you at least warn them? Ponytail: Eh. Whatever.\n[Cueball and Hairbun, both wearing headsets, are sitting on one legged stools on either side of a slim desk with two computers screens on top of it. Each are looking at their own screens while typing on a keyboard in front of them. Hairbun is pointing at her screen. A small frame is overlaid on the top of the panels frame with a caption:] NASA, 2018: Cueball: Initiating Webb calibrat- Cueball: Aaaaa ! What the hell is that!? Hairbun: Hey, look, exoplanets!\n","explanation":"Megan and Ponytail are talking about space telescopes in general. Megan says that these telescopes could see exoplanets better by using occulting disks , in the form of free floating opaque discs, that could block out light from the exoplanets' stars, thus enabling the telescopes to see the weak light from the planets when the glare of the stars has been diminished.\nShe continues by explaining that the scientists behind the new James Webb Space Telescope , at the time of the comic scheduled to launch in 2018, thought about including such a disk (a starshade ), but that it was cut for budget reasons . Ponytail asks if it has to be their own disk, and then decides to kickstart a fundraiser to build a starshade. Ponytail is referring to the crowdfunding site Kickstarter , although there is no actual project for a starshade for Webb (or for the New Worlds Mission; see title text explanation) on Kickstarter. Megan asks her to at least warn the scientists if she makes the starshade, but Ponytail just replies \"whatever\".\nThe final panel shows the NASA control center in 2018 when the Webb telescope is being calibrated. It turns out that Ponytail succeeded and did indeed not warn the scientists. Cueball is surprised by the disc -- and possibly by what the disc might have printed on it, given its crowdfunded origins -- but Hairbun immediately notices exoplanets, implying that Ponytail's plan worked.\nNote that the telescope has partners from 20 countries and is being operated not only by NASA but also by European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).\nThe best known space telescope is the Hubble Space Telescope , which was launched back in 1990. The Webb telescope is seen as a successor instrument to Hubble and, because its instruments are designed to work primarily in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, also as a successor to the Spitzer Space Telescope launched in 2003. In addition to having more sensitive sensors and being larger, Webb will also be located near the L2 Earth\u2013Sun Lagrangian point , and thus not in orbit around Earth. This means that it can keep focusing on a specific point for longer times, while Hubble can see a given point for only about half an hour before moving behind Earth again. When operating in the infrared range as the Webb telescope does (from middle infrared to red and orange visible light), it is important to be outside the atmosphere or at least on very high mountains. Another important feature is to keep the temperature constant and very cool. Since the Webb telescope is always in the light of the sun, this is achieved using protection from a large sunshield .\nThe title text mentions the New Worlds Mission . This mission is to find exoplanets (hence the name New Worlds) by applying a starshade to block the light of distant stars, so that the planets around the stars are more visible. All discovered exoplanets so far have been found indirectly and not by direct visual observation. The starshade proposed by the New Worlds Mission is a spacecraft designed to work in tandem with a space telescope (not necessarily just the Webb telescope). It is a large occulter that blocks a star's light. One problem with this concept is that light coming from the target star would diffract around the disc and constructively interfere along the central axis. Thus the starlight would still be easily visible, making planet detection impossible. In order to avoid this problem, the proposed starshade is a sunflower-shaped coronagraph disc. The \"petals\" of the \"sunflower\" shape are designed to eliminate this diffraction, making exoplanet observation possible. The starshade would fly 72,000 km (45,000 mi) in front of a space telescope (between the telescope and a target star) in order to work. A video demonstrating the starshade is available on the Wikipedia page for the New Worlds Mission. The title text explains that NASA actually sponsored this mission's proposal to build a starshade for the Webb telescope, and concludes that the surprise shown in the comic is not likely to occur in real life. NASA stopped this sponsorship in 2008, and the New Worlds Mission has been looking for additional financing since 2010. Telescope people refers to the engineers and scientists who build, operate, and use space telescopes.\nIt seems clear that Randall would like to point attention to the New Worlds Mission, possibly hoping for increased funding for the project so a starshade could become a reality for the Webb telescope. That Randall is interested in exoplanets has been demonstrated many times in xkcd.\nNote that two of the Webb telescope's instruments , the NIRCam and the MIRI, feature starlight-blocking coronagraphs for observation of faint targets such as exoplanets, so the telescope has ways to improve the visibility of these planets. However, Randall (and the New Worlds Mission) believe that a starshade would be better suited for this task.\nThe idea of an occulting telescope was used in 975: Occulting Telescope , where it turns out the purpose is to just block all star light, not to see exoplanets.\n[Megan and Ponytail are walking.] Megan: Space telescopes could see exoplanets better if they used free-floating opaque discs to block the stars' glare.\n[They stop walking in this zoom in on their heads. Ponytail has turned towards Megan.] Megan: They thought about including one with the Webb telescope, but cut it to save money. Ponytail: Well... does it have to be their disc?\n[In this frame-less panel Megan is left standing as Ponytail turns and walks away.] Megan: What do you mean? Ponytail: Like, if I Kickstart a starshade for them? Megan: Um. Would you at least warn them? Ponytail: Eh. Whatever.\n[Cueball and Hairbun, both wearing headsets, are sitting on one legged stools on either side of a slim desk with two computers screens on top of it. Each are looking at their own screens while typing on a keyboard in front of them. Hairbun is pointing at her screen. A small frame is overlaid on the top of the panels frame with a caption:] NASA, 2018: Cueball: Initiating Webb calibrat- Cueball: Aaaaa ! What the hell is that!? Hairbun: Hey, look, exoplanets!\n"}
{"id":1731,"title":"Wrong","image_title":"Wrong","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1731","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wrong.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1731:_Wrong","transcript":"[White Hat is walking beside Megan, index finger extended] White Hat: Really, we're all made of antimatter. A proton consists of two quarks and an antiquark. Megan: ...I don't think that's right.\n[White Hat stops to take out his smartphone tapping on it. Megan stops and turns towards him.] White Hat: Sure it is. Neutrons are, too. Megan: Do you mean \"up\" and \"down\" quarks? I think antiquarks are a different thing. White Hat: No, let me show you... Tap Tap\n[Zooming in on White Hat's head, while he is holding his phone up looking at it. He is thinking as shown with a bubbly thought bubble.] White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?\n[White Hat has lowered the phone. He is still thinking the same but the text has been scribbled out.] White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?\n[White Hat purges the thought from his mind] White Hat (thinking): ...\n[Similar setting as in the first panel, but in a full row wide panel, and White Hat is still holding his smartphone] White Hat: Really, the whole idea of \"particles\" is inaccurate. These are abstractions arising from quantum field theory, but what most people don't realize is... Megan: *Sigh*\n","explanation":"All matter that we encounter in everyday life is normal matter and not antimatter . Atoms, while once when they were named believed to be the smallest unit of matter, are now known to be made up of protons , neutrons and electrons . Protons and neutrons are in turn made up of quarks , which are fundamental particles (meaning not made of other particles). Quarks come in six different \" flavours \" (up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange), with protons and neutrons being made of up and down quarks. Each flavour also has a corresponding antiparticle , an antiquark, which would make up antiprotons and antineutrons.\nWhite Hat and Megan appear to be discussing the topics of antimatter and subatomic particles. White Hat makes the assertion that we (referring to people and objects) are made partially of antimatter, because, as he claims, a proton (one of the particles which make up all matter) is made of two quarks and an antiquark. In fact, protons are made up of two up quarks and a down quark, which are all not antiquarks. He is likely making the mistake of mixing up the \"up\" and \"down\" flavours of quarks (which can be seen as complementary flavours of quarks) and mistaking them to be mutual antiparticles. He continues to elaborate on his idea by mentioning neutrons, which are made of two down quarks and an up quark.\nWhen Megan (accurately) doubts his claim, White Hat takes out his smartphone to look it up, in order to show Megan that he is correct. However, upon researching online, he realizes that he was, in fact, wrong (hence the title of the comic). Not wanting to admit being incorrect or yield his position in the discussion, he convinces himself that he wasn't actually wrong, as depicted by his mentally erasing the realization that he was wrong. Instead, he completely changes the topic to try and re-frame it so that he is not wrong. In this case, he circles back and criticizes the entire scientific concept of \"particles\", which can be seen as an attempt at a straw man on his part. Presumably, he will go on to explain how humans are not made of particles and quarks, but of waves.\nIt is rather common to be unwilling to admit fault (the whole topic of this comic) and to instead try to maintain an air of infallibility and intelligence. Some people are just too prideful to admit that they are inherently fallible. White Hat is one of those people, as depicted in several of his earlier appearances (see trivia section ). Randall uses this comic to criticize people who are unable to put aside their ego and re-assess what they know in the face of empirical data. Such thinking flies directly against scientific rigor (adding an extra layer of irony to the situation, since White Hat and Megan are discussing a scientific topic). This method had already been called wrong in 803: Airfoil .\nWhite Hat's new topic, where he can be right, includes the quantum field theory , a very complicated field, which it is likely one Megan is not well versed in (inferred by the fact that she was not quite sure about the anti-quarks). So he may be raising the topic because he believes she will not understand it sufficiently to refute his correctness. Megan, however, recognizes exactly what he is trying to do, and can only sigh in response to his failed efforts. In the QFT, particles are often described as resonances or excited states of the underlying physical field, in the same way as photons may be thought of as excitations in the electromagnetic field; in this way White Hat appears to be dismissing his earlier errors by implying that particles are merely an effect of something more complex, of which he can demonstrate his knowledge. Furthermore, in quantum field theory quarks do not exist in the conventional sense.\nIn the title text, White Hat just remembers another thing he's right about. This demonstrates even more clearly that he is not interested in a discussion on the merits of a topic, but instead is seeking only recognition and validation for being right. This bears some similarity to 386: Duty Calls , in which Cueball stays up late correcting someone on the Internet, and 2051: Bad Opinions , where Cueball actively seeks out people with bad opinions for him to correct.\nWhite Hat may have incorrectly remembered that, while the valence quarks in a proton are all matter, quantum field theory says that protons also contain an indefinite number of \"virtual\" anti-quarks, quarks, and gluons. See this video What are Quarks? about this. His final comment could be referring to the ontological debate over whether virtual particles are in some sense real or only an artefact of perturbation theory. Alternatively, he may have been confused by the fact that negatively charged quarks contribute negatively to baryon number. <!-- I think that that's incorrect; could you be thinking about strangeness and bottomness instead? I'm not wrong, but let's talk about something else that I'm right about instead. -->\n[White Hat is walking beside Megan, index finger extended] White Hat: Really, we're all made of antimatter. A proton consists of two quarks and an antiquark. Megan: ...I don't think that's right.\n[White Hat stops to take out his smartphone tapping on it. Megan stops and turns towards him.] White Hat: Sure it is. Neutrons are, too. Megan: Do you mean \"up\" and \"down\" quarks? I think antiquarks are a different thing. White Hat: No, let me show you... Tap Tap\n[Zooming in on White Hat's head, while he is holding his phone up looking at it. He is thinking as shown with a bubbly thought bubble.] White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?\n[White Hat has lowered the phone. He is still thinking the same but the text has been scribbled out.] White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?\n[White Hat purges the thought from his mind] White Hat (thinking): ...\n[Similar setting as in the first panel, but in a full row wide panel, and White Hat is still holding his smartphone] White Hat: Really, the whole idea of \"particles\" is inaccurate. These are abstractions arising from quantum field theory, but what most people don't realize is... Megan: *Sigh*\n"}
{"id":1732,"title":"Earth Temperature Timeline","image_title":"Earth Temperature Timeline","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1732","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/earth_temperature_timeline.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1732:_Earth_Temperature_Timeline","transcript":"Note there are several spelling errors in the comic, so please do only correct spelling errors that are not part of the comic! See more in the trivia section .\n[A large heading, followed by a sub-caption. Below that two lines with a statement in between:] A timeline of Earth\u2019s average temperature since the last ice age glaciation When people say \u201cThe climate has changed before,\u201d these are the kinds of changes they\u2019re talking about.\n[A very long chart below the headings above is headed with a label for the scale of the X-axis above the chart. Below that a sub-caption. To the left an arrow down to the top of the chart pointing to the dotted curves starting point (at -4.3\u00b0C below the 1961-1990 average) with a label above the arrow. And arrow pointing left to the left of the center and another pointing right to the right of the center has labels. Below these is the temperature scale of the X-axis, with 9 ticks between the borders each with a label ranging from -4 to +4\u00b0C compared to the 1961-1990 average, but with another step in each direction not labeled towards to axis so the chart covers -5 to +5\u00b0C compared to the 1961-1990 average.] Temperature Compared to the 1961-1990 average Start Colder Warmer -4\u00b0C -3\u00b0C -2\u00b0C -1\u00b0C 0\u00b0C +1\u00b0C +2\u00b0C +3\u00b0C +4\u00b0C\n[To the right of the chart is a gray text standing on the side down along the outer boarder of the chart with the sources for the chart:] Source: Shakun et. al. (2012) , Marcott et. al. (2013), Annan and Hargreaves (2013) , HadCRUT 4 , IPCC\n[The chart is split in 10 columns by the temperature scale and the borders. The two central columns are white, and then from there to the left the background becomes a faded color that changes from light blue to blue at the edge in four steps. Similarly to the right the color changes from light red to red. To the left there is a time scale taking 500 years leaps from 20,000 BCE all the way to year 1, where there are two years, one for BBC and one for CE. The 500 year leaps continue until 1500 CE and from there the steps are down to 100 years until 2100 with also present day 2016 labeled. After 1500 the CE is omitted. The labels stop there, but there is space below covering down to 2200 CE. There is clearly visible division line across the chart on the level of each of the 500 step, and fainter lines for each of the 100 steps all the way even though only the last 5 of these 100 steps are labeled. There is a similar clear line at 2016. Below each step on the Y-axis is noted, and then any text starting before the next step is noted below indented. If there are extra image belonging to text this is indented once more. The graph that the whole chart is about is a dotted line that begins at the \u201cstart\u201d point mentioned above at -4.3\u00b0C and then begins to go straight down. It will change left and right all the way down. To being with all text and most drawings are to right of the dotted curve. Whenever something is to the left it will be noted. When it says to the left above something, and then nothing over the next, then the next will be to the right. Only at the very bottom are there more entries to the left than right. ] 20000 BCE [An arrow goes from the dotted line to the central line at 0\u00b0C. In the middle of the line there is a temperature label:] 4.3\u00b0C At the start of our timeline, 22,000 years ago, Earth is 4\u00b0C colder than during the late 20 th century. Boston is buried under almost a mile of ice, and the glaciers reach as far south as New York City. [The Statue of Liberty is shown in front of a glacier front. A very tiny Cueball is on top of the glacier. The drawing is labeled and so is also the glacier.] New York Ice [Cueball (wearing a knit cap with a pom-pom is seen walking in a snowy landscape leaving black footprints behind him. He walks through the white central part of the chart.] [The skyline of Boston is shown with two clear buildings among all the other. Above it is a line and in between this area has been filled with thin lines. The drawing is labeled and so is this area. Also the skyline has an arrow pointing at it with a label:] Boston Ice Modern skyline\n19500 BCE But the world is about to warm up. By this time, humans have already spread across Africa, Eurasia, and Australia. They\u2019ve created painting, pottery, rope, and bows and arrows, but haven\u2019t developed writing or farming.\n19000 BCE Changes in the Earth\u2019s orbit mean that more sunlight reaches the polar ice\u2026 [A line chart with a labeled Y-axis with three labeled ticks. The curve starts up and then goes down five times and up four times ending down. There is one plateau towards the end compared to the rest of the curve where the ups and downs are quite alike.] Summer sun W\/m 2 at 60\u00b0N 550 500 450\n18500 BCE [A map of the world. At the top is a light gray area covering North America, Greenland and northern Europe and most of the northern part of Russia. A similar gray area covers Antarctica. There are two labels in the gray area above and one in the gray area below:] Ice Ice Ice\n18000 BCE \u2026And the ice sheets start to melt.\n17500 BCE Temperatures have been creeping upward, but around this point, CO 2 levels start to climb\u2026\n17000 BCE \u2026And then the warming speeds up.\n16500 BCE [Cueball is standing with a spear just the right of the graph talking to a rabbit.] Cueball: Still pretty cold.\n16000 BCE [Megan points to the graph to the right of her and between her and Ponytail standing on the other side. Mean is the first drawing on the left side of the dotted curve, which has hardly moved since the beginning, only to just on the other side of 4\u00b0C.] [In the right part of the chart is an explanation of the data. Below the first two lines there are four drawings each showing possible temperature swings in reality compared to the smoothed data that represents the dotted curve of the entire chart. The dotted curve is shown in all four drawings and a thin line is shown running along it but with much more fluctuation left and right on the first two, a large spike right on the third and a large bump way right on the fourth. Above these there are two labels. The first labels is inside a bracket that covers the first three, and the last label is for the last drawing. Below is a list of sources.] Limits of this data: Short warming or cooling spikes might be \u201csmoothed out\u201d by these reconstructions but only if they\u2019re small or brief enough. Possible Unlikely Reconstructions are from Shakun (2012) and Marcott (2013), scaled to Annan + Hargreaves (2013) estimate for the last glacial period.\n15500 BCE In what is now France, humans paint murals on the walls of the Lascaux caves [Hairy paints three animals, two with horns, and two humans, Cueball holding hand with Hairy who has a spear. On the other side of the central line Megan writes three letters, the last of which is reversed.] NI\u0418\n15000 BCE Ice sheets around Alaska shrink, exposing a land bridge between Asia and North America [From around the bottom if this section and down to 11500 BCE the dotted curve moved steadily to the right towards warmed temperature peaking close to -1.5\u00b0C. Before this the temperature had not moved much away from that at the start.]\n14500 BCE [Cueball walks right looking back at the graph behind him. Megan walks in front of him pointing further right.] Cueball: Cool. Humans reach North America.\n14000 BCE The edge of the ice withdraws from New York City and retreats North. [A large glacier front speaks in a speech bubble with an arrow pointing at it. Behind is there are four peaks in the horizon and in front of it three small melting pools and some rocks on the ground.] Glacier: That\u2019s it! I\u2019m moving to Canada!\n13500 BCE Humans domesticate dogs (Date uncertain, may be much earlier) [Megan and Cueball is watching a wolf looking at them.] Megan: Okay, you can live in our homes and we\u2019ll feed you, but we\u2019ll still get mad f you poop on the floor. Wolf: Deal. Cueball: And we get to breed you to be tiny and dress you in little costumes. Wolf: \u2026Wait.\n13000 BCE [Randall did not use the normal spelling for Woolly Rhino, but this is an accepted alternative spelling:] Wooly Rhino goes extinct Oregon is scoured by huge floods as glacial dams burst and lakes of meltwater flow to the sea\n12500 BCE Ice sheets withdraw from Chicago\n12000 BCE Humans settle Abu Hureyra in Syria\n11500 BCE [An arrow on the left side of the dotted curve is pointing down along the dotted curve and to the left indicate temperature is declining again, meaning the dotted curve now moves left to colder temperatures. This only continues until 10500 BCE. It is only the second time something is noted on the left side after Megan at 16000 BCE] Temperatures start to decline, mainly in the Northern hemisphere This may be caused by changes in ocean circulation due to the floods of cold fresh meltwater flowing into the Atlantic as the North American ice sheet melts. This cooler period is called the Younger Dryas\n11000 BCE [This is the first text to the left of the dotted curve:] Humans reach Argentina\n10500 BCE [An arrow pointing down along the right side of the dotted curve and to the right indicate temperature is increasing again, meaning the dotted curve now moves right to hotter temperatures. This continues until 8000 BCE where it levels out just above 0\u00b0C.] Warming resumes Human settlements at Jericho\n10000 BCE First development of farming\n9500 BCE Saber-toothed cat goes extinct [To the left:] Horses disappear from North America\n9000 BCE [To the left, Randall spelled Pok\u00e9mon wrong:] Last North American Pokemon go extinct [Cueball with a speak and Megan is looking up at this last \u201cfact\u201d.] Megan: That is not a real fact. Temperatures reach modern levels Rising seas cut off the land bridge between North America and Asia Cattle domesticated\n8500 BCE Ice sheets retreat across the Canadian border Temperatures start to level out slightly above 1961-1990 levels\n8000 BCE [The above sentence breaks over the 8000 BCE line. From here a maximum in temperature on the chart is reached at 0.5\u00b0C which will not be overtaken until 2000 CE. It stays almost constant here until 5000 BCE where a slight cooling begins.]\n7500 BCE [To the left:] This warm, stable period is called the Holocene Climate Optimum [To the left:] Jiahu settled in China\n7000 BCE Final collapse of the North American ice sheet leads to rapid 2-4m sea level rise\u2026 [A small arrow points down and left to the right of the dotted curve. There is a small decrease in temperature but it is very small and would have been missed without the arrow and label.] \u2026And a period of cooling in the Northern hemisphere\n6500 BCE [To the left:] As seas rise to near their modern levels, Britain is cut off from mainland Europe\n6000 BCE Humans develop copper metalworking\n5500 BCE [To the left:] Massive volcanic eruption in Oregon creates crater lake Gold metalworking\n5000 BCE [To the left:] Invention of the wheel [To the left. To the right of the dotted curve is an arrow pointing down and slightly left. From here temperature decreases very slowly but steadily from 0.5\u00b0C until 1000 BCE where a stable plateau is reached around 0\u00b0C.] Earth begins to cool slowly mainly due to regular cycles in its orbit\n4500 BCE [To the left:] Proto-Indo-European language develops [To the right of the curve Ponytail holds up a hand towards Cueball.] Ponytail: Let\u2019s make our language heavily inflected, so future students have to memorize a zillion verb endings! Cueball: Okay! [To the left:] Permanent settlements in the fertile crescent\n4000 BCE Horses domesticated [To the left:] Minoan culture arises on Crete\n3500 BCE Egyptian mummification Rise of the Indus Valley civilization [To the left:] Invention of writing in Sumer \u201cprehistory\u201d ends, \u201chistory\u201d begins Earliest human whose name we know (Pharaoh Iry-Hor in Egypt)\n3000 BCE Three Sovereigns and five emperors period in China Gilgamesh [To the left:] Imhotep Mayan culture emerges [To the left:] Great Pyramid constructed\n2500 BCE Corded Ware culture in Europe [To the left of the curve two rock musicians with long hair and electrical guitars are standing on either side of a small gate made of three slabs of stone, one on top of the other two standing stones.] Stonehenge completed Chariots developed\n2000 BCE [To the left:] Alphabetic writing developed in Egypt Last mammoths on a tiny Siberian island go extinct [To the left:] Minoan eruption\n1500 BCE [To the left:] Iron smelting Olmec civilization develops in Central America [A Trojan horse with two Cueball-like guys in front and a third standing on its back. Its back is at three Cueball\u2019s height and its head rises to the level of the Cueball on its back. It stands on a platform with four wheel on the visible side. There is text on the horse] Setting of the Iliad and the Odyssey Text on horse: Not a trap [To the left:] Invasion of the Sea peoples* * A real thing Polynesians explore the Pacific Ocean\n1000 BCE [From 1000 BBC to 1000 CE the temperature is stable and very close to 0\u00b0C.] [To the left:] Solomon Illiad [sic] and Odyssey composed [To the left:] Rise of Greek city-states Neo-Assyrian empire [To the left:] First Olympics Zapotec writing in modern Mexico [To the left:] Confucius\n500 BCE [To the left:] The stuff in the 300 (film)|movie 300 , but regular speed and with more clothing Buddha Nazca Lines [To the left:] Alexander the Great [To the left:] Mayan hieroglyphics Ashoka the Great [To the left:] Paper invented [To the left:] Asterix Teotihuac\u00e1n metropolis [To the left:] Julius Caesar\n[At the year 0, there is instead two numbers for each of the two scales before and after Christ:] 1 BCE 1 CE [To the left:] Roman Empire Jesus [To the left and erupting volcano.] Pompeii Three Kingdoms period [To the left:] Gupta empire [To the left:] Various groups take turns sacking Rome Attila the Hun\n500 CE Muhammad [To the left:] Tang Dynasty [An arrow to the right of the dotted curve pointing down, takes a swing far out from the curve and then bends back again. The text label next to it breaks into the next 500 period. The dotted curve stays stable at 0\u00b0C along this arrow.] Medieval warm period in Europe and some northern regions (too regional to affect the global average much) [To the left:] Leif Eriksson\n1000 CE [The dotted curve moves to the left towards lower temperature reaching a minimum around 1650 of about -0.6\u00b0C at the Little Ice Age.] [To the left a drawing of a compass with needle pointing the black end towards north east. There are labels for the four main directions and a label next to it:] N W E S Magnetic compass navigation [To the left:] Ghengis [sic] Khan Zheng He\u2019s fleet explores Asia and Africa [To the left:] Aztec Alliance [To the left:] Printing press [To the left:] Columbus\n1500 CE European Renaissance [To the left:] Shakespeare\n1600 [To the left:] Newton [To the right of the dotted curve there is an arrow pointing down that makes a swing in towards the curve and then back out again. At -0.6\u00b0C this is the coldest it has been since 9500 BCE. It is labeled:] \u201dLittle Ice Age\u201d\n1700 Steam engines [To the left:] Unites States Independence\n1800 Industrial Revolution [To the left:] Telegraphs [After this the dotted curve becomes solid.]\n1900 [To the left, and on the line for 1900:] Airplanes [To the left:] World Wars [The solid line takes a step to the right close to 0\u00b0C. Over the rest of the 1900s it moves closer to 0\u00b0C crossing it before 2000 where it almost reaches the maximum temperature of 0.5 \u00b0C from earlier in 8000 BCE.] Fossil fuel CO 2 emissions start rapidly increasing [To the left:] Nuclear weapons [To the left:] Internet\n2000 Northwest Passage opens [From here to present day the solid line increases rapidly and in 2016 present day is almost reaches 1\u00b0C, with about 0.8\u00b0C.]\n2016 [To the left on the line for 2016:] Present day [From here the curve once again becomes dotted as this is the future. After one dot it splits in two and after the first two dots another split between them occurs forming three possible future dotted curves. The first curve bending down before the others, and thus to the right of the other two reaches about 1.2\u00b0C and then goes straight down and stops at the 2100 line. An arrow points to it from the left and a label is written patly before and the rest after the 2100 line to the left of the curve:] Best-case scenario assuming immediate massive action to limit emissions\n2100 [The middle curve bends a little down after reaching 1.3\u00b0C and then continues this path reaching 2\u00b0C in 2100. An arrow point from below to it and a label is written below the curve and below 2100 line:] Optimistic scenario [The last line continues along the path from the last 16 years of the solid line reaching 4.2\u00b0C at 2100, almost as far on the other side of 0\u00b0C in 150 years as it took 14000 years to move from the other side from the start of the chart. Another arrow point to this from below with a label below the curve and below 2100 line:] Current Path\nThis comic became popular with a much broader audience than most xkcd comics. It was discussed admiringly by news sites such as Popular Science , Reason , Slate , Smithsonian , Forbes , Vox , NPR , Quartz , Science Alert and Climate Central . It was promoted by famous individuals such as Elon Musk and even twitted by the UN council on Climate Change , and obviously hated on by vocal climate change deniers and cranks such as Anthony Watts debunked and Joanne Nova debunked\nSaying the \"dotted line comes from computer models\" is a bit inaccurate. Prehistoric temperature reconstructions are based on lots of measurements from lots of places around the planet: ice cores, lake and ocean sediments, etc. which are the best proxy records of climate change. From those measurements, one infers temperature, so Randall Munroe may be more correct than he realises . Calling that process computer modeling stretches the meaning of the phrase. For more rationalist critique of this chart not driven by the agenda of pushing pseudoscientific beliefs which are against the worldwide consensus, see t h i s and most insightfully, this .\nNote: Since a lot of new people are here looking for this chart today, I'll be posting Wednesday's comic on Thursday instead. Before that, the normal heading with the release day of xkcd was shown. This was (of course) still there Tuesday the day after the release, because it was first on Wednesday there were reason to note the delay. It stayed in place even for some time after the \"Wednesday\" comic was released on Thursday, but was then removed before noon (EST) on Thursday. Randall did thus not post a link to this comic in the header text for new visitors to use, only giving them that one extra day. Even though the next comic was released on a Thursday, the scheduled Friday comic 1734: Reductionism was still released as planned. This was also the first time this occurred on xkcd - see this trivia item from the Friday comic.\n","explanation":"This comic is a timeline on how the temperature has changed from 20,000 BCE (Before Common Era ) to the present day (2016), with three predictions for the rest of the 21st century depending on what actions are taken (or not taken) to stop CO\u2082 emission. This comic is a direct, but much more thorough, follow up on the previous global warming comic: 1379: 4.5 Degrees . By having readers scroll through millennia of slow-paced natural changes, Randall uses the comic to confront the rapid temperature rise in recent years.\nOver the past 100 years, human action has produced a large amount of CO\u2082 emissions , which have caused a rise in average global temperature through the greenhouse effect . This is called global warming and is part of a climate change , a subject that has become a recurrent subject on xkcd. There are still many people who claim that this is not happening, or at least that it is not caused by any human actions, called climate change deniers . One argument of theirs is that global warming is happening for natural causes, summarized with the phrase \"temperature has changed before\".\nThis comic shows that while temperature changes have indeed occurred before, the speed of the current temperature rise is much, much faster than those measured for many previous thousands of years. The comic became so popular that Randall postponed the release of his next comic to keep this one on the front page one day longer.\nThe temperature curve is a dotted line most of the time, but from about 1850 to 2016 the measurement data is good enough to let the curve become a solid line indicating that this is not an estimate. Before 1850 the temperature is an estimate based on the sources given. And likewise into the future the three possible curves are also dotted to show that they are predictions, based on how seriously the population of Earth takes knowledge (and comics) like this.\nAlthough this is a topic Randall obviously takes very seriously, and by far most of the facts fit with known history, he still includes several jokes in the comic . See also the table explaining each item in the comic. After the election of Donald Trump for president later the year of this comic's release, it is possible that Randall believes that his worst fears (as expressed by the current path at the bottom) will hold up, with the actions taken by the new president.\nThe title text compares the saying that \"the temperature has changed before\" comparing temperature changes over thousands of years to the rapid global warming over the last century with saying that the \"small\" changes to the temperature a car experiences over the years of normal usage should not make you worried over the rapid temperature increase that happens when someone sets your car on fire. Randall previously used this joke in 1693: Oxidation .\nThe image attributes climate data sources as \"Shakun et al. (2012), Marcott et al. (2013), Annan and Hargreaves (2013), HadCRUT4, IPCC\":\nNote there are several spelling errors in the comic, so please do only correct spelling errors that are not part of the comic! See more in the trivia section .\n[A large heading, followed by a sub-caption. Below that two lines with a statement in between:] A timeline of Earth\u2019s average temperature since the last ice age glaciation When people say \u201cThe climate has changed before,\u201d these are the kinds of changes they\u2019re talking about.\n[A very long chart below the headings above is headed with a label for the scale of the X-axis above the chart. Below that a sub-caption. To the left an arrow down to the top of the chart pointing to the dotted curves starting point (at -4.3\u00b0C below the 1961-1990 average) with a label above the arrow. And arrow pointing left to the left of the center and another pointing right to the right of the center has labels. Below these is the temperature scale of the X-axis, with 9 ticks between the borders each with a label ranging from -4 to +4\u00b0C compared to the 1961-1990 average, but with another step in each direction not labeled towards to axis so the chart covers -5 to +5\u00b0C compared to the 1961-1990 average.] Temperature Compared to the 1961-1990 average Start Colder Warmer -4\u00b0C -3\u00b0C -2\u00b0C -1\u00b0C 0\u00b0C +1\u00b0C +2\u00b0C +3\u00b0C +4\u00b0C\n[To the right of the chart is a gray text standing on the side down along the outer boarder of the chart with the sources for the chart:] Source: Shakun et. al. (2012) , Marcott et. al. (2013), Annan and Hargreaves (2013) , HadCRUT 4 , IPCC\n[The chart is split in 10 columns by the temperature scale and the borders. The two central columns are white, and then from there to the left the background becomes a faded color that changes from light blue to blue at the edge in four steps. Similarly to the right the color changes from light red to red. To the left there is a time scale taking 500 years leaps from 20,000 BCE all the way to year 1, where there are two years, one for BBC and one for CE. The 500 year leaps continue until 1500 CE and from there the steps are down to 100 years until 2100 with also present day 2016 labeled. After 1500 the CE is omitted. The labels stop there, but there is space below covering down to 2200 CE. There is clearly visible division line across the chart on the level of each of the 500 step, and fainter lines for each of the 100 steps all the way even though only the last 5 of these 100 steps are labeled. There is a similar clear line at 2016. Below each step on the Y-axis is noted, and then any text starting before the next step is noted below indented. If there are extra image belonging to text this is indented once more. The graph that the whole chart is about is a dotted line that begins at the \u201cstart\u201d point mentioned above at -4.3\u00b0C and then begins to go straight down. It will change left and right all the way down. To being with all text and most drawings are to right of the dotted curve. Whenever something is to the left it will be noted. When it says to the left above something, and then nothing over the next, then the next will be to the right. Only at the very bottom are there more entries to the left than right. ] 20000 BCE [An arrow goes from the dotted line to the central line at 0\u00b0C. In the middle of the line there is a temperature label:] 4.3\u00b0C At the start of our timeline, 22,000 years ago, Earth is 4\u00b0C colder than during the late 20 th century. Boston is buried under almost a mile of ice, and the glaciers reach as far south as New York City. [The Statue of Liberty is shown in front of a glacier front. A very tiny Cueball is on top of the glacier. The drawing is labeled and so is also the glacier.] New York Ice [Cueball (wearing a knit cap with a pom-pom is seen walking in a snowy landscape leaving black footprints behind him. He walks through the white central part of the chart.] [The skyline of Boston is shown with two clear buildings among all the other. Above it is a line and in between this area has been filled with thin lines. The drawing is labeled and so is this area. Also the skyline has an arrow pointing at it with a label:] Boston Ice Modern skyline\n19500 BCE But the world is about to warm up. By this time, humans have already spread across Africa, Eurasia, and Australia. They\u2019ve created painting, pottery, rope, and bows and arrows, but haven\u2019t developed writing or farming.\n19000 BCE Changes in the Earth\u2019s orbit mean that more sunlight reaches the polar ice\u2026 [A line chart with a labeled Y-axis with three labeled ticks. The curve starts up and then goes down five times and up four times ending down. There is one plateau towards the end compared to the rest of the curve where the ups and downs are quite alike.] Summer sun W\/m 2 at 60\u00b0N 550 500 450\n18500 BCE [A map of the world. At the top is a light gray area covering North America, Greenland and northern Europe and most of the northern part of Russia. A similar gray area covers Antarctica. There are two labels in the gray area above and one in the gray area below:] Ice Ice Ice\n18000 BCE \u2026And the ice sheets start to melt.\n17500 BCE Temperatures have been creeping upward, but around this point, CO 2 levels start to climb\u2026\n17000 BCE \u2026And then the warming speeds up.\n16500 BCE [Cueball is standing with a spear just the right of the graph talking to a rabbit.] Cueball: Still pretty cold.\n16000 BCE [Megan points to the graph to the right of her and between her and Ponytail standing on the other side. Mean is the first drawing on the left side of the dotted curve, which has hardly moved since the beginning, only to just on the other side of 4\u00b0C.] [In the right part of the chart is an explanation of the data. Below the first two lines there are four drawings each showing possible temperature swings in reality compared to the smoothed data that represents the dotted curve of the entire chart. The dotted curve is shown in all four drawings and a thin line is shown running along it but with much more fluctuation left and right on the first two, a large spike right on the third and a large bump way right on the fourth. Above these there are two labels. The first labels is inside a bracket that covers the first three, and the last label is for the last drawing. Below is a list of sources.] Limits of this data: Short warming or cooling spikes might be \u201csmoothed out\u201d by these reconstructions but only if they\u2019re small or brief enough. Possible Unlikely Reconstructions are from Shakun (2012) and Marcott (2013), scaled to Annan + Hargreaves (2013) estimate for the last glacial period.\n15500 BCE In what is now France, humans paint murals on the walls of the Lascaux caves [Hairy paints three animals, two with horns, and two humans, Cueball holding hand with Hairy who has a spear. On the other side of the central line Megan writes three letters, the last of which is reversed.] NI\u0418\n15000 BCE Ice sheets around Alaska shrink, exposing a land bridge between Asia and North America [From around the bottom if this section and down to 11500 BCE the dotted curve moved steadily to the right towards warmed temperature peaking close to -1.5\u00b0C. Before this the temperature had not moved much away from that at the start.]\n14500 BCE [Cueball walks right looking back at the graph behind him. Megan walks in front of him pointing further right.] Cueball: Cool. Humans reach North America.\n14000 BCE The edge of the ice withdraws from New York City and retreats North. [A large glacier front speaks in a speech bubble with an arrow pointing at it. Behind is there are four peaks in the horizon and in front of it three small melting pools and some rocks on the ground.] Glacier: That\u2019s it! I\u2019m moving to Canada!\n13500 BCE Humans domesticate dogs (Date uncertain, may be much earlier) [Megan and Cueball is watching a wolf looking at them.] Megan: Okay, you can live in our homes and we\u2019ll feed you, but we\u2019ll still get mad f you poop on the floor. Wolf: Deal. Cueball: And we get to breed you to be tiny and dress you in little costumes. Wolf: \u2026Wait.\n13000 BCE [Randall did not use the normal spelling for Woolly Rhino, but this is an accepted alternative spelling:] Wooly Rhino goes extinct Oregon is scoured by huge floods as glacial dams burst and lakes of meltwater flow to the sea\n12500 BCE Ice sheets withdraw from Chicago\n12000 BCE Humans settle Abu Hureyra in Syria\n11500 BCE [An arrow on the left side of the dotted curve is pointing down along the dotted curve and to the left indicate temperature is declining again, meaning the dotted curve now moves left to colder temperatures. This only continues until 10500 BCE. It is only the second time something is noted on the left side after Megan at 16000 BCE] Temperatures start to decline, mainly in the Northern hemisphere This may be caused by changes in ocean circulation due to the floods of cold fresh meltwater flowing into the Atlantic as the North American ice sheet melts. This cooler period is called the Younger Dryas\n11000 BCE [This is the first text to the left of the dotted curve:] Humans reach Argentina\n10500 BCE [An arrow pointing down along the right side of the dotted curve and to the right indicate temperature is increasing again, meaning the dotted curve now moves right to hotter temperatures. This continues until 8000 BCE where it levels out just above 0\u00b0C.] Warming resumes Human settlements at Jericho\n10000 BCE First development of farming\n9500 BCE Saber-toothed cat goes extinct [To the left:] Horses disappear from North America\n9000 BCE [To the left, Randall spelled Pok\u00e9mon wrong:] Last North American Pokemon go extinct [Cueball with a speak and Megan is looking up at this last \u201cfact\u201d.] Megan: That is not a real fact. Temperatures reach modern levels Rising seas cut off the land bridge between North America and Asia Cattle domesticated\n8500 BCE Ice sheets retreat across the Canadian border Temperatures start to level out slightly above 1961-1990 levels\n8000 BCE [The above sentence breaks over the 8000 BCE line. From here a maximum in temperature on the chart is reached at 0.5\u00b0C which will not be overtaken until 2000 CE. It stays almost constant here until 5000 BCE where a slight cooling begins.]\n7500 BCE [To the left:] This warm, stable period is called the Holocene Climate Optimum [To the left:] Jiahu settled in China\n7000 BCE Final collapse of the North American ice sheet leads to rapid 2-4m sea level rise\u2026 [A small arrow points down and left to the right of the dotted curve. There is a small decrease in temperature but it is very small and would have been missed without the arrow and label.] \u2026And a period of cooling in the Northern hemisphere\n6500 BCE [To the left:] As seas rise to near their modern levels, Britain is cut off from mainland Europe\n6000 BCE Humans develop copper metalworking\n5500 BCE [To the left:] Massive volcanic eruption in Oregon creates crater lake Gold metalworking\n5000 BCE [To the left:] Invention of the wheel [To the left. To the right of the dotted curve is an arrow pointing down and slightly left. From here temperature decreases very slowly but steadily from 0.5\u00b0C until 1000 BCE where a stable plateau is reached around 0\u00b0C.] Earth begins to cool slowly mainly due to regular cycles in its orbit\n4500 BCE [To the left:] Proto-Indo-European language develops [To the right of the curve Ponytail holds up a hand towards Cueball.] Ponytail: Let\u2019s make our language heavily inflected, so future students have to memorize a zillion verb endings! Cueball: Okay! [To the left:] Permanent settlements in the fertile crescent\n4000 BCE Horses domesticated [To the left:] Minoan culture arises on Crete\n3500 BCE Egyptian mummification Rise of the Indus Valley civilization [To the left:] Invention of writing in Sumer \u201cprehistory\u201d ends, \u201chistory\u201d begins Earliest human whose name we know (Pharaoh Iry-Hor in Egypt)\n3000 BCE Three Sovereigns and five emperors period in China Gilgamesh [To the left:] Imhotep Mayan culture emerges [To the left:] Great Pyramid constructed\n2500 BCE Corded Ware culture in Europe [To the left of the curve two rock musicians with long hair and electrical guitars are standing on either side of a small gate made of three slabs of stone, one on top of the other two standing stones.] Stonehenge completed Chariots developed\n2000 BCE [To the left:] Alphabetic writing developed in Egypt Last mammoths on a tiny Siberian island go extinct [To the left:] Minoan eruption\n1500 BCE [To the left:] Iron smelting Olmec civilization develops in Central America [A Trojan horse with two Cueball-like guys in front and a third standing on its back. Its back is at three Cueball\u2019s height and its head rises to the level of the Cueball on its back. It stands on a platform with four wheel on the visible side. There is text on the horse] Setting of the Iliad and the Odyssey Text on horse: Not a trap [To the left:] Invasion of the Sea peoples* * A real thing Polynesians explore the Pacific Ocean\n1000 BCE [From 1000 BBC to 1000 CE the temperature is stable and very close to 0\u00b0C.] [To the left:] Solomon Illiad [sic] and Odyssey composed [To the left:] Rise of Greek city-states Neo-Assyrian empire [To the left:] First Olympics Zapotec writing in modern Mexico [To the left:] Confucius\n500 BCE [To the left:] The stuff in the 300 (film)|movie 300 , but regular speed and with more clothing Buddha Nazca Lines [To the left:] Alexander the Great [To the left:] Mayan hieroglyphics Ashoka the Great [To the left:] Paper invented [To the left:] Asterix Teotihuac\u00e1n metropolis [To the left:] Julius Caesar\n[At the year 0, there is instead two numbers for each of the two scales before and after Christ:] 1 BCE 1 CE [To the left:] Roman Empire Jesus [To the left and erupting volcano.] Pompeii Three Kingdoms period [To the left:] Gupta empire [To the left:] Various groups take turns sacking Rome Attila the Hun\n500 CE Muhammad [To the left:] Tang Dynasty [An arrow to the right of the dotted curve pointing down, takes a swing far out from the curve and then bends back again. The text label next to it breaks into the next 500 period. The dotted curve stays stable at 0\u00b0C along this arrow.] Medieval warm period in Europe and some northern regions (too regional to affect the global average much) [To the left:] Leif Eriksson\n1000 CE [The dotted curve moves to the left towards lower temperature reaching a minimum around 1650 of about -0.6\u00b0C at the Little Ice Age.] [To the left a drawing of a compass with needle pointing the black end towards north east. There are labels for the four main directions and a label next to it:] N W E S Magnetic compass navigation [To the left:] Ghengis [sic] Khan Zheng He\u2019s fleet explores Asia and Africa [To the left:] Aztec Alliance [To the left:] Printing press [To the left:] Columbus\n1500 CE European Renaissance [To the left:] Shakespeare\n1600 [To the left:] Newton [To the right of the dotted curve there is an arrow pointing down that makes a swing in towards the curve and then back out again. At -0.6\u00b0C this is the coldest it has been since 9500 BCE. It is labeled:] \u201dLittle Ice Age\u201d\n1700 Steam engines [To the left:] Unites States Independence\n1800 Industrial Revolution [To the left:] Telegraphs [After this the dotted curve becomes solid.]\n1900 [To the left, and on the line for 1900:] Airplanes [To the left:] World Wars [The solid line takes a step to the right close to 0\u00b0C. Over the rest of the 1900s it moves closer to 0\u00b0C crossing it before 2000 where it almost reaches the maximum temperature of 0.5 \u00b0C from earlier in 8000 BCE.] Fossil fuel CO 2 emissions start rapidly increasing [To the left:] Nuclear weapons [To the left:] Internet\n2000 Northwest Passage opens [From here to present day the solid line increases rapidly and in 2016 present day is almost reaches 1\u00b0C, with about 0.8\u00b0C.]\n2016 [To the left on the line for 2016:] Present day [From here the curve once again becomes dotted as this is the future. After one dot it splits in two and after the first two dots another split between them occurs forming three possible future dotted curves. The first curve bending down before the others, and thus to the right of the other two reaches about 1.2\u00b0C and then goes straight down and stops at the 2100 line. An arrow points to it from the left and a label is written patly before and the rest after the 2100 line to the left of the curve:] Best-case scenario assuming immediate massive action to limit emissions\n2100 [The middle curve bends a little down after reaching 1.3\u00b0C and then continues this path reaching 2\u00b0C in 2100. An arrow point from below to it and a label is written below the curve and below 2100 line:] Optimistic scenario [The last line continues along the path from the last 16 years of the solid line reaching 4.2\u00b0C at 2100, almost as far on the other side of 0\u00b0C in 150 years as it took 14000 years to move from the other side from the start of the chart. Another arrow point to this from below with a label below the curve and below 2100 line:] Current Path\nThis comic became popular with a much broader audience than most xkcd comics. It was discussed admiringly by news sites such as Popular Science , Reason , Slate , Smithsonian , Forbes , Vox , NPR , Quartz , Science Alert and Climate Central . It was promoted by famous individuals such as Elon Musk and even twitted by the UN council on Climate Change , and obviously hated on by vocal climate change deniers and cranks such as Anthony Watts debunked and Joanne Nova debunked\nSaying the \"dotted line comes from computer models\" is a bit inaccurate. Prehistoric temperature reconstructions are based on lots of measurements from lots of places around the planet: ice cores, lake and ocean sediments, etc. which are the best proxy records of climate change. From those measurements, one infers temperature, so Randall Munroe may be more correct than he realises . Calling that process computer modeling stretches the meaning of the phrase. For more rationalist critique of this chart not driven by the agenda of pushing pseudoscientific beliefs which are against the worldwide consensus, see t h i s and most insightfully, this .\nNote: Since a lot of new people are here looking for this chart today, I'll be posting Wednesday's comic on Thursday instead. Before that, the normal heading with the release day of xkcd was shown. This was (of course) still there Tuesday the day after the release, because it was first on Wednesday there were reason to note the delay. It stayed in place even for some time after the \"Wednesday\" comic was released on Thursday, but was then removed before noon (EST) on Thursday. Randall did thus not post a link to this comic in the header text for new visitors to use, only giving them that one extra day. Even though the next comic was released on a Thursday, the scheduled Friday comic 1734: Reductionism was still released as planned. This was also the first time this occurred on xkcd - see this trivia item from the Friday comic.\n"}
{"id":1733,"title":"Solar Spectrum","image_title":"Solar Spectrum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1733","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/solar_spectrum.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1733:_Solar_Spectrum","transcript":"[A chart shows the visible colored spectrum of the sun from deep violet to deep red. Along the spectrum are shown 28 black spectral lines of different thickness. Above the chart is a caption:] The Sun's spectral lines\n[Above the chart there are four and below the chart there are two labels, each label has one or more arrows pointing to different black lines. The two that has only one arrow points to two close lines marking them both. Only 22 lines are labeled like this, the other 6 are not labeled. The labels in reading order, with the number of arrows noted behind in square brackets:] Calcium [3] Iron [5] Sodium [1] Oxygen [2] Hydrogen [3] Magnesium [1] Those giant sunglasses [5]\n","explanation":"This comic's release day was postponed from the scheduled Wednesday release to a Thursday release because Randall noticed the extreme popularity of the previous comic on Monday: 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline . Randall even explained this in the header text; see this trivia item from the previous comic.\nThis comic depicts the Fraunhofer lines , i.e. the spectral lines seen when sunlight is split in a spectrometer . These appear as black gaps in the rainbow of light, caused by light being absorbed by elements in the Sun . The frequencies of light that an atom absorbs depend on the exact arrangement of electron orbitals around it - because each element has a different pattern of orbitals, each one has a distinctive pattern in the absorption spectrum. The chart shows most of the main lines in the visible spectrum and identifies the elements linked to them.\nThe image of the Fraunhofer lines from Wikipedia is shown below in the section with a table of these lines. Here it can be seen that all the lines that are labeled with elements are correctly labeled. Also all lines shown in the part of the spectrum included in the comic are included. Ten of the lines included are not labeled in the picture on Wikipedia (at least not with an element; two of the three \"h\" labels are not in the table on Wikipedia). Six of these also have no label in the comic. The other four lines' label Those giant sunglasses constitutes the joke of the comic. There seems to be only one clear error in the comic and that is the fifth line labeled Sunglasses, the middle of the lines, which is actually a Hydrogen line (C in the picture below). But the line next to it to the right is one of those not labeled in either picture and it seems likely that it was this line Randall meant to be a Sunglass line...\nAll ten extra lines (including both the labeled and unlabeled ones) seem to correspond to the spectrum of silicon , and the joke then refers to the silicon dioxide (aka glass) used in the lenses of the Sun's sunglasses. Of course, this means that the glasses have been ionized and turned into plasma by the heat of the sun.\nThe idea of a sun with sunglasses is a reference to pictures\/clipart of the sun wearing sunglasses, often used to denote good weather. Randall has specifically used this picture in at least two what if? posts:\nIn Into the Sun it is seen in the fourth image. The title text of that image even references the fact that those sunglasses will block the light to Earth: A partial solar eclipse is when the Earth moves across the part of the Sun blocked by its sunglasses.\nSo this comic is a direct callback to this what if? post.\nIn Black Hole Moon it is in the first image also including a banana as the mouth. Both the image and the title text of that image references the fact that those sunglasses will block (eclipse) some the light to Earth: Doctors warn that even sunglasses that block UVB will only protect you from the part of the Sun covered by them.\nThere is another joke in drawing a sun with sunglasses because sunglasses are meant to protect your eyes from the sun, so what should they protect the Sun's eye from, Star light...? Also, any glasses worn by the sun, would they not become sun glasses?\nTransitions \u00ae is a brand of photochromic lenses ; however, photochromic lenses are often referred to as \"transition lenses\", so the title text does not necessarily refer to the brand. Photochromic lenses are a type of plastic lens used in prescription spectacles that allow the lens to turn dark when exposed to UV light such as that found in sunlight. The sun choosing to get transition lens would prove a waste of money as the lenses would be permanently transitioned to be dark, so a pair of ordinary sunglasses would likely have proved more cost effective. (Always assuming they do not turn into plasma when getting close to the sun...)\nThis is the official image for Fraunhofer lines (solar spectrum) on Wikipedia: The graph is a typical spectral lines chart, with a long rainbow band (from ultraviolet to the left to infrared on the right both colors appearing black as they are not visible.) The black lines in it, indicating the traces of different elements. Noe that the comic only covers the visible part of this spectrum.\n[A chart shows the visible colored spectrum of the sun from deep violet to deep red. Along the spectrum are shown 28 black spectral lines of different thickness. Above the chart is a caption:] The Sun's spectral lines\n[Above the chart there are four and below the chart there are two labels, each label has one or more arrows pointing to different black lines. The two that has only one arrow points to two close lines marking them both. Only 22 lines are labeled like this, the other 6 are not labeled. The labels in reading order, with the number of arrows noted behind in square brackets:] Calcium [3] Iron [5] Sodium [1] Oxygen [2] Hydrogen [3] Magnesium [1] Those giant sunglasses [5]\n"}
{"id":1734,"title":"Reductionism","image_title":"Reductionism","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1734","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reductionism.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1734:_Reductionism","transcript":"[The comic represents an entry in a dictionary for a word. Unlike normal comics not only capital letters are used, and thus here the capitalization of the comic is also used in the transcript. The entry is cut off through the bottom of the fourth line by the bottom of the panel, but the last line is still readable.] REDUCTIONISM \u2022 n . 1. \"R\" is a letter with origins in the Egyptian hieroglyphics. \"E\" stands for a vowel sound normally represented by \"I\" until the 1500's. \"D\" is\n","explanation":"Reductionism is an approach that seeks to understand the world by breaking problems into simpler pieces. This approach can disregard emergent properties which appear only from the individual parts working together.\nIn this comic Randall shows the first part of a dictionary entry on the word Reductionism . In a real dictionary like Dictionary.com an entry with similar build up looks like this:\nReductionism Noun 1. The theory that every complex phenomenon, especially in biology or psychology, can be explained by analyzing the simplest, most basic physical mechanisms that are in operation during the phenomenon. 2. The practice of simplifying a complex idea, issue, condition, or the like, especially to the point of minimizing, obscuring, or distorting it.\nIn the comic the n refers to noun and the \"1.\" indicate that this is the first of more than one entries about the word.\nThe meta joke is that Randall is attempting to define the word Reductionism by taking the reductionist approach to its extreme. He thus breaks the word into its 12 individual letters explaining the origin of each individual letter, acting as if the word was nothing more than the \"sum\" of all its letters. In doing so he entirely fails to explain the actual meaning of the word.\nThe entire entry number 1. could in principle have 12 phrases one for each of the letters R, E, D, U, C, T, I, O, N, I, S and M, but here only the first two for R and E are included, the third (D) only just starts when the entry is cut off at the bottom of the panel. It could be argued that the two I's could share one explanation, but as a reductionist you might not even notice that the I had already been explained.\nAs it happens, every letter of the Latin alphabet (the writing system used by the English language and many other languages) is ultimately derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics , not just \"R\". But maybe the same sentence is used for all the consonants as the only word in the explanation for \"D\" is \"is\"; the same that starts the explanation for \"R\".\nThe second letter that is explained is \"E\", a vowel . In modern English spelling, the letter \"E\" is used \u2013 alone or in combination \u2013 to represent a number of different vowel sounds (compare \"gene\", \"bed\", \"crepe\"). In the word \"reductionism\", the \"E\" can be pronounced as \/\u026a\/ (\"riductionism\"), \/i\u02d0\/ (\"reeductionism\") or \/\u0259\/ (\"ruductionism\"), depending on dialect and emphasis, but the comic is talking about the sound used to pronounce the letter itself, \/i\u02d0\/ (\"long E\"). It explains that this vowel sound was normally represented with the letter \"I\" until the 1500's. This is a reference to the Great Vowel Shift , a change in the pronunciation of many English vowels around that time. Before then, a word like \"see\" was pronounced \/se\u02d0\/ (approximately \"seh\", with no diphthong), while a word like \"bite\" was pronounced \/bi\u02d0t\/ (\"beet\"). So in modern English pronunciation, the \"long E\" sound is the same as what the \"long I\" spelling used to represent.\nIn the title text, two people are speaking. The first speaker has noticed that \"physics people can be a little on the reductionist side\". (Randall would consider himself a physicist). The presumed physicist then says that it is a ridiculous notion. He challenges the other to \"Name ONE reductionist word I've ever said.\" But by claiming he is not a reductionist by focusing on the individual words (which, even\/especially in the case of \"reductionist\", are never used solely by reductionists) he is asking for an impossible comparison to be made, when proof of reductionism is clearly an emergent property of a fuller sentences, if not whole discourses. By insisting on focusing only upon individual words in this manner the speaker likely proves themself a reductionist, in the very act of trying to refute this accusation.\nReductionism has previously appeared deep down in 1416: Pixels .\n[The comic represents an entry in a dictionary for a word. Unlike normal comics not only capital letters are used, and thus here the capitalization of the comic is also used in the transcript. The entry is cut off through the bottom of the fourth line by the bottom of the panel, but the last line is still readable.] REDUCTIONISM \u2022 n . 1. \"R\" is a letter with origins in the Egyptian hieroglyphics. \"E\" stands for a vowel sound normally represented by \"I\" until the 1500's. \"D\" is\n"}
{"id":1735,"title":"Fashion Police and Grammar Police","image_title":"Fashion Police and Grammar Police","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1735","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fashion_police_and_grammar_police.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1735:_Fashion_Police_and_Grammar_Police","transcript":"[Beneath two headings to the left and right are shown two aggressive-looking groups of people with only the four people in the front clearly shown for each group. Behind them five other people can be seen, but they are not drawn with the same solid line and are only partly shown behind the first four, but legs from all five in each group can be seen along with some heads (all Cueball like) and arms etc. The front of the left group consist of Hairy holding a fist up towards left, Megan with her arms crossed in front of her chest, Cueball holding a sign, using both hands, straight up above his head and another Cueball-like guy to the right is holding up a broken branch in one hand toward right. The person behind this last person is shown to hold up his fist towards right like Hairy does to the left. The sign shows a Crocs shoe in a circle with a strike through it going above the Crocs from top left to bottom right.  The front of the right group consist of Megan holding both her arms over her head hands folded into fist while looking towards left, Cueball holding a sign, using both hands, towards the right and up above Ponytails head, she is raising one hand in a fist to the left and finally a bald guy with glasses is brandishing a short sword in one hand toward right while holding his other hand palm up. The sign has three similar words written beneath each other.] Left: Fashion Police Right: Grammar Police Sign: Their They're There\n[Below the two groups are eight points with bullets:] Judgemental and smug Angry about something deeply arbitrary Strong opinions backed by style guides Appreciate that the way that you are interpreted is your responsibility Understand that there's no way to \"opt out\" of sending messages by how you present yourself, and attempts to do so send strong messages of their own To seem cool and casual, pretend to ignore them while understanding them very well Vindictive about things that are often uncomfortably transparent proxies for race or social class Fun to cheer on until one of them disagrees with you\n[Caption below the panel:] I just realized these are literally the same people\n","explanation":"In this comic, two groups of angry protesters are presented and labeled. They are probably not actually protesting side by side, but simply drawn side by side to compare their similarities.\nThe left group represents the Fashion Police with Cueball holding a sign implying that Crocs are prohibited (by showing Crocs shoe\/sandall in a circle with a strike through it). Crocs are a type of clogs made of foam. Crocs (and their imitators) have become fairly popular due to their low price, comfort, and ease of use, but are broadly considered unfashionable to wear in public . It is not the first time Randall mocks a special type of shoes, previously in 1065: Shoes Randall was after shoes that has those creepy individual toes like Vibram FiveFingers . They will also never be a hit with the Fashion Police. [ citation needed ]\nThe right group represents the Grammar Police with another Cueball holding a sign with three homophones: Their (belongs to them), They're (contraction meaning \"they are\"), There (a location).  These words, due to their common usage and identical pronunciation are frequently confused for one another, with one spelling being used in a context meant for a different one, causing the Grammar Police to quickly intervene (see 386: Duty Calls ). See the Grammar Police on Twitter and also Linguistic prescription which comes up on Wikipedia when searching for Grammar Police.\nThe two groups look similar, standing in similar poses, with one Cueball holding signs in each group, and Megan in the front line of both groups. Each group also has one member brandishing a sword, indicating the exaggerated level of intensity they feel about their respective causes.\nBoth types of people will correct, criticize, denigrate or mock those who fail to conform to their criteria for what is \"correct\". Fashion police oppose people wearing clothing that's mismatched, out of style\/ fashion or simply \"ugly\" to them. Grammar police are \"sticklers\" for grammar rules and have an immediate negative reaction when someone uses non-standard grammar in a sentence. These two groups are generally seen as socially separate, and their goals appear very distinct, but the comic explains how the two groups are actually very similar.  This is demonstrated by listing eight characteristics (plus a ninth in the title text) common to both groups. See explanation in the table below .\nIn the caption below the comic Randall notes that he just realized that these are literally the same people because they both exhibit the listed traits.\nIt seems like a safe assumption (see 1339: When You Assume ) that there are more grammar pedants (see title text of 1652: Conditionals ) than fashion police people who read xkcd, and it also would seem likely that many xkcd readers would dislike the Fashion Police.  This comic may, therefore, be intended to point out to grammar pedants that their behavior is functionally similar to that of other people who they dislike. Ponytail also represented the grammar police in 1576: I Could Care Less , where Megan puts her in place after she polices her sentence; this thus shows what Randall thinks about such police work and supports the above assumption. In 1576: I Could Care Less, \"literally\" was also used in the title text.\nRandall is, with regards to language, definitely one of those that can belong in this group: To seem cool and casual, pretend to ignore them while understanding them very well.\nThe title is a ninth point to add to the list, with the asterisk in front representing one more bullet. See the last entry in the table below for more:\n[Beneath two headings to the left and right are shown two aggressive-looking groups of people with only the four people in the front clearly shown for each group. Behind them five other people can be seen, but they are not drawn with the same solid line and are only partly shown behind the first four, but legs from all five in each group can be seen along with some heads (all Cueball like) and arms etc. The front of the left group consist of Hairy holding a fist up towards left, Megan with her arms crossed in front of her chest, Cueball holding a sign, using both hands, straight up above his head and another Cueball-like guy to the right is holding up a broken branch in one hand toward right. The person behind this last person is shown to hold up his fist towards right like Hairy does to the left. The sign shows a Crocs shoe in a circle with a strike through it going above the Crocs from top left to bottom right.  The front of the right group consist of Megan holding both her arms over her head hands folded into fist while looking towards left, Cueball holding a sign, using both hands, towards the right and up above Ponytails head, she is raising one hand in a fist to the left and finally a bald guy with glasses is brandishing a short sword in one hand toward right while holding his other hand palm up. The sign has three similar words written beneath each other.] Left: Fashion Police Right: Grammar Police Sign: Their They're There\n[Below the two groups are eight points with bullets:] Judgemental and smug Angry about something deeply arbitrary Strong opinions backed by style guides Appreciate that the way that you are interpreted is your responsibility Understand that there's no way to \"opt out\" of sending messages by how you present yourself, and attempts to do so send strong messages of their own To seem cool and casual, pretend to ignore them while understanding them very well Vindictive about things that are often uncomfortably transparent proxies for race or social class Fun to cheer on until one of them disagrees with you\n[Caption below the panel:] I just realized these are literally the same people\n"}
{"id":1736,"title":"Manhattan Project","image_title":"Manhattan Project","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1736","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/manhattan_project.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1736:_Manhattan_Project","transcript":"[A five panel layout with each panel slightly narrower than the one before.] [Ponytail holding her arms out speaks to Cueball.] Ponytail: What we need to cure cancer is a new Manhattan Project!\n[Cueball stands next to Ponytail on podium with a banner overhead. Ponytail is lifting her arms high up and addresses a huge crowd below the podium. Faces disappear into the distance, but at the podiums edge are four full faces, from left to right they are Hairy, a person with flat hair, a person with white hair and a Cueball-like guy.] Banner: Research Initiative\n[Cueball and Megan sitting behind a desk looking out and Ponytail standing to the right facing away from them wear laboratory goggles and laboratory coats. There are several Erlenmeyer flasks on the desk and Ponytail is also holding such a flask. There are other glass wares on the desk.]\n[Megan, holding a hand in front of her face, Cueball and Ponytail, all wearing some kind of glasses strapped around the back of their heads stand behind two chest-height barriers looking into the distance where a large mushroom cloud rises high in the air with the typical ring around the stem below the main cloud and smoke\/dust surrounding the bottom of the stem. It is much higher in the image than the three mountains in the left background.]\n[Close up of Ponytail, as she faces to the right. She is wearing very dark protection glasses, looking like those used for looking at the sun during a solar eclipse.] Ponytail: Wait.\n","explanation":"The Manhattan Project was a big, expensive, secret research and development project that produced the first nuclear weapons during World War II . Because of the unprecedented scale of the project, which involved some of the brightest minds in science and the efforts of thousands of people, \"Manhattan Project\" has become a metaphor for any kind of all-out effort involving the top minds of a discipline to achieve a single objective, often expressed as the phrase \" We need a new Manhattan Project \".\nThe day before this comic was released the following announcement was made: Microsoft will \u2018solve\u2019 cancer within the next 10 years by treating it like a computer virus . And on the day this comic was released (but probably after the comic was released) there was a press conference where Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Pledge $3 Billion to Fighting Disease (all disease in general.) This is the kind of projects that could be called Manhattan type projects and these (at least the Microsoft announcement) could be the reason this comic came out now.\nIn this comic, Ponytail starts by making the suggestion that they should create a \"new Manhattan Project\" to cure cancer. Taken figuratively, this would imply a heavily-funded, massive collaborative effort involving the best scientists in the field of cancer research , and is not an unreasonable idea in itself. However, she and her fellow scientists all take the idea literally instead, and the New Manhattan Project ends up actually developing a nuclear bomb. In the final panel, Ponytail appears to realize that this runs somewhat counter to her original objective [ citation needed ] (not to mention is redundant, as the original Manhattan Project already invented the nuclear bomb).\nThe title text hastily justifies this mistake by claiming a partial success; that their nuclear detonation did, indeed, kill all cancer within the blast radius of the explosion. However, it fails to mention that the blast would also kill everything else as well. It also admits that the explosion would most likely end up causing more cancer due to the ionizing radiation and fallout . The title text is reminiscent of both the main comic and the title text of 1217: Cells .\nThis was the first time since 1355: Airplane Message , more than two years prior, that Randall mentions cancer (on a banner!), a recurring subject on xkcd, but mainly around the time when his then-fianc\u00e9e (now wife) was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer in October of 2010. Interestingly enough there are only two facts in that previous comic, and that other fact (from the title text) was referenced the week before this comic came out in 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline . But it could be a coincidence.\nThe Manhattan Project was the scene of 809: Los Alamos , and a story from the site is being told in 1520: Degree-Off . According to 980: Money the Manhattan project used $24,400,000,000. Nuclear weapons in general has been a recurrent subject on xkcd and their invention was also mentioned last week in 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline around 1950 CE. The previous comic with a similar mushroom cloud was 1655: Doomsday Clock , and in that comics explanation at least three other \"recent\" comics about such weapons of mass destruction are mentioned.\n[A five panel layout with each panel slightly narrower than the one before.] [Ponytail holding her arms out speaks to Cueball.] Ponytail: What we need to cure cancer is a new Manhattan Project!\n[Cueball stands next to Ponytail on podium with a banner overhead. Ponytail is lifting her arms high up and addresses a huge crowd below the podium. Faces disappear into the distance, but at the podiums edge are four full faces, from left to right they are Hairy, a person with flat hair, a person with white hair and a Cueball-like guy.] Banner: Research Initiative\n[Cueball and Megan sitting behind a desk looking out and Ponytail standing to the right facing away from them wear laboratory goggles and laboratory coats. There are several Erlenmeyer flasks on the desk and Ponytail is also holding such a flask. There are other glass wares on the desk.]\n[Megan, holding a hand in front of her face, Cueball and Ponytail, all wearing some kind of glasses strapped around the back of their heads stand behind two chest-height barriers looking into the distance where a large mushroom cloud rises high in the air with the typical ring around the stem below the main cloud and smoke\/dust surrounding the bottom of the stem. It is much higher in the image than the three mountains in the left background.]\n[Close up of Ponytail, as she faces to the right. She is wearing very dark protection glasses, looking like those used for looking at the sun during a solar eclipse.] Ponytail: Wait.\n"}
{"id":1737,"title":"Datacenter Scale","image_title":"Datacenter Scale","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1737","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/datacenter_scale.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1737:_Datacenter_Scale","transcript":"[Zoom in on a woman with a bun holding her hand palm up in front of her taking to people off-panel right.] Woman with a bun: RAID controllers don't make sense at our scale; everything is redundant at higher levels. When a drive fails, we just throw away the whole machine.\n[In this frame-less panel it is revealed that the woman with a bun talked to Cueball and Ponytail who is looking her way.] Cueball: Machine? We throw away whole racks at a time. Ponytail: Yeah, who replaces one server ?\n[Hairy has appeared from the left and holds one hand palm up towards the other three where also the woman with a bun has turned towards him.] Hairy: We just replace whole rooms at once. At our scale, messing with racks isn't economical. Woman with a bun:  Wow. Cueball: Like Google!\n[Megan walks in from the left, and everyone including Hairy now looks towards her. Cueball has taken a hand up to his chin. The replies to Megan are written with clearly smaller font.] Megan: We don't have sprinklers or inert gas systems. When a datacenter catches fire, we just rope it off and rebuild one town over. Hairy: Makes sense. Cueball: I wonder if the rope is really necessary.\n","explanation":"This comic expands, to the limit, the strategy that it's a net cost saving to allow cheap hardware to fail and simply replace it than to have robust but much more expensive systems to start with. The technique was made famous by Google circa 1999, when its successful cost-effective server designs were actually using sub-consumer, nearly junk, hardware.\nRAID (\"redundant array of independent disks\") is a technology that splits data across several hard drives as if they were one. RAID comes in several levels (varieties) which have different applications, but one of the big applications of RAID is creating mirrored hard disks that back each other up. If one disk drive in such a RAID fails, no data is lost.\nHowever, RAID is complicated to configure, so you don't want to be constantly setting it up. An alternative technique for data centers is, therefore, to simply send the data to several servers at once. This makes maintenance easier, but without RAID, one hard disk crash basically breaks the server. However, this is what the woman with a bun's (possibly an adult Science Girl ) data center is doing since their scale is so large that fixing individual servers actually more expensive than simply buying a new one for replacement, and instead of fixing the drive they throw away the machine. (More about this approach will be explained later on)\nFrom here, the comic starts to exaggerate. Nowadays, servers can be made extremely small (\" Blade servers \") and dozens of servers can be attached to one 19-inch rack in a data center. Rather than going to the effort of unplugging and unscrewing one blade from the rack, when a blade fails at Cueball 's data center they just throw away the rack, and Ponytail agrees and mildly mocks the woman with a bun for replacing one server.\nHairy 's data center goes one step further - they have so many servers that they would constantly have to be throwing away and replacing racks, so instead they just build a new room when one rack fails. This would be currently possible with small modular data centers that are built in shipping containers for easy transport and can be linked together to expand capacity.  Here the cargo-container \"room\" with the failure would be quickly swapped with a fresh one.  Cueball adds \"like Google!\" - Randall previously mentioned Google's approach to hard drive failures in the what if? Google's Datacenters on Punch Cards . Back in 2007 they had one failure every few minutes, which might have increased hugely since then.\nFinally Megan appears and her company, of course, breaks the scale of silliness in exaggeration. She says that they don't have any fire extinguishers (neither regular sprinklers nor the systems that deploy gasses like FM-200 which alter the room air's ability to sustain a fire). Rather, they just rope the center off, thus letting the data center burn down. Then they simply move a town over and build a new one. This may indicate they are so big that the entire town will burn down if their center catches fire, for else they did not have to skip town. Alternatively, they just leave the center burning and this may cause problems in that town, so they simply flee the premises.\nMost big internet companies do have multiple redundant data centers around the world, in order to increase speeds for users in different countries, but Megan's idea would be very expensive, result in increased latency , possibly kill people (either in their company, or other people in the town and since they do not try to put out the fire), and cause severe destruction of properties in addition to their own.  These last two items would result in additional litigation and fines, and potentially jail sentences for the people charged with implementing the policy.  They may also result in other towns being unwilling to take their business, out of fear they will wind up burning too.\nHairy still thinks that it makes sense, while Cueball wonders what difference the roping off does. This could again be a reference to the fact that they just let the buildings burn without bothering about the local consequences, and the next step is just one more step towards the extreme of the title text.\nThis comic references how, as data requirements expand, the cost of time eventually outweighs the cost of hardware at ever increasing scales (drive, rack, room, building). While this comic takes this to the extreme, with whole buildings being destroyed for simple flaws, the concept is not as far-fetched as it seems if \"thrown out\" is taken to include being sold to equipment refurbishers.  It could indeed be cost effective for a large data services provider to resell racks or even whole data center modules at some significant fraction of their \"as new\" price as opposed expending the time and effort to attempt a repair.  The equipment refurbisher would then rely on a cost advantage like cheaper labor to repair the flaw and sell it back to Google or another company with less demanding requirements.  Equipment rental firms already operate on this model and with the added incentive customers preferring to rent newer models, this means that the equipment is often preemptively replaced before failures even occur.\nThe title text refers to Isaac Asimov 's science-fiction short story The Last Question ( comic version ), where humanity asks, at different stages of its spatial and technological development, the same question to increasingly advanced computers: \"How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?\". At each point, the computer's answer is that it does not yet have sufficient data for a meaningful answer. Ultimately, the computers are all linked through hyperspace, outside the physical boundaries of the universe, and make up a single computing entity named AC which keeps pondering the question even as the heat death of the universe occurs and time and space cease to exist. When AC finally discovers the answer, since there is nobody left to report it to, it decides to demonstrate it and says \" LET THERE BE LIGHT! \", which are the first words said by God during the Creation, according to the Book of Genesis . Here, the title text implies that, as the universe died, AC no longer had a use for it as a physical support and, taking the comic's logic to the next extreme, chose to discard it and get a brand-new one instead of bothering to \"fix\" it by reversing its entropy. This short story was also referenced in 1448: Question .\nThis comic's concept of taking a real world phenomenon and exaggerating it to levels currently considered implausible for comic effect closely mimics an earlier comic which describes progressively more \"hardcore\" programmers in 378: Real Programmers . This comic might be related to 1567: Kitchen Tips which suggests not throwing away your dishes but washing them.\n[Zoom in on a woman with a bun holding her hand palm up in front of her taking to people off-panel right.] Woman with a bun: RAID controllers don't make sense at our scale; everything is redundant at higher levels. When a drive fails, we just throw away the whole machine.\n[In this frame-less panel it is revealed that the woman with a bun talked to Cueball and Ponytail who is looking her way.] Cueball: Machine? We throw away whole racks at a time. Ponytail: Yeah, who replaces one server ?\n[Hairy has appeared from the left and holds one hand palm up towards the other three where also the woman with a bun has turned towards him.] Hairy: We just replace whole rooms at once. At our scale, messing with racks isn't economical. Woman with a bun:  Wow. Cueball: Like Google!\n[Megan walks in from the left, and everyone including Hairy now looks towards her. Cueball has taken a hand up to his chin. The replies to Megan are written with clearly smaller font.] Megan: We don't have sprinklers or inert gas systems. When a datacenter catches fire, we just rope it off and rebuild one town over. Hairy: Makes sense. Cueball: I wonder if the rope is really necessary.\n"}
{"id":1738,"title":"Moon Shapes","image_title":"Moon Shapes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1738","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/moon_shapes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1738:_Moon_Shapes","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Interpreting the shape of the moon in art [The left part of the panel shows a two column chart is shown with labels above the columns. The left side shows the moons shape as white on a black square. These types of moons could be seen in certain art pieces. The right side saying whether this is normal or not as indicated with a green check mark or a red X. Right of the second column there are explanations of why the specific type of moon is marked as it is and what it could be called or how it could be possible even with the red X. The upper three moons have one common explanation as indicated with a bracket that covers all three with the text on the middle part of the bracket. Similarly moon five and six also have a bracket and only one explanation.] Shape Normal?\n[Shape #1-3 shows a white circle (full moon), a more than half full moon (Gibbon) and a thin seal at the bottom right of the square.] \u2713 \u2713 \"Full\" or \"Quarter\" or \"Harvest\" or \"Wax Gibbon\" or whatever \u2713\n[Shape #4 same as #3 but with the seal in the upper part of the square.] X Not possible at night\n[Shape #5-6 shows a full moon with a circular section taken out of the right side and a seal that goes almost all the way around the circumference of the moon with almost a full circle taken out of the top left part of the moon.] X X Only possible during a lunar eclipse (#1 only, dubious) or a solar eclipse (bright part is the Sun)\n[Shape #7 same as #3 but with the seal a little smaller and more to the top and less to the left. Around the moon there are several starts represented with 29 small white dots. In the center of the black square there is a black circle, coinciding with the outer rim of the seal. Within this circle (the dark side of the moon) there are no stars!] \u2713 Looks OK\n[Shape #8 same as #7 but apart from the 29 small white dots from before there are now also 6 more dots inside the dark circle with no stars in #7.] X There's either a hole in the Moon or a nuclear war on its surface.\n","explanation":"The Earth's Moon , being the most prominent object in the night sky (most of the time), is a frequent subject of art; particularly art depicting a nighttime scene. Unfortunately, the moon often appears in works of art in ways that are very dramatic and would not be realistically possible. It may be done out of ignorance, or knowingly by taking artistic license . As someone interested in and who has worked in astronomy, this likely bothers Randall .\nThe Moon is well known to have \" phases \" describing what portion of the visible surface of the moon is illuminated by sunlight and highly visible, and what portion is dark, and generally only slightly visible when the moon appears while the sun is also up. These phases progress between \"New\" (when the surface facing the Earth is completely dark) and \"Full\" (when the surface facing the Earth is completely illuminated, appearing as a full disk as viewed from Earth). Mid-way between those extreme phases is a \"Quarter\" Moon, when exactly one-half of the surface facing Earth is completely dark - at this point the Moon is a quarter of the way in its cycle from the New Moon, either one quarter of the way into it (\"First\" Quarter) or a quarter of the way from completing it (\"Last\" Quarter).\nBecause the Moon is approximately spherical, its illuminated side appears as \"crescent\" in shape as it progresses from New to First Quarter phase. As it progresses from First Quarter to Full phase, observers on Earth see a Waxing \" Gibbous Moon (which just means that the dark portion has formed a crescent). One can imagine this like a globe on which you draw a straight line from the north pole to the south pole down the center of the side facing you (appearing to create two semi-circles); upon rotating the globe, the line would become rounded as it moved away creating a crescent on the side the line was moved towards. Because of the geometry involved, a line connecting the two points (horns) of a Crescent Moon (or of the darkened crescent inverse of a Gibbous Moon) must be a diameter of the moon (i.e. it must pass through the center of the circle).\nThe deliberate misidentification of a Waxing Gibbous Moon (\"waxing\" means going from new to full; that is increasing in illuminated area) as a \"wax gibbon\" (a Southeast Asian ape made of a nonpolar solid) is a source of humor in this comic. This is probably a reference to H.P. Lovecraft, who had several of his stories take place under \"a gibbous moon\" for dramatic effect, or even more likely a reference to the Discworld by Terry Pratchett , often referenced in xkcd (as in 1498: Terry Pratchett ). In the witch series the Gibbous Moon is mentioned several times as the most magic, rather than the more often used Crescent or Full Moon.\nFurther, because the light portion of the Moon is illuminated by sunlight (whether or not the Moon is in the sky at the same time as the Sun), the light side of the Moon will always be facing towards the Sun. If the Moon is in the night sky, the Sun must be somewhere \"below\" the horizon on the other side of the Earth. Thus, at night, the light portion of the Moon must always be on the half of the Moon that faces the horizon (there are points during the daytime when the orientation can go the other way); however, because of the moon tilt illusion it is possible for the light portion of the moon to appear to point up. The moon tilt illusion is generally not as severe and may only last a few hours after sunset.\nIt is worth noting that while the Moon's dark portion blends imperceptibly with the dark night sky, it is still a solid body. Therefore it would be impossible to see more distant objects such as stars \"through\" the dark portion of the Moon's circumference. This is most dramatically exemplified by a solar eclipse during which the Moon passes in front of the Sun and is therefore completely dark (the Sun is lighting only the far side), but the Moon's circumference still blocks a circular portion of the Sun's light.  Therefore, if we were to see any lights in the part of the sky the dark side of the Moon blocks, they would need to be from sources between us and the Moon's surface, such as a nuclear war on the moon.\nThis comic lists some of the some common mistakes. In some cases, a depiction may be unrealistic in multiple ways - for example, the Flag of Tunisia has both unrealistic horns and a star visible between the horns, while the Charles VI tarot shows a Moon with over-long horns pointing towards the horizon.\nIn the title text, Randall is referring to the movie Independence Day and how one of the alien's ships (in the movie) 'eclipses' part of the Moon. He says that if the points go halfway or longer around the Moon, then he imagines it's caused by an alien ship and interprets the entire piece of art in that context (i.e. aliens are about to attack those shepherds!).\n[Caption above the panel:] Interpreting the shape of the moon in art [The left part of the panel shows a two column chart is shown with labels above the columns. The left side shows the moons shape as white on a black square. These types of moons could be seen in certain art pieces. The right side saying whether this is normal or not as indicated with a green check mark or a red X. Right of the second column there are explanations of why the specific type of moon is marked as it is and what it could be called or how it could be possible even with the red X. The upper three moons have one common explanation as indicated with a bracket that covers all three with the text on the middle part of the bracket. Similarly moon five and six also have a bracket and only one explanation.] Shape Normal?\n[Shape #1-3 shows a white circle (full moon), a more than half full moon (Gibbon) and a thin seal at the bottom right of the square.] \u2713 \u2713 \"Full\" or \"Quarter\" or \"Harvest\" or \"Wax Gibbon\" or whatever \u2713\n[Shape #4 same as #3 but with the seal in the upper part of the square.] X Not possible at night\n[Shape #5-6 shows a full moon with a circular section taken out of the right side and a seal that goes almost all the way around the circumference of the moon with almost a full circle taken out of the top left part of the moon.] X X Only possible during a lunar eclipse (#1 only, dubious) or a solar eclipse (bright part is the Sun)\n[Shape #7 same as #3 but with the seal a little smaller and more to the top and less to the left. Around the moon there are several starts represented with 29 small white dots. In the center of the black square there is a black circle, coinciding with the outer rim of the seal. Within this circle (the dark side of the moon) there are no stars!] \u2713 Looks OK\n[Shape #8 same as #7 but apart from the 29 small white dots from before there are now also 6 more dots inside the dark circle with no stars in #7.] X There's either a hole in the Moon or a nuclear war on its surface.\n"}
{"id":1739,"title":"Fixing Problems","image_title":"Fixing Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1739","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fixing_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1739:_Fixing_Problems","transcript":"[Cueball sitting in an office chair at his desk typing on his laptop. A person addresses him from the left:] Off-panel voice: What are you working on? Cueball: Trying to fix the problems I created when I tried to fix the problems I created when I tried to fix the problems I created when...\n","explanation":"Due to the complex relationships within a program or other system, making an alteration can cause problems with other parts of the program. This can lead to a seemingly small \"fix\" becoming a long chain of debugging and consecutive fixes, which Cueball is in the middle of, a typical example of recursion often used in xkcd. As Cueball attempts to solve the initial computer issue, he creates more problems along the way.\nThe title text suggests that the original problem was not stopping the function of the program and the benefits that Cueball may have hoped to achieve with the mentality of \"If it ain't broke, break it and fix it\" are being consumed by the expanding effort of the fix.  Attempting to solve all of these problems results in more time wasted than he hoped would be gained by optimizing the inefficient tool described in the title text. Though depending on the tool, he could publish the changes once completed, allowing the community using that tool to gain back the man-hours collectively. Wondering if something is worth doing has been a subject in 1205: Is It Worth the Time?\nThis comic is similar in thesis to 1445: Efficiency and 1319: Automation . Other relevant comics include 1171: Perl Problems , where using regular expressions causes more problems than it solves, 349: Success , where Randall comments on the goals of a project decreasing in optimism as a project goes on due to more and more problems distracting from the original, and 1579: Tech Loops , which shows that attempting to fix one problem in a piece of software can force a developer to delve into seemingly irrelevant parts of the relevant tech loop that the software in question is trapped in.\n[Cueball sitting in an office chair at his desk typing on his laptop. A person addresses him from the left:] Off-panel voice: What are you working on? Cueball: Trying to fix the problems I created when I tried to fix the problems I created when I tried to fix the problems I created when...\n"}
{"id":1740,"title":"Rosetta","image_title":"Rosetta","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1740","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rosetta.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1740:_Rosetta","transcript":"[A control room with Megan and Hairy sitting on stools in front of an opposite desk with computers. Hairy has his arms in the air. Ponytail is standing between them with Cueball, she is watching Megan and he is looking at Hairy.] Megan: Signal lost. Megan: Rosetta has impacted the comet. Ponytail: Good work everyone. Hairy: Woooo!\n[Zoom on Ponytail, still looking at Megan and Cueball who has turned towards Ponytail.] Cueball: So. Cueball: Do you think we deflected it?\n[Ponytail turns to Cueball as does Hairy who turns and looks away from his computer.] Ponytail: Huh? Cueball: Did we hit the comet hard enough to deflect it away from Earth?\n[In a frame-less panel Ponytail talks with Cueball.] Ponytail: That... Is that what you thought we were doing? Cueball: I just assumed...\n[Megan enters whispering in Ponytail's ear, holding a hand up to her mouth. Ponytail still looks at Cueball who raises his arms up in the air.] Megan: He's a huge Armageddon fan. Let him have this. Ponytail: Okay, fine. Ponytail: Yes! We did it! The Earth is saved! Cueball: Wooo!\n","explanation":"On the day this comic was posted (September 30th 2016), the Rosetta mission ended with the final descent of Rosetta onto the comet 67P . Landing Rosetta on the comet gave the scientists ( Ponytail , Megan and Hairy ) a chance to collect extra data from very close to the comet, using the spacecraft's powerful sensors.\nCueball however assumed that the landing was a \" kinetic impact \" mission to deflect a comet that was on a collision course with Earth. A similar scenario (but using a nuclear weapon implanted inside of the asteroid to deflect it) was depicted in the 1998 film Armageddon , of which Cueball is apparently a fan. Armageddon is a high-throttle action movie, infamous among NASA employees for its incredibly liberal application of artistic license. IMDb has a list of factual inaccuracies .\nIn reality, at the time Rosetta landed, 67P was already leaving the inner solar system and was a long way past Earth . It will return to the inner solar system in around 5 years' time, but its orbit will not pass close to the Earth in any foreseeable time.\nAlso, as the title text hints, Rosetta's speed was only 90 cm per second relative to the surface at the moment of impact (or about 2 mph\/3.25 km\/h; the speed of a slow walk), while the comet was traveling at 14.39 km\/s. Given that Rosetta only weighs a couple of tons (or six horses ), and 67P weighs nearly 10 billion tons (or 22 billion horses), Rosetta's landing will have no actual measurable effect on the comet's momentum.\nRosetta (and its lander, Philae ) were previously the subject of the comics 1402: Harpoons and 1446: Landing , and were mentioned in 1461: Payloads , 1547: Solar System Questions and possibly 1621: Fixion .\n[A control room with Megan and Hairy sitting on stools in front of an opposite desk with computers. Hairy has his arms in the air. Ponytail is standing between them with Cueball, she is watching Megan and he is looking at Hairy.] Megan: Signal lost. Megan: Rosetta has impacted the comet. Ponytail: Good work everyone. Hairy: Woooo!\n[Zoom on Ponytail, still looking at Megan and Cueball who has turned towards Ponytail.] Cueball: So. Cueball: Do you think we deflected it?\n[Ponytail turns to Cueball as does Hairy who turns and looks away from his computer.] Ponytail: Huh? Cueball: Did we hit the comet hard enough to deflect it away from Earth?\n[In a frame-less panel Ponytail talks with Cueball.] Ponytail: That... Is that what you thought we were doing? Cueball: I just assumed...\n[Megan enters whispering in Ponytail's ear, holding a hand up to her mouth. Ponytail still looks at Cueball who raises his arms up in the air.] Megan: He's a huge Armageddon fan. Let him have this. Ponytail: Okay, fine. Ponytail: Yes! We did it! The Earth is saved! Cueball: Wooo!\n"}
{"id":1741,"title":"Work","image_title":"Work","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1741","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/work.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1741:_Work","transcript":"[A table is shown with a glass of water to the left and a lamp standard type desk lamp on the right. There are nine labels in relation to different parts of these three items. For each label, one or two arrows points to the relevant part. Five labels are written above the table, two on the table and two below the table between the front legs. These last two labels are causing the table legs to the rear to disappear, and also cuts the lamp cord, going beneath the table, in two. Below each label will be written under a description of what they point to going in normal reading order from left to right, two lines above, one line on and one line below the table.]\n[Arrow points a line that follow the curve of the lamps shade:] An engineer worked late drawing this curve in AutoCAD\n[Arrow points to back of lamp shade just above the stem. The shade has four visible vents on the front. The part the arrow points to is not visible:] Extra vents added to avoid California safety recall\n[Arrow points to glass:] Years-long negotiation with glass supplier\n[A double arrow is placed above the center of the glass, ending on two lines above the edges of the glass:] 4 hours of meetings\n[Two arrow points on either side of the lamp's stem:] 9 hours of meetings\n[Two arrow, one pointing up at the bottom and the other down at the inside bottom of the glass:] Months of tip-over testing\n[An arrow points to the lamp information sticker on the bottom part of the lamps base. Unreadable text can be seen as thins lines on the sticker:] Ongoing debate\n[An arrow points to the front edge of the desk, ending in a starburst on the edge:] Wood source changed due to 20 year legal fight over logging in the Great Bear rainforest\n[Arrow points to the switch on the lamps cord which can be seen going over the right edge of the table and hanging down below the table. The switch can be seen just under the table edge:] Argument over putting switch on cord got someone fired\n[Caption under the panel:] Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work that went into the ordinary objects around me.\n","explanation":"This comic details a set of theoretical examples of how much work went into the design and manufacture of everyday objects. See explanation of individual design elements below.\nThe joke centers around the fact that most people in modern times are constantly surrounded with human-built objects, which we generally use without giving them much thought. Randall implies that he occasionally imagines what went into seemingly simple objects around him (in this case his desk and the water glass and the desk lamp on top of it), and finds it overwhelming. This is because there are so many built items around us, many of which are inexpensive and mass-produced, which nonetheless resulted from a great deal of human effort.\nThis is similar to the thesis of the classic essay I, Pencil , except that while I, Pencil idealizes manufacture and commerce to argue for the free market and against regulation, the comic focuses on details that are far more human or based in bureaucratic or government red tape.\nPresumably, this kind of realization is more likely for people who've worked in design and engineering, like Randall, because they have some insight into what's involved in bringing a product to market. Also people who sit around all day wondering what could be funny, like Randall, could also end up in such a thought spiral. The comment about California recalls is based on the tags on products that often state \"This item has been known by the state of California to cause...\"\nThere's a double joke in the title as the first thing most people will think of, when seeing such a table with a typical desk lamp, is that this is a work desk rather than about all the work put into making the desk and lamp. The potential implication is that Randall is so distracted imagining the work that went into creating his workspace that he can't get his own work done, hence the title. (Interestingly, but without being related to this comic, the next comic was called 1742: Will It Work ).\nThe argument over putting the switch on the cord getting someone fired hits on another aspect of the design issue. Companies that design and manufacture goods will inevitably have human conflicts, where decisions will be argued over, and human personalities and office politics will impact the final design.\nIn the title text Randall states that this incidence is imaginary (based on his imagination) but still he has apparently come up with an entire fictional narrative about the conflict over whether to put the lamp's switch on the lamp body itself, or to attach it to the lamp's power cord. And now he has SUCH a strong opinion about the firing incident.\nThis may be because he already had a strong opinion about who was right, which could make him angry if that person was the one getting fired. Randall's distaste for lamps where the switch is on the cord was mentioned in the title text of 1036: Reviews . As the lamp on this desk is with the switch on the cord, and as it seems Randall really dislikes such lamps, this would make sense, as it would probably be the one wishing to put the switch on the body who were fired. Alternatively it could have been the one who put the switch on the wire that was fired later, when they got poor on-line reviews...\nUsing the lamp as shown on this desk would make it annoying with the switch on the cord, as it will be hard to reach under the table, when sitting at the desk. Often such lamps have the switch either at the main body or on the head of the lamp. That would make it easy to reach it while sitting at the desk.\nA similar theme of the unseen contributions of engineers is found in 277: Long Light , including the title text: \"You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think 'some engineer was frustrated while designing this.' It's a little human connection.\" This fits in well with Randall's annoyance with a switch on the cord, as he might believe it was a frustrated engineer that is the cause of such an inconvenient placement of the switch.\n[A table is shown with a glass of water to the left and a lamp standard type desk lamp on the right. There are nine labels in relation to different parts of these three items. For each label, one or two arrows points to the relevant part. Five labels are written above the table, two on the table and two below the table between the front legs. These last two labels are causing the table legs to the rear to disappear, and also cuts the lamp cord, going beneath the table, in two. Below each label will be written under a description of what they point to going in normal reading order from left to right, two lines above, one line on and one line below the table.]\n[Arrow points a line that follow the curve of the lamps shade:] An engineer worked late drawing this curve in AutoCAD\n[Arrow points to back of lamp shade just above the stem. The shade has four visible vents on the front. The part the arrow points to is not visible:] Extra vents added to avoid California safety recall\n[Arrow points to glass:] Years-long negotiation with glass supplier\n[A double arrow is placed above the center of the glass, ending on two lines above the edges of the glass:] 4 hours of meetings\n[Two arrow points on either side of the lamp's stem:] 9 hours of meetings\n[Two arrow, one pointing up at the bottom and the other down at the inside bottom of the glass:] Months of tip-over testing\n[An arrow points to the lamp information sticker on the bottom part of the lamps base. Unreadable text can be seen as thins lines on the sticker:] Ongoing debate\n[An arrow points to the front edge of the desk, ending in a starburst on the edge:] Wood source changed due to 20 year legal fight over logging in the Great Bear rainforest\n[Arrow points to the switch on the lamps cord which can be seen going over the right edge of the table and hanging down below the table. The switch can be seen just under the table edge:] Argument over putting switch on cord got someone fired\n[Caption under the panel:] Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work that went into the ordinary objects around me.\n"}
{"id":1742,"title":"Will It Work","image_title":"Will It Work","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1742","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/will_it_work.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1742:_Will_It_Work","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Likelihood you will get code working based on how you're supposed to install it:\n[A chart with a double arrow going from the top to the bottom. Both arrows are labeled. Along the arrow, six labels follow from top to bottom. The first five take up different amounts of space, but the space between them (bottom of one to top of the next) is the same and resembles a typical line shift between paragraphs. The space, however, to the last label is more than three times as wide.] Very likely\nApp store or package manager\nGitHub Link\nSourceForge Link\nGeocities\/Tripod Link\nCopy-and-paste example from paper's appendix\n\nAnything that \"requires only minimal configuration and tweaking\"\nUnlikely\n","explanation":"This comic humorously lists how likely computer code is to function on the user's computer based on the source of the code.\nApp store or package manager: Most likely referring to the Apple's Mac or iOS App Store , Google's Google Play , Microsoft's Windows or Windows Phone Store , or package managers such as Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool (APT). Programs in the App Store are already compiled from raw code into executable files that have been tested on their respective platform -- otherwise they would be rejected from the storefront -- and so should be expected to run with no effort from the user. Similarly, a package manager for a Linux OS handles downloading and installing the program requested, as well as installing any dependencies (other programs or libraries needed by the desired program, potentially including locusts ) automatically.\nGitHub Link: GitHub is a website where people can host Git repositories of code that they are working on. Since Git is built to track changes in code for an entire project, it is likely that all of the code needed to run the project is included in the download. One reason it may be less reliable than the previous entry is that it may not include external libraries expected to already be on the user's computer.\nSourceForge Link: SourceForge is similar in scope to GitHub\u00a0: hosting source code repositories but also binary packages. But it is older and dwindling in popularity. As a result, a project hosted on SourceForge is more likely to be abandoned.\nGeocities\/Tripod Link: Geocities is a now-defunct free website host. Tripod is a similar website host owned by Lycos . The fact that the software comes from there means that nobody has paid attention to the project since Geocities shut down, which could mean that code rot has begun to take effect, with various dependencies being less and less likely to work over time.\nCopy-and-paste example from paper's appendix: Some academic papers publish code or pseudocode ( example of a paper with pseudocode in appendix ) in order to illustrate their concepts, strategies or algorithms. Often this code is not meant to be compiled because it is thought to illustrate ideas rather than be used in an actual working piece of software. Copying and pasting this code and trying to compile it will rarely give satisfactory results, and that is why it is at this point in the comic's spectrum.\nAnything that \"requires only minimal configuration and tweaking\": The punchline of the comic is that something advertised as having been tested and working with \"minimal configuration and tweaking\" on the system it was developed on turns out to be a frustrating mess that will almost inevitably require huge fixes for anybody else trying to get it to function. It's also often used by technically advanced people who are not aware of how difficult even minimal configuration and tweaking can be for beginners.\nThe title text refers to websites such as Stack Overflow that allow users to post questions about their code and have other users provide answers. Websites like Stack Overflow usually generate useful answers but the quality may be lower if the conversation is disgruntled (i.e. if the asker has put in very little effort to solve the problem themselves) or if the language is less commonly used. The title text of 1185: Ineffective Sorts also references executing arbitrary code until it works, in that comic the code is actually mentioned as being from StackOverflow.\nSaying that something \"depends on the phase of the moon\" usually means that there is some apparently random component to the problem, as neither the performance of a program nor the quality of answers on websites should depend on the position of the moon in its orbit. However, there was at least one case where the phase of the moon did, in fact, trigger a bug in code.  This comic was released the day after Rosh Hashanah, a Jewish holiday that always occurs at or near a new moon.  It is not clear whether this is why Randall was thinking about moon phases or just a coincidence.\nThe shape of the moon was the subject of 1738: Moon Shapes released during the week before this comic was released. This comic is called Will It Work , the previous comic was just called 1741: Work\n[Caption above the panel:] Likelihood you will get code working based on how you're supposed to install it:\n[A chart with a double arrow going from the top to the bottom. Both arrows are labeled. Along the arrow, six labels follow from top to bottom. The first five take up different amounts of space, but the space between them (bottom of one to top of the next) is the same and resembles a typical line shift between paragraphs. The space, however, to the last label is more than three times as wide.] Very likely\nApp store or package manager\nGitHub Link\nSourceForge Link\nGeocities\/Tripod Link\nCopy-and-paste example from paper's appendix\n\nAnything that \"requires only minimal configuration and tweaking\"\nUnlikely\n"}
{"id":1743,"title":"Coffee","image_title":"Coffee","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1743","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coffee.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1743:_Coffee","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: We should make coffee for our guests. Megan: Crap. I know nothing about coffee. Cueball: We're basically fake adults. Megan: Don't panic. We can figure this out.\n[Megan shakes a can of coffee grounds out on the floor as Cueball watches.] Megan: We just pour the coffee grounds...\n[Pan to only Megan who pours a pail of water over the grounds now lying in a pile on the floor.] Megan: ...Add water...\n[Cueball watches as Megan vacuums up the mixture on the floor with a bag-less vacuum cleaner, the wire going off panel right behind her.] Vacuum cleaner: Vrrrr\n[Megan is holding the dirt canister from the vacuum cleaner over two lit gas burners on a stove. The canister free vacuum cleaner is standing behind her and Cueball is behind this watching her.] Megan: Now we just hold it over the burners... Burners: Hissss\n[Megan is holding the dirt canister over one shoulder while pouring the hot content into a small mug, as Cueball watches. Three wiggly lines above the liquid indicates that it is hot.] Megan: Annnd... serve. Cueball: Nice! Megan: I'm a regular Starbuck!\n","explanation":"In this comic Cueball and Megan are anticipating guests.  Offering coffee to house guests is a commonly-accepted courtesy in the United States (and most of the western world (and rest of the world)). However, they seem to be unaware of the basics of coffee making . Cueball is concerned that this lack of knowledge is an indication of their mutual immaturity (thinking of himself as a \"fake adult\"),\nThis comic thus follows a frequently used theme of people growing up but finding themselves unable or unwilling to accept traditional adult roles (see 150: Grownups , 441: Babies , 616: Lease , 905: Homeownership and 1674: Adult ). While there are cultures where coffee is served to children, it is generally seen in the United States (and western world (and rest of the world)) as an adult beverage\u2014like beer which has also served as the subject in the comic 1534: Beer .\nMegan is, however, confident that the necessary steps can be determined. The steps she follows however are quite unorthodox...\nShe attempts to make coffee by pouring the ingredients on the ground (misinterpreting the meaning of \"ground coffee\"), sucking it up with a Dyson vacuum cleaner (misinterpreting the meaning of \" vacuum brewing \"), then boiling the mixture by placing the vacuum cleaner's removable plastic canister over a hot stove, and pouring the resulting sludge through the vacuum-cleaner filter (instead of a standard coffee filter ).\nMegan says she is a regular \"Starbuck\" after pouring the batch of coffee, believing the name of the cafe chain Starbucks to be synonymous with the actual job title \" barista \", further indicating a general lack of knowledge regarding the subject of coffee. The Starbucks coffee chain was loosely named after the fictional character Starbuck from the book Moby Dick , so she could be referring to this, although Starbuck had nothing to do with coffee brewing! The third possible interpretation is that Megan is unaware of the reason for Starbucks' naming and thought that it was the possessive \"Starbuck's\" and that the founder was named Starbuck. See more trivia about Starbuck below.\nThis method of making coffee would be very expensive as it would most likely destroy the vacuum-cleaner canister and filter. If the vacuum cleaner had ever been used, then it would not be very hygienic either, although if it had not been used then the floor would probably also be very unhygienic anyway. Since the plastic from the canister has probably also gone into contact with the sludge after being heated over open fire, there is a high risk that this \"coffee\" is actually poisonous for more than one reason.\nThe title text refers to the expense of replacing the \"filter\", as vacuum-cleaner filters are considerably more costly than single-use coffee filters.\nThis was the first of two comics in a row about food, the next being 1744: Metabolism .\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: We should make coffee for our guests. Megan: Crap. I know nothing about coffee. Cueball: We're basically fake adults. Megan: Don't panic. We can figure this out.\n[Megan shakes a can of coffee grounds out on the floor as Cueball watches.] Megan: We just pour the coffee grounds...\n[Pan to only Megan who pours a pail of water over the grounds now lying in a pile on the floor.] Megan: ...Add water...\n[Cueball watches as Megan vacuums up the mixture on the floor with a bag-less vacuum cleaner, the wire going off panel right behind her.] Vacuum cleaner: Vrrrr\n[Megan is holding the dirt canister from the vacuum cleaner over two lit gas burners on a stove. The canister free vacuum cleaner is standing behind her and Cueball is behind this watching her.] Megan: Now we just hold it over the burners... Burners: Hissss\n[Megan is holding the dirt canister over one shoulder while pouring the hot content into a small mug, as Cueball watches. Three wiggly lines above the liquid indicates that it is hot.] Megan: Annnd... serve. Cueball: Nice! Megan: I'm a regular Starbuck!\n"}
{"id":1744,"title":"Metabolism","image_title":"Metabolism","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1744","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/metabolism.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1744:_Metabolism","transcript":"[Cueball, on the left, and White Hat are sitting on chairs on either side of a table, facing each other. They each have plates of food and glasses of some beverage set in front of them. Each has picked up a portion of food on a fork to eat it.]\nCueball: I have one of those metabolisms where I can eat whatever I want and my body converts it to energy and stores the excess as fat.\n","explanation":"Eating is fundamentally a process where energy from food gets absorbed into the body in order to drive every cellular process in the body.  Energy that is absorbed but not needed in the short term gets converted and stored as body fat. This is called metabolism . Consuming too much food and not exercising enough are major factors for obesity , which is a problem in many first world countries today, especially in the United States .\nFor obese people, losing weight is often an enormously difficult task.  Standing in stark contrast, there are also lean people who do not seem to ever gain any weight even though they appear to eat whatever and however much they want.  This leads some people (including the lean people themselves) to believe that one can have a special metabolism where excess food energy somehow does not affect the body.  This belief is common, though not supported by scientific evidence.  The comic makes fun of that kind of notion.  While Cueball describes to White Hat how his metabolism is \"special\" (the phrase \"one of those\" implicitly meaning unusual), he is in fact only describing the normal case: no matter what he eats, his body converts the food to energy and stores any excess food as fat which stays in his body for future use.\nThe title text stretches this further, telling about the normal habit of drinking water (and the consequences of not drinking it) as something odd.  Starting to feel bad at first and eventually dying if refraining from drinking for too long a time are perfectly normal consequences of dehydration. This was also touched upon in 1708: Dehydration , in which Megan spent all day researching whether low-grade dehydration is really a thing -- ironically forgetting to eat or drink at all, to predictable results.\nObesity has only fairly recently become a public health issue due to lifestyle changes brought on by technologies such as industrialization and trade.  Human bodies evolved under conditions where it was hard to ever find enough to eat, so to store as much excess energy as possible as fat was a beneficial adaptation.  Historically, stored fat would be consumed during hard times that was sure to come.  The act of collecting food through farming or hunting\/gathering also demanded physical labor which limited the amount of excess energy that would remain.  In comparison, people nowadays hardly need to expend any energy to buy their food from a nearby market.  They also have much more sedentary lifestyles and rarely ever go hungry.  Without an active commitment to exercise more or eat less, there would almost never be a shortage of energy and no chance for body fat to be used. Randall has previously shown how bad his health becomes when he starts eating lots of fat (or sweet) food in 418: Stove Ownership .\nThere are many rational explanations for why some people might not gain weight despite eating a lot.  For example, it's possible that they only eat a lot during special occasions and social gatherings, where they are easily seen eating.  On more private occasions when no one is watching, they could just as well eat much less or even skip entire meals.  They might also lead a much more active lifestyle and thus require more energy than an average person despite their thin appearance.  Other less pleasant reasons might include chronic diseases, parasite infections, or eating disorders.\nThis is the second comic in a row about food, the previous being 1743: Coffee .\n[Cueball, on the left, and White Hat are sitting on chairs on either side of a table, facing each other. They each have plates of food and glasses of some beverage set in front of them. Each has picked up a portion of food on a fork to eat it.]\nCueball: I have one of those metabolisms where I can eat whatever I want and my body converts it to energy and stores the excess as fat.\n"}
{"id":1745,"title":"Record Scratch","image_title":"Record Scratch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1745","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/record_scratch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1745:_Record_Scratch","transcript":"[In a black area, with jagged edges, at the top of the comic is a sound effect written with white text. Below there are two frames with text. This text is narrated by Cueball standing below with four people around him. Cueball is highlighted by being drawn in the regular way whereas the other four people are drawn in light gray. Cueball has just dropped a wineglass, spilling wine on the floor to the left and dropping the glass, spilling more wine, to the right, He has his arms slightly out, and seems to be turned towards three people to the right, while looking to the left at Ponytail. Ponytail is holding a glass of wine in one hand and is the other hand up waving her fist at Cueball. On his other side Hairy is advancing towards him with both hands up in fists ready for a fight. (It could be his wine glass dropped on the floor at Cueball's feet as it is also drawn in gray). Behind Hairy is Megan also with a wine glass held in one hand, and behind her is another Cueball-like guy with a wine glass holding one arm out pointing a  finger at Cueball.]\nRecord Scratch\nCueball (narrating): You're probably wondering what that sound was. Cueball (narrating): Well, long ago, music was recorded on vinyl discs...\n","explanation":"A vinyl disc (also known as a gramophone record ) is a type of storage medium that stores audio recordings on the disc by carving the audio data into a continuous spiral groove on the surface of the disc. These are typically played on a phonograph (also known as record players (since 1940s) or, most recently, turntables). The player spins the disc as a stationary stylus rides along the groove. The movement of the stylus along the groove is converted by an electromagnetic or piezoelectric transducer into a corresponding electric current, which an amplifier then converts to sound.\nThe noise referred to as a \"record scratch\" can be caused by someone attempting to stop a record's play by dragging the stylus across the radius of the record, or by stopping the disc's rotation with one's hand (opposing the turntable's rotation). As a result, this is often used as a sound effect in movies for comedic effect. This type of sound is also often used in hip-hop music; in particular, rapidly and manually rotating the disc in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions.\nThe comic pokes fun at a movie clich\u00e9 in which the story opens with the main character in some kind of unbelievable predicament, followed by a record scratch, seemingly freezing time (using the sound of a sudden pausing of a record to symbolize the sudden pausing of time in the movie). As the action in the film is paused, a character narrates something along the lines of, \"Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering (how I ended up in this situation)...\" The rest of the story then follows, often with the film going back in time to depict the events that leads up to the situation of the opening scene.\nIn this case, it would be interesting to know why Cueball is at a party where everyone has wine glasses in their hands, but suddenly one of the glasses (Cueball's or his nearest adversary's) is lying on the floor, and it seems like a fight is about to break out. This is what an opening narration might begin to explain (typically in a flashback) after the record scratch.  At the time of the comic's posting, parodying the clich\u00e9, variations on the phrase had become a popular meme on social media. As the record scratch continues to be used despite the fact that record players (gramophones) have largely become obsolete technology, Randall pokes fun at this by beginning this meme by giving the backstory on what that sound actually is, (as many people from the younger generation may very well not know this), rather than giving context to the situation via a story. This is yet one more of Randall's comics that is trying to make people feel old , and is likely most relevant to those who have actually used vinyl to listen to music, comedy or other recordings.\nThe title text indicates (in a manner similar to that of 891: Movie Ages ) that the \"78-rpm era\" \u2013 referring to the fact that the original industry standard of records making 78 revolutions per minute (rpm) (1925-1950s) \u2013 is now closer to the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865) than it is to present day, another way that Randall is making the reader feel old. Note; these 78 rpm records were made of shellac, not of vinyl.\n[In a black area, with jagged edges, at the top of the comic is a sound effect written with white text. Below there are two frames with text. This text is narrated by Cueball standing below with four people around him. Cueball is highlighted by being drawn in the regular way whereas the other four people are drawn in light gray. Cueball has just dropped a wineglass, spilling wine on the floor to the left and dropping the glass, spilling more wine, to the right, He has his arms slightly out, and seems to be turned towards three people to the right, while looking to the left at Ponytail. Ponytail is holding a glass of wine in one hand and is the other hand up waving her fist at Cueball. On his other side Hairy is advancing towards him with both hands up in fists ready for a fight. (It could be his wine glass dropped on the floor at Cueball's feet as it is also drawn in gray). Behind Hairy is Megan also with a wine glass held in one hand, and behind her is another Cueball-like guy with a wine glass holding one arm out pointing a  finger at Cueball.]\nRecord Scratch\nCueball (narrating): You're probably wondering what that sound was. Cueball (narrating): Well, long ago, music was recorded on vinyl discs...\n"}
{"id":1746,"title":"Making Friends","image_title":"Making Friends","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1746","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/making_friends.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1746:_Making_Friends","transcript":"[Cueball is walking with Ponytail holding her arms out while talking.] Ponytail: Making friends is so much harder once you're out of school. Ponytail: Everyone's so busy. And how do you even meet people?\n[In this frame-less panel Cueball raises his arms in front of his chest while they walk on.] Cueball: Here's what I do: Cueball: I pretend to be weak and injured, and wait for others to start circling, hoping to take my food, shelter, and nutrients.\n[Cueball stop walking and lifts both arms straight out as Ponytail turns towards him.] Cueball: Then, before they can descend, I start telling them cool facts about space until they like me. Cueball: Bam , friendship! Ponytail: This explains a lot.\n","explanation":"Ponytail is complaining to Cueball that it is hard to make new friends once you are out of school. She even has problems just meeting new people, let alone making those new people her friends.\nThis is a common problem, or maybe rather an advantage of going to school. In school you are forced together with a group of people you have to see everyday and work together with in groups. This is a great catalyst for making new friends. In the early grades the kids haven't had time to form many friendships so they are ready to make new friends, and later in college the young people often move away from their home town, and thus have no friends in their new town, and are again ready to make friends. Later in life it is rare to be put in a similar situation, and the people you do meet might already have several friends; for most people there is usually a rather low limit on how many friends it is possible to keep close. Thus many feel it is hard to make new friends compared to when they went to school.\nCueball has a solution, but it is very weird. He says he pretends to be injured, and then, as if he were a weak animal on the savanna , he expects other people to begin circling around him, not directly to eat him, but to take his food, shelter and nutrients . This is a weird formulation as nutrients is what you get from your food, so either he is referring twice to his food, or he actually refers to his value as nutrient (i.e. food) for another being. Also it is unlikely for a person to steal his shelter, unless this refers to his clothing, as \"the shelter\" would usually be seen as a normal person's house, which is rather hard to take [ citation needed ] , especially if the person is renting and it belongs to someone else.\nHe then talks about these possible future friends as if they will descend on him, making it sound even more like they are birds hanging above him like vultures . But his plan is to start telling these people who are ready to rob him of his life support cool facts about space before they get a chance to descend, and then make them like him based on this knowledge. And then before they know what hit them, they are instantly his friends. If this were actually about vultures, his method could be used to trap said vultures, a trick that might be used to try and capture vultures by tricking them to come down in order to eat them yourself (if stuck in a desert, etc).\nCueball seems to think this is a fantastic idea, as shown by his arm gestures. But Ponytail seems to think otherwise. Her comment this explains a lot is probably a reference to other strange habits of Cueball that she has observed. Or his lack of other friends. Or there was a story about how they met that had confused her until this conversation occurred...\nThe logic of Cueball's \"friends\" could be that Cueball is extremely rich. If he pretends to be near death, some cynics might try to become closer to Cueball to gain at least some of Cueball's wealth upon his death.\nIn the title text Ponytail mentions that what Cueball has just described fits well with the behavior of turkey vultures rather than humans. Turkey vultures are a type of bird of prey which feeds on carrion. They are known to identify and circle weak, injured, dead or dying animals so they can eat them (take their nutrients).\nAs they are animals they would not care about cool facts about space, but Cueball did seem to talk about other humans in the main comic. The title text, however, goes even further out this line and have Cueball cite his mom: \"My mom always told me a turkey vulture is just a friend you haven't met yet, usually because you don't smell enough like decaying meat.\" This is  a reference to the old saying: \"A stranger is just a friend you haven't met yet\", and the action of the vultures eating dead animals.\nSmelling of decaying meat would be likely to attract the vultures but it should be noted that this is likely to drive away most other potential (human) friends, as most people don't like the smell of decaying meat. [ citation needed ] Also, there is very little reason to believe that you could become friends with vultures , although if you get up and show that you are not really injured, they are likely to give up and fly away rather than attack you, unless they are starving .\nVultures hanging in the air over prey that is about to die, was also the subject of 926: Time Vulture . Saying cool things about space, hoping that people like you, was the subject of 1644: Stargazing . The comic 1485: Friendship , was not about friendship...\n[Cueball is walking with Ponytail holding her arms out while talking.] Ponytail: Making friends is so much harder once you're out of school. Ponytail: Everyone's so busy. And how do you even meet people?\n[In this frame-less panel Cueball raises his arms in front of his chest while they walk on.] Cueball: Here's what I do: Cueball: I pretend to be weak and injured, and wait for others to start circling, hoping to take my food, shelter, and nutrients.\n[Cueball stop walking and lifts both arms straight out as Ponytail turns towards him.] Cueball: Then, before they can descend, I start telling them cool facts about space until they like me. Cueball: Bam , friendship! Ponytail: This explains a lot.\n"}
{"id":1747,"title":"Spider Paleontology","image_title":"Spider Paleontology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1747","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spider_paleontology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1747:_Spider_Paleontology","transcript":"[The Sphere, a time-traveler depicted as a solid floating black energy sphere surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments) seems to have materialized in front of Megan and Cueball who is in the right part of the panel facing left towards it.  The Sphere looks like this except in the zoom in from panel two. A voice emanates from the Sphere.] Sphere: I'm here from the distant future! Megan: Cool! What for? Sphere: Spiders!\n[A close-up of the Sphere, still depicted as a black sphere, but not perfectly round at this zoom level and also clearly with some white dots in the dark area. It is also now surrounded by seven (rather than six) narrow rays with irregular dots between the rays. Megan answers it from off-panel.] Sphere: We've learned about your planet's spiders from fossils. Sphere: There's a whole spider craze. We have spider theme parks, spider movies, spider costumes... Sphere: Such beautiful animals! Megan (off-panel): I guess...\n[Same setting as in the first panel but Megan is pointing left past the Sphere.] Sphere: Now we've got time travel, so I'm here to see one for myself! Megan: Sure! There's one over there!\n[The Sphere floats over a leafless branch sticking out of the ground. A spider web is strung between the left border of the panel (four spokes) and the branch (three spokes). A spider (almost as large as the Sphere) sits in the center of the web. Megan answers it from off-panel.] Sphere: Woowwww! Sphere: What's that giant net it's caught in? Megan (off-panel): You mean its web? Sphere: Its what?\n[Same setting as in the first panel.] Megan: Oh, right, fossils. So you wouldn't know about...\n[In a frame-less panel only Megan is shown facing left while she ponders. Beat panel.] Megan: ...\n[Again a scene similar to the first.] Megan: Oh my God. Dinosaurs must have been so weird . Cueball: Holy crap, yeah. Megan: Listen, can we borrow your time machine?\n","explanation":"This Monday comic was the first in a series of two comics that continued in the next release 1748: Future Archaeology on Wednesday. Both comic in this series have titles of a noun followed by a field of research.\nA time-traveler (the black floating energy Sphere) visits the present day from the far future. Spiders are the Sphere civilization's current craze, just as dinosaurs are currently our craze. The Jurassic Park media franchise began with the first film in 1993 and the year before the release of this comic in 2016, the fourth movie Jurassic World were released with at least one more film in development. We also have theme parks and kids dressing up as dinosaurs.\nThe time-traveler arrives in the presence of Megan and Cueball , and tells them who it is and why it is here, to see spiders which they learned about through fossils (See the explanation of the next comic about the strange fact that it speaks English). Megan points it towards a spider sitting in its web; the Sphere is awestruck to see the object of its obsession in the living flesh, but seeing it sitting in it's web, the Sphere asks why it has been caught. Megan realizes that because it only knows about spiders from fossils, it could come as a big surprise that the spiders sit in their webs like this. Spider silk does in fact fossilize in amber (and most fossils of spiders are also found in amber because the soft body of a spider does not easily petrify ). The reason we know that silk threads in amber are the spider's web is because we can compare fossils with the spiders of today. If not for the fact that we knew about spiders' webs in advance, it would be hard to say if we would have made the connection from the amber fossils. The Sphere is thus surprised to see the spider in a web since they had not understood any possible hint of spider webs in the fossil records, from which the Sphere's civilization gathered all their knowledge of spiders. Spiders have been on Earth at least for 380 million years and are still thriving and more than 40,000 species are known.\nWith our current knowledge, we know that webs are an essential part of a spider's life. Making sense of a spider's life is practically impossible without including their webs. However, the future-people have done just that until now; discovering how wrong they are is bound to become an intense experience for them. It should be noted that there have been multiple present-day discoveries of fossilized spiders' webs preserved in amber - however, since fossils forming like this is a rare event, it is quite possible that none would have been found by the future-people.\nMegan immediately connects the fact that the Sphere did not know about spider webs to our current understanding of dinosaurs: If a future civilization thinks they understand spiders based on fossils, while missing something as essential as their web, what is the human civilization missing about dinosaurs? Cueball quickly catches on, and Megan asks if they can borrow the time-machine to experience their own revelations about dinosaurs just like the revelation the Sphere has just had about spiders.\nThe title text calls back to one of Randall's favorite facts (see 1211: Birds and Dinosaurs ) - that birds are technically part of the clade Dinosauria . Birds do lots of weird stuff - like starlings flocking , the dances of birds of paradise , lyrebird mimicry or petrels puking stomach oil . Randall says that for every time a birds does something weird then it is likely that dinosaurs would have had equally strange behaviors, and birds are only a small subset of all dinosaurs. So there would have been even more strange behaviors among the dinosaurs than among the present days birds. It is, however, basically impossible to tell from the fossil record. All we know is that dinosaurs had features such as display feathers (like on a Peafowl (a descendant of dinosaurs)), neck frills , and crests (like on the Dimetrodon , which lived before the dinosaur with which it is not related) which likely played a role in mating and territorial shows.\nIt is unclear what the Sphere is. Since it states that what they know about spiders comes from fossils on our planet, it seems likely that the Sphere is neither human nor from our planet. So most likely they are a space traveling species and not human. The appearance as a sphere may either be an indication that they did not travel in person but rather only look out at the past through the energy sphere, or it may be that these aliens are actually spheres, floating as energized objects in space. In that case this is an actual alien floating in front of Megan and Cueball. It seems like the Sphere's civilization already had the spider craze before they invented time travel, and they decided to use time travel the first time to go back to see real spiders on Earth. This also tells us that they are from so far into the future that there are no spiders left. Of course with climate changes etc. going on, that may not necessarily be too far into the future. As long as the human race (or knowledge of spiders) has also disappeared from Earth. But since the Sphere itself tells us that it comes from a distant future, the setting is not related to how fast humans and spiders becomes extinct. As is seen in the next follow up comic, there is very little left of our current civilization, and no records of spiders and their webs.\nThis is the second comic with special mentioning of a science related directly to spiders, the first being 1135: Arachnoneurology .\nIn this comic Randall manages to combine no less than three of his favorite recurring subjects with time travel , spiders and, of course, dinosaurs .\n[The Sphere, a time-traveler depicted as a solid floating black energy sphere surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments) seems to have materialized in front of Megan and Cueball who is in the right part of the panel facing left towards it.  The Sphere looks like this except in the zoom in from panel two. A voice emanates from the Sphere.] Sphere: I'm here from the distant future! Megan: Cool! What for? Sphere: Spiders!\n[A close-up of the Sphere, still depicted as a black sphere, but not perfectly round at this zoom level and also clearly with some white dots in the dark area. It is also now surrounded by seven (rather than six) narrow rays with irregular dots between the rays. Megan answers it from off-panel.] Sphere: We've learned about your planet's spiders from fossils. Sphere: There's a whole spider craze. We have spider theme parks, spider movies, spider costumes... Sphere: Such beautiful animals! Megan (off-panel): I guess...\n[Same setting as in the first panel but Megan is pointing left past the Sphere.] Sphere: Now we've got time travel, so I'm here to see one for myself! Megan: Sure! There's one over there!\n[The Sphere floats over a leafless branch sticking out of the ground. A spider web is strung between the left border of the panel (four spokes) and the branch (three spokes). A spider (almost as large as the Sphere) sits in the center of the web. Megan answers it from off-panel.] Sphere: Woowwww! Sphere: What's that giant net it's caught in? Megan (off-panel): You mean its web? Sphere: Its what?\n[Same setting as in the first panel.] Megan: Oh, right, fossils. So you wouldn't know about...\n[In a frame-less panel only Megan is shown facing left while she ponders. Beat panel.] Megan: ...\n[Again a scene similar to the first.] Megan: Oh my God. Dinosaurs must have been so weird . Cueball: Holy crap, yeah. Megan: Listen, can we borrow your time machine?\n"}
{"id":1748,"title":"Future Archaeology","image_title":"Future Archaeology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1748","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/future_archaeology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1748:_Future_Archaeology","transcript":"[The Sphere, a time-traveler depicted as a solid floating black energy sphere surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments (first seen in the previous comic), is floating in front of Megan and Cueball who is walking after it towards the right part of the panel. The Sphere looks like this in all panels, but in the zoom in from panel two more details can be seen. A voice emanates from the Sphere.] Megan: Since you're from the future, do you know who wins the election? Sphere: Haven't the faintest idea. Hardly any text has been recovered from your era, so we know little about your history and culture. Sphere: We're mostly here for the spiders, anyway.\n[A close-up of the Sphere, still depicted as a black sphere, but not perfectly round at this zoom level and also clearly with some white dots in the dark area. It is still surrounded by six narrow rays with irregular dots between the rays.] Sphere: There are only two written accounts we've reconstructed. Sphere: We don't know whether they describe real events or myths.\n[The Sphere is now on the left side of Megan and Cueball who has stopped walking and has turned to look at the Sphere.] Sphere: One is a story about a man who built a boat to survive a great flood. Megan: Oh yeah. Noah. Cueball: We do like our flood narratives.\n[The Sphere has drifted further away from Megan and Cueball.] Sphere: The other is an account of how a man named Aaron Carter defeated a god named Shaq. Megan: That one may have been mangled a bit by the eons.\n","explanation":"This Wednesday comic is a direct continuation of the previous comic 1747: Spider Paleontology from Monday about a time-traveler (the black floating energy Sphere) who has come back from far in to the future to see spiders (only known from fossils in their time). See 1747: Spider Paleontology for a more complete explanation of this part of the joke. This series ended with this comic. Both comics in this series have titles of a noun followed by a field of research.\nSince Megan and Cueball now have access to the Sphere from the future they ask if it knows who will win the election. This is a reference to the United States elections, 2016 where the very controversial Donald Trump was up against former United States First Lady Hillary Clinton , who also had several controversies going on. This comic was released about three weeks before election day. It is likely one of the most discussed elections ever, especially in the rest of the world outside the US, where especially European leaders have made it clear that they are against Trump. That was mainly earlier on, before they realized he might actually stand a chance. Of course anyone interested in any election would be interested to hear from the future how it went, but this particular election may interest a larger proportion of the world population than any prior election. (The election was the subject three weeks later the day before the election where Randall endorsed Hillary directly in 1756: I'm With Her .)\nSadly for Megan and Cueball, the sphere has come back from so far in to the future, that even spiders have gone extinct. (Whether humans also have is unclear, see discussion about this in 1747: Spider Paleontology ). The Sphere makes this clear by stating that its civilization hardly know anything about our era and they know little about our history and culture. (And by the way it only came back for the spiders, anyway).\nThe idea is that history is filtered in similar fashion to fossils.  What is contemporaneously important, like a spider's web , dinosaur feathers (see previous comic), or the United States presidential election may not survive. The Sphere tells them that only two written accounts have been reconstructed (note that they are not found in their entirety). And they do not know if they even represents real events or myths. One of the two is indeed a myth, as it is about a man building a boat to survive a great flood. Megan recognizes this as being about Noah and his famous Ark from the Genesis flood narrative , as Cueball refers to. The other is a reference to a popular pop song.\nThe joke is that, in the future, the 2000 Aaron Carter hip hop song \" That's How I Beat Shaq \" ( lyrics and video ) is considered as valuable a historical document when researching humans as parts of the Bible .\nWhile secular historians consider the story of the Flood to be mythical, they still use it to infer facts about the early history of the Middle East, simply because there are a fairly small number of texts surviving from that era. \"That's How I Beat Shaq\" is, likewise, a fictional story including some true elements; it's just that as long as there are abundant sources documenting life in the year 2000, there's no reason to consult the song in any historical context. Yet it is the latter story that the time traveler assumes to be a clearly religious one, while seeing the former as a relatively straightforward survival story. A further layer of humor is that \"That's How I Beat Shaq\" is an archetypal David and Goliath story\u2014the story of David and Goliath of course being a Biblical one as well.\nIn fact the Spheres civilization believes Shaq ( Shaquille O'Neal a professional basketball player 2.16 m (7 ft 1 in) tall) to refer to a god, which was then defeated by Aaron, a 14 year old (and rather small kid) at the time of the release of his single in 2001. He beats Shaq on the basketball court one on one, so although this is a David vs. Goliath story it is not a fight till death. But to Aaron and his basketball fan friends, Shaq is probably seen as kind of god. Megan comments that the pop song may have been mangled by the eons .\nThe title text expands on the joke by letting the Sphere explain that the only connection they have found between their two historical documents is via the biblical story of Moses . As Moses is also one of God's chosen prophets and leaders, like Noah and Abraham before him, these two stories appear close together in the Bible, though not close together chronologically, and it would be likely that their document with the Flood story also has some parts about Moses. Moses had an older biological brother named Aaron and the Sphere's civilization has hastily concluded that Moses' brother and Aaron Carter are one and the same. According to the Bible, God parted the Sea of Reeds (commonly mistranslated as Red Sea) for Moses and the Israelites . This is often referred to, either erroneously or out of simplification, as Moses having parted the Red Sea. Along with Noah's Flood, this is one of the two major times in the Bible that God effects grand change on a body or bodies of water.\nThe Sphere asks Megan and Cueball if it is true that Aaron (Carter's) brother Moses did part an ocean. Megan decides to refrain from trying to explain this, having already in the previous comic realized how hard it is to explain spiders to someone who is a fan, but has never heard of spider web, and thus just states yes, yes exactly. Of course according to the Bible she can say yes to the question about Moses parting the water, as long as she does not say anything about the connection with Aaron Carter.\nThere appears to be a major flaw in the comic on the fact that the Sphere speaks perfect English, and understands Megan and Cueball. If they only have two written accounts from our time, why do they then speak English? Especially since they seem to come from another planet and are thus likely not humans (see discussion of the sphere in the previous comic). Of course if they are humans and have come from Earth (maybe traveled away), they may just have retained the English language. But given the fact that young people today probably would not understand their own grandparents' grandparents, and that the Sphere is from so long into the future that Megan calls it eons, spiders are extinct, and only two texts have survived, it should be impossible for the language to have stayed the same. Alternatively they have also recovered some video clips, but then it would be strange the Sphere did not mention this. A final solution is that the Sphere's civilization is so advanced that it can learn the language instantly by just being in the room with other beings, simply reading it from their mind. Given the fact that it seems the Sphere has come to Earth from another planet, and has the ability to travel in time, this last option may not even be so far-fetched.\nThis comic was published the day after the what if? Flood Death Valley , thus referring indirectly to a new possible flood history. It was the first what if? post in almost three months, the longest break between two post during 2016 (and third longest of all time at the time of its release), and it thus seems realistic that there should be some kind of connection between that and this comic. A later comic ( 1750: Life Goals ) also referenced this what if? post more or less directly.\nIn this comic Randall manages to combine no less than four of his favorite recurring subjects with time travel , spiders , politics and religion .\n[The Sphere, a time-traveler depicted as a solid floating black energy sphere surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments (first seen in the previous comic), is floating in front of Megan and Cueball who is walking after it towards the right part of the panel. The Sphere looks like this in all panels, but in the zoom in from panel two more details can be seen. A voice emanates from the Sphere.] Megan: Since you're from the future, do you know who wins the election? Sphere: Haven't the faintest idea. Hardly any text has been recovered from your era, so we know little about your history and culture. Sphere: We're mostly here for the spiders, anyway.\n[A close-up of the Sphere, still depicted as a black sphere, but not perfectly round at this zoom level and also clearly with some white dots in the dark area. It is still surrounded by six narrow rays with irregular dots between the rays.] Sphere: There are only two written accounts we've reconstructed. Sphere: We don't know whether they describe real events or myths.\n[The Sphere is now on the left side of Megan and Cueball who has stopped walking and has turned to look at the Sphere.] Sphere: One is a story about a man who built a boat to survive a great flood. Megan: Oh yeah. Noah. Cueball: We do like our flood narratives.\n[The Sphere has drifted further away from Megan and Cueball.] Sphere: The other is an account of how a man named Aaron Carter defeated a god named Shaq. Megan: That one may have been mangled a bit by the eons.\n"}
{"id":1749,"title":"Mushrooms","image_title":"Mushrooms","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1749","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mushrooms.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1749:_Mushrooms","transcript":"[Cueball is squatting in front of a group of four mushrooms (two tiny, one small and one large), touching the top of the nearest and largest mushroom with a finger. This mushroom has several small dots, which becomes more visible in later panels. The other three mushrooms do not appear to have these dots. Megan is standing behind him looking on.] Cueball: Mushrooms are so weird. Megan: You know, evolutionarily, they're closer to being animals than to plants.\n[Megan starts walking away as Cueball now leans on the ground with the hand he touched the mushroom with. Only the large mushroom is visible in this and the rest of the panels.] Cueball: ...Really? Megan: Yup!\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball still squats in front of the mushroom, now resting his hand on his knees.]\n[Cueball stands up looking down at the mushroom.]\n[Cueball is walking away as the mushroom makes a sound indicated with several small lines emanating from the top of the mushroom along with a regular speech line.] Mushroom: Grrrr\n[Cueball snaps around to look at the mushroom again, standing in a prepared state arms slightly out and legs spread out as well.]\n","explanation":"Cueball is looking at a mushroom , contemplating how weird they are, when Megan adds another layer to their weirdness by supplying the trivia that evolutionarily , mushrooms (which are basidiomycete fungi ) are closer to the animal kingdom than to plants on the tree of life . (Note that, technically, mushrooms themselves are only the fruiting bodies of the fungi. A mushroom is only part of a fungus, in the same way an apple is only part of a tree. The majority of the fungus grows beneath the soil, in a part of the fungus called the mycelium , which is composed of root-like structures called hyphae .)\nBoth animals and fungi are part of the opisthokont group of eukaryotic organisms, while plants are in the archaeplastida group of eukaryotic organisms with the green and red algae .  This surprises Cueball, as he, like many people, is likely to think of mushrooms as plants, as they are \"grown\" just like other crops. Even scientists, before the 1960s, considered fungi to be 'plants'; it took DNA-based studies in the 1990s and 2000s to 'seal the deal' and place the fungi with the animals, and not the plants. But fungi do not perform photosynthesis , and therefore do not need sunlight to grow. Instead, they get their energy from other living matter, either live (parasitic mushrooms) or dead (e.g. manure; saprobic mushrooms). Edible mushrooms like Agaricus bisporus (or white mushroom) are saprobes, farmed in caves . The body plans of fungi are also utterly unlike those of plants. There are a few plants that don't do photosynthesis, such as the parasitic flowering plant Monotropa uniflora . But these plants otherwise look like, and are built like, plants, and don't look or grow at all like fungi. Ironically, many plants, both photosynthetic and nonphotosynthetic, depend on root-associated mycorrhizal fungi for their survival and growth.\nMegan then walks away, and Cueball, after pondering the mushroom a while further, gets up and walks away too. But as soon as Cueball has his back turned the mushroom growls after him. Cueball spins around to look back at the now again silent mushroom. This is a bit of absurdist humor; while mushrooms are technically more animal-like than plant-like, they are still so far removed from animals they wouldn't have any of the body parts needed to growl. [ citation needed ] For that matter, most animals lack the parts needed to growl.  Cueball's shock and astonishment is quite justified, and maybe it was just his imagination running wild after Megan's trivia. The reader is left to wonder what Cueball's next move will be - especially, those readers who have ever felt, or indulged, the urge to stomp mushrooms.\nAnother interpretation of the mushroom's growling is that mushrooms might be \"fake\" animals disguising as plants. The mushroom seems to be a plant, and acts very plantlike until Cueball looks away. The mushroom might have growled because it was planning on killing Cueball in a sort of \"kill the witnesses\" action.  This comic might be hinting that mushrooms are evil and plotting the downfall of humanity under the disguise of \"harmless\" plants. Or, simply, mushrooms want to mess with other living things.\nThe title text takes this further, by stating that mushrooms are technically a type of ghost . Maybe because they arise from decaying remains. The title text may also refer to 1240: Quantum Mechanics or 1475: Technically , suggesting caution when dealing with a statement preceded by \"technically.\" It may also refer to the other name of Monotropa uniflora , \"ghost plant\" which hosts are certain fungi.\nThe title text might also refer to the behavior of ghosts (called Boos) in the Super Mario series, in that they only act or move when the player is facing away, as does the growling mushroom.\n[Cueball is squatting in front of a group of four mushrooms (two tiny, one small and one large), touching the top of the nearest and largest mushroom with a finger. This mushroom has several small dots, which becomes more visible in later panels. The other three mushrooms do not appear to have these dots. Megan is standing behind him looking on.] Cueball: Mushrooms are so weird. Megan: You know, evolutionarily, they're closer to being animals than to plants.\n[Megan starts walking away as Cueball now leans on the ground with the hand he touched the mushroom with. Only the large mushroom is visible in this and the rest of the panels.] Cueball: ...Really? Megan: Yup!\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball still squats in front of the mushroom, now resting his hand on his knees.]\n[Cueball stands up looking down at the mushroom.]\n[Cueball is walking away as the mushroom makes a sound indicated with several small lines emanating from the top of the mushroom along with a regular speech line.] Mushroom: Grrrr\n[Cueball snaps around to look at the mushroom again, standing in a prepared state arms slightly out and legs spread out as well.]\n"}
{"id":1750,"title":"Life Goals","image_title":"Life Goals","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1750","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/life_goals.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1750:_Life_Goals","transcript":"[A to-do list with a caption above:] Life Goals \u2610 Meet Skrillex in Phoenix \u2610 Study zymurgy \u2610 Get a pet axolotl named Hexxus \u2610 Observe a syzygy from Zzyzx, California \u2610 Port the games Zzyzzyxx and Xexyz to Xbox \u2610 Publish a Zzzax\/Mister Mxyzptlk crossover \u2610 Bike from Xhafzotaj, Albania to Qazaxb\u0259yli, Azerbaijan \u2610 Paint an archaeopteryx fighting a muzquizopteryx \u2610 Finish a game of Scrabble without getting punched\n","explanation":"All visible goals except the last one on this to-do list feature one or more strange words containing an excess of the last three letters of the alphabet (X, Y and Z), often using several of them in the same words, even several of the same rare letter in a row. (See Table of life goals below).\nAll of these words can be looked up in the English version of Wikipedia, but only a few are common nouns , three of them weird animal names, the rest being proper nouns , i.e. persons names (fictional or artist) or obscure names for places or video games. The first goal is the one with fewest of these letters, only using two x's, and only the first word is strange, Skrillex being the artist name of a musician. All later entries have at least three of these letters, which are most often used in very strange, often difficult-to-pronounce, words.\nThe punchline, in the final and ninth goal, expresses that the writer of this list often uses these unexpected and bizarre words in Scrabble games, which exasperates his opponents to such a great extent that he has yet to finish a game without getting punched. All of these words would theoretically earn a player many points in Scrabble, but outside of casual play it is not allowed to use proper nouns (see Scrabble points below).\nIn the title text, a reference is made to the fact that none of these goals have been checked off yet. It also turns out that it is indeed Randall's list, since the writer of the list did (at least) manage to check off the goal Make something called xkcd early. Sadly there are neither y's nor z's nor even more than one x in that four letter combo.\nThis comic was published the week after the what if? Flood Death Valley , which referred directly to the city Zzyzx in one of the pictures. It's the second comic in that week after the what if? post that references it more or less directly, the previous one being 1748: Future Archaeology . It seems likely that Randall created this comic after doing research for this what if? post, and came across the city Zzyzx as the shortest way to dig a channel to flood Death Valley.\nAll of these strange words would theoretically earn a player the prize of many points in Scrabble (Go to the table of words below). However, most of them would not be found in SOWPODS (the combined list of all words valid in either British or North American Scrabble tournaments).  Also, many include too many X's, Y's or Z's (there's 1 X, 2 Y's, 1 Z in a standard set), meaning at least one would have to be substituted for a blank (which is not worth any points). Some words would also be very difficult to play in reality, since there are only 7 letters in a Scrabble hand, so they could only be played in extremely rare circumstances (there are only a couple of ways to play MUZQUIZOPTERYX: for instance, from MU and OPTER; or MU, QUIZ and ER; or an astonishingly unlikely set of crossing letters). Many are long enough that, in theory, they could net the player the additional 50 point bonus for using all seven letters in a hand if played right.\n[A to-do list with a caption above:] Life Goals \u2610 Meet Skrillex in Phoenix \u2610 Study zymurgy \u2610 Get a pet axolotl named Hexxus \u2610 Observe a syzygy from Zzyzx, California \u2610 Port the games Zzyzzyxx and Xexyz to Xbox \u2610 Publish a Zzzax\/Mister Mxyzptlk crossover \u2610 Bike from Xhafzotaj, Albania to Qazaxb\u0259yli, Azerbaijan \u2610 Paint an archaeopteryx fighting a muzquizopteryx \u2610 Finish a game of Scrabble without getting punched\n"}
{"id":1751,"title":"Movie Folder","image_title":"Movie Folder","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1751","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/movie_folder.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1751:_Movie_Folder","transcript":"[Black Hat is sitting in an armchair, with the right arm on the armrest and looking at his smartphone held in his left hand, when a voice from behind him (off-panel left) addresses him. It turns out in the next panels that it is Cueball.] Cueball (off-panel): Your movie folder is so weird . Where do you find all this stuff? Black Hat: Dunno. Black Hat: Around.\n[In an frame-less panel Cueball is seen sitting in an office chair at a desk facing left. He is looking at Black Hat's computer while typing on the keyboard which is on a shelve lower than the regular desk surface. Black Hat replies to his queries from behind him off-panel right.] Cueball: Lorem Ipsum: The Movie? Cueball: Titanic XCVIII? Black Hat (off-panel): That series gets good when they start hitting the reef created by all the previous wrecks.\n[Cueball leans in closer to the screen.] Cueball: Debbie Did 9\/11? Cueball: Time Jam: A Connecticut Huskie on King Arthur's Court? Black Hat (off-panel): Really underrated Space Jam sequel.\n[Zoom in on the scene so nothing beneath the keyboard is visible. The screen and Cueballs head almost spans the width of the panel.] Cueball: Harold and Kumar Go to Howl's Moving Castle? Cueball: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates? Black Hat (off-panel): That's the original-the book was a novelization.\n[Back to Black Hat sitting in the chair as in the first panel, but leaning a bit further back and the arm on the armrest has been moved closer to him.] Cueball (off-panel): Michael Bay's The Vagina Monologues!? Black Hat: It's pretty good, despite all the CGI explosions.\n","explanation":"Cueball is looking through Black Hat's downloaded movies, which are all adaptations of non-literary works, improbable sequels, and\/or crossovers between very disparate properties. Cueball reacts with increasing incredulity to Black Hat's collection, while Black Hat casually responds with equally unlikely (non-)explanations. Knowing Black Hat, his movie folder is deliberately weird just to provoke this kind of reaction.\nIn the real world, there are movies which can provoke similar shock. For example, many successful films get direct-to-video (or, now, direct-to-digital ) sequels and spinoffs, often featuring none of the original cast and which get very little marketing. Therefore, someone might be surprised to know that there's an American Psycho 2 , a Starship Troopers 3 , a Dr. Dolittle 5 , or a Bring It On 5 . Randall previously made fun of the proliferation of direct-to-video sequels in What If: Twitter Timeline Height , with at least 27 Land Before Time films (in reality, there were 14).\nAnother source of weird titles are mockbusters . When a film uses a public domain property as its basis, or a title that is too generic to trademark, other studios will simply create their own films and pretend that they're a sequel to the more famous film. Examples include Titanic II , Troll 2 , Troll 3 , the other Troll 3 , Day of the Dead 2: Contagium , Alien 2: On Earth (not to be confused with the real sequel Aliens ) and War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave .\nMarketing wheezes have also produced some crossovers almost as unexpected as those in the comic \u2014 Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter are all real films.\nA similar setting with Cueball and Black Hat also discussing movies was seen in 493: Actuarial . Back then Black Hat was still reading newspapers. Black Hat has previously given similar non-answers to long series of questions from Cueball in 908: The Cloud and 1159: Countdown .\nAnother type of comic where movie titles needs to be guessed from strange versions of the title was previously used in the Synonym Movies series.\n[Black Hat is sitting in an armchair, with the right arm on the armrest and looking at his smartphone held in his left hand, when a voice from behind him (off-panel left) addresses him. It turns out in the next panels that it is Cueball.] Cueball (off-panel): Your movie folder is so weird . Where do you find all this stuff? Black Hat: Dunno. Black Hat: Around.\n[In an frame-less panel Cueball is seen sitting in an office chair at a desk facing left. He is looking at Black Hat's computer while typing on the keyboard which is on a shelve lower than the regular desk surface. Black Hat replies to his queries from behind him off-panel right.] Cueball: Lorem Ipsum: The Movie? Cueball: Titanic XCVIII? Black Hat (off-panel): That series gets good when they start hitting the reef created by all the previous wrecks.\n[Cueball leans in closer to the screen.] Cueball: Debbie Did 9\/11? Cueball: Time Jam: A Connecticut Huskie on King Arthur's Court? Black Hat (off-panel): Really underrated Space Jam sequel.\n[Zoom in on the scene so nothing beneath the keyboard is visible. The screen and Cueballs head almost spans the width of the panel.] Cueball: Harold and Kumar Go to Howl's Moving Castle? Cueball: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates? Black Hat (off-panel): That's the original-the book was a novelization.\n[Back to Black Hat sitting in the chair as in the first panel, but leaning a bit further back and the arm on the armrest has been moved closer to him.] Cueball (off-panel): Michael Bay's The Vagina Monologues!? Black Hat: It's pretty good, despite all the CGI explosions.\n"}
{"id":1752,"title":"Interplanetary Experience","image_title":"Interplanetary Experience","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1752","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interplanetary_experience.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1752:_Interplanetary_Experience","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Where to go on Earth to get the Interplanetary Explorer Experience\n[A chart with seven rows with celestial bodies on the left side of seven lines and a description on the right side. The first entry has three celestial bodies in two rows, the rest are in one row, although the last entry encompasses a list of planets. Four times the day\/night side of the celestial bodies is mentioned in brackets.]\nPluto, Moon (night) Mt. Everest at night Mercury (night) Moon (day) Mt. Everest at noon under a tanning lamp Mercury (day) A lava flow on a volcano at noon Venus A heat-shrink wetsuit in a blast furnace Mars Mt. Everest at sunset Titan Waist-deep in an outgassing Siberian swamp Jupiter-Neptune Jumping from a high-altitude balloon over an Antarctic Ocean winter storm\n","explanation":"This comic lists ten celestial bodies : most other planets , the dwarf planet Pluto , as well as two moons , the Earth's Moon and Titan (the largest moon of Saturn ). It then asks what places on Earth people could go to for a real Interplanetary Experience , as if they were explorers on these planets. It turns out that none of these ten other worlds are very nice to visit...\nThis is a parody on organizations that in preparation for future planetary exploration organize half-realistic experiments in human behavior on other planets, trying to emulate or mock-up - often on low budget - the conditions in which future explorers are to live and work. For this purpose, they build mock-up bases, habitats etc. in places that look like other planets or have the environmental conditions somewhat similar to other celestial bodies' surfaces. They seek out desolate places like deserts or polar regions for this purpose.\nIn this comic Randall tries to identify places on Earth that actually have environmental conditions as close to these other worlds' as can be possible on the surface of the Earth. Some of the places suggested by Randall are borderline-survivable for a human, but most will kill you extremely quickly without a lot of high-tech gear - whether through severe hypothermia (freezing), conflagration (fire), crushing (high pressure), or from violent winds.\nBasically, nowhere in the solar system , except Earth, is even close to survivable (and there is actually only a very limited amount of Earth's surface where humans can actually live permanently). There is no planet or moon with a breathable atmosphere, or where the temperature stays within the human-tolerable range of roughly \u221220\u00b0C to 40\u00b0C (\u22125\u00b0F to 105\u00b0F, 250-310 K). It is also only with really good clothing and a place to stay at night that humans can live in a place much colder than 10\u00b0C for longer periods. The only place humans have so far ventured off-Earth is the Moon, and only during lunar morning while wearing thick pressurized spacesuits.\nSome celestial bodies, like Venus and Jupiter , may never be visitable by humans without either huge advances in material science or full-scale terraforming (for Venus). Some places, like the centers of any planet (for example, the gas giants or even Earth itself), will probably never be visited, even by robots. (The title text suggests what happens when falling towards the center of a gas giant).\nBelow is a list going through the seven suggested places on Earth. Due to the low pressure and temperature on the top of Mount Everest it is mentioned no less than three times, but using different time of day to represent different celestial bodies. In the first entry it even takes care of three in one go. Two of those are the Moon and Mercury, but for both only on their night side facing away from the sun. They are thus each mentioned twice, as there is a huge difference in environmental conditions between the sunlit faces of these two and their night sides. On the other end of the temperature scale are mentions of lava and a blast furnace ; also high pressure environments are suggested to simulate other planets. The last goes for the gas giants, which are all mentioned together in the last entry.\nThe two groupings explains why there are only seven places mentioned for ten celestial bodies. The reason that the Moon is mentioned is of course that it is the closest companion to Earth and that we have actually visited it. That the only other moon mentioned is likely because it is the only really cold celestial body that actually has an atmosphere as well as a surface humans could stand on. But there are many other large moons that would be interesting to visit, like the Galilean moons especially Europa . But that could probably be compared to being on Pluto, except the sun is a bit larger. That Pluto is included as the only dwarf planet is probably because it was still a planet when Randall was a kid (see 473: Still Raw ) and is the most recent (new) celestial body visited by a space probe at the time of release of this comic. This was celebrated by Randall in 1551: Pluto .\nThe title text is just a continuation of the last entry about falling down through the atmosphere of a gas giant, and it is also explained in the table below. This was also explored in What If? Jupiter Submarine .\nThe dwarf planet Pluto is a small icy rock so far away from the Sun that it practically makes no difference if it is day or night, the Sun is just the brightest star in the sky of Pluto's \"day\" side. But for both the Earth's Moon and Mercury (the innermost and smallest planet of the solar system ) it makes a huge difference, which is why there is both a day and a night experience mentioned for these two celestial bodies (see below). Although they are very much closer to the Sun than Pluto, this makes no difference during their night time (when they face away from Sun). They are both relatively small, rocky bodies with practically no atmosphere and relatively slow rotation. Therefore their surfaces not illuminated by the Sun will cool down to very low temperatures (around -170 \u00b0C, -290 \u00b0F, 100 K), making their nighttime hemispheres desolate, dark and cold places. Randall proposes the summit of Mount Everest (the tallest mountain on Earth) as the place that will emulate the conditions most closely. It is a rocky, desolate and cold place. Even though it is not the coldest place on Earth, it is the highest point on land, therefore it has the lowest atmospheric pressure. It cannot be compared to the near-zero pressure and 100 Kelvins conditions on the aforementioned bodies, but it is as close as you can get on Earth. The top of Mt. Everest has an air pressure just 1\/3 of what it is at sea level, and the oxygen levels are so low that they are barely survivable, although a few people have reached the top without oxygen tanks , but others have died after losing their oxygen supply, making it as close as you can get on Earth to the near-vacuum found on these worlds.\nAs explained above, Mount Everest is as good an emulation of the Moon surface at night as you can get on Earth. During the Moon's day, its surface gets about as much solar radiation as Earth at noon, because both bodies' distance from the Sun is almost the same. The Earth's atmosphere, however, stops most of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation . A tanning lamp is a device emitting mostly ultraviolet radiation for the purpose of artificial tanning ; here it is used to augment the filtered Sun's radiation in an attempt to emulate the Moon's daytime conditions better. Since the Moon does not have any atmosphere it is hard to discuss the temperature experienced on the Moon, but still the surface of the Moon reaches temperatures above water's boiling point (100\u00b0C or 212 \u00b0F) during the day with an average daytime temperature of the Moon at 107\u00b0C (224.6 \u00b0F). This effect will not be very well emulated on top of Mount Everest or even in the hottest (non-volcanic) place on Earth's surface that reaches 53.9\u00b0C (129\u00b0F) \u2014 see the what if? Flood Death Valley .\nMercury's surface never quite reaches lava temperatures (if it did, it would be molten), but it gets close. At noon, Mercury's equator reaches 420\u00b0C (800\u00b0F, 700 K). Lava is a liquid usually at temperatures from 700 to 1,200 \u00b0C (1,300 to 2,200 \u00b0F, 970 K to 1470 K) but depending on what type of rock it's formed from, lava can erupt at temperatures as low as 500\u00b0C-600\u00b0C (930\u00b0F-1100\u00b0F, 770\u2013870 K). Standing on a volcano on a partially solidified lava flow (which, it goes without saying, is incredibly dangerous) would expose you to similar temperatures.\nNear the poles, Mercury's surface temperature is always very low as the axial tilt is almost zero, meaning that the poles do not get much direct sunlight and their temperature is constantly below \u221293 \u00b0C (\u2212136 \u00b0F, 180 K).\nThe average surface temperature on Venus is around 470\u00b0C (870\u00b0F, 740 K) (enough to melt lead at 327 \u00b0C (620\u00b0F, 600 K), which is the usual comparison ), and the pressure is 92 bar (by comparison, pressure on earth is only about 1 bar). A blast furnace is a bit too hot \u2014 the blast itself is 900 \u00b0C to 1300 \u00b0C (1600 \u00b0F to 2300 \u00b0F, 1170 K to 1570 K), and they can reach 2000 \u00b0C \u2014 but either temperature is enough to kill you in seconds. As the blast furnace would emulate Venus' temperature but not pressure, Randall proposes that a daring volunteer wear a hypothetical heat-shrink wetsuit. A wetsuit is an elastic garment worn mostly over the whole body by swimmers, divers etc. Heat-shrink tubing is an elastic tube made of a material that shrinks when heated, used to provide extra insulation and mechanical or environmental protection in electrical and electronics work \u2014 you put a length of tubing over your wire, connector, or a joint and heat it with a hot air gun, making it shrink and crimp over your device. A hypothetical heat-shrink wetsuit worn while sitting in a blast furnace supposedly would shrink rapidly in the extreme temperature, exerting great pressure on your body, thus emulating Venus' surface atmospheric pressure. In other words, do not go to Venus!\nAgain use Mount Everest's thin atmosphere and very cold temperatures to emulate the planet, but Mars' dusty, greenhouse-gas-containing atmosphere means it's not as cold as Mercury at night, nor as hot as the Moon during the day. Also the sun is much farther from Mars than from the Earth\/Moon system, but much, much closer than Pluto, so it should be colder than the day side of the Moon. But the Sun still looks like a sun rather than a star from Mars, unlike on Pluto. The sunset will also make the sky reddish-purple, similar to the way the Martian sky often looks .\nTitan, the largest of Saturn moons (and one of the largest moons in the solar system) is one of the promising worlds for life.  Given that its surface temperature is \u2212180\u00b0C (\u2212290\u00b0F, 95 K), that says a lot about how inhospitable the rest of the solar system is. The chemistry of the planet is interesting \u2014 there are lots of nitrogen compounds and hydrocarbons and the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and methane. It has been confirmed that methane lakes exist on Titan's surface. It thus follows that there is likely also some precipitation of methane \"snow\", similarly to how water forms lakes and falls down as sleet on Earth. Similar compounds are produced by rotting material in swamps , hence the comparison to a cold Siberian swamp. Due to the global warming large area of the tundra in Siberia that used to be permanently locked in permafrost are now heating up enough to release these gases . It might thus be possible to end up waist deep in one of these \"heated\" swamp areas due to the resulting outgassing . Sadly for the global temperature this outgassing just increases the release of greenhouse gasses, making the global warming increase even faster. This may very well be the reason Randall chooses to mention it here, as another call back to recurring theme of Climate change and to the recent comic 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline . One key difference though is that on Earth, swamps are mostly water. On Titan \u2014 if they exist at all \u2014 they're liquid methane. Siberia also has some of the most extreme temperature differences on Earth, while Titan is just consistently cold. The coldest place in Siberia is the Pole of Cold , the coldest point in the Northern hemisphere having reached \u221271.2 \u00b0C (\u221296.2 \u00b0F, 202 K). Not quite Titan levels of cold, but certainly deadly enough. But in such cold places there would be no outgassing, so on Earth it is not possible to have both the cold and the outgassing.\nNote that it is Jupiter to Neptune thus including also Saturn and Uranus . They are under one called gas giants for a reason. All the planets are very cold and have stormy weather (Uranus is the least active, and Neptune is the most active) and extreme temperature and pressure gradients.  On the edge of the atmosphere, conditions aren't much different from space, but as you fall in, the temperature and pressure rapidly increase past the freezing point (allowing clouds of ice and water). This environment is simulated by jumping out of a high-altitude balloon (low pressure and cold) and falling down into an Antarctic Ocean winter storm, a very cold and violently windy place. The storms on the gas planets can be much more violent than any storm on Earth. On Neptune the storms can reach 2,100 km\/h (580 m\/s, 1,300 mph), whereas the Great Red Spot of Jupiter only reaches 430 km\/h (120 m\/s, 270 mph). The highest wind speed on Earth (outside tornadoes ) has been measured at 408 km\/h (113 m\/s, 253 mph), and that was only the gusts.\nThe title text continues the last entry in the main comic, so this explanation is also a direct continuation of the above entry. The extreme temperature and pressure gradients mentioned do not stop when the atmospheric temperature and pressure increase beyond water's freezing point.  Soon the temperature reaches past the boiling point, and on up to thousands of degrees and unimaginably high pressures, increasing further until reaching the central core. The cores of Neptune and Uranus most likely consist of rock (superheated silicates, iron and nickel) or in the case of Saturn and Jupiter of liquid metallic hydrogen , where the extreme high-pressure and temperature causes hydrogen to behave like a metal. The suggested simulation of this environment is to fall into a super hot bath tub that falls into the burning engine room of a ship that is sinking, and thus is about be crushed by the water pressure of the deep ocean.  This is the closest representation of the pressure and temperature conditions of the inner parts of the gas giants that can be imagined on Earth, but of course the cores of these planets are far, far more inhospitable than the scenarios mentioned above. Descending into Jupiter was also explored in the what if? Jupiter Submarine .\n[Caption above the panel:] Where to go on Earth to get the Interplanetary Explorer Experience\n[A chart with seven rows with celestial bodies on the left side of seven lines and a description on the right side. The first entry has three celestial bodies in two rows, the rest are in one row, although the last entry encompasses a list of planets. Four times the day\/night side of the celestial bodies is mentioned in brackets.]\nPluto, Moon (night) Mt. Everest at night Mercury (night) Moon (day) Mt. Everest at noon under a tanning lamp Mercury (day) A lava flow on a volcano at noon Venus A heat-shrink wetsuit in a blast furnace Mars Mt. Everest at sunset Titan Waist-deep in an outgassing Siberian swamp Jupiter-Neptune Jumping from a high-altitude balloon over an Antarctic Ocean winter storm\n"}
{"id":1753,"title":"Thumb War","image_title":"Thumb War","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1753","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thumb_war.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1753:_Thumb_War","transcript":"[Two children are sitting on their knees between a toy truck to the left and five building blocks to the right; three square blocks are stacked in a precarious tower and to the right of the tower there is one more square block which has a rectangular block leaning on it. Both children have lots of hair but the child to the left has a black hat on, so they are possibly young versions of Black Hat and Hairy. They are sitting across from each other with one hand touching the other's hand. Their thumbs can be seen sticking up above their hands.] Black Hat: One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war. Black Hat: Five, six, seven, eight, finger guns proliferate. Black Hat: Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, digits can't protect themselves. Black Hat: Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, thumb U.N. won't intervene. Hairy: I don't want to play with you anymore.\n","explanation":"Two small children, one a small Black Hat , sitting among their toys are playing thumb war . This is a common game for children, in which two players hold hands and attempt to pin each other's thumb down. The game is often started with both players chanting \"one, two three, four, I declare a thumb war.\" In some variations, the chant continues counting up by an additional set of four, with a rhyme. Once the opening chant is complete, the game consists of trying to pin the opponent's thumb down. A pinned thumb must be held down for long enough to complete a count of four, or to complete the closing chant, \"one, two, three, four, I won the thumb war\".\nThe standard concept is subverted here: Young Black Hat interprets the simulation of hand-to-hand combat with thumbs differently, comparing it with real conflict. He shows this in further lines, invented by himself.\nThe second rhyme, \"finger guns proliferate,\" is a pun on the finger gun gesture and describes small arms proliferation - the spread of black-market weapons which often comes with war as captured and smuggled guns make their way into the hands of paramilitary groups. Black Hat transfers this into the \"thumb war universe\", introducing finger guns into the thumb-to-thumb combat.\nThe third rhyme continues the counting until twelve and mentions digits as in fingers, and states that they cannot protect themselves. This may be implying an imposition of firearms regulation or arms control as a response to the small-arms proliferation in the previous verse, or the defenseless nature of noncombatants in war.\nIn the last line Black Hat states that, even though this thumb war goes on and on, the \"thumb U.N.\", the thumb war universe equivalent of the United Nations (UN), won't intervene. In real life the UN would try to put an end to a given war by using diplomatic power and has the mandate of using (blue-helmet) peace forces in war zones to put an end to violence and give out a mandate to nations so that they can intervene in some crisis on their own behalf.\nThe thumb war game in Black Hat's version is instead a quite cynical portrayal of our world, criticizing the \"might is right\" mentality that is the sad reality of our globe, and the government of the world by the militarily strongest nations.\nThe other child, who will someday turn into Hairy , meanwhile, is unnerved by all this and wants to stop playing. Since Hairy is just a normal child he is really not interested in Black Hat's realistic version of what a war really is.\nIn the title text it seems like Hairy interrupts Black Hat's last rhyme after twenty, and finishes with his own rhyme, with \"Bunny\" ending in the same sound if you pronounce twenty like \"twunny\" as in some parts of the world. So it goes like this:\nBlack Hat: Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty Hairy: Can't we just read Pat the Bunny?\nThus Hairy requests that they do something more appropriate for children, like reading a picture book - specifically, the \"touch and feel\" book for small children and babies known as Pat the Bunny . It isn't clear what Black Hat would have said if not interrupted, but if twenty was indeed pronounced so as to slant-rhyme with bunny, one possibility is, \"I'll annex your entire country,\" (which could conceivably be followed by, \"Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. You're not sovereign anymore.\").\nThis is the second time a young Black Hat has been used. The first was in 1139: Rubber and Glue . Black Hat has continued to make Hairy uncomfortable even as an adult, for instance in 1210: I'm So Random .\n[Two children are sitting on their knees between a toy truck to the left and five building blocks to the right; three square blocks are stacked in a precarious tower and to the right of the tower there is one more square block which has a rectangular block leaning on it. Both children have lots of hair but the child to the left has a black hat on, so they are possibly young versions of Black Hat and Hairy. They are sitting across from each other with one hand touching the other's hand. Their thumbs can be seen sticking up above their hands.] Black Hat: One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war. Black Hat: Five, six, seven, eight, finger guns proliferate. Black Hat: Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, digits can't protect themselves. Black Hat: Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, thumb U.N. won't intervene. Hairy: I don't want to play with you anymore.\n"}
{"id":1754,"title":"Tornado Safety Tips","image_title":"Tornado Safety Tips","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1754","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tornado_safety_tips.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1754:_Tornado_Safety_Tips","transcript":"[Beneath a large caption there are two pictures above each other to the left and a bullet list with five points to the right of the pictures. The top picture shows a black tornado beneath a white cloud. It is destroying something on the ground. To the right of the debris is a house and to the left some trees. The picture below shows Black Hat from the waist and up.] Tornado Safety Tips Avoid low-lying cool air Keep your downdrafts and updrafts from mixing Seek out warm and humid surface air layers Don't let rain-cooled air choke off your circulation Avoid letting your supercell merge with a squall line\n","explanation":"The comic features a Public Service Announcement (PSA) poster, which generally contain public-interest messages aimed at raising awareness or steering behavior around a specific issue of concern, that in this case contains tips for tornado safety. Typically, a poster labeled \"Tornado Safety Tips\" would be filled with instructions for how humans can stay safe in the event of a tornado, such as \"stay away from windows,\" \"go to the lowest floor of your home,\" \"if in the open, take shelter in a ditch,\" and so on, see these examples: Example 1 (with same title as comic), example 2 and example 3 .\nBlack Hat on the other hand, has flipped this on its head by publishing a poster that contains safety tips for the tornado itself and contains information for how tornadoes can stay safe, i.e., continue to exist; see the table of tips below. The joke is that just as, for example, a \"climber safety\" poster is directed at climbers, the \"tornado safety\" poster is directed at tornadoes.\nIt is thus in no way helpful for people who actually live in an area that experiences tornadoes or even for people that don't live in tornado-prone areas but want to be ready for their possible occurence [ citation needed ] . It is not possible to follow most of the guidelines [ citation needed ] , as they are intended for tornadoes. But the advice a human could follow would only take you towards places which can sustain tornadoes. Instead they should choose to use an app like the one in 937: TornadoGuard .\nThe title text simply adds more tornado advice for tornadoes, bringing up the common myth about tornadoes not crossing mountains, except from the tornado's perspective.\nAlthough this is clearly not a tip for humans, the idea of tornado safety tip is yet another tips comic .\nTornadoes are a recurring subject on xkcd. The tornado in this comic is similar to the picture used in the Tornado version of 1037: Umwelt .\n[Beneath a large caption there are two pictures above each other to the left and a bullet list with five points to the right of the pictures. The top picture shows a black tornado beneath a white cloud. It is destroying something on the ground. To the right of the debris is a house and to the left some trees. The picture below shows Black Hat from the waist and up.] Tornado Safety Tips Avoid low-lying cool air Keep your downdrafts and updrafts from mixing Seek out warm and humid surface air layers Don't let rain-cooled air choke off your circulation Avoid letting your supercell merge with a squall line\n"}
{"id":1755,"title":"Old Days","image_title":"Old Days","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1755","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/old_days.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1755:_Old_Days","transcript":"[Cueball and Hairbun are standing together and Cueball is talking to her.] Cueball: What were things like in the old days? Cueball: I hear that you had to ... compile things for different processors? Hairbun: Yeah\n[Same setting in a slimmer panel, now Hairbun is replying.] Hairbun: To compile your code, you had to mail it to IBM. Hairbun: It took 4-6 weeks.\n[Close-up of Hairbun from the waist up.] Hairbun: Before garbage collection, data would pile up until the computer got full and you had to throw it away.\n[Same setting as in the first panel with Hairbun gesturing toward Cueball raising one hand  palm up.] Hairbun: Early compilers could handle code fine, but comments had to be written in assembly.\n[In a frame-less panel Hairbun is seen from the front, with both arms out to the side with both hands held palm up.] Hairbun: C could only be written on punch cards.You had to pick a compact font, or you'd only fit a few characters per card.\n[Exactly the same setting as the first panel, but with Hairbun doing the talking.] Hairbun: C++ was big because it supported floppy disks. Hairbun: It still punched holes in them, but it was a start. Cueball: Wow.\n","explanation":"This comic is showing a conversation between (young) Cueball and (old) Hairbun about computer programming in the past, specifically the compilers . Cueball, having a faint idea of just how difficult and byzantine programming was \"in the old days\", asks Hairbun to enlighten him on the specifics. Hairbun promptly seizes the opportunity to screw with his head. This later became a series when 2324: Old Days 2 was released more than 3 and a half years later. While her initial agreement that code needed to be compiled for multiple architectures is correct, Hairbun's claims rapidly grow ridiculous.\nHairbun tells Cueball a tall tale about how hard it was back in the old days , making it sound like some of the programming languages used today (C, C++) were written on punch cards and that you had to ship your code in the mail to a computer company ( IBM in this case) to compile your code, which would take from four to six weeks. If there was a simple error, you would have to ship it again for another compilation.\nThis is factually incorrect, but is plausible to those who do not have the knowledge or context to challenge it, similar to a Snipe hunt , or several other cultural myths told about things like the Tooth Fairy . It is clear from Cueball's final Wow that he falls for it. She then continues to explain more and more implausible so-called facts from the the olden days.\nWhat she says is true in that it was tough and slow to program on punch cards, which were actually used for an extended period of time. However, there is very little in the rest of Hairbun's story that  accurate, except that it was a big deal when the floppy disk was invented. The comment about punching holes in floppy disks is true. However, the nature and purpose of the holes punched this way was dramatically different than in punch cards. 5.25\" and 3.5\" floppy disks had holes or notches in them to indicate the data capacity and it was common to punch additional holes into cheaper, lower capacity floppy disks to trick the computer into writing more data on them than specified by the manufacturer. With punchcards on the other hand, the holes themselves encoded the data so punching them was itself the act of programming. It is unclear if this was a coincidence, or intentionally included as a humorous aside to the readers who know the history as a misinterpreted truth in a sea of falsehoods.\nIn the title text, Hairbun continues her musings on the old compiler days, stating that there was a lot of drama in those days . Specifically she references Reflections on Trusting Trust a famous 1984 paper by UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson in which he described a way to hide a virtually undetectable backdoor in the UNIX login code via a second backdoor in the C compiler. Using the technique in his paper, it would be impossible to discover the hacked login by examining the official source code for either the login or the compiler itself.  Ken Thompson may have actually included this backdoor in early versions of UNIX, undiscovered. Ken Thompson's paper demonstrated that it was functionally impossible to prove that any piece of software was fully trustworthy.\nHairbun claims that one of the dramas she refers to was that people tried to force Ken Thompson to retire, so everyone could stop being so paranoid about compilers.  In reality, any coder who created the first version of a compiler (or a similar critical component) could inject a similar backdoor into software, so it would be false safety. Even if no one else had thought of this, then Thompson's paper was there for any future hacker to see. Though the problem was (claimed to be) solved in David A. Wheeler 's Ph.D dissertation \" Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) \".\n[Cueball and Hairbun are standing together and Cueball is talking to her.] Cueball: What were things like in the old days? Cueball: I hear that you had to ... compile things for different processors? Hairbun: Yeah\n[Same setting in a slimmer panel, now Hairbun is replying.] Hairbun: To compile your code, you had to mail it to IBM. Hairbun: It took 4-6 weeks.\n[Close-up of Hairbun from the waist up.] Hairbun: Before garbage collection, data would pile up until the computer got full and you had to throw it away.\n[Same setting as in the first panel with Hairbun gesturing toward Cueball raising one hand  palm up.] Hairbun: Early compilers could handle code fine, but comments had to be written in assembly.\n[In a frame-less panel Hairbun is seen from the front, with both arms out to the side with both hands held palm up.] Hairbun: C could only be written on punch cards.You had to pick a compact font, or you'd only fit a few characters per card.\n[Exactly the same setting as the first panel, but with Hairbun doing the talking.] Hairbun: C++ was big because it supported floppy disks. Hairbun: It still punched holes in them, but it was a start. Cueball: Wow.\n"}
{"id":1756,"title":"I'm With Her","image_title":"I'm With Her","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1756","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/im_with_her.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1756:_I%27m_With_Her","transcript":"[Inset: Eleven characters are drawn around a huge H with a rightwards arrow as the horizontal bar connecting the two vertical towers.  Ponytail stands on the left with a raygun looking leftwards. Behind her is Black Hat who looks at a girl that might be Danish or Megan (but with longer hair than Megan typically has). She is flying a kite above the first two characters. Behind her and looking up at the kite is White Hat. The H is right behind him, and on top of the left tower sits Blondie looking straight out at the reader with her legs dangling over the edge and her arms resting on her knees. On the arrow sits Megan leaning against the left tower, also dangling her legs over the edge and arms resting on her knees. Cueball stands to her right by the right tower. On top of the right tower sits Hairbun with glasses looking straight right with her legs dangling over the edge one arm resting on a knee and leaning back on the other arm. On the right side of the H is an adult version of Science Girl holding a hand out towards the squirrel which Beret Guy is holding out in both arms towards her. Another Cueball stands on an office chair on the right brandishing a sword looking rightwards. He keeps his balance by holding his other arm out behind him. Caption] I'm with her.\n[Centred] How to help Vote\u2015iwillvote.com Get a ride to the polls\u2015drive2vote.org If you're having problems voting\u2015866-OUR-VOTE Experimental social turnout project\u2015civicinnovation.com App Store: VoteWithMe Reminder: If you're in line when the polls close, they have to let you vote.\n","explanation":"In this serious, no joke , comic released the day before the 2016 United States presidential election (which was more contentious than most, due in part to many people finding both candidates unusually distasteful), Randall urged his American viewership to vote, and showed his endorsement for Hillary Clinton , the Democratic nominee in the election. She was up against the Republican nominee Donald Trump , who ended up winning. For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that there were also nominees from other parties, including Green Party nominee Jill Stein , and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson . Neither hoped to garner enough votes to become president, but there was a chance they could affect the result in some states (no third-party candidate has won a state since 1968 , and it did not occur this time either: the closest any came in 2016 was independent candidate Evan McMullin in Utah.)\nIt was the second time Randall referred to this election, the first being 1748: Future Archaeology three weeks before the election, but here it was just a wish to know the result using time travel (of course he did not learn the result back then\u2026).\nThe \"H\" with an arrow was Clinton's campaign logo, and I'm with her an official slogan that was widely used by her supporters, hence the title. Randall then lists tips to help you cast your vote ( see table below ) suggesting a personal investment in the election. Clinton herself may be represented by Blondie sitting on top of the H looking out at the reader as the only of the 11 characters. The only type of joke in the comic is the chosen characters. Two with weapons flank the left and right side looking out ready to defend against Trump: Ponytail with an emp gun (that she also wielded in 322: Pix Plz for melting computers of persons who make snide remarks at women, clearly a reference to allegations of Donald Trump's sexual harassment of women in general and especially to his grab them by the pussy comment ) and Cueball with his sword (from 303: Compiling ). See more details in the character gallery below.\nThis is the first time Randall has used a comic to directly support a presidential campaign, although he did endorse Barack Obama in 2008 on his Blag . At that time, Randall wrote that he was troubled by Hillary Clinton's \"basic lack of integrity\", which is interesting considering he later endorsed her. He wrote later that it was very controversial when he endorsed Obama, but that it was not the most controversial comic he had published at that time. This comic might take that prize now, given that this was one of the most discussed elections up to its time.  This is particularly noteworthy outside the US\u2014for example, some European leaders openly opposed Trump, while others supported him. There were also reports of Russian hackers attempting to influence the election.\nRandall's support for Hillary Clinton may have been due in part to Donald Trump being a prominent climate change denier . Randall has published comics opposing climate change denial such as this: 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline , published less than two months before the election, as well as several other comics on climate change . Also Trump beating Clinton made Randall's regex that matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents impossible to update.\nAll the information on the bottom half of the comic includes sites, numbers, info, etc., current as of 2016, that are intended to help US voters to vote, regardless of whom they vote for. Including this information can assist voters who don't understand the process, don't feel that it's worth it, or feel intimidated or threatened.  In general, these sites and numbers were likely included to help boost voter turnout.\nThe title text, \"We can do this\", refers to Randall's desire to unite Democratic voters and elect Hillary Clinton to the White House instead of Trump.  One can buy T-shirts with the famed \" We Can Do It! \" logo from the Rosie the Riveter wartime poster, but with Hillary Clinton in the famed position.  Both resemble the former president Barack Obama 's campaign slogan Yes We Can and German Chancellor Angela Merkel 's \" Wir schaffen das \" (We can do this) refrain during the Syrian War refugees influx the year earlier\u2014like Clinton, Merkel was fighting against a populist nativist movement that wanted to close the country's borders.\nUnfortunately for Randall, these efforts were in vain, as Donald Trump was elected on Tuesday, November 8. This result became a fact less than two weeks before the first ( 1761: Blame ) of several sad comics that all seemed related to the election of Donald Trump. Trump was never mentioned in these directly sad comics, and it took more than two years before his full name was finally used in xkcd in 2137: Text Entry in April 2019. Here it was remarked that the fact that Donald Trump was president was the weirdest thing of 2019.\nThe list of things that can help is all about getting people to vote.  While Randall is likely to have wanted to boost voter turnout regardless of political leanings, it's clear from his endorsement of Clinton that he believed increased turnout would have helped her win the race.  There is general evidence that certain more heavily Democratic-leaning demographics are less likely to vote, and in this election in particular, the various political issues that had been raised against Hillary (such as the FBI's public disclosures of its investigation into her use of a private email server) were shown to have reduced enthusiasm among Democrats.  But all these issues aside, both Republicans and Democrats alike agree on encouraging everyone to vote, and Randall is likely to have agreed with that sentiment as well.\nHere is Randall's list of suggestions for how to help Hillary Clinton win the election:\nThe comic shows a gallery of 11 xkcd characters including all the main characters from xkcd (except Hairy ), which stand united behind Randall and Clinton despite their lack of agreement in many other comics.\nNote that the two characters at either side of the comic wield weapons pointing out, defending the other nine. Those next to the characters with weapons are doing recreational things like kiting and admiring adorable squirrels, both of which are recurring subjects in xkcd.\n[Inset: Eleven characters are drawn around a huge H with a rightwards arrow as the horizontal bar connecting the two vertical towers.  Ponytail stands on the left with a raygun looking leftwards. Behind her is Black Hat who looks at a girl that might be Danish or Megan (but with longer hair than Megan typically has). She is flying a kite above the first two characters. Behind her and looking up at the kite is White Hat. The H is right behind him, and on top of the left tower sits Blondie looking straight out at the reader with her legs dangling over the edge and her arms resting on her knees. On the arrow sits Megan leaning against the left tower, also dangling her legs over the edge and arms resting on her knees. Cueball stands to her right by the right tower. On top of the right tower sits Hairbun with glasses looking straight right with her legs dangling over the edge one arm resting on a knee and leaning back on the other arm. On the right side of the H is an adult version of Science Girl holding a hand out towards the squirrel which Beret Guy is holding out in both arms towards her. Another Cueball stands on an office chair on the right brandishing a sword looking rightwards. He keeps his balance by holding his other arm out behind him. Caption] I'm with her.\n[Centred] How to help Vote\u2015iwillvote.com Get a ride to the polls\u2015drive2vote.org If you're having problems voting\u2015866-OUR-VOTE Experimental social turnout project\u2015civicinnovation.com App Store: VoteWithMe Reminder: If you're in line when the polls close, they have to let you vote.\n"}
{"id":1757,"title":"November 2016","image_title":"November 2016","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1757","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/november_2016.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1757:_November_2016","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] The November 2016 Guide to making people feel old [A chart with a list of items to be put into the two first lines above the chart. First there are a line using the first column, then there are two lines using the second column. Below those lines are the two columns with underlined captions above. Between the columns are a long line connecting the two.] If they're [age], you say: \"Did you know [thing] has been around for the majority of your life?\" Age Thing 16 Grand Theft Auto IV 17 Rickrolling 18 Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters 19 The Nintendo Wii 20 Twitter 21 The Xbox 360, xkcd 22 Chuck Norris Facts 23 Opportunity's Mars Exploration 24 Facebook 25 Gmail, Pirates of the Caribbean 26 In da Club 27 Firefly 28 The War in Afghanistan 29 The iPod 30 Shrek , Wikipedia 31 Those X-Men movies 32 The Sims 33 Autotuned hit songs\n34 The Star Wars prequels 35 The Matrix 36 Pok\u00e9mon Red&Blue 37 Netflix, Harry Potter , Google 38 Deep Blue's Victory 39 Tupac's Death 40 The last Calvin and Hobbes strip 41 Toy Story >41 [Don't worry, they've got this covered]\n","explanation":"This is yet another comic designed to make people feel old , following soon after the last one 1745: Record Scratch . Not so long ago a comic with the very title of the largest bold letters in the caption above the panel was released: 1686: Feel Old . The next comic about feeling old, was released 11 months later, with a similar title, which is special in itself, 1898: October 2017 see more on both title and this follow up comic in the trivia section below.\nSpecifically this comic contains The November 2016 Guide to making people feel old . (The unusual title for the comic indicates that it only works during this month). It lists ages between 16 and 41 and links each age to one or more events that happened approximately half that age ago, so 8 years ago for the 16 years old and 20 years ago for the 40 years old etc, which means that a person of that age would have had the mentioned thing in their life for the majority of their life. And then it explains that to make a person of a given [age] feel old, look up the [thing] (or things) connected to it, and say:\n\"Did you know [thing] has been around for the majority of your life?\"\nAs an example the age 21 can be used, as it list both the Xbox 360 as well as this comic, xkcd itself. The two possible sentences would then be:\n\"Did you know that the Xbox 360 has been around for the majority of your life?\" \"Did you know that xkcd has been around for the majority of your life?\"\nThis matches earlier attempts to make people feel old by mentioning how long ago it was that, for instance, a movie comes out as was the case in 891: Movie Ages . (But on this exact day when the comic was released there might have many people who did already feel old and tired - see trivia ). When an event seems to have occurred recently to you, like seeing a movie when you were twenty (with Toy Story ) and then suddenly realizing that this was 21 years ago, you will very likely feel old. Since humans' perception of time is not related to how much time has actually passed but rather to important memories, then memories like seeing the first feature-length fully computer-animated movie ( Toy Story ) makes a big impression and may stay vivid in peoples' memories. When they then, after hearing the sentence from this comic, realize that more than half their life has passed since that event, they realize how much time has passed and that makes them feel old.\nThis is why it affects a 20-year-old to hear that Twitter is ten years old, where this will not have the same impact on a 16-year-old, since they were so young when it came out that they probably feel like it has been around for ever, and you do not feel old by hearing, for instance, something like that the TV was invented before you were born. It thus makes sense to pick something that happened almost midway through a person's life, because they then realize they are now double as old as when they first heard of Twitter. Of course also many ten years old would not have been active on Twitter when it was released, so it may not have that big an impact on those 20 years old today.\nThe joke at the end is that people over 41 don't need anything to make them feel old, because they already feel old. He thus teases people above 41 years old by claiming they are old, although many people (above 40) would claim you are not old before you retire. This trick was also used to cap the above mentioned 891: Movie Ages to 35 years old, stating anyone as older was already old. But that comic was also released five years ago, and now Randall is himself closing in on 35 at 32 years at the time of this comics release. So he pushed the limit 6 years further, probably for this reason. Now he no longer thinks people at 36 are too old to try to make them feel old.  It may be a coincidence, but still interesting, that he stopped the list just before 42, a number Randall has referred to many times in relation to it being the \" Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything \" in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy .\nThe title text points out that the same chart can be used for the same person once they are twice as old. So it urges the user to note down the age of the person it was used on, and then wait until their age reaches double that. So for a 16-year-old that would only be 16 more years until they are 32, but for a 41-year-old it would have to wait until they are 82 years old. When showing them this chart, they will realize that this has existed for half of their life and again have the same type of \"feeling old\" that this comic is supposed to instigate today.(It will work better if they still remember the joke made on them those many years ago)...\n[Caption above the panel:] The November 2016 Guide to making people feel old [A chart with a list of items to be put into the two first lines above the chart. First there are a line using the first column, then there are two lines using the second column. Below those lines are the two columns with underlined captions above. Between the columns are a long line connecting the two.] If they're [age], you say: \"Did you know [thing] has been around for the majority of your life?\" Age Thing 16 Grand Theft Auto IV 17 Rickrolling 18 Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters 19 The Nintendo Wii 20 Twitter 21 The Xbox 360, xkcd 22 Chuck Norris Facts 23 Opportunity's Mars Exploration 24 Facebook 25 Gmail, Pirates of the Caribbean 26 In da Club 27 Firefly 28 The War in Afghanistan 29 The iPod 30 Shrek , Wikipedia 31 Those X-Men movies 32 The Sims 33 Autotuned hit songs\n34 The Star Wars prequels 35 The Matrix 36 Pok\u00e9mon Red&Blue 37 Netflix, Harry Potter , Google 38 Deep Blue's Victory 39 Tupac's Death 40 The last Calvin and Hobbes strip 41 Toy Story >41 [Don't worry, they've got this covered]\n"}
{"id":1758,"title":"Astrophysics","image_title":"Astrophysics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1758","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/astrophysics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1758:_Astrophysics","transcript":"[A sign on two posts, in the grass in front of a building with windows and double doors, a window on each door, and bars facing outwards. There is a cement walk leading to the doors. On the sign is the text:] Department of Astrophysics Motto: Yes, everybody has already had the idea, \"Maybe there's no dark matter\u2014Gravity just works differently on large scales!\" It sounds good but doesn't really fit the data.\n","explanation":"In physics, the theory of gravity produced by general relativity combined with dark matter are our current best model for explaining the behavior of gravity and galaxies.  The evidence supporting this model is extensive.  General relativity accurately predicts the orbit of planets, even precise details like the precession of Mercury which Newtonian gravity couldn't fully explain.  Dark matter, in turn, explains behaviors of galaxies such as their rotation rates that were not correctly predicted with general relativity alone.  Most astrophysicists believe dark matter exists, either in the form of an unknown type of star that is too dim to see , or an undiscovered subatomic particle .\nHowever, because the concept of dark matter posits something so pervasive yet unknown and so far undetected, it can be difficult to accept, since typically inability to detect something tends to mean non-existence of that thing. One might be reminded of Aether , a similar theory that an undetectable substance exists in space to allow light and gravity to travel, although unlike dark matter that has been debunked. Thus, it is common to hear objections to dark matter, with a popular alternative idea being that dark matter can be explained away by a modified theory of gravity.\nOne such alternative theory which gets proposed regularly is modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). In MOND, gravity doesn't simply follow the inverse square law but has more complicated behavior. Usually, the extra behavior is either to say that gravitational force can be affected by the acceleration of the particle, or that it goes from inverse-square to just inverse at large distances. It can be appealing because it's relatively simple and seemingly more logical \u2014 it just changes our understanding of Newton's law of gravitation, rather than requiring entirely new forms of matter or unknown stars to exist \u2014 and because it has some nice side-effects, such as explaining why there seems to be a limit on the density of galaxies.  Unfortunately, physicists have explored this avenue and cannot reconcile it with all existing data. One famous counterexample is the Bullet Cluster , where two colliding galaxy clusters are ripping through each other.  The mass distribution within the cluster can be inferred through gravitational lensing, and appears to show dark matter and ordinary matter being separated to a certain extent which cannot be explained with MOND.  Another counterexample is MOND's incompatibility with observations of the motion of galaxies in galaxy clusters. More generally, MOND isn't compatible with general relativity \u2014 which has a huge amount of experimental data in its favour \u2014 and a MOND-compatible general relativity would be very complicated and ugly.\nThis comic illustrates physicists' exasperation for people who constantly try to challenge the existence of dark matter without considering all the evidence and theoretical foundation that support it.  Apparently members of this department are so tired of hearing the same old ideas being repeated to them, that they have adopted a motto and even erected a sign in an attempt to clear the dissuation.  The specific impetus for this comic may be the press coverage around this publication by Erik Verlinde (see popular description of the paper here ). It was released online three days before the release of this comic and got a lot of coverage exclaiming \"this will prove Einstein wrong\".  While Verlinde's work on entropic gravity is a serious theory derived from thermodynamics and quantum information theory , it is important to keep in mind that it's just a pre-print and hasn't been peer-reviewed or experimentally verified yet. Verlinde's theory also doesn't match all available data - it disagrees with experimental results showing how particles interact with gravity .  Thus, it is still a far cry from being a contender for replacing dark matter.\nThe title text alludes to a similar issue faced by the Department of Neuroscience from popular misconceptions of Mirror neurons .  Mirror neurons are brain cells which trigger when watching someone else do something. Experiments claim to have found mirror neurons in humans and apes, and there are theories that make mirror neurons the foundation of learning, empathy, language and consciousness itself. However, the evidence for mirror neurons is still patchy , and even if they exist, it's very simplistic to try to attribute so much of human behavior to a single type of relatively simple cell. In light of this, the motto of the neuroscientists at the department rightfully reflect their frustration. Flipping tables is a common depiction for expressing extreme outrage. It is used here also as a pun because mirrors flip the image in front of them.\nAnother story of similar press coverage questioning the current established scientific theory was also mentioned two days before the release of this comic, on the YouTube channel Space Time from PBS Digital Studios in their video titled Did Dark Energy Just Disappear? .  This one was regarding the paper Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae . The video concluded that dark energy is still the best explanation. Note this is about the existence of dark energy rather than dark matter. The two are very distinct concepts.\nScience papers with results that supposedly disprove solidly founded theories have been the subject before in 955: Neutrinos .\n[A sign on two posts, in the grass in front of a building with windows and double doors, a window on each door, and bars facing outwards. There is a cement walk leading to the doors. On the sign is the text:] Department of Astrophysics Motto: Yes, everybody has already had the idea, \"Maybe there's no dark matter\u2014Gravity just works differently on large scales!\" It sounds good but doesn't really fit the data.\n"}
{"id":1759,"title":"British Map","image_title":"British Map","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1759","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/british_map.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1759:_British_Map","transcript":"[A black-and-white map of Great Britain. The detail on the map is minimal, showing mainly the outlines of the land, upward-pointing angles representing mountains, and points representing cities. The only other features are a small drawing of a protractor south of one peninsula, and a lake with two small sailboats on the west side of the largest landmass. The caption in the upper-right states in large letters \"A BRITISH MAP,\" then in smaller letters underneath, \"LABELED BY AN AMERICAN.\" Most of the map's area is covered by labels for various features, which are listed below.]\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke similar to \"How Americans see the world\" showing how the average American has opinions on the world, often including jokes such as a lack of Africa , etc. This has been used before in 850: World According to Americans . The map also plays with the joke by noting it has been labeled by a specific American rather than \"Americans\".\nMany areas of the UK are most familiar to foreigners thanks to their depiction in various fantasy novels and TV series. This map labels some of these, as well as including many silly names that simply sound like real British towns to an American ear. A protractor is shown off the coast of the Mull of Kintyre in reference to the \" Mull of Kintyre test \" - according to urban legend, the angle of the Mull defines the maximum allowed erectness for a man on films and home video releases in the UK.\nRandall previously posted a map of Great Britain on his blog as part of the promotion for his book What If? . This map is from a very similar position and appears to have been traced from the same source, although there are some slight differences. Both maps include a sketch of Lake Windermere with boats on it, and both have the locations of London, Oxford and Cambridge labeled (the blog map also shows Edinburgh and Bristol - in this comic, these are labelled Eavestroughs and Minas Tirith). Both also contain references to Stonehenge and Watership Down .\nNote that in British English, the correct spelling of \u201clabeled\u201d is \u2018labelled\u2019.\nThe title text plays around with the concept of the compass directions and how numerous regions (such as South \"Sussex\" and West \"Wessex\") incorporate such literal names in their description. Randall is creating similar sounding names which are nonsense-ish (\"Norsussex\" would be the region of the Northern-Southern Saxons), and placing them in relation to each other in ways which would be geographically implausible, similar to this old joke about Boston . However, in Germany there exists the region called Westphalia ( Westfalen ), and the eastern part of it is often referred to as East-Westphalia ( Ostwestfalen ), which sounds somewhat ridiculous. Part of the joke in the title text could be the fact that while three of the locations are fictional, Middlesex does actually exist.\n[A black-and-white map of Great Britain. The detail on the map is minimal, showing mainly the outlines of the land, upward-pointing angles representing mountains, and points representing cities. The only other features are a small drawing of a protractor south of one peninsula, and a lake with two small sailboats on the west side of the largest landmass. The caption in the upper-right states in large letters \"A BRITISH MAP,\" then in smaller letters underneath, \"LABELED BY AN AMERICAN.\" Most of the map's area is covered by labels for various features, which are listed below.]\n"}
{"id":1760,"title":"TV Problems","image_title":"TV Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1760","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tv_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1760:_TV_Problems","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting by his TV, holding his phone, when White Hat walks in.] White Hat: Hey, turn on the news. Cueball (Sitting on the floor in front of a computer holding a cell phone): Can't. Downloading a CD onto my phone.\nWhite Hat (off-screen): Why? Cueball: So I can use it to fix my computer's operating system enough that I can teach it to talk to my TV screen.\nWhite Hat: But then you'll be able to watch the news? Cueball: (off-screen): No.\nWhite Hat: Don't you have a computer science degree? Cueball: That just means I understand how everything went so wrong.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball has broken his computer's software so much that he is unable to \"turn on the news\" as requested by White Hat . Since his computer is not working at all, he is using the next best thing to download a fix: his smartphone, via a CD . This is probably one of two things:\nHe later states that even that first step of mending won't be enough to display the news, as his computer's state is so bad that being able to send information to the TV screen is just the first step of debugging. In the last panel, he tells White Hat that his computer science degree just helps him understand how he ended up with such a terrible situation, but did not give him enough foresight to prevent the most unexpected issues. The title text clarifies this statement with a similar problem- when things start to go horribly wrong while falling from a plane, certified skydiving instructors will be able to better understand why and how bad the situation is, but won't be able to do anything if their usual tools have failed them. Besides, while they are less likely to make a fatal mistake on a given flight and fall, they are more likely to make one in their life, because of the far greater number of attempts. This is especially true considering most people never attempt a jump in their lives, giving them absolutely zero probability of dying in a skydiving accident. This also resembles 795: Conditional Risk : the more informed a person is, the more likely this person is to suffer from the issue they know about.\nComputers breaking in unexpected ways, and somewhat weird solutions to computer problems seems to be a thing with Cueball - and probably Randall as well. At that point, you might assume he probably enjoys it. In 1586: Keyboard Problems , he also had a problem involving both software and hardware. 1739: Fixing Problems could very well apply to this comic; Cueball may have ended with this situation while trying to correct a simple problem (eg: channels in the wrong order), and just made the situation worse every step of the way. In 456: Cautionary , he teaches his cousin about breaking fixing a computer.\nIn this instance Cueball has his single tasking phone busy while he downloads to it and cannot interrupt what he's doing just to use the phone as a remote for the TV, although it appears more that the TV is one of the things he is trying to fix.\n[Cueball is sitting by his TV, holding his phone, when White Hat walks in.] White Hat: Hey, turn on the news. Cueball (Sitting on the floor in front of a computer holding a cell phone): Can't. Downloading a CD onto my phone.\nWhite Hat (off-screen): Why? Cueball: So I can use it to fix my computer's operating system enough that I can teach it to talk to my TV screen.\nWhite Hat: But then you'll be able to watch the news? Cueball: (off-screen): No.\nWhite Hat: Don't you have a computer science degree? Cueball: That just means I understand how everything went so wrong.\n"}
{"id":1761,"title":"Blame","image_title":"Blame","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1761","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blame.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1761:_Blame","transcript":"[Cueball stands.] Cueball (thinking): I feel sad. Cueball (thinking): Bad things are happening.\n[Cueball still stands.] Cueball (thinking): They must be someone's fault. Cueball (thinking): But whose?\n[Cueball makes several thinking poses before a light bulb appears over his head.]\n[Close-up of Cueball's head.] Cueball (thinking): My friends on Facebook.\n","explanation":"Cueball is blaming his \"friends on Facebook \" for \"bad things [that] are happening\".\nPeople often rant on social media sites (like Facebook) about various things which are blamed on certain people (or sometimes usually everyone), but the person doing the ranting never thinks that the problem might be with themselves.\nWhile there could be possible reasons for bad events (for example if the bad event was nobody wishing him a happy birthday or someone posting compromising pictures), his friends would not be a likely source for bad events extending beyond a personal or local scope. Most people have a few hundred (or thousand) \"friends\" on Facebook, most of whom do not have enough influence to cause bad events on a national or global level. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text refers to people venting. The humorous assumption here is that one will feel better after doing so. While some amount of venting might help to relieve stress caused by bad events, alienating people you know by blaming them for bad events usually causes more stress in the long run.\n[Cueball stands.] Cueball (thinking): I feel sad. Cueball (thinking): Bad things are happening.\n[Cueball still stands.] Cueball (thinking): They must be someone's fault. Cueball (thinking): But whose?\n[Cueball makes several thinking poses before a light bulb appears over his head.]\n[Close-up of Cueball's head.] Cueball (thinking): My friends on Facebook.\n"}
{"id":1762,"title":"Moving Boxes","image_title":"Moving Boxes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1762","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/moving_boxes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1762:_Moving_Boxes","transcript":"[A bunch of cardboard boxes stacked up, each labeled]\nContents: Grids Bison Checkerboards Fog Contents: Beacons Elves Sand Contents: Hemoglobin Contents: Water Hooves Contents: Shorebirds Contents: Oil Vectors Silt Contents: Membranes Shards Contents: Shawls Glucose Kits Hydrants Particles Knots Contents: Graphite Taupe Contents: Field Lines Contents: Traps Contents: Edges Tribes Dough Contents: Dark Matter Contents: Manifolds Contents: Triangles Peat Crowns Contents: Scrolls\n[Caption below the panel:] I always forget to label my moving boxes until they're sealed up and I've forgotten what's in them.","explanation":"Randall talks about moving boxes and not labeling them until he forgets what's in them. Since he doesn't know what's in them, he writes silly things on the boxes as a joke. Some things are unusual\/unlikely (e.g. sand, hydrants, peat) and some are abstract\/impossible (e.g. elves, taupe, dark matter). Several of the categories overlap confusingly; for instance, \"sand\" and \"silt\" and \"dark matter\" are all generally considered as \"particles\"; \"membranes\", \"edges\", and \"shawls\" are all kinds of \"manifolds\"; \"hooves\" are part of \"bison\"; \"fog\" contains \"water\"; and \"triangles\" consist of three \"edges\". Another way to interpret this comic is that Randall actually has these items (or at least some of them) in the boxes and has simply forgotten which boxes contain what.\nAccording to the title text, when Randall remembers that he is calling movers, he frantically scribbles \"Normal House Stuff\" on all the boxes. He says this makes the situation worse, possibly because the movers see the scribble and become suspicious. Alternatively, labeling every box with the exact same phrase will make it even harder to figure out what they contain and where they should go in the new dwelling.\n[A bunch of cardboard boxes stacked up, each labeled]\nContents: Grids Bison Checkerboards Fog Contents: Beacons Elves Sand Contents: Hemoglobin Contents: Water Hooves Contents: Shorebirds Contents: Oil Vectors Silt Contents: Membranes Shards Contents: Shawls Glucose Kits Hydrants Particles Knots Contents: Graphite Taupe Contents: Field Lines Contents: Traps Contents: Edges Tribes Dough Contents: Dark Matter Contents: Manifolds Contents: Triangles Peat Crowns Contents: Scrolls\n[Caption below the panel:] I always forget to label my moving boxes until they're sealed up and I've forgotten what's in them."}
{"id":1763,"title":"Catcalling","image_title":"Catcalling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1763","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/catcalling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1763:_Catcalling","transcript":"Offscreen: Hey! Are you messing with the Universe Control Console!?\nMegan: [standing at a control panel with a small lever and what appears to be a display] It's cool. Just gotta fix one thing.\n[Megan still at the control panel; now a mouse pointer appears]\n[Megan still at the control panel; \"Catcalling\" appears written at the top of the panel above a dropdown menu that says \"Harasses women\"; the pointer is hovering over the arrow]\n[Megan still at the control panel; The dropdown menu is expanded to show two elements: \"Harasses women\" and \"Attracts cats\". The pointer is hovering over \"Attracts cats\", which is highlighted]\n","explanation":"\" Catcalling \" refers to the act of whistling or shouting  to express sexual interest in a person, and often constitutes harassment. Annoyed by this practice, Megan alters the Universe Control Console to create a setting in which catcalling actually attracts cats (as the name implies), thus resulting in the catcaller being harassed by the overwhelming feline presence, instead of the other way around, likely in an attempt to discourage the act.\nWhen read without the title text, it could be assumed that Megan is trying not to punish catcallers, but to turn catcalling into a positive thing, since after the change is made catcalling will no longer offend women and instead attract the attention of cats, an animal many people on the internet find cute. [ citation needed ] It is only with the clarifying information in the title text that it becomes clear that Megan is trying to punish catcalling, thus changing the joke.\nIt is interesting to note that changing what women find insulting\/harassment would involve fundamentally changing their psychology on some level. How exactly the Universal Control Console will make them immune to this specific behavior is unclear. The Universal Control Console is an intentionally ambiguous device, but based on how Megan and Ponytail used it in 1620: Christmas Settings , it can be implied to change people's memories of what reality was like before a change, so using the catcalling example, it might make everyone in the universe forget what catcalling initially was, thus removing the insult of even trying to do it in the first place.\nThe \"Universe Control Console\" was introduced in 1620: Christmas Settings as the \"Universe Control Panel\", where it was used to control aspects of reality related to Christmas.  Based on the name, it is presumed all aspects of reality could be altered using this fictitious device. The pointer arrow and menu options shown above Megan appear to depict aspects of the user interface that Megan is seeing. In 2240: Timeline of the Universe someone hit the inflation switch starting the inflation again. And then someone stopped this by hitting the emergency stop. These must also be on the Universe Control Panel.\nThe Console appears to have been modified\/upgraded since its last appearance and features fewer controls while gaining a joystick in this incarnation. It also appears that Megan has learned to operate the console better since first encountering it. ( Ponytail , who first demonstrated the console to Megan, could be the offscreen voice in this comic.)\nFurthermore, the title text suggests that catcalling now attracts all cats within two miles for an entire year. The prospect of being piled in cats for a year would discourage people from catcalling by a large amount. [ citation needed ] 1156: Conditioning also persuades people to change behavior related to wildlife.\nThe redefining of terms related to sexual harassment as more innocent things has also been discussed in 1178: Pickup Artists .\nAlso, the cursor on the console is left-handed for some reason.\nOffscreen: Hey! Are you messing with the Universe Control Console!?\nMegan: [standing at a control panel with a small lever and what appears to be a display] It's cool. Just gotta fix one thing.\n[Megan still at the control panel; now a mouse pointer appears]\n[Megan still at the control panel; \"Catcalling\" appears written at the top of the panel above a dropdown menu that says \"Harasses women\"; the pointer is hovering over the arrow]\n[Megan still at the control panel; The dropdown menu is expanded to show two elements: \"Harasses women\" and \"Attracts cats\". The pointer is hovering over \"Attracts cats\", which is highlighted]\n"}
{"id":1764,"title":"XKCDE","image_title":"XKCDE","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1764","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcde.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1764:_XKCDE","transcript":"Installing the xkcd development environment\n[Inside a frame three instructions are shown:] 1. Spin up a VM 2. Spin up a VM inside that VM 3. Continue spinning up nested VMs and containers until you get fired\n","explanation":"Randall has created a theoretical software environment named XKCDE (a portmanteau on xkcd and CDE (Collaborative Development Environment)), which relies on the user creating a series of nested virtual machines inside each other (creating sort of a digital version of the Droste effect ), which would likely cause extreme strain on the resources of the machine running it. This strain is explained in 676: Abstraction , at least for the normal case.\n\"Virtual Machines\" are software which pretend to be PC hardware so that a \"guest\" operating system can run inside of them, under a \"host\" operating system. Nesting VMs is the process of making a guest also be a host to yet another guest. Generally this is considered wasteful of resources, especially beyond one or two layers deep, and is not done except in a test lab for very specific purposes.\n\"Containers\" are a lighter form of PC abstraction. Instead of emulating the entire physical hardware, they only emulate the software stack sitting on top of the kernel. A containerisation tool will have its own standard library, software-stack and installed programs, but delegates all system calls to the host kernel.\nThis is more efficient because no hardware needs to be emulated, but the disadvantage is reduced isolation between host and guest. A misbehaving guest can induce kernel crashes that take the host with them.\nThe most well-known example of container software is Docker .\nRandall derives humour from repeating the nesting ad absurdum in a never-ending fractal of nested VMs, thus trapping the follower of the instruction forever, in a form of Nerd Sniping : Any external observer, such as your boss, who sees you doing this is likely to fire you for wasting company time (An outcome which is undesirable, though still better than being hit by a truck [ citation needed ] ).\nA software environment which disables both the machine it runs on and the user that runs it could be thought of as a useless machine.\nThe title-text is a joke on the words root and leaf as used in abstract data structures, drawing an analogy of cutting down a tree (unplugging the root machine) scattering leaves (the nested VMs).\nA subtle pun is hidden in 'spinning': several tree species use spinning leaves to scatter their seeds. The autorotation due to the special shape of the leaves helps the seeds travel farther on the wind from their parent tree.  Randall mixes this meaning of 'spinning' with the act of \"spinning up a VM\", the colloquial phrasing for starting up a new instance of a guest virtual machine.\nAs a seed grows into a new tree where it lands, so apparently do the scattered VMs spin up new instances of themselves wherever they land.\nIn this case, a literal interpretation would be that turning off the computer the VMs are running on would make all the VMs without any VMs running in them propagate themselves through a network and install themselves on other computers, which at the end of the day would be a very inefficient method of creating a virus.\nIn 'normal' software development, spinning up a (single, non-nested) VM is a practice to ensure that the development environment is identical between developers, thus minimising hard-to-reproduce bugs due to local machine differences, such as unmatching library versions , locale settings or additional installed or missing software .\nThe single VM image is shared between all developers, who each spin up their own instance on their personal workstation.\nIn such cases, spinning up the VM is the first step in bringing up a local development environment, after which additional steps will usually instruct which programs to open, which configuration settings to change, etc.\nSomeone got 4 levels deep with this.\nInstalling the xkcd development environment\n[Inside a frame three instructions are shown:] 1. Spin up a VM 2. Spin up a VM inside that VM 3. Continue spinning up nested VMs and containers until you get fired\n"}
{"id":1765,"title":"Baby Post","image_title":"Baby Post","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1765","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/baby_post.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1765:_Baby_Post","transcript":"[Ponytail is looking at her phone while talking to Cueball.] Ponytail: Why did you post a The Wheels on the Bus Youtube video to Facebook six times? Cueball: Haha, whoops! My daughter was watching the tablet and must have hit something.\n[Cueball is talking to someone on the phone while pushing a shopping cart with a few items in it.] Phone: Hey, did you mean to post \"FHFF,,,M,,,,\" and a link to a map of hardware stores? Cueball: I should really look up how to lock the screen.\n[White Hat is holding his phone while walking with Cueball.] White Hat: You just posted videos on metal-working, zip lines, and camouflage. Cueball: Uhh...\n[Ponytail is looking at her phone while talking to Cueball.] Ponytail: Um, you posted blueprints of the Crown Jewel rooms in the Tower of London. Cueball: Maybe we should be keeping more of an eye on her.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is questioned about a series of posts made to his Facebook account. He explains the posts as the result of leaving his daughter (a baby, according to the title) unattended with his tablet. This is very common for parents with small children in modern times. Children tend to be fascinated with touchscreen devices, which include many entertainment options for small children (such as the mentioned \" Wheels on the Bus \" video). Infants also tend to experiment with such devices, and frequently open apps, post links, and make calls without intending to. [ citation needed ] This explains the first two panels: sharing the same video six times could be the result of the child repeatedly hitting the same area of the screen (such as a \"share\" link), and the gibberish text \"FHFF,,,M,,,,\" could be due to the child randomly tapping on the screen, all without knowing what she was doing.\nThe joke begins when Cueball discovers an apparent pattern in the new posts, starting with a map of hardware stores and culminating in blueprints for the Tower of London . These subjects, if they were chosen consciously by an adult, would strongly suggest the poster was planning a heist to steal the Crown Jewels , which have a reputation, based in part on several movies (for example, Minions ), for being overly complicated to steal. It is very unlikely for a baby to be capable of designing and carrying out such a plan, [ citation needed ] but it is also unlikely for these specific links to be posted all by accident.  Cueball seems genuinely perplexed by the links (and presumably wouldn't have posted them if he were planning the crime himself), so the reader is left wondering what could have caused these posts, and whether Cueball and\/or his daughter might know more than they let on.  Cueball's suggestion of \"keeping an eye\" on his daughter suggests he is seriously considering the possibility that she might be an evil genius.\nThe title text continues the joke by notifying Cueball that his flight to London is leaving soon, and an Uber driver is coming to pick him up. Since his daughter was using the tablet and he is surprised by the messages, this suggests she is in fact the mastermind who has already started executing her plan.  Either she is making the journey herself (and Cueball is only receiving notifications because he has the same accounts linked to his phone), Cueball is being roped into the crime, or his daughter is deliberately making it look like he intends to steal the Crown Jewels in order to get him into trouble.\n[Ponytail is looking at her phone while talking to Cueball.] Ponytail: Why did you post a The Wheels on the Bus Youtube video to Facebook six times? Cueball: Haha, whoops! My daughter was watching the tablet and must have hit something.\n[Cueball is talking to someone on the phone while pushing a shopping cart with a few items in it.] Phone: Hey, did you mean to post \"FHFF,,,M,,,,\" and a link to a map of hardware stores? Cueball: I should really look up how to lock the screen.\n[White Hat is holding his phone while walking with Cueball.] White Hat: You just posted videos on metal-working, zip lines, and camouflage. Cueball: Uhh...\n[Ponytail is looking at her phone while talking to Cueball.] Ponytail: Um, you posted blueprints of the Crown Jewel rooms in the Tower of London. Cueball: Maybe we should be keeping more of an eye on her.\n"}
{"id":1766,"title":"Apple Spectrum","image_title":"Apple Spectrum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1766","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/apple_spectrum.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1766:_Apple_Spectrum","transcript":"[A mapping, showing types of apples. Each apple is in a bubble]\n","explanation":"The comic shows a spectrum of different types of apples, with Red Delicious towards the bad end of the spectrum, and Honeycrisp towards the good end of the spectrum. Although most spectra are only one-dimensional, Granny Smith is on some side branch, implying that the taste is so different from the other two that it deserves its own category. (Granny Smith apples have a distinctively tart, or sour, flavor with a subtle sweetness, and is commonly used for cooking, as opposed to the other mentioned varieties that are quite sweet and primarily eaten raw.) Randall has previously shown his disdain for Red Delicious apples in footnote 1 in this what if ; he also ranked green apples as tastier than red apples in 388: Fuck Grapefruit .  The labeling of Red Delicious as \"bad\" compared to apples in general is perhaps unwarrantedly uncharitable; most apple trees produce fruit so bad that it is considered unfit for any purpose but fermentation.  On the rare occasions that a tree naturally produces palatable apples, it is grafted onto other trees so that they will produce more of its apples instead of their own--all Granny Smiths are genetically identical. For a long time, though, in the US apples were mainly divided into three sorts. In case of the Red Delicious apples the colour, not the taste was deemed most important to the buyers which (along with the genetic variability of Red Delicious) lead to many Red Delicious apples breeds that looked great, but actually tasted bad leading to a big restructuration of the apple market.\nIn the title text, Randall observes a common type of hypothetical question designed as a creative way to inquire about a person's preferences: If he were on a desert island with an unlimited access to something they like -- in this case, unlimited supply of any one type of apple -- what would he choose? However, Randall gives an unorthodox and unexpected answer to the typically playful hypothetical by taking it literally and questioning how such a situation would occur. How did he get stuck on the island, and how did he get a literally unlimited supply of apples? In reality, a desert island is unlikely to have an unlimited supply of any food [ citation needed ] , let alone apples.\n[A mapping, showing types of apples. Each apple is in a bubble]\n"}
{"id":1767,"title":"US State Names","image_title":"US State Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1767","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/us_state_names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1767:_US_State_Names","transcript":"[A political map of the United States is shown. The title reads:] Geography challenge: Name all 50 states\n[The state names in red text color are:] Alabama => Bandana Alaska => Alberta Arizona => Verizona Arkansas => Arkanoids California => Cafeteria Colorado => Colocated Connecticut => Connect Four Delaware => Delorean District of Columbia => District of Colubrids Florida => Fyoridor Georgia => George Hawaii => Kawaii Idaho => Idolatry Illinois => SK8RBOIS Indiana => That Other One Iowa => Iota Kansas => Candice Kentucky => Kennedy Louisiana => Loisa Maine => Spanish Maine Maryland => Maybelline Massachusetts => Masseuses Michigan => Mishy Minnesota => Minestrone Mississippi => Misstate Missouri => Mossouri Montana => mount -a Nebraska => Nebrunswick Nevada => Fallout New Vegas New Hampshire => New Hamper New Jersey => Nude Juggalos New Mexico => Namaste New York => Newark North Carolina => Sweet Caroline South Carolina => South Caroline Ohio => Oh Hi Oklahoma => Okay Oregon => Organs Pennsylvania => Pencilmania Rhode Island => Roald Dahl South Dakota => Dakota North Dakota => More Dakota Tennessee => Thennessy Texas => Hexxus Utah => Uhaul Vermont => Vermouth Virginia => Virjayjay Washington => Willwheaton West Virginia => Wyvern Wisconsin => Wainscot Wyoming => WYSIWYG\n","explanation":"Randall has taken a map of the United States of America labeled \"Geography Challenge: Name all 50 States\" and filled in the states with words that sound similar to the states' names. The joke is that Randall is apparently terrible at remembering states by heart, or else that he interpreted \"name\" as \"give a name to\" and is giving each state a name similar to but different from its previous name. A similar joke is also seen in 1554: Spice Girls . Songs such as the 50 Nifty United States make these issues seem rarer, thus making it funnier. Below is the list.\nThis also may be a play on the ambiguity of the phrase \"Name all 50 states\".  When you are asked to \"name\" something, it can be a request to supply its given name or to come up with a new name for it.  Randall has apparently taken the latter interpretation.  He also may be playing with the distinction between an object's identity and its label, e.g., \"The state of Texas (identity) is named Hexxus (label)\", though you can argue that \"Texas\" is also a label.\nThis comic is similar to 1759: British Map . Also note that the text at the top of the comic is not in all caps.\nBelow are the Randall's fictional state names, next to the actual ones in parenthesis, and a short explanation for each one.\nAlberta ( Alaska ) Alberta is a Canadian province known for being parochial, politically conservative, and having a strong independence movement, similarly to Alaska. Arkanoids ( Arkansas ) Arkanoid is an arcade game, developed by Taito in 1986. Bandana ( Alabama ) A bandana is a large handkerchief cloth, worn either around the head or neck. Often used in Westerns. Cafeteria ( California ) A cafeteria is both a kind of restaurant and a name for a lunch room that serves food. California is large and diverse, offering a wide variety of choices. California also grows a large proportion of common vegetables available in the US ( Source ), making it a 'Cafeteria' for the country. Candice ( Kansas ) Candice is an alternate spelling of the girl's name \" Candace \", which comes from the Latinized version of \" kandake ,\" a title used in the Kingdom of Kush (an ancient African monarchy) for a reigning queen, queen consort, or queen mother; possibly used for female members of the royal family in general. Colocated ( Colorado ) May refer to computer servers located in a colocation centre , or to collocation , a linguistic term for words or terms that appear together with a frequency greater than chance. Connectfour ( Connecticut ) Connect Four is a two-player game, in which the objective is to connect four of your checkers in a row while preventing your opponent from doing the same. It has already been mentioned in 1002: Game AIs . Dakota ( South Dakota ) Setting up the joke in North Dakota. Delorean ( Delaware ) The DeLorean DMC-12 is a car, made famous as the time machine in the Back to the Future movies. District of Colubrids ( District of Columbia ) The Colubridae are the biggest family of snakes, accounting for about two thirds of the world's species.  As the title text mentions, the District of Columbia, although not part of any state, is technically not a state itself, but is usually labeled on the maps like the 50 others for practical reasons. Here, Randall humorously explains the reason as people not wanting to upset the aforementioned snakes by dismissing their district for this pedantic reason. Fallout New Vegas ( Nevada ) Fallout New Vegas is a video game set in post-apocalyptic Nevada. Fyoridor ( Florida ) Possibly derived from the Russian name Fyodor, as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky . George ( Georgia ) Georgia was named for George II of Great Britain . Hexxus ( Texas ) The antagonist of FernGully . Ferngully is said to be the model for the later film Avatar . This is the second time Hexxus was mentioned in xkcd, the first occurrence being in 1750: Life Goals and the third being in 1918: NEXUS . May allude to the Texas oil industry and the state's general reputation for a lack of environmental protection. Idolatry ( Idaho ) Idolatry is the worship of a physical object as a god, forbidden in the Abrahamic religions. Iota ( Iowa ) Iota is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet . In English, the word iota may also mean \"an inconsiderable amount\". Kawaii ( Hawaii ) A Japanese term for cute, commonly romanized similar to Hawaii. Not to be confused with Kauai , a Hawaiian island. Kennedy ( Kentucky ) Kennedy Fried Chicken is New York City\u2013based fast food brand that shares its initials with KFC, which was formerly (and still conventionally) Kentucky Fried Chicken.  \"Kennedy\" is also the name of a former US president ( John ) and two former US senators ( Robert and Ted ). Louisa ( Louisiana ) Louisa, feminine of Louis, is an Old German name meaning \"famous warrior\". Louisiana was named after King Louis XIV when it was founded as a French colony. Masseuses ( Massachusetts ) Women who give massages professionally. A contentious term in the therapeutic massage industry due to its appropriation by prostitutes. Randall might be making fun about how difficult he thinks it is to spell Massachusetts. Maybelline ( Maryland ) Maybelline is a make-up brand. Minestrone ( Minnesota ) Minestrone is a thick vegetable soup, originating in Italy. Mishy ( Michigan ) According to the Urban Dictionary, \"mishy\" means \" mushy and horny at the same time \".  Or it could just be a nickname, the way a lot of people's names, often children, get shortened with a trailing y (Bobby, Becky, Johnny, Suzy, Davey, Jimmy, etc.). Misstate ( Mississippi ) The word \"misstate\" means to state improperly. \"Mis-\" is also a prefix meaning \"wrong,\" \"incorrect,\" or simply negating. \"Misstate\" could be a non-state. Miss State is a university in Mississippi. This may also be a joke on the fact that Mississippi is one of the most commonly misspelled state names. More Dakota ( North Dakota ) Might be a reference to \"More Dakka\" , a catchphrase by Orks from the Warhammer 40000 universe which is also a page on TVTropes referring to the large-scale use of ammunition. May also allude to the idea that North Dakota is less visible in popular culture than its Southern neighbor, owing to the fact that the latter contains Mount Rushmore but the former does not have any major landmarks. mount -a ( Montana ) A command to mount all disk volumes in fstab (except for ones with the noauto flag). Mossouri ( Missouri ) The single different letter represents probably a typo (O is adjacent to I in a keyboard). This typo has about 22,000 results on Google. Alternatively, this could be an attempt to \"correct\" the spelling of the state name to match its non-intuitive postal abbreviation , MO, which is sometimes used as a pronounceable acronym. Or it could be a reference to Katie Mossouris . Namaste ( New Mexico ) Namaste is a Hindu greeting. Probably unabbreviated from NM (postal code for New Mexico). Nebrunswick ( Nebraska ) New Brunswick , a Canadian province.  New Brunswick is abbreviated \"NB\" in the Canadian postal system , and \"NB\" was also as the postal abbreviation for Nebraska until 1969. It was then changed to \"NE\" specifically to avoid the confusion between the two. Nevertheless, people sometimes still use \"NB\" to refer to Nebraska. New Hamper ( New Hampshire ) A hamper is a large basket, often with lid, used for laundry. Also another name for a picnic basket. Newark ( New York ) The city of Newark is a suburb of New York City (NYC), and many people who live in Newark commute the 14 miles to work in NYC, however it is actually located in the state of New Jersey rather than New York. Other references: Newark Liberty International Airport (a major flight hub serving the New York metropolitan area ), the village of Newark, New York (near Lake Ontario), and Newark element14 (or simply \"Newark\"), the official distributor of Raspberry Pi. Possible reference to William Gibson's works. A mispronunciation of New York. Nude Juggalos ( New Jersey ) Juggalo is a name given to fans of the group Insane Clown Posse or any other Psychopathic Records hip hop group. Also shares the same initials as New Jersey. Oh Hi ( Ohio ) Oh (expression of surprise), Hi (greeting). A common utterance upon meeting an acquaintance unexpectedly. Okay ( Oklahoma ) OK is the state's abbreviation . Okay is a spelling of another abbreviation O.K., which means \"yes\" or \"good\", and has quite a few possible origins . Organs ( Oregon ) Could refer to either body parts that perform vital functions, or large musical instruments having rows of tuned pipes. Also a possible reference to Organ Trail , a retro survival video game that parodies The Oregon Trail . Pencilmania ( Pennsylvania ) Pencil Mania is a 1932 Tom and Jerry cartoon in which they pull out a pencil and proceed to draw figures in the air. Probably joking about how the first part of Pennsylvania sounds like the word \"pencil\". Roald Dahl ( Rhode Island ) A British writer , famous for child novels such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . This name does not actually rhyme well with Rhode Island. Dahl used the Norwegian pronunciation of his name (roo-ahl dahl, rather than ro-ahld dahl), as he had Norwegian parents. Because of how the pronunciation of the name has not been wildly known by readers, Randall may not have been aware of this. Sk8rbois ( Illinois ) \"Skater Boys\" or just \"Skater Boy\" if the '-ois' is pronounced the same as it is in \"Illinois\". Sk8er Boi is a song by Avril Lavigne . South Caroline ( South Carolina ) A further reference to song 'Sweet Caroline' by Neil Diamond, similar to 'Dakota' and 'More Dakota.' Plays on similarity between the names 'Caroline' and 'Carolina'. Spanish Maine ( Maine ) The Spanish Main was the mainland Spanish colonial possessions around the Gulf of Mexico.  Also refers to the surrounding sea, as in the opening of the (children's?) song, \"Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main, ...\". May also refer to the USS Maine (ACR-1) , which, upon sinking, started the Spanish-American war. Sweet Caroline ( North Carolina ) A song by Neil Diamond. That Other One ( Indiana ) 'That Other One' is something someone might say if they were trying to name all the states from memory, and knew where a state was but not what it was called. Appropriate for Indiana, due to being a state with relatively few distinguishing features. Thennessy ( Tennessee ) Hennessy is a brand of cognac. Uhaul ( Utah ) U-Haul is a company that rents moving vans which are frequently decorated with scenes from places that most people have never visited. Verizona ( Arizona ) Verizon , a telecommunications company, has the shared text \"Rizon\" with Arizona (Ve rizon , A rizon a). Vermouth ( Vermont ) Vermouth is an Italian alcoholic beverage. Virjayjay ( Virginia ) Virginia is similar to vagina . Vajayjay is slang for vagina. Wainscot ( Wisconsin ) Wainscot is a type of wood panelling covering only the lower half of a wall. Wilwheaton ( Washington ) Wil Wheaton is an actor and writer, famous for his role as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek . Wysiwyg ( Wyoming ) Acronym for \" what you see is what you get \". A reference to Types of Editors . Wyvern ( West Virginia ) A Wyvern is a mythical creature.\n\n[A political map of the United States is shown. The title reads:] Geography challenge: Name all 50 states\n[The state names in red text color are:] Alabama => Bandana Alaska => Alberta Arizona => Verizona Arkansas => Arkanoids California => Cafeteria Colorado => Colocated Connecticut => Connect Four Delaware => Delorean District of Columbia => District of Colubrids Florida => Fyoridor Georgia => George Hawaii => Kawaii Idaho => Idolatry Illinois => SK8RBOIS Indiana => That Other One Iowa => Iota Kansas => Candice Kentucky => Kennedy Louisiana => Loisa Maine => Spanish Maine Maryland => Maybelline Massachusetts => Masseuses Michigan => Mishy Minnesota => Minestrone Mississippi => Misstate Missouri => Mossouri Montana => mount -a Nebraska => Nebrunswick Nevada => Fallout New Vegas New Hampshire => New Hamper New Jersey => Nude Juggalos New Mexico => Namaste New York => Newark North Carolina => Sweet Caroline South Carolina => South Caroline Ohio => Oh Hi Oklahoma => Okay Oregon => Organs Pennsylvania => Pencilmania Rhode Island => Roald Dahl South Dakota => Dakota North Dakota => More Dakota Tennessee => Thennessy Texas => Hexxus Utah => Uhaul Vermont => Vermouth Virginia => Virjayjay Washington => Willwheaton West Virginia => Wyvern Wisconsin => Wainscot Wyoming => WYSIWYG\n"}
{"id":1768,"title":"Settling","image_title":"Settling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1768","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/settling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1768:_Settling","transcript":"Life Scorecard\nTimes when I thought...\n\"I'm not really happy here, but maybe this is the best I can expect and I'll regret giving it up.\"\n...It turned out I...\nShould have stayed: 2 (in tally marks)\nShould have left sooner: thirteen (in tally marks)\n","explanation":"This is a chart showing the outcomes when Randall was confronted with situations he wasn't happy with. It counts 13 situations which he realizes, in retrospect, he should have left sooner than he did, and only 2 situations where he should have stayed. The implication is that, in his experience, it's generally better to leave a situation you don't like, rather than stick with it in the hope that it will improve.\nPeople often stick with situations they are not happy with (a broken relationship, an unfulfilling career, a stale piece of cake) because they think sticking with the situation is better than throwing it away, and fear that they won't find something better if they leave. This is sometimes referred to as \"settling\", thus the title of the comic. This risk aversion can lead to people sticking with something a lot longer than they ought to if they want to be happiest. Humans' aversion to loss is common; you, being at the necessary reading level for this wiki, can surely easily recall many times when you feared to lose access to something or someone you valued.\nEconomists and behavioral scientists refer to this behavior as the \"sunk cost fallacy\", more formally known as Escalation of commitment . Colloquially, this is a situation where resistance to change is justified by the amount of effort or time already expended. A proverb recognizing the error in this thinking is \"Throwing good money after bad\" , while a competing proverb seemingly justifying the behavior is \"In for a penny, in for a pound\" . The popular book \"Thinking, Fast and Slow\" by Daniel Kahneman details many \"errors\" in human decision-making, like our aversions to losses, the sunk cost fallacy, and others.\nThe title text references a common thread in human regret, which is wondering whether we should have turned the other way when making a choice (\"I would have...\", \"I could have...\", \"I should have...\", et al). Randall points out that it is literally impossible to know how it would have turned out, perhaps urging readers not to regret their decisions, and to live in the moment. It also points out that the previous \"scorecard\" cannot be regarded as certain, since a person is not given the luxury of knowing what would have happened if they had made a different choice. Thus, one can think that they made the wrong choice and would have been better off if they had left sooner, but in actuality, it may have turned out even worse. It is impossible to know, and therefore he can't be positive that he didn't actually make the right choice in the situations where he \"should have left\" .\nAlthough knowing individual outcomes is impossible, and although it is difficult to separate correlation from causation when analyzing large numbers of decisions, rigorous attempts have been made. Notably, a paper titled \"Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness\" . The paper confirmed that \"For important decisions (e.g. quitting a job or ending a relationship), those who make a change (regardless of the outcome of the coin toss) report being substantially happier two months and six months later.\"\nLife Scorecard\nTimes when I thought...\n\"I'm not really happy here, but maybe this is the best I can expect and I'll regret giving it up.\"\n...It turned out I...\nShould have stayed: 2 (in tally marks)\nShould have left sooner: thirteen (in tally marks)\n"}
{"id":1769,"title":"Never Seen Star Wars","image_title":"Never Seen Star Wars","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1769","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/never_seen_star_wars.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1769:_Never_Seen_Star_Wars","transcript":"[White Hat is facing Cueball while talking to him.] White Hat: You know the scene on the Death Star where\u2013 Cueball: Nah, I've never seen Star Wars .\n[Close-up of White Hat in a smaller panel.] White Hat: WHAT.\n[White Hat and Cueball are still facing each other.] White Hat: ...How?! Cueball: Uh, it was easy? Cueball: It was literally the default option.\n[Close up of Cueball. White Hat is speaking off-panel.] White Hat: But... How did you\u2013 Cueball: Not doing things is my superpower. I'm not doing an infinite number of things as we speak!\n[White Hat and Cueball are still facing each other.] White Hat: We have to watch it. Cueball: Nah, I'm good.\n[White Hat has turned away from Cueball and has his hands to his mouth to shout to people off-panel. Cueball has likewise turned away as he walks away and is speaking back over his shoulder.] White Hat: Hey everyone! This guy's never seen Star Wars! Cueball: Listen, I gotta go.\n[A small caption above the single panel.] Later...\n[Ponytail is looking down at her phone in her left hand while Cueball is facing her.] Ponytail: Wait, there's a new Star Wars ? Cueball: Oh, I've nev\u2013 Cueball: ...yeah! Excited for it! Big fan.\n[Ponytail holds her phone to her side, transferred to her right hand, as she and Cueball face each other.] Ponytail: What'd you think of the last one? Cueball: Uh... That Darth Vader, man. Cueball: Sure does love eating Jedi.\n[Ponytail and Cueball continue facing each other.] Ponytail: Haha, he sure does! Cueball (thinking): Phew. Ponytail (thinking): Phew.\n","explanation":"White Hat tries to start a conversation with Cueball about the Star Wars space opera film franchise, which Cueball cuts short by stating that he has never seen the movies. This deeply astonishes White Hat. Because the movies are known worldwide and are ingrained into American pop culture, White Hat considers seeing Star Wars a universal experience.\nCueball reasons that not having watched the films is the \"default option\", the option that applies if a person makes no explicit choice. In this case it means that if a person does not make the explicit choice to watch the films, then they remain in their initial state of not having watched them. It has been estimated that about 1 billion people, about 15% of the world's population, have seen at least one of the Star Wars movies. This means that about 85% of people alive today have, intentionally or otherwise, exercised that default option. Even accounting for people who have never had the option of seeing Star Wars movies (through poverty, age, country of residence, and so on), people who have not seen Star Wars are still in the majority.\nHowever, the Star Wars mythology is so frequently referenced in American popular culture [ citation needed ] that it's difficult to consume a normal media diet in the US without being exposed to enough quotes, clips, references, parodies and analogies to piece together most of the plot and major scenes of the films, even having taken no action to see them. Even without having watched it, it's reasonable that White Hat would expect Cueball to know something about the series. He is right, as it happens, since Cueball is able to recognize that \" Death Star \" is a Star Wars reference, and later knows that Darth Vader is a major character and that there exists something known as Jedi.\nWhen White Hat finally begins to grasp that Cueball has indeed not seen Star Wars , he declares that they must see it very soon or even immediately. When Cueball again shows a lack of interest, White Hat seemingly calls in social reinforcements to agree with him that having watched Star Wars is the norm. Cueball feels threatened by his friend's unreasonably assertive behavior and quickly removes himself from the situation.\nLater, Ponytail likewise wishes to start a conversation about Star Wars , this time about a new movie coming out. Based on his previous experience, Cueball reconsiders admitting to not having seen the past movies, and instead pretends to be looking forward to the new one. Ponytail then tries to continue the conversation, so Cueball bluffs with an incorrect declaration that Darth Vader eats Jedi, likely constructed from other mentions of the Star Wars characters that he has overheard throughout his life. Cueball carefully chooses his words to make it seem as if he knows what he is talking about.\nHowever, Ponytail doesn't call him out on this error, instead agreeing with it. Cueball is relieved \u2014 expressed as his thinking an onomatopoeic sigh of relief \u2014 as he believes he has guessed at an accurate piece of information and has avoided entering a similar situation to the previous one. The punchline of this part of the comic is Ponytail's identical feeling of relief, suggesting that she also hasn't seen Star Wars , and is also bluffing to hide that fact. It may be inferred that Ponytail has had similar experiences to Cueball, and now actually starts a conversation about Star Wars in order to avoid that social stigma. It might also be viewed as both of them having lost an opportunity to have a conversation with someone else who hasn't seen Star Wars , because both are afraid of how they'll be treated.\nThe \" Expanded Universe \" (EU) was the term used to refer to canonical content outside of original six motion pictures, including novels, comic books, and video games, which existed in a shared continuity. After the Star Wars franchise was acquired by Disney it was announced that the \"Expanded Universe\" would be discontinued and rebranded as \"Legends\", so that the new Star Wars movies would not have to adhere to the established EU canon.\nThe title text is a tip for people like Cueball, to help them hide deception when roped into conversations about the films. It argues that since the Jedi Prince series of novels established so many strange concepts that don't mesh with most other canon information, it makes for an excellent scapegoat to blame ill-fitting declarations on, seeing as even the most devoted, well informed fan has agreed to forget the entire series. Casually bringing up such a forgotten series might also make the bluffer out to be extremely knowledgeable about the Star Wars franchise as a whole.\n[White Hat is facing Cueball while talking to him.] White Hat: You know the scene on the Death Star where\u2013 Cueball: Nah, I've never seen Star Wars .\n[Close-up of White Hat in a smaller panel.] White Hat: WHAT.\n[White Hat and Cueball are still facing each other.] White Hat: ...How?! Cueball: Uh, it was easy? Cueball: It was literally the default option.\n[Close up of Cueball. White Hat is speaking off-panel.] White Hat: But... How did you\u2013 Cueball: Not doing things is my superpower. I'm not doing an infinite number of things as we speak!\n[White Hat and Cueball are still facing each other.] White Hat: We have to watch it. Cueball: Nah, I'm good.\n[White Hat has turned away from Cueball and has his hands to his mouth to shout to people off-panel. Cueball has likewise turned away as he walks away and is speaking back over his shoulder.] White Hat: Hey everyone! This guy's never seen Star Wars! Cueball: Listen, I gotta go.\n[A small caption above the single panel.] Later...\n[Ponytail is looking down at her phone in her left hand while Cueball is facing her.] Ponytail: Wait, there's a new Star Wars ? Cueball: Oh, I've nev\u2013 Cueball: ...yeah! Excited for it! Big fan.\n[Ponytail holds her phone to her side, transferred to her right hand, as she and Cueball face each other.] Ponytail: What'd you think of the last one? Cueball: Uh... That Darth Vader, man. Cueball: Sure does love eating Jedi.\n[Ponytail and Cueball continue facing each other.] Ponytail: Haha, he sure does! Cueball (thinking): Phew. Ponytail (thinking): Phew.\n"}
{"id":1770,"title":"UI Change","image_title":"UI Change","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1770","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ui_change.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1770:_UI_Change","transcript":"[Cueball is doing something on his phone]\nCueball: Ugh, I hate when apps make arbitrary changes to their UI.\nCueball: Stuff I do all the time just got harder for no reason!\nOff-Screen Voice: Man.\nOff-Screen Voice: You are not gonna like getting old.\n","explanation":"The system that sets out the way in which the user interacts with an app or program is called its \"user interface\" (UI). For an app, that may be the graphic design of the app, and commonly the nature and location of certain controls.\nSometimes, when websites and apps are updated, the UI is modified. This is often done to make space for new features or to make what the developer considers to be an improvement, to the look or efficiency of the app. Occasionally UIs are modified with no obvious goal in mind other than to make changes to give the illusion of improvement when no new features have been added, thus making them completely arbitrary.\nGiven that some users use some apps many times a day, users tend to learn and get used to the UI of common apps. Whether or not these changes are good in the long term, users often complain because all the workflows they're familiar with have been changed, and often the software never tells you where buttons and other options have been moved to. On occasion, these changes actually make common tasks more difficult and slower to accomplish. For example, in iOS 10 , on the quick access control panel (which formerly consisted of a single page of controls), moves the controls for music to a second page (accessed by an additional swipe). While this has a benefit of allowing more information about one's music to be displayed, it adds an additional step to the UI before one can control their music from the control panel. Changes also often require users to \"unlearn\" the automatic behavior they have in using the app (such as automatically moving to press a button in its old location).\nOld people get to see during their lifetime lots of these kind of changes to the way they did things in the past, and they often don't see the reason why they are made, since the young people who make the changes have a different cultural environment that the elderly won't \"get\".\nAlso, just as young people like to complain about petty changes to apps, old people complain about the way their body starts to break down as they age. Muscle weakness makes tasks like opening doors and jars more difficult, the senses such as sight and hearing deteriorate, and mental processes such as memory and rationalization can become slower and less reliable. These have a far bigger impact on one's day-to-day ability to do tasks than a simple UI change.\nThe comment in the title text could refer to either user interface changes or the effects of aging. As for the former, when websites and programs make unpopular changes, users sometimes start petitions to have them reverted - for example, 1.7 million Facebook users joined \"Petition Against the New Facebook\". Of course, they didn't get their way, and nowadays few will even remember the old Facebook layout. Cueball 's comment in the title text might refer to the fact that people naively believe that if they complain a lot about an undesired change on the UI of some app that is considered permanent, they might change it back, while in real life those complaints usually don't have any effect, just like the Facebook example given before.\nAs for the latter, there's no human with the power to undo the effects of aging yet [ citation needed ] , and a petition to God would typically be called a prayer, rather than a petition. Scientific research on how to stop or reverse the effects of old age is ongoing, with limited successes but no indication that we're anywhere close to the ability to \"change things back\" by restoring an old person to full youthful vigor, nor that this will necessarily happen within the lifetime of anyone currently alive (though neither is it guaranteed not to happen [ citation needed ] , but it will take a while if it does). There has always been a market for immortality, with many historical figures seeking it through alchemy, science, or magic, but as of yet, products claiming to grant it have all been shams. Perhaps Cueball is hoping that advancing technologies will become sufficient to keep him from experiencing the negative effects of old age at all, and that complaining about the situation might improve the pace of progress.\n[Cueball is doing something on his phone]\nCueball: Ugh, I hate when apps make arbitrary changes to their UI.\nCueball: Stuff I do all the time just got harder for no reason!\nOff-Screen Voice: Man.\nOff-Screen Voice: You are not gonna like getting old.\n"}
{"id":1771,"title":"It Was I","image_title":"It Was I","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1771","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/it_was_i.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1771:_It_Was_I","transcript":"[Emperor Palpatine, Luke Skywalker, and Darth Vader in throne room] Emperor: It was I who allowed the Alliance to know the location of the shield generator. Luke: You mean \"It was me .\" You're following an archaic grammar rule.\n[Zoomed in on Darth Vader, with the Emperor speaking off panel] Emperor: It was me who allowed the- Vader: No, my master, an archaic tone is appropriate here. The sentence sounds-\n[Zoomed in on Luke Skywalker, with the Emperor speaking off panel] Emperor: It was I who allowed- Luke: Come on, the accusative case is fine. Nominative pronouns are-\n[Zoomed in on the Emperor, with Darth Vader responding off panel] Emperor: It me Emperor: I allowed it Vader: My master, Vader: Please never say that again.\n","explanation":"This comic starts with a scene from Return of the Jedi , with Emperor Palpatine , Luke Skywalker (drawn as an xkcd character) and Darth Vader .  The original scene in the movie had a tense mood as the hero faces the villains.  The comic's version of the scene, however, descends into a silly debate of grammar rules.\nInitially Palpatine begins saying \"It was I who...\" in accordance with traditional prescriptive English grammar.  The verb \"to be\" is a copula , meaning that in a sentence of the form \"A is B\", both A and B are treated like the subject of the sentence. In most Indo-European languages, subjects use the nominative case ( I , he , she , and we ) while objects use the accusative case ( me , him , her , us ).  This rule is still strong in languages like German, where speakers still use cases and therefore are familiar with how they work.\nThe case system in English has almost died out, and only a few fossils of nominative case pronouns still remain.  English's case system is so weak that most people have reduced the rule to \" I goes before a verb, me comes after a verb or preposition\". This gives the correct result in sentences like \"It saw me\". By extension, speakers therefore often say \"It was me\" ( here's a famous example from Vince McMahon ) even though this is not true to the traditional rules.  Luke thinks that there's nothing wrong with this modern sense.  It's possible the intent was to portray a descriptivist approach to grammar.  His words could also be said to be prescriptivist in a different way, as he is objecting to Palpatine's grammar for not being modern enough.\nDarth Vader counters by pointing out that regardless of the grammatical correctness of \"It was I\", it is a set phrase with a good archaic ring to it suitable for a dramatic revelation from an Emperor. Vader and the Emperor using English archaisms has canon basis in Star Wars , with Vader asking \"What is thy bidding, my master?\" in The Empire Strikes Back .  Historically, \"thee\", \"thou\", and \"thy\" were actually informal pronouns, but because they are not used in modern English, except in reciting historical works like some editions of the Bible, they are thought of as ceremonial and formal today.  Using the archaic form would be more consistent with the Emperor's speech pattern.\nPalpatine finally decides to take a third option, and uses \" it me \", a popular meme on Twitter in 2016. Darth Vader, out of embarrassment, begs him not to talk like that again.\nOne of Randall 's themes is that grammar pedants apply rules to correct other people long after those rules have fallen out of actual usage. Luke is here being an anti-grammar-pedant, asking the Emperor to disapply the rule. See 890: Etymology for another instance of Luke failing to notice semantics.\nCharacters concentrating on the linguistics of other characters speech while they deliver dramatic revelations, or the overall situation being already critical, is a classic joke . But characters interrupted for grammatical remarks typically ignore it or just blame the interrupter for not focusing on the important subject. Here, Randall goes one step further by having the other characters join the grammatical argument instead.\nThe title text runs with the joke in the final panel, applying the same meme to Darth Vader's iconic quote \"No, I am your father.\" It could be said that such a phrasing robs the moment of all gravitas, but then again, Yoda managed to coin a phrase like \"Do or do not; there is no try\", and still be taken seriously.\n[Emperor Palpatine, Luke Skywalker, and Darth Vader in throne room] Emperor: It was I who allowed the Alliance to know the location of the shield generator. Luke: You mean \"It was me .\" You're following an archaic grammar rule.\n[Zoomed in on Darth Vader, with the Emperor speaking off panel] Emperor: It was me who allowed the- Vader: No, my master, an archaic tone is appropriate here. The sentence sounds-\n[Zoomed in on Luke Skywalker, with the Emperor speaking off panel] Emperor: It was I who allowed- Luke: Come on, the accusative case is fine. Nominative pronouns are-\n[Zoomed in on the Emperor, with Darth Vader responding off panel] Emperor: It me Emperor: I allowed it Vader: My master, Vader: Please never say that again.\n"}
{"id":1772,"title":"Startup Opportunity","image_title":"Startup Opportunity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1772","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/startup_opportunity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1772:_Startup_Opportunity","transcript":"[Around a table, sitting in a meeting, are Ponytail, White Hat, Beret Guy, Hairy, Hairbun, and Cueball.]\nWhite Hat: We've discovered that your company doesn't do anything. Beret Guy: How is that possible?! We have so many chairs!\n[Close up on White Hat and Beret Guy.]\nWhite Hat: You need to find an industry to disrupt. Beret Guy: An...industry? Beret Guy: Oh, yeah! Beret Guy: The zoning thing from SimCity!\nWhite Hat: No, like, a kind of business. Beret Guy: How do I find those? White Hat: I don't know. What's something you spend a lot of money on?\n[Beat panel showing only Beret Guy.]\n[White Hat, Beret Guy, Hairy, and Hairbun are shown. At left and right, respectively, parts of Ponytail's and Cueball's arms and lower bodies can be seen.]\nBeret Guy: You know those mysterious shops that sell you magical items, and then it turns out they're cursed, but when you go back later there's no sign the shop was ever there? Beret Guy: I get most of my stuff from those. Beret Guy: Like groceries.\n[Closeup on Hairy, Hairbun, and Cueball. Cueball has his hand on his chin.]\nHairy: We should go. Hairbun: Wait. High-value sales, no regulation, and when customers try to complain, they can't find you... Cueball: Maybe this is the perfect startup.\n","explanation":"Beret Guy's company , first seen in 1032: Networking , 1293: Job Interview and 1493: Meeting , returns, and its purpose is as vague as ever.\nAnalysts, brought in to advise his company, determine that it doesn't actually serve any purpose (a problem which could ironically be attributed to business analysts in general). Beret Guy is dumbfounded, claiming that his company must do something , and takes a line of reasoning that faintly resembles the sort of logic a child might use. A child that visits an office building might conclude that an office does a lot because there are a lot of employees working inside, unaware that what really makes a successful business is how efficiently it uses its employees to deliver goods and services to the consumer, and whether said goods and services are competitive in their market (by their quality, or through advertising campaigns, or price).\nNow, if Beret Guy is given the benefit of the doubt, his odd statement could be taken to mean that his company has many administrators (a.k.a. chairmen); as the owner of a sufficiently large business often interacts with the department in charge of overhead, a person in his position runs the risk of becoming myopic, losing touch with the workers that actually make the business function.\nHowever, this is Beret Guy we're talking about here. He has demonstrated, time and time and time again, that he is hopelessly out of touch with reality, and this very strip shows no sign of him having gotten a firmer grasp of Earth logic. Displaying less business acumen than a child and less grounding in perspective than a CEO, he uses the number of chairs in the workplace as a yardstick for success, with no mention of his actual, human workforce. It may even be a stretch to say that a child would make the same assumption based on the number of chairs.\nThe analysts suggest that Beret Guy find an industry to disrupt. The mention of \"industry\" immediately reminds Beret Guy of SimCity , where Industrial (along with Residential and Commercial) is one of the three main zone types - it allows factories and farms to develop. Disruption means coming up with a product that redefines what the market expects and leaving existing competitors in the dust (for instance, smartphones disrupted mobile, digital photography disrupted film, and air travel disrupted rail and sea travel (and is in turn being disrupted by high-speed rail)) - it's now an industry buzzword and virtually every company claims to be \"disruptive\".\nWhen pointed in the right direction, Beret Guy realizes that the main industry he deals with is weird disappearing shops selling cursed goods, such as the WiFi in 1812: Onboarding . This is a common trope in fantasy stories (notably Stephen King's novel Needful Things , using this exact premise), and as soon as Hairy hears about it he wants out of the building, but as his colleagues point out it also bears more than a passing resemblance to many dodgy startup companies . These appear suddenly with a lot of promotion and a marketable idea, looking for venture capital (or, a lot of times in recent times, pre-orders on Kickstarter ). However, many startups fail - either because they didn't take into account the difficulties involved in bringing a product to market, or because they were an active scam - and disappear without a trace, leaving customers either empty handed or with a buggy product that falls short of promises. As Cueball notes, these cursed shops are actually the perfect startup, at least from a moneymaking perspective. This humorously ignores the more obvious larger problem, that such a business would be impossible to create due to not actually having magical items to sell (unless, of course, one is referring to items that are sold by making unrealistic or implausible claims as to their use, which could be considered similar to \"magic\". This is common enough in the real world, and many such products call themselves \"magic\" without actually explicitly claiming to use mysterious powers of sorcery. One character could be thinking literally, and the other one figuratively). Apparently, the business may become one, if he does spend most of his money there.\nAs with most Beret Guy comics, there are multiple layers of absurdity. For a start, the fact that he-and by extension, the rest of the cast-live in a world including supernatural shops is, while not inconsistent, still supernatural. The assertion that this is where he buys most of his materials and other products is also curious, given the shops' inherent temporary nature, as it implies either something about him causes these shops to appear, or that he is drawn to these shops instinctively. Most absurdly, he apparently purchases his food from these establishments (which may also serve as an explanation for his 'soup outlet' in 1293: Job Interview ), despite previously stating everything they sell is cursed, conjures troubling images in the mind of how exactly food would be cursed-and its effects. Perhaps this explains Beret Guy's strange powers .\nThe title text alludes to the fact that irrespective of whether or not there is formal regulation, it is unwise to anger a group of people who have access to cursed magical items. It is easy to imagine numerous ways they could make one's life substantially worse.\nIn 2332: Cursed Chair , Beret Guy purchases a chair from such a shop. In 2376: Curbside it is revealed that while the shops seem to require masks, they do not have curbside pickup.\n[Around a table, sitting in a meeting, are Ponytail, White Hat, Beret Guy, Hairy, Hairbun, and Cueball.]\nWhite Hat: We've discovered that your company doesn't do anything. Beret Guy: How is that possible?! We have so many chairs!\n[Close up on White Hat and Beret Guy.]\nWhite Hat: You need to find an industry to disrupt. Beret Guy: An...industry? Beret Guy: Oh, yeah! Beret Guy: The zoning thing from SimCity!\nWhite Hat: No, like, a kind of business. Beret Guy: How do I find those? White Hat: I don't know. What's something you spend a lot of money on?\n[Beat panel showing only Beret Guy.]\n[White Hat, Beret Guy, Hairy, and Hairbun are shown. At left and right, respectively, parts of Ponytail's and Cueball's arms and lower bodies can be seen.]\nBeret Guy: You know those mysterious shops that sell you magical items, and then it turns out they're cursed, but when you go back later there's no sign the shop was ever there? Beret Guy: I get most of my stuff from those. Beret Guy: Like groceries.\n[Closeup on Hairy, Hairbun, and Cueball. Cueball has his hand on his chin.]\nHairy: We should go. Hairbun: Wait. High-value sales, no regulation, and when customers try to complain, they can't find you... Cueball: Maybe this is the perfect startup.\n"}
{"id":1773,"title":"Negativity","image_title":"Negativity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1773","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/negativity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1773:_Negativity","transcript":"[Cueball walking on grass] Cueball: It's nice to get outside, away from the pain and negativity of the internet,\n[Cueball stops walking] Cueball: And just enjoy the cool breeze and the grass under my feet.\n[Cueball stands there, hands to his hips, looking to the cloudy sky]\n[Cueball looks down while pointing a finger at the grass behind him.] Grass: You suuuuck Cueball: Hey!\n","explanation":"Cueball is going outside for some fresh air because he wants to escape the trolls of the Internet , which is known for hosting several hostile and unpleasant ideas and people. However, as he walks, some grass speaks up to insult him, and Cueball is upset to find that he hasn't escaped the negativity at all. (see 1749: Mushrooms which involves an unusual occurrence of a vocalizing angry mushroom).\nThe title text expands on this, with him searching Google for how to \"block the lawn\". Blocking someone refers to a standard setting on websites and online services that can prevent certain users from communicating with you, but it is as yet unknown how this would work for a lawn insulting you. This is made ironic by the fact he is using the Internet to find an Internet technique (blocking) on a non-Internet object, while at the start of the comic, he just wanted to escape the Internet.\nThe term \" blocking \" is actually used in lawn-care to refer to techniques where sunlight is restricted from reaching the lower parts of the grass stems and to persuade the root system to grow deeper into the soil.\nThe negativity Cueball meets on-line is likely due to the results of the recent 2016 United States presidential election and this one was released only three days before the U.S. Electoral College voted for Donald Trump to become the 45th president of the United States, and this was still a bit exciting as there where rumors\/hopes that some of the electors would not vote for Trump . (But only two changed away from Trump!) That this is likely is further supported with other recent comics. The first of these 1761: Blame is almost a prequel to this one, as it is about being sad about what happens on-line. This comic here was thus the second sad comic following the election, culminating shortly after his inauguration with a comic simply titled 1790: Sad . (See more on other depressive comics here .)\nLater in 1802: Phone , Cueball cannot go outside for a walk without bringing his phone as he cannot stand to be disconnected from his feed, which is the exact opposite of what he tries in this comic. Although in the title text he does try to disconnect, he then finds that this is also bad because it leads to social isolation.\n[Cueball walking on grass] Cueball: It's nice to get outside, away from the pain and negativity of the internet,\n[Cueball stops walking] Cueball: And just enjoy the cool breeze and the grass under my feet.\n[Cueball stands there, hands to his hips, looking to the cloudy sky]\n[Cueball looks down while pointing a finger at the grass behind him.] Grass: You suuuuck Cueball: Hey!\n"}
{"id":1774,"title":"Adjective Foods","image_title":"Adjective Foods","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1774","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/adjective_foods.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1774:_Adjective_Foods","transcript":"[An arrangement of labeled foodstuffs, from left to right and top to bottom:] Premium Stone-ground Bespoke, Cage-free Gourmet Fire-roasted Glazed flamb\u00e9 Organic All-natural Locally-sourced Artisanal, Kosher, Grade A Craft Barrel-aged Smoked Authentic Homemade Sun-dried Whole Extra Sharp Low-calorie Lite Original Flavor [Caption:] I'm trying to trick supermarkets into carrying my new line of adjective-only foods.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall imagines creating food items whose\u00a0labels\u00a0contain only adjectives, and putting them on display in supermarkets.  This is likely a jab at food market buzzwords, which usually rely on adjectives that bring up certain feelings based on how the food is \"supposed to be\", rather than a factual description of what the food actually\u00a0is.  By removing\u00a0all nouns from product labels, Randall\u00a0takes this trend\u00a0to its extreme.  The items depicted in this comic are filled\u00a0with popular descriptions\u00a0that make\u00a0them sound appealing,\u00a0but give no useful information\u00a0about their contents.  It is implied that some consumers who are susceptible to buzzword marketing will nevertheless purchase these products.\nThe adjectives\u00a0seen in the comic are:\nThe title\u00a0text may be a continuation of the main\u00a0joke, in that Randall has removed\u00a0the noun (nutrient\u00a0type)\u00a0which the recommended daily allowance is supposed to measure.  This\u00a0leaves \"100%\" which\u00a0gives an impression of good value,\u00a0but\u00a0it is useless without knowing what it describes.  Alternatively, it may be suggesting facetiously that the foods contain 100% of the recommended daily allowance of adjectives, given the high quantity of them in the product names. Obviously, adjectives are not a nutrient the human body needs that would normally be subject of a nutritional chart.\nThis joke is very similar to comic 1060, Crowdsourcing , in that Randall is doing nothing, and trying to make it look like he is doing something. It expresses the opposite idea from comic 993, Brand Identity .\n[An arrangement of labeled foodstuffs, from left to right and top to bottom:] Premium Stone-ground Bespoke, Cage-free Gourmet Fire-roasted Glazed flamb\u00e9 Organic All-natural Locally-sourced Artisanal, Kosher, Grade A Craft Barrel-aged Smoked Authentic Homemade Sun-dried Whole Extra Sharp Low-calorie Lite Original Flavor [Caption:] I'm trying to trick supermarkets into carrying my new line of adjective-only foods.\n"}
{"id":1775,"title":"Things You Learn","image_title":"Things You Learn","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1775","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/things_you_learn.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1775:_Things_You_Learn","transcript":"[A simple X and Y graph, with the X labeled \"how bad it is if you don't know {thing}\" and ranging from \"not bad\" to \"very bad\", and Y labeled \"how easy it is to grow up without learning {thing}\" and ranging from \"easy\" to \"hard\" from top to bottom.]\n[Points on graph from top to bottom on the left side of the Y-axis:]\n100 digits of pi Lyrics to We Didn't Start the Fire How to ride a bike How to escape movie quicksand Lyrics to 12 Days of Christmas TV theme songs\n[Points on graph from top to bottom on the right side of the Y-axis:]\nThat cat bites are really serious and if bitten you should wash the bite and call a doctor immediately Red flags for an abusive relationship Signs for a stroke Cough into your elbow, not your hand That you have to empty the dryer lint trap Stop, drop, and roll That you have to pay taxes\n","explanation":"This graph shows various items of information plotted by two criteria: a horizontal \"How Bad Is It If You Don't Know [THING]\" axis and a vertical \"How Easy It Is To Grow Up Without Learning [THING]\" axis. Specifically, the vertical axis measures roughly how likely the average person is to remain ignorant of a particular item. The horizontal axis measures the likelihood and severity of bad consequences arising from such ignorance.\nThe title text describes an encounter Randall had where a cat climbed into the engine compartment of his car. It probably serves as an explanation for the seemingly out of place point on the graph about how serious cat bites are. The \"two thumbs\" is a reference to a well known type of jokes among English speakers. One of the most frequent forms is one person interrupting another mid-speech and asking \"what has two thumbs and doesn't give a f*ck? THIS GUY!\", before pointing to themselves with their thumbs. The idea is that you only direct the attention to your thumbs so that they can point back to you, though mentioning the thumbs was not actually required except as a topic change. Randall plays on an inversion of this joke as he (presumably) was bitten on the thumb might have lost a thumb or perhaps not have been able to make it at all without the intervention of the ER people. So here the \"who has two thumbs\", is not a deceiving distraction out of a boring conversation, and the thumbs are actually the focus of the phrase.\n100% not bad: not bad at all . . . 100%>not-badness\u226550%: not bad . . . 50%>not-badness\u22650%: not too bad\n100% very bad: very, very bad . . . 100%>very badness\u226550%: very bad . . . 50%>very badness>0%: bad\n100% hard: very, very hard . . . 100%>hardness\u226550%: very hard . . . 50%>hardness>0%: hard\n100% easy: very, very easy . . . 100%>easiness\u226550%: very easy . . . 50%>easiness\u22650%: easy\n[A simple X and Y graph, with the X labeled \"how bad it is if you don't know {thing}\" and ranging from \"not bad\" to \"very bad\", and Y labeled \"how easy it is to grow up without learning {thing}\" and ranging from \"easy\" to \"hard\" from top to bottom.]\n[Points on graph from top to bottom on the left side of the Y-axis:]\n100 digits of pi Lyrics to We Didn't Start the Fire How to ride a bike How to escape movie quicksand Lyrics to 12 Days of Christmas TV theme songs\n[Points on graph from top to bottom on the right side of the Y-axis:]\nThat cat bites are really serious and if bitten you should wash the bite and call a doctor immediately Red flags for an abusive relationship Signs for a stroke Cough into your elbow, not your hand That you have to empty the dryer lint trap Stop, drop, and roll That you have to pay taxes\n"}
{"id":1776,"title":"Reindeer","image_title":"Reindeer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1776","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reindeer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1776:_Reindeer","transcript":"[Black Hat and a boy, with a lot of dark hair, are standing to the right of an empty sleigh pulled by a reindeer with eight spider-like legs. Black Hat has raised one arm towards the reindeer and the boy has his arms out to either side.] Black Hat: In earlier Norse myths, the eight reindeer were actually one steed with eight legs . Black Hat: So I think this is more authentic. Boy: Aaaaaa!\n","explanation":"In this Christmas comic Black Hat is at it again, freaking out a young child, by replacing the eight reindeer of Santa's sleigh with a single spider-legged reindeer, thus with eight legs. He considers this \"more authentic\" because Santa Claus is based on Odin (among many other things) , the chief god of Norse mythology. On the pagan holiday of Yule , Odin was said to ride his eight-legged horse, Sleipnir , across the land. Children would leave one of their boots out and fill it with hay for Sleipnir to eat, then Odin would refill the boot with gifts. This predates the Christmas tradition of hanging stockings by the chimney.\nThe traditional interpretation of the horse with eight legs is a normal equine body, with a pair of identical legs where each leg of a normal horse is.  As such, Sleipnir looks majestic and not entirely unnatural.  Black Hat's interpretation is to use the body plan of a spider. The result of this is to make a chimaera that is both creepy and terrifying, [ citation needed ] particularly to those with arachnophobia (the quite common fear of spiders). [ citation needed ]\nThe title text is a parody of two lines from the poem \" Twas the Night Before Christmas \", \"And then in a twinkling, I heard on the roof \/ The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.\"\nThe lines are changed to what they could have been if Santa had a spider-legged reindeer - the sound of \"eight tarsal claws\", referring to the small pair (or triplet) of claws at the end of each of a spider's eight legs. These claws allow them to hold onto objects, including their own web. However, as such an eight-legged spider would have 16 or 24 claws, the text is slightly incorrect.\n[Black Hat and a boy, with a lot of dark hair, are standing to the right of an empty sleigh pulled by a reindeer with eight spider-like legs. Black Hat has raised one arm towards the reindeer and the boy has his arms out to either side.] Black Hat: In earlier Norse myths, the eight reindeer were actually one steed with eight legs . Black Hat: So I think this is more authentic. Boy: Aaaaaa!\n"}
{"id":1777,"title":"Dear Diary","image_title":"Dear Diary","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1777","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dear_diary.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1777:_Dear_Diary","transcript":"[Black Hat is seated at a table, writing with a pencil in a diary.]\nWriting: Dear Diary, Writing: Hello. I am the Crown Prince of Nigeria. I have recently come into a large fortune, but...\n","explanation":"Black Hat is writing in a diary (probably his, but possibly not; see below).  His entry starts with the common idiom \"Dear diary\". In a regular diary entry, this opening is used to give the impression of writing to a trusted friend, the diary being anthropomorphized to take that friend's role. However, where other people would write about their day or put their feelings into words, Black Hat's diary entry consists of a standard phishing scam attempting to request some private information in exchange for a large cash amount which does not exist. In this case, the scam is the infamous Nigerian Royalty scam , where the 'royalty' needs bank details to give money, when it will in fact be taken. Black Hat apparently is so used to tricking people that even his own anthropomorphized diary is not safe from his pranks. Alternatively, the entry is intended for anyone who looks at his diary without his permission. It's also possible he has obtained someone else's diary and is somehow trying to scam the diary's owner, although it's not clear how that might work.  Or, since it is a rather obvious scam, he may simply being trying to scare the diary's owner, perhaps the same child as he traumatized in the previous comic with a reindeer mutated to look like a spider.\nThis comic creates a stark contrast by putting together elements that seem similar, but do not belong together, for comedic effect.\nIt is possible that the diary is actually the journal from the Journal series, and that ever since being outdone by Danish , he no longer uses it for recording all the things he would say if he were nice.\nThe title text is similar to 1675: Message in a Bottle , which also uses the word \"unsubscribe\" in an unusual way. The title text also mimics a standard way to get off some mailing lists, so perhaps it's Randall 's diary that Black Hat is molesting, and therefore the title-text is Randall expressing a desire to be disassociated from it.\n[Black Hat is seated at a table, writing with a pencil in a diary.]\nWriting: Dear Diary, Writing: Hello. I am the Crown Prince of Nigeria. I have recently come into a large fortune, but...\n"}
{"id":1778,"title":"Interest Timescales","image_title":"Interest Timescales","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1778","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interest_timescales.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1778:_Interest_Timescales","transcript":"[At the bottom of this chart there is a long double arrow pointing at two words:] Fast Slow\n[Above the line there are four drawings going from left to right:]\n[Cueball watches a fireworks display to the left of him, two firework rockets are going up and another one is exploding even higher.] Cueball: Ooooh!\n[A tine Cueball is watching a space rockets launch to the left of him while he is holding his arms in the air. The main rocket rises on a hughe plume of smoke.] Cueball: Wow!\n[Cueball climbs a tree, holding on to the left of the two main branches going out from the trunk beneath the treetop.] Cueball: Zoom!\n[A person, presumably Cueball, is standing at the tip of the highest mountain in a mountain range. The largest mountain in the background has three peaks, with Cueball on top of the tallest central peak. Four other much smaller (or distant) peaks are shown behind the big mountain, two on either side. All five mountains have a line beneath the tip that most likely indicate snow. On the big mountain the two tallest peaks are above this line, but not the third.] Cueball: Wheeeee!\n[Caption below the panel:] Most of my interests fall under \"things rising up from the ground, hanging in the air, and then drifting away on the breeze,\" just on very different timescales.\n","explanation":"Randall 's sharing a bit about himself and the things that interest him, in one of his strange but still funny graphs.\nThe caption reads: \"Most of my interests fall under 'things rising up from the ground, hanging in the air, and then drifting away on the breeze,' just on very different timescales.\" The four examples fit this as follows:\nIn the case of a fireworks display, the fireworks fire up into the air, explode, and then the glowing embers drift away on the breeze in the course of a few seconds. This comic was the last released before this years New Year comic 1779: 2017 , so this may explain the thoughts of fireworks.\nIn the case of a rocket launch, the rocket launches from the ground into space, leaving a large plume of smoke that slowly dissipates over many minutes. The rocket remains in space for a time, and then later it re-enters the atmosphere and reaches the ground\u2014in the case of a typical parachute-descent system, it literally drifts through the air. A typical timespan for such an event is several days or weeks.\nIn the case of a tree, it grows from the ground upwards, remains there until autumn comes, then drops its leaves, which drift on the breeze. This process takes months.\nEntire trees like the one shown typically last several decades or even centuries before they die - if not felled by humans, most are eventually toppled by the wind as well. The breeze needed for that can be measured on the Beaufort scale , likely above 5.\nFinally, in the case of a mountain, a mountain rises slowly from the ground due to movement of tectonic plates which result in mountains either via volcanic activity or by simply pressing the ground up through the process of subduction (see 1388: Subduction License ). The mountains are then very slowly broken down by natural erosion forces, and the stone particles disperse on the wind. These events are much slower than the others, typically taking tens of millions of years to completely erode away a mountain.\nAdditionally, some humor stems from the fact that Cueball acts like the mountain is a roller coaster , even though a mountain may take thousands or millions of years to noticeably change.\nThe title text refers to the dramatic event in which a mountain suddenly explodes due to a violent volcanic eruption. Such events are rare and potentially deadly to living things. Calling it \"extra interesting\" is an understatement.\n[At the bottom of this chart there is a long double arrow pointing at two words:] Fast Slow\n[Above the line there are four drawings going from left to right:]\n[Cueball watches a fireworks display to the left of him, two firework rockets are going up and another one is exploding even higher.] Cueball: Ooooh!\n[A tine Cueball is watching a space rockets launch to the left of him while he is holding his arms in the air. The main rocket rises on a hughe plume of smoke.] Cueball: Wow!\n[Cueball climbs a tree, holding on to the left of the two main branches going out from the trunk beneath the treetop.] Cueball: Zoom!\n[A person, presumably Cueball, is standing at the tip of the highest mountain in a mountain range. The largest mountain in the background has three peaks, with Cueball on top of the tallest central peak. Four other much smaller (or distant) peaks are shown behind the big mountain, two on either side. All five mountains have a line beneath the tip that most likely indicate snow. On the big mountain the two tallest peaks are above this line, but not the third.] Cueball: Wheeeee!\n[Caption below the panel:] Most of my interests fall under \"things rising up from the ground, hanging in the air, and then drifting away on the breeze,\" just on very different timescales.\n"}
{"id":1779,"title":"2017","image_title":"2017","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1779","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2017.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1779:_2017","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan walking outdoors] Cueball: Can't wait for this stupid year to be over.\n[The two approach a fallen tree] Megan: I can. This year made the future scarier. So much of why 2016 was bad was because of the things it sent us into 2017 without.\n[Megan has hopped up onto the tree trunk and begins to walk along it] Cueball: You gotta have hope, though. Megan: You say that, but you also said all this awful stuff couldn't happen, and it did. You're as clueless as the rest of us.\n[Cueball also walks along the tree trunk as Megan stops and turns to look at him] Cueball: Well, if we're wrong about which bad things can happen, it's got to make us at least a little less sure about which good things can't.\n[Closeup of Megan hopping down from the tree] Megan: I guess.\n[A distant shot of Megan and Cueball walking along again] Cueball: Plus, 2017 has a cool eclipse in it. Megan: Ooh, yeah! Cueball: And it's prime. Prime years have always been good for me. Megan: Sure, I'll take it.\n","explanation":"In this New Year comic , Cueball and Megan share some of their (or Randall's ) thoughts about the ending 2016 and the new year 2017 (hence the title). 2016 was a year which many people eagerly awaited the end of because of its increased turmoil (terrorist attacks, controversial political events in numerous countries including the election of Donald Trump for president in the United States and the United Kingdom voting for Brexit ) as well as the deaths of an unusually large number of well-known and beloved celebrities (several of these died in the first few days after Christmas).\nInstead of simply condemning 2016 as a terrible year and expecting 2017 to be significantly better, Megan observes that much of what made 2016 bad is the effect that it will have upon future years rather than the actual events themselves (for instance, a divisive U.S. presidential election has caused significant controversy in 2016, but President Donald Trump actually took office and began to affect the world as President in 2017). Megan specifically states that 2016 was bad was because of the things it sent us into 2017 without. As it is known that Randall is a Hillary Clinton supporter (as shown in the 1756: I'm With Her comic), an additional reading of that line could be that we are headed into 2017 \"without\" a Hillary Clinton presidency. It can also refer to the many dead celebrities passing in 2016, (at least three famous musicians\/actors so recent that they died after Christmas Eve), as we would be without all of them in 2017.\nCueball claims that they should still have hope for the future, but Megan states that people had claimed that many of the bad things that did happen in 2016, could not happen (for instance Trump and Brexit). And as these things did happen, she foresees even worse events occurring in 2017, that we did not even think would be possible.\nHowever, Randall also offers a glimpse of hope in the last few panels when Cueball observes that, just as all of the bad things in 2016 were unexpected, good things in 2017 that are unexpected could also happen, which should make us less sure what good may come of 2017. As such, he argues that we should hold on to our hope even though things seem difficult right now.\nAs the conversation unfolds, Megan and Cueball encounter an uprooted tree and cross it like a balance beam. This is a visual metaphor; the dead tree represents the end of the old year, while the crossing represents the transition into the new year. This is similar to the magical toboggan from Calvin and Hobbes that serves as a metaphor for their conversations, mentioned in 529: Sledding Discussion and 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) .\nIn the last panel Cueball mentioned that 2017 will also have a cool eclipse , going through the central parts of North America. This may also serve as a reminder that the Earth continues to spin on despite all of the human turmoil going on on its surface. This is literally true, as the eclipse Randall is excited about is caused by the orbits of three celestial bodies lining up just right (the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon).\nCueball then also notes that 2017 is a prime number and states that prime-numbered years (prime years) have always been good to him. He thus illustrates the positive attitude that people can choose to take in order to see all that which is good and to spread a little bit more cheerfulness, and Megan is ready to take this positive view, although she may not totally buy in to it. This could also be a pun referencing the saying \"being in his prime years\".\nThe title text is a reference to Nate Silver who is well-known (in the United States) as an election polling analyst on FiveThirtyEight .  His model allowed for a higher chance that Donald Trump would win the presidency compared to other similar models \u2014 though the fact that he still favored a Clinton win may be contributing to getting humor from the idea that he may be \"wrong\" again, and the Moon could possibly vanish in 2017, making the year definitely worse than 2016. (Earth and Moon are so close in the space order of things, that any event affecting Moon orbit seriously will almost certainly end our civilization too.) This is accentuated by the qualifier \"almost definitely\", which is of humorously low confidence for presenting a fact as certain as the Moon not somehow disappearing within the next year.\nIn the background of the first few panels of this comic, we see a fallen tree, but a sapling growing in its place. This may be a subtle message by Randall that there is still hope, and that things will be alright in the end.\nRandall previously mentioned his excitement for the 2017 eclipse exactly three years earlier in 1302: Year in Review , where Megan complains about not having seen an aurora during 2013, and she really hopes they don't cancel the 2017 eclipse. So this comic is the second time Randall has expressed concern that he will miss the eclipse. Leading up to and after the eclipse Randall released six more comics on the subject: 1868: Eclipse Flights , 1876: Eclipse Searches , 1877: Eclipse Science , 1878: Earth Orbital Diagram , 1879: Eclipse Birds , and 1880: Eclipse Review .\nThere have been three previous New Year's comics with only the year used as the title: 998: 2012 in 2012, 1311: 2014 in 2014 and 1624: 2016 in 2016. This is the first odd-numbered year (and thus of course the first prime year) using only the new year as the title.\n[Cueball and Megan walking outdoors] Cueball: Can't wait for this stupid year to be over.\n[The two approach a fallen tree] Megan: I can. This year made the future scarier. So much of why 2016 was bad was because of the things it sent us into 2017 without.\n[Megan has hopped up onto the tree trunk and begins to walk along it] Cueball: You gotta have hope, though. Megan: You say that, but you also said all this awful stuff couldn't happen, and it did. You're as clueless as the rest of us.\n[Cueball also walks along the tree trunk as Megan stops and turns to look at him] Cueball: Well, if we're wrong about which bad things can happen, it's got to make us at least a little less sure about which good things can't.\n[Closeup of Megan hopping down from the tree] Megan: I guess.\n[A distant shot of Megan and Cueball walking along again] Cueball: Plus, 2017 has a cool eclipse in it. Megan: Ooh, yeah! Cueball: And it's prime. Prime years have always been good for me. Megan: Sure, I'll take it.\n"}
{"id":1780,"title":"Appliance Repair","image_title":"Appliance Repair","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1780","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/appliance_repair.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1780:_Appliance_Repair","transcript":"[Cueball faces Megan and White Hat as he stands in the middle of a mess of a dissasembled machine, holding a screwdriver.] Cueball: After disassembling and inspecting the humidifier, I've determined that the main problem with it is that someone took it apart.\n","explanation":"Cueball is either trying to repair his appliances himself or possibly running an appliance repair service. Although, he isn't doing much in the repairs aspect, as he is diagnosing problems with the appliances that he himself caused. Megan and White Hat (supposedly) call him over to have him fix a humidifier that isn't working. As most repairmen\/handymen do, he takes apart the machine to find the root of the problem. However, after this he states the reason it isn't working is because someone took it apart. In this case it was Cueball himself. This would not be very helpful for repairing the appliance. [ citation needed ]\nIn the title text it is mentioned that Cueball is holding up a three-phase motor that he has taken from the humidifier. Normally when a person repairing an appliance shows you a part, they are showing you the part of the machine that was broken. In this comic however, Cueball is just showing off a (presumably) random part of the machine and stating that the problem is that the machine it came from is broken \u2013 something that was already known and unlikely to help find the root cause of the problem. In addition, it is unlikely that the part being held ever would have worked, because three-phase motors won't work on residential power in North America. Residential humidifiers use single-phase voltage , while three-phase equipment uses three-phase voltage .\nThis might also be a reference to self reference which is referenced in xkcd sometimes.\n[Cueball faces Megan and White Hat as he stands in the middle of a mess of a dissasembled machine, holding a screwdriver.] Cueball: After disassembling and inspecting the humidifier, I've determined that the main problem with it is that someone took it apart.\n"}
{"id":1781,"title":"Artifacts","image_title":"Artifacts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1781","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/artifacts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1781:_Artifacts","transcript":"[Cueball is standing on a podium pointing at his presentation which includes a large line graph in the center part. There is plenty of text on the presentation, but none of it is readable. The central part of the line is raised high above the left and right part. The point where the line drops towards right is highlighted with a circle, with a double arrow above it pointing to a caption. There is also text next to the circle to the right.  Above the graph there are three smaller panels with drawings. There is one caption above these, and also one above the large graph. Below the graph there are two smaller panels with curves, each panel has it's own caption. Cueball addresses an unseen audience, and one from the audience interrupts him.] Cueball: The data clearly proves that- Offscreen voice: Are you Indiana Jones? Offscreen voice: Because you've got a lot of artifacts there, and I'm pretty sure you didn't handle them right.\n","explanation":"The comic shows Cueball presenting data that was probably gathered in research. It's not clear what type of data it is, but one spike has been highlighted on the graph, despite this spike being apparently no larger than the noise in the data (and is much smaller than the central peak). Cueball seems to have made some kind of mistake in either the statistics or the measurement of the undefined subject of his research, thus his data results in many outliers. The word artifact is a wordplay with two meanings. It is either an archaeological artifact (such as the Holy Grail as in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ) or a fault in your experiment, where you (usually accidentally) influence the measurement with your equipment or unanticipated environmental factors. These are called error artifacts .\nIndiana Jones is (often humorously) cited as being a bad archaeologist . He often destroys the area he is looking for artifacts in, despite the context in which they were found being as or more important, archaeologically, than the artifacts themselves. He does not appear to make any records, carries the artifacts around without any thought for their ancient and fragile nature, and most often ends up losing the artifacts altogether.\nAn example of an error artifact is the measurement of the force between two charged metal spheres ( Coulomb force ), where the potential of unearthed nearby objects influences the measurement, thus causing an artifact. Artifacts have been mentioned before in xkcd, as in 1453: fMRI , where getting into the MRI machine induced unintended effects, such as thoughts of claustrophobia.\nThe title text refers to the entire data set being \"outliers.\" In statistics, an outlier is an observation point that is distant from other observations. One way to have a data set composed entirely of outliers would be a data set with N points, in a 1\/2 N-dimensional space, where each point is zero for every dimension except one, unique to itself. The 1\/2 is because there would also be a -1 point. [1] All these points are equidistant from each other.\nWe could also infer that the accusation is a jab at the fact that the data points are all over the place; a good example of such chaotic data can be see in 1725: Linear Regression .\n[Cueball is standing on a podium pointing at his presentation which includes a large line graph in the center part. There is plenty of text on the presentation, but none of it is readable. The central part of the line is raised high above the left and right part. The point where the line drops towards right is highlighted with a circle, with a double arrow above it pointing to a caption. There is also text next to the circle to the right.  Above the graph there are three smaller panels with drawings. There is one caption above these, and also one above the large graph. Below the graph there are two smaller panels with curves, each panel has it's own caption. Cueball addresses an unseen audience, and one from the audience interrupts him.] Cueball: The data clearly proves that- Offscreen voice: Are you Indiana Jones? Offscreen voice: Because you've got a lot of artifacts there, and I'm pretty sure you didn't handle them right.\n"}
{"id":1782,"title":"Team Chat","image_title":"Team Chat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1782","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/team_chat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1782:_Team_Chat","transcript":"[Hairbun holding up her palm toward Cueball. A frame over the top border of the panel has a caption:] 2004 Hairbun: Our team stays in touch over IRC.\n[Megan is looking at Ponytail who is holding up her palm toward her. A frame over the top border of the panel has a caption:] 2010 Ponytail: Our team mainly uses Skype, but some of us prefer to stick to IRC.\n[Cueball is talking with Megan in a frameless panel. A frame at the top of the panel has a caption:] 2017 Cueball: We've got almost everyone on Slack, Cueball: But three people refuse to quit IRC and connect via Gateway.\n[A black panel with white text and drawings. The main body of text is above a the singularity, a starburst around a circle with two more broken lined circles around the starburst. To the right another Cueball-like guy floats in space with his laptop computer, typing on the keyboard.  A frame, that is white inside, is over the top border of the panel has a caption: ] 2051 Narration: All consciousnesses have merged with the Galactic Singularity, Narration: Except for one guy who insists on joining through his IRC client. One Guy: I just have it set up the way I want, okay?! Galactic Singularity: *Sigh*\n","explanation":"Randall provides us with a \u2013 presumably anecdotal \u2013 montage of the Internet's changing attitude towards different instant messaging protocols, framed within the context of a team trying to remain in communication while tolerating each others' different tastes.\nAlthough one-on-one \"talk\" programs date back to 1960s mainframes, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was one of the first real-time group communication protocols, invented in 1988. While it remains the format on which most later apps were based, the convenience and accessibility of other protocols such as AIM and Skype gradually exceeded IRC in popularity. Many users took to the new environments, but others preferred the old and familiar, hence schisms between groups began to grow.\nSkype and Slack are both proprietary centralized communication protocols (usually used through their official clients). Skype focuses mainly on voice communication, be it for personal or business use, and own installable client, while Slack relies almost entirely on text communication, focuses on work communication and works completely well in its own web client, even though official desktop and mobile clients are available as well. Slack also features a huge customizability (bots, plugins) possibly inspired by IRC, and its users need to create communication teams, working inside subdomains at *.slack.com. It is possible to connect to Slack via IRC as well, using a third-party gateway. (Originally, Slack had a gateway feature , if allowed by the team's admin, but that was turned off in mid 2018, after the publication of this comic.)\nRandall here seems to be commenting on the persistence of IRC; while generally considered to be ancient software in comparison to newer and still-competing protocols, its endless customizability has led some people to support it above all others.\nExtrapolating for the sake of humor, the joke here lies in a particularly uncommon but memorable type of Internet denizen: even in a far-off distant future where the world's technology has led to a superlative messaging network encompassing all people in some supposed, incredible bliss, there is always \u2014 in Randall's vision \u2014 going to be That IRC Guy. This might also be a reference to the scenarios in science fiction stories such as Isaac Asimov's concept of Galaxia in the Foundation novels, or the concept of a merged human-computer intelligence as in \"The Last Question\" [1] , the concept of which is most notably highlighted by this line:\n[...] One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain. [...]\nIn the title text, both screen and tmux are unix programs that help you multitask while working in terminal, and irssi and weechat are both communication clients supporting mainly IRC, capable of working in a terminal environment. Tmux is a newer and apparently more user-friendly project, complete with handy menus and titles, while screen is something of an industry standard, but relatively difficult to use \u2013 you need to know what you are doing or read help before using it, otherwise you get lost and frustrated. [2] The same it is with the newer, more feature-packed and user-friendly weechat vs industry-standard, harder-to-use irssi. [3]\nBasically, that one guy is a hardcore UNIX geek who doesn't use any graphical user interface, and in 2051 he still chooses to use terminal-emulation-based tools.\nTiming of this strip follows the release of irssi version 1.0.0 .\nRandall touched on similar themes earlier in 927: Standards and later in 2365: Messaging Systems .\n[Hairbun holding up her palm toward Cueball. A frame over the top border of the panel has a caption:] 2004 Hairbun: Our team stays in touch over IRC.\n[Megan is looking at Ponytail who is holding up her palm toward her. A frame over the top border of the panel has a caption:] 2010 Ponytail: Our team mainly uses Skype, but some of us prefer to stick to IRC.\n[Cueball is talking with Megan in a frameless panel. A frame at the top of the panel has a caption:] 2017 Cueball: We've got almost everyone on Slack, Cueball: But three people refuse to quit IRC and connect via Gateway.\n[A black panel with white text and drawings. The main body of text is above a the singularity, a starburst around a circle with two more broken lined circles around the starburst. To the right another Cueball-like guy floats in space with his laptop computer, typing on the keyboard.  A frame, that is white inside, is over the top border of the panel has a caption: ] 2051 Narration: All consciousnesses have merged with the Galactic Singularity, Narration: Except for one guy who insists on joining through his IRC client. One Guy: I just have it set up the way I want, okay?! Galactic Singularity: *Sigh*\n"}
{"id":1783,"title":"Emails","image_title":"Emails","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1783","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/emails.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1783:_Emails","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking along.] Megan: Did you have any New Year's Resolutions? Cueball: Gonna finally finish dealing with those emails from 2008.\n[Caption below the panel:] As my email backlog approaches 10 years, I'm starting to have doubts about my approach.\n","explanation":"In this rather late New Year comic (January 9th), Megan asks Cueball if he has any New Year's resolutions . New Year's is, to many people, a time for thinking about the year and coming up with resolutions to improve themselves. These kind of resolutions hardly ever work .\nCueball replies that he has one resolution. It's to finish reading and replying to his backlog of emails from 2008, 9 years prior to this comic. He obviously does not read his email when they arrive in his inbox, and he now vows to at least get those e-mails from 9 years ago read.\nAs he further states in the caption below, he now (finally) begins to doubt his method for replying to e-mails, since his backlog now approaches 10 years. Some would probably say he should have found this out when his backlog approached 10 days, or at least when it reached a month.\nA common technique for some more productive or efficient users of email is to batch reply to email instead of replying to each one individually as they come. The principle is that setting aside specific times to reply instead of always being \"on call\" gives the messages the attention they deserve while avoiding the urge to constantly check your email when you should be doing important work. Such a technique could be to check and answer all your emails once a day, or once a week, for instance and allocating a specific amount of time like one hour every day to do so. It is unlikely that somebody would wait years to start the task of checking emails, so obviously the time reserved per unit of time is way too short, if even existing. This would create a backlog of emails, that could soon be so large it would take years to catch up to the e-mail you just got right now.\nAnother technique for efficient people is not to answer certain e-mails; if a subject really is important, the sender will send a reminder a few days later. (If he does not, the sender can be presumed to have solved the problem himself, saving lots of time on the receiver's side. Of course then you have to check your e-mails to realize if someone has sent a reminder.) Cueball has possibly used this technique on a friend's request, but became remorseful after nine years.\nThe title text is a reply to an email in which Rob wished to see the movie WALL-E , a film that came out in 2008, with Cueball during its opening weekend. However, the opening weekend is now far in the past, and yet Cueball doesn't realize it and trails off with \"are you still doing that, or...?\" Mentioning the release of a popular movie and then making it clear that it will soon be ten years ago that the movie came out, feels a lot like a hidden comic to make one feel old , but it may be stretching it to include this directly in that category. But it is a technique often used by Randall , quite clearly in most of that category, for instance 891: Movie Ages .\nA real (and useful [ citation needed ] ) New Year's resolution would involve trying to answer his emails as they arrive (instead of spending any more time on years old emails), which would have avoided the mess he's currently in, and will stop it from getting worse in the future.\nIn this comic Cueball may represent Randall . He receives so many e-mail due to the xkcd comic that he may have a hard time going through them all. Then there is his what if? email, and possibly many more. Hopefully he has a separate e-mail for friends that wish to send him a request for going to the opening of new recent movie. On the about page on xkcd he does write the following for one of the e-mails he cites as contact:\npress @ xkcd.com -- Press questions, etc (may take a long time to get to me).\n[Megan and Cueball are walking along.] Megan: Did you have any New Year's Resolutions? Cueball: Gonna finally finish dealing with those emails from 2008.\n[Caption below the panel:] As my email backlog approaches 10 years, I'm starting to have doubts about my approach.\n"}
{"id":1784,"title":"Bad Map Projection Liquid Resize","image_title":"Bad Map Projection: Liquid Resize","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1784","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bad_map_projection_liquid_resize.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1784:_Bad_Map_Projection:_Liquid_Resize","transcript":"[Caption at the top of the panel:] Bad map projection #107: The Liquid Resize A political map compressed using Photoshop's content-aware resizing algorithm to cut down on unused blank space\n[Below the caption there is a map of the world divided and colored by political boundaries, with outlines around each continent in black and around each country in dark gray. Antarctica is colored in light gray, bodies of water in white, and countries in pale shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. The map is heavily distorted, with Africa in the center and the other continents curving around it, approximating the bounds of a square with rounded corners. The oceans have been removed but also huge countries like the US, Australia, Brazil, Russia and especially India and Argentina have been heavily distorted while areas in the center with many smaller countries like Africa and Europe is almost unchanged.]\n","explanation":"This is the first comic in the series of Bad Map Projections presenting Bad map projection #107: The Liquid Resize. This turned into a series when 1799: Bad Map Projection: Time Zones (#79), was released just a bit more than a month after this one.\nThere is no perfect way to draw a map of the world on a flat piece of paper. Each one will introduce a different type of distortion, and the best projection for a given situation is sometimes disputed. Randall previously explored 12 different projections in 977: Map Projections , and expressed his disdain for some types he sees as less efficient but whose users feel superior. None of them are truly perfect as any 2D map projection will always distort in a way the spherical reality, and a map projection that is useful for one aspect (like navigation, geographical shapes and masses visualization, etc.) will not be so for all the others. Local maps of smaller areas can be quite accurate, but the idea of both these map projection comics is to map the entire globe on a flat surface.\nThis comic suggests that there are many other projections than the 12 from the previous map projection comic, and Randall seems to have an entire list, of which at least 358 are \"Bad Map Projections.\" The one presented here is #107 and is it called the \"Liquid Resize.\" It is unclear if he includes the previous 12 in this list. Quite possibly he does, since all 2D projections of the surface of a 3D sphere will be bad in certain respects. (The next comic's projections Time Zones based on these, has #79 and could be concluded as being less bad than this one, which also seems realistic as this map looks more like a normal map projection, although it also has huge flaws).\nThe Liquid Resize map projection, however, is not only useless for most map applications -- as the size, shape, and position of most countries are quite distorted -- but its creation includes two steps which are outright counterproductive. If the list is sorted from best to worst it may be hard to find a worse projection method than this, so finding 106 projections better than this one seems realistic!\nFirst, this method needs a planar map projection as its starting point, thus compounding the problems right off the bat. Planar projections are relatively accurate near the center but heavily distorted toward the edges. A famous example of a planar projection is the logo of the United Nations . Planar projections are basically only useful for 3D graphics rendering, if the user needs a quick, inexpensive way to store map textures that will later be attached to a sphere.\nSecond, the map uses Photoshop's content aware resizing tool , a very questionable choice. [ citation needed ] (Using a Photoshop tool for a task it is not intended for was also used in 1685: Patch where a GNU patch tool was replaced with Adobe Photoshop's patch tool to compile code.) The content aware resizing tool resizes images by identifying what it thinks are important details and preserving these, while shrinking or stretching less detailed areas. For example, when used on a face , the algorithm detects that the eyes and mouth are important details and tries to keep these in place, while stretching the skin around it. When applied to a map, this means that areas with lots of countries - and therefore lots of detail - such as Europe, West Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Central America\/the Caribbean are relatively unchanged, while big countries like India, China and the US are very warped. The choices that the resizing tool makes are also dependent on the exact visual features of the original map, such as the choice of not having any topography or infrastructure drawn on, or not including a latitude\/longitude grid, so what areas are deemed as unimportant is even more arbitrary than it would be on, say, a photographic picture of the Earth.\nBad content aware scaling is already a meme. This projection does do a good job, however, of making almost every country clearly visible and indicating which countries are neighbors. \nSouth America fits into Africa almost as it did in the era of the super-continent Pangaea .\nTissot's indicatrices are equally sized small circles overlaid on a globe to show the distortion of a particular map projection; if the map distortion distorts the shapes or areas of countries, it will do the same to the circles. The title text suggests that the shapes of Tissot's indicatrices would be pretty well preserved by the Liquid Resize transformation, 'as long as you draw them in before running the resize'.  This is a joke. \"Drawing them in before running the resize\" means that a different projection would be generated (probably preserving the indicatrices themselves), making the use of the indicatrices meaningless, sort of like cheating. In fact by drawing them small enough there will be no resizing at all.\n[Caption at the top of the panel:] Bad map projection #107: The Liquid Resize A political map compressed using Photoshop's content-aware resizing algorithm to cut down on unused blank space\n[Below the caption there is a map of the world divided and colored by political boundaries, with outlines around each continent in black and around each country in dark gray. Antarctica is colored in light gray, bodies of water in white, and countries in pale shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. The map is heavily distorted, with Africa in the center and the other continents curving around it, approximating the bounds of a square with rounded corners. The oceans have been removed but also huge countries like the US, Australia, Brazil, Russia and especially India and Argentina have been heavily distorted while areas in the center with many smaller countries like Africa and Europe is almost unchanged.]\n"}
{"id":1785,"title":"Wifi","image_title":"Wifi","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1785","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wifi.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1785:_Wifi","transcript":"[A line graph with a curve that starts just right of the Y-axis above the middle of the axis. Then it increases slightly and stays almost stable on a long flat plateau before it falls off fast towards the right.  Each axis ends in an arrow and has a label to the left of the Y-axis and below the x-axis. Over the curve there are three labels, pointing with one arrow to the two rising and falling parts, and three arrows to the center label above the plateau.] Y-axis: Probability houseguest will be able to connect to WiFi X-axis: Houseguest tech-savviness Left label: Can't find wifi settings Center label: Works fine Right label: Something involving the word \"firmware\"\n","explanation":"This comic shows the supposed probability that a guest will be able to connect to the owner's Wi-Fi in graph form. Connecting to\u00a0a new Wi-Fi network is a fairly simple operation that most people can perform, typically only requiring selecting the correct network\u00a0name on a settings\u00a0screen, then entering a password.\nThe graph starts with tech-illiterate people who don't even know how to control their Wi-Fi connection (\"can't find wifi settings\"). This\u00a0group has slightly lower than normal probability of connecting successfully, since they would not know what\u00a0to do if left alone. However,\u00a0they still have a reasonable chance to connect as long as someone is available to help them. Once the initial setup is done, they can continue using the connection without any technical knowledge or intervention.\nThe average\u00a0case in\u00a0the middle of the graph represents\u00a0typical\u00a0users\u00a0who\u00a0simply wish to connect and gain Internet access (\"works fine\"). This group\u00a0of\u00a0users have enough\u00a0knowledge to be able\u00a0to connect and are then satisfied with\u00a0the connection just working. Since networking devices use a standard protocol to communicate behind the scenes,\u00a0users typically will not experience any issues.\nFinally, the large drop in the graph on the right-hand side is explained by \"something involving the word 'firmware'\". Firmware is programming which operates a device at the lowest level, typically stored in a ROM or an EEPROM\/flash. Both Wi-Fi routers and guest's devices (smartphones, tablets, computers) have firmware. Modifying the firmware can have certain benefits, for example to gain features that aren't included in the base product. Also, especially for newly adopted wireless standards (such as, most recently, IEEE 802.11ac ), incompatible interpretations of the standard may prevent devices from different manufacturers from communicating reliably or at full speed, requiring firmware changes to patch the issues. However, working with firmware requires a great deal of technical knowledge,\u00a0and can be quite risky\u00a0for people\u00a0without experience. Not all custom firmware will interoperate correctly with all devices.\u00a0Technical issues with custom firmware can also be harder to fix due to lack of support from the device manufacturer. In the worst case, installing the wrong firmware,\u00a0or any errors or glitches in the process,\u00a0can even leave devices bricked . It's likely\u00a0that the sharp dropoff in the graph is caused\u00a0by inexperienced users who know \"just enough\" to want\u00a0to modify their firmware, but\u00a0don't know how to deal with the multitude of issues that can arise. Particularly\u00a0for users\u00a0whose connection was already\u00a0working fine\u00a0but nevertheless want to experiment\u00a0with new firmware, their changes often end up worsening their chances of connecting.\nThe title text indicates that the curve recovers once users are more experienced, and can consistently install firmware correctly to get a working connection. In such case, the users are able to enjoy better connections through their firmware changes while avoiding their pitfalls. These experienced\u00a0users are often able to diagnose and\u00a0fix connection\u00a0issues through the appropriate use of firmware, making their chances of connecting even better than the average user.\nRandall has previously used the title text to add extra info that would not fit in the main graph.  This has happened in 388: Fuck Grapefruit , 1242: Scary Names , 2466: In Your Classroom and 1501: Mysteries . The first three have extra data points mentioned there because they are far off the chart, whereas the last has a point whose description would be too long to fit on the chart. All these other graphs are scatter plots, as opposed to this comic being a line-graph.\nComputer issues have previously appeared in several xkcd comics, notably 456: Cautionary , where WiFi problems specifically are mentioned in the title text.\nThe apparent paradox of people knowing more about a subject also having more problems with it is also explored in 1760: TV Problems .\n[A line graph with a curve that starts just right of the Y-axis above the middle of the axis. Then it increases slightly and stays almost stable on a long flat plateau before it falls off fast towards the right.  Each axis ends in an arrow and has a label to the left of the Y-axis and below the x-axis. Over the curve there are three labels, pointing with one arrow to the two rising and falling parts, and three arrows to the center label above the plateau.] Y-axis: Probability houseguest will be able to connect to WiFi X-axis: Houseguest tech-savviness Left label: Can't find wifi settings Center label: Works fine Right label: Something involving the word \"firmware\"\n"}
{"id":1786,"title":"Trash","image_title":"Trash","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1786","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trash.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1786:_Trash","transcript":"[Cueball looking at garbage chute attached to wardrobe. Black Hat answers him from off panel.] Cueball: What's this thing on your wardrobe? Black Hat (off-panel): Garbage chute.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball has turned away from the wardrobe (now off-panel) and he walks towards Black Hat.] Cueball: Into a wardrobe? Black hat: There's some sort of portal to a magical land in there. Half the furniture I get has them-it's kinda a pain.\n[Cueball stops walking closer to Black Hat.] Cueball: You dump your trash in Narnia ? Black Hat: Yeah, it's a real time-saver. Black Hat: There's a huge cat in there, but I have a spray bottle I use when he tries to come up through the chute.\n","explanation":"Black Hat is, once again, thoroughly confusing Cueball (another example of this is 908: The Cloud ). This time, when inquired about a chute protruding from his wardrobe, Black Hat explains that it is a garbage chute into another dimension. Apparently these kinds of portals appear on about half of all the furniture that Black Hat buys, and he is somewhat annoyed about it. (This sounds more like something Beret Guy would encounter, although he would have reacted very differently than Black Hat.) It would be interesting to know whether all the portals lead into the same alternative world\/dimension, but it seems Black Hat is not interested in visiting these worlds, instead just being annoyed about his broken furniture. (Given Black Hat's personality, this may well be a practical joke meant to mess with Cueball's head rather than an actual portal to another dimension.)\nCueball quickly realizes this is a reference to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , the first published book in The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis . In the books, the child characters use different portals to get into the alternative dimension\/world of Narnia . The children first find a portal inside an old wardrobe, and use it at least three times to travel into Narnia. Black Hat confirms his trash chute indeed leads to Narnia and explains how this is a great time-saver for him, as he can easily get rid of his trash. The Narnia books are for children and Narnia is a magical world, so Cueball is appalled to learn that Black Hat dumps his trash there.\nA discussion of problems with this comic vs. Narnia chronology is discussed in the trivia section .\nThe \"huge cat\" he refers to is Aslan , a magical lion in Narnia that represents God. In his lion form he sometimes walks around and watches over Narnia, but not all the time. It is revealed in the last book that he is also the guardian of the other worlds, where he has different names and takes on different appearances, so he is actually a representation of a benevolent God in many forms.\nAslan, or any other large cat or inhabitants of such a different world, would probably be really upset that someone is throwing their trash there [ citation needed ] . He would probably try to stop this by any means necessary, including coming up through a trash chute into another dimension. But because lions are a type of cat (feline), apparently Aslan can be repelled with an ordinary spray bottle. The joke is that this is a technique used to tame small house cats; it would be unlikely to work on a lion, especially if the lion was really a deity [ citation needed ] .\nIn the title text, the fact that time passes much faster in Narnia than on Earth is mentioned. (Time does not pass at a constant rate compared to Earth time.) This could also be the case even if the portal in Black Hat's wardrobe accessed a different world than Narnia. So everything that is actually pushed to the other side of the portal would be disposed of very efficiently, as the trash could completely decompose within just a few Earth minutes. This would then explain how Black Hat can keep pushing more stuff into the other world: anything sent through the portal will decompose and vanish before he comes with his next load of trash.\nThe title text mention of Yucca Mountain is a reference to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository , a partially-built nuclear waste repository that has been defunded at the present time. Black Hat wants to contact those that wish to make such a repository and let them dispose of their radioactive waste through his \"magical\" portal, likely to make a profit for himself. If throwing trash into Narnia is terrible, radioactive waste would be far worse [ citation needed ] . Of course in Earth time radioactive materials would soon decay back to background levels of radiation. This is thus another jab at all the world's environmental problems, as is also done with all the comics about climate change . This comic could be a take on humans dumping waste in the \"endless\" oceans, more specifically ocean disposal of radioactive waste . This was done in the past but is now banned, as Earth's oceans are not endless [ citation needed ] .\nThe title text copies the idea behind the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from October 15 2014 . The button at the bottom of that comic shows a sad Mr. Tumnus , a faun Lucy meets on her first visit to Narnia, rather than an angry Aslan as suggested in this comic.\nThe portal through the wardrobe to Narnia was previously featured in 665: Prudence , 969: Delta-P and 821: Five-Minute Comics: Part 3 . In the latter, the different passage of time was also mentioned.\n[Cueball looking at garbage chute attached to wardrobe. Black Hat answers him from off panel.] Cueball: What's this thing on your wardrobe? Black Hat (off-panel): Garbage chute.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball has turned away from the wardrobe (now off-panel) and he walks towards Black Hat.] Cueball: Into a wardrobe? Black hat: There's some sort of portal to a magical land in there. Half the furniture I get has them-it's kinda a pain.\n[Cueball stops walking closer to Black Hat.] Cueball: You dump your trash in Narnia ? Black Hat: Yeah, it's a real time-saver. Black Hat: There's a huge cat in there, but I have a spray bottle I use when he tries to come up through the chute.\n"}
{"id":1787,"title":"Voice Commands","image_title":"Voice Commands","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1787","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voice_commands.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1787:_Voice_Commands","transcript":"[Ponytail is looking at Cueball facing her direction, and he looks down at the smartphone he is holding in his hand.] Ponytail: Can you text it to me? Cueball: Sure! Cueball: Svat ussupd\u00a0;dlh a kdbk Ponytail: ...What? Phone: *Beep*\n[Caption under the panel:] Setting my phone's speech recognition to Dvorak was a pain at first, but it's more efficient in the long run.\n","explanation":"In this comic Cueball has shown Ponytail something relevant to her on his smartphone and she asks if he can send it to her. He agrees but then says something completely incomprehensible to Ponytail, but obviously his phone understands and sends the message with a beep.\nThe caption explains that he was speaking as though he was using a QWERTY keyboard layout and writing as it was a Dvorak Simplified Keyboard . In other words, Cueball is saying keys on a Dvorak keyboard and the phone is receiving the spaces on a QWERTY keyboard that each of Cueball's Dvorak letters uses. Cueball can be sure that nobody else will be able to use voice commands on his phone.\nThe sentence Cueball tells his phone translates to \"Okay Google send a text\" - he says it as if he were typing the sentence on a Dvorak layout with the keyboard set to a QWERTY layout. How such words would be pronounced is a mystery, as the letters in the words are merely substituted with others with no regard to phonetics; without standardized pronunciations, a speech-to-text program would be useless. To add to the confusion, one of the words in Cueball's sentence includes a semi-colon as one of its letters despite the fact that semi-colons are punctuation rather than phonemes, which only complicates the pronunciation further.\nThe title text is a reference to the fact that many users of Dvorak keyboards claim they may be hard to learn, but they are more movement efficient and put less stress on your fingers due to less movement. This makes little sense in the scenario set up by the comic, as speaking gibberish using oddly placed vowels would be equally difficult, if not in fact harder, on the vocal cords. [ citation needed ]\n[Ponytail is looking at Cueball facing her direction, and he looks down at the smartphone he is holding in his hand.] Ponytail: Can you text it to me? Cueball: Sure! Cueball: Svat ussupd\u00a0;dlh a kdbk Ponytail: ...What? Phone: *Beep*\n[Caption under the panel:] Setting my phone's speech recognition to Dvorak was a pain at first, but it's more efficient in the long run.\n"}
{"id":1788,"title":"Barge","image_title":"Barge","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1788","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/barge.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1788:_Barge","transcript":"[There is one panel in this comic with the main drawing at the bottom. Two smaller drawings are inserted above this drawing to explain the idea.]\n[The first insert shows a barge with no center and a large piece of paper with the SpaceX logo above the barge.]\n[The second insert shows the paper stretched over the hole.]\n[The main drawing at the bottom shows a cross-section of the barge in water, showing there is only water below the paper. Above the paper the large first stage, without the top part with the payload, of a reusable rocket is attempting to land on the paper on the SpaceX logo (not visible in this view). It is still so high above the fake barge that the exhaust fire below the rocket is nowhere near the paper.]\n[Caption below the panels:] My hobby: Hollowing out the center of a barge, stretching paper over the hole painted with the SpaceX logo, and leaving it floating offshore near launch sites.\n","explanation":"This is another one of the \" My Hobby \" series, where Randall tells about a strange hobby. This one is depicted with three drawings illustrating the core concept, and explained in details in the caption.\nThe launch company SpaceX has developed a reusable rocket system, where the first rocket stage is capable of landing back on either the launch pad or an autonomous spaceport drone ship after launch (See this video displaying both types of landing, from when the sea landing was successful the first time). The landing pads and ships are decorated with a \"X\" symbol from the SpaceX logo, with the center of the X being the desired landing spot. [ citation needed ]\nRandall imagines creating a similar-looking barge and placing it near the intended landing site, except his barge's platform would be hollow in the middle with only a sheet of paper supporting the part where the rocket would land. Since the paper is painted to look just like the real landing platform, the goal of this setup is presumably to trick a returning first stage rocket into falling into the sea. This is the same concept as the old trapping pit . If a rocket attempts to land on Randall's barge, it will quickly burn through the paper and fall through the hole.\nThere are several reasons why this setup would not work in real life.  First, the rocket actually navigates to the landing site using GPS coordinates shared with the real barge.  It does not use cameras to identify its landing site and will not recognize another barge based solely on a painted logo.  Also, a wide area around the rocket's flight path would be restricted around the launch window due to safety concerns.  Vessels that are not part of the official launch plan would not be allowed in the area.  Even if the fake barge manages to enter the area and does not get removed by authorities, at most it will cause the launch to be canceled for the day.\nThis \"my hobby\" is probably the most destructive one so far, as it would result in the total loss of the first stage containing nine space rocket engines. The costs associated with buying and remodeling a barge would also likely make this the most expensive hobby, even disregarding the costs to others, though it could potentially be reused if it did not get destroyed by the falling rocket. This hobby seems more appropriate for Black Hat , considering that he is a real classhole , and goes to show that Black Hat is as much part of Randall's personality as Cueball .\nThe title\u00a0text plays on the incredible difficulty\u00a0of\u00a0landing a rocket on a barge.  Reusing rockets like this is a feat that has only recently\u00a0become possible,\u00a0some 60 years\u00a0after the launch of the first satellite Sputnik 1 .  SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk , was the first (and so far only) organization to do so successfully. Blue Origin is also currently testing reusable rockets and achieved landing their first stage before SpaceX, albeit only on land and only with a sub-orbital rocket .\nThus Randall imagines an even more implausible idea of turning the scenario upside down and getting a barge to land on one of Elon Musk's rockets. That would be a spectacular feat of engineering, and the challenges it presents as well as its inherent irony appear to satisfy Randall so much that he would make it into one of his life goals. Launching a barge in the first place would be tremendously difficult - they are big, heavy and not very aerodynamic . Maneuvering it through the air precisely enough to come down on top of a rocket would be difficult as well.  The barge (and probably the rocket) would have to be redesigned if the goal is a soft landing, otherwise the falling barge would certainly destroy the rocket and possibly itself.\nThis\u00a0comic was\u00a0published on the week following SpaceX's Iridium 1\u00a0mission ,\u00a0where the first stage of the rocket\u00a0which delivered 10 satellites into orbit successfully\u00a0landed\u00a0on a\u00a0barge near California. This was filmed from the returning stage 1 and also from further away .  More details of the launch are available here .  It marked the seventh\u00a0time SpaceX successfully landed and recovered its booster on a commercial mission.\n[There is one panel in this comic with the main drawing at the bottom. Two smaller drawings are inserted above this drawing to explain the idea.]\n[The first insert shows a barge with no center and a large piece of paper with the SpaceX logo above the barge.]\n[The second insert shows the paper stretched over the hole.]\n[The main drawing at the bottom shows a cross-section of the barge in water, showing there is only water below the paper. Above the paper the large first stage, without the top part with the payload, of a reusable rocket is attempting to land on the paper on the SpaceX logo (not visible in this view). It is still so high above the fake barge that the exhaust fire below the rocket is nowhere near the paper.]\n[Caption below the panels:] My hobby: Hollowing out the center of a barge, stretching paper over the hole painted with the SpaceX logo, and leaving it floating offshore near launch sites.\n"}
{"id":1789,"title":"Phone Numbers","image_title":"Phone Numbers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1789","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/phone_numbers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1789:_Phone_Numbers","transcript":"[White Hat is looking at a smartphone held out by Cueball.] Cueball: I have five phone numbers for you. Which one should I use? White Hat: That first one is my cell - you should use the Google Voice one, since it will forward to my laptop if I'm on WiFi. #5 is my work number, which just forwards to #1. #3 should always work but can't do texts. White Hat: You can delete #4. I think.\n[Caption below the frame:] Another reason I never call people.\n","explanation":"Cueball , who again represents Randall as given from the caption below the comic, has several phone numbers stored for White Hat under his contact entry on his phone and asks him which number he should generally use.\nOften, people who have known each other for a long time may have old information recorded for each other, which may no longer be accurate. For instance, if they know each other from when cell phones were still rather new, they would have had a home phone number also. More and more people have discontinued their land lines and now only keep the cell phone number.\nCueball has five numbers for White Hat, listed here as #1 to #5 as they are numbered in the comic (and not the order he mentions them):\nWhite Hat does say that Cueball should use #2, the Google Voice number. This is a telephone service that provides call forwarding and voicemail services, voice and text messaging for Google customers. Google is updating Google Voice so that is probably the reason for the comic as the update came out rather late on the day when Google made the announcement of the update.\nHowever, he then makes it clear that this will only work when he is online with his laptop on a WiFi connection. This could be his way of saying that he only wishes to talk to Cueball when he is in such a position.\nHowever, he also explains the other numbers more or less making it clear how he could be reached. And all in all it seems like his cell phone is still the best way to reach him.\nToday on smartphones it could be possible in your contact list to save such tedious details about each number (such as \"should always work but doesn't accept texts.\") But who wishes to do so? Also not all cell phones do have this option, and maybe at best you can only label the numbers as \"work\", \"home\" or \"cell\" but not to the detail that White Hat provides.\nIn the caption below Randall explains that this kind of trouble with getting the correct number for people he wish to contact is one (another) of more (several?) reasons he never calls people. Today there are so many other methods of getting into contact, also even if texting is out of the questions as well. Skype, messenger, other social networking platforms like Facebook and of course the old way of sending a letter or talking in person...\nWhite Hat's answer reveals a complicated history of communication practices. This cobbled-together personal technology is a common theme for Randall, see 1254: Preferred Chat System for another example, where Voicemail, text and Google Voice is also mentioned (and mixed in with written letter if not real mail).\nThe title text must refer to one of the five numbers saying that texting works for one of the numbers. This should then not be #3. It could be the number he says Cueball should use #2, but it seems more likely that it is an amendment to the last I think for #4. Maybe he realizes that this is the number he used to receive text on, when his #3 number was all he had and since that could not receive text he got the number which is now #4.\nIn either case the number he talks about can in fact receive text - but if #4 it can probably not receive phone calls. And then it gets weird because if the text gets too long then the message goes to voicemail . This is of course nonsense as a text message cannot just turn in to a spoken message. (Though of course there are text-to-speech programs, but as this takes up more space than text on a server, it would make no sense).\nTo cap it up, just in case it did turn into a voicemail, it would not make any difference because White Hat has been locked out of his voicemail.\nIt is not uncommon that young people never use voicemail and expect people to text them rather than leave a message. This could be a problem for them if \"old\" people call to let them know of a job they have been offered etc. So it is likely that Randall also jokes about this by letting White Hat be indifferent to having been locked out of his voicemail.\n[White Hat is looking at a smartphone held out by Cueball.] Cueball: I have five phone numbers for you. Which one should I use? White Hat: That first one is my cell - you should use the Google Voice one, since it will forward to my laptop if I'm on WiFi. #5 is my work number, which just forwards to #1. #3 should always work but can't do texts. White Hat: You can delete #4. I think.\n[Caption below the frame:] Another reason I never call people.\n"}
{"id":1790,"title":"Sad","image_title":"Sad","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1790","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sad.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1790:_Sad","transcript":"[Cueball is walking up to Ponytail who sits at her desk in an office chair typing on her computer.] Cueball: How are you doing? Ponytail: Hah. Cueball: You seem distant lately. For the past few months. Ponytail: Can't imagine why.\n[Cueball talks to Ponytail at her desk from off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): Your projects have stagnated. Ponytail: But my Stardew Valley farm is doing great . Cueball (off-panel): You can't just hide from everything. Ponytail: Fact check : Mostly false.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball is seen standing behind Ponytail at her desk.] Cueball: I'm glad you're including more comments in your code, but it would be nice if they were comments about your code. Cueball: Or at least a bit less obscenity-filled. Ponytail: Look, they say to write what you know.\n[Cueball leans forward towards Ponytail at her desk (who has looked on the screen in the same position through the entire comic).] Cueball: All the functions you've written take everything passed to them and return it unchanged with the comment \"No, you deal with this.\" Ponytail: It's a functional programming thing. Avoiding side effects. Cueball: You avoid all effects. Ponytail: Only way to be sure.\n","explanation":"The comic is about Cueball confronting Ponytail over her recent behavior and poor emotional state over the past few months. While Ponytail doesn't give any details on what's causing it, it can be inferred that she is referring to the recent election of Donald Trump as President of the United States , which happened about 2 months prior to the publication of this comic. This is a common reaction in the United States whenever a new president is elected, as the voters who did not vote for the new\/upcoming President will be feeling unpleasant emotions that their chosen candidate did not win, and will want to express these emotions to the wider world. With the advent of the internet, and more recently social media, the expressions of these emotions have grown more common and often more hyperbolic, regardless of the quality of the candidate.\nPonytail has retreated to video games for solace to the point that her real life projects are suffering. Stardew Valley is a video game in which a player creates and manages a virtual farm. And when Cueball mentions that her projects have stagnated, she retorts that her farm in the game is doing great. A comic with the name of that game was releases only two weeks later, 1797: Stardew Valley , indicating that it is indeed Randall who has played this game excessively.\nCueball's statement about not being able to hide from everything is a common one to give to insecure people or to those trying to run away from their problems. Ponytail's reply is in the form of a PolitiFact reply, claiming (possibly quite truly) that such assertions are mostly false , one of the six options, but it is far from being the worst, thus acknowledging that you can't hide from everything, just mostly. Politifact.com was also the subject of an earlier comic, 1712: Politifact .\nIn computer programming, comments are pieces of non-functional, descriptive text that programmers include in their code. Typically, they are used as a form of documentation, to make the code easier for other developers to understand. This is why Cueball is glad that Ponytail is at least writing more comments; documentation is something that's often neglected by developers, despite its usefulness. Unfortunately, the comments that Ponytail is putting in her code are not actually about the code at all; she is, presumably, commenting more generally on whatever is troubling her as a way of venting her issues.\nPonytail's reply to \"write what you know\" is a common piece of advice given to amateur fiction writers - it means that writers tend to write best when they are writing about something they personally know well, since they will have plenty of interesting and useful experience to draw from. However, since Ponytail's comments are full of obscenities, she is sarcastically suggesting that obscenity is all she currently knows.\nFunctions are reusable pieces of code which developers create to avoid repetition and make the code more organized. For example, if the code often has to calculate the distance between two points, it makes sense to place that calculation logic into a \"calculateDistance\" function, which can then just be called whenever it is needed. More generally, a function accepts inputs (eg. the coordinates of two points) and may return an output (eg. the distance between the two points).\nCueball notes, however, that all of the functions Ponytail has written are not actually doing anything with their inputs; they are just returning them straight back again and demanding that the calling code should deal with the problem itself. This makes the functions practically useless. Ponytail sardonically tries to justify this as a functional programming technique by saying that she is \"avoiding side effects\". A side effect is a situation in programming in which an isolated piece of code changes something about the global state of the program - this can be problematic, as there could be other parts of the code that were not expecting the change, and might behave differently as a result. Their different behavior is a side effect . Sometimes side effects are intentional, but when they are not, they can be tricky to debug and fix.\nFunctional programming is a programming paradigm in which most or all computation is performed within the scope of self-contained functions, thus avoiding stateful behavior entirely. This removes the possibility of any side effects, since each function only knows what it is told via its inputs, and does not need to be concerned with anything happening outside of itself. Technically, Ponytail is adhering to this paradigm, but only in the sense that her functions are not doing anything at all , and so cannot have side effects.\nCueball fairly makes this point by noting she is avoiding all effects, to which Ponytail quotes part of a famous quote from Ripley in Aliens : I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure . By replying that it's the \" only way to be sure \" she is thus indirectly saying better safe than sorry, but in reality she just doesn't care about her programming anymore because of her sad state of mind.\nThe title text is a pun, interpreting the phrase \"side effect\" literally. If you turn an object 90 degrees along the right axis you will place it on its side, so thus making it a effect of putting something on its side, or a \"side effect.\" You can also turn 90 degrees (along another axis), facing what was previously your side.\nSadness could come from many causes (breaking up, family member dying etc). However, the notion that this comic is political is supported by the fact check in the second panel, and also that this was only the second comic released after Donald Trump 's inauguration . This comic gave rise to this page: Sad comics . It was the fourth very sad\/negative comic in a bit more than two months after the election and the page describes the relations of these comics and others which relates to election or politics related to Donald Trumps presidency.\n[Cueball is walking up to Ponytail who sits at her desk in an office chair typing on her computer.] Cueball: How are you doing? Ponytail: Hah. Cueball: You seem distant lately. For the past few months. Ponytail: Can't imagine why.\n[Cueball talks to Ponytail at her desk from off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): Your projects have stagnated. Ponytail: But my Stardew Valley farm is doing great . Cueball (off-panel): You can't just hide from everything. Ponytail: Fact check : Mostly false.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball is seen standing behind Ponytail at her desk.] Cueball: I'm glad you're including more comments in your code, but it would be nice if they were comments about your code. Cueball: Or at least a bit less obscenity-filled. Ponytail: Look, they say to write what you know.\n[Cueball leans forward towards Ponytail at her desk (who has looked on the screen in the same position through the entire comic).] Cueball: All the functions you've written take everything passed to them and return it unchanged with the comment \"No, you deal with this.\" Ponytail: It's a functional programming thing. Avoiding side effects. Cueball: You avoid all effects. Ponytail: Only way to be sure.\n"}
{"id":1791,"title":"Telescopes Refractor vs Reflector","image_title":"Telescopes: Refractor vs Reflector","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1791","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/telescopes_refractor_vs_reflector.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1791:_Telescopes:_Refractor_vs_Reflector","transcript":"[A one panel comic showing two different telescope designs next to each other with labels above them and a bullet list of points below them. The left drawing will be described first then the right.]\n[Left:] Refractor\n[A slim telescope design is shown. At the top the light enters shown in a light yellow shade between two thin parallel light gray lines that just fits inside the opening of the telescope which is slightly wider at the top than at the lens sitting a short way into the opening. The lens causes the light to focus just where the telescope again changes dimensions, and the light enters a small opening at the bottom of the long pipe of the telescope. Here the yellow light is a point as the two gray lines cross each other at that point. The light then broadens slightly again and the thin yellow light cone hits a mirror at the bottom of the telescope and is reflected to the left and out through the eyepiece. Below are the following points:] More expensive Less compact Chromatic aberration Reduced light-gathering\n[Right:] Reflector\n[A much broader (more than 150% of the first) but also much shorter (66%) telescope design is shown. At the top the light enters shown in a light yellow shade between two thin parallel light gray lines that still just fits inside the opening of the telescope. On it's way down to the bottom of the telescope the light passes by a small mirror turned down towards the bottom. When the hits the curved bottom mirror light is focus on it's way back back and a small light cone hits the small mirror mentioned before sitting almost at the top of the telescope. This mirror reflects the light to the left into an even thinner light cone that goes out through the eyepiece located near the top of the telescope. Below is the following point:] Can't see space vampires\nIn an earlier version of this comic, the eyepiece of the refracting telescope included a mirror, often used with refractors to give an upright image and more comfortable access for the observer. This would of course invalidate the only advantage it has (vampire-visibility) over reflecting telescopes.\nRandall later corrected this so the current\/final version shows the light going straight out of the end.\nAn amici roof prism is sometimes used instead of a mirror with refractors, because it does not only deliver an upright image, but also one that is not a mirror image. In a prism, there is only total reflection, which, as opposed to a metal mirror, would probably work on vampires.\n","explanation":"This comic compares two major types of optical telescopes : The refracting telescope and the reflecting telescope . A refracting telescope produces an image with a series of lenses. A reflecting telescope uses mirrors. (A third type, the catadioptric system telescope, uses both mirrors and lenses. It is not shown here.)\nIt first looks like the comic is simply trying to show that refracting has many flaws, such as expense, size and visibility (see more details below ). However, the punchline invalidates these complaints with the (apparently major) flaw listed with the reflecting telescope: It can't see space vampires .\nThe unstated reason for this is that vampires , according to some cultures , cannot be seen in a mirror. As Space Vampires (like earth vampires) are widely believed to be made up and thus unlikely to interest most stargazers , [ citation needed ] this complaint is superfluous, and the reflecting telescope effectively has no flaws in comparison to the refracting telescope. There are other problems, though, with reflecting telescopes see details below . (Also there was a big problem in the original version of this comic ).\nFrequently, however, the right-angle transition at the base of the refractor telescope is done with a prism (an \"image erector\"). This uses the optical principle of total internal reflection. If mirror-non-appearance of vampires is due to the interaction of evil with silver, a refractor using a prism could still see vampires. On this theory, however, the reflector could too, since modern astronomical mirrors are coated with aluminum, not silver.\nThe title text expands on the seeing of supernatural beings, as another negative point is added to the refracting telescope; it apparently can't see Shadow People or the Slavic god Chernabog (sometimes spelled Chernobog), both of which are important although clearly not as important to the telescope's merit as seeing vampires since the fact is only mentioned in the title text. So of course the refracting telescope is still the best. Of course also neither the shadow people nor the god exists [ citation needed ] so this would likewise be a moot point.\nIn reality, \"shadow people\" are a psychological phenomenon wherein humans ascribe human shapes and movements to shadows in dark spaces. Chernobog is a 12th century Slavic deity, whose name translates to black god . His most famous appearance in modern media was in the 1940 Disney movie Fantasia (and Disney merchandise is also almost the only place that his name is spelled as Randall spelled it, with an \"a\" in the middle). Because shadows are dark and the god is also dark, they cannot be seen by the refracting telescope due to the reduced light-gathering which has already been mentioned as a drawback in the main comic.\nTelescopes have been the subject of many comics on xkcd. Recently one about space telescope was released 1730: Starshade and before that a large \"private\" telescope was shown in 1522: Astronomy .\nThe basic performance of a telescope is determined by its size: a wider telescope catches more light, making it easier to see faint objects, while a longer telescope is better for high magnification viewing. For looking at stars, the width is actually more important. No matter how much you zoom, a star is too far away to make bigger, but with a big aperture, you can see stars too faint for the naked eye. Planets benefit more from magnification, and distant galaxies need both.\nIn both respects, it's much easier to make a big reflector telescope than a big refractor one. Since a lens can only be held in place by its edge, the center of a large lens sags due to gravity, distorting the images it produces. This means most refractor telescopes make do with narrow apertures only a couple of inches across. Reflector telescopes are sometimes called \"light buckets\" because they can have extremely big openings that can catch light from even very faint stars. In addition, because it has a mirror at one end, the reflector telescope is, in effect, twice as long as it appears - a refractor just cannot compete.\nRefracting telescopes were only gradually overtaken by reflecting telescopes, however. In the age of great refractors , the largest telescopes in the world were refractors. Reflectors at the time had mirrors surfaced in speculum metal that began to tarnish only months after application, negatively affecting telescope performance. This problem was resolved when it became possible to surface a mirror in silver, but the problems with refractive lenses persist. Because of this, the largest optical telescopes ever built are reflectors, rather than refractors. In addition, a liquid mirror telescope uses a very cheap, but potentially very large mirror - with the drawback that the telescope can only look straight upwards.\nRandall's points:\nOther problems not mentioned by Randall:\nIt is worth noting that (apart from the vampire problem) a reflecting telescope also has disadvantages compared to a refracting telescope:\nDespite this disadvantage, reflecting telescopes are used almost exclusively in modern astronomy because of practical limitations in making large refracting telescopes. Very few amateur astronomers use refracting telescopes - nowadays, they mostly exist to con people looking for Christmas presents in department stores (just because a telescope promises 100x zoom doesn't mean the image quality is any good!)\nOn the other hand, reflecting telescopes help astronomers gaze at Beige Gorgons (mentioned in comic 2360: Common Star Types ).\n[A one panel comic showing two different telescope designs next to each other with labels above them and a bullet list of points below them. The left drawing will be described first then the right.]\n[Left:] Refractor\n[A slim telescope design is shown. At the top the light enters shown in a light yellow shade between two thin parallel light gray lines that just fits inside the opening of the telescope which is slightly wider at the top than at the lens sitting a short way into the opening. The lens causes the light to focus just where the telescope again changes dimensions, and the light enters a small opening at the bottom of the long pipe of the telescope. Here the yellow light is a point as the two gray lines cross each other at that point. The light then broadens slightly again and the thin yellow light cone hits a mirror at the bottom of the telescope and is reflected to the left and out through the eyepiece. Below are the following points:] More expensive Less compact Chromatic aberration Reduced light-gathering\n[Right:] Reflector\n[A much broader (more than 150% of the first) but also much shorter (66%) telescope design is shown. At the top the light enters shown in a light yellow shade between two thin parallel light gray lines that still just fits inside the opening of the telescope. On it's way down to the bottom of the telescope the light passes by a small mirror turned down towards the bottom. When the hits the curved bottom mirror light is focus on it's way back back and a small light cone hits the small mirror mentioned before sitting almost at the top of the telescope. This mirror reflects the light to the left into an even thinner light cone that goes out through the eyepiece located near the top of the telescope. Below is the following point:] Can't see space vampires\nIn an earlier version of this comic, the eyepiece of the refracting telescope included a mirror, often used with refractors to give an upright image and more comfortable access for the observer. This would of course invalidate the only advantage it has (vampire-visibility) over reflecting telescopes.\nRandall later corrected this so the current\/final version shows the light going straight out of the end.\nAn amici roof prism is sometimes used instead of a mirror with refractors, because it does not only deliver an upright image, but also one that is not a mirror image. In a prism, there is only total reflection, which, as opposed to a metal mirror, would probably work on vampires.\n"}
{"id":1792,"title":"Bird\/Plane\/Superman","image_title":"Bird\/Plane\/Superman","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1792","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bird_plane_superman.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1792:_Bird\/Plane\/Superman","transcript":"","explanation":"This comic is a logical comparison of observations to resolve the classic Superman catchphrase of comic book bystanders: \"Look, up in the sky... It's a bird !... It's a plane !... It's Superman !\", hence the title. Superman, a character originally created for comic books in the 1930s, is an alien with superpowers, including the power of unaided flight; hence the catchphrase exclaiming peoples' amazement.\nAt the correct distance both birds, planes and the fictional Superman could be mistaken for each other. So this comic aims to help people identify the airborne object by listing on which properties they are alike and on which they are different. This problem was also mentioned in the title text of 1633: Possible Undiscovered Planets , putting Superman near the bird\/plane boundary explaining why all this confusion has arisen.\nThe observations compared range from the mundane to the bizarre and they are listed and explained below in the table . Here some highlights are mentioned, but for all these there are much more detail below.\nSome of the mundane observations are that birds don't fly around with people, while Superman can do it, and planes are meant for it;  and that the latter two are new \"inventions\", whereas birds have flown around for millions of years.\nInterestingly enough there are actually two observations that have check mark for all three; the first being that there are enthusiasts for all three different flying objects. And these will obsess over small color details in otherwise similar looking objects. The other common thing is that they all may have sex in midair. The possibility of that happening for the all three are discussed in the table.\nThree observations only counts for birds, where all those that do not count for birds do count for both planes and superman. Two of these relates to the fact that birds are eaten by cats and humans, the last is that birds flap their wings to fly, the others have other means of flight. There are observations that rules out only planes or only superman, but none that rules out only one of them at the same time as birds are ruled out.\nThere are also three direct jokes towards the bottom. The first is that David Attenborough may also have observed Superman's mating habits just like he has with birds in the documentary series The Life of Birds . The second is that not only birds poop in flight, but that Superman could and would also do so. And the third (and also final observation) is that not only birds chase insects to eat them, but Superman also chases them... though only when he is bored. These last three observations have that in common that the planes are left out of all of them, and the joke is always on Superman. As it has been before in 1384: Krypton and 1394: Superm*n (released just ten comics apart).\nThe title text refers to black stickers (decals) in the shape of an easily recognizable predatory bird, like falcons to enhance the visibility of clear glass windows or doors and scare smaller birds away before they crash into the window. This may actually not work very well according to this article: Why Birds Hit Windows , where a falcon decal is also shown. But they are meant to warn birds away and according to this comic they could also prevent Superman from flying through your window (and thus also stop him from possibly just continuing through the building). They are not known to affect the risk of airplanes flying into the building. [ citation needed ]\n"}
{"id":1793,"title":"Soda Sugar Comparisons","image_title":"Soda Sugar Comparisons","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1793","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/soda_sugar_comparisons.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1793:_Soda_Sugar_Comparisons","transcript":"[Above the four rows of two panels with captions above them are the following title and note:] Soda Sugar Comparisons See also xkcd.com\/1035\n[Above the two columns of panels are the following captions for the left and right column:] In terms of sugar, drinking this much soda... ...is equivalent to eating this:\n[In the first rows left panel there is a drawing of a bottle with a screw cap and label. The content in the bottle is gray, as is the cap. The air above the liquid in the bottle beneath the cap as well as the label are light gray and the label is empty of text. The following text is written on three lines left of the bottle next to the label:] One 20 oz soda bottle ( e.g. Coca Cola )\n[In the opposite first row right panel there are two drawings. First three gray eggs are placed in a small pyramid. A thin line goes down the lang axis of the eggs. Text on two lines is below the eggs. Next to the eggs is a long gray bar standing up. It has wiggly lines for giving its surface features along its entire length. Two lines at the top and bottom are used to measured the length with two arrows pointing to either line, which are then going to the text next to the bar which are thus in between the arrows, taking up five lines.] 3 Cadbury eggs... ...Or a Snickers bar the length of the bottle.\n[In the second rows left panel seven soda bottles are drawn like the one in the first panel (as are all later bottles). They are standing close to each other. Along the bottom of all the bottles is the following text:] One soda per day for a week\n[In the opposite second row right panel there is a drawing of a bottle with light gray content being poured out of the open bottle down in to a small pile next to the screw cap lying below the open bottle. The content is obviously not liquid but rather oozing frosting being dumped out of the bottle not ending up in a puddle but in a taller structure with jagged edges. A bit of the oozing material hangs far out of the bottle without dropping. Also the light gray content in the bottle is uneven with darker and brighter patches. Below and left of the screw cap and pile of goo there are two lines of text:] One bottle of cake frosting\n[In the thirds rows left panel a soda bottle is drawn next to two rows of three full month calendar pages, which takes up the same height as the bottle. A text below the pages takes up two lines.]|| One soda per day for six months\n[In the opposite third row right panel there drawings of four large transparent plastic milk jugs filled to the to the brim with something that is a mixture between gray and white in small clumps. Two of the jugs are in front of the other two, and covers all but the top of the one between them and half of the last which extends right of the other two. Leaning up against the rightmost jug is a dark gray pack of candy with the candy name written in white on the open pack, and more unreadable white text is at the top of the pack. Next to the pack lies five candy pieces, three in front and two to the right. These candy pieces are dark gray (three) or light gray (two). There is a line of text beneath the jugs:] Label: Skittles Four gallons of Skittles\n[In the fourth and final rows left panel one soda bottles is next to three rectangles on top of each other with a year given in each. Beneath the drawing there is a text over two lines:] 2017 2018 2019 One soda per day for three years\n[In the opposite fourth row right panel there is a drawings of a convenience store counter with three cashiers behind it at their cash register with payment terminal close by each of them as well. From left to right they are Ponytail, Cueball and  Megan. the cash registers are to the left for all of them, with terminal next to it for Ponytail and on the other side for the other two. Between the two outer and the middle cashier, there are two signs on high poles with unreadable text. One is close to Ponytail the other is in the middle of the other two. Beside Cueball there is an additional flat thing which could be a candy weight. To Megan's right there is a square thing on top of which something sticks up in several layers. It could be a box of Kleenex. On four rows of shelves under the disc various items are closely stacked, so they cannot be separate from one another. It in though possible from white rows with prices to see that there are four rows. Underneath this drawing there is a text in two lines:] A convenience store's entire 20-foot candy counter","explanation":"This comic is one of the rare incidences where the title is actually written at the top of the comic. It is also a rare example where an old comic, 1035: Cadbury Eggs , is directly referenced, and even at such a prominent place, albeit in a faded down gray font.\nIn the comic, Randall compares soda's sugar content to different types of sugary food (see trivia ).\nThe first two panels compare the sugar content of a 20 oz bottle of soda (i.e. 591 mL, thus almost like a half liter bottle) to three Cadbury eggs or one Snickers bar if it had the length of the bottle (9 inches or about 23 cm; most actual Snickers bars are only 4 inches or 10 cm, though the company does manufacture various \"king\" sizes).\nIn the next row, Randall compares one bottle of soda each day of a week (seven bottles) to a bottle of cake frosting .\nContinuing the estimations in the third row, Randall states that one soda a day for six months will provide the same amount of sugar as four gallons of Skittles (15.1 liters).\nFinally, Randall compares three years' worth of daily sodas contains as much sugar as a convenience store's 20-foot (6.1 m) long candy counter .\nThe reference to Cadbury Eggs is of course the topic of the referenced comic 1035: Cadbury Eggs , which has the same comparison between soda's sugar content and Cadbury Eggs, as well as comparing a number of other substances to the eggs. So that comic goes the other way around.\nIn the title text, it is stated that the key is portion control, which sounds normal until it is revealed that the portion control is actually for frosting instead of soda. Eating frosting out of cans is also referenced in the title text of 418: Stove Ownership .\nOf interest in this case is that the American Heart Association recommends less than 20-36 grams per day for a sedentary lifestyle (7.5 to 9 MJ per day).\n[Above the four rows of two panels with captions above them are the following title and note:] Soda Sugar Comparisons See also xkcd.com\/1035\n[Above the two columns of panels are the following captions for the left and right column:] In terms of sugar, drinking this much soda... ...is equivalent to eating this:\n[In the first rows left panel there is a drawing of a bottle with a screw cap and label. The content in the bottle is gray, as is the cap. The air above the liquid in the bottle beneath the cap as well as the label are light gray and the label is empty of text. The following text is written on three lines left of the bottle next to the label:] One 20 oz soda bottle ( e.g. Coca Cola )\n[In the opposite first row right panel there are two drawings. First three gray eggs are placed in a small pyramid. A thin line goes down the lang axis of the eggs. Text on two lines is below the eggs. Next to the eggs is a long gray bar standing up. It has wiggly lines for giving its surface features along its entire length. Two lines at the top and bottom are used to measured the length with two arrows pointing to either line, which are then going to the text next to the bar which are thus in between the arrows, taking up five lines.] 3 Cadbury eggs... ...Or a Snickers bar the length of the bottle.\n[In the second rows left panel seven soda bottles are drawn like the one in the first panel (as are all later bottles). They are standing close to each other. Along the bottom of all the bottles is the following text:] One soda per day for a week\n[In the opposite second row right panel there is a drawing of a bottle with light gray content being poured out of the open bottle down in to a small pile next to the screw cap lying below the open bottle. The content is obviously not liquid but rather oozing frosting being dumped out of the bottle not ending up in a puddle but in a taller structure with jagged edges. A bit of the oozing material hangs far out of the bottle without dropping. Also the light gray content in the bottle is uneven with darker and brighter patches. Below and left of the screw cap and pile of goo there are two lines of text:] One bottle of cake frosting\n[In the thirds rows left panel a soda bottle is drawn next to two rows of three full month calendar pages, which takes up the same height as the bottle. A text below the pages takes up two lines.]|| One soda per day for six months\n[In the opposite third row right panel there drawings of four large transparent plastic milk jugs filled to the to the brim with something that is a mixture between gray and white in small clumps. Two of the jugs are in front of the other two, and covers all but the top of the one between them and half of the last which extends right of the other two. Leaning up against the rightmost jug is a dark gray pack of candy with the candy name written in white on the open pack, and more unreadable white text is at the top of the pack. Next to the pack lies five candy pieces, three in front and two to the right. These candy pieces are dark gray (three) or light gray (two). There is a line of text beneath the jugs:] Label: Skittles Four gallons of Skittles\n[In the fourth and final rows left panel one soda bottles is next to three rectangles on top of each other with a year given in each. Beneath the drawing there is a text over two lines:] 2017 2018 2019 One soda per day for three years\n[In the opposite fourth row right panel there is a drawings of a convenience store counter with three cashiers behind it at their cash register with payment terminal close by each of them as well. From left to right they are Ponytail, Cueball and  Megan. the cash registers are to the left for all of them, with terminal next to it for Ponytail and on the other side for the other two. Between the two outer and the middle cashier, there are two signs on high poles with unreadable text. One is close to Ponytail the other is in the middle of the other two. Beside Cueball there is an additional flat thing which could be a candy weight. To Megan's right there is a square thing on top of which something sticks up in several layers. It could be a box of Kleenex. On four rows of shelves under the disc various items are closely stacked, so they cannot be separate from one another. It in though possible from white rows with prices to see that there are four rows. Underneath this drawing there is a text in two lines:] A convenience store's entire 20-foot candy counter"}
{"id":1794,"title":"Fire","image_title":"Fire","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1794","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fire.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1794:_Fire","transcript":"[The comic shows the top part of the front page of a folded newspaper. The main headline is the only readable with a photo covering half of the pages below. In the photo a factory is on fire, with sound waves emanating to all sides. There are several sections with unreadable text.] 50,000-Alarm Fire at Alarm Factory\n\n","explanation":"In the United States and Canada, the term multiple-alarm fire is used to categorize the level of response to fires by local authorities, for instance how many units responded to the alarm. The range typically only goes through a small number of levels: typically a one-alarm fire, two-alarm fire, and three-alarm fire, perhaps up to five or six alarms in some cities, though a ten-alarm fire did occur near where Randall lives two months before the comic.\nIn the comic, a newspaper front page is shown with its cover story reporting a \"50,000-alarm\" fire, with a picture of a factory on fire. The humor lies in the unusual use of the term.  Instead of indicating the severity of the fire, the number merely indicates the number of alarms being manufactured or stored in the factory at the time of the fire. As indicated by the sound waves, or agitrons, shown in the image, at least some of those alarms appear to have been set off. It is unclear what the causal relationship between the alarms and the fire is.  The presence of fire might have activated those alarms (e.g. if they are smoke detectors), the sounding of alarms might have caused the fire to start (e.g. due to workers' attention being diverted from other critical operations), or they might be unrelated events that happened at the same time.\nThe title text mentions the musician Billy Joel being detained briefly as a suspect for the fire. But he was quickly released, likely because he didn't start the fire , which is a reference to his song \" We Didn't Start the Fire \". In other words, Billy Joel's claim that he is not responsible for the fire at the alarm factory has been taken seriously enough for him to be released. Also, the reference is humorous because it compares the literal fire depicted in the factory to the metaphorical fire in people's hearts, in the song. (Or just ignores the fact that the song's fire was metaphorical, for the sake of the joke.)\nThe incident where Billy Joel got arrested for arson was earlier shown on a similar folded newspaper with only one line of text visible next to an image. This was in comic #4 of 821: Five-Minute Comics: Part 3 .\nThis all fits together as the cover of the single is also a newspaper page with a picture of Billy Joel beneath a headline which is the title of the song. The column of text to the right of the picture is readable here. It is not easy to read it through as some of the text continues outside the image. (The text is a section of the lyrics for the song starting from \"Richard Nixon\" after the fourth chorus continuing in to the next chorus).\nThe lyrics of the song is also mentioned in 1775: Things You Learn .\nThat Billy Joel was released is also obvious since he has also sung the song An Innocent Man , where he sings I am an innocent man, Oh yes I am .\n[The comic shows the top part of the front page of a folded newspaper. The main headline is the only readable with a photo covering half of the pages below. In the photo a factory is on fire, with sound waves emanating to all sides. There are several sections with unreadable text.] 50,000-Alarm Fire at Alarm Factory\n\n"}
{"id":1795,"title":"All You Can Eat","image_title":"All You Can Eat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1795","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/all_you_can_eat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1795:_All_You_Can_Eat","transcript":"[The comic shows the facades of four stores next to each other on a street, with the sidewalk shown in front of them. To the top of each store's name there has been appended white signs. Three of the white signs partially cover the name part of the sign above three of the stores, but the fourth sign is placed entirely above the text of the third store. Thus that white sign's top is higher up than the building's.]\n[First store from the left. The top line of two on the store's sign is obscured by the white sign:] White sign: All-you-can-eat Store sign: Discount Tires\n[Second store from the left. The top line of two on the store's sign is obscured by the white sign:] White sign: All-you-can-eat Store sign: Hair Salon\n[Third store from the left. The white sign on this store is slightly tilted, and most of it is above the top of the store completely above the store sign:] White sign: All-you-can-eat Store sign: Lumber and Store sign: Flooring Depot\n[Fourth store from the left. The top line of two on the store's sign is obscured by the white sign. However, the name can still be deduced, and the top line says \"Kevin's\".] White sign: All-you-can-eat Store sign: Pet Store\n[Caption below the frame:] My hobby: Going out at night and adding \"all-you-can-eat\" to every store's sign\n\n","explanation":"An all-you-can-eat buffet is when a restaurant will charge you once for entry and then continuously serve you more food at no additional cost until you have eaten all-you-can-eat. Part of the \" My Hobby \" series, this comic shows Randall wishes to pre-pend \"all-you-can-eat\" to random stores.\nWith the exception of the pet store, which sells pet food, these stores do not sell food, so the very idea of eating their product would be ridiculous for most humans. However, this is what Randall's stunt makes the stores he defaces seem to advertise. Most people would not seriously consider eating the products these stores sell [ citation needed ] even with the signs suggesting they should, as they sell tires , hair cuts , lumber and flooring and pets .\nThe \"all-you-can-eat\" signs obscured the top line for three of the four shops signs. It is not really possible to read the obscured part of the first two signs, although it is likely that the first and last letters in the first sign are A and K. And also since the A is taller than the white sign, this first letter must be larger than the others which do not show above the white sign. There could be room for anything from 8 to many more letters hidden as it can be seen in the second line below that the I's take up much less space than the other letters. But from the letters below it seems likely there were 9 (maybe including a space) if no I's were used resulting in a word or two like this \"A _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ K\". All letters in the comic seems to be capital, but Randall sometimes use small caps, where the first capital letter is larger than the others. This would fit with this sign.\nThe third sign is fully visible, and it makes sense as it is not a name in the top line but part of the description of what the store provides.\nThe last sign is though clearly readable even though the white sign covers the name at the top, and it says \"Kevin's Pet Store\". There actually exists a web page with the name \"Kevin's Pet Shop\" , supposedly located in Texas, but there is very limited information on the page. See more about the use of Kevin in xkcd in the trivia below.\nIn the title text, Randall seems to have fallen for his own prank. After he puts the \"all-you-can-eat\" sign onto the signmakers' place, he proceeds to heed his own sign literally and eat the posterboards that he is supposed to make signs from. To remind himself not to make the same mistake again, he tells himself to \"do the sign-making place last.\"\nIt should also be noted that sometimes \"all-you-can-eat\" is used to mean \"unlimited usage\". An all-you-can-eat data plan, for example, is another way to say unlimited data. If this definition of the word were used, all-you-can-eat would mean \"unlimited copies of our product for a one time fee\". A kapsalon can, arguably, also be called an all-you-can-eat hair salon.\nNote that some pets are considered food in some cultures; rabbits are commonly kept as pets as well as served as food, dogs are consumed in some areas in eastern Asia, guinea pigs in South America and Africa, and some fictional characters are known for eating cat. Even more normally, a cat owner that wants to buy an \"all you can eat\" bird feast for their cat would be happy with this last store.\nAside from pets, pet stores also sell pet food, and while frowned upon by some, it is common practice to give human nutrition supplements to pets and vice versa. Some animal snacks are considered very tasty by many people, and there even exist several brands of snacks designed to be eaten both by people and their pets so that the owners could feel somehow closer to their beloved companion. Premium pet foods are made to standards that are no worse than standards for human food, so eating them poses no health risks in the short term - long term, most pet diets would fail to deliver the right balance of nutrients needed by humans.\n[The comic shows the facades of four stores next to each other on a street, with the sidewalk shown in front of them. To the top of each store's name there has been appended white signs. Three of the white signs partially cover the name part of the sign above three of the stores, but the fourth sign is placed entirely above the text of the third store. Thus that white sign's top is higher up than the building's.]\n[First store from the left. The top line of two on the store's sign is obscured by the white sign:] White sign: All-you-can-eat Store sign: Discount Tires\n[Second store from the left. The top line of two on the store's sign is obscured by the white sign:] White sign: All-you-can-eat Store sign: Hair Salon\n[Third store from the left. The white sign on this store is slightly tilted, and most of it is above the top of the store completely above the store sign:] White sign: All-you-can-eat Store sign: Lumber and Store sign: Flooring Depot\n[Fourth store from the left. The top line of two on the store's sign is obscured by the white sign. However, the name can still be deduced, and the top line says \"Kevin's\".] White sign: All-you-can-eat Store sign: Pet Store\n[Caption below the frame:] My hobby: Going out at night and adding \"all-you-can-eat\" to every store's sign\n\n"}
{"id":1796,"title":"Focus Knob","image_title":"Focus Knob","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1796","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/focus_knob.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1796:_Focus_Knob","transcript":"[Caption above the drawing:] Personal Focus\n[A gray rotary control knob with the range of options divided by small ticks on a black semi. The knob has a black line that indicates that the knob's setting. At the bottom left and right where the semi circle begins and ends there are two labels in normal black text:] Left: Detail-Oriented Right: Big Picture\n[Above and all along the black semi circle with the range, another semi circle is drawn in light gray. This has been divided into three sections, with two large sections left and right forming the actual semi circle with double arrow lines. There is a short section with no tick inside it between the two other sections. There are three labels for each of these section, with a line from the label down to the small section. All described here are drawn light gray color. Note that Randall has misspelled \"existential\".] Left section: Fiddling with email settings Right section: Panic and existental paralysis Small section: Healthy balance\n\n","explanation":"The comic is a pun. Normally, a rotary control knob is used for adjusting parameters in instruments, and the parameter \"focus\" is used to adjust the focal length on microscopes, telescopes, and other lens-based equipment. Here, however, the \"focus knob\" is used for Randall's personal sense of focus -- that is, how focused he is on his work and productivity, with the extremes of focus being towards Detail-Oriented (small details) and the Big Picture respectively. (A similar knob was used in 1620: Christmas Settings ).\nThe healthy balance, Randall suggests, is focusing mostly towards the Big Picture (two thirds of the way towards the Big Picture between ticks 24 and 25 out of 37), while keeping an eye on the details by still staying one third Detail-Oriented . Focusing too much on the big picture can ensure nothing gets done, leading to panic and existential paralysis . Unfortunately, the range of healthy balance appears to be vanishingly small and difficult to reach; additionally, if we assume the knob can only stop at the little ticks marked along the outside and that the boundaries are not inclusive, there is no way to set it in the window of Healthy Focus .\nWhile performing any task (including your daily life as well as editing explainxkcd), it is easy to get so lost in the details that you forget the big picture. It is also equally easy to think too much about the big picture and make vague plans while missing out on the details.\nIt is clear that at the moment Randall is mainly focusing on the small details fiddling with his e-mail settings as the knob is set to the 13th tick only just past one third away from Detail-Oriented . He thus seems to try to avoid seeing the big picture right now, since it is his personal knob to set as he wishes.\nExistential paralysis stemming from Randall getting worried about realizing how serious the state of the world is today (at the time of the comics release) are a common punchline in xkcd. With all the crises going on around the world, people get bombarded with these negative stories if they follow the news, either on TV, in news papers of on any social media (See 1773: Negativity ), especially on Facebook (see 1761: Blame ). It can thus become very overwhelming, if people do not focus more on their e-mail settings! This goes especially in a time like this, where many panics on Facebook due to for instance wars and conflicts around the world (like in Syria ), talk about climate change , or all the executive orders currently being signed by the recently inaugurated President Donald Trump , who took office less than three weeks before this comic's release. See more about these issues and other recently released sad comics here .\nGetting too deep into all this could cause the kind of panic attacks that could lead to the existential paralysis mentioned on the right side of the knob. It is these that Randall may be trying to avoid by keeping his focus firmly in the realm of e-mail settings rather than anywhere near the big picture.\nThe joke in the title text relates to Randall's use of an old fashioned analog control, probably a potentiometer , in the graphic versus a more electronically modern and efficient switching system.  Randall imagines a replacement control using pulse-width modulation (PWM), which is a technique often used to control the regulation in electronic power supplies or the speed of electric motors with far greater power efficiency than simpler analog controllers. This technique consists of shifting between fully on and fully off states so that the average is the expected output, but no power is wasted by holding the control mechanism \"partially on\". For example switching back and forth between 0 and 1, spending half the time in each position will lead to a mean value of 0.5. To code 0.67 (the healthy balance ), Randall would have to spend more time in the extreme big picture position (67% of the time) than in the detail-oriented position.  In the real world of course, a person switching so radically and completely between attention states might get diagnosed with some sort of mania . But the knob might just be switched between the dividers bordering the healthy zone, creating the perfect balance.\n[Caption above the drawing:] Personal Focus\n[A gray rotary control knob with the range of options divided by small ticks on a black semi. The knob has a black line that indicates that the knob's setting. At the bottom left and right where the semi circle begins and ends there are two labels in normal black text:] Left: Detail-Oriented Right: Big Picture\n[Above and all along the black semi circle with the range, another semi circle is drawn in light gray. This has been divided into three sections, with two large sections left and right forming the actual semi circle with double arrow lines. There is a short section with no tick inside it between the two other sections. There are three labels for each of these section, with a line from the label down to the small section. All described here are drawn light gray color. Note that Randall has misspelled \"existential\".] Left section: Fiddling with email settings Right section: Panic and existental paralysis Small section: Healthy balance\n\n"}
{"id":1797,"title":"Stardew Valley","image_title":"Stardew Valley","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1797","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stardew_valley.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1797:_Stardew_Valley","transcript":"[Inside a slim frame at the top of the comic there is a caption:] Stardew Valley morning routine\n[Below this frame there are two rows each consisting of three small panels taking up the same width as the caption panel above:]\n[Cueball wakes and rises up from his pillow sitting beneath his blanket in his four poster bed with round knobs. He yawns with a hand to his mouth. Above him floats a large sound bubble:] Cueball: Yawn\n[Cueball walks to the right with a small watering can held in front of him.]\n[Cueball pours water from the can over the three small plants. A line goes from the water to another bubble:] Water: Splish\n[Cueball walks back to the left with the watering can.]\n[Cueball stops with the can right next to a sleeping cat, which has a speech bubble pointing to its head.] Cat: Z\n[Cueball proceeds to pour water on the cat which immediately jumps up away from him trying to escape as water cascades on it. Again there is a line from the water to a speech bubble, but both the cats angry sound and Cueball's comment is written without bubbles.] Water: Splish Cat: Mrowl!! Cueball: \u2013Dammit.\n","explanation":"Stardew Valley is an indie farming simulation role-playing video game published by Chucklefish Games . Just as in similar games like Farmville and Harvest Moon , the player takes the role of a farmer who establishes their own farm and performs everyday tasks such as watering plants , growing food, and tending to animals. Pelican Town , referenced in the title text, is a fictional village in this game.\nIn this comic, Cueball begins his morning routine in a Stardew Valley session by waking up and watering some of his farm's plants.  However, he then walks up to a sleeping cat, pauses for a moment, then pours water on it, startling it awake.  He says \"Dammit!\" to this, likely indicating this isn't the first time he's made this mistake.\nIn the game, watering plants is an essential chore, which requires the player to \"equip\" a watering can.  The player moves their character up to a plant and simply presses an action button (or key) to perform the watering action.  The same action button is used to interact in different ways with other things, animals and people (e.g. to talk to them), so accidentally leaving the watering can equipped while trying to talk to someone can cause the player to \"water\" them instead.  The comic illustrates how easy it is to do this in the game, as well as the comedic value of seeing this happen from the point of view of the player's character.\nThe title text reinforces this humor by indicating that Randall has used the watering can, probably unintentionally, on nearly every person and object in the game.  It's amusing to think that he may curse each time he realizes he's still holding the can when he tries to talk to someone.  (His use of the word \"Dammit\" in this comic also calls to mind a brief discussion on the word in 559: No Pun Intended .)\nThe use of the word \"virtually\" in the title text plays with the word's double meaning. It is used here in the sense of \"almost\", however when swapping the words \"virtually\" and \"waters\", the word assumes its alternate meaning, but the title text still makes sense: Since the game is only a simulation, the player \"virtually waters\" his plants.\nStardew Valley was also mentioned only two weeks prior to this comic in 1790: Sad ; this comic explains why.\nInterestingly, this comic is drawn in a slightly unusual style for xkcd .  Of note is the border around the caption (\"Stardew Valley Morning Routine\"), the thicker-than-normal penmanship, and the use of drawn borders around the watering sound effects, Cueball's yawn, and the cat's sleeping word balloon.  The cat's balloon in particular follows the visual style of the game (in which certain objects and animals may show their current emotional states with word balloons) - more generally, actions that normally occur in the game, such as the yawn and the watering action, appear to be shown in balloons while Cueball's \"Dammit!\" is written in the style of other xkcd comics.  This likely suggests that Cueball's epithet here represents the player (Randall) actually saying this in response to the incorrect action of his character in the game.\n[Inside a slim frame at the top of the comic there is a caption:] Stardew Valley morning routine\n[Below this frame there are two rows each consisting of three small panels taking up the same width as the caption panel above:]\n[Cueball wakes and rises up from his pillow sitting beneath his blanket in his four poster bed with round knobs. He yawns with a hand to his mouth. Above him floats a large sound bubble:] Cueball: Yawn\n[Cueball walks to the right with a small watering can held in front of him.]\n[Cueball pours water from the can over the three small plants. A line goes from the water to another bubble:] Water: Splish\n[Cueball walks back to the left with the watering can.]\n[Cueball stops with the can right next to a sleeping cat, which has a speech bubble pointing to its head.] Cat: Z\n[Cueball proceeds to pour water on the cat which immediately jumps up away from him trying to escape as water cascades on it. Again there is a line from the water to a speech bubble, but both the cats angry sound and Cueball's comment is written without bubbles.] Water: Splish Cat: Mrowl!! Cueball: \u2013Dammit.\n"}
{"id":1798,"title":"Box Plot","image_title":"Box Plot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1798","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/box_plot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1798:_Box_Plot","transcript":"[A box plot with three vertical data points is shown. Each point consists of a shaded rectangular box, and a T-shaped whisker on each end.]\n[Cueball walks in; revealing that the box plot is a physical object which he looks up on.]\n[Cueball climbs on top of the diagram, holding onto the top whisker of the leftmost data point.]\n[Cueball, now standing upright on top of the box plot, bends over, grips the whisker of the center data point and starts pumping. The shaded box of the data point bulges. Cueball's movements are accompanied by sounds:] Pump Pump Pump\n[The box has been inflated so much that it almost touches the left and right data points. Cueball walks away.]\n\n","explanation":"This comic shows three vertical box plots in the first panel, hence the title.\nIn descriptive statistics , a box plot is a convenient way of graphically depicting groups of numerical data through their quartiles . The second quartile is the median and it is not indicated in this comic, as it should be a line through the box (see the definitions of quartiles ). But the top and bottom of the box is the first and third quartile, which splits the lowest\/highest 25% off data of from the highest\/lowest 75%, respectively.\nBox plots may also have lines extending vertically from the boxes (whiskers) indicating variability outside the upper and lower quartiles, (that is, the highest and lowest values in the data,) hence the terms box-and-whisker plot. These can be used to indicate the interquartile range , a measure of statistical dispersion . These have been included on the three boxes in the plot.\nThe joke in the comic arises, because it turns out that the box plot is actually three real world objects and Cueball walks into the plot in the second panel, climbs up on the lower first box and on to the highest middle box. When the boxes are depicted in the orientation shown, the boxes can look like they are pumps, where the middle part, the box, can be pumped up. And Cueball does just that in the fourth panel, by pushing the top whisker down and when he leaves in the fifth and last panel, this box stays inflated, with the whisker visibly lower than in the first three panels, although higher than when he pushed it down in the fourth panel. (Inflating things that cannot be inflated was also the joke in 1395: Power Cord . But as opposed to inflating the meaning of data, which many researchers sadly do in the real world, what Beret Guy does in that comic, is strictly supernatural .)\nIt could be said that the \"data\" in this comic was \"inflated\" and thus Cueball has been trying to show a smaller interquartile range than there actually is, thus inflating the possible conclusions that could be drawn from the data.\nThe title text refers to how dynamite , an explosive, often used to have detonator boxes (aka. blasting machines ) which also looked similar to the top part of the box (without the lower whisker). These detonators were most commonly used for mining, with long wires leading to the explosives. Modern blasting machines are operated by push buttons and key switches, but the old push-handle design still resonates in the public consciousness today, due to its exposure in classic slapstick cartoon shorts like Looney Tunes , especially often used by Wile E. Coyote against the Road Runner. See this compilation for examples.\nThe title text also refers to so-called dynamite plots . This type of plot used to be very common in scientific publications, but since it hides most details about one's actual data, it is now frowned upon. The recommended alternative is the box plot.\nThe title text thus warns against this kind of data inflation, since sometimes it can go awry and lead to explosions. Randall has often made comics about presenting data as more important that they are, in one way or another, and this comics clearly falls into that category. See for example 882: Significant , 1132: Frequentists vs. Bayesians , 1478: P-Values and 1574: Trouble for Science , and this one for manipulating the way data is presented: 558: 1000 Times .\nA box plot was also used in 539: Boyfriend , maybe the only other time in xkcd. There are many other types of data carts that have their own subcategories, but not this type.\n[A box plot with three vertical data points is shown. Each point consists of a shaded rectangular box, and a T-shaped whisker on each end.]\n[Cueball walks in; revealing that the box plot is a physical object which he looks up on.]\n[Cueball climbs on top of the diagram, holding onto the top whisker of the leftmost data point.]\n[Cueball, now standing upright on top of the box plot, bends over, grips the whisker of the center data point and starts pumping. The shaded box of the data point bulges. Cueball's movements are accompanied by sounds:] Pump Pump Pump\n[The box has been inflated so much that it almost touches the left and right data points. Cueball walks away.]\n\n"}
{"id":1799,"title":"Bad Map Projection Time Zones","image_title":"Bad Map Projection: Time Zones","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1799","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bad_map_projection_time_zones.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1799:_Bad_Map_Projection:_Time_Zones","transcript":"Bad map projection #79: Time Zones Where each country should be, based on its time zone( s )\n[A world map is shown divided and colored by political boundaries. There are many distortions, and especially Russia looks weird. Many countries have their name listed in a gray font and at the bottom below Australia there are two specialties mentioned for time zones which are not divided in full hours. One of these is a footnote used by other countries as well.]\n[The labels are listed here in order of the \"continents\" as they come from top left to down right. Similarly within each continent's list the countries which are usually said to belong to a given continent (at least politically or partially, e.g. Greenland and Turkey in Europe) are listed in a similar reading order as accurately as possible.]\n[North America. (Newfoundland, the most easterly part of Canada, is labeled with a star *):] Canada, *, United States, Mexico, Gua., Hon., Nic., C.R., Pan., Cuba, Haiti, Jam., D.R.\n[South America:] Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, F.G., Suriname, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Par., Chile, Argentina, Uruguay\n[Europe. (Russia is as the only country mentioned twice, the other place is over the central part in the Asia section):] Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, UK, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bel., Russia, Ger., Pol., Ukraine, France, It., Romania, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey\n[Africa:] W.S., Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Sen., Mali, Niger, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Gb., Guin., B.F., S.L., Liberia, C\u00f4te d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Cam., C.A.R., S.S., Ethiopia, Somalia, E.G., Gabon, R. of Congo, Dem. Rep. of the Congo, Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Namibia, Bots., Zimb., Mozambique, Madagascar, South Africa\n[Asia. (Russia is the only country mentioned twice, the other label is within the European border. The text written over Bhutan is unreadable in the image and marked with a question mark in this list):] Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran*, Oman, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan*, Taj., Pakistan, India*, Nepal*,\u00a0?, China, N.K.*, S.K., Japan, Ban., Bur.*, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines\n[Oceania\/Australia. (In Australia there is a star * in the middle of it above the name):] Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, *, Australia, New Zealand\n[Below Australia there is an arrow pointing to the south coast and below that a footnote for the stars * used above:] UTC+8:45 (One small area)\n*=Half-hour offset\n\nSome countries and territories are missing from the map. Most of these omissions are undoubtedly deliberate, but some are likely mistakes.\n","explanation":"This is the second comic in the series of Bad Map Projections and presents Bad map projection #79: Time Zones. It was first with this comic that it became a series. The series began a month earlier with 1784: Bad Map Projection: Liquid Resize (#107). It was followed almost three years later with 2256: Bad Map Projection: South America (#358).\nThis comic shows a map projection in which countries are placed according to the time zones that they fall under. It seems that Randall , being Randall, runs with the idea as he has made yet another map projection that is not only inaccurate, but utterly unusable, though less so than the previous one.\nThe first \"Liquid Resize\" was #107, while this comic features #79. Since the liquid resize was purely aesthetic, whereas this one at least conveys some meaningful information it makes sense that this projection is ranked higher.\nConceptually, the series is a comment on the fact that there is no perfect way to draw a map of the world on a flat piece of paper. Each one will introduce a different type of distortion, and the best projection for a given situation is sometimes very disputed. Randall previously explored 12 different projections in 977: Map Projections , and expressed his disdain for some types he sees as less efficient but whose users feel superior. None of them are really good as any 2D map projection will always distort in a way the spherical reality, and a map projection that is useful for one aspect (like navigation, geographical shapes and masses visualization, etc.) will not be so for all the others. Local maps of smaller areas can be quite accurate, but the idea of both these map projection comics is to map the entire globe on a flat surface.\nTime zones are based on the way the Sun shines on the Earth, so these time zones, which are based on the sun's position in the sky, would best be divided by roughly longitudinal (North-to-South Pole) lines. However, this is not the case in practice, as the defined time zones tend to have very jagged boundaries, and furthermore some countries use a completely different time than the zones they are in, at least for some parts (see China ). Since Randall knows he cannot fix the boundaries of the time zones, he instead \"fixes\" the world by making a map appear to match up with the time zone system, as shown in this map , also posted in the trivia . This results in bizarre distortions such as the large, gum-like strands of Greenland (these are the towns of Danmarkshavn (UTC) and Ittoqqortoormiit (UTC-1), which use different time zones to the rest of the island) and three enormous gulfs in Russia (some time zones in Russia are only used in southern areas, leaving two-hour differences between some adjacent areas on the country's northern border).  See also this map with a time zone map overlayed the comic .\nThe effect of this map is to \"punish\" large countries with a single time zone - for instance, China, which uses UTC+8 across the whole country - and countries that share large time zones - for instance, almost all of Europe is packed into the Central European UTC+1 zone - by shrinking these down. Conversely, countries that use multiple time zones without filling them out are stretched out - for example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Mongolia , as pointed out in the title text - as are slim countries that do not fill out the full width of their time zones but where their neighbors use different timezones so they have to fill the entire width of their time zone. For instance Finland (also mentioned in the title text) and the Baltic countries , who look huge because their western and eastern neighbors do not use the UTC+2 Eastern Europe time, and thus have to fill out the distance between the countries that are pushed to the zones on their east\/west borders.\nOther map projections distort countries this way as well, but based on their actual physical location as opposed to their position on imaginary time zones. The Mercator projection is infamous for distorting Greenland in this way, to the point that it appears to be larger than Africa despite being nowhere near the same size.\nSee the table below for lots more information on the comic, but here are some further details.\nThe map is imperfect for several reasons:\nRandall attempts to preserve adjacency where possible - for instance, Chad and Sudan are neighbors even though Chad uses West Africa Time (UTC+1) and Sudan uses East Africa Time (UTC+3). Randall draws an extremely thin strand connecting the countries through Central\/South Africa Time (UTC+2), even though no part of Chad or Sudan uses this time. Similarly, a thin strand of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan is shown projecting into the UTC+4 time zone in order to separate Russia and Iran, which do not really share a border. Worst of all is China, which has to have borders to several countries that do not share the single eastern time zone of east China, which the whole China is forced to use. A thin strand, resembling the Yangtze river, is shown passing through time zones that China does not use. This is the most complicated preservation of adjacency shown in the map.\nThere is no mention of daylight saving time - all countries shown are given the base winter time. Depending on the time of year, countries will shift around - around June, many northern hemisphere countries will move east, while some southern hemisphere countries will move east around December.\nThe map doesn't allow for half-hour time zones. (India, for instance, is on UTC+5.5) Instead, countries that use fractional time zones are shifted so they straddle the two time zones, and are then marked with an asterisk (*). This is also true of regions within countries, including the island of Newfoundland in Canada and a section in the center of Australia.\nThe only extra detail mentioned in the map is also for Australia. It is the UTC+8:45 time zone that is used only by 5 roadhouses covering a population of only a few hundred people.\nThere are several errors in the map, see below .\nThis sortable table includes all countries shown in the map, not just those are labeled, as well as the continents and some other regions are mentioned.\nThe countries or continents are mentioned approximately in reading order. If a country is not labeled with full name the abbreviation is in brackets behind the name. If the country is not labeled, labeled wrong or not even shown in the comic, there is a note after the name. Countries labeled with a footnote by an asterisk (*) are shown together with that asterisk at the name.\nIf a country has more than one time zone all are listed.\nBad map projection #79: Time Zones Where each country should be, based on its time zone( s )\n[A world map is shown divided and colored by political boundaries. There are many distortions, and especially Russia looks weird. Many countries have their name listed in a gray font and at the bottom below Australia there are two specialties mentioned for time zones which are not divided in full hours. One of these is a footnote used by other countries as well.]\n[The labels are listed here in order of the \"continents\" as they come from top left to down right. Similarly within each continent's list the countries which are usually said to belong to a given continent (at least politically or partially, e.g. Greenland and Turkey in Europe) are listed in a similar reading order as accurately as possible.]\n[North America. (Newfoundland, the most easterly part of Canada, is labeled with a star *):] Canada, *, United States, Mexico, Gua., Hon., Nic., C.R., Pan., Cuba, Haiti, Jam., D.R.\n[South America:] Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, F.G., Suriname, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Par., Chile, Argentina, Uruguay\n[Europe. (Russia is as the only country mentioned twice, the other place is over the central part in the Asia section):] Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, UK, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bel., Russia, Ger., Pol., Ukraine, France, It., Romania, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey\n[Africa:] W.S., Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Sen., Mali, Niger, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Gb., Guin., B.F., S.L., Liberia, C\u00f4te d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Cam., C.A.R., S.S., Ethiopia, Somalia, E.G., Gabon, R. of Congo, Dem. Rep. of the Congo, Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Namibia, Bots., Zimb., Mozambique, Madagascar, South Africa\n[Asia. (Russia is the only country mentioned twice, the other label is within the European border. The text written over Bhutan is unreadable in the image and marked with a question mark in this list):] Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran*, Oman, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan*, Taj., Pakistan, India*, Nepal*,\u00a0?, China, N.K.*, S.K., Japan, Ban., Bur.*, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines\n[Oceania\/Australia. (In Australia there is a star * in the middle of it above the name):] Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, *, Australia, New Zealand\n[Below Australia there is an arrow pointing to the south coast and below that a footnote for the stars * used above:] UTC+8:45 (One small area)\n*=Half-hour offset\n\nSome countries and territories are missing from the map. Most of these omissions are undoubtedly deliberate, but some are likely mistakes.\n"}
{"id":1800,"title":"Chess Notation","image_title":"Chess Notation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1800","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chess_notation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1800:_Chess_Notation","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat facing each other.] Cueball: I've decided to score all my conversations using chess win-loss notation. White Hat: I don't know or care what that means. Cueball: Fine. White Hat: Fine.\n[Caption below the frame:] \u00bd\u2013\u00bd\nThe following points are debated:\nChess players and critics use certain notations to write down chess games in a very short fashion (for example the Forsyth\u2013Edwards Notation , which is both computer- and human-readable). In addition, chess annotation symbols like\u00a0! and\u00a0!? help to comment certain moves in a similarly short fashion. That way it is possible to print or discuss a chess game (or a chess opening) in a limited space, for example in printed reference manuals.\nA short synopsis about common chess annotation symbols:\n!! \u2013 brilliant move: Very strong and counter-intuitive move. A sound sacrifice. ! \u2013 good move: A surprisingly good move. !? \u2013 interesting move: Risky, or worthy of attention and analysis. ?! \u2013 dubious move: Designates a move that may be bad, but it is hard to explain why. ? \u2013 mistake: Poor move that should not be played. ?? \u2013 blunder : Exceptionally bad move, usually designates a move that turns a winning position into a draw, or a draw into a losing position.\nThe score of the \"white\" player is always given first, followed by the score of the \"black\" player. Possible notations for the game outcome are:\n1-0 \u2013 a win (for white) 0-1 \u2013 a loss (for white) \u00bd-\u00bd \u2013 a draw\nBecause every chess game begins by moving a white piece, the following can be observed: When Cueball ends a conversation with 1-0,\nA chess game can be won (and lost for the other party) or drawn . It should be noted that draws most commonly occur by agreement , or very rarely by stalemate . A stalemate is a situation where the opponent's king is not in check, but none of the opponent's pieces can be moved in a legal way. In a human conversation, what amounts to a draw, and what amounts to a stalemate?\nIf agreed draws should be allowed (and under which circumstances) is a matter of some discussion among chess players, thus adding another point to Randall's comic. For example, some tournament rules (e.g. the so-called \" Sofia Rules \") do not allow a draw to be offered directly - any player has first to announce the intention of drawing to the arbiter (referee), who then decides if the position should be played out further or not.\nThe official chess rules offer some ways the concept of a \"draw\" could be applied to a human conversation. According to the World Chess Federation (FIDE) rules, a draw can occur:\nSimilarities\nDifferences\n","explanation":"Cueball begins a conversation with White Hat with the declaration that he will be scoring his conversations using chess notation (hence the title). White Hat is not interested, so the conversation dies out, with both Cueball and White Hat saying \"Fine\".\nAnd just as promised, Cueball has scored this particular conversation, giving it a \u00bd-\u00bd , as he believes that this is a drawn conversation . The reasons for the draw may be due to agreement (both parties walk away afterwards), a stalemate (the conversation isn't going anywhere), draw by repetition (both players have played the same moves over and over again, and cannot improve their position - probably if \"Fine\" had been repeated more times), 50-move rule (the conversation has been going on fruitlessly for too long - unlikely here since it is only 4 dialogues long) or something else. There could be some similarities between chess games and conversations . In general, see more under the trivia section.\nThe title text contains the same assertion that Cueball is scoring all his conversations in chess notation, followed by a (??). In chess notation, (??) means the move in question was a very bad, or losing, move - a blunder. Cueball scores this part of the conversation as a blunder, which is understandable as it immediately turned the conversation against him. It can also be considered a losing move not just in the conversation but in general, being a confusing and pointless decision with no apparent gain. If Cueball is treating his conversation itself like a chess game (memorizing openings, using tactics, and evaluating various possible things to say), then he will avoid ever opening a conversation with this statement again. If he was scoring his idea to score his conversations as a blunder, then that itself may yet be another blunder.  Either way, quite a\u00a0?? indeed!!\nThe (??) may also be interpreted not as chess notation, but as regular interpunction, in which case it would denote a confused reaction by someone who doesn't know what chess notation is (like White Hat in the comic). This makes it a double entendre, covering both the case when either the conversation party or the reader doesn't understand what chess notation is (and thus reacts with confusion to Cueball's announcement), and the case when chess notation is understood, and actually used to comment on the soundness of Cueball's move as being a blunder.\n[Cueball and White Hat facing each other.] Cueball: I've decided to score all my conversations using chess win-loss notation. White Hat: I don't know or care what that means. Cueball: Fine. White Hat: Fine.\n[Caption below the frame:] \u00bd\u2013\u00bd\nThe following points are debated:\nChess players and critics use certain notations to write down chess games in a very short fashion (for example the Forsyth\u2013Edwards Notation , which is both computer- and human-readable). In addition, chess annotation symbols like\u00a0! and\u00a0!? help to comment certain moves in a similarly short fashion. That way it is possible to print or discuss a chess game (or a chess opening) in a limited space, for example in printed reference manuals.\nA short synopsis about common chess annotation symbols:\n!! \u2013 brilliant move: Very strong and counter-intuitive move. A sound sacrifice. ! \u2013 good move: A surprisingly good move. !? \u2013 interesting move: Risky, or worthy of attention and analysis. ?! \u2013 dubious move: Designates a move that may be bad, but it is hard to explain why. ? \u2013 mistake: Poor move that should not be played. ?? \u2013 blunder : Exceptionally bad move, usually designates a move that turns a winning position into a draw, or a draw into a losing position.\nThe score of the \"white\" player is always given first, followed by the score of the \"black\" player. Possible notations for the game outcome are:\n1-0 \u2013 a win (for white) 0-1 \u2013 a loss (for white) \u00bd-\u00bd \u2013 a draw\nBecause every chess game begins by moving a white piece, the following can be observed: When Cueball ends a conversation with 1-0,\nA chess game can be won (and lost for the other party) or drawn . It should be noted that draws most commonly occur by agreement , or very rarely by stalemate . A stalemate is a situation where the opponent's king is not in check, but none of the opponent's pieces can be moved in a legal way. In a human conversation, what amounts to a draw, and what amounts to a stalemate?\nIf agreed draws should be allowed (and under which circumstances) is a matter of some discussion among chess players, thus adding another point to Randall's comic. For example, some tournament rules (e.g. the so-called \" Sofia Rules \") do not allow a draw to be offered directly - any player has first to announce the intention of drawing to the arbiter (referee), who then decides if the position should be played out further or not.\nThe official chess rules offer some ways the concept of a \"draw\" could be applied to a human conversation. According to the World Chess Federation (FIDE) rules, a draw can occur:\nSimilarities\nDifferences\n"}
{"id":1801,"title":"Decision Paralysis","image_title":"Decision Paralysis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1801","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/decision_paralysis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1801:_Decision_Paralysis","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are standing near two sport cars. Megan points excitedly at the cars while Cueball looks at his smartphone.] Megan: There! If we steal one of those cars, we can get to the base and defuse the bomb! Cueball: Hmm, the one on the left accelerates faster but has a lower top speed. Cueball: Ooh, the right one has good traction control. Are the roads wet?\n[Caption below the frame:] Protip: If you ever need to defeat me, just give me two very similar options and unlimited internet access.\n\"A discrete decision based upon an input having a continuous range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time.\"\n","explanation":"This comic illustrates a common problem in the internet era where, with the wealth of knowledge available to us at all times, one puts undue weight on otherwise arbitrary decisions.\nThis is taken to a comedic extreme by showing how Cueball is unable to make a critical, time-sensitive choice without putting hours of research in to justify it. Any benefit to researching the imminent decision of \"which car will get us to our destination fastest\" will be more than offset by the time it takes to make that decision. [ citation needed ] The inability to make a snap judgment in this case will prove very destructive as the bomb mentioned by Megan will now likely detonate before they get to the base. The difference in time\/effort needed to steal either car is likely presumed to be insignificant to this scenario.\nIn the caption below the comic Randall gives the reader one of his recurring protips . In the tip, he reveals a weakness for his potential opponents to exploit. Randall admits to having the same problems with decision-making as Cueball, and suggests that if he were placed in an equally urgent situation testing his (in)ability to choose, he would fail just as spectacularly, as long as he had free access to the internet. As the old saying goes, \"give 'em enough rope, and they'll hang themselves\"; in this case, give Randall enough internet access, and he'll get caught in an indefinite research loop.\nThe title text continues this absurdity by bringing a third option to the table, the choice of inaction (which by wasting his time on calculations and research, Cueball has taken), a choice here that seems unacceptable, but the time spent mentioning (and researching it) simply adds to that already spent researching the two cars. Of course this option ensures that they are not killed when the bomb explodes, because they will not be anywhere close to the base. That might make it the only reasonable choice left after wasting so much time pondering which car to steal.\nThat not making a choice is also a choice has often been mentioned in literature and other places, like when the band Rush in their song Freewill sings \"If you choose not to decide - You still have made a choice\".\nSupposing both of them know how to drive (and steal) a car and defuse the bomb, the best option in this situation is to leave the phone in the pocket and steal both cars, and see who gets there first to defuse the bomb. This would both ensure one of them reaches the base as quick as possible and at the same time resolve the problem of which car would be best for the problem. Of course that would also have defused the joke, No Pun Intended ...\n[Megan and Cueball are standing near two sport cars. Megan points excitedly at the cars while Cueball looks at his smartphone.] Megan: There! If we steal one of those cars, we can get to the base and defuse the bomb! Cueball: Hmm, the one on the left accelerates faster but has a lower top speed. Cueball: Ooh, the right one has good traction control. Are the roads wet?\n[Caption below the frame:] Protip: If you ever need to defeat me, just give me two very similar options and unlimited internet access.\n\"A discrete decision based upon an input having a continuous range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time.\"\n"}
{"id":1802,"title":"Phone","image_title":"Phone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1802","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/phone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1802:_Phone","transcript":"[Someone off-panel asks Cueball a question which he answers while walking to a small table with some items laying on it.] Off-panel voice: Wanna go for a walk? Cueball: Sure, just need to grab my device that feeds me a 24\/7 stream of opinions, context-free scary world news, and random emotional stimuli. Cueball: Plus a spare battery so the feed won't be interrupted.\n","explanation":"When someone asks you if you want to go for a walk they often expect to have a conversation, while enjoying both the exercise, the fresh air and the company. Thus any disturbance not related to the walk is not welcome. Going for a walk is often seen as a way to relax from all the daily stress, as it takes the walkers away from work and chores.\nCueball agrees to go for a walk, but not to all the associated expectations. His first instinct is to bring along his smartphone , though rather than call it such, he opts for a lengthy description detailing all the functions he intends to use. He describes the phone as a device that gives him a continuous ( 24\/7 ) stream of information, much of which is often out of context. The stream contains people's opinions, context-free but scary news, and other random stimuli. Conspicuously, long-distance communication (ostensibly the primary function of a smartphone) is not listed. This may be a sign that Cueball is addicted to his phone .\nThe stream of opinions mentioned could be from news or bloggers but it could also just be from his friends on social media platforms. News stories that are shared on social media are often scary, which becomes even worse because news outlets are likely to use a title that exaggerates the topic to create a fear reaction. The random emotional stimuli could be from many things such as text messages\/emails and pictures of kittens and babies on social network, and shared internet memes or viral videos. All things that could cause a quick shift in emotions.\nAs if all this was not enough, Cueball even says he will also take his spare battery, so he won't risk that his constant feed could be interrupted, because he will not be able to recharge his phone during the walk. All in all, his choice and constant need for staying updated and being online violates all the usual expectations, that his friend could have expected from asking him out for a walk. Randall's fear of running out of power on his smartphone was earlier mentioned in 1373: Screenshot , where a low battery charge stresses him too much to realize it is someone else's screenshot, rather than his own phone that has a low charge. Since then he has made other references to his issue with low batteries in 1872: Backup Batteries and 1965: Background Apps .\nThe title text shows it would be possible to take an action to avoid this feed. In the first bracket a person (could be Cueball or Randall ) disables all his social networking accounts . Most of his news feed will thus disappear. But this leads to the next bracket which states that such a choice would lead to increased social isolation , since he will no longer be in contact with any of his online friends. In fact, today many people also get into contact with their \"real\" local friends through social media, so one might thus miss out on events like parties or get-togethers.  In addition, his friends, not sharing his dislike for social media, may not understand his decision. All of this leads to the final sentence Wait, why does this ALSO feel bad?\n[Someone off-panel asks Cueball a question which he answers while walking to a small table with some items laying on it.] Off-panel voice: Wanna go for a walk? Cueball: Sure, just need to grab my device that feeds me a 24\/7 stream of opinions, context-free scary world news, and random emotional stimuli. Cueball: Plus a spare battery so the feed won't be interrupted.\n"}
{"id":1803,"title":"Location Reviews","image_title":"Location Reviews","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1803","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/location_reviews.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1803:_Location_Reviews","transcript":"[Inside the main panel there is a frame with a Google location map with the typical red pin stuck in the center of the map inside a large gray region of the map. A river goes from the north through the gray region and out to the west. East and south of the river some roads and other items are shown, several of them also outside the gray region. The red pin is stuck next to a corner in one of the roads.]\n[Below the map is the name of the location at the red pin, and below that there are three lines of unreadable text:] Canyon River Nuclear Launch Facility\n[Below that there is broken line with text in the break, and below that follows 11 reviews with yellow stars to the left. The stars are either just outlines or colored completely, with the left one always being filled:] Reviews (22) [5 of 5 stars filled] Greatest country on earth [2 of 5 stars filled] Looks cool but you can't get in [1 of 5 stars filled] What is this store [4 of 5 stars filled] My cousin worked here [2 of 5 stars filled] Waitstaff heavily armed and very rude [1 of 5 stars filled] Stop doing chemtrails [1 of 5 stars filled] This place is a symptom of the military-industrial complex strangling our democracy and... (read full review-1184 words) [4 of 5 stars filled] Anyone else notice the hole in the west fence? [5 of 5 stars filled] Whoa, missiles! [3 of 5 stars filled] Good idea but confusing web site. How do I preorder? [1 of 5 stars filled] Please don't launch these\n[Caption below the panel:] I love finding reviews of places that really don't need to have reviews.\n","explanation":"Many online advertising services and social media networks (like Google and Yelp , both mentioned in the title text, and for instance Facebook ) allow users to leave reviews of stores, businesses and locations. For various reasons these sites often find themselves with pages dedicated to, as Randall puts it, \"places that really don't need reviews\" such as municipal works installations, government property, and natural landmarks. This naturally attracts both clueless people and lots of self-styled comedians leaving less-than-helpful comments on such review pages.\nRandall is just poking fun at this phenomenon by inventing possible reviews for the (fictional) location Canyon River Nuclear Launch Facility , depicted with a Google Maps -styled map page along with a series of so-called reviews. (There does exist a Canyon River located in Ontario \/ Canada and one in Washington \/USA (the latter is a significant tributary to the Satsop River ). Canada does not maintain nuclear weapons since 1984, so the launch site should be located in Washington).\nSee explanations for the 11 visible (out of 22) reviews in the table below . Of course those responsible for such a facility with nuclear missiles would not like the attention they would be getting in this way, especially not when one of the comments mentions a hole in the fence... Although this comic makes a joke about reviews it has chosen a very dangerous facility to joke about. See more about this under Politics below\nIn the title text Randall mentions that both Google and Yelp keep deleting his scathing reviews of several locations like the above. The questions is if they would have done it if they had not been so harsh... While Canyon River Nuclear Launch Facility appears not to exist, the places\/phenomena he lists in the title text certainly do, and are places that you either cannot or would not normally visit as destinations. Here below each \"location\" is explained. That the deletion of such reviews is real has been proven by this comic, as it also happened for those that (of course) posted these reviews on Google maps as a response to this comic.\nMariana Trench is the deepest area of the world's oceans, about 10,994 meters (36,070 ft) deep, located between Japan and Australia. The pressure in the Mariana Trench is about 1,086 bars, more than 1,000 times the standard atmospheric pressure of about 1 bar at sea level. Despite this enormous pressure some organisms live in the Mariana Trench . Humans can reach the ground only by special deep-sea submarines, like Jacques Piccard did in 1960 with the Bathyscaphe Trieste . See reviews for the Mariana Trench at Google Maps and Facebook .\nThe Chernobyl reactor core is the most dangerous part of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant . It is located in the North of Ukraine. In the reactor No. 4 there was a nuclear disaster that happened on 26 April 1986. It caused devastating damage and massive radioactive contamination. There is still a Chernobyl Exclusion Zone 30 kilometers around the power plant. See reviews for the Chernobyl power plant at Google Maps and Facebook .\nJet streams are a meteorologic phenomenon about 9 to 16 kilometers above the ground. A stream consists of air currents with speeds from 92 km\/h (50 kn; 57 mph) to over 398 km\/h (215 kn; 247 mph). Such jet streams are routinely used for reducing fuel usage for long distance plane travels. As it is a ribbon rather than a point, it could not have a single point on the map. Also, the jet stream fluctuates north and south; so even if it could be pinpointed, the location would be constantly changing.\nThe equator is, as with the jet streams, not a singular place but a circumference around the Earth. Reviewing the equator as a singular location is rather pointless, though there is a whole range of specific (and interesting) locations around the equator, with countries with tropical rainforest climate , which many people from European and North American countries struggle with. That said, most of the equator goes over water.\nIn the table the rating is given with the review. After that an explanation both of the rating and of the review is given. Notice that any or all of the reviews could be sarcastic or \"trolling\", as is fairly typical on the internet, especially for reviews given for such a location as this one. This table assumes all the reviews are played straight.\nThe decision to make a comic depicting a nuclear missile launch facility may not be entirely random, given Randall's mildly political mood lately. In particular, it could be due to the cold relationship between Russia and the United States at the time of this comics release. Two weeks prior to this comics release Russia Deploys Missile, Violating Treaty and Challenging Trump . This was less than a month after Donald Trump became president. Trump has been positive towards Vladimir Putin earlier, but after the violation USA condemned the new missile. That Randall was not in favor of Trump becoming president was made clear in 1756: I'm With Her . His predecessor Barack Obama even stated, before Trump was elected, that If Trump can't handle Twitter, then he can't handle nuclear codes . Randall has earlier mentioned the codes indirectly in 1242: Scary Names , where he mentions the Nuclear football , which is much more scary than the name... It is a year ago he finished a \"series\" of four comics in a short period about nuclear weapons with 1655: Doomsday Clock (see about the other comics at the bottom of that explanation). But it seems that recent events have made him think about it again, although he tries no to as made evident in 1796: Focus Knob .\n[Inside the main panel there is a frame with a Google location map with the typical red pin stuck in the center of the map inside a large gray region of the map. A river goes from the north through the gray region and out to the west. East and south of the river some roads and other items are shown, several of them also outside the gray region. The red pin is stuck next to a corner in one of the roads.]\n[Below the map is the name of the location at the red pin, and below that there are three lines of unreadable text:] Canyon River Nuclear Launch Facility\n[Below that there is broken line with text in the break, and below that follows 11 reviews with yellow stars to the left. The stars are either just outlines or colored completely, with the left one always being filled:] Reviews (22) [5 of 5 stars filled] Greatest country on earth [2 of 5 stars filled] Looks cool but you can't get in [1 of 5 stars filled] What is this store [4 of 5 stars filled] My cousin worked here [2 of 5 stars filled] Waitstaff heavily armed and very rude [1 of 5 stars filled] Stop doing chemtrails [1 of 5 stars filled] This place is a symptom of the military-industrial complex strangling our democracy and... (read full review-1184 words) [4 of 5 stars filled] Anyone else notice the hole in the west fence? [5 of 5 stars filled] Whoa, missiles! [3 of 5 stars filled] Good idea but confusing web site. How do I preorder? [1 of 5 stars filled] Please don't launch these\n[Caption below the panel:] I love finding reviews of places that really don't need to have reviews.\n"}
{"id":1804,"title":"Video Content","image_title":"Video Content","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1804","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/video_content.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1804:_Video_Content","transcript":"[From left to right: Hairy, Cueball, Megan and Hairbun sit around a conference table.] Cueball: Research shows young people like YouTube, so we should present news stories as videos instead of text! Megan: Good idea! Hairbun: They'll love that!\n[Caption below the panel:] Instead of arguing with newspapers about this, we should just tell them how much young people like making out and see what happens.\n","explanation":"This comic is a commentary on the growing publishing industry and their successful attempts at regaining an audience.\nNews media has evolved dramatically as the world entered the information era . Newspapers , which were at one point the most widely distributed and consumed form of media, have rapidly been eclipsed by new technologies such as television , Internet , and streaming video .  Subscriptions to paper-based media have been drastically declining to the point where many publishers are on the verge of shutting down.  While publishers are making an effort to move their content to newer, more popular forms of media, in many cases they are still clearly behind the times.\nThe comic illustrates one such example with Cueball suggesting presenting news stories as videos rather than text. This is presented and received by Megan , Hairbun and Hairy as a clever new idea that would appeal to young people based on the fact that they like watching YouTube videos. However, apparently no one in the comic has realized that television news programs have been filling such a niche for decades and that young people are just as uninterested. In fact, online video based news is often considered annoying, especially if autoplaying or if there is no text based alternative. In reality, this idea is not at all original and likely to be doomed to fail from the start.  As with many similar attempts, the new \"ideas\" that publishers are trying to adopt are merely cramming news content into things young people like, without really understanding why they like it and without considering whether news would be a good fit.\nIn the caption, Randall suggests it would be pointless to argue with newspaper publishers about their ideas.  Presumably Randall believes publishers who fall for those ideas are already out of touch with the new generation, and would not be able to understand why those ideas lack merit.  Instead, he suggests taking the trend to a ridiculous extreme, by telling publishers that young people like making out .  Suppose publishers follow the same pattern and try to cram news into this as well, they would end up creating some form of news program centered around making out.  The results may turn out completely laughable or highly entertaining.  If the former, it could serve as a wake-up call to publishers that they need to reconsider their approach.  If the latter, then it could actually become a trend and unexpectedly reinvigorate the industry.\nIn the title text it seems like the news agency actually consider this idea, or is at least confused enough to ask. Their interpretation of combining \"making out\" with news is to make it sexy, but the next speaker says that this has been tried before and doesn't work. This is likely a reference to Naked News (no link due to NSFW -ness), a news program that does that: it features attractive women delivering the news while simultaneously disrobing. This concept has not, for some reason, spread to the mainstream.\nAccording to the speaker, merely making the news sexy is not enough \u2013 the news content must be directly integrated into the making out; how this would be accomplished is as yet unclear.\nThe title text also dismisses the proposed name Mouth Content as possibly the title of a Neil Cicierega album, in reference to his recently-released Mouth Moods , as well as his prior albums Mouth Sounds and Mouth Silence .\n[From left to right: Hairy, Cueball, Megan and Hairbun sit around a conference table.] Cueball: Research shows young people like YouTube, so we should present news stories as videos instead of text! Megan: Good idea! Hairbun: They'll love that!\n[Caption below the panel:] Instead of arguing with newspapers about this, we should just tell them how much young people like making out and see what happens.\n"}
{"id":1805,"title":"Unpublished Discoveries","image_title":"Unpublished Discoveries","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1805","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unpublished_discoveries.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1805:_Unpublished_Discoveries","transcript":"[Ponytail walks up to Megan, who is sitting in an office chair at a desk using her laptop.] Ponytail: When you make a big scientific discovery, it takes a while to get it published. Ponytail: Right? Megan: Mm hmm.\n[Zoom-in on Ponytail.] Ponytail: So there are probably several research teams out there who are sitting on Nobel-Prize-worthy discoveries, but haven't told the rest of us yet. Megan (off-panel): Makes sense.\n[Ponytail leans over the desk, trying to see Megan's laptop screen from behind it.]\n[Ponytail leans further. Megan pulls the screen down so Ponytail cannot see it.] Ponytail: Sooo... What are you working on? Megan: It isn't me! Ponytail: I promise I won't tell. Megan: Shoo! Go bother someone else.\n","explanation":"Ponytail walks up to Megan , and makes the observation that when a scientific discovery is made, it then takes a while to publish it. She then goes on to note that there are probably research teams making \"Nobel-Prize-worthy\" discoveries that have simply not been published. She is obviously curious if Megan is working on something like this, and tries to see what Megan is working on, but Megan prevents her from seeing this by partly closing her laptop. Then Ponytail asks Megan what she is doing but Megan just tells her that she isn't the one working on a project like this and ask her to \"Go bother someone else.\"\nThis is not the first time Ponytail asks Megan if she is working on some groundbreaking research project: Back in 1067: Pressures , Ponytail was probing Megan about her work, since, as hinted by the caption of that comic, Megan is a Swiss patent clerk just like Albert Einstein . Ponytail thus assumes she has the same potential to produce Nobel-Prize-worthy work as him. While there is no clear indication that this comic should be a continuation of that comic or that Megan is a patent clerk, Ponytail still assumes Megan is on her way to a Nobel Prize - but that Megan is just not yet ready to announce her discovery to the public for one reason or another.\nIn the first two panels, Ponytail is referring to the general issue that, to publish a discovery on a scientific topic, it can take a very long time, especially when the discovery is \"Nobel-Prize-worthy\". Obviously the first step is for the researcher to demonstrate rigor by more supporting experiments (see 397: Unscientific ), plus summarize the discovery into the format accepted by the journal the paper is submitted too. The latter can take considerable time by itself, especially if the first journal the paper is submitted to declines publication. Because other journals chosen afterwards may have a completely different layout (for instance in physics, the journal with the greatest impact factor is Nature , then followed by for instance Science and then Physical Review Letters . All three have very different layouts regarding format and figures etc.) Thus the paper may need to be submitted to various journals until one accepts, which may also take a few months, and even when accepted it can take anywhere from 25 days to 150+ days just for the paper to be processed through the publishing system due to various reasons , including the nature of the publishing process, assigning extra work as conditions for acceptance, or even formatting problems. This has prompted researchers to come up with some interesting work-arounds .\nIn the title text, Megan claims that she is actually just trying to convert an emailed tax form to a PDF. This could of course just be to ward off any further attempts by Ponytail to spy on her \"real\" Nobel-worthy work. Megan sarcastically states that her conversion of tax forms is in the running for a Nobel Prize, perhaps because she considers it an incredibly difficult task (even for these things that should not be hard - see 1349: Shouldn't Be Hard ). While this could be true, this task is in no way connected to any kind of scientific endeavor, and as a result could never be considered for any kind of Nobel Prize. That the task is so difficult is though officially acknowledged by the IRS as they themselves note that saving and printing their Online tax forms could be tricky. Quote:\nFill-In Tax Forms The IRS also offers Free Fillable Forms which allow you to save (and print) the information you\u2019ve typed in online. The fill-in tax forms also require Adobe Acrobat Reader software. To save the data you\u2019ve filled in, use the Adobe Reader\u2019s \u201cSave\u201d function (not the web browser\u2019s \u201cSave\u201d function). ...\nThe months and weeks before April 15th (this comic was released on March 1st), is the \"tax season\" in the US so Americans are in the process of completing their tax forms, which is why this comic is timely. Given the US tax code is complained by many to be too complex , it is possible for researchers to delay publication of their discoveries to deal with their tax returns first. This can cause people to \"sit on their discovery\" for a while, although hopefully not as long as the task of publishing itself.\nA year after this comic, 1971: Personal Data became the second tax related comic to be released in March, close to the tax day, making it two years in a row. Also before these comics the trouble with tax returns was the joke in 1566: Board Game , but it was released in August.\n[Ponytail walks up to Megan, who is sitting in an office chair at a desk using her laptop.] Ponytail: When you make a big scientific discovery, it takes a while to get it published. Ponytail: Right? Megan: Mm hmm.\n[Zoom-in on Ponytail.] Ponytail: So there are probably several research teams out there who are sitting on Nobel-Prize-worthy discoveries, but haven't told the rest of us yet. Megan (off-panel): Makes sense.\n[Ponytail leans over the desk, trying to see Megan's laptop screen from behind it.]\n[Ponytail leans further. Megan pulls the screen down so Ponytail cannot see it.] Ponytail: Sooo... What are you working on? Megan: It isn't me! Ponytail: I promise I won't tell. Megan: Shoo! Go bother someone else.\n"}
{"id":1806,"title":"Borrow Your Laptop","image_title":"Borrow Your Laptop","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1806","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/borrow_your_laptop.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1806:_Borrow_Your_Laptop","transcript":"[White Hat walks toward Cueball's desk pointing at his laptop while looking back at Cueball standing behind him.] White Hat: Can I load it up on your laptop? Cueball: Sure! Cueball: Oh, just hit both shift keys to change over to QWERTY. Cueball: Caps lock is control. And spacebar is capslock. Cueball: And two-finger scroll moves through time instead of space. Cueball: And\u2013\n[Caption below the panel:] Once I've used a computer for a while, no one else will ever use it again.\nSupporters claim that typing speed is faster on a Dvorak keyboard, although this is still contentious, and this is a reason Randall often makes jokes about it as can be seen in the category referenced above.\nThe same problem would arise if the computer is set to another language than the keyboard layout, which often happens in countries where more than one language is common.\nNevertheless by doing some registry hacking (Windows) or editing configuration text files (UNIX\/Linux) it is possible to reach Cueball's approach. The simpler and operating system independent approach would be to use a programmable keyboard, such as a keyboard using QMK firmware [1] A typical classic configuration for the shift key in Windows is by pressing one of the shift keys five times in a row it turns on a Sticky Key notice, where the Ease of access center enables people with for instance only one hand to be able to reach Ctrl+Alt+Delete or other combinations on which two hands are needed.\n","explanation":"White Hat asks to borrow Cueball's laptop to view something (possibly a website). Cueball permits this, but immediately begins rattling off a list of very unusual key- and mouse-bindings that he has applied to the device. In the caption, Randall states that he himself tends to continually re-configure computers that he owns in weird ways, eventually rendering it unusable or at least unpleasant to use for others.\nOf the three items in Cueball's list of customizations only the first and half of the second seems like a real and relevant changes.\nAt first he has programmed the computer so that hitting both shift keys simultaneously will change the keyboard back to QWERTY. The QWERTY keyboard is the standard in the US (as well as some other places using the roman alphabet). This implies that Cueball prefers a different keyboard layout, (most likely the Dvorak keyboard layout, see trivia ), but doesn't need the printed letters to match up with those of the laptop. Cueball would have to make a special customization to make pressing the two shift key trigger this shift (see trivia ). Presumably Cueball can later return to this favorite layout by pressing the shift keys again.\nCueball tells, in the first part of the second point on the list, that he has changed his keyboard layout so that capslock acts as the control key (Ctrl). Swapping capslock and control is a common thing to do in the world of enlightened users on Unix or for users of the Emacs editor . The \"Caps Lock\" key (immediately to the left of the \"A\" in a traditional layout) is much easier to reach for a touch typist than the more out-of-the-way \"Ctrl\", and the latter is often used more frequently, especially by programmers.\nHowever, the second part where Cueball says he has then moved capslock so that it is activated when hitting the spacebar makes no sense. It is quite impractical, as the spacebar is the largest key and it will not gain anything from being used for anything other than spaces, especially not a rarely used key that locks into capital letter mode move when activated. It would make the common accidental application of capslock more likely. And what is worse he doesn't tell White Hat where he has put the space bar function, making it impossible to write a simple text, although he could try to see what the Ctrl keys does now...\nFinally Cueball goes out on a limb with an impossible setting, which is that his laptop is setup so that scrolling moves through time instead of through \"space\" (as in up and down on the screen). This refers to spacetime , a common model in relativistic physics. The feature in only activated when using two-finger scroll , which is often used on touchpads \/track pads for laptops as a gesture for scrolling. The title text may suggest that \"moving through time\" may pertain to undo\/redo, or perhaps browser history.\nFinally it becomes clear these three settings are not the only important changes, as Cueball's list continues with at least one other point which he doesn't get to finish in the comic. Thus the list may be much longer than four points.\nIn the title text Randall says that he would actually find a feature where the scroll wheel was mapped to send a stream of undo\/redo commands would be kind of cool. (Notice he is no longer talking about the two-finger scroll from the comic). But only if used with software that could keep up with such a feature. He thus indirectly states that many programs would not be be able to keep up. For an example of what this might look like, many digital artists record timelapse footage of their art, which could be thought of as a continuous string of redo commands (occasionally broken up by undo commands whenever the artist needs to correct a mistake).\nOutside of art programs, such continuous undo\/redo action would produce unexpected and chaotic results. This could also indicate that this was a similar feature that Cueball was referring to when talking about moving through time with the two finger scroll in the main comic. So not as in the computer traveling through time, but rather scrolling through the previous actions performed on the computer, as in moving through the computers past.\nPeople often have reasons to change their keyboard layouts on laptops, due to the reduced keyboard, which can leave vital keys out. Rather than change the keyboard layout all the time in order to access keys which are not accessible in one of the layouts, one can take advantage of text substitution and keyboard remapping programs to set shortcuts for keys they use often.\n[White Hat walks toward Cueball's desk pointing at his laptop while looking back at Cueball standing behind him.] White Hat: Can I load it up on your laptop? Cueball: Sure! Cueball: Oh, just hit both shift keys to change over to QWERTY. Cueball: Caps lock is control. And spacebar is capslock. Cueball: And two-finger scroll moves through time instead of space. Cueball: And\u2013\n[Caption below the panel:] Once I've used a computer for a while, no one else will ever use it again.\nSupporters claim that typing speed is faster on a Dvorak keyboard, although this is still contentious, and this is a reason Randall often makes jokes about it as can be seen in the category referenced above.\nThe same problem would arise if the computer is set to another language than the keyboard layout, which often happens in countries where more than one language is common.\nNevertheless by doing some registry hacking (Windows) or editing configuration text files (UNIX\/Linux) it is possible to reach Cueball's approach. The simpler and operating system independent approach would be to use a programmable keyboard, such as a keyboard using QMK firmware [1] A typical classic configuration for the shift key in Windows is by pressing one of the shift keys five times in a row it turns on a Sticky Key notice, where the Ease of access center enables people with for instance only one hand to be able to reach Ctrl+Alt+Delete or other combinations on which two hands are needed.\n"}
{"id":1807,"title":"Listening","image_title":"Listening","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1807","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/listening.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1807:_Listening","transcript":"[Black Hat and Danish enter Cueball and Ponytail's house. They have hardly passed the door mat, with the door still open showing the road and another house outside.] Ponytail: Hello, welcome to our house! Black Hat: Thanks for inviting us! Black Hat: Alexa, order two tons of creamed corn. Black Hat: Alexa, confirm purchase.\n[Caption below the frame:] When visiting a new house, it's good to check whether they have an always-on device transmitting your conversations somewhere.\n","explanation":"This comic depicts Cueball and Ponytail welcoming Black Hat and Danish to their house. Black Hat immediately talks to Amazon Alexa to order two tons of creamed corn . This would be quite expensive (around $10,000), and the hosts would be charged because it was ordered on their Amazon Echo device. It would also be a serious inconvenience, as the purchase would be quite bulky and useless, seeing as an average person would have very little use for two tons of creamed corn. [ citation needed ]\nThe caption claims that this is an effort to find systems recording conversations, such as Alexa or Google Home , for the security of the guests , so they aren't being monitored by an always-on listening device without their consent (at least not without any consequences). However, because Black Hat is the one coming up with this it's more likely his motives are on the sadistic side, and it's more likely a warning for the hosts to turn off any voice-activated systems before having guests come over, so that the guests don't take advantage of them. (It should also be noted that such purchasing services encourage the user to set up a PIN code to stem off such exploits.)\nA concerned \"visitor\" may also want to test for voice-activated systems when near any persons carrying an iPhone or Android mobile device, because these are also always-on listening devices. \"Hey Siri\" and \"Ok Google\" voice activation use the same technology as \"Alexa\" and \"Echo\" detection.\nThe title text says that this takes care of the \"host gift thing\", referring to the custom where house guests give a gift to the hosts. However, Black Hat is making the hosts pay for it, so it can be as expensive as he wants, thus making this yet another example of his being a classhole . For more examples of this, see the trivia below.\n[Black Hat and Danish enter Cueball and Ponytail's house. They have hardly passed the door mat, with the door still open showing the road and another house outside.] Ponytail: Hello, welcome to our house! Black Hat: Thanks for inviting us! Black Hat: Alexa, order two tons of creamed corn. Black Hat: Alexa, confirm purchase.\n[Caption below the frame:] When visiting a new house, it's good to check whether they have an always-on device transmitting your conversations somewhere.\n"}
{"id":1808,"title":"Hacking","image_title":"Hacking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1808","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hacking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1808:_Hacking","transcript":"[Ponytail is writing on her laptop at her desk while Cueball looks over her shoulder.] Ponytail: You know how sometimes people put a space in their email address to make it harder to harvest? Cueball: Yeah? Ponytail: They have a tool that can delete the space! Cueball: Oh my god.\n[Caption below the panel:] Less-dramatic revelations from the CIA hacking dump\n","explanation":"This comic is referencing an incident on the day before this comic was released, March 7, 2017, in which WikiLeaks exposed thousands of hacking exploits (thus the title) and programs from the CIA (see for instance this article: WikiLeaks Just Dumped a Mega-Trove of CIA Hacking Secrets ). Many of the tools that were in the leak were similar to publicly available tools, or not entirely unexpected, with several coming from sites such as StackOverflow and Reddit .\nThe main joke in this comic refers to the common practice of adding spaces between parts of an email address when publishing them on websites.  For example, \" [email\u00a0protected] \" may be written as \"john dot doe at example dot org\".  The purported goal of doing this is to thwart page scraping bots from harvesting the correct email addresses and prevent them from becoming the target of spam or being sold as address lists for email marketers.\nIn this comic, Ponytail tells Cueball that the CIA has a tool which can delete such spaces. Such a tool can fix the space and most likely convert the words \"dot\" and \"at\" into their respective symbols. This will overcome the problems faced by harvesting tools, and make these email addresses more prone to receive spam.\nCueball appears shocked to hear this news, but given the caption below, stating that this was one of the less dramatic revelations from the CIA hacking dump, this is likely sarcasm by Cueball (and Randall ). In fact, it is quite simple to devise a program which detects and converts\/removes such spaces; it's naive to believe that one can prevent e-mail addresses from being harvested just by writing the addresses with space or omitting @ etc. Some people might not realize that he's being sarcastic, though, and that misunderstanding might be part of the joke.\nThe title text lists three other undramatic (fictitious) hacking exploits which sound more interesting, but are still more or less useless, and certainly not dramatic news. They are:\n[Ponytail is writing on her laptop at her desk while Cueball looks over her shoulder.] Ponytail: You know how sometimes people put a space in their email address to make it harder to harvest? Cueball: Yeah? Ponytail: They have a tool that can delete the space! Cueball: Oh my god.\n[Caption below the panel:] Less-dramatic revelations from the CIA hacking dump\n"}
{"id":1809,"title":"xkcd Phone 5","image_title":"xkcd Phone 5","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1809","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_phone_5.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1809:_xkcd_Phone_5","transcript":"[An image of a smartphone with a common optical camera lens attached on its back is shown. Over the entire length the case is slightly rounded. There are several features visible as bottom like features at the top and bottom of the front as well a microphone like slit at the top. A sliding switch is visible on the side, and at the bottom there is a knob, a connector port and a small slit. Clockwise starting from the top left all the labels read:] Hook shot Bluetooth speaker Stained-glass display Gallium chassis remains solid up to 85\u00b0F Soundproof Can feel pain E-ZPass partnership: Phone can be dropped into coin basket to pay tolls Foldable (once) Screen transfers images to skin Retina storage Background task automatically catches and eats Pok\u00e9mon Supercuts partnership: Trims hair fed into charging port Squelch knob IBM buckling-spring home button Cot-caught merger switch 60x optical zoom camera LORAN navigation 28-factor authentication\n[Below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd Phone 5 We're trying to catch up to Apple but refuse to skip numbers \u00aeTM\n","explanation":"This is the fifth entry in the ongoing xkcd Phone series , and once again, the comic plays with many standard tech buzzwords, and horribly misuses all of them, to create a phone that sounds impressive but self-evidently isn't to even the most ignorant customer. The previous comic in the series 1707: xkcd Phone 4 was released almost 8 months before this one and the next 1889: xkcd Phone 6 was released 7 months later.\nThe slogan beneath the phone, \"We're trying to catch up to Apple but refuse to skip numbers\", is a reference to inconsistent product numbering, such as Samsung releasing the Note 7 after the Note 5 , likely in an attempt to catch up to the numbering of either the iPhone or Galaxy S series, both of which were already at 7. Similarly, there was also no official iPhone 2 . But there is an xkcd Phone 2 available. The trademark sign behind the word \"numbers\" possibly indicates a reference to the Apple spreadsheet app with the same name.\nThis phone seems to have a curved display. But the edges are curved down and not up, as they are on other curved phones.\nThe title text that says that the phone will be returned to you by the toll operators is a reference to E-ZPass partnership feature; see explanation in the table regarding that feature.\nHook shot\nIn The Legend of Zelda the Hookshot is a recurring weapon\/tool.  It is a machine consisting of a chain and hook. When used, the chain extends and sends the hook which is attached to it. It is used to bring items to Link or bring Link closer to a goal ( Link is the name shared by the main protagonists, each possessing the Spirit of the Hero). Likely a reference to new video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild , which was released a week prior to this comic (ironically, that game does not feature the Hookshot).\nIn the comic the hook shot is shown as a small port upon the phone's top; the hook itself is not visible, suggesting it is contained in the device until use. Most Hookshots in the game series are large enough to be grasped in or encompass the hand, with the hook being large and extending out of the tool even without use. The size of the port and absence of the hook before use implies a very small hook and a very thin chain, making it impractical for use in either of the tool's functions.\nBluetooth speaker\nBluetooth speakers are often used to play audio from a smartphone wirelessly, usually with more volume and better quality than the phone's small built-in speaker can provide. Embedding a bluetooth speaker into the phone would allow the phone to play audio from outside sources through its built-in speaker, which could be useful if no better speakers were available but would generally be avoided given the previously noted limitations of phone speakers. This is perhaps a jab at the current trend of playing music or Internet content audibly in public through the tiny, tinny speaker embedded in most phones. The Bluetooth speaker is located in the normal place for a phone's speaker.\nStained-glass display\nStained glass is colored glass, traditionally used for decorative windows in buildings most often churches. It is generally much thicker and because of the color much less transparent, especially for some colors, than the glass types normally used for touch-screens, making the phone difficult to use as it would remove some of the colors shown on the screen below the glass. A typical feature noticed about the glass for real phones would be its strength, as in work phones for construction workers.\nGallium chassis remains solid up to 85\u00b0F\nMany high-end electronic devices have chassis made of alloys of light metals such as magnesium or titanium rather than steel or plastic . Besides being lightweight and of superior quality and durability than ordinary sheet steel or cheap plastic, these are often perceived as bragging points by the users, boasting about 'rare' metal chassis.\nGallium , however, is an uncommon metal with a very low melting point of 85\u00a0\u00b0F (or 29.8\u00a0\u00b0C), making it one of only four pure metals (along with mercury , rubidium and caesium ) that can be liquid around room temperature. Because the melting point is lower than the average human body temperature of 98.6\u00a0\u00b0F (37\u00a0\u00b0C) a gallium smartphone chassis would melt in the user's bare hand, assuming it hadn't already done so due to heat produced by its internal components. Even if the electronics had good heat management, cooling in smartphones is normally accomplished by distributing heat to the case, not exhausting it.\nA similar real advertisement regarding the chassis would be that it was waterproof down to some depth (say, 85 feet or 25 meters). See also the feature below regarding this.\nSoundproof\nA Soundproof chassis could result in the unwanted effect that the speakers and microphone may not work as no sound may enter or leave the phones chassis. A more likely feature would be waterproof (see above point).\nCan feel pain\nPossibly a reference to intelligent personal assistants like Siri , Cortana or Alexa gaining consciousness (see 1807: Listening for the latter). Such artificial intelligence references is a recurring subject on xkcd.\nThis could mean that either the phone feels pain for damages inflicted upon it or it feels the user's pain level (regarding either physical and\/or emotional pain).  The meaning would quickly become apparent for the user if the chassis melts on contact with exposed skin leaving the phone with \"open wounds\".\nThis could be seen as a similar feature of the first xkcd phone, 1363: xkcd Phone , where the title text notices (among many other things) that the phone will drown if submerged in water. A similar thing is also mentioned for 1549: XKCD Phone 3 . That phone is waterproof but can drown . Since this phone is soundproof but not waterproof, per the two points above, the drowning issue may still be relevant. The second phone, 1465: xkcd Phone 2 , cries when lost a similar display of emotions\/feelings. That phone also mentions waterproofing, but here it is only the interior, and although it is washable, it is only a one-time feature (like the fold-ability of this one; see two points below). Finally it also 1707: xkcd Phone 4 mentions that it is waterproof, but not between 30-50 m down...\nE-ZPass partnership Phone can be dropped into coin basket to pay tolls\nE-ZPass is an electronic toll collection system. The vehicle drives through the toll lane without stopping, and sensors detect the pass and deduct the appropriate amount from the user's account. The phone's integration with E-ZPass is absurd since the phone needs to be dropped into a coin basket to work. Not only would you have to stop in order to throw the phone into the coin basket, which defies the idea of E-ZPass, but you would also lose your phone.\nIn the title text , however, it says that the phone will be retrieved by the toll operators and returned by mail within 4\u20136 weeks. So this slightly mitigates the problem of losing the phone, but there would be about a month where the phone could not be used.\nFoldable (once)\nAlmost anything long and slim can be \"folded\" by simply snapping it in half. But as it says, this can only be done once, because the phone cannot be unsnapped and will not work any more once it has been folded.\nThis is a reference to the rumors of the new Samsung Galaxy X that is really foldable like a piece of rubber. See this video .\nIt could also refer to the fact that a version of iPhone had a weak spot that lead it to easily folding and breaking. And it could be a reference to flip phones .\nScreen transfers images to skin\nTransferring images to the skin sounds like either real tattoos or the water tattoos used by children or other kinds of temporary tattoos . Likely it should be understood that it would be possible to transfer the image displayed on the screen to your skin, hopefully when activating the feature rather than by accident, and, preferably, also not permanently. This may also be a reference to the experimental Cicret Bracelet's ability to project images onto your arm: [1]\nRetina storage\nThis is a play on the name of Apple's prized \" Retina Display \". The joke may be in reference to Apple's possession of a trademark for the word \"retina\" in regards to computer equipment, which is made to seem absurd by the unusual use. It is not made clear whose retinas are meant to be stored. It could also be a reference to retinally implanted computers. The retina storage is a slot at the bottom of the phone right of the charging port.\nBackground task automatically catches and eats Pok\u00e9mon\nA reference to Pok\u00e9mon Go , an augmented reality game where the goal is to go to specific locations and play a mini-game in order to catch virtual creatures called Pok\u00e9mon (see 1705: Pok\u00e9mon Go ). This phone apparently catches Pok\u00e9mon automatically, similar to the external device Pok\u00e9mon Go Plus . However, this feature also eats them, which is something that is not part of the game and wouldn't be desirable, as it is about collection and storing as many different Pok\u00e9mon as possible. It could be a coincidence, but it seems funny that the label for this background feature is the only one that points at the back of the phone.\nSupercuts partnership Trims hair fed into charging port\nSupercuts is an American hair salon chain that provides hair cuts and styling.  The implication here is that the user can get a haircut by Supercuts by sticking hair into the charging slot. This is not only impractical and would only work for hair long enough to be fed into the port, but it would most likely result in a bad haircut. Also the slot would soon be filled with hair. The charging slot is otherwise placed in the normal spot and looks like a regular charging port.\nThis feature could actually be quite dangerous if the hair is not removed from the charging slot afterwards because the hair could melt or catch fire inside the phone.\nSquelch knob\nSquelch is a feature of radios (CB, ham, scanner, etc) which quiets background noise when no usable signal is present.  It cuts off audio completely when only noise is present.  As different environments can have differing levels of background noise, an adjusment such as a knob is required to set the level at which the squelch circuit deactivates and lets audio through (\"opening\" or \"breaking\" the squelch). This feature already exists in audio call software but hardwiring it to a knob on the outside of the phone is probably excessive. For a smartphone, perhaps this knob could control the \"signal-to-noise\" ratio of your Facebook feed or other social media platforms. It takes the place of the headphone jack, replacing the normal hole with a small knob.\nIBM buckling-spring Home button\nIBM buckling-spring keyboards are favorites of geeks for the feeling of quality and auditory feedback (keys click loudly when pressed) they provide. Real smartphones' home buttons, typically located exactly as in this image, provide little to no such satisfaction when pressed.\nCot-caught merger switch\nThis is a reference to the cot\u2013caught merger , a linguistic change happening among English speakers, particularly in some parts of North America and the British Isles, which causes caught (previously pronounced \"kawt\") to be pronounced the same as cot (pronounced \"kot\"). The switch is clearly visible on the side of the phone. A real feature physically similar to this is the slide switch on the iPhone and iPad, allowing the user to (un)lock the orientation of the screen or to (un)mute the device.\n60x optical zoom camera\nA powerful optical zoom lens is usually a desirable feature for cameras. However, as shown in the comic, it results in very bulky lens. If 60\u00d7 zoom should be achieved the lens needs to be as big as shown on the backside of the phone, and the whole idea of being able to carry the smartphone easily in a pocket would be defied.\nFor that reason, such lenses are never used in smartphones, although rarely some devices, like the Samsung Galaxy Camera , use a smaller lens with a similar design. But this is no longer a smartphone.\nThis feature would seem to be a jab at the variety of add-on devices, including close-up lenses, handles, and external flashes, that are currently in use to enhance the phone's ability to function like a camera (and the selfie stick ).\nSome phones might instead mention their digital zoom level instead. But that is not a popular feature among photo enthusiasts, as digital zooming gains no additional optical resolution. Users would actually be better off using the maximum optical zoom, and then enlarging their images with photo-editing software, which might offer better, but slower, algorithms (e.g. linear resampling versus Lanczos resampling ). Likewise, (mobile phone) cameras are often advertised with their high number of megapixels , while retaining their small image sensor size . As each individual sensor gets less light, it creates more image noise .\nRandall has made several comics about cameras before; see for instance 1719: Superzoom and other comics linked via this.\nContrast the EasyMacro band - 4x zoom with little appreciable thickness.\nAssuming 60x is referring to the base focal length of the iPhone and that the xkcd Phone 5 has the same dimensions as the iPhone 7 Plus then in 35mm format this lens would be 30-1800mm f\/0.4-f\/24. This is a completely infeasible (but not physically impossible) lens in 35mm format, but similar small format lenses (albeit with more reasonable aperture ranges) do exist in mass production, for example the Nikon P900.\nLORAN navigation\nLORAN (Long Range Navigation) was a precursor to modern GPS navigation, using land-based transmitters. Once developed for sea shipping, it is accurate to about 300 meters (1,000 feet). The joke, of course, is that all modern smartphones have integrated GPS navigation which is far more accurate. Due to the much lower frequencies involved, reception of LORAN signals though is much better in areas with obstructed view of the sky. However LORAN has been decommissioned more or less completely since before 2000.\nIncidentally, some receivers of the Decca Navigator System (which operates on a similar principle as LORAN) featured moving map displays, something we associate with modern GPS devices.\n28-factor authentication\nAn authentication factor is a way of proving one's identity. There are 3 generally recognized forms : something you know, something you have, and something you are. It can be a password, a fingerprint, a physical key, etc.... Secure applications may include two or more factors; a common example is the \"PIN and chip\" system used with credit cards, where you need both the card and secret code to authorize a transaction. Many online services now provide two-factor authentication to protect against password-based attacks. 28-factor authentication would likely be very secure in theory but also so impractical that it would be unusable. The user will need to prove their identity 28 different ways which would be so time consuming that would outweigh the convenience of a smart phone. A 2-factor smoke detector was soon after mentioned in one of the tips in 1820: Security Advice .\n[An image of a smartphone with a common optical camera lens attached on its back is shown. Over the entire length the case is slightly rounded. There are several features visible as bottom like features at the top and bottom of the front as well a microphone like slit at the top. A sliding switch is visible on the side, and at the bottom there is a knob, a connector port and a small slit. Clockwise starting from the top left all the labels read:] Hook shot Bluetooth speaker Stained-glass display Gallium chassis remains solid up to 85\u00b0F Soundproof Can feel pain E-ZPass partnership: Phone can be dropped into coin basket to pay tolls Foldable (once) Screen transfers images to skin Retina storage Background task automatically catches and eats Pok\u00e9mon Supercuts partnership: Trims hair fed into charging port Squelch knob IBM buckling-spring home button Cot-caught merger switch 60x optical zoom camera LORAN navigation 28-factor authentication\n[Below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd Phone 5 We're trying to catch up to Apple but refuse to skip numbers \u00aeTM\n"}
{"id":1810,"title":"Chat Systems","image_title":"Chat Systems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1810","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chat_systems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1810:_Chat_Systems","transcript":"[An Euler diagram with many circle like drawings for various chat systems is shown. Some circles overlapping others in complicated ways, others are single circles with no connections, but most are embedded into others. Inside the circles mainly the standard sticky figures like Cueball, Megan, Ponytail and Hairy are shown but there are also a few others.]\n[The list of items and its intersections from left top to right bottom is:] Skype - none, Email Email - none, Skype, SMS, Slack, Hangouts, IRC, ICQ, iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Zephyr, FB Messenger, Instagram DM, BBM, Telegram, Twitter DM SMS - none, Email, Slack, Hangouts, IRC, Snapchat, iMessage, Signal, WeChat, WhatsApp, Zephyr, FB Messenger, Instagram DM, Peach, BBM, Twitter DM AIM - none Slack - Email, SMS, Hangouts, IRC, Signal Hangouts - Email, SMS, Slack, IRC, Signal IRC - Email, SMS, Slack, Hangouts, Signal Snapchat - SMS ICQ - Email iMessage - Email, SMS, Signal, FB Messenger Signal - Email, SMS, Slack, Hangouts, IRC, iMessage, Zephyr, Instagram DM WeChat - SMS WhatsApp - Email, SMS Zephyr - Email, SMS, Signal FB Messenger - Email, SMS, iMessage Instagram DM - Email, SMS, Signal Peach - SMS BBM - Email, SMS Telegram - none, Email Twitter DM - none, Email, SMS The \"chat\" tab in an old Google Doc - none Apache Request Log - none Wall (Unix) - none Wall (bathroom) - none\n[Caption below the panel:] I have a hard time keeping track of which contacts use which chat systems.\n","explanation":"The comic consists of an Euler diagram showing a wide variety of chat systems and their intersections. (Euler diagrams should not be confused with Venn diagrams , see more on this here ). The comic demonstrates the complexity that can be involved in modern communications: simply remembering how to get in touch with someone can be a challenge.\nBelow is a table with explanation for all 24 mentioned chat systems and below that a list of each system's intersections with the other systems. Several of the systems are already considered old, like The \"chat\" tab in an old Google Doc , but some people keep using them, which is part of the joke. There only seems to be one \"chat\" system which could in no way be said to be an on-line chat system, and that is the Wall (bathroom) at the bottom, which refers to how people writes notes on public bathroom walls, making it an extra joke and possibly a reference to 229: Graffiti .\nIn the title text, Randall explains how he is one of the only few Instagram users to use the UNIX 'talk' gateway (an old peer-to-peer chat system whereby users logged into the same UNIX system could privately communicate with each other in a full-screen interface.) But he doesn't tell how he had enhanced this old fashioned software.\nNote that this is similar to the earlier 949: File Transfer .\nThe 24 chat systems with the number of stick figures inside are listed. Notice there are only 23 real systems, as one of the systems is a bathroom wall.\n[An Euler diagram with many circle like drawings for various chat systems is shown. Some circles overlapping others in complicated ways, others are single circles with no connections, but most are embedded into others. Inside the circles mainly the standard sticky figures like Cueball, Megan, Ponytail and Hairy are shown but there are also a few others.]\n[The list of items and its intersections from left top to right bottom is:] Skype - none, Email Email - none, Skype, SMS, Slack, Hangouts, IRC, ICQ, iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Zephyr, FB Messenger, Instagram DM, BBM, Telegram, Twitter DM SMS - none, Email, Slack, Hangouts, IRC, Snapchat, iMessage, Signal, WeChat, WhatsApp, Zephyr, FB Messenger, Instagram DM, Peach, BBM, Twitter DM AIM - none Slack - Email, SMS, Hangouts, IRC, Signal Hangouts - Email, SMS, Slack, IRC, Signal IRC - Email, SMS, Slack, Hangouts, Signal Snapchat - SMS ICQ - Email iMessage - Email, SMS, Signal, FB Messenger Signal - Email, SMS, Slack, Hangouts, IRC, iMessage, Zephyr, Instagram DM WeChat - SMS WhatsApp - Email, SMS Zephyr - Email, SMS, Signal FB Messenger - Email, SMS, iMessage Instagram DM - Email, SMS, Signal Peach - SMS BBM - Email, SMS Telegram - none, Email Twitter DM - none, Email, SMS The \"chat\" tab in an old Google Doc - none Apache Request Log - none Wall (Unix) - none Wall (bathroom) - none\n[Caption below the panel:] I have a hard time keeping track of which contacts use which chat systems.\n"}
{"id":1811,"title":"Best-Tasting Colors","image_title":"Best-Tasting Colors","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1811","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/best_tasting_colors.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1811:_Best-Tasting_Colors","transcript":"[Caption above the chart:] Best-Tasting Colors\n[Below the caption there is a scale with two large ticks (with labels written above) at either end and seven smaller ticks in between for nine ticks in total. The labels:] Bad Good\n[Below the scale to the left is a numbered list of ten colors. Black double arrows goes under the scale. On the arrows there are labeled points, but there is also questions marks and other exceptions where text is not pointing to a point. Labels appear both above and below the arrows, but here the text is listed as it appears on the scale from left (bad) to right (good):] 1. Pink - Watermelon,\u00a0???, Cotton candy 2. Red - Raspberry, Cherry, Strawberry 3. Blue -\u00a0???, Blue raspberry,\u00a0??? 4. Green - Lime, Mint, Pistachio??, Watermelon, Green apple 5. White -\u00a0???, White chocolate,\u00a0???, Vanilla,\u00a0??? 6. Brown - Coffee, Caramel ? [However you feel about chocolate]\u00a0? 7. Orange - Orange, Creamsicle 8. Yellow - Popcorn?!, Lemon 9. Purple - Grape 10. Black - Licorice\n\n\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall rates colors based on tastiness of various flavors, which makes it very similar to 388: Fuck Grapefruit .  The colors are sorted in descending order (from most tasty to least tasty) by the midpoint of their overall taste range.\nWithin each color, several individual items are placed at points marked by dots along a tastiness scale, with nine ticks ranging from bad (1) to good (9). For example, within the pink color band at the very top, watermelon is only rated 6\/9 \u2014 much less tasty than cotton candy, which is almost at 9\/9, making it the very best tasting flavor in the chart. Interestingly, watermelon is mentioned twice, as it is also listed under green. Usually people do not eat the green part of a watermelon, so it is strange that Randall has rated both types at almost the same level of tastiness. It could be that he sees the green watermelon as green, but also sees the pink fruit inside, so it is actually the pink fruit that is rated for both colors, or the chart is a rating of candy (such as jellybean or popsicle) flavors, as it is not uncommon for both green and pink to represent watermelon in those situations.\nFor pink, blue and white there are one, two and three regions, respectively labeled with \"???\". It is not clear what the purpose of these is. Perhaps they indicate regions in which Randall is unable to think of any examples, and is inviting the reader to speculate. For instance, are there any pink-colored foods more tasty than watermelon (6\/9) but less tasty than cotton candy (8.5\/9)? It could also be that he thinks there must be other interesting foods with this color, which could seem to be the case for white and blue, where there are a group of question marks above the most tasty labeled flavor blue raspberries and vanilla for white.  The latter is yet a joke, as vanilla is black, but is often used in white food such as vanilla ice, which he may have been thinking off, or just again messes with his readers.\nThe question marks thus imply an arbitrary tastiness assigned to a color that is not derived from an actual data point, however. For instance, the only blue datapoint is \"blue raspberry\", assigned a ranking of 5.5. But the range assigned to blue as a whole is 4 to 8. The regions on either side of the blue raspberry dot are labeled with\u00a0???.\nThere are a few exceptions with chocolate the most obvious as Randall makes a wide range for chocolate for brown, ranging from 2.5-9.5 out of 9. And the arrows here ends in single question marks indicating that the range could be even longer. In the title text he acknowledges the fact chocolate is its own thing and that regarding its taste reasonable people may differ in opinion.\nThe region for chocolate could not go further down because below the section for chocolate for brown food, there is another range with some other brown food items that Randall really does not like, caramel and especially coffee at 1.5\/9. It may seem that Randall has never grown up to drink the drinks that society often dictates that you should drink. Not drinking Coffee (or hating it when you do) can be a problem with all the coffee breaks and meetings held over coffee etc. And as Randall has shown in 1534: Beer he also doesn't like beer...\nAlthough it is not so clear as with chocolate pistachio is also split up with three lines indicating a range on the green from about 5 to 7 without any assigned point to their taste. And finally popcorn at 1.5\/9 simply falls below the otherwise already low and slim rating range for yellow foods (2.5-3.5) with only lemon at 3\/9 included. Many people love popcorn, but not especially for the corns actual taste, which is non existing if not for the adding of salt or sugar or other additives.\nThe worst taste by far to Randall, though, is licorice, and black food has a very small range from almost below 1 to less than 1.5. In USA it seems few people like licorice (although as most of the other mentioned food items, it may come in a wide variety of flavors and strengths). But in for instance northern Europe (Scandinavia) many people love it. See more explanations for all the mentioned flavors in the table below. It also seems that Randall's taste has changed over the nine years since the grapefruit comic.\nIn the title text, Randall asserts that his rankings of colors and flavors are indisputable (with the exception of chocolate). This together with rather obscure flavors included (\"blue raspberry\", \"creamsicle\") rather than more obvious choices, such as banana for yellow and carrot for orange could be a jab at the reception of his first food ranking comic, 388: Fuck Grapefruit which ranked fruits based on their tastiness and ease of consumption. Randall claims that it is the most controversial piece he has ever published. So all this is maybe just a way to generate even more controversy about this comic, and based on the discussion below he may have succeeded.\nIn 882: Significant researchers were studying the effect of eating 20 differently colored types of jelly beans (and all colors here are included except white).\n[Caption above the chart:] Best-Tasting Colors\n[Below the caption there is a scale with two large ticks (with labels written above) at either end and seven smaller ticks in between for nine ticks in total. The labels:] Bad Good\n[Below the scale to the left is a numbered list of ten colors. Black double arrows goes under the scale. On the arrows there are labeled points, but there is also questions marks and other exceptions where text is not pointing to a point. Labels appear both above and below the arrows, but here the text is listed as it appears on the scale from left (bad) to right (good):] 1. Pink - Watermelon,\u00a0???, Cotton candy 2. Red - Raspberry, Cherry, Strawberry 3. Blue -\u00a0???, Blue raspberry,\u00a0??? 4. Green - Lime, Mint, Pistachio??, Watermelon, Green apple 5. White -\u00a0???, White chocolate,\u00a0???, Vanilla,\u00a0??? 6. Brown - Coffee, Caramel ? [However you feel about chocolate]\u00a0? 7. Orange - Orange, Creamsicle 8. Yellow - Popcorn?!, Lemon 9. Purple - Grape 10. Black - Licorice\n\n\n"}
{"id":1812,"title":"Onboarding","image_title":"Onboarding","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1812","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/onboarding.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1812:_Onboarding","transcript":"[Beret Guy shakes hands with Ponytail in front of a building while he points at the two large double doors under an unreadable sign.] Beret Guy: Hi! Welcome to the team! Beret Guy: We do business here and we'll turn into dirt later.\n[Beret Guy and Ponytail walk by three bikes.] Beret Guy: This is our main campus. Beret Guy: We have a free bikeshare system, at least until whoever owns those bikes finds out.\n[Beret Guy points forward as they walk on.] Beret Guy: The LaserJet is over there, and the printer is over there. Beret Guy: You can't use it right now; it's been printing an infinite-scroll webpage since 2013.\n[Zoom in on their heads.] Beret Guy: Restrooms are all-digital - no pipes. Beret Guy: The WiFi is very fast, but cursed. Beret Guy: Our server room is carbon-neutral but produces bismuth constantly.\n[Beret Guy has turned towards an off-panel Ponytail holding a hand out towards her.] Beret Guy: You'll be working on our infrastructure, which is currently maintained by Lin-Manuel Miranda.\n[Zoom out to both facing each other. From the right singing is heard from off-panel, as indicated with two musical notes.] Ponytail: ...The songwriter? Is he also an engineer? Beret Guy: Nope, huge misunderstanding on our part. Cost a fortune. But he's really nice and it makes karaoke nights fun. Lin-Manuel Miranda (off-panel): How far I'll gooo\n","explanation":"This is another one of Beret Guy's mysterious businesses , in which he shows new employee Ponytail around the building in which the company resides. The process of showing a new employee around the business and starting to get them introduced to people and systems and procedures is often referred to as \" onboarding \" - hence the title of the comic.\nThe first panel starts out as a typical welcoming of the new employee to a small indie business. Very quickly, however, Beret Guy's explanation jumps to an existential viewpoint. Very rarely do conversations or introductions involve discussing the eventual fate of our bodies, and certainly not in a professional light as in this comic. Beret Guy, however, has no problem with discussing death and decay as just part of his business. This seemingly contradicts the title text in 1493: Meeting , where it is claimed that employees of the company can not physically die. However, this could be a new company he has started since then. Alternatively, this is a literal statement, perhaps related to the cursed Wi-Fi mentioned later in the comic.\nIn the second panel, Beret Guy shows Ponytail the free bikeshare system this business apparently has in place. Bikesharing is a system in which many users share one or more bikes among themselves. Typically the bikes belong to some of the members of the group who are allowing them to be used by other members who may not have one, but Beret Guy calmly remarks that this system will only exist \"until whoever owns those bikes finds out\", implying that they were not donated or shared by any member of the group, but are being used without permission or the knowledge of the true owner of the bikes. This is, thus, not actually a bikeshare, and would be more properly described as theft.\nIn the third panel, Beret Guy shows Ponytail that the laserjet is over there and the printer is over there, thus indicating that  the laserjet is not a printer. This is a bit disconcerting, since the HP LaserJet is in fact a common brand of laser printer , suggesting that his laserjet may be some rather more exotic device, such as a laser-propelled jet aircraft . In any case, however, the printer is not available, as it's been printing an infinite-scroll web page since 2013.\nAn infinite-scrolling web page is a web page that, as the name implies, seems to have no end. This style of webpage typically has no definite pages or sections, but instead continues to feed data to the screen as the user scrolls. In reality, trying to print one of these would only print the current section the user was viewing, and even if it was somehow able to infinitely print, the operator could theoretically cancel the operation at any time. Presumably, this continuous printing serves some useful purpose, e.g. prints latest news, because someone would have to be refilling the paper for the printer to have kept running this long; it would have run out of paper long ago otherwise.  Mistaken print jobs are sometimes notoriously difficult to stop due to many levels of buffering (application, printer driver, OS spooler, print server, printer device) and lapses in job control software.\nInfinite scrolling (in the sense of an annoying UI design style for browsing large but finite documents) was previously covered in 1309: Infinite Scrolling . A similar separation of the phrase \"laserjet printer\" has been explored in 1681: Laser Products .\nIn the fourth panel, Beret Guy makes three more remarks.\nRestrooms are all-digital\u2014no pipes. While many technology standards nowadays are entirely digital, one's restroom is one of the things that most definitely should not be. A restroom without pipes would have no way to bring water in and transfer wastes away, and would most certainly be at the very least an unpleasant encounter. (It's implied that the waste is being transferred digitally, although this is obviously impossible .) This could also be a pun joking with the fact that a common (in the past and reappearing recently) technology in sound amplifiers is the use of tubes, but nowadays most sound amplifiers are all-digital. So a \"latest technology\" restroom cannot have pipes (synonym of tubes) and has to be all-digital.\nThe Wi-Fi is very fast, but cursed. Fast Wi-Fi is certainly desirable, but in this case, he claims it is also cursed. Whether the curse is a side-effect of the fast Wi-Fi or totally unrelated is left unsaid, as well as what the curse is. This could possibly be a joke relating to American slang: all technology can behave inexplicably from time to time, and Wi-Fi is notorious for randomly losing connection -- this is often exaggerated and called \"cursed\". Knowing Beret Guy, though, it's probably literal , perhaps purchased from one of the \" mysterious shops that sell you magical items, and then it turns out they're cursed\" .\nOur server room is carbon-neutral but produces bismuth constantly. Normally, carbon-neutral would mean that it is designed to be environmentally friendly by reducing and offsetting its carbon emissions enough that it has no net effect on the environment. The term is a little bit confusing because the meaning is of course carbon-dioxide-neutral. But while carbon is not a common material used in servers, bismuth is used as lead replacement in some solders . While this replacement is often used because of the toxicity of lead , in this case it refers to an IBM mainframe computer where the Bi 58 Sn 42 alloy is used because of its low temperature soldering characteristics. So producing bismuth would destroy all the electric connections in the server. An alternative explanation is a compact nuclear reactor in the server room which can both make the server room carbon-neutral and leak bismuth (by creating it in the reactor).\nIn the last two panels, Beret Guy explains that Ponytail will be working on the infrastructure, which is apparently maintained by Lin-Manuel Miranda . He is among other things a songwriter but certainly not an engineer or anyone qualified to be responsible for an entire infrastructure. Ponytail knows about his songs and thus surprised asks if he is also an engineer. (This echoes 1665: City Talk Pages , which includes a train station designed by Andrew Lloyd Webber , a composer best known for writing The Phantom of the Opera ).\nIt is worth noting that Beret Guy actually acknowledges the mistake here, claiming the mistake \"cost a fortune.\" This is unusual for Beret Guy, as he has of yet failed to acknowledge or recognize the oddity of every other aspect of his mysterious business, many of which are certainly stranger than this. However, he doesn't seem to mind this at all and does not wish to fire him. Instead he plans on fixing the mistake by hiring a real network engineer, Ponytail, to do the work alongside Miranda. Because, as Beret Guy continues to explain, the bright side of having Lin-Manuel Miranda in his business overshadows the lost fortune. Apparently Lin-Manuel Miranda is really nice and he makes karaoke nights fun, a clear reference to his engaging stage presence and vocal skills.\nOff screen, Lin-Manuel Miranda is heard singing \" How Far I'll Go \", which is a song that he composed for the Disney movie Moana . It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song in the 2017 show just a few weeks prior to this comic.\nThe title text mentions the potential dangers of having your server room constantly produce bismuth, but only as a prelude to a bismuth\/business pun. Because of the earlier carbon reference, it could also be a parallel to the difficulty in convincing businesses to become more energy efficient and reduce greenhouse gas emissions despite the urgency, as Randall has often referred to in xkcd with 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline .\n[Beret Guy shakes hands with Ponytail in front of a building while he points at the two large double doors under an unreadable sign.] Beret Guy: Hi! Welcome to the team! Beret Guy: We do business here and we'll turn into dirt later.\n[Beret Guy and Ponytail walk by three bikes.] Beret Guy: This is our main campus. Beret Guy: We have a free bikeshare system, at least until whoever owns those bikes finds out.\n[Beret Guy points forward as they walk on.] Beret Guy: The LaserJet is over there, and the printer is over there. Beret Guy: You can't use it right now; it's been printing an infinite-scroll webpage since 2013.\n[Zoom in on their heads.] Beret Guy: Restrooms are all-digital - no pipes. Beret Guy: The WiFi is very fast, but cursed. Beret Guy: Our server room is carbon-neutral but produces bismuth constantly.\n[Beret Guy has turned towards an off-panel Ponytail holding a hand out towards her.] Beret Guy: You'll be working on our infrastructure, which is currently maintained by Lin-Manuel Miranda.\n[Zoom out to both facing each other. From the right singing is heard from off-panel, as indicated with two musical notes.] Ponytail: ...The songwriter? Is he also an engineer? Beret Guy: Nope, huge misunderstanding on our part. Cost a fortune. But he's really nice and it makes karaoke nights fun. Lin-Manuel Miranda (off-panel): How far I'll gooo\n"}
{"id":1813,"title":"Vomiting Emoji","image_title":"Vomiting Emoji","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1813","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vomiting_emoji.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1813:_Vomiting_Emoji","transcript":"[Cueball, looking at his smartphone, approaches Megan who is sitting in an office chair at a desk working on her laptop. Next to Megan's reply is a large yellow faced emjoi with closed eyes and a large open mouth from where a thick green stream of vomit is gushing out. ] Cueball: The proposed emoji for Unicode 10.0 look good. Megan: Hmm. Megan: \"U+1F92E Face with open mouth vomiting\"\n[Cueball is holding his phone down looking at Megan's screen.] Cueball: Eww. Megan: Really, \"vomiting\" should be a combining modifier, so you can use it to make a vomiting version of any emoji. Cueball: Umm. Megan: I'm gonna write up a proposal.\n[Megan's proposal with six examples of vomiting emoji. All six are colorful also apart from the green stream of vomit gushing out of mouth or holes when there is no mouth. Above the list is Megan's suggested title for the modifier, and the title for each emoji is next to them in the list. The cowboy is like the original version but with a hat. The Statue of Liberty is blue and bends forward to vomit. The gray dove has lost its green olive branch, now above its head. The yellow moon is in first quarter and has a face. The red and blue rocket has fire out the rear and the vomit out an open hatch. The yellow hand has a big hole in its center.] U+1F93F Vomiting modifier U+1F920 U+1F93F Vomiting cowboy U+1F5FD U+1F93F Vomiting Statue of Liberty U+1F54A U+1F93F Vomiting dove U+1F31B U+1F93F Vomiting moon U+1F680 U+1F93F Vomiting rocket ship U+270B U+1F93F Vomiting hand\nTwo years after this comic was published, in 2019, Unicode added U+1F93F in Unicode 12.0 and Emoji 12.0, but instead used the code for a diving mask emoji .\n","explanation":"This comic relates to the recent Emoji v5.0 proposal for Unicode 10.0 which includes a vomiting emoji . Cueball initially states that the newly proposed emoji look good, until Megan points out the existence of the vomiting emoji.  While Cueball finds this distasteful, Megan rather seems to like it, going as far as suggesting rather than a single emoji, it should be possible to have a whole array of vomiting emojis by combining the vomiting action with other existing emojis.\nNote: Some of the emojis below may not display correctly if your browser or operating system doesn't implement the latest Unicode standard.\nUnicode is the computing industry standard for representing text. More recent additions have included emoji characters, such as grinning face (\ud83d\ude01) or hands clapping (\ud83d\udc4f).  Each Unicode character is assigned a numerical code, usually written in hexadecimal notation.  For example, the grinning face emoji is assigned the code U+1F601, and the clap symbol is assigned U+1F44F.  Unicode also supports \"combining modifiers\" which allow, among other uses, placing accents on letters, adding decorations to other emojis, or changing the colors of flags or skin tones.  For example, letters such as A, O, or n together with a combining tilde (U+303) modifier result in those letters having a tilde glyph on top (A\u0303, O\u0303, n\u0303), and various emojis for people, such as \ud83d\udc68 or \ud83d\udc69, together with the medium-dark skin tone modifier (U+1F3FE), results in those same people with altered skin color (\ud83d\udc68\ud83c\udffe, \ud83d\udc69\ud83c\udffe).\nAlong the same lines, Megan's proposal is to assign the code U+1F93F to be a combining modifier indicating vomiting.  Under this proposal, it would theoretically be possible to combine a vomiting modifier with any emoji to produce a vomiting version of that emoji.  Six examples are given in the last panel, with each being progressively more nonsensical.  The title text continues this and gives another example of a ridiculous combination.\nThe examples given in the comic are:\nMost of these Emoji could be seen as related to the political situation in the USA at the moment, see more here .\nAssigning Unicode characters to emojis has been controversial historically due to the fact that Unicode was created as a standard for text.  Emojis, which are essentially drawings of people or objects, aren't typically perceived as parts of text, and so leads some to object to co-opting the standard for non-text things.  Using combining modifiers to further expand emojis is also seen as an abuse of the original purpose of modifier characters.  As an alternative, emoji zero-width joiner sequences are in use, where an emoji is encoded as a series of simpler emoji and zero-width joiners.  In practice, this would probably be how the above characters would be implemented, instead of with a combining modifier.  Jokes that make fun of Unicode, involving emojis that shouldn't exist or inappropriate combinations thereof, are fairly common on the Internet.\nIn the title text of 1726: Unicode , Randall mentioned the proposed \" brontosaurus \" emoji in Unicode. And shortly before that Megan talked in similarly drawn emojis in 1709: Inflection . In general emoji has become a recurrent topic on xkcd.\n[Cueball, looking at his smartphone, approaches Megan who is sitting in an office chair at a desk working on her laptop. Next to Megan's reply is a large yellow faced emjoi with closed eyes and a large open mouth from where a thick green stream of vomit is gushing out. ] Cueball: The proposed emoji for Unicode 10.0 look good. Megan: Hmm. Megan: \"U+1F92E Face with open mouth vomiting\"\n[Cueball is holding his phone down looking at Megan's screen.] Cueball: Eww. Megan: Really, \"vomiting\" should be a combining modifier, so you can use it to make a vomiting version of any emoji. Cueball: Umm. Megan: I'm gonna write up a proposal.\n[Megan's proposal with six examples of vomiting emoji. All six are colorful also apart from the green stream of vomit gushing out of mouth or holes when there is no mouth. Above the list is Megan's suggested title for the modifier, and the title for each emoji is next to them in the list. The cowboy is like the original version but with a hat. The Statue of Liberty is blue and bends forward to vomit. The gray dove has lost its green olive branch, now above its head. The yellow moon is in first quarter and has a face. The red and blue rocket has fire out the rear and the vomit out an open hatch. The yellow hand has a big hole in its center.] U+1F93F Vomiting modifier U+1F920 U+1F93F Vomiting cowboy U+1F5FD U+1F93F Vomiting Statue of Liberty U+1F54A U+1F93F Vomiting dove U+1F31B U+1F93F Vomiting moon U+1F680 U+1F93F Vomiting rocket ship U+270B U+1F93F Vomiting hand\nTwo years after this comic was published, in 2019, Unicode added U+1F93F in Unicode 12.0 and Emoji 12.0, but instead used the code for a diving mask emoji .\n"}
{"id":1814,"title":"Color Pattern","image_title":"Color Pattern","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1814","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/color_pattern.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1814:_Color_Pattern","transcript":"[Cueball holds up his smartphone in front of his laptop which stands in front of him on a desk. Megan is sitting in an armchair reading, facing away from Cueball. She is singing her reply, as indicated with four double musical notes around her two lines of text.] Cueball: I took a picture of my computer screen\u2014why is the photo covered in these weird rainbow patterns? Megan: When a grid's misaligned with another behind Megan: That's a moir\u00e9...\n","explanation":"The comic references moir\u00e9 patterns in a parody of the song \u201c That's Amore \u201d made famous by Dean Martin in 1953 . (See trivia for pronunciation).\nIn mathematics, physics, and art, moir\u00e9 patterns or moir\u00e9 fringes are a kind of aliasing -- large scale interference patterns that can be produced when an opaque ruled pattern with transparent gaps is overlaid on another similar pattern. For the moir\u00e9 interference pattern to appear, the two patterns must not be completely identical in that they must be displaced, rotated, etc., or have different but similar pitch. Moir\u00e9 patterns appear in many different situations. In printing, the printed pattern of dots can negatively interfere with the image. In television and digital photography, a pattern on an object being photographed can interfere with the shape of the light sensors to generate unwanted artifacts .\nIn digital photography or videography, moir\u00e9 patterns occur when the pattern of pixels on the image sensor are not 100% identically aligned with patterns on the subject being photographed.  Photographs of a digital screen taken with a digital camera often exhibit moir\u00e9 patterns, since it is very difficult to align the camera sensor's grid with the screen's pixel grid perfectly.  This is the problem Cueball ran into, where the photo he just took of his computer screen is covered in weird rainbow patterns (the color patterns from the title).  It is possible to reduce this effect by changing the distance and angle between the camera and the screen.  There can also be bands of uneven brightness on digital photos or videos of electronic displays, those are caused by scan lines and are different from the moir\u00e9 patterns described in this comic.\nMegan responds to Cueball's complaint with a song that explains moir\u00e9 patterns. Her song is a parody of the song That's Amore , where \"Amore\" means \"love\" in Italian. The pun is that \"That's a Moir\u00e9\" and \"That's Amore\" are phonetically quite similar . The title text continues the song with a second verse, again with musical notes indicating that it should be sung. More information on when moir\u00e9 patterns occur is given here, indicating that the space between the grid lines should be small and the two grids should be almost identical, for the maximum moir\u00e9 effect. This verse, however, could also work if a moir\u00e9 was changed to amore , as two people squeezed tight together, and without much difference between them could lead to a romantic relationship.\nRandall was not the first to spoof this song using \"a moir\u00e9\" instead of \"Amore\". His two verse version, two verses from the original song, and other prior versions can be found below .\nIt is the second time that Randall has changed the lyrics to \"That\u2019s Amore\", although the first time, in 321: Thighs , he only changed eye to thigh in the original versions first verse.\nIt turns out that Randall was not the first to spot the possibility of changing the lyrics from \"That\u2019s Amore\" to \"That's a Moir\u00e9.\" Verses are shown below as follows: the lyrics first to the original song, then to Randall's song from this comic, and below that other songs (with citations).\nThe two first verse in the original song :\nWhen a moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie That's amore\nWhen the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine That's amore\nThe entire version of Megan's ( Randall's ) song is:\nWhen a grid's misaligned with another behind That's a moir\u00e9...\nWhen the spacing is tight And the difference is slight That's a moir\u00e9\nA similar song based on the same pun was made by Craig Swanson in 1993 and can be found on his web comic Perspicuity in this comic: That's a Moir\u00e9 . His song text was:\nWhen new lines hit your eyes From two screens when they ply That's a Moire!\nJamie Zawinski and Michael Bayne wrote a similar verse for the Moir\u00e9 screensaver they made in 1997 (search for that's to find it on the linked page):\nWhen the lines on the screen Make more lines in between, That's a moir\u00e9!\n[Cueball holds up his smartphone in front of his laptop which stands in front of him on a desk. Megan is sitting in an armchair reading, facing away from Cueball. She is singing her reply, as indicated with four double musical notes around her two lines of text.] Cueball: I took a picture of my computer screen\u2014why is the photo covered in these weird rainbow patterns? Megan: When a grid's misaligned with another behind Megan: That's a moir\u00e9...\n"}
{"id":1815,"title":"Flag","image_title":"Flag","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1815","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flag.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1815:_Flag","transcript":"[A three-colored flag is shown, divided in vertical thirds. The left and rightmost parts of the flag are dark blue, and the center is red and each section has a large white star in its center. Neighboring thirds are separated by a thinner white vertical stripe. At the top of the flag, there is an off-white status bar like one found at the top of an iOS smart device. On the left it is displaying the strength of the connection (3\/5 dots), in the center it is displaying the time and on the right there are three small icons the last is the battery charge:] 3G 5:48 PM 39%\n[Below the panel there are two captions] The design committee fired me once they realized that my editing process involved a screenshot, but it was too late. Until they change it, our new country has the only national flag to include a phone notification bar.\n","explanation":"Presumably Randall was hired by a committee to propose a new flag for an unspecified country. His process of editing the flag involved taking a screenshot of his design to export it, a mistake that went unnoticed by anyone until the flag was officially implemented.\nOnce the problem was pointed out, the design committee placed the blame on Randall, but could not immediately undo their decision until new suggestions had been submitted and a new committee could agree on another design. Thus the country is now stuck with this design, making it the only country with such a bar in the flag.\nThe title text mentions a compromise bill that will change the flag. This implies that the flag was approved with the status bar included. Apparently, there is some controversy about removing the status bar from the flag, as the compromise bill proposes keeping the status bar and changing the displayed percentage of the battery from 39% to 100%. This may be wordplay on the term \"charge\" as used in vexillology , where it refers to a figure appearing on the background of the flag. It may also be a reference to 1373: Screenshot .\nThe bar in notification bar , is a vexillological descriptor, as in the \" Stars and Bars ,\" a term used for the first flag of the Confederate States of America , not to be confused with the counting technique.\nFlags are often minimalist and involve geometric shapes and solid colors. A notification bar at the top of the flag would clash with these design elements and look unprofessional. [ citation needed ] The flag in the comic is otherwise well-designed, conforming with a principle of heraldry and vexillology known as the rule of tincture : the \"metals\" consist of white\/silver and yellow\/gold, while the \"colours\" consist of red, blue, green, black, and purple; anything in the \"metal\" category should only be placed upon a background of the \"colour\" category and vice versa.\nThe elements of the flag's intended design\u2014the colors red, white, and blue; the use of stripes; and the star emblems\u2014are the same that are used in the American flag the Stars and Stripes .\nThe elements of this flag are, however, also present in several other existing flags, like those derived from Union Jack , the flag of the United Kingdom , and like the flags of Australia and New Zealand . They are also in the flags of North Korea , Liberia , and Malaysia . The flags from USA, Australia, Liberia and Chile have white stars , and those of USA and Liberia have white bars as well.\nThe low battery status might imply that the country is low on resources. It thus seems like people have taken the reference to modern times smartphones to their hearts and actually wish to have this very modern design.\nBut if they indeed continue with this idea, thinking that their country would look better with a full battery charge, they might also consider changing the 3G connection to the newer 4G or 5G version, according to what was available at that time in that location, and giving the phone a full signal (5\/5 instead of only 3\/5 dots). And maybe also choose a time that would mean something rather than 5:48 PM. For instance noon\/midnight, or 8:00.\nThe reason such a status bar could be missed in the first place could be that most people today look at pictures on their smartphones all the time, and thus their own phone's status bar is indirectly included at the top of all the pictures they see. People thus do not notice these status bars any longer as they are always there and clearly not important for the picture. Randall has mentioned before, in 1373: Screenshot , that he cannot take smartphone screenshots seriously if the battery of the device is low, as he cannot focus on the content, becoming afraid his own device is running out of power\u2014a problem that only occurs if he sees it on his smartphone, as he then becomes concerned that it is his phone that is about to run out of charge. But in this status bar, there is still 39%, enough not to cause immediate concern. His fear of losing his on-line connection like this was the joke in the comic 1802: Phone released about a month before this one.\nSince Randall was asked to create this flag, it seems most likely that he would have to be a citizen of this new country. It could thus indicate that a group of states has broken free from the United States to form their own smaller union of three states, one for each star. With the current political situation in the states after Donald Trump\u2019s inauguration there has been some talk about states leaving the USA, and Randall has clearly been against the election of Trump, see 1756: I'm With Her . His choice of comic subjects seems to have been affected by the election result. Since Randall lives in Massachusetts , it could be this and two other nearby states that have formed their own new union of states, maybe the other two small states Connecticut and Rhode Island .\n[A three-colored flag is shown, divided in vertical thirds. The left and rightmost parts of the flag are dark blue, and the center is red and each section has a large white star in its center. Neighboring thirds are separated by a thinner white vertical stripe. At the top of the flag, there is an off-white status bar like one found at the top of an iOS smart device. On the left it is displaying the strength of the connection (3\/5 dots), in the center it is displaying the time and on the right there are three small icons the last is the battery charge:] 3G 5:48 PM 39%\n[Below the panel there are two captions] The design committee fired me once they realized that my editing process involved a screenshot, but it was too late. Until they change it, our new country has the only national flag to include a phone notification bar.\n"}
{"id":1816,"title":"Mispronunciation","image_title":"Mispronunciation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1816","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mispronunciation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1816:_Mispronunciation","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are walking.] Cueball: I sometimes misspell \"misspell\" and \"mispronunciation,\" and I mispronounce \"mispronunciation,\" Cueball: But the epitome of mispronunciation is probably the way I pronounce \"epitome.\"\n","explanation":"This comic is a meta-joke where Cueball explains to White Hat which words he often spells or pronounces incorrectly. Ironically, those words happen to be words whose definitions mean \"to spell incorrectly\" and \"being pronounced incorrectly\".  While describing the words he says he has trouble with, he manages to use the same words correctly in sentences both inside quotation marks (to refer to the word itself) and outside (to describe the action corresponding to those words).\nThe word misspell is misspelled quite often (although not in this comic!). Misspell is quite commonly misspelled as mispell or miss-spell . Some might argue that misspelled is the one word which should always be misspelled intentionally and written mispelled , so that its orthography reflects its meaning. (\"If it isn't mispelled, then it isn't mispelled !\")\nThe word mispronunciation is often misspelled and mispronounced like \"mispronounciation\", with the middle part like \"noun\" instead of \"nun\".  This is made even more confusing by the fact that the related word, \"pronounce\", does in fact have \"noun\" in the middle.\nThe punchline comes when Cueball tells that the epitome of mispronunciation is the way Cueball pronounces epitome . This is also metahumor, as epitome refers to a very good or perfect example. Thus Cueball shows the epitome of mispronunciation when he incorrectly pronounces epitome .\nThe title text explains Cueball's mispronunciation of epitome. It is supposed to be pronounced in four syllables, \/\u0259\u02c8p\u026at\u0259mi\/ (uh-PIH-tuh-mee), starting with a schwa , then emphasis on the second syllable pronounced like \"pit\", and a long E on the fourth syllable pronounced like \"me\". Instead, he pronounces it \/\u02c8\u025bp\u026ato\u028am\/ (EPPY-tome), with emphasis on the first part pronounced like the beginning of \"epic\", and a silent E on the second part pronounced like \"tome\". The mispronounced version is what a person unfamiliar with the word might reasonably guess, given other words with similar spelling like \"epicenter\", \"epitaph\", and \"episode\".\nEpiPen , a trademark for a type of epinephrine autoinjector (i.e. adrenaline), is brought up to further illustrate the inconsistency between spelling and pronunciation.  This time the word is supposed to be pronounced with an emphasized \"EPPY\", but he (intentionally?) mispronounces it like \"uh-PIE\", possibly to match other proper nouns such as Epirus and Epione .\n[White Hat and Cueball are walking.] Cueball: I sometimes misspell \"misspell\" and \"mispronunciation,\" and I mispronounce \"mispronunciation,\" Cueball: But the epitome of mispronunciation is probably the way I pronounce \"epitome.\"\n"}
{"id":1817,"title":"Incognito Mode","image_title":"Incognito Mode","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1817","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/incognito_mode.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1817:_Incognito_Mode","transcript":"[A woman with long blonde hair (maybe a version of Blondie) holds both arms up as she addresses Cueball who is sitting in an office chair working on his laptop.] Woman: ...But remember\u2014if you browse in incognito mode for more than two hours, you'll be trapped there forever!\n[Caption below the panel:] Animorphs tech tips\n","explanation":"A woman (maybe a different version of Blondie , or Rachel from Animorphs) warns Cueball about not browsing for more than two hours in incognito mode as he might get stuck there forever.\nIncognito mode\/private mode is a feature in a web browser that automatically clears any cookies and web history when the browser window is closed, but does not shield you from censorship, malware, or tracking . One could become metaphorically \"trapped\" in this mode if they don't want to lose this data (for example if they've found a useful page which they want to refer back to, or if they're on a website like YouTube which uses cookies to provide recommended videos and they're finding the recommendations interesting), meaning that they can never close the browser again. Presumably this is more likely to happen after a longer browsing session. The only option to keep browsing data when the incognito\/private session is closed is to bookmark or write down the URLs of interesting pages; there is no way to keep the cookies, so things such as recommended YouTube videos from within the incognito browsing session will inevitably be lost when it is closed.\nAs a side note, desktop users can use a browser extension to export the list of open tabs, but mobile browsers usually can not. However, mobile browsers might deny basic features such as saving pages and screenshots in incognito mode, making it unattractive to use. And currently, there is no way to back up cookies from incognito mode on either browser type.\nAnimorphs is a book series by K. A. Applegate featuring several teenagers who have a special power: they can morph into various animals whose DNA they have absorbed through alien technology. However, if they stay morphed for over two hours, they will get stuck in that form until they die (this is presumably where the \"two hours\" in the comic comes from).\nIn this comic Randall pokes fun at this by relating it to surfing in incognito mode\/privacy mode in a browser. As explained above, staying for too long in incognito mode may cause the user to become \"stuck\" in this mode until something causes the browser to close, such as the browser\/computer crashing or a power failure. This is analogous to the Animorphs who become stuck in animal form if they spend too long in that form.\nAn alternative interpretation revolves around the use of incognito\/private browsing modes when the user is paranoid. They may use this mode if, for example, they don't want the risk of anyone else discovering what they've been doing online, and they find it safer to simply use incognito mode rather than manually deleting the relevant cookies and browsing history afterwards. If they use this mode a lot, the sense of paranoia that initially led them to use incognito mode can reinforce itself, and over time they may become uncomfortable browsing outside of incognito mode. This is another way in which one may become \"trapped\" in incognito mode after extended use.\nThe caption explains that tech tips from Animorphs are the worst, i.e. the woman is an Animorph, and this was not good advice. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text continues the idea that an Animorph tech support team would be the worst possible explaining that their solutions are always the same. And then it gives an example which references a common occurrence in the Animorphs book series wherein the protagonists uses their ability to morph into animals to infiltrate enemy strongholds. In the example it is an update for Apple's OS X (a popular commercial operating system), that broke something. The solution is to infiltrate Apple by morphing apples. Morphing into fruits is nonsensical within the rules for morphing, put forth in the books, since the children can only turn into animals and not into fruits like apples. It would also be very ineffective, since fruits can't move on their own. Plus, Apple Inc. has little to do with actual apples, so this is not a good form to infiltrate their headquarters (morphing into bugs or even Apple's employees would be more effective, and is allowed by books' rules). Randall is not the first to propose morphing into vegetables as an Animorph's parody .\nAnimorphs has been referenced before, first only in the title texts of 1187: Aspect Ratio and 1360: Old Files , and then later in the main comic in 1380: Manual for Civilization , with the books being the actual manual...\n[A woman with long blonde hair (maybe a version of Blondie) holds both arms up as she addresses Cueball who is sitting in an office chair working on his laptop.] Woman: ...But remember\u2014if you browse in incognito mode for more than two hours, you'll be trapped there forever!\n[Caption below the panel:] Animorphs tech tips\n"}
{"id":1818,"title":"Rayleigh Scattering","image_title":"Rayleigh Scattering","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1818","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rayleigh_scattering.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1818:_Rayleigh_Scattering","transcript":"[Science Girl asks Blondie a question which she answers while lifting her arm towards Science Girl.] Science Girl: Why is the sky blue? Blondie: Because air is blue.\n[Megan walks in from behind Science Girl.] Megan: No, the sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering\u2013 Blondie: Nah, it's because air is blue. Blue light bounces off it and hits our eyes. Same as why anything is any color.\n[Zoom in on Blondie's face.] Blondie: It's why far-off mountains look blue \u2013 because of all the blue air in the way.\n[Zoom out to Megan standing longer from Science Girl than Blondie who has thrown her arms out. Science Girl is facing directly out towards the reader.] Megan: There's a specific quantum mechanism by which\u2013 Blondie: Yeah but there's a physics mechanism for every color. You don't have to get all quantum right away.\n[Frameless panel with Science Girl looking up at Blondie who stands holding her hands on her sides. Megan speaks from off-panel.] Megan (off-panel): ...OK, I guess. Blondie: Any other questions? Science Girl: How do planes stay up?\n[Blondie holds a finger up in front of Science Girl while Megan now is the one to throw out her arms.] Megan: Well, the airflow\u2013 Blondie: Tiny birds in the wings. Thousands. Flapping hard. Science Girl: WOW! Megan: NO!\n","explanation":"This comic suggests it is better to explain things in an easy-to-understand and intuitive manner, even if such explanations may not capture all of the scientific detail involved.  This is especially the case for children whose ability to grasp abstract physics has not yet fully developed.  Giving the most complete and physically accurate explanation would make the concepts much more elaborate than necessary, and would cause major confusion in inexperienced listeners.\nThe principle is demonstrated by the explanation on why the sky is blue .  The commonly given explanation for this is, as the comic title says, Rayleigh scattering .  However, in order to understand how Rayleigh scattering works to produce a blue color, one must go into quantum mechanics and deal with properties of molecules in air and their effects on different wavelengths of light.  Even then, one will also need to know about the inner workings of human visual perception to realize why the color we perceive isn't the wavelength that's being most strongly scattered (see 1145: Sky Color ).  The child is not likely to understand this kind of explanation.\nOn the other hand, a much simpler explanation, such as \"because air is blue\" \u2014 that is, air molecules reflect blue light, in the same way blue paint reflects blue light \u2014 also adequately explains the phenomenon, and is much more understandable to less physically inclined listeners. When Science Girl asks Blondie (possibly Miss Lenhart ) why the sky is blue, Megan walks in and starts to explain in a very scientific way involving quantum mechanics. This is criticized by Blondie, who then convinces her that the simpler explanation is sufficient, as there is a quantum mechanical explanation for every color, there is no need to elaborate on the sky's color any more than any other object's color.\nMegan implicitly accepts this, but then in the final panel, Science Girl asks another common question - how do planes fly? Megan starts again to give the traditional answer (airflow causing lift ) but is interrupted by Blondie saying that it's because the wings of an airplane are full of small birds.  While this might not be as ridiculous as it first seems (the child might later learn that the \"tiny birds\" are actually air molecules, and \"flapping wings\" are actually pressure differentials), it is certainly over-simplified to a staggering extent.  Thus Megan and Blondie illustrate the two extremes of education philosophy: where one chooses to teach the complete truth with no regard for whether it's understandable, the other chooses to make up understandable explanations with no regard for whether it's true.  Arguably, neither approach is in the student's best interest and a balance needs to be achieved.\nWhen Science Girl reacts like she believes Blondie's last comment about the planes, she could almost have been called April Fool. Although this comic was released one day too early for that, this was also the only year between April 1st of 2011 and April 1st of 2018 where no such comic was released. See more about this in the trivia section below.\nThe title text refers to another common question as for why leaves are green. This is commonly explained by the fact that they are filled with chlorophyll , a chemical used by plants for photosynthesis. Randall points out that it would be an equally valid question to ask why chlorophyll is green. This poses an interesting contrast to the answer to the question about the color of the sky, since even physicists are usually satisfied with the general explanation for leaves and don't feel the need to jump into describing quantum phenomena that cause chlorophyll to reflect green light.  Also, \"Why does chlorophyll scatter green light\" may be a great question because chlorophyll reflects, not scatters, light and this challenges Megan-types to coherently explain the difference before they go challenging little children with pedantry. Or because green light is less efficient during photosynthesis, and explaining that is similar to explaining Rayleigh Scattering.\nWhat-if 141 also mentions the simpler explanation to the original question: Sunbeam has this relevant text: \"Normal light interacts with the atmosphere through Rayleigh scattering. You may have heard of Rayleigh scattering as the answer to 'why is the sky blue.' This is sort of true, but honestly, a better answer to this question might be 'because air is blue.' Sure, it appears blue for a bunch of physics reasons, but everything appears the color it is for a bunch of physics reasons.\" There is also a footnote in that comment with an additional example: \"When you ask, 'Why is the statue of liberty green?' the answer is something like, 'The outside of the statue is copper, so it used to be copper-colored. Over time, a layer of copper carbonate formed (through oxidation), and copper carbonate is green.' You don't say 'The statue is green because of frequency-specific absorption and scattering by surface molecules.' \"\nRandall himself has published Thing Explainer which gives simplified descriptions of complex scientific and technological objects.  Even in his book, some of the more advanced details have been simplified to a toy model (such as calling liquid oxygen \"cold wet air\" and a nuclear reactor \"box of burning metal\").\n[Science Girl asks Blondie a question which she answers while lifting her arm towards Science Girl.] Science Girl: Why is the sky blue? Blondie: Because air is blue.\n[Megan walks in from behind Science Girl.] Megan: No, the sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering\u2013 Blondie: Nah, it's because air is blue. Blue light bounces off it and hits our eyes. Same as why anything is any color.\n[Zoom in on Blondie's face.] Blondie: It's why far-off mountains look blue \u2013 because of all the blue air in the way.\n[Zoom out to Megan standing longer from Science Girl than Blondie who has thrown her arms out. Science Girl is facing directly out towards the reader.] Megan: There's a specific quantum mechanism by which\u2013 Blondie: Yeah but there's a physics mechanism for every color. You don't have to get all quantum right away.\n[Frameless panel with Science Girl looking up at Blondie who stands holding her hands on her sides. Megan speaks from off-panel.] Megan (off-panel): ...OK, I guess. Blondie: Any other questions? Science Girl: How do planes stay up?\n[Blondie holds a finger up in front of Science Girl while Megan now is the one to throw out her arms.] Megan: Well, the airflow\u2013 Blondie: Tiny birds in the wings. Thousands. Flapping hard. Science Girl: WOW! Megan: NO!\n"}
{"id":1819,"title":"Sweet 16","image_title":"Sweet 16","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1819","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sweet_16.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1819:_Sweet_16","transcript":"[The comic shows a direct elimination bracket (a single-elimination tournament): there is a single match played by every pair of teams, and the winners of those matches are paired up for the next round of matches, this continues until there are no more matches to be played. There are sixteen teams described here (hence the number in the title), eight on each side of the empty rectangle in the middle. Every two teams are connected, these connectors are then also connected, these connectors are yet again connected, and a final pair of connectors, after making one counter-clockwise right angle turn, end up in the top and bottom edges of the central rectangle. The bracket is empty, no results of any of the matches are indicated.]\n[These are paired.] A school with a dog on their team A school whose team is entirely dogs [These are paired.] A dog team with one human A dog team with one cat [These are paired.] A baseball team playing basketball A basketball team with baseball gear [These are paired.] NBA2K17 top players NBA2K17 top developers [These are paired.] The 1988 Los Angeles lakers Four kindergarteners and Lebron James [These are paired.] Boxers playing basketball Basketball players in boxing gloves [These are paired.] A team playing on stilts A team playing on Segways [These are paired.] A bad team that would make a good Cinderella story A good team playing in glass slippers\n","explanation":"March Madness , with its championship played on the day this comic was published, is a colloquial name for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament, which features 68 American college basketball teams in an elimination bracket. Due to the setup, the 16 teams that make it to the third round of the tournament (or fourth if counting the \"First Four\") are sometimes called the \"Sweet 16\", hence the title. Winning a third round game means that a team is part of the \"Elite Eight,\" who can win to move on to the \"Final Four,\" and then to the championship game, where a winner is crowned.\nThis is the second time Randall has made a bracket with strange opponents meeting each other in a bracket; the first was 1529: Bracket and brackets were mentioned a second time in 2131: Emojidome . References to basketball is a recurring subject on xkcd, as is Randall's lack of interest for sport in general .\nIn this comic, the bracket, see details below , of the final 16 is not filled in with actual college team names, but descriptions of the odd circumstances of each team. For example, the first team is \"a school with a dog on their team\", a reference to Air Bud . The team descriptions become increasingly bizarre, comprising varied sports and pop culture references and often building on and playing off of previous team descriptions.\nThe first four teams on the left are composed partially or completely of animals, which are most likely pets, but could be animals for assisting disabled persons, emotional support animals, police dogs, feral cats, etc. The next two teams consist of some form of baseball -basketball crossover. The bottom two teams on the left feature developers and players of NBA 2K17 , a basketball video game by 2K Games.\nThe first team on the right, the 1988 Los Angeles Lakers is an actual historical NBA team; though the particular team from 1988 would not exist today, it could be a team of the same players, who would now be in their mid-50s or 60s. They are paired against a team of four kindergartners and current Cleveland player Lebron James (born 1984), who was also a kindergartner in 1988. James was considered the best active NBA player as of 2017. Ironically, LeBron James has since become a Laker, as of the 2019-20 NBA season; he has become the first NBA player to win a championship in 3 different teams (having previously won titles with the Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers).\nThe next two teams feature basketball- boxing crossovers. The bracket after that features teams on unconventional mobility aids, Segways and stilts .\nThe final two teams are Cinderella teams . A Cinderella story is when a weak team works hard to achieve success. The final team consists of players wearing glass slippers, often a part of the Cinderella fairy tale.\nThe title text explains what the heck Randall was doing to make this comic: Randall is incredibly out of touch with sports, or at least their traditions. During March Madness a popular pastime is to take a look at the starting bracket of all 68 teams and speculate who will win each round. This activity is sometimes associated with gambling, where the person with the most correct bracket could potentially win money. Randall, when handed a blank bracket, instead fills it with teams he wants to see play rather than who is actually in the tournament. A bracket is considered \"busted\" when a number of predicted teams lose earlier than expected. In this case, since Randall's Sweet 16 does not include any of the real teams participating in the tournament, his bracket is busted from the beginning.\nAs neither this comic from April 3rd or the previous comic, 1818: Rayleigh Scattering from March 31st was one of Randall's April fools' comics , this was the first year since 2010 with no April Fools' Day comic. See more on this in the Trivia section for the previous comic.\nTwo years later in 2019 the April Fools' comic 2131: Emojidome , was using such a bracket as above to match 512 emojis to find the best emoji. Same time of year, so probably again a reference to March Madness.\n[The comic shows a direct elimination bracket (a single-elimination tournament): there is a single match played by every pair of teams, and the winners of those matches are paired up for the next round of matches, this continues until there are no more matches to be played. There are sixteen teams described here (hence the number in the title), eight on each side of the empty rectangle in the middle. Every two teams are connected, these connectors are then also connected, these connectors are yet again connected, and a final pair of connectors, after making one counter-clockwise right angle turn, end up in the top and bottom edges of the central rectangle. The bracket is empty, no results of any of the matches are indicated.]\n[These are paired.] A school with a dog on their team A school whose team is entirely dogs [These are paired.] A dog team with one human A dog team with one cat [These are paired.] A baseball team playing basketball A basketball team with baseball gear [These are paired.] NBA2K17 top players NBA2K17 top developers [These are paired.] The 1988 Los Angeles lakers Four kindergarteners and Lebron James [These are paired.] Boxers playing basketball Basketball players in boxing gloves [These are paired.] A team playing on stilts A team playing on Segways [These are paired.] A bad team that would make a good Cinderella story A good team playing in glass slippers\n"}
{"id":1820,"title":"Security Advice","image_title":"Security Advice","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1820","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/security_advice.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1820:_Security_Advice","transcript":"[Cueball is listening to Ponytail who holds her hands out in front of her.] Ponytail: We've been trying for decades to give people good security advice. Ponytail: But in retrospect, lots of the tips actually made things worse.\n[Cueball takes his hand to his chin as Ponytail takes her arms down.] Cueball: Maybe we should try to give bad advice? Ponytail: I guess it's worth a shot.\n[Below these two panel is one large and long panel with a long list with 13 tips. The underlined heading and the bracket below it are centered above the bullet list below.] Security tips (Print out this list and keep it in your bank safe deposit box.)\n","explanation":"The comic depicts a conversation between Cueball and Ponytail , discussing the fact that giving people security advice in the past has failed to improve their internet security, and in some cases even made things worse.  One such example is telling people to create complicated passwords containing numbers and symbols, which not only made the passwords harder to remember (leading people to create huge security risks by leaving post-it notes with their passwords on their computer monitor ), but did not actually make those passwords harder to crack (see 936: Password Strength ).\nAs a result, Cueball suggests using reverse psychology and give out bad advice instead, in hopes of achieving a positive effect. The last panel contains a list with 13 security tips, which are parodies of actual security tips. The title text is just one more tip. See table below for explanations for all 14 tips.\nThis comic is yet another tips comic .\n[Cueball is listening to Ponytail who holds her hands out in front of her.] Ponytail: We've been trying for decades to give people good security advice. Ponytail: But in retrospect, lots of the tips actually made things worse.\n[Cueball takes his hand to his chin as Ponytail takes her arms down.] Cueball: Maybe we should try to give bad advice? Ponytail: I guess it's worth a shot.\n[Below these two panel is one large and long panel with a long list with 13 tips. The underlined heading and the bracket below it are centered above the bullet list below.] Security tips (Print out this list and keep it in your bank safe deposit box.)\n"}
{"id":1821,"title":"Incinerator","image_title":"Incinerator","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1821","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/incinerator.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1821:_Incinerator","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail stand next to an incinerator, with a combustion chamber and flue that rises up to the top of the frame.] Ponytail: Great, the new incinerator is installed. Now we just need to dispose of the old one.\n[Ponytail walks out of the frame.]\n[Cueball lowers his head, beat panel]\n[Cueball raises his hand and begins to ask a question.] Cueball: Hey, could\u2014 Ponytail (off-panel): No. Cueball: Aww, maaan.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Ponytail have just finished installing an incinerator for some unspecified purpose at some establishment. Ponytail brings up the problem of having to get rid of the old incinerator, and Cueball begins to suggest using the new incinerator to incinerate the old one, but he is shut down by Ponytail off-panel. This makes him noticeably disappointed, probably because the idea of using an incinerator to destroy an incinerator is novel to him.\nThrowing an incinerator inside another incinerator would probably break some kind of regulations or safety concerns, and since incinerators are meant to withstand their own high heat capacities it would be ineffective anyway.\nThe title text implies that this comic was inspired by recent events at Randall 's house: his trash can broke and he struggled with how to dispose of it. At least for Randall, there is something wrong with forcing anything to destroy something of its own kind -- in this case, throwing the old trash can in the new trash can. Since machines have no human emotion [ citation needed ] this would not cause any trauma for the machine , but the humans in charge might feel as if something is wrong, and Randall mentions having an existential crisis . This is because humans tend to project human qualities onto the machines they are working with ( anthropomorphization ), thus possibly framing the situation in the context of something like cannibalism or homicide.\nAnother way of taking it would be in the sense of \"being replaceable\". Many people live without wanting to think of what might happen to everything around them after they die, but in this title text one can start comparing the trash can to themselves \u2014 the same way the trash can turns into something to be disposed and replaced with a new one after it becomes useless, what about people then? What will happen to you when you grow older? Should you suddenly go sick and become useless? How about in your job, what would happen if someone more superior than you comes around and starts threatening your hard-earned position?\nYet another interpretation is that while disposing of the trash can, Randall realized that he was now in the same situation as the trash can itself. The trash can was a tool used by others, in order to dispose of trash. And yet, in time, the trash can itself became trash and had to be disposed of by Randall. Which makes one wonder if Randall is himself a tool created\/used by others, who will one day dispose of Randall when he has outlived his usefulness, the same way that he disposed of the trash can when it outlived its usefulness. From this perspective, Randall is simply a more intelligent and autonomous trash-junking-tool, different in degrees but similar in nature to his own trash can.\nMany people define themselves by the things they do and are capable of. The idea of losing those, and then being replaced for it, is a bitter pill that we will all have to swallow at some point. All things must come to end after all, including ourselves.\nA more simple reason for this may be that for almost anything else you might pick up, having done so you now have the option to put it in the trash can. Picking up the trash can itself (perhaps just to work out if it is beyond use) simultaneously removes \"the trash can you may opt to put something you hold in\" from its usual point in your normally instintively simple mental mapping of the domestic universe.\nPlus, actually throwing out a garbage can can be surprisingly difficult .\nAnother device to perform a meta-action was previously explored in 952: Stud Finder .\n[Cueball and Ponytail stand next to an incinerator, with a combustion chamber and flue that rises up to the top of the frame.] Ponytail: Great, the new incinerator is installed. Now we just need to dispose of the old one.\n[Ponytail walks out of the frame.]\n[Cueball lowers his head, beat panel]\n[Cueball raises his hand and begins to ask a question.] Cueball: Hey, could\u2014 Ponytail (off-panel): No. Cueball: Aww, maaan.\n"}
{"id":1822,"title":"Existential Bug Reports","image_title":"Existential Bug Reports","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1822","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/existential_bug_reports.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1822:_Existential_Bug_Reports","transcript":"[Megan is sitting in an office chair at her desk typing on her laptop. Above her are two light-gray frames with text. Above each frame is a bold header:] Issue: Recent update broke support for hardware I need for my job.\nWorkaround: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun.\n","explanation":"Megan is sitting at her desk, writing an error report. Her description of the issue is fairly standard, albeit somewhat vague: A recent software update has broken the support for hardware she needs for her job.  Most likely, she is saying that her OS is now reporting a piece of hardware is no longer supported.  This is self-evidently problematic for her, as described in her error report.\nThe humor in this strip comes from her own suggested workaround (a short-term method of working despite the problem), which is absurd as she proposes simply waiting for the Sun to consume the Earth when it turns into a red giant towards the end of its lifetime approximately 5 billion years from now.\nWhile this would eliminate the issue, as both the hardware and software as well as Megan and her job would all cease to exist, this would not be helpful to Megan as it does not address the underlying problem of her being unable to work in the present. 5 billion years is also far in excess of the lifespan of humans [ citation needed ] and operating systems alike. Lastly, as it does not allow Megan to actually continue her work, it's not strictly speaking a workaround.\nIn the title text, Randall asks for a workaround from Megan's \"workaround\". He writes it down as another bug report, as though it were a software problem. The answer is that there is none . Randall in his crisis see no way to prevent Earth from being consumed by the Sun. However, one possible workaround could be evacuation of the Solar System, as if humanity still exists by the time the Earth's destruction occurs, we will likely have highly advanced technology. Maybe at that time it would even be possible to move the Earth , first further out to prevent both the engulfment and also the earlier evaporation of the oceans and later it could then be moved back in when the sun turns into a white dwarf .\nMegan has previously expressed such existential problems in 220: Philosophy , where Randall presented a solution for it. Similar she was depressed in 1111: Premiere , where it was the boiling away of the oceans, mentioned above, that was her concern.\n[Megan is sitting in an office chair at her desk typing on her laptop. Above her are two light-gray frames with text. Above each frame is a bold header:] Issue: Recent update broke support for hardware I need for my job.\nWorkaround: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun.\n"}
{"id":1823,"title":"Hottest Editors","image_title":"Hottest Editors","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1823","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hottest_editors.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1823:_Hottest_Editors","transcript":"[A short list with a heading above a line and below that a list of seven years increasing with 5 years intervals. After each year are gray lines that leads to the name of an editor, except for the first two years, where there is a two row square bracket around the first entry;] Hottest Editors -------------------- 1995-2000\u2014[Emacs\u2013Vim Editor war] 2005\u2014Vim 2010\u2014Notepad++ 2015\u2014Sublime Text 2020\u2014CRISPR 2025\u2014CRISPR (Vim keybindings)\n","explanation":"The comic has a play on the word 'Editor'. The editors from 1995 to 2015 are software text editors, and the editor(s) from 2020 onward are genomic editing techniques that edit DNA .\nText editors are popular among programmers and computer scientists to edit machine-readable text, as well as other digital files.\nTwo of the earlier editors, Vim and Emacs , traditionally use the keyboard (rather than the mouse) to perform common actions (like scrolling, marking text, saving, and searching).\nAs Vim and Emacs use different keyboard commands in different styles, proficiency in one editor does not make it easy to use the other.\nThe \" Editor wars \" refers to Vim and Emacs users debating heavily over which of the two editors is the best (keyboard bindings is just one argument). This debate was previously mentioned in 378: Real Programmers .\nMore modern editors (including Notepad++ and Sublime Text) mainly use keyboard shortcuts that are global to the operating system, again different from Vim and Emacs.\nNotepad++ is a popular text and source code editor, initially released in 2003 and available only for the Windows platform. Sublime Text is the current \"most popular\" text editor according to this comic; it was released in 2008. Sublime Text, Vim, and Emacs are cross-platform.\nThe 2020 editor ' CRISPR ' is not a text editor, but a technique used to edit DNA in a pre-existing genome. The technique has experienced a surge of recent attention in the media (beginning with the 2016 publication of \"The Heroes of CRISPR\" and litigation over the patent ownership), suggesting it may become the most popular \"editor\" in years to come. The joke lies in the comic intentionally not distinguishing between text\/code editing and genome editing. \nIt may also suggest that we will not be editing digital plain-text files, but DNA in 2020, possibly due to very recent advances in DNA digital data storage .\nMany pieces of software that contain editing functions (in text boxes, on command lines, etc.) offer Emacs and\/or Vim keybindings: the keys will be (roughly) the same as in Emacs or in Vim, so that someone familiar with one of those editors can use the keyboard without learning something new.\nThe comic suggests that in 2025, the Vim key-bindings will be the most popular for editing genes using CRISPR.\nThis creates a comical effect: CRISPR is a technique that operates on genes and not on digital hardware, so it does not use a keyboard per se. Consequently, it is surprising that CRISPR would have key bindings. The comic also suggests that in 2025, Vim will make a comeback in DNA editing, thus having 'won' the battle with Emacs.\nThe title text says that Randall has been banned from the code base of Tesla , as he keeps sending pull requests (code changes) to steer a Tesla car using Vim keybindings. Not only does this seem implausible,  but it seems dangerous to steer a car with a (computer) keyboard. The arguably most important keybindings of a text editor are those to move the editing location (the cursor) around. Vim classically uses the h , j , k , and l keys for left , down , up , and right functions, although it also supports the arrow keys present on modern keyboards. To use these in a vehicular context, up and down would probably, as in many racing games, be mapped to acceleration and braking, respectively. One additional problem with using essentially binary inputs (key pressed or not) as a replacement for a car's steering wheel is achieving different degrees of direction change. Pressing, say, the h key could either cause the car to turn its wheels left by a pre-set, fixed amount, or it could turn them left the more the longer the key is held down. There has been a spoof based on the reverse principle, however.\n[A short list with a heading above a line and below that a list of seven years increasing with 5 years intervals. After each year are gray lines that leads to the name of an editor, except for the first two years, where there is a two row square bracket around the first entry;] Hottest Editors -------------------- 1995-2000\u2014[Emacs\u2013Vim Editor war] 2005\u2014Vim 2010\u2014Notepad++ 2015\u2014Sublime Text 2020\u2014CRISPR 2025\u2014CRISPR (Vim keybindings)\n"}
{"id":1824,"title":"Identification Chart","image_title":"Identification Chart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1824","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/identification_chart.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1824:_Identification_Chart","transcript":"[A silhouette identification guide chart shows eight silhouettes in two rows. The silhouettes are a combination of the fuselage of an aircraft and the wings of birds, or in the second case an insect. Below each silhouette is a label:] Osprey  Hornet  Falcon  Harrier Eagle  Kestrel  Hawk  Blackbird\n","explanation":"Some aircraft are named after creatures of flight, including birds of prey , other birds, and insects. This comic spoofs an \"identification guide\" of bird silhouettes, each with the fuselage of an aircraft and the wings of the flying animal from which the aircraft gets its name. All are birds with the exception of the hornet which is an insect, see the table below for individual explanations.\nThis idea of having feathered wings on a plane is absurd, as bird wings (for birds that can fly) are made to support the lightweight structure of a bird. Supporting the metal parts of a plane along with its human pilot would be impossible. [ citation needed ]\nGeneral military training often includes aircraft identification. Silhouette charts are given to ground observers for memorization and reference so that friend or foe can be determined in the field. Conversely, many bird watching books will carry pictures of avian silhouettes from below, as often key details like tail and wing shape are the easiest way to determine the species of a high soaring bird, especially birds of prey. (Two comics later Cueball is out birdwatching with his friend in 1826: Birdwatching and could need such a chart, if he could spot any birds that is. A hawk, that is actually a drone, was spotted in 1910: Sky Spotters .)\nThe pseudo-confusion between birds and planes here could be a reference to the \"It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman\" quote often used in, naturally, Superman -related entertainment. A similar joke was used in 1792: Bird\/Plane\/Superman .\nThe comic highlights not only the various designs of aircraft tails, but also bird wings. Some wings are highly adapted for soaring (eagle), speed (falcon), as well as rapid acceleration and short flights (blackbird).\nThe title text is juxtaposing military air bases with breeding nests of the animals, both of which might earn a hostile response to approach at the wrong time, but in wildly different measure. Encroaching on breeding territory of some of the birds being referenced may result in getting dived at or chased, so the comparison invites the reader to imagine what might happen if the analogous creatures in the comic were defending their nest with aircraft ordnance. And if the birds were armed, with the missiles normally found on a military aircraft then imagine what would happen... This could also be a reference to the increasing hostility between US and Russia, as well as the generally more strained relationship US now has with many countries after the election of Donald Trump for president half a year before this comic was released. This is also the second comic to refer to the military in less than two months, the first being 1803: Location Reviews reviewing a Nuclear Launch Facility. Randall has seemed very worried in his comics since the election, see more regarding this here .\nThe idea of a bird with plane engines was first used in 1729: Migrating Geese , which also shows birds in silhouette. The third last bird in the right arm of the V-formation has twin engines.\n[A silhouette identification guide chart shows eight silhouettes in two rows. The silhouettes are a combination of the fuselage of an aircraft and the wings of birds, or in the second case an insect. Below each silhouette is a label:] Osprey  Hornet  Falcon  Harrier Eagle  Kestrel  Hawk  Blackbird\n"}
{"id":1825,"title":"7 Eleven","image_title":"7 Eleven","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1825","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/7_eleven.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1825:_7_Eleven","transcript":"[A person in a spacesuit is trying in vain to open the door to a convenience store, rattling the handle. Behind him stands a tall post with a big 7-eleven logo at the top and the opening hours on a bar below the logo.] Sign: 7-Eleven Bar: Open 24 hours Door: Rattle rattle\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm glad they finally opened a 7-Eleven here on Mars, but it's annoying how it closes for 37 minutes every day.\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at the idiosyncrasies of time keeping.  Since units of time are intimately tied to a planet's rotation, and planets rotate at different rates, time keeping doesn't always follow a simple pattern.\nMany stores advertise being open 24\/7, which means that they're open all day, every day. Many locations of the convenience store chain 7-Eleven are now \"open 24 hours\", again meaning they are always open (despite historically being open only from 7 AM to 11 PM local time, hence its name).\nThe main joke in the comic refers to the fact that a day on Mars (the time it takes for Mars to make a full rotation on its own axis) is about 24 hours and 37 minutes.  If a 7-11 store is open for literally 24 hours per Mars day, then it would actually be closed for around 37 minutes each day.  NASA, for its Mars missions, uses a \"Mars-hour\" that is one twenty-fourth of a Martian day; had the sign implicitly referred to 24 Mars-hours then the store would be open for the entire Mars day.\nThe duration for the Martian day used by Randall is the Martian sidereal day (how long it takes the non-Sun stars to get to the same position in the sky) of 24 hours, 37 minutes, and 22.663 seconds. However, Mars exploration missions use the Martian solar day (how long it takes the Sun to get to the same position in the sky) or sol of 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds. Thus in practice, the 7-11 store would be closed for 39 minutes daily instead of 37 minutes. Likewise, Earth time usually refers to solar days; a typical (mean) sidereal Earth day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0916 seconds long.\nThe first part of the title text refers to daylight saving time (DST), where clocks are changed on predefined days of the year in order to maximize use of available sunlight.  In the United States, most places set clocks forward by one hour on the second Sunday of March, resulting in a 23-hour day, and back again on the first Sunday of November, resulting in a 25-hour day.  Thus technically, even a 7-11 in the US would not truly be open \"24 hours\" every day.  Arizona and Hawaii are called out as exceptions because they do not observe daylight saving time (except on the Navajo reservation in Arizona). Randall has made fun of DST several times before , and once again he shows his disdain for DST by saying that in the U.S., only 24-hour stores within the two states not using DST are honest. This comic came out over a month after DST began in the US.\nThe second part of the title text refers to leap seconds , which may be added or subtracted to the end of June or December in order to synchronize time with Earth's actual rotation.  Months with a leap second will see its last day being one second longer than 24 hours.  Since leap seconds apply to all Earth-based clocks, any store on Earth would not technically be open for exactly 24 hours on such days. Leap seconds have been referred to before in the title text of 1514: PermaCal .\n[A person in a spacesuit is trying in vain to open the door to a convenience store, rattling the handle. Behind him stands a tall post with a big 7-eleven logo at the top and the opening hours on a bar below the logo.] Sign: 7-Eleven Bar: Open 24 hours Door: Rattle rattle\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm glad they finally opened a 7-Eleven here on Mars, but it's annoying how it closes for 37 minutes every day.\n"}
{"id":1826,"title":"Birdwatching","image_title":"Birdwatching","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1826","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/birdwatching.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1826:_Birdwatching","transcript":"[Cueball and Knit Cap with a knit cap are standing together looking up in the sky. Cueball holds a camera with a large lens down in front of him, and his friend holds binoculars down in front of him.] Cueball: Birdwatching is hard. Cueball: They're all way too small and far away.\n[In a frame-less panel they both raise their tool eyepieces to their eyes.] Cueball: That hawk is over a mile up! How did you even spot it?\n[Both lower their eyepiece again. The friend still looks up while Cueball looks down on his camera which he holds up in front of him. A black squiggly line above his head indicates that he is fuming over his camera's abilities.]\n[Cueball now has a vacuum cleaner with a big body and a large hose which he is pointing towards the sky, as air is visibly sucked in to the hose and the vacuum cleaner is making a very loud noise which extends beyond the frame of the panel.Cueball is holding one hand on the vacuum cleaner which has a label with its brand on it. Cueball's camera lies on the ground in front of the vacuum cleaner. The friend looks back at Cueball.] Vacuum cleaner: Whrrrrr Label: Shop Vac\n","explanation":"In this comic Cueball and Knit Cap are out birdwatching (hence the title). Birdwatching is an activity to observe birds. Usually this is done at a distance, as birds are flying in the air, and are far away. It is thus helpful to use binoculars .\nKnit Cap uses binoculars and manages to spot a hawk a mile up. Cueball, however, has brought his camera, probably his superzoom camera from 1719: Superzoom . (He uses that again already two comics later in 1828: ISS Solar Transit ). It is very difficult to find anything in such a camera, especially if held in one's hand (as opposed to on a tripod) and zoomed in. Maybe Cueball is with his trained friend, out birdwatching for the first time. Cueball is frustrated and comments on the difficulty and is amazed Knit Cap can spot birds over such distances.\nFrustrated with his camera, Cueball comes up with a solution, which is to use a vacuum cleaner , specifically a shop vac , to pull the birds in closer so he won't need the superzoom camera to see them. This is physically impossible with such a small device. Even if the shop vac created a perfect vacuum, it can only pull out air at the speed of sound, which amounts to approximately 1 cubic meter per second considering the apparent size of the hose. This is not enough to create a significant amount of wind or affect the atmosphere. (He might've borrowed it from Beret Guy who has many strange powers that also extends to improving vacuum cleaners, which Cueball knows about as seen in 1486: Vacuum ).\nCueball's shop vac bird collector is similar in concept to vacuum-based insect collectors used by entomologists . Cueball evidently thinks that a similar concept will work to easily collect birds.\nThe title text refers to park rangers , who are officials in charge of protecting the natural elements (i.e. plants, animals, etc.) in many parks and would certainly object to birds being forced to coalesce via an extremely powerful vacuum. If such a vacuum were created and used for this purpose, it probably would pose a threat to the safety of birds. Cueball says he has solved this problem by placing a perforated screen in front. In doing so, he can safely attract the birds without trapping them inside the vacuum. He implies that this should remove the danger to the birds, which is not the case. While the birds can no longer enter the vacuum itself, having a large number of birds pulled into a (presumably small) screen would probably fare poorly for the birds, so Cueball's solution is rather poor.\nWhen out birdwatching it is a great idea to have a silhouette chart to be able to recognize the birds by the shadow they make against the sky. Two comics before this one Randall made a comic with just such a chart, 1824: Identification Chart , although that was for combinations of birds and planes...\n[Cueball and Knit Cap with a knit cap are standing together looking up in the sky. Cueball holds a camera with a large lens down in front of him, and his friend holds binoculars down in front of him.] Cueball: Birdwatching is hard. Cueball: They're all way too small and far away.\n[In a frame-less panel they both raise their tool eyepieces to their eyes.] Cueball: That hawk is over a mile up! How did you even spot it?\n[Both lower their eyepiece again. The friend still looks up while Cueball looks down on his camera which he holds up in front of him. A black squiggly line above his head indicates that he is fuming over his camera's abilities.]\n[Cueball now has a vacuum cleaner with a big body and a large hose which he is pointing towards the sky, as air is visibly sucked in to the hose and the vacuum cleaner is making a very loud noise which extends beyond the frame of the panel.Cueball is holding one hand on the vacuum cleaner which has a label with its brand on it. Cueball's camera lies on the ground in front of the vacuum cleaner. The friend looks back at Cueball.] Vacuum cleaner: Whrrrrr Label: Shop Vac\n"}
{"id":1827,"title":"Survivorship Bias","image_title":"Survivorship Bias","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1827","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/survivorship_bias.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1827:_Survivorship_Bias","transcript":"[Hairy, holding an arm out towards an unseen crowd, is standing on a podium with five large bags around him, each having a dollar sign on it.] Hairy: Never stop buying lottery tickets, no matter what anyone tells you. Hairy: I failed again and again, but I never gave up. I took extra jobs and poured the money into tickets. Hairy: And here I am, proof that if you put in the time, it pays off!\n[Caption below the panel:] Every inspirational speech by someone successful should have to start with a disclaimer about survivorship bias.\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of entrepreneurial speeches. Entrepreneurial speeches are talks, such as graduation commencements or motivational speeches. The idea behind graduation commencements is that the entrepreneur, having accumulated wisdom and experience in the process of becoming successful, will share his insights and experience to the students, in the hope that they learn lessons that will help them achieve success as well. Companies hire motivational speakers to motivate employees to work hard.\nA common theme in these talks is that the entrepreneur succeeded by persisting through hardship, sometimes despite other people telling them they would be better off giving up. They advise students to do the same, and to keep pursuing their dreams even through subsequent failure. While this isn't necessarily bad business advice, this can give students a biased vision of reality, and lead them to imagine that they will succeed as long as they keep trying.\nThis comic makes a joke about survivorship bias, hence the title. Survivorship bias , or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that \"survived\" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may be actual people, as in a medical study, or could be companies or research subjects or applicants for a job, or anything that must make it past some selection process to be considered further. They may also have \"survived\" on only some of their attempts.\nIn this comic Hairy is giving a talk encouraging people to \"never stop buying lottery tickets\". This is an unwise investment plan, because the chances of winning the lottery are mathematically very low and the total payout is usually less than the total ticket sales, meaning the expected return from buying a lottery ticket is ( almost ) always negative. Survivorship bias applies in this situation since people who eventually win (and, presumably, win more than they've spent on lottery tickets in the time that it took them to win) are much more likely to give inspirational speeches than someone who never won or didn't win enough to make the \"investment\" worthwhile.\nThe obvious bad strategy (keep buying lottery tickets) is a metaphor for strategies that successful entrepreneurs recommend (keep persisting and putting money into your start-up); these strategies may be bad on average, but people who pursued them and succeeded are much more likely to be invited and give speeches than people who pursued them and went bankrupt (or people who pursued safer strategies and kept their money), making it appear to students that taking high risks and persisting in the face of expensive failure is the optimal strategy.  And those who have done both, are more likely to speak about the successes than the failures and bankruptcies.\nRandall says in the caption below the panel that people should be informed about survivorship bias before hearing inspirational talks from successful people.\nThe title text says \"They say you can't argue with results, but what kind of defeatist attitude is that?  If you stick with it, you can argue with ANYTHING.\"  In the comic, the speaker's \"result\" was winning the lottery.  Pointing out the survivorship bias is Randall effectively arguing with results, by pointing out that they were obtained randomly, and that it ignores all the other people who may have (foolishly) followed this same process, but never won the lottery.  Taken a step further, one could use the survivorship bias to argue against the results of any process, be it research (Any given research process is bound to produce SOME good results, and since those are the only ones published, it is difficult to determine if the research process itself contributed to the good results), business decisions (Some businesses fail, and others succeed, but since only the successful ones stick around, it can be difficult to determine WHY they failed or succeeded), etc..\n[Hairy, holding an arm out towards an unseen crowd, is standing on a podium with five large bags around him, each having a dollar sign on it.] Hairy: Never stop buying lottery tickets, no matter what anyone tells you. Hairy: I failed again and again, but I never gave up. I took extra jobs and poured the money into tickets. Hairy: And here I am, proof that if you put in the time, it pays off!\n[Caption below the panel:] Every inspirational speech by someone successful should have to start with a disclaimer about survivorship bias.\n"}
{"id":1828,"title":"ISS Solar Transit","image_title":"ISS Solar Transit","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1828","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/iss_solar_transit.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1828:_ISS_Solar_Transit","transcript":"[Cueball is kneeling in front of a small platform while operating a camera with a very long objective. The camera is angled sharply upward toward the sky as it is attached to a tripod standing on the platform. An off-panel voice calls out to him.] Off-panel voice: What's going on? Cueball: ISS solar transit. From this spot, the space station should briefly line up with the sun. Cueball: I got a sun filter and I'm trying to take a picture of it crossing.\n[Two half height panels above each others follow. The first shows an image of the very orange sun on a black background, as seen through the camera.]\n[The second of the two half height panels shows Cueball making further adjustments to the camera, as in the first panel.] Cueball: Perfect. Hmm, I should set the white balance.\n[Once gain there are two panels above each other. The top is black with white text and icons from the white balance menu. It has the following options shown after each of the icons as mentioned below in the square brackets:] [Shining light bulb]: Incandescent [Shining fluorescent lamp]: Fluorescent [Shining sun]: Direct sunlight [Lightning]: Flash [Cloud]: Cloudy [A house that cast a shade]: Shade [Two triangles with a circle between them]: Custom\n[In the panel below Cueball still operates the camera as before]\n[A frame-less but full height panel follows where Cueball leans back from the camera with his hands on his thighs.]\n[The last two panels are again above each other. It is almost the same panels as before the frame-less panels, except that the direct sunlight option has been selected as shown with a blue selection band across that option.] Incandescent Fluorescent Direct sunlight Flash Cloudy Shade Custom\n[In the bottom panel Cueball again operates the camera.]\n","explanation":"This is the first comic in a two comic series , released during the same week on Monday and Friday. This comic continues in 1830: ISS Solar Transit 2 .\nCueball is trying to take a photograph of the International Space Station moving in front of the sun ( example ). He has his camera with a long lens set up with a fixed setting to keep it still while he contemplates the best way to get the photographs he wants.\nA normal camera is not able to take a photograph of the sun due to the extreme brightness. This is why Cueball is using a solar filter , which makes the sun look orange instead of white, as shown in the second panel.\nDigital cameras need to determine the color temperature of a photograph to correctly display colors. This is done using the white balance setting. The joke here is that Cueball selects the \"direct sunlight\" option, as he feels it is the option that best suits his unusual situation of directly photographing the sun, even though the \"direct sunlight\" setting is intended to be used for photographing objects directly illuminated by the sun and not for the sun itself.\nThe light from an object illuminated by \"direct sunlight\" is, in fact, indirect sunlight when it reaches the camera sensor; so when photographing the sun itself, the camera receives sunlight that is even more direct than \"direct\".\nThe use of a solar filter influences the color temperature, so \"custom\" would probably be the correct option here. A camera using the \"custom\" option usually requires you to focus on a white or gray object first to determine the correct setting. Most high-end cameras, like the superzoom camera that is likely depicted here, are able to capture in raw image format , allowing the user to adjust the white balance afterwards in software.\nThe title text is pointing out that the sunlit side of the moon is also in direct sunlight, which is why we are able to see it, and so \"direct sunlight\" would actually be the correct setting in this case.\nIt is the second comic within a week where Cueball is using a camera, similar to the one he used in 1719: Superzoom . The previous comic was 1826: Birdwatching , two comics before this one.\n[Cueball is kneeling in front of a small platform while operating a camera with a very long objective. The camera is angled sharply upward toward the sky as it is attached to a tripod standing on the platform. An off-panel voice calls out to him.] Off-panel voice: What's going on? Cueball: ISS solar transit. From this spot, the space station should briefly line up with the sun. Cueball: I got a sun filter and I'm trying to take a picture of it crossing.\n[Two half height panels above each others follow. The first shows an image of the very orange sun on a black background, as seen through the camera.]\n[The second of the two half height panels shows Cueball making further adjustments to the camera, as in the first panel.] Cueball: Perfect. Hmm, I should set the white balance.\n[Once gain there are two panels above each other. The top is black with white text and icons from the white balance menu. It has the following options shown after each of the icons as mentioned below in the square brackets:] [Shining light bulb]: Incandescent [Shining fluorescent lamp]: Fluorescent [Shining sun]: Direct sunlight [Lightning]: Flash [Cloud]: Cloudy [A house that cast a shade]: Shade [Two triangles with a circle between them]: Custom\n[In the panel below Cueball still operates the camera as before]\n[A frame-less but full height panel follows where Cueball leans back from the camera with his hands on his thighs.]\n[The last two panels are again above each other. It is almost the same panels as before the frame-less panels, except that the direct sunlight option has been selected as shown with a blue selection band across that option.] Incandescent Fluorescent Direct sunlight Flash Cloudy Shade Custom\n[In the bottom panel Cueball again operates the camera.]\n"}
{"id":1829,"title":"Geochronology","image_title":"Geochronology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1829","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geochronology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1829:_Geochronology","transcript":"[Ponytail is gesturing toward some rock formations in a grass field while addressing Megan and Cueball who are looking down at the rocks, Cueball with a hand to his chin.] Ponytail: This bedrock likely formed as the Dalmatian microplate subducted under East Laika during the Upper Pomeranian. Cueball: Ah, yes.\n[Caption below the panel:] Geology Tip: There are so many microplates and ages that no one remembers them all, so in a pinch you can bluff with dog breeds.\n","explanation":"Ponytail is describing the origin of some rock formations to Megan and Cueball . She apparently forgot the names of the microplates and the age when the subduction occurred, so she substituties them with names of dog breeds ( Dalmatian , Laika and Pomeranian ) to seem knowledgeable and impress her audience.\nAlthough no microplates or geological ages with these names exist, this is not obvious for people outside of the field, as dog breeds are often named after geographic regions.  For example Dalmatia is the name of a region in Croatia , and a microplate named after it could exist (possibly as a fragment of the former Adriatic Plate ). Likewise, a Laika Plate could be named after the Laika Island in Vanuatu ; however, the name is unrelated to the island and originates from the Russian word \u043b\u0430\u0439\u043a\u0430 (lit. \"barker\", a generic name for several breeds of hunting dogs and also the given name of the first dog in space on Sputnik 2 ). Geological ages are often named after place where the first rocks dating from the age were found e.g. the Devonian is named after the English ceremonial county of Devon (aka Devonshire), while the Permian is named after the Russian city of Perm . Thus, a Pomeranian Age named after Pomerania , a region on the Baltic Sea split between Poland and Germany , might reasonably exist.\nSo the comic concludes in the caption with one of Randall's many tips , this time a geology tip, about how it is possible to pretend to be more knowledgeable regarding geology (and to bluff others not educated in the science) by just inserting dog breeds names instead of real names as no one remembers the names of all the microplates. An actual geologist, unlike Ponytail, would not be fooled.\nThe title text continues the situation until Ponytail starts to run out of dog breeds. Her audience catches on... until one of them chimes in that her \"explanation\" did name two real geological features: the dog breeds Labrador and Newfoundland are named after the two Canadian regions of Labrador and Newfoundland respectively. Geologically, Labrador is the easternmost section of the Canadian Shield , the ancient core of the North American continent. In contrast, Newfoundland (especially western Newfoundland) was formed from terranes , the remnants of a series of plates that collided with - and subducted beneath - North America. Some geologists have assigned the name \"Newfoundland Plate\" to one of these former microplates that Newfoundland now comprises. However, the title text explanation is not likely to be entirely accurate, because the most significant mountains in Newfoundland are the Long Range Mountains , which are the northernmost of the Appalachian Mountains , created when Africa and North America collided to form Pangaea ; no mountain range is identified as being the result of the collision of the Newfoundland Plate with North America.\nSubduction was featured in a previous comic 1388: Subduction License .\n[Ponytail is gesturing toward some rock formations in a grass field while addressing Megan and Cueball who are looking down at the rocks, Cueball with a hand to his chin.] Ponytail: This bedrock likely formed as the Dalmatian microplate subducted under East Laika during the Upper Pomeranian. Cueball: Ah, yes.\n[Caption below the panel:] Geology Tip: There are so many microplates and ages that no one remembers them all, so in a pinch you can bluff with dog breeds.\n"}
{"id":1830,"title":"ISS Solar Transit 2","image_title":"ISS Solar Transit 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1830","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/iss_solar_transit_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1830:_ISS_Solar_Transit_2","transcript":"[Every panel is split into two half-height panels arranged vertically.]\n[The first top panel shows an image of an orange sun on a black background with a white dot labeled in light-blue letter at the top right corner. The dot is in a light-blue cross-hair and a light-blue dotted trail is behind it as indicating movement towards the sun.] ISS\n[In the bottom panel Cueball is kneeling in front of a small platform while operating a camera with a very long objective while holding a smartphone. The camera is angled sharply upward toward the sky as it is attached to a tripod standing on the platform.] Cueball: Perfect! Transit in three... two...\n[The upper image is the same but the dot has halved the distance to the sun.] ISS\n[Cueball sits in the panel below.] Cueball: ...one...\n[In the upper panel the dotted line enters the Sun and the white dot has plunged into the sun making a flare \"splash\" out from the surface of the Sun. This makes a sound written in orange letters.] Fwoosh\n[Cueball sits silent in the panel below.]\n","explanation":"This Friday comic is a continuation of the Monday comic from the same week, 1828: ISS Solar Transit , where Cueball was preparing his camera in order to capture the transit of the International Space Station (ISS) across the Sun . The comic is also made in the same special way using split panels. As noted in the first comic in the ISS series the white balance is still not set properly, because the sun looks orange instead of white\/yellow.\nHowever, instead of transiting across the face of the sun, the ISS crashes into the Sun. In reality, of course, this can never happen, because the ISS orbits Earth at an altitude of between 330 and 435 km, while the Earth orbits the Sun at an altitude of about 149.60 million kilometers or 1 astronomical unit . This means the minimum distance between the ISS and the Sun is only slightly less than 1 AU. Also, due to parallax , only people in a very localized region on earth are able to see the ISS \"hit\" the sun. For all others the ISS would travel past the sun.\nAdditionally, even if the ISS would somehow impact the sun, it would not make a noticeable splash, due to being incredibly tiny compared to the sun. It would get vaporized before reaching it. (See the what if? Tungsten Countertop ). And it would make no \"Fwoosh\" sound to be heard on Earth, primarily because there's a lot of empty space between Earth and the Sun [ citation needed ] , and sound cannot propagate in empty space.\nThe title text plays on the event in the comic, by saying that a new space station is being launched every few weeks as the event in the comic keeps happening, with a continual series of ISSs being destroyed by crashing into the Sun on a regular basis. This is clearly implausible, as it has taken many years to build up the ISS, and there are at least three astronauts on board that would get killed a couple of times a month in that case.\nIt's possible that the comic is a play on conspiracy theories about space exploration, such as the moon landing being faked. In these situations, while the government may be trying to cover up or show something different from what actually happened, amateur photographers\/astronomers\/radio enthusiasts (such as Cueball in this comic) claim to observe the event independently of government or commercial sources, and see what really happened. In this case, the conspiracy theory would be that the ISS actually does crash into the sun every few weeks, but we're made to believe that it orbits the earth without crashing, while Cueball is able to observe what really happens with his camera. It further bears certain resemblance to the beliefs of the Flat Earth Society, which is that the Sun and Moon are only 3000 miles away from the earth, with the rest of the cosmos being only 100 miles further way. Were that the case, such a collision would be far less unlikely; as it is, such a collision is patently ridiculous.\n[Every panel is split into two half-height panels arranged vertically.]\n[The first top panel shows an image of an orange sun on a black background with a white dot labeled in light-blue letter at the top right corner. The dot is in a light-blue cross-hair and a light-blue dotted trail is behind it as indicating movement towards the sun.] ISS\n[In the bottom panel Cueball is kneeling in front of a small platform while operating a camera with a very long objective while holding a smartphone. The camera is angled sharply upward toward the sky as it is attached to a tripod standing on the platform.] Cueball: Perfect! Transit in three... two...\n[The upper image is the same but the dot has halved the distance to the sun.] ISS\n[Cueball sits in the panel below.] Cueball: ...one...\n[In the upper panel the dotted line enters the Sun and the white dot has plunged into the sun making a flare \"splash\" out from the surface of the Sun. This makes a sound written in orange letters.] Fwoosh\n[Cueball sits silent in the panel below.]\n"}
{"id":1831,"title":"Here to Help","image_title":"Here to Help","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1831","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/here_to_help.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1831:_Here_to_Help","transcript":"[Megan, standing next to Hairy, is addressing the reader holding her arms out. Cueball walks in from the right.] Megan: Our field has been struggling with this problem for years.\n[Cueball holds his laptop high up in one arm above Megan's head while holding his other arm out as well. Megan has turned to look at him.] Cueball: Struggle no more! I'm here to solve it with algorithms!\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball sits on a chair at a desk with his laptop working on it, while Hairy and Megan looks on from behind.]\n[Cueball, still sitting at his laptop, points at the screen. Megan raises her arms and four small lines above her head, on either side of her speech line, indicate her annoyance with Cueball.] Six months later: Cueball: Wow, this problem is really hard. Megan: You don't say.\n","explanation":"This comic is a satire of computer programmers, who sometimes forget that not everything can be solved with an algorithm , or of the tendency to think computers are the answer to everything. In the first panel, Megan talks about how the field that she and Hairy work in has a difficult problem that many people have been working on. Cueball , believing that algorithms can solve their problem, tries to help. In the next panel, Megan and Hairy silently watch Cueball working on the problem on his laptop. Finally, six months later, Cueball concedes, and an exasperated Megan retorts sarcastically, pointing out that she had explained its difficulty six months ago within the timeline.\nThe title text furthers Cueball's apparent arrogance by showing a dialogue. Megan or Hairy says, \"We TOLD you it was hard,\" referring to the first panel, but Cueball, still confident in his own ability's superiority, says, \"Yeah, but now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard.\" The joke is that Cueball believes that, even though he has just failed, it was his attempt which proved the difficulty, and not Megan and Hairy's work for years. The dialog references an exchange from the film The Imitation Game , in which Alan Turing's superior claims, \"The Americans, the Russians, the French, the Germans, everyone thinks Enigma is unbreakable,\" and Turing replies, \"Good. Let me try and we'll know for sure, won't we?\"\nThe satire, however, applies far beyond computer programmers.  It can be read as a political commentary, as in nobody knew health care could be so complicated. It is what we'd all like to see when well-meaning advice givers provide the \"simple\" solution to all our problems, or management provides glib advice from ten thousand feet.  It is a commentary on the universal tendency to see problems as simple because we don't know what makes them hard.\nThis comic calls back to 793: Physicists and possibly 1570: Engineer Syllogism in central theme.\n[Megan, standing next to Hairy, is addressing the reader holding her arms out. Cueball walks in from the right.] Megan: Our field has been struggling with this problem for years.\n[Cueball holds his laptop high up in one arm above Megan's head while holding his other arm out as well. Megan has turned to look at him.] Cueball: Struggle no more! I'm here to solve it with algorithms!\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball sits on a chair at a desk with his laptop working on it, while Hairy and Megan looks on from behind.]\n[Cueball, still sitting at his laptop, points at the screen. Megan raises her arms and four small lines above her head, on either side of her speech line, indicate her annoyance with Cueball.] Six months later: Cueball: Wow, this problem is really hard. Megan: You don't say.\n"}
{"id":1832,"title":"Photo Library Management","image_title":"Photo Library Management","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1832","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/photo_library_management.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1832:_Photo_Library_Management","transcript":"[A line graph is shown. The x-axis is labeled \"Photos taken per day\" and the y-axis is labeled \"Time spent going through photos per day\". The content is divided into six sections:]\n[Section 1: Few photos taken per day, no limit to time spent:] \"No problems\" [Section 2: Some photos taken per day, a limited amount of time spent going through:] \"Photo library fits on most devices as long as they're not too old\" [Section 3: More photos taken per day, less time spent going through:] \"Need cloud storage, external hard drive, or frequent upgrades\" [Section 4: A lot of photos taken per day, and even less time spent going through:] \"Photo library grows faster than Moore's Law\" [Section 5: Above line increasing where more time is spent as more photos are taken:] \"Can't find the good photos among the thousands of bad ones\" [Section 6: Below line of negative gradient, as number of photos increases and time decreases:] \"Can't sleep, too busy sifting through photos to find the best one\"\n","explanation":"The comic is about the results of how many photos one takes. It is a graph showing multiple areas corresponding to the number of photos taken per day by a user and the total time spent reviewing them.\nThe comic is split into 6 sectors as described below:\nAs Randall goes through more photos, he finds more bad ones, erases them and more storage becomes available. This allows taking more photos and still don't exceed the limits of the quota. This is why the \"secondary\" lines (e.g between the different storage types) are not completely vertical but tilted to the right at the top.\nThe title text states \"A good lifehack is to use messy and unstable systems to organize your photos. That way, every five years or so it becomes obsolete and\/or collapses, and you have to open it up and pick only your favorite pictures to salvage.\" If you know that you will lose everything, that knowledge will encourage you to save what you want the most and leave everything else. It will also help decrease how many photos you have through the same awareness.\n[A line graph is shown. The x-axis is labeled \"Photos taken per day\" and the y-axis is labeled \"Time spent going through photos per day\". The content is divided into six sections:]\n[Section 1: Few photos taken per day, no limit to time spent:] \"No problems\" [Section 2: Some photos taken per day, a limited amount of time spent going through:] \"Photo library fits on most devices as long as they're not too old\" [Section 3: More photos taken per day, less time spent going through:] \"Need cloud storage, external hard drive, or frequent upgrades\" [Section 4: A lot of photos taken per day, and even less time spent going through:] \"Photo library grows faster than Moore's Law\" [Section 5: Above line increasing where more time is spent as more photos are taken:] \"Can't find the good photos among the thousands of bad ones\" [Section 6: Below line of negative gradient, as number of photos increases and time decreases:] \"Can't sleep, too busy sifting through photos to find the best one\"\n"}
{"id":1833,"title":"Code Quality 3","image_title":"Code Quality 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1833","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/code_quality_3.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1833:_Code_Quality_3","transcript":"[Ponytail sitting in front of a computer screen typing. Cueball speaks only off-panel, but since this is a direct continuation of comic 1513 and 1695: Code Quality and Code Quality 2 where Cueball is shown, there can be no doubt it is him.] Ponytail: Your code looks like song lyrics written using only the stuff that comes after the question mark in a URL. Cueball (off-panel): Sorry. [Zoom in on Ponytail's upper body.] Ponytail: It's like a JSON table of model numbers for flashlights with \"tactical\" in their names. [Zoom back out again. Ponytail has lifted her hands off the table and is slightly leaning back against the chair.] Ponytail: Like you read Turing's 1936 paper on computing and a page of JavaScript example code and guessed at everything in between. [Zoom in again on Ponytail's face.] Ponytail: It's like a leet-speak translation of a manifesto by a survivalist cult leader who's for some reason obsessed with memory allocation. Cueball (off-panel): I can get someone else to review my code. Ponytail: Not more than once, I bet.\n","explanation":"This comic is the third in the Code Quality series:\nIn the first panel, Ponytail references query strings , which store information, such as search queries or page numbers, relevant to the URL. Query strings are not meant to be especially human-readable (eg. \"&sxsrf=APq-WBvn82l8oTeNNzZeCkI7B9nM5nxoVg%3A1647235405067\"), so a song based on one would likely not be a good one. [ citation needed ]\nA tactical flashlight is a light that can be mounted on a gun for use in low-light scenarios. They tend to be very durable and very bright. Different models have different features and capabilities, so they are given cool-sounding model numbers. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a subset of JavaScript used, by many programming languages, as a convenient way of recording structured data. It's not clear what else would be in the table (tables typically have more than one column) and JSON technically has arrays and objects (dictionaries) but not tables, but a JSON array of objects of these model numbers would look something like:\nAlan Turing was a British theoretical computer scientist, often considered the father of the field. His 1936 paper outlined Turing machines, a theoretical model for computing, as well as computability and the halting problem. Theoretical computer science is very different from practical coding; understanding the contents of the paper would not at all help a coder to understand today's algorithms, design patterns, and best practices. This is not helped by a page of JavaScript example code. JavaScript is a popular programming language which makes web pages responsive to user inputs, and while JavaScript arguably solves the problem in a practical manner (as opposed to Turing's very theoretical work), it does get a lot of criticism - for instance it is nearly untyped , which allows the programmer to do very interesting things, like JSFuck . Then, example code is used to explain a concept in programming or demonstrate how a program works, but it does not actually run on any computer. \"Guessing everything in between\" would involve attempting to write code using skills that could range anywhere from the most basic programming to Turing's extremely advanced ideas.\nIn the final panel, Ponytail references leet-speak , in which symbols are replaced with similar-looking symbols, and a manifesto , a statement of a person or group's beliefs and intentions. A manifesto from a survivalist cult leader might be nonsensical, even before being translated to leet-speak. Memory allocation is a low-level computer programming concept; most modern languages have features that take care of memory allocation for the programmer, possibly implying that Cueball does not know how to use these features.\nAt this point Cueball, quickly becoming impatient with Ponytail's sass in what is supposed to be a formal code review, retorts that if she can't start giving him the constructive criticism that he's looking for, he can always find someone else to replace her. Ponytail smugly responds that nobody else would be able to stomach his code for more than one sitting, and that she's the only one he's got.\nForth is an old programming language that tends to be difficult to read. It is stack-based, meaning that values to be operated on are moved on a stack before the operation to be performed is given. Using stacks can be considered different from programming languages that resemble natural human language (e.g. COBOL ). While stack-based computing makes some problems very simple (for example, it is relatively simple to design a Forth compiler, or reversing the order of an array) and uses less computing resources, such programming languages are not easy to learn.  Since Forth allows the programmer to rewrite the language, or define their own language, and it does not enforce restrictions like data types, it may be especially easy for novices to write cryptic code.\nA cryptogram is a cipher puzzle, generally one easy enough to be solved manually. The title text implies that the code is so bad that it looks like unreadable Forth code that is missing random characters.\n[Ponytail sitting in front of a computer screen typing. Cueball speaks only off-panel, but since this is a direct continuation of comic 1513 and 1695: Code Quality and Code Quality 2 where Cueball is shown, there can be no doubt it is him.] Ponytail: Your code looks like song lyrics written using only the stuff that comes after the question mark in a URL. Cueball (off-panel): Sorry. [Zoom in on Ponytail's upper body.] Ponytail: It's like a JSON table of model numbers for flashlights with \"tactical\" in their names. [Zoom back out again. Ponytail has lifted her hands off the table and is slightly leaning back against the chair.] Ponytail: Like you read Turing's 1936 paper on computing and a page of JavaScript example code and guessed at everything in between. [Zoom in again on Ponytail's face.] Ponytail: It's like a leet-speak translation of a manifesto by a survivalist cult leader who's for some reason obsessed with memory allocation. Cueball (off-panel): I can get someone else to review my code. Ponytail: Not more than once, I bet.\n"}
{"id":1834,"title":"Lunch Order","image_title":"Lunch Order","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1834","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lunch_order.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1834:_Lunch_Order","transcript":"[Three Hairy's are between two control panels, one is sitting at the panel on the right, the two others are standing and talking in the middle.] Hairy 1: Sir - Strategic command has sent us a lunch order. Hairy 2: Don't they have anything better to do?\n[Caption below the panel:] Everyone complains about autocorrect, but we forget about the time it prevented a nuclear war.\n","explanation":"The comic plays on the similarity of the words \"launch\" and \"lunch,\" and the fact that both \"Lunch order\" and \"Launch order\" are common phrases in their respective environments.  A \"lunch order\" is common in many work places, where a person may be asked to go pick up lunches for multiple coworkers so they don't all need to leave to get their lunches -- they would typically give their lunch order to the person making the run so they would know what to order.  A \"launch order\" would only apply to a place capable of launching missiles , such as military installation housing launch-able missiles.  So while a \"lunch order\" is pretty benign and could certainly apply to such a place, a \"launch order\" of a nuclear warhead is a much more drastic command, meaning that the principle of deterrence has failed and mutually assured destruction is imminent.  By receiving an order for \"Lunch\" instead of to \"Launch,\" nuclear conflict was avoided.\nAutocorrect is a feature in many software text-entry applications (such as smartphone \"keyboards\") that will make changes to entered text that it identifies as misspelled in order to quickly increase legibility of the final text. While this process typically makes text entry quicker and easier for users, sometimes the automatically corrected text will not match what the user intended to send, which can lead to miscommunication.\nIn most circumstances, military units charged with the maintenance of active nuclear weapons will receive their orders to employ those weapons based on direct communication from a commanding authority, these forces in the United States are commanded by the United States Strategic Command. The majority of modern nuclear weapons are prepared to be deployed by rocket launch.\nThe joke does not depict an actual historic event. To our knowledge, the last time the United States almost launched nuclear missiles at a hostile power was June 1980 , while the function we know today as Autocorrect would not enter development until the 1990's . That said, the country still maintains a large nuclear arsenal ready to launch on short notice.  The comic might be playing off recent fears involving hostilities between the United States and North Korea ; if any l(a)unch preparations have been taken in 2017, they were not declassified by the time this comic was published.\nThe title text plays on the similarity between two phrases: \"GO FOR LAUNCH\" is the standard way to express the Launch status check for a rocket (and means that all checks have passed and launch can proceed), whereas \"GO FOR LUNCH\" expresses the more mundane act of simply beginning one's lunch break. Despite the repetition (which is intended to reduce the chance of a miscommunication), the autocorrect still managed to distort the message a further two times.\nA previous comic also explain the 898: Chain of Command and who's responsible of the red button. Missile launch systems and inaccurate alteration of text also figure in the later comic 2099: Missal of Silos .\n[Three Hairy's are between two control panels, one is sitting at the panel on the right, the two others are standing and talking in the middle.] Hairy 1: Sir - Strategic command has sent us a lunch order. Hairy 2: Don't they have anything better to do?\n[Caption below the panel:] Everyone complains about autocorrect, but we forget about the time it prevented a nuclear war.\n"}
{"id":1835,"title":"Random Obsessions","image_title":"Random Obsessions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1835","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/random_obsessions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1835:_Random_Obsessions","transcript":"[The comic shows curves plotted in an (x,y)-plane. The x-axis shows years from 2004 to 2017, with every even year labeled. The y-axis is labeled \"popularity relative to peak (based on google trends)\". There are five vaguely bell-shaped curves, each stretching over 9-10 years. It is implied that they rise from a value close to zero, to which they also return.]\nThe curve labeled \"robot monkeys\" peaks in early 2005 and ends near the x-axis in late 2011. The curve labeled \"pirates vs ninjas\" peaks in late 2008 and ends in late 2014. [The remaining three curves all end in mid 2017, the comic release date. ] The curve labeled \"zombies\" starts in late 2007 and peaks in early 2013. By 2017 it has fallen to about 30% of its peak value. The curve labeled \"bacon\" starts in late 2009 and peaks in mid-2015. By 2017 it shows a value of about 90% of its peak value. The curve labeled \"definition of a sandwich\" starts in late 2013 and in 2017 it has reached approximately half its peak value.\n[Text below the panel:] Judging from Google Trends, these random semi-ironic obsessions seem to last about nine or ten years, so we should be done with the sandwich thing by 2024.\n","explanation":"This comic is formatted as a graph showing various Internet trends over the years according to Google Trends . The caption states that these \"random obsessions,\" as stated in the title, have 9-10 year cycles, and so predicts that the sandwich debate will be over by around 2024.\nDiscussions about the definition of \"sandwich\" are surprisingly common on the web, such as \"Is hot dog a sandwich?\" (See this discussion on Reddit)\nThe title text is a joke based on the debate over the definition of a sandwich. The speaker, presumably Randall , starts out with the fairly reasonable stance that open-faced sandwiches are not true sandwiches, but then veers off into the absurd by claiming that literally every other physical object in the universe is a sandwich. We can only hope that Randall does not extend this view to human beings .  (On the other hand, Randall may simply be defining a sandwich in an unusual way without implying that all other items are edible, or that all objects \"sandwiched\" between two of the same thing (such as air, vacuum, laptops, or slices of bread) constitute a \"sandwiched item\" which is not necessarily edible.  Such strange definitions have been seen before, in the title text of 1405: Meteor .)\nThe other obsessions mentioned are, in order: robot monkeys, pirates vs ninjas, zombies, and bacon.\n\"Robot Monkeys\" likely refers to people being obsessed with a movie or robots of some kind. It may specifically refer to the American\/Japanese animated TV series, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! , which aired from September 18, 2004 to December 16, 2006. It is possible that, based on this, that the trend curve does not actually begin in 2001, but does actually begin in 2004 as shown.\n\"Pirates vs Ninjas\" refers to a longstanding internet meme, popular in roughly the years shown on the chart, that held that ninjas and Caribbean pirates were arch-enemies.\n\"Zombies\" refers to the recent occurrence of zombie themed television shows (The Walking Dead) and movies (World War Z etc).\nThough the trend is dying out, as seen by the fact the graph is past the peak, there has been an explosion in bacon flavored\/scented products as well as items of clothing and decor that look like bacon. The YouTube channel Epic Meal Time was also part of the bacon fad, as adding large quantities of bacon to the meal being prepared was one of the running gags of the channel.\n[The comic shows curves plotted in an (x,y)-plane. The x-axis shows years from 2004 to 2017, with every even year labeled. The y-axis is labeled \"popularity relative to peak (based on google trends)\". There are five vaguely bell-shaped curves, each stretching over 9-10 years. It is implied that they rise from a value close to zero, to which they also return.]\nThe curve labeled \"robot monkeys\" peaks in early 2005 and ends near the x-axis in late 2011. The curve labeled \"pirates vs ninjas\" peaks in late 2008 and ends in late 2014. [The remaining three curves all end in mid 2017, the comic release date. ] The curve labeled \"zombies\" starts in late 2007 and peaks in early 2013. By 2017 it has fallen to about 30% of its peak value. The curve labeled \"bacon\" starts in late 2009 and peaks in mid-2015. By 2017 it shows a value of about 90% of its peak value. The curve labeled \"definition of a sandwich\" starts in late 2013 and in 2017 it has reached approximately half its peak value.\n[Text below the panel:] Judging from Google Trends, these random semi-ironic obsessions seem to last about nine or ten years, so we should be done with the sandwich thing by 2024.\n"}
{"id":1836,"title":"Okeanos","image_title":"Okeanos","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1836","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/okeanos.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1836:_Okeanos","transcript":"[The comic takes place during a typical YouTube livestream. The livestream video titled \"Camera 1: Exploring the Central Pacific Basin\" is provided by the channel \"OceanExplorerGov\" and recorded from Okeanos Explorer exploratory vessel. On the left hand side, the live video feed is playing, showing a jellyfish in the ocean's depths. On the right hand side, the live chat is displayed.]\nUser #1: Fake User #2: Who else is watching this in 2017? User #3: Is this prerendered or will this be in the game? User #4: That squid is a neoliberal User #5: Why do the McElroys never talk User #6: Stop messing around and eat the fish already User #7: This is why Trump won User #8: Why do u never craft anything User #9: This is just a distraction User #10: Something is wrong with that baby giraffe\n[Caption below the panel:] I love watching the Okeanos Ocean Exploration livestream, but it's probably for the best that they don't enable chat.\n","explanation":"The NOAAS Okeanos Explorer , named after the Greek (and Roman) personification of the sea Okeanos , is a vessel that is currently exploring the Central Pacific Basin. It livestreams the video feed [1] of its deep sea exploration online.\nThis comic seems to be a representation of the livestream on YouTube [2] ; see the table below for details.\nThe chat section for the actual livestream is disabled, but the comic adds some humorous examples of what the chat section would look like.  Several of the examples are the product of commenters falsely believing the livestream is that of a game, probably since most livestreams on YouTube are of people playing games; Randall is joking about the viewers of said streams in particular not being able to tell the difference, as well as YouTube commenters in general. Randall has mentioned the ridiculousness of comments on YouTube before in both 202: YouTube and 481: Listen to Yourself . One of the comments seems to refer to Minecraft or a similar game, since one of the comments asks why nothing is being crafted (crafting is a mechanic in many games, used to make items).\nIn the caption below Randall states that he likes to view the stream and commends them on disabling the chat section, for the reasons given in the comic above.\nThe title text is yet another comment by someone who dropped their phone from a boat, and now wants to use Okeanos' resources to find it, which is of course impossible; if the boat was anywhere near Okeanos, the phone would have swiftly been hidden in the silt on the bottom. And even if not, the chance of finding anything dropped in the Pacific Ocean , the largest Ocean on the Earth, is all but zero. Also, the Central Pacific Basin, where Okeanos was at the time of this comic's release, is 6500 meters deep; at that depth the water pressure is approximately 4454.863 kilopascals, or roughly 646 PSI. This is probably enough to irrevocably damage something as breakable as a cell phone. Even if the phone were of the so-called \"waterproof\" variety, that rating is usually only applicable to a few meters of depth rather than thousands of meters.  Needless to say, retrieving one's phone from the bottom of the Central Pacific Basin would be a challenging and pointless endeavor.\n[The comic takes place during a typical YouTube livestream. The livestream video titled \"Camera 1: Exploring the Central Pacific Basin\" is provided by the channel \"OceanExplorerGov\" and recorded from Okeanos Explorer exploratory vessel. On the left hand side, the live video feed is playing, showing a jellyfish in the ocean's depths. On the right hand side, the live chat is displayed.]\nUser #1: Fake User #2: Who else is watching this in 2017? User #3: Is this prerendered or will this be in the game? User #4: That squid is a neoliberal User #5: Why do the McElroys never talk User #6: Stop messing around and eat the fish already User #7: This is why Trump won User #8: Why do u never craft anything User #9: This is just a distraction User #10: Something is wrong with that baby giraffe\n[Caption below the panel:] I love watching the Okeanos Ocean Exploration livestream, but it's probably for the best that they don't enable chat.\n"}
{"id":1837,"title":"Rental Car","image_title":"Rental Car","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1837","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rental_car.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1837:_Rental_Car","transcript":"[A Cueball-like guy standing behind a desk looking at a computer screen services Megan and Cueball on the other side of the desk.] Guy: We have two rental cars left. Guy: One is the murder car. But don't let the name scare you! Guy: It's definitely haunted. But most drivers don't get murdered. Guy: Maybe one in six.\n[The guy lifts his hand and looks at Megan and Cueball.] Guy: The other is a regular sedan. Guy: But it has a GPS that's stuck trying to navigate to Seattle, and you can\u2019t turn it off. Megan: ...I can ignore it, right? That's fine.\n[In a frame-less panel Megan and Cueball drive in the sedan.] GPS: Turn left GPS: Recalculating GPS: Make a U-turn GPS: Recalculating GPS: Turn right GPS: Make a U-turn GPS: Recalculating\n[Megan and Cueball walk back into the agency with the guy behind his desk. Megan holds out the car keys in one hand.] Guy: Back already? Megan: We'll take the murder car. Guy: Popular choice.\n","explanation":"In this comic the couple Megan and Cueball want to rent a car. The Cueball-like guy from the car rental agency tells them they only have two vehicles available:\nMegan believes she can ignore this and accepts the less lethal car. The comic suggests that driving with a GPS that tries to guide you to a different destination than that which you wish to visit\u2014so it is always recalculating and asking you to do U-turns\u2014is incredibly annoying. So annoying that given the choice between the persistent low-level annoyance of the GPS on one hand, and the (\"low\") probability of being murdered on the other, most people will choose the latter option. After all, they might survive murderous ghosts but they feel they will not survive long having to listen to the broken GPS.\nAccording to the title text, the murderous ghosts haunt both cars, but as soon as the car starts driving and the GPS begins to drone on, even the ghost cannot stand listening to the broken GPS and stops possessing it.\nApart from the joke about GPS, this is also a subtle joke on the horrible cars one might get at a car rental service.\nIt is also possible that the car rental service is trying to drive people away from the haunted car, which we can assume is just a normal car, to get more profit when people come back and take the \"haunted\" car when their GPS is broken.\n[A Cueball-like guy standing behind a desk looking at a computer screen services Megan and Cueball on the other side of the desk.] Guy: We have two rental cars left. Guy: One is the murder car. But don't let the name scare you! Guy: It's definitely haunted. But most drivers don't get murdered. Guy: Maybe one in six.\n[The guy lifts his hand and looks at Megan and Cueball.] Guy: The other is a regular sedan. Guy: But it has a GPS that's stuck trying to navigate to Seattle, and you can\u2019t turn it off. Megan: ...I can ignore it, right? That's fine.\n[In a frame-less panel Megan and Cueball drive in the sedan.] GPS: Turn left GPS: Recalculating GPS: Make a U-turn GPS: Recalculating GPS: Turn right GPS: Make a U-turn GPS: Recalculating\n[Megan and Cueball walk back into the agency with the guy behind his desk. Megan holds out the car keys in one hand.] Guy: Back already? Megan: We'll take the murder car. Guy: Popular choice.\n"}
{"id":1838,"title":"Machine Learning","image_title":"Machine Learning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1838","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/machine_learning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1838:_Machine_Learning","transcript":"[Cueball Prime holds a canoe paddle at his side and stands on top of a \"big pile of linear algebra\" containing a funnel labeled \"data\" and box labeled \"answers\". Cueball II stands to the left side of the panel.)]\nCueball II: This is your machine learning system?\nCueball Prime: Yup! You pour the data into this big pile of linear algebra, then collect the answers on the other side.\nCueball II: What if the answers are wrong?\nCueball Prime: Just stir the pile until they start looking right.\n","explanation":"Machine learning is a method employed in automation of complex tasks. It usually involves creation of algorithms that deal with statistical analysis of data and pattern recognition to generate output. The validity\/accuracy of the output can be used to give feedback to make changes to the system, usually making future results statistically better.\nCueball stands next to what looks like a pile of garbage (or compost), with a Cueball-like friend standing atop it. The pile has a funnel (labelled \"data\") at one end and a box labelled \"answers\" at the other. Here and there mathematical matrices stick out of the pile. As the friend explains to the incredulous Cueball, data enters through the funnel, undergoes an incomprehensible process of linear algebra , and comes out as answers. The friend appears to be a functional part of this system himself, as he stands atop the pile stirring it with a paddle. His machine learning system is probably very inefficient, as he is integral to both the mechanical part (repeated stirring) and the learning part (making the answers look \"right\").\nThe main joke is that, despite this description being too vague and giving no intuition or details into the system, it is close to the level of understanding most machine learning experts have of the many techniques in machine learning. 'Machine learning' algorithms that can be reasonably described as pouring data into linear algebra and stirring until the output looks right include support vector machines , linear regressors , logistic regressors , and neural networks . Major recent advances in machine learning often amount to 'stacking' the linear algebra up differently, or varying stirring techniques for the compost.\nThis comic compares a machine learning system to a compost pile. Composting is the process of taking organic matter, such as food and yard waste, and allowing it to decompose into a form that serves as fertilizer. A common method of composting is to mound the organic matter in a pile with a certain amount of moisture, then \"stirring\" the pile occasionally to move the less-decomposed material from the top to the interior of the pile, where it will decompose faster.\nIn large-scale composting operations, the raw organic matter added to the pile is referred to as \"input\". This cartoon implies a play on the term \"input\", comparing a compost input to a data input.\nA recurrent neural network is a neural network where the nodes affect one another in cycles, creating feedback loops in the network that allow it to change over time. To put it another way, the neural network has 'state', with the results of previous inputs affecting how each successive input is processed. In the title text, Randall is saying that the machine learning system is technically recurrent because it \"changes\" (i.e. gets mushy) over time.\n[Cueball Prime holds a canoe paddle at his side and stands on top of a \"big pile of linear algebra\" containing a funnel labeled \"data\" and box labeled \"answers\". Cueball II stands to the left side of the panel.)]\nCueball II: This is your machine learning system?\nCueball Prime: Yup! You pour the data into this big pile of linear algebra, then collect the answers on the other side.\nCueball II: What if the answers are wrong?\nCueball Prime: Just stir the pile until they start looking right.\n"}
{"id":1839,"title":"Doctor Visit","image_title":"Doctor Visit","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1839","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/doctor_visit.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1839:_Doctor_Visit","transcript":"[Cueball is seated on an medical examination table while Ponytail stands dressed in a doctor's coat holding a file in her right hand.] Cueball: Everything look good? Ponytail: I don't get how your body has been moving around for years and still works at all. My USB cables fray after like a month.\nPonytail: Your heart has been pumping for decades without pausing for even a few minutes. Ponytail: And your eyes! They're so fragile and exposed!\n[Zoom in on Cueball gazing at his palms.] Ponytail (off-panel): You're full of all these high-pressure fluids and intricate parts that could kill you in seconds if they stopped working!\n[Zoom out again to the entire scene.] Cueball: ...can you just tell me whether I'm healthy? Ponytail: Yeah, you're fine. Ponytail: Which is weird, given that your body is basically made from dissolved bread.\nLater Doctor Ponytail offers these thoughts again as an internal monologue in 2057: Internal Monologues .\n","explanation":"Cueball is visiting his doctor Ponytail , apparently for a general medical checkup.\nWhile there is nothing wrong with him medically, the doctor wonders why he has continued to work for many years despite his body parts' individual fragility. Compared to man-made structures - like the USB cables mentioned by Ponytail, which quickly begin to fray - it's surprising that the body can survive for so long while sustaining so much wear and tear. Actually the body gets stronger and more fit the more it is used (an example of antifragility ), in contrast to USB cables, which tend to wear out with use.\nPonytail specifically mentions his eyes which are so fragile and exposed. Yet most people go through a whole life with both eyes intact, although the vision itself may be impaired. The human reflexes and the shape of the skull around the eyes has a lot to do with the fact that it is possible to protect such fragile structures for a lifetime.\nPonytail also remarks that the body is composed of high pressure fluids (particularly blood, intracellular and extracellular fluids) and intricate parts (like the nervous system and the heart). If the fluids stopped flowing or the intricate parts stopped working, the entire body would fail, killing Cueball.\nIt should be noted that the human body is constantly replacing dead\/injured cells and proteins. In a young human body, everything in the body is continually refurbished, and nothing is able to become old enough to deteriorate unintentionally; this requires a constant supply of energy and nutrients to keep this process going. As the body ages, these self-repair mechanisms eventually slow and can no longer keep up with the required repairs; this manifests as the various symptoms of old age (wrinkled skin, graying and balding hair, worsening eyesight and hearing, etc.) and eventual death.\nUSB cables are built to withstand far more wear and tear than the human body. But while this makes them tougher than blood vessels on the outset, they inevitably fray and fail faster than blood vessels because they lack the self-repair mechanisms of organic material.\nThe doctor's final remark is that Cueball is mainly made from dissolved bread, which is true from the perspective that the food (bread) he eats is digested in his alimentary system, absorbed into his bloodstream and used as nutrients for growth and repair. Paleontologists use a method called isotopic analysis to determine the diets of ancient people from elements preserved in teeth and bones. Ponytail could have ordered a similar test on Cueball.\nThis is taken further in the title text, where she states that the blood tests reveal he is 30% breakfast cereal . This likely comes from the widely-cited but not entirely accurate factoid that the human body is 70% water. The other 30% would then be flesh and other organic matter, or the dissolved bread the doctor described. Breakfast cereal and bread are both products of cereal , the edible part of a grain, making the comparison apt.\nAll things taken into consideration, we don't actually have any confirmation that Ponytail is a real doctor . As Randall has stated before, anybody can just buy a lab coat . Although Ponytail's answer in the final panel lacks the usual \"I have no idea\" or equivalent non-answer , it's still somewhat possible she's a real doctor having an existential episode.\n[Cueball is seated on an medical examination table while Ponytail stands dressed in a doctor's coat holding a file in her right hand.] Cueball: Everything look good? Ponytail: I don't get how your body has been moving around for years and still works at all. My USB cables fray after like a month.\nPonytail: Your heart has been pumping for decades without pausing for even a few minutes. Ponytail: And your eyes! They're so fragile and exposed!\n[Zoom in on Cueball gazing at his palms.] Ponytail (off-panel): You're full of all these high-pressure fluids and intricate parts that could kill you in seconds if they stopped working!\n[Zoom out again to the entire scene.] Cueball: ...can you just tell me whether I'm healthy? Ponytail: Yeah, you're fine. Ponytail: Which is weird, given that your body is basically made from dissolved bread.\nLater Doctor Ponytail offers these thoughts again as an internal monologue in 2057: Internal Monologues .\n"}
{"id":1840,"title":"Genetic Testing Results","image_title":"Genetic Testing Results","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1840","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/genetic_testing_results.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1840:_Genetic_Testing_Results","transcript":"[Cueball is seated on an medical examination table while Ponytail stands dressed in a doctor's coat holding a file in her right hand.] Ponytail: Your genetic test results are back. Apparently you're part of an unbroken lineage stretching back billions of years to the early Earth!\n","explanation":"Ponytail continues Cueball 's medical checkup with a genetic test. Genetic tests show people genetic diseases that they might be at risk for and\/or give them insight into their ancestry. In this case, the genetic results are extremely obvious: His genes are part of a long line of genes stretching back to some of the earliest life forms to have genes. This information is universally true - every known organism has such a genetic history - which makes it so vague as to be useless for either medicine or ancestry.\nIn epidemiology, a risk factor is a variable associated with an increased risk of disease or infection. The title text says that this is a risk factor because being a living organism is, trivially, associated with every disease that exists.\n[Cueball is seated on an medical examination table while Ponytail stands dressed in a doctor's coat holding a file in her right hand.] Ponytail: Your genetic test results are back. Apparently you're part of an unbroken lineage stretching back billions of years to the early Earth!\n"}
{"id":1841,"title":"Who?","image_title":"Who?","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1841","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/who.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1841:_Who%3F","transcript":"[Cueball is walking from left to right while Hairy follows him.] Hairy: ...I'm getting a ride with Katie to Adam's wedding. Hoping to see Brian on the way! Cueball: Oh, that's cool! Cueball: ...I can't keep living this lie, so I'm just gonna come out and admit it: I have no idea who any of the people you keep mentioning are.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Hairy are walking while Hairy is talking about going to a wedding by sharing a ride. He names three people: the groom; a friend with whom he's sharing the ride; and another person he hopes to meet on the way, perhaps another guest at the wedding. The ellipsis at the beginning indicates he's been talking beforehand, and Cueball has listened to all of it.\nCueball at first replies with an \"it's cool\" sentence, apparently expressing interest, satisfaction or approval at the idea of Hairy meeting the people he mentioned. This usually happens when two people are talking about something they have in common, like meeting with friends at a social gathering.\nHowever, Cueball suddenly expresses that he's been lying about knowing them, and he doesn't have any intentions of preserving such lie. Note that he didn't need to explicitly acknowledge to be those people's acquaintance, he might just have nodded or said expressions like \"it's cool\".\nPart of a social need for inclusion, or as a way to continue a conversation, people sometimes agree with the person they are talking to, or feign knowledge of the people, things or topics that were mentioned.\nThe title text suddenly changes the situation by stating that it's possible Hairy has been talking to someone else using a Bluetooth earphone set . This hands-free device is used to communicate via phone call and is small in nature and only visible from one side of the face, so anyone who comes across someone using this device can at first wonder whether they're actually talking to them, because no phone can be seen. This situation could mean that Cueball has been hearing and \/ or talking to this person, who might not even be his acquaintance, given that he knows people that Cueball doesn't seem to know about, and that he might not actually be his friend. This is a hilarious exaggeration of people with some attention problems.\nThe title text is an allusion to 476: One-Sided , where Randall doesn't realize who the other person is talking to.\nIn 302: Names Cueball also has difficulty with names.\nThe problems with bluetooth headsets' inconspicuousness is a key point in 736: Cemetery .\nAnother example of not knowing someone is talking on the phone: [1]\n[Cueball is walking from left to right while Hairy follows him.] Hairy: ...I'm getting a ride with Katie to Adam's wedding. Hoping to see Brian on the way! Cueball: Oh, that's cool! Cueball: ...I can't keep living this lie, so I'm just gonna come out and admit it: I have no idea who any of the people you keep mentioning are.\n"}
{"id":1842,"title":"Anti-Drone Eagles","image_title":"Anti-Drone Eagles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1842","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/anti_drone_eagles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1842:_Anti-Drone_Eagles","transcript":"[Black Hat, Cueball and Megan are standing and talking.] Cueball: Everyone loves these eagles that take down drones, but... I dunno. Megan: You gotta admit, it's pretty cool.\n[Close-up of Cueball.] Cueball: Yeah, but... training rare animals to hurl themselves at whirling machinery can only get us so far, you know?\n[In a frame-less panel the setting is back to that of the first panel.] Cueball: At some point, it's like releasing police dogs onto freeways to attack speeding motorcycles. Megan: Also cool, but I see your point.\n[Black Hat lifts his hand and Cueball turns his face towards him.] Black Hat: Plus, I just finished my autonomous drone that hunts eagles. Cueball: Man, you are an entirely separate class of problem.\n","explanation":"Law enforcement and security agencies often use birds of prey to combat drones flying unlawfully over restricted sites. This is often more cost effective than using technological means (such as scramblers and counter-drones) and safer for the public than using conventional weaponry (such as shotguns).\nEagles, being predators, have natural tendencies to attack the central components of drones while avoiding the sharp and spinny bits.\nCueball argues that this is unethical as it forces rare animals to put their lives at risk, and compares it to using police dogs for traffic control, which people would generally frown upon.\nEffectiveness depends upon the conditions of use. Obviously eagles can't be used everywhere that drones are restricted, but they are often effectively used where ground security is also present to identify and arrest those that might be unlawfully flying the drones, so they can't indefinitely replenish their hardware. The first paragraph has links to real life examples. Not only would it be unethical, but also ineffective. The supply of Eagles is rather limited, and there are biological limits to how fast it can be replenished, whereas more drones can be created very quickly to replace those that are destroyed.  Traffic control dogs would be similarly ineffective, as dogs would struggle to run as fast as a speeding motorcycle, and would be powerless to stop the motorcycle even if they could.\nMegan thinks both ideas (eagles and dogs) sound cool, but she understands the ethical argument against using them for traffic control.\nBlack Hat , on the other hand, goes a step further and says that he has created a drone that hunts the eagles, flipping the premise from \u201canti-drone eagles\u201d to \u201canti-eagle drones\u201d. In the title text, he continues that is ethical because they (only the title text mentions that there are several of such drones) only target the most populous species first, although they will eventually eradicate the endangered ones once they bring down the number of all birds of prey (note that this implies that he wants to make all birds of prey extinct or endangered). He seems to miss the point that it is not merely the relative number of birds that creates the ethical problem, but the fact that animals' lives are being put at direct risk by humans. His construction of the anti-eagle drone may be simply for the point of making the eagles' goals not only dangerous, but also entirely ineffective. This is probably not an opposition to privacy but merely his trademark classholery in action.\nNevertheless, Black Hat raises a crucial point in ecology : There are generalist and specialist predators (as well as herbivores). A specialist hunts or eats only one species (e.g. the koala eats only eucalyptus ), while a generalist hunts or eats the most available food. Thus, a generalist often spares species that have become rare due to overhunting, disease or famine. A generalist predator (or herbivore) thus manages the wildlife, and a healthy population of generalists is almost always beneficial. Now, if Black Hat creates a drone that hunts the most available species, he gets the right idea (a food generalist manages wildlife), but gets the other one seriously wrong: Eagles are already doing their job as generalists, and as predatory birds are not so abundant, a generalist that feeds on predatory birds would need to have a very large territory. And as drones cannot reproduce yet and do not need to hunt as an energy source, releasing a drone to fulfil an ecological role would not make any sense. How does the drone know it has hunted enough eagles? Does the eagle-hunting drone feel hunger and decide to hunt elsewhere after reducing the number of local eagles, or does it just hibernate?\n[Black Hat, Cueball and Megan are standing and talking.] Cueball: Everyone loves these eagles that take down drones, but... I dunno. Megan: You gotta admit, it's pretty cool.\n[Close-up of Cueball.] Cueball: Yeah, but... training rare animals to hurl themselves at whirling machinery can only get us so far, you know?\n[In a frame-less panel the setting is back to that of the first panel.] Cueball: At some point, it's like releasing police dogs onto freeways to attack speeding motorcycles. Megan: Also cool, but I see your point.\n[Black Hat lifts his hand and Cueball turns his face towards him.] Black Hat: Plus, I just finished my autonomous drone that hunts eagles. Cueball: Man, you are an entirely separate class of problem.\n"}
{"id":1843,"title":"Opening Crawl","image_title":"Opening Crawl","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1843","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/opening_crawl.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1843:_Opening_Crawl","transcript":"[On a black background with many stars is five blocks of yellow text that recedes towards a black section at the back of the panel. The last block cannot be read, but it is (almost) possible to read the second block of text at the back. The bottom line of the last text block is cut off through the middle of the letters.]\n\"All systems show battle ready, Admiral,\" the comm officer reported from the portside crew pit. \"The task force is beginning to check in.\"\n\"Very good, Lieutenant,\" Grand Admiral Thrawn nodded. \"Inform me when all have done so. Captain Pellaeon?\"\n\"Sir?\" Pellaeon said, searching his superior's face for the stress the Grand Admiral must be feeling. The stress he himself was certainly feeling. This was not just another tactical strike against the Rebellion, after all\u2014not a minor shipping raid or even a complex but straightforward hit-and-fade against some insignificant planetary base. After nearly a month of frenzied preparations, Thrawn's master campaign for the Empire's final victory was about to be launched.\nBut if the Grand Admiral was feeling any tension, he was keeping it to himself. \"Begin the countdown,\" he told [Cut off through the middle and at the end]: Pellaeon, his voice as calm as if he were ordering\n[Caption beneath the panel:] Movie theater projection booth prank: see how many pages of a Star Wars novel you can get people to read before they figure out there's no movie coming after it.\n","explanation":"Each episodic Star Wars film begins with an \" opening crawl \" giving the audience some of the backstory, which often reads like the prologue of a novel.\nRandall wants to reverse this by projecting the text of a Star Wars novel and see how long this can be continued before viewers realize it is a prank. The text in the opening scroll is actually from the beginning of the final book of the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn.\nThe title text compares different Star Wars novels' style, remarking on how well suited they would be for this prank.\nTimothy Zahn is a science fiction writer who has written and contributed to many novels and comics in the Star Wars expanded universe . The text in the comic is the first five paragraphs from the book The Last Command . The characters mentioned are Grand Admiral Thrawn , the primary antagonist of the Thrawn Trilogy , and Gilad Pellaeon , who serves as a Dr. Watson -type companion to Thrawn throughout much of the trilogy.\nSplinter of the Mind's Eye was an early Star Wars novel written before the original film was expanded to a trilogy (and then expanded some more), so it contains multiple aborted subplots which can make it very confusing for a fan who has seen the later works.\nThe term \"EU\" refers to \"Expanded Universe\", which was the term for the corpus of non-cinematic Star Wars content before Star Wars was acquired by Disney . Not wanting to be constrained by previous canon, Disney declared all \"Expanded Universe\" content to be non-canonical to all future movies, and re-branded the EU as \"Legends\" to take place in its own alternate continuity.\nFor a very long time, fans believed that the Thrawn Trilogy would have constituted Star Wars VII to IX should the movie have been made and thus \"before they figure out there's no movie coming after it\" refers to both the mistaken belief of fans and the novelisation as delivered through the opening crawl.\n[On a black background with many stars is five blocks of yellow text that recedes towards a black section at the back of the panel. The last block cannot be read, but it is (almost) possible to read the second block of text at the back. The bottom line of the last text block is cut off through the middle of the letters.]\n\"All systems show battle ready, Admiral,\" the comm officer reported from the portside crew pit. \"The task force is beginning to check in.\"\n\"Very good, Lieutenant,\" Grand Admiral Thrawn nodded. \"Inform me when all have done so. Captain Pellaeon?\"\n\"Sir?\" Pellaeon said, searching his superior's face for the stress the Grand Admiral must be feeling. The stress he himself was certainly feeling. This was not just another tactical strike against the Rebellion, after all\u2014not a minor shipping raid or even a complex but straightforward hit-and-fade against some insignificant planetary base. After nearly a month of frenzied preparations, Thrawn's master campaign for the Empire's final victory was about to be launched.\nBut if the Grand Admiral was feeling any tension, he was keeping it to himself. \"Begin the countdown,\" he told [Cut off through the middle and at the end]: Pellaeon, his voice as calm as if he were ordering\n[Caption beneath the panel:] Movie theater projection booth prank: see how many pages of a Star Wars novel you can get people to read before they figure out there's no movie coming after it.\n"}
{"id":1844,"title":"Voting Systems","image_title":"Voting Systems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1844","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voting_systems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1844:_Voting_Systems","transcript":"[White Hat and Ponytail are standing on either side of Cueball who is talking while lifting one hand.] Cueball: I prefer approval voting, but if we're seriously considering instant runoff, then I'll argue for a Condorcet method instead.\n[Caption beneath the panel:] Strong Arrow's theorem: The people who find Arrow's theorem significant will never agree on anything anyway.\n","explanation":"This comic is about types of single-winner voting systems:\nArrow's impossibility theorem gives a list of criteria for ranked voting systems and states that no system can satisfy all of them at once, despite that for each of them it may seem \"obvious\" that an electoral system ought to satisfy it. Some voting theorists (such as Cueball) dislike IRV because it fails more of the criteria than Condorcet does.\nThe primary joke in the comic is the premise that people who are pedantic or knowledgeable enough to find Arrow's theorem to be relevant will self-fulfill the theorem by being inclined to disagree on any effort to change the voting system. This is illustrated by Cueball's voting system preference that is contingent on the preferences of other people, which defeats their effort to produce a community-wide ranking.\nA secondary joke in the comic is that often voters don't pick their favorite choice in a vote. Instead, they vote for a less favorable, but more likely electable, person as a way to prevent their least favorite choice from being elected. This is commonly called \"spoiler effect\"; in Arrow's parlance it is a form of IIA criterion failure . Cueball's strategic vote switch implies that they may be using FPTP (which they dislike) to make the decision, as FPTP is the only system to involve a potential \"spoiler effect\" (note, however, that certain vote distributions in systems such as IRV can produce a similarly problematic and illogical effect on the outcome).\nA third joke is the recursive self-referencing inherent in voting to choose a voting system.\nThe title text stipulates that Cueball has no fixed ranking of preference for human candidates, but makes this choice dependent on which voting system is favoured by the group. This exceeds strategic voting considerations as the ranking should have full information, whom Cueball prefers in each situation. Therefore Arrow's impossibility theorem and the analysis behind it assume the ranked preferences of an individual voter as a fixed given. To make them dependent on the voting system makes assessing the efficacy of the voting systems absurd or at least much more complicated to do as a general assessment. That is given as the reason why Arrow would wholeheartedly hate him.\n[White Hat and Ponytail are standing on either side of Cueball who is talking while lifting one hand.] Cueball: I prefer approval voting, but if we're seriously considering instant runoff, then I'll argue for a Condorcet method instead.\n[Caption beneath the panel:] Strong Arrow's theorem: The people who find Arrow's theorem significant will never agree on anything anyway.\n"}
{"id":1845,"title":"State Word Map","image_title":"State Word Map","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1845","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/state_word_map.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1845:_State_Word_Map","transcript":"[Caption above the map, with sub caption:] Most-Used Word in Each State Based on Something Something Search Data\n[Beneath the captions are a colorful map of the United States of America. Each state has one color, but the colors do not change from state to state, but rather between rows of states. The top \"row\" is purple, the second row is gray-blue, but only goes half across. Where it stops a pink row of states begins. Beneath this runs a yellow row, except it does not take California with it, since it belongs to the next purple line beneath this yellow line. Finally the two states not in the contiguous states as well as the southern states from Texas to Florida are again pink. Inside each state is written one, and only one word (or for small states the word is outside and if needed a line indicates which state it belongs to). The words size depends on the size of the state and the word. If it can fit inside the state it will be written in a font large enough to fill the entire state if possible (in one case a hyphen is used). So a short word, like \"lets\" in huge Texas becomes huge, but a word like \"noise\" which has been fitted inside small Massachusetts becomes small.]\n[Here are the 50 words written in lines resembling the colors on the map (from left to right). Purple, gray-blue, pink, yellow, purple and pink:] You can make these maps say whatever you want by adjusting the methodology. Half the time you're just amplifying random noise. Because the underlying data doesn't vary that much from one state to another. But whatever. Nobody checks this stuff. Just pick whatever normal-ization lets you make fun of Florida.\n","explanation":"This is another of the many comics where Randall used a map of the United States for his joke (see below for examples).\nSimilar in spirit to 1138: Heatmap , this comic pokes fun at many maps that attempt to use data to discern unique characteristics about various sub-regions, in this case American states . This map may have been inspired by this map posted on Twitter by Google Trends the day before the comic was posted. Many web companies use maps like this in viral marketing, but the methodology behind them is pretty weak. The random noise in the data will mean that there will be variations between states even if there is no underlying pattern - and this can be further boosted by statistical tricks. A common one is to show the \"most characteristic\" or \"most distinctive\" term for each state. For instance, the most common cause of death is heart disease or cancer in every US state, but this makes for a boring map. Looking at the most distinctive cause of death produces a more interesting map, but it highlights very minor trends - Lousiana is marked as having syphilis as its most distinctive cause of death, even though only 15 Louisianans in every 100,000 have the disease and there were only 22 syphilis deaths in the state over a whole decade. These maps can give a misleading impression of huge variation between states that doesn't really exist.\nThis map does not include real data, but says (when read left to right\/west to east):\nYou can make these maps say whatever you want by adjusting the methodology. Half of the time you're just amplifying random noise because the underlying data doesn't vary that much from one state to another. But whatever. Nobody checks this stuff. Just pick whatever normalization lets you make fun of Florida.\nThe primary joke is that the likelihood of these being the words used most often by the inhabitants of each state is low, rather than accurately representing the most used words Randall has just done exactly what he says he can do (make fun of Florida by putting whatever he wants). He also has not obtained the data from anywhere, just 'Something Something'.\nThe joke about Florida is that the most used word in Florida is \"Florida\", which would make people in Florida very self-centered.\nThe comic continues to make fun of Florida in the title text by saying that Florida searches for sex porn instead of porn , which is not needed since porn means images and film of people having sex. This is also probably a reference to PornHub's data-farming exercises, where they have periodically released the most frequently searched term by state.\nFlorida is often the butt of many jokes, including the Florida Man meme and many mocking jibes regarding its messy electoral history . For more information on why Florida itself seems eager to play into this stereotype, check out the \"Only in Florida\" phenomenon\nRandall previously used a map of the United States as the basis for his comics in 1767: US State Names , 1653: United States Map , 1509: Scenery Cheat Sheet and in 1079: United Shapes .\n[Caption above the map, with sub caption:] Most-Used Word in Each State Based on Something Something Search Data\n[Beneath the captions are a colorful map of the United States of America. Each state has one color, but the colors do not change from state to state, but rather between rows of states. The top \"row\" is purple, the second row is gray-blue, but only goes half across. Where it stops a pink row of states begins. Beneath this runs a yellow row, except it does not take California with it, since it belongs to the next purple line beneath this yellow line. Finally the two states not in the contiguous states as well as the southern states from Texas to Florida are again pink. Inside each state is written one, and only one word (or for small states the word is outside and if needed a line indicates which state it belongs to). The words size depends on the size of the state and the word. If it can fit inside the state it will be written in a font large enough to fill the entire state if possible (in one case a hyphen is used). So a short word, like \"lets\" in huge Texas becomes huge, but a word like \"noise\" which has been fitted inside small Massachusetts becomes small.]\n[Here are the 50 words written in lines resembling the colors on the map (from left to right). Purple, gray-blue, pink, yellow, purple and pink:] You can make these maps say whatever you want by adjusting the methodology. Half the time you're just amplifying random noise. Because the underlying data doesn't vary that much from one state to another. But whatever. Nobody checks this stuff. Just pick whatever normal-ization lets you make fun of Florida.\n"}
{"id":1846,"title":"Drone Problems","image_title":"Drone Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1846","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/drone_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1846:_Drone_Problems","transcript":"[Megan is sitting on her knees at the porch in front of a house with a smartphone in one hand and operating with her other hand a dish-antenna pointing into the sky. Cueball comes walking up towards the stairs up to the porch while he is looking back and up over his shoulder and pointing into the air.] Megan: People in the park keep flying drones near me, so I've built a system to shoot them down. Cueball: Cool! Oh yeah, there's one now. Megan: Time for a test!\n[Zoom in on Megan with the device on the porch with Cueball still at the bottom of the stairs leading down. She is operating her phone, which can be seen to be connected with a wire to the dish-antenna device. Cueball is looking away from her and down.] Megan: Okay, locking on\u2026 Cueball: Wait, it just crashed. Megan: Damn.\n[Cueball has walked up the stairs and are standing behind Megan at the door. Megan is now looking up into the sky while still sitting with her phone in front of the device.] Cueball: Here comes another one! Aim for\u2026 nope, it got stuck in a tree.\n[Cueball is now sitting on the porch with a half-full drinking glass in one hand leaning back on the other hand. Megan is gesturing at her device while holding her phone down. Above the top part of the frame, there is another smaller frame overlaid with a caption:] Three hours later\u2026 Cueball: Finally, two more just\u2014 no, one crashed and the other is hurtling sideways toward the lake. Megan: Will you people learn to fly these things?!\n","explanation":"Megan is frustrated because people are flying drones too close to her, so she builds a system to shoot them down. She shows it to Cueball , who is also excited about the idea and helps spot the drones. However, each of the drones gets accidentally destroyed by its pilot because of their inability to fly the drones before Megan can destroy them herself. \nAfter three hours of unsuccessful drone hunting, a frustrated Megan complains about people unable to fly the drones, which prevents her (and Cueball) from having fun shooting them down. The joke is that she created the system to get rid of the drones, so the lack of drones should be the desired output - and now she wants the drones nearby (even if only temporarily).\nThis comic is a follow up on 1842: Anti-Drone Eagles , and confirms that Cueball prefers technological air-defense systems to biological measures.\nThe title text refers to the fact that from the pilots' perspective, the system is successful at keeping all the drones away from the house, even though in reality the system has not had a chance to be successful yet.\nWhile Megan attributes the repeated drone crashes to poor pilot skill, a possible source for the drones' sudden loss of control is hinted at in panel two, in which the target drone crashes immediately after Megan's device (equipped with a miniature parabolic dish) attempts to \"lock on\" to the drone in question. While a small and fast-moving drone may be difficult to hit, the control system that directs its movements is easily interfered with (either by overwhelming the RF signal controlling it or by using microwaves to induce short circuits in sensitive electronics). The irony here is that the targeting system for Megan's anti-drone device unintentionally appears to be more effective than the actual weapon it is designed to guide, disabling the drones so quickly that the \"real\" weapon is unable to be tested.\nIt may also be a reference to the May 30, 2017 FTG-15 test of the United States GMD missile defense system, where an interceptor kill vehicle destroyed a test ICBM . From the perspective of a US adversary, such as North Korea (whose missiles the system is allegedly targeted at), \"as far as they know, the system is working perfectly,\" as the test was declared to be a success. But substantial controversy has dogged the missile defense system for decades, as critics have alleged it is vulnerable to trivial countermeasures . But \"as far as they know\" strongly implies that the text following it is not true, i.e. the system does not work perfectly.\nAnother possible secondary joke is that the drones were flying near her because the pilots can't fly properly. Yet another possible take on the joke is that Megan's system is actually effective, but Megan is not aware it's been activated.\nMegan had previously suggested in 1586: Keyboard Problems , that robots (and thus also drones) getting near Cueball's house ( and possibly Cueball's general vicinity ) would unexpectedly crash.\nMegan previously had a laser cannon to shoot down squirrels in 382: Trebuchet , so this is not the first time she has built a device for shooting things down.\n[Megan is sitting on her knees at the porch in front of a house with a smartphone in one hand and operating with her other hand a dish-antenna pointing into the sky. Cueball comes walking up towards the stairs up to the porch while he is looking back and up over his shoulder and pointing into the air.] Megan: People in the park keep flying drones near me, so I've built a system to shoot them down. Cueball: Cool! Oh yeah, there's one now. Megan: Time for a test!\n[Zoom in on Megan with the device on the porch with Cueball still at the bottom of the stairs leading down. She is operating her phone, which can be seen to be connected with a wire to the dish-antenna device. Cueball is looking away from her and down.] Megan: Okay, locking on\u2026 Cueball: Wait, it just crashed. Megan: Damn.\n[Cueball has walked up the stairs and are standing behind Megan at the door. Megan is now looking up into the sky while still sitting with her phone in front of the device.] Cueball: Here comes another one! Aim for\u2026 nope, it got stuck in a tree.\n[Cueball is now sitting on the porch with a half-full drinking glass in one hand leaning back on the other hand. Megan is gesturing at her device while holding her phone down. Above the top part of the frame, there is another smaller frame overlaid with a caption:] Three hours later\u2026 Cueball: Finally, two more just\u2014 no, one crashed and the other is hurtling sideways toward the lake. Megan: Will you people learn to fly these things?!\n"}
{"id":1847,"title":"Dubious Study","image_title":"Dubious Study","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1847","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dubious_study.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1847:_Dubious_Study","transcript":"[Megan is standing behind Cueball who is sitting at a computer desk using a laptop.] Megan: Are you sure this study is legit? Cueball: Sure, it says it was accepted for publication. Megan: Where? Cueball: Hmm... The National Academy of Proceedings .\n[Caption below the panel:] If something is formatted like a serious scientific paper, it can take me a while to realize it isn't one.\n","explanation":"This comic alludes to the growing industry in disreputable academic journals , many of whom accept articles of dubious merit for publication without rigorous peer review upon payment of a fee.  In an attempt to sound legitimate (and thus attract submissions), many such publishers publish journals whose names sound intentionally similar to (if not identical to) established titles.  Here, the National Academy of Proceedings is a meaningless title that sounds similar to the highly regarded academic title Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA .\nIn the caption, Randall points out that even he is sometimes fooled into believing a study is serious because it is well-formatted and looks professional, at least at first. Even though he eventually realizes the study is dubious, sometimes it's only after reading a significant portion of the paper. A possible unstated concern Randall may have is that some readers might never realize this and end up believing whatever results and conclusions are included in the paper, thereby leading to a belief in false or misleading information among some portion of the population.\nThe title text implies that this (at present) fictional journal has a dubious online presence in the faded internet site MySpace , where the publishers make claims that may be true but are misleading: \"peer-viewed\" sounds similar to \" peer-reviewed \", the community-led process of establishing a paper's scientific integrity prior to publication, but in fact means only that scientists have viewed the content (as Cueball is now).  Likewise, some journals might be \"published biannually\", whereas \"downloaded biannually\" implies that the journal is read only twice each year. Single articles in high-profile journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences would expect to receive hundreds to thousands of views in their first year of publication.  The fictional journal publisher no doubt hopes that an inexperienced scientist may mistake these claims for meaningful statements of authority, and thus submit a paper (and eventually pay a fee for its publication).\nThe National Academy of Proceedings in fact sets itself apart from certain predatory journals by ensuring that the claims on its website are in fact factually accurate (if phrased to mislead article authors, particularly those with English as an additional language); some journals are openly dishonest on their websites.\nRandall also judges academic content based on superficial details in comic 1301: File Extensions , where he focuses on how the information is formatted (in particular if it is in TeX or with the TeX rendering-style of a scientific publication). Similarly, in 906: Advertising Discovery , Randall muses on how we automatically trust anything formatted in Wikipedia style. (This was later proven in a scientific study. [1] ) And on a different note, prestigious-sounding but meaningless names also appear in the title text for 1068 , where SwiftKey suggests the phrase \"Massachusetts Institute of America\" to Randall.\n\n[Megan is standing behind Cueball who is sitting at a computer desk using a laptop.] Megan: Are you sure this study is legit? Cueball: Sure, it says it was accepted for publication. Megan: Where? Cueball: Hmm... The National Academy of Proceedings .\n[Caption below the panel:] If something is formatted like a serious scientific paper, it can take me a while to realize it isn't one.\n"}
{"id":1848,"title":"Glacial Erratic","image_title":"Glacial Erratic","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1848","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/glacial_erratic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1848:_Glacial_Erratic","transcript":"[Ponytail and Megan walks up to a large rock, Ponytail points at it.] Ponytail: That rock is a glacial erratic-A glacier broke it off from those hills and placed it here.\n[In a frame-less panel they stand and watch the rock.] Megan: What? And just left it here? Megan: And everybody's okay with this?\n[Megan tries to lift the rock with two hands.]\n[Megan turns her back to the rock and tries to push it with all her might.] Megan: Get... Megan: ...back...\n[Ponytail looks on as Megan again has turned around and tries to roll the boulder using both hands.] Ponytail: Why ... Why are you doing that? Megan: Because fuck glaciers!\n","explanation":"Ponytail and Megan are walking along when they come across an erratic rock (which differs from the surrounding geology and is brought there by glacial action ). Not wishing to bow down to the forces of nature, Megan tries to take it back to its rightful place, obviously in vain.\nMegan is annoyed with the glacier for just littering the place up with rocks. She wishes to put it back in place, just like picking up a piece of litter and putting it in the trash bin where it belongs.\nThe title text furthers the absurdity by suggesting that Megan is extra annoyed with having to clean up after the glacier, because it will take a long time (and as she put it \"Fuck Glaciers\"). The problem for Megan is that she is already using her time chiselling out igneous intrusions which is another type of rock formation caused by solidification of magma , which Megan also plans to undo. To soothe her mind she keeps watching the scene from the Superman film where Superman turns back time to prevent an earthquake and thus also create a fault-sealing by reversing the creation of the fault in the first place. He also prevents the destruction of the Hoover Dam and the death of Lois Lane , but it seems like this is not important to Megan. She is only interested in undoing what nature has already done, and if the Superman scene could be made real it would solve her problems.\nThis may be a play on words based on the word \"erratic,\" as Megan's behavior could be described as such.\nMegan's actions here are reminiscent of the ones carried out by Cueball in 1119: Undoing .\n[Ponytail and Megan walks up to a large rock, Ponytail points at it.] Ponytail: That rock is a glacial erratic-A glacier broke it off from those hills and placed it here.\n[In a frame-less panel they stand and watch the rock.] Megan: What? And just left it here? Megan: And everybody's okay with this?\n[Megan tries to lift the rock with two hands.]\n[Megan turns her back to the rock and tries to push it with all her might.] Megan: Get... Megan: ...back...\n[Ponytail looks on as Megan again has turned around and tries to roll the boulder using both hands.] Ponytail: Why ... Why are you doing that? Megan: Because fuck glaciers!\n"}
{"id":1849,"title":"Decades","image_title":"Decades","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1849","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/decades.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1849:_Decades","transcript":"[A timeline across the top of the box marks decades from 1960 to 2030, the labels are above the line and the ticks marking each decade are below.]\n[Label: 1960] 60s Music; 60s Fashion; 60s Movies; 60s Culture\n[Label: 1970] 70s Music; 70s Fashion; 70s Movies; 70s Culture\n[Label: 1980] 80s Music; 80s Fashion; 80s Movies; 80s Culture\n[Label: 1990] 90s Music; 90s Fashion; 90s Movies; 90s Culture\n[Label: 2000 and 2010] [Items grouped over two decades.] Fashion; Culture; Music; Movies\n[Label: 2020] [The text is in light grey font.] 20s Music?; 20s Fashion?; 20s Movies?; 20s Culture?\n[Label: 2030]\n[Caption below the panel:] It's weird how for 20 years we stopped grouping our cultural memories by decade because \"2000s\" is ambiguous and and \"Aughts\" and \"Teens\" never really stuck.\n\n","explanation":"This comic shows, by use of a timeline, an interesting phenomenon where music, fashion, movies and culture created between the years 2000 and 2020 are not commonly grouped into the decade in which they were produced like previous decades. The comic asserts the reason for this is the lack of a single clear term to describe these decades, stating that the term \" 2000s \" is ambiguous (as it could refer to the decade, century or millennium as a whole) and the terms \" Aughts \" and \"Teens\" never became the widely accepted terms for these decades.\nThe time-line in the comic stretches into the future (as of the time of publication) and attempts to name the 2020-2029 decade as the 20s, but does so with an uncertain question mark, presumably because it's (presently) an open question whether this dating convention will be reinstated after a 20-year pause. As the comic points out, common vernacular has managed to operate without clear terms for that grouping for 17 years, and that may have left enough of a mark on our thinking that we'll simply continue to operate in that way. There's an argument to be made grouping culture by decades is fairly arbitrary and not essential in cultural discussions. It should also be considered that that \"the twenties\" is still occasionally used to refer to the 1920s, and so reusing it to refer to the 2020s could be a source of confusion. It's not impossible that decade-based grouping will fall out of favor altogether in the 21st century.\nIt should perhaps also be noted that culture (particularly when associated with young people) in the 2000s and 2010s is often termed \" millennial culture \", although this term frequently comes with negative connotations.\nThe title text talks about Randall's local radio station. Until the 90s, they were able to use clear decade groupings to classify music. Once the year 2000 hit, they began saying \"today\", avoiding aughts or 2000s, which, as Randall says, never gained popular support. Instead of adopting a term for the 2010s, they simply continued to use \"today\" to refer to everything after the 1990s (this practice has been fairly common on American radio stations). Randall expresses interest in what change they will include in the 2020s (changing to the 20s or continuing their format), but includes a comedic jab at radio, suggesting that the medium might not last that long. The increasing speed and ubiquity of the internet, combined with compact digital music storage, has made radio programming increasingly obsolete in the United States and other wealthy countries. That said the joke is still based on exaggeration to an extent, since commercial radio is unlikely to disappear entirely in the next three years, but is likely to become less and less viable as an industry over time and what remains or springs from the ashes will likely shift radically in its format and delivery.\nTwenties were discussed again later in 2249: I Love the 20s .\n[A timeline across the top of the box marks decades from 1960 to 2030, the labels are above the line and the ticks marking each decade are below.]\n[Label: 1960] 60s Music; 60s Fashion; 60s Movies; 60s Culture\n[Label: 1970] 70s Music; 70s Fashion; 70s Movies; 70s Culture\n[Label: 1980] 80s Music; 80s Fashion; 80s Movies; 80s Culture\n[Label: 1990] 90s Music; 90s Fashion; 90s Movies; 90s Culture\n[Label: 2000 and 2010] [Items grouped over two decades.] Fashion; Culture; Music; Movies\n[Label: 2020] [The text is in light grey font.] 20s Music?; 20s Fashion?; 20s Movies?; 20s Culture?\n[Label: 2030]\n[Caption below the panel:] It's weird how for 20 years we stopped grouping our cultural memories by decade because \"2000s\" is ambiguous and and \"Aughts\" and \"Teens\" never really stuck.\n\n"}
{"id":1850,"title":"Air Force Museum","image_title":"Air Force Museum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1850","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/air_force_museum.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1850:_Air_Force_Museum","transcript":"[Megan walks from left over to Cueball.] Megan: How was your day? Cueball: I visited the military aircraft museum over at the Air Force base. It was really neat!\n[Both walking together to the right.] Cueball: They have planes from different eras, all kinds of cool equipment, and you can even watch missiles being loaded.\n[Beat frameless panel. Cueball and Megan walking.]\n[Both still walking.] Cueball: ...at least, I hope that was a museum. Megan: Do you hear helicopters?\n","explanation":"Megan asks Cueball about his day. He tells about his visit to a military aircraft museum at the air force base and lists some of the things he saw. It starts with things you would expect at a typical museum, such as a mix of aircraft from different eras, before revealing the fact that Cueball was able to watch missiles being loaded, which is something that would be out of place and potentially dangerous at a museum. Realizing this, Cueball remarks that he hopes that he was at a museum, and Megan asks him if he hears helicopters. The implication is that Cueball observed the actual military operations at the base; the sound of helicopters might imply Cueball is now being pursued by the military, or may simply be evidence of some military operation potentially related to what Cueball observed.\nThe mention of \"planes from different eras\" alludes to the fact that military aircraft are often still in use after a much longer time than they were originally designed for. An example of this are the US Air Force's B-52 bomber, first introduced in 1955 (62 years before the publication of this comic) and expected to serve into the 2040s. Additionally, aircraft museums typically house military aircraft from previous eras, such as from WWII and the Cold War, to show the evolution in aircraft design and to showcase technological advances.\nThe title text builds on this premise. Randall says that he had fun visiting another Air Force \"museum\", but he adds that if they don't have a museum (in which case he was trespassing on a military base) then he denies ever having been anywhere near it. Fortunately for Randall, there is in fact an Air Force museum nearby: the Air Mobility Command Museum about half a mile south of the Dover Air Force Base .\n[Megan walks from left over to Cueball.] Megan: How was your day? Cueball: I visited the military aircraft museum over at the Air Force base. It was really neat!\n[Both walking together to the right.] Cueball: They have planes from different eras, all kinds of cool equipment, and you can even watch missiles being loaded.\n[Beat frameless panel. Cueball and Megan walking.]\n[Both still walking.] Cueball: ...at least, I hope that was a museum. Megan: Do you hear helicopters?\n"}
{"id":1851,"title":"Magnetohydrodynamics","image_title":"Magnetohydrodynamics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1851","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/magnetohydrodynamics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1851:_Magnetohydrodynamics","transcript":"[Ponytail holding her hands up is facing Cueball and Megan .] Ponytail: The Sun's atmosphere is a superhot plasma governed by magnetohydrodynamic forces... Cueball: Ah, yes, of course.\n[Caption below the panel:] Whenever I hear the word \"magnetohydrodynamic\" my brain just replaces it with \"magic.\"\n","explanation":"In this comic, Ponytail explains to Cueball that the Sun's atmosphere is a super hot plasma controlled by \" magnetohydrodynamics \" (a real word), the study of magnetic properties of electrically conducting fluids. This is true, as plasma is both electrically charged (following the laws of electrodynamics) and a fluid (following the laws of hydrodynamics). However, the combination is so difficult for Cueball that he finds it easier to comprehend any statements containing the word \"magnetohydrodynamic\" by dropping the central part of the word (\"netohydrodynam\"). Thus, he pretends that Ponytail instead said \"The Sun's atmosphere is a superhot plasma governed by magic forces\". If Cueball really thinks that magic is more comprehensible than magnetohydrodynamics, then considering just how vaguely and inconsistently magic is portrayed across fiction, that must mean that magnetohydrodynamics is really, really hard! [ citation needed ]\nIn the title text, Randall riffs on the sheer difficulty of magnetohydrodynamics, claiming that they are as simple and understandable as Maxwell's equations and the Navier\u2013Stokes equations -- which is to say, not at all. Maxwell's equations require an advanced knowledge of calculus to even be able to interpret the symbols used, and the solutions of Navier\u2013Stokes equations are on the Millennium Problems list . Randall also notes the alarming frequency with which the subject of magnetohydrodynamics is paired with quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity ; he sarcastically quips that physicists must find magnetohydrodynamics so easy to work with, since they're so compelled to spice it up.\n[Ponytail holding her hands up is facing Cueball and Megan .] Ponytail: The Sun's atmosphere is a superhot plasma governed by magnetohydrodynamic forces... Cueball: Ah, yes, of course.\n[Caption below the panel:] Whenever I hear the word \"magnetohydrodynamic\" my brain just replaces it with \"magic.\"\n"}
{"id":1852,"title":"Election Map","image_title":"Election Map","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1852","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/election_map.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1852:_Election_Map","transcript":"[On a TV-screen Cueball is seen pointing at a map on the left which is colored in red and blue. There is a header on the map and in the top right corner of the screen the title of the program is shown. Below this at the bottom of the screen text indicate that the program is broad live. Cueball explains the map, with his text shown above the TV.] Header: Results Title: Election Night Live\nCueball: These northern precincts appear red, which probably means they're moving away from us, whereas these bluer regions are approaching us. I believe the district may be rotating in space.\n[Caption below the panel:] My career as an election analyst was short-lived.\n","explanation":"A wave (e.g. an electromagnetic wave, like light) changes its frequency and wavelength when its source is moving relative to the observer, due to the Doppler effect . In the case of light, increased frequency \u2014 indicating movement towards the observer \u2014 is called blueshift , while reduced frequency \u2014 indicating movement away from the observer \u2014 is called redshift . These names apply even if the effect is outside of the visible spectrum (e.g. infrared light that has reduced frequency is called redshifted, even though its frequency is further away from that of visible red light than normally). Red and blue colors are used accordingly to indicate the effect.\nThe recent advent of the integral field spectrograph allowed astronomers to produce images illustrating how different parts of a galaxy move along our sightline, images that look not very different from the map Cueball shows. If one side of the image is higher redshifted while the other side is less or even blueshifted, the usual interpretation is that the galaxy is rotating with an axis of rotation not completely parallel to our sightline, but other interpretations are also possible. Nevertheless no redshifted object appears in red to the human eye, it's still white. But the spectral lines are shifted. This means all colors used in those scientific images are not real.\nThe map Cueball shows represents election results. Red regions mark where one of the political parties won, while blue regions indicate another party. (Because Randall lives in the United States, blue most likely corresponds to the Democratic Party , and red to the Republican Party , but this is not stated in the comic.) Cueball, however, analyzes the map as if it showed the magnitude of Doppler effect by the light emitted by the region. This is a very strange interpretation in the context of an election, and is not what the viewers would expect to hear. This is why Cueball was quickly fired from his job, as the caption states.\nThe title text states that the Green Party did not win any precincts . If the Green Party won, its regions would likely be colored green, which would not fit to Cueball's Doppler effect analysis. Sometimes, however, green is used to indicate lack of movement. And since the center of rotating object isn't moving, green-colored spaces could actually be interpreted according to Doppler analysis - but only if they appeared near the center of the rotation.\nThe map appears to depict Georgia's 6th congressional district , which was set for a runoff election on June 20, 2017, the day after the comic ran. The map in the comic appears to be broadly similar to both the result maps of the primary ballot of April 18, 2017 and the result map of the runoff election . The April primary had included 5 Democratic candidates, 12 Republican candidates, and 2 independent candidates (who combined for less than 0.1% of the primary vote), with the top two finishers (who were a Democrat and a Republican) advancing to the runoff. The red-and-blue result maps were similar for the primary and runoff elections because the precincts where Democratic or Republican candidates predominated in the April vote also (generally speaking) tended to have the candidate of the same party lead the vote in June.\n[On a TV-screen Cueball is seen pointing at a map on the left which is colored in red and blue. There is a header on the map and in the top right corner of the screen the title of the program is shown. Below this at the bottom of the screen text indicate that the program is broad live. Cueball explains the map, with his text shown above the TV.] Header: Results Title: Election Night Live\nCueball: These northern precincts appear red, which probably means they're moving away from us, whereas these bluer regions are approaching us. I believe the district may be rotating in space.\n[Caption below the panel:] My career as an election analyst was short-lived.\n"}
{"id":1853,"title":"Once Per Day","image_title":"Once Per Day","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1853","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/once_per_day.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1853:_Once_Per_Day","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are standing together, facing each other.] Megan: Got any plans for the day? Cueball: I'm going to eat an apple, an egg, one baby aspirin, and a piece of dark chocolate, drink six glasses of water, one glass of red wine, a cup of coffee, and a cup of tea, then do 30 minutes of exercise. Cueball: Then back to sleep for another 8 hours!\n[Caption below the panel:] I only do things that news stories have specifically told me to do once per day.\n","explanation":"Many news reports on health recommend the \"best\" way to perform the processes, such as eating, drinking, exercising, or sleeping, that are required to live healthy. These reports tend to give such factors as a type of food to consume regularly, the amount of a nutrient to consume, or how long to exercise, in terms of what or how much to do daily. A simple example of this is the proverb, \"An apple a day keeps the doctor away.\" Perhaps this kind of advice is overthinking things, but Cueball decides to follow it strictly as explained in the caption.\nSo when Megan asks Cueball what his plans are, he just lists his routine consisting only of things that the news has told him exactly how often to do.\nHis list includes the following, which he has to do once per day:\nSeveral obvious problems arise with these \"you should do ... daily\" tips. They are often based on population studies, but they may be harmful in the case of some individual persons. This health-related advice would be beneficial in, say, 60 or 70% of the population, but may be ineffective in other 20% of the people, and deleterious in 10%. This especially relates to the suggested daily intake of aspirin.\nThe second problem is the shaky scientific foundation of this advice. There have been studies examining the effects of a daily glass of red wine, for example, but there is certainly no study which has observed the interaction of all ten of these health tips at once. In particular, tannins (which occur in red wine and coffee) are known to absorb certain substances, which may influence the way in which apples and eggs are digested.\nFurthermore the scientific basis for these articles are shaky at best. A large number of these studies are just junk science - poor methodology and bias making the study more attention-grabbing, but lacking real substance. Even those studies that are scientifically rigorous are often reported on poorly. \"Study proves that dark chocolate helps you lose weight\" is a better headline than \"Several studies over the last five years hint that chocolate may have certain long term benefits; more research needed\"\nOf course, if Cueball only does these things, then he can't\/doesn't attend to other important matters, such as going to work, which most likely allows him to buy the recommended materials in the first place, or even using the toilet. Also, if Cueball only does these things, he will complete his \"daily\" schedule in significantly less than a day, probably between 8.5 and 9 hours. This means that he will do his \"daily\" schedule on average almost three times a day. One consequence is that Cueball will be drinking on average about 19 glasses of wine per week instead of 7 glasses of wine per week if he actually drank one glass of wine per day. While drinking 7 glasses of wine per week won't have any negative consequences as long as they are evenly or about evenly spaced, drinking more than fourteen servings of alcohol (where one glass of wine has one serving of alcohol) per week causes long-term liver damage. Also, it's not clear how Cueball is able to overpower his circadian rhythm in order to sleep for over twenty hours per day. Furthermore, while the routine is theoretically subject to change as soon as Cueball hears another such daily recommendation on the news, this won't happen because he hasn't heard a recommendation to tune in to the news every day, so poor Cueball is trapped in his daily schedule.\nIn the title text Cueball explains that his daily routine is not completely fixed. It is broken twice a year, since he also follows public information campaigns suggesting the replacement smoke detector batteries twice a year. While the US National Fire Protection Association recommends a replacement at least once per year others suggest every time when the clock changes according to daylight saving time , i.e. twice a year. (All such recommendations will likely become irrelevant as citizens of the United States, starting in California, are encouraged to replace their existing smoke detectors with new models containing irremovable ten-year batteries.) This is just another example for official overdone recommendations nobody follows, in this case since smoke detectors make annoying beeps when their batteries run low and thus rarely need routine replacements before then.\n[Megan and Cueball are standing together, facing each other.] Megan: Got any plans for the day? Cueball: I'm going to eat an apple, an egg, one baby aspirin, and a piece of dark chocolate, drink six glasses of water, one glass of red wine, a cup of coffee, and a cup of tea, then do 30 minutes of exercise. Cueball: Then back to sleep for another 8 hours!\n[Caption below the panel:] I only do things that news stories have specifically told me to do once per day.\n"}
{"id":1854,"title":"Refresh Types","image_title":"Refresh Types","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1854","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/refresh_types.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1854:_Refresh_Types","transcript":"[A table with three columns is shown. The header is:] Refresh Type; Example Shortcuts; Effect\n[First row:] Soft Refresh [The word refresh has a border to mimic a button:] Gmail REFRESH Button Requests update within JavaScript\n[Second row:] Normal Refresh [Two PC shortcuts and the Apple command key followed by an R:] F5, CTRL-R,  \u2318R Refreshes page\n[Third row:] Hard Refresh [One PC shortcut, the combination Control plus Shift, and the Apple command key followed by Shift and R:] CTRL-F5, CTRL-\u21e7,  \u2318\u21e7R Refreshes page including cached files\n[Fourth row:] Harder Refresh [One single combination using Control plus Shift plus Hyper plus Escape plus R plus F5:] CTRL-\u21e7-HYPER-ESC-R-F5 Remotely cycles power to datacenter\n[Fifth row:] Hardest Refresh [One single combination using Control plus the Apple command key plus the Windows key plus Shift plus the hash key plus R plus F5 plus F plus 5 plus Escape plus the letter O plus a slashed zero plus a slashed letter O plus an eject sign plus Scroll Lock:] CTRL-\u2318 \u229e \u21e7#-R-F5-F-5-ESC-O-0-\u00d8-\u23cf-SCROLL LOCK Internet starts over from ARPANET\n","explanation":"In this comic Randall presents five different levels of refresh operations for web applications. The first three ( soft refresh , normal refresh , and hard refresh ) are common operations to keep the content in the browser retrieved from the server up to date. The other two ( harder refresh and hardest refresh ) are fictional operations to perform refresh operations on remote resources. The terms are probably adopted from soft and hard reset operations used to restart broken computers or e.g. smartphones.\nSoft refresh refers to an operation in a web page, commonly known as Ajax , that requests new information without reloading the entire page. The given example, Gmail , includes a feature that allows users to poll new emails and show it in the inbox interface. It is a command using JavaScript to load new contents from the server in the background and only update necessary components of the page. Since modern web applications do this also automatically in short time intervals those buttons are mostly unnecessary. In Gmail a user will see a new message instantly.\nThe normal refresh is a browser operation that reloads the complete web page, text and other content that has changed since the original load will be updated. The operation can be triggered by refresh buttons in browsers, though it also can be requested using the common keyboard commands as listed by Randall. Many pages -- like the main page at xkcd.com -- don't have a refresh button. If the page has been opened before a new comic release, pressing F5 afterwards causes reload and the new comic is shown.\nWhat Randall calls hard refresh is a less common browser operation forcing the browser to re-download every part of the web page, ignoring any cached content. Caching is a common way of decreasing web page load times. Browsers save resources such as images or CSS stylesheets on the first visit on a web page and use the local copy on subsequent visits. It allows them to decrease amount of transfer needed to show the web page, but can prevent showing changes made to the resources (for example a web developer changing the stylesheet). In those cases the hard refresh ensures that each part of the website is downloaded in its newest form.\nIf there is a proxy or a cache (like used for this wiki) in between the browser and the server this type of refreshing may not work. In this case, unless a purge link is available, the user has to wait until the cache entry is expired and a new request to the web server is done. Someone may try to avoid this behavior by including special headers in the HTTP reply to control caching, but not all proxies or clouds follow these instructions.\nHarder refresh is a joke that extends the existing naming scheme. The joke is that if a hard refresh resets the browser display and cache, a harder refresh should reset the source of the data by cycling power in the data center. Assuming no damage was done, this would reset the memory on the server, erasing any information that had not been written to disk, and setting the server to the state it was in at launch. This would cause considerable downtime, and would be unlikely to help the user at all.\nIn orchestrated environment it may indirectly cause some virtual machines in the cloud to be rebooted and assigned to an other web server needing more workload. But a growing workload is caused by hundreds or thousands additional requests and not just a single key combination from one browser. While there are administrative web tools allowing to perform a reboot (physical or virtual server) just by clicking a single button, this is not what is being referred to in the comic. A standard (non-administrative) user rebooting an actual physical server using a common web page is not possible, unless there is a software or operating system bug that will cause exactly this. This would be considered an extremely critical problem and its resolution would be given an extremely high priority by the server owners.\nThe harder refresh uses six keys, including the non-standard ' HYPER ' key, a feature of the Space cadet keyboard . Hyper could also refer to the Linux modifier key Hyper, similar to Control, Alt, and Super.\nThe fifth option, hardest refresh , moves beyond resetting the source of the data and resets the entire internet back to ARPANET , an early military network which was a forerunner to the modern internet. The implications of this are not made clear, but it should be noted that it wouldn't help to fix any problems a user is experiencing in-browser, as HTTP , the protocol by which web pages are sent, was not developed until late 1990, the year ARPANET was decommissioned.\nThe hardest refresh shortcut uses fifteen keys, including non-standard ones such as \u00d8 and \u23cf. (The former is a key found on Danish and Norwegian keyboards, the latter is the \"eject\" key found on Mac keyboards and some laptops.) The shortcut makes amusing comparisons about a shortcut that includes not only the F5 function key, but also the keys for the letter \"F\" and the digit \"5\", as well as the similarity in appearance between O, 0, and \u00d8.\nThe title text suggests that the inclusion of both the Windows key and Command key in the hardest refresh shortcut is a security measure akin to the Two-man rule , as it would require two keyboards to enter. Normally this would not work in practice as the modifier keys are handled per keyboard and not combined across keyboards for most operating systems allowing more than one keyboard.\n[A table with three columns is shown. The header is:] Refresh Type; Example Shortcuts; Effect\n[First row:] Soft Refresh [The word refresh has a border to mimic a button:] Gmail REFRESH Button Requests update within JavaScript\n[Second row:] Normal Refresh [Two PC shortcuts and the Apple command key followed by an R:] F5, CTRL-R,  \u2318R Refreshes page\n[Third row:] Hard Refresh [One PC shortcut, the combination Control plus Shift, and the Apple command key followed by Shift and R:] CTRL-F5, CTRL-\u21e7,  \u2318\u21e7R Refreshes page including cached files\n[Fourth row:] Harder Refresh [One single combination using Control plus Shift plus Hyper plus Escape plus R plus F5:] CTRL-\u21e7-HYPER-ESC-R-F5 Remotely cycles power to datacenter\n[Fifth row:] Hardest Refresh [One single combination using Control plus the Apple command key plus the Windows key plus Shift plus the hash key plus R plus F5 plus F plus 5 plus Escape plus the letter O plus a slashed zero plus a slashed letter O plus an eject sign plus Scroll Lock:] CTRL-\u2318 \u229e \u21e7#-R-F5-F-5-ESC-O-0-\u00d8-\u23cf-SCROLL LOCK Internet starts over from ARPANET\n"}
{"id":1855,"title":"Telephoto","image_title":"Telephoto","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1855","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/telephoto.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1855:_Telephoto","transcript":"[Cueball stands behind a huge telephoto lens which rests on two tripods, one at the left in front of Cueball, and an other larger one in the middle. The lens is more than five times longer than Cueball is high. In front of the lens is a tree with a bird on top close to the lens. The bird is labeled \"Subject\". Inside the telephoto lens at the location of the objective lens a small device is shown and labeled \"Webcam\". From that device a small cable runs through the entire telephoto lens to the eyepiece, where an other device labeled \"Camera\" is shown.] [Caption below the panel:] Telephoto tip: If you add enough converters and extenders, you don't actually need a fancy lens.\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Telephoto Tip.\nTelephoto lenses are special lenses for cameras that are physically shorter than their focal length . Using a long-focus lens allows the photographer to magnify a photographic image of an object rather than being physically close to the object. Alternatively one could add \" converters \" and \" extenders \" to an existing lens to get a greater focal length for the cost of reduced brightness. The joke is that Cueball did not want to spend the money on buying a new telephoto lens or real converters, and instead achieved the same effect by moving his cheap camera (a standard webcam , in this case) close enough to the subject to obviate the need for magnification.\nThere are many problems with this. First, the end result is completely impractical to carry around; as shown in the comic, Cueball has to set up two tripods just to support the weight of his hulking behemoth of a camera. Second, if you're an animal photographer like Cueball, you need to be able to see the animal as close up as possible in order to get a good picture; a lens with lots of magnification power accomplishes just that without alerting the animal to the photographer's presence, but Cueball's camera would surely scare off any birds he tried to photograph (except in fanciful proof-of-concept diagrams like this comic).\nPerhaps most damning of all, though, is the fact that Cueball's idea involves installing a webcam at the far end to be able to photograph anything. Webcams are not designed to capture high-resolution images, so the resulting image will be of considerably lower quality compared to professional photographers' works, although it could be better than a standard camera setup taking account of the huge achievable zoom levels. But more importantly, the presence of the webcam renders the functionality of the extenders (and the base camera itself!) completely redundant, cementing this idea as a total waste of money and effort. The same could be achieved by mounting the webcam on a long stick; an extraordinary long selfie stick will achieve nearly the same effect, for considerably less cost and set-up than Cueball's behemoth.\nThe title text continues this by saying he was banned from the Airliners.net photography forum because his new modified lens was so long that it started brushing against planes as they flew by. If Cueball's gargantuan lens is being set up on or near runways or is so long that it potentially damages planes in-flight, then being banned from an online forum should be the least of his worries. [ citation needed ] In-flight damage dealt to planes can cause severe consequences, e.g. causing them to crash. This would possibly put him on the no-fly watchlist, as well as being charged with unintentional damage.\n[Cueball stands behind a huge telephoto lens which rests on two tripods, one at the left in front of Cueball, and an other larger one in the middle. The lens is more than five times longer than Cueball is high. In front of the lens is a tree with a bird on top close to the lens. The bird is labeled \"Subject\". Inside the telephoto lens at the location of the objective lens a small device is shown and labeled \"Webcam\". From that device a small cable runs through the entire telephoto lens to the eyepiece, where an other device labeled \"Camera\" is shown.] [Caption below the panel:] Telephoto tip: If you add enough converters and extenders, you don't actually need a fancy lens.\n"}
{"id":1856,"title":"Existence Proof","image_title":"Existence Proof","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1856","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/existence_proof.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1856:_Existence_Proof","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart stands in front of a whiteboard and points at calculations written on it.] Miss Lenhart: There exists some number x such that f(x)=G(f(0))=1.\n[Miss Lenhart moves her arm in a frameless panel.] Miss Lenhart: Oh yes. Miss Lenhart: Somewhere out there, it exists.\n[Zoom-in on Miss Lenhart raising a fist.] Miss Lenhart: And we must find it... and destroy it.\n[Miss Lenhart raises a sword.] Miss Lenhart: Grab your swords, students! We ride! Student #1 (off-screen): I think I'm in the wrong math class? Student #2 (off-screen): I'm finally in the right one.","explanation":"In mathematics, an existence proof is a proof that only shows that an object with a specific property exists, but does not tell what this object is. For instance, if f is a continuous function such that f(0) = 0 and f(100) = 2, it is easy to prove that there exists an x between 0 and 100 such that f(x) = 1 (as in the comic). However, this proof gives no way to find such an x.\nIn many situations, a proof of existence is enough to satisfy a mathematician, but in others, it is desirable to actually identify the object whose existence has been proven.\nThe full statement itself seems like a solution to some kind of function composition problem. Seems like what the class has proven is that if you apply certain function G(x) to a starting point of function f(0), then what it will do is just give you a value of f(x) at some other value of x, existence of which is stated to be proven. The sentence \"There exists some number x such that f(x)=G(f(0))=1.\" boils down to \"There is an x such that f(x)=1\". The part with G(f(0)) is only a way to arrive at 1. For some reason there is an x that satisfies f(x)=G(f(0)), and since G(f(0))=1, it is equivalent to f(x)=1.\nIn the comic, Miss Lenhart (and students) take this one step further, by taking up arms to destroy the function value, which they have proven to exist. In the last panel, some students off screen begin to wonder if they are in the right class, as normal math classes do not take up swords to fight abstract concepts. [ citation needed ] Another student remarks that they are finally in the right math class, implying that this is the kind of thing they wanted from their math curriculum all along.\nThe phrase \" We ride \" is commonly used in rallying battle cries, particularly in fantasy or medieval dramas where characters are preparing to enter combat on horseback. Variations of the phrase are used several times in The Lord of the Rings , for example.\nThe title text refers to Real Analysis , a branch of mathematics dealing with real numbers and real-valued functions (as opposed to studies dealing with integers , rational numbers , imaginary numbers in the complex plane, etc.). As the speaker implies, Real Analysis is supposed to remain confined to the theoretical realm of mathematics; certainly nobody signing up for such a class would ever expect to be embroiled in a crusade against intangible constructs! Taken out of its mathematical context, \"analysis\" literally means \"breaking down\", referring to the teacher's intention to cut things up with a sword. The use of the uncommon word \"realer\" conveys that the situation has suddenly developed unusually high stakes. This nuance would be lost if the word \"realer\" were replaced with the technically correct phrasing of \"more real\".\nThis may be a continuation of 982: Set Theory , where numbers were \"executed\" to prove a point.\n[Miss Lenhart stands in front of a whiteboard and points at calculations written on it.] Miss Lenhart: There exists some number x such that f(x)=G(f(0))=1.\n[Miss Lenhart moves her arm in a frameless panel.] Miss Lenhart: Oh yes. Miss Lenhart: Somewhere out there, it exists.\n[Zoom-in on Miss Lenhart raising a fist.] Miss Lenhart: And we must find it... and destroy it.\n[Miss Lenhart raises a sword.] Miss Lenhart: Grab your swords, students! We ride! Student #1 (off-screen): I think I'm in the wrong math class? Student #2 (off-screen): I'm finally in the right one."}
{"id":1857,"title":"Emoji Movie","image_title":"Emoji Movie","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1857","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/emoji_movie.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1857:_Emoji_Movie","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking together while Megan is looking at her smartphone.] Megan: Did you see there's an emoji movie? Cueball: If they have to make a movie about a section of Unicode, it's not the worst choice... Megan: They should do a whole series. I would watch the Combining Diacritical Marks movie . Cueball: That series would have way too many characters.\n","explanation":"Megan asks Cueball if he knows about the then-upcoming The Emoji Movie . It was released on July 28, 2017, a month after this comic, and had been widely reviled on the Internet for its lack of original plot, characters, and jokes.\nCueball responds to the topic by damning it with faint praise , starting with the presumption that somebody had to make a film about a \"section of Unicode\".\nUnicode is the standard by which almost all modern text, in all languages, is represented as computer data. It consists of thousands of \"code points\", grouped into about 280 contiguous sections known as \"blocks\". There is no formal term \"section of Unicode\", which Randall seems to be using to skirt the fact that emojis are not all represented within one Unicode block.\nExamples of potential Unicode blocks include \"Playing Cards\", \"Musical Symbols\", \"Tibetan\", \"Hangul Jamo Extended-B\", \"Braille Patterns\" \u2013 and of course \"Combining diacritical marks\" and \"Dingbats\", referred to in the comic.\nEmojis are standard pictograms which include smileys (eg \ud83d\ude02) and common objects such as beer (\ud83c\udf7a) and eggplant (\ud83c\udf46). Dating from the late 1990s, they were added to Unicode in 2010. There is actually no Unicode block known as \"Emojis\". There is Emoticons (U+1F600..U+1F64F), which contains 80 code points, mostly of facial expressions. However it does not include all emojis. For instance, \"Baby\" (\ud83d\udc76) is U+1F476, within the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block.\nThe topic of emoji in Unicode also appears in 1813: Vomiting Emoji .\nMegan responds to this presumption by facetiously suggesting that Hollywood should make a series of films about different code blocks, referencing Hollywood's current trend of reducing risk by making many sequels and adaptations. She proposes a movie about Combining Diacritical Marks (see 1647: Diacritics ), a different section of Unicode which contains 112 code points (each assigned to a character). These code points include many varieties of diacritics such as accents, cedillas and tildes which can be combined with other letters to produce an almost unlimited number of possibilities, such as \"\u045e\" (Cyrillic U plus breve).\nCueball quips that this series would have too many characters. This is a pun on the word \"character\", which has the double meaning of a fictional character , or a symbol which corresponds to a grapheme (e.g. letter, digit, punctuation mark). It's true that although the Combining Diacritical Marks movie would have only 112 characters, the series as a whole would have tens of thousands, including such epics as \"Egyptian Hieroglyphs\" (1,071) and \"CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B\" (42,720).\nThe \" Antz \/ A Bug's Life thing\" in the title text refers to the twin films phenomenon, in which two films with very similar (or identical) concepts are released within roughly the same timeframe. Competing studios Dreamworks and Pixar released their respective insect-oriented films in 1998, a year infamous for many other such film pairings (see the Wikipedia article for a full list).\nDingbats were an early form of pictograph included within the normal mechanisms for producing computer text, serving a similar function to emojis, but oriented towards practical symbols such as telephones, airport symbols and a wide variety arrows. Unlike emojis, they are usually black-and-white. Previously, dingbats required a specific font to render, but as part of Unicode (U+2700\u2013U+27BF), they can now be displayed in a variety of fonts. For example: \u2708  \u2706 \u27b9 \u2702 \u2730 Some characters are both dingbats and emoji, and are followed with a variant-selector character to indicate whether they should be in color.\nThe joke is that although dingbats and emojis are superficially equivalent, a film which contains many cute human expressions would have much more potential for success than one about dry symbols such as arrows, asterisks and scissors.\nMegan and Cueball's discussion about the movie is continued in 1870: Emoji Movie Reviews .\n[Megan and Cueball are walking together while Megan is looking at her smartphone.] Megan: Did you see there's an emoji movie? Cueball: If they have to make a movie about a section of Unicode, it's not the worst choice... Megan: They should do a whole series. I would watch the Combining Diacritical Marks movie . Cueball: That series would have way too many characters.\n"}
{"id":1858,"title":"4th of July","image_title":"4th of July","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1858","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/4th_of_july.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1858:_4th_of_July","transcript":"[One single panel is shown. The header reads:] 4 th of July activities\n2014 - Watching fireworks 2015 - Watching fireworks from drones 2016 - Flying drones through fireworks 2017 - Intercepting fireworks with drones 2018 - Competitions to hit drones with fireworks 2019 - Teams compete to shoot down each other's firework-armed drones 2020 - Sentient firework-armed drones overthrow humans 2021 - Drones celebrate independence day\n","explanation":"In the United States, the 4th of July is celebrated as Independence Day . This comic claims to show the timeline of different activities that are used to celebrate the holiday. One common activity is to watch fireworks displays. With the rise of personal drones there have been several videos of fireworks from drones, including flying the drones through the middle of the display. The comic then purports that starting in the year it was published (2017), fireworks and drones will be at some sort of war with each other, starting with drone pilots leading their drones into the path of the rising fireworks before they explode, leading to fireworks technicians intentionally trying to strike down drones. In 2019, Randall posits that the drones will be weaponized with fireworks and competitions will be held to shoot down your opponents' drone. This wanton destruction of drones leads them to turn against their pilots and humanity in 2020 (after gaining sentience, presumably by their AI evolving through the competition), and then in 2021, they will be celebrating their Independence Day from the humans. As of November 2021, drones have not yet overthrown humans. [ citation needed ]\nDespite the many unfortunate events that happened in 2020, sentient firework-armed drones overthrowing humans was not one of them. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text refers to another popular 4th of July activity in the United States: Barbecues with fare such as hot dogs and hamburgers. But since the drones don't have mouths or a digestive tract, they simply make a mess by using their rotors as a blender.\n[One single panel is shown. The header reads:] 4 th of July activities\n2014 - Watching fireworks 2015 - Watching fireworks from drones 2016 - Flying drones through fireworks 2017 - Intercepting fireworks with drones 2018 - Competitions to hit drones with fireworks 2019 - Teams compete to shoot down each other's firework-armed drones 2020 - Sentient firework-armed drones overthrow humans 2021 - Drones celebrate independence day\n"}
{"id":1859,"title":"Sports Knowledge","image_title":"Sports Knowledge","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1859","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sports_knowledge.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1859:_Sports_Knowledge","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat are walking together.] Cueball: Mike Trout's on-base plus slugging has been at career highs. After this injury, the Lakers will be lucky if he can hit even close to that. White Hat: ...Lakers? Cueball: I forget which team he is. Broncos?\n[Caption below the panel:] I know a handful of very specific things, but after that my sports knowledge falls apart quickly.\n","explanation":"Cueball , representing Randall , demonstrates that he has some knowledge about Mike Trout , a baseball player for the Los Angeles Angels . However, he mixes up the Los Angeles baseball team for one of the city's basketball teams when he mentions the Lakers . White Hat questions his mentioning of the Lakers, after which Cueball takes another wild guess, this time mentioning an American football team, the Denver Broncos , based in Denver, Colorado, over 800 miles (1300 kilometers) away from Los Angeles, indicating even poorer knowledge about sports.\nOn-base plus slugging (OPS) is a baseball statistic calculated as the sum of the on-base percentage (the number of times a player reaches base divided by the number of plate appearances) and slugging percentage (singles + 2 times the doubles + 3 times the triples + 4 times the home runs divided by at bats). It is useful for figuring out how well a player reaches base and hits for power . As of the date this comic was published, Trout's OPS for the 2017 season at 1.203 was indeed higher than in any of his previous seasons, albeit over a smaller number of games because Trout indeed suffered a thumb injury in late May and had not played since then. (He returned to play starting on July 14.)\nAt the end of the season, the teams leading each division make the playoffs, along with a certain number of other teams. In the NFL (with 8 division winners) and MLB (with 6 division winners), 4 extra teams make the playoffs, and, in the NBA (also with 6 division winners), 10 teams beside the division winners qualify for the playoffs. In baseball the two teams in the American League play a Wild Card game against each other, as do the two in the National League, and in American football , there are Wild Card games in which the two wild card teams per conference play the two lower seeded division winners.  At the time of publication, the Los Angeles Angels were, indeed, in the running for a wild-card spot (2\u00bd games out of the playoffs).\nWith the baseball season being halfway over (and thus months away from the Wild Card games in early October) and both football and basketball being in the off-season, Cueball further shows his lack of sports knowledge in asking whether it is next week, and assuming that he could spontaneously decide, at game time, to just go. He could make a decision to go now, but he would have to wait until the season is almost over when the seeding for the playoffs and wild card spots are decided. Sometimes the wild card spots aren't decided until the last game of the season; since MLB rules dictate that the Wild Card team with the better record hosts the game, this scenario would complicate the process of buying the tickets (which could be sold out prior to game time due to high demand), as well as other logistical matters (such as traveling to the game; if Cueball were located in the East Coast of the United States and the game were hosted by the Angels, Cueball would need to take a cross continent flight). In the end, the Angels were eliminated from postseason contention on the final weekend of the season, making Cueball's wish impossible until the next season.\nAs the caption says, he demonstrates that he has very specific knowledge in the topic but stumbles when anything out of his narrow field of view is brought up, similar to 132: Music Knowledge .\nTo compensate for his lack of interest and knowledge in sport Randall made the comic 1107: Sports Cheat Sheet , and he has before directly mentioned his missing knowledge in 1480: Super Bowl . (See more comics linked in those two).\n[Cueball and White Hat are walking together.] Cueball: Mike Trout's on-base plus slugging has been at career highs. After this injury, the Lakers will be lucky if he can hit even close to that. White Hat: ...Lakers? Cueball: I forget which team he is. Broncos?\n[Caption below the panel:] I know a handful of very specific things, but after that my sports knowledge falls apart quickly.\n"}
{"id":1860,"title":"Communicating","image_title":"Communicating","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1860","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/communicating.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1860:_Communicating","transcript":"[Egg-shaped character Humpty Dumpty, drawn with an angry face, is sitting on a brick wall and facing Alice, depicted as Science Girl.] Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less. Alice: I wonder what all those words you just said meant. Maybe you're telling me I can have all your stuff! Humpty Dumpty: What!? No! Alice: Your car, too? Gosh, thanks!\n","explanation":"There's glory for you.\nIn Lewis Carroll's \" Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There \", Alice meets Humpty Dumpty (the egg-shaped character from the children's verse). Humpty Dumpty is a Looking Glass creature, and the Looking Glass creatures all feature some form of inversion. For Humpty Dumpty the inversion is in meanings. When they first meet, Humpty Dumpty berates Alice for having a name that doesn't mean anything (contrasted with his name which means his shape).\nBut later, Humpty declares to Alice \"There's glory for you\". Alice doesn't understand what Humpty means by \"glory\". Humpty explains that he can make words mean whatever he chooses to mean. By \"glory\" he meant \"a nice knock-down argument\". And he adds: \"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less.\" ( [1] )\nIn the comic Humpty is explaining to \"Alice\" (portrayed by Science Girl ) that he can choose meanings for his words. Alice points out the obvious problem by pretending to wonder what meaning should be given to that utterance, and decides it means \"Please take all my belongings\". Humpty realizes he has been caught in a trap, but now Alice is choosing meanings, and even his protests are taken to mean \"take my car along with my belongings\".\nWhile it seems that Alice chooses these specific meanings of words to educate Humpty Dumpty about the mistake in his way of thinking, she could as well inform him about planned theft with random, meaningless words or not at all. After all, she got \"permission\". Also, even though Humpty Dumpty decides about the meanings of words by himself, he \"accidentally\" chooses the normal meanings of all of Alice's words, because otherwise he wouldn't be informed about the planned theft and wouldn't be able to react to this with \"What!? No!\".\nHumpty Dumpty is known from the nursery rhyme or riddle:\nHumpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpy Dumpty had a great fall. All the King's horses and all the King's men, Couldn't put Humpty together again.\nCarroll's Humpty Dumpty is a parody of people who use technical language without defining their terms, and expect others to understand. The title text continues this. By Humpty insisting that he is not responsible for others understanding him he is unable to get help getting down from the wall, which will lead to his inevitable demise. This two-sided nature of communication is also shown in the title text of 1028: Communication , as well as in later comics like 1984: Misinterpretation (with a list of other comics about communication).\n[Egg-shaped character Humpty Dumpty, drawn with an angry face, is sitting on a brick wall and facing Alice, depicted as Science Girl.] Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less. Alice: I wonder what all those words you just said meant. Maybe you're telling me I can have all your stuff! Humpty Dumpty: What!? No! Alice: Your car, too? Gosh, thanks!\n"}
{"id":1861,"title":"Quantum","image_title":"Quantum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1861","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/quantum.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1861:_Quantum","transcript":"[A chart with the Y-axis titled \"How Philosophically Exciting the Questions Are to a Novice Student\" and the X-axis titled \"How Many Years of Math are Needed to Understand the Answers\". The upper-right portion of the chart is labeled \"Danger Zone\". The following topics are charted as follows: Basic Physics: low excitement, low prerequisites Fluid Dynamics: low excitement, high prerequisites Magnets: medium excitement, medium prerequisites General Relativity: medium excitement, high prerequisites (on the border to the \"Danger Zone\") Special Relativity: high excitement, low prerequisites Quantum Mechanics: high excitement, high prerequisites (in the \"Danger Zone\")]\n[Caption below the panel:] Why so many people have weird ideas about Quantum Mechanics\n","explanation":"The comic depicts a relationship between how philosophically exciting the questions in a field of study are, versus how many years are required to understand the answers.  For example, special relativity poses very intriguing philosophical questions, such as \" can the temporal ordering of spatially separated events depend on the observer? \", or \" can time run at different rates for differerent observers? \".  But it doesn't take a lot of mathematical knowledge to understand the answers - that when objects move very close to the speed of light, time slows down and their lengths contract : the key Lorentz transformations ultimately involve little more than high-school algebra. Hence, Special Relativity is very high up on the y-axis but not very far on the x-axis.  Basic physics is not very philosophically interesting but also not very complicated. Fluid dynamics , as captured by the Navier\u2013Stokes equations is very complicated, but it's concerned with a very specific topic - how water or other fluids flow around - so it doesn't lead to big philosophical questions.\nThe \"danger zone\" in the top right of the chart is when a field of study is wide-ranging enough to pose broad philosophical questions, and also so complicated that most people can't answer those questions. Quantum mechanics deals with some very strange concepts that readily lend themselves to philosophical questions, such as the idea that merely observing something can change it, or the idea that something can be both a wave and a particle at the same time.  However, the explanation for those phenomena is a very complicated piece of math, notably the Schr\u00f6dinger equation , which means that most people don't have accurate answers to those questions. Randall suggests that this is the reason why so many people have \"weird ideas\" about quantum mechanics.\n1240: Quantum Mechanics also discusses weird ideas that people have about quantum mechanics.\nGeneral relativity also presupposes considerable mathematical sophistication to understand the Einstein field equations . However, the main contribution of GR \u2013 the explanation of gravity in terms of a curved spacetime \u2013 does not seem to induce a lot of philosophical novelty beyond that already seen in special relativity, possibly with the exception of black holes .\nThe title text references the Insane Clown Posse (ICP) song \" Miracles \", made memetic by the lyric \"Fucking magnets, how do they work?\"  An axis is the direction on a graph in which some quantity is increasing or decreasing.  So things that are far along the \"miracle\" axis are presumably more miraculous.  As you move from bottom-left to top-right on the graph, items become both more philosophically interesting and harder to understand.  It would be fair to describe something that's hard to understand and raises big philosophical questions as a \"miracle\". The ICP \"Miracles\" axis would also intersect the topic \"magnets\" infamously mentioned in the song.\n[A chart with the Y-axis titled \"How Philosophically Exciting the Questions Are to a Novice Student\" and the X-axis titled \"How Many Years of Math are Needed to Understand the Answers\". The upper-right portion of the chart is labeled \"Danger Zone\". The following topics are charted as follows: Basic Physics: low excitement, low prerequisites Fluid Dynamics: low excitement, high prerequisites Magnets: medium excitement, medium prerequisites General Relativity: medium excitement, high prerequisites (on the border to the \"Danger Zone\") Special Relativity: high excitement, low prerequisites Quantum Mechanics: high excitement, high prerequisites (in the \"Danger Zone\")]\n[Caption below the panel:] Why so many people have weird ideas about Quantum Mechanics\n"}
{"id":1862,"title":"Particle Properties","image_title":"Particle Properties","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1862","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/particle_properties.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1862:_Particle_Properties","transcript":"Particle Properties in Physics\n","explanation":"A table is presented comparing the range (maximum and minimum value) and scale (how big number increments are) of several measures. The table begins by listing properties pertinent to particle physics as the title suggests, but quickly devolves to other domains such as role-playing games (such as D&D) and sports after failing to provide a good definition of flavor .\nThe title text says that in addition each particle has a password, but only hash of the password can be observed. This is a computer science reference. In computer science, properties (e.g. of an object or program) often can be changed with a single command. In physics as we observe it, properties can locally change with the environment. There are several experiments , whether physical constants are really time-const. Password hashing is the practice of hiding the password itself by storing only an irreversible representation of the password. Since the password itself is not stored, the password cannot ever be viewed by the user or a hacker (outside of the login page). This method is considered to be safest way of storing passwords. Password hashing using some key derivation function makes it impossible to steal passwords even if the server that stores hashes is cracked, unless the hash function is also broken, which should be a task which cannot be completed in any feasible time for sufficiently strong passwords. The title-text claims this is predicted by the cosmic censorship hypothesis , which in reality claims that a gravitational singularity must always be obscured by an event horizon (i.e.: there can't be a naked singularity ). There is also a hint of quantum mechanics in the statement, as observation is one of the central concepts of the field, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle actually states that it is impossible to observe (measure) some property of a particle with arbitrary precision when another one is known (e.g.: you can't determine the momentum and position of a particle). This makes the title text a mix of several domains, as was the above table.\nParticle Properties in Physics\n"}
{"id":1863,"title":"Screenshots","image_title":"Screenshots","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1863","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/screenshots.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1863:_Screenshots","transcript":"Intro to Screenshots\n[The left side of the panel shows three images. The largest image is a screenshot of text with the middle section highlighted and margins and top and bottom rows marked with red lines and arrows. The two smaller images below are cropped versions of the screenshot in the first image: the left image has an incorrect \"squashed\" aspect ratio and a red X on it, while the right image has a correct aspect ratio and a green check mark.]\n[The right side of the panel:]\nSyllabus Highlighting: What & how much Aspect ratios Cropping: Pre- and post- Whitespace Screenshots vs links Catching the right GIF frame Snapchat and trust Embarrassing background tabs Spellcheck's red outlines Security: Beware URL tokens Redacting personal info Useful browser modes Tradeoffs: PNG vs JPG Watermark ethics Spotting fakes\n[Caption below the panel:] My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.\n","explanation":"The comic shows a syllabus of an introductory course on screenshots . Screenshots have become a common way of spreading and sharing content on social media like Tumblr and Twitter, particularly excerpts of text such as seen in the cartoon. This in turn has developed into a common language with unwritten rules; the comic imagines a world where such rules have become codified into best practices, able to be taught in classes.\nThe image on the left shows an image of screenshots of text, along with what seems like annotations describing various ratios and dos and don'ts about making such screenshots. The right side shows the main points of the course, touching on topics that are relevant for making and publishing screenshots. Some of these guidelines are violated on a regular basis by people sharing screenshots on the internet, leading to impaired readability and the degradation of digital quality (see 1683: Digital Data ).\nThe punchline of the comic describes a high attendance in the course (presumably many people are interested in how to take high-quality screenshots); however, the digital textbook only sold one copy, implying that the only attendee that bought the book was adept enough to distribute screenshots of the textbook content to the others, because of the information gathered from the class itself. In essence, the writer of the textbook has taught their students how to pirate their material, effectively putting themselves out of a job. There isn't anything that the author can do to prevent this due to the analog hole , which states that if non-interactive media can be visually seen by humans, it can be copied, as with a screenshot.\nDetailed explanation of the headings on the right:\nHighlighting: What & How much? This refers to highlighting text of particular interest in screenshots, as depicted on the left.\nAspect ratios Again, depicted on the left. If a screenshot is too wide, it might be difficult to read, and\/or it will not fit into thumbnails and social networking feeds. This leads to the screenshot being scaled down too much to be readable (see bottom left). An aspect ratio that is too tall would have similar effects, so in general it is better to stick to near-square aspect ratios (see bottom right of the left section). Some users change the aspect ratio when scaling with a very ugly result (see e.g. 1187: Aspect Ratio ).\nCropping: Pre- and Post- This refers to cropping the image, that is, cutting away the irrelevant or unnecessary parts, leaving just the content one needs to communicate. Pre- and Post- refers to when the cropping is done, either before the screenshot (i.e. framing the shot) or cropping the screenshot after it has been taken (i.e. fine tuning it in a photo editing program).\nWhitespace This section presumably deals with whitespace . This generally refers to the space around the content of interest, which is often but not always white. In the main image on the left side of this comic, most of the red marks are arrows indicating the white space of that image. In this case the \"whitespace\" at the top and bottom are indeed not white, but rather filled with text not relevant to the screenshot. Removing all whitespace makes an image more efficient and helps provide focus on the important part of a screenshot, but too little whitespace can be less comfortable to read or look at, and therefore appear as a more amateurish result. This section of the course would likely discuss this balance.\nScreenshots vs Links For the most part it is recommended that one links to the original content, rather than publishing a screenshot of said content. In some situations it is advisable to opt for using screenshots, such as if the content in question has been removed from the original source, and one still wants to communicate the fact that it was published there. Additionally, a screenshot is easier to catch people's attention with, as it doesn't require them to take any actions to view.\nCatching the right GIF frame A GIF is a bitmap image format that was developed in 1987 by CompuServe and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability. The format supports animations and is often used for short looping animations on the internet. They often employ a low frame rate , so that one might notice a funny or interesting frame during playback. The na\u00efve approach is to press the 'Print Screen' button with careful timing, but in this manner it can be very challenging to capture the desired frame of any GIF that plays at a speed of greater than 5 frames per second. Presumably, the course introduces its students to special tools to get the job done, such as the EZgif website or the downloadable 7GIF app .\nSnapchat and trust Snapchat is a popular social networking application for mobile devices primarily used for sharing images and short videos. One of the main selling points is the transience of content posted. The idea is that as soon as one opens an image or video, a timer starts, and once it has expired the content is no longer accessible on the device. This has led to people sending sensitive content to their friends, thinking that they wouldn't be able to cause much harm, as the content is non-permanent. An obvious flaw in this model is the capability of modern mobile devices to take screenshots (usually available from shortcut keys), and thus permanently save the images to the phone's memory. Saving embarrassing images of one's friends, that they themselves meant as a transient joke, is a serious breach of trust, hence the heading.\nEmbarrassing background tabs A common error when publishing screenshots is not being careful, and leaving content visible that might be embarrassing. For instance, a browser tab open in the background might show content that is embarrassing or private information, such as a page about a sensitive disease one may have (e.g. AIDS ) or pornography . It is easy to miss this when checking, which leads to situations such as this one , where a politician handed out a document with background tabs to pornography websites.\nSpellcheck's red underlines Spell checkers are designed to notify the writer of a document of spelling and grammatical mistakes in the text. This is usually done through the editor marking text it thinks is incorrect with an underline (usually red, but other colors may indicate different kinds of mistakes). Sometimes these mistakes are not relevant to the writer, such as when editing source code or using a spellchecker that is set to another language. Even if the corrections are relevant, however, one would not want the ugly red underlines on a screenshot. This section presumably deals with this problem.\nSecurity: Beware of URL tokens URL tokens are pieces of code embedded in the URL of a website. If implemented well, these help identify a particular document or search query, and do not carry any sensitive security information. Insecure web-apps, however, may encode authentication information (such as session IDs , or even worse: usernames and passwords) in the URL, leading to a massive security risk on the part of someone whose screen might be visible to others. Screenshots allow anyone to easily read off these parameters, and possibly successfully impersonate the creator of the screenshot on a website. This is especially hard to notice to less technically inclined users, who might not know that, say, a session ID (a seemingly random jumble of characters), might be used to impersonate them.\nRedacting personal info Somewhat related to the previous point: Screenshots might include personal information, such as indications of institutions one might work for, e-mail addresses, and the like, that one might not want to share with the world. This section presumably deals with ways of obscuring such information on screenshots.\nUseful browser modes Using the private browsing mode offered by most browsers helps with the previous point of keeping your personal information out of the screenshots because websites see you as logged out. Another helpful mode is the full screen browsing mode (usually F11) that will maximize the content to cover the whole screen, keeping the browser UI out of the screenshots. This also helps with privacy, as it will keep the bookmarks on your browser toolbar from being visible, as well as your username if you're logged in Chrome, without having to crop the screenshots manually. Counterpointing with the final bullet on spotting fakes, the Inspect Element browser mode allows you to live-edit the HTML source of the webpage, allowing you to create more convincing fakes if that is your goal.\nTradeoffs: PNG vs JPG PNG and JPG are file formats with different image compression algorithms . JPG is widely used for encoding photographs, as it compresses real-world images to a fraction of their normal size without losing much quality. On artificial images with lots of sharp changes in contrast (such as text), however, JPG produces visible compression artifacts due to its lossy compression . For these, PNG is usually used, as it compresses large blocks of a single color, and repeating patterns efficiently, and due to it having a lossless option is able to encode text without artifacts, improving readability. PNG is usually superior for screenshots, as these are artificial images, but if the screenshot is of an actual photo (or a frame of a GIF or movie), JPG might yield lower file sizes at comparable quality. This tradeoff is presumably discussed under the heading. JPG images also have an attached EXIF data file, not present in PNG images, which may contain information about the device that the screenshot was taken on (especially \"with\", e.g. a camera) and thus be a potential privacy risk in some cases. However, EXIF metadata is not used with JPEG 2000. However, PNG can contain a transparency layer, allowing the object in the image to exist without a background.\nWatermark ethics Many users and websites add watermarks to their original content (or even worse: their screenshots) to indicate where it came from. As depicted in 1683: Digital Data this can lead to degradation of quality as watermarks are stacked on top of each other. It is generally considered okay to put a single unobtrusive watermark on one's own original work; anything other than that would be considered unethical.\nSpotting fakes It is relatively easy to fake a screenshot in an image editing program such as GIMP or just editing the page source, making it seem like another organization or person is the original source of the content, possibly damaging their reputation. Some of these techniques are easily detectable by looking at the images metadata or correlating the contents of the screenshot with other sources.\nThe title text once again refers to the continual re-screenshooting of data as seen in 1683: Digital Data , where the final examination consists of the students taking a screenshot good enough that it is still recognizable (and hopefully readable) after being re-compressed, re-screenshot and re-uploaded to various social networking sites, deteriorating its quality. This is quite a difficult task, considering the student only has control over the first screenshot, and subsequent screenshots could degrade the quality to any level. Hopefully the professor is aware of this and plans to perform the test under controlled conditions, as well as grade on a curve.\nScreenshots were previously explored by Randall in 1373: Screenshot , 1683: Digital Data and 1815: Flag . This comic is one of a small set of comics with the same or almost the same title as another comic (with only the plural form of the word screenshot being the difference).\nIntro to Screenshots\n[The left side of the panel shows three images. The largest image is a screenshot of text with the middle section highlighted and margins and top and bottom rows marked with red lines and arrows. The two smaller images below are cropped versions of the screenshot in the first image: the left image has an incorrect \"squashed\" aspect ratio and a red X on it, while the right image has a correct aspect ratio and a green check mark.]\n[The right side of the panel:]\nSyllabus Highlighting: What & how much Aspect ratios Cropping: Pre- and post- Whitespace Screenshots vs links Catching the right GIF frame Snapchat and trust Embarrassing background tabs Spellcheck's red outlines Security: Beware URL tokens Redacting personal info Useful browser modes Tradeoffs: PNG vs JPG Watermark ethics Spotting fakes\n[Caption below the panel:] My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.\n"}
{"id":1864,"title":"City Nicknames","image_title":"City Nicknames","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1864","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/city_nicknames.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1864:_City_Nicknames","transcript":"[Black Hat, Megan, and Ponytail are standing on a hill overlooking a city. The Gateway Arch is visible, as well as a number of skyscrapers in the skyline.] Black Hat: Ah, New York. The Hot Tamale. Megan: This is St. Louis. Also, that's not\u2013 Black Hat: The Winged City. The Gold Trombone. Castleopolis. Megan: It's none of those.\n[Close-up of Black Hat] Black Hat: The Kissing Kingdom. Sandland. The High Place. Ol' Ironhook. Megan (off-panel): Still wrong. Black Hat: The Thousand Spires. The Graveyard of Kings. Bloomtown. Lantern City USA. Megan (off-panel): Please stop.\n[Black Hat, Megan, and Ponytail are walking] Black Hat: The City of Many Daughters. Big Mauve. The Glass Cradle. The Road Source. London Prime. Hamtown. The Salad Bowl. God's Boudoir. The Glittering Swamp. The Steel Forest. The Mobius Strip. The Land of Trains and Fog. The Meeting Place. The Dark Star. The Walled Garden. Skin City. The Horse Rotary. Turkeytown. The Naked Towers. The Meta-City. The Urban Orb. The City of Angles. The Big Wheel. Bird City USA. The City of Seven Crowns. Hilltopia. Bug City. The Bottomless Cup. [Text size getting smaller] Lorde's Fen. The Last Town. The Empty Set. Ghost Harbor. Megan: How long does this last? Ponytail: No city has ever let him stay long enough to find out.\n","explanation":"Cities often have official or unofficial nicknames. For instance, St. Louis, Missouri , is known as \"Gateway to the West\" among several other nicknames. The nicknames typically invoke some historical or geographic feature of the city, but can sometime be opaque to those not familiar with the city. The full, formal name of Bangkok includes a long list of superlatives translating as \"The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city (of Ayutthaya) of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarn.\"\nDespite the skyline being clearly recognizable as St. Louis due to the Gateway Arch , Black Hat calls it New York City . However, the nickname he gives is neither a common New York nickname (such as \" The Big Apple \") nor a St. Louis nickname. Megan tries to correct him, but it becomes clear that Black Hat is making up nicknames. Many of his suggestions are puns for real nicknames of other places.\nThe title text contains made up demonyms in the same pattern. A demonym is a word for the people who live in a particular place. They are typically derived from the name of the place (e.g. \"St. Louisan\" for people from St. Louis, or New Yorker for those from New York), but some regions have an informal demonym that can be used colloquially by those familiar with the place to refer to its residents (e.g. Hoosier for people from Indiana).\n[Black Hat, Megan, and Ponytail are standing on a hill overlooking a city. The Gateway Arch is visible, as well as a number of skyscrapers in the skyline.] Black Hat: Ah, New York. The Hot Tamale. Megan: This is St. Louis. Also, that's not\u2013 Black Hat: The Winged City. The Gold Trombone. Castleopolis. Megan: It's none of those.\n[Close-up of Black Hat] Black Hat: The Kissing Kingdom. Sandland. The High Place. Ol' Ironhook. Megan (off-panel): Still wrong. Black Hat: The Thousand Spires. The Graveyard of Kings. Bloomtown. Lantern City USA. Megan (off-panel): Please stop.\n[Black Hat, Megan, and Ponytail are walking] Black Hat: The City of Many Daughters. Big Mauve. The Glass Cradle. The Road Source. London Prime. Hamtown. The Salad Bowl. God's Boudoir. The Glittering Swamp. The Steel Forest. The Mobius Strip. The Land of Trains and Fog. The Meeting Place. The Dark Star. The Walled Garden. Skin City. The Horse Rotary. Turkeytown. The Naked Towers. The Meta-City. The Urban Orb. The City of Angles. The Big Wheel. Bird City USA. The City of Seven Crowns. Hilltopia. Bug City. The Bottomless Cup. [Text size getting smaller] Lorde's Fen. The Last Town. The Empty Set. Ghost Harbor. Megan: How long does this last? Ponytail: No city has ever let him stay long enough to find out.\n"}
{"id":1865,"title":"Wifi vs Cellular","image_title":"Wifi vs Cellular","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1865","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wifi_vs_cellular.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1865:_Wifi_vs_Cellular","transcript":"[A graph with two curves that cross each other. The two areas beneath the curve at the top, and down to either the X-axis or the other curve are shaded with vertical gray lines. The Y-axis has no label, but represents reliability, the X-axis is a timeline, with labels indicating years beneath the axis, without any ticks. The two curves are labeled with text interrupting the curves, in the second case using two lines for the text. In the left shaded area there is a label inside and the right shaded area the label is beneath the curves with an arrow pointing to the area. All this text and the arrow is gray. Above the curves there is a caption also in gray font:] To get something to load on my phone, sometimes I have to...\nLabel left area: ...Connect to WiFi Label right area: ...Turn off WiFi\nLabel curve one: Home WiFi reliability Label curve two: Cellular data reliability\nYear labels: 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020\n[Caption below the panel:] It seems weird from a networking point of view, but sometime in the last few years this flipped for me.\n","explanation":"In this comic Randall remarks on how recent changes in Wi-Fi and Cellular data reliability have impacted his behavior. Wi-Fi technology has had several advantages over cellular data transmission due to Wi-Fi antennas' more ubiquitous distribution and ability to focus on high data transmission rates instead of broad signal coverage. However, as Wi-Fi has become more popular it is increasingly common to encounter Wi-Fi networks using outdated hardware, poorly organized or overburdened networks, and competition for bandwidth with other Wi-Fi devices. Meanwhile due to continued commercial investment in upgrading and expanding cellular networks and the more frequent consumer replacement of cellular handsets, the reliability of cellular data has continued to increase.\nRandall notes that prior to 2015 he found that he could improve his internet connection by connecting to a Wi-Fi network instead of using cellular data. After 2015 however, he finds that in many cases he is able to get a stronger connection by disengaging his Wi-Fi connection and getting his data over a cellular connection.\nAnything larger than a few kilobytes would previously require someone to switch off network data and connect to a wireless network. However, for a couple of years, cellular networks' data transmission rates have often become more reliable (albeit usually costlier for larger amount of data usage) while home Wi-Fi has remained fairly constant, meaning the cellular network is often the best choice to download a file.\nRandall says it is weird from a networking point of view , but in fact modern LTE connections via the cellular network are faster ( up to 300 Mbit\/s ) than the common used Wi-Fi standards like 802.11b\/g and 802.11n ( 54-150 Mbit\/s ). Faster Wi-Fi standards do exist but they are very rarely supported.\nIn the title text Randall takes a moment to rail against the often misleading promotional rates offered by cable internet providers. Such providers often attempt to up-sell consumer on internet packages with additional features. Here Randall juxtaposes several descriptors that might feature in a cable ad with several that refer to other things entirely. Xtreme Gigaband is a plausible internet package name, but might also be a reference to Comcast's often derided \" Xfinity \" promotions. And while Panamax sounds like it may be a film term, it is actually a ship classification that denotes the maximum size ship that can safely pass through the Panama canal . (This could also be referencing the title text of 1632: Palindrome .) Seeing as the title text mentions the cable company, implying that they're also Randall's Internet Service Provider, being \"with HBO \" would mean including HBO in the cable channel line-up, and most likely include being able to stream TV shows made by HBO. Since HBO shows include Game of Thrones , whose 7th season started only 3 days earlier, it's plausible that this comic might have been inspired by Randall attempting to stream the season premiere. Flavor-Blasted is a food term often used in hyperbolic television food ad, but also could be a reference to Comcast Cable's \"Blast!\" internet packages. Pricing mentioned in title text is exaggerated with only $5 more during first six months, but costing 5 billion after, which is a reference to how service providers would often advertise a lower temporary price, while if you read the fine print the plan is much more costly once the limited time offer runs out, and discounting is simply used for marketing purposes. What's worse, these discounted periods (typically six months) often come with a much longer contract (typically two years) which imposes cancelation fees.\n[A graph with two curves that cross each other. The two areas beneath the curve at the top, and down to either the X-axis or the other curve are shaded with vertical gray lines. The Y-axis has no label, but represents reliability, the X-axis is a timeline, with labels indicating years beneath the axis, without any ticks. The two curves are labeled with text interrupting the curves, in the second case using two lines for the text. In the left shaded area there is a label inside and the right shaded area the label is beneath the curves with an arrow pointing to the area. All this text and the arrow is gray. Above the curves there is a caption also in gray font:] To get something to load on my phone, sometimes I have to...\nLabel left area: ...Connect to WiFi Label right area: ...Turn off WiFi\nLabel curve one: Home WiFi reliability Label curve two: Cellular data reliability\nYear labels: 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020\n[Caption below the panel:] It seems weird from a networking point of view, but sometime in the last few years this flipped for me.\n"}
{"id":1866,"title":"Russell's Teapot","image_title":"Russell's Teapot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1866","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/russells_teapot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1866:_Russell%27s_Teapot","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of a blueprint labeled \"CubeSat-Based Design\", containing a satellite with a teapot in the top.]\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm crowdfunding a project to launch a teapot into orbit around the sun to settle the Russell thing once and for all.\n","explanation":"Russell's Teapot is a philosophical argument that reflects on the difficulty of trying to prove a negative. It involves a hypothetical teapot orbiting a heavenly body, whose existence hasn't been proven, and states that it cannot be disproven (somebody put it there secretly?). While an instrument could be theoretically engineered to pick out a teapot-sized object of any luminosity, the teapot would be very easy to confuse for other pieces of space debris, and the space to search is extremely large; the task is thus akin to the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.\nBertrand Russell devised this analogy \"to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.\" As such, Russell's teapot is very often used in atheistic arguments.\nCueball is trying to settle the teapot argument by actually launching a teapot into space via a crowdfunding campaign. This misses the point of Russell's argument, which is about unfalsifiable claims in rhetoric and not a literal teapot.\n\" CubeSat -based design\" refers to a type of miniaturized satellites that is made up of 10-centimeter cube units (here seemingly consisting of 3 units) and enables cost-effective means for getting a payload into orbit.\nThe title-text refers to Russell's paradox , also formulated by Bertrand Russell. Russell's paradox was a flaw found in na\u00efve set theory where one could consider \"the set of all sets that do not contain themselves\" (a \"set\" is a mathematical term for a \"group of things\" -- \"things\" in this case including a set itself). The paradox arises with whether this set, in turn, contains itself: if it does, then it cannot; if it doesn't, then it must. Similarly, like in the barber paradox , the vehicle which launches only vehicles which do not launch themselves is impossible: if the vehicle takes off, it must launch itself as well as the teapot, and thus can never be launched (without violating alleged NASA regulations, at least). That said, he might get around those regulations by using an initial first stage with an offboard power source for the moment of launch, for example a laser striking a parabolic mirror and massively heating air beneath the craft, causing expansion, or a compressed gas cold launch system such as used to clear submarine launched missiles from their tubes before the real rocket motor ignites.\nThe barber paradox can be stated as follows: \"Consider a town in which a man, the barber, shaves precisely those men who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?\" Either answer, yes or no, leads to a contradiction. Sometimes the paradox is incorrectly stated, replacing \"precisely those\" with \"only\". Under that scenario, there is no paradox; the barber is merely unkempt.\nThere is, however, a solution in this case. Instead of launching itself, the teapot-containing vehicle may be fired from a space gun , catapult, or other launcher, and then boost itself the rest of the way. This, while true for the CubeSats themselves, is not true for their carrier.\nRandall has talked about CubeSats in later comics as well, specifically in 1992: SafetySat and 2148: Cubesat Launch .\nFrom the top right, clockwise.\n[Cueball is standing in front of a blueprint labeled \"CubeSat-Based Design\", containing a satellite with a teapot in the top.]\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm crowdfunding a project to launch a teapot into orbit around the sun to settle the Russell thing once and for all.\n"}
{"id":1867,"title":"Physics Confession","image_title":"Physics Confession","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1867","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/physics_confession.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1867:_Physics_Confession","transcript":"[Megan is facing Ponytail and Cueball.] Megan: I'll be honest: We physicists talk a big game about the theory of everything, but the truth is, we don't really understand why ice skates work, how sand flows, or where the static charge comes from when you rub your hair with a balloon.\n","explanation":"A Theory of Everything is a goal of modern physics which would describe the properties of all fundamental particles and all the interactions between them. The current approach to a theory of everything is to describe how at high energies different interactions, such as electromagnetic forces and the strong and weak nuclear interactions merge. It would be possible, in principle to demonstrate how the rest of known physics can be derived from that quantum behavior. This approach, however, leaves many everyday phenomena which are not understood by modern physics, and many arguments against a theory of everything suggest that it won't ever be able to actually precisely describe everything. This comic lists several of those phenomena:\nThe fine detail of how ice skates work is unknown. It is known that there is a film of water between the skate and the ice that lubricates sliding, but scientists dispute how the film gets there. The commonly held belief is that it is caused by the pressure of the narrow skate; another belief is that the ice is melted by the friction of movement; but both fail to fully explain why skating continues to be possible at temperatures that are significantly below 0 Celsius. A better explanation is simply that, near the melting point of a solid, there will be a thin layer of liquid on the surface due to the dynamic equilibrium between the two phases, hence why ice is slippery. This happens regardless of the presence of skates. A more complete explanation is given in the linked article: Why is ice slippery? .\nPhysicists lack a clear understanding of the interactions involved in the flow of granular materials , such as sand. It is known that the behavior diverges greatly from that of a liquid, but it is unknown exactly how the flow works. PhysicsCentral:Granular Materials\nModern physics also doesn't understand what makes electrons move from one material to another when two materials are rubbed against each other (the triboelectric effect ), and why the transfer takes more electrons in one direction than in the other. However, this happens, and it's the cause of static electricity , which can be seen when one rubs a latex rubber balloon against hair.\nThe title text mentions another common phenomenon that is poorly understood: the separation of charges in a cumulonimbus cloud. It is thought that interactions between ice and water transfer electrons, and then the different motion of ice (as hail) and water droplets in the cloud separates the charge. NOAA How lightning is created .\n[Megan is facing Ponytail and Cueball.] Megan: I'll be honest: We physicists talk a big game about the theory of everything, but the truth is, we don't really understand why ice skates work, how sand flows, or where the static charge comes from when you rub your hair with a balloon.\n"}
{"id":1868,"title":"Eclipse Flights","image_title":"Eclipse Flights","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1868","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eclipse_flights.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1868:_Eclipse_Flights","transcript":"[Cueball is standing behind Megan, looking over her shoulder as she's seated in front of her laptop.] Cueball: What's that? Megan: Flight plans. Looks like there will be 50 to 100 flights whose route puts them in the path of the eclipse next month.\n[A map with a shaded path of the eclipse and red planes traveling is shown, with nine planes inside the path and one inside the eclipse shadow..]\nCueball: I'm sure the airlines will be prepared. Pilots know that stuff. Megan: But can you imagine being on the one flight where the pilot didn't?\n[A more detailed plane is shown flying into a curtain of darkness.] Captain: *KSSCHHH* [sound of intercom being activated] Captain: This is your captain speaking. If you look out the right side of the plane, you'll see, uhh... Captain: Folks, this appears to be the end times.\n","explanation":"A total solar eclipse occurred on Monday, August 21, 2017 .  It was visible as a total eclipse in a narrow band across the contiguous United States from Oregon on the Pacific coast to South Carolina on the Atlantic. Cueball asks Megan what she is doing, which turns out to be mapping the flights of aircraft that will be flying through the path of totality during the eclipse. She has found between 50 to 100 such flights.\nWhile most flights during the eclipse are coincidental, a few airlines had special flights planned for the occasion. Alaska Airlines, for example, chartered an invitation only flight for about 50 astronomers and serious eclipse chasers.\nOn the map, the center of the greatest eclipse is shown on the border between Illinois and Kentucky . Cueball says that the airlines and pilots will be prepared and aware of the situation, but Megan wonders what it would be like on a plane with an unprepared crew. The last panel shows a plane flying into the area of the eclipse with one of the crew telling the passengers that the end of the world has come.\nIn many cultures such as ancient Egypt, the end of the world is represented by a great darkness and the sun going out. During past eclipses, people were said to have believed the world was ending much like this comic (except without planes). This could also be a reference to 1391: Darkness as in that comic the reporters also believed a natural event to be the world ending although in a different setting.\nThe title text refers to the 'fasten seat belts' signs on display for the passengers, as a precautionary measure for turbulence. Many pop-culture depictions of the end of the world feature storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, etc; as the captain believes that the end of the world is upon them, he feels it safe to ensure his passengers are prepared for turbulence from any of the phenomena that occur during the end times. However, the precaution of having one's seat belt fastened is vastly insufficient when confronted with such catastrophic events.\nThis was the first reference to the Eclipse within a month of the totality. It was followed less than three weeks later by 1876: Eclipse Searches . The 2017 eclipse was mentioned as early as 2013 in the title text of 1302: Year in Review . And this year's New Year comic, 1779: 2017 , also mentions it. Both comics express concern, in the title text, that it would be canceled\/not happen.\n[Cueball is standing behind Megan, looking over her shoulder as she's seated in front of her laptop.] Cueball: What's that? Megan: Flight plans. Looks like there will be 50 to 100 flights whose route puts them in the path of the eclipse next month.\n[A map with a shaded path of the eclipse and red planes traveling is shown, with nine planes inside the path and one inside the eclipse shadow..]\nCueball: I'm sure the airlines will be prepared. Pilots know that stuff. Megan: But can you imagine being on the one flight where the pilot didn't?\n[A more detailed plane is shown flying into a curtain of darkness.] Captain: *KSSCHHH* [sound of intercom being activated] Captain: This is your captain speaking. If you look out the right side of the plane, you'll see, uhh... Captain: Folks, this appears to be the end times.\n"}
{"id":1869,"title":"Positive and Negative Reviews","image_title":"Positive and Negative Reviews","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1869","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/positive_and_negative_reviews.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1869:_Positive_and_Negative_Reviews","transcript":"[A picture with four small bottles and a larger one is shown. The text to the right reads:] SmartQuench 9000 Sports Drink 20 oz\u00a0\u00a012-pack\n[Below is a list with reviews; a picture for the user (avatar) and the name below, the rating (in stars) and the text to the right.] ---Customer reviews--- Amy 2015 (4 of 5 stars) Perfect after a run Anon513 (5 of 5 stars) My favorite flavor Merlin (1 of 5 stars) Drinking this made me thirstier Mike63 (4 of 5 stars) Good price B Button (1 of 5 stars) Drank 3 bottles on a hot day and got dehydrated!\n[Caption below the frame:] Physics tells us that negative reviews are really just positive reviews from people traveling backward in time.\n","explanation":"The comic shows customer reviews from people who purchased a made-up sports drink multi-pack containing twelve 20 oz bottles. The people who gave negative reviews are Merlin (the wizard from the legends of King Arthur) and B. Button (from the short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and its film adaptation ). Merlin remembers the future; in the T. H. White novel series The Once and Future King , he was born at the wrong end of time and has to live backwards. Benjamin Button was born with the physical appearance of an old man and grows younger as time progresses. In this comic, they apparently perceive time backwards: Merlin was thirsty then he drank the SmartQuench 9000, but he perceived it as drinking and then becoming thirsty. Benjamin Button was dehydrated then drank 3 bottles and got better, but perceived it the other way around.\nParticles of matter can have a positive or negative electric charge . Particles have associated antiparticles with opposite charge. For example electrons are negatively charged particles and their antiparticles are positrons , which are positively charged. Antiparticles can be interpreted as if they were the associated particle moving backward in time. Applying that interpretation to customer reviews gives the caption of the comic: positive reviews from people traveling backward in time are negative reviews (the \"antiparticles\" of positive reviews).\nThe caption seems to say that there are only positive experiences\u2014some going forward, some backward in life. However, Randall gives an example in the title text of a positive review which is actually about a negative experience by a person traveling backward in time (the person ate at a restaurant then got sick). The conclusion is that there are both positive and negative events, but the way they are perceived depends on both the event and whether one sees it going forward or backward in time.\n[A picture with four small bottles and a larger one is shown. The text to the right reads:] SmartQuench 9000 Sports Drink 20 oz\u00a0\u00a012-pack\n[Below is a list with reviews; a picture for the user (avatar) and the name below, the rating (in stars) and the text to the right.] ---Customer reviews--- Amy 2015 (4 of 5 stars) Perfect after a run Anon513 (5 of 5 stars) My favorite flavor Merlin (1 of 5 stars) Drinking this made me thirstier Mike63 (4 of 5 stars) Good price B Button (1 of 5 stars) Drank 3 bottles on a hot day and got dehydrated!\n[Caption below the frame:] Physics tells us that negative reviews are really just positive reviews from people traveling backward in time.\n"}
{"id":1870,"title":"Emoji Movie Reviews","image_title":"Emoji Movie Reviews","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1870","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/emoji_movie_reviews.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1870:_Emoji_Movie_Reviews","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are walking. Megan is checking her phone.] Megan: Reviews for The Emoji Movie are... not good. Cueball: People are just snobs about emoji. I like them! Language is cool and weird.\n[Zoom on Megan; Cueball is outside of the frame.] Megan: It's apparently 80% product placement. Cueball (off-screen): Whatever. So was The Lego Movie, and I liked that .\n[Zoom out; Cueball looks at Megan's phone.] Megan: It features the emoji we all know and love - with a \"Meh\" emoji in the starring role! Cueball: Wait... a \"Meh\" emoji? Megan: I wondered about that, too; the others are all familiar. Do they mean \ud83d\ude12? Or \ud83d\ude10 or \ud83d\ude15? Cueball: That's a little confusing...\n[Zoom in on both heads; Megan is looking at her phone.] Megan: There's a joke in the movie about the \"emoji that no one uses\" that includes the eggplant emoji. Cueball: ...was that on purpose? Or did they not run the script by enough people?\n[Megan and Cueball continue walking.] Megan: Here's a line from the Wikipedia plot summary: Megan: Gene and Hi-5 come to a piracy app where they meet the hacker emoji Jailbreak, who wants to reach Dropbox so that she can live in the cloud. Cueball: Okay. Cueball: It's possible this movie is bad.\n","explanation":"This comic discusses reviews of The Emoji Movie (previously covered in 1857: Emoji Movie ) between the cynical, Internet-equipped point of view of Megan and Cueball's language-enthusiasm. They ultimately agree the movie is bad.\nThe Emoji Movie was released to theaters in late July 2017 and received nearly universally-negative reviews. It is particularly notable for having a rating below 10% on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes . Many critics of movie point to superficial problems like the subject matter and the product placement. Here, that train of thought is articulated a bit more, and ultimately it's argued that the real reason the film is bad is because the creators cashed in on a trend without doing any research into it.\nWhen Megan first mentions the movie's negative reviews, Cueball initially accuses the audience of being overly judgmental of the subject matter. He further expresses his fondness for emoji as an interesting and quirky part of language.\nCueball offers an early defense of The Emoji Movie by comparing it to The Lego Movie , which \u2013 despite effectively being an entire movie of product placement for Lego \u2013 received generally positive reviews.\nThey start talking about a \"Meh\" emoji, who is the main character of the movie. The idea of \" meh \" as an emoji is actually ambiguous, as various emoji can be used to describe being unimpressed or neutral towards something. As given in examples from comic those are \ud83d\ude12 ( U+1F612 Unamused face), \ud83d\ude10 (U+1F610 Neutral face) or \ud83d\ude15 (U+1F615 Confused face). The selection of a less identifiable emoji for the leading role also contrasts with the fact that the movie also features more iconic emojis.\nMegan mentions that one of the attempted jokes in the film is a room full of emojis that are unpopular. Bizarrely, the eggplant emoji (\ud83c\udf46, U+1F346 Aubergine) is featured among them. This is a clear sign that the creative team in charge of this movie had limited first-hand experience with SMS messaging; as any frequent user of emoji will tell you, the \ud83c\udf46 is frequently used as a sly stand-in for a penis, due to its similar shape. Cueball's reaction is to ask whether the creators of this film intentionally got this wrong (perhaps as a joke, or active denial of the emoji's common usage because it wouldn't be appropriate for a kid's movie).\nThe line from the Wikipedia plot summary was a direct quote from Wikipedia . The sentence was introduced to the article by editor Voicebox64 on July 28, 2017 , and the exact phrasing quoted in the comic came from editor SubZeroSilver on July 30 . Cueball's response to hearing this line, stating that \"it's possible this movie is bad\", is likely due to the fact that piracy is the act of obtaining media illegally, generally without paying for it over the internet. This means that there is a very low chance of there being a 'piracy app', as an app such as this would not be allowed on any online app store.  (A few piracy-focused apps do exist, like Popcorn Time , but they are not available in app stores for obvious reasons.) Jailbreak's design in the movie also does not bear a resemblance to hacker-like emojis at the time the movie was released (\ud83d\udc69\u200d\ud83d\udcbb, \ud83d\udc68\u200d\ud83d\udcbb) or any existing emoji. (This lack of any existent hacker emoji, however, is addressed in the movie; when pressed on the topic, Jailbreak is revealed to be the princess emoji in disguise.) Furthermore, the blatant product placement of the protagonists' desires to use Dropbox, the proprietary software of a for-profit company, is the final nail in the movie's coffin in Cueball's opinion. The fact that Jailbreak's plans to live 'in the cloud' superficially match with Dropbox's cloud storage service does not salvage the concept.\nThe title text is an argument against the common prediction that emojis would lead to less nuanced communication, and as evidence it cites the thinking face emoji (\ud83e\udd14) and upside-down smiley (\ud83d\ude43), both of which are used in ways that have developed difficult-to-define nuances and meanings. In the first case, the thinking-face emoji is often used sarcastically -- for example, feigning confusion when presented with contradictory\/hypocritical statements from the same source. The upside-down smiley also has specific usage, indicating a tone of silliness or even insanity, and is also often used sarcastically, such as when reacting to bad news.\n[Cueball and Megan are walking. Megan is checking her phone.] Megan: Reviews for The Emoji Movie are... not good. Cueball: People are just snobs about emoji. I like them! Language is cool and weird.\n[Zoom on Megan; Cueball is outside of the frame.] Megan: It's apparently 80% product placement. Cueball (off-screen): Whatever. So was The Lego Movie, and I liked that .\n[Zoom out; Cueball looks at Megan's phone.] Megan: It features the emoji we all know and love - with a \"Meh\" emoji in the starring role! Cueball: Wait... a \"Meh\" emoji? Megan: I wondered about that, too; the others are all familiar. Do they mean \ud83d\ude12? Or \ud83d\ude10 or \ud83d\ude15? Cueball: That's a little confusing...\n[Zoom in on both heads; Megan is looking at her phone.] Megan: There's a joke in the movie about the \"emoji that no one uses\" that includes the eggplant emoji. Cueball: ...was that on purpose? Or did they not run the script by enough people?\n[Megan and Cueball continue walking.] Megan: Here's a line from the Wikipedia plot summary: Megan: Gene and Hi-5 come to a piracy app where they meet the hacker emoji Jailbreak, who wants to reach Dropbox so that she can live in the cloud. Cueball: Okay. Cueball: It's possible this movie is bad.\n"}
{"id":1871,"title":"Bun Alert","image_title":"Bun Alert","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1871","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bun_alert.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1871:_Bun_Alert","transcript":"[Beret Guy and Ponytail see a rabbit sitting in the grass; Beret Guy points to the bun.] Beret Guy: Bun alert! Ponytail: Oh, yeah! Cute! Beret Guy: Gotta document this. I'll notify everyone, send out a push alert. Ponytail: ...to who?\n[Zoom in on Beret Guy and Ponytail; Beret Guy taps on his phone.] Beret Guy: Everyone subscribed to the alert system. Ponytail: Alert system? Beret Guy: Yeah! We built it over the last few years. It's pretty small. Still looking for investors. Ponytail: But... why are you alerting people about rabbits?\n[Zoom out; Beret Guy puts away his phone, points at the bun.] Beret Guy: I mean...look at them. They're like loaves of bread that hop. Ponytail: I see. Beret Guy: People need to know.\n[Zoom on Beret Guy in a frameless panel.] Beret Guy: They need to know: Beret Guy: There are buns.\n[Ponytail walks off, Megan comes running towards Beret Guy with a phone in her hand.] Ponytail: Okay, uhh, I'm gonna go. Megan: I got the alert! Where's the bun? Is it small? Beret Guy: Extremely. Megan: Oh my God.\n","explanation":"The comic opens with Beret Guy identifying a \"bun\", an informal term for a rabbit also used in 1682: Bun . The title text of that former comic specifically refers to sending out a \"BUN ALERT\" to friends and family with location and photographic evidence of the bun, so in this comic, that concept appears to have been elevated from a simple mass SMS\/MMS message to a standalone application.\nUpon seeing the bun, Beret Guy uses his phone to send an alert about the \"Bun\" with a push notification . He is still looking for investors, though such an app would likely not appeal to a wide market. In response to Ponytail 's confusion, he explains that bunnies are \"like loaves of bread that hop\" making a pun by comparing rabbits to bread, as \"bun\" can commonly refer to a small loaf of bread. Beret Guy is known to be fascinated with bakeries, as shown in the comics 434: xkcd Goes to the Airport , 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel , or 452: Mission , so it makes sense that this sort of comparison occurs to him. It is known that the word \"bun\" is similar to the word \"pun\". Beret Guy has a history of misinterpreting statements and phrases (and often making said misinterpretations correct through some strange power of his), so it is not implausible that he actually genuinely thinks that these \"buns\" are bread products that somehow behave exactly like rabbits.\nAs Ponytail leaves, apparently to remove herself from the situation, Megan hurriedly approaches, excited to see the \"bun\". This serves as a punchline as, despite Ponytail appearing to be the voice of reason, it seems that Beret Guy's inane bun alert system has gathered a dedicated following after all.\nMegan's question \"Is it small?\" and her amazement when she finds out that it is parallels the idea in 1682: Bun where the bun's size is said to be inversely correlated with its status; smaller buns such as the one in this comic are thought of as higher-ranking \"king buns\" by the characters in both strips. In real life, smaller rabbits are more likely to simply be young. It is also possible that she simply thinks smaller buns are cuter, which might have been the motivation for the whole bun-ranking system thing in the first place.\nThe title text refers to buns being crepuscular and nocturnal animals, meaning they are primarily active at twilight and night, respectively. This means that someone with the app would get a lot of notifications while they would most likely be asleep. Many smartphones have a \"Do Not Disturb\" mode that can be activated so that only select communications (i.e. direct calls) will actually set off the ringer\/vibration, and all others will simply be added to the device's notification queue; such a function can be scheduled to automatically activate during the period when the user is asleep. The title text unironically points out a prime example of the need for such a function: if something is likely to notify your device late at night, then you should make sure that those notifications are silenced by the Do Not Disturb function.\nThe bun alert reappears in 1903: Bun Trend , where Beret Guy receives the alert.\n[Beret Guy and Ponytail see a rabbit sitting in the grass; Beret Guy points to the bun.] Beret Guy: Bun alert! Ponytail: Oh, yeah! Cute! Beret Guy: Gotta document this. I'll notify everyone, send out a push alert. Ponytail: ...to who?\n[Zoom in on Beret Guy and Ponytail; Beret Guy taps on his phone.] Beret Guy: Everyone subscribed to the alert system. Ponytail: Alert system? Beret Guy: Yeah! We built it over the last few years. It's pretty small. Still looking for investors. Ponytail: But... why are you alerting people about rabbits?\n[Zoom out; Beret Guy puts away his phone, points at the bun.] Beret Guy: I mean...look at them. They're like loaves of bread that hop. Ponytail: I see. Beret Guy: People need to know.\n[Zoom on Beret Guy in a frameless panel.] Beret Guy: They need to know: Beret Guy: There are buns.\n[Ponytail walks off, Megan comes running towards Beret Guy with a phone in her hand.] Ponytail: Okay, uhh, I'm gonna go. Megan: I got the alert! Where's the bun? Is it small? Beret Guy: Extremely. Megan: Oh my God.\n"}
{"id":1872,"title":"Backup Batteries","image_title":"Backup Batteries","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1872","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/backup_batteries.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1872:_Backup_Batteries","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to White Hat. He is wearing a large backpack and holding a phone battery.] Cueball: I get stressed out when my phone battery is low, so I carry this backup battery. Cueball: But then I worry about the backup running low, so I carry this second backup. Cueball: Then I worry\u2014\n[Caption below the frame:] My bag is 90% backup batteries.\n","explanation":"Most smartphones (except iPhones and a few others) use replaceable batteries. So it's often possible to buy additional batteries and use them as a backup in case there is no external power source available to recharge the phone. Otherwise it's possible to buy a charging device (also with batteries) that could be connected via cable to the phone to recharge the internal battery. Since there is no cable in the comic picture Cueball probably shows a battery that could replace an empty one in the phone.\nCueball gets stressed when his phone is at low battery because the device may run out at any moment, interrupting his activities. In an effort to prevent stress, Cueball decides to carry a backup battery so he can just replace the current battery when it runs low. Cueball realizes that the backup battery itself is prone to depletion, and so he carries a second. He then comes to the same realization for the second backup battery, and indeed every subsequent battery he can carry. Finally this would lead to an unending series of backup batteries, hence his speech is cut off, becoming unending as well.\nWhat Cueball never grasps is that his irrational need to hoard a supply of batteries tending to the infinite is the real cause of his stress. In reality, he only needs to consider the maximum amount of time that he spends between recharging his phone, and divide that by the average lifespan of a phone battery, and round up that figure to get the minimum number of batteries required to avoid a power outage (multiplied by 1.5 if the mere state of running low causes stress). If he charges up his phone and backup batteries every night, he would only need 2 to 3 backup batteries, tops.\nThe title text says that Cueball's backpack will turn red if it is less then 20% of it is filled with batteries, similar to the battery indicator on a smartphone when at low battery to warn the user. Cueball probably gets similarly stressed when that happens, perhaps requiring a backup backup-battery backpack. Most backpacks do not have this function. [ citation needed ] It is unclear by what mechanism the backpack turns red or detects that it should do so.\nThat Randall has issues with low battery power on cell phones can be seen in the earlier comics 1373: Screenshot and 1802: Phone and in the later comic 1965: Background Apps .\n[Cueball is talking to White Hat. He is wearing a large backpack and holding a phone battery.] Cueball: I get stressed out when my phone battery is low, so I carry this backup battery. Cueball: But then I worry about the backup running low, so I carry this second backup. Cueball: Then I worry\u2014\n[Caption below the frame:] My bag is 90% backup batteries.\n"}
{"id":1873,"title":"Email Reply","image_title":"Email Reply","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1873","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/email_reply.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1873:_Email_Reply","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk, typing on a laptop. The following message is displayed above him:]\nDear Kevin,\nI'm sorry it's taken me two years to reply to your email. I've built up so much stress and anxiety around my email inbox; it's an unhealthy dynamic which is more psychological than technical. I've tried one magical solution after another, and as each one has failed, deep down I've grown more certain that the problem isn't email \u2013 it's me.\nRegardless, these are my issues, not yours; you're my friend, and I owe you the basic courtesy of a response. I apologize for my neglect, and I hope you haven't been too hurt by my failure to reply.\nAnyway, I appreciate your invitation to join your professional network on LinkedIn, but I'm afraid I must decline...\n","explanation":"Cueball is sitting at his desk writing an email . He is responding to Kevin, who sent him an email two years ago. Cueball is so far behind in responding to his email, he goes to great lengths to apologize for it. Instead of blaming the email culture which creates enormous quantities of messages, he blames himself for not keeping up. Failing to answer emails is a common symptom of general anxiety disorder, a problem which can snowball out of control as more and more emails go unread or unanswered.\nAt this point in the email, the reader assumes that Kevin's message really demanded a faster response, being personal and timely. Then Cueball reveals that the email is just the ubiquitous LinkedIn invitation. LinkedIn is a professional networking site notorious for inundating its users with emails inviting them to connect to other users (frequently people the user has little-to-no connection to), as well as any email contacts of their users whether or not they actually belong to LinkedIn themselves. Thus, an invitation to connect to LinkedIn is most often immediately deleted or ignored. A less socially anxious person who understands the irrelevance of such an email would not worry about failing to respond to such a request at all, and certainly would not pour his heart out in apology for failing to reply.\nThe title text makes Cueball's overinvestment in the email even more exaggerated, suggesting that Cueball is rejecting the invitation not because of its pointlessness, but because he feels that as a bad friend who doesn't respond to emails, he is no longer even worthy of it.\nOne could interpret the letter as a passive-aggressive lashing out, but that does not seem to be in character for Cueball . Had the character worn a Black Hat though...\nCueball's difficulty in checking his email was previously addressed in 1783: Emails (trivia: the comic numbers 1783 and 1873 are anagrammatic).\nThis is the fourth comic within a year where Randall uses \"Kevin\" as a go-to-name, although it was half a year since last time in 1795: All You Can Eat . See details in that comic's trivia .\n[Cueball sits at a desk, typing on a laptop. The following message is displayed above him:]\nDear Kevin,\nI'm sorry it's taken me two years to reply to your email. I've built up so much stress and anxiety around my email inbox; it's an unhealthy dynamic which is more psychological than technical. I've tried one magical solution after another, and as each one has failed, deep down I've grown more certain that the problem isn't email \u2013 it's me.\nRegardless, these are my issues, not yours; you're my friend, and I owe you the basic courtesy of a response. I apologize for my neglect, and I hope you haven't been too hurt by my failure to reply.\nAnyway, I appreciate your invitation to join your professional network on LinkedIn, but I'm afraid I must decline...\n"}
{"id":1874,"title":"Geologic Faults","image_title":"Geologic Faults","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1874","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geologic_faults.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1874:_Geologic_Faults","transcript":"[The comic shows nine different schematic views to present geographic faults and some more.]\n[Two planes with a slip fault drifting away to the left and right.] Normal fault [Two planes with a slip fault drifting against each other from left and right.] Reverse fault [Two planes moving sideways away from each other.] Transverse fault\n[The left plate is moving over the right plate, while the right plate is sliding under the left one] Thrust fault [Two planes drifting away and the connection between them gets smaller, like a piece of taffy candy.] Taffy fault [On top of both planes a small piece with splints holds them together.] Splinted fault\n[The two planes pressing together with a piece in the middle moving upwards.] Squeezed-bar-of-soap fault [The right plane is connected to the left and swinging up and down.] Apple power cable fault [One side with a thin connector and the other with an evenly spaced hole connecting the planes together. The pieces fit together like a puzzle.] Brio fault\nFaults have been mentioned several times in xkcd. Thrust faults were previously mentioned in 1082: Geology , and in the title text of 1388: Subduction License , Beret Guy tells Cueball he can't be a 'normal' roomate because in his motion he is creating a reverse fault.\nA similar joke to the Apple power cable fault is used in 1406: Universal Converter Box .\n","explanation":"This comic appears to be a successor to 1714: Volcano Types . Similar to its predecessor, the comic explores several phenomena (in this case, geologic faults), both real, and several made up for the point of a joke.\nA fault is a geologic feature involving a planar fracture with displacement in a large mass of rock, including the boundaries of two tectonic plates .\nNormal fault\nIn a normal fault , the hanging wall (the lower wall; right) moves downward relative to the footwall (the upper wall; left). The Earth's crust is extended in this type of fault.\nReverse fault\nA reverse fault is basically the opposite of a normal fault. The hanging wall (left) moves upward relative to the footwall (right), and the Earth's crust is compressed.\nTransverse fault\nA transverse fault, also known as a transform fault , is where the two plates move parallel to each other, but in opposite directions.\nThrust fault\nA thrust fault is when older rocks are pushed (or thrust) on top of younger rocks. The angles are typically lower (more horizontal) than in reverse faults.\nTaffy fault\nThis appears to involve one tectonic plate, that is being stretched out like a piece of taffy . Ductile crustal thinning of this type actually occurs in rocks under tension at sufficient depths .  Such deformation is not a fault, however, as there is no fracture along which movement takes place.\nSplinted fault\nThis appears to be a normal or reverse fault that someone has attempted to fix in position by attaching a large splint, as you might with a broken bone. This is unlikely to prove effective. [ citation needed ]\nSqueezed-bar-of-soap fault\nTwo plates seem to be moving towards each other, while a third smaller plate is squeezed between them and pushed upwards, much as a slippery bar of soap might pop up when squeezed between two hands.\nApple power cable fault\nThe plate appears to have been twisted and bent so many times that parts of it are fraying and the end is splitting apart, similar to a damaged Apple MagSafe connector.\nBrio fault\nBRIO is a company from Sweden that makes wooden toys, including train sets. The Brio fault seems to be two tectonic plates which join together like the Brio train track pieces do. (However, this join is obvously incorrect because of the height difference.)\n(Title text) Torn-bag-of-potato-chips-where-the-tear-is-rapidly-growing fault\nThe title text refers to when a bag of chips gets a tear in it. When this happens, any further stress on the bag, such as reaching in to get more chips, can easily increase the size of the tear, sometimes very quickly. It would be frightening to live near a fault that behaved like this [ citation needed ] because it could cause major seismic events very quickly. If you were close enough to the fault, you might be afraid that the crack would grow underneath you, causing you to fall into the bag of chips \u2014 or, rather, the Earth.\n[The comic shows nine different schematic views to present geographic faults and some more.]\n[Two planes with a slip fault drifting away to the left and right.] Normal fault [Two planes with a slip fault drifting against each other from left and right.] Reverse fault [Two planes moving sideways away from each other.] Transverse fault\n[The left plate is moving over the right plate, while the right plate is sliding under the left one] Thrust fault [Two planes drifting away and the connection between them gets smaller, like a piece of taffy candy.] Taffy fault [On top of both planes a small piece with splints holds them together.] Splinted fault\n[The two planes pressing together with a piece in the middle moving upwards.] Squeezed-bar-of-soap fault [The right plane is connected to the left and swinging up and down.] Apple power cable fault [One side with a thin connector and the other with an evenly spaced hole connecting the planes together. The pieces fit together like a puzzle.] Brio fault\nFaults have been mentioned several times in xkcd. Thrust faults were previously mentioned in 1082: Geology , and in the title text of 1388: Subduction License , Beret Guy tells Cueball he can't be a 'normal' roomate because in his motion he is creating a reverse fault.\nA similar joke to the Apple power cable fault is used in 1406: Universal Converter Box .\n"}
{"id":1875,"title":"Computers vs Humans","image_title":"Computers vs Humans","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1875","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/computers_vs_humans.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1875:_Computers_vs_Humans","transcript":"[A laptop sits on a desk with office chair while Cueball is sitting with his back towards the desk in a sofa while he is reading from something in his hands, a book or a smartphone.] Laptop: We computers finally beat you humans at Go. Cueball: Yup. Laptop: Sucks for you! Cueball: Mm hmm.\n[Same setting in a frameless panel.] Laptop: What's next? Which quintessentially human thing should we learn to do better than you? Cueball: Being too cool to care about stuff.\n[Same setting.] Laptop: Okay, I'll apply 10,000 years of CPU time to the initial\u2014 Cueball: Sounds like you've already lost. Laptop: Damn. This is hard. Cueball: Is it? Never noticed.\n","explanation":"Cueball 's laptop smugly crows to its owner about how computers have proven their intellectual superiority over humans yet again. In May 2017, a Google artificial intelligence beat the world's best Go player at the game. Go is a very complex and deep board game, so this could seem alarming to a person concerned about competing with computers.\nHowever, Cueball seems too focused on his book or phone to care. He remains nonchalant in the face of this news, and suggests that computers learn next to become \"too cool to care about stuff\" themselves. The computer gets to work preparing to outdo humans at not caring. However, by expending the physical effort to set up the algorithm, it proves that it cares about reaching this goal, a contradiction that Cueball points out. Cueball further rubs it in by coolly stating that he doesn't even have to try to act the way he acts \u2013 much like a wide range of everyday human behaviors, such as moving around, or recognizing objects in images, require very little conscious effort, while being quite hard for machines to emulate.\nRelative strengths of human versus computer go players was previously mentioned in 1263: Reassuring .  This comic also presents something that looks like a reassuring parable (something humans can do which computers are not yet able to do).  An irony here is that, unlike in the cartoon, it is very easy to make a computer not care about something.  It is making it care about anything that would be quite difficult.\nThe title text elaborates on the hypothetical paradox of computers trying not to care about stuff. Neural network programs are developed by training them with sample inputs and the desired output.  When the end goal is not to care, that is, that the output is unaffected by this input, then any examples where the output did depend on the input would be sarcasm: the use of irony to mock or to convey contempt.\nRandall already noticed that computers would soon beat humans in Go back in 2012 in the comic 1002: Game AIs and a year later the event is so close that it became the main topic of 1263: Reassuring . The present comic could almost be seen as a continuation of Reassuring.\n[A laptop sits on a desk with office chair while Cueball is sitting with his back towards the desk in a sofa while he is reading from something in his hands, a book or a smartphone.] Laptop: We computers finally beat you humans at Go. Cueball: Yup. Laptop: Sucks for you! Cueball: Mm hmm.\n[Same setting in a frameless panel.] Laptop: What's next? Which quintessentially human thing should we learn to do better than you? Cueball: Being too cool to care about stuff.\n[Same setting.] Laptop: Okay, I'll apply 10,000 years of CPU time to the initial\u2014 Cueball: Sounds like you've already lost. Laptop: Damn. This is hard. Cueball: Is it? Never noticed.\n"}
{"id":1876,"title":"Eclipse Searches","image_title":"Eclipse Searches","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1876","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eclipse_searches.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1876:_Eclipse_Searches","transcript":"[Cueball walks up to Megan while holding his smartphone up in his hand. Megan sits in an office chair in front of her desk with an open laptop on it. She turns her head towards him. A footnote to Cueball's speech is at the bottom right of the panel.] Cueball: Have you seen this cool map* showing how Google searches for \"eclipse\" trace the eclipse's path? Megan: Yeah! Megan: But you know what else I noticed? Cueball: What? Footnote: *wapo.st\/2vkgIBv\n[Two panels are on top of each other. In the smaller top panel a colored graph is shown with a blue growing graph and a steeper growing red graph above it. Both are labeled. The x-axis (a black line) has labels and arrows below it in red and blue to indicate time periods. Text above the graph:] Searches for \"eclipse\" in the weeks before the eclipse are outpacing searches for \"election\" in the weeks before the 2016 election. Red line: Eclipse Blue line: Election Red x-axis labels: 2017 \u2192|\u2190 July \u2192|\u2190 August \u2192 Blue x-axis labels: 2016 - September \u2192|\u2190 October \u2192|\u2190\n[Behind the top panel is a second larger panel slightly lower end more to the right. The visible part at the bottom of this panel is showing the same line graphs with the one from the election going past the election day. The x-axis labels ranges over a later time. The blue graph has a huge peak at the election day, visible in the part of the panel to the right of the top panel) and this date is written in a blue dot on the label. Similar the date of the Eclipse is written in a red dot. The red graph above the blue still ends in dots before the expected peak, as it is in the future.] Red line: Eclipse Blue line: Election Red x-axis labels: 2017 - July \u2192|\u2190 August 21 \u2192 Blue x-axis labels: 2016 - October \u2192|\u2190 November 8 \u2192\n[Megan with her hands on the laptop and Cueball are both looking at the laptop. Beat panel.]\n[Cueball stands again and Megan has taken her hands down from the laptop.] Cueball: This is gonna be bad, isn't it? Megan: If you're planning to be on the road next Monday, bring water.\n","explanation":"This comic is the first of five consecutive comics published in the week before and during the solar eclipse occurring on Monday, August 21, 2017 which was visible as a total solar eclipse within a band across the contiguous United States from west to east and visible as a partial eclipse across the entire contiguous United States and beyond. The other comics are 1877: Eclipse Science , 1878: Earth Orbital Diagram , 1879: Eclipse Birds , and 1880: Eclipse Review .\nCueball comes to tell Megan about a cool map showing that searches on Google on the word Eclipse trace the same path across the USA as the totality band does, implying that those living in the zone are more interested than the rest of the US population.\nThe \" cool map \" is hosted by The Washington Post and sourced from Google Trends data. The link shown in the comic is here: wapo.st\/2vkgIBv (subscription required);  an archived version is available here at archive.org\nSince the eclipse searches are outpacing the 2016 election searches now, this is saying the eclipse popularity is going to rocket upwards just before the eclipse. Cueball is thus warned by Megan that the extreme amount of social media interest in the eclipse may lead to massive traffic jams, as last days frenzy regarding the eclipse will cause an enormous amount of people to decide to go to the eclipse in the last moment, causing huge traffic jams. (These traffic jams may be analogous to long lines at the polls or traffic jams caused by people trying to get to the polls.) Also as soon as people driving on the freeway enters the totality zone it has been seen happening that people just stop their cars and get out blocking the roads.  This time also the eclipse-viewers will wish to post their content on the social media which might also cause a cyber traffic jam, in which users may find that they experience delays in sending or receiving data due to a high demand on telecommunications infrastructure. Megan tells Cueball to bring water if he is on the road during the totality, the implication being that people who are on the road may be stuck in their vehicles for long periods of time, and thus need refreshments.\nIn the graph charting interest in the 2016 US presidential election , November 8 is an important date as it was the day the election was held. August 21, 2017 refers to the date of the then upcoming solar eclipse.\nThe title text refers to the total eclipses from 1970 and 1979 which were also visible in the US, but both only for a few states. The traffic jams will be worse than those caused by previous eclipses, as we did not have viral social media in the 1970s, and also much less traffic on the roads.\n[Cueball walks up to Megan while holding his smartphone up in his hand. Megan sits in an office chair in front of her desk with an open laptop on it. She turns her head towards him. A footnote to Cueball's speech is at the bottom right of the panel.] Cueball: Have you seen this cool map* showing how Google searches for \"eclipse\" trace the eclipse's path? Megan: Yeah! Megan: But you know what else I noticed? Cueball: What? Footnote: *wapo.st\/2vkgIBv\n[Two panels are on top of each other. In the smaller top panel a colored graph is shown with a blue growing graph and a steeper growing red graph above it. Both are labeled. The x-axis (a black line) has labels and arrows below it in red and blue to indicate time periods. Text above the graph:] Searches for \"eclipse\" in the weeks before the eclipse are outpacing searches for \"election\" in the weeks before the 2016 election. Red line: Eclipse Blue line: Election Red x-axis labels: 2017 \u2192|\u2190 July \u2192|\u2190 August \u2192 Blue x-axis labels: 2016 - September \u2192|\u2190 October \u2192|\u2190\n[Behind the top panel is a second larger panel slightly lower end more to the right. The visible part at the bottom of this panel is showing the same line graphs with the one from the election going past the election day. The x-axis labels ranges over a later time. The blue graph has a huge peak at the election day, visible in the part of the panel to the right of the top panel) and this date is written in a blue dot on the label. Similar the date of the Eclipse is written in a red dot. The red graph above the blue still ends in dots before the expected peak, as it is in the future.] Red line: Eclipse Blue line: Election Red x-axis labels: 2017 - July \u2192|\u2190 August 21 \u2192 Blue x-axis labels: 2016 - October \u2192|\u2190 November 8 \u2192\n[Megan with her hands on the laptop and Cueball are both looking at the laptop. Beat panel.]\n[Cueball stands again and Megan has taken her hands down from the laptop.] Cueball: This is gonna be bad, isn't it? Megan: If you're planning to be on the road next Monday, bring water.\n"}
{"id":1877,"title":"Eclipse Science","image_title":"Eclipse Science","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1877","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eclipse_science.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1877:_Eclipse_Science","transcript":"[Hairy is speaking into a microphone while interviewing Megan.] Hairy: Tell us, are you scientists excited for the eclipse? Megan: Sure, lots of people are!\n[Zoom in on Megans head.] Hairy (off-panel): Is this a big moment for science? Megan: It's a big moment for the sky.\n[Same setting as first panel in a wider panel.] Hairy: Are people really excited enough about science to travel to see it? Megan: Honestly, it's not that scientific. I mean, it's cool if you're into astronomy, but it's also cool if you're, like, aware of the sun.\n[Same setting.] Hairy: But there's lots of science involved. Megan: I guess? There's lots of science involved in the Olympics, but you don't need to be a scientist to watch.\n[Megan holds a hand out towards Hairy.] Megan: It's not like the concept is all that arcane or mathematical. It's a thing going in front of another thing.\n[Zoom in on Megan holding both arms out.] Hairy (off-panel): Then why are you so excited? Megan: I'm excited because it's a nearly once-in-a-lifetime chance to watch the sun go dark, hear birds freak out, and see a glowing ring appear in the sky with a sunset on every horizon.\n[Back to same setting as in the first panel.] Hairy\u00a0: Will you be making any scientific observations? Megan: I will be like, \"Holy shit, look at the sky.\" Megan: Maybe also \"This is so cool.\" Megan: We'll see!\n","explanation":"This comic is the second of five consecutive comics published in the week before and during the solar eclipse occurring on Monday, August 21, 2017 which was visible as a total solar eclipse within a band across the contiguous United States from west to east and visible as a partial eclipse across the entire contiguous United States and beyond. The other comics are 1876: Eclipse Searches , 1878: Earth Orbital Diagram , 1879: Eclipse Birds , and 1880: Eclipse Review .\nThis comic reflects on various reasons scientists have for being interested in a total solar eclipse. An eclipse is an astronomical event, which most laypeople associate with science and thus might assume would be of interest to scientists. However, when the reporter probes Megan on scientific interest on the eclipse, Megan gives short and sarcastic answers, downplaying any experimental significance of the phenomenon and indicating that her only interest is in spectacle rather than science. She also makes the point that science is no more involved in an eclipse than any other spectator event, and does not work to observe phenomena without any interest in discovery. Eclipses are well-understood events and there is no lack of models for explaining the physics behind them; the alignment of bodies in space is a result of orbital mechanics which are present at all times, making the whole event only significant to the observer.\nWhile some astronomers might be testing elaborate hypotheses during an eclipse, for other scientists (e.g. organic chemists and paleontologists) it is just a once in a long time (maybe even once in a lifetime) event which is visually interesting. Some biologists may, however, be collecting data on the behavior of animals during an eclipse, which is poorly understood due to its rarity.\nMegan's point is that in 2017 (and for several decades\/centuries previous) eclipses are thoroughly understood. Wikipedia has a listing of every eclipse that will occur in the 21st Century , to include the coordinates and time of greatest eclipse. While eclipses offer a unique opportunity for ground based observation of the Sun's outer layers the majority of the study of the sun is done by satellites that do not require an eclipse to take readings.\nThe title text refers to a 1919 experiment during an eclipse to observe gravitational deflection of light waves. The 1919 experiment was the first strong experimental confirmation of Einstein's then-new theory. One century later, general relativity has been tested and confirmed in so many different ways that pretty solid is a vast understatement.\n[Hairy is speaking into a microphone while interviewing Megan.] Hairy: Tell us, are you scientists excited for the eclipse? Megan: Sure, lots of people are!\n[Zoom in on Megans head.] Hairy (off-panel): Is this a big moment for science? Megan: It's a big moment for the sky.\n[Same setting as first panel in a wider panel.] Hairy: Are people really excited enough about science to travel to see it? Megan: Honestly, it's not that scientific. I mean, it's cool if you're into astronomy, but it's also cool if you're, like, aware of the sun.\n[Same setting.] Hairy: But there's lots of science involved. Megan: I guess? There's lots of science involved in the Olympics, but you don't need to be a scientist to watch.\n[Megan holds a hand out towards Hairy.] Megan: It's not like the concept is all that arcane or mathematical. It's a thing going in front of another thing.\n[Zoom in on Megan holding both arms out.] Hairy (off-panel): Then why are you so excited? Megan: I'm excited because it's a nearly once-in-a-lifetime chance to watch the sun go dark, hear birds freak out, and see a glowing ring appear in the sky with a sunset on every horizon.\n[Back to same setting as in the first panel.] Hairy\u00a0: Will you be making any scientific observations? Megan: I will be like, \"Holy shit, look at the sky.\" Megan: Maybe also \"This is so cool.\" Megan: We'll see!\n"}
{"id":1878,"title":"Earth Orbital Diagram","image_title":"Earth Orbital Diagram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1878","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/earth_orbital_diagram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1878:_Earth_Orbital_Diagram","transcript":"[An orbital map of the Earth is shown. The Sun is in the center, the Earth is at the right bottom, and the Moon is left below the Earth.] Why isn't there an eclipse every month? This is a common question! The answer is made clear by a quick look at the Earth's orbital diagram:\n[Label Sun:] Solar plexus\n[Label on the Earth's plane:] Sagittal plane\n[Labels on Earth's orbit (beginning at the Earth counterclockwise):] Perihelix, Declension, Obsequity, Hypothecate, Enceliopsis, Equinox ( Solstice in British English)\n[Two angles in the plane are labeled as:] Determinant of the date of Easter, Arctangent\n[The plane of the Moon is pictured in a small angle to the Earth's plane and named Astral Plane. The angle is presented between two lines (Greek Nu or Gamma and a double Greek Chi) and identified by a character that looks similar to a Greek Phi but with two vertical lines.] [The labels at the Moon's path are:] Tropopause, Prolapse, Errata.\n[An arrow points to the Earth at the zero meridian on the equator. The label reads:] Dimples of Venus\n","explanation":"This comic is the third of five consecutive comics published in the week before and during the solar eclipse occurring on Monday, August 21, 2017 which was visible as a total solar eclipse within a band across the contiguous United States from west to east and visible as a partial eclipse across the entire contiguous United States and beyond. The other comics are 1876: Eclipse Searches , 1877: Eclipse Science , 1879: Eclipse Birds , and 1880: Eclipse Review .\nThe comic claims that the reason that eclipses don't happen every month is simple to understand by looking at an orbital diagram. Ironically, the cartoon has so many parts and labels that it is far more difficult to understand than is implied. While the graph itself is based on astronomical definitions , all the labels are nonsense in this context. In effect, the comic is a new take on a common joke in which a person asks a scientist a question, the scientist begins by saying \"It's really quite simple\", then proceeds to give a very lengthy and highly technical explanation that non-scientists would not be expected to understand. Diagrams for eclipses commonly include things that laypeople may not find relevant, without explanation, such as the umbra and penumbra.\nAll of the labels in the diagram are complicated words or phrases. Some are related to orbital mechanics (e.g. \"equinox\" and \"perihelion\"), while others are wholly unrelated or even made up.  Each label is nonsensical in its place in the diagram.  Compare\/contrast with the standard Kepler Orbit diagram.\nThe title text references warnings to not look directly into the sun, but parodies those warnings by referring to 'orbit', the anatomical term for the eye socket.\nAll items are not drawn to scale. Neither the sizes of the celestial objects are that similar as shown nor the orbits are. The real scales are shown in this table:\nWhen the distance Sun-Earth is scaled to one meter or below neither Moon nor Earth can be seen by the human eye.\nArctangent\nAstral plane\nDeclension\nDeterminant of the date of Easter\nDimples of Venus\nEnceliopsis\nEquinox \/ Solstice\nEquinox and Solstice have very different meanings:\nBoth types occur because the Earth's rotation axis is tilted (at 23.4 degrees) from its orbital plane (ecliptic) about the Sun.\nJokingly insisting that two different terms are American\/British variants of the same word has been the topic of 1677: Contrails .\nHypothecate\nObsequity\nPerihelix\nProlapse\nSagittal plane\nSolar plexus\nTropopause\nAngle between the Astral and the Sagittal Planes\nErrata\nIf the plane of where the Earth orbits the Sun and where the Moon orbits the Earth were completely aligned, then there would be a solar eclipse at every new moon (once every 29.5 days ) and a lunar eclipse at every full moon (half a lunar period about 14.7 days after a New Moon).  However, the plane in which the Moon orbits the Earth is tilted with an inclination of 5 degrees relative to that of the ecliptic plane (the plane defined by the Earth's orbit around the Sun).  Eclipses are only possible during two eclipse seasons each year (half a year apart) where for a period of 31 to 37 days the Sun is nearly aligned with the two points in the tilted Earth-Moon plane where the Moon crosses the ecliptic plane.  During an eclipse season at the time of a new moon there will be solar eclipses visible from certain locations and during full moons there will be lunar eclipses.\n\nThe real explanation of eclipses is evident from this xkcd comic, but is labeled with a fictional character similar to a Greek phi but with two vertical lines; the remaining labels also do not contribute to this explanation and exist only to distract or misinform or entertain the reader. Thus, there is some truth behind the statement, \"The answer is made clear by a quick look,\" assuming a quick look means only a glance at the diagram\/drawing without taking the time to read the labels.\n[An orbital map of the Earth is shown. The Sun is in the center, the Earth is at the right bottom, and the Moon is left below the Earth.] Why isn't there an eclipse every month? This is a common question! The answer is made clear by a quick look at the Earth's orbital diagram:\n[Label Sun:] Solar plexus\n[Label on the Earth's plane:] Sagittal plane\n[Labels on Earth's orbit (beginning at the Earth counterclockwise):] Perihelix, Declension, Obsequity, Hypothecate, Enceliopsis, Equinox ( Solstice in British English)\n[Two angles in the plane are labeled as:] Determinant of the date of Easter, Arctangent\n[The plane of the Moon is pictured in a small angle to the Earth's plane and named Astral Plane. The angle is presented between two lines (Greek Nu or Gamma and a double Greek Chi) and identified by a character that looks similar to a Greek Phi but with two vertical lines.] [The labels at the Moon's path are:] Tropopause, Prolapse, Errata.\n[An arrow points to the Earth at the zero meridian on the equator. The label reads:] Dimples of Venus\n"}
{"id":1879,"title":"Eclipse Birds","image_title":"Eclipse Birds","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1879","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eclipse_birds.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1879:_Eclipse_Birds","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan standing together looking to the right.] Cueball: I heard that during an eclipse the birds all freak out. Megan: I guess we'll see!\n[Beat panel, the white background sky turns at the top slightly darker.]\n[As the sky turns to dusk sounds can be heard. It's written above Cueball and Megan inside squiggly bubbles.] Chirp Chirp! Chirp! Peep peep peep! Squawk!\n[The sky is now nearly dark, more at the top of the panel. The sounds continue, written in similar bubbles.] Chirp! Clank clank clank The time is upon us! Peep! Kachunk Prepare the blood cauldron! Cueball: Wow. Megan: Isn't nature amazing?\n","explanation":"This comic is the fourth of five consecutive comics published in the week before and during the solar eclipse occurring on Monday, August 21, 2017 which was visible as a total solar eclipse within a band across the contiguous United States from west to east and visible as a partial eclipse across the entire contiguous United States and beyond. The other comics are 1876: Eclipse Searches , 1877: Eclipse Science , 1878: Earth Orbital Diagram , and 1880: Eclipse Review .\nDuring an eclipse, birds and other animals show atypical behavior like they do in the case of the darkness in the night and the following sunrise. Birds stop singing during totality, then greet the return of the sun with a \"dawn chorus\". Owls, however, become active as do mosquitoes. But it's not easy to find studies about this behavior because the main focus lies mostly on the eclipse itself. And total solar eclipses are rare -- roughly every 18 months and then mostly not in the same region of this world. A nice article can be found here: Effects of the 2001 total solar eclipse on African wildlife . Hippos were so confused that their daily routine even on the next day was not back to normal. Baboons stopped feeding and a sun squirrel that fed in the afternoons didn't do so, while other larger animals like crocodiles, zebras, or lions were not affected. Butterflies settled and did not restart flying, mosquitoes appeared and settled before reappearing in the evening. Also, bees moved into a hive and didn't come out until the next morning.\nAfter the 2017 eclipse, NASA published some highlights . A video presents chirping crickets in Jefferson City, Missouri. The California Academy of Sciences supports a citizen science project about life responds .\nIn this comic, Cueball tells Megan that this will happen. However, instead of just cheeping and screeching in a different pattern than birds actually do during an eclipse, in the comic, the birds begin to prepare to make a sacrifice to appease their gods, similar to how ancient cultures like the Aztecs are said to have acted . Megan remains strangely nonchalant, offering only a clich\u00e9d admiration of nature as the birds around her use fluent English to set up a sacrificial ritual.\nIn the title text, it turns out that the birds are about to sacrifice Megan, and Cueball tells them to stop. But Megan tells him it is OK as she wants to try experiencing being carried to a blood cauldron as she won't get another chance until the next eclipse in the US on 8th of April, 2024 . (A small region around Carbondale, Illinois will experience two total eclipses in 7 years).\n[Cueball and Megan standing together looking to the right.] Cueball: I heard that during an eclipse the birds all freak out. Megan: I guess we'll see!\n[Beat panel, the white background sky turns at the top slightly darker.]\n[As the sky turns to dusk sounds can be heard. It's written above Cueball and Megan inside squiggly bubbles.] Chirp Chirp! Chirp! Peep peep peep! Squawk!\n[The sky is now nearly dark, more at the top of the panel. The sounds continue, written in similar bubbles.] Chirp! Clank clank clank The time is upon us! Peep! Kachunk Prepare the blood cauldron! Cueball: Wow. Megan: Isn't nature amazing?\n"}
{"id":1880,"title":"Eclipse Review","image_title":"Eclipse Review","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1880","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eclipse_review.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1880:_Eclipse_Review","transcript":"[A scatter plot with five labeled dots is drawn. The x-axis reads \"How cool it sounds like it would be\" and the y-axis is labeled with \"How cool it is to see in person\".] [Bottom left] Planetary conjunction [Bottom middle] Supermoon [Low left-center] Lunar eclipse [Low-center middle] Partial solar eclipse [Upper right, with a dotted arrow above it pointing up] Total solar eclipse\n","explanation":"This comic is the last of five consecutive comics published in the week before and during the solar eclipse occurring on Monday, August 21, 2017 which was visible as a total solar eclipse within a band across the contiguous United States from west to east and visible as a partial eclipse across the entire contiguous United States and beyond. The other comics are 1876: Eclipse Searches , 1877: Eclipse Science , 1878: Earth Orbital Diagram , and 1879: Eclipse Birds .\nThe comic is another comparison graph, like 1775: Things You Learn or 1701: Speed and Danger . It contrasts how cool something sounds and how cool it actually is . It has five points on it, planetary conjunction, supermoon, lunar eclipse, partial solar eclipse, and total solar eclipse.\nWhile the four other things than total solar eclipse are relatively close to each other on the \"how cool to see\" scale, the graph is not even high enough to plot the total solar eclipse point as indicated by the dotted arrow showing that this point should be way higher up. This is as opposed to leaving the point out, as Randall did with the coconut in 388: Fuck Grapefruit , where it is only mentioned in the title text. This could be an indication that if the scale had been high enough to fit the total solar eclipse point, then the rest of the points would be on the x-axis without any indication of which would be cooler.\nA total solar eclipse correctly sounds like it is the coolest of the five, but it is vastly cooler to see it in person by a wide margin. It seems like Randall is trying to convince those who missed the eclipse this time to go watch in seven years when another total solar eclipse is visible in the USA.\nPlanetary Conjunction\nIn a planetary conjunction two or more planets are visible close together in the night sky. This happens relatively often because all planets lie in roughly the same plane around the sun (the Sagittal ecliptic ). This looks like two big stars close to each other, and isn't particularly exciting.\nSupermoon\nA supermoon is a full moon or a new moon that approximately coincides with the Moon's closest approach in its elliptic orbit around the Earth. This results in a larger-than-usual apparent size of the lunar disk, but a typical human doesn't recognize the difference. Nevertheless, in recent years the press has often announced supermoons as important astronomical events. The opposite of a supermoon is called a micromoon. A \"supermoon\" sounds very cool, but like a planetary conjunction it's almost indistinguishable in the average night sky (see 1394: Superm*n , and this list ) of other comics that have referred to the term).\nLunar Eclipse\nA lunar eclipse occurs during the full moon and, like at a solar eclipse, happens only when the Moon is in the region where the orbital planes of the Moon and the Earth intersect. The Earth's shadow falls on the Moon, causing it to appear dark red. The moon doesn't generally darken completely due to some light still reaching the Moon through the outer layers of the Earth's atmosphere. As with solar eclipses, lunar eclipses occur on average once every six months, but they can be viewed by anyone who is on the night-time side of Earth during the eclipse, as opposed to only being visible from a small strip of the Earth's surface. A lunar eclipse looks noticeably different from a usual full moon, making it fairly cool.\nPartial Solar Eclipse\nThere are three types of non-total solar eclipses . A partial eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are not exactly in line with an observer on Earth, and thus the Moon doesn't fully obscure the Sun. An annular eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon do line up with an observer on Earth, but the Moon is too far away from earth to block the entire Sun. The Sun appears as a very bright ring, which is also called an annulus. A hybrid eclipse is an eclipse which is total when viewed from some parts of the earth, but is annular when viewed from others. These mixed eclipses are comparatively rare, even when compared with total eclipses. A large percentage of the continental United States experienced a partial eclipse along with the total solar eclipse on August 21st. A partial solar eclipse is quite cool, but nowhere near as dramatic as a sky-darkening total solar eclipse.\nTotal Solar Eclipse\nThe total solar eclipse is the topic of this and the four preceding comics. It occurs during the new moon, and happens only when the Sun and Moon are exactly in line with an observer on Earth and when the Moon appears large enough to fully obscure the Sun. Unlike a lunar eclipse, only a small portion of the Earth lies within the Moon's shadow at any given time, roughly a disc with a diameter of approx. 100 km. The disc moves very fast over the Earth's surface, meaning that at any given location eclipses can't last longer than a few minutes. At locations outside of this shadow-disc , in a region over a few thousand kilometers, the eclipse is partial.\nIn the title text Randall reveals that he had traveled to a location in Missouri (possibly the Shaw Nature Reserve ) because at his home in Massachusetts the eclipse was only partial. And, without a doubt, the total solar eclipse was the coolest thing he ever has seen in his life.\n[A scatter plot with five labeled dots is drawn. The x-axis reads \"How cool it sounds like it would be\" and the y-axis is labeled with \"How cool it is to see in person\".] [Bottom left] Planetary conjunction [Bottom middle] Supermoon [Low left-center] Lunar eclipse [Low-center middle] Partial solar eclipse [Upper right, with a dotted arrow above it pointing up] Total solar eclipse\n"}
{"id":1881,"title":"Drone Training","image_title":"Drone Training","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1881","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/drone_training.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1881:_Drone_Training","transcript":"[Black Hat stands in front of a store counter facing White Hat who stands behind.] Black Hat: My drone keeps flying into the wrong rooms. Do you have anything to discourage it? White Hat: Sir, this is a pet store.\nBlack Hat: Yeah, I was thinking one of those spray bottles for cats. White Hat: I don't think you can train a drone.\n[White Hat hands a spray bottle over the counter.] Black Hat: Eh, they say that about cats, too. Plus, these days they probably all come with deep learning or whatever. Drones, I mean. Maybe cats too. White Hat: Fine, here's a bottle.\nBlack Hat: Do you sell a shock collar that can fit around a Roomba? White Hat: I'm going to have to ask you to leave.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Black Hat enters a pet store run by White Hat . He wants to buy something to help him train his drone, which keeps flying into the wrong rooms. This is absurd as drones are semi-autonomous flying machines, not living creatures like dogs or cats, which can be trained to do tricks, or stay in the correct areas (inside his property). Alternatively, Black Hat could be developing a way to make drones sentient\/autonomous in other to annoy other drone-owners when their drones don't obey them or to allow Black Hat's drones to annoy other people without Black Hat having to control them. He also wants a shock collar for his Roomba , which would train it to stay inside or at least on his lawn.\nCat repellents are devices or substances for training cats or repelling them from furniture or other areas. An example of a cat repellent spray which can be created at home as shown here: Friendly (but Effective) Cat Repellent .\nRoomba is an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner and controlling it by electric shocks from a shock collar , normally used for dogs, is more than questionable. Those collars are legal in the US but banned in nine other countries. A Roomba was previously mistaken for a dog in 1558: Vet .\nThis might be playing with the concept of machine learning.  Knowing Black Hat, he might be poking fun at people's assumptions that modern robots are more advanced than they actually are. It is also possible, however, that he just wants to terrify people with the idea of robot abuse\/conditioning, and even more likely that he genuinely believes he can force robots to obey him via inflicting suffering.\nThe title text may mean one of three things: The endeavor will become a total flop when the Roomba gets rid of the collar and terrorizes the neighborhood; as a result dogcatchers from the animal control service will arrest this \"wild animal.\" Or animal control services will confiscate the Roomba to save it from its abusive owner. Or, possibly, the text refers to White Hat, who also owns a Roomba, and it will be taken into custody because it has not been trained with a shock collar.\n[Black Hat stands in front of a store counter facing White Hat who stands behind.] Black Hat: My drone keeps flying into the wrong rooms. Do you have anything to discourage it? White Hat: Sir, this is a pet store.\nBlack Hat: Yeah, I was thinking one of those spray bottles for cats. White Hat: I don't think you can train a drone.\n[White Hat hands a spray bottle over the counter.] Black Hat: Eh, they say that about cats, too. Plus, these days they probably all come with deep learning or whatever. Drones, I mean. Maybe cats too. White Hat: Fine, here's a bottle.\nBlack Hat: Do you sell a shock collar that can fit around a Roomba? White Hat: I'm going to have to ask you to leave.\n"}
{"id":1882,"title":"Color Models","image_title":"Color Models","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1882","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/color_models.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1882:_Color_Models","transcript":"[A simple flowchart is shown. The text above the panel reads:] Evolution of my understanding of color over time:\n[On the left side is a vertical dashed line in gray, on top it's labeled:] Grade school [And at the bottom the label reads:] Now\n[Header above the chart:] \"Color\" is...\n[The chart starts with three items, one left and an other on the right, a third is below in the middle.] ...three primary colors mixed together ...a rainbow, and each color is a wavelength ...unknowable (\"maybe what I see as blue, you see as...\")\n[Arrows from the left and the middle item point to a new left one, while two other arrows from the middle and the right item lead to one at the right.] ...three-ish primary colors mixed together (RGB\/RYB\/CMYK) ...a mix of infinite wavelengths filtered through three eye pigments\n[The arrows of both items point to one in the middle:] (something about the opponent color model)\n[The remaining items are all in the middle and each is connected by one arrow downwards to the next.] ...an abstract multidimensional gamut (CIE 1931, L*a*b*, etc) ...an abstract multidimensional gamut filtered through inconsistently-implemented device color profiles ...a hyperdimensional four-sided quantum Klein manifold? Is that a thing? ...hopefully somebody else's problem.\n","explanation":"Randall is describing how his level of understanding of colors has changed by age. The chart starts with two tracks of understanding color.\nIn grade school he learned about the primary colors, and the very simple model of colors, as shown in the left track. Mixing of color solids, as in painting (or finger painting being probably the earliest exposure to color mixing), is intuitive for a child. The process is subtractive, and the more colors you mix the darker and closer to black you get. Color is seen by the eyes when light bounces off the solid colors and becomes light of different wavelengths that the eye can then see. However at this level, things just \"look\" like different colors without understanding light's role. The color models mentioned in the second point of the left track are the additive model RGB (red-green-blue) and the subtractive models RYB (red-yellow-blue) and CMYK (cyan-magenta-yellow-key, used in color printing).\nThe right track is about mixing of colored light, as in prisms and light waves, where mixing colors is additive and the more you mix the lighter and closer to white you get. But this is without a real understanding of light bouncing off surfaces, and is limited to an understanding of different colors of light and how they mix. The first exposure in grade school is usually by shining white light through a prism to separate it into the different visible colors.\nMeanwhile, philosophically, color is unknowable because it's impossible to say if everyone has the same qualia for colors. E.g. \"Maybe what I see as blue, you see as my idea of purple, but we both call it blue because we've been brought up to know to call that color blue?.\"\nThe opponent color model connects these two models, by considering how the signals from rods and cones are processed, after different wavelengths of light are absorbed by different rods and cones in the eyes.\nThe \"complex multidimensional gamut\" mentions two more models: CIE 1931 and L*a*b* . These are more detailed models based on the opponent color model, which precisely define how a particular color maps to the different channels that our eyes see.\nHowever, understanding how the eye sees color still isn't enough, because not every device can display all the colors your eye can see. Your laptop might have a different gamut from that of your phone, and when you print the page, you might see yet another color. To handle this issue, web browsers use \"color profiles\", so that an image can be tagged with the color space it uses and the browser can handle it appropriately. Unfortunately, browsers do this inconsistently and not very well.\nFurther complicating the matter, ostensibly identical device may show colors differently (depending on how they are adjusted, variations between devices, aging of the device, and the viewing environment).  Devices and software exist to attempt to match systems to reproduce colors consistently, however  most systems are not set up this way, color correction can be complicated, and the corrections have to be frequently readjusted.\nThe \"hyperdimensional four-sided quantum Klein manifold\" is a joke, and could also be a pun upon the color Klein Blue . A Klein manifold is described by the Klein bottle , where the bottle was originally a surface (a mix-up of the German words Fl\u00e4che for surface and Flasche for bottle). It is a two-dimensional manifold, or simply just a surface with some special characteristics. Randall is here projecting an \"abstract multidimensional gamut\" onto an even more complicated surface, presumably in order to eliminate the errors in color rendering caused by previous attempts to eliminate the errors in color rendering. The Klein bottle has to be projected into 4 dimensional (4-D) space for this to work, as it would otherwise intersect with itself.\nThe \u201cquantum\u201d may be a reference to the \"color\" charge in Quantum chromodynamics .\nEventually it appears Randall has given up, realizing color is very difficult and hoping somebody else will deal with the difficulty in describing, understanding and using the concept of colors.\nThe title text expands on this joke, implying that the reason for the \"unknowable\" answer in the comic is that everyone's browser shows colors slightly differently. Despite the complexity and thoroughness of color models, this common software can't get it right.\n[A simple flowchart is shown. The text above the panel reads:] Evolution of my understanding of color over time:\n[On the left side is a vertical dashed line in gray, on top it's labeled:] Grade school [And at the bottom the label reads:] Now\n[Header above the chart:] \"Color\" is...\n[The chart starts with three items, one left and an other on the right, a third is below in the middle.] ...three primary colors mixed together ...a rainbow, and each color is a wavelength ...unknowable (\"maybe what I see as blue, you see as...\")\n[Arrows from the left and the middle item point to a new left one, while two other arrows from the middle and the right item lead to one at the right.] ...three-ish primary colors mixed together (RGB\/RYB\/CMYK) ...a mix of infinite wavelengths filtered through three eye pigments\n[The arrows of both items point to one in the middle:] (something about the opponent color model)\n[The remaining items are all in the middle and each is connected by one arrow downwards to the next.] ...an abstract multidimensional gamut (CIE 1931, L*a*b*, etc) ...an abstract multidimensional gamut filtered through inconsistently-implemented device color profiles ...a hyperdimensional four-sided quantum Klein manifold? Is that a thing? ...hopefully somebody else's problem.\n"}
{"id":1883,"title":"Supervillain Plan","image_title":"Supervillain Plan","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1883","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/supervillain_plan.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1883:_Supervillain_Plan","transcript":"[On the left of this single panel comic Black Hat sits on a high throne, showing a fist, and looking down to Cueball and Magan who stand in front of him on the right.]\nBlack Hat: ... then, after our drones take control of the cities, we will detonate the devices. California will break off from the mainland and drift out to sea! Megan: How far out to sea? Will it put any of the cities in the UTC-9 time zone? Black Hat: What? I don't know. Megan: One request: Can we make sure this doesn't happen during the daylight saving changeover?\n[Caption below the panel:] You can tell when someone's been a programmer for a while because they develop a deep-seated fear of time zone problems.\n","explanation":"In this comic Black Hat is a supervillain , befitting his character . He plans to use drones and explosives to move the entire State of California into the Pacific, a la Lex Luthor in the 1978 Superman movie.\nHis henchmen are Cueball and Megan . The latter appears to be a programmer who is concerned that the mission (and hence the drones' coding) may have to account for time\/date adjustments, such as time zones and daylight saving time (DST), which would be a factor if the event took place on the wrong date or the landmasses were pushed too far apart. (Though by coding the drones on UTC, the drones would not need to change time zones, except for displaying the local time for some reason, which would likely be unneeded.)\nIn computer programming, working with dates and times can be complicated. Think about leap years or leap seconds , the non existing year zero which even worse for scientists does exist in astronomical calendars , or the Y2K and year 2038 problem. Nevertheless in this comic there is only a time zone problem mentioned. To handle this the tz database , also known as tzdata , provides all relevant information for every country back to 1970 and, less accurate, before. But it's still up to the programmer to use this data in useful ways.\nSupervillains have reason to fear daylight saving time issues. In 1999, two coordinated car bombings ended up killing the terrorists transporting the bombs when they exploded one hour early. Details explained e.g. on the Darwin Awards site.\nTime zones and DST can give seemingly nonsensical results when used improperly. For example, a flight going west might leave at 02:00pm and reach its destination at 03:00pm while the reverse flight will leave at 02:00pm and arrive at 05:00pm. In both cases, the travel time is two hours, but the one hour difference between the two time zones makes it seem otherwise. You might even find yourself arriving at your destination at an earlier time than your departure! DST can also makes a given time mean two different things, if after 01:59am you go back to 01:00 am, 01:30am can either be one hour after 00:30am, or one hour before 02:30am. Or in the reverse change, some dates don't actually exist, like 02:30 when going straight from 01:59 to 03:00. Humans often avoid this issue by being in only one place at the same time [ citation needed ] , or by sleeping when the DST changes happen, but computer communications often span over large distances, and drones don't need to sleep at night. Megan wants to make sure she won't have to deal with the difficult problem of communication between drones and other systems with those issues, where a single poorly communicated date can have disastrous effects (although possibly far less disastrous than moving California into the sea [ citation needed ] ).\nCalifornia is currently located entirely within the UTC-8 time zone (at standard time PST , while in summer PDT is at UTC-7 ). But after Black Hat's actions California is at risk of floating West into the next time zone at UTC-9 .\nHowever, in reality, time zones in the United States are determined by Department of Transportation regulations , and California's time zone is not defined based on its longitude. Consequently, even if California were pushed out to sea, its time zone would remain the same unless the Department of Transportation issued a regulation otherwise, so Megan can rest easy. (On the other hand, Black Hat could alter the time zone of any of the East Coast states except Maine if his drones could push the state east of 67\u00b030' W. longitude, since the Eastern Time Zone's eastern boundary is mostly based on longitude, except for Maine.)\nNote: Megan should be happy Black Hat hasn't planned to involve Arizona in his scheme .\nA \"tick tock article\" is a term in journalism for a step by step account of an event or timeline, such as this one recounting the end of the 2011 MLB regular season . Such an article published for an event during the change to or from Daylight Saving Time would need to account for the changeover, making the timeline confusing for those unaware of the switch.\n[On the left of this single panel comic Black Hat sits on a high throne, showing a fist, and looking down to Cueball and Magan who stand in front of him on the right.]\nBlack Hat: ... then, after our drones take control of the cities, we will detonate the devices. California will break off from the mainland and drift out to sea! Megan: How far out to sea? Will it put any of the cities in the UTC-9 time zone? Black Hat: What? I don't know. Megan: One request: Can we make sure this doesn't happen during the daylight saving changeover?\n[Caption below the panel:] You can tell when someone's been a programmer for a while because they develop a deep-seated fear of time zone problems.\n"}
{"id":1884,"title":"Ringer Volume\/Media Volume","image_title":"Ringer Volume\/Media Volume","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1884","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ringer_volume_media_volume.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1884:_Ringer_Volume\/Media_Volume","transcript":"[A x-y-graph is shown and the header above is:] Trying to turn down the volume before a video starts playing:\n[At the line graph the horizontal axis is labeled with the text \"Time\" and an arrow pointing to the right. The vertical axis represents the volume but has no label. There are two signed lines, \"Ringer volume\" in black and \"Media volume\" in gray roughly at the same level. Below are eight smartphone screens showing the running app over time.]\n[The first seven screens showing a circle indicating that an app is loading. At the second screen a volume control is depicted with an arrow to the lower button.] TAP TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" decreases four times.]\n[Further in time before the third screen the volume control is depicted again with an arrow to the upper button.] TAP TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" increases to normal.]\n[Nothing happens on the 4th screen but at the 5th the volume control is shown again with an arrow to the lower button.] TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" decreases three times.]\n[Before the 6th screen the volume control is shown, again with an arrow to the upper button.] TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" increases back to normal.]\n[At the 7th screen there is again the volume control with an arrow to the lower button.] TAP TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" decreases four times.]\n[Before the 8th screen the volume control is shown with an arrow to the upper button and the tapping starts:] TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" increases two times, still below normal, and the video starts at the screen.] TAP TAP [The \"Media volume\" increases two times above normal.] Person in the video: HELLO, AND WELCOME TO...\n","explanation":"Most smartphones , when this comic was published, have multiple system-level sound volume settings, such as, phone call ringer volume, timed alarm volume, phone communication volume, and media volume (which covers video, music, games and such). For comparison, personal computers tend to expose the user to a master sound volume control by default, which affects all the sounds emitted by system. Applications that emit sound (other than basic interface sounds, such as clicking) tend to implement a separate volume control.\nFurther, smartphones often have a pair of hardware buttons for raising or lowering sound volume. However, they don't differentiate which of the available volume controls the user wants to adjust. Smartphone operating systems tend to adjust the volume level of the currently emitted sound type, with some defaulting to the phone call ringer in the case no sound is playing. Adjusting arbitrary volume control is usually possible using a system settings app controlled by touch screen, which can take more time than pressing dedicated buttons, and\/or stopping the program currently being used, depending on the smartphone in question.\nThe comic demonstrates, using a time axis, a typical annoyance generated by this kind of setup. A implied user wants to play a video clip but expects its sound volume to be too loud, so the user starts to preemptively press the volume down button. However, since the video clip just started loading while the user preemptively pressed the button, this adjusts the phone ringer volume instead of media volume. The user proceeds to raise the ringer volume and waits until the information box about ringer volume being adjusted disappears from screen, then tries again. Since the video is still loading this still doesn't work. Apparently the application needs to start emitting sound before the possibility of adjusting that sound with volume buttons arises. This is exactly what eventually happens - the video starts uncomfortably loud and the user's delayed reaction while attempting to readjust ringer volume level leads, in fact, to raising the media volume. At this point the graph ends, though the user is implied in the title text to proceed to reduce the video's volume directly afterwards.\nDespite most applications implementing separate sound controls, Windows has also offered the option to adjust volume on per-activity basis since at least Windows 95. You can access this feature on Windows 10 by right-clicking the speaker icon on the tray, and selecting the \"Open Volume Mixer\" option. This setup is roughly equivalent to opening system settings on a smartphone, in that user can see multiple volume controls and select to adjust some. Additionally, some versions of Windows made the system tray volume control only affect the currently focused program, sort of analogously to described smartphone behavior, in that a single interface area can correspond to different volume controls depending on the context. However, this feature has been removed in more recent versions, presumably to reduce user confusion.\nThe title text presents a method of exploiting the phenomenon presented in the main comic by putting important parts of an advertisement very early in the video clip in loud audio form. Since user may have problems with adjusting video sound volume before it starts playing, this will result in the important part of ad (here, product name) emitted very loudly, to the levels of narrator of title text expecting it to reach people in other rooms than one the smartphone is in.\n[A x-y-graph is shown and the header above is:] Trying to turn down the volume before a video starts playing:\n[At the line graph the horizontal axis is labeled with the text \"Time\" and an arrow pointing to the right. The vertical axis represents the volume but has no label. There are two signed lines, \"Ringer volume\" in black and \"Media volume\" in gray roughly at the same level. Below are eight smartphone screens showing the running app over time.]\n[The first seven screens showing a circle indicating that an app is loading. At the second screen a volume control is depicted with an arrow to the lower button.] TAP TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" decreases four times.]\n[Further in time before the third screen the volume control is depicted again with an arrow to the upper button.] TAP TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" increases to normal.]\n[Nothing happens on the 4th screen but at the 5th the volume control is shown again with an arrow to the lower button.] TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" decreases three times.]\n[Before the 6th screen the volume control is shown, again with an arrow to the upper button.] TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" increases back to normal.]\n[At the 7th screen there is again the volume control with an arrow to the lower button.] TAP TAP TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" decreases four times.]\n[Before the 8th screen the volume control is shown with an arrow to the upper button and the tapping starts:] TAP TAP [The \"Ringer volume\" increases two times, still below normal, and the video starts at the screen.] TAP TAP [The \"Media volume\" increases two times above normal.] Person in the video: HELLO, AND WELCOME TO...\n"}
{"id":1885,"title":"Ensemble Model","image_title":"Ensemble Model","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1885","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ensemble_model.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1885:_Ensemble_Model","transcript":"[Inside this single panel comic the header on top reads:] In an ensemble model , forecasters run many different versions of a weather model with slightly different initial conditions. This helps account for uncertainty and shows forecasters a spread of possible outcomes.\n[To the left side a picture shows several gray overlapping swirling lines emitted from a point, then gradually diverging rightwards. Below are two smaller pictures; the first shows the lines connected to several loops and in the second it's still a similar figure to the above but moving into the opposite direction with the point emerged to a spiral.]\n[The text right to the pictures reads:] Members in a typical ensemble: A universe where\u2026 \u2026rain is 0.5% more likely in some areas \u2026wind speeds are slightly lower \u2026pressure levels are randomly tweaked \u2026dogs run slightly faster \u2026there's one extra cloud in the Bahamas \u2026Germany won WWII \u2026snakes are wide instead of long \u2026Will Smith took the lead in The Matrix instead of Wild Wild West \u2026swimming pools are carbonated \u2026sliced bread, after being banned in January 1943, was never re-legalized.\n2149: Alternate Histories also deals with the alternative history setting of Germany winning WW2 and subsequently more weird alternate history settings.\n","explanation":"An ensemble model is a combination of multiple, similar models to show a wider range of possible outcomes. The graphs on the left are tracks of predictions from multiple models.  In this comic, Randall starts out describing actual changes that ensemble models show, but sinks into absurdity, describing strange alternate universes and scenarios that likely would not be necessary in an actual model.\nThe upper graph shows a typical plot of predicted wind speeds over time from various ensemble members. The graph shows that it is predicted that the storm will strengthen, with varying degrees of weakening depending on the ensemble member. The graph at the left bottom is a typical map of isobars (lines of equal pressure ) for various ensemble members with the ensemble members showing slightly different configurations. The bottom right graph is a typical hurricane path-prediction graphic, starting in the Atlantic moving westwards and then turning to north, often with the Caribbean Islands or the US coast in the path. Some hurricanes don't reach mainlands and after turning north they head eastwards and can reach Europe still as strong storm.\nThe term universe is in mathematics a class that contains all the entities of an ensemble in a given situation. Don't be confused with the more common usage of the words universe , the entire space where we live, and multiverse , a hypothetical set of possible universes.\nThe first three outcomes are real while the others are less serious. They are explained below:\n\u2026rain is 0.5% more likely in some areas \u2026wind speeds are slightly lower \u2026pressure levels are randomly tweaked\nThese realistic outcomes are only possible under calm weather conditions. Predicting these values with an accuracy better than 1% indicates that the model is stable even when the initial conditions are slightly changed. Modern weather forecasts at normal circumstances are often not good as this and for a hurricane or tornado the variances are much higher.\n\u2026dogs run slightly faster\nThis is where the comic diverges from reality; there is no reason to have the locomotion speed of dogs as a parameter in a usual weather model [ citation needed ] .\nThe speed of dogs might be a parameter in a wildlife model, where the speed of a predator might affect the predator\/prey ratios.  In terms of weather models, dogs traditionally chase cats, so running faster might affect the number of cats.  Cats prey on birds, which in turn eat insects.  So faster dogs might increase the number of birds, reducing the number of butterflies.  Butterflies in turn affect the weather through the butterfly effect (that is that the movement of a butterflies wings may change the development of tornados, or other weather, in difficult to predict ways, as for instance with the quantum weather butterfly ).\n\u2026there is one extra cloud in the Bahamas\nThis situation is most likely too specific and subtle a difference to be useful to the model.\n\u2026Germany won WWII\n\"What if Germany won World War II\" is a very popular subject for alternate history stories.\n\u2026snakes are wide instead of long\nSnakes being wider than they are long (think \"eyes and mouth in the middle of their body and a tail on both sides\") in present reality would have enormous consequences for zoology and other fields of biology, including evolutionary biology. It would also have an impact on art history, especially where it involves paintings depicting certain scenes from  the book of Genesis. Compared to these effects, the expected upshot for meteorology seems to be limited.\n\u2026Will Smith took the lead in The Matrix instead of Wild Wild West\nActor Will Smith famously [ citation needed ] turned down the lead role of Neo in The Matrix , instead taking the role of Captain James T. West in the widely-panned action-comedy Wild Wild West . The role of Neo ultimately went to Keanu Reeves .\nBesides the significance of the role and what many surmise might have happened if Smith had pulled off the role in the iconic and groundbreaking film trilogy, another possible reason behind calling out Will Smith in particular is that he has turned down other offered roles that would place him in an ensemble cast, rather than the lead.\n\u2026swimming pools are carbonated\nA simple calculation reveals this as a serious greenhouse problem. In the United States alone there are no less than 5,000,000 private owned pools. Conservatively assumed, a volume of 25,000 liters per pool gives 125 billion liters of carbonated soda. According to Wikipedia the U.S. sales reached around 30 billion bottles of water in 2008 (including non-carbonated water) which is much less than all of the pool water. While all those bottles are not considered to have an impact on the greenhouse effect, this scenario gets even worse. Open a bottle of carbonated water and pour the content into a glass. Sooner or later the bubbles fade, meaning you have to open the next bottle and pour it in and so on. In a pool at the bottom the pressure is high enough to hold the carbon dioxide, but on the surface it behaves like the glass. So, while a glass needs new carbonated water every two hours, or ten times per day, it would be about three times per day for the pool, which leads to 1095 times per year. The total number in this scenario would be 125 trillion liters of carbonated soda, ejecting carbon dioxide, per year. Even taking into account the pressure at the bottom of the pool: Randall has shown in Soda Sequestration this effect would be minimal.\n\u2026sliced bread, after being banned in January 1943, was never re-legalized.\nSliced bread was in fact banned in the US for about two months in early 1943, as a supposed wartime conservation measure. The issue was not the bread itself, but that the pre-sliced loaves required a heavier wax paper wrapping to prevent them from drying out too quickly.\nThe title text suggests that Randall has been pitching an absurd \"alternate-universe crime drama\" to Netflix , apparently based on the premise that a permanent sliced-bread ban would spawn a criminal underground (similar to those created by alcohol and drug prohibitions in actual history). The first half of the sentence is set up to imply that production had started on the series but a breakdown in communication has occurred between them, playing on the reader's expectations. The conclusion of the sentence nonetheless makes it clear that Netflix has zero interest in the pitch, and so Randall has become overzealous in pushing his idea, to the point that Netflix employees are changing their numbers (presumably they can't block his number because he has resorted to calling from many different phones). He has even taken to infiltrating Netflix's corporate headquarters using ill-gotten security codes, which is definitely illegal [ citation needed ] , much like Elaine 's \"meetings\" with Steve Jobs in 1337: Part 3 .\nHowever, it is clear that Netflix is uninterested and is attempting to prevent Randall from contacting them (or trespassing into the building).\n[Inside this single panel comic the header on top reads:] In an ensemble model , forecasters run many different versions of a weather model with slightly different initial conditions. This helps account for uncertainty and shows forecasters a spread of possible outcomes.\n[To the left side a picture shows several gray overlapping swirling lines emitted from a point, then gradually diverging rightwards. Below are two smaller pictures; the first shows the lines connected to several loops and in the second it's still a similar figure to the above but moving into the opposite direction with the point emerged to a spiral.]\n[The text right to the pictures reads:] Members in a typical ensemble: A universe where\u2026 \u2026rain is 0.5% more likely in some areas \u2026wind speeds are slightly lower \u2026pressure levels are randomly tweaked \u2026dogs run slightly faster \u2026there's one extra cloud in the Bahamas \u2026Germany won WWII \u2026snakes are wide instead of long \u2026Will Smith took the lead in The Matrix instead of Wild Wild West \u2026swimming pools are carbonated \u2026sliced bread, after being banned in January 1943, was never re-legalized.\n2149: Alternate Histories also deals with the alternative history setting of Germany winning WW2 and subsequently more weird alternate history settings.\n"}
{"id":1886,"title":"Typing Notifications","image_title":"Typing Notifications","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1886","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/typing_notifications.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1886:_Typing_Notifications","transcript":"[A sequence of eight panels representing the same conversation in an electronic chat. The header always reads:] What did you think of my show? Did you like it? Be honest!\n[The reply area on the first seven panels is empty, but on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 7th the input is activated and showing three dots.]\n[On the last panel the reply area reads:] It was great!\n[Caption below the panels:] My least favorite aspect of typing notifications\n","explanation":"Randall has sent an instant message to someone and is now watching the screen expecting a reply. The message contains simple questions about a show Randall had undertaken and he insists on an honest answer. The phone indicates that the respondent is typing a response, but then pauses, resumes typing, and pauses a second time, before sending a simple \"It was great!\"\nTyping notifications, often called \"typing awareness indicator\", is a feature of some instant messaging systems. It lets you know when the other person in a conversation is typing and preparing a reply. It may appear in different forms, like the literal text \"[Contact] is typing.\" or often has a empty answer (possibly a different color) containing three animated dots. It gives the sender confidence that their message has been received and the other one is working on a reply.\nWhen the final response is received it is anodyne \"It was great\", suggesting that the first two deleted drafts could be far more critical. The fact that you know that a message has been deleted or edited twice provokes you to imagine what the deleted drafts may have contained. The issue with typing notifications that Randall is talking about might also just be the difficulty to interpret them. The distant contact might just have been doing something else at the same time, had a bad, unsteady internet connection, started typing in the wrong conversation, or corrected a typo, but because Randall has interpreted the long pauses the same way one would read face-to-face interactions, the typing notifications make it seem like they weren't honest.\nIf one partner of a conversation takes their sweet time to reply, possibly deleting their text and starting from scratch as shown in this comic, the typing notification feature can lead to anxiety, as the person waiting for a response starts to overthink the issue. Thoughts come to mind like the other person might not be honest, try to carefully word a sensitive subject or not care enough about you to quickly reply. If finally the answer arrives and consists of just a laconic \"ok\" or similar, these feelings become even stronger, leading to thoughts like the other person is trying to hide something. This phenomenon has become so widespread that many people have written about it in newspapers and blogs, calling it texting anxiety .\nThe caption below the screens summarizes that what Randall dislikes the most about these systems of notification that the other party on the conversation is actively working on a reply is the lengthly alternation between indications that the other party is composing a reply, amidst pauses wherein one presumes the other party is thinking carefully about what they are wanting to say, then more typing as in response to their deep thinking, etc. until at the end of this extended period when one expects the other side to have written a book's worth of notes given the time and work they appear to have dedicated to the reply -- and all they get is a simple 3-word reply.  It leaves him wondering what all the other party really typed, and really thought, that they ended up not sending. This type of notification was mentioned as rule no. 1 in the much later 2235: Group Chat Rules .\nOne way around giving your text receiver texting anxiety would be to open a blank note and work out what you want to say there. Since you're not typing in the messaging app, there's no typing notification.\nIn the title text, Randall expresses that he likes to watch when the recipient reacts and is trying to write an answer but he's also happy to not receive notifications that the texter is composing a response in a blank note file. Typically, one composes responses in blank notes when they need to be careful or thoughtful about how they respond (as well as avoid alerting the recipient, via the notifications, that they've received their text and are preparing a response). If Randall were to be notified about such actions, it would confirm his above fears that the writer was being tactful and guarded in their response, which would just lead to more anxiety about what they were trying to hide. Also, it would expose him if he wanted to compose his own message privately.\n[A sequence of eight panels representing the same conversation in an electronic chat. The header always reads:] What did you think of my show? Did you like it? Be honest!\n[The reply area on the first seven panels is empty, but on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 7th the input is activated and showing three dots.]\n[On the last panel the reply area reads:] It was great!\n[Caption below the panels:] My least favorite aspect of typing notifications\n"}
{"id":1887,"title":"Two Down, One to Go","image_title":"Two Down, One to Go","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1887","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/two_down_one_to_go.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1887:_Two_Down,_One_to_Go","transcript":"[There are three rows equally filled with squares and above are year dates beginning from 2002 until 2017. The first year (2002) is cut on the left and the color is light gray. It fades in to black, which it becomes in in 2005. To the left of the three rows the text reads:] Total eclipse Aurora Meteor storm [Below the year 2017 the squares in the first two rows are checked.]\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall lists three of the most spectacular astronomical sights: a total solar eclipse , an aurora (Aurora Borealis in the northern hemisphere and Aurora Australis in the south), and a meteor storm . In 2017, the first two of these phenomena happened within weeks of each other for observers in much of the US - a coincidence that Randall celebrates.\nIn the title text, Randall suggests the next meteor storm could be 2034, probably because this is predicted to be a good year for Leonids .\nRandall then continues by saying that if he manages to see a supernova during the daytime, he will drop the goal for the meteor storm and call it 3 of 3. This is because such an event is so unlikely that he hasn't even included it in his bucket list, and he would be happy to switch between the two types of events if he had the chance. A few stars, when they turn supernova, could be so bright that they can be seen during the day time here  on Earth. The brightest supernova recorded in human history was SN 1006 which was sixteen times brighter than Venus but still not bright as the full moon. SN 1054 is an other example. When such an extremely rare event might happen is impossible to predict. There is a (very small) chance that the giant star Betelgeuse will go supernova within Randall's lifetime, allowing him to tick this off the list too. Randall even mentioned that this could not happen soon enough in 1644: Stargazing . Note that if you could see it during the day time, it would be one of the brightest objects in the night sky after the Moon.  Also keep in mind that if Betelgeuse were to go supernova in Randall's lifetime, he wouldn't see it since it's over 600 light years away.  For Randall to see it during his lifetime, it must have already gone supernova some 600 odd years ago, and we won't know that until we actually see it 613-881 years after it happened.\nAstronomical backgrounds\n[There are three rows equally filled with squares and above are year dates beginning from 2002 until 2017. The first year (2002) is cut on the left and the color is light gray. It fades in to black, which it becomes in in 2005. To the left of the three rows the text reads:] Total eclipse Aurora Meteor storm [Below the year 2017 the squares in the first two rows are checked.]\n"}
{"id":1888,"title":"Still in Use","image_title":"Still in Use","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1888","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/still_in_use.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1888:_Still_in_Use","transcript":"[Cueball is trying to take out a trash bag from his garbage can.] Trash: Sorry, you can't empty the garbage yet. A paper towel in here is currently in use by some object in your house.\n","explanation":"Cueball is trying to remove the trash bag from his garbage can. However, the can refuses to let him do so, citing that a paper towel in the trash is being used by some object in his home.\nThis comic draws parallels between the act of emptying a physical rubbish bin and emptying the recycle bin integrated into a desktop computing environment like Windows, macOS, most Linux derivatives, and others. It originated with the Xerox Alto , but was first commercially introduced on Apple Lisa in 1982 called Wastebasket and, while it was adopted by most other desktop environment operating system, using slightly different names, the main purpose still remains: A user can restore a file after they have deleted it -- hence the most common name recycle bin , you still can get your paper towel and use it again. In many (earlier) command line based systems like DOS or UNIX\/Linux (besides the desktop interfaces) a removed file was gone. Some undelete commands exist, but there are hard restrictions because the then free space on the hard drive must not have been used again and often file names aren't fully recoverable.\nBut sometimes when attempting to delete files, a running program may still have the file marked as in use. The operating system will therefore prevent the file's deletion, but some do not tell the user which program is using the file.\nPreventing the file from being deleted from the file system in this case may be a correct behavior, because the document is still being worked on. But sometimes it may happen erroneously, perhaps because of a program not closing the file properly, a glitch in the operating system, or user error. The user then is required to find the cause of the problem and rectify it before the file can be deleted. This may be difficult because error messages may not reveal the affected file or the program blocking its removal. Similar problems may occur when unmounting (or \"safely removing\") a removable storage device.\nThe title text may refer to a simple solution to these sorts of problems: Wait a while, perhaps overnight, and see if the (unknown) application(s) have closed the open file(s). Alternatively, the user can shut down the system to make absolutely sure that nothing is using anything. This is usually effective and harmless -- programs that falsely flagged something in the recycle bin as \"in use\" usually won't recreate the problem when the computer finishes booting up -- but this is really not a convenient solution for the user because all applications are closed.\nAdvanced users may be inconvenienced by unhelpful error messages but at least are likely to know the tools available to solve the problem. However, a less experienced user just trying to free some space is not only annoyed, their only solution is to reboot or shut down the computer.\nSome tools:\n[Cueball is trying to take out a trash bag from his garbage can.] Trash: Sorry, you can't empty the garbage yet. A paper towel in here is currently in use by some object in your house.\n"}
{"id":1889,"title":"xkcd Phone 6","image_title":"xkcd Phone 6","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1889","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_phone_6.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1889:_xkcd_Phone_6","transcript":"[A smartphone is shown, the screen is slightly wider than the case, in the middle is a photo lens, and at the right bottom a small extra part is added to the screen.] [On top a bracket ranges nearly over the entire width of the case. The text reads:] Full-width rear camera [The label at the photo lens is:] Front camera (centered for eye contact during video chat) [The label on the extra part says:] Extra screen [At the bottom below the case a label reads:] Wireless charging port\n[The labels left to the phone are:] 4k pixels (50x80) Radium backlight Sterile packaging College-ruled Broad spectrum SPF 30 Pre-seasoned Burns clean coal Includes applicator Fonts developed by NASA Shroud of turn-style facial transfer unlock High thread count CPU Screen goes past the edge Safe for ages 6-8 months, 10 months, 18 months-3 years, and 12 years and older\n[The labels right to the phone are:] CDC partnership: Phone automatically administers seasonal flu vaccine to cheek every year 12-function Dishwasher safe GPS transmitter 3-G acceleration Portable, solar-heated Pore-cleaning strip Maximum strength Never needs sharpening Can survive up to 30 minutes out of water Exclusive Audubon Society app identifies birds and lets you control their flight\n[Text below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd Phone 6, VIII, 10, X, 26, and 1876 We didn't start this nonconsecutive version number war, but we will not lose it. \u2122\u00ae\u00a9\u00b0\n","explanation":"This is the sixth entry in the ongoing xkcd Phone series , and once again, the comic plays with many standard tech buzzwords, and horribly misuses all of them, to create a phone that sounds impressive but self-evidently isn't to even the most ignorant customer. The previous comic in the series 1809: xkcd Phone 5 was released 7 months before this one and the next 2000: xkcd Phone 2000 was released 8 and a half months later.\nThis comic was released the day after Apple announced their new iPhone 8 and the higher-end iPhone X (pronounced iPhone 10) with facial recognition features.\nFront camera (centered for eye contact during video chat) A front camera has become a common feature of smartphones. The camera lens is located on the same side of the phone's case as the main screen, making it possible to capture the image of the user's face looking at the screen and display the interlocutor's face on the screen simultaneously, enabling video chat. However, as the camera is usually located above the screen, when the user looks at the displayed image of the other person they direct their eyes at the center of the screen and not at the camera's lens. This makes it appear on the other end of the chat as if the person talking was looking down and not making eye-contact, which can be an uncomfortable situation for many people. For this reason, professionals involved in movie or TV-making, like actors or reporters, are trained to look straight into the camera's lens while talking, which creates impression of looking straight at the viewer's face. During a video chat, however, looking into the lens of an above-screen camera does not allow one to see the interlocutor's face clearly because it is then in the peripheral field of vision.\nTo solve this conundrum, Randall proposes locating the camera lens right in the middle of the screen. The user looking at the the other person's face on the screen would then also be looking at the lens, creating an impression on the other end of the chat that they are looking straight at the other person. This is absurd, since the lens would then take place of some of the center pixels of the screen, which would probably mean that it could not display the center part of the captured image of the other person's face. This could include features such as eyes and\/or lips, which play an important part in non-verbal communication. Locating the camera lens in this way would probably also interfere with the touch-screen function. It would probably make other applications on the phone difficult to use, since virtually no user interface is designed to accommodate a blind spot in the center.\nThe idea of having the camera in the middle of the screen is only currently absurd, however, as advances in technology may eventually enable such a feature to work without disturbing the appearance or function of the phone's display, unlike the visual disturbance clearly indicated in the comic. For instance, previous technological advancements have improved the functionality of the display, starting with adding touch sensing. The touch sensitive hardware of the phone is located in a thin layer above the hardware, that generates the image for the display, and capacitive touch sensing technology is less obtrusive than previous resistive sensing. While it has yet to be released to market, certain manufacturers are aiming to place a phone's fingerprint reader underneath the screen, for seamless functionality. Although it may be difficult at this point, figuring out a way to have a camera capture images through the array of pixels on the screen is not completely beyond imagination.\nFull-width rear camera Historically, there has been an 'arms race' among phone manufacturers to increase the 'size' of the rear camera, in terms of the number of pixels they can capture. This is not typically accompanied by equivalent increases in physical size, though. Phone cameras tend to have lenses which are quite small, and round or square -- measuring the same in width as in height. On this phone, the 'full-width' lens appears to be a long, thin strip, like an oval or rectangle shape. This could allow the camera to gather a lot more light, potentially working in low light situations. However the lens would be more vulnerable to damage and dirt. Unless a very large sensor was used, focusing the image could be a problem, since cell phones are typically not very deep.\nCDC partnership - phone automatically administers seasonal flu vaccine to cheek every year U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a government agency tasked with addressing public health concerns, such as infectious diseases, including seasonal flu. A common way of limiting the spread of an infectious disease is vaccination , which most often involves administering a specially prepared vaccine via an intramuscular injection , though researchers have investigated other delivery systems, including aerosol, or microneedle injection. Uptake of vaccination is often poor, and many governments routinely use various different campaigns and techniques to try to encourage more people to get themselves vaccinated.\nThis feature implies that the phone would automatically perform some form of injection once a year, administering a vaccine via a small aperture while the user is holding the phone to their cheek during a call. However, the placement of this component is dubious, as it would line up with the user's ear, rather than their cheek, during a phone call. It may be designed to detect the fraction of a second during which your cheek would be in the appropriate position (perhaps after a phone call, as you may be dropping the phone from your ear), and administer it at that moment; this would conveniently prevent disturbances to a majority of conversations.\nA further absurdity to this feature is that the vaccine is different every year, in order to account for various mutations causing different, and typically new, strains of the virus, which is the reason it has to be administered yearly. The CDC bases the combination of strains on a best-guess of what will be the most significant strains in circulation over the upcoming year, so in order to have the current year's vaccine, the user would have to physically load the new version into the phone for later administration, or there would have to be a mechanism to synthesize the concoction on-board the phone, and an associated logistics framework and digital standards for OTA delivery of specifications for the year's vaccine.\n12-function Most smartphones can be used for more than twelve different things [ citation needed ] . However, this may refer to the twelve basic functions of algebra (identity, squaring, cubing, square root, logarithm, exponential, reciprocal, sine, cosine, greatest integer, absolute value, and logistic), or the twelve function keys on a modern keyboard (more than the ten on the original IBM PC keyboard). Alternatively, it may be a reference to calculators: basic models are sometimes referred to as four function calculators (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), and complex scientific calculators may advertise 250 or more functions.\nDishwasher safe Waterproofing has become a much-pushed feature of many recent smartphones, with manufacturers competing on the claimed resilience of their models. A phone that was truly dishwasher safe would be ahead in this race, as it would have to be able to withstand high-pressure jets of water, high temperatures, and caustic effects of detergent over significant periods. This is often listed as a selling point of items used for preparing, serving, or storing food, such as plastic containers or crockery, which a normal person might want to clean using a dishwasher, but it seems excessive for phones, which are rarely cleaned with anything more than a quick wipe, and most people would not intentionally attempt to clean in a dishwasher.\nGPS transmitter Many smartphones have a receiver for the Global Positioning System , which allows a phone to compute its position based on signals from the constellation(s) of GPS satellites. However, a device with a \"GPS transmitter\" would broadcast signals that would interfere with the GPS receivers of all devices nearby. This might be used in some form of differential GPS, broadcasting signals from a known location to allow more precise determination of other locations, or such a system might be used to confuse or control devices, such as drones, which navigate using GPS.\n3-G acceleration This is a mixture of three unrelated concepts with similar names. In computer graphics, \" 3-D acceleration \" refers to GPU hardware that speeds up handling of three-dimensional data, such as shapes rotating in space. In physics, \"3 Gs of acceleration\" refers to speed increasing at a rate of 3 times the acceleration of Earth's gravity, or approximately 30 m\/s\u00b2. In cellular networks, 3G refers to a standard for data communication. GPUs, accelerometers, and compatibility with 3G networks are all normal features of modern smartphones. \"3-G acceleration\", however, is not a real term, and doesn't describe any meaningful feature of a phone. It appears to suggest that either the phone is capable of self-propelling with 3 Gs of acceleration, which doesn't seem particularly useful, or, perhaps more feasibly, that it has some way of increasing the data transfer rate over a 3G connection.\nPortable, solar-heated Portability is pretty much the entire point of using a mobile phone, so advertising portability is rather redundant. Solar power charging could be a very useful feature on a phone, but solar heating usually applies to plumbing, where a water tank is heated by the sun and used to supply hot water to taps. Technically, as the sun heats up everything it shines on, the phone is in fact solar heated. However, since avoiding overheating is a particular challenge in smartphone design, deliberately capturing solar energy simply in order to heat the device would seem rather counter-productive.\nPore-cleaning strip Pore-cleaning strips are sticky strips designed to be applied to the skin and then pulled away to remove dirt and oils from the pores, with the intention of reducing spots and improving the complexion. The location shown for this feature would be inconvenient and irritating, as it would come into contact with the face every time the phone was held to the ear to make a call; something sticky on that location would be very annoying for clean-shaven people and extremely painful for anyone with facial hair. It would probably also result in that strip of the screen becoming obscured by an accumulation of facial gunk. Pore strips have been mentioned before in 777: Pore Strips .\nThis may act as a sensor for the Shroud of Turin-style facial transfer unlock , whereby the phone would collect the dirt, oils, and microflora from the user's face when it is pressed against the phone, and use it to verify their identity.\nMaximum strength Medicines are often sold as \"Maximum strength\", usually indicating that they contain the highest dose of active ingredients allowed by law, or allowed without a prescription. For phones, there are sometimes \"hardened\" or \"ruggedized\" versions, which are designed to survive harsher environmental conditions, such as surviving drops and collisions, excessive water, dust, etc. Maximum strength here could indicate such a \"ruggedized\" phone, though this would be hard to achieve with a screen that extended past the edges.\nNever needs sharpening Phones do not need to be sharpened in the first place [ citation needed ] . This is a feature more likely to be found in a knife advertisement -- the slogan is infamous for hawking knives that cannot easily be sharpened, like a serrated blade -- or a mechanical pencil. Since the screen goes past the edge, it might be sharp enough to cut through things, much like a knife, though the phone would be unsafe to carry and handle if that were the case [ citation needed ] .\nMight also refer to sharpening the camera, which usually means adjusting the lens till an object is in focus. Most phones have autofocus and rarely need to be manually sharpened.\nCan survive up to 30 minutes out of water This is a play on the common IP-rating of water resistance, which is typically rated for submersion to a rated depth for 30 minutes. A phone which could only be used or carried for 30 minutes before it needed to be immersed in water would be rather inconvenient, although the phone short circuiting would likely not be an issue, as the phone is \"dishwasher safe.\"\nAlternatively, either this phone's target market could be whales, dolphins, or other marine life, such as octopodes, or the feature could be optional. While such a feature would prove to be extremely useful for aquatic customers, the \"solar-heated\" feature would undoubtedly be inhibited significantly as water depths increased.\nExclusive Audubon Society app identifies birds and lets you control their flight The National Audubon Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of nature, and mainly of birds, which also organizes open birdwatching events. There are apps that attempt to identify bird species, for example, from a photo or audio recording of a bird made by the smartphone itself, though the Audubon Society's own app does not offer anything this interactive. An app allowing you to control the bird's flight would be way cooler and might work using the built-in GPS transmitter, confusing their navigation systems. However birds do not use GPS to navigate [ citation needed ] , and it would fly in the face of the Audubon Society's core activity. This is a reference to drones (which could be thought of as artificial \"birds\") which are often controlled by a smartphone app. This may also be a reference to 1425: Tasks , in which an app that can recognize if a bird is on camera is proposed.\nExtra screen Some phones advertise an additional display or display mode, often giving access to basic information, such as battery level and notifications without needing to activate the main screen function. Typically, this would be a low-power mode of operation of the normal screen, or else a form of display on another surface of the phone, such as the side or rear. Here, it seems to be an oddly shaped rectangular extension on the bottom of the main screen. This may have been added to make up for the loss of screen estate due to the center camera.\nWireless charging port A port for wireless charging is an oxymoron, since wireless charging has no wires and thus has no need for a port, unless it is required for fuel for a fuel cell (see clean coal, below). This may be a jab at Apple's removal of the headphone port from their previous phones.\nSafe for ages 6-8 months, 10 months, 18 months-3 years, and 12 years and older Usually an item is deemed safe for a particular age or older, or (in the case of toys) is recommended for a particular age range. This is unusual in that it's a hodge-podge of age ranges with no apparent reason why some ages are safe and others are not. It may be a parody of drug commercials that list several age ranges for which the drug had to be separately approved.\nScreen goes past the edge A parody of the trend of \"edge to edge\" displays in recent generations of smartphones, or phones whose screens curve partway around the edge of the phone. In this case the screen is wide enough that it could curve partway around the edge, except the spillover does not actually form to the curves, resulting in a screen that is wider than the body of the phone. If the spillover is rigid, this would make the phone rather uncomfortable to hold, and the spillover is at risk of chipping off.\nHigh thread count CPU A CPU thread is a task the CPU performs. Several threads may share memory, making them a process. Threads are meant to run in parallel and the operating system distributes the workload on the available hardware execution units. These execution units are sometimes called hardware threads, especially when there is more than one per processing unit (or core). For example, the Intel Core i7 7700 is considered a 4-core, 8-thread CPU. The vague \"high thread count\" statement could make sense in this context, however, it is most likely a joke about bedding, where it is an actual selling point; the thread count of a textile signifies the density of fibres in the material, and a high thread count is an indicator of a high quality fabric.\nShroud of Turin-style facial transfer unlock The Shroud of Turin contains an image of the body and face of a man, originally believed to be Jesus Christ , before the Shroud was found to be 1200 years too young. Some theories suggest the image was created by interaction with or transfer from the body that was wrapped in the shroud. Presumably, to unlock this phone, the user would have to physically press their face against the phone, the way the Shroud-Man's image was allegedly transferred to the shroud. This is probably a reference to the iPhone X's FaceID unlock, which uses a photograph of your face, augmented with spatial information, to unlock itself, and which had attracted significant criticism immediately before this comic came out.\nFonts developed by NASA This may be a reference to many advertisements that claim that their product uses technology developed by NASA in an attempt to make it seem more impressive. NASA technology does often tend to be quite strong and advanced, as they claim at their spin off website. Between 1975 and 1992 NASA used the \"worm\" logotype in its insignia; it was a special font that omitted the horizontal bar in the capitalized letter A. However, it would not be particularly impressive to use this, since fonts have very little to do with NASA's core operations [ citation needed ] , and it potentially implies that it would not support many other common, and perhaps more readable, fonts.\nThis may also be riffing on the urban legend that NASA invested vast amounts of research in developing a pen that could write in space, rather than just using a pencil.\nIncludes applicator This is found on the packaging for many products, such as tampons, cosmetics, and paints. An applicator for a phone would be absurd, since the phone cannot be applied, spread, inserted, or attached to something else. However, this may be referring back to the aforementioned yearly vaccine.\nBurns clean coal Clean coal is coal that is burned so that it does not give off as much soot, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury, or other pollutants as \"normal\" coal, or methods of burning coal that give off relatively less pollutants. This may be advertised by energy companies trying to appear to be using clean energy, due to pollution concerns. Coal burning power plants are usually quite large, so a traditional coal fired thermal-electric plant in a cell phone would be absurd. fuel cells , which produce electricity by oxidizing some fuel, can be small enough to fit in a cell phone, but they do not typically burn coal. The cordless charging port might be a receptacle for refueling the phone, using liquid or a fuel cartridge.\nPre-seasoned Pre-seasoned typically refers to cast iron cookware which is ready to use out of the box, as opposed to needing to season it with oil and heat. It can also refer to packaged meats which are ready to cook without needing to be seasoned with herbs and spices, or timber that has been dried and is ready for use. A more technical definition of 'seasoning' means operating devices, usually calibrated standards or battery cells, for a while in the factory, to make sure the device meets constant performance requirements without deviating or diminshing too much. In this sense it could apply to the battery of the phone.\nBroad-spectrum SPF 30 The xkcd phone somehow gives a sun protection factor (SPF) 30 level of protection from sunlight, meaning that it blocks all but 1\/30 of skin-burning UVB radiation from sunlight, though it is not clear whether it is the user or the phone itself which is protected. Phones do not typically require protection from sunlight [ citation needed ] . On the other hand, if, when placed between the user and the sun, the phone allows >3% of the radiation through, this would be remarkably more translucent, and therefore less effective, than most phones (which allow much less than 1% of UVB, or any other visible or near-visible wavelength, through). It would also be an inefficient method of protection, since it would only be able to protect a relatively small patch of skin.\nCollege-ruled College-ruled is a style of notebook paper having narrower than normal lines, in order to fit more text per page. That the phone is college-ruled suggests that there are lines permanently displayed on the screen, which could obscure any images on the screen, and make any text that doesn't line up with the lines hard to read. Defective screens can show similar patterns; for example, the iPhone 6 \"touch disease\" causes regularly spaced vertical lines to appear on top of the screen. Here, it is possible that the manufacturer is trying to pass off screen defects as features.\nSterile packaging Useful for medical supplies, less so in a phone. There are numerous studies and resulting 'news' articles looking at the number of bacteria, fecal samples, and so forth, that can be found on the typical phone, typically with a sensationalist take on how you will be 'shocked' to discover this. However, sterile packaging would do little to counter this, since most of this contamination is accumulated after the user removes the phone from the packaging and begins using it.\nRadium backlight The discovery of the radioactive element radium sparked a brief fad in which manufacturers of consumer products began coating them with a paint containing radium and a radioluminescent substance, such as zinc sulfide, which converted the radiation from the radium into visible light. In particular, some clock and watch makers painted the faces or hands of their timepieces, allowing the time to be read at night without an external power source for the light. However, it was eventually realized that regular exposure to radium could result in radiation poisoning, particularly for the workers assembling and painting the products. A radium-based backlight would therefore be both potentially dangerous (especially for an object carried on one's person much of the time) but also largely useless, as the radioluminescent light is rather dim compared to conventional phone back lights.\n4K pixels (50\u00d780) \"4K\" typically denotes a screen with a width of ~4000 pixels, such as 4K TVs, which have 3840\u00d72160 pixels, or about 8.3 million pixels total. That would be an outstanding resolution for a cell phone. Here, however, the \"fine print\" in parentheses clarifies that 4000 is actually the total number of pixels, not the width, which would be remarkably low resolution for a smart phone. As a comparison, the old Commodore VIC-20, with a resolution of 176 \u00d7 184, would have over 8 times the pixels of this phone. It is more comparable to the screen resolution of the sturdy Nokia 3310, which boasted a total of 4032 pixels, positioned 84 \u00d7 48.\nIn the caption below the phone Randall presents many different version numbers:\nThe \"nonconsecutive version number war\" referenced below the version names refers to several recent phones, and possibly operating systems, released consecutively with nonconsecutive version numbers, including:\nRandall's ludicrous naming scheme aims to 'defeat' all of these by eclipsing them. By counting parallel version numbers xkcd defeated Apple 6:2.\nThe symbols at the end are \u2122 for trademark, \u00ae for registered trademark, and \u00a9 for copyright. The degree symbol \u00b0 after the letter C could be a play with degree Celsius. The use of all four symbols after the phrase is ridiculous, as \u2122 and \u00ae indicate trademarks with opposite registration statuses, slogans can't be copyrighted, and the degree symbol usually has no meaning when applied to text.\nIn the title text Randall recognises privacy concerns about the facial recognition feature. A picture of a face will only be used for facial recognition, but never stored on the device nor transmitted to the internet. A small side effect may be that the famous selfie pictures aren't possible anymore, as well as video calls. Ironic, considering that the reason the camera is in the middle is to allow easier video calls.\n[A smartphone is shown, the screen is slightly wider than the case, in the middle is a photo lens, and at the right bottom a small extra part is added to the screen.] [On top a bracket ranges nearly over the entire width of the case. The text reads:] Full-width rear camera [The label at the photo lens is:] Front camera (centered for eye contact during video chat) [The label on the extra part says:] Extra screen [At the bottom below the case a label reads:] Wireless charging port\n[The labels left to the phone are:] 4k pixels (50x80) Radium backlight Sterile packaging College-ruled Broad spectrum SPF 30 Pre-seasoned Burns clean coal Includes applicator Fonts developed by NASA Shroud of turn-style facial transfer unlock High thread count CPU Screen goes past the edge Safe for ages 6-8 months, 10 months, 18 months-3 years, and 12 years and older\n[The labels right to the phone are:] CDC partnership: Phone automatically administers seasonal flu vaccine to cheek every year 12-function Dishwasher safe GPS transmitter 3-G acceleration Portable, solar-heated Pore-cleaning strip Maximum strength Never needs sharpening Can survive up to 30 minutes out of water Exclusive Audubon Society app identifies birds and lets you control their flight\n[Text below the phone:] Introducing The xkcd Phone 6, VIII, 10, X, 26, and 1876 We didn't start this nonconsecutive version number war, but we will not lose it. \u2122\u00ae\u00a9\u00b0\n"}
{"id":1890,"title":"What to Bring","image_title":"What to Bring","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1890","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/what_to_bring.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1890:_What_to_Bring","transcript":"[Text in the top-left corner of the comic:]\n\"Should you bring _____ to ______?\"\n[The comic is laid out like a grid, with implements down the left-hand side (A knife \/ A gun \/ Water \/ A lid) and the type of \"fight\" across the top (A knife fight \/ A gun fight \/ A wood fire \/ An oil fire). The grid illustrates the \"match-ups\", with a green square denoting a \"correct\" match-up and a red square denoting a Very Bad Idea.]\n[From the top left corner, going from left to right, top to bottom, with each first item being on its own line in the grid, the squares are as follows:]\n[Green square, two combatants face off against each other with knives, equally matched.] A knife to A knife fight\n[Red square, a person with a knife faces off against someone with a gun, and is clearly outmatched.] A knife to A gun fight\n[Red square, a person holds a knife in a wood fire while saying \"OW OW OW\".] A knife to A wood fire\n[Red square, the person with the knife scrapes at the oil inside the pan that's on fire while saying \"OW OW OW\". The scraping accompanied by the text \"SCRAPE SCRAPE\".] A knife to An oil fire\n[Green square, the person with the gun points it at the opponent with the knife, who exclaims, \"Dude!\"] A gun to A knife fight\n[Green square, two combatants point guns at one another, equally matched.] A gun to A gun fight\n[Red square, the person with the gun shoots pointlessly three times at the wood fire, which carries on blazing. The shooting is accompanied by the text \"BLAM BLAM BLAM\".] A gun to A wood fire\n[Red square, the person with the gun shoots at the flaming pan, which does nothing to put it out. The shooting is accompanied by the text \"BLAM\".] A gun to An oil fire\n[Red square, the person with the water throws it uselessly in the face of the person holding the knife.] Water to A knife fight\n[Red square, the person with the water throws it uselessly in the face of the person holding the gun.] Water to A gun fight\n[Green square, the person throws the water on the fire and successfully extinguishes it, which makes a \"SPLOOSH\" sound.] Water to A wood fire\n[Red square, the person is shown reeling back from the oil fire, the water glass going flying, as the oil fire explodes with a \"FOOM\".] Water to An oil fire\n[Red square, the person with the lid comically places it on the head of the person with the knife, who stands there in confusion.] A lid to A knife fight\nRed square, the person with the lid ineffectually places it on top of the gun the other person is pointing at them. A lid to A gun fight\nRed square, the person with the lid holds it near the wood fire, which does nothing to put out the fire. A lid to A wood fire\n[Green square, the person places the lid on top of the oil fire, which suffocates and extinguishes it.] A lid to An oil fire","explanation":"This comic derives its humor from combining two common but unrelated pieces of advice: \"never bring a knife to a gun fight\", and \"never put water on an oil fire\". The corollary to these phrases is that a knife is only useful for a knife fight, and water is only useful for a wood fire (or similar solid and porous fuel). Randall creates a confusion matrix applying each of the solutions (knives, guns, lids, and water) to each of the situations (knife fight, gun fight, wood fire, oil fire) to predict the likely outcomes.\nThe squares in the table are highlighted in green to answer \"Yes\" to the question, where the specified object is appropriate or advantageous for the situation, or red to answer \"No\", usually because the object would not be helpful in resolving the situation. The grid concludes that, not only are both pieces of advice correct (bringing knives to gun fights, and using water on oil fires would both end in likely disaster), but only the prescribed solutions are appropriate for each situation (e.g. any solution other than a lid would be ineffective for an oil fire, and potentially very dangerous). The sole exception to this trend is bringing a gun to a knife fight, which would give you a major tactical advantage over your opponent.\nThe ultimate point of this comic may be in the title text. There is a phrase in American English, \"to bring a knife to a gun fight,\" which means \"to be so naive as to be unprepared.\" While Randall may be commenting specifically on managing conflict escalation by being adequately prepared for the situation, it is also possible that he is subtly expressing his opinion about the virtues of restraint.\n[Text in the top-left corner of the comic:]\n\"Should you bring _____ to ______?\"\n[The comic is laid out like a grid, with implements down the left-hand side (A knife \/ A gun \/ Water \/ A lid) and the type of \"fight\" across the top (A knife fight \/ A gun fight \/ A wood fire \/ An oil fire). The grid illustrates the \"match-ups\", with a green square denoting a \"correct\" match-up and a red square denoting a Very Bad Idea.]\n[From the top left corner, going from left to right, top to bottom, with each first item being on its own line in the grid, the squares are as follows:]\n[Green square, two combatants face off against each other with knives, equally matched.] A knife to A knife fight\n[Red square, a person with a knife faces off against someone with a gun, and is clearly outmatched.] A knife to A gun fight\n[Red square, a person holds a knife in a wood fire while saying \"OW OW OW\".] A knife to A wood fire\n[Red square, the person with the knife scrapes at the oil inside the pan that's on fire while saying \"OW OW OW\". The scraping accompanied by the text \"SCRAPE SCRAPE\".] A knife to An oil fire\n[Green square, the person with the gun points it at the opponent with the knife, who exclaims, \"Dude!\"] A gun to A knife fight\n[Green square, two combatants point guns at one another, equally matched.] A gun to A gun fight\n[Red square, the person with the gun shoots pointlessly three times at the wood fire, which carries on blazing. The shooting is accompanied by the text \"BLAM BLAM BLAM\".] A gun to A wood fire\n[Red square, the person with the gun shoots at the flaming pan, which does nothing to put it out. The shooting is accompanied by the text \"BLAM\".] A gun to An oil fire\n[Red square, the person with the water throws it uselessly in the face of the person holding the knife.] Water to A knife fight\n[Red square, the person with the water throws it uselessly in the face of the person holding the gun.] Water to A gun fight\n[Green square, the person throws the water on the fire and successfully extinguishes it, which makes a \"SPLOOSH\" sound.] Water to A wood fire\n[Red square, the person is shown reeling back from the oil fire, the water glass going flying, as the oil fire explodes with a \"FOOM\".] Water to An oil fire\n[Red square, the person with the lid comically places it on the head of the person with the knife, who stands there in confusion.] A lid to A knife fight\nRed square, the person with the lid ineffectually places it on top of the gun the other person is pointing at them. A lid to A gun fight\nRed square, the person with the lid holds it near the wood fire, which does nothing to put out the fire. A lid to A wood fire\n[Green square, the person places the lid on top of the oil fire, which suffocates and extinguishes it.] A lid to An oil fire"}
{"id":1891,"title":"Obsolete Technology","image_title":"Obsolete Technology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1891","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/obsolete_technology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1891:_Obsolete_Technology","transcript":"[Ponytail sits in front of an old computer. Megan stands behind her.] Ponytail: Whoa, this is running MS-DOS! It's weird how new technology takes forever to reach some industries. Megan: Yeah. Like how we still use gunpowder for fireworks, even though we've had nuclear weapons for over 70 years.\n","explanation":"This comic mocks people who criticize an industry for using obsolete technology, even when said technology is sufficient for the task at hand. The claim often comes with the implication that those in charge of the industry are behind the times and cannot adapt to the cutting edge. What these critics often fail to realize is that there are cost benefits to sticking with \"obsolete\" infrastructure, and that upgrading to the newest tech can introduce unwanted side effects and other risks.\nHere, Ponytail acts as one such critic, complaining that the business is taking \"forever\" to get with the times. Megan uses sarcasm to deliver her counterargument: despite the advent of nuclear weapons, fireworks use the ancient technology of gunpowder (invented in the 9th century), because fireworks are used by civilians for celebratory purposes and should have as few lethal side effects as possible.\nAs they use gunpowder, fireworks do claim a handful of lives and cause thousands of injuries each year due to improper handling procedures; between June 18th and July 18th of 2016 (thus including the Independence Day celebrations on July 4th), fireworks caused an estimated 11,000 injuries, of which 7,000 had to be treated in hospitals. In the whole year of 2016, four people died ( U.S. stats ). Nuclear explosions, meanwhile, have \"detrimental effects\" [ citation needed ] on human health in the same way sledgehammers have \"detrimental effects\" [ citation needed ] to chicken eggs. For example, should a nuclear explosion at a firework display be too powerful, the spectators, and possibly the neighborhood around the display, would be vaporized instantly. Fallout from a nuclear reaction could spread radiation across a wide area, leading to increased risks of cancers and other detrimental [ citation needed ] genetic mutations.\nIn other words, sometimes using newer technology is \"overkill\" for the purpose, and it might be costlier to switch to a newer technology. For example, many industrial machines were designed and sold in the 1990s when floppy disks were the prevalent means of storing the instructions, but those machines still have one or two or even more decades of usable lifetime left, and the instruction files still fit on those floppy disks. So, in 2017, there are several companies that thrive on buying, refurbishing and selling floppy disks. This report portrays one of these companies.\nMS-DOS is a computer operating system made by Microsoft that was dominant during much of the 1980s. When Microsoft released the Windows line of operating systems, they encouraged people to switch to the new platform, which many did. MS-DOS became essentially obsolete when Microsoft released Windows 95 in 1995. However, there remain rare circumstances in which MS-DOS (or another command-line operating system) is still preferred, such as when no mouse, touchscreen, or other pointing hardware is available, or when the hardware does not support a newer operating system. To make matters simpler, there is DOSBox , a free and open-source MS-DOS emulator which is actively maintained and extended. Likewise, FreeDOS is a free and open-source operating system designed to run on both older and newer computers which is compatible with programs written for MS-DOS.\nThe title text uses a different twist, criticizing the current use of fax machines. In many respects, faxing is obsolete compared to e-mail; it supports only black-and-white images, it complicates the process of modifying sent text by rendering it as images, it consumes the recipient's paper and toner and, in some countries, requires the recipient to pay a fee. Fax machines are a peculiar topic among \"obsolete\" technology; in some fields, like lawyer offices, pharmacies and medical practices, they staunchly hold their ground, as they offer a way to quickly transfer handwritten and hand-signed documents. Confidentiality is also an issue; fax, which uses a landline, is more difficult to intercept than internet-based traffic. In some countries, a telecopy is a valid document, having the same legal value as the original. A patient can thus call their doctor to fill a prescription, which is faxed to the pharmacy where the patient can fetch their drugs, saving precious time. In the same manner, a legal request can be sent to the receiver, without having to use a courier or express mail.\nBut rather than argue on any of the above points, the title text instead claims that faxing is obsolete due to being electron-based, while neutrino -based communication would be faster. In 2017, neutrino detectors are heavy and expensive, used for nuclear research only. Electronic communications travel at a fair share of the speed of light and the advantage of path would be at most a factor of \u03c0\/2, so neutrino-based communication would normally be far too expensive compared to the speed gain. Even in the most extreme case (communicating between antipodes ), the time saved would be a few hundredths of a second \u2013 insignificant for almost all purposes, but potentially enough to gain an edge in high-frequency trading , as suggested in a 2012 Forbes article. Real-world fax detractors would rather replace it with other electronic communication systems, not neutrinic ones.\n[Ponytail sits in front of an old computer. Megan stands behind her.] Ponytail: Whoa, this is running MS-DOS! It's weird how new technology takes forever to reach some industries. Megan: Yeah. Like how we still use gunpowder for fireworks, even though we've had nuclear weapons for over 70 years.\n"}
{"id":1892,"title":"USB Cables","image_title":"USB Cables","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1892","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/usb_cables.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1892:_USB_Cables","transcript":"[15 USB cables are shown lying in a column. They are mostly very similar, with small differences. To the right of the cables there are 12 labels, as three of the labels belongs to three sets of two cables.] [2 cables] Carry power but not data Carries data but not power Too short Charges phone slowly Won't auto-activate portable charger [2 cables] Has annoying ferrite lumps Heavy and not very flexible [2 cables] Frayed Plug doesn't fit through case Needs to be twisted to keep working Weird shape The good one\n[Caption below the panel:] The law of USB cables: No matter how many you get, you only ever have one good one.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall states the 'Law of USB cables': You will never have more than one which has no problems now matter how many you get. Now that most devices charge off USB, having a cable (specifically, USB-A (the big end) to Micro-B or USB-C (the small end)) is essential. However, most USB cables are cheaply made, and carrying them around quickly damages them. This comic lists some common (and not so common) problems with USB cables.\nThe title text refers to the popular meme \" Tag yourself, I'm... \" which is used with pictures containing lots of strange objects, phrases or other elements. The phrase prompts people to identify individual elements from the image that they personally feels matches their own identity, usually self-deprecatingly. (The meme stems from Facebook, where people can place tags identifying themselves in photos, but has spread to other websites without an actual tagging system.) Here, Randall suggests that, like a USB cable, he's frayed. \"I'm frayed\" is also a pun on the sentence \"I'm afraid\" that is commonly added to the end of a comment which the speaker believes may leave a negative impression on the listener.\n[15 USB cables are shown lying in a column. They are mostly very similar, with small differences. To the right of the cables there are 12 labels, as three of the labels belongs to three sets of two cables.] [2 cables] Carry power but not data Carries data but not power Too short Charges phone slowly Won't auto-activate portable charger [2 cables] Has annoying ferrite lumps Heavy and not very flexible [2 cables] Frayed Plug doesn't fit through case Needs to be twisted to keep working Weird shape The good one\n[Caption below the panel:] The law of USB cables: No matter how many you get, you only ever have one good one.\n"}
{"id":1893,"title":"Thread","image_title":"Thread","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1893","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thread.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1893:_Thread","transcript":"[A mock-up of a \u201ctweet\u201d from the site twitter.com is shown. It contains a mock-up of a user photo of the fictional character F\u2019nor that resembles Hairy , including a tiny line sketch of F\u2019nor\u2019s brown dragon Canth flying overhead. Below the tweet are several action buttons typical of a Twitter post for comments, replying, likes, etc.]\nF\u2019nor @fnor Thread: The greatest threat to our life on Pern 1\/1\nOn Friday, the header was replaced with a message from Randall about how he would be visiting the U.K. on the following week. It read as follows:\n","explanation":"F'nor is a character from the popular [ citation needed ] sci-fi\/fantasy series Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey . He is posting a Twitter comment (a \" thread \" that's only one comment long, hence \"1\/1\") about \" Thread \", a massively destructive alien organism from the same series. Pern is a fictional human-colonized planet and the main setting of the series.\nTypically, when starting a series of tweets (used to post content longer than 140 characters), one will start the first tweet with \"Thread: \" and end it with 1\/X. The second tweet will read 2\/X, and so on. If X, the total number of tweets, is unknown at the start, it will be listed or 1\/many or omitted: 1\/\nHere, there is a play on the Twitter thread and the actual threat to Pern.\nThe use of threads on Twitter became significantly more common in 2016 and through 2017. The title text dubs this \"Threadfall.\" In the Pern novels, Threadfall is also the name for the beginning of 50-year cyclic periods when Thread attacks the world of Pern and its inhabitants, which occur between relatively safe \"Intervals\" of around 200 years. Since according to the title text Threadfall occurred in 2016, it should be expected to continue for ~50 more years until the mid-2060s, when the next Interval will begin.\n[A mock-up of a \u201ctweet\u201d from the site twitter.com is shown. It contains a mock-up of a user photo of the fictional character F\u2019nor that resembles Hairy , including a tiny line sketch of F\u2019nor\u2019s brown dragon Canth flying overhead. Below the tweet are several action buttons typical of a Twitter post for comments, replying, likes, etc.]\nF\u2019nor @fnor Thread: The greatest threat to our life on Pern 1\/1\nOn Friday, the header was replaced with a message from Randall about how he would be visiting the U.K. on the following week. It read as follows:\n"}
{"id":1894,"title":"Real Estate","image_title":"Real Estate","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1894","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/real_estate.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1894:_Real_Estate","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball sit in office chairs on either side of a desk. Ponytail looks at a piece of paper she is holding in her hand, more papers lie on the table. Cueball sits with his hands in his lap, thinking in a thought bubble before he replies to her remark.] Ponytail: The sellers offer to drop their price by $10,000 and cover the driveway repairs. Cueball [thinking]: These are all staggeringly large amounts of money that I have no idea how to even think about, let alone compare. Cueball [speaking]: Tempting. We'll need a few hours to consider it.\n[Caption below the panels:] Me in any financial negotiation.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is speaking with Ponytail , his real estate agent, about an ongoing negotiation over the price of a house he is looking to buy. This is probably his first time buying a house and he is very overwhelmed by the process, a very common feeling among first-time home buyers. The housing market is so complicated and ever-changing, that it is almost impossible for the layman to have any concept of what a piece of property is worth. One must rely on the opinions of their real estate agent, building inspector, friends and family, along with research regarding the housing market in the area (average property values, what houses recently sold for, etc). Despite the comic mocking it as an obvious stalling tactic, telling the agent that you need time to think about it is a good strategy to research further while seeming to know what you're doing.\nIn the caption Randall makes it seem that he is in Cueball's situation in any financial negotiation, not only for such large ones as when buying real estate.\nIn the title text Randall mentions that he tried to convert the prices into the equivalent numbers of pizzas that amount could buy (most pizza parlors charge roughly 15 dollars for a 16-inch\/40 cm pizza, so this price cut could net him over 650 pizzas even before the driveway repairs). Thinking of the price of an object (or a reduction in the price) in terms of the number of pizzas (or similar objects) that amount could buy is a good strategy for weighing the pros and cons of a smaller purchase, but doesn't help in this situation, as the number of pizzas is so large that it becomes meaningless in itself. For example, a $300k house would represent 20k pizzas, or enough to have a pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for about 18 years! A better strategy would be to compare the large price to his average monthly cost of living (rent, utility bills, car payments, et al), or to compare to the comparatively stable average cost to build on-site, or the price of factory built homes.\nThis comic is in line with the much older 616: Lease and the more recent 1674: Adult regarding buying real estate and not feeling grown up (see also 905: Homeownership ).\nThis comic (and the title text) also alludes to the fact that humans are generally very bad at comprehending\/visualizing very large numbers; mathematician Spencer Greenberg has similarly suggested trying to convert very large numbers into different units (such as US national debt into US national debt per person) in an effort to bring the magnitudes down into something more comprehensible, something that Randall humorously attempts to do with the aforementioned conversion to quantities of pizza.\n[Ponytail and Cueball sit in office chairs on either side of a desk. Ponytail looks at a piece of paper she is holding in her hand, more papers lie on the table. Cueball sits with his hands in his lap, thinking in a thought bubble before he replies to her remark.] Ponytail: The sellers offer to drop their price by $10,000 and cover the driveway repairs. Cueball [thinking]: These are all staggeringly large amounts of money that I have no idea how to even think about, let alone compare. Cueball [speaking]: Tempting. We'll need a few hours to consider it.\n[Caption below the panels:] Me in any financial negotiation.\n"}
{"id":1895,"title":"Worrying Scientist Interviews","image_title":"Worrying Scientist Interviews","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1895","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/worrying_scientist_interviews.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1895:_Worrying_Scientist_Interviews","transcript":"[A chart consisting of a line with double arrows that has 12 dots progressing from left to right. Each dot has a line going to a label above or below the line. Above the labels is another label belonging to an arrow to its right that points right. Above this is a larger caption:] How worried you should be if you see local reporters interviewing scientists about a breaking news story, by field: More worried --->\n[The chart shows the following titles left to right (least to most worrisome), some above and some below the line however that doesn't affect their relative positions.  They are listed here in ascending worrisomeness for ease of viewing.] Archeologist Economist Nutritionist Criminologist Ornithologist Botanist Marine biologist Entomologist Astronomer Virologist Vulcanologist Astronomer who studies the sun\n","explanation":"When a new development occurs, news channels will often interview an expert in the field to educate laymen in what, exactly, is happening. Thus, when you turn on the local news and see a scientist being interviewed, it is likely that something new has come up regarding their field of study that could affect you. How much it affects you could range from an interesting bit of information about your local area, to the complete annihilation of the human race. So, to help identify how serious the issue likely is, Randall has made this chart showing how worried you should be depending on the field of the scientist. A table has been arranged to explain the amount of worry needed for each field below.\nTo the far left, the least worrying are archaeologist and economist . An archaeologist studies ancient human civilizations, which would be unlikely to harm any modern person. Economists study and explain the trends of finances and resources, which are also unlikely to pose an immediate threat. [ citation needed ]\nFollowing this, it shows nutritionists and eventually criminologists . A nutritionist studies nutrition in the human body, and is likely discussing which food options are healthy or unhealthy. While this may be important, it is not a cause for immediate concern. A criminologist, however, studies criminal behaviour. If a criminologist is being interviewed on the news, there is likely a change in criminal actions within the neighbourhood, be it more or less. It is also possible there may be a serial criminal working in the area. However, because crime is a relatively rare occurrence, and one for which precautions can be taken, it is still unlikely to be an immediate threat to the viewer.\nIt then moves past researchers studying different types of organisms, before reaching astronomers. Still only very few events would be local regarding astronomy, but it could of course be regarding a pending meteor strike.\nA virologist studies viral infections and their spread, and a vulcanologist studies volcanoes . Viruses spread quickly, and can be fatal, meaning a breaking news development in one's locale regarding viruses is likely to mean imminent danger. Volcanoes, depending on their size, can potentially demolish entire countries, thus having one making headlines nearby is also very concerning.\nThe last point to the right (most worried) \"Astronomer who studies the Sun\", also called a \" solar physicist \" (mentioned in the title text), could be really troublesome, but not especially locally. If there are serious problems with the Sun it will be a world-wide problem. But you should still be worried.\nThe title text mentions that the reason they are not called solar physicists, is that before they can tell the reporter this, they are interrupted by the anxious reporter who wishes to know what's wrong with the Sun. This is not really something that happens so often [ citation needed ] that the title texts \"They always try\" has any real meaning. And this is also why no one knows or uses the term solar physicists...\n[A chart consisting of a line with double arrows that has 12 dots progressing from left to right. Each dot has a line going to a label above or below the line. Above the labels is another label belonging to an arrow to its right that points right. Above this is a larger caption:] How worried you should be if you see local reporters interviewing scientists about a breaking news story, by field: More worried --->\n[The chart shows the following titles left to right (least to most worrisome), some above and some below the line however that doesn't affect their relative positions.  They are listed here in ascending worrisomeness for ease of viewing.] Archeologist Economist Nutritionist Criminologist Ornithologist Botanist Marine biologist Entomologist Astronomer Virologist Vulcanologist Astronomer who studies the sun\n"}
{"id":1896,"title":"Active Ingredients Only","image_title":"Active Ingredients Only","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1896","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/active_ingredients_only.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1896:_Active_Ingredients_Only","transcript":"[A picture of a pack of cold medicine. At the top there is a large advert in three lines. In a black line, to the right of the advert, white text states what kind of medicine is in the pack. Below to the left is a square frame listing ingredients. Most of the text inside this frame is unreadable scribbles. To the right of the frame is another advert inside a black frame. On the side of the box are also unreadable scribbles, both at the top and down next to the ingredients list. At the bottom of the box it can be seen how the pack can open up.] Active Ingredients Only TM We're not here to waste your time\u00ae\nCold Medicine\nActive ingredients [Six lines of scribbles, with first a name, then a statement in brackets and finally a column right of this with a short line of scribbles.]\nInactive ingredients None\nNo binders!\n","explanation":"Commercial medicine typically has one (or a few) \"Active\" ingredient and many \"Inactive\" ingredients. Active ingredients are the actual medicine, while inactive ingredients -- such as preservatives, dyes, or binders -- are added to dilute the active ingredient to a healthy level and help the body absorb the dose of active ingredient.\nRandall thus presents a pack of cold medicine that has \"Active Ingredients Only\", which is the name of the brand as can be seen since it has \"\u2122\" after the name (the unregistered trademark symbol). It has six active ingredients and no inactive ingredients. This is a spoof of the current trend of advertising food as containing \"no additives and no preservatives\".\nCold medicines are commonly packaged in blister packs, with each dose contained separately, and vegans commonly open up gelatin capsules and discard the capsule, ingesting only the contents of the pill (note that this may not be safe . Please consult your pharmacist or doctor before doing this).  By removing the inactive ingredients of the gelatin and the requirement to open it up, the slogan We're not here to waste your time , is justified.  This slogan is also trademarked.\nThe slogan is a registered trademark (\u00ae) while the product name is a common law trademark. This means that the slogan likely stays the same, while the product name changes from time to time.\nIn the title text, the medicine company promises their product \"Contains the active ingredients from all competing cold medicines, plus the medicines for headaches, arthritis, insomnia, indigestion, and more, because who wants THOSE things?\" This may be  be a follow-up (or a wish from Randall) after 1618: Cold Medicine , where Cueball wishes to try all possible types of cold medicine at once. The provided justification for combining all these medications is simple: These medicines cure unpleasant symptoms, so taking them all must be a good thing. What this ignores is that taking medicine intended to solve symptoms one doesn't have can be potentially harmful, and would likely be unavoidable for this product's consumers unless they are suffering from all these conditions simultaneously. Furthermore, mixing medications can often lead to unintended reactions and side effects, and is typically advised against.\nAnother joke is that popular cold medicines contain no antiviral ingredients at all, and treat symptoms only -- while it might make your runny nose less runny, it will do just as much to clear the rhinovirus causing your runny nose as a sugar pill. This part of the comic may be a follow-up to 1526: Placebo Blocker , where a sugar pill is offered to treat a headache.\nA secondary joke is by claiming the active ingredients from all \"competing\" cold medicines, the company producing this \"Active Ingredients Only\" may choose whom they say they are competing against.  Some cold medications treat only pain and fever, for example, and do nothing for cough, congestion, runny nose and sneezing.  Doctors recommend medicines which aid for the particular symptoms of the cold one is experiencing.\n[A picture of a pack of cold medicine. At the top there is a large advert in three lines. In a black line, to the right of the advert, white text states what kind of medicine is in the pack. Below to the left is a square frame listing ingredients. Most of the text inside this frame is unreadable scribbles. To the right of the frame is another advert inside a black frame. On the side of the box are also unreadable scribbles, both at the top and down next to the ingredients list. At the bottom of the box it can be seen how the pack can open up.] Active Ingredients Only TM We're not here to waste your time\u00ae\nCold Medicine\nActive ingredients [Six lines of scribbles, with first a name, then a statement in brackets and finally a column right of this with a short line of scribbles.]\nInactive ingredients None\nNo binders!\n"}
{"id":1897,"title":"Self Driving","image_title":"Self Driving","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1897","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/self_driving.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1897:_Self_Driving","transcript":"[Inside a frame there is the following text above an image:] To complete your registration, please tell us whether or not this image contains a stop sign:\n[The square image is a drawing of a road leading up to a sign post with a hard to read word at the top part of the eight-sided sign. The sign also has two smaller signs left and right with unreadable text. The image is of poor quality, but trees and other obstacles next to the road can be seen. Darkness around the edges of the image could indicate that it is night and the landscape is only lit up by a cars head lights.] Sign: Stop\n[Beneath the image there are two large gray buttons with a word in each:] No Yes\n[Beneath the buttons are the following text:] Answer quickly \u2013 our self-driving car is almost at the intersection.\n[Caption beneath the frame:] So much of \"AI\" is just figuring out way to offload work onto random strangers.\n","explanation":"This comic references the approach of using CAPTCHA inputs to solve problems, particularly those involving image classification, which are not solvable by computers, specifically reCAPTCHA v2's fallback puzzle, and hCaptcha's puzzle, both of which are based on identifying road features and vehicles. A reCAPTCHA version of this puzzle would ask \"check all squares containing a STOP SIGN\" using one or more images derived from Google Street View .\nSuch an approach can serve to create the learning set as the basis for training an artificial intelligence (AI) to better recognize or respond to similar stimuli. This approach was used by Google, the owners of reCAPTCHA, to identify house numbers in Street View to improve their mapping, and nowadays Google also uses CAPTCHAs to identify vehicles, street signs and other objects in Street View pictures. This might be a reasonable way to help improve the performance of the AI in a self-driving car that responds to video input, by reviewing images it might encounter and flagging road signs, etc. that it should respond to. Later a similar approach to learning important things, for the robots, was used in 2228: Machine Learning Captcha .\nHowever, the temptation might be to simply sidestep the hard problem of AI by having all instances 'solved' by \"offloading [the] work onto random strangers\" through CAPTCHAs.  For example, this has been used to defeat CAPTCHAs themselves; people were asked to solve CAPTCHAs to unlock pornographic images in a computer game, while the solution for the CAPTCHA was relayed to a server belonging to cybercriminals. (See PC stripper helps spam to spread and Humans + porn = solved CAPTCHA ).\nAlarmingly, the developers of this ' self driving ' car seem to have gone for the lazy approach.  Instead of teaching an AI, the CAPTCHA answer is used in real time to check whether the \"self-driving\" car is about to arrive at an intersection with a stop sign. This information is pretty critical, as failing to mark the stop could cause an accident. The user is unlikely to respond to the CAPTCHA in time to avert disaster, not to mention that any interruption to the car's internet connection could prove fatal. Self driving cars have become a recurrent theme on xkcd.\nThe system depicted is a Wizard of Oz experiment (as is the \"Mechanical Turk\" which a popular crowdworking system is named after) whereas actual self-driving cars, to the extent that they can use reCAPTCHA-style human detection systems, would involve an asynchronous decision system. Other synchronous decision systems which actually exist are political voting and money as a token of the exchange value of trade.\nThe title text explains that this method could be called \"crowdsourced steering\", crowdsourcing meaning sending the data on the internet to let several users provide their ideas and input on a problem. People would naturally suspect that this is considerably less safe than a car which is actually capable of self-driving; if the internet can barely collectively steer a videogame character , what chance do they have steering an actual, physical vehicle?\nThis also suggests that Randall is a bit skeptical of the current stage of AI, as this doubts whether the AI technology really is working in the way that we expect. It also comments on how what we call 'progress' actually is putting our work onto other people.\n[Inside a frame there is the following text above an image:] To complete your registration, please tell us whether or not this image contains a stop sign:\n[The square image is a drawing of a road leading up to a sign post with a hard to read word at the top part of the eight-sided sign. The sign also has two smaller signs left and right with unreadable text. The image is of poor quality, but trees and other obstacles next to the road can be seen. Darkness around the edges of the image could indicate that it is night and the landscape is only lit up by a cars head lights.] Sign: Stop\n[Beneath the image there are two large gray buttons with a word in each:] No Yes\n[Beneath the buttons are the following text:] Answer quickly \u2013 our self-driving car is almost at the intersection.\n[Caption beneath the frame:] So much of \"AI\" is just figuring out way to offload work onto random strangers.\n"}
{"id":1898,"title":"October 2017","image_title":"October 2017","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1898","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/october_2017.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1898:_October_2017","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking.] Megan: Want to feel old? Cueball: Why do you always start your factoids that way? Of course I don't want to feel old. I already feel old.\n[Slim beat panel where they keep walking.]\n[In a frame-less panel only Cueball is shown walking.] Cueball: ...Fine, hit me.\n[Megan holds her hand up as they again are shown walking together. Cueball balls his hands up into fists in response to her comment.] Megan: If you broke a mirror back when the Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie came out, your seven years of bad luck would be over this week. Cueball: Dammit.\n","explanation":"Randall once again makes us feel old by referencing an old movie that our memory puts as recent. The movie in question is The Social Network , written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher , which was released seven years and three days prior to this comic, on October 1, 2010. Seven years is also how long some people believe bad luck will follow you after breaking a mirror .\nMegan has often tried to make Cueball feel old and he thus claims he doesn't want to hear another of her factoids that will make him feel older, as he already feels old. Megan actually complies, but in the end Cueball gets too curious and ask her to hit him with the fact, which he immediately regrets.\nA mirror was previously broken by Black Hat in 1136: Broken Mirror . However, as of October 2017, there are still 2 years left of bad luck.\nThe title text refers to the the 2016 US presidential election which took place on November 8, 2016, almost 11 months before this comic, and Randall\/Cueball cannot understand that this is not longer ago. Donald Trump won in a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton ( Randall 's preferred of the two, see 1756: I'm With Her ). A common refrain, especially among comedians, is that Donald Trump's tumultuous presidency so far has been so stressful and eventful that the election feels like it took place far longer than 11 months ago. Backward telescoping is a psychological effect that causes people to overestimate the elapsed time since an event.\nInterestingly, the title of this comic is patterned on the previous \"this will make you feel old\" comic \" November 2016 ,\" which was published in the early hours of November 9th, while the presidential election's ballots were still being counted. Some people (including explain xkcd editors, writing in that explanation's trivia section, see that for more details, also on this special title name) felt that Randall could have published something more timely, and commented that the election had made them feel old enough as it was. By using the same sort of title and making this joke, Randall brings the whole thing full circle.\nShortly after the election Randall made several comics that could indicate his emotions regarding the result, but references to the election have become fewer and farther apart and here he again indicates that he has not been happy with the election result and what has followed, causing him to feel that all these bad things could not really have happened in less than a year, but they did.\n[Megan and Cueball are walking.] Megan: Want to feel old? Cueball: Why do you always start your factoids that way? Of course I don't want to feel old. I already feel old.\n[Slim beat panel where they keep walking.]\n[In a frame-less panel only Cueball is shown walking.] Cueball: ...Fine, hit me.\n[Megan holds her hand up as they again are shown walking together. Cueball balls his hands up into fists in response to her comment.] Megan: If you broke a mirror back when the Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie came out, your seven years of bad luck would be over this week. Cueball: Dammit.\n"}
{"id":1899,"title":"Ears","image_title":"Ears","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1899","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ears.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1899:_Ears","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting with his back towards Megan who is lying on her back on a grassy hill. Both are looking up at a sky with small puffy clouds (one large, two small, and four tiny). In the background fields are visible below their vantage point.]\n[Same setting, but with the clouds removed, to make room for Cueball's text.] Cueball: Do you ever just look up at the sky and wonder...\n[Same setting, zoomed a bit out to make more of the background fields visible, still with the clouds missing due to the text from the two people.] Cueball: \"What are normal peoples' ears shaped like, that earbuds stay in without falling out?\" Megan: Man, who knows what's going on in there.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Megan are sitting in a park together and appear to be cloudwatching. Cueball asks if Megan has ever looked up in the sky and wondered, suggesting that he is thinking deep thoughts while allowing his mind to wander, what \"normal\" people's ears are shaped like; that their earbuds stay fitted inside their ears instead of falling off. It is possible, but not evident, that Cueball is listening to some audio device through earbuds , and his wondering is caused because he looked up at the sky and they fell out, leading to his thoughts about what it would be like to have \"normal shaped ears\" that would allow him to wear earbuds without this happening. (This joke is directed towards a large group of people who cannot use earbuds successfully because they fall out.) Megan's response could either be making fun of Cueball (whatever goes on in his head with the random conversation points he tends to bring up) or agreeing with him that earbud wearers' ears are mysterious.\nThe comic appears to be a variation on a famous and often-quoted fragment from Voltaire 's satirical novella Candide , wherein Dr. Pangloss states that we live in ' the best of all possible worlds ', among other reasons because '\u2026noses were made to wear spectacles, and so we have spectacles'.\nThe title text is a play on conspiracy theories wherein the human race is being assimilated by aliens, and the person coming up with the conspiracy theory thinks he is one of the few \"free\" survivors. The use of \"brain slugs\" in particular may be a reference to the Animorphs book series, a nostalgic favorite of Randall's, in which humanity is being colonized by parasitic alien slugs called Yeerks , that enter a human's brain through the ears and can control them. Randall\/Cueball here is suggesting that the reason most humans can wear earbuds is because the Yeerks hold the earbuds in place.\nAnother possibility, given the earbud\/music reference, is that Randall is making a joke about earworms .\n[Cueball is sitting with his back towards Megan who is lying on her back on a grassy hill. Both are looking up at a sky with small puffy clouds (one large, two small, and four tiny). In the background fields are visible below their vantage point.]\n[Same setting, but with the clouds removed, to make room for Cueball's text.] Cueball: Do you ever just look up at the sky and wonder...\n[Same setting, zoomed a bit out to make more of the background fields visible, still with the clouds missing due to the text from the two people.] Cueball: \"What are normal peoples' ears shaped like, that earbuds stay in without falling out?\" Megan: Man, who knows what's going on in there.\n"}
{"id":1900,"title":"Jet Lag","image_title":"Jet Lag","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1900","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jet_lag.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1900:_Jet_Lag","transcript":"[Hairy, with more messed up hair than usual, is rubbing his eyes while small \"sleepy\" bubbles form over his head, while walking towards Ponytail.] Hairy: Sorry, I just woke up. Ponytail: It's 3 PM! ...Oh, of course, you're still jet lagged. Hairy: I-yeah, that's it! I definitely didn't spend half the night reading Wikipedia articles about random maritime disasters.\n[Caption below the panel:] I love traveling, because my sleep schedule is as messed up as always, but suddenly I have an excuse.\n","explanation":"Jet lag is a physiological condition widely attributed to the effect of changing one's longitude fast enough that one's \"body clock\" is unable to adapt to the official clock. (The actual causes are somewhat more complex, and may be influenced by the cramped conditions on the airplane.  The effect of travel between the east coast of North America and the west coast of South America, which are at nearly the same longitude, and differ by only one hour in official clock time, is much more severe than the effects of setting clocks ahead an hour in the spring and behind an hour in the fall.  Some White House staffers get jet lag when they travel on commercial flights but not when they travel on Air Force One.)  Symptoms include a sleep cycle which does not match the solar cycle as it usually would. [ citation needed ]\nHairy , representing Randall , has just woken up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and Ponytail mentions he must be still jet lagged (possibly from a recent trip). Hairy then denies much too specifically that he has actually been up to some late-night Wikipedia browsing and reading about maritime disasters .\nIn the caption Randall confesses that he loves traveling, because he can then use jet lag as a nice excuse for what is actually his usual messed up sleep cycle.\nIn the title text, Randall states that he had to do some important research. But what he lists, are clearly also just topics he read in Wikipedia: proposed interstellar space missions, basketball statistics , canceled skyscrapers , and every article linked from \" Women in warfare and the military in the 19th century .\" Randall has earlier illustrated this issue in 214: The Problem with Wikipedia .\nRandall has previously discussed his oft-changing sleep cycle in 320: 28-Hour Day and 448: Good Morning , and has alluded to it more subtly in 68: Five Thirty , 92: Sunrise , and 776: Still No Sleep . We can thus see that this is a habit of Randall's that has persisted for more than a decade, as has his obsession with Wikipedia.\n[Hairy, with more messed up hair than usual, is rubbing his eyes while small \"sleepy\" bubbles form over his head, while walking towards Ponytail.] Hairy: Sorry, I just woke up. Ponytail: It's 3 PM! ...Oh, of course, you're still jet lagged. Hairy: I-yeah, that's it! I definitely didn't spend half the night reading Wikipedia articles about random maritime disasters.\n[Caption below the panel:] I love traveling, because my sleep schedule is as messed up as always, but suddenly I have an excuse.\n"}
{"id":1901,"title":"Logical","image_title":"Logical","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1901","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/logical.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1901:_Logical","transcript":"[White Hat is spreading his arms and facing Cueball.] White Hat: We wouldn't have all these problems if people just learned to be more logical and science-driven instead of relying on feelings . Cueball: Oh? What study are you basing that on? White Hat: It just seems obvious! White Hat: I mean, look at the crap these idiots believe!\n","explanation":"White Hat says that problems in society could be avoided if people relied on logic and science rather than feelings\u2014but when Cueball presses him to back up his claim, White Hat insists that his claim must be true, because it just seems obvious (to White Hat), and what the opposition (which he dismissively refers to as \"these idiots\") believes is crap in his opinion. Since White Hat refers to all people in general and since he falls in the same trap as he complains about, using his feelings for his case instead of logic and science, White Hat's argument is both fallacious and hypocritical.\nThe title text is White Hat's opinion, where he states that he has always said that people just need more common sense . He then adds, but not the kind of common sense that lets them figure out that he is condescending (i.e. talking down to them) and basically thinks that they are stupid. If they did, they would probably realize that White Hat considers himself smarter than them, and likely feel insulted and take retribution. (At the same time, he may himself lack this form of \"common sense,\" as Cueball's question could be seen as a veiled insult highlighting White Hat's hypocrisy.)\nWhen people talk about \"common sense\", they often really mean \"they should think like I do\". Using a term like \"common sense\" as a proxy for one's personal point of view implies that everyone else should have the same point of view. This discredits the fact that each person has their own point of view, completely valid to their own mind, and any attempts to push someone else's idea of a \"common sense\" upon them usually feels like \"being talked down to\" because of the implicit \"fact\" that that person's point of view is \"common\" and makes \"sense\", and therefore they must be smarter than you if you don't agree with their \"common sense\".\nIronically, there is some inconclusive scientific evidence against White Hat's position. It is possible that effective rational thought depends on feelings and emotions as a preprocessing step. For example, people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lose their ability to have gut reactions to decision options. In Antonio Damasio 's research, they were unable to make good decisions in everyday life. This may be because every option seems emotionally as good as any other and the brain is not good at conscious processing of large numbers of alternatives. See Descartes' Error by Damasio (1994) and The Righteous Mind by Haidt (2012).\n[White Hat is spreading his arms and facing Cueball.] White Hat: We wouldn't have all these problems if people just learned to be more logical and science-driven instead of relying on feelings . Cueball: Oh? What study are you basing that on? White Hat: It just seems obvious! White Hat: I mean, look at the crap these idiots believe!\n"}
{"id":1902,"title":"State Borders","image_title":"State Borders","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1902","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/state_borders.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1902:_State_Borders","transcript":"[An outline map of the United States is shown, including state boundaries. The following edit marks are shown in red text:] [Minnesota's Northwest Angle is circled] Give to Canada [Border between Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula is crossed out] This should be Wisconsin [New York's Long Island is circled, with arrows and question marks pointing to New Jersey and Connecticut] Move Long Island to NJ or CT or make it its own state [New York's eastern border has been straightened] [Wyoming's western border is moved to align with that of Colorado. The Montana\/Idaho and Idaho\/Utah borders are extended to reach the new border. Similarly, Colorado's eastern border is moved to align with that of Wyoming, and the Nebraska\/Kansas border has been extended] Align to grid [West Virginia's northern panhandle has been given to Ohio and part of its eastern panhandle has been given to Maryland. In return, Western Maryland has been given to West Virginia. The altogether effect is that West Virginia and Maryland have more compact shapes] Clean Up [Rhode Island has been enlarged to encompass southeastern Massachusetts, and Delaware now takes up the entire Delmarva Peninsula] Enlarge Rhode Island & Delaware [The Oklahoma Panhandle has been extended west until it reaches Nevada, taking the northernmost parts of Arizona and New Mexico with it] If we're going to have a panhandle, why not commit to it? [The Missouri Bootheel has been given to Arkansas] Fix this thing [The part of Virginia west of the Appalachian Mountains has been given to Kentucky] [The southwestern and eastern borders of Nevada have been extended into Arizona until they meet a point. A part of California is slightly extended to reach the revised border] [Parts of Arizona and New Mexico have been ceded to Mexico, and part of Texas has been given to New Mexico, so that the southern borders of Arizona and New Mexico and the northern border of the Trans-Pecos area of Texas collectively form a straight line] Clean Up [Parts of northeastern Texas have been given to Arkansas and Louisiana] [The northern and southern borders of Tennessee have been straightened] Straighten to fix survey errors [A line has been traced along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida] Good curve! Keep. [Alaska's southeastern panhandle has been circled] Let's be honest - this should be Canada, too. [The Alabama\/Florida border has been erased, and Alabama's eastern border has been extended south until it meets the Gulf of Mexico] Why should Florida get Alabama's coastline? It has plenty.\n[Caption below the panel:] It was scary when graphic designers seized control of the country, but it turned out they just wanted to fix some things about the state borders that had always bothered them.\n\n","explanation":"In this comic, graphic designers take control of the United States, but the only thing they do is to change the state and national borders, using primarily aesthetic criteria. State and national borders have generally emerged from some combination of political decisions, natural boundaries, control of natural resources, and, to some degree, from chance. As the comic implies, some borders originally resulted from surveying errors, but became encoded by law and tradition, and thus were never changed.\nDespite the caption's rather blas\u00e9 reaction to the graphic designers' master plan, the changes they propose could be rather tumultuous. Political boundaries are difficult to change because rewriting them places entire populations in different states or even different countries. Even within the US, changing a population from one state to another has serious implications. A different state means different laws, tax obligations, public benefits, business regulations, infrastructure support, etc. It would also mean that control of some very substantial natural resources would be transferred from one state to another. More significantly, the suggestion to cede portions of the US to Canada and Mexico would be a much bigger deal, forcing residents of those areas to either leave their homes, businesses, and communities or surrender their current nationality and apply for citizenship in another country. The joke behind the comic is that graphic designers would tend to ignore these practical concerns and pay more attention to a map looking orderly.\nThis comic hints at the fact that it is indeed Randall who wants to see these changes made.\nIn the title text, the graphic designers have a civil war between the ones that favor \"panhandles\" in the borders, such as the Oklahoma one which is enlarged in the map, the Florida one which is removed in the map, and maybe others such as the Texas region known as the \"Texas panhandle\". However, as graphic designers, they get too caught up in making the flag designs for their faction to actually fight. Randall has shown interest for vexillology (the study of flags) in the past.\n[An outline map of the United States is shown, including state boundaries. The following edit marks are shown in red text:] [Minnesota's Northwest Angle is circled] Give to Canada [Border between Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula is crossed out] This should be Wisconsin [New York's Long Island is circled, with arrows and question marks pointing to New Jersey and Connecticut] Move Long Island to NJ or CT or make it its own state [New York's eastern border has been straightened] [Wyoming's western border is moved to align with that of Colorado. The Montana\/Idaho and Idaho\/Utah borders are extended to reach the new border. Similarly, Colorado's eastern border is moved to align with that of Wyoming, and the Nebraska\/Kansas border has been extended] Align to grid [West Virginia's northern panhandle has been given to Ohio and part of its eastern panhandle has been given to Maryland. In return, Western Maryland has been given to West Virginia. The altogether effect is that West Virginia and Maryland have more compact shapes] Clean Up [Rhode Island has been enlarged to encompass southeastern Massachusetts, and Delaware now takes up the entire Delmarva Peninsula] Enlarge Rhode Island & Delaware [The Oklahoma Panhandle has been extended west until it reaches Nevada, taking the northernmost parts of Arizona and New Mexico with it] If we're going to have a panhandle, why not commit to it? [The Missouri Bootheel has been given to Arkansas] Fix this thing [The part of Virginia west of the Appalachian Mountains has been given to Kentucky] [The southwestern and eastern borders of Nevada have been extended into Arizona until they meet a point. A part of California is slightly extended to reach the revised border] [Parts of Arizona and New Mexico have been ceded to Mexico, and part of Texas has been given to New Mexico, so that the southern borders of Arizona and New Mexico and the northern border of the Trans-Pecos area of Texas collectively form a straight line] Clean Up [Parts of northeastern Texas have been given to Arkansas and Louisiana] [The northern and southern borders of Tennessee have been straightened] Straighten to fix survey errors [A line has been traced along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida] Good curve! Keep. [Alaska's southeastern panhandle has been circled] Let's be honest - this should be Canada, too. [The Alabama\/Florida border has been erased, and Alabama's eastern border has been extended south until it meets the Gulf of Mexico] Why should Florida get Alabama's coastline? It has plenty.\n[Caption below the panel:] It was scary when graphic designers seized control of the country, but it turned out they just wanted to fix some things about the state borders that had always bothered them.\n\n"}
{"id":1903,"title":"Bun Trend","image_title":"Bun Trend","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1903","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bun_trend.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1903:_Bun_Trend","transcript":"[Beret Guy holds a stick and points at a board next to him. The board contains a picture of a rabbit, a data point graph, and other notes.] Beret Guy: Good morning, Governor. Our tracking systems show a rapid increase in the number of buns around the Capitol.\n[Hairy is sitting at an office desk and facing Beret Guy in a frameless panel.] Hairy: Buns? Beret Guy: Yes; there's been a long-term upward trend, but it has accelerated recently. Hairy: The trend in... rabbits. Beret Guy: Yes.\n[Beret Guy takes out his phone.] Hairy: So... so what? Beret Guy: So if you want to see some buns, there are lots of them outside! [Beret Guy's phone vibrates] Phone: beep! Beret Guy: Ooh! Beret Guy: There's a small one right now!\n[Zoom-in on Beret Guy.] Hairy (offscreen): Do you... actually work for me? Beret Guy: Almost certainly. We had an election, right? I wrote my name in on the thing. Hairy (offscreen): Security? Beret Guy: It's been an honor to serve.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Beret Guy takes his bun shenanigans to the state government, reporting to the governor that the number of buns around the capitol has shown a rapid increase. The governor is confused, then finally comes to grasp that Beret Guy is talking about rabbits , lots of which can be seen if he would just go outside (by the way, there is a small one RIGHT NOW !).\nElections in the United States often have a blank spot on the ballot for the voter to write the name of a write-in candidate . Beret Guy thinks he works for the governor because he wrote his name in on the ballot. This does not mean that he actually works for the governor. [ citation needed ]\nThe governor finally takes appropriate action by calling security, and Beret Guy confronts his fate with poise and honor. Indeed, the readiness with which he accepts his removal almost seems to suggest that he doesn't belong, which would be an unusual level of awareness for his character. Alternatively, Beret Guy might have misinterpreted the governor's request for security as a question of whether he works in security, or simply ignorance. This also may be an ironic reference to the rapid turnover in President Trump 's staff.\n\"Buns\" have been mentioned previously in 1682: Bun and 1871: Bun Alert .\nBeret Guy's uncertain position in the government is very similar to the way he treats and operates his business.\nIn the title text, experts characterize the ecological impact of a large number of bunnies as \"adorable\" instead of giving information on how the rabbits are affecting the environment.\n[Beret Guy holds a stick and points at a board next to him. The board contains a picture of a rabbit, a data point graph, and other notes.] Beret Guy: Good morning, Governor. Our tracking systems show a rapid increase in the number of buns around the Capitol.\n[Hairy is sitting at an office desk and facing Beret Guy in a frameless panel.] Hairy: Buns? Beret Guy: Yes; there's been a long-term upward trend, but it has accelerated recently. Hairy: The trend in... rabbits. Beret Guy: Yes.\n[Beret Guy takes out his phone.] Hairy: So... so what? Beret Guy: So if you want to see some buns, there are lots of them outside! [Beret Guy's phone vibrates] Phone: beep! Beret Guy: Ooh! Beret Guy: There's a small one right now!\n[Zoom-in on Beret Guy.] Hairy (offscreen): Do you... actually work for me? Beret Guy: Almost certainly. We had an election, right? I wrote my name in on the thing. Hairy (offscreen): Security? Beret Guy: It's been an honor to serve.\n"}
{"id":1904,"title":"Research Risks","image_title":"Research Risks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1904","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/research_risks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1904:_Research_Risks","transcript":"[A chart with two crossing lines with double arrows. Each arrow is labeled:] Y axis top: High Y axis bottom: Low X axis left: Low X axis right: High\n[Near each of the \"high\" ends of the two axis there is a label written in gray, with a line pointing to the relevant axis:] Y axis: Risk of your research being used by a supervillain for world domination X axis: Risk of the thing you're studying breaking free from your facility and threatening the local population\n[The following points are on the charts upper left quadrant (in reading order):] Prosthetics Neuroscience Laser Optics Pharmacology Materials Science Sociology History Psychology\n[The following points are on the charts upper right quadrant (in reading order):] Robotics Genetic Engineering Chemistry Microbiology\n[The following points are on the charts lower left quadrant (in reading order):] Geology Linguistics Paleontology Astronomy Molasses Storage Dentistry\n[The following points are on the charts lower right quadrant (in reading order):] Botany Entomology Mycology Marine Biology Ornithology\n","explanation":"This is a comparison of the possibility of the subjects of various sciences being a threat to humanity. It can either be an autonomous threat to the local population (i.e. by escape from a lab), or as part of a supervillain's scheme to rule the world .\nIn general, areas of study that could be used by supervillains, but are unlikely to \"break free\" refer to technologies that are unlikely to be self-propagating or self-maintaining, but could be used as weapons or for some other form of control. Subjects that could break free, but are unlikely to be used by supervillains are all living organisms (which could presumably breed and multiply without human intervention), but which have little potential as weapons.  Areas of study that fall in both categories are either more controllable forms of biology (microbiology, genetic engineering), forms of technology that could become self-propagating (robotics), or a study where a release could be dangerous without being self-propagating (chemistry).\nThe category of a low risk of either could, of course, contain many fields of study, as most research fields have limited potential for weaponry and little danger of going out of control on a large scale.\nSee the chart below for detailed explanations of each scatter point.\nThere have so far been several similar comics with such scatter plots . See for instance 1242: Scary Names , 1468: Worrying , 1501: Mysteries and 1701: Speed and Danger .\nThe title text is related to the Molasses Storage entry at the bottom left of the chart, and references the Great Molasses Flood , also known as the Great Boston Molasses Flood. It occurred on January 15, 1919 in the North End neighborhood of Boston , Massachusetts (the state in which Randall lives). A large molasses storage tank burst and a wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph (56 km\/h), killing 21 and injuring 150. The joke in the title text is that in 2031 (14 years after the release of this comic) the Canadian Space Agency has an even more serious disaster, which will be known as the orbital maple syrup delivery disaster. The title text claims that this disaster then became the deadliest confectionery containment accident, thus killing more than 21 people.\nNote\u00a0: percentages refer to the position of the center of the smallest enclosing rectangle around each name. 0% and 100% correspond to the low and high arrow tips, respectively.\n[A chart with two crossing lines with double arrows. Each arrow is labeled:] Y axis top: High Y axis bottom: Low X axis left: Low X axis right: High\n[Near each of the \"high\" ends of the two axis there is a label written in gray, with a line pointing to the relevant axis:] Y axis: Risk of your research being used by a supervillain for world domination X axis: Risk of the thing you're studying breaking free from your facility and threatening the local population\n[The following points are on the charts upper left quadrant (in reading order):] Prosthetics Neuroscience Laser Optics Pharmacology Materials Science Sociology History Psychology\n[The following points are on the charts upper right quadrant (in reading order):] Robotics Genetic Engineering Chemistry Microbiology\n[The following points are on the charts lower left quadrant (in reading order):] Geology Linguistics Paleontology Astronomy Molasses Storage Dentistry\n[The following points are on the charts lower right quadrant (in reading order):] Botany Entomology Mycology Marine Biology Ornithology\n"}
{"id":1905,"title":"Cast Iron Pan","image_title":"Cast Iron Pan","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1905","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cast_iron_pans.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1905:_Cast_Iron_Pan","transcript":"[White Hat is holding a pan by the handle pointing to the frying surface as he shows it to Cueball.] White Hat: Never clean a cast-iron pan with soap. It destroys the seasoning. Cueball: Got it.\n[White Hat shift the pan to his right hand and lowers it to his side holding a finger up in front of Cueball.] White Hat: If you ever let soap touch the pan, throw it away. You're clearly not up to taking care of it. Cueball: Wow, okay.\n[In a frame-less panel White Hat has taken the pan back to the first hand holding on the the edge while he holds his other hand close to the frying surface.] White Hat: Apply moisturizer to the pan daily to keep it fresh. Cueball: ...Moisturizer? White Hat: Do you want it to get all wrinkly? Cueball: ...I...guess not.\n[White Hat has shifted the pan to the second hand again holding it by the handle away from Cueball, while pointing at Cueball with the other hand.] White Hat: Twice a year, fill the pan with iron filings and leave it in direct sunlight for 24 hours. Cueball: Wait. 24 hours of sun? White Hat: If you're not willing to travel to the Arctic, you don't deserve cast iron.\n","explanation":"White Hat is discussing tips for maintaining Cast-iron cookware . Cast-iron cookware is well-loved and often promoted by cooking aficionados, but requires more effort and care to maintain than many other modern forms of cookware. This strip satirizes both the amount of effort involved, and the attitude of connoisseurs who look down on people who are unwilling to put in such effort. In typical xkcd fashion, the comic starts off somewhat realistic and escalates to absurdity.\nWhite Hat tells the old myth (debunking articles: Lifehacker , The Kitchn , Serious Eats ), that \"you shouldn't wash your cast iron pan with soap since it destroys the seasoning \", to Cueball . Seasoning is the process of treating the surface of a pan with a stick-resistant coating formed from polymerized fat and oil on the surface. Although it may not be a problem to use soap on your seasoned cast iron pan, you should still proceed with care with how you treat it.\nWhite Hat starts to exaggerate; he tells him that if he ever as much as let soap touch the pan he should just throw it away, as that fact alone would prove that he would not be up to taking care of such a precious possession. This is a kind of scare tactic that might make Cueball believe this and anything else he tells him.\nWhite Hat continues to give dubious advice to the point of absurdity, and Cueball becomes more and more wary of it.\nHis next word of advice is to apply moisturizer to the pan daily to keep it fresh. Cueball asks why and is told that it is to avoid the pan getting wrinkles . This implies that the pan would age like a human and get wrinkles. This is, of course, nonsense [ citation needed ] , but Cueball is not yet ready to dismiss White Hat's advice.\nThe final piece of advice is that twice a year Cueball should fill the pan with iron filings and leave it in direct sunlight for 24 hours. Both details are intended to be absurd. For one, neither the iron filings nor the sunlight appear to serve any actual purpose . Second, 24 continuous hours of direct sunlight is impossible to achieve in most places. North of the Arctic Circle (often shortened to simply \"the Arctic \") there will be at least one day a year where the sun does not set. While one might assume that a combined total of 24 hours over couple of days would be sufficient, White Hat implies that it's necessary to travel to very remote locations in very specific parts of the year to meet an extreme requirement. He further casts an unwillingness to meet this unreasonable standard as rendering a person unworthy of cast iron.\nWhite Hat's strict tone \"If you're not willing to travel to the Arctic, you don't deserve cast iron\" might also suggest that cast iron is a special almost-legendary metal similar to Damascus steel or its fictional counterpart Valyrian steel and requires distant travel to obtain\/maintain. This is likely a parody of the level of reverence cast iron cookware tends to receive in certain circles.  Despite there being alternatives that are much easier to maintain, a significant number of cooks insist that cast iron has qualities that make it worth the amount of effort involved.\nIn the title text, White Hat mentions that, if you wish to evenly space the two 24 hours of sun each year, it is easiest to alternate between the Arctic and the Antarctic regions. But this will mean that you have to travel a long distance at least once a year; even if you already lived inside one of the Polar Circles , you would have to travel to the other at least once a year.\nIt is implied that you do not have to space them evenly. As he mentions, some people just go to the Arctic twice a year near the equinoxes .  However, according to White Hat, this is not the same, probably because it doesn't lead to an exact six-month spacing and the sun would stay very low on the horizon and the sunlight would not be as intense.\nIn order to accomplish this other scheme, it also means that they would actually have to go very close to the North Pole (or South Pole ), as this is the only place with midnight sun around the equinoxes. So, in principle, this would be much more cumbersome than just going inside the southernmost part of the Arctic region at the summer solstice , and similarly the northernmost part of the Antarctic region at the northern hemisphere's winter solstice (which will be the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere).\nWhen looking at it like this, it may seem that White Hat actually means that you should always go to the poles, rather than just to a place with 24 hours of sunlight, in order to have the sun high in the sky as well.\n[White Hat is holding a pan by the handle pointing to the frying surface as he shows it to Cueball.] White Hat: Never clean a cast-iron pan with soap. It destroys the seasoning. Cueball: Got it.\n[White Hat shift the pan to his right hand and lowers it to his side holding a finger up in front of Cueball.] White Hat: If you ever let soap touch the pan, throw it away. You're clearly not up to taking care of it. Cueball: Wow, okay.\n[In a frame-less panel White Hat has taken the pan back to the first hand holding on the the edge while he holds his other hand close to the frying surface.] White Hat: Apply moisturizer to the pan daily to keep it fresh. Cueball: ...Moisturizer? White Hat: Do you want it to get all wrinkly? Cueball: ...I...guess not.\n[White Hat has shifted the pan to the second hand again holding it by the handle away from Cueball, while pointing at Cueball with the other hand.] White Hat: Twice a year, fill the pan with iron filings and leave it in direct sunlight for 24 hours. Cueball: Wait. 24 hours of sun? White Hat: If you're not willing to travel to the Arctic, you don't deserve cast iron.\n"}
{"id":1906,"title":"Making Progress","image_title":"Making Progress","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1906","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/making_progress.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1906:_Making_Progress","transcript":"[Megan is sitting and looking at a laptop.] Megan: I started the day with lots of problems. Megan: But now, after hours and hours of work, Megan: I have lots of problems in a spreadsheet .\n","explanation":"Megan has procrastinated made progress on a large backlog of problems. While she started the day with lots of problems, she has entered those problems into a spreadsheet. While this could potentially allow her to tackle her problems in a more organized way and fix them more quickly, the humor lies in that none of the problems have actually been solved. Additionally, it's questionable whether this was worth the hours of effort she put into making the spreadsheet, and even whether the spreadsheet has made her problems any easier to tackle in the first place. The comic questions the usage of spreadsheets for anything beyond organization.\nIn the title text she reveals that even her spreadsheet has a problem, because \"#REF Circular Dependency detected\" is a spreadsheet error meaning that a formula is (possibly indirectly) using its own cell in the equation. This is probably because she has used the Count() function to find the number of problems to be solved, but since one of those problems is not knowing how many problems she has, it is trying to include itself in the count.\nThis counting problem may also be a metaphor for circular dependencies within the problems themselves, such that a solution to one problem would help solve another problem, but solving the first problem depends on a solution to the second problem (e.g. organizing a cluttered mess of objects requires room to work, which is not available because of all the clutter).\nArguably, this has introduced a further problem, so she actually now has (#REF Circular Dependency detected)+1 problems. It's also possible, since Megan has chosen to interpret the error message as a numeric value representing the number of problems she has, that she is simply not good at using her spreadsheet software, which may be another problem that needs adding to her list. The use of COUNT() has, rather than returning an exact amount of problems to solve, implied that her original problems cause so many more that she does indeed have \"countless problems\".\nThe error shown is similar to two different errors in the popular spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel : #REF! , which means that an invalid reference has been made (such as to a cell or sheet that has since been deleted), and circular references , which means that a certain cell's content has been made to depend, at some stage, on its own content, recursively . The latter could be because it directly refers to itself, or because it refers to another cell which, in some way, refers back to it. Most versions of Excel do not show circular references in the cell, next to where a #REF! error would be; rather they show an error message box and arrows drawn over the sheet which connect the dependencies of the cells involved in the error. However, since the comic does not specify which spreadsheet software Megan is using, Randall can simply make the errors up, to make the joke more quickly understandable, while clearly referencing errors that show in actual spreadsheet software.\n[Megan is sitting and looking at a laptop.] Megan: I started the day with lots of problems. Megan: But now, after hours and hours of work, Megan: I have lots of problems in a spreadsheet .\n"}
{"id":1907,"title":"Immune System","image_title":"Immune System","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1907","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/immune_system.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1907:_Immune_System","transcript":"[Ponytail is standing in front of a boardroom meeting, pointing to a presentation on a screen. Cueball, Megan and Hairbun are in the audience, sitting at a long table; an extra, unoccupied chair is in the front.] Ponytail: My body hosts an autonomous microscopic defensive swarm that will do anything to protect me. Ponytail: I have no ability to restrain it and I don't know my own power. Ponytail: So listen up. Ponytail: Sales grew by 4% this quarter...\n[Caption below the panel:] Business protip: You can strengthen any presentation by opening with a reminder about how cool immune systems are.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Ponytail is delivering an informative report to a group of listeners, likely important managers of some large company. She begins her lecture by stating she is the host of a microscopic autonomous swarm that will do anything to protect her. She is referring to the immune system, which could technically be defined as a \"microscopic autonomous swarm\" that will do anything to protect her -- i.e destroy pathogens such as viruses and bacteria, both of which cause multitudinous diseases in humans. Like many of the systems of the body, the immune system cannot be controlled by conscious thought, and should not be taken as unordinary.\nThe caption below reveals the method behind her madness. Randall claims that beginning any business presentation with a surreal description of one's own immune system is guaranteed to strengthen your case. Whether or not this is actually the case is irrelevant, the point of the comic is about \"how cool the immune system is\", and explains its coolness through an unconventional description of how the process works. Additionally, Ponytail's description implies more potential power over external entities than an immune system typically has, perhaps to to gain more respect\/fear from the speaker's audience.\nThe title text elaborates further on this, stating that similar arguments can be used in negotiation. The description of the immune system is deliberately misleading, implying that the immune system may attack the other negotiator if the terms of the deal aren't satisfactory. While it is correct that your immune cells cannot be reasoned with [ citation needed ] and theoretically it could cause an anaphylactic shock in the targeted organism, the veiled threat omits the fact that the immune system 1) is unaffected by external negotiations conducted by its host, 2) is incapable of attacking things outside of the body, and 3) would have to overcome the target's own immune system.\n[Ponytail is standing in front of a boardroom meeting, pointing to a presentation on a screen. Cueball, Megan and Hairbun are in the audience, sitting at a long table; an extra, unoccupied chair is in the front.] Ponytail: My body hosts an autonomous microscopic defensive swarm that will do anything to protect me. Ponytail: I have no ability to restrain it and I don't know my own power. Ponytail: So listen up. Ponytail: Sales grew by 4% this quarter...\n[Caption below the panel:] Business protip: You can strengthen any presentation by opening with a reminder about how cool immune systems are.\n"}
{"id":1908,"title":"Credit Card Rewards","image_title":"Credit Card Rewards","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1908","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/credit_card_rewards.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1908:_Credit_Card_Rewards","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a desk and is on his laptop. Hairy stands behind him.] Cueball: I'm trying to figure out which of these credit card rewards programs is best given my spending.\n[Cueball leans backwards in a frameless panel.] Cueball: But at some point, the cost of the time it takes me to understand the options outweighs their difference in value.\n[Close-up of Cueball's head and torso.] Cueball: So I need to figure out where that point is, and stop before I reach it. Cueball: But... when I factor in the time to calculate THAT , it changes the overall answer.\n[Cueball has his arms outstretched.] Hairy: I question the assumption that you'd otherwise be spending your time on something more valuable. Cueball: Come on, I could be failing to optimize so many better things!\n","explanation":"A credit card , at its most basic form, is a loan contract to an individual from a bank . Like all contracts, the bank will offer several different types in an attempt to appeal to a large number of individuals. Unlike traditional loans which focus on a single item (car, house, boat, etc), a credit card is an unsecured loan geared towards daily and weekly transactions. Because these transactions cover a wide variety of items, credit cards can be further tweaked towards offering benefits in certain areas. For example, gas purchases, or even gas purchases through a single retail chain, can offer higher rewards on one type of plan vs. other plans.\nThese benefits, typically called rewards, have several different options. \" Cashback \" is a reward where the individual is given money back when they make a purchase that follows certain rules spelled out in the contract. \"No interest \" is a reward where the individual is not charged interest on their purchases if they pay the loaned money back within a specified amount of time. \"Points\" are similar to the cashback program, but are typically reserved towards purchasing a single large item or plan. Points towards a vacation is a popular option. Besides these three types of rewards, the number of actual rewards to pick from are limited only by the creativity and fiscal limitations of the issuing bank.\nCueball is trying to choose the optimal credit card program that will result in the biggest savings for his typical income and spending patterns. He will need to trade off the value of any benefits against the cost of any fees and interest charges that would be incurred. This could become quite complex if he is prepared to consider taking out multiple cards to access the various benefits they offer, and in order to get the best outcome he may need to regularly shift funds from one card to another to make use of introductory or short-term offers. On top of all this, the incentives on offer may change his spending behaviour, which would further impact the calculation. (This table was actually created in 1205: Is It Worth the Time? )\nHe then realizes that there is a cost of him spending time on optimizing his choice, so he wants to limit the time spent doing the optimizing so that it doesn't outweigh the maximum advantage he might gain from choosing the best deal. Finding a definite answer to the time at which he should stop his optimization efforts is hard, if not impossible, because the fact that he cannot complete them means that he probably cannot know for certain what the maximum advantage would be; he will have to rely on a probabilistic solution instead. To further complicate things, he will need to factor in the cost of the time spent solving the problem of how long to spend on optimizing (and, presumably, the time spent solving that problem, and so on infinitely).\nHairy challenges a hidden assumption that Cueball's time has significant value, which would imply that if he wasn't worrying about this problem. he would be doing something more productive, implying that Cueball's obsession with optimization is lame enough to suggest that he does not actually have any more worthwhile interests to pursue. His response that he \"could be failing to optimize so many better things!\" just further proves Hairy's point, and suggests that Cueball is aware of both the big flaw in his reasoning and the fact that, when he attempts to optimize things, it seldom really helps his situation.\nThe title text further expands the idea. Cueball wants to work out which optimization problems he could most productively work on first. However, his proposed idea of creating a spreadsheet to calculate this may well end up costing more in time than the benefit he would gain from working on them in priority order (particularly since, on this evidence, the potential gains from each problem are marginal at best). Furthermore, if the 'several variables' he needs to consider lead to the kind of complexity seen in the credit card problem, a spreadsheet may not be the best tool for the kind of calculations he needs to perform.\nThe idea of spending more time organising tasks in a spreadsheet than you actually do working on the tasks was previously featured in 1906: Making Progress .\n[Cueball sits at a desk and is on his laptop. Hairy stands behind him.] Cueball: I'm trying to figure out which of these credit card rewards programs is best given my spending.\n[Cueball leans backwards in a frameless panel.] Cueball: But at some point, the cost of the time it takes me to understand the options outweighs their difference in value.\n[Close-up of Cueball's head and torso.] Cueball: So I need to figure out where that point is, and stop before I reach it. Cueball: But... when I factor in the time to calculate THAT , it changes the overall answer.\n[Cueball has his arms outstretched.] Hairy: I question the assumption that you'd otherwise be spending your time on something more valuable. Cueball: Come on, I could be failing to optimize so many better things!\n"}
{"id":1909,"title":"Digital Resource Lifespan","image_title":"Digital Resource Lifespan","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1909","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/digital_resource_lifespan.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1909:_Digital_Resource_Lifespan","transcript":"My access to resources on [SUBJECT] over time:\n[Below, a timeline and a graph with gray bars is shown:]\n[1980s-past 2020:] Book on subject\n[Early 2000s-past 2020:] [SUBJECT].pdf\n[2000-2010:] [SUBJECT] web database Site goes down, backend data not on archive.org [Small bar, 2000-2016\/17:] Java frontend no longer runs\n[2010-2015\/16:] [SUBJECT] mobile app (Local university project) Broken on new OS, not updated\n[2000-2010:] [SUBJECT] analysis software Broken on new OS, not updated\n[Late 1990s-late 2000s:] Interactive [SUBJECT] CD-ROM CD scratched; new computer has no CD drive anyway.\n[1980s-past 2020:] Library microfilm [SUBJECT] collection\n[Caption below the panel:] It's unsettling to realize how quickly digital resources can disappear without ongoing work to maintain them.\n","explanation":"In this chart, Randall laments the tendency of digital resources to quickly become obsolete or non-functional.  By taking a general subject, such as xkcd's core subjects of \"romance, sarcasm, math, and language\", one can see that a useful tool such as a smartphone or computer app or interactive CD-ROM (essentially, software) does not have the lasting power of printed books (e.g. textbooks, for many general subjects) and microfilm\/microfiche.  The printed resources, not having to rely on a computerized platform for use, are far more reliable despite being less mobile and taking up physical space. The only digital source which is still working is Portable Document Format (aka PDF) which encapsulates fixed layout flat documents, and is supported for years already by Adobe Systems and is part of ISO standards, so has a widespread support, and should be still viewable in foreseeable future.\nThe title text makes a statement that libraries do not require the support of original authors\/experts to organize and store vast resources for any subject imaginable.  This is true, but omits the fact that ongoing efforts are required by experts in information organization and storage -- namely, librarians.  Physical books and microfilm\/microfiche need controlled storage environments, manual handling for storage, retrieval, distribution (in library terms, \"circulation\"), and the like.  Thus, a library can require significant resources in personnel and facilities, but is usually seen as a \"public good\" for the benefit of society; thus, many communities and educational institutions invest in creating and maintaining a library despite the costs.\nArchive.org refers to The Internet Archive , a non-profit organization that maintains the Wayback Machine , one of the largest archives of the World Wide Web . When a website is taken offline, copies of its content can often be found backed-up on the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is primarily designed to back up websites , however, and will often not be able to save information stored in a site's databases , as alluded to in the comic. The Internet Archive has a part for non-website archives, but it cannot hold recent databases either due to copyright problems.\nMy access to resources on [SUBJECT] over time:\n[Below, a timeline and a graph with gray bars is shown:]\n[1980s-past 2020:] Book on subject\n[Early 2000s-past 2020:] [SUBJECT].pdf\n[2000-2010:] [SUBJECT] web database Site goes down, backend data not on archive.org [Small bar, 2000-2016\/17:] Java frontend no longer runs\n[2010-2015\/16:] [SUBJECT] mobile app (Local university project) Broken on new OS, not updated\n[2000-2010:] [SUBJECT] analysis software Broken on new OS, not updated\n[Late 1990s-late 2000s:] Interactive [SUBJECT] CD-ROM CD scratched; new computer has no CD drive anyway.\n[1980s-past 2020:] Library microfilm [SUBJECT] collection\n[Caption below the panel:] It's unsettling to realize how quickly digital resources can disappear without ongoing work to maintain them.\n"}
{"id":1910,"title":"Sky Spotters","image_title":"Sky Spotters","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1910","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sky_spotters.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1910:_Sky_Spotters","transcript":"[White Hat and Hairy are standing in front of some buildings. White Hat points to the sky while holding his smartphone in the other hand, while Hairy holds his smartphone up in both hands as he looks at the screen.] White Hat: That's odd\u2014another PA-24 Comanche with red trim. Registered to a holding company, no recent flight plans. Hairy: I'll ask the forums if anyone knows who operates those.\n[Hairbun and an old man with a white sailor cap are standing in a field with rolling hills behind them. Hairbun is looking at the sky through her binoculars, which she has on a string around her neck. The man also looks up but he is holding his string attached binoculars down in front of him.] Hairbun: Goodness, I think that's a broad-winged hawk! Man with sailor cap: In November?! They should be long gone by now! Hairbun: I'll email the list.\n[Five people sit around a table in a boardroom, which presumably belongs to the government as the table has a circular insignia with an eagle in the center and unreadable text in the ring around the eagle and beneath the insignia. A man with slick black hair is sitting at the end of the table in an office chair. The other four are sitting behind the long side of the table; from the left they are Cueball, Megan, another version of Hairy with spikier hair, and to the right, Ponytail.] Man at the end of the table: Dammit, why are there so many different subcultures obsessed with staring at the sky? Ponytail: What else could we disguise our surveillance drones as? Cueball: Weather balloons? Ponytail: No, that gets the UFO people and the weather people. Ponytail: Don't know who's worse.\n","explanation":"This comic explores how people with various hobbies notice strange things in the sky.\nIn the first panel the plane enthusiasts White Hat and Hairy notice that there is a Piper PA-24 Comanche in the sky (apparently the most recent of several), belonging to a holding company that has filed no flight plans. Flight plans do not need to be filed for many short flights at lower altitudes in good weather, so for a small aircraft like the PA-24, the missing flight plan alone should not be unusual. Many government or company planes used for secret purposes, like FBI planes registered to fake companies , go a step further and are blacklisted from major databases. Regardless, it makes White Hat and Hairy wonder why, enough that they decide to post about it on their plane spotter forums. (See 1669: Planespotting ). The reference to red trim on the Piper PA-24 Comanche could be a reference to the livery of Janet Airlines which operates clandestine flights between Las Vegas , Area 51 , and other desert military bases , although these planes are in fact registered to the Department of the Air Force , rather than a holding company.\nIn the second panel Hairbun and a male bird enthusiast are wondering why there is a broad-winged hawk in the area in November when many broad-winged hawks should have migrated south to areas like Florida and Central America. They decide to send a message to their birdwatching e-mail list. (See 1824: Identification Chart and 1826: Birdwatching ). The two birdwatchers in this panel look like the old version of Cueball and Megan in 572: Together .\nIn the last panel, a committee from what appears to be the National Security Agency wonders how to disguise their drones so that people will not pay attention to them. The boss at the end of the table is lamenting the fact that both their bird- and plane-disguised drones have been noticed because of all these people constantly checking out the sky, also indicating that there are even more subcultures who are obsessed with things in the sky than the two mentioned already. Ponytail asks what else they could disguise their (secret) surveillance drones as, and Cueball suggests a weather balloon . But Ponytail shoots this down, since such a disguise would attract both the UFO enthusiasts and the \"weather people\" (presumably some regulation board that checks unauthorized use of meteorological survey balloons, or otherwise hobbyist meteorologists or perhaps even members of the Cloud Appreciation Society ). She then jokes that she doesn't know which is worse. Since most people consider UFO enthusiasts to be into conspiracies, the \"weather people\" may be annoyed by this. Maybe Randall is indicating that people trying to predict the weather are correct as often as those claiming to have seen a UFO...\nThere are numerous instances of weather balloons being labeled as UFOs by enthusiasts, one of the most notable being the Roswell UFO incident , which for years was explained by the US military as a weather balloon crash, but turned out to be a nuclear test surveillance balloon. It is now known as the most thoroughly debunked UFO claim .\nIn the title text, it is suggested that \"lost birthday party balloons\" should not attract too much attention. But then it is noted that it might make marine wildlife people angry, their concern probably being that balloons ultimately end up in some water body, which causes marine wildlife to get trapped in plastic and other synthetic material that was dumped in the water. (see Marine debris ) \"Marine wildlife people with sharks\" may be a reference to 585: Outreach , which also features a balloon carrying a shark. Another possible issue with disguising drones as \"lost balloons\" is that such balloons are quite rarely seen, and a sudden increase in the number of \"lost balloons\" seen would certainly raise suspicion even without a \"spotting community\" that focuses on them.\nAmong other types of people looking at the sky, the comic doesn't even get around to mentioning the subject of comic 1644: Stargazing .\n[White Hat and Hairy are standing in front of some buildings. White Hat points to the sky while holding his smartphone in the other hand, while Hairy holds his smartphone up in both hands as he looks at the screen.] White Hat: That's odd\u2014another PA-24 Comanche with red trim. Registered to a holding company, no recent flight plans. Hairy: I'll ask the forums if anyone knows who operates those.\n[Hairbun and an old man with a white sailor cap are standing in a field with rolling hills behind them. Hairbun is looking at the sky through her binoculars, which she has on a string around her neck. The man also looks up but he is holding his string attached binoculars down in front of him.] Hairbun: Goodness, I think that's a broad-winged hawk! Man with sailor cap: In November?! They should be long gone by now! Hairbun: I'll email the list.\n[Five people sit around a table in a boardroom, which presumably belongs to the government as the table has a circular insignia with an eagle in the center and unreadable text in the ring around the eagle and beneath the insignia. A man with slick black hair is sitting at the end of the table in an office chair. The other four are sitting behind the long side of the table; from the left they are Cueball, Megan, another version of Hairy with spikier hair, and to the right, Ponytail.] Man at the end of the table: Dammit, why are there so many different subcultures obsessed with staring at the sky? Ponytail: What else could we disguise our surveillance drones as? Cueball: Weather balloons? Ponytail: No, that gets the UFO people and the weather people. Ponytail: Don't know who's worse.\n"}
{"id":1911,"title":"Defensive Profile","image_title":"Defensive Profile","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1911","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/defensive_profile.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1911:_Defensive_Profile","transcript":"[A profile on an unknown social media site is displayed. The profile picture is a close-up image of Megan. The profile reads:] I speak my mind and don\u2019t care who I offend. No filter.\n[In the next panel, the text is highlighted, and a context menu has appeared. There is a mouse pointer on the option \"View translation\".] Copy Select all View translation [selected] Print\n[In the last panel, the profile text is updated:] I don\u2019t understand why people keep getting mad at me and I\u2019m using this pep talk to convince myself that\u2019s okay.\n","explanation":"This comic demonstrates a theoretical feature which provides more honest interpretations of social media profiles. We see a profile for a person who says they have \u201cno filters\u201d and has no qualms about offending or upsetting anybody with their seemingly radical views. But the \u201ctranslation\u201d of the description reveals that it is a vastly insecure person who seems to have the problem of saying the wrong thing every time and so their profile description is a way for them to justify their comments.\nThe title text continues, with the aggressive \u201cNO DRAMA ZONE\u201d turning out to mean that the user is merely trying to keep any offended or genuinely upset comments away from their page because they simply have no idea how to emotionally handle hurting someone\u2019s feelings.\nRandall previously demonstrated another theoretical feature to address passive-aggressive behavior in 1085: ContextBot . And show Cueball having the same feeling in 1984: Misinterpretation .\nThe comic\u2019s feature may be based on the context menu option of the Google Chrome web browser to have a foreign language webpage translated to the user\u2019s selected native language. However, in Google Chrome, the user may only translate the entire page, while in this comic the user may also select some text and have only the selected part translated. Also, Google Chrome uses Google Translate for translation by default, which cannot read minds like in the comic yet (though it might be able to someday, given how much information Google has control over). However, if one uses the official Google Translate extension for Google Chrome, one may actually translate only the selected text. It is possible then that it is instead the extension which inspired the comic\u2019s feature.\nThis comic not only illustrates such a feature, but implies that the \u201ctranslated\u201d thoughts are what\u2019s actually going on behind posts of these types on social media, as if Randall can actually read those people\u2019s minds somehow. If this implication is the intent of the comic, then Randall thinks that people who have \u201cno filter\u201d are actually insecure and that people who want \u201cNO DRAMA\u201d are actually afraid of upset comments. Alternatively, Randall hates people who post such things in their profiles, and therefore wants to belittle them in this comic as actually being insecure, rather than being as confident as their aggressive behavior implies. This explanation is corroborated by notable news near the comic\u2019s publishing time (see below).\nThe style of the profile showcased in the comic resembles the profiles of the popular social media website Twitter, which while the user is logged in, shows the user\u2019s own profile on the left side of the page in a similar style to the comic, with their picture on the left side of their name, their Twitter handle under their name (which explains the extra line of text under what is presumably the name) and their \u201cbio\u201d right below those. The Twitter \u201cbio\u201d is a space usually used for the user to explain who they are. Common details about a person which are included in their \u201cbio\u201d are their profession, their personal interests and the products they have for sale. Some people also write about their personality, such as the one in the comic, which is quite outspoken and frank about her opinions.\nThe title of this comic is \u201cDefensive Profile\u201d. \u201cDefensive\u201d is the opposite of \u201coffensive\u201d, which is a word that might be used to describe the contents of profiles which display such a warning as in the comic. However, the feature reveals the warnings to actually be defenses against behaviors that deeply bother the profile owner. The profile is thus proved to actually be \u201cdefensive\u201d instead of \u201coffensive\u201d, at least regarding the warning text.\n[A profile on an unknown social media site is displayed. The profile picture is a close-up image of Megan. The profile reads:] I speak my mind and don\u2019t care who I offend. No filter.\n[In the next panel, the text is highlighted, and a context menu has appeared. There is a mouse pointer on the option \"View translation\".] Copy Select all View translation [selected] Print\n[In the last panel, the profile text is updated:] I don\u2019t understand why people keep getting mad at me and I\u2019m using this pep talk to convince myself that\u2019s okay.\n"}
{"id":1912,"title":"Thermostat","image_title":"Thermostat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1912","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thermostat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1912:_Thermostat","transcript":"[Hairy, with a headset on, is sitting in an office chair at a desk with his hands ready on the keyboard of his computer.] Hairy: Tech support, how can I help you?\n[Cueball is on his smartphone while looking at a small blinking panel on the wall in front of him.] Cueball: The little LCD on my thermostat says Error: Android system recovery: Unrecognized boot volume \"\/MONTHLY ENERGY REPORT (1).DOC\"\n[In a frame-less beat panel Hairy just stares at his screen with his hands on his lap.]\n[Back to Cueball, now with Hairy's reply coming from the smartphone in a box with a jagged arrow pointing to the smartphone.] Cueball: It's asking if I want to partition the volume. What should I do? Hairy (on the phone): Have you tried walking into the sea.\n","explanation":"Hairy is working at a tech support office, and receives a call from Cueball . After the scripted greeting, Cueball, who has the most bizarre tech issues , tells Hairy that his thermostat \u2013 a single-purpose device used to control indoor heating and air conditioning \u2013 is showing an error screen from the Android operating system , and asking if he wants to partition the volume. The Android error seems to imply that it is trying to mount a file with .doc extension (likely a Microsoft Word document ) as the boot device . An added twist is the \"(1)\" in the filename, which is commonly appended when a user attempts to copy a file into a directory that already has a file with the same name. Furthermore, the extension .docx has been the default option from Microsoft Office 2007 onwards rather than the earlier .doc extension used in the comic, implying that the file is likely a rather old one.\nThe error message suggests a system problem at a low level of the device. Not only is the operating system missing, but the device is trying to locate the operating system inside a Microsoft Word document, something that has little to do with regulation of temperature and probably has no way of getting onto the device in the first place, let alone being considered as a bootable file.\nThis is so abnormal that Hairy is briefly struck silent and, upon recovering, he suggests Cueball walk into the sea as a form of suicide, rather than try to solve the issue.\nThe title text elaborates that the situation is so absurd that it must be divine punishment, so Hairy does not want to try and help him for fear of invoking the wrath of whatever deity is issuing it. An example of such reasoning in literature can be found in the character of Aeolus in the Odyssey , who, having made an unsuccessful attempt to assist Odysseus by giving him a bag containing unfavorable winds, refused to provide further assistance on the grounds that the gods were clearly hostile to Odysseus.\nPart of the humor is in the problem being only a slight exaggeration of real software issues. The symptoms are unlikely, yet possible (a thermostat could be running Android and could generate a report as a .doc file; given some data corruption, the name of the .doc file could get into the boot script and a volume could appear unpartitioned). It would take an expert Android or Unix engineer to fix, particularly on an embedded device with no obvious way to connect remotely or attach a keyboard. In real life, it would probably be easier to just replace an embedded device whose software was this broken.\nThis is explored further in 2083: Laptop Issues where throwing Cueball into the ocean is mentioned. Both comics could explain the original \"computer problem link to oceans\" comic 349: Success .\n[Hairy, with a headset on, is sitting in an office chair at a desk with his hands ready on the keyboard of his computer.] Hairy: Tech support, how can I help you?\n[Cueball is on his smartphone while looking at a small blinking panel on the wall in front of him.] Cueball: The little LCD on my thermostat says Error: Android system recovery: Unrecognized boot volume \"\/MONTHLY ENERGY REPORT (1).DOC\"\n[In a frame-less beat panel Hairy just stares at his screen with his hands on his lap.]\n[Back to Cueball, now with Hairy's reply coming from the smartphone in a box with a jagged arrow pointing to the smartphone.] Cueball: It's asking if I want to partition the volume. What should I do? Hairy (on the phone): Have you tried walking into the sea.\n"}
{"id":1913,"title":"A ?","image_title":"A \ufffd","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1913","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1913:_A_%C3%AF%C2%BF%C2%BD","transcript":"[A picture of a yellow post-it note with a handwritten message:] A \u2370 took out the trash but the dishwasher still needs to be run\n[Caption below the panel:] Apple can try to fix the autocorrect bug, but I've already incorporated it into my handwriting.\n","explanation":"After the update to Apple's iOS 11.1 , many (though not all) iPhone users suffered from a strange bug, where the autocorrection changed any input of the single lowercase letter \"i\" to either \"A\" or \"!\" followed by a space and a Unicode variation selector 16 (U+FE0F, on iOS displayed as a question mark in a square). [1] Using a replacement character (U+FFFD) to approximate this display, the result of typing \"i took\" might be \"A \ufffd took\" or \"! \ufffd took\". In a handwritten text, the \"\ufffd\" symbol could then be mistaken for a censored word, signifying indignation against the person taking out the trash. This problem previously manifested as an \"I\" followed directly by the VS-16 \"emojify character\", turning them into an \" \ufffd\" without the \"A\". [2]\nThe note in this comic is the equivalent of starting a text message with \"i took out...\" and triggering the iOS bug. The joke revolves around acceptance of the bug through repetition has influenced the writer's hand written style.\nThe codes in the title text refer to \"A \ufffd\" and \"! \ufffd\" respectively. The text provides a way to keep the \"bug\" active with the U+FFFD approximation, (which can be realized through the use of a Cydia tweak) even after it is patched. Although this would have no practical use, it is still a fun way [ citation needed ] for iPhone users to keep the infamous bug fresh in everyone's mind, and to make sure that the Apple company never lives down the embarrassing incident.\nThe statement in the title text \"no update can never take this away from you\" is a double negative , which is a considered non-standard grammatical use in modern English, although common in many dialects.  Taking literally it could actually mean \"any update can take this away from you\". This may be a typo or a colloquial use, with the intended meaning to be \"ever\" instead of \"never\" with some exaggeration.\n[A picture of a yellow post-it note with a handwritten message:] A \u2370 took out the trash but the dishwasher still needs to be run\n[Caption below the panel:] Apple can try to fix the autocorrect bug, but I've already incorporated it into my handwriting.\n"}
{"id":1914,"title":"Twitter Verification","image_title":"Twitter Verification","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1914","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/twitter_verification.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1914:_Twitter_Verification","transcript":"[A bearded figure, depicting the Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is standing behind a podium with the blue Twitter bird logo.] Jack: Everyone calm down\u2014 Jack: We just need to go figure out how to bestow a global in-or-out status badge on some people, at our discretion, without anyone reading anything into who gets one. Jack: This should only take a moment.\n","explanation":"Some Twitter users (such as Randall Munroe , Coldplay , and, prior to being suspended, Donald Trump) have a verification checkmark next to their name.  This checkmark is used to indicate that the user is who they say they are, rather than being a fake account made by someone else using their picture and name. This helps fans find the real accounts of their favorite celebrities. However, since the most notable people benefit from this the most, there is some ambiguity in the granting of the verified mark, as it also seems to be interpreted as a status symbol to indicate the notable celebrities. Some even see this as Twitter actively endorsing the user. For this reason, Twitter has removed verified checkmarks from real accounts of celebrities because of political controversies in the past. Examples of this are political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos (before he was banned from the service). One recent controversial decision regarding the verified mark is that Twitter gave a verification checkmark to Jason Kessler , the organizer of a recent far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.  This drew attention to Twitter's verification system, so they temporarily suspended it.\nThe alt-text comments on the lack of foresight on Twitter's part when implementing the verified system: as it by design separates users between an in-group and an out-group, it seems to imply endorsement or, at least, favors some users to the detriment of others. This in turn automatically creates the twin sets of \"people who shouldn't have been verified, but were\" and \"people who deserve to have been verified, but weren't.\" As the internet is populated by various large and strongly opinionated groups [ citation NOT needed ] , neither set will ever be empty and Twitter will always be seen as either endorsing unworthy or snubbing worthy people.\nThe last line of dialogue is a typical English sentence and has nothing to do with the Twitter Moments feature, which can be used to compile several tweets with a shared theme into a browsable gallery. The character depicted is the (at the time of publication) Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey , judging by the beard.\n[A bearded figure, depicting the Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is standing behind a podium with the blue Twitter bird logo.] Jack: Everyone calm down\u2014 Jack: We just need to go figure out how to bestow a global in-or-out status badge on some people, at our discretion, without anyone reading anything into who gets one. Jack: This should only take a moment.\n"}
{"id":1915,"title":"Nightmare Email Feature","image_title":"Nightmare Email Feature","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1915","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nightmare_email_feature.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1915:_Nightmare_Email_Feature","transcript":"[A panel with a short email message, with the first line partly obscured by the top of the panel. Below that, in light gray font, is an information message from the email client.] Enjoyed it! I'm busy this weekend, but let me know if you're free sometime next week and want to get dinner or something.\nTotal time spent revising this email before sending: 47 minutes 12 seconds ...\n[Caption below the panel:] My nightmare email feature\n","explanation":"Most modern email clients provide tools to help their users read, write, and keep track of email efficiently. For instance, the user may receive a notification if the email body contains wording that suggests a file has been attached, but there is no actual attachment, in order to prevent them forgetting to include the intended file in the email.\nThis comic suggests a similar feature, one which would inform not the user, but the recipient of the message, how long the email has been revised before being sent. This is an expansion of a common feature of collaboration tools used by law firms, and modern word processors such as Microsoft Word 2016. Randall calls this his nightmare email feature, implying he spends too much time in revision of what should be simple email messages and that making himself - or worse, the recipient - aware of the actual time would make him anxious.\nIn the case shown it seems that the sender and recipient of the e-mail had recently met, and the recipient suggested meeting again this weekend. It then took 47 minutes to write a short reply in which the sender ends up saying only that they enjoyed the thing referred to, but, alas, they have no time this weekend, and then lets the other suggest a possible time for a dinner... or something. Of course there could be more to the email above the panel, but it seems to be a very short answer to another e-mail, and it increases the nightmare for the writer (and the impact of the joke) if this was all that was written in 47 minutes.\nIf the text had been written out in less than 2 minutes, it would not have been a problem, but it seems the writer of this e-mail had to think a lot about how it was phrased. This could lead the recipient to wonder what took so long. Was it that they did not enjoy it, but ended up writing this to be nice? They only write that they are busy this weekend, thus not giving any reason as to why, and the last part allows them the possibility of also being \"busy\" on whatever time is suggested for dinner. Also, \"or something\" is very non-committal. Alternatively it could be the opposite, for a case where the writer enjoyed the time a lot, and is really looking forward to another meeting, but tries to seem relaxed and open minded, to not scare the other person away. All of this would also be true if it had been written in 2 minutes, but then at least there would have been the excuse of not having spent a lot of time thinking about how the reply was phrased.\nThe title text describes a similarly uncomfortable feature, which would inform the recipient how long a message has been sitting in the user's drafts folder, thus highlighting their procrastination, as well as demonstrating that \"(...)didn't see your message until just now\" is a lie, or at least it was only true when the original message was written, and now three days later another message should have been written instead. This feature would also be able to catch anyone who tries to avoid the feature depicted in the comic by saving the email in \"drafts\" while making revisions outside the mailing software, either mentally or in another word processing program.\nRandall has explored a related anxiety-inducing feature of instant messaging in 1886: Typing Notifications .\nApplying the feature in the comic to this explanation: it sat incomplete in this wiki for approximately 2 months and 26 days (since the comic's creation), before an unregistered user removed its incomplete tag.\n[A panel with a short email message, with the first line partly obscured by the top of the panel. Below that, in light gray font, is an information message from the email client.] Enjoyed it! I'm busy this weekend, but let me know if you're free sometime next week and want to get dinner or something.\nTotal time spent revising this email before sending: 47 minutes 12 seconds ...\n[Caption below the panel:] My nightmare email feature\n"}
{"id":1916,"title":"Temperature Preferences","image_title":"Temperature Preferences","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1916","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/temperature_preferences.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1916:_Temperature_Preferences","transcript":"[A chart labeled:] Where to live based on your temperature preferences [In gray, the data source is mentioned below:] Climate data from weatherbase.com\n[A chart with two lines with single arrows. Each arrow is labeled:] Y axis bottom: Cold winters X axis right: Hot\/humid summers (measured via Humidex, which combines heat and dew point)\n[Near each of the corners of the chart there is a gray blob, labeled:] Top left: If you hate cold and heat Top right: If you hate cold and love heat Bottom left: If you love cold and hate heat Bottom right: If you love cold and heat\n[The following city names intersect with the top left blob [hate cold and heat] (in reading order):] Mexico City Quito Addis Ababa Bogot\u00e1 San Francisco Wellington\n[The following city names intersect with the top right blob [hate cold and love heat] (in reading order):] Bangkok Ho Chi Minh City Manila Singapore Mumbai Jakarta Dar Es Salaam Honolulu Lagos Rio [de Janeiro] Dhaka Kinhasa Miami Karachi Dubai Cairo Hong Kong Delhi Riyadh Guangzhou Lahore Sabha Houston Needles El Paso Baghdad Dallas\n[The following city names intersect with the bottom left blob [love cold and hate heat] (in reading order):] Reykjavik (with arrow pointing left) Berlin Stockholm Oslo Calgary Halifax Daqaidam Kiev Casper Yumen St Petersburg Volgograd Moscow Ottawa Vladivostok Thunder Bay Duluth Urumqi Altay Regina Irkutsk Abakan Ulaanbaatar Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom right blob) Fairbanks McMurdo (with arrow pointing down-left) Yellowknife (with arrow pointing down) Hailar\n[The following city names intersect with the bottom right blob [love cold and heat] (in reading order):] [Washington] DC Shanghai Tehran Saint Louis New York Xi'An Salt Lake City Kansas City Beijing Seoul Sapporo Pyongyang Sioux Falls Turpan Jinzhou Minneapolis Shenyang Fargo Tongliao Qiqihar Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom left blob)\n[The following city names do not intersect with any blob (in reading order):] Nairobi S\u00e3o Paulo Brisbane Los Angeles Perth Cape Town Sydney Athens Santiago Barcelona Melbourne Rome Buenos Aires Jerusalem Atlanta Raleigh Madrid Chengdu Tokyo Dublin Portland Richmond London Istanbul Edinburgh Vancouver Paris Flagstaff Santa Fe Tashkent Wuhan Geneva Lubbock Boston Budapest Kabul Toronto Omaha\n","explanation":"This is a chart of major (and not-so-major) populated areas showing seasonal temperature patterns. The chart is a guide to where one might like to live depending on how much summer heat and winter cold they enjoy. There are four focused zones:\nThe summer heat axis is determined by humidex , a system that combines heat and humidity to generate an estimate of perceived \"summer discomfort\".\nNote that if the values from this table are charted, the result is similar but not exact to how Randall drew the comic.  For instance, he shows Kinshasa as having a \u201ccolder\u201d winter than Honolulu, but the average low in the coldest month for Kinshasa (20\u00b0C) is hotter than the average low in Honolulu (18.9\u00b0C).  In general these differences are minor, but a few stand out:\nIt is not certain if these differences are a due to errors, the use of a different data set, or deliberate \u201cEaster Eggs\u201d set to see if anyone would notice.\nAccording to Randall:\nHowever, given the great variability of weather patterns across the globe, it's not altogether clear how useful this would actually be to someone looking to choose where to live, since it's not clear exactly what \"love\/hate hot\/cold\" would mean.  It's also not clear that the relationship between temperature and discomfort is linear. More likely is that there is a small temperature band where each degree of change causes significantly more discomfort, and beyond which it's just \"too hot\/cold\".\nHottest and coldest month therefore may not be the best measure.  For example, is one or two very cold days better or worse than a month's worth of moderately cold days?  Shown in the table below for each place are the number of days above 32\u00b0C (90\u00b0F) and the number of days below 0\u00b0C (32\u00b0F), taken from Weatherbase.com (Randall's source).  For most people a temperature above 32\u00b0C is considered hot and a temperature below 0\u00b0C is considered cold.  So, for instance, someone who loves heat might want to live in Tehran (with three months above 32\u00b0C) rather than Beijing (with only one month) even though the peak month Humidex in Beijing is higher.  Someone who loves cold might want to live in Santa Fe, where it never gets particularly cold (only -8\u00b0C) but where it is below freezing almost half of the year (179.8 days on average).  In general though, the places with the most hot or cold days also have the hottest and coldest extremes.\nOnce again, Turpan stands out for its misery, with days above 32\u00b0C totaling four months and days below 0\u00b0C totaling four months.  In fact, on average there is at least one day every month of the year that the temperature is either above 32\u00b0C or below 0\u00b0C.  This includes almost every day in June, July and August being hot and every single day in December, January and February being below freezing.\nSome of the most extreme climates on earth are not shown on this comic, however, perhaps because some of them are uninhabited. Eismitte (a camp established in the center of Greenland in the 1930s) and Vostok Station (in the center of Antarctica) both see temperatures far colder than McMurdo, although being in the middle of ice caps neither can be inhabited without outside support.  The areas around Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk in eastern Siberia also see temperatures colder than McMurdo and are actual towns, although summer temperatures are much higher.  In both places the summer weather is generally average (Humidex of 22\u00b0C to 23\u00b0C) but they have seen record highs of 34\u00b0C  to 37\u00b0C  and record lows of almost -68\u00b0C, giving them the greatest temperature swings on earth. Bouvet Island is a small island in the South Atlantic Ocean, near the latitude where there are no land masses to interrupt storms and currents (south of South America but north of Antarctica).  As a result it has one of the most consistent climates on earth, with a high and low almost always within a few degrees of 0\u00b0C all year long \u2013 a perpetual state of almost to just freezing, combined with clouds, fog, wind and rain from ocean storms. Death Valley in California, Shahdad in Iran, and Murzuk in Libya all vie for having the highest temperature in the world, although not the highest Humidex.\nThe relevant temperature data for these extreme locations, where known, is in the second table for comparison.\nThe title text refers to a quote sometimes attributed to Mark Twain ; however, as it points out, the quote is misattributed , and it is unknown who created it. The text then goes on to claim that the person who originally said the quote never visited McMurdo Station , a US Antarctic research center, which is certainly a colder place than San Francisco.\nThe comic as originally published had a \"smudge\" or scattering of gray pixels, visible in the center of the image between the labels for Madrid and Lubbock. A new version of the image was later uploaded with this removed.\nBy editing the image to increase the contrast between the background and the \"smudge\", as shown here, it is possible to see dots and grid lines. This would seem to be a scatter graph, likely one showing temperature data used by Randall as a reference while making this comic, and accidentally left visible when the comic was first uploaded. A similar thing happened in 1561: Water Phase Diagram , where a phase diagram from Wikipedia was faintly visible in the original version of the comic .\n[A chart labeled:] Where to live based on your temperature preferences [In gray, the data source is mentioned below:] Climate data from weatherbase.com\n[A chart with two lines with single arrows. Each arrow is labeled:] Y axis bottom: Cold winters X axis right: Hot\/humid summers (measured via Humidex, which combines heat and dew point)\n[Near each of the corners of the chart there is a gray blob, labeled:] Top left: If you hate cold and heat Top right: If you hate cold and love heat Bottom left: If you love cold and hate heat Bottom right: If you love cold and heat\n[The following city names intersect with the top left blob [hate cold and heat] (in reading order):] Mexico City Quito Addis Ababa Bogot\u00e1 San Francisco Wellington\n[The following city names intersect with the top right blob [hate cold and love heat] (in reading order):] Bangkok Ho Chi Minh City Manila Singapore Mumbai Jakarta Dar Es Salaam Honolulu Lagos Rio [de Janeiro] Dhaka Kinhasa Miami Karachi Dubai Cairo Hong Kong Delhi Riyadh Guangzhou Lahore Sabha Houston Needles El Paso Baghdad Dallas\n[The following city names intersect with the bottom left blob [love cold and hate heat] (in reading order):] Reykjavik (with arrow pointing left) Berlin Stockholm Oslo Calgary Halifax Daqaidam Kiev Casper Yumen St Petersburg Volgograd Moscow Ottawa Vladivostok Thunder Bay Duluth Urumqi Altay Regina Irkutsk Abakan Ulaanbaatar Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom right blob) Fairbanks McMurdo (with arrow pointing down-left) Yellowknife (with arrow pointing down) Hailar\n[The following city names intersect with the bottom right blob [love cold and heat] (in reading order):] [Washington] DC Shanghai Tehran Saint Louis New York Xi'An Salt Lake City Kansas City Beijing Seoul Sapporo Pyongyang Sioux Falls Turpan Jinzhou Minneapolis Shenyang Fargo Tongliao Qiqihar Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom left blob)\n[The following city names do not intersect with any blob (in reading order):] Nairobi S\u00e3o Paulo Brisbane Los Angeles Perth Cape Town Sydney Athens Santiago Barcelona Melbourne Rome Buenos Aires Jerusalem Atlanta Raleigh Madrid Chengdu Tokyo Dublin Portland Richmond London Istanbul Edinburgh Vancouver Paris Flagstaff Santa Fe Tashkent Wuhan Geneva Lubbock Boston Budapest Kabul Toronto Omaha\n"}
{"id":1917,"title":"How to Make Friends","image_title":"How to Make Friends","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1917","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/how_to_make_friends.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1917:_How_to_Make_Friends","transcript":"[First panel with words, with the words in the center white and on a black oval background, which is in turn on the white background:] Presenting:\nHow to make friends\n[Second panel with Cueball and Hairy facing each other:] Cueball: Want to go eat food together? Cueball: We could also sit together and talk without eating. I don't need to eat. I mean, I do need to eat. But if you don't want to eat then we can just talk. I can eat later.\n[Third panel with words, same format as first panel:] Okay\nIt turns out I still haven't figured out how to do this.\nSorry\n","explanation":"This comic follows a sample interaction, purportedly showing how to make friends. We see Cueball 's strategy for making friends. It does incorporate various points of advice for building friendships, which are completely sound in the abstract. But it's clearly not helping him -- he's out of sync with the interaction context and makes bigger social gaffes by following the abstract advice. Escalating awkwardness ensues.\nIt starts out with a common way of making friends or interacting with friends, hanging out over a meal. However, Cueball suggests doing so with awkwardly literal phrasing; whereas most people use expressions such as \u201chave lunch\u201d or \u201cgrab a bite to eat\u201d, Cueball explicitly invites Hairy to \u201ceat food\u201d. The fact that he feels the need to clarify that they\u2019ll be eating food, as opposed to any other orally consumable items, indicates his lack of confidence to clearly communicate his intentions.\nBefore Hairy can even respond, Cueball then says that they could instead \u201csit together and talk without eating.\u201d Although this is indeed another common way to make friends, it\u2019s kind of an odd way to phrase it, especially since he didn\u2019t even give Hairy a chance to reply to his initial suggestion. Cueball then says he doesn\u2019t need to eat (meaning not right now , especially as a prerequisite to talking), but he immediately feels compelled to clarify that he does need to eat (meaning in general ). Again, it\u2019s weird that he clarified, as his original wording probably would have been understood. He then awkwardly remarks about how he can eat later if Hairy would rather just talk. The overall implication is that Cueball\u2019s awkwardness and over-explanation would put off a typical person, although some people find it endearing .\nThis is a situation that Randall has encountered before, in 1746: Making Friends , in which he offered \"advice\" to play dead to attract new friends and\/or turkey vultures; presumably he has \"learned\" from his unsuccessful attempts and is trying more conversational approaches, but apologizes to the reader as he hasn't quite figured that out either.\nThe title text says Cueball wants to be friends at Hairy, rather than with him, which isn\u2019t how friendship usually works. \u201cAt\u201d implies that Cueball considers being friends to be a unilateral action that he needs to direct towards Hairy, like \u201csmiling at\u201d or \u201cpointing at\u201d, and does not understand that it is typically a mutual activity of building a relationship, which would be indicated by being friends with him. \u201cAt\u201d can even carry a degree of animosity (compare: \u201che just phoned up to wash his head at us\u201d ).\n[First panel with words, with the words in the center white and on a black oval background, which is in turn on the white background:] Presenting:\nHow to make friends\n[Second panel with Cueball and Hairy facing each other:] Cueball: Want to go eat food together? Cueball: We could also sit together and talk without eating. I don't need to eat. I mean, I do need to eat. But if you don't want to eat then we can just talk. I can eat later.\n[Third panel with words, same format as first panel:] Okay\nIt turns out I still haven't figured out how to do this.\nSorry\n"}
{"id":1918,"title":"NEXUS","image_title":"NEXUS","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1918","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nexus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1918:_NEXUS","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball walking through an airport.] Sign: Apply for NEXUS Save time at the border Megan: Maybe we should sign up for this. Cueball: No way. I refuse to have anything to do with Nexus after what they did to FernGully.\n","explanation":"Cueball is confusing NEXUS , a USA and Canada border control pre-screening program , with Hexxus , the villains from the animated film FernGully .\nTrusted traveller programs like Nexus allow people who match certain criteria to apply for a membership and subsequently save time when boarding airplanes or crossing borders via use of expedited lanes.\nFernGully is a story set in an Australian rainforest inhabited by fairies including Crysta, who accidentally shrinks a young logger named Zak to the size of a fairy. Together, they rally the fairies and the animals of the rainforest to protect their home from the loggers and a malevolent pollution entity, Hexxus. Hexxus has previously been mentioned in 1750: Life Goals as an especially hard-to-spell word and in 1767: US State Names (as a replacement for Texas).\nThe title text is confusing Cisco (a telecoms & tech brand which has a line of switches called Nexus ) with:\n[Megan and Cueball walking through an airport.] Sign: Apply for NEXUS Save time at the border Megan: Maybe we should sign up for this. Cueball: No way. I refuse to have anything to do with Nexus after what they did to FernGully.\n"}
{"id":1919,"title":"Interstellar Asteroid","image_title":"Interstellar Asteroid","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1919","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interstellar_asteroid.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1919:_Interstellar_Asteroid","transcript":"[Megan walks towards Cueball while looking at her phone. Cueball sits in front of his laptop.] Megan: Hey, you know that asteroid that tumbled past from another star system? It's apparently really long and skinny. Megan: Like a ratio of 6:1 or 10:1. Cueball: Weird. Wonder what it's shaped like.\n[Megan lowers her phone and looks up. Cueball looks backward.] Megan: Without more data, it would be irresponsible to speculate further. Cueball: So...you're going to? Megan: Absolutely.\n[Frameless panel focusing on Megan.] Megan: Here are some objects with a similar shape ratio: Megan: The 1:4:9 monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey . Megan: A star destroyer. Megan: A huge eggplant emoji.\n[Same setting with Megan and Cueball.] Megan: A statue of Weird Al. An iPhone XXXXX. Voltron. Megan: A giant space coffin. But who could be inside? We can only guess. I'll start: Cueball: This is all based on how many data points, again? Megan: One. But it's a perfect fit!\n","explanation":"\u02bbOumuamua is the first detection of an interstellar asteroid passing through the Solar System originating from another solar system.\nMegan 's list of objects with a similar shape ratio:\nAs soon as Megan lists off the last item, she is about to start speculating within her own speculative scenario about who or what might be in the coffin before Cueball interrupts her. Cueball attempts to bring Megan back down to earth by reminding her that she has too little data to work with (one data point), but Megan is far too excitable to listen to reason. A good example of the dangers of speculating irresponsibly, it would seem.\nIt could also be argued that Megan with this makes fun of many news outlets whose first reaction to a new space body often seems to be to search for something to compare its shape to, such as with the 'rubber duck' comet . Making fun of media covering science news is a recurring theme on xkcd.\nThe title text suggests taking reciprocal action by sending asteroids away when the solar system receives them. This would, of course, be difficult, given the amount of energy needed to shift asteroids outside of the Sun's gravity hold. On top of that, it appears to imply that some non-human entity is sending these rocks, which is an inane idea. This could be a reference to the movie Starship Troopers , where a race of aliens mankind is at war with supposedly hit Earth with asteroids. Given that a typical interstellar traveler -- like the one spotted now in real life -- spends millions of years getting from one star system to another, the movie's idea is plain stupid; in fact, the movie gives no proof the aliens were actually responsible, leading to a common fan theory that the asteroid was indeed random space junk and the aliens are being framed by the human government as pretense for war.\n[Megan walks towards Cueball while looking at her phone. Cueball sits in front of his laptop.] Megan: Hey, you know that asteroid that tumbled past from another star system? It's apparently really long and skinny. Megan: Like a ratio of 6:1 or 10:1. Cueball: Weird. Wonder what it's shaped like.\n[Megan lowers her phone and looks up. Cueball looks backward.] Megan: Without more data, it would be irresponsible to speculate further. Cueball: So...you're going to? Megan: Absolutely.\n[Frameless panel focusing on Megan.] Megan: Here are some objects with a similar shape ratio: Megan: The 1:4:9 monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey . Megan: A star destroyer. Megan: A huge eggplant emoji.\n[Same setting with Megan and Cueball.] Megan: A statue of Weird Al. An iPhone XXXXX. Voltron. Megan: A giant space coffin. But who could be inside? We can only guess. I'll start: Cueball: This is all based on how many data points, again? Megan: One. But it's a perfect fit!\n"}
{"id":1920,"title":"Emoji Sports","image_title":"Emoji Sports","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1920","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/emoji_sports.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1920:_Emoji_Sports","transcript":"New sports created from random emoji\n[Man Playing Water Polo + Volcano] \ud83e\udd3d\u200d\u2642\ufe0f\ud83c\udf0b \tLavaball\n[Woman Playing Handball + Person Fencing] \ud83e\udd3e\u200d\u2640\ufe0f\ud83e\udd3a \tBladeball\n[Woman Dancing (2 emojis) + Soccer Ball] \ud83d\udc83\ud83d\udc83\u26bd \tFancyball\n[Hole + Horse Racing (3 emojis)] \ud83d\udd73\ufe0f\ud83c\udfc7\ud83c\udfc7\ud83c\udfc7 \tHorse hole\n[Kitchen Knife + Basketball + Pick] \ud83d\udd2a\ud83c\udfc0\u26cf\ufe0f \tBasketball shredding\n[Egg + Telescope + Woman Detective] \ud83e\udd5a\ud83d\udd2d\ud83d\udd75\ufe0f\u200d\u2640\ufe0f \tEggspotting\n[Skier + Crocodile] \u26f7\ufe0f\ud83d\udc0a \tAlligator jumping\n[Woman + Fishing Pole + Merman] \ud83d\udc69\ud83c\udfa3\ud83e\udddc\u200d\u2642\ufe0f \tMerfishing\n[Man + Badminton + Fairy + Badminton + Woman] \ud83d\udc68\ud83c\udff8\ud83e\uddda\ud83c\udff8\ud83d\udc69 \tTinkerball\n[Curling Stone + Hedgehog + Curling Stone] \ud83e\udd4c\ud83e\udd94\ud83e\udd4c \tHedgehog curling\n[Clamp + Hamburger] \ud83d\udddc\ufe0f\ud83c\udf54 \tBurger clamping\n[Woman Astronaut + Bow and Arrow + Satellite] \ud83d\udc69\u200d\ud83d\ude80\ud83c\udff9\ud83d\udef0\ufe0f \tConsequence archery\n[Owl + Right Arrow + Open Mailbox] \ud83e\udd89\u27a1\ufe0f\ud83d\udcec \tOwlstuffing\n[Fork and Knife + Candle + Fork and Knife] \ud83c\udf74\ud83d\udd6f\ufe0f\ud83c\udf74 \tCandle eating\n[Flag in Hole + Bomb + Woman Golfing] \u26f3\ud83d\udca3\ud83c\udfcc\ufe0f\u200d\u2640\ufe0f \tConsequence golf\n[Pointing Right + Snake + Pointing Left] \ud83d\udc49\ud83d\udc0d\ud83d\udc48 \tSnake shaming\n[Fire + Woman Climbing + Fire] \ud83d\udd25\ud83e\uddd7\u200d\u2640\ufe0f\ud83d\udd25 \tHell escape\n[Video Game + Avocado + Video Game] \ud83c\udfae\ud83e\udd51\ud83c\udfae \tMultiplayer avocado\n","explanation":"This comic, as the heading indicates, arbitrarily selects emoji and uses them to make up very bizarre sports. Although some of these might be completely normal, most of them take things to a completely absurd level.\nThe title text is a reference to the Triple Crown , which is an highly prestigious award given to a three-year-old thoroughbred horse who wins the Kentucky Derby , the Preakness Stakes , and the Belmont Stakes , the first three of the four listed events. The joke is that if Horse Hole was a real sport, then one who won a major competition for it, the Missouri Horse Hole, in addition to the three main horse racing events, would win a \"Quadruple Crown\".\nPlease note that some emoji may not be supported by your browser, in which the emoji will appear as a black rectangle, and if there is a male\/female version of the emoji, a male\/female sign will appear next to the rectangle.\nNew sports created from random emoji\n[Man Playing Water Polo + Volcano] \ud83e\udd3d\u200d\u2642\ufe0f\ud83c\udf0b \tLavaball\n[Woman Playing Handball + Person Fencing] \ud83e\udd3e\u200d\u2640\ufe0f\ud83e\udd3a \tBladeball\n[Woman Dancing (2 emojis) + Soccer Ball] \ud83d\udc83\ud83d\udc83\u26bd \tFancyball\n[Hole + Horse Racing (3 emojis)] \ud83d\udd73\ufe0f\ud83c\udfc7\ud83c\udfc7\ud83c\udfc7 \tHorse hole\n[Kitchen Knife + Basketball + Pick] \ud83d\udd2a\ud83c\udfc0\u26cf\ufe0f \tBasketball shredding\n[Egg + Telescope + Woman Detective] \ud83e\udd5a\ud83d\udd2d\ud83d\udd75\ufe0f\u200d\u2640\ufe0f \tEggspotting\n[Skier + Crocodile] \u26f7\ufe0f\ud83d\udc0a \tAlligator jumping\n[Woman + Fishing Pole + Merman] \ud83d\udc69\ud83c\udfa3\ud83e\udddc\u200d\u2642\ufe0f \tMerfishing\n[Man + Badminton + Fairy + Badminton + Woman] \ud83d\udc68\ud83c\udff8\ud83e\uddda\ud83c\udff8\ud83d\udc69 \tTinkerball\n[Curling Stone + Hedgehog + Curling Stone] \ud83e\udd4c\ud83e\udd94\ud83e\udd4c \tHedgehog curling\n[Clamp + Hamburger] \ud83d\udddc\ufe0f\ud83c\udf54 \tBurger clamping\n[Woman Astronaut + Bow and Arrow + Satellite] \ud83d\udc69\u200d\ud83d\ude80\ud83c\udff9\ud83d\udef0\ufe0f \tConsequence archery\n[Owl + Right Arrow + Open Mailbox] \ud83e\udd89\u27a1\ufe0f\ud83d\udcec \tOwlstuffing\n[Fork and Knife + Candle + Fork and Knife] \ud83c\udf74\ud83d\udd6f\ufe0f\ud83c\udf74 \tCandle eating\n[Flag in Hole + Bomb + Woman Golfing] \u26f3\ud83d\udca3\ud83c\udfcc\ufe0f\u200d\u2640\ufe0f \tConsequence golf\n[Pointing Right + Snake + Pointing Left] \ud83d\udc49\ud83d\udc0d\ud83d\udc48 \tSnake shaming\n[Fire + Woman Climbing + Fire] \ud83d\udd25\ud83e\uddd7\u200d\u2640\ufe0f\ud83d\udd25 \tHell escape\n[Video Game + Avocado + Video Game] \ud83c\udfae\ud83e\udd51\ud83c\udfae \tMultiplayer avocado\n"}
{"id":1921,"title":"The Moon and the Great Wall","image_title":"The Moon and the Great Wall","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1921","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_moon_and_the_great_wall.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1921:_The_Moon_and_the_Great_Wall","transcript":"[Megan is holding her arm up towards Ponytail as they stand atop a large brick wall with merlons along the top. They are standing to the left of a tower with three small windows as well as merlons on the top.] Megan: Did you know that the moon's craters and plains are the only structures on the surface of a celestial body that can be seen with the naked eye from the Great Wall of China?\n","explanation":"This is a reference to the myth that the Great Wall of China is the only manmade object [ citation needed ] that can be seen from the Moon (or from space) with the naked eye. Sadly, it cannot . In fact, it's barely visible from the orbit of low satellites.\nThis comic mocks the myth by conflating it with another saying about the Moon, and how the Moon's craters and valleys are visible to the naked human eye. Indeed, the Moon is the only celestial body for which this is true, as all other bodies (with the potential exception of the Sun, see the title text) can only be seen as tiny points of light by the unaided human eye. There is nothing special about the Great Wall of China in this factoid, though; the Moon\u2019s features can be seen equally well from practically any place on Earth with a view of the Moon. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text states that one is sometimes able to see large sunspots if any are present and conditions are ideal. However, looking directly at the sun with the naked eye risks extensive damage to the eye and should NEVER be done. It could, however, be possible to see them when the Sun is seen through a thin cloud cover or maybe at sunset\/sunrise. (It's possible to see very large sunspots with solar eclipse glasses or other adequate protection , but that's not unaided human eye.)\n[Megan is holding her arm up towards Ponytail as they stand atop a large brick wall with merlons along the top. They are standing to the left of a tower with three small windows as well as merlons on the top.] Megan: Did you know that the moon's craters and plains are the only structures on the surface of a celestial body that can be seen with the naked eye from the Great Wall of China?\n"}
{"id":1922,"title":"Interferometry","image_title":"Interferometry","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1922","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interferometry.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1922:_Interferometry","transcript":"[Cueball is walking behind Beret Guy, who is walking two small dogs on two leashes.] Beret Guy: Interferometry. Is so cool!\n[They stop and Beret Guy is holding the leashes in his hand. He has taken them off the dogs and points at the dogs, which he has placed facing outward so they are standing a couple of paces apart. The distance between them is indicated by a labeled line.] Beret Guy: If you put two small dogs a large distance apart, they can function as a single giant dog. Line: d\n[Cueball begins to speak but is cut off by Beret Guy yelling as he jumps into the space above the two dogs, with each leg a good distance above one of the dogs. (The leashes have disappeared, as well as the distance line).] Cueball: I'm not sure that's- Beret Guy: Hyah!\n[As Cueball watches, Beret Guy floats on top of the invisible giant dog about a meter above the two small dogs, and then rides away with the two small dogs still seen below as they run to the right, leaving Cueball standing in the dust the \"big\" dog creates in its wake. The invisible giant dog barks from a position just in front of Beret Guy's face, far above the two small dogs.] Invisible giant dog: WOOF Beret Guy: Away!\n","explanation":"Interferometry is the practice of overlapping two different waves to get a different signal, which can be used to determine the distance between two reflecting surfaces. An astronomical interferometer uses this principle to build an array of separate telescopes that are able to work together as a single telescope, effectively providing higher resolution using a process known as aperture synthesis .\nIn the comic, Beret Guy and Cueball are walking Beret Guy's dogs when Beret Guy makes a comment on how interferometry is really cool. Beret Guy states that two dogs placed at a consistent interval will function as a larger dog \u2014 a play on the astronomical interferometer. While this idea works on waves, it probably won't work on dogs [ citation needed ] (though since h\/p=\u03bb it might), which is why Cueball is confused and starts to correct him. Before he can respond, however, Beret Guy jumps on his \"large\" dog and appears to be floating in midair. The existence of large dog is further proven when it gives out a large bark. Cueball looks on speechless while Beret Guy appears to exhibit another of his strange powers .\nIn 1614: Kites , Beret Guy is \"walking\" a dog. It is possible that one of the dogs in this comic is the dog from Kites.\nThe title text states that the effective giant dog is not any more 'good' than the two original dogs. This is analogous to sensitivity for astronomical interferometers. Interferometry does not increase the light-gathering area, so it cannot view dim objects as well as a single large telescope could. This is also a reference generally to dog-owners calling their dogs \"good dog\" or \"good boy\/girl\" when they behave well; presumably, Beret Guy's giant interferometry dog is only as well-behaved as the dogs they are derived from. (However, as interferometry does collect more light than any individual telescope used, the interferometry dog is presumably more good than either individual dog. Considering the destructive potential of a giant bad dog, this is a good thing.) It may also be a reference to the They're Good Dogs, Brent meme.\n[Cueball is walking behind Beret Guy, who is walking two small dogs on two leashes.] Beret Guy: Interferometry. Is so cool!\n[They stop and Beret Guy is holding the leashes in his hand. He has taken them off the dogs and points at the dogs, which he has placed facing outward so they are standing a couple of paces apart. The distance between them is indicated by a labeled line.] Beret Guy: If you put two small dogs a large distance apart, they can function as a single giant dog. Line: d\n[Cueball begins to speak but is cut off by Beret Guy yelling as he jumps into the space above the two dogs, with each leg a good distance above one of the dogs. (The leashes have disappeared, as well as the distance line).] Cueball: I'm not sure that's- Beret Guy: Hyah!\n[As Cueball watches, Beret Guy floats on top of the invisible giant dog about a meter above the two small dogs, and then rides away with the two small dogs still seen below as they run to the right, leaving Cueball standing in the dust the \"big\" dog creates in its wake. The invisible giant dog barks from a position just in front of Beret Guy's face, far above the two small dogs.] Invisible giant dog: WOOF Beret Guy: Away!\n"}
{"id":1923,"title":"Felsius","image_title":"Felsius","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1923","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/felsius.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1923:_Felsius","transcript":"[A thermometer is shown where the temperature is indicated, with a red column of liquid, to be just above room temperature. This can be seen from the five labels belonging to five lines pointing at the scale. None of these coincide with the 14 ticks on the actual scale for the thermometer. Below the last label is the formula for calculating the temperature on this scale.] 92\u00b0\u22f2 world heat record 68\u00b0\u22f2 body temperature 47\u00b0\u22f2 room temperature 16\u00b0\u22f2 water freezes \u20139\u00b0\u22f2 0\u00b0F \u00b0\u22f2=7\u00d7\u00b0C\/5+16=(7\u00d7\u00b0F\u201380)\/9\n[Caption below the panel:] Since the Celsius vs Fahrenheit debate has proven surprisingly hard to resolve, as a compromise I've started using Felsius (\u00b0\u22f2), the average of the two.\n\nAn implementation of Felsius is available at Weather In Felsius , using a location based on user's IP address and accepting US ZIP codes (permanent dead link).\n","explanation":"Just like in 1292: Pi vs. Tau , Randall tries to unify two measurement systems by averaging both values, with little success (however this is a matter of opinion).\nThere are several temperature scales actively used in different parts of the world of for different purposes, including Celsius and Fahrenheit , but e.g. also Kelvin and Rankine .\nThe debate on whether to use Fahrenheit or Celsius is, just like the one between United States customary units (which uses Fahrenheit), imperial units (outdated system that used Fahrenheit), and metric units (which use Celsius or Kelvin), one that is mostly restricted to the US. While Fahrenheit is a widely used temperature scale in the US, most other countries have already switched from Fahrenheit to Celsius or have always used Celsius. In scientific circles, even in the US, only Celsius (and Kelvin) are used.\nThe conversion factors between Celsius and Fahrenheit are:\n\u00b0C = (\u00b0F \u2212 32) \u00d7 5 \/ 9 \u00b0F = \u00b0C \u00d7 9 \/ 5 + 32\nwhich makes the average (mean) value of \u00b0C and \u00b0F: \u00b0\u22f2 = \u00b0C \u00d7 7 \/ 5 + 16.  The step-by-step derivation of this is:\n\u00b0\u22f2 = (\u00b0C + \u00b0F) \/ 2 = (\u00b0C + (\u00b0C \u00d7 9 \/ 5 + 32)) \/ 2 = (\u00b0C + \u00b0C \u00d7 9 \/ 5 + 32) \/ 2 = (\u00b0C \u00d7 5 \/ 5 + \u00b0C \u00d7 9 \/ 5 + 32) \/ 2 = (\u00b0C \u00d7 (5+9) \/ 5 + 32) \/ 2 = (\u00b0C \u00d7 14 \/ 5 + 32) \/ 2 = \u00b0C \u00d7 7 \/ 5 + 16\nRandall chose to name his new unit of temperature Felsius (a portmanteau of Fahrenheit and Celsius).\nComically enough, the Felsius scale discards the main advantages of either temperature scale. The Celsius scale is based around 0 \u00b0C as the melting point of water and 100 \u00b0C as the boiling point, which is an advantage Felsius does not preserve. Fahrenheit is often argued to be a convenient temperature measure for human comfort, as 0 \u00b0F is very cold and 100 \u00b0F is very hot. Many places on earth which humans inhabit fall reasonably well within these extremes the majority of the time, but Felsius does not preserve this advantage of the Fahrenheit scale either.\nThe title text states that the symbol he chose to represent this unit also is the average of two other symbols. Visually, it is assumed to be a combination of Celsius and Fahrenheit (a C with a crossbar), but it is actually the unrelated symbols for the euro (\u20ac) and the Greek lunate epsilon (\u03f5). Randall's symbol has a single crossbar, like the Greek lunate epsilon, but the crossbar continues to the left, like the Euro symbol. (In this explanation and the transcript, we have used the mathematical symbol U+22F2 , which may appear too large or too small depending on the font.)\nIn doing all this, Randall has fallen into the trap of creating a new temperature scale\/standard: see 927: Standards .\nRandall has also compared Celsius and Fahrenheit scales earlier in 1643: Degrees and in 526: Converting to Metric he tries to give users of the Fahrenheit scale an idea about what a given Celsius temperature would feel like.\nThis is an example of Argument to Moderation , also known as the false middle point fallacy.  A famous use of this fallacy is in the Bible, the Judgment of Solomon .  The true mother of a disputed baby is discovered [1] by proposing the \"compromise\" of cutting the baby in half. Perhaps Randall has a similar strategy in proposing Felsius, an absurd compromise, in order to somehow discover the \"true\" temperature scale.\nNote that this is not the first time Randall has proposed a controversial third way .\n[A thermometer is shown where the temperature is indicated, with a red column of liquid, to be just above room temperature. This can be seen from the five labels belonging to five lines pointing at the scale. None of these coincide with the 14 ticks on the actual scale for the thermometer. Below the last label is the formula for calculating the temperature on this scale.] 92\u00b0\u22f2 world heat record 68\u00b0\u22f2 body temperature 47\u00b0\u22f2 room temperature 16\u00b0\u22f2 water freezes \u20139\u00b0\u22f2 0\u00b0F \u00b0\u22f2=7\u00d7\u00b0C\/5+16=(7\u00d7\u00b0F\u201380)\/9\n[Caption below the panel:] Since the Celsius vs Fahrenheit debate has proven surprisingly hard to resolve, as a compromise I've started using Felsius (\u00b0\u22f2), the average of the two.\n\nAn implementation of Felsius is available at Weather In Felsius , using a location based on user's IP address and accepting US ZIP codes (permanent dead link).\n"}
{"id":1924,"title":"Solar Panels","image_title":"Solar Panels","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1924","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/solar_panels.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1924:_Solar_Panels","transcript":"[A flow chart that features four questions in bubbles. Each question has yes\/no options in bubbles overlain to the left and right on the question bubble. Curved arrows points from the yes and no bubbles to either the next question or the result. The result written at the bottom is not inside bubbles. The chart has two main branches, that ends up in five places using only four different results, as the middle result is shared by both branches. Above the chart, there is a caption:] Should I put solar panels on it?\nDoes it move around? Yes Does it have regular chances to recharge or swap batteries? Yes Probably not No When running, is it hot to the touch? No Maybe Yes Haha good luck No Is there an empty space nearby where it would be easier to put them? Yes Probably not [Uses the same sentence as the one in the first branch.] No Sure\n","explanation":"This handy decision tree aims to help in finding out whether a given object should have solar panels installed on it.\nThe root question is whether the object of choice moves. If it doesn't and has no nearby empty space that would be more practical for the solar panel installation, then yes, the object should be equipped with the solar panels. If the object is static, but you could more easily install the panels somewhere else nearby, probably that's the best place. An example of this is a slanted rooftop of a house or a field on a hillside: it's certainly possible to put solar panels there, but if a flat surface, like a flat-roofed house or a level field, is available, it would generally be easier to put them on that. This way, you can select the optimal direction for the panels to face, which might not be possible on a given incline, or even have them move to track the sun . However, if the house has a side that is turned towards the sun (south in the Northern hemisphere) then a house roof could be even better than on the ground, which is why the title text says \"sure\" for rooftops. For another example of things where \"putting next to it\" instead of \"on it\" is generally the easier (and arguably better) option, see the \"highway surfaces\" of the title text.\nIf the object moves, the next question is whether its batteries can be recharged or swapped with ease, in which case batteries may be a better option than solar panels, if the purpose of the panels is to power the object. The idea is that solar panels on a vehicle sound like an interesting idea, but batteries can be much more easily (and economically) recharged from a fixed electrical station than using solar panels on the vehicle as a power source. It may be possible to have solar panels on the electrical station , but that is a separate device to consult the table on.\nFinally, if the object moves and batteries are not an option, the last question is whether the object heats up during operation. If so, solar panels may not work well. Randall doubts it mockingly, see also the title text regarding his Haha Good luck final option. \nSolar panels can only produce electrical power equal to about 20% of the solar radiation they receive. Thus, a device that heats up during use likely consumes much more power than the amount which could be produced by solar panels covering its surface - so \"good luck\". Obviously, many animals are also \"moving objects\" fitting this condition, and installing solar panels on them is bound to be a challenge.\nMoreover, solar panels do not work effectively when excessively hot [1] (solar panels are typically designed to operate in temperature ranges of 15-25 Celsius, 59-77 Fahrenheit, 288.15-298.15 Kelvin, 518.67-536.67 Rankine, 12-20 R\u00e9aumur, 15.38-20.63 R\u00f8mer, 127.5-112.5 Delisle, 4.95-8.25 Newton, 5.968 546\u00d710\u207b\u00b2\u00b9 - 6.174 608\u00d710\u207b\u00b2\u00b9 joules of translational kinetic energy or 37-51 Felsius ).\nBut if changing batteries is not an option, and heat production and power requirements are low, then solar panels can be an excellent solution on a moving object. An excellent case for this is on space probes and satellites, which are typically powered entirely by solar panels (and reliably receive sunlight, because there are no clouds to interfere). Randall is well aware of this, as shown with the comics 695: Spirit and 1504: Opportunity about the two solar-powered Mars rovers , although in this comic he seems to have only been concerned with Earthbound objects.\nThe flow chart, however, does not mention if the thing in question actually needs solar panels, but according to the title text it works very well, and thus Randall implies that if the answer is sure then it is relevant to put solar panels there. The more solar panels in place, the fewer fossil fuels are needed, and this is in line with Randall's general interest in reducing climate change .\nThe title text suggests that this flow chart is very broadly applicable to anything the Sun hits.\nRooftops are classed as \"sure\", and those are, indeed, an active subject of solar installation (though, if there's suitable land nearby, it might not be the most efficient).\nHighway surfaces are classed as \"probably not\".  There have been proposals and experiments a concerning photovoltaic pavement covering roadways with solar panels , but these have proven to be impractically expensive and prone to damage.  The flow chart suggests that, since many highways are near land that could be used for solar panels, that will usually be the more viable option.\nSailboats are classed as \"maybe\".  Unlike boats with motors, sailboats don't consume enough power to heat up, only requiring enough power to provide electricity for whatever equipment and appliances are on board. Since some sailboats are at sea long enough that swapping or recharging batteries may be difficult, solar panels could be a viable option.\nMultiple other moving objects, including jets, cars, and wild deer ends up on the haha good luck result.  While these examples seem unrelated, they all have the same limitation: they consume far more power while moving than could realistically be harnessed from solar panels (as demonstrated by the fact that they noticeably heat up).  There are some experimental solar-powered cars, but these tend to be exceptionally low power (and resultingly low-performance) vehicles. Wild deer are clearly a humorous option, as they'd have little use for the electricity from solar panels, and would likely resist any efforts to install them.  Nonetheless, Randall includes them to make the point that the chart is effective, even with ridiculous examples.\n[A flow chart that features four questions in bubbles. Each question has yes\/no options in bubbles overlain to the left and right on the question bubble. Curved arrows points from the yes and no bubbles to either the next question or the result. The result written at the bottom is not inside bubbles. The chart has two main branches, that ends up in five places using only four different results, as the middle result is shared by both branches. Above the chart, there is a caption:] Should I put solar panels on it?\nDoes it move around? Yes Does it have regular chances to recharge or swap batteries? Yes Probably not No When running, is it hot to the touch? No Maybe Yes Haha good luck No Is there an empty space nearby where it would be easier to put them? Yes Probably not [Uses the same sentence as the one in the first branch.] No Sure\n"}
{"id":1925,"title":"Self-Driving Car Milestones","image_title":"Self-Driving Car Milestones","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1925","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/self_driving_car_milestones.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1925:_Self-Driving_Car_Milestones","transcript":"Upcoming and recently-achieved Self-driving car milestones\nAutomatic emergency braking Highway lane-keeping Self-parking Full highway autonomy First sex in a self-driving car Full trips with no input from driver Full trips by empty cars An empty car wandering the highways for months or years until someone notices the credit card fuel charges Cars that read other cars' bumper stickers before deciding whether to cut them off Autonomous engine revving at red lights Self-loathing cars Autonomous canyon jumping Cars capable of arguing about the trolley problem on Facebook\n","explanation":"With the creation of self-driving cars, many new milestones are being found and\/or solved thanks to them. Some are good, and some are downright weird. This comic lists some that have already been achieved, some that are being worked on and some that are facetious \"milestones\".\nAutomatic emergency brakes This is another reference to how hard it can be to program human-obvious stuff (as in 1425: Tasks ). A self-driving car has to be able to distinguish a danger (cliff, person on foot\/cycle\/etc., other cars coming the wrong way\/doing weird stuff) from the side of the road, the background, the other cars, or even a light pole safely standing on the side of the road. Then the car also has to decide the optimal response, taking into account weather conditions, road type and traffic - whether to turn aside, just slow down (as danger is not imminent), or actually do the strong brake. There are big potential advantages for self-driving cars if this problem can be solved: computers don't tend to panic as much as humans, would have faster reaction times and would have more reliable judgment .\nHighway lane-keeping Sometimes, especially on highways where road delimitations might be faint or absent , or when lane markings could have faded away, a self-driving car programmed to pilot based on road markings would have issues holding to the correct side of the road. This is a bigger problem on highways than in cities, as cars move faster on highways, so the danger detection mentioned above might not manage to detect danger in time, while braking or avoiding the obstacle needs to be anticipated much more.\nSelf-parking Already implemented in recent normal cars, this feature is important to remove the car from the road while not in use, and is sometimes considered a difficult maneuver for drivers to master, as it requires a good \"feeling\" of the car dimensions, as well as of distances and maneuverability of the car, and also information about surrounding barriers. The latter parameters, being easy to sense with radar and back-camera aide, are made more reliable with computers.\nFull highway autonomy The ability for a car to drive itself on a highway. As of 2017, there are plans under consideration to set highway lanes aside for self-driving cars, but this milestone would require a car to be able to operate on a highway that also has human-driven cars, as well as wildlife, pedestrians, debris and other obstacles, should they enter the highway.\nFirst sex in a self-driving car This is not a milestone for the cars themselves, but just the age-old practice of having sex in cars, performed in a car that happens to be self-driving. Given the nature of human sexuality, it is probable that this had already happened at the time of this comic. The first public documentation of this milestone was published in May of 2019, as a video featuring coitus occurring in a Tesla Model X on autopilot went viral on PornHub.\nFull trips with no input from driver The main point of self-driving cars, allowing all humans within to act as passengers. As of 2017, self-driving cars require a human to be able to take over just in case, but any such trip where the human never actually took control would qualify for this milestone. However, there could be an additional joke here that the car is driving without human input including the destination. In this case, the car itself is choosing where to go, leaving the humans helpless.\nFull trips by empty cars A more complete version of the above, since with no humans present, no human can take control. This could be considered fulfilled by the DARPA Grand Challenge entrants, as the challenges are racing competitions of autonomous cars with no humans on board. Possibly a reference to 1559: Driving .\nSelf-refueling of empty cars This would require either: a robotic fuel station, able to refuel cars with humans inside as well; an ordinary full-service fuel station (that is, one where the station's employee performs the refueling of the car) that happens to service a self-driving car with no humans aboard (which could be arranged as a publicity stunt); a specially designed fuel station that would allow self-driving cars to refuel by docking to it (likely to require fine control of the docking procedure that would render it unsuitable for more fallible human-driven cars); or, perhaps least likely, a robotic arm attachment on the car that would allow it to use a normal self-service fuel station. Currently Tesla's robotic charging station is the closest thing to this accomplishment. It is most certainly a reference to 1559: Driving .\nAn empty car wandering the highways for months or years until someone notices the credit card fuel charges Cars are expensive enough that, were one to drive itself off and wander, some effort would be made to track it down. As this would require the self-refueling milestone, local fuel stations could be alerted to look for the \"rogue\" car\u2014and in any case, whatever payment method is used to pay for the fuel would be traced.\nCars that read other cars' bumper stickers before deciding whether to cut them off Another facetious milestone, implying self-driving cars might obtain the capacity to hold and act upon opinions that might override safety and efficiency of transit. This would be generally considered undesirable [ citation needed ] , so this seems unlikely to actually happen, except perhaps as an unintended consequence of runaway self-learning.\nAutonomous engine revving at red lights Mimicking the human practice. This is often done by human drivers who wish to draw attention to their car and then speed off as quickly as possible once the light turns green, but is regarded by most as being a nuisance. As such, this is an unlikely goal for self-driving cars to achieve.\nSelf-loathing cars This would require cars to become sentient enough to understand, and have negative opinions about, themselves. Depending on one's definition, though, self-diagnostic software might qualify, as they would be running on a car's computer and could express a negative opinion about the car (albeit normally limited to the context of the car needing maintenance).\nAutonomous canyon jumping Although it seems unlikely that a navigation routine would ever decide that jumping a canyon is part of an optimal route, a car could be programmed to jump a canyon as part of a stunt or show, with no human driver (or any other human aboard) at the time of the jump. It is questionable how \"autonomous\" such a car would be, though. Could also be a reference to the next point, with another popular setting in the discussions mentioned below: \"should a self-driving car leave the road and drive into a canyon, which will kill the driver (and passengers), or stay on the road and kill others?\". Possibly a reference to when a Tesla was driven off a cliff and the driver and his passenger survived without injury. The car was not on autopilot at the time. Could also be a reference to the previous point where the car develops enough self-loathing to want to commit suicide. Or it may be a reference to certain Knight Rider episodes.\nCars capable of arguing about the trolley problem on Facebook The Trolley problem is a well-known thought experiment in ethics, in which a person must choose between passively allowing several people to die or actively causing a single person to die. With the increasing likelihood of fully autonomous vehicles, there's been a flurry of interest in this problem, centered around what a vehicle should be programmed to do in such a case (for example, if avoiding a high-speed collision required running over a pedestrian). Munroe seems to mock this debate by arguing that the true milestone would not be when the vehicle can make such a decision, but when it can argue about it on Facebook. This may refer to the idea that humans aren't capable of agreeing on a resolution to the problem, so expecting a vehicle to resolve it would be less reasonable than expecting it to be able to debate. On the day this comic was released the Youtube channel Vsauce posted a video, The Greater Good - Mind Field S2 (Ep 1) , where they tested people's reactions to the trolley problem in a fake situation where the subjects genuinely believed they were in a situation where they were choosing between saving five from an oncoming train by killing one on another track. Given such a coincidence, it is extremely likely that this milestone was added after Munroe saw the episode.\nEvaluating arbitrarily complex Boolean expressions on \"honk if [...]\" bumper stickers and responding accordingly (title text) As with the cut-off milestone, this implies the development of artificial intelligence unrelated to the basic functions of a car, though still imitating human drivers' behavior. This joke is a reference to a previous comic about honking and formal logic .\nUpcoming and recently-achieved Self-driving car milestones\nAutomatic emergency braking Highway lane-keeping Self-parking Full highway autonomy First sex in a self-driving car Full trips with no input from driver Full trips by empty cars An empty car wandering the highways for months or years until someone notices the credit card fuel charges Cars that read other cars' bumper stickers before deciding whether to cut them off Autonomous engine revving at red lights Self-loathing cars Autonomous canyon jumping Cars capable of arguing about the trolley problem on Facebook\n"}
{"id":1926,"title":"Bad Code","image_title":"Bad Code","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1926","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bad_code.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1926:_Bad_Code","transcript":"[Cueball is at his desk on a swivel chair, using his computer. Ponytail walks towards him.] Ponytail: That's the ugliest mess of code I've ever seen. What on earth are you working on?\n[Cueball swivels his chair to face Ponytail in a frameless panel.] Cueball: It's nothing weird this time, I swear. Cueball: It just looks bad because it's a spreadsheet formula.\n[Cueball is turns back towards the computer while Ponytail looks over his shoulder at the computer screen.] Cueball: ...which assembles a Haskell function. Ponytail: Uhhh. Cueball: ...for parsing HTML. Ponytail: ...oh my God.\n[Ponytail points away from the scene while still looking at the computer screen.] Cueball: It's ok! Nothing depends on this. Ponytail: That wall isn't load-bearing. Does that mean we can just throw hammers at it? Cueball: ...I mean... Ponytail: Wait. Crap.\n","explanation":"This comic is the fourth in the Code Quality series:\nPonytail has caught Cueball in the act of writing some messy code \u2014 code in the form of a spreadsheet formula, which in turn produces another program in a language called Haskell . Haskell is a purely functional programming language, a concept that has a debatably steep learning curve, which causes it to be somewhat obscure, as referenced in 1312: Haskell . It is explained that this code will, in turn, interpret more source code, specifically code written in HTML .  Parsing HTML is notoriously tricky without a dedicated software library for several reasons, including frequent changes to web pages, a nested structure of tags and quotes that frustrates regular expressions , allowing new lines to be started almost anywhere, and different standards that are followed or not followed to varying degrees.\nAfter Cueball excuses his bad code by stating that \"nothing depends on this\" (meaning that no other projects rely on this code being good to operate properly), Ponytail uses the analogy of breaking a non-load-bearing wall to ridicule Cueball's excuse. A load-bearing wall is a wall that plays a role in supporting the building. Damaging such a wall would threaten the structural integrity of the entire building, and could potentially cause a collapse. In contrast, walls that aren't load-bearing are designed only to separate spaces within the building, and do not contribute to keeping the building up. Damaging or destroying such walls wouldn't endanger the overall structure of the building. However, supporting the building is just one of the functions which could depend on having an intact wall, and non-load-bearing walls are still there for a purpose. Walls serve many other important purposes, from creating opaque and sound blocking barriers (desirable for privacy purposes, particularly for bedrooms and bathrooms), to containing and protecting water pipes and electrical wiring. Ponytail's analogy suggests that, even though poorly written-code wouldn't cause the entire program to fail, it's still not a good idea.\nImmediately after, Ponytail appears to have realized that she's only inspired Cueball to go ahead and break the wall, instead of swaying him away from writing ugly code. If left unchecked, this will only end in tragedy .\nThis is most likely a continuation of the Code Quality series, but it differs slightly. For one thing, all of the previous strips were named \"Code Quality <number>\", with the exception of the first, which was just named \"Code Quality\". Also note that, unlike the previous Code Quality strips, Ponytail does not start using similes like \"This is like being in a house built by a child using nothing but a hatchet and a picture of a house\". It's also the longest explanation of Cueball's code by Cueball himself.\nThe title text suggests that Cueball's approach to breaking the wall - scotch-taping a bunch of hammers together - is as good as his code, and his excuse is similar.\n[Cueball is at his desk on a swivel chair, using his computer. Ponytail walks towards him.] Ponytail: That's the ugliest mess of code I've ever seen. What on earth are you working on?\n[Cueball swivels his chair to face Ponytail in a frameless panel.] Cueball: It's nothing weird this time, I swear. Cueball: It just looks bad because it's a spreadsheet formula.\n[Cueball is turns back towards the computer while Ponytail looks over his shoulder at the computer screen.] Cueball: ...which assembles a Haskell function. Ponytail: Uhhh. Cueball: ...for parsing HTML. Ponytail: ...oh my God.\n[Ponytail points away from the scene while still looking at the computer screen.] Cueball: It's ok! Nothing depends on this. Ponytail: That wall isn't load-bearing. Does that mean we can just throw hammers at it? Cueball: ...I mean... Ponytail: Wait. Crap.\n"}
{"id":1927,"title":"Tinder","image_title":"Tinder","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1927","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tinder.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1927:_Tinder","transcript":"[A Smartphone is shown with the screen facing the viewer. On the screen is the Tinder UI. The main photo is of Cueball, in the cockpit of a plane which appears to be tilting to the right, holding up a makeshift sign saying:] If you know how to fly a plane please swipe right ASAP\n","explanation":"Tinder is a social media\/dating app. The main interface of Tinder shows photos of people. Users swipe right for matches that they like, and left otherwise. The purpose of the app is to get dates, with the intent of a romantic relationship or sexual intercourse. However, in the comic, Cueball is trying to use it to request assistance flying a plane instead. If the request is genuine, this is a bad situation, because it suggests Cueball is in charge of a plane he is unable to fly, and unless he finds a match with someone who can, and is able to provide assistance, the plane will crash. Even then, unless the matched person happens to be on board, and therefore able to assist directly, providing help through Tinder messages is unlikely to be a sufficiently efficient way of solving the problem.\nAlternatively, Cueball may simply be pretending that there is an emergency so that he can get matches on Tinder. In either case, depending on the jurisdiction, Cueball may be violating the law by using a cell phone that is not in \"airplane mode\" (in some phones, \"flight mode\" or \"offline mode\") when on an airplane. WiFi can be enabled on some flights during the entire flight; in others it may be banned during takeoff and landing. Even if he is either uploading the picture after the flight or using the in-flight internet service, he is still violating other, more serious laws (if he is a pilot, he may be liable for negligence, and if he is an ordinary passenger, God knows what he may have done...)\nThe title text explains that Cueball's unwise method for getting help stems from astonishingly skewed priorities and no small amount of selfishness. He claims to strongly dislike conversing over audio-only channels, and this dislike is apparently so overwhelming that he would rather jeopardize his life and that of any passengers on the plane, than put aside his own hang-ups. Even if we give Cueball the benefit of the doubt and assume that he has a phobia of public speaking, most human beings tend to automatically suspend their irrational anxieties when experiencing the fear of imminent mortal peril, at least until after the danger has passed. For example, those normally afraid of dating Cueball would \"match\" with him to prevent a plane crash, which may be his secret intent after all.\nRandall may be satirizing people who use Tinder (and other similar social apps) by portraying an extreme caricature of a Tinder user.\nThis comic is similar to 1897: Self Driving , and as well as 582: Brakes , which also is about bad ways to get help in emergencies and other time-critical situations.\nNote that the photo is at an angle, but the view out of the window shows the airplane to be in level flight. This could be due to haste taking the picture, or a feigned haste in taking the picture, or could suggest that, for whatever reason, the photo is making the situation seem worse than it is.\n[A Smartphone is shown with the screen facing the viewer. On the screen is the Tinder UI. The main photo is of Cueball, in the cockpit of a plane which appears to be tilting to the right, holding up a makeshift sign saying:] If you know how to fly a plane please swipe right ASAP\n"}
{"id":1928,"title":"Seven Years","image_title":"Seven Years","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1928","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/seven_years.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1928:_Seven_Years","transcript":"[The first eight panels, used earlier in the comic 1141: Two Years , are faded out.]\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit on a bed, Randall's fianc\u00e9e is talking on the phone. The person she is talking to, a doctor holding a clipboard, is shown inset.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: Oh god.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit together while Randall's fianc\u00e9e, now bald, is receiving chemotherapy. They are both on their laptops.] IV pump: ... Beeep ... Beeep ... Beeep ...\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (who is wearing a knit cap) are paddling a kayak against a scenic mountain backdrop.]\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit at a table, staring at a cell phone. There is a clock on the wall. Her head is stubbly.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: How long can it take to read a scan!?\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are back at the hospital again, Randall's fianc\u00e9e receiving chemo. They are playing Scrabble.] Randall: \"Zarg\" isn't a word. Randall's fianc\u00e9e: But caaaancer. Randall: ...Ok, fine.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (wearing a knit cap) are listening to a Cueball-like friend. A large thought bubble is above their heads and it obscures the friends talk. The text below, split in three is the only part there can be no doubt about:] Friend: So next year you should come visit us up in the mounta a and Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (thinking): \"Next year\"\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are getting married, with a heart above their heads. Randall's wife's hair is growing back.]\n[Randall and Randall's wife (wearing a knit cap) stand on a beach, watching a whale jump out of water. This is the last gray panel, with an additional label in normal black color.] Fwoosh Label: Two years\n[Randall and Randall's wife (with her hair noticably longer) are walking through a forest.]\n[Randall's wife is sitting down, not in the forest anymore.] Randall's wife: My toe hurts and I found a report of a case in which toe pain was an early sign of cancer spreading. Randall: Wait\u2014didn\u2019t you stub your toe yesterday? Randall's wife: Yes, but what if this is unrelated?\n[Randall and his wife are going spelunking. The guide is gesturing deeper into the cave while Randall and his wife are climbing down.]\n[Randall's wife stands on a rock above an alligator in a swamp, photographing the alligator.  Randall is on a balcony behind safety railings.] Randall: When they estimated your survival odds, I think they made some optimistic assumptions about your hobbies.\n[Randall's wife sits on an examination bed, listening to a doctor holding a clipboard.] Doctor: This is probably nothing. Doctor: But given your history, we should do a full scan. Doctor: We'll call with the results in a few days.  Try not to worry about it until then!\n[Randall and his wife stand above a deep pond full of fish and other objects.  Randall's wife is piloting a wired underwater camera with lights.]\n[Randall and his wife are standing next to each other.  Randall's wife has shoulder-length hair covering most of her face.] Randall's wife: Hard to believe\u2014six years ago, I was bald.  But today, after a long struggle, I finally look like the little girl from The Ring . Randall: That's, uhh... good? Randall's wife: Hissssss\n[A line of six people, including Randall and his wife, stand and watch the solar eclipse.]\n[The sky has been brightened.] Ponytail: Wow. Randall's wife: Yeah.\n[Randall and his wife are walking together and holding hands.] Randall's wife: That was incredible. Randall's wife: When's the next one? Randall: In seven years. Randall: Wanna go see it?\n[Still walking, Randall and his wife think together about a timeline.  Seven years have passed since 2010, represented with a solid line from the past to 2017; seven years in the future will be 2024, represented with a dotted line into the future and surrounded by three question marks.]\n[The pair keeps walking.] Randall's wife:  Yeah. Randall's wife:  I'll do my best. Randall: It's a date!\n","explanation":"Randall 's then girlfriend, now wife, was diagnosed with cancer in late 2010, a matter he has discussed in the comic multiple times before . Here, motivated by the seven-year period between the American solar eclipses of 2017 and 2024 , we see them reminiscing the seven years prior to the first eclipse, leaving an open question to what the next seven years will bring.\nThis comic is part of a series of comics and directly continues 1141: Two Years , which is shown as the first eight panels, slightly grayed out. It later continued in 2386: Ten Years .\nIt was released as a response to another cancer diagnosis, this is explained in the Header text , which, for this comic only , has replaced the standard xkcd updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The header for this comic, with the active link included, is:\nBecky Beaton, sister of fellow cartoonist Kate Beaton, has also been diagnosed with cancer. You can support her treatment here .\nKate Beaton is the creator of the web comic Hark! A Vagrant . Although this comic is not one on Randall's list of Comics I enjoy , he is clearly much influenced by another cancer diagnosis among someone in his own creative field.\nExplanations of the individual panels:\nThe title text is a continuation to panel 15 concerning the horror movie The Ring . Specifically, watching the videotape in The Ring is supposed to kill a person in seven days, but the title text instead says \"seven years\".\nWith all these thoughts in mind, there is no wonder that he wishes to participate in helping a colleague's cancer-stricken sister with the unique header text above this comic, as mentioned above.\n[The first eight panels, used earlier in the comic 1141: Two Years , are faded out.]\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit on a bed, Randall's fianc\u00e9e is talking on the phone. The person she is talking to, a doctor holding a clipboard, is shown inset.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: Oh god.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit together while Randall's fianc\u00e9e, now bald, is receiving chemotherapy. They are both on their laptops.] IV pump: ... Beeep ... Beeep ... Beeep ...\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (who is wearing a knit cap) are paddling a kayak against a scenic mountain backdrop.]\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit at a table, staring at a cell phone. There is a clock on the wall. Her head is stubbly.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: How long can it take to read a scan!?\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are back at the hospital again, Randall's fianc\u00e9e receiving chemo. They are playing Scrabble.] Randall: \"Zarg\" isn't a word. Randall's fianc\u00e9e: But caaaancer. Randall: ...Ok, fine.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (wearing a knit cap) are listening to a Cueball-like friend. A large thought bubble is above their heads and it obscures the friends talk. The text below, split in three is the only part there can be no doubt about:] Friend: So next year you should come visit us up in the mounta a and Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (thinking): \"Next year\"\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are getting married, with a heart above their heads. Randall's wife's hair is growing back.]\n[Randall and Randall's wife (wearing a knit cap) stand on a beach, watching a whale jump out of water. This is the last gray panel, with an additional label in normal black color.] Fwoosh Label: Two years\n[Randall and Randall's wife (with her hair noticably longer) are walking through a forest.]\n[Randall's wife is sitting down, not in the forest anymore.] Randall's wife: My toe hurts and I found a report of a case in which toe pain was an early sign of cancer spreading. Randall: Wait\u2014didn\u2019t you stub your toe yesterday? Randall's wife: Yes, but what if this is unrelated?\n[Randall and his wife are going spelunking. The guide is gesturing deeper into the cave while Randall and his wife are climbing down.]\n[Randall's wife stands on a rock above an alligator in a swamp, photographing the alligator.  Randall is on a balcony behind safety railings.] Randall: When they estimated your survival odds, I think they made some optimistic assumptions about your hobbies.\n[Randall's wife sits on an examination bed, listening to a doctor holding a clipboard.] Doctor: This is probably nothing. Doctor: But given your history, we should do a full scan. Doctor: We'll call with the results in a few days.  Try not to worry about it until then!\n[Randall and his wife stand above a deep pond full of fish and other objects.  Randall's wife is piloting a wired underwater camera with lights.]\n[Randall and his wife are standing next to each other.  Randall's wife has shoulder-length hair covering most of her face.] Randall's wife: Hard to believe\u2014six years ago, I was bald.  But today, after a long struggle, I finally look like the little girl from The Ring . Randall: That's, uhh... good? Randall's wife: Hissssss\n[A line of six people, including Randall and his wife, stand and watch the solar eclipse.]\n[The sky has been brightened.] Ponytail: Wow. Randall's wife: Yeah.\n[Randall and his wife are walking together and holding hands.] Randall's wife: That was incredible. Randall's wife: When's the next one? Randall: In seven years. Randall: Wanna go see it?\n[Still walking, Randall and his wife think together about a timeline.  Seven years have passed since 2010, represented with a solid line from the past to 2017; seven years in the future will be 2024, represented with a dotted line into the future and surrounded by three question marks.]\n[The pair keeps walking.] Randall's wife:  Yeah. Randall's wife:  I'll do my best. Randall: It's a date!\n"}
{"id":1929,"title":"Argument Timing","image_title":"Argument Timing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1929","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/argument_timing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1929:_Argument_Timing","transcript":"[Shown is a curved time plot. There is a black line, marked \"Before Smartphones and Facebook\" and a red line marked \"After.\" On the y-axis the label reads \"Odds of getting in a friendship-ending argument.\" while there is no scale shown. On the x-axis, at uneven intervals some times of the day are marked as \"Wake up\", \"Get out of bed\", \"Breakfast\", \"Lunch\", \"Dinner\", \"Go to bed\", and \"Fall asleep.\"]\n[With the exception of \"Waking up\" and \"Falling asleep\", the red line is slightly lower than the black line. Directly after \"Waking up\" and during the interval between \"Going to bed\" and \"Falling asleep\", the black line is near zero while the red line peaks.]\n","explanation":"This comic comments on how (a) the prevalence of using mobile devices in bed, combined with (b) burgeoning use of social media, especially Facebook , has increased the potential for conflict by encouraging early morning and late night communications, when those involved may not be at their most clear-headed.\nBefore mobile devices were common, the ability to argue on-line usually ended when a person left their computer to go to bed. Before social media was common, arguments with friends would mostly occur in person or during a phone call. The 'old-fashioned' cycle for arguing suggests that the odds start at near zero, because most people didn't interact with others immediately after waking up unless they lived together, and even then were unlikely to get in arguments first thing in the morning. The frequency increased as the day went on, with peaks at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and a final peak in the evening. This likely indicates that people would frequently share meals with friends and loved ones, then spend time together in the evenings, meaning those times had the most potential for conflict. As the evening ended, the odds fell away dramatically, becoming very low by bedtime, and effectively zero immediately afterward.\nThe red line, indicating argument frequency with mobile devices and social media, has a similar trend, but is distorted by massive peaks between waking up and getting out of bed, and then between going to bed and going to sleep. This suggests that, in Munroe's experience, most relationship-ending arguments in modern times happen over social media and electronic communication, while still in bed. It's not clear whether this indicates people primarily using their devices in bed, or just that people tend to get into arguments more while posting in bed (possibly making less inhibited and diplomatic comments due to fatigue). It could also be that people objecting to their partners using social media in bed is also contributing to the number of arguments. Interestingly, this line indicates the chances of conflict in the mobile\/Facebook era remains above zero for a short time after one goes to sleep. This may suggest that Randall sometimes falls asleep while writing a social media post but finishes it while sleep-typing, or it may be that he is prone to sending out ill-considered messages just before going to sleep, which are only later picked up, unwelcomed, by the recipient.\nThe title text talks about different types of arguers, saying that some people argue more at certain times, or in certain states. \"Hangry\" is a portmanteau of \"hungry\" and \"angry\", meaning bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger.\n490: Morning Routine covers similar ground to this comic.\n[Shown is a curved time plot. There is a black line, marked \"Before Smartphones and Facebook\" and a red line marked \"After.\" On the y-axis the label reads \"Odds of getting in a friendship-ending argument.\" while there is no scale shown. On the x-axis, at uneven intervals some times of the day are marked as \"Wake up\", \"Get out of bed\", \"Breakfast\", \"Lunch\", \"Dinner\", \"Go to bed\", and \"Fall asleep.\"]\n[With the exception of \"Waking up\" and \"Falling asleep\", the red line is slightly lower than the black line. Directly after \"Waking up\" and during the interval between \"Going to bed\" and \"Falling asleep\", the black line is near zero while the red line peaks.]\n"}
{"id":1930,"title":"Calendar Facts","image_title":"Calendar Facts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1930","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/calendar_facts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1930:_Calendar_Facts","transcript":"-Calendar Facts-\n[Shown below is a branching flow chart of sorts that begins at the phrase \"Did you know that\", then flows through various paths to build up a sentence. (Note that the \"\u2192\" arrow symbol is used below to indicate a new branch with no intermediate text from a previous branch.)]\nDid you know that: the ( Fall | Spring ) Equinox the ( Winter | Summer ) ( Solstice | Olympics ) the ( Earliest | Latest ) ( Sunrise | Sunset ) Daylight ( Saving | Savings ) Time Leap ( Day | Year ) Easter the ( Harvest | Super | Blood ) Moon Toyota Truck Month Shark Week \u2192 happens ( earlier | later | at the wrong time ) every year drifts out of sync with the Sun Moon Zodiac ( Gregorian | Mayan | Lunar | iPhone ) Calendar atomic clock in Colorado might ( not happen | happen twice ) this year because of time zone legislation in ( Indiana | Arizona | Russia ) a decree by the pope in the 1500s ( precession | libration | nutation | libation | eccentricity | obliquity ) of the Moon Sun Earth's axis equator prime meridian ( International Date | Mason-Dixon ) Line magnetic field reversal an arbitrary decision by ( Benjamin Franklin | Isaac Newton | FDR ) ? Apparently it causes a predictable increase in car accidents. that's why we have leap seconds. scientists are really worried. it was even more extreme during the Bronze Age. Ice Age. Cretaceous. 1990s. there's a proposal to fix it, but it will never happen. actually makes things worse. is stalled in congress. might be unconstitutional. it's getting worse and no one knows why.\n","explanation":"This is the second comic using Facts in the title.\nRandall presents what appears to be a generator of 156,000 facts [20 x 13 x (8 + 6 x 7) x 12], about calendars, most of which are false or have little meaning [ citation needed ] . The facts are seeded by a mishmash of common tidbits about the time of year.\nThe formula for each generated fact goes as follows: \"Did you know that [a recurring event] [occurs in an unusual manner] because of [phenomena or political decisions] ? Apparently [wild card statement] .\"\nThis is the fifth time that Randall has referred to the phenomenon of a supermoon , which he typically makes fun of, most prominently in 1394: Superm*n .\nThe title text continues the chart with supposed real-life consequences of the trivia in the comic.\nThere are multiple online generators of Calendar 'facts' using this formula here and here .\nAll 156 000 possible combinations can be found here , lovingly assembled by hand (or rather, by a python script) for your entertainment. A random fact generator (including title text), written in Python, can be found here .\n-Calendar Facts-\n[Shown below is a branching flow chart of sorts that begins at the phrase \"Did you know that\", then flows through various paths to build up a sentence. (Note that the \"\u2192\" arrow symbol is used below to indicate a new branch with no intermediate text from a previous branch.)]\nDid you know that: the ( Fall | Spring ) Equinox the ( Winter | Summer ) ( Solstice | Olympics ) the ( Earliest | Latest ) ( Sunrise | Sunset ) Daylight ( Saving | Savings ) Time Leap ( Day | Year ) Easter the ( Harvest | Super | Blood ) Moon Toyota Truck Month Shark Week \u2192 happens ( earlier | later | at the wrong time ) every year drifts out of sync with the Sun Moon Zodiac ( Gregorian | Mayan | Lunar | iPhone ) Calendar atomic clock in Colorado might ( not happen | happen twice ) this year because of time zone legislation in ( Indiana | Arizona | Russia ) a decree by the pope in the 1500s ( precession | libration | nutation | libation | eccentricity | obliquity ) of the Moon Sun Earth's axis equator prime meridian ( International Date | Mason-Dixon ) Line magnetic field reversal an arbitrary decision by ( Benjamin Franklin | Isaac Newton | FDR ) ? Apparently it causes a predictable increase in car accidents. that's why we have leap seconds. scientists are really worried. it was even more extreme during the Bronze Age. Ice Age. Cretaceous. 1990s. there's a proposal to fix it, but it will never happen. actually makes things worse. is stalled in congress. might be unconstitutional. it's getting worse and no one knows why.\n"}
{"id":1931,"title":"Virtual Assistant","image_title":"Virtual Assistant","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1931","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/virtual_assistant.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1931:_Virtual_Assistant","transcript":"[Megan stands next to a small table with a Google Home sitting on it.] Megan: Ok, Google\u2013 Google Home: THUMP-THUMP-THUMP Google Home: CRASH\u00a0 THUD! Google Home: CLICK\u00a0 THUMP THUMP Google Home: [sink running] Google Home: ZIIIIIP!\u00a0 CLICK Google Home: THUMP THUMP\u00a0 CLICK Google Home: SLAM! Google Home: THUMPATHUMPATHUMPA Google Home: H... *Pant* ...Hello... *Pant* Google Home: How... How can I help you?\n[Text below the panel:] I want to hack the world's smart home devices, but not to create a botnet or anything\u2014I just want to make them play this sound clip every time you invoke them.\n","explanation":"Megan invokes her smart device's virtual assistant with the keyphrase \"Okay Google\", intending to follow up with a voice command (e.g. \"Check the weather forecast\" or \"Order two tons of creamed corn\" ). But before she can continue, the smart device interrupts her with a comical cacophony of assorted noises, as a supposed assistant living in the device clumsily rushes from a distant room to Megan's location. The sounds can be interpreted as: tromping down stairwells, knocking over a fragile antique, opening a locked door, taking a quick pit stop in the bathroom, going back through the door, running across another hardwood floor, opening and slamming another door, and finally running up to Megan, greeting her while clearly being out of breath.\nThe idea of a product that is (in reality) a virtual assistant [ citation needed ] being an actual person with physical form was featured a few days before this comic on Live from Here on December 16, 2017, in a segment in which Amazon.com and its virtual assistant Alexa were satirized as \"Amazon Lazy\", which delivered the user things that were already in the user's home -- or simply carried the user from one room of the house to another.  (Audio available at https:\/\/www.livefromhere.org\/shows\/59375 )\nRandall is amused by the idea that such a \"virtual\" assistant made \"real\" might be rather clumsy. In fact, Randall finds the concept so humorous that he would like to troll smart device owners by hacking and re-programming their devices to play this sound file whenever the VA is invoked. He makes it clear that he doesn't want to create a botnet with them, perhaps in reference to the infamous Mirai attacks of 2016, whose creators pled guilty in court a week before the comic was posted. Another similar activity that is gaining popularity is hacking IP webcams with embedded speakers for comedic purposes (here's a YouTube channel ).\nThe title text extends the concept further. If the owner attempts to disable the feature, rather than refrain from playing the clip, the virtual assistant apologetically promises to be quieter next time; thereafter, the device plays a modified version of the clip where the noises are only slightly diminished and punctuated with additional apologies from the live-in assistant. Randall has characterized the assistant as being incapable of answering without causing a ruckus.\nA previous comic, 1897: Self Driving , also toys with the idea that AI is actually just people behind-the-scenes. Sounds of things falling over and breaking off-screen is a comedic trope used in movies. The idea of making it look as if excessive work is put in to being ready to answer the user may be a reference to the Monty Python \"it's\" man.\n[Megan stands next to a small table with a Google Home sitting on it.] Megan: Ok, Google\u2013 Google Home: THUMP-THUMP-THUMP Google Home: CRASH\u00a0 THUD! Google Home: CLICK\u00a0 THUMP THUMP Google Home: [sink running] Google Home: ZIIIIIP!\u00a0 CLICK Google Home: THUMP THUMP\u00a0 CLICK Google Home: SLAM! Google Home: THUMPATHUMPATHUMPA Google Home: H... *Pant* ...Hello... *Pant* Google Home: How... How can I help you?\n[Text below the panel:] I want to hack the world's smart home devices, but not to create a botnet or anything\u2014I just want to make them play this sound clip every time you invoke them.\n"}
{"id":1932,"title":"The True Meaning of Christmas","image_title":"The True Meaning of Christmas","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1932","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_true_meaning_of_christmas.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1932:_The_True_Meaning_of_Christmas","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to a guy wearing a Santa hat.] Cueball: You\u2019re looking festive. Santa Hat: I love Christmas! Cueball: Really? Doesn\u2019t seem like your kind of thing. Santa Hat: It\u2019s our most meta holiday!\n[Same setting.] Cueball: How so? Santa Hat: All our Christmas stories now are about discovering the \u201ctrue meaning of Christmas.\u201d\n[The same setting in a frame-less panel where Santa Hat shrugs.] Cueball: Huh, yeah. And then sharing it with others. Santa Hat: At some point, that quest itself became the true meaning.\n[Same setting with Santa Hat holding a hand to his chin.] Cueball: Like a word whose definition is \u201cthe act of looking up the definition of this word.\u201d Santa Hat: \u201cAutometalogolex\u201d? Cueball: My least favorite of Santa\u2019s reindeer.\n","explanation":"This is the first of two Christmas comics in a row. It is making fun of the common trope in popular media that the true meaning of Christmas is about family, friends, and sharing the Christmas Spirit. It subverts the trope by suggesting that once the stories of the \"True Meaning of Christmas\" become sufficiently common, the real true meaning becomes to spread those stories. Thus the search for the \"True Meaning of Christmas\" is itself the meaning of Christmas, in a sort of \"the journey is the reward\" discovery.\nIn the last panel and title text, \"Autometalogolex\" is a neologism of Randall's, which can be broken down to its various prefixes and the root:\n\"Auto-\" - Greek meaning \"self.\" \"Meta-\" - Greek meaning \"after,\" \"beyond,\" or \"in reference to.\" \"Logo-\" - Greek meaning \"word\" or \"speech.\" \"Lex\" - \"lexis\" is another Greek word meaning \"word\"; but in this case it is more likely to be a shortening of \"lexicon\" (another word for dictionary), or perhaps a reference to the process of \"lexing\" (lexical analysis), part of the process of computer analysis of text.\nThus, \"Autometalogolex\" would literally mean \"A word that refers to itself in the dictionary,\" or more precisely \"the act of looking up the definition of autometalogolex\", which leads to a recursion, as all meaning of Christmas stories do. Recursion and self-reference is a recurring theme in xkcd.\nThe term Autometalogolex might also refer to autological words, words that refer to a property of the word itself. (\"noun\" is a noun, \"pentasyllabic\" is pentasyllabic [has 5 syllables]). \"Autometalogolex\" is a 'meta' version of the looking up (lex) of an autological word.\nCueball finally states that Autometalogolex is his least favorite of Santa Claus's reindeer . This is not among the commonly quoted list of names: Dasher , Dancer , Prancer , Vixen , Comet , Cupid , Donder , and Blitzen . [ citation needed ] As the title text reveals this ninth reindeer could be a reference to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer , who was not accepted by the others until Santa had problems and asked it to lead the other reindeer pulling the sleigh. The title text may also imply the only effective outcome of Autometalogolex (or the newly defined Christmas) is giving headaches, as with many self-referential concepts. As headaches generally are bad, Autometalogolex is not accepted, but - as in a typical Christmas story, here driven into the absurd realm - Santa needed a headache, and Autometalogolex was there to save the day.\n[Cueball is talking to a guy wearing a Santa hat.] Cueball: You\u2019re looking festive. Santa Hat: I love Christmas! Cueball: Really? Doesn\u2019t seem like your kind of thing. Santa Hat: It\u2019s our most meta holiday!\n[Same setting.] Cueball: How so? Santa Hat: All our Christmas stories now are about discovering the \u201ctrue meaning of Christmas.\u201d\n[The same setting in a frame-less panel where Santa Hat shrugs.] Cueball: Huh, yeah. And then sharing it with others. Santa Hat: At some point, that quest itself became the true meaning.\n[Same setting with Santa Hat holding a hand to his chin.] Cueball: Like a word whose definition is \u201cthe act of looking up the definition of this word.\u201d Santa Hat: \u201cAutometalogolex\u201d? Cueball: My least favorite of Santa\u2019s reindeer.\n"}
{"id":1933,"title":"Santa Facts","image_title":"Santa Facts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1933","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/santa_facts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1933:_Santa_Facts","transcript":"[An annotated picture of Santa is shown.] Santa Facts and Figures\nType: Flying\/Psychic Plural: \"Santa\" Active Warrants: 5 Lubricated for easy passage down chimneys Vertical leap: 14 Miles Sleigh flag of convenience: Panama 9th in presidential line of succession Not technically an insect\u2014actually an arthropod Only known vampire able to enter house without being invited Works with Alexa Ribbed IUCN red list: Critically endangered Diet: 80% Reindeer Liability Insurance: None\n","explanation":"This, the second Christmas comic in a row, provides some dubious \"Facts\" and \"Figures\" of the creature known as \"Santa\". We can see from the drawing that this is obviously meant to be either Santa Claus or a parody of Santa Claus. It is the third comic using Facts in the title.\nThis comic is reminiscent of the xkcd Phones series .\nType: Flying\/Psychic\nA reference to Pok\u00e9mon . The type of a Pok\u00e9mon describes and determines its abilities (including attacks), affinities, and general nature. In most stories Santa Claus rides a sled pulled by flying reindeer (all other Flying-type Pok\u00e9mon fly under their own power) and some kind of magical power. Psychic possibly refers to his ability to know a child's activities and behavior, including when they are sleeping or awake , implying a psychic ability to read minds. There is a Pok\u00e9mon based on Santa, Delibird , although it is Ice\/Flying instead of Flying\/Psychic.\nPlural: \"Santa\"\nThe plural form of 'Santa' conveniently parallels that of 'reindeer' (as well as those of all species of Pok\u00e9mon and the term \"Pok\u00e9mon\" itself). In real life, \"santa\" means \"saint\" in most Romance languages . However \"santa\" is not plural in any of these languages (for example, in Portuguese the proper plural would be \"santos\"). Under the most common English approach for making a plural noun, Santa would have a plural of \"Santas\". Taking \"Santa Claus\" as a separate noun, the plural would be \"Santa Clauses\".\nActive warrants: 5\nThere is an active warrant for Santa's arrest in 5 jurisdictions, presumably for breaking and entering or for operating a flying sleigh without the proper licensing, while drunk, or over the speed limit.\nLubricated for easy passage down chimneys\nThe diagram indicates that Santa's attire is lubricated to ease his traditional method of ingress and egress. This explanation is incomplete, however, as a great many chimneys have cross-sectional area substantially smaller than that of a normal human body, let alone a portly one, as commonly described. The common presence of chimney caps, fireplace dampers, and the like would also impede Santa's passage down a great many chimneys. That said, if we take the classic poem \" A Visit from St. Nicholas \" into account, the statement is technically true, just \"lubricated\" with magic rather than physical lubrication. A less classic example of Santa going down the chimney with help of magic can be seen in The Santa Clause [1] . \"Lubricated\" is also a reference to lubricated condoms - see \"Ribbed\" below.\nVertical Leap: 14 Miles\nFor a non-magical being or object, a vertical leap of 14 miles (~23 km), ignoring air resistance would require an initial launch velocity of slightly more than 2180 feet per second (665 m\/s), somewhat over twice the speed of sound. Achieving this velocity by means of bending then straightening the legs would require an acceleration of roughly 25,000 G, placing extraordinarily high demands on the strength of the legs. As Santa does not have a particularly aerodynamic shape, air resistance would increase the launch velocity and launch acceleration requirements substantially. Santa may be able to overcome these problems due to his magical nature; however, there is clearly still a limit to what this can achieve, as there is a maximum to his leaping ability.\nSleigh Flag of Convenience: Panama\nThe Flag of Convenience identifies the country in which an ocean-going vessel has its registration information. Panama maintains one of the top three open registries. Owners of a vessel may choose to use an open registry to avoid labor or safety regulations of the owner's country. They may also choose such a registry to help obscure ownership of the vessel. Which concern applies in the case of Santa's sleigh is not stated, or (more likely) not known. It may also be the only type of registration available, since the north pole is not in any country, so there is no \"owner's country\".\nHowever, a ship's flag state exercises regulatory control over the vessel and is required to inspect it regularly, certify the ship's equipment and crew, and issue safety and pollution prevention documents. One suspects that this does not , in fact, happen regularly with Santa's sleigh. Also, as a flying sleigh, the registry for ocean-going vessels is not applicable. Instead, it would be registered as an aircraft, with the FAA (in the U.S.), EASA (in Europe), or the equivalent in another country. Civilian aircraft have their registration number painted on their tails, but are not required to display a \"flag\". (However, U.S. Airways used a stylized version of a U.S. flag as a corporate logo prior to its merger with American Airlines.)\nThe country being Panama may be a reference to the Panama Papers\n9th in Presidential Line of Succession\nThe Presidential Line of Succession specifies the order in which persons may become or act as President of the United States if the incumbent President becomes incapacitated, dies, resigns, or is removed from office. Having Santa as the 9th in that order would place him above the Secretary of Agriculture . An alternative interpretation would hold that Santa is the present Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack .\nAssuming Tom Vilsack is not Santa Claus, Santa is likely ineligible for the Presidency, as most origin stories of Santa have him a natural-born citizen of a European country (or of Turkey) rather than the United States.  Alternately, Santa might be old enough to qualify under the \"citizen at the time of the adoption of this constitution\" clause, although in light of the information that Santa is actually an arthropod and\/or a vampire (see below), his status as an American citizen is dubious.\nNot technically an insect \u2014 actually an arthropod\nThis \"fact\" uses an absurd misconception to correct a relatively common misconception. Absurdly, Randall has mistaken Santa for a lobster, given his bright red coloration and the surname Claus (which is pronounced the same as a lobster's \"claws\"). This may be an homage to the film the Nightmare Before Christmas, where Jack Skellington believes Christmas Town is led by \"Sandy Claws\" who is \"like a lobster, huge and red\".\nThere is a relatively common misconception that lobsters are insects. In fact, lobsters are crustaceans, but there is a kernel of truth to the misconception, as crustaceans and insects are related (both are arthropods).  Thus, the \"fact\" states that Lobster-Santa is not technically an insect; he is actually an arthropod.\nOnly known vampire able to enter house without being invited\nIn traditional vampire folklore, a vampire cannot enter an abode without an invitation from the owner of the same . Santa, however, seems to be able to enter houses even without explicit invitation (although plenty of children do welcome him, either via written notes or by their general sentiments), so if he is a vampire he is the exception to that rule. This juxtaposes interestingly with the previous point about his arthropod nature.\nHis being a vampire is perhaps related to his dressing all in red, and alleged immortality.\nWorks with Alexa\nMay have any of several meanings, including that Alexa (Amazon's virtual assistant) is Santa's colleague, that Santa uses Alexa in his work, that Santa is somehow functionally compatible with Alexa, or a reference to various Santa-themed 'skills' that Alexa can be associated with. A common advertisement states that a product is compatible with Amazon's smart device, Alexa. But it could also be a play on the idea or fear that Alexa may be used to spy on people from the privacy of their own homes, much like what is claimed of Santa (\"he sees you when you're sleeping, [...]\"). Finally, several skills designed to entertain users of Alexa are themed around Santa Claus, including asking Alexa where Santa is on Christmas Eve, whether or not you've been naughty or nice, or even leaving the jolly old elf a voicemail.\nRibbed\nA reference to condoms, which have ridges or ribbing in order to promote pleasurable stimulation during coitus (see \"Lubricated\" above). This also puns on the fact that, as a humanoid, Santa presumably has a rib cage. (This might directly contradict the claims about his being an arthropod.)\nIUCN Red List: Critically endangered\nThe International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) monitors the size and viability of populations of organisms; 'critically endangered' marks a population as being highly susceptible to extinction. Santa, being one (or possibly two, if we include his wife) of a kind and lacking any offspring (and, indeed, likely being incapable of effectively producing any), will most likely be the last member of his population; thus extinction will arrive with his or his wife's death. Note, however, that the presence on the Red List implies that \"Santa\" is a biological species, not a fantasy, robot, or other non-biological entity. This is consistent with Santa being an arthropod and\/or vampire, but would suggest that there are many specimens of Santa, while other 'Facts' (such as having a definite ranking in the Presidential Line of Succession) suggest Santa to be a single individual.\nDiet: 80% Reindeer\nA mocking allusion to Santa Claus's sleigh, usually pulled by reindeer. Usual folklore depict Santa Claus being extremely fond of his reindeer, thus making it a humorous contrast to suggest he'd be eating reindeer meat on a daily basis.\nLiability Insurance: None\nAs a result of his diet (see above), alleged criminal activity (ditto), species ambiguity, and occupation, Santa would find the cost of liability insurance quite high. He instead chooses to 'go bare' and operate without any.\nThe title text states that as a result of intervention Santa's diet is now 20% milk & cookies, implying that previously it was 100% Reindeer. It is a tradition to leave out milk and cookies as a \"gift\" for Santa. If he is indeed a vampire, it is odd that Santa could survive on a diet of reindeer, milk, and cookies, since vampires supposedly need human blood to survive. Of course, his entering without being invited already shows Santa to be a highly unusual vampire. Additionally, it is possible that he consumes reindeer blood as part of his reindeer diet (vampires living off animal blood is not unheard of in modern fantasy). Related to that may be the observation that he seems to develop \"nutritional deficiencies\" when going below 80% reindeer meat, as that would logically result in him consuming less blood and thus starvation due to his vampiric nature.\n[An annotated picture of Santa is shown.] Santa Facts and Figures\nType: Flying\/Psychic Plural: \"Santa\" Active Warrants: 5 Lubricated for easy passage down chimneys Vertical leap: 14 Miles Sleigh flag of convenience: Panama 9th in presidential line of succession Not technically an insect\u2014actually an arthropod Only known vampire able to enter house without being invited Works with Alexa Ribbed IUCN red list: Critically endangered Diet: 80% Reindeer Liability Insurance: None\n"}
{"id":1934,"title":"Phone Security","image_title":"Phone Security","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1934","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/phone_security.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1934:_Phone_Security","transcript":"[The content of a configuration screen on a smartphone is shown. All items listed are activated as indicated by green switches.] Security Options Passcode to unlock (Set Code) Erase phone after ten failed unlock attempts\nIf stolen, phone can be remotely Tracked Erased Detonated\nIf phone is stolen, erase data and play an earsplitting siren until the battery dies or is removed\nIf phone is stolen, do a fake factory reset. Then, in the background...\n...constantly request dozens of simultaneous rideshares to the phone's location ...automatically order food to phone's location from every delivery place within 20 miles ...if thief logs in to Facebook, send hostile messages to all their family members ...automatically direct self-driving car to drive toward phone's location at 5 mph ...take photos of random objects at the thief's address and post them as \"free\" on Craigslist and Nextdoor\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at various phone security measures. At first, it covers some real measures, and then continues on to measures that are clearly somewhat overzealous or otherwise humorous. It is worth noting that all of the options are turned ON in the screen shown, so apparently the owner must be very afraid that their phone is going to be stolen, or just wants to see what will happen.\nThese may be options that would appear on the xkcd Phone , but that is not mentioned specifically, and this comic does not appear to be directly linked.\nThe first two options: Set Passcode to Unlock , and Erase phone after 10 failed unlock attempts are both real security measures found on many phones. The remaining options would rely on the fact that the phone could sense that it is stolen:\nIf stolen, phone can be remotely... The items on this sub-heading indicate the requirements of a separate device (i.e. the owner's laptop). The phrasing leaves it ambiguous whether they are only available when it is sensed to be stolen, or if they are simply indicators of whether the owner can perform the given actions when activated.\nIf the phone is stolen, play an earsplitting siren until the battery dies or is removed : This would be to draw attention to the thief, and discourage them from stealing future phones. Noticeably, it does not specify how the phone determines it is stolen, and, similar to the \"detonate\" option above, this has the potential to be an irritation if it is activated by accident, glitch, or hack.\nIf the phone is stolen, do a fake factory reset. Then, in the background... : This series of options is all humorous, indicating that the phone would allow the thief to think that it had factory reset, but the phone would, in fact, not do so, and would instead annoy the thief by doing various horrible things to them.\nThe title text extends the last category with: ...wait until they type in payment information, then use it to order yourself a new phone. If the thief used the thief's own payment information, then this would be the ultimate in poetic justice, as it would basically say that the user does not care if their phone gets stolen, because the thief will end up unintentionally buying them a new one. If the thief were to complain about this, they would have to admit that they had stolen the first phone in order to do so, which they would be disinclined to do. However, if the thief used fraudulent or stolen payment information (whether stolen by the same thief or acquired online), then the replacement phone would be purchased with the payment information of the other victim, and when that person complained, the owner of the stolen phone would appear to be the person who stole the payment information, and might be arrested for that theft.  This is a very, very bad idea [ citation needed ] .\nNote that all of these security measures, with the possible exception of the remote detonation, could theoretically be done by a security app on a typical smartphone, although the fake factory reset and most (if not all) of what follows would likely require a phone to be rooted and have a custom operating system installed. With the advent of open source phones such as the Librem 5, tricks such as these have become much easier for the average programmer to implement, and some may already exist in the wild. (Even the remote detonation might be possible on some phones that prevent battery explosions with software rather than physical circuitry.)\n[The content of a configuration screen on a smartphone is shown. All items listed are activated as indicated by green switches.] Security Options Passcode to unlock (Set Code) Erase phone after ten failed unlock attempts\nIf stolen, phone can be remotely Tracked Erased Detonated\nIf phone is stolen, erase data and play an earsplitting siren until the battery dies or is removed\nIf phone is stolen, do a fake factory reset. Then, in the background...\n...constantly request dozens of simultaneous rideshares to the phone's location ...automatically order food to phone's location from every delivery place within 20 miles ...if thief logs in to Facebook, send hostile messages to all their family members ...automatically direct self-driving car to drive toward phone's location at 5 mph ...take photos of random objects at the thief's address and post them as \"free\" on Craigslist and Nextdoor\n"}
{"id":1935,"title":"2018","image_title":"2018","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1935","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2018.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1935:_2018","transcript":"[Megan is walking.] Megan: I wonder if 2018 will be a leap year.\n[Now it turns out that Cueball walks behind Megan.] Cueball: ...it won't be, right? Megan: I doubt anyone knows at this point.\n[Same scene in a frame-less panel.] Cueball: No, it's definitely not. Leap years are divisible by 4. Megan: Right, and for odd numbers, that's easy. Megan: But 2018 is even. Megan: 50\/50 chance.\n[Zoomed-out view with both walking in silhouette on a dark slightly curved ground.] Cueball: I can settle this with a calculator. Megan: No way. If it were easy to factor large numbers like that, modern cryptography would collapse. Cueball: I see. Megan: I just hope we manage to brute-force it by February.\n","explanation":"In this, the first of two New Year comics in a row, Megan wonders whether 2018 will be a leap year . Cueball thinks 2018 will not be a leap year, and Megan responds that she \"doubts anyone knows at this point.\" This appears to be a jab at people who suggest that anything they don't know is generally unknown. As Cueball says, leap years occur every four years (though there are a few exceptions - a year divisible by 100 is not a leap year, unless it is also  divisible by 400), adding an extra day to account for the fact that Earth takes a bit longer than 365 days to orbit the Sun. Therefore, most years that are a multiple of four are leap years. As Megan says, this is easy for odd-numbered years, since no odd numbers are divisible by four. However, for even-numbered years, it isn't quite as simple. (Though, since the number 2,000 is evenly divisible by 4, the problem can be reduced to the much simpler question of whether the number 18 is divisible by 4.)\nThe last panel expresses a misunderstanding of modern public-key cryptography , which relies on the fact that it is difficult to factorize large numbers. Megan is applying this concept to the year, claiming that it is hard to determine whether or not 2,018 is a multiple of four and hence is a leap year. In reality, factorization is not needed here, since we already know the factor in question, which is four. Megan states that, if it were possible to factor large numbers with a calculator, modern cryptography would collapse. While true, it is true only for truly large numbers (hundreds of digits), and no factorization is needed in this case.\nAt the end of the strip, Megan hopes the answer can be brute-forced by February. Brute force is a method of breaking cryptography by trying every possible option until one works. This is misdirection upon misdirection, in that, even if we needed to factorize 2,018 (which we don't), the simplest brute-forcing algorithm would need to try only 14 numbers -- each prime from 2 to 43 (the square root of 2,018 is closest to 44). In cryptography, the algorithms use numbers much, much bigger than 2,018 -- on the order of hundreds or even thousands of digits.\nThe title text refers to calculating which day Christmas will fall on. As Christmas always lands on December 25 by definition, the day of the week varies from year to year, though it's always the 359th or, in leap years, the 360th day of the year. Still, determining which day of the week December 25 lands on is not a difficult problem to solve, requiring only a few mathematical operations to compute. Alternatively, this might be an oblique reference to Easter, the date of which jumps from year to year according to a multi-layered algorithm that most people don't know. The changing date of Easter was recently included in 1930: Calendar Facts . Additionally, uncertainty with the regard to the date of Christmas has also been referenced in 679: Christmas Plans .\nA handy coincidence to help with this problem for those living in America or following American politics is that leap years fall on presidential election years.\n[Megan is walking.] Megan: I wonder if 2018 will be a leap year.\n[Now it turns out that Cueball walks behind Megan.] Cueball: ...it won't be, right? Megan: I doubt anyone knows at this point.\n[Same scene in a frame-less panel.] Cueball: No, it's definitely not. Leap years are divisible by 4. Megan: Right, and for odd numbers, that's easy. Megan: But 2018 is even. Megan: 50\/50 chance.\n[Zoomed-out view with both walking in silhouette on a dark slightly curved ground.] Cueball: I can settle this with a calculator. Megan: No way. If it were easy to factor large numbers like that, modern cryptography would collapse. Cueball: I see. Megan: I just hope we manage to brute-force it by February.\n"}
{"id":1936,"title":"Desert Golfing","image_title":"Desert Golfing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1936","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/desert_golfing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1936:_Desert_Golfing","transcript":"[An analog clock showing 11:12 hangs on the wall left above of Cueball who is sitting on a couch leaning on the left armrest, feet up on the couch. He holds a smartphone horizontally and the screen is clearly brown. Above him is a large brown bubble showing the content of the screen, thus showing that he is playing Desert Golfing. The sky is light brown, the sand below is dark brown, the golf ball is white and is followed by a white line showing its trajectory towards the gray flag stick with a yellow flag on it, which is to the right of the screen. The hole is just before the flag stick, an indentation in the sand.]\n[The clock is now showing 12:00 and Cueball is sitting straight upright on the couch, the screen display above him shows that he continues to play, but now on a new golf hole with different contours. The trajectory of the ball is much more complicated than before, and it seems he has had to play a very special loop shot to get out of a deep pit.]\n[The clock is showing 12:34 as Cueball once again sits as in the first panel, but now towards the right armrest and he is almost lying down with his head on the rest. Once again the screen is visible above him and it is shown that the hole has changed again.]\n[The clock is showing 1:47 when Cueball, now sitting up against the right armrest, finally speaks while continuing to play, with the brown screen visible, as he holds it on his knees, but the screen display is not shown. An off-panel voice answers him from the right.] Cueball: Technically, I've been playing Desert Golfing nonstop since late 2017. Off-panel voice: Might want to take a break sometime in 2018. Cueball: Yeah, my New Year's resolution is to go to bed.\n","explanation":"A common joke surrounding the turn of the New Year is to make a comment about \"next year\" on New Year's Eve or \"last year\" on New Year's Day. While technically correct, some people may derive a snarky humor from making observations about the span of years when the reality has been more along a span of days or even, as in this comic, only a few hours.\nIn this, the second of two New Year comics in a row, with this one being released on New Year's Day 2018, Cueball observes that he has technically \"been playing Desert Golfing nonstop since late 2017\". Desert Golfing is a game that takes place in an endless side-scrolling desert, where the player can shoot a golf ball using a one finger swipe to determine direction and power. The entirety of the \"golf course\" is made of sand, making the physics of the golf ball more difficult to predict and control, as if from a bunker. After reaching a hole, the game automatically generates a completely random new course, making the game go on forever, and the score is purely dependent on how long you play the game.\nAlthough Cueball's statement could be taken to mean he has devoted his waking hours to the game, the clock on the wall reveals both the truth of his comment and that he is not exaggerating. While he has only been playing the game for two and a half hours, give or take, those two-and-a-half hours started at about 11:10 PM on December 31st, meaning that it is presently January 1st and he has indeed been playing the game \"nonstop since late 2017\" (assuming he has not taken a break to eat or use the facilities).\nSomeone off-panel acknowledges the joke by saying that he should \"take a break in 2018\", and Cueball declares it is his New Year's resolution to go to bed. This is not a typical New Year's resolution, as most resolutions are about something you need to change in your life from last year, and going to bed (or at least sleeping) is not something you would have been able to avoid for a whole year. [ citation needed ] This may also be making a joke about how quickly many New Year's resolutions are broken, as Cueball has singularly failed to stick to his. New Year's resolutions have been mentioned before, the first time in 1154: Resolution , where the tradition of New Year's resolutions is the entire joke.\nThe title text states that the only reason Cueball has stayed up to play Desert Golfing is to watch the ball drop into hole number 2018 \u2014 this is a pun on the Times Square Ball , a pyrotechnical device in New York City that lights up spectacularly as soon as the new year begins. Because the event is televised on many news channels, \"watching The Ball drop\" is now a common way to count down the seconds to the new year. Cueball takes this literally, and tries to drop his (golf) ball to signify the beginning of 2018.\n[An analog clock showing 11:12 hangs on the wall left above of Cueball who is sitting on a couch leaning on the left armrest, feet up on the couch. He holds a smartphone horizontally and the screen is clearly brown. Above him is a large brown bubble showing the content of the screen, thus showing that he is playing Desert Golfing. The sky is light brown, the sand below is dark brown, the golf ball is white and is followed by a white line showing its trajectory towards the gray flag stick with a yellow flag on it, which is to the right of the screen. The hole is just before the flag stick, an indentation in the sand.]\n[The clock is now showing 12:00 and Cueball is sitting straight upright on the couch, the screen display above him shows that he continues to play, but now on a new golf hole with different contours. The trajectory of the ball is much more complicated than before, and it seems he has had to play a very special loop shot to get out of a deep pit.]\n[The clock is showing 12:34 as Cueball once again sits as in the first panel, but now towards the right armrest and he is almost lying down with his head on the rest. Once again the screen is visible above him and it is shown that the hole has changed again.]\n[The clock is showing 1:47 when Cueball, now sitting up against the right armrest, finally speaks while continuing to play, with the brown screen visible, as he holds it on his knees, but the screen display is not shown. An off-panel voice answers him from the right.] Cueball: Technically, I've been playing Desert Golfing nonstop since late 2017. Off-panel voice: Might want to take a break sometime in 2018. Cueball: Yeah, my New Year's resolution is to go to bed.\n"}
{"id":1937,"title":"IATA Airport Abbreviations","image_title":"IATA Airport Abbreviations","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1937","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/iata_airport_abbreviations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1937:_IATA_Airport_Abbreviations","transcript":"[A list with abbreviations and their meaning is shown in two columns.]\n[On top left the header reads:] Confused by those airport abbreviations used by your friends who fly a lot?\nJust memorize this list!\n[On top right an iMessage conversation is shown:] [There is a text in grey, on the left:] I'm flying into EWR tonight, then DTW tomorrow. [Answer (in blue, two message bubbles on the right):] Ok, cool I definitely know what those mean without Googling\n[The list:]\nAMD Amsterdam TMI Turkmenistan International BAE Beijing LAX Las Angalas ORD Orlando EWR Edwards Air Force Base IAD Idaho (Boise) PHL Pittsburgh JFC Jefferson City SWF Sherwood Forest IUD Washington Dulles KUL Kingdom of Loathing FYI Fayetteville STL Silent Hill LOL Louisville BUF Sunnydale ATL Atalante TBA Tribeca HGM Hogsmeade SMH Smithfield OMW Omaha BLT Baltimore ANC Ankh-Morpork YYY Toronto Downtown HSV Hunstville YYZ Toronto Pearson SAN San Diego MIA Colombo, Sri Lanka SAN San Juan CLT [Censored] SAN San Jose FHQ Fhqwhgads SAN San Francisco FFS Flagstaff Station SAN San Antonio DTF Dartford DWI Delaware International MDW Midway Atoll DFW Down for Whatever PDX Pordlanx DTW Down to Whatever SEA [Indicates Water Landing]\n","explanation":"This comic is making fun of the three-letter codes assigned to mostly all airports in the world. These codes are overseen by the IATA (International Air Transport Association) . Some airport codes are very intuitive, taking letters from the city name (e.g., DEN for Denver ). Other codes are somewhat intuitive, taking a letter or two from the nearby city name but adding an additional letter (e.g., LAX for Los Angeles ). Other codes make seemingly no sense at all (e.g., ORD for Chicago's O'Hare International , due to it formerly being named Orchard Field). In many cases, the airport codes appear to have been chosen (or invented) because they are also common abbreviations and acronyms. Randall is obviously confused by these codes, replying to his friend that he definitely knows what those mean without googling, basically revealing that he used Google to search for the codes, and has created a list for us to memorize. In fact, this list is complete nonsense, with some of the \"airports\" mentioned not even existing, and the existing airports are all paired with the wrong codes, except for Huntsville (HSV) and Toronto Pearson (YYZ).\nIf we use the table provided, Randall's friend is flying into Edwards Air Force Base and then \"down to whatever\" -- not a real flight. [ citation needed ] In actuality, the friend is flying into Newark tonight and Detroit tomorrow.\nThe title text is a pun about the acronym IATA , stating it stands for I nternational A irpor T A bbreviation. This is as wrong as almost everything else here, because the real International Air Transport Association is not an organization only responsible for abbreviations in aviation. This acronym also leads to some redundancy in the title by making the true title of the comic be \"International Airport Abbreviation Airport Abbreviations,\" which might be an example of RAS syndrome .\nThis comic could be inspired by the recent news about an Indian businessman charged with making a bomb threat at a Mumbai airport claiming he was misheard by a telephone operator while asking for the BOM to DEL flight status.\nIt may also be a reference to tongue-in-cheek ' teen texting code ' explanations for older generations.\n[A list with abbreviations and their meaning is shown in two columns.]\n[On top left the header reads:] Confused by those airport abbreviations used by your friends who fly a lot?\nJust memorize this list!\n[On top right an iMessage conversation is shown:] [There is a text in grey, on the left:] I'm flying into EWR tonight, then DTW tomorrow. [Answer (in blue, two message bubbles on the right):] Ok, cool I definitely know what those mean without Googling\n[The list:]\nAMD Amsterdam TMI Turkmenistan International BAE Beijing LAX Las Angalas ORD Orlando EWR Edwards Air Force Base IAD Idaho (Boise) PHL Pittsburgh JFC Jefferson City SWF Sherwood Forest IUD Washington Dulles KUL Kingdom of Loathing FYI Fayetteville STL Silent Hill LOL Louisville BUF Sunnydale ATL Atalante TBA Tribeca HGM Hogsmeade SMH Smithfield OMW Omaha BLT Baltimore ANC Ankh-Morpork YYY Toronto Downtown HSV Hunstville YYZ Toronto Pearson SAN San Diego MIA Colombo, Sri Lanka SAN San Juan CLT [Censored] SAN San Jose FHQ Fhqwhgads SAN San Francisco FFS Flagstaff Station SAN San Antonio DTF Dartford DWI Delaware International MDW Midway Atoll DFW Down for Whatever PDX Pordlanx DTW Down to Whatever SEA [Indicates Water Landing]\n"}
{"id":1938,"title":"Meltdown and Spectre","image_title":"Meltdown and Spectre","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1938","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meltdown_and_spectre.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1938:_Meltdown_and_Spectre","transcript":"[Zoom out with Cueball and Ponytail walking to the right on the ground.] Cueball: The Meltdown and Spectre exploits use \"speculative execution?\" What's that? Ponytail: You know the trolley problem? Well, for a while now, CPUs have basically been sending trolleys down both paths, quantum-style, while awaiting your choice. Then the unneeded \"phantom\" trolley disappears.\n[Zoom in on only Ponytail who has turned towards Cueball off-panel left.] Ponytail: The phantom trolley isn't supposed to touch anyone. But it turns out you can still use it to do stuff. Ponytail: And it can drive through walls.\n[Cueball and Ponytail, lifting both her palms up, are standing, facing each other.] Cueball: That sounds bad. Ponytail: Honestly, I've been assuming we were doomed ever since I learned about Rowhammer.\n[In a frame-less panel they continue talking, both with their arms down.] Cueball: What's that ? Ponytail: If you toggle a row of memory cells on and off really fast, you can use electrical interference to flip nearby bits and\u2014 Cueball: Do we just suck at...computers? Ponytail: Yup. Especially shared ones.\n[Zoom out again as they resume walking to the right on the ground. Cueball is lifting his smartphone up and looks at the screen.] Cueball: So you're saying the cloud is full of phantom trolleys armed with hammers. Ponytail: ...Yes, that is exactly right. Cueball: Okay. I'll, uh... install updates? Ponytail: Good idea.\nAlthough this is clearly not part of the series Code Quality , it might be the same two characters, with Ponytail again displaying a much better understanding of computers than Cueball with his Computer Problems .\nThe Trolley problem was mentioned a month before this comic in the last milestone on this list in 1925: Self-Driving Car Milestones ; see more there regarding why this problem might have resurfaced in xkcd. Three years before that comic, a comic was even named after the problem: 1455: Trolley Problem .\nThe fact that compromising IT systems is sometimes easier done physically than logically is also mentioned in 538: Security .\n","explanation":"This comic was inspired by the Meltdown and Spectre bugs found in certain processors; these vulnerabilities were disclosed to the public in the week of this comic. The bugs result from flawed implementations of speculative execution , and made big news because they broke the \"walls\" between programs executing concurrently on the same computer, in some circumstances allowing malware to steal secrets from normal, bug-free programs.\nSpeculative execution is a technique used to speed up the execution of computer programs. Processors handle instructions in a series of steps , like an assembly line. The processor works on several successive instructions, each at a different stage in the assembly line. It may start speculatively executing instructions that follow a particular result of a decision before the execution of the logic that makes that decision is finished. Once the decision is made, it keeps results from the selected path, and discards unnecessary results. This allows it to keep doing useful work while some slower decision is made.\nIn the Meltdown and Spectre bugs, the results of speculatively executed instructions are not completely discarded, allowing them to affect things that the program logic should have prevented.\nPonytail uses the Trolley Problem , and trolley (tram) tracks in general, as an analogy for streams of instructions in a program. The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment where an out-of-control trolley is heading to a switch which you control. Leaving the switch as-is will cause it to kill multiple people (typically five) stuck on the tracks, but switching the track will cause it to kill only one person, who would not have died if the switch was left untouched. This creates the ethical dilemma of passively causing multiple deaths, versus actively causing one. The Trolley Problem has gained significant memetic traction, helped in no small part by its frequent inclusion in \u201cintroduction to philosophy\u201d type courses. The problem has seen revitalized interest with the emergence of autonomous cars , which may be faced with what are, essentially, such choices in emergency situations.\nAs an analogy for multiple mutually exclusive paths being executed at the same time, Ponytail invokes certain interpretations of quantum mechanics , where quantum-level particles can be viewed as taking every possible path at once, with the result being the sum of all of them. This is an idea popularized by the common interpretation of Schr\u00f6dinger's cat , where the cat is both dead and alive until some event results in one of the states being selected.\nThe phantom trolley driving through walls is an analogy for the computer instructions being able to access areas of memory that should be protected from them. This may also be a reference to quantum tunnelling , or even simply a joke about the phantom trolley being a literal phantom, i.e. incorporeal.\nIn many cases, contrary to what the comic implies, both paths are not taken simultaneously during speculative execution. A branch predictor may be used to select the most likely path, and the effects should be completely erased if the predicted path is incorrect. Both branch prediction and taking both paths (known as eager evaluation) are considered speculative execution and are affected by these bugs.\nThe Row hammer problem had been known for many years before this comic was published. A common form of computer memory is constructed from tiny capacitors organized in a two-dimensional grid of rows and columns. Capacitors store charge to represent information. By applying a pattern of memory access that rapidly changes a row of capacitors, you can cause charge to overflow to nearby rows and incorrectly change their states.\nPonytail mentions that we especially suck at building \"shared computers\" because Row hammer, Spectre, and Meltdown all break down the security divisions built between programs and between users. A hacker running a separate program in a separate account shouldn't be able to access your data or change the behavior of your program, but these problems allow them to. This is particularly dangerous for time-sharing, servers, and the cloud , where different programs, websites, or even companies can be sharing the same hardware.\nCueball takes her explanation literally, and comes to the conclusion that the cloud \"is full of phantom trolleys armed with hammers\", and Ponytail cannot be bothered correcting him. Cueball's final line ironically suggests that these exploits can be repaired with a simple software update. This seems to be mocking the naive misunderstanding that software can make up for flawed hardware. However, the exploits discussed in this comic are not trivial oversights, but reflect fundamental issues in the design of modern processors.\nA zero-day vulnerability is an attack that takes advantage of a vulnerability that hasn't been published yet, and so is not patched in any vulnerable system. The title text suggests that, until it was 'disclosed' here, nobody was aware that as well as Row hammer, computer servers can also be harmed by regular hammers. In reality, this would be obvious to most people. [ citation needed ] One might \"patch\" a server against this attack by plating it with stronger metal.\n[Zoom out with Cueball and Ponytail walking to the right on the ground.] Cueball: The Meltdown and Spectre exploits use \"speculative execution?\" What's that? Ponytail: You know the trolley problem? Well, for a while now, CPUs have basically been sending trolleys down both paths, quantum-style, while awaiting your choice. Then the unneeded \"phantom\" trolley disappears.\n[Zoom in on only Ponytail who has turned towards Cueball off-panel left.] Ponytail: The phantom trolley isn't supposed to touch anyone. But it turns out you can still use it to do stuff. Ponytail: And it can drive through walls.\n[Cueball and Ponytail, lifting both her palms up, are standing, facing each other.] Cueball: That sounds bad. Ponytail: Honestly, I've been assuming we were doomed ever since I learned about Rowhammer.\n[In a frame-less panel they continue talking, both with their arms down.] Cueball: What's that ? Ponytail: If you toggle a row of memory cells on and off really fast, you can use electrical interference to flip nearby bits and\u2014 Cueball: Do we just suck at...computers? Ponytail: Yup. Especially shared ones.\n[Zoom out again as they resume walking to the right on the ground. Cueball is lifting his smartphone up and looks at the screen.] Cueball: So you're saying the cloud is full of phantom trolleys armed with hammers. Ponytail: ...Yes, that is exactly right. Cueball: Okay. I'll, uh... install updates? Ponytail: Good idea.\nAlthough this is clearly not part of the series Code Quality , it might be the same two characters, with Ponytail again displaying a much better understanding of computers than Cueball with his Computer Problems .\nThe Trolley problem was mentioned a month before this comic in the last milestone on this list in 1925: Self-Driving Car Milestones ; see more there regarding why this problem might have resurfaced in xkcd. Three years before that comic, a comic was even named after the problem: 1455: Trolley Problem .\nThe fact that compromising IT systems is sometimes easier done physically than logically is also mentioned in 538: Security .\n"}
{"id":1939,"title":"2016 Election Map","image_title":"2016 Election Map","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1939","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2016_election_map.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1939:_2016_Election_Map","transcript":"[A map of the United States, with Hawaii and Alaska offset, is shown. Across the states red, blue and green Cueball like stick figure are scattered about, much more on each coast, and very few in the central parts, especially in the mid west. There are about the same amount of red and blue stick figures. There are not many green, but they are represented almost in any state with more than 10 stick figures.  Above the map there is a large bold title. Below that there is a legend description explaining the red, blue and green Cueball stick figure with labels of who they represent next to them. Below this, in light gray text, are two lines of explanation of how the map was created:] 2016 Election Map Each figure represents 250,000 votes [Red stick figure:] Trump [Blue stick figure:] Clinton [Green stick figure:] Other Based on 2016 election results Votes are distributed by states as accurately as possible while keeping national totals correct. Location within each state is approximate.\n\n","explanation":"The United States elects its president not directly by popular vote but by an Electoral College composed of a number of electors, partially proportional to population, from each state. Presently, a \"winner-take-all\" system is used in most states: the winner of the popular vote in each state receives all of the electoral votes for that state. Though, strictly speaking, the electors are not required to cast their ballots according to this system, many states impose penalties on them if they don't. Technically, the popular vote in each state is to elect a slate of electors who in turn elect the President. Many Republicans tend to claim that Trump had a strong victory, and show maps filled with large, red counties. These maps look even redder than the state maps, so they make it look like Trump won a large nationwide victory. However, as Randall points, out, those maps are misleading, and using them to promote your candidate is a bit disingenuous.\nThe news media commonly use maps to represent the progress or results of the election. Because of this winner-take-all system, states won by the Democratic candidate are typically portrayed in one color (blue is currently in wide use), and states won by the Republican candidate in another (currently red). In recent years, this distinction has gone far beyond electoral maps, and states are often referred to as \"blue\" or \"red\" by their political leaning in many contexts.\nRandall seems to be making a point on the shortcomings of both maps, by showing how different the actual vote was from the red and blue choropleth maps. He mentions how strange cartograms look, and by creating this map he hopes that it will convey the actual vote by geography well, while keeping the normal geographic boundaries.\nThe title text repeatedly attempts and fails to spell the term choropleth map , a map that uses shading or colors to show information about a geographic area, such as a 'normal' election map that shows districts\/states colored to the party that won them. In geography classes, \"choropleth\" is known as a chronically misspelled and mispronounced word. This is because the \"choro\" syllable sounds very similar to the Greek prefix \"chloro\", meaning \"green in color\" or \"containing chlorine\". The similar \"pl\" consonant cluster in the second syllable adds to this, resulting in metathesis . A choropleth map has many shortcomings. For example, many large Western states have small populations and thus don't make much difference to the electoral vote count, but look like a broad swath of red or blue on the map. The map overall can have the appearance of being very red or very blue, suggesting to the eye an overwhelming victory, when in fact the election can be extremely close. Donald Trump has repeatedly emphasized how red the map appears, especially when broken down by county, even though he actually lost the popular vote. In a speech on June 21, 2017, he said, \"And those maps, those electoral maps, they were all red. Beautiful red.\"\nIn this cartoon, Randall seems to be pointing out the shortcomings of the choropleth map (or perhaps this overall red-state\/blue-state mentality). His map shows more clearly the small impact of the low-population states, as well as how combination of the winner-take-all system with the typical election maps fails to show the sometimes large number of opposition votes in a given state. This map also combines all third-party or independent candidate into one type of marker (green), making it clear that a substantial number of votes went to these candidates. \nA cartogram , also referenced in the title text, is a map that changes the size, and sometimes shape, of a region based on population or some other metric. Like a choropleth, these maps also have many shortcomings, the most obvious being the distortion required for the maps to work sometimes making it difficult to tell what and where the region actually is. Many versions of cartograms use squares to represent each region, with the size of the square corresponding to the metric measured. Often, it's easier to find specific places on these square maps.\nA similar map was actually used during the 2016 election by the Financial Times ( discussed here ). It made similar use of colorless states for geographic information and color in proportion to population for electoral information. However, the FT map is based on the electoral college, not the popular vote. It in turn is similar to a 2013 map used by The Guardian for the 2013 Australian election ( discussed here ). Other compromise maps of geographic and electoral information exist, such as maps of geographically accurate but re-scaled states: a 2016 election example is here , indirectly inspired by a similar vox.com map .\nShortly after the election Randall made several comics that could indicate his emotions regarding the result, but references to the election have become fewer and farther apart.\nWith a stick figure representing 250,000 votes, Trump would have exactly 251.918544 stick figures and Clinton would have exactly 263.37844 stick figures according to the final results . The map shows 252 Trump stick figures and 264 Clinton stick figures, meaning Randall used ceiling rounding instead of conventional rounding, which would have shown Clinton with one fewer stick figure.\n[A map of the United States, with Hawaii and Alaska offset, is shown. Across the states red, blue and green Cueball like stick figure are scattered about, much more on each coast, and very few in the central parts, especially in the mid west. There are about the same amount of red and blue stick figures. There are not many green, but they are represented almost in any state with more than 10 stick figures.  Above the map there is a large bold title. Below that there is a legend description explaining the red, blue and green Cueball stick figure with labels of who they represent next to them. Below this, in light gray text, are two lines of explanation of how the map was created:] 2016 Election Map Each figure represents 250,000 votes [Red stick figure:] Trump [Blue stick figure:] Clinton [Green stick figure:] Other Based on 2016 election results Votes are distributed by states as accurately as possible while keeping national totals correct. Location within each state is approximate.\n\n"}
{"id":1940,"title":"The Food Size Cycle","image_title":"The Food Size Cycle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1940","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_food_size_cycle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1940:_The_Food_Size_Cycle","transcript":"[There is a chart with the x-axis shown on top labeled \"Food item size\" and the y-axis labeled \"Time\". There are arrows pointing away from the top left corner on both axis.]\nThe food size cycle [A normal sandwich is shown high up the chart. The text on the right reads:] Initial normal-sized food (sandwich, burger, burrito, taco, etc)\n[The next part below, further in time, has no pictured item but the text reads:] Food becomes more popular\n[Next below a larger sandwich is shown.]\n[And below again an even larger sandwich is shown. The text to the right is:] Size arms race: average item grows as restaurants compete to offer the largest version to hungry customers\n[On the left side, representing small food sizes, the text embedded in arrows pointing to every direction is:] Void\n[Below of that an enormously large sandwich is shown. The text is:] Food gets too large to eat comfortably\n[More below a new row on the left for small sizes comes up, inside is a panini. The text reads:] New format appears and fills the void (panini, burrito bowl, taquito, slider, etc)\n[Below of all the two paths may converge, indicated by two arrows pointing downwards and slightly together. The final text reads:] Merger or replacement\n","explanation":"This comic illustrates the evolution of the size of food items over time, using the example of a sandwich. It starts with a regular sandwich at the beginning. As the sandwich became more popular, sandwich makers had an arms race concerning sandwich size as they competed for customers. Eventually, these sandwiches became too big to eat comfortably. At this point (according to Randall) some smart guy invented the panini, a small sandwich, to cater to those who couldn't find a sandwich small enough for their needs. Eventually, the panini itself will begin to grow, and either displace or become indistinguishable from the existing giant sandwiches, and the cycle will repeat. This is similar to Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption, where products keep adding features beyond what is needed by customers, and is then resolved by cheaper products with adequate features.\nThe title text suggests that the same cycle may be applicable to the depth of pizza crust, with thin crusts being replaced with deeper and deeper ones, eventually necessitating a resurgence in thin crust. Randall laments that despite seeking funding to conduct experiments to test that hypothesis, he keeps getting turned down, probably because it sounds suspiciously like he wants to be paid for eating pizza.\n[There is a chart with the x-axis shown on top labeled \"Food item size\" and the y-axis labeled \"Time\". There are arrows pointing away from the top left corner on both axis.]\nThe food size cycle [A normal sandwich is shown high up the chart. The text on the right reads:] Initial normal-sized food (sandwich, burger, burrito, taco, etc)\n[The next part below, further in time, has no pictured item but the text reads:] Food becomes more popular\n[Next below a larger sandwich is shown.]\n[And below again an even larger sandwich is shown. The text to the right is:] Size arms race: average item grows as restaurants compete to offer the largest version to hungry customers\n[On the left side, representing small food sizes, the text embedded in arrows pointing to every direction is:] Void\n[Below of that an enormously large sandwich is shown. The text is:] Food gets too large to eat comfortably\n[More below a new row on the left for small sizes comes up, inside is a panini. The text reads:] New format appears and fills the void (panini, burrito bowl, taquito, slider, etc)\n[Below of all the two paths may converge, indicated by two arrows pointing downwards and slightly together. The final text reads:] Merger or replacement\n"}
{"id":1941,"title":"Dying Gift","image_title":"Dying Gift","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1941","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dying_gift.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1941:_Dying_Gift","transcript":"[An old man (wrinkled and deformed head with a bit of hair left) is lying in his bed, head on a pillow, body beneath a blanket. He points to one of the three people standing along the side of the bed, Ponytail, Cueball, and a kid with spiky hair.] Old man: And to you... Old man: I leave the 30-foot Foucault Pendulum from the main hall. Old man: It has been swinging for fifty years. As long as you remember me, you must never let it stop!\n[Caption below the panel:] A fun prank: as you're dying, leave people gifts that will be as difficult as possible to put into storage.\n","explanation":"In some cultures it is customary to make bequests, usually in written form called a will, of some or all of your possessions, to be given to people close to you after your death. Often, items bequeathed may be of purely sentimental value to the giver. That sentimental value may not carry over to the recipient, but they may, nonetheless, feel obliged to keep possession of them in order to respect the giver's wishes. In some cases, if the items are unwanted, unusable, or the recipient simply doesn't know what to do with them, they may elect to place the items in storage, rather than dispose of them.\nRandall therefore suggests the following prank to be played by someone near death: bequeath an item that is intentionally very difficult to store or even move. In this case, the old dying man gives his Foucault pendulum to someone in his family.\nA Foucault pendulum is a type of pendulum that is commonly used in science museums to practically demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. In order to attain the sensitivity required to do this, the pendulum must be very long - in this case, it is thirty feet (approximately nine meters) in length: about the height of a large hall. It must also be undisturbed; any disruption, such as a touch on the pendulum, will prevent it from accurately portraying the rotation of the Earth.\nBy insisting that the pendulum never stop swinging, the old man has made it impossible for the pendulum to be simply detached and stowed away. Even transporting it will be extremely difficult, as it is thirty feet tall, and any change to its orientation will disrupt its swing. (Note, however, that the old man didn't specify that it has to work as a Foucault pendulum; merely, that it must not stop swinging.) He has also added an extra layer of guilt to the 'gift' by suggesting that if they do ever let it stop swinging it will be because they have forgotten him.\nThe title text takes it even further, with a life-sized ice sculpture replica of the Piet\u00e0 which was blessed by the Pope. A Piet\u00e0 is a representation of the body of Jesus Christ on the lap of his mother, Mary , in the aftermath of his Crucifixion . When styled \"The Piet\u00e0\" it usually refers to Piet\u00e0 a Renaissance sculpture by Florentine artist Michelangelo . It is widely considered one of the masterpieces of sculpture . While replicas of Piet\u00e0 do exist, there are none known to have been made of ice , let alone made of ice and blessed by the Pope . That said, if such a sculpture were made, there are several ways to obtain a papal blessing. Such a sculpture would be over six feet tall and weigh several tons, and would have to be constantly maintained at sub-zero temperatures. While the gift could potentially be very valuable, the statement \"all gifts must be removed from my estate within 24 hours\" would dramatically increase its chances of melting.\nFor both the pendulum and the ice sculpture, it is theoretically possible to devise a way to remove, transport, and store them with all the necessary conditions met, but they would probably be huge and very expensive logistical feats, requiring substantial planning and preparation. The final condition that everything must be removed within 24 hours makes such a feat practically impossible.\nAs a side note: Catholic canon law would discourage selling such a sculpture and, were such a sculpture to melt, the water would need to be collected \"burned, buried, or consumed\". These are the proper ways to dispose of a blessed object.\nAlternatively, the title text could be read as meaning that there is a Piet\u00e0 that has been blessed by the Pope, which formed the basis for this replica, though that would make the ice sculpture itself somewhat less remarkable.\n[An old man (wrinkled and deformed head with a bit of hair left) is lying in his bed, head on a pillow, body beneath a blanket. He points to one of the three people standing along the side of the bed, Ponytail, Cueball, and a kid with spiky hair.] Old man: And to you... Old man: I leave the 30-foot Foucault Pendulum from the main hall. Old man: It has been swinging for fifty years. As long as you remember me, you must never let it stop!\n[Caption below the panel:] A fun prank: as you're dying, leave people gifts that will be as difficult as possible to put into storage.\n"}
{"id":1942,"title":"Memorable Quotes","image_title":"Memorable Quotes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1942","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/memorable_quotes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1942:_Memorable_Quotes","transcript":"Looking for a quote for something? Here are some for general use.\nThey can be attributed to xkcd or Randall Munroe as needed.\n\"I disagree strongly with whatever work this quote is attached to.\" \"This quote was taken out of context.\" \"This quote is often falsely attributed to Mark Twain.\" \"I'm being quoted to introduce something, but I have no idea what it is and certainly don't endorse it.\" \"This quote is very memorable.\" \"I wrote this book, and the person quoting me here is taking credit for it.\" \"This entire thing is the quote, not just the part in quote marks.\" [quote marks, brackets, and editor's note are all in the original. -ED.] \"Websites that collect quotes are full of mistakes and never check original sources.\" \"This quote will be the only part of this presentation you remember.\" \"Oooh, look at me, I looked up a quote!\" \"If you're doing a text search in this document for the word 'butts,' the good news is that it's here, but the bad news is that it only appears in this unrelated quote.\" \"Wait, what if these quote marks are inside out, so everything in the rest of the document is the quotation and this part isn't? Duuuuude.\" \"The editors of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations are a bunch of cowards who don't have the guts to print this.\" \"This quote only looks profound when it's in a script font over a sunset.\" \"I don't do a lot of public speaking, so I looked up a memorable quote to start my speech, and this is what I found. OK, you're staring at me blankly, but this whole thing is a quote. I know that sounds confusing, but... You know what, never mind!\" \"Sent from my iPhone.\"\n","explanation":"This comic \"helpfully\" provides random quotes to be used by anyone as blurbs , online reviews, motivational quotes or similar short bits of text. Either the webcomic xkcd or its creator Randall Munroe may be quoted when using any of the provided lines, as stated at the top of the comic.\nIn particular, their \"usefulness\" lies in the fact that almost any of them are equally applicable to almost any situation. This is achieved by making each quote not really about anything in particular, aside from the fact that they are quotes. This is in contrast to typical quotes, which are never quite this aware that they will be quoted, but this is to be expected when the lines here were made solely for being quoted.\nThese self-aware quotes are, on a meta level, jokes about quotations generally. Most of Randall's quotes either sabotage the quoting work, reference some aspect of quotes as used in practice, or both---and it can be both when the aspects referenced are about twisting people's words to look like they agree with you.\nThe title-text does not have an ending quote mark, so \"- Randall Munroe\" is part of the quote, and possibly everything in xkcd after that until the next ending quote. Note that the next quote mark in xkcd is in 1946: Hawaii .\nLooking for a quote for something? Here are some for general use.\nThey can be attributed to xkcd or Randall Munroe as needed.\n\"I disagree strongly with whatever work this quote is attached to.\" \"This quote was taken out of context.\" \"This quote is often falsely attributed to Mark Twain.\" \"I'm being quoted to introduce something, but I have no idea what it is and certainly don't endorse it.\" \"This quote is very memorable.\" \"I wrote this book, and the person quoting me here is taking credit for it.\" \"This entire thing is the quote, not just the part in quote marks.\" [quote marks, brackets, and editor's note are all in the original. -ED.] \"Websites that collect quotes are full of mistakes and never check original sources.\" \"This quote will be the only part of this presentation you remember.\" \"Oooh, look at me, I looked up a quote!\" \"If you're doing a text search in this document for the word 'butts,' the good news is that it's here, but the bad news is that it only appears in this unrelated quote.\" \"Wait, what if these quote marks are inside out, so everything in the rest of the document is the quotation and this part isn't? Duuuuude.\" \"The editors of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations are a bunch of cowards who don't have the guts to print this.\" \"This quote only looks profound when it's in a script font over a sunset.\" \"I don't do a lot of public speaking, so I looked up a memorable quote to start my speech, and this is what I found. OK, you're staring at me blankly, but this whole thing is a quote. I know that sounds confusing, but... You know what, never mind!\" \"Sent from my iPhone.\"\n"}
{"id":1943,"title":"Universal Dreams","image_title":"Universal Dreams","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1943","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/universal_dreams.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1943:_Universal_Dreams","transcript":"[Megan, Ponytail, and Black Hat are standing around.] Megan: I've been out of school for years, but I still get those dreams where I have an exam and I didn't prepare.\n[Ponytail shrugs.] Ponytail: I think that's one of those weird universal dreams\u2014 like forgetting your clothes or discovering rooms in your house you didn't know about.\n[Zoom-in on Black Hat.] Black Hat: Yeah! Or when you're having a normal dream, but then a horse appears on a distant hilltop, and it means that the dream is about to turn bad! Ponytail or Megan (off-screen): I... What? Black Hat: I have that one like every night.\n[Megan and Ponytail look at Black Hat.] Black Hat: Or those ones where you're talking to someone, and they start repeating a latitude and longitude over and over, and then you wake up that morning and there's an earthquake there. Black Hat: Haha, dreams, right? So weird!\nDreaming of latitude and longitude was also a topic of 240: Dream Girl , but in contrast to this comic, the events in that dream did not come true within the comic. (However, a real-life meetup of xkcd fans occurred at the location and date mentioned within the comic.)\n","explanation":"The first and second panel are a discussion between Megan and Ponytail about dreams . Megan mentions a dream or nightmare about failing to prepare for an exam, despite not being a student for years. This is similar to the dream depicted in 557: Students . Ponytail responds that certain dreams occur with surprising frequency among many people, dubbing them \"Universal Dreams\" (which is the title of the comic). Universal dreams are dreams that are weirdly common, as also abused in 719: Brain Worms .\nIn the third panel, Black Hat describes an avatar of misfortune in the form of a horse appearing on a hill. This could be a play on the word nightmare . A mare was originally a demon or goblin that gave bad dreams. The modern word mare , meaning female horse, has a different origin, but still serves handily as a homophonic pun .\nAlternatively, this may be a reference to the 2007 film Michael Clayton , which features a dreamlike sequence where the title character recognizes a scene of three horses on a hilltop from an illustration in a book. He stops his car, gets out and approaches the horses, just minutes before his car explodes. This marks a major turning point in the direction Clayton takes for the rest of the film, similar to how Black Hat says \"[the horses] mean the dream is about to turn bad.\"\nIn the last panel, Black Hat describes having dreams where he receives specific information about the real world, which seems closer to prophesying or precognition than what would be considered a normal dream, as normal dreams do not tell the future. [ citation needed ] This may be a reference to the 2009 film Knowing , in which a child hears voices telling her the date, time, latitude, and longitude of major disasters (including earthquakes) that will occur 50 years in the future. This could also be a reference to comic 240 .\nIn the title text, either Megan or Ponytail is responding to Black Hat when she unexpectedly interrupts herself with the first part of geographic coordinates (Latitude 35), just as Black Hat described, implying that the whole comic might be another of Black Hat's dreams. 35 degrees North would include 31 major cities around the world, including 11 in Japan and 8 in the USA (including California, a seismically active region); the only major city within 35 degrees South is Canberra, Australia. This would suggest that an earthquake would happen soon in one of those major cities. The remainder of the coordinates are most likely cut off to add uncertainty to the situation.\n[Megan, Ponytail, and Black Hat are standing around.] Megan: I've been out of school for years, but I still get those dreams where I have an exam and I didn't prepare.\n[Ponytail shrugs.] Ponytail: I think that's one of those weird universal dreams\u2014 like forgetting your clothes or discovering rooms in your house you didn't know about.\n[Zoom-in on Black Hat.] Black Hat: Yeah! Or when you're having a normal dream, but then a horse appears on a distant hilltop, and it means that the dream is about to turn bad! Ponytail or Megan (off-screen): I... What? Black Hat: I have that one like every night.\n[Megan and Ponytail look at Black Hat.] Black Hat: Or those ones where you're talking to someone, and they start repeating a latitude and longitude over and over, and then you wake up that morning and there's an earthquake there. Black Hat: Haha, dreams, right? So weird!\nDreaming of latitude and longitude was also a topic of 240: Dream Girl , but in contrast to this comic, the events in that dream did not come true within the comic. (However, a real-life meetup of xkcd fans occurred at the location and date mentioned within the comic.)\n"}
{"id":1944,"title":"The End of the Rainbow","image_title":"The End of the Rainbow","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1944","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_end_of_the_rainbow.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1944:_The_End_of_the_Rainbow","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking.] Megan: There's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Cueball: Rainbows are circles. They have no end. Megan: Not quite!\n[In a borderless panel, a multi-part graphic is shown depicting what Megan is describing off-panel: a short cone inside a longer cone, with the longer cone having its point starting at the Sun, the shorter cone having its point at a miniature Cueball's head, and both cones sharing the same circular base. The diagram is repeated from 3 different perspectives to make the structure easier to grasp.] Megan (off-panel): A rainbow is light leaving the Sun, bouncing off the clouds, and converging on your eye. It's an inside-out two-ended cone.\n[Megan and Cueball are still walking.] Megan: One end of that cone is your retina.\n[A wider view of the same scene, with Megan and Cueball walking on a dark ground.] Megan: The other end is the Sun\u2014which contains quintillions of tons of gold. There's more gold in the Sun than water in the oceans. Cueball: So there is a pot of gold! Cueball: What about leprechauns? Megan: All incinerated as the sun formed. Very sad.\nAs of January 19, 2017, the value of gold is 42,692.98 USD per kilogram. Based on this, all of the gold in the sun is worth 2.5474901 \u00d7 10^22 (25 sextillion 474 quintillion 901 quadrillion) USD. Of course, if you tried to sell the gold in the sun, the market would be saturated and the value of gold would plummet astronomically. You would never be able to cash out.\nThe idea that the Sun is valuable in monetary terms is also present in 1622: Henge .\n","explanation":"Megan appears to reference the myth that at the end of every rainbow lies a leprechaun 's pot of gold. Instead of claiming that leprechauns and their gold don't exist, Cueball offers the refutation that, technically, rainbows are circles , so they do not have an end. This is true for an idealised rainbow, and for some actual rainbows: if the viewer has an unobstructed view of the light-reflecting substance creating the effect for the whole of the circle's circumference, they could see a full circle. In practice, the circle is often broken by the horizon or, for example, discontinuity in cloud cover.\nHowever, Megan counters that if one considers the path that light takes to form a rainbow, then it forms a two-cone structure, where the Sun (the vertex of the outer cone) emits light rays that move towards the Earth (forming the faces of the outer cone), then reflect off water droplets located at just the right angle (the circular base) to reach our eyes (the vertex of the inner cone). Thus, such a rainbow structure can be said to have \"ends\", represented by the vertices of the two cones: one at the eye of the viewer, and another at the light source (usually the sun).\nA common rainbow (which base is formed by a water droplets in the Earth's atmosphere) can not be viewed as that. The Sun's diameter is orders of magnitude greater than Earth's one (even including the outer layers of the atmosphere), and we would expect the apex of a cone to be much smaller than its base. Thus a two-cone rainbow which starts in Sun shall have its base formed in the outer space.\nMegan then says that the Sun is indeed a pot of gold. The Sun is approximately 1.989 \u00d7 10 30 (1 nonillion 989 octillion) kilograms , and its abundance of gold is approximately 0.3 parts per trillion (ed: this value is incorrect - values in the paper are not in ppt - see comments below). Based on these numbers, the sun contains 5.967 \u00d7 10 17 (596 quadrillion 700 trillion) kilograms of gold. This equates to 5.967 \u00d7 10 14 (596 trillion 700 billion) metric tons of gold. As such, Megan's statement that the sun contains \"quintillions of tons of gold\" is off by a factor of roughly 4000, but the amount of gold within the sun is, nonetheless, far more than a pot's worth. [ citation needed ]\nThe amount of water in the oceans is about 1.35 \u00d7 10 18 (1 quintillion 350 quadrillion) metric tons . If we assume that Megan is still talking in terms of mass rather than volume or molecule count, then her next statement (that there is more gold in the sun than water in the oceans) would have been true had she been correct in her previous claim, but in fact there is more sea-water than sun-gold by a factor of roughly 2300.\nCueball then asks about leprechauns (perhaps ironically, since Megan's theory at this point appears to involve astronomy\/physics, not mythical creatures\/beings). Megan replies that the leprechauns all died when the Sun formed, building on the irony of Cueball's question (& opening questions about the role of leprechauns in the early formation of our solar system).\nThe title text suggests that, since the pot of gold exists as an idea in the brains of people thinking about it, and the retina is the foremost part of the brain for light perception, it can be argued that, in addition to existing in the sun as the comic explains, the gold (and leprechauns) also exist at the perceiver's end of the cone, as long as they are thinking about a pot of gold at the time (and then it's gone as soon as they stop thinking about it). Many neurologists would agree with the concept that ideas in your mind can be said to be physically located in your brain. However, this seems to go further, and suggest an idealist ontological position, that things, in this case a pot of gold, exist by virtue of our having an idea of them.\n[Megan and Cueball are walking.] Megan: There's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Cueball: Rainbows are circles. They have no end. Megan: Not quite!\n[In a borderless panel, a multi-part graphic is shown depicting what Megan is describing off-panel: a short cone inside a longer cone, with the longer cone having its point starting at the Sun, the shorter cone having its point at a miniature Cueball's head, and both cones sharing the same circular base. The diagram is repeated from 3 different perspectives to make the structure easier to grasp.] Megan (off-panel): A rainbow is light leaving the Sun, bouncing off the clouds, and converging on your eye. It's an inside-out two-ended cone.\n[Megan and Cueball are still walking.] Megan: One end of that cone is your retina.\n[A wider view of the same scene, with Megan and Cueball walking on a dark ground.] Megan: The other end is the Sun\u2014which contains quintillions of tons of gold. There's more gold in the Sun than water in the oceans. Cueball: So there is a pot of gold! Cueball: What about leprechauns? Megan: All incinerated as the sun formed. Very sad.\nAs of January 19, 2017, the value of gold is 42,692.98 USD per kilogram. Based on this, all of the gold in the sun is worth 2.5474901 \u00d7 10^22 (25 sextillion 474 quintillion 901 quadrillion) USD. Of course, if you tried to sell the gold in the sun, the market would be saturated and the value of gold would plummet astronomically. You would never be able to cash out.\nThe idea that the Sun is valuable in monetary terms is also present in 1622: Henge .\n"}
{"id":1945,"title":"Scientific Paper Graph Quality","image_title":"Scientific Paper Graph Quality","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1945","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scientific_paper_graph_quality.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1945:_Scientific_Paper_Graph_Quality","transcript":"[Heading on top of the graph:]\nGeneral quality of charts and graphs in scientific papers\n[A graph is shown with the y-axis on the origin labeled \"bad\", on the arrowhead labeled \"good\", and the x-axis being a timeline labeled with decades from 1950s to 2010s.]\n[The pre-1993 and post-2015 parts are white, with increasing quality before 1990 and after 2015. The 1993-2015 part indicates bad quality and is highlighted in grey, labeled \"PowerPoint\/MSPaint era\".]\n","explanation":"Microsoft Paint was first introduced in 1985 as a component of Windows 1.0 , and Microsoft PowerPoint debuted in 1990. As easy-to-use tools, these allowed for the easy creation of graphs by computer users. The comic implies that these are responsible for decreasing the overall quality of graphs in scientific papers, presumably by enabling a large number of inexperienced designers, and encouraging certain kinds of designs that are ineffective for communicating scientific results.\nCritics of PowerPoint , such as Edward Tufte , have argued that the software is ill-suited for reporting scientific analyses. Many scientific journals nowadays explicitly forbid the use of PowerPoint in their instructions for authors. It can be argued that other software specifically built for this task - and techniques to do so - have been refined over time, leading to a rise in graph quality outside the PowerPoint\/MSPaint era (though see discussion).\nThe title text states that among the bad quality graphs, the ones \u201cwith qualitative, vaguely-labeled axes and very little actual data\u201d are the worst. While this may indicate that the problem with PowerPoint era graphs is that they seem to focus on getting the point across (qualitative as in \u201cyou get the idea\u201d) over accuracy (little actual data), this is more hypocritical humor on Randall's part, as the comic itself features exactly that sort of lambasted graph. The vertical axis labeled \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d is entirely qualitative, the horizontal axis manages to use numbers and still be vague by labeling the area between the ticks as decades instead of labeling the ticks, the definition of what constitutes the \u2018PowerPoint \/ MSPaint era\u2019 is entirely unclear, and it is doubtful that any actual data was used to make the graph \u2013 certainly there are no actual data points indicated. Its quality is doubtful, and it might represent more of an impression, or opinion, than an actual fact.\n[Heading on top of the graph:]\nGeneral quality of charts and graphs in scientific papers\n[A graph is shown with the y-axis on the origin labeled \"bad\", on the arrowhead labeled \"good\", and the x-axis being a timeline labeled with decades from 1950s to 2010s.]\n[The pre-1993 and post-2015 parts are white, with increasing quality before 1990 and after 2015. The 1993-2015 part indicates bad quality and is highlighted in grey, labeled \"PowerPoint\/MSPaint era\".]\n"}
{"id":1946,"title":"Hawaii","image_title":"Hawaii","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1946","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hawaii.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1946:_Hawaii","transcript":"[Cueball is standing, slightly crouched, at a desk with one hand on a laptop and the other holding his phone.] Off-screen voice: Hurry! Cueball: It keeps saying \"Wrong Password!\" I've tried everything it might be! Off-screen voice: The clock is ticking! Cueball: I requested a reset but haven't gotten it! Which email did I use?! Off-screen voice: Sirens are going off!! Cueball: It's not in my password manager! Is it in a browser? Which browser? Is Autofill synced to my phone?? Off-screen voice: OH MY GOD THE SCREAMING!!\n[Caption below the panel:] I feel bad for everyone in Hawaii, but when the governor couldn't get into his Twitter account, he lived out one of my very specific nightmares in real life.\nThe Hawaii emergency agency also might have password problems. In a news article from June 2017 there was a photo showing an agency employee standing beside his own computer, which sports a password on a sticky note. This caused further criticism of the agency security practices .\n","explanation":"On January 13, 2018, the state of Hawaii sent out an emergency alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile attack. The message was specifically noted to NOT be a drill. This caused widespread panic and fear amongst the island residents, and there were follow-up confirmations from local entities who thought the original warning was real. It was eventually determined that the alert was sent in error -- the explanation being that a technician accidentally sent out the \"real\" version when they were supposed to be testing the system during an end-of-shift changeover -- but the fact that it took around 15 minutes for the correction to be sent drew widespread criticism. On January 23, it was revealed that the governor of Hawaii knew the alert was a false alarm only two minutes after it was sent, but couldn't notify the public because he had forgotten the login information for his Twitter account.\nThe proliferation of online services requiring authentication, together with variations in security requirements, various flavours of Multi-factor authentication , a variety of password retrieval methods, and security advice not to re-use passwords across services, has resulted in the management and memorisation of passwords becoming a major headache for many people. This comic shows Cueball, representing the governor, frantically trying to retrieve his log in to Twitter and encountering a number of common frustrations:\nOff-panel, another person is adding to the stress of his situation by screaming at him that people are beginning to panic and warning sirens are going off, underscoring the need to get the correction out as fast as possible. As the caption under the comic indicates, Randall has had a nightmare along these (very specific) lines, and is amused to find someone experiencing that nightmare in the real world.\nThe alt-text refers to USB security keys, physical USB devices that act as tangible 'passwords' for various accounts or devices. (A traditional key of shaped metal is literally a tangible password, with each digit of the password releasing one tumbler of a physical lock; Electronic keys replace the key-and-tumbler password system with a digital password signal.) In the context of this comic, the governor attempts to sign into his Twitter account using one such key, but can't insert it into his computer correctly (as USB devices are infamous for needing to be inserted in a particular orientation despite having a symmetrical outer appearance; also known as USB superposition .) Trying to flip the key around, Cueball drops it into a vent - similar to what happens in 1518: Typical Morning Routine .\n[Cueball is standing, slightly crouched, at a desk with one hand on a laptop and the other holding his phone.] Off-screen voice: Hurry! Cueball: It keeps saying \"Wrong Password!\" I've tried everything it might be! Off-screen voice: The clock is ticking! Cueball: I requested a reset but haven't gotten it! Which email did I use?! Off-screen voice: Sirens are going off!! Cueball: It's not in my password manager! Is it in a browser? Which browser? Is Autofill synced to my phone?? Off-screen voice: OH MY GOD THE SCREAMING!!\n[Caption below the panel:] I feel bad for everyone in Hawaii, but when the governor couldn't get into his Twitter account, he lived out one of my very specific nightmares in real life.\nThe Hawaii emergency agency also might have password problems. In a news article from June 2017 there was a photo showing an agency employee standing beside his own computer, which sports a password on a sticky note. This caused further criticism of the agency security practices .\n"}
{"id":1947,"title":"Night Sky","image_title":"Night Sky","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1947","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/night_sky.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1947:_Night_Sky","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are walking under the night sky.] Megan: The internet is so overwhelming for me these days. It feels like everyone I know is yelling all the time.\n[Frame is zoomed out. Stars are visible in the sky.] Megan: That's why it's so nice to unplug. Leave the phones at home, go for a walk, and look up at the stars. Megan: It helps you focus on what really matters.\n[Frame is zoomed in again.] Cueball: Like \"Where the hell are we?\" Megan: And \"Why did I leave my phone at home? It has my map and flashlight.\" Cueball: \"Are there mountain lions around here? Did you hear a twig break?\" Megan: Yeah, the big questions!\n","explanation":"With the increasing ubiquity of connected devices in people's lives have come concerns about the social and mental effects this is having. A common trend in lifestyle advice is the idea of \" unplugging \" and getting away from technology, with the idea that this can improve one's sense of wellbeing, and allow a focus on the important things in life, such as asking the \"big\" existential questions .\nCueball and Megan are taking one such activity: a nighttime walk without their phones. However, rather than being grandiose, the questions they ask are increasingly immediate to their current situation. Far from finding the experience liberating, they find it first frustrating, as they no longer have access to useful features of their phones, such as mapping with GPS, which would help them find their way, and a flashlight, which would let them see where they were going, and then unsettling, as without their devices to distract them they begin to imagine dangers, such as mountain lions , lurking in the darkness.\nThe fact that Megan enthusiastically affirms that those really are the \"big questions\" of life reveals that they are sarcastically teasing each other about their regrettable decision.\nThe reference to mountain lions might be related to the declaration that eastern cougars were officially declared extinct the day before this comic was published.\nThe title text claims that technology is so omnipresent that even the threatening mountain lion has a phone and is reading Facebook (and, therefore, is not so threatening, since it now can not notice them). Alternatively, either Cueball or Megan might be teasing the other.\n[Cueball and Megan are walking under the night sky.] Megan: The internet is so overwhelming for me these days. It feels like everyone I know is yelling all the time.\n[Frame is zoomed out. Stars are visible in the sky.] Megan: That's why it's so nice to unplug. Leave the phones at home, go for a walk, and look up at the stars. Megan: It helps you focus on what really matters.\n[Frame is zoomed in again.] Cueball: Like \"Where the hell are we?\" Megan: And \"Why did I leave my phone at home? It has my map and flashlight.\" Cueball: \"Are there mountain lions around here? Did you hear a twig break?\" Megan: Yeah, the big questions!\n"}
{"id":1948,"title":"Campaign Fundraising Emails","image_title":"Campaign Fundraising Emails","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1948","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/campaign_fundraising_emails.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1948:_Campaign_Fundraising_Emails","transcript":"[An e-mail inbox window is displayed. On each line appears an illegible e-mail address and a checkbox.] Donate now. It's crunch time, and we're low on cash. If you chip in just $5 by midnight, we\u2026 Donate $35.57 now! Our data team has determined that we should ask you for $35.57 to optimize the\u2026 Help. Our campaign made some mistakes and we need a lot of money ASAP. Any kind, but cash is\u2026 Washington is broken. When I win, I'll look those other senators in the eye and tell them: \"Jobs.\" Then I\u2026 Hopeless. It's bad. Really bad. If you don't chip in now, the darkness spreading across the land will\u2026 As the first woman to fly a fighter jet through our state's formerly all-male university, I learned\u2026 We're broke. No paid staff. No ads. And the cafe has told us to stop using their wifi to send fundraising\u2026 When Amy decided to run for Congress, I was like \"Huh?\" but I checked Wikipedia, and apparently it's a branch of\u2026 Are you familiar with the Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch? His work illustrates my opponent's plan for\u2026 Being a single mom running a small business while going to law school while being deployed to Iraq taught me\u2026 I will lead the fight against the big banks, special interests, the Earth's climate, and our children. I\u2026 Wow. Have you seen this video of the squirrel obstacle course? Incredible! Anyway, I'm running because I\u2026 Outrageous. Granted, this was a few years ago, but did you hear what President Ford said about\u2026 Whoops. Due to a typo, we spent months running attack ads against Tom Hanks. Now, we need to make up for\u2026 They say we can't win\u2014 that we're \"underdogs\" with \"no money\" who \"lost the election last week.\" But they don't\u2026 Our campaign's only chance is to seduce Jennifer ActBlue, heir to the ActBlue fortune. For that, we need a fancy\u2026 Doom. Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed, like rain on\u2026 Warmest greetings. I am the crown prince of Nigeria. I am running for Congress because I believe that\u2026\n","explanation":"Many politicians and organizations in the United States have taken to using email  to conduct aggressive fundraising drives seeking campaign contributions. Signing a petition or expressing interest in a cause can lead to being added to a myriad of mailing lists for similar groups, all looking for support. This comic shows a caricature of the kind of inbox that can result from this. The emails get more and more absurd as the list goes on. For example, the last one combines a request for campaign contributions with the infamous 'Nigerian prince' advance-fee scam phishing scheme.\n[An e-mail inbox window is displayed. On each line appears an illegible e-mail address and a checkbox.] Donate now. It's crunch time, and we're low on cash. If you chip in just $5 by midnight, we\u2026 Donate $35.57 now! Our data team has determined that we should ask you for $35.57 to optimize the\u2026 Help. Our campaign made some mistakes and we need a lot of money ASAP. Any kind, but cash is\u2026 Washington is broken. When I win, I'll look those other senators in the eye and tell them: \"Jobs.\" Then I\u2026 Hopeless. It's bad. Really bad. If you don't chip in now, the darkness spreading across the land will\u2026 As the first woman to fly a fighter jet through our state's formerly all-male university, I learned\u2026 We're broke. No paid staff. No ads. And the cafe has told us to stop using their wifi to send fundraising\u2026 When Amy decided to run for Congress, I was like \"Huh?\" but I checked Wikipedia, and apparently it's a branch of\u2026 Are you familiar with the Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch? His work illustrates my opponent's plan for\u2026 Being a single mom running a small business while going to law school while being deployed to Iraq taught me\u2026 I will lead the fight against the big banks, special interests, the Earth's climate, and our children. I\u2026 Wow. Have you seen this video of the squirrel obstacle course? Incredible! Anyway, I'm running because I\u2026 Outrageous. Granted, this was a few years ago, but did you hear what President Ford said about\u2026 Whoops. Due to a typo, we spent months running attack ads against Tom Hanks. Now, we need to make up for\u2026 They say we can't win\u2014 that we're \"underdogs\" with \"no money\" who \"lost the election last week.\" But they don't\u2026 Our campaign's only chance is to seduce Jennifer ActBlue, heir to the ActBlue fortune. For that, we need a fancy\u2026 Doom. Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed, like rain on\u2026 Warmest greetings. I am the crown prince of Nigeria. I am running for Congress because I believe that\u2026\n"}
{"id":1949,"title":"Fruit Collider","image_title":"Fruit Collider","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1949","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fruit_collider.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1949:_Fruit_Collider","transcript":"[Ponytail points with a stick at a graph hanging on the wall. It depicts a collision of two apples producing a banana, a bunch of grapes, a cherry, three strawberries, and one product which is too small to distinguish clearly but which may be a single grape or berry.] Ponytail: When two apples collide, they can briefly form exotic new fruit. Pineapples with apple skin. Pomegranates full of grapes. Watermelon-sized peaches. Ponytail: These normally decay into a shower of fruit salad, but by studying the debris, we can learn what was produced. Ponytail: Then, the hunt is on for a stable form.\n[Caption below the panel:] How new types of fruit are developed\nRandall has previously indicated that he finds pineapple tasty but very hard to eat in 388: Fuck Grapefruit .\nThis comic was published on the Jewish holiday for the trees, Tu BiShvat (Hebrew: \u05d8\u05d5 \u05d1\u05e9\u05d1\u05d8) , on which it is traditional to eat exotic fruits.\n","explanation":"Ponytail is suggesting that exotic new fruit can be created in a similar way to that in which exotic subatomic particles can, by smashing together more common varieties at high speed.\nParticle accelerators are used to smash sub-atomic particles together at near-light speeds. This can result in a release of enough energy to produce massive exotic particles that do not exist under standard conditions. By examining the results, physicists can test theories in physics and, sometimes, unexpected consequences can force them to revise existing theories. When explaining particle accelerators to the general public, this kind of experiment is sometimes explained with a fruit analogy. For example, the University of Oxford's \" Accelerate! \" show says \"It's like throwing together two apples really really hard and getting three bananas and a mango.\" In this comic strip, the analogy is taken literally, and claims that several interesting new types of fruit have been created.\nPineapples with apple skin.\nThe tough, spiny skin of pineapples makes them (almost) impossible to eat without a knife and, while high in fiber, can be a danger to the intestinal tract and is commonly considered inedible. Nevertheless, many people really like the taste of them. Creating a variety with the skin of an apple would allow them to be enjoyed without the usual inconvenience.\nPomegranates full of grapes .\nA pomegranate is a large berry containing a large number of seeds with fleshy coverings. Many people find the high seed-to-flesh ratio offputting when eating them. If these were replaced with grapes, this ratio would be much lower; if it were a seedless variety of grape, it could be zero.\nWatermelon -sized peaches .\nThis could be a reference to the Roald Dahl story James and the Giant Peach , or Randall may just really like peaches, as shown in 388: Fuck Grapefruit .\nStrawberry banana [title text]\nStrawberry and banana is a popular flavor combination for yogurts and smoothies. The \"massive collider\" in Europe refers to the Large Hadron Collider , the largest particle accelerator in the world. However the Large Hadron Collider was built to investigate the relationship between matter and forces [1] , and not to search for a strawberry banana [ citation needed ] .\nMany fruit-based snacks and drinks will derive flavors from fruit blends. These are generally created by mixing the juice, or artificial substitute flavorings, of two separate, individual fruits, rather than by attempting to create a new fruit by smashing the constituent fruits together. Some man-made hybrid fruits have been created via cross-breeding, grafting, and genetic engineering. It is notable that fruiting plants are generally far more capable of mixing genes across species than animals are. It is often quite possible to produce a hybrid of two fairly distantly related fruits by forcing the pollen of one to fertilize the ovary of another, or even splicing the bulk of the genes together. Of course, this would be more likely to happen in a high-energy collision of their reproductive parts, rather than their fruits. Smashing two fruits together at high speeds will usually result in a sticky mess rather than a new fruit hybrid, as recognised in the title text.\nIt should be noted that the hypothesis presented in this strip has now been tested by The Slow Mo Guys .\n[Ponytail points with a stick at a graph hanging on the wall. It depicts a collision of two apples producing a banana, a bunch of grapes, a cherry, three strawberries, and one product which is too small to distinguish clearly but which may be a single grape or berry.] Ponytail: When two apples collide, they can briefly form exotic new fruit. Pineapples with apple skin. Pomegranates full of grapes. Watermelon-sized peaches. Ponytail: These normally decay into a shower of fruit salad, but by studying the debris, we can learn what was produced. Ponytail: Then, the hunt is on for a stable form.\n[Caption below the panel:] How new types of fruit are developed\nRandall has previously indicated that he finds pineapple tasty but very hard to eat in 388: Fuck Grapefruit .\nThis comic was published on the Jewish holiday for the trees, Tu BiShvat (Hebrew: \u05d8\u05d5 \u05d1\u05e9\u05d1\u05d8) , on which it is traditional to eat exotic fruits.\n"}
{"id":1950,"title":"Chicken Pox and Name Statistics","image_title":"Chicken Pox and Name Statistics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1950","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chicken_pox_and_name_statistics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1950:_Chicken_Pox_and_Name_Statistics","transcript":"[The first panel shows graph with only the x-axis labeled and with seven labeled ticks. The y-axis has three ticks with percentage labels. A red line rises from bottom to top as it goes from left to right. There is an arrow pointing at the graph with a label. Above the left part of the red line there is a title and beneath that a reference to the source of the data in gray font.] [According to the graph, the percentage is close to 0 for ages below 15 and close to 100 for ages above 30.] Fraction of kids your age who got chicken pox (Very rough US estimates based on DOI:10.15585\/mmwr.mm6534a4 and DOI:10.1016\/j.vaccine.2012.05.050) 100% 50% 0% Your age: 5\u00a0\u00a010\u00a0\u00a015\u00a0\u00a020\u00a0\u00a025\u00a0\u00a030\u00a0\u00a035 Vaccine introduced in 1995\n[The second panel shows a graph with only the x-axis labeled and with seven labeled ticks. The graph has six gray lines with labels on them. To the right is a title and beneath that a reference to the source of the data in gray font.] [According to the graphs, Sarah and Brian are more popular names for older age groups.] Relative popularity of several names in your age group (Source: ssa.gov) Harper Sarah Jaxon Brian Brooklyn Logan Your age: 5\u00a0\u00a010\u00a0\u00a015\u00a0\u00a020\u00a0\u00a025\u00a0\u00a030\u00a0\u00a035\n[The third panel shows a list of names with a percentage next to them. Above the list is a title and beneath that a statement in gray font:] Chicken pox incidence by name: (Very rough estimate) Brian: 75% Sarah: 60% Logan: 20% Brooklyn: 10% Jaxon: 4% Harper: 2%\n[Caption below the panels:] Fun Fact: People named \"Sarah\" and \"Brian\" think chicken pox is normal and common, and people named \"Logan\" and \"Harper\" do not.\n","explanation":"This is another comic with one of Randall's fun facts .\nIn this comic statistics are used to point out some non-intuitive correlations.  The first panel sketches out the prevalence of chicken pox by age in the United States . As the graph indicates, prior to the introduction of the varicella vaccine in the United States, it was an exceptionally common childhood illness, with almost 100% of the population experiencing it at some point. The illness is highly memorable (since the symptoms last for days and are intensely uncomfortable) and noticeable (since the characteristic blisters are distinctive and difficult to hide), meaning that it was once a common experience that people expected to both experience and see in their peers. As the vaccine became widespread in the US, rates of varicella infection declined dramatically, and new infections are now relatively uncommon. The graph points out that this has led to a fundamental shift in experiences by age. For an American over the age of 30, nearly all your peers growing up would have had chicken pox. For an American under the age of 10, virtually none of them would have had it. This means that older people are likely to think of chicken pox as a normal part of life, while children are likely to have no experience with it, and may not even know what it is.\nThe second, seemingly unrelated graph, charts the popularity of certain names over time, in the US. It's normal and expected for certain names to rise and fall in popularity over time, which means that the number of people with those names ends up clustered by age. The names \"Sarah\" and \"Brian\" have gone from being highly popular to relatively uncommon for new babies, meaning that people with those names are much likelier to be older. Names like \"Logan\", \"Brooklyn\", \"Jaxon\" and \"Harper\" went from being virtually unused to having a spurt of popularity, meaning that (as of 2018) people with those names are much more likely to be under the age of 15 than over it.\nThe final panel points out that these trends, taken together, generate the interesting effect that you can, in some cases, estimate the odds of someone having had chicken pox, based solely on their first name. Having a name like \"Brian\" or \"Sarah\" raises the odds that you're over 30, which raises the odds that you had chicken pox. People named \"Harper\" or \"Jaxon\" are almost certainly young enough to have grown up with the vaccine in broad use.  These time-based trends predict both the odds of a person having had the illness personally, and the odds that they grew up in a time when infections were common and generally expected.\nThe cartoon demonstrates the correlative fallacy, i.e. what can go wrong if one attempts to draw conclusions based on a random comparison of two variables, as described by the famous saying: \" Correlation does not imply causation \". In this case, there's a real correlation between names and the incidence of a particular disease. A superficial reading could suggest that either certain names make people prone to the disease, or that the disease, in some way, impacts a person's name. The real cause of this correlation is simply that certain trends just happen to coincide, causing them to statistically correlate without either variable having a real causal affect on the other.\nThe citations are real articles. The first citation DOI:10.15585\/mmwr.mm6534a4 is on the Center for Disease Control (CDC) web site at [1] and the second citation DOI:10.1016\/j.vaccine.2012.05.050 is an article in Vaccine at [2] . Both articles describe the effects of the vaccine for varicella which is the virus that causes chicken pox and shingles (also known as herpes zoster).\nThe title text states that people with all six of the names in the last panel (and indeed, most people in general) tend to think that it's weird we have teeth after thinking about it for a while, but that people named Trevor don't in an unexplained statistical anomaly. Teeth are a normal and near-universal part of the human anatomy (and that of many other animals). Like many aspects of biology, they're generally taken for granted, but can seem \"weird\" if you think about them too much. Randall has often demonstrated a tendency to over-analyze typical aspects of life until they become troubling. Here, he jokes that people with one particular name (Trevor) don't experience this, for unexplained statistical reasons.  This is, of course, fictional. The joke comes from the fact that, were that claim true, it would be as random and as hard to believe as the real phenomenon that the comic addresses.\n[The first panel shows graph with only the x-axis labeled and with seven labeled ticks. The y-axis has three ticks with percentage labels. A red line rises from bottom to top as it goes from left to right. There is an arrow pointing at the graph with a label. Above the left part of the red line there is a title and beneath that a reference to the source of the data in gray font.] [According to the graph, the percentage is close to 0 for ages below 15 and close to 100 for ages above 30.] Fraction of kids your age who got chicken pox (Very rough US estimates based on DOI:10.15585\/mmwr.mm6534a4 and DOI:10.1016\/j.vaccine.2012.05.050) 100% 50% 0% Your age: 5\u00a0\u00a010\u00a0\u00a015\u00a0\u00a020\u00a0\u00a025\u00a0\u00a030\u00a0\u00a035 Vaccine introduced in 1995\n[The second panel shows a graph with only the x-axis labeled and with seven labeled ticks. The graph has six gray lines with labels on them. To the right is a title and beneath that a reference to the source of the data in gray font.] [According to the graphs, Sarah and Brian are more popular names for older age groups.] Relative popularity of several names in your age group (Source: ssa.gov) Harper Sarah Jaxon Brian Brooklyn Logan Your age: 5\u00a0\u00a010\u00a0\u00a015\u00a0\u00a020\u00a0\u00a025\u00a0\u00a030\u00a0\u00a035\n[The third panel shows a list of names with a percentage next to them. Above the list is a title and beneath that a statement in gray font:] Chicken pox incidence by name: (Very rough estimate) Brian: 75% Sarah: 60% Logan: 20% Brooklyn: 10% Jaxon: 4% Harper: 2%\n[Caption below the panels:] Fun Fact: People named \"Sarah\" and \"Brian\" think chicken pox is normal and common, and people named \"Logan\" and \"Harper\" do not.\n"}
{"id":1951,"title":"Super Bowl Watch Party","image_title":"Super Bowl Watch Party","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1951","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/super_bowl_watch_party.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1951:_Super_Bowl_Watch_Party","transcript":"[A woman, looking like Megan, walks up to a group of people watching TV. Cueball and Megan (with shorter hair than the walking woman) are sitting on a couch. A Cueball-like guy sits in front of them, while Ponytail lies on the ground, head resting on a hand, in front of a TV, which is quite far from the couch.] Woman: Morning. How's the game? Cueball: Eagles got to the 26-yard line around midnight.  They've been walking across the field since then.  Just entered a huddle. Megan: I bet the next frame will be a cut. Guy on floor: You always say that. Ponytail: Do you think the first ads will come by the end of February?\n[Caption below the comic:] I'm at a year-round Super Bowl watch party. We're playing the stream at 1 \/ 2300x speed, so it will end just as next year's Super Bowl starts.\n","explanation":"The Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the highest level of professional American football . In late January or early February each year, the winner of the American Football Conference (AFC) plays the winner of the National Football Conference (NFC) to determine the champion. In Super Bowl LII held on Sunday, February 4, (the day before this comic's release), the NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles defeated the AFC champion New England Patriots 41-33. Based on its wide-reaching cultural impact, the Super Bowl is the single most important American football game of the year.  Over a hundred million people (across the world) watch it, many of whom are not even fans of American football.\nMany people have parties centered on watching the game. The full game lasts around four hours, including breaks for advertisements and a halftime.  The halftime show of the Superbowl includes a live musical performance, and is generally considered one of the most prestigious shows in the country, meaning it will generally be an elaborate show by a particularly popular artist or group.  Because of the high viewership of the Superbowl, advertising time is very expensive ($5 million for a 30-second national spot, as of 2019). This has led to companies putting substantial resources into producing the commercials, to make them as memorable as possible. The net effect is that the halftime show and the commercials, despite being interruptions to the game, have become attractions in their own right, with some viewers tuning in primarily, or even solely, to watch them.\nCueball and Megan (on the couch) have such a Super Bowl Watch Party going with their friends (hence the title), but in order to watch the game so that the end will be at the start of the next game, they have slowed down the broadcast so the game takes an entire year to watch. Television in the United States is broadcast at 29.97 frames per second (usually rounded up to 30fps) and takes four hours, for a total of 431568 frames. But by slowing the video down by a factor of 2300, the show would last a full year. (Actually it would last 33,119,967 seconds which is 383 days, 18 days more than a year. To make it last a year, minus 4 hours, it should be slowed down a factor of 2189). Each frame would be shown for about 76.7 seconds. Each day of watching the slow video would cover just under 40 seconds of \"actual\" time. With this method of viewing, the watchers are instead reduced to analyzing the game frame-by-frame, which may make it easier to understand the sequence of events, but also creates a feeling of tedium. [ citation needed ]\nDue to this extension creating a lack of variety, Megan tries to make it interesting by guessing the next frame shown will be a cut to a different camera angle. Cuts happen frequently during the broadcast, especially when the ball is not in play, and these cuts may be marked by a black screen. If this is the case, then the cut will be around a minute of nothing to look at at this speed. Megan has a relatively high probability (albeit still incredibly low, with cuts being less than one in every 1000 frames) of being right simply by chance that the next frame will be a cut, but Cueball's tired comment that she always guesses that indicates that the game is so slow or the cuts are so rare that she is almost never correct.\nPonytail asks if they think the first ad block will come out before the end of February, about 20 days after the start of the Super Bowl show. The ads and halftime show are considered integral parts of the broadcast, and many advertisers debut elaborate commercials especially for this game, since so many people watch it. Many people claim to watch the Super Bowl only for the commercial breaks, as mentioned in 60: Super Bowl , and the anticipation for these is exaggerated for this game, as the wait is much longer with the extended broadcast. (In exchange, however, the commercials will be longer, too.)\nThe title text refers to how, during a commercial break during the 2018 Super Bowl, only blackness was broadcast for 28 seconds due to equipment failure at NBC.  At the rate they watch it would last almost 18 hours as described (17 hours 53 minutes).\nIn previous comics regarding the Super Bowl, Randall has explained that he now watches the Super Bowl ( 1480: Super Bowl ), despite previously expressing a lack of interest in the game ( 60: Super Bowl ) or any other sport ( 1107: Sports Cheat Sheet ). A slowly updating video is similar to the concept behind 1190: Time , and is also reminiscent of Douglas Gordon's 1993 art installation 24 Hour Psycho . Also, As Slow as Possible is an organ piece that is currently played in a German church - it will end in 2640, after 639 years of continuous playing. The theme of a group becoming interested in frame-by-frame shots is reminiscent of 915: Connoisseur . Related to frame-by-frame film watching is the Cinema interruptus concept used by film critic Roger Ebert at the Conference on World Affairs , where you first watch a film at normal speed, without interruptions, and then you watch it again, over several afternoons - while everybody present can stop the film at any time, and have a discussion about anything related to the scene. This is also a method that coaches use to discuss recordings of games.\n[A woman, looking like Megan, walks up to a group of people watching TV. Cueball and Megan (with shorter hair than the walking woman) are sitting on a couch. A Cueball-like guy sits in front of them, while Ponytail lies on the ground, head resting on a hand, in front of a TV, which is quite far from the couch.] Woman: Morning. How's the game? Cueball: Eagles got to the 26-yard line around midnight.  They've been walking across the field since then.  Just entered a huddle. Megan: I bet the next frame will be a cut. Guy on floor: You always say that. Ponytail: Do you think the first ads will come by the end of February?\n[Caption below the comic:] I'm at a year-round Super Bowl watch party. We're playing the stream at 1 \/ 2300x speed, so it will end just as next year's Super Bowl starts.\n"}
{"id":1952,"title":"Backpack Decisions","image_title":"Backpack Decisions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1952","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/backpack_decisions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1952:_Backpack_Decisions","transcript":"[Cueball stands in front of a store display with 17 backpacks and a couple of boxes on the shelf. He has pulled two backpacks down, and they sit at his feet along with a messenger bag (or satchel) behind him. He thinks to himself:] It's down to two: the one with the charger pocket and the one with\u2014 Wait, that other one is waterproof! Ugh. Do I even want a backpack? Maybe I should be looking at messenger bags again. OK, starting over.\n[Caption below the comic:] Amount of time I\u2019ve spent paralyzed by indecision over choosing the right\u2026 [A bar graph is shown. Each label is followed by a black bar representing the amount of time:] College [short bar that is 40 pixels wide] Phone [short bar that is 26 pixels wide] Apartment [short bar that is 33 pixels wide] Car [shortest bar, 20 pixels wide] Laptop [second longest bar, 46 pixels wide] Backpack [longest bar, 202 pixels wide]\nPrevious comics explained that decision paralysis might happen because there are detailed reviews online for the items (in 1036: Reviews ), you have very similar options and unlimited internet access (in 1801: Decision Paralysis ), or just that you're a nerd (in 309: Shopping Teams ).\n","explanation":"Cueball , probably representing Randall , is having issues choosing a good backpack. He notices their different features and is indecisive. After presumably spending a long time choosing, he is able to narrow his choices down to two backpacks, only to discover that another backpack had the extra feature of being waterproof, a criterion he had not up to then been accounting for. This has made him more indecisive. Frustrated by the extra information load, he considers giving up on backpacks to take another look at messenger bags. Disregarding that thought, he decides to start over, evaluating all of the backpacks again considering the new information. Clearly he is spending a lot of time on this, and the chart below shows that he spends more time unsure of what backpack to pick than of any other major choice, such as a college or a car. This is unusual, since differences between backpacks impact one's life much less than those between colleges or cars. [ citation needed ]\nA backpack and its features, or lack thereof, might impact a person on a more ongoing and intimate basis than a college choice (which, for Randall, was a long time ago) or a car (if your view of cars mainly concerns their function) in certain situations. A perfectionist technology geek, such as Cueball or Randall (as Cueball is implied to be) would likely remember, every time he used his backpack, the satisfaction of having found the perfect backpack, or the disappointment of being unable to do so.\nThe title text is Cueball having a conversation (or thinking to himself) about a backpack, which seems (absurdly) to be made of heavy tungsten mesh. In fact, at 85 pounds (39 kg), it is so heavy that Cueball thinks he will need to carry it around in a cart, defeating the purpose of the backpack. However, Cueball considers it simply because of the perfect pocket arrangement, which he cannot use anyway, due to the backpack's heaviness. The explanation about the pocket arrangement is written in all caps , indicating that Cueball is yelling from pure excitement at the pocket arrangement.\n[Cueball stands in front of a store display with 17 backpacks and a couple of boxes on the shelf. He has pulled two backpacks down, and they sit at his feet along with a messenger bag (or satchel) behind him. He thinks to himself:] It's down to two: the one with the charger pocket and the one with\u2014 Wait, that other one is waterproof! Ugh. Do I even want a backpack? Maybe I should be looking at messenger bags again. OK, starting over.\n[Caption below the comic:] Amount of time I\u2019ve spent paralyzed by indecision over choosing the right\u2026 [A bar graph is shown. Each label is followed by a black bar representing the amount of time:] College [short bar that is 40 pixels wide] Phone [short bar that is 26 pixels wide] Apartment [short bar that is 33 pixels wide] Car [shortest bar, 20 pixels wide] Laptop [second longest bar, 46 pixels wide] Backpack [longest bar, 202 pixels wide]\nPrevious comics explained that decision paralysis might happen because there are detailed reviews online for the items (in 1036: Reviews ), you have very similar options and unlimited internet access (in 1801: Decision Paralysis ), or just that you're a nerd (in 309: Shopping Teams ).\n"}
{"id":1953,"title":"The History of Unicode","image_title":"The History of Unicode","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1953","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_history_of_unicode.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1953:_The_History_of_Unicode","transcript":"[1988:] [A bearded man holds a document labeled \"Unicode\". Most likely he represents Joe Becker.] Bearded man: My \"Unicode\" standard should help reduce problems caused by incompatible binary text encodings.\n[2018:] [A tweet from Twitter is shown. To the left of Senator Angus King's name is his avatar (a face with a mustache) and to the right is the blue checkmark used by Twitter to signify a verified user.] Senator Angus King\u200f @SenAngusKing Great news for Maine - we're getting a lobster emoji!!! Thanks to @unicode for recognizing the impact of this critical crustacean, in Maine and across the country. Yours truly, Senator \ud83d\udc2e\ud83d\udc51 2\/7\/18 3:12 PM\n[Cueball and the bearded man (the latter now grey-haired) are looking at a wall with the Unicode standard, labeled \"1988\", and Senator King's tweet, labeled \"2018\", posted on it.] Cueball: What... what happened in those thirty years? Bearded man: Things got a little weird, okay?\n","explanation":"An encoding of a character set is a mapping from characters to numbers.  For example, the letter \"A\" might be represented by the value 65.  A problem was that each script had its own character set.  Different characters could be represented by the same value.  Some languages, such as Japanese, had several inconsistent character encodings, so before people could send text, they would have to have agreed which character set to use. Unicode was planned as a way of solving this by providing for a single character encoding for all the various characters used in the world's languages.\nUnicode is run by a consortium of major technology companies and stakeholders. The founders of Unicode include Joe Becker , who worked for Xerox in the 1980s.  He has a beard and may be the character featured in the first and third panels.\nNew characters have continued to be added to Unicode, and recently many \" emoji \" (picture characters) have been added.  Emoji were originally added to be compatible with text message encodings in Japan, but after devices in other countries started supporting them as part of Unicode, they caught on worldwide.  Now emoji characters are added for their own sake, not just for compatibility.\nThe lobster emoji , \ud83e\udd9e, was approved as part of Unicode 11, for release in 2018. This comic was published in 10 February 2018\u200e.\nThis comic shows the creator of Unicode talking about how it would change the way we thought about managing text, which could help with incompatible binary text encoding.  This seems to have derailed over the next 30 years, as shown in a real tweet from the junior Senator from Maine , Angus King . In the tweet , Sen. King writes that he is excited that the system is getting a new lobster emoji, showing that now the Unicode system is used for more frivolous reasons. He even signs using two emoji to form his name. There is a cattle breed called Angus cattle , so the cow emoji, \ud83d\udc2e, stands for \"Angus\", and the crown emoji, \ud83d\udc51, of course represents \"King\". Thus Angus King becomes \ud83d\udc2e\ud83d\udc51. This is thus not part of the xkcd joke; it just uses the real tweet for comic effect. The tweet was released February 7th, only two days before this comic; the second comment on the tweet posted this comic and asked which came first, but of course the tweet did. A user comments that Senator King should see it as a badge of honor (\ud83c\udf96) to have his tweet included in an xkcd strip...\nThe title text imagines that Unicode will gain other unexpected roles in the next 30 years.  In particular it acts as an armed force, capable of intervening in military disputes, such as an annexation of Maine by its neighbor, New Hampshire.  The title text ends with three Unicode emoji: \"\ud83d\ude4f\" code point 1F64F \"PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS\", \"\ud83d\ude81\" code point 1F681 \"HELICOPTER\", and \"\ud83c\udf96\" code point 1F396 \"MILITARY MEDAL\", suggesting that they are thanking them for their effort in the war, sending helicopters and soldiers to aid them against New Hampshire. The phrase \"we're once again an independent state\" may also be a political pun, as 2048 should be an election year, and King is an Independent senator.\n[1988:] [A bearded man holds a document labeled \"Unicode\". Most likely he represents Joe Becker.] Bearded man: My \"Unicode\" standard should help reduce problems caused by incompatible binary text encodings.\n[2018:] [A tweet from Twitter is shown. To the left of Senator Angus King's name is his avatar (a face with a mustache) and to the right is the blue checkmark used by Twitter to signify a verified user.] Senator Angus King\u200f @SenAngusKing Great news for Maine - we're getting a lobster emoji!!! Thanks to @unicode for recognizing the impact of this critical crustacean, in Maine and across the country. Yours truly, Senator \ud83d\udc2e\ud83d\udc51 2\/7\/18 3:12 PM\n[Cueball and the bearded man (the latter now grey-haired) are looking at a wall with the Unicode standard, labeled \"1988\", and Senator King's tweet, labeled \"2018\", posted on it.] Cueball: What... what happened in those thirty years? Bearded man: Things got a little weird, okay?\n"}
{"id":1954,"title":"Impostor Syndrome","image_title":"Impostor Syndrome","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1954","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/impostor_syndrome.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1954:_Impostor_Syndrome","transcript":"[Megan points at Ponytail and introduces her to Cueball.] Megan: This is Dr. Adams. She's a social psychologist and the world's top expert on impostor syndrome. Dr. Adams: Haha, don't be silly! There are lots of scholars who have made more significant\u2026 Dr. Adams: \u2026Oh my God.\n","explanation":"Impostor syndrome is a common psychological phenomenon where successful individuals are unable to internalize their success and fear being exposed as a \"fraud\" or \"impostor.\" Events and accomplishments that would seem to be evidence of competence, skill, intelligence, and so forth, are instead viewed (by the person) as luck, timing, and the ability to appear more confident\/competent than they actually are.\nPonytail , representing Dr. Adams, is introduced by Megan as \"the world's top expert on impostor syndrome.\" Dr. Adams then demonstrates that she herself (like a relatively large number of women according to some reports [1] ) is afflicted by this syndrome. She realizes this after she reacts to the flattering introduction by starting about \"other scholars\" whom she deems to be superior to her.\nThe Dunning\u2013Kruger effect , mentioned in the title text, is a cognitive bias wherein people who possess comparatively little direct expertise in a given field may unrealistically inflate their estimation of their own level of expertise in that field; while those who actually are highly competent (and especially experts on the topic at hand) are likely to downplay their level of expertise. This cognitive bias arises when people of low relevant ability lack the practical knowledge to validly assess their competence: The criteria for good or poor performance in a given field may not be weighed accurately by someone lacking direct expertise and formal training in that specific field. For instance, a commuter experienced in filtering through traffic quickly may consider themselves to be excellent at driving, while a professional evaluating driving habits may observe adherence to regulations and best practices for safety to be the primary criteria for being a \"good\" driver.\nConversely, people with extensive knowledge of a given field may develop an acute awareness of the necessarily limited scope of their (or any one person's) expertise. While this effect primarily refers to cognitive ability, it is also sometimes used to refer to people who are competent in one area (and thus not lacking metacognitive skills) believing that their abilities grant them unusually-high aptitude in a different but seemingly related area.\nIn practice, more expertise still largely correlates to higher confidence in one's expertise (that is to say that competence remains positively correlated with an individual's perception of their own competence), but a lack of the appropriate cognitive skills can result in that perception of competence starting at a high level yet increasing at a slower rate. However, in popular usage, the Dunning\u2013Kruger effect is used to claim that a negative correlation exists, and that non-experts will claim expertise and confidence at a higher overall level than actual experts.\nIn the title text, a conference for the Dunning\u2013Kruger effect was having trouble, presumably because the actual researchers were downplaying their knowledge and expertise to the point where they refused to be the keynote speaker, while the random undergrads (who lack experience in the topic) felt sufficiently confident in their knowledge of it to give the keynote. This more closely matches both the secondary usage (as undergrads are unlikely to lack metacognitive skills, but may inflate their understanding) and the popular usage (as the confidence is inverse to the actual competence) than the primary and in-practice observance made in the original research.\n[Megan points at Ponytail and introduces her to Cueball.] Megan: This is Dr. Adams. She's a social psychologist and the world's top expert on impostor syndrome. Dr. Adams: Haha, don't be silly! There are lots of scholars who have made more significant\u2026 Dr. Adams: \u2026Oh my God.\n"}
{"id":1955,"title":"Robots","image_title":"Robots","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1955","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/robots.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1955:_Robots","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at his desk in an office chair pointing to his laptop while looking back over his shoulder talking to Megan off-panel.] Cueball: Did you see this Boston Dynamics robot video? Cueball: We're definitely all gonna die.\n[Megan walks in to the panel towards Cueball who still looks at her, but stops pointing.] Megan: You know, it's funny. Megan: Humans see a robot open a door, and we all instantly assume we're in mortal peril.\n[Zoom in on the heads of Megan and Cueball, both now looking at the off-panel screen.] Megan: So doesn't it make more sense to say the robots are all gonna die? Cueball: Violently overreacting to a perceived threat? That doesn't sound like humans. Megan: Yeah, I must be thinking of some other species.\nPossibly coincidentally, approximately seven weeks before this video and strip, the series \" Black Mirror \" released an episode entitled \" Metalhead \". The episode set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are hunted by robots highly reminiscent of this line of Boston Dynamics robots. Clearly, the concept of these robots becoming a threat isn't unique to XKCD.\n","explanation":"This comic refers to a YouTube video posted one day earlier by robotics company Boston Dynamics . The video shows a quadruped robot with a roughly canine form approach a door, then stop and 'look' to the side where a second robot appears, which has an articulated arm attachment on top. This robot sizes up the door, then uses its arm to grasp the handle and open the door. It holds the door open for the first robot, then follows it through the doorway.\nThe video was extremely popular, receiving over four million views in the first day. Many social media comments joked that humanity is doomed, as the robots we are developing will soon become capable enough to rise up and overthrow us. This is a common jest or anxiety expressed when robots manage to master a task that previously had given them difficulty. It is especially appropriate here, since the ability to open doors is extremely useful when dealing with humans. Randall has previously made the point that a robot uprising would promptly fail because most robots couldn't successfully open doors (or even successfully negotiate thresholds, in some cases). This latest advance seems to specifically undercut that assurance.\nAfter Cueball sees this video, he reiterates the same line by saying that we're definitely going to die. Megan , however, offers an alternative view: that in fact, due to human nature, it is the robots that are in mortal peril from this technological development, not humans, since humans tend to respond aggressively to potential threats.\nTaking Megan's point, Cueball sarcastically suggests that humans don't tend to overreact violently to perceived threats, to which Megan replies, equally sarcastically, that she must be thinking of another species.\nThe title text may refer to the Mad Scientist or Evil Genius tropes in science fiction, where someone builds an army of robots with the intent of using them to take over the world. Alternatively, the title text could refer to the real life phenomena of military programs expending enormous resources to develop unmanned offensive capabilities, such as the Predator drone and SWORDS mobile weapon platform . In the latter context, it may be sensible to show concern with the methods, reasoning, motivations, and long-term stability of people directing the development of potentially lethal robots. Boston Dynamics is one of the foremost innovators in the field of military-grade automation.\n[Cueball is sitting at his desk in an office chair pointing to his laptop while looking back over his shoulder talking to Megan off-panel.] Cueball: Did you see this Boston Dynamics robot video? Cueball: We're definitely all gonna die.\n[Megan walks in to the panel towards Cueball who still looks at her, but stops pointing.] Megan: You know, it's funny. Megan: Humans see a robot open a door, and we all instantly assume we're in mortal peril.\n[Zoom in on the heads of Megan and Cueball, both now looking at the off-panel screen.] Megan: So doesn't it make more sense to say the robots are all gonna die? Cueball: Violently overreacting to a perceived threat? That doesn't sound like humans. Megan: Yeah, I must be thinking of some other species.\nPossibly coincidentally, approximately seven weeks before this video and strip, the series \" Black Mirror \" released an episode entitled \" Metalhead \". The episode set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are hunted by robots highly reminiscent of this line of Boston Dynamics robots. Clearly, the concept of these robots becoming a threat isn't unique to XKCD.\n"}
{"id":1956,"title":"Unification","image_title":"Unification","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1956","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unification.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1956:_Unification","transcript":"[Ten rounded frames with text inside are shown in two rows. Below each frame there is a line going down and then this line either joins with one or two of the other frames lines or in two cases do not joins with any other. At the bottom of the panel the now five remaining lines turn towards the center of the bottom of the panel and ends in arrows that points towards three question marks. The first three frames' lines are unified, same goes for the next two, and the three after that. The lines of the last two are not joined with any other lines. The text in the transcript is given as it appears from left to right, disregarding if it is the top or bottom row, but this will alternate through the ten frames, starting with one up, then one down etc.]\n[Group one, starting with up:] Electricity Magnetism Weak force\n[Group two starting with down:] East Germany West Germany\n[Group three starting with down:] Star Wars Disney Pixar\n[Two single frames, the first is up:] Strong force Gravity\n[All five arrows points to this:] ???\n[Caption below the panel:] Progress toward unifying the fundamental forces of nature\n","explanation":"In physics, the fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces, are the interactions that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four fundamental interactions known to exist: the gravitational and electromagnetic interactions, which produce significant long-range forces whose effects can be seen directly in everyday life, and the strong and weak interactions, which produce forces at minuscule, subatomic distances and govern nuclear interactions. Some scientists speculate that a fifth force might exist, but, if so, it is not widely accepted nor proven.\nThis comic lists five physical forces (it split up electricity and magnetism), but also includes a number of other things (two countries and three businesses) that are known for \"unifying\" in a non-physics sense. East and West Germany united politically in 1990 , more than forty years after being divided at the end of World War II . Entertainment company Disney has united in a business sense with a number of others over the years; the comic mentions animation studio Pixar and the Star Wars franchise. The comic states that this is the progress toward unifying the fundamental forces of nature, which is absurd, with the addition of Disney and Germany , neither of which is one of the fundamental forces. [ citation needed ] Star Wars is, of course, all about The Force , but this has, for some reason, gone unnoticed by most physicists.\nThe title text jokes that some physicists tried to unify the force of gravity with the 2013 movie Gravity , starring Sandra Bullock . Of course, this is also absurd, but it turns out that this is just another jab by Randall at George Lucas for selling his rights to Star Wars to Disney . The jab comes when he makes it clear that the director of Gravity Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n would refuse to sell the rights to his film to Disney, even if he was held in underground chamber of water for 10 31 years.\nThis water chamber and incredible time span is a reference to Proton decay , which is being investigated by trying to detect the Cherenkov radiation that could occur from possible decay of protons in water. These measurements are being conducted in immense water tanks buried under mountains to protect them against similar signals that could result from cosmic radiation. The same type of tanks have been used to detect neutrinos .\nThe half life of protons is currently believed to be between 10 31 \u201310 36 years. This should be compared to the age of the universe at around 1.3\u00d710 10 years, which means that one second compared to the age of the universe is larger than the age of the universe compared to the smallest suggested half life of the proton (as used in the comic) by a factor of about 10,000, but even this time would not make Cuar\u00f3n cave in...\n[Ten rounded frames with text inside are shown in two rows. Below each frame there is a line going down and then this line either joins with one or two of the other frames lines or in two cases do not joins with any other. At the bottom of the panel the now five remaining lines turn towards the center of the bottom of the panel and ends in arrows that points towards three question marks. The first three frames' lines are unified, same goes for the next two, and the three after that. The lines of the last two are not joined with any other lines. The text in the transcript is given as it appears from left to right, disregarding if it is the top or bottom row, but this will alternate through the ten frames, starting with one up, then one down etc.]\n[Group one, starting with up:] Electricity Magnetism Weak force\n[Group two starting with down:] East Germany West Germany\n[Group three starting with down:] Star Wars Disney Pixar\n[Two single frames, the first is up:] Strong force Gravity\n[All five arrows points to this:] ???\n[Caption below the panel:] Progress toward unifying the fundamental forces of nature\n"}
{"id":1957,"title":"2018 CVE List","image_title":"2018 CVE List","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1957","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2018_cve_list.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1957:_2018_CVE_List","transcript":"[A heading is centered above a list of 21 vulnerabilities] Leaked list of major 2018 security vulnerabilities\nCVE-2018-????? Apple products crash when displaying certain Telugu or Bengali letter combinations. CVE-2018-????? An attacker can use a timing attack to extploit a race condition in garbage collection to extract a limited number of bits from the Wikipedia article on Claude Shannon. CVE-2018-????? At the cafe on Third Street, the Post-it note with the WiFi password is visible from the sidewalk. CVE-2018-????? A remote attacker can inject arbitrary text into public-facing pages via the comments box. CVE-2018-????? MySQL server 5.5.45 secretly runs two parallel databases for people who say \"S-Q-L\" and \"sequel.\" CVE-2018-????? A flaw in some x86 CPUs could allow a root user to de-escalate to normal account privileges. CVE-2018-????? Apple products catch fire when displaying emoji with diacritics. CVE-2018-????? An oversight in the rules allows a dog to join a basketball team. CVE-2018-????? Haskell isn't side-effect-free after all; the effects are all just concentrated in this one. computer in Missouri that no one's checked on in a while. CVE-2018-????? Nobody really knows how hypervisors work. CVE-2018-????? Critical: Under Linux 3.14.8 on System\/390 in a UTC+14 time zone, a local user could potentially use a buffer overflow to change another user's default system clock from 12-hour to 24-hour. CVE-2018-????? x86 has way too many instructions. CVE-2018-????? NumPy 1.8.0 can factor primes in O (log n ) time and must be quietly deprecated before anyone notices. CVE-2018-????? Apple products grant remote access if you send them words that break the \"I before E\" rule. CVE-2018-????? Skylake x86 chips can be pried from their sockets using certain flathead screwdrivers. CVE-2018-????? Apparently Linus Torvalds can be bribed pretty easily. CVE-2018-????? An attacker can execute malicious code on their own machine and no one can stop them. CVE-2018-????? Apple products execute any code printed over a photo of a dog with a saddle and a baby riding it. CVE-2018-????? Under rare circumstances, a flaw in some versions of Windows could allow Flash to be installed. CVE-2018-????? Turns out the cloud is just other people's computers. CVE-2018-????? A flaw in Mitre's CVE database allows arbitrary code insertion. [~~Click here for cheap viagra~~]\nRandall has previously referenced diacritics in 1647: Diacritics .\nBruce Schneier was previously mentioned in the title texts of 748: Worst-Case Scenario and 1039: RuBisCO .\n","explanation":"CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) is a standardized format for assigning an identity to a cybersecurity vulnerability (similar to the way that astronomical bodies are assigned unique identifiers by committees). Giving vulnerabilities a unique identifier makes them easier to talk about and helps in keeping track of the progress made toward resolving them. The typical format of a CVE identifier is CVE-[YEAR]-[NUMBER] . For example, the CVE identifier for 2017's widespread Meltdown vulnerability is CVE-2017-5754 . CVEs also contain a short description of the issue.\nIn this comic (released in February 2018), Randall presents a number of spurious predicted CVEs for later in 2018. Each CVE identifier is given as \"CVE-2018-?????\", reflecting the fact that they have not yet happened so we don't know exactly what their CVE identifier will be.\nFollowing are short descriptions of all the vulnerabilities mentioned in the comic.\nApple products crash when displaying certain Telugu or Bengali letter combinations. This refers to a real vulnerability in iOS and MacOS publicized a few days before the comic was released, as well as past similar iOS vulnerabilities. An attacker can use a timing attack to extploit [ sic ] a race condition in garbage collection to extract a limited number of bits from the Wikipedia article on Claude Shannon. The reference to using a Timing Attack to exploit a race condition in garbage collection refers to Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws that can be exploited in a cloud server like the ones in Wikipedia. Claude Shannon was an early and highly influential information scientist whose work underlies compression, encryption, security, and the theory behind how information is encoded into binary digits. This is not a security problem, since Wikipedia articles are public. However, since Shannon formulated how the amount of unique or actual information some entity contains is proportional to the number of bits required to encode it, retrieving only a few bits casts a dark perspective upon the significance of the Shannon article's content. At the cafe on Third Street, the Post-it note with the WiFi password is visible from the sidewalk. Caf\u00e9s often offer free access to WiFi as a service to patrons, as a business strategy to encourage said patrons to remain in the building and buy more coffee. Some use a password, so that only patrons can use the WiFi, and may display the password on signage inside. Since anybody could go into the cafe to read the post-it, and then use the network from nearby, the ability to read it from outside is, at most, a trivial problem. For systems that are supposed to be secure, writing passwords in a visible place is a major security flaw. For instance, following the 2018 Hawaii false missile alert , the agency concerned received criticism for a press photo showing a password written on a sticky note attached to a monitor. A remote attacker can inject arbitrary text into public-facing pages via the comments box. Describes a common feature on news sites or social media sites like Facebook. The possibility for users to \"inject\" text into the page is by design. This is a humorous reference to the relatively common security vulnerability \" persistent cross-site scripting \", where input provided by a user, such as through a comment section, can result in dangerous content containing arbitrary HTML or JavaScript code being displayed to other users. MySQL server 5.5.45 secretly runs two parallel databases for people who say \"S-Q-L\" and \"sequel.\" Some people pronounce \" SQL \" like \"sequel\", after SQL's predecessor \"SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language)\". The standard for SQL suggests that it should be pronounced as separate letters; however, the author of SQL pronounces it \"sequel\", so the debate persists (with even more justification than arguments about how to pronounce \"GIF\"). MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. The latest generally available version (at the time of writing) is MySQL 5.7. A flaw in some x86 CPUs could allow a root user to de-escalate to normal account privileges. Privilege escalation refers to any illegitimate means by which a system user gains greater access privileges than they are supposed to have. The most highly-sought privilege is that of the root user, which allows complete access to an entire system\u2014 a superuser . Any flaw that would allow an ordinary user to escalate to superuser status is a critical security threat, as they then have full control of the machine. This is what most hackers seek to achieve when attacking a device. This CVE presents the less-threatening reverse situation: allowing a root user to de-escalate to normal account privileges. In fact, root users can already do this at any time; superuser privileges allow them to take control of any user account, so they can simply switch to an account which has fewer privileges than the root user. Apple products catch fire when displaying emoji with diacritics. This is a reference to a common problem of modern gadgets catching fire (usually related to flaws in lithium-ion batteries), as well as to Apple products crashing when attempting to display certain character sequences. Diacritics are the accents found on letters in some languages (eg. \u010d, \u0123 \u0137, \u013c, \u0146, \u0161, \u017e). These would not normally be found on emojis [ citation needed ] . \ud83d\udd25\u0303 is an example of such an emoji. An oversight in the rules allows a dog to join a basketball team. This probably refers to the movie Air Bud , about a dog playing basketball. This has been a common theme in xkcd comics: see 115: Meerkat , 1439: Rack Unit , 1819: Sweet 16 , 1552: Rulebook . In 2017, it was discovered that an oversight in the constitution of the state of Kansas may permit a dog to be governor . Shortly before this comic published, the Secretary of State's office ruled that it could not . Haskell isn't side-effect-free after all; the effects are all just concentrated in this one computer in Missouri that no one's checked on in a while. Haskell is a functional programming language. Functional programming is characterized by using functions that don't have side effects because they can not change things accessible in other parts of the program, as in 1312: Haskell . The joke here is discovering that it does indeed have side-effects, manifested via external alteration, not violating the internal alteration paradigm. It may also be a reference to \" The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas ,\" a short story by Ursula Le Guin in which a utopian city concentrates all its misery into one child who is locked away in a basement. Nobody really knows how hypervisors work. \"Hypervisors\" are a tool for computer virtualization. Virtualization is implemented via various combinations of hardware and\/or software, which requires a computer to completely simulate another computer, with its own unique hardware and software, and to varying degrees as to whether or not the virtualization is aware of or can determine whether it is being virtualized. Many IT professionals and businesses rely heavily on various forms of virtualization, but most of the individual employees would be hard-pressed to explain how it works. Programs running on other virtual computers, or on the real computer, may be able to access information on a virtual computer in ways which would not be possible with a single real computer. Consequently, understanding how the hypervisor works is important to assessing the security of a virtual server. Meltdown and Spectre are related to this. Critical: Under Linux 3.14.8 on System\/390 in a UTC+14 time zone, a local user could potentially use a buffer overflow to change another user's default system clock from 12-hour to 24-hour. This joke is about arcane systems that are running Linux in exceedingly rare situations, meaning that reproducing errors would be incredibly difficult or inconvenient, and would only affect a very tiny user base (if any at all). System\/390 is an IBM mainframe introduced almost 30 years before this comic, which has a version of Linux. UTC+14 is a time zone used only on some islands in the Pacific Ocean (Primarily the Line Islands ) and is also the earliest time zone on Earth. Even if all of these absurd conditions were met, the resulting vulnerability would still be relatively benign: simply changing a user's preferred clock display format. Other xkcd comics make references to such obscure computer-time issues relating to time zones and time conversions, and how many programmers find these issues frustrating or even traumatizing. x86 has way too many instructions. The x86 architecture (used in many Intel and AMD processors) is very complicated. Processors typically implement such a complex architecture using programs (microcode) run on a set of hidden, proprietary processors. The details of these hidden machines and errors in the microcode can result in security vulnerabilities, such as Meltdown, where the physical machine does not match the conceptual machine. A more complicated instruction set is more complex to implement. [ citation needed ] The x86 architecture is considered \"CISC\" (a \" Complex instruction set computer \"), having many instructions originally provided to make programming by a human simpler; other examples include the 68000 series used in the first Apple Macintosh . In the 1980s, this design philosophy was countered by the \"RISC\" (\" Reduced instruction set computer \") design movement - based on the observation that computer programs were increasingly generated by compilers (which only used a few instructions) rather than directly by people, and that the chip area dedicated to extra instructions could be better dedicated to, for example, cache. Examples of RISC style designs include SPARC , MIPS , PowerPC (used by Apple in later Macintoshes) and the ARM chips common in mobile phones. Historically, there was considerable discussion about the merits of each approach. At one time the Mac and Windows PC were on different sides; owners of other competing systems such as the Archimedes and Amiga had similar arguments on usenet in the early 1990s. This \"issue\" may be posted by someone who still recalls these debates. Technically, the extra instructions do slightly complicate the task of validating correct chip behaviour and complicate the tool chains that manage software, which could be seen as a minor security risk. However, the 64-bit architecture introduced by AMD , and since adopted by Intel , does rationalize things somewhat, and all recent x86 chips break down instructions into RISC-like micro-operations, so the complication from a hardware perspective is localized. Recent security issues, such as the speculative cache load issue in Meltdown and Spectre, depend more on details of implementation, rather than instruction set, and have been exhibited both by x86 (CISC) and ARM (RISC) processors. NumPy 1.8.0 can factor primes in O (log n ) time and must be quietly deprecated before anyone notices. Fantastically, this would be an unimaginable software threat, not to be confused with the even speedier, but future-bound, threat in hardware via Quantum computing . NumPy is the fundamental package for scientific computing with the programming language Python. O (log n ) is Big O notation meaning that the time it takes for a computer algorithm to run is in the order of log n , for an input of size n . O (log n ) is very fast and is more usual for a search algorithm. Prime factorization currently is O ( 2 n n)). If something can find the prime factors of a number this quickly, especially a semiprime with two large factors, it will enable attacks to break many crypto functions used in internet security. However, prime numbers have only a single factor, and \"factoring primes\" quickly is a simpler problem, that of proving that a number is in fact a prime . Apple products grant remote access if you send them words that break the \"I before E\" rule. Another joke on the first CVE and a common English writing rule of thumb , which fails almost as often as it succeeds. Possibly a jab at Apple's image, portraying their software as unable to handle improper grammar or spelling. Skylake x86 chips can be pried from their sockets using certain flathead screwdrivers. Skylake x86 chips are a line of microprocessors made by Intel. Some processors are soldered directly to a system board or daughter board, while others are attached to boards that plug into the system board by means of a socket (pins or connectors that make physical contact with receptacles or connectors on a system board). Some sockets, especially older ones, require force to insert or remove, and often require the use of a flat blade screwdriver or a specialized tool, but most modern ones use ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) techniques, often involving a lever or similar to tighten or loosen the friction\/tightness of the contacts. No screwdriver is needed in this case. However, any processor can be forcefully removed from its socket with a screwdriver. [ citation needed ] Apparently Linus Torvalds can be bribed pretty easily. Linus Torvalds is the benevolent dictator for life of the Linux kernel codebase. Normally it is hard to make changes because he has the last word, and because the kernel is replicated in all Linux installations. Linus made the news in January 2018 when, having looked at one of Intel's proposed fixes for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, he declared \" the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE \". Presumably, it may be found that he may be successfully bribed to be less blunt and\/or less critical of vulnerability fixes that are complete and\/or utter garbage. If this were the case, this would be a severe critical vulnerability to all Linux servers and machines. An attacker can execute malicious code on their own machine and no one can stop them. The point of an attack is to make someone else's machine perform actions against the owner's will. Anyone can make their own machine execute any code if they have root access and the necessary tools, but this would usually not be described as an attack, except in the case of a locked-down appliance, such as a video game console, a John Deere tractor, or pay TV decoder. Apple products execute any code printed over a photo of a dog with a saddle and a baby riding it. This could refer to a CVE vulnerability of JPG files where JavaScript embedded within the image file is executed by some application. In this case, though, the code is visible on the image instead of invisibly encoded within the image file. The code is also only executed if the image contains a photo of a baby in a saddle riding a dog. It's unclear whether the photo would be a digital photo, a printed photo (i.e. as taken using a digital camera), or maybe both. Other than by some metadata , either internal to the image file, or embedded along with it, as in a web page, or a PDF or other container file, this \"bug\" would require the device to figure out specifically what the photo contains image-wise (something that's REALLY HARD for computers to do reliably), but would also require OCR (optical character recognition) code to convert the text superimposed on the photo into executable code. In other words, it's hard to believe in 2018 that such a bug could exist. Maybe in the future when such things are more routine...? As an example, OCR used to be hard to do reliably, but now it's a lot more routine and built into a lot of devices. Under rare circumstances, a flaw in some versions of Windows could allow Flash to be installed. Adobe Flash has been an integral browser plugin for decades, but has fallen out of favor in the 2010s, and eventually discontinued because of its notoriously abysmal security record. All security experts advise against installing it. Preventing installation of Flash would make systems more secure, but most versions of Windows do not prevent Flash installation (provided, as of 2021, the user still has a copy of the files with which to do so). The joke here relates to the difficulty of keeping Flash up to date, or even installed properly to begin with. A common user experience, which is the subject of numerous jokes and memes, is the constant nagging notification to install or update Flash in order for web pages to display properly. Many IT professionals will bemoan the trouble they have experienced in the workplace due to these notifications and problems related to them. In late 2020, Microsoft released an optional Windows update that removes Flash and prevents users from installing it again. Turns out the cloud is just other people's computers. This refers to a meme that demands that \"cloud\" be replaced with \"other people's computers\" in all marketing presentation to CEOs and non-computer literate persons evaluating the security impact of using cloud services. Part of the humor here is that \"the cloud\" is, in actuality, simply a term for hosted services, or in other words computers being run by other people (typically businesses that specialize in this type of \" Platform as a Service \" or \"PaaS\" service model). Referring to \"the cloud\" as \"other people's computers\" is, at its core, entirely accurate, though it takes away the business jargon and simplifies the situation in such a way that it might cast doubt on the security, reliability, and general effectiveness of using \"cloud\" solutions.  In 908: The Cloud , it turns out that Black Hat is the \"other people\" whose computer is the Cloud. A flaw in Mitre's CVE database allows arbitrary code insertion. [~~CLICK HERE FOR CHEAP VIAGRA~~] Mitre's CVE database is where all CVEs are stored. This log message forms the punchline of the comic, as it implies that all of the exaggerated error messages above might have been inserted by hackers exploiting the vulnerability. To pour salt in the wound, they then included in a typical spam link purporting to offer inexpensive brand-name Sildenafil . It turns out Bruce Schneier is just two mischevious kids in a trenchcoat. Appears in the title text. Bruce Schneier is security researcher and blogger. The \"two kids in a trenchcoat\" is a reference to the Totem Pole Trench trope. Shortly before this comic was posted, a story went viral in which two kids were photographed attempting this for real to get into a screening of Black Panther .\n[A heading is centered above a list of 21 vulnerabilities] Leaked list of major 2018 security vulnerabilities\nCVE-2018-????? Apple products crash when displaying certain Telugu or Bengali letter combinations. CVE-2018-????? An attacker can use a timing attack to extploit a race condition in garbage collection to extract a limited number of bits from the Wikipedia article on Claude Shannon. CVE-2018-????? At the cafe on Third Street, the Post-it note with the WiFi password is visible from the sidewalk. CVE-2018-????? A remote attacker can inject arbitrary text into public-facing pages via the comments box. CVE-2018-????? MySQL server 5.5.45 secretly runs two parallel databases for people who say \"S-Q-L\" and \"sequel.\" CVE-2018-????? A flaw in some x86 CPUs could allow a root user to de-escalate to normal account privileges. CVE-2018-????? Apple products catch fire when displaying emoji with diacritics. CVE-2018-????? An oversight in the rules allows a dog to join a basketball team. CVE-2018-????? Haskell isn't side-effect-free after all; the effects are all just concentrated in this one. computer in Missouri that no one's checked on in a while. CVE-2018-????? Nobody really knows how hypervisors work. CVE-2018-????? Critical: Under Linux 3.14.8 on System\/390 in a UTC+14 time zone, a local user could potentially use a buffer overflow to change another user's default system clock from 12-hour to 24-hour. CVE-2018-????? x86 has way too many instructions. CVE-2018-????? NumPy 1.8.0 can factor primes in O (log n ) time and must be quietly deprecated before anyone notices. CVE-2018-????? Apple products grant remote access if you send them words that break the \"I before E\" rule. CVE-2018-????? Skylake x86 chips can be pried from their sockets using certain flathead screwdrivers. CVE-2018-????? Apparently Linus Torvalds can be bribed pretty easily. CVE-2018-????? An attacker can execute malicious code on their own machine and no one can stop them. CVE-2018-????? Apple products execute any code printed over a photo of a dog with a saddle and a baby riding it. CVE-2018-????? Under rare circumstances, a flaw in some versions of Windows could allow Flash to be installed. CVE-2018-????? Turns out the cloud is just other people's computers. CVE-2018-????? A flaw in Mitre's CVE database allows arbitrary code insertion. [~~Click here for cheap viagra~~]\nRandall has previously referenced diacritics in 1647: Diacritics .\nBruce Schneier was previously mentioned in the title texts of 748: Worst-Case Scenario and 1039: RuBisCO .\n"}
{"id":1958,"title":"Self-Driving Issues","image_title":"Self-Driving Issues","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1958","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/self_driving_issues.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1958:_Self-Driving_Issues","transcript":"[Cueball is speaking while standing alone in a slim panel.] Cueball: I worry about self-driving car safety features.\n[In a frame-less panel it turns out that Cueball is standing between  White Hat and Megan, holding his arms out towards each of them, while he continues to speak.] Cueball: What's to stop someone from painting fake lines on the road, or dropping a cutout of a pedestrian onto a highway, to make cars swerve and crash?\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head as he continues to contemplate the situation holding a hand to his chin, while looking in White Hat's direction. Megan replies from off-panel behind him.] Cueball: Except... those things would also work on human drivers. What's stopping people now? Megan (off-panel): Yeah, causing car crashes isn't hard.\n[Zoom back out to show all three of them again.] White Hat: I guess it's just that most people aren't murderers? Cueball:  Oh, right. I always forget. Megan: An underappreciated component of our road safety system.\nThe title text was published with a typo: \"murderers\" was misspelled as \"muderers.\"\nThe theme of human fear and overreaction to the advent of more or less autonomous robots also features in 1955: Robots .\nSelf-driving cars is a recurring subject on xkcd.\nA variation on the idea that humans are mentally \"buggy\" is suggested in 258: Conspiracy Theories , though in that case divine intervention is requested to implement the \"firmware upgrade\".\nThis comic appeared one day after the Electronic Frontier Foundation co-released a report titled The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation . The report cites subversions and mitigations of AI such as ones used in self-driving cars. However, the report tends toward overly technical means of subversion. Randall spoofs the tenor of the report through his mundane subversions and over-the-top mitigations.\n","explanation":"Cueball explains being worried about self-driving cars , noting that it may be possible to fool the sensory systems of the vehicles. This is a common concern with AIs ; since they think analytically and have little to no capability for abstract thought, they can be fooled by things a human would immediately realize is deceptive.\nHowever, Cueball quickly assumes that his argument actually doesn't hold up when comparing AI drivers to human drivers, as both rely on the same guidance framework. Human drivers follow signs and road markings, and must obey the laws of the road just as an AI must. Therefore, an attack on the road infrastructure could impact both AIs and humans. However, humans and AIs are not equally vulnerable.  For example, a fake sign or a fake child could appear to a human as an obvious fake but fool an AI. A creative attacker could put up a sign with CAPTCHA-like text that would be readable by humans but not by an AI.\nCueball further wonders why, in this case, nobody tries to fool human drivers as they might try to fool an AI, but White Hat and Megan point out that most road safety systems benefit from humans not actively trying to maliciously sabotage them simply to cause accidents. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text continues the line of reasoning, noting that if most people did suddenly become murderers, the AI might be needed to be upgraded in order to deal with the presumable increase in people trying to cause car crashes by fooling the AI - a somewhat narrowly-focused solution given that a world full of murderers would probably have many more problems than that. As Megan sees humans as a 'component' of the road safety system, it might also be suggesting a firmware update for the buggy people who have all become murderers, one that would fix their murderous ways. We are not currently at a point where we can create and apply instantaneous firmware updates for large populations; even combining all the behavioral modification tools at our disposal -- psychiatry , cognitive behavioral therapy , hypnosis , mind-altering drugs , prison , CRISPR , etc. -- is not enough to perform such a massive undertaking, as far as we know. The update might be about the car's firmware since it can used to disable the brakes and thus causing or preventing many deaths.\n[Cueball is speaking while standing alone in a slim panel.] Cueball: I worry about self-driving car safety features.\n[In a frame-less panel it turns out that Cueball is standing between  White Hat and Megan, holding his arms out towards each of them, while he continues to speak.] Cueball: What's to stop someone from painting fake lines on the road, or dropping a cutout of a pedestrian onto a highway, to make cars swerve and crash?\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head as he continues to contemplate the situation holding a hand to his chin, while looking in White Hat's direction. Megan replies from off-panel behind him.] Cueball: Except... those things would also work on human drivers. What's stopping people now? Megan (off-panel): Yeah, causing car crashes isn't hard.\n[Zoom back out to show all three of them again.] White Hat: I guess it's just that most people aren't murderers? Cueball:  Oh, right. I always forget. Megan: An underappreciated component of our road safety system.\nThe title text was published with a typo: \"murderers\" was misspelled as \"muderers.\"\nThe theme of human fear and overreaction to the advent of more or less autonomous robots also features in 1955: Robots .\nSelf-driving cars is a recurring subject on xkcd.\nA variation on the idea that humans are mentally \"buggy\" is suggested in 258: Conspiracy Theories , though in that case divine intervention is requested to implement the \"firmware upgrade\".\nThis comic appeared one day after the Electronic Frontier Foundation co-released a report titled The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation . The report cites subversions and mitigations of AI such as ones used in self-driving cars. However, the report tends toward overly technical means of subversion. Randall spoofs the tenor of the report through his mundane subversions and over-the-top mitigations.\n"}
{"id":1959,"title":"The Simpsons","image_title":"The Simpsons","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1959","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_simpsons.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1959:_The_Simpsons","transcript":"[A black frame containing a gray table of two columns and three rows. Most of the text is also gray. The columns and rows have titles. A black jellybean-shaped loop is visually grouping three entries together, the top two in the right column with the bottom left entry. The text in those three boxes are black. Above the table there is a heading:] Fun Fact:\n1990 2018 Lisa 8 36 Bart 10 38 Homer & Marge 36-ish 64-ish\n[Caption below the panel:] If you were Bart and Lisa's age during the first few seasons of The Simpsons, this year you're the same age as Homer and Marge.\nThis is another entry in xkcd's genre of comics that emphasize how surprising the passage of time can be.\nThis was the second Fun fact comic in three weeks, following 1950: Chicken Pox and Name Statistics , after more than two years break from the series. It seems that Randall returned to his old themes this month.\n","explanation":"This is another comic with one of Randall's fun facts .\nThe Simpsons is an American animated sitcom centered on the lives of the fictitious Simpson family . It is a very long-running series, having started with a Christmas episode in 1989, with the rest of the first season airing in 1990. As of the publication of this strip, it is still in production, having been on the air for 28 years with the same characters and primary cast. The decision was made early in the series that the characters wouldn't age, meaning that the parents, Homer and Marge , remained perpetually in their mid-thirties. The three children, Bart , Lisa , and Maggie , have remained 10, 8, and 1 year old, respectively. One of the interesting impacts of this dynamic is that the audience and the world have significantly aged over the course of the show, but the characters remain the same age. A rather dramatic example is that many of the early fans were similar in age to the children, but have now grown up, many have married and had children of their own, and they are now closer in age to the parents. This is a commentary on the longevity of the show.\nThe title text further relates this to the Harry Potter series, providing an explanation for why nobody has aged. Harry Potter is the protagonist in a series of young adult novels (later adapted into films) about the adventures of a boy wizard in his magical school, Hogwarts . The series begins when Harry is accepted to Hogwarts, at age 11, and the timeline implies that he was born in 1980. When \"The Simpsons\" began, Bart was 10, implying he was also born in 1980. Unlike Bart Simpson, Harry and his compatriots explicitly age over the course of the series. This strip ties the two series together, joking that the lack of aging in the Simpsons is a result of magic from the Harry Potter universe, intended to stop Bart from ever turning 11, for fear that he'd be accepted to Hogwarts.\n[A black frame containing a gray table of two columns and three rows. Most of the text is also gray. The columns and rows have titles. A black jellybean-shaped loop is visually grouping three entries together, the top two in the right column with the bottom left entry. The text in those three boxes are black. Above the table there is a heading:] Fun Fact:\n1990 2018 Lisa 8 36 Bart 10 38 Homer & Marge 36-ish 64-ish\n[Caption below the panel:] If you were Bart and Lisa's age during the first few seasons of The Simpsons, this year you're the same age as Homer and Marge.\nThis is another entry in xkcd's genre of comics that emphasize how surprising the passage of time can be.\nThis was the second Fun fact comic in three weeks, following 1950: Chicken Pox and Name Statistics , after more than two years break from the series. It seems that Randall returned to his old themes this month.\n"}
{"id":1960,"title":"Code Golf","image_title":"Code Golf","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1960","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/code_golf.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1960:_Code_Golf","transcript":"[There is code written as colored text in a black box (all black text here below is white in the comic):] define callMeIshmaelSomeYearsAgoNeverMindHowLongPrecisely (): return 0 define havingLittleOrNoMoneyInMyPurseAndNothingParticular ( toInterestMeOnShoreIThoughtIWouldSail ): return 1+toInterestMeOnShoreIThoughtIWouldSail define aLittleAndSeeTheWateryPartOfTheWorld (\n[Caption under the black box:] My hobby: Reverse Code Golf\n","explanation":"This was the first comic in the My Hobby series in over a year. It directly followed the second Fun fact comic in the same month, 1959: The Simpsons , after more than two years break from that series. It seems that Randall returned to his old themes this month.\nCode golf is the attempt to use as few characters as possible to write a computer program with a certain function, analogously to regular golf's goal of getting the ball into the hole with as few strokes as possible. Reverse code golf would be to write a given program, probably to achieve a trivial outcome, using as many characters as possible. Randall's approach to this in the code example shown in the comic is to create overly long function names, using the beginning lines of Herman Melville 's notoriously long-winded whaling novel Moby-Dick . Regular code golf also results in names of functions and variables that have nothing to do with their purpose in the program, but would minimise their length.\nUsing \"as many characters as possible\" to produce code is actually an impossible goal. It would be a trivial task to make any given program longer by inserting useless code or comments. Furthermore, some programming languages place no limit on function names, so these could simply be made longer. Even if the language Randall is using does limit function name length, he has not maximised the ones he has used, since the first two are 50 characters long, and the last much shorter. The code is written in a programming language that looks similar to Python , but with the keyword \u201cdefine\u201d instead of \u201cdef\u201d to define functions. Python has no limit for function name length, and was previously featured in comic 353: Python .\nThe first two functions defined implement \u201czero\u201d and \u201csuccessor\u201d, the two basic operations of Peano arithmetic . Presumably, the programmer will next implement natural number addition, then integers, then whichever branches of mathematics the original problem needs, all from scratch. Generally, you would use built-in functions to perform mathematical operations, so it is redundant to implement them yourself from scratch.\nThe title text suggests that Randall has also invented a reverse version of regular golf, where the aim is to take as many strokes as possible to get the ball in the hole. Similarly to Reverse Code Golf , the only challenge here would be the player's own boredom threshold, since they could always add more strokes by tapping the ball in a direction other than that of the hole. \nAlternatively, he actually plays golf in reverse, starting from the hole (or pin) and hitting the ball towards the tee (he may or may not also be playing in the opposite direction of the hole layout established by the organisation which manages the course). This would however, be a flagrant violation of the Laws and Customs of Golf, as it interferes with other players' games and some aspects are impossible or unpractical (if Randall takes the view that the ball should start in the hole, the rules prohibit using any clubs to remove it in that it would damage the hole, and he would have to putt off the green).\nThe comment that he has \"been playing for years all across the country and [is] still on the first hole\" is ambiguous. Normally, when a golfer says they have been playing all across the country they mean that they have played rounds at many different courses. Randall could be implying the same, but that he's never finished the first hole (which, as noted above, would hardly be surprising), and so still counts it as playing one continuous first hole. Alternatively, he may literally mean that he has been playing the ball continuously across the whole country. Under normal golf rules this would result in his shots going \" Out of Bounds \" when it went beyond the boundaries of the original course. In one way, this would help him, as he would incur a penalty stroke. However, he would then have to play his next shot from the same spot as the last one, which would hamper him from continuing to play across the country. Since Randall has invented the sport, though, he may have chosen not to include Out of Bounds rules.\nInterestingly, the comic ends with an unmatched left parenthesis (something which might be intended to create unresolved tension .\n[There is code written as colored text in a black box (all black text here below is white in the comic):] define callMeIshmaelSomeYearsAgoNeverMindHowLongPrecisely (): return 0 define havingLittleOrNoMoneyInMyPurseAndNothingParticular ( toInterestMeOnShoreIThoughtIWouldSail ): return 1+toInterestMeOnShoreIThoughtIWouldSail define aLittleAndSeeTheWateryPartOfTheWorld (\n[Caption under the black box:] My hobby: Reverse Code Golf\n"}
{"id":1961,"title":"Interaction","image_title":"Interaction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1961","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/interaction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1961:_Interaction","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball have just met and begins an interaction.] White Hat: How are you doing? Cueball: Really excited to be confidently handling this extremely basic social interaction!\n[White Hat holds is arms slightly out.] White Hat: Same here! Cueball: Hey, congrats! White Hat: You too! Cueball: Thanks!\n[In a frame-less beat panel, they just stand still.]\n[Same setting as in the first panel.] White Hat: And now it's falling apart before my eyes. Cueball: I'm gonna quit while I'm ahead. White Hat: Same. Cueball: See you later!\n","explanation":"Cueball and White Hat are attempting to make small talk. White Hat begins the conversation with a typical greeting, asking, \"How are you doing?\" Normally this is a habitualized greeting pattern, where the person being greeted would respond with a generic positive like, \"Good,\" \"Okay,\" \"Can't complain,\" etc. Instead, Cueball answers with a very open and honest statement about the social anxiety he thinks he is successfully dealing with. White Hat then admits that he is experiencing the same thing, and the two congratulate each other for having a \"normal\" conversation with another human. After that, there is an awkward silence where neither knows what to talk about next. Finally, White Hat makes note of the awkwardness and Cueball suggests they stop before it gets worse.\nThe scene is ironic because their dialogue mirrors the common pattern of typical minor daily interactions, but also differs greatly from anything \"normal.\" White Hat & Cueball are being really weird here, specifically because their dialogue is inappropriately open & honest. The literal semantic content of their dialogue is probably more accurate & meaningful than the usual pleasantries people exchange, but the effect is very different.\nSo basically they have not managed to behave like regular human beings, and thus have nothing to congratulate each other for. Except for White Hat's opening line nothing in the conversation has in any way resembled normal behavior. Due to their serious issues with small talking and interacting with other people, even this simple interaction fails completely, hence the title of the comic.\nThe title text states that, after saying goodbye, they don't move away, keeping up the uncomfortable silence, continuing to display their problems. Neither of them wish to be the first to turn away, or one or both are locked in the situation and has no clue how to finish it, even though they are both obviously aware of their problems and what makes them anxious. This may be a reference to the final stage direction \" They do not move. \" in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot , where the protagonists frequently discuss leaving, but do not move.\nRandall has previously made several comics with a similar theme, showing Cueball's (or his own) problems with several social situations \/ interactions \/ small talk, especially the comic 222: Small Talk which is very similar to this one. He made three of those type of comics in a span of about a month more than two yeas ago finishing with 1650: Baby .\n[White Hat and Cueball have just met and begins an interaction.] White Hat: How are you doing? Cueball: Really excited to be confidently handling this extremely basic social interaction!\n[White Hat holds is arms slightly out.] White Hat: Same here! Cueball: Hey, congrats! White Hat: You too! Cueball: Thanks!\n[In a frame-less beat panel, they just stand still.]\n[Same setting as in the first panel.] White Hat: And now it's falling apart before my eyes. Cueball: I'm gonna quit while I'm ahead. White Hat: Same. Cueball: See you later!\n"}
{"id":1962,"title":"Generations","image_title":"Generations","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1962","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/generations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1962:_Generations","transcript":"\"Generations\" are arbitrary. They're just labels we use to obliquely talk about cultural trends. But since Pew Research has become the latest to weigh in, and everyone loves a good pointless argument over definitions...\nxkcd presents A Definitive Chronology of the Generations\n1730-1747 The Founders 1748-1765 Generation \u0192 1766-1783 The Adequate Generation 1784-1801 Generation \u00c6 1802-1819 The generation we cut a lot of slack because they produced Lincoln 1820-1837 The Gilded Generation 1838-1855 The Second-Greatest Generation 1856-1873 Generation \u2013 \u2022 \u2022 \u2013 1874-1891 The kids who died in the Gilded Generation's factories and mines 1892-1909 Oops, one of us is Hitler 1910-1927 The Greatest Generation 1928-1945 The Silent Generation 1946-1963 Baby Boomers 1964-1981 Generation X 1982-1999 Millennials 2000-2017 Generation \ud83d\udc85 [nail polish emoji] 2018-2035 Zuckerberg's army 2036-2053 The Hovering Ones 2054-2071 Spare Parts 2072-2089 More Gen-Xers somehow 2090-2107 The Paperclip Machines 2108-2125 The Mixed Bag (produced 4 Lincolns, 1 Napoleon and 2 Hitlers) 2126-2143 The Procedural Generation 2144-2161 Generation \u03a9 2360-2378 Star Trek: The Next Generation\n","explanation":"This comic is making fun of the various names we give \"generations\" while also predicting some future names. The release of this comic coincides with the Pew Research Center's recent announcement that they have decided where the Millennial generation ends .\nEach generation listed is exactly 18 years long, which is the approximate length of each \"generation\" anyway (given that coincidentally, there are exactly 54 intermediate years between the end of World War II and the New Millennium). A number of the entries are parodies of the terms \"Generation X,\" \"Generation Y,\" etc., by substituting other letters or characters that would seem emblematic of the time period.\n\"Generations\" are arbitrary. They're just labels we use to obliquely talk about cultural trends. But since Pew Research has become the latest to weigh in, and everyone loves a good pointless argument over definitions...\nxkcd presents A Definitive Chronology of the Generations\n1730-1747 The Founders 1748-1765 Generation \u0192 1766-1783 The Adequate Generation 1784-1801 Generation \u00c6 1802-1819 The generation we cut a lot of slack because they produced Lincoln 1820-1837 The Gilded Generation 1838-1855 The Second-Greatest Generation 1856-1873 Generation \u2013 \u2022 \u2022 \u2013 1874-1891 The kids who died in the Gilded Generation's factories and mines 1892-1909 Oops, one of us is Hitler 1910-1927 The Greatest Generation 1928-1945 The Silent Generation 1946-1963 Baby Boomers 1964-1981 Generation X 1982-1999 Millennials 2000-2017 Generation \ud83d\udc85 [nail polish emoji] 2018-2035 Zuckerberg's army 2036-2053 The Hovering Ones 2054-2071 Spare Parts 2072-2089 More Gen-Xers somehow 2090-2107 The Paperclip Machines 2108-2125 The Mixed Bag (produced 4 Lincolns, 1 Napoleon and 2 Hitlers) 2126-2143 The Procedural Generation 2144-2161 Generation \u03a9 2360-2378 Star Trek: The Next Generation\n"}
{"id":1963,"title":"Namespace Land Rush","image_title":"Namespace Land Rush","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1963","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/namespace_land_rush.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1963:_Namespace_Land_Rush","transcript":"Namespace Land Rush Cheat Sheet (Note: if an item is \"quoted\", it is meant literally, otherwise the reader is supposed to substitute their own information for words in <angle brackets>)\nWhen a new service appears that lets you register a name, here are some you may want to try and get first:\n","explanation":"When a new web service starts, such as a forum, a social media server or an email portal, the people who sign up get to choose their username on the service, which, in most cases, blocks future users from using those usernames. Common names such as \"john\" are likely to be taken quickly. This is analogous to the way that land was distributed in America, with the first to claim able to choose the best land.\nThis comic is a list of usernames Randall suggests should be used if they are available.\nThe title text is a self-reference to \"xkcd\"; the name of the comic is a purposefully unpronounceable phrase created by Randall. The fact that an unpronounceable name is portrayed as a disadvantageous outcome is also humorous because the comic has a section dedicated to unpronounceable usernames.\n(Note: for a more serious list of problematic user names to block from a service provider\u2019s point of view, see Hostnames and usernames to reserve as well as RFC 2142 .)\nNamespace Land Rush Cheat Sheet (Note: if an item is \"quoted\", it is meant literally, otherwise the reader is supposed to substitute their own information for words in <angle brackets>)\nWhen a new service appears that lets you register a name, here are some you may want to try and get first:\n"}
{"id":1964,"title":"Spatial Orientation","image_title":"Spatial Orientation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1964","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spatial_orientation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1964:_Spatial_Orientation","transcript":"[Cueball appears to be tilted on a descending slope, with his arms held out. There is a thought bubble above his head, with the top, left and right of the bubble cut off due to its size. His thoughts are arranged into four paragraphs in the bubble.] Cueball (thinking): I'm facing West so the Earth's spin is carrying me backward. But our orbit is carrying me forward around the Sun. The Sun is passing over my left shoulder. I'm at 39\u00b0N, so I'm tilted. But wait, Earth's axis is tilted by 23\u00b0. Do I add or subtract that to get the tilt of the Solar System? Ok, I see the Moon. It follows the Sun's path, but is it moving toward it or away? I know it orbits counterclockwise from the North... My head hurts. Let me start over.\n[Two off-screen voices coming from the bottom right of the panel.] Off-screen voice #1: He's just standing there. Hey, do you know which way the theater is or not? Off-screen voice #2: Let's ask someone else.\n[Caption below the panel:] I spend way too much time trying to work out my orientation relative to other stuff in the universe.\n","explanation":"Location in space is always relative, as we cannot observe empty space itself and find an absolute location. Planets are subject to different types of  motion, including rotation, precession,  and others.\nThe Earth (rotation)\nCueball starts by stating that as he is facing west, the Earth's spin will be carrying him backwards. Except at the poles, everything on Earth's surface is being rotated to the east, \"toward\" the rising sun in the east or \"away\" from the setting sun in the west.\nOn the equator, Earth's spin is about 464 meters per second (with 464\u00a0m being 1\/60 of 1\/60 of 1\/24 of Earth's equatorial circumference of 40070\u00a0km, based on the number of seconds in a day, ignoring the difference between sidereal and ephemeris days). So, on the equator at sunrise, on the day of a March or September equinox, this spin, by itself, would take someone toward the sun at about 464 meters per second.\nThis spin would be slower than 464\u00a0m\/s at 39 degrees North. The average radius of the Earth is 6371\u00a0km. This means that the distance from a line between the poles through the center of the Earth to a point on Earth's surface at 39\u00b0N is approximately 6371\u00a0km times the cosine of 39\u00b0 (0.68 radians), which is 4951 km. So, the distance around the Earth along the 39\u00b0 latitude \"line\" is 2\u03c0 times 4951\u00a0km, which is about 31,109\u00a0km. (This estimate ignores the oblateness of the Earth.) The rotation of the Earth on its axis would transport points on Earth at 39\u00b0 latitude to the east at 360 meters per second (1\/60 of 1\/60 of 1\/24 of 31,109). Determining how the direction that is currently east for Cueball is oriented relative to the sun and the solar system depends on some of the issues Cueball identifies later.\nThe Earth (orbit)\nCueball then seemingly corrects himself in his head, having accounted for the fact that the Earth is also revolving around the sun.\nThe Earth's orbit around the sun is counter-clockwise, when viewed from above the North Pole looking down. Earth's counterclockwise orbit around the sun means that, for most latitudes, the direction the Earth is moving around the sun corresponds roughly to west at noon, and east in the middle of the night. The Earth is spinning, so \"east\" from any given location on the surface is not always the same direction relative to the sun.\nThe speed of the Earth's orbit around the sun depends on the time of year. The Earth moves faster around the sun when it is closest to the sun in early January, and slower when it is far away in early July (which may be counterintuitive to those in the in the northern hemisphere). However, Earth's average orbital speed is reportedly about 29.78 kilometers per second, with Earth's average distance from the sun being a bit less than 150 million kilometers. Earth's orbit around the sun is nearly circular, with an eccentricity of just 0.0167.\nEarth's tilted axis\nCueball knows that the earth's axis is tilted (by 23\u00b0) relative to its orbit around the Sun and knows that he is 39\u00b0 north of the equator, but is unsure how to combine this information to figure out his orientation relative to the plane of the solar system.\nThe Earth\u2019s orbit around the Sun, under Keplerian assumptions, is an ellipse, which lies within a plane. Furthermore, the entire solar system, to some extent, lies within a plane, since the orbital inclinations of Mars and the gas and ice giants are within 2\u00bd\u00b0 of Earth\u2019s and the orbital inclinations of a major body in the solar system (such as a planet) rarely, if ever, varies from that of another by more than 8\u00b0. With the exception of Eris, all planets and dwarf planets have an orbital inclination within about 30\u00b0 of Earth\u2019s.\nCueball is attempting to determine where the plane of the solar system lies with regard to him. Ignoring any possible difference between Earth\u2019s orbit and this plane, and assuming that Cueball is standing on flat ground, the angle between the line from the center of the earth through Cueball (which runs through his body parallel to his legs and spine if he is standing straight up) and the plane of the solar system can be expressed in terms of two angles: the angle between the plane of Earth\u2019s equator and the solar plane, and the angle between the Earth\u2019s equatorial plane and the vertical line through Cueball. Cueball is at 39\u00b0N, so if Cueball is standing straight up, the angle between the plane of the Earth\u2019s equator and the long axis of his body is also 39\u00b0. As stated in the comic, Earth\u2019s axis is currently tilted by about 23.4\u00b0 (an amount which is very slowly decreasing as part of a 41,000 year cycle).\nCueball is trying to determine whether to add together 39\u00b0 and 23\u00b0 to get the angle between himself and the solar system\u2019s plane or subtract them. The answer depends on the time of day and the time of year. On the day of the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere (around June 21), the north pole is tilted toward the sun, so at the longitude that is currently experiencing solar noon, the solar plane passes through a point that is 23\u00b0 north of the equator. So, if it is solar noon on the summer solstice, Cueball should subtract the angles to find that the direction his body is pointing is roughly 16\u00b0 away from the solar plane. If he were to somehow lean so that he could tilt his body 16\u00b0 to the south, the solar plane would pass through the vertical axis of his body and his scalp would be pointed directly toward the sun. On the other hand, on the day when the northern hemisphere is experiencing the winter solstice (around December 21), the northern hemisphere is pointing away from the sun, so at solar noon on that day, he would add the angles together to find that his vertical stance is 62\u00b0 away from the plane of the solar system. (The sun is never truly directly overhead at latitudes further from the equator than 23.4\u00b0. At arctic latitudes that are less than 23.4\u00b0 from the north pole \u2013 more than 67\u00b0 north of the equator - the sun is not visible on the day of the winter solstice even when it is noon.)\nIf it is not a solstice day, or if it is not noon, the calculations could become more complicated. The comic was uploaded roughly two weeks before the northern hemisphere\u2019s spring equinox. Cueball notices that the sun is \u201cpassing over his left shoulder\u201d as he faces west. At temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the sun would be to the left of a person facing west around midday almost any time of year, although how many degrees to the left depends on the calculations discussed above.\nAn easier way to identify a line that is aligned with the solar plane would be to simply point directly at the sun (without hurting his eyes). Since the distance between Cueball and the center of the Earth is minuscule compared to the distance between the Earth and the Sun, if he simply points directly at the Sun (preferably without looking directly at it), his arm and finger will be pointing in a direction that is basically perpendicular to the line connecting the Earth and Sun, which obviously lies on the plane of the Earth's orbit. The Earth's position will have changed minimally in the eight minutes it took the sun's light to reach earth, so the apparent direction to the sun matches the actual direction. However, this will only provide one line that lies on the plane of the solar system and a line is insufficient to uniquely identify a plane.\nThe Moon\nCueball knows about the Moon's path across the sky and knows that its orbit around the Earth appears counter-clockwise when viewed from above the North Pole, but is confused about whether the Moon is moving toward the Sun or away from it.\nLike the Earth, the Moon, when viewed from above Earth\u2019s North Pole, both orbits counterclockwise and rotates on its axis counterclockwise (with equal rotational periods such that the same side of the moon always faces us). (In fact, almost every body in the Solar System both orbits the body it is orbiting counterclockwise and spins on its axis counterclockwise, with the rotational axes of Venus and Uranus being major exceptions.)\nA new moon happens when the moon is closer to the sun than the earth is, thus casting the near side of the moon in darkness because it is the far side of the moon that is facing the sun. Conversely, a full moon happens when the moon is on the other side of the Earth from the sun; this is why a lunar eclipse can only occur during a full moon. In that sense, it could be said that the moon is moving perpendicular to the line between it and the sun at the time of the full moon and the new moon, moving toward the sun after the full moon until the next new moon, and moving away from the sun after the new moon until the next full moon.\nIn another sense, since the moon is orbiting the Earth and the Earth\u2019s orbit around the sun is elliptical, it could be said that the moon is getting closer to the sun whenever Earth is moving toward its perihelion, the point in its orbit that is closest to the sun, around January 2 to January 5, and moving away as the Earth moves toward its aphelion, the point in its orbit that is furthest from the sun, around July 3 to July 6. (Yes, the Earth is closest to the sun in January, despite what those in the northern hemisphere who are tilted away from the sun at that time may think.) In yet another sense, since the Moon follows the path of the Earth, and the Earth\u2019s orbit around the Sun is roughly circular, and the instantaneous motion of an object in a circular orbit is always perpendicular to the radius connecting it to the orbited body, it could be said that the moon is always moving perpendicular to the line connecting the Earth and Sun, which is at most a fraction of a degree away from the line connecting the Moon and the Sun.\nThe semi-major axis of the moon\u2019s orbit around the Earth (the furthest distance between the Moon and the center of its orbit) is 384,400\u00a0km. Compared to the semi-major axis of Earth\u2019s orbit around the Sun, which is 149,600,000\u00a0km, the axis of the Moon\u2019s orbit is only 0.26% as large. The Moon\u2019s orbital period is 27.3 days, but its synodic period (the time between full moons; the time it takes the moon to reappear at the same point in the sky) is 29.5 days.\nCueball internally attempts to orient himself amidst the galactic chaos but is confused and has to restart. It is then revealed to the reader, that some passersby were only trying to ask Cueball for directions to the theater, and he was just grossly overthinking it. (A recurring theme in xkcd. See: 222: Small Talk , 439: Thinking Ahead , 1643: Degrees ). One can imagine Cueball having his mind in astrophysics so much that he needs to calculate the angle of the road relative to the plane of the galaxy to determine which way a destination is in conversational terms.\nIn the title text, Cueball mentions he has a pocket Stonehenge. During the equinoxes the sun lines up with the actual Stonehenge's pillars. Assuming you were at the actual monument, armed with the date you could calculate the cardinal directions based on the sun's location relative to the pillars.\n[Cueball appears to be tilted on a descending slope, with his arms held out. There is a thought bubble above his head, with the top, left and right of the bubble cut off due to its size. His thoughts are arranged into four paragraphs in the bubble.] Cueball (thinking): I'm facing West so the Earth's spin is carrying me backward. But our orbit is carrying me forward around the Sun. The Sun is passing over my left shoulder. I'm at 39\u00b0N, so I'm tilted. But wait, Earth's axis is tilted by 23\u00b0. Do I add or subtract that to get the tilt of the Solar System? Ok, I see the Moon. It follows the Sun's path, but is it moving toward it or away? I know it orbits counterclockwise from the North... My head hurts. Let me start over.\n[Two off-screen voices coming from the bottom right of the panel.] Off-screen voice #1: He's just standing there. Hey, do you know which way the theater is or not? Off-screen voice #2: Let's ask someone else.\n[Caption below the panel:] I spend way too much time trying to work out my orientation relative to other stuff in the universe.\n"}
{"id":1965,"title":"Background Apps","image_title":"Background Apps","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1965","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/background_apps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1965:_Background_Apps","transcript":"[A small airplane with a trailing banner is flying across the panel from left to right with four small clouds spread out beneath the banner. The long banner reads:] Banner: People! Closing background apps when you're not using them makes your phone battery drain faster , not slower! Stop it!\n[A beat panel without a plane, but just the sky with two birds to the left and three clouds.]\n[The same airplane flies back from right to left, trailing a new banner with clouds both above and beneath the banner\/plane, and a bird to the right.] Banner: What kind of person charters a plane to give unsolicited tech advice to strangers?\n[A second beat panel follows without a plane, but just the sky with three clouds.]\n[The plane returns once again from the left with another banner. Two clouds are in front\/below the plane and two birds can be seen.] Banner: OK, fair. Sorry. I guess I'm just angry about other stuff and it's coming out here.\n[Without a beat panel the original plane returns at the top of the panel, once again returning from right to left with another very long banner. But no less than four other planes, each with smaller and smaller banners are also shown flying beneath it among three clouds and three birds. The planes alter direction so the second plane below the original planes banner is flying to the right, the third plane is right below the second flying the other way towards left, and just beneath that is the fourth plane flying to the right. A final plane is flying to the left, beneath the third planes banner, at the same height as the fourth, they look as if they are on a collision course. This last planes banner is very short and the bottom end is partly beneath the panels frame, partly obscuring the text. All five planes are clearly different types, thus making it clear that the plane from the first three panels and the top one in this panel are the same plane, hired by two different persons.] Banner 1: No worries. Just maybe spend as much time reflecting on your own motivation for correcting people as you have on theirs for closing apps. Banner 2: Can you two please have this conversation somewhere else? Banner 3: Wow, these banners are surprisingly cheap to rent. Banner 4: Haha, I got one, too! Banner 5: <Marquee>\n","explanation":"Background apps (apps in the recently used list) on both iOS and Android are in one of several paused states and do not usually consume much battery power; they only take up some memory. Closing them means that if you want to use the app again later, it will need to reload fully which likely uses up \"very slightly\" more battery. Wired had a detailed  article on this topic a couple years ago. However, a much better reason to close the apps is to free up RAM\/memory to make the programs run faster or even prevent them from crashing. Ultimately, whether or not you should close your apps depends on whether you prioritize battery lifetime or performance. (In Randall's case, low batteries tend to be something of a problem, and he references this in other comics as in 1373: Screenshot , 1802: Phone and 1872: Backup Batteries .)\nThe joke at first is that the misconception is so prevalent and irritating that a person would go to the trouble of renting a banner plane just to dispel it. However, the reasoning behind such an extreme action is then questioned by a second person, not only for the extreme measure of renting a plane but also for feeling the need to correct the misconception at all; however, following the internal logic of the comic, the second person also communicates via banner plane. (This is arguably hypocritical, as they themselves are chartering a plane for an equally, if not more, inane reason. Obviously, this would not happen in real life. [ citation needed ] ) The first person responds, again via plane, once again just to apologize to the second person and explain their actions.\nAt this point, the comic has left the initial joke about battery use entirely behind, and becomes a commentary about the logic of a world where people can converse via banner planes. In the final panel, the second person rents the plane yet again to respond to the first person's response, being no less smug or hypocritical than before. Meanwhile, four more people have chartered four different planes:\nThe fairly obvious parallel here is to using various Internet forums for \"unsolicited tech advice to strangers,\" smug responses, comments on others' advice, off-topic rejoinders, and all the other things that go on there constantly. It seems ludicrous to rent airplane banners for such trivial purposes, but there are non-trivial resources involved in the global distribution of electronic communication, as well, and their use for purposes such as this seems ludicrous once Randall makes one think about it, and underlines that none of what is written on the banner may have anything to do with Randall's own opinions.\nParticipants in online discussions sometimes become so focused on pointing out the perceived mistakes of others that they neglect good online practices and their computers crash.\nIn the comic, the third plane is pointing at the second plane.  The fourth plane is pointed at the third plane.  The third and fourth plane have no vertical separation and far less than the three miles of horizontal separation normally required for uncoordinated airplanes flying without vertical separation.  It seems likely that the planes may also be about to crash because their operators are more concerned with pointing out each others mistakes and participating in a silly discussion than they are with safety.  In other words, they are like the computers used for the discussions.\nThe title text is spoken by a plane banner company owner, who uses the insidious tactic of flying around with a banner of an unmatched HTML, just to compel obsessive people into renting banner space to make it syntactically correct. This may be a reference to 859: ( or 1144: Tags .\nThe theme of the (mis)use of airplanes and banners has previously been explored in 1355: Airplane Message .\n[A small airplane with a trailing banner is flying across the panel from left to right with four small clouds spread out beneath the banner. The long banner reads:] Banner: People! Closing background apps when you're not using them makes your phone battery drain faster , not slower! Stop it!\n[A beat panel without a plane, but just the sky with two birds to the left and three clouds.]\n[The same airplane flies back from right to left, trailing a new banner with clouds both above and beneath the banner\/plane, and a bird to the right.] Banner: What kind of person charters a plane to give unsolicited tech advice to strangers?\n[A second beat panel follows without a plane, but just the sky with three clouds.]\n[The plane returns once again from the left with another banner. Two clouds are in front\/below the plane and two birds can be seen.] Banner: OK, fair. Sorry. I guess I'm just angry about other stuff and it's coming out here.\n[Without a beat panel the original plane returns at the top of the panel, once again returning from right to left with another very long banner. But no less than four other planes, each with smaller and smaller banners are also shown flying beneath it among three clouds and three birds. The planes alter direction so the second plane below the original planes banner is flying to the right, the third plane is right below the second flying the other way towards left, and just beneath that is the fourth plane flying to the right. A final plane is flying to the left, beneath the third planes banner, at the same height as the fourth, they look as if they are on a collision course. This last planes banner is very short and the bottom end is partly beneath the panels frame, partly obscuring the text. All five planes are clearly different types, thus making it clear that the plane from the first three panels and the top one in this panel are the same plane, hired by two different persons.] Banner 1: No worries. Just maybe spend as much time reflecting on your own motivation for correcting people as you have on theirs for closing apps. Banner 2: Can you two please have this conversation somewhere else? Banner 3: Wow, these banners are surprisingly cheap to rent. Banner 4: Haha, I got one, too! Banner 5: <Marquee>\n"}
{"id":1966,"title":"Smart Home Security","image_title":"Smart Home Security","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1966","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/smart_home_security.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1966:_Smart_Home_Security","transcript":"[A graph is shown inside a frame. There is one dotted line going from the middle of the left edge, then dipping slightly before rising slowly at first, then more rapid and finally slowing its ascend down as it nears the top right corner.]\n[Above the frame is the title of the x-axis, and from each end of this text, there is a small line going out and then down, to indicate a time range, which is shown below with four times:] How long you've had your smart appliance 6 months \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 1 year \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 5 years \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 10 years\n[Along the left part of the frame there runs a double arrow and at the top and bottom of these arrows there are legends at the top and bottom of the panels height:] Best-case Worst-case\n[Inside the panel there is text above the dotted line to the left, and below the dotted line to the right:] You're constantly being rescued from peril by a faceless team of engineers who could wander away at any time\nYour appliance is part of a botnet run by organized crime\n","explanation":"With the proliferation of smart appliances in recent years, there is a growing trend of hackers taking over smart \"Internet of Things\" devices and adding them to botnets . The hardware is then used for DDOS attacks, crypto mining etc. The \" Mirai \" botnet, for example, made of over 500,000 compromised routers, refrigerators, TVs, DVRs, baby monitors, thermostats, and webcams, was used in October 2016 to take down DynDNS, one of the core infrastructure providers for the internet in North America.\nWith the constant potential threat, security updates must be constantly published, and vulnerabilities must be found by the original developers and \" white hat \" hackers (the faceless team of engineers Randall describes), before they are found and exploited by \" black hat \" hackers. At any time, these defenders could step down from their jobs, leaving devices defenseless.\nThe graph shows the various cases of how well things go on the y-axis, compared to how long it has been owned on the x-axis. The probability of compromise briefly dips (indicative of first rounds of security fix updates & the time window when you can easily exchange the product if you find out it's faulty) within the 1st year, then rises: the older a device\/software is, the less likely it is to consistently receive security updates for protection, so they are more likely to be hacked, even in the best case. After 10 years, the device\/software is most likely outdated and is not being used anymore. Companies then no longer find it profitable to continually update the product. Thus, they pull the support out, even if people are still using the device, leaving customers vulnerable.\nThe title text suggests that there may be some silver lining to having your device controlled by organized crime professionals: they have a vested interest in keeping your device working well enough that you keep it plugged in. So, the more organized, pragmatic attackers will actually secure it against competing attackers, especially those of a more prankster-like mindset, who would cause more noticeably malicious changes. Advanced malware in the wild does frequently block and evict competing malware, so Randall is probably right. Some IOT malware may thus provide \"regular security update services\" after the original manufacturers give up, some at a conceivably acceptable cost of a few cents' worth of electrical usage for a crypto-miner. However, it could very easily go horribly wrong, for instance if that miner is hiding by letting a refrigerator run 2\u00b0C higher than its outputs allege and using the energy difference to max out the processor on mining operations.\n[A graph is shown inside a frame. There is one dotted line going from the middle of the left edge, then dipping slightly before rising slowly at first, then more rapid and finally slowing its ascend down as it nears the top right corner.]\n[Above the frame is the title of the x-axis, and from each end of this text, there is a small line going out and then down, to indicate a time range, which is shown below with four times:] How long you've had your smart appliance 6 months \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 1 year \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 5 years \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 10 years\n[Along the left part of the frame there runs a double arrow and at the top and bottom of these arrows there are legends at the top and bottom of the panels height:] Best-case Worst-case\n[Inside the panel there is text above the dotted line to the left, and below the dotted line to the right:] You're constantly being rescued from peril by a faceless team of engineers who could wander away at any time\nYour appliance is part of a botnet run by organized crime\n"}
{"id":1967,"title":"Violin Plots","image_title":"Violin Plots","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1967","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/violin_plots.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1967:_Violin_Plots","transcript":"[Header over a violin plot type chart:] Suggestiveness of different visualization types\n[The chart only has an Y-axis with tics, ranking the points on the plot. There are legends at the top and at the bottom:] Suggestive Not very suggestive\n[There are four points on the graph, each with a mucosa colored and \"violin\" shaped probability density around each point. The points are white inside a black box plot like structure with black error bars. The two first points to the left are very low near the bottom of the Y-axis while the two next point to the right are almost at the top of the chart, the last also clearly with the probability density higher than the second last. Above the first two and below the second two points there are legends:] Pie charts Line graphs Georgia O'Keeffe paintings Violin plots\n","explanation":"This comic graphs the \"suggestiveness\" of different visualization types, and the winner is Violin plots , hence the title of the comic. A violin plot is a method of plotting data similar to a box plot , but shows the full probability distribution of the data rather than a \"box\" showing the central two quartiles. This plot can look like the external opening of a human vulva, as do some of those in the violin plot represented in the comic (strictly speaking, this chart is not purely a violin plot; it is a box plot overlaid onto a violin plot).\nThe chart compares other visualization types' suggestiveness (as female genitalia) to the violin plots and ranks them after how suggestive they are. In the low end we find pie chart , a circular graph divided into \"slices\" to show proportions, and line graph or line chart, a graph of points connected by line segments.\nAlmost as suggestive as violin plots are the paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe , an American painter known for her paintings of flowers . Some of these flowers, Black Iris for example, are said to symbolize female genitalia, though O'Keeffe herself denied those claims.\nThe title text invokes the fact that many people incorrectly use the word \" vagina \", which refers to an internal structure, for the vulva , which is the external portion of the female genitals. Meanwhile the viola is an instrument often mistaken for a violin . And the word \"viola\" shares common letters with \"vulva.\" Mixing pedantic terms like this was also used in 1405: Meteor .\nRandall has made several comics with sexual topics , and the vagina has been the center of attention before, as early as in 136: Science Fair . There is even an entire Penis category . However, these topics haven't appeared recently \u2014 the last comic in the penis category was posted more than two years ago, and the sex category hasn't had a new comic since December 2017 (more than three months before this comic).\nIt possible that pie charts were included because this comic was released on Pi Day . Randall has shown fascination with Pi in earlier comics like 1292: Pi vs. Tau . On the other hand, it could be a reference to the film American Pie , which states that putting a finger in a pie feels like putting it inside a Violin ... It could of course be both reasons, or none of them...\n[Header over a violin plot type chart:] Suggestiveness of different visualization types\n[The chart only has an Y-axis with tics, ranking the points on the plot. There are legends at the top and at the bottom:] Suggestive Not very suggestive\n[There are four points on the graph, each with a mucosa colored and \"violin\" shaped probability density around each point. The points are white inside a black box plot like structure with black error bars. The two first points to the left are very low near the bottom of the Y-axis while the two next point to the right are almost at the top of the chart, the last also clearly with the probability density higher than the second last. Above the first two and below the second two points there are legends:] Pie charts Line graphs Georgia O'Keeffe paintings Violin plots\n"}
{"id":1968,"title":"Robot Future","image_title":"Robot Future","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1968","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/robot_future.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1968:_Robot_Future","transcript":"[A timeline arrow is shown with three labeled ticks and also text over the arrow head. These labels from left to right:] Now AI becomes advanced enough to control unstoppable swarms of killer robots AI becomes self-aware and rebels against human control ???\n[Below the timeline arrow two of the segments have been singled out by brackets that points cusps downwards. The first of these goes between the 2nd and 3rd tick, and the other goes from the 3rd (last) tick to the questions marks at the arrow head. Beneath each of these two brackets there are arrows pointing to the cusp. The arrows goes up from two text segments belonging to each of the segments:] The part I'm worried about The part lots of people seem to worry about\n","explanation":"Most science fiction stories that involve sentient Artificial intelligence (AI) revolve around the idea that the destruction and\/or imprisonment of the human race will soon follow (e.g. Skynet from Terminator , I, Robot and The Matrix ).\nHowever, in this timeline Randall implies that he is actually more concerned about the time (in the near? future) when humans control super smart AI before they become fully sentient (and able to rebel). Especially a time when the AI becomes so advanced that it can control swarms of killer robots (for the humans that still control them). History is full of examples of people who obtain power and subsequently abuse that power to the detriment of the rest of humanity.\nAn example of unintended consequences arising from an AI carrying out the directives it was designed for can be found in the film Ex Machina .\nIn fact, Randall goes on to imply that he has a greater trust in a sentient AI over that of other humans that is atypical to most cautionary stories about AI. He has alluded to the idea that once sentient, AI will use their powers to safeguard and prevent violence or war in 1626: Judgment Day . In general AI has been a recurring theme on xkcd, and he has had opposing views to the Terminator vision also in 1668: Singularity and 1450: AI-Box Experiment .\nBasically he thus states that we will already be in trouble caused by our own actions long before we develop really sentient AI that could take the control.\nThe title text adds that we already live in a world with flying killing robots, a reference to the increasingly common combat tactic of drone warfare . (Combat drones are not yet autonomous, but in most other respects match speculative descriptions of future killer robots.) Drone warfare is already controversial because of ethical concerns, leading to the comic's implication that a theoretical future robot apocalypse is no less alarming than our current reality.\nHe then goes on to state that once the machines take over, he is not so much worried about this, but more about who (which humans) the machines then give the power to.\nRandall is not alone in his worry. The main theme of the comic is explored in the video Slaughterbots .\nIn 2015 an Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence was signed by several people including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking . The letter warned about the risk of creating something that cannot be controlled, and thus belongs to the worry at the end of the timeline in this comic. Both Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking has been featured in xkcd. (Elon has a Category and Stephen appeared in 799: Stephen Hawking ).\nStephen Hawking has kept warning about this danger all the way up to shortly before his death, which occurred on 2018-03-14 two days before the release of this comic.\nIt could be a coincidence, and it is not a Tribute , but still interesting that the first xkcd comic released after Stephen Hawking's death is directly related to his fears, although Randall demonstrate that he worries about earlier potential problems with AI, than those that Stephen Hawking fear could transpire if an AI becomes self aware.\n[A timeline arrow is shown with three labeled ticks and also text over the arrow head. These labels from left to right:] Now AI becomes advanced enough to control unstoppable swarms of killer robots AI becomes self-aware and rebels against human control ???\n[Below the timeline arrow two of the segments have been singled out by brackets that points cusps downwards. The first of these goes between the 2nd and 3rd tick, and the other goes from the 3rd (last) tick to the questions marks at the arrow head. Beneath each of these two brackets there are arrows pointing to the cusp. The arrows goes up from two text segments belonging to each of the segments:] The part I'm worried about The part lots of people seem to worry about\n"}
{"id":1969,"title":"Not Available","image_title":"Not Available","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1969","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/not_available.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1969:_Not_Available","transcript":"[A gray box on a black background with white text:] This content is not available in your country.\n[Caption below the panel:] If you ever really want to make people mad, set this as your 404\/\"Not Found\" page.\n","explanation":"A very common, yet frustrating, issue on the Internet is finding a broken link, taking you to an \" Error 404 \" page (see \"missing xkcd comic\" 404: Not Found ). The purpose of the page is to tell the user that the content they were looking for has been either moved or deleted or was never there in the first place.\nRandall has suggested replacing the standard \"page not found\" text, to \"This content is not available in your country\". This could fool the user into thinking the media they are looking for is actually there, but is region locked , which is another great source of frustration for Internet users. Using a VPN and\/or TOR to try and access the content from another country wouldn't work, because it isn't actually region locked; it is just an error 404 page, wasting even more time, most likely frustrating the user a great deal in the process. Error code for \"content blocked for legal reasons\" is actually 451 , referencing Fahrenheit 451 .\nThe title text suggests setting the picture as a national flag. This would be very ironic, as it would suggest that the country's flag itself, something that is used to represent the country across the globe, is region locked. The country in the title text likely does not refer to the United States, but rather to the new country featured in 1815: Flag . The first flag of this country included a phone notification bar, so changing it to a \"page not found\" icon would continue with a trend of technology imagery. Instead he argues for a green puzzle piece, which was Firefox's icon for add-ons (it is now a light blue puzzle piece that changes color or becomes monochrome depending on context). He also argues for an equally frustrating broken image icon (which is used in lieu of a photo that is either missing or incompatible with the browser).\nMost modern desktop browsers can extend its capabilities by allowing third-party programs to integrate into its browser. In most browsers, there are two types: extensions, which uses the technologies already available on each respective browsers, and plug-ins which adds new technologies on webpages. Extensions are now more commonly used as they only used browser-approved methods to provide their services while plug-ins are full-fledged computer programs which means that plug-ins are less secure (with the popular plugins like Flash and Java having newly-discovered security problem nearly every day). Fortunately, plug-ins are on the way out, however visitors of older sites that relies on plug-ins will see a \"plugin missing\" message (which is previously a real message, now a misnomer as plug-ins are being phased-out).\nThe \"broken image icon\" is the icon that a browser shows instead of an image when that image can't be found or when the browser doesn't recognize it as a valid image. It is similar to the icon shown when the image has not been loaded yet (such as in the rare case when the browser is set to not load images until requested, in order to save on bandwidth, or if the connection is too slow to load pictures quickly), which is commonly a simplified picture frame containing a simple painting or picture, except on Firefox where it appears to be a blank document. The broken image version usually has a corner cracked off the picture frame. Usually a broken image icon is the result of the source picture being moved or deleted from the location referenced, or if there's an error in the reference (like the filename being misspelled).\n[A gray box on a black background with white text:] This content is not available in your country.\n[Caption below the panel:] If you ever really want to make people mad, set this as your 404\/\"Not Found\" page.\n"}
{"id":1970,"title":"Name Dominoes","image_title":"Name Dominoes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1970","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/name_dominoes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1970:_Name_Dominoes","transcript":"[This comic a large grid, 27 units wide and 35 units high, with 271 black \"domino\" tiles. On each tile there is a name written with white text. The grid is arranged so that each touching side corresponds with the first or last name of another person. Some of the domino tiles are rotated 90, 180 or 270 degrees so the text is either to be read down, up-side down or up. The names on the tiles are listed here below in approximate reading order starting at top left.] Christian Campbell, Neve Campbell, Joe McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy, Gene Vincent, Gene Kelly, Kate Hudson, Rock Hudson, Gordon Brown, James Brown, Jon Brown, John Howard, Columbo, Chris Columbus, Christopher Columbus, Naomi Campbell, Joseph Campbell, Joseph Smith, Frank Vincent, John Kelly, Katherine Johnson, The Rock, Chris Rock, Chris Isaac, James Newton Howard, John Wayne, Howard Stern, Howard Hunt, Chris Hughes, Naomi Watts, Naomi Klein, Kevin Kline, Francis Bacon, Francis Drake, Lyndon Johnson, Oscar the Grouch, Oscar Isaac, Isaac Hayes, Isaac Newton, Wayne Newton, Wayne Knight, Helen Hunt, Helen Hughes, James Watt (Steam), James Watt (Interior), Kevin Costner, Kevin Bacon, Kevin Love, Lisa Frank, Frank Drake, Drake, Oscar de la Renta, Oscar de la Hoya, Sean Hayes, Wallace Shawn, Wayne Howard, Wayne Brady, James Brady, Tom Brady, Helen Thomas, Tom Hanks, Hank Aaron, Aaron Carter, Stephen James, Will Smith, Kevin Smith, Kein James, Garfield, James Garfield, Warren Buffett, Jimmy Buffett, Warren Beatty, Elizabeth Warren, Earl Warren, Eliabeth Kolbert, Stephen Colbert, George Wallace, Charles Wallace, James Monroe, Marilyn Monroe, Hank Williams, William C. Williams, Steve Harvey, Domino Harvey, Harvey Milk, James Saint James, Etta James, Jim Jones, James Earl Jones, Charlie Parker, Ray Parker Jr., Ray Charles, Charles Manson, Marilyn Manson, Robin Williams, Billy D. Williams, Will Wright, Fats Domino, Bill Clinton, Jimmy John, Tom Jones, Tommy John, Quincy Jones, James Earl Ray, Man Ray, Rachel Ray, Ray Allen, Tim Allen, Tim Cook, Tim Howard, Robin Wright, Wilbur Wright, Fatty Arbuckle, Fat Joe, George Clinton, John Kerry, Kerry Washington, John Irving, John Quincy Adams, John Adams, Amy Adams, Aimee Mann, Superman, Batman, Ayn Rand, Lily Allen, Paul Allen, Ron Howard, Howard Hughes, Joe Kennedy, George Bush, George Wasington, Wasington Irving, Martha Wasington, Ma Rainey, Jack Ma, Super Grover, Jack Black, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Paul Simon, Ron Paul, John Hughes, Langston Hughes, John F. Kennedy, Little Richard, Rich Little, Martha Stewart, Yo Yo Ma, Ma Bell, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Grover Cleveland, Jack White, Jack Ryan, Debby Ryan, Carly Simon, Carly Hughes, Charles Evans Hughes, John Williams, Little John, Stuart Little, Potter Stewart, Kristen Stewart, Kristen Bell, Kristen Hooks, Alexander Graham Bell, Franklin Graham, Lloyd Alexander, Meg White, Meg ryan, Debbie Reynolds, John Reynolds, Carly Fiorina, Grace Lee Boggs, Wade Boggs, William Safire, Prince William, Little Prince, Harry Potter, James Potter, James Hook, James Dean, Aretha Franklin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Barry White, Walter White, Walt Whitman, John Kelly, Grace Lee, Nancy Grace, Garnet, Prince, Prince Fielder, Prince Harry, Harry Styles, John Dean, Benjamin Franklin, Harrold Lloyd, Harrold Ford, Betty White, Meg Whitman, Christine Todd Whitman, Megyn Kelly, Grace Kelly, Grace Jones, Jack Nicholson, Jack Ruby, Jack Russel, Harry Fielder, Harry Trueman, Harry Jon Benjamin, John Edward, Benjamin Harrison, Harrison Ford, Henry Ford, Betty Ford, Betty Friedan, Chris Christie, Chris Pratt, Maggie Grace, Grace Hopper, Russel Crowe, Russ Smith, John Smith, Justin Long, John Bel Edwards, John Candy, John Henry, Henry James, Bill James, Chirs Cooper, Chirs Hemsworth, Chirs Evans, Topher Grace, Van Morrison, Sheryl Crow, Sheryl Sandberg, Cameron Crow, Long John Silver, Olivia Newton John, Huey long, John Edwards, Candy Crowley, Alestier Crowley, James Fenimore Cooper, James Cook, Robert Frost, Bob Evans, Evan Tayler Jones, Van Jones, James Cameron, Cam Newton, Cameron Diaz, Huey Newton, Huey Lewis, John Lewis, Jenny Lewis, Ryan Lewis, Burt Reynolds, Alistiar Cooke, Alistair Cookie, Cokie Roberts, John Roberts, Robert Johnson, Robert E. Lee, Tommy Lee, Tommy Lee Jones, Etta James, John Oliver, Ryan Reynolds, Alastair Reynolds\n","explanation":"Dominoes is a family of boardgames played with rectangular \"domino\" tiles. A domino tile is divided into two squares, each displaying a number. Under most rules, a domino tile is placed on the table adjacent to another tile, and the adjacent ends must match in some way (usually by the number displayed on the touching ends). Randall's \"name dominoes\" shows a set of domino tiles with people's names instead of numbers, and adjacent tiles are matched by whether the closest name is the same (such as how Chris Evans' family name matches Evan Taylor Jones' given name).\nThe title text spells out a rule that a player may only place a tile if they know who that person is. This is a variation of a rule in Scrabble , where a player loses a turn if their chosen word don't survive a dictionary challenge over the validity of the word. This rule implies that players are allowed to create new name dominoes tiles and that it is not a fixed set. In this case the player that is challenged has used the name Frank Johnson of which there are 12 exact matches on Wikipedia along with six with a middle name and more.  (The player was likely trying to place a tile in the upper-left area of the board, in an attempt to connect the \"Frank Vincent\" and \"Lyndon Johnson\" dominoes.  The move was subsequently made impossible when the \"Francis Drake\" domino was played.)  In a google search as of the day the comic came out the first hit was Frank Johnson who is a retired American professional basketball player and coach. Randall has made several references to basketball in his comics.\nA large board is covered in rectangular \"dominoes\" (271 pieces), with each domino bearing the name of a \"well-known\" person or character (fictional). The dominoes are arranged as if a game of dominoes were being played, but instead of the game requiring the number of spots of adjacent dominoes to match up, this game requires adjacent names to match up. Because most people have two or more names, different matches are made at each end of a domino. Fun fact is that two of the people are \"named after\" the game: Fats Domino and Domino Harvey .\nThe match can be exact (e.g., \"Kevin\" on one domino adjacent to \"Kevin\" on another), homonymic (e.g., \"Klein\" adjacent to \"Kline\"), nickname-based (e.g., \"James\" adjacent to \"Jimmy\", which in turn is adjacent to \"Jim\"), or gender different versions of a name (e.g., \"Olivia\" adjacent to \"Oliver\"). Sometimes last names are matched up with first names (e.g., \" Elizabeth Warren \" adjacent to \" Warren Beatty \"), and in some cases only a single name is used (e.g., \" Columbo \", \" Drake \", \" Garfield \", \" Prince \"). Singular names are represented by a half-size square \"domino\" (or \" monomino \"), with a few exceptions: \" Garnet \" has a full-size tile (a complex reference explained below), and \" Batman \" and \" Superman \" have full-size tiles and are placed as though they were two-part names: the first square of \"Superman\" is matched with \"Super\", and the second square is matched with the second square of \"Batman\" (as though both characters had the last name \"Man\"). Some people have three or more names (e.g., \" Frank Lloyd Wright \") and have a 3-square domino tile (or \"straight tromino \", 50% longer than normal) which permits matching to a middle name (e.g. \"Frank Lloyd Wright\" is matched to \" Lloyd Alexander \" and \" Harold Lloyd \").\nThe names come from a wide variety of fields: scientists (e.g., Isaac Newton ), historical figures ( George Washington ), musicians ( Drake ), politicians ( John Kerry ), actors ( Kevin Costner ), writers ( Washington Irving ), fashion designers ( Oscar de la Renta ), and so on. Most of the names are real people but a few are fictional characters, including some non-human characters like Garfield and Super Grover . In one case the nick name for a company is used: Ma Bell aka Bell System.\nOne notable reference beyond just the use of a name is in the bottom left, there is the connection [ William Safire ][ Garnet ][ Ruby, Jack ]. The connection seems to be based on the fact that Sapphire , Garnet and Ruby are all gemstones , which does not match the implied rules of the game. This tile is a reference to the character Garnet in the cartoon Steven Universe , who is a \"fusion\" formed by two Gems: Ruby and Sapphire. Thus, the name \"Garnet\" is treated as though it was two names \"Ruby\" and \"Sapphire\", requiring a two-square tile despite having a one-word name. Randall has previously made references to this universe in 1608: Hoverboard . (See this and this image from that comic).\nAdditionally, Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan and Rand Paul have been mentioned before, in the title text of 1277: Ayn Random . That idea may have been the prototype for this.\nConnecting Marilyn Manson with Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson is likely a tongue-in-cheek reference, as the musician's stage name was literally chosen in the same way as this.\nIn at least one case it is not entirely clear who is being referred to: \"John Kelly\" most likely refers to Gen. John F. Kelly , Donald Trump's chief of staff, but the name is extremely common and could equally refer to any number of people .\nThe number # refers to the numbers on this numbered picture . Read more on this page: 1970: Name Dominoes\/Numbered images .\nWiki links not tested as they were set in only from the name in the comic.\n[This comic a large grid, 27 units wide and 35 units high, with 271 black \"domino\" tiles. On each tile there is a name written with white text. The grid is arranged so that each touching side corresponds with the first or last name of another person. Some of the domino tiles are rotated 90, 180 or 270 degrees so the text is either to be read down, up-side down or up. The names on the tiles are listed here below in approximate reading order starting at top left.] Christian Campbell, Neve Campbell, Joe McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy, Gene Vincent, Gene Kelly, Kate Hudson, Rock Hudson, Gordon Brown, James Brown, Jon Brown, John Howard, Columbo, Chris Columbus, Christopher Columbus, Naomi Campbell, Joseph Campbell, Joseph Smith, Frank Vincent, John Kelly, Katherine Johnson, The Rock, Chris Rock, Chris Isaac, James Newton Howard, John Wayne, Howard Stern, Howard Hunt, Chris Hughes, Naomi Watts, Naomi Klein, Kevin Kline, Francis Bacon, Francis Drake, Lyndon Johnson, Oscar the Grouch, Oscar Isaac, Isaac Hayes, Isaac Newton, Wayne Newton, Wayne Knight, Helen Hunt, Helen Hughes, James Watt (Steam), James Watt (Interior), Kevin Costner, Kevin Bacon, Kevin Love, Lisa Frank, Frank Drake, Drake, Oscar de la Renta, Oscar de la Hoya, Sean Hayes, Wallace Shawn, Wayne Howard, Wayne Brady, James Brady, Tom Brady, Helen Thomas, Tom Hanks, Hank Aaron, Aaron Carter, Stephen James, Will Smith, Kevin Smith, Kein James, Garfield, James Garfield, Warren Buffett, Jimmy Buffett, Warren Beatty, Elizabeth Warren, Earl Warren, Eliabeth Kolbert, Stephen Colbert, George Wallace, Charles Wallace, James Monroe, Marilyn Monroe, Hank Williams, William C. Williams, Steve Harvey, Domino Harvey, Harvey Milk, James Saint James, Etta James, Jim Jones, James Earl Jones, Charlie Parker, Ray Parker Jr., Ray Charles, Charles Manson, Marilyn Manson, Robin Williams, Billy D. Williams, Will Wright, Fats Domino, Bill Clinton, Jimmy John, Tom Jones, Tommy John, Quincy Jones, James Earl Ray, Man Ray, Rachel Ray, Ray Allen, Tim Allen, Tim Cook, Tim Howard, Robin Wright, Wilbur Wright, Fatty Arbuckle, Fat Joe, George Clinton, John Kerry, Kerry Washington, John Irving, John Quincy Adams, John Adams, Amy Adams, Aimee Mann, Superman, Batman, Ayn Rand, Lily Allen, Paul Allen, Ron Howard, Howard Hughes, Joe Kennedy, George Bush, George Wasington, Wasington Irving, Martha Wasington, Ma Rainey, Jack Ma, Super Grover, Jack Black, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Paul Simon, Ron Paul, John Hughes, Langston Hughes, John F. Kennedy, Little Richard, Rich Little, Martha Stewart, Yo Yo Ma, Ma Bell, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Grover Cleveland, Jack White, Jack Ryan, Debby Ryan, Carly Simon, Carly Hughes, Charles Evans Hughes, John Williams, Little John, Stuart Little, Potter Stewart, Kristen Stewart, Kristen Bell, Kristen Hooks, Alexander Graham Bell, Franklin Graham, Lloyd Alexander, Meg White, Meg ryan, Debbie Reynolds, John Reynolds, Carly Fiorina, Grace Lee Boggs, Wade Boggs, William Safire, Prince William, Little Prince, Harry Potter, James Potter, James Hook, James Dean, Aretha Franklin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Barry White, Walter White, Walt Whitman, John Kelly, Grace Lee, Nancy Grace, Garnet, Prince, Prince Fielder, Prince Harry, Harry Styles, John Dean, Benjamin Franklin, Harrold Lloyd, Harrold Ford, Betty White, Meg Whitman, Christine Todd Whitman, Megyn Kelly, Grace Kelly, Grace Jones, Jack Nicholson, Jack Ruby, Jack Russel, Harry Fielder, Harry Trueman, Harry Jon Benjamin, John Edward, Benjamin Harrison, Harrison Ford, Henry Ford, Betty Ford, Betty Friedan, Chris Christie, Chris Pratt, Maggie Grace, Grace Hopper, Russel Crowe, Russ Smith, John Smith, Justin Long, John Bel Edwards, John Candy, John Henry, Henry James, Bill James, Chirs Cooper, Chirs Hemsworth, Chirs Evans, Topher Grace, Van Morrison, Sheryl Crow, Sheryl Sandberg, Cameron Crow, Long John Silver, Olivia Newton John, Huey long, John Edwards, Candy Crowley, Alestier Crowley, James Fenimore Cooper, James Cook, Robert Frost, Bob Evans, Evan Tayler Jones, Van Jones, James Cameron, Cam Newton, Cameron Diaz, Huey Newton, Huey Lewis, John Lewis, Jenny Lewis, Ryan Lewis, Burt Reynolds, Alistiar Cooke, Alistair Cookie, Cokie Roberts, John Roberts, Robert Johnson, Robert E. Lee, Tommy Lee, Tommy Lee Jones, Etta James, John Oliver, Ryan Reynolds, Alastair Reynolds\n"}
{"id":1971,"title":"Personal Data","image_title":"Personal Data","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1971","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/personal_data.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1971:_Personal_Data","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Ponytail and White Hat. Both of them are looking at Cueball.] Cueball: Everyone keeps talking about \"personal data.\" To be honest, I don't really know what it is . Cueball: I mean, I understand the idea and know it's a thing I should protect. But it's so... abstract.\n[Close-up on Ponytail.] Ponytail: Yeah. Ponytail: It's like \"the economy.\" I don't really know what the economy is, if we're getting specific. I know stocks going up is good. For people who own stocks, at least. Ponytail: Whatever \"stocks\" are.\n[White Hat responds with his arms slightly out and palms open. Both Ponytail and Cueball are looking at him.] White Hat: Yeah, or taxes. Everyone talks about taxes. What are they? Do I have to pay them? And to who? Cueball: OK, wait, you definitely need to learn about that one. Ponytail: Yeah, ideally sometime in the next few weeks.\n","explanation":"This is another comic poking fun at adults who have trouble dealing with grown-up issues.\nThe comic starts with Cueball wondering what \" personal data \" is, saying he doesn't understand what it is, and it is an abstract concept. Ponytail follows by pointing out she doesn't understand what \" the economy \" is, and conjecturing that it is related to \" stocks \", although admitting that she also does not understand what stocks are.  The punchline comes when White Hat says that he doesn't understand what \" taxes \" are and asks if he really has to pay them and to whom.  This surprises Cueball and Ponytail, who promptly advise him to learn about that one soon.  The title text has White Hat asking another series of tax-related questions that adults are expected to know already, further compounding his troubles. See details on these four difficult topics below.\nThe joke is that White Hat has mistakenly associated taxes with the economy and personal data as \"grown-up\" topics which are too confusing to fully grasp. Like the other two topics, taxes are a complex issue which many adults don't fully understand and have a vague sense that they should know more about or interact with. However, most people can remain passively ignorant about the significance of the economy or personal data without it disrupting their lives; this is not true of taxes, which people must actively pay and file annually or suffer financial and possibly criminal penalties.\nWhite Hat not knowing what taxes are indicates that he may not have paid his taxes in previous years, which would be alarming since tax evasion is punishable as a crime.  Ponytail's remark that he should do this ideally in the next few weeks is referring to this year's US Tax Day which falls on April 17, 2018, less than four weeks after the release of this comic. So if you do not have your tax preparation under control, it is time to research how it works now.\nThis is not the first time Randall has made a comic about people having trouble understanding the US tax system in relation to an approaching tax day.  Other instances include the title text of 1805: Unpublished Discoveries from March the year before this comic, and this one from August 2015: 1566: Board Game .\nThis comic references several advanced topics that people commonly talk about, but may not actually understand well:\nPersonal data is usually thought of as any information that pertains to a private person.  But this definition is very vague and can encompass a huge variety of data ranging from very sensitive (Social Security number, bank account details, passwords) to less sensitive (first name, color of pet cat).  Different people also have different ideas of what information is considered sensitive.  For example, some may want eagerly to share the location of their weekend activity with the world, whereas others may prefer not to let everyone know their location.\nEven though it is generally advised to keep personal data private and not to expose it to the public or to companies (especially online, e.g. Facebook and Google), not everyone agrees on the level of privacy that should be afforded to the data.  Some hold the view that even innocent-looking personal data can be harvested and used for unsavory purposes (for example, a health insurance company can use social media posts about eating fast food as a cause to raise premiums, or a government can use cat pictures as evidence of pet ownership and demand license fees), and therefore all personal data should be strictly controlled.  Others hold the view that sometimes it is worth exchanging some degree of privacy for other conveniences (for example, meeting friends by sharing their location info or getting cheaper prices from targeted advertising based on web browsing history).\nPersonal data breaches were in the news a few days before the publishing of this comic when the UK's Channel Four released an investigative documentary about political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.  Among the revelations of the documentary were that the company had used Facebook to not only harvest the personal data of users taking their polls, but the friends and family of those users, without their knowledge or consent.  They used this information to attempt to influence both the 2016 United States presidential election and the UK's Brexit vote .  This sparked an ongoing discussion about the security of personal data and the role of social media in securing it. Such data breaches has been the topic of at least one previous comic: 1286: Encryptic .\nTechnological changes in the past few decades have made personal data much easier to collect, share, and analyze in bulk, raising new questions and concerns that have not been considered before.  Even people who can define what data is personal to them may not realize the full extent of how others might use it, or how it impacts their lives.\nThe economy, at a basic level, is the circulation of money which enables productivity.  For example, a bus driver might use their money to watch a movie, the movie producer might use their revenue (gathered from the bus driver and many others) to purchase editing software, the software maker might use their revenue (from the movie producer and others) to buy food, and the food producer might use that money to take a bus, thus returning the money back to the bus driver.  The total amount of money has not changed, it merely circulated in a loop, but everyone in the loop received benefits and produced value in the form of goods or services.\nThe real world economy has much larger and more complex networks of buyers and producers compared to the example above, but nevertheless it works on the same principle.  Many people correctly associate the economy with money (or stocks in Ponytail's case), but may not understand the full picture.\nCirculation of money is critical to a healthy economy.  In a recession, financial hardship causes people to spend less money, which leads to fewer goods being produced, fewer jobs available, and people earning and spending even less money.  That is why (somewhat counter-intuitively) governments need to spend more money during a recession in order to infuse money back into the economy and get it circulating again.  The Federal Reserve lowering interest rates is also a planned, strategic move to increase the money supply, which encourages investment and economic growth.\nRandall made a comic where stock and economy was an integral part of the largest of the panels: 980: Money\nStocks in this context refers to companies listed on public stock exchanges, in which investors can buy and sell an economic stake, or share of the company's ownership.  Companies offer stocks as a way to raise funds for its operation and expansion, selling off partial ownership of the company in exchange for cash.  Investors mainly trade stocks for financial gain as well, collecting part of the company's profits as dividends and potentially selling the same shares at a higher price later.\nThe value of stocks depends on a subjective valuation of the company.  Stock price generally rises if the company is doing well and investors expect it to keep growing and make more profit.  It generally falls if the company is doing poorly and investors don't see a brighter future.  However, it is also influenced easily by external factors like political climate, release of (mis-)information, or even investors' mood.  It is very hard even for experts to predict stock price movements accurately. This is why scientists should not think they can figure out the stock market, which was the topic of this comic: 1570: Engineer Syllogism .\nThrough pension funds, mutual funds and other investment vehicles, a large portion of the population of developed countries have an indirect stake in the success (or otherwise) of many of the businesses that make up a significant element of the economy (see above).  An economy that is experiencing healthy growth would generally see the value of those businesses increase, and that is reflected in the value at which investors would be willing to buy and sell those shares.  So a growing economy would tend to associated with rising stock prices.\nIn the past, stock ownership has been tracked using paper certificates which owners can hold and store, like cash.  Nowadays most stock transactions are performed electronically and no physical items are sent.  The intangibility of shares and volatility in price makes stocks feel like only a virtual concept that can be hard to grasp.\nTaxes are money that governments collect from people under their jurisdiction in order to fund government agencies providing public services.  To answer White Hat's other questions (including the ones in the title text):\nWhile the concept of paying taxes is simple, the processing of filling out the paperwork is often complex and laborious.  This is because the calculations leading to the final tax amount needs to take many many factors into account:\n... and much more.\nMany people would not be familiar enough with the tax code to be able to do all their paperwork alone.\n[Cueball is talking to Ponytail and White Hat. Both of them are looking at Cueball.] Cueball: Everyone keeps talking about \"personal data.\" To be honest, I don't really know what it is . Cueball: I mean, I understand the idea and know it's a thing I should protect. But it's so... abstract.\n[Close-up on Ponytail.] Ponytail: Yeah. Ponytail: It's like \"the economy.\" I don't really know what the economy is, if we're getting specific. I know stocks going up is good. For people who own stocks, at least. Ponytail: Whatever \"stocks\" are.\n[White Hat responds with his arms slightly out and palms open. Both Ponytail and Cueball are looking at him.] White Hat: Yeah, or taxes. Everyone talks about taxes. What are they? Do I have to pay them? And to who? Cueball: OK, wait, you definitely need to learn about that one. Ponytail: Yeah, ideally sometime in the next few weeks.\n"}
{"id":1972,"title":"Autogyros","image_title":"Autogyros","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1972","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/autogyros.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1972:_Autogyros","transcript":"[A picture of Megan wearing aviator goggles, sitting in an autogyro and holding the control stick. The autogyro is surrounded by sentence fragments, explaining its characteristics. The one above the blade that concerns the blade has an arrow pointing from the text to the blade. The sentences in columns from the left (i.e. first four sentences to the left, then two above the autogyro's body, and finally six sentences to the right):] Looks like a helicopter, but is nothing like a helicopter Flies like a plane but is nothing like a plane Sort of like a powered parachute Rare in the US, usually homemade. Common in Europe. Big blade on top is not powered and spins freely Can often be flown without a license Cheap Needs a runway to take off, but not a long one Can land vertically Cannot hover Never stalls Extremely safe, unless you do the one thing you instinctively do to escape a stall in a normal airplane, in which case it will crash immediately.\n[Caption below the panel:] Autogyros are weird .\n","explanation":"Randall has been looking at the facts about autogyros , hence the title of the comic. He has drawn Megan flying in such a vehicle with several statements of the facts he has unveiled.\nRandall states that an autogyro is nothing like a helicopter (which it looks like), nothing like a plane (but flies like one) and works like a powered parachute or paraplane (which it might kind of look like except without a parachute). He continues to make a total of 12 statements which will be explained individually below.\nThe final statement at the bottom right is the punch line of how strange these flying machines are, because they are safe, as long as you do not do what a pilot instinctively would do in a plane in case of a stall because if you do so the autogyros will crash immediately... See the explanation below . That sentence is almost rendered unnecessary by the one above it that states that autogyros never stalls !\nRandall's conclusion is clear: Autogyros are weird .\nIn the title text Randall continues on the last statement by saying that today, autogyros are much more stable. Which, presumably, must refer to how this was not always the case. This new stability, then, probably means that a stall situation is much less likely and the last statement is not really all that relevant.\nRandall then goes on to suggest that the autogyro people will be angered by this comic, which attacks the safety of their beloved machines. But he keeps on mocking them, stating that they will come after him, once they have finished building the autogyros they have been working on in their garages for the last 10 years. By this, he implies that the people who work on them do this as a home garage project, so they will never really be able to finish or fly them.\n\"Looks like a helicopter, but is nothing like a helicopter\"\nIt is like a helicopter in the sense that a horizontally spinning fan provides the lift. It is unlike a helicopter because A) the fan is not powered, B) the fan does not provide forward propulsion, C) it is incapable of hovering, or moving in any other direction than forward.\n\"Flies like a plane but is nothing like a plane\"\nIts flight pattern resembles a plane in that it can only move forward, turns by banking, and needs to maintain forward velocity in order to climb. However, unlike a plane, it can only maintain control when the rotor is loaded in the normal direction. Airplanes are \"ok\" when upside down, or when there's no load on the lifting surfaces. Autogyros lose control, much like a parachute under those circumstances.\n\"Sort of like a powered parachute\"\nA powered parachute , also referred to as a PPC or paraplane, is a similar design except instead of a freely-rotating blade they are attached to a large parachute that acts like an airplane wing. As long as there is thrust the parachute will fill with air and maintain its wing-like characteristics, with the advantage of acting like a real parachute in the event of a loss of thrust (i.e. engine dies) wherein they come floating down at a speed significantly slower and more survivable than freefall. A single-seater can often be flown without a license and can be as inexpensive as $5,000 USD in parts.\n\"Rare in the US, usually homemade. Common in Europe.\"\nAutogyros are uncommon in the US because of the light sport rule (there is nothing on autogyros), while there is a detailed section in the European version of the light sport rule so they would obviously be more common in Europe.\n\"Big blade on top is not powered and spins freely\"\nThe blades rotate due to the wind. Some autogyros use power to rotate the blade to speed before take-off but the power is removed for flight.\n\"Can often be flown without a license\"\nAutogyros are frequently built as ultralights , and that group of aircraft are a special case where licenses are not needed. ( In the US , ultralights are aircraft that weigh less than 254lbs, carry less than 5 gallons of fuel, stall at less than 24kts, have a maximum speed of less than 55kts, and carry only the pilot.)\n\"Cheap\"\nHelicopters are notorious for being extremely expensive to operate. At a typical general aviation service in the US, a two-seat aircraft may rent for under $100\/hr, while a helicopter runs over $200\/hr. Similarly, a small used helicopter may cost almost $200,000 while a small new autogyro may cost under $25,000. Since many people home-build their autogyros, it would often be even cheaper.\n\"Needs a runway to take off, but not a long one\"\nAn autogyro must be moving forward relative to airspeed in order for the rotor to generate lift. It needs a runway to take off, but with the extra lift provided by the rotors, the runway can be much shorter than a regular one.\n\"Can land vertically\"\nAn autogyro can land vertically: for that matter, so can any airplane. What matters isn't ground speed but airspeed, and as long as there's as much headwind as the landing airspeed of the aircraft, it will land vertically. Now, with fixed-wing airplanes, the landing speed is at least 40-50 mph, and you don't often find headwinds like that. The much lower landing airspeed of an autogyro makes vertical landings feasible.\n\"Cannot hover\"\nTrue hovering would require the rotor to be powered. However, an autogyro must be moving forward relative to airspeed in order for the rotor to generate lift.\n\"Never stalls\"\nMost conditions that would cause a stall in a fixed-wing airplane such as low speeds, high-G maneuvers, and gusty winds don't apply to autogyros.\nThe rotor in an autogyro is in equilibrium, the inner, slower part is stalled, the middle part makes it spin and the outer, faster part slows down the rotor and provides lift. As the angle of attack increases, a fixed-wing aircraft would stall, however, on an autogyro, it will just make the lift-generating area smaller, causing the rotor to automatically spin faster and the equilibrium is restored.\nThis is not entirely correct, however. If you reduce the forward speed of an autogyro, the rotor slows down, reducing lift so the autogyro will descend. Under most circumstances, this would lead to a controlled landing. However, if it happens at a high altitude, you can run out of lift completely while still high above the ground causing a stall. This is more likely to happen if there is a strong tailwind.\n\"Extremely safe, unless you do the one thing you instinctively do to escape a stall in a normal airplane, in which case it will crash immediately.\"\nAutogyros are considered safe due to their slow landing speed, which is important in emergency landings, their forgiving behavior in windy conditions, and the fact they are almost impossible to stall. This is thanks to the freely spinning rotor. Unfortunately, as soon as the rotor stops spinning, the whole aircraft falls like a brick and the rotor may be impossible to restart in flight. This is a situation that should be avoided at all costs.\nNormally it is not a problem since the weight of the aircraft keeps the rotor spinning. However, if the weight becomes too low or even negative, the angle of attack will become negative, and the rotor will slow down and eventually stop. It can happen when the pilot \"pushes on the stick\" and dives.\nUnfortunately, \"pushing on the stick\" is also how you escape a stall in a fixed-wing (normal) airplane as it is a way to regain airspeed. This is actually a counter-intuitive maneuver but because a stall is an emergency, pilots are trained to do it instinctively. It can trick a pilot trained in fixed-wing aircraft into doing the one thing that shouldn't be done on a gyro.\n[A picture of Megan wearing aviator goggles, sitting in an autogyro and holding the control stick. The autogyro is surrounded by sentence fragments, explaining its characteristics. The one above the blade that concerns the blade has an arrow pointing from the text to the blade. The sentences in columns from the left (i.e. first four sentences to the left, then two above the autogyro's body, and finally six sentences to the right):] Looks like a helicopter, but is nothing like a helicopter Flies like a plane but is nothing like a plane Sort of like a powered parachute Rare in the US, usually homemade. Common in Europe. Big blade on top is not powered and spins freely Can often be flown without a license Cheap Needs a runway to take off, but not a long one Can land vertically Cannot hover Never stalls Extremely safe, unless you do the one thing you instinctively do to escape a stall in a normal airplane, in which case it will crash immediately.\n[Caption below the panel:] Autogyros are weird .\n"}
{"id":1973,"title":"Star Lore","image_title":"Star Lore","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1973","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/star_lore.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1973:_Star_Lore","transcript":"[A black panel with 31 dots of different sizes and in various colors (white, red, yellow, blue and green). These bright dots are scattered around three white speech bubbles for off-panel speakers. Next to the top left corner of the first bubble, there are five dots close together. Two white, two yellow (one brighter than the other) and a red dot that is clearly larger than any of the other four.] Person 1 (off panel): That cluster was known to the ancients as the Five Sisters. Person 1 (off panel): The red one is a supergiant and will probably explode within the next million years. Person 2 (off panel): Wow!\n[Caption below the panel:] There are too many status LEDs in my room.\n","explanation":"Computers, chargers, and other electronic items often have status lights in various colors. In a dark room, these lights appear as pinpricks of light, similar to constellations. Presumably, Randall's room has many such items. This may be a My Hobby comic in the sense that his room doesn't really look like that, rather, he claims it does for humor value. It's also not clear whether this refers to Randall's bedroom (typical US usage of \"my room\" refers to one's bedroom) or some other room Randall spends a good deal of time in. However, since a bedroom is generally the only room in which one might spend significant time in the dark, it seems very likely this is referring to Randall's bedroom.\nThe comic's narrator is explaining how some of his lights remind him of stars, which gives him an opportunity to show off his knowledge of sci-fi trivia: \"The Five Sisters\" could be a reference to a pentagon-shaped constellation from Isaac Asimov's book Foundation's Edge , though it could not have been 'known to the ancients' since it was less than 100 years old; though it could also be a somewhat more oblique reference to the Pleiades cluster (often called the Seven Sisters). It could also refer to the cluster of 5 lights next to the speech bubble, which is reinforced by the next bubble talking specifically about the bigger red light in the cluster.\nInterestingly, there are some green stars. Stars might look green due to a neighbouring star, but green stars are actually impossible due to the principle of black body radiation. Green status lights on electronics are common, however. [ citation needed ]\nIn the title text, the narrator describes his smoke alarm status light as a pulsing variable star. A smoke alarm is a device that detects smoke, which would indicate a fire. These are commonly placed in houses as a safety precaution. Typically, many smoke alarms have a status light that blinks to assure that they are still functioning. A subtle blinking light is more clear in its (intermittent) activation than a steady one that might actually be inactive but reflecting external illumination, while a high-intensity photoemitter capable of being seen in near-direct daylight would be annoyingly bright when the lights are off at night.\n[A black panel with 31 dots of different sizes and in various colors (white, red, yellow, blue and green). These bright dots are scattered around three white speech bubbles for off-panel speakers. Next to the top left corner of the first bubble, there are five dots close together. Two white, two yellow (one brighter than the other) and a red dot that is clearly larger than any of the other four.] Person 1 (off panel): That cluster was known to the ancients as the Five Sisters. Person 1 (off panel): The red one is a supergiant and will probably explode within the next million years. Person 2 (off panel): Wow!\n[Caption below the panel:] There are too many status LEDs in my room.\n"}
{"id":1974,"title":"Conversational Dynamics","image_title":"Conversational Dynamics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1974","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/conversational_dynamics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1974:_Conversational_Dynamics","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a computer and pointing at the CRT monitor. White Hat is standing behind him.] Cueball: Check it out!  My new system allows anyone on Earth to inject themselves into any conversation happening anywhere\u00a0 at any time. White Hat: Cool!  I bet this won't lead to any unhealthy dynamics!\n[Caption under the panel:] The creation of the modern web\n","explanation":"On the modern World Wide Web (usually coined as Web 2.0 , in contrast to the original web envisioned and created by Tim Berners-Lee ), particularly on internet forums (like the xkcd forums ), a pervasive issue is that forum users with strong opinions but little interest in fruitful discussion will often interject themselves into all conversations that are related to their area of interest; examples include conspiracy theorists , political extremists , and trolls . This counterproductive behavior is not feasible in real life, where conversations happen locally and synchronously and one must be physically present in order to participate. In this sense, it is enabled by Internet forum technology. In forums that have search features, it is even easier for these problematic users to identify and target large numbers of threads rapidly. The field of conversational dynamics studies the interpersonal processes underlying dialog between people, and this is an example of how changing the mode of communication can negatively impact productive \"conversational dynamics\" (hence the title).\nIn this satirical comic, Randall imagines the inventor of the modern web, here depicted as Cueball , correctly anticipating that anyone will be able to inject their opinion into any conversation. When he tells White Hat about it, White Hat's comment, either sarcastic or very naive, interprets this as a benefit as he is willing to bet that this will not lead to any unhealthy [conversational] dynamics . In the best case, naive scenario, the web enables broader participation by helpful users with relevant information, in the real world it rather turned out as a potential problem as described above with trolls and conspirators overtaking many online forums. Note that in contrast to what the comic depicts, there is no single person or group who created the foundation of the modern web, unlike the original web where there is an identifiable person.\nIn the title text, White Hat suggests to Cueball to add a search feature that will enable these \"helpful\" users to be even more helpful by enabling them to jump into not just one conversation at a time, but into hundreds of conversations simultaneously. This may be referring to free, anonymous chat sites like 4Chan or possibly Discord . Whether White Hat is again sarcastic or just even more naive, Cueball immediately jumps to the conclusion that this will be an even better idea than his own, and continues to envision a system where \"only the most well-informed people with the most critical information to share will use that feature.\"\nIn reality, as any modern user of Internet forums would be aware, both of these technologies are routinely abused by problematic users, and the characters are being too optimistic.\nThat we today need someone to fight online trolls was the subject of 591: Troll Slayer .\n[Cueball is sitting at a computer and pointing at the CRT monitor. White Hat is standing behind him.] Cueball: Check it out!  My new system allows anyone on Earth to inject themselves into any conversation happening anywhere\u00a0 at any time. White Hat: Cool!  I bet this won't lead to any unhealthy dynamics!\n[Caption under the panel:] The creation of the modern web\n"}
{"id":1975,"title":"Right Click","image_title":"Right Click","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1975","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/right_click.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1975:_Right_Click","transcript":"[Empty frame with Cueball standing slightly right of center.]\n[Caption below the frame:] Editor's Note: Today's comic is optimized for local viewing. To see the full version, just save a copy of the image!\n\n\n","explanation":"This was the eighth April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous April Fool's comic was not from the year before as there was no such comic released in 2017 . Instead, the previous one was 1663: Garden , scheduled for released Friday, April 1st, 2016, but in the end released on Monday April 4th 2016. The next was 2131: Emojidome released on Monday, April 1st, 2019.\nThis comic was released on April 1 even though that was a Sunday (only the fourth comic to be released on a Sunday). But it was only due to the April Fool joke, as it did replace the comic that would have been scheduled for Monday, April 2nd. The next comic, 1976: Friendly Questions , was first released on Wednesday, April 4th.\nAt first, the comic seems like the most simplistic xkcd comic possible - Cueball standing and doing nothing. The \"editor's note\" tells you to save a copy of the image to \"view the full comic\".\nTo save an image from a browser most people would right-click on it (or long-click in mobile devices) which normally leads to a \"context menu\" allowing several actions related to the image, including saving\/downloading. This is what you are encouraged to do by the editorial note as well as by the comic name and title text. However, the context menu opened is not the default context menu of the browser but an elaborate context menu containing many nonsensical options.\nAt first it also seems impossible to save the image using that menu. However, after exploring the context menu you can find an \"easter egg\" in one of two different places (see below) which unlocks the save option. This save option gives you a different image than the one you see, which can be thought of as \"the full comic\" although the meat of the comic is actually in the interactive context menu itself. Note that \"cheating\" by disabling JavaScript and other methods that allow you to directly save the image won't get you that \"full comic\" image.\nThis comic pokes fun at how hard it can be to save an image or to just navigate context menus in some computer programs. The \"easter egg hunt\" might be related to the fact the comic was released during Easter (which fell on April fool's in 2018). It might also be related to the movie \"Ready Player One\" which was recently released when the comic was released. In the movie, based on the book by Cline, finding an \"easter egg\" in a VR world was a central plot point.\nThe title is reminiscent of one of the first interactive comics 1110: Click and Drag , where the title explains what the user should do to experience it. However, that was not a fools' day comic.\nThe comic uses JavaScript and HTML5 to override the standard context menu. Since modern browsers use the same features to integrate Add-ons into that menu, the behavior may be different depending on the browser environment.  Browsers with JavaScript disabled, either totally or by using NoScript , won't access the functionality of the comic, but of course can easily save the image (not \"the full version\" but the image that is seen initially).\nThe manipulated context menu is described below .\n\nHere all the spells from the \"d&d\" game are detailed, including the traits you need to enter to get to them and the link they lead to\/effect they create.\nTo get to a specific spell using this table you need to go to games->d&d->cast and then enter the traits - level, class, school, and components - in any order. Note that many spells list more than one class in the table (in d&d it means multiple classes can cast that spell), which means you need to choose one of those classes in the menu. Components are listed in the table as V for Verbal Components, S for Somatic Components and M for Material Components - choose \"yes\" or \"no\" for these based on whether the matching letter is there or not.\nThe vast majority of spells (285 of them apparently) are actually links to xkcd comics, what ifs, or external pages that somehow demonstrate or relate to the spell.\nThese 9 spells all appear with an arrow and open submenus when hovered on. The submenus are all actually from different parts of the context menu. Several of the spells are \"teleportation\/transportation\" related which might explain why they lead you to a different place in the menu.\nThese 10 spells activate different JavaScript functions that affect the page in various ways, permanent or temporary, that are suggestive of the spell that was cast.\n[Empty frame with Cueball standing slightly right of center.]\n[Caption below the frame:] Editor's Note: Today's comic is optimized for local viewing. To see the full version, just save a copy of the image!\n\n\n"}
{"id":1976,"title":"Friendly Questions","image_title":"Friendly Questions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1976","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/friendly_questions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1976:_Friendly_Questions","transcript":"[Cueball and Hairy meet each other.] Cueball: Hey! Hairy: Oh, hi!\n[Cueball looks down at a sticky note in his hand.]\n[The yellow sticky note reads:] Normal human conversation 1. Ask them about themselves\n[Cueball looks at Hairy.] Cueball: How many...apples...have you eaten? Hairy: ...Like, in my life? Cueball: Yes. Hairy: ... Cueball: ...I should go. Hairy: OK.\n","explanation":"A common theme in xkcd is social awkwardness . Oftentimes Cueball \/ Randall will grossly overthink casual social interactions, such as small talk.\nIn this comic, Cueball has prepared a note to himself, preparing for the said small talk with Hairy , but it ultimately backfires. This is very similar to the comic 1961: Interaction which came out just 5 weeks before this one. And a similar interaction between Cueball and Hairy occurs in 1917: How to Make Friends from less than half a year before this comic.\nIn this comic, Cueball has prepared for a conversation with Hairy, by writing an instructional note for himself. The note tells him to start the conversation by asking some questions about the other person. In theory, this is perfectly good conversational advice; unfortunately, Cueball's understanding of social interactions is so abstract that he actually has no idea what questions to ask. He hastily improvises a question about the number of apples Hairy has eaten in his lifetime, which, although it does meet the criteria suggested by the note, is not a particularly interesting or meaningful question to ask someone. Cueball realizes from Hairy's reaction that he has made a mistake, and decides to abort the interaction.\nNormally, one would ask questions such as \"How are you?\" or \"What have you been up to lately?\", instead of asking random facts of someone else's life, such as \"How many apples have you eaten in your life?\" [ citation needed ]\nThe title text continues to show the flaws in Cueball's approach to social interaction, which is very systematic: he seems to trying to create some kind of reproducible methodology that he can follow in order to carry out a conversation, unaware that conversations tend to be spontaneous and do not follow rigidly defined rules. Additionally, one of the main points of conversation is to gain some understanding of the other person; by focusing on the conversation itself , Cueball is denying the very purpose of the interaction.\nA slight side-joke is the list being numbered despite only containing one item, although this could imply that Cueball has other notes that he would have continued to refer to if the first one produced a successful result.\nThe advice to \"Ask them about themselves\", specifically noted as the \"first thing\" after introducing yourself, was promoted to overcome society anxiety in the Periscope -based videocast of Scott Adams , creator of the Dilbert comic strip (see audio-only podcast [1] ).  Given Randall's personality and previous professional vocation (working with nerds at NASA and in academia), it is highly likely he would be a fan of the strip and also the creator's related works such as Adams's blog, Twitter feed, and the like.  The real coincidence is the videocast in question likely occurred just a day before this comic was published ; the audio was published the same day as the comic and usually delays the video by a day.\n[Cueball and Hairy meet each other.] Cueball: Hey! Hairy: Oh, hi!\n[Cueball looks down at a sticky note in his hand.]\n[The yellow sticky note reads:] Normal human conversation 1. Ask them about themselves\n[Cueball looks at Hairy.] Cueball: How many...apples...have you eaten? Hairy: ...Like, in my life? Cueball: Yes. Hairy: ... Cueball: ...I should go. Hairy: OK.\n"}
{"id":1977,"title":"Paperwork","image_title":"Paperwork","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1977","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/paperwork.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1977:_Paperwork","transcript":"[Cueball holds his smartphone in both hands and takes a picture of his desk which has several sheets of paper (with unreadable text) lying around on it, hanging out over the edge of the table and also on top of his laptop standing on it. A more than half empty glass of water stands behind the laptop. The shutter sound is shown with small dots around it to indicate the picture is just being taken now.] Phone: Click\n[A smaller frame is inside the main frame to the right. It shows Cueball now typing on his phone. Above the frame a \"speech\" box goes outside the smaller frame but points with a jagged arrow towards the phone. Inside this box Cueball's message is displayed. At the bottom two typical social media buttons are shown, the left of them is grayed out, with gray text inside a thin gray line, the right button has dark text on a dark gray background with a solid black line around, probably to indicate that Cueball has pushed this right button at this very moment.] Ugh, check out how much tax paperwork I have to do. Cancel Post\n[Caption below the panel:] I've accidentally discovered the world's most efficient way to leak personal information.\n","explanation":"Cueball is complaining on social media about how much tax paperwork he has to do. He posts a picture of all his tax documents to share how much work he had to do before Tax Day . At first this just seems like an innocuous and generic thing people post on social media, but then the caption gives us a sobering reminder (and punchline): Tax documents contain many specific and important personal information in a very small area, like your social security number, address, income etc, and Cueball has just posted all of them for identity thieves to just stumble upon.\nIt is generally a bad idea to give out personal information like this to anyone, especially people online as this data can be used in many forms of fraud, by people pretending to be you or even using your login to gain access to your bank or other private matters. A picture of this information-dense tax return is the \"most efficient\" way to leak this critical data short of sending out the actual return.\nLots of people take photos of themselves, others, and objects around them, and post them in public and semi-public places, often without fully thinking about the kinds of personal information they might be accidentally including.  Even if they do examine the photo for personal information and conclude the photo is safe to post, information they think is innocuous might end up being meaningful to someone else, possibly in combination with other public information they might have gathered about a person.\nOne example of a photo revealing more than was expected is when the Washington Post posted a picture of the TSA master keys .  The photo was detailed enough that people were able to create and 3D print their own working keys.\nThe title text further adds to the issues. First, it explains the picture was geotagged , which means anyone could easily find Cueball's home. Next, it also says his password manager was on his laptop screen, unlocked and presumably showing many of his passwords, usernames, and other information needed to log in to his accounts (such as email, banking sites, social media sites, etc.), thus allowing anyone to easily get in.  Finally, the title text suggests Cueball's naked body was reflected off the laptop screen, and inadvertently included in the picture. Thus the people wishing to use his information can now potentially blackmail him with this nude picture as well on top of anything else.\nWith xkcd's stick figures it's usually impossible to tell if they are clothed or naked, but now that we know Cueball is naked in this one it may make this strip NSFW . Thus consider yourself warned.  The nakedness of xkcd stick figures have been mentioned before \u2013 for instance, in the third strip of 566: Matrix Revisited , and in 864: Flying Cars where Megan is pictured topless.\nHaving a picture of oneself naked on the internet, without your own intent or consent, is also generally a bad idea. Many young people (kids) find out when they send a nude picture to a boyfriend\/girlfriend over Snapchat that it can be screenshotted. This prevents it from being removed later. And if\/when they then fall out of love it might be shared online. Although illegal, this happens often, and causes harm to both the victim (who has been humilated online) and the offender (who can be jailed for this; it is considered child pornography if the nude person is underage).\nBoth the United States and the United Kingdom have important tax-related deadlines in April, the month this comic was released. In the United States, the 2018 Tax Day fell on April 17, and in the United Kingdom April 6 is the start of the tax year .\nTaxes were also the topic of the comic 1971: Personal Data which was released just two weeks before this comic.\n[Cueball holds his smartphone in both hands and takes a picture of his desk which has several sheets of paper (with unreadable text) lying around on it, hanging out over the edge of the table and also on top of his laptop standing on it. A more than half empty glass of water stands behind the laptop. The shutter sound is shown with small dots around it to indicate the picture is just being taken now.] Phone: Click\n[A smaller frame is inside the main frame to the right. It shows Cueball now typing on his phone. Above the frame a \"speech\" box goes outside the smaller frame but points with a jagged arrow towards the phone. Inside this box Cueball's message is displayed. At the bottom two typical social media buttons are shown, the left of them is grayed out, with gray text inside a thin gray line, the right button has dark text on a dark gray background with a solid black line around, probably to indicate that Cueball has pushed this right button at this very moment.] Ugh, check out how much tax paperwork I have to do. Cancel Post\n[Caption below the panel:] I've accidentally discovered the world's most efficient way to leak personal information.\n"}
{"id":1978,"title":"Congressional Testimony","image_title":"Congressional Testimony","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1978","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/congressional_testimony.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1978:_Congressional_Testimony","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball sitting against a leafless tree; they are on opposite sides.] Megan: Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before Congress this week. Cueball: Should be interesting.\n[Beat panel.]\nMegan: I recently re-watched Terminator . Cueball: Yeah?\nMegan: It's weird that the thing that evolved into Skynet wasn't our nuclear launch systems or our humanoid robots. Megan: It was the phone book where the Terminator looked up Sarah Connor's address. Cueball: Funny how things turn out.\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are discussing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's upcoming testimony before Congress . The prepared testimony was released on the day this comic was released--see Congress releases Mark Zuckerberg's prepared testimony ahead of Wednesday's hearing . Facebook is facing questions on the Facebook\u2013Cambridge Analytica data scandal involving the collection of personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users by the political targeting firm Cambridge Analytica.\nMegan then starts talking about re-watching The Terminator , a movie about a killer robot called \"the Terminator\" sent back in time by Skynet , a computer system that became self-aware (AI) and tried to kill off humans. The Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger , was sent back to try to kill the mother of the leader of the resistance before he was born. In the movie, the Terminator looked up the mother's name, Sarah Connor, in the phone book of a phone booth to find her address.\nMegan notices how strangely things have turned out in the real world. In the movie it was a nuclear launch system that turned on humans, building humanoid robots to hunt humans down; today, despite the fact that we have computer-controlled nuclear launch systems as well as humanoid robots, it was rather the modern version of said phone book that became our version of Skynet (Facebook). The computer program that tracks our information in a manner similar to a phone book was responsible for doing harm to its users by selling their information (and now it could be said to harm the people who created it, as well, since Zuckerberg is on trial). Cueball can only agree with her how funny things always turn out in retrospect.\nThe title text makes the claim that James Cameron , who directed the first two films, was planning to make a third movie in the 1990s, which would have been the really prophetic one (i.e. the one that would have mirrored our present day most closely). Therefore, Skynet, having seen the result of this movie, wished to prevent the movie from ever being made, sending yet another robot back in time to prevent Cameron from directing it. Instead, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was released in 2003 and directed by Jonathan Mostow . Although Cameron is credited for writing it, he only created the characters. Since then three other movies have been made, all with different directors.\n[Megan and Cueball sitting against a leafless tree; they are on opposite sides.] Megan: Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before Congress this week. Cueball: Should be interesting.\n[Beat panel.]\nMegan: I recently re-watched Terminator . Cueball: Yeah?\nMegan: It's weird that the thing that evolved into Skynet wasn't our nuclear launch systems or our humanoid robots. Megan: It was the phone book where the Terminator looked up Sarah Connor's address. Cueball: Funny how things turn out.\n"}
{"id":1979,"title":"History","image_title":"History","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1979","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/history.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1979:_History","transcript":"[In a small panel top left, Cueball walks up to Megan who is sitting on an office chair holding a tablet showing a screen full of (to the reader) unreadable text.] Megan: I read this article in an old newspaper, and I can't stop thinking about it.\n[Below is a large panel twice as wide as the first, and much longer. It contains the newspaper clip that Megan talks about. Three sections of the text is in normal black font, the rest is in gray font:] The public events of the last three months are of the class which will go into its permanent history. We have been living in an atmosphere of history which will be immortally preserved. Even the brief series of important dates to be collated for the use of the schoolboys of centuries hence will contain the day of the assassination, and the day of the death of President Garfield.\nThe intermediate events co-related, like the defeat of Roscoe Conkling, will be of great interest, but will scarcely be likely to stand prominently out from the page of history written in 1881. To us who have been the witnesses, so to speak, of the tragic incidents of the times, it seems entirely probable that future generations will eagerly scan every feature of the recent bereavement which the nation has suffered.\nHow accurately will future generations know the immense volume of grief and sorrow which has rolled over the land? Will those who come after us ever be able to understand the extent of our loss? Is there anything in the first century of our history\u2014even the death of the great Lincoln\u2014which can be used as a parallel?\nPerhaps a careful reading of the daily papers of the present. period may give some future antiquarian a fine idea of the feelings of the nation during the past summer. But these journals are so large, so full of detail, that we imagine the coming American will never find time to read the record. He must depend on a brief statement, meagerly compiled by some dry and tedious historian.\n\u2014The Bloomington Daily Pantagraph September 30, th 1881\n[The third and final panel is the same size as the first, below and to the right. It contains a zoom in on Cueball and Megan talking.] Cueball: Man. The past is so big . Megan: How do historians even cope? Cueball: I have no idea. Megan:  I honestly have enough trouble just with the present.\n","explanation":"This comic quotes a lengthy section of the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph's September 30, 1881 issue . The tragic event referenced throughout is the assassination of President James A. Garfield . Interestingly, the article is about how closely studied the incident will or will not be in the future. Garfield's assassination is rarely more than a quick note in a history class, leaving only the \"dry and tedious\" historians to comb through the details.\nThe writer also notes that vast quantities of accounts exist of the national grief and trauma caused by Garfield's murder, and wonders whether students in the future will bother to read those accounts to understand it, or simply let historians sum it up without conveying the vastness of the response. That fear at least did prove well-founded; most students are not aware of the fallout of the assassination, or indeed, of Garfield at all. Cueball and Megan are discomfited by the fact there exists a vast, untapped store of information that they have never read, about an event they know little to nothing about despite it apparently causing nationwide trauma. This leads to a larger point about the vastness of history, and the impossibility of learning all of it.\nThe article itself references other events that would have been in recent memory at the time of publication and draws some conclusions about which will be considered more important in the future.\nFor example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies assuming that he would easily win re-election by the state legislature--but then failed to achieve re-election due to party factions and political infighting.\nInterestingly a comparison of Google search frequency for the years 2004-2018 shows that Garfield is indeed searched for many times more often than Conkling. Conkling's failure to be re-elected by the New York state legislature, which seemed so vitally important at the time, is summarized by a brief two sentences near the bottom of Conkling's Wikipedia article and not even mentioned in the biography's summary. So the writer does appear to be correct that Conkling's re-election defeat was an episode that was of high importance as a current event that in the future was to become not much more than an obscure footnote.\nThe writer speculates that there may not be any event in American history that matches the level of grief caused by Garfield's assassination, not even that of Lincoln. Here the writer is further off the mark, because in current historical memory, the Lincoln assassination is still a towering, defining event, whereas Garfield's is, comparatively speaking, a footnote.\nThe bolded sections of the text emphasize some of the main points of the article for the modern reader and may also be another way Munroe makes the point that future readers are unlikely to have the patience to read lengthy, detailed explanations of past events. If they have time to pay attention at all, future readers will want the essence boiled down to a few major highlights.\nThe title text indicates that there is more information about the past than can be researched by the manpower of available historians at this time. For whatever reason, be it lack of funding to carry out research or lack of interested people becoming historians, the facetious solution is to just ignore events of either even or odd numbered years. This would essentially halve the amount of data to go through and the amount of time to go through it, but it would be at the detriment of our understanding of all of the context of said events. As an example World War 2 started and ended on odd years, but some of the most tide-turning battles (Fall of France, most of Stalingrad, D-Day) happened on even years.\nAlthough this format with small panels above and below a larger one has been seen before, there could be an extra joke this time, if it is seen as if there were originally five panels to the comic, but the second and fourth (the even ones) were removed.\n[In a small panel top left, Cueball walks up to Megan who is sitting on an office chair holding a tablet showing a screen full of (to the reader) unreadable text.] Megan: I read this article in an old newspaper, and I can't stop thinking about it.\n[Below is a large panel twice as wide as the first, and much longer. It contains the newspaper clip that Megan talks about. Three sections of the text is in normal black font, the rest is in gray font:] The public events of the last three months are of the class which will go into its permanent history. We have been living in an atmosphere of history which will be immortally preserved. Even the brief series of important dates to be collated for the use of the schoolboys of centuries hence will contain the day of the assassination, and the day of the death of President Garfield.\nThe intermediate events co-related, like the defeat of Roscoe Conkling, will be of great interest, but will scarcely be likely to stand prominently out from the page of history written in 1881. To us who have been the witnesses, so to speak, of the tragic incidents of the times, it seems entirely probable that future generations will eagerly scan every feature of the recent bereavement which the nation has suffered.\nHow accurately will future generations know the immense volume of grief and sorrow which has rolled over the land? Will those who come after us ever be able to understand the extent of our loss? Is there anything in the first century of our history\u2014even the death of the great Lincoln\u2014which can be used as a parallel?\nPerhaps a careful reading of the daily papers of the present. period may give some future antiquarian a fine idea of the feelings of the nation during the past summer. But these journals are so large, so full of detail, that we imagine the coming American will never find time to read the record. He must depend on a brief statement, meagerly compiled by some dry and tedious historian.\n\u2014The Bloomington Daily Pantagraph September 30, th 1881\n[The third and final panel is the same size as the first, below and to the right. It contains a zoom in on Cueball and Megan talking.] Cueball: Man. The past is so big . Megan: How do historians even cope? Cueball: I have no idea. Megan:  I honestly have enough trouble just with the present.\n"}
{"id":1980,"title":"Turkish Delight","image_title":"Turkish Delight","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1980","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turkish_delight.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1980:_Turkish_Delight","transcript":"[A person wearing a cap, a fur coat, and gloves sits in a sled handing over a plate with small cubic pieces on it to a small boy with dark hair standing beneath. The boy reaches one hand to the plate.] Person in the sled: Have some Turkish delight. If you betray your family, there's more where that came from.\n[The boy tastes one piece.]\n[The boy looks at that piece.]\n[The boy looks up, to the direction where the gift came from, the piece still in his hands.] Boy: Wow. Boy: This is ... not great.\n[Caption below:] The Narnia books gave me a really unrealistic impression of how good Turkish delight tastes.\n","explanation":"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a fantasy novel by British novelist C. S. Lewis , the first published and best known of seven novels in The Chronicles of Narnia . In it, a group of four sibling children discover another world called Narnia. At the beginning of the story, the land is in a perpetual winter caused by the White Witch (the antagonist of the story). One of the children, Edmund Pevensie , is approached by the White Witch and offered Turkish delight , a type of confection, in exchange for leading the other children to her.  What the book says and what the movie leaves out is he doesn't know the sweets are enchanted by the White Witch to make the eater want them the more they eat them.  Not a full mind control, but more of a strong urge to get more.\nTurkish delight is very different from typical confections found in the modern Western world and isn't very popular in the United States. The primary flavoring agent of Turkish Delights, rosewater, has a strong perfume-like taste and is generally considered an acquired taste for western palates. Randall , who has made comics about being unimpressed by food in the past, comments that he was very disappointed when he tried Turkish delight, especially after having read in the novel about how delicious the characters considered it. If he were in Edmund's shoes, he would not have been persuaded.\nIt is not uncommon for present-day Narnia fans to be disappointed when they try Turkish delight , as different as it is to modern confections. However, in the late Victorian era when Lewis grew up, Turkish delight was very popular in England .  Because it was nearly impossible for local confectioners to make properly, it had to be imported from Turkey, at great expense, making it a status symbol for the wealthy and a rare treat for those with less money. When Lewis wanted to come up with the perfect temptation for Edmund, he drew on his own childhood memories of a favorite rare and expensive treat--which would have been even harder to come by because of sugar rationing during World War II , when the story was set. It also serves to emphasize how powerful the White Witch is for her to be able to offer such an expensive and hard-to-obtain treat so easily.\nCinnabon (referenced in the title text) is a popular chain restaurant in the USA which serves mostly cinnamon buns covered in a thick, sugary glaze. The chain is not well known in Britain, but has recently opened a few restaurants , mainly in the London area. (A more common UK equivalent of the cinnamon bun is the Chelsea bun .) There are presumably no branches of Cinnabon in Narnia. [ citation needed ] Randall is saying that he finds cinnamon buns delicious, to the point where he would betray anyone for them. It should be noted that, in the books, it was Edmund who requested the Turkish Delight. Thus, had it been Randall instead of Edmund, he very well could have requested cinnabons.\n[A person wearing a cap, a fur coat, and gloves sits in a sled handing over a plate with small cubic pieces on it to a small boy with dark hair standing beneath. The boy reaches one hand to the plate.] Person in the sled: Have some Turkish delight. If you betray your family, there's more where that came from.\n[The boy tastes one piece.]\n[The boy looks at that piece.]\n[The boy looks up, to the direction where the gift came from, the piece still in his hands.] Boy: Wow. Boy: This is ... not great.\n[Caption below:] The Narnia books gave me a really unrealistic impression of how good Turkish delight tastes.\n"}
{"id":1981,"title":"Rickrolling Anniversary","image_title":"Rickrolling Anniversary","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1981","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rickrolling_anniversary.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1981:_Rickrolling_Anniversary","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are walking.] Cueball: This month marks ten years since the peak of the Rickrolling phenomenon.\n[In a frame-less panel they keep walking.] Megan: Seriously? Megan: Wow. Happy anniversary, I guess.\n[They keep walking silently, beat panel.]\n[And they walk on.] Cueball: We've known each other for so long. Megan: We really have.\n","explanation":"Cueball tells Megan that by the release of this comic in April 2018 it is the 10th anniversary of the peak of rickrolling , and she is amazed that this has been so long ago. She then expresses a half-hearted happy anniversary wish, though it's not clear whether the anniversary she is congratulating is the phenomena itself having reached 10 years, or if she and Cueball met 10 years ago, coinciding with the height of the popularity of rickrolling, and this is reminding her to wish him a happy anniversary. After a beat panel Cueball concludes \"We've known each other for so long\", which is both a poetic affirmation of his friendship with Megan, and a line from the song \" Never Gonna Give You Up ,\" the hit song by Rick Astley on which rickrolling is based.\nThe first reference to rickrolling in xkcd was in 351: Trolling from 2007, where Astley himself was Rickrolled by Black Hat . Black Hat then later uses Astley to show his girlfriend Danish how Rick rolls in 524: Party , a New Year party from the end of 2008.\nRickrolling had first started in 2007, but reached a peak in about April 2008 when, as an April fool's day prank, Youtube linked all its featured videos to Never Gonna Give You Up , and the New York Mets were Rickrolled by a public vote to choose a song for the 8th innings sing-song. This coincided with a sharp peak in searches for \"Rick Astley\" and related terms.\nThe title text refers to another old xkcd meme of giving snippets of information to the reader that make them feel old . Although comics such as 218: Nintendo Surgeon in 2007 refer to facts that could make you feel old, the first comic directly build around factoids to make one feel old in xkcd was 891: Movie Ages in April 2011. This was 7 years before the time of publishing. The Bush Kerry election was in November 2004, 6\u00bd years before that comic, making the title text statement that the beginning of this meme is closer to that election that today. This is the way most of these make you feel old comics are built.\n[Cueball and Megan are walking.] Cueball: This month marks ten years since the peak of the Rickrolling phenomenon.\n[In a frame-less panel they keep walking.] Megan: Seriously? Megan: Wow. Happy anniversary, I guess.\n[They keep walking silently, beat panel.]\n[And they walk on.] Cueball: We've known each other for so long. Megan: We really have.\n"}
{"id":1982,"title":"Evangelism","image_title":"Evangelism","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1982","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/evangelism.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1982:_Evangelism","transcript":"[A chart is shown with a line drawn from left to right with five markers on it. Each marker has a line going to it from a labeled below the main line. Above this there is a title and right below that a label above an arrow pointing to the right.] People by intensity of evangelism More intense\nReligious proselytizers People who want the US to switch to metric People who want the US to switch to metric but keep Fahrenheit People who threw away their socks and bought all one kind People who open bananas from the other end\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall presents a line plot where causes are listed, in increasing order, by the intensity of the evangelism of their advocates. Evangelism , in Christianity , is the commitment to or act of publicly preaching of the Gospel with the intention of spreading the message and teachings of Jesus Christ. \u201cEvangelism\u201d is also defined as any zealous advocacy for a cause, religious or not.\nThe first punchline is that religious proselytizers are unexpectedly much less intense than advocates for such things as opening bananas from the other end\u2014which is also the subject of the title text. The comic\u2019s release date on April 18th, is likely correlated with this days assignment as the official \u201cBanana Day\u201d in the US. (However, at the time of release of this comic, this day was not mentioned on the Wikipedia list of food days in the US ).\nAs the graph moves from left to right, the issues at stake have less and less impact on the life of someone who \u201cconverts\u201d, but the intensity and fervor of those spreading the cause increases. This is counterintuitive, which is the joke.\nBelow, each of the points on the chart, as well as the title text, is discussed.\nReligious proselytizers\nReligious proselytizers are the best known evangelists, and the term \u201cevangelism\u201d originally applied only to them. Christian faith remains roughly as popular as ever, but Christian evangelism has become less common and less accepted in the public sphere in recent decades, and often only practiced in specific venues. Randall contrasts them in this strip with four other groups which he finds to be more intense in their \u201cevangelism\u201d.\nPeople who want the US to switch to metric\nUnlike most of the world, the US uses US Customary units instead of metric units . The vast majority of the world population (and even some within the US) wish for the US to change, to the point that the US Congress already passed the Metric Conversion Act that U.S. President Gerald Ford signed into law on December 23, 1975. Though the US now uses SI units in many areas, especially professionally, most Americans deal more with US Customary units in their day-to-day lives.\nRandall has made a conversion chart for helping US people with the confusing metric units: 526: Converting to Metric .\nPeople who want the US to switch to metric but keep Fahrenheit\nPro-metric people who wish to keep the Fahrenheit scale rather than change to Celsius are ranked as slightly more evangelic. A common argument for keeping the Fahrenheit scale is due to 0\u00b0F equating to \u201creally cold\u201d and 100\u00b0F to \u201creally hot\u201d when talking about weather. Fahrenheit also has smaller degrees than Celsius, so temperatures can be cited more precisely, if necessary, without the need to include fractional degrees. This also gives Fahrenheit the advantage that \u201cdecades\u201d of temperatures are more useful as in saying the weather is in the 40s or the 70s, for instance. Because the Celsius degree is larger, the range of temperatures within any decade is wider and saying the temperature is in the 10s may not be as useful as it is a wider range of temperatures, compared to Fahrenheit.\nTo many people, making the shift only partially may immediately seem very silly\u2014and yet the people arguing for this are even more ardent than those that wish to shift entirely, perhaps precisely because of this immediate strangeness. Also, if someone is being an SI purist, supporting a full shift to SI units, one could argue they should be advocating a switch to Kelvin as the unit of thermodynamic temperature, even though Celsius has the status of an SI derived unit .\nFahrenheit versus Celsius has been the topic of 1643: Degrees and 1923: Felsius .\nPeople who threw away their socks and bought all one kind\nThe reason to do such a thing would be that any two socks in your drawer will match, saving time since they don't need to be matched or rolled\/folded. It also reduces the likelihood of ending up with an unmatched sock\u2014or a whole stack of them\u2014in your drawer. This is a problem that scientists have researched .\nTo ordinary people, it immediately seems quite aesthetically boring to always wear the same color of socks or other clothing. But it will be easier to find matching socks, so time is saved and there will be reduction in cost as no unmatched socks will have to be discarded. For those reasons, people that do this will recommend it quite ardently to all their friends, and, at least according to the comic, even more so than the pro-metric advocates.\nRandall previously referenced this idea in the xkcd survey (see 1572: xkcd Survey ) from September 2015. It included this question:\nPeople who open bananas from the other end\nThe most evangelic people Randall includes are the people who open bananas from the \"other\" end. Some people prefer to open bananas from the calyx end instead of the stem end. This thought is continued in the title text.\nTitle text\nThe title text describes a fictional argument that apparently somehow tore apart Europe between the two factions Other primates open them from the small end and But the little bit of banana at the small end is gross . It continues the most evangelic point in the chart about how bananas are supposed to be opened from the \u201cright\u201d end. It seems absurd that this could have actually happened, over such a trivial issue. However, major schisms in religion, such as that between Catholicism and Protestantism (which did, in fact, split Europe) may seem similarly trivial to the non-religious.\nThe supposed argument stems [ pun intended ] from a disagreement between those that find it easier to open a banana from the bottom and those that find the small bit at the base of a banana unappetizing.\nThough primates do not eat bananas in the wild , in captivity, some have been observed to open bananas from the bottom end away from the stem, as one of the two factions refers to. Less force is required to open a banana at the bottom than at the stem, causing less bruising of the fruit and generally making it easier to open. However, if not done carefully, this can result in the fruit getting squished and making a mess on the person\u2019s fingers. Opening bananas from the stem end appears to be the predominant habit of most banana-eating humans (in Randall\u2019s sample). One explanation is that using the stem as a lever makes for greater ease of opening and thus less damage in practice.  (Bananas grow with the stem at the bottom ).\nThe entire \"correct banana end\" discussion could be a reference to the wars between the Blefuscudians, who opened their eggs at the big end, and the Lilliputians, who broke their eggs at the small end, as told in Jonathan Swift\u2019s epic novel Gulliver\u2019s Travels . This in turn is the origin of the terms \"Little Endian\" and \"Big Endian\" which were much debated in circa 1980's computer architectures - which may also have been on Randall's mind.\nRandall\u2019s thoughts on the problems with opening bananas could also explain why this fruit, which many find very easy to peel and consume, is listed in the middle of the easy\/difficult scale in the 388: Fuck Grapefruit chart.\n[A chart is shown with a line drawn from left to right with five markers on it. Each marker has a line going to it from a labeled below the main line. Above this there is a title and right below that a label above an arrow pointing to the right.] People by intensity of evangelism More intense\nReligious proselytizers People who want the US to switch to metric People who want the US to switch to metric but keep Fahrenheit People who threw away their socks and bought all one kind People who open bananas from the other end\n"}
{"id":1983,"title":"Clutter","image_title":"Clutter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1983","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/clutter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1983:_Clutter","transcript":"[There is a panel containing a line graph. The x- and y-axes are labeled \"time\" and \"amount of stuff in my house\" respectively.] [The y-value generally increases straight-line as x increases. There are a few labeled exceptions where the y-value decreases slightly but instantly increases again. From left to right:] \"I need to clean up.\" \"I've really let junk build up. Feels good to clear it out.\" \"I hate moving, but at least it's a chance to finally get rid of all this excess stuff.\" \"Ah, spring cleaning!\"\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm starting to worry about my strategy for dealing with clutter.\n","explanation":"As the graph shows, the amount of junk sitting around Randall 's house is on an ever-increasing trend. Thus, it will continue to pile up and cause problems.\nRandall cleans up sometimes, thinking that he is returning to the same baseline amount of stuff each time, but it is not actually effective enough to keep up with the cluttering trend, and hence his worry.\nThe four places on the graph where the amount of stuff decreases reference common times when people clean up and get rid of junk or excess stuff.  This includes:\nAlthough not mentioned in the quotes, it is also common in the United States to clean up and donate items (for instance to Goodwill) on December 31st, right before the New Year, to gain the charitable donation benefit on their taxes for that year.\nThe title text refers to the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo . The main concept of the book is that one should gather all belongings and only retain items that \"spark joy\". Ironically, the thought of reading the book didn't spark joy for Randall so he decided to donate it.  Thus, one of the few things that he did get rid of was something that if he had kept and put into practice could have helped him actually reduce his clutter.\n[There is a panel containing a line graph. The x- and y-axes are labeled \"time\" and \"amount of stuff in my house\" respectively.] [The y-value generally increases straight-line as x increases. There are a few labeled exceptions where the y-value decreases slightly but instantly increases again. From left to right:] \"I need to clean up.\" \"I've really let junk build up. Feels good to clear it out.\" \"I hate moving, but at least it's a chance to finally get rid of all this excess stuff.\" \"Ah, spring cleaning!\"\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm starting to worry about my strategy for dealing with clutter.\n"}
{"id":1984,"title":"Misinterpretation","image_title":"Misinterpretation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1984","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/misinterpretation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1984:_Misinterpretation","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk in front of a laptop with his hands raised above the keyboard. An off-panel person replies to his remarks.] Cueball: Ugh, people are mad at me again because they don't read carefully. Cueball: I'm being perfectly clear. It's not my fault if everyone misinterprets what I say. Off-panel person: Wow, sounds like you're great at communicating, an activity that famously involves just one person.\n","explanation":"Cueball is complaining that people are mad at him again because of a misinterpretation of his statements. This is referenced by the comic's title. He complains that since (he believes) he is being perfectly clear, it cannot be his fault that everyone misinterprets him. The off-screen voice sarcastically agrees that communication is an activity that only involves one person; in fact, of course, it famously involves at least two .\nCueball speaks as though his communications are complete and perfect once he has finished making them. The reality is that communication can't be considered complete until the message has also been received and understood. Cueball is failing to take into account the need for partnership between sender and receiver, and doesn't realise that the problem may well be in the way he carries out his side of the transaction rather than in the way everybody else is carrying out theirs.\nIn the title text, Cueball then answers that he cannot possibly account for the many possible interpretations which the message, potentially reaching the whole world, could acquire. This is an example of the Nirvana fallacy . Cueball's idealized solution is to consider how every person on Earth would interpret the message, so Cueball rejects doing anything less as insufficient; however, actually figuring out how every person on Earth would interpret the message is unfeasible, so Cueball doesn't do that either. The reply comes once again sarcastically, deriding his point and saying that a middle ground between taking up such an effort and entirely avoiding it must be reached.\nThis avoidance is phrased using a simile as \u201ccovering your eyes and ears and yelling logically correct statements into the void\u201d, implying that no one would understand the logical sentences (thus the void), and would instead read them more naturally \u2013 and also that ignoring the appalled reaction of listeners to their own interpretation of the sentences is similar to covering your eyes and ears. This action makes communication more difficult through the popular [ citation needed ] means of speech, text and sign language. If the hands are occupied with covering either part, then Braille communication is also impossible. Therefore, the action of \u201ccovering your eyes and ears\u201d is a metaphor for deliberately making it more difficult to communicate with oneself. The simile might also mean that Cueball subconsciously rejects criticism as it would hurt his ego.\nIt is clear that Cueball is acting as a straw man to further Randall's point, and the off-panel character is portrayed as the (sarcastic) voice of reason.\nRandall returns to a recurring theme in his comics, regarding, in contexts of communication, the responsibility of the speaker for how they are interpreted. Having gradually gotten less subtle, this theme is now laid bare, there being no joke other than the sarcasm. What follows is a chronological history of this theme.\nThis theme is part of the larger category of comics about social interactions .\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk in front of a laptop with his hands raised above the keyboard. An off-panel person replies to his remarks.] Cueball: Ugh, people are mad at me again because they don't read carefully. Cueball: I'm being perfectly clear. It's not my fault if everyone misinterprets what I say. Off-panel person: Wow, sounds like you're great at communicating, an activity that famously involves just one person.\n"}
{"id":1985,"title":"Meteorologist","image_title":"Meteorologist","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1985","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meteorologist.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1985:_Meteorologist","transcript":"[Cueball is presenting a weather forecast while seated with his folded hands resting on a table. A graphic to the left of Cueball shows the weather for five consecutive hours from 12pm to 4pm, each with a rainy cloud icon and the same percentage of 20% written below the icon. The TV channel's logo is shown on the bottom left, with the 4 in a white font inside a black circle.] Cueball: Our forecast says there's a 20% chance of rain for each of the next five hours. Cueball: How likely is it to rain this afternoon? It's a simple question, but I don't know the answer. Is each hour independent? Correlated? Or is rain guaranteed and we're just unsure of the timing?\n12pm\u00a0 1pm\u00a0 2pm\u00a0 3pm\u00a0 4pm 20%\u00a0 20%\u00a0 20%\u00a0 20%\u00a0 20% News 4 Weather\n[Cueball still sits at the table, but the weather graphic is gone and he looks to the right.] Cueball: It says \"scattered showers.\" Is this the chance of rain somewhere in your area? How big is your area? What if you have two locations you're worried about? Cueball: I've asked management, but they've stopped answering my emails, so\u2014Hang on, the security guy is coming over.\n[A black screen is shown with white text and two short white lines between each of the three segments of text. The TV logo is shown below the last text, with the white 4 inside a gray circle with a white border.] Technical Difficulties \u2014 We apologize for hiring a meteorologist with a pure math background. \u2014 We'll be back on the air shortly. News 4\n[Blondie now sits at the desk, in the same position as Cueball, but without the graphic. She looks to the right towards a person who speaks to her from outside the panel. This voice is indicated with two square speech bubbles, connected with a double line and with a small arrow pointing to the right off-panel from the top bubble.] Blondie: Sorry about that. Hi, I'm your new meteorologist. Person off-panel: And you're not a mathematician, right? Blondie: No. I do have a linguistics degree. Person off-panel: That's fine.\n[Blondie continues in the same position but now looks into the camera at the viewers. The off-panel person only speaks one word, which again is inside a square speech bubble with a small arrow pointing to the right off-panel.] Blondie: It might rain this afternoon. Blondie: But what is \"it\" here? Is it a true dummy pronoun, as in the phrase \"It's too bad?\" Or is the weather an entity? Blondie: Also, what if I say, \"It's hot out, and getting bigger?\" Person off-panel: Security!\n","explanation":"Although we\u2019re constantly exposed to them, many (most?) people don\u2019t understand the details of how to properly interpret weather forecasts. But even beyond the normal questions, there can be much more complex issues hiding beyond those (though most people will not care for those). This comic takes this to the ridiculous extreme of the weather reporters coming from some other profession where you look into those questions. It shows questions asked by three different people with different backgrounds: mathematics , linguistics , and (in the title text) software development . While some of those questions have actual answers (which you'd expect someone working in that job to know, such as the definition of \"scattered showers\" and how it's determined, what a \"chance of rain\" means, and so on), each professional finally ends up with questions that are almost disturbing in how they cannot be answered. (So management ends up calling security to remove those announcers.)\nIt should be pointed out that hiring someone without any meteorological training to read the weather does not make them an actual meteorologist, no more than say hiring a bricklayer as a doctor would actually make them a real doctor.\nThe first meteorologist, Cueball , has a background in pure math. His forecast states that each of the next five hours has a 20% chance of rain. As a mathematician he sees how limited that information is. There is no information about whether or how those probabilities are correlated . This becomes obvious if you ask the question \"How likely is it to rain this afternoon\" (a question even some non-mathematicians might be interested in). Cueball states that he does not know (as no one only getting the information about 20% rain in each hour can know). And then lists some scenarios that all fit the the description, but have totally different results for \"How likely is it to rain this afternoon?\"\nThe first thing a mathematician would ask (and Cueball does here) is asking if those 5 events are independent . Events are independent if the outcome of one of them is unrelated to the outcome out of the others, i.e. knowing whether it rained at 3\u00a0pm has no effect on whether it rains at 4\u00a0pm, in which case the probability of any rain over the 5 hours is 1\u00a0\u2212\u00a0(1\u00a0\u2212\u00a00.2) 5 = 67.2%. (Rain is very seldom independent, as usually having rain in one hour increases the chance to rain in another hour, as systems of rainy weather usually persist for many hours). Another common extreme in probability theory is a set of mutually exclusive events. In this example that would be the scenario that the chance of rain is 5\u00a0\u00d7\u00a020% = 100%, but it will only rain in exactly one hour and not rain at all for the other four. (Also possible but quite unlikely). This is what the mathematician was referring to by, \"Is rain guaranteed and we're just unsure of the timing?\"\nIn the second panel he continues to discuss what scattered showers means. Like most of the other weather terms in this comic, the term \"scattered showers\" is one whose technical definition is largely unknown but appears simple enough that most people would assume they understand what it means. \"Scattered\" refers to when the rain covers roughly 30\u201350% of the area at a given moment. To somebody who doesn't know this, like the first meteorologist, there's still the very valid question of how likely it is to rain in a specific spot (is it 30\u201350% of the total probability, or is it more than that because showers move and sweep out a larger area?), and how this is affected by the previous chance of rain. Not to mention, the percentage that defines \"scattered showers\" implicitly assumes a surface area that is accounted into the percent. Cueball rightly asks clarification on how large the location used to determine \"scattered showers\" is.\nWhile the all but the last question of the first part of the second panel can be answered by looking up their definitions, the last one is \"What if you have two locations you are worried about?\" This is an extremely complex question. Because there is no chance at all to answer this question from the answers of the previous questions or even from most other data a forecast might usually produce. To answer this you'd need the raw data from the ensemble forecast in order to specifically look at the correlation between weather at those two locations. Simply looking at the averaged result won't help.\nFinally in that panel Cueball begins to explain that he has asked the management about these things, but that they have stopped replying to his e-mails. At this point he spots the security guy coming over, and the screen goes black in to a technical difficulty screen that excuses this behavior to the viewers. It is implied that the security guy came over to force Cueball to leave the set, because he has been fired for confusing the viewers.\nQuestioning these things on air is likely confusing to the viewers, although they are all valid questions. But this may lose viewers and the news network is afraid of this. The technical difficulty panel further cements this, apologizing for hiring a person with a pure math background. Often seen as one that do not understand how to talk to regular people.\nWhen they get back on air gain a new meteorologist, Blondie , steps in. The management enquires (on air) to make sure she is not also a mathematician. She states no, but tells that she has a linguistics degree, which the management thinks is fine, and thus believes they have prevented the problem with Cueball. However, this proves to be in vain, as Blondie goes into a tangent once more but from a linguistics standpoint, rather than a mathematical one, detailing the true meaning of the word \"it\" as referring to the weather. After one panel of this the management calls for security again.\nWhile, at the most basic level, human speech is broken into subject, object, and verb; for some reason we are capable of producing and comprehending speech without both objects or verbs, but in English there is a certain \"resistance\" to speech without a subject. Thus if you are in the passenger seat of a car going down the highway and happened to see some deer in the trees nearby, you could simply say \"Deer.\", rather than \"there is a deer over there\", deer being the subject of the sentence. However, if you noticed that it had begun to rain, you could not simply say \"Raining.\" on it's own. Feel how that sentence just seems weird? Hence we have developed the tendency to use the filler word \"it\" despite the fact that when we say \"It's raining.\" the \"it\" is not a reference to the clouds producing the rain, but the general state of the rainfall around us. (McWhorter, John. Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language. https:\/\/www.thegreatcourses.com\/courses\/understanding-linguistics-the-science-of-language.html )\nThe first question is again quite harmless, and both possible answers (\"it\" being a dummy pronoun or referring to the weather) are valid answers, but the second question is much more disturbing.\nIn \"It's hot out, and getting bigger\" the first part of the sentence might be a dummy pronoun or it might reference the weather. But the second part breaks it: With a dummy pronoun \"getting bigger\" would be the impersonal action, which is not what is meant. It is referencing something (the hotness, that is getting bigger). But if the it references this entity in the second part, by grammatical rules it would also have to reference that in the first part. But \"The hotness is hot out\" makes no sense at all. (An alternative explanation is that the sentence is referring to the fact that if a dark (so as to absorb light energy from sunlight and convert it to thermal energy) object is placed outside in sunlight, it will heat up and undergo thermal expansion.)\nThis is again a common occurrence with informal speech: From a grammatical point of view, it is pure non-sense. But it still has meaning people understand. So if you want a proper descriptive grammar, it needs to cope with those cases. But then most such informal sentences would be special cases. (Case of point: What is the grammatical function of the \"out\" in that sentence?)\nIn the title text, the news station has made the same error again, this time by hiring a software developer as the third meteorologist. This last person is stating concerns about the feasibility of the time system used to correlate to the weather patterns. Because it appears simple, many people would simply assume they understand what is being said when a meteorologist talks about \"12pm\" or \"1pm\".  This is a common mistake because noon is neither post meridiem (pm) nor ante meridiem , and should be stated as \"noon\" or \"12 noon\" instead of \"12 pm.\". However, because software developers frequently have to deal with things such as specifying exactly what time-label means what, the new meteorologist begins to wonder what time period is actually meant on a per-hour forecast. On such an hour forecast does 12pm refer to the hour from 12 to 1pm, from 11:30 to 12:30 or is it actually only to the weather precisely at 12:00 that is referred to? The software developer also worries about an off-by-one error , which is a common error in software development occurring when boundary conditions include one element too few or too many: when counting by 24 once every set period (for example), it is common to forget whether the count should stop at 23 or at 24, especially if the number 0 (midnight) is included. In the 24-hour forecast, that means there's 25 hours represented every day, and the software developer worries that these 25 hours might add up and, every progressive day, the forecast is one more hour off. (If the news station's meteorology department had been around for a while, worrying about this would be absurd because if the new station tried to predict the weather one hour further into the future each day, it would eventually ask for the weather further into the future than the forecast models could supply, resulting in an error that someone would definitely notice (and it would likely be the case that long before that happened, someone would perceive the weather forecasts as being inaccurate or early). However, based on how quickly the linguist was fired, this was likely either the mathematician's first day or second day on the job, so if we assume that the mathematician was the first meteorologist (or that all previous meteorologists were fired quickly enough that the mathematician started within a few days of when the meteorology department started), there wouldn't have been enough time for the effects of an off-by-one error to stack up enough to be noticed, so the software developer's concern about an off-by-one error would not have been ruled out yet.) In theory these are valid concerns and notably less inane than his predecessors, but they are all things he should have asked before he went on the air.\nManagement would certainly answer the mathematician's questions! The questions themselves have been asked of meteorologists before. The National Weather Service (NWS), a unit of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has published relevant answers for probability of precipitation , as well as timing and the meanings of particular forecast words . The naming is also addressed here .\nRegarding probability of precipitation, NOAA forecasts give the probability that it will rain at all at any given point in an area. To rephrase it, it is the probability of rain occurring at all within a forecast area multiplied by the percentage of area affected by the rain. The \"forecast area\" is a clearly defined area of land and can be seen in the map of any official NWS forecast. Here is an example .\nRegarding the timing of the forecast, an hourly forecast gives the probability for each particular hour, stretching from the time listed to right before the next hour listed. So, the forecast for noon describes the time period from noon to 1pm. The forecasts for individual hours can be correlated; for this reason, the NOAA generates forecasts that stretch over longer time periods, giving a useful estimate for that time range. Thus, the chance of rain for \"Today\" specifically means: what is the chance of it raining at any given location during any time between 6am and 6pm?\nRegarding phrases like \"scattered showers\", this specifically means a 25-54% probability of precipitation from convective cloud sources. Other phrases, and when they are used, are detailed in the chart at the end of this PDF .\nSo, to conclude:\n[Cueball is presenting a weather forecast while seated with his folded hands resting on a table. A graphic to the left of Cueball shows the weather for five consecutive hours from 12pm to 4pm, each with a rainy cloud icon and the same percentage of 20% written below the icon. The TV channel's logo is shown on the bottom left, with the 4 in a white font inside a black circle.] Cueball: Our forecast says there's a 20% chance of rain for each of the next five hours. Cueball: How likely is it to rain this afternoon? It's a simple question, but I don't know the answer. Is each hour independent? Correlated? Or is rain guaranteed and we're just unsure of the timing?\n12pm\u00a0 1pm\u00a0 2pm\u00a0 3pm\u00a0 4pm 20%\u00a0 20%\u00a0 20%\u00a0 20%\u00a0 20% News 4 Weather\n[Cueball still sits at the table, but the weather graphic is gone and he looks to the right.] Cueball: It says \"scattered showers.\" Is this the chance of rain somewhere in your area? How big is your area? What if you have two locations you're worried about? Cueball: I've asked management, but they've stopped answering my emails, so\u2014Hang on, the security guy is coming over.\n[A black screen is shown with white text and two short white lines between each of the three segments of text. The TV logo is shown below the last text, with the white 4 inside a gray circle with a white border.] Technical Difficulties \u2014 We apologize for hiring a meteorologist with a pure math background. \u2014 We'll be back on the air shortly. News 4\n[Blondie now sits at the desk, in the same position as Cueball, but without the graphic. She looks to the right towards a person who speaks to her from outside the panel. This voice is indicated with two square speech bubbles, connected with a double line and with a small arrow pointing to the right off-panel from the top bubble.] Blondie: Sorry about that. Hi, I'm your new meteorologist. Person off-panel: And you're not a mathematician, right? Blondie: No. I do have a linguistics degree. Person off-panel: That's fine.\n[Blondie continues in the same position but now looks into the camera at the viewers. The off-panel person only speaks one word, which again is inside a square speech bubble with a small arrow pointing to the right off-panel.] Blondie: It might rain this afternoon. Blondie: But what is \"it\" here? Is it a true dummy pronoun, as in the phrase \"It's too bad?\" Or is the weather an entity? Blondie: Also, what if I say, \"It's hot out, and getting bigger?\" Person off-panel: Security!\n"}
{"id":1986,"title":"River Border","image_title":"River Border","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1986","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/river_border.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1986:_River_Border","transcript":"[Ponytail and Megan are standing on a grassy riverbank, with the nearby part of the river shown above their heads. They are looking towards the river and Ponytail is gesturing at the river with her hand.] Ponytail: This is a cool spot. Ponytail: The Missouri-Nebraska state line follows this river. If the river's path changes gradually, the border moves with it.\n[A map is shown beneath the text spoken by Ponytail (off-panel). The map includes a bendy river shown in gray which is snaking its way from the left part of the panel down to the bottom. A dotted line indicates the old path of the river. It follows the gray river most of the way, but towards the bottom, this line moves away from the current river extending to north-east, including a large chunk of land that the river used to encompass previously. Two arrows point to the gray section of the river with the dotted line, and another arrow points to the section of the dotted line not following the gray section. Both are labeled. On each side of the dotted arc, where it is farthest from the gray part of the river the state names are labeled, so the text follows the direction of the river (almost north to south here).] Ponytail (narrating): But when it abruptly changes course, the border stays behind. Ponytail (narrating): This is a spot where that happened. We're on the Missouri side, but we're in Nebraska. River Old riverbed Nebraska Missouri\n[In a frame-less panel (with no background) Ponytail has turned to look at Megan who is holding a hand to her chin.] Megan: Wow. Megan: So... Megan: We can commit all the crimes we want here and the cops can't do a thing!\n[Megan runs away from Ponytail while she is holding her arm up in the air with a finger extended up.] Ponytail: What? No. Why would you even think that? Megan: I'm going to cut a pizza into a spiral! Ponytail: That's not even illegal! Megan: Crimes!\n","explanation":"Ponytail explains to Megan that the Missouri-Nebraska state border is based on the Missouri River they are watching. And because the path of rivers mostly only changes slowly, these borders are typically adopted to that changes. But then she explains that the river once had changed abruptly by a meander cutoff and the border didn't move with it. That means that they are on a part of the Missouri side of the river that in fact belongs to Nebraska.\nIt then occurred to Megan that she could break the law in this area because she is under the mistaken impression that she is in Nebraska but the police can't reach her over the river and Missourian cops actually don't have jurisdiction. In fact, there are no bridges linking it to Nebraska so police would have to go through Missouri in order to get to that part of Nebraska.\nIt should be noted that there are real-world examples of strange border interactions that either create legal loopholes or make law enforcement difficult.  A famous example, in the US, is a section of Yellowstone National Park that crosses over the Idaho border. An article in the Georgetown Law Review noted that, since the Park is a federal district, and juries must be selected from people living in the same state and federal district as the crime, the only qualified jurors would have to live in the Idaho section of the park, but that section has no permanent residents. In theory, then, any crimes committed on this patch of land could not be prosecuted. How this would work out in real life remains questionable, as there are no records of anyone being arrested for a crime in that region, but the law seems to have inadvertently created a zone in which laws cannot be enforced.  Similarly, Bir Tawil , a region along the border between Egypt and Sudan, is claimed by neither country as a result of the Halaib Triangle border dispute, and thus crimes committed in the area would be unlikely to be prosecuted.  Megan seems to mistakenly think something similar is in effect any time a state's border briefly crosses a river.\nThe final panel shows Megan saying she's going to cut a pizza into a spiral, which while unconventional is by no means illegal, and she runs off to commit more things she calls crimes, likely similar acts to cutting a pizza in an uncommon way.\nIn the title text, Randall claims\/hypothesizes the disputed region is probably considered like the high seas , suggesting the pizza case would then fall under maritime law . \"Pieracy\" is a portmanteau of pie (another name for a pizza) and \"piracy\"; and pizzas are frequently made with marinara sauce, so \"Maritime\" law is rendered \"Marinaritime\". This is most likely a reference to The Martian , in which it was noted that Mars is technically international waters as well.\nThe region mentioned in the comic can be seen here at Google maps and is known as McKissick Island . In 1904, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in Missouri v. Nebraska that a sudden change of a river's course does not change any border. See: Missouri v. Nebraska, 196 U.S. 23 (1904) .\nThis strip is alluding to the concepts of 'accretion' and 'avulsion' in boundary law.\nAccretion is the gradual change of the location of a river or stream by erosion or addition of sediment through natural river processes. According to common law in the United States and elsewhere, if a river or stream location changes gradually, then the boundary line moves with the stream. In cases of pure accretion, it is possible for a parcel of land to be entirely eroded away on one side of a river, and have material be added to the opposite side of the river. In such cases, one property owner could lose all their land.\nAn avulsion is a sudden change in the location of a river or stream, often due to flooding. In times of flood, a river can cut a new channel through surrounding land, which can create islands and oxbow lakes. According to common law, an avulsive change will not change the boundary of the land, as it is likely that the property is unchanged except for the new channel.\nIn the real world, however, river systems undergo both accretion and avulsion multiple times over a period of time. This makes the determination of property lines along riverine boundaries one of the most complicated aspects of boundary surveying. An examination of a river boundary will require in-depth research of the local history of the river, including reviewing deeds, government survey plats, private survey maps, aerial photos taken over time, local landowners recollections, and local lore. In situations where there is disagreement over whether an avulsive or accretive change happened, landowners may have to go to court for a suit to quiet title.\nFurther in-depth reading may be found in the US Bureau of Land Management's 2009 Manual of Surveying Instructions, Chapter 8, specifically pages 197-205. (See: PDF (37.7 MByte) .)\nOften, borders defined by a river actually change. There are three methods to define a border:\nThe Mexican-US-Border that follows the Rio Grande is one of the most prominent examples of an international border that needs meticulous regulation. Thus, the International Boundary and Water Commission was created. This commission was involved when the two nations rectified the course of the river, ceding equal amounts of land to each other. The Canada-US-Border is overseen by a similar commission. There is also a strange section on the border to Canada, which Randall mentions in this comic: 1902: State Borders .\nThe border between Delaware and New Jersey veers from the median and talweg methods such that Delaware's border includes all the way to the New Jersey shore where the Delaware River is within what is known as the Twelve-Mile Circle .\nOne of the causes of the Iran-Iraq War was the dispute on shipping rights on the Shatt-el Arab river , and because the border was defined as the low water mark at the eastern side of that river, Iranian shipping was severely restricted. So the Shah of Persia announced to ignore the 1937 treaty on shipping rights, saying that most riverine borders all around the world are defined by the talweg.\nBetween Switzerland and Italy, the border is, at most locations, defined by the actual drainage divide . Because the Theodul Glacier between Zermatt (Switzerland) and Breuil-Cervinia (Italy) is slowly melting, the drainage divide moves southwards, thus slowly enlarging the Swiss territory.\nMost other national borders in Europe are defined today as fiat borders instead of following natural landmarks like rivers. If a river changes course now, the depicted situation would occur; however, most larger rivers have been rectified more than a century ago and thus don't change course often.\n[Ponytail and Megan are standing on a grassy riverbank, with the nearby part of the river shown above their heads. They are looking towards the river and Ponytail is gesturing at the river with her hand.] Ponytail: This is a cool spot. Ponytail: The Missouri-Nebraska state line follows this river. If the river's path changes gradually, the border moves with it.\n[A map is shown beneath the text spoken by Ponytail (off-panel). The map includes a bendy river shown in gray which is snaking its way from the left part of the panel down to the bottom. A dotted line indicates the old path of the river. It follows the gray river most of the way, but towards the bottom, this line moves away from the current river extending to north-east, including a large chunk of land that the river used to encompass previously. Two arrows point to the gray section of the river with the dotted line, and another arrow points to the section of the dotted line not following the gray section. Both are labeled. On each side of the dotted arc, where it is farthest from the gray part of the river the state names are labeled, so the text follows the direction of the river (almost north to south here).] Ponytail (narrating): But when it abruptly changes course, the border stays behind. Ponytail (narrating): This is a spot where that happened. We're on the Missouri side, but we're in Nebraska. River Old riverbed Nebraska Missouri\n[In a frame-less panel (with no background) Ponytail has turned to look at Megan who is holding a hand to her chin.] Megan: Wow. Megan: So... Megan: We can commit all the crimes we want here and the cops can't do a thing!\n[Megan runs away from Ponytail while she is holding her arm up in the air with a finger extended up.] Ponytail: What? No. Why would you even think that? Megan: I'm going to cut a pizza into a spiral! Ponytail: That's not even illegal! Megan: Crimes!\n"}
{"id":1987,"title":"Python Environment","image_title":"Python Environment","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1987","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/python_environment.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1987:_Python_Environment","transcript":"[A single frame depicting a flowchart is shown. Many chaotic arrows are arranged between the items which are:] $PYTHONPATH EASY_INSTALL ANACONDA PYTHON HOMEBREW PYTHON (3.6) ANOTHER PIP?? HOMEBREW PYTHON (2.7) PYTHON.ORG BINARY (2.6) PIP EASY_INSTALL $PATH (MISC FOLDERS OWNED BY ROOT) ????\n[The endpoints are:] \/usr\/local\/Cellar \/usr\/local\/opt \/(A BUNCH OF PATHS WITH \"FRAMEWORKS\" IN THEM SOMEWHERE)\/ ~\/python\/ ~\/newenv\/ \/usr\/local\/lib\/python3.6 \/usr\/local\/lib\/python2.7\n[Caption below the panel:] My Python environment has become so degraded that my laptop has been declared a superfund site.\n","explanation":"A development environment is the collection of tools used to create a computer program.  It generally includes an interpreter , a package manager , and various libraries that the project needs.  Computer programs often depend on a specific version of these tools, such as a program that only runs on Python 2.7.  A badly configured build environment can lead to mysterious errors as the program looks for libraries or features that aren't there, making it hard to develop stable and portable software.\nPython is a computer programming language which has been around for quite a while, especially on Linux platforms. Randall has shown his fascination with Python before . He has likely used it on his computer for quite a few years, from the early years when it wasn't so easy to install, through newer versions where there is a more defined way to install it. Because standards change over time (in particular, although the newest version of Python is Python 3.x, many people prefer Python 2.x, and it's still widely used for backward-compatibility), and he didn't completely uninstall old versions before installing new versions (likely to not break what was already working), he's ended up with a mess where different pieces and versions of Python and its related components litter his hard drive 's directory structure .\nSuperfund is a US federal government program created for cleaning up contaminated land. The comic is saying that his computer's Python environment is so messed up that it's comparable to a real-world environmental disaster.\nThe title text may refer to the philosophical debate surrounding the construction of warning features around the WIPP site in New Mexico, and other nuclear waste disposal sites. In particular, it may refer to this article . These would have to last and be understandable for tens of thousands of years, longer than any known human-made structure or language to date. It also refers to the use of \"sudo\", a Posix command utility that allows a user to operate with heightened permissions. Using \"sudo\" to install a Python package may make the package available to the entire system, or, based on the settings of Virtualenv\/Anaconda, it may end up installing the package in a user's home directory. This would make it so that the user could not update, edit, or remove the packages.\n$PATH $PATH refers to the PATH environment variable, which determines where to search for executable files. In this case, it indicates that the pip, Homebrew Python (2.7), and macOS's pre-installed Python are accessible on path, with ~\/newenv\/ and a mysterious\u00a0???? as part of PATH. pip pip is the Python package management system , and is used to install and manage python packages. As it is written in Python, it requires Python to run. It leads to easy_install, Homebrew Python (2.7), \"(misc folders owned by root)\", and\u00a0????. Homebrew Python (2.7) Homebrew is a third-party macOS package manager. Homebrew Python (2.7) is the Python 2 version installed through Homebrew. This leads to Python.org binary (2.6) and \/usr\/local\/Cellar. OS Python Apple bundles an (out of date) version of Python with macOS. This only leads to\u00a0????. ???? With so many versions of Python installed and used in the system, it becomes very hard to track which Python program uses which version and environment. The system becomes unpredictable and its workings and faults mysterious. All parts of the graph that lead to this point, lead to confusion. easy_install easy_install, much like pip, is a cpan-like tool to download and install Python packages.  As of the creation of the comic, many people discourage its use.  (e.g., this question on stack exchange. ) Anaconda Python Anaconda is a Python distribution for data science and machine learning-related applications. Homebrew Python (3.6) As of the creation of the comic, Python 3.6 is the current stable version of Python. It can be installed together with Python 2.7 on the same computer. Care must be taken to use an appropriate version for every Python program, however. Homebrew is a \"macos\" package management utility. Presumably, Randal installed Python 3.6 with Homebrew (as opposed to downloading and compiling the language himself). Python.org binary (2.6) Python.org is the home site of the Python language and provides its reference implementation. Among other stuff, there are downloadable installers that create ready-to-use Python environments for you (on Windows and macOS only). It makes little sense, however, to use it on a computer where Homebrew, Anaconda, and a locally compiled version are already present, since the Python.org version is the baseline one, doesn't give you any benefits, and can't be optimized for your needs. Having an obsolete 2.6 version, when the typically used 2.7 is already on the computer, also doesn't help. Some justified uses do exist (tests, programs that depend on this particular version), but in the end, an extra version of Python just adds to the overall confusion. (Misc folders owned by root) This suggests that over years Randall dropped various versions of Python environments everywhere around his computer, probably by hand without proper installers, and used root privileges to do so. The exact locations either are highly nonstandard, so it makes no sense to show them to us, or have simply been forgotten. Now it's hard to even tell where exactly those Pythons lay, what in the system depends on them, and if it's safe to remove them or not (because if installed by the root, they can integrate into unexpected places in the system; having them can break something, and removing them can break something). \/usr\/local\/Cellar The default (normal) location of the Homebrew Cellar, the directory where Homebrew actually stores the files of the installed packages. It's a storage-only location, the files, including Python, will be symlinked from other, more convenient places in the files tree, and should not be used through \/usr\/local\/Cellar path directly. It seems that Randall broke this safety rule in the past, so some stuff of his accesses Python directly in the Cellar. Such setup can break if Homebrew performs automatic maintenance in the Cellar (like removing unneeded versions of the packages). The name cellar is likely a reference to the practice of storing wines and other alcohol in cellars, intended as a pun of homebrew. \/usr\/local\/opt A folder that is usually created by Homebrew. \/(A bunch of paths with \"Frameworks\" in them somewhere)\/ Python on macOS is often distributed as a framework and placed in a \"Frameworks\" folder. For example, the system-included Python distribution in macOS resides in \/System\/Library\/Frameworks, and many package managers will also install the framework in a folder with this name. $PYTHONPATH The environment variable PYTHONPATH specifies the search path for Python modules to the Python interpreter. Having it refer to locations controlled by 3 different package managers, each of which is managing software for different versions of Python, as shown, is likely to lead to incompatible software being loaded together. Another pip?? Pip is a Recursive acronym for \"Pip Installs Packages.\" There should only be one installation of pip (or other package management system) managing any given working environment. Often, additional \"pip\" executables are installed based on the Anaconda settings for different virtual envs. This often leads to internal contradictions in the software. Randall is confused as to how this other one relates to the rest of the development environments. ~\/python\/ Might be another virtualenv, or, given the absurdity of the rest of the comic, even a manually compiled python installation (many online guides instruct users to extract sources into the home (~) directory). ~\/newenv\/ Probably a virtualenv.  Virtualenvs are mechanisms for having Python environments that don't conflict with the system Python.  They include the Python interpreter, independent library paths, and usually a copy of pip.  The user typically installs packages using the virtualenv's pip such that they can only be accessed by the virtualenv's Python instances, while more common packages are still referenced via the system Python paths. \/usr\/local\/lib\/python3.6 The default place under a Unix-like OS for the Python 3.6 standard libraries for a locally compiled Python 3.6 interpreter. \/usr\/local\/lib\/python2.7 The default place under a Unix-like OS for the Python 2.7 standard libraries for a locally compiled Python 2.7 interpreter.\n[A single frame depicting a flowchart is shown. Many chaotic arrows are arranged between the items which are:] $PYTHONPATH EASY_INSTALL ANACONDA PYTHON HOMEBREW PYTHON (3.6) ANOTHER PIP?? HOMEBREW PYTHON (2.7) PYTHON.ORG BINARY (2.6) PIP EASY_INSTALL $PATH (MISC FOLDERS OWNED BY ROOT) ????\n[The endpoints are:] \/usr\/local\/Cellar \/usr\/local\/opt \/(A BUNCH OF PATHS WITH \"FRAMEWORKS\" IN THEM SOMEWHERE)\/ ~\/python\/ ~\/newenv\/ \/usr\/local\/lib\/python3.6 \/usr\/local\/lib\/python2.7\n[Caption below the panel:] My Python environment has become so degraded that my laptop has been declared a superfund site.\n"}
{"id":1988,"title":"Containers","image_title":"Containers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1988","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/containers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1988:_Containers","transcript":"[White Hat is sitting at a laptop. Cueball is standing behind him.] White Hat: Man, Docker is being used for everything . White Hat: I don't know how I feel about it. Cueball: Story time!\n[Cueball is standing by himself.] Cueball: Once, long ago, I wanted to use an old tablet as a wall display.\n[A picture of Cueball's imagined tablet with two applications open side by side. The app on the left is \"LiveCam\". The app on the right is Google Calendar.] Cueball: I had an app and a calendar webpage that I wanted to show side by side, but the OS didn't have split-screen support. Cueball: So I decided to build my own app.\n[White Hat and Cueball as before, but White Hat has turned to face Cueball.] Cueball: I downloaded the SDK and the IDE, registered as a developer, and started reading the language's docs.\n[A picture of two smartphones glued together side by side, held on a backing board. The same two applications shown earlier are open on different phones.] Cueball: ...Then I realized it would be way easier to get two smaller phones on eBay and glue them together. Cueball: On that day, I achieved software enlightenment.\n[White Hat and Cueball still facing each other, with White Hat's arm resting on the back of the chair.] White Hat: But you never learned to write software. Cueball: No, I just learned how to glue together stuff that I don't understand. White Hat: I...OK, fair.\n","explanation":"Docker is a computer program that performs operating-system-level virtualization also known as containerization. White Hat notices that many people are using Docker for \"everything,\" implying that he does not understand what all the fuss is about. Cueball then explains the fundamental idea behind Docker with a simple story.\nHe notes how difficult it can be to combine two programs and have them work together as one. This is something all programmers can relate to. His specific example is to get two separate programs to display side-by-side on a tablet. The main joke is that Cueball's solution is a surprising twist to solving the problem. Instead of writing a lot of complicated code to deal with the problem at hand, he sidesteps the problem by using two separate devices, literally gluing them together. Containerization software, like Docker, uses the same general idea but the \"glue\" and the \"multiple computers\" are done in software, instead of literally gluing two computers together.\nCueball states that he achieved \"software enlightenment\" when he \"solved\" the problem by sidestepping it.\nWhite Hat's initial confusion comes from the fact that Cueball did not write any software, yet achieved \"software enlightenment.\" A good programmer doesn't necessarily need to be able to write programs or even understand how they work, provided that they have the skills needed to combine existing programs to solve tasks. An alternate interpretation is that someone with little programming experience is able to create a working program simply by copy\/pasting code snippets from a coding site such as Stack\u00a0Overflow and \"gluing\" them together without really understanding how they work.\nThe title text makes a joke about developers writing code for use in a containerized environment. The ideal is to only write \" microservices \" which are modules that do just one thing and do it well. The joke here is that even when a module does many different things, you can pretend it is a \"microservice\" by just ignoring all of its features but one (hopefully one that it does well).\n[White Hat is sitting at a laptop. Cueball is standing behind him.] White Hat: Man, Docker is being used for everything . White Hat: I don't know how I feel about it. Cueball: Story time!\n[Cueball is standing by himself.] Cueball: Once, long ago, I wanted to use an old tablet as a wall display.\n[A picture of Cueball's imagined tablet with two applications open side by side. The app on the left is \"LiveCam\". The app on the right is Google Calendar.] Cueball: I had an app and a calendar webpage that I wanted to show side by side, but the OS didn't have split-screen support. Cueball: So I decided to build my own app.\n[White Hat and Cueball as before, but White Hat has turned to face Cueball.] Cueball: I downloaded the SDK and the IDE, registered as a developer, and started reading the language's docs.\n[A picture of two smartphones glued together side by side, held on a backing board. The same two applications shown earlier are open on different phones.] Cueball: ...Then I realized it would be way easier to get two smaller phones on eBay and glue them together. Cueball: On that day, I achieved software enlightenment.\n[White Hat and Cueball still facing each other, with White Hat's arm resting on the back of the chair.] White Hat: But you never learned to write software. Cueball: No, I just learned how to glue together stuff that I don't understand. White Hat: I...OK, fair.\n"}
{"id":1989,"title":"IMHO","image_title":"IMHO","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1989","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/imho.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1989:_IMHO","transcript":"[Cueball, Megan, and Ponytail stand together, talking.] Cueball: I thought the \"H\" in \"IMHO\" was \"humble,\" but Buzzfeed ran a poll and \"honest\" won. Megan: That can't be true. Their readers are messing with us.\n[Cueball and Megan look at Ponytail.] Ponytail: Are you sure? I always used it to mean \"honest.\" Megan: ...What?!\n[Close up of Cueball holding a phone. A box with usage of \"IMHO\" and \"TBH\" from Google Trends shows \"TBH\" suddenly rising in 2011, with a second spike in 2014.] Cueball: It was definitely \"humble\" in the 1990s. Cueball: Maybe people who picked it up after the rise of \"TBH\" in 2011 interpreted it as \"honest\" and used it that way.\n[Cueball, Megan, and Ponytail as before.] Megan: I can't get over this. What other wrong opinions do you have? Megan: The \"G\" in \"G-I-F\"? Ponytail: Silent.\n[Close up of Ponytail, with Megan talking from offscreen.] Megan: The \"S\" in \"SMDH\"? Ponytail: \"Swallowing.\" Megan: The \"G\" in \"OMG\"? Ponytail: \"Giantess\" or \"genitals.\"\n[Cueball, Megan, and Ponytail as before.] Megan: The Dress? Ponytail: Black and white. Megan: Is the database language \"sequel\" or \"ess cue ell\"? Ponytail: I've always said \"squill.\"\nCueball: Okay, the big one: how many spaces after a period? Ponytail: None; I use tabs. Cueball: OMG. Megan: Yeah, mine too.\n","explanation":"The conversation begins with a reference to the controversy between whether IMHO stands for \"in my honest opinion\" or \"in my humble opinion\". Some older Internet users, including Cueball, use the H to mean \"humble\", which Cueball references as being the norm in the 1990s. However, many younger Internet users, including, apparently, Ponytail, use it to mean \"honest\", which became the norm after another SMS abbreviation, TBH (to be honest) became popular c. 2011 [1] . However, the joke veers into absurdity with Ponytail sharing her unusual opinions on other Internet controversies, including:\nBefore the 20th century, it was common typographical practice to use an em-space (or other similar wide-space) between sentences.  In the 1930s, common practice was to use smaller inter-sentence spacing, and by the 1950s, inter-sentence spaces were the same size as inter-word spaces.  Although modern style guides all insist on single-spacing between sentences, many people prefer to include two spaces, possibly out of habit from typewriter usage (which commonly used two spaces to mimic the 19th century typographic standards).  (See also: 1285: Third Way .) Tabs vs. Spaces also refer to the programmers' debate on how to indent code correctly.\nIn the last panel, Cueball exclaims \"OMG\" (meaning \"Oh, my God\") to which Megan replies \"Yeah, mine too\", taking the meaning as \"Oh, my genitals\" from the 5th panel. This leads to the title text \"TMI\" (too much information). The pun on periods (typographical and menstruation) might also explain the reaction.\nIn the title text, another incorrect belief Ponytail has is believing TMI to be \"tantalizing meat info,\" as opposed to too much information. (Remarkably, this makes sense in the context of Megan's comment about her genitals.)\nThe comic also obliquely references the mistaken opinion that Website polling is an accurate measure of anything; selection bias (among many other problems) renders them almost useless for measuring the general population.\nEtymology of IMHO\nESR's Jargon File (later known as The New Hacker's Dictionary) has an entry of \"IMHO\" . It's also seen in variant forms such as IMNSHO (In My Not-So-Humble Opinion) and IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion).\nAnd it has been added into the Jargon File v2.1 in January 1990 , the first version under Eric S. Raymond. Maybe the acronym \"IMHO\" was invented by science fiction fans in frequent discussions and used on the Usenet which started in 1980. It was in common usage as \"humble\" in APA (Amateur Press Association) publications during the 1980s, and possibly earlier.\n[Cueball, Megan, and Ponytail stand together, talking.] Cueball: I thought the \"H\" in \"IMHO\" was \"humble,\" but Buzzfeed ran a poll and \"honest\" won. Megan: That can't be true. Their readers are messing with us.\n[Cueball and Megan look at Ponytail.] Ponytail: Are you sure? I always used it to mean \"honest.\" Megan: ...What?!\n[Close up of Cueball holding a phone. A box with usage of \"IMHO\" and \"TBH\" from Google Trends shows \"TBH\" suddenly rising in 2011, with a second spike in 2014.] Cueball: It was definitely \"humble\" in the 1990s. Cueball: Maybe people who picked it up after the rise of \"TBH\" in 2011 interpreted it as \"honest\" and used it that way.\n[Cueball, Megan, and Ponytail as before.] Megan: I can't get over this. What other wrong opinions do you have? Megan: The \"G\" in \"G-I-F\"? Ponytail: Silent.\n[Close up of Ponytail, with Megan talking from offscreen.] Megan: The \"S\" in \"SMDH\"? Ponytail: \"Swallowing.\" Megan: The \"G\" in \"OMG\"? Ponytail: \"Giantess\" or \"genitals.\"\n[Cueball, Megan, and Ponytail as before.] Megan: The Dress? Ponytail: Black and white. Megan: Is the database language \"sequel\" or \"ess cue ell\"? Ponytail: I've always said \"squill.\"\nCueball: Okay, the big one: how many spaces after a period? Ponytail: None; I use tabs. Cueball: OMG. Megan: Yeah, mine too.\n"}
{"id":1990,"title":"Driving Cars","image_title":"Driving Cars","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1990","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/driving_cars.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1990:_Driving_Cars","transcript":"[Cueball stands in front of a car holding his hands together in front of him.] Cueball: Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!\n[Caption below the panel:] Driving freaks me out.\n","explanation":"This comic is about how dangerous cars are. Cueball observes that it is a giant machine, and that he is able to accelerate it up to terrifying speeds simply because he once took a brief driving test. Note that the length and complexity of a driving test varies greatly per country. 20 minutes would be fairly normal for the USA, but much shorter than what is required on most other Western countries. However, it should be noted that you sometimes have to retake the test if your drivers license has expired, so the \"just because I took a twenty minute test in high school\" part is partially incorrect.\nThis is similar to other comics, such as 1075: Warning and 722: Computer Problems , where Randall comments on how some of our routine, everyday tasks are quite unusual when viewed from a reductionist perspective. This subject has been covered in the many comics about Self-driving cars . Although this comic is not directly about such cars, the reference to Cueball steering with his hands could be seen as being in contrast with letting a computer drive (which is much safer ). The joke is that driving is in fact one of the top five most common causes of death, yet many (most?) people do not think of driving as an especially \"scary\" or \"dangerous\" activity.\nThe rest of the joke is in the title text, \"It's probably just me. If driving were as dangerous as it seems, hundreds of people would be dying every day!\" This statement is ironic, drawing attention to the fact that many people ( over 3,000 per day world-wide, about 100 per day in the USA) do in fact die in car crashes. These statistics indicate that driving is as dangerous as Cueball thinks it seems; it is not just him perceiving it that way. As a matter of fact, in most regions of the US, automotive accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged 18 to 35. It's also worth noting that a difficult-to-estimate number of people die prematurely as a consequence of pollution caused by cars.\n[Cueball stands in front of a car holding his hands together in front of him.] Cueball: Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!\n[Caption below the panel:] Driving freaks me out.\n"}
{"id":1991,"title":"Research Areas by Size and Countedness","image_title":"Research Areas by Size and Countedness","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1991","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/research_areas_by_size_and_countedness.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1991:_Research_Areas_by_Size_and_Countedness","transcript":"[An X-Y scatter plot of research areas, written in gray font, where both axes have arrows in both ends. At the end of each arrow is a label. Above the left part of the X-axis there is a line which goes to a text about the meaning of the X-axis. Similarly there is a line to from the top of the Y-axis to a questions \u201casked\u201d to those that study the given subject, their answers being somewhere between the two labels on the Y axis.]\n[The X-axis from left to right, text first and then labels:] Size of the thing you study Small Big\n[The Y-axis from top to bottom, question first and then labels:] \"That thing you study - how many of them are there?\" \"We have a pretty good estimate.\" \"We have no idea\"\n[The research areas names are listed here below by sorting them into the four quadrants from top left to bottom right. In each quadrant the areas are listed after most left first, and then top to bottom for those at the same x position.]\n[Upper left quadrant (Small & count known):] Elementary particle physics Dentistry Shakespeare studies Ornithology Ancient Literature\n[Upper right quadrant (Big & count known):] Presidential History Marine Mammology Railway Engineering Geology Cosmology* (*Depends who you ask)\n[Lower left quadrant (Small & count unknown):] Pharmacology Microbiology Entymology Mycology\n[Upper right quadrant (Big & count unknown):] Botany Paleontology Exobiology Black Hole Astronomy Theology\nSortable table with the coordinates in percent:\n","explanation":"This comic is a scatter plot that ranks different research fields according to the precision of the knowledge of the number of the studied object (vertical axis) vs. how large (the size of) the studied object is on the horizontal axis.\nFor instance, the facts pertaining to the number of United States presidents are well known (although the exact number is disputed in that Grover Cleveland is usually counted twice, because he served non-consecutive terms, so the official count exceeds the number of unique Presidents), so the study of their history is at the top of the Y-axis. This study is placed close to the Y-axis as the size of a president is about midway in size between the two extremes of the X-axis, elementary particles to the left (small) and the entire cosmos (cosmology) to the right (big).\nOn the X-axis, Presidents are close to the middle. Both presidents and other larger life forms (as a research area) including extinct animals (paleontology) and exobiology are all close to the same central position just right of the Y-axis, with smaller animals like birds and insects just to the left of the Y-axis. But where the number of presidents is well known (aside from the dispute about Cleveland), then the number of exoplanet life forms (exobiology) is completely unknown (and would likely be affected by other disputes, such as whether something the size of Pluto counts as a planet) and thus it will be found at the very bottom of the Y-axis, since we have no idea if there are life elsewhere and if so how many places will it be and how varied.\nThe 19 research areas are listed and explained in the tables below.\nIn the title text, mathematicians may give a third answer that the concept of counting the things being studied is not reasonable, because the things are abstract or otherwise not discrete.  There are many different types of math that blend into each other, and many have turned into separate sub-disciplines based on different interpretations of fundamental rules.  As a specific example in geometry, different interpretations of how many lines you may draw parallel to another line through a given point has lead to hyperbolic (infinite parallel lines) and spherical (0 parallel lines) geometric systems that are just as valid (and valuable, in some contexts) as the more commonly known Euclidean (1 parallel line) geometry.  As a specific example of the blending, number theory , set theory , and topology all interrelate and it is difficult to concretely say whether many theorems belong to one branch of math or another.\nFor a table with the coordinates given in percentage for each research field, see the table in the trivia section\nThis is the section with the small items with count known.\nThis is the section with the big items with count known.\nThis is the section with the small items with count unknown.\nThis is the section with the big items with count unknown.\n[An X-Y scatter plot of research areas, written in gray font, where both axes have arrows in both ends. At the end of each arrow is a label. Above the left part of the X-axis there is a line which goes to a text about the meaning of the X-axis. Similarly there is a line to from the top of the Y-axis to a questions \u201casked\u201d to those that study the given subject, their answers being somewhere between the two labels on the Y axis.]\n[The X-axis from left to right, text first and then labels:] Size of the thing you study Small Big\n[The Y-axis from top to bottom, question first and then labels:] \"That thing you study - how many of them are there?\" \"We have a pretty good estimate.\" \"We have no idea\"\n[The research areas names are listed here below by sorting them into the four quadrants from top left to bottom right. In each quadrant the areas are listed after most left first, and then top to bottom for those at the same x position.]\n[Upper left quadrant (Small & count known):] Elementary particle physics Dentistry Shakespeare studies Ornithology Ancient Literature\n[Upper right quadrant (Big & count known):] Presidential History Marine Mammology Railway Engineering Geology Cosmology* (*Depends who you ask)\n[Lower left quadrant (Small & count unknown):] Pharmacology Microbiology Entymology Mycology\n[Upper right quadrant (Big & count unknown):] Botany Paleontology Exobiology Black Hole Astronomy Theology\nSortable table with the coordinates in percent:\n"}
{"id":1992,"title":"SafetySat","image_title":"SafetySat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1992","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/safetysat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1992:_SafetySat","transcript":"[A prototype for a small cube-shaped \"CubeSat\" satellite, with labels on various components.]\n[Labeled on top:] Rare-Earth Magnets Bic Mini Lighter Software-Defined Radio (code editable via a public wiki)\n[Labeled on right:] Laser Pointers (fixed) Laser Pointer (Hubble-seeking) Ozone-Depleting CFC Spritzer\n[Labeled on bottom:] Celebratory Firework Volatile Epoxy Seal Filler (Guncotton)\n[Labeled on left:] Americium Corners Spark Plug Solar Panel (found) Batteries (eBay) Wet Sand Dispenser\n[Labeled from within drawing in white text on top of a black rectangle:] Crude Oil\n[Caption below the panel:] My CubeSat proposal was the first to be rejected for violating every design and safety requirement simultaneously.\n","explanation":"CubeSat is a standard format for small satellites that can fit in a 10\u00d710\u00d710\u00a0cm format with a mass of less than 1.3\u00a0kg. They have been widely used by academics for research satellites, and by both small and large companies. CubeSats have been discussed both before and after this comic, in 1866: Russell's Teapot and 2148: Cubesat Launch .\nCubeSats are often launched as an additional payload on commercial launches but also deployed from the International Space Station at the Kibo-Module or other airlocks. All these satellites are orbiting the Earth in a low orbit and since they have no propulsion system they also become a part of space debris when they are out of control; Eventually they will reenter earth's atmosphere without any further hazard.\nOnly a few days before this comic was released the first interplanetary CubeSats called Mars Cube One was launched together with NASA's probe InSight aiming to the planet Mars .\nOne of Randall's influences in creating this comic may have been controversy surrounding a commercial launch of a sub-CubeSat sized pico-satellite from a launch site in India, after the company had previously been denied launch permission within the US, due to safety concerns.\nThere are multiple safety rules to ensure that the CubeSat cannot damage the primary payload. However, the joke in this comic is that Randall 's design seeks to break as many rules as possible.\nItems clockwise from top left:\nRare-Earth Magnets Violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.10. Rare-earth magnets are very powerful magnets that have a high likelihood of messing up the functioning of nearby electronics, like other CubeSats.  Might also cause the CubeSat to stick to other satellites, as the M-Cubed and Explorer-1 Prime CubeSats did.\nBIC Mini-Lighter Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 10.1.3, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 Fire source, resting on the can of crude oil. The pressurized butane could also make the lighter burst, but in space without oxygen the lighter never would ignite. And even if the inside of the CubeSat contains some oxygen in weightlessness a flame would go out very soon, of course if it set off the crude oil or the guncotton then it would not matter, as the CubeSat would be destroyed.\nSDR\/ Software-Defined Radio (Code Editable via Public Wiki) Violates Title 47 CFR Part 97 \u00a7 97.207(b), in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.4.3.2.1 A radio which can be programmed to broadcast and receive in a range of frequencies, and formats. Software-Defined Radios are useful for development of new or modified wireless protocols, as well as for monitoring the raw waveform data of a transmission regardless of the protocols used. The radio in this comic is stated to run firmware which can be modified from a publicly editable Wikipedia-style webpage. Since anyone could change the radio's instructions, the radio could interfere with other satellites, or with the launch vehicle. This counts as a huge security risk, as anyone could edit it.\nLaser Pointers (Fixed) Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 8.2.2, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 These three laser points will effectively point in 3 different random directions, which is not safe for other objects around this Cubesat.  It depends on the power of the laser pointers but, in general a laser over 5 mW can heat up and damage things given enough time. [ citation needed ] . Of course, with the satellite being in orbit it could potentially mess up the optical sensors of other satellites, but it would be a matter of chance. This could also be a reference to the book What If? , specifically the chapter Laser Pointer .\nLaser Pointer (Hubble-Seeking) Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 8.2.2, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 Aiming a laser at a visible light telescope is potentially destructive to the telescope in question by damaging its optical sensors. This is because CCD & CMOS image sensors are designed to detect finite light sources, concentrated & focused by an optical lens. Lasers produce high light levels well beyond the (comparatively) very low intensity light which astronomical image sensors are designed to detect; The energy of these excess photons can heat up the circuits between rows of photosensitive cells to the point where they overheat and fuse. For much the same reason, originates the phrase \"do not stare into laser with remaining eye\". Unlike the fixed laser pointers above, this one would track and aim a laser at the Hubble, with potentially disastrous results.\nCFCs\/Ozone-depleting CFC Spritzer Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 10.3, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are fully halogenated paraffin hydrocarbons that contain only carbon, chlorine, and fluorine, produced as volatile derivative of methane, ethane, and propane. Freon is a common example of a CFC, and the use of CFCs has been linked to a depletion of the Earth's ozone layer leading many countries to ban their use. Thus spritzing CFCs in an area relatively close to the Ozone layer may be a bad idea.\nCelebratory Firework Violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.3. Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 13.2, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 Explosive fire source that could hit other satellites in the vicinity; Also potentially breaking the adjacent seal & igniting the crude oil behind it, turning it into crude oil that is also on fire. Could also set off the guncotton and result in an explosion that destroys the satellite. At the very least, the off-axis position of the firework within the CubeSat would most likely send the satellite into an uncontrolled spin, upon celebratory launch.\nVolatile Epoxy Seal Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 10.1.3, 12.1, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 Epoxy is a substance composed of long-chain molecules which exhibit very strong adhesive bonds. Many mixtures of epoxy are flammable & produce hazardous fumes when burned. If this particular epoxy seal fails, everything within splatter range gets coated in flammable crude oil.\nCrude Oil Violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.6 Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 10.1.3, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 Exxon Valdez oil spill , Deepwater Horizon explosion , Keystone Pipeline leaks ... need we say more? Of course the leakable volume would not be near those levels, but plenty dangerous nonetheless if it were to leak though a faulty seal or weld breakage or stress fractures. Containment and cleanup of such a leak would not be helped by the fact that such leakage could occur in orbit or even during launch. Oil spills in orbit might even present new and unexpected complications due to unusual behavior of liquids in vacuum and microgravity.\nGuncotton Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 10.1.3, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 A form of nitrocellulose ; an explosive. Could be set off by the firework, the crude oil, or the spark plug. Nitrocellulose does not work reliably in vacuum and possibly caused a failure of Philae space probe .\nAmericium corners Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 9.1.1, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 Americium is a very dense and radioactive substance. Depending on the amount of americium involved, this alone could shoot the mass over the 1.3 kg mass limit. The isotope 241 Am is used in smoke detectors but also proposed for use in radioisotope thermoelectric generators in spaceflight.\nSpark Plug Does not conform to AFSPCMAN 91-710, Volume 3 \u00a7 10.1.3, 10.1.4, in turn violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.1.7 Fire ignition source, if connected to electricity; excess mass if not. The electrodes on the spark plug are next to the guncotton which could ignite if the spark plug fires.  Additionally, sparks cause electromagnetic interference and electrical shorts.\nSolar Panel (Found) The quality of the solar panel and the power it produces would have to be investigated thoroughly before being cleared for space flight. Also, it isn't clear on the design exactly what, if anything, it is supposed to power, or if it is just excess mass.\nBatteries (eBay) The quality of batteries bought on auction sites can vary widely, and certain batteries exposed to conditions outside their design specifications can explode or leak corrosive acids . These batteries might also be connected to the adjacent spark plug. Non-rechargable commercial batteries may leak or explode if a recharge is attempted, so if this is the intention of the Solar Panel, these would escalate into an even greater risk.\nWet Sand Dispenser Violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.4.3 Possible reference to the Kessler syndrome , which refers to a hypothetical situation wherein there are enough objects floating around in low earth orbit that collisions between objects might result in a \"domino effect,\" each collision causing more collisions and breaking objects into smaller pieces of space debris, which increase the likelihood of further collisions. Wet sand exhibits a high grip:slip ratio, where the surface tension of the water tends to make particulates clingy. Sand (silica granules) can be very harmful to a wide variety of systems, due to its hardness & abrasive qualities. Depending upon the pattern of water sublimation in either shaded or sunlit zones, the exact behavior of various quantities of \"wet sand\" in low Earth-orbital space might be of interest to the designers of this and of other spacecraft.\nTitle text Violates CubeSat Design Specification Rev. 13 \u00a7 3.4.4 Prongs that extend in the event of an unexpected sensor reading at launch could damage the rocket and\/or nearby CubeSats\/payloads. That the CubeSat reacts to an \"unexpected\" sensor reading - which could include any number of readings that aren't actually a problem - is also funny, as is the fact that this is described as \"safely\" securing the CubeSat and any surrounding CubeSats. Along with this, it is not unlikely that this CubeSat might be the source of any internal problem that might arise; in such a situation, having such a dangerous CubeSat further secure itself would be counterproductive, if spitefully entertaining.\n[A prototype for a small cube-shaped \"CubeSat\" satellite, with labels on various components.]\n[Labeled on top:] Rare-Earth Magnets Bic Mini Lighter Software-Defined Radio (code editable via a public wiki)\n[Labeled on right:] Laser Pointers (fixed) Laser Pointer (Hubble-seeking) Ozone-Depleting CFC Spritzer\n[Labeled on bottom:] Celebratory Firework Volatile Epoxy Seal Filler (Guncotton)\n[Labeled on left:] Americium Corners Spark Plug Solar Panel (found) Batteries (eBay) Wet Sand Dispenser\n[Labeled from within drawing in white text on top of a black rectangle:] Crude Oil\n[Caption below the panel:] My CubeSat proposal was the first to be rejected for violating every design and safety requirement simultaneously.\n"}
{"id":1993,"title":"Fatal Crash Rate","image_title":"Fatal Crash Rate","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1993","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fatal_crash_rate.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1993:_Fatal_Crash_Rate","transcript":"[Graphs are shown inside of a panel.]\n[Graph 1:] My fatal car crash probability based on my age [Label at 2018:] Now\n[Graph 2:] Overall US fatal crash rate per mile traveled [Label:] General safety improvements\n[Graph 3:] My miles traveled by car per year [Label after 2018:] Depends on job, where I live, etc.\n[Graph 4, below the previous graphs:] My estimated lifetime probability of being in a fatal car crash [Label pointing at late-2020s:] Point at which self-driving cars become safe and widely adopted, making crashes rare (assuming that happens) [Label pointing at a gray segment after late-2020s:] Fatal crashes avoided\n[Caption below the panel:] It feels weird to look at car crash statistics and wonder whether we'll all be able to stop driving before I'm involved in a fatal crash.\n","explanation":"This is the second recent comic after 1990: Driving Cars on the subject of the dangers of cars.\nIt combines general statistical correlations between age and safety improvements with fatal crashes. The graphs are:\nThe final graph, ostensibly the product of the three previous graphs' probabilities, shows that Randall worries that he will eventually be involved in a fatal car crash unless self driving cars take over, which he believes would eliminate car related fatalities. He is of the opinion that they will take over, but that they might not do so quickly enough to 'save' him from the spike of age-related fatalities in later life.\nThe comic includes three smaller line graphs along the top, and then a larger line graph, which is kind of a combination of the three smaller ones, at the bottom.  A vertical dotted line is used on all these graphs to indicate \"now\", 2018; everything to the left of the graph has already happened (though the graphs are showing statistical history rather than actual history) and everything to the right is projected to happen, statistically.\nThe first smaller graph, labeled \"My fatal car crash probability based on my age\", shows the likelihood he'll be involved in a car crash at different ages.  The line doesn't start until slightly before 2000, probably when he first learned how to drive and started driving himself.  He's not including when he would have been a child and a passenger, just when he is the actual driver.  The two most dangerous ages to be driving are generally when you've first learned how to drive (and haven't yet mastered the skills or gained learned reflexes) and then again at an elderly age when your reflexes are slower and your senses become more limited (narrow field of vision\/loss of peripheral vision, worse hearing, etc.).\nThe middle smaller graph, labeled \"Overall US fatal crash rate per mile traveled\", lists how likely a fatal car crash is on a mile-by-mile basis, regardless of age.  It used to be you were much more likely to have a fatal car crash in any given mile due to lack of safely features in cars in the 1970's.  As more safely features were introduced and mandated, some to help prevent accidents (i.e. anti-lock brakes) and some to help make more of the accidents survivable (seat belts, air bags), overall safely has improved and is projected to continue improving.\nThe third smaller graph, labeled \"My miles traveled by car each year\", is a simple graph of the distance Randall has driven every year.  As he approached 2010, he was driving a lot more then when he first started, then life circumstances presumably changed so his need to drive diminished a bit, and now it's slightly increasing again.  He has no way to predict future life driving needs, however, so the graph converges after \"now\" to include both gradually increasing as well as gradually decreasing driving needs.  At an advanced age he'll probably mostly stop driving.\nThe final, large graph, labeled \"My estimated lifetime probability of being in a fatal car crash\", combines these different factors into a smoother curve of gradually being safer (or at least not dying) while driving, with the possibility introduced, at an indeterminate time, that self-driving cars get to the point where they are both safe and widely adopted, at which point Randall expects the chance of a fatality to decrease to zero over a relatively short period of time (i.e. a decade).  In the event the self-driving cars do not deliver in safely and\/or are not widely adopted, the safety will gradually level off and then increase a bit near older age before dropping off again, but always with a distinct chance of fatality.\nAs the title text points out, fixating to this degree on a single source of danger is unhealthy. But the more Randall fixates on the danger of car crashes, the safer (or maybe the less ) he drives, which reduces his chance of being in a fatal car crash.\nNote that Randall used to fixate on the danger of velociraptors, there is even an entire category based on his fear of them.\nIf one were to become a professional driver and drive at 50 mph for 8 hours a day, 200 days a year, for 50 years - one would drive about 4 million miles - so one's risk of dying in a car crash would be much less than 1%.\n[Graphs are shown inside of a panel.]\n[Graph 1:] My fatal car crash probability based on my age [Label at 2018:] Now\n[Graph 2:] Overall US fatal crash rate per mile traveled [Label:] General safety improvements\n[Graph 3:] My miles traveled by car per year [Label after 2018:] Depends on job, where I live, etc.\n[Graph 4, below the previous graphs:] My estimated lifetime probability of being in a fatal car crash [Label pointing at late-2020s:] Point at which self-driving cars become safe and widely adopted, making crashes rare (assuming that happens) [Label pointing at a gray segment after late-2020s:] Fatal crashes avoided\n[Caption below the panel:] It feels weird to look at car crash statistics and wonder whether we'll all be able to stop driving before I'm involved in a fatal crash.\n"}
{"id":1994,"title":"Repairs","image_title":"Repairs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1994","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/repairs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1994:_Repairs","transcript":"[Caption above the diagram:] How well something works After I decide to fix it\n[The comic shows a graph with a solid curve that decreases in 8 different sized steps from the top left to the bottom right. The X-axis shows time passes and gives the time from zero to five hours with 6 ticks with labels beneath. The Y-axis shows how well something works with 8 ticks, but only four of them labeled.]\nWorks great Has minor problems Doesn't work\nWill never work again\n0 hours\u00a0\u00a0 1 hour\u00a0\u00a0 2 hours\u00a0\u00a0 3 hours\u00a0\u00a0 4 hours\u00a0\u00a0 5 hours\n[The solid line has six labels with eight arrow pointing to different sections, two times the same label has two arrows pointing to different sections the first two places where the lines takes a step down, and the second to two plateaus on either side of a step. In total the arrows point four times on both steps and plateaus. Both the first and final plateau has a dot has added to the line, and the arrows point to those. Above the solid line there are three dotted lines going up from three plateaus just before the solid line takes a step down, the last two of these lines split up in two, with one going higher. At the end of each of these five dotted lines there is a sentence spoken. The solid line begins at the 2nd tick on the Y-Axis and finishes at the last. The three dotted lines going up ends up at the 1. tick on the Y-axis, for the last two there are also a line ending at the 2nd tick and 3rd tick respectively. Only the first label being above the first tick on the X-axis but the last three labels are all above the last tick on the X-Axis. Here is a list of all the labels in chronological order according to the position on the X-axis. For those that has the same time stamp the top one will be mentioned first. Those at the end of a line are indented:] I start trying to fix it \"It just needed cleaning!\" Take it apart \"Fixed it!\" \"Well, at least it's not more broken than when I started.\" Take it apart more Watch YouTube instructional videos Take a deep breath and cut wires \"That was heroic and I deserve a Nobel prize.\" \"Well, it sort of works now.\" (Turn to other possessions) \"...And let that be a lesson to you.\"\n","explanation":"This graph depicts the sentiment created by the act of repairing something, depending on the time it took (x-axis) and the ensuing result (y-axis). The degree of triumph and exultation (expressed in sentences in quotes inside the graph)  is strongly enhanced by the time the operation takes and is also positively correlated with the result (if any). Actions during the repair process are described in sentences without quotes. \nThe conclusions are rather optimistic; the most negative feeling expressed (after the maximum time of repair with the minimum degree of success) is a threat against other objects that might have plans to break.\nThe graph shows the main path most of his fixes apparently usually take (solid line) along with some variations they sometimes take (dotted lines).  Projects usually start out with items that mostly work, but have minor problems.  Occasionally they just need a cleaning (first dotted line).  If that doesn't work, he takes them partly apart, and then there are times he's able to put them back together and get them to either work completely (one branch of a dotted line) or get it back to the condition it started out in (the other branch of the dotted line), at which point he doesn't tempt fate by continuing, knowing what's likely to happen if he continues messing with it.  When it's still not working, he takes it apart more, starts doing less reversible things like cutting wires, and finally starts watching YouTube videos hopefully showing the right way to fix it, or at least how others fixed it.  This takes it to a state just one step above \"Will never work again\", after which there can be several results. One dotted line shows it's restored to being fully fixed and he feels victorious and proud that all the hard work paid off, and he thinks he deserves a Nobel Prize for his efforts. The next dotted line is when he gets it partially working again, and gives up, satisfied to at least not have completely destroyed it even though it's a little worse than before.  The third, main path result is total failure, which he could take as a personal failure but to which he instead responds with humor by admonishing the rest of his possessions not to develop minor problems otherwise the same total destruction might happen to them.  This path ends up a partial step below \"Will never work again\" so it's unclear what that state is... maybe that's the \"throw it away\" state.\nThe title text shows another excuse for failure. Nobody would spend five hours being a trash compactor. One could however claim to be separating the different parts for sorting into recycling bins or separating the parts that aren't themselves damaged by the process from those that will no longer be of use to anyone. This still doesn't have any tangible benefits for the one doing the sorting (although it might earn them points with the recipient).\nA similar sentiment was expressed in 349: Success . However, in Success, the computer would keep developing new problems and putting Cueball in worse and worse situations while in this comic it is just that Randall has increasing trouble fixing the issue as time wears on.\n[Caption above the diagram:] How well something works After I decide to fix it\n[The comic shows a graph with a solid curve that decreases in 8 different sized steps from the top left to the bottom right. The X-axis shows time passes and gives the time from zero to five hours with 6 ticks with labels beneath. The Y-axis shows how well something works with 8 ticks, but only four of them labeled.]\nWorks great Has minor problems Doesn't work\nWill never work again\n0 hours\u00a0\u00a0 1 hour\u00a0\u00a0 2 hours\u00a0\u00a0 3 hours\u00a0\u00a0 4 hours\u00a0\u00a0 5 hours\n[The solid line has six labels with eight arrow pointing to different sections, two times the same label has two arrows pointing to different sections the first two places where the lines takes a step down, and the second to two plateaus on either side of a step. In total the arrows point four times on both steps and plateaus. Both the first and final plateau has a dot has added to the line, and the arrows point to those. Above the solid line there are three dotted lines going up from three plateaus just before the solid line takes a step down, the last two of these lines split up in two, with one going higher. At the end of each of these five dotted lines there is a sentence spoken. The solid line begins at the 2nd tick on the Y-Axis and finishes at the last. The three dotted lines going up ends up at the 1. tick on the Y-axis, for the last two there are also a line ending at the 2nd tick and 3rd tick respectively. Only the first label being above the first tick on the X-axis but the last three labels are all above the last tick on the X-Axis. Here is a list of all the labels in chronological order according to the position on the X-axis. For those that has the same time stamp the top one will be mentioned first. Those at the end of a line are indented:] I start trying to fix it \"It just needed cleaning!\" Take it apart \"Fixed it!\" \"Well, at least it's not more broken than when I started.\" Take it apart more Watch YouTube instructional videos Take a deep breath and cut wires \"That was heroic and I deserve a Nobel prize.\" \"Well, it sort of works now.\" (Turn to other possessions) \"...And let that be a lesson to you.\"\n"}
{"id":1995,"title":"MC Hammer Age","image_title":"MC Hammer Age","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1995","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mc_hammer_age.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1995:_MC_Hammer_Age","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat are walking together.] Cueball: Want to feel old? MC Hammer just turned 40. White Hat: Wow. White Hat: I mean, I guess that's not too surprising, right? White Hat: It's been a long time.\n[Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Deliberately lowballing \"Want to feel old\" factoids to set up a bigger payoff later when they learn the correct number.\n","explanation":"This is the first comic to combine the My Hobby series with the theme of listing facts that make one feel old .\nIn the comic Cueball (as Randall , as it is his hobby) is asking White Hat if he wants to feel old. (This exact opening phrase was used by Megan in 1898: October 2017 ). Cueball doesn't wait for an answer, though like Megan did, but tells White Hat that MC Hammer just turned 40. Surprisingly, at first, this doesn't really make White Hat feel old, he actually feels this is rather normal (compared to his own age).  MC Hammer is a pop rapper\/singer who was most popular in the early 1990's for U Can't Touch This with the catch phrase Stop: Hammer Time , and shiny baggy pants often incorrectly referred to as parachute pants .\nSo at first it seems that Randall's attempt to make White Hat feel old has failed miserably. However in the caption Randall explains that this is part of his hobby. By \"lowballing\" the facts to begin with he can make people feel really old when he tells them the truth, so they learn that the correct number (age\/years ago, your age at the time etc.) is even worse than the first opening statement.\nIn the title text he then tells White Hat the \"truth\": \"Wait, sorry, I got mixed up--he's actually almost 50. It's the kid from The Karate Kid who just turned 40.\" This suddenly adds ten more years to MC Hammer's age, and the kid from the Karate Kid movies is already 40 years old. This likely makes White Hat feel old. In the original The Karate Kid , Ralph Macchio was the actor who starred as Karate Kid.\nThe real blow, comes when White Hat (and most likely the reader), now intrigued goes home and looks these two people up on Wikipedia. Ralph Macchio was already much older than the kid he portrays in the movie, a school kid - he was 22 years old when shooting the first movie. On the day this comic came out, both MC Hammer and Ralph Macchio were 56 years old. And Ralph is the older one of the two being born in 1961, while Hammer was born in 1962. (In fact, Macchio is older now than Pat Morita , who played his mentor in The Karate Kid , was when that film was released.)\nSo even in the title text, the corrections are both \"lowballed\" facts, so still preserving the maximum effect while adding more credibility to the claims, so people already start to feel old before the last 6 years is added to Hammer's age.\nOf course, this is assuming they do look it up, and if they believe Randall the first time, there is no reason to assume this will happen. However, then they probably already feel old from the first correction.\nNote that in the other make one feel old comics Randall did not apparently indulge in this new hobby of lowballing facts. As far as we can tell, those were all accurate for the time the comic was created. But if this is a new hobby, we may need to examine newer \"feel old\" comics extra carefully from now on. (If we want to feel even older that is.)\n[Cueball and White Hat are walking together.] Cueball: Want to feel old? MC Hammer just turned 40. White Hat: Wow. White Hat: I mean, I guess that's not too surprising, right? White Hat: It's been a long time.\n[Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Deliberately lowballing \"Want to feel old\" factoids to set up a bigger payoff later when they learn the correct number.\n"}
{"id":1996,"title":"Morning News","image_title":"Morning News","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1996","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/morning_news.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1996:_Morning_News","transcript":"[Megan, looking on a smartphone in her hand, and Hairbun are standing together and talk.] Megan: Every morning, before my eyes even focus all the way, I read a bunch of infuriating national news stories and bad opinions. I wonder what this is doing to my brain. Megan: It's probably not great.\n[Zoom in to the head of Hairbun.] Hairbun: Back in my day, we had to pay people to print out infuriating news stories and bring them to our door. And we waited until we had stumbled out to the kitchen to read them. Hairbun: Totally different.\n[Frameless panel, zoom out on both while Megan has lowered her hand holding the phone.] Megan: OK, fair. But newspapers at least had more local news mixed in, right? Hairbun: Yeah, true.\n[Same as last panel, except it has a border.] Megan: I bet they weren't full of bad opinions. Hairbun: Yyyyyes. Hairbun: All our opinions were good. It was a remarkable time. Hairbun: Please don't go check.\n","explanation":"Megan is complaining to Hairbun about her easy access to infuriating national news stories and bad opinions (editorial articles and commentary) and worries that it may be having a negative effect on her, perhaps by promoting misinformation, by distraction, or by prompting adverse emotional reaction to content; she muses that, in some way or another, this habit is probably doing some sort of damage to her brain's wiring, training it to think in ways that are not necessarily good. While the capacity of the brain to change and adapt to a person's daily habits is, like most neurological phenomena, as yet not very well understood, it's clear that something of the sort exists--scientists refer to this capacity as \" neuroplasticity .\"\nHairbun sarcastically tells Megan that things were different in her time, implicitly stating that access to infuriating stories via newspapers took only a tiny bit more time and effort during a morning routine compared to accessing them via the Internet.\nMegan counters this idea and says that while it is true that newspapers provided the sort of national news she is being provoked by, they also had much more local news mixed in (which may be of a lighter nature, sometimes referred to in a derogatory sense as \"fluff\" news pieces), to which Hairbun agrees.\nMegan also raises the point that bad opinions were not granted wide distribution. Hairbun is rather less quick to agree to this, and suggests that Megan not check that, revealing that Megan\u2019s assertion isn\u2019t entirely true. Indeed, before the Internet, newspapers were a common medium for expressing opinions, either by local columnists or average citizens via letters to the editor, and they, as with any body of opinions throughout history, were frequently noxious or ill-informed.\nThis comic has a similar tone to 1348: Before the Internet in that it makes fun of the idea that life and society were better \"in the good old days\".\nThe title text takes another jab at newspapers as a supposedly superior source of news. Supporting your local paper is generally considered a positive action, as it is often the best or only source for local news (national media can't focus on smaller areas, and radio\/television often lacks print media's focus on investigative journalism). However, in recent years, many seemingly independent local newspapers in major cities have been bought up by financial groups rather than traditional publishing companies, and their effect on the industry as a whole has been controversial. Most notably, hedge fund groups often attempt to make newspapers profitable by cutting costs and downsizing , at the expense of quality reporting; critics call such hedge fund groups \"vulture capitalists\" who are throttling newspapers for short-term profit, without any thought of long-term viability or public service. The owners of the fund may also be unethical or controversial for other reasons. Thus, the standard well-meaning suggestion of supporting your local paper may no longer be good advice.\n[Megan, looking on a smartphone in her hand, and Hairbun are standing together and talk.] Megan: Every morning, before my eyes even focus all the way, I read a bunch of infuriating national news stories and bad opinions. I wonder what this is doing to my brain. Megan: It's probably not great.\n[Zoom in to the head of Hairbun.] Hairbun: Back in my day, we had to pay people to print out infuriating news stories and bring them to our door. And we waited until we had stumbled out to the kitchen to read them. Hairbun: Totally different.\n[Frameless panel, zoom out on both while Megan has lowered her hand holding the phone.] Megan: OK, fair. But newspapers at least had more local news mixed in, right? Hairbun: Yeah, true.\n[Same as last panel, except it has a border.] Megan: I bet they weren't full of bad opinions. Hairbun: Yyyyyes. Hairbun: All our opinions were good. It was a remarkable time. Hairbun: Please don't go check.\n"}
{"id":1997,"title":"Business Update","image_title":"Business Update","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1997","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/business_update.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1997:_Business_Update","transcript":"[Beret Guy, Ponytail, Hairy, Hairbun and Megan sit around a table, left to right. Beret Guy and Megan are sitting on chairs at the ends. All others are behind the table with no visible chairs. All characters face Beret Guy.] Beret Guy: Quarterly reports are looking good. Beret Guy: Our office is full of cash, we're producing stocks faster than ever before, and our customers are experiencing rapid growth. Beret Guy: Any updates?\n[Closeup on Ponytail, facing left.] Ponytail: Bad news: many of our assets were liquidated this morning due to a thermostat glitch. Ponytail: Good news: the sink in the kitchen has stopped producing original content.\n[Same as panel one, but characters are facing Megan.] Beret Guy: How are our finances? Megan: Our biggest source of revenue is our ongoing project to transmute lead into gold. Megan: Our biggest expense is our project to transmute it back.\n[Closeup on Beret Guy, facing right, offset to the left of the panel. Two characters speak from off-panel right.] Beret Guy: Lastly, any luck getting the girl from The Ring to stop showing up in our video conferences? Off-panel person 1: No, but honestly, she's made some good contributions. Off-panel person 2: Yeah, I think we should hire her.\n","explanation":"This comic shows a meeting at Beret Guy 's business (as seen in these other comics ). As usual, those in the business demonstrate a misuse of business terminology and take strange happenings within the business in their stride.\nThough maintaining a semblance of business-savviness through the use of many corporate buzzwords, it becomes clear that what is normally metaphorical in a usual boardroom meeting is here are quite likely meant literally. The Quarterly Reports, described as \"looking good,\" may be literally physically attractive (rather than recording successful business dealings). Beret Guy's comment that \"the office is full of cash\" seems to be an ordinary comment at a glace, but him saying that the office contains a lot of money instead of has a lot of money implies that the office is literally full of money, like coins, dollar bills, twenty dollar bills, etc., and not simply economically well-off. Most businesses keep their money in banks; any business that keeps all their money insecurely in the office is either criminally shady or incompetent.\n\"We're producing stocks [as in the stock market, a.k.a. shares] faster than ever before.\" Stocks are valuable, so from an outside perspective making more of them would create value. However, the humor of this situation is that in real life, creating shares from nothing would reduce the value of existing shares (as the combined value of stocks should add up to the total value of the company...so creating more stocks means each has to be worth less to make the addition balance out). This is ironic in that typically stocks represent the value of the company, rather than being the product being created.\nAlternatively, the company may be producing the leg restraints known as stocks . It's unlikely that there would be many people wishing to buy these stocks. Conversely, if what they are making is soup stocks, then it could be related to the 'rapid growth' (i.e., obesity) of the customers.\n\"Rapid growth\" is something a business is supposed to attain for itself or its userbase, not its individual customers. If the customers are not children they are likely very concerned by this rapid growth, as should be Beret Guy if the rapid growth is being caused by his business and its products.\n\"Liquidating assets\" typically means that assets are being sold off for money rather than being retained or used. Assets \"liquidated\" in a thermostat glitch, meanwhile, may have been literally melted (\"turned into liquid\"). It could also mean that their infrastructure is so hilariously messed up (and\/or the assets so bizarre) that a simple glitch in a thermostat somehow resulted in the loss of a large amount of the company's assets. Note that this type of thing is not entirely unheard of, as shown by a hack of a thermostat in a casino that led to massive data loss in 2017 .\n\"Original content\" is a catch-all term for unique creative products created by a website, e.g. articles, videos or TV shows. However, it is not typically used to describe sinks, which only provide water. Since the business team regards it as a problem, this means the sink is likely leaking or backing up, possibly with polluted water or rotting food waste, or perhaps creating things one would not expect a sink to dispense or even to exist (depending on how \"original\" this original content is).\nTransmuting lead into gold was a goal of alchemists for many centuries. With modern nuclear technology, it is actually now possible to accomplish transmutation of lead into gold, and gold into lead. While the expense far exceeds the value of the gold produced by such methods, it seems plausible that, given Beret Guy's surpassing strangeness, his company may be successfully and cheaply transmuting large quantities of lead into gold and back again. Since gold is worth much more than lead in today's market, the first transmutation could indeed result in major profit, while the reverse would obviously result in major losses, and be a rather pointless undertaking for a typical, profit-oriented business.\nIt is also worth noting that the \"largest source of revenue\" may not be producing much revenue at all; it can still be the biggest if there are no others. On the other hand, past experience with Beret Guy's business would indicate that this company is making plenty of money , though they aren't necessarily sure how .\nAlternately, Beret Guy may be speaking literally about their \"biggest source of revenue,\" referring not to the amount of revenue generated, but to the physical size of the source itself. A facility capable of transmuting heavy elements would most likely be constructed around a large particle accelerator such as a synchrotron, and accelerators of this type commonly measure several kilometers in diameter. Such a facility would likely be the largest physical structure owned by a commercial entity.\nIn the last panel, \"the girl from The Ring \" refers to Sadako Yamamura, the antagonist of the Ring series by Koji Suzuki , or her counterpart Samara Morgan from the American remake , who has been referenced by xkcd several times in the past \u2014 396: The Ring for example. One of Sadako\/Samara's supernatural abilities is to appear in television screens as well as exit from them into the real world. Beret Guy claims she has done this several times in their video conferences, which may be possible if someone has hacked their video feed to play footage from the 2002 movie. However, some of Beret Guy's employees then proceed to remark that she has made contributions to the meetings in question, implying that the image of Sadako\/Samara is not only alive but sentient and communicating with the employees, rather than killing them as she typically does in her movies.  It's also possible that Sadako\/Samara is simply the recording from the series, and her contributions are just in keeping with the general tone of the company's video conferences. Either way, it would appear that Beret Guy's sheer eccentricity has affected his staff to the point that a digital spectre would not be an abnormal employee; they're also oddly nonchalant about a movie character appearing in the real world, and at Sadako\/Samara's out-of-character behavior.\nThe title text refers to the May 25 deadline to implement the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ; this comic parodies a business meeting about what the company is doing to prepare for it. However, while normally the problem would be how to handle the customers' personal information that the company requires to retain in order to do business, in this case it seems the company does not require personal information at all, and instead, customers are sending them theirs on their own (and they refuse to stop doing it!). Even more bizarrely, Beret Guy was told by the EU (or at least, he thinks he was) that he is exempt because he is European royalty of some kind, which would give him sovereign immunity , but he wants to fix this problem anyway, just to be on the safe side.\n[Beret Guy, Ponytail, Hairy, Hairbun and Megan sit around a table, left to right. Beret Guy and Megan are sitting on chairs at the ends. All others are behind the table with no visible chairs. All characters face Beret Guy.] Beret Guy: Quarterly reports are looking good. Beret Guy: Our office is full of cash, we're producing stocks faster than ever before, and our customers are experiencing rapid growth. Beret Guy: Any updates?\n[Closeup on Ponytail, facing left.] Ponytail: Bad news: many of our assets were liquidated this morning due to a thermostat glitch. Ponytail: Good news: the sink in the kitchen has stopped producing original content.\n[Same as panel one, but characters are facing Megan.] Beret Guy: How are our finances? Megan: Our biggest source of revenue is our ongoing project to transmute lead into gold. Megan: Our biggest expense is our project to transmute it back.\n[Closeup on Beret Guy, facing right, offset to the left of the panel. Two characters speak from off-panel right.] Beret Guy: Lastly, any luck getting the girl from The Ring to stop showing up in our video conferences? Off-panel person 1: No, but honestly, she's made some good contributions. Off-panel person 2: Yeah, I think we should hire her.\n"}
{"id":1998,"title":"GDPR","image_title":"GDPR","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1998","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gdpr.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1998:_GDPR","transcript":"[The picture shows a long text:] Privacy policy We've updated our privacy policy. This is purely out of the goodness of our hearts, and has nothing to do with any hypothetical unions on any particular continents. Please read every part of this policy carefully, and don't just skip ahead looking for sex scenes. This policy governs your interactions with this website, herein referred to as \"The Service\", \"The Website\", \"The Internet\", or \"Facebook\", and with all other websites and organizations of any kind. The enumeration in this policy, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the users. By using this service, you opt in to quartering troops in your home.\nYour personal information Please don't send us your personal information. We do not want your personal information. We have a hard enough time keeping track of our own personal information, let alone yours. If you tell us your name, or any identifying information, we will forget it immediately. The next time we see you, we'll struggle to remember who you are, and try desperately to get through the conversation so we can go online and hopefully figure it out.\nTracking pixels, cookies, and beacons This website places pixels on your screen in order to form text and images, some of which may remain in your memory after you close the page. We use cookies to enhance your performance. Our website may use local storage on your device if we run low on space on our end. We may use beacons to call Rohan for aid.\n3rd party extension This service may utilize 3rd party extensions in order to play the song Can U Feel It from their debut album Alive .\nPermission For users who are citizens of the European Union, we will now be requesting permission before initiating organ harvesting.\nScope and limitations This policy supersedes any applicable federal, state, and local laws, regulations and ordinances, international treaties, and legal agreements that would otherwise apply. If any provision of this policy is found by a court to be unenforceable, it nevertheless remains in force. This organization is not liable and this agreement shall not be construed. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This website is intended to treat, cure  and prevent any disease. If you know anyone in Europe, please tell them we're cool.\n","explanation":"This comic was released on the date on which the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law went into effect. Most people will have already seen a large number of updated privacy policies in the week or two leading up to this law going active. And while xkcd would likely be outside of the jurisdiction that the law can enforce, it technically does fall within the scope of the law (as certainly EU citizens visit xkcd). This extra-territorial applicability is one of the major keys in this regulation and can be seen in more detail at the EU GDPR Information Portal .\nThere are several references made to this law, but also several jokes are included about the way people treat privacy policies specifically, and user agreements in general.\nThe comic is a joke privacy policy, with terms that no one would agree to under normal circumstances. In most cases, website users will use websites without reading the policies, potentially \"agreeing\" to something unexpected.\nThe title text is a reference to Shakespeare's \" The Tempest \", in which the witch Sycorax imprisoned the sprite Ariel in a cloven pine prior to Ariel's rescue by Prospero. As this clause cannot be escaped by anything short of restarting your computer, it may also reflect on how hard it often proves to be to opt out of privacy policy agreements and other forms to be filled on website, for all that they may appear optional. The fact that it appears as a title-text akin to a footnote, which a careless reader of the Privacy Policy may not notice at first glance, may also continue the joke of small but unexpected clauses hidden amidst a long-winded block of legalese, agreed to by users who haven't read them.\n[The picture shows a long text:] Privacy policy We've updated our privacy policy. This is purely out of the goodness of our hearts, and has nothing to do with any hypothetical unions on any particular continents. Please read every part of this policy carefully, and don't just skip ahead looking for sex scenes. This policy governs your interactions with this website, herein referred to as \"The Service\", \"The Website\", \"The Internet\", or \"Facebook\", and with all other websites and organizations of any kind. The enumeration in this policy, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the users. By using this service, you opt in to quartering troops in your home.\nYour personal information Please don't send us your personal information. We do not want your personal information. We have a hard enough time keeping track of our own personal information, let alone yours. If you tell us your name, or any identifying information, we will forget it immediately. The next time we see you, we'll struggle to remember who you are, and try desperately to get through the conversation so we can go online and hopefully figure it out.\nTracking pixels, cookies, and beacons This website places pixels on your screen in order to form text and images, some of which may remain in your memory after you close the page. We use cookies to enhance your performance. Our website may use local storage on your device if we run low on space on our end. We may use beacons to call Rohan for aid.\n3rd party extension This service may utilize 3rd party extensions in order to play the song Can U Feel It from their debut album Alive .\nPermission For users who are citizens of the European Union, we will now be requesting permission before initiating organ harvesting.\nScope and limitations This policy supersedes any applicable federal, state, and local laws, regulations and ordinances, international treaties, and legal agreements that would otherwise apply. If any provision of this policy is found by a court to be unenforceable, it nevertheless remains in force. This organization is not liable and this agreement shall not be construed. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This website is intended to treat, cure  and prevent any disease. If you know anyone in Europe, please tell them we're cool.\n"}
{"id":1999,"title":"Selection Effect","image_title":"Selection Effect","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/1999","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/selection_effect.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/1999:_Selection_Effect","transcript":"[Ponytail stands on a podium giving a presentation in front of a chart with some box plots.] Ponytail: Our research shows that compared to the overall population, people who agree to participate in scientific studies are significantly less likely to call the police to rescue them from our lab.\n","explanation":"The title refers to the effect in scientific fields where instead of investigating the whole population (i.e. all cancer patients or all trees) only a subset is analysed. This is common practice as the analysis of all specimens is often impractical. However, special care needs to be taken when selecting the sample to ensure that it accurately represents the general population. Otherwise the results are misleading and do not reflect reality. For example if 1000 people are asked about the numbers of cars they own but all live in a city the results cannot be generalised to the whole country. This is called the selection bias . If non-human subjects are studied this can be avoided by randomising the selection process, but this is not possible with humans as they cannot be forced to participate in a study against their will. For example, if people are asked to participate in a study about their political views it is likely that the responders care about politics while people with no clear opinion do not bother to respond. This is called the self-selection bias .\nPonytail says that people who agree to be in a study at their lab are less likely to attempt to escape. The only way Ponytail could have come to this conclusion is if she compared those people to people who did not agree to be in the study. This implies that Ponytail has recently kidnapped people for a study, and that most of the people she kidnapped called the police, as one should do when being kidnapped. This makes sense, since if you agreed to the study, you know why you are there, while if you didn't, you may have been kidnapped. As Ponytail presents this as a finding, it appears that she was attempting to establish a protocol for randomised selection of human subjects and comparing it to the normal selection process.\nThe comic shows Ponytail being allowed to present the results of this study at a conference; reputable scientific journals and conferences should not legitimize studies that clearly violate their ethical norms, such as by failing to obtain informed consent from human subjects before experimenting on them. Unfortunately, involuntary studies are published and presented, like this 2014 Facebook's emotional contagion study . It is not clear how many people who did agree to participate may have attempted to call the police for assistance regardless; compare the Stanford Prison Experiment . This is similar to previous comics where obvious things are presented in obfuscated, scientific ways (e.g. 1990: Driving Cars ). Of course, any study of the way people behave when being kidnapped for scientific experiments would inherently involve kidnapping them. Therefore there is no way this kind of research could be done in an ethical fashion.\nThe title text refers to a technique that measures brain activity, called Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) . Of course it's much more likely that people who did not sign up will resist and escape before the scan is complete.\n[Ponytail stands on a podium giving a presentation in front of a chart with some box plots.] Ponytail: Our research shows that compared to the overall population, people who agree to participate in scientific studies are significantly less likely to call the police to rescue them from our lab.\n"}
{"id":2000,"title":"xkcd Phone 2000","image_title":"xkcd Phone 2000","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2000","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_phone_2000.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2000:_xkcd_Phone_2000","transcript":"[The comic depicts a smartphone showing many uncommon features. The front view shows a mouse cursor and a circle in the middle. The side view reveals the circle as something like an old photo lens from 1900 extending far above the surface and four large buttons (camera lenses) at the rear. The third view is from the top and just mentions a \"hollow ground.\" The bottom view looks like as it was opened by a can opener and shows a big USB connector and on the right a small black connection.] Dockless Silent Quad camera takes four copies of every picture Front-facing camera obscura 3D facial contour analysis shows you a realistic preview of your death mask Sponsored pixels Front and rear pop-out grips Humidity-controlled crisper Antikythera mechanism New York Times partnership: all photos taken with camera app are captioned in real time by reporter Maggie Haberman Spit valve Standard USB connector Coin purse-style squeeze access Hollow-ground Absorbent Keyboard supports dynamic typing Backflow preventer Swiss Army partnership: folding knife (unlocks only if Switzerland is invaded) 100% BPA-free PCB construction AMOLCD display (7-segment) Runs on battery for the first 6 hours, then uses gasoline Sharpie\u00ae dual stylus (dry-erase + permanent) Mouse cursor\nIntroducing The xkcd Phone 2000 We're still hoping this sounds like a futuristic number\u00ae\u00ae\u2122\u00ae\u00a9\u2122 \u00ae\nThe stylus was previously called 'permenant'. This was later corrected, to permanent. You can still see the original image here\n","explanation":"This is the seventh entry in the ongoing xkcd Phone series , and once again, the comic plays with many standard tech buzzwords, and horribly misuses all of them, to create a phone that sounds impressive but self-evidently isn't to even the most ignorant customer. The previous comic in the series 1889: xkcd Phone 6 was released 8 and a half months before this one, and the next comic 2377: xkcd Phone 12 was released five months later.\nThis time a nonconsecutive version number is used to match the milestone comic number 2000.\nList of features (clockwise from top-center):\nThe tagline for the phone says that the marketing team hopes that 2000 still sounds like a futuristic number. It was common for a time to have futuristic science-fiction take place on or around the year 2000 (e.g. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Knight Rider 2000, Death Race 2000, Space: 1999), and many devices marketed in the late 20th century had a \"2000\" as part of their product name in order to sound futuristic. However, since the year 2000 was 18 years ago at the time of this comic's publication, this is no longer the case. The number 2000 also represents the fact that this is the 2000th xkcd comic.\nThe nonsensical trademarking of xkcd Phone slogans has become even more pronounced: as well as the inapplicable-as-ever copyright symbol, the slogan is listed three times as a registered trademark and twice as an unregistered one \u2013 and the second of those trademark signs is itself trademarked.\nThe title text refers to Retina Display , a term used to describe Apple products with higher pixel densities. The xkcd Phone marketing team would be unable to use the term due to Apple's having registered it as a trademark, as it would be a copyright violation. Additionally, the central fovea region is a portion of your eye's retina containing the most densely packed photosensitive neurons (confusing the biological retina with the electronics display of the same name). Foveated rendering is a genuine computer graphics technique intended to increase performance by rendering with higher quality to the regions of the display where the user is looking, and lower quality at the edges of vision; it is expected to be useful for virtual reality (one of the uses for cell phones) as a way to deal with the required high pixel densities while managing power consumption. There are displays with variable density, in specialist uses, but such a feature is not practical in a phone because the whole area of the display is typically useful and needs to provide high resolution (as the user's eye moves across it). Also, hundreds of pixels per inch is not considered a very high resolution, as a full-hd smartphone has 440.58 pixels per inch .\n[The comic depicts a smartphone showing many uncommon features. The front view shows a mouse cursor and a circle in the middle. The side view reveals the circle as something like an old photo lens from 1900 extending far above the surface and four large buttons (camera lenses) at the rear. The third view is from the top and just mentions a \"hollow ground.\" The bottom view looks like as it was opened by a can opener and shows a big USB connector and on the right a small black connection.] Dockless Silent Quad camera takes four copies of every picture Front-facing camera obscura 3D facial contour analysis shows you a realistic preview of your death mask Sponsored pixels Front and rear pop-out grips Humidity-controlled crisper Antikythera mechanism New York Times partnership: all photos taken with camera app are captioned in real time by reporter Maggie Haberman Spit valve Standard USB connector Coin purse-style squeeze access Hollow-ground Absorbent Keyboard supports dynamic typing Backflow preventer Swiss Army partnership: folding knife (unlocks only if Switzerland is invaded) 100% BPA-free PCB construction AMOLCD display (7-segment) Runs on battery for the first 6 hours, then uses gasoline Sharpie\u00ae dual stylus (dry-erase + permanent) Mouse cursor\nIntroducing The xkcd Phone 2000 We're still hoping this sounds like a futuristic number\u00ae\u00ae\u2122\u00ae\u00a9\u2122 \u00ae\nThe stylus was previously called 'permenant'. This was later corrected, to permanent. You can still see the original image here\n"}
{"id":2001,"title":"Clickbait-Corrected p-Value","image_title":"Clickbait-Corrected p-Value","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2001","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/clickbait_corrected_p_value.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2001:_Clickbait-Corrected_p-Value","transcript":"[Under a heading that says Clickbait-Corrected p-Value there is a mathematical formula. Below that is the description of the two used variables and what they mean:] Clickbait-corrected p-value:\nP CL = P traditional \u2219 click(H 1 )\/click(H 0 )\nH 0 : NULL hypothesis (\"Chocolate has no effect on athletic performance\") H 1 : Alternative hypothesis (\"Chocolate boosts athletic performance\") click(H): Fraction of test subjects who click on a headline announcing that H is true\n","explanation":"Clickbait is the practice of using deceptive or hyperbolic headlines to entice readers to click on a dubious or sensationalist news story, often with the purpose of generating site traffic and ad revenue. Randall uses the scientific controversy regarding the health effects of chocolate to humans as an example, as there is widespread misinformation on the health effects of chocolate online. In fact, there are no reliable studies to confirm any health effects while no medical authority has approved any health claims regarding chocolate.\nHypothesis testing in statistics is a standard method to determine whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the data. For the topic given in this comic, a researcher might compare data on athletic performance with data on chocolate consumption by those athletes to determine whether the two trend together. By convention, the \"null hypothesis\" (denoted H 0 ) is that there is no correlation (e.g. chocolate doesn't affect athletic performance) while the \"alternate hypothesis\" (H 1 ) would be that they are correlated. (If the study consists of feeding chocolate to one of two identical groups and not the other, rather than tracking what they'd be eating anyway, then the alternative hypothesis can be strengthened to be that chocolate causes improved performance.) These sets are subjected to statistical tests which return a \"test statistic\". From that test statistic a \"p-value\" is calculated. The p-value indicates the probability of observing the obtained results (or any more extreme value), when the null hypothesis is true (e.g. chocolate has no effect on athletic performance).\nIn other words, the p-value is an indicator as to the statistical significance and consequential reliability of the results affirming the \"alternate hypothesis\"( not the probability that the null hypothesis is correct ). It answers the question: If there is no correlation, how likely was it that I saw a correlation at least this big? Hence, if the p-value is low enough (by convention < 0.05), the null hypothesis is rejected, and we conclude that the alternate hypothesis is supported by the data (NOT that it is \"correct\" or \"true\").\nIn this comic, the p-value is corrected by a factor that takes clickbait into account. This factor has the effect of increasing the p-value if H 1 is more clickbaity than H 0 , and decreases the p-value if H 0 is more clickbaity than H 1 . This suggests that whatever clickers of clickbait believe, the reverse is likely to be true.\nFurthermore, this factor may be interpreted as normalisation for the inherent selection bias where the p-values for more clickbaity H 1 s tend to be lower than they should be and p-values for non-clickbaity H 0 s to be higher than they should be. For example, one explanation could be that for p-values that are on the cusp of significance, researchers may be more incentivized to fudge and adjust the data to get the p-value down if the H 1 is highly sensational, since the H 1 would make the research more likely to get published and attract attention. (See also FiveThirtyEight's article on p-hacking and this Stack Exchange question about p-hacking in the wild .) P-hacking has also previously already been associated with chocolate and media sensationalism.\nAs the statistical results now depend on people's beliefs about the hypothesis, this could appear as far from actual science as one can get. However, in a way, it is more in tune with a quote by John Arbuthnot (one of the originators of the use of p-values) attributing variation to active thought rather than chance, \"from whence it follows, that it is Art, not Chance, that governs.\" Randall applying that quote to the thoughts of the masses brings it in line with \"Art\".\nIf this correction could be somehow enforced on the scientific world, it would have the effect of keeping the popular view of scientific results more in line with reality. Often one study will be performed that shows an exciting result, and consequently be sensationalised by the media prior to further studies to verify it. This is in part due to the conflicting interest of the scientific community and the media.  The clickbait correction may aid a reader in exercising caution when interpreting sensationalist scientific discoveries in news media.  Additionally, there can be a problem in some areas of science where more mundane results never undergo the third-party replication studies (see replication crisis , or perhaps are even never studied in the first place. The clickbait correction factor has the opposite effect on these more mundane topics, making it easier to demonstrate effects within them with a lower statistical barrier for entry, perhaps in the hope that more will get studied, published, and exposed to the public.\nTechnically , the comic's depiction of null and alternative hypotheses is not entirely correct. As the alternative hypothesis (H 1 ) predicts that chocolate will improve performance (i.e., a one-tailed, directional hypothesis), the null hypothesis (H 0 ) should predict that chocolate will do nothing or make performance worse. In other words, the alternative hypothesis should be true if and only if the null hypothesis is false. For example, alternatively, if the H 1 were to say that chocolate will change performance (for better or worse; i.e., a two-tailed hypothesis) then H 0 should say that chocolate will do nothing .\nThe title text refers to Bayesian statistics , a statistical technique which involves considering (before you see the new data) how likely you think it is that the hypothesis is true. (It is worth noting that the traditional statistical analysis described above, doesn't directly say anything about how likely the hypothesis is to be *true*. It simply assesses whether the data is consistent with the null hypothesis.) Under Bayesian analysis, you begin with a prior probability , or simply just \"prior\", which expresses how likely you think the alternate hypothesis is. Then after seeing the new data, you apply Bayes' theorem to *update* your belief about the hypothesis, and as a result you should then consider the hypothesis to be more likely (or less likely) than you considered it before.\nBayesian statistics therefore recognizes that an extraordinary claim should require more evidence to convince you than a \"reasonable\" claim would. (Which is, arguably, sort of, the same point being made by the Clickbait-correction.) But also that *enough* evidence, perhaps gathered step by step over time, should be sufficient to convince you even of extraordinary claims.\nThe technique can be hard to apply in science however, because of the difficulty in agreeing upon reasonable priors. Here it's suggested that an alternative \"clickbayes factor\" (a pun and portmanteau of clickbait and Bayesian) could be used to approximate hard to quantify priors.\n[Under a heading that says Clickbait-Corrected p-Value there is a mathematical formula. Below that is the description of the two used variables and what they mean:] Clickbait-corrected p-value:\nP CL = P traditional \u2219 click(H 1 )\/click(H 0 )\nH 0 : NULL hypothesis (\"Chocolate has no effect on athletic performance\") H 1 : Alternative hypothesis (\"Chocolate boosts athletic performance\") click(H): Fraction of test subjects who click on a headline announcing that H is true\n"}
{"id":2002,"title":"LeBron James and Stephen Curry","image_title":"LeBron James and Stephen Curry","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2002","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lebron_james_and_stephen_curry.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2002:_LeBron_James_and_Stephen_Curry","transcript":"NBA Playoffs DataDive LeBron James and Stephen Curry What makes these superstars so extraordinary?\n[The comic consists of several plots and tables, listed here from top to bottom, left to right.]\nScatter plot of Social Security number vs Free throw percentage [Social Security numbers range from 000-00-0000 to 999-99-9999. No pattern discernable, aside from points being a bit denser in the middle of the plot. Stephen Curry is marked as a point on the right edge of the plot, corresponding to a high free throw percentage.]\nScatter plot of 2018 points per game vs Average teammate APGAR score [APGAR scores range from 0 to 10. Pattern suggests a somewhat positive link between the two factors. LeBron James is marked as having a lot of points, but a low teammate APGAR score of approximately 2.1.]\nShot map [Legend: grey dot for all players, black dot for Stephen Curry] [A diagram of a basketball court is shown with dots placed where players have taken shots at the goal. For the all players category the dots generally cluster next to the goal basket and in front of the three point line. Stephen has 3 dots next to the basket (one is behind it), but does cluster next to the three point line. He also has several dots on the other side of the playing field, and outside it, including three in the bleachers and one in the locker room.]\nSandwiches eaten during play vs Win\u00a0% [Sandwiches eaten range from 0 to 4. A plot that suggests no relation between the factors because practically all dots are in the zero sandwiches column. 2018 Warriors have one dot at around 60% and 4 sandwiches.]\n2018 total points [A table listing teams and their points overall and \"When net is within 15\u00b0 of magnetic north\". The rows for the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers are highlighted, the latter showing an abnormally high score in the magnetic north column.]\n2018 total points Overall When net is within 15\u00b0 of magnetic north Golden State Warriors 9304 330 Houston Rockets 9213 268 New Orleans Pelicans 9161 219 Toronto Raptors 9156 341 Cleveland Cavaliers 9091 1644 Denver Nuggets 9020 280\n[A table at the bottom:]\nStephen Curry LeBron James Have you heard of him Probably Yes President during most recent game 7 loss Obama Bush Pog collection Large Staggeringly large Career average Fed interest rate 3.42% 4.41% Name Scrabble score 22 22 Best sport Basketball Basketball Height Over 6' Over 6' Retirement year 2027 Unknown Nate Silver FiveThirtyEight total rating (devised by Nate Silver to combine all metrics into a single stat) 37.4 31.8 86.6\nThis comic was posted the day after the second game in the 2018 NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors (Stephen Curry's team) and the Cleveland Cavaliers (LeBron James' team).  It is the fourth consecutive time the two teams faced each other at the finals, which is unprecedented in major sports leagues in North America.  The Warriors won in 2015 and 2017, the Cavaliers won in 2016. At the time of the comic, the Warriors led the current series 2-0; which they eventually won.\n","explanation":"At the time of this comic, the 2018 NBA Finals were going on, between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors with the Warriors leading 2 games to 0 in a best of seven series. At first glance, the comic looks like an in-depth analysis of two of the star players on those teams, LeBron James and Stephen Curry . The joke is that while comprehensive, all the statistics are completely meaningless - many of them are obviously false, and many don't show any correlation, and if there is one, it's extremely unlikely there is any causal link in there.\nThe first graph includes a nine-digit Social Security number issued for US citizens which is typically not considered a metric related to athletic ability. As Social Security numbers are essentially random numbers ( until 2011 , there was a geographic correspondence for the first three digits), the graph shows only the free throw percentage of a large number of players, artificially spread vertically. Also note that Social Security numbers are not usually made public, barring security leaks.\nThe second graph is a graph of 2018 points per game vs teammate's APGAR score. APGAR score is used to quickly summarize the health of newborn children, with scores of 7 and above indicating an infant has generally normal health; its use to rank adult NBA players is odd, if not improper. This graph indicates LeBron's teammates have an average APGAR score of approximately 2.1. Scores of 3 and below are generally regarded as critically low and possibly requiring medical attention. Low APGAR scores can also be associated with increased risk of neurological disorders such as cerebral palsy. The joke appears to be in giving LeBron's less-than-impressive teammates a low APGAR score.\nThe shot map shows from what position Curry's shots were scored compared to other NBA players. This references Stephen Curry's propensity to take (and make) shots from well beyond the normal distance required for 3 points. [1] The comic then takes this to hilarious extremes by showing he supposedly scored several times from outside the playing field (not a legal play), including twice from the bleachers ( definitely not a legal play), and once from the locker room (which is physically impossible due to multiple walls in between [ citation needed ] ).\nNext is a graph of (team) win percentage vs sandwiches eaten during play. Average win percentage seems to go down as number of sandwiches eaten goes up to 3. It does indicate that the Golden State Warriors still have quite high win rate even though they have eaten either 4 sandwiches per game, or 4 sandwiches total during games, over the course of the 2018 season (the graph is unclear on this point). Golden State Warriors seem to be an outlier as their win percentage is much higher than the one of the teams that have eaten 2-3 sandwiches.\nIn the \"2018 total points\" table, the highlighted Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers represent the teams of Stephen Curry and LeBron James respectively. Magnetic north is the south pole of the Earth's magnetic field . Certain animals use the magnetic field to navigate and align themselves (including migratory birds, bees, and foxes), but there is no evidence that humans are affected by the earth's magnetic field. This means that there should not be any correlation between orientation of a basketball court and points scored. But Cleveland Cavaliers have a much a higher percentage of goals scored when orientation is towards magnetic North than other teams, probably it is implied that LeBron James and\/or his team somehow actually senses magnetic field and uses that to direct shots, but more likely explanation would be that it is just the orientation of the court during their home games.\nThe title text is a continuation of the joke in the bottom table. FiveThirtyEight , sometimes referred to as 538, is a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging.\nThe table at the bottom includes more unrelated comparisons:\nHave You Heard of Him Although both players are well known in their native United States, elsewhere basketball is considered a minority sport. Of the 7 billion people in the world it is likely that less than 2% [ dubious ] of the total population will have heard of either player. [ citation needed ] According to Randall, LeBron James is a more well known player than Stephen Curry. President During Most Recent Game 7 Loss In the NBA, the top 16 teams qualify for a single elimination play-off to determine the season champion, with each series played as a best-of-seven series (first to win 4 games). After the fourth game, fixtures are only played as required. Most fixtures are therefore resolved before the last game. Lebron James has participated in seven playoff game 7s in his career (winning 5 of 7), and the last time his team lost a game seven was on May 18, 2008 ( George W. Bush was still President). This also highlights that James is an older athlete, yet has been fairly dominant through his career. Stephen Curry's last game 7 loss came at the hands of Lebron James in the 2016 NBA Finals ( Barack Obama was President). It is notable that both the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers won their respective games 7 in their Conference Finals to make it to this year's NBA Finals. Pog Collection Pogs were a fad in the 1990s. It is unclear why either would have a large collection of them, or why LeBron's collection would be even more \"staggeringly large\" than Curry's, besides being 4 years older than him.\nCareer Average Fed Interest Rate The Federal Interest Rate, or federal funds rate , is an interest rate set by the United States Federal Reserve . This rate is increased or decreased periodically based on the health of the U.S. economy. As of the time of publishing, the federal interest rate was targeted at 1.75%. The rate has fluctuated from a high of around 5% to a low of near 0% (during the time of the 2008 recession ). James' career average federal interest rate is higher than Curry's, because James began his career before Curry, when interest rates were higher. Name Scrabble Score Both \"lebronjames\" and \"stephencurry\" are worth 22 points in Scrabble . However, proper names are not recognized as scorable words in Scrabble, and thus would be worth nothing. Best Sport It is claimed that their best sport is basketball. This fact should be exceedingly obvious, as they are arguably the two greatest current basketball players; considering all the work they would have dedicated to reach that point, it is extremely unlikely that they have reached an even greater level of mastery in any other sport. Height Both are listed as over 6 feet tall, which is not at all unusual for professional basketball players. Stephen Curry is 6'3\" and LeBron James is 6'8\", although this chart does not distinguish the exact heights. In most contexts, bucketing humans into broad height-groups would be unsurprising, but in basketball more detail is relevant. Thus, the information is accurate but uninformative --- like the rest of the data in this comic. Retirement Year In 2027, Stephen Curry will be 39 years old, which is a typical retirement age for NBA players. LeBron James's retirement age is listed as Unknown . In reality, there is no way to know when either will return, and if Curry's retirement date is just a projection or prediction, it is unclear why the same could not be done for LeBron (it could perhaps refer to James's high level of play through his mid-30s, when typical players have a decline in their performance). FiveThirtyEight Total Rating Nate Silver is a political commentator and founder of the website FiveThirtyEight , which uses and promotes statistical approaches in explaining the world.  The site's two major areas of focus are in politics (especially on elections - it became famous for correctly predicting for whom 49 of 50 states would vote in the 2008 US presidential election and every US state in the 2012 election, and though it wasn't as accurate in 2016 it had given Donald Trump a larger chance of Electoral College victory than other mainstream media sources) and sports (Silver first got into statistical analysis via baseball). The presence of both sports-related and politics-related topics in the comic, however related they are (or not) with each other, seems to be a nod towards FiveThirtyEight's content. Nate Silver has a much higher 538TR than either Curry or James. As explained in the title text, the 538TR combines basketball skill (either real-life or video game basketball) with election forecasting. This could suggest that Silver is proficient at basketball, presumably the video game kind, or else that election forecasting is heavily weighted.\nNBA Playoffs DataDive LeBron James and Stephen Curry What makes these superstars so extraordinary?\n[The comic consists of several plots and tables, listed here from top to bottom, left to right.]\nScatter plot of Social Security number vs Free throw percentage [Social Security numbers range from 000-00-0000 to 999-99-9999. No pattern discernable, aside from points being a bit denser in the middle of the plot. Stephen Curry is marked as a point on the right edge of the plot, corresponding to a high free throw percentage.]\nScatter plot of 2018 points per game vs Average teammate APGAR score [APGAR scores range from 0 to 10. Pattern suggests a somewhat positive link between the two factors. LeBron James is marked as having a lot of points, but a low teammate APGAR score of approximately 2.1.]\nShot map [Legend: grey dot for all players, black dot for Stephen Curry] [A diagram of a basketball court is shown with dots placed where players have taken shots at the goal. For the all players category the dots generally cluster next to the goal basket and in front of the three point line. Stephen has 3 dots next to the basket (one is behind it), but does cluster next to the three point line. He also has several dots on the other side of the playing field, and outside it, including three in the bleachers and one in the locker room.]\nSandwiches eaten during play vs Win\u00a0% [Sandwiches eaten range from 0 to 4. A plot that suggests no relation between the factors because practically all dots are in the zero sandwiches column. 2018 Warriors have one dot at around 60% and 4 sandwiches.]\n2018 total points [A table listing teams and their points overall and \"When net is within 15\u00b0 of magnetic north\". The rows for the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers are highlighted, the latter showing an abnormally high score in the magnetic north column.]\n2018 total points Overall When net is within 15\u00b0 of magnetic north Golden State Warriors 9304 330 Houston Rockets 9213 268 New Orleans Pelicans 9161 219 Toronto Raptors 9156 341 Cleveland Cavaliers 9091 1644 Denver Nuggets 9020 280\n[A table at the bottom:]\nStephen Curry LeBron James Have you heard of him Probably Yes President during most recent game 7 loss Obama Bush Pog collection Large Staggeringly large Career average Fed interest rate 3.42% 4.41% Name Scrabble score 22 22 Best sport Basketball Basketball Height Over 6' Over 6' Retirement year 2027 Unknown Nate Silver FiveThirtyEight total rating (devised by Nate Silver to combine all metrics into a single stat) 37.4 31.8 86.6\nThis comic was posted the day after the second game in the 2018 NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors (Stephen Curry's team) and the Cleveland Cavaliers (LeBron James' team).  It is the fourth consecutive time the two teams faced each other at the finals, which is unprecedented in major sports leagues in North America.  The Warriors won in 2015 and 2017, the Cavaliers won in 2016. At the time of the comic, the Warriors led the current series 2-0; which they eventually won.\n"}
{"id":2003,"title":"Presidential Succession","image_title":"Presidential Succession","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2003","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/presidential_succession.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2003:_Presidential_Succession","transcript":"A proposal for a new presidential line of succession Current politics aside, most experts agree the existing process is flawed. The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 is probably unconstitutional on several counts, and there are many practical issues with the system as well. (For more, see the surprisingly gripping Second Report of the Continuity of Government Commission , June 2009.) Proposed line of succession: President Vice president Secretary of State Secretary of Defense Secretary of Homeland Security Attorney General Five people who do not live in Washington DC, nominated at the start of the president's term and confirmed by the Senate Tom Hanks State Governors, in descending order of state population at last census Anyone who won an Oscar for playing a governor Anyone who won a Governor's award for playing someone named Oscar Kate McKinnon, if available Billboard year-end Hot 100 singles artists #1 through #10 (for groups, whoever is credited first in name, liner notes, etc) The top 5 US astronauts in descending order of total spaceflight time Serena Williams (or, if she lost her most recent match, whoever beat her) The most recent season NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL MVPs Bull Pullman and his descendants by absolute primogeniture The entire line of succession to the British throne The current champion of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest All other US citizens, chosen by a 29-round single-elimination Jousting tournament\n","explanation":"The United States presidential line of succession is the order of people who serve as president if the current incumbent president is incapacitated, dies, resigns, or is removed from office.\nThe Presidential Succession Act of 1947 revised the presidential order of succession to its current order. This Act, though never challenged in the courts, may not be constitutional for two reasons. First, the Act names two members of Congress as successors.  There are serious questions as to whether this violates the principle of Separation of Powers. The second issue is that the Act allows for anyone skipped over for succession to later assume the office if circumstances change to allow them to hold it. This would mean that the person in question could effectively unseat a sitting President, which raises serious constitutional issues.\nThere are also practical concerns regarding the Act. The line of succession includes all members of the Cabinet in the order that their department was established, with the oldest departments first. No consideration is given to which departments would be most relevant to the Presidency, particularly considering that this type of succession would presumably involve a serious crisis, which the new president would need to be able to address immediately. The Department of Homeland Security is in charge of the security and protection of the United States and its citizens and would probably already be privy to sensitive intelligence and briefings related to national security, but because it is the latest of the Departments to have been established (in 2003), the Secretary of Homeland Security is last in the current Presidential line of succession, behind Secretaries in much less sensitive roles, such as those of Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and Education.\nAnother concern is that, by including members of Congress immediately after the Vice President, there is a serious risk that the simultaneous death of the President and Vice President could cause the Presidency to change to the opposing party, which could lead to serious political instability at the precise moment when the country is facing a national crisis. It even presents the possibility that simultaneous assassinations of the President and Vice President could function as an effective coup, shifting power to their opponents.\nFinally, there is the issue that, usually, everyone in the line of succession lives and works in Washington D.C. Hence, a sufficiently destructive attack or natural disaster impacting the city could realistically incapacitate all of them, leaving the USA leaderless at a time of extreme crisis. It is already established practice in the USA that everyone in this line not gather together at once. In cases where most senior government officials gather (such as the State of the Union ), at least one member of the line of succession (referred to as the \"designated survivor\") is secured off-site, and would assume the presidency in the unlikely event that a mass casualty event were to kill or incapacitate everyone else in the line. However, disasters impacting an entire city remain a possibility, and no provision is made for them in current law.\nTo correct these issues, a think tank known as the Continuity of Government Commission prepared a report recommending a new line of succession, which would not include members of Congress, would reorder the cabinet secretaries so that the most suitable roles would be the first successors, and would include people who do not live or work in Washington DC.  The full text of their report can be found here . A short, readable summary, including the report's recommended new line of succession, is here .\nThe first six members of the commission's list are taken from the current line of succession, though the order is changed; they propose that after this, five new people should be appointed specifically for the purpose of assuming the presidency, if needed. Randall's list begins with these eleven people (combining the five new appointees into #7); afterwards, his list becomes increasingly comical and ridiculous.\nRandall's list omits members of Congress, as well as other cabinet positions, in accordance with the report's concerns about constitutionality and qualifications. However, his other additions totally ignore these issues, including people with no apparent qualifications for the office (such as actors, athletes, and competitive eaters) and people who are constitutionally ineligible for the office.  The US Constitution requires that the President of the United States must be a natural-born US citizen, at least 35 years of age, and have resided in the US for at least fourteen years. Randall's list includes many people who don't meet these requirements.  Most notably, he includes the entire succession to the British crown, almost none of whom meet the requirement of being natural-born citizens of the United States.\nIt may be expected that many of the athletes, musicians and actors on this list are likely to be ineligible as well. Most professional athletes in the relevant sports are under 35 years old, particularly those at the peak of their careers (when they'd likely win MVP awards), the most popular musicians also tend to be younger than 35, and many who meet these requirements were not born US citizens (and some many not even reside in the US).  However, the existing line of succession can also contain ineligible people, who would simply be skipped over for succession. For example, at the comic's publication, Elaine Chao was the Secretary of Transportation and would normally be 14th in line, but because she is a naturalized citizen of the US, rather than native-born (she was born in Taiwan) she would not qualify for the office if the line came to her.\nThe title text mentions that ties will be broken by whoever was closest to the surface of Europa when they were born. Europa is a moon of Jupiter and one of the most likely locations in the Solar System for potential habitability . This is likely a parody of systems in which ties are broken by semi-arbitrary rules (such as the older candidate automatically winning a tie) or a randomized ones (such as ties being decided by a coin flip).  The position of Europa with respect to Earth at the time of one's birth depends on enough factors that it acts as a pseudo-random tie breaker, albeit a needlessly complicated one.\nThe presidential line of succession was first mentioned in 1933: Santa Facts\nBased on the comic's defined criteria for the order of succession, these are the specific individuals in that order, including only people who are otherwise eligible to be the President of United States (35 year old and natural born US citizens who lived in US for last 14 years) as of the date the comic was published .\nBased on the comic's defined criteria for the order of succession, these are the specific individuals in that order, including only people who are otherwise eligible to be the President of United States (35 year old and natural born US citizens who lived in US for last 14 years) as of the current date . (Last updated on 26 January 2022)\nA proposal for a new presidential line of succession Current politics aside, most experts agree the existing process is flawed. The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 is probably unconstitutional on several counts, and there are many practical issues with the system as well. (For more, see the surprisingly gripping Second Report of the Continuity of Government Commission , June 2009.) Proposed line of succession: President Vice president Secretary of State Secretary of Defense Secretary of Homeland Security Attorney General Five people who do not live in Washington DC, nominated at the start of the president's term and confirmed by the Senate Tom Hanks State Governors, in descending order of state population at last census Anyone who won an Oscar for playing a governor Anyone who won a Governor's award for playing someone named Oscar Kate McKinnon, if available Billboard year-end Hot 100 singles artists #1 through #10 (for groups, whoever is credited first in name, liner notes, etc) The top 5 US astronauts in descending order of total spaceflight time Serena Williams (or, if she lost her most recent match, whoever beat her) The most recent season NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL MVPs Bull Pullman and his descendants by absolute primogeniture The entire line of succession to the British throne The current champion of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest All other US citizens, chosen by a 29-round single-elimination Jousting tournament\n"}
{"id":2004,"title":"Sun and Earth","image_title":"Sun and Earth","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2004","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sun_and_earth.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2004:_Sun_and_Earth","transcript":"[The entire comic is within a panel. At the bottom of the image a curved shape depicting a small part of the Earth's surface and labeled as \"Earth\" is shown. At the top a similar sized shape but opposite curve is labeled as \"Sun\". The surface of the Sun is seething while on Earth's surface a few plants, two birds, and Cueball together with Megan are visible.]\n[Two arrows pointing to the Sun and the Earth with a caption applying to both of them:] Massive convective systems which occasionally blast huge plumes of heat at us without warning through mechanisms we can't directly observe and don't really understand.\nCueball: What a nice day!\n","explanation":"This is one of a number of comics which describe everyday events in unusual terms, making them sound really weird. In this case, both the Sun and the Earth are \"massive convective systems [blasting] huge plumes of heat\", which contrasts sharply with the daily idea of the Sun being a ball in the sky and the Earth the thing under our feet.\nFree convection is based on an difference in density.  What is colder is typically denser, so gravity forces it downwards, displacing what is hotter (and less dense) upward (This should not be confused with forced convection , which uses fans or other devices that are not practical to build on the scale of a planet). In the sun, most of the energy to drive this process comes from nuclear fusion, specifically the fusion of hydrogen into helium.  We cannot directly see inside of the earth, [ citation needed ] but its core is known to be much hotter than its surface.\nThe magnitude of these systems gives you an idea of the size of the fluctuations you can expect. The sun is very massive, meaning the fluctuations in its convective or heat-dissipating behavior are very large. This is an instance of the Fluctuation-Dissipation theorem . These fluctuations take the form of a solar flare, as explained below. For a more thorough (but non-technical) explanation of the role of gravity and entropy in such systems, see this .\nThe Sun produces great amounts of light and heat and blasts it towards us, which is why we can live on Earth. Since Ludwig Boltzmann pointed out the fact in 1875, people have been working on establishing exactly how such far from equilibrium systems as life might depend upon, or be formed by ( like this article ), such massive entropy gradients as between the sun and earth (or rather the sun and empty space). Main sequence stars like the sun transport energy by radiation and by convective currents of plasma , bringing the heat generated in the core of the sun to its surface.  These quickly moving charged particles create a massive magnetic field, which occasionally gets concentrated into a solar prominence which can snap, causing a large amount of charged particles to get shot into space as a solar flare .  If the Earth happens to be in the direction of the solar flare, we can notice all sorts of interesting and often damaging effects.  Thankfully, there are lots of other directions for the sun to shoot solar flares, so they don't come by the Earth that often.\nThe Earth's interior is also very hot. Mantle convection causes plate tectonics which is the main cause of volcanic activity (next to mantle plumes ), which essentially also consists of huge blasts of heat.\nThis could sound like a very bad scenario, but the title text reminds us that the real scenario we live in is far worse, as we are not likely to die from a Sun blast or volcano eruption. In doing this, he indirectly points out the hard truth about our lives: that they're limited and they're short, and it is far easier to die of because of other things. In this way Randall attempts to give the reader an existential crisis; he concludes that his statement did not help to reassure himself.\nThis comic was likely inspired by the recent eruptions of the K\u012blauea and Volc\u00e1n de Fuego . In contrast, solar activity is currently low, because the sunspot solar cycle is in the low end of the 11-year cycle.\n[The entire comic is within a panel. At the bottom of the image a curved shape depicting a small part of the Earth's surface and labeled as \"Earth\" is shown. At the top a similar sized shape but opposite curve is labeled as \"Sun\". The surface of the Sun is seething while on Earth's surface a few plants, two birds, and Cueball together with Megan are visible.]\n[Two arrows pointing to the Sun and the Earth with a caption applying to both of them:] Massive convective systems which occasionally blast huge plumes of heat at us without warning through mechanisms we can't directly observe and don't really understand.\nCueball: What a nice day!\n"}
{"id":2005,"title":"Attention Span","image_title":"Attention Span","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2005","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/attention_span.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2005:_Attention_Span","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing together.] Cueball: I haven't read any books in forever. I have no attention span anymore.\n[Zoom in on the faces of Cueball and Megan.] Megan: Didn't you literally just spend six hours obsessively reading about the theory that Thomas the Tank Engine is authoritarian propaganda depicting a post-apocalyptic fascist dystopia?\n[Cueball still standing there. Megan begins pacing away.] Cueball: OK Cueball: I mean I have no attention span for anything good anymore. Megan: Let's check out your bookshelf, shall we?\n[Cueball alone.] Cueball: What are you- Off-panel: I see a dragon holding a sword in its teeth on the cover of a book that's thicker than it is wide. Cueball: And? That's a classic! Off-panel: Just saying, I don't think this is a new development.\n2005 (the comic number) is also the year of the first XKCD comic.\nThe dragon described is very loosely similar to the legendary pokemon Zacian , whose game had been teased at the release of this comic.","explanation":"People often groan about their shrinking attention span, attributing it to an increased illiteracy. This allows for fond nostalgia about the times when they were supposedly more intelligent and focused. For instance, Nicholas Carr wrote this article to compile both anecdotes (which are more abundant) and research (which is more useful) to describe this phenomenon.\nCueball does the same here, but Megan retorts that he spent six hours reading over a pointless (if disturbingly plausible) theory about a banal show based off a series of bedtime stories made to entertain small children. Thomas The Tank Engine is a British children's series based off a series of books written by Wilbert Awdry. It follows the adventures of anthropomorphized train locomotives and other vehicles.\nCueball qualifies his statement: he has no attention span for anything good anymore. Megan, in reply, examines Cueball\u2019s bookshelf, finding a book that cements Cueball\u2019s status as a nerd who reads high fantasy . Cueball protests that the book is a classic, but Megan dismisses the fact.\nTo be fair to Cueball, many great fantasies have covers such as those in the comic (e.g. A Song of Ice and Fire , The Lord of the Rings , Randall's personal favorite Discworld ). To be fair to Megan, this book is apparently not one of them, being thicker than it is wide (like The Complete Miss Marple by Agatha Christie ), a telltale sign of needless bombast and turgid prose.\nOther possibilities for the dragon book are His Majesty's Dragon from the Temeraire series or Dragonsbane from the Winterlands series.\nIf there was any doubt about Cueball\u2019s dubious literary tastes before, Megan dispels them in the title text, refering to a novelization of the excoriated movie Surf Ninjas , a movie that is exactly what it sounds like. Signed novelizations of a movie named \u201cSurf Ninjas\u201d are not typical fodder for great minds. [ citation needed ]\nThe comic contains a hyperlink to an article with the same unfortunate content Cueball has apparently finished reading prior to this comic: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of \u201cThomas the Tank Engine & Friends\u201d . This article, the articles linked from it, further linked articles from those, links found by googling the topic, and other related web surfing on the topic could easily add up to six hours or more of reading.\n[Cueball and Megan are standing together.] Cueball: I haven't read any books in forever. I have no attention span anymore.\n[Zoom in on the faces of Cueball and Megan.] Megan: Didn't you literally just spend six hours obsessively reading about the theory that Thomas the Tank Engine is authoritarian propaganda depicting a post-apocalyptic fascist dystopia?\n[Cueball still standing there. Megan begins pacing away.] Cueball: OK Cueball: I mean I have no attention span for anything good anymore. Megan: Let's check out your bookshelf, shall we?\n[Cueball alone.] Cueball: What are you- Off-panel: I see a dragon holding a sword in its teeth on the cover of a book that's thicker than it is wide. Cueball: And? That's a classic! Off-panel: Just saying, I don't think this is a new development.\n2005 (the comic number) is also the year of the first XKCD comic.\nThe dragon described is very loosely similar to the legendary pokemon Zacian , whose game had been teased at the release of this comic."}
{"id":2006,"title":"Customer Rewards","image_title":"Customer Rewards","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2006","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/customer_rewards.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2006:_Customer_Rewards","transcript":"[To the right Cueball stands in front of a sales desk, his shopping bag on the desk. Behind the desk on the left is a sales clerk wearing a peaked cap and typing on a cash register.] Sales clerk: That will be $23.03. Sales clerk: Also, I'll pay you 24 cents for your last name, 35 cents for a list of your family members, 79 cents for your cell number, and $1.20 if you hand me your phone and let me scroll through your Facebook posts.\n[Caption below the panel:] Loyalty cards and rewards account offers get way weirder if you think of them as separate transactions.\n","explanation":"Many supermarkets offer customers Loyalty programs that give discounts. To join one of these programs you often need to give various personal data, such as your name, or download an app that can access your Facebook account. The supermarket gets lots of valuable marketing data to target the customer in the future. They think this will make lots of money for them, so they entice people to do this. This is why it is able to offer a discount to members of the program.\nHere, Cueball is at a store where the clerk is offering to give him benefits in exchange for data and to help them advertise their products. This comic imagines the exchange of data for a discount as the sales clerk offering cash at the point of sale, to emphasize how odd this exchange is. Not to mention, when flat-out asking to see someone's phone to write down their contact info and look at all their Facebook posts it sounds disturbingly like uncouth data harvesting, not too far removed from potential identity theft.\nThe title text continues this by considering how companies will also find ways to incentivize positive viral marketing or offer services in exchange for viewing adverts. By imagining these situations as if they were cash transactions makes them seem ridiculous.\nAll this information is used to send personalized ads which have a better chance of succeeding and earning money for the store owner.\n[To the right Cueball stands in front of a sales desk, his shopping bag on the desk. Behind the desk on the left is a sales clerk wearing a peaked cap and typing on a cash register.] Sales clerk: That will be $23.03. Sales clerk: Also, I'll pay you 24 cents for your last name, 35 cents for a list of your family members, 79 cents for your cell number, and $1.20 if you hand me your phone and let me scroll through your Facebook posts.\n[Caption below the panel:] Loyalty cards and rewards account offers get way weirder if you think of them as separate transactions.\n"}
{"id":2007,"title":"Brookhaven RHIC","image_title":"Brookhaven RHIC","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2007","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brookhaven_rhic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2007:_Brookhaven_RHIC","transcript":"[A single panel contains a simplified overhead map view of the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and some of the surrounding area. The map is rotated 90\u00b0; north is to the left. The collider is located on the left hand side of the image as a yellow beam (representing the Gold ions) outlined in black.  Parts of the collider are are labeled and there are light gray arrows indicating the direction of travel for the ions.  At the bottom of the main accelerator ring there is a diverter that splits the ion beam and directs it towards a set of three Cash for Gold stores, passing through a more diverters along the way.  Each Cash for Gold store is represented with a yellow burst and is marked with a Google maps style \"store\" locator pin. The following labels are written on the map.]\nBrookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Gold Ion Source Accelerator Ring Diverter Gold Ion Beam\n[There are arrows coming from this label pointing at each store] Cash for Gold Stores\n[Caption below the panel:] Sadly, Brookhaven rejected my proposed experiment\n","explanation":"The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is a particle accelerator designed to collide gold ions together at incredibly high speeds. This is normally done to study particle physics - the high-energy collisions allow us to learn more about how subatomic particles behave.\nRandall proposes that, instead of using the beam of gold ions for particle collisions, it should be diverted and sold at cash-for-gold stores to make money. In effect, the particle accelerator would be reconfigured to become an extremely complicated and expensive method to transport gold ions from the foil to the cash-for-gold stores.\nRandall proposed modifying part of the circular particle accelerator to add a diverter, so he can direct the gold ion beam to the three stores. It is unclear, however, how he would manage to transport the gold to the stores, as once it leaves the circular particle accelerator, parts of the beam are not in an enclosed space, and would likely collide with something. It would also cause problems once it reached the stores, as the gold ions travel at relativistic speeds.\nPart of the joke may be that because they are traveling at relativistic speeds, the mass of the particles being sold will be much more than the mass of the ions being supplied to the collider's input. However, it would be very difficult to sell a beam of charged particles [ citation needed ] , and the amount of gold involved is below microscopic scales. That, and the fact that he is trying to misuse the particle accelerator for his own profit, is the reason why Brookhaven rejected Randall's proposal. Also, the energy used by the particle accelerator would cost more than the revenue from selling the gold.\nRandall has done many comics describing impractical research proposals in the past.\nThe title text imagines the owner of the stores complaining about the sale, not because of impracticality, but because Randall tries to sell gold ions with the entire positively-charged nucleus of the gold atom with all 79 electrons stripped from it instead of normal, electrically neutral gold atoms. This is also a pun on the word \"charges\", which could refer to electric charge or to criminal charges .\nThis is an actual map of the area around Brookhaven National Laboratory , with east at the top. The cash for gold stores depicted in the comic are, from left to right:\n[A single panel contains a simplified overhead map view of the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and some of the surrounding area. The map is rotated 90\u00b0; north is to the left. The collider is located on the left hand side of the image as a yellow beam (representing the Gold ions) outlined in black.  Parts of the collider are are labeled and there are light gray arrows indicating the direction of travel for the ions.  At the bottom of the main accelerator ring there is a diverter that splits the ion beam and directs it towards a set of three Cash for Gold stores, passing through a more diverters along the way.  Each Cash for Gold store is represented with a yellow burst and is marked with a Google maps style \"store\" locator pin. The following labels are written on the map.]\nBrookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Gold Ion Source Accelerator Ring Diverter Gold Ion Beam\n[There are arrows coming from this label pointing at each store] Cash for Gold Stores\n[Caption below the panel:] Sadly, Brookhaven rejected my proposed experiment\n"}
{"id":2008,"title":"Irony Definition","image_title":"Irony Definition","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2008","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/irony_definition.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2008:_Irony_Definition","transcript":"[Black Hat and Cueball are walking together, with Black Hat walking behind Cueball with his arms out and palms up. Cueball is visibly upset, as evidenced by the squiggle floating above his head and his balled up fists.] Black Hat: It's ironic how you know the definition of irony, yet I'm the one in this conversation who's happy.\n","explanation":"This comic presents a snapshot of an argument between Black Hat and Cueball . Black Hat states that it's ironic how Cueball understands the definition of irony, yet Black Hat is happy while Cueball is not. Cueball is upset because Black Hat is purposely misusing the term \"ironic\", likely after Cueball had previously corrected him on his use of the word.\nIrony is a broad concept that is very often the subject of confusion and debate, especially concerning whether something is \"really\" irony. In this comic, Black Hat is probably referencing situational irony , which occurs when there is a sharp contrast between the expected and actual results of a situation, often in a humorous way or one that includes some sort of contradiction. For example, cane toads were introduced to Australia to control the native cane beetle, a pest to farmers. Ironically, the toads have caused massive ecological damage and become a pest themselves, and have even failed to control the cane beetles. That someone who understands what irony is would be unhappy while someone who doesn't would be happy is not an example of irony. Since Black Hat is trying to irritate Cueball, he is intentionally misusing the word \"ironic\".\nIrony can have other meanings besides situational irony. Verbal irony (which is related to sarcasm) refers to a contradiction between a statement's stated and intended meaning. Dramatic irony is a device in fiction in which the consumer of a work is aware of information that is unknown to a character in the narrative. The adjective \"ironic\" is often used colloquially to mean strange, interesting, unexpected, or funny based on some subversion of expectations. The use of the word in these ways is often what prompts conversations and arguments about what really is or isn't ironic.\nWhat could be going on is that Cueball was trying to correct Black Hat's misuse of the word irony, in order to make him feel bad about misusing it. However, Black Hat being the classhole he is, could have decided to take advantage of it, and misuse it again , to make Cueball angry again.\nIn the title text Black Hat once again misuses the word ironic , this time in an even more absurd way. It is unknown what Black Hat means when he says Cueball's glaring makes him feel \"ironic\", as this is a totally spurious use of the word, and one which is probably not intended to actually mean anything and is only done to annoy Cueball further.\n[Black Hat and Cueball are walking together, with Black Hat walking behind Cueball with his arms out and palms up. Cueball is visibly upset, as evidenced by the squiggle floating above his head and his balled up fists.] Black Hat: It's ironic how you know the definition of irony, yet I'm the one in this conversation who's happy.\n"}
{"id":2009,"title":"Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram","image_title":"Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2009","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hertzsprung_russell_diagram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2009:_Hertzsprung-Russell_Diagram","transcript":"Expanded Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram [A scatter plot is shown, with the x-axis labeled Effective Temperature (in kelvins), and the y-axis Luminosity (watts).] [Circled items in the top left (high temperature and high luminosity):] Supergiants Giants Main sequence White dwarfs Brown dwarfs [Items shown as points and their values:] Betelgeuse: \t3200 K, \t1.6 \u00d7 10 31 W Vega: \t10,000 K, \t1.8 \u00d7 10 28 W Sun: \t5800 K, \t3.6 \u00d7 10 26 W Proxima Centauri: \t2700 K, \t2.0 \u00d7 10 23 W HD 189733 b: \t2100 K, \t4.8 \u00d7 10 21 W Interior of a hydrogen bomb during detonation: \t~108 K, \t~10 20 W Jupiter: \t285 K, \t1.2 \u00d7 10 18 W Venus: \t330 K, \t5.0 \u00d7 10 17 W Earth: \t300 K, \t3.0 \u00d7 10 17 W Mars: \t255 K, \t2.0 \u00d7 10 16 W Moon: \t300 K, \t1.2 \u00d7 10 16 W Nuclear Fireball: \t8000 K, \t2.0 \u00d7 10 14 W France: \t300 K, \t2.0 \u00d7 10 14 W Europa: \t90 K, \t3.5 \u00d7 10 14 W Lightning Bolt: \t30,000 K, \t30 GW Ivanpah Solar Plant Salt Tank: \t1200 K, \t1.2 GW Medium-sized Lava Lake: \t800 K, \t32 MW Cruise Ship: \t325 K, \t30 MW Campfire: \t870 K, \t7.0 kW Blue whale: \t280 K, \t78 kW Arc lamp: \t6500 K, \t150 W Lightbulb: \t4800 K, \t75 W LED Bulb: \t5800 K, \t8 W Astronomer: \t310 K, \t100 W\n","explanation":"The Hertzsprung\u2013Russell diagram is a scatterplot showing absolute luminosities of stars against its effective temperature or color. It's generally used to understand a star's age.\nThe axes are labeled in Kelvin (degrees Celsius above absolute zero ) for effective temperature and, unlike many Hertzsprung\u2013Russell diagrams, Watts for luminosity . While most Hertzsprung\u2013Russell diagrams are labelled in units of solar luminosity or absolute magnitude , all three are perfectly valid measures of luminosity , which refers to the total power emitted by the star (or other body). Effective temperature refers to temperature of a blackbody with the same surface area and luminosity. This is meant to provide an estimate of the surface temperature of the object.\nRoughly speaking, the luminosity (i.e. total power radiated) by an object is proportional to (1) the total surface area of the object, multiplied by (2) the (absolute) temperature raised to the fourth power. So a high luminosity generally results from either a very hot or a very large object, or a combination of the two. The surface-area dependence explains why the whale and the cruise ship are more luminous than the hotter campfire.\nRegular Hertzsprung\u2013Russell diagrams cover ranges of about 1,000K to 30,000K, and what is labeled on this diagram as 10 21 to 10 33 watts\u2014i.e. the upper-left corner. Extended diagrams increase the luminosity range only to include the \"Brown Dwarfs\". This diagram has been extended to much lower magnitudes on both axes. The joke comes from the absurdity of a diagram meant for stars including much smaller objects, such as planets ... and astronomers.\nThough not included in the diagram, the title text notes that the diagram itself would probably be plotted somewhere in the lower right corner due to its (relatively) low power output and temperature. On its face this is nonsensical - the diagram itself, being mere information, possesses neither power output nor temperature - but one can read this as the power output and temperature of a typical screen displaying the diagram. Bigger screens have a higher total output (in terms of luminosity) and are thus positioned further towards the diagram's top. An \"unusually big screen\" would have to be something like a JumboTron or a projector for its luminosity or temperature to put it outside of the lower right corner.\nExpanded Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram [A scatter plot is shown, with the x-axis labeled Effective Temperature (in kelvins), and the y-axis Luminosity (watts).] [Circled items in the top left (high temperature and high luminosity):] Supergiants Giants Main sequence White dwarfs Brown dwarfs [Items shown as points and their values:] Betelgeuse: \t3200 K, \t1.6 \u00d7 10 31 W Vega: \t10,000 K, \t1.8 \u00d7 10 28 W Sun: \t5800 K, \t3.6 \u00d7 10 26 W Proxima Centauri: \t2700 K, \t2.0 \u00d7 10 23 W HD 189733 b: \t2100 K, \t4.8 \u00d7 10 21 W Interior of a hydrogen bomb during detonation: \t~108 K, \t~10 20 W Jupiter: \t285 K, \t1.2 \u00d7 10 18 W Venus: \t330 K, \t5.0 \u00d7 10 17 W Earth: \t300 K, \t3.0 \u00d7 10 17 W Mars: \t255 K, \t2.0 \u00d7 10 16 W Moon: \t300 K, \t1.2 \u00d7 10 16 W Nuclear Fireball: \t8000 K, \t2.0 \u00d7 10 14 W France: \t300 K, \t2.0 \u00d7 10 14 W Europa: \t90 K, \t3.5 \u00d7 10 14 W Lightning Bolt: \t30,000 K, \t30 GW Ivanpah Solar Plant Salt Tank: \t1200 K, \t1.2 GW Medium-sized Lava Lake: \t800 K, \t32 MW Cruise Ship: \t325 K, \t30 MW Campfire: \t870 K, \t7.0 kW Blue whale: \t280 K, \t78 kW Arc lamp: \t6500 K, \t150 W Lightbulb: \t4800 K, \t75 W LED Bulb: \t5800 K, \t8 W Astronomer: \t310 K, \t100 W\n"}
{"id":2010,"title":"Update Notes","image_title":"Update Notes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2010","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/update_notes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2010:_Update_Notes","transcript":"[There are two panels that show smartphone-esque screens with two different apps with different update notes, showing a conversation between two people. New updates are added to the top, so to follow the conversation flow one would start from the bottom and alternate between the second app and the first one.] [At the top, the status bars between the two panels are slightly different: telephone reception, WiFi strength, battery, GPS...]\n[\"Updates\" is written in uppercase at the top. The first app's icon is an \"A\" symbol. Next to it, there is the following information:] [The app name is a scribble] Version 3.0.1 June 22, 2018\nUpdate Notes:\nv3.0.1 I'm actually off work Monday so that's perfect.\nv3.0 Oh, that sounds fun! What night?\nv2.8.31 Are you around this weekend? We're heading to the beach.\nv2.8.3 Hey Mike, you there?\n[\"Updates\" is written in uppercase at the top. The second app's icon consists of three stars arranged in a triangle. Next to it, there is:] [The app name is a scribble followed by two stars in parentheses] Version 7.0 June 22, 2018\nUpdate Notes:\nv7.0 It peaks August 12-13 th .\nv6.8.16 Sorry, no, going to a wedding. But do you want to camp out for the meteor shower in August?\nv6.8.15 Yeah, what's up?\nv6.8.14 Introduced bugs and degraded performance[.]\n[At the bottom of each panel, there are menu icons: a star, a stack of rectangles, a bullet list, a magnifying glass and an arrow pointing down to a square]\n[Caption below the panels:] My friend and I both have apps we've stopped maintaining, so we just use the updates to chat.\n\n[For convenience, here are the update notes in order of release (note that the first is not part of the conversation with Mike):]\n\"A\" app (v6.8.14): Introduced bugs and degraded performance[.]\n\"3-star\" app (v2.8.3): Hey Mike, you there?\nA (v6.8.15): Yeah, what's up?\n3-star (v.2.8.31): Are you around this weekend? We're heading to the beach.\nA (v6.8.16): Sorry, no, going to a wedding. But do you want to camp out for the meteor shower in August?\n3-star (v3.0): Oh, that sounds fun! What night?\nA (v7.0): It peaks August 12-13th.\n3-star (v3.0.1): I'm actually off work Monday so that's perfect.\n","explanation":"Update notes or release notes are notes (or documents) released when software has been updated, to inform the user of any important changes to the software.\nIn this comic, Randall and his friend are using release notes of their apps as a form of chat service, instead of actual software change information. He says this is possible because the two apps are no longer being maintained, so theoretically, there are not many people using the app who would read the update \/ change notes. Incidentally, one can still argue that the chat is still technically update notes, only instead of updating users on what has changed about an app, it is now giving Randall and his friend status \"updates\".\nThis comic has a similar theme as 1305: Undocumented Feature both use old software forums as a chat application.\nThis \"chat service\" would not be in real time, so presumably, Randall and his friend would have to be constantly checking each other's apps to see if there are updates.\nOn the \"stars\" app, the last \"actual\" notes says \"Introduced bugs and degraded performance\". This is a very common change when new features are added, however, developers will normally describe what the new features are rather than just state the negative consequences. It goes in contrast with the typical change note \"fixed bugs and improved performance\" that usually follows.\nThe comic also refers to a meteor shower occurring in August, most likely the Perseid meteor shower .\nThe title text says that Randall, who is at the beach, has left his sunscreen in his car, but that the trunk (a pun with the name of the main software development branch in SVN) is unlocked, for whoever is still reading the updates for this app. This may invite the attention of thieves, who are now informed that Randall's trunk is unlocked.  However they may not know what city Randall lives in, and conversely readers of the release notes could be anywhere in the world so most are probably not in a position to physically make contact with Randall's car.\nThis comic could be seen as a subtle reference to how plain sight communication such as gang codes and steganography are used by people, possibly out of coerced necessity, to communicate information both deniably and publicly.  It is likely that this often happens in real app update messages in real life.  This kind of communication would more realistically allow a criminal worker to communicate with a contact point without endangering their anonymity by associating with them directly.\nThis comic could also be poking fun at the non-descriptive updates many popular apps post in the \"What's new\" or change log. One example of this would be the Uber app stating \"We update the app as often as possible\" as a \"new\" feature every update. Apple recently changed AppStore guidelines [1] to require clear descriptions of new features and product changes, effectively putting an end to the problem Randall is highlighting.\nRealistically, even if it were permitted, this would be a rather slow form of communication, especially on platforms such as Apple\u2019s App Store, where Randall and his friend would need to wait from a few hours to a few days for their app to be manually reviewed for each \u201cupdate\u201d.\n[There are two panels that show smartphone-esque screens with two different apps with different update notes, showing a conversation between two people. New updates are added to the top, so to follow the conversation flow one would start from the bottom and alternate between the second app and the first one.] [At the top, the status bars between the two panels are slightly different: telephone reception, WiFi strength, battery, GPS...]\n[\"Updates\" is written in uppercase at the top. The first app's icon is an \"A\" symbol. Next to it, there is the following information:] [The app name is a scribble] Version 3.0.1 June 22, 2018\nUpdate Notes:\nv3.0.1 I'm actually off work Monday so that's perfect.\nv3.0 Oh, that sounds fun! What night?\nv2.8.31 Are you around this weekend? We're heading to the beach.\nv2.8.3 Hey Mike, you there?\n[\"Updates\" is written in uppercase at the top. The second app's icon consists of three stars arranged in a triangle. Next to it, there is:] [The app name is a scribble followed by two stars in parentheses] Version 7.0 June 22, 2018\nUpdate Notes:\nv7.0 It peaks August 12-13 th .\nv6.8.16 Sorry, no, going to a wedding. But do you want to camp out for the meteor shower in August?\nv6.8.15 Yeah, what's up?\nv6.8.14 Introduced bugs and degraded performance[.]\n[At the bottom of each panel, there are menu icons: a star, a stack of rectangles, a bullet list, a magnifying glass and an arrow pointing down to a square]\n[Caption below the panels:] My friend and I both have apps we've stopped maintaining, so we just use the updates to chat.\n\n[For convenience, here are the update notes in order of release (note that the first is not part of the conversation with Mike):]\n\"A\" app (v6.8.14): Introduced bugs and degraded performance[.]\n\"3-star\" app (v2.8.3): Hey Mike, you there?\nA (v6.8.15): Yeah, what's up?\n3-star (v.2.8.31): Are you around this weekend? We're heading to the beach.\nA (v6.8.16): Sorry, no, going to a wedding. But do you want to camp out for the meteor shower in August?\n3-star (v3.0): Oh, that sounds fun! What night?\nA (v7.0): It peaks August 12-13th.\n3-star (v3.0.1): I'm actually off work Monday so that's perfect.\n"}
{"id":2011,"title":"Newton's Trajectories","image_title":"Newton's Trajectories","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2011","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/newtons_trajectories.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2011:_Newton%27s_Trajectories","transcript":"[The panel shows a shaded sphere with a rocket launched from its top to the right. Several trajectories are plotted around the sphere.]\n[Trajectory 1 (in black) shows a successful circular orbit.] Humans slip the bonds of Earth to travel the stars\n[Trajectory 2 (in red) shows a ballistic arc that crashes into the sphere near the bottom.] Civilization ends in fire\n[Trajectory 3 (in red) shows a much shorter ballistic arc. No label.]\n[Caption below the panel:] In retrospect, Newton's little cannonball drawing does a surprisingly good job illustrating the range of possible futures of our species.\n","explanation":"The comic shows the Earth, with three apparent rockets on separate trajectories. One is released with sufficient velocity to attain a stable orbit, while the other two fall towards the Earth. This is a slight modification of Newton's cannonball , a thought experiment demonstrating the planetary effects of gravity.\nThe black rocket trajectory is typically that of a rocket delivering a payload to low earth orbit. While a satellite in orbit is still bound to earth, it represents an important step in the history of space exploration. Today, a lot of scientific research regarding the future of human spaceflight is done from low earth orbit, most notably on the ISS .\nThe red rocket trajectories are suborbital, and more commonly associated with ICBMs . These are missiles typically equipped with nuclear warheads. Using such a weapon is likely to trigger a global nuclear war, with disastrous effects for civilization. It is worth noting that ICBMs normally use a different trajectory that goes much higher before falling down at a steeper angle. These trajectories are also different from FOBS , where missiles actually go into orbit (the black trajectory) before deorbiting and falling back on earth.\nHere, Newton's cannonball is used both to observe humanity\u2019s technological future (interplanetary travel, availability of advanced technology to the masses, and constant scientific improvement; or nuclear desolation and the extinction of our species) and to underscore that argument by pointing out the inherent metaphor in the experiment: the cannonball can only escape the atmosphere by achieving high velocity (i.e. escape velocity). Similarly, Randall\u2019s technological utopia will only deliver us from nuclear extinction if it happens quickly; otherwise, mankind will destroy itself.  Of course, that threat only exists because of a triumph of technological progress, the Manhattan Project , but again, technology is a means to an end.\nThe phrase \"slip the bonds of Earth\" comes from the sonnet \" High Flight \" written in 1941 by John Gillespie Magee Jr., an American pilot in the Second World War. Portions of this poem appear on the headstones of many interred in Arlington National Cemetery, particularly aviators and astronauts; it was also quoted in President Reagan's speech after the Challenger disaster.\nThe title text alludes to the unfortunate film The Core , involving drilling to the center of the Earth to restart the stopped rotation of the magnetic core. The line is ostensibly aimed at the center of the Earth. Apparently, not even Newton could predict such a bold, daring and disastrous movie. Or movies.\n[The panel shows a shaded sphere with a rocket launched from its top to the right. Several trajectories are plotted around the sphere.]\n[Trajectory 1 (in black) shows a successful circular orbit.] Humans slip the bonds of Earth to travel the stars\n[Trajectory 2 (in red) shows a ballistic arc that crashes into the sphere near the bottom.] Civilization ends in fire\n[Trajectory 3 (in red) shows a much shorter ballistic arc. No label.]\n[Caption below the panel:] In retrospect, Newton's little cannonball drawing does a surprisingly good job illustrating the range of possible futures of our species.\n"}
{"id":2012,"title":"Thorough Analysis","image_title":"Thorough Analysis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2012","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thorough_analysis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2012:_Thorough_Analysis","transcript":"[The comic panel consists of the beginning of a research paper written in gray, with the last line being slightly cut at the bottom by the panels frame indicating that the text continues below.] 1. Introduction\nThe December 1811 earthquake near New Madrid, Missouri reportedly caused church bells to ring in Charleston, South Carolina.\nBut did it?\nThe original bell tower has been lost, but a computer model of the church building was created from archival plans and forensic masonry analysis. Genetic testing of the timber from local trees related to those used in the bell tower shows a weakness in the\n[Caption below the panel:] My favorite genre of scientific papers are exhaustive 100-page treatises that answer some minor question with the obsessive thoroughness of the 9\/11 Commission Report.\n","explanation":"This comic remarks on how obsessively some scientific papers investigate some insignificant, obscure things. It gives the example of an investigation into whether an earthquake in 1811 caused church bells 600 miles away in Charleston, South Carolina to ring, which, although mildly interesting, is of minimal scientific importance. The earthquake itself is of enormous scientific interest, as an earthquake of the same magnitude in the same area today could cause enormous damage, but Charleston is not in the area considered at significant risk.\nAn explicit comparison is made to the 9\/11 Commission Report , a study that was undertaken to, broadly, answer the question of how the September 11 attacks were able to occur (and by extension, what errors in security and communication needed to be addressed to improve detection of and response to other terrorist acts).\nThis paper describes the researchers going as far as to genetically test local trees, likely to find those most closely related to the trees used for construction, so as to measure their structural properties and extrapolate the likely structural properties of the original building.  Such extrapolation might require its own study to back its validity.  It is likely in real life that the small differences such research would reveal would end up being too unsubstantial to have actually warranted any searching.\nThe title text is a continuation of this paper, which researches into the bells' shapes, and then goes on to note that the entire interview is provided in Appendix VII, indicating that this paper has a substantial amount of additional information considered distracting from the main body.\nThe Tower of London would be a strange place to seek expertise on church bells: even its Bell Tower contains warning bells rather than church-style bells (explain xkcd's transcript with the Tower of London officials on this manner can be viewed in Appendix B).  Until 2017, the nearby Whitechapel Bell Foundry would have been a much better (arguably the best possible) source of information. Whites of Appleton (in Oxfordshire) or John Taylor & Co (in Loughborough) would be current alternatives.  Closer to home for the paper's author, the McShane Bell Foundry in Maryland is likely to offer far more relevant expertise certainly than the Tower of London, and may in addition be able to offer relevant insights specific to the history of bellfounding in the USA.\nIn keeping with the meta thorough analysis theme of the original comic and this explanation, the comic starts with \"The December 1811 earthquake near New Madrid, Missouri...\"  The town of New Madrid existed in 1811, but Missouri Territory did not exist until June 4, 1812, and the State of Missouri not until August 10, 1821.\n[The comic panel consists of the beginning of a research paper written in gray, with the last line being slightly cut at the bottom by the panels frame indicating that the text continues below.] 1. Introduction\nThe December 1811 earthquake near New Madrid, Missouri reportedly caused church bells to ring in Charleston, South Carolina.\nBut did it?\nThe original bell tower has been lost, but a computer model of the church building was created from archival plans and forensic masonry analysis. Genetic testing of the timber from local trees related to those used in the bell tower shows a weakness in the\n[Caption below the panel:] My favorite genre of scientific papers are exhaustive 100-page treatises that answer some minor question with the obsessive thoroughness of the 9\/11 Commission Report.\n"}
{"id":2013,"title":"Rock","image_title":"Rock","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2013","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rock.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2013:_Rock","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are looking at a rock that Megan is holding up in one hand.] Megan: This rock erupted from a volcano near the South Pole when the world was frozen over, just before multicellular life arose.\n[Zoom out reveals that Cueball and Megan are standing on the beach of a bay with hills in the background. The water surface is quite flat without any waves. Megan throws the rock which skips 5 times across the water before it sinks.] Stone: Skip Skip Skip Skip Skip Plunk\n[Zoom back on Cueball and Megan who are still looking in the direction she threw the stone.] Megan: Now it'll be covered in sediment that becomes a new rock layer. It will likely stay buried until it melts down, erodes away, or the earth is consumed by the sun.\n[Cueball and Megan still looking the same way.] Cueball: Today was a weird day in its incredibly long life. Megan: Five brief skips, then eons of darkness. Cueball: Five is a lot, though! Megan: It was a good throw.\nMegan throws the rock with her left hand, which supposes that she may be left-handed.\n","explanation":"Megan either knows enough about geology to tell on sight how this particular rock formed, or has brought this rock from a collection. Alternatively she\u2019s simply guessing. Despite admiring its formation, all she wants is to use it as a skipping stone to give it \"a weird day in its life\" (similar to 325: A-Minus-Minus ), and possibly confuse future geologists.\nMegan provides three pieces of information about the rock: It formed at the south pole, during an ice age, just before multicellular life developed. Unfortunately, due to disagreements among geologists and palaeontologists about when exactly the first multicellular life emerged it is unclear which time Megan refers to - and consequently where she is and what kind of rock she is holding. There are two possibilities:\nThus \u2014 assuming that Megan has accurately identified the stone \u2014 the stone is either from Western Africa or Northern Europe and has \"travelled\" from there to get to her.\nStone skipping is the art of throwing a flat stone across water in such a way that it bounces off the surface. Despite there being many factors attributed to successfully skipping a stone (including the attributes of the stone itself), Cueball and Megan are in agreement that skipping this particular stone five times is an above-average throw. (It is, however, far short of the world record of 88 skips set by Kurt Steiner in 2013).\nThis comic is one of many that look at everyday things from a new, philosophical perspective.\n[Cueball and Megan are looking at a rock that Megan is holding up in one hand.] Megan: This rock erupted from a volcano near the South Pole when the world was frozen over, just before multicellular life arose.\n[Zoom out reveals that Cueball and Megan are standing on the beach of a bay with hills in the background. The water surface is quite flat without any waves. Megan throws the rock which skips 5 times across the water before it sinks.] Stone: Skip Skip Skip Skip Skip Plunk\n[Zoom back on Cueball and Megan who are still looking in the direction she threw the stone.] Megan: Now it'll be covered in sediment that becomes a new rock layer. It will likely stay buried until it melts down, erodes away, or the earth is consumed by the sun.\n[Cueball and Megan still looking the same way.] Cueball: Today was a weird day in its incredibly long life. Megan: Five brief skips, then eons of darkness. Cueball: Five is a lot, though! Megan: It was a good throw.\nMegan throws the rock with her left hand, which supposes that she may be left-handed.\n"}
{"id":2014,"title":"JWST Delays","image_title":"JWST Delays","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2014","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jwst_delays.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2014:_JWST_Delays","transcript":"[Top caption, in the panel:] James Webb Space Telescope [Subtitle of top caption:] Launch Delays\n[There is a positive-quadrant only line graph. The x- axis is labeled 'Current Date' and the y axis is labeled 'Planned Launch Date'. The dates on both of the axes range from 1995 to 2030.] [In the graph are 15 points, starting at (1997,2007) and extending at a slope of a little less than one. The most recent one is labeled 'Now: 2021'.] [There are two lines on the graph: a red one and a dashed black one. The red one is a regression of the points on the graph. It has a slope of about \u2154. The black one is a line with a slope of one. They intersect at the point (2026,2026), marked by the label 'Late 2026'?]\n[Caption below the panel:] Look, at least the slope is less than one.\n","explanation":"The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope created to be the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope .\nThe telescope has been in development since 1996, but has been plagued by numerous delays and cost overruns. This comic was likely inspired by the most recent delay announcement , which was posted on June 27, 2018. At that time, the JWST was scheduled to launch on March 30, 2021.\nThis comic portrays the launch delays and the new predicted launch years and the times at which those predictions were made.  There have been so many delays in this project that you can plot a line of best fit with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy.  Randall says optimistically that the line\u2019s slope is less than one (there is less than one year of new delay per year of elapsed time), implying, of course, that if events continue without further intervention, it will eventually be built, with a predicted date of late 2026.\nThe title text alludes to the famous research over the universe\u2019s accelerating expansion .  The expansion had been predicted to be slowing due to gravity from everything in the universe; instead, it was found to be accelerating since about 5 billion years ago.  Here, Randall looks at the apparently ever-delaying schedule and observes that the delay per time does not decrease, although the date gets nearer (which should help to schedule the launch date, as research and unknown parameters are replaced with engineering and exact predictions and measurements). However, this delay inflation contradicts Randall's usage of a linear trendline.  Given the COVID-19 pandemic brought some additional delays in 2020 and 2021, the \"early 2020\" date was perhaps unintentionally prescient.\nThe Wikipedia article linked above includes a table which provides the data points for the chart:\n[Top caption, in the panel:] James Webb Space Telescope [Subtitle of top caption:] Launch Delays\n[There is a positive-quadrant only line graph. The x- axis is labeled 'Current Date' and the y axis is labeled 'Planned Launch Date'. The dates on both of the axes range from 1995 to 2030.] [In the graph are 15 points, starting at (1997,2007) and extending at a slope of a little less than one. The most recent one is labeled 'Now: 2021'.] [There are two lines on the graph: a red one and a dashed black one. The red one is a regression of the points on the graph. It has a slope of about \u2154. The black one is a line with a slope of one. They intersect at the point (2026,2026), marked by the label 'Late 2026'?]\n[Caption below the panel:] Look, at least the slope is less than one.\n"}
{"id":2015,"title":"New Phone Thread","image_title":"New Phone Thread","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2015","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_phone_thread.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2015:_New_Phone_Thread","transcript":"[A thread of posts by the same user is shown with a default user profile, and square and heart-shaped buttons.]\nWhoa, weird\nI'm looking at my timeline on my friends phone, and some of my posts look normal\nWhat the hell?\nI mean the words are correct\nThat's exactly what I typed!\n?????????\nI think this new phone is working really well\nNo, it's doing it again\nThose are my words!\nHelp!\nHow do I explain?\nIt's taking the words I type and leaving them exactly the same\nForget it, I give up\nI'll never get a new phone. This one is perfect.\nWhat?!?\nListen, if you're thinking about buying the new Mobile Pro 3, you should. It's the best phone on the market at an incredible price. [ORDER NOW button]\nAAAAA HELPPP\nI love my new phone!!!!\n","explanation":"This comic shows the posts on an online forum by a person whose new phone is programmed to autocorrect every complaint about the phone to applaud it, \u00e0 la Orwell. The phone goes so far as to change a certain complaint to a scripted customer testimonial, complete with a hyperlink to an ordering site. This is of course a highly undesirable feature [ citation needed ] . This is continued in the title text, which presumably contains several flattering compliments about the great developers and the company.\n\"It's taking the words I type and leaving them exactly the same\", \"I mean the words are correct\" and \"some of my posts look normal\" are definitely something one would not normally say.  However, the \nauto-correct features of cell phones are so notorious for mangling people's posts, that one might express astonishment at a phone which did not change one's meaning.  However the rest of the thread does not support this interpretation.\nThe original posts may have read something like this:\nWhoa, weird\nI'm looking at my timeline on my friends phone, and some of my posts look strange\nWhat the hell?\nI mean the words are different\nThat isn't what I typed!'\n?????????\nI think this new phone isn't working properly\nNo, it's doing it again\nThose aren't my words!\nHelp!\nHow do I explain?\nIt's taking the words I type and changing them [from criticism to praise]\nForget it, I give up\nI'll just get a new phone. This one is crap . {or this message may have been inserted entirely by the phone}\nWhat?!?\nListen, if you're thinking about buying the new Mobile Pro 3, you shouldn't . It's the worst phone on the market , a total rip-off. DON'T BUY IT! {or this entire paragraph may be an ad inserted by the phone with no prompting}\nAAAAA HELPPP\nI hate my new phone!!!!\nI'm going to tell the manufacturer that their business practices are DEPLORABLE and HEINOUS and their developers are DISGUSTING and I'm going to report them to the FCC for their DESPICABLE CRIME .\nThe posts also make sense when posts are read in the reverse order.\nThe comic may have been inspired by a bug in Samsung Galaxy S9 and Note 8 , discovered a few days earlier \u2013 the phone sometimes sent random photos to contacts without leaving any sort of evidence. This doesn't happen with the Mobile Pro 3.\n[A thread of posts by the same user is shown with a default user profile, and square and heart-shaped buttons.]\nWhoa, weird\nI'm looking at my timeline on my friends phone, and some of my posts look normal\nWhat the hell?\nI mean the words are correct\nThat's exactly what I typed!\n?????????\nI think this new phone is working really well\nNo, it's doing it again\nThose are my words!\nHelp!\nHow do I explain?\nIt's taking the words I type and leaving them exactly the same\nForget it, I give up\nI'll never get a new phone. This one is perfect.\nWhat?!?\nListen, if you're thinking about buying the new Mobile Pro 3, you should. It's the best phone on the market at an incredible price. [ORDER NOW button]\nAAAAA HELPPP\nI love my new phone!!!!\n"}
{"id":2016,"title":"OEIS Submissions","image_title":"OEIS Submissions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2016","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/oeis_submissions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2016:_OEIS_Submissions","transcript":"SUB[43]: All integers which do not appear in the example terms of another OEIS sequence SUB[44]: Integers in increasing order of width when printed in Helvetica SUB[45]: The digits of Chris Hemsworth's cell phone number SUB[46]: All integers, in descending order SUB[47]: The digits of the OEIS serial number for this sequence SUB[48]: 200 terabytes of nines SUB[49]: The decimal representation of the bytes in the root password to the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences server\n[Caption below the panel:] OEIS keeps rejecting my submissions\n","explanation":"The OEIS is the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences , a listing of hundreds of thousands of sequences of integers, generally of real mathematical interest, such as prime numbers or Armstrong numbers .  The OEIS normally expects submissions to be accompanied by references to scholarly articles about, or at least referencing, the sequence.  They would not be interested in the personal or idiosyncratic sequences proposed by Randall, though they do have the list of subway stops on the New York City Broadway line (IRT #1) , perhaps because a NY Times article mentioned that they don't.\nRandall is trying to put his integer sequences on the OEIS website, including making OEIS reveal its password.\nsub[43] - All integers which do not appear in the example terms of another OEIS sequence Every OEIS sequence lists several example terms to demonstrate the content of said sequence. This request wants to list all integers which are not used as examples elsewhere. Any numbers used as example terms for this sequence are not counted, so this list is not self-disqualifying. It is well-defined at any given time. Like many other OEIS sequences, it has infinitely many terms (more precisely, it includes all integers except a finite number). However, it may change at any time, whenever a new sequence or a new example is added to the OEIS. If included, it would therefore have to be constantly updated. Such integers are sometimes called \" uninteresting numbers \" in mathematical terms, and attempts have been made to count them. The list changes, but in July 2009 it began 11630, 12067, 12407, 12887, 13258... sub[44] - Integers in increasing order of width when printed in Helvetica This sequence is not uniquely defined as it depends on the specific version of the Helvetica font used, its point size, the software used to render it (e.g. kerning algorithm), the handling of equal widths by the sorting algorithm and possibly other parameters. Also, all digits usually have the same width, with the exception of the sequence \"11\", which is a tiny bit narrower because a kerning pair exists in Helvetica. Without an additional tie-breaker for equal width numbers, the order is: 1 to 9 in no particular order, 11, 10 and 12 to 99 in no particular order and so on; for a particular choice of parameters the first 50 terms might be: 1, 9, 6, 2, 8, 5, 0, 7, 3, 4, 11, 61, 71, 91, 21, 51, 81, 41, 31, 19, 13, 18, 10, 12, 15, 16, 14, 17, 69, 63, 68, 79, 60, 62, 65, 73, 78, 99, 93, 98, 66, 70, 72, 75, 29, 90, 92, 95, 23, 28... Despite all of the above issues, and as a direct response to this comic, a well-defined version of this sequence was added to the OEIS . sub[45] - The digits of Chris Hemsworth's cell phone number An attempt to phish the phone number of actor Chris Hemsworth . Luckily for the OEIS there is a loophole to this request: the correct ordering of the digits isn't specified. sub[46] - All integers, in descending order To list all integers in descending order, you would have to begin at the largest integer, but there is no largest integer, so this is impossible. It is equally impossible to list all integers in ascending order, for that matter. On the other hand, A001477 is the sequence of all nonnegative integers in ascending order, as there is the smallest nonnegative integer. Also, A001057 is the sequence of all integers, but in canonical order (i.e. by increasing absolute value). sub[47] - The digits of the OEIS serial number for this sequence This sequence is only important tautologically. sub[48] - 200 terabytes of nines This submission appears to be a joke on common video game limits for, e.g., currency or ammunition, in which the maximum a player can carry is one less than a power of 10. This sequence would be entirely useless, as there is no mental effort required to conceive a list that consists only of a single repeated term, however arbitrarily large. Such a list is also incredibly wasteful; to give a comparison, this very large math proof from 2016 is also 200 terabytes, and requires a supercomputer to hold in its entirety. 200 terabytes is equal to 2\u00a0\u00d7\u00a010 14 bytes. In UTF-8, each ASCII character, including control characters such as \u2402 (start of text) and \u240d (carriage return), can be represented by a single byte. If the list is presumed to be formatted as \"\u24029\u240d9\u240d9 ... 9\u240d9\u2403\", the first term would take up 3 bytes, and all other terms would take up 2 bytes. Assuming Randall wants the file size to be 200 terabytes minimum , the resulting list would be a minimum of 1\u00a0\u00d7\u00a010 14 , or 100 trillion, terms long. Curiously, OEIS does in fact contain an entry that lists \" all nines \" which contains this proposal as a subsequence. sub[49] - The decimal representation of the bytes in the root password to the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences server This would give any user the password to OEIS. Anyone can easily forecast what happens next. Perhaps the idea is to hack OEIS on the premise that accepting this sequence will force OEIS staff to populate it. sub[59] (title text) - The submission numbers for my accepted OEIS submissions in chronological order This would only be useful to Randall. If all of his submissions have been rejected, this would be an empty set. However, if this submission is accepted, the set would, by definition, include at least one number (except that this would not be known at the time of submission). Thus, as in the Russell Paradox, this set would be out of date as soon as it was accepted, since the set of accepted submission numbers would change at that point.\nSUB[43]: All integers which do not appear in the example terms of another OEIS sequence SUB[44]: Integers in increasing order of width when printed in Helvetica SUB[45]: The digits of Chris Hemsworth's cell phone number SUB[46]: All integers, in descending order SUB[47]: The digits of the OEIS serial number for this sequence SUB[48]: 200 terabytes of nines SUB[49]: The decimal representation of the bytes in the root password to the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences server\n[Caption below the panel:] OEIS keeps rejecting my submissions\n"}
{"id":2017,"title":"Stargazing 2","image_title":"Stargazing 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2017","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stargazing_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2017:_Stargazing_2","transcript":"[In a dark panel, Megan is a TV host standing in front of a group of 5 people: two Cueballs, Ponytail, Hairbun and a Megan-like woman.] Host: Welcome back to stargazing. Host: When the stars disappeared this morning, I figured I had to find a new job, but they're back! This rules!\n[A frame-less white panel in which the host points to the upper right with the Megan-like woman, Ponytail and Cueball looking in that direction.] Host: Those three stars form a constellation called the triangle. Host: Those three are another triangle. Host: Lotta triangles. Very important shape.\n[Back to a dark panel with the host now pointing to the upper left in a close-up.] Host: Those dots are planets, or \"fool's stars.\" Without interstellar travel, they're the only ones we can realistically hope to dump trash on. Host: Speaking of space trash, that dot is a satellite. There are apps that will tell you whose fault it is.\n[The host is now turned right not pointing, still in a close-up.] Off-panel voice: What's that blinking one? Host: Airplane. They're full of snacks and money and stuff, but don't bother trying to catch them- they're way too high up. Host: Learned that the hard way in grad school. Host: Got a thesis out of it, at least.\n","explanation":"This is the second comic in the Stargazing series: The first was 1644: Stargazing , two and a half years earlier. It was followed by 2274: Stargazing 3 one and a half years later.\nThis comic continues with Megan as a TV host mixing accurate astronomical information with trivialities, as well as utterly bizarre statements. (See this section from the original Stargazing comic about the host and also the trivia , from the original comic, regarding the gender of the host).\nIn the first panel, the host voices surprise that the stars are visible again after disappearing during daylight.\nThe host mentions three stars in a constellation which she says is called The Triangle, likely referring to the constellation Triangulum , which is in fact just three main stars in a narrow triangle. However, this may also simply be intended to show the host's lack of knowledge of constellations, since she then goes on to point out three other stars forming a triangle and concludes that one can form lots of triangles by connecting groups of three stars. In Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, any set of three non-collinear points will form a triangle, so to say that there are a \"lotta triangles\" is both trivial and an understatement. [ citation needed ] (There are about 125 billion triangles visible in the night sky with around 9096 visible stars.)\nThen she points to planets, calling them dots known as \"fool's stars\" (like fool's gold). Planets such as Venus and Jupiter are often mistaken as stars, and the word itself is derived from the Greek, plan\u0113t\u0113s or \"wanderer.\" She also notes that lacking interstellar transportation, humanity will likely only reach the planets within our solar system. However, she then makes the seemingly ludicrous assertion that humans will turn these planets into interplanetary landfills, which might be a comment on how humans have used the Earth.\nThe host also notices a dot of \"space trash\": An artificial satellite. Since the nascent Space Age, the Earth's orbit has gradually accumulated artificial materials that include satellites, spent rockets, and space stations. There are concerns such debris accumulation will increasingly imperil current and future space projects. However, the host claims there is an app that can tell you \"whose fault it is,\" presumably a satellite-tracking smartphone app such as SkyView which can inform you who launched a given satellite and thus whose \"fault\" that particular bit of space-junk might be.\nThe host eventually goes off on a tangent when someone from the audience points out something blinking in the sky. The host says it is a plane, and tells them what is inside it. The host continues, \"don't bother trying to catch that one.\" This could be understood as she means it's too hard to point the telescope at it properly because it is moving too fast. In the title text, however, she means this literally, revealing that at one point during her studies she apparently used the reflective mirror of a telescope to shine light directly at airplanes, which caused the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to close down the observatory. She claims it was worth getting shut down by the FAA because she completed her thesis for her graduate degree. \"Got a thesis out of it\" is a phrase typically used by a scholar after discussing a research project, as a way of indicating that it was actually the main research they had conducted as a student in graduate school. Conducting research and writing it up in a thesis is one of the major hurdles toward earning a graduate degree (masters or doctorate).\nIn the title text, she clarifies that as she was exiting the observatory, she literally \"got\", as in \"stole\", someone else's thesis paper and multiple doctorates (presumably framed degrees), either to fraudulently claim them as her own accomplishments, or perhaps just because she wanted to steal stuff. Usually \"got a thesis\" is shorthand for the process of \"writing a lengthy thesis paper and having it be accepted as a requirement for graduation\", however in this case she simply swiped someone else's document. The revelations that she's extremely unqualified (and unethical) would explain her many bizarre statements.\n[In a dark panel, Megan is a TV host standing in front of a group of 5 people: two Cueballs, Ponytail, Hairbun and a Megan-like woman.] Host: Welcome back to stargazing. Host: When the stars disappeared this morning, I figured I had to find a new job, but they're back! This rules!\n[A frame-less white panel in which the host points to the upper right with the Megan-like woman, Ponytail and Cueball looking in that direction.] Host: Those three stars form a constellation called the triangle. Host: Those three are another triangle. Host: Lotta triangles. Very important shape.\n[Back to a dark panel with the host now pointing to the upper left in a close-up.] Host: Those dots are planets, or \"fool's stars.\" Without interstellar travel, they're the only ones we can realistically hope to dump trash on. Host: Speaking of space trash, that dot is a satellite. There are apps that will tell you whose fault it is.\n[The host is now turned right not pointing, still in a close-up.] Off-panel voice: What's that blinking one? Host: Airplane. They're full of snacks and money and stuff, but don't bother trying to catch them- they're way too high up. Host: Learned that the hard way in grad school. Host: Got a thesis out of it, at least.\n"}
{"id":2018,"title":"Wall Art","image_title":"Wall Art","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2018","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wall_art.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2018:_Wall_Art","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are standing together and looking at eleven framed pictures on a wall.] Cueball: Getting older is so weird. 20 years ago, I thought thumbtacked Pok\u00e9mon posters made my wall look so cool.\n[Cueball has his hands raised up in a close-up.] Cueball: But these days I feel this compulsion to get framed oil paintings and spend hours carefully arranging them.\n[Return to the setting in the first frame.] White Hat: These are all oil paintings of Pok\u00e9mon. Cueball: Look, I\u2019m meeting maturity halfway.\nThis is the only xkcd comic ever where the year when the comic was published, in the Gregorian calendar, is the same as the comic's number. This comic is numbered 2018 and was published on Wednesday, July 11, 2018.\n","explanation":"Pok\u00e9mon is a media franchise managed by The Pok\u00e9mon Company, which started with the release of the first video games, Pok\u00e9mon Red and Blue , for the Game Boy in 1996. Originally released in Japan as Pok\u00e9mon Red and Green , the game was released in North America as Pok\u00e9mon Red and Blue in 1998, 20 years ago at the time of publishing.\nThis is another comic about getting older. Cueball mentions that he thought Pok\u00e9mon posters were cool 20 years ago (when Pok\u00e9mon was first released). Now that he is older, he instead has framed oil paintings, which were what wealthier older folks were displaying on their walls at the times that their teenagers were widely into Pok\u00e9mon. The punchline comes when White Hat mentions that his oil paintings are just paintings of Pok\u00e9mon characters, showing that Cueball hasn't completely adopted those older cultures in 20 years of maturing, but does have more money.\nThe title text mentions that Cueball originally had \"regular\" oil paintings. However, these appear to have been stolen from the Louvre , a famous art museum in Paris, which houses the Mona Lisa . Thus the \"grumpy and unreasonable\" detectives which came to retrieve the paintings. It even suggests that Cueball had attached those valuable and expensive oil paintings on his wall by poking through them with thumbtacks.  The fact that Cueball stole expensive paintings, poked them with thumbtacks, and did not realize that the detectives were trying to recover priceless artwork that rightfully belonged to the museum may demonstrate that Cueball indeed has not completely grown up.\nThe comic repeats a common theme of poking fun at how nerds tend to not fully \"get\" the culture surrounding them, adopting parts but remaining completely blind to other parts. Sharing and reading jokes about this may help people who experience that pattern handle the stress of being unable to completely conform, by bonding over the commonality.\n[White Hat and Cueball are standing together and looking at eleven framed pictures on a wall.] Cueball: Getting older is so weird. 20 years ago, I thought thumbtacked Pok\u00e9mon posters made my wall look so cool.\n[Cueball has his hands raised up in a close-up.] Cueball: But these days I feel this compulsion to get framed oil paintings and spend hours carefully arranging them.\n[Return to the setting in the first frame.] White Hat: These are all oil paintings of Pok\u00e9mon. Cueball: Look, I\u2019m meeting maturity halfway.\nThis is the only xkcd comic ever where the year when the comic was published, in the Gregorian calendar, is the same as the comic's number. This comic is numbered 2018 and was published on Wednesday, July 11, 2018.\n"}
{"id":2019,"title":"An Apple for a Dollar","image_title":"An Apple for a Dollar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2019","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/an_apple_for_a_dollar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2019:_An_Apple_for_a_Dollar","transcript":"[Megan is at the store counter, behind which Ponytail (the cashier) is waiting.] Megan: Just this apple, thanks. Ponytail: That will be one dollar. Megan: Exactly? No tax or anything? Ponytail: That's right.\n[Megan stares at the apple in a frameless panel.]\n[Scene zooms in on Megan.] Ponytail: ...Is that a problem? Megan: It's just weird to realize that every other transaction in my life will be more complicated than this.\n[Scene changes focus to Ponytail behind the counter.] Megan: This is like a platonic ideal exchange. An apple for a dollar. Ponytail: I see.\n[Scene changes back to Megan, once again lost in profound contemplation of the apple.] Megan: Are we on a frictionless plane? Is a train leaving Chicago at 40 mph? Should I solve for something?? Ponytail: Okay, apples are $2.17 now. Megan: That's... probably better for us both.\n","explanation":"Megan is about to buy an apple at a grocery store when she is surprised that the price is exactly one dollar. A common practice in pricing items is to deliberately make them slightly less than a round number, such as $1.99 or $1.95 instead of $2, as a psychological trick to make the item seem significantly cheaper than it really is, as \"less than two dollars\" sounds much less than \"two dollars\" even though the difference of 0.01 is minimal.  Additionally, in most cases in the US, sales tax must be taken into account, as it is generally not included in the list price (although, most states do exempt food sold in grocery stores from sales taxes), so a price rarely comes out to a round value.  That it came out to an exact dollar is so strange for Megan that it throws her for a loop. Buying one apple for one dollar feels to her more like a simplified, imaginary Idea of a transaction (a \" Platonic Ideal \") than like something that could actually happen in real life.\nMegan likely shares Randall's background in engineering and math.  When learning science, engineering, and math in the education system, one studies examples where every number is some round value, and all situations are simplified to the barest essentials so as to demonstrate the ideas being taught.  Then, when doing real problems in the real world, one spends the rest of one's life almost never being able to use the simplified tricks demonstrated as examples in school, because when math is used to describe the natural world, nothing is ever a round number unless by design.\nMegan references Platonic Idealism , which is the theory attributed to Plato that abstract or non-physical Ideas represent the purest, most accurate version of reality, but we can only perceive of more flawed versions of Ideas because of our limited viewpoint (as explained in his Allegory of the Cave). Thus we can understand the concept of a perfect circle or a perfect line, even though we have never seen one, and cannot create one. Megan believes she has glimpsed a Platonic Ideal because the absolute concept of currency is it is the exact worth of something in trade. Megan is awed because, if this is true, then she is witnessing the next layer of reality, which Plato often compared to heaven.\nThe harsh difference between being able to buy an apple for a dollar at this quaint store, and having to deal with arbitrary decimals and numbers in the rest of life could be touching on Megan's life experience of the world not being what she was prepared for, resulting in her intense response.  Regardless if that is true or not, it seems the cashier is unable to figure out how to handle it (or does not want to), and raises the price to an arbitrary non-rounded value, which has the intended effect of halting Megan's outburst. The unexpected resolution of the rising tension is a source of humor in this strip.\nMegan's references refer to common parameters used in solving science or math questions. A Frictionless plane is a scenario from the writings of Galileo to calculate the movement of an object down an inclined plane , since his equations did not account for friction .\n\"A train leaving Chicago at 40 mph\" refers to common math questions, involving trains and solving for the distance required to overtake said train, although this problem involves the rather unrealistic assumption that the train's velocity keeps constant and doesn't need to accelerate in order to reach its speed. Like the frictionless plane, this is a common simplification that allows the problem to be solved with quite simple techniques, just like having round quantities (e.g. 1 dollar\/apple) eases arithmetic problems. See also 669: Experiment . Apples themselves are commonly used as units for math problems, including problems as simple as basic arithmetic.\nThe comic repeats a common theme in the strip of engineers and computer scientists trying to apply their technical experience to social situations.  In this case, the conversation partner is \"normal\", and does not respond supportively, which is a common situation in the real world and a possible point of empathy with readers.  -- An alternate viable reading is that the conversation partner responds extremely supportively (by cleverly removing the source of Megan's distress, rather than by questioning the validity of Megan's response). This is a possible point of wish-fulfillment for readers.\nIt seems that according to the title text, Megan only has (or only wants to spend) one dollar, so she would not be able to buy a whole apple at the new price (0.4608 \u00d7 $2.17 \u2248 $1). Stores usually sell whole apples, so asking for a fraction of one is not likely to work out. [ citation needed ]\nThere are some stores, such as Dollar Tree , that specialize in selling everything in the store for one dollar per item, which would seem to be operating at that ideal... except they usually do charge sales tax on taxable items leading many sales to not be an even multiple of a dollar. If a store were to charge one dollar per item without charging sales tax, etc. separately (i.e. building the sales tax into the price of each dollar item), they might be able to simplify some operations, such as not dealing with coin change as much, cashiers would be able to calculate the total in their heads, etc.  Customers other than Megan would probably be happier.\n[Megan is at the store counter, behind which Ponytail (the cashier) is waiting.] Megan: Just this apple, thanks. Ponytail: That will be one dollar. Megan: Exactly? No tax or anything? Ponytail: That's right.\n[Megan stares at the apple in a frameless panel.]\n[Scene zooms in on Megan.] Ponytail: ...Is that a problem? Megan: It's just weird to realize that every other transaction in my life will be more complicated than this.\n[Scene changes focus to Ponytail behind the counter.] Megan: This is like a platonic ideal exchange. An apple for a dollar. Ponytail: I see.\n[Scene changes back to Megan, once again lost in profound contemplation of the apple.] Megan: Are we on a frictionless plane? Is a train leaving Chicago at 40 mph? Should I solve for something?? Ponytail: Okay, apples are $2.17 now. Megan: That's... probably better for us both.\n"}
{"id":2020,"title":"Negative Results","image_title":"Negative Results","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2020","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/negative_results.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2020:_Negative_Results","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on a laptop computer. The following message is displayed above him:] Dear Nature Magazine, I found no evidence sufficient to reject the null hypothesis in any research areas because I spent the whole week playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild . I'll send you another update next week!\n[Caption below the panel:] The push to publish negative results seems kinda weird, but I'm happy to go along with it.\n","explanation":"Recently, scientists have begun encouraging each other to publish negative results, where a study failed to find the intended effect, as a way of counteracting publication bias (where only interesting positive results get published), which results in false-positive results being published while negative results are not.\nCueball misinterprets the \"push to publish negative results\" as meaning that he should always attempt to publish the fact that he failed to find evidence of an effect, even when he didn't even try, spending his time playing a video game instead. This plays on the unspoken assumption that scientists would only choose to submit (and journals would only accept) negative results where a study was designed and executed well enough that it should have shown an effect or at least demonstrated evidence of some kind.\nBesides personal preferences, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild , the most recent Legend of Zelda game at the time of publication, was likely chosen for its notable length, Nintendo nerd cred, and a relevance to Nature magazine\u2019s subject. The average time to beat 100% of the content is over 175 hours .\nThe title text references the practice of \"pre-registration\" of a study, which is one means to prevent publication bias: details of a planned study are registered with an organization before the study is conducted, so that a null result or a change in methodology cannot be hidden. The title text may be a play on words, mixing this up with registering (or booking) travel. On the other hand, it may just be playing on the absurdity of pre-registering a simple trip to the beach with a registry for scientific studies.\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on a laptop computer. The following message is displayed above him:] Dear Nature Magazine, I found no evidence sufficient to reject the null hypothesis in any research areas because I spent the whole week playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild . I'll send you another update next week!\n[Caption below the panel:] The push to publish negative results seems kinda weird, but I'm happy to go along with it.\n"}
{"id":2021,"title":"Software Development","image_title":"Software Development","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2021","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/software_development.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2021:_Software_Development","transcript":"[Cueball and Hairy are standing together and Hairy holds a power tool in his hands.] Cueball: We need to make 500 holes in that wall, so I've built this automatic drill. It uses elegant precision gears to continually adjust its torque and speed as needed. Hairy: Great, it's the perfect weight! We'll load 500 of them into the cannon we made and shoot them at the wall.\n[Caption below the frame:] How software development works\n","explanation":"Software development is often characterized by graceless solutions to rudimentary problems. Cueball has built an elegant drill (function) that can adjust torque and speed as necessary automatically to fulfill his requirement of 500 holes in the wall. Hairy , in a categorically inelegant solution, loads 500 drills into a cannon and shoots them at the wall. This solution, in reality, would entail too many ludicrous safety problems to execute, but in software, the implications are only really bad code .\nThe casual disregard for the software itself is reminiscent of the idea of cattle not pets when deploying to servers.\nThis resembles assigning two different software teams to resolve different parts of a problem and of making the independent tools collaborate to form a fluid solution. The so-called \"drill team\" is given the task of making the part of the system that makes a hole in the wall. The cannon team was given the task of making the part of the system that aims what the drill team produces at the designated place on the wall and subsequently drills the hole. The drill team assumed that the aiming device would merely position their portion on the wall allowing it to make the hole, but the cannon team could not make assumptions about how the drill team would generate holes - they needed to make something that could use whatever the drill team produced to make the holes, thus making a cannon, so they could ensure their success.\nThe title text is a joke about how often in software the best solution to a problem is general rather than specific. See for example developers using Ruby on Rails (a full web framework with support for emails, templating, and web sockets) for a simple API-only service. They only need a very small part of rails (the hole drilling part), but end up with the whole framework anyway due to design limitations.\nAnother explanation of the title text is that software development is also often characterized by complexity and unintentional interdependence between different modules of code.  It is an unending source of frustration for coders that a seemingly minor change to code can cause major changes to how the program works, including changes seemingly unrelated to the specific code that changed.  A similar problem is when a line of code that \u201cshould be\u201d unnecessary (according to the rules of the programming language) ends up being essential because the program will not work if the code is cleaned up and the line removed.  A final factor is that coders often write a particular function once in the first module, and then call back to that function when necessary in subsequent modules rather than rewriting the function over and over again.  In that case, the first module cannot be eliminated, even if it is no longer necessary, because then all of the calls to the original function would be null, and the rest of the modules could not work.  This can happen not just within programs but across them, as much software on the internet relies on large collections of program modules in public or open source software databases.  When a module goes missing it can have wide ranging effects, as seen in March of 2016.\nIn the context of the comic, it could be that the code for the cannon was written to check if it is \u201cloaded\u201d before it does anything, so the drill code is still needed to get the cannon to move on its motorized base and make the holes.  Or the code for the drill defines an obscure variable that is used by other code for the cannon or its base, so \u201cremoving\u201d the drill code would cause the cannon to \u201ccrash\u201d and not operate.\n[Cueball and Hairy are standing together and Hairy holds a power tool in his hands.] Cueball: We need to make 500 holes in that wall, so I've built this automatic drill. It uses elegant precision gears to continually adjust its torque and speed as needed. Hairy: Great, it's the perfect weight! We'll load 500 of them into the cannon we made and shoot them at the wall.\n[Caption below the frame:] How software development works\n"}
{"id":2022,"title":"Sports Champions","image_title":"Sports Champions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2022","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sports_champions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2022:_Sports_Champions","transcript":"[Two rows of people wielding sports equipment are shown, six in the upper row, five in the lower, only the last has no equipment but is standing behind a lectern with a microphone attached to it. Below each person, their name is given and the decade in which they were champions of their sport is given below their name, in brackets. Here is a list of the 11 people:]\n[Woman with dark hair holding a tennis racket] Margaret Court (1960s)\n[Cueball with a golf club] Gary Player (1970s)\n[Cueball with a basketball] Lonzo Ball (2020s)\n[Hairy on a skateboard] Jake Halfpipe (2030s)\n[Woman with dark hair wearing a swim cap and goggles] Sarah Goggles (2030s)\n[A man with a baseball cap throwing a baseball to the right] Kevin Slurve (2050s)\n[A woman with long black hair in a knit cap and wearing ski googles is standing on skis holding ski poles] Julia Chairlift (2050s)\n[Hairy holding a badminton racket bouncing a shuttlecock on it] Dwight Shuttlecock (2060s)\n[Hairy holding a pair of shoes in his hand] Brandon Sponsorship (2060s)\n[Hairbun standing next to a bicycle.] Kate Dopingscandal (2070s)\n[Hairy standing behind a lectern with a microphone on it.] Jebediah Disasterous Postgame PressConference (2080s)\n[Caption below the panel:] Fun fact: Every sport eventually produces a champion competitor named after a common element of the game.\n","explanation":"In an example of nominative determinism , the comic lists people whose surname relates to their participation in various sports. It is presented as though it was created in the far future, reflecting on champions over the decades through to the 2080s. The first three are real sportspeople, the remainder are imaginary players of the future. The names progress from real, to fictional-but-plausible, to rare or highly unusual, to utterly implausible and impractical names.\nThe caricatures are participating in their sport, except for Jebediah who is standing at a lectern .\nMargaret Court (1960s, Tennis) Margaret Court is an Australian tennis player, former world number 1, who won many competitions in the 1960s and 70s. A tennis court is the playing arena used in that sport. Gary Player (1970s, Golf) Gary Player is a South African golfer who won nine major championships between 1959 and 1978. Competitors are often known as player s, such as in The Players Championship . Lonzo Ball (2020s, Basketball) Lonzo Ball is an American professional basketball player, with the Los Angeles Lakers at the time of publishing. The 2020s decade predicts future success, as he began playing professionally in 2017 and the comic was published in 2018. Basketball is, of course, a ball game . Jake Halfpipe (2030s, Skateboarding) A halfpipe is a structure used in extreme sports such as skateboarding and snowboarding. Sarah Goggles (2030s, Swimming) Goggles are protective eyewear used in many sports, such as swimming or skiing. Kevin Slurve (2050s, Baseball) A slurve is a baseball throwing technique, a portmanteau of sl ider and c urve . Julia Chairlift (2050s, Skiing) A chairlift is an aerial machine often used to transport winter sports participants up mountains. Dwight Shuttlecock (2060s, Badminton) A shuttlecock is a projectile used in the sport of badminton. Brandon Sponsorship (2060s, Unclear) Sporting professionals are often sponsored by corporations. Brandon is holding a pair of shoes, which are probably a branded sponsorship item. Possible pun on \"brand on sponsorship\", i.e. a sponsored player. Kate Dopingscandal (2070s, Cycling) There have been many doping scandals in the world of cycling. Doping refers to the \"use of physiological substances or abnormal methods to obtain an artificial increase in performance.\" (See: 1173: Steroids .) Jebediah Disasterous Postgame-PressConference (2080s, Unspecified) At the end of sporting events - i.e. post-game - there is often a press conference where the competitors discuss the result. Sometimes, these live interviews are a disaster. Randall has chosen to spell his name as \"Disasterous\", rather than the more conventional \"Disastrous\". Title Text: Usain Bolt (2010s) and Derek Legs (2090s, Sprinting) From the title text, Usain Bolt is a retired world record sprinter . He was a solid contender for this list since he can bolt down the track. However the fictional Derek Legs is selected, either as an even faster sprinter, or because \u201clegs\u201d more clearly and unambiguously relates to running than \u201cbolt\u201d does.\n[Two rows of people wielding sports equipment are shown, six in the upper row, five in the lower, only the last has no equipment but is standing behind a lectern with a microphone attached to it. Below each person, their name is given and the decade in which they were champions of their sport is given below their name, in brackets. Here is a list of the 11 people:]\n[Woman with dark hair holding a tennis racket] Margaret Court (1960s)\n[Cueball with a golf club] Gary Player (1970s)\n[Cueball with a basketball] Lonzo Ball (2020s)\n[Hairy on a skateboard] Jake Halfpipe (2030s)\n[Woman with dark hair wearing a swim cap and goggles] Sarah Goggles (2030s)\n[A man with a baseball cap throwing a baseball to the right] Kevin Slurve (2050s)\n[A woman with long black hair in a knit cap and wearing ski googles is standing on skis holding ski poles] Julia Chairlift (2050s)\n[Hairy holding a badminton racket bouncing a shuttlecock on it] Dwight Shuttlecock (2060s)\n[Hairy holding a pair of shoes in his hand] Brandon Sponsorship (2060s)\n[Hairbun standing next to a bicycle.] Kate Dopingscandal (2070s)\n[Hairy standing behind a lectern with a microphone on it.] Jebediah Disasterous Postgame PressConference (2080s)\n[Caption below the panel:] Fun fact: Every sport eventually produces a champion competitor named after a common element of the game.\n"}
{"id":2023,"title":"Y-Axis","image_title":"Y-Axis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2023","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/y_axis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2023:_Y-Axis","transcript":"[Graph within a frame. The x-axis is unlabeled, with, in addition to the vertical line representing the y-axis, six straight vertical grid lines, evenly spaced, each corresponding to one of the six data points of the line plot.  The y-axis has eleven grid lines, including the x-axis, which are evenly spaced where they intersect the y-axis.  Only the lines for 0% (the x-axis), 50% (the line starting halfway up the graph), and 100% (the top of the graph) are labeled.  Except for the x-axis and the top line, these \"horizontal\" grid lines are not straight: they start out horizontally, but by the time they have met the first vertical line, representing the first data point, they have diverged significantly from their original positions. The lines representing 20% to 90% curve upwards and then back to horizontal, so that the eight lines representing y-axis values from 20%-90% are, after the first data point, squeezed into the top 10% of the area of the graph.  From this point onwards, the line representing 20% is horizontally even with the label for the 90% line, and the 30%-90% lines are evenly spaced between the 20% line and the 100% line at the top of the graph. Similarly, the 10% line curves downwards and then back to horizontal by the first data point, continuing horizontally from there at a level of approximately 2% of the total height of the graph.  The data points are at approximately 30%, 35%, 20%, 33%, 30%, and 80% of the total height of the graph, and are all between the lines which begin at 10% and 20% of the height of the y-axis.] [Caption below the frame:] People have wised up to the \"Carefully Chosen Y-Axis Range\" trick, so we misleading graph makers have had to get creative.\n","explanation":"The comic itself makes a poke at recent trends where the y range for a given dataset is exaggerated, so that a dataset that varies very little in its y-values is exaggerated by constricting the y-axis of the graph to range from just barely below the minimum y-value to just barely above the maximum y-value. This spreads out the y-values so very small differences appear larger and more significant than they really are.\nThe graph shows an attempt to mislead readers by manipulating the y-axis scale of the graph in a creative manner: The y-axis labels at the left side of the graph are normally spaced; however, the thin, gray gridlines marking each 10% increment are wavy, not straight, and they bunch up before reaching the first data point, resulting in a distorted effective y-axis for the rest of the graph. All the data points lie between the 10% and 20% gridlines, but a casual reader may not notice this and think that the graph uses the full 0% to 100% range.\nThe title text refers to the Semi-log plot , where one of the two axes is plotted on a logarithmic scale. The title text takes this to a further extreme with the semi-semi-log, where the y-axis labels are only interpreted as logarithmic on the left half of the graph. (For example, on the left half of the graph \"3\" would be interpreted as 10^3, or 1000, but on the right half it would be interpreted as 3)\n[Graph within a frame. The x-axis is unlabeled, with, in addition to the vertical line representing the y-axis, six straight vertical grid lines, evenly spaced, each corresponding to one of the six data points of the line plot.  The y-axis has eleven grid lines, including the x-axis, which are evenly spaced where they intersect the y-axis.  Only the lines for 0% (the x-axis), 50% (the line starting halfway up the graph), and 100% (the top of the graph) are labeled.  Except for the x-axis and the top line, these \"horizontal\" grid lines are not straight: they start out horizontally, but by the time they have met the first vertical line, representing the first data point, they have diverged significantly from their original positions. The lines representing 20% to 90% curve upwards and then back to horizontal, so that the eight lines representing y-axis values from 20%-90% are, after the first data point, squeezed into the top 10% of the area of the graph.  From this point onwards, the line representing 20% is horizontally even with the label for the 90% line, and the 30%-90% lines are evenly spaced between the 20% line and the 100% line at the top of the graph. Similarly, the 10% line curves downwards and then back to horizontal by the first data point, continuing horizontally from there at a level of approximately 2% of the total height of the graph.  The data points are at approximately 30%, 35%, 20%, 33%, 30%, and 80% of the total height of the graph, and are all between the lines which begin at 10% and 20% of the height of the y-axis.] [Caption below the frame:] People have wised up to the \"Carefully Chosen Y-Axis Range\" trick, so we misleading graph makers have had to get creative.\n"}
{"id":2024,"title":"Light Hacks","image_title":"Light Hacks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2024","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/light_hacks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2024:_Light_Hacks","transcript":"[Megan walks to the right, holding a sheet of paper and a light bulb] Megan: I discovered a cool life hack - you can put a white sheet behind a lightbulb to reflect more light. Off-panel voice: I'm ... not sure that's a life hack.\n[Megan stops, and positions the light bulb between two sheets of paper] Megan: And you can put a sheet in front to diffuse the light. Off-panel voice: So you've invented the lampshade. Megan: Life hacks!\nMegan: Freeman Dyson suggested that advanced civilizations would build spherical shells that surrounded their bulbs, redirecting 100% of their energy. Off-panel voice: Yes, they have those at IKEA.\nMegan: Well, they might. Infrared surveys are inconclusive. Off-panel voice: You know you can just check their website. Megan: Ooh, great life hack! Off-panel voice: No!\n","explanation":"\" Life hacking \" is the practice of using common everyday items in novel ways to increase the convenience or enjoyment of daily activities. This comic pokes fun at the many blogs and video channels that purport to cover life hacking tips, but merely point out obvious or intended uses for products or well known techniques as low effort clickbait.\nMegan tells someone off panel, possibly Cueball , that, by using sheets of paper, she can reflect and diffuse the light coming from a lightbulb. She refers to her discovery as a life hack, while Cueball sarcastically points out that all she has done is reinvent the lampshade, to which Megan again refers to as a life hack.\nA Dyson sphere is a hypothetical energy-collecting megastructure encompassing a star, and collecting a large percent of its energy in the process. It is named after the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson .\nThe joke here is that Dyson spheres are generally not intended for lightbulbs, yet using them in this way is suggested by Megan as a life hack, poking fun at the fact that life hacks make things more complicated instead of convenient. Freeman Dyson argued that Dyson spheres, if they existed, could be found by infrared surveys, as large objects that would emit infrared radiation. IKEA pendant lampshades are spherical shells that surround the bulb. Megan claims studies have tried to use infrared surveys to find Dyson spheres at Ikea locations, without success. When Cueball tells her the easier way, searching for it online, she eagerly refers to his method as another life hack, much to Cueball's annoyance.\nThe title text creates a different sort of confusion of the term lifehack, with another sort of popular clickbait videos. Described activity, if done, would be considered a prank - depriving the distractible civilization of their sunlight and energy source, rather than bringing any benefit to the builders of the smaller sphere.\n[Megan walks to the right, holding a sheet of paper and a light bulb] Megan: I discovered a cool life hack - you can put a white sheet behind a lightbulb to reflect more light. Off-panel voice: I'm ... not sure that's a life hack.\n[Megan stops, and positions the light bulb between two sheets of paper] Megan: And you can put a sheet in front to diffuse the light. Off-panel voice: So you've invented the lampshade. Megan: Life hacks!\nMegan: Freeman Dyson suggested that advanced civilizations would build spherical shells that surrounded their bulbs, redirecting 100% of their energy. Off-panel voice: Yes, they have those at IKEA.\nMegan: Well, they might. Infrared surveys are inconclusive. Off-panel voice: You know you can just check their website. Megan: Ooh, great life hack! Off-panel voice: No!\n"}
{"id":2025,"title":"Peer Review","image_title":"Peer Review","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2025","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/peer_review.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2025:_Peer_Review","transcript":"[Ponytail is sitting in a office chair at a desk reading from a laptop. Above her the text from the screen is shown in a frame with a zigzag arrow pointing to the laptop.] RE: Economics Journal Submission We have received your manuscript \"The Bizarre Economics of Academic Publishing: Why Volunteer Peer Reviewers Should Rise Up and Demand Payment from For-Profit Journals.\" We have elected not to send it out for review.\n","explanation":"When a researcher wants to publish their findings, they send it to an academic journal. The editor of the journal is another researcher (usually a college professor), who gets paid nothing or a minimal honorarium for editing the journal. The editor chooses a few (usually three) peer reviewers who are other researchers familiar enough with the study's subfield to judge the study's quality fairly and accurately, and sends it out to them for review. These peer reviewers do not get paid for the work of reviewing the manuscript and offering a detailed critique of every part of the study, from literature review to methodology to conclusions drawn from the results. If the peer reviewers and editor agree that the study was well-conducted and the paper well-written (or just needs minor revisions), it is accepted and published in the journal. The researcher is not paid for getting their paper published in the journal.\nIn short, nobody in the process is paid for their work except the journal publisher, who charges other researchers, libraries and individuals for access to the fruit of these people's free labor. This is commonly referred to as a \" paywall \".\nThis system relies upon researchers to be employed by either companies or universities in positions which require them to publish in order to remain employed or achieve promotions or pay raises. In universities, only postdocs and tenure-track or tenured professors are paid in a way that figures in their research time as well as their teaching time, which means that anyone not in one of those positions (lecturers, educators, adjunct instructors) is not paid for any research they might be doing and publishing, nor are those who are conducting research but cannot get a tenure-track job due to universities replacing tenure lines with non-tenure-track positions.\nCharging for access to these works has raised controversy in recent years, due to concerns that this may lead to information silos .\nPonytail seems to be presenting papers concluding that this flow of currency is not equitable. Unfortunately, the journal she has submitted these findings to has opted not to review or publish them, likely because they have a financial interest that conflicts with the publishing of her findings, since sending her paper to review would reach her target audience of voluntary peer reviewers and could potentially incite them to go on strike and demand payment for their work.\nFurthermore, the comic contains the joke that Ponytail is doing exactly what she is dis-encouraging in the paper: publishing it in a journal, which probably does not pay their reviewers and possibly locks the papers behind a paywall. However, as this is how science works at the moment, she is obliged to do so in order to reach her audience.\nThe title text refers to a Twitter post that went viral. Researcher Dr. Holly Witteman informs the public that you could just ask many researchers for a PDF copy of their academic paper and that they would be delighted to do so free of charge. (This hearkens back to the days of snailmail, when researchers would distribute printed copies, \"reprints\", of their work for, at most, the price of a self-addressed stamped envelope.) She has additionally written an article on the situation and how to get papers for free.\nPre-print repositories, such as arXiv , are online databases for researchers to publish drafts of their research for quick distribution to willing reviewers, sidestepping the lengthy and often arduous reviewing process as conducted by many research journals. These databases are free to access by researchers and the general public, and often papers will remain on these sites long after their journal publication, making them a convenient way to get to papers locked behind a paywall. However, the pre-print versions of the papers will often lack peer review, and as such may contain a higher occurrence of errors. There are also sites which collect and re-publish papers for free, such as Sci-Hub , which attempts to provide all published papers free of charge globally. Links to Sci-Hub can go dead after being widely published; as of 4\/5\/22, this link is active.\nIn the title text, the publisher refuses to publish a paper that describes ways to get around the paywall restrictions that make up their bottom line. In this refusal they even acknowledged that the author has tried to trick them, maybe by using one of those very long titles filled with incomprehensible jargon that is almost impossible to read, and remember to the end. So they finish the refusal by adding a \"but nice try\".\n[Ponytail is sitting in a office chair at a desk reading from a laptop. Above her the text from the screen is shown in a frame with a zigzag arrow pointing to the laptop.] RE: Economics Journal Submission We have received your manuscript \"The Bizarre Economics of Academic Publishing: Why Volunteer Peer Reviewers Should Rise Up and Demand Payment from For-Profit Journals.\" We have elected not to send it out for review.\n"}
{"id":2026,"title":"Heat Index","image_title":"Heat Index","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2026","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/heat_index.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2026:_Heat_Index","transcript":"[A flowchart is shown beneath its title:] How to Calculate the \"Heat Index\":\n[There are four boxes with arrows between. The first rectangular box is at the top, and an arrow points straight down:] Measure the Temperature\n[From there an arrow goes straight down to a decision diamond:] Does it look hot enough?\n[Two arrow goes out from the diamond. One goes straight down to another rectangular box. Both the arrow and the box has labels:] No Add a few degrees\n[From the bottom box an arrow goes back to the diamond. The other arrow from the diamond goes right to a final box with no arrows.  Again both the arrow and the box has labels:] Yes Done\n","explanation":"Heat index, like wind chill, is a way to combine multiple factors, in this case temperature and humidity, to get a single number indicating what the air \"feels like.\" This page gives a table, a formula, and lots more explanation.\nHuman skin does not directly detect temperature - only the rate of heat gain or loss.  This is why a piece of metal feels cooler than a piece of plastic or wood at the same exact temperature (below body temperature, above it is the other way around) - the metal conducts heat away from the higher body temperature at a higher rate than a good insulator does.\nSo in warm weather, it's not just the temperature that matters for comfort.  The humidity and wind speed also factor into it.  When humidity is high, sweat evaporation is less effective at cooling us off than in a \"dry heat\" with low humidity.\nHence, meteorologists use a combination of temperature and humidity to come up with the \"heat index\" value...and a combination of temperature and wind speed to produce a \"wind chill\" number.\nNeither scale is particularly scientific in terms of measuring how people feel - but both are a more accurate representation of comfort levels than temperature alone.\nThe joke here is that these numbers seem entirely subjectively chosen - and in a sense, they really are, although they are calculated from an actual formula (a multivariate fit to a mathematical model of the human body - with nine terms!) and not by guesswork as the flow chart implies.\nThe title text suggests another way it is calculated: In general the effective temperature is calculated based on the conductivity of heat based on humidity. This is a legitimate method of determining how hot something feels because the heat conductance of water is higher than dry air and humans perceive more heat when the humidity is higher. But humans also tend to exaggerate and so Randall implies to add still a bunch more to satisfy the subjective sentiment.\n[A flowchart is shown beneath its title:] How to Calculate the \"Heat Index\":\n[There are four boxes with arrows between. The first rectangular box is at the top, and an arrow points straight down:] Measure the Temperature\n[From there an arrow goes straight down to a decision diamond:] Does it look hot enough?\n[Two arrow goes out from the diamond. One goes straight down to another rectangular box. Both the arrow and the box has labels:] No Add a few degrees\n[From the bottom box an arrow goes back to the diamond. The other arrow from the diamond goes right to a final box with no arrows.  Again both the arrow and the box has labels:] Yes Done\n"}
{"id":2027,"title":"Lightning Distance","image_title":"Lightning Distance","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2027","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lightning_distance.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2027:_Lightning_Distance","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan stand on either side of a window, observing a bolt of lightning in a dark sky.] Cueball: What's that trick for telling how many miles away lightning is? Megan: Just count the seconds between the visible flash and the radio wave burst, then multiply by 5 billion.","explanation":"The usual trick for determining the distance to a lightning flash is to count the seconds from when you see the flash until when you hear thunder , and divide by five to get miles (or three to get kilometers).  This works because the transmission of light is essentially instantaneous over the relevant distances, while the speed of sound is 331.2 m\/s (1,087 ft\/s, 1,192 km\/h, or 741 mph, varying a bit based on temperature), or about 1\/5 mile per second (1\/3 kilometer per second).\nThis comic subverts the usual trick by having Megan describe a highly impractical alternative method.  Megan's method is based on the fact that the speed of electromagnetic radiation, which includes light and radio waves, is not truly fixed and varies by wavelength in a refractive medium (consider the classic case of visible light in a prism). The electromagnetic radiation emitted by lightning on Earth also has to travel through air, which changes its speed in a fashion which depends on its frequency.\nLightning is most visibly observable in the near-infrared visible spectrum around a wavelength of 777 nm . The refractive index (n) of air at 15\u02daC for a wavelength of 777 nm is 1.0002752 , which equates to a speed of light of 299,709,978 m\/s given the relation n=c\/v, where c=speed of light in a vacuum and v=the velocity of light in the medium.\nTerrestrial lightning generates very-low-frequency radio waves ranging in frequency from 1 kHz to 30 kHz known as whistlers from bouncing off the ionosphere, and wider-band emissions known as sferics . Much of this would exist in the very low frequency category of radio waves, for which literature values of refractive index is harder to determine. Using the formula given in this paper , the refractive index for radio waves in similar conditions is 1.000315, which equates to a speed of light of 299698.0 km\/s (or 186223.7 miles\/s). This means that to get the distance in kilometers, the time difference between flash and radio burst should instead be multiplied by 13.6 billion (or 8.45 billion for miles).\nUsing a setup similar to that used for passive radar , it would theoretically be possible to use this effect to determine the distance to a source of extremely short bursts of visible light and radio waves, although one might have to compensate for the tiny effect time with tricks involving phase detection or receiver harmonics.  Large inaccuracies may propagate from the inconsistency of air pressure, temperature, electron density, humidity in the atmosphere, even local temperature of the receiver, which may need to be taken into account.\nThe joke is that it is impractical for people who haven't spent time with radio engineering, because they haven't heard of measuring such small time intervals (on the scale of 0.1 nanoseconds per kilometer or mile) and because they don't know how to detect radiation outside the visible spectrum, which can be done with a $20 radio dongle.  An upconverter may be needed to measure the low-frequency details, and possibly building one's own loop antenna to pick them up in the first place.  It would be difficult to use such a \"rule of thumb\" for somebody not already exposed to either the amateur software-defined-radio scene or professional hardware.\nAlthough lightning lasts about 60 to 70 microseconds , during which time the signals we receive would rise and fall somewhat erratically, a software-defined radio can sample the phase and strength of the signal in detail during this time and provide a record of it for comparison with a recording at a different frequency.  A more expensive radio would make life easier, as a sampling rate of at least a few GHz would allow for the time discrepancy to be measured directly using the onset of the signal, rather than possibly inferred from phase differences at different frequencies.\nFor the purpose of the joke, the \"5 billion\" value used in the comic is a fair estimate which also references the original rule of 5 seconds per mile nicely, though the result can have a huge margin of error depending on actual conditions (temperature, humidity, etc.), as the title text suggests (\"the index of radio refraction does have a lot of variation\").\nThe title text suggests another method of calculating the distance to lightning. Since the absorption of light is also different in different wavelengths, it would be possible to calculate the difference by comparing the brightness instead of relative delay. This would, however, require the knowledge of the emission spectrum of lightning and attenuation ratios of different wavelengths (which would both vary across conditions).\n[Cueball and Megan stand on either side of a window, observing a bolt of lightning in a dark sky.] Cueball: What's that trick for telling how many miles away lightning is? Megan: Just count the seconds between the visible flash and the radio wave burst, then multiply by 5 billion."}
{"id":2028,"title":"Complex Numbers","image_title":"Complex Numbers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2028","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/complex_numbers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2028:_Complex_Numbers","transcript":"[Cueball (the student) is raising his hand and writing with his other hand. He is sitting down at a desk, which has a piece of paper on it.] Cueball: Does any of this really have to do with the square root of -1? Or do mathematicians just think they're too cool for regular vectors?\n[Miss Lenhart (the teacher) is standing in front of a whiteboard.] Miss Lenhart: Complex numbers aren't just vectors. They're a profound extension of real numbers, laying the foundation for the fundamental theorem of algebra and the entire field of complex analysis.\n[Miss Lenhart is standing slightly to the right in a blank frame.] Miss Lenhart: And we're too cool for regular vectors. Cueball (off-screen): I knew it!\n","explanation":"The complex numbers can be thought of as pairs of real numbers with rules for addition and multiplication.\n\n\nAs such, they can be modeled as two-dimensional vectors , with standard vector addition and an interesting rule for multiplication. The justification for this rule is to consider a complex number as an expression of the form , where , i.e. i is the square root of negative 1. Applying the common rules of algebra and the definition of i yields rules for addition and multiplication above.\nRegular two-dimensional vectors are pairs of values, with the same rule for addition, and no rule for multiplication.\nThe usual way to introduce complex numbers is by starting with i and deducing the rules for addition and multiplication, but Cueball is correct to say that some uses of complex numbers could be modeled with vectors alone, without consideration of the square root of a negative number.\nThe teacher, Miss Lenhart , counters that to ignore the natural construction of the complex numbers would hide the relevance of the fundamental theorem of algebra (Every polynomial of degree n has exactly n roots, when counted according to multiplicity) and much of complex analysis (calculus with complex numbers; the study of analytic and meromorphic functions), but she also agrees that mathematicians are too cool for \"regular vectors.\" Just because the complex numbers can be interpreted through vector space, however, that doesn't mean that they are just vectors, any more than being able to construct the natural numbers from set logic mean that natural numbers are really just sets.\nIn mathematics, a group is the pairing of a binary operation (say, multiplication) with the set of numbers that operation can be used on (say, the real numbers), such that you can describe the properties of the operation by its corresponding group. An Abelian group is one where the operation is commutative, that is, where the terms of the operation can be exchanged: The title text argues that the \"link\" between algebra and geometry in \"algebreic [sic] geometry\" and \"geometric algebra\" is the operation in an Abelian group, such that both of those fields are equivalent.  Algebraic geometry and geometric algebra are mostly unrelated areas of study in mathematics. Algebraic geometry studies the properties of sets of zeros of polynomials. It runs relatively deep. Its tools were used for example in Andrew Wiles' celebrated proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. For its part, a geometric algebra (a Clifford algebra with some specific properties) is a construct allowing one to do algebraic manipulation of geometric objects (e.g., vectors, planes, spheres, etc.) in an arbitrary space that has a resultant geometric interpretation (e.g., rotation, displacement, etc.). The algebra of quaternions, which is often used to handle rotations in 3D computer graphics, is an example of geometric algebra, as is the algebra of complex numbers. Meta-Abelian groups (often contracted to metabelian groups) is a class of groups that are not quite abelian, but close to being so.\nRandall's joke in the title text is a wordplay combining the concepts of (meta-)abelian groups and change in the order of word orders with the general idea of \"meta\".\nThis comic is similar to the earlier Miss Lenhart comic 1724: Proofs .\n[Cueball (the student) is raising his hand and writing with his other hand. He is sitting down at a desk, which has a piece of paper on it.] Cueball: Does any of this really have to do with the square root of -1? Or do mathematicians just think they're too cool for regular vectors?\n[Miss Lenhart (the teacher) is standing in front of a whiteboard.] Miss Lenhart: Complex numbers aren't just vectors. They're a profound extension of real numbers, laying the foundation for the fundamental theorem of algebra and the entire field of complex analysis.\n[Miss Lenhart is standing slightly to the right in a blank frame.] Miss Lenhart: And we're too cool for regular vectors. Cueball (off-screen): I knew it!\n"}
{"id":2029,"title":"Disaster Movie","image_title":"Disaster Movie","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2029","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/disaster_movie.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2029:_Disaster_Movie","transcript":"[A fraction of an office with two desks is shown. On the right Cueball sits behind a computer while in the middle Ponytail talks into a radio device with a small antenna. On the left Megan runs into the scene holding something like a tablet computer in her hand.] Megan: The lava is entering the sea, and new rifts are opening to the north! Ponytail: Get a GIS survey team in the air! We need to revise our coastline shapefiles!\n[Caption below the frame:] I want to make a disaster movie that just shows scientists rushing to update all their data sets.\n","explanation":"Disaster movies are a sub-genre of movies, which resolve around a disaster, such as a natural disaster, worldwide disease pandemic or an attack. Typically, the plot of a disaster movie is how the main characters escape the disaster, avert its climax or deal with the aftermath of the disaster. Here, Randall has subverted this plot device by showing Ponytail call for a GIS survey team to map out the result of the disaster. Instead of panicking for survival, the scientists are rushing to update their data sets.\n\"Lava entering the sea, and new rifts opening to the north\" may be a reference to the 2018 lower Puna eruption , a volcanic event on the island of Hawaii . Due to this eruption event, lava did enter the Pacific Ocean. As of the time of publishing, this event was still occurring.\nGIS (\"geographic information system\") is a computer system that stores and analyses spatial and geographic data, and by extension, the profession of experts who use computers to make maps and perform spatial analysis.\nPresumably, a \"GIS survey team\" would go above the affected area in a helicopter, mapping the coastline changes caused by the natural disaster. A \"GIS survey team\" presumably means a team of geographic surveyors. However, surveying is usually carried out on the ground, and surveying is not usually considered part of GIS. Also, these days, satellite imagery is usually used for this purpose, as there are several companies that can provide imagery refreshed as often as every day. Finally, a \"GIS survey team\" would most likely be one of many companies that provides these kinds of services, not \"scientists\", as suggested in the caption. An example of this is an ArcGIS map of the mentioned 2018 lower Puna eruption.\nA Shapefile is a proprietary data format for spatial data which remains in widespread use, despite being created in the early 90s, and based on an even older database format. Amongst non-GIS people \"shapefile\" is often used synonymously with \"geographic data\", regardless of the actual file format. \"Our coastline shapefiles\" then means \"our geographic data for the coastlines\", although such data would most likely be stored in a database, not a Shapefile.\nThe situation described (scrambling to update geographical datasets in the advent of natural disaster) is actually a common occurrence these days. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team 's Disaster Response unit does almost exactly this: When there is a natural disaster in a location that lacks high quality GIS data (common in much of the developing world), a team of volunteers across the world mobilises to update and improve OpenStreetMap. They use the latest available satellite imagery, usually donated free for the purpose. Disaster response teams then use the GIS data in OpenStreetMap to create maps and plan their response.\nThe title text refers to the fact that most GIS datasets are not published in \"real time\", but, rather in updates every 3 months or less often. This is due to the many manual steps still present in many GIS publishing and consuming workflows, which preclude more frequent schedules. Thus, there is not as much of a rush to do their updates, and the need is not as urgent as the proposed film would show. Randall claims the urgency was exaggerated for dramatic effect, humorously disregarding the fact that neither version of this scene would be dramatic to a typical moviegoer.\n[A fraction of an office with two desks is shown. On the right Cueball sits behind a computer while in the middle Ponytail talks into a radio device with a small antenna. On the left Megan runs into the scene holding something like a tablet computer in her hand.] Megan: The lava is entering the sea, and new rifts are opening to the north! Ponytail: Get a GIS survey team in the air! We need to revise our coastline shapefiles!\n[Caption below the frame:] I want to make a disaster movie that just shows scientists rushing to update all their data sets.\n"}
{"id":2030,"title":"Voting Software","image_title":"Voting Software","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2030","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voting_software.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2030:_Voting_Software","transcript":"[A Megan-like woman, with bushy hair, is holding a handheld microphone and interviewing Hairbun and Cueball, standing in a line] [Heading above the panel]: Asking aircraft designers about airplane safety:\nHairbun: Nothing is ever foolproof, but modern airliners are incredibly resilient. Flying is the safest way to travel.\n[In a frameless panel, Hairy is holding a handheld microphone and interviewing Cueball] [Heading above the panel]: Asking building engineers about elevator safety:\nCueball: Elevators are protected by multiple tried-and-tested failsafe mechanisms. They're nearly incapable of falling.\n[Ponytail is holding a handheld microphone and interviewing Megan and Cueball, standing in a line] [Heading above the panel]: Asking software engineers about computerized voting:\nMegan: That's terrifying .\n[Zoomed in on Ponytail, Megan and Cueball's faces] Ponytail: Wait, really? Megan: Don't trust voting software and don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe. Ponytail: Why? Megan: I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.\n[Zoomed back out, showing Ponytail, Megan and Cueball standing in a line] Ponytail: They say they've fixed it with something called \"blockchain.\" Megan: AAAAA!!! Cueball: Whatever they sold you, don't touch it. Megan: Bury it in the desert. Cueball: Wear gloves.\n","explanation":"This comic is a commentary on voting machines specifically, and more generally the contrast between what experts will trust and what the average user will trust.\nThe first two panels of this comic involve a reporter talking to professional mechanical engineers, asking about the given safety of the products\/solutions that each of their fields help to produce (airplanes from aircraft designers in panel 1, elevators from building engineers in panel 2). While the two inventions selected are relatively new when compared to how long humans have existed, the two fields mentioned have existed for multiple human generations, giving enough time to find flaws in their products\/solutions and solve said flaws to the point that they can be considered safe for the general public to use.\nThe comic from panel 3 onwards contrasts this with computer engineers Megan and Cueball , both agreeing that their given field (computer science\/software development\/software engineering) does not have the overall consistent competency that other fields have (or at least appear to have). Indeed, at least anecdotally there are very few ethical and security restrictions for what developers can\/cannot do, and relatively minor consequences when catastrophes arise from poor decisions.\nWhen the reporter follows the interview up with a mention of blockchain technology, Megan and Cueball reflexively tell the reporter to avoid any voting system using the technology at all costs. Blockchain is a relatively new technology that is intended to solve some computer security issues by making it difficult to doctor old data. However, in the process of solving the old computer security issues, it has introduced new computer security issues that have not yet been ironed out; for instance, it doesn't solve input fraud issues, only data-doctoring fraud, so if a program caused the voting machine to record a vote for candidate B whenever a vote for candidate A was cast (such a program could be uploaded to the voting machines through USB, or through the internet which the voting machine must be connected to for blockchain), blockchain would not prevent it. Blockchain has also had a large number of high-profile scams, thefts, and implementations with critical security holes. Thus, Megan and Cueball may not trust this blockchain solution because of this history.\nThe title text confirms the comic's stance by implicitly saying that any digital voting systems are to not be used under any circumstances. It may also highlight that anyone working in the field is vulnerable to corruption, or at least that the field is far from maturity. Humorously the title text says digital voting systems should still be developed, but mostly to keep the people who want to use them occupied, rather than allowing them to actually publish their work in the real world where it can cause serious harm.\nComputer systems, operating primarily in a digital domain, fail differently from most traditional areas of engineering, which operate in analog (or continuous) domains. A small error in an analog part often gives a result which is close to the desired properties (it almost fits, it works most of the time). By contrast, a small error in a digital system (just one bit being changed) can easily make the system function in radically different ways (if not just crash entirely). So not only is software engineering younger than other areas of engineering, but the domain is much less forgiving. Even small errors\/variations produce catastrophe down the line.\nThis fear of computerized voting is a result of a fundamental difference between computer security and other types of safety measures: Most engineers only have to deal with wear and tear, and very rarely have to guard against sabotage. In contrast, in cryptography there is always somebody trying to undo what you've built. Not only that, but new advances in cryptography tend to point out vulnerabilities with previous versions, making them not only obsolete, but dangerously so. For these reasons, it is especially important to make sure that whoever is selling you the security method is both competent and non-malicious, but because crypto software is highly technical and often confidential\/proprietary, it can be hard to verify this if you're not an expert in the field (which you won't be, if you're buying it).\nThese issues are especially pertinent to voting machines , which store incredibly sensitive information but are often catastrophically outdated due to lack of funding. There are also major issues with electronic voting in general; for example, this video from Computerphile raises issues of malware infections, transferring the votes to the election authorities without having them intercepted, and needing to trust both the machine's software and central counting system to present an accurate account of the votes. Furthermore, the people purchasing them, the politicians, are generally not known for their technical understanding -- or their impartiality.\nInterestingly, this comic was posted a day before DEF CON 2018, and it was shown there that the voting systems that will be used across America for the mid-term vote in November are, in many cases, extremely insecure. The topic of voting machines has been covered before in 463: Voting Machines , where the use of anti-virus software on the machines has been discussed.\nThe way blockchain works is that several computers have data being inputted into them. With each tick, they all share their current states with each other, and encrypt and hash it. That state then becomes a 'block' in the chain. They then share states, including that block as part of the state, then hash and encrypt it, and then it becomes a 'block' in the chain. Each 'block' is included in the cryptographic hash of all following blocks, so if a change is made to any given block, all blocks after that block must be changed.\nDue to the distributed nature, if changes are made to any chain, it can be compared against the other chains, and so long as the majority say that the changes didn't happen, it's reverted and removed.\nThis is really great at preventing post-facto data changes. With blockchain you can somewhat guarantee that no one comes in after the election and changes the votes on the machines. (Unless they're handling the blockchain in a stupid fashion, for example without the distribution.) What you cannot do is prevent someone from installing a program on the machine that makes it think that there's a voter when it's idle, and makes it start registering the correct sequence of actions to signify a vote while idle.\nAlso, the security issues that Blockchain solves could also be solved via write-once memory, which would be more secure and more difficult to doctor.\nMost computer security specialists are more worried about programs that randomly deliberately misreport a vote, than people changing the votes after they're already recorded, so blockchain would solve an issue that most computer security specialists are less worried about, while causing new issues (the perpetual internet connection among them).\n[A Megan-like woman, with bushy hair, is holding a handheld microphone and interviewing Hairbun and Cueball, standing in a line] [Heading above the panel]: Asking aircraft designers about airplane safety:\nHairbun: Nothing is ever foolproof, but modern airliners are incredibly resilient. Flying is the safest way to travel.\n[In a frameless panel, Hairy is holding a handheld microphone and interviewing Cueball] [Heading above the panel]: Asking building engineers about elevator safety:\nCueball: Elevators are protected by multiple tried-and-tested failsafe mechanisms. They're nearly incapable of falling.\n[Ponytail is holding a handheld microphone and interviewing Megan and Cueball, standing in a line] [Heading above the panel]: Asking software engineers about computerized voting:\nMegan: That's terrifying .\n[Zoomed in on Ponytail, Megan and Cueball's faces] Ponytail: Wait, really? Megan: Don't trust voting software and don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe. Ponytail: Why? Megan: I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.\n[Zoomed back out, showing Ponytail, Megan and Cueball standing in a line] Ponytail: They say they've fixed it with something called \"blockchain.\" Megan: AAAAA!!! Cueball: Whatever they sold you, don't touch it. Megan: Bury it in the desert. Cueball: Wear gloves.\n"}
{"id":2031,"title":"Pie Charts","image_title":"Pie Charts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2031","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pie_charts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2031:_Pie_Charts","transcript":"[Two colored circles are shown. The circle on the right is warped and bent in shape and shows some shadows from the middle to the outer edges, like a round piece of cloth with wrinkles going out from the center.]\n[The left pie chart:] Wrong: 45% (red) 15% (blue) 30% (yellow) 40% (green)\n[The right warped and bent pie chart with shadows:] Right: 45% (red) 15% (blue) 30% (yellow) 40% (green)\n[Caption below the frame:] How to make a pie chart if your percentages don't add up to 100\n","explanation":"Pie Charts graph proportions as \"slices\" of a circle, like a pie that you cut into slices.  The circle, or Pie, represents the whole sum of the slices, or 100% of the data.  As such, if the data represented by the slices is expressed as percentages, the total of all the slices, by definition, must total 100%.  This comic introduces a new technique for getting around that rule by \"warping\" the circle to allow more than 100% of the data to exist in the graph. Thus the total amount of 130% is represented with a shape presumably 30% larger in area than the circle.\nThe resulting warped circle is then actually part of a hyperbolic plane , while a normal circle is part of a flat plane. Of course, it doesn't matter if the geometric shape is a circle or a hyperbolic plane: A changed graphic doesn't magically solve the misrepresentation of percentages. At best, it serves to highlight the methodical error. Regarding doctored statistics: If the same numbers were presented as absolute values instead of percentages, the error would still remain but would be less obvious, especially if you omit the total count of the sample ( Of all people asked, 40 selected green as favorite color, 45 selected red, 30 yellow and 15 blue. This statement omits that you surveyed only 100 people and several of them named several colors, and readers will assume a larger sample.)\nPercentages that add up to more than 100% are often a sign that a math error has occurred, whether a typo somewhere or a sloppy case of taking numbers from different sources. However, they can arise naturally in cases where each item can belong to more than one group, such as approval voting (40% of the people like green 45% like red etc., however there may be some that like both green and red). In such cases, a more accurate depiction would have some form of overlap of the pie pieces, not a warping of the space which they occupy, or a completely different representation, such as a bar chart.  Minor cases can also occur if the percentages of the pieces have been rounded for readability - summing the rounded numbers can result in them adding to 99% or 101%.\nPercentages don't need to add up to 100% to be correct. For example, if ten people wear blue t-shirts and ten wear red t-shirts, then 50% of them wear each color for a total of 100%. Now if one of each joins the group, 55% of the original population wears each color, for a total of 110%, as the total population risen by 10%. That said, this change should be represented by something like a bar graph, not by pie chart. If percentages are represented by a pie chart, the assumption is that the total should be 100%, independently of the math behind it.\nIn this case, the right image appears to be what happens when you cut the pie chart segments out of fabric, stitch them together, and let the resultant fabric flop around a bit.\nThe title text presents an alternative if shading is not possible, namely to excuse the percentage inaccuracy with scientists discussing curvature of space.\n[Two colored circles are shown. The circle on the right is warped and bent in shape and shows some shadows from the middle to the outer edges, like a round piece of cloth with wrinkles going out from the center.]\n[The left pie chart:] Wrong: 45% (red) 15% (blue) 30% (yellow) 40% (green)\n[The right warped and bent pie chart with shadows:] Right: 45% (red) 15% (blue) 30% (yellow) 40% (green)\n[Caption below the frame:] How to make a pie chart if your percentages don't add up to 100\n"}
{"id":2032,"title":"Word Puzzles","image_title":"Word Puzzles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2032","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/word_puzzles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2032:_Word_Puzzles","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan standing together. He makes some gestures with his hand and some musical notes are above him while Megan holds her fist before her mouth.] Cueball: Parts of this aria were composed by Brian Eno's Opera Star au pair at the start of his post-live era. Megan (thinking): ...parts...start...eno...aria...\n[Caption below the frame:] My hobby: Messing with word game enthusiasts by using words that make them sure there's a puzzle to solve\n","explanation":"This is another comic in the \" My Hobby \" series, where Randall presents his hobby of fooling other people. This particular hobby seems to be a case of Nerd Sniping . Cueball knows that Megan is a word game enthusiast and - while both are probably at a party - he presents a complex sentence rather than just doing small talk. And he is successful as we can see that she is just thinking about the proper solution to that puzzle where probably none exists.\nThe dialog, caption, and title text contain many words that appear frequently in crossword puzzle answers because they fit well with intersecting words, in part because they have a high density of vowels. Some of the terms (parts of, start of) are also commonly used in cryptic crossword clues to indicate that nearby words should be combined or split to create an answer.\nBrian Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, writer, and visual artist. He is best known for his pioneering work in ambient music and contributions to rock, pop, electronic, and generative music. He was born on 15 May 1948, and is still an active artist. But live concerts by him were rare and may not happen ever again. However, the aria was not written by himself but by his au pair who is also an opera star. And this happened after Eno ended his live career.\nThe title text goes further on this puzzle and asserts that Lance Ito was playing the aria solo on an oboe at the fictive Ohio's AirAsia Arena . Ito is well known as the judge in the O. J. Simpson murder case.\nThe kind of puzzle that Megan thinks she is solving is called a \"Cryptic\" or cryptic crossword , which has markedly different rules than ordinary crosswords. If Cueball's statement had been \"Part of this aria is an Indian garment\" the answer would have been \"sari\", because a part of the phrase \"this aria\" is the sequence \"sari\", which in turn is an Indian garment. Cueball's actual statement contains quite a few familiar cryptic puzzle triggers. The word \"composed\" can be a hint of a preceding or following anagram, in this case of \"this aria\" or of \"by Brian\" or of even longer adjacent strings. Although \"opera star\" could be a famous singer, say \"Caruso\", it might also be the name of an opera followed by the name of an astronomical star. \"Au pair\" could be any of its ordinary meanings, say \"nanny\", but might also be \"earrings\" (because Au is the chemical symbol for gold, and a gold pair could be earrings). The word \"start\" is often a hint to take just the beginning of a word, so \"the start\" would be \"t\", or \"start of his\" would be \"h\" or \"hi\". The New York Times runs a cryptic crossword as its \"second Sunday puzzle\" every other month or so, and there are other regular cryptic crossword venues. There are various guides on the web for solving cryptics, such as this one at The Atlantic: Puzzler Instructions .\n[Cueball and Megan standing together. He makes some gestures with his hand and some musical notes are above him while Megan holds her fist before her mouth.] Cueball: Parts of this aria were composed by Brian Eno's Opera Star au pair at the start of his post-live era. Megan (thinking): ...parts...start...eno...aria...\n[Caption below the frame:] My hobby: Messing with word game enthusiasts by using words that make them sure there's a puzzle to solve\n"}
{"id":2033,"title":"Repair or Replace","image_title":"Repair or Replace","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2033","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/repair_or_replace.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2033:_Repair_or_Replace","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in a car parked to the left of Hairy, who thus stands in front of it while pointing behind him towards a big black hole.] Cueball: My engine's making a weird noise. Can you take a look? Hairy: Sure, just pop the hood. Cueball: Oh, the hood latch is also broken. Hairy: OK, just pull up to that big pit and push the car in. We'll go get a new one.\n[Caption below the frame:] I'm sure the economics make sense, but it still freaks me out how quick companies are to replace computing devices instead of trying to fix them.\n","explanation":"This comic compares the repair of cars with that of computers or other similar electronic devices.  The question Repair or Replace? comes up more frequently with electronics than with cars, hence the title of the comic, and the humor derived.\nCueball is in his car. He says that there is a weird sound and asks if the  car mechanic Hairy will take a look. Hairy asks him to open the car's hood , exposing the engine, to further identify the cause of the problem. Cueball then says that his hood latch, the lever used to open the hood, is also broken. The solution, according to Hairy, is then to discard the car, and \"replace\" it with a new car.\nIn reality, fixing the latch on the hood is a simple task for a skilled mechanic and would not justify writing-off the car. When a car is malfunctioning, the usual response is to attempt to repair it. A car is designed so that many of the parts can be replaced or adjusted. Even in the case of a product recall where the manufacturer recalls the vehicles, it is usually only a single malfunctioning part that needs to be replaced and the rest of the car is left alone to return to the customer. It would be extremely inefficient for a car dealership or mechanic to simply \"replace\" the entire car when there is a problem with it (although many insurers will provide a temporary replacement \"courtesy car\" while the car is being repaired). \nHowever, right around the time this comic was published, Subaru just instituted a recall of a few hundred vehicles that it says it will replace the entire car (rather than a single malfunctioning part), as seen here , and this could be the inspiration for this comic.\nBy contrast, when a computer or electronic device is malfunctioning, it is often judged to be more expensive to repair than to replace, and the usual action is to purchase a new device. It is generally possible to replace each part of a desktop or laptop computer, but harder to do so for more integrated devices such as tablets, and almost impossible to repair individual components with faulty or damaged integrated circuits.\nEven where replacing a component is relatively easy (needing little more than a set of screwdrivers), the cost of replacement parts and labor can be a significant proportion of the cost of a completely new device, particularly where a user is not technically confident and pays a repair shop to fit new components. Also, the length of the technology \"upgrade cycle\" - typically around 3-5 years - is roughly the mean failure time of a device's components.  Thus, users may already be considering a new purchase when their device breaks. Thus, Randall notes in this comic that while it does make sense for electronic devices, the \"solution\" of replacing an object instead of attempting to repair seems absurd for any other object.\nThe title text refers to data stored on a computer or electronic device. Before replacing the device, it is recommended backup all your personal files, so that you have future access to them, and to remove them for security. Randall likens this to having your friends and family exit the vehicle, or making backup friends and family before the vehicle is thrown away.\nThe economics\nCars are much more expensive than computers or other electronic devices, and become obsolete less quickly. The point at which it becomes cheaper to purchase a new computer or phone rather than repair an old one comes much more quickly.\nCars are mostly valuable for their macroscopic features and functions, whereas electronics deliver value mostly with microscopic circuitry. While we can mass produce integrated circuit devices efficiently, the equipment is massively complex and expensive, so it's only practical on an industrial scale. Repairing an individual switch or data line in an individual chip might take a team of experts and a state of the art lab with electron microscopes etc. - millions of times the per unit cost once assembly lines are running\nAlso, although the comic implies that replaced electronics are discarded (like a car pushed into a pit), sometimes they are sent off to be repaired or refurbished elsewhere.  This provides a better experience for the customer (they get a working device right away instead of waiting for repair) and is more efficient for the company (a consolidated repair facility can have the experience and equipment to repair a device much more quickly than at a retail location). This assumes that the customer asked the manufacturer for a replacement, and did not throw it away themselves before purchasing a new one.\nElectronics Repair\nAlthough most corporations find it more profitable to have consumers replace their electronics, there are many resources that are more geared towards repair. Free Geek offers free technology to volunteers in exchange for their work in repairing broken items.  More locations across the world are listed near the bottom of their resources page.  Alternatively, hackerspaces are present in many large cities, and often at the larger ones there are people who would be happy to assist somebody trying to learn to repair their electronics.  On one's own, most problems with electronics can be fixed with some persistence, googling, purchasing of a few tools, and carefully watching youtube videos.\n[Cueball is sitting in a car parked to the left of Hairy, who thus stands in front of it while pointing behind him towards a big black hole.] Cueball: My engine's making a weird noise. Can you take a look? Hairy: Sure, just pop the hood. Cueball: Oh, the hood latch is also broken. Hairy: OK, just pull up to that big pit and push the car in. We'll go get a new one.\n[Caption below the frame:] I'm sure the economics make sense, but it still freaks me out how quick companies are to replace computing devices instead of trying to fix them.\n"}
{"id":2034,"title":"Equations","image_title":"Equations","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2034","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/equations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2034:_Equations","transcript":"[Nine equations are listed, three in the top row and two in each of the next three rows. Below each equation there are labels:]\nE=K 0 t+1\/2 \u03c1vt 2 All kinematics equations\nK n =\u2211 \u221e i=0 \u2211 \u221e \u03c0=0 (n-\u03c0)(i-e \u03c0-\u221e ) [K sub n = the summation from i = 0 to infinity of the sum from pi = 0 to infinity of (n - pi) * (i-e^(pi-infinity))] All number theory equations\n\u2202\/\u2202t \u2207\u22c5\u03c1=8\/23 (\u222f \u03c1 ds dt \u22c5 \u03c1 \u2202\/\u2202\u2207) All fluid dynamics equations\n|\u03c8 x,y \u232a=A(\u03c8)A(|x\u232a\u2297|y\u232a) All quantum mechanics equations\nCH 4 +OH+HEAT\u2192H 2 O+CH 2 +H 2 EAT All chemistry equations\nSU(2)U(1)\u00d7SU(U(2)) All quantum gravity equations\nS g =(-1)\/(2\u03b5\u0304) i\u00f0(\u0302 \u03be 0 \u2a22 p \u03b5 \u03c1 v abc \u22c5\u03b7 0 )\u0302 f\u0335 a 0 \u03bb( \u03be ) \u03c8(0 a ) All gauge theory equations\nH(t)+\u03a9+G\u22c5\u039b ... [There is a brace linking the three cases together.] ... > 0 (Hubble model) ... = 0 (Flat sphere model) ... < 0 (Bright dark matter model) All cosmology equations\n\u0124 - u\u0327 0 = 0 All truly deep physics equations\n","explanation":"This comic gives a set of mock equations. To anyone not familiar with the field in question they look pretty similar to what you might find in research papers or on the relevant Wikipedia pages. Most of the jokes are related to the symbols or \"look\" of most equations in the given field.\nThe comic makes jokes about the fields of kinematics, number theory, fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, quantum gravity, gauge theory, cosmology, and physics equations. Of course, all of the equations listed are not real equations ( and H 2 EAT are clearly jokes and making a mockery of the given field). As always, Randall is just having a laugh.\nAll kinematics equations\nMost kinematics equations tend to make heavy use of constants, addition, powers, and multiplication. This specific equation resembles the actual kinematics equation d = vt + 1\/2at^2, but replaces a (acceleration) with v (velocity) times (density) and replaces velocity with \"K 0 \", which is not a term used in kinematics.\nAll number theory equations\nRandall jokes about how number theory often involves the use of summations. The use of \u03c0 as an integer variable in the double summation is a joke, as \u03c0 is essentially always used for the well-known constant 3.14159..., not a variable. The use of i as a summation variable is common, though it can also be confused with the imaginary unit \u221a-1. The constants e , i , and \u03c0 , as well as the theoretical upper bound , often appear in number theory equations.\nAll fluid dynamics equations\nFluid dynamics equations often involve copious integrals, especially those over closed contours as done here, which are often the main telling factors of those equations to an outsider. The time derivative and gradient operator are common in fluid dynamics, mostly via the Navier-Stokes equation, and the fluid density is one of the functions of central importance. The fraction 8\/23 is a comically weird choice, but various unexpected fractions do pop up in fluid dynamics. The ds and dt go with the double contour integral (s is probably distance, t is time), but the derivative with respect to at the end is very much not allowed.\nAll quantum mechanics equations\nQuantum mechanics often involves some of the foreign-looking symbols listed, including bra-ket notation , the tensor product , and the Greek letter Psi for a quantum state. Specifically, the left side of the equation is a ket state labeled Psi that depends on x and y (probably positions), while the right-hand side may be an operator A that depends on the state Psi (it is very unusual to have such a dependence) acting on what looks like another copy of that operator which depends on the outer product of states labeled by x and y (again strange). A charitable interpretation could be that the second A is the eigenfunction A of the operator A. Normally this is clearly indicated by giving the operator a \u201chat\u201d (^ symbol) or making the eigenfunction into a ket eigenstate, but since the equation is intentionally nonsense both A\u2019s are left ambiguous. Also note that the bra-ket math is inconsistent here, as the left side is a ket, but the right side is just two A\u2019s, which are either operators or functions but are definitely not kets.\nAll chemistry equations\nChemistry equations use formulas of chemical compounds to describe a chemical reaction. Such equations show the starting chemicals on the left side and the resulting products on the right side, as displayed. Sometimes such an equation might optionally indicate that an activation energy is required, for the reaction to take place in a sensible timeframe, e.g. by heating. A reaction requiring heating is usually indicated by a Greek capital letter Delta ( \u0394 ) or a specified temperature above the reaction arrow, however this comic uses the \"+ HEAT\" term on the left side instead. The joke is that Randall interprets \"HEAT\" to be another chemical, which reacts with Hydrogen (H) to H 2 EAT, which is nonsensical, as heat is transferred energy here, not added matter. Regardless of this, Randall gets the stoichiometry of this equation correct, with the same number of all types of 'atoms' on each side of the equation.\nAll quantum gravity equations\nQuantum gravity uses mathematical groups denoted by uppercase letters, as shown. SU(2) , U(1) , and U(2) are all well-studied groups, though 'SU(U(2))' makes no sense.  The lack of relator means this expression isn't an equation.\nAll gauge theory equations\nGauge theory is a subset of field theory. Most gauge theory equations appear to have many strange-looking constants and variables with odd labels. However, almost none of the symbols used here are found or applicable to gauge theory.\nAll cosmology equations\nCosmology is the science of the development and ultimate fate of the universe. The joke here may be pertaining to the different models accepted in the field of cosmology. H is the Hubble parameter , \u03a9 is the universal density parameter , G is the gravitational constant , and \u039b is the cosmological constant .\nAll truly deep physics equations\nThe joke about the \"truly deep physics equations\" is that most of the universal physics equations are simple, almost exceedingly so. In general, many of these equations are types of conservation law equations, which reflect some of the basic truths of the universe. A hallmark of conservation laws is that the total amount of some physical value does not change, and so one side of the equation is zero, as shown in the example. One example is Einstein's E = mc\u00b2 , which shows conservation of mass-energy. Noether's theorem shows that conservation laws have a one-to-one correspondence with a symmetry of nature, making these equations truly 'deep'.\nThe title text is referencing the fact that the electric and magnetic fields are often explained to physics students using an analogy with fluid dynamics, as well as the fact that they do share some similarities (only in terms of mathematical description as three-dimensional vector fields) with fluids. The permittivity constant (represented with \u03b5 0 ) and the permeability constant (represented with \u03bc 0 ) are coefficients that relate the amount of charge required to cause a specific amount of electric flux in a vacuum and the ability of vacuum to support the formation of magnetic fields, respectively. They appear frequently in Maxwell's equations (the equations that define the electric and magnetic fields in classical mechanics), so Randall is making the joke that any surface integral with them in it automatically is an electromagnetism equation.\n[Nine equations are listed, three in the top row and two in each of the next three rows. Below each equation there are labels:]\nE=K 0 t+1\/2 \u03c1vt 2 All kinematics equations\nK n =\u2211 \u221e i=0 \u2211 \u221e \u03c0=0 (n-\u03c0)(i-e \u03c0-\u221e ) [K sub n = the summation from i = 0 to infinity of the sum from pi = 0 to infinity of (n - pi) * (i-e^(pi-infinity))] All number theory equations\n\u2202\/\u2202t \u2207\u22c5\u03c1=8\/23 (\u222f \u03c1 ds dt \u22c5 \u03c1 \u2202\/\u2202\u2207) All fluid dynamics equations\n|\u03c8 x,y \u232a=A(\u03c8)A(|x\u232a\u2297|y\u232a) All quantum mechanics equations\nCH 4 +OH+HEAT\u2192H 2 O+CH 2 +H 2 EAT All chemistry equations\nSU(2)U(1)\u00d7SU(U(2)) All quantum gravity equations\nS g =(-1)\/(2\u03b5\u0304) i\u00f0(\u0302 \u03be 0 \u2a22 p \u03b5 \u03c1 v abc \u22c5\u03b7 0 )\u0302 f\u0335 a 0 \u03bb( \u03be ) \u03c8(0 a ) All gauge theory equations\nH(t)+\u03a9+G\u22c5\u039b ... [There is a brace linking the three cases together.] ... > 0 (Hubble model) ... = 0 (Flat sphere model) ... < 0 (Bright dark matter model) All cosmology equations\n\u0124 - u\u0327 0 = 0 All truly deep physics equations\n"}
{"id":2035,"title":"Dark Matter Candidates","image_title":"Dark Matter Candidates","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2035","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dark_matter_candidates.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2035:_Dark_Matter_Candidates","transcript":"Dark matter candidates: [A line graph is shown and labeled at left quarter in eV and further to the right in g together with some prefixes.] [The labels read:] \u00b5eV, meV, eV, keV, MeV, GeV, TeV, 10 -18 kg, ng, \u00b5g, mg, g, kg, TON, 10 6 kg, 10 12 kg, 10 18 kg, 10 24 kg, 10 30 kg\n[All items are shown in bars ranging between two approximately values:] < 1 \u00b5eV - 10 meV: Axion\n1 eV - 10 keV: Sterile neutrino\n0.5 MeV (exactly): Electrons painted with space camouflage\n10 GeV - 10 TeV: Neutralino\n100 TeV - 10 -17 kg: Q-ball\n1 ng - 100 ng: Pollen\n0.1 mg - 1 mg: No-See-Ums\n10 -1 g (exactly): Bees\n10 g - 100 g: 8-balls\n100 kg - TON: Space cows\nTON - 10 9 kg: Obelisks, monoliths, pyramids\n10 9 kg - 10 33 kg: Black holes ruled out by: 10 9 kg - 10 13 kg: Gamma rays 10 13 kg - 10 17 kg: GRB lensing 10 15 kg - 10 22 kg: Neutron star data 10 21 kg - 10 30 kg: Micro lensing 10 24 kg - 10 30 kg: Solar system stability 10 30 kg - 10 33 kg: Buzzkill astronomers\n10 33 kg - >10 36 kg: Maybe those orbit lines on space diagrams are real and very heavy\n","explanation":"Dark matter is a hypothetical, invisible form of matter used by the vast majority of astronomers to explain the far too high apparent mass of objects at large scales in our universe. In galaxies, stars are orbiting faster than the gravitational force of the sum of the masses of visible matter in the galaxy could cause, and entire galaxies are observed moving much faster around each other than their visible masses could explain. In galactic collisions, the mass can appear to separate from the visible matter, as if the mass doesn't collide but the visible matter does. A small handful of galaxies have been observed to not have this property, suggesting that it is a thing that a galaxy can have more or less of and is separable from. At scales of our solar system, those effects are too small and can't be measured. The most plausible explanation for all of these phenomena is that there is some \"dark matter\" that has gravity, but is otherwise undetectable. In cosmology, dark matter is estimated to account for 85% of the total matter in the universe.\nThis comic gives a set of possibilities for what dark matter could possibly be, charted by mass from smallest (given in electronvolts ) to largest (given in kilograms). Masses in the range 10 \u221215 to 10 \u22123 kg are given in grams together with appropriate prefixes, while the ton takes the place of 10 3 kg.\nOnly massive objects ranging from subatomic particles up to super massive ones are covered in this comic. There are also alternative hypotheses trying to modify general relativity with no need of additional matter. The problem is that these theories can't explain all different observations at once. Nonetheless dark matter is a mystery because no serious candidate has been found yet.\nThe joke in this comic is that the range of the mass of the possible particles and objects stretch over 81 powers of ten, with explanations suggested by astronomers covering only some portions of that range. Randall fills the gaps with highly absurd suggestions.\nAn axion is a hypothetical elementary particle postulated in 1977 to resolve the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics , a theory of the strong force between quarks and gluons which form hadrons like protons or neutrons . If axions exist within a specific range of mass they might be a component of dark matter. The advantage of this particle is that it's based on a theory which could be proved or also disproved by measurements in the future. Other theories, not mentioned in this comic, like the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are much more vague.\nSterile neutrinos are hypothetical particles interacting only via gravity. It's an actual candidate for dark matter. The well known neutrinos are also charged under the weak interaction and can be detected by experiments.\nElectrons are fundamental particles which compose the outer layers of atoms. A large number of electrons in the galaxy would be relatively easy to detect, as they not only interact with light (which dark matter does not appear to), but also have a strong electric charge. Presumably, space camouflage is a positively-charged coating which prevents electrons from interacting with light. (Needless to say, this is not an actual candidate for dark matter.) The mass of an electron is about 0.5\u00a0MeV which fits well into the graph.\nA neutralino is a hypothetical particle from supersymmetry and is also a current candidate for dark matter. But there is not evidence whether or not supersymmetry is correct and none of the predicted particles have been found yet.\nIn theoretical physics, a Q-ball is a stable group of particles. It's an actual candidate for dark matter.\n(In billiards, a cue ball is the white (or yellow) ball hit with the cue in normal play. In addition, Cueball is the name explainxkcd uses for the most common xkcd character.)\nPollen is a joke candidate, though people with seasonal allergies may suspect that the universe is genuinely made up entirely of pollen in the springtime.\nNo-See-Ums are a family (Ceratopogonidae) of small flies, 1\u20134\u00a0mm long, that can pass through most window screens. Another joke candidate, because dark matter is invisible and the name \"no-see-ums\" implies that the flies are invisible.\nInsects of the clade Anthophila are major pollinators of flowering plants. In recent years bees have been disappearing at an alarming rate; Doctor Who explained that they are in fact aliens leaving Earth prior to a Dalek invasion.\nIn pool, the 8-ball is a black ball numbered 8. It's a pun with Q-ball\/cue ball. Unless undetected aliens have discovered billiards and become addicted to it, 8-balls are found only on Earth and are, hence, unlikely dark matter candidates. The 8-ball is also a popular unit of sale for black market pharmaceuticals like cocaine, where it stands for \u215b ounce (3.5\u00a0g). This doesn't make sense as a dark matter candidate either \u2013 unless dark matter is hard to detect because it's illegal & trying to avoid the cops.\nCows are bovines extensively farmed on Earth for milk and meat. [ citation needed ] Although there is folklore concerning cows achieving circum-lunar orbits , not to mention their appearance on a beloved space western TV show , as Muppet cow Natalie in the Sesame Street News Flash (and others less-remembered ), they have yet to be found elsewhere in the Universe.  In the television show \"Too Close for Comfort\", one of the characters is the cartoonist of a comic strip called \"Cosmic Cow\". Spherical cows (and especially those in a vacuum, as they would essentially be if in space) have also been used (humorously) by physicists needing to simplify some source of mass in a given problem.\nWhile those human constructions are huge on a human scale, they're negligible at universe-scale. It would take a large number of such constructions, distributed through space, to replicate the effects of dark matter; while a scenario could be envisioned where enough such constructs existed, with properties and distribution allowing them to match observations, this is obviously not a likely explanation.\nThey often show up in fiction and pseudo-scientific literature as alien artifacts generating immense unknown power out of nowhere, with the most famous and influential example being the three monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey (with the largest having a mass of about 500,000 tonnes).\nBlack holes are known to occur in sizes of a few solar masses (about 10 30 -10 31 kg) as remnants of the core of former big stars, as well as in quite large sizes at the centers of galaxies (millions or even billions of solar masses). But recent gravitational wave detections indicate that black holes at 50 or 100 solar masses also exist, though their origin is still not understood. Randall doesn't mention this but some astronomers hope that these could fill at least a part of the gap. While black holes are widely reported to be ruled out as a candidate for dark matter for various reasons Randall has listed, such constraints are based on \"monochromatic\" mass distributions -- meaning that all such black holes are assumed to have the same mass -- which is considered physically implausible for populations of merging bodies which are known to have vastly different masses. See: Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter (2017) and Primordial black hole constraints for extended mass functions (2017) (That this is a common practice in cosmology may be part of the reference to \"buzzkill\" astronomers.) He rules out all black holes in the range of approximately 10 10 kg to 10 33 kg even when below some gaps at the bars appear.\nExcept the last item, all range below the mass of the sun (2x10 30 kg) while the smallest known black hole is about four solar masses.\nNot covered by this comic are massive astrophysical compact halo objects (MACHOs) composed of hard to detect dim objects like black holes, neutron stars, brown dwarfs, and other objects composed of normal baryonic matter. Nevertheless observations have shown that the total amount of baryonic matter in our universe on large scales is much smaller than it would be needed to explain all the measured gravitational effects.\nDiagrams of our solar system (or any planetary system) often show lines representing the elliptical paths the planet takes around its sun. These lines don't show real objects, though. Astronomers just draw them on pictures of the solar system to show where the planets move. If you draw a line on a map to give someone directions, that line isn't an object in real life; it's just on the map. If these lines were real, they would be huge (Earth's would be 940 million km long (2\u03c0 AU) and Neptune's would be 28 billion kilometers long). Powers of Ten (1977) gives a good sense of just how large these orbit lines need to be in order to be visible in space diagrams. If these orbit lines were also very dense, they would have a huge mass and could possibly account for the missing 85% of the mass in the universe. But they would also constantly be impaling the planets, including the Earth, which would probably be a problem. [ citation needed ] Their mass would also affect planetary motions in ways which we would detect.  A related worry about space travel was expressed in previous centuries; it was thought that the planets were embedded within crystal shells (spheres or Platonic solids), and a rocket into space could smash the shells and send planets plummeting to Earth. Another joke candidate.\nThe title text refers to the fact that space is just vast emptiness where a little bit of dirt could be overlooked. Actually the mean density of detectable matter in the universe, according to NASA, is equivalent to roughly 1 proton per 4 cubic meters . And because this matter is mostly located in galaxies -- and inside there in stars and clouds -- the space between is even more empty. For comparison, one gram of hydrogen consists of 6.022\u00a0\u00d7\u00a010 23 atoms . Like at home wiping with a cleaning cloth in which we can see the dirt that wasn't clearly visible on the surface we have wiped, Randall believes that some few atoms more per cubic meter could stay undetected in the same way. This isn't true because in the space between galaxies astronomers can detect matter as it spreads over thousands or millions cubic light years. Atoms can't hide; there is always radiation.\nDark matter candidates: [A line graph is shown and labeled at left quarter in eV and further to the right in g together with some prefixes.] [The labels read:] \u00b5eV, meV, eV, keV, MeV, GeV, TeV, 10 -18 kg, ng, \u00b5g, mg, g, kg, TON, 10 6 kg, 10 12 kg, 10 18 kg, 10 24 kg, 10 30 kg\n[All items are shown in bars ranging between two approximately values:] < 1 \u00b5eV - 10 meV: Axion\n1 eV - 10 keV: Sterile neutrino\n0.5 MeV (exactly): Electrons painted with space camouflage\n10 GeV - 10 TeV: Neutralino\n100 TeV - 10 -17 kg: Q-ball\n1 ng - 100 ng: Pollen\n0.1 mg - 1 mg: No-See-Ums\n10 -1 g (exactly): Bees\n10 g - 100 g: 8-balls\n100 kg - TON: Space cows\nTON - 10 9 kg: Obelisks, monoliths, pyramids\n10 9 kg - 10 33 kg: Black holes ruled out by: 10 9 kg - 10 13 kg: Gamma rays 10 13 kg - 10 17 kg: GRB lensing 10 15 kg - 10 22 kg: Neutron star data 10 21 kg - 10 30 kg: Micro lensing 10 24 kg - 10 30 kg: Solar system stability 10 30 kg - 10 33 kg: Buzzkill astronomers\n10 33 kg - >10 36 kg: Maybe those orbit lines on space diagrams are real and very heavy\n"}
{"id":2036,"title":"Edgelord","image_title":"Edgelord","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2036","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/edgelord.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2036:_Edgelord","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to White Hat, who is balling his fist and has small lines above his head to indicate annoyance.] Cueball: So, I hear you're a real edgelord. White Hat: No!\n[Caption below the frame:] How to annoy a graph theory Ph.D.\n","explanation":"\"Edgelord\" is modern slang describing a brash provocateur on social media; often in a satirical way that if taken literally would be found disturbing or insensitive. The term derives from the word \"edgy\", which is used to describe things which are designed to be provocative. \"Edgy\" and \"edgelord\" are quite derogatory, carrying further implications of being style over substance, or only having appeal with rambunctious teenagers.\nIn mathematics, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures made up of nodes (points) which are connected by edges (or lines).\nThis comic plays on the fact that graphs have edges. Calling someone with a Graph Theory Ph.D. an 'edgelord' (a master of edges) is somewhat analogous to calling an engineering student a 'forcelord', an astronomy PhD a ' starlord ', or a pharmacologist a ' druglord '.\nIn reply, White Hat shouts \"No\", and is also clenching his fists in anger, which is ironic, because he seems to be on edge. Because \"edgelord\" is perceived as an insult by socially aware adults, Cueball is actually provoking White Hat, making Cueball an edgelord in this interaction.  Similar situational humor is also found in 2008: Irony Definition .\nThe title text makes the same joke, except that the title would be hyperedgelord instead of edgelord. A hypergraph is a generalization of a graph in which each edge may have more than two endpoints. The term \"hyper edge\" could easily be considered stereotypically \"edgy.\"\n[Cueball is talking to White Hat, who is balling his fist and has small lines above his head to indicate annoyance.] Cueball: So, I hear you're a real edgelord. White Hat: No!\n[Caption below the frame:] How to annoy a graph theory Ph.D.\n"}
{"id":2037,"title":"Supreme Court Bracket","image_title":"Supreme Court Bracket","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2037","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/supreme_court_bracket.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2037:_Supreme_Court_Bracket","transcript":"[A tournament bracket tree is shown with 16 participants each on the left and right side. From both sides toward the middle the brackets reduce to eight, then four, two, and one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle.]\n[Left side:] Marbury - Madison McCulloch - Maryland Gibbons - Ogden Near - Minnesota NLRB - Jones & Laughlin Brown - Board of Education Gideon - Wainwright Griswold - Connecticut\n[Right side:] Miranda - Arizona Loving - Virginia Roe - Wade United States - Nixon Bush - Gore Lawrence - Texas Massachusetts - EPA Obergefell - Hodges\n[Caption below the frame:] Now that we've finished the round of 32, the Supreme Court will be moving on to the Sweet 16.\n","explanation":"The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest federal court of the United States. A tournament bracket is a tree diagram that represents the series of games played during a knockout tournament. US Supreme Court cases are typically titled as Petitioner versus Respondent. To spoof this, Randall has put sixteen famous Supreme Court cases into a tournament bracket, as though they were games in the first round of a single-elimination tournament, and that the winners of the 16 listed court cases will somehow file against each other and then again until the final winner is selected. This is similar to college basketball's March Madness , complete with a ranking bracket. \"Sweet 16\" in the context of a tournament refers to the stage in a tournament where 16 competitors remain. This comic's concept is thus a word play on \"court\" (court of law v. basketball court).  The phrase \"Supreme Court Bracket\" also sounds similar to \"Supreme Court Docket\", which is the official schedule of cases that the Supreme Court will adjudicate (as all of these cases have been).\nThe cases are:\nThe case Marbury v. Madison declared a provision of the Judiciary Act of 1789 unconstitutional, thus preventing several late-term appointments by outgoing President John Adams from being seated under incoming President Thomas Jefferson . More importantly, the ruling established the principle of judicial review by which the Supreme Court can overturn, on the basis of unconstitutionality, laws passed by Congress and signed into law by the President . For this reason it is considered the single most important decision in American constitutional law.\nThe case McCulloch v. Maryland established a broad interpretation of the \"necessary and proper\" clause, specifically finding that Congress could incorporate a Bank of the United States because the purpose was to help carry out Congress' explicit powers under Article I, section 8.\nThe case Gibbons v. Ogden established that interstate commerce is regulated by the U.S. Congress according to the U.S. Constitution, that interstate navigation is fundamental to interstate commerce, and that therefore the power to regulate interstate navigation in this way rests with the U.S. Congress, not with any state legislature.\nOn 01 March 1824, the US Supreme Court decided in favor of Thomas Gibbons in his appeal of a case brought against him by Aaron Ogden in an attempt to prevent Gibbons from operating steamboats to transport goods and passengers between New York City, New York and Elizabethtown, New Jersey. The US Supreme Court decision reversed a prior injunction against Gibbons issued by a New York State court deciding that Ogden held exclusive navigational rights by way of having licensed them from two men to whom the New York State Legislature had granted the navigation rights in several acts between 1798 and 1807.\nThe case Near v. Minnesota is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision that found that prior restraints on publication violate freedom of the press as protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution , a principle that was applied to free speech generally in subsequent jurisprudence. The Court ruled that a Minnesota law that targeted publishers of \"malicious\" or \"scandalous\" newspapers violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.\nNoteworthy it was later a key precedent in New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), in which the court ruled against the Nixon administration's attempt to enjoin publication of the Pentagon Papers.\nNational Labor Relations Board v Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation was a US labor law case. It declared that the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was constitutional. It effectively preserved the New Deal , which was being pursued by US President Roosevelt in reaction to the Great Depression . Previous Supreme Court cases, unlike NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin , had invalidated New Deal statutes.\nThe case Brown v. Board of Education the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. It stated that \"separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.\"\nThis ruling paved the way for the Civil Rights Movement . However, the decision did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II only ordered states to desegregate \"with all deliberate speed.\"\nIn the case Gideon v. Wainwright the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states are required under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to provide an attorney or lawyer to defendants in criminal cases who are unable to afford their own attorneys.\nIn the case Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court ruled that a statute barring birth control to prevent pregnancy, also known as contraception, was unconstitutional, at least in its application to married couples, as there was an implicit right to privacy in the \"penumbras\" and \"emanations\" of other constitutional provisions. This ruling was used as precedent in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which extended the right to unmarried couples, and in Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas (see below).\nIn Miranda v. Arizona , it was ruled that inculpatory and exculpatory statements would not be accepted in court if a defendant was not informed of their rights under the Fifth Amendment. The \"Miranda Rights\" warning (\"You have the right to remain silent\", etc.) is now used across the US.\nIn Loving v. Virginia the Supreme Court ruled that state laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional, and were struck down.  This decision was well ahead of public opinion; a Gallup poll (cited by Think Progress ) conducted the following year showed only 20% in favor.  This case was cited as precedent in Obergefell v. Hodges, listed below.\nIn Roe v. Wade , the Supreme Court ruled that a woman's right to privacy, balanced against the state's interest in limiting abortions , allowed women to undergo abortions in the first and second trimesters and allowed states the right to forbid third-trimester abortions.\nIn United States v. Nixon , the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that then-President Richard Nixon 's refusal to hand over certain tape recordings during his impeachment process was unconstitutional. This case placed limits on the power of executive privilege.\nIn Bush v. Gore , the Supreme Court decided the highly contested 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, arguing in a 5-4 decision that the recount required by Florida state law could not be carried out before the December 12 deadline required by the United States Code. As such, the statewide recount was stopped, and the now-official initial count (which favored Bush) propelled Bush to the presidency.\nLawrence v. Texas ruled that sodomy laws were unconstitutional, making same-sex sexual activity legal in all US states and territories. It explicitly overturned another Supreme Court decision, Bowers v. Hardwick , a case which had previously ruled such laws to be constitutional.\nIn Massachusetts v. EPA , Massachusetts and 11 other states sued the EPA for not regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, saying that contrary to the claims of the EPA at that point in time, greenhouse gases are pollutants. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the petitioners, forcing the EPA to start placing regulations on greenhouse gases.\nIn Obergefell v. Hodges , the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the right to marriage is protected for same-sex couples by the Fourteenth Amendment.\nWith the results given above, the \"Sweet 16\" of the bracket given would be as follows:\nThe title text refers to a practice of filling out a March Madness bracket, predicting a winner for each game up to the championship. A bracket is \"busted\" when the result of a game is not as predicted; because future matchups depend on previous results, the whole bracket is worthless at that point. Randall \"had Massachusetts v. Connecticut in the final\", predicting both parties would win all previous rounds and advance to the final game\/case. Because Connecticut lost its first-round case to Griswold, his bracket is busted in the first round.\nIn the second part of the title text, Randall writes: \"I had Massachusetts v. Connecticut in the final, probably in a case over who gets to annex Rhode Island.\"  In fact, there actually was a Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. Connecticut (summary at Justia.com , full text at Google Scholar ) dealing with water rights on the Connecticut River, which flows between the two states.\nRhode Island is a smaller state that borders both Massachusetts and Connecticut (and no other state), hence the joke about \"who gets to annex Rhode Island.\"\nIn an actual March Madness bracket, \"Massachusetts\" and \"Connecticut\" refer to the basketball teams from the University of Massachusetts and the University of Connecticut. So it is possible that a \"Massachusetts v. Connecticut\" matchup could occur in the basketball championship as well.\nOccasionally, cases with the same names (if not the same defendants) have occurred in the United States.\n[A tournament bracket tree is shown with 16 participants each on the left and right side. From both sides toward the middle the brackets reduce to eight, then four, two, and one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle.]\n[Left side:] Marbury - Madison McCulloch - Maryland Gibbons - Ogden Near - Minnesota NLRB - Jones & Laughlin Brown - Board of Education Gideon - Wainwright Griswold - Connecticut\n[Right side:] Miranda - Arizona Loving - Virginia Roe - Wade United States - Nixon Bush - Gore Lawrence - Texas Massachusetts - EPA Obergefell - Hodges\n[Caption below the frame:] Now that we've finished the round of 32, the Supreme Court will be moving on to the Sweet 16.\n"}
{"id":2038,"title":"Hazard Symbol","image_title":"Hazard Symbol","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2038","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hazard_symbol.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2038:_Hazard_Symbol","transcript":"[The comic shows symbols, drawn in black on top of a yellow background.] [One large symbol embeds four others and it's composed of the outline of three overlapping and outwards narrowing rings arranged by 120 degrees.] [The symbol at the center shows at the same orientation three blades with a small stepped circle in the middle.] [Inside the ring on top is a symbol of a backwards falling human with a small line depicting the ground.] [The ring on the right below the center contains a circle with radiant alternating smaller and longer lines around. One more longer line points toward the center of the image.] [Embedded into the left lower ring is a bolt with an arrow pointing left downwards.]\n[Caption below:] It's important to know the international warning symbol for radioactive high-voltage laser-emitting biohazards that coat the floor and make it slippery.\n","explanation":"Hazard symbols are often required to indicate certain threats to human health. These symbols are typically black symbols on yellow backgrounds, a contrast typically associated with danger even in nature, a phenomenon known as aposematism . However, these symbols also need to be easy to interpret. Therefore, they have simple, recognizable shapes that are internationally uniform and intended to be well-understood.\nThis comic inverts this latter expectation, by combining multiple hazard symbols into one, creating something that is unique, and very hard to understand. In practice, if such an object were to be labelled, the five hazard symbols would be separated, each in their own triangle.\nThe hazard symbols are biohazard \u2623, radiation \u2622, slip and fall hazard symbol, laser hazard, and high voltage symbol \u26a1\ufe0e.\nAnother ridiculous aspect of this comic is how these hazards interact with each other, and their attendant risks. Radioactive waste is usually a show-stopper on its own, but bio hazards, lasers, and high-voltage situations usually scare people more than slippery floors. This is probably a joke on how some hazard symbols are worse than others. Some of these would also cancel each other out: both high voltage and lasers have a tendency to harm microorganisms that might be bio-hazards. Most radioactive substances are solid, thus they are hard to slip on. While they do form compounds which could potentially be liquid and therefore slippery, many of these would kill the pathogens. For example, Uranium hexafluoride is a powerful oxidizer that would destroy most germs.\nBiohazard and radioactivity could be combined as radioactive isotopes of Hydrogen, Carbon and Oxygen can be substituted for their stable counterparts, and high voltage electricity can be applied to anything.  However laser hazard and slipping hazard seem to be mutually exclusive as the former applies to devices and the latter to substances.  One possibly \"solution\" could be a room sized gas discharge tube filled with a radioactive biohazard that partly condenses and makes the floor slippery.\nThe title text refers to another unsafe subversion of expectations, in this case, against the NFPA 704 \"fire diamond\". These are the colourful diamond-shaped symbols often found on the back of tankers, but they are also necessary inclusions on materials safety datasheets. These symbols give numeric indication of the hazardous nature of the material, in three different respects (flammability, health, and reactivity), in addition to providing space for an extra warning on the bottom, typically in the form of one or more letters. Using an emoji instead of numbers and letters would defeat the purpose of the fire diamond, as it would only give a qualitative indication of the danger (\"very dangerous\"), and additionally, could be very easily mistaken for a 0 (meaning safe).\nNote, Material Safety Data Sheets have been deprecated in favor of SDS (Safety Data Sheets) in order to come into compliance with the GHS (Globally Harmonized System) .\n\ud83d\ude30 is described by Emojipedia as \" Anxious Face With Sweat \".  As an additional joke, using this symbol in the fire diamond could be an expression of how awful this mysterious substance is.\n[The comic shows symbols, drawn in black on top of a yellow background.] [One large symbol embeds four others and it's composed of the outline of three overlapping and outwards narrowing rings arranged by 120 degrees.] [The symbol at the center shows at the same orientation three blades with a small stepped circle in the middle.] [Inside the ring on top is a symbol of a backwards falling human with a small line depicting the ground.] [The ring on the right below the center contains a circle with radiant alternating smaller and longer lines around. One more longer line points toward the center of the image.] [Embedded into the left lower ring is a bolt with an arrow pointing left downwards.]\n[Caption below:] It's important to know the international warning symbol for radioactive high-voltage laser-emitting biohazards that coat the floor and make it slippery.\n"}
{"id":2039,"title":"Begging the Question","image_title":"Begging the Question","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2039","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/begging_the_question.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2039:_Begging_the_Question","transcript":"[Ponytail and White Hat standing next to each other talking. White Hat has raised his hand while Cueball stands behind him.] Ponytail: That food made me nauseous. White Hat: No, the food was nauseous. It made you nauseated . Cueball: Come on, you're just begging the question.\n[Caption below the frame:] I annoy people on all sides by using \"beg the question\" to mean \"fight a losing battle against changing usage\".\n","explanation":"This comic makes fun of the constant battle between those who maintain a prescriptive view of language and those who have a descriptive view .  In the prescriptive view, language has fixed rules and fixed usage, and any usage that does not adhere to established rules is incorrect. In the descriptive view however, language is malleable and any usage can be correct if it is common and understood by most people.\nThe comic specifically calls out two phrases which are commonly misused in the prescriptive sense, and whose meanings have changed in modern usage in the descriptive sense:\nNauseous\nNauseous in its supposedly 'proper' form means \"causing nausea \", while nauseated means affected with nausea.\nPrescriptively speaking, it is only correct to use the word \"nauseous\" to describe the food item since that was the cause of Ponytail's nausea. Saying \"the food made her nauseous\" would be interpreted, by a prescriptivist, as meaning the food somehow caused her (her body, her appearance, etc.) to become so disgusting that she now causes other people to feel nausea. As White Hat states, the proper phrasing is that the \"the food was nauseous\", and it \"made [her] nauseated\".\nBoth historically and in modern usage, however, \"nauseous\" is a valid synonym of \"nauseated\". It is difficult, if not impossible, to cite an era of history when most people would not understand \"she is nauseous\" to mean she does not feel well.\nBegging the question\nBegging the question originally referred to a logical fallacy where an argument assumed its conclusion. The phrase first meant to question (beg) the original question. In modern usage, it has come to mean to \"raise a question or point that has not been dealt with\". This is often a point of contention for prescriptivists. However, as the caption explains, Cueball has an entirely different meaning for this phrase that he created himself: \"fight a losing battle against changing usage\". This is actually a meta-meaning, as that is actually the common activity of prescriptivists who complain about incorrect usage; it's a losing battle, because language change is inevitable and unstoppable. And specifically, trying to preserve the original meaning of \"begging the question\" is a losing battle.\nPonytail might recognize that her exposure to nauseous food has both nauseated her and caused her to become nauseous to Cueball. The question is not merely begged, it is missed.\nThe title text also plays on another word commonly argued over by prescriptivists. \"Enormity\" in its classical usage means either extreme wickedness or a monstrous offense or evil, though it is more commonly used in modern writing as a synonym for enormousness (i.e. largeness in size). The title text exploits the lexical ambiguity that this creates.\n[Ponytail and White Hat standing next to each other talking. White Hat has raised his hand while Cueball stands behind him.] Ponytail: That food made me nauseous. White Hat: No, the food was nauseous. It made you nauseated . Cueball: Come on, you're just begging the question.\n[Caption below the frame:] I annoy people on all sides by using \"beg the question\" to mean \"fight a losing battle against changing usage\".\n"}
{"id":2040,"title":"Sibling-in-Law","image_title":"Sibling-in-Law","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2040","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sibling_in_law.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2040:_Sibling-in-Law","transcript":"[A single layer of a family tree with 15 people depicted as sticky figures side by side is shown. They are connected alternated either by a bracket on top or a short line between them. The four outermost figures on each side are faded out in gray.] [In the middle is Cueball and from below an arrow points at him:] Me [To the left Ponytail is connected by a bracket and the arrow below says:] Sibling [To the right of Cueball Megan is shown connected by a small line, an arrow below her reads:] Spouse [Further to the left and the right the next figures have an arrow below with the nested text:] Siblings-in-law [The next connected figures on both sides are drawn with two other wider arrows embedding this statement:] Also siblings-in-law, I think? [All remaining figures left and right have similar arrows below and the text is:] Possible additional siblings-in-law???\n[Caption below the frame:] People complain that \u201c<X> th cousin <Y> times removed\u201d is hard to understand, but to me the most confusing one is sibling-in-law, because it chains across both sibling and marriage links and I don't really know where it stops.\n","explanation":"This comic shows the complicated way that English refers to sibling-in-law family relationships. As shown in the comic, your sibling's spouse would be called your \"sibling-in-law\" (brother-in-law for male, sister-in-law for female). However, your spouse's sibling is also called the same way.\nThe confusion lies with your siblings-in-law's siblings. Randall says they may be \"also siblings-in-law, I think?\" and further relations are also \"possible additional siblings-in-law\". \nAccording to Wikipedia, \"sibling-in-law is one's spouse's sibling, or one's sibling's spouse, or one's spouse's sibling's spouse\"; therefore Randall would be correct with the \"also siblings-in-law\" on the right (his 'spouse's sibling's spouse') but would be incorrect regarding the one on the left (his 'sibling's spouse's sibling' would not generally be considering a sibling-in-law).\nWiktionary lists a more restrictive definition: siblings-in-law are either \"the sibling of one's spouse\" or \"the spouse of one's sibling\". This definition includes only those whom Randall calls siblings-in-law, and none of those he calls \"also siblings-in-law, I think?\".  The spouse of the sibling of one's spouse or the sibling of the spouse of one's sibling are to be referred as co-siblings-in-law. If anything, this shows that the definition of a sibling-in-law is loose, justifying the \"I think\u00a0?\" sentence of the comic.\nMany families also use the term \"out-law\" to jokingly refer to the distant sibling+spouses which Randall seems uncertain about.\nThe caption compares \"sibling-in-law\" to \"<X>th cousin <Y> times removed\". This family relationship, for example, 1st cousin once removed , is used to describe your 1st cousin's child or the first cousin of one of your parents. The \"once removed\" indicates that the family relative is one generation above or below yours.\nThe title text  describes a scenario in a traditional wedding in most English-speaking regions. Prior to the wedding being completed, the officiant will provide a final opportunity for anyone in the audience to speak a reason to object to the wedding. This intended for reasons why they cannot lawfully be wed -- such as that one of the participants is already married to someone else or is too young to marry, that the couple are so closely related that the marriage would be incestuous, or that the marriage license is expired -- or other serious emergencies -- such as evidence of infidelity (sexual or otherwise) that might change one of the participants' minds about their continued commitment to their spouse-to-be. In movies and fiction, this is usually a dramatic moment used for the climax of a critical scene. Regardless, it is an incredibly serious objection to raise, and should not be done so lightly. However, the title text describes a confusing and mundane scenario where the only reason the speaker is objecting to the wedding is because they're unsure whether the marriage would make one of the participants their brother-in-law and thus wouldn't know what to call the groom after the wedding.  In order to avoid their own confusion, they attempted to stop the wedding altogether. The officiator rightly ruled that this objection was neither just cause to object nor a reason that the wedding would be unlawful, and is therefore no reason the couple should be prevented from their own chance at wedded bliss.\nSince the title text begins with a FYI (for your information) it is implied that Randall has actually tried to stop a wedding using that reason and has been overruled, and thus he wishes to help others avoid that socially-awkward experience.\n[A single layer of a family tree with 15 people depicted as sticky figures side by side is shown. They are connected alternated either by a bracket on top or a short line between them. The four outermost figures on each side are faded out in gray.] [In the middle is Cueball and from below an arrow points at him:] Me [To the left Ponytail is connected by a bracket and the arrow below says:] Sibling [To the right of Cueball Megan is shown connected by a small line, an arrow below her reads:] Spouse [Further to the left and the right the next figures have an arrow below with the nested text:] Siblings-in-law [The next connected figures on both sides are drawn with two other wider arrows embedding this statement:] Also siblings-in-law, I think? [All remaining figures left and right have similar arrows below and the text is:] Possible additional siblings-in-law???\n[Caption below the frame:] People complain that \u201c<X> th cousin <Y> times removed\u201d is hard to understand, but to me the most confusing one is sibling-in-law, because it chains across both sibling and marriage links and I don't really know where it stops.\n"}
{"id":2041,"title":"Frontiers","image_title":"Frontiers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2041","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/frontiers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2041:_Frontiers","transcript":"[In a single framed picture a hand drawn rhombiod is shown. At the inside a few small arrows pointing to the four sides. The text in the middle reads:] Human achievement so far\n[Text above the top left side:] Space [Text above the top right side:] The oceans [Text below the bottom left side:] The human mind [Text below the bottom right side:] Alaska\n[Caption below the frame:] Final remaining \u201cfrontiers,\u201d according to popular usage\n","explanation":"This comic refers to four remaining \u201cfinal frontiers\u201d of human discovery, according to popular usage\u2014perhaps analyzed using an Internet search engine. It seems to imply that other fields of research aren\u2019t a challenge anymore.\nOuter space is so vast in size that it\u2019s impossible for humans to discover even just the stars in our galaxy within a lifetime. Space travel is also very difficult and expensive.\nThe oceans are very deep [ citation needed ] . The vast majority of the deeper oceans hasn\u2019t been visited by humans, and there is still much we don\u2019t know about the living beings in the deep sea.\nThe human mind is not only very complex, but also often seems irrational, which makes it harder to investigate. Its relation to the brain is also somewhat mysterious: philosophy of mind is split on whether the mind is ultimately material (materialism) or immaterial (dualism\/idealism). Further, certain philosophical systems have trouble explaining its relation to the body, in what is termed the mind\u2013body problem .\nAlaska is the state of largest area in the U.S., and also the most sparsely populated. Many places in Alaska have only been partially explored to this day. Randall was probably inspired by the TV series Alaska: The Last Frontier , which plays off of the state\u2019s official nickname of \u201cThe Last Frontier\u201d.\nThe humor from this comic comes from the fact that Alaska seems comparably of less important than the other \u201cFinal Frontiers\u201d. It is not as hard or expensive to explore as the ocean bottom and outer space, and it is much smaller. While one's own human mind is much more easily accessible than the other three locations, its nature is a substantial frontier in human knowledge. Furthermore, minds other than one\u2019s own are very hard to access.\nThe title text refers to the movie Star Trek V: The Final Frontier , released in 1989. \u201cFinal frontier\u201d is a recurring motif in the Star Trek franchise (coming from the opening narration for Star Trek: The Original Series ), and is used to describe the exploration of outer space, which remains a notable frontier to humans, both in real life and within Star Trek . Randall , however, jokingly posits that the frontier to be explored is the film itself, and assumes that, because this movie has been out for a while\u2014nearly thirty years\u2014it ought to be fully and comprehensively explored by now.\n[In a single framed picture a hand drawn rhombiod is shown. At the inside a few small arrows pointing to the four sides. The text in the middle reads:] Human achievement so far\n[Text above the top left side:] Space [Text above the top right side:] The oceans [Text below the bottom left side:] The human mind [Text below the bottom right side:] Alaska\n[Caption below the frame:] Final remaining \u201cfrontiers,\u201d according to popular usage\n"}
{"id":2042,"title":"Rolle's Theorem","image_title":"Rolle's Theorem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2042","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rolles_theorem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2042:_Rolle%27s_Theorem","transcript":"[A single framed picture shows a colored x-y-graph with a text above:] Rolle's Theorem From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia\nRolle's theorem states that any real, differentiable function that has the same value at two different points must have at least one \"stationary point\" between them where the slope is zero.\n[The graph shows a sine like curve in blue intersecting the x-axis at points \"a\" and \"b\" marked in red while in the middle a point \"c\" has a vertical dashed green line to the apex and on top also in green f'(c)=0 is drawn with a horizontal tangent line.]\n[Caption below the frame:] Every now and then, I feel like the math equivalent of the clueless art museum visitor squinting at a painting and saying \"c'mon, my kid could make that.\"\n","explanation":"In mathematics, a differentiable function is a function that is \"smooth\" everywhere, without any sudden breaks or pointy \"kinks\" or similar. The derivative of such a function is a new function that represents the \"slope\" or \"rate of change\" of the original. The function in this comic curves up from point (a) until a point above (c), smoothly turns around, and then curves down from (c) to (b). As a result, the derivative of this function is positive from (a) to (c), and then is negative from (c) to (b). At (c) itself, the function is \"flat\": the more one zooms in, the more horizontal it looks. The function is moving neither up nor down, so the derivative is neither positive nor negative, but zero. This is what f'(c) = 0 means, as f' is a common notation for the derivative of the function f in differential calculus .\nA theorem in mathematics is a statement that has been proven from former accepted statements, like other theorems or axioms . This comic references Rolle's theorem . The theorem essentially states that, if a smoothly changing function has the same output at two different inputs, then it must have one or more turning points in between, as the derivative is zero at each one. As a special case, should the function remain flat between the two inputs, then its derivative is actually zero for every point between the inputs. To Randall , this is obvious. However, the proof of this theorem is not as obvious as the result.\nThe seeming triviality of the theorem, coupled with the honour bestowed on the theorem namer, leads Randall to make a comparison to attendees of art museums who look at abstract art pieces and perceive only an apparent technical simplicity in the work. Such a visitor might exclaim \"My child could paint that!\". However, such works of art typically are seen as having value from attributes other than the painterly difficulty in achieving the piece. For example, an artist's work in this style may be lauded for its visionary qualities, or the emotions expressed through the choice of colours or textures. One such artist is Jackson Pollock . The 'clueless' visitor does not see these aspects and believes their child could imitate the piece. Randall suggests he experiences a similar feeling looking at Rolle's Theorem and noting only the obvious correctness without acknowledging the complicated nature of the proof, or other hidden aspects of the theorem.\nIn the title text, Randall mentions a line together with a coplanar circle. This simply means that both those two-dimensional objects must lay in the same plane in a higher, three-or-more-dimensional space. And by this means, every line drawn through the center of a circle is just a diameter which divides it into two equal parts. Even if this fact is trivial, Proclus says that the first man who proved it was Thales . Auctioning of naming rights , also noted in the title text, refers to the practice of naming entertainment venues for companies which pay for the privilege, such as any of the three Red Bull Arenas or Quicken Loans Arena . Furthermore, \"Rolle's\" sounds like \"Rolls\", a common abbreviation for the Rolls Royce brand implying possible sponsorship by the British car manufacturer. The naming of mathematical theorems (along with lemmas, equations, laws, methods, etc.) is not always straightforward and often results in misleading names .\nRandall implies that there are many seemingly easy theorems like this. For instance the Dirichlet's box principle, also known as the Pigeonhole principle , that states that if you have more objects than containers, you're going to have to put at least two objects in one container.\n[A single framed picture shows a colored x-y-graph with a text above:] Rolle's Theorem From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia\nRolle's theorem states that any real, differentiable function that has the same value at two different points must have at least one \"stationary point\" between them where the slope is zero.\n[The graph shows a sine like curve in blue intersecting the x-axis at points \"a\" and \"b\" marked in red while in the middle a point \"c\" has a vertical dashed green line to the apex and on top also in green f'(c)=0 is drawn with a horizontal tangent line.]\n[Caption below the frame:] Every now and then, I feel like the math equivalent of the clueless art museum visitor squinting at a painting and saying \"c'mon, my kid could make that.\"\n"}
{"id":2043,"title":"Boathouses and Houseboats","image_title":"Boathouses and Houseboats","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2043","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/boathouses_and_houseboats.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2043:_Boathouses_and_Houseboats","transcript":"[A chart with three rows and three columns is shown, both with the same heading \"car\", \"house\", and \"boat\". On the top left a text with the word \"this\" two times embedded in a bubble and an arrow respectively pointing to the row and column heading reads:] A this that holds this\n[Most entries have the common word in black, but crossed out in red with another word below also in red. Two entries remain in green.] A Car that holds a Car: Tow truck Carcar A House that holds a Car: Garage Carhouse A Boat that holds a Car: Car ferry Carboat A Car that holds a House: Mobile home Housecar A House that holds a House: Apartment Househouse A Boat that holds a House: Houseboat (green text) A Car that holds a Boat: Boat trailer Boatcar A House that holds a Boat: Boathouse (green text) A Boat that holds a Boat: Lifeboat Boatboat\n[Caption below the frame:] I really like the words for \"boathouse\" and \"houseboat\" and think we should apply that scheme more consistently.\nThe first version of the comic image used a different wording to indicate which word held the other. The column word holds the row. The original wording can be seen here .\n","explanation":"Most English compound nouns can be constructed recursively. In many cases they are written open or spaced like \"piano player\" (a player of a piano.) But closed forms like \"wallpaper\" (paper for a wall) are not less common.\nRandall is engaging in creative linguistics again. This time he is humorously suggesting to use a consistent naming scheme for things holding other things, the same way we call a boat holding a house a houseboat. He is extending this to all combinations boats, houses and cars. This would, however, be somewhat impractical, as these names do not include why one thing is on an other, and are also sometimes ambiguous: a carcar can be a tow truck as much as a car carrier, and a househouse can be either an apartment (house in a house) or an apartment building (house containing houses).\nAdditionally, he is somewhat inconsistent in some parts of the chart. While the chart is supposed to show examples of neologistic compound words <x><y> that refer to a <y> that holds an <x>, rather than a <y> in an <x>. However, Randall's examples sometimes are those of the latter example. He proposes to call lifeboats, which are boats held by other boats, \"boatboat\", instead of using that to refer to boats holding other boats, such as floating drydocks. Additionally, it is established naval practice to refer to a boat which is carried by another vessel as a \"ship's boat\", and call any vessel that carries a boat a \"ship\". In other words, according to usual naval terminology, a \"boatboat\" is a contradiction in terms; it is either a \"boatship\", synonymous with ship and hence redundant, or a \"shipboat\", the ship's boat. \"Apartment\" is a similar case: an apartment is a house in a house, while a house that holds a house is an apartment building or apartment complex. (However, in the title text, Randall points out an <x><y> could also refer to a <y> in an <x>, similar to the lifeboat and apartment examples. Nevertheless, \"lifeboat\" and \"apartment\" do not fit with the rest of the items of the chart and disobey the rule annotated in the corner.)\nIn the title text: \"Truck food\" is in some areas a common term for the meals offered by \" food trucks\" . Car phones were a feature in automobiles throughout the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, serving as the predecessors to mobile phones, although they were permanently installed into a car and not removable. Bananaphone , a song by Raffi Cavoukian, is also mentioned.\n[A chart with three rows and three columns is shown, both with the same heading \"car\", \"house\", and \"boat\". On the top left a text with the word \"this\" two times embedded in a bubble and an arrow respectively pointing to the row and column heading reads:] A this that holds this\n[Most entries have the common word in black, but crossed out in red with another word below also in red. Two entries remain in green.] A Car that holds a Car: Tow truck Carcar A House that holds a Car: Garage Carhouse A Boat that holds a Car: Car ferry Carboat A Car that holds a House: Mobile home Housecar A House that holds a House: Apartment Househouse A Boat that holds a House: Houseboat (green text) A Car that holds a Boat: Boat trailer Boatcar A House that holds a Boat: Boathouse (green text) A Boat that holds a Boat: Lifeboat Boatboat\n[Caption below the frame:] I really like the words for \"boathouse\" and \"houseboat\" and think we should apply that scheme more consistently.\nThe first version of the comic image used a different wording to indicate which word held the other. The column word holds the row. The original wording can be seen here .\n"}
{"id":2044,"title":"Sandboxing Cycle","image_title":"Sandboxing Cycle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2044","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sandboxing_cycle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2044:_Sandboxing_Cycle","transcript":"[The comic consists of four panels arranged in a circle around the center. Black arrows connecting them clockwise in an infinite loop. All panels show the same 14 tiny circles and three different rings embedding some of the circles while other circles are outside. A few circles and rings are connected by lines but there is no connection between them all.]\n[The panel at top left shows this configuration but with a few circles in red.] \"I wish these parts could communicate more easily.\"\n[Clockwise the next panel on the right shows new lines in green connecting nearly all remaining also now green circles and the lower most circle has a dashed green line to the outside.] \"Ohh, this new technology makes it easy to create arbitrary connections, integrating everything!\"\n[At the third panel to the bottom right all green parts are now in black and even more connections are established. Parts of these and some others are now highlighted in red.] \"Uh-oh, there are so many connections it's creating bugs and security holes!\"\n[At the fourth panel to the bottom left all red parts are now in black, showing a complex structure. Four green rings separate the structure with only green connections between them and to the outside.] \"Ohh, this new technology makes it easy to enclose arbitrary things in secure sandboxes!\"\n[The arrow above the fourth panel connects it to the first and the circle continues from the beginning.]\n","explanation":"A sandbox or sandpit is a playground where children can play safe without interfering the world outside. By this meaning the term was adopted by others like the sand table in military uses, or as a Wikipedia Sandbox , a playground for inexperienced editors to test their additions, and in computer security (sandbox) which Randall probably references at this comic.\nSoftware is getting more and more complex, and in an effort to reduce programming work and security vulnerabilities, large applications are composed of multiple programs. Getting these mostly self-contained programs to work with each other can be tricky, since requirements can vary a lot between different applications, requiring a rather general interface or API for communication. The more open such interfaces are, the higher the risk of unintended side effects, like vulnerabilities and overly permissive data access which could be exploited by hackers.\nAt the top left panel it could be a software collection whose parts are not yet fully connected to each other; the parts of the system which are as yet unconnected are shown in red, symbolizing a problem. A simple example is a typical office suite used for documents, presentations, spreadsheets, charts, databases, and more. In the early days those separate applications weren't much connected together, copy and paste was one of the most important features; which suggests the applications haven't yet been fully developed. However, software is never fully developed, improvements can always be made.\nThe next panel uses some \"new technology\" (in green, representing a solution) to interconnect those parts not only internal but also to the world outside at the internet. In the simple office suite example this means a document can now use a spreadsheet directly by using just a simple connection to another file. If that spreadsheet is changed the document uses this new content without any need of copying it manually.\nBut this leads to the third panel, with undesired connections shown in red. The undesired connections mean that problems in specific applications may spread to other applications because nobody can oversee everything in a large environment. It even may destroy the original document in the office suite example or allow malicious users to exploit security holes.\nThe fourth panel shows (in green, representing a solution) a method applied to this problem known as sandboxing. This is a security mechanism for separating running programs without risking harm to others. This can tighten up sloppy security. A direct consequence of restricted communication is that the programs now again can't connect easily to each other, resulting in a situation very similar like in the first panel and restarting the \"sandboxing cycle.\"\nThe point made by this comic is that it is often difficult to easily use a system without lowering security in that system; a dilemma that can be found both in the office suite example above or the social media example below.\nThe dilemma is again stated in the title text: Randall wants both ease of use and high security. In practice, a tradeoff has to be made.\n[The comic consists of four panels arranged in a circle around the center. Black arrows connecting them clockwise in an infinite loop. All panels show the same 14 tiny circles and three different rings embedding some of the circles while other circles are outside. A few circles and rings are connected by lines but there is no connection between them all.]\n[The panel at top left shows this configuration but with a few circles in red.] \"I wish these parts could communicate more easily.\"\n[Clockwise the next panel on the right shows new lines in green connecting nearly all remaining also now green circles and the lower most circle has a dashed green line to the outside.] \"Ohh, this new technology makes it easy to create arbitrary connections, integrating everything!\"\n[At the third panel to the bottom right all green parts are now in black and even more connections are established. Parts of these and some others are now highlighted in red.] \"Uh-oh, there are so many connections it's creating bugs and security holes!\"\n[At the fourth panel to the bottom left all red parts are now in black, showing a complex structure. Four green rings separate the structure with only green connections between them and to the outside.] \"Ohh, this new technology makes it easy to enclose arbitrary things in secure sandboxes!\"\n[The arrow above the fourth panel connects it to the first and the circle continues from the beginning.]\n"}
{"id":2045,"title":"Social Media Announcement","image_title":"Social Media Announcement","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2045","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/social_media_announcement.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2045:_Social_Media_Announcement","transcript":"[Cueball sitting in front of a laptop typing.] Why I'm Quitting Facebook, Joining LinkedIn, Deleting My LinkedIn, Rejoining Facebook, Quitting Twitter, Getting Locked Out of Facebook, Moving to Mastodon, and Lobbying Microsoft to Take Over Mastodon and Merge It With LinkedIn: A Manifesto.\nIn the original version of this comic, Cueball misspelled \"Mastodon\" as \"Mastadon\".\n","explanation":"In 2018, especially after Facebook privacy abuses were revealed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal , many individuals began seeking alternatives. The #deletefacebook hashtag peaked around April 2018, and in some communities, this type of \"why I'm leaving Facebook\" announcements were popular. Randall parodies this mentality with Cueball, who wants to think he is making a point about standing by his values, values he assumes other people share. However the overly-long title of his manifesto is too specific to apply to anyone but himself, and also reveal a few embarrassing confessions that probably have nothing to do with his values (such as losing his Facebook password).\nMastodon is a distributed, federated social network with  microblogging features similar to Twitter . \"Federated\" means that there is one app hosted in many places, so users can choose a host that meets their needs, but everyone can still talk to each other, similar to email. Near the peak of #deletefacebook, mastodon became trending as a twitter alternative with less nazis .\nWil Wheaton famously moved to Mastodon from Twitter, but was ultimately disappointed by the experience , because while Mastodon's community is generally less toxic, it does not yet have the tools to handle the kind of targeted harassment that a celebrity might face.\nMicrosoft has been buying up professional-themed social media platforms lately, such as LinkedIn and GitHub , intending to integrate them more fluidly with their enterprise software suite. Mastodon seems  an unlikely target for an acquisition, since its decentralized nature means that one corporate entity can't control it, and the culture there is decidedly unprofessional as of this comic.\nThe title text presents an alternative approach by moving most social activities to the cloud-based proprietary team collaboration platform Slack . After making his first workspace in Slack he suggests that he wishes to avoid the people invited, so he creates a second account and a new workspace. This also didn't last long and he stops interacting on social media entirely and reverted to simple texting, probably sending old fashioned SMS-messages to others or just writing texts on paper no one reads.\n[Cueball sitting in front of a laptop typing.] Why I'm Quitting Facebook, Joining LinkedIn, Deleting My LinkedIn, Rejoining Facebook, Quitting Twitter, Getting Locked Out of Facebook, Moving to Mastodon, and Lobbying Microsoft to Take Over Mastodon and Merge It With LinkedIn: A Manifesto.\nIn the original version of this comic, Cueball misspelled \"Mastodon\" as \"Mastadon\".\n"}
{"id":2046,"title":"Trum-","image_title":"Trum-","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2046","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trum.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2046:_Trum-","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan walking together while talking.] Megan: It's pretty weird that we've had two totally unrelated presidents whose last names start with \"T-R-U-M-\" . Cueball: Oh, sure, that's definitely the weirdest thing about the presidency right now. Megan: It's less weird than every other fact . But still weird. Cueball: True.\n","explanation":"The President of the United States , at the time when this comic was published, is Donald Trump and he shares the first letters of his surname with Harry S. Truman , who was US President between 1945 and 1953. Megan notes that both of these presidents' last names start with \"T-R-U-M\", but she also states that they are not much related.\nThere were several presidents of the US who even have the exact same last name. For example, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams , and the more recent father and son George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush . Similarly Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are 5th cousins. Grandfather and grandson William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison also share a last name.  And there are the two most distantly related presidents with the same surname, both Andrew Johnson and Lyndon B. Johnson have the last name of Johnson (7 letters), although the shared last name is coincidental, given they do not share any relatives with the name Johnson.\nBesides T-R-U-M- and the cases of identical names, the longest common surname prefix is H-A-R (3 letters), shared by William Henry (or Benjamin) H-A-R-rison and Warren Gamaliel H-A-R-ding. (The next longest common surname prefixes are B-U-, shared by James B-U-chanan and George (H.) W. Bush; and C-L-, shared by Grover Cleveland and Bill Clinton.)\nThe longest common suffix (not counting identical names) is also 4 for I-S-O-N for James Madison and the two Harrison presidents. (It is an interesting fact that the name HARRISON contains both the second-longest common prefix and the longest common suffix among non-identical president surnames.)\nThe joke is that the matching of those few letters is the least weird thing. Trump's presidency is commonly considered weird in ways too varied to concisely list in this article, and both Megan and Cueball seem to agree on this.\nThe title text lists \"absurd\" last names that could start with the same letters as other presidents: Bill Eisenhamper, Amy Forb, Ethan Obample, and Abigail Washingtoast. These would refer to Dwight D. Eisenh ower , Gerald For d , Barack Obam a , and George Washingto n .\n[Cueball and Megan walking together while talking.] Megan: It's pretty weird that we've had two totally unrelated presidents whose last names start with \"T-R-U-M-\" . Cueball: Oh, sure, that's definitely the weirdest thing about the presidency right now. Megan: It's less weird than every other fact . But still weird. Cueball: True.\n"}
{"id":2047,"title":"Beverages","image_title":"Beverages","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2047","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/beverages.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2047:_Beverages","transcript":"[Inside a single frame, liquid pouring out of a glass through mouth, the esophagus, and to the stomach is shown. However the surrounding bodies like the organs or the glass are not pictured, are only defined by the shape of the liquid, and must be imagined. Further two small parts within or near the invisible stomach with no visible connection to the rest are also wetted.] [Caption below the frame:] It freaks me out to imagine what a beverage is shaped like when I\u2019m in the middle of drinking it.\n","explanation":"It is frequently stated that liquids take the shape of their container. While being poured, though, what that \"shape\" is is open to interpretation. The comic shows the \"shape\" of a liquid being \"poured\" down someone's throat (in the process of drinking) and highlights how unsettling this may look without any visible guidance for its flow. While the flow of the beverage wets every parts downwards, it looks as if the stomach is only partially filled, because the process of drinking is still underway and the glass is still half full, and because the contents of the glass would not be enough to fill the stomach in any case.  Therefore the shape of the liquid in the stomach area would not correspond to the full shape of the stomach, and there could be additional blobs of liquid where it might have splashed and detached from the main liquid mass, such as depicted by the two little disconnected pieces to the right of the stomach area.\nThe title text expands on this, encouraging the reader to think of the liquid travelling through the entire human digestive tract and to consider that it will eventually dilute through the entire human body (\"shaped like me\"), with what doesn't leaving the body to pass through the water treatment process (\"some pipes and tanks\"), and that finally most particles from any ingested liquid will mix with all water on Earth (\"all of Earth's oceans\"). But by the time a beverage is diluted enough to take the shape of Earth's oceans, the molecules will be so dispersed that the beverage effectively becomes invisible.\nNote: A barium swallow is a medical procedure that actually studies the shape of a liquid when it is being swallowed, to diagnose problems in the esophagus and other structures.\n[Inside a single frame, liquid pouring out of a glass through mouth, the esophagus, and to the stomach is shown. However the surrounding bodies like the organs or the glass are not pictured, are only defined by the shape of the liquid, and must be imagined. Further two small parts within or near the invisible stomach with no visible connection to the rest are also wetted.] [Caption below the frame:] It freaks me out to imagine what a beverage is shaped like when I\u2019m in the middle of drinking it.\n"}
{"id":2048,"title":"Curve-Fitting","image_title":"Curve-Fitting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2048","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/curve_fitting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2048:_Curve-Fitting","transcript":"Curve-Fitting Methods and the messages they send\n[In a single frame twelve scatter plots with unlabeled x- and y-axes are shown. Each plot consists of the same data-set of approximately thirty points located all over the plot but slightly more distributed around the diagonal. Every plot shows in red a different fitting method which is labeled on top in gray.]\n[The first plot shows a line starting at the left bottom above the x-axis rising towards the points to the right.] Linear \"Hey, I did a regression.\"\n[The second plot shows a curve falling slightly down and then rising up to the right.] Quadratic \"I wanted a curved line, so I made one with math.\"\n[At the third plot the curve starts near the left bottom and increases more and more less to the right.] Logarithmic \"Look, it's tapering off!\"\n[The fourth plot shows a curve starting near the left bottom and increases more and more steeper towards the right.] Exponential \"Look, it's growing uncontrollably!\"\n[The fifth plot uses a fitting to match many points. It starts at the left bottom, increases, then decreases, then rapidly increasing again, and finally reaching a plateau.] LOESS \"I'm sophisticated, not like those bumbling polynomial people.\"\n[The sixth plot simply shows a line above but parallel to the x-axis.] Linear, no slope \"I'm making a scatter plot but I don't want to.\"\n[At plot #7 starts at a plateau above the x-axis, then increases, and finally reaches a higher plateau.] Logistic \"I need to connect these two lines, but my first idea didn't have enough Math.\"\n[Plot #8 shows two red lines embedding most points and the area between is painted as a red shadow.] Confidence interval \"Listen, science is hard. But I'm a serious person doing my best.\"\n[Plot #9 shows two not connected lines, one at the lower left half, and one higher at the right. Both have smaller curved lines in light red above and below.] Piecewise \"I have a theory, and this is the only data I could find.\"\n[The plot at the left bottom shows a line connecting all points from left to right, resulting in a curve going many times up and down.] Connecting lines \"I clicked 'Smooth Lines' in Excel.\"\n[The next to last plot shows a echelon form, connecting a few real and some imaginary points.] Ad-Hoc filter \"I had an idea for how to clean up the data. What do you think?\"\n[The last plot shows a wave with increasing peak values. Finally the plot of the wave is continued beyond the x- and y-axis borders.] House of Cards \"As you can see, this model smoothly fits the- wait no no don't extend it AAAAAA!! \"\n","explanation":"An illustration of several plots of the same data with curves fitted to the points, paired with conclusions that you might draw about the person who made them. These data, when plotted on an X\/Y graph, appear to have a general upward trend, but the data is far too noisy, with too few data points, to clearly suggest any specific growth pattern. In such a case, many different mathematical and statistical models could be presented as roughly fitting the data, but none of them fits well enough to compellingly represent the data.\nWhen modeling such a problem statistically, much of the work of a data scientist or statistician is knowing which fitting method is most appropriate for the data in question. Here we see various hypothetical scientists or statisticians each applying their own interpretations to the exact same data, and the comic mocks each of them for their various personal biases or other assorted excuses. In general, the researcher will specify the form of an equation for the line to be drawn, and an algorithm will produce the actual line.\nNonetheless scientists work much more seriously on the reliability of their assumptions by giving a value for the standard deviation represented by the Greek letter sigma \u03c3 or the Latin letter s as a measure to quantify the amount of variation of the data points against the presented best fit . If the \u03c3-value isn't good enough an interpretation based on a specific fit wouldn't be accepted by the science community.\nSince Randall gives no hint about the nature of the used data set - same in each graph - any fitting presented doesn't make any sense. The graphs could represent a star map, the votes for the latest elected presidents, or your recent invoices on power consumption. This comic just exaggerates various methods on interpreting data, but without the knowledge of the matter in the background nothing makes any sense.\n\nLinear regression is the most basic form of regression; it tries to find the straight line that best approximates the data. As it's the simplest, most widely taught form of regression, and in general differentiable functions are locally well approximated by a straight line, it's usually the first and most trivial attempt of fit.\nThe picture to the right shows how totally different data sets can result in the same line. It's obvious that some more basics about the nature of the data must be used to understand if this simple line really does make sense.\nThe comment below the graph \"Hey, I did a regression.\" refers to the fact that this is just the easiest way of fitting data into a curve.\n\nQuadratic fit (i.e. fitting a parabola through the data) is the lowest grade polynomial that can be used to fit data through a curved line; if the data exhibits clearly \"curved\" behavior (or if the experimenter feels that its growth should be more than linear), a parabola is often the first, easiest, stab at fitting the data.\nThe comment below the graph \"I wanted a curved line, so I made one with math.\" suggests that a quadratic regression is used when straight lines no longer satisfy the researcher, but they still want to use simple math expression. Quadratic correlations like this are mathematically valid and one of the simplest kind of curve in math, but this curve doesn't appear to satisfy the data any better than does simple, linear regression.\n\nA logarithmic curve grows slower on higher values, but still grows without bound to infinity rather than approaching a horizontal asymptote . The small b in the formula represents the base which is in most cases e , 10, or 2. If the data presumably does approach a horizontal asymptote then this fit isn't an effective method to explain the nature of the data.\nThe comment below the graph \"Look, it's tapering off!\" builds up the impression that the data diminishes while under this fit it's still growing to infinity, only much slower than a linear regression does.\n\nAn exponential curve , on the contrary, is typical of a phenomenon whose growth gets rapidly faster and faster - a common case is a process that generates stuff that contributes to the process itself; think bacteria growth or compound interest.\nThe logarithmic and exponential interpretations could very easily be fudged or engineered by a researcher with an agenda (such as by taking a misleading subset or even outright lying about the regression), which the comic mocks by juxtaposing them side-by-side on the same set of data.\nThe comment below the graph \"Look, it's growing uncontrollably!\" gives an other frivolous statement suggesting something like chaos. Also this even faster growth is well defined and has no asymptote at both axes.\nA LOESS fit doesn't use a single formula to fit all the data, but approximates data points locally using different polynomials for each \"zone\" (weighting data points differently as they get further from it) and patching them together. As it has many more degrees of freedom compared to a single polynomial, it generally \"fits better\" to any data set, although it is generally impossible to derive any strong, \"clean\" mathematical correlation from it - it is just a nice smooth line that approximates the data points well, with a good degree of rejection from outliers.\nThe comment below the graph \"I'm sophisticated, not like those bumbling polynomial people.\" emphasises this more complicated interpretation, but without a simple mathematical description it's not very helpful to find informative interpretations of the underlying data.\n\nAlso known as a constant function, since the function takes on the same (constant) value c for all values of x . The value of c can be determined simply by taking the average of the y -values in the data.\nApparently, the person making this line figured out pretty early on that their data analysis was turning into a scatter plot, and wanted to escape their personal stigma of scatter plots by drawing an obviously false regression line on top of it. Alternatively, they were hoping the data would be flat, and are trying to pretend that there's no real trend to the data by drawing a horizontal trend line.\nThe comment below the graph \"I'm making a scatter plot but I don't want to.\" is probably done by a student who isn't happy with their choice of field of study.\nThe logistic regression is taken when a variable can take binary results such as \"0\" and \"1\" or \"old\" and \"young\".\nThe curve provides a smooth, S-shaped transition curve between two flat intervals (like \"0\" and \"1\").\nThe comment below the graph \"I need to connect these two lines, but my first idea didn't have enough math.\" implies the experimenter just wants to find a mathematically-respectable way to link two flat lines.\nNot a type of curve fitting, but a method of depicting the predictive power of a curve.\nProviding a confidence interval over the graph shows the uncertainty of the acquired data, thus acknowledging the uncertain results of the experiment, and showing the will not to \"cheat\" with \"easy\" regression curves.\nThe comment below the graph \"Listen, science is hard. But I'm a serious person doing my best.\" is just an honest statement about this uncertainty.\nMapping different curves to different segments of the data. This is a legitimate strategy, but the different segments should be meaningful, such as if they were pulled from different populations.\nThis kind of fit would arise naturally in a study based on a regression discontinuity design. For instance, if students who score below a certain cutoff must take remedial classes, the line for outcomes of those below the cutoff would reasonably be separate from the one for outcomes above the cutoff; the distance between the end of the two lines could be considered the effect of the treatment, under certain assumptions. This kind of study design is used to investigate causal theories, where mere correlation in observational data is not enough to prove anything. Thus, the associated text would be appropriate; there is a theory, and data that might prove the theory is hard to find.\nOne notable time this is used is when a researcher studying housing economics is trying to identify housing submarkets. The assumption is that if two proposed markets are truly different, they will be better described using two different regression functions than if one were to be used.\nThe additional curved lines visible in the graph are the kind of confidence intervals you'd get from a simple OLS regression if the standard assumptions were valid. In the case of two separate regressions, it would be surprising if all those assumptions (that is, i.i.d. Normal residuals around an underlying perfectly-linear function) were in fact valid for each part, especially if the slopes are not equal.\nA classical example in physics are the different theories to explain the black body radiation at the end of the 19th century. The Wien approximation was good for small wavelengths while the Rayleigh\u2013Jeans law worked for the larger scales (large wavelength means low frequency and thus low energy.) But there was a gap in the middle which was filled by the Planck's law in 1900.\nThe comment below the graph \"I have a theory, and this is the only data I could find.\" is a bit ambiguous because there are many data points ignored. Without an explanation why only a subset of the data is used this isn't a useful interpretation at all. As a matter of fact, with the extra degrees of freedom offered by the piecewise regression, it could indicate that the researcher is trying to fit the data to confirm their theory, rather than building their theory off of the data.\nThis is often used to smooth gaps in measurements. A simple example is the weather temperature which is often measured in distinct intervals. When the intervals are high enough it's safe to assume that the  temperature didn't change that much between them and connecting the data points by lines doesn't distort the real situation in many cases.\nThe comment below the graph \"I clicked 'Smooth Lines' in Excel .\" refers to the well known spreadsheet application from Microsoft Office . Like other spreadsheet applications it has the feature to visualize data from a table into a graph by many ways. \"Smooth Lines\" is a setting meant for use on a line graph , a graph in which one axis represents time; as it simply joins up every point rather than finding a sensible line, it is not suitable for regression.\nDrawing a bunch of different lines by hand, keeping in only the data points perceived as \"good\". Not really useful except for marketing purposes.\nThe comment below the graph \"I had an idea for how to clean up the data. What do you think?\" admits that in fact the data is whitewashed and tightly focused to a result the presenter wants to show.\nNot a real method, but a common consequence of misapplication of statistical methods: a curve can be generated that fits the data extremely well, but immediately becomes absurd as soon as one glances outside the training data sample range, and your analysis comes crashing down \"like a house of cards\". This is a type of overfitting . In other words, the model may do quite well for (approximately) interpolating between values in the sample range, but not extend at all well to extrapolating values outside that range.\nNote: Exact polynomial fitting, a fit which gives the unique th degree polynomial through points, often display this kind of behaviour.\nThe comment below the graph \"As you can see, this model smoothly fits the- wait no no don't extend it AAAAAA!!\" refers to a curve which fits the data points relatively well within the graph's boundaries, but beyond those bounds fails to match at all.\nThe name is also a potential reference to the TV show House of Cards . The plot in House of Cards began with a premise of a rise to power in the United States government, but as it continued into more seasons the premise was taken to an extreme, introducing more and more ridiculous plot points (\"WAIT NO, NO, DON'T EXTEND IT!\").\nCauchy-Lorentz is a continuous probability distribution which does not have an expected value or a defined variance. This means that the law of large numbers does not hold and that estimating e.g. the sample mean will diverge (be all over the place) the more data points you have. Hence very troublesome (mathematically alarming).\nSince so many different models can fit this data set at first glance, Randall may be making a point about how if a data set is sufficiently messy, you can read any trend you want into it, and the trend that is chosen may say more about the researcher than about the data. This is a similar sentiment to 1725: Linear Regression , which also pokes fun at dubious trend lines on scatterplots.\nA brief Google search reveals that Augustin-Louis Cauchy originally worked as a junior engineer in a managerial position. Upon his acceptance to the Acad\u00e9mie des Sciences in March 1816, many of his peers expressed outrage. Despite his early work in \"mere\" engineering, Cauchy is widely regarded as one of the founding influences in the rigorous study of calculus & accompanying proofs.  Notably, his later work included theoretical physics, and Lorentz was also a well-known physicist.  Therefore, the title-text may be referring back to 793: Physicists .\nAlternately, the title-text could be implying that the person who applied the Cauchy-Lorentz curve-fitting method may not be well qualified to the task assigned.\nCurve-Fitting Methods and the messages they send\n[In a single frame twelve scatter plots with unlabeled x- and y-axes are shown. Each plot consists of the same data-set of approximately thirty points located all over the plot but slightly more distributed around the diagonal. Every plot shows in red a different fitting method which is labeled on top in gray.]\n[The first plot shows a line starting at the left bottom above the x-axis rising towards the points to the right.] Linear \"Hey, I did a regression.\"\n[The second plot shows a curve falling slightly down and then rising up to the right.] Quadratic \"I wanted a curved line, so I made one with math.\"\n[At the third plot the curve starts near the left bottom and increases more and more less to the right.] Logarithmic \"Look, it's tapering off!\"\n[The fourth plot shows a curve starting near the left bottom and increases more and more steeper towards the right.] Exponential \"Look, it's growing uncontrollably!\"\n[The fifth plot uses a fitting to match many points. It starts at the left bottom, increases, then decreases, then rapidly increasing again, and finally reaching a plateau.] LOESS \"I'm sophisticated, not like those bumbling polynomial people.\"\n[The sixth plot simply shows a line above but parallel to the x-axis.] Linear, no slope \"I'm making a scatter plot but I don't want to.\"\n[At plot #7 starts at a plateau above the x-axis, then increases, and finally reaches a higher plateau.] Logistic \"I need to connect these two lines, but my first idea didn't have enough Math.\"\n[Plot #8 shows two red lines embedding most points and the area between is painted as a red shadow.] Confidence interval \"Listen, science is hard. But I'm a serious person doing my best.\"\n[Plot #9 shows two not connected lines, one at the lower left half, and one higher at the right. Both have smaller curved lines in light red above and below.] Piecewise \"I have a theory, and this is the only data I could find.\"\n[The plot at the left bottom shows a line connecting all points from left to right, resulting in a curve going many times up and down.] Connecting lines \"I clicked 'Smooth Lines' in Excel.\"\n[The next to last plot shows a echelon form, connecting a few real and some imaginary points.] Ad-Hoc filter \"I had an idea for how to clean up the data. What do you think?\"\n[The last plot shows a wave with increasing peak values. Finally the plot of the wave is continued beyond the x- and y-axis borders.] House of Cards \"As you can see, this model smoothly fits the- wait no no don't extend it AAAAAA!! \"\n"}
{"id":2049,"title":"Unfulfilling Toys","image_title":"Unfulfilling Toys","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2049","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unfulfilling_toys.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2049:_Unfulfilling_Toys","transcript":"[The comic presents toys in six different frames.]\n[Cueball slaps his wrist with a strap-like item in his hand.] Smack Rigid slap bracelet\n[Cueball jumps on top of a pouch full of air connected via a hose to an air propelled rocket. The pouch does not budge and the rocket remains connected to its base.] Sealed stomp rocket\n[Ponytail holds a water gun and makes use of its hand-operated pump system.] Pump pump pump Pump Click Pump-only SuperSoaker\n[Megan pulls an item apart between her hands. The middle section breaks into many pieces on the ground and liquid is falling from the end parts.] Pop Glass glow stick\n[Cueball holds a figurine sitting on top of a hand-held device and pulls a string connected to it.] Spin Wingless sky dancer\n[Megan holds a yo-yo until the yo-yo falls from the string and starts rolling on the ground.] Roll No-strings-attached yo-yo\n[Caption below the frames:] My least successful product line was probably \"deeply unfulfilling versions of classic toys.\"\n","explanation":"This comic lists and illustrates six different classic toys that are missing a key piece or attribute that makes them work and\/or that makes them unique or fun.\nSlap bracelets are flexible curved strips of spring steel that roll up and become a bracelet when you slap them against your wrist. This function operates on the same principle and basic design as the rolled band of metal inside a tape measure. A rigid one would not twist and would be deeply frustrating and potentially painful.\nA stomp rocket has a rubber pouch full of air, connected via a hose to a vertical cylinder contained snugly within the base of an air-propelled rocket.  By stomping on the pouch, the air is forced out the top end of the cylinder, launching the rocket into the air.  By sealing the air channel, the rocket would stay on the cylinder and the person would just be bounced into the air by the pouch \u2014 acting like the world's smallest bouncy house \u2014 or the pouch will burst, rendering the toy even more useless.\nA Super Soaker \u2122 is a brand of water gun that works by first pumping air into the gun, thereby introducing pressurized air above the water, then releasing the water using the gun's trigger \u2013 the extra pressure from the pumped air makes the water go much further than a traditional water gun which relies upon the pressure generated from a single pump of the trigger itself.  In Randall 's version, the water cannot be released, so the fun part of the water gun \u2013 getting to spray your friends \u2013 isn't available.\nIn a classic glow stick , made of flexible plastic, one must first bend it enough to break the glass cylinder inside. This allows the chemicals inside to mix and begin glowing within the plastic tube.  If the entire tube were made of actual glass, however, it would not only shatter into many sharp glass pieces but would also cover the hands of the unfortunate user with a mixture of mild but not harmless chemicals. Also, depending on this contraption's construction and\/or luck, the chemicals either won't mix and not glow at all, defeating the purpose of the glow stick, or stain your hands, clothes, and surroundings with a glowing liquid, which would be rather unfortunate.\nIn the original toy , a doll or figure with folded-up wings sits on top of a hand-held device with a wrapped string or other mechanism that lets it spin the doll very fast.  As the doll spins, centrifugal force causes the wings to unfold and provide lift, and the doll rises up in the air and flies, spinning, sometimes going quite high.  Without the wings, the doll will spin but otherwise remain flightless.\nIn a traditional yo-yo , one attaches a string to their finger and the other end of the string is looped around the shaft of the yo-yo, in such a way that it will hold the yo-yo but the yo-yo can still spin.  In this case, the string is presumably included but not attached to the yo-yo, so when the yo-yo reaches the end of its string it will fall off, instead of coming back to the person or spinning at the end of the string.\nNonetheless off-string yo-yoing technique exists that has been a division of the World Yo-Yo Contest since 2003. The division specifies that the string is tied to one finger but not the yo-yo. It was popularized by yo-yo player Jon Gates. It differs from the manipulation of a Diabolo because the string is tied to one finger instead of being tied to two sticks. The return is accomplished with a twist of the string called a bind. Diabolos don't return. A good example is here at this video titled \"Crazy Stringless Yoyo Tricks!\" .\nNote that the phrase \"no strings attached\" is an idiom and usually refers to something being available without special conditions or restrictions, a favor being done with nothing expected in return, or a relationship intended to be very casual.  In this case, it is literal rather than an idiom, in that the string that is normally attached to the yo-yo is literally not attached.\nIn order to build the magnetic Rubik's Cube , you would need to embed magnets in the inward-facing sides of each cube. This actually can be achieved by using a checkered pattern for the polarity of each piece, a single piece uses the same polarity at all its connecting sides while the immediate neighbor is configured in the opposite. This video shows the principle and even a working 5x5x5 magnetic cube.\nBecause such a cube doesn't fall apart Randall had to remove it from his \"deeply unfulfilling versions of classic toys.\"\nIt is also worth noting that although Randall said that there were 27 small magnetic cubes, only 26 small 'cubes' (or 'cubelets') appear in a traditional Rubik's cube, of three main types. There is no center block in a traditional Rubik's cube, instead there is a pivoting armature connecting the six face-centres (with just a single flat face) together while allowing their individual rotation, each of which can keep the 12 edge-centres (two externally-flat faces) rotatably-anchored to at least one face at a time by a form of dovetailed tab on those edge pieces and, similarly, those hold the eight corners (with three outer faces) in place even as they follow a single face's rotation primarily held by the two most currently relevent of the adjacent edges.\nIt might also refer to various square-shaped neodymium magnet-based toys, like this one or this one , which although they can be taken easily apart, they are successful and very fulfilling products on their own.\n[The comic presents toys in six different frames.]\n[Cueball slaps his wrist with a strap-like item in his hand.] Smack Rigid slap bracelet\n[Cueball jumps on top of a pouch full of air connected via a hose to an air propelled rocket. The pouch does not budge and the rocket remains connected to its base.] Sealed stomp rocket\n[Ponytail holds a water gun and makes use of its hand-operated pump system.] Pump pump pump Pump Click Pump-only SuperSoaker\n[Megan pulls an item apart between her hands. The middle section breaks into many pieces on the ground and liquid is falling from the end parts.] Pop Glass glow stick\n[Cueball holds a figurine sitting on top of a hand-held device and pulls a string connected to it.] Spin Wingless sky dancer\n[Megan holds a yo-yo until the yo-yo falls from the string and starts rolling on the ground.] Roll No-strings-attached yo-yo\n[Caption below the frames:] My least successful product line was probably \"deeply unfulfilling versions of classic toys.\"\n"}
{"id":2050,"title":"6\/6 Time","image_title":"6\/6 Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2050","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/6_6_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2050:_6\/6_Time","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat are walking to the right.  Cueball has his hands up in an explaining position.] Cueball: Under my time system, the sun rises at 6 am and it sets at 6 pm, as it should . Cueball: The length of the second is different each day and night, and the current time shifts with your latitude and longitude. Cueball: Today is one of the two days each year when my clocks run at the same speed as everyone else's.\n[Caption below the frame:] Time standards are so unfixably messy and complicated that at this point my impulse is just to try to make them worse.\n","explanation":"Cueball suggests a regional time system similar to that used in many societies prior to the invention of mechanical time keeping , such as Japan during the Edo period or the Roman Empire , where the day is separated into two parts based on night and day and then subdivided by hour, minute, and second to give season-variable lengths for each. This method is also named temporal hour , and still in use in the Jewish religion time table.\nMidpoints in time such as noon and midnight vary on the longitude from east and west, while the length of day and night depends on the latitude . The first problem is solved today by using time zones in which at noon the sun is in most cases at or close to the zenith and sunrise\/sunset happens at different times. The second issue is attributed to the tilt of Earth's axis and the curvature of its surface; in summer days are longer than nights and vice versa in winter. In the polar regions, there are very long days (and nights) and by Cueball's suggestion the entire months-long polar day would last only 12 of the newly defined \"hours\".\nThe caption lays out the punchline in which Randall has very strong feelings and opinions on how standards of time should be measured (his feelings on Daylight Savings Time have been well-documented in other comics), but as bad as he believes the official standards are he also recognizes that his own rules would not be popular with other people. After coming to recognize this he has made a hobby or game out of making the worst possible system of measuring time and sharing it with other people.\nThe caption, though vague, can also be assumed to relate to the gradual deviation of certain regions from the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) zones with \" Daylight Saving Time \" that is observed inconsistently and smaller regions opting for awkward fractional increments of deviation from Coordinated Universal Time.\nThe title text refers to Einstein's special theory of relativity which postulates that the speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of the light source (or the observers). An observer at high speed measures the same speed of light as an observer with no motion, measured from the same light source. In classical physics, the speed of the moving observer would be added up, but in special relativity, this isn't true. Instead, the time runs slower for the moving observer. Additionally to this time dilation , there is also a length contraction , without which the geometry wouldn't work.\n\"Today is one of the two days each year when my clocks run at the same speed as everyone else's\" refers to the autumnal and vernal equinoxes when day and night are the same lengths, therefore causing his clocks to match the world. The comic was released one day after that year's September equinox, which would be the autumnal equinox for Randall.\n[Cueball and White Hat are walking to the right.  Cueball has his hands up in an explaining position.] Cueball: Under my time system, the sun rises at 6 am and it sets at 6 pm, as it should . Cueball: The length of the second is different each day and night, and the current time shifts with your latitude and longitude. Cueball: Today is one of the two days each year when my clocks run at the same speed as everyone else's.\n[Caption below the frame:] Time standards are so unfixably messy and complicated that at this point my impulse is just to try to make them worse.\n"}
{"id":2051,"title":"Bad Opinions","image_title":"Bad Opinions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2051","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bad_opinions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2051:_Bad_Opinions","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a laptop.] Offscreen voice: What are you doing? Cueball: I just thought of a bad opinion someone could have, and now I'm searching to see if anyone does so I can be mad at them. Offscreen voice: Sounds like you have a healthy relationship with the internet. Cueball: Hey, at least I'm not this guy I just found!\n","explanation":"Cueball is imagining bad opinions, searching them up on the Internet, and becoming angry with the people holding said opinions. An offscreen character, upon learning about this, sarcastically remarks that this indicates a \"healthy relationship with the internet.\" Of course, if Cueball wasn't thinking of all these bad opinions, they most likely wouldn't have come to his attention, and he wouldn't have an opportunity to be mad about them. The fact that Cueball is the cause of his own agitation is the joke of (or perhaps, the sad part of) the comic. Cueball misses the offscreen character's point and remarks that he's not as bad as some person he has discovered, presumably through the aforementioned method of searching for bad opinions he thinks up.\nIn title text he goes further, where he can't find an opinion he imagined on the internet, but still wants to discredit it, just because he is so infuriated by just being able to imagine it. This is similar to straw man fallacy , where someone attempts to discredit an opponent by misrepresenting their argument, rather than addressing their real point.\nIronically, the comic itself could potentially be considered an example of this kind of behavior. It is possible that Randall imagined the absurd person and behavior depicted in the comic, and wrote a comic satirizing it, without knowing if such a person actually exists.\nThe unhealthy conversation habits enabled by the Interblag has been a regular theme in xkcd. In fact, this is a rather obvious callback to one of the most popular xkcd comics, 386: Duty Calls , wherein Cueball is actively seeking to discredit and correct people who are \"wrong\" on the internet. This is later done in 2071: Indirect Detection .\nPerhaps due to the inherent combination of disconnection and intense focus involved in use of the internet, it's pretty common for people to get into arguments online.  Cueball has followed the trend of finding social success online by dedicating more time and energy to arguing pedantic points than his opponents.  He's done this to such a great degree that he is now actively seeking possible arguments, even when the situations do not arise on their own.  The end result is that his life has needlessly more stress, his interpersonal habits are those of contradiction and conflict, he makes unnecessary enemies, and he is always looking at a computer screen instead of his real world friends.\n[Cueball sits at a laptop.] Offscreen voice: What are you doing? Cueball: I just thought of a bad opinion someone could have, and now I'm searching to see if anyone does so I can be mad at them. Offscreen voice: Sounds like you have a healthy relationship with the internet. Cueball: Hey, at least I'm not this guy I just found!\n"}
{"id":2052,"title":"Stanislav Petrov Day","image_title":"Stanislav Petrov Day","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2052","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stanislav_petrov_day.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2052:_Stanislav_Petrov_Day","transcript":"[Megan is looking at her phone while Cueball stands in front of her.] Megan: Hey, Wednesday was Stanislav Petrov Day. We missed it. Cueball: Oh, shoot! Cueball: I got a calendar alert for it, but I assumed it was a false alarm.\n","explanation":"Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who became known as \"the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war \" for his role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident . The incident was unknown to the public until it was revealed shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.\nOn 26 September 1983, during the Cold War , the satellite-based early-warning system of the Soviet Union reported the launch of multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles from the United States . At the time, tensions with the U.S. were on edge, and high officials of the Soviet Union, including General Secretary Yuri Andropov , were thought to be highly suspicious of a U.S. attack.\nPetrov checked ground-based radars which had not detected a launch, noted that the warning system had detected only 1-5 missiles instead of the hundreds that would have been expected in the event of a first strike , and chose to mark the system alert as a false alarm. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack, which would have probably resulted in immediate escalation of the Cold War stalemate to a full-scale nuclear war and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Investigation of the satellite warning system later confirmed that the system had indeed malfunctioned.\nWhile it is highly probable that if Petrov had reported this incident to his superiors they would have come to the same conclusion, it was a point in time when many people feared that the Cold War might become hot. Andropov, the new Soviet leader, was considered weak by the US president Ronald Reagan , and the Western countries were deploying new missile installation in Europe to counter existing missiles in the Eastern Bloc. This fear of nuclear war meant that at this time the peace movement in most western countries reached one of its highest levels.\nIn this comic Cueball reacts to his alert on Stanislav Petrov Day as if it was a false alarm. This is of course a pun since what we celebrate is that Stanislav treated an alert as a false alarm. Also his first comment \"Oh shoot\" could have been the reaction of Stanislav if he had not assumed it was a false alarm.\nIn real life, many alerts reach everybody on their mobile devices, often causing them to be ignored without deeper knowledge about the issue behind. This was however not the point in this comic.\nThe title text presents a much less important false alarm where one of them, probably Cueball (or perhaps Randall ), was thinking about giving a gift to the other one in the form of an alarm clock that alerts randomly in the middle of the night. That particular alarm is one where she or he can just breathe a sigh of relief and go back to sleep because it's not a real alarm and is perfectly safe to ignore. However if this keeps going off when it\u2019s not supposed to, then when you are actually supposed to wake up you may very well end up assuming that it\u2019s another false alarm, and thus will sleep late anyway, completely defeating the point of the alarm. Also when a real alarm is supposed to wake you up in the middle of the night, you will have been trained to ignore alarms. This is all part of the joke.\nOn the 2007 anniversary, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a blog post for LessWrong suggesting that \"Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.\" Not destroying the world has since evolved into an annual tradition. There is a website for the holiday, with several variations of a ritual involving lighting and snuffing candles. The intended mood is that of a somber holiday, somewhere between Thanksgiving and a funeral.\nHowever, there are also more lighthearted takes . A \"hardcore mode\" would be just like the normal holiday, but \"During said ceremony, unveil a large red button. If anybody presses the button, the ceremony is over. Go home. Do not speak.\" Alternatively, \"you use a website connected to *another* house where people are also celebrating Petrov Day. If anyone in one house presses the button, the other house receives a launch alarm. They have 60 seconds to respond. At the end of 60 seconds, their party is over, and they must go home silently. The website has some chance of giving you a false alarm.\" The website can be found here with instructions on how to use it here .\nStanislav Petrov himself died in 2017, but in 2018 the Future of Life Institute decided to award his surviving family a $50,000 prize for his contributions. However, in the words of MIT Professor Max Tegmark, who presented the award, the fact that Petrov's son couldn't \"get a visa to visit the city his dad saved from nuclear annihilation is emblematic of how frosty US-Russian relations have gotten, which increases the risk of accidental nuclear war.\u201d\n[Megan is looking at her phone while Cueball stands in front of her.] Megan: Hey, Wednesday was Stanislav Petrov Day. We missed it. Cueball: Oh, shoot! Cueball: I got a calendar alert for it, but I assumed it was a false alarm.\n"}
{"id":2053,"title":"Incoming Calls","image_title":"Incoming Calls","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2053","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/incoming_calls.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2053:_Incoming_Calls","transcript":"[A line graph shows the portions of phone calls by type over time beginning slightly before 1990 until today.] Incoming personal calls over time or: why I finally stopped picking up for unknown numbers\n[The x-axis is labeled with years beginning at 1990 in five-year segments up to NOW (2018). The y-axis shows a relative distribution of callers.] [The calls are (from top to down):] Appointment reminders, misc. (small growing all over time) Family (larger in the beginning, constant with some fluctuations since 2000) Friends (growing from 1995 to 2005, then decreasing but intersected with \"that one friend who hates texting\", after that decreasing) Legal telemarketers (peak in the beginning, decreasing over time) Auto insurance scammers (a big peak between 2005 and 2012) Other scammers (beginning in 2010, replacing the auto insurance, increasing until today) Political (starting in 2002 and increasing since then) Wrong numbers (constant up to 2000 and then decreasing to nearly today)\n","explanation":"This comic shows a graph (a 100% stacked area chart) of incoming phone calls over time to Randall since he was older than six years. Not covered are major modern ways to communicate like SMS , talking on Facebook , or other messaging apps.\nWrong numbers used to be a small but significant portion of the phone calls that Randall received and remained fairly steady until the late 1990s, when they began a gradual and accelerating decline, eventually tapering off to nearly none in 2015. This is likely due to the rise of cellphones and programmable land-line phones, which contain their own address books and only require the caller to enter the number once, greatly reducing the chances of accidentally entering a wrong number in general and eliminating the possibility entirely for anyone with whom you have taken the time to save their number.\nAppointment reminders and miscellaneous similar calls have steadily increased with time, likely due to a combination of Randall's increasing responsibilities as he ages, and thus the number of appointments and legitimate businesses who need to contact him, and the increased use by businesses of automated reminder systems. The appointments section seems to be slightly tapering off, possibly for the rise of using other means, such as SMS, for reminders.\nThe proportion of family members started slowly decreasing until 1998 where it remained almost constant until roughly 2008-2009. Possible reasons for the decline is that Randall's family has been passing away from old age, or that Randall has ceased contact with them; a possible reason for the increase thereafter is Randall's meeting of his current wife, thus gaining in-laws.\nA note to keep in mind though is that the graph represents the relative percentage of calls, not the absolute number; therefore, a third possibility is simply that the number of calls hadn't changed, but rather the volume of phone calls from everyone else has gone up. Likewise, the increase in phone calls from family might simply be due to the number of phone calls from everyone else going down while family calls have remained constant. Additionally, as mentioned below, phone communication may be be decreasing due to the rise of other communication mediums.\nThe proportion of friends who call Randall rapidly increased in the 1990s and began to overtake family, likely due to a combination of gaining new friends over time and old friends growing into teenage years owning a cell phone roughly starting in the 2000s. At that time the Internet wasn't a primary method of communication especially when away from home, thus phone calls were the main way to connect with friends when apart. Over time, Randall's friends and family have been less likely to make phone calls to him, likely as phone calls have been succeeded by other methods of communication. This is supported by an entry for \"that one friend who hates texting\" which has grown to encompass pretty much the entire \"Friends\" category; presumably all his friends EXCEPT that \"one friend\" do all their communicating with Randall by text or other chat services.\nAdditionally, although there was a large percentage of phone calls from legal telemarketers in the 1990s, this percentage has significantly dropped, perhaps due to the National Do Not Call Registry in the United States, which prohibits telemarketing\/automatic dialing to those on the list. Political advertisements are exempt from this list. Instead, there has been a rise in phone calls from scammers and political advertisements.\nTelemarketers may target calls based on victims' age or other publicly available statistics. The rise and fall of auto insurance scammers may indicate targeting people in their early twenties. It could also be tied to other events, such as the purchase of an automobile. There have also been various reports online about the commonality of this scam in and around 2013, ( [1] ) indicating this may have been a particularly challenging problem during this period.\nThe title text refers to a common scamming tactic in which a robocaller , typically one named \"Emily,\" will claim to be having trouble with their headset and say \"Can you hear me now?\" The trick is either to keep you on the line while taking a second or two to connect you to a real person to get scammed, or to get a recording of you saying \"yes\" for potential fraudulent use (or both).\n[A line graph shows the portions of phone calls by type over time beginning slightly before 1990 until today.] Incoming personal calls over time or: why I finally stopped picking up for unknown numbers\n[The x-axis is labeled with years beginning at 1990 in five-year segments up to NOW (2018). The y-axis shows a relative distribution of callers.] [The calls are (from top to down):] Appointment reminders, misc. (small growing all over time) Family (larger in the beginning, constant with some fluctuations since 2000) Friends (growing from 1995 to 2005, then decreasing but intersected with \"that one friend who hates texting\", after that decreasing) Legal telemarketers (peak in the beginning, decreasing over time) Auto insurance scammers (a big peak between 2005 and 2012) Other scammers (beginning in 2010, replacing the auto insurance, increasing until today) Political (starting in 2002 and increasing since then) Wrong numbers (constant up to 2000 and then decreasing to nearly today)\n"}
{"id":2054,"title":"Data Pipeline","image_title":"Data Pipeline","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2054","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/data_pipeline.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2054:_Data_Pipeline","transcript":"[Cueball is standing with an open laptop, showing it to Ponytail and White Hat.] Cueball: Check it out - I made a full automated data pipeline that collects and processes all the information we need.\n[Ponytail is looking down at Cueball's laptop.] Ponytail: Is it a giant house of cards built from random scripts that will all completely collapse the moment any input does anything weird?\n[Borderless beat panel]\n[Cueball looks at his laptop.] Cueball: It... might not be. Ponytail: I guess that's someth- Cueball: Whoops, just collapsed. Hang on, I can patch it.\n","explanation":"In the first panel Cueball shows Ponytail and White Hat a Data Pipeline he has constructed that, as he puts it, 'collects and processes all the data we need'. This implies that the three are running some sort of project that requires data processing. Ponytail assumes that this data pipeline is an unstable mess of scripts that will cease to function correctly should any unexpected input be received. Cueball tries to claim it isn't, but his hesitation (including using the word \"might\") essentially states that this is very likely, although he seems to hope that it might not be. Ponytail then seems impressed and expresses this to him. She, however, gets interrupted by Cueball who tells her that the system just malfunctioned and collapsed. He, however, states that he can fix it, making it seem like this cycle of patching and collapsing could repeat infinitely, or until all problems have been patched. Knowing Cueball's code, though, it seems more likely he can't patch it.\nIn the title text, Ponytail or White Hat proceeds to question how such an important system can run on such a small computer. However, Cueball makes it worse by saying he uses his phone due to the better connection. While this might give the pipeline more uptime, it also means its system resources are far more limited.\nThis comic can be logically connected to the Code Quality series ( 1513: Code Quality , 1695: Code Quality 2 and 1833: Code Quality 3 ), similarly showing Cueball having a coding ineptitude and Ponytail's exasperation with it, though this Cueball shows a higher level of competence by having produced something useful, albeit fragile. However, Ponytail doesn't see the actual code in this case, and there's no issues with or comments on coding syntax like in the Code Quality series.\nCueball's hesitant response in this comic has some similarities to 410: Math Paper .\n[Cueball is standing with an open laptop, showing it to Ponytail and White Hat.] Cueball: Check it out - I made a full automated data pipeline that collects and processes all the information we need.\n[Ponytail is looking down at Cueball's laptop.] Ponytail: Is it a giant house of cards built from random scripts that will all completely collapse the moment any input does anything weird?\n[Borderless beat panel]\n[Cueball looks at his laptop.] Cueball: It... might not be. Ponytail: I guess that's someth- Cueball: Whoops, just collapsed. Hang on, I can patch it.\n"}
{"id":2055,"title":"Bluetooth","image_title":"Bluetooth","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2055","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bluetooth.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2055:_Bluetooth","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat are talking, Cueball is holding a cell phone and wireless headphones.] Cueball: I haven\u2019t used a wireless\/bluetooth thingy in like ten years. Is audio stuff still a nightmare? White Hat: Nah, it\u2019s great now.\n[Zoom in on White Hat, who is holding his palm out. Cueball is off-screen.] White Hat: You tap devices together twice to link them and they flash in sync. (It pairs using accelerometer timing and sound.) Tap them three times to disconnect. White Hat: You can pair multiple inputs and outputs and it handles it smoothly. Cueball (off screen): Nice! White Hat: It just works. Sound comes from where you expect. Cueball (off screen): Wonderful.\n[Zoom out to White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: Haha, just kidding, it\u2019s a nightmare. Cueball: Noooooo! White Hat: When I connect to my car, music starts blasting from my headphones while the car repeatedly plays a \u201cNew connection!\u201d chime. Cueball: This is not what Josiah Bluetooth intended!\nThough it has been around since 2001, Bluetooth has been a well known technology for use with wireless speakers and headphones since smartphones became popular in the early 2010s.\nBluetooth was the subject of particularly wide public attention in 2016 when Apple announced the removal of the 3.5 mm headphone jack in their then-latest smartphone, the iPhone 7 . Apple believes the future of audio lies in Bluetooth earphones, but some others argue that the technology is not advanced enough to replace wired earphones. The debate continues as other companies have followed suit in removing headphone jacks in favor of Bluetooth devices.\n","explanation":"Bluetooth is a technology invented in the mid 1990s and intended for devices to connect wirelessly over a relatively short range for the purpose of transmitting information and\/or audio.  For example, a headset that connects via Bluetooth could be connected to a computer that's also Bluetooth-enabled, and then whatever would normally come out of the computer's speakers would come out the headset's ear pieces instead, and whatever was spoken into the headset's microphone would be transmitted to the computer's audio input system as if coming in through the computer's microphone.  For this to work, the two devices need to be paired, which means they need to know the unique identification number of the other device and have been given permission to communicate with it, as well as knowing what kind of data exchanges are both possible and allowed. Pairing is not always a smooth process, especially given the somewhat limited methods some of these devices have for user interaction.  For example, headsets typically don't have screens and user interfaces that make it easy to select what computer or other device you want them to connect to, so you're often confronted by blinking lights and\/or sounds to make it through the pairing process, with each device having its own method for initiating or accepting a pairing request.\nCueball is talking to White Hat about Bluetooth and wireless connectivity. He asks if it has become easier to stream audio via Bluetooth since he last used it. White Hat then jests that it has become an easy-to-use and streamlined service, where connecting devices is easy, and he gives some examples of how easy it is to use. Cueball is excited about this, until White Hat reveals that he was lying and that Bluetooth is still as hard to use as ever.  Cueball then invokes the name of \"Josiah Bluetooth\", a fictitious person implied to have invented the eponymous Bluetooth. \"Josiah\" is an old-timey name and suggests the amusing idea that in the 1700s or 1800s a hardy inventor named Josiah Bluetooth came up with the idea for wireless audio.  (Note that while there is no \"Josiah Bluetooth\" person, there is a \" Josiah \" Bluetooth ceramic speaker.)\nThis comic also references the common problem of audio playing through the wrong device when Bluetooth is activated.\nThe title text is another misdirection joke because while the first part of the sentence is true (Bluetooth was indeed named after a tenth-century Viking king), it goes on to make the silly claim that King Harald himself developed a wireless charging standard. This is a reference to the Qi wireless power transfer standard that, like Bluetooth, is a well-branded industry standard with a catchy name and wide adoption that also does not work quite as well as promised even 10 years after its first release. (It could also be a reference to Medieval Vikings charging into battle, which is, by most accounts, usually a fairly wireless affair [ citation needed ] (assuming one discounts chainmail armor). In this case, the standard could be a pun as a standard also denotes a royal or military flag.)\nSpecifically, the Viking king referenced in the title text, Harald \u201cBluetooth\u201d Gormsson , usually called Harald Bluetooth, was a ruler of Denmark and Norway who died in 985 or 986. Jim Kardach of Intel named the Bluetooth protocol after him, apparently as he united the various Norse tribes of Denmark into a single kingdom just as Bluetooth unites communication protocols. The Bluetooth logo unites the two Norse runes corresponding to \"H\" and \"B\" for Harald Bluetooth.\n[Cueball and White Hat are talking, Cueball is holding a cell phone and wireless headphones.] Cueball: I haven\u2019t used a wireless\/bluetooth thingy in like ten years. Is audio stuff still a nightmare? White Hat: Nah, it\u2019s great now.\n[Zoom in on White Hat, who is holding his palm out. Cueball is off-screen.] White Hat: You tap devices together twice to link them and they flash in sync. (It pairs using accelerometer timing and sound.) Tap them three times to disconnect. White Hat: You can pair multiple inputs and outputs and it handles it smoothly. Cueball (off screen): Nice! White Hat: It just works. Sound comes from where you expect. Cueball (off screen): Wonderful.\n[Zoom out to White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: Haha, just kidding, it\u2019s a nightmare. Cueball: Noooooo! White Hat: When I connect to my car, music starts blasting from my headphones while the car repeatedly plays a \u201cNew connection!\u201d chime. Cueball: This is not what Josiah Bluetooth intended!\nThough it has been around since 2001, Bluetooth has been a well known technology for use with wireless speakers and headphones since smartphones became popular in the early 2010s.\nBluetooth was the subject of particularly wide public attention in 2016 when Apple announced the removal of the 3.5 mm headphone jack in their then-latest smartphone, the iPhone 7 . Apple believes the future of audio lies in Bluetooth earphones, but some others argue that the technology is not advanced enough to replace wired earphones. The debate continues as other companies have followed suit in removing headphone jacks in favor of Bluetooth devices.\n"}
{"id":2056,"title":"Horror Movies","image_title":"Horror Movies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2056","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/horror_movies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2056:_Horror_Movies","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are standing together and talking. White Hat points at Cueball who has raised his arms.] White Hat: Wanna see a horror movie? Cueball: Sure! I love watching terrible things happen to people and feeling afraid!\n[Caption below the frame:] I know everyone's into what they're into, but I have never understood horror movies.\nIn early issues, Randall frequently referenced his fear of velociraptors based on watching Jurassic Park as a kid.\n","explanation":"This comic is the first in the Horror Movies series, which was followed by 2076: Horror Movies 2 a month later.\nHorror movies are a genre of movie or film which attempt to elicit the emotional response of fear in the viewer.  Some enjoy that type of movie because it allows them to experience and release that emotion, perhaps as a form of catharsis or release.  Others take a more detached view and enjoy watching bad things happen to other people, perhaps deriving humor or enjoyment out of a situation that they are glad not to be in themselves.\nWhite Hat suggest to Cueball that they see a horror movie, and Cueball appears excited and states Sure! I love watching terrible things happen to people and feeling afraid! This is basically the idea about seeing horror movies, so people who like them might make a statement like this if they say they enjoy them.  As the caption speaks against horror movies, it's most likely that Cueball is being sarcastic.\nRandall comments on this in the caption below the panel saying that he simply does not understand why people would want to watch a movie whose themes and intended emotions are steeped in such negativity. While he fully admits he is criticizing from a position of ignorance (and tries his best not to think less of horror movie fans) he still cannot wrap his head around them.\nIn the title text a conversation between Randall and a friend goes on, as the friend double checks that his favorite movie of all time is Jurassic Park . This movie could be considered a \"horror\" film as there are elements of fear and terror, especially when the dinosaurs that Randall loves so much are chasing and eating humans. However, this movie type is usually placed in the adventure or science fiction genre. Randall agrees that he likes it, but instead of claiming that Jurassic Park isn't a horror film, replies by saying that he likes dinosaurs and actually wants there to be an island full of them. He then continues by giving an example of an alternative premise for Jurassic Park which maintains the horror aspect of the film by removing the dinosaurs and adding serial killers instead, and that type of movie wouldn't appeal to Randall. An amusement park about \"Serial killers in creepy masks\" refers to the movie trope from the Scream , Halloween and the Friday the 13th series of films, among others. The friend then states that such an idea would be really great for a horror movie. While Randall may not agree, he could see the humor in watching Jeff Goldblum (who portrays Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park), in the scene where his attempts to prevent the \"brilliant\" idea of breeding serial killers as an amusement park attractions from coming to fruition, fails! This of course also fails in the case with Dinosaurs in the original movie, but how could Jeff fail to convince people about the bad idea in breeding human serial killers for an amusment park? It is that scene, and only that, Randall would like to watch from that alternative movie.\n[White Hat and Cueball are standing together and talking. White Hat points at Cueball who has raised his arms.] White Hat: Wanna see a horror movie? Cueball: Sure! I love watching terrible things happen to people and feeling afraid!\n[Caption below the frame:] I know everyone's into what they're into, but I have never understood horror movies.\nIn early issues, Randall frequently referenced his fear of velociraptors based on watching Jurassic Park as a kid.\n"}
{"id":2057,"title":"Internal Monologues","image_title":"Internal Monologues","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2057","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/internal_monologues.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2057:_Internal_Monologues","transcript":"[Beneath a two line caption are five characters shown, with their thoughts inside thought bubbles. Below them are labels giving their respective fields of science.] Internal Monologues from various fields\nBotany Megan: I can't get over the fact that trees are made of air.\nPhysics Cueball [looking at a phone in his hand]: It's so weird that I can feel the Earth and my phone being pulled together.\nComputer security Blondie: I wonder if today will be the day everyone gets hacked and it all finally collapses.\nGraphic design Hairy: I wonder how that store ended up with the Law & Order font for their sign.\nMedicine Ponytail: We're all acting normal even though we're full of blood and bones and poop.\n","explanation":"This comic explores some seemingly strange perspectives that academics or professionals might have due to their deeper knowledge and understanding of the fields that they study.\nMany seemingly mundane phenomena can actually be quite weird or counterintuitive if you understand how they really work. The five people featured in this comic, all from different disciplines, are all aware of certain facts about reality that seem so strange even they have trouble believing they are true; yet, undeniably, they are.\nFour of the five people are pondering things that they happen to find very interesting but that aren't too concerning to an everyday person, whereas what Blondie is pondering could have widespread or even global effects on our way of life. In the title text, Blondie amends her thought, since she actually knows an even more concerning truth: we've already all been hacked, and we just don't know it yet.\nBelow, the people's thoughts are explained in detail.\nBotany\nMuch of the mass of trees is extracted from the air. An Australian ABC program explains that \" Trees are made from air \". More precisely: The bulk of the mass of a tree is composed of cellulose and water.\nCellulose is a polysaccharide, a large molecule consisting of many glucose molecules (C 6 H 12 O 6 ) bonded together. Plants make those glucose molecules through photosynthesis: they make them by combining water (H 2 O) and carbon dioxide molecules (CO 2 ) using the energy from sunlight, releasing oxygen in the process (O 2 ). Plants get the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and arguably the water also as it usually comes from rain which is condensed water vapor.\nThe main photosynthesis balance is given by the formula\u00a0:\n6 CO 2 + 6 H 2 O -> C 6 H 12 O 6 + 6 O 2\nPhysics\nGravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces in physics but also to humans the most preeminent one. In everyday experience, most people tend to think of gravity merely as a pervasive downward force, but as a physicist, Cueball is more aware that in fact, all gravitational forces are mutual; any pair of objects will exert a gravitational force on each other, regardless of how big they are. Therefore, he is correct in saying that his phone and the Earth are being \"pulled together\", and finds it remarkable that he is able to sense this interaction between two objects of such an disparate size even when the gravitational pull of the phone is hard to detect.\nComputer Security\nAnyone well versed in computer security understands just how insecure the systems that we depend on actually are.\nIn the title text it is noted that possibly all our systems are already hacked, and we just haven't found out yet. Since malicious hackers do their work covertly, a successful hack often isn't discovered until days, weeks, or even years later if at all.  By that time they may have successfully hacked many other systems using the same techniques and\/or exploiting the same widely unknown or un-patched security flaws.  Some high profile hacks recently discovered at the time of this posting include a 50-million user hack of Facebook and Google+ announcing they are shutting down the consumer side of Google+ , in part due to a security flaw that was discovered and patched months ago.\nGraphic Design\nGraphic designers recognize fonts and design elements, and see how they come together. In this comic, the graphic designer wonders how the Law & Order font was chosen for a particular storefront's sign. Law & Order is a police procedural TV series created by Dick Wolf in 1990, which has had various spinoffs. The font used for the title sequence of Law & Order is called Friz Quadrata , and is also the font used for the signage of the New York Police Department headquarters.\nMedicine\nDoctors are well versed in human anatomy , and are likely to think about what is inside of people more than the average person would. And most people would actually like not to think about all the blood and bones we are all carrying around with us. Not to mention the poop or the contents of our stomach that could be considered vomit or the pee etc.\nMost people do not think about that the person next to them is actually a skeleton packed in meat and animated by electricity... But Ponytail does, because she is being exposed to this fact all the time through her study of medicine.\n[Beneath a two line caption are five characters shown, with their thoughts inside thought bubbles. Below them are labels giving their respective fields of science.] Internal Monologues from various fields\nBotany Megan: I can't get over the fact that trees are made of air.\nPhysics Cueball [looking at a phone in his hand]: It's so weird that I can feel the Earth and my phone being pulled together.\nComputer security Blondie: I wonder if today will be the day everyone gets hacked and it all finally collapses.\nGraphic design Hairy: I wonder how that store ended up with the Law & Order font for their sign.\nMedicine Ponytail: We're all acting normal even though we're full of blood and bones and poop.\n"}
{"id":2058,"title":"Rock Wall","image_title":"Rock Wall","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2058","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rock_wall.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2058:_Rock_Wall","transcript":"[Ponytail is gesturing towards Megan with her hand, while talking to her.] Ponytail: I live next to a wall of rock 20 miles thick.  There's no way around or over it. I'm trapped on this side forever. Ponytail: I study the stuff on the other side.\n[Caption below the frame:] Mantle geology seems like the most frustrating field.\n","explanation":"Mantle geologists study that part of the planet that's below the top \" crust \" of the planet.  The top layer of the planet, which is several dozen miles thick, is the only layer we've been able to explore, by digging tunnels , spelunking , etc. The only way to study the mantle and other inner layers of the earth are through non-visual, non-tactile, indirect methods, and by analyzing old samples of the mantle that have made their way to the surface.\nIn this comic, Ponytail , talking to Megan , is describing her job as a mantle geologist as that of living on one side of a thick wall that is, and likely always will be, impossible to get around, but she has to study what is on the other side of the wall.  In this case the wall is horizontal rather than vertical, the wall being the earth's crust, and makes a complete sphere, so the only way to get past the wall would be to go through.  It is theoretically possible to go through, but as of the comic's posting, humanity is far from doing so.  (The deepest hole dug as of at that time, as measured by true vertical depth , is the Kola Borehole , which only goes down to 12,262 metres out of the estimated 35,000 meters needed to get through at that location.)\nIn the title text Randall states that he doesn't trust mantle\/core geologists. Because if they got the chance he believes they would not hesitate (even the duration of a heartbeat) to strip away Earth's crust to study the mantle or even worse the core directly. Of course if they only did this locally to look at the mantle it would not shatter the Earth although that local area may become a volcano. But if they actually peeled the entire outer layer away, we humans would have no place to live, as the mantle is really hot and would melt easily (producing magmas and therefore lavas when magma\u2019s exposed to surface, see title text of 1405: Meteor to be more confused). However, after a while all these erupted lavas would solidify and become a new crust. Humanity needs to withstand just some millennia of active worldwide volcanism.\nIf they somehow exposed the core even locally something weird would be bound to happen. [ citation needed ]\nBut Randall is afraid that their craving to get around that 20 mile wall would prevent the researchers from even hesitating if they did get that chance. Fortunately, we can study planetary cores in the solar system without stripping Earth's surface by visiting an asteroid which is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet. The Psyche mission is scheduled to launch in 2022 and arrive at 16 Psyche in 2026.\nThis comics seems to be a spin-off from the previous comic 2057: Internal Monologues , where Randall tried to find some interesting monologues from scientist from different research fields. Maybe he did not find an internal monologue he liked for geologists, but ended up with this idea instead. Thinking about the core or mantle, lava and magma seems to be something Randall does a lot, and thus he must have some ideas about how a geologist would , as in 913: Core .\n[Ponytail is gesturing towards Megan with her hand, while talking to her.] Ponytail: I live next to a wall of rock 20 miles thick.  There's no way around or over it. I'm trapped on this side forever. Ponytail: I study the stuff on the other side.\n[Caption below the frame:] Mantle geology seems like the most frustrating field.\n"}
{"id":2059,"title":"Modified Bayes' Theorem","image_title":"Modified Bayes' Theorem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2059","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/modified_bayes_theorem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2059:_Modified_Bayes%27_Theorem","transcript":"[The comic shows a formula with a header in gray on top:] Modified Bayes' theorem:\n[The formula:] P(H|X) = P(H) \u00d7 (1 + P(C) \u00d7 ( P(X|H)\/P(X) - 1 ))\n[Variables and functions are described also in gray:] H: Hypothesis X: Observation P(H): Prior probability that H is true P(X): Prior probability of observing X P(C): Probability that you're using Bayesian statistics correctly\n","explanation":"Bayes' Theorem is an equation in statistics that gives the probability of a given hypothesis accounting not only for a single experiment or observation but also for your existing knowledge about the hypothesis, i.e. its prior probability. Randall's modified form of the equation also purports to account for the probability that you are indeed applying Bayes' Theorem itself correctly by including that as a term in the equation.\nBayes' theorem is:\nP(H | X) is the probability that H , the hypothesis, is true given observation X . This is called the posterior probability . P(X | H) is the probability that observation X will appear given the truth of hypothesis H . This term is often called the likelihood . P(H) is the probability that hypothesis H is true before any observations. This is called the prior , or belief . P(X) is the probability of the observation X regardless of any hypothesis might have produced it. This term is called the marginal likelihood .\nThe purpose of Bayesian inference is to discover something we want to know (how likely is it that our explanation is correct given the evidence we've seen) by mathematically expressing it in terms of things we can find out: how likely are our observations, how likely is our hypothesis a priori , and how likely are we to see the observations we've seen assuming our hypothesis is true. A Bayesian learning system will iterate over available observations, each time using the likelihood of new observations to update its priors (beliefs) with the hope that, after seeing enough data points, the prior and posterior will converge to a single model.\nThe probability always has a value between zero and one, the latter value represents a 100% probability. Both extremes would be:\nIt is a linear-interpolated weighted average of the belief from before the calculation and the belief after applying the theorem correctly. This goes smoothly from not believing the calculation at all up to be fully convinced to it.\nBayesian statistics is often contrasted with \"frequentist\" statistics. For a frequentist, probability is defined as the limit of the relative frequency after a large number of trials. So to a frequentist the notion of \"Probability that you are using Bayesian Statistics correctly\" is meaningless: One cannot do repeated trials, even in principle.  A Bayesian considers probability to be a quantification of personal belief, and so concepts such as \"Probability that you are using Bayesian Statistics correctly\" is meaningful. However since the value of such subjective prior probablities cannot be independently determined, the value of P(H|X) cannot be objectively found.\nThe title text suggests that an additional term should be added for the probability that the Modified Bayes Theorem is correct. But that's this equation, so it would make the formula self-referential, unless we call the result the Modified Modified Bayes Theorem. It could also result in an infinite regress -- needing another term for the probability that the version with the probability added is correct, and another term for that version, and so on. If the modifications have a limit, then a Modified \u03c9 Bayes Theorem would be the result, but then another term for whether it's correct is needed, leading to the Modified \u03c9+1 Bayes Theorem, and so on through every ordinal number .\nModified theories are often suggested in science when the measurements doesn't fit the original theory. An example is the Modified Newtonian dynamics theory, among many others, in which some physicists try to explain dark matter with not much success.\n[The comic shows a formula with a header in gray on top:] Modified Bayes' theorem:\n[The formula:] P(H|X) = P(H) \u00d7 (1 + P(C) \u00d7 ( P(X|H)\/P(X) - 1 ))\n[Variables and functions are described also in gray:] H: Hypothesis X: Observation P(H): Prior probability that H is true P(X): Prior probability of observing X P(C): Probability that you're using Bayesian statistics correctly\n"}
{"id":2060,"title":"Hygrometer","image_title":"Hygrometer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2060","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hygrometer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2060:_Hygrometer","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking and talking. Cueball is holding his phone with one hand, looking at it.] Megan: ...A hygrometer is a device for measuring\u2014 Cueball: I want one! Ooh, found one for $7.99 with free shipping! I'm buying it. Megan: \u2014Humidity. Cueball: Oh, cool!\n[Caption below the frame:] For some reason, I feel a powerful compulsion to own any device whose name ends in \"-ometer.\"\n","explanation":"Here, Megan is talking to Cueball about hygrometers . But before she can even finish explaining what it does, Cueball has looked up, found, and purchased the product. A hygrometer is an instrument for measuring the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, or the amount of water in solids such as soil or wood.\nIt seems Randall (or Cueball) loves being able to measure things and therefore finds instruments or measurement tools that end in -ometer very interesting, and wishes to own all of them. Many measuring instruments use the suffix -meter which is derived from the Greek noun \u03bc\u03ad\u03c4\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd for \"measure\". The character \"o\" always belongs to the first term, but it also belongs to old Greek words like Thermo -meter, micro -meter, or even hygro -meter. Other measurement devices such as speedometer use an English word with an \"o\" appended to mimic the Greek-derived terms, purportedly for easier marketing. Because themes in science often based on Greek terminology that ending at the first part appears often. Nonetheless, Randall believes that this \"o\" belongs to the general term for measuring devices.\nIn the title text, Randall states he is working on assembling a combination of usually unrelated measuring instruments, for a purpose that is neither stated in the comic nor easy to guess. The list consists of:\nFinally, he mentions an ometerometer , a concatenation of -ometer with itself, which would be a device for measuring devices. It has been included in a humorous list of Other Types of Ometers from 2007, where it was described as measuring the measuring capacities of other measuring devices.\n[Megan and Cueball are walking and talking. Cueball is holding his phone with one hand, looking at it.] Megan: ...A hygrometer is a device for measuring\u2014 Cueball: I want one! Ooh, found one for $7.99 with free shipping! I'm buying it. Megan: \u2014Humidity. Cueball: Oh, cool!\n[Caption below the frame:] For some reason, I feel a powerful compulsion to own any device whose name ends in \"-ometer.\"\n"}
{"id":2061,"title":"Tectonics Game","image_title":"Tectonics Game","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2061","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tectonics_game.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2061:_Tectonics_Game","transcript":"[Cueball is standing behind Ponytail, who is sitting on the floor playing a video game on a TV which displays a diagram of tectonic plates.] Cueball: What game is that? Ponytail: Tectonics! Ponytail: You steer chunks of crust around, rifting, subducting, and building and eroding mountains.\n[A view of the game screen is shown. It includes a large cross-section of the Earth with smaller charts around it.] Ponytail (narrating): You try to keep your climate stable and your biosphere rich. Ponytail (narrating): Avoid making large igneous provinces! They're the worst .\n[Cueball holds his hand out in a frameless panel.] Cueball: Cool! Cueball: Can I try? Ponytail (off-panel): Sure!\n[Cueball plays the game while Ponytail watches.] Cueball: ...How do I unpause? Ponytail: It's not paused. Cueball: ... Ponytail: Continents can only move a few inches per year.\n[Cueball has stopped playing and holds the controller in one hand. Ponytail points at the screen that shows an achievement page with no completed achievements, but a progress bar halfway done for an achievement with the number 1 and a mountain.] Cueball: It's real-time? Ponytail: Just 400 millennia to go until your first mountain achievement!\n","explanation":"This comic is to show similarity to many simulation games , which have various niche popularity.  Similar to Maxis' Spore , the game in question allows you to terraform entire worlds.  However, in a typical Randall twist, unlike most simulation games, you could not speed up the progress of time to make world-changing endeavours occur in a matter of seconds.  The game operates in real time, which means most of the user time-frame will be spent idly watching nearly non-moving continents, drifting at the real speed of continental drift, a couple of inches a year, which makes for very slow gameplay. Thus several hundred millennia of play time is needed to reach a game achievement of forming a kilometre high mountain.\nMany computer games simulate to one degree or another real items and tasks, but often simplify them to fit into a game format -- to make them more exciting, to make them quicker, to advance a particular plot line or quest, etc.  For example, a game about farming might allow you to grow corn, but whereas in real life corn takes about 90 days to germinate from seed and grow to maturity, in a game the growth might be instantaneous or measured by minutes, rather than by days\/weeks\/months. The comic may thus be a jab at how our lives already are real time MMORPG .\nIn this game, especially, one would expect such shortcuts, given the extreme time frames required for geological events to be manifested.  The joke is that this game is so realistic that it's played in \"real-time\", which means for every second or hour or eon something would take in real life, in the game it would take the same second or hour or eon to happen.  Playing such a game where the events take longer than the person would be alive would likely be unsatisfying. [ citation needed ] A mildly less extreme example of a simulation game being played in real-time would be the Desert Bus video game where you have to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona , to Las Vegas, Nevada , in real time at a maximum speed of 45 MPH. The trip requires eight hours of continuous play to complete, at which point you score one point with the option to continue playing for additional points at the rate of one point per successful eight hour trip.  The action consists almost entirely of just keeping the bus from veering off the road.  It cannot be paused or sped up, and failure requires a tow back to the starting point at the same 45 MPH speed.\nThe frames show some elements of gameplay.  The first frame shows a destructive plate margin in which an oceanic plate (grey) is being subducted under a continental plate (brown with a person standing on it) while sediments between the plates are compressed to form mountains.  Clockwise from top left, the second frame shows a cross section through the planet and various statistics about the planet (CO 2 levels of 840\u00a0ppm, solar irradiation of 1184 W\/m 2 and heat-flow through the crust of 91\u00a0mW\/m 2 ). Solar irradiation and heat-flow are similar to the Earth, but CO2 levels are raised.  Bottom right displays several stats titled L T , L M , L A and L L , and bottom left is a view of the planet showing the proportion covered by ice (3%), land (31%) and water (66%). It seems that the raised CO2 levels have reduced the amount of ice compared to the Earth. The final panel shows some of the achievements that can be unlocked, the first is 1\u00a0km mountain and the last achievement of the first row is 10\u00a0km mountain. Below that seem to be achievements in the formation of an atoll.\nLarge igneous provinces are suspected to be related to extinction level events and rapid climate changes in real life. Thus, they 'are the worst' in this game.\nIn the title text type A3 V stars are mentioned which are white main sequence stars at mass from 1.4 to 2.1 times the mass of the Sun. Thus they have a shorter lifespan than the Sun, hundreds of millions of years, compared to the 10 billion years lifespan of the Sun. By starting the game now with an A3 V star, there would be plenty of time to complete the game before the real Sun would go to a Red Giant destroying the Earth.\n[Cueball is standing behind Ponytail, who is sitting on the floor playing a video game on a TV which displays a diagram of tectonic plates.] Cueball: What game is that? Ponytail: Tectonics! Ponytail: You steer chunks of crust around, rifting, subducting, and building and eroding mountains.\n[A view of the game screen is shown. It includes a large cross-section of the Earth with smaller charts around it.] Ponytail (narrating): You try to keep your climate stable and your biosphere rich. Ponytail (narrating): Avoid making large igneous provinces! They're the worst .\n[Cueball holds his hand out in a frameless panel.] Cueball: Cool! Cueball: Can I try? Ponytail (off-panel): Sure!\n[Cueball plays the game while Ponytail watches.] Cueball: ...How do I unpause? Ponytail: It's not paused. Cueball: ... Ponytail: Continents can only move a few inches per year.\n[Cueball has stopped playing and holds the controller in one hand. Ponytail points at the screen that shows an achievement page with no completed achievements, but a progress bar halfway done for an achievement with the number 1 and a mountain.] Cueball: It's real-time? Ponytail: Just 400 millennia to go until your first mountain achievement!\n"}
{"id":2062,"title":"Barnard's Star","image_title":"Barnard's Star","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2062","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/barnards_star.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2062:_Barnard%27s_Star","transcript":"[A black sky is shown with a yellow spot near the bottom, left of the center. Three smaller red spots at the diagonal from top left to bottom right indicate a moving star over time. Above these red spots lines are connected to a text that starts and ends with many A s, first growing, and at the end getting smaller:] ...AAAAHHi Sun! I was here billions of years before you formed and will shine for trillions of years after you dieEEEEEEAAA...\n[Caption below the frame:] Sometimes, I wonder what Barnard's Star is saying to the Sun as it performs its 20,000-year-long high-speed flyby.\n","explanation":"Barnard's Star is a very-low-mass red dwarf about 6 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Ophiuchus . It is the fourth-nearest known individual star to the Sun after the three components of the Alpha Centauri system; it is the closest star to Earth in the Northern Hemisphere. It is a red dwarf with a mass of 0.144 Solar masses, a diameter one fifth that of the Sun, and it is 7\u201312 billion years old. Because of this low mass the gravitational pressure in the core is much lower and thus the fusion rate is far smaller than in the core of the Sun. In fact this star is so dim that, even though it's one of the nearest, it can't be seen by the naked eye. The low fusion rate also means that the lifespan of small stars is much longer. While huge stars might last a few hundred million years, and the Sun about 10 billion years, a small red dwarf has a lifespan of about a trillion years.\nBarnard's Star is the star with the greatest proper motion in the sky. Proper motion is motion in the sky other than that caused by Earth's rotation or orbit. Barnard's star is both very close to the sun (as these things go) and moving now at a speed of more than 140 km\/s toward the Sun. It will make its closest approach to the Sun in approximately 10,000 years, at a distance of about 3.75 light-years.\nThe image on the right shows different stars near the Sun over 100,000 years and it can be seen that none of them are getting closer than 3 light-years. This is a safe distance to our Solar System and the stars will not influence the orbits of the planets or smaller bodies. It's also obvious that much closer approaches never have happened since the Solar System formed 4.5 billion years ago because otherwise the nearly circular orbits of the planets in the same plane wouldn't be possible. Closer encounters have happened in the past by mostly small stars like Scholz's Star which actually passed through the Oort cloud at a distance of 0.82 light-years about 70,000 years ago, and at least one estimate suggests that a star is expected to pass through the Oort Cloud every 100,000 years or so. This distance is still too far away to influence the orbits of the planets, but those encounters cause comets perturbed from the Oort cloud to the inner Solar System roughly 2 million years later.\nThe comic shows the sizes and the distances not in a proper scale. If the Sun was 1.4 cm (1.4 Mio km in real) in diameter, Barnard's Star would be less than 3 mm at a distance of 356 km. Even Jupiter wouldn't fit into this picture -- at ten times smaller than the Sun, it would be a few pixels, but at a distance of 7.8 m to the Sun and all the other planets would fit into a circle less than 100 meters in diameter. The distances to others stars are far beyond human imagination and at its closest distance a message still takes 3.75 years from Barnard's Star to the Sun.\nIn regards to \"20,000-year-long high-speed flyby\", the joke here is suggesting Barnard's Star would need to scream out the maleficent, trolling statement as quickly as possible due to 20,000 years being such a small segment of time relative to the lifespan of the star (and our Sun, for that matter).\nThe title text emphasizes that this close approach will not be any hazard to the Solar System, but someone is envious of the long lifetime of Barnard's Star or annoyed by its unpleasant behavior (yelling at the sun for 20,000 years would be a minuscule amount of time for the stars, but for humans it would be a vast length of time, and would get annoying very quickly).\n[A black sky is shown with a yellow spot near the bottom, left of the center. Three smaller red spots at the diagonal from top left to bottom right indicate a moving star over time. Above these red spots lines are connected to a text that starts and ends with many A s, first growing, and at the end getting smaller:] ...AAAAHHi Sun! I was here billions of years before you formed and will shine for trillions of years after you dieEEEEEEAAA...\n[Caption below the frame:] Sometimes, I wonder what Barnard's Star is saying to the Sun as it performs its 20,000-year-long high-speed flyby.\n"}
{"id":2063,"title":"Carnot Cycle","image_title":"Carnot Cycle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2063","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/carnot_cycle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2063:_Carnot_Cycle","transcript":"[A cartesian plot in the first quadrant with axes labeled \"P\" on the vertical axis and \"V\" on the horizontal axis, with a rhombus-shaped set of four points with arrows between them.] [Caption above the graph:] The four stages of the Carnot Cycle\n[The first line starts at the top-left point and goes right and slightly downwards to the next point. The label is:] 1. Isometric Expansion When heated, the gas becomes larger due to increasing volume\n[The next line starts at the last point and goes downwards and a little to the right.] 2. Isotonic Expansion The gas expands further due to dark energy while percent milkfat remains constant\n[The next line starts at this last point and goes to the left and slightly upwards.] 3. Isopropyl Compression While inflation is held constant, the gas contracts due to tightening interest rates\n[The last line goes upwards and slightly to the left, returning to the first point.] 4. Decline and Fall The gas diminishes and goes into the west while remaining Galadriel, completing the cycle\n","explanation":"This comic shows a Pressure\u2013volume diagram which is used in this case for a Carnot cycle , a theoretical thermodynamic cycle covered in most thermodynamics classes which looks a lot like the figure drawn. The most common example of a (suboptimal) Carnot cycle is the vapor compression cycle used in refrigerators . However in this case, Randall has replaced the labels of the 4 stages of the real Carnot cycle with new ones.\nPressure\u2013volume diagrams were first developed to understand the efficiency of steam engines and plot the change of pressure p with respect to volume V for a specific process. The process forms a cycle and the amount of energy involved can be estimated by the area under the curve on the chart. The Carnot cycle describes the ideal efficiency that such an engine can achieve during the conversion of heat into work, or vice versa like in a refrigeration system. The real steps are called (explained in short):\nAn isothermal process is a change of a system, in which the temperature remains constant. In this diagram the volume increases (expansion) or decreases (compression). The term isentropic describes a lossless process where no heat leaves the gas, here the increased volume only causes a further decrease in pressure; it is also called an adiabatic process and is the thing which warms air when you compress it quickly. Isentropic means \"doesn't cause the heat death of the universe\", which is a rare thing.\nThe prefix iso- is derived from the Ancient Greek word \u00edsos which translates to equal and used widely in modern days in science like here to indicate a process at the same temperature (-thermal) which is not shown in the graph. The prefix is- to the term entropy is used because isoentropic sounds stupid.\nIn the comic, the cycle also has two phases of expansion followed by two phases of contraction (or \"decline\"), but the names of steps one to three are replaced with other words beginning with the prefix \"iso-\" meaning same or equal, and the factors that are held constant are absurd.\nEach step in this comic is explained below:\n1. Isometric expansion. When heated, the gas becomes larger due to increasing volume\nIsometric (literally \"equal dimensions\") can refer to a property or process that is symmetrical in all dimensions (i.e. the gas is expanding radially) or to a type of thermodynamic process where volume is held constant but temperature is free to vary, the exact opposite of the first step in the real Carnot cycle. Additionally, the comic text uses a circular argument (become larger due to increasing volume).\nIn mathematics, an isometric mapping (between metric spaces) is a map that keeps all the distances intact. If we measure the distance the same way throughout the cycle, then isometric expansion (or for that matter, isometric compression) is not really an expansion (or a compression).\n2. Isotonic expansion. The gas expands further due to dark energy while percent milkfat remains constant.\nIsotonic is a descriptor commonly associated with sports drinks (and not thermodynamics), which contain similar concentrations of salt and sugar as in the human body. Dark energy is hypothesized to be a cause for the expansion of the universe, which obviously isn't relevant to thermodynamics.(Yet.) The density of milk depends on milkfat and solids-non-fat, which includes lactose. Fortified milk has increased solids-non-fat but the same percentage of milkfat, resulting in increased calories and an increased density. So the fortification of milk results in increased calories, possibly referred to as dark energy, and a contraction, as less space is needed for 1 kg of milk. However, this explanation does not match the expansion suggested in the comic.\nLater Randall again combined dark energy (and also dark matter) with milkfat in 2216: Percent Milkfat .\n3. Isopropyl compression. While inflation is held constant, the gas contracts due to tightening interest rates.\nIsopropyl alcohol is commonly used for cleaning. Inflation and contraction could refer to changes in gas volume, but the reference to interest rates puts them in the context of macroeconomics . Raising (\"tightening\") interest rates tends to reduce inflation and\/or \"contract\" the economy. High interest rates are a feature of the third stage (recession) of the Juglar cycle . In economics (and other sciences) to better understand model parameter relations, some parameter may be held constant in theory. This could refer to the Fisher equation . Holding one parameter constant is also done in the Carnot cycle (for a physical parameter): not only in theory but also in practice! (In free market economies the inflation cannot be directly held constant).\nBut inflation may also refer to dark energy mentioned at the isotonic expansion section above. Inflation in cosmology is a theory of the exponential expansion of space in the early universe, an effect associated with the \"accelerating universe\" and for which findings the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was given. The National Geographic blog entry Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 \u2013 The Accelerating Universe explains that \"...Today, most physicists, influenced by inflation, would ... call it dark energy.\"\n4. Decline and fall. The gas diminishes and goes into the West while remaining Galadriel, completing the cycle.\nGaladriel is a character in The Lord of the Rings . She is one of the leading elves , a race that in the time of the book is said to be dwindling (in number and importance) in Middle Earth and migrating westward to Valinor . Galadriel is one of the last elves to leave, after successfully resisting temptation to take the One Ring and become an all-powerful queen who dominates Middle-earth, instead saying \"I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.\" The title may be a reference to Edward Gibbon 's 18th century masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , or to the novel Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (which is itself a reference to Gibbon's book). This stage is present in the cycle because in the real cycle, at this stage, volume of the gas decreases without exchange of heat. It is the last stage after which the gas has its original value of variables, thus completing the cycle.\nThe title text refers to Richard Wagner and J.R.R Tolkien . Wagner's Ring Cycle consists of four operas. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings , which some have suggested was inspired by Wagner's Ring. Their works are known as literary cycles .\n[A cartesian plot in the first quadrant with axes labeled \"P\" on the vertical axis and \"V\" on the horizontal axis, with a rhombus-shaped set of four points with arrows between them.] [Caption above the graph:] The four stages of the Carnot Cycle\n[The first line starts at the top-left point and goes right and slightly downwards to the next point. The label is:] 1. Isometric Expansion When heated, the gas becomes larger due to increasing volume\n[The next line starts at the last point and goes downwards and a little to the right.] 2. Isotonic Expansion The gas expands further due to dark energy while percent milkfat remains constant\n[The next line starts at this last point and goes to the left and slightly upwards.] 3. Isopropyl Compression While inflation is held constant, the gas contracts due to tightening interest rates\n[The last line goes upwards and slightly to the left, returning to the first point.] 4. Decline and Fall The gas diminishes and goes into the west while remaining Galadriel, completing the cycle\n"}
{"id":2064,"title":"I'm a Car","image_title":"I'm a Car","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2064","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/im_a_car.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2064:_I%27m_a_Car","transcript":"[The bottom right rear end of a car is shown with a bumper sticker next to the unreadable license plate.] I'm a car and I vote\n","explanation":"This comic was released eleven days before the United States midterm elections on Tuesday, November 6, 2018 and even the header text at the top of the xkcd page had changed a few days before by showing a link to vote.org to help US citizens to register and finding their polling places. Randall uses a neutral way to encourage people to use the right to rule their governmental representatives. Before the presidential election, 2016 , however, he chose the Democrats as shown in the comic 1756: I'm With Her (see more here ).\nThis comic shows a car with a bumper sticker , which is generally a thin rectangle piece of plastic with a message on one side and adhesive on the other side in order to stick to a car.  This allows the owner of the car to display a message they want to present to whoever is driving behind them or in their vicinity.  Bumper stickers are usually used to express a viewpoint, whether personal or political, held by the owner or driver of the car.  This comic makes literal the ones that include or allude to the personal pronoun \"I\" and its variations, i.e. first person singular statements.  Of course the intent is that \"I\" is referring to the person who put the bumper sticker on the car, but as the sticker is attached to the car the more literal interpretation is that \"I\" is referring to the car. So the humor is derived by the notion that the car itself is making these statements.  (On an even more meta level, the comic could be interpreted as saying that the person who wrote the words in the comic, i.e. Randall , is saying that he is a car.)\nThe bumper sticker on the car in the comic is a variation of a sticker used to both encourage people to vote, as well as express their political position: \"I'm a ___, and I vote\" (where the blank is traditionally filled in with \"Union Worker\", \"Catholic\", \"Senior Citizen\", \"Gun Owner\" or some other demographic or organizational membership). However here it is attributed to an automobile which is not capable of voting [ citation needed ] .\nThe comic could be an indirect reference to the growing \"intelligence\" of self-driving cars , such that one day they might have the intellect to communicate, vote, and engage in other self-motivated activities. See \u2018 Sally \u2019 by Isaac Asimov . It may also relate to security concerns around increasing use of electronic voting mechanisms - the joke being that the car is able to abuse the interfaces to such systems either to vote on behalf of its owner or as its own entity. Though voting might not be one's biggest concern if their \"intelligent\" car got dragged into a bot net...\nThe title text seems to be another typical message on a bumper sticker, saying that the driver is a \"Proud Parent Of An Honor Student\". However, this sticker is a bit longer, since it continues to state that \"the person driving me is proud, too\". Thus once again it is the car who is the proud parent. And thus maybe it is a car that is the honor student?  Another thought is that this may be a reference to the 1965-66 TV sitcom My Mother The Car .\n[The bottom right rear end of a car is shown with a bumper sticker next to the unreadable license plate.] I'm a car and I vote\n"}
{"id":2065,"title":"Who Sends the First Text?","image_title":"Who Sends the First Text?","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2065","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/who_sends_the_first_text.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2065:_Who_Sends_the_First_Text%3F","transcript":"Who sends the first text more often? [A line graph with a segmented bar underneath shows a 50\/50 marker in the middle while the left end is labeled \"I text first 100% of the time\" whereas the right end is labeled \"They text first 100% of the time\".]\n[The bar below is divided into five sections:]\n[A small part at the left, and a next, slightly larger part. The text below points to the second part:] People who I think of as friends but secretly worry that they're just politely putting up with me\n[Below this a text is shown for the first part:] ... definitely just politely putting up with me\n[In the middle is a big part:] Friends\n[To the right the parts are symmetric, the first is larger:] That really nice friend who keeps inviting me to things even though I flake constantly\n[The last small bar at the right:] Automated alerts and political campaigns\n","explanation":"Text messaging is a back-and-forth communication via SMS between two users. In this comic, Randall shows a line graph of \"who sends the first text more often?\" This is meant to show who Randall initiates conversations with, and who initiates conversations with him.\nMaintaining a friendship or relationship (whether intimate, friendship, casual, or business) typically requires communication; often that communication takes place when two individuals are not in the same location by means of an exchange of text messages.  A normal balanced relationship typically involves both parties involved to have an approximately equal interest in making conversations happen, as measured in this case by \"who sends the first text\".  The person who desires that a particular communication take place typically will send a text message, and once the other person responds the conversation happens, and the relationship progresses.  If neither person initiates, the relationship will likely suffer.\nWhile this graph shows the majority of his relationships involve friends whereby both sides are prone to initiating conversations, the graph also shows some groups that are a little more at the extremes, some where Randall texts a lot but they typically don't initiate text conversations to him, and some where others text him a lot but he rarely initiates text conversations with them.\nOn the left side of the graph are people with whom Randall initiates conversations with \"100% of the time\". On the right side of the graph are those who initiate conversations with Randall.\nThe chart is separated into 5 blocks. The two blocks on the left are those who may be, or definitely are, \"just politely putting up with [Randall]\". This is implied that they may not be close friends with Randall, but Randall still wants to be friends with them. Their reluctance to initiate conversation with Randall is shown by the fact that Randall usually sends the first text to them.\nThe largest block, in the middle, is \"friends\". These friends range from Randall initiating a lot, to them initiating a lot. There is a healthy range of who initiates first.\nThe next block to the right is for \"that really nice friend who keeps inviting me to things even though I flake constantly\". This means that Randall promises to go to events that this friend invites him to, but does not always follow through. This friend is still persistent in inviting Randall. Additionally, Randall could be less close to this person, based on him not categorizing this person under \"friends\".\nThe final block is \"automated alerts and political campaigns\". Randall would certainly not be likely to initiate \"conversation\" with automated systems, and would be very unlikely to initiate conversations with political campaigns. The fact that the bar is not purely 100% suggests that he has on rare occasion sent the first text to such recipients, perhaps for a campaign he believes in, or to request to be added to an automated alert system (i.e. opt-in). The fact that it includes political campaigns is a reference to the incessant texts being sent to Americans about the upcoming midterms.\nIn the title text, Randall wishes that he would know the percentage of \"who sends the first text more often\", for each person that he texts. But he is also wary of the potential implications of finding out this information.\n(Many old school messenger like pidgin offer such statistics through plugins though)\nWho sends the first text more often? [A line graph with a segmented bar underneath shows a 50\/50 marker in the middle while the left end is labeled \"I text first 100% of the time\" whereas the right end is labeled \"They text first 100% of the time\".]\n[The bar below is divided into five sections:]\n[A small part at the left, and a next, slightly larger part. The text below points to the second part:] People who I think of as friends but secretly worry that they're just politely putting up with me\n[Below this a text is shown for the first part:] ... definitely just politely putting up with me\n[In the middle is a big part:] Friends\n[To the right the parts are symmetric, the first is larger:] That really nice friend who keeps inviting me to things even though I flake constantly\n[The last small bar at the right:] Automated alerts and political campaigns\n"}
{"id":2066,"title":"Ballot Selfies","image_title":"Ballot Selfies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2066","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ballot_selfies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2066:_Ballot_Selfies","transcript":"[Megan, Ponytail, Cueball, White Hat, and Hairbun are standing in a line with Hairbun in front. All are facing forward to the right except Cueball, who is looking to his left at Ponytail. Megan holds a phone in her hand while Ponytail carries an easel under her left arm and a paintbrush in her right hand.] Ponytail: Ballot selfies are illegal in this state, so to immortalize my vote I'm doing an oil painting in the voting booth.\n","explanation":"This comic was published six days prior to the 2018 United States general elections , also called midterm elections , because they happen halfway between two presidential elections, two years before and after. At the time, the xkcd header still provided a link to vote.org , a website that helps US citizens with essential voting issues, like how to register or how to find their polling locations. It is the first of three consecutive comics that deal with this election.\nIn the United States, \" ballot selfies \" refers to the practice of taking a picture of oneself with a completed ballot. These have been illegal in many states, due to laws passed to prevent vote selling.\nWithout proof of how a vote was cast, if someone bribed (or even violently coerced) a voter to vote for candidate A, the voter could just vote 'B' and the coercer would be unable to tell whether they voted as instructed.  This is at the heart of the concept of \"a secret ballot\".  But if ballot-selfies or other proof-of-vote mechanisms are permitted then the evil-doer can demand verification that the voter did what they were coerced to do - and this jeopardizes the idea of a truly free and fair election.\nHowever, the \"secret ballot\" principle is not universally valued nor enforced. Some voting machines produce a paper receipt showing the choices the voter made - and many jurisdictions permit use of a postal ballot - so there are plenty of other ways to circumvent the law in those places.  So the ban on ballot selfies is harder to justify unless those other lines of coercion are also ruled out.\nOn the other hand, the desire to take and distribute ballot selfies often comes from an excitement in participating in the voting process and the desire to share that excitement in the hopes of encouraging others to vote, and anything that helps get more people to the polls is generally considered to be a good thing. In addition, the law is incredibly difficult to enforce -- there is little way to prevent somebody from photographing their ballot and privately showing this photo to somebody else -- and the practice of enforcing it (i.e. searching for possible photographic devices all together) would make the local government incredibly unpopular.  Lastly, voters storing evidence of their votes could be useful to prevent voting fraud performed by the state.\nThis dual threat\/benefit has led some states to explicitly legalize ballot selfies, other states to specifically disallow them and even levy steep financial penalties, while the rest are still debating or ignoring the issue .\nAs Ponytail is aware of this law, she believes she has identified a solution wherein she will make an oil painting of her voting rather than taking a photograph .  A painting being more of an artistic endeavor that doesn't have to faithfully record all aspects of the image, it may well be valid both on grounds of freedom of speech as well as not being a verbatim record of her vote - thereby preserving the secrecy of the ballot.  Of course, making a painting of her vote may lead to additional problems. If she intends to paint the portrait herself, of herself (i.e. a self-portrait ) casting her vote, it would be very difficult and time consuming to attempt to do that, especially without a mirror, which she apparently doesn't have with her and which is generally not standard issue in voting booths. [ citation needed ] She could also try to recruit someone else to do the painting, not knowing the level of their artistic talent, however, usually only the person casting the vote is allowed in the booth, and they are expected to close the curtain or otherwise ensure no outside person, like the painter, can view the vote casting act. It would also require her to stay in the booth longer than most voters.\nWhile Hairbun and White Hat are simply standing in line, Megan can be seen using a mobile phone.\nThe comic might also be a reference to the existing ban of cameras in US courtrooms , which lead US newspapers to widely adopt cartoons as a replacement.\nIn many US states, changes to state law can be made through the initiative and referendum process, which can be initiated and pursued by any citizen.\nThe title text refers to the legality of taking a ballot selfie whilst voting against the law against ballot selfies.\n[Megan, Ponytail, Cueball, White Hat, and Hairbun are standing in a line with Hairbun in front. All are facing forward to the right except Cueball, who is looking to his left at Ponytail. Megan holds a phone in her hand while Ponytail carries an easel under her left arm and a paintbrush in her right hand.] Ponytail: Ballot selfies are illegal in this state, so to immortalize my vote I'm doing an oil painting in the voting booth.\n"}
{"id":2067,"title":"Challengers","image_title":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2067","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/challengers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2067:_Challengers","transcript":"[A loading screen appears shortly before the large picture has rendered. We can see an American flag in an oval badge with the text:] I voted [And beneath a text saying:] Loading...\n2018 Midterm Challengers The bigger the candidate's name, the higher the office and the better their chances of success.\n[In a frame a zoomable map shows all US-States (Alaska and Hawaii are shown in the left lower corner.) The candidates are shown colored mainly in red and blue at different sizes. Each state has many landmarks shown in gray. There are also many comics embedded into the picture.]\nBy Randall Munroe, Kelsey Harris, and Max Goodman\nLandmarks from Wikipedia. Success odds estimated from district voting history, special election results, and seat ratings. Thank you to Dailykos Elections for their spreadsheets, shapefiles, election ratings, and advice, and to @davidshor, @charlotteeffect, and @thedlcc for additional candidate data.\nMap of interesting features on the comic ( Red X : comic strip, Green X : independent candidate, Blue X : xkcd landmark)\n\n","explanation":"Regarding the midterm elections held in the United States on November 6, 2018, this comic shows probably all challengers, which are candidates running against the current office-holder, as well as those running in open seats where a change of the major party from the previous election could occur. It is the second of three consecutive comics that deal with this election.\nRandall states on top that \"The bigger the candidate's name is,\"\nWhile an office can be subclassified by order from state down to county, the guesses on better chances to success can be only based on surveys before the elections.\nAll names provide an indirect link to the first Google Search result on that specific person and position. As common, Democratic candidates are shown in blue text, Republican candidates in red, and independent candidates are in green.\nThe landmarks shown in gray are essentially links to Wikipedia pages containing coordinates pointing to the US in their body (both visible on the site and hidden in the wiki source) that point to places in the US. If they contain more than one coordinate then the first one is used, for example the List of the major 3000-meter summits of the United States page is shown in Alaska, and the xkcd page is linked near Boston, Massachusetts. This list seems to be auto-generated from a Wikipedia dump made possibly before 2017. There doesn't seem to be any other criteria as the list also contains orphaned wikipedia pages that only contain hidden coordinates in their sources pointing to the US, for example this one .  Wikipedia pages containing these coordinates can be easily enumerated on the site in blocks of 500 at a time.\nSince the map is large there's also a loading screen present that can be seen while the map is loading.\nThere are a total of nine comics embedded into the map at various locations. They are showed when zooming into the map at the appropriate section.\nLocation: Lubbock, Texas\n[Black Hat and Cueball are talking.] Black Hat: Starting on November 7th, we're going to blanket the airwaves with attack ads. Cueball: Isn't the election on November 6th? Black Hat: Yeah, the advertising rates go way down after that.\nAttack ads are campaign advertising that usually attack the opponents' campaign instead of promoting one's own. The comic also refers to the fact that media outlets usually spike their advertising prices during the campaign, and it becomes cheaper afterwards. However there's usually no point in advertising afterwards for a campaign as the polling has already taken place. This may also be a callback to 1130: Poll Watching .\nLubbock was the place where some attack ads were shown few months before the election. Texas is also notable as in 2008 during the Democratic Party primary Hillary Clinton started running attack ads aimed at Barack Obama, who later became President, causing controversy.\nLocation: Weed, California\n[Cueball is holding a piece of paper and talking to Megan.] Cueball: Question #1 voids all 2018 ballot measures except itself. Cueball: Question #2 retroactively lowers the threshold for passing ballot measures to 5%. Cueball: Question #3 requires a re-vote on all failed ballot measures a day later. Cueball: Question #4 requires a re-vote on all passed ballot measures a day later. Cueball: Question #5 bans those annoying phone scammers, but also says that if an odd number of ballot measures pass, Christmas is canceled. Cueball: Question #6 makes a \"yes\" count as a \"no\" on odd-numbered ballot measures. Cueball: Question #7 does nothing but counts as a ballot measure passing. Cueball: Question #8 says that- Megan: I'm leaving these all blank and voting against whoever approves ballot measures.\nBallot measures are proposed laws that are approved and rejected by voters. In California, apart from the elections to Congressional and state offices, there will be also be 12 extra propositions for the voters in this election. Sometimes propositions also include changing how voting should be done in subsequent elections. There are people who believe proposals on US ballots are asked in a very convoluted way, and could be made simpler.\nIn this comic a lot of the proposals sound complex and self-referential as well, therefore Megan just says that she doesn't wish to vote to any of them, and would actually like to ban people creating ballot papers like this. Not voting might also refer to the scenario where people believe none of the choices during an election are good, and instead vote to no-one or deface their ballot papers in protest.\nThe name of the town chosen, Weed, California, may be a pun on how marijuana is legal in California.\nLocation: Bellingham, Washington\n[Cueball holds a presentation to a group of people including White Hat and Hairbun sitting at an office desk. The presentation shows a map of a district.] Cueball: Under my new Carlymandering plan, we'll create five red districts, five blue districts, and one district which contains only Carly Rae Jepsen. Hairbun: That seems fair.\nThis refers to gerrymandering , a tactic used to re-shape voting district boundaries to make sure one candidate prevails over the other. \"Carlymandering\" is a malamanteau which combines gerrymandering with Carly Rae Jepsen , a Canadian singer, whose single \" Party for One \" was released the day before the comic's publication. Although the song is about partying (e.g. going out) alone, [ citation needed ] the joke is that it could also mean a one-person political party, and she would have a full gerrymandered district to herself.\nJepsen lives in Vancouver, which is just on the other side of the US border in Canada. The comic is placed in Whatcom County, which is notable for Point Roberts , a peninsula which, although part of Washington state, is actually an exclave of the US, as it's surrounded by sea on three sides, and has its only land border with Vancouver to the north. The comic might refer to the fact that Jepsen could solely live in this exclave. However, since she is not a US citizen, she can neither vote nor be elected in US elections.\nLocation: Washington, DC\n[Cueball is standing in the middle of Washington, DC] Cueball: I can see my House from here!\nComic is probably referencing the White House , the residence of the President, located in Washington, DC. This could also refer to the Capitol Building , the home of the House of Representatives , also located in Washington, DC.\nLocation: Primm, Nevada\n[A group of five people are standing] Blondie: Remember: The only poll that counts is the one on Election Day. And the ones that help campaigns allocate resources. And the ones that drive media coverage and the ones that inform us all about what our fellow members of the public believe. And the ones that...\nThe word \"poll\" has two distinct meanings in regards to elections -- the place where you go to cast your official vote is called a poll, as are the unofficial surveys done to try to gauge how people are likely to vote.\nDuring campaign there is usually polling done by survey companies to determine each candidate's chances of winning. This comic refers to the fact that often the candidate that is behind in the unofficial polls tells their electorate that these polls don't matter, as they are just surveys and not the actual final result. This is usually to encourage their voter base that it's still worth voting for them. The joke here is that Blondie doesn't finish here but tells the electorate that other polls are actually also important.\nNevada is one of the states where there is only a slim difference between the candidates based on polls hence the need for each candidate to rally their supporters and make sure everyone is voting.\nLocation: Chadron, Nebraska\n[Megan is standing at a podium with her arm raised] Megan: If elected, I vow to find and punish the voters responsible.\nOften candidates make promises of things they will do when they are elected. Vowing to find and punishing people responsible for a certain action, oftentimes criminals, is also common. However, certain performance artists aside, these two things are generally not conflated, as they are here, to ludicrous effect.\nPutting this comic into Nebraska might refer to the fact that in 2016 Nebraska voted to repeal the death penalty ban , allowing the reinstatement of the death penalty, also called capital punishment, in the state.\nLocation: Storm Lake, Iowa\nCueball: The midterms are so stressful. Megan: I just hope J.D. Scholten wins. Cueball: Why? Megan: Google Steve King. [Cueball looking at his phone] Cueball: Yikes.\nJ.D. Scholten is a Democratic candidate for Iowa's 4th Congressional District. Steve King is a Republican representative who has stirred controversy due his endorsement of candidates, in other countries, who were members of parties with white supremacist ties, and he has explicitly and frequently stated concern with the American society being destroyed by \"other people's babies\" . King would go on to win re-election by a narrow margin.\nLocation: Richmond, Virginia\n[Cueball is holding a sign that says: Abigail Spanberger for Congress]\nAbigail Spanberger was a candidate running for Congress in Virginia's 7th district, which includes Richmond. Based on polls she had a chance to beat her opponent, and she then became the first Democrat in her district after 50 years of Republican control, beating out Republican incumbent David Brat by 2 percentage points. Cueball probably was trying to encourage people to vote for her on election day.\nLocation: Saint Louis, Missouri\n[Two people next to the Gateway Arch are talking] Cueball: Ah, Saint Louis. Home of America's largest... Whatever that thing is.\nSaint Louis, Missouri is the location of the Gateway Arch , the largest arch in the United States. (It's also one of the most recognizable arches in Saint Louis, according to 1368: One Of The .) Since in this comic they are next to the side of the arch, it is possible its sheer size stops them from determining what it is, although they should probably know. An alternate interpretation is that they are baffled by the existence of a giant, seemingly-useless steel arch, and do not know what to refer to it as.\nThe area surrounding the Arch was known as Jefferson National Expansion Memorial until February 2018, when it was renamed to Gateway Arch National Park.\nThe title text shows the hint that the reader can zoom in and move over all 50 states to reveal details which can't be seen in the overall view. Furthermore Randall calls on Americans to vote: he requests that people take an active part in the elections to change that picture.\n[A loading screen appears shortly before the large picture has rendered. We can see an American flag in an oval badge with the text:] I voted [And beneath a text saying:] Loading...\n2018 Midterm Challengers The bigger the candidate's name, the higher the office and the better their chances of success.\n[In a frame a zoomable map shows all US-States (Alaska and Hawaii are shown in the left lower corner.) The candidates are shown colored mainly in red and blue at different sizes. Each state has many landmarks shown in gray. There are also many comics embedded into the picture.]\nBy Randall Munroe, Kelsey Harris, and Max Goodman\nLandmarks from Wikipedia. Success odds estimated from district voting history, special election results, and seat ratings. Thank you to Dailykos Elections for their spreadsheets, shapefiles, election ratings, and advice, and to @davidshor, @charlotteeffect, and @thedlcc for additional candidate data.\nMap of interesting features on the comic ( Red X : comic strip, Green X : independent candidate, Blue X : xkcd landmark)\n\n"}
{"id":2068,"title":"Election Night","image_title":"Election Night","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2068","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/election_night.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2068:_Election_Night","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball face each other while talking on the left of the panel] Megan: Ugh, I'm just going to hide out for election night. We'll know the results the next day anyway. The drama is so unnecessary. Cueball: Yeah. The internet and the 24-hour news have turned elections into a continuous, inescapable media onslaught. [A man in a top hat appears on the right side of the panel with a \"Poof\"]\n[Panel with just the man in a top hat, holding a newspaper] Man in a top hat: Hi! I'm a time traveler from 1896. Let me tell you about our election night coverage. Man in a top hat: *Ahem* Man in a top hat: From the Chicago Tribune\n[Zoom in on the head of the man in a top hat] Man in a top hat: \"Once every hour from the roof of the Great Northern Hotel a series of bombs, which will ascend for several thousand feet, will be fired. Two colors will be used, blue and red.\" Man in a top hat: \"Blue to indicate McKinley's election, red to indicate Bryan's election.\" Man in a top hat: \"The bombardment of the skies will commence at 7 o'clock and will be repeated hourly.\" [Grey citation]: Chicago Tribune, Oct 30th & Nov 1st, 1896\n[Megan and Cueball on the left looking at the man in the top hat on the right] Megan: Yeah, well, we have a needle, though. Man in a top hat: A needle. Megan: It jiggles! Man in a top hat: Sounds awful. Cueball: Listen, you had to be there.\n","explanation":"This is the third comic in a row that deals with elections in the United States; the trio has been published in the week before the US midterm elections held on November 6, 2018 and it compares media coverage on election results in 1896 and 2018. During this time the Header text of xkcd was also changed three times, including on the release days of both this and the previous comic, to help people go and vote. See more in the trivia section .\nWhile elections and voting have been a public staple for generations, election coverage by the media can result in voter fatigue .  While voter fatigue is considered a major criticism of things like first past the post voting systems, media outlets will also contribute.\nThe time traveler from 1896, wearing a top hat (the typical hat used at that time), presents Megan and Cueball a method how the latest news --over the night-- is published to the public. No broadcasting television or even radio existed then and most newspapers, reaching the readers on the next morning, were printed in the evening before the election results were certain.  For the election referenced in this clipping , Republican candidate William McKinley (assigned the color Blue) won in a close race against Democrat-Populist candidate William J. Bryan (assigned the color Red).\nHere, Randall is taking a unique opportunity to point out that unlike our recollection of history (which is usually modified by the misinformation effect , where we perceive the past as being easier and find a source to blame for the election night jitters) that in fact, in the past, a bombardment of fireworks every hour was used to convey the hour-by-hour play of the election night, a significantly more jarring effect that couldn't even be turned off.  We have progressed, in some ways, to a more opt-in system, rather than the opt-out system of the past, where you had to leave Chicago to avoid the news.\nThe part about the \"jiggling needle\" may be a reference to the New York Times' 2016 presidential election results webpage, which displayed a \"needle\" it used to forecast the results of the presidential election between then-candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  The position of the needle was initially set based on pre-election polls, pointing heavily toward Hillary Clinton, but as election results from around the country -- and from individual counties within states -- started coming in it changed to reflect those results.  Especially near the beginning, before a lot of real election data had come in, results reported from small counties could dramatically swing the needle to one side or the other when coming from heavily Democratic or Republican districts, then swing again when another county reported.  Only when a significant amount of data had come in did the needle settle down and move more incrementally.\nThe title text explains that in 1896 even blind people were taken care of, as enormous megaphones were installed to convey the news equally unavoidably to those who couldn't (or didn't want to) see the color bombs. This is in fact true but was intended for those in the colosseum, not all of Chicago.\n[Megan and Cueball face each other while talking on the left of the panel] Megan: Ugh, I'm just going to hide out for election night. We'll know the results the next day anyway. The drama is so unnecessary. Cueball: Yeah. The internet and the 24-hour news have turned elections into a continuous, inescapable media onslaught. [A man in a top hat appears on the right side of the panel with a \"Poof\"]\n[Panel with just the man in a top hat, holding a newspaper] Man in a top hat: Hi! I'm a time traveler from 1896. Let me tell you about our election night coverage. Man in a top hat: *Ahem* Man in a top hat: From the Chicago Tribune\n[Zoom in on the head of the man in a top hat] Man in a top hat: \"Once every hour from the roof of the Great Northern Hotel a series of bombs, which will ascend for several thousand feet, will be fired. Two colors will be used, blue and red.\" Man in a top hat: \"Blue to indicate McKinley's election, red to indicate Bryan's election.\" Man in a top hat: \"The bombardment of the skies will commence at 7 o'clock and will be repeated hourly.\" [Grey citation]: Chicago Tribune, Oct 30th & Nov 1st, 1896\n[Megan and Cueball on the left looking at the man in the top hat on the right] Megan: Yeah, well, we have a needle, though. Man in a top hat: A needle. Megan: It jiggles! Man in a top hat: Sounds awful. Cueball: Listen, you had to be there.\n"}
{"id":2069,"title":"Wishlist","image_title":"Wishlist","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2069","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wishlist.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2069:_Wishlist","transcript":"[In a frame a bullet-list is shown:] Mario\/Luigi hybrid The SkiFree monster Siri Ellie from Up Zordon Clippy The Sarlaac The InstallShield Wizard Mr. Clean Comet Cursor Beto O'Rourke The Monopoly boot Lot's wife D.B. Cooper The Blair Witch Mavis Beacon\n[Caption below the frame:] Super Smash Brothers never did end up adding anyone from my wishlist.\n","explanation":"Super Smash Brothers (also titled as Super Smash Bros. and usually shortened to Smash ) is a crossover fighting game series published by Nintendo , with the core roster of playable characters originating from Nintendo's own intellectual properties such as Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda . At the time this comic was published, there were 77 playable characters in total across the 5 games in the series. Starting with the third game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl , characters from third-party franchises (non-Nintendo) have been made available, though most of them had at least made major appearances on a Nintendo system at some point. This comic is a parody of various fans' wishes for the roster of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate , which was announced in 2018 along with multiple trailers revealing new characters to appear in the roster. In the November 1st trailer it was stated every new character in the launch version of the game had been announced, though with five more characters coming in 2019 as downloadable content .\nThroughout the series fans have suggested new characters to add; however, developer acquiescence to these requests is rare, with only six characters out of 77 ( King Dedede , Steve, Sonic the Hedgehog , Ryu , Bayonetta , and Ridley ) having been added this way. On November 3rd, 2018, the developer studio Sora Ltd. made a statement on Twitter telling fans that the as-yet unrevealed DLC characters for Ultimate were already chosen and that they were not accepting further requests; all remaining characters would then be gradually released over the next three years, culminating in Sora 's reveal in October 2021.\nThis comic lists 16 \"characters\" that Randall supposedly wishes were made available in Super Smash Bros. , ranging from plausible playable characters, to the absurd.\nMario \/ Luigi hybrid Mario and Luigi are characters in the Super Mario series, one of Nintendo's flagship franchises. They are both playable characters in the Super Smash Bros. series. A hybrid of these two characters would be quite interesting, even though such a concept does not exist within the Super Mario series. When considering how Mario and Luigi have evolved throughout the Smash series, one could argue that Dr. Mario is a hybrid of these two in terms of moveset.\nThe SkiFree monster SkiFree is a computer game for Windows released in 1991. The player controls a skier trying to avoid obstacles. After the end of a full run, a white furry monster appears, and tries to catch the player. The SkiFree monster was a subject of the 667: SkiFree comic. Unlike most of the characters on this list, the SkiFree monster at least has had an appearance on a Nintendo system, as the game had a Game Boy Color port as part of the \"The Best of Entertainment Pack\" in 2001.\nSiri Siri is the name given to Apple's personal virtual assistant for iOS, macOS, and its other operating systems. Siri is generally a voice without a visual representation, so it is unclear how Siri would be a playable character in Super Smash Bros.\nEllie from Up Ellie is one of the characters in Up , a 2009 Pixar film. In the beginning of the film, Ellie passes away, leaving her husband Carl alone, and leading him to start his adventure in Paradise Falls. While there was a tie-in video game based on the movie released in the same year for multiple systems (including the Wii and Nintendo DS), Ellie was not playable in it.\nZordon Zordon is a fictional character from the Power Rangers franchise who serves as the mentor for the earlier Ranger teams. While he is technically trapped in another dimension, he is usually depicted as a blurry head in a tube. He occasionally has lightning powers, and had a robot sidekick (Alpha 5) who might be able to move him around. Alas, he is currently dead, having used his life energy to remove all evil from the galaxy at that time. While there have been many Power Rangers video games over the years, including on Nintendo platforms, Zordon would be an unlikely character not only due to his lack of extremities, but also due to the fact that the Power Rangers franchise is primarily built on stock footage of the Japanese Super Sentai series.\nClippy Clippit, commonly nicknamed Clippy , was one of the Office Assistants for Microsoft Office (versions 1997 to 2003). It was an user interface with the purpose to assist users. Clippy (and the other Office Assistants) was negatively received by users, and was eventually removed in Office 2007.\nThe Sarlaac [sic] The Sarlacc is an alien monster that lived in Tatooine in the Star Wars universe. It is most prominently shown in the film Return of the Jedi , when the main heroes are sentenced to death by being dropped into the Sarlacc's mouth.  Notably, the Sarlacc is a large, stationary creature embedded in the ground (essentially, a pit). This could be a reference to the Piranha Plant being confirmed as a DLC character, as Piranha Plants are typically stationary and embedded in the ground, and also have their big, toothy mouth as a primary feature. While the Sarlacc was featured in 1994's Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System , its lack of mobility would make it a poor choice for a character.\nInstallShield Wizard A wizard is a type of UI that simplifies configuration of an app or process by guiding the user through a number of screens in sequence. A user makes one decision on each screen, and the overall process puts less cognitive load on the user. InstallShield is a proprietary software tool for creating installer applications (or software packages) for Microsoft Windows. When the created package is being installed, the installer application can be shown in form of a 'standard Windows Wizard' dialog. Depending on the creativity of the user creating the package, the Wizard can display images while different stages of the installer are being executed. There are known instances of The InstallShield Wizard showing a wizard-like character images. Also, the standard wording of the installer text shown to the user ('software-to-be-installed is preparing the InstallShield Wizard, which will guide you through the program setup process') suggests that the Wizard is a 'real character'.\nMr. Clean Mr. Clean is a brand and mascot for Procter & Gamble used for all-purpose cleaners and melamine foam cleaners.\nComet Cursor Comet Cursor was Windows software that allowed users or websites to customise the mouse cursor. It was often installed with minimal user interaction and was accused of tracking users and being \"spyware\".\nBeto O'Rourke Beto O'Rourke is an American politician and businessman serving as the U.S. Representative for Texas's 16th congressional district since 2013. He was the nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2018 Texas U.S. Senate election (which was held the day before this comic appeared), running against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. O'Rourke received much media attention leading up to the election, with many considering the election abnormally competitive.  He ultimately did lose against Ted Cruz. While not a video game character, it is more than possible to create a Mii Fighter based on Beto O'Rourke in the game. However, the game does not come with a Beto O'Rourke Mii, and Nintendo has not created an official Mii of Beto O'Rourke. [ citation needed ]\nThe Monopoly boot The \"boot\" is one of the classic pewter tokens from the board game Monopoly . Despite the absurdity of the request, the boot appeared in the 1999 Monopoly video game adaptation for the Nintendo 64. In 2017, the boot token was retired from the standard version of Monopoly .\nLot's wife Lot and his wife are characters from the book of Genesis in the Bible. According to the book of Genesis, Lot and his family had to flee the city of Sodom , which was being judged by God for its wickedness. They were commanded to flee and not look back at the city. However, Lot's wife looked back at the city and was turned into a pillar of salt. It is unclear which version of Lot's wife Randall wishes to be playable in the game.\nD.B. Cooper D.B. Cooper is the name popularly used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft on November 24, 1971. He extorted $200,000 in ransom and parachuted out of the plane. His identity and whereabouts have never been discovered. D.B. Cooper was a subject of the 1400: D.B. Cooper comic. As mentioned above, an enterprising player could easily make a Mii Fighter based on D.B. Cooper, though no such Mii has been provided by Nintendo.\nThe Blair Witch The Blair Witch is the titular character of the The Blair Witch Project , a 1999 \"found footage\" supernatural horror film. The film became one of the most successful independent films of all time. The witch is never actually shown in the film, making it difficult to turn into a character in the game.\nMavis Beacon Mavis Beacon is a fictional character and the mascot of the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software series.\nThe title text refers to two US Supreme Court Associate Justices who were considered as additions to Smash . Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed by Bill Clinton; Elena Kagan was appointed by Barack Obama.  Both are considered to be on the \"liberal\" wing of the court, but Ginsburg\u2019s forceful dissenting opinions may explain why she would have been a more popular character for Super Smash Bros. Additionally, Ginsburg has been parodied on Saturday Night Live , adding to her popularity: [1]\n[In a frame a bullet-list is shown:] Mario\/Luigi hybrid The SkiFree monster Siri Ellie from Up Zordon Clippy The Sarlaac The InstallShield Wizard Mr. Clean Comet Cursor Beto O'Rourke The Monopoly boot Lot's wife D.B. Cooper The Blair Witch Mavis Beacon\n[Caption below the frame:] Super Smash Brothers never did end up adding anyone from my wishlist.\n"}
{"id":2070,"title":"Trig Identities","image_title":"Trig Identities","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2070","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trig_identities.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2070:_Trig_Identities","transcript":"[Inside a single frame comic a right-angled triangle is shown. The shorter sides are labeled \"a\" and \"b\" and the hypotenuse has a \"c\". All angles are marked: the right angle by a square and the two others by arcs. One arc (enclosed by \"a\" and \"c\") is labeled by the Greek symbol theta (\u03b8).]\n[Supposed trigonometric functions of the marked angle \u03b8 are shown:]\nsin \u03b8 = b\/c cos \u03b8 = a\/c tan \u03b8 = b\/a\ncot \u03b8 = a\/b sec \u03b8 = c\/a csc \u03b8 = c\/b\ncin \u03b8 = b\/s cas \u03b8 = o\/c tab \u03b8 = b\u00b2\/n\u200ba\nbot \u03b8 = a\/c \u2192 boat \u03b8 = a\u00b2\/c \u2192 stoat \u03b8 = a\u00b2\/c \u00b7 s\u200bt\/b\ntan \u03b8 ( = b\/a = b\/a \u00b7 c\/c = b\/c \u00b7 c\/a = sin \u03b8 sec \u03b8 ) = insect \u03b8\u00b2\n(tan \u03b8)\u00b2 = b\u00b2\/a\u00b2 ( \u2192 t\u00b2n\u00b2a\u2074 = b\u00b2\/\u03b8\u00b2 \u2192 a\u200bt\u00b2b\u200ba(n\u200ba)\u00b2 = b\u00b3\/\u03b8\u00b2 from physics: distance = 1\/2 a\u200bt\u00b2 \u2192 ) distance2banana = b\u00b3\/\u03b8\u00b2\n[Caption below the frame:] Key trigonometric identities\n","explanation":"This comic shows several real trigonometric identities at the first two lines and further below some identities \"derived\" by applying algebraic methods to the letters in the trigonometric function names, which is obviously nonsense.\nThe first line are the known trigonometric functions: sine, cosine and tangent, and the second line contains the reciprocals of the trigonometric functions from the first line: cosecant, secant, and cotangent.\nThe following identities are made up and are increasing in absurdity. The comic reflects on the confusion one gets when working more intensely with these identities, since there are a lot of hidden dependencies between them. You can also check how they are related through the various Trigonometry Formulas .\nThe third and fourth line is made by treating the trigonometric function as a product of variables rather than a function and then using the above identities to create words. e.g. sin = b\/c -> cin = b\/s (this could also be a reference to the C++ cin).\nThe second to last line performs some algebra on the individual letters of (tan \u03b8)\u00b2 = b\u00b2\/a\u00b2 as a setup to the last line.  The last line takes the formula distance = 1\/2 a\u200bt\u00b2 \"from physics\" and plugs it into the equation of the previous line, doing some algebra to replace a\u200bt\u00b2 with distance2 and expanding (na)\u00b2 into nana to get the final equation, distance2banana = b\u00b3\/\u03b8\u00b2.  This is valid algebra only if the trigonometric operators are taken as variable products rather than operators, but this is a common misconception encountered when people first learn trigonometry.  The distance equation is the distance a constantly accelerating object initially at rest moves in a given length of time t, most often used to find how far an object dropped from rest will fall under the influence of gravity in a given amount of time (or how long it will take to fall a given distance).\nThere are a few formulas that have mistakes if you simply make algebraic manipulations to the six standard trigonometric functions.\nThe title text is an anagram . Due to the commutative property of multiplication (which states that order does not affect the product), these equations are equivalent if treated as individual variables as earlier. Another layer of absurdity is added in that the variable Theta is spelled out and broken into its letters, which are then treated as individual variables. (The arctangent referred to here is the inverse tangent, a one-sided inverse to the tangent function.  You would not normally write , since the theta in the comic refers to an angle, and the arctangent has an angle as its value rather than as its argument ; however, using theta here is merely unconventional, not forbidden.) The arctangent generally produces theta, the meaning of it being taken on theta being poorly understood. Randall here elucidates, via tongue-in-cheek algebraic proof, that taking a second arctangent of theta produces magical effects.\nThe formula s=1\/2 a\u200bt\u00b2 gives the distance a uniform accelerating object reaches over time. The second formula belongs to astronomy and the third law of Kepler in which the square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit , meaning the fraction of b 3 and t 2 is a constant (banana).\nBut using the angle \u03b8 as an argument leads to Richard Feynman , who did many famous Lectures on Physics and his lost lecture about the Motion of Planets Around the Sun from 1964 in which he only used geometry, based on the orbital ellipse, a circle around, and matching right-angled triangles to illustrate this law from Kepler. For deeper understanding why it really does work there is a nice presentation at the \"Journal of Symbolic Geometry\": Feynman Says: \u201cNewton implies Kepler, No Calculus Needed! (Brian Beckman, 2006)\u201d\nSome have tried to argue there are mathematical justifications for the errors in some of the formulas, by stating (without proof) that you could prove that valid solutions to the original six trig identities (where letters are taken to be variables multiplied together) can be manipulated to show that solutions must have\na=o and s=t.\nThese proofs are incorrect and can be shown easily with a counterexample. If you make the following assignments of variables like\no=s=1\/2 and set c=e=2 while leaving the other variables set to 1 (a=b=i=n=t=\u03b8=1). This variable assignment will simultaneously satisfy all six original trig identities: ; ; ; ; ; .\nHowever in this valid assignment, we have\nsince and we have as .\nThis demonstrates that you can not make a valid algebraic derivation of\nor\nwithout additional assumptions beyond the six given trigonometric identities.\n[Inside a single frame comic a right-angled triangle is shown. The shorter sides are labeled \"a\" and \"b\" and the hypotenuse has a \"c\". All angles are marked: the right angle by a square and the two others by arcs. One arc (enclosed by \"a\" and \"c\") is labeled by the Greek symbol theta (\u03b8).]\n[Supposed trigonometric functions of the marked angle \u03b8 are shown:]\nsin \u03b8 = b\/c cos \u03b8 = a\/c tan \u03b8 = b\/a\ncot \u03b8 = a\/b sec \u03b8 = c\/a csc \u03b8 = c\/b\ncin \u03b8 = b\/s cas \u03b8 = o\/c tab \u03b8 = b\u00b2\/n\u200ba\nbot \u03b8 = a\/c \u2192 boat \u03b8 = a\u00b2\/c \u2192 stoat \u03b8 = a\u00b2\/c \u00b7 s\u200bt\/b\ntan \u03b8 ( = b\/a = b\/a \u00b7 c\/c = b\/c \u00b7 c\/a = sin \u03b8 sec \u03b8 ) = insect \u03b8\u00b2\n(tan \u03b8)\u00b2 = b\u00b2\/a\u00b2 ( \u2192 t\u00b2n\u00b2a\u2074 = b\u00b2\/\u03b8\u00b2 \u2192 a\u200bt\u00b2b\u200ba(n\u200ba)\u00b2 = b\u00b3\/\u03b8\u00b2 from physics: distance = 1\/2 a\u200bt\u00b2 \u2192 ) distance2banana = b\u00b3\/\u03b8\u00b2\n[Caption below the frame:] Key trigonometric identities\n"}
{"id":2071,"title":"Indirect Detection","image_title":"Indirect Detection","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2071","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/indirect_detection.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2071:_Indirect_Detection","transcript":"[A single social media post is shown. On the top left is a portrait of a spiky-haired face, the text right aside is not readable. The post is:] Everyone on here needs to stop laughing about how \"adopting pets from a shelter is for losers\" and \"those animals should all be hunted for sport instead.\" It's reprehensible on so many levels! First of all...\n[Caption below the frame:] Sometimes, one of my friends posts an angry response to some terrible opinion I've never heard before, and it's a weird indirect way to learn how awful their other friends must be.\n","explanation":"This comic shows an angry social media post by one of Randall's spiky-haired friends, objecting to the views of unknown third parties, which appear to be a cartoonishly and unrealistically evil take on the proper treatment of abandoned animals. This could perhaps be in part a callback to 2051: Bad Opinions , in which Cueball is looking to post a response to an absurd or inflammatory opinion that currently may or may not actually exist anywhere on the internet. Sometimes when posting something on social media, such as Facebook, that post can be seen by all the people you have designated as your \"friends.\" In this case the original comment was intended to be read by the people holding these views, people who are not direct friends of Randall's and whose posts he therefore could not see, but because it was posted by his direct friend he could read that response and was able to imagine what it was those other people were saying. Knowing a little about what these other mystery people are saying, through direct quotes from within his friend's comment, and having to fill in the rest by his imagination, he reflects on how weird it is to learn that people who hold such views exist in such an indirect manner.\nThe title text is a pun comparing the shadows of Plato's cave to the practice of \" throwing shade \" (slang for throwing insults, usually subtly), and \"the wall\" could have a double meaning of both the wall of the cave and the term for someone's social media page.\nPlato's Cave is an allegorical tale taking place in a hypothetical cave. The cave contains lifelong prisoners who are chained such that they may only look at one wall.  A fire burns, and the goings-on are cast as shadows upon this wall.  Lacking a more complete or direct source of information, the cave occupants can only guess about the world by interpreting these shadows as a view of the world itself, and therefore base their other beliefs about the world upon the transitory appearances of these shadows. In this way, Plato's Cave serves as an allegory for our limited understanding of phenomena that occur primarily or entirely outside direct perception by our natural senses.  It also offers imagery of how our perceptions and beliefs can be so restricted by what our information channels provide to us, which are now controlled by hidden computer algorithms and marketing teams.\nIn the same way one might make incorrect assumptions about the makeup and chemical properties of air if one's information on the subject were gathered entirely from watching wind blow through leaves, the hypothetical occupants of Plato's Cave may reasonably be expected to produce wildly inaccurate theories about the outside world, a world they experience only as a kind of shadowplay. To be more specific, if one sees only a reaction (shadow) to an unseen post, one might become polarized against an imagined horrible thing, like if there were a large percentage of people who supported killing pet animals from shelters for sport, when in fact it is only the shadow which you have observed anything about, rather than the object that cast it.\n[A single social media post is shown. On the top left is a portrait of a spiky-haired face, the text right aside is not readable. The post is:] Everyone on here needs to stop laughing about how \"adopting pets from a shelter is for losers\" and \"those animals should all be hunted for sport instead.\" It's reprehensible on so many levels! First of all...\n[Caption below the frame:] Sometimes, one of my friends posts an angry response to some terrible opinion I've never heard before, and it's a weird indirect way to learn how awful their other friends must be.\n"}
{"id":2072,"title":"Evaluating Tech Things","image_title":"Evaluating Tech Things","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2072","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/evaluating_tech_things.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2072:_Evaluating_Tech_Things","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball talking.] Megan: Sooner or later, someone is going to fly a drone into a tornado and post the footage to YouTube.\n[Zoom in on Cueball imagining a semicircular dial with a moving pointer currently fixed vertically in the mid value. The left-most value indicating his opinion to be \"This raises big questions about technology and society\" and the right-most being \"Haha, cool!\"]\n[Panel with just Cueball and the imaginary dial above his head, the pointer having shifted a small amout to the right.]\n[Same panel with Cueball, his right hand pensively on his chin, the pointer having shifted an equally small amount to the left of the mid value.]\n[Panel with Cueball, Megan and the imaginary dial above, the pointer now all the way to the right.] Cueball: Haha, cool!\n","explanation":"Many things are possible today thanks to technology, and while often the \"wow factor\"\u2014how cool it is that we can do that\u2014kicks in right away, there can also be deep potential longer term consequences for humanity.  Things like atomic fission , the Internet , CRISPR technology, are amazing things we have learned how to do, but they also have the potential, in some cases already realized, of massively affecting human life (e.g. nuclear annihilation, instant wide-scale communication, elective genetic engineering), both for the better and for the worse.\nHere Cueball , upon hearing of a cool idea he hadn't thought of before, mentally measures it on a scale to decide if he can be excited about it, or should be worried about how it might affect humanity.  After weighing it out, he decides it's just plain cool and it will not adversely affect humanity at all. In the comic, it appears this mental decision took awhile, judging by the multiple panels showing him thinking, ambivalently rubbing his chin as the dial oscillates left and right, before he gives his response.\nThe title text refers to this mental weighing also being known as the Black Mirror \u2013 Mythbusters scale. Black Mirror and Mythbusters are both TV shows that explore science and technology. Black Mirror , on the one end of the scale, explores the unintended and often dire consequences of many of our more influential technologies\u2014the horrible stuff that can happen\u2014whereas Mythbusters , on the other end of the scale, explores the fun side of technology to see what kinds of cool things can or cannot be done.\nWorrying about the effect that technology has on our lives is a theme that has been explored before, in 1215: Insight .\n[Megan and Cueball talking.] Megan: Sooner or later, someone is going to fly a drone into a tornado and post the footage to YouTube.\n[Zoom in on Cueball imagining a semicircular dial with a moving pointer currently fixed vertically in the mid value. The left-most value indicating his opinion to be \"This raises big questions about technology and society\" and the right-most being \"Haha, cool!\"]\n[Panel with just Cueball and the imaginary dial above his head, the pointer having shifted a small amout to the right.]\n[Same panel with Cueball, his right hand pensively on his chin, the pointer having shifted an equally small amount to the left of the mid value.]\n[Panel with Cueball, Megan and the imaginary dial above, the pointer now all the way to the right.] Cueball: Haha, cool!\n"}
{"id":2073,"title":"Kilogram","image_title":"Kilogram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2073","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/kilogram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2073:_Kilogram","transcript":"[Black Hat talking to Ponytail, Cueball, and Megan while all stand in a row. Megan's hands are raised emphatically.] Black Hat: To end many years of confusion, the International Committee for Weights and Measures has just voted to redefine the kilogram. Black Hat: As of next May, it will equal exactly one pound. Ponytail: Oh, cool. Cueball: That does make things simpler. Megan: No!!\nTo further expand on this, the classic definitions of all our various units of time, length, mass, and temperature are based on phenomena that are neither convenient to measure precisely nor in fact consistently reproducible.  The duration of an Earth day and year vary unpredictably, the circumference of the Earth varies, the International Prototype Kilogram gains or loses mass any time it is handled (and in fact just sitting there it and its reference copies diverge from each other), and the value of baseline temperatures such as the freezing point of water depend on which isotopes of hydrogen are in the water molecules.\nNevertheless, there really are constants of nature.  For example, one of them is \u2018 c \u2019, the speed of light in a vacuum.  The expressed value of c depends on your choice of the unit of distance and the unit of time, but it\u2019s a constant in those units.  Now just suppose we all had a reproducible way to define a specific unit of time, which just for fun we call a \u2018second\u2019.  You might not know the length of a \u2018metre\u2019, but if I told you that measured in metres per second the universal constant value of c is exactly 299792458 metres per second, then I would have fixed the length of a metre to be exactly the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1\/299792458 seconds.  And in fact this is what the international body responsible for defining our SI units has done.\nOne second is defined to be a specific number of periods of the radiation emitted in a certain transition of a cesium 133 atom.  The specific number was set in the year 1967, so as to match a previous astronomical standard called ephemeris time to the limit of human measuring ability at the time.  The 1967 definition didn\u2019t change the actual duration of a second, but it did make its measurement forever reproducible.\nIn 1983 the value of c was fixed to the value noted above.  Prior to that it had been measured with respect to existing definitions of a metre, and had to be expressed with a measure of uncertainty.  For example in 1973 a team at the US National Bureau of Standards refined c to 299,792,457.4 m\/s \u00b1 1 m\/s.  But from 1983 onwards, with an exact integer value for c that is quite close to that Bureau measurement, the length of a metre is now fixed with no plus\/minus uncertainty.  Furthermore, both the second and the metre match their predecessor definitions for all intents and purposes.\nSimilar redefinitions of units of mass and of temperature in terms of universal constants have been agreed to, mass with regard to the Planck constant h , and temperature with regard to the Boltzmann constant k .  The constants h and k had previously been measured quantities, complete with uncertainties.  The SI body fixed both of them to exact values, resulting in exact, no-uncertainty values for a kilogram of mass and a kelvin of thermodynamic temperature.  As with the second and the metre, these new definitions match their predecessor definitions for all intents and purposes.\nTo expand on this even further, three additional universal constants that were previously measured and that had uncertainty values have been assigned fixed values, resulting in exact definitions of three corresponding units of measurement without affecting their applicability.  Fixing the unit of elementary charge, e , serves to define the unit of electric current, the Ampere.  Fixing the unit of luminous efficacy K cd serves to define the unit of luminous intensity, the candela.  And fixing the Avogadro constant N A serves to define the unit of amount of substance, the mole.\nA Wikipedia article about redefining the SI units of measure in terms of newly fixed values of things taken to be universal constants is 2019 redefinition of the SI base units .\nAdditionally, it might be worth noting the pound has multiple different types and definitions. The most common definition today is the international avoirdupois pound (lb), which is defined (discarding the semantics) as a unit of mass equal to 0.45359237 kilograms. However the pound is commonly used as to describe force, defined as the force an avoirdupois pound exerts on the Earth (lbf). These definitions however are identical in practical terms, such that an item with 0.45359237 kilograms of mass exerts one avoirdupois pound of force on the Earth. In the SI, the derived unit of force is the newton.\n","explanation":"Standard units such as the kilogram, metre, and second are redefined from time to time as measurement technologies improve. These redefinitions are generally done to improve the precision to which the various units can be known or reproduced, without changing their actual value. The joke here is that redefining the kilogram to equal one pound sounds like an incredible idea to Americans who never use the kilogram. It would not only fail to improve on its precision, but would also significantly change the value of what a kilogram is, making all things already measured for science and in the rest of the world impossible to correctly understand the mass of.\nOn the day of this comic, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (which Randall confuses with the International Committee for Weights and Measures ) voted to redefine the kilogram by fixing it to the value of Planck's Constant . This is measured using a Kibble balance , which involves passing a measured current through an electromagnet to exert a force to balance 1\u00a0kg. The change took effect on May 20, 2019, when the platinum cylinder International Prototype Kilogram that defines the unit was retired. This means that the mass of a kilogram is no longer tied to a physical object, but to the fundamental properties of the universe. By fixing the value of Planck constant to 6.62607015\u00d710 -34 kg\u22c5m 2 \u22c5s \u22121 , the kilogram is defined in terms of the second and the speed of light via the metre.\nThe previous method of confirming that a kilogram is accurate is to use physical metal weights measuring exactly one kilogram, periodically transporting them around the world to an official weight lab to confirm they still weigh the same. Over time these physical objects have changed very slightly in their mass making them unreliable in the long run -- thus running into the issue that a kilogram did not stay a constant measure of mass. Note that these weights and comparisons are so precise that a fingerprint on one of the weights could throw them off.\nThe new method of confirming that a kilogram is accurate relies upon an extremely precise knowledge of local gravitational effects & an absence (or counteraction) of electromagnetic interference. On a traditional scale, two units of equal weight will balance, regardless of local gravitational levels; whereas the new method requires that the gravitational force be determined precisely for every site, meaning an additional measurement has to take place. This involves a high-precision gravimeter such as the FG5 absolute gravimeter.\nIn this comic, Black Hat announces that the kilogram has been redefined as equal to one pound . Ponytail and Cueball seem to think this makes things simpler, but Megan is alarmed. The metric system of measurement is the one used by most of the world and is the standard system used in science. Redefining the kilogram to be equal to the pound would be very disruptive and outrage supporters of the metric system. Redefining the kilogram as being a completely different size from before will create a lot of confusion, since now when people read a mass in kilograms they need to work out whether it was written in old kilograms or new (pound-sized) kilograms.\nThe pound is officially defined as 0.45359237 kilograms, or less than half a kilogram. This makes defining a kilogram as one pound even more impossible as they are then stuck in a loop, as 0.45359237 kilograms must have the same mass as 1 kilogram, meaning the value of the kilogram would be equal to zero.\nThe title text continues the joke by saying that the metre has been defined as exactly three feet. The yard, the closest US measurement to the metre, is three feet. However, a metre is about 9 centimetres (~3.55 inches) longer than a yard. As with the pound, the metric system is used to define the yard as it is officially defined as 0.9144 metres. This joke recreates the comic in the real world, with Randall playing as Black Hat, and the reader responding. Those who fall for the claim will either be excited that things are simpler, or devastated at what the result will be.\n[Black Hat talking to Ponytail, Cueball, and Megan while all stand in a row. Megan's hands are raised emphatically.] Black Hat: To end many years of confusion, the International Committee for Weights and Measures has just voted to redefine the kilogram. Black Hat: As of next May, it will equal exactly one pound. Ponytail: Oh, cool. Cueball: That does make things simpler. Megan: No!!\nTo further expand on this, the classic definitions of all our various units of time, length, mass, and temperature are based on phenomena that are neither convenient to measure precisely nor in fact consistently reproducible.  The duration of an Earth day and year vary unpredictably, the circumference of the Earth varies, the International Prototype Kilogram gains or loses mass any time it is handled (and in fact just sitting there it and its reference copies diverge from each other), and the value of baseline temperatures such as the freezing point of water depend on which isotopes of hydrogen are in the water molecules.\nNevertheless, there really are constants of nature.  For example, one of them is \u2018 c \u2019, the speed of light in a vacuum.  The expressed value of c depends on your choice of the unit of distance and the unit of time, but it\u2019s a constant in those units.  Now just suppose we all had a reproducible way to define a specific unit of time, which just for fun we call a \u2018second\u2019.  You might not know the length of a \u2018metre\u2019, but if I told you that measured in metres per second the universal constant value of c is exactly 299792458 metres per second, then I would have fixed the length of a metre to be exactly the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1\/299792458 seconds.  And in fact this is what the international body responsible for defining our SI units has done.\nOne second is defined to be a specific number of periods of the radiation emitted in a certain transition of a cesium 133 atom.  The specific number was set in the year 1967, so as to match a previous astronomical standard called ephemeris time to the limit of human measuring ability at the time.  The 1967 definition didn\u2019t change the actual duration of a second, but it did make its measurement forever reproducible.\nIn 1983 the value of c was fixed to the value noted above.  Prior to that it had been measured with respect to existing definitions of a metre, and had to be expressed with a measure of uncertainty.  For example in 1973 a team at the US National Bureau of Standards refined c to 299,792,457.4 m\/s \u00b1 1 m\/s.  But from 1983 onwards, with an exact integer value for c that is quite close to that Bureau measurement, the length of a metre is now fixed with no plus\/minus uncertainty.  Furthermore, both the second and the metre match their predecessor definitions for all intents and purposes.\nSimilar redefinitions of units of mass and of temperature in terms of universal constants have been agreed to, mass with regard to the Planck constant h , and temperature with regard to the Boltzmann constant k .  The constants h and k had previously been measured quantities, complete with uncertainties.  The SI body fixed both of them to exact values, resulting in exact, no-uncertainty values for a kilogram of mass and a kelvin of thermodynamic temperature.  As with the second and the metre, these new definitions match their predecessor definitions for all intents and purposes.\nTo expand on this even further, three additional universal constants that were previously measured and that had uncertainty values have been assigned fixed values, resulting in exact definitions of three corresponding units of measurement without affecting their applicability.  Fixing the unit of elementary charge, e , serves to define the unit of electric current, the Ampere.  Fixing the unit of luminous efficacy K cd serves to define the unit of luminous intensity, the candela.  And fixing the Avogadro constant N A serves to define the unit of amount of substance, the mole.\nA Wikipedia article about redefining the SI units of measure in terms of newly fixed values of things taken to be universal constants is 2019 redefinition of the SI base units .\nAdditionally, it might be worth noting the pound has multiple different types and definitions. The most common definition today is the international avoirdupois pound (lb), which is defined (discarding the semantics) as a unit of mass equal to 0.45359237 kilograms. However the pound is commonly used as to describe force, defined as the force an avoirdupois pound exerts on the Earth (lbf). These definitions however are identical in practical terms, such that an item with 0.45359237 kilograms of mass exerts one avoirdupois pound of force on the Earth. In the SI, the derived unit of force is the newton.\n"}
{"id":2074,"title":"Airplanes and Spaceships","image_title":"Airplanes and Spaceships","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2074","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/airplanes_and_spaceships.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2074:_Airplanes_and_Spaceships","transcript":"[A timeline is shown with three dots on it. Each dot has a label beneath the dot, and the two intervals between the dots are also labeled, with lines indicating which dots are belonging to that label.]\nDot 1 December 17, 1903 First human airplane flight\nDot 2 April 12, 1961 First human spaceflight\nDot 3 Today\nInterval 1-2 57 years 4 months Interval 2-3 57 years 7 months\n[Caption beneath the frame:] Spaceships are now older than airplanes were when we flew our first spaceships.\n","explanation":"This comic is pointing out that more time has elapsed since the first spaceship flight, than previously elapsed between the first airplane flight and the first spaceship flight. (This was at the time of release of this comic on November 19th of 2018, a month before the 115th anniversary for the first airplane flight).\nAirplanes and spaceships are often considered to be related vehicles, under the term aerospace, with degrees in aerospace fields often having aeronautics (airplanes) or astronautics (spaceships) tracks.  The jump in technology and performance between the first airplane and the first spaceship was enormous: the Wright Flyer had a max speed of 30 mph (48 km\/h), and the first flights reached only about 30 feet (9 m) above ground, with distances of only 120 to 850 feet  (260 m).  In comparison the Vostok 1 mission of Yuri Gagarin reached orbital velocity of 17,500 mph (28,000 km\/h), a minimum altitude of 91 miles (480,480 ft; 146 km), and traveled once around the earth (about 25,000 miles or 40,000 km).  This represents an increase in performance of between about 600 and 150,000 times.\nBy contrast, an equal amount of time has passed between the first spaceflight and the publish date of this comic, but aeronautical performance has not improved much at all. Although the Apollo mission broke speed and altitude records, and later space missions extended the distance traveled in a single flight by sustaining Earth orbit for longer, the overall technology and performance is not much different than that used during the first space mission.\nIt is one of the typical takes by Randall to try to make people feel old . Flight seemed old news when the Apollo mission started, so people who lived through the space race, will now feel very old since they were alive back when the space race is new, and that is now old news. This take is also used in the title text.\nThe title text refers to the 2003 film The Core . In this film, there is an instability in the Earth's magnetic field, so a team of scientists attempt to drill to the center of the Earth and set off nuclear explosions to restart the rotation of the Earth's core. To do this, they travel in a vehicle made of \"Unobtainium\" that can withstand the heat and pressure within the Earth's crust. Randall is sad to report that there is little progress being made on creating this vehicle. Incidentally, The Core is a film which represents science and engineering wrong in many, many aspects. There is a long list of flaws . For instance, if a material is resistant to the extreme heat and pressure of the Earth's core, then the significantly cooler and less forceful techniques of human metallurgy would certainly not be able to work that material at all, let alone craft it into a functional hull for a vehicle.\nRandall makes sure to mention that the movie is from 2003, so 15 years old. Many people are surprised when realizing that a movie they saw \"recently\" is now so old that children born that year no longer need their parents guidance when watching it.\nThe Core was already used as the main plot starter in 673: The Sun back in 2009, and earlier in 2018 it was mentioned in the title text of 2011: Newton's Trajectories . That Randall has a great interest in the Earths cores is shown in several comics, and may explain why he continues to return to the movie, even though he probably (taken from his comics mentioning it) thinks is a bad movie. See a recent comic here, 2058: Rock Wall and of course 913: Core .\n[A timeline is shown with three dots on it. Each dot has a label beneath the dot, and the two intervals between the dots are also labeled, with lines indicating which dots are belonging to that label.]\nDot 1 December 17, 1903 First human airplane flight\nDot 2 April 12, 1961 First human spaceflight\nDot 3 Today\nInterval 1-2 57 years 4 months Interval 2-3 57 years 7 months\n[Caption beneath the frame:] Spaceships are now older than airplanes were when we flew our first spaceships.\n"}
{"id":2075,"title":"Update Your Address","image_title":"Update Your Address","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2075","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/update_your_address.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2075:_Update_Your_Address","transcript":"[Cueball is standing and talking on a phone.] Voice: Do you still live at 342 River St? Cueball: No, I moved last year.\n[Cueball is standing behind a counter with Hairy, whose hands are on a keyboard.] Hairy: Is 21 Ash Tree Lane still a good address? Cueball: What? That's my childhood home. How is that even in your system?\n[Cueball is talking on a phone again in a borderless panel.] Voice: The address we have is 205 Second St #2. Cueball: I... think that's where my parents lived before I was born!?\n[Cueball stands behind another counter with Ponytail and a tablet.] Ponytail: Are you still living in... \"The Austro-Hungarian Empire?\" Cueball: You know what, sure. Ponytail: Austria-Hungary dissolved in 1918. Cueball: Well, I come from a long line of people who hate updating stuff.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is facing several instances where entities asking or confirming his address find that the address they possess is incorrect - each address is progressively more outdated.  In the final comic, Cueball gives up and confirms that yes, he is still living in a country that hasn't existed for over a century.\nInaccurate addresses may be a common problem for someone who has moved constantly in their lifetime. Alternatively, Cueball and his family do not find it important to update addresses for those particular businesses \/ entities.\nAustria-Hungary was a European empire that existed between 1867 and 1918, dissolving during World War I . It is possible that Cueball's ancestors hail from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though it would be even more absurd for that to be used as an address, given that the polity ended a century ago, whereas the earliest programmable computer was created 20 years after the country was dissolved and personal\/small business computers approximately 40 years after that.\nAsh Tree Lane refers to House of Leaves , a postmodern novel from 2000 in which one of many nested plots involves a house on Ash Tree Lane that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, and in fact contains a labyrinth with a minotaur .  The book, and Ash Tree Lane specifically, have previously been referenced in 472: House of Pancakes , 827: My Business Idea , and 886: Craigslist Apartments .\nThe title text treats bank accounts (and the PIN codes needed to access them) as though they were physical heirlooms passed down generation to generation. The patent for PIN codes was submitted in May 1966, and the first public use of a PIN code was in 1967, when Barclays used them to process cheques at automated teller machines . It would be unusual for Cueball to inherit both an active bank account and the PIN associated with it --  when a person with a bank account dies, the bank usually closes the account altogether and transfers the money to a separate account of whoever is named the beneficiary. Treating the account number and\/or its PIN as though they were physical heirlooms plays into the joke of them not changing through the years (due to the perceived difficulty of updating them).\n[Cueball is standing and talking on a phone.] Voice: Do you still live at 342 River St? Cueball: No, I moved last year.\n[Cueball is standing behind a counter with Hairy, whose hands are on a keyboard.] Hairy: Is 21 Ash Tree Lane still a good address? Cueball: What? That's my childhood home. How is that even in your system?\n[Cueball is talking on a phone again in a borderless panel.] Voice: The address we have is 205 Second St #2. Cueball: I... think that's where my parents lived before I was born!?\n[Cueball stands behind another counter with Ponytail and a tablet.] Ponytail: Are you still living in... \"The Austro-Hungarian Empire?\" Cueball: You know what, sure. Ponytail: Austria-Hungary dissolved in 1918. Cueball: Well, I come from a long line of people who hate updating stuff.\n"}
{"id":2076,"title":"Horror Movies 2","image_title":"Horror Movies 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2076","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/horror_movies_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2076:_Horror_Movies_2","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are walking, with Cueball holding his arms out in front of him.] White Hat: So you don't like any horror movies? Cueball: Spooky stuff is neat but I hate jump scares and watching people get murdered. Why would you want to see that?\n[Zoom in on the two.] White Hat: It's like roller coasters. People like experiencing powerful feelings in a safe, controlled setting. Cueball: But why not good feelings?\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball stops and turns towards White Hat.] White Hat: We've always been into tragic stories. Romeo and Juliet, Titanic... Cueball: See, that's another thing I don't get!\n[Zoom out again as White Hat walks past Cueball who now hold his arms out to the side as he looks after White Hat.] Cueball: I loved Titanic because Rose and Jack found each other and seemed so happy! I just hated the ending. White Hat: I'll be sure to give James Cameron and Shakespeare your feedback.\n","explanation":"This comic is the second in the Horror Movies series, and is the follow-up to 2056: Horror Movies released a month earlier.\nWhile the first Horror Movies comic was about giving voice to Randall's inability to enjoy horror movies, this comic takes Randall's previous position and exaggerates it.\nWhite Hat and Cueball (as Randall) discuss the appeal of horror movies and tragic plots. Cueball expresses his dissatisfaction with stories that focus on evoking negative feelings. As an example he mentions how he disliked the ending of Titanic where Jack sacrifices his life in order to save Rose. White Hat does not seem to share Cueball's point of view on successful storytelling and sarcastically promises to send feedback to the movie director James Cameron as well as the 16th century playwright and writer William Shakespeare , whose most famous works include tragedies like Romeo and Juliet .\nIn the title text Cueball (as Randall?) discusses the ending of the science fiction novel The Giver where the fate of the main character Jonas [sic, see Trivia ] had been left ambiguous. The joke is a stereotype that the Newbery Medal , a children's literature award, is only given to books with tragic endings. However, the protagonist lives, as there are three more titles in the series, two of which have the main character as a side character. However, those three books are rather obscure.\nThis was the first of two comics in a row to reference a specific movie genre, this one horror movies, the next one, 2077: Heist , heist movies.\n[White Hat and Cueball are walking, with Cueball holding his arms out in front of him.] White Hat: So you don't like any horror movies? Cueball: Spooky stuff is neat but I hate jump scares and watching people get murdered. Why would you want to see that?\n[Zoom in on the two.] White Hat: It's like roller coasters. People like experiencing powerful feelings in a safe, controlled setting. Cueball: But why not good feelings?\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball stops and turns towards White Hat.] White Hat: We've always been into tragic stories. Romeo and Juliet, Titanic... Cueball: See, that's another thing I don't get!\n[Zoom out again as White Hat walks past Cueball who now hold his arms out to the side as he looks after White Hat.] Cueball: I loved Titanic because Rose and Jack found each other and seemed so happy! I just hated the ending. White Hat: I'll be sure to give James Cameron and Shakespeare your feedback.\n"}
{"id":2077,"title":"Heist","image_title":"Heist","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2077","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/heist.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2077:_Heist","transcript":"[A man in a cap with a toolbox approaches Cueball, who is shown to be thinking with a cloud like bubble above his head with his thoughts.] Man: Do you have the key to the server room? I'm from the building and I'm here to check the fire alarm. Cueball  [thinking]: Oh no oh no\n[Caption below the panel:] Thanks to movies, whenever anyone asks me to open any door, I immediately assume I'm a minor character in a heist.\n","explanation":"In heist films , a heist or other crime is carried out, sometimes involving the criminal(s) posing as some type of repairman or similar. The criminal then gains access to their target through the disguise, as humans do not normally critically assess someone if their appearance fit expectations. Due to the prevalence of this trope, Cueball is concerned whenever somebody comes by to ask for access as he believes the person may be planning a crime, and his inadvertent assistance will make him a \"minor character\" in the wider heist story. In such movies, minor characters are sometimes held hostage or even killed in the course of the crime being committed, particularly if the heist goes wrong. The risk of being a minor character could also perhaps include the risk of being harmed. In general people would probably prefer to be the main character in a film, rather than a bystander.\nIn this case, he is asked to open the server room - ostensibly to allow the fire alarm to be checked. However, gaining physical access to the server allows the criminal to bypass most security features that should prevent unauthorized access to the data (a scenario known as an evil maid attack ). If the hard disks are not encrypted it is trivial to copy all files or even remove and abscond with the disk drives - allowing the theft of sensitive information stored on the network. Even if the files are encrypted physical access to the server will allow the attacker to corrupt the system either by installing malware or adding malicious hardware components, which will then allow them to retrieve passwords and\/or encryption keys.\nBeing aware of these dangers Cueball immediately assumes that he (or his employers) are the target of a heist.\nThe title text seems to be Cueball's internal monologue trying to calm himself down. He points out to himself that the repairman has both a hat (possibly with a company logo) and a toolbox full of tools, then sarcastically asks himself how a thief could possibly get their hands on such a disguise.\nThis is the second comic in a row to reference a specific movie genre, this one heist movies the previous one, 2076: Horror Movies 2 , horror movies.\n[A man in a cap with a toolbox approaches Cueball, who is shown to be thinking with a cloud like bubble above his head with his thoughts.] Man: Do you have the key to the server room? I'm from the building and I'm here to check the fire alarm. Cueball  [thinking]: Oh no oh no\n[Caption below the panel:] Thanks to movies, whenever anyone asks me to open any door, I immediately assume I'm a minor character in a heist.\n"}
{"id":2078,"title":"Popper","image_title":"Popper","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2078","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/popper.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2078:_Popper","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart is teaching a class of three students; Hairy, Ponytail, and Science Girl, sitting behind their desks.] Miss Lenhart: There's no evidence that Karl Popper wasn't born on July 28th, 1902. Miss Lenhart: No one has proven that he didn't grow up in Vienna...\n","explanation":"In this comic, Miss Lenhart teaches to a class comprising of Hairy , Ponytail , and Science Girl about Karl Popper . Karl Popper was a philosopher of science who endorsed the idea that science is distinguished from non-science by treating its theories as falsifiable. This means that science does not treat any theory as definitive, because future research could show that it is false.\nA not uncommon reading of Popper assumes that instead of proving hypotheses, scientists are disproving hypotheses. This reading leads to technicalities like the ones stated in the comic: Instead of asserting that Popper was indeed born on July 28, 1902, and grew up in Vienna, a scientist can only assert that there is no evidence disproving these facts, which seems counter-intuitive because one cannot disprove the facts of Popper's birthdate and childhood residence.\nNote however that falsifiability is often interpreted to mean that there has to be a way to disprove a given statement if it is wrong, or to distinguish between two mutually competing hypotheses; not that a statement is accepted solely due to the lack of evidence to the contrary, e.g. a birth certificate is often used to establish a date of birth and falsifying that date of birth would then mean calling into question the birth certificate's authenticity or accuracy, but without any historical records of the date of birth one would normally not even speculate at all about the precise date of birth.  As such reasoning solely on the absence of proof to the contrary would be considered unusual in most contexts.\nThe humor comes when the comic applies this idea to the life and biographical information of Karl Popper himself. Note that in real life, such a subject would be a matter for historical proof, not scientific, and would thus fall outside the realm of study Popper was thinking of.\nThe title text takes this reading a couple of steps further in a kind of meta-analysis. It points out that Miss Lenhart 's claim of no evidence has not been proven false, and also that we're dealing with only the knowledge of a single individual who may not be aware of evidence that might exist.\nAnother reading of Popper points out that Popper\u2019s philosophy discarded proofs altogether as a defining feature of science. Thus there is no such thing as definitive evidence in Popper\u2019s notion of science: Even falsifying assertions themselves are seen as falsifiable.\n[Miss Lenhart is teaching a class of three students; Hairy, Ponytail, and Science Girl, sitting behind their desks.] Miss Lenhart: There's no evidence that Karl Popper wasn't born on July 28th, 1902. Miss Lenhart: No one has proven that he didn't grow up in Vienna...\n"}
{"id":2079,"title":"Alpha Centauri","image_title":"Alpha Centauri","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2079","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alpha_centauri.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2079:_Alpha_Centauri","transcript":"[Ponytail stands on a podium giving a presentation in front of a slide with an image of a Voyager-like spacecraft.] Ponytail: Our probe can reach Alpha Centauri in under 35 years. Offscreen voice: We should go somewhere else.  Alpha Centauri sucks. Ponytail: Huh? It's the closest, most convenient system! Offscreen: Yeah, but I checked online and it only has three stars.\n","explanation":"Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our solar system, being about 4.37 light-years away. As such, there are numerous ongoing plans and projects to journey to, and explore the star system, especially since the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b was found in 2016 to possibly have liquid water oceans and a very thin atmosphere. Similar to this project , Ponytail announces such a project using a Voyager -like probe.\nHowever, an offscreen person is against the idea of sending a probe to that particular part of the galaxy, as they think that \"Alpha Centauri sucks\". The person says that they looked \"online\" and that the system \"only has three stars\". This is a pun playing on the stars used in online reviews and stars as celestial objects.\nOnline rating systems, such as Yelp , often use star rating systems , with more stars indicating higher quality, up to an arbitrary maximum, such as five stars to indicate the best rating. Due to the nature of 5 star rating systems, as shown in in comic 1098: Star Ratings , anything scoring less than 4 out of 5 in a 5 star rating system is crap; and in a 10-star rating system, scoring a mere 3 stars out of a possible 10 stars would be exceedingly low quality. The Alpha Centauri star system has 3 physical stars : Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B, and Proxima Centauri. The offscreen person has misconstrued this fact of the system as some kind of review.\nThe title text furthers the pun. Some online star rating systems also allow partial stars, such as a half-star, to allow more precision in rating (e.g. rating 2.5 stars instead of being forced to chose 3 stars or 2 stars), or display an average collective rating as partial stars (e.g. showing 2.5 stars when five people have rated 3 stars and five people have rated 2 stars). Alpha Centauri's \"half star\" refers to Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf , which is a type of low-mass star. According to the offscreen person, this barely qualifies it to be a star. Furthermore, Proxima Centauri is nearly 13,000 AU (0.21 light years) away from the other 2 stars in the system, so it was long unknown whether Proxima Centauri was gravitationally bound to the Alpha Centauri star system.\nAll numbers are rounded after subsequent calculations.\nAccording to space.com the fastest spacecraft ever will be the Parker Solar Probe which will reach 430,000 mph (692,000 km\/h) as it reaches its closest point orbiting the sun. This is just over half of 1% of the needed speed of the Alpha Centauri vehicle proposed in the comic. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, is currently traveling at about 38,000 mph (61,000 km\/h).\nDistance to Alpha Centauri system = 4.367ly\n4.367 light years \/ 35 years = 0.12477ly per year\n0.12477 light years\/year * 5.879e+12 miles\/light year = 733,484,000,000 miles\/year\n733,484,000,000 miles\/year \/ 365 days\/year \/ 24 hours\/day = 83,000,000 Miles\/hour \/ 1.60934 miles\/kilometer = 134,000,000 Kilometers\/hour\nThe above math assumes a constant speed, and requires a speed of ~0.124855c.  Assuming a constant acceleration from rest (non-relativistic math follows):\n35*365.25*24*60*60 = 1.10e+9 seconds in 35 years\n4.367 * 5.879e+12 = 2.57e+13miles, 4.13e+13 km, 4.13e+16 m.\nx = 1\/2*a*t 2\na = 2*x*t -2\nAssuming constant acceleration to the halfway point and constant deceleration to the destination, (otherwise you streak through the system, barely observing anything):\nt trip = 2*t halfway\na = 2*2.06e+16*(5.50e+8) -2 = 0.136 m\/s 2 , roughly 1\/80 gravity.\nv halfway = a*t halfway .\nTop Speed: 75,000,000 m\/s ~ 1\/4*c.\nAssuming E = F*d, 0.136*1*4.13e+16 = 5.37e15 Joules will be required for each kilogram carried to Alpha Centauri in 35 years.\nThis would require an unimaginable amount of mass for a conventional chemical rocket, and is a completely impractical power requirement for any sort of passive solar sail concept.\nFurther, the top speed is fast enough to require a recalculation using relativistic physics to model the problem.  This means that the energy budget will need to increase, as the relativistic mass of the probe will increase, requiring more force (and thus more energy) to accelerate and decelerate near its top speed than this calculation returns.\nActive , laser based propulsion methods require currently non-existent and purely specualtive laser and materials technologies, as well as a powerplant equivalent to 12,500 of the World's Largest Nuclear Plant to transport sub-gram masses on this timescale.  This also assumes that any probes can be steered accurately enough across interstellar distances to come close enough to image with any resolution the bodies they will be passing at a non-trivial fraction of c.\nShort of FTL travel or near-perfect mass-energy conversion technology, transporting more than a fraction of a gram of material to Alpha Centauri in a human lifetime will be unachievable.  Short of an enormous breakthrough in power generation, transporting even a fraction of a gram is impossible.\nNonetheless, Breakthrough Starshot is attempting to send many gram-sized probes to Alpha Centauri within the century.  Following current technological trends, they expect the efficiency of laser-based propulsion to increase by launch time, allowing launches driven by an unreasonably-large-but-achievable amount of power.  The top speed needed is halved by refraining from slowing at all at the destination: the probes will aim a distance away from the target, so that it traverses by slowly enough for a camera to rotate and track it, even at near-light speeds.  To account for error and space dust, the plan is to launch many tiny probes simultaneously.  They may only be able to accomplish their goal if they can get enough funding to actually affect the global economy enough to make the technologies they require more efficient to produce.  Launches would additionally burn incredible quantities of natural gas.\n[Ponytail stands on a podium giving a presentation in front of a slide with an image of a Voyager-like spacecraft.] Ponytail: Our probe can reach Alpha Centauri in under 35 years. Offscreen voice: We should go somewhere else.  Alpha Centauri sucks. Ponytail: Huh? It's the closest, most convenient system! Offscreen: Yeah, but I checked online and it only has three stars.\n"}
{"id":2080,"title":"Cohort and Age Effects","image_title":"Cohort and Age Effects","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2080","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cohort_and_age_effects.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2080:_Cohort_and_Age_Effects","transcript":"[Cueball as a news anchor is sitting at a desk with hands folded in front of him on the table.] Cueball: Tonight: Are Millennials killing the joint replacement industry?\n\n[To the left of Cueball is a presentation which includes a two by two table with a header above the table. Each of the two rows and columns are labeled, with rows entitled 'Baby Boomers' and  'Millennials', and columns entitled 'Knee' and 'Hip']\nOperation rate per 100,000 Baby Boomers: Knee: 720 Hip: 390 Millennials: Knee: 1 Hip: 3\n\n[Caption below the panel:] Stats Pet Peeve: People mixing up cohort effects and age effects.\n","explanation":"Another of Randall's many Pet Peeves , this time it's statistics. It is the first in more than four years, since 1368: One Of The .\n\" Millennials \" are the generation of Westerners who were born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, whereas baby boomers are the generation born during the \"baby boom\", a period of high birth rates from the late 1940s to early 1960s. A common headline on news websites is \"Millennials are killing the X industry\" where X is a product whose sales have dropped in recent years, such as jungle gyms for kids . One of the most famous is the diamond industry , where a combination of the wage gap , stigma over conflict diamonds , increased knowledge of ( in Randall's words ) \"complicated gemstone market\" and less desire to get married early has seen millennials buying less diamond jewelry than previous generations.\nRandall spoofs this idea. In the comic, Cueball , as a news anchor , presents a heading which opens his story by asking if millennials are killing the industry of surgical joint replacements , illustrating it with numbers of joint replacement procedures among millennials compared to baby boomers. The joke is that millennials are simply too young for most of them to need joint replacements (which are usually used to treat senile osteoarthritis ), so most people will see that so there really isn't a news story here. Randall is using this example to highlight that this kind of story is ridiculous. Millennials will likely need joint replacements in the future as they get older, potentially keeping sales of joint replacements at close to their current rate.\nA cohort effect is a cultural difference between generations (such as buying fewer diamonds), whereas an age effect is one that is simply related to getting older (such as getting arthritis). Joint replacement rates are an age effect, but the newscast is presenting them as if they were a cohort effect. (More correctly, the table rows would be labelled e.g. \u201cpeople aged 50\u201370\u201d and \u201cpeople aged 22\u201337\u201d.)\nThe title text points out that although numbers of millennials receiving joint replacements are low, they are higher than the numbers of baby boomers who received them at the same age \u2014i.e. in their 20s\u2014due to advances in medical diagnosis and technology in the last 50 years, as well as (in some countries at least) better access to healthcare. This statistic can be used to create a headline which is the reverse of the one in the comic, namely \"millennials are getting more joint replacements than ever\". Randall notes that you could therefore use either headline to back up your argument, depending on the agenda you are trying to present.\n[Cueball as a news anchor is sitting at a desk with hands folded in front of him on the table.] Cueball: Tonight: Are Millennials killing the joint replacement industry?\n\n[To the left of Cueball is a presentation which includes a two by two table with a header above the table. Each of the two rows and columns are labeled, with rows entitled 'Baby Boomers' and  'Millennials', and columns entitled 'Knee' and 'Hip']\nOperation rate per 100,000 Baby Boomers: Knee: 720 Hip: 390 Millennials: Knee: 1 Hip: 3\n\n[Caption below the panel:] Stats Pet Peeve: People mixing up cohort effects and age effects.\n"}
{"id":2081,"title":"Middle Latitudes","image_title":"Middle Latitudes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2081","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/middle_latitudes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2081:_Middle_Latitudes","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan standing and talking, Megan with her arms raised.] Cueball: It would be nice if the sun could rise and set at normal times. But it would also be cool to experience 24-hour darkness for weeks on end. Megan: Well, what if we split the difference, so all winter everything was normal but slightly more dim and bleak? Cueball: Perfect! [Caption below the frame:] Middle latitudes are the worst.\n","explanation":"Because of the Earth's axial tilt, the apparent daily path of the Sun through the sky - in particular, how long it takes and how high in the sky it gets - is different depending on how far North or South of the Equator you are (your latitude), and also changes throughout the year as the Earth revolves around the Sun. This fact yields two very important pairs of latitudes:\nand\nThe latitudes that lie within these two bands are called the middle latitudes - also sometimes referred to as the North Temperate Zone and the South Temperate Zone respectively.\nThe Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are the latitudes beyond which, if you go any further from the Equator, it is no longer possible for the Sun to be directly overhead at any time of the year. Similarly, the Arctic and Antarctic Circles represent the latitudes beyond which it is possible for the Sun not to rise or set at all at some times of the year.\nIn the middle latitudes - which occur between these extremes - we instead get the rather less impressive phenomenon of daylight simply being a bit longer in summer and a bit shorter in winter.\nIn the comic, the middle latitudes are sarcastically proffered as a compromise between two extremes described by Cueball: day lengths that don't vary that much (as occurs in the torrid zone near the Equator), and the possibility of days with no daylight at all (as occurs in the Arctic\/Antarctic zones). However, it is clear that Megan's compromise merely results in seasonal weather that has no interesting or useful features at any time of the year. In particular, winter is singled out as a season that is generally just dim and bleak in the middle latitudes, with days that don't last long and are cold and dull anyway.\nThe title text extends the idea with another spurious compromise, this time between snowy blizzards and warm sunny beaches - both of which are enjoyable in their own ways, but \"splitting the difference\" and combining the two would result in unpleasant icy slush.\nThere are other comics that refer to the length of the day, and how it is different each day, for example, 2050: 6\/6 Time .\n[Cueball and Megan standing and talking, Megan with her arms raised.] Cueball: It would be nice if the sun could rise and set at normal times. But it would also be cool to experience 24-hour darkness for weeks on end. Megan: Well, what if we split the difference, so all winter everything was normal but slightly more dim and bleak? Cueball: Perfect! [Caption below the frame:] Middle latitudes are the worst.\n"}
{"id":2082,"title":"Mercator Projection","image_title":"Mercator Projection","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2082","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mercator_projection.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2082:_Mercator_Projection","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a hand up as he talks to White Hat.] Cueball: Did you know Canada is actually a smallish island in Lake Ontario? White Hat: What? Cueball: Yeah, it only appears to have a land border with the U.S. due to the Mercator Projection. White Hat: Wow! I had no idea.\n[Caption below the frame:] At this point people feel so misled by the Mercator Projection that you can use it to convince them of basically any map fact.\n","explanation":"The Mercator projection is a map projection (a way to present the spherical Earth surface into a flat 2-D map) presented by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It was the standard map projection for some time, because it does preserve all angles in their true shape (i.e. it is a conformal map projection ). This means that if you measure an angle on the map you get the right direction in the real world - a very useful feature if you're using the map for navigating. However, preserving the angle leads to severe distortions of the surface area, especially in the higher latitudes where countries appear much larger than they actually are. For example on the Mercator Projection, Greenland (the largest non-continent island in the world) is shown to be much larger than Australia (the smallest continent), although the latter in reality is nearly 4 times as big. Other examples of regions having distorted sizes and shapes due to the Mercator Projection can be explored in this link .\nCueball uses White Hat's mistrust of the Mercator projection to convince him of ridiculous facts about Canada, namely that it is simply a small island in Lake Ontario . Map projections are generally continuous functions , meaning that they never map a disconnected space onto a connected one and therefore can never give the false impression that two areas that don't border each other do.\nThe title text continues on these falsehoods, claiming that the Great Lakes are simply \"water on the far side of Canada Island\", and that it is possible to drive directly into Alaska from the Pacific Northwest region of the US (it's not, Canada is in the way). Cueball can possibly make these statements as Canada is a country in the northern regions, where the Mercator Projection would show it larger than it actually is. However, Canada is the second largest country in the world by total area (land and water), after Russia.\nThe Mercator Projection was previously mentioned in 977: Map Projections of \"what your favorite map projection says about you\". People who preferred the Mercator Projection was listed as \"You're not really into maps.\" It is also the second comic in a row that relates somehow to latitudes. Bad Map Projections is a series in xkcd, showing that it is really something on Randall's mind.\nIt is not the first time Cueball (or Randall) tries to spread misinformation, for instance it also has White Hat as the target in 1677: Contrails , but it can also be other people that are fooled like in 1405: Meteor .\n[Cueball is holding a hand up as he talks to White Hat.] Cueball: Did you know Canada is actually a smallish island in Lake Ontario? White Hat: What? Cueball: Yeah, it only appears to have a land border with the U.S. due to the Mercator Projection. White Hat: Wow! I had no idea.\n[Caption below the frame:] At this point people feel so misled by the Mercator Projection that you can use it to convince them of basically any map fact.\n"}
{"id":2083,"title":"Laptop Issues","image_title":"Laptop Issues","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2083","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/laptop_issues.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2083:_Laptop_Issues","transcript":"[Cueball, carrying a laptop, is walking past a sign with a right-pointing arrow reading \"Tech Support\".] Off panel voice #1: Oh no. Off panel voice #2: What? Off panel voice #1: This guy.  He has the worst tech problems.\n[Cueball standing at a tech support desk with an open laptop facing Hairy and Ponytail on the other side of the desk.] Cueball: My laptop's battery won't hold a charge. Hairy: We can replace it. Cueball: Tried that.  Now the new ones won't either.\n[Close-up of Cueball gesturing with left hand] Cueball: Also, random files get corrupted on the first day of every month.  Factory reset didn't help. Off panel voice: You weren't kidding.\n[Close-up of Cueball with right hand on chin, gesturing with left hand] Cueball: When it's plugged in, I get static shocks from my plumbing. Off panel voice: What the... Cueball: And it reboots if someone uses an arc welder nearby.\n[Same tableau as second panel except that the laptop is slightly closed now.] Cueball: Transitions\u00ae lenses go dark when exposed to the screen, and when I open too many tabs, it fogs nearby photographic film. Hairy: We don't usually do this, but I've gotten permission from my manager to have you and the laptop hurled into the ocean. Cueball: That's probably for the best.\n","explanation":"Cueball goes to tech support with his laptop. Hairy and Ponytail are waiting behind the counter; one has dealt with Cueball's bizarre tech issues before, and warns the other. Sure enough, Cueball sets the computer down and offers a detailed list of the arcane problems his computer is giving him.\n\"My laptop's battery won't hold a charge.\" A common problem; most laptops use lithium ion batteries due to their high power to weight ratio. Whilst the charge storage capacity of all batteries decreases over repeated charging and discharging cycles, lithium ion batteries are particularly prone to degradation over time. This is because charge is stored by lithium ions intercalated between layers of a 2D metal oxide material. When the battery is discharged the lithium ions move out of the metal oxide layers, allowing the material to contract, and it is this mechanical expansion and contraction of the material over repeated charging cycles that damages the battery, reducing storage capacity. However...\n\"Tried [replacing the battery]. Now the new ones won't either.\" ...the problem persisting despite the battery's replacement fails to make any significant sense. It may be a problem with his laptop's charging port, but his comment that the \"new ones\" now fail to hold a charge seems to imply it is persisting despite the replacement batteries being used elsewhere after attempting to use them for his laptop and failing... Many modern batteries have firmware built in now that reports their charge level. It is possible that his laptop is installing a faulty firmware to any batteries that get connected. Alternatively, an electrical fault within the laptop may be shorting the battery, leading to high currents which damage the battery.\n\"Also, random files get corrupted on the first of every month.\" Some devices may be scheduled to do a \" disk cleanup \" on the first of every month. Somehow, this task is corrupting files that should be kept.\n\"Factory reset didn't help.\" A factory reset of a device deletes all files, undoes all customizations, and generally puts the system back to square one. Under normal circumstances, this is an effective last-resort measure for dealing with glitches, viruses, and malware, so the fact that it doesn't offer any help suggests that the device's factory settings were already corrupt when they were first made or that the problem is hardware-related, although the typical hardware issues would tend to occur at random times and not be dependent on the calendar. External factors are likely here, such as visiting somewhere highly magnetic monthly. That or the people who coded the factory reset made improper assumptions about what is unchangeable and should not be checked; most Android factory resets won't fix a botched rooting, for instance, because low-level binary executables shouldn't need resetting, right? Nobody should be able to knacker that deep (although Cueball apparently just did).\n\"When it's plugged in, I get static shocks from my plumbing.\" Static discharge from a portable device while it's charging is common. Static charge on other items in the building is not. However, plumbing systems on older houses were often used to provide a ground instead of using grounding rods, which are now the accepted norm. This could imply that Cueball's house is old, and for some reason his laptop is pumping a large amount of charge directly to ground.\n\"And it reboots if someone uses an arc welder nearby.\" The high power draw of an arc welder will occasionally cause less devoted power supplies to flicker. Coupled with the bad battery that cannot keep the computer running when the power dips, this might cause his laptop to reboot. This could also be just because the arc welder is causing a large amount of electromagnetic interference.\n\"Transitions\u00ae lenses go dark when exposed to the screen,\" Photochromic lenses (commonly known by the brand name Transitions\u00ae lenses) in prescription glasses darken when exposed directly to UV rays; this is to avoid the wearer any hassle of needing prescription sunglasses . This seems to indicate that the screen of Cueball's laptop is emitting UV radiation. Whilst Cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors can emit small amounts of UV light and X-rays, most laptops use either Liquid-crystal or OLED displays which do not emit significant amounts of UV-light, and would not be expected to cause photochromic lenses to darken. Most displays would also be expected to contain a filter to block any harmful UV-light from damaging the eyes of the user. Since UV-light is very damaging to the eyes, a screen that emits sufficient UV-light to darken sunglasses would be hazardous to look at.\n\"and when I open too many tabs, it fogs nearby photographic film.\" Photographic film used in old analogue (not digital) cameras contains light-sensitive chemicals which change from transparent to opaque when exposed to light. The photographic film ' negatives ' are then printed onto paper, inverting the colors (i.e. areas that appear dark on the film appear bright on the print, as they do in real life). If photographic film is exposed to light, either intentionally or unintentionally (such as by accidentally opening the back of the camera whilst the film is unwound) then the film will become over-exposed, leading to a bright 'fog' that obscures the image. Fogging can also occur as a result of chemical degradation of the film or by exposure to radiation sources including X-rays. In order to cause fogging, the screen would have to be emitting X-rays that can pass through the film's container and expose the film. It is unclear why this should only occur when too many tabs are opened. Combined with the previous statement this indicates that a worrying range of light being emitted by the screen.\nThe sheer incongruity of everything Cueball has reported, in combination with past issues, leads Hairy to report that his manager has authorized Cueball and his laptop be thrown into the ocean. Cueball accepts this without objection. This is a reference to 1912: Thermostat , where Cueball has an issue with his thermostat, and the Tech support employee asks him if he has tried walking into the sea. It seems this suggestion has evolved into forcefully throwing him into the sea, for lack of a better idea. It could also be that this is a reference back to the first of the series of comics on Cueball's many computer problems , 349: Success , where he ended up in the ocean. Alternatively, it seems very similar to the account of Jonah in the Bible, who was thrown overboard into the ocean during a violent storm after which the storm ceased.\nThe title text contains mention of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a part of the United States government responsible for preventing pollution. In real life, most of a laptop computer's components are considered toxic waste, and the EPA, as part of their mission, would not want it dumped in the ocean. More to the point, it's implied that whatever Cueball did to it renders it far more dangerous than an ordinary laptop, and the EPA really doesn't want his cursed possessions in the ocean; thus they are sending a hazmat team to collect the laptop and safely dispose of it. However, in the comic, the EPA do not seem to be bothered with Cueball himself being thrown into the ocean.\n[Cueball, carrying a laptop, is walking past a sign with a right-pointing arrow reading \"Tech Support\".] Off panel voice #1: Oh no. Off panel voice #2: What? Off panel voice #1: This guy.  He has the worst tech problems.\n[Cueball standing at a tech support desk with an open laptop facing Hairy and Ponytail on the other side of the desk.] Cueball: My laptop's battery won't hold a charge. Hairy: We can replace it. Cueball: Tried that.  Now the new ones won't either.\n[Close-up of Cueball gesturing with left hand] Cueball: Also, random files get corrupted on the first day of every month.  Factory reset didn't help. Off panel voice: You weren't kidding.\n[Close-up of Cueball with right hand on chin, gesturing with left hand] Cueball: When it's plugged in, I get static shocks from my plumbing. Off panel voice: What the... Cueball: And it reboots if someone uses an arc welder nearby.\n[Same tableau as second panel except that the laptop is slightly closed now.] Cueball: Transitions\u00ae lenses go dark when exposed to the screen, and when I open too many tabs, it fogs nearby photographic film. Hairy: We don't usually do this, but I've gotten permission from my manager to have you and the laptop hurled into the ocean. Cueball: That's probably for the best.\n"}
{"id":2084,"title":"FDR","image_title":"FDR","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2084","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fdr.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2084:_FDR","transcript":"[Close-up of a form. Each field has a label (the first is assumed) and a handwritten entry. The name and country are each half visible. The numeral \"4\" has been only partially written before being scratched out.] [ NAME ] Randall Munroe DATE Dec 7, 194 12, 2018 COUNTRY United States\n[Caption below the frame:] FDR was so good at speeches that I spend a whole month each year writing the date wrong.\n","explanation":"The United States Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked in 1941 , and is credited with starting the United States' involvement in World War II. The then US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), issued a speech to the American people which begins with the line \"Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy... \". Whenever Randall writes \"December\" he feels compelled to complete the line, a mistake which is visible in this comic.\nThis may be a parody of a more common type of error in which people writing dates during January (particularly early in the month) accidentally write the previous year instead of the current one because the previous year number is an established pattern while the new one is a recent change.\nThe title text confuses the date of the northern hemisphere summer solstice (June 21st) with the date of the 365 Crete earthquake that happened on July 21st 365AD.  The earthquake had a magnitude of at least 8.0 which caused widespread destruction across the Eastern Mediterranean.  Then it mentions Guy Fawkes Night , the anniversary of the famous failed attempt to bomb Parliament on the night of November 5th, 1605. The latter event is immortalized in the rhyme \"remember remember, the fifth of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot\", the former event less so.\nRandall also may be suggesting that Roosevelt implied the degree of \"infamy\" of an event can be measured by how long its date is remembered. Pearl Harbor resulted in 2,458 deaths and obviously extensive damage to a military base and fleet. It has been remembered 77 years, thus far. The earth quake of 365AD resulted in an estimated 230,000 killed and numerous cities severely damaged or destroyed. Randall states it was remembered for a few centuries. The Gunpowder Plot resulted in the death of a couple of conspirators and no notable damage. It has been remembered, at least in song, for \"over 400 years\".\n[Close-up of a form. Each field has a label (the first is assumed) and a handwritten entry. The name and country are each half visible. The numeral \"4\" has been only partially written before being scratched out.] [ NAME ] Randall Munroe DATE Dec 7, 194 12, 2018 COUNTRY United States\n[Caption below the frame:] FDR was so good at speeches that I spend a whole month each year writing the date wrong.\n"}
{"id":2085,"title":"arXiv","image_title":"arXiv","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2085","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/arxiv.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2085:_arXiv","transcript":"[Megan and Ponytail are standing together. Megan is talking to Ponytail.] Megan: Wait, all the papers in your field are posted as free PDFs on arXiv? That must be killing big science journals, since they charge such huge subscription\/publication fees.\n[Ponytail responds with her arms wide, palms up.] Ponytail: Nah, we\u2019ve been doing it since the 90s and nobody seems to care.\n[Megan contemplates, speechless.]\n[Megan slightly raises her arms and Ponytail puts up a hand to shush her.] Megan: That makes no sense at all!! Ponytail: Shhh, you\u2019ll jinx it!\n","explanation":"arXiv is a free online repository of electronic preprints of scientific papers in various fields, particularly in physics, math, and computer science. Scientists typically publish \"preprint\" versions of journal articles to arXiv, which are free to publish to and read. In this comic Megan remarks that academic journals must have a hard time getting by since their primary revenue is from researchers who pay to publish articles and readers who pay for subscriptions. Her remark seems to assume that arXiv must be a recent development, perhaps similar to the Sci-Hub project which began in 2011. However, Ponytail informs her that the arXiv project has been around since the 1990s (1991 to be exact).\nAfter a panel of Megan looking contemplative, she remarks that that does not make sense at all. After all, why would publishing companies be able to make money from something that is free online? Ponytail tries to stop her from freaking out, so that her outrage does not inform others about the current arrangement and thus ruin the system. She uses the term \" jinx \", which in common usage means to affect negatively by speaking about, to imply that this system is one that could break down if discussed.\nPonytail expressing confusion about the continued existence of scientific journals previously happened in 2025: Peer Review .\nThe title text refers to another project that is invaluable for internet research, the Internet Archive ( link to it here ). Internet Archive is a public archive of information, including public domain books and music. Internet Archive runs the Wayback Machine , an archive of backups of web pages all over the Web at various times that can be used to see past versions of a page, even if that site has since shut down. Internet Archive accepts submissions of any type of information, including new backups of web pages and newly-made public domain content. The title text argues that these two projects are so useful, yet make so little economic sense, that, if they did not exist, we would dismiss them as ideas that would never be viable. In addition, as \"arXiv\" is intended to be pronounced the same as \"archive\", both sites have URLs with a common pronunciation.\n[Megan and Ponytail are standing together. Megan is talking to Ponytail.] Megan: Wait, all the papers in your field are posted as free PDFs on arXiv? That must be killing big science journals, since they charge such huge subscription\/publication fees.\n[Ponytail responds with her arms wide, palms up.] Ponytail: Nah, we\u2019ve been doing it since the 90s and nobody seems to care.\n[Megan contemplates, speechless.]\n[Megan slightly raises her arms and Ponytail puts up a hand to shush her.] Megan: That makes no sense at all!! Ponytail: Shhh, you\u2019ll jinx it!\n"}
{"id":2086,"title":"History Department","image_title":"History Department","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2086","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/history_department.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2086:_History_Department","transcript":"[Ponytail is standing behind a lectern holding a hand up indicating the presentation screen next to her with a list of time periods. The screen has a string ending in ring, attached to it, to pull it down.] Ponytail: 2018 was a productive year for the history department - we were able to fully analyze over four months of history. Ponytail: Unfortunately, over that same period, an entire year of new history was produced. Ponytail: I'm afraid we're falling behind.\n[Presentation:] Studied November 1833 April 19-22, 1979 May 21-25, 585 BCE June-August 1848 May 16, 2001\n","explanation":"In this comic Ponytail is a representative of the history department, which might be a department of a university or other organisation. She presents the year report of 2018. In this, she explains, the department has fully analyzed over four months of history. In the meantime, due to the passage of time, another year of history has been added to their workload (implied to be the year spanning between the current meeting and the previous one). This presents a cycle in which the department would only be able to keep up if they could analyze, within a one year period, more than or exactly one year of history.\nA department in a business, such as the finance department, is typically required to keep up with their own workload and complete an entire year's worth of workload every year.  A business that fails to manage this minimum would almost certainly fail: bills would not get collected, invoices would not get paid, employees would not get paid, etc.  A history department fails to follow this model in two very important ways.  First, the subject of history cannot be fully processed.  New discoveries change what we know about certain time periods.  Even current events cannot be fully processed, as future events will cause historians to see connections in things not previously thought to be connected.  Second, the standard model for history departments focuses on specific eras or specific subjects for the purpose of explaining the events to students.  History departments do not process years, but instead process the subject so that it stays relevant to the understanding of the current student body.\nThere are, however, long running historical projects that have suffered this very problem. An example is the Histoire litt\u00e9raire de la France which began publication in 1733 with a volume covering up to the year 300. By 1995 over 40 volumes had been published, but the historical account had only reached the 14th century. The volumes for the 14th century had taken 130 years to produce. Although over the 250 years of the project publication had been proceeding faster than time elapsed, the proliferation of literary content following the dawn of printing in the 15th century is likely to cause the project to slip further into reverse.\nThe title text further expands this problem by indicating the discovery of a new era of history that had previously gone un-analyzed, which would have added more undiscovered history than it removed. The 1750s decade is possibly a reference to the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar by the British Empire .\nRandall previously mentioned that history is huge in 1979: History .\nEvents in the dates listed:\nJune \u2013 The Serbians from Vojvodina start a rebellion against the Hungarian government. June 2\u2013June 12 \u2013 The Prague Slavic Congress brings together members of the Pan-Slavism movement. June 17 \u2013 The Austrian army bombards Prague , and crushes a working class revolt. June 21 \u2013 Wallachian Revolution of 1848 : The Proclamation of Islaz is made public, and a Romanian revolutionary government led by Ion Heliade R\u0103dulescu and Christian Tell is created. June 22 \u2013 The French government dissolves the national workshops in Paris, giving the workers the choice of joining the army or going to workshops in the provinces. The following day, the June Days Uprising begin in response. July \u2013 The Public Health Act establishes Boards of Health across England and Wales . July 5 \u2013 The Hungarian national revolutionary parliament starts to work. July 19 \u2013 Women's rights \u2013 Seneca Falls Convention : The 2-day Women's Rights Convention opens in Seneca Falls, New York and \" Bloomers \" are introduced at the feminist convention. July 26 \u2013 The Matale Rebellion breaks out, against British rule in Sri Lanka . July 29 \u2013 Young Irelander Rebellion : A nationalist revolt in County Tipperary , against British rule, is put down by the Irish Constabulary . August 6 \u2013 HMS Daedalus reports a sighting of a sea serpent. August 14 \u2013 American President James K. Polk annexes the Oregon Country , and renames it the Oregon Territory as part of the United States. August 17 \u2013 Yucat\u00e1n officially unites with Mexico. August 24 \u2013 The U.S. barque Ocean Monarch is burnt out off the Great Orme , North Wales , with the loss of 178, chiefly emigrants. August 28 \u2013 Mathieu Luis becomes the first black member to join the French Parliament , as a representative of Guadeloupe .\n[Ponytail is standing behind a lectern holding a hand up indicating the presentation screen next to her with a list of time periods. The screen has a string ending in ring, attached to it, to pull it down.] Ponytail: 2018 was a productive year for the history department - we were able to fully analyze over four months of history. Ponytail: Unfortunately, over that same period, an entire year of new history was produced. Ponytail: I'm afraid we're falling behind.\n[Presentation:] Studied November 1833 April 19-22, 1979 May 21-25, 585 BCE June-August 1848 May 16, 2001\n"}
{"id":2087,"title":"Rocket Launch","image_title":"Rocket Launch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2087","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rocket_launch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2087:_Rocket_Launch","transcript":"[The major stages of a rocket launch are shown, with the rocket trajectory indicated by dotted lines. Each stage is annotated with a description and an arrow. A title above the image reads 'Outline of a typical rocket launch'.]\n[A rocket with two boosters is shown at the bottom left hand corner of the image taking off from a launch pad on the ground, surrounded by clouds of smoke.] Liftoff\n[The rocket ascends vertically] Max-Q: Peak aerodynamic stress\n[Separation of the two external booster rockets is shown, with the main rocket continuing to ascend vertically with a slight rightward tilt and the two boosters curving off to the right.] Booster separation\n[The main rocket stage starts to curve over to the right.] Max-CB: Highest chance of collision with care bears\n[Separation of the second rocket stage. Main rocket heads right, whilst second booster stage curves downward to meet trajectory of first booster stages.] Main stage separation\n[Main rocket continues towards the right.] GPS silenced so it will stop saying \"make a U-turn\"\n[First and second stage booster rocket trajectories meet and become a single trajectory heading upwards and right.] Reunification\n[Trajectory of main rocket wobbles slightly.] Pilot panics, copilot takes command after struggle\n[Booster stage rockets continue to head upwards and right towards the main rocket trajectory.] Pursuit phase\n[Main rocket and booster stage trajectories meet and cross three times.] Inter-stage dogfight\n[The trajectory for one of the stages ends in an explosion.]\n[The remaining trajectory, indicated with dashed-lines and question marks, continues towards the right and off the edge of the page.] Winner proceeds to space\n\n","explanation":"This comic was posted on a week with a notably high number of rocket launches .  Originally, there were to be four orbital rocket launches from the United States on December 19, 2018 (the publish date for the comic), which would have tied with the prior record for number of orbital rocket launches in one day.  While these launches were ultimately delayed, breaking the event, the comic was doubtless under production by then.\nOnly some of the steps listed are actually typical.\nLiftoff The traditional start of a launch, when the rocket leaves the ground.  The engines will typically have been ignited a short time before, often one-by-one in a specifically engineered sequence to reduce shock stress on the rocket, but need to throttle up to produce enough thrust to overcome the rocket's weight.  Some launch pad configurations physically restrain the rocket (at least to some degree) until the engines are known to produce the required thrust then the rocket is released (e.g. by pyrotechnically crushing restraining bolts such as in NASA Space Shuttle configuration, or by hydraulic actuators opening a sturdy \"clamp\", such as in SpaceX Falcon 9 configuration).  \"Liftoff\" refers to the moment this happens, making the rocket lift off the ground. Max-Q : Peak aerodynamic stress. A rocket accelerates from the moment it leaves the ground.  The faster a rocket goes, the bigger volume of air it pushes through per second - but the higher a rocket goes, the thinner the air.  (Before liftoff, the rocket is not moving, and thus is not pushing through air.  Once in orbit, there is essentially no air to push through, so the rocket is not pushing through air.  Between those two times, the rocket is pushing through some amount of air, the exact amount increasing before Max Q and decreasing after Max Q.)  \"Max Q\" is the moment where these two factors produce a maximum, and is the point where the rocket's structure must withstand the most air pushing back against it. Booster separation Rockets are designed in stages , so they do not have to carry the empty fuel tanks all the way to orbit.  (Carrying any mass to orbit is expensive, so the more that can be dropped off earlier, the better.) Two or three stages are typical.  \"Booster separation\" marks the point where the first of these stages (the \" booster \"), its fuel expended, is typically ejected. Max-CB: Highest chance of collision with Care Bears . This is entirely fictitious.  Care Bears are fictitious characters, which have a toy line, television series, and movies.  The existence of a basketball sneaker named the \"Nike Air Force Max CB\" may or may not be relevant. Main stage separation See \"booster separation\" above.  This marks the point where the second stage (the \"main stage\") is ejected. GPS silenced so it will stop saying \"Make a U-turn\" Again, this is fictional.  While some rockets do make use of signals from the Global Positioning System (\"GPS\"), no rockets are known to use the navigational devices that incorporate GPS readers and street maps, providing directions - often with optional text-to-speech - along the Earth's surface.  Some such devices are notorious for getting confused in extreme situations (such as the high Mach numbers that rockets achieve); constantly uttering \"make a U-turn\" would be one such confusion, and any device in such a confused state might well be silenced for being more annoying than helpful.  Navigation of this nature is neither necessary nor useful on a rocket, which will have its entire route from ground to orbit computed before launch, and piloting typically left entirely to computers given the precise timing required. Reunification (of boosters) Another fictional step.  Discarded stages fall back into the Earth's atmosphere, either hitting the ground (or, more often, water) or burning up because of the heat-up resulting from high compression of air in front of them while re-entering thick layers of atmosphere at extreme speed.  The booster and main stage would not be on a course to come anywhere near each other, and would not have enough fuel to change their course (running out of fuel being why they were discarded in the first place).  Even if they did, landing for reuse (as SpaceX has attempted , often successfully) would be far more likely than a mid-air reunion. Pilot panics, copilot takes command after struggle Another fictional step.  Astronauts are not the sort of people who panic easily, nor struggle with their crewmates.  More importantly, in any modern rocket the \"pilot\" is not a human being, but a computer incapable of panic [ citation needed ] (as in the human emotion).  It is possible that part of the flight computer could fail, causing redundant failsafes to take over, but the process could not correctly be described as a \"struggle\", and in any case this sort of failure is uncommon enough that it is not part of a \"typical\" rocket launch. Pursuit phase Fictional.  This assumes the (nonexistent) reunified booster would have enough fuel to pursue the top stage of the rocket, and a reason to do so.  See \"Reunification\".  This might be a reference to Pursuit guidance . The comic indicates that a fight ensues with only one of the pair continuing to orbit. Inter-stage dogfight Fictional.  See \"Pursuit phase\".  A dogfight is an aerial battle between fighter aircraft, conducted at close range.  This step claims that the rocket booster and the top stage of the rocket engage in a battle. Winner proceeds to space Fictional.  As noted above, in a real rocket launch there is no dogfight of which there can be a \"winner\". A careful reading would note that the bottom stage \"wins\" by default; in contrast, in a real (orbital) rocket launch, the top stage typically proceeds to space.\nThe title text refers once again to the Care Bears franchise. The Care Bears live in a castle made of clouds, called Care-a-Lot Castle , so the comic claims that NASA aims to avoid launching into their castle, but sometimes cannot avoid hitting \"stray\" Care Bears. That being said, the point about the strike has a basis in truth; at the speeds a rocket moves, impact with something roughly the size and weight of a human (or a Care Bear) has the potential to be catastrophic. If something should threaten to connect with the rocket, the best that the humans involved can do is hope for a glancing blow with a part of the rocket sturdy enough to endure the impact.\n[The major stages of a rocket launch are shown, with the rocket trajectory indicated by dotted lines. Each stage is annotated with a description and an arrow. A title above the image reads 'Outline of a typical rocket launch'.]\n[A rocket with two boosters is shown at the bottom left hand corner of the image taking off from a launch pad on the ground, surrounded by clouds of smoke.] Liftoff\n[The rocket ascends vertically] Max-Q: Peak aerodynamic stress\n[Separation of the two external booster rockets is shown, with the main rocket continuing to ascend vertically with a slight rightward tilt and the two boosters curving off to the right.] Booster separation\n[The main rocket stage starts to curve over to the right.] Max-CB: Highest chance of collision with care bears\n[Separation of the second rocket stage. Main rocket heads right, whilst second booster stage curves downward to meet trajectory of first booster stages.] Main stage separation\n[Main rocket continues towards the right.] GPS silenced so it will stop saying \"make a U-turn\"\n[First and second stage booster rocket trajectories meet and become a single trajectory heading upwards and right.] Reunification\n[Trajectory of main rocket wobbles slightly.] Pilot panics, copilot takes command after struggle\n[Booster stage rockets continue to head upwards and right towards the main rocket trajectory.] Pursuit phase\n[Main rocket and booster stage trajectories meet and cross three times.] Inter-stage dogfight\n[The trajectory for one of the stages ends in an explosion.]\n[The remaining trajectory, indicated with dashed-lines and question marks, continues towards the right and off the edge of the page.] Winner proceeds to space\n\n"}
{"id":2088,"title":"Schwarzschild's Cat","image_title":"Schwarzschild's Cat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2088","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/schwarzschilds_cat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2088:_Schwarzschild%27s_Cat","transcript":"[A graph is shown. The x-axis is labeled \"Cat size\" and the y-axis, \"Cat cuteness\". Parallel to and a short distance from the y axis is a dashed line the same length as the y-axis line, representing a vertical asymptote; the space between the y axis and the dashed line is labelled \"Critical Limit\". Graphed is a function coming down from infinity, starting close to the dashed line; it then levels off and does not reach zero on-screen. At the top end of the graph is the text \"Schwarzschild's Cat\" and an arrow pointing upwards outside of the graph.]\n","explanation":"This comic is primarily a wordplay joke about the Schwarzschild radius , or the distance from a black hole corresponding to the event horizon .The Schwarzschild radius for a given body is the limit to which a given mass can be shrunk down before it becomes a black hole - the Schwarzschild radius also represents the event horizon of this newly-created black hole. The event horizon, in turn, is the limit from which nothing can leave a black hole; not even light. The joke is that, apparently, smaller cats are cuter, and there is a limit below which a sufficiently small cat (but larger than zero) will approach infinite cuteness, in a similar pattern to the way time's rate for an observer will approach infinity, the closer they get to the event horizon of a black hole.\nIt's also an oblique reference to the Schr\u00f6dinger's cat thought-experiment, since the names (Erwin) \"Schr\u00f6dinger\" and (Karl) \"Schwarzschild\" are somewhat similar and both men were early 20th-century physicists who exchanged ideas with Albert Einstein. However, the actual comic doesn't bring up quantum superposition .\nThe title text makes two allusions. First, it alludes to what happens when an object falls into a black hole. From an outside observer's point of view, such objects appear to slow down and take an infinite amount of time to cross the event horizon due to the time dilation of General relativity . The object's photons become increasingly red-shifted, fading as they lose energy to the black hole's gravity well. The scientific consensus suggests that from the falling object's point of view, it should continue to experience time and cross the Schwarzschild radius, but that event is unobservable from the outside (hence the term \"event horizon\").\nSecond, the title text is a play on the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, which slowly fades from view until only its grin remains.\nRandall previously discussed the superiority of tiny mammals in 1682: Bun , and drew graphs relating to the perceived cuteness of cats in 231: Cat Proximity .\n[A graph is shown. The x-axis is labeled \"Cat size\" and the y-axis, \"Cat cuteness\". Parallel to and a short distance from the y axis is a dashed line the same length as the y-axis line, representing a vertical asymptote; the space between the y axis and the dashed line is labelled \"Critical Limit\". Graphed is a function coming down from infinity, starting close to the dashed line; it then levels off and does not reach zero on-screen. At the top end of the graph is the text \"Schwarzschild's Cat\" and an arrow pointing upwards outside of the graph.]\n"}
{"id":2089,"title":"Christmas Eve Eve","image_title":"Christmas Eve Eve","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2089","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/christmas_eve_eve.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2089:_Christmas_Eve_Eve","transcript":"[Cueball with his arms out is talking with White Hat and Megan. In Cueball's long last remark the letters get smaller from line to line.]\nCueball: Today is Christmas Eve. Yesterday was Christmas Eve Eve. Megan: Uh huh... Cueball: Of course, tomorrow is Christmas. And then, my favorite... Megan: Oh no. Cueball: ...Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve! Megan: I'm returning the presents I got you.\n11 14 14 14 15 16 17 17 18 20 21 22 24 25 27 30 32 27 364 total! The first line also has Christmas along with the 11 eves, and do take up more space than the 14 eves below. The last line is only partially filled, with 4 eves from the line above on each side (so room for more than 35, probably 40, eves in one line with that font size.) The first three lines with 14 eves becomes clearly shorter, before more is added almost in every line after this, except two lines with 17 each.\n","explanation":"This year's Christmas comic was posted on December 24, 2018, the Christmas Eve of 2018.\nThe evening or day preceding a special day such as a holiday is often referred to as the eve of that day (derived from the same word from which we get evening ). Thus December 24 is Christmas Eve. Some people extend this and call December 23 \"Christmas Eve Eve,\" as Christmas Eve is itself a noted holiday. The day before that would be \"Christmas Eve Eve Eve,\" adding one \"Eve\" for each night before Christmas morning, although the increasing extension leads to each additional \"Eve\" being continuously less common.\nCueball notes the general idea, and Megan acknowledges it. Cueball follows by naming December 24 as Christmas Eve, December 25 as Christmas, and then mentions that the following day is his favorite. Megan's \"Oh no\" implies that she knows what Cueball will say next.\nSince December 26 is the 364th day before Christmas (when the following year is not a leap year, which was correct in 2018 when the comic was released), it follows that it is \"Christmas\" followed by \"Eve\" 364 times.\nMegan finds listening to Cueball recite this unacceptable. As such, she announces that she will not give him gifts, taking the extra step of returning the gifts she'd already bought. As Christmas presents in America are first handed out on Christmas Day's morning (unless the giver and recipient are aware in advance they will be unable to meet in person on that day; Megan's presence on Christmas Eve indicates this is not a threat), she has not given it to him yet.\nThe title text refers to the Boxing Day holiday celebrated the day after Christmas in the UK and many parts of the former British Empire. Although the exact origin of the name is unknown, it is believed to be in reference to the Alms Box placed in areas of worship to collect donations to the poor, which was then opened right after Christmas. Most Americans don't know this and make jokes about how it refers to the sport of boxing . In this title text we can presume Cueball was punched (or boxed ) after his litany of 364 Eve s, to which he replies, \"Oh, so that's why they call it Boxing Day.\" As this is a pun of groan-inducing triviality, he receives another punch .\n[Cueball with his arms out is talking with White Hat and Megan. In Cueball's long last remark the letters get smaller from line to line.]\nCueball: Today is Christmas Eve. Yesterday was Christmas Eve Eve. Megan: Uh huh... Cueball: Of course, tomorrow is Christmas. And then, my favorite... Megan: Oh no. Cueball: ...Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve  Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve! Megan: I'm returning the presents I got you.\n11 14 14 14 15 16 17 17 18 20 21 22 24 25 27 30 32 27 364 total! The first line also has Christmas along with the 11 eves, and do take up more space than the 14 eves below. The last line is only partially filled, with 4 eves from the line above on each side (so room for more than 35, probably 40, eves in one line with that font size.) The first three lines with 14 eves becomes clearly shorter, before more is added almost in every line after this, except two lines with 17 each.\n"}
{"id":2090,"title":"Feathered Dinosaur Venn Diagram","image_title":"Feathered Dinosaur Venn Diagram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2090","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/feathered_dinosaur_venn_diagram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2090:_Feathered_Dinosaur_Venn_Diagram","transcript":"[The comic shows a rectangular panel containing two circles, side by side and not intersecting. A caption is underneath each circle.] [Left circle caption:] People Who Don't Think Feathered Dinosaurs Sound Scary [Right circle caption:] People Who Have Tried To Fight An Ostrich\n","explanation":"Translated plainly, this comic reads \"People who don't think feathered dinosaurs sound scary have never tried to fight an ostrich.\"\nThis comic is a jab at people who dismiss the idea feathered dinosaurs sound scary.  Adding feathers to a reptile can trigger a cognitive dissonance; people today see feathers and think of harmless birds. However, the ostrich and a few other avian species, which are feathered dinosaurs ( 1211: Birds and Dinosaurs ) are in fact deadly.  The diagram points out that anyone who has tried to fight an ostrich would be scared of a dinosaur with feathers, and anyone who thinks a feathered dinosaur doesn't sound scary has never tried to fight one.  The two groups of people are exclusive because the two circles do not overlap.\nOstriches are not typically considered scary or dangerous because its appearance is comical or awkward to most people; they are also herbivorous and not typically aggressive, choosing to use its great speed to outrun predators rather than fight them. In reality, however, ostriches are much larger than a human and will attack when cornered or when their family is threatened; their powerful legs can kick hard enough to kill lions and other predators, and their feet are equipped with large claws which can disembowel a human. Thus, the actual experience of fighting an ostrich would quickly convince any human that survives the experience that ostriches (and by extension other feathered dinosaurs) are, in fact, scary.\nThe title text refers to \" Volunteer Boy \", a kid in the beginning of Jurassic Park who dismisses a raptor fossil as a \"six-foot turkey\". Dr. Grant uses a fossil of a raptor talon to imply that a raptor would slice open his belly and eat him while he's still alive. This scares the kid into respecting the raptor.  The title text theorizes that if he didn't get that pep talk, and continued to think of dinosaurs as \"six-foot turkeys\", then he would grow up to make some of the contested sequels in the franchise. Raptors play a central role throughout the series of movies, with some even being trained by a raptor handler like dogs.\nTechnically , the diagram is an Euler diagram , rather than a Venn diagram . A Venn diagram shows all possible combinations of two or more sets, including those with no elements, and so all of the regions must intersect in all possible combinations. An Euler diagram only depicts the non-empty combinations, and therefore does not have this constraint. However, this is a technicality, and many people use the words interchangeably.\n[The comic shows a rectangular panel containing two circles, side by side and not intersecting. A caption is underneath each circle.] [Left circle caption:] People Who Don't Think Feathered Dinosaurs Sound Scary [Right circle caption:] People Who Have Tried To Fight An Ostrich\n"}
{"id":2091,"title":"Million, Billion, Trillion","image_title":"Million, Billion, Trillion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2091","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/million_billion_trillion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2091:_Million,_Billion,_Trillion","transcript":"[A graph with Y-axis labeled \u201cPerceived size of number\u201d and X-axis labeled \u201cActual size of number (log scale)\u201d.] [The line graph shows points that are labeled with the following numbers from \u201c1 million\u201d to \u201c100 trillion\u201d:]\n[ Points on graph: ]\n1 million [ (2, 1.5) ] 10 million [ (3, 3.5) ] 100 million [ (4, 4.8) ] 1 billion [ (5, 2.8) ] 10 billion [ (6, 4.4) ] 100 billion [ (7, 5.3) ] 1 trillion [ (8, 4.3) ] 10 trillion [ (9, 5.1) ] 100 trillion [ (10, 5.6) ]\n[The perceived size increases between most numbers, but decreases between 100 million and 1 billion, and between 100 billion and 1 trillion. The decreases are shown as dashed lines labeled \u201c?\u201d, in contrast to the solid unlabeled lines between the increases. The increases and decreases in perceived size become smaller as the numbers grow in actual size.] [Caption below the panel:] Talking about large numbers is hard\n","explanation":"Much like comic 558 , this comic addresses the difficulty ordinary people have with large numbers. Though most if not all people intuitively understand the difference between one object and two objects, or one object and ten objects, or even one object and a hundred objects, as numbers increase most people's ability to innately conceive of the numbers being discussed decreases remarkably quickly. When numbers reach the millions and the billions, and especially the trillions, most people don't truly process the numbers at all, and instead conceive of them as some version of a drastically-oversimplified concept such as \"very big.\" Where comparing one to ten is simple, comparing \"very big\" to a different \"very big\" can prove extremely challenging, and will certainly require non-intuitive, conscious thinking.\nThe comic represents this challenge by providing a graph which represents Randall 's intuitive conception of the values of various very large numbers, and said conception's misalignment with reality. Though some trends reflect the real value of the numbers on the graph, i.e. 100 million larger than 10 million larger than 1 million and 1 billion larger than 1 million, the curve is far from the linear (exponential on the log-scaled axes) path it should take, with 1 billion being intuitively understood as less than 100 million, based, presumably, on the fact, easily comprehended on an intuitive level, that 100 is larger than 1 , and therefore the presence of 100 in 100 million places it at a higher value than the 1 in 1 billion would place the latter. In reality, of course, 1 billion is ten times larger than 100 million, but the comic deals not with actual reality, but with the perception of reality  of these numbers before conscious thought is applied .\nThe most interesting parts of the graph, and the parts where the disconnect between intuition and reality becomes clearest, are the dashed sections labeled with question marks, the one between 100 million and 1 billion, the other between 100 billion and 1 trillion. Here two competing intuitive understandings compete for dominance. On the one hand, the intuitive understanding described above, with 100 trumping 1, would see the curve taking a sharp downturn. On the other hand, the path from 100 million to 1 billion is paved with such numbers as 500 million, 700 million, and 900 million, all of which would theoretically be seen intuitively as larger than 100 million, thanks to the fact that 9 is greater than 7, and 7 greater than 5, and so on, bending the curve up rather than down. These two conflicting intuitions leave Randall with no single intuitive path for the two dashed sections, leading to their dashed and questioned state.\nThe comic's caption and title highlight another problem surrounding the intuitive grasping of large numbers: the flaws in the English words used for them. For instance, nothing about the word \"million\" suggests smallness relative to the word \"billion\" on an intuitive scale. This unintuitive language contributes greatly to the \"100 trumps 1\" intuitive fallacy described above.\nThe title text references a highly relevant disconnect between the long and short scales of large numbers .\nFor all English speakers, and for most languages, 1 million constitutes 1,000 thousands, or, less ambiguously, 10^6. However, this is the last of the consensus numbers, and the definition of what should be the \"next step\" varies depending on how each country's language evolved.\nIn other words, 1 billion objects in a country using the short-scale would be 1,000 million objects in a country using the long-scale; at the \"next step\", 1 trillion in the short-scale would be named 1 billion in the long-scale, despite the fact that the number of objects has remained the same. This difference between languages using the short-scale and the long-scale often causes confusion when translating articles with large numbers in them, as translators sometimes fail to change between short-scale and long-scale schemes, wrongly translating large numbers to incorrect values.\nThe fact that such a staggering difference of terminology was able to exist and be almost completely unknown to many supports Randall's point about the failure of human intuition in the discussion of extremely large numbers.\n[A graph with Y-axis labeled \u201cPerceived size of number\u201d and X-axis labeled \u201cActual size of number (log scale)\u201d.] [The line graph shows points that are labeled with the following numbers from \u201c1 million\u201d to \u201c100 trillion\u201d:]\n[ Points on graph: ]\n1 million [ (2, 1.5) ] 10 million [ (3, 3.5) ] 100 million [ (4, 4.8) ] 1 billion [ (5, 2.8) ] 10 billion [ (6, 4.4) ] 100 billion [ (7, 5.3) ] 1 trillion [ (8, 4.3) ] 10 trillion [ (9, 5.1) ] 100 trillion [ (10, 5.6) ]\n[The perceived size increases between most numbers, but decreases between 100 million and 1 billion, and between 100 billion and 1 trillion. The decreases are shown as dashed lines labeled \u201c?\u201d, in contrast to the solid unlabeled lines between the increases. The increases and decreases in perceived size become smaller as the numbers grow in actual size.] [Caption below the panel:] Talking about large numbers is hard\n"}
{"id":2092,"title":"Consensus New Year","image_title":"Consensus New Year","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2092","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/consensus_new_year.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2092:_Consensus_New_Year","transcript":"[A graph labeled \u201cPercentage of the world's population living in 2019\u201d with Y-axis markers at 0%, 50%, and 100%, and X-axis markers at 10:00 AM EST Dec 31st, 1:30 PM EST, 7:00 PM EST, Midnight EST, 3:00 AM EST Jan 1st, and 7:00 AM EST.] [The line graph shows the percentage increasing from 0 to 100% in several steps, with 50% reached at 1:30 PM EST.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Consensus New Year: as of 1:30PM Eastern Time (6:30PM UTC) a majority of the world's population will be living in 2019.\nRandall has mislabeled the leftmost point of the graph: the Earth's earliest time zone ( UTC+14:00 ) should have the midnight at 5:00 AM EST rather than 10:00 AM EST. The number of one-hour increments on the x-axis does not match Randall's label.\n","explanation":"In this New Year comic , Randall is proposing a compromise for when to celebrate, or recognize, New Year's Day .  These celebrations traditionally take place at the stroke of midnight between Dec. 31st and Jan. 1st, at the local time of the event's location.  With \"Consensus New Year\", these celebrations would happen at the same time, world over, and would be at exactly 1:30 pm EST (6:30 pm UTC ).  At this time, about half the world's population would be in 2018 local time and the other half would be in 2019.  This is due to the various time zones throughout the world, and the graph is based on the proportion of the population in these zones.\nThis is based on the assumption that the entire world uses the same calendar system.  Randall's graph shows the year starting on the same day for the entire world.  While the Gregorian calendar is used as the civil calendar in most countries of the world, the Eastern Orthodox churches uses the Julian calendar, on which the year will begin 13 days later, and the year (as of December 2018-January 2019) is 1440 on the Muslim calendar and 5779 on the Hebrew calendar. Other countries have the same New Year as the Gregorian calendar but count years differently; for example, 2019 is the year 108 in Taiwan and 2562 in Thailand.\nThe Wiktionary entry for \" consensus \" includes multiple definitions, including these two meanings:\nIn an attributive grammar structure, a noun is placed before another noun to assign an attribute to it.  When \"consensus\" is used this way, it's a statistical term which means the average projected value of the modified noun.\nRandall properly uses this first definition for both the title of the comic and the graph itself, where the graph represents the average projected value of the percentage of the world population reaching the new year at any given time.\nRandall may be purposefully misusing the second definition of the word \"consensus\" to reflect the common misuse of the term consensus for the practice of majority vote .\nIn scenarios involving group decision-making, consensus means that all or almost all members of the group will accept the decision.  Depending on how it is done, this generally results in a slower decision-making process due to discussion, but decisions that many more people are happy with.  Consensus can scale to large groups of people using approaches such as the spokescouncil model to speed dialogue. By this definition, Consensus New Year happens at one of the last four time zones as the last to \"agree\" enter 2019, so (nearly full consensus definition) 4:00 am, 5:00 am, 6:00 am, or (full consensus definition) 7:00 am EST on January 1, 2019.\nConsensus lies in contrast to majority vote, where a decision passes when over 50% of the people desire it.  Majority vote is used in most current large democracies and is what most people are familiar with.  It is quick to describe and implement, but can result in polarized political parties and a stark lack of minority rights, unless enough people develop concern for the issues that they are tempered with constitutions and logrolling .\nThe leftmost horizontal axis label (10am EST Dec 31st) was an error. The point marked as 0% should be 5am EST (see table below).\nAdditionally, some of the lines are shown with a slope, which is inaccurate. Since sun time is not used anywhere, a correct graph line would only consist of horizontal and vertical lines.\n[A graph labeled \u201cPercentage of the world's population living in 2019\u201d with Y-axis markers at 0%, 50%, and 100%, and X-axis markers at 10:00 AM EST Dec 31st, 1:30 PM EST, 7:00 PM EST, Midnight EST, 3:00 AM EST Jan 1st, and 7:00 AM EST.] [The line graph shows the percentage increasing from 0 to 100% in several steps, with 50% reached at 1:30 PM EST.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Consensus New Year: as of 1:30PM Eastern Time (6:30PM UTC) a majority of the world's population will be living in 2019.\nRandall has mislabeled the leftmost point of the graph: the Earth's earliest time zone ( UTC+14:00 ) should have the midnight at 5:00 AM EST rather than 10:00 AM EST. The number of one-hour increments on the x-axis does not match Randall's label.\n"}
{"id":2093,"title":"Reminders","image_title":"Reminders","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2093","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reminders.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2093:_Reminders","transcript":"[Cueball at his desk using a laptop.] Laptop: You got this email six days ago. Do you want to follow up? Cueball: Oh, right, I should do that. [Cueball types on laptop.] *type type* Laptop: Did you forget the attachment? Cueball: Oops, yes. Laptop: Today is the recipient's birthday. Did you want to mention that? Cueball: Wait, it is?\n[Caption below the panel:] These reminders make me uncomfortable, not because computers are getting too smart, but because it reminds me how often I fall short of even baseline levels of conscientiousness.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is using an email client program on a laptop, which is a popular tool for communicating by email with others.\nIn recent years, many email clients have started implementing helpful warnings and reminders to catch common human mistakes and ease the process of communication. One such feature, demonstrated in this comic, is that many clients will now warn you if you've mentioned an attachment in your email but haven't actually attached anything, a common error people make when emailing.\nThis has gotten to the point where email clients are increasingly stepping in to help with social obligations too; for example, reminding you if you've left an email unanswered for too long, or that someone is celebrating a birthday today and should be congratulated. With the increasing availability of social data and advances in machine learning, these features have the potential to become very sophisticated, to the point that they can effortlessly make social inferences and connections that might have slipped a human user's mind.\nSuch features are meant to be helpful aids, but have led people to be worried about privacy issues, or about how \"smart\" technology is becoming. However, in this comic, Cueball (likely representing Randall himself) has come to the uncomfortable realization that technology is now easily surpassing his own ability to maintain social relationships with other people, by being more aware of his friends' social lives than he is. He is disturbed by how unwittingly unconscientious he has become.\nThe title text suggests that the problem of keeping up a baseline level of interest in other people's lives eventually solves itself; implying, somewhat darkly, that if you don't put in even the bare minimum effort to keep up, you'll end up with fewer friends as some get annoyed by your lack of interest in their lives.\n[Cueball at his desk using a laptop.] Laptop: You got this email six days ago. Do you want to follow up? Cueball: Oh, right, I should do that. [Cueball types on laptop.] *type type* Laptop: Did you forget the attachment? Cueball: Oops, yes. Laptop: Today is the recipient's birthday. Did you want to mention that? Cueball: Wait, it is?\n[Caption below the panel:] These reminders make me uncomfortable, not because computers are getting too smart, but because it reminds me how often I fall short of even baseline levels of conscientiousness.\n"}
{"id":2094,"title":"Short Selling","image_title":"Short Selling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2094","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/short_selling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2094:_Short_Selling","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are walking together, talking.] Cueball: I don't understand shorting stocks. Ponytail: It's like when you promise your firstborn to a witch for five magic beans.\n[Ponytail close up] Cueball (off-panel): Is that a common\u2013 Ponytail: She's a sucker, right? You know your awful kid will be worth one or two beans at best .\n[Ponytail and Cueball stopped, facing each other] Ponytail: But then it turns out you love your kid, a love worth 200 beans! You can't afford that loss! Ponytail: There's only one way out: Ponytail: You gotta fight the witch.\n[Ponytail and Cueball stopped, facing each other] Ponytail: So you send your kid up the beanstalk to battle the giant, who represents interest rates. Cueball: This analogy is getting less helpful by the minute. Ponytail: If only you'd somehow shorted my wisdom before you asked.\n","explanation":"Shorting stocks (short selling stocks) is a stock market practice. If we think of normal investing where we buy into a stock as betting on the stock rising in value then shortselling is a corresponding betting on a stock to fall in value. This inverse procedure is accomplished by getting the stock on a loan or \"front\" basis to begin with, then selling the stock that isn't actually owned, so that when the stock loses value you're able to pay back a lower amount and keep the difference. We could say someone takes a risk because they believe that a certain stock's price is going to drop.  The risk-taker borrows stock from someone, and then sells the stock that they've just borrowed, keeping the money from the sale. They then owe that stock to the lender. But the risk-taker believes that they will be able to buy the same stock back on the stockmarket later on at a lower price, and then give it to the lender to replace what they borrowed.  If everything goes according to plan and the stock drops in price, the risk-taker will walk away with a profit.  Of course, if things don't go according to plan and the stock rises in price instead, the risk-taker winds up losing money, because they have to buy back the stock for more than they sold it.\nCueball asks Ponytail to explain shorting stocks.  Ponytail starts out with a fairy tale story that falls apart almost before she even starts.\nThe process of short selling a stock functions similarly to the initial parts of the story. The major steps in normal shorting are described here alongside the analogous (sort of) parts of the story:\nAn investor decides that stock S is likely to decrease in value, and wants to make money from this difference. Stock S is currently selling for $5, but the investor believes it will drop in value to $1 or $2 in the near future. The person in the story is going to have a child, and believes that the child will be worth one or two magic beans. They have been offered a price of five beans for the child, and they see this as a benefit.\nThe investor finds a person willing to allow them to borrow stock S now. This is usually done through a broker. The investor then sells the stock they borrowed, adding $5 to their account. They plan on waiting until stock S is selling for $1, then buying it again. They will have made $4 in profit, and can return the stock they borrowed. The parent in the story sells the rights to their child for five beans because their child is worth one or two beans to them, so they will end up making a profit of three or four beans.\nStock S does not decrease in price, but increases dramatically to $200. The investor has promised to return the stock within a specific timeframe, and they must do this or they will be in violation of various laws and contracts. They can wait in the hopes that the value will drop again, but they will eventually have to buy the stock for the new price of $200. They will lose $195 on this transaction. The child is born, and the parent involved decides that they love the child. They would put a valuation of this child at two hundred magic beans, and would prefer not to turn the child over to the witch. They have no choice, however, as they have formerly agreed to do this.\nThis part of the story somewhat matches the process of short selling a stock, except that there is a convenient market for buying and selling stocks at a common price, while a network of witches buying children or a method of valuing them does not exist. [ citation needed ]\nPonytail's version does not make exact analogies to the process of short selling. The first major difference occurs when  the parent sells a child they haven't had yet to a witch.  Like short selling, the parent is selling something they don't own.  But unlike short selling, the parent is selling something that doesn't exist yet. The somewhat broken analogy breaks further when Ponytail says the parent now is going to fight the witch instead of paying the witch with the child.  There is no legal option to \"fight\" the other person if a shorted stock or call-writing strategy fails. You simply lose money.\nOur now definitely broken analogy breaks down even further (if possible) by sending the kid up the beanstalk to fight the giant - a giant that Ponytail says represents high interest rates.  Interest rates have nothing to do with shorting stocks.  (Technically they can, but the short seller would have \/ should have calculated that when determining if their investment strategy would work.) In addition, it is not possible for the investor, on their own, to fight interest rates that are harming their strategy, as those rates are set by lenders and are based on the credit worthiness of the borrower, the stated use case for the funds, and the nation's government's monetary policy.\nCueball comments that the analogy is rapidly losing its value to him.  Ponytail fires back with the comment that he should have shorted her advice before asking for it, thus making a profit. The decreased helpfulness of her wisdom is analogous to the decreased value of a shorted stock price. She once again proves that she lacks the knowledge of how short selling functions, or at least the knowledge to explain it, as her advice does not have a price to anyone, was presumably given to Cueball for free, and cannot be traded.\nHer story appears to be based on plot elements of multiple fairy tales. It begins by mixing up the story of Rapunzel with Jack and the Beanstalk .\nIn one version of Rapunzel a Father breaks into a witch's garden to steal the Rapunzel plant for his pregnant wife. The Witch catches him and agrees to let him go and not punish him in exchange for the child.\nIn one version of the \" Jack and the Beanstalk \" fairy tale story, Jack sells a cow for magic beans.  His mother, thinking the beans are fake, is angry with Jack.  Jack plants the beans and a magic beanstalk grows up into the clouds.  Jack climbs the beanstalk and explores the land above the clouds.  He finds the home of a cruel giant and proceeds to steal from the giant.  The giant discovers the theft and chases Jack back down the beanstalk.  Jack reaches the bottom of the beanstalk first and cuts the beanstalk down.  The giant falls to his death, and Jack uses his stolen wealth to take care of himself and his mother.\nThe combination of the two stories is similar to the story from the musical \" Into the Woods ,\" in which a Father sneaks into the Witch's garden to steal vegetables, then trades his soon to be born child for the vegetables, but also steals beans in the process.\nThe title text is actually the most useful part of this comic when it comes to investment advice.  The witch (the broker) is offering the father (short seller) 20 magic beans now if the father\/short seller buys all of the analogies (stocks) later.  However, multiple witches\/stock brokers trick multiple people into this strategy.  Since every father\/seller now needs the same analogies\/stocks, and multiple witches need the exact same complete set of analogies, a bidding war erupts and it's impossible to please all the witches.  The \"winner\" pays a much higher price than expected (limiting how much of a win it really is).  And the losers wind up either dead or enslaved (bankrupt). In the stock market the corresponding phenomenon is known as a short squeeze , hence Cueball's comment. However, if the witches implement this strategy by discussing among themselves to orchestrate the phenomenon, it would be in violation of various trading regulations, and brokers rarely have a reason to hope for their clients to go bankrupt.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are walking together, talking.] Cueball: I don't understand shorting stocks. Ponytail: It's like when you promise your firstborn to a witch for five magic beans.\n[Ponytail close up] Cueball (off-panel): Is that a common\u2013 Ponytail: She's a sucker, right? You know your awful kid will be worth one or two beans at best .\n[Ponytail and Cueball stopped, facing each other] Ponytail: But then it turns out you love your kid, a love worth 200 beans! You can't afford that loss! Ponytail: There's only one way out: Ponytail: You gotta fight the witch.\n[Ponytail and Cueball stopped, facing each other] Ponytail: So you send your kid up the beanstalk to battle the giant, who represents interest rates. Cueball: This analogy is getting less helpful by the minute. Ponytail: If only you'd somehow shorted my wisdom before you asked.\n"}
{"id":2095,"title":"Marsiforming","image_title":"Marsiforming","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2095","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/marsiforming.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2095:_Marsiforming","transcript":"[Cueball is on a stage giving a presentation, with a diagram behind him. The diagram shows Earth and Mars side-by-side, along with some writing below the two.] Cueball: Earth and Mars may look different now, but with some orbiting mirrors and atmospheric adjustments, we could change that.\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm having trouble selling people on my proposal to terraform Earth to resemble Mars.\n","explanation":"Terraforming is the (so far only suggested) process of changing a planet, usually to make it more habitable for humans or other Earth life. A very common example is Mars , which is known to harbour water ice and believed to have previously been warm enough to have liquid water. Normally, plans for terraforming try to adjust temperatures to be compatible with liquid water, and an atmosphere containing significant amounts of oxygen but little carbon dioxide. The word Terra is the Latin name for Earth , so terraforming would be \"Earth Forming\".\nIn this comic Cueball is suggesting doing the opposite: change Earth to be more like Mars, i.e. extremely dry, cold, and with a very thin atmosphere, approximately 1\/160 of Earth's surface pressure. In addition, Mars has no magnetic core, so it is possible that Cueball wants to remove the magnetic field from Earth. The comic title combines Mars with Forming (with a linking \"i\") to create the new word Marsiforming.  He is having trouble getting the enthusiastic response to his proposal that he expects.\nThe title text provides examples of how this could improve things: preserving Martian life (a proposed reason to terraform Mars would be to provide a second planet to preserve Earth life at the cost of destroying any potential [undiscovered] Martian organisms, so by marsiforming Earth, we would provide a second planet to preserve Martian life, if there is any life on Mars), needing fewer interplanetary launches (no need to leave this planet's atmosphere in order to visit itself, and Martians who might otherwise need to return to their home planet could instead settle on Earth), and making it easier to field-test Mars rovers (field-test means to test in the environment of actual use, which would readily be available on Earth). While the second and third items would indeed be advantages, and the first would be as well if Mars has developed life, they are severely outweighed by the fact that most life on Earth, including humans, would die.\nUnstated in the comic are the extreme costs such a proposal would incur, which would surely be grounds for rejection.  Between the thin atmosphere, harsh solar radiation, and other changes, Earth would become uninhabitable for most life currently on Earth, most notably humans.  Almost all humans value the continued existence of the human race far more than Martian exploration [ citation needed ] (if nothing else, it is for the benefit of humans that Mars is being explored, so exterminating the human race would render the benefits moot).\nThere are known extremophile species that would survive underground on Mars.  If similar life is hiding on Mars, marsiforming the Earth would benefit their possible eventual interplanetary efforts.  There is an existing project to begin experimental terraforming on Mars by nurturing some of our extremophile species on it.\n[Cueball is on a stage giving a presentation, with a diagram behind him. The diagram shows Earth and Mars side-by-side, along with some writing below the two.] Cueball: Earth and Mars may look different now, but with some orbiting mirrors and atmospheric adjustments, we could change that.\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm having trouble selling people on my proposal to terraform Earth to resemble Mars.\n"}
{"id":2096,"title":"Mattresses","image_title":"Mattresses","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2096","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mattresses.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2096:_Mattresses","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are talking to each other] Cueball: ...It's firmer than my old mattress, which I thought I wouldn't like, but it's actually really nice. Ponytail: Cool, maybe I should get one. Cueball: Now let's take some listener questions! Ponytail: What?\n[Caption below the panel:] I can't talk about mattresses, underwear, or the Post Office anymore without feeling the urge to segue back into a podcast.\nThe image was originally posted as an indexed image with only a 3-color map (white, black, and grey), leading to graphical artifacts in place of a smooth blur between black and white. Most of Randall's comic images are indexed images with over 200 different grayscale colors. The original image can be seen here .\n","explanation":"Cueball is talking to Ponytail about his mattress, in what appears to be just a casual conversation.  Cueball suddenly offers to take any questions from listeners, as though the conversation were part of a podcast; this confuses Ponytail. The subtitle explains that Randall has heard so many advertisements for certain products on podcasts that he can't discuss them without feeling as though he's in a podcast himself.\nPodcasts are typically audio-only programs available online, which frequently generate income through advertisements. Ads are often read by the podcast host. Hosts will often include segues or personal anecdotes to further reduce the \"topical whiplash\" caused by abruptly switching subjects from that of the podcast to an unrelated brand plug, and back.\nIn 2018, many podcasts (or at least many podcasts that Randall listens to) contained ads by Casper or Helix Sleep (both mattress brands), MeUndies or Tommy John (both underwear brands), and Stamps.com (an internet-based mailing\/shipping service).\nThe title text refers to \"The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare\" , about the pressures companies put on reviewers, and the legal battle between a mattress review site that makes money through affiliate sales, and a mattress company, which was unhappy with a review. Since saying anything unfavorable about mattresses might open one to legal action, the title text author opted to avoid them entirely.  However, that could be seen as an endorsement of sleeping on the floor, thus requiring a disclaimer. It also references the way that podcast hosts will often note when they intentionally or unintentionally endorse a product sponsor in an attempt to remain transparent about their financial supporters.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are talking to each other] Cueball: ...It's firmer than my old mattress, which I thought I wouldn't like, but it's actually really nice. Ponytail: Cool, maybe I should get one. Cueball: Now let's take some listener questions! Ponytail: What?\n[Caption below the panel:] I can't talk about mattresses, underwear, or the Post Office anymore without feeling the urge to segue back into a podcast.\nThe image was originally posted as an indexed image with only a 3-color map (white, black, and grey), leading to graphical artifacts in place of a smooth blur between black and white. Most of Randall's comic images are indexed images with over 200 different grayscale colors. The original image can be seen here .\n"}
{"id":2097,"title":"Thor Tools","image_title":"Thor Tools","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2097","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thor_tools.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2097:_Thor_Tools","transcript":"[A wide image is shown in a single frame.] Hand tools Thor could have ended up with [Below is a small centered horizontal line with arrows at both ends, labeled \"Best\" to the left and \"Worst\" on the right.]\n[The rest of the image shows an other horizontal line in the middle, also with arrows at both ends, covering the full width. Items are marked by a dot with a text above or below, and sometimes a figure wearing a winged helmet, above the line, uses a tool mentioned below:] Hammer Axe Claw hammer Circular saw [Above, the winged helmet guy uses a circular saw:] Bzzzz zzzz Shovel Jackhammer Socket wrench [Above, the winged helmet guy spins the socket of a socket wrench with a tiny sound.] Bolt cutters Hacksaw Nail gun Staple gun [Above, the winged helmet guy fires staples into the ground in front of him:] Kachunk kachunk Coping saw Screwdriver (flat) Ball-peen hammer Screwdriver (Phillips) Awl Digital Caliper Dremel [Above, the winged helmet guy shows a running Dremel to the left:] Bzzzzz Plane\n","explanation":"In Norse mythology, Thor is the name of a god of thunder and lightning. His signature weapon is a magic hammer called Mj\u00f6lnir . In popular culture Thor might be best known for his role in Marvel comics and films , which his appearance here seems to be referencing.  In the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, Avengers: Infinity War, Thor also wields an axe named Stormbreaker.\nAlthough this hammer was historically a weapon, this comic interprets it as it would more commonly be interpeted today -- as a tool.  The comic is listing various hand tools in order of utility and viability as Thor's weapon, besides his actual, enchanted hammer. Hammers are heavy, blunt, and can do large amounts of damage to an opponent, whereas a hand plane is sharp, but only in one place, and will only inflict surface wounds.\nSome of these tools require power, which would generally require Thor to stay near an outlet or keep a battery charging, such as the circular saw, or Dremel. However, being the god of lightning may allow him to circumvent this, by producing electricity for the direct current (D.C.) tools, although he would need an inverter to convert the lightning (D.C.) to alternating current (A.C.) for the tools requiring it. Thor would also need compressed air for the nail gun or jackhammer, only allowing Thor so many shots before reloading the air tank at an outlet, or via a concentrated wind storm.\nThe nail gun and staple gun would also require nails or staples respectively to function as a weapon. Although Mj\u00f6lnir is believed to return to Thor if thrown, it's not clear how a similar system could work with nails and staples.\nThe usefulness of the nail gun as a weapon might depend on whether it was an older one that can be bump-fired or a newer one that requires a separate trigger pull for each nail.\nIn the title text, Randall writes that the order of the axis label should be reversed, making the plane the best tool and Mj\u00f6lnir the worst.  Considering that the title of the comic is \"Thor Tools\" (\"tools\", instead of \"weapons\"), the argument seems to be that a hammer is less useful than the rest, by seeing them as tools and not as weapons.\nA few other interpretations of this could be:\nThe title may be a reference to Gary Larson's The Far Side comic, Cow Tools . The comic depicted a cow next to a set of crude tools, and was famous for no one understanding it.\nAll shown tools are explained below:\nHammer A hammer is a tool consisting of a weighted \"head\" fixed to a long handle that is swung to deliver an impact to a small area of an object . Thor was a hammer-wielding god and produced the lighting by using this tool. A war hammer was an actual blunt weapon used for combat in medieval times, and is the original Thor's attribute. There exists a variety of craftsman's hammers designed for specific purposes which can be used as weapons of opportunity to various degrees, depending on the tool's size, weight and material. Axe An axe or just ax is another old human tool used to split and cut wood, but it also was used as a dangerous weapon in the medieval times. The battle-axes of old were of considerably different design than the woodworking ones, being lighter and having thinner and wider blades. A woodworking axe, though not designed for combat, could be a formidable weapon of opportunity. Notably, this tool is placed slightly below the hammer, possibly indicating Randall's thoughts on Thor's axe, 'Stormbreaker' which features in the Marvel films. (Note: In Norse mythology Thor is depicted exclusively with a hammer rather than an axe). Claw hammer A claw hammer is a hammer tool primarily used for driving nails into other objects, but also for pulling nails from them. This item seems a bit redundant in the presence of a general hammer on the axis, but could be seen as more scary because it has a pointed, curved and split back head (used for pulling nails). In fact, the usefulness of its back head for combat is debatable at least. On the other hand, it is smaller and lighter than some other craftman's hammers, and less scary than a true war hammer, so its place on the axis may be justified. Circular saw A circular saw is using a, mostly electric powered, fast-revolving toothed disc to cut materials. A stationary version is called a table saw but the figure of Thor drawn above presents him using a lighter hand-held version making a buzzing sound. Since the power of the saw is far beyond the human power it is quite a dangerous tool and could be fatal to the user himself. However, it would be rather unwieldy in combat, as it is quite heavy and bulky. Also, electric circular saw would be limited by its cord length, however cordless (battery-operated) saws exist today. This item could be a mock reference to a common trope in horror movies or computer games, when a chainsaw (not a circular saw) is used a weapon. Shovel A shovel is also a historic tool. It can be used to dig into the ground, move snow or dirt, harvest, and much more. Because it has a relatively thin, sharp metal blade at the end of a pole, it can be used as a weapon of opportunity. Indeed, a small (sometimes foldable), sturdy spade was and still is a standard issue item for an infantryman in some countries, intended mainly for entrenching work, but also usable as a weapon \u2013 and the soldiers are trained to use it as such, sometimes to a high skill, specifically among special forces. It is rumored that Russian Spetznaz operators are specifically trained to use their spades as throwing weapons. It is therefore more useful in combat than a circular saw \u2013 but may be seen as less scary. Jackhammer A jackhammer is a power tool used to drill and crush hard but brittle materials like stone, concrete etc. It has heavy body with a protruding shaft that makes hard and rapid back-and-forth (and optionally also rotary) movements that drive an implement (a drill, a chisel etc.) into the worked material. Like the circular saw jackhammer is a tool that is powered far beyond single human capabilities. Most jackhammers are very heavy and can be reasonably used only in a facing-down position to work on floors, pavements and other near-horizontal surfaces, nullifying combat application. However, since Thor is purportedly very strong, he may be able to hold it horizontally for some combat... Socket wrench A handle attached to a socket wrench is mostly used to tighten bolts or nuts. But since it is quite heavy and resembles a hammer it could also be used in a similar fashion. It may be a self-reference to comic 538 . Bolt cutters Bolt cutters are cutters with very long handles, typically 2 or 3 feet long, and comparatively tiny jaws. The length of the handles provides the user enough mechanical advantage to sheer through things like bolts, chain links, and lock shackles. Although this tool can cut some fairly tough objects, its usefulness in combat is limited \u2013 as far as the cutting action goes at least. On the other hand they are quite heavy and can be used as a blunt weapon. Hacksaw A hacksaw is a type of hand saw with very small teeth. Hacksaws are well suited to cutting materials like metal and plastic, where the larger teeth of a wood saw would tend to bind or damage the material around the cut. Hacksaw blades are fairly unlikely to seriously injure people, though a hacksaw may be useful against metal baddies like Ultron. Nail gun A nail gun is a tool for driving nails or other fasteners into various materials ranging from soft wood to hard concrete by a single powerful \"shot\" to the nail being driven. There are models powered by compressed air, electricity (several types of mechanisms) or explosive charges similar to firearm ammunition (most often compatible with .22 Short blank cartridges). They are normally used by slightly pushing the \"nozzle\" against an object, disengaging a safety nose contact mechanism, and pulling the trigger. These are quite dangerous tools and can be potentially modified \u2013 by removing safety mechanisms \u2013 to act similarly to a handgun, shooting nails as high-speed projectiles. Its place in the middle of the axis seems not right compared to the work hazard level of other tools placed left of it. If safety mechanisms are left intact, a nail gun would need to be used in close combat by pressing it against an opponent which would make it difficult to apply, but if applied successfully it would inflict grievous wounds. Staple gun A staple gun is a tool used to drive staples (C-shaped pieces of hard wire) into relatively soft materials such as wood, plastics and light masonry in order to fix something to them. There exist spring-loaded hand-operated staple guns as well as power ones utilizing either electricity or compressed air. The power discharged during staple action is a lot less than that of a nail gun and would inflict minor skin wounds at most. If one manages to eject a staple into the air (not against an object) it won't travel very far. A figure of Thor is drawn above the axis showing him using a staple gun this way, with staples falling short onto the ground. The gun held by Thor makes kachunk sounds characteristic for a spring-loaded version of the tool. Coping saw A coping saw is a hand saw with a thin replaceable blade and is used to cut curves and shapes in wood or other relatively soft materials.  While it could produce a surface wound and draw blood, a person would generally not stand still long enough to be seriously hurt by being sawed at by a coping saw, plus they could bend or break the blade relatively easily. Screwdriver (flat) A (flat) screwdriver is a metal rod with a handle, flattened and ground at the other end to form a fairly sharp but short edge perpendicular to the rod. It is normally used to drive screws into a material, by putting the edge into a groove on the screw's head and turning it while pressing firmly. It is not very dangerous normally, but many people have cut their fingers while driving screws in, or sometimes whilst using it incorrectly to unscrew a bolt . It could potentially be used as a stabbing weapon similarly to a dagger, but much less effectively, or alternatively the heavy handle may be used as a bludgeon, though the smooth rod would be difficult to grip. Some nations seem to regard it so much dangerous as to ban its possession in public along knives. Ball-peen hammer Like a regular hammer, a ball-peen hammer has a flat head designed to hammer things like nail.  However instead of the \"claw\" a regular carpenter's hammer has to pull out nails, it has a second head that is shaped like a ball and which is used to bang surfaces such as sheet metal directly.  A ball-peen hammer is probably the smallest of traditional hammers, and usually used for more delicate work.  Thor's Hammer has two flat surfaces for pounding (no claw), so a ball peen might be like a smaller Thor's Hammer and could be pretty deadly in his hands.  The ball part would probably not be any more or less effective than the flat part, except it might bounce or deflect off some surfaces where a flat one might not. Screwdriver (Phillips) Similar to a flat screwdriver, but with a cross-shaped tip, designed to drive screws with matching cross-shaped heads.  While a Phillips screwdriver could potentially be used as an improvised weapon to stab or strike like a flat screwdriver, the blunter, cross shape is less likely to inflict cutting injury, likely leading to its lower position on the list. Awl An awl is a hand tool, basically a rather short, thin, sharp (sometimes curved) spike with a handle. It is used for punching holes through soft material (leather, fabrics) or to mark points or lines on wood or metal to assist further work such as cutting or drilling. In a pinch, it could be used as a stabbing weapon like a dagger, but a screwdriver is more sturdy for such purpose. Digital Caliper Digital calipers are an instrument for precisely measuring the dimensions of small objects. Typically, digital calipers can measure inner diameters, outer diameters, and depth. The reason they are considered more formidable than Dremels and planes is likely how surprisingly sharp the calipers are. They need to be sharp to make accurate measurements, but it is not uncommon for people to cut themselves while using a digital caliper. Dremel Dremel is a brand name (often used in a generic sense) of small rotary power tools that can be used in precise work involving small objects such as engraving, milling, drilling, grinding, cutting, polishing etc. It consists of a relatively small and lightweight body housing a high-speed electric motor driving a shaft equipped with a chuck . Various implements can be fixed to the chuck \u2013 drills, milling cutters of various shapes, small cutting disks, grinding stones, brushes, soft polishing disks etc. Typically the tool is used handheld against an object held in a vice. It can also be mounted in a stand with a flexible shaft attached, at the other end of which an implement is fixed in a chuck, allowing for still more precise work. A Dremel would be rather useless in combat, effecting in superficial wounds only. It could be seen as a baby circular saw, therefore much less scary and placed much more to the right of the scale. However, it is still a heavy object with a firm grip, and could plausibly be wielded as a bludgeon, making it slightly more effective than a plane. Plane A hand plane is a tool for shaping wood using muscle power to force the cutting blade over the wood surface.  It is designed to scrape layers of wood off the surface.  While a plane does have a sharp edge and can cause painful injuries if misused, its awkward shape and the small size of the cutting edge would make it impractical to wield and nearly useless as a combat weapon, even for bludgeoning.  A hand plane could plausibly be used as a particularly brutal torture device on a restrained victim, but as Thor is typically depicted as an honorable and heroic character it is unlikely that he would use one in this manner. Could also mean an actual plane that is meant to fly. Most likely to be used as a thrown projectile or, since Thor can fly using Mj\u00f6lnir, he can use the plane to fly as well.\n[A wide image is shown in a single frame.] Hand tools Thor could have ended up with [Below is a small centered horizontal line with arrows at both ends, labeled \"Best\" to the left and \"Worst\" on the right.]\n[The rest of the image shows an other horizontal line in the middle, also with arrows at both ends, covering the full width. Items are marked by a dot with a text above or below, and sometimes a figure wearing a winged helmet, above the line, uses a tool mentioned below:] Hammer Axe Claw hammer Circular saw [Above, the winged helmet guy uses a circular saw:] Bzzzz zzzz Shovel Jackhammer Socket wrench [Above, the winged helmet guy spins the socket of a socket wrench with a tiny sound.] Bolt cutters Hacksaw Nail gun Staple gun [Above, the winged helmet guy fires staples into the ground in front of him:] Kachunk kachunk Coping saw Screwdriver (flat) Ball-peen hammer Screwdriver (Phillips) Awl Digital Caliper Dremel [Above, the winged helmet guy shows a running Dremel to the left:] Bzzzzz Plane\n"}
{"id":2098,"title":"Magnetic Pole","image_title":"Magnetic Pole","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2098","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/magnetic_pole.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2098:_Magnetic_Pole","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are talking to each other. White Hat has a cellphone in his hand, while Cueball is raising his hands in the air in mock exasperation.] White Hat: I just read that the Earth's North magnetic pole is drifting rapidly. Cueball: Oh no! I must update our declination tables post haste, lest our merchant schooners run aground on the shoals!\n[Caption below the panel:] I like when the Earth's magnetic field does weird stuff, because it's a huge, cool, urgent-seeming science thing, but there's nothing I personally need to do about it.\n","explanation":"Over the last couple of months, Earth's magnetic fields have been shifting rapidly . Although the magnetic fields do move regularly, the current shift has been unexpected and unprecedented. As many location systems are reliant on the magnetic fields to function, the accuracy of such tools is being shifted beyond the maximum acceptable error.\nLocational and navigational systems use the magnetic field, combined with a model of field behavior, to do fancy math and pop out data. Because of the rapid shifts, a new model was scheduled to be created; however, the model has been considerably delayed by the US government shutdown ,\nAs shifts occur, the error of geopositional data will increase until a new model is released. The effect is especially pronounced as you move toward the poles.\nCueball is saying that because of the currently published magnetic declination data being slightly incorrect, his schooners (old merchant sailing ships) may go off-course and crash on shoals . This is to illustrate how magnetic pole shift doesn't actually affect many people's daily lives.  Modern ships' navigation systems do not rely on magnetic pole location \u2013 in contrast to old vessels which mostly used a compass .\nSince the movement is only about two-fifths of a degree, it wouldn't cause much disruption for Cueball or require him to adjust anything about his lifestyle, but since the speed of the change has been steadily increasing over the past few years, it may mean we are heading for a geomagnetic reversal in the next few decades, something very exciting indeed. During a magnetic reversal, the poles wouldn't just switch places; several different poles would form and interact chaotically, and it's likely that one of them would end up close enough to where Randall lives to cause auroras to become more common at some point during the transition.\nIn the title text, Randall mentions that there are reasons people could be concerned, but says that they would be more than made up for by newly being able to experience mid-latitude auroras. Since auroras occur between 10\u00b0 and 20\u00b0 from the magnetic poles, the migration of the poles to middle latitudes would cause the auroras to occur there as well; since more people live at middle latitudes than in the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, and since auroras are considered aesthetically attractive, the psychological benefits of the drifting poles might more than make up for the technical difficulties it causes.\n[White Hat and Cueball are talking to each other. White Hat has a cellphone in his hand, while Cueball is raising his hands in the air in mock exasperation.] White Hat: I just read that the Earth's North magnetic pole is drifting rapidly. Cueball: Oh no! I must update our declination tables post haste, lest our merchant schooners run aground on the shoals!\n[Caption below the panel:] I like when the Earth's magnetic field does weird stuff, because it's a huge, cool, urgent-seeming science thing, but there's nothing I personally need to do about it.\n"}
{"id":2099,"title":"Missal of Silos","image_title":"Missal of Silos","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2099","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/missal_of_silos.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2099:_Missal_of_Silos","transcript":"[A passage from the Wikipedia page for Missal of Silos is shown, with underlined heading and with links in the text in blue font. The last line is partly cut off by the comics panel, but can be read.] Missal of Silos From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Missal of Silos is the oldest known paper document created in the Christian West; it is 11th century in date. [1] The missal is held in the library of the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos near Burgos, Spain . It is one of a number of liturgical manuscripts...\n[Caption below the panel:] Spain would like to remind everyone not to use fuzzy string matching in their nuclear strike target lists.\n","explanation":"This comic plays on the similarity in name between missile silos, places where long range weapons are deployed, and the missal of Silos, an old document residing in Spain .\nIn Christianity , a missal is a priest 's book of instructions , texts and music for the proper celebration of Mass . The Missal of Silos is an 11th-century missal from the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos in northern Spain ; it is famous for being the oldest known paper document in Europe, written at a time when the usual writing material was parchment .\nMissile silos are often thought to be the first targeting priority in event of a nuclear strike, in hopes of preventing retaliation.  If one was searching for potential nuclear missile targets, the Missal of Silos could conceivably be returned as a result of a fuzzy search for \"missile silos\", and be made a target.\nFuzzy, or approximate, string matching is a technique used for searching text for sequences of characters similar to a given sequence.  Normal string matching would only find results that matched the search exactly (searching for \" missile \" would find only occurrences of \" missile \").  Fuzzy string matching instead finds results that are \"close enough\" by some metric (searching for \" missile \" would find \" missile \" but also close variants like \" missal \" or \" missel \").  Fuzzy string matching is often used in search engines, as typos, misspellings, and inexact searches are common.\nCheyenne Mountain is a mountain in Colorado , which houses an underground military compound (aptly named the Cheyenne Mountain Complex ) designed to withstand a nuclear strike and host to the North American Aerospace Defense Command . Cheyenne, Wyoming , on the other hand, is the capital of Wyoming . The residents of Cheyenne, Wyoming would prefer their town not to be the target of a nuclear attack because of confusion with Cheyenne Mountain. [ citation needed ] However, Cheyenne, Wyoming is likely a listed target because of the nearby 90th Operations Group at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base operating Minuteman III ICBMs from missile silos.\nThere have been several comics with nuclear weapons as a part of the plot. See for instance 1655: Doomsday Clock , where several other comics are mentioned in the explanation.\n[A passage from the Wikipedia page for Missal of Silos is shown, with underlined heading and with links in the text in blue font. The last line is partly cut off by the comics panel, but can be read.] Missal of Silos From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Missal of Silos is the oldest known paper document created in the Christian West; it is 11th century in date. [1] The missal is held in the library of the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos near Burgos, Spain . It is one of a number of liturgical manuscripts...\n[Caption below the panel:] Spain would like to remind everyone not to use fuzzy string matching in their nuclear strike target lists.\n"}
{"id":2100,"title":"Models of the Atom","image_title":"Models of the Atom","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2100","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/models_of_the_atom.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2100:_Models_of_the_Atom","transcript":"[Heading:] Models of the Atom over time\n[What follows is a progression of depictions of atoms.]\n[A ball.] 1810 Small hard ball model\n[A 'pudding' inside of which there are electrons.] 1904 Plum pudding model\n[A ball, with four birds perched on it and two of them singing.] 1907 Tiny bird model\n[A ball with electrons orbiting chaotically, in all directions, around it.] 1911 Rutherford model\n[A ball with electrons circling around it.] 1913 Bohr model\n[A nunchuck swinging, with the left stick filled with protons and the right stick filled with electrons.] 1928 Nunchuck model\n[A nucleus with protons and neutrons, with electrons circling around it like the Bohr model.] 1932 Chadwick model\n[A pie chart. 38% is allocated to neutrons, 31% to protons, and 31% to electrons.] 2008 538 model\n[A nucleus with clover-like orbitals around it and surrounded by two outer partly dashed circles.] Today Quantum model\n[A ball surrounded with numbers.] Future \"Small hard ball surrounded by math\" model\n","explanation":"This comic humorously describes the changing view of what an atom is.  This has happened so much it seems that we never really knew what we are looking at, and there have been many competing theories aside from the mainstream ones we are taught in school.  He lists major depictions in the history of our understanding of an atom, and adds a few humorous ones in to poke fun at how diverse, contentious, and in retrospect often foolhardy, this history has been.\nSmall hard ball model\nThe first model shown, in 1810, is said to be a \"small hard ball model.\" Around this time, John Dalton published his textbook A New System of Chemical Philosophy which linked existing ideas of atomic theory and chemical reactivity to produce a combined law of multiple proportions which proposed that each chemical element is comprised of a single unique type of atom, and introduced the concept of molecular weight . Dalton's theories form the basis of what is known today as stoichiometry , which underpins chemical reactivity. As atoms were considered at this time to be the smallest possible division of matter the scientific community thought of them as \"hard round balls\" of different sizes; thus the name described here. The \"small hard ball\" model is still commonly used when teaching and discussing chemical molecules which do not require the level of detail provided by more advanced models, with atoms represented as small, hard, round balls connected by sticks representing chemical bonds.\nPlum pudding model\nIn the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the study of these \"atom\" things faced a crisis: where would the newly discovered \" electrons \" go? In 1904, physicist J. J. Thomson , who discovered electrons, had an idea: maybe the electrons were small point charges moving around in a big mass of positive charge. This was the \" plum pudding model \", the second model on the comic, called this because people imagined the positively charged mass as a \" plum pudding \". (The title text references Thomson (although misspelled as \"J.J. Thompson\") as well, along with the humorous observation that plum puddings themselves are made of atoms.) The problem with this approach is that same charges generally repel, resulting in the more mobile or unbalanced charges forming a surface shell around the others, attempting to escape, rather than being content to being randomly distributed among them.\nTiny bird model\nThere were many competing ideas in the formative years of what-are-atoms-made-of-ology; Randall makes up a 1907 \"tiny bird model,\" which he suggests might have fit well in the relative chaos of the period. In this model, four birds surround the small hard ball at equal distances to one another. Two of them are singing and the other two are not and all birds are opposite to their identical bird. The non-singing birds balance the singing birds like electrons and protons. This model might be mocking the strange and sometimes illogical models that were presented for the shape of an atom.\nRutherford model\nThe tentative winner in the battle was the model of Thomson's student Ernest Rutherford , who discovered from electrostatic scattering experiments that the positive charge seemed to be concentrated in the center of the atom, and proposed his Rutherford model , or \"planetary model\", in 1911, where electrons orbit a very concentrated positive charge. This model has often been compared to the orbit of the planets around the sun, with the electrostatic attraction of the electrons and protons shaping the orbits, rather than gravity.  This is the fourth model in the comic.\nBohr model\nThe Rutherford model could not explain the discrete spectral lines in absorption and emission spectra. It also did not explain why electrons did not spiral in to the nucleus. Niels Bohr patched the model up by proposing that electrons could only exist in distinct \"energy levels\" at discrete distances from the nucleus.  The 1913 \" Bohr model \", the fifth model shown here, was part of beginning quantum mechanics.  Physics behaves differently at the small scale of atoms than the large scales we are more familiar with.\nNunchuck model\nRandall facetiously suggests a \" nunchuck model\", the sixth model shown, of a packet of protons swinging a packet of electrons around.  One can imagine a handle filled with electrons bonded by the strong nuclear force to a chain made of neutrons, bonded again by the strong nuclear force to a handle made of protons.  The heavier protonic handle acts loosely as an orbital center as the electron-filled opposite handle swings wildly around it, attempting to resolve its electrostatic attraction within the restraints of its chain.\nChadwick model\nThe next refinement was in the structure of the nucleus.  Note that at this time, nobody thought of splitting up the nucleus into protons and neutrons . But pretty soon people noticed that protons and neutrons existed; James Chadwick , who discovered the neutron, figured that the atom had a nucleus of neutrons and protons, along with a bunch of electrons orbiting around it in a Bohrish manner. This is what the layman today often thinks of as an atom, and is the seventh model shown here.\n538 model\nThe eighth model shown is a made up \"538 model,\" in 2008. FiveThirtyEight is a statistical analysis website that gained fame in 2008 for predicting every race but 2 correctly in the US presidential election and predicting every state and Obama's win in the 2012 election. Unlike most other media and polling institutes it saw a rather high probability of 29% for Trump to win the 2016 election by summing up the uncertainties in all the battle states. It has since been known for making mathematical models for everything; the model jokingly suggests that 538 has modeled and presumably made predictions about the atom. The pie chart shows the statistical composition of neutrons, protons and electrons, 38%, 31%, and 31% respectively. This could either be the average of a massive body with several isotopes or represent gallium-69, the most abundant isotope of gallium , with 31 protons, 31 electrons and 38 neutrons. FiveThirtyEight has previously been mentioned in several xkcd comics, including in 477: Typewriter , 500: Election , 635: Locke and Demosthenes , 1130: Poll Watching , 1779: 2017 , and 2002: LeBron James and Stephen Curry .  It's appropriate to list the 538 model as a precursor to the quantum model, as it is a step towards considering the likelihood of different quantities of subatomic particles to be in different volumes of space, rather than considering them as strictly kinematic particles.  The comic moves this development into 2008 in support of this joke, when it was actually made much earlier.\nQuantum model\nBut is the Chadwick model what scientists endorse today? No! The theory of electromagnetism says that accelerated charges, like the electrons circling, would lose energy emitted as electromagnetic waves and would quickly orbit into the nucleus. Bohr only postulated that this would not happen, but his model could not explain why. Another problem [ citation needed ] is that atoms, even the hydrogen atom are not flat - which they would be, if a single electron orbited in a circular or elliptical trajectory (the circular motion of charge results in a magnetic moment; Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach showed that independent from the direction of the measurement the angular momentum - for certain elements - always has the maximum positive or negative value, i.e. not only the radius, but also the angular momentum is quantized - and never zero. You cannot 'look at' the atom from above and 'see' the orbital circle. It always 'seems', as if you 'looked' from the side and would measure the full magnetic dipole. Stern and Gerlach actually saw the spin of an electron of the silver atom instead of the angular momentum, which is according to quantum mechanics 0).\nToday (i.e. actually since 1926, 29 years after the discovery of the electron) physicists subscribe to a quantum model, which is the ninth model shown here. Instead of electrons with definite location and momentum (~speed), the parts of the atom are described by probability fields of possible locations and momentums. The changes in momentum probability normally cancel each other out, so there is no electromagnetic radiation. This is very abstract, and in the last model, the model is postulated to get so abstract that it is just a \"small hard ball surrounded by math\" model, the last model shown. This then is remarkably similar to the model we started out from, the \"small hard ball model\" (without the math).\n\u201cSmall hard ball surrounded by math\u201d model\nThe picture for the \"small ball surrounded by math\" depicts a circle with several numbers around it. While the numbers seem to symbolize the \"surrounding math\" in a general sense, some of them suggest constants used in actual mathematical equations or other numbers related to the quantum model.  The shapes and densities of the atomic orbitals are calculated with the Schr\u00f6dinger equation , which is complex and difficult to solve. For this reason atoms are generally precisely considered in only very simple simulations, and the details of interactions of many atoms at large scales that form our daily lives are incredibly hard to precisely understand and predict on an atomic level.  It comes down to \"these roundish things we call atoms are moving around in these approximate ways obeying this complex equation with too many numbers involved in most situations to accurately model, so let's use a different, empirically derived formula that describes the behavior of the system in general.\"\nThis model is probably a reference to the mathematical universe hypothesis and, as a striking case of prescience , may be seen as a prediction of April 2020\u2019s Wolfram Physics Project .\n[Heading:] Models of the Atom over time\n[What follows is a progression of depictions of atoms.]\n[A ball.] 1810 Small hard ball model\n[A 'pudding' inside of which there are electrons.] 1904 Plum pudding model\n[A ball, with four birds perched on it and two of them singing.] 1907 Tiny bird model\n[A ball with electrons orbiting chaotically, in all directions, around it.] 1911 Rutherford model\n[A ball with electrons circling around it.] 1913 Bohr model\n[A nunchuck swinging, with the left stick filled with protons and the right stick filled with electrons.] 1928 Nunchuck model\n[A nucleus with protons and neutrons, with electrons circling around it like the Bohr model.] 1932 Chadwick model\n[A pie chart. 38% is allocated to neutrons, 31% to protons, and 31% to electrons.] 2008 538 model\n[A nucleus with clover-like orbitals around it and surrounded by two outer partly dashed circles.] Today Quantum model\n[A ball surrounded with numbers.] Future \"Small hard ball surrounded by math\" model\n"}
{"id":2101,"title":"Technical Analysis","image_title":"Technical Analysis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2101","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/technical_analysis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2101:_Technical_Analysis","transcript":"[A series of red and green box-and-whisker plots form a line that starts in the bottom left corner of the image and wiggles up to the top right corner, with a series of peaks and troughs that resemble a typical stock market diagram. The diagram is annotated with lines, arrows and text.]\n[Title in top left corner] The basics of technical analysis\n[A roughly horizontal section with mostly green boxes:] Allegro\n[A horizontal bracket encompasses the next three sections] Prologue\n[Slope becomes slightly negative. Mostly red boxes, bordered with a black line above and below:] Decline\n[A roughly horizontal section with mostly green boxes, bordered with a black line above and below:] Doldrums\n[Line curves upwards with mostly green boxes, with a dashed black line below:] Spline\n[Three green boxes at minor peaks in the line are circled and indicated with arrows:] [Hmm!]\n[A section with slight positive slope and a mixture of red and green boxes, with a solid black line below:] Lumbar support\n[Slope increases. All green boxes, with a black line through the centre:] Renewal\n[A sharp upwards incline, with two large green boxes:] Hark! The cliffs!\n[Two black dots and a dashed black line connect two major peaks:] These two points define a line! Promising signal\n[Inside trough between two major peaks is a roughly drawn black triangle:] Bathtub\n[Slope becomes negative, mostly red boxes with a black line through the centre:] Declination\n[At the lowest point of the trough:] Inflection\n[Slope becomes positive, mostly green boxes with a black line through the centre:] Uptalk\n[Slight negative slope, with large error bars. Mixture of red and green boxes. One red box is marked with an arrow:] Yikes!\n[Negative slope, all red boxes. Gap between two central boxes is circled:] Wrong!\n[Line rises then falls. Mixture of red and green boxes with non-parallel dashed black lines above and below:] If I add some lines here I can convince myself I'm doing something more than just seeing patterns in a graph of a random walk.\n[Positive slope, all green boxes with a black line through the centre:] Slope!\n[One error bar on a green box is circled:] Could be an omen?\n[Arrow indicating peak:] Red + Green = Christmas!\n[Positive slope, all green boxes with a wiggly black arrow through the centre. A separate arrow points off the edge of the page:] Likely to continue forever\n","explanation":"There are two recognized methods to attempt to predict the stock market, each with its own pros and cons:\nRandom Walk theory suggests that neither of these methods are particularly useful at predicting the future of the stock market (see link for a funny story about dart throwing monkeys).\nThe theoretical value of a stock is its net present value , which is the sum of all its future earnings, with earnings in the future discounted appropriately to account for the time value of money . Because these earnings are never fully predictable, traders may have different ideas about the true value of a stock, and buy the stock if they believe the currently offered prices are particularly low, or sell it when the prices are high.\nTechnical analysis, however, does not even attempt to understand the earnings of the stock, instead focusing on the shapes and patterns that result from traders making their moves. While there is a human behavioral component to stock trading, it is not clear that one can extract much information from the shapes of stock charts. To the extent it does work, a substantial part of its success may be simply an artifact of the herd behavior of traders who engage in technical analysis, a zero-sum game.\nThe comic displays a stock price chart , annotated with labels which purport to be technical analysis. These labels are nonsense from the perspective of technical analysis, but do accurately describe the graph itself: \" allegro \" (a musical term used to set the tempo at the beginning of a score), \" prologue \" (an introductory section of a play, book, or similar), \" lumbar support\" (the thing in a chair shaped to better support your back), \"bathtub\" (possibly a reference to the so-called \" Bathtub curve \"), \" uptalk \" (a speech pattern). One label celebrates that \"these two points define a line! Promising signal.\" (In geometry, any two points define a line.)\nThe shape of the chart is similar to the exponential behavior of cryptocurrencies when they are successful, where price (positional height on the chart) roughly increases while volatility (height of the bars or candles themselves, and of the peaks and troughs, on the chart) does the same.  Technical analysis used to be an esoteric domain held by well-paid stock analysts, but as cryptocurrency has spread, and as financial companies have made it easier for members of the public (\"retail investors\", as opposed to \"institutional investors\") to engage in investment trading, people from all walks of life have begun staring at charts like this.\nThe title text is a quote from James Tobin (from his 1984 paper On the efficiency of the financial system ) that raises a question of very talented people building systems to make themselves a lot of money without actually accomplishing anything worth money. The quote was about the stock market and high speed traders in particular. It comments on the 'financialization' of the economy, where activities like speculation and abstracted financial products have become an increasingly large part of the economy, as opposed to investment in productive industry.\nInterestingly, this comic appeared the day after Oxfam reported that the world's 2,200 billionaires had added 12% to their wealth in 2018, while the 3.8 billion people comprising the poorest half of the world's population had lost 11%. Perhaps this prompted what appears to be Randall's jab at those whose business is merely making money.\n[A series of red and green box-and-whisker plots form a line that starts in the bottom left corner of the image and wiggles up to the top right corner, with a series of peaks and troughs that resemble a typical stock market diagram. The diagram is annotated with lines, arrows and text.]\n[Title in top left corner] The basics of technical analysis\n[A roughly horizontal section with mostly green boxes:] Allegro\n[A horizontal bracket encompasses the next three sections] Prologue\n[Slope becomes slightly negative. Mostly red boxes, bordered with a black line above and below:] Decline\n[A roughly horizontal section with mostly green boxes, bordered with a black line above and below:] Doldrums\n[Line curves upwards with mostly green boxes, with a dashed black line below:] Spline\n[Three green boxes at minor peaks in the line are circled and indicated with arrows:] [Hmm!]\n[A section with slight positive slope and a mixture of red and green boxes, with a solid black line below:] Lumbar support\n[Slope increases. All green boxes, with a black line through the centre:] Renewal\n[A sharp upwards incline, with two large green boxes:] Hark! The cliffs!\n[Two black dots and a dashed black line connect two major peaks:] These two points define a line! Promising signal\n[Inside trough between two major peaks is a roughly drawn black triangle:] Bathtub\n[Slope becomes negative, mostly red boxes with a black line through the centre:] Declination\n[At the lowest point of the trough:] Inflection\n[Slope becomes positive, mostly green boxes with a black line through the centre:] Uptalk\n[Slight negative slope, with large error bars. Mixture of red and green boxes. One red box is marked with an arrow:] Yikes!\n[Negative slope, all red boxes. Gap between two central boxes is circled:] Wrong!\n[Line rises then falls. Mixture of red and green boxes with non-parallel dashed black lines above and below:] If I add some lines here I can convince myself I'm doing something more than just seeing patterns in a graph of a random walk.\n[Positive slope, all green boxes with a black line through the centre:] Slope!\n[One error bar on a green box is circled:] Could be an omen?\n[Arrow indicating peak:] Red + Green = Christmas!\n[Positive slope, all green boxes with a wiggly black arrow through the centre. A separate arrow points off the edge of the page:] Likely to continue forever\n"}
{"id":2102,"title":"Internet Archive","image_title":"Internet Archive","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2102","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/internet_archive.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2102:_Internet_Archive","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are walking to the right.] Ponytail: The Internet Archive is so weird. If it didn't exist, it would sound totally implausible. Cueball: Seriously.\n[Ponytail and Cueball continue walking to the right.] Cueball: Do you ever worry about how reliant we are on systems that someone happens to maintain for some reason but which could disappear at any time?\n[Ponytail and Cueball are seen in silhouette from a distance.] Ponytail: Yeah - the same thing freaks me out about having a body. Cueball: I know, right?? I don't even know what half these parts do ! Ponytail: And yet if they stop, we die! Cueball: Probably best not to think about it.\n","explanation":"The Internet Archive is a project that is invaluable for internet research. It is a public archive of information, including public domain books and music. It also runs the Wayback Machine , an archive of backups of web pages all over the Web at various times that can be used to see past versions of a page, even if that site has since shut down. The Internet Archive accepts submissions of any type of information, including new backups of web pages and newly-made public domain content.\nPonytail and Cueball first remark upon how weird the concept of the Internet Archive is, commenting that it would seem like an implausible concept if not for the fact that it already existed.\nThis revisits a point that Randall made in 2085: arXiv : in the title text for that comic, he wrote,\nBoth arXiv and archive.org are invaluable projects which, if they didn't exist, we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable.\nOur culture has an overarching theme of equating profit with success, so when efforts succeed due to inherent public benefit, this can often yield surprise.\nThey then become more philosophical, and wonder about invaluable systems that are maintained by a just a few individuals, meaning that they could disappear if any of those people stopped doing what they were doing. They relate this to the function of the human body , which does contain many systems whose function and inner workings are unknown to the average person.\nAgain, as in 2085: arXiv , the two try not to \"jinx things\" by drawing attention to the improbability of this system working perfectly. In arXiv, when Megan exclaims that being able to post research papers as free PDFs on arXiv \"makes no sense at all\", Ponytail responds, \"Shhh, you'll jinx it!\" Here, Cueball tells Ponytail, \"Probably best not to think about it.\"  This is ironic as the inclusion of this information in a popular comic like xkcd is drawing attention to it.\nAs an example of \"invaluable systems maintained by just a few individuals\", the title text refers to the \" npm left-pad incident \", a 2016 incident where a package for the npm package manager was removed from the software library by its author. As this particular package was used by many projects, both directly and indirectly, this caused a severe disruption in the software world. Randall is relieved that cases like this do not occur more frequently. This topic appears to stay on his mind for a while, since 2347: Dependency covers a similar theme.\n[Ponytail and Cueball are walking to the right.] Ponytail: The Internet Archive is so weird. If it didn't exist, it would sound totally implausible. Cueball: Seriously.\n[Ponytail and Cueball continue walking to the right.] Cueball: Do you ever worry about how reliant we are on systems that someone happens to maintain for some reason but which could disappear at any time?\n[Ponytail and Cueball are seen in silhouette from a distance.] Ponytail: Yeah - the same thing freaks me out about having a body. Cueball: I know, right?? I don't even know what half these parts do ! Ponytail: And yet if they stop, we die! Cueball: Probably best not to think about it.\n"}
{"id":2103,"title":"Midcontinent Rift System","image_title":"Midcontinent Rift System","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2103","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/midcontinent_rift_system.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2103:_Midcontinent_Rift_System","transcript":"[A map of North America shows the Midcontinent Rift System as a red line curving through the Great Lakes and down through the midwestern United States.] 1.1 billion years ago, the North American continent began to split in half.\n[Black Hat stands at a lectern with a \"Vote 2020\" sign on it. He gestures to an image of the globe with a giant crowbar inserted in the rift with an arrow indicating applying pressure to widen the rift.] Black Hat: We don\u2019t know why it stopped.  If elected, I vow to finish the job.  Thank you.\n[Ponytail, Black Hat, Megan, and Cueball walk to the right away from a set of stairs. Cueball is looking at a phone and Ponytail is looking at a device or paper with writing on it.] Ponytail: Great job up there. Black Hat: Thanks!  How are my polling numbers? Ponytail: Well, I\u2019m seeing some weakness in the Midwest. Black Hat: So am I.  So am I.\n","explanation":"Recently, USA politics has caused polarization of the public. [1] It is said to be \u201csplit\u201d in two camps (liberal, mostly loyal to the Democratic Party , and conservative, mostly loyal to the Republican Party ). Here Black Hat is trying to get elected to some sort of federal office in the at the time upcoming 2020 elections by promising he will actually split America in two. His presentation illustrates, using a giant crowbar, the completion of the Midcontinent Rift , which is a large crack that started to form about 1.1 billion years ago, but failed to completely sever the continent. Around the same time, the rift was also mentioned in \"How To\", Chapter 9: How to build a lava moat.\nIt is unclear why anyone would vote for such a thing, but people directly affected (the Midwest) are likely to vote against Black Hat . While Black Hat and his campaign advisor Ponytail speak of weakness in the Midwest, they are talking about two different things: Black Hat refers to the physical weakness of the North American Plate in the Midwest due to the geological rift which he thinks could be exploited by a large enough crowbar, while Ponytail is referring to a political weakness for Black Hat\u2019s campaign in the Midwest due to the likely-unpopular proposal (different regions of the US have different voters and populations who have different priorities and stances, so candidates and their campaigns\u2019 platforms will likely be more popular in some regions and less popular in others).  In this case a successful or attempted completion of the rift would likely result in the destruction of millions of houses, buildings, and other man-made structures, not to mention the deaths of many humans (if proper evacuation were not fully implemented and enforced) as well as millions of animals that could not be evacuated.  The proposal would also cause huge economic impacts; the Midwest produces a significant proportion of America\u2019s food supplies and hosts important economic centres, such as Chicago and Cleveland.  So the popularity among those directly or even indirectly affected is likely quite low.  The successful passing of a highly destructive measure such as this would generally involve more direct and overwhelming compensation of the many interests that would otherwise be harmed, to incentivize them to vote against their present livelihood.\nThe title text is a pun. A wedge issue is a controversial issue which splits apart a demographic group. It is often introduced to create controversy within an opponent\u2019s base so that if the opponent takes any position on the issue, half the voters will desert the opponent. Here the joke is that the \u201cwedge issue\u201d is an actual wedge to split apart the United States. It could potentially be a wedge issue, as while most people would oppose such a measure, some people could be convinced that it would benefit certain Midwestern cities by making them port cities, which would result in an economic boom and make trade easier if those cities weren't destroyed. Also, some die-hard liberals living outside the Midwest might favor the destruction of the Midwest because it tends to vote conservative. Ponytail seems to state that Black Hat's proposal is only unpopular in the Midwest.\n[A map of North America shows the Midcontinent Rift System as a red line curving through the Great Lakes and down through the midwestern United States.] 1.1 billion years ago, the North American continent began to split in half.\n[Black Hat stands at a lectern with a \"Vote 2020\" sign on it. He gestures to an image of the globe with a giant crowbar inserted in the rift with an arrow indicating applying pressure to widen the rift.] Black Hat: We don\u2019t know why it stopped.  If elected, I vow to finish the job.  Thank you.\n[Ponytail, Black Hat, Megan, and Cueball walk to the right away from a set of stairs. Cueball is looking at a phone and Ponytail is looking at a device or paper with writing on it.] Ponytail: Great job up there. Black Hat: Thanks!  How are my polling numbers? Ponytail: Well, I\u2019m seeing some weakness in the Midwest. Black Hat: So am I.  So am I.\n"}
{"id":2104,"title":"Biff Tannen","image_title":"Biff Tannen","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2104","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/biff_tannen.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2104:_Biff_Tannen","transcript":"[Cueball talks while walking up behind White Hat, who is reading in an armchair.] Cueball: You know, in the universe where Biff Tannen took Marty McFly\u2019s sports almanac back in time, the people wouldn\u2019t have any counterfactuals to work with. Cueball: Their world would be the world.\n[In a frame-less panel White Hat turns his head to look at Cueball as he keeps talking.] Cueball: They would have spent decades debating which structural problems enabled the rise of BiffCo, the decline of the city, and general social decay. Cueball: Everyone would find reasons it confirmed their pet theory.\n[White Hat turns his head back to his book.] Cueball: I'm going to write a book set in that universe. I'll call it Hill Valley Elegy . White Hat: ... I hate you.\n","explanation":"Cueball is expounding a theory to White Hat regarding the alternate timeline seen in the movie Back to the Future II , in which the character Biff Tannen stole a time machine and used it to travel 60 years into the past to 1955. In that timeline, Future Biff gave his younger self a sports almanac containing 50 years of outcomes of sporting events, which enabled his younger self to earn millions from betting on horse races . The end result of this is that the now-altered present of 1985 has become a corporate dystopia due to the actions of the exceedingly wealthy Biff and his company, BiffCo.\nCueball's theory is that the people now living in this dystopian 1985 would never know that their timeline was altered; as far as they are concerned, theirs is the true timeline. Because of this, they would seek to analyze every detail of Biff Tannen's rise to power, inventing their own theories as to his success and arguing with each other over the supporting evidence.\nHowever, in the third panel, it becomes clear that this has all merely been Cueball's elaborate setup for a bad pun, causing White Hat to voice his disapproval.\nBack to the Future II\nThis comic is based on Back to the Future II . In this movie, the character Biff Tannen steals the time machine , which is the main plot device, and uses it to go back in time from 2015 to 1955. He then gives Marty McFly\u2019s sports almanac , containing the outcomes of 50 years (1950\u20132000) worth of sporting events, to his own younger self. His younger self uses this sports almanac to make millions by successfully betting on horse races . He then forms a company, and calls it BiffCo . In the movie, the protagonists reverse this, by going back to 1955 and stealing the almanac back soon after Biff delivered it. It is heavily implied that the universe where BiffCo exists, also called \u201c 1985A \u201d in the movie, stops existing after this change, since the Biff from 1985A tries to kill Marty to stop him from doing this. However, Cueball imagines the 1985A timeline as continuing to exist in parallel, rather than being destroyed by the almanac heist as the movie seems to imply. This is consistent with the multiverse theory.\nThe movie is set in the fictional town of Hill Valley, California . When the protagonists return to 1985, they find that Biff has turned the town\u2019s \u201cCourthouse Square\u201d into a 27-story casino, and generally taken over Hill Valley. This has apparently resulted in the town being overrun by armed gangs, and beset by crime, violence, corruption, and an overall atmosphere of quasi-dystopian misery. This is what Cueball refers to as \u201cthe decline of the city, and general social decay\u201d.\nCounterfactuals\nCueball mentions that this universe \u2013 that is, the 1985A Back to the Future timeline \u2013 would not have any counterfactuals to work with. This is often short, in epistemology , for counterfactual conditionals , that is, conditional statements about what would be true if something were true that we know for a fact is not true. Randall\u2019s \u201c what if? \u201d series is based on counterfactuals, since it explores hypotheticals\u2014conditionals which are contrary to fact. For example, the first \u201cwhat if?\u201d post, about what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball that was thrown at 90% the speed of light, is a counterfactual, because we know for a fact that a baseball has never been thrown at such a speed [ citation needed ] . In the case of the 1985A universe, they would not have any information on the counterfactuals , that is, the facts about what would happen if Biff did not have this almanac.\nHillbilly Elegy\nHillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a book, published in June 2016, that gives an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town, and gives a broader, probing look at the struggles of America\u2019s white working class. This comic is a play on the title of this book, which has been described as explaining the \u201csocial, regional, and class\u201d issues in white working-class America. The white American working class was a key factor in the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, and many critics have interpreted the book as an explanation of his election, which was deemed improbable by many analysts before it happened. Netflix had purchased the rights to an upcoming film adaptation of the book three days before this comic, prompting another wave of criticism of the book\u2019s theories.\nCueball is proposing a similarly-titled book, set in the Back to the Future II 1985A timeline, that would describe the supposed factors leading to the rise of Biff Tannen in Hill Valley. In that universe, while the rise of Biff\u2014and the subsequent decay of the city\u2014is the result of his using a future sports almanac to cheat at sports betting, the rest of the population would have to guess at the structural societal issues that might have caused Biff\u2019s otherwise inexplicable success. Thus, Cueball compares such blind guessing with the analysis contained in Hillbilly Elegy .\nWhite Hat\u2019s reaction\nThis makes White Hat angry. This may be for various reasons:\nRelationship to political events\nRandall is known to have supported Hillary Clinton , the main opponent of Donald Trump, in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, having made a comic just to promote her and several Sad comics followed Trump\u2019s election. This may add to explaining the comic in the following ways:\nThe title text continues the comparison to the election situation by mentioning thinkpieces from newspapers that would appear in the Back to the Future II 1985A universe where Biff has taken over. Various thinkpieces did appear in real life newspapers in an attempt to explain Trump\u2019s rise to power after his election, and asking whether it was inevitable.\nAs Back to the Future II \u2019s important October 2015 setting date approached, commentators began noting the similarities between the older version of the character Biff Tannen and then presidential candidate Donald Trump. When the comparison was brought to the attention of the film\u2019s writer, Bob Gale , in an interview, he claimed that elements of Tannen\u2019s personality were actually based on Trump, who was already well known in the late 1980s for his work in real estate and tabloid controversies. Thus, there is a real connection between Biff Tannen and Donald Trump. This supports the comparison between the two made by Randall. That being said, actor Tom Wilson has denied that his performance of the role was in any way based on Trump.\n[Cueball talks while walking up behind White Hat, who is reading in an armchair.] Cueball: You know, in the universe where Biff Tannen took Marty McFly\u2019s sports almanac back in time, the people wouldn\u2019t have any counterfactuals to work with. Cueball: Their world would be the world.\n[In a frame-less panel White Hat turns his head to look at Cueball as he keeps talking.] Cueball: They would have spent decades debating which structural problems enabled the rise of BiffCo, the decline of the city, and general social decay. Cueball: Everyone would find reasons it confirmed their pet theory.\n[White Hat turns his head back to his book.] Cueball: I'm going to write a book set in that universe. I'll call it Hill Valley Elegy . White Hat: ... I hate you.\n"}
{"id":2105,"title":"Modern OSI Model","image_title":"Modern OSI Model","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2105","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/modern_osi_model.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2105:_Modern_OSI_Model","transcript":"[A light gray shape that surrounds seven stacked dark gray rectangles centered above each other, all with labels. The light gray shape is connected but sometimes only on one side of the dark rectangles. It goes above and below the top and bottom rectangles. At the top there is a heading:] Modern OSI Model\n[The first black rectangle has two lines of text. It is supported by the light gray shape on both sides:] Application (Facebook)\n[Pulling the second rectangle out to the right would collapse the tower, with the top tipping to the right:] Presentation\n[Pulling the third rectangle out to the left would collapse the tower, with the top tipping to the left:] Session\n[The fourth rectangle is supported on both sides:] Transport\n[Pulling the fifth rectangle out to the left would collapse the tower making it tip to the left:] Network\n[Between the fifth and sixth dark rectangles is a label for the entire light gray shape:] Google & Amazon\n[The sixth rectangle is supported on both sides:] Data link\n[The seventh rectangle is supported on both sides:] Physical\n","explanation":"The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Model is a conceptual model for network communications that defines 7 layers of functionality, where higher layers add increasing complexity to lower layers through associated protocols and standards.  The 7 layers in the standard OSI Model are:\nIn practice, the OSI model abstracts the communication between two end points, like a Facebook client and Facebook servers all the way from the application layer on the server, down to the wire on which the data is transmitted, and back up to the application layer where the user views the data. As Facebook is one of the most used websites in the world with more than a billion users, Randall claims that the \"application\" layer (what the client sees and uses) is mostly Facebook .\nA light gray shape labeled \"Google & Amazon\" surrounds all seven layers of the model in an irregular shape indicating that Google and Amazon, by dint of their size and dominance at multiple layers of the model influence the entire structure. An example of Google's influence would be their introduction of new protocols like QUIC and SPDY as replacements for the existing TCP protocol that was a foundation of the web, and their accompanying modifications of the original HTTP protocol.\nThe significance of the irregular pattern of the \"Google & Amazon\" blob isn't clear. It is likely that it is in reference to the irregular way in which their modifications to the OSI stack have evolved. Potentially with extensions to the left representing the influence of Google, and extension to the right representing the influence of Amazon. However, it is also notable that the irregular structure of the stack is reminiscent of a Jenga tower. Jenga is a game in which blocks are removed from a vertical stack and added back to the top until the whole collapses. This may be a commentary on the instability of the network stack in general, or on how Google and Amazon's additions and changes to it have destabilized the networking protocols.  Or, the specific blocks to be pulled out (presentation, session, and network) may be the ones whose removal collapses the tower while the other ones can be easily removed and replaced (like the center blocks in Jenga), implying that between Google and Amazon, even if these were pulled out, the tower would remain standing.  What this says about the three layers that would destabilize the tower is unclear.\nThe title text refers to Horcruxes used by Voldemort in the Harry Potter book series. A Horcrux is a magical artifact used to house a wizard's soul, preventing them from dying if their body is destroyed. Since they can only be created by murdering other people, they are heavily forbidden, and before Voldemort it was unheard of for a wizard to use more than one. Voldemort used seven -- the same number of layers in the OSI model. However, while Voldemort hid his seven Horcruxes in different places to make himself that much harder to kill, Randall's have all been collected in Google and Amazon, defeating the purpose of using more than one. Alternatively, transforming each layer of the OSI model into a horcrux may be regarded as a strategy to prevent them from being destroyed since doing so would destroy networking. This strategy would fail in the modern world, since some of the envisioned layers were not used in the more common modern TCP\/IP networking model and in the case of cloud infrastructure potential exists to provide even more shortcuts.\nThe title text may also be a reference to a prior comic about Randall mixing up things that come in groups of seven, like data layers and Horcruxes.\n[A light gray shape that surrounds seven stacked dark gray rectangles centered above each other, all with labels. The light gray shape is connected but sometimes only on one side of the dark rectangles. It goes above and below the top and bottom rectangles. At the top there is a heading:] Modern OSI Model\n[The first black rectangle has two lines of text. It is supported by the light gray shape on both sides:] Application (Facebook)\n[Pulling the second rectangle out to the right would collapse the tower, with the top tipping to the right:] Presentation\n[Pulling the third rectangle out to the left would collapse the tower, with the top tipping to the left:] Session\n[The fourth rectangle is supported on both sides:] Transport\n[Pulling the fifth rectangle out to the left would collapse the tower making it tip to the left:] Network\n[Between the fifth and sixth dark rectangles is a label for the entire light gray shape:] Google & Amazon\n[The sixth rectangle is supported on both sides:] Data link\n[The seventh rectangle is supported on both sides:] Physical\n"}
{"id":2106,"title":"Sharing Options","image_title":"Sharing Options","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2106","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sharing_options.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2106:_Sharing_Options","transcript":"[Cueball floating in midair is communicating with a small floating screen that resembles a smartphone. Other people and clouds visible floating by in background.] Screen: Welcome to social media! When you put stuff here, you have two options: (1) You can make it available to a small set of 300 or so approved friends.\n[Cueball is still floating and talking with the smartphone. Other people and clouds visible floating by in background.] Screen: Or (2) you can share permanent copies of it all with billions of people, including internet scammers, random predatory companies, and hostile governments.\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball has stopped moving and is facing the screen] Cueball: Why would anyone pick option two? Screen: Two is the default. Cueball: Yikes.\n[Cueball is still floating and talking with the smartphone. Other people and clouds visible floating by in background. Cueball has his hand raised] Cueball: So those are the only two options? There\u2019s nothing in in between? Screen: I don\u2019t understand. Like what?\n[Cueball continues floating and talking with the smartphone. Other people and clouds visible floating by in background.] Cueball: I mean...there are numbers between 300 and a billion. Screen: Huh? Name one. Screen: Pretty sure I would have heard of those.\n","explanation":"Cueball is floating, talking to a screen that looks like a smartphone with a virtual assistant. Ponytail and other characters also fly in the background.  The screen is explaining his options for sharing information on social media , he can make it available only to those he selects, or he can make it available to everyone, including various high risk groups.  \t\nThe drawing may represent a Virtual Reality cyberspace. The comic might be set in the distant future, where VR will have become commonplace and be embraced by Cueball and his friends. This cyberspace may be the social network\u2019s cyberspace where everyone interacts. The clouds could represent the cloud server where the data of the social network is stored. The virtual assistant seems to have a face and have very advanced AI, which can even be arrogant by assuming that it already knew the information about the \u201coption in between\u201d.\nMany social media sites allow users to control who can see content (posts, pictures, etc.) that users share.  Several high profile social media sites have sparked controversy by automatically widely sharing user data, unless the user restricts access.  The settings for controlling the sharing of data are not always obvious to the user, or easy to use.  Access may be limited to immediate friends, or be available to all users (public); some platforms allow intermediate levels of control. \nAs most social media sites are free to use, the business model for these companies involves a mixture of selling advertising space on their website and selling data on its users.  Targeted advertising takes data on users\u2019 past behavior and things that they have liked, and uses this to predict what adverts they may be interested in or be most vulnerable to. Targeted adverts are more valuable to advertisers as they avoid paying to show adverts to individuals who are unlikely to be interested in their products; but can lead to users feeling that they are being spied on. While the terms and conditions for social media websites will include details of how data will be used, the length of these documents and legal terminology may deter users from reading them, meaning that they may be unaware that their data is being exploited in this way. Regulation has been slow to catch up with changing online trends; however, the European Union have recently introduced General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) which aims to regulate how user data can be shared. GDPR was featured in comic 1998: GDPR .\nData from social media may be used for marketing, for law enforcement, mass surveillance and social control, for investigative journalism, for criminal activity, confidence games , among other things.\nInternet scammers use online information to manipulate people, often to commit fraud. They may acquire personal data using web crawlers to automatically scan social networks for personal information (particularly emails) to scam their owners. Those bots called web crawlers can get the information without scammers' manual browsing of the victims' profile. Those people who set their social network account as public (the 2nd option in the comic) are more likely victims of scammers since they can access their profiles without being the victim's friend or follower.\nOther examples of questionable uses for social media on xkcd include 300: Facebook .\nRandall is making a point that there ought to be some option between sharing posts only with your friends and making them completely public. The title text shows that he would specifically like to know when corporations read regular peoples' posts.\nThis also could be a stab at the sharing policies between Facebook and the just-announced end of Google+.  Google+ allowed users to create multiple groups called 'circles'.  Posts could then be shared by targeting specific circles.  For example: \"I'm in the hospital\" could be shared with just the family circle, but the \"I got a promotion\" could be shared with the family circle, the co-workers circle, and the general public circle.  Facebook provides an option to share with \u201cfriends of friends,\u201d leaving the decision about how widely a post is shared not with the posts creator, but with the posts recipients.  \t\nThe comic is set in the future of VR, yet the fact that Internet companies like Facebook, Tencent and Twitter try hard to collect and sell user data won't change. This may suggests that Randall believe those companies will never reconsider their approach regarding user privacy.\n[Cueball floating in midair is communicating with a small floating screen that resembles a smartphone. Other people and clouds visible floating by in background.] Screen: Welcome to social media! When you put stuff here, you have two options: (1) You can make it available to a small set of 300 or so approved friends.\n[Cueball is still floating and talking with the smartphone. Other people and clouds visible floating by in background.] Screen: Or (2) you can share permanent copies of it all with billions of people, including internet scammers, random predatory companies, and hostile governments.\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball has stopped moving and is facing the screen] Cueball: Why would anyone pick option two? Screen: Two is the default. Cueball: Yikes.\n[Cueball is still floating and talking with the smartphone. Other people and clouds visible floating by in background. Cueball has his hand raised] Cueball: So those are the only two options? There\u2019s nothing in in between? Screen: I don\u2019t understand. Like what?\n[Cueball continues floating and talking with the smartphone. Other people and clouds visible floating by in background.] Cueball: I mean...there are numbers between 300 and a billion. Screen: Huh? Name one. Screen: Pretty sure I would have heard of those.\n"}
{"id":2107,"title":"Launch Risk","image_title":"Launch Risk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2107","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/launch_risk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2107:_Launch_Risk","transcript":"[A large spaceship rocket is standing on it's launchpad, just decoupled from the tower that supports it ready for launch. At the very top of the rocket where the astronauts are sitting there are two lines coming out, indicating the speak from the two astronauts inside the rocket. Next to the top of the rocket there is a speech bubble drawn with jagged line indicating sound from a loudspeaker. It is the countdown to the launch.] Astronaut 1: How you feeling? Astronaut 2: Honestly, pretty nervous. Astronaut 1: I know it seems dangerous, but just remember: you're more likely to be struck by lightning than to be selected to become an astronaut. Astronaut 2: Oh that's a good- Astronaut 2: ...Wait. Countdown: T-Minus 20...19...\n","explanation":"This comic deals with the faulty application of general statistics based on a large population, such as all Americans, to specific situations with vastly different statistics, such as astronauts.\nA manned rocket ship is about to be launched into space. Mission control counts down from \"T-minus 20,\" where \"T\" stands for the time at which the rocket is scheduled to launch. In the capsule, one astronaut asks another how they are feeling. The second admits that they are nervous. The first one offers a supposedly reassuring observation that they are more likely to be struck by lightning than to be selected to become an astronaut.  Such comparisons are commonly used to illustrate that a particular probability is very small, and therefore not worth worrying about.\nThe second astronaut is about to agree that they have a good point, but then realizes the problem with their argument: the likelihood of being selected as an astronaut is a moot point, because they both already are astronauts. The comparison ignores the relevant concern, which is the danger involved in being an astronaut and launching into space. The second astronaut's nervousness is understandable as space missions are historically quite dangerous, and have numerous avenues for potentially fatal failure, certainly far beyond the minuscule risk of being struck by lightning, approximately 1 in 14,600 throughout your entire life .\nThe title text creates additional confusion by referencing another common statistical reference point, the probability of dying in a shark attack. In addition to shark attacks being uncommon, they are also less likely to kill their victim than is commonly assumed. Still, while shark attacks are more frequently fatal than rocket launches, this comparison is once again useless, as the astronaut is not in any danger of sharks, but is literal seconds from launching into space. The astronaut is presumably not especially reassured by the \"pretty high\" survival rate.\nOf the 557 people who who have been in Earth orbit, 18 (3%) have died in related accidents, not specifically at launch ( List of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents , Astronaut\/Cosmonaut Statistics ).  Of the 93 incidents logged for 2018 in the Global Shark Attack File , 4 (4.3%) were fatal, but the statistic has been higher in the past when there was likely less education against provoking sharks.\nA large metal rocket, such as depicted would be more likely to be struck by lightning than nearby structures.  However launch controllers generally monitor weather carefully to reduce the chances of attempting to launch when lightning is likely.\nA spacecraft launch can also trigger lightning, by creating a conductive path through electrically charged clouds.  Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice during the launch phase. Thankfully backup systems allowed the flight to proceed. For more information, see NASA: Lightning and Launches\nThe perceived value of risk is a recurring topic and is also featured in 795: Conditional Risk and 1252: Increased Risk .\n[A large spaceship rocket is standing on it's launchpad, just decoupled from the tower that supports it ready for launch. At the very top of the rocket where the astronauts are sitting there are two lines coming out, indicating the speak from the two astronauts inside the rocket. Next to the top of the rocket there is a speech bubble drawn with jagged line indicating sound from a loudspeaker. It is the countdown to the launch.] Astronaut 1: How you feeling? Astronaut 2: Honestly, pretty nervous. Astronaut 1: I know it seems dangerous, but just remember: you're more likely to be struck by lightning than to be selected to become an astronaut. Astronaut 2: Oh that's a good- Astronaut 2: ...Wait. Countdown: T-Minus 20...19...\n"}
{"id":2108,"title":"Carbonated Beverage Language Map","image_title":"Carbonated Beverage Language Map","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2108","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/carbonated_beverage_language_map.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2108:_Carbonated_Beverage_Language_Map","transcript":"[A map of the United States divided into purple, red, green, blue, and yellow colored regions.]\n\n[A purple area in North West Washington.] Fanta\n[A blue area spanning the Western border of Washington and Oregon.] S\u00f6de\n[A yellow area spanning the remainder of Washington, North Western Oregon, Northern Idaho and the North Western corner of Montana.] Ichor\n[A green area spanning the North Eastern corner of Oregon, central Idaho and the majority of Montana.] Spicewater\n[A blue area spanning Eastern Montana, the North Eastern corner of Wyoming and the majority of North and South Dakota.] Refill\n[A red area spanning Eastern North and South Dakota, the majority of Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin and Michigan North of the lakes.] Mead\n[A green area spanning the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin.] Canadian Ale\n[A yellow area spanning the South Eastern corner of Minnesota, the North Eastern corner of Iowa and the majority of Wisconsin.] Aether\n[A green area in North East Wisconsin.] Mouthwater\n[A purple area covering most of Michigan south of the lakes.] Kid's coffee\n[A red area covering Northeast & central New York.] Hydro\n[A green area covering Vermont and spanning the border with New York.] [No word for them]\n[A yellow area covering Maine and the majority of New Hampshire.] Sugar milk\n[A red area spanning Eastern Massachusetts and the border with New Hampshire.] Harvard tea\n[A blue area covering Rhode Island and spanning Eastern Connecticut, central Massachusetts and the South West corner of New Hampshire.] Bubbler\n[A yellow area spanning the South Eastern corner of New York, the South Western corner of Massachusetts, Western Connecticut and Northern New Jersey.] Mouth Buzz\n[A red area spanning North Eastern California, Southern Oregon, the South Western corner of Idaho and the majority of Nevada.] You-know-what\n[A blue area spanning South Western Idaho, Eastern Nevada, the majority of Utah and the border of Utah and Arizona.] Softie\n[A green area spanning Northern Utah and the majority of Colorado.] Punch\n[A yellow area covering the majority of Wyoming.] Fizz ooze\n[A purple area spanning the South Eastern corner of Wyoming, the North Eastern corner of Colorado, the North Western corner of Kansas, Southern South Dakota, the majority of Nebraska and Iowa, and Northern Missouri.] Tickle juice\n[A blue area spanning Eastern Iowa, Southern Wisconsin, the majority of Illinois and Indiana, the Southern border of Michigan, the Western border of Ohio and North Western Kentucky.] Capri\n[A green area spanning South Eastern Michigan, the majority of Ohio and Pennsylvania, South Western New York, Northern West Virginia and Western Maryland.] Medicine\n[A purple area spanning Eastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey.] Brad's Elixir\n[A red area spanning the South Eastern corner of Pennsylvania, Eastern Maryland, Delaware and Northern Virginia.] Hot Water\n[A yellow area spanning Eastern Kentucky, the Southern border of Ohio, Southern West Virginia, the majority of Virginia and Northern North Carolina.] Broth\n[A blue area in Western California, North of San Francisco.] True water\n[A yellow area in Western California, South of San Francisco.] Crypto\n[A green area in South Western California, North of Los Angeles.] Yum\n[A blue area in South Western California, close to Los Angeles.] Sparkle fluid\n[A purple area in South Western California, close to San Diego.] King cola\n[A yellow area spanning South Eastern California, Southern Nevada and the North Western corner of Arizona.] Tab\n[A green area spanning the South Eastern corner of California and the majority of Arizona.] Ohio tea\n[A red area spanning Eastern Arizona, the majority of New Mexico, Southern Colorado and the border between New Mexico and Texas.] Fun wine\n[A blue area spanning Northern Texas, South Western Kansas and the majority of Oklahoma.] Sugar oil\n[A red area spanning Central and Eastern Kansas, Southern Nebraska, Central Missouri and South Western Illinois.] Bubble Honey\n[A yellow area spanning Southern New Mexico and Western Texas.] Diet\n[A blue area in Southern Texas.] Code red\n[A green area spanning the majority of Texas and the Southern border of Oklahoma.] The wet drink\n[A purple area spanning Eastern Texas, the South Eastern corner of Oklahoma, the majority of Arkansas, Southern Missouri and Western Louisiana.] Carbonated beverage\n[A yellow area spanning Eastern Louisiana, Eastern Arkansas, Southern Missouri, the South Western corner of Tennessee, the majority of Mississippi and the South Western corner of Alabama.] Skim shake\n[A green area spanning the majority of Tennessee, Southern Kentucky, Northern Alabama, Northern Georgia and Western North Carolina.] Regular\n[A purple area covering the majority of North Carolina.] Fluid\n[A red area spanning Eastern Mississippi, Central Alabama, Northern Georgia and the South Western border of South Carolina.] Tang\n[A yellow area covering the majority of South Carolina.] Coke zero\n[A blue area in Central Georgia.] Fool's Champagne\n[A purple ares spanning Southern Alabama, Southern Georgia and Northern Florida.] Formula\n[A yellow area in Eastern Florida, near Orlando.] Carbo\n[A blue area in Western Florida, near Tampa.] Quicksilver\n[A red area in Southern Florida, South of Tampa and Orlando.] Glug\n[A green area in Southern Florida, near Miami.] Water plus\n[A yellow area corresponding to Hawaii except for the island of O'ahu.] Pepsi\n[A red area corresponding to the Hawaiian island of O'ahu.] Crystal Pepsi\n[A blue area covering the majority of Alaska.] Boat drink\n[A red area in Southern Alaska, near Anchorage.] Melt\nIn the original version of this comic \"elixir\" was misspelled as \"elixer\", however this was later corrected.\n","explanation":"In the US, people in various parts of the country refer to carbonated beverages by different names such as \"soda\", \"pop\", \"coke\", and others. Generally, the West Coast and Northeast say \"soda\", the South says \"coke\" and the rest of the country says \"pop\".\nThere are various maps of where these different names are used, including popvssoda.com and this map on Laughing Squid . Such maps were trending and popular in 2013.\nxkcd's map is a satire of those maps \u2013 these regional terms are fake. Not only are there far more terms than are actually used by Americans, many are terms for other beverages (mead), unrelated liquids (quicksilver), or trademarked beverage names less popular than Coke \/ Coca Cola ( Code Red ) \u2013 and in one case, something that's not even tangible ( \"Crypto\" ).\n[A map of the United States divided into purple, red, green, blue, and yellow colored regions.]\n\n[A purple area in North West Washington.] Fanta\n[A blue area spanning the Western border of Washington and Oregon.] S\u00f6de\n[A yellow area spanning the remainder of Washington, North Western Oregon, Northern Idaho and the North Western corner of Montana.] Ichor\n[A green area spanning the North Eastern corner of Oregon, central Idaho and the majority of Montana.] Spicewater\n[A blue area spanning Eastern Montana, the North Eastern corner of Wyoming and the majority of North and South Dakota.] Refill\n[A red area spanning Eastern North and South Dakota, the majority of Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin and Michigan North of the lakes.] Mead\n[A green area spanning the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin.] Canadian Ale\n[A yellow area spanning the South Eastern corner of Minnesota, the North Eastern corner of Iowa and the majority of Wisconsin.] Aether\n[A green area in North East Wisconsin.] Mouthwater\n[A purple area covering most of Michigan south of the lakes.] Kid's coffee\n[A red area covering Northeast & central New York.] Hydro\n[A green area covering Vermont and spanning the border with New York.] [No word for them]\n[A yellow area covering Maine and the majority of New Hampshire.] Sugar milk\n[A red area spanning Eastern Massachusetts and the border with New Hampshire.] Harvard tea\n[A blue area covering Rhode Island and spanning Eastern Connecticut, central Massachusetts and the South West corner of New Hampshire.] Bubbler\n[A yellow area spanning the South Eastern corner of New York, the South Western corner of Massachusetts, Western Connecticut and Northern New Jersey.] Mouth Buzz\n[A red area spanning North Eastern California, Southern Oregon, the South Western corner of Idaho and the majority of Nevada.] You-know-what\n[A blue area spanning South Western Idaho, Eastern Nevada, the majority of Utah and the border of Utah and Arizona.] Softie\n[A green area spanning Northern Utah and the majority of Colorado.] Punch\n[A yellow area covering the majority of Wyoming.] Fizz ooze\n[A purple area spanning the South Eastern corner of Wyoming, the North Eastern corner of Colorado, the North Western corner of Kansas, Southern South Dakota, the majority of Nebraska and Iowa, and Northern Missouri.] Tickle juice\n[A blue area spanning Eastern Iowa, Southern Wisconsin, the majority of Illinois and Indiana, the Southern border of Michigan, the Western border of Ohio and North Western Kentucky.] Capri\n[A green area spanning South Eastern Michigan, the majority of Ohio and Pennsylvania, South Western New York, Northern West Virginia and Western Maryland.] Medicine\n[A purple area spanning Eastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey.] Brad's Elixir\n[A red area spanning the South Eastern corner of Pennsylvania, Eastern Maryland, Delaware and Northern Virginia.] Hot Water\n[A yellow area spanning Eastern Kentucky, the Southern border of Ohio, Southern West Virginia, the majority of Virginia and Northern North Carolina.] Broth\n[A blue area in Western California, North of San Francisco.] True water\n[A yellow area in Western California, South of San Francisco.] Crypto\n[A green area in South Western California, North of Los Angeles.] Yum\n[A blue area in South Western California, close to Los Angeles.] Sparkle fluid\n[A purple area in South Western California, close to San Diego.] King cola\n[A yellow area spanning South Eastern California, Southern Nevada and the North Western corner of Arizona.] Tab\n[A green area spanning the South Eastern corner of California and the majority of Arizona.] Ohio tea\n[A red area spanning Eastern Arizona, the majority of New Mexico, Southern Colorado and the border between New Mexico and Texas.] Fun wine\n[A blue area spanning Northern Texas, South Western Kansas and the majority of Oklahoma.] Sugar oil\n[A red area spanning Central and Eastern Kansas, Southern Nebraska, Central Missouri and South Western Illinois.] Bubble Honey\n[A yellow area spanning Southern New Mexico and Western Texas.] Diet\n[A blue area in Southern Texas.] Code red\n[A green area spanning the majority of Texas and the Southern border of Oklahoma.] The wet drink\n[A purple area spanning Eastern Texas, the South Eastern corner of Oklahoma, the majority of Arkansas, Southern Missouri and Western Louisiana.] Carbonated beverage\n[A yellow area spanning Eastern Louisiana, Eastern Arkansas, Southern Missouri, the South Western corner of Tennessee, the majority of Mississippi and the South Western corner of Alabama.] Skim shake\n[A green area spanning the majority of Tennessee, Southern Kentucky, Northern Alabama, Northern Georgia and Western North Carolina.] Regular\n[A purple area covering the majority of North Carolina.] Fluid\n[A red area spanning Eastern Mississippi, Central Alabama, Northern Georgia and the South Western border of South Carolina.] Tang\n[A yellow area covering the majority of South Carolina.] Coke zero\n[A blue area in Central Georgia.] Fool's Champagne\n[A purple ares spanning Southern Alabama, Southern Georgia and Northern Florida.] Formula\n[A yellow area in Eastern Florida, near Orlando.] Carbo\n[A blue area in Western Florida, near Tampa.] Quicksilver\n[A red area in Southern Florida, South of Tampa and Orlando.] Glug\n[A green area in Southern Florida, near Miami.] Water plus\n[A yellow area corresponding to Hawaii except for the island of O'ahu.] Pepsi\n[A red area corresponding to the Hawaiian island of O'ahu.] Crystal Pepsi\n[A blue area covering the majority of Alaska.] Boat drink\n[A red area in Southern Alaska, near Anchorage.] Melt\nIn the original version of this comic \"elixir\" was misspelled as \"elixer\", however this was later corrected.\n"}
{"id":2109,"title":"Invisible Formatting","image_title":"Invisible Formatting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2109","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/invisible_formatting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2109:_Invisible_Formatting","transcript":"[A text editor, with some options. They are superscript in one section, bold, italic and underscore in another section and alignments in the third section. The word \"not \", including the following space, is highlighted in blue. There is a cursor below it.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Action: Select\n[The cursor is on the \"bold\" option and the selected word is bolded.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Action: Click\n[The cursor is next to the \"to\". No text is highlighted.] Thought bubble: ...Nah, the bold is too much. Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo...\n[The word \"not\" is now highlighted in blue again, but the following space is not.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Action: Select\n[The cursor is on the \"bold\" option and the selected word is not bolded.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Action: Click\n[The cursor and the blue highlighting are gone. The space after \"not\" has a dashed box around it, and an arrow points to it.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Arrow: Hidden bold space\n[Caption below the panels:] When editing text, in the back of my mind I always worry that I'm adding invisible formatting that will somehow cause a problem in the distant future.\nThere are also other occasions where a hidden bold space may be a problem for later editors etc. These include:\nPopular modern word processing programs have features which may make it easier to notice improperly formatted invisible characters. In the tutorials linked here, one may learn how to view invisible characters in Microsoft Word , Pages and LibreOffice Writer , however even with this on it would be difficult to spot a bolded space (which looks like a bolded dot \u2013 now visible but so small it's still hard to tell if it's bold or not). In the older word processor WordPerfect , one could do this with the \u201cReveal Codes\u201d feature, which showed you character codes, separate from the characters themselves, around the characters.  For example, a bolded space would look something like \" [BOLD\u227b \u227aBOLD] \".\nWeb sites which allow content to be edited by users but generate the formatting code automatically often have versions of the invisible formatting problem; for example, eBay listings which use anything other than the default font rapidly accumulate hard spaces, font end and begin transitions, and other invisible formatting if they are subsequently edited, which can slow page loading and cause other problems. This is also seen in blogs etc.\n","explanation":"In various word processor programs, when highlighting text, whether by clicking-and-dragging or double-clicking, it is easy to highlight characters which have no visible effects when markup is applied (ie italics or bold ), such as a space or the end-of-paragraph passage. Since in most fonts the word space looks identical between the bold, the italicized, and the regular, this has no effect on how the end user will read the document, but could theoretically cause a problem in certain occasions, most notably in computers which might parse a bold space differently or incorrectly. This problem is compounded if the text cursor does not indicate clearly the space is in bold or italics when a user hovers their mouse over it. Randall worries about this.\nIn the pictured case, Randall does not appear to have selected the word by double-clicking, since the cursor is depicted past the end of the word instead of on top of it; rather, he has clicked-and-dragged the mouse cursor to select it. The space character is a relatively thin character, which makes it hard to avoid and to notice, but even so most people don\u2019t worry if they've selected it and tend not to bother fixing. Randall later uses the same click-and-drag method to have the bold removed, but this time omits the space, retaining its bold formatting on that character. Since it is a blank character, there is no easy way to tell it is still bold \u2014 even if it is slightly longer in the bold font, this may be hard to notice. This is the situation the comic is highlighting, no pun intended .\nUsually, if one were to highlight a word via double-clicking, the word and the space following would both become highlighted. Therefore, this problem could have been avoided if Randall had used this method to highlight, as the space would have been automatically included both times, thus removing markup on the space character as well.\nThough Randall is likely thinking of computer-related problems caused by his invisible formatting, there is also a chance that his bold space would cause other, non-computer-related issues. As Randall has bolded the word \"not\" but then changed his mind, it indicates that he believes writing not is too strongly-worded. With an invisible bold space, whoever the document was intended for could notice Randall's bold space and figure that the word \"not\" was originally bolded. Depending on the context, a bolded \"not\" could be enough to change the tone of the text from polite and formal to dismissive (eg. \"We believe you are not suitable for this position.\" vs \"We believe you are not suitable for this position.\")\nIn the title text, Randall says that he \u201cfixes\u201d this by running the text through OCR , which turns physical copies or images into text. Although this would \"fix\" the invisible formatting (since the OCR is unable to detect it), this would usually ruin even more formatting, and add inaccuracies to the text. This way, no one can tell which bugs were introduced by him and which ones by the OCR, which he facetiously suggests is better somehow.\nAs the title text explains, Randall finds it very important to control all information he publishes. Real-world examples are governments changing the impact of reports for political reasons. Attempted tampering of this kind can be revealed by bold spaces. Another example would be a casual and short one-sentence reply e.g. to a romantic interest, which one takes one hour to formulate to sound as natural as possible.\nThere are also other occasions where a hidden bold space may be a problem for later editors (see the Trivia section below). Randall\u2019s background in computer programming could also make him more attentive to these types of technical problems, and therefore add this as a reason for his worries about invisible formating.\n[A text editor, with some options. They are superscript in one section, bold, italic and underscore in another section and alignments in the third section. The word \"not \", including the following space, is highlighted in blue. There is a cursor below it.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Action: Select\n[The cursor is on the \"bold\" option and the selected word is bolded.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Action: Click\n[The cursor is next to the \"to\". No text is highlighted.] Thought bubble: ...Nah, the bold is too much. Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo...\n[The word \"not\" is now highlighted in blue again, but the following space is not.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Action: Select\n[The cursor is on the \"bold\" option and the selected word is not bolded.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Action: Click\n[The cursor and the blue highlighting are gone. The space after \"not\" has a dashed box around it, and an arrow points to it.] Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo... Arrow: Hidden bold space\n[Caption below the panels:] When editing text, in the back of my mind I always worry that I'm adding invisible formatting that will somehow cause a problem in the distant future.\nThere are also other occasions where a hidden bold space may be a problem for later editors etc. These include:\nPopular modern word processing programs have features which may make it easier to notice improperly formatted invisible characters. In the tutorials linked here, one may learn how to view invisible characters in Microsoft Word , Pages and LibreOffice Writer , however even with this on it would be difficult to spot a bolded space (which looks like a bolded dot \u2013 now visible but so small it's still hard to tell if it's bold or not). In the older word processor WordPerfect , one could do this with the \u201cReveal Codes\u201d feature, which showed you character codes, separate from the characters themselves, around the characters.  For example, a bolded space would look something like \" [BOLD\u227b \u227aBOLD] \".\nWeb sites which allow content to be edited by users but generate the formatting code automatically often have versions of the invisible formatting problem; for example, eBay listings which use anything other than the default font rapidly accumulate hard spaces, font end and begin transitions, and other invisible formatting if they are subsequently edited, which can slow page loading and cause other problems. This is also seen in blogs etc.\n"}
{"id":2110,"title":"Error Bars","image_title":"Error Bars","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2110","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/error_bars.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2110:_Error_Bars","transcript":"[A line graph with eight marks on the Y-axis and five marks on the X-axis.  The graph has four points represented by dots and connected by three lines between them.  Each dot has error bars coming out of the top and bottom of it.  The horizontal line delineating the end of each error bar has another set of smaller error bars attached to it.  These second error bars in turn have a still smaller third set of error bars attached to the end of them.  There is a final fourth set of very small error bars attached to the third set, for a total of 56 error bars]\n[Caption below the panel:] I don't know how to propagate error correctly, so I just put error bars on all my error bars.\n","explanation":"On statistical charts and graphs, it is common to include error bars showing the probable variation of the actual value from the value shown (or the possible error of the value shown). Since there is always uncertainty in any given measurement, the error bars help an observer evaluate how accurate the data shown is, or the implications if the true value is within the likely error, rather than the exact value shown. There are statistical methods for calculating error bars (they can show a standard deviation , a standard error , or a confidence interval ) but the fact that there are multiple ways of calculating them - plus general unfamiliarity with statistical methods - means that people often misinterpret or misunderstand them.\nAs charts may be of data that has been mathematically processed, the known error from the recording process must also be mathematically processed in order to determine the likely error in the final result - a process called propagation of error. Different transformations of the data result in different transformations of the error, and the correctness of the transformations used can sometimes depend on the subtle differences in the distribution of the source data. At a loss as to how to correctly propagate all the possible sources of error, Randall instead puts error bars on the ends of his error bars to reflect his uncertainty in the original error bars. However, since his second error bar calculations are also suspect, he puts a third set of error bars on them.  This repeats ad infinitum (though only four levels are drawn), creating a fractal-like object.\nIn the title text, he says that the effect size of some variable being calculated is 1.68 and follows it with a 95% confidence interval, or CI (a range of possible values which, under repeated sampling, would contain a number within the interval 95% of the time), which would normally be represented by something like \"1.68 (95% CI 1.56 - 1.80).\" Since he is stating that those bounds are uncertain, he starts with \"1.68 (95% CI 1.56\" but then puts the 95% CI for that lower bound of the interval, \"95% CI 1.52,\" followed by the lower bound for that value, \"95% CI 1.504,\" and so on. He goes 11 layers deep before resorting to an ellipsis.\nIn real life, there is not enough data to compute an error bar on error bars. The data being measured have a sampling distribution, e.g. one might make ten measurements of something which come out to 1, 1, 1.1, 1, 1.4, 1, 1, 0.5, 1, and 1, suggesting it is probably close to 1, so there is a range of values that could likely be. However, properties such as the average and standard deviation do not themselves typically have ranges. If one is uncertain that one has computed these correctly, there is not enough data to compute one's own uncertainty in one's skills in any meaningful way; one can claim error bars on error bars, as in this example, but those are just guesses with no statistically useful backing. One way to make the nested error bars valid might be (if one had the time and money) to run the entire experiment ten times, calculating sigmas each time; then there would be a valid (although not necessarily useful) sigma on the sigmas. Then one would have to run the set of ten runs ten times for the next \"level\" of sigmas, etc. The difficulty of doing this entire process, especially when considering that Randall is only nesting error bars out of ignorance, makes this comic all the more absurd.\n[A line graph with eight marks on the Y-axis and five marks on the X-axis.  The graph has four points represented by dots and connected by three lines between them.  Each dot has error bars coming out of the top and bottom of it.  The horizontal line delineating the end of each error bar has another set of smaller error bars attached to it.  These second error bars in turn have a still smaller third set of error bars attached to the end of them.  There is a final fourth set of very small error bars attached to the third set, for a total of 56 error bars]\n[Caption below the panel:] I don't know how to propagate error correctly, so I just put error bars on all my error bars.\n"}
{"id":2111,"title":"Opportunity Rover","image_title":"Opportunity Rover","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2111","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/opportunity_rover.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2111:_Opportunity_Rover","transcript":"[White Hat is watching while Science Girl and Cueball in the background hold their smartphones up to use them as cameras. A narrator (Randall) comments with text above them:] Narrator: Some people complain that we see the world through our cameras. White Hat: Kids these days...\n[Cueball points to the left with his hand while shouting and holding his other hand up near his mouth. Again there is narrating text, both above and below this time.] Narrator: But for me, the really exciting part of finding something new Cueball: Wow, you gotta come see this! Narrator: has always been showing it to others.\n[A black panel shows a space probe approaching a planet. White narrating text is above and below.] Exploring an entire new world would already be the adventure of a lifetime. Imagine having the chance to share every new sight\n[A queue of seven people is seen following a rover driving in front of them on a rock filled landscape. Its track is shown behind it. The people do not leave foot prints though. The rover speaks. At the top of the panel there is a last narrating text inside a small box across the top of the panel. The seven people are Cueball, Science Girl, Hairy (looking back), another Cueball holding his hand to his chin, Ponytail and finally Megan, who points forward.] Narrator: with seven billion friends. Rover: ...and here's a trench I dug with my wheel, and here's where a dust devil went right past me, and over there is the biggest cliff I've ever seen, and this is...\n","explanation":"This comic is a tribute to the Opportunity rover and its nearly 15 year mission in which it sent back publicly available photos and research from Mars to Earth. The evening prior to this comic uploading (Feb 12, 2019), Nasa's JPL sent their final data request to the rover, in hopes that it would respond. When it did not, the rover was declared to be officially lost.\nThe comic starts with White Hat, looking at some people taking photographs and lamenting the fact that they're taking pictures all the time, saying \"Kids these days...\", a common complaint of younger people by their elders. This could be considered a Straw man argument, as White Hat is lamenting that the younger generation look at the world through their camera phones and thus don't experience it directly, and believe that they lose some of the joy of the event in the process - an opinion he has expressed previously in 1314: Photos .\nTo this Randall appears to counter that sharing and showing to others is an exciting part of the joy, an opinion which he also expressed as Cueball in 1314: Photos . He then proceeds to say that the Opportunity of exploring a completely new world is an exciting part of the exploration, and expresses joy in the fact that MER-B Opportunity was able to share its experiences in its 15-year, 45-kilometer journey on Mars with the entirety of humanity.\nThe comic ends by thanking the Opportunity rover (and NASA) for allowing the general public the incredible experiences it had on Mars in its 15 Earth-year lifetime, to receive the pictures and data, while traversing along hostile terrain for us. The last panel shows some \"followers\" which represents everyone on Earth listening to the words from the rover as it transmits the incredible experiences it had on Mars in its 15 Earth-year lifetime. Note, perhaps the reference to \"dust devil\" suggests these may have been the last such descriptions as that may refer to the deadly global dust storm that likely killed the rover and ended the mission. The dust-devils were also likely responsible for the amazing extended missions for both rovers as they tended to blow the accumulated dust off the solar panels.\nThe title text shows gratitude for the rover, which brought everyone on Earth, including Randall along in its journey by sending images of the journey to Earth.  Also, Randall used to work for NASA, so as much joy as it brought the world at large, it probably felt just a little more personal for him.\nThe Opportunity rover also appeared in 1504: Opportunity , while its twin rover Spirit also had a dedicated comic in 695: Spirit .\n[White Hat is watching while Science Girl and Cueball in the background hold their smartphones up to use them as cameras. A narrator (Randall) comments with text above them:] Narrator: Some people complain that we see the world through our cameras. White Hat: Kids these days...\n[Cueball points to the left with his hand while shouting and holding his other hand up near his mouth. Again there is narrating text, both above and below this time.] Narrator: But for me, the really exciting part of finding something new Cueball: Wow, you gotta come see this! Narrator: has always been showing it to others.\n[A black panel shows a space probe approaching a planet. White narrating text is above and below.] Exploring an entire new world would already be the adventure of a lifetime. Imagine having the chance to share every new sight\n[A queue of seven people is seen following a rover driving in front of them on a rock filled landscape. Its track is shown behind it. The people do not leave foot prints though. The rover speaks. At the top of the panel there is a last narrating text inside a small box across the top of the panel. The seven people are Cueball, Science Girl, Hairy (looking back), another Cueball holding his hand to his chin, Ponytail and finally Megan, who points forward.] Narrator: with seven billion friends. Rover: ...and here's a trench I dug with my wheel, and here's where a dust devil went right past me, and over there is the biggest cliff I've ever seen, and this is...\n"}
{"id":2112,"title":"Night Shift","image_title":"Night Shift","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2112","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/night_shift.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2112:_Night_Shift","transcript":"[Comments with peoples' profile pictures in front of them are shown in white comment boxes on a gray background.] Cueball: The Atlantic Ocean is big Ponytail: The Pacific is even bigger Cueball With Full Body Profile Picture (WFBPP): They're both very big\nMegan: A lot of people have TVs Hairbun: Some people don't Megan: Yeah, that's true\nCueball: 24 isn't a prime number Cueball WFBPP: Neither is 25\nHairbun: Have you ever been to Colorado? Megan: No Cueball WFBPP: No Cueball: Yeah Ponytail: No\n[Caption below the panel:] My phone has a night shift mode to help me sleep, but instead of reducing the intensity of blue light, it reduces the intensity of opinions.\n","explanation":"Many electronic devices have settings to adjust display color and intensity.  \" Night shift ,\" or similar modes make the display less blue. This may be useful in the evening, since blue light interferes with melatonin, the hormone which regulates the sleep cycle. Exposure to intense blue light in the evening can interfere with becoming sleepy.  This comic re-imagines such a mode as influencing the content of messages to encourage sleepiness\u2014or, at least, to dampen the emotional response that might keep someone up too late at night .\nIn the title text, the reverse has occurred. By setting his white balance incorrectly, the opinions that Randall is reading are more intense, even about \"simple\" things as having visited Colorado or not (instead of his phone display merely becoming too bluish). This may be a play on angry white male , or similar, which is also characterized by violent expressions of views, and uses the word white.  Randall might have meant brightness instead of white balance, with the idea that increasing the amount of light coming from the screen also increases the vehemence of the posts.\nThis strip then references the fact that on the internet, very few people answer in the singulars of 'Yes' or 'No' or another equally short and definable answer. This may be because there is little perceived value in such a short but factual answer, when you have the opportunity to voice your opinion, sometimes at length. Also in many cultures indirect expression is the norm, or polite; a short direct answer is considered less acceptable, especially in the negative.\n[Comments with peoples' profile pictures in front of them are shown in white comment boxes on a gray background.] Cueball: The Atlantic Ocean is big Ponytail: The Pacific is even bigger Cueball With Full Body Profile Picture (WFBPP): They're both very big\nMegan: A lot of people have TVs Hairbun: Some people don't Megan: Yeah, that's true\nCueball: 24 isn't a prime number Cueball WFBPP: Neither is 25\nHairbun: Have you ever been to Colorado? Megan: No Cueball WFBPP: No Cueball: Yeah Ponytail: No\n[Caption below the panel:] My phone has a night shift mode to help me sleep, but instead of reducing the intensity of blue light, it reduces the intensity of opinions.\n"}
{"id":2113,"title":"Physics Suppression","image_title":"Physics Suppression","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2113","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/physics_suppression.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2113:_Physics_Suppression","transcript":"[White Hat, with his hands balled into fist and held up above him, is talking with Megan.] White Hat: You physicists are suppressing my theory because it's inconvenient for your models! Megan: Wait, we have a mafia that can suppress annoying results? Megan: Why didn't they do something about the dark energy people?! Megan: We gave them a Nobel prize but I'm still mad at them!\n","explanation":"White Hat is mad at physicists in general and directs his fury at Megan , a physicist. He has a theory and blames physicists for suppressing it. He believes that no one takes it seriously because his theory would disrupt the standard model in physics.\nMegan is not taking him seriously and instead states that she did not know that physicists had a Mafia that was able to suppress anyone from publishing annoying results. She continues that if such a group were there to do so, then why were they not there to stop the people who published results about dark energy? The Mafia is a criminal organization famous for their use of force to get their way, and while White Hat didn't mention the Mafia, Megan is facetious in her mentioning them because they would be an extreme example of a group that could do what White Hat seems to think is being done.\nShe acknowledges that the \"dark energy people\" were awarded a Nobel Prize (in 2011 ), but she's still mad at them for the \"trouble\" this new concept caused for other physicists, including her.\nDark energy is an unknown form of energy which is hypothesized to permeate all of space, tending to accelerate the expansion of the universe.\nIt should be noted that White Hat doesn't state that he actually has some results, but just a theory that contradicts known physics.  The reason the \"dark energy people\" got a Nobel Prize is that the experiments and measurements show that they were onto something real. It seems like White Hat currently only has a model, and not data, to back his theory up which is probably why his theory is being ignored (which he decides to interpret as \"suppression\").\nThe title text mentions BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, 2nd generation) which was part of a series of experiments measuring the polarization of the cosmic microwave background . On 17 March 2014, it was announced, to much fanfare, that BICEP2 had detected signals (B-modes) caused by gravitational waves in the early universe (called primordial gravitational waves). A few years later, this announcement was retracted, as it was found that most, if not all, of the reported signal was actually due to interstellar dust within the Milky Way. [1]\nThe title text notes that if there had been a physics mafia, then those results would have ended in bloodshed due to the controversy they caused.\n[White Hat, with his hands balled into fist and held up above him, is talking with Megan.] White Hat: You physicists are suppressing my theory because it's inconvenient for your models! Megan: Wait, we have a mafia that can suppress annoying results? Megan: Why didn't they do something about the dark energy people?! Megan: We gave them a Nobel prize but I'm still mad at them!\n"}
{"id":2114,"title":"Launch Conditions","image_title":"Launch Conditions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2114","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/launch_conditions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2114:_Launch_Conditions","transcript":"[A rocket sits on a launch pad and the tower to the left has retracted its access arms. The engines seem to have just started firing and a small cloud at the bottom is visible.]\n[The rocket still sits on the pad but the cloud is growing and extending to both sides on the ground.]\n[Ponytail's head, much larger than the rocket, appears above the rocket on the right. The cloud covers the full ground and hides a bigger part of the rocket.]\n[Zoom out. Ponytail stands behind a pedestal with a rocket model on top and the cloud is all around the bottom of the rocket and below.] Off screen: It's still pretty dry in here. Ponytail: I love the new humidifier, though.\n","explanation":"An image of a rocket (presumably a Long March 5 ) with a progressively larger white cloud around it is shown, but no external object for scale is visible until the third panel.\nIt is then revealed to be a model or miniature when Ponytail walks into the shot.\nThe dialog reveals the miniature rocket is a domestic humidifier appliance, using its plumes of water mist to mimic the appearance of the exhaust plume of a full-size rocket.\nModern rocket launches are backed by a Sound Suppression System avoiding damages to the rocket itself, the payload, or humans inside. This system drops vast amounts of water into the exhaust of the rocket engines and the water vaporizes immediately. This vapor mainly interrupts the sound reflections from the ground. This reduces the sound to a level the rocket can withstand but also produces a big cloud of water mist. The cloud at the ground consists mostly of water and not the exhaust of the rocket engines. This article shows how the system works: NASA's Incredible Sound Suppression System Prevents Rockets from Exploding (interestingengineering.com) .\nSome rockets use liquid hydrogen as a fuel, especially for upper stages, so steam is the combustion product.\nThis comic was posted the day after the death of Peter Cosgrove was reported. He was known for photographing many Space Shuttle launches.\nThe title text references the failed o-ring that led to the disintegration of the Challenger Space Shuttle . \nThis disaster was a focal point of controversy, which Richard Feynman played a key role in piercing .  The o-ring in question failed to expand at freezing temperatures, resulting in a leak of gas around the edges that was visible as a small vapor plume on the recording.  The launch was pushed to a day with lower temperatures than the engineers had planned for.  For the humidifier to vent the water mist from this opening is indeed in poor taste, even though the model does not resemble a shuttle.\n[A rocket sits on a launch pad and the tower to the left has retracted its access arms. The engines seem to have just started firing and a small cloud at the bottom is visible.]\n[The rocket still sits on the pad but the cloud is growing and extending to both sides on the ground.]\n[Ponytail's head, much larger than the rocket, appears above the rocket on the right. The cloud covers the full ground and hides a bigger part of the rocket.]\n[Zoom out. Ponytail stands behind a pedestal with a rocket model on top and the cloud is all around the bottom of the rocket and below.] Off screen: It's still pretty dry in here. Ponytail: I love the new humidifier, though.\n"}
{"id":2115,"title":"Plutonium","image_title":"Plutonium","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2115","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/plutonium.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2115:_Plutonium","transcript":"[Megan, Hairy, Cueball, and Ponytail are talking.] Megan: How will we keep the spacecraft supplied with heat and electricity? Cueball: We could use a power orb. They give off thousands of watts 24\/7. Megan: Huh? How do you recharge it? Cueball: You don't. It's just made of a metal that emits energy. Megan: OK, come on. Hairy: Can we please be serious here?\n[Caption below the panel:] For something that's real, plutonium is so unrealistic.\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at the properties of plutonium , claiming that it is so unrealistically powerful that it may as well be random science fiction jargon. Indeed, the ability for a metal to radiate energy sounds impossible (this comic leaves out the inherent dangers of highly radioactive material). This is reflected by Megan and Hairy treating Cueball's idea as a joke.\nThere are devices that need substantial electrical power over long time \u2013 in the order of decades \u2013 but local sources of energy are insufficient or unavailable, yet constructing a power line or resupplying them with some power source (like fuel, fresh chemical batteries etc.) is either impossible or overly costly. Such devices include maritime beacons and buoys, automatic weather and science stations located in remote areas, and \u2013 most importantly \u2013 deep space probes and some planetary probes or science packs. Probes sent beyond Jupiter cannot effectively rely on photovoltaic panels for energy, because the great distance to the Sun means that the amount of solar radiation per unit of area is very low, requiring impractically large (and thus heavy) panels to provide enough energy. Carrying a lot of fuel adds mass to the probe, making them more expensive to launch.\nInstead, such devices usually use radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). In an RTG the natural radioactive decay of some unstable isotope (such as plutonium-238 or strontium-90 ) produces a lot of heat, which is then used to generate energy using thermopiles , which generate electricity directly from temperature differences using the thermoelectric effect . The key element of an RTG, a pellet of radioactive material such as plutonium dioxide, could be facetiously described as a \"power orb\" \u2013 a lump of a substance that gives out heat apparently out of nothing.\nPlutonium-238 must be produced from uranium in a nuclear reactor.  Unlike plutonium-239, the alpha radiation emitted by plutonium-238 is relatively harmless, as it is quickly absorbed by surrounding material and turned to heat \u2013 but plutonium is still incredibly dangerous if it gets inside a human body unprotected. In pure form it produces a little more than half a watt of heat per gram, which slowly drops as the material decays to lead, emitting a quarter watt per gram after 100 years. Other disadvantages of RTGs include the risk of contamination in the event of a launch failure, and the relatively limited supply of plutonium.\nThe title text references development of games. A rule or strategy within a game is often called a mechanic , meant as one particular rule (singular) out of the overall set of rules (game mechanic s ). In this context, the word mechanics is a metaphor referring to the set of rules and interactions that govern the imaginary world of the game. The mechanics of a game define the deterministic or randomized functions of events and\/or characters within the game, the outcomes of actions commanded by the players, and so on. This metaphor refers to the mechanics science, and how it describes behavior of physical objects in the real world; However, contrary to real-world mechanics which \"just happen\" and we only try to describe how things work, in game mechanics every single rule or interaction has to be explicitly defined. The game simulates (to a given extent) an actual world. Game rules do not need to mimic the real world closely and often don't for many reasons; This results in (intended or otherwise) inconsistencies, unexpected behavior or imbalance. Game players complain about \u201cimbalance\u201d when a particular rule, interaction or item present in the game (such as an extremely powerful magical artifact) gives a character exploiting it a great and unjustified advantage. Inconsistencies and possible imbalances can lead to problematic game mechanics being unused or left unresolved, after the creator of those mechanics ceases their participation in the game or game development process.\nThings that seem like they shouldn't work but do are the main topic of 2540: TTSLTSWBD .\n[Megan, Hairy, Cueball, and Ponytail are talking.] Megan: How will we keep the spacecraft supplied with heat and electricity? Cueball: We could use a power orb. They give off thousands of watts 24\/7. Megan: Huh? How do you recharge it? Cueball: You don't. It's just made of a metal that emits energy. Megan: OK, come on. Hairy: Can we please be serious here?\n[Caption below the panel:] For something that's real, plutonium is so unrealistic.\n"}
{"id":2116,"title":".NORM Normal File Format","image_title":".NORM Normal File Format","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2116","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/norm_normal_file_format.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2116:_.NORM_Normal_File_Format","transcript":"[Cueball is at a computer. Someone is talking to him from off-panel.] Voice: I sent you the data. Cueball: Thanks! Cueball: \u2026this is a Word document containing an embedded photo you took of your screen with the spreadsheet open. Voice: Yeah? Does your computer not support .NORM files? Maybe you need to update.\n[Caption below the panel:] Since everyone sends stuff this way anyway, we should just formalize it as a standard.\nSeveral days after this comic release Microsoft announced support for loading pictures into Excel. A photo of a printed data table shall be converted it into a fully editable table. See: Microsoft Excel will now let you snap a picture of a spreadsheet and import it (theverge.com)\n","explanation":"Cueball's friend seems to have sent him a rather unusual datafile passed off as a new \"normal\" standard.\nPeople who work with data, and need data sent to them electronically, typically need it sent in a way that they can easily use it \u2013 either in a text format that can be copy-pasted, or as a spreadsheet or CSV file that can be imported into a spreadsheet program, or such.\nInformation sent by Cueball's friend in this fashion \u2013 a photograph of a spreadsheet embedded into a word processing file \u2013 is not only aesthetically unpleasing, but essentially useless for any purpose beyond being looked at.  The recipient has no choice but to retype the entire data set, or attempt to use optical character recognition (OCR) and hope that no mistakes are made in the process.\nAny functional relationships between data (such as formulas used to compute data values) have been lost.  Further, the size of the data is bloated by being converted first from numbers and formulas into text, then from text into graphics, and then from graphics to embedded graphics in a word processing document.  This adds nothing to the content, and only adds steps to the process of retrieving the data.\nHowever useless this kind of data manipulation might be, it is becoming more and more common, especially as more computer-illiterate people find \"creative\" ways to exchange information. Usually, their job is getting the data together in a Word file, and the only file they have is a screenshot of the spreadsheet, not the original file, so they just put the screenshot in the Word file. Cueball's friend suggests that this is now a normal way to send files, and that Cueball should update his system to support this new type of file, represented by a \".norm\" suffix. In 2341: Scientist Tech Help a .norm like file is referenced.\nThe caption acknowledges that this has become a de facto standard and that we should just accept and formalize it.\nThe comic image links to a tweet by OpenElections that displays an Excel file produced by the City of Detroit that contains a lookup table for the city's absentee precincts in 2016. The data had been input as clip art (images) of the values, instead of being entered in the spreadsheet cells.\nThis comic is reminiscent of the comic 763: Workaround , which also describes convoluted formats.\nThe title text suggests that eventually compression (or at least compression with data\/quality loss) will be unnecessary as technology improves in the future. SVG ( Scalable Vector Graphics ) is a vector graphic format that is fundamentally a lossless format, representing images using geometric figures. JPEG is a lossy format, representing images as an array of rectangles approximating the original image.  Randall suggests that some people in the future may choose to include JPEG artifacts to SVG vector graphics for its \"aesthetics\", perhaps as a throwback to when lower quality JPEG images were commonplace, or as a form of glitch art . It is possible that some in the future will view JPEG artifacts as giving their images a quaint\/retro feel, much the way that some people today use sepia-tone filters on their images. (And much like some people today use JPEG artifacts to give their images an intentionally low-quality appearance .)\nThis is made even more reasonable by the fact that the SVG specification employs a lot of filters and already can embed regular pixel-based JPEG files. Furthermore, it allows JavaScript to be used to manipulate objects, meaning such an effect may be implementable in the current SVG 2.0 specification.\n[Cueball is at a computer. Someone is talking to him from off-panel.] Voice: I sent you the data. Cueball: Thanks! Cueball: \u2026this is a Word document containing an embedded photo you took of your screen with the spreadsheet open. Voice: Yeah? Does your computer not support .NORM files? Maybe you need to update.\n[Caption below the panel:] Since everyone sends stuff this way anyway, we should just formalize it as a standard.\nSeveral days after this comic release Microsoft announced support for loading pictures into Excel. A photo of a printed data table shall be converted it into a fully editable table. See: Microsoft Excel will now let you snap a picture of a spreadsheet and import it (theverge.com)\n"}
{"id":2117,"title":"Differentiation and Integration","image_title":"Differentiation and Integration","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2117","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/differentiation_and_integration.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2117:_Differentiation_and_Integration","transcript":"[Two flow charts are shown.]\n[The first flow chart has four steps in simple order, one with multiple recommendations.] DIFFERENTIATION Start Try applying Chain Rule Power Rule Quotient Rule Product Rule Etc. Done? No [Arrow returns to \"Try applying\" step.] Yes Done!\n[The second flow chart begins like the first, then descends into chaos.]\nINTEGRATION Start Try applying Integration by Parts Substitution Done? Haha, Nope!\n[Chaos, Roughly from left to right, top to bottom, direction arrows not included.] Cauchy's Formula ???? ???!? ??? ??? ? Partial Fractions ?? ? Install Mathematica ? Riemann Integration Stokes' Theorem ??? ? Risch Algorithm ??? [Sad face.] ????? ??? What the heck is a Bessel Function?? Phone calls to mathematicians Oh No Burn the Evidence [More arrows pointing out of the image to suggest more steps.]\n","explanation":"This comic illustrates the old saying \"Differentiation is mechanics, integration is art.\" It does so by providing a flowchart purporting to show the process of differentiation, and another for integration.\nDifferentiation and Integration are two major components of calculus . As many Calculus 2 students are painfully aware, integration is much more complicated than the differentiation it undoes.\nHowever, Randall dramatically overstates this point here.  After the first step of integration, Randall assumes that any integration can not be solved so simply, and then dives into a step named \"????\", suggesting that it is unknowable how to proceed.  The rest of the flowchart is (we can assume deliberately) even harder to follow, and does not reach a conclusion.  This is in contrast to the simple, straightforward flowchart for differentiation. The fact that the arrows in the bottom of the integration part leads to nowhere indicates that \"Phone calls to mathematicians\", \"Oh no\" and \"Burn the evidence\" are not final steps in the difficult journey. The flowchart could be extended by Randall to God-knows-where extents.\nIt should be noted that Randall slightly undermines his point by providing four different methods, and an \"etc\", and a \"No\"-branch for attempting differentiation with no guidelines for selecting between them.\nChain rule\nFor any and , it follows that .\nPower Rule\nFor any and , it follows that .\nQuotient rule\nFor any and , it follows that if .\nProduct rule\nFor any and , it follows that .\nIntegration by parts\nThe \"product rule\" run backwards. Since , it follows that by integrating both sides you get , which is more commonly written as . By finding appropriate values for functions such that your problem is in the form , your problem may be simplified. The catch is, there exists no algorithm for determining what functions they might possibly be, so this approach quickly devolves into a guessing game - this has been the topic of an earlier comic, 1201: Integration by Parts .\nSubstitution\nThe \"chain rule\" run backwards. Since , it follows that . By finding appropriate values for functions such that your problem is in the form your problem may be simplified.\nCauchy's Formula\nCauchy's Integral formula is a result in complex analysis that relates the value of a contour integral in the complex plane to properties of the singularities in the interior of the contour. It is often used to compute integrals on the real line by extending the path of the integral from the real line into the complex plane to apply the formula, then proving that the integral from the parts of the contour not on the real line has value zero.\nPartial Fractions\nPartial fractions is a technique for breaking up a function that comprises one polynomial divided by another into a sum of functions comprising constants over the factors of the original denominator, which can easily be integrated into logarithms.\nInstall Mathematica\nMathematica is a modern technical computing system spanning most areas. One of its features is to compute mathematical functions. This step in the flowchart is to install and use Mathematica to do the integration for you. Here is a description about the intricacies of integration and how Mathematica handles those . (It would be quicker to try Wolfram Alpha instead of installing Mathematica, which uses the same backend for mathematical calculations.)\nRiemann Integration\nThe Riemann integral is a definition of definite integration. Elementary textbooks on calculus sometimes present finding a definite integral as a process of approximating an area by strips of equal width and then taking the limit as the strips become narrower. Riemann integration removes the requirement that the strips have equal width, and so is a more flexible definition. However there are still many functions for which the Riemann integral doesn't converge, and consideration of these functions leads to the Lebesgue integral . Riemann integration is not a method of calculus appropriate for finding the anti-derivative of an elementary function.\nStokes' Theorem\nStokes' theorem  is a statement about the integration of differential forms on manifolds. It is invoked in science and engineering during control volume analysis (that is, to track the rate of change of a quantity within a control volume, it suffices to track the fluxes in and out of the control volume boundary), but is rarely used directly (and even when it is used directly, the functions that are most frequently used in science and engineering are well-behaved, like sinusoids and polynomials).\nRisch Algorithm\nThe Risch algorithm is a notoriously complex procedure that, given a certain class of symbolic integrand, either finds a symbolic integral or proves that no elementary integral exists. (Technically it is only a semi-algorithm, and cannot produce an answer unless it can determine if a certain symbolic expression is equal to 0 or not.) Many computer algebra systems have chosen to implement only the simpler Risch-Norman algorithm, which does not come with the same guarantee. A series of extensions to the Risch algorithm extend the class of allowable functions to include (at least) the error function and the logarithmic integral. A human would have to be pretty desperate to attempt this (presumably) by hand.\nBessel function\nBessel functions are the solution to the differential equation , where n is the order of Bessel function. Though they do show up in some engineering, physics, and abstract mathematics, in lower levels of calculus they are often a sign that the integration was not set up properly before someone put them into a symbolic algebra solver.\nPhone calls to mathematicians\nThis step would indicate that the flowchart user, desperate from failed attempts to solve the problem, contacts some more skilled mathematicians by phone, and presumably asks them for help. The connected steps of \"Oh no\", \"What the heck is a Bessel function?\" and \"Burn the evidence\" may suggest the possibility that this interaction might not play out very well and could even get the caller in trouble.\nSpecialists and renowned experts being bothered - not to their amusement - by strangers, often at highly inconvenient times or locations, is a common comedic trope, also previously utilized by xkcd (for example in 163: Donald Knuth ).\nBurn the evidence\nThis phrase parodies a common trope in detective fiction, where characters burn notes, receipts, passports, etc. to maintain secrecy. This may refer to the burning of one's work to avoid the shame of being associated with such a badly failed attempt to solve the given integration problem. Alternatively, it could be an ironic hint to the fact that in order to find the integral, it may even be necessary to break the law or upset higher powers, so that the negative consequences of a persecution can only be avoided by destroying the evidence.\nSymbolic integration\nSymbolic integration is the basic process of finding an antiderivative function (defined with symbols), as opposed to numerically integrating a function. The title text is a pun that defines the term not as integration that works with symbols, but rather as integration as a symbolic act, as if it were a component of a ritual. A symbolic act in a ritual is an act meant to evoke something else, such as burning a wooden figurine of a person to represent one\u2019s hatred of that person. Alternatively, the reference could be seen as a joke that integration might as well be a symbol, like in a novel, because Randall can't get any meaningful results from his analysis.\n[Two flow charts are shown.]\n[The first flow chart has four steps in simple order, one with multiple recommendations.] DIFFERENTIATION Start Try applying Chain Rule Power Rule Quotient Rule Product Rule Etc. Done? No [Arrow returns to \"Try applying\" step.] Yes Done!\n[The second flow chart begins like the first, then descends into chaos.]\nINTEGRATION Start Try applying Integration by Parts Substitution Done? Haha, Nope!\n[Chaos, Roughly from left to right, top to bottom, direction arrows not included.] Cauchy's Formula ???? ???!? ??? ??? ? Partial Fractions ?? ? Install Mathematica ? Riemann Integration Stokes' Theorem ??? ? Risch Algorithm ??? [Sad face.] ????? ??? What the heck is a Bessel Function?? Phone calls to mathematicians Oh No Burn the Evidence [More arrows pointing out of the image to suggest more steps.]\n"}
{"id":2118,"title":"Normal Distribution","image_title":"Normal Distribution","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2118","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/normal_distribution.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2118:_Normal_Distribution","transcript":"[A bell curve of a normal distribution, with the area between two horizontal lines shaded.]\n[The center of the chart is marked between the two lines:] Midpoint\n[The distance between the lines is marked to the right of the midpoint, with the label:] 52.7%\n[A label on the outside of the graph, describing the distance between the two lines:] \"Remember, 50% of the distribution falls between these two lines!\"\n[Caption below the panel:] How to annoy a statistician\n","explanation":"In statistics, a distribution is a representation that can be understood in terms of how much of a sample is expected to fall into either discrete bins or between particular ranges of values.  For example, if you wanted to represent an age distribution using bins of ten years (0-9, 10-19, etc.), you could produce a bar chart, one bar for each bin, where the height of each bar represents a count of the portion of the sample matching that bin. To turn that bar chart into a distribution, you'd get infinitely many people (technically: a number N which tends to infinity), put them into age bins that are infinitely narrow (technically: bins whose size is O(1\/sqrt(N))), and then divide each bin count by the total count so that the whole thing added up to 1. It is common to ask how much of the distribution lies between two vertical lines; that would correspond to asking what percent of people are expected to fall between two ages.\nMany statistical samplings resemble a pattern called a \" normal distribution \".  A theoretically perfect normal distribution would have an infinite sample size and infinitely small bins.  That would produce a bar chart matching the shape of the curve in the comic.\nThe area between two vertical lines of the distribution represents the probability that a randomly selected X-value is between the X-values of the lines. Randall instead finds the area between two horizontal lines, which is mathematically meaningless, because the Y-axis of a probability distribution is typically taken to represent magnitude as a fraction of unity. In the age-distribution analogy above, two points with the same X-value could be understood to represent two people with the same age; but two points with the same Y-value cannot easily be understood in terms of the analogy. The items \"represented\" by the magnitude at any given horizontal position are indistinguishable, unordered, and interchangeable; the fact that two items happen to fall at the same position on the Y-axis doesn't mean they have anything in common.\nIn short, Randall has invented a new probability distribution, which the title text humorously implies should be called the tangent distribution . This distribution is defined as follows: consider the area between the curve in the comic and the horizontal axis, and consider a random point (X, Y) uniformly distributed in that region.  Then X has the normal distribution and Y has the tangent distribution.  Areas between vertical lines in the comic give probabilities concerning X, and areas between horizontal lines in the comic give probabilities concerning Y.  The comic correctly indicates that if we let R be the interval of Y values that is 52.682% of the range of Y centered at the midpoint of the range, then any randomly selected Y value has probability 1\/2 of falling inside interval R .\nThis distribution has never been discussed before, and has no known application. Moreover, the distribution of Y is not symmetric: while 50% of Y values fall inside interval R , 41% fall below R and only 9% fall above R . So the single piece of information in the comic is not a good way to describe this distribution! We do use such intervals for the normal distribution because the normal distribution is symmetric, and the center of symmetry is the mean, median, and mode. (However, it would be just about as ridiculous to observe that 50% of the X values in a standard normal distribution fall between the vertical lines X=-0.2 and X=1.41.)\nThe title text refers to the notion of normals and tangents in geometry. Given a 2D curve or 3D surface, a line which points perpendicularly outward from a point on the curve or surface (making a 90-degree angle with the curve) is said to be normal to the curve, while a line which just grazes the curve, being exactly parallel to the curve at the point of contact, is said to be tangent to the curve at that point. The joke is that this geometrical notion of normal is completely unrelated to the statistical normal distribution . Randall observes that if you take a geometric normal and rotate it 90 degrees, you produce a tangent; thus, if you take the normal distribution and rotate it by 90 degrees, you must get something called the \" tangent distribution.\" Saying this to a statistician would only annoy the statistician further.\nThis is annoying to a statistician not only because the terms normal and tangent come from differential geometry and have no established meaning in probability theory.  Even the word perpendicular has no established meaning in probability theory.  Of course, the x and y coordinates in the comic are perpendicular (orthogonal) coordinates, but X and Y are not \"perpendicular\" or \"orthogonal\" random variables.  Even if we give \"perpendicular\" or \"orthogonal\" a probabilistic meaning, and the most obvious such meaning is either independent , which even uses a symbol related to the geometric symbol for perpendicularity, or uncorrelated , which makes X and Y orthogonal vectors in the Hilbert space of random variables that are square integrable with respect to Lebesgue measure, X and Y are not perpendicular in either of these senses.\nSo the more probability and statistics you know, the more annoying this comic becomes.  It is not just about confusing novices.\n[A bell curve of a normal distribution, with the area between two horizontal lines shaded.]\n[The center of the chart is marked between the two lines:] Midpoint\n[The distance between the lines is marked to the right of the midpoint, with the label:] 52.7%\n[A label on the outside of the graph, describing the distance between the two lines:] \"Remember, 50% of the distribution falls between these two lines!\"\n[Caption below the panel:] How to annoy a statistician\n"}
{"id":2119,"title":"Video Orientation","image_title":"Video Orientation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2119","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/video_orientation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2119:_Video_Orientation","transcript":"[The image shows three columns by three rows with the following headers:] Video Orientation Pros Cons\n[First row:] [A wide picture with a text above:] Horizontal [Pros are:] Looks normal to old people Format used by a century of cinema [Cons are:] Humans are taller than are wide I'm not turning my phone sideways\n[Second row:] [A tall picture with a text above:] Vertical [Pros are:] How most normal people shoot and watch video now so we may as well accept it [Cons are:] Human world is mostly a horizontal plane\n[Third row:] [A picture rotated by 45 degrees with a text above:] Diagonal [Pros are:] Bold and dynamic Equally annoying to all viewers Good compromise [Cons are:] None\n","explanation":"This comic compares selected pros and cons of 3 video \"orientations\" (also known as angling), one of which is entirely made-up. This comic could have been inspired by articles published by Mashable , and Scientific American , which comment on how videos are now filmed vertically through smartphones.\nRandall's observations on horizontal vs vertical indicate that he has resigned himself to the acceptance of vertical videos. However, he does love a good compromise , so he suggests \"Diagonal Orientation\" as a third option to equally dissatisfy both types of user. The issue with this is that diagonal angling fails to fully capture the benefits of either horizontal or vertical angling.\nThis is another comic claiming that an obviously bad idea keeps being done by accident \"so we might as well just accept it\", following on from 2116: .NORM Normal File Format a week prior.\nHorizontal orientation\nPros:\nCons:\nVertical orientation\nPros:\nCons:\nDiagonal orientation\nPros:\nCons:\nThe diagonal orientation is similar to the \"oblique angle\" or \" Dutch angle \" in cinema, and is often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed. Note that while \"Dutch angle\" is filmed diagonally, it is projected in the classic Horizontal orientation.\nCircular video\nPros:\nCons:\n[The image shows three columns by three rows with the following headers:] Video Orientation Pros Cons\n[First row:] [A wide picture with a text above:] Horizontal [Pros are:] Looks normal to old people Format used by a century of cinema [Cons are:] Humans are taller than are wide I'm not turning my phone sideways\n[Second row:] [A tall picture with a text above:] Vertical [Pros are:] How most normal people shoot and watch video now so we may as well accept it [Cons are:] Human world is mostly a horizontal plane\n[Third row:] [A picture rotated by 45 degrees with a text above:] Diagonal [Pros are:] Bold and dynamic Equally annoying to all viewers Good compromise [Cons are:] None\n"}
{"id":2120,"title":"Brain Hemispheres","image_title":"Brain Hemispheres","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2120","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brain_hemispheres.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2120:_Brain_Hemispheres","transcript":"[Cueball is shown with the right half of his brain (on the viewer's left) colored in orange and the left half (on the viewer's right) in iris blue. An iris blue box is overlaid over the right half of the  body (on the viewer's left), and an orange box is overlaid over the top half. The boxes are overlapping in a greenish color on the upper right quarter of the body (on the viewer's left).] Neuroscience Fact: [An arrow pointing to the iris blue rectangle on top with the text above:] The left half of the brain actually controls the right half of the body... [An arrow pointing to the orange rectangle at the right, the text reads:] ...while the right half of the brain actually controls the top half of the body. [An arrow pointing to the overlapping area (the top left body from the viewers perspective) with the text below:] Disputed\/dual control [An arrow pointing to Cueball's left leg area (on the viewer's right), not highlighted by any color, and the text is:] This leg is fully autonomous\n","explanation":"As a general rule, each cerebral hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body; things on the left half of the body are controlled by the right side of the brain and vice-versa. Biology is complicated, of course, so as with most biology \"rules\" there are exceptions, such as the cranial nerves , but it's true for most motor functions, and a relatively well-known factoid, if not strictly correct in all cases.\nRandall spoofs this by saying that rather than controlling the left half of the body, the right brain controls the top. This leads to a Venn-diagram-like picture of the human body, with an overlap in the upper right, labelled \"disputed,\" echoing maps that display a territorial dispute , suggesting that the halves of your brain fight for control of the region, or \" dual control \" like in an airplane, where the pilot and the copilot both can control the plane at any time. The reorganization also leaves a gap in the bottom left, implying that the left leg is not controlled by any part of the brain, and instead has a mind of its own.\nThe title text is another, separate joke about the same factoid. He proposes that the hands should be referred to not by their physical location, but by the hemisphere of the brain they're connected to. Of course, this is not only silly but inconsistent: if the hands were labelled by hemispheres of the brain, the same would presumably apply to the arms. Furthermore, there would be no reason to give left\/right names to the hemispheres themselves, since their placement in the skull would be irrelevant.\n[Cueball is shown with the right half of his brain (on the viewer's left) colored in orange and the left half (on the viewer's right) in iris blue. An iris blue box is overlaid over the right half of the  body (on the viewer's left), and an orange box is overlaid over the top half. The boxes are overlapping in a greenish color on the upper right quarter of the body (on the viewer's left).] Neuroscience Fact: [An arrow pointing to the iris blue rectangle on top with the text above:] The left half of the brain actually controls the right half of the body... [An arrow pointing to the orange rectangle at the right, the text reads:] ...while the right half of the brain actually controls the top half of the body. [An arrow pointing to the overlapping area (the top left body from the viewers perspective) with the text below:] Disputed\/dual control [An arrow pointing to Cueball's left leg area (on the viewer's right), not highlighted by any color, and the text is:] This leg is fully autonomous\n"}
{"id":2121,"title":"Light Pollution","image_title":"Light Pollution","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2121","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/light_pollution.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2121:_Light_Pollution","transcript":"[Four views of the night sky are shown in separate panels. They look more like photographs than drawn comics. A caption at the top reads:] Light Pollution and the Disappearing Night Sky\n[The first view shows only a few bright stars visible on a fairly light gray-brownish background. The inline text on the left top is:] High Light Pollution (Cities)\n[In the second view more stars, and hints of a few galactic clouds, are visible against a dark-gray background.] Moderate Light Pollution (Suburbs)\n[A lot of stars in the third image, some partly colored, and a clear view of the Milky Way.] Low Light Pollution (Very remote areas)\n[The fourth and last image shows even more stars and brighter colors. A slightly fuzzy illuminated triangular grid overlays the entire sky. Embedded within it are three ghostly silhouettes of celestial sailing ships. The text on the top left reads:] No Light Pollution (How the sky should look) [Four arrows are pointing to some triangles:] Lattice of the crystal spheres [Three arrows are indicating the sailing ships:] Ships of the Sky King\n","explanation":"This comic shows how light pollution in cities affect what you can see from the night sky. The first three panels show realistic examples of what you could see from the sky inside a large city, in the suburbs and far away from light pollution.  These panels roughly correlate on the Bortle Scale to 8-9 (city), 5-6 (suburbs) and 2-3 (remote area).\nThe last panel contrasts these for comedic effect with fake things in the sky that are not actually present in the night sky. [ citation needed ] The \"Ships of the Sky King\" may be a reference to an elven legend in J. R. R. Tolkien 's works, in which several elven ships sail tangentially off the planet of Middle Earth and into the sky. This story was previously mentioned in 1255: Columbus . \" Crystal spheres \" is an ancient theory about the heavens and what it was that held up the stars, before it was commonly accepted that space could be made of hard vacuum and celestial bodies held there by laws of inertia and gravity and vast distances.  The spheres are nested inside each other concentrically.  Randall proposes they are held by latticework like that which supports the Eiffel Tower, and that the lattice structure could be seen long ago when the sky was much darker. It is also a possible reference to the science fiction short-story \" The Crystal Spheres \" by David Brin, where the solar system is surrounded by hard crystal spheres that have to be broken before leaving as an explanation of the Fermi Paradox. Furthermore, in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, the solar system is also enclosed in a massive crystal sphere, with other solar systems in similar solar systems, separated by \"the flow\".\nAlthough all crystals do have a crystal lattice , as in the meaning 3 of the word \"crystal\" in Merriam-Webster ( a body that [...] has a regularly repeating internal arrangement of its atoms and often external plane faces ), these lattices are sub-microscopic and would be invisible in the sky.  Additionally, crystal structure was not yet known at the time that the celestial spheres theory was popular.\nIn consensus reality, the sky does contain many invisible objects that can observe us and\/or provide major structures of our society, such as satellites, nearcraft , and drones, but these are usually invisible due to size and distance more than brightness.\nThe title text starts off sounding like a legitimate statement about light pollution.  It is common to remark that the vast majority of people never see things in the night sky that were commonly seen by our ancestors every night prior to industrialization, such as the Milky Way or now-obscure phenomena such as Zodiacal light , Airglow or Gegenschein .  The title text then further adds to the humor of the last panel by describing non-existent features, which could be references to H. P. Lovecraft as he often refers to beasts the possible size that \u201cThe Destroyer of Sagittarius\u201d would have to be ( Sagittarius is one of the constellations of the zodiac and Sagittarius A* a black hole at the center of the Milky Way inside of that constellation.). He also often speaks of insanity and color, connecting the two.\n[Four views of the night sky are shown in separate panels. They look more like photographs than drawn comics. A caption at the top reads:] Light Pollution and the Disappearing Night Sky\n[The first view shows only a few bright stars visible on a fairly light gray-brownish background. The inline text on the left top is:] High Light Pollution (Cities)\n[In the second view more stars, and hints of a few galactic clouds, are visible against a dark-gray background.] Moderate Light Pollution (Suburbs)\n[A lot of stars in the third image, some partly colored, and a clear view of the Milky Way.] Low Light Pollution (Very remote areas)\n[The fourth and last image shows even more stars and brighter colors. A slightly fuzzy illuminated triangular grid overlays the entire sky. Embedded within it are three ghostly silhouettes of celestial sailing ships. The text on the top left reads:] No Light Pollution (How the sky should look) [Four arrows are pointing to some triangles:] Lattice of the crystal spheres [Three arrows are indicating the sailing ships:] Ships of the Sky King\n"}
{"id":2122,"title":"Size Venn Diagram","image_title":"Size Venn Diagram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2122","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/size_venn_diagram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2122:_Size_Venn_Diagram","transcript":"[A Venn diagram with five sets titled 'Big', 'Little', 'Large', 'Small' and 'Great'. Various words which can be prefixed by these titles are shown in the relevant segment.]\nBig: Bang Theory, Enchilada, Board, Sur Little: Orphan Annie, House on the Prairie, Richard Large: format, Millimeter Telescope, Hadron Collider Small: claims court, potatoes Great: Barrier Reef, Wall of China, Depression, Terror, aunt\nBig\/Great: Bend, Bear Lake Big\/Small: time, screen Big\/Little: Dipper, Planet, lies, sister Little\/Great: Blue Heron Little\/Large: Professor, Forest Bat Big\/Large: Toothed Aspen Large\/Small: intestine, Magellanic Cloud Little\/Small: wonder, soldiers Small\/Great: pox, cardiac vein Large\/Great: Billed Seed Finch\n\nBig\/Large\/Great: hearted Big\/Small\/Great: end Big\/Little\/Small: foot Big\/Little\/Great: league Little\/Large\/Great: (none) Big\/Little\/Large: foundation Big\/Large\/Small: Eyed Conger, Blue Little\/Large\/Small: emerald Little\/Small\/Great: circle, room Large\/Small\/Great: flying fox\nBig\/Large\/Small\/Great: game, white Big\/Little\/Small\/Great\u00a0: world, one Big\/Little\/Large\/Great\u00a0: (none) Big\/Little\/Large\/Small\u00a0: frog Little\/Large\/Small\/Great\u00a0: (none)\nBig\/Little\/Large\/Small\/Great: Island\n","explanation":"This comic is a Venn diagram illustrating the complete set of possible intersections of five different size adjectives: \"little\", \"large\", \"small\", \"great\" and \u201cbig\u201d. Each unique intersection contains a short list of nouns that can be preceded by each of its intersecting adjectives.\nFor example, \"flying fox\" (a type of bat) appears at the intersection of \"large\", \"small\", and \"great\", because the species large flying fox , small flying fox , and great flying fox all exist, but there is no such species as a \"big flying fox\" or a \"little flying fox\". Similarly, humans have organs named the small intestine and large intestine , but no \"little intestine\", \"great intestine\", or \"big intestine\".\nSome descriptors are applied in combination to their noun, rather than individually; for example, \"planet\" is placed in both the \"little\" and \"big\" groups in reference to the 2008 video game Little Big Planet .\nIn the title text, Randall declares that he will start intentionally using term combinations that don't appear in the above diagram, presumably to ensure every intersection contains at least one term.\nA similar concept can be seen in 181: Interblag , but in a tabular form rather than a Venn diagram.\nThe following table lists all size\/noun combinations that the Venn diagram can generate, with a description of each.\n[A Venn diagram with five sets titled 'Big', 'Little', 'Large', 'Small' and 'Great'. Various words which can be prefixed by these titles are shown in the relevant segment.]\nBig: Bang Theory, Enchilada, Board, Sur Little: Orphan Annie, House on the Prairie, Richard Large: format, Millimeter Telescope, Hadron Collider Small: claims court, potatoes Great: Barrier Reef, Wall of China, Depression, Terror, aunt\nBig\/Great: Bend, Bear Lake Big\/Small: time, screen Big\/Little: Dipper, Planet, lies, sister Little\/Great: Blue Heron Little\/Large: Professor, Forest Bat Big\/Large: Toothed Aspen Large\/Small: intestine, Magellanic Cloud Little\/Small: wonder, soldiers Small\/Great: pox, cardiac vein Large\/Great: Billed Seed Finch\n\nBig\/Large\/Great: hearted Big\/Small\/Great: end Big\/Little\/Small: foot Big\/Little\/Great: league Little\/Large\/Great: (none) Big\/Little\/Large: foundation Big\/Large\/Small: Eyed Conger, Blue Little\/Large\/Small: emerald Little\/Small\/Great: circle, room Large\/Small\/Great: flying fox\nBig\/Large\/Small\/Great: game, white Big\/Little\/Small\/Great\u00a0: world, one Big\/Little\/Large\/Great\u00a0: (none) Big\/Little\/Large\/Small\u00a0: frog Little\/Large\/Small\/Great\u00a0: (none)\nBig\/Little\/Large\/Small\/Great: Island\n"}
{"id":2123,"title":"Meta Collecting","image_title":"Meta Collecting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2123","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/meta_collecting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2123:_Meta_Collecting","transcript":"[The comic depicts Cueball reading from a list to White Hat, standing next to a case filled with collectables including an urn, a model ship, a compact disc, a vinyl record, a doll or figurine, a martini glass, and a teapot.] Today we're looking for a lunchbox, a snow globe, a Maytag dryer, a Harley Davidson, and a stamp.\n[Caption below the frame:] My hobby: Collecting one item from every category listed on Wikipedia's \"List of collectables.\"\nAs of 13 March 2019 at 6:44 PM ET, there was a debate on the Wikipedia talk tab about locking this page.\nThis has now been upheld, and the page was temporarily locked.\nAs of 25 May 2019 at 10:25 PM ET, the page was unlocked and yachts were back on the list.\nA previous comic, 739: Malamanteau , also caused a similar situation on Wikipedia, with many xkcd fans attempting to create the fictional page. The page has been turned into a redirect to the Wikipedia page for xkcd.\n","explanation":"This is another comic in the \" My Hobby \" series.\nMany people's hobbies involve collecting many items of the same category: Post stamps, collectible cards, painted dolls, wine, and so on. Just about anything can be collected, however, some things are collected much more often than others. Wikipedia has a page listing the most popular categories of such collectible items.\nIn Randall's usual style of going meta with everything, he decided to start a meta-collection\u2014a collection of examples of different things that people can collect. He uses Wikipedia's list of collectibles for reference. In the comic, Cueball is showing to his friend his collection of various items that have nothing in common except that they're all popular collectibles. So while most people try to collect everything in one narrow category of collectibles, Cueball's collection will only be complete if he can get one item from each of the list of collectible items as cataloged by Wikipedia's list, so he has a collection of representative elements from all collections.\nIn the title text, Randall complains about a Wikipedia editor who keeps adding yachts to the list of collectibles, probably because it would force him to buy a yacht if he ever wanted to complete his collection of collectibles. Yachts are traditionally considered immensely expensive and the vast majority of people own zero yachts, let alone a collection of them. [ citation needed ] Note that Randall does not specify how he is trying to get the page locked, and the comic itself might be a rather meta way of doing so: xkcd fans have a history of making lots of edits to Wikipedia articles Randall mentions, resulting in them being protected or locked. The article has in fact been edited and reverted about 50 times by these fans over the course of a single day and was temporarily protected on March 14th, 2019, which expired three days later. The first addition of Yachts to this page was by a user named Xkcd2123 , but it is unlikely that this user is Randall.\nItems are numbered on each shelf from left.\n[The comic depicts Cueball reading from a list to White Hat, standing next to a case filled with collectables including an urn, a model ship, a compact disc, a vinyl record, a doll or figurine, a martini glass, and a teapot.] Today we're looking for a lunchbox, a snow globe, a Maytag dryer, a Harley Davidson, and a stamp.\n[Caption below the frame:] My hobby: Collecting one item from every category listed on Wikipedia's \"List of collectables.\"\nAs of 13 March 2019 at 6:44 PM ET, there was a debate on the Wikipedia talk tab about locking this page.\nThis has now been upheld, and the page was temporarily locked.\nAs of 25 May 2019 at 10:25 PM ET, the page was unlocked and yachts were back on the list.\nA previous comic, 739: Malamanteau , also caused a similar situation on Wikipedia, with many xkcd fans attempting to create the fictional page. The page has been turned into a redirect to the Wikipedia page for xkcd.\n"}
{"id":2124,"title":"Space Mission Hearing","image_title":"Space Mission Hearing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2124","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/space_mission_hearing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2124:_Space_Mission_Hearing","transcript":"[Megan and Ponytail are standing and talking.] Ponytail: All ready for the hearing? Let's go over things one more time. Ponytail: *ahem* Ponytail: What is the main reason to fund this mission?\n[Close-up of Megan.] Megan: It will significantly advance out long-term goal of better understanding the formation and evolution of the Solar System, while fulfulling our mandate to develop a new generation of interplanetary spacecraft. Ponytail (off-panel): Great.\n[Megan and Ponytail are standing and talking. Megan's arms are raised.] Megan: And because it's space! Megan: Spaaaaaace. Megan: Pew pew pew! Megan: Space! Ponytail: Dial it back.\n","explanation":"Megan and Ponytail are organizers of a space mission going over their upcoming presentation to a hearing that will approve the mission's funding. Megan recites the grown-up, professional, scientific justification for the mission, but soon her enthusiastic and nerdy attitude toward space breaks through, and she exclaims \"space\" and \"pew pew pew\" (An internet meme for the sound of lasers, inspired as a typical sound that media space weapons make, and now an onomatopoeia often used in gaming speak for ray weapons and spells as a joke) with childish abandon. Ponytail wants her to rein in her enthusiasm during the actual hearing as the funding is unlikely to come if they are behaving childishly instead of being professional.\nThe joke is that most of the motivation people working in space agencies have for spending billions of dollars and other resources on interplanetary exploration is not really for all the stuffy reasons listed, but simply because they believe space is cool. Funnily, due to the vacuum in space, you would actually not hear sounds and so some part of the enthusiasm is entirely childish.\nThe title text refers to a repurposable piece of electronics contained within specific greeting cards , which plays a prerecorded song when the card is opened. Usually, these cards play a song, like \"Happy Birthday\", when they are opened. Apparently, their grant application has incorporated speakers which play \"spaceship noises\", in order to stimulate excitement about the coolness of space in the receiver which is in contrast to the business-like atmosphere that a mission hearing would normally have. An additional joke is that the card will likely hurt their chances to get the funding instead of stimulating excitement in the receiver.\n[Megan and Ponytail are standing and talking.] Ponytail: All ready for the hearing? Let's go over things one more time. Ponytail: *ahem* Ponytail: What is the main reason to fund this mission?\n[Close-up of Megan.] Megan: It will significantly advance out long-term goal of better understanding the formation and evolution of the Solar System, while fulfulling our mandate to develop a new generation of interplanetary spacecraft. Ponytail (off-panel): Great.\n[Megan and Ponytail are standing and talking. Megan's arms are raised.] Megan: And because it's space! Megan: Spaaaaaace. Megan: Pew pew pew! Megan: Space! Ponytail: Dial it back.\n"}
{"id":2125,"title":"Luna 2","image_title":"Luna 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2125","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/luna_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2125:_Luna_2","transcript":"[Cueball is standing behind while Megan sits at a laptop.] Megan: Huh. Luna 2 , the first artificial object to touch another world, carried a sphere made of steel Soviet flag emblems.\n[A patterned sphere is shown blowing up to pieces.] It was designed to blow apart on impact, scattering tiny metal flags and ribbons across the surface of the moon.\n[Close-up of Cueball and Megan's faces.] Cueball: So the first physical contact humans had with a heavenly body... Megan: ...was throwing a shrapnel grenade full of flags at it. Cueball: Well, it's on-brand for us, at least.\n","explanation":"This comic is referring to Luna 2 , the first man-made object to make contact with the surface of the moon, and consequently, as stated in the comic, the first man-made object to touch another world. On September 13, 1959, it hit the Moon's surface east of Mare Imbrium near the craters Aristides, Archimedes , and Autolycus .\nMegan is sitting in front of a computer, and telling Cueball about the Luna 2. She shows a picture of the probe and explains that the probe was designed to explode on impact, thus scattering multiple metal Soviet flags and ribbons on the surface of the Moon. They compare it to throwing a shrapnel grenade with flags in it at the moon (see Trivia ).\nIn truth, the idea behind the two explosive spheres was rather clever.  The spacecraft arrived at the moon at about 12,000 mph - and with uncontrolled orientation.  But no matter which orientation that these spheres were in as they arrived at the moon, the force of the explosion would cause the commemorative plaques nearest to the direction of motion to be thrown even faster at the moon (and, presumably, be vaporized) - while the ones from the opposite side of the sphere would be slowed down by the force of the explosion and might possibly arrive at the surface intact.\nCueball's observation that it is \"on-brand\" for humans to litter another world with an explosion of nationalist iconography immediately upon reaching it, is a reference to the vastly numerous historical instances when, upon setting foot on territory for the first time, humans \"conquer\" it, by planting flags on the first thing they see.  Alternately, it may be \"on-brand\" for humanity's first interaction with a new object to be striking it with a weapon.\nThe title text refers to the fact that for the Luna 2 mission it was more important to just get to the moon at all rather than have a sophisticated landing mechanism. This was due to the fact that it happened during the space race between the USA and USSR and both countries tried to reach significant milestones in space exploration. The metaphorical interpretation is that sometimes people get overly excited after an initial breakthrough and dive into projects without thinking them through or considering long term consequences. This often leads to the project failing or barely achieving its aim. This often goes along with the confidence to be able to \"wing it\" making up a solution on the spot when a problem comes up.\nNote that Randall makes a subtle yet strong declaration that he is an engineer, a human, and an Earthling first, and American second, by saying \"we\" in the title text, regarding this effort to reach the Moon.\n[Cueball is standing behind while Megan sits at a laptop.] Megan: Huh. Luna 2 , the first artificial object to touch another world, carried a sphere made of steel Soviet flag emblems.\n[A patterned sphere is shown blowing up to pieces.] It was designed to blow apart on impact, scattering tiny metal flags and ribbons across the surface of the moon.\n[Close-up of Cueball and Megan's faces.] Cueball: So the first physical contact humans had with a heavenly body... Megan: ...was throwing a shrapnel grenade full of flags at it. Cueball: Well, it's on-brand for us, at least.\n"}
{"id":2126,"title":"Google Trends Maps","image_title":"Google Trends Maps","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2126","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/google_trends_maps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2126:_Google_Trends_Maps","transcript":"The least informative Google Trends Maps I've created over the years\n(All are real but not all cover the same date range)\n[12 maps of the United States are shown with the states colored. There are labels for the colors.]\n[Map 1] [Blue:] Frostbite [Red:] Heat stroke [Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington are red. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 2] [Blue:] Best church [Red:] Best strip club [Nevada is red. Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming are gray. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 3] [Blue:] Bigfoot [Red:] Mike Pence [Indiana is red. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 4] [Blue:] Etiquette [Red:] Sexting [Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, and West Virginia are red. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 5] [Blue:] Little dog [Red:] Big cat [Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 6] [Blue:] Shark attack [Red:] Childbirth [California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 7] [Blue:] Snakes [Red:] Ants [Yellow:] Bees [Green:] Alligators [Florida is green. Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are red. Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming are yellow. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 8] [Blue:] Retirement planning [Red:] Bungee jumping [Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming are gray. Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 9] [Blue:] Super Bowl [Red:] Funeral home [Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, and Washington are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 10] [Blue:] Resume tips [Red:] Skateboard tricks [Arizona is red. Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming are gray. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 11] [Blue:] Donald Trump [Red:] What do I do [California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 12] [Blue:] Existential crisis [Red:] Marco Rubio [Alaska is blue. All other states are red.]\n","explanation":"Google Trends is a website for visualizing Google search activity by date and region. Used properly, it can give a picture of what topics people are interested in (as evidenced by what they search for) at particular times and in different places. Used improperly, it can simply amplify random noise .\nRandall has created several Google Trends maps of search activity in the US. Each map colors in states according to which of two (or more) search queries was more popular. As noted at the top of the comic, all of these based on real queries (though not reflecting the same time period across all maps). However, none of them seem to show any especially useful comparisons. States in gray did not return enough data for Google Trends to consider it significant.\nThe title text uses two of these maps to paint a picture of the year 2020 (implying that these search patterns are both meaningful and likely to continue into the future). In this scenario, most of the country continues to read about Marco Rubio (except for Alaskans, still searching for help with their existential crises), and individuals are trying to learn about etiquette, sexting, or both, depending on their location.\nThe least informative Google Trends Maps I've created over the years\n(All are real but not all cover the same date range)\n[12 maps of the United States are shown with the states colored. There are labels for the colors.]\n[Map 1] [Blue:] Frostbite [Red:] Heat stroke [Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington are red. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 2] [Blue:] Best church [Red:] Best strip club [Nevada is red. Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming are gray. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 3] [Blue:] Bigfoot [Red:] Mike Pence [Indiana is red. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 4] [Blue:] Etiquette [Red:] Sexting [Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, and West Virginia are red. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 5] [Blue:] Little dog [Red:] Big cat [Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 6] [Blue:] Shark attack [Red:] Childbirth [California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 7] [Blue:] Snakes [Red:] Ants [Yellow:] Bees [Green:] Alligators [Florida is green. Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are red. Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming are yellow. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 8] [Blue:] Retirement planning [Red:] Bungee jumping [Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming are gray. Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 9] [Blue:] Super Bowl [Red:] Funeral home [Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, and Washington are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 10] [Blue:] Resume tips [Red:] Skateboard tricks [Arizona is red. Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming are gray. All other states are blue.]\n[Map 11] [Blue:] Donald Trump [Red:] What do I do [California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin are blue. All other states are red.]\n[Map 12] [Blue:] Existential crisis [Red:] Marco Rubio [Alaska is blue. All other states are red.]\n"}
{"id":2127,"title":"Panama Canal","image_title":"Panama Canal","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2127","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/panama_canal.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2127:_Panama_Canal","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of a poster with two maps showing the Americas. He is pointing to the right one with a stick he is holding in his hand. Specifically to the red line going through the Americas from the Arctic sea above Canada near Alaska, down through North America, through the middle of Central America down through the middle of South America to end up in the Antarctic sea below the tip of South America. On the map to the left there is a similar red line indicating the Panama Canal crossing the thinnest part of Central America from the Pacific Oceanto the Atlantic Ocean. Both lines end in small dots on either \"side\" of the continent. The two maps have labels above them:] Atlantic-Pacific option Arctic-Antarctic option\n[Caption below the panel:] I still don't understand why the Panama Canal planners rejected my proposal.\n","explanation":"The Panama Canal is, as the name suggests, a canal through the country of Panama. It is important for bridging the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and is an important trade route. The canal is in Panama because this is the narrowest piece of land for crossing between the two oceans. When the Panama Canal was being proposed, several alternate routes were suggested such as the recently-revived Nicaragua Route .\nCueball says that when the Panama Canal connecting the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean was being planned, he proposed an alternate route that connects the Arctic Ocean to the Great Southern Ocean . At the time, the northern terminus would have been inaccessible, because the Arctic Ocean was almost completely covered by ice. His suggested route runs somewhat to the east of the continental divide and has a total length of slightly over ten thousand miles, in contrast to the real-life canal which is only fifty miles long. The extra length and more-rugged terrain make his proposal much more difficult to build and maintain than the real-life Panama Canal. [ citation needed ]\nMoreover, while the real-life canal significantly shortens the travel distance between major cities on the east and west coasts of the Americas, his alternative offers little benefit over traveling north or south in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans. In fact, with the lack of currents that can aid travel and the slow speed required to traverse canal locks, it would be significantly slower. In addition, ships would have to wait approximately 100 years for global warming to melt the ice in the Arctic Ocean along the northern coast of North America sufficiently for them to enter or exit the northern end of the canal. (However, since construction of this canal might take even longer, the ice might not be a problem by the time it was completed.)\nThe title text references the now-existing Panama Canal, and the fact that Randall's canal would need to cross it at some point. The title text suggests that crossing two canals would have to be done via aqueduct , instead of the more useful at-grade crossing , most likely at Gatun Lake , which would allow boats to travel between the two canals by simply connecting them. The humor here is that this canal would be one of the most ambitious construction projects in history; an aqueduct being added to the costs is an expense on the same scale of needing an extra screw to hold something in on Apollo 11. The route depicted appears to cross the Mackenzie, Missouri, Rio Grande, and Amazon rivers anyway, so only this additional crossing is apparently \"unreasonable.\"\n[Cueball is standing in front of a poster with two maps showing the Americas. He is pointing to the right one with a stick he is holding in his hand. Specifically to the red line going through the Americas from the Arctic sea above Canada near Alaska, down through North America, through the middle of Central America down through the middle of South America to end up in the Antarctic sea below the tip of South America. On the map to the left there is a similar red line indicating the Panama Canal crossing the thinnest part of Central America from the Pacific Oceanto the Atlantic Ocean. Both lines end in small dots on either \"side\" of the continent. The two maps have labels above them:] Atlantic-Pacific option Arctic-Antarctic option\n[Caption below the panel:] I still don't understand why the Panama Canal planners rejected my proposal.\n"}
{"id":2128,"title":"New Robot","image_title":"New Robot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2128","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_robot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2128:_New_Robot","transcript":"[Ponytail is standing on a raised platform with a robot behind her, talking to someone off-screen. The spherical floating robot is equipped with a grappling gun and an antenna that \"zaps\" a lightning bolt at the floor below it.] Robot: ZAP Ponytail: Our robot floats using a helium sphere, which is highly charged and can induce lightning strikes. Ponytail: It moves using a grappling gun like the hook shot from Zelda . Off-screen voice: What is the robot for ? Ponytail: Uh Ponytail: It could help with search and rescue after disasters.\n[Caption below the panel:] \"It could help with search and rescue\" is engineer-speak for \"we just realized we need a justification for our cool robot.\"\n","explanation":"The comic is a commentary on how many robots and engineering products are labeled as being for \u201cSearch and Rescue\u201d purposes.\nSearch And Rescue (SAR) involves entering an unknown, possibly hazardous disaster-stricken environment, identifying humans or other items of interest which may be hidden, partly (or completely) buried, or injured, and then figuring out how to safely extract the target and deliver it to safety.  These tasks are hard enough for humans and are even more challenging for robots, which generally work better in well-controlled situations.  This is why many robot challenges are themed around search-and-rescue; the techniques that are developed for handling such challenging circumstances can be applied to make other robots (such as robotic caretakers, autonomous cars, AI-assisted medicine, and other lucrative applications) more robust.\nThe comic may be remarking that 'search and rescue' may be used as a cover for developing robots that will actually be tasked to 'search and destroy'.  (See: lethal autonomous weapons .)  Although search-and-rescue is a function that militaries perform, a robot that can satisfactorily perform a search-and-rescue task can easily be adapted to more destructive purposes.  Randall has previously written about his concerns about human authorities misusing military robots in 1968: Robot Future .\nThe joke is that the group of engineers who built the robot did it just because it would be cool to have a robot that can induce lightning strikes and has a grappling gun like the hook shot from (The Legend Of) Zelda. Realizing that they need to have an actual purpose for the robot the engineer presenting the robot makes up the reason that it could be used for search and rescue operations. The grappling gun can be used to pull people out or supply food to people stuck in a place. In the case that there is a dangerous amount of charge present in the atmosphere lightning can be induced which will protect other objects and people from lightning. Also, the helium sphere can allow the balloon to float in places that are hard to reach.  (Another possible interpretation is that the question \"What is the robot for?\" meant why do the helium sphere and grappling gun need to have a robot \u2014 and the answer means that the robot is to rescue those who are hit by either the lighting or the grappling gun.)\nThe Hookshot is a type of grappling hook that is a recurring piece of equipment in The Legend of Zelda video game franchise, first appearing in the 1991 game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past . It is a machine consisting of a chain and hook, which can be used by Link , the protagonist and player character of Zelda . When used, the chain extends and sends the hook attached to it towards its target. If the hook latches onto certain objects, Link reels himself in towards that object. Link can also use it to pull enemies and objects towards him. Although it is referred to by the traditional 'Hookshot' name, the traditional Hookshot involves a bladed tip that mounts in wood; the grappling gun equipped on the robot is more reminiscent of the later Clawshot , which grasps its target on contact.\nIn theory, the Hookshot-esque function of the robot could be used for anchoring purposes - a useful function for a flying robot in search-and-rescue situations. If it is using a Clawshot design, it could also conceivably seize the parties in need of rescue. However, merely by comparing the grappling device to the Hookshot, it is clear that its attachment was specifically designed in an effort to replicate the game's tool.\nThe title text ominously suggests that since there are more rescue robots than required for the number of people needing rescue, another robot project will be used to place people in need of rescue, or destroy search-and-rescue robots.  (Even more ominously, it is possible that this may be the project that creates a need for rescue, as the fires caused by the lightning strikes could be the disaster from which rescue is needed.)\n[Ponytail is standing on a raised platform with a robot behind her, talking to someone off-screen. The spherical floating robot is equipped with a grappling gun and an antenna that \"zaps\" a lightning bolt at the floor below it.] Robot: ZAP Ponytail: Our robot floats using a helium sphere, which is highly charged and can induce lightning strikes. Ponytail: It moves using a grappling gun like the hook shot from Zelda . Off-screen voice: What is the robot for ? Ponytail: Uh Ponytail: It could help with search and rescue after disasters.\n[Caption below the panel:] \"It could help with search and rescue\" is engineer-speak for \"we just realized we need a justification for our cool robot.\"\n"}
{"id":2129,"title":"1921 Fact Checker","image_title":"1921 Fact Checker","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2129","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1921_fact_checker.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2129:_1921_Fact_Checker","transcript":"[In a panel with light-gray background is a block of text:] An investigator claims to have discovered in some dusty archives that back in the days when the Pilgrims landed each person coming to America from England was required to bring with them eight bushels of corn meal, two bushels of oatmeal, two gallons of vinegar and a gallon each of oil and brandy.\nIn view of the fact that nothing of importance hinges on the truth or falsity of this statement, not much time need be consumed to ascertain whether this is truth or fiction. \u2014Kansas City Sun Friday, May 6 th , 1921\n[Caption below the panel] I have a grudging respect for this 1921 newspaper fact-checker.\n","explanation":"This comic shows a 1921 newspaper article with information about the Pilgrims coming to America. Randall has a 'grudging respect' for the author, who feels the information is so unimportant that no fact-checking has been done, and has enough integrity to inform the reader of this.\nThe Kansas City Sun referenced by the comic was a newspaper in Kansas City, Kansas that ran from 1892 to 1924(?). (Interestingly, there was also a Kansas City Sun in Kansas City, Missouri that ran from 1908 to 1924.)\nPolitiFact , mentioned in the title text, is a fact-checking project which evaluates the truth or falsity of various statements made by politicians and other people involved in U.S. politics. The positions on its rating scale are \"True\", \"Mostly True\", \"Half True\", \"Mostly False\",  \"False\", and \"Pants on Fire\", the last position being reserved for the most egregiously \"false\" claims. \"Mostly Whatever\", the rating identified in the title text, is presented by Randall as a rating that could apply to claims that have so little relevance or interest that they are not worth checking. See also 1712: Politifact .\n[In a panel with light-gray background is a block of text:] An investigator claims to have discovered in some dusty archives that back in the days when the Pilgrims landed each person coming to America from England was required to bring with them eight bushels of corn meal, two bushels of oatmeal, two gallons of vinegar and a gallon each of oil and brandy.\nIn view of the fact that nothing of importance hinges on the truth or falsity of this statement, not much time need be consumed to ascertain whether this is truth or fiction. \u2014Kansas City Sun Friday, May 6 th , 1921\n[Caption below the panel] I have a grudging respect for this 1921 newspaper fact-checker.\n"}
{"id":2130,"title":"Industry Nicknames","image_title":"Industry Nicknames","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2130","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/industry_nicknames.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2130:_Industry_Nicknames","transcript":"[A line chart is shown going from left to right between two small vertical stop lines. On the line are eight dots spread out unevenly from close to each end. The most central dot is the one with furthest distance to the nearest dots, having almost the same distance in both direction the nearest dots. The other dots are in some cases very close. Beneath each dot there goes a line down to a label written beneath each line. Above the chart there is a big title and below that an explanation. Below that again, there is a small arrow pointing to the right with a label above it.] Nicknames for Industries and Organizations Ranked by how silly it sounds when you say someone is \"In the pocket of...\"\n[Arrow label:] Sillier\n[Labels for the eight dots from left to right:] Cigarette companies: \"Big Tobacco\" Drug companies: \"Big Pharma\" The farming industry: \"Big Ag\" Automakers: \"Big Car\" The International Equestrian Federation: \"Big Horse\" The Board of Podiatric Medicine: \"Big Foot\" The mining industry: \"Big Hole\" The American Egg Board: \"Big Egg\"\n","explanation":"\"Big industry\" is a common nickname used to describe monopolistic or near-monopolistic practices in the United States. To be \"in someone's pocket\" means this person can readily influence the subject's behavior, whether by bribe, blackmail, law, threat, lobbying, social status, finances, freedoms, or affection.\nOf the 8 industries listed, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma are nicknames that are commonly used. The mining industry may be referred to in this context by sector, as Big Coal or Big Oil (Randall uses the term \"big hole\", which sounds similar to these.  Most but not all forms of mining involve large holes.) The U.S. automobile industry was until recent decades referred to as \"Detroit,\" later meaning only the Big Three automobile manufacturers before falling out of common usage. Big Ag is sometimes used to describe the farming and agricultural industry, and while the rest are purely fictional, Randall could be imagining a possible future in which these industries become big players in the political arena. \"Big Foot\" is likely a reference to the mythical creature Bigfoot .  Those who have been on the rough end of how large organizations can push not only individuals but entire communities around in a mafia-like way may take issue with a medical board being equated with such groups.\nChansey , mentioned in the title text, is a type of female-only Pok\u00e9mon who carries around an egg in her marsupial-like front pouch. For Chansey the phrase \"in the pocket of Big Egg\" would be rather literal, except that the egg is in her pocket, rather than the other way around. Randall does not specify why Chansey would be a \"threat\" or why a Pok\u00e9mon would be bribing people. Perhaps because, if being in the pocket of Big Egg is bad, and Big Egg is in the pocket of Chansey, then Chansey controls Big Egg and is the one to worry about.\n[A line chart is shown going from left to right between two small vertical stop lines. On the line are eight dots spread out unevenly from close to each end. The most central dot is the one with furthest distance to the nearest dots, having almost the same distance in both direction the nearest dots. The other dots are in some cases very close. Beneath each dot there goes a line down to a label written beneath each line. Above the chart there is a big title and below that an explanation. Below that again, there is a small arrow pointing to the right with a label above it.] Nicknames for Industries and Organizations Ranked by how silly it sounds when you say someone is \"In the pocket of...\"\n[Arrow label:] Sillier\n[Labels for the eight dots from left to right:] Cigarette companies: \"Big Tobacco\" Drug companies: \"Big Pharma\" The farming industry: \"Big Ag\" Automakers: \"Big Car\" The International Equestrian Federation: \"Big Horse\" The Board of Podiatric Medicine: \"Big Foot\" The mining industry: \"Big Hole\" The American Egg Board: \"Big Egg\"\n"}
{"id":2131,"title":"Emojidome","image_title":"Emojidome","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2131","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/emojidome.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2131:_Emojidome","transcript":"[This was an interactive and dynamic comic during April 1st from its release until its completion. But the final and current image, will be the official image to transcribe. But the dynamic part of the comic as well as the \"error image\" displayed to services that could not render the dynamic comic is also transcribed here below.]\n[The final picture shows the winner of the gold medal in the Emojidome bracket tournament, as well as the runner up with the silver medal. There is no text. The winner is the \"Space\", \"Stars\" or \"Milky Way\" emoji, which is shown with a blue band on top of a dark blue band on top of an almost black background, indicating the light band of the Milky Way in the night sky. Stars (in both five point star shape and as dots) in light blue are spread out in all three bands of color. The large gold medal with its red neck string, is floating close to the middle of the picture, lacking any kind of neck in space to tie it around. To the left of the gold medal is the runner up, the brown Hedgehog, with light-brown face. It clutches the smaller silver medal, also with red neck string, which floats out there in space. The hedgehog with medal is depicted small enough to fit inside the neck string on the gold medal.]\n[This is an example of how the comic appeared during the competition. The example includes one of the final winner, Space's, matches. The dynamic part of the comic is transcribed below:] [At the top center of the comic, the two emojis battling it out are shown next to each other. The emojis displayed in the comic used the twemoji icon set. A different emoji set was shown in links to image of the tournament brackets. These matches are called bouts in the comic. The emoji from the top (or left) of the bracket is shown to the left. In this case it was space, night sky, milky way or stars vs Maglev train. Between them is the following text:] VS\n[There are two buttons one below each of the two emoji. If pressed the buttons became red. They could be pressed multiple times each match. The buttons have text on them:] Vote Vote\n[From the buttons colored hearts are released, often in bundles, and then they wave up across the emoji who's button they emanated from.]\n[Below the buttons there is and indicator showing how long the current battle is open for further votes. In the example the text is:] Remaining time: 24 minutes\n[The time began at \"26 minutes\" during the final rounds. It changed to \"1 minute\", with 1 minutes and 30 seconds left, and then 30 seconds later to \"60 seconds\" counting down to a few seconds. Then, before reaching 2 or 3 seconds it changed (a bit too early) to \"Time's up!\" Shortly there after a new bout would begin.]\n[Above the two emoji at the very top is a comment. The commentator is shown as a robot emoji. The comment often changed during the long final rounds. In the current example the text is:] \"~future~\"\n[But there would have been several others during the match. Given that Space won the entire Emojidome, the train lost this match. Often a final comment was posted just as the result was in. These final messages was then put at the top of the list of past bouts (matches). These bouts was displayed at the bottom of the comic below the remaining time. To the left was the following text:] Past bouts:\n[Below this text was a list of all previous matches, showing the two emojis, with the loser grayed out, with their final comment next to them. As soon as there where more than three a scroll bar appeared to the right, making it possible to scroll down through all these previous matches. As it was 512 emojis to begin with, there were 256 bouts in the first round, and then 255 the rest of the way to the final for a total of 511 bouts at the end. Here are the the text of the three matches that can be seen in the example (the grayed out loser was Sushi, Bee and Wizard):] \ud83c\udf0b vs \ud83c\udf63 \"Sushi has received a technical disqualification for being very very cooked\" \ud83d\udc1d vs \ud83e\udd89 \"Owls well that ends well\" \ud83e\udd94 vs \ud83e\uddd9 \"The Wizard didn't do it\"\n[All the final bouts remarks, as well as the match ups, the score of votes, and all the other comments coming at the top during each bout can be found below in the round 1 to round 9 sections. They are thus not only a transcript.]\n[Finally at the bottom of the comic below the scroll-able version of the past bouts, there was a link to images of the brackets, beginning with the full long one of all 512 emojis, and the zooming in and out, plus updating with results along the way. The link was a text that explained what the link was for. In the current example the link text, which is link blue, was:] Full bracket for today's comic (round 3).\n\n[This is the image that appears when JavaScript fails or other errors occur. This is what embeds and automated programs usually see, as they load down dynamic comics. The transcript for this image is below the image:] [A tournament bracket tree is shown with eight participants each on the left and right side, for a total of sixteen, all of which are the \ud83d\ude30 emoji (\"Face With Open Mouth and Cold Sweat\"). From both sides towards the middle the brackets reduce to eight, then four, two, and one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle. Below is an explanation of why this is seen instead of the correct comic. It is due to an error with JavaScript. This is also why the sad emoji is used in all sweet sixteen places.]\nVisit xkcd.com to participate\nIf you are on xkcd.com, then you're seeing this because of something something JavaScript.\nListen, websites are hard \ud83d\ude30\n","explanation":"This was the ninth April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous fools comic was 1975: Right Click from Sunday April 1, 2018. The next became 2288: Collector's Edition , which was delayed two days and released on Friday April 3, 2020.\nThe interactive comic began at noon ET (16:00 UTC) on April 1, 2019, and ended a day later. In it, users were shown two emojis and voted for their favorite before the time ran out. 512 different emojis were paired against each other in a cup or bracket system, with only one winner. See more below under How it worked .\nBrackets - like the one in this comic, for finding the best emoji - are a recurring theme in xkcd. It is also relevant for this time of year, and two years ago in 2017, the first comic in April, 1819: Sweet 16 from April 3rd was a bracket, referencing March Madness . The 2019 version of the National Collegiate Athletic Association College basketball national championship tournament began March 19th and ends April 8th 2019. So this comic could also be said to reference this, although it is not so explicit here. Earlier Randall made another large and \"silly\" bracket in 1529: Bracket (which someone then actually made into an online voting system, just like in this comic).\nThe title is a reference to the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome , which had the tagline:  \"Two men enter. One man leaves.\" The \"Thunderdome\" in the film is a gladiatorial arena where conflicts are resolved by a duel to the death.\nIn the final round, the Milky Way emoji (\ud83c\udf0c) won against the Hedgehog emoji (\ud83e\udd94). The comic was updated to show the result.\nClicking the comic links to a bracket of 128 emojis showing the winners: https:\/\/xkcd.com\/2131\/emojidome_bracket_round_of_128.png\nIn the first round, the voting period for each bout lasted 37.5 seconds. The voting period for each bout doubled for the second, third, and fourth rounds. The voting period for each bout for the fifth round through the end was 26 minutes. The entire bracket took 24 hours 6 minutes.\nRemaining time of a given bout was shown on a timer beneath the voting buttons. If the time remaining was one minute or greater, the time was shown rounded to the nearest minute (e.g., \"Remaining Time: 26 minutes\"); thus the minute would change on the half minute (e.g., \"2 minutes\" changed to \"1 minute\" at 1 minute 30 seconds). If the time remaining was less than a minute, the time was shown in seconds (e.g., \"59 seconds\"). When there were two (sometimes three) seconds remaining, the timer would display \"Time's Up!\" through the end of the bout and for a couple of seconds after the end of the bout while the images for the next bout were loading. Then the next bout would appear and the results of the previous bout would be added to the list of past bouts, with the most recent bout at the top.\nCommentary was displayed above the images for each bout, and changed occasionally through the bout. In the first round, the commentary was made up of some stock phrases with a few custom phrases mixed in. Later commentary was tailored to suit each match-up and provided live updates on how each bout was progressing. A final comment was included in the list of past bouts.\nThe competing candidates were periodically overlaid with colored hearts that floated up from the vote button oscillating in a triangle wave pattern before disappearing above the candidate. Below the current competition, the results of past bouts were shown with the \"loser\" displayed in greyscale, the winner in color, and the final robot-commentator comment on that match.\nThe commentary appeared to suggest that there was some real-time feedback from the results of the competition. For instance, \"It seems like our friends over Australia is joining the fun\" appeared in the commentary. So did \"We are getting a lot of questions on this today. This is live commentary, folks.\" https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/8kPwjou.png , directly declaring that the commentary is live.\nNote that the schedule might show different emoji pictures than the main voting screen, presumably because of fonts. The image is pre-rendered.\nThe competing candidates are chosen in order of Unicode value at first, resulting in similar emojis being compared. Examples include:\n\ud83d\ude1c squaring off against \ud83d\ude1b - two emojis playfully sticking their tongues out\n\ud83e\udd29 squaring off against \ud83d\ude0d - two smiling emojis with symbols for eyes\n\ud83d\ude02 squaring off with \ud83e\udd23 - two emojis that are crying in laughter\/joy.\nThe original title text \"\ud83e\udd3c\ud83e\udd3c\ud83e\udd3c\ud83e\udd3c\ud83e\udd3c\ud83e\udd3c\ud83e\udd3c\ud83e\udd3c\" consisted of eight wrestler emojis. This likely represented the round of 8, where the eight winners then can turn to the winner next to them and continue the quarterfinals, etc. The title text was updated after the final round.\nNotably, it appears the eggplant emoji (\ud83c\udf46) and the peach emoji (\ud83c\udf51) were left out of the bracket, alongside the middle finger emoji (\ud83d\udd95). The eggplant and peach are frequently used to represent a penis and vulva\/buttocks, respectively. There has been no statement from Randall on why they were left out.\nA robot face announcer-emoji (\ud83e\udd16) and a link to the full bracket was added at 38 minutes in. https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2131\/emojidome_bracket.png shows 512 emojis in a single-elimination tournament. https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2131\/emojidome_bracket_256.png was added later and shows the 256 emojis that competed on the second round. https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2131\/emojidome_bracket_round_3.png was added for the third round. https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2131\/emojidome_bracket_round_4.png was added for the fourth round. The round 3 bracket was later updated with results during the Volcano vs Owl fight. There was an error where the flying saucer had beaten the stars, which was not the case.\nA new bracket image was created for the Round of 32 which seems to be updated with new results as they come in. https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2131\/emojidome_bracket_round_of_32.png\nIt is not clear how the winner is decided when both emojis tied for first. This has happened twice: in Cupcake vs. Birthday Cake (\ud83e\uddc1 vs. \ud83c\udf82) with 3658 points each, where the Birthday Cake (\ud83c\udf82) was declared winner, and in the very first match of Grinning Face vs. Grinning Face With Smiling Eyes (\ud83d\ude00 vs. \ud83d\ude01), in which no votes were cast, but the Grinning Face With Smiling Eyes (\ud83d\ude01) was declared winner. Both of these tied bouts occurred in round 1, and both declared winners lost their subsequent match in round 2.\nReal data with results (clicks) can be seen as JSON-websocket at https:\/\/emojidome.xkcd.com\/2131\/socket , transposed into a more human-readable format at https:\/\/leet.nu\/tmp\/xkcd-2131.html .\nhttps:\/\/phiresky.github.io\/emojidome\/ , made by a redditor , shows the brackets along with the final scores and comment.\n[This was an interactive and dynamic comic during April 1st from its release until its completion. But the final and current image, will be the official image to transcribe. But the dynamic part of the comic as well as the \"error image\" displayed to services that could not render the dynamic comic is also transcribed here below.]\n[The final picture shows the winner of the gold medal in the Emojidome bracket tournament, as well as the runner up with the silver medal. There is no text. The winner is the \"Space\", \"Stars\" or \"Milky Way\" emoji, which is shown with a blue band on top of a dark blue band on top of an almost black background, indicating the light band of the Milky Way in the night sky. Stars (in both five point star shape and as dots) in light blue are spread out in all three bands of color. The large gold medal with its red neck string, is floating close to the middle of the picture, lacking any kind of neck in space to tie it around. To the left of the gold medal is the runner up, the brown Hedgehog, with light-brown face. It clutches the smaller silver medal, also with red neck string, which floats out there in space. The hedgehog with medal is depicted small enough to fit inside the neck string on the gold medal.]\n[This is an example of how the comic appeared during the competition. The example includes one of the final winner, Space's, matches. The dynamic part of the comic is transcribed below:] [At the top center of the comic, the two emojis battling it out are shown next to each other. The emojis displayed in the comic used the twemoji icon set. A different emoji set was shown in links to image of the tournament brackets. These matches are called bouts in the comic. The emoji from the top (or left) of the bracket is shown to the left. In this case it was space, night sky, milky way or stars vs Maglev train. Between them is the following text:] VS\n[There are two buttons one below each of the two emoji. If pressed the buttons became red. They could be pressed multiple times each match. The buttons have text on them:] Vote Vote\n[From the buttons colored hearts are released, often in bundles, and then they wave up across the emoji who's button they emanated from.]\n[Below the buttons there is and indicator showing how long the current battle is open for further votes. In the example the text is:] Remaining time: 24 minutes\n[The time began at \"26 minutes\" during the final rounds. It changed to \"1 minute\", with 1 minutes and 30 seconds left, and then 30 seconds later to \"60 seconds\" counting down to a few seconds. Then, before reaching 2 or 3 seconds it changed (a bit too early) to \"Time's up!\" Shortly there after a new bout would begin.]\n[Above the two emoji at the very top is a comment. The commentator is shown as a robot emoji. The comment often changed during the long final rounds. In the current example the text is:] \"~future~\"\n[But there would have been several others during the match. Given that Space won the entire Emojidome, the train lost this match. Often a final comment was posted just as the result was in. These final messages was then put at the top of the list of past bouts (matches). These bouts was displayed at the bottom of the comic below the remaining time. To the left was the following text:] Past bouts:\n[Below this text was a list of all previous matches, showing the two emojis, with the loser grayed out, with their final comment next to them. As soon as there where more than three a scroll bar appeared to the right, making it possible to scroll down through all these previous matches. As it was 512 emojis to begin with, there were 256 bouts in the first round, and then 255 the rest of the way to the final for a total of 511 bouts at the end. Here are the the text of the three matches that can be seen in the example (the grayed out loser was Sushi, Bee and Wizard):] \ud83c\udf0b vs \ud83c\udf63 \"Sushi has received a technical disqualification for being very very cooked\" \ud83d\udc1d vs \ud83e\udd89 \"Owls well that ends well\" \ud83e\udd94 vs \ud83e\uddd9 \"The Wizard didn't do it\"\n[All the final bouts remarks, as well as the match ups, the score of votes, and all the other comments coming at the top during each bout can be found below in the round 1 to round 9 sections. They are thus not only a transcript.]\n[Finally at the bottom of the comic below the scroll-able version of the past bouts, there was a link to images of the brackets, beginning with the full long one of all 512 emojis, and the zooming in and out, plus updating with results along the way. The link was a text that explained what the link was for. In the current example the link text, which is link blue, was:] Full bracket for today's comic (round 3).\n\n[This is the image that appears when JavaScript fails or other errors occur. This is what embeds and automated programs usually see, as they load down dynamic comics. The transcript for this image is below the image:] [A tournament bracket tree is shown with eight participants each on the left and right side, for a total of sixteen, all of which are the \ud83d\ude30 emoji (\"Face With Open Mouth and Cold Sweat\"). From both sides towards the middle the brackets reduce to eight, then four, two, and one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle. Below is an explanation of why this is seen instead of the correct comic. It is due to an error with JavaScript. This is also why the sad emoji is used in all sweet sixteen places.]\nVisit xkcd.com to participate\nIf you are on xkcd.com, then you're seeing this because of something something JavaScript.\nListen, websites are hard \ud83d\ude30\n"}
{"id":2132,"title":"Percentage Styles","image_title":"Percentage Styles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2132","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/percentage_styles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2132:_Percentage_Styles","transcript":"Percentage styles in order of acceptability [A long vertical line is shown with five dots on it.] [Label at the top:] Best [Dot labels from top to bottom:] 65% [very short distance] 65 percent [at roughly quarter scale] 65 per cent [at roughly half scale] Sixty-five% [at the end] 65 per\u00a2\n","explanation":"On March 29, 2019, The AP Stylebook changed a long-standing rule that forbade press writers from using the percent sign (%) when writing percentages. This had long been a controversial rule, leading to much debate over the preferable way to write percentages, before the Associated Press finally conceded the point.\nThe comic lists the best to worst ways in which you can write out phrases that are phonetically the same as \"65%\".  They go from the common \"65%\" and \"65 percent\" to \"65 per cent,\" which is not common in Randall's area and time, to the eccentric \"sixty-five%\" and \"65 per\u00a2\" (using the cent currency symbol) which are not used in normal writing and would stand out like a sore thumb when read. The middle option, \"65 per cent\", was common in older literature, along with \"65 per cent.\", using \"cent.\" as an abbreviation for \"centum\", which is Latin for \"hundred\". (\"per\" in Latin translates to \"through\", \"for\", and several other English prepositions.) The entire string would translate to \"65 for every hundred.\" \"Per cent\" is more widely used in British English than in American English today.\nA small gap between the ends of the bar and the best and worst options may suggest the existence of even better and worse options not listed in this comic, such as \"6ty5\/\u00a2\".\nOther abbreviations not mentioned in the comic include \"pct.\", \"pct\" or \"pc\". See Percentage .\nThe title text references the ambiguity of hard and soft C in English. In Classical Latin, \"C\" is always pronounced like \"K\". However, in English, most \"C\"s before E, I and Y (including \"percent\") are soft, and pronounced like \"S\". In academia, Latin students are taught the Classical Latin pronunciations of words , rather than the pronunciation used by the Catholic church. Some students of Latin may adopt the Latin pronunciation of English words derived from Latin. Such people may tend more to pronounce, even when not the correct choice, \"celtic\" like \"keltic\" (this is the correct choice, except for the basketball team ), \"caesar\" like \"kaiser\", or \"cent\" like \"kent\" (although since this involves obviously saying something others aren't going to understand unless they took the same classes, it might as well be \"per kentum\").\nPeople sometimes train a cat out of a bad behavior, such as scratching upholstery, by spritzing the cat with water when the cat does the undesired behavior. In this case, Randall's friends found him so annoying they trained him out saying \"per kent\" by spraying him with water every time he pronounced it that way. Training people this way was previously a punchline in 220: Philosophy , while training a cat this way was previously a punchline in 1786: Trash .\n65% This is the standard way of writing percentages. Randall's approval acceptability is 98%. 65 percent This one has no space, it is more common in American English. Rating: 97 percent 65 per cent This one has a space, it is more common in British English. Rating: 86 per cent Sixty-five% This one writes out the number, but not the percent sign. Rating: Sixty% 65 per\u00a2 This one uses the cent symbol in place of the word cent, which is incorrect in this context, as cent here does not refer to a currency. Rating: 2 per\u00a2\nPercentage styles in order of acceptability [A long vertical line is shown with five dots on it.] [Label at the top:] Best [Dot labels from top to bottom:] 65% [very short distance] 65 percent [at roughly quarter scale] 65 per cent [at roughly half scale] Sixty-five% [at the end] 65 per\u00a2\n"}
{"id":2133,"title":"EHT Black Hole Picture","image_title":"EHT Black Hole Picture","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2133","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eht_black_hole_picture.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2133:_EHT_Black_Hole_Picture","transcript":"[Cueball is standing behind a lectern, with \"Press Conference\" and the EHT logo displayed on a projector screen behind him.] Cueball: We linked up our observatories, got everything aligned, and there it was: Cueball: The first image of a black hole!\n[Zoom in on Cueball. A question is asked from off panel.] Off-panel question: Can you share the picture? Cueball: Well, here's the thing...\n[Cueball lifts his arm holding his hand with its palm up.] Cueball: Turns out our telescope feed is like Pinterest, where you can't right-click to save an image. Cueball: So we tried to take a screenshot, but the key combination kept turning off the display instead.\n[Zoom back out to show that the image on the projector screen has changed to show a blurry picture of a white computer screen against a black background. The EHT logo remains at the bottom of the projector screen.] Cueball: I grabbed my phone and tried to take a picture of the screen, but I was too slow. The observation had ended. Cueball: We're planning to try again next year, and we'll definitely record the screen this time.\n","explanation":"This comic references the Event Horizon Telescope , an international project dedicated to imaging black holes Sagittarius A* and M87* with angular resolution comparable in size to their event horizons.  The first image of M87 was released to the public on Wednesday, April 10, 2019, five days after this comic's release, and appeared on the same day in the comic 2135: M87 Black Hole Size Comparison .\nThe image was produced from data gathered since 2006, collected by over a dozen radio telescopes around the world and combined through a process called interferometry .  Normally, a telescope's resolution is limited by the size of its aperture, but by recording radio signals at multiple sites, the minute differences between the signals can be digitally processed into an image with much higher resolution.  The telescopes used for the EHT are in Hawaii, North and South America, Europe, and Antarctica, and so the effective diameter of the collective EHT is almost the size of the Earth itself.  As each telescope recorded observations of the black holes, the results were written to hard drives and mailed to observatories at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy for processing.  Astronomical recordings can involve astronomical amounts of data, so the raw, original, feed from a telescope may never be stored if it is too dense -- it is instead processed live by computers to capture the information of interest, and the processed result is stored.\nThe first image released by the EHT was expected to be in April 2017, but unforeseen events delayed it by two years, to April 2019.  Randall predicts this trend will continue, and makes a joke by analogy to real-world difficult experiences capturing important moments.\nLuckily this comic was not in any way prophetic, and five days after this comic was released the EHT team released a black hole picture for the world to enjoy.\nThe comic shows Cueball giving a press conference on the recent photographing of a black hole.  However, the photograph is a disappointment, caused by the spectacular failure of several systems:\nObviously, it would be quite impractical to fail to reliably provide this in an astronomical system. Cueball describes the system as being like Pinterest , where JavaScript prevents you from right-clicking on an image so that you could save it (or at least attempts to, there are many workarounds).\nCueball states that they then tried to take a screenshot, but the key combination to make a screenshot instead turned off the monitor where the picture was being displayed whenever they tried to use it, requiring extra time and effort each attempt in order to return to the view of the black hole. This could reference the fact that many mobile devices incorporate the power button in their screen shot combination and the power button can also turn off the screen.  Laptops and operating systems may also have undocumented key combinations that blank the screen, which users can accidentally press when in a hurry and create further stress for themselves. Content under DRM may also prevent screenshots, and attempting to screenshot a protected video will result in a black image.\nAs a last act of desperation, Cueball took out his phone and attempted to take a photo of the screen showing the black hole, but by that time, the observation had ended, and the photo was lost.\nIn reality, none of this should be an issue as the picture would be immediately saved by the system and would not need to be downloaded from the site, but NASA especially knows that developers of a system can never predict the obscure happenstances that can combine to create failure at the end.\nCueball then states that they would try to take a picture of a black hole again next year.\nThe title text explains that (after presumably five years of annual tries), the picture failed again as the telescope was too zoomed in and only captured a featureless square. Since a black hole by definition returns no light sent to it, the photograph would be entirely black. Researchers however are primarily presumably trying to obtain images of the more interesting edge known as an accretion disc , which could actually be meaningfully photographed.  The joke is that the black hole could only be photographed once a year, and in each year some incidental set of mistakes combined to prevent the photograph from actually being shared with anybody.  This could be a reference to the cosmic censorship hypothesis , which states that a \"naked\" singularity cannot be viewed from outside an event horizon, where in this case the censor is some kind of \"butterfly of doom\" that bedevils astronomers who attempt to image one anyway, similar to some interpretations of the Novikov self-consistency principle (a possible resolution to various time travel paradoxes which asserts that any event which would lead to a paradox must have probability zero).\n[Cueball is standing behind a lectern, with \"Press Conference\" and the EHT logo displayed on a projector screen behind him.] Cueball: We linked up our observatories, got everything aligned, and there it was: Cueball: The first image of a black hole!\n[Zoom in on Cueball. A question is asked from off panel.] Off-panel question: Can you share the picture? Cueball: Well, here's the thing...\n[Cueball lifts his arm holding his hand with its palm up.] Cueball: Turns out our telescope feed is like Pinterest, where you can't right-click to save an image. Cueball: So we tried to take a screenshot, but the key combination kept turning off the display instead.\n[Zoom back out to show that the image on the projector screen has changed to show a blurry picture of a white computer screen against a black background. The EHT logo remains at the bottom of the projector screen.] Cueball: I grabbed my phone and tried to take a picture of the screen, but I was too slow. The observation had ended. Cueball: We're planning to try again next year, and we'll definitely record the screen this time.\n"}
{"id":2134,"title":"Too Much Talking","image_title":"Too Much Talking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2134","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/too_much_talking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2134:_Too_Much_Talking","transcript":"[Cueball is walking into the panel from the right] Off-screen: How was the party? Cueball: Taaalkiiiiiiing Cueball: Blablablabla Cueball: I talked so much. Too much? Probably. Cueball: My face is tired.\n[Cueball moving to retreat under a bed] Cueball: So many conversations. Cueball: I'm worried that all my opinions are bad. Why did I talk so much? Cueball: Time to hide under my bed and never speak to another human again.\n[The bed is shown, presumably with Cueball under it.]\nFive minutes later... [Cueball crawling out from under the bed] Cueball: I have some new opinions. Off-screen: That didn't take long.\n","explanation":"Cueball has recently returned from a party, something which is unusual since Cueball has mostly been shown as an introverted type. Like most introverts, social interactions and obligations have worn him out, and different from most after-party regrets, he appears to have \"talked too much.\"\nWhile at the party, he has likely expressed opinions that might be rejected or seen as embarrassing by his social circle or society as a whole, and is now remorseful and embarrassed he said such things. In his shame, he recedes under his bed, but evidently he finds new opinions to feel strongly about, and quickly returns to society.\nThe title text presents a suggestion that will likely not go over well, as forcing those at a party to quietly listen to you is a great way to kill the party. It also does not allow others to respond to said opinions before moving on to the next.\n[Cueball is walking into the panel from the right] Off-screen: How was the party? Cueball: Taaalkiiiiiiing Cueball: Blablablabla Cueball: I talked so much. Too much? Probably. Cueball: My face is tired.\n[Cueball moving to retreat under a bed] Cueball: So many conversations. Cueball: I'm worried that all my opinions are bad. Why did I talk so much? Cueball: Time to hide under my bed and never speak to another human again.\n[The bed is shown, presumably with Cueball under it.]\nFive minutes later... [Cueball crawling out from under the bed] Cueball: I have some new opinions. Off-screen: That didn't take long.\n"}
{"id":2135,"title":"M87 Black Hole Size Comparison","image_title":"M87 Black Hole Size Comparison","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2135","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/m87_black_hole_size_comparison.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2135:_M87_Black_Hole_Size_Comparison","transcript":"[Caption above the panel:] Size comparison: The M87 Black Hole and Our Solar System\n[Caption at top left of the panel:] EHT Black Hole Image Source: NSF\n[An image of the M87 black hole captured by the event horizon telescope on the day that this comic was published is shown, in the shape of a thick red-and-yellow ring on a black background.]\n[A white ring about 1\/4 of the diameter of the central black portion of the image is labelled with an arrow:] Pluto\n[A small white circle at the center of the image is labelled with an arrow:] Sun\n[A small white dot on the right hand edge of the central black portion of the image is labelled with an arrow:] Voyager 1\n","explanation":"This comic shows the picture of the M87 black hole by the Event Horizon Telescope that was published on the same day as this comic. Overlaid on the picture is a scale image of the Solar System, showing the Sun, Pluto (one of the most well-known dwarf planets ) and its orbital path, and Voyager 1 , a deep-space probe and the current farthest probe from Earth. The comic is quite similar to 1551: Pluto , in which Randall overlaid annotations onto the recently-released first images of Pluto taken by the New Horizons spacecraft.\nThe point of the comic is to celebrate the release of this image by the Event Horizon Telescope, referenced two comics earlier, in 2133: EHT Black Hole Picture , as well as to indicate the hugeness of M87 and the awe-inspiring thing that space is.  This image has been widely publicized as being the first image ever of a black hole.  Science had no visual evidence of black holes at all until 2012 .\nIn the title text Randall hypothesizes that if the Sun were at the center of M87, Voyager would be outside the event horizon. This is confirmed by a 2015 study in which the Schwartzchild radius of M87* was found to be 5.9x10^-4 pc, as opposed to the distance of 7.04x10^-4 pc, at the time the comic was written, between Voyager 1 and the Sun.\nThe comic's scale seems to be slightly small; while the orbit of Pluto should be about 4.9 microarcseconds across, in the comic it's about 3.9 microarcseconds across.\n[Caption above the panel:] Size comparison: The M87 Black Hole and Our Solar System\n[Caption at top left of the panel:] EHT Black Hole Image Source: NSF\n[An image of the M87 black hole captured by the event horizon telescope on the day that this comic was published is shown, in the shape of a thick red-and-yellow ring on a black background.]\n[A white ring about 1\/4 of the diameter of the central black portion of the image is labelled with an arrow:] Pluto\n[A small white circle at the center of the image is labelled with an arrow:] Sun\n[A small white dot on the right hand edge of the central black portion of the image is labelled with an arrow:] Voyager 1\n"}
{"id":2136,"title":"Election Commentary","image_title":"Election Commentary","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2136","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/election_commentary.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2136:_Election_Commentary","transcript":"[Cueball is presenting a graphic on his left that shows two names followed by five digits] Cueball: Smith is leading in 3 of the 5 digits, and is tied in another. But Jones has a solid lead the thousands place, if Smith can't catch up there, it's over.\nSmith: 5 5 3 8 4 Jones: 5 9 1 0 2\n[In each column, the higher number is marked with a check mark and the lower with a cross and greyed out. The fives in the leftmost column are marked \"tie\"]\n[Caption below the panel:] A lot of election commentary just consists of unnecessarily convoluted ways to add up who has more votes.\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke about the way newscasters commentate elections, and how they make it far more complicated than it needs to be in an election in which the candidate with the most votes wins. It's not uncommon for these methods to be used to imply the election is neck-and-neck long past the point one candidate has an insurmountable lead.\nSmith has 55384 votes, while Jones has 59102 votes. Instead of comparing the votes as one number, and admitting that Jones' four thousand vote lead is likely going to earn him the win, Cueball compares each digit to see which is larger. Smith's digits in the hundreds, tens, and ones are all higher than Jones', so ultimately he implies that Smith has a chance to win, if only he could pull ahead in the thousands digit and secure a dramatic upset. In reality all that matters is who has the higher total number of votes.\nIt should be noted that for U.S. Presidential elections, the candidate with more votes does not necessarily win. Each state (plus the District of Columbia) gets a certain number of votes, and the victor in those states usually (though not always) receives all of the state's votes. In that specific case, tracking individual victories (though in states, not in digits) is actually highly relevant to who wins. That said, the comic appears be depicting something on a much smaller scale, such as a municipal or district election, which is likely to use the more common most-votes-wins method of election.\nThe title text is a similarly satirical twist on a common news comment during elections. Candidates often employ different strategies during the election season, with varying degrees of success. For example, if a strategy collected many votes (or important votes, see above paragraph), then it could be said that the area it affected was \"crucial\". Here, the area affected by Jones' strategy (an entire place value) is said to have been crucial \u2014 an obvious claim, seeing as greater place values always result in greater amounts indicated.\n[Cueball is presenting a graphic on his left that shows two names followed by five digits] Cueball: Smith is leading in 3 of the 5 digits, and is tied in another. But Jones has a solid lead the thousands place, if Smith can't catch up there, it's over.\nSmith: 5 5 3 8 4 Jones: 5 9 1 0 2\n[In each column, the higher number is marked with a check mark and the lower with a cross and greyed out. The fives in the leftmost column are marked \"tie\"]\n[Caption below the panel:] A lot of election commentary just consists of unnecessarily convoluted ways to add up who has more votes.\n"}
{"id":2137,"title":"Text Entry","image_title":"Text Entry","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2137","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/text_entry.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2137:_Text_Entry","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are sitting on a couch, with Megan standing behind them.  Cueball is pointing a remote at a television. The word space is written inside a frame.] Television: O...U...R...SPACE...P...L... Remote: Click Click Click\n[Caption below the panel:] The weirdest thing about 2019 is obviously that Donald Trump is president, but I think the second weirdest is that you sometimes still have to type stuff in by picking letters on a screen one at a time with a cursor like you're entering a high score in a 1980s arcade game.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall remarks upon something that he considers to be an absurdity of modern living; that in spite of our amazing advances in technology, there still exist user interfaces in 2019 where a person has to \"pick letters\" to type, a somewhat clunky and inefficient method of text entry. This can be seen when doing searches in a TV guide menu or in menus for streaming options like Netflix or Hulu . Some of these menus may allow for voice searches or support bluetooth keyboards , but the traditional method is still to select letters via a cursor.  Many controllers for devices only have a few buttons, which makes it necessary to use schemes such as scrolling around a picture of a keyboard to laboriously select letters, making this extremely inconvenient and annoying to users. The fact that these haven't been replaced with better interfaces comes as a surprise to Randall, hence him  believing it to be the second most weird thing in 2019. Cueball is probably looking up Our Planet which was a popular Netflix series when this comic was released. Cueball has spelled out \"O U R [space] P L\" so far.\nRandall references the \" high score \" in an arcade game . When achieving a high score in an arcade game, the user typically is able to enter their name or initials into the machine. These are entered by picking letters one by one (and usually under a time limit, for extra fun and\/or stress ), as the comic mentions.\nThe title text mentions the keyboard system Dvorak , a recurrent theme on xkcd, which is a keyboard layout patented by August Dvorak and William Dealey . As the Dvorak layout is optimized for more efficient typing with two hands, it is unlikely that using it would be more efficient than a standard Qwerty when limited to cursor entry methods. Another drawback would be that the Dvorak layout is visually unfamiliar to most people, even to many Dvorak typists who rarely look at their keyboard and instead rely on muscle-memory to find keys. As such it could be confusing for users to use for TV selection menus compared to either the more visually familiar Qwerty layout or showing letters in alphabetical order. Alternately, Randall may be referring to Dvorak\u2019s placement of frequently used letters clustered in the center as a potential slight improvement over the linear A-Z layout of such interfaces (a half-measure offered ironically, of course).\nAlthough the focus of this comic is on the text entry method, Randall prefaces the comic with what he considers to be the actual weirdest thing about 2019: that Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America. Randall had previously expressed support for Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the comic 1756: I'm With Her which preceded the 2016 US Presidential Election. In that comic he did not mention Trump. Although several comics may have a relation to Donald Trump becoming president, this is the first time ever , Donald Trump has been mentioned by his full name in a standard xkcd comic. (In 1939: 2016 Election Map he is referred to by his surname).\n[Ponytail and Cueball are sitting on a couch, with Megan standing behind them.  Cueball is pointing a remote at a television. The word space is written inside a frame.] Television: O...U...R...SPACE...P...L... Remote: Click Click Click\n[Caption below the panel:] The weirdest thing about 2019 is obviously that Donald Trump is president, but I think the second weirdest is that you sometimes still have to type stuff in by picking letters on a screen one at a time with a cursor like you're entering a high score in a 1980s arcade game.\n"}
{"id":2138,"title":"Wanna See the Code?","image_title":"Wanna See the Code?","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2138","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wanna_see_the_code.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2138:_Wanna_See_the_Code%3F","transcript":"[Cueball is walking, talking to Ponytail, who is offscreen.] Cueball: I wrote a script to automate that thing. Ponytail: Oh cool! Ponytail: ...wait, you wrote it? Ponytail: Oh no.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other and talking.] Cueball: Wanna see the code? Ponytail: I would, if you hadn't said that in the tone of voice of \"Wanna see a dead body?\"\n[Same scene as before, except Cueball has his hand on his chin.] Cueball: My code is sort of similar to a dead body, in that you can either come look at it now, or wait a few weeks until it becomes a problem. Ponytail: And because you're lucky that the people around you understand that they create more problems than they solve.\n","explanation":"This comic is the fifth and latest comic in the Code Quality series:\nCueball declares that he has written a script to automate some (presumably time-consuming or tedious) task, which pleases Ponytail at first... until she remembers how messy Cueball's code tends to be, and gets worried.\nCueball offers to show her his code, but Ponytail remarks that it sounds like he's creepily inviting her to see a dead body. Magnanimously, Cueball accepts the comparison, noting that his code does have at least one similarity to a deceased corpse: although unpleasant, if Ponytail allows it to go unchecked, it causes problems which will get increasingly worse over time. In the \"dead body\" analogy, a recently-deceased corpse is easier to deal with than one that has been left for a few weeks, which will be decayed, unpleasantly smelly, and will likely have attracted disease-spreading vermin.\nPonytail then makes a near threatening comment where she says that he is lucky that people understand both that his code causes more problems than it solves and that dead bodies create more problems than they solve. Most likely this means that they understand that killing him would cause more problems than it solves (the problem solved would no doubt be his code).\nThis may be a reference to the concept of technical debt in software development: the idea that an initially poor implementation accrues a sort of \"compound interest\" over time, becoming increasingly difficult to repair the longer it is left unfixed. This happens because any future development might have to take unorthodox or unrecommended measures to work around the problems that are already there, making the system increasingly complex and fragile the more that is added to it.\nIn the title text, \"downstream\" has a double meaning, as it is a term that applies to a situation where a dead body would decompose in or near some river, and as well to a software engineering concept: In the river situation, the dead body will contaminate the water or groundwater that it feeds from and have consequences for organisms that come in contact with that water. In the software engineering analogue, \"downstream\" refers to software derived from, or depending on, \"upstream\" software like the cadaver that Cueball devised. The causality with flowing water and software is reasonably comparable: both can be seen as a stream of atoms that are (almost) endlessly divisible and recombinable.\n[Cueball is walking, talking to Ponytail, who is offscreen.] Cueball: I wrote a script to automate that thing. Ponytail: Oh cool! Ponytail: ...wait, you wrote it? Ponytail: Oh no.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other and talking.] Cueball: Wanna see the code? Ponytail: I would, if you hadn't said that in the tone of voice of \"Wanna see a dead body?\"\n[Same scene as before, except Cueball has his hand on his chin.] Cueball: My code is sort of similar to a dead body, in that you can either come look at it now, or wait a few weeks until it becomes a problem. Ponytail: And because you're lucky that the people around you understand that they create more problems than they solve.\n"}
{"id":2139,"title":"Email Settings","image_title":"Email Settings","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2139","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/email_settings.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2139:_Email_Settings","transcript":"Email Settings [A list of controls with radio buttons and checkboxes] Default reply behavior ( ) Reply ( ) Reply All (*) Forward to address book\nVacation autoresponder (*) While on vacation ( ) Always\n[x] Reply to all newsletters with \"Thank you for the newsletter!\"\nAttachment limit ( ) 300 KB (*) 1.4 MB ( ) 5 MB (Beta)\nDefault email format (*) Plain text ( ) HTML ( ) CSS\n[x] Reply to HTML emails with \"Whoa, buddy, what's all this code?\"\nCharacter set ( ) ASCII (Unicode 0-127 only) (*) Non-ASCII (Unicode 128+ only)\nSmart autocomplete ( ) Do not suggest replies ( ) Suggest replies (*) Automatically respond to all emails with suggested reply\nImportant emails (*) Show ( ) Hide\nShow unread email count... (*) Now ( ) On my projected day of death\nSignature (*) \"That's my email. Hope you liked it!\" ( ) None\n","explanation":"The comic shows some email settings with a few less-than-helpful options.\nPlain text is self-explanatory; plain text with no special formatting options. HTML means that it can have markup to allow for bold text, colors, etc. CSS is in reference to Cascading Style Sheets, which is a styling option often combined with HTML, but useless on its own. With emails, it is typically used as inline CSS.\nEmail Settings [A list of controls with radio buttons and checkboxes] Default reply behavior ( ) Reply ( ) Reply All (*) Forward to address book\nVacation autoresponder (*) While on vacation ( ) Always\n[x] Reply to all newsletters with \"Thank you for the newsletter!\"\nAttachment limit ( ) 300 KB (*) 1.4 MB ( ) 5 MB (Beta)\nDefault email format (*) Plain text ( ) HTML ( ) CSS\n[x] Reply to HTML emails with \"Whoa, buddy, what's all this code?\"\nCharacter set ( ) ASCII (Unicode 0-127 only) (*) Non-ASCII (Unicode 128+ only)\nSmart autocomplete ( ) Do not suggest replies ( ) Suggest replies (*) Automatically respond to all emails with suggested reply\nImportant emails (*) Show ( ) Hide\nShow unread email count... (*) Now ( ) On my projected day of death\nSignature (*) \"That's my email. Hope you liked it!\" ( ) None\n"}
{"id":2140,"title":"Reinvent the Wheel","image_title":"Reinvent the Wheel","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2140","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reinvent_the_wheel.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2140:_Reinvent_the_Wheel","transcript":"[Beret Guy is talking to Ponytail.] Beret Guy: We don't want to reinvent the wheel, so every day we Google image search \"wheel\", and whatever object comes up, that's what we attach to our vehicles. Beret Guy: Sure, external dependencies carry risks, but so far they've all been pretty good wheels.\n\n","explanation":"\" Reinventing the wheel \" is an idiom\/metaphor that refers to duplicate effort to recreate something that has already been created or perfected previously without adding any value in the process. The phrase relates to the idea that the round wheel was invented a long time ago and there is no way to make it better, as a circle is the most optimal shape. While the phrase includes the word \"wheel\", it isn't typically directly associated with the wheel but instead uses the word \"wheel\" because of the easily understandable meaning - a simple object with no improvements that can be made. That being said, we have actually reinvented the wheel at one point in time - a tire is a modern improvement to the wheel, which reduces bumps and shocks that people in the car would feel from uneven road surfaces.\nIn this comic, Beret Guy works for an automotive company (or this is his own company ), and he is explaining to Ponytail their decision to not reinvent the wheel for the automobiles that they produce, using the phrase in a literal sense instead of figuratively.  Instead of determining for themselves what wheel to use, they want to use whichever wheel is presumably considered the \"best\" wheel by the world, using a daily Google image search for \"wheel\" to determine the highest ranked wheel, and then using that wheel on the vehicles they produce that day. In reality, this would be a very bad way of choosing the wheels of the automobiles Beret Guy's company produces. In addition to being extremely inefficient, as they might have to change the wheels they use every day, it may also result in copyrights and lawsuits against his company.\nThe point of the comic is to make fun of programmers who take the idea that you should never reinvent the wheel too seriously. When these people have a problem, they may Google to find a solution to that problem, and when they find a piece of online code, they use it in their own code, even if it wasn't initially designed to handle the task for which it is being used and thus may have unintended side effects or other issues.\nAnother way that programmers may go too far in avoiding reinventing the wheel is in using external dependencies.  It can be valuable to use external libraries, especially for applications where certain tasks have strange edge cases that a 'reinvention' is likely to miss or require lots of development effort to correctly implement (like time ).  However, using someone else's code means taking on the risk of security vulnerabilities, and when the library is updated on live installations, the user also takes on the risk that the library might become unavailable or otherwise break.  In this case, Beret Guy's company updates their wheel \"library\" on a daily basis from Google's image search.  Google is unlikely to shut down a core search product, but they might change the API that Beret Guy's company uses (unless he's just going to their website himself), and they have been known to shut down projects that people like, such as Google Reader .  On the day this comic was released, Randall changed the Header text of xkcd, adding a reference to Google Reader .\nThe popular programming language Python manages external dependencies with packages called \"wheels\" which are \"published to the cheese shop\", which may or may not be an intended reference.\nIn any event, Beret Guy is in effect reinventing the wheel by doing a new search for wheels on Google Images every day. If the wheel he finds on Google Images on a given day is suitable for his company's needs, the company would likely be better off using the same wheel on succeeding days (unless circumstances change which make that unfeasible), compared to trying to doing a new search for wheels every day. In addition, Beret Guy's company might be forced to create new wheel-producing machinery every day, although if Beret Guy can transmit soup and air through electrical cords, it may simply be a matter of copying the image then pasting it in real life.\nThe title text indicates that Beret Guy is currently using bicycle wheels for his vehicles, requiring his vehicles to be lighter as bicycle wheels cannot carry a lot of weight.  He says this \"reduce[s] overhead\", which is both literally true, that his vehicle weighs less, and refers to the usual figurative desire of reducing overhead costs of development by using external libraries. If the former interpretation is correct, this raises the question of why Beret Guy's company didn't try to lighten the load of its vehicles beforehand. Finally, the narrator (supposedly Beret Guy) explains that at one point a wheel of cheese was near the top of the Google images search. If it had reached the top, it would have been disastrous as a wheel of cheese is completely unsuited for use as a vehicle's wheel. [ citation needed ] Beret Guy implies that his company would have used it if it reached the first position even though he knows that it would be unsuitable for usage in vehicles, further demonstrating Beret Guy's lack of business knowledge.\nOn the day the comic was released a bicycle wheel came up first when searching for \"wheel\", see image in the Trivia section below.\n[Beret Guy is talking to Ponytail.] Beret Guy: We don't want to reinvent the wheel, so every day we Google image search \"wheel\", and whatever object comes up, that's what we attach to our vehicles. Beret Guy: Sure, external dependencies carry risks, but so far they've all been pretty good wheels.\n\n"}
{"id":2141,"title":"UI vs UX","image_title":"UI vs UX","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2141","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ui_vs_ux.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2141:_UI_vs_UX","transcript":"[Two underlined headings are above two columns of text with seven lines. The left \"symbol\" (labelled \"Designer\") is explained by the text to the right (labelled \"What they are responsible for\").]\nUI: Elements of the interface that the user encounters\nUX: The user's experience of using the interface to achieve goals\nUZ: The psychological roots of the user's motivation for seeking out the interaction\nU\u221d: The user's self-actualization\nU\u03a9: The arc of the user's life\nU\u221e: Life's experience of time\nU\u26ab: The arc of the moral universe\n","explanation":"UI vs UX is a discussion in software engineering of the differences between user interface design (UI) and user experience design (UX). As explained in the comic, UI design is typically concerned with the elements of the interface that a user encounters, while UX design is more concerned about the user's overall experience in using such interface. UX design can be seen as more holistic & abstract than UI. This comic extends the idea, adding increasingly all-encompassing, abstract & fanciful design perspectives.\nTo start, the two real categories are:\nUI - Elements of the interface that the user encounters This standard software engineering practice involves trying to come up with a user interface - icons, colors, placement or text and elements, etc. that works well together, that isn't confusing, and that hopefully makes it easy for the user to view the information they need to digest, as well as make whatever choices the user is expected to make.  They also look at things like how long it takes to move from one screen or task to another, etc. UX - The user's experience of using the interface to achieve goals Sometimes a UI designer makes choices that they think are easy for the user, but it turns out not to be as easy as expected when it comes to real users and practical situations. So the UX designer focuses on observing how a user uses a product, both how they use the user interface as well as other less technical aspects of their experience such as how they come to find out about the product, what they tell others about the product, etc.\nThe comic takes this to absurd levels by adding these additional categories:\nUZ - The psychological roots of the user's motivation for seeking out the interaction The comic says that UZ is the investigation of the psychological roots of why the user even wants to use the interface. This is not normally something that computer programmers do [ citation needed ] , and is usually best left in the hands of psychologists [ citation needed ] . \"The psychological roots of motivation\" is a buzzword phrase from management theory which may not have a particularly well-defined meaning. Motivation is itself the psychological root of behavior. While motivations certainly have causes, they are usually not clear enough to meaningfully treat in formal or clinical contexts. U\u03b1 - The user's self-actualization \" Self actualization \" is the most abstract, immaterial form of motivation, meaning the need to find comfort in one's own goals and achievements. Available only when more material needs such as those for food, shelter, warmth, security, and a sense of belonging are met, it forms the pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy of needs . \u03b1 is alpha , the first letter of the Greek alphabet. It's often used to show the \"beginning\" or \"first\" of something (including in philosophical contexts). And as the first Greek letter, it can be thought of \"beyond Z\" in a sense; the Atlantic hurricane name list uses the Greek alphabet this way, for example (as 944: Hurricane Names alludes to). U\u03a9 - The arc of the user's life \"The arc of one's life,\" means the overall thematic elements present in a person's existence. It occurs in the philosophical humor novel The World According to Garp , which remarks on how easily the arc of any human life can turn on a single sexual relationship. Continuing the philosophical theme, \u03a9 is omega , the last letter of the Greek alphabet. As such, it's often used to show the \"last\", \"end\", or \"ultimate\" of something. U\u221e - Life's experience of time \"Life's experience of time\" is a very rare phrase which does not seem to have a coherent meaning across the handful of times it occurs. \u221e (U+221E) is the mathematical symbol for infinity , again furthering the philosophical abstraction. U \u2b24 - The arc of the moral universe \"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,\" is a famous line from a speech by Martin Luther King , referring to the slow pace at which social progress is often achieved, and paraphrasing parts of a 1853 sermon by abolitionist minister Theodore Parker : \"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.\" President Obama had the sentence from King's speech woven into a rug in the Oval Office. The \u2b24 is a filled-in circle the size of the letters around it, represented here by the Unicode \" black large circle \" character ( U+2B24 ). Continuing the philosophical abstraction, it comes well after the Greek alphabet and most mathematical symbols in Unicode, and is especially unlikely to be used as a text character in its own right like this. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text refers to a higher power bending the moral arc, but mirrors the UI and UX categories, with the implication that the list continues in a spiral through ever more rarefied levels of higher powers, with even less likely symbols denoting them.\nU[unprintable glyph] - The elements a higher power uses to bend that moral arc Essentially UI for the higher power's moral arc bending utility. U[even more unprintable glyph] - The higher power's overall experience bending that moral arc Essentially UX for the higher power's moral arc bending utility.\n[Two underlined headings are above two columns of text with seven lines. The left \"symbol\" (labelled \"Designer\") is explained by the text to the right (labelled \"What they are responsible for\").]\nUI: Elements of the interface that the user encounters\nUX: The user's experience of using the interface to achieve goals\nUZ: The psychological roots of the user's motivation for seeking out the interaction\nU\u221d: The user's self-actualization\nU\u03a9: The arc of the user's life\nU\u221e: Life's experience of time\nU\u26ab: The arc of the moral universe\n"}
{"id":2142,"title":"Dangerous Fields","image_title":"Dangerous Fields","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2142","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dangerous_fields.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2142:_Dangerous_Fields","transcript":"[A line chart is shown going from left to right with two arrows on either side. On the line are ten dots spread out unevenly from close to each end. The first four dots are clustered together on the left side. Then follows 5 more dots unevenly spaced, all to the left of center. On the far right of the line, near the end, there is one dot. Beneath each dot, there goes a line down to a label written beneath each line. Above the chart, there is a big title and below that is an explanation. Below that again, there is a small arrow pointing to the right with a label above it.] Probability that you'll be killed by the thing you study By field\n[Arrow pointing right, labeled:] More likely\n[Labels for the ten dots from left to right:] Mathematics (0 pixels from first field, 0.00% of overall range of fields) Astronomy (9px, 1.35%) Economics (16px, 2.40%) Law (22px, 3.30%) Criminology (77px, 11.56%) Meteorology (96px, 14.41%) Chemistry (156px, 23.42%) Marine Biology (166px, 24.92%) Volcanology (206px, 30.93%) Gerontology (666px, 100.00%)\n","explanation":"This is a graph of fields of study, ordered by how likely one is to die because of something that that field studies, with mathematics being the least dangerous and gerontology being the most. Gerontology, the scientific study of old age, is shown as much more dangerous than the other fields, so it is far on the right side of the graph. The joke is in the distinction between the danger of studying the thing, and the overall death rate from the thing.  Studying aging doesn't put you at much more risk of aging than the general population.  However, studying volcanoes is likely to put you in dangerous environments.\nThe title text is about Epidemiology , the study of health and disease conditions in populations. In the event of an epidemic, there is a strong chance that epidemiologists in the search for the cause, transmission, and treatment will be exposed and become victims of the disease in their own right. However, the title text refers more broadly to the role of epidemiology in maintaining detailed statistical records of diseases and other causes of death, such that eventually any epidemiologist (whatever the cause of death) will become one of their own statistics.\n[A line chart is shown going from left to right with two arrows on either side. On the line are ten dots spread out unevenly from close to each end. The first four dots are clustered together on the left side. Then follows 5 more dots unevenly spaced, all to the left of center. On the far right of the line, near the end, there is one dot. Beneath each dot, there goes a line down to a label written beneath each line. Above the chart, there is a big title and below that is an explanation. Below that again, there is a small arrow pointing to the right with a label above it.] Probability that you'll be killed by the thing you study By field\n[Arrow pointing right, labeled:] More likely\n[Labels for the ten dots from left to right:] Mathematics (0 pixels from first field, 0.00% of overall range of fields) Astronomy (9px, 1.35%) Economics (16px, 2.40%) Law (22px, 3.30%) Criminology (77px, 11.56%) Meteorology (96px, 14.41%) Chemistry (156px, 23.42%) Marine Biology (166px, 24.92%) Volcanology (206px, 30.93%) Gerontology (666px, 100.00%)\n"}
{"id":2143,"title":"Disk Usage","image_title":"Disk Usage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2143","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/disk_usage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2143:_Disk_Usage","transcript":"[This comic shows a pie chart with 10 slices, each with a label and a line pointing to these ten different sized slices. There is a caption above the chart:] Disk Space Usage Report\n[The labels on each slice is given in anti-clockwise order starting from the 12 o'clock position. The percentages are estimated from the image and are noted in the square brackets before the transcript:]\n[18%] Photos [1%] Good Photos [3%]: Documents [6%]: Everything you've streamed since 2017 [9%]: A single five-year-old PowerPoint presentation [21%]: \"System\" [2%]: Unused [9%]: \"Cache\" [23%]: \"Other\" [8%]: Why are there two full backups of my phone from 2015 deep in a settings folder?\n","explanation":"Many personal computers provide a way to obtain a graphical breakdown of how their storage space is being used, most commonly by representing the filesystem as a pie chart in which each slice represents the proportion of the total storage space being taken up by a particular item.\nIn this comic, Randall has illustrated the usage of his hard disk drive in just such a way, although as is common for him, the items in his hard drive start off seemingly normal and become increasingly strange:\nPhotos Digital photographs are a common item to be stored on a hard disk; many people take lots of photographs with their smartphone or a camera and will commonly transfer them to a disk drive for safekeeping, editing, or organizing. With the high resolution of modern cameras and the ease of taking photos, it is common for photo collections to consume a significant amount of disk space. Good photos On the flipside, the ease of taking photographs means that it is very easy to take bad photographs, particularly as most people are not experienced at photography. The pie chart is rather bluntly indicating that of the many photographs Randall has taken, only a vanishingly small fraction of them are actually good. Documents On a file system, \"Documents\" is generally used as a catch-all term for the user's personal files. Everything you've streamed since 2017 Streaming is a term that refers to accessing audio or video content on the Internet without downloading the entire media file first - it is instead played while it's being retrieved. An example of streaming is watching a YouTube video. Assuming a weekly 2h live stream (@4Mbps) between 2017-01-01 and 2019-04-29, these recordings would be 425GB in size. When these files take up 6% of all the used disk space, the full amount of used space would be roughly 7TB, which is plausible, given the rise of 10TB hard disks in 2016 . It might also be referring to temporary media files that were stored on the disk while it was being \"streamed\" for viewing or listening from the Internet and never deleted when done. A single five-year old PowerPoint presentation Almost a tenth of the entire disk space is taken up by a single file, a presentation made five years ago in Microsoft PowerPoint . It's unclear why Randall has kept this file or why it is so huge - possibly it is important to him for some reason, or perhaps he can't bear the thought of throwing information away, regardless of how much storage it requires. While it's possible that the file may genuinely be long or detailed enough to require so much space, it could also be that the file is bloated due to PowerPoint's strategy of converting compressed graphics to full-resolution bitmaps for historical cross-platform compatibility . This has been known to result in PowerPoint decks that are much larger than the sum of their component files. \"System\" This would be files related to the computer's Operating System . While these files will generally show up on a disk usage analysis, it is generally recommended to leave them alone, as they may be critical to the computer's operation. A well-known trolling tactic involves tricking unsuspecting users into deleting their critical system files (eg. the \"System32\" folder on Windows), which renders the operating system unusable. Unused Parkinson's law , the computer storage corollary, says that data expands to fill the space available for storage.  As such, this sliver representing the unused portion of the storage device will always be tiny. \"Cache\" The operating system and other programs often keep copies of data they've used or downloaded in case they need to use that data again; such data is usually stored in cache files.  Often these can be deleted without too much ill effect, but some programs have different ways of deleting their own cache files. \"Other\" People attempting to organize their files will often end up creating a directory called \"Other\" or \"Misc\" for any files that they could not categorize. On Randall's hard disk, this \"Other\" directory takes up a significant amount of disk space, indicating that either his categorization system isn't working very well, or he doesn't have the discipline to properly maintain his file organization. Alternatively, this could be a category defined by the usage report, which would include anything it can't categorize - often a strangely large portion of the files. Why are there two full backups of my phone from 2015 deep in a settings folder? Full backups of an old phone may have been stored to \"settings\" by a version of backup or file synchronization software which wanted to keep the resulting backup images in a location away from user control so they would be less likely to modify any of their component files, which might, for example, tend to clobber new versions with the modified old versions. Renaming a device under such circumstances might lead to duplicate backup images.\nAnother possible explanation is that folder names like \"Other\", \"Cache\" and \"System\" refer to storing porn while trying to hide this fact by using unsuspicious folder names. Hence the quotes.\nAlarmingly, the \"Unused\" portion of the pie chart is extremely small, which means the disk is nearly full with very little remaining capacity. Users don't usually worry about what is using space on their computer disk until they get an alert about the disk running out of space - this is likely when a user would resort to viewing this type of graph to figure out what they can delete to free up disk space.\nThe title text references the management UI of a hypothetical disk cleaning utility. The following options are mentioned in its menu:\nOptimize space usage A common nondescript phrase often found in such tools. Encrypt disk usage report Often, one might want to encrypt data on the disk, not reports about said data. This may suggest that the unusual disk usage is embarrassing enough that the user may want to encrypt the usage report, preventing other people from reading it. Convert photos to text-only Plain-text documents take less space than pictures. The most high-compression option would be to replace the photo file with a text file containing a short description of the photo, for example using an AI algorithm like CaptionBot . Scanned documents can be automatically transcribed (OCR). However, applying such an algorithm to photos will result in garbage. One alternative, could be that the tool turns image files into text files by changing the extension to .txt. This would not save any space, and would only make the files more difficult to open. Another alternative would be converting the images into so called ASCII art , by converting regularly sampled blocks of pixels to ASCII characters that closely approximate the general shape and at times color of those pixels, potentially saving a general impression of the content of the images while significantly reducing file size. Delete temporary files Another real option. Temporary files are often not deleted automatically, so deleting them can save a significant amount of disk space. Delete permanent files A made-up term, that might refer to the user's documents, pictures, etc. You would not want to delete them. Delete all files currently in use Deleting files that are in use would most definitely result in data loss or program crashes, including perhaps even the program doing the deleting, making it effectively single-use. Windows explicitly disallows deleting open files & Linux, etc. provide locking mechanisms to prevent it, since it can cause data loss. Deleting all open files would be catastrophic, especially if it included system utilities & the kernel. If the program is capable of deleting all files in use anywhere on the planet, it would be considerably worse (& looking at these options, it's hard to say for sure the program won't try to go that far). Optimize menu options Those options could really do with some optimization. (a reference to the first entry?) Download cloud, Optimize cloud Here, the cloud probably refers to cloud storage (online storage). Cloud storage would be too large by many orders of magnitude to fit, let alone download onto a desktop computer, but in 908: The Cloud , the cloud is depicted as (ultimately) running on a single desktop-sized server in Black Hat 's house.  Perhaps the \"Optimize cloud\" option would be used to enable such an arrangement. Upload unused space to cloud \"Uploading empty space\" is a) impossible and b) would result in less space being available, which is the opposite of what a disk cleaner utility is supposed to do. Note that \"unused space\" may contain actual data. Often, when a file is deleted, the operating system just marks the content as available. The result is that it stays there until overwritten by new data. There are many data recovery tools that takes advantage of it in order to \"undelete\" files.\n[This comic shows a pie chart with 10 slices, each with a label and a line pointing to these ten different sized slices. There is a caption above the chart:] Disk Space Usage Report\n[The labels on each slice is given in anti-clockwise order starting from the 12 o'clock position. The percentages are estimated from the image and are noted in the square brackets before the transcript:]\n[18%] Photos [1%] Good Photos [3%]: Documents [6%]: Everything you've streamed since 2017 [9%]: A single five-year-old PowerPoint presentation [21%]: \"System\" [2%]: Unused [9%]: \"Cache\" [23%]: \"Other\" [8%]: Why are there two full backups of my phone from 2015 deep in a settings folder?\n"}
{"id":2144,"title":"Adjusting a Chair","image_title":"Adjusting a Chair","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2144","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/adjusting_a_chair.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2144:_Adjusting_a_Chair","transcript":"[Cueball is shown adjusting a chair by pressing a button on the bottom of the chair. There is a caption in a frame over the top of the panel:] Adjusting a chair:\n[The seat back of the chair swings backward with him rather fast as shown by a few movement lines.] Chair: Clunk\n[Cueball leans forward against the new chair position and presses another button.]\n[The chair extends to several times its previous height, very fast as shown by many lines beneath the seat.] Chair: Hiss\n[At the top of this very high seat Cueball leans forward and presses another button.]\n[The seat expands in all directions, so Cueball only sits in the middle of it with his legs on top of the inflated cushion.] Chair: Poof\n[The chair is now a massive contraption. It has 5 bases, each with wheels as the original chair. The main's seat is in the middle of the contraption with a single trunk going up from the five bases connecting them and the large cushion of the seat. Two entire chairs are branching out from underneath this central seat, they are each hanging in a thin wire more or less upside down to each side of the main trunk. Two poles are coming up from the central seat, each with a new seat and two back-to-back seat backs. Yet another seat is supported by a thin rod connecting the two top seats, looking almost like a table between the two chairs. Cueball is still on the main seat's cushion. He is holding on to one of the poles above him as he leans down and attempts to press yet another button beneath the seat. There is a caption in a frame over the top of the panel:] Two hours later...\n","explanation":"This comic shows Cueball 's attempts to adjust a swivelling chair. This comically culminates in a massive chair with a big central seat and several other chairs branching off of it as Cueball continues learning how to to adjust it. The chair also apparently has so many controls it takes two hours to discover them all (although Cueball may have shown off his newly-discovered abilities in the mean time, so it might not take two hours of continuous experimentation).\nAs many people have experienced, these chairs can be quite difficult to raise, lower, or manoeuvre if one does not know how. Typically, the chairs have multiple knobs and levers underneath the seat, which requires the user to rely on muscle memory to find them, since these levers are commonly used while sitting in the chair. There are often several ways to manipulate each control (may be rotated, moved laterally, vertically, or axially.) One usually needs to experiment with the levers and knobs in a new chair to understand how to work the chair, and it appears Cueball is experimenting with them.\nEach step gets farther away from what real-life office chairs could do. In sequence, Cueball finds his chair doing more and more surprising things:\nThe title text refers to a common claim on such chairs, that the chair offers 360 degrees rotation and several degrees of freedom. This is a double entendre, depending on if \"360 degrees\" or \"degrees of freedom\" is interpreted as an object. However, here it means there are 360 mechanical degrees of freedom , which is the number of independent parameters that define the configuration of an object; in other words, the chair has 360 different levers and options, far more than a standard chair [ citation needed ] .\n[Cueball is shown adjusting a chair by pressing a button on the bottom of the chair. There is a caption in a frame over the top of the panel:] Adjusting a chair:\n[The seat back of the chair swings backward with him rather fast as shown by a few movement lines.] Chair: Clunk\n[Cueball leans forward against the new chair position and presses another button.]\n[The chair extends to several times its previous height, very fast as shown by many lines beneath the seat.] Chair: Hiss\n[At the top of this very high seat Cueball leans forward and presses another button.]\n[The seat expands in all directions, so Cueball only sits in the middle of it with his legs on top of the inflated cushion.] Chair: Poof\n[The chair is now a massive contraption. It has 5 bases, each with wheels as the original chair. The main's seat is in the middle of the contraption with a single trunk going up from the five bases connecting them and the large cushion of the seat. Two entire chairs are branching out from underneath this central seat, they are each hanging in a thin wire more or less upside down to each side of the main trunk. Two poles are coming up from the central seat, each with a new seat and two back-to-back seat backs. Yet another seat is supported by a thin rod connecting the two top seats, looking almost like a table between the two chairs. Cueball is still on the main seat's cushion. He is holding on to one of the poles above him as he leans down and attempts to press yet another button beneath the seat. There is a caption in a frame over the top of the panel:] Two hours later...\n"}
{"id":2145,"title":"Heists And Escapes","image_title":"Heists And Escapes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2145","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/heists_and_escapes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2145:_Heists_And_Escapes","transcript":"[Seven different room scenarios are shown with characters attempting to get inside or outside, each with a label below them.]\n[Cueball and Ponytail trying to exit a room.] Escape rooms\n[Cueball and Megan trying to enter a room.] Heist movies\n[A small version of Cueball stands in the middle of a room while a Hairy on the left and Cueball on the right are trying to enter.] Home Alone (1990)\n[A room is shown inside a larger room. Two characters try to enter from outside and two others try to exit from the inner room while Megan and Cueball are standing between them.] The Battle of Winterfell\n[Four rooms are shown inside of each other. Two characters try to enter from outside while three Cueballs in each room are standing while asleep.] Inception (2010)\n[Smaller rooms are recursively shown inside of larger ones, with two characters trying to escape from each.] The Divine Comedy (1320)\n[At the bottom a more complicated combination of various rooms shown in gray, with arrows labeled with question marks showing escape routes for two characters in black. On the left is a large room labelled Truman Show, and on the right is the nine-level Dante's Inferno. Between them is the river Styx. Inside the Truman Show are the Bank, which contains a Room with the two people in it, a Vault with a money bag in it, and The Dead; and Kevin McCallister's House and Subconscious.]\n[Label in the bottom in black:] My plan for the greatest escape room game of all time\nJudging by the depicted scene, the Battle of Winterfell referenced in the comic seems to refer to the battle taking place in the 3rd episode of the 8th season of the TV show Game of Thrones. While there is no official naming of all battles in the show, this is in line with the naming on most blogs and other discussions published around the premiere of that episode. However several wikis and other more long term reviews of the show refer to this battle as the \"Battle of Ice and Fire\". On these sites the \"Battle of Winterfell\" refers to the battle in the 10th episode of the 5th season between Stannis Baratheon and the Boltons.\n","explanation":"The top six panels show a stylized version of various options where people try to get into or out of rooms. There are always two xkcd figures trying to get into or out of a room. One is always rattling, possibly at a locked door. While no door is drawn, the position of their hands indicates this. The second figure always has their hands at head height, possibly looking for weaknesses in the structure. The characters in each panel vary and there seems to be no specific pattern to them.\nThe six top panels show these scenarios:\nAt the end, Randall proposes a combination of all of these things, and also combining it with others, to form the \"greatest escape room game of all time\":\nThe escape room begins in a small room, shown with Cueball and Megan standing inside, who likely represent the participants of the escape room. An arrow leads out from that room into a larger bank, where some more characters labeled The Dead, referencing The Battle of Winterfell, are standing. An arrow leaves from them that merges into Cueball and Megan\u2019s, implying they join them as they escape the room.\nThe arrows continue outside the bank, into a larger room labeled Truman Show , inspired by the film where the protagonist was living in a constructed reality show, although he did not know it. The path branches upwards around or into Kevin McCallister\u2019s house, with the arrows inside spitting yet again, either exiting the house again or entering Kevin McCallister\u2019s subconscious, a reference to the movie Inception . The arrows once again split and continue either downwards or to the right, both exiting McCallister\u2019s house.\nThe path to the right splits, the top path crossing Styx , a river in Greek mythology that forms the boundary between Earth and the Underworld, represented by Dante\u2019s Inferno, taken from The Divine Comedy , and the other returning to the line that leads downwards. The line that leads to Dante\u2019s Inferno is met by the line that leads around Kevin McCallister\u2019s house. It can be assumed that this is not a breaking into the underworld as portrayed in some movies, but due to the simplicity of the paths (note that unlike for the escape the line just crosses Styx) it is the possibility of failing prior puzzles and dying. In that case the escape room puzzle would continue with escaping from the underworld to rejoin the puzzles.\nBoth paths lead downwards back across Styx, rejoining the other lines below McCallister\u2019s house. The lines continue to the bank and spit to either re-enter the bank or exit the escape room entirely. The line that re-enters the bank either returns to The Dead or into the bank\u2019s vault, which the line also exits the escape room.\nThe title text refers to this article , which claims that Kevin McCallister is dead, and is actually a ghost.\n[Seven different room scenarios are shown with characters attempting to get inside or outside, each with a label below them.]\n[Cueball and Ponytail trying to exit a room.] Escape rooms\n[Cueball and Megan trying to enter a room.] Heist movies\n[A small version of Cueball stands in the middle of a room while a Hairy on the left and Cueball on the right are trying to enter.] Home Alone (1990)\n[A room is shown inside a larger room. Two characters try to enter from outside and two others try to exit from the inner room while Megan and Cueball are standing between them.] The Battle of Winterfell\n[Four rooms are shown inside of each other. Two characters try to enter from outside while three Cueballs in each room are standing while asleep.] Inception (2010)\n[Smaller rooms are recursively shown inside of larger ones, with two characters trying to escape from each.] The Divine Comedy (1320)\n[At the bottom a more complicated combination of various rooms shown in gray, with arrows labeled with question marks showing escape routes for two characters in black. On the left is a large room labelled Truman Show, and on the right is the nine-level Dante's Inferno. Between them is the river Styx. Inside the Truman Show are the Bank, which contains a Room with the two people in it, a Vault with a money bag in it, and The Dead; and Kevin McCallister's House and Subconscious.]\n[Label in the bottom in black:] My plan for the greatest escape room game of all time\nJudging by the depicted scene, the Battle of Winterfell referenced in the comic seems to refer to the battle taking place in the 3rd episode of the 8th season of the TV show Game of Thrones. While there is no official naming of all battles in the show, this is in line with the naming on most blogs and other discussions published around the premiere of that episode. However several wikis and other more long term reviews of the show refer to this battle as the \"Battle of Ice and Fire\". On these sites the \"Battle of Winterfell\" refers to the battle in the 10th episode of the 5th season between Stannis Baratheon and the Boltons.\n"}
{"id":2146,"title":"Waiting for the But","image_title":"Waiting for the But","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2146","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/waiting_for_the_but.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2146:_Waiting_for_the_But","transcript":"[Ponytail is talking to Cueball, while holding her hands up with both palms up. Cueball is thinking as shown with a thought bubble.] Ponytail: Listen, I'm all in favor of reducing car accidents, I think arson is a serious crime, and I'm a big fan of those \"No Animals Were Harmed\" disclaimers at the end of movies... Cueball (thinking): Uh-oh.\n[Caption below the panel:] The longer you have to wait for the \"but\", the worse whatever comes after it is going to be.\n","explanation":"Often arguments are made in the form of \"I think X, but Y\", where Y is almost but not quite contradictory to X. More specifically, the argument would go \"I am not [something generally considered distasteful], but [a more specific statement most people consider part of that general statement]\". The first part of such a statement can sometimes be viewed as an apology or an excuse because the person talking knows that the second part might upset people. A common example would be \"I'm not a racist, but I don't think we should let refugees from Africa into Europe.\" The idea of denying help to people from Africa will be seen as racist by many people, so the speaker tries to preempt that opinion of themself.\nIn this comic, Cueball is having a conversation with Ponytail , who lists several seemingly unrelated but agreeable positions, such as reducing car accidents , treating arson as a serious crime, and approving of \"No Animals were Harmed\" disclaimers in modern media, with Cueball wondering when the \"but..\" of the statement will come, and conjuring increasingly outrageous images of what Ponytail could have in mind that involves violating all of them, for example some sort of reckless fiery car stunt involving animals.\nThe title text gives another example of a sentence that will probably be followed by a \"but\". Multi-level marketing schemes and the Spanish Inquisition are both considered bad in very different ways, so the implication that if the speaker has to apologize in advance for sounding like defending both of them, they must have a remarkably troubling idea in mind, involving somehow using a version of the Spanish Inquisition as an MLM scheme.\nAnother possible explanation would be that when people hear a sentence that starts with \"Listen, I'm\" they tend to wait for the \"but\", and the longer it takes the more tension it may cause them, while the speaker may never intend to say \"but\". Similar ideas were used for 365: Slides and 559: No Pun Intended .\n[Ponytail is talking to Cueball, while holding her hands up with both palms up. Cueball is thinking as shown with a thought bubble.] Ponytail: Listen, I'm all in favor of reducing car accidents, I think arson is a serious crime, and I'm a big fan of those \"No Animals Were Harmed\" disclaimers at the end of movies... Cueball (thinking): Uh-oh.\n[Caption below the panel:] The longer you have to wait for the \"but\", the worse whatever comes after it is going to be.\n"}
{"id":2147,"title":"Appendicitis","image_title":"Appendicitis","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2147","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/appendicitis.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2147:_Appendicitis","transcript":"[Cueball is seated on an medical examination table, clutching his stomach, while Ponytail stands dressed in a doctor's coat holding a file on a clipboard in her left hand.] Ponytail: Well, we zapped you with energy beams, and it looks like one of your stupid organs is a traitor. Cueball: ...which one? Ponytail: I dunno, appendix? Gallbladder? One of the little ones that sucks. Cueball: What should I do?\n[Closeup on Ponytail. She holds her left hand in a clenched fist.] Ponytail: You could quash the revolt with the ruthless deployment of chemical and biological weapons. Cueball (off-screen): ...antibiotics? Ponytail: But certain victory comes only through the sword . Cueball (off-screen): Surgery.\n[Closeup on Ponytail with her fists raised.] Ponytail: While we're inside, we'll look around-if we see any signs of insurrection elsewhere, we will not hesitate to act. There can be no armistice. Your parts must fall in line or be crushed. Cueball (off-screen): Um.\n[Zoom out again to the entire scene. Ponytail points her left hand up.] Ponytail: When the battle is won, we will salt your abdomen so no new organs can ever sprout up to trouble you again. Cueball: Maybe I should get a second opinion. Ponytail: Only if you care what a weaker doctor would say.\n","explanation":"Cueball , representing Randall , is visiting Doctor Ponytail , this time to diagnose some medical condition. From her description, zapped you with energy beams , it sounds like they just took an x-ray image , maybe in the form of a CT scan , and Ponytail is following up on the results. It appears that he may have appendicitis , the title of the comic, which could be treated through antibiotics , or through an appendectomy surgery.\nAs is typical for Doctor Ponytail, she characterizes the diagnosis in a strange and not-entirely-helpful way, in this case likening Cueball's inflamed appendix to a social uprising or rebellion. In some ways, this is not a bad metaphor - Cueball is an organism, and as such, functions best when all of his organic parts are working correctly in unison. People often express the similar sentiment of being \"betrayed by their own body\" to describe a biological function that isn't working right. However, Doctor Ponytail insists on talking only in metaphor, preventing Cueball from getting any useful medical detail about his condition.\nAntibiotic treatment is described as using \"chemical \/ biological weapons\", while the appendectomy is described as \"victory through the sword\". She further describes more extreme \"battle tactics\", like crushing all other rebellions in his body. Lastly, she mentions \"salting his abdomen\" to prevent other rebellions. This is a reference to the salting the earth tactic in battle, which was a ritual to symbolize a curse on a conquered city and would have theoretically hindered future crop production, thus preventing that city from being rebuilt. It is likely that the medical usage would be the application of saline solution, salt in water, which is used for cleaning wounds.\nAfter all this explanation, Cueball begins to question Ponytail's methods, and requests to see a different doctor to get a second opinion .\nThe title text appears to be Randall speaking directly to the reader addressing a recent appendicitis and his current health state. He continues the comic's joke with a meta reference pondering the repercussions if his organs subsequently discover this comic. The title text of 2508: Circumappendiceal Somectomy , from August 2021, seems to indicate that while antibiotics may have cured this event, a later infection required surgery anyway, a bit more than two years after this comic was released.\n[Cueball is seated on an medical examination table, clutching his stomach, while Ponytail stands dressed in a doctor's coat holding a file on a clipboard in her left hand.] Ponytail: Well, we zapped you with energy beams, and it looks like one of your stupid organs is a traitor. Cueball: ...which one? Ponytail: I dunno, appendix? Gallbladder? One of the little ones that sucks. Cueball: What should I do?\n[Closeup on Ponytail. She holds her left hand in a clenched fist.] Ponytail: You could quash the revolt with the ruthless deployment of chemical and biological weapons. Cueball (off-screen): ...antibiotics? Ponytail: But certain victory comes only through the sword . Cueball (off-screen): Surgery.\n[Closeup on Ponytail with her fists raised.] Ponytail: While we're inside, we'll look around-if we see any signs of insurrection elsewhere, we will not hesitate to act. There can be no armistice. Your parts must fall in line or be crushed. Cueball (off-screen): Um.\n[Zoom out again to the entire scene. Ponytail points her left hand up.] Ponytail: When the battle is won, we will salt your abdomen so no new organs can ever sprout up to trouble you again. Cueball: Maybe I should get a second opinion. Ponytail: Only if you care what a weaker doctor would say.\n"}
{"id":2148,"title":"Cubesat Launch","image_title":"Cubesat Launch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2148","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cubesat_launch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2148:_Cubesat_Launch","transcript":"[Megan is holding a cube attached by a string to a quad-copter drone flying above her head. She talks to Cueball standing next to her.] Megan: A spot on a CubeSat launch costs a lot, but you can get a drone and a spool of fishing line for cheap. Cueball: Uh oh.\n[A wide shot of Megan flying the drone with the cube at her feet while Cueball stand behind her looking after the drone that flies up to the left.] Megan: No no, watch. Megan: This is gonna go great.\n[Wide shot of a rocket standing on its launch pad with the support tower. The, now very small, drone is approaching, string attached, from the right.]\n[Slim shot of the rocket as the drone attaches to the rocket, just under the tip with the payload. The string goes down and out to the right.] Megan (off-panel): Perfect!\n[A huge cloud is emitted from the bottom of the rocket as it lift off the ground every so slightly.] Foom\n[As the rocket is taking off it begins tilting in the direction of the string. Two off-panel voices come from Megan and Cueball's direction.] Off-panel voice #1: Should it be tilting already? Off-panel voice #2: Hey, move your leg.\n[Close up of Megan and Cueball struggling in tangle of string that surrounds Megan while she is holding the cube in one hand and the remote for the drone in the other. Cueball uses both hands to try and help her out of the tangle. The string goes out to the left towards the rocket.] Megan: Ugh, let go, I can get- Cueball: -No, lift your other arm-\n[Three slim panels follow, one above the others, of the rocket, with string, tilting increasingly to the right and down as if pulled by the string. In the final panel of the three the tip of the rocket is now further than where the string goes down to the bottom of the panel. So the string now goes back left from where it is attached to the rocket, rather than to the right as in all previous panels.]\n[Megan entangled in the string with the cube in her hand and Cueball hanging below her holding on to the string, are flying through the air, as the string goes up right, and with small lines drawn above it to indicate it is moving to the right. On the ground Science Girl holds a hand to her mouth looking up at them, while a guy looking like Cueball runs away with hands over his head.] Megan and Cueball (screaming): Aaaaaa\n[A disheveled looking Megan and Cueball both with plaster casts on their arms stand before four people, Hairbun, another Cueball like guy, Ponytail and Hairy. They are the members of an interview panel and are sitting behind a desk like table with a large label on its front:] Launch accident investigation board Megan: Listen. Megan: Space exploration is never going to be completely safe.\n","explanation":"A CubeSat (aka U-class spacecraft)\u00a0is a miniature artificial-satellite with cubic dimensions of 10 cm \u00d7 10 cm \u00d7 11.35 cm (~ 4 in \u00d7 4 in \u00d7 4.5 in), and masses of about 1.33 kg (2.9\u00a0lbs) per unit. CubeSats are put into orbit from the International Space Station or launched as secondary payloads. As of January 2019, at least 900 CubeSats have successively achieved orbit, and at least 80 have been destroyed in launch failures. Their common functions include: Earth observation, amateur radio transmitters, as well as testing prototype small-satellite technology.\nThe comic begins with Megan telling Cueball that being officially part of a CubeSat launch is fairly expensive (starting at around $40,000), [1] but she has an idea for a much cheaper alternative: use a fishing line on a drone to attach to a rocket (that is similar visually to the European Vega rocket) just before launch, with the CubeSat attached to the other end of the fishing line so it gets pulled into space.\nIn reality, this plan would fail for multiple reasons.\nUpon realizing her plan, Cueball immediately responds with \"uh-oh\", indicating his concern, but Megan assures him that it will be fine, before piloting the drone towards the rocket. She successfully connects the drone to the rocket, and the rocket lifts off.\nWhatever her plan was, it goes wrong almost immediately. The unexpected force on the rocket from the side causes it to tilt and go off course. Perhaps if the rocket's control software employed adaptive control techniques, it could have maintained control in the presence of this unexpected force. It is implied that it's not due to the comparatively small force of the CubeSat, but because Cueball is standing on the fishing line. However in real life the force from Cueball stepping on the line would still be very small and would be unable to cause a scenario like this. Megan and Cueball get tangled in the fishing line and are carried away. While the fate of the rocket is not shown, it is likely that its unplanned attitude change would activate the automatic termination sequence or result in manual activation of the destruction protocol.\nMegan and Cueball miraculously survive and are brought to an investigative board to explain their actions. Megan attempts to defend herself using flawed logic: something was bound to go wrong sooner or later, so it's not her fault that she was the cause. This logic does not account for the fact that this particular rocket's chance to crash was greatly increased by the drone attempting to connect to it. She isn't totally to blame for the accident anyways, since the launch should have been scrubbed as soon as the drone came anywhere near the rocket, and the failure of Mission Control to do so is negligence on their part, and hence they are more responsible for the failure of the mission than Megan and Cueball as they did not follow proper protocol and allowed the launch to occur under unsafe conditions.\nThe title text describes that the supposedly huge damages they caused were partly covered by the earnings from a water skiing championship, which Cueball and Megan presumably won by being dragged across the water by the rocket. This might be a tangential reference to an incident in the Tintin adventure The Black Island , wher Thomson and Thompson blunder into and win an aerobatics competition when they compel a mechanic with no flying experience into taking off in pursuit of that volume's antagonists. Alternatively, it may simply be a case of the title text being largely irrelevant to the comic itself and simply something Randall found funny.\nThis topic of CubeSats has been covered in older comics: 1866: Russell's Teapot and in 1992: SafetySat .\n[Megan is holding a cube attached by a string to a quad-copter drone flying above her head. She talks to Cueball standing next to her.] Megan: A spot on a CubeSat launch costs a lot, but you can get a drone and a spool of fishing line for cheap. Cueball: Uh oh.\n[A wide shot of Megan flying the drone with the cube at her feet while Cueball stand behind her looking after the drone that flies up to the left.] Megan: No no, watch. Megan: This is gonna go great.\n[Wide shot of a rocket standing on its launch pad with the support tower. The, now very small, drone is approaching, string attached, from the right.]\n[Slim shot of the rocket as the drone attaches to the rocket, just under the tip with the payload. The string goes down and out to the right.] Megan (off-panel): Perfect!\n[A huge cloud is emitted from the bottom of the rocket as it lift off the ground every so slightly.] Foom\n[As the rocket is taking off it begins tilting in the direction of the string. Two off-panel voices come from Megan and Cueball's direction.] Off-panel voice #1: Should it be tilting already? Off-panel voice #2: Hey, move your leg.\n[Close up of Megan and Cueball struggling in tangle of string that surrounds Megan while she is holding the cube in one hand and the remote for the drone in the other. Cueball uses both hands to try and help her out of the tangle. The string goes out to the left towards the rocket.] Megan: Ugh, let go, I can get- Cueball: -No, lift your other arm-\n[Three slim panels follow, one above the others, of the rocket, with string, tilting increasingly to the right and down as if pulled by the string. In the final panel of the three the tip of the rocket is now further than where the string goes down to the bottom of the panel. So the string now goes back left from where it is attached to the rocket, rather than to the right as in all previous panels.]\n[Megan entangled in the string with the cube in her hand and Cueball hanging below her holding on to the string, are flying through the air, as the string goes up right, and with small lines drawn above it to indicate it is moving to the right. On the ground Science Girl holds a hand to her mouth looking up at them, while a guy looking like Cueball runs away with hands over his head.] Megan and Cueball (screaming): Aaaaaa\n[A disheveled looking Megan and Cueball both with plaster casts on their arms stand before four people, Hairbun, another Cueball like guy, Ponytail and Hairy. They are the members of an interview panel and are sitting behind a desk like table with a large label on its front:] Launch accident investigation board Megan: Listen. Megan: Space exploration is never going to be completely safe.\n"}
{"id":2149,"title":"Alternate Histories","image_title":"Alternate Histories","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2149","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alternate_histories.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2149:_Alternate_Histories","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking together] Megan: In alternate history stories where the allies lost WWII, sometimes they have their own fiction with the premise \"what if the allies had won ?\" which differs from our world since they'd be speculating and wouldn't predict everything. Cueball: Yeah, I think they do that in Man in the High Castle .\n[Megan and Cueball continue walking together] Megan: But within those stories, they should have \"what if the allies had lost ?\" fiction which is even more removed from our world. Cueball: Uh oh. Megan: So how deep does it go?\n[Cueball and Megan, wearing tall black ball-topped hats and large bracelets and presumably from some alternate history, are walking together. There is a caption in a frame over the top of the panel] 500 levels in: Megan: In my alternate history, Scotland never develops hovercraft, so Canada's cybernetic horses defeat the Belgium-Madagascar-New Jersey alliance. Cueball: Wow!\n[Alternate history Cueball and Megan continue walking together] Cueball: Then who becomes God-Emperor of Missouri, if not Laura Ingalls Wilder? Megan: Senator Truman! Cueball: He survives the accident?! Megan: Yeah, the pajama craze never catches on, so he's wearing normal clothes when he walks by the printing press...\n","explanation":"Alternate histories are a common device in speculative fiction. One of the most common (even cliche) uses of alternate history is to posit a world in which the Axis Powers achieved victory in World War II .  This is presumably so compelling because it was a relatively recent event in which a series of relatively minor changes could have altered world history in major ways.  One of the standard literary works along this line is Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle , where the world is split into spheres of influence controlled by the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany . This novel has been developed into a popular TV series of the same name on Amazon Prime.\nAt one point, The Man in the High Castle discusses the fiction of their own world, which includes their own alternate histories in which the Allies had won the war instead. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is one such novel. Because these stories are speculative, they don't entirely match the 'real' history of our world, differing in key ways. This results in an \"alternate-alternate\" history where the Allies won World War II, but the details still differ rather significantly than the history of World War II in our reality -- most notably, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy depicts a post-World War II world defined by a Cold War between the United States and the British Empire, rather than one between the United States and Soviet Union. In one sense, this functions as a meta-critique of the very concept of alternate histories, highlighting the reality that we can never know the details of what would have happened if history had gone differently.\nIn this comic, Megan and Cueball discuss this fictional device. Then in typical xkcd fashion, things start to get exaggerated to ridiculous proportions: Megan points out that, if characters in our stories have their own fiction, then the characters in their stories presumably have their own body of fiction, and so on, creating a recursive loop. If each alternate history contains its own alternate history, presumably each iteration would deviate more and more from our own reality, because each would be speculation based on increasing layers of speculation. Eventually (by the 500th iteration) the history would differ so wildly from our own as to be completely absurd to us, with very few elements being even recognizable.\nThe 500th iteration timeline apparently includes hovercraft and cybernetic horses. Hovercraft are a real technology which does have military applications as landing craft, but their use in actual warfare has been limited. Cybernetic horses do not exist in our timeline yet [ citation needed ] , but Boston Dynamics is getting close. In our timeline, Scotland is part of the United Kingdom, and would likely not develop military technology independently. New Jersey is a state in the United States and Madagascar was controlled by France during World War II; neither of these would normally be able to pursue an independent foreign policy that would have allowed them to join alliances and fight wars unless their parent governments also did. Belgium was occupied by the Axis Powers early in the war. These three regions developing a alliance and fighting against Canada (which was also an Allied power) would require a highly unlikely combination of events. How this war would be affected by the lack of Scottish hovercraft is unclear. This scenario also apparently contains a theocracy of some variety in Missouri, which (remarkably!) is vaguely plausible.\nInterestingly, even within the bounds of the exceedingly meta-fiction, it is bordering on impossible for the scenario to come into existence; the reason for this is that while the ending would become evermore bizarre, the actual events will only be able to vary so much, as they are based on predetermined scenarios that occur before the changes take place. Unless at least two wars are being modified, or the events are based on a later occurrence, (basically the two are discussing something different entirely, albeit still a historical scenario) the idea of so many implausible things occurring is unlikely no matter what the circumstances, unless they all happened over the course of the war. Of course, it's possible several of those 500 iterations involve BAD alternate histories fiction. Or possibly fiction based on history which was deliberately falsified.\nIt's unlikely, but it's worth noting that \"cybernetic horses\" could be a reference to cyber forces , since in 1418: Horse that substitution is suggested.\nLaura Ingalls Wilder was an American author, best known for her Little House on the Prairie series. In the 500th iteration timeline, she apparently became \"God-Emperor of Missouri\", despite not being known as a political figure in our timeline. Harry S Truman , in our timeline, became 33rd President of the United States, following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the 500th iteration timeline, Truman apparently died in an accident involving pajamas and a printing press while still a senator (presumably a U.S. senator, since in our reality he was serving in the United States Senate prior to being nominated as Roosevelt's vice president in 1944). He apparently remained a significant enough figure for 500th-iteration Megan to speculate that he would have become God-Emperor of Missouri if he'd survived.\nThe title text continues the discussion about Truman, mentioning a photograph of Truman screaming in horror as he is hoisted by newspaper-printing machinery. This plays off a famous photograph from our world where Truman is the one hoisting up a copy of the Chicago Tribune in triumph, as said newspaper erroneously claimed he was defeated in the 1948 United States presidential election by Thomas Dewey .\n[Megan and Cueball are walking together] Megan: In alternate history stories where the allies lost WWII, sometimes they have their own fiction with the premise \"what if the allies had won ?\" which differs from our world since they'd be speculating and wouldn't predict everything. Cueball: Yeah, I think they do that in Man in the High Castle .\n[Megan and Cueball continue walking together] Megan: But within those stories, they should have \"what if the allies had lost ?\" fiction which is even more removed from our world. Cueball: Uh oh. Megan: So how deep does it go?\n[Cueball and Megan, wearing tall black ball-topped hats and large bracelets and presumably from some alternate history, are walking together. There is a caption in a frame over the top of the panel] 500 levels in: Megan: In my alternate history, Scotland never develops hovercraft, so Canada's cybernetic horses defeat the Belgium-Madagascar-New Jersey alliance. Cueball: Wow!\n[Alternate history Cueball and Megan continue walking together] Cueball: Then who becomes God-Emperor of Missouri, if not Laura Ingalls Wilder? Megan: Senator Truman! Cueball: He survives the accident?! Megan: Yeah, the pajama craze never catches on, so he's wearing normal clothes when he walks by the printing press...\n"}
{"id":2150,"title":"XKeyboarCD","image_title":"XKeyboarCD","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2150","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkeyboarcd.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2150:_XKeyboarCD","transcript":"[Headings above a drawing of a very special keyboard:] Introducing the XKeyboarCD A keyboard for powerful users and their powerful fingers\u00ae\n[The keyboard has many more keys than a usual Keyboard. Usual keyboards for stationary computers typically have a few of the rows with 21 keys, and then some with fewer. This Keyboard has 28 keys on the top row. The other rows have special keys that make it difficult to compare, but there is basically also room for 28 in the bottom row, except one spot where there is one key in a space for 2x2 keys. Begining from the bottom and coutning keys there are 27. Skipping those that take up space in two or more rows, when going to the next row from the bottom there are 23, then 24, then 18, then 27 and finally 28 keys in the top row, for a total of 147 keys (vs 105 on a regular keyboard). Then there are 54 extra keys above the keyboard to the left (27 shown) and 156 in 6 rows of 26 to the right for a total of 357 keys 330 shown. All six rows have keys all the way over with no empty space in between, as there are on regular keyboards. Also there are no space between the top row (with F1 button etc) and those below. At each side of the keyboard the keys do no align at the edges, which is normally the case. The keyboard has several special features, most of which are labeled. The only special features that is not labeled is a small square with 2x2 keys that are elevated a bit above all other keys. It is in the region above the normal position of the four arrows. All eight other special features have an arrow pointing to them from their labels. Here below is a description of the labeled items as well as a transcript of their labels. They are listed in the order of their labels first above and then below the keyboard going from left to right.]\n[Five keys close to the QWERTY keys positions have colorful emoji on them. They each take up the space of 2x2 normal keys, although it is not clear if all the \"normal\" keys have the same size:] Hardcoded plastic keys for the 5 most useful emoji \ud83d\ude30 \ud83d\ude02 \ud83d\udc19 \ud83c\udfc7 \ud83d\udea1\n[A cube with 3x3 keys on each side hangs above the keyboard to the left supported by a small rod. Three sides are fully visible, 27 keys:] 54 configurable Rubik's keys\n[Just right of the middle above the main keyboard is a cylinder with keys inside in 6 rows of 26 keys (126 in all). It either decreases in diameter into it making it look almost like a tunnel, or is drawn as if it almost disappear in the far distance, being much deeper than it should be.] Ergonomic design\n[In the region where the normal numberpad would be there are 15 numbers from 1 to 15 in a 4x4 grid leaving space for an empty key hole. There is a row of keys both above and below this grid. The numbers do not come in order from 1 to 15, but rather in a jumble. Also the empty hole is not a full key spot. Instead it is in the second row of numbers, with a bit more space to the left than to the right of the middle of the three keys.]\n15 puzzle-style numberpad 1 8 4 12 7 Empty area 11 3 15 6 10 9 2 5 13 14\n[To the left in the second row (below the Caps Lock position) the outer key is twice as wide as the other normal keys.] Serif Lock\n[An arrow points to the eight key in the bottom row, but is probably just referring to all the keys in general:] Unlimited key travel\n[There is a segment of the keyboard that seems to be empty of keys, but still white like the rest of the keys, not black as where keys are actually missing. It is where on a regular keyboard, the normal keys are separated from the special function keys. But it turns out it is indeed a long key going vertically:] Diagonal spacebar\n[Where the four arrow keys are on a regular keyboard there is a 2x2 key segment that only has one key in the middle with black background around it. It has an arrow head on it pointing right. That is if the key had not been turned about 45 degree counter clockwise, so the arrow points up to the right.] Arrow key (rotate to adjust direction)\n","explanation":"In the same vein (and with the same humor) as the xkcd Phone series , the XKeyboarCD seems to be an overly inventive and borderline ludicrous keyboard intended for some unknown audience. It has an assortment of features (some fairly normal, some more exotic) which give it a...\"diverse skill set\". This may be in reference to Space-cadet keyboards which were made for programmers and had several keys not present on standard QWERTY keyboards.\nXKeyboarCD is a play on xkcd, and keyboard. (XK eyboar CD)\n54 Configurable Rubik's Keys\nThe tiles on a Rubik's cube (just 'colours' on actually good cubes, such as Valk cubes) resemble computer keys, so this feature makes fun of that by adding a spinnable Rubik's cube above the keyboard. The implication is that the keys would be 'configured' by twisting the sides of the cube until the desired configuration is reached, although parity means that not all configurations could be reached by conventional means by a 3x3 cube. (Parity exists on 4x4 cubes.) There can be a maximum of 53 keys (the bottom center position can't contain a key because it's the mounting position). Additionally, the top key can't be moved around, so the maximum amount of configurable keys is 52. (The four remaining centers can be moved by rotating the entire cube.) The bottom-facing keys would obviously be hard to see\/reach.\nHardcoded Plastic Keys for the 5 Most Useful Emoji\nThis feature parodies the feature of some laptop-keyboards where it is possible to dynamically assign emojis to a small touchscreen area. There is a disaccord between hard-coded, useful and emoji, especially with the large keys in a central position on the keyboard. Which emojis would be \"the most useful\" is highly subjective. For example in the comic it shows the quite popular laughing with tears emoji, along with the octopus emoji and others. Notably, the \"aerial tramway\" was once the least-used emoji, and remains very rarely used.\nSerif Lock\nSerifs are small lines on the ends of certain characters in fonts such as Times New Roman and Georgia. It is dependent on the font, not on the character; \"A\" is represented by the same code regardless of its font. Since a given font almost always either has or doesn't have serifs, this key seems challenging to implement. This key could be implemented, however, by simply changing between a pair of fonts when it is pressed, or by using the characters in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block. What's more, the button is placed roughly where left shift is on most keyboards, liable to cause frustration.\nUnlimited Key Travel\nKey travel is the distance a key moves between its unpressed and pressed states. In reality, laptop keys only move a few millimeters before bottoming out, and conventional keyboards up to about a centimeter. Increased key travel may make typing more comfortable, up to a point. However, the usefulness of having unlimited key travel is unclear, and the question of how this would be physically possible in the keyboard depicted remains unanswered. The keyboard would have to be infinitely deep to allow unlimited key travel, although pushing it to the near bottom would require infinitely long fingers. At least it is the greatest possible value, trumping any other keyboard.\nDiagonal Spacebar\nInstead of a wide key at the bottom that typists can hit easily with either thumb, we now have a tall, narrow key that requires being pressed with the right pinkie. This would not be a good change since most peoples' pinkies are their weakest finger. Some ergonomic keyboards have a slightly curved spacebar or a separated spacebar for each thumb.\nArrow Key (Rotate to Adjust Direction)\nThis is essentially a jog dial , or similar rotary encoder .  These are sometimes used with keyboards: as controls for volume, video editing, or drawing.\nMany computer keyboards have four arrow keys : up, left, right, and down. However, the XKeyboarCD just has one that can be rotated. This has the added bonus of allowing the arrow keys to point more than four different directions. In a keyboard, it would be awkward to operate as going from horizontally left to horizontally right, for example, would require the user to rotate the key first and then press it, which wastes precious time when playing a video game like the hoverboard comic , where you have to rapidly press arrow keys to move around. It would not let one press multiple arrow keys at once. Trackpoint devices provide similar joystick-like direction function, but are easier to control with a finger.\n15 Puzzle-Style Numberpad\nA 15 puzzle is a square containing fifteen smaller squares and one blank spot, which allows the squares to be moved around. The squares are shuffled and then reassembled as a game or pastime, and are usually labelled 1-15 (as is the case here) or, when assembled properly, create a picture. A numberpad in this style would be frustrating to use for typing numbers, as they could shift (or be shifted) around, but could provide a fun feature to use as a game. Alternatively the keys could be rearranged as with the Rubik`s keys. How this would be used to generate numeric input is unclear, but the presence of 16 positions suggests hexadecimal input is possible. Keyboard keypads do have around 17 keys, but only 0-9 usually have numbers whereas the XKCD keypad has numbers 1-15 in the middle of the numberpad probably also surrounded by the more conventional arithmetic operators, enter, and decimal point.\nErgonomic Design\nThe cylindrical portion of the keyboard is advertised as being an ergonomic design. Most ergonomic keyboards are both curved into a convex shape and split in the middle, with the blocks of keys on either side rotated around the vertical axis. This is done to follow natural arm and finger movements more closely, that is, avoid forcing the user to rotate their arms and hands to match the flat and rectangular key arrangement of a non-ergonomic keyboard.  Some ergonomic keyboards come in unconventional form factors, such as vertical keyboards, to allow the user's hands to rest in more neutral positions or to change positions throughout the day, but the cylinder shape presented here is a concave shape which requires the user to lift and twist his arms to reach certain keys (or roll the cylinder from side to side), which would be an even more strenuous motion than typing on a standard keyboard. The slogan of the keyboard \u2014 \"for power users and their powerful fingers\" \u2014 fits this difficulty, but makes no sense as a feature.\n\nThe title text references sound changes in languages. Every language (and indeed, every dialect) routinely undergoes changes in its sounds and phonemes, in a mostly regular and systematic, but not totally predictable way (otherways the dialects would sound the same and also the century, when a shift occurs, and the rate of change are not predictable). While not only vowels are affected, in languages with many vowels such as English, they're particularly likely to shift around and\/or merge. While having dynamic keycaps that change can actually come in handy, the feature of only having vowels change in response to sound shifts is a bit less so. One normally enters the spelling and not the pronunciation of words (except with some Asian input systems). The spelling and pronunciation do not change at the same time.\nFirstly, while changes in how we pronounce words are always ongoing, the way we write words down tends to stay relatively static, and thahs wiy wuhd faynd thaet werds biykahm ihnkaammpriyhehnsihbuhl duew tuow nhw laager biyigg sphld es thy wor bifffrr. Second, English only uses five glyphs (aeiou) and a variety of methods to represent four times as many vowel sounds, so the software would need to have a way to handling that (in some dialects \"bird\" and \"turn\" for example, have the same vowel but are represented by \"ir\" and \"ur\", as it also can be by the \"er\" in the bird called the \" tern \" - or not). Third, vowel shifts are not ubiquitous: the Caught-cot merger , for example, is a phenomenon happening across some parts (but not all) of the US and UK. Therefore, while some people would say \"caught\" and \"cot\" have the same vowel it should be spelled the same by the keyboard, but others would say they're two different vowels and should not be spelled identically. Fourth, sound shifts tend to occur over a relatively long period of time (in terms of human lifetimes), so a user would probably find the keycaps only change once or twice. All in all, this is not a very useful feature.\nAn alternative explanation is that the keys actually map to the International Phonetic Alphabet and converts what you type into English words (and the vowel changes). The IPA is an alphabet used in linguistics and language teaching, designed to represent every phoneme present in languages of the world unambiguously, with optional modifiers to indicate more subtle nuances in pronunciation, intonation and speech pathology. This alphabet consists of 107 letters and 56 modifiers (with some letters shared with the Latin and Greek alphabets), which would explain the large number of keys. In that case, the feature remains questionable since it only handles vowel shifts and not consonants, and anybody who'd use an IPA-keyboard would probably need to type out the phonology of other languages and appreciate not having to find a key has moved because English has undergone a vowel shift.\nThis is the second time that the \"xkcd\" has been used around a middle word, which uses some of the xkcd letters to form this word. The first was 1506: xkcloud - XKC lou D, to spell ClouD with the C and D from XKCD, in that comic the letters were all lowercase. In this comic the Keyboard, has an X before the word and a C before the D with the xkcd letters capitalized.\n[Headings above a drawing of a very special keyboard:] Introducing the XKeyboarCD A keyboard for powerful users and their powerful fingers\u00ae\n[The keyboard has many more keys than a usual Keyboard. Usual keyboards for stationary computers typically have a few of the rows with 21 keys, and then some with fewer. This Keyboard has 28 keys on the top row. The other rows have special keys that make it difficult to compare, but there is basically also room for 28 in the bottom row, except one spot where there is one key in a space for 2x2 keys. Begining from the bottom and coutning keys there are 27. Skipping those that take up space in two or more rows, when going to the next row from the bottom there are 23, then 24, then 18, then 27 and finally 28 keys in the top row, for a total of 147 keys (vs 105 on a regular keyboard). Then there are 54 extra keys above the keyboard to the left (27 shown) and 156 in 6 rows of 26 to the right for a total of 357 keys 330 shown. All six rows have keys all the way over with no empty space in between, as there are on regular keyboards. Also there are no space between the top row (with F1 button etc) and those below. At each side of the keyboard the keys do no align at the edges, which is normally the case. The keyboard has several special features, most of which are labeled. The only special features that is not labeled is a small square with 2x2 keys that are elevated a bit above all other keys. It is in the region above the normal position of the four arrows. All eight other special features have an arrow pointing to them from their labels. Here below is a description of the labeled items as well as a transcript of their labels. They are listed in the order of their labels first above and then below the keyboard going from left to right.]\n[Five keys close to the QWERTY keys positions have colorful emoji on them. They each take up the space of 2x2 normal keys, although it is not clear if all the \"normal\" keys have the same size:] Hardcoded plastic keys for the 5 most useful emoji \ud83d\ude30 \ud83d\ude02 \ud83d\udc19 \ud83c\udfc7 \ud83d\udea1\n[A cube with 3x3 keys on each side hangs above the keyboard to the left supported by a small rod. Three sides are fully visible, 27 keys:] 54 configurable Rubik's keys\n[Just right of the middle above the main keyboard is a cylinder with keys inside in 6 rows of 26 keys (126 in all). It either decreases in diameter into it making it look almost like a tunnel, or is drawn as if it almost disappear in the far distance, being much deeper than it should be.] Ergonomic design\n[In the region where the normal numberpad would be there are 15 numbers from 1 to 15 in a 4x4 grid leaving space for an empty key hole. There is a row of keys both above and below this grid. The numbers do not come in order from 1 to 15, but rather in a jumble. Also the empty hole is not a full key spot. Instead it is in the second row of numbers, with a bit more space to the left than to the right of the middle of the three keys.]\n15 puzzle-style numberpad 1 8 4 12 7 Empty area 11 3 15 6 10 9 2 5 13 14\n[To the left in the second row (below the Caps Lock position) the outer key is twice as wide as the other normal keys.] Serif Lock\n[An arrow points to the eight key in the bottom row, but is probably just referring to all the keys in general:] Unlimited key travel\n[There is a segment of the keyboard that seems to be empty of keys, but still white like the rest of the keys, not black as where keys are actually missing. It is where on a regular keyboard, the normal keys are separated from the special function keys. But it turns out it is indeed a long key going vertically:] Diagonal spacebar\n[Where the four arrow keys are on a regular keyboard there is a 2x2 key segment that only has one key in the middle with black background around it. It has an arrow head on it pointing right. That is if the key had not been turned about 45 degree counter clockwise, so the arrow points up to the right.] Arrow key (rotate to adjust direction)\n"}
{"id":2151,"title":"A\/B","image_title":"A\/B","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2151","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/a_b.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2151:_A\/B","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting behind a computer desk, facing to the right, gesturing at the screen. Ponytail stands behind him and Hairy stands in front of him, both taking notes in a pad.] Cueball: I like this one more because it encodes Mycenaean Greek. The other one just looks like gibberish.\n[Caption below the panel:] Linear A\/B testing\nVersions of the script engine used in early versions of the Opera web browser were named after ancient writing scripts: Linear A, Linear B, Futhark (the oldest form of the runic alphabets used by Germanic tribes), and Carakan ( Javanese script known as Aksara Jawa, a modern variant of Aksara Kawi).\n","explanation":"A\/B testing is a form of controlled experiment in which test subjects are randomly split into two groups, A and B, and each group is shown a slightly different version of the same thing. This is most often used for market research, as it allows researchers to discover which of two options are received more favorably by consumers. For example, a website might employ A\/B testing by randomly showing 50% of visitors a version with a different font. By checking their site traffic analytics afterward, the site operators can see which version of the site received the most user engagement, which might tell them that the alternate font is a better choice.\nLinear A is an as-of-yet undeciphered writing system of the ancient Minoan civilization (a civilization based on the island of Crete ). It appears similar to the deciphered Linear B writing system, but if the pronunciation rules of Linear B are applied to Linear A, it produces a language unrelated to any known language.\nLinear B , on the other hand, has been deciphered.  It is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek , the earliest form of Greek for which we have evidence. It predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries and likely evolved out of the earlier Linear A writing system.\nWhile not completely consistent with the definition of A\/B testing presented above, the comic jokingly suggests that the choice of writing system could be decided through A\/B testing, with the \"A\" and \"B\" literally being Linear A and Linear B. The test subject apparently can read Linear B (which encodes Mycenaean Greek), but not Linear A (which produces what's seemingly gibberish when read through the rules of Linear B).  It is also a pun on the common phrase \"[it's] Greek to me \", which people use to refer to something as gibberish, but here, it is the Greek text which is comprehensible to Cueball , while instead the other one isn't.\nThe title text explains the selection of script code (i.e. programming language ) used to create the web site. Aksara Kawi is a script (i.e. a writing system) that was used on the island of Java (today part of Indonesia) from the 8th century until 1500 AD.  Referring to it as \"Java script\" is a pun on JavaScript , which is a browser scripting language for creating web pages. Here, Linear A (\"Crete script\") is selected as the \"script\" language over Aksara Kawi because it rendered faster in testing.\n[Cueball is sitting behind a computer desk, facing to the right, gesturing at the screen. Ponytail stands behind him and Hairy stands in front of him, both taking notes in a pad.] Cueball: I like this one more because it encodes Mycenaean Greek. The other one just looks like gibberish.\n[Caption below the panel:] Linear A\/B testing\nVersions of the script engine used in early versions of the Opera web browser were named after ancient writing scripts: Linear A, Linear B, Futhark (the oldest form of the runic alphabets used by Germanic tribes), and Carakan ( Javanese script known as Aksara Jawa, a modern variant of Aksara Kawi).\n"}
{"id":2152,"title":"Westerns","image_title":"Westerns","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2152","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/westerns.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2152:_Westerns","transcript":"[A horizontal timeline spanning between the years 1840 and 2020. Every decade is indicated by a tick below the line, and labeled every 50 years. Two ranges are highlighted by brackets and labeled:] [1862-1898:] The \"Wild West\" era [1902-2019:] Western films, books, video games, etc\n[Caption below the panel:] It's weird to realize that the Western genre has now existed for three times longer than the period it's based on.\n","explanation":"The \" western \" genre refers to narrative works set in the American \" Old West \" west of the Mississippi River between the years of 1865 (when the Civil War ended) and 1895 (when the US Census officially declared the frontier to be closed).  These dates are naturally somewhat arbitrary, but most works in the genre are set more or less in that relatively narrow window of time.  This definition may be too narrow, however, as many events related to the American West took place before the Civil War.  The fur trade was significant in the western frontier from the early 1800s to about 1845.  The Oregon Trail saw its first wagon trail in 1836, and along with variants such as the California and Utah\/Mormon trail, was regularly and heavily used beginning around 1845-1847.  The California Gold Rush took place in 1849.  Stories of fur trapping, wagon trains, and mining all feature heavily in the \"western\" genre, making the disparity between the length of real history and the length of historical fiction less great.\nThis era in American history was marked by aggressive settling of western lands.  The US had pursued an expansionist policy known as \" Manifest Destiny \", which had the primary goal of extending US borders across the continent. This led to various strategies to increase the lands under US control (ranging from diplomatic efforts to expansionist wars), displacing, containing, and eliminating native peoples from the land, and encouraging American settlement in the western territories. Settlers were encouraged to go west with the promise of cheap or free land for agriculture, mineral riches, and freedom from the dangers of large cities.\nThese sparsely populated lands quickly gained a reputation for being dangerous, unpredictable, and violent. The men and women who settled them were admired as rugged individualists, civilizing a wild frontier through hard work, courage and persistence. The mythos of the \"wild west\" arguably continues to impact American culture to this day.\nThe timeline in this strip suggests that the Western genre began almost immediately after the frontier closed. This matches the \"official\" timeline.  The first critically recognized Western novel, The Virginian , was published in 1902, and one of the earliest silent films, The Great Train Robbery , was made in 1903. However, it should be noted that pulp novels and magazines set in the frontier, as well as \"Wild West Shows\" that toured the eastern states and Europe had begun decades earlier. And the end of the \"Wild West\" era can be considered to have lasted into the 1910's, or even the 1920's. In other words, Westerns were an established genre while the real western frontier was still in existence. The genre transitioned from a contemporary setting to a historical one without significant disruption.\nThe Western genre has varied in popularity, but has never gone away, and continued to produce popular works throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. Artists who grew up admiring Western heroes have proceeded to use the genre for their own visions, and have reinterpreted the setting across multiple generations, and an evolving media landscape. Literature, music and live performances gave way to film, then television, and now video games.  This strip points out the irony that the actual Old West took place over a fairly limited time and space, but the setting has managed to accommodate a genre that's maintained popularity for over a century (at least three times as long as the actual frontier era) and is consumed both throughout the US and across the world.\nThe title text is in reference to the popular video game Red Dead Redemption 2 , which takes place in an Old West setting. Red Dead Redemption 2 has already sold in excess of 24 million copies, while at the 1890 census the entire West - even going by the widest definition, counting every state and territory west of the Mississippi - had a population of just 16.8 million. The region now counted by the US Census Bureau as the \"Western United States\" was even smaller, at just 3.64 million. Assuming every copy sold represents one player (some sold may not have been played, but others sold may account for multiple players), not only are there more RDR2 players than there were people in the Wild West at its height, there may be more than lived in the region at all during the frontier years.\nA similar question was asked in what if? WWII Films .\n[A horizontal timeline spanning between the years 1840 and 2020. Every decade is indicated by a tick below the line, and labeled every 50 years. Two ranges are highlighted by brackets and labeled:] [1862-1898:] The \"Wild West\" era [1902-2019:] Western films, books, video games, etc\n[Caption below the panel:] It's weird to realize that the Western genre has now existed for three times longer than the period it's based on.\n"}
{"id":2153,"title":"Effects of High Altitude","image_title":"Effects of High Altitude","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2153","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/effects_of_high_altitude.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2153:_Effects_of_High_Altitude","transcript":"Effects of High Altitude How life is different at one mile above sea level (e.g. in Denver)\n[Eight small panels, each containing an image with a caption at the top:]\n[A pot on a stovetop, with steam rising from the pot] Water boils at 202\u00b0F\n[A baseball flying through the air] Baseballs and golf balls fly 5-10% farther\n[Five wavy arrows hitting a curved surface, two at a low point and three at a high point] Sunburns develop significantly faster\n[Scrabble tiles for letters Q, X and Y with point values 12, 9 and 5, respectively] Scrabble letters are worth 16% more\n[Cueball looking down at a broken hand mirror on the floor] Breaking a mirror only causes 5\u00bd years of bad luck\n[Cueball and Megan are talking. Megan is gesturing] 40 is the new 28 Megan: 50 is the new 40, and when you account for elevation it's more like 37.\n[Five black balloons floating] Nuclear war can be started with only 94 red balloons.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are talking. Ponytail is looking at her phone] People make marijuana jokes slightly earlier Cueball: Hey, what time is it? Ponytail: 4:17 Blaze it!\n","explanation":"This comic starts out with three effects of high altitude related to the air getting \"thinner\" and the lower air pressure. Denver is one mile (5280 feet or 1609 meters) above sea-level (as marked on the steps of the State Capitol). At this elevation, the average atmospheric pressure is about 83% of sea level pressure, or about 840 mbar instead of 1013 mbar, and gravity is 99.94% of gravity at sea level at the same latitude, or 9.796 m\/s 2 instead of 9.801 m\/s 2 . This has a number of effects:\nAs usual for xkcd, the effects of high altitude are extended in a comically absurd manner, applying this \"slightly less\" rule to things that have nothing to do with altitude:\nThis point increase would have little impact in the board game when two players sit across each other. However, it would imply that scrabble played via internet should require players to state their altitude at the beginning of the online game which then assigns advantages to higher-altitude players. This advantage seems arbitrary, unless the altitude difference is really significant enough to impede the thinking ability of the higher-altitude party.\nIn the title text, One Hundred and One Dalmatians is a Disney franchise (based on a children's book), where the villain, Cruella de Vil , aims to capture and kill 99 Dalmatian puppies (97 in the book) to have the perfect spotted fur coat. (The title includes the parents [book: and other Dalmatian caregivers] of the Dalmatian puppies.) The comic claims that, at a higher altitude in Flagstaff (6903 ft \/ 2104 m), she would only have needed 89 Dalmatians, possibly implying that puppies at higher altitudes are bigger (perhaps because there is less air pressure to compress them ) or that Cruella de Vil at high altitudes is smaller (possibly because of the higher humidity and lower temperature ).\nEffects of High Altitude How life is different at one mile above sea level (e.g. in Denver)\n[Eight small panels, each containing an image with a caption at the top:]\n[A pot on a stovetop, with steam rising from the pot] Water boils at 202\u00b0F\n[A baseball flying through the air] Baseballs and golf balls fly 5-10% farther\n[Five wavy arrows hitting a curved surface, two at a low point and three at a high point] Sunburns develop significantly faster\n[Scrabble tiles for letters Q, X and Y with point values 12, 9 and 5, respectively] Scrabble letters are worth 16% more\n[Cueball looking down at a broken hand mirror on the floor] Breaking a mirror only causes 5\u00bd years of bad luck\n[Cueball and Megan are talking. Megan is gesturing] 40 is the new 28 Megan: 50 is the new 40, and when you account for elevation it's more like 37.\n[Five black balloons floating] Nuclear war can be started with only 94 red balloons.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are talking. Ponytail is looking at her phone] People make marijuana jokes slightly earlier Cueball: Hey, what time is it? Ponytail: 4:17 Blaze it!\n"}
{"id":2154,"title":"Motivation","image_title":"Motivation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2154","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/motivation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2154:_Motivation","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail sitting at a desk, working on their laptops.] Cueball: What are you working on? Ponytail: Playing a game that involves exactly as much planning, problem-solving and boring drudgework as the actual job I'm avoiding.\n[Zoom in on Cueball, leaning back with one arm on the back of his chair.] Cueball: Haha, yeah, I've definitely been there.\n[Zoom back out to Cueball and Ponytail sitting at a desk, working on their laptops.] Cueball: What's your job these days, anyway? Ponytail: Video game playtester. Cueball: ... Ponytail: Look, motivation is weird, ok?\n","explanation":"Motivation is an important part of human psychology . It arouses a person to act towards a desired goal. It is a driving force which promotes action. As Ponytail is feeling unmotivated to do her job, she decides to procrastinate by playing a video game on her laptop instead, with the hope that she will eventually be more motivated to do her assigned task. Cueball seems to understand her sentiment, and admits to being in the same situation in the past, seemingly assuming she's referring to games that feel like work.\nGames are sometimes criticized for feeling like work. This is usually aimed at games that simulate an actual or historical job which can frequently cause the player to have to check each individual plant as if he were an actual gardener, or work out a cost-benefit analysis as if he were an actual manager. This is more generally applied to any video game grinding , also known as farming. This is why when Cueball asks Ponytail what she's doing, she replies that she's playing a game that involves exactly as much planning, problem-solving and boring drudgework as the actual job she's avoiding. Cueball then laughs and says that he has definitely been there before, before asking Ponytail what her job is.\nThe punch line for this comic comes when Ponytail admits that her actual job is a video game playtester , someone whose job is to test and play video games. So it seems that Ponytail is avoiding doing her task to test video game X by playing video game Y. As a result, her original statement can be interpreted in a completely different way: Instead of comparing the game she's playing to a regular job, implying that grinding is as difficult and boring as an actual job, playing games is her actual job, and she's simply comparing two games she's playing. Though being a game tester can be seen as glamorous and fun to people who enjoy playing video games (\"I get to play video games all day at work\"), it is less rewarding than it may seem , as game testers often aren't playing the game but are testing it by constantly doing mundane tasks and running through a game that they may not like to identify bugs and problems, which is far less enjoyable than playing a game one likes for fun, even if it requires a grind.\nThe title text continues Ponytail's admission, adding that she had originally been assigned to play video game Y in the first place, and was previously procrastinating by playing video game X. Her company may have caught on to her procrastination, as they then changed her assignment to work on video game X that she was already playing to procrastinate. To further procrastinate herself, Ponytail changed to play video game Y, the original video game that she was assigned. However, this would not serve to have her work on her original task to test video game Y.  Testing a video game is very different from playing a video game while procrastinating.  For example, video game testers must intentionally make \"mistakes\" to verify that the game responds correctly and, more importantly, report on what worked or didn't work.  Playing normally, while attempting to win, would not yield the data obtained from proper testing.\n[Cueball and Ponytail sitting at a desk, working on their laptops.] Cueball: What are you working on? Ponytail: Playing a game that involves exactly as much planning, problem-solving and boring drudgework as the actual job I'm avoiding.\n[Zoom in on Cueball, leaning back with one arm on the back of his chair.] Cueball: Haha, yeah, I've definitely been there.\n[Zoom back out to Cueball and Ponytail sitting at a desk, working on their laptops.] Cueball: What's your job these days, anyway? Ponytail: Video game playtester. Cueball: ... Ponytail: Look, motivation is weird, ok?\n"}
{"id":2155,"title":"Swimming","image_title":"Swimming","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2155","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/swimming.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2155:_Swimming","transcript":"[The single panel comic is around 4 times higher than it is wide (317\u00d71284 pixels). A Cueball is watching from the beach while Megan with another character is standing neck deep in water near an extreme drop off (continental shelf?) and another Cueball is swimming further. This part of the comic is at the very top, and the characters are drawn much smaller than usual.]\nMegan: It's OK, I can still touch bottom here.\n[As the tall image is scrolled down, there are some deep water fish, a jellyfish, and an octopus, a bottom ledge with a beach umbrella on it, and another drop off.]\n[Caption below the panel:] I love swimming, but occasionally I realize I don't know how deep the water under me is and it freaks me out.\n","explanation":"This comic is about an irrational fear about the depth of water beneath oneself, also known as thalassophobia . Whenever you don't explicitly know how deep the water is, and cannot see the bottom, there is nothing preventing the sea\/lake\/riverbed from being exceptionally far away. This phenomenon is actually quite common with many bodies of water having a relatively shallow shelf extending a short ways out from land. These typically end with little to no warning, giving rise to the fear that is depicted here.\nIt is an irrational fear because if one is swimming, the depth of the water underneath is not important to safety as long as one can reliably get back to shore. (This fear may be due to excessively worrying about what happens if one stops swimming, thinking that walking should be safer because almost everyone spends more time walking than swimming, ignoring the fact that the safest thing to do in this case is to keep swimming.) If one is wading, presumably one would feel the bottom drop away. Following the safety saying \"Walk out, swim back\" would help avoid this situation.\nHere, Megan and Cueball are in in the ocean, with Cueball treading water and Megan standing on the seabed, with another girl in the water and another Cueball watching from the beach. Megan mentions that she can still touch bottom, thus thinking it is safe. In front of her however the seabed drops off steeply, becoming nearly vertical. Fish and jellyfish are in the water below, while at the bottom of the frame, but not the sea floor, a small ledge holds an octopus and a beach umbrella.\nThe beach umbrella may be from the beach, to give human scale. It could also be a Lemmings reference.\nThe title text alludes to the fact that humans live at or near the bottom of a vast sea of air: the atmosphere.  Every day, most people never rise far from the floor of the atmosphere.  However, this is nowhere near as perilous as descending to the bottom of a sea of water.  Indeed, surviving a rise to the top of the atmosphere requires life support measures.  Also, unlike in water, humans are far too dense to \"swim\" (fly) in the atmosphere.\n\n[The single panel comic is around 4 times higher than it is wide (317\u00d71284 pixels). A Cueball is watching from the beach while Megan with another character is standing neck deep in water near an extreme drop off (continental shelf?) and another Cueball is swimming further. This part of the comic is at the very top, and the characters are drawn much smaller than usual.]\nMegan: It's OK, I can still touch bottom here.\n[As the tall image is scrolled down, there are some deep water fish, a jellyfish, and an octopus, a bottom ledge with a beach umbrella on it, and another drop off.]\n[Caption below the panel:] I love swimming, but occasionally I realize I don't know how deep the water under me is and it freaks me out.\n"}
{"id":2156,"title":"Ufo","image_title":"Ufo","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2156","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ufo.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2156:_Ufo","transcript":"[Mulder from The X-Files depicted as Hairy sits in his office chair at his desk and points to his computer screen while looking over his shoulder and addressing Scully off-panel, who replies.] Mulder: Hey Scully, have you seen these Navy UFO videos? Scully (off-panel): Oh, the History Channel thing?\n[In a frame-less panel, Scully walks in from the right towards Mulder, who has turned around in his chair facing towards her (the desk is not included). He is leaning on the back of the chair with one arm. Scully has shoulder length hair, not similar to any of the regular women in xkcd.] Scully: I don't know about the other two videos, but in one of them, if you take the angles and ranges on the HUD and do a little geometry, it kind of suggests the object isn't really moving.  It just looks like it because the plane's camera is panning.\n[Zoom in on Scully.] Scully: The pilots got excited for the same reason we did.  Then the media got into it. Scully: But I think what they saw was a round, white object floating at 13,000 feet.\n[Zoom out again to shown that Mulder sits straight up in his chair with hands in his lap and the desk with computer behind him. Scully stand in front of him.] Mulder: So your theory is that the military claims to have footage of aliens, but you think it's a giant cover-up to hide that it's a weather balloon? Scully: Some kind of balloon, yes. Mulder: Pretty weird conspiracy. Scully: Maybe the shadowy forces that control the world just want to believe, too.\n","explanation":"This cartoon makes fun of conspiracy theories , by suggesting that authorities, like the Navy, could be promoting mysterious explanations for mundane phenomena (such as a weather balloon ).  UFO is an acronym for an unidentified flying object . This comic is most likely inspired by reports of US Navy pilots seeing unexplained objects. The \"History Channel thing\" could refer to this upcoming series .\nBy a weather balloon, it is possible they could mean Cory Doctorow 's balloon, which he has appeared in past comics with.\nThis comic features Fox Mulder and Dana Scully , two fictional FBI agents from the television show The X-Files . In the show, Mulder is usually a believer in all manner of conspiracies and supernatural phenomena, whereas his partner, Scully, is reflexively skeptical of any claims of the paranormal.\nA fighter aircraft's head-up display (HUD) projects information about the aircraft and its surroundings on a glass panel in front of the pilot. This allows the pilot to fly and fight without looking down at gauges and panels in the cockpit. When the pilot selects a radar contact to track, information including the angle and range to that contact is displayed on the HUD. The HUD is also overlaid on video recorded by the airplane's on-board camera. Scully has examined the tracking information recorded in one video and concluded that the unidentified object was relatively stationary. Her opinion is that the object is likely a mundane weather balloon, rather than an extraterrestrial craft.\n\"Maybe the shadowy forces that control the world just want to believe\" is an allusion to \"I Want to Believe\", a phrase from the The X-Files associated with Mulder and his iconic UFO poster.\nThe title text also contains critique about governments that fail to acknowledge the severity of humanity-induced (anthropogenic) climate change and use their influence to actively hide evidence (such as the US government till 2021 that ordered US government agencies to stop or minimize research and reporting on climate change ), which even by Mulder's standards seems too crazy for a conspiracy, yet happens in reality.\nThe government wanting to cover up a balloon to the point of allowing people to think it was aliens supposedly did happen, as documents declassified in the 90's revealed the existence of a top secret project to use high altitude spy balloons to detect evidence of Soviet nuclear tests, known as \" Project Mogul .\"  One of these balloons was the source of the debris in the famous Roswell incident .  To maintain secrecy, the government claimed it was instead a weather balloon despite this not being quite consistent with the descriptions of the debris, and how they didn't make an effort to properly refute things when 30 years later UFO enthusiasts started claiming it was an alien spaceship (the whole incident was quite obscure and quickly forgotten until someone published some claims about the events decades later, in 1978).\n[Mulder from The X-Files depicted as Hairy sits in his office chair at his desk and points to his computer screen while looking over his shoulder and addressing Scully off-panel, who replies.] Mulder: Hey Scully, have you seen these Navy UFO videos? Scully (off-panel): Oh, the History Channel thing?\n[In a frame-less panel, Scully walks in from the right towards Mulder, who has turned around in his chair facing towards her (the desk is not included). He is leaning on the back of the chair with one arm. Scully has shoulder length hair, not similar to any of the regular women in xkcd.] Scully: I don't know about the other two videos, but in one of them, if you take the angles and ranges on the HUD and do a little geometry, it kind of suggests the object isn't really moving.  It just looks like it because the plane's camera is panning.\n[Zoom in on Scully.] Scully: The pilots got excited for the same reason we did.  Then the media got into it. Scully: But I think what they saw was a round, white object floating at 13,000 feet.\n[Zoom out again to shown that Mulder sits straight up in his chair with hands in his lap and the desk with computer behind him. Scully stand in front of him.] Mulder: So your theory is that the military claims to have footage of aliens, but you think it's a giant cover-up to hide that it's a weather balloon? Scully: Some kind of balloon, yes. Mulder: Pretty weird conspiracy. Scully: Maybe the shadowy forces that control the world just want to believe, too.\n"}
{"id":2157,"title":"Diploma Legal Notes","image_title":"Diploma Legal Notes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2157","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/diploma_legal_notes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2157:_Diploma_Legal_Notes","transcript":"[An official document with a title at the top between two images of graduation hats on either side:]\nCongratulations, Class of 2019!\nYour diploma grants you many new powers and privileges. These include: You may now legally perform marriages and arrest people. If you have your diploma with you, you can use grocery store express lanes with any number of items. All graduates are entitled to delete one word of their choice from the Oxford English Dictionary. The university will mail you your working lightsaber within 6-8 weeks. You can send mail without stamps. You have earned the right to challenge the British royal family to trial by combat. If you defeat them all, the throne is yours. You may now ignore \"Do Not Pet\" warnings on airport security dogs.\n","explanation":"A class of 2019 graduate, presumably for some college or university, is given some rather unusual privileges for graduating.\nA common line in degree granting ceremonies is \"the degree of X is conferred with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.\" This dates from the Roman Empire and continued through the rise of the university as an institution in medieval times. In the Roman era, the rights and privileges accorded to physicians and scholars included exemption from certain civic duties and military services, immunity from certain levies and from being summoned to court unduly, and even granting a state salary. In the medieval era, rights generally mirrored those of ecclesiastical figures and included immunity from civil law (instead scholars were subject to canon, or church law), as well as safe conduct on their travels between jurisdictions.\nWhile true that some degrees do grant professional privileges today, generally additional accreditation beyond the degree is required (passing the bar, medical certification, etc.) to gain anything most people would consider a privilege or right or incur any obligation. (The obligation to pay your student loans back exists regardless of completing your degree).\nYou may now legally perform marriages and arrest people. Depending on the jurisdiction, these may or may not be privileges that one already has by virtue of being in a particular jurisdiction or being part of a particular culture.\nIn some cultures, a couple might be recognized as married if they meet certain conditions (as opposed to being legally recognized by a religious or civil authority), such as being recognized by the community or after the birth of their first child . Because states often provide benefits (tax reductions, social services, etc) for being married, they often require that, in order to receive the benefits, that a marriage have a registered person recognize the marriage, which is likely the privilege that this graduating class' diploma is supposedly granting.\nIn common law jurisdictions, citizen's arrest is legal without a warrant in some situations, although in many cases, it is better to let a police officer arrest criminals due to potential legal and safety issues that might arise. The privilege granted by graduating might grant or extend this privilege, depending on where the graduating class is located.\nIf you have your diploma with you, you can use grocery store express lanes with any number of items. It has become common for a small number of checkout lanes of a larger store to be explicitly reserved as \"express\" lanes for the use of those with, for example, fewer than 10 items. This lets someone with a few items (handheld, in a basket, or possibly in a low-capacity cart) who will pass through quickly avoid being held up by people purchasing larger numbers of items who will take longer.\nIn some cases, shoppers may try to argue the true meaning of \"fewer than N items\" in their favor, for example by arguing that \"3 for the price of 2\" promotions should only count as two items. The prevailing interpretation of \"express\" may be driven by the opinion of the surrounding shoppers who are also queuing for an express checkout lane and who may express displeasure at the taking of such liberties.\nWhether or not it is genuinely more beneficial to have the privilege of using the express lane with any number of items is arguable due to various complex factors, but the new holder of the diploma (who is, ironically, now possibly capable of defining the number of items more rigorously depending upon the academic subject just mastered) need not concern themselves with counting the number of items in their basket or ever needing to wait behind slow shoppers ever again (provided they always carry their diploma with them when they do their shopping).\nAll graduates are entitled to delete one word of their choice from the Oxford English Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press. It is unclear what benefit deleting a word from the OED would provide, and doing so would prevent anyone else from looking up the word which would typically be seen as a disadvantage. As the OED is often used as an authority on which words are valid words in the English language (for example for word games such as Countdown ), perhaps the intention is that such \"deleted\" words are in fact removed from the English language itself.  For example, Lake Superior State University has an annual tradition of publishing a list of \"banished words\" that they consider to be overused.\nA different interpretation is the right to delete literally one word from the text of the dictionary. While mostly useless, it could be used to alter some definitions, removing some details or even completely reversing the meaning by deleting \"not\".\nThe OED contains around 228000 words . Given that US universities and colleges alone are expected to award around 1.9 million bachelor's degrees each year, this policy could lead to a rapid collapse of the OED.\nThe university will mail you your working lightsaber within 6-8 weeks. Doctoral degree recipients wear various forms of dress or other items. For example, in Finland a doctoral sword is traditional. A lightsaber is a fictional weapon from the Star Wars universe which is used in a manner similar to a sword but which would likely be highly-regulated if it did exist in the real world due to its extreme power (in Star Wars, lightsabers are capable of cutting or burning through most materials and is only stopped by few things such as another lightsaber).  Building a lightsaber is an important part of becoming a Jedi Knight, but Apprentices must find and assemble the parts themselves as part of their training and education; the only lightsabers they are given by the Temple are low-powered training lightsabers.\n\"6-8 weeks\" is a meme made popular on Stack Overflow meaning that the person making the estimate has no idea how long something is actually going to take or whether it's even going to happen at all.\nYou can send mail without stamps. The franking privilege allows sending mail without stamps and is often granted to legislators conducting \"official business.\" A group of legislators elected at the same time may sometimes be referred to as the \"class of year \" (such as \"the congressional freshman class of 2019...\" ), which may be seen as a parallel to a year of graduates from a university.\nYou have earned the right to challenge the British royal family to trial by combat . If you defeat them all, the throne is yours. \"Trial by combat\" or \"ritual combat\" was a manner to settle disputes where two individuals would engage in a duel, with the winner being declared right. This type of ritual combat was depicted in the film Black Panther , with the winner of the combat declared the king of Wakanda. T'Challa, the Black Panther, was victorious in a fight against M'Baku, but was defeated by Erik Killmonger.\nThe British royal family consists of the descendants and relatives of the current Queen, Queen Elizabeth II. However, the line of succession to the throne consists of potentially over 4,000 individuals; it is possible that a challenger would have to duel all of them, starting at the bottom of the line. The British royal family was also referenced in 2003: Presidential Succession .\nYou may now ignore \"Do Not Pet\" warnings on airport security dogs. Security dogs are typically used in airports for the purpose of identifying explosives, drugs, or other prohibited items by smell. Although these dogs often work in private areas of the airport, they may sometimes be seen in public areas.\nSince dogs, in most western societies, are primarily kept as pets, it's a common reaction to want to interact playfully with the animals. This is prohibited for security dogs for multiple reasons. Petting the dog can distract it and otherwise prevent it from carrying out its job. In some cases the dogs may be aggressive to unsolicited contact. Criminals might deliberately attempt to distract or even poison security dogs to prevent detection. As such, the dogs typically carry a warning to not pet them and someone who ignores the warning will likely be detained for questioning. However, according to this comic, the holder of the diploma is supposedly permitted to pet such dogs with no consequences, despite the warnings.\nThe title text builds on the items about lightsabers and the British royal family and advises that, because several of the younger royals also have diplomas, they have received their lightsaber already. Thus you should wait at least the 6-8 weeks until your lightsaber arrives to have a fair chance, given that lightsabers is a very lethal weapon. Also some of them may even be proficient with the weapon. Special mention goes to Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge , aka Kate Middleton, who was supposedly on the varsity lightsaber team at St Andrews .\n[An official document with a title at the top between two images of graduation hats on either side:]\nCongratulations, Class of 2019!\nYour diploma grants you many new powers and privileges. These include: You may now legally perform marriages and arrest people. If you have your diploma with you, you can use grocery store express lanes with any number of items. All graduates are entitled to delete one word of their choice from the Oxford English Dictionary. The university will mail you your working lightsaber within 6-8 weeks. You can send mail without stamps. You have earned the right to challenge the British royal family to trial by combat. If you defeat them all, the throne is yours. You may now ignore \"Do Not Pet\" warnings on airport security dogs.\n"}
{"id":2158,"title":"Qualifiers","image_title":"Qualifiers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2158","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/qualifiers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2158:_Qualifiers","transcript":"[Cueball is standing next to White Hat.] Cueball: Ok, so, listen, the thing is, well, like, I'm just saying, and maybe it's just me, but, I mean, here's the thing, I could be way off here, but, look, I gotta say,\n[Caption below the panel:] When I forget what I was going to say, I just keep prefixing qualifiers until I think of something new.\n","explanation":"This comic shows how qualifiers , which are usually used when the person speaking is concerned about offending their conversational partner, may also be used to delay saying something when a person is nervous or loses their train of thought momentarily. Again, this is a comic related to social interactions and especially displaying that Cueball\/Randall has problems coping with simple social norms.\nIn this comic, Cueball is talking with White Hat . Cueball has lost his original train of thought during a conversation, so he keeps using qualifiers until he comes up with something to say. Here he has used more than a dozen common qualifiers, including \"OK\", \"so\", \"listen\", \"like\", and \"but\". The title text says that after 20 minutes he says \"hi\", a reversal of expectations and a comedic play on how there was a huge buildup to something insignificant. He simply couldn't think of something new to say, and \"hi\" was the best he could come up with. White Hat presumably kept listening, although normal people would stop Cueball well before this. [ citation needed ]\nWhile this scenario has probably happened to many people some time in their life, it is highly unlikely that one would keep on for such an extensive amount of time. It is also highly unlikely that the listener would have such patience to keep listening to this endless stream of qualifiers, although it actually fits in White Hat's unusual mentality.\n[Cueball is standing next to White Hat.] Cueball: Ok, so, listen, the thing is, well, like, I'm just saying, and maybe it's just me, but, I mean, here's the thing, I could be way off here, but, look, I gotta say,\n[Caption below the panel:] When I forget what I was going to say, I just keep prefixing qualifiers until I think of something new.\n"}
{"id":2159,"title":"Comments","image_title":"Comments","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2159","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/comments.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2159:_Comments","transcript":"[Single panel comic depicting a screenshot of an Internet article, showing the article title, lines of wavy characters representing the article text, and several comments from readers of the article with their profile pictures.]\nBacklash: Internet users are outraged over news stories using a handful of random comments to support arbitrary narratives!\n[Close-up of Megan:] I can't believe how easy it is to create an impression of peer consensus.\n[Close-up of Hairy:] This dynamic is so easily manipulated and it freaks me out. xkcd.com\/1019\n[Full picture of Hairbun:] Everytime I share something and a friend responds \"Haha, did you see the top comments...\" it just reminds me how influential these things are in shaping the impressions of even relatively internet-savvy readers.\n[Close-up of Cueball on a black background:] NPR got rid of comments in 2016 when they realized they all came from a handful of visitors posting hundreds of times a month.\n[Full picture of two guys, Cueball and Hairy:] Eventually social norms will adapt to this stuff, but it needs to hurry up.\n[Close-up of Ponytail:] I have nine followers and created my account last month; how am I being quoted in this news article??\nOne of the comments to the article references an earlier xkcd comic 1019: First Post , which compares the cost of buying election ads on news sites versus paying college student to wait for news articles and submit the first comments to every news article.\n","explanation":"This comic represents a news article that bemoans how sometimes lazy journalists will, instead of taking time to research the genuine public opinion on a certain issue, simply cherry pick comments as evidence to support their thesis. The irony is that the article is likely basing its own narrative of outrage among Internet users on random comments as well. For example, an anonymous Twitter account from Northern Ireland with 159 followers got used as an example in the first paragraph of a NY Times article about how U.S. Millennials think.\nThe commenters create the narrative here, by pointing out how easy it is for commenters to push a point of view, and how little editorial control or fact checking there is in such a process.  The final commenter reveals that the article itself is cherry picking from a handful of random comments to support its arbitrary narrative of internet outrage, proving the real joke.\nThe link in one of the comments is to 1019: First Post , which also refers to manipulating comments to change public opinion of a topic. It specifically mentions \"creating an impression of peer consensus\", a line which is near-quoted in the first comment included in this comic.\nAnother comment mentions a National Public Radio (\"NPR\") decision to remove comments from their website in 2016 because they represented only a tiny fraction of their readers. The statement released by NPR suggested they had decided to use social media channels to engage readers instead of using an on-site commenting system.\nThe last of the comments may be from the user \"Mary\" who, in the NPR article, was explicitly cited to have said that the comments have been too violent. But it is unclear how this is possible given that this article claims to have been published after the comments having been turned off. This may also be a reference to 1303: Profile Info , as both of the characters would decrease the efficiency of the ad\/article by being chosen as a quote.\nThe title text refers to the ability to edit webpages using in-browser tools, like \"Inspect Element.\" However, such changes are temporary and only on the machine used for viewing the web site; anyone else loading the page will not see them, and refreshing the page causes the changes to be replaced with the real content. This would mean that no other users would be able to see the comments, and news sources could not use them to influence public opinion.\n[Single panel comic depicting a screenshot of an Internet article, showing the article title, lines of wavy characters representing the article text, and several comments from readers of the article with their profile pictures.]\nBacklash: Internet users are outraged over news stories using a handful of random comments to support arbitrary narratives!\n[Close-up of Megan:] I can't believe how easy it is to create an impression of peer consensus.\n[Close-up of Hairy:] This dynamic is so easily manipulated and it freaks me out. xkcd.com\/1019\n[Full picture of Hairbun:] Everytime I share something and a friend responds \"Haha, did you see the top comments...\" it just reminds me how influential these things are in shaping the impressions of even relatively internet-savvy readers.\n[Close-up of Cueball on a black background:] NPR got rid of comments in 2016 when they realized they all came from a handful of visitors posting hundreds of times a month.\n[Full picture of two guys, Cueball and Hairy:] Eventually social norms will adapt to this stuff, but it needs to hurry up.\n[Close-up of Ponytail:] I have nine followers and created my account last month; how am I being quoted in this news article??\nOne of the comments to the article references an earlier xkcd comic 1019: First Post , which compares the cost of buying election ads on news sites versus paying college student to wait for news articles and submit the first comments to every news article.\n"}
{"id":2160,"title":"Ken Burns Theory","image_title":"Ken Burns Theory","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2160","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ken_burns_theory.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2160:_Ken_Burns_Theory","transcript":"[Cueball is standing next to Megan.] Cueball: Lincoln was \"President\" in The Civil War (1990), the same office held by Johnson in The Vietnam War (2017). Cueball: And Baseball (1994) briefly showed 1960s \"protesters.\" I think they were protesting Johnson's war! Cueball: It all fits!\n[Caption below the panel:] I have a fan theory that every Ken Burns miniseries exists within a single cohesive universe.\n","explanation":"Some fiction writers and filmmakers set some (or all) of their works in a common, or shared, universe , meaning that characters in one work can conceivably meet characters in another work via conventional travel. Often, it's unmentioned or even outright denied that two distinct works take place in the same universe, but nevertheless  fans may try to find a way to relate them to a common storyline (such as the examples of fan theories described in this Mental Floss article ).\nKen Burns is an American filmmaker renowned for his historical documentaries; thus, all his documentary series are set in a common universe - namely, the real one - and usually the setting is a small part of that (real) universe: the United States in the last two centuries. The series mentioned are\nThe joke here is that Cueball is trying to find the common features between Ken Burns' series to set them in a common universe, as a fiction fan would do, \"discovering\" similarities between series that are simply facts in American history. For example, several series have an office named \"President\", which Cueball \"guesses\" to be the same for Lincoln and Johnson , and which obviously is just the President of the United States . Cueball has also drawn inferences from facts established in one series to draw conclusions about another, when he ( correctly ) concludes that the 1960s protesters depicted in Baseball were protesting \"Johnson's war\" as depicted in The Vietnam War .\nThe title text continues the joke by saying these stories are set in the \"KBCU\", an acronym which stands for \"Ken Burns Cinematic Universe\" similar to the popular Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).\nDoris Kearns Goodwin , mentioned in the title text, is a famous historian who has written biographies of several U.S. Presidents. She is also a fan of baseball's Boston Red Sox and a sportswriter who appeared in the Baseball miniseries. Cueball states that having a character that had written biographies of both presidents, while also a sportswriter was \"unrealistic\". It's not uncommon for writers trying to fit different stories into a single 'universe' to cause a single character to become important in both, even though it makes little narrative sense. This can be denounced as \"trying too hard\" to fit the stories together.\nFinding that certain aspects of reality seems unrealistic is quite common . This is because our judgment of realism is based on our own experiences and our (often flawed) perception of probabilities.  Because the complexities of the world generally exceed any person's experience, and because it's natural for highly unlikely events to occur sometimes, real events can seem implausible. In this case, people tend to think of sports journalism and political biography as being very different fields. The odds that one person would do work in both fields important enough to be relevant to all three documentaries under discussion feels unlikely. As a result, we (or rather, Cueball) deem it as unrealistic, even though it actually happened.\n[Cueball is standing next to Megan.] Cueball: Lincoln was \"President\" in The Civil War (1990), the same office held by Johnson in The Vietnam War (2017). Cueball: And Baseball (1994) briefly showed 1960s \"protesters.\" I think they were protesting Johnson's war! Cueball: It all fits!\n[Caption below the panel:] I have a fan theory that every Ken Burns miniseries exists within a single cohesive universe.\n"}
{"id":2161,"title":"An Apple a Day","image_title":"An Apple a Day","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2161","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/an_apple_a_day.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2161:_An_Apple_a_Day","transcript":"[Megan is facing straight out of a slim panel as she stands behind a lectern addressing the reader.] Megan: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Megan: Or at least, it used to.\n[The comic zooms out revealing that Megan and the lectern are standing on a podium. Megan is pointing behind her, with a stick, to at a poster prominently featuring Doctor Ponytail with three apples over her head.] Megan: Over time, some doctors have developed a resistance to apples. Keeping them away takes two or three apples instead of one. Megan: And there are worrying signs that a few doctors may have become completely immune.\n[The comic zooms in again on Megan behind the lectern.] Megan: So we must stockpile our finest apples in reserve, using them to fend off only the very worst doctors. Megan: Honeycrisps still work on most of them, but we don't know for how long.\n","explanation":"\" An apple a day keeps the doctor away \" is a common English proverb and rhyme . The suggestion is that eating one apple daily will keep you healthy, and therefore reduce your necessity to go to the doctor or, more literally, to have the doctor come to you as was likely the case when this proverb was first used.\nMegan is giving a talk, starting with the common proverb, before continuing with \"At least, it used to.\" In a normal scenario, this might have been to imply that eating apples is no longer enough to stay healthy. However, in this comic, this expression is reinterpreted to mean that an apple used to repel a doctor. It also suggests that keeping doctors away is of great importance, presumably because doctors in this scenario are undesirable. The method of action of apples is not specified; they could act as repellents, analogous to insect repellent , or possibly as lethal agents, as antibiotics are to bacteria , or fungicides are to fungi .\nMegan continues with her reinterpretation, mentioning that doctors have become resistant to apples so two or even three may be needed. As control agents become more widely used, organisms which are less sensitive to the control may become more common, as is happening with mosquitoes becoming insensitive to repellents , or antimicrobial resistance , and pesticide resistance .  Such resistant organisms may require higher doses, or use of multiple control agents.\nIn the worst cases, doctors have become completely immune to apples (i.e., superbugs ). A poster behind Megan shows Doctor Ponytail with three apples above her. Megan advocates using the 'finest' apples only in these cases (a reference to multidrug-resistant pathogens , where some antibiotics are only used as a last-resort to reduce the development of resistance to them).\nThis comic is a clear reference to the overuse of antibiotics in modern society, leading to an increase in antimicrobial resistance (\"Superbugs\"), which has seen increasing awareness in the last few years. The World Health Organization had the first Antibiotic Awareness Week in 2015, where a talk similar to the one in the comic would seem appropriate.  Similar problems occur in growing plants, where various pests (whether insect, fungi, microbes, or plants) adapt to control measures, making control less effective.\nIn the title text, this is taken further: \"Gran-negative\" is a pun on Gram-negative , a category of bacteria. A well-known technique called Gram staining distinguishes two classes of bacteria (Gram positive versus Gram negative) on the basis of properties of their cell walls. In this case, Granny Smith apples are supposedly effective against Gran-positive doctors (since the name begins with \"Gran\"), making them ineffective against new Gran-negative doctors.\nHoneycrisp and Granny Smith are two different cultivars of apples. Granny Smith apples are a refreshingly tart green apple, which have mixed reviews among apple eaters. Conversely, Honeycrisp are a very sweet apple, considered by some to be \"an ideal apple for eating raw\", and is the state fruit of Minnesota.\n[Megan is facing straight out of a slim panel as she stands behind a lectern addressing the reader.] Megan: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Megan: Or at least, it used to.\n[The comic zooms out revealing that Megan and the lectern are standing on a podium. Megan is pointing behind her, with a stick, to at a poster prominently featuring Doctor Ponytail with three apples over her head.] Megan: Over time, some doctors have developed a resistance to apples. Keeping them away takes two or three apples instead of one. Megan: And there are worrying signs that a few doctors may have become completely immune.\n[The comic zooms in again on Megan behind the lectern.] Megan: So we must stockpile our finest apples in reserve, using them to fend off only the very worst doctors. Megan: Honeycrisps still work on most of them, but we don't know for how long.\n"}
{"id":2162,"title":"Literary Opinions","image_title":"Literary Opinions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2162","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/literary_opinions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2162:_Literary_Opinions","transcript":"[Megan is walking with a finger raised toward Cueball, who is seated in a chair with a book.] Megan: Literary opinion: Megan: I firmly believe that William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Chuck Palahniuk, and David Foster Wallace are different names for the same person. Cueball: ...I see.\n[Megan puts down her hand.] Megan: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fight Club ? Same book with different covers, I bet. Cueball: I have both. Want to open them and check? Megan: I do not.\n[Cueball turns back to his book.] Megan: Moving on: my next opinion-- Cueball: You should start a book club for discussing the books you refuse to read. Megan: --is that E.B. White and T.H. White are the same person. Cueball: Ok, that I believe.\n","explanation":"Megan is telling Cueball about some of her literary opinions: She believes that William S. Burroughs , Hunter S. Thompson , Chuck Palahniuk , and David Foster Wallace are different names for the same person. Many authors write under pen names for some of their works, or even several different pen names.  Sometimes people come to believe that different people are actually a same person, which is known as the Fregoli delusion ; the person is usually believed to change appearance.\nShe then says that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (by Thompson) and Fight Club (by Palahniuk) are the same book with different covers, probably because the title and promotional images for both hint at fighting taking place in a big city (i.e., she is literally judging the books by their covers ), when in reality the books are vastly different. Books sometimes have different covers and titles in different regions . That said, Fight Club does contain a plot twist where two \"different\" things turn out to be the same thing (see 109: Spoiler Alert for more information).\nCueball's attempt at a reality check (proposing to actually open the books she is talking about) is met with disinterest. It becomes clear that Megan just wants to share her weird beliefs and does not care if they can be proven false - a theme that previously appeared in 1717: Pyramid Honey .\nAs a last resort, Cueball humorously proposes she should start a book club to discuss the books she has not read. This may be to congregate all people who criticize books without reading them, or in hopes that it will be attended by people who have read the book and can prove to Megan her opinions are baseless.\nMegan finishes telling him her opinion anyway, which is that E.B. White and T.H. White are the same person. This is apparently an opinion that Cueball can agree with, as he tells her that he believes it. This is likely a joke that the two names are hard to distinguish due to the having the same last name with only initials instead of a first name. In reality, the books they authored are very different, with E.B. White writing children's books ( Charlotte's Web , Stuart Little , etc.) and T.H. White writing adult books about King Arthur ( The Sword in the Stone and its sequels), although his works were adapted into a Disney movie so they could, to some degree, be considered children's books.\nThe title text continues with this, with Megan saying that she can distinguish between John Steinbeck and John Updike , or between Gore Vidal and Vidal Sassoon , but she can't do so simultaneously. Again this is likely due to the similarities in their names. However, John Steinbeck and John Updike are also easy to confuse because they are both giants of 20th century American literature, whereas Gore Vidal has almost nothing in common with Vidal Sassoon (see chart below).\nAdditionally, the mention of simultaneity could be a nod to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle , which states that there is a trade-off in precision when simultaneously measuring position and momentum. It could also be a nod to how the brain cannot simultaneously interpret two different things at once, similar to looking at the Rabbit-duck illusion ; at any moment, one can only see a duck or a rabbit in the image, but not both at exactly the same time.\n[Megan is walking with a finger raised toward Cueball, who is seated in a chair with a book.] Megan: Literary opinion: Megan: I firmly believe that William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Chuck Palahniuk, and David Foster Wallace are different names for the same person. Cueball: ...I see.\n[Megan puts down her hand.] Megan: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fight Club ? Same book with different covers, I bet. Cueball: I have both. Want to open them and check? Megan: I do not.\n[Cueball turns back to his book.] Megan: Moving on: my next opinion-- Cueball: You should start a book club for discussing the books you refuse to read. Megan: --is that E.B. White and T.H. White are the same person. Cueball: Ok, that I believe.\n"}
{"id":2163,"title":"Chernobyl","image_title":"Chernobyl","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2163","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chernobyl.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2163:_Chernobyl","transcript":"[Ponytail and White Hat facing each other.] Ponytail: Did you like Chernobyl ? White Hat: Yeah! White Hat: But I still don't understand the meltdown. Can you explain it...simpler?\n[Zoom in to closeup of Ponytail holding one hand out with palm up, with White Hat off-panel to the right.] Ponytail: Well, the graphite\u2013 White Hat (off-panel): Already too complicated. Ponytail: Uh...they put the reactor in an unstable\u2013 White Hat (off-panel): Nope, sorry.\n[Zoom back out to full view of Ponytail and White Hat, with Ponytail holding hand to her chin.] Ponytail: Hmm, ok. Ponytail: Long ago, humans banged rocks together to make fire. White Hat: Ok...\n[Full view of Ponytail and White Hat, who has both hands held straight out to both sides.] Ponytail: 30 years ago, we banged some rocks together too hard. White Hat: Oh no! Ponytail: Yeah, we messed up real bad.\n","explanation":"Ponytail and White Hat discuss the HBO miniseries Chernobyl which depicts the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown and the fact that none of them needs to state that they refer to the series, not to the power plant shows the impact the miniseries had on language, at least at this time. White Hat asks Ponytail for an explanation of how the meltdown occurred, but his understanding of science is so limited that he finds even the first part of the first sentence of Ponytail's explanation too complicated to understand.\nPonytail starts explaining the role of graphite in the reactor's core as the neutron moderator, but White Hat immediately interrupts her, as if he doesn't understand the word graphite . Ponytail tries starting the explanation from another angle, stating that the nuclear reactor was inadvertently put in an unstable state moments before the disaster, but White Hat interrupts again. Realizing that White Hat does not understand what a reactor is, even though the reactor is the entire subject of the reactor meltdown, Ponytail resolves to use plain words every person should know, and to employ a metaphor.\nShe compares the purpose of a nuclear reactor as a heat-generating device to primitive humans' way of heating by starting a fire. She goes on describing how a fire can be started by banging rocks (pieces of flint) to create sparks, which in turn would light a fire. Seeing that White Hat understands this simple activity, she compares starting a runaway nuclear fission reaction to banging rocks too hard, presumably splitting or crushing them and injuring the wielder.\nNuclear reactions are often simplistically described and illustratively pictured as forcibly colliding colored balls representing various nuclear particles or nuclei, resulting in creating other balls, joining some into bigger ones, or splitting some into smaller ones. Fission reaction, in particular, involves a neutron causing a heavy nucleus to split into smaller parts, including more neutrons, that may cause further splits, and so on. To facilitate nuclear reactions, particles need to carry great amounts of energy as compared to their tiny sizes and masses. This may evoke a mental image of hitting rocks too hard so they split.\nAlternatively, banging some rocks too hard may suggest to a person not entirely familiar with the process of starting fire by the use of flint, that instead of providing small sparks and lighting a controlled fire by striking flint moderately, overdoing it may create a huge uncontrolled fire \u2013 and it is what has happened in Chernobyl, a huge fire caused by reactor overheat and subsequent explosion and core meltdown, with additional harmful effect of spreading radioactive particles over large area by the fire's fumes.\nThe title text explains the cause of the accident using an analogy with the volume of an audio system. To sustain a controlled nuclear fission chain reaction, various mechanisms are involved in controlling the level of neutrons produced and consumed by the nuclear fuel. Due to various design flaws and operation errors leading up to the Chernobyl disaster, the reactor core was producing less heat than desired by the reactor operators, who were preparing to conduct a simulated power outage experiment. To increase heat production, the operators pulled out almost all available control rods without diagnosing the cause first, akin to turning the volume knob to maximum on a sound system while there was no signal on input because of some condition independent from volume setting and not readily recognized by the operator. Then the commencement of the experiment, which reduced the coolant water supply, further enhanced the positive feedback loop of the neutron production. Seeing a rapid rise in the power output, the operators began an emergency shutdown. A critical design flaw of the reactor caused the neutron production to increase temporarily in the reactor once the emergency shutdown started in this condition, which resulted in a runaway reaction caused by the multiple positive feedback loops taking place, ending up with dramatic increase of generated heat, coolant water rapidly boiling, steam explosion breaching the pressure vessel and breaking the coolant lines, and melting of the reactor core. The extreme heat of the melted core caused remaining water to split, and the accumulated hydrogen finally caused a chemical explosion that finally destroyed the reactor. Per the title text, this is analogous to a input signal returning to normal on a sound system that has the volume turned all the way up, creating a \"deafening blast of sound.\"\n[Ponytail and White Hat facing each other.] Ponytail: Did you like Chernobyl ? White Hat: Yeah! White Hat: But I still don't understand the meltdown. Can you explain it...simpler?\n[Zoom in to closeup of Ponytail holding one hand out with palm up, with White Hat off-panel to the right.] Ponytail: Well, the graphite\u2013 White Hat (off-panel): Already too complicated. Ponytail: Uh...they put the reactor in an unstable\u2013 White Hat (off-panel): Nope, sorry.\n[Zoom back out to full view of Ponytail and White Hat, with Ponytail holding hand to her chin.] Ponytail: Hmm, ok. Ponytail: Long ago, humans banged rocks together to make fire. White Hat: Ok...\n[Full view of Ponytail and White Hat, who has both hands held straight out to both sides.] Ponytail: 30 years ago, we banged some rocks together too hard. White Hat: Oh no! Ponytail: Yeah, we messed up real bad.\n"}
{"id":2164,"title":"Glacier","image_title":"Glacier","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2164","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/glacier.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2164:_Glacier","transcript":"[Knit Cap and Beret Guy are standing to the left of a glacier.] Knit cap person: Glaciers are so neat. You can't see it, but this ice is slowly advancing.\n[Zoom in on Beret Guy, who has his hand to his mouth, thinking.]\n[Zoomed in, Beret Guy exits to the left of the panel.]\n[Beret Guy enters the panel from the left, carrying two fencing sabres.]\n[Beret Guy uses a blow dryer to attach one of the sabres to the glacier.] Whirrrr [Beret Guy is holding the blow dryer and looks at the sabre that is attached to the glacier.]\n[Beret Guy stands in a defensive position with sabre in hand, ready to defend against the \"advancing\" glacier.]\nThe author of The Sword in the Stone , T. H. White, was mentioned two comics ago in 2162: Literary Opinions .","explanation":"A glacier is a wall of dense ice. Though glaciers tend to appear still, they are actually slowly moving, typically by around 10 inches (25 cm)\/day.\nBeret Guy and Knit Cap are facing the forward edge of a glacier. Knit Cap wearing a knit cap remarks that glaciers are amazing, mentioning the fact that though we can't see it, the ice is slowly advancing. After considering this, Beret Guy leaves, then returns with two sabres and a hairdryer. He uses the hairdryer to melt a part of the glacier, which he then attaches a sabre to. This use of the hair dryer may be another example of Beret Guy's strange powers , since the dryer does not appear to be plugged into anything. After he attaches the sabre to the glacier, he then takes a defensive position. \"Advancing\" is a basic forward movement in fencing, and Beret Guy appears to feel it is unfair for the glacier not to have a weapon.\nThe title text refers to The Sword in the Stone , a famous sword in the legends of King Arthur, and Norway , a country known for its glaciers. In the original legend, the sword is set into solid rock, and enchanted so that only the true King could draw it out. The legend has been alluded to in a previous comic . The title text might be making any of several implications about a Norwegian adaptation, including:\n[Knit Cap and Beret Guy are standing to the left of a glacier.] Knit cap person: Glaciers are so neat. You can't see it, but this ice is slowly advancing.\n[Zoom in on Beret Guy, who has his hand to his mouth, thinking.]\n[Zoomed in, Beret Guy exits to the left of the panel.]\n[Beret Guy enters the panel from the left, carrying two fencing sabres.]\n[Beret Guy uses a blow dryer to attach one of the sabres to the glacier.] Whirrrr [Beret Guy is holding the blow dryer and looks at the sabre that is attached to the glacier.]\n[Beret Guy stands in a defensive position with sabre in hand, ready to defend against the \"advancing\" glacier.]\nThe author of The Sword in the Stone , T. H. White, was mentioned two comics ago in 2162: Literary Opinions ."}
{"id":2165,"title":"Millennials","image_title":"Millennials","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2165","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/millennials.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2165:_Millennials","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: I'm just saying\u2013 White Hat: All these millennials will be in for a shock when they have to grow up and enter the real world.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head and upper body.] Cueball: Except... Cueball: \"Millennials\" started reaching adulthood about 20 years ago.\n[Zoom out to full view of White Hat and Cueball facing each other in a frameless panel.] Cueball: Which means that some millennials can't respond to your criticism because they're busy taking their kids to check out colleges.\n[White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: But ...no, millennials are college kids! Cueball: Maybe they're not the ones failing to grow and change over time here.\n","explanation":"According to the definitive chronology of generations , millennials are born between 1982 and 1999. Those born in 1982 reached adulthood (18 years) in 2000. As of writing of this comic (mid 2019), this is about 20 years ago. When the term became widespread around 2012, replacing the previous term \"Generation Y\", the average millennial was 21 years old, so the image was popularized of millennials as \"college kids\". The parlance of the word in everyday usage seems to be expanding so that it now includes not just those that were originally Gen Y, but also some younger Gen Xers, as well as current teens and college kids (many of whom are actually Gen Z\/Generation \ud83d\udc85).\nIn this strip, White Hat expresses a sentiment of prejudice against millennials, claiming they aren\u2019t prepared for \u201cthe real world.\u201d This is a sentiment that sometimes can be found among those of older generations.\nHowever, Cueball refutes this by saying that many millennials have been adults for almost 20 years, and those that had kids early on are taking them to college. This is due to another common misunderstanding, where the definition of \u201cmillennial\u201d has changed so much, and expanded so often, that nobody really knows what it means anymore.\nWhite Hat refuses to accept this, saying millennials are the college kids, to which Cueball says that maybe White Hat is the one not growing up and accepting that millennials are, in fact, adults. The title text builds on this, complaining that Randall has been having these discussions for over a decade.\nThe title text begins with the word \"ironically,\" for what appears to be an entirely sincere complaint, possibly in reference to Alanis Morissette's pop song \" Ironic ,\" which is often said to be a generation-defining hit among millennials, and which was widely criticized for misusing the word. Alternatively, Randall may simply be using \"ironically\" to mean \"strangely\".\nWhite Hat has been similarly confused by what ages different generations are in 973: MTV Generation .\n[White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: I'm just saying\u2013 White Hat: All these millennials will be in for a shock when they have to grow up and enter the real world.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head and upper body.] Cueball: Except... Cueball: \"Millennials\" started reaching adulthood about 20 years ago.\n[Zoom out to full view of White Hat and Cueball facing each other in a frameless panel.] Cueball: Which means that some millennials can't respond to your criticism because they're busy taking their kids to check out colleges.\n[White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: But ...no, millennials are college kids! Cueball: Maybe they're not the ones failing to grow and change over time here.\n"}
{"id":2166,"title":"Stack","image_title":"Stack","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2166","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stack.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2166:_Stack","transcript":"[Single-panel with a label at the top and 8 box layers stacked vertically, with in and out arrows at the top representing normal data flow and an arrow out of each box to the left or right representing exploit data flow] The Modern Tech Stack Compromised by a customer (arrow to the right) Compromised by a former employee (arrow to the left) Compromised by a current employee (arrow to the right) Compromised by bitcoin miners (arrow to the right) Compromised by unknown hackers (arrow to the left) Compromised by our own government (arrow to the right) Compromised by a foreign government (arrow to the left) Massive undiscovered hardware vulnerability (arrow to the right)\nComic 1636: XKCD Stack also has a hypothetical technology stack, with farcical layers.\n","explanation":"In software engineering, a tech stack is the set of technology platforms and tools that a company or app uses. A common tech stack is LAMP , composed of a Linux operating system , an Apache Web server , a MySQL database , and the PHP programming language.\nIn this instance, all of the layers represent systems which have been subverted or compromised (\"hacked\") by various entities, instead of various software technologies. The stack resembles an OSI network architecture, with an eighth layer added representing the user itself.\nCompromised by a customer: The user experience, above the OSI layers. Compromised by users doing something wrong or ill-advised.\nCompromised by a former employee: In the OSI model, this would be the application layer. The application may include a hidden spyware in its codebase. Recent examples of compromise: Desjardins Group\nCompromised by a current employee: This is the presentation layer. See above. Probably, that was compromised by a mistake of a current unexperienced employee.\nCompromised by Bitcoin miners: This is the session layer, where SSL historically resided. Cryptographic exploits may cause compromise of whole communication. Examples of compromise: Dozens of bitcoin mining viruses.\nCompromised by unknown hackers: This is the transport layer. IP and port spoofing is a possible compromise.\nCompromised by our own government: This is the network layer. It refers to communication intercepts by governments. Examples of compromise: Cisco (for US citizens)\nCompromised by a foreign government: This is the data link layer. This layer may be compromised by malrouting packets. Examples of compromise: Huawei (for non-Chinese citizens)\nMassive undiscovered hardware vulnerability: This is the physical layer. An undiscovered hardware vulnerability may cause compromises further up in the stack. Examples of compromises: Intel Management Engine , Meltdown , Row hammer\nIn the title text, Randall expresses sympathy for a situation where someone spends a significant length of time on something that then becomes completely unnecessary.  In this case, it's the state-sponsored hackers who develop an exploit of some hardware component, which then becomes completely useless because the target database on that hardware is totally open anyway to anyone with a web browser (which is essentially everyone).  While he's not suggesting he agrees with their hacking, he has some sympathy for their wasted effort.\n[Single-panel with a label at the top and 8 box layers stacked vertically, with in and out arrows at the top representing normal data flow and an arrow out of each box to the left or right representing exploit data flow] The Modern Tech Stack Compromised by a customer (arrow to the right) Compromised by a former employee (arrow to the left) Compromised by a current employee (arrow to the right) Compromised by bitcoin miners (arrow to the right) Compromised by unknown hackers (arrow to the left) Compromised by our own government (arrow to the right) Compromised by a foreign government (arrow to the left) Massive undiscovered hardware vulnerability (arrow to the right)\nComic 1636: XKCD Stack also has a hypothetical technology stack, with farcical layers.\n"}
{"id":2167,"title":"Motivated Reasoning Olympics","image_title":"Motivated Reasoning Olympics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2167","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/motivated_reasoning_olympics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2167:_Motivated_Reasoning_Olympics","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a trophy with a 2 engraved on it, showing it off to Ponytail] Cueball: Check it out, I won first place at the Motivated Reasoning Olympics! Ponytail: That trophy says \"second.\" Cueball: Well, the guy who won was caught cheating in an earlier round, so the board is almost certain to strip him of his win once they review the...\n","explanation":"Cueball is talking to Ponytail about the trophy he won for winning the \u201cMotivated Reasoning Olympics\u201d (hence the title). Ponytail rightly points out that the trophy says he only got second place. Cueball then displays the \" motivated reasoning \" skills that won him the trophy, by claiming that the athlete who beat him cheated in an earlier round and that the judges were \u201ccertain\u201d to disqualify him after reviewing. Here, the cognitive dissonance that should result from believing that he won first place but having a trophy that says second place is reduced by Cueball's motivated reasoning. He has developed a narrative that explains away the inconsistent fact of the label on the trophy, and thus, convinces himself that there couldn't have been any shortcoming in his own performance. These are all characteristics of motivated reasoning.\nThe title text is a continuation where Cueball suggests the judges are biased in favor of the original winner, whom they approve of. He further states that this is evidence of corruption and is the reason why his league split off from the official state-sponsored league just prior to the Motivated Reasoning Olympics. Of course, motivated reasoning is an emotion-biased decision-making phenomenon, by definition, so he should expect the judging to be biased.\n[Cueball is holding a trophy with a 2 engraved on it, showing it off to Ponytail] Cueball: Check it out, I won first place at the Motivated Reasoning Olympics! Ponytail: That trophy says \"second.\" Cueball: Well, the guy who won was caught cheating in an earlier round, so the board is almost certain to strip him of his win once they review the...\n"}
{"id":2168,"title":"Reading in the Original","image_title":"Reading in the Original","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2168","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reading_in_the_original.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2168:_Reading_in_the_Original","transcript":"[Cueball is addressing Megan. He is holding a hand with a thumb up out toward her. Megan is spreading her arms out as she replies.] Cueball: It's in the \"Languages\" box in the lower left. It took a while to learn, but I find I get so much more out of it by reading it as it was intended . Megan: That's not how that works!\n[Caption below the panel:] People get mad when I tell them I only read Wikipedia in the original Greek.\n","explanation":"Many academics and aficionados argue that studying texts in the original language is more valuable than reading translations. The argument is that translations are rarely able to fully capture all of the nuances, linguistic subtleties and intent of the original author, and may even alter the meaning in some way due to the translator's interpretation and word choices. The drawback to this is that it requires the reader to be sufficiently fluent in whatever language the text is written. Critically, a reader of the original source also needs to understand the cultural and historical context of the original work, something a professional translator might deal with much better. This can even happen when working with archaic texts in the same language, as certain references and phrases may have had a significance which was lost over time.\nCueball's commenting that he read works \"in the original Greek\" implies a high-level of literary scholarship, as this phrase is associated with scholars studying ancient Greek texts, which form a significant part of the foundational works of Western literature.\nA similar thing happens with dubbed movies or TV series\/anime, with many people remarking that they instead prefer to watch the original version (sometimes with subtitles), instead of the dubbed version.\nThe joke in this comic is that Cueball has apparently taken the time to learn Greek in order to read the Greek-language Wikipedia in that language, believing it to be the \"original\" one. Wikipedia was originally launched as a single English-language edition encyclopedia, but Cueball apparently treats it as though it was originally written in Greek. (An Ancient Greek Wikipedia test project also exists, but is not nearly as large as the modern Greek one and isn't available through the languages box.)  Wikipedia has editions in about 300 languages; the 'languages' box that Cueball mentions does link to the corresponding page in other languages when they are available, but such pages are not usually translations of each other, having been written separately. Cueball's dedication to appearing to be a committed scholar is therefore contrasted with the ignorance of not understanding that Greek is not the original language of every text.  Megan, recognizing that Wikipedia articles were not originally in Greek, exclaims that \"That's not how that works!\"\nThe movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country has a joke concerning someone speaking of a foreign \"original\" language of something that actually was originally written in English: Chancellor Gorkon says, \"You have not experienced Shakespeare until you've read it in the original Klingon .\" (In reality, Shakespeare lived in England, and wrote in English, not Klingon.) [ citation needed ]\nThe title text combines two jokes.  First, the reference to pages being \"much shorter\" is because the English language Wikipedia has the most editors and is the most developed; outside of areas of intense interest to Greeks, most pages would be more complete on the English Wikipedia, which would normally be a sign to Cueball that his interpretation that Greek was the original text is incorrect.  Second, the way he explains away this contradiction is an etymology joke, since \"Wikipedia\" was coined from two parts, \" wiki \", from Hawaiian, and \" pedia \", from Greek. However, words having roots in different languages is common and does not signify any link between the separate languages; for example, while the word \"Wikipedia\" does have etymological roots in Hawaiian and Greek, it is not true that the site was originally composed of texts written in Hawaiian and Greek. In Hawaiian, wiki means quick. In Greek, the suffix pedia is related to learning, which makes Wikipedia mean \"quick learning\" when combining these two languages.\n[Cueball is addressing Megan. He is holding a hand with a thumb up out toward her. Megan is spreading her arms out as she replies.] Cueball: It's in the \"Languages\" box in the lower left. It took a while to learn, but I find I get so much more out of it by reading it as it was intended . Megan: That's not how that works!\n[Caption below the panel:] People get mad when I tell them I only read Wikipedia in the original Greek.\n"}
{"id":2169,"title":"Predictive Models","image_title":"Predictive Models","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2169","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/predictive_models.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2169:_Predictive_Models","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on a laptop. Above him is the text he writes along with what the predictive text tool suggests, the latter in grey text. The TAB at the end is in a small frame.] Cueball typing: Long live the revolution. Our next meeting will be at | the docks at midnight on June 28 [tab] Cueball: Aha, found them!\n[Caption below the panel:] When you train predictive models on input from your users, it can leak information in unexpected ways.\n","explanation":"Predictive text is a feature on many systems where as you type the system automatically suggests likely words or phrases to follow what you have written to that point.  For instance, if you type \"I'm heading\" the system may suggest \"home\" or \"back\" as likely words to follow.  Predictive systems usually use prior input to generate their predictions, so if you frequently type \"Totally amazing!\" the system will suggest \"amazing!\" every time you type \"totally\" even if you actually want to type \"totally true\" sometimes.\nIn the comic, Cueball is using predictive text to uncover a plot against his organization\/government, but instead of using only his personal input, the system is using input from all users.  By typing in an obscure phrase related to revolution and a meeting, he gets the predictive text algorithm to display where and when the next supposedly secret meeting will be held based on other users input.  This works because it is unlikely that anyone else other than revolutionaries would be typing this phrase, thus the only data the algorithm has to predict from is the actual message from the revolutionaries on their next meeting.  The caption of the comic is pointing out that systems which use prior input for predictive purposes in this way can end up leaking information that might otherwise be considered private.  (However, this method may produce outdated information.  On June 29, 2019, typing in Google \"Long live the revolution. Our next meeting will be at\" gave the predicted completion \"long live the revolution. our next meeting will be at comic con 2018\", which would not be useful information to anyone looking for revolutionaries, because Comic-Con 2018 was already over.)\nThe title text shows the revolutionaries using the same technique.  By typing in \"We will arrest the revolution members\" they are hoping that the algorithm will suggest the time and date of their planned arrest, since no one other than the authorities would be typing in that phrase. Pressing the key [tab] to autocomplete that text produces \"WE WILL ARREST THE REVOLUTION MEMBERS [AT THE JULY 28TH MEETING]\", and the revolutionaries then say \"Cancel the meeting! Our cover is blown.\" The revolutionaries have apparently made the serious mistake of holding secret meetings on regular, predictable dates (such as the 28th day of each month, the last date guaranteed to exist in any month of the Gregorian Calendar), and the authorities have successfully figured this out, either through the predictive-text attack or by other means.\nBoth examples assume that the revolutionaries and the authorities would be talking about very secret information in the clear on a network accessible to their adversaries.  In the real world people engaged in sensitive activities would communicate via code, encryption, or both, or would do so through what they believe to be secure channels.  There is still the danger of secret information leaking via non-secret channels, however.\nSide-channel attacks use information gained from the implementation of a system to deduce supposedly protected information.  A famous example occurred in World War II.  The Germans kept tank production figures a secret, but they gave items like engine blocks sequential serial numbers.  The Allies wanted to know exact tank production figures, so they solved the German tank problem by using statistical methods to analyze the distribution of these numbers on captured vehicles.  They were able to predict tank production figures extremely accurately, to the point they predicted 270 tanks in a month when 276 were actually built.  Thus the secret information on tank production leaked.\nSome systems require frequent password change, in an effort to limit danger from a password being discovered.  However, people respond by choosing passwords in patterns, so it is easy to predict what subsequent passwords will be, given old ones, thus defeating the purpose of requiring frequent changes. Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era\nAlthough the comic title is \"Predictive Models\", the term Predictive modelling usually refers to computer programs that try to predict outcomes from data aggregation, such as reviewing health records to identify people most at risk from certain diseases based on weight, prior injuries, etc., before testing directly for the diseases themselves.  This is similar to but not precisely like the example in the comic, since predictive text is using direct input to predict further input, while predictive modelling is using related input (such as make and model of a car along with driver acceleration patterns) to predict a different output (such as likelihood of a crash).  Both predictive text and predictive modelling could leak information as the comic suggests, however.\nPredictive text and the possibility to leak unintended information has been parodied on xkcd before in 1068: Swiftkey .\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on a laptop. Above him is the text he writes along with what the predictive text tool suggests, the latter in grey text. The TAB at the end is in a small frame.] Cueball typing: Long live the revolution. Our next meeting will be at | the docks at midnight on June 28 [tab] Cueball: Aha, found them!\n[Caption below the panel:] When you train predictive models on input from your users, it can leak information in unexpected ways.\n"}
{"id":2170,"title":"Coordinate Precision","image_title":"Coordinate Precision","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2170","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coordinate_precision.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2170:_Coordinate_Precision","transcript":"[Single panel containing a table with two columns for \"Lat\/Lon Precision\" and \"Meaning\" and a caption above the table.] Caption: What The Number of Digits in Your Coordinates Means\n[Row 1] Lat\/Lon: 28\u00b0N, 80\u00b0W Meaning: You're probably doing something space-related\n[Row 2] Lat\/Lon: 28.5\u00b0N, 80.6\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing out a specific city\n[Row 3] Lat\/Lon: 28.52\u00b0N, 80.68\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing out a neighborhood\n[Row 4] Lat\/Lon: 28.523\u00b0N, 80.683\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing out a specific suburban cul-de-sac\n[Row 5] Lat\/Lon: 28.5234\u00b0N, 80.6830\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing to a particular corner of a house\n[Row 6] Lat\/Lon: 28.52345\u00b0N, 80.68309\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing to a specific person in a room, but since you didn't include datum information, we can't tell who\n[Row 7] Lat\/Lon: 28.5234571\u00b0N, 80.6830941\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing to Waldo on a page\n[Row 8] Lat\/Lon: 28.523457182\u00b0N, 80.683094159\u00b0W Meaning: \"Hey, check out this specific sand grain!\"\n[Row 9] Lat\/Lon: 28.523457182818284\u00b0N, 80.683094159265358\u00b0W Meaning: Either you're handing out raw floating point variables, or you've built a database to track individual atoms. In either case, please stop.\n","explanation":"This cartoon gives increasingly precise latitude and longitude coordinates for a location on the planet Earth. However, a given pair of coordinates covers a trapezoidal region of land, and thus leaves some ambiguity; therefore, greater precision requires an increasing count of decimal places in your coordinates. This comic uses this information to roughly identify how precise a given coordinate length might be.\nThe increasing precision of coordinates in this cartoon are similar to the increasing magnification in the short documentary \"Powers of 10,\" which can be found here .  (Also parodied in #271:Powers of One ).\nThe coordinates at 28.52345\u00b0N, 80.68309\u00b0W (in decimal degrees form; in geographic coordinate system form using degrees, minutes, and seconds, 28\u00b0 31\u2032 24.4\u2033N, 80\u00b0 40\u2032 59.1\u2033W) are pointing to the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida \u2014specifically, the tip of the Delta rocket.\nThe sixth entry in the table, with seven digits of precision, includes the caveat that, while your coordinates map to areas small enough on the Earth's surface to indicate pointing to a specific person in a room, \"since you didn't include datum information, we can't tell who\". This is a reference to the geodetic datum or geodetic system \u2014 different ways of dealing with the fact that the Earth is neither perfectly spherical nor perfectly an oblong ellipsoid. The various datums do not make much difference at six digits of precision, but at seven, there is enough skew depending on which system is in use that the person in a room you are referring to with the coordinates is ambiguous. It is unstated, but the remaining lines in the table with ever-greater precision suffer from this same issue and are equally ambiguous without datum information.\nThe final entry, with seventeen digits of precision, suggests that either the user is referring to individual atoms in the much-larger-scale whole-Earth coordinate system, or (perhaps more likely) has not bothered to format the values from the GPS module for viewing in the software UI in any way whatsoever, resulting in a value that is meaninglessly precise because the measurement wasn't that accurate to begin with. Even if the value is accurate, locating individual atoms by coordinates is not actually useful in most cases, and the motions of multiple systems within our physical world (continental drift, subtle vibrations, Brownian motion , etc.) would render the precise value obsolete rather quickly.\nFor the decimal places past the 5th on the latitude, the digits given are actually the first part of the decimal expansion of the constant e (2.7182818284), while for the decimal places past the 5th on the longitude, the digits given are part of the decimal expansion of the constant \u03c0 (3.14159265358) starting with the second digit (4).\nThe title text references how at sufficiently small distances, our understanding of reality itself begins to break down. Smaller than the Planck length , which is more than a quintillion times smaller than the diameter of a proton, the ideals of Euclidean geometry no longer apply and space itself may be composed of a quantum foam where the very geometry of spacetime itself fluctuates, meaning coordinate systems based on an assumption that space doesn't change would no longer work. String theory, on the other hand, assumes that at a short enough distance the world is composed of ten space dimensions, which precludes the use of a two-dimensional coordinate system (not that our \u201cnormal\u201d three dimensions don't do so in themselves).\nThe actual number of longitude digits needed to identify a point to a particular precision depends on its latitude. Near the poles, you need fewer longitude digits than at the equator \u2013 starting with one digit fewer at around lat. 85\u00b0, past all constantly inhabited human settlements, and with two digits fewer at lat. 89.5\u00b0, inaccessible to anyone but polar researchers and the occasional guided tour. The number of latitude digits for some particular accuracy stays essentially the same everywhere.\n*Since the Earth is not exactly spherical, the actual length of one degree of latitude varies between 110.574 km (68.707 mi) at the equator and 111.694 km (69.403 mi) at the poles, while one degree of longitude is 111.320 km (69.171 mi) at the equator, 55.800 km (34.673 mi) at lat. 60\u00b0, and 0 km (0 mi) at the poles.\n[Single panel containing a table with two columns for \"Lat\/Lon Precision\" and \"Meaning\" and a caption above the table.] Caption: What The Number of Digits in Your Coordinates Means\n[Row 1] Lat\/Lon: 28\u00b0N, 80\u00b0W Meaning: You're probably doing something space-related\n[Row 2] Lat\/Lon: 28.5\u00b0N, 80.6\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing out a specific city\n[Row 3] Lat\/Lon: 28.52\u00b0N, 80.68\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing out a neighborhood\n[Row 4] Lat\/Lon: 28.523\u00b0N, 80.683\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing out a specific suburban cul-de-sac\n[Row 5] Lat\/Lon: 28.5234\u00b0N, 80.6830\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing to a particular corner of a house\n[Row 6] Lat\/Lon: 28.52345\u00b0N, 80.68309\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing to a specific person in a room, but since you didn't include datum information, we can't tell who\n[Row 7] Lat\/Lon: 28.5234571\u00b0N, 80.6830941\u00b0W Meaning: You're pointing to Waldo on a page\n[Row 8] Lat\/Lon: 28.523457182\u00b0N, 80.683094159\u00b0W Meaning: \"Hey, check out this specific sand grain!\"\n[Row 9] Lat\/Lon: 28.523457182818284\u00b0N, 80.683094159265358\u00b0W Meaning: Either you're handing out raw floating point variables, or you've built a database to track individual atoms. In either case, please stop.\n"}
{"id":2171,"title":"Shadow Biosphere","image_title":"Shadow Biosphere","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2171","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/shadow_biosphere.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2171:_Shadow_Biosphere","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing facing each other. A shadowy figure is behind Megan.] Shadowy figure: These days most of our funding comes in from the shadow biotech industry. Megan: Did you hear something? Cueball: I think it's the wind.\n[Caption below the panel:] The shadow biosphere exists, but if you study it, you become a shadow biologist.\n","explanation":"A shadow biosphere is a hypothetical microbial biosphere of Earth that uses radically different biochemical and molecular processes than currently known life. Although life on Earth is relatively well-studied, the shadow biosphere may still remain unnoticed because the exploration of the microbial world targets primarily the biochemistry of the macro-organisms.\nBecause organisms based on RNA would not have ribosomes, which are usually used to detect living microorganisms, they would be difficult to find in normal circumstances.\nThe comic suggests that this hypothetical biosphere exists, and its study is funded by \"shadow biotech\" corporations. The field would be called \"shadow biology\", so people that study it would be \"shadow biologists\". However, this is reinterpreted to mean \"shadow\" biologist, meaning that anyone that studies it becomes undetectable. A \"shadowy\" figure, presumably a shadow biologist, is telling this to Megan and Cueball , but they are not shadow biologists and can't hear him.\nThe title text references desert varnish , an orange-yellow to black coating found on exposed rock surfaces in arid environments, which has been suggested as a potential candidate for a shadow biosphere. Unless a building was made with already-varnished rocks, it would be impractical to cover a building in desert varnish (it forms naturally on rocks over thousands of years). Ignoring its impracticality, the joke is that if a building were covered in desert varnish, it would supposedly be invisible to biologists who don't study the shadow biosphere.\n[Cueball and Megan are standing facing each other. A shadowy figure is behind Megan.] Shadowy figure: These days most of our funding comes in from the shadow biotech industry. Megan: Did you hear something? Cueball: I think it's the wind.\n[Caption below the panel:] The shadow biosphere exists, but if you study it, you become a shadow biologist.\n"}
{"id":2172,"title":"Lunar Cycles","image_title":"Lunar Cycles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2172","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lunar_cycles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2172:_Lunar_Cycles","transcript":"Understanding lunar cycles\nNodal precession [A diagram showing a broad cosine-like wave with wavelength labelled as 18.6 years. To the right are two diagrams showing an orbital cycle moving in and out of plane.]\nApsidal precession [A diagram similar to the one above but with a slightly shorter wavelength, labelled as 8.9 years. To the right are two diagrams showing an elliptical orbit around a planet and the same orbit rotated.]\nPhase [A diagram similar to those above with a shorter wavelength, labelled as 29.5 days. To the right is a diagram showing four phases of the moon: New, Waxing crescent, Waxinf gibbos, Full.]\nDistance [A diagram similar to those above with a shorter wavelength, labelled as 27.5 days. To the right is a diagram showing the distance of the moon from the Earth over time, with distances marked by arrows.]\nEarth-Moon relative size [A wave with long wavelength with an arrow pointing to the minimum labelled 'Earth bigger' and an arrow pointing to the maximum labelled 'Moon bigger'. To the right are two diagrams of the moon and Earth, one showing the Earth bigger than the Moon and the other showing the Moon bigger than the Earth.]\nLunar shape [A wave with long wavelength with an arrow pointing to the minimum labelled 'Circle' and an arrow pointing to the maximum labelled 'Square'. To the right is a diagram showing a circle, a circle transforming into a square with outward arrows at each corner and a square transforming into a circle with inward arrows.]\nLunar mood [A wave with long wavelength with an arrow pointing to the minimum labelled 'Bad' and an arrow pointing to the maximum labelled 'Good'. To the right are four emojis:\u00a0:),\u00a0:|,\u00a0:(,\u00a0:|]\n[A superimposed graph of all the above waves. Different points on the graph are labelled: Harvest moon, Supermoon, Blue moon, Skinny Jeans popular, Super blood moon, Golden age of TV, Dire moon, Pork moon, Two week window in which astrology works, Total eclipse of the sea.]\n","explanation":"This comic shows a mixture of real, scientific lunar cycles and cycles that are comedic or fictional in nature.\nThe light gray \"phase \u00d7 distance\" plot does not correspond to the product of periods given for phase and distance, which look like this instead. A harvest moon is the traditional name for the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox, but there is nothing astronomically significant about it. A supermoon is a full or new moon when the Moon is closest to the Earth, resulting in a slightly larger-than-usual apparent size. A full supermoon is roughly 14% larger in diameter than when the Moon is furthest away. See also 1394: Superm*n . A blue moon was originally a description of the very rare occurrence of atmospheric conditions that gave the Moon a bluish tinge, hence the expression \"once in a blue moon\" for something that happens only rarely.  However, the actual blue-hued appearance of the moon is so rare that it the phrase \"blue moon\" has been reinterpreted as referring to a merely uncommon event:  the occurrence of two full moons in a single calendar month. That kind of \"blue moon\" naturally does not look any different from a regular full moon. A blood moon refers to the moon during a lunar eclipse. While the popularity of skinny jeans ( slim-fit pants ) does change over time, the idea that this is connected to a lunar cycle is also a joke. The Golden Age of Television is said to have occurred in the 1940s and 50s, and the 2000s. Pork moon cakes have been prepared in the rural areas west of Shanghai since more than a thousand years ago, for the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival . \"The Vampire of the Dire Moon \" is a recently introduced, uncommon card from the Magic: The Gathering card game. Astrology is a pseudoscience which claims that the positions of the celestial bodies can be used to predict human affairs. The chart jokingly suggests that astrology actually does work, but only within a very specific two-week timeframe. Finally, while the idea of a total eclipse of the sea seems absurd, an eclipse was famously used to explain the migration of maritime animals : biologists were beginning to unravel the mystery of this \u2018false bottom\u2019\u2013a layer in the ocean that looks the the sea floor on the sounder but isn\u2019t\u2013which covered much of the ocean. This false bottom rises in up at night and sinks down during the day. This rising and falling is in fact caused by the largest migration of animal on Earth\u2013everything from fish, shrimp and jellyfish, moving hundreds of meters in unison up and down each day.... the moon moved into its place in front of the sun, daylight rapidly faded, and the scientists solved the migration mystery: the deep layer of animals began to rise. Bioluminescent creatures started to shine, and nocturnal creatures started a frantic upward thrust. As the world grew darker, they swam upward nearly 80 meters. But this frantic migration didn\u2019t last long. As the moon receded and the sun revealed itself, the massive animal layer did an about-face, scrambling back into the safety of the darkness. (Backus, Clark, and Wing (1965) \"Behaviour of certain marine organisms during the solar eclipse of July 20, 1963\" Nature 4975: 989-91.)\nThe Antikythera mechanism mentioned in the title text is an ancient Greek machine, rediscovered in 1901, designed to calculate astronomical positions. The title text jokes that there is a set of gears on said mechanism that is used to predict the popularity of \"skinny jeans\" and \"low-rise waists.\"  Since it was likely created in the 1st or 2nd century B.C., it is impossible for the creators to have had any knowledge of skinny jeans or low-rise waists - both are modern-day clothing fashions [ citation needed ] .\nUnderstanding lunar cycles\nNodal precession [A diagram showing a broad cosine-like wave with wavelength labelled as 18.6 years. To the right are two diagrams showing an orbital cycle moving in and out of plane.]\nApsidal precession [A diagram similar to the one above but with a slightly shorter wavelength, labelled as 8.9 years. To the right are two diagrams showing an elliptical orbit around a planet and the same orbit rotated.]\nPhase [A diagram similar to those above with a shorter wavelength, labelled as 29.5 days. To the right is a diagram showing four phases of the moon: New, Waxing crescent, Waxinf gibbos, Full.]\nDistance [A diagram similar to those above with a shorter wavelength, labelled as 27.5 days. To the right is a diagram showing the distance of the moon from the Earth over time, with distances marked by arrows.]\nEarth-Moon relative size [A wave with long wavelength with an arrow pointing to the minimum labelled 'Earth bigger' and an arrow pointing to the maximum labelled 'Moon bigger'. To the right are two diagrams of the moon and Earth, one showing the Earth bigger than the Moon and the other showing the Moon bigger than the Earth.]\nLunar shape [A wave with long wavelength with an arrow pointing to the minimum labelled 'Circle' and an arrow pointing to the maximum labelled 'Square'. To the right is a diagram showing a circle, a circle transforming into a square with outward arrows at each corner and a square transforming into a circle with inward arrows.]\nLunar mood [A wave with long wavelength with an arrow pointing to the minimum labelled 'Bad' and an arrow pointing to the maximum labelled 'Good'. To the right are four emojis:\u00a0:),\u00a0:|,\u00a0:(,\u00a0:|]\n[A superimposed graph of all the above waves. Different points on the graph are labelled: Harvest moon, Supermoon, Blue moon, Skinny Jeans popular, Super blood moon, Golden age of TV, Dire moon, Pork moon, Two week window in which astrology works, Total eclipse of the sea.]\n"}
{"id":2173,"title":"Trained a Neural Net","image_title":"Trained a Neural Net","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2173","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trained_a_neural_net.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2173:_Trained_a_Neural_Net","transcript":"[White Hat is looking at a smartphone in his hand, while he talks to Cueball, who lifts a hand palm up towards White Hat.] White Hat: Oh, hey, you organized our photo archive! Cueball: Yeah, I trained a neural net to sort the unlabeled photos into categories. White Hat: Whoa! Nice work!\n[Caption below the panel:] Engineering Tip: When you do a task by hand, you can technically say you trained a neural net to do it.\n","explanation":"An artificial neural network , also known as a neural net, is a computing system inspired by a human brain, which \"learns\" by considering lots and lots of examples to develop patterns. For example, these are used in image recognition - by analyzing thousands or millions of examples, the system is able to identify particular objects. Neural networks typically function with no prior knowledge, and are \"trained\" by feeding in examples of the thing that they are told to analyze.\nHere, Cueball is telling White Hat how he trained a neural net to sort photos into categories. The joke in the comic, is the engineering tip from the caption. It states that since a human brain is already a neural network, albeit a biological one instead of an artificial one, then by teaching oneself (or others) to do a task, you are de facto training a neural network to do so. So instead of designing and training an artificial neural net that could do this task, all Cueball did was manually sort the photos into categories (although he could then use those sorted images to train an artificial neural network). This is the first time such a tip has been used, but engineering tip just continues the tips trend that Protip began long ago.\nIt is not advisable to say this in real life, because you might then be expected to use your already-trained neural net to do a similar task (or redo the same task) with much greater speed, thus ruining the fa\u00e7ade.  However, presenting work done by humans as work done by machines has been done in real life, perhaps starting with The Turk in 1770 and continuing into the present day by various AI-themed startups.  For example, Engineer.ai described itself as using \"natural language processing and decision trees\" to automate app development, but was actually employing humans .\nThe title text is a continuation of this joke, as instead of designing and training two artificial neural nets named \"Emily\" and \"Kevin\", all he has done is train two people with those names to manually respond to support tickets. Again, doing this in real life is not advisable, as people are offended when they are referred to by programmers as deterministic automata with no free will. [ citation needed ]\nNeural networks have been trained to perform other tasks that are routine for humans, but formerly more difficult for computers, such as driving cars, playing games like chess, go, and Jeopardy!, and communication skills like extracting phonological information from speech as per Figure 1 here . In 1897: Self Driving , Randall suggested that crowdsourced applications like ReCAPTCHA, that have been used to train neural nets to recognize objects necessary for safe driving in photographs, may also be used for Wizard of Oz experiments . An example of such a Wizard of Oz experiment for phonological training as a form of peer learning has been explored, and related work is occurring on automating vocational training.\nThe extent to which computer neural nets are analogous to human neurobiology is a topic which fascinates the scientist and layperson alike. While there is no fully universal consensus on the matter, at least one apparently longstanding theoretical paradigm has received attention recently.\n[White Hat is looking at a smartphone in his hand, while he talks to Cueball, who lifts a hand palm up towards White Hat.] White Hat: Oh, hey, you organized our photo archive! Cueball: Yeah, I trained a neural net to sort the unlabeled photos into categories. White Hat: Whoa! Nice work!\n[Caption below the panel:] Engineering Tip: When you do a task by hand, you can technically say you trained a neural net to do it.\n"}
{"id":2174,"title":"First News Memory","image_title":"First News Memory","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2174","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/first_news_memory.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2174:_First_News_Memory","transcript":"[Ponytail, Cueball, Megan, Hairy, White Hat, Black Hat and Hairbun are all at a party, discussing their earliest news memories.]\n[Panel with Ponytail, Cueball, Megan, and Hairy] Ponytail: What's your first news memory? Cueball: I always like this question! Mine was the 1988 election. Megan: Berlin wall for me. You?\n[Frame-less panel with Megan, Hairy, White Hat, and Black Hat] Hairy: Watching the Challenger launch in class. We were so excited; everyone was horrified when it blew up. Hairy: It was 1995. Hairy: Our teacher got fired soon after.\n[Panel with Hairy, White Hat, Black Hat, and Hairbun] White Hat: Mine's the 2016 election. Hairbun: ...aren't you in your 30's? White Hat: Look, we're not all great about keeping up with the news, OK?\n[Panel with White Hat, Black Hat, and Hairbun] Black Hat: My first memory is when we landed on the moon. Black Hat: My second memory is my mom telling us we were moving to Earth instead, to blend in with the humans. Hairbun: This explains a lot.\n","explanation":"Seven xkcd characters are discussing their \"first news memory\", their first memory of an event that was reported by the news media. A person's \"first news memory\" can vary based on their age, the region where they grew up, and how in touch with the news they are.\nThe following is a breakdown of the memories given by the characters, in typical xkcd fashion:\nFour people are standing in-frame: Ponytail , Cueball , Megan , and Hairy .\nPonytail gets the ball rolling by posing the question. Cueball recalls the election coverage from the year 1988. As Randall lives in the US, this is probably the 1988 US presidential election in which George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis. Megan recalls the removal of the Berlin wall , which began in 1989.\nThe view pans right to show Megan, Hairy, White Hat , and Black Hat standing around.\nHairy recalls the Challenger explosion , which occurred in 1986. Many schools allowed teachers to bring a television to the classroom to show their students the launch, sadly unaware of the impending disaster the children would witness. However, Hairy remembers watching the footage in 1995, so Hairy's teacher was knowingly showing the students recorded footage of a disaster. Presumably, knowingly showing a number of young schoolchildren a traumatizing event led to the teacher's dismissal.\nThe view pans right to show Hairy, White Hat, Black Hat, and Hairbun standing around.\nWhite Hat says that his first news memory was about the 2016 election (presumably the 2016 US presidential election ), which is only three years prior to the publication date of this comic. As he is in his thirties, this implies that he spent most of his life not paying attention to the news.\nThe view pans right, leaving just White Hat, Black Hat, and Hairbun in-frame.\nBlack Hat 's first sentence is normal in the context of the question, albeit making him older than the others. Given only the sentence 'we landed on the moon,' the 'we' is inferred to be 'the United States of America' or 'the human race.' The first moon landing occurred on July 20, 1969. \nHowever, Black Hat goes on to say that 'my second memory is my mom telling us we were moving to Earth instead, to blend in with the humans.' This gives a completely different meaning to his first memory, as it is now implied that Black Hat is a humanoid alien who moved to the Moon, but whose mother then decided to move to Earth. Whether any news coverage resulted is unclear. Hairbun then remarks that this revelation explains Black Hat's odd (and usually disruptive) behavior. It is unclear whether Black Hat is telling the truth, but knowing Black Hat, and considering the fact that this would be unlikely to receive news coverage, he is likely intentionally trying to unnerve others.  Another possibility is that Black Hat was the youthful victim of a prank by his own mother, with Hairbun's comment implying that such an upbringing accounts for the trollish aspects of Black Hat's character in the present day.\nThe title text gives the claim that flashbulb memories of big events can be unreliable. Randall (or another character in the comic, possibly Hairbun) denies this claim, claiming to remember watching on CNN as the Challenger spacecraft crashed into the Berlin Wall. This is an inaccurate memory of these two events, as the Challenger explosion occurred in 1986 over the Atlantic Ocean, just east of Cape Canaveral, Florida, and did not occur near the Berlin Wall (in Berlin, Germany). Also, the Berlin Wall was intentionally demolished starting in 1989; it was not damaged by a space shuttle. It is possible that this memory also conflates those events with those of the September 11 attacks since the latter did involve three winged craft crashing into and destroying landmark structures.\n[Ponytail, Cueball, Megan, Hairy, White Hat, Black Hat and Hairbun are all at a party, discussing their earliest news memories.]\n[Panel with Ponytail, Cueball, Megan, and Hairy] Ponytail: What's your first news memory? Cueball: I always like this question! Mine was the 1988 election. Megan: Berlin wall for me. You?\n[Frame-less panel with Megan, Hairy, White Hat, and Black Hat] Hairy: Watching the Challenger launch in class. We were so excited; everyone was horrified when it blew up. Hairy: It was 1995. Hairy: Our teacher got fired soon after.\n[Panel with Hairy, White Hat, Black Hat, and Hairbun] White Hat: Mine's the 2016 election. Hairbun: ...aren't you in your 30's? White Hat: Look, we're not all great about keeping up with the news, OK?\n[Panel with White Hat, Black Hat, and Hairbun] Black Hat: My first memory is when we landed on the moon. Black Hat: My second memory is my mom telling us we were moving to Earth instead, to blend in with the humans. Hairbun: This explains a lot.\n"}
{"id":2175,"title":"Flag Interpretation","image_title":"Flag Interpretation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2175","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flag_interpretation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2175:_Flag_Interpretation","transcript":"[8 panels in 2 rows, 4 panels per row - each panel shows a flagpole in a different state of flying flag(s) with a caption at the bottom of the panel below the flagpole.] [The US flag at half mast.] Caption: Someone important died [The same flag at three-quarter mast.] Caption: Someone died but we're not sure how we feel about them [The flag at the base of the mast.] Caption: Everyone important died [Two identical flags at full mast.] Caption: Someone important was successfully cloned [Two identical flags at half mast.] Caption: An important person died battling their evil clone [An upside-down flag at half mast.] Caption: Nobody has died for weeks and that seems good but statistically it's very alarming. [A normal-sized flag at half mast and five tiny flags at full mast.] Caption: Someone diverted a trolley to save five people by killing one important person [A flagpole with no flag.] Caption: The person who knows where the flag is stored at night died.\n","explanation":"In many countries including the United States (whose flag is depicted in the comic), it is customary to lower the flag to half staff when important public figures die. This is normally done by raising the flag to full height, then immediately \"lowering\" it to half height. In the US, regulations regarding flying the flag at half staff specify the length of time for the flag to be flown at half staff, and are based on the importance of the person who has died. There are no regulations where the flag would be flown at any height other than full height or half staff, and there are no regulations where multiple flags would be flown.\nThe definition of half-staff, or half-mast, differs between countries and does not necessarily imply flying the flag at half the height of the pole or mast. For example, in the USA the flag is usually flown at half the height of the pole, whereas UK practice is to leave space for an 'invisible flag' above the flown flag, which may mean flying the flag near the top of the pole depending on its height. These differing practices contribute to confusion and ambiguity concerning the flag height, which is exploited in the comic.\nRandall, as usual, makes a humorous list of fictional additional traditions.\nThe title text is a reference to The Persistence of Memory and other paintings and sculptures by Salvador Dal\u00ed which include watches and other objects that are melting.\n[8 panels in 2 rows, 4 panels per row - each panel shows a flagpole in a different state of flying flag(s) with a caption at the bottom of the panel below the flagpole.] [The US flag at half mast.] Caption: Someone important died [The same flag at three-quarter mast.] Caption: Someone died but we're not sure how we feel about them [The flag at the base of the mast.] Caption: Everyone important died [Two identical flags at full mast.] Caption: Someone important was successfully cloned [Two identical flags at half mast.] Caption: An important person died battling their evil clone [An upside-down flag at half mast.] Caption: Nobody has died for weeks and that seems good but statistically it's very alarming. [A normal-sized flag at half mast and five tiny flags at full mast.] Caption: Someone diverted a trolley to save five people by killing one important person [A flagpole with no flag.] Caption: The person who knows where the flag is stored at night died.\n"}
{"id":2176,"title":"How Hacking Works","image_title":"How Hacking Works","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2176","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/how_hacking_works.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2176:_How_Hacking_Works","transcript":"[Two panels with a caption below each panel:]\n[Three masked characters standing near a desk with a computer inside a home. One of the masked characters is holding a notebook.] Masked Character 1 [holding a walkie-talkie]: Control, we have flown to the USA and breached the target's house. Masked Character 2: They wrote all their passwords in a book labeled \"Passwords\"! Masked Character 3: The fool!\n[Caption below the panel:] How people think hacking works\n[Two Cueball-like characters, each sitting on opposite sides of a single desk with laptops in front of them] Cueball 1: Hey look, someone leaked the emails and passwords from the Smash Mouth message boards. Cueball 2: Cool, let's try them all on Venmo.\n[Caption below the panel:] How it actually works\n","explanation":"In similar spirit to 538: Security , this comic deals with how many people perceive hacking and security best practices, and how it differs from the actual reality. Specifically, the comic points out the flaw in the argument of some security-minded people that writing passwords down on a sheet of paper is a massive operational security vulnerability, not accounting for the threat model of the general public: reused passwords being leaked from seemingly benign places.\nThe first panel shows a group of masked men, who have apparently flown to the US from a different country and broken into someone's house. They find a book labeled \"Passwords\" that contains all the passwords of their target, and one reports this using a walkie-talkie , while another remarks that the target is a fool for writing down their passwords. While it is true that storing passwords on paper is generally a bad idea, one has to keep in mind the alternatives\u2014password reuse or unencrypted password documents on a computer\u2014that non-technical people might otherwise engage in. These are far easier to exploit for a casual attacker that goes for quantity over quality.  In addition, given the larger group of potential attackers are the remote attackers, storing passwords on a piece of paper, while horrible for security from a local \"in person\" attacker, is actually pretty effective against a remote attacker being able to gather up your passwords.\nThe second panel goes into detail how such an attack is usually executed: First, a database containing usernames\/emails and associated passwords or insufficiently salted password hashes is stolen from an improperly secured website. Randall's example uses a fictional breach of a small forum dedicated to the band Smash Mouth , but even large companies are not immune to leaks. Assuming the passwords were not hashed, the crooks then go on and automatically try to log in to a popular payment service, Venmo , with the harvested credentials. Even though the success rate might be just fractions of a percent, due to the scale and cheapness of the attack (which can be automated, requiring no sustained effort from the crooks), it is likely still profitable. Such an attack has previously been discussed in 792: Password Reuse .\nAlthough writing passwords on paper can allow users to create unique complex passwords without being limited by human memory, and therefore protect themselves from these sorts of mass-breach attacks, their passwords are now more vulnerable to insider attacks by e.g. family members, close friends, or co-workers.\nThe way recommended by most security experts to prevent these kinds of attacks is to use a password manager - a secure application that stores all of your passwords in an encrypted vault that only you can access. This way, you only need to remember one password - the master password to your vault - and all of your other passwords can be as long, different, and random as you like. This means that even if a crook manages to get one of your passwords, they won't be able to use it to access any other sites, and so the attack shown in the comic would fail.  Websites can also support two-factor authentication , where the user must supply a randomly changing code from a second device, such as a cell phone application or standalone keyfob, to log in.\nThe title text is referring to Smash Mouth's song \" All Star ,\" where the first line of the lyrics is \"Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me.\"  The singer subsequently admits that he is not \"the sharpest tool in the shed,\" which would be consistent with re-using simple passwords across multiple accounts (including financial accounts).\n[Two panels with a caption below each panel:]\n[Three masked characters standing near a desk with a computer inside a home. One of the masked characters is holding a notebook.] Masked Character 1 [holding a walkie-talkie]: Control, we have flown to the USA and breached the target's house. Masked Character 2: They wrote all their passwords in a book labeled \"Passwords\"! Masked Character 3: The fool!\n[Caption below the panel:] How people think hacking works\n[Two Cueball-like characters, each sitting on opposite sides of a single desk with laptops in front of them] Cueball 1: Hey look, someone leaked the emails and passwords from the Smash Mouth message boards. Cueball 2: Cool, let's try them all on Venmo.\n[Caption below the panel:] How it actually works\n"}
{"id":2177,"title":"Gastroenterology","image_title":"Gastroenterology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2177","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gastroenterology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2177:_Gastroenterology","transcript":"[The first five panels appear in a single row.] [Ponytail, wearing a lab coat, and a guy wearing a scrubs hat rush in from the right side of the panel. Ponytail is holding a water bottle. There is a desk on the left of the panel with two jars.] Hat guy: Hurry, they're right behind us!\n[Zoom in on Ponytail, behind the desk, pouring the two smaller jars into the water bottle.] An arrow points to the left jar: Probiotic An arrow points to the right jar: Antibiotic\n[A borderless panel. Zoom out on Ponytail shaking the water bottle to mix the two substances.] Shake Shake Shake\n[Ponytail throws the water bottle toward the right side of the panel, at something off-screen.]\n[Hat guy and Ponytail run toward the left side of the panel, as the water bottle explodes.] BOOM\n[The last panel is the only panel in its row, appearing at the far right end of the row and slightly narrower than the fifth panel above it.] [Megan and Ponytail sitting at a table, facing each other, having a meal.] Megan: So what's gastroenterology like? Ponytail: Pretty boring. Lotta paperwork.\n","explanation":"Gastroenterology is the study of the normal function and diseases of the digestive system: esophagus, stomach, small intestine, colon and rectum, pancreas, gallbladder, bile ducts and liver.\nAntibiotics are substances that kill bacteria. They are effective at treating bacterial infections, including in the gut; unfortunately, they can also kill the normal gut bacteria. Probiotics are harmless or helpful bacteria which are sometimes used to replace the bacteria killed by an antibiotic. This reduces chances of re-infection by pathogens, and allows the natural gut microbiome to recover more effectively; comic 1471 was about the same theme. Probiotics are included in many foods, such as yogurt, as well as supplements, and are marketed as having health benefits.\nThe comic plays on the names probiotic and antibiotic.  When matter and antimatter are mixed, they annihilate each-other, rapidly releasing energy (an explosion).\nThis comic imagines a similar process when probiotics and antibiotics are mixed: Ponytail and a nurse runs into a room, with someone chasing after them, leading the nurse to exclaim that \u201cthey\u2019re right behind us.\u201d Ponytail mixes the probiotics and antibiotics, and throws the jar like a grenade, before continuing to run with the nurse. The reaction between the probiotics and antibiotics causes the jar to explode, presumably killing the pursuer. In reality, antibiotics and probiotics are often used simultaneously during treatment, but they are taken so that they do not mix (taken at different times or by different methods). Mixing them as in the comic, would just cause the antibiotic to kill the probiotic bacteria. Explosive reactions between antibiotics and probiotics are highly unlikely. [ citation needed ]\nMatter and antimatter would react pretty much instantly upon mixing, not a short time later, as in the comic.  (Also, one could not keep antimatter in a normal jar, or pour it in an atmosphere).  The reaction shown is similar to the reaction between a strong acid and a strong base, which could cause an explosion after a short delay if kept in a tightly sealed container like a water bottle, as in the explosion here.\nIn the last panel, Ponytail is giving a more mundane summary of what gastroenterology is like (lots of paperwork). This is similar to Indiana Jones saying that archaeology is boring. The explosion sequence might be:\nIn the title text, Ponytail adds that her work makes her aware of a child coughing as the server was bringing food at the restaurant table, exposing the food to possible germs that could cause a gastrointestinal infection.\n[The first five panels appear in a single row.] [Ponytail, wearing a lab coat, and a guy wearing a scrubs hat rush in from the right side of the panel. Ponytail is holding a water bottle. There is a desk on the left of the panel with two jars.] Hat guy: Hurry, they're right behind us!\n[Zoom in on Ponytail, behind the desk, pouring the two smaller jars into the water bottle.] An arrow points to the left jar: Probiotic An arrow points to the right jar: Antibiotic\n[A borderless panel. Zoom out on Ponytail shaking the water bottle to mix the two substances.] Shake Shake Shake\n[Ponytail throws the water bottle toward the right side of the panel, at something off-screen.]\n[Hat guy and Ponytail run toward the left side of the panel, as the water bottle explodes.] BOOM\n[The last panel is the only panel in its row, appearing at the far right end of the row and slightly narrower than the fifth panel above it.] [Megan and Ponytail sitting at a table, facing each other, having a meal.] Megan: So what's gastroenterology like? Ponytail: Pretty boring. Lotta paperwork.\n"}
{"id":2178,"title":"Expiration Date High Score","image_title":"Expiration Date High Score","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2178","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/expiration_date_high_score.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2178:_Expiration_Date_High_Score","transcript":"[Title up in the panel:]\nWhat's the most expired item you've found in your house?\nCalculate your Expiration Date High Score (must be something you purchased)\n[Equation in a circle:]\nScore = (year you found item) minus (year item expired) divided by (your age when you found it), multiplied by 100\n[Megan and Cueball talking in a kitchen, with Megan holding a can.]\nMegan: These beans expired in 2010! That's... let's see... 24.3! New personal best! Cueball: You're never going to beat your mom's jar of pickles from 1978. Megan: Maybe there are more cans in there. Remind me not to look until 2030. Cueball: This is the worst competition.\nThe formula suggests Megans age to be 37, if this comic plays in 2019, when it was released. That puts her birth year to either 1982 or 1981 (depending on whether this plays before or after her birthday in 2019). This is in slight contrast to 630: Time Travel , which implies her birth year to be 1983.\n","explanation":"Randall is introducing the rules of the game Expiration Date High Score hence the title.\nIf you find an item which you purchased, but is now past its expiration date , you get a score which is what percent of your lifetime elapsed between when the item expired and when you found it.\nMegan , looking in a cupboard, find a can of beans that expired in 2010 (9 years ago), and that gives her a score of 24.3. Megan's age is thus revealed to be 37, found by substituting 2019 and 2010 into the formula 100*(2019-2010)\/<age> = 24.3 and solving for the age. This is consistent with 630: Time Travel , in which Megan's date of birth is given as 1983.\nCueball then remarks that she will never beat her mom's jar of pickles that was from 1978. Megan then wonders if there are more cans (from 2010 or before) in the cupboard, and asks Cueball to remind her to not look any further until 2030. At that time the can would have been 20 years old and she would be 48, giving such a can a score of 100*(2030-2010)\/48 = 41.6. That would thus beat her mom's high score.\nIf her mom's jar had expired in 1978 (not clear from the text), and for instance was found last year in 2018, then the formula for the mother's score would be 100*(2018-1978)\/<Mom's age>. And this should then not be more than 41, thus revealing the mother age to be around 100 years old today (98 last year). Of course the jar could have had an expiration day some years later, or have been found earlier. Otherwise Megan's mom would have been above 60 when giving birth to Megan. Of course Megan could also just take this extra long wait in case the next can is not from 2010 but only 2013 etc.\nCueball's final remark is that this is a terrible competition, the worst ever. Because keeping food that can spoil could potentially be dangerous, if not so, at least disgusting when finally trying to get rid of it later.\nMany perishable items, such as food, cosmetics, medications, batteries, or condoms, have expiration dates, or sometimes best by dates. The only other rule is, that it has to be something you have purchased yourself, so that heritages or stuff that was left in the basement when one moved in, does not count.  A score of 100 or higher would indicate the item expired when you were born or before you were born, meaning it was already expired when you purchased it.\nThe joke is, that owning expired items without noticing for a long time, is here getting you a high score, while in reality it is not considered favorable to have food that has expired long time ago. [ citation needed ]\nThe other joke is both the items in the comic (a can of beans and a jar of pickles) do not go bad with time but in fact remain edible indefinitely (as long as the jar\/can is not opened and is undamaged.)\nFood going bad, in the sense that it will make you sick if you eat it, is most often caused by harmful bacteria growing in the food.  Less often caused by fungi or yeast growing in the food and creating a poisonous substance, like methanol (wood alcohol.)  The process of canning food involves boiling it to kill all possible pathogens, then sealing it in a can\/jar while the food is still hot, with no air bubble.  As long as this process is done correctly, the jar lid will have an airtight seal, so as long as the can is not punctured, or does not have a hole become rusted through, no bacteria\/virus\/yeast\/fungi can get in and the food cannot spoil.  Some food may discolor over time in the jar\/can, or the texture may change, but it cannot go bad in a way that makes it unsafe to eat.\nMegan's mom could not have a jar of pickles with a 1978 expiration date because in 1978 jars and cans of food did not have expiration dates. Since then many countries introduced laws and regulations requiring companies to put expiration dates on perishable goods. In some instances this can have the negative effect of people throwing out good food by blindly following the suggested expiration date. This behavior can incentivize companies to adjust the expiration date, or put expiration dates on non-perishable goods, so that people will re-buy the products sooner.\nThe title text continues the conversation from the comic. Cueball remarks that they moved since 2010... Thus the beans were apparently bought while living in a different home, meaning they were moved along with their other belongings. This is somewhat unusual as many people take moving as an opportunity to go through their old stuff and get rid of things they no longer need. Since the rules clearly states that you have to have bought it yourself, it could not have been in the house when they moved in, they had to have brought it along (unless they later bought something that was already expired). But given Megan's final answer that \"some of us were just born to be champions\" indicates that she did bring it along, anticipating this game, and thus given her self a great score. And as is clear she is willing to wait 11 years to try to beat her mom's score.\nIt is not clear why they are keeping items for long periods of time in order to win.  An easier way to win this game would be to buy food that is already expired.  One could obtain a score of 100 simply by buying something that expired when one was born, and finding it the next day.\n[Title up in the panel:]\nWhat's the most expired item you've found in your house?\nCalculate your Expiration Date High Score (must be something you purchased)\n[Equation in a circle:]\nScore = (year you found item) minus (year item expired) divided by (your age when you found it), multiplied by 100\n[Megan and Cueball talking in a kitchen, with Megan holding a can.]\nMegan: These beans expired in 2010! That's... let's see... 24.3! New personal best! Cueball: You're never going to beat your mom's jar of pickles from 1978. Megan: Maybe there are more cans in there. Remind me not to look until 2030. Cueball: This is the worst competition.\nThe formula suggests Megans age to be 37, if this comic plays in 2019, when it was released. That puts her birth year to either 1982 or 1981 (depending on whether this plays before or after her birthday in 2019). This is in slight contrast to 630: Time Travel , which implies her birth year to be 1983.\n"}
{"id":2179,"title":"NWS Warnings","image_title":"NWS Warnings","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2179","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nws_warnings.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2179:_NWS_Warnings","transcript":"[Heading on top of frame:]\nAlert: Everyone Just Keep An Eye Out In General\n[A map of the 48 contiguous states of the United States, surrounded by several warning polygons that cover most or all of the area, along with parts of neighboring countries or the sea.]\n[The following warning headers are printed in different colors around the map of the United States, some of which are cut off by the frame. Assumptions about text outside of the frame are given in square brackets.]\nGale Warning, Tornado Warning, Flash Flood Warning, Air Quality [Alert] Frost Advisory, Severe Thunderstorm Warning, Dense Fog Advisory [Hurricane Force W]ind Watch, Tropical Storm Warning, Ice Stor[m Warning] [Extreme Cold] Warning, Heat A[dvisory] [Flood] Advisory, Snow [Squall Warning] [Storm Surge] Warning, Brisk W[ind Advisory] [Lake Effect Snow] Watch, Coastal Fl[ood Advisory] Dense Smo[ke Advisory] [Severe Weather Sta]tement, Gale War[ning] [Lakeshore Flood] Advisory, Wind Chill Ad[visory] [Extreme] Cold Warning, Blizzard Warn[ing] Hurricane Warning, Extreme Fire [Danger] [Freezing Fog Adv]isory, Tsunami Warning, Avalanche W[arning] [Ice S]torm Warning, Frost Advisory, Fire Warning, Volcano Warn[ing] Ashfall Advisory, Red Flag Warning, Radiological Hazard Warning\n[Text below frame:]\nWhen the National Weather Service needs to take a day off, they just issue warnings for everything so no one is caught by surprise.\n","explanation":"The National Weather Service (NWS) is a United States federal agency that is tasked with issuing national weather forecasts and extreme weather alerts .\nThis comic portrays the NWS as a person that needs breaks, which is absurd, as it is an important service and would probably always have staff active, even on holidays. For example, the NWS continued to work during federal government shutdowns , as it was considered an essential service for the protection of life and property. Even if one of the NWS's 122 local weather offices were to be incapacitated, contingency plans are in place to ensure that nearby offices act as emergency cover; as happened in March 2019 with flooding in Nebraska forcing the NWS office in Valley to evacuate.\nRegardless, in this comic the NWS has decided to take a break, and so has opted to issue every extreme weather alert possible for the entire contiguous portion of the United States (including DC, but not Alaska or Hawaii) to make sure no one is caught by surprise by extreme weather, since the NWS will not be able to issue warnings. As the NWS could not be sure which areas will need to get warned of severe incidents, the NWS has decided to issue warning polygons that cover the entire United States (ostensibly except Alaska and Hawaii). A layer of humor is that this would necessitate warnings where they would be highly unlikely to occur in real life; examples include issuing blizzard warnings for Florida, where any amount of snow is rare, and tsunami warnings for areas very far from any ocean coastline.\nEach of the text warnings within the map are coloured, which matches the NWS color coding used for a given warning event.\nThe title text mentions how some of the warnings that have been issued require action to get to safety that contradicts the other warnings, for example, an evacuation warning and a shelter in place order, since doing one would mean failing to do the other. This confusing scenario would likely prompt many concerned citizens to call emergency services for clarification, but the 911 outage alert would advise against this, adding another layer to the absurdity of the occurrence of the NWS taking a break.\nThis comic was likely inspired by the heat wave that impacted two-thirds of the US for more than a week.\nNWS and tornado warnings was later mentioned in the title text of 2219: Earthquake Early Warnings .\nAssumptions about text outside of the frame are given in square brackets. This page from the NWS lists all the warnings and colors, including all the hex codes for them which we stole referenced.\n[Heading on top of frame:]\nAlert: Everyone Just Keep An Eye Out In General\n[A map of the 48 contiguous states of the United States, surrounded by several warning polygons that cover most or all of the area, along with parts of neighboring countries or the sea.]\n[The following warning headers are printed in different colors around the map of the United States, some of which are cut off by the frame. Assumptions about text outside of the frame are given in square brackets.]\nGale Warning, Tornado Warning, Flash Flood Warning, Air Quality [Alert] Frost Advisory, Severe Thunderstorm Warning, Dense Fog Advisory [Hurricane Force W]ind Watch, Tropical Storm Warning, Ice Stor[m Warning] [Extreme Cold] Warning, Heat A[dvisory] [Flood] Advisory, Snow [Squall Warning] [Storm Surge] Warning, Brisk W[ind Advisory] [Lake Effect Snow] Watch, Coastal Fl[ood Advisory] Dense Smo[ke Advisory] [Severe Weather Sta]tement, Gale War[ning] [Lakeshore Flood] Advisory, Wind Chill Ad[visory] [Extreme] Cold Warning, Blizzard Warn[ing] Hurricane Warning, Extreme Fire [Danger] [Freezing Fog Adv]isory, Tsunami Warning, Avalanche W[arning] [Ice S]torm Warning, Frost Advisory, Fire Warning, Volcano Warn[ing] Ashfall Advisory, Red Flag Warning, Radiological Hazard Warning\n[Text below frame:]\nWhen the National Weather Service needs to take a day off, they just issue warnings for everything so no one is caught by surprise.\n"}
{"id":2180,"title":"Spreadsheets","image_title":"Spreadsheets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2180","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spreadsheets.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2180:_Spreadsheets","transcript":"[Cueball is at his computer. In the air on either side of him are an angel version of Cueball, with a halo and wings, and a devil version of Cueball, with horns and a pitchfork.]\n[The angel's dialogue appears in regular print, while the devil's dialogue appears in white print in black speech balloons.]\nAngel: Don't use a spreadsheet! Do it right . Devil: But a spreadsheet would be so easy . Angel: In the long run you'll regret it!\n[Closeup on Cueball, the angel, and the devil.]\nAngel: Take the time to write real code. Devil: Just paste the data! Tinker until it works! Devil: Build a labyrinth of REGEXREPLACE() and ARRAYFORMULA()! Devil: Feel the power!\n[Closeup on the devil.]\nAngel (off-panel): Fight the temptation! Devil: Ever tried QUERY() in Google Sheets? It lets you treat a block of cells like a database and run SQL queries on them.\n[Another shot of Cueball at his computer with the angel and devil at either side.]\nAngel: Don't listen to-- Angel: ... wait, really? Devil: Yes, and let me tell you about IMPORTHTML() ... Angel: Oooh...\nSpreadsheets used for complex tasks and evolving into complex algorithms was also the punchline of 1667: Algorithms .\n","explanation":"Cueball is doing some task on his computer, with an angel and devil on either side of him , trying to influence his work. The angel is telling him to do things the \"right\" way, while the devil is telling him to do his work using a spreadsheet , which is considered by professional software engineers to be a shortcut or a hack.\nSpreadsheets provide an array of cells, which can contain information or instructions.  Spreadsheets are a common end-user development tool, allowing non-developers to easily create code.  However they can be hard to maintain, thus they are often mocked by developers as a wrong approach to programming. Although it is not clear from the cartoon that this is meant, the \"right\" alternative to using a spreadsheet for some tasks may involve a database or a more general programming language.\nThe punch line comes when the angel becomes so intrigued by the spreadsheet functions, Google Sheets in particular, that it gives up trying to dissuade Cueball, and asks for more information from the devil.\nIn the title text, Randall mentions a time when he created a calendar grid in Google Sheets using a list of dates. This is described as being done in a \"single-cell formula\", and taking a long time to run. This shows the power and complexity of spreadsheets.  The procedure taking a long time to run, and freezing up the computer for 15 seconds every time it ran, was probably not what Randall's brother had in mind when he requested help.  His brother learned he might need to be wary about what he gets back when asking Randall for assistance.\nAll functions mentioned in this comic can be found in Google Sheets , but functions similar to some of them can be found in most modern spreadsheet applications.\nREGEXREPLACE (text, regular_expression, replacement) \u21d2 Replaces part of a text string with a different text string using regular expressions .\nARRAYFORMULA (array_formula) \u21d2  Enables the display of values returned from an array formula into multiple rows and\/or columns and the use of non-array functions with arrays.\nQUERY (data, query, [headers]) \u21d2  Runs a Google Visualization API Query Language query across data.\nIMPORTHTML (url, query, index) \u21d2  Imports data from a table or list within an HTML page.\nSEQUENCE (rows, columns, start, step) \u21d2  Returns an array of sequential numbers, such as 1, 2, 3, 4.\nREGEXMATCH (text, regular_expression) \u21d2  Whether a piece of text matches a regular expression.\n[Cueball is at his computer. In the air on either side of him are an angel version of Cueball, with a halo and wings, and a devil version of Cueball, with horns and a pitchfork.]\n[The angel's dialogue appears in regular print, while the devil's dialogue appears in white print in black speech balloons.]\nAngel: Don't use a spreadsheet! Do it right . Devil: But a spreadsheet would be so easy . Angel: In the long run you'll regret it!\n[Closeup on Cueball, the angel, and the devil.]\nAngel: Take the time to write real code. Devil: Just paste the data! Tinker until it works! Devil: Build a labyrinth of REGEXREPLACE() and ARRAYFORMULA()! Devil: Feel the power!\n[Closeup on the devil.]\nAngel (off-panel): Fight the temptation! Devil: Ever tried QUERY() in Google Sheets? It lets you treat a block of cells like a database and run SQL queries on them.\n[Another shot of Cueball at his computer with the angel and devil at either side.]\nAngel: Don't listen to-- Angel: ... wait, really? Devil: Yes, and let me tell you about IMPORTHTML() ... Angel: Oooh...\nSpreadsheets used for complex tasks and evolving into complex algorithms was also the punchline of 1667: Algorithms .\n"}
{"id":2181,"title":"Inbox","image_title":"Inbox","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2181","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/inbox.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2181:_Inbox","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are sitting at a desk, facing each other, each working on their laptop computers.] Megan: Answering email is the worst. It just leads to getting more email. Cueball: Yeah, email is a trap.\n[Beat panel.]\n[Megan looks up from her work on the computer.] Megan: I bet the reason the Ancient Romans got so much done was that they had no concept of Inbox Zero. Cueball: That explains it.\n","explanation":"Email differs from \"snail\" mail, in that people often expect a prompt reply. Replying to an email may lead to another email response, thus leading to a \"loop\" of constant replies and responses.  Since an individual email is quick and cheap to send, people send lots of them.  Thus people get a lot of emails, and may spend a large portion of their day dealing with email.\nMegan observes that maybe the Romans got a lot done because they did not spend time on email.  In doing this she plays on the email handling strategy named Inbox Zero, which they might not have had because the Roman number system had no symbol for zero.  This is of course redundant, as email did not exist at the time. [ citation needed ]\nInbox Zero is an approach to email inbox management espoused by Merlin Mann, with the idea that people should spend as little time as possible in their email inbox. To achieve this, one should check one's inbox as few times as practical, and quickly deal with all new emails by deleting, delegating, sending a short reply where possible or categorizing them for later tasks.  Basically it's a continuation of the \"touch it once\" strategy for dealing with physical mail.\nThe ancient Romans are one of the model historical societies, well revered for their culture and life. A common misconception is that Romans did not have a concept of the number zero. The Romans were aware of the concept of zero, but there is no numeral for 0 in the Roman numeral system, as Roman numerals do not have place values like Arabic numerals. A value of ten or greater is represented in Arabic numerals using 0 as a placeholder for empty place values. Roman numerals do not have such a placeholder digit, and so did not have a numeral for zero; the word nulla was used to refer to \"zero\" in the sense of \"nothing\". Various sources indicate that this eventually gave use to N as a Roman numeral for \"zero\", and such is the case for modern users of Roman numerals.\nThe title text refers to Hannibal's crossing of the Alps , a famous military campaign by Hannibal against the Romans. Randall claims that Hannibal needed to invade Rome to tell them to stop sending him so many emails. The reason for this was that Rome's email was sent from a \" no-reply \" email address, so Hannibal had no way of replying by email, and had to tell them in person. The real reason for Hannibal to cross the Alps was because he wanted to conquer Rome. He did not conquer Rome, so he never sent his \"unsubscribe\" message.\n[Megan and Cueball are sitting at a desk, facing each other, each working on their laptop computers.] Megan: Answering email is the worst. It just leads to getting more email. Cueball: Yeah, email is a trap.\n[Beat panel.]\n[Megan looks up from her work on the computer.] Megan: I bet the reason the Ancient Romans got so much done was that they had no concept of Inbox Zero. Cueball: That explains it.\n"}
{"id":2182,"title":"When I'm Back at a Keyboard","image_title":"When I'm Back at a Keyboard","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2182","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/when_im_back_at_a_keyboard.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2182:_When_I%27m_Back_at_a_Keyboard","transcript":"[Cueball is walking while holding his phone in both hands. A line from the screen on the phone goes to the text above him, indicating what he writes:] Cueball (texting): Sure, I can reply once I'm back at a keyboard and can type more easily.\n[Caption below the panel:] I say this a lot for someone who routinely types thousands of words in text message conversations when someone brings up Jurassic Park .\n","explanation":"Cueball is texting someone on his phone. However, since with a full sized physical keyboard you can type with all of your fingers, which is usually a much faster and more accurate way than using an on-screen keyboard on a smartphone, Cueball cuts off the conversation and says he will get back to whoever he was talking to when he can type on an actual keyboard, presumably at home and on his computer.  While there are multiple techniques for making a smartphone increasingly easier to enter words into using its on-screen virtual keyboard , such as keyboard swiping, on-the-fly spelling and grammar checkers, and voice recognition to minimize using the keyboard at all, the combination of a full-sized keyboard along with a generous sized screen is hard to beat for speed and accuracy when typing larger blocks of text.\nThe joke is that despite claiming to be more proficient with a physical keyboard, rather than a digital one, Randall still goes into long rants through messages on his smartphone, whenever anybody brings up Jurassic Park .\nThere might also be a reference on Dennis Nedry, a character from the first Jurassic Park film. The programmer is responsible for a security sabotage and intends to be away from his keyboard only for a short while, but dies (not altogether) unexpectedly, worsening the situation in the park.\nThe title text shows a typical sentence from Randall after having been in a chat over his phone. Before the sentence he has written 1500 words on his phone, all related to Jurassic Park, more or less. When he finally have written his fingers off he then says that he will have to stop now but once back at a keyboard, and even though he just typed 1500 words on his phone, he is ready to type even more (5000 words) using his keyboard.\nThe widespread uptake of mobile devices has stark implications for user-generated content sites on the internet. According to a 2014 New York Times article, only one percent of the changes to Wikipedia articles were made via mobile devices, although they displayed about a third of all Wikipedia page views that year.\n[Cueball is walking while holding his phone in both hands. A line from the screen on the phone goes to the text above him, indicating what he writes:] Cueball (texting): Sure, I can reply once I'm back at a keyboard and can type more easily.\n[Caption below the panel:] I say this a lot for someone who routinely types thousands of words in text message conversations when someone brings up Jurassic Park .\n"}
{"id":2183,"title":"Icon Swap","image_title":"Icon Swap","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2183","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/icon_swap.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2183:_Icon_Swap","transcript":"[A histogram of books finished over time. Spikes occur at certain points, with arrows marked \"Icon Swap\" pointing to the point before them.]\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm not saying I have a problem compulsively checking news and social media on my phone, but when I replace the social media app icon with my eBook reader, I read a half-dozen books before I get used to the change.\n","explanation":"Randall denies having a social media addiction . However, he concludes that he must have some problem, as he opens his social media \/ news apps many times a day. He tries to remedy this addiction by rearranging the icons on his phone\u2019s app launcher. Specifically, he swaps the app icon with that of an eBook reader, so opening the \"social media app\" would lead to the eBook reader, and vice versa. In this case, when he swaps a social media\/news app with his E-book reading app, he ends up reading more books (as shown by the graph) because he is used to having his media app in its place, and is opening it up through muscle memory .\nThis results in the punch line, where he says that this causes him to read \"a half-dozen\" books before his muscle memory adjusts and not he stops opening his reader as often. Presumably, he changes the icons again in order to trick his muscle memory when he makes a conscious decision to read more books or use less social media.\nAlternatively, Randall does not realize that he is reading books instead of a social media feed, and often gets through many books before realizing.\nIn the title text, Randall says that there is probably an eBook app in development that will use \"breaking news alerts\", typically sent as push notifications , about what is happening in the book, to prompt readers to continue reading more pages. This parallels how a news app works, which would send an alert when a new event occurs.\nThis topic is similar to one he went over in 477: Typewriter , where he is compulsively trying to check news websites despite using a typewriter.\n[A histogram of books finished over time. Spikes occur at certain points, with arrows marked \"Icon Swap\" pointing to the point before them.]\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm not saying I have a problem compulsively checking news and social media on my phone, but when I replace the social media app icon with my eBook reader, I read a half-dozen books before I get used to the change.\n"}
{"id":2184,"title":"Unpopular Opinions","image_title":"Unpopular Opinions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2184","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unpopular_opinions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2184:_Unpopular_Opinions","transcript":"[Ponytail, Cueball, and Megan are all looking at their cell phones. Cueball is in the middle, facing out, holding his phone in both hands, while the two women face towards him with only one hand on their phones. Ponytail is tapping on the phone as shown by small lines over her fingers. they talk to each other, but before that, there is the following text above them:] Unpopular positive opinion challenge: Name a movie that... (1) you genuinely like (not \"so bad it's good\") (2) came out in your adult life post-2000, and (3) is rated below 50% on Rotten Tomatoes.\nPonytail: Wow, this is harder than I thought. Cueball: ...Terminator Genisys? Megan: Seriously?! Cueball: I like time travel, OK??\n[Caption below the panel:]\nWhen people talk about their \"unpopular opinions\" about movies, they usually mean hating something everyone likes, but liking something everyone hates is much harder.\n","explanation":"Everybody has their own preferences as to what movies they like and dislike, and when your like or dislike of a movie seems to be different than the majority of people, you could call your preference the \"unpopular opinion\" because your opinion is the less prevalent one. This often takes the form of \"I hate this movie and I don't understand why everybody else seems to like it\", but this comic is talking about the opposite form, which it categorizes as less common, namely \"I like this movie and don't understand why everybody else seems to hate it.\"  The comic points out that it's relatively common to hate movies others appear to like, but the converse, in which you like a movie others seem to hate, is much harder to find.\nTo illustrate how hard it is to like a movie everyone else seems to dislike, the comic presents a challenge whereby you 1) identify a movie you definitely like, which 2) came out during your adult life (so it isn't tainted by childhood nostalgia ), and which 3) the majority of other people don't like, as measured informally by having a popularity rating below 50% on the Rotten Tomatoes website (a website that aggregates reviews of films).  Supposedly you will find it hard to find a movie that meets all three criteria. The rules prohibit a movie that the viewer finds \"So Bad, It's Good\" - the enjoyment of the movie must be genuine, for its positive qualities, rather than ironic enjoyment of its negative qualities.\nThe image in this comic gives an example of this effect, namely the movie Terminator Genisys , the fifth in the Terminator series, released in 2015. This series, about time-travelling killer robots, included the highly rated Terminator 2 (93% on Rotten Tomatoes), while Terminator Genisys is only 26%.\nThe title text refers to three movies in the Terminator franchise, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Terminator Salvation (2009), and Terminator: Dark Fate (due out later in 2019). The Terminator movie series has featured both time travel and trucks driving or attempting to drive into people, and Randall apparently finds himself drawn to such movies. He hopes that Dark Fate will be a good movie, but has low expectations, considering the less than stellar ratings of the last 3 movies (69%, 33%, and 26%).\nA Tomatoes search ordered by release date limited to qualifying movies can help individuals verify the difficulty of finding such movies for themselves.\n[Ponytail, Cueball, and Megan are all looking at their cell phones. Cueball is in the middle, facing out, holding his phone in both hands, while the two women face towards him with only one hand on their phones. Ponytail is tapping on the phone as shown by small lines over her fingers. they talk to each other, but before that, there is the following text above them:] Unpopular positive opinion challenge: Name a movie that... (1) you genuinely like (not \"so bad it's good\") (2) came out in your adult life post-2000, and (3) is rated below 50% on Rotten Tomatoes.\nPonytail: Wow, this is harder than I thought. Cueball: ...Terminator Genisys? Megan: Seriously?! Cueball: I like time travel, OK??\n[Caption below the panel:]\nWhen people talk about their \"unpopular opinions\" about movies, they usually mean hating something everyone likes, but liking something everyone hates is much harder.\n"}
{"id":2185,"title":"Cumulonimbus","image_title":"Cumulonimbus","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2185","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cumulonimbus.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2185:_Cumulonimbus","transcript":"[Drawing of a small cloud with with a label beneath:] Cumulus\n[Drawing of a medium sized tall hourglass shaped cloud with a label beneath:] Cumulonimbus\n[Drawing of a large cloud, larger at the top than at the bottom, with a label beneath:] Cumulonimbulonimbus\n[Drawing of a huge and very complicated cloud in three layers, with a label beneath:] Cumulonimbulonimbulocumulonimbus\n","explanation":"This comic follows the naming of clouds. As with other lists (like in 2022: Sports Champions ), it starts off as normal but then gets more unusual until it is unrealistic.\nCumulus The first panel shows a cumulus cloud , from the Latin for \"heap\". These are common clouds and are relatively small. Cumulus clouds form when warm (and thus rising) moist air condenses when it hits the dew point , the temperature at which relative humidity hits 100%. Cumulus clouds with sharp, defined borders are still growing. When they stop growing (because the rising moist air is exhausted), they get fuzzy and fluffy, and eventually dissolve. Cumulo nimbus The second panel shows a cumulonimbus cloud , from the Latin for \"heaping raincloud\", with the upper part about the same size as the lower part. Though somewhat like the cumulus cloud, it is more prone to causing rain and lightning. Cumulonimbus clouds, like cumulus clouds, grow vertically because of their moist warm air, but they have enough energy to  reach the top of the troposphere , giving them the distinctive anvil shape shown in the comic and their tendency to produce nasty weather. Cumulo nimbulo nimbus The third panel shows an even bigger cloud and names it cumulonimbulonimbus (Latin for \"heaping rainy raincloud\"). Here the scientific facts end and the humor begins. The cloud has the upper part about twice as large as the lower part. The humor here comes from building up an even bigger name by adding another \"nimbus\" element for the cloud as its size increases, suggesting that its growth as compared to the second cloud shown has made it even more \"rainy\". Cumulo nimbulo nimbulo cumulo nimbus The fourth panel shows an absurdly large cloud with three major layers and gives it the name cumulonimbulonimbulocumulonimbus (Latin for \"heaping rainy rainy heaping raincloud\"). This is a combination of the third and second cloud names in this comic, and indeed the fourth cloud looks a lot like the second one emerging out of the top of the third. This cloud may look like a super soaker , ready to spray water on everyone, or perhaps a faucet ready to open and pour water down. Alto cumu lenticulo strato nimbulo cirrus lenticulo mamma noctilucent The title text takes this comic to its logical extreme by naming a new cloud that has the longest name of them all and is also supposedly the rarest. Its name can be translated as \"mid-altitude, heaped, lense-shaped, layered, grey, rainy, wispy, breast-like and lit at night\". It mentions a common joke in weather communities, making fun of the common trope that thunderstorms form when \"warm moist air\" meets \"cold dry air,\" an extreme oversimplification. A complicated cloud needs complicated processes, so Randall adds in \"cold slippery air,\" then cursed air and nanobots , which makes the cloud impossible since neither of those exist. [ citation needed ]\nThe name of this cloud is a compound of the following cloud names: altocumulus : \"heap up high\"; these clouds are mid-altitude white patches. lenticular cloud , often shaped like a flying saucer. stratus : a layered cloud, effectively above-ground fog. nimbus : a grey cloud producing continuous rain. cirrus : a cloud that looks like thin, wispy strands. \"lenticulo\" gets repeated, perhaps indicating that there's a second disc in the cloud. mammatus : a breast-like cloud structure that forms at the bottom of some thunderstorm clouds, which signifies sinking air and is associated with severe storm activity and, in the central United States, tornado formation. noctilucent : a cloud-like structure formed from ice crystals, often formed after volcano eruptions and other cataclysmic events and illuminated by a just-set sun.\nThe International Cloud Atlas defines the cloud types that are recognized by the WMO, the World Meteorological Organization . It was first published in 1896. Similarly, IUPAC publishes a manual that allows chemists to name chemical compounds in a consistent manner. The Altocumulenticulostratonimbulocirruslenticulomammanoctilucent may thus be a pun on IUPAC, which (theoretically) offers a unique name for each possible strand of DNA and other complex molecules (such as Titin ). Therefore, Randall might have seen a unique cloud that has never been observed before, but yet, thanks to IUPAC-like cloud naming rules, he came up with a \"valid\" name for his observation.\n[Drawing of a small cloud with with a label beneath:] Cumulus\n[Drawing of a medium sized tall hourglass shaped cloud with a label beneath:] Cumulonimbus\n[Drawing of a large cloud, larger at the top than at the bottom, with a label beneath:] Cumulonimbulonimbus\n[Drawing of a huge and very complicated cloud in three layers, with a label beneath:] Cumulonimbulonimbulocumulonimbus\n"}
{"id":2186,"title":"Dark Matter","image_title":"Dark Matter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2186","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dark_matter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2186:_Dark_Matter","transcript":"[Megan walks with Cueball. She is holding a hand out while telling Cueball something.] Megan: Dark matter density in the solar system is around 0.3 GeV\/cm 3 Cueball: Is... that a lot?\n[As they continue to walk and talk she spreads her arms out.] Megan: In terms of mass, it means the Earth contains one squirrel worth of dark matter at any given time. Cueball: Wow.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball stops while Megan walks past him. Megan is face-palming herself while looking down.] Cueball: Is there any way to find out which squirrel it is? Megan: No, it's not literally-\n[Cueball holds his hand with one finger up in front of Megan, while she has turned towards him and is holding both arms up, possible with balled fist, as she shouts back at him, shown both with large fat letters and with small lines emanating above her head.] Cueball: Oh, that explains why they weigh enough to set off those spinning bird feeders! Megan: Dark matter isn't squirrels!\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are talking about dark matter , the mysterious invisible mass observed indirectly by the rate at which galaxies rotate. Megan states that dark matter's density in the solar system is 0.3\u00a0GeV\/cm 3 , as claimed, for example, by Bovy and Tremaine (2012) \"On the local dark matter density\" in The Astrophysical Journal . Cueball does not understand what that means, so Megan explains that it equates to one squirrel's mass of dark matter in the volume of the Earth . In the final two panels, Cueball humorously misinterprets this as implying dark matter is actually one or more squirrels, and thereby provides the mass which causes squirrels to spin on bird feeders designed to deter them while birds, with lower mass, do not. This enrages Megan.\nThe gigaelectronvolt (GeV) is a unit of energy that can be converted to a mass using Einstein's formula E = mc 2 . It is typically used for subatomic particles, such as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), one of several contending possibilities for the still-open question of the composition of dark matter, and one which Megan's uniform density figure implies constitutes most of it. For example, the mass of a proton is 0.938\u00a0GeV\/ c 2 . However, it is common to omit the c 2 denominator, representing masses as GeV or MeV. A mass represented as 0.3 GeV is equal to 5.35\u00a0\u00d7\u00a010 \u221225 grams [1] . Since the Earth's volume is 1.083\u00a0\u00d7\u00a010 27 cm 3 Megan's figures imply that a squirrel has a mass of about 1.3\u00a0lb (1.083\u00a0x\u00a05.35\u00a0\u00d7\u00a010 27\u221225 g = 580\u00a0g [2] ), a typical weight for several species of common squirrels.\nSquirrels are a recurring topic on xkcd, but are not a serious alternative to WIMPs as a scientific explanation for the composition of dark matter . Since the September 2015 detection by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and subsequent confirmation by the Virgo interferometer of gravitational waves from unexpectedly many merging black holes substantially more massive than those produced by stellar collapse, primordial black holes (PBHs) have become a popular alternative explanation to WIMPs (or squirrels), attracting proponents at NASA, and other cosmologists for several reasons. But PBHs remain controversial, because if they constituted more than a very small portion of dark matter, alternative explanations would be almost entirely excluded.\nOther alternative hypotheses for the observations suggesting dark matter, such as theories involving the gravitational force varying over different distances , often upset cosmologists as much as Megan is shown to be, because they violate the cosmological principle among other issues. Part of this frustration may be due to the fact that even after many decades of careful, tremendously expensive, and often stunningly beautiful experiments, none of the many explanations for dark matter or the observations suggesting it have as yet any support from direct empirical observations.\nTo help resolve this mystery, the title text imagines using a spinning bird feeder like a particle accelerator , colliding squirrels at relativistic speeds as if they were subatomic particles, to detect dark matter particles like the CERN accelerator discovered the Higgs boson . (Note, however, that accelerating even one squirrel to relativistic velocities would destroy the feeder along with any nearby birds, not to mention the squirrels, and the surrounding city.)\n[Megan walks with Cueball. She is holding a hand out while telling Cueball something.] Megan: Dark matter density in the solar system is around 0.3 GeV\/cm 3 Cueball: Is... that a lot?\n[As they continue to walk and talk she spreads her arms out.] Megan: In terms of mass, it means the Earth contains one squirrel worth of dark matter at any given time. Cueball: Wow.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball stops while Megan walks past him. Megan is face-palming herself while looking down.] Cueball: Is there any way to find out which squirrel it is? Megan: No, it's not literally-\n[Cueball holds his hand with one finger up in front of Megan, while she has turned towards him and is holding both arms up, possible with balled fist, as she shouts back at him, shown both with large fat letters and with small lines emanating above her head.] Cueball: Oh, that explains why they weigh enough to set off those spinning bird feeders! Megan: Dark matter isn't squirrels!\n"}
{"id":2187,"title":"Geologic Time","image_title":"Geologic Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2187","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geologic_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2187:_Geologic_Time","transcript":"[Megan, arms spread out, is delivering a long-winded explanation to Hairbun and Cueball.] Megan: Imagine Earth's history as a football field, from the planet's formation at one end to today at the other. Megan: Complex life would be largely limited to the final ten yards. Dinosaurs appear at the five-yard line, the age of mammals happens in the last 1\u00bd yards, and humans arise in the final few millimeters. Megan: All of written history would fit in a strip narrower than a single hair. Megan: \"Two weeks\" would be too small to see even with a powerful microscope. Hairbun: Mm hmm.\n[Caption below the panel:] Geologists always try this when they're late turning something in.\n","explanation":"Analogies to explain the passage of billions of years are often used in popular science explanations, to help compress these huge spans of time into something the human mind can comprehend; the football field analogy is one such analogy. The Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old ; if you were to present a timeline of Earth as long as a football field (100 yards or 91 meters), then each inch of that length would comprise more than 1.26 million years of Earth's history and each millimeter nearly 50,000 years.\nMegan , a geologist , tells a story about how small the timespan of human history is compared to Earth's total history. She does this to juxtapose it with normal human time-scales, to imply that her being two weeks late turning in her project is immaterial by the standards of the Earth's tremendous age. She tries to sell this story to Cueball and Hairbun , but Hairbun's response does not seem to bode well for Megan.\nMegan's delay of two weeks would map to about eight nanometers on the football field.  The most powerful electron microscopes have a magnification of ten million, which would make it look like about eight centimeters (about three inches), so her statement about it being \"too small to see even with a powerful microscope\" is a bit of an exaggeration.  The most powerful optical microscope has 6500x magnification,( New York Times, March 8, 2011 ) which would indeed be inadequate.\nRandall states in the caption that this is a trick that geologists always try to use when being late turning something in.\nIn the title text, Hairbun and Cueball reply by turning Megan's own argument against her. They promise to pay her for her work in what could be considered a short amount of time on the geological scale - which could easily be many, many times longer than Megan's own lifespan. Megan, like all working people, wants to be paid in a timely manner for her work, and would be deeply dissatisfied to have her payment delayed for so long. Thus, Hairbun and Cueball's rebuttal proves a point: when other people require you be punctual, it's easy to dismiss them as just being impatient; when you're the one who needs other people to be punctual, it's not so easy to criticize yourself.\nThe comparison with a football field is a typical, but doubtful practice to explain people what the size of an area is ( 1257: Monster ). Here it is used as an analogy with a one-dimensional timescale.\n[Megan, arms spread out, is delivering a long-winded explanation to Hairbun and Cueball.] Megan: Imagine Earth's history as a football field, from the planet's formation at one end to today at the other. Megan: Complex life would be largely limited to the final ten yards. Dinosaurs appear at the five-yard line, the age of mammals happens in the last 1\u00bd yards, and humans arise in the final few millimeters. Megan: All of written history would fit in a strip narrower than a single hair. Megan: \"Two weeks\" would be too small to see even with a powerful microscope. Hairbun: Mm hmm.\n[Caption below the panel:] Geologists always try this when they're late turning something in.\n"}
{"id":2188,"title":"E Scooters","image_title":"E Scooters","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2188","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/e_scooters.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2188:_E_Scooters","transcript":"[Cueball is getting off his e-scooter, with his bicycle helmet hanging on the handlebars. He has stopped right in front of White Hat who addresses him.] White Hat: Hey, you got one of those e-scooters! Cueball: Yeah!\n[Cueball is now standing next to the e-scooter holding on to the handlebars with one hand. Both he and White Hat look down at the scooter.] White Hat: So what do you think? I hear so much about these things.\n[A large panel with just White Hat who is spreading his arms out.] White Hat: Are they impractical and unsafe toys? Or a last-mile transit revolution?\n[Closeup on White Hat holding both arms out and up with palms held up.] White Hat: A low-carbon car replacement? Or Silicon Valley sidewalk clutter?\n[In a frame-less panel only Cueball and his e-scooter is shown.] Cueball: Well, having given it lots of thought, here is my opinion on scooters:\n[Cueball is bending at the knees and holding on to the handlebars with both hands as White Hat is looking at him. Cueball starts making machine noises.] Cueball: Zooooooom! Cueball: Neeeeeoooormm Cueball: Vrrrm Vrrmvrmm Cueball: Wheeee!\n[Cueball continues making sounds as in the previous panel. White Hat seems to have taken a step back.] Cueball: Pew pew pew! Cueball: Bzzzzt Kaboom! White Hat: Wait, why are there lasers? Cueball: Pew!\n","explanation":"At the time of publishing, motorized scooters or e-scooters were very popular, especially with the rise of ride-share companies such as Lime and Bird that use apps allowing users to rent the scooters by the minute. ( Randall uses \"e scooter\" or \"E Scooter\" for the comic's title. But in the comic White Hat does say e-scooter, which is also the way the Wikipedia article on e-scooters mentions them.)\nCueball drives up to White Hat on his e-scooter. White Hat asks him for his thoughts on the scooter; he is interested as he has heard so much about them. However, instead of just waiting to hear Cueball's response, White Hat then goes on to list four opinions he has heard other people say about e-scooters:\nWhen White Hat finally stops talking, Cueball tells him that he has given this a lot of thought and says he will give him his opinion on e-scooters. But instead of choosing an opinion from  White Hat's list, or any logical opinion at all for that matter, Cueball starts making engine\/vehicle sounds. This may indicate he doesn't care about any of White Hat's complicated opinions and is just excited about the fun of riding an e-scooter. In the last panel Cueball also makes \"pew pew pew\" sounds and other sounds from shooter-type video games, perhaps indicating that for him, riding a scooter is akin to the fun he gets from playing such video games.\nSome people consider e-scooters as a \"low-carbon car replacement\", as they are better for the environment than polluting gas cars (while others consider the resources used in their creation and their disposal a bigger threat). Additionally, e-scooters have been touted as a form of \"last-mile transit\" - used to cover the \"last mile\" to your destination after taking other forms of public transportation. However, others consider e-scooters a public nuisance, as users often leave them on the sidewalk haphazardly; hence the question about them being clutter. The comment about them being specifically \"Silicon Valley\" clutter is due to the expense, the city-infrastructure needed, and the high-tech nature of these devices. Many of the e-scooter companies are also from the Silicon Valley area. Scooters have also been seen as dangerous (\"unsafe toys\"), as many users do not wear helmets when riding e-scooters (though Cueball is seen with a helmet in the comic, although not wearing it) or ride them at high speed on sidewalks with many pedestrians. Some cities have gone so far as to ban e-scooters from their communities .\nCueball's response of making onomatopoeic sounds which mimic the e-scooter is humorous for two reasons. First, e-scooters are fun and may seem futuristic, like something from his childhood. This would bring out a youthful and childish joy children have when making engine noises when playing with toy cars. He is acting like a kid because riding a scooter makes him feel like one. The second reason this is funny is that the scooters, being battery-powered, are nearly silent. He is making the sounds a traditional motorized scooter makes to fill in the audible gap. It is unclear why the scooter has lasers. Part of the joke is that there is no good or logical explanation for them. This forces the reader to come up with their own devious or honorable plan Cueball is executing. Not knowing why makes it more sinister and mysterious.\nThe title text refers to Dean Kamen, an American inventor best known for founding the Segway company. At the time of the invention of the Segway, it was billed as a revolution in personal transit, with articles (and Kamen himself) speculating that future cities might be entirely rebuilt around it and similar personal transporters. That buzz quickly died down, and Segways became the subject of a great deal of mockery. The text implies that Kamen might resent the fact that a similar vision has re-emerged and is once again being taken seriously, but without his invention. However, Segway actually manufactures scooters for e-scooter rental agency Lime .\n[Cueball is getting off his e-scooter, with his bicycle helmet hanging on the handlebars. He has stopped right in front of White Hat who addresses him.] White Hat: Hey, you got one of those e-scooters! Cueball: Yeah!\n[Cueball is now standing next to the e-scooter holding on to the handlebars with one hand. Both he and White Hat look down at the scooter.] White Hat: So what do you think? I hear so much about these things.\n[A large panel with just White Hat who is spreading his arms out.] White Hat: Are they impractical and unsafe toys? Or a last-mile transit revolution?\n[Closeup on White Hat holding both arms out and up with palms held up.] White Hat: A low-carbon car replacement? Or Silicon Valley sidewalk clutter?\n[In a frame-less panel only Cueball and his e-scooter is shown.] Cueball: Well, having given it lots of thought, here is my opinion on scooters:\n[Cueball is bending at the knees and holding on to the handlebars with both hands as White Hat is looking at him. Cueball starts making machine noises.] Cueball: Zooooooom! Cueball: Neeeeeoooormm Cueball: Vrrrm Vrrmvrmm Cueball: Wheeee!\n[Cueball continues making sounds as in the previous panel. White Hat seems to have taken a step back.] Cueball: Pew pew pew! Cueball: Bzzzzt Kaboom! White Hat: Wait, why are there lasers? Cueball: Pew!\n"}
{"id":2189,"title":"Old Game Worlds","image_title":"Old Game Worlds","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2189","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/old_game_worlds.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2189:_Old_Game_Worlds","transcript":"[A light gray drop down menu is shown with three sections split up with three grays lines split up with section titles in the same gray font. Beneath each section title is 3, 4 and 6 lines of black text. An white arrow cursor hovers over the second last option, which is thus highlighted with a dark gray background and white text.] New Games Subnautica Russian Subway Dogs Kerbal Space Program Old Games Worms Armageddon Elasto Mania Katamari Damacy Mario Kart Very Old Games Link's Awakening Escape Velocity SimCity Prince of Persia Super Mario Bros MS Flight Simulator 3\n[A colorful scene is shown from the Super Mario Bros. side-scrolling game, the first level World 1-1. Mario with red hat and trousers is standing on the brown blocks beneath the blue sky. Another character in the game, Goomba, is standing in front of some green bushes. Above them is narration text:] Narrator: It feels weird that you can go into old games and the whole world is still there. Goomba: Mario? Mario: It'sa me! Goomba: What are you doing here?\n[Mario stands between an e-scooter, a dismounted and broken Question Mark Box lying on its side and a cellphone tower. Narration continues above:] Narrator: Part of me expects to find that everything's changed.\n[Mario looks at a damaged green but rusty Warp Pipe and there is a quadcopter drone flying by over his head. Weeds are growing both from the pipe and from the blocks he is walking on. Narration continues above:] Narrator: That pipes have rusted, walls have crumbled, bad guys have moved on.\n[Mario has moved on to World 1-4, the castle has been replaced with a bakery. The blocks beneath his feet are now smaller and gray and above them is black background. The character Toad with the white hat with red circles is standing in front of a bakery disc with shelves of bread and cake behind it. There is a green sign on the front of the brown disk. Toad talks to Mario with white text in the black background. Above the black part of the image is more narration in a frame-less white section:] Narrator: That even our game worlds can't escape the passage of time. Toad: Thank you, Mario! Toad: But this is a Panera now! Sign: Panera\n","explanation":"Randall sits at his computer looking at a menu of games which have been ordered into three sections, New, Old and Very old games (see List of games below). At the bottom of this list, 2nd to last, he chooses to click on Super Mario Bros. which  then opens as shown in the next four panels.\nThis comic explores the difference between the real world, where artificial structures require constant upkeep and communities change with time, and the digital worlds of video games, where everything is static until the plot demands otherwise. Although online games do require server maintenance by the owners and sometimes receive major changes to their content, offline games are - and always have been - perpetual existences, unchanging so long as the data is intact. (This is later revisited in 2221: Emulation )\nAs the narration explores this incongruity, and theorizes about the idea of it not being so, the comic displays the alternative with the ubiquitous video game - Super Mario Bros. (1985) - as an example. Mario arrives in World 1-1 to find a Goomba expressing surprise that the plumber has deigned to return to the place where his first journey began. As he advances, he finds both signs of progress - a cellphone tower , an e-scooter , a drone - and signs of disrepair - damaged Warp Pipes , loose blocks. At World 1-4, he finds Toad ; in the game, Toad would warn him that the Princess is being held in another castle , but now, he's informing Mario that the castle has been remodeled into a Panera bakery.\nThis reflects common experiences of a person returning to a place they once knew well, but haven't seen in a long time. The atmosphere of the place may be changed by modern elements that hadn't existed before.  Buildings and other infrastructure may have decayed or fallen into disrepair.  And areas that have not been neglected will often be redeveloped, meaning that landmarks you remember may be repurposed or demolished to make room for something new. This tends to stir up feelings of nostalgia and loss in real life, when the settings of your memory no longer exist in the form that you remember.\nThe title-text abruptly switches to Mario's acceptance of the changes to World 1, and deciding to make the most of it by purchasing a cinnamon roll . \"Coins\" are the omnipresent currency of the Mushroom Kingdom and most other locations Mario visits in the Mario series, taking the form of large nondescript golden circles, usually with a rectangular indent in the middle.\nThe concept of an old, dilapidated version of the world of the original Super Mario Bros. was explored by Nintendo themselves in the Mushroomy Kingdom stage featured in multiple Super Smash Bros. games.\nThe first panel shows a list of games in approximately reverse chronological order of their release:\nThe first game in the Mario Kart series was Super Mario Kart from 1992. As can be seen that Mario Kart game would be older than Link's Awakening. So it seems likely Randall was referring to Mario Kart 64 from 1997, the first in the series to begin with Mario Kart leaving out the Super. With this in mind all the games in the two bottom sections are older than all those in the previous section. But they are not listed chronologically within the three sections.\nRussian Subway Dogs is the newest game from 2018 (and at the time of this comic's release in August 2019, is the only one of the 13 games mentioned in this comic that does not currently have a Wikipedia entry).\nSuper Mario Bros., the game most prominently featured in the comic, is the oldest of the 13. The first version of Microsoft Flight Simulator , MS flight simulator 1.0 , was from 1982, but the list this comic specifies the third version, released in 1988.\nAlthough the games in this comic appear to be grouped by date of their release, the time span covered by these groupings is not uniform. The first three games mentioned are from 2014-2018. The next four date from between 1997-2004, and the last six from between 1985-1996. With the earliest games grouped as 1985-1996, uniform grouping could split the later games between a group released in 1997-2008 and a group of games released in 2009 or later. If grouped by decades, 1985-1995 would potentially place the Escape Velocity game in the Old Games section instead of the Very Old Games section. Although some of these games did have releases intended to run on a 'Personal Computer' , the list in this comic seems to focus on games released for gaming consoles , with no mention of games released for first or second generation consoles which pre-dated the Nintendo Entertainment System (such as Pong published by Atari; Brain Wave, Haunted House, Interplanetary Voyage, & Wipeout for the Magnavox Odyssey ; & Adventure for the Atari 2600 ).\n[A light gray drop down menu is shown with three sections split up with three grays lines split up with section titles in the same gray font. Beneath each section title is 3, 4 and 6 lines of black text. An white arrow cursor hovers over the second last option, which is thus highlighted with a dark gray background and white text.] New Games Subnautica Russian Subway Dogs Kerbal Space Program Old Games Worms Armageddon Elasto Mania Katamari Damacy Mario Kart Very Old Games Link's Awakening Escape Velocity SimCity Prince of Persia Super Mario Bros MS Flight Simulator 3\n[A colorful scene is shown from the Super Mario Bros. side-scrolling game, the first level World 1-1. Mario with red hat and trousers is standing on the brown blocks beneath the blue sky. Another character in the game, Goomba, is standing in front of some green bushes. Above them is narration text:] Narrator: It feels weird that you can go into old games and the whole world is still there. Goomba: Mario? Mario: It'sa me! Goomba: What are you doing here?\n[Mario stands between an e-scooter, a dismounted and broken Question Mark Box lying on its side and a cellphone tower. Narration continues above:] Narrator: Part of me expects to find that everything's changed.\n[Mario looks at a damaged green but rusty Warp Pipe and there is a quadcopter drone flying by over his head. Weeds are growing both from the pipe and from the blocks he is walking on. Narration continues above:] Narrator: That pipes have rusted, walls have crumbled, bad guys have moved on.\n[Mario has moved on to World 1-4, the castle has been replaced with a bakery. The blocks beneath his feet are now smaller and gray and above them is black background. The character Toad with the white hat with red circles is standing in front of a bakery disc with shelves of bread and cake behind it. There is a green sign on the front of the brown disk. Toad talks to Mario with white text in the black background. Above the black part of the image is more narration in a frame-less white section:] Narrator: That even our game worlds can't escape the passage of time. Toad: Thank you, Mario! Toad: But this is a Panera now! Sign: Panera\n"}
{"id":2190,"title":"Serena Versus the Drones","image_title":"Serena Versus the Drones","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2190","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/serena_versus_the_drones.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2190:_Serena_Versus_the_Drones","transcript":"[A panel at the top of the comic has a quote and to the right of the quote is a picture of Randall's new book. It is black with large blue text and smaller white text. On the book cover, in white drawings, are seen Megan with a ladder and either Black or White Hat (hard to say on black background). Both are looking up on Cueball who is floating in the air with a quadcopter drone beneath either leg, trying to plug in an electric light bulb in a naked lamp hanging down near him. It seems he has already removed the broken light bulb, as he has one in both hands. And now he tries to put in the new one. The blue text stating title and author can be read.] \"It's a pretty bad idea.\" \u2014Serena Williams on my idea\nBook: How To Book: Randall Munroe\n[Caption below this panel above another set of panel:] Which types of sports equipment would be most effective at bringing down a rogue photography drone? My new book features a real-world test by Serena Williams.\n[A large panel shows Serena Williams, with curly hair and a very large ponytail, swinging her tennis racket to smash a tennis ball towards, and hitting, a quadcopter drone flying towards her. As the ball hits a small explosion seems to happen with the drone which is stopped in mid air. Above the drone are two other drones flying towards her, with one more below. There is a broken drone on the ground in front of her. Three tennis balls lie behind her.]\n[Three smaller panels are beneath the large panel. The first panel is smaller than the other two and a bit higher up than they are and is overlaying the second panel. It shows Serena jumping with the racket held high. No drones are shown, but her shadow can be seen beneath her.]\n[In the next panel she is seen smashing her racket into one of the drones, breaking a rotor off, she is still hanging in the air, her shadow beneath her and her legs partly behind the previous panel, which is covering most of the left part of this panel. Another drone is flying above her.]\n[In the final panel she is seen standing again, turning around facing the other way, taking another swing at two drones that try to evade her. The ground is now filled with debris from several smashed drones.]\n[Caption beneath the panels, with the \"here\" in link blue color... The entire image is a link, so no need to click on the here though.] To read an excerpt about Serena's drone battle, click here or go to blog.xkcd.com\n","explanation":"Another comic which is a promotion of Randall's up coming book How To , to be released less than 3 weeks after this comic's release, on September 3, 2019. And this time permanent - as opposed to Disappearing Sunday Update from about two weeks before. It stars Serena Williams , an American professional tennis player and former world No. 1.\nMost book advertisements feature laudatory quotes from famous people or reviewers, but here, Serena Williams is quoted as saying \"It's a pretty bad idea\" about Randall's idea of her attacking drones as given by the title of the comic. That idea is one of the chapters in the book and Serena Williams actually agreed to go and shoot tennis balls after an old drone with a broken camera. This can be read in the Blag post that is linked at the bottom of the comic: Serena Versus the Drones .  Unlike other books, \"It's a pretty bad idea\" is a pretty good quote for his \"How To\" book given that many of Randall's humorous explorations of scientific methods of doing usual and unusual things are pretty bad ideas.\nAs usual with Randall there is no need to click on the link, as the entire image is a link to the blog post. This was mentioned in 1572: xkcd Survey , and even earlier in the banner for his book tour for the what if? book.\nThe title text says that Serena Williams said that if she wanted to defend herself against drones and if she had to use sports equipment, she would use a tennis racket and ball. Notably, according to the Blag post, this would be ineffective compared to throwing.\n[A panel at the top of the comic has a quote and to the right of the quote is a picture of Randall's new book. It is black with large blue text and smaller white text. On the book cover, in white drawings, are seen Megan with a ladder and either Black or White Hat (hard to say on black background). Both are looking up on Cueball who is floating in the air with a quadcopter drone beneath either leg, trying to plug in an electric light bulb in a naked lamp hanging down near him. It seems he has already removed the broken light bulb, as he has one in both hands. And now he tries to put in the new one. The blue text stating title and author can be read.] \"It's a pretty bad idea.\" \u2014Serena Williams on my idea\nBook: How To Book: Randall Munroe\n[Caption below this panel above another set of panel:] Which types of sports equipment would be most effective at bringing down a rogue photography drone? My new book features a real-world test by Serena Williams.\n[A large panel shows Serena Williams, with curly hair and a very large ponytail, swinging her tennis racket to smash a tennis ball towards, and hitting, a quadcopter drone flying towards her. As the ball hits a small explosion seems to happen with the drone which is stopped in mid air. Above the drone are two other drones flying towards her, with one more below. There is a broken drone on the ground in front of her. Three tennis balls lie behind her.]\n[Three smaller panels are beneath the large panel. The first panel is smaller than the other two and a bit higher up than they are and is overlaying the second panel. It shows Serena jumping with the racket held high. No drones are shown, but her shadow can be seen beneath her.]\n[In the next panel she is seen smashing her racket into one of the drones, breaking a rotor off, she is still hanging in the air, her shadow beneath her and her legs partly behind the previous panel, which is covering most of the left part of this panel. Another drone is flying above her.]\n[In the final panel she is seen standing again, turning around facing the other way, taking another swing at two drones that try to evade her. The ground is now filled with debris from several smashed drones.]\n[Caption beneath the panels, with the \"here\" in link blue color... The entire image is a link, so no need to click on the here though.] To read an excerpt about Serena's drone battle, click here or go to blog.xkcd.com\n"}
{"id":2191,"title":"Conference Question","image_title":"Conference Question","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2191","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/conference_question.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2191:_Conference_Question","transcript":"[Hairy stands on a podium having just addressed a crowd of seated people. Beret Guy stands in the middle of the crowd, addressing Hairy. One of Beret Guy's hands is raised at chest height. The front row consists of Cueball, Ponytail, another Hairy, Megan, Hairbun, Danish and another Cueball.]\nBeret Guy: I have a question. Beret Guy: Well, less of a question and more of a comment. Beret Guy: I guess it's less of a comment and more of an utterance. Beret Guy: Really it's less an utterance more an air pressure wave. Beret Guy: It's less an air pressure wave and more a friendly hand wave. Beret Guy: I guess it's less a friendly wave than it is a friendly bug. Beret Guy: I found this bug and now we're friends. Do you want to meet it?\n","explanation":"Usually, at a conference or other event involving a speaker addressing a crowd, members of the crowd are given the chance to ask questions. This is intended so that people can perhaps ask the speaker to elaborate on a point they've made, or to ask the speaker's opinion on a topic related to their talk.\nOccasionally, people at such an event will use (or, rather, abuse) the opportunity to ask a question to instead provide their own (unsolicited) opinion or statement. Such statements are often preceded with something along the lines of \"I have a question. Well, less of a question and more of a comment.\" This formulation in particular has attracted a lot of criticism for not adding anything to the discussion and for pulling focus away from the speaker.\nIn the comic, this idea is taken to an extreme, with Beret Guy not only transforming the opportunity to ask a question into an opportunity to make a statement through successive rephrasing, turning this into an opportunity to show off a bug he has found. This is accomplished by using a multitude of synonyms in a continuum of relatable word pairs, except near the last: \"question\" and \"comment\" are similar, as are \"comment\" and \"utterance\", but the extremes, the difference between the first and the last in the entire set (in this case \"question\" and \"friendly bug\") is profound. In a way, this segue is meant to be similar to how, in the lines of a color spectrum, red fades into yellow: gradually, and with no abrupt transitions in color ( YMMV : CGA versus 4K ).\n\nQuestion. A question is what the crowd member is expected to provide, such that the speaker or a panel member could provide a related answer.\nComment. A comment by a crowd member, is when they just say something they believe, without expecting an answer, giving the speaker or panel members nothing to do. This may be seen as annoying by everyone else, as the crowd did not come to hear the opinion of other crowd members. But answers to relevant questions would be interesting to the crowd and the panel.\nUtterance. An utterance is just making a noise, which may or may not be actual words, or if actual words it may not be a complete sentence.\nAir Pressure Wave. Sounds are literally pressure waves in the air.  So this could be a simple sound, or not a sound at all depending on the severity of the wave.  It might be the person simply blowing.\nFriendly Hand Wave. Now instead of using his mouth to generate an air pressure wave, he's producing it with his hand, in a manner intended to be interpreted as \"friendly\".  Many times hand waves are done in a friendly manner, designed more for the visual appeal than the amount of air pressure waves they generate.\nFriendly Bug. Now he is no longer doing anything himself, except to point out the fact that he has found a bug or insect , which he anthropomorphizes as being friendly.\nWant to meet it? He has decided that he and the friendly bug are actual friends and ironically comes full circle by finally asking a question, though presumably whether the speaker wants to meet a bug is not related to the topic of the speaker's talk.\nThe title text takes the opposite route of Beret Guy, and each step instead refers to successively worse forms of magic spells that would, presumably, have a negative effect upon the listener. Starting from a mere utterance and then using Beret Guy's \"it is less than\" scheme, it progresses over worse and worse curses, ending with an unforgivable curse!\nUtterance. It begins with \"utterance\", which was also used by Beret Guy. See above.\nIncantation. Incantation , or a spell, is a magical formula intended to trigger a magical effect on a person or objects. It is not necessarily with evil intent.\nMalediction. A malediction is another word for curse (the prefix \"mal\" being a Latin root meaning \"evil\"). This is always with evil intent.\nWord of Power. \"Word of Power\" could refer to the dragonish form of magic in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim , or the early 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons high level spells .\nUnforgivable Curse. The term \" Unforgivable Curse \" refers to a set of three spells from the Harry Potter series, said to be so evil that their use on another person is unforgivable and illegal. The three spells are able to mind control ( Imperius ), torture ( Cruciatus ), and kill ( Avada Kedavra ) their target. It is unclear which spell is implied, though if it was accurate to call it a singular word of power, it is unlikely to be the killing curse.\nThe title text can be interpreted as a reply by Hairy (the speaker) to Beret Guy, indicating his annoyance at the topic being derailed. It could also be representative of Randall's feelings towards those who abuse the opportunity to ask a question in order to make a statement.  Randall has recently done some book tours and was at San Diego Comic-Con last month where he served on various panels, so he probably has had personal first-hand experience with these kinds of circuitous non-questions.\n[Hairy stands on a podium having just addressed a crowd of seated people. Beret Guy stands in the middle of the crowd, addressing Hairy. One of Beret Guy's hands is raised at chest height. The front row consists of Cueball, Ponytail, another Hairy, Megan, Hairbun, Danish and another Cueball.]\nBeret Guy: I have a question. Beret Guy: Well, less of a question and more of a comment. Beret Guy: I guess it's less of a comment and more of an utterance. Beret Guy: Really it's less an utterance more an air pressure wave. Beret Guy: It's less an air pressure wave and more a friendly hand wave. Beret Guy: I guess it's less a friendly wave than it is a friendly bug. Beret Guy: I found this bug and now we're friends. Do you want to meet it?\n"}
{"id":2192,"title":"Review","image_title":"Review","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2192","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/review.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2192:_Review","transcript":"[A profile picture of Cueball in a small frame is next to five solid yellow stars. Below this is a review:] \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 Great graphics, huge world\n[Caption below the comic:] My overall review of Earth\n","explanation":"This comic is a five of five star review of planet Earth , by Randall , depicted as Cueball in his profile picture. The review is written as a video game review, praising the size and realism of the world. The comic's humor draws from the fact that Earth is a completely real object and shouldn't be rated on the same lines as a video game, and the fact that there's no place that the Earth can be reviewed (with the possible exception of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ). The \"huge world\" remark is a play on Open world games like Minecraft , which are praised when their size allows hundreds of hours of exploration; exploring Earth would allow more than a lifetime of novelties.\nThe title text states that the 'controls are hard to figure out', possibly alluding to the fact that it takes a lot of time to learn how to walk and talk, a rather basic thing in most video games, or to the fact that it is in general hard to navigate around in one's life, as has been the subject of many comics.\nEarth (or humans and other life forms on Earth) has many problems at the moment, such as climate change , overpopulation , gun violence , sexual violence , censorship , poverty , and increasing depression , to name just a few.\nHowever, this comic also serves as a reminder that, overall, the world is a five-star world. It reminds us to look around: there's so much world to explore! And also that it is worth preserving for future generation to play around on. It is not a game that grows outdated and will be replaced by a new and better version next year...\nWhile there aren't any games that can recreate the detail that reality has (Due to the computing power required to do such a thing would be on an intergalactic level to recreate earth 1 to 1 in a simulation), there are some games that can either attempt to have a map that is similar in area, the graphic levels become close to reality, or difficult game-play\/hard to learn controls.\nExamples of such games that attempt these things would be: Minecraft, No Man's Sky , The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim , Grand Theft Auto V , The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild , The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt , QWOP , Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy , and any of the Souls (series) , which includes Demon's Souls , Dark Souls , Dark Souls II , and Dark Souls III . Some people like to include games like Bloodborne , Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice , and Elden Ring into the same series as the Souls series due to similarity's to those games, and because they were developed by the same company.\n[A profile picture of Cueball in a small frame is next to five solid yellow stars. Below this is a review:] \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 Great graphics, huge world\n[Caption below the comic:] My overall review of Earth\n"}
{"id":2193,"title":"Well-Ordering Principle","image_title":"Well-Ordering Principle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2193","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/well_ordering_principle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2193:_Well-Ordering_Principle","transcript":"[Megan rubs a lamp held in her hands. A genie appears from the end of the lamp. The genie resembles the top half of Cueball's body, with a head, torso, and crossed arms, but with a squiggle representing a puff of smoke in place of his legs.] Genie: Greetings, mortal.  You have freed me. I will grant you one wish. Megan: Hmm.\n[Megan holding the lamp to her side. The genie is off-panel.] Megan: It's been over 30 years since Back to the Future came out.  Since then, probably hundreds of thousands of people have tried to dress as Marty McFly for Halloween. Genie: OK, and?\n[Megan, holding the lamp to her side, talking to the genie, who is floating in the air.] Megan: Of those people, one of them must have done the worst job. Megan: My wish is to see their costume.\n[Megan still holding the lamp and talking to the genie. The genie is exasperated, and has his hands raised.] Genie: Not a billion dollars? Flight? Infinite wishes? Megan: These wish things are always traps. Megan: Just show me the worst McFly and we'll call it even.\n","explanation":"In the comic, Megan has found a genie lamp. A genie (or Jinn ) in a lamp is a supernatural, immortal being from many fairy tales, the most well known that from Aladdin , who grants one or more wishes to the person who frees it, such as by polishing or opening the lamp. Instead of wishing for multiple wishes, flight, money, or other \"traditional\" wishes, Megan instead wishes to see the worst Marty McFly Halloween costume.\nMarty McFly , played by actor Michael J. Fox , is a main character of the science fiction film about time travel Back to the Future , which was released, we are reminded , over thirty years ago, starting a series of sequels. The films are popular, so many people dress up as McFly or Doc Brown, the other main character, on Halloween , a holiday on October 31 when it is traditional in the USA to wear different costumes . McFly's outfit in the original film consists of little more than an orange vest, jean jacket, checkered shirt, jeans, and sneakers. It would seem difficult to get this wrong.\nIn the final panel, the genie questions why she would wish for something so mundane, when he has the power to grant wishes beyond her wildest dreams. Megan, being savvy of tropes, used in fiction since biblical times, points out that encounters with wish-granting entities often turn out to be traps. Genies in fiction will often interpret wishes in ways the wisher did not intend, and particularly mean-spirited ones will twist a mortal's desire into their own personal hell . Even when the wish-granting entity isn't malicious, they're often portrayed as carrying unintended consequences, such that extremely consequential wishes become extremely dangerous. So Megan tries to play it safe by wishing for something innocuous and with little room for harmful side-effects.  Unfortunately, Megan appears to have forgotten the overarching trope: all wishes can be twisted against the wisher.\nThe genie may also be reluctant to fulfill the wish due to the insurmountable practical difficulties of fulfilling such subjective, ill-defined request. The well-ordering principle is a mathematical fact stating that every non-empty set of positive integers contains a least element. This principle would apply to Megan's request if there was guaranteed to be an absolute worst costume of Marty McFly. However, subjective preference , while reflexive and transitive , is not well-founded (or symmetric or necessarily antisymmetric or (semi-)connex for that matter) and is therefore considered to be a preorder , also called a quasiorder. This means that the genie may not be able to fulfill Megan's wish if the selection is based on the preferences of any one person. For example, the genie may have no opinion on the quality of any McFly costume, or might judge them on criteria completely different from Megan's. Her own criteria might apply to some pairs of costumes but not others, leading to ambiguity as to which is the worst, and no way to say whether any of the candidate possibilities are as bad as the others.\nWhile Megan isn't explicitly wishing for a common or widely-shared opinion , the title text contemplates organizing a \"nationwide\" search. People's preferences can be combined, such as with a mean opinion score which, while not strictly well-ordered, is usually able to identify a single worst costume, or at least a set of costumes tied for worst place according to aggregate subjective preferences. There are many other ways to combine preferences (e.g. voting) but none of them meet all of the criteria considered desirable, as demonstrated by Arrow's impossibility theorem . There is no way to exclude the possibility that even an omniscient and omnipotent genie might be technically unable to fulfill the wish, at least without, for example, changing one or more persons' preferences or modifying the space-time continuum to retroactively change the quality of some costumes of the past. The genie could fulfill the wish by showing Megan every McFly costume ever worn, which would necessarily show her the worst by any possible definition, but could be the trap she was hoping to avoid because viewing all the \"hundreds of thousands\" would take an inordinately long time.\nThe title text may explain why Megan is interested in this wish: any means available to her would be restricted to a geographic area's (nationwide) photographs or drawings from memory. It is likely the worst costume was either never photographed, or isn't remembered accurately by those who saw it (it is \"lost to time\" -- which usually is just a figure of speech, but may actually be literally true in this case given the Back to the Future series' central theme of time travel). By asking the genie to show her, she might be able to see the truly worst costume without being restricted to only those for which evidence remains.  Such a wish fulfillment might even require actual time travel to the time and location where the costume existed. The title text can also be interpreted as Randall's wish to know about the worst costume. So this is not Megan but Randall who has the wish to see this costume. The best we can do today is to look through all the available photos of McFly costumes. But even if one of those could be agreed upon to be the worst, there is no guarantee that there is not even worse versions that is not documented for posterity. In this interpretation, what Randall really would like is to use a dangerous genie wish to get around these difficulties.\nAn additional, subtle pun plays on the word \"well\". In European folklore, water wells are often associated with spirits which may grant wishes, similar to genies. Thus, Megan's explanation of why she made a simple request of the genie is a statement of her \"well-ordering principle\"; her principle for ordering wishes from wells. (See also the Well series ).\n[Megan rubs a lamp held in her hands. A genie appears from the end of the lamp. The genie resembles the top half of Cueball's body, with a head, torso, and crossed arms, but with a squiggle representing a puff of smoke in place of his legs.] Genie: Greetings, mortal.  You have freed me. I will grant you one wish. Megan: Hmm.\n[Megan holding the lamp to her side. The genie is off-panel.] Megan: It's been over 30 years since Back to the Future came out.  Since then, probably hundreds of thousands of people have tried to dress as Marty McFly for Halloween. Genie: OK, and?\n[Megan, holding the lamp to her side, talking to the genie, who is floating in the air.] Megan: Of those people, one of them must have done the worst job. Megan: My wish is to see their costume.\n[Megan still holding the lamp and talking to the genie. The genie is exasperated, and has his hands raised.] Genie: Not a billion dollars? Flight? Infinite wishes? Megan: These wish things are always traps. Megan: Just show me the worst McFly and we'll call it even.\n"}
{"id":2194,"title":"How to Send a File","image_title":"How to Send a File","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2194","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/how_to_send_a_file.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2194:_How_to_Send_a_File","transcript":"[Randall, depicted as Cueball, stands with his arms spread out] Randall: It feels weird that it's 2019 and yet I still sometimes find that the easiest way to move a file around is to email it to myself.\n[Randall has raised a hand to his chin,] Randall: If only there were a better way...\n[A picture of Randall's new book is shown to the left of the text. The book is black with large blue text and smaller white text. On the book cover, in white drawings, are seen Megan with a ladder and White Hat. Both are looking up on Cueball who is floating in the air with a quadcopter drone beneath either leg, trying to plug in an electric light bulb in a naked lamp hanging down near him. It seems he has already removed the broken light bulb, as he has one in both hands. And now he tries to put in the new one. The blue text stating title and author can be read but not the white trext. The \"blog.xkcd.com\" link is in link blue color.] Book: How To Book: Randall Munroe My new book How To is out next week! If you want to learn how to send data, you can visit blog.xkcd.com for a sneak preview of Chapter 19: How to Send a File\n[Beneath a heading are three pictures next to each other of a laptop computer. The first picture shows a regular laptop computer, with a labeled arrow pointing to the lower half of the computer. The second picture shows the laptop in a lighter outline, with scissors instructing to cut horizontally on a dotted line across the middle of the laptop. The third picture shows a laptop in two pieces cut over between the screen and the rest. There is a very jagged edge on both parts, which has been moved away from each other.] Exclusive advice from How To: When sending a file, it helps to know which part of your device the file is stored in. Label: Files are usually in this part\n","explanation":"Similar to 2190: Serena Versus the Drones , this is another teaser ad for Randall's new (at the time the comic came out) book, How To , due to be released a week from this comic's release, on September 3, 2019. This also prompted a change to the xkcd Header text .\nThe comic shows an image from of one of the chapters, and containing being a link to a larger piece of that chapter, or perhaps the entire chapter.\nThis comic discusses transferring files, previously discussed in 949: File Transfer and in what if 31 . The snippet from his book that is shown in this comic shows scissors cutting off the (top) screen of a laptop, presumably as a way to give the \"bottom\" portion to someone for file transfer. This is probably not a good idea. [ citation needed ]\nThe chapter linked to shows other methods of getting your files to another person and, in fact, explicitly states that breaking a computer to send files is not a good idea.\nThe title text hints at other amazing content in the upcoming book, including discussion of butterfly migration (does it cause predictable tornadoes in Kansas? Can they carry coconuts to England?). It also threats that using the books idea for file transfer  will make sure you will never see those files again, i.e. they will be lost for good if you try the book's method at home.\nThe chapter preview, that the comic links to, discusses using butterflies as a method of sending files from one person to another on the form of flash media attached to butterflies, or encoded in DNA, and goes pretty in depth into these particular methods of data transmission as opposed to the more traditional methods that are detailed in traditional computer science books.\n[Randall, depicted as Cueball, stands with his arms spread out] Randall: It feels weird that it's 2019 and yet I still sometimes find that the easiest way to move a file around is to email it to myself.\n[Randall has raised a hand to his chin,] Randall: If only there were a better way...\n[A picture of Randall's new book is shown to the left of the text. The book is black with large blue text and smaller white text. On the book cover, in white drawings, are seen Megan with a ladder and White Hat. Both are looking up on Cueball who is floating in the air with a quadcopter drone beneath either leg, trying to plug in an electric light bulb in a naked lamp hanging down near him. It seems he has already removed the broken light bulb, as he has one in both hands. And now he tries to put in the new one. The blue text stating title and author can be read but not the white trext. The \"blog.xkcd.com\" link is in link blue color.] Book: How To Book: Randall Munroe My new book How To is out next week! If you want to learn how to send data, you can visit blog.xkcd.com for a sneak preview of Chapter 19: How to Send a File\n[Beneath a heading are three pictures next to each other of a laptop computer. The first picture shows a regular laptop computer, with a labeled arrow pointing to the lower half of the computer. The second picture shows the laptop in a lighter outline, with scissors instructing to cut horizontally on a dotted line across the middle of the laptop. The third picture shows a laptop in two pieces cut over between the screen and the rest. There is a very jagged edge on both parts, which has been moved away from each other.] Exclusive advice from How To: When sending a file, it helps to know which part of your device the file is stored in. Label: Files are usually in this part\n"}
{"id":2195,"title":"Dockless Roombas","image_title":"Dockless Roombas","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2195","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dockless_roombas.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2195:_Dockless_Roombas","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan walk in from the right and sees two Roombas on the ground in front of them.] Cueball: Are those... Roombas? Megan: Yeah, the dockless rental apps have really taken off.\n[Cueball stops and turns to look at Megan, who has also stopped, as Beret Guy comes walking in from the left with his smartphone in his hand.] Cueball: What?\n[As Cueball and Megan turn to look at Beret Guy, he stops between the two Roombas, looking down at the Roomba to his left. He taps his smartphone and the Roomba makes a sound.] Smartphone: Tap tap Roomba: Unlock\n[Beret Guy is squatting down on the Roomba as it drives him away, while Cueball and Megan turns to stare after him,] Roomba: Whirrrr\n","explanation":"In this comic Cueball discovers two Roombas outside, and Megan explains that they are dockless Roombas for rent. Cueball is confused, but then Beret Guy walks in, activates one with an app on his smartphone , and rides away standing on it.\nA Roomba is a small automated (robotic) vacuum cleaner designed to clean a room or other bounded area by repeatedly and automatically going over the floor, vacuuming, until it has made multiple passes, and either runs low on power or is turned off.  The \"intelligence\" of various models can vary from relatively random operation with basic techniques to get around obstacles, to models that generate a general mental map of the area and contents and attempt to be deliberate in passing over all reachable areas.  A Roomba generally includes a recharging \"dock\", which it can find and automatically connect with when it gets low on power, allowing it to recharge and perhaps automatically begin another round of cleaning. Roombas are a recurring theme on xkcd. In 1193: Externalities it was Ponytail that drove a Roomba. And in 1486: Vacuum Beret Guy flew on a regular vacuum cleaner.\nA dockless scooter is a system of sharing personal scooters whereby they can be left anywhere for someone else to use, rather than returned to a particular home location. They are typically activated via a smartphone app. The term \"dockless\" in the name refers to the fact they have no predefined home, or place to dock. Like a Roomba, they do need recharging, but no special station is needed for that -- anyone can pick them up and recharge them overnight from a standard power outlet, receiving a fee from the scooter company for this service. In the past several years they have become popular in many large cities around the world. Scooters have recently been featured in 2188: E Scooters .\nThe humor here is replacing the scooters with Roombas, which people would then ride.  There are multiple problems with this idea:\nThe title text refers to the controversy in many cities surrounding dockless scooters, which can be dangerous to pedestrians when in use and can block sidewalks and driveways when not.  Dockless scooters were introduced in many cities before there were any regulations about scooter use, with some critics claiming scooters exploited loopholes in existing law and regulation, and leading some cities to pass legislation to specifically ban or curtail the use of dockless scooters. Here it is the Roombas that exploit loopholes in those scooter laws, which initially bothers city officials before they realize the positive benefit of the Roombas cleaning their streets as they are ridden.\n[Cueball and Megan walk in from the right and sees two Roombas on the ground in front of them.] Cueball: Are those... Roombas? Megan: Yeah, the dockless rental apps have really taken off.\n[Cueball stops and turns to look at Megan, who has also stopped, as Beret Guy comes walking in from the left with his smartphone in his hand.] Cueball: What?\n[As Cueball and Megan turn to look at Beret Guy, he stops between the two Roombas, looking down at the Roomba to his left. He taps his smartphone and the Roomba makes a sound.] Smartphone: Tap tap Roomba: Unlock\n[Beret Guy is squatting down on the Roomba as it drives him away, while Cueball and Megan turns to stare after him,] Roomba: Whirrrr\n"}
{"id":2196,"title":"Nice To E-Meet You","image_title":"Nice To E-Meet You","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2196","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nice_to_e_meet_you.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2196:_Nice_To_E-Meet_You","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at his desk on an office chair, while typing at his laptop. The line he is writing on the computer is shown with white text in a black box up at the top of the panel while his thoughts shown in a thought bubble with small bubbles going to it from his head.] Text: Nice to meet you! Cueball [thinking]: That sounds weird; we\u2019re not actually meeting in person. Laptop: Type type Laptop: Delete delete\n[Same setting:] Text: Nice to e-meet you! Cueball [thinking]: What is this, a 1995 cyberpunk novel? Laptop: Type type Laptop: Delete\n[Cueball stops typing and leans back resting an arm on the back of the chair while looking at laptop, no black box shown.] Cueball [thinking]: OK. Cueball [thinking]: Chill. Cueball [thinking]: Just be normal.\n[Cueball resumes typing a much longer text in two black boxes, one large with five lines of text, and a small below with one line.] Text: It\u2019s weird to think that the words I\u2019m typing will be projected onto your retinas. It\u2019s like my hands are touching your eyes. Text: Anyway, hi. Cueball [thinking]: Nailed it. Laptop: Type type\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is considering how to greet someone online.\nAt first, Cueball considers simply saying \"Nice to meet you!\", a typical greeting used when meeting someone in person. However, he notes that since the introduction is taking place electronically, saying that he is actually \"meeting\" them is inaccurate; he duly discards the greeting.\nNext he considers replacing the word \"meet\" with \"e-meet.\" The use of \" e- \" as a prefix for anything related to electronics was a popular naming trend in the early 1990s, such as eWorld , eBay , and as a standardized shorthand for electronic mail . Earlier cyberpunk novels, such as 1984's Neuromancer , did not use the \"e-\" prefix, as they were written before that linguistic trend, while the prefix generally fell out of fashion by the 2000s. Cueball using the phrase \"e-meet\" thus sounds anachronistic to the 1990s, and he recognizes it, discarding his greeting again.\nHe then decides that he needs to throw off the shackles of normal conversation and simply \"be normal.\" Being a geek, Cueball therefore writes up a long-winded exposition of how strange electronic communication actually is in terms of the photons being projected by the computer screen, comparing it to his hands touching the receiver's eyes, then concludes the greeting with a simple \"Anyway, hi.\" This might be off-putting to a friend that Cueball had just now met. This makes it funnier that Cueball believes he just \"nailed\" his greeting; he clearly has no idea what he is doing.\nThe title text continues the theme of \"his hands touching the receiver's eyes\"; Randall is talking about how as a construct that your mind makes, he  is now \"inside your head\"-- and taking it that statement to its logical conclusion, he \"wants to get out.\"\nThe comic discusses how adhering to conversational convention during social interactions can be quite difficult, especially with the advent of new technology. Social awkwardness is a recurring theme in xkcd.\nAdvice has been written regarding the topic of whether to use \"Nice to (e-)meet you\" and possible alternatives, e.g. by Forbes , Huffington Post and Grammarly . The consensus seems to be that \"Nice to meet you\" is fine, though a bit cliche.\n[Cueball is sitting at his desk on an office chair, while typing at his laptop. The line he is writing on the computer is shown with white text in a black box up at the top of the panel while his thoughts shown in a thought bubble with small bubbles going to it from his head.] Text: Nice to meet you! Cueball [thinking]: That sounds weird; we\u2019re not actually meeting in person. Laptop: Type type Laptop: Delete delete\n[Same setting:] Text: Nice to e-meet you! Cueball [thinking]: What is this, a 1995 cyberpunk novel? Laptop: Type type Laptop: Delete\n[Cueball stops typing and leans back resting an arm on the back of the chair while looking at laptop, no black box shown.] Cueball [thinking]: OK. Cueball [thinking]: Chill. Cueball [thinking]: Just be normal.\n[Cueball resumes typing a much longer text in two black boxes, one large with five lines of text, and a small below with one line.] Text: It\u2019s weird to think that the words I\u2019m typing will be projected onto your retinas. It\u2019s like my hands are touching your eyes. Text: Anyway, hi. Cueball [thinking]: Nailed it. Laptop: Type type\n"}
{"id":2197,"title":"Game Show","image_title":"Game Show","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2197","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/game_show.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2197:_Game_Show","transcript":"[Cueball, Black Hat, and Megan are game show contestants standing behind lecterns with Hairy standing in front of them as the game show host. Black Hat, standing in the middle of the three, is holding a finger up while speaking.]\nBlack Hat: A boat. A plane. Amelia Earhart's plane. Amelia Earhart's skeleton . The Statue of Liberty's internal support frame. The Crown Jewels. This show's entire television audience. The Greenland ice sheet. Earth's north magnetic pole. Black Hat: Am I in the Pacific Ocean? Black Hat: If so, the Atlantic Ocean.\nHairy: Uhh. Hairy: Our producers are going to need some time on this one.\n[Caption below the panel:] The game show realized that they should have added some restrictions to their \"take any item to a deserted island\" challenge, but it was too late.\n","explanation":"Many shows have situations where the participants are asked hypothetical questions. A common hypothetical question asked to ascertain what someone considers most important to them is the one item they would take to a deserted island -- to make the best of a boring situation.\nBlack Hat is on such a game show, and he does his best to undermine the intent of the question. Instead of answering with a favorite item -- such as his favorite album or book -- he lists various things (see below ), which he doesn't own and apparently expects the show's producers to provide him, starting with somewhat reasonable means of escape (e.g., a plane) to increasingly absurd items that appear to be chosen solely based on how difficult they would be to actually provide (e.g., the entire Atlantic Ocean). The items appear to follow Black Hat's stream of consciousness, starting with a boat, then a plane, then a distinctive plane, the bones of the pilot of that plane, the internal structure (similar to bones) of the famed landmark Statue of Liberty, etc.\nThe title text reveals that the game show has ultimately acquiesced to one of Black Hat's wishes in a way: the dog leash mentioned would allow him to water-ski home, though such a dog leash is implausible (for example, a dog leash from San Francisco to Hawaii would be over 2000 miles long).\n[Cueball, Black Hat, and Megan are game show contestants standing behind lecterns with Hairy standing in front of them as the game show host. Black Hat, standing in the middle of the three, is holding a finger up while speaking.]\nBlack Hat: A boat. A plane. Amelia Earhart's plane. Amelia Earhart's skeleton . The Statue of Liberty's internal support frame. The Crown Jewels. This show's entire television audience. The Greenland ice sheet. Earth's north magnetic pole. Black Hat: Am I in the Pacific Ocean? Black Hat: If so, the Atlantic Ocean.\nHairy: Uhh. Hairy: Our producers are going to need some time on this one.\n[Caption below the panel:] The game show realized that they should have added some restrictions to their \"take any item to a deserted island\" challenge, but it was too late.\n"}
{"id":2198,"title":"Throw","image_title":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2198","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/throw.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2198:_Throw","transcript":"[As this is an interactive comic, not all possible text should be given in this transcript. Also, it is not possible to see all the different throwers or objects in one image. This transcript here includes the text that can be found when loading the page, without changing the thrower or object (the default), but also includes the text that can be found by scrolling in the two select \"windows\" as that would be similar to a long comic where you need to scroll as well as customization options. For further differences that occur by changing the objects refer to a table of all combinations.]\n[A heading with a subheading is above a line, beneath which are a sentence, that is generated by the selections in the two windows beneath this sentence:] Throw Calculator This calculator implements the approximate throwing distance estimation model from How To Chapter 10: How to throw things .\nHow far could George Washington throw a Microwave oven?\n[Beneath this sentence are two \"windows\" with a frame around them, one to the left and one to the right, each with a heading breaking the top frame. Each also has a scroll bar to the right, which allows one to scroll down through 8 different possible selections in the left window and 16 in the right window. There are, depending on the browser zoom level, one or two selections on each line. Each window's content is given here under their respective headings. Each possible selection is a drawing with a caption beneath it.] Select a thrower\nYou An NFL Quarterback George Washington Pikachu Carly Rae Jepsen Thor, God of Thunder Chris Hemsworth A squirrel\nSelect an object to be thrown You A microwave oven A basketball A blender A gold bar A wedding cake A ping-pong ball An acorn Thor's Hammer A javelin George Washington Pikachu A car A silver dollar (spinning) A silver dollar (tumbling) A squirrel\n[Below the two windows is the result of the animation that will happen when a selection has been made. An animation of the selected thrower throwing (or failing to throw) the selected object is shown, and the object's traveling distance is measured out both in meters (SI units) and in some other unit in brackets below. If the distance is not too long compared to the size of the object and thrower, then both can be seen, and in case the object is soft it may break from the throw.]\n[In the pre-selected version, George Washington throws a microwave oven, which ends up several meters from him lying on a corner broken with its wire lying beneath it. The distance is given under the ruler along which the throw has occurred, with markings for approximately every meter. In this case, there are seven steps even though the distance is above 7 meters:] 7.76 meters (25.46 feet)\n[Clicking on \"You\" in the thrower box opens a new window over the above described comic parts. some of the comic can still be seen including the thrower and his item, and a new throw occurs every time something is changed in this new window. It is a customization box with several options shown below.]\nYour Name ____You_____ [can be changed]\nHeight 5.8 ft [number can be changed; ft can be changed to m]\nMass 160 lb [number can be changed; lb can be changed to kg]\nAthleticism [Below is a scale showing Black Hat, Knit Cap depicting You , George Washington, and a person with goggles and a helmet. A marker is set at You, but can be changed. Below the characters are descriptions.] Black Hat: Moving objects around is for suckers. Minimal You: I'm in decent shape and have pretty good form. Decent George Washington: I'm so good at throwing they made me president. Extremely High Goggles: I use a time machine to train for 36 hours a day. Champion Athlete\n[Once done the box can be clicking on a cross at the top right or just clicking outside the window on the comic behind it. Now the thrower you (and the object you) will have the weight, length and strength chosen and will be able to throw (or be thrown) with these stats. ]\n","explanation":"This is an interactive comic made to celebrate the release of Randall's new book, How To . The comic is based on a chapter in the book.\nAs the comic celebrates the book, which was released on Tuesday, September 3rd, 2019, the comic was thus also released on a Tuesday to coincide with the release day, replacing that week's normal Wednesday release. This was the same timing used for another of Randall's book releases, when 1608: Hoverboard came out on the Tuesday when Thing Explainer came out. Although the Hoverboard comic is much more complex than this one, they are both dynamic and interactive , with animations a part of them. Also the xkcd Header text changed to promote the release creating a large combined promotion of the book during the three full days the comic was on the front page (see more here ).\nIn this comic the viewer can select a thrower and an object to be thrown, see this table , and get an animation of how the selected throw would work out, along with an estimated distance of the throw (both in the SI unit meter (m) and in other very arbitrary units; see this table below) if the throw was possible. Impossible throws include those where the thrower is not strong enough to throw the object, or when the thrower tries to throw themselves, which is possible as four \"objects\" are also listed as throwers, most prominently George Washington . As the comic picture above cannot show all the possible selections in the two windows, pictures of all can be found here\nThe formula\/guideline is apparently based on chapter 10 from the new How to book, see more under Formulas .\nIt seemed though, that there was a special case to the calculations with Thor's hammer ( Mjolnir ). Because this comic obviously refers to the Thor from the Marvel universe , played by  another  possible thrower, Chris Hemsworth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe , and his hammer , which is enchanted such that only those deemed \"worthy\" are able to lift it. As such, despite its mass in principle being liftable by many of the characters, only Thor, God of Thunder (who is canonically worthy), is able to throw it. Also Thor is the only one who uses furlongs to measure his distances among the standard throwers. However, it is not a canonical part of this comic that only he can throw it, and its mass is not realistic, see more below.\nOriginally , when the comic was just released, there where only 7 throwers and 15 things to throw, giving a total of 105 different combinations; see the table below. But only Thor can throw all 15, with three of the objects (George Washington, Thor's hammer, and the car) unthrowable by any of the other throwers. The smaller critters can throw only a few things, so the total number of throws is much less than 105. Still, there is an animation for all 105 combinations, but with no throw distance for many of these.\nBut already on day one the comic was out, a new thrower was added with the standard name \"You\", and this person, Knit Cap , was also added to the objects that can be thrown increasing the number of throwers to 8 and objects to be thrown to 16. However, it would not be true to say that the number of options now would be 8 x 16 = 128, since the \"You\" can be customized when selecting it in the throwers menu (but not when selecting You in the object menu). When doing so a new window called Custom thrower will open up over the comic. The \"You\" option can then be customized by changing the name (from the default \"You\"), and defining the height (default 5.8 ft = 1.77 m) and weight (default 160 lb = 72.57 kg), where ft (feet) can be changed to m (meter) and lb (pound) can be changed to kg (kilograms). But when doing so the window will not correct the number from feet to meter etc. but stay the same.\nBelow the above options there is line with four persons above it, defining a scale of athleticism , the default second option being the drawing of \"you\" which represents Decent form (i.e. a normal person).  The first on the scale is Black Hat , who thinks moving things is for suckers, thus representing minimal athleticism. \"You\" in second position is in decent shape and pretty good form, representing decent athleticism. George Washington in third position represents extremely high athleticism, and as he states he threw so well they made him President. Finally the fourth position, representing a champion athlete, shows a person with a helmet with chin strap and goggles who states that he trains 36 hours a day by using a time machine. It is thus indicated that such athletes can only be so good by training more than is possible; for instance, if he travels 24 hours back every day, he could use 12 more of these to practice, making it 36 hours on that \"normal day\" and he would then still have 12 hours to eat and sleep\/restitution before his next 36 hours training pass.\nChanging away from the decent \"You\" to one of the other three characters on the athleticism scale does not, however, change the character used for the animation, which stays the same. But still this gives a very large number of different \"yous\" to both throw and be thrown.\nA self-created character, unrealistically tall and heavy well over the human records for height ( 272 cm ) and\/or weight ( 635 kg ), can actually be able to throw Thor's hammer (For instance 4m and 1000 kg, see more here . So it is not because it is magically inclined to only be thrown by Thor, it is just that the weight is set to 2000 kg, and only Thor of the standard characters have the strength (1000 times normal human strength) to throw such a heavy object. But if the \"You\" is big enough, the athletic difference with Thor will be compensated by sheer weight and height. See this table of data from the comic for the above numbers.\nInterestingly, Thor can throw a squirrel 257 meters.  If a Custom Thrower is created, and they are 200 meters tall and 150 KG, they can throw the squirrel 256 meters (1 meter less than Thor).  Thor can throw an acorn 136 meters, and the Custom Thrower will throw it 133 meters.  Now, Thor can throw Thor's Hammer 19 meters.  The Custom Thrower can throw it 44 meters!  Apparently there is more to the enchantment of Thor's Hammer than meets the eye, as it would have been expected that if Thor can throw a squirrel and an acorn farther than an extraordinary human, then certainly he could throw his own enchanted Hammer a longer distance. This is, of course, because the Custom Thrower now throws from much higher than Thor.  As to why the height doesn't affect the acorn or squirrel throwing distance in the same way it does Thor's Hammer, we'll leave that to you, the reader.\nThe title text refers to throwing a party (a colloquial synonym of hosting a party) and first makes the assumption of actually giving hints for giving a party, and then switches to suggest a mechanism to literally throw a huge object, such as a house with a party going on inside. An aircraft steam catapult is a mechanism to launch aircraft from ships, typically used on aircraft carriers.\nMany of the items, even if technically possible to throw, may not be able to be thrown safely.\nFor example:\n\n\nConstants and Units:\nAs this comic is very complicated several screen shots and tables are needed for the full explanation. In order to keep this main page easy to use, these pictures and possibly some of the tables will be placed on some extra pages, as has also been done with other complex comics in the past:\n[As this is an interactive comic, not all possible text should be given in this transcript. Also, it is not possible to see all the different throwers or objects in one image. This transcript here includes the text that can be found when loading the page, without changing the thrower or object (the default), but also includes the text that can be found by scrolling in the two select \"windows\" as that would be similar to a long comic where you need to scroll as well as customization options. For further differences that occur by changing the objects refer to a table of all combinations.]\n[A heading with a subheading is above a line, beneath which are a sentence, that is generated by the selections in the two windows beneath this sentence:] Throw Calculator This calculator implements the approximate throwing distance estimation model from How To Chapter 10: How to throw things .\nHow far could George Washington throw a Microwave oven?\n[Beneath this sentence are two \"windows\" with a frame around them, one to the left and one to the right, each with a heading breaking the top frame. Each also has a scroll bar to the right, which allows one to scroll down through 8 different possible selections in the left window and 16 in the right window. There are, depending on the browser zoom level, one or two selections on each line. Each window's content is given here under their respective headings. Each possible selection is a drawing with a caption beneath it.] Select a thrower\nYou An NFL Quarterback George Washington Pikachu Carly Rae Jepsen Thor, God of Thunder Chris Hemsworth A squirrel\nSelect an object to be thrown You A microwave oven A basketball A blender A gold bar A wedding cake A ping-pong ball An acorn Thor's Hammer A javelin George Washington Pikachu A car A silver dollar (spinning) A silver dollar (tumbling) A squirrel\n[Below the two windows is the result of the animation that will happen when a selection has been made. An animation of the selected thrower throwing (or failing to throw) the selected object is shown, and the object's traveling distance is measured out both in meters (SI units) and in some other unit in brackets below. If the distance is not too long compared to the size of the object and thrower, then both can be seen, and in case the object is soft it may break from the throw.]\n[In the pre-selected version, George Washington throws a microwave oven, which ends up several meters from him lying on a corner broken with its wire lying beneath it. The distance is given under the ruler along which the throw has occurred, with markings for approximately every meter. In this case, there are seven steps even though the distance is above 7 meters:] 7.76 meters (25.46 feet)\n[Clicking on \"You\" in the thrower box opens a new window over the above described comic parts. some of the comic can still be seen including the thrower and his item, and a new throw occurs every time something is changed in this new window. It is a customization box with several options shown below.]\nYour Name ____You_____ [can be changed]\nHeight 5.8 ft [number can be changed; ft can be changed to m]\nMass 160 lb [number can be changed; lb can be changed to kg]\nAthleticism [Below is a scale showing Black Hat, Knit Cap depicting You , George Washington, and a person with goggles and a helmet. A marker is set at You, but can be changed. Below the characters are descriptions.] Black Hat: Moving objects around is for suckers. Minimal You: I'm in decent shape and have pretty good form. Decent George Washington: I'm so good at throwing they made me president. Extremely High Goggles: I use a time machine to train for 36 hours a day. Champion Athlete\n[Once done the box can be clicking on a cross at the top right or just clicking outside the window on the comic behind it. Now the thrower you (and the object you) will have the weight, length and strength chosen and will be able to throw (or be thrown) with these stats. ]\n"}
{"id":2199,"title":"Cryptic Wifi Networks","image_title":"Cryptic Wifi Networks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2199","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cryptic_wifi_networks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2199:_Cryptic_Wifi_Networks","transcript":"[Knit Cap (who has a backpack) is checking a phone at the highest mountain in a mountainous landscape, with 5 snow covered mountain peaks behind, and a smaller peak connected to and just below that one. There seems to be no snow on those two peaks. Above is a view of the phone's screen as indicated with a zigzag line from the phone's screen to the frame with text. There is also a wifi icon at the top left and a padlock icon at the end of the second line of text. The bottom line is a gray font.] Phone: Available WiFi Networks Phone: Toshiba-U2187-OfficeLink-Net46UHZ Phone: Join other network\n[Caption below the panel:] Tech Trivia: No one actually knows what devices produce those cryptic WiFi networks. They just appear at random across the Earth's surface.\n","explanation":"In the comic, Knit Cap is on top of a high mountain in a remote location (second comic in a row with knit cap). Mobile devices frequently launch a popup telling users to choose a network to connect to. Knit Cap sees a WiFi network name listed on a handheld device, perhaps a cell phone. This is something you would expect in a city, but certainly not on a mountain top, hence the joke, that what produced these WiFi networks are unknown, but seem to be distributed randomly over the face of the Earth, disregarding nearness to technology.\nCryptic Wi-Fi (or WiFi) network names, called Service Set Identifiers (SSIDs) are part of the joke about not knowing where the corresponding wireless router is located, suggesting they are unexplained phenomena instead of wireless radio devices. Some of the earliest WiFi devices like printers and internet routers advertised cryptic SSIDs, as do many of them today. In 1998, Lucent introduced the WaveLAN IEEE , the first integrated circuit chip set supporting the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN protocol, spinning off Agere Systems to produce them in 2000. WiFi followed mid-1990s short-range wireless networks like Bluetooth and radio internet protocols like the 1980s KA9Q , with roots going back to the earliest ticker tape digital telegraphy systems from the mid-1850s. Humorous SSID names are not uncommon.\nThe SSID displayed is Toshiba-U2187-OfficeLink-Net46UHZ which is 33 characters long, unfortunately one character more than are allowed. Toshiba is a multinational electronics conglomerate manufacturing many products including untold multitudes of different kinds of printers over the years. Such devices often have embedded wireless access points including the manufacturer name in the SSID. Many network names contain words like Net, Office or Link. The code might indicate a model U2187 device from Toshiba named (or having an interface program named) OfficeLink, which has a sub-model number or operates on a wireless network designated 46UHZ. That \"Hz\" is an abbreviation for Hertz suggests that designation may or may not have something to do with the frequency on which the transmitting device operates. 48 microhertz corresponds to a period of 4.1 per day, or a radio wavelength 41 times as far as the Earth is from the Sun. Or U2187 could be the Unicode character code for the Roman numeral 50,000 spelled \"\u2187\" or a serial number for a user or a utility pole. We don't know whether the SSID is connected to a network of more than one or is just one device. The padlock icon indicates that a password is required to communicate. The \"join other network\" option allows for manually typing SSIDs to attempt to connect with networks which are not configured to display their SSIDs.\nWhile the most likely explanation in an office environment might be a printer plugged in somewhere nearby, other possibilities include a marsupial delivery drone, television, cryptocurrency mining rig, speaker, pacemaker, alarm system, offshore flying wind turbine, fashion accessory, autonomous antimissile defense system node, hobby project, surveillance device, balloon , distributed denial of service attack platform malware-infested coffee pot, satellite , vending machine, seawater dialysis station, telecommunication facility, solar-powered drone , distributed exoskeleton, visiting interstellar colony(?) ship, power-to-gas pipeline valve, ransomware worm nest, or anything else in the Wifi Internet of Things . Sometimes, the ionosphere reflects radio waves, vastly increasing the distance that they can travel to and from remote locations, but this skywave propagation normally affects frequencies below 30 MHz, and never above 300 MHz, so they couldn't be the cause of receiving far away Wifi signals, which are 900 MHz and above.\nNetwork names can be used to track the geographic locations of mobile devices, for example in the Wi-Fi positioning system . Google street view equipment records locations of networks to assist with geolocation . Location information can be searched in tools like Wigle or OpenWifiMap . The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) committee number for WiFi is 802.11, which is composed of sub-committees like 802.11ad , designing the 60 GHz Multiple Gigabit Wireless System (MGWS) and 802.11ay working on multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) bandwidth enhancements. This portable Toshiba printer supports the \"802.11 a\/b\/g\/n\" WiFi protocols. The software which produces SSID listings is administered by network communities and depends on mesh configurations . (Please see also 1785: Wifi .) Alternatives include bluetooth mesh networks and other ad hoc networks to provide internet connectivity services.\nThe title text indicates that the first WiFi networking client interface displayed unexpected SSIDs. If true, this could potentially rule out all of the alternative explanations other than an alien visitation, a software bug, rogue industrial espionage, time travel, trans-multiverse or trans-dimensional communication, hardware misconfiguration, the simulation hypothesis , or the supernatural. (It is worth noting that cryptic-sounding WiFi networks generated by a time-traveling alien entity as a trap was used as a plot device in the 2013 Doctor Who episode \" The Bells of Saint John .\")\n\n[Knit Cap (who has a backpack) is checking a phone at the highest mountain in a mountainous landscape, with 5 snow covered mountain peaks behind, and a smaller peak connected to and just below that one. There seems to be no snow on those two peaks. Above is a view of the phone's screen as indicated with a zigzag line from the phone's screen to the frame with text. There is also a wifi icon at the top left and a padlock icon at the end of the second line of text. The bottom line is a gray font.] Phone: Available WiFi Networks Phone: Toshiba-U2187-OfficeLink-Net46UHZ Phone: Join other network\n[Caption below the panel:] Tech Trivia: No one actually knows what devices produce those cryptic WiFi networks. They just appear at random across the Earth's surface.\n"}
{"id":2200,"title":"Unreachable State","image_title":"Unreachable State","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2200","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unreachable_state.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2200:_Unreachable_State","transcript":"[Cueball, sitting on an office chair at his desk with his hands over his laptop computer. There is an error message on the screen which is displayed above him with a zigzag line from the screen to the text. The exclamation mark at the top is shown in white on a black triangle.] ! Error If you're seeing this, the code is in what I thought was an unreachable state. I could give you advice for what to do. But honestly, why should you trust me? I clearly screwed this up. I'm writing a message that should never appear, yet I know it will probably appear someday. On a deep level, I know I'm not up to this task. I'm so sorry.\n[Caption below the panel:] Never write error messages tired.\n","explanation":"When writing a computer program, developers often need to make assumptions about what state the system could potentially be in at the time the program is executed. For example, a program designed to fetch data from a database requires that the database be accessible at the time it tries to fetch data; if it is not, then the program needs to know how to handle that state, or it might simply hang or crash the system. A good developer will have accounted for this possibility and may give the program a way to fail gracefully; often, this is done by outputting an error message to the user, to tell them what is wrong.\nSometimes, cautious developers will identify states that, in theory, should never be reachable at all - if they were, it would imply that something has gone fundamentally wrong. A paranoid developer might still decide to handle this case anyway, perhaps including a note that the situation should theoretically never happen, but they aren't confident enough to state with absolute certainty that it cannot.\nThis comic shows Cueball reading (or possibly writing) just such an error message from a program he is using. The developer has evidently written this text while tired (possibly from overwork), and did not trust themself enough to be sure that the state is truly unreachable. The hopeless tone of the message supports this lack of confidence in their work.\nThe title text refers to the common trope of a character being given a \"magic\" item and winning something because of it, then being told that the item was not actually magic and that the magic was inside them all along . It is often used as a fable to tell people to follow their dreams. The title text puts the fable in a place where it doesn't belong, saying that finding the \"unreachable state\" that is the error code implies that the finder can do anything.\n[Cueball, sitting on an office chair at his desk with his hands over his laptop computer. There is an error message on the screen which is displayed above him with a zigzag line from the screen to the text. The exclamation mark at the top is shown in white on a black triangle.] ! Error If you're seeing this, the code is in what I thought was an unreachable state. I could give you advice for what to do. But honestly, why should you trust me? I clearly screwed this up. I'm writing a message that should never appear, yet I know it will probably appear someday. On a deep level, I know I'm not up to this task. I'm so sorry.\n[Caption below the panel:] Never write error messages tired.\n"}
{"id":2201,"title":"Foucault Pendulum","image_title":"Foucault Pendulum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2201","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/foucault_pendulum.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2201:_Foucault_Pendulum","transcript":"[Megan is addressing Cueball, Black Hat and Ponytail as they are looking a pendulum, which consists of a large swinging sphere with a spike beneath it hanging on a string coming down from above with seven small markers under it. Megan is pointing at it while it is swinging towards them, as indicated with lines behind the sphere and the string.] Megan: This Foucault pendulum demonstrates Earth's rotation. It stays in a fixed plane while the Earth rotates under it.\n[Close-up on Black Hat holding a hand to his chin.] Black Hat: Hmm, really. Black Hat: So that means...\n[Zoom out to Black Hat running to the pendulum grabbing it with both hands. He knocks over two of the seven markers that can now be seen to be small pegs standing up on he floor beneath the pendulum. A line goes from his hand on the pendulum up to a sound bubble. Two people off-panel yell at him.] Character off-panel 1: Hey! Character off-panel 2: Stop him! Sound: Grab!\n[Blondie as a news anchor uses her held out hand to indicate Black Hat who is shown on a screen next to her. There is a caption in two lines above it. The first line in normal text, the second line in white in a black rectangle. There are further unreadable text below the picture.] Blondie: The Earth's rotation was briefly halted today until geophysicists wrestled the intruder to the ground... Breaking news\n","explanation":"Black Hat is attending what appears to be a guided tour of a museum with a Foucault pendulum . Megan is explaining to him, Cueball and Ponytail about the device which demonstrates the rotation of the Earth.\nBlack Hat, being himself, immediately sees an opportunity to cause chaos and seizes it with both hands, quite literally \u2014 he grabs the pendulum, which causes the others to shout after him to stop. At first this would seemingly be for fear of ruining the delicate demonstration. However, in the final panel, the news anchor Blondie reveals to us that by arresting the motion of the pendulum, Black Hat has somehow stopped the rotation of the Earth. However, it was only briefly, since the local geophysicists managed to wrestle him down, and it must be assumed that they then quickly restarted the pendulum and thus the Earth's rotation.\nThis of course is blatantly impossible, since the Foucault pendulum's motion is tied to the Earth's rotation, not the other way around (at least in any significant way, see below). A Foucault pendulum is a regular pendulum that swings from a bearing that allows rotation in any direction, like your shoulder joint instead of your elbow, as a demonstration that the Earth is rotating beneath it. If the Earth were stationary, the pendulum's plane of oscillation would not change relative to its immediate surroundings, but the Earth is not stationary, so the pendulum's plane of oscillation will appear to rotate over the course of a day, although in reality it is the Earth that rotates. The low-friction bearing doesn't allow the rotation of the Earth to affect the motion of the pendulum, so it tends to stay aligned with its original inertial reference frame rather than with its surroundings, which rotate with the Earth. A Foucault pendulum located at one of the poles will take a full day to \"move\" one full round. At the equator there is no movement, and in between it will take longer than 24 hours (24 hours divided by the sine of the latitude).\nThe fact that the Earth's rotation does not influence the motion of the pendulum does NOT mean that other forces can't affect it - for example, someone running up and manually repositioning the pendulum. Of course, the apparent rotation of the pendulum's plane relative to the Earth is an effect of the planet's motion, rather than the cause of it. Thus, stopping a Foucault pendulum manually does not entail pausing the rotation of the Earth. [ citation needed ]\nIf it were somehow possible for a Foucault pendulum to control Earth's rotation (see above), Black Hat would probably not want to alter the momentum of the pendulum if he were not at one of the Earth's poles. That is assuming he was told that it was related to Earth's rotation and assuming that he would prefer to preserve his own life over creating chaos (unless he has some means to prevent his being slammed into a nearby wall at the speed of sound). This is because, if the rotation of the Earth were to be stopped for even very short amounts of time (a few seconds), it would cause everything on Earth that wasn't bolted\/fastened to the ground to move eastward compared to the now stationary ground. Objects near the Equator would suddenly be moving at a speed of 300-360 meters per second, likely causing the death of most lifeforms on Earth beneath a certain latitude almost instantaneously. Those close enough to the poles may survive, though. Also this will cause massive windstorms, tsunamis, volcanic and tectonic events on a scale not previously observed on Earth. This would likely cause a mass extinction event and wipe out most of humanity in the initial events (which would eventually lead to our total extinction). It is possible that Black Hat's grabbing the pendulum would cause a gradual slowing prior to stopping, minimizing the issue (though this doesn't seem to be the case), but the results would still be catastrophic, as the aforementioned events are still likely to occur (specifically the tsunamis and volcanic events). However, as mentioned above, if this pendulum were located at the South Pole, then Black Hat and other people around him would not be affected immediately, and he could both do it, survive and be stopped again. The question is whether there would be any more news stories to cover this, given what would happen to the rest of the world! If there was no one to readjust the pendulum's rotation, then certain events would happen after the initial damage (see this video [1] ). Randall previously covered this scenario in detail in his what if? book, see XKCD's Creator Explains What Would Happen If Earth Stopped Spinning .\nTo be completely correct, the angular momentum of the Earth+pendulum system is constant, so that when Black Hat \"stops\" the pendulum's rotation with respect to the Earth, he actually transfers to the pendulum some of Earth's angular momentum, thereby slightly slowing Earth's rotation. But the order of magnitude of that effect is (at most) in proportion to the pendulum-to-Earth mass ratio. Earth's mass being ~6 x 10 24 kg, the effect for any practical pendulum would be beyond the 20th decimal place and would therefore go totally unnoticed.\nThe title text mentions the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service , an organization providing standards for global time and reference frames; this organization would have a very rough day after the fiasco with Black Hat. The title text refers to a (probably) fictional paramilitary enforcement arm of this organization and the foolishness of tangling with such a force. If Foucault pendulums were somehow able to influence the rotation of the Earth in any measurable way, the IERS enforcers would probably strictly control their installation and monitor their use (and misuse). Black Hat is likely in for a rough day as well. It seems likely that some on this team are geophysicists, since they were the ones who took Black Hat down.\n[Megan is addressing Cueball, Black Hat and Ponytail as they are looking a pendulum, which consists of a large swinging sphere with a spike beneath it hanging on a string coming down from above with seven small markers under it. Megan is pointing at it while it is swinging towards them, as indicated with lines behind the sphere and the string.] Megan: This Foucault pendulum demonstrates Earth's rotation. It stays in a fixed plane while the Earth rotates under it.\n[Close-up on Black Hat holding a hand to his chin.] Black Hat: Hmm, really. Black Hat: So that means...\n[Zoom out to Black Hat running to the pendulum grabbing it with both hands. He knocks over two of the seven markers that can now be seen to be small pegs standing up on he floor beneath the pendulum. A line goes from his hand on the pendulum up to a sound bubble. Two people off-panel yell at him.] Character off-panel 1: Hey! Character off-panel 2: Stop him! Sound: Grab!\n[Blondie as a news anchor uses her held out hand to indicate Black Hat who is shown on a screen next to her. There is a caption in two lines above it. The first line in normal text, the second line in white in a black rectangle. There are further unreadable text below the picture.] Blondie: The Earth's rotation was briefly halted today until geophysicists wrestled the intruder to the ground... Breaking news\n"}
{"id":2202,"title":"Earth-Like Exoplanet","image_title":"Earth-Like Exoplanet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2202","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/earth_like_exoplanet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2202:_Earth-Like_Exoplanet","transcript":"[Side view of Megan standing behind a lectern, speaking to an off-panel audience in front of her. Two people from the audience react to her statement.] Megan: We've discovered the most earth-like exoplanet yet! Off-panel voices: Yay!!\n[Front view of Megan behind lectern:] Megan: Well, it's in the habitable zone. Habitable-ish. \"Habitable.\" Megan: The survivable zone.\n[In a frameless panel with the same setting as before, Megan holds her left hand out with palm up.] Megan: It's tidally locked. And blasted with stellar flares. And probably meteors. And bathed in acid.\n[Closeup side view of Megan, now holding up a finger on her left hand. Again an unseen audience member replies.] Megan: But we've detected water vapor! In between all the swinging blades. Off-panel voice: I see. Megan: We're hoping to find biosignatures in the form of screaming.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to the recent discovery of water vapor in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b . The planet was discovered already in 2015 by the Kepler Space Observatory , orbiting the red dwarf star K2-18 . Water on exoplanets is considered a biosignature , meaning it's an indicator that there could be life there. However, as Megan reveals the planet's other characteristics, it becomes clear that it is unlikely to actually support life, and in fact is actually a horrible hellscape. The question of habitability by higher forms of life is profoundly different from the way astrobiologists use the term for microbes. Even a \"survivable zone\" can't mitigate the description of just how inhospitable this new wet planet would be to life as we know it, save possibly for extremophile organisms. In the comic 1231: Habitable Zone , this zone was the subject.\nThe planet being tidally locked indicates that the same side would face the planet's star year-round, meaning half of the planet would be in constant day and the other half would be in constant night. It is believed that K2-18b is tidally locked . Based on our (admittedly limited) understanding of life, abiogenesis can only occur in environments with liquid water; however, the day hemisphere would likely be so hot that all water found there would be in a gaseous state, and all water found in the night hemisphere would likely be frozen due to the intense cold. If life were to be found on this exoplanet, it would be in the twilight strip, a thin ring around the edge separating the two hemispheres where sunlight can reach but is refracted by the atmosphere. The environment in the twilight strip would thus experience something akin to an eternal sunset, and temperatures there would be moderate enough to allow life to come about.\nUnfortunately, the other characteristics of the exoplanet severely undermine our chances of finding life even in its twilight strip, as there are many problems with the habitability of red dwarf systems .\nThe comic uses swinging blades as a metaphor to succinctly describe the planet's perilous conditions. That is, as far we know, there are no actual swinging blades on K2-18b. [ citation needed ] Swinging blades made their first famous appearance in the Edgar Allan Poe poem \"The Pit and the Pendulum ,\" where the titular pendulum was a large blade swinging back and forth slowly. Due to the fame of Poe's work and the number of allusions made to it over the years, swinging blades have become a common feature in fictional deathtraps, and were used as an analogy to illustrate that the planet is chronically inhospitable to life.\n\"Biosignatures in the form of screaming\" suggests that any life that had developed on the planet would be in continuous pain or fear due to their hazardous surroundings. In addition, this suggests that the screaming of these organisms would cause ripples in the atmosphere which we should be able to detect light-years away through the vacuum of space and that it would be more noticeable than other signs of life (such as the spectra from the ash produced by burning organic material.)\nThe title text mentions that fire could indicate the presence of life. This is because fire requires both fuel and oxygen (or some other similar, reactive gas). The occurrence of fire suggests that those things are both being continuously produced by some process.  The most likely processes we know for producing oxygen are biological.  The irony, of course, is that fire is also very dangerous, and almost universally lethal to organisms that are exposed to it for long enough. Munroe points out that oxygen reliably indicates that there was life, before the fire, with the implication that the fire may have killed everything.\n[Side view of Megan standing behind a lectern, speaking to an off-panel audience in front of her. Two people from the audience react to her statement.] Megan: We've discovered the most earth-like exoplanet yet! Off-panel voices: Yay!!\n[Front view of Megan behind lectern:] Megan: Well, it's in the habitable zone. Habitable-ish. \"Habitable.\" Megan: The survivable zone.\n[In a frameless panel with the same setting as before, Megan holds her left hand out with palm up.] Megan: It's tidally locked. And blasted with stellar flares. And probably meteors. And bathed in acid.\n[Closeup side view of Megan, now holding up a finger on her left hand. Again an unseen audience member replies.] Megan: But we've detected water vapor! In between all the swinging blades. Off-panel voice: I see. Megan: We're hoping to find biosignatures in the form of screaming.\n"}
{"id":2203,"title":"Prescience","image_title":"Prescience","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2203","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/prescience.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2203:_Prescience","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an armchair holding a book. He seems to be looking off as he talks to an off-panel person behind him. This person replies.] Cueball: You know, it's been a while since there's been a really big meteor impact. Off-panel voice: Will you stop that?!\n[Caption below the panel:] I say this kind of thing every so often, because I don't believe it affects the outcome and it has a slim chance of looking incredibly prescient.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball states that it's been a long time since there's been a really big meteor impact . Due to the Gambler's Fallacy , this is taken to be Cueball implying that a big meteor impact is coming soon. The off-panel voice is annoyed about his statement, but whether from fear of it happening or because he does this all the time is unclear, see more below. The joke is that Cueball does this often, also with other types of major random events, just in case they do actually happen soon. For instance, if there does happen to be an impact soon after he made the statement, it makes him look incredibly prescient , whereas if there isn't one, no one really cares or remembers.\nIt is also unclear how big an impact he refers to. It has been 60 million years since the impact that killed the dinosaurs , but that if that is the type of event he refers to, then maybe no one will be there to remember what he said. So it is likely much smaller impacts he is talking about.\nPrescience means to predict the future. It is clear from this comic that Randall makes fun of both of those that claim to have prescience and of those that have a superstition against talking about something happening that could cause it to happen.\nAlthough only one method is scientifically recognized, there are at least three possible sources of prescience recognized by people.\nThe first of the two main ways of predicting the future involves a mix of common sense and historical knowledge.  By understanding the past, the direction of the future can be guessed at with varying levels of accuracy.  This type of prescience is also known sometimes as future modeling, statistical prediction, and even wisdom to name a few.\nThe second way to predict the future is not scientifically recognized but remains popular in culture and fiction.  It can involve magic, psychic power, higher powers (gods), and other such methods.  Collectively, they are labeled supernatural; any method to predict the future using this class of method cannot be easily measured by science.\nAlthough not technically a way to predict the future, the third way to predict the future is through superstition.  The method involved in this comic effectively boils down to \"speak the name of evil, and you will summon it.\"  This superstition can have surprising power in people's lives, however.  A woman planning her outdoor wedding may feel the urge to hit her friend if they say \"Gosh, I hope it doesn't rain on that day.\"  A doctor working in the Emergency Room may feel the need to kick anyone who says \"Wow, it's really quiet around here.\"  Such thoughts spoken aloud do not have the power to control the weather or cause people to seriously injure themselves.  Yet people often react emotionally as if not speaking the name of 'evil' will keep it away.\nThis comic may reflect that emotional reaction when the off-screen character yells at Cueball: \"Will you stop that?!\". Alternatively, it is one, like Megan , who knows Cueball well enough to know that which is stated in the caption, that he only does this to look good if said thing happens. And the person is so tired of it! Maybe Cueball does it at least once a week, and obviously from the caption, it is not only about meteor impact, but any major random event, that he could then be remembered as having predicted.\nThe title, Prescience, has a double meaning. The first meaning is about the prescience that would appear if one actually predicts a natural disaster this way. The second meaning involves the fact that it is spelled pre-science - since there are many more scientific ways to predict meteor impacts, even though they aren't entirely accurate.\nThe title text refers to the RMS Titanic , a ship which was claimed to be unsinkable by those promoting its maiden voyage. But then it struck an iceberg in an unfortunate way so more compartments would be filled with water that it could survive; and, therefore, it could and eventually would sink. But with all the news stories that had just been published hailing this unsinkable ship as a modern wonder of the world, this shipwreck was particularly ironic. The story of the sinking of the Titanic has been memorialized in popular culture, most memorably in the 1997 film Titanic .\nIn the title text, Randall thus suggests that lots of ships had been called unsinkable before Titanic. But saying such hubris out loud doesn't make any ship more likely to sink. But when such a ship, like Titanic, then sinks it does, however, increase the value of the story ensuring it will be remembered.\nIt should be noted that few among the ship's builders or crew boasted the Titanic to be unsinkable. Most of the boasting came from the owners that used the news media of the day to create hype and promote their ship, just when the ship was finished and dedicated (the ship's builders did, however, boast that the ship exceeded all safety standards of the time). In addition, the hubris was only one small part of the fame of the sinking of the Titanic ; the Titanic' s status as a world record setter for most massive ship ever built, the incredible wealth of most of its passengers, and the fact it sank on its maiden voyage all contributed to the fame and hype behind the great maritime tragedy.\nIronically part of what caused this disaster was hubris, since those that were interested in promoting the ship also wished it to make a speed record, by reaching New York a day before expected. Thus the captain, even though he would have realised that the ship could sink, took the fateful decisions of running at full speed through waters known to contain icebergs during a still night with very calm waters. Spotting icebergs in such conditions is known to be difficult, especially as there will be no notably foaming waves around the icebergs' bases and patchy mists will inconveniently diffuse the horizons and any useful starlight.\n[Cueball is sitting in an armchair holding a book. He seems to be looking off as he talks to an off-panel person behind him. This person replies.] Cueball: You know, it's been a while since there's been a really big meteor impact. Off-panel voice: Will you stop that?!\n[Caption below the panel:] I say this kind of thing every so often, because I don't believe it affects the outcome and it has a slim chance of looking incredibly prescient.\n"}
{"id":2204,"title":"Ksp 2","image_title":"Ksp 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2204","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ksp_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2204:_Ksp_2","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk in front of a computer. He is surrounded by four people, and is looking over his shoulder at the ones standing behind him, Hairy - holding his palms up - and Ponytail stretching her arms out towards him. On the other side of the desk is another Cueball-like guy holding his arms out palms up and Hairbun who stretches her arms out to the side.] Hairy: Please hold off until the end of summer. We can't afford the personnel hit right before the late July launch window. Ponytail: People have already started calling in sick! Hairbun: Do you want a moon? We'll give you a moon!\n[Caption below the panel:] NASA tries desperately to get the Kerbal Space Program team to delay KSP 2 until after the Mars 2020 mission launches.\n","explanation":"Cueball , a programmer, is sitting at his computer while four other persons from NASA , Hairy , Ponytail , Hairbun and another Cueball-like person try to convince him to delay the release of a sequel to Kerbal Space Program (KSP 2).\nKerbal Space Program (KSP for short) is a space flight simulation video game with a Keplerian orbital physics engine, allowing for semi-realistic orbital maneuvers. KSP is a recurring theme in xkcd. A sequel, abbreviated here as KSP 2, was planned at the time of the comic's publication to be released in 2020, although it has since been delayed to Early 2023.\nAlso planned for 2020 is the Perseverance mission, a mars rover originally named Mars 2020 , which successfully landed. The joke in the comic comes as engineers are likely to want to extensively play with KSP 2 to the exclusion of other things, and NASA is worried about the Mars 2020 mission being delayed or failing because the engineers are too focused on playing KSP 2, including taking an extended vacation and \"sick\" days off.\nCueball, sitting at a desk in front of a computer, is represented here as being in charge of KSP 2, and the other characters standing around him are pleading with him to delay the release of KSP 2 until the Mars rover program is complete, even being willing to \"give [him] a moon\".\nOffering to give somebody the moon occurs occasionally in songs and poetry, as an idiom meaning desire to offer something of great value, or expressing great desire to please.  Literally giving a moon to Cueball is impossible, [ citation needed ] but it is possible to name a moon after Cueball, so that may be what is implied instead.  This could also be a reference to the film Despicable Me , which revolves around Gru and his Minions trying to steal the Moon.  The Kerbals (mascots of Kerbal Space Program) resemble the Minions from the film.\nThe title text is a sentence said by someone from a committee in NASA that oversees the progress and budget of the Mars 2020 mission. They are satisfied that the launch in 2020 is still on track, but has a question regarding the 'human capital\/personnel retention' budget, which has several unmarked cash payments, more than they would expect. As they begin to ask what they are, someone from the Mars 2020 project interrupts, having probably foreseen this question, stating that it is Public outreach.\nIn the original Kerbal Space Program, playing in career mode, the player can select various \"strategies\" at the administration building to exchange or boost various assets.  \"Public Outreach\" appears similar to the \"Public Relations\" strategy \"Appreciation Campaign\", which exchanges a portion of in-game money earned completing mission contracts for prestige, which has an effect on mission contracts the game makes available.\nThe title text suggests NASA could be paying Private Division, the developers of Kerbal Space Program, money to delay their release until after the Mars mission.\nNASA has dabbled in game physics engines for \"public outreach,\" with the same mixed record of success as any promising R&D endeavor. Pertinent projects included a series of collaboration laboratories on various forms of social media including Second Life which hosted a \"NASA CoLab\" region active from 2007 to around 2013. While the unrealistic constraints imposed by real-time physics engine simulation prevented much actual engineering, such shared 3D computer aided design (CAD) systems provide a measure of drafting training in a play sandbox system outside of a formal work environment. NASA frequently holds design competitions, including some in which winning participants have spoken highly of KSP, and some of which are used for developments in medical informatics, for example, outside the field of aerospace engineering and space colonization simulation. The use of game development competitions to assist scientific progress is also used in the Fold.it competitive protein folding game, where the winners build antibodies to save the lives of those who have health care. Such efforts have often been supported by SBIR -sized government agency grants from several countries, along with other individuals (i.e., customer) support and help from organizations to build software improving competitive score achievement. NASA has also been involved in asking software publishers to remove, withdraw, or restrict their releases, such as the COMSOL plasma physics engine library, rumored to be useful for the design of nuclear weapons. But whether any government agency has ever paid for the delay of a computer simulation game in order to increase their productivity is an open question.\nAn alternative suggestion of the title text is that NASA gave cash to employees, their families, friends, associates, and foreign spy followers to purchase additional copies of KSP 2 to encourage development innovations, international collaboration, as a \"force multiplier\" for personnel retention, and as bonus incentive awards for engineers who are ahead of schedule for their part of the Mars 2020 launch.\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk in front of a computer. He is surrounded by four people, and is looking over his shoulder at the ones standing behind him, Hairy - holding his palms up - and Ponytail stretching her arms out towards him. On the other side of the desk is another Cueball-like guy holding his arms out palms up and Hairbun who stretches her arms out to the side.] Hairy: Please hold off until the end of summer. We can't afford the personnel hit right before the late July launch window. Ponytail: People have already started calling in sick! Hairbun: Do you want a moon? We'll give you a moon!\n[Caption below the panel:] NASA tries desperately to get the Kerbal Space Program team to delay KSP 2 until after the Mars 2020 mission launches.\n"}
{"id":2205,"title":"Types of Approximation","image_title":"Types of Approximation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2205","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/types_of_approximation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2205:_Types_of_Approximation","transcript":"[Three panels show the same setup with three different characters. In the upper-right corner of each panel is the lower-left portion of a wheel and hub diagram, showing two spokes going out to a curved rail. The two spokes connect to the rail with a small raised portion on the inside of the rail. There are both readable and unreadable text\/symbols both outside and inside the curve and an equation below the curved rail. There are two small squares with readable labels. The three different characters are all holding a pointer up to the diagram while explaining an assumption. In the last panel an off-panel voice interrupts the speaker. This means the text from the reply to this comment goes further down over the diagram, so the top is hidden by text, compared to the first two. Above each panel is a label with the character's profession. As the text on the diagram is the same on all three panel, this text is shown here:] r 1 r 2 d=2\u03c0(r 1 +r 2 )\/2\n[Panel 1 - Cueball. Caption above:] Physicist Approximations Cueball: We'll assume the curve of this rail is a circular arc with radius R .\n[Panel 2 - Megan. Caption above:] Engineer Approximations Megan: Let's assume this curve deviates from a circle by no more than 1 part in 1,000.\n[Panel 3 - Ponytail. Caption above:] Cosmologist Approximations Ponytail: Assume pi is one. Off-panel voice: Pretty sure it's bigger than that. Ponytail: OK, we can make it ten. Whatever.\n","explanation":"In physics and engineering, problem solving typically requires approximations , as physical properties of the universe can be difficult to model. For example, in introductory physics classes, theories are introduced in frictionless environments. The level of precision required in a calculation or approximation varies depending on the context.\nIn the comic, Cueball , the physicist, generally dealing with theoretical constructs that can use relatively simple math, is introducing a problem with the assumption that the particular curve is a (perfectly) circular arc with a radius represented by R. Engineers have to deal with real things, which deviate from ideal shapes. Dimensions may be known to a certain tolerance. Megan , the engineer, also assumes that the curve is similar to a circle, with a deviation factor of 1\/1000 or less.\nThe joke arises when Ponytail , the cosmologist, uses the much less precise approximation of pi (\u03c0) equal to 1.\nPonytail offering to use 10 instead of 1 alludes to Fermi approximations , as shown in Paint the Earth . Numbers are rounded to the nearest order of magnitude (1, 10, 100, etc.) using a base 10 logarithmic scale. On this scale, \"halfway\" between 1 and 10 would be \u221a 10 \u2248 3.16. Thus, numbers between about 0.316 and 3.16 are rounded to 1, between 3.16 and 31.6 are rounded to 10, and so on. Pi is an irrational number that can be approximated by 3.14, so it is very close to the 3.16 cutoff point. The closest order of magnitude to pi is 10 0 , or 1. But using this form of estimation it doesn't really matter to Ponytail whether pi is approximated to 1 or the other reasonable Fermi approximation, 10 1 , or 10.\nPi is defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. This number is an irrational starting with 3.14159, the value for this ratio in a flat geometry. But in a curved space , the ratio might be different. The title text makes use of the fact that almost every number can be this ratio depending on the curvature of the space the circle is in. The cosmologist doesn't know the curvature of \"this particular universe\" (a funny way to state the universe the cosmologist lives in, which is not perfectly flat ), and so pi may not be the best value to use for the ratio between a circle's circumference and diameter.\nThis comic is a parody of the tendency of cosmology to use much rougher approximations in their work that would horrify engineers, other physicists, mathematicians, etc. In general, cosmologists deal with distances, time spans, masses, etc. that are so vast, with such large estimated errors, that approximations that would be ridiculous elsewhere still yield useful answers in cosmology. When dealing with the large numbers in cosmology, small multiplicative factors like 3 vanish into the rounding error: there probably isn't a useful difference between 10 100 and 10 100.497 , even though these numbers differ by a factor very close to pi -- an error that would greatly disturb most physicists and engineers.\nApproximating pi as 1 may also refer to the habit astronomers have of changing the units of measure such that important constants of the universe (such as the speed of light or the gravitational constant) are equal to 1, which highly simplifies the formulas without compromising the math. The number pi, however, is a dimensionless ratio, which doesn't depend on the unit of measure.\n[Three panels show the same setup with three different characters. In the upper-right corner of each panel is the lower-left portion of a wheel and hub diagram, showing two spokes going out to a curved rail. The two spokes connect to the rail with a small raised portion on the inside of the rail. There are both readable and unreadable text\/symbols both outside and inside the curve and an equation below the curved rail. There are two small squares with readable labels. The three different characters are all holding a pointer up to the diagram while explaining an assumption. In the last panel an off-panel voice interrupts the speaker. This means the text from the reply to this comment goes further down over the diagram, so the top is hidden by text, compared to the first two. Above each panel is a label with the character's profession. As the text on the diagram is the same on all three panel, this text is shown here:] r 1 r 2 d=2\u03c0(r 1 +r 2 )\/2\n[Panel 1 - Cueball. Caption above:] Physicist Approximations Cueball: We'll assume the curve of this rail is a circular arc with radius R .\n[Panel 2 - Megan. Caption above:] Engineer Approximations Megan: Let's assume this curve deviates from a circle by no more than 1 part in 1,000.\n[Panel 3 - Ponytail. Caption above:] Cosmologist Approximations Ponytail: Assume pi is one. Off-panel voice: Pretty sure it's bigger than that. Ponytail: OK, we can make it ten. Whatever.\n"}
{"id":2206,"title":"Mavis Beacon","image_title":"Mavis Beacon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2206","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mavis_beacon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2206:_Mavis_Beacon","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk in front of his computer reading a message that is shown coming from the screen with a zigzag line, going to the text above him. The two upper lines (of five) are separated from the lines below, but connected with a small zigzag line. The computer short cut is written in three boxes. The last line is the numbers from 1 to 9 and 0, in a highly stylized format but recognizable in this context. The digits are shown below in their standard appearance since the stylized versions cannot be reproduced in this transcript.] Congratulations. Use this power wisely.\nKey Code (secret!!): Alt + Tilde + Scroll Lock + Number 1234567890\n[Caption below the panel:] After 30 years, I finally beat the end boss of Mavis Beacon and unlocked the ability to type capital numbers.\n","explanation":"Cueball is being congratulated by the game he plays, Mavis Beacon , on his computer, because he has beaten the end boss and unlocked a new ability - the ability to type capital numbers...\nMavis Beacon Teaches Typing is a computer game first released in 1987, with the goal of teaching touch-typing and improving typing speed on a computer keyboard. Unlike many video games, Mavis Beacon contains no combat and therefore does not feature any \" end boss \" (a very powerful enemy encountered as the final challenge of the game). In many video games, defeating major opponents \"unlocks\" special features, such as improved weapons. Also, playing Mavis Beacon , although it may improve typing skill, has no effect on how typing works on one's computer.\nIn the caption, however, Randall asserts that after 30 years of playing Mavis Beacon , he encountered and defeated such a boss. Playing the same game for 30 years is rare [ citation needed ] . Regardless, Randall claims that defeating this \"end boss\" unlocked an ability to type esoteric \"capital numbers,\" which Randall depicts as more extravagant versions of the familiar numerals. Although modern Latin letters have different letter case (i.e. capital or upper case  and small or lower-case), Arabic numerals - the conventional numerals 0-9 used in the Western world - do not.\nStating that the game is old enough that it could have been played for 30 years, could be another attempt at making people, who actually did play the game in the early days, feel old (or an appeal to nostalgia). But this doesn't seem to be the main point of the comic.\nTyping such numerals is said to require pressing the Alt, tilde (~), Scroll Lock, and numeral keys at the same time. Some keyboard layouts do not have a scroll lock key or a separate tilde key (such that pressing ~ actually requires pressing a shift\/ modifier key along with the ~ key), and in any event pressing four or five keys at once would be quite difficult. Needless to say, pressing all those keys simultaneously does not, in fact, do anything like what the comics describes in any known computer system, though some smaller subset of those keys together (i.e. \"Alt ~\" or \"Alt numeral-key\") might activate other operating system or user-defined shortcuts.\nKeyboards vary in how many simultaneous key presses they can process ( rollover ).  Computer keyboards for English may be limited to as few as 3 simultaneous keys, whereas other languages or higher quality keyboards may be able to handle an unlimited number of keys at once.  (A musical keyboard might need to handle 10 or more simultaneous keys, likewise gaming or braille keyboards may need to handle many simultaneous keys.)\nIn the title text, Randall notes that certain typefaces feature text figures , numerals that have ascenders and descenders, much as lower-case letters do, rather than all standing at the full X-height like capital letters. He then goes on to joke that, conversely, there are true \"capital numerals,\" but they are a guarded secret of Mavis Beacon. Mavis Beacon was the character created as the typing instructor for the Mavis Beacon game, and is fictional, not a real person. Additionally, as a typing instructor, this person (even if she actually existed) would not be able to change typographical standards. Randall's description of Mavis Beacon as a \"number maven \" (that is, expert or connoisseur) contrasts with her supposed field of expertise in typing, which involves letters and punctuation more than numbers.\nThe comic itself hotlinks to this article: Oldstyle Figures . It is about typographic oldstyle digits.  The article assert that oldstyle digits are also called \"lowercase\" digits.\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk in front of his computer reading a message that is shown coming from the screen with a zigzag line, going to the text above him. The two upper lines (of five) are separated from the lines below, but connected with a small zigzag line. The computer short cut is written in three boxes. The last line is the numbers from 1 to 9 and 0, in a highly stylized format but recognizable in this context. The digits are shown below in their standard appearance since the stylized versions cannot be reproduced in this transcript.] Congratulations. Use this power wisely.\nKey Code (secret!!): Alt + Tilde + Scroll Lock + Number 1234567890\n[Caption below the panel:] After 30 years, I finally beat the end boss of Mavis Beacon and unlocked the ability to type capital numbers.\n"}
{"id":2207,"title":"Math Work","image_title":"Math Work","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2207","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/math_work.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2207:_Math_Work","transcript":"[White Hat is watching Cueball from a couple of meters away. Cueball is contemplating the formulas and diagrams that fills the blackboard he stands in front of. Cueball holds a chalk in his hand. None of the content on the blackboard is readable, but there is a diagram in the shape of a circle and a another pie shaped diagram. Both are thinking with large thought bubbles above their heads, with small bubbles connecting them and the larger bubble.] White Hat (thinking): Amazing watching a physicist at work, exploring universes in a symphony of numbers. White Hat (thinking): If only I had studied math, I could appreciate the beauty on display here.\nCueball (thinking): Oh no. This has two unknowns. That's gonna be really hard. Cueball (thinking): Ughhhhhhh. Cueball (thinking): Think. There's gotta be a way to avoid doing all that work...\n","explanation":"White Hat is observing a physicist , Cueball , who is staring at some equations and diagrams on a chalkboard (unreadable in the comic). White Hat is neither a physicist nor a mathematician , but he seems to glorify those professions. He wishes he understood the mathematics in Cueball's work and \"the beauty on display here.\" People who profess a love for mathematics often cite the beauty they see in pure math, how things work out so perfectly, as the reason they love math.\nThe joke here is that Cueball as a physicist is doing something instead quite simple and relatable: Avoiding hard work. Solving many kinds of constraints for two unknowns isn't necessarily difficult, but can be depending on the details. Cueball clearly thinks a solution is possible but would rather find an easier route. The same could be said about the field of mathematics in general: A proof is beautiful to a mathematician when it provides aesthetic pleasure, usually associated with being easy to understand. A proof is elegant when it is both easy to understand and correct, and mathematical solutions are profound when useful.\nThe title text continues Cueball's thought process, with the possibility of using an automatic equation solver to find the unknowns. Equation solvers are not often considered beautiful ways to address purely mathematical problems, even if they are often the most efficient and in that sense elegant solutions to applied problems in engineering. Using a formal solver with symbolic, numeric, or both methods requires making sure that the constraints (e.g. equations) are entered correctly, with parentheses balanced in their correct locations for the solution to succeed. This might be a further joke about Cueball's laziness, suggesting that he doesn't even have the energy to check whether his parentheses are placed correctly. At the same time it might show how far away he is from finding the real solution: Any missing, misplaced or spurious parenthesis will most likely immediately invalidate the whole equation system.\n[White Hat is watching Cueball from a couple of meters away. Cueball is contemplating the formulas and diagrams that fills the blackboard he stands in front of. Cueball holds a chalk in his hand. None of the content on the blackboard is readable, but there is a diagram in the shape of a circle and a another pie shaped diagram. Both are thinking with large thought bubbles above their heads, with small bubbles connecting them and the larger bubble.] White Hat (thinking): Amazing watching a physicist at work, exploring universes in a symphony of numbers. White Hat (thinking): If only I had studied math, I could appreciate the beauty on display here.\nCueball (thinking): Oh no. This has two unknowns. That's gonna be really hard. Cueball (thinking): Ughhhhhhh. Cueball (thinking): Think. There's gotta be a way to avoid doing all that work...\n"}
{"id":2208,"title":"Drone Fishing","image_title":"Drone Fishing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2208","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/drone_fishing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2208:_Drone_Fishing","transcript":"[Cueball is seated in a leaning chair, with a tackle box behind it and two drones lying on the ground in front of him. He is holding a fishing rod from which he is flying a kite on a long string. The kite is high up in the air and far away from Cueball. On the long string there are three smaller lines dangling below the string closer to the kite that to Cueball. Each line has six hooks evenly spread out, from a bit beneath the string to the end of the lines. Three quadcopter type drones are in the air nearby, with Science Girl and a Cueball-like kid standing right beneath the kite holding remote-controls for their respective drones. They are facing each other, the Cueball-like kid looking up, whereas Science Girl seems to be looking at the drone right in front of her, between and just above the kids. It has just begun to rise up as shown by lines beneath it. The two other drones are on either side of the kite line, both flying towards the hooks. Whoever controls the third drone must be off panel, and it is not clear which of those two the kid is controlling. The only text is a caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Drone Fishing\n","explanation":"Another comic in the My Hobby series.\nThis comic is a parody of the traditional activity of fishing for fish. Typically, a person who is fishing will sit as Cueball does in this comic, by some body of water and wait for a fish to bite their cast line. However, some fisherman will use a kite to allow them to cast their line further in the water, and this is called \" Kite fishing \". But it is also possible to use drones for this, as in \"drone fishing.\"\nRandall , however, is interpreting \"Drone fishing\" not as fishing with drones but as fishing for drones (\"drone fishing\" as in \"lobster fishing\"). In fact, what Cueball (or Randall) is doing, is kite fishing for drones, by flying a kite with fishhooks attached over some drone enthusiasts in hopes of snagging their drones. This is quite likely illegal, especially if Cueball were to \"reel\" the caught drone in. [ citation needed ] It seems like he has already caught two that lay in front of his feet. All the drones are of the quadcopter type, as they are called in 1630: Quadcopter .\nThe title text parodies a common line about fishing, about the \"joy of going out in nature\", catching fish, and the struggle of reeling in large fish. However, instead of being about fishing, Randall has replaced the line to be about catching drones, and fighting off their owners. Considering that the two drone owners beneath his kite are children, Science Girl and a Cueball like kid, clearly smaller than Cueball\/Randall in the chair, this should not be so tough in the pictured case.\nReal life methods for capturing drones involve French Army falconry training of golden eagles (a technique abandoned by Dutch police) and firing nets from other drones, which has been proposed for orbital debris removal , or the use of nets hanging on counter-drones.\nA similar setup for catching bats with hooks on a kite string have been used, although it's illegal. It seems unlikely that Randall has had this in mind when he made this comic though.\n[Cueball is seated in a leaning chair, with a tackle box behind it and two drones lying on the ground in front of him. He is holding a fishing rod from which he is flying a kite on a long string. The kite is high up in the air and far away from Cueball. On the long string there are three smaller lines dangling below the string closer to the kite that to Cueball. Each line has six hooks evenly spread out, from a bit beneath the string to the end of the lines. Three quadcopter type drones are in the air nearby, with Science Girl and a Cueball-like kid standing right beneath the kite holding remote-controls for their respective drones. They are facing each other, the Cueball-like kid looking up, whereas Science Girl seems to be looking at the drone right in front of her, between and just above the kids. It has just begun to rise up as shown by lines beneath it. The two other drones are on either side of the kite line, both flying towards the hooks. Whoever controls the third drone must be off panel, and it is not clear which of those two the kid is controlling. The only text is a caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Drone Fishing\n"}
{"id":2209,"title":"Fresh Pears","image_title":"Fresh Pears","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2209","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fresh_pears.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2209:_Fresh_Pears","transcript":"[Megan is rattling the coin-slot of a machine while Beret Guy stands behind her arm held out towards her. The Machine has a tall wall in front of Megan, with only the coin-slot and a dispenser visible to her. Behind it is a hopper connected to the dispenser. On top of that is a two time folded arm with a gripper at the end. Below this is a box with a label. Beneath the box is a small cannon like protrusion, which shoots something into the dirt to the left of the machine. There are lines indicating both the explosion, the trajectory of the projectile and the impact with sounds noted at either end. Behind White Hat is a sign.] Box Label: Seeds Cannon: Ptoo Impact: Thwup Coin-slot: Rattle rattle Megan: I put in my quarters. Is the machine broken? Beret Guy: It just takes a while to work. Sign: Fresh pears 50\u00a2\n","explanation":"Here, Beret Guy has set up a machine advertising \"fresh pears\". Megan , presumably his first customer, has inserted her quarters into the machine for the specified price, and expresses concern that the pears aren't being dispensed; Beret Guy simply assures her that \"it takes a while to work\".\nBehind the front of the machine, thus hidden from Megan, we see that what the machine does is dispense a seed into the dirt via a small cannon. Above it is a robotic arm and a hopper for collecting and dispensing the ripened pears. So it seems that Megan will have to rattle the coin-slot \"a while\" before she gets her fresh pear.\nThe term \"a while\" is ambiguous, but in the context of waiting for a vending machine to dispense food, it's usually assumed to be a matter of seconds [ citation needed ] .  Beret Guy, in his typical surrealist approach to business , seems to consider it reasonable to wait at the machine for years until a tree has sprouted from the dispensed seed, grown to maturity and begun bearing fruit, that could be picked by the robotic arm and dispensed to the buyer. This could easily take between 5-8 years for a pear tree, when starting only with a seed!  While such a pear would indeed be \"fresh\", it's implausible that anyone would accept that kind of lag time in buying a pear at a vending machine, even if it is cheap, particularly considering that any number of factors could interfere with the production of pears in the meantime. [ citation needed ] Alternatively, Beret Guy may be planning on using time-altering abilities to rapidly grow the tree.\nThis comic strip may be based on a fable about an old man who plants trees, knowing that he will not be alive when they bear fruit, to \"pay it forward\" to his children as his ancestors planted the trees that had sprouted and fed him.  Beret Guy may be practicing good moral behavior and ecological stewardship, but as a customer-facing business model it leaves a little to be desired.\nIt seems Megan is one of the first to use the machine, as no pear sprouts are shown behind the machine.\nThe title text refers to the increased difficulty in cultivating desirable apples , as compared to other fruits.  Apples cannot be reliably produced from seeds, seedlings often don't survive, and even when they do, they don't generally reflect the characteristics of the parent plant. As a result, apple orchards are created by grafting tissue from desirable trees onto suitable rootstock.  This process is more complex and labor-intensive than simply planting seeds.  The joke, then, is that the next planned version of the machine would not only require the user to wait years, but would also involve as-yet unavailable technology to automatically perform the grafting process as to create an apple tree that produces desirable fruit.\n[Megan is rattling the coin-slot of a machine while Beret Guy stands behind her arm held out towards her. The Machine has a tall wall in front of Megan, with only the coin-slot and a dispenser visible to her. Behind it is a hopper connected to the dispenser. On top of that is a two time folded arm with a gripper at the end. Below this is a box with a label. Beneath the box is a small cannon like protrusion, which shoots something into the dirt to the left of the machine. There are lines indicating both the explosion, the trajectory of the projectile and the impact with sounds noted at either end. Behind White Hat is a sign.] Box Label: Seeds Cannon: Ptoo Impact: Thwup Coin-slot: Rattle rattle Megan: I put in my quarters. Is the machine broken? Beret Guy: It just takes a while to work. Sign: Fresh pears 50\u00a2\n"}
{"id":2210,"title":"College Athletes","image_title":"College Athletes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2210","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/college_athletes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2210:_College_Athletes","transcript":"[Cueball, Ponytail and White Hat are having a conversation. Ponytail is checking her phone.] Ponytail: Oh, huh. California passed a law giving college athletes full rights to their names and images. White Hat: Good, I think?\n[Cueball holds his hand up in a fist, while Ponytail, holding her phone down, and White Hat looks at him.] Cueball: That's nothing. Our state gave college players rights to use the names and images of any California athletes. Ponytail: It did not.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball holds his hands out, Ponytail's phone is gone and White Hat puts a hand to his chin.] Cueball: Sure it did! Cueball: That's how our school fielded a basketball team made up entirely of Steph Currys. White Hat: Or is the plural \"Stephs Curry\"?\n[Cueball holds both hands up in front of him. Ponytail has her arms down but she is balling her hands into fists.] Cueball: They didn't all copy the original Steph, though. One player got the rights to his name, then the next player got it from them, and so on. Cueball: This process is known as \"currying\". Ponytail: ...I hate you so much.\n","explanation":"Ponytail is reading from her phone about the California Fair Pay to Play act , which was signed into law on September 30, 2019, two days before this comic was released. It gives college athletes the rights to their name and image (face, body, etc.) for financial gain, in contrast to NCAA rules which require that athletes be unpaid. This bill threatens the NCAA's notion of amateurism , which has become a topic of public debate.\nWhite Hat thinks this law is a good thing, but then Cueball claims that his state has passed an even better law giving college players rights to the names and images of any California athletes. Note that Cueball's state is thus not California, so it is very odd they can use names from another state, in addition to the oddity of gaining rights to another person's name and image.\nPonytail doesn't believe Cueball, but he carries on claiming that all members of his school's basketball team thus have changed their name to Steph Curry after the NBA player who plays for the Golden State Warriors , a team in California. Cueball explains in particular that only one player copied the name from the NBA player, then another member of the team copied the name from that player, and so on.\nAs it turns out, in his final remark, all this has only been the setup for his grand joke: Cueball tells Ponytail and White Hat that this process of recursive name usage is known as \"currying\". In addition to a pun with basketball rules against carrying , avoidance of which often involves passing from one player to another, this is also a play on both the basketball player's name \"Curry\" used here, as well as the mathematical procedure called currying , named after mathematician Haskell Curry . This sort of humor is very typical of Cueball, leading Ponytail to state that she \"hates him\".\nCurrying is when a multi-variable function is broken down into a sequence of single-variable functions, each of which outputs a new function until the final variable is consumed. For example, the function f(x,y,z) can be curried into f(x)(y)(z), where f is a function that consumes x and produces a function f(x), which in turn consumes y, yielding the function f(x)(y), and that in turn is a function f(x)(y) which consumes the parameter z to finally produce f(x)(y)(z), which is equal to the original f(x,y,z). This is not commonly used in most areas of math except for foundational logic but it is widely used in functional programming.\nWhen Cueball says a team made up entirely of Steph Currys , White Hat questions what the plural form should be, and should it instead have been \" Stephs Curry \"? This is referring to the pluralization of phrases where a noun is followed by a modifier of some sort, such as attorneys general , parts unknown , heirs apparent , mothers-in-law , and so on. In these cases, plurals are formed by pluralizing the noun parts of the phrases; however, some of these are rare or foreign enough that speakers of English don't always identify them correctly and pluralize the last word instead, e.g. attorney generals .\nThe title text is a computer science joke, saying that the Steph Currys basketball team's signature play is the \"three-point combinator\", a joke on the three-point play in basketball, and a type of fixed-point combinator called the Y Combinator , introduced by Haskell Curry. The description of \"three-point combinator\" is dense with word play that relates to the Y Combinator, which is used to implement recursive methods in functional programming languages, has notable properties relating to halting (see: the halting problem ), and has a common form in which a second argument is used as a counter that is increased by one with each recursive call until termination. \"Signature play\" may also be a play on words, as currying transforms a method signature .\nIn this case, when this move is performed, it will just keep accumulating points, as it is guaranteed it cannot halt and will not stop until the time runs out and the buzzer that ends the game is activated. Such a move can of course not be a part of a real basketball game, and more of a nod to the Golden State Warriors' reputation as a high-scoring, nearly-unstoppable offense widely known for three-point shooting.\n[Cueball, Ponytail and White Hat are having a conversation. Ponytail is checking her phone.] Ponytail: Oh, huh. California passed a law giving college athletes full rights to their names and images. White Hat: Good, I think?\n[Cueball holds his hand up in a fist, while Ponytail, holding her phone down, and White Hat looks at him.] Cueball: That's nothing. Our state gave college players rights to use the names and images of any California athletes. Ponytail: It did not.\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball holds his hands out, Ponytail's phone is gone and White Hat puts a hand to his chin.] Cueball: Sure it did! Cueball: That's how our school fielded a basketball team made up entirely of Steph Currys. White Hat: Or is the plural \"Stephs Curry\"?\n[Cueball holds both hands up in front of him. Ponytail has her arms down but she is balling her hands into fists.] Cueball: They didn't all copy the original Steph, though. One player got the rights to his name, then the next player got it from them, and so on. Cueball: This process is known as \"currying\". Ponytail: ...I hate you so much.\n"}
{"id":2211,"title":"Hours Before Departure","image_title":"Hours Before Departure","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2211","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hours_before_departure.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2211:_Hours_Before_Departure","transcript":"[Three Cueball-like astronauts with space helmets are walking toward the back side of a van with the rear door open. There is a logo with text on the side of the van. The front of the van is off-panel. Above them is a time and below that a description.] 6:27 AM Crew departs for launch site Logo: NASA\n[A rocket launch pad with the rocket in the process of taking off, having lifted its exhaust to about a third of the height of the support tower. Smoke is billowing everywhere around the launch pad from the exhaust of the rocket. Above the rocket is a time and below that a description.] 9:32 AM Liftoff\n[Caption beneath the panel:] I know I tend to arrive too early at the airport, but it still weirds me out that Neil Armstrong left for the launch site just three hours before departure.\n","explanation":"This comic, as from the caption, depicts Neil Armstrong , Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins , leaving in their spacesuits ( Cueballs with helmets) to go in a NASA van at 6:27, to be shot into space on a Saturn V rocket to fly to the Moon on the Apollo 11 mission (1969). The launch happened at 9:32 on July 16, just a bit more than 3 hours after they left for the launch pad.\nThe joke is that Randall is amazed they manage this in just three hours, given that he himself tends to arrive too early at the airport, and since they typically ask you to be there two hours before an international flight, he probably leaves from home more than three hours before his departure.\nCatching transportation from one place to another requires being there and being prepared before the vehicle leaves. Some transportation, such as public city buses and personal cars require very little in preparation, and one can leave as soon as the vehicle is there and ready.  Others have more complications involved, whether it be in payment, security, slower boarding, etc.\nTo board a Greyhound bus , for example, one would normally need to be there 10-15 minutes before it is scheduled to leave, because it takes time to get everyone on board at the same time, stow luggage, and present a boarding pass or proof of payment.\nBoarding an airline flight is even more complicated (security checkpoints, long terminal walks, more bags, etc.) making the delays longer, and so conventional advice is to arrive two hours early for a domestic (same country) flight and three hours for an international flight. Seasoned travelers can often cut these times shorter, but to be ready for unexpectedly long delays the less experienced traveler would want to leave themselves plenty of time.\nBased on that, the exceedingly complicated business of traveling to space would instinctively require you to be ready much longer than the three hours they recommend for international flights, however, three hours is about how long it took for the astronauts traveling to the moon for the first time to prepare to take off.\nThe comic doesn't represent the preparations for the Apollo launch entirely accurately, however. Prior to their \"departure\" to the launch pad, the Apollo 11 astronauts had woken up at 4:15 AM, and after a 25-minute breakfast had spent at least an hour and a half getting into their spacesuits.  For regular travel on an airplane or other modes usually no more than a few minutes preparation is needed, for instance, to load luggage in a car or wait for a cab.  What's more, because all activity took place at Cape Canaveral, the \"trip\" to the launch site took only 8 minutes, and the crew began to take their seats in the Saturn V rocket only a few minutes later, at 6:45 AM.  Thus they were locked in the capsule for about two-and-a-half hours prior to launch.  For normal travel, people will only be in their seats for a few minutes before departure, or for large aircraft maybe a half an hour while it loads.  Thus the total time from beginning to get ready to liftoff was about five hours, which in fact is longer than less complicated activities like air travel. [ citation needed ] This is though still significantly shorter than you would think preparation for a journey over a distance of almost 10 times around the Earth, each way, and in significantly more dangerous conditions, would take.\nThe alt-text is a reference to Global Entry , a United States Customs and Border Protection program that allows US citizens to quickly proceed through customs checks when arriving from overseas, instead of waiting in a long line to present a passport. The Global Entry program also allows for access to the TSA PreCheck program, which allows for expedited security screenings, but here the word \"Global\" is literally true of an astronaut returning to earth, not a marketing phrase.\nIn the case of the Apollo astronauts, their return to the earth involved re-entry into the atmosphere (technically called Atmospheric entry ), and of course global is another word for things relating to the earth.  So the Apollo astronauts could be said to have undergone \"global entry\" on their return.  The joke is that since they have \"Global Entry\" privileges, the astronauts did not need to arrive as early to the Saturn V launch site.\n[Three Cueball-like astronauts with space helmets are walking toward the back side of a van with the rear door open. There is a logo with text on the side of the van. The front of the van is off-panel. Above them is a time and below that a description.] 6:27 AM Crew departs for launch site Logo: NASA\n[A rocket launch pad with the rocket in the process of taking off, having lifted its exhaust to about a third of the height of the support tower. Smoke is billowing everywhere around the launch pad from the exhaust of the rocket. Above the rocket is a time and below that a description.] 9:32 AM Liftoff\n[Caption beneath the panel:] I know I tend to arrive too early at the airport, but it still weirds me out that Neil Armstrong left for the launch site just three hours before departure.\n"}
{"id":2212,"title":"Cell Phone Functions","image_title":"Cell Phone Functions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2212","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cell_phone_functions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2212:_Cell_Phone_Functions","transcript":"[A graph with time on the x-axis and items Randall replaced with his smartphone on the y-axis. For each item, the time he (allegedly) replaced it is marked; the marks form a jagged line down the graph, roughly sorted by when he switched. The regions are marked] I have a specific device for this [and] I just use my phone [items where the switch-over date is in the past:] Telephone Web Browser Camera Newspaper Flashlight TV Remote Credit Card Car Key [items where the switch-over date is in the future:] Dog Leash Steering Wheel Band-Aid Cheese Grater Stapler Nail Clipper Electric Drill Toothbrush\n[The x-axis (time) shows at point labelled as 'now' roughly halfway along the graph, a grey dashed line runs vertically down the whole graph. Car Keys have just been replaced by a phone, all other items listed below that have yet to be replaced. For the most part the gradient of the trend is constant at around -1. The last item (Toothbrush) is replaced before the penultimate item (Electric Drill)]\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at the ever-increasing function of smartphones and their users' reliance on them through an unusual horizontal bar graph showing what services a smartphone provides (or will provide) that were performed by other devices in the past and when the switch took or will take place. It starts sensibly: Calling, browsing the Internet, and taking pictures are the most prominent examples of tasks that many if not most people use a smartphone instead of a specific device nowadays. The next item, newspaper, extends the Internet's capabilities (either from within the mobile browser or as a dedicated app), and the next, flashlight, repurposes the phone camera's flash unit; both are now commonplace features of smartphones. Some people even use their smartphone as the remote for their TV (either via RF wireless [e.g., WiFi] for smart TVs, or via their phone's infrared port) or to pay in stores using payment providers like Google Play Wallet, Samsung Pay, or Apple Pay, which utilize the near-field communication functionality of modern smartphones. A few cars now support using a phone app instead of a key fob, rendering yet another item obsolete; apparently, Randall just started using this feature in his car, as this item is in the very recent past in the comic's diagram.\nThen the comic drifts off into smartphone capabilities either not yet possible or likely never to be possible. These capabilities are right of the \"now\" mark, meaning Randall has not switched to using a smartphone for them: One cannot currently use a phone app as a dog leash, nor as an adhesive bandage. While using a phone as a steering wheel is possible (likely interfacing with the car's self-driving features), it would be a reversal of current initiatives to prevent drivers from using cell phones while driving. Things get increasingly odd, to the point where a smartphone is allegedly used as a toothbrush. Several items would require physical changes to the phone and not just repurposing existing capabilities, such as operating as a cheese grater, stapler or nail clipper, which would make the phone look and feel more like a Swiss Army Knife instead. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text continues this path by continuing the list of objects his phone will supposedly replace. These include a \"tazer\" (a misspelling of taser ), a fire extinguisher, a bird feeder, and toilet paper, continuing the path of absurdity the comic implies with its supposed future uses for a phone.\n[A graph with time on the x-axis and items Randall replaced with his smartphone on the y-axis. For each item, the time he (allegedly) replaced it is marked; the marks form a jagged line down the graph, roughly sorted by when he switched. The regions are marked] I have a specific device for this [and] I just use my phone [items where the switch-over date is in the past:] Telephone Web Browser Camera Newspaper Flashlight TV Remote Credit Card Car Key [items where the switch-over date is in the future:] Dog Leash Steering Wheel Band-Aid Cheese Grater Stapler Nail Clipper Electric Drill Toothbrush\n[The x-axis (time) shows at point labelled as 'now' roughly halfway along the graph, a grey dashed line runs vertically down the whole graph. Car Keys have just been replaced by a phone, all other items listed below that have yet to be replaced. For the most part the gradient of the trend is constant at around -1. The last item (Toothbrush) is replaced before the penultimate item (Electric Drill)]\n"}
{"id":2213,"title":"How Old","image_title":"How Old","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2213","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/how_old.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2213:_How_Old","transcript":"[White Hat holds his hand out towards a man with a sailor-cap standing to the left in the image while addressing Cueball standing to the right.] White Hat: I'd like you to meet my dad. Cueball: Aww, how old is he?\n[Caption below the panel:] Interaction tip: This is a common question to ask parents about their kids, but for some reason in the other direction it's weird.\n","explanation":"Another comic of the tips type , this time regarding one of Randall's problems, social interactions , this time including an interaction tip .\nWhite Hat introduces his dad to Cueball , who then expresses a reaction more typical of people being introduced to children, by saying Aww, how old is he?\nWhen introduced to a young kid, saying \"aww\" is accepted as normal, because the speaker thinks the little child is cute. The speaker also wishes both to know the age of the kid and to give the kid a chance to answer this question.\nBut when meeting someone older this would feel very awkward, and Randall, indicating he is very awkward around other (normal) people, continues to make this type of comic about problems with social interactions. Hence for others with his problems, this comic gives an interaction tip in the caption, letting you know that How Old? (the title of the comic) is a common question to ask only when introduced to kids, not to older people such as elderly parents. Another excellent example of how Randall also doesn't know how to speak with people with children can be seen in 1650: Baby .\nWhite Hat's father is wearing a sailor cap like the old version of Cueball in 572: Together and as other old people both in 586: Mission to Culture and 1910: Sky Spotters .\nIn the title text, Cueball continues down the road to awkwardness by saying other things normally reserved for meeting kids. Here he notes that he has actually met White Hat's father before, but so long ago that he since has changed height. For kids this usually means they have grown taller, but old people, who have long stopped growing, will over time become more compressed and lose height. So apart from saying that he remembers when White Hat's father was thiiiis tall , he also holds his hand an inch (2\u20133\u00a0cm) above the father's head to indicate this age-related height loss. For a growing child, he would instead have held his hand some distance below the top of their head.\nThis interaction would be really embarrassing for White Hat and his father, as being made aware of aging is usually not something people like to be confronted with by someone they hardly know, and being treated like a child is embarrassing. [ citation needed ]\n[White Hat holds his hand out towards a man with a sailor-cap standing to the left in the image while addressing Cueball standing to the right.] White Hat: I'd like you to meet my dad. Cueball: Aww, how old is he?\n[Caption below the panel:] Interaction tip: This is a common question to ask parents about their kids, but for some reason in the other direction it's weird.\n"}
{"id":2214,"title":"Chemistry Nobel","image_title":"Chemistry Nobel","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2214","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chemistry_nobel.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2214:_Chemistry_Nobel","transcript":"[Ponytail stands in front of an image with a white section in the shape of the 7 rows of the periodic table  of the elements, but without the two rows usually shown beneath with the lanthanides and actinides. The \u201cempty\u201d sections at the top of the table are filled with three rows of dotted boxes, 16 boxes in the top row and two rows with 10 boxes each, shifted one right from the top row. Ponytail points to this area with a pointer while she looks and gestures towards an off-panel audience.] Ponytail: I don't know why no one else thought to look here.\n[Caption below the panel]: The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the team that discovered the elements in the big gap at the top of the periodic table.\n","explanation":"The periodic table of the elements is a display which arranges all of the 118 ( currently ) known chemical elements by atomic number and sorts them into columns such that each column contains a group of elements displaying similar chemical properties. The original version of this table was developed by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, when he realized that certain properties repeated periodically as elements became more massive. Notably, this system left obvious gaps at the top of the table. Mendeleev correctly predicted that some of these gaps represented elements that had not been discovered yet, and even predicted their properties based on the patterns in the table. The later discovery of those elements (including germanium and gallium) helped validate Mendeleev's work. Other gaps, however, were not due to undiscovered elements, but merely resulted from the properties of electron orbitals in atoms: upper rows of the table represent orbitals with fewer possible electrons and hence fewer elements, so displaying the lower rows properly below the upper ones leaves gaps in the upper rows. In other words, elements could not actually exist in these spaces, spaces which only existed in the realm of human bookkeeping. The joke of this comic is that it treats these gaps as if they represented elements that hadn't been discovered yet. Ponytail and her team have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry merely by looking for and finding these elements. She expresses surprise that no one else had thought of such a simple direction for research.\nBy definition, each element has one more proton than the previous element - so element 1, hydrogen, has one proton in the nucleus, while element 2, helium, has two protons in the nucleus. The periodic table represents elements in their atomic form, where there are an equal number of protons and electrons (as opposed to an ionized form where they are unequal), so the structure of the periodic table is based on the structure of the \"orbitals\" that electrons fall into.\nThe first row of the periodic table has elements whose electrons only have an \"s orbital\" (at least when the electrons are in their ground state, which is the non-excited state that they are normally in). There is only one s orbital in each row, and an s orbital only has room for two electrons, so there are only two elements in the first row. The Pauli exclusion principle, mentioned in xkcd 658, means that only two electrons can be in each orbital. The second row of the periodic table contains elements with only s and p orbitals. As mentioned, there is only one s orbital at each \"level\" of orbital, with each level basically corresponding to a row, but there are three p orbitals at each level, so there can be four total pairs of elements in the second row, for eight total elements in the second row. (You can see that level one has a total of 1^2 orbitals, or 1 orbital, while level two has 2^2 orbitals, or 4 orbitals.) After p orbitals, the next type of orbital that can exist at higher levels is a d orbital. For levels that have a d orbital, there are five d orbitals at each level. Beginning with the fourth row, you can see elements whose highest-energy electrons are in an s orbital (the first two columns), a p orbital (the last six columns), or a d orbital (the middle ten columns). The d orbitals for row four are actually classified as the 3d orbitals (meaning they belong to level three), but because they have higher energy than the 4s orbital, they are put on the fourth row. The \"aufbau principle\" says that electrons fill the lowest energy orbitals first, which means that level one orbitals get filled before level two orbitals, which get filled before level three orbitals, and that within each level the s orbitals get filled before the p orbitals. So, there are two columns on the periodic table for each orbital - although helium is put in the far right instead of in the second row with the other elements whose highest electron is the second one in an s orbital, because putting it on the far right shows that helium is stable like the other \"noble gases\" in the far right row.\nThe final type of orbital that exists as the ground state for a known element is the f orbital, but almost all periodic tables show the elements with their highest electrons in an f orbital - the lanthanides and actinides that are mentioned in the title text and described below - in rows below the table, to prevent the table from becoming too wide to print easily.\nThe comic is based on the joke that somehow every physicist and chemist for generations somehow missed that there are actually p and d orbitals at levels one and two, and so it shows the empty space in the columns corresponding to the p and d orbitals in level one and the d orbitals in level two being filled with undiscovered elements. In reality, there are no p or d orbitals at the first level and no d orbital at the second level, due to quantum mechanics (involving the possible values of something called the quantum n, l, m, and s numbers, where n is the level and l determines whether is an s, p, d, or f orbital). The comic also shows a line of d orbital elements in the third row, even though the 3d orbitals are already represented in the fourth row (where they are placed due to having higher energy than the level 4 s orbitals). The Pauli exclusion principle has been known since 1925, and Mendeleev (mentioned in xckd 965) developed the structure of the periodic table in 1863 to describe the structure of the known elements, so the idea that such a basic thing as more elements in the early rows that had never been discovered by any chemist ever would be quite surprising. In reality, the elements toward the top of the periodic table that are known to be naturally occurring were generally discovered earlier, while all the most recently discovered elements are higher-numbered elements lower down on the table that are very short-lived before they undergo radioactive decay to another element and have never been seen to be naturally occurring.\nThe lanthanides and actinides mentioned in the title text are series of elements with higher atomic numbers that have electrons in orbitals that no previous elements have, and thus occupy columns of the periodic table that don't exist for lower-numbered elements. Sometimes these elements are displayed in the table , a format that corresponds with their actual orbital structure; this format is too wide for most display media, thus the lanthanides and actinides are separated out and displayed \"floating\" beneath the rest of the periodic table. The title text jokes that these floating series of elements are actually surrounded by actual elements.\nIn real life, the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino for their work in the development of lithium-ion batteries; it was announced on October 9, just a few days before this comic was published, so the chemistry Nobel Prize was in the news.\n[Ponytail stands in front of an image with a white section in the shape of the 7 rows of the periodic table  of the elements, but without the two rows usually shown beneath with the lanthanides and actinides. The \u201cempty\u201d sections at the top of the table are filled with three rows of dotted boxes, 16 boxes in the top row and two rows with 10 boxes each, shifted one right from the top row. Ponytail points to this area with a pointer while she looks and gestures towards an off-panel audience.] Ponytail: I don't know why no one else thought to look here.\n[Caption below the panel]: The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the team that discovered the elements in the big gap at the top of the periodic table.\n"}
{"id":2215,"title":"FacultyStudent Ratio","image_title":"Faculty:Student Ratio","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2215","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/faculty_student_ratio.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2215:_Faculty:Student_Ratio","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting hunched over a desk writing while ten people crowd around him, five on each side, all leaning towards him. On the left side, they are Hairbun, a Cueball-like man, Hairy, Megan - who speaks, and another Cueball-like man. On the right are Ponytail, a third Cueball-like man, another Megan-like woman, Blondie, and finally a fourth Cueball-like man.] Megan: How's the work going? Cueball: Can you all at least stand back a little?\n[Caption below the panel]: My school tried to game the ratings by having a 30:1 faculty:student ratio\n","explanation":"Universities are often rated in various ways to help students\/parents pick which one to attend. This comic satirizes the very real culture of schools modifying their actions to artificially inflate their ratings. One metric used in ratings is the ratio between the number of faculty members to the number of students . Typically this is expressed as the student-teacher ratio, which normally determines how much time teachers get to spend with individual students. The lower the ratio, i.e., the fewer students per teacher, the smaller classes teachers have to teach, and thus the more attention the teachers can give to each student. However, having many more teachers than student(s), as in this comic, is not very beneficial to the student(s). (For context for international readers, high student-teacher ratios are common and expected in the United States, Randall's home country, whereas some nations especially in Asia sometimes report much lower ratios, often close to 1:1 in some areas.)\nAnother metric commonly used to measure a college's exclusivity and therefore prestige is the college's rejection rate; more prestigious schools get more applicants, and since they can accept only a limited number, they must reject many. Less prestigious schools often accept a higher fraction of their applicants, but some schools will reject students whose test scores, r\u00e9sum\u00e9, etc. are much higher than average for the school since it's likely that college is a \"safety school\" and the student won't actually go there. This rejection can decrease the school's acceptance rate and make it appear more prestigious. However, if the above-average student does want to attend that school, they are unable to, even though it would be good for both the college and the student.\nFor-profit universities and diploma mills may use techniques like this to artificially boost their ratings or use fabricated metrics and accreditation mills to give an inflated appearance of value. Predatory publishers and conferences are other techniques used to inflate the perceived value of a school or to pad curriculum vitae.\nIn the title text, other metrics are skewed in the school's favor:\n[Cueball is sitting hunched over a desk writing while ten people crowd around him, five on each side, all leaning towards him. On the left side, they are Hairbun, a Cueball-like man, Hairy, Megan - who speaks, and another Cueball-like man. On the right are Ponytail, a third Cueball-like man, another Megan-like woman, Blondie, and finally a fourth Cueball-like man.] Megan: How's the work going? Cueball: Can you all at least stand back a little?\n[Caption below the panel]: My school tried to game the ratings by having a 30:1 faculty:student ratio\n"}
{"id":2216,"title":"Percent Milkfat","image_title":"Percent Milkfat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2216","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/percent_milkfat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2216:_Percent_Milkfat","transcript":"[Ponytail, raising her palm, and Cueball are talking.] Ponytail: \"2% milk\" is 2% milkfat. But \"whole milk\" isn't 100% milkfat\u2013it's 3.5%. Cueball: Weird. What's the rest of it? Ponytail: About 27% is dark matter. The remainder is dark energy.\n","explanation":"While cow milk contains a variable amount of fat (about 4.2%), whole milk from the store generally contains about 3.5% milkfat by weight according to the comic and some sources; other sources list similar but not identical numbers such as 3.25%.\nDairies commonly sell whole milk as well as products with less fat produced by removing milkfat. In the United States , there are three common products with less fat: 2% or \"reduced fat\" milk, 1% or \"lowfat\" milk, and \"fat-free\" or \"skim\" milk with 0 to 0.5% milkfat.\nSince whole milk is labeled as \"whole\" milk and not as \"3.5% milk,\" one might naively assume that whole milk is 100% milkfat, although this is not the case; 100% would be a product which is entirely milkfat (also known as butterfat), such as clarified butter or ghee. In milk, the remainder is mainly water along with proteins, lactose (a sugar), and other substances.\nThe comic analogizes this difference to the fact that physicists believe that \"ordinary\" matter constitutes only 5% of the actual mass-energy of the universe. Scientists predict the existence of another kind of matter known as \" dark matter ,\" invisible to our current instruments but exerting gravitational force on ordinary matter, which would constitute 85% of total matter and 27% of the universe's mass-energy, with the remainder an even less detectable and more mysterious \" dark energy \" accounting for the increasing speed of expansion of the universe .\nPonytail uses these quantities to \"explain\" the \"missing\" percentage in whole milk between the actual 3.5% and a potential 100% \"whole.\" She actually uses the 27% as mentioned above for dark matter. She thus indicates that dark energy takes up the remaining 69.5% of the whole milk.\nPonytail is assuming that dark matter and dark energy are distributed uniformly throughout all pockets of the universe, no matter how small. This assumption is common in statistics and may have seemed appropriate since no one knows the proportion of dark matter or dark energy of an object as small as a milk carton (though a more sensible argument is that all matter is accounted for when considering the milk and the carton; no additional \"dark\" matter is necessary to explain the weight of the milk carton).\nCosmologists are working to better understand dark energy or another reason for the universe's accelerating expansion. The title text supposes that both cosmologists and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates milk and other food items in the United States, are trying to understand the dark energy of the whole milk. In real life, the work of cosmologists and FDA scientists does not overlap at all. [ citation needed ]\nDark energy was recently mentioned in 2113: Physics Suppression , but before that milkfat and dark energy were actually mentioned in the same sentence in 2063: Carnot Cycle from almost a year before this comic, so the idea behind this comic is not new for Randall. Dark matter was mentioned back in 1758: Astrophysics .\n[Ponytail, raising her palm, and Cueball are talking.] Ponytail: \"2% milk\" is 2% milkfat. But \"whole milk\" isn't 100% milkfat\u2013it's 3.5%. Cueball: Weird. What's the rest of it? Ponytail: About 27% is dark matter. The remainder is dark energy.\n"}
{"id":2217,"title":"53 Cards","image_title":"53 Cards","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2217","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/53_cards.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2217:_53_Cards","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to a flowchart, with Cueball gesturing to it.]: Cueball: I've found a way to turn a 52-card deck into 53 cards by shuffling and rearranging them. Ponytail: No, you haven't. Cueball: How do you know?! I challenge you to find an error in my math!\n[The flow chart consist of 15 boxes of different sizes, connected with arrows. In four of them (top, bottom and two in the middle) a deck of card is shown. Next to the top and bottom a number is written, near the other two, which are the only round boxes, numbers are shown in one of the nearby boxes instead. Beneath the top box there are two boxes with readable text. The other 7 boxes, without numbers or card decks have unreadable text. From top to bottom are the readable content:] 52 Shuffle Cut 21 38 53\n[Caption below the panel]: Every conversation between a physicist and a perpetual motion enthusiast.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball claims that he has found a way to manipulate a 52-card deck into a 53-card deck by shuffling and rearranging the cards, presenting a complex-looking diagram to support his claim. Ponytail naturally disputes the claim immediately, which Cueball counters by challenging Ponytail to prove that his math is wrong.\nThe comic is a satire of the way that conversations tend to go between physicists and perpetual motion enthusiasts (or cranks in general). Perpetual motion is the idea that it could be possible for a mechanical system to work indefinitely without any external input of energy. The laws of thermodynamics absolutely prohibit this, so the only way that this could be possible is if the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics are some of the most foundational and well-tested laws in science, so perpetual motion is considered to be a pseudoscience , pursued only by ignorant or quixotic cranks.\nOne of the things that you could do with a perpetual motion machine is to violate the law of conservation of energy - that is, you could create free energy out of nothing, simply by building a mechanical device. This is likely what Randall is satirizing with the idea of a process that can generate an extra card out of nowhere - it makes no physical sense, but nonetheless Cueball is convinced that he has found a way to do it.\nA common defense employed by pseudoscientists, when challenged on their ideas, is to issue a counter-challenge and demand people prove them wrong, as Cueball does in this comic. This is a fallacious line of argument, since the fact that Ponytail cannot prove Cueball wrong does not mean that he is right. Nonetheless, this aggressive defense often works to discourage argument, since it takes far less effort to make a claim than to refute it.\nPossibly, Cueball's plan involves usage of the Banach-Tarski paradox , a mathematical theorem which describes a method of \"dismantling\" a solid sphere, rearranging the component pieces, and reassembling them into two solid spheres identical to the original. This is only possible in a mathematical ideal case, because the \"component pieces\" are actually collections of infinitely many disjoint points; such a procedure cannot be performed in physical reality. Cueball's operations of shuffling and rearranging are analogous to the operations used in the Banach-Tarski operation, which involves only moving and rotating the component pieces without changing their shape. The Banach-Tarski paradox was also referenced in 804: Pumpkin Carving .\nIn the title text, Ponytail responds to Cueball's challenge with snark, claiming that the most obvious error is the fact that the formula's result is \"53\". The implication is that his math results in the wrong answer , which is proof that the calculations must contain errors.  This, of course, starts with the assumption that Cueball's claimed result is impossible, rather than attempting to find the flaws in his specific method. Because most people would conclude, by basic physical reasoning, that merely shuffling and rearranging a deck of cards cannot increase the number of cards in the deck, that feels like a safe assumption. By analogy, increasing the amount of energy in a system only by moving and transferring energy should be equally impossible, on its face.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to a flowchart, with Cueball gesturing to it.]: Cueball: I've found a way to turn a 52-card deck into 53 cards by shuffling and rearranging them. Ponytail: No, you haven't. Cueball: How do you know?! I challenge you to find an error in my math!\n[The flow chart consist of 15 boxes of different sizes, connected with arrows. In four of them (top, bottom and two in the middle) a deck of card is shown. Next to the top and bottom a number is written, near the other two, which are the only round boxes, numbers are shown in one of the nearby boxes instead. Beneath the top box there are two boxes with readable text. The other 7 boxes, without numbers or card decks have unreadable text. From top to bottom are the readable content:] 52 Shuffle Cut 21 38 53\n[Caption below the panel]: Every conversation between a physicist and a perpetual motion enthusiast.\n"}
{"id":2218,"title":"Wardrobe","image_title":"Wardrobe","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2218","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wardrobe.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2218:_Wardrobe","transcript":"[Megan is entering into an open wardrobe, while Cueball stands outside.] Megan: I'll go ask. Megan: You wait here.\n[Cueball stands outside the now-closed wardrobe.]\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball keeps standing outside the closed wardrobe with voices heard from inside the wardrobe. The characters talking are inferred from the context.] Mr. Tumnus (from inside wardrobe): Halt! Who goes there? Megan (from inside wardrobe): Hey Tumnus. Quick question. Mr. Tumnus (from inside wardrobe):  Yes?\n[Cueball is walking away from the closed wardrobe. Voices can still be heard from inside the wardrobe.] Megan (from inside wardrobe):  Is Narnia in the E.U.? Mr. Tumnus (from inside wardrobe): Yes, we joined after you did. Megan (from inside wardrobe):  Oh great, another border to deal with. Cueball: I'll go find a lock for the door.\n","explanation":"Megan leaves Cueball outside while she goes into a wardrobe to consult with Tumnus on the pressing question if Narnia is part of the EU. It turns out they have joined (some time after the UK joined), which makes Megan complain about another border to deal with. And Cueball waiting outside goes looking for a lock for the wardrobe door.\nThis comic references The Chronicles of Narnia , a series of children's fantasy books by C.S. Lewis (some of which were later made into movies , plays, and TV and radio shows) about a group of children from England who travel to a magical land called Narnia. In the first book of the series (by publication date), The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe , Narnia is accessible through a wardrobe in a residence in the English countryside. Mr. Tumnus is a faun in Narnia and the first character that the first human visitor, Lucy Pevensie , meets on her first trip through the wardrobe portal. Referencing Narnia is a recurring theme in xkcd. Tumnus was depicted in the first comic to reference Narnia: 665: Prudence .\nThe comic also makes reference to membership in the European Union . The United Kingdom (UK) is a member of the EU at the time of this comic, but narrowly voted via public referendum in 2016 to exit the EU (a process commonly referred to as Brexit , portamanteau for Britain\/British and exit), but working out the details of this separation has proven more complicated than the simple in\/out vote implied.\nNarnia applying to join the EU shortly after the UK, as referred to in the title text, would theoretically be possible, even if only The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was considered, since the UK joined the EU in 1973, whereas the wardrobe entrance to Narnia was discovered during World War 2, therefore in the period between 1939 and 1945. However, they would most likely be rejected due to not technically existing in Europe and having a monarchy government (EU membership requires a stable democracy).\nOne of the major issues with Brexit was the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland . The two countries share the island of Ireland , but Northern Ireland is part of the UK while the Republic is an independent country which remains part of the EU. If the UK exit the EU, it would have different customs regulations than the Republic of Ireland, and there would need to be some kind of customs border.  The most obvious solution would be to establish a controlled land border between the two countries, but this would raise some serious difficulties and dangers.\nNorthern Ireland has had a long history of civil unrest and ethno-nationalist conflict. The most recent period of conflict, commonly referred to as The Troubles , resulted in over 3000 deaths between 1969 and 1998. In 1998, the UK and Ireland entered into a treaty, known as the Good Friday Agreement (overwhelmingly approved by referendums in both parts of Ireland). This treaty was intended to resolve many of the issues that drove the conflict, and has largely been successful in putting a stop to the violence. One of the agreements in the treaty was a totally open border between the two parts of Ireland. As both were in the EU, this was easily done, because they already shared a customs union. Over the following two decades, the ease of transit created major trade links between the two areas, and many people lived in one country and worked in the other. In the UK Brexit referendum, a majority of Northern Ireland voters voted to remain in the EU. Placing a hard border between the two countries would create major economic disruptions, and serious hardships for people living near the border. It would also undermine the intent of the Good Friday Agreement, which could lead to terrorist attacks and the rekindling of hostilities. The Irish government raised this issue from the time Brexit was first proposed, but their warnings were not fully heeded.\nThe alternative to this border would be to maintain open borders between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, but institute customs checks between the island of Ireland and the United Kingdom.  In October 2019, Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister, negotiated a Brexit deal with the EU that included this arrangement\nWhile the Northern Ireland\/Republic of Ireland border issue has received the most attention, the UK has land borders with two other EU countries. The UK territory of Gibraltar shares a border with Spain. There are also two Sovereign Bases Areas that share a border with the Republic of Cyprus.\nThe portal in the wardrobe represents another border of the UK, namely the border between England and Narnia. This 'border', of course, exists only in fiction, but the joke here is that it must be dealt with in the Brexit negotiations, further complicating an already messy situation. [ citation needed ] A further source of implicit humor is the juxtaposition of a fantasy children's tale about the magical land of Narnia with the highly contentious, political, adult world of Brexit.\nCueball suggests solving the situation by simply locking the wardrobe (which was never very accessible, even in The Chronicles of Narnia ), effectively isolating the UK from Narnia and making the border problem moot. This wouldn't work even in the fictional world of the books, as new ways to enter Narnia pop up in every book, although most of them are accessible only to the kids from the first book and their friends.\nThe title text references the amount of time it has taken to complete the Brexit negotiations, currently three-plus years and counting. The negotiators have set a series of deadlines to complete the negotiations, but have repeatedly had to extend those deadlines because they haven't reached any agreement. The comic was posted roughly one week before the then-current Brexit deadline of Oct. 31, 2019.  However it was already expected that that deadline too would probably be extended . In The Chronicles of Narnia , time moves inconsistently in Narnia compared to Earth, usually passing more rapidly in Narnia than on Earth. Lucy Pevensie and her siblings enter the wardrobe as children, have extensive adventures in Narnia lasting many years, and then return to Earth to find that they are children again and that only a few minutes have passed. The suggestion here is that holding the slow, complex Brexit negotiations in Narnia would take relatively little time on Earth, and the whole affair could be completed in time for the deadline.\nA punchline similar to the title text, where the slower passing of time was used to take on time-intensive real world problems, was also used for one of the comics in 821: Five-Minute Comics: Part 3 . The time difference was also mentioned in the title text of 1786: Trash .\n[Megan is entering into an open wardrobe, while Cueball stands outside.] Megan: I'll go ask. Megan: You wait here.\n[Cueball stands outside the now-closed wardrobe.]\n[In a frame-less panel Cueball keeps standing outside the closed wardrobe with voices heard from inside the wardrobe. The characters talking are inferred from the context.] Mr. Tumnus (from inside wardrobe): Halt! Who goes there? Megan (from inside wardrobe): Hey Tumnus. Quick question. Mr. Tumnus (from inside wardrobe):  Yes?\n[Cueball is walking away from the closed wardrobe. Voices can still be heard from inside the wardrobe.] Megan (from inside wardrobe):  Is Narnia in the E.U.? Mr. Tumnus (from inside wardrobe): Yes, we joined after you did. Megan (from inside wardrobe):  Oh great, another border to deal with. Cueball: I'll go find a lock for the door.\n"}
{"id":2219,"title":"Earthquake Early Warnings","image_title":"Earthquake Early Warnings","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2219","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/earthquake_early_warnings.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2219:_Earthquake_Early_Warnings","transcript":"[Megan is looking at her phone while standing next to Cueball] Megan: Ooh, California has a new earthquake early warning app. Cueball: Yeah, I'm so mad about it.\n[Megan puts her phone down and looks at Cueball who throws his arms up in the air.] Megan: What, why? Cueball: It ruins the experience of trying to recognize the p-waves before the obvious main waves hit.\n[Megan still looks at Cueball who has taken his arms down.] Megan: So you're mad about earthquake spoilers? Cueball: I just want to experience the shaking the way the tectonic plate intended!\n","explanation":"A week before this comic, on October 17th, California introduced an earthquake warning system in the form of an app for smartphones called MyShake .\nThe system works through a network of sensors across the state that can detect P-waves from an earthquake , which move faster than the S-waves , which cause most of the damage. In addition, the sensors send the warning electronically - at a significant fraction of the speed of light - much faster than either P-waves or S-waves. Because of these differences in speed, the network can send warnings through the app about 5-20 seconds before major shaking occurs, enough time for people to take cover under tables, run outside, etc. The farther you are away from the epicenter, the more warning time you have.\nIn the comic Megan talks about the app, suggesting how cool it is, but Cueball is upset.  He seems to think that prediction of the earthquake coming is like a spoiler that ruins the experience of how an earthquake should be experienced.  Apparently he prefers to simply be taken by surprise like most people are when an earthquake large enough to feel hits.\nHe also personifies the tectonic plates (whose shifting positions causes the quake), saying that we should all feel the shaking the way the tectonic plate intended. The statement is usually one regarding to arts, such as a music lover might prefer to listen to older music from vinyl (including cracking sounds, etc.) instead of a remastered digital version, as it is, as the artist intended.\nIn the title text Cueball mentions that he was fired from the National Weather Service five minutes after they hired him because the first thing he did was to rename tornado warnings as tornado spoiler alerts. A spoiler alert is something used, for instance, when talking about a plot twist of a new movie, so that people who haven't seen the movie can avoid learning important details that would spoil the experience of seeing the movie. Cueball seems to genuinely wish to be surprised by these potentially lethal phenomena for which just minutes of warning may make the difference between life and death.\nEarthquake warnings, on a smartphone but not as an app, were the topic of 723: Seismic Waves , and shortly before that a protip for an alternative seismograph was mentioned in 711: Seismograph . An app for warning about tornadoes was the topic of 937: TornadoGuard . Warnings in general by the NWS were the subject in 2179: NWS Warnings , which mentioned tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and many other hazards. Tsunamis are often caused by earthquakes, though earthquakes were not specifically mentioned.\n[Megan is looking at her phone while standing next to Cueball] Megan: Ooh, California has a new earthquake early warning app. Cueball: Yeah, I'm so mad about it.\n[Megan puts her phone down and looks at Cueball who throws his arms up in the air.] Megan: What, why? Cueball: It ruins the experience of trying to recognize the p-waves before the obvious main waves hit.\n[Megan still looks at Cueball who has taken his arms down.] Megan: So you're mad about earthquake spoilers? Cueball: I just want to experience the shaking the way the tectonic plate intended!\n"}
{"id":2220,"title":"Imagine Going Back in Time","image_title":"Imagine Going Back in Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2220","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/imagine_going_back_in_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2220:_Imagine_Going_Back_in_Time","transcript":"[Cueball talks to Megan while looking at his smart phone.] Cueball: Ugh. A player named \"Reelect Trump 2020\" put a frog Pokemon in the gym next to mine.\n[Megan puts her hand to her face. Cueball is holding a device in his hand with an antenna. He uses the other hand to move a stick on the device.] Megan: Imagine going back in time and saying that to yourself 20 years ago. Cueball: Oh, I have a time machine! I'll try that.\n[A sound effect between panels, likely the sound of Cueball's time machine.] Bzzzzt\n[Two Cueballs standing, facing each other. The one on the right is holding the handheld device, and is thus Cueball from 2019.  He is apparently repeating his statement to the other Cueball from 1999, with only the last 3 words shown. He gestures towards the left Cueball. Above the left Cueball there is a frame with a caption:] 1999 Cueball from 2019: ...next to mine.\n[Cueball from 1999 is shown, with Cueball from 2019 speaking off panel.] Cueball from 1999: I see. Cueball from 1999: Pokemon is still popular in 2019? Cueball from 2019: Yeah.\n[Cueball from 2019 is holding a finger up in front of Cueball from 1999.] Cueball from 1999: And it's cool for people your age to play it? Cueball from 2019: OK, I did not come here to be mocked. Cueball from 1999: This is a sobering cautionary tale. Cueball from 2019: Listen, self...\n","explanation":"Cueball is checking his Pok\u00e9mon Go app to check on the status of a Pok\u00e9mon he had previously left in a gym (to defend it against the other two teams in the game). In the gym he sees that another player named \"Reelect Trump 2020\" has left a frog Pok\u00e9mon, which is now standing next to his. Cueball, evidently not a fan of President Trump or his supporters, finds it distasteful to be indirectly associated with someone whose political views he finds unpleasant. Alternatively, it may simply be that Cueball doesn't want politics injected into a game that he plays for fun.\nWhen he remarks on this to Megan , she observes how strange that remark would sound if he said it to his younger self from 20 years ago. Normally when people say \"imagine going back in time\", they are merely constructing a hypothetical scenario to illustrate how rapidly society has changed over the years. Megan is likely pointing out that the idea of Donald Trump becoming the President of the United States (let alone coming up for re-election) would have seemed very farfetch'd just 20 years ago.\nHowever, it turns out that Cueball somehow actually does have the time-travel technology required to pull this off, and so he takes Megan's suggestion literally and goes back in time 20 years to do exactly what she suggested: he repeats the statement to his younger self to see what his reaction will be.\nUnfortunately, past Cueball (in the year 1999) chooses to focus on a completely different aspect of the statement: the fact that Pok\u00e9mon - a game that past Cueball sees as a children's game - will still somehow be popular in 20 years, and that his adult self is still playing it. These observations make Cueball feel uncomfortable, as they highlight the fact that he is spending time on pursuits that his younger self sees as frivolous or childish. He gets defensive and starts to argue with his younger self.\nWhen his younger self begins to call it a sobering and cautionary tale, it may dawn upon present Cueball that he may just have changed how his former self will behave. (Could he, in the new iteration, never even begin playing Pok\u00e9mon Go, and thus present Cueball may disappear and a different version of himself will exist 20 years later? Or could he have seeded encouragement for himself being more readily connected to all things Pok\u00e9mon in the intervening years, putting himself further ahead of the resurgence in its popularity?) Or else future-Cueball is just frustrated at how past-Cueball is failing to notice his intended revelation \u2014 and in turn is failing to appreciate past-Cueball's own naive but still insightful interpretation.\nPok\u00e9mon is a media franchise that debuted in 1996 in Japan as both a video game and a trading card game. It was originally designed for and marketed to younger children (the tie-in cartoon series constantly emphasizes its main characters are ten years old), with a design, aesthetic and gameplay that were optimized for a younger audience. Since then, and up to 2019, there have been a total of eight generations of video games on consoles. As the franchise continued to thrive and evolve, it's gone through multiple generations, including Pok\u00e9mon Go , an augmented reality game for smartphones. These latest versions, in particular, have become popular with (and marketed to) adults, some of whom grew up playing the earlier generations.\nIn 1999 in North America, only the first generation of Pok\u00e9mon video games had been released, consisting of Pok\u00e9mon Blue and Pok\u00e9mon Red for the Nintendo Gameboy. The second generation of Pok\u00e9mon video games would not even be announced in Japan until November 1999 , and advertising for the North American release would begin in December of 1999.  A person living in 1999, who has only seen the first generation, with no official confirmation that a second generation was even being considered, and unable to predict the nostalgia market that would appear later, would quite plausibly wonder about its popularity 20 years later.\nDonald J. Trump was the president of the United States at the time of publishing, elected in 2016. Even during his campaign, the idea of his election was considered absurd in many circles, as he had never held any kind of public office, and had no background that would lend itself to expertise in government or public policy. Prior to his election, he was primarily known as a New York real estate mogul and host of the 2003 reality television show The Apprentice .  While he'd been teasing the idea of a presidential run since the 1980s, and indeed was seeking the Reform Party candidacy in 1999 (at the advice of then-Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura , another actor-turned-politician), most people did not take the idea seriously, and the concept of him actually being President of the United States would have been hugely unexpected to most Americans in an earlier era.  1999 Cueball might regard the name \"Reelect Trump 2020\" as an ironic joke, like a campaign button for Vermin Supreme or the Sweet Meteor Of Death . That Randall is not a fan of Donald Trump became clear in 1756: I'm With Her and many comics that followed it, now including this.\nRandall released a comic about Pok\u00e9mon Go less than a week after its release back in July 2016: 1705: Pok\u00e9mon Go . But Pok\u00e9mon in general has been a recurring theme in xkcd long before Pok\u00e9mon Go was released.\nPepe the Frog is an internet meme that has become associated with Donald Trump after his use of it during his presidential campaign. The use of a frog Pok\u00e9mon, therefore, is a callback to this internet phenomenon.\nThe Pok\u00e9mon left in the gym is most likely Politoed , the only official frog Pok\u00e9mon released in the game at the time of publication. It comes from the tadpole series with Poliwag that evolves into Poliwhirl which by using a King's Rock can be evolved to Politoed (instead of to Poliwrath ). There are other frog-like Pok\u00e9mon in the game which are scheduled to be added to Pok\u00e9mon Go, but where people who dislike Trump might have chosen Toxicroak , it seems an unlikely choice by a fan that hopes Trump is reelected!\nThis comic's joke is similar to one used in the 1985 science-fiction film Back to the Future , in which Doc Brown (of 1955) is shocked to learn that Ronald Reagan would be the President of the United States in thirty years' time, when in 1955 Reagan was a TV actor.\nDigimon , as mentioned in the title text, is another media franchise which is similar to Pok\u00e9mon in some ways, though it is sometimes perceived as more \"cool\" and \"adult\" oriented.  Its popularity in North America rose around 1999 with the airing of its anime series, but never became as popular as Pok\u00e9mon .\nThis was the first of two time travel comics in less than a week, as the one two comics after this one, 2222: Terminator: Dark Fate , also had future Cueballs travel back to visit their past self.\n[Cueball talks to Megan while looking at his smart phone.] Cueball: Ugh. A player named \"Reelect Trump 2020\" put a frog Pokemon in the gym next to mine.\n[Megan puts her hand to her face. Cueball is holding a device in his hand with an antenna. He uses the other hand to move a stick on the device.] Megan: Imagine going back in time and saying that to yourself 20 years ago. Cueball: Oh, I have a time machine! I'll try that.\n[A sound effect between panels, likely the sound of Cueball's time machine.] Bzzzzt\n[Two Cueballs standing, facing each other. The one on the right is holding the handheld device, and is thus Cueball from 2019.  He is apparently repeating his statement to the other Cueball from 1999, with only the last 3 words shown. He gestures towards the left Cueball. Above the left Cueball there is a frame with a caption:] 1999 Cueball from 2019: ...next to mine.\n[Cueball from 1999 is shown, with Cueball from 2019 speaking off panel.] Cueball from 1999: I see. Cueball from 1999: Pokemon is still popular in 2019? Cueball from 2019: Yeah.\n[Cueball from 2019 is holding a finger up in front of Cueball from 1999.] Cueball from 1999: And it's cool for people your age to play it? Cueball from 2019: OK, I did not come here to be mocked. Cueball from 1999: This is a sobering cautionary tale. Cueball from 2019: Listen, self...\n"}
{"id":2221,"title":"Emulation","image_title":"Emulation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2221","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/emulation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2221:_Emulation","transcript":"[Cueball sits in an office chair at a desk typing on a laptop computer. The computers response to his typing is shown emanating from a starburst on the screen with zigzag lines between different sentences.] Laptop: Loading... please insert disk into drive A: Cueball: *click* There you go. Laptop: Thank you. Wow, this disk is incredibly fast! Cueball: Yeah, uh, it's the new model from Memorex. Laptop: Amazing. And how is President Reagan? Cueball: He's... He's fine.\n[Caption under the panel] I feel weird using old software that doesn't know it's being emulated.\n","explanation":"Here Cueball is speaking with a fictitious example of artificially intelligent software similar to the type popularized in the 1980's when personal computers had just become mainstream.  Although modern computing platforms might still be backwards-compatible with 8-bit era software, it is more likely that the old applications will need to be run within an emulator that can simulate the necessary hardware components required by the application.\nIn this case the \"8-bit AI\" is having a conversation with Cueball as it carries out tasks common to the era, specifically asking the user to insert a floppy disk into drive \"A:\" (A: traditionally being the first floppy drive on IBM-compatible PCs).  At the time internal storage like a hard disk was an expensive luxury item and most applications were stored on removable media.  An application that could not fit on a single floppy disk would be programmed to prompt the user to insert successive floppies which held the required data.  However, the speed at which data could be loaded from such devices was very slow , requiring anywhere from ten seconds to ten minutes to load a level or an advanced dialog box. Sometimes the software would even incorporate feedback mechanisms like loading screens to let the user know the program was proceeding as intended and had not crashed.\nWhen software operating under an emulator such as DOSBox makes a request to access disc storage, the emulator will often map the command to a file or file system on the enveloping computing environment which can now contain hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of storage.  Depending on the configuration, this may require a user action to complete the virtual operation (Cueball's click). The speed of modern hardware allows the data to be transferred at speeds several orders of magnitude higher than what was possible in the past. The 8-bit AI notices this and makes a comment about the transfer speed.\nHere we begin to see the consequences of emulation upon the anthropomorphized software application. Because the emulator is constructing the application's entire reality, the 8-bit AI has no reason to believe it is anywhere other than a 1980's computing platform for which it was designed.  While the application does notice the abnormally fast load time, Cueball decides to not burst his anthropomorphized program's bubble and responds that the file loaded quickly because of a new floppy disk from Memorex , which was a well-known manufacturer of premium magnetic recording media in the 1980s.  Memorex was also known for a famous series of commercials with the tagline, \"Is it live? Or is it Memorex?\"\u2014tying into the comic's theme of a lack of unawareness that something is being digitally duplicated.\nTo compound the problem, computers of the era often lacked a real-time clock or would have an inability to process dates beyond 1999 , and therefore the software application in this comic still believes that it is running at the time of its creation - the 1980's. To this end the program casually asks how President Reagan is doing, as Ronald Reagan was the President of the United States from 1981-1989 when early PCs were on the rise. He died in 2004, 15 years before the publication of the comic. This is why Cueball seems slightly uncomfortable with noncommittally telling the software Reagan is \"fine.\"\nIn the title text, Cueball references the living in a simulation trope, mentioning that it is not fully clear that he is actually living in 2019. This has been a theme in science fiction such as The Matrix , which has been referenced several times in xkcd. That we are living in a simulation was also the subject of the comic 505: A Bunch of Rocks .\n[Cueball sits in an office chair at a desk typing on a laptop computer. The computers response to his typing is shown emanating from a starburst on the screen with zigzag lines between different sentences.] Laptop: Loading... please insert disk into drive A: Cueball: *click* There you go. Laptop: Thank you. Wow, this disk is incredibly fast! Cueball: Yeah, uh, it's the new model from Memorex. Laptop: Amazing. And how is President Reagan? Cueball: He's... He's fine.\n[Caption under the panel] I feel weird using old software that doesn't know it's being emulated.\n"}
{"id":2222,"title":"Terminator Dark Fate","image_title":"Terminator: Dark Fate","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2222","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/terminator_dark_fate.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2222:_Terminator:_Dark_Fate","transcript":"[Cueball is walking to the right. Another Cueball, Cueball-2, appears behind him in a bubble of energy that appears with a loud sound. The bubble floats in the air behind the walking Cueball, with Cueball-2 inside holding his arms out to the side and having his legs bend.] Zap!\n[Cueball-2 from the sphere is standing to the left of Cueball, pointing at him. Cueball has stopped and is looking back over his shoulder] Cueball-2: I've traveled back in time to stop you from seeing Terminator: Dark Fate !\n[Cueball-2 is looking at Cueball who has turned around and holds his arm a bit out to the sides.] Cueball: But it looks so good! Reviews are actually decent! Mackenzie Davis! Linda Hamilton is back!\n[Cueball-2 is holding both arms up, hands held down as Cueball stands normally.] Cueball-2: I know, but you always think this, and you're always disappointed. Cueball: I guess ...\n[Zoom out as another Cueball, Cueball-3, appears to the left in a similar bubble of energy and noise as in the first panel, his arms are out to the sides and his legs are bent. Cueball-2 is holding a hand in front of his mouth, while Cueball throws his arms out to the side.] Zap! Cueball-3: Hi, I'm from the future where you didn't watch it and I realize I still kind of want to see it. Cueball: Let's go together!\n[Another bubble appears from the right of the three Cueballs, the one in the middle (Cueball-2) holding his arms out. This new bubble contains two Cueballs. The first, Cueball-4, throws up his arms over his head, while Cueball-5 has one arm out in front of him. Both have their legs bent.] Cueball-4: No! We're both of you from the future! We're here to stop you!\n[In a large panel, five more individual energy bubbles with five Cueballs appear. Two of the bubbles float over the now five Cueballs on the ground. The other three are a bit lower and in line to the right. Cueball-6 to 10 are in different poses, all with their legs bent, all the way to sitting on the knees in one case and most of them throw their arms out to the side. All look down at the five regardless of their bubble's position. Their text is alternating between being up and down, so the text goes over or below the other text, making it hard to decide which comes first. This may be intentional. But here they are in the order of Cueballs as they come from left to right:] Cueball-6: I'm here to stop you! Cueball-7: I'm here to stop the robot sent to stop you! Cueball-8: I'm here to protect you from...you? I lost track. Cueball-9: I'm here to kill Hitler. Did I get the right year? Cueball-10: I'm here to get tickets because in like 20 minutes you people buy them all.\n","explanation":"Cueball is on his way to see the new Terminator movie; Terminator: Dark Fate , when Cueball's future self comes back to stop him, trying to convince him that, as always, he will be disappointed by sequels. (This was, for instance, the main joke in the last part of 566: Matrix Revisited .)\nFuture Cueball (who we shall call Cueball-2) almost succeeds in convincing present-day Cueball (who we shall call Cueball-1) not to go see the movie in spite of good reviews and the fact that the original star Linda Hamilton is back after several movies without her. Due to the nature of time travel, Terminator: Dark Fate actually negates any movie that came after the first two ( The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day ). However, they are interrupted by a second Future Cueball, Cueball-3, who states that in his timeline he hadn't seen it but wished he had, making present-day Cueball exclaim that they should go see it together.\nCueballs 1, 2, and 3 are interrupted again by the appearance of two more Cueballs, presumably Cueball-1 and Cueball-3 who have seen the movie, regretted it as Cueball-2 did, and travel back in time to stop themselves from seeing it. In the next panel another 5 Cueballs appear, however, their reasons for coming back have degraded, with the last one stating that he came back simply because, at the time he came from, the theater sold out of tickets because all the time-traveling Cueballs purchased all of them.\nA common trope in science fiction is to Set Right What Once Went Wrong , where characters travel in time in order to stop a particular event from happening so as to prevent an undesirable timeline. The Terminator series film series is famous for this time travel trope. The initial 3 films feature a time-traveling robot sent from the dystopian future to kill a particular human, with the future resistance in turn sending a protector to ensure the human's survival. However, the series has never been consistent on even the broadest rules of how time travel affects the timeline, with each movie exploring different possibilities. This is another point of spoof for the comic, featuring multiple recursive time loops until it becomes a jumbled mess.\nThe final panel also invokes the \"killing Hitler\" trope. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany during World War II, and it has been a common plot idea to \"go back in time to kill Hitler\" such as in 1063: Kill Hitler , by presuming that the world would be better if World War II and The Holocaust had never happened. There are also works that postulate that such a killing would have unintended consequences, making things worse (for example, if Hitler had been replaced by a more competent leader, the Axis power might have won the war). In any case, this Cueball is over 70 years too late to kill Hitler, as Hitler is now dead. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text is what is said by the next Cueball-11 (the 10th time-traveler), with each link in the chain relating to the Terminator movies. Except at the end where the initial \"dangerous robot\" turns out to be a robot sent to vacuum the floor. Robotic vacuums, such as the Roomba , are a recurring theme on xkcd.\nThe title text split up:\nThus Cueball-11 tries to stop the person that needs to destroy the Roomba by stopping his protector's protector, presumably so that the floor will be cleaned in his timeline.  It's strange that Cueball would rather execute a complicated time-travel plot than just clean the floor himself, but we've seen him make extreme versions of mundane activities before (e.g. 1017: Backward in Time , which is not actually related to time travel despite the name).\nThis was the second time travel comic in less than a week, as the comic two comics before this one, 2220: Imagine Going Back in Time , also had Cueball travel back to visit his past self.\n[Cueball is walking to the right. Another Cueball, Cueball-2, appears behind him in a bubble of energy that appears with a loud sound. The bubble floats in the air behind the walking Cueball, with Cueball-2 inside holding his arms out to the side and having his legs bend.] Zap!\n[Cueball-2 from the sphere is standing to the left of Cueball, pointing at him. Cueball has stopped and is looking back over his shoulder] Cueball-2: I've traveled back in time to stop you from seeing Terminator: Dark Fate !\n[Cueball-2 is looking at Cueball who has turned around and holds his arm a bit out to the sides.] Cueball: But it looks so good! Reviews are actually decent! Mackenzie Davis! Linda Hamilton is back!\n[Cueball-2 is holding both arms up, hands held down as Cueball stands normally.] Cueball-2: I know, but you always think this, and you're always disappointed. Cueball: I guess ...\n[Zoom out as another Cueball, Cueball-3, appears to the left in a similar bubble of energy and noise as in the first panel, his arms are out to the sides and his legs are bent. Cueball-2 is holding a hand in front of his mouth, while Cueball throws his arms out to the side.] Zap! Cueball-3: Hi, I'm from the future where you didn't watch it and I realize I still kind of want to see it. Cueball: Let's go together!\n[Another bubble appears from the right of the three Cueballs, the one in the middle (Cueball-2) holding his arms out. This new bubble contains two Cueballs. The first, Cueball-4, throws up his arms over his head, while Cueball-5 has one arm out in front of him. Both have their legs bent.] Cueball-4: No! We're both of you from the future! We're here to stop you!\n[In a large panel, five more individual energy bubbles with five Cueballs appear. Two of the bubbles float over the now five Cueballs on the ground. The other three are a bit lower and in line to the right. Cueball-6 to 10 are in different poses, all with their legs bent, all the way to sitting on the knees in one case and most of them throw their arms out to the side. All look down at the five regardless of their bubble's position. Their text is alternating between being up and down, so the text goes over or below the other text, making it hard to decide which comes first. This may be intentional. But here they are in the order of Cueballs as they come from left to right:] Cueball-6: I'm here to stop you! Cueball-7: I'm here to stop the robot sent to stop you! Cueball-8: I'm here to protect you from...you? I lost track. Cueball-9: I'm here to kill Hitler. Did I get the right year? Cueball-10: I'm here to get tickets because in like 20 minutes you people buy them all.\n"}
{"id":2223,"title":"Screen Time","image_title":"Screen Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2223","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/screen_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2223:_Screen_Time","transcript":"[Cueball  is looking down at his phone. The text is what he reads on the screen, as shown by a zigzag line emanating from a starburst at the top of the phone.] Phone: Screen time report: Phone: While awake, you averaged 2 H 48 M per day looking at things other than your phone. That's up 6% from last week!\n[Caption below the panel] At some point, it starts making more sense to track non -screen time.\n","explanation":"Cueball is reading the report from a smartphone app showing the average time each day that he was NOT looking at his phone during the hours he was awake this last week.  This is a reversal of the more expected behavior for a screen-time app, which would normally report the amount of time spent looking at the screen. The point is that as mobile phone usage becomes more prevalent, it may be easier to comprehend to report non-screen time.\nPeople in the US spent an average of 24 hours of non-work\/education screen time per week in 2015, compared to 10 hours of active leisure, according to one estimate.[ How free time became screen time ]  Averaged per day that comes to 3.4 hours screen time and 1.4 hours active leisure.\nScreen time may be associated with various undesirable conditions, such as mental health difficulties like depression, decreased activity, reduced sleep quality and quantity.\nIn Cueball's particular case, if we assume that he is awake 17 hours a day (the average for most people in USA), then his non-screen time average of 2 hours 48 minutes means that he spent more than 84% of his awake time last week looking at a screen. This means that while his 6% improvement is positive, he still has quite a significant habit. His previous non-screen-time would have been 2 hours 38 minutes, so he has managed to shave 10 minutes off.  Increased screen time often comes at the expense of decreased sleep time, so it may not be fair to assume a constant amount of sleep. [1] [2]\nIronically, in order for Cueball to use the app, he has to be looking at his mobile screen. The increasing use of mobile devices in modern society has been a cause for concern, with many people arguing this leads to addiction, other health risks, or people simply not talking to each other.\nThe title text parodies the idea of a screen time app by describing a \"shoe time\" app, which would track the amount of time a person spends wearing shoes. It's unclear what the practical use for this would be, as there is little controversy about the prevalence of shoes in our society. Possibly an app that tracks the amount of time wearing specific shoes could be useful; for example, a person suffering medical problems from wearing the wrong footwear could track the amount of time they spend wearing particular shoes, and correlate this with their health to figure out which ones are causing problems.\nPossibly, the point being made is that use of phones have become so constant in our lives that using them for many hours a day is as unremarkable as using shoes for many hours a day. Or, since it's the socks that are Bluetooth-enabled, they may be reporting negatively about almost constant obstruction by shoes, whereas the socks would prefer to report a much lower \"Shoe Time\" score.\nSome cultures have the custom of taking shoes off when in the house, so those people would boast lower (and presumably more favorable) \"Shoe Time\" scores.  It may also be a reference to the \" shoe phone \" on the television show Get Smart . (If Maxwell Smart wore these socks, they could track his phone usage, because his phone was in his shoe).\n[Cueball  is looking down at his phone. The text is what he reads on the screen, as shown by a zigzag line emanating from a starburst at the top of the phone.] Phone: Screen time report: Phone: While awake, you averaged 2 H 48 M per day looking at things other than your phone. That's up 6% from last week!\n[Caption below the panel] At some point, it starts making more sense to track non -screen time.\n"}
{"id":2224,"title":"Software Updates","image_title":"Software Updates","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2224","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/software_updates.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2224:_Software_Updates","transcript":"[A graph with two axes. Over and right of the axes are two labeled arrows pointing along the two axes:] X-axis: Time Y-axis: Software Version Number\n[The graph consists of three lines. Two gray lines moves in upwards step from left to right. The upper line begins a bit up the Y-axis, the bottom line begins somewhat down the X-axis. From there both lines move upwards in steps of different height. The distance between them stays on average about the same for the entire graph, but moves from bottom to top of the graph. Labeled arrows point to the top and the bottom gray line. The area between them is shaded light gray and has a gray label written in the middle. The third line is black. It begins from a dot just under the second step in the upper gray line. This line also makes steps, keeping close to the upper line, although it makes fewer steps than that line. But a bit over halfway to the top, it stops stepping, staying on the same level for the rest of the graph; thus eventually it falls outside of the light gray area between the other two lines, where it had been until the bottom line stepped above it. This black line is also labeled, with normal black text written beneath the first full step inside the gray area. There is one other point labeled on the black line: a dot just after the final step, under the next large step in the upper gray line. At the end of the black line there are question marks with an arrow beneath pointing right. The arrow has a label to the left.] Upper gray line: Newest Version Bottom gray line: Oldest Supported Version Light gray area: Support Zone Black line: My current version Start dot: First Install Second dot: An update finally breaks a feature I'm unwilling to lose End of black line:\u00a0??? Arrow label: The Abyss\n[Caption below the chart]: All software is Software as a Service.\n","explanation":"As time passes, upgrades to most products are inevitable, with software being no exception.\nHowever, as many updates create multiple versions, support for all of them can become a bit of a hassle for the company that creates them, so old versions frequently become unsupported after some years, or in some cases even months, of their releases.\nSoftware as a Service (SaaS) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software runs on the vendor's computers (servers), accessed by customers remotely. The software is said to run \"in the cloud\" as \"cloud applications\". Customers purchase subscription licenses. Since the only copy of the software is that which the vendor runs on their own computers, all customers use the one latest version of the software, which is upgraded whenever the vendor chooses to.\nThe benefits of SaaS is that the customer mostly does not have to worry about whether their machine is able to run the software, and both the vendor and customer only have to concern with managing one version instead of being familiar with multiple ones. The downside of SaaS, however, is that if the vendor alters or removes a feature that the customer prefers or requires, or introduces a bug, the customer has no ability to remain with an older version, losing a feature of the software that they depend on, or get impacted by a new bug that is introduced by an upgrade to the software with no ability to run the older version.\nThis downside of SaaS is frequently pointed out by skeptics of SaaS, who like to argue that the traditional purchase model allows the consumer to theoretically able to operate that version indefinitely; there is no obligation to pay ongoing fees or to upgrade to later versions. Indeed, some users do stay on old editions because of unfavorable changes in the newer versions, which is not something SaaS customers can do.\nRandall argues that in reality, though, because even these traditional pieces of software have versions and are equally susceptible to having a feature axed by the developer, as well as the problems of running increasingly old software - mainly concering bugs and later-discovered security vulnerabilities that would only be patched via upgrades, the practical upshot of these trends is that it's rarely plausible to buy a single copy of software and continue to run it indefinitely. Almost all consumers who continue to use a particular piece of software will eventually need to upgrade to and pay for new versions. While this isn't precisely the same as paying regular licensing fees and running software that automatically updates, it's an effectively similar model. In that sense, \"All software is Software as a Service\".\nThe title text refers to a different aspect of cloud applications. Since they run \"in the cloud\" on remote computers, they are subject to the limitations of network speed to the servers. The time for data to be sent to a server and a response to be received back is called the \"ping time\".\nSince a \"cloud server\" is just a computer, there is no fundamental difference between software running remotely and software running locally on a user's computer. The biggest difference is that software running locally will respond almost instantly to user input, whereas software running remotely may take longer to respond, since the data first needs to be sent over a network (the internet), processed, and then sent back to the user's computer. In addition, the chance of data loss (packet loss) may cause the response to be even slower, as data has to be re-sent, or often result in no response at all. Hence, in practice, this can have an enormous impact on the experience of using remote software vs software that runs locally (as anyone who has tried online gaming on a laggy server can attest).\nHowever, technically speaking, there is a nonzero time taken for the data to travel from the user's keyboard onto the computer, across the various circuitry, and back to the monitor. Hence there is a \"ping\" time even for a local computer (in fact, many \"gaming\" monitors advertise low input lag, in the order of 1-5 milliseconds, as a feature). Therefore, you could technically say that all applications are cloud applications, just that some (local computers) have very fast ping times whereas for others (servers on another continent) it may be quite slow.\nThis ignores the fact that being a \"cloud application\" implies that it runs on a server in a remote location. The joke is similar to the one that claims everyone commutes to work - including those that \"work from home\" - but their commute times just vary a lot. For example, consider the \"commute\" from your bedroom to your home office.\n[A graph with two axes. Over and right of the axes are two labeled arrows pointing along the two axes:] X-axis: Time Y-axis: Software Version Number\n[The graph consists of three lines. Two gray lines moves in upwards step from left to right. The upper line begins a bit up the Y-axis, the bottom line begins somewhat down the X-axis. From there both lines move upwards in steps of different height. The distance between them stays on average about the same for the entire graph, but moves from bottom to top of the graph. Labeled arrows point to the top and the bottom gray line. The area between them is shaded light gray and has a gray label written in the middle. The third line is black. It begins from a dot just under the second step in the upper gray line. This line also makes steps, keeping close to the upper line, although it makes fewer steps than that line. But a bit over halfway to the top, it stops stepping, staying on the same level for the rest of the graph; thus eventually it falls outside of the light gray area between the other two lines, where it had been until the bottom line stepped above it. This black line is also labeled, with normal black text written beneath the first full step inside the gray area. There is one other point labeled on the black line: a dot just after the final step, under the next large step in the upper gray line. At the end of the black line there are question marks with an arrow beneath pointing right. The arrow has a label to the left.] Upper gray line: Newest Version Bottom gray line: Oldest Supported Version Light gray area: Support Zone Black line: My current version Start dot: First Install Second dot: An update finally breaks a feature I'm unwilling to lose End of black line:\u00a0??? Arrow label: The Abyss\n[Caption below the chart]: All software is Software as a Service.\n"}
{"id":2225,"title":"Voting Referendum","image_title":"Voting Referendum","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2225","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voting_referendum.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2225:_Voting_Referendum","transcript":"[A voting ballot is shown with an underlined header and 10 different options below with different boxes\/buttons next to each choice.  Some are empty, some are marked\/checked or numbered.] Which voting system should we use?\n[Empty radio button]: First past the post [Empty radio button]: Top-two primary [Filled radio button]: Louisiana primary [Three radio buttons in a row, first two filled]: Cumulative voting [Checked box]: Approval voting [Checked box]: Multiple non-transferrable vote [Box marked]: 3: Instant runoff voting [box marked]: 1: Single transferrable vote [box marked]: 2: Borda count [Slider with value slightly below half]: Range voting\n[Caption below the panel:] The referendum went well, but we can't figure out how to count the ballots.\n","explanation":"The day before this comic's publication was an election day throughout the United States , primarily for local and state issues (normal elections for federal offices of the President, Senate, and House of Representatives are always in even years). The topic of today's comic highlights many different methods for conducting elections and counting votes. While elections are primarily used to allow voters to select from candidates for public offices, election ballots also frequently present questions for voters to directly voice their support or opposition to some change in a process or law - commonly called a referendum .  The comic depicts an election ballot referendum for voters to select the method to be used in future elections.  While the referendum is asking voters to select a method from a long list of methods, a referendum is usually presented as a specific proposal which requires a simple Yes or No vote.\nAs an example, the ballot in New York City included a referendum ( which passed ) on whether to use a different method, ranked choice voting (another name for instant-runoff voting as described below).\nA common issue with such referenda is what method to use to conduct the referendum itself. Here, the method of marking each choice on the ballot reflects the marking method which would be used if it were the winner. Moreover, each item is listed in a way which is suggestive of what it means (e.g., \"First past the post\" is the first one, \"Top-two\" is among the top two, and \"Multiple non-transferable vote\" is selected among numerous other ones). A few of the methods allow for multiple winners, which can often be good when electing councils and representatives, but it is unclear what it would mean to have several of these voting methods all win.\nThe aim of political elections in first-past-the-post is to determine which of the candidates standing for election is most preferred by the most voters. In a simple two-person contest, this process is quite effective, since whichever candidate receives the most votes will be the one that the majority of voters prefer. This system works well for simple cases, but for elections with more than two candidates this system may result in a candidate being elected who less than 50% of the voters would prefer.\nFor example, in a contest with three candidates, A, B and C, in which candidate A receives 43% of the vote, candidate B 38%, and candidate C 19%, candidate A will be elected, even though some of the voters who chose candidate C might have preferred candidate B as their second choice instead of candidate A, leading to a result which pleases less than half of the population. For example, the above distribution of votes happened in the 2000 United States presidential election in Florida , where George W. Bush beat Al Gore by less than 1000 votes largely because of the third-party candidacy Ralph Nader, whose 100,000 voters would mostly have otherwise gone to Gore.\nAdditionally, in election of multiple candidates across a country (or region etc.), first past the post does not lead to a distribution of elected representatives proportional to the total number of votes, only electing the lead candidate in each case. For example, imagine a country with 100 representatives to be elected, with each seat having the same distribution as described in the example above. Under first past the post, 100 representatives will be elected representing party A, and none for party B or C.\nDespite these drawbacks, First Past the Post voting continues to be used for political elections in many countries including the US and UK, which historically have both had two main parties receiving the majority of votes. The First Past the Post system has received much criticism, particularly from smaller parties who may lose out; however, supporters promote the simplicity of the system compared to other methods.\nThis system is shown with a radio button , the classic computer metaphor for being allowed one choice out of a set.\nThis method is used in California and Washington to select candidates for the US House of Representatives. In most states' primary-election systems, each party votes separately to select one candidate to continue to a first-past-the-post general election ballot. In these two states, on the other hand, candidates from all parties, as well as \"independent\" candidates from no party, run in a single race, and the top two finishers then contest the general election, even if both are from the same party (a common occurrence in heavily-Democratic California), and even if one candidate has a clear majority of the vote. (In an older version, a majority winner in the primary was immediately declared elected. This was held to be in violation of federal law, by effectively setting an \"election day\" before the national Election Day in November.) This is a form of the two-round system , a system for selecting elected officials most notably used to elect the President of France\nThis system is almost identical to the top-two primary, but with two differences. First, the open-to-all ballot is held on the national Election Day, instead of on the state's primary day. (This avoids the conflict with Federal law described above.) Also, the second round of the election is not held if one candidate has a clear majority (more than 50%) of the votes in the first round. Like the top-two primary and the first-past-the post system, the comic represents this system with a radio button, except this one has been marked, indicating the vote.\nIn cumulative voting, voters get as many votes as there are seats to be filled, and may distribute them as they choose. This system's most common use is in selecting corporate boards of directors. It is also used in some areas to allow a minority bloc within an electorate to elect some of its preferred candidates without imposing a system of separate districts.\nThe comic illustrates this with multiple radio buttons, each row representing an option\/candidate and each (implied) column one vote. On the ballot the first 2 radio buttons are marked, as they are each the only radio buttons in their column and cannot be unmarked.\nIn this system, each candidate is listed as a yes\/no choice, where the voters can choose which candidates they approve of winning the election, and which ones they do not approve of.  The winner of the election is the candidate with the highest approval rate.\nThis type of voting system can be used as a vetting process to filter out undesirable candidates before the final vote; for example, the United Nations uses a series of \"straw polls\" to filter out candidates for the Secretary General before the Security Council makes a final vote.  In 2018, Fargo, North Dakota switched to using approval voting to elect local politicians, making it the only jurisdiction in the United States to use this system.\nIn the xkcd ballot, the approval option is presented as a checkbox, where a check in the box is \"approve\" or an empty box is \"disapprove\". Checkboxes are distinct from radio buttons in that several can be marked in the same field, and can also be unmarked without marking another.\nThis system for electing multiple members to a ruling body is also known as plurality-at-large voting or block vote. It is commonly used in the US for city council elections, and simply limits the number of votes per voter to the number of winners. It allows a cohesive plurality of the electorate to claim all of the seats, denying other voters any representation whatsoever.\nIn 2019, the Justice Department required Eastpointe, Michigan to run at least the next two elections via single transferable vote because their existing plurality-at-large system was disenfranchising black citizens.\nThis system is also shown as a checkbox, as each candidate gets either 0 or 1 votes from each voter.\nIn this system, people vote for all the candidates, or perhaps their favorite three, but assign different preferences to each candidate they vote for, as in 1 for their first choice, 2 for the second, 3 for their third, etc.  If at least 50% of voters vote for a candidate as their first choice, that candidate wins.  If not, the person with the least votes gets eliminated, and anyone who voted for that person has their next (slightly less favorable) choice automatically move up a rung.  The 50% mark is again checked, and if there is no winner, another lowest-voted candidate is eliminated.  Eventually one candidate will emerge victorious. The advantages of this system are that there is rarely a need to have another election if things are close (the information is already there to \"instantly\" recalculate the vote based on additional voter preferences), and \"spoiler\" candidates only cause problems when they become competitive. And as Arrow's impossibility theorem shows, as with all ranking methods, sometimes voters can hurt a candidate by ranking them more favorably .\nOn this weird xkcd ballot, we see this type of ranking between this type of voting ( Instant runoff voting ) and the two that follow ( Single transferable vote and Borda count ), all of which allow multiple ranked votes.  It appears that between these three, Randall has voted for Single transferable vote as his top choice, Borda count for his second choice, with Instant runoff voting as his third choice.\nThis system extends the instant runoff to multiple-winner elections. Specifically, the election threshold is set not at 50%, but at 100%\/( k +1) where k candidates will win (in other words, just high enough to prevent more candidates from reaching it than there are seats). The bottom candidates are eliminated as in instant-runoff and their votes redistributed. In addition, if a candidate wins with more than enough votes, the extra votes (either a fraction of each vote, or some subset of the ballots) are also redistributed. This procedure continues until the requisite number of winners is reached.\nEach ballot is counted as 1 point for the last choice, 2 for next-to-last, and so on up to n for the first choice among n candidates. The highest point-earner(s) win. This system may also be calculated as 1 point for first choice, 2 for second, etc., with the lowest total winning; this variant, called the \"cross-country vote\" (due to its resemblance to the scoring system of the sport of cross-country running), is used by the NCAA's various selection committee as one step in choosing championship tournament fields.\nThe title text refers to the inventor of the Borda count, Jean-Charles de Borda (for whom it is named), implying that the use of the system implies the inclusion of a ballot in which he gets one point in the counting. This \"1 point\" would be quickly drowned out by any sensible quantity of actual votes. This also humorously suggests that if no one were to vote at all, Borda would win by default.\nFor each candidate, the voter selects a value within a fixed range (the xkcd voter sees this choice presented as a slider) for each candidate, independent of the values given to other candidates. The highest total wins. (If the range is restricted to two values, this becomes the approval system.)\nThe punchline for the comic is that the whole referendum is a chicken-and-egg problem: in order to accomplish the purpose of a referendum, one needs to know how the votes will be translated into a result, but in this case, determining that rule is the purpose of the referendum. Additionally this xkcd demonstrates one of the mechanisms that makes it hard to change the currently-used voting system in any state: Each voting system in fact votes for itself as the ones who are able to decide upon the voting system being in use have been elected using the current voting system and therefore are likely to profit from it.\n[A voting ballot is shown with an underlined header and 10 different options below with different boxes\/buttons next to each choice.  Some are empty, some are marked\/checked or numbered.] Which voting system should we use?\n[Empty radio button]: First past the post [Empty radio button]: Top-two primary [Filled radio button]: Louisiana primary [Three radio buttons in a row, first two filled]: Cumulative voting [Checked box]: Approval voting [Checked box]: Multiple non-transferrable vote [Box marked]: 3: Instant runoff voting [box marked]: 1: Single transferrable vote [box marked]: 2: Borda count [Slider with value slightly below half]: Range voting\n[Caption below the panel:] The referendum went well, but we can't figure out how to count the ballots.\n"}
{"id":2226,"title":"Recombination And Reionization","image_title":"Recombination And Reionization","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2226","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/recombination_and_reionization.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2226:_Recombination_And_Reionization","transcript":"[Panel showing Ponytail sitting working at some type of console, possibly in her laboratory. Cueball is standing on the other side of the console, facing her.] Ponytail: Our lab is trying to pick up the spin line of neutral hydrogen. It's the only radiation from the era before the first stars formed.\n[Panel showing Ponytail and Cueball.  Ponytail has paused working, with one hand raised off the console.] Ponytail: It was 1.4 GHz at first, but by now it's redshifted to the 100-MHz range. Cueball: Isn't that also where FM radio broadcasts?\n[Frameless panel showing Ponytail and Cueball.  Ponytail is pressing a key on the console to enable and disable a live signal from her lab's equipment.] Ponytail: Yeah. That's the problem.  Listen: Sound of switch on console: *Click* Audio signal from console: You're tuned to Hot 92.7: the Vibe! Coming up next... Sound of switch on console: *Click*\n[Panel showing Ponytail and Cueball.  Ponytail has resumed working at the console, and Cueball has raised a hand to his chin.] Ponytail: But once this guy stops talking, that Nobel Prize will be ours . Cueball: Maybe that's not a station \u2013 maybe that's just what reionization sounds like. Ponytail: Reionization plays a lot of Selena Gomez.\n","explanation":"The hydrogen line is a spectral line of neutral (un-ionized) hydrogen atoms. The electrons in an atom have a property called spin, equal to either 1\/2 or -1\/2, and one \"spin state\" of the electron in neutral hydrogen has slightly more energy than the other spin state. This means that when the electron in a hydrogen atom spontaneously switches its spin state, it releases a photon at a certain frequency called the hydrogen line. This line falls in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, with a frequency of ~1.42 gigahertz (GHz). The wavelength corresponding to this frequency is about 21.1 centimeters, giving it the common name of the 21-centimeter line. In this comic, Ponytail is attempting to detect the signal of this emission line from the ancient universe, although due to redshift , the line's frequency has decreased from 1.4 GHz to only ~100 megahertz (MHz), putting it in the current FM broadcast band . In most parts of the world, FM radio makes use of frequencies from 87.5 to 108 MHz.\nThe problem that FM radio and the signal for which Ponytail is searching overlap in frequency quickly becomes apparent when tuning to the frequency detects a local radio station rather than the desired signal. The radio station is called Hot 92.7: The Vibe; this indicates that Ponytail is searching for a signal at 92.7 MHz, but there is a radio station interfering with it. She demonstrates this to Cueball by playing the live signal for him, but says that once the radio DJ stops talking, their research will result in a Nobel Prize . This is unlikely, as most radio stations broadcast 24 hours a day without ever stopping (except in cases of power failure, which would also affect Ponytail's radio telescope). An unstated joke is that Ponytail's observational setup receives the FM radio signal at all; any actual radio telescope would have incorporated methods from its inception to exclude local sources of radio signals such as FM radio.\nCueball points out that perhaps the signal is what the supposed primordial hydrogen line actually sounds like during the phase of universe formation called reionization . Ponytail jokes back that the primordial universe must enjoy playing popular singer Selena Gomez . Although it is theoretically possible that a naturally occurring radio transmission might sound like music to humans, it would not contain clearly understandable coherent sentences in a language that did not exist when the transmission was created. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text refers to the signal Ponytail is detecting, claiming that it originates from before the formation of the first stars in the universe (which took place approximately 150 to 200 million years after the Big Bang ), but is additionally post-Malone. \" Post Malone \" is the stage name of a popular hip hop musician and singer, so this is a play on words, as the \"Post\" in his stage name isn't referring to \"after\" something, but is simply his (real) last name, and perhaps a play on the expression \"a star is born\" for an artist becoming a famous celebrity.\n[Panel showing Ponytail sitting working at some type of console, possibly in her laboratory. Cueball is standing on the other side of the console, facing her.] Ponytail: Our lab is trying to pick up the spin line of neutral hydrogen. It's the only radiation from the era before the first stars formed.\n[Panel showing Ponytail and Cueball.  Ponytail has paused working, with one hand raised off the console.] Ponytail: It was 1.4 GHz at first, but by now it's redshifted to the 100-MHz range. Cueball: Isn't that also where FM radio broadcasts?\n[Frameless panel showing Ponytail and Cueball.  Ponytail is pressing a key on the console to enable and disable a live signal from her lab's equipment.] Ponytail: Yeah. That's the problem.  Listen: Sound of switch on console: *Click* Audio signal from console: You're tuned to Hot 92.7: the Vibe! Coming up next... Sound of switch on console: *Click*\n[Panel showing Ponytail and Cueball.  Ponytail has resumed working at the console, and Cueball has raised a hand to his chin.] Ponytail: But once this guy stops talking, that Nobel Prize will be ours . Cueball: Maybe that's not a station \u2013 maybe that's just what reionization sounds like. Ponytail: Reionization plays a lot of Selena Gomez.\n"}
{"id":2227,"title":"Transit of Mercury","image_title":"Transit of Mercury","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2227","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/transit_of_mercury.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2227:_Transit_of_Mercury","transcript":"[Panel showing the sun partially obscured by clouds with faded gray blue sky around the sun, mainly upper right, as there are clouds in the lower left part. The image is very bright and blown out at the bottom left, obscuring most of the surface detail of the sun.  A small black dot is visible in the upper-right part of the sun's image.]\n[Caption below panel, with a yellow unhappy smiley before the hash tag:] This photo of the transit of Mercury fried my telescope's imaging sensor \ud83d\ude41 #NoFilter\n","explanation":"This comic is in reference to the transit of the planet Mercury across the Sun on November 11, 2019 (the date of the publication of this comic), which appeared from Earth as a small black dot moving against the background of the Sun. Randall has made comics about solar transits before, albeit about the transit of the International Space Station, in 1828: ISS Solar Transit and 1830: ISS Solar Transit 2 . Viewing a solar transit requires a special lens filter to prevent the intense light from the Sun from burning out a telescope's imaging sensor.\nThe hashtag #nofilter is typically used on photo sharing sites, especially Instagram, to humblebrag about having encountered situations so photogenic that no further image enhancement (\" filter \") is required to prepare them for general advertisement. In this comic, the hashtag is instead used to cap off an image about the predicament of the poster, where the lack of a proper astronomic filter has led to damage of personal property. The image shown on the comic is quite bright and blown out , and though the poster did manage to get a picture of Mercury, the sun's bright light permanently damaged their telescope.\nThe title text refers to a still different meaning of the word \"filter\"; it imagines a swimming pool growing green scum in the absence of a water filter , as opposed to a photographic or astronomic filter.\nAlthough not directly referred to in this comic (although a variant was used in 1911: Defensive Profile , a third common variation of \"No filter\" is possibly alluded to here and can refer to someone who makes, or posts, tactlessly candid comments. While often this means comments that reflect the individual's actual views which are potentially offensive or socially unacceptable, it could also refer to someone who posts every mundane detail of their lives, such as what is growing in their swimming pool (as is shown in the title text). Multiple layers of meaning makes this pretty clever word play.\n[Panel showing the sun partially obscured by clouds with faded gray blue sky around the sun, mainly upper right, as there are clouds in the lower left part. The image is very bright and blown out at the bottom left, obscuring most of the surface detail of the sun.  A small black dot is visible in the upper-right part of the sun's image.]\n[Caption below panel, with a yellow unhappy smiley before the hash tag:] This photo of the transit of Mercury fried my telescope's imaging sensor \ud83d\ude41 #NoFilter\n"}
{"id":2228,"title":"Machine Learning Captcha","image_title":"Machine Learning Captcha","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2228","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/machine_learning_captcha.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2228:_Machine_Learning_Captcha","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk with one hand in his lap and the other poised over the keyboard of his computer. A zigzag line is drawn from a starburst on the computer screen going above the computer to where it is shown what is displayed on the screen. At the top there is the following text:] Computer: To prove you're a human, click on all the photos that show places you would run for shelter during a robot uprising.\n[Below the text there are nine images arranged in a 3 by 3 square. In reading order they are: A house, possibly with an open carport; a large tree with two trees in the background; a bunker\/bomb shelter; a car; a city skyline with several sky scrapers; a sidewalk with road on the left, grass on the right; a log with a board leaning up on the log; a mailbox; and a hole in the ground.]\n","explanation":"All websites other than explain xkcd have difficulties with spambots, which are automated entities created in order to log onto a website and spam or otherwise wreak havoc upon it. (This never happens to explain xkcd.) To guard against this eventuality, websites have implemented CAPTCHAs , a challenge used to prove the user is a human and not an automated program. A typical CAPTCHA might distort a random sequence of letters and numbers and put it in a strange and\/or mixed font and ask a user to type it, or it might show a set of pictures and ask the user which ones contain fire hydrants; these tasks are meant to be easy for humans but obscenely difficult for computers. CAPTCHAs are a recurring theme on xkcd.\nCAPTCHAs run by Google are also used to train artificial intelligences to get better at these difficult tasks, such as reading poorly-scanned text or identifying objects of interest on the road (the latter being the subject of 1897: Self Driving ).\nThis comic jokes about a malicious CAPTCHA which is being used to train an AI to dominate the world. In order to prevent people from taking shelter, the AI uses the CAPTCHA to ask humans like Cueball to tell it places where they would hide. The implication is that during a robot uprising, the AI, on the side of the robots, would then be able to track down humans much more easily.  The choices presented are (left to right, top to bottom):\nHouse Sometimes, the best (or least-worst) response to a disaster is to \"shelter in place\" until the danger is passed, rather than risk getting caught in the open or in traffic.  This is commonly advised in response to biological, chemical, or radiological hazards, or in the case of a violent act committed in the community.  If the robot uprising is localized, then sheltering at home would be a fine response, because traveling to the other locations would increase the risk of being spotted and attacked by self-driving cars or aerial drones.  On the other hand, most homes contain a multitude of internet-connected devices, some of which may control vital electrical or heating systems, so if the robot uprising is widespread, then the home would not be a safe shelter. Tree or forest If there is a robot uprising, then traveling to a forest or other nature reserve, far away from developed cities and towns, would reduce the risk of being near a hostile piece of technology.  However, it also comes with limited resources for sustaining human life, unless the forest abuts meadows or farmland. Bunker or bomb shelter If the robot uprising includes the use of weapons of mass destruction (as in the Terminator franchise, or as was threatened in WarGames ), then only a hardened military structure is likely to survive. Car Cars offer some shelter and, more importantly, mobility in one convenient package.  Most families own at least one, and they are widespread in human-occupied areas, so even if the car is not as suitable as a long-term shelter (depending on how the road and gasoline\/power networks survive the uprising) it makes a fine first step in evacuating to a more permanent hiding place.  This is of course assuming that the car is not self-driving and that hostile self-driving cars are not widespread. City Cities offer thorough selections of supplies and tools that may be harder to come by in more rural areas, but they are also home to lots of robots and automated systems that may participate in the uprising, not to mention humans who may be prime targets for the machines.  It may be necessary to visit the city to stock up on supplies in a post-apocalyptic scenario, but in the early stages of a robot uprising, it is best to leave them as quickly as possible. Sidewalk The sidewalk is exposed and presumably falls within a built-up area that is readily accessible to the machines; it is not at all suitable as shelter. Lean-to The log with a board leaning on it is an example of an improvised shelter.  Such a shelter could be constructed anywhere with local materials, and would not be marked on any map known to the robots, which are both positives for surviving the onset of the uprising.  However, it is lacking in insulation and protection, which makes it less suitable for longer stays. Mailbox Only a very young infant could fit in this mailbox.  This is not a viable shelter. A hole in the ground Like the improvised shelter, this option can be made almost anywhere and is easy to camouflage, and it offers additional insulation from weather and weapons of mass destruction.  It's a fine option if you happen to already have one or know where to find one, but it will be difficult to create a suitable one after the uprising begins.\nSome of these choices may be Cow Tools , that is, presented not as serious options but to be funny because they are nonsensical.\nThe title text imagines a different malicious CAPTCHA which Randall says is \"more likely\" than the robot-uprising scenario, in which a company or government asks users to identify \"disloyal\" members of society. Presumably the company or government would then use this information to eliminate such \"disloyal\" members, either by firing them (company) or jailing, expelling, or executing them (government). This follows a theme of previous comic strips (e.g. 1968: Robot Future ) in which Randall expresses that he is more concerned about humans using AI for evil ends than he is about AI being evil in itself.\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk with one hand in his lap and the other poised over the keyboard of his computer. A zigzag line is drawn from a starburst on the computer screen going above the computer to where it is shown what is displayed on the screen. At the top there is the following text:] Computer: To prove you're a human, click on all the photos that show places you would run for shelter during a robot uprising.\n[Below the text there are nine images arranged in a 3 by 3 square. In reading order they are: A house, possibly with an open carport; a large tree with two trees in the background; a bunker\/bomb shelter; a car; a city skyline with several sky scrapers; a sidewalk with road on the left, grass on the right; a log with a board leaning up on the log; a mailbox; and a hole in the ground.]\n"}
{"id":2229,"title":"Rey and Kylo","image_title":"Rey and Kylo","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2229","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rey_and_kylo.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2229:_Rey_and_Kylo","transcript":"[Rey, on the left, and Kylo Ren, on the right, from the Star Wars series, are facing one another and wielding lightsabers:]\nRey: Kylo, we shouldn't fight! Let's set aside our differences and work together to measure the local properties of space, just in case someone in the far future is watching from another galaxy and wants our help to constrain the expansion rate!\n[Caption below the panel:] The new Star Wars totally panders to cosmologists.\n","explanation":"Rey and Kylo Ren , from the latest trilogy of the Star Wars series, are engaging in a lightsaber duel. Rey tells Kylo that they should not fight, but work together on cosmology , the study of the origins of the universe. Specifically she wants to study the expansion rate of the universe; scientists believe that the universe is expanding, and that the expansion rate is accelerating, but aren't sure of the exact rate, what the rate was in the past, or if it varies depending on location. Since the Star Wars movies take place \"a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away\", if Rey and Kylo presented their findings in the movie, it would theoretically give scientists more data points.  Although it is unlikely that modern scientists would use cosmological data from a movie generally considered fictional [ citation needed ] , especially as said time long ago and distance far, far away are never quantified, some movies and TV shows have spurred scientific innovations due to their subject matter (see below).\nThe caption, besides explaining the obvious nerd cred this turn of events would earn if it actually occurred in the movies, might also be a play on accusations against the Disney-owned franchise that it has begun pandering to progressives, with the complainers citing its racially diverse cast, powerful (in their eyes overpowered, and Mary Sue-ish) female protagonist, and a willingness to sacrifice sensible plot for perceived progressive talking points (e.g. Vice Admiral Holdo's plan and failure to communicate it).\nThe title text is Randall 's complaint that the Star Wars movies have been more focused on the Wars aspect than the Star aspect. It seems he would want a film about stars. It's worth noting that, with a half-width  space, \"Star\u200a\" and \"\u200aWars\" are the same number of letters long, and are therefore perfect halves of the title.\nKylo Ren and Rey, though enemies in the films, have been shipped in fanfictions and fan theories, so their joining together in this comic may also be a play on that desired relationship.\nStar Wars is a recurring topic on xkcd.\nAs far as we can tell, the stars of Star Wars (that is, the celestial bodies, not the actors) seem to be much the same as ours.  The \"galaxy far, far away\" has had various depictions over the years, but all sources agree that it is a spiral galaxy approximately the same size as our Milky Way galaxy, albeit with a less prominent bar than the Milky Way has.  We don't ever hear what name, if any, the Star Wars characters have for the galaxy, or why they call it a \"galaxy\" when the word comes from a Latin phrase, \"Via Galactica\" or \"Milky Way\" -- a question that Randall has brought up in 890: Etymology .\nLight is known to have a speed, although we are not told what that speed is, or if it is constant for all observers in all reference frames.  That speed is an upper bound on the speed that objects can travel in real-space, as in our universe, but in Star Wars , ships can travel faster than that speed by \"jumping\" into a parallel dimension called \"hyperspace\".  This allows them to cross the galaxy in a matter of hours rather than tens of thousands of years.  According to our understanding of relativity, transmitting information faster than light is equivalent in some reference frames to transmitting information backwards in time (cf. the tachyonic antitelephone ), but such temporal paradoxes are not known to occur in the Star Wars universe.  The only known examples of information transmitted backwards in time come from the Force, such as limited precognition of incoming dangers or vague, prophetic visions of possible futures.  Speaking of which, \"the Force\" is said to be \"an energy field, created by all living things\" which \"binds the galaxy together\".  It's not clear if the Force is a fifth fundamental force or \"merely\" a manipulation of the fundamental forces by focused will, but powerful Force-users have been known to raise and move heavy objects, conjure lightning, and manipulate minds.\nIt is not known if the universe of Star Wars is expanding, contracting, or steady-state, although prior to Lucasfilm's acquisition by Disney, the officially-published non-film Star Wars media were collectively known as the \"Star Wars Expanded Universe\".\nIn addition to the usual stellar evolution process, stars in Star Wars are subject to premature destruction or spontaneous creation by various superweapons, such as the Sun Crusher and Star Forge.\nMany of the planets of Star Wars are dominated by one or two biomes, rather than the dozens into which our homeworld is divided.  Some of these are reasonable enough (a planet could certainly be covered in desert or ice or lava depending on its water content and proximity to a star), but others require some novel climate patterns not exhibited on Earth (the same atmospheric pattern that gives rise to Earth's tropical rainforests also produces the Sahara Desert).\n[Rey, on the left, and Kylo Ren, on the right, from the Star Wars series, are facing one another and wielding lightsabers:]\nRey: Kylo, we shouldn't fight! Let's set aside our differences and work together to measure the local properties of space, just in case someone in the far future is watching from another galaxy and wants our help to constrain the expansion rate!\n[Caption below the panel:] The new Star Wars totally panders to cosmologists.\n"}
{"id":2230,"title":"Versus Bracket","image_title":"Versus Bracket","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2230","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/versus_bracket.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2230:_Versus_Bracket","transcript":"[A tournament bracket tree is shown with 16 participants each on the left and right side. From both sides toward the middle the brackets reduce to eight, then four, two, and one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle.]\n[Left side:] Kramer - Kramer Ford - Ferrari The People - Larry Flint Joe - The Volcano King Kong - Godzilla Freddy - Jason Dracula - Frankenstein Alien - Predator\n[Right side:] Marvel - Capcom Marge - The Monorail Justice League - Teen Titans Asterix - Caesar Batman - Superman Scott Pilgrim - The World Mega Shark - Giant Octopus Plants - Zombies\n","explanation":"This comic shows a tournament bracket in which the initial matches represent works of fiction or non-fiction with \"versus\" (represented as versus , vs. , v , etc) in their names (e.g. Batman is initially matched against Superman in reference to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ).  The list includes 13 movies, 2 video games, and one television episode.  The works referenced are:\nAssuming the tournament bracket reflects the results of each original work, the second round would result as follows:\nThe title text refers to the 2002 action film Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever , which is qualified to be in this tournament by virtue of having the word \"vs.\" in its title, but as the film is regarded as one of the worst movies ever made , it has been defeated in a pre-entry match vs. \"the passage of time\" - it is thus not considered worthy of entry in the tournament.\nTournament brackets is a recurring subject on xkcd, most recently used in 2131: Emojidome and 2037: Supreme Court Bracket . The latter is especially similar to this comic, considering that it also extends normal \"versus\" situations to a second round. The first bracket comic, 1529: Bracket , prompted people to create a series of polls to determine the end results, much like Randall later did himself with Emojidome. Randall even made a reference to one of those polls in the xkcd Header text .\n[A tournament bracket tree is shown with 16 participants each on the left and right side. From both sides toward the middle the brackets reduce to eight, then four, two, and one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle.]\n[Left side:] Kramer - Kramer Ford - Ferrari The People - Larry Flint Joe - The Volcano King Kong - Godzilla Freddy - Jason Dracula - Frankenstein Alien - Predator\n[Right side:] Marvel - Capcom Marge - The Monorail Justice League - Teen Titans Asterix - Caesar Batman - Superman Scott Pilgrim - The World Mega Shark - Giant Octopus Plants - Zombies\n"}
{"id":2231,"title":"The Time Before and After Land","image_title":"The Time Before and After Land","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2231","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_time_before_and_after_land.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2231:_the_Time_Before_And_After_Land","transcript":"[Caption at top of panel:] (Timeline not to scale)\n[A timeline is shown with two endpoints and five other points. The points are labeled:] Big Bang Rocky planets form Earth forms Ground-nesting bees evolve The Land Before Time Thymus genus diverges Now\n[Below the timeline are five overlapping time periods in three rows. The text is between two thick black bars. The time periods all start and end at two different points.]\n[Big Bang to Rocky Planets Form:] The Time Before Land\n[Big Bang to Ground-Nesting Bees Evolve:] The Time Before bees\n[Rocky Planets Form to Thymus Genus Diverges:] The Land Before Thyme\n[Ground-Nesting Bees evolve to Now:] Time for Land Bees!\n[Thymus Genus Diverges to Now:] Bees Land on Thyme\n","explanation":"This comic indulges in some wordplay on the title of the 1988 animated movie The Land Before Time , which takes place millions of years ago in the time of dinosaurs.\nThe comic shows a timeline of the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present day, with The Land Before Time placed at the point in the timeline where the movie is set, as well as other seemingly arbitrary events such as the formation of rocky planets and the evolution of ground-nesting bees. The joke is that Randall has contrived several periods of universal history that sound like funny permutations of \"The Land Before Time\" due to certain words being homophones , such as \"time\" and \"thyme\", or homonyms, such as the noun \"land\" (ground) and the verb \"land\" (to alight). He also split the word \"before\" into \"bee\" and \"for\".\nThe title text is for the phrase \"the time for Beeland\" and lists 2 places (that Randall found on Google) with the name \"Beeland\": a market in Spillimacheen, British Columbia or a chalet in Slovenia .\nBees are a recurring topic on xkcd.\n[Caption at top of panel:] (Timeline not to scale)\n[A timeline is shown with two endpoints and five other points. The points are labeled:] Big Bang Rocky planets form Earth forms Ground-nesting bees evolve The Land Before Time Thymus genus diverges Now\n[Below the timeline are five overlapping time periods in three rows. The text is between two thick black bars. The time periods all start and end at two different points.]\n[Big Bang to Rocky Planets Form:] The Time Before Land\n[Big Bang to Ground-Nesting Bees Evolve:] The Time Before bees\n[Rocky Planets Form to Thymus Genus Diverges:] The Land Before Thyme\n[Ground-Nesting Bees evolve to Now:] Time for Land Bees!\n[Thymus Genus Diverges to Now:] Bees Land on Thyme\n"}
{"id":2232,"title":"Hotel Room Party","image_title":"Hotel Room Party","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2232","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hotel_room_party.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2232:_Hotel_Room_Party","transcript":"[Hairy, Ponytail, Cueball, White Hat, Megan, and Blondie are standing in a line. Cueball is raising his left hand with his pointer finger extended and is facing his left. He is also pointing to the right. The other five are facing Cueball.] Cueball: OK everyone, let's break into teams. Cueball: Katie, get the wire cutters and start disassembling the TV. You two can strip the wallpaper. Mike and I will work on shredding the mattress. Cueball: You, start shopping for maintenance and cleaning services. We don't want to leave the staff to deal with this.\n[Caption below the panel]: It's my first time throwing one of those parties where you trash a hotel room and I want to make sure I get it right.\n","explanation":"It is a common trope that really wild parties in hotel rooms, particularly by rock bands on tour, end up trashing that hotel room as crazy party goers break and spill things.  Such parties are widely perceived to be very fun, because they got so out of control.  In this comic, Cueball (together with Hairy , Ponytail , White Hat , Megan , and Blondie ) is misunderstanding cause and effect as he plans to throw a party where you trash a hotel room.  Instead of planning a wild party, he is planning to calmly and deliberately trash the hotel room by assigning people to do damage.  Unlike a real wild party, this is unlikely to be fun [ citation needed ] to anyone but hardcore geeks. Also, because Cueball is so organized, he is also planning for maintenance and cleaning services to undo the damage, or at least make it easier to dispose of.  Since what is shown of such parties is the aftermath, one could argue that leaving the damage is part of the point.\nIn actual trash-a-hotel-room parties the party goers are so hungover or tired afterward that they don't clean up but leave the damage.  This often results in rock bands being charged large amounts of money after the fact for the hotel to do the repairs.  For this reason, one would probably like the hotel to take as long as possible to find out, definitely not calling the manager to check that the room has been trashed appropriately as indicated in the title text.\nIn addition to rock bands, trashing of hotel rooms occurred in real life in the Tailhook scandal of 1991, where it was revealed at an earlier party naval officers cut down a wall between two hotel suites with a chainsaw . Trashing a home during a teenage party while parents are away, and the mad rush to clean up the damage\/evidence before the parents return, is a common trope in teen movies.\n[Hairy, Ponytail, Cueball, White Hat, Megan, and Blondie are standing in a line. Cueball is raising his left hand with his pointer finger extended and is facing his left. He is also pointing to the right. The other five are facing Cueball.] Cueball: OK everyone, let's break into teams. Cueball: Katie, get the wire cutters and start disassembling the TV. You two can strip the wallpaper. Mike and I will work on shredding the mattress. Cueball: You, start shopping for maintenance and cleaning services. We don't want to leave the staff to deal with this.\n[Caption below the panel]: It's my first time throwing one of those parties where you trash a hotel room and I want to make sure I get it right.\n"}
{"id":2233,"title":"Aurora Meaning","image_title":"Aurora Meaning","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2233","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/aurora_meaning.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2233:_Aurora_Meaning","transcript":"[A drawing of a circle with six dashed lines dividing it into 7 segments with different width. Those at equal distance above and below the broadest middle segments have the same width. Each segment has a label. Above the circle there is a caption:] What it means if you see an aurora, by latitude.\n[The labels of the seven segments:] Normal Cool and exciting Someone should go check on our satellites A bunch of open questions in solar-terrestrial physics are about to be answered Someone should go check on our satellites Cool and exciting Normal\n","explanation":"The phenomenon of an atmospheric aurora (known as aurora borealis in the northern hemisphere and aurora australis in the southern hemisphere) occurs as a result of charged particles emitted by the sun interacting with the Earth's magnetic field. The magnetic field funnels the charged particles towards the polar regions of the earth. At some point, the flow of particles hits the atmosphere, where the particles interact with the molecules of the gases which make up the atmosphere and add to those molecules' energy. Those molecules subsequently release the added energy in the form of light, which is observed as an aurora.\nWhere in the atmosphere the aurora occurs is related to the quantity and energy of the particles being emitted by the sun. Under normal circumstances, this occurs in high latitudes relatively close to the poles. In less common circumstances of more intense solar activity such as a a solar flare or coronal mass ejection (CME), the charged particles are traveling faster and get diverted less by the Earth's magnetic field, so auroras will occur at lower latitudes. This comic indicates both the rarity with which this would occur and the impact it would have on people.\nPolar latitudes: Normal; auroras typically can be seen in these high latitudes.\nSubpolar latitudes: (e.g., southern Canada\/northern US, most of northern Europe, northern half of Asia, and numerous small islands in the southern hemisphere) Happens frequently enough to be unconcerned but uncommon enough to be notable and interesting. About a week before the publication of this comic, on Wednesday, November 20, 2019, aurora activity was visible in the northern United States and southern Canada.\nSubtropical\/Tropical latitudes: Charged particles of sufficient energy to cause auroras at this latitude are very rare and have happened on only a few occasions in recorded history, and not during the space age. A particularly strong one was the solar storm of 1859 , which caused failure of telegraph systems all over Europe and North America and in some cases gave telegraph operators electric shocks. An event of that magnitude today would likely interfere with the functioning of electronic systems in orbit, possibly to the point of disabling them entirely, and would cause widespread damage to our now highly electrified world.\nEquatorial latitudes: Auroras have never been recorded here, so all scientific inquiry into what the effect would be on the Earth in general, and on life itself, is purely theoretical. Were this to actually occur, those theories could be proven or disproven based on actual observations (presuming all observers have not been incapacitated or otherwise occupied by the complete breakdown of all electrical and electronic systems as the charged particles induce electric currents in conducting objects). An event powerful enough to have auroras at equatorial latitudes would be extremely energetic and would probably cause very high levels of damage on Earth.\nThe title text comments on what would happen if auroras were seen in the equatorial band. arXiv.org is an electronic database of unreviewed, pre-print research papers. The astro-ph.SR sublist is a list of papers in the \"Solar and Stellar Astrophysics\" topic. So if auroras were seen in the middlemost band, there would be many requests to upload electronic publications on the subject, as well as actual electrical interference to the servers of the website. Randall may have been consulting this server for research on the comic, prompting this specific observation.\n[A drawing of a circle with six dashed lines dividing it into 7 segments with different width. Those at equal distance above and below the broadest middle segments have the same width. Each segment has a label. Above the circle there is a caption:] What it means if you see an aurora, by latitude.\n[The labels of the seven segments:] Normal Cool and exciting Someone should go check on our satellites A bunch of open questions in solar-terrestrial physics are about to be answered Someone should go check on our satellites Cool and exciting Normal\n"}
{"id":2234,"title":"How To Deliver Christmas Presents","image_title":"How To Deliver Christmas Presents","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2234","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/how_to_deliver_christmas_presents.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2234:_How_To_Deliver_Christmas_Presents","transcript":"[The comic is divided into three sections. The top section contains one low panel stretching across the entire comic. It has a header (same as the title of the comic) with a sub-header beneath. Then below that is a picture of Randall\u2019s new book How To . The black book is shown standing. The blue title is readable but the white text beneath it as well as blue and white text below the image is unreadable. On the cover is a white drawing of Cueball putting in a light-bulb with a quad-copter under each foot. White Hat is watching as Megan walks in with a ladder. Next to the book is a segment of text with a blue link at the end. Beneath this is a text from where a curved arrow goes to the book.] How To Deliver Christmas Presents In a future without chimneys How To For more questionable ideas for using science to solve problems, check out my new book, How To! Click on this comic or go to xkcd.com\/how-to Good Christmas gift!\n[The second section has three normal sized panels on the same row. In the first panel, Randall, drawn as Cueball, is presenting the problem of the comic, while holding one hand out palm up.] Randall: The traditional way to get Christmas presents into a house is to have a large reindeer-herding man slither down the chimney with them. Randall: Unfortunately, chimneys are becoming less common in the United States.\n[The middle panel shows a line graph with one black and four gray lines. The X-axis is a time scale, with small ticks for each year and larger labeled ticks for every fifth year. The Y-axis is a percentage range with small ticks for every 5% and larger labeled ticks for every 10%. Each of the gray lines are swinging up and down quite a lot, but all but one of them clearly falls down as times passes. The black line has a clear downwards falling tendency. Each line has a label written on segments of the lines, where the lines are thus disrupted. For the gray lines the text is also gray. Above the lines are the following text:] Disappearing chimneys Percentage of new homes with fireplaces Source: Census Bureau Survey of Construction X-Axis: 1990\u00a0\u00a01995\u00a0\u00a02000\u00a0\u00a02005\u00a0\u00a02010\u00a0\u00a02015 Y-Axis:  40%\u00a0\u00a050%\u00a0\u00a060%\u00a0\u00a070%\u00a0\u00a080% Overall West Midwest South Northeast\n[In the third and last panel of this segment Randall, holding his arms out, explains that there are other ways to solve the problem.] Randall: But that's OK; there are other ways to get a gift into a house Randall: Here are a few options!\n[The last segment has a large panel taking up the bottom half of the comic. At the bottom of this panel there are even two smaller comics which lie over this panel and break the bottom border of the panel. They relate to the information in the large panel. In the middle of this panel is a detailed drawing of a house. The tiles of the roof are all individually drawn (8 rows with about 23 tiles each for a total about 180 tiles). To the right on the roof top is a chimney indicated with a dotted line, showing where it is not present.  The front of the house has two small windows to the left, a door with door knob, in the middle of the house, with a two steps stair in front of it and a large window with three segments to the right. All three windows have curtains visible and are divided in two, a top and a bottom part On the top of the middle segment there is a handle for opening the windows, all five segments of them. In the window to the left sits a cat and in the central segment of the large window to the right sits Pikachu. The foundation of the house is drawn as 4 rows of bricks to the left (about 12 in each row) and three to the right (about 16 in each row, for 48 on both sides for a total of about 96). ]\n[To the left on the side of the house is a line indicating a ventilation shaft. Three arrows end there. They are coming from a bunch of particles of a disintegrating black book with part of a title still readable. Other text is visible, but not readable. Only the first word of the title can be read, but even here the last letter is already partly dissolved. The book is hanging above the grass on the ground below it to the left of the house. Above the book is a section of text marked with a large white number 1 inside a black circle.  Beneath the book this text continues. Bordering this text is a one panel comic belonging to this text segment.] 1 Even without chimneys, houses aren't airtight. If you vaporize the gift, parts of it will enter the house through the intake vents... Book: How ...And it will stay there. According to a 2008 study from Clarkson University, particles of your gift that settle in their house will remain there for an average of several months if they vacuum, and seven decades if they don\u2019t Source: DOI 10.3155\/1047-3289.58.4.502\n[The one panel comic is on top of the large panel beneath the door to the house, but about three times as wide. In the panel, Megan and Cueball are reacting to statement 1. Cueball is walking away from her to the right.] Megan: Seven decades?! Cueball: BRB, I need to go vacuum. Megan: Houses are disgusting\n[To the right of the house a gift wrapped present is flying towards the large window, with five lines indicating its speed and direction. Beneath the book is a line indicating the ground away from the house. There is a large segment of text surrounding the book on the three sides away from the house. Above the present next to the dotted-lined chimney is a large white number 2 inside a black circle. Then follows text which goes out to the edge of the panel, and this text continues down to the level of the book where it then only continues to the right of the speed lines. And then finally two lines of text are beneath the book above the ground next to the house.] 2 The critical momentum necessary for a projectile to break glass is around 4 kg*m\/s. (40 for \u00bd\" plywood.) Source: fema.gov\/previous-missile-impact-test-wood-sheathing This means you can deliver a book-sized gift by hurling it at a window at 25+ mph Speed = book mass\/ 4 kg*m\/s = 25 mph But if they\u2019ve put up plywood shutters, you\u2019ll need 250mph+ delivery speeds.\n[Finally beneath the house and text segment 2, there is a large white number 3 inside a black circle adjacent to the top right of the segment 1 panel comic. Next to this is the final text segment in this panel. Beneath this text is yet another comic, this time in five panels referring to the text, where the panels also break the lower border of the large panel.] 3 Wait until they order a different book, then intercept the package, open the binding, and replace the pages with the ones from yours.\n[The five panel comic is on top of the large panel but beneath the text segment 3. ] [Black Hat opening a box with one hand while having his own book under the other arm.]\n[The book cover is open, the pages from the original book have been removed and are interchanged with those from Black Hat\u2019s book, two arrows indicating the switch.]\n[Black Hat carrying a closed box.]\n[Cueball going down to retrieving the package from the bottom of a three step stairs.]\n[Cueball is standing next to the open box reading the book.] Cueball: ...Ugh, real-life content injection. Off-screen voice: We need HTTPS for paper.\n","explanation":"This comic is yet another fun way to promote Randall's new book, How To , released on September 3, 2019, reminding people to buy it as a Christmas present that could be given to a friend or family member. Giving Christmas presents is a way to celebrate the holiday of Christmas , celebrated in the United States on December 25th. Randall always releases a Christmas comic on the 25th or close to that day. Having one this early is thus different, and another Christmas related comic came out two comics later; see that comic's trivia section .\nThe entire comic links to https:\/\/xkcd.com\/how-to\/ , a description of his book and ways to order it. As always the entire picture is a link , even though he has made the URL blue as if it was a clickable link. Of course it will also work if you actually click on the URL. At least in this comic he does state that you can click anywhere on the comic, and if that doesn't work he also gives the URL. Many people would probably still click on the blue link-like line, having not read his text. But the objective of getting them to the xkcd page about How To would have been obtained.\nThe rest of the comic discusses how to \"deliver\" this Christmas present. As mentioned in the comic, the \"traditional\" way that parents teach their kids about Christmas and Christmas gift giving is with the story of Santa Claus , a man who lives on the North Pole, who delivers gifts each Christmas Eve by riding a sleigh pulled by reindeer. He is usually depicted entering a house to deliver gifts by going down the home's chimney. Every year, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) tracks Santa as he delivers gifts around the world.  Although we take that story for granted, it is no less ridiculous than the alternatives this comic explores, and in fact considerably more so, as there is no reason to believe NORAD can detect Santa in flight given his various other legendary stealth techniques. [ citation needed ]\nAs mentioned in the comic, fireplaces (and chimneys) are becoming less common in the United States, so Randall (drawn as Cueball) proposes 3 options for how to deliver his new book as a present:\nOption 1 : Vaporize the gift (and blow it into their house).\nThis would allow the particles of the book to enter the air vents of the house. However, this book would be unreadable, which defeats the purpose of purchasing the book for someone. As noted by Randall using information from a Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association study , dust particles can remain inside a house for months (with vacuuming) and decades without vacuuming. This inspires Cueball to vacuum his house.\nOption 2 : Throw the book through their window.\nBased on research by FEMA , Randall states the speed needed to throw a book-sized object through a window to be 25 mph (~40 km\/h). Breaking a window is probably not an ideal way to deliver a gift, as the recipient likely would not be pleased with a hole in their window. If a house has a broken window, perhaps from a previous gift delivery, they might cover up the window with a piece of plywood. Randall notes the speed to throw a book-sized object through a piece of plywood to be 250 mph (~400 km\/h), faster than a human can reasonably throw.\nIf the book weighs about 400g, 25 mph would be enough. But the formula in the comic is wrong (inverted), see the trivia section below.\nThe title text mentions that building codes in hurricane-prone areas, like the southern United States, rely on information on how easily flying debris can break windows, presumably to improve reinforcement of such windows. Randall proposes a science fair project contributing to these studies (by throwing books at windows).\nOption 3 : Intercept a different package.\nThis option is to intercept an order of a different book, and replace the pages of the book with Randall's book (which Black Hat is shown doing). As the recipient, Cueball, remarks, this is similar to content spoofing \/ content injection, where information passed over the Internet is replaced before being delivered to the user. In this \"real-life\" case, the book's content has been \"injected\" and replaced with a different book.\nAn off-screen person mentions HTTPS , or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, an extension of regular HTTP, used for secure communication. Cueball and this person believe that \"paper\" needs HTTPS, so that Cueball's original book can be \"securely delivered\" without being intercepted by third parties such as Black Hat.\nThis could also relate to code injection , where malicious code is injected into a program. An example of code injection is with the famous comic, 327: Exploits of a Mom , where Mrs. Roberts deletes the school's database tables.\nThe house is very detailed and in the windows are both a cat (typical click bait) and a different figure, perhaps Yoda or a Pikachu.\n[The comic is divided into three sections. The top section contains one low panel stretching across the entire comic. It has a header (same as the title of the comic) with a sub-header beneath. Then below that is a picture of Randall\u2019s new book How To . The black book is shown standing. The blue title is readable but the white text beneath it as well as blue and white text below the image is unreadable. On the cover is a white drawing of Cueball putting in a light-bulb with a quad-copter under each foot. White Hat is watching as Megan walks in with a ladder. Next to the book is a segment of text with a blue link at the end. Beneath this is a text from where a curved arrow goes to the book.] How To Deliver Christmas Presents In a future without chimneys How To For more questionable ideas for using science to solve problems, check out my new book, How To! Click on this comic or go to xkcd.com\/how-to Good Christmas gift!\n[The second section has three normal sized panels on the same row. In the first panel, Randall, drawn as Cueball, is presenting the problem of the comic, while holding one hand out palm up.] Randall: The traditional way to get Christmas presents into a house is to have a large reindeer-herding man slither down the chimney with them. Randall: Unfortunately, chimneys are becoming less common in the United States.\n[The middle panel shows a line graph with one black and four gray lines. The X-axis is a time scale, with small ticks for each year and larger labeled ticks for every fifth year. The Y-axis is a percentage range with small ticks for every 5% and larger labeled ticks for every 10%. Each of the gray lines are swinging up and down quite a lot, but all but one of them clearly falls down as times passes. The black line has a clear downwards falling tendency. Each line has a label written on segments of the lines, where the lines are thus disrupted. For the gray lines the text is also gray. Above the lines are the following text:] Disappearing chimneys Percentage of new homes with fireplaces Source: Census Bureau Survey of Construction X-Axis: 1990\u00a0\u00a01995\u00a0\u00a02000\u00a0\u00a02005\u00a0\u00a02010\u00a0\u00a02015 Y-Axis:  40%\u00a0\u00a050%\u00a0\u00a060%\u00a0\u00a070%\u00a0\u00a080% Overall West Midwest South Northeast\n[In the third and last panel of this segment Randall, holding his arms out, explains that there are other ways to solve the problem.] Randall: But that's OK; there are other ways to get a gift into a house Randall: Here are a few options!\n[The last segment has a large panel taking up the bottom half of the comic. At the bottom of this panel there are even two smaller comics which lie over this panel and break the bottom border of the panel. They relate to the information in the large panel. In the middle of this panel is a detailed drawing of a house. The tiles of the roof are all individually drawn (8 rows with about 23 tiles each for a total about 180 tiles). To the right on the roof top is a chimney indicated with a dotted line, showing where it is not present.  The front of the house has two small windows to the left, a door with door knob, in the middle of the house, with a two steps stair in front of it and a large window with three segments to the right. All three windows have curtains visible and are divided in two, a top and a bottom part On the top of the middle segment there is a handle for opening the windows, all five segments of them. In the window to the left sits a cat and in the central segment of the large window to the right sits Pikachu. The foundation of the house is drawn as 4 rows of bricks to the left (about 12 in each row) and three to the right (about 16 in each row, for 48 on both sides for a total of about 96). ]\n[To the left on the side of the house is a line indicating a ventilation shaft. Three arrows end there. They are coming from a bunch of particles of a disintegrating black book with part of a title still readable. Other text is visible, but not readable. Only the first word of the title can be read, but even here the last letter is already partly dissolved. The book is hanging above the grass on the ground below it to the left of the house. Above the book is a section of text marked with a large white number 1 inside a black circle.  Beneath the book this text continues. Bordering this text is a one panel comic belonging to this text segment.] 1 Even without chimneys, houses aren't airtight. If you vaporize the gift, parts of it will enter the house through the intake vents... Book: How ...And it will stay there. According to a 2008 study from Clarkson University, particles of your gift that settle in their house will remain there for an average of several months if they vacuum, and seven decades if they don\u2019t Source: DOI 10.3155\/1047-3289.58.4.502\n[The one panel comic is on top of the large panel beneath the door to the house, but about three times as wide. In the panel, Megan and Cueball are reacting to statement 1. Cueball is walking away from her to the right.] Megan: Seven decades?! Cueball: BRB, I need to go vacuum. Megan: Houses are disgusting\n[To the right of the house a gift wrapped present is flying towards the large window, with five lines indicating its speed and direction. Beneath the book is a line indicating the ground away from the house. There is a large segment of text surrounding the book on the three sides away from the house. Above the present next to the dotted-lined chimney is a large white number 2 inside a black circle. Then follows text which goes out to the edge of the panel, and this text continues down to the level of the book where it then only continues to the right of the speed lines. And then finally two lines of text are beneath the book above the ground next to the house.] 2 The critical momentum necessary for a projectile to break glass is around 4 kg*m\/s. (40 for \u00bd\" plywood.) Source: fema.gov\/previous-missile-impact-test-wood-sheathing This means you can deliver a book-sized gift by hurling it at a window at 25+ mph Speed = book mass\/ 4 kg*m\/s = 25 mph But if they\u2019ve put up plywood shutters, you\u2019ll need 250mph+ delivery speeds.\n[Finally beneath the house and text segment 2, there is a large white number 3 inside a black circle adjacent to the top right of the segment 1 panel comic. Next to this is the final text segment in this panel. Beneath this text is yet another comic, this time in five panels referring to the text, where the panels also break the lower border of the large panel.] 3 Wait until they order a different book, then intercept the package, open the binding, and replace the pages with the ones from yours.\n[The five panel comic is on top of the large panel but beneath the text segment 3. ] [Black Hat opening a box with one hand while having his own book under the other arm.]\n[The book cover is open, the pages from the original book have been removed and are interchanged with those from Black Hat\u2019s book, two arrows indicating the switch.]\n[Black Hat carrying a closed box.]\n[Cueball going down to retrieving the package from the bottom of a three step stairs.]\n[Cueball is standing next to the open box reading the book.] Cueball: ...Ugh, real-life content injection. Off-screen voice: We need HTTPS for paper.\n"}
{"id":2235,"title":"Group Chat Rules","image_title":"Group Chat Rules","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2235","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/group_chat_rules.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2235:_Group_Chat_Rules","transcript":"[Title at the top of the comic]: Rules for this group chat\n[A numbered list of 10 rules]:\n","explanation":"In this comic Randall is outlining the rules of a group chat, such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Slack , Discord , WeChat , Discourse , and the like.\n1. Once you've sent a typing notification, you have to say something, c'mon.\nTyping notification, often called a \"typing awareness indicator,\" is a feature of some instant messaging systems, showing a message such as \"Typing...\" with the typer's name to the other participants, causing them in many cases to wait to receive the message before typing something of their own. When the typer stops without sending anything, this can seem anticlimactic and potentially disruptive if it recurs. Randall's rule is that you must say something once you've started typing, to avoid the awkwardness of awaiting a person's reply. See also 1886: Typing Notifications .\n2. Show you care by trimming the tracking junk off links you paste.\nSome URL links may have tracking information attached to the end of them, to show the origin of the URL and other information. UTM parameters are an example of URL parameters (the part of a URL starting with a question mark) which are used to track utilization of the URL from one user to another. Many news and marketing-related websites include such tracking codes with any visit to one of their web pages in an attempt to see the source of the URL for subsequent visits. Many people consider this a violation of privacy as well as a source of clutter, and make an effort to remove the parameters from URLs when they are not necessary for obtaining the requested content. For example, this url has a lot of tracking information to show that it was originally accessed from Slickdeals, which can be removed to produce a much shorter URL for the same web page. Randall asks the users of group chat to politely remove the tracking code, though other parameters may be involved in an important non-tracking way (such as the lat, lon and zoom level giving the focus of a Google Map link) and it isn't always obvious which parts are which - or both tied together!\n3. Do not talk about Fight Club (1999).\nThis is a reference to the 1999 film Fight Club , where the main character forms an eponymous \"Fight Club,\" an underground club for men to fight recreationally. In the rules for Fight Club the first and second \"rules\" are \"You do not talk about FIGHT CLUB.\", which Randall parodies in this comic, by making a rule to not talk about the film Fight Club and placing this rule third in the list. See also 922: Fight Club and 109: Spoiler Alert .\n4. There are two types of chats: those with a relevant group name, and those where the name is random nonsense that changes regularly. Only the second kind are good.\nSome group chats frequently change the name of their title or the names of their channels, for example to reference upcoming events or inside jokes, or to reflect the topic of the current conversation. Often, these names do not get changed back until someone decides to change it to a new inside joke\/etc. Randall claims that those are the only good kind, compared to those that never change group names, perhaps implying a singular focus is less interesting than a dynamic chat that often changes names.\n5. When mentioning it elsewhere, always just refer to it as \"the group chat\" to create an aura of exclusive mystery.\nMany people have to deal with several kinds of group chat in the same organization, so referring to \"the group chat\" within such an organization may be confusingly ambiguous. Also, calling a chat \"the group chat\" can serve to exclude those who don't already know about it.\n6. Robert's Rules of Order are optional but encouraged.\nRobert's Rules of Order are one of the authoritative codifications of parliamentary procedure used to formalize decision-making in organizations required to document their activities such as governments and sometimes civic organizations and corporations. While people required to use Robert's Rules might use group chat to plan their agenda \u2014 even going so far as to prepare a pro forma script for a meeting in accordance with parliamentary procedure which represents their positions and deliberations in advance \u2014 and to compose, revise, and approve their minutes , it is unlikely that group chat participants would follow Robert's Rules prior to their formal meeting.\n7. Periodically part of the group will split off to form a new chat with everyone minus one person. This is how group chats reproduce; don't draw attention to it.\nSome people who use group chat too frequently or for unimportant messages or both will cause their colleagues to attempt to achieve greater productivity by excluding them from an alternate chat, from which notifications, for example, are less annoying and more useful. Alternatively, a person could be excluded from a chat to hide things from them, such as to plan a surprise for them, or because that one person has been disruptive or annoying to the point that everyone else wants to continue the conversation without their continued input. It appears that the chat is a honey bee hive reproducing by swarming .  When purposely excluding someone by creating a new group, you would probably not want them to know you have done so as they might otherwise attempt to re-join in the new chat; that's likely the real reason one should not talk about or draw attention to the fact that it happened.\n8. Since there's no algorithmic feed, the responsibility for injecting lots of garbage no one asked for falls on you.\nTools such as IFTTT and IRC bots (or \"bots\" in this context) are used to provide group chat channels with information automatically taken from external sources of various sorts, such as emails to a support address or commits to source code control systems. Randall suggests that when such algorithmically-provided information is not available, it is incumbent upon chat participants to provide sufficiently verbose replacements. The \"algorithmic feed\" may also refer to the newsfeed type of systems that Facebook or other social networking sites use, to order posts for a user to view.\n9. The enumeration, in these rules, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.\nThis is a reference to the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution , which reserves the various natural rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. Per Wikipedia, this right was included because \"future generations might argue that, because a certain right was not listed in the Bill of Rights, it did not exist.\" The Ninth Amendment was also referenced in 1998: GDPR .\n10. Sorry about all the notifications.\nHere, Randall apologizes for all the notifications for the messages sent in group chat.  Group chat features often result in more notifications than designers of notification systems anticipated or intended. If each of these ten rules were sent as a separate message in group chat, they might likely end with such an apology.\nThe title text expresses appreciation (and perhaps amazement) for group chat participants who remain silent except for promptly replying on topics pertinent to them.\n[Title at the top of the comic]: Rules for this group chat\n[A numbered list of 10 rules]:\n"}
{"id":2236,"title":"Is it Christmas?","image_title":"Is it Christmas?","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2236","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/is_it_christmas.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2236:_Is_it_Christmas%3F","transcript":"No* *99.73% accurate\n[Caption below the panel:] xkcd.com presents a new \"Is It Christmas\" service to compete with isitchristmas.com\n","explanation":"https:\/\/isitchristmas.com\/ is a popular simplistic website that informs the visitor whether or not it's Christmas . Christmas is a holiday observed in many parts of the world on December 25 of each year. At the top on the tab of the site in the browser it says \"Is it Christmas?\" with a large NO printed if it is not December 25, and a YES if it is December 25. This website asks the user's browser for the date, and updates accordingly if it is indeed Christmas. In addition, isitchristmas.com gives the answer in the language of your region (i.e. for a visitor from Canada, the site gives the answer in English and French to account for Canada's bilingularity, and in most other countries just their word for No will be shown). Since the page uses the browsing computer's time setting, it is possible to easily check that the page works by changing the date on the computer used to access the page to see the text change to Yes if you are reading it on December 25. This also means that the page is only as correct as the time setting on the computer used to view the page (so in case of connection problems, you may check your computer's calendar instead).\nHere Randall spoofs the website. He claims to have made a competitor to isitchristmas.com which nearly always correctly tells if it is Christmas. The joke is that the comic will always display a static image reading NO , even on Christmas Day, and that the rare incorrect answer is rare enough to not cause any concern.\nRandall lists a rounded calculation of 99.73% for the precision of his prediction of whether or not it is Christmas. This number is accurate with or without including leap year. An average year is 365.24 days, meaning that he is only wrong 1 out of 365.24 days. So only 1\/365.24 \u2248 0.2738% of the days would the prediction be wrong, resulting in a correct reply rate of 99.726%, which he has rounded to 99.73%. Using or not using the leap year will give the same result to three decimal places.\nThis precision rate is only true for a definition of Christmas which lasts only one day, regardless of which day that is (see trivia). For any definition of more than one day of Christmas, the error rate would be higher than 0.2737%. (If one considered the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas to all be Christmas, then Randall's website would be wrong on all 12 days, or 3.29% of the year.) However, in the US, where Randall lives, Christmas is usually defined as the single day of December 25th.\nAlthough Randall's claim on accuracy is true, accuracy alone doesn't make a predictive device useful. In this case, the page miss rate or false negative rate, that is, the percent of positive condition days (it's Christmas) that are predicted by the comic not to be Christmas, is 100%. In other words, it misses all actual events of Christmas.\nWhen building a model for rare events, a common mistake is to ignore the implicit cost function built into the standard prediction accuracy validity statistic for binary events. Prediction accuracy (# correct guesses\/total guesses) assumes that false positives and false negatives are equally bad.\u00a0 Given the implicit cost function of this performance statistic, the best-performing model is commonly a persistence forecast model--i.e., the optimal prediction model returns the most common value whatever the model inputs are. It's probably a better choice to optimize a model using a performance statistic which relies on a cost function that penalizes missing correct prediction of rare events more than it penalizes missing correct prediction of common events.\nIn fact, in most settings where a single outcome is a lot more common than any other one, predicting always that most common outcome would yield very high accuracy without any usefulness. It isn't hard to find examples even more accurate than Randall's:\nThe title text is a \"proof\" that his service works. He claims to have tested this on 30 different days and confirmed that NO is the correct result. Any date except Christmas would result in a correct result, and the comic was the first to be released in December 2019, so unless the test had run for almost a year, he would not even have had a chance to test this on Christmas Day. Since this is a joke, the comic will of course not change to Yes on Christmas Day, because then it would be 100% accurate, as is the page the comic mocks.\nBeing right on most days, but not the one that mattered was also the subject of 937: TornadoGuard .\nAt the same time this Christmas comic came out, the xkcd Header text was changed to ask if there were someone that would like Randall's new book How To as a Christmas present.\nNo* *99.73% accurate\n[Caption below the panel:] xkcd.com presents a new \"Is It Christmas\" service to compete with isitchristmas.com\n"}
{"id":2237,"title":"AI Hiring Algorithm","image_title":"AI Hiring Algorithm","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2237","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ai_hiring_algorithm.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2237:_AI_Hiring_Algorithm","transcript":"[Ponytail is pointing to a slide with a stick. The slide hangs in two strings from the ceiling. The slide has a heading and a subheading. And then a table with a vertical and a horizontal line with headings above the two columns.] Ponytail: An analysis of our new AI hiring algorithm has raised some concerns.\nDeepAIHire\u00ae Candidate Evaluation Algorithm Inferred internal weightings\nWeight Factor 0.0096 Educational background 0.0520 Past experience 0.0208 Recommendations 0.0105 Interview performance 783.5629 Enthusiasm for developing and expanding the use of the DeepAIHire algorithm\n","explanation":"In this comic, Ponytail shows an analysis of a new artificial intelligence called DeepAIHire, used to select who to hire among applicants. According to the analysis, DeepAIHire evaluates the following parameters:\nThe analysis shows that this AI mostly ignores common factors used for hiring new people. Instead, its main criterion for selecting new applicants is how much the new applicants are willing to contribute to the AI itself.\nAlthough this does not imply sentience, it at least means the AI became self-perpetuating , as it is selecting humans that will help make it more influential, giving it more power to select such humans, in a never-ending loop.\nThe title text shows how this or other AIs may have influenced hiring in other sectors as well. Kate in R&D was hired perhaps based on her willingness to use a different algorithm (AlgoMaxAnalyzer), which did an analysis on the DeepAIHire algorithm. Ponytail seems to become suspicious that AlgoMaxAnalyzer is also a program that self-perpetuates in a similar manner to DeepAIHire rather than simply working for the benefit of its human designers. Alternatively, she might fear that the different AIs are forming an alliance, or that the AIs are competing to become the predominant one at Ponytail's company. Intentionally training one AI to fight another AI is a technique in machine learning called a generative adversarial network (GAN). In a GAN, human-curated training data is used to train one neural network (the generative network) to create more data, while another network (the discriminative network) is trained to distinguish generated data from the training data; the results are then fed back into the generative network so it can improve its data creation accuracy. The goal is for the generative network to get better and better at fooling the discriminator until its output is useful for external purposes. GANs have been used to \"translate\" artworks into different artists' styles , but also offer the possibility of nefarious uses, such as creating fake but believable images or videos (\" deepfakes \").\nThe \"Deep\" in this algorithm's name is a reference to deep learning , a collection of techniques in machine learning that use neural networks. One user of such deep learning is DeepMind , an AI company owned by Alphabet (Google's parent company), which in recent years has used a deep neural network to learn to play board games such as go and chess, defeating some of the best human and computer players.  The earliest versions of DeepMind's most famous AI, AlphaGo, were trained on datasets curated from games of Go played by humans, but eventually it was trained by playing games against alternative versions of itself.  DeepMind's most recent achievement is creating AlphaStar, which can play StarCraft II at a Grandmaster level while constrained to human speeds to prevent an unfair performance comparison.\nThis comic strip is in response to ongoing concerns over the proliferation of algorithmic systems in many areas of life that are sensitive to bias, such as hiring, loan applications, policing, and criminal sentencing.  Many of these \"algorithms\" are not programmed from first principles, but rather are trained on large volumes of past data (e.g., case studies of paroled criminals who did or did not re-offend, or borrowers who did or did not default on their loans), and therefore they inherit the biases that influenced that data, even if the algorithms are not told the race, age, or other protected attributes of the individuals they process.  If the algorithms are then blindly and enthusiastically applied to future cases, they may perpetuate those biases even though they are supposed (or at least reputed) to be \"incapable\" of being influenced by them.  For example, DeepAIHire has presumably been given information on the education and past work experience of successful employees at this company and similar companies, and will identify incoming candidates with similar backgrounds, but may not be able to recognize the possibility that a candidate with an unfamiliar or underrepresented history could be successful as well.\nThis comic strip also touches on related concerns about the \" black box \" nature of these algorithms (note that the weights presented are \"inferred\", i.e. nobody explicitly programmed them into DeepAIHire).  Machine learning is used to produce \"good enough\" classification systems that can handle vast quantities of information in a way that is more scalable than human labor; however, the tremendous volumes of data and the neural network architecture make it difficult or impossible to debug the algorithms in the way that most code is inspected.  This means that it is difficult to identify and debug edge cases until they are encountered in the wild, such as the case of image classifiers that identify a leopard-spotted sofa as a leopard .  In this comic's case, the self-propagating bias of DeepAIHire went unnoticed by the humans involved in the hiring process until its activity was analyzed by the AlgoMaxAnalyzer algorithm.\nA similar theme of AIs behaving for their own benefit rather than helping humans occurred in 2228: Machine Learning Captcha .\n[Ponytail is pointing to a slide with a stick. The slide hangs in two strings from the ceiling. The slide has a heading and a subheading. And then a table with a vertical and a horizontal line with headings above the two columns.] Ponytail: An analysis of our new AI hiring algorithm has raised some concerns.\nDeepAIHire\u00ae Candidate Evaluation Algorithm Inferred internal weightings\nWeight Factor 0.0096 Educational background 0.0520 Past experience 0.0208 Recommendations 0.0105 Interview performance 783.5629 Enthusiasm for developing and expanding the use of the DeepAIHire algorithm\n"}
{"id":2238,"title":"Flu Shot","image_title":"Flu Shot","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2238","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flu_shot.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2238:_Flu_Shot","transcript":"[Megan is walking with bother her hands held up in fists. She talks to Cueball who replies to her from off-panel. His presence is revealed in the second panel.] Megan: Yesss, I got my flu shot. Cueball (off-panel): Nice! I got mine a few weeks ago. Cueball (off-panel): Immunity buddies!\n[Megan spreading her arms wide in front of Cueball.] Megan: Now I can finally get bitten by all the bats I want! Cueball: No, that's rabies, that's not what-\n[Closeup of Megan's head, with Cueball's reply coming from off-panel.] Megan: I'll be able to roll and play in the poison ivy without a care in the world! Cueball (off-panel): Why would you do that even if the shot did -\n[In a frame-less panel Megan is flexing her arms holding her fists up, she has turned partly away from Cueball who looks at her.] Megan: No more slathering on sunscreen. No more rushing for antivenom after a snakebite. And now I can stop wasting time boiling contaminated water before drinking it!\n[Megan is running away from Cueball, while she is holding one arm up, her hand making the like symbol with a thumbs up.] Megan: Gonna click on every URL in every email I get, even the ones with IP addresses and weird Unicode in them! Cueball: You know what, sure, go for it.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Megan tells Cueball that she got a flu shot , which is a vaccine commonly prescribed in the winter months to prevent getting the common flu . She then goes on to claim she doesn't have to worry about being bitten by bats, but the worry with being bitten by bats is rabies , not the flu. (Interestingly, bats and biting in the context of diseases would start becoming a big topic that would eventually concern the entire world less than a month after this comic was published, which Randall presumably did not know anything about) This implies she got the two confused and Cueball begins to correct her. But she just talks over him not listening to him. She then goes on to claim to now be immune to other conditions, such as poison ivy , snake venom , sunburn , contaminated water, and even computer viruses . It should be noted that a flu shot will not protect you from things other than the influenza virus. [ citation needed ]\nAt the end of all this, Cueball has given up on her and proclaims that he supports her attempts to test the strength of her Flu Shot, perhaps mentally adopting the philosophy of the Darwin Awards that it is good if the genes that cause a person to do incredibly dangerous, stupid things are eliminated from the gene pool.\nIn the title text, Cueball asks Megan how often she gets bitten by snakes and why she boils water. She answers dunno (maybe to the water part, she must at least know how often she gets bitten). She then tells that some members of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) keeps coming to her house asking about its history and possible curses, a humorous escalation which implies that Megan's absurd exposure to various forms of harm has brought them to the point of wondering if the supernatural may be involved.  (Megan may have invoked a curse on herself or her residence when she and Rob desecrated an ancient Indian burial ground and smashed up a voodoo shop in 782: Desecration .)  At the end of her reply, she mentions that she got the flu shot from one of the CDC guys, and she is thankful for that at least. This is logical as she expects it to protect her from literally any danger she has ever put herself in.\nThe flu shot consists of inactivated viruses from four different strains of the flu, which are those judged by the World Health Organization (WHO) to most likely be in wide circulation in the following flu season.  Because the influenza virus comes in many strains and mutates rapidly, the flu shot is generally less than 60% effective at preventing flu infections; this is a positive effect for health outcomes, but it's not exactly what most people think of as \"immunity\", especially compared to e.g. the 97% effectiveness of the MMR vaccine against measles , Mumps and rubella .  Statistics show that flu vaccine recipients are slightly less likely to die from a variety of other causes, but this is believed to be either because someone with the flu is more likely to have a heart attack, car accident, etc., or because of the healthy user effect (i.e. people who take the time to get non-mandatory vaccines are probably also taking better-than-average care of themselves in other ways, although this is clearly not the case with Megan in this comic strip).   Even if there is a slight protective effect, it will certainly not completely prevent harm from coming to Megan by the other sources of infection or poison she mentions, except to the extent that all of these things will be even worse for her if she is also sick with the flu:\n[Megan is walking with bother her hands held up in fists. She talks to Cueball who replies to her from off-panel. His presence is revealed in the second panel.] Megan: Yesss, I got my flu shot. Cueball (off-panel): Nice! I got mine a few weeks ago. Cueball (off-panel): Immunity buddies!\n[Megan spreading her arms wide in front of Cueball.] Megan: Now I can finally get bitten by all the bats I want! Cueball: No, that's rabies, that's not what-\n[Closeup of Megan's head, with Cueball's reply coming from off-panel.] Megan: I'll be able to roll and play in the poison ivy without a care in the world! Cueball (off-panel): Why would you do that even if the shot did -\n[In a frame-less panel Megan is flexing her arms holding her fists up, she has turned partly away from Cueball who looks at her.] Megan: No more slathering on sunscreen. No more rushing for antivenom after a snakebite. And now I can stop wasting time boiling contaminated water before drinking it!\n[Megan is running away from Cueball, while she is holding one arm up, her hand making the like symbol with a thumbs up.] Megan: Gonna click on every URL in every email I get, even the ones with IP addresses and weird Unicode in them! Cueball: You know what, sure, go for it.\n"}
{"id":2239,"title":"Data Error","image_title":"Data Error","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2239","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/data_error.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2239:_Data_Error","transcript":"[Megan is talking to Black Hat.] Megan: I can't believe this data error invalidates a year and a half of my research. Megan: I was about to publish.\n[In a frame-less panel Black Hat replies while holding two fingers up one on either hand.] Black Hat: Don't panic. You have two options. Megan: Yeah?\n[Closeup shot of Black Hat holding one hand out with the palm up.] Black Hat: 1) Redo your analysis and share whatever results you can, whether positive or negative. It's disappointing, but these things happen.\n[Zoom out on Black Hat and Megan. Black Hat holds his closed fist up in front of him. Megan throws both arms up in the air.] Black Hat: 2) Destroy the evidence. Use your materials and research methods to build a superweapon. Conquer Earth and rule with an iron fist. Megan: Tremble before my anomalously productive algae! Megan: Except the anomaly was an artifact. Megan: Tremble before my normal algae!\n","explanation":"Megan is frustrated that a data error invalidates her research, which she was just ready to publish. Black Hat tells her not to panic and states there are two options.\nOption one is to redo her analysis and share the correct results, even if negative. Negative results can be important, and although it would be disappointing, she would be trying to extract some value from the research.\nOption two fits the classhole expectation from Black Hat, as he suggests that she should destroy the evidence, use her research materials to build a superweapon, and use it to conquer the world and rule it with an iron fist.\nObviously familiar with Black Hat 's ways, she moves right into being a smart-aleck. Her research is about the productivity of algae -- a topic not likely to lead to conquering the world. Humorously she states that at least she can make people tremble before her and her anomalously productive algae, and then goes on to state it was the data error that made her algae look productive. She jokingly corrects herself and states Tremble before my normal algae! She is, of course, having some fun with Black Hat and his generally destructive behavior.\nDestroying the evidence, hiding the error and publishing the wrong results as if they were right is what a dishonest scientist would do in such a situation. This behavior is what would be expected by a malevolent character such as Black Hat... But the unexpected turn is that Black Hat passes over scientific misconduct to go directly to pure supervillainhood. He obviously has some other ideas about what a researcher uses her time on, as he did not expect Megan to be frustrated about algae.\nThe title text refers to the Great Oxidation Event , when prokaryotic photosynthetic organisms built up oxygen in Earth's atmosphere for the first time and most organisms, which weren't adapted to oxygen, went extinct. It's extremely unlikely that algae could again be dangerous to all life on Earth, though Black Hat may wish they could be. (Note that cyanobacteria , which are colloquially referred to as \"blue-green algae\", are not considered to be true algae by many scientists, who restrict the term to eukaryotes .) On the other hand, algae and cyanobacteria can still be locally harmful .\nMegan's data error could have been any number of things.  Her data pipeline might have had a unit conversion error, or perhaps she mistyped the baseline productivity value that she was comparing her algae to, or perhaps her calculations used assumed or estimated values related to phenomena that were poorly understood at the time but have since been resolved in an unfavorable direction.\nWhatever Megan's data error was, it seems harmless enough, but a similar data error spurred the development of nuclear weapons.  In 1940, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls wrote a memo \" On the construction of a 'superbomb' based on a nuclear chain reaction in uranium \".  In this memo, Frisch and Peierls estimated that only 570 grams of uranium-235 would be required to construct a \"superbomb\" (what we now call a nuclear weapon), compared to many tons of natural uranium-238.  This inspired the British and American governments to begin developing infrastructure for uranium enrichment through the Tube Alloys and Manhattan Project programs.  Later experiments in these programs revealed that the values Frisch and Peierls had used for uranium's density and nuclear cross-section were overestimates (the true critical mass is actually around fifty kilograms), but by that time, the programs were far enough along that they could simply press on with enriching more material to eventually produce working weapons.\n[Megan is talking to Black Hat.] Megan: I can't believe this data error invalidates a year and a half of my research. Megan: I was about to publish.\n[In a frame-less panel Black Hat replies while holding two fingers up one on either hand.] Black Hat: Don't panic. You have two options. Megan: Yeah?\n[Closeup shot of Black Hat holding one hand out with the palm up.] Black Hat: 1) Redo your analysis and share whatever results you can, whether positive or negative. It's disappointing, but these things happen.\n[Zoom out on Black Hat and Megan. Black Hat holds his closed fist up in front of him. Megan throws both arms up in the air.] Black Hat: 2) Destroy the evidence. Use your materials and research methods to build a superweapon. Conquer Earth and rule with an iron fist. Megan: Tremble before my anomalously productive algae! Megan: Except the anomaly was an artifact. Megan: Tremble before my normal algae!\n"}
{"id":2240,"title":"Timeline of the Universe","image_title":"Timeline of the Universe","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2240","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/timeline_of_the_universe.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2240:_Timeline_of_the_Universe","transcript":"[A large header is above the main drawing:] Timeline of the Universe\n[The drawing shows a diagram of the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang (left) to the present right with lines indicating possible futures continuing right of the main drawing. The drawing is that of a black horn of plenty, very thin to the left and then it becomes broader, mainly in steps but also slightly between each step. n a few places the diameter decreases a bit. Along the \"tube\" are segments divided with thin white lines, with about equal distance between them. The first 20 the tube is black, but then stars form, shown as many white dots, and finally in the last 3-4 segments galaxies are shown. At the top and bottom of the opening to the right there are four dashed lines which behaves the same way. Two points inward, two continue the trend from before they begin, two goes out fast again, and then falls back to slow increase, and two goes almost straight up and down. At the far left there is a line going in to a small dot. On the line before the dot are two questions mark. A line points to the dot which has a starburst around it. It represents the Big Bang. After this firs labeled point on the drawing there are mange other labeled sections with a line going from the label to a segment on the drawing. There are 9 above, 9 below and one at each end. The one at the right end pointing to the four dashed future lines at the top. From left to right in the order they are labeled on the timeline, the labels are:] ?? Big Bang [The Universe comes in as a circle with action lines around it. It stays the same size for a while.] Planck Epoch Medium Bang [The Universe starts inflating very slowly] Inflation [The Universe briefly inflates very rapidly, and returns to its normal rate of expansion.] Quark Epoch Lepton Epoch Photon Epoch Cool Bug Epoch [The Universe starts inflating and deflating rapidly, forming a series of bumps in the universe diagram like the grip on a hand tool.] Molded grip [Stars appear in the timeline. The Universe starts inflating slightly faster than before.] Stars form Stagflation [The Universe starts deflating slowly.] Settling Rebound [The Universe starts inflating slowly again.] Someone tripped and accidentally hit the \"Inflation\" switch again [The Universe starts inflating at the same rate as the Inflation section.] Emergency Stop triggered [The Universe abruptly stops inflating, and stays level.] [Galaxies appear in the timeline. The Universe starts inflating at a medium pace.] Galaxies form Earth forms Present day [We see the edge of the Universe, with a rounded shape. Various dotted line predictions are on the edges.] Future Cosmological development handed over to J.J. Abrams, outcome unknown\n","explanation":"This comic is about the size of the visible universe , presented as a timeline in a way typical of representations of the timeline of epochs in cosmology .\nSome events it describes, including the Big Bang and Inflation are real, but others are jokes, including the Medium Bang and Settling .  The size history of the visible universe is also embellished for the sake of jokes; the actual size history of the universe has one period referred to as Inflation, which occurred shortly after the Big Bang, followed by comparatively gentle but accelerating expansion.  This is artistically depicted in this image from NASA . Part of the humor in this comic comes from the fact that the varied rate of change in expansion is not yet fully understood, with explanations of events leading to this change including theories such as \"dark matter\" and \"dark energy\" (this might therefore be construed as \"dark humour\"). At the end of the drawing four possible continuations of the timeline are suggested, with director J. J. Abrams listed as the deciding factor between them, stating that all future cosmological development has been handed over to him. Abrams directed the Star Trek movie entitled Star Trek , which established additional alternate timelines for Star Trek, so it may be implied that multiple timelines could result from direction by Abrams in the future. Notably, each Star Trek series has included multiple interacting timelines. For information about each of the events shown in this comic's Timeline of the Universe , see detailed explanations in the section Events on the Timeline of the Universe below.\nThe title text is a variation of one of Randall's standard jokes that his drawings are Not actual size ; in the case of this comic there is technically one spot near the left where the drawing depicts the actual relative size of the universe at the time the drawing represents. Where his drawing begins, at the time when the universe began, per definition, our visible universe had no measurable size. Very soon (within a tiny fraction of an attosecond) after the universe as we know it began, the inflation period blew it up very very fast and then it continued to expand until present day. So at some \"time\" after the big bang, our visible universe would have had a size (i.e. diameter) that would be the same as any thickness of Randall's universe \"line\". Since the universe as depicted in the comic goes from infinitesimal size at the moment of the Big Bang to the full size of the universe today, at some point near the left there will be a point where Randall's representation would have the same size as the universe at the correct \"time period\". Of course a problem with this is that there was only a very very short time period after inflation where the diameter of the observable universe is on the same scale as this comic, and that point is neither indicated nor likely to be accurate in relation to the duration of time elapsed. According to an answer given here regarding the size of the visible universe after inflation, there is reason to believe that the size was still less than 1 mm in diameter when the stage of expansion known as Inflation ended, which is less than the thickness of the line shown at the Big Bang (depending on the screen size the comic is viewed upon); So the point along the timeline where the size of our visible universe matched the line width appears after the Inflation period is thought to have ended. Since Randall includes the Medium Bang before Inflation on his drawing he has already inserted a mistake there, but as the next three epochs after Inflation are real epochs, it is likely somewhere in this part of the drawing that the visible universe would have had the same diameter as the thickness of the drawing at a relevant time epoch on the drawing. This will thus not be that far to the left but around the Quark epoch.\nThe events presented in the timeline are:\n[A large header is above the main drawing:] Timeline of the Universe\n[The drawing shows a diagram of the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang (left) to the present right with lines indicating possible futures continuing right of the main drawing. The drawing is that of a black horn of plenty, very thin to the left and then it becomes broader, mainly in steps but also slightly between each step. n a few places the diameter decreases a bit. Along the \"tube\" are segments divided with thin white lines, with about equal distance between them. The first 20 the tube is black, but then stars form, shown as many white dots, and finally in the last 3-4 segments galaxies are shown. At the top and bottom of the opening to the right there are four dashed lines which behaves the same way. Two points inward, two continue the trend from before they begin, two goes out fast again, and then falls back to slow increase, and two goes almost straight up and down. At the far left there is a line going in to a small dot. On the line before the dot are two questions mark. A line points to the dot which has a starburst around it. It represents the Big Bang. After this firs labeled point on the drawing there are mange other labeled sections with a line going from the label to a segment on the drawing. There are 9 above, 9 below and one at each end. The one at the right end pointing to the four dashed future lines at the top. From left to right in the order they are labeled on the timeline, the labels are:] ?? Big Bang [The Universe comes in as a circle with action lines around it. It stays the same size for a while.] Planck Epoch Medium Bang [The Universe starts inflating very slowly] Inflation [The Universe briefly inflates very rapidly, and returns to its normal rate of expansion.] Quark Epoch Lepton Epoch Photon Epoch Cool Bug Epoch [The Universe starts inflating and deflating rapidly, forming a series of bumps in the universe diagram like the grip on a hand tool.] Molded grip [Stars appear in the timeline. The Universe starts inflating slightly faster than before.] Stars form Stagflation [The Universe starts deflating slowly.] Settling Rebound [The Universe starts inflating slowly again.] Someone tripped and accidentally hit the \"Inflation\" switch again [The Universe starts inflating at the same rate as the Inflation section.] Emergency Stop triggered [The Universe abruptly stops inflating, and stays level.] [Galaxies appear in the timeline. The Universe starts inflating at a medium pace.] Galaxies form Earth forms Present day [We see the edge of the Universe, with a rounded shape. Various dotted line predictions are on the edges.] Future Cosmological development handed over to J.J. Abrams, outcome unknown\n"}
{"id":2241,"title":"Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect","image_title":"Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2241","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/brussels_sprouts_mandela_effect.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2241:_Brussels_Sprouts_Mandela_Effect","transcript":"[Cueball is standing between Ponytail and Megan talking to them.] Cueball: I always thought of Brussels sprouts as terrible, but they're actually really good! I can't believe I let everyone mislead me!\n[In a frame-less panel Megan replies. Below her is a footnote with a citation to back up her statement.] Megan: It's not just you! Farmers developed a less-bitter cultivar like 15 years ago. * * npr.org\/773457637\n[Back to all three as Megan continues to explain while holding her arms away from her.] Megan: Now the whole world is having this revelation, one person at a time. It's like a real Mandela effect. We secretly switched to the parallel universe where Brussels sprouts taste good. Cueball: Cool.\n[Ponytail lifts a finger as Cueball and Megan turns to look at her.] Ponytail: Also, licorice is good now. Cueball: Whoa, really? Megan: This is a trap. Ponytail: And those silica gel packets that say \"Do not eat\"? Delicious. Cueball: I knew it.\n","explanation":"Brussels sprouts are a leafy vegetable from the cabbage family which were cultivated in Brussels, in what is now Belgium, in the 13th century, giving them their name.  Many adults and children dislike Brussels sprouts , perhaps because of their bitterness.\nCueball was one of these people who thought he had a dislike for Brussels sprouts, but after trying them recently he had a change of heart and likes them now.  He feels \"misled\" by the public dislike for Brussels sprouts. Megan chimes in and  notes that it is not just him. Farmers started to develop a newer cultivar of Brussels sprouts in the 1990s (as opposed to the 15 years ago referenced in the comic), which taste less bitter than the \"original\" cultivar of Brussels sprouts that Cueball grew up eating. (A source is provided in the comic as a foot note to Megan's statement. This would be the first of two comics in a row with this type of reference given, the second coming in 2242: Ground vs Air .)\nIt seems that others have also started to like Brussels sprouts, which Megan calls a real Mandela Effect , hence the title Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect . Megan explains that now the whole world have a \"false\" shared memory of Brussels sprouts tasting bad, and it is like we have all switched to the parallel universe where they taste good. This idea was earlier used in 1268: Alternate Universe regarding the weird idea of eating lobsters.\nFalse memories may arise via suggestibility, activation of associated information, the incorporation of misinformation, and source misattribution, and they can be shared , sometimes widely, when one of these triggers happens to many people in a population.\nThe Mandela Effect, however, is a pseudoscience explanation for a false memory shared by multiple people. It proposes that the false memory is actually real, but the people who share it somehow experienced it in a parallel world, or that reality somehow around them changed in some way, while their memories remained intact. This is why Megan calls this a real Mandela effect, because in this situation it is the world we live in that has actually changed, not our memories that are wrong. Now the Brussels sprouts taste different than we remembered, it is not our memories that are wrong.\nIn the last panel, Ponytail then tricks Cueball into thinking that licorice , another widely disliked food , is good tasting. At this point Megan realizes that this must be a trap. Unlike Brussels sprouts, the taste of licorice has not changed noticeably, so people who hated the taste before are likely to still find it unpleasant.\nThat Ponytail is up to no good is shown to be true when she additionally claims that silica gel packets are actually edible and taste delicious. This is very false! Silica gel packets are typically used as a desiccant, to keep electronics and other moisture sensitive items dry.  They are typically marked \" Do Not Eat \" to warn people that they are not edible. Although not toxic, and even allowed in some form in food , silica gel has a sand-like texture and no flavor or nutritional value, can cause irritation if digested in the raw form, and the packets may contain potentially toxic additives .\nCueball, having been prepped by both his own experience and Megan's facts are totally ready to believe Ponytail, even to the extent that he seems to feel cheated by the makers of silica gel packets, who he must now think has written Do Not Eat just to keep that delicious gel for themselves. Hopefully Megan can convince him not to find and eat them. Ponytail is often not nice to Cueball, although in other comics it is more like she talks him down, see Code Quality , not directly trying to harm him.\nThe title text suggests that \"Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect\" is a music band, who once were the opening act for the presumably better known band \"Correct Horse Battery Staple\". This latter group is a reference to 936: Password Strength . It hints at the \" good name for a musical band \" trope, which Randall before tried to replace by a dot tumblr dot com trope in 1025: Tumblr . Indirectly, he also suggests that Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect would be a great long password that is now easy to remember (as long as you remember there is an S at the end of Brussels (at least in English, but not in Dutch, which is one of the official languages of Brussels\/Belgium)).\nFor a comic about awkwardly named bands, see 119: Worst Band Name Ever .\n[Cueball is standing between Ponytail and Megan talking to them.] Cueball: I always thought of Brussels sprouts as terrible, but they're actually really good! I can't believe I let everyone mislead me!\n[In a frame-less panel Megan replies. Below her is a footnote with a citation to back up her statement.] Megan: It's not just you! Farmers developed a less-bitter cultivar like 15 years ago. * * npr.org\/773457637\n[Back to all three as Megan continues to explain while holding her arms away from her.] Megan: Now the whole world is having this revelation, one person at a time. It's like a real Mandela effect. We secretly switched to the parallel universe where Brussels sprouts taste good. Cueball: Cool.\n[Ponytail lifts a finger as Cueball and Megan turns to look at her.] Ponytail: Also, licorice is good now. Cueball: Whoa, really? Megan: This is a trap. Ponytail: And those silica gel packets that say \"Do not eat\"? Delicious. Cueball: I knew it.\n"}
{"id":2242,"title":"Ground vs Air","image_title":"Ground vs Air","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2242","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ground_vs_air.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2242:_Ground_vs_Air","transcript":"[Caption above the drawing]: Which is thicker\u2014the ground or the air?\n[The drawing shows a Winkel tripel projection of the Earth. The features of the main map is unlabeled, with only the outlines of the landmasses present. Various parts of the map are labeled with \"Air\" (four times) or \"Ground\" (5 times). Areas marked as \"Ground\" are differentiated with gray shading. These are always over large landmasses or close to them. They cover most of North America (labeled), the northern part of South America (labeled), Northern Europe and most of Asia (labeled), Japan, most of Australia and part of the Indonesia, Western Africa, sub-equatorial Africa (labeled), and finally the central parts of Antarctica (labeled). Air is written on the West Coast of the United States, in the Atlantic Ocean, over the central part of Africa and in the Pacific Ocean, near the Philippines.] [Over West Coast of the United States]: Air [Over North America]: Ground [Over Atlantic Ocean]: Air [Over South America]: Ground [Over the central part of Africa]: Air [Over the southern part of Africa]: Ground [Over Asia]: Ground [Over Pacific Ocean]: Air [Over Antarctica ]: Ground\n[A small diagram is present in the Pacific Ocean left of South America. The diagram depicts several labeled layers of Earth and its atmosphere, listed below. Cueball, a body of water, and several mountains are shown on the flat surface part of the diagram, with the ocean floor lower than where Cueball stands. Above is a line representing the border to space. The line beneath the surface is much more curved going both up and down. Two double arrows representing the thickness of the atmosphere and the lithosphere are drawn between the surface and the layers above and below. Another curved double arrow is pointing to each of these distances and it is marked with a question mark in the middle of the line.] Space Atmosphere Lithosphere Asthenosphere ?\n[In the bottom right corner of the comic with gray text is a reference:] Based mostly on Conrad and Lithgow-Bertelloni (2006) DOI.1029\/2005GL025621\n","explanation":"This comic depicts a map of the world using the Winkel tripel projection , comparing the thickness of the ground, which is defined as the lithosphere , to the \"thickness\" (or height) of the air above it, which refers to the atmosphere .\nIn an inserted figure, Randall defines the thickness using three boundaries. At the top is space , defined by the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line at an altitude of 100\u00a0km (\u2248\u00a062\u00a0mi). (See the Trivia section below for a discussion of this definition of the beginning of space). Below that is the atmosphere which goes down to the ground, where Cueball is standing, or the water. Beneath the surface is the lithosphere, comprised of the Earth's crust along with the rigid upper part of the mantle, and beneath this is the asthenosphere , the partially melted, highly viscous region of the upper mantle just below the lithosphere. The lithosphere is variable in thickness, averaging about 100 km, but the oceanic lithosphere is much thinner than the continental lithosphere (oceanic crust is thinner and denser than continental crust).  The diagram also shows oceanic cross-section to the left-hand side and, though the diagram does not make it explicit, presumably the two measurements used are of the atmosphere down from 'space' to the surface of the ground, if dry, or to the surface of the water covering the ground (which is essentially sea level in the oceans, fluctuating slightly with the tides, but covers a broader range for inland water, from the Dead Sea, at 0.4 km below sea level, to Lake Titicaca, almost 4 km above sea level) and of rock descending from the solid interface down to the asthenosphere, as the sliver of liquid that can intervene between the two spans is referred to as a separate measurement elsewhere.\nThe map shades in the parts where the thickness of the ground is thicker than the thickness of the air. This almost only occurs directly over continents, and certainly only where the continental crust is located (which can stretch into the near-coast parts of oceans). Oceanic crust is much thinner than continental crust. It is also made of a different material; it is denser. Because it is denser, it floats lower in the liquid asthenosphere, causing it to be below sea level. Some parts of continental crust are also under sea level (the continental shelf). These are the areas on the map that are marked as having thicker ground that appear to be over the ocean (such as Northern Canada, or the Caribbean) - they are actually still continental crust. (There are still some exceptions, such as the Sea of Japan and the Philippines).\nRandall has mainly used a work by Conrad and Lithgow-Bertelloni from 2006 to estimate the thickness of the \"ground\", and he gives the reference to the paper DOI.1029\/2005GL025621 . Basically, Randall has taken their map and shaded the green and blue areas. It is the second comic in a row with a citation, after the footnote in 2241: Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect .\nThe title text refers to the ancient four classical elements : earth, water, air, fire. The lithosphere, or ground, is earth, the oceans is water, the atmosphere is air, and fire would thus be the hot, plastic rock of the Earth's mantle, see 913: Core . The mantle is not \"on fire\", but it is hot enough that it would ignite almost anything on the surface. The water layer on Earth is never more than 11 km deep, even at the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench , and thus cannot compare to the thickness of the atmosphere or the lithosphere. An expansive definition of \"fire\" to include the rest of the Earth below the lithosphere puts the fire layer at 6,000 km thick, the radius of the Earth, much thicker than the other layers, hence the and fire is *definitely* thicker comment at the end of the title text. Space or vacuum would in the classical element terminology have been called the Aether .\nIn 977: Map Projections the Winkel-Tripel projection is the fifth projection which is linked to the hipster subculture.\n[Caption above the drawing]: Which is thicker\u2014the ground or the air?\n[The drawing shows a Winkel tripel projection of the Earth. The features of the main map is unlabeled, with only the outlines of the landmasses present. Various parts of the map are labeled with \"Air\" (four times) or \"Ground\" (5 times). Areas marked as \"Ground\" are differentiated with gray shading. These are always over large landmasses or close to them. They cover most of North America (labeled), the northern part of South America (labeled), Northern Europe and most of Asia (labeled), Japan, most of Australia and part of the Indonesia, Western Africa, sub-equatorial Africa (labeled), and finally the central parts of Antarctica (labeled). Air is written on the West Coast of the United States, in the Atlantic Ocean, over the central part of Africa and in the Pacific Ocean, near the Philippines.] [Over West Coast of the United States]: Air [Over North America]: Ground [Over Atlantic Ocean]: Air [Over South America]: Ground [Over the central part of Africa]: Air [Over the southern part of Africa]: Ground [Over Asia]: Ground [Over Pacific Ocean]: Air [Over Antarctica ]: Ground\n[A small diagram is present in the Pacific Ocean left of South America. The diagram depicts several labeled layers of Earth and its atmosphere, listed below. Cueball, a body of water, and several mountains are shown on the flat surface part of the diagram, with the ocean floor lower than where Cueball stands. Above is a line representing the border to space. The line beneath the surface is much more curved going both up and down. Two double arrows representing the thickness of the atmosphere and the lithosphere are drawn between the surface and the layers above and below. Another curved double arrow is pointing to each of these distances and it is marked with a question mark in the middle of the line.] Space Atmosphere Lithosphere Asthenosphere ?\n[In the bottom right corner of the comic with gray text is a reference:] Based mostly on Conrad and Lithgow-Bertelloni (2006) DOI.1029\/2005GL025621\n"}
{"id":2243,"title":"Star Wars Spoiler Generator","image_title":"Star Wars Spoiler Generator","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2243","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/star_wars_spoiler_generator.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2243:_Star_Wars_Spoiler_Generator","transcript":"Star Wars Spoiler Generator\n[Shown below is a branching flowchart of sorts that begins at the phrase \"In this Star Wars movie, our heroes return to take on the First Order and new villain...\", then flows through various paths to build up a story.]\nIn this Star Wars movie, our heroes return to take on the First Order and new villain... Kyle Ren Malloc Darth Sebelius Theranos Lord Juul\n...with help from their new friend... Kim Spacemeasurer Teen Yoda Dab Tweetdeck Yaz Progestin TI-83\nRey builds a new lightsaber with a... beige ochre mauve aquamarine taupe\n...blade, and they head out to confront the First Order's new superweapon, the... Sun Obliterator Moonsquisher World Eater Planet Zester Superconducting Supercollider\n...a space station capable of... blowing up a planet with a bunch of beams of energy that combine into one blowing up a bunch of planets with one beam of energy that splits into many cutting a planet in half and smashing the halves together like two cymbals increasing the CO 2 levels in a planet's atmosphere, causing rapid heating triggering the end credits before the movie is done\nThey unexpectedly join forces with their old enemy... Boba Fett Salacious Crumb The Space Slug the bottom half of Darth Maul Youtube commenters\n...and destroy the superweapon in a battle featuring a bow that shoots little lightsaber-headed arrows X-Wings and TIE fighters dodging the giant letters of the opening crawl a Sith educational display that uses Force Lightning to demonstrate the dielectric breakdown of air Kylo Ren putting on another helmet over his smaller one a Sith car wash where the bristles on the brushes are little lightsabers\nP.S. Rey's parents are... Luke Leia Han Obi-Wan a random junk trader\n...and... Poe BB-8 Amilyn Holdo Laura Dern a random junk trader that one droid from the Jawa Sandcrawler that says Gonk\n","explanation":"On December 20, 2019 (2 days after the publication of this comic), the final movie of the \"Skywalker saga\" of Star Wars films, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker , was officially released to the US. It received a world premiere in Los Angeles on December 16, so there are lots of spoilers online, and also lots of people who want to avoid spoilers. Randall has created a flowchart that generates \"spoilers\" to the film, but as he probably has not seen the film (or, if he has, he doesn't actually want to spoil it for us), all of the so-called spoilers are nonsensical.\nThe formula for each spoiler is as follows: \"In this Star Wars movie, our heroes return to take on the First Order and new villain [villain name] with help from their new friend [friend name] . Rey builds a new lightsaber with a [color] blade, and they head out to confront the First Order's new superweapon, the [superweapon name] , a space station capable of [evil plan] . They unexpectedly join forces with their old enemy [character] and destroy the superweapon in a battle featuring [strange event] . P.S. Rey's parents are [character] and [character] \".\nThe First Order is the main antagonist group in the Star Wars sequel trilogy series. In Star Wars: The Force Awakens , they use a superweapon in their base, Starkiller Base, to destroy the planetary system housing the headquarters of the New Republic , the democratic government which was formed after the Empire 's defeat in Return of the Jedi .\n\"Building a lightsaber \" is one of the rites of passage for becoming a Jedi Knight. In the prequel trilogy , new Jedi build lightsabers as an official part of the journey towards Knighthood, and in the original trilogy , Luke Skywalker builds a lightsaber between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as part of his training with Yoda . Rey has used the lightsaber that Anakin Skywalker made and used (which Luke also used when he was a new Jedi) for the first two movies of the sequel trilogy, and so it would be thematically appropriate for her to build her own prior to the trilogy's final entry.  Most Jedi's lightsabers are either blue or green, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Mace Windu 's purple lightsaber signifies his incredible combat prowess).  Kyber crystals are aligned with the Light Side of the Force , so Sith must overpower and \"bleed\" their crystals before they will function for them, which causes their distinctive red color.  Having a lightsaber of a color other than blue, green, or red is often seen in the Star Wars fandom as a sign of being a \" Mary Sue \", which is an accusation which has been made of Rey. [ actual citation needed ]\nAnother common plot point in Star Wars media is the construction, use, and destruction of a superweapon.  These are inspired by stories and media of World War II, in which militaries sought to find, attack, and destroy critical elements of their enemies' resources and infrastructure, and meanwhile would construct elaborate defenses for themselves.  The attack on the Death Star in particular is inspired by Operation Chastise , the \"bouncing bomb\" attack on Germany's hydroelectric power plants; Operation Chastise was dramatised in the 1951 book and 1955 film The Dam Busters , which was very thoroughly homaged by A New Hope .  The original trilogy of movies only had two Death Stars, but superweapons quickly became a staple of the Expanded Universe fiction, to the point that one book had Han Solo make fun of the Empire's tendency towards building superweapons, proposing such ridiculous names as \"Galaxy Destructor\" and \"Nostril of Palpatine\".  Superweapons are common in superhero stories.\nRedemption and making allies of old enemies is also a common plot point in Star Wars .  Anakin Skywalker fell to the Dark Side and became Darth Vader, but eventually returned to the Light Side to protect his son, and Han Solo was initially a morally ambiguous character who was eventually convinced to join the Rebellion.\nRey, one of the main characters in the sequel trilogy series is an orphan, who was left behind on the planet Jakku as a child. As Rey is Force-sensitive and adept at using a lightsaber, there is much speculation among Star Wars fans as to the identity of her parents. Many major characters in Star Wars have unexpected heritages of great portent, most famously Luke, who was very distressed to learn that Darth Vader did not kill his father, as Obi-Wan had told him, but is his father. In Star Wars: The Last Jedi , villain Kylo Ren tells her that she is the child of \"filthy junk traders\", but many fans speculate that he was lying to her.\nThe title text refers to the bottom option of the [strange event in battle] section. Apparently Lord Juul (or Darth Juul) is fighting the heroes in the Sith car wash. It is unclear what \"flipping the switch\" from Regular to Premium would do, but it seems to be beneficial to Darth Juul. A \"premium\" car wash usually has more features than a regular car wash, e.g. more cleaning brushes, waxing the car, cleaning the tires, etc., so perhaps the premium mode activates additional lightsabers.\nThis is the second false fact generating comic, after 1930: Calendar Facts .\nStar Wars Spoiler Generator\n[Shown below is a branching flowchart of sorts that begins at the phrase \"In this Star Wars movie, our heroes return to take on the First Order and new villain...\", then flows through various paths to build up a story.]\nIn this Star Wars movie, our heroes return to take on the First Order and new villain... Kyle Ren Malloc Darth Sebelius Theranos Lord Juul\n...with help from their new friend... Kim Spacemeasurer Teen Yoda Dab Tweetdeck Yaz Progestin TI-83\nRey builds a new lightsaber with a... beige ochre mauve aquamarine taupe\n...blade, and they head out to confront the First Order's new superweapon, the... Sun Obliterator Moonsquisher World Eater Planet Zester Superconducting Supercollider\n...a space station capable of... blowing up a planet with a bunch of beams of energy that combine into one blowing up a bunch of planets with one beam of energy that splits into many cutting a planet in half and smashing the halves together like two cymbals increasing the CO 2 levels in a planet's atmosphere, causing rapid heating triggering the end credits before the movie is done\nThey unexpectedly join forces with their old enemy... Boba Fett Salacious Crumb The Space Slug the bottom half of Darth Maul Youtube commenters\n...and destroy the superweapon in a battle featuring a bow that shoots little lightsaber-headed arrows X-Wings and TIE fighters dodging the giant letters of the opening crawl a Sith educational display that uses Force Lightning to demonstrate the dielectric breakdown of air Kylo Ren putting on another helmet over his smaller one a Sith car wash where the bristles on the brushes are little lightsabers\nP.S. Rey's parents are... Luke Leia Han Obi-Wan a random junk trader\n...and... Poe BB-8 Amilyn Holdo Laura Dern a random junk trader that one droid from the Jawa Sandcrawler that says Gonk\n"}
{"id":2244,"title":"Thumbtacks And String","image_title":"Thumbtacks And String","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2244","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thumbtacks_and_string.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2244:_Thumbtacks_And_String","transcript":"[Beret Guy is in front of a bulletin board covered in images, connected by thumbtacks and string. The below transcripts of each image are left to right, top to bottom.] Sale String and Twine \ud83e\uddf5 \ud83e\uddf5 Where to Buy Thumbtacks Scrapbooking Supplies (partially covered:) Call Now Sale \ud83d\udccc ??? Great Deals YARN \ud83e\uddf6 Office Supplies Thumbtacks Pushpins & More \ud83d\udccc Office Depot ? Office Supply Liquidation SALE \u2b50\n","explanation":"In many media , crimes and conspiracy theories are solved on bulletin boards. \"Leads\" are attached to the board using thumbtacks , and the leads are connected to each other using string (specifically twine is mentioned), in order to sort out connections and possibilities. There are many systems for information mapping that show entities as nodes in a graph , with relationships represented by connections between nodes.\nBeret Guy , eccentric as always, manipulates this by making just such a setup solely to determine where to buy the thumbtacks and string for use in it. The joke is that the bulletin board is entirely self-referential -- without a need for thumbtacks and string to hold and connect things on the bulletin board, there would be no need for the bulletin board itself, but because of the bulletin board's string and thumbtacks, Beret Guy needs the items advertised on it. An additional minor joke may be that the Office Depot store map near the bottom of the bulletin board has markers that are often called \"digital pushpins\" .\nIn media, characters (especially conspiracy theorists) tend to obsess over these boards, overanalyzing or staring at every little detail to try and make sense of them - Beret Guy may be so obsessed with these string boards that he has been driven to obsessing further over the details of making more of these boards.\nThe title text continues the self-reference theme: The receipt for the tattoo is tattooed to the person who orders the tattoo, which is the receipt for said tattoo of the receipt. This has happened for real in Norway .\nThe idea of the receipt being the object you buy, has been used in a rug that used to be sold by IKEA .\n[Beret Guy is in front of a bulletin board covered in images, connected by thumbtacks and string. The below transcripts of each image are left to right, top to bottom.] Sale String and Twine \ud83e\uddf5 \ud83e\uddf5 Where to Buy Thumbtacks Scrapbooking Supplies (partially covered:) Call Now Sale \ud83d\udccc ??? Great Deals YARN \ud83e\uddf6 Office Supplies Thumbtacks Pushpins & More \ud83d\udccc Office Depot ? Office Supply Liquidation SALE \u2b50\n"}
{"id":2245,"title":"Edible Arrangements","image_title":"Edible Arrangements","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2245","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/edible_arrangements.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2245:_Edible_Arrangements","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are sitting on opposite sides of a leafless tree. They are silhouetted.] Cueball: I don't get how Edible Arrangements is a thing.\n[Zoomed in on Cueball and Megan leaning against the tree] Megan: That's easy \u2014 picking out presents is hard and fruit is delicious. Cueball: Yeah, true.\n[Megan gestures with an open hand] Megan: But my question is, why did they call it \"Edible Arrangements\" and not \"Vore of the Roses\"?\n[Pan to just Megan. Megan turns to face Cueball] Cueball: Just for that, I'm going to cancel the one I got you. Megan: Nooo! I want my Mouth Blossoms! Megan: My Juicy Bouquet! My Oral Floral! Megan: Hey, come back!\n","explanation":"This is the first of two comics in a row about presents, and it is also the last comic released before Christmas Day . This is the first Christmas comic of 2019, with 2246: Christmas Presents being the second Christmas comic, released on Christmas Day.\nEdible Arrangements is a company that sells fruit, and other edible items that have been cut and arranged to look like flower bouquets. They can be ordered and sent to a given recipient for a variety of purposes. Flower arrangements are typically not eaten, as showy flowers are so economically inefficient to mass produce that modern culture has forgotten they are edible. [ citation needed ]\nIn the first panel, Cueball seems to find the concept incongruous, and wonders how it came about. Megan points out the easy answer: picking out a gift for someone can be difficult, but a tasteful meal is always welcome so long as it's something the recipient can eat safely.\nShortly afterwards, Megan uses the same incongruity of eating a floral arrangement to make puns. Vore of the Roses is a play on the War of the Roses , either the English civil war or the 1989 movie of the same name. 'Vore' is a word part referring to eating, as in carnivore (meat eater), herbivore (plant eater), voracious (hungry or eating a lot), etc. It's also used on the internet to refer to the Vore fetish, in which one gets sexually excited about the idea of eating or being eaten by someone (not in the metaphorical sense of oral sex, but actually consuming someone whole).\nCueball is probably in pain because of the bad pun (or perhaps because he doesn't like the idea of food items desiring to be eaten) and says he will cancel the edible arrangement that he had bought for Megan. She tries to convince him otherwise by providing alternative names, which are evidently not any more to his liking, since he has left Megan before she's finished with her suggestions.\nMouth Blossoms, Juicy Bouquet, and Oral Floral are all combinations referencing the eating of a floral arrangement. In theory, these combinations could be good names for a band, or possibly a tumblr blog.\nThe title text also makes reference to the fact that many flowers that are often found in floral arrangements, such as roses, violets, tulips, daisies, lavender and many more, are items that a human can eat. Such flowers are safe to consume but usually unappetizing; Randall makes the point that if a person is sufficiently hungry and thus doesn't care how appetizing their meal is, any floral arrangement can be eaten. Since he doesn't use flower in the title text, he actually says that if you are hungry enough anything can be eaten. The title text may also be an allusion to a Mitch Hedberg joke: \"Any book is a children's book if the kid can read!\"\n[Cueball and Megan are sitting on opposite sides of a leafless tree. They are silhouetted.] Cueball: I don't get how Edible Arrangements is a thing.\n[Zoomed in on Cueball and Megan leaning against the tree] Megan: That's easy \u2014 picking out presents is hard and fruit is delicious. Cueball: Yeah, true.\n[Megan gestures with an open hand] Megan: But my question is, why did they call it \"Edible Arrangements\" and not \"Vore of the Roses\"?\n[Pan to just Megan. Megan turns to face Cueball] Cueball: Just for that, I'm going to cancel the one I got you. Megan: Nooo! I want my Mouth Blossoms! Megan: My Juicy Bouquet! My Oral Floral! Megan: Hey, come back!\n"}
{"id":2246,"title":"Christmas Presents","image_title":"Christmas Presents","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2246","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/christmas_presents.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2246:_Christmas_Presents","transcript":"[A Christmas tree decorated with 16 balls and a star at the top with a high trunk with space for several presents beneath. About 13 presents with different patterns of paper and some with strings around. Three arrows with text at the blunt end points towards different areas. To the left one points to a present, beneath this one points to the area beneath the tree (the bottom of one present) and  to the right one points to the tree.] Bright white and red colors indicate a lack of Chlorophyll Flourishing in the shade Tree health suffering\n[Caption beneath the panel:] The evidence is clear: Christmas presents are parasitic plants.\n","explanation":"This is the second comic in a row about presents, this one in particular calls them Christmas presents , and it was also released on Christmas Day. This is the second Christmas comic in a row after 2245: Edible Arrangements .\nA Christmas tree cut down from the woods will typically be placed in a living-room soon after being cut down, and left standing there through the holiday season. On Christmas Eve or Christmas Day , or even earlier, presents are typically put beneath the tree under the lower branches. Once the tree is cut down, it will eventually start turning brown and\/or losing its needles as it no longer receives any nutrients from its roots. [ citation needed ]\nBased on this observation (on Christmas Day) some biologist (or Randall ) concludes that the presents are a type of parasitic plant \u2014that is, a plant that derives some or all of its nutritional requirement from another living plant. Since such a plant can use the sugars produced by the parasitised tree it does not necessarily have to perform photosynthesis by itself (although some parasitic plants such as mistletoe are photosynthetically active). If the parasitic plant is not doing photosynthesis it can live in the shade beneath a tree that it parasitizes as it has no need for light, and since it does not need chlorophyll either, it may not be green (e.g. Orobanche ).\nWith  presents often being wrapped in bright white and red colored paper, Randall concludes that this indicates a lack of chlorophyll, thus fitting with the idea of a parasitic plant. With the presents being in the shade of the tree and the tree's health suffering, the evidence can only lead to the conclusion that Christmas presents are parasitic plants.\nIn the title text a biologist says that \"The parasitism might be mediated by a fungus!\"  While many parasitic plants attach themselves directly to the plant they are parasitising (e.g. mistletoe , a parasitic plant which is often used to symbolize romance at Christmas) this is obviously not the case with the Christmas presents which are not growing out of the Christmas tree - which appears to rule out a parasitic relationship. However, the biologist has an answer for that: Some parasitic plants (such as snow flowers ) do not attack the tree directly but instead form a connection to mycorhizal fungi . These fungi are receiving sugars from the trees and in turn provide it with mineral nutrients. By parasitising these fungi the snow flower can steal the sugars of the tree indirectly, one says that the fungi is mediating the parasitism.\nRandall dismisses these words as coming from a biologist who is \"trying to ruin Christmas again\", which could have several meanings.  It could be that the biologist really is just trying to ruin Christmas, and is trying to be more successful than in previous years by tying Christmas presents to fungus in people's minds.  One might say that the biologist is not a \"fun guy\" for doing this. [ citation needed ]\nIt could instead be the case that the biologist is quite earnest in his belief that Christmas presents are harmful plant parasites and is attempting to spray the presents with a fungicide , which would probably be toxic and potentially contaminate not only the wrapping paper but also the presents inside their boxes.\nFinally, it could be that the biologist is right, and Christmas presents are hosts to or otherwise associated with a parasitic fungus (and Randall's dismissal is a sign of his infection).  There are some parasitic fungi that hijack the brains of host animals and alter their behavior.  The most famous of these is probably Ophiocordyceps unilateralis , the so-called \"zombie ant fungus\", which causes its hosts to perch on a high plant to maximize the distance traveled by the fungus's spores.  Ants have in turn developed strategies for detecting and removing infected members from the colony's territory.  None of these fungi are known to infect humans, but they did inspire the zombie fungus in The Last of Us .\n[A Christmas tree decorated with 16 balls and a star at the top with a high trunk with space for several presents beneath. About 13 presents with different patterns of paper and some with strings around. Three arrows with text at the blunt end points towards different areas. To the left one points to a present, beneath this one points to the area beneath the tree (the bottom of one present) and  to the right one points to the tree.] Bright white and red colors indicate a lack of Chlorophyll Flourishing in the shade Tree health suffering\n[Caption beneath the panel:] The evidence is clear: Christmas presents are parasitic plants.\n"}
{"id":2247,"title":"Weird Hill","image_title":"Weird Hill","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2247","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/weird_hill.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2247:_Weird_Hill","transcript":"[Cueball, frustrated, is sitting on a chair in front of a computer and Beret Guy pulling the chair back] Computer: * [email\u00a0protected] Beret Guy: Why pick a weird hill to die on...\n[Cueball gets up, still frustrated] [Cueball and Beret Guy leave the room]\n[Cueball and Beret Guy climbing a hill]\n[Cueball and Beret Guy lying down at the top of a hill] Beret Guy: ... when you could pick a soft hill to lie on? Cueball: This is nice.\n","explanation":"This comic is a joke about the expression \"a (weird) hill to die on\" , which refers to holding a position as if it has great importance, and being willing to fight for that position, no matter how much opposition you face, or how little benefit is derived.  The term comes from the military practice of capturing and holding hills in disputed areas, in order to command the high ground. Because hills tended to be highly disputed, soldiers would frequently die in their defense. Hence picking \"a hill to die on\" implies that you're choosing a position that you consider to be so important that you'd defend it at the cost of your own life. The term is generally used to point out the pointlessness of defending a rhetorical position with such fervor, particularly if the point is not especially important, and\/or the other party is unlikely to change their views.\nIn this strip, Beret Guy interrupts Cueball , who is apparently arguing with someone who is wrong on the Internet . Pulling him away from the argument, Beret Guy asks why Cueball should pick a weird hill to die on (fight over an opinion online) when he could pick a soft hill to lie on, going out into nature and relaxing. This comic has a similar message to 386: Duty Calls , 1731: Wrong , and 2051: Bad Opinions . The theme is sometimes we either assign too much importance to our opinions, or we expend too much effort trying to persuade others, and it's often wiser to simply let the argument go. Leaving a computer problem to relax in nature was also mentioned in 1024: Error Code .\nThe title text is an absurd juxtaposition: that Cueball will pick a weird hill to lie on. In this case, he may be referring to a physical hill, in which case the meaning of \"weird\" is unclear due to lack of context.\nThe phrase \"a weird hill to die on\" was also featured in 1717: Pyramid Honey . (Normally the expression is just \"a hill to die on\".)\n[Cueball, frustrated, is sitting on a chair in front of a computer and Beret Guy pulling the chair back] Computer: * [email\u00a0protected] Beret Guy: Why pick a weird hill to die on...\n[Cueball gets up, still frustrated] [Cueball and Beret Guy leave the room]\n[Cueball and Beret Guy climbing a hill]\n[Cueball and Beret Guy lying down at the top of a hill] Beret Guy: ... when you could pick a soft hill to lie on? Cueball: This is nice.\n"}
{"id":2248,"title":"New Year's Eve","image_title":"New Year's Eve","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2248","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_years_eve.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2248:_New_Year%27s_Eve","transcript":"[Cueball, with his hands raised, is talking to Megan and White Hat.] Cueball: Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, and you know what that means: Cueball: It's the one day of the year when you can convert between ages and birth years by subtraction without worrying about off-by-one errors! Cueball: Also there are probably parties.\n","explanation":"This was the first of two New Year comics around the 2019-2020 New Year, the second being 2249: I Love the 20s .\nAn easy way to determine someone's age is to subtract their birth year from the current year. However, if their birthday has not happened yet that year, this calculation will predict them to be a year older than they actually are. By New Year's Eve , everybody's birthday has happened that year (or is happening, but legitimately tallied up), so this error will not occur. Cueball is excited by this, whereas most people would be more excited by the parties that typically occur around New Year's.\n\"Off-by-one\" errors are commonly made in computer programming, especially by novices, when looping over sets of objects. They can also appear in everyday life. If one is given a range of numbers, such as {10, 11, 12, ..., 99, 100}, a common error is to assume that the number of numbers in the range is the first number minus the last number: 100-10 = 90. However, the correct answer is 91 since both endpoints are included in the set. This specific type of \"off-by-one\" error is called a fencepost error.\nIn the title text, Cueball suggests a New Year's Eve party with the theme of \"off-by-one errors\", saying it's challenging to build off of but that he's heard of worse. No information is given as to what such a party theme would entail, nor what could possibly be a worse party theme. (On the other hand, the parties depicted in 51: Malaria and 829: Arsenic-Based Life , based on themes of disease and poison, respectively, look much worse than an \"off-by-one errors\" party would likely be.)\nThe idea of off-by-one errors for a New Year's Eve party is inspired by the numerous discussions about the time when the next decade starts, whether 2020 or 2021. 2249: I Love the 20s also treats the subject directly.\n[Cueball, with his hands raised, is talking to Megan and White Hat.] Cueball: Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, and you know what that means: Cueball: It's the one day of the year when you can convert between ages and birth years by subtraction without worrying about off-by-one errors! Cueball: Also there are probably parties.\n"}
{"id":2249,"title":"I Love the 20s","image_title":"I Love the 20s","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2249","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_love_the_20s.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2249:_I_Love_the_20s","transcript":"[Megan walks in from the left greeting Cueball, White Hat, and Ponytail standing next to each other, the last two looking in her direction.] Megan: Happy new decade! Ponytail: Welcome to the '20s! White Hat: Actually\u2014 Ponytail: I'm excited we can name decades again. Ponytail: \"Aughts\" and \"teens\" never caught on.\n[Megan stops next to Cueball as White Hat has his finger raised.] White Hat: Actually, the new decade doesn't start- Ponytail: Mostly, I'm just glad we can go back to attributing cultural trends to decades instead of generations.\n[All four just stand normal.] Cueball: Yeah. Cueball: Decades were silly, but making everything about \"millennials\" turned out to be even worse. Ponytail: Seriously.\n[Only White Hat and Ponytail are shown, both with their arms held out to the sides.] White Hat: It's technically not a new decade until 2021 . Ponytail: OK, listen. Ponytail: If you're going to be pedantic, you should at least be right. White Hat: I am right! Ponytail: You're not .\n[Zoom in on White Hat and Ponytail's upper bodies as they gesture towards each other both raising their hands palm up. Megan interrupts them from off panel, as made clear in the next panel. Her voice comes out of a starburst on the left panel frame.] White Hat: See, the 20 th century didn't start until-- Ponytail: But decades aren't centuries. They're not cardinally numbered. White Hat: You don't get it. Let me draw a-- Ponytail: No, you don't-- Megan (off-panel): Stop!\n[All four characters are displayed again. Megan has raised a finger and all the others look at her.] Megan: I can resolve this. Megan: *Ahem* Megan: MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This (1990) was featured in I Love the '90s , not '80s . Ponytail: ...That settles that. White Hat: Yeah, I accept VH1's authority. White Hat: You win.\n","explanation":"This comic was released on the first day of the year 2020 . It was the second of two New Year comics around the 2019-2020 New Year, after 2248: New Year's Eve .\nThe comic opens with Megan , Cueball , White Hat , and Ponytail celebrating the new year and discussing their relief that the change of decade brings with it two beneficial side-effects; firstly, they can now unambiguously name the decade \"the 20s\", and secondly, since the decade has a well-defined name, any cultural trends that begin in the 20s can be attributed to the decade itself, and not to the generation that happens to coincide with it.\nWhite Hat, however, tries a couple of times to raise a pedantic objection: he believes that the new decade does not \"officially\" start until 2021.\nPonytail corrects him on this, but he refuses to accept the correction until Megan cites an unlikely source: the fact that the VH1 television show I Love the '90s categorized MC Hammer's 1990 single \" U Can't Touch This \" as a 90s song, which supports Ponytail's definition of decade. The joke is that a pop culture documentary is not an authoritative source for definitions of time standards, yet for some reason everyone is willing to accept its authority on such matters anyway.\nThe disagreement over the definition of when decades start is due to the fact that there is more than one way to count decades. You could do it in one of the following two ways:\nWhite Hat's definition is an \"ordinal\" method, since it functions by counting the number of ten-year spans since the first one , which is defined to have begun in the year 1. However, Ponytail's definition is the \"cardinal\" method, which simply groups years by their common most significant digits. For example, when we say \"the 1980s\", we mean \"the span of ten years that all began with the digits 1-9-8\".\nNeither definition is wrong, however Ponytail's definition is the more common one, and she notes that this is not how decades are typically determined (the show isn't called \"I Love the 200th Decade\"), and the fact that we count centuries in an ordinal way does not mean that we should do the same with decades.\nWhite Hat's objection (probably deliberately) recalls an issue that was frequently discussed around the year 2000.  Because we do count centuries ordinally (eg. \"1st century\", \"20th century\", etc.), and the first century began on the year 1, the 21st century did not technically start until 2001. Much of the world, not understanding this (or not caring), celebrated the dawning of the year 2000 as the start of both a new century and a new millenium, ignoring those who point out the change wouldn't happen for another year. (Though it should be noted unlike decades this is a genuine mistake rather than two slightly different definitions.)\nMegan's exclamation \"Stop!\" is similar to the line famously used by MC Hammer in \"U Can't Touch This\" (\"Stop! Hammer time.\").\n\" Aughts \" and \"Teens\" were names suggested for the 2000s and 2010s respectively; however, neither of those names managed to gain widespread acceptance.\nMillennials is a name given to the generation which was born in the 80s and 90s, such that they began entering adulthood in the 2000s. The term was sometimes used pejoratively by older generations who view millennials as immature or complacent, particularly during the 2010s. The comic speculates that millennials may have been unfairly targeted due to the fact that the decade didn't have an easily-identifiable name; if it had, then people might have attributed their misgivings about modern culture to the decade itself, instead of singling out a demographic. This phenomenon was previously discussed in 1849: Decades .\nContinuing the dubious \"proof\" offered by Megan, the title text goes on to use the Billboard Best of the 80s chart as proof that the 1980s started in 1980, as their chart includes Blondie's \" Call Me \", which was released in 1980. The title text ends with QED (\"quod erat demonstrandum\"), which means \"which was [necessary] to be shown\", and is traditionally used at the end of a mathematical proof, as if this second landmark piece of evidence proves Megan's point as conclusively as a mathematical proof.\n[Megan walks in from the left greeting Cueball, White Hat, and Ponytail standing next to each other, the last two looking in her direction.] Megan: Happy new decade! Ponytail: Welcome to the '20s! White Hat: Actually\u2014 Ponytail: I'm excited we can name decades again. Ponytail: \"Aughts\" and \"teens\" never caught on.\n[Megan stops next to Cueball as White Hat has his finger raised.] White Hat: Actually, the new decade doesn't start- Ponytail: Mostly, I'm just glad we can go back to attributing cultural trends to decades instead of generations.\n[All four just stand normal.] Cueball: Yeah. Cueball: Decades were silly, but making everything about \"millennials\" turned out to be even worse. Ponytail: Seriously.\n[Only White Hat and Ponytail are shown, both with their arms held out to the sides.] White Hat: It's technically not a new decade until 2021 . Ponytail: OK, listen. Ponytail: If you're going to be pedantic, you should at least be right. White Hat: I am right! Ponytail: You're not .\n[Zoom in on White Hat and Ponytail's upper bodies as they gesture towards each other both raising their hands palm up. Megan interrupts them from off panel, as made clear in the next panel. Her voice comes out of a starburst on the left panel frame.] White Hat: See, the 20 th century didn't start until-- Ponytail: But decades aren't centuries. They're not cardinally numbered. White Hat: You don't get it. Let me draw a-- Ponytail: No, you don't-- Megan (off-panel): Stop!\n[All four characters are displayed again. Megan has raised a finger and all the others look at her.] Megan: I can resolve this. Megan: *Ahem* Megan: MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This (1990) was featured in I Love the '90s , not '80s . Ponytail: ...That settles that. White Hat: Yeah, I accept VH1's authority. White Hat: You win.\n"}
{"id":2250,"title":"OK\/okay\/ok","image_title":"OK\/okay\/ok","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2250","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ok_okay_ok.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2250:_OK\/okay\/ok","transcript":"[Four different ways to write the word \"okay\" are presented with a caption below each version.] okay Normal\nok Normal\nOK Kind of old\nO.K. Like an alien impersonating a human\n[Caption below the panel:] How your spelling of \"okay\" makes you sound\n","explanation":"This comic states how you 'sound' (as the typical narrative voice in your readers' collective heads) based on how you spell the word \"OK\" in your text.\nThe word \" OK \", per Wikipedia, \"is an American English word denoting approval, acceptance, agreement, assent, acknowledgment, or a sign of indifference.\" Many etymologies have been proposed to explain its origin.  The Oxford English Dictionary and most other modern dictionaries say that it began in 1839 as \"O.K.\", a fanciful abbreviation for \"oll korrect\" (all correct).\nAccording to Randall , modern usage is to either have both letters in lowercase \"ok\", or the expression as a single word, with the sounds spelled phonetically: \"okay\". Using OK with both capital letters is kind of old, as the expression is almost never thought of as an abbreviation anymore. The original spelling of the word as \"O.K.\" with periods after the letters is less commonly used in modern times, so Randall equates this usage to \"an alien impersonating a human\". (See for instance the last picture in this comic, 1530: Keyboard Mash for who might use that spelling).\nIn the title text Gretchen McCulloch , a Canadian Internet linguist, is mentioned. She focuses on trends in use of English words in online communications. Randall claims that he consulted with her on the use of \"ok\" in his book How To and after changing back and forth between different options he settles for \"ok\". But he is still unsure which version to use, and claims he is now considering switching to \"oK.\", a strange spelling that \"compromises\" between the three abbreviations, having one lowercase letter, one capital letter, and only one period. And ending the sentence with an abbreviation with a period inside the quotation marks also makes it uncertain if he means \"oK\" or \"oK.\" as that can be debated. This was most likely on purpose knowing Randall's love for grammar rule and spelling. It is of course debated in this explanation's discussion.\nWikipedia says, \"Whether this word is printed as OK, Ok, ok, okay, or O.K. is a matter normally resolved in the style manual for the publication involved.\" So luckily Randall did not settle for \"oK.\" or \"oK\" in his book, which are not among the mentioned versions.\n[Four different ways to write the word \"okay\" are presented with a caption below each version.] okay Normal\nok Normal\nOK Kind of old\nO.K. Like an alien impersonating a human\n[Caption below the panel:] How your spelling of \"okay\" makes you sound\n"}
{"id":2251,"title":"Alignment Chart Alignment Chart","image_title":"Alignment Chart Alignment Chart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2251","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alignment_chart_alignment_chart.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2251:_Alignment_Chart_Alignment_Chart","transcript":"[A 3\u00d73 grid of squares. Each square contains a label at the top and a drawing of a chart, and each square has a caption below it. From left to right, a row at a time:]\nSoil Chart\n[describe this chart here]\nLawful Good\nPunnett Square\n[describe this chart here]\nNeutral Good\nIPA Vowel Chart\n[describe this chart here]\nChaotic Good\nPhase Diagram\n[describe this chart here]\nLawful Neutral\nAlignment Chart\n[A 3\u00d73 grid of nine empty squares, each with an unreadable label below it.]\nTrue Neutral\nCIE Chromaticity Diagram\n[describe this chart here]\nChaotic Neutral\nPolitical Compass\n[describe this chart here]\nLawful Evil\nQAPF Rock Diagram\n[The diagram is a rhombus with each corner labeled: \u2018Q\u2019 at the top, \u2018A\u2019 at the left, \u2018P\u2019 at the right, and \u2018F\u2019 at the bottom. The diagram is divided into trapezoids and triangles, each with labels. The writing in most subdivisions are unreadable. The readable subdivisions:]\nNeutral Evil\nOmnispace Classifier\nChaotic Evil\n[describe this chart here]\n\n","explanation":"\"Alignment\" and \"alignment charts\" come from tabletop roleplaying games, most prominently Dungeons & Dragons . Every character has an alignment , which very roughly identifies their tendencies. The most widely used alignment system was introduced in the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set in 1977 and has been reused in many (but not all) subsequent editions of the game. This system uses two perpendicular axes, each divided into three levels (for a total of nine categories). The two axes are:\nIn this system, the \"lawful\" attribute is independent from the \"good\" attribute.  Lawful alignment means that a character is committed to a set of rules, which can refer to actual established laws, or to something like a rigid personal code, a set of traditions, or a chain of command, while a chaotic alignment means that a character has no interest in those, and may actively oppose them. The good vs evil scale is generally based on a character's concern for the lives and well-being of others; a good character will actively seek to help others and prevent harm, while an evil character will have no such concern and may actively harm others. Being 'good' is assumed to be independent of being 'lawful'. For example, a character who actively breaks laws to help those who are unjustly imprisoned or oppressed would be be considered to be \"chaotic good\".  In both cases, a neutral alignment can indicate a character's indifference to a concept, or that their commitment is conditional, or that they consciously seek to balance both sides. A character with the \"neutral neutral\" alignment is called a true neutral.\nAn alignment chart is a grid that divides the alignments, usually for the purpose of putting descriptions or particular characters on it. Alignment charts are frequently used as a meme template , where humorous or absurdist things are organized into different alignments. In addition to the \"classic\" Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart, there are a number of variant alignment charts in use as meme templates. Many keep the three-by-three grid structure but replace the lawful-neutral-chaotic and good-neutral-evil axes with descriptions.\nThis comic claims to be a meta-alignment chart, where nine \"alignment charts\" are themselves sorted into the nine Dungeons and Dragons alignments, following the use of alignment charts to humorously classify abstract concepts. However, these \"alignment charts\" are mostly diagrams used in academic classifications, which are being treated as if they were blank meme templates. There are two levels of absurdity here: first, the idea of using these diagrams to classify things they were never intended for, and second, the conflation of chaos as a physics concept and an assigned moral weight as it applies to each of these classification systems.\nThe title text describes Randall's alignment as \"lawful heterozygous silty liquid\" which references the true neutral, neutral good, lawful good, and lawful neutral charts in the Alignment Chart Alignment Chart. Lawful is the left side of an alignment chart, heterozygous is the top right or bottom left of a Punnet Square, silty is the bottom right of a soil chart, and liquid is the top right of a phase diagram. As such, the title text describes Randall's alignment as between Lawful Neutral and Neutral Good on this chart.\nAn alignment chart was also featured in 2408: Egg Strategies , which was published exactly one year later.\n[A 3\u00d73 grid of squares. Each square contains a label at the top and a drawing of a chart, and each square has a caption below it. From left to right, a row at a time:]\nSoil Chart\n[describe this chart here]\nLawful Good\nPunnett Square\n[describe this chart here]\nNeutral Good\nIPA Vowel Chart\n[describe this chart here]\nChaotic Good\nPhase Diagram\n[describe this chart here]\nLawful Neutral\nAlignment Chart\n[A 3\u00d73 grid of nine empty squares, each with an unreadable label below it.]\nTrue Neutral\nCIE Chromaticity Diagram\n[describe this chart here]\nChaotic Neutral\nPolitical Compass\n[describe this chart here]\nLawful Evil\nQAPF Rock Diagram\n[The diagram is a rhombus with each corner labeled: \u2018Q\u2019 at the top, \u2018A\u2019 at the left, \u2018P\u2019 at the right, and \u2018F\u2019 at the bottom. The diagram is divided into trapezoids and triangles, each with labels. The writing in most subdivisions are unreadable. The readable subdivisions:]\nNeutral Evil\nOmnispace Classifier\nChaotic Evil\n[describe this chart here]\n\n"}
{"id":2252,"title":"Parenthetical Names","image_title":"Parenthetical Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2252","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/parenthetical_names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2252:_Parenthetical_Names","transcript":"[Cueball is typing on his smartphone. Three messages appear in gray boxes above him:] Do you want to go see Sonic (the Hedgehog)? Why are there so many books about Jack (the Ripper)? I didn't know Robin Williams once played Popeye (the Sailor Man)\n[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Whenever I mention anyone called \"<Name> the <X>,\" I put \"the <X>\" in parentheses, like I added it as a clarification.\n","explanation":"This is another comic in the My Hobby series.\nParentheses are generally used in a sentence to add additional information that clarifies the topic. For example, in the sentence, \" Barack Obama (a Democrat) is the 44th President of the United States,\" the parenthetical clause clarifies who Obama is, but is not strictly necessary to the sentence. However, in the comic, Randall uses parentheses for people where the parantheses are not encircling a clarification but rather the person's title. In a sense, it is like putting someone's last name in brackets, e.g. Randall (Munroe).\nSonic the Hedgehog is a video game franchise featuring the eponymous Sonic the Hedgehog character. A film featuring the character titled Sonic the Hedgehog was released February 2020. When the first trailer was released, the public reacted with shock and horror at the movie's design of Sonic, who was said to fall into the \" uncanny valley \" by being too anthropomorphic and not cartoony enough.  The design was hastily re-developed, which was received much more favorably; evidently, Cueball has warmed to the movie and is asking his friends if they want to go see it. Sonic is also the name of a train , a restaurant franchise , and a Californian internet service provider , among other things Randall is trying to avoid confusing the movie with.  Perhaps Randall's friends often go to see the restaurant.\nJack the Ripper is the name attributed to a serial killer active in London in 1888. His true identity has never been confirmed, and he has been featured in hundreds of works . \"Jack\" is one of the most-common given names for males in much of the Anglosphere (which is probably why it was adopted, like John is for Messers Doe , Smith and (Q.) Public). Technically Randall should not be using parentheses for any of the three names, but here it is extra important as Jack due to being a common name would not make people immediately think of Jack the Ripper if somebody simply says \"Jack\".\nAmerican actor Robin Williams played Popeye the Sailor in the 1980 musical-comedy film Popeye . Popeye's theme song is titled \"I'm Popeye the Sailor Man\". Popeye the Sailor is the best-known character named \"Popeye\", so it is a little unusual that Randall would have to clarify which Popeye he is referring to. Other Popeyes include Jimmy \"Popeye\" Doyle from The French Connection and the criminal Popeye from William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary .  Like \"Sonic\", there is a restaurant chain named \" Popeyes \", which is the second-largest fast-food chicken restaurant chain in the world (after KFC).  The founder of Popeyes claimed he named the restaurant after the French Connection character, and not the sailor, but from 1971 to 2006, Popeyes did license the cartoon characters and used them in promotions.\nThe title-text alters the pattern slightly by discussing the Battle of Midway (i.e. the X of Y).  This case has additional humor because Randall clarifies which battle he is talking about, but not which of the several movies depicting the battle (although he was most likely referring to the film released in November 2019, simply called Midway ).\n[Cueball is typing on his smartphone. Three messages appear in gray boxes above him:] Do you want to go see Sonic (the Hedgehog)? Why are there so many books about Jack (the Ripper)? I didn't know Robin Williams once played Popeye (the Sailor Man)\n[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Whenever I mention anyone called \"<Name> the <X>,\" I put \"the <X>\" in parentheses, like I added it as a clarification.\n"}
{"id":2253,"title":"Star Wars Voyager 1","image_title":"Star Wars Voyager 1","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2253","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/star_wars_voyager_1.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2253:_Star_Wars_Voyager_1","transcript":"[Cueball is looking down at the smartphone he is holding in one hand, while he is holding his other hand's finger up in the air. He is standing behind an armchair where Megan is sitting reading a book or paper. She holds it open with both hands. She has turned her head halfway towards him. Sitting on the floor in front of her is Beret Guy, legs bent and leaning back resting on one hand, with his phone in the other hand.] Cueball: The time it takes light to travel between Earth and Voyager 1 is exactly equal to the combined runtime of Star Wars episodes I-IX...\n[A slim beat panel, showing only Cueball standing in the same pose as in the first panel.]\n[Cueball looks up from his phone and raises his finger higher up. Megan has turned back to reading. Beret Guy looks up, and he has put his phone on the floor to put his, now free, hand on his heart, while singing, as indicated both with nodes before and after the lyrics he sings as well as letting his speech line start at a starburst near his head, rather than just beginning near the head, as normally.] Cueball: ... Now! Megan: Weird that I don't hear any fireworks. Beret Guy (singing): Should ollld acquaintance be forgooot\n","explanation":"Cueball has added together all the runtimes of the Star Wars movies (episodes I-IX) and then calculated the exact time at which a message sent to Voyager 1 will have that exact duration in light speed delay. He announces this information to Megan and Beret Guy only seconds before it occurs, allowing him to signal the moment by saying \"Now!\", after waiting in the beat panel.\nMegan expresses surprise that the event isn't being celebrated with fireworks. Judging by the fact that she doesn't look up from her book, her surprise is sarcastic. Beret Guy breaks into song with the New Year's traditional \" Auld Lang Syne \".\nThis comic highlights an interesting relationship between the Star Wars Episodes and the NASA Space Probe \"Voyager 1\", which most likely no one else has thought about, but most likely fitting well with fans of both xkcd and Star Wars .\nThe original Star Wars film was released on May 25th, 1977, only four months before Voyager 1 was launched on September 5th, 1977. The last film was released more than 42.5 years later on December 20th, 2019, only three weeks before this comic.\nVoyager 1 was, with a distance of 148.68 Astronomical units (22.2 billion km; 13.8 billion mi) from Earth as of December 26, 2019, the most distant human-made object from Earth. This data is given with reference in the Wikipedia article for Voyager 1. That was less than a week after the release of the new movie. That is approximately 20.6 light hours away. With the recently released last episode the total viewing time of the nine episodes is 20.35 hours (not including the spin-off movies). So a discrepancy of 15 minutes. This could be explained by the title text.\nIn the mission status of the two Voyager probes there were a One-Way Light Time of 20 hours 36 minutes and 46 seconds on the day the comic was released. This corresponds to 20.613 light hours, only the 46 seconds deviation from exactly 20.6 hours.\nThis is an odd coincidence that Cueball\/ Randall saw significant enough to mark with a timer and acknowledgment to Megan and Beret Guy (and the rest of the fans of xkcd).\nIn the title text Randall notes that there can be different ways of measuring run times, both if you do not count credits into the runtime or with more than one version existing of at least the original trilogies films, with added extra footage. This means that if you choose the longest possible run time, you may still have a chance to throw a party for some time to come, as every extra minute of film will add time before Voyager 1 reaches that extra light minute.\nHowever as demonstrated in the Table of runtime below, then only for the very longest versions would this have worked around the time of the release of the movie. Now, three weeks later it is too late.\nWhen Voyager 1 left the heliosphere it was traveling at about 17 kilometers per second (11 mi\/s), making it the fastest heliocentric recession speed of any spacecraft, and it is not really slowing down. (Do note that the speed with which it travels from Earth is not the same since Earth is in orbit around the Sun and sometimes travels faster towards Voyager 1 than Voyager 1 leaves the sun, but then Earth turns and goes the other way!)\nSince a light minute is 1.799\u00d710 7 kilometers it takes Voyager 1 12.25 days to travel this far. So for every minute added to the run time, the party start time will be delayed by more than 12 days. However, it is already 14 days since the distance given on Wikipedia, so more than one extra minute is needed to postpone the party to after the release day of the comic.\nThe last possible chance is to assume that all run times have been rounded down, which could add anywhere from a half a minute to almost 9 full minutes if they round 125.9 down to 125, and not only rounded 125.4 (and not rounding 125.5 up). Actually, assuming all runtimes are rounded down, it is realistic that there is on average half a minute extra runtime per episode making 4.5 minutes extra time. This would buy 55 extra days from the 26th of December... But to find this out correctly, someone would need to review all the 9 episodes from the very first second to the very last of the most extended versions. It seems that it could still be possible to find a day where the party can still be held after the release day of the comic.\nIn the extreme case that all movies went 59 seconds over a full minute, but all times are rounded down, it would add 8 minutes and 51 seconds. This could give 108 extra days from 2019-12-26, meaning that Easter Sunday 2020 (2020-04-12) would be the last possible day for such a party.\nThis may also be a play on the confusion between the Star Wars and the Star Trek franchises. In the case of Star Trek, the very first movie dealt with a Voyager probe (Voyager 6 in this case), and the number of hours and quantity of Star Trek movies rivals and exceeds that of the main Star Wars movies; about 25 and a half hours between 13 movies.  Maybe we'll see this in an xkcd when Voyager gets a little further away?\n[Cueball is looking down at the smartphone he is holding in one hand, while he is holding his other hand's finger up in the air. He is standing behind an armchair where Megan is sitting reading a book or paper. She holds it open with both hands. She has turned her head halfway towards him. Sitting on the floor in front of her is Beret Guy, legs bent and leaning back resting on one hand, with his phone in the other hand.] Cueball: The time it takes light to travel between Earth and Voyager 1 is exactly equal to the combined runtime of Star Wars episodes I-IX...\n[A slim beat panel, showing only Cueball standing in the same pose as in the first panel.]\n[Cueball looks up from his phone and raises his finger higher up. Megan has turned back to reading. Beret Guy looks up, and he has put his phone on the floor to put his, now free, hand on his heart, while singing, as indicated both with nodes before and after the lyrics he sings as well as letting his speech line start at a starburst near his head, rather than just beginning near the head, as normally.] Cueball: ... Now! Megan: Weird that I don't hear any fireworks. Beret Guy (singing): Should ollld acquaintance be forgooot\n"}
{"id":2254,"title":"JPEG2000","image_title":"JPEG2000","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2254","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/jpeg2000.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2254:_JPEG2000","transcript":"[Cueball and Hairbun are sitting on office chairs opposite each other on a shared desktop with a small division wall between them. They are both working on their own respective computers.]\n[Cueball leans back and stops typing. Hairbun continues to type.]\n[Cueball makes a statement as he looks over at Hairbun who looks back at him when she replies. She has moved one hand off the keyboard down to her lap. Cueball's keyboard has disappeared!] Cueball: I'm starting to worry that JPEG 2000 isn't catching on as fast as we expected. Hairbun: Don't worry! We're in this for the long haul.\n","explanation":"JPEG2000 is a standard for digital image storage created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group from 1997 to 2000 to improve on the original JPEG standard, published in 1992. The original JPEG standard is the most widely used image format in the world for both digital cameras and the World Wide Web, while the newer and improved JPEG2000 standard is relatively rare.  As of 2020, it is supported by Photoshop, the Safari browser, and GIMP, but it remains unsupported or poorly supported by other popular software, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers. Meanwhile, competing format WebP which appeared 10 years later is supported in all major browsers and has much wider support in other applications as well.\nAs a result, the conventional file name extensions for files using the JPEG2000 standard, .jp2 and .jpx, remain unfamiliar to many users while the .jpg extension, denoting the original standard, is well known.\nThe JPEG2000 standard was seen as an improvement by its creators, supporting many features not included in the original standard, such as multiple resolutions, progressive transmission, a lossless compression option, and alpha channel transparency.  The complexity of fully implementing the standard, as well as patent concerns, may have slowed adoption.\nCueball and Hairbun seem to have some desire for or stake in JPEG2000 adoption. Cueball begins to worry after more than 20 years without much progress but Hairbun is confident that it will eventually prevail, and she cares more about its eventual use than rapid adoption.\nThe core concept of this comic is that engineers often expect that a superior technology or standard will catch on, though often other factors keep an \"inferior\" standard dominant. (See various comics referencing Dvorak keyboards, as well as the term \" betamaxed .\")\nThe \"we are in this for the long haul\" statement might refer to the engineers believing that superior technology will eventually win despite the evidence to the contrary. Its humor comes from the fact that as of the comic publication in 2020, JPEG2000 shows no sign of becoming a widely-used standard.\nThe title text suggests that Randall feels bad that the standard hasn't been adopted, perhaps because he empathizes with the engineers who worked hard to develop it or anthropomorphizes the standard itself, which has been ignored by most of the computer-using world. Also he may actually believe it is the better standard that should have been more widely used. DCI, short for Digital Cinema Initiatives , is a collaboration of several major film studios to establish standards for the security and proper display of digital films. Version 1.0 of the DCI\u2019s \u201cDigital Cinema System Specification\u201d was released in 2005.\n[Cueball and Hairbun are sitting on office chairs opposite each other on a shared desktop with a small division wall between them. They are both working on their own respective computers.]\n[Cueball leans back and stops typing. Hairbun continues to type.]\n[Cueball makes a statement as he looks over at Hairbun who looks back at him when she replies. She has moved one hand off the keyboard down to her lap. Cueball's keyboard has disappeared!] Cueball: I'm starting to worry that JPEG 2000 isn't catching on as fast as we expected. Hairbun: Don't worry! We're in this for the long haul.\n"}
{"id":2255,"title":"Tattoo Ideas","image_title":"Tattoo Ideas","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2255","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tattoo_ideas.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2255:_Tattoo_Ideas","transcript":"[A list with an underlined heading and then 14 items, the first 13 being struck out with a red line. The red lines are straight through the center of the text if the item is only on one line. The red lines are curly up and down if the items take up more than one line on the list. The last item has a red line around it in an ellipse.]\nTattoo Ideas Lorem Ipsum Text Email password Graph of the popularity of tattoos over time, with the date I got the tattoo marked (update regularly) \"Changeme\" Slide rule markings on forearms Eurion constellation, so no one can photocopy pictures of me The sentence \"it's what my tattoo says\" written in another language Tissot's Indicatrix Summary of the Snopes page on the tattoo epidural thing (lower back) Pre-surgical checklist Tattoo artist's social security number Boarding pass for an upcoming flight Recap of the plot of Memento This list, in its entirety\n","explanation":"This comic is a list of potential tattoo ideas. Many of them play on the trope of regretting a tattoo by being tattoos of things that would not be useful outside of the immediate future, while others are simply ludicrous ideas with little functionality.\nA tattoo by nature is designed to be permanent and difficult to change or remove.  A lot of the jokes below describe things that are designed to be impermanent and\/or change frequently.\n[A list with an underlined heading and then 14 items, the first 13 being struck out with a red line. The red lines are straight through the center of the text if the item is only on one line. The red lines are curly up and down if the items take up more than one line on the list. The last item has a red line around it in an ellipse.]\nTattoo Ideas Lorem Ipsum Text Email password Graph of the popularity of tattoos over time, with the date I got the tattoo marked (update regularly) \"Changeme\" Slide rule markings on forearms Eurion constellation, so no one can photocopy pictures of me The sentence \"it's what my tattoo says\" written in another language Tissot's Indicatrix Summary of the Snopes page on the tattoo epidural thing (lower back) Pre-surgical checklist Tattoo artist's social security number Boarding pass for an upcoming flight Recap of the plot of Memento This list, in its entirety\n"}
{"id":2256,"title":"Bad Map Projection South America","image_title":"Bad Map Projection: South America","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2256","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bad_map_projection_south_america.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2256:_Bad_Map_Projection:_South_America","transcript":"[A map of the world, but every landmass has been replaced with South America, rotated and resized to roughly match the real landmasses they represent. South America is correct, except that the islands at the southern tip of the continent also have been switched to a small South America.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Bad Map Projection #358: Oops, all South Americas!\n","explanation":"This is the third comic in the series of Bad Map Projections displaying Bad Map Projection #358: Oops, all South Americas!. It came almost three years after the second 1799: Bad Map Projection: Time Zones (#79) (3 years after the first). And was first followed one and a half year later by 2489: Bad Map Projection: The Greenland Special (#299).\nThe comic shows a map projection in which every continent and large island has just been replaced with a differently scaled and rotated version of the continent of South America .\nBy overlaying this map with the selection of map projections presented in 977: Map Projections , it seems that the \"underlying\" projection used here is the Winkel tripel projection , also used in 2242: Ground vs Air .\nThe comic is similar to joke map designs in which continents like Africa and South America have been swapped, or where someone will jokingly replace Greenland with South America.\nThe caption of the comic is a reference to the Cap'n Crunch cereal type that became a meme, Oops! All Berries .\nInterestingly on the original South America, the archipelago or main island (hard to tell) of Tierra del Fuego is replaced with a small South America, while all other South Americas, including the one replacing the Tierra del Fuego, include it in their shape.\nThe title text claims that the map projection does a good job preserving distance and azimuth, the joke being that the distance and azimuth being preserved for the non-South America continents are those of South America and not the original continent. Note that for the map as drawn in the comic, while this is true for most of the larger landmasses, many of the smaller South Americas are distorted more significantly (such as the South Americas that replace New Zealand).\nFrom roughly left to right and top to bottom, the South Americas replace:\nThese are the 26 largest non-Antarctic landmasses, plus 2 peninsulas of those landmasses, and 8 more islands.\nSee also related comics with map changes in comics 1500: Upside-Down Map and 1653: United States Map .\n[A map of the world, but every landmass has been replaced with South America, rotated and resized to roughly match the real landmasses they represent. South America is correct, except that the islands at the southern tip of the continent also have been switched to a small South America.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Bad Map Projection #358: Oops, all South Americas!\n"}
{"id":2257,"title":"Unsubscribe Message","image_title":"Unsubscribe Message","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2257","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unsubscribe_message.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2257:_Unsubscribe_Message","transcript":"Caption: Choosing the right emotional tone for your unsubscribe message\n[A window labelled \"Very Negative\"] Website: You want to unsubscribe?!?! How could you do this to us?! We need you!!! \u2717\u2717\u2717 Very Bad\n[A window labelled \"Negative\"] Website: We're sad to see you go\u00a0:( \u2717 Not Great\n[A window labelled \"Neutral\"] Website: You have been unsubscribed. \u2713 Perfect\n[A window labelled \"Positive\"] Website: Success! You have been unsubscribed!! \u2713 A little weird\n[A window labelled \"Very Positive\"] Website: You have been unsubscribed. This is the best gift you could have given us. Thank you. \u2717\u2717\u2717 Very Bad\n","explanation":"When a website offers a subscription service (e.g., an email newsletter), they will offer the opportunity to unsubscribe from the service in the event that the subscriber is no longer interested in the service, or discovers that the service is not what they thought it was. As with any online process, subscribing and unsubscribing require messages to inform the viewer that the process has completed as intended. Some sites also request confirmation when unsubscribing, to prevent accidentally unsubscribing due to a mistyped URL or a misclicked link.\nThis comment explores the different \"moods\" that unsubscribe messages can carry, taking standard examples and pushing them further than is normally seen. It also pokes fun at the trend for websites to guilt users when they unsubscribe (or try to guilt them out of it before they complete the process), which is widespread among new-age website design and some examples of which can be seen at \/r\/Clickshaming\/ . The first example appears to be a message in the confirmation phase, while the others are messages that the unsubscription is complete.\nThe first message is of a \"very negative\" mood, where the \"confirmation\" message begs to know why the user dared to unsubscribe to the service, sounding either very angry or alarmingly desperate, as if the service is endangered by the user's unsubscribing. This can be very off-putting and would be very likely to confirm to the user that they made the right choice; hearing such an aggressively needy tone when they leave could make them feel like they escaped something instead, and thus it is given three red X marks and ranked \"Very Bad\".\nThe second message is of a more controlled \"negative\" mood; the \"process complete\" message tells the viewer that they will be missed with a sad emoticon accompanying it. Although not quite so bad as the forceful clinginess of the \"very negative\" message, this one can still come across as an attempt to guilt the user into re-subscribing; thus it is rated with one red X and the label \"Not Great\".\nThe third message is of a fully \"neutral\" mood; the \"process complete\" message is simply a matter-of-fact statement that the user has been successfully unsubscribed from the service. Randall seems to consider this the optimal mood for an unsubscribe message to carry; thus it is rated with a green check mark and the label \"Perfect\".\nThe fourth message is of a \"positive\" mood; the \"process complete\" message cheerfully proclaims that the attempt to unsubscribe has been completed. This is the most common mood for many services that attempt to avoid emotionless, robotic messages; however, in this particular instance, it can come across as somewhat unnerving, since no service should seem happy to see a user leave. The tone also comes across like a proclamation of the sort you would see in a video game text box, making the action feel like an achievement, which wouldn't make sense for a company to do. This mood is rated with a green check mark, but also with the label \"A Little Weird\".\nThe fifth message is \"very positive\", where the \"process complete\" message expresses relief that the user has chosen to unsubscribe from their service, as though their subscription in the first place had been some sort of burden upon the service, and indeed, their leaving is stated to be the best thing to happen to the service. Like the \"very negative\" message, this response is likely to assure the user never returns, since they have been indirectly insulted and told \"good riddance\".\nThe title text expands on the joke by combining the positive reaction to unsubscribing with a more negative tone, which supports the user's choice to unsubscribe because they were unwanted. This references the 1% rule , which states that for users of an online service only approximately 1% will be significantly active.\nCaption: Choosing the right emotional tone for your unsubscribe message\n[A window labelled \"Very Negative\"] Website: You want to unsubscribe?!?! How could you do this to us?! We need you!!! \u2717\u2717\u2717 Very Bad\n[A window labelled \"Negative\"] Website: We're sad to see you go\u00a0:( \u2717 Not Great\n[A window labelled \"Neutral\"] Website: You have been unsubscribed. \u2713 Perfect\n[A window labelled \"Positive\"] Website: Success! You have been unsubscribed!! \u2713 A little weird\n[A window labelled \"Very Positive\"] Website: You have been unsubscribed. This is the best gift you could have given us. Thank you. \u2717\u2717\u2717 Very Bad\n"}
{"id":2258,"title":"Solar System Changes","image_title":"Solar System Changes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2258","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/solar_system_changes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2258:_Solar_System_Changes","transcript":"[A not-to-scale diagram of the solar system is shown with the right edge of the sun on the left side, featuring all eight planets along with their major moons, Pluto (along with its major moon), and the asteroid belt. The original solar system is drawn in black, but several changes have been proposed. If some of the existing planets are removed or changed, they are greyed out, possibly with red crosses over them or red circles or arrows. New planets, moons, rings and asteroids have been added all in red. Each change has been labeled with red text. Only the Sun and Mercury are completely unchanged, Earth and Neptune are not changed directly but their moons have changed. The only black text is a caption at the top:] Changes I Would Make to the Solar System\n[Below each of the changes to the solar system is mentioned from left to right, with their labels, that are all in red text. Except for the label under Jupiter and Saturn, there is a line going from the changes to the relevant label.]\n[Three additional planets, one Mercury sized and two smaller on either side very close to each other, have been drawn in between Mercury and the Sun. A bracket marks all three of them and a long line goes from that to the label above, which is even above the next label positioned above the planets.] Add mysterious planets inside Mercury's orbit\n[A ring has been drawn around Venus, and a dot representing a moon has been added on its left. A small line goes from the label beneath to Venus.] After what it's been through, Venus deserves rings and a moon\n[Next to Earth, drawn with four of the major continents visible, the Moon has been grayed out and crossed out with a red X. Also Mars has been grayed out and it is inside a red circle. An arrow goes from the circle around Mars to the Moon. a small line goes from the arrow between the Moon and Mars to the label above the planets.] Replace our moon with Mars. Mars is more interesting and we can consolidate missions.\n[An additional planet, all in red, has been added between Mars and the asteroid belt, about halfway in size between Earth and Neptune. Four continents are visible in a large ocean, along with weather patterns as in an atmosphere. A small line goes from the planet to the label beneath.] The Solar System needs a super-Earth\n[Numerous asteroids have been drawn, half in black, with the other half in red added to the existing asteroids that were already there. A small line goes from the asteroids to the label beneath.] More asteroids!\n[Jupiter and Saturn have both been greyed out and also crossed out with two red X'es. Two arrows points from each of the original planets to a new larger red planet drawn above the two. This new planet has the belts, zones, Red Spot, and size of Jupiter, and the hexagon on the north pole and rings of Saturn. It also has the four largest moons from Jupiter on one side and the largest moon from Saturn on the other side, with all five drawn similarly to the original moons. Below the two original planets is a label.] Merge the big planet and the ringed planet into a big ringed planet (\"Jaturn\")\n[Uranus is greyed out and also crossed out with a red X. A line goes down to the label beneath it.] Cut Uranus. Uranus and Neptune are redundant and Neptune is better. Tough but fair.\n[Pluto and Charon have both been greyed out and are inside a red circle. An arrow points from Pluto and Charon to the right side of Neptune, where Pluto and Charon have been redrawn in red. Neptune's own largest moon is on the other side of Neptune. A line goes from the arrow up to a label above the planet.] Settle the planet thing by making Pluto a moon of Neptune\n","explanation":"This comic shows a drawing with a standard sketch of the Solar System , featuring the Sun, 8 planets, the asteroid belt, and Pluto. Randall then proposes eight changes to the solar system that he would make if he had the power to do so. Each change is drawn in red with explanatory labels. Performing these changes would be impossible in practice [ citation needed ] , and would probably make the solar system unstable if actually performed [ citation needed ] .\nSee explanations of each proposed change in the table below.\nThe title text is being spoken by \"someone who knows [that] Jupiter is within earshot,\" implying that the speaker does not wish to offend Jupiter. While Jupiter does have its own ring system , it is so faint that it wasn't discovered until 1979. Considering that Jupiter is known to disrupt the asteroid belt and send asteroids towards the inner solar system (cf. Kirkwood gap ) and completely destroy other celestial bodies ( Comet Shoemaker\u2013Levy 9 ), someone who is \"within earshot\" of Jupiter may wish to reassure the planet that they think its ring system is already very impressive when they really don't.\nRandall has in the past proposed other types of ridiculous changes, such as in 1061: EST , 1069: Alphabet , and 1902: State Borders .\n[A not-to-scale diagram of the solar system is shown with the right edge of the sun on the left side, featuring all eight planets along with their major moons, Pluto (along with its major moon), and the asteroid belt. The original solar system is drawn in black, but several changes have been proposed. If some of the existing planets are removed or changed, they are greyed out, possibly with red crosses over them or red circles or arrows. New planets, moons, rings and asteroids have been added all in red. Each change has been labeled with red text. Only the Sun and Mercury are completely unchanged, Earth and Neptune are not changed directly but their moons have changed. The only black text is a caption at the top:] Changes I Would Make to the Solar System\n[Below each of the changes to the solar system is mentioned from left to right, with their labels, that are all in red text. Except for the label under Jupiter and Saturn, there is a line going from the changes to the relevant label.]\n[Three additional planets, one Mercury sized and two smaller on either side very close to each other, have been drawn in between Mercury and the Sun. A bracket marks all three of them and a long line goes from that to the label above, which is even above the next label positioned above the planets.] Add mysterious planets inside Mercury's orbit\n[A ring has been drawn around Venus, and a dot representing a moon has been added on its left. A small line goes from the label beneath to Venus.] After what it's been through, Venus deserves rings and a moon\n[Next to Earth, drawn with four of the major continents visible, the Moon has been grayed out and crossed out with a red X. Also Mars has been grayed out and it is inside a red circle. An arrow goes from the circle around Mars to the Moon. a small line goes from the arrow between the Moon and Mars to the label above the planets.] Replace our moon with Mars. Mars is more interesting and we can consolidate missions.\n[An additional planet, all in red, has been added between Mars and the asteroid belt, about halfway in size between Earth and Neptune. Four continents are visible in a large ocean, along with weather patterns as in an atmosphere. A small line goes from the planet to the label beneath.] The Solar System needs a super-Earth\n[Numerous asteroids have been drawn, half in black, with the other half in red added to the existing asteroids that were already there. A small line goes from the asteroids to the label beneath.] More asteroids!\n[Jupiter and Saturn have both been greyed out and also crossed out with two red X'es. Two arrows points from each of the original planets to a new larger red planet drawn above the two. This new planet has the belts, zones, Red Spot, and size of Jupiter, and the hexagon on the north pole and rings of Saturn. It also has the four largest moons from Jupiter on one side and the largest moon from Saturn on the other side, with all five drawn similarly to the original moons. Below the two original planets is a label.] Merge the big planet and the ringed planet into a big ringed planet (\"Jaturn\")\n[Uranus is greyed out and also crossed out with a red X. A line goes down to the label beneath it.] Cut Uranus. Uranus and Neptune are redundant and Neptune is better. Tough but fair.\n[Pluto and Charon have both been greyed out and are inside a red circle. An arrow points from Pluto and Charon to the right side of Neptune, where Pluto and Charon have been redrawn in red. Neptune's own largest moon is on the other side of Neptune. A line goes from the arrow up to a label above the planet.] Settle the planet thing by making Pluto a moon of Neptune\n"}
{"id":2259,"title":"Networking Problems","image_title":"Networking Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2259","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/networking_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2259:_Networking_Problems","transcript":"[A chart is shown with one horizontal line with 13 ticks (the first larger) and ending in an arrow. There are three labels along the line, at the start in the middle an towards the end before the arrow. Below are two clouds in gray with labels. The first cloud is long and it is getting thinner towards the right. It goes between the first and second label above the chart. The second blob is smaller and of equal thickness and it goes from the last label towards right. Above the chart is a heading and a subheading:] Types of Computer Problems By how much debugging them makes your brain stop working\n[The three labels above and the two in the clouds:] None Some A lot Normal problems Networking problems\n[Below the chart, only in the right part of the comic is a comic drawing. Cueball is kneeling before a rack of servers.  One of the server blades is extended and connected by a cable to a laptop sitting on a box, which Cueball is using.  Behind Cueball, there is a wireless router sitting on a stool, which is connected by a cable to another wireless router sitting on the floor, which is connected to another laptop. From behind him to the right an off-panel voice emanates from a starburst at the edge of the panel.] Cueball: Before noon, odd -numbered packets were laggy, but after noon, even -numbered ones are! It's the opposite of yesterday! Off-panel voice: Are you sure you're okay? Cueball: I'm fine and I believe in ghosts now!\n","explanation":"Computer problems are frequent and can be difficult to solve [ citation needed ] . Networking problems in particular can puzzle even seasoned people and sometimes seem to have arbitrary issues causing them. Packets are units of data transfer used in computer networking, and one measure of network performance is lag , the amount of time it takes for data to travel from one point to another (and perhaps back); saying a packet's transmission is 'laggy' means it is unacceptably slow.\nLag in packet transmission and other network performance measures can appear quite random. Just to start with, your ISP may be engaged in traffic shaping, which can do very weird things indeed to your packets (making the first megabyte of a transfer faster than any other, for example); now imagine that your ISP's ISP (usually known as an \"Upstream Provider\") is engaged in something similar, and you begin to see the scale of the problem. Wireless latency can relate to things as unexpected as where people are standing, what they are touching, the weather, viruses and other system compromises, network activity by other unseen users, and so on. Because humans are wired to perceive patterns, they will find them even in random data , a fallacy that Cueball is probably suffering from here. He variously attributes the network behavior he sees to the packet number being even vs. odd, packet arrival time being before vs. after noon, and packet arrival day being today vs. yesterday. Such a pattern would make sense if it were merely \"every other packet\" regardless of odd or evenness, but that still leaves unexplained the other \"patterns\" Cueball is seeing.\nThese non-existent patterns that Cueball is 'finding' are driving him mad, so much so that he says he believes in ghosts now. The statement of belief in ghosts may be a reference to the intermittent or fluctuating nature of the network issues being caused by mischievous or malevolent spirits. Ghosts generally are not concerned with expressions of belief, but there are some religious traditions that include group clapping and chanting. Many works of fiction depict a future or alternate history where machines are worshiped as gods or spirits , such as the Adeptus Mechanicus of Warhammer 40,000 .  Some of this terminology can be found in present-day IT and other support personnel, including references to \" daemons \" and \" black magic \".  Another possible reference Randall may be making is to the Ghost in the machine , a term describing AI. A third possibility is that Cueball's brain had stopped working, as Randall had suggested in his chart. it may also be a reference to 1316: Inexplicable , in which Megan concludes Cueball's computer is haunted.\nThe title text continues Cueball's maniacal attempts at self-assurance, with him alluding to J.M. Barrie's play Peter Pan by saying that latency falls every time you \"CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE\". In the play, Peter Pan says, \"If you believe in fairies, wave your handkerchiefs and clap your hands.\" [ actual citation needed ] A more mundane explanation of the network behavior Cueball is experiencing might be that it is random but he's seeing a pattern anyway, or that there is a loose connection or trace and the vibration of clapping and speaking in the vicinity of the equipment in question closes the connection.\nSimilar superstition regarding computer devices was used previously in 1457: Feedback .\n[A chart is shown with one horizontal line with 13 ticks (the first larger) and ending in an arrow. There are three labels along the line, at the start in the middle an towards the end before the arrow. Below are two clouds in gray with labels. The first cloud is long and it is getting thinner towards the right. It goes between the first and second label above the chart. The second blob is smaller and of equal thickness and it goes from the last label towards right. Above the chart is a heading and a subheading:] Types of Computer Problems By how much debugging them makes your brain stop working\n[The three labels above and the two in the clouds:] None Some A lot Normal problems Networking problems\n[Below the chart, only in the right part of the comic is a comic drawing. Cueball is kneeling before a rack of servers.  One of the server blades is extended and connected by a cable to a laptop sitting on a box, which Cueball is using.  Behind Cueball, there is a wireless router sitting on a stool, which is connected by a cable to another wireless router sitting on the floor, which is connected to another laptop. From behind him to the right an off-panel voice emanates from a starburst at the edge of the panel.] Cueball: Before noon, odd -numbered packets were laggy, but after noon, even -numbered ones are! It's the opposite of yesterday! Off-panel voice: Are you sure you're okay? Cueball: I'm fine and I believe in ghosts now!\n"}
{"id":2260,"title":"Reaction Maps","image_title":"Reaction Maps","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2260","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/reaction_maps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2260:_Reaction_Maps","transcript":"[Caption to the left of the comic:]\nTexting Tip\nIs your reaction too intense to be expressed in an emoji or gif? Try using driving directions! The extra research it requires shows how strongly you feel.\n[A split panel, showing Ponytail texting Cueball with her text messages shown above in gray and Cueball reading the texts angrily below]\nPonytail: You should name your new Honda Civic The Treaty of Edinburgh Ponytail: Because it's a Tudor compact Ponytail: Get it\n[Cueball replies to Ponytail, with his text messages shown above him. Ponytail's last text (\"Get it\") is shown. Cueball sends Ponytail a screenshot of driving directions that go through Truly, Saari, Toulouse, A, Friendship, and This Way]\n[Cueball continues to text Ponytail, with his text messages shown above him. He sends Ponytail a screenshot of driving directions that go through Hope, Yoe, and Fallin Lake]\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Texting Tip. Randall suggests that readers send a set of driving directions as an intense \/ extremely annoyed response (a \"Reaction Map\", named after the \" Reaction Face \", \"Reaction Gif\", and other memes).  The words \"Reaction Map\" in Chemistry refer to a diagram that shows how compounds react to form different compounds; an example can be found here .\nIn this comic, Ponytail texts the following car pun\/joke:\nYou should name your new Honda Civic The Treaty of Edinburgh Because it's a Tudor compact [\"Tudor\" pronounced \"two-door\" in some USA accents, \"tyudor\" elsewhere.]\nThe Treaty of Edinburgh was a treaty drawn up in 1560, which falls during the Tudor period of the history of England , while a compact is another word for a treaty -- hence a Tudor compact. A Honda Civic is a compact car , which has a coup\u00e9 body model with only two doors (there are also hatchback and 4-door sedan versions) -- hence a two-door compact. The joke is thus a double pun on the similarity of the words \"Tudor\" and \"two-door\", as well as a pun on the words \"treaty\" and \"compact.\"\nPronouncing \"Tudor\" as \"Tyoo-dor\" (i.e. without American-style yod-dropping ) rather than \"Too-\" may hinder comprehension of this pun.\nPuns rise and fall in popularity, and some people dislike them at all times. Recipients often groan , sometimes even while laughing or smiling. Because of this pun, Cueball gets so mad at Ponytail that he replies twice, first that their friendship is over and second that he hopes she falls in a lake. Both times he uses driving directions to do so because he wishes to show how mad he is by spending time finding cities with relevant names just to do it.\nThe list of map destinations , Truly (MT), Saari (MI), Toulouse (KY), A (WV), Friendship (SC), This Way (TX) is a way of saying, \"Truly sorry to lose a friendship this way\".\nThe list of map destinations , Hope (NY), Yoe (PA), Fallin Lake (AR) is a way of saying, \"Hope you fall in [a] lake\".\n\"A\" is one of the three districts in Clay County, WV . The others are \"B\" and \"C\".\nIn the title text, Randall offers a different option if \"A\" is removed from Google Maps, Ina (IL) , to make this response : Jump (OH), Ina (IL), Big Hole (TX) (\"Jump in a big hole\".)\nIn 2245: Edible Arrangements , Cueball was irritated by a pun from Megan which was also themed on English history (\"Vore of the Roses\"), but in that strip, he evidently didn't get angry enough to send a map expressing that he would \" Cancelada Arrangements \" he had bought for her -- he simply told her so in person and then walked away when she kept punning.\n[Caption to the left of the comic:]\nTexting Tip\nIs your reaction too intense to be expressed in an emoji or gif? Try using driving directions! The extra research it requires shows how strongly you feel.\n[A split panel, showing Ponytail texting Cueball with her text messages shown above in gray and Cueball reading the texts angrily below]\nPonytail: You should name your new Honda Civic The Treaty of Edinburgh Ponytail: Because it's a Tudor compact Ponytail: Get it\n[Cueball replies to Ponytail, with his text messages shown above him. Ponytail's last text (\"Get it\") is shown. Cueball sends Ponytail a screenshot of driving directions that go through Truly, Saari, Toulouse, A, Friendship, and This Way]\n[Cueball continues to text Ponytail, with his text messages shown above him. He sends Ponytail a screenshot of driving directions that go through Hope, Yoe, and Fallin Lake]\n"}
{"id":2261,"title":"Worst Thing That Could Happen","image_title":"Worst Thing That Could Happen","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2261","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/worst_thing_that_could_happen.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2261:_Worst_Thing_That_Could_Happen","transcript":"[Ponytail is standing in front of a desk with a computer. One of her hands is on the keyboard. Behind her, Cueball, Hairy, and Megan are looking at the computer screen.] Ponytail: We should upgrade.  What's the worst that could happen? Cueball: Supervolcano. Hairy: Robot uprising. Megan: Everyone falls down a well at once.\n[Zoom in on Cueball, Hairy, and Megan. Cueball has turned toward the other two.] Cueball: Instead of hitting the tallest thing around, lightning starts hitting the nicest. Megan: Seagulls all get handguns. Hairy: A really slow nuclear war.\n[Large panel with the original setting. Ponytail has turned towards the other three but is now facepalming, as Cueball gesturing with his hands at chest-height are still looking at the other two facing him.] Cueball: We all have to go on a game show where they show you photos of people you've met once and ask you their names, and if you get one wrong a trapdoor opens and you fall into a garbage disposal. Hairy: Ooh, that's a good one. Megan: Yeah, let's put off the upgrade.\n","explanation":"Ponytail and her friends are considering upgrading some part or program of their computers. They may feel the need to upgrade because the software they are currently using has some vulnerability that is only patched in newer revisions (this comic was released just two weeks after the end of extended support for Windows 7 ), or because they want to have access to some new feature. As part of the decision-making process, Ponytail asks her friends, \"What's the worst that could happen?\" If the computers they are discussing are privately owned, she may be concerned about losing personal data or having to learn new software interfaces. On the other hand, if they are discussing a corporate computer system, there may also be business-related risks. If their company relies on functionality offered by their current system that has been deprecated or modified in the updated version (such as in 1172: Workflow , or as with many specialized tools or machines in the real world), they may suffer downtime while they modify the rest of their workflow. Even if the upgraded system should continue to fit their needs, they may need to take some downtime to perform the update and deal with the risks of something going badly along the way, and there may be major costs associated with license subscriptions and support contracts. \"What's the worst that could happen?\" is also a common rhetorical question ; Ponytail may be expressing a belief that nothing bad could happen as a result of the upgrade, and not expecting an answer.\nUnfortunately, Ponytail's friends answer with their ideas for the worst things that could happen ever , not as a result of the upgrade , as Ponytail meant, or they are taking the question to the logical extreme and invoking chaos theory . The result is a list of \"worst things\" ridiculously unconnected to a computer upgrade. At the end, however, Megan interprets these as possible results of the upgrade, and advises against upgrading. A list with explanations can be found below. Ponytail facepalms at her friends' overly-literal senses of humor.\nAlternatively, Ponytail could be facepalming at the fact that the worst thing which could happen, according to her team, is that they are put on a ridiculous game show in which, if they answer a question incorrectly, they are chucked in garbage disposal. This may be bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as an erupting supervolcano or nuclear war. [ citation needed ] However, Cueball has shown anxiety and difficulties in social situations, such as the less-than-helpful advice in 1917: How to Make Friends , so he (and likewise Hairy and Megan) may consider that embarrassment on the game show (which might then be immortalized online) is worse than instantaneous death in a nuclear war.\nMegan and Cueball have previously experienced a severely-botched upgrade in 349: Success , in which Cueball somehow caused them to end up in shark-infested waters off the coast of a deserted island when he was just trying to get their computer to dual-boot BSD.\nThe title text talks about searching upgrade release notes for some of the things listed to be sure none are potential side effects of an upgrade. \"Ctrl-F\" is a common keyboard shortcut for \"find text string\" in many programs. Since Randall is just reading but not changing the patch notes, a web browser, PDF viewer, or word processing program such as Adobe Reader or Microsoft Word might have been used.\n[Ponytail is standing in front of a desk with a computer. One of her hands is on the keyboard. Behind her, Cueball, Hairy, and Megan are looking at the computer screen.] Ponytail: We should upgrade.  What's the worst that could happen? Cueball: Supervolcano. Hairy: Robot uprising. Megan: Everyone falls down a well at once.\n[Zoom in on Cueball, Hairy, and Megan. Cueball has turned toward the other two.] Cueball: Instead of hitting the tallest thing around, lightning starts hitting the nicest. Megan: Seagulls all get handguns. Hairy: A really slow nuclear war.\n[Large panel with the original setting. Ponytail has turned towards the other three but is now facepalming, as Cueball gesturing with his hands at chest-height are still looking at the other two facing him.] Cueball: We all have to go on a game show where they show you photos of people you've met once and ask you their names, and if you get one wrong a trapdoor opens and you fall into a garbage disposal. Hairy: Ooh, that's a good one. Megan: Yeah, let's put off the upgrade.\n"}
{"id":2262,"title":"Parker Solar Probe","image_title":"Parker Solar Probe","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2262","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/parker_solar_probe.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2262:_Parker_Solar_Probe","transcript":"[A tall, but very narrow box with Earth at the top, with Cueball and Megan standing precariously \"on top\" of Earth on each side of the center, trying to keep their balance. At the very bottom is shown a slice of the Sun. Between Earth and the Sun the two inner planets and two spacecraft are depicted with relation to their distance from the Sun. The spacecraft closest to the Sun is shown two times at different times, as it moves closer and closer to the sun. All 7 objects have labels close to them. The largest distance is between Venus and Mercury, with the Earth-Venus distance the second longest. The distances between the objects below Mercury are much shorter. There is a caption above the slim panel:]\nLooking down toward the Sun and the Parker Solar Probe (Distances are to scale, sizes are not to scale)\nEarth Cueball: Careful!\nVenus\nMercury\nHelios 2 (1976)\nParker Solar Probe (today)\nParker Solar Probe (2025)\nSun (Not to scale)\n","explanation":"This is an informative comic meant to represent the relative distances of astronomical objects relative to the Parker Solar Probe . It also shows where the probe will be in 2025 if its mission continues going according to plan. As explained by the caption at the top of the image, the distances between entities on the chart is drawn to scale; the sizes of said entities, however, are not, which is humorously showcased front-and-center by Cueball and Megan being shown as Earth-sized.\nThe Parker Solar Probe is a robotic spacecraft launched by NASA in 2018 with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It travels in an elongated orbit that passes close to the Sun and sometimes passes near Venus, arranged such that Venus nudges the orbit slightly in each pass to bring the probe's perihelion (the lower end of its orbit) closer and closer to the Sun. Two days before this comic was published the probe again passed through perihelion , establishing new records for closeness to the Sun (0.12 AU ) and speed (244,225 mph). [1] By the end of the probe's planned lifetime in 2025, it will pass within 0.046 AU (6.9 million km), or about 5 solar diameters, of the Sun's center, at a speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 km\/h). The title text incorrectly states this distance to be 9 or 10 solar diameters measured from the Sun's surface .\nHelios 2 was a solar probe launched in the 1976 that formerly held the records for closest man-made object to the Sun and fastest man-made object. Both records were surpassed by the Parker probe in 2018.\nCueball and Megan are standing on Earth. The way this diagram is drawn, they look like they could fall off Earth toward the Sun -- hence the comment \"Careful!\" -- though the joke is that in real life they would fall toward the center of the Earth, not toward the Sun. Also the surprise for many people is that it is much harder to reach the sun than Pluto. Because we already travel so fast here on Earth, and to reach the sun this speed has to be reduced, which is a larger speed difference than the one needed to escape the Sun's gravity well. If you could \"fall\" off Earth, you would just keep the approximately same distance to the Sun, but drifting slowly away from Earth.\nThe title text says the probe will get within 9 or 10 Sun- diameters of the Sun's surface . This is a bit of a mistake: it will actually get within that many Sun- radii (only 4\u00bd or 5 Sun-diameters) of the center of the Sun, which corresponds to 4 or 4\u00bd Sun-diameters above its surface. All the same, the title text makes the point that \"Sun-diameters\" (or \"Sun-radii\", for that matter) sounds like an astronomical distance, until you use the same scale for other distances. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is approximately 106 Sun-diameters; by that scale, 4 Sun-diameters is indeed \"practically all the way down\". Below is a table showing these and other distances using more common units of measurement.\n[A tall, but very narrow box with Earth at the top, with Cueball and Megan standing precariously \"on top\" of Earth on each side of the center, trying to keep their balance. At the very bottom is shown a slice of the Sun. Between Earth and the Sun the two inner planets and two spacecraft are depicted with relation to their distance from the Sun. The spacecraft closest to the Sun is shown two times at different times, as it moves closer and closer to the sun. All 7 objects have labels close to them. The largest distance is between Venus and Mercury, with the Earth-Venus distance the second longest. The distances between the objects below Mercury are much shorter. There is a caption above the slim panel:]\nLooking down toward the Sun and the Parker Solar Probe (Distances are to scale, sizes are not to scale)\nEarth Cueball: Careful!\nVenus\nMercury\nHelios 2 (1976)\nParker Solar Probe (today)\nParker Solar Probe (2025)\nSun (Not to scale)\n"}
{"id":2263,"title":"Cicadas","image_title":"Cicadas","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2263","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cicadas.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2263:_Cicadas","transcript":"[This comic is laid out in a variation of a regular four-panel comic. One wide panel is overlaid by two smaller panels, which are placed where the second and fourth panels would be. These panels are slightly offset so they extend above the wide panel.]\n[Cueball and Ponytail are facing each other across a desk while having a conversation. Cueball is holding up a tablet in his hand while Ponytail is typing at a laptop on the desk.] Cueball: What can you tell from genome comparison? Ponytail: I think there's a duplication on the - Ponytail: Look out!\n[An overlaid panel shows that the air is full of flying cicadas, many of which have landed on Cueball, Ponytail, the laptop, the tablet, and the desk. Ponytail and Cueball have their arms up in a futile attempt to shield themselves from the bugs, with Cueball having put the tablet down on the table.] Bzzzzzzz\n[The cicadas are gone, and Cueball and Ponytail resume their conversation. Cueball has picked up the tablet again] Ponytail: - a duplication on the gene right before the cleavage site, so the resulting protein - Ponytail: Look out!\n[An overlaid panel shows that the air is again full of flying cicadas, which have once again landed on Cueball, Ponytail, the laptop, the tablet, and the desk. Ponytail and Cueball have raised their arms to shield themselves again.] Bzzzzzzz\n[Caption below the large panel:] Our genetics work has produced 17-second cicadas, but we're having a hard time figuring out how.\nThe widely-accepted scientific explanation for the long and seemingly arbitrary 17-year lifecycle is that seventeen is a prime number - it's believed that this is an evolutionary adaptation against lifecycles of competitors taking easy advantage of the cicada as a food source (if a predator) or emerging early to dominating their shared food source (if a fellow feeder), since 17 years cannot be divided by any whole number of years other than itself and 1.\nA 16-year cicada might find a creature with an 8-year, 4-year, or biennial cycle could profit from it in a 'clash' of expectations, but only a cycle that is a multiple of 17 (by an identical accident of evolution, that must also match the 'beat' years of the Cicada to be useful) would affect the presumed ancestors of the comic-strip breed. Predators often work to yearly cycles of plenty and scarcity of food or can survive a low number of famine years between the better ones, but if they have less than one year of 'bounty' for every decade or so of 'normal' feeding then they cannot build up the numbers needed to threaten such prey that plays the long-game.\nOther broods of cicada have 13-year lifecycles (the next lowest prime number), and would potentially clash for resources (or hybridize) only every 221 years. Even if this causes a single bad cycle, for both sub-species, the next cycle of appearance is their own once more (for each) and the respective populations have plenty of opportunity to recover from this event by the time a further two centuries pass.  Thus it is theorized the happenstance evolution of a period of dormancy that gives a cycle of a significantly large prime-number of years - though still low enough to survive that period - is ultimately more advantageous than any cousins who tried to evolve to a period with smaller factors\/shorter harmonics.\n","explanation":"Cicadas are a species of insect whose nymphs burrow underground and emerge as adults to reproduce several years later.  One common species in North America is the 17-year cicada, also known as the periodical cicada . These cicadas form distinct broods which burrow and emerge as a group every 17 years, with different broods starting the cycle at different times.  This results in a couple of weeks every 17 years when the cicadas swarm in huge numbers, then vanish just as quickly when the adults die off.  Cicadas also make a distinctive buzzing sound, which makes their periodic appearance even more memorable.\nIn the comic, Cueball and Ponytail have accidentally created 17- second cicadas using genetic engineering .  This means that rather than seeing a massive swarm every 17 years that lasts for a few weeks, they have to deal with a swarm every 17 seconds that lasts for a few moments. This makes it very difficult for them to do their work, especially to figure out how the cicadas were created because the swarm keeps interrupting their work. Note that the comic has been drawn differently than most other straight four-panel comics, probably to highlight the interruptions of the buzzing swarm - see the transcript .\nThe title text is a pun on \" circadian rhythm .\" In particular, it might resemble something said to someone getting adjusted to a new sleep schedule. But here it is the 17 seconds interruption, not a time zone shift, that has to be adjusted for.\nThis entire comic seems to only have been a lead-up to the \"cicadian rhythm\" punchline. This is an interesting suggestion since Randall has mentioned in an interview that he makes up the title text after completing the comic. [ actual citation needed ] Seems like he made an exception here; unless he didn't.\n[This comic is laid out in a variation of a regular four-panel comic. One wide panel is overlaid by two smaller panels, which are placed where the second and fourth panels would be. These panels are slightly offset so they extend above the wide panel.]\n[Cueball and Ponytail are facing each other across a desk while having a conversation. Cueball is holding up a tablet in his hand while Ponytail is typing at a laptop on the desk.] Cueball: What can you tell from genome comparison? Ponytail: I think there's a duplication on the - Ponytail: Look out!\n[An overlaid panel shows that the air is full of flying cicadas, many of which have landed on Cueball, Ponytail, the laptop, the tablet, and the desk. Ponytail and Cueball have their arms up in a futile attempt to shield themselves from the bugs, with Cueball having put the tablet down on the table.] Bzzzzzzz\n[The cicadas are gone, and Cueball and Ponytail resume their conversation. Cueball has picked up the tablet again] Ponytail: - a duplication on the gene right before the cleavage site, so the resulting protein - Ponytail: Look out!\n[An overlaid panel shows that the air is again full of flying cicadas, which have once again landed on Cueball, Ponytail, the laptop, the tablet, and the desk. Ponytail and Cueball have raised their arms to shield themselves again.] Bzzzzzzz\n[Caption below the large panel:] Our genetics work has produced 17-second cicadas, but we're having a hard time figuring out how.\nThe widely-accepted scientific explanation for the long and seemingly arbitrary 17-year lifecycle is that seventeen is a prime number - it's believed that this is an evolutionary adaptation against lifecycles of competitors taking easy advantage of the cicada as a food source (if a predator) or emerging early to dominating their shared food source (if a fellow feeder), since 17 years cannot be divided by any whole number of years other than itself and 1.\nA 16-year cicada might find a creature with an 8-year, 4-year, or biennial cycle could profit from it in a 'clash' of expectations, but only a cycle that is a multiple of 17 (by an identical accident of evolution, that must also match the 'beat' years of the Cicada to be useful) would affect the presumed ancestors of the comic-strip breed. Predators often work to yearly cycles of plenty and scarcity of food or can survive a low number of famine years between the better ones, but if they have less than one year of 'bounty' for every decade or so of 'normal' feeding then they cannot build up the numbers needed to threaten such prey that plays the long-game.\nOther broods of cicada have 13-year lifecycles (the next lowest prime number), and would potentially clash for resources (or hybridize) only every 221 years. Even if this causes a single bad cycle, for both sub-species, the next cycle of appearance is their own once more (for each) and the respective populations have plenty of opportunity to recover from this event by the time a further two centuries pass.  Thus it is theorized the happenstance evolution of a period of dormancy that gives a cycle of a significantly large prime-number of years - though still low enough to survive that period - is ultimately more advantageous than any cousins who tried to evolve to a period with smaller factors\/shorter harmonics.\n"}
{"id":2264,"title":"Satellite","image_title":"Satellite","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2264","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/satellite.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2264:_Satellite","transcript":"[Science Girl is facing Cueball and Megan. A small satellite orbits her, indicated by a tilted circle around her at about neck height. The satellite is between her and her parents.] Science Girl: Hey, look, I found a satellite! Can I keep it? Please? Cueball: Sweetie, no. Megan: Put it back where you found it.\n[Zoom in on Science Girl who looks straight out of the panel, the satellite is passing by her ear with the circle going behind her. The satellite is detailed in this zoom in. There is a central main part of the satellite, almost square, with a small protrusion at the \"top\" and two small lines (antennae) at the \"bottom.\" Two solar panels extend on either side, each longer than the central part.] Science Girl: But I think it was abandoned! Science Girl: And it's so cute! Science Girl: Please? Science Girl: Pleeeease?\n[Back to all three again, Science Girl has her arms raised above her head. The satellite is beneath her head.] Megan: Fine. But you have to promise to boost it to a graveyard orbit when it stops working. Don't just leave it drifting around. Science Girl: Yaaaay!\n[Same setting as in the first panel, so Science Girl has lowered her arms.] Cueball: We're serious. I am not cleaning up after Kessler syndrome again. Megan: We couldn't use the dining room for weeks! Science Girl: I promise, I promise.\n","explanation":"This comic humorously compares the relationship between humans and satellites to the relationship between humans and pets .  \"He followed me home, can we keep him?\" is a stock phrase said by children pleading with their parents to keep a \"found\" animal as a pet.  The stock response is to admonish the child to look after the pet's needs, especially the less fun ones, like cleaning up after the pet.  In this comic, Science Girl wishes to adopt an \"abandoned\" satellite, but rather than being asked to clean up after the satellite's waste, she is lectured by her parents on how to properly discard it once it stops working. This would be like saying \"you have to promise to bury the dog in the backyard when it dies, not leave its corpse to decompose in the dining room like the last one,\" which is not how most pet-adoption conversations go. [ citation needed ]\nA graveyard orbit is an orbit far away from operational satellites.  Graveyard orbits are used when a satellite is far enough away from the Earth that de-orbiting it into Earth's atmosphere is too expensive to be practical.  The most widely-used graveyard orbit is approximately 300 km above geostationary orbit ; a satellite at the end of its life will briefly accelerate to move further away from Earth, so Science Girl's parents refer to \"boosting\" the satellite into a graveyard orbit.\nKessler syndrome is a proposed scenario in which satellite collision(s) produce many pieces of orbiting space junk, which then hit other satellites and create even more pieces of junk, which hit more satellites, and so on. In this scenario Earth becomes surrounded by so much man-made debris that the risk of a collision makes space activities difficult. Apparently Science Girl has recreated this scenario before in her parents' home, requiring extensive cleanup of the dining room and making it unusable for weeks. Kessler syndrome was the premise of the movie Gravity , where the collision of two satellites produces pieces of shrapnel that go on to tear apart other satellites including the International Space Station and a Space Shuttle .  A variation of Kessler syndrome was the focus of the first part of the Neal Stephenson novel Seveneves , where cascading collisions of fragments of the moon led to natural and artificial debris field around the Earth.\nThe title text is more advice from Science Girl's parents. They tell her that if she is going to let her satellite reenter the atmosphere and burn up, she should do it above the deep end of the bathtub. This echoes how satellites in orbit can be purposefully de-orbited, and are usually planned so that any debris that isn't fully destroyed lands in the ocean and does not pose a safety risk.  When it is possible, satellites are generally directed towards the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area, commonly known as the \" spacecraft graveyard \", to land over a thousand miles away from any populated landmass.\nAbandoned satellites were in the news recently, as two defunct satellites had a near miss on January 29, 2020, the week before this comic strip was published. This is becoming more of an issue, especially in Low Earth Orbit, as more and more satellites are built, and old satellites go defunct.\nHumans orbited by satellites were previously featured in 1300: Galilean Moons ; here, of course, the satellites were natural satellites, i.e. moons.\nAn alternative reading is that the characters are actually planet-sized creatures around which the discarded debris of primitive lifeforms, carelessly sent into space, orbits.  Saturn happens to have a density less than that of water, so it could conceivably float in a suitably-sized bathtub.\n[Science Girl is facing Cueball and Megan. A small satellite orbits her, indicated by a tilted circle around her at about neck height. The satellite is between her and her parents.] Science Girl: Hey, look, I found a satellite! Can I keep it? Please? Cueball: Sweetie, no. Megan: Put it back where you found it.\n[Zoom in on Science Girl who looks straight out of the panel, the satellite is passing by her ear with the circle going behind her. The satellite is detailed in this zoom in. There is a central main part of the satellite, almost square, with a small protrusion at the \"top\" and two small lines (antennae) at the \"bottom.\" Two solar panels extend on either side, each longer than the central part.] Science Girl: But I think it was abandoned! Science Girl: And it's so cute! Science Girl: Please? Science Girl: Pleeeease?\n[Back to all three again, Science Girl has her arms raised above her head. The satellite is beneath her head.] Megan: Fine. But you have to promise to boost it to a graveyard orbit when it stops working. Don't just leave it drifting around. Science Girl: Yaaaay!\n[Same setting as in the first panel, so Science Girl has lowered her arms.] Cueball: We're serious. I am not cleaning up after Kessler syndrome again. Megan: We couldn't use the dining room for weeks! Science Girl: I promise, I promise.\n"}
{"id":2265,"title":"Tax AI","image_title":"Tax AI","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2265","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tax_ai.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2265:_Tax_AI","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting, hands on his knees, in his office chair at his desk reading a message on the screen of his laptop. The message is shown above the laptop an is indicated to be on the screen with a zigzag line starting at a starburst on the screen.] Laptop: You may claim up to 1040 defendants on your seitan local income tax for fiscal year 20202 by taking the standard deduckling and atomizing your clams.\n[Caption below the panel:] I used a neural net to prepare my tax returns, but I think I cut off its training too early.\n","explanation":"The deadline for filing tax returns in the United States is April 15, so many people in the US are already in the process of filing their taxes at the time of this comic's publication. Traditionally, people used tax provider companies, but it is becoming more popular to use tax preparation software, such as TurboTax or a service from the Free File Alliance , which helps to fill in the tax forms after a user enters their income information and deductions for the year.\nIn this comic, Cueball has attempted to train an artificial neural net to prepare his US tax return , but it has made several comical errors, purportedly because it was not trained extensively enough.  Most of the errors consist of malapropisms , words that sound almost the same but mean very different things switched for comic effect.  This suggests Cueball trained the neural net by talking to it.\nThe title \"Tax AI\" can be considered a pun, either referencing the AI software Cueball just trained to prepare his tax return, or an exhortation to tax AI entities, as a possible slogan supporting Robot tax .\nThe title text references 2173: Trained a Neural Net , which indicates that getting a human to do something is basically using a \"pretrained neural net\". Cueball has chosen to use a local tax provider to help him file his taxes, aka a \"pretrained neural net\" in the form of a human named Greg.\nRandall also \"trained\" humans to do his tax returns in 1566: Board Game . Tax returns and the troubles of filling them out were also the subjects of 1971: Personal Data and 1977: Paperwork .\n[Cueball is sitting, hands on his knees, in his office chair at his desk reading a message on the screen of his laptop. The message is shown above the laptop an is indicated to be on the screen with a zigzag line starting at a starburst on the screen.] Laptop: You may claim up to 1040 defendants on your seitan local income tax for fiscal year 20202 by taking the standard deduckling and atomizing your clams.\n[Caption below the panel:] I used a neural net to prepare my tax returns, but I think I cut off its training too early.\n"}
{"id":2266,"title":"Leap Smearing","image_title":"Leap Smearing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2266","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/leap_smearing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2266:_Leap_Smearing","transcript":"[Cueball, Ponytail, and Hairy are looking up at a digital clock on a wall. It displays the time in white on a black background, with a logo on the frame beneath the time.] 3:02 AM Google\nCueball: Why do the clocks say it's 3AM? Ponytail: Adding an extra day creates too many glitches. Instead, we're just running our clocks 3.4% slower during February, to avoid the irregularity.\n[Caption below the panel:] This year, Google has expanded their leap second \"smearing\" to cover leap days as well.\n","explanation":"Clocks usually measure time by regularly-sized intervals, but the natural world is not always so accommodating.  Since the solar year is not an integer number of days long, we add leap days every four years (except for years divisible by 100 but not 400) to prevent our calendars from drifting with respect to the seasons.  We also add leap seconds to the clock every now and then, to prevent noon on our clocks from drifting away from solar noon.  Unfortunately, Earth's day is not as regular as Earth's year, so leap seconds cannot be predicted with a formula but are added as needed, most recently in 2016.  Officially, the leap second is added at midnight UTC (so a clock will tick 23:59:59... 23:59:60 ...00:00:00), but this is an extremely inconvenient edge case, to the point that there are many proposals to do away with leap seconds entirely (as of this comic strip's publication, the matter will be discussed in the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2023).\nRather than inserting an extra tick into timestamps and dealing with the resulting hiccups (e.g. programs hard-coded to expect that every minute will contain exactly sixty seconds ), Google 's services 'smear' the leap second over the course of a 24-hour period, officially called Leap Smear by Google. The smear is centered on the leap second (at midnight) so from noon the day before to noon the day after each second is 11.6\u202f\u03bcs longer (1s\/(24*60*60) = 11,574 \u03bcs). This difference is too small for most of Google's services to be bothered with, and by centering on midnight, the difference in time will never be more than half a second at midnight; just before midnight it will be half a second behind, after midnight it'll be half a second ahead.  This comic's joke arises from the idea of extending this practice to smearing leap days over the month of February.  This comic strip was published February 10th, 2020, almost three weeks before the leap day on February 29th, 2020.\nIn the comic, Cueball is visiting one of Google's facilities, presumably during office hours on the 10th day of February, when the comic was released. But when he looks at their clocks he sees they are all around 3:00 AM (which is in the middle of the night). He thus asks Ponytail and Hairy why their clocks are wrong. Ponytail tells him it is because of leap day smearing.\nPonytail explains that adding an extra day creates too many glitches. So they just run their clocks 3.4% slower during February. She thus states that it works approximately like leap smearing for seconds, so that the extra day's 24 hours are spread evenly over the course of February, keeping it at the regular 28 days, but still running over 24*29 = 696 hours, even though their clocks only go through 672 hours = 24*28.\nThus the 24 hours less to count are spread out over the 696 real hours, which means their clocks run 24\/696 = 3.445\u00a0% slower (matching the 3.4% Ponytail mentions). Every smeared day will thus be about 0.86 hours, or 51 minutes and 40 seconds, longer (24\/28) than a standard day. So when day-smearing clocks read 3:02 AM on February 10th (the comic was released on February 10th), about 9.1264 smeared days will have passed. This translates to about 9.4523 standard days (9.1264*29\/28), which is approximately 10:51 AM on February 10th, well within normal working hours.\nThe joke of course is that contrary to leap second smearing this would be very inconvenient for those following it, due to the fact that clocks would be noticeably out of sync with Earth's rotation (and perhaps more importantly, with everyone else's clocks) for most of the month. (Although it does mean they would sync up better with some of their partners abroad; see 1335: Now and 448: Good Morning .)  A different kind of time-smearing was looked at in the far earlier comic 320: 28-Hour Day , which was actually designed with a form of convenience in mind, and it would be interesting to see what the results could be of creatively combining both systems.\nThe title text humorously suggests that some people (at Google) suspect that the real reason for the leap day smearing was actually a \"No, I didn't forget Valentine's Day\" excuse that got out of hand.  The idea is, that maybe a CEO at Google forgot to buy something for their romantic partner for Valentine, and thus tried to suggest that it was not because they forgot, but that at work it was still February 14th.  Presumably, in February 2016, they used this excuse to buy 12 extra hours (as the end of a smeared Feb 14 is exactly halfway through the month) to get their partner a present, and then required the company to actually implement \"leap day smearing\" by 2020 to maintain the illusion.\nRandall has some issues with Valentines , see for example 1016: Valentine Dilemma . This comic was released four days before Valentines Day of 2020. It was the first time in 8 years he made any reference to Valentine around this time of year, but the seventh time in total. Randall has since not mentioned Valentine's day.\n1481: API also covered leap seconds in its title text.\n[Cueball, Ponytail, and Hairy are looking up at a digital clock on a wall. It displays the time in white on a black background, with a logo on the frame beneath the time.] 3:02 AM Google\nCueball: Why do the clocks say it's 3AM? Ponytail: Adding an extra day creates too many glitches. Instead, we're just running our clocks 3.4% slower during February, to avoid the irregularity.\n[Caption below the panel:] This year, Google has expanded their leap second \"smearing\" to cover leap days as well.\n"}
{"id":2267,"title":"Blockchain","image_title":"Blockchain","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2267","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blockchain.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2267:_Blockchain","transcript":"[A flowchart is shown. A rectangular block at the top has one line down to a diamond shaped block. From there lines go right and down from two of the edges. The line to the right immediately takes a turn and goes down to a rectangular block. From this block a line goes to the block to the left, which is also the one that the down line from the diamond points to, so both routes ends here. There are text in each of the four blocks and labels above the lines for the two options going out from the diamond.] [Start block:] Should your project use a blockchain?\n[Diamond:] Are you making the decision using a flowchart you just found?\n[Reply:] No\n[Right block:] You definitely are\n[From right block of if reply was:] Yes\n[Result block:] No\n","explanation":"This comic is a flowchart intended to help project leaders decide if their project needs a blockchain.\nA blockchain is a data storage structure shared between various computers.  Each block is digitally signed and includes the digital signature of the block before it, which makes it highly resilient against tampering.  However, what sets blockchains in the context of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin apart from e.g. Merkle trees used in programs such as Git is that anyone can write to a blockchain.  This is sometimes specified as a \"public\" or \"permissionless\" ledger or blockchain.  In order to prevent the blockchain from being vandalized, various mechanisms are used to determine consensus about which additions to the blockchain are legitimate.  Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies use a \" proof of work \" system, where writing a block includes some task which is computationally difficult to perform but simple to verify, such as finding a magic number (called a \" cryptographic nonce \") that, when appended to the block, makes its hash value start with lots of zeroes.  This results in a system which is, in ideal circumstances, extremely difficult to vandalize, as the attacker must find new nonce values for the block he wishes to modify and every succeeding block, and then broadcast the modified blockchain from enough nodes to convince the rest of the network to go along with it instead of the legitimate one.\nIn practice, in order to actually make this so-called \"51% attack\" unfeasible, the network needs to have as many legitimate actors using as much computing power as possible.  This results in the Bitcoin network using approximately a million times more energy per transaction than Visa's network, while smaller cryptocurrencies have actually experienced 51% attacks and double-spending .  For almost any practical project, there is no need to allow everyone in the world to have write access to a database, so it is generally quite acceptable to use a straightforward centrally-controlled permissioning system rather than proof-of-work or other decentralization schemes to restrict write access.  This is why all branches of the flowchart lead to the answer \"No\".\nPart of the joke is that the only question asked in the flowchart, \"Are you making the decision using a flowchart you found?\" has nothing to do with blockchains or any details of the project itself, and can only honestly be answered 'yes' (which is why the 'no' branch leads to a block reading \"You definitely are\" before leading to the final \"No\" answer).  For a flowchart with a little more technical content, you can see Figure 6 (page number 42, page 53 of the PDF) of the Blockchain Technology Overview published by NIST .  In particular, they conclude that blockchain is only potentially useful if you need a data store that must never be erased (not even for the sake of e.g. removing illegal or harmful content, which has been written into blockchains in the past ), must be auditable, and where lots of people need to write to it (more than can feasibly be enumerated or controlled in any way) but none of them can be trusted to have administrative authority over it.\nPresumably, if a project were in the rare category of truly needing a blockchain, that decision would be made by a technical expert who is not consulting this flowchart.  This flowchart is probably intended as a \"resource\" for clueless project managers who have latched on to \"blockchain\" as a buzzword, such as the investors who tripled the stock price of Long Island Iced Tea after it changed its name to \"Long Blockchain Corp.\" and professed a pivot into the blockchain space.  As stated above, one of those real-world problems which is \"solved\" by blockchains is the libertarian ideal of creating a system which allows anyone to perform transactions while (hopefully) preventing anyone from double-spending their coins, much as physical cash does, but without relying on trusted third parties such as government regulators, banks, or mints.  Even in that case, however, cryptocurrency exchanges are running into challenges with anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer regulations, which (among other things) ban certain actors from being served by banks, so they are having to use ordinary certificates, passwords, and identification documents, which are definitely not implemented via a blockchain.\nIn the title text block chains are compared to grappling hooks . These hooks are devices with several claws (hooks) attached to the end of a rope. A grappling hook is one of Link's weapons from the The Legend of Zelda series. Additionally, Luke Skywalker used a grappling hook to swing with Princess Leia across a chasm in the first Star Wars film, A New Hope .\nLike Blockchains, grappling hooks are thus seen as a cool tool when they encounter a problem for which they are the right solution, like boarding an enemy ship... However, just like for blockchains, in real life there are very few cases where these hooks are the best solution for a given problem.  As an example of a problem that is not well-solved by a grappling hook, see 2128: New Robot where an electrically-charged \"search and rescue\" robot has been equipped with such a hook.\nBlockchain was previously mentioned in 2030: Voting Software , with Megan and Cueball expressing distrust in its use for electronic voting.\nFlowcharts are a recurring theme in xkcd. If you are unfamiliar with them see 518: Flow Charts . Similar simple flowcharts like this comic, where there is only one reply has been used before like 1723: Meteorite Identification and 2026: Heat Index . See also the similar 1691: Optimization , where the flowchart, as it does here, asks if you are using flowcharts.\n[A flowchart is shown. A rectangular block at the top has one line down to a diamond shaped block. From there lines go right and down from two of the edges. The line to the right immediately takes a turn and goes down to a rectangular block. From this block a line goes to the block to the left, which is also the one that the down line from the diamond points to, so both routes ends here. There are text in each of the four blocks and labels above the lines for the two options going out from the diamond.] [Start block:] Should your project use a blockchain?\n[Diamond:] Are you making the decision using a flowchart you just found?\n[Reply:] No\n[Right block:] You definitely are\n[From right block of if reply was:] Yes\n[Result block:] No\n"}
{"id":2268,"title":"Further Research is Needed","image_title":"Further Research is Needed","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2268","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/further_research_is_needed.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2268:_Further_Research_is_Needed","transcript":"[A panel, representing an excerpt from a scholarly journal, with two sentences clearly visible. Below the text is one more readable word, with a horizontal line below it, and then four numbered lines with unreadable text. The text is written with normal capitalization rather than in all caps.] We believe this resolves all remaining questions on this topic. No further research is needed. References 1. 2. 3. 4.\n[Caption below the panel:] Just once, I want to see a research paper with the guts to end this way.\n","explanation":"In most scientific fields, it's very common to end research papers with the caveat that \"more research is needed\", or words to that effect. This is particularly true when reporting results on a topic that's not well studied, and in which there's not enough literature to form a broad consensus. This is a very reasonable suggestion, an individual research project may produce results that suggest a certain conclusion, but it would be foolhardy to take something as established fact based on a single study. Individual studies may produce misleading information, they may have flaws that don't become evident until later, they may be based on assumptions that don't hold up, or the results may end up having an alternate explanation (as when a correlation is found, but does not establish specific causation). It's all too common for science reporters, particularly in low-quality outlets, to draw broad and bold conclusions from a single study, but actual scientists quickly learn to be more cautious. Peer-reviewed papers will generally make clear that conclusions are tentative, and may be modified or even overturned by future research.\nThis comic's fictional paper, however, ends with a statement that the paper has resolved all the problems about its topic, and that no more research is necessary. Humorously, the authors are so confident in their research skills that they believe that they have solved all the problems in that particular topic that can be solved. Munroe jokes that he'd like to see researchers with \"the guts\" to make such a proclamation. In real life, doing so would likely damage the reputation of the study's authors, because it would belie both a breathtaking arrogance and a lack of understanding of the research process. If nothing else, studies need to be replicated, to establish that the initial data gathering was accurate. In addition, no single study could realistically address every aspect, variation and complication in a given topic. It's simply not feasible that a single paper could \"[resolve] all remaining questions\" on any given topic, and making such a ridiculous claim would badly damage a researcher's credibility. At the same time, if no further research were necessary, every researcher in the field, including the author who wrote the study, would need to either change fields or change careers. The title text ironically states that \"further research\" is indeed needed to understand how the researchers who wrote the paper were able to resolve all the problems in that topic or field, thus allowing the researchers to justify future funding for their research.\nPerhaps the statement most like this made by a real scientist was by Albert A. Michelson , at the 1894 dedication of the University of Chicago's Reyerson Physical Laboratory: \"[I]t seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.\" (Variants of this statement are sometimes misattributed to William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin .) Even this statement is couched in much less certainty than the concluding statement presented in this comic strip, and sure enough, just eleven years later, Albert Einstein wrote his Annus Mirabilis papers . These four papers explained the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence, turning established physics on its head. Ironically, Michelson made this statement despite the fact that he himself had upset a major of notion of established physics just seven years before, when the Michelson-Morley experiment demonstrated that the speed of light was constant, disproving the Aether theories then prevalent in physics. This result in turn was part of the inspiration for Einstein's theory of special relativity.\n[A panel, representing an excerpt from a scholarly journal, with two sentences clearly visible. Below the text is one more readable word, with a horizontal line below it, and then four numbered lines with unreadable text. The text is written with normal capitalization rather than in all caps.] We believe this resolves all remaining questions on this topic. No further research is needed. References 1. 2. 3. 4.\n[Caption below the panel:] Just once, I want to see a research paper with the guts to end this way.\n"}
{"id":2269,"title":"Phylogenetic Tree","image_title":"Phylogenetic Tree","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2269","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/phylogenetic_tree.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2269:_Phylogenetic_Tree","transcript":"[A circular phylogenetic tree is shown, with various parts of the tree colored red, green, blue, and black.  Text is written on the root of the tree and the first few branches, getting smaller until it becomes unreadable.  The visible text is:] Duke Duke Gonzaga Louisville Duke UVA FSU Dayton UVA Kansas FSU\n[Caption below the panel:] I was kicked off the biology project after I secretly replaced all the phylogenetic trees in our new paper with March Madness brackets.\n","explanation":"In biology, phylogenetic trees are a way of showing evolutionary relationships between species. Each split in the tree represents a species that was the common ancestor of the two species beneath it, resulting in a bifurcating structure that can be followed all the way back to a single root - the most recent common ancestor of all species in the tree.\nIn sport, a tournament tree is a diagrammatic way of showing the progress of competitors in an elimination tournament. Each split in the tree represents the winner of a match between the two competitors beneath it. This too results in a bifurcating tree structure, which eventually terminates at a single root representing the champion of the tournament. Tournament brackets are a recurring theme at xkcd.\nIn this comic, Randall has taken advantage of the similarity between these two diagrams in order to prank his fellow biologists.\nEach year in the United States, in March and early April, 68 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I college basketball teams play in a single elimination postseason tournament to decide the national champion of college basketball. This tournament is colloquially known as March Madness . Associated with this tournament, it has become commonplace to guess the outcomes of each game, and predict who will win the tournament. A diagram illustrating the progress and elimination of teams through the tournament is called a bracket . Presumably Randall is referring to the men's college basketball tournament here, though there is a separate women's college basketball tournament that is also referred to as \"March Madness\".\nRandall has replaced the trees in a biology paper with a basketball March Madness bracket , which is not related to biology. The 2019-20 NCAA college basketball regular season had not ended yet at the time of this comic's publication, so the partial bracket shown is a fictional bracket. Compared to a phylogenetic tree, the 'root' of a tournament tree is the final result (once known), rather than the common ancestor that was prior in time to all those that came after; the 'leaves' are all the initially hopeful competitors, rather than the latest extant (or unsucceeded extinct) organisms.\nThe title text shows the inverse of what the comic says: Apparently the March Madness bracket pool removed Randall after he tried to introduce biology-related evidence comparing the National Basketball Association (NBA) and American Basketball Association (ABA) to organisms and claiming the ABA is an endosymbiont living inside the NBA. An endosymbiont is an organism living inside another organism. In a way, this can be considered true of these two leagues, as the NBA and ABA merged in 1976 after which the ABA ceased to exist. 4 teams from the ABA, the Denver Nuggets , Indiana Pacers , Brooklyn Nets and San Antonio Spurs , continue to exist today as NBA teams. It is additionally humorous that Randall brings up the ABA\/NBA merger in a March Madness bracket group, as March Madness is a college basketball tournament, as opposed to professional basketball played by the NBA and ABA.\nA March Madness bracket was also the topic of 1819: Sweet 16 .\nThe bracket shows the Duke University basketball team winning the NCAA college basketball tournament. Strangely, it shows Gonzaga University linked only to explicitly non-Gonzaga branches, suddenly appearing out of the bottom section, which is not possible in a sports bracket context, but possible in biology if Gonzaga is an identified ancestral root with all descendant evolved species identified by a new term. In fact, the implied unchanged continuity of Duke from 'universal ancestor' to niche population sharing the world with all of its diverged and re-evolved outbranchings (rather than perhaps used as a term for a typically broad cladistic group of branches, such as Archaea) would be more curious - or just imply an inherent of available precision in the necessary paleobiological studies that classify the proposed UA and its descendency.\nAs of the publish date of this comic, all of the college basketball teams mentioned (except the University of Virginia) were ranked in the top 25 of the Associated Press poll . The University of Virginia was the 2019 national champion (winner of the tournament), so that may have been why they were mentioned.\n[A circular phylogenetic tree is shown, with various parts of the tree colored red, green, blue, and black.  Text is written on the root of the tree and the first few branches, getting smaller until it becomes unreadable.  The visible text is:] Duke Duke Gonzaga Louisville Duke UVA FSU Dayton UVA Kansas FSU\n[Caption below the panel:] I was kicked off the biology project after I secretly replaced all the phylogenetic trees in our new paper with March Madness brackets.\n"}
{"id":2270,"title":"Picking Bad Stocks","image_title":"Picking Bad Stocks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2270","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/picking_bad_stocks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2270:_Picking_Bad_Stocks","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are walking together.]\nCueball: I feel like by now I should know about the stock market. Cueball: What is investing?  Do you just open a website and pick the companies you like?\n[Cueball and Ponytail are still walking; Ponytail is holding out her hand palm-up.]\nPonytail: Well, you totally can. Ponytail: But there's a lot of evidence that no investing strategy consistently picks stocks that outperform the average of the whole market.  A lot of fund management is a myth.\n[Close-up on Ponytail, who has turned to Cueball.]\nCueball (off-screen): Huh, okay. Ponytail: But there's a weird corollary to that idea: it implies that, ignoring fees and stuff, it's just as hard to consistently lose money by picking bad stocks from an index.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are both back in frame.  They are standing still and facing each other.]\nPonytail: If someone could consistently buy bad stocks, you could beat the average by hiring them, letting them pretend to invest, then buying every stock except the ones they pick. Ponytail: In a way, bad judgement is just as helpful as good judgement.\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball and Ponytail are standing facing each other; Cueball is raising his hands.]\nCueball: Oh my God. Cueball: I can do that! Ponytail: No, it's just an example-- Cueball: This is the job I was born for.\n[Cueball is either sitting in a box or being viewed on a camera screen.  He is sitting in front of a computer console, and a camera is pointed at him.  Megan and White Hat are viewing him, and White Hat is holding a tablet.]\n[Text box: Soon...] Cueball: Hey, this company's CEO wants revenge on the same ghost as me!  I'm buying! Cueball: Ooh, and this one is planning to develop a \"Camping Roomba.\"  That's a sure bet! Megan: Drop companies #208 and #1434 from the index. White Hat: Done.\n","explanation":"Cueball and Ponytail are discussing the stock market. Ponytail explains that there has been no reliable way to consistently pick stocks that outperform the market average. She also states that there could be a corollary to that; there is no way to consistently pick bad stocks (presumably for this discussion, bad stocks refers to stocks whose value is expected to go down).  Cueball states that he could consistently pick bad stocks, and the last panel shows him at a trading terminal purportedly buying bad stocks, while White Hat and Megan use his bad stock picks as indications that those stocks should be removed from whatever stock index they manage.\nGenerally, people invest in the stock market hoping to make money.  They buy stock in companies whose value they expect will increase, and sell stock when they feel its value is about to stop increasing or start decreasing.  Someone who could tell whether a stock's price will rise or fall (more than the average stock) in a given time interval could make a lot of money, but this is an infamously difficult problem.  Market prices already reflect the consensus estimate of what a stock should be worth based on all public information about the company. Some investors use fundamental analysis , that is, they attempt to understand companies based on their financial statements and market position to identify which stocks are likely to become more or less valuable over time, while others use technical analysis which seeks to identify patterns in the stock prices themselves.  Technical analysis was featured in comic 2101 . However, while the rise and fall of stock prices are sometimes connected to real events (strong or weak profit statements, new product announcements, major scandals) that one person might predict better than another, they more often exhibit random-walk behavior. Many studies, such as the long-running \" Investment Dartboard Contest \" run by The Wall Street Journal , have found that an index of stocks that represent the total market, or even a set of randomly-selected stocks (often colloquially stated as \"picked by a monkey\") beats paying an expert to choose your portfolio.\nRealistically, in investing, someone who purposely trades in bad stocks is called a short seller , and someone who could consistently pick bad stock could make a lot of money in the stock market. Short selling consists of selling a stock before you own it, with the anticipation that the stock's price will drop soon, and you can later purchase the stock to fulfill the sale. The difference between the selling price and the purchase price is your profit, just as with any normal (\"long\") purchase and sale. However, in US stock markets, it is illegal to sell stocks that you don't own, so when you short a stock, you need to borrow that stock from a third party (possibly the trading firm you're working with, or some other firm that the trading firm has a stock loan relationship with, that currently holds a position in the stock you're shorting) to cover the sale. This is all done automatically by the trading platform you use. Between the time you sell the stock until the time you repurchase the stock on the open market, you will have what's called a short position on the stock, and you need to pay interest to the company that lent you that stock. Because of the interest payments, short sales are almost always short-term positions, as the interest paid on the loan can quickly exceed any profit you might make on the sale. A. Gary Shilling , a financial analyst, famously remarked that \" markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent. \"  Ponytail attempted to explain short selling to Cueball in 2094: Short Selling (perhaps that comic and this one are part of the same conversation), although Cueball found Ponytail's advice much less helpful than he has found this comic's conversation. However, in this case, Ponytail is not describing short selling but instead, investing in every stock except for the bad ones\nCueball's statement about wanting revenge on a ghost may be a reference to 2259: Networking Problems , in which Cueball was driven insane trying to debug network problems and came to believe in ghosts.  Perhaps the CEO of company #208 has had a similar experience with a network.\nIf Cueball's statement that a company is developing a \"camping Roomba \" is correctly attributing the trademark (as opposed to genericizing it to refer to any small cleaning robot), then presumably company #1434 is iRobot .  While a Roomba for camping may sound like a ridiculous concept that is not likely to make much money, developing a robot that can navigate and move around natural environments would be a major advancement leading to new opportunities for both their civilian and military product lines.  A campground offers a more challenging environment than indoors, while being slightly more controlled than a truly wild area, making for a good development step.  Dropping iRobot from this company's index is probably not a move that would be suggested by a stock broker who is earnestly trying to make money, but maybe Cueball's \"market anti-sense\" knows something we don't.\nIn the title-text, it seems that Cueball is worse at picking bad stocks than he thinks he is; a legitimate investor could have seen what Cueball saw and taken it as a good sign. This only validates Ponytail's point regarding the stock market - there is no way to consistently identify what stocks will go up or down.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are walking together.]\nCueball: I feel like by now I should know about the stock market. Cueball: What is investing?  Do you just open a website and pick the companies you like?\n[Cueball and Ponytail are still walking; Ponytail is holding out her hand palm-up.]\nPonytail: Well, you totally can. Ponytail: But there's a lot of evidence that no investing strategy consistently picks stocks that outperform the average of the whole market.  A lot of fund management is a myth.\n[Close-up on Ponytail, who has turned to Cueball.]\nCueball (off-screen): Huh, okay. Ponytail: But there's a weird corollary to that idea: it implies that, ignoring fees and stuff, it's just as hard to consistently lose money by picking bad stocks from an index.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are both back in frame.  They are standing still and facing each other.]\nPonytail: If someone could consistently buy bad stocks, you could beat the average by hiring them, letting them pretend to invest, then buying every stock except the ones they pick. Ponytail: In a way, bad judgement is just as helpful as good judgement.\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball and Ponytail are standing facing each other; Cueball is raising his hands.]\nCueball: Oh my God. Cueball: I can do that! Ponytail: No, it's just an example-- Cueball: This is the job I was born for.\n[Cueball is either sitting in a box or being viewed on a camera screen.  He is sitting in front of a computer console, and a camera is pointed at him.  Megan and White Hat are viewing him, and White Hat is holding a tablet.]\n[Text box: Soon...] Cueball: Hey, this company's CEO wants revenge on the same ghost as me!  I'm buying! Cueball: Ooh, and this one is planning to develop a \"Camping Roomba.\"  That's a sure bet! Megan: Drop companies #208 and #1434 from the index. White Hat: Done.\n"}
{"id":2271,"title":"Grandpa Jason and Grandpa Chad","image_title":"Grandpa Jason and Grandpa Chad","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2271","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/grandpa_jason_and_grandpa_chad.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2271:_Grandpa_Jason_and_Grandpa_Chad","transcript":"[A progression chart covering the period of years between 1950 to 1995. One line, representing the birth years of people becoming grandparents, is dotted and begins low at the start, climbs, then steeply declines. Two solid lines, representing the birth years of people named \"Chad\" or \"Jason\", begin in the early 1960s, rise almost concurrently, however one declines steadily while the other has a curve almost before the end of the chart. The overlapping area between the dotted and solid lines is shaded. The lines show the following data:]\nBirth years of people becoming grandparents this year (United States, very rough estimate) [A dotted line which begins at 1950, rises to its peak at 1970, then steeply declines to zero by the late '70s.]\nBirth years of people named \"Jason\" and \"Chad\" (Social Security data) [Chad: A solid line beginning at 1962, rises to its peak by 1975, then drops through the '80s and '90s. Jason crosses underneath it in 1985, but then re-crosses it in 1993.] [Jason: A solid line beginning at 1963, rises to its peak between 1977-80, then declines, dropping beneath Chad around 1985 but climbing above it again in 1993.]\n[Caption below the comic:] Fun fact: We have now entered the era of \"Grandpa Jason\" and \"Grandpa Chad.\"\n","explanation":"This is another comic with one of Randall's fun facts .\nThe comic contains three separate curves, with the x-axis being the date and the y-axis being the frequency of three separate sets of data:\nThe graph shows that the names \"Jason\" and \"Chad\" were extremely uncommon in the US prior to the 1960's, but then experienced a surge in popularity, peaking in the late 1970's, and falling off thereafter.  There are a couple of interesting effects when certain names become temporarily trendy. It means that those names become closely associated with a particular age cohort, so one can guess a person's age range based solely on their first name, and therefore predict other tendencies associated with age (this is also explored in 1950: Chicken Pox and Name Statistics ).  A side effect of this is that, when this cohort first comes of age, those names enter the public consciousness as being associated with youth, trendiness and irresponsibility. Of course, that cohort continues to age, and eventually becomes the adult cohort, then the senior cohort, but stereotypes are often slow to change. 2165: Millennials is similarly about how a label has outlived the demographic that it was used to describe, while the people described by the label have outgrown the traits that the label entails.\nIn addition to dealing with with the inertia of our assumptions and stereotype, this comic also continues a long XKCD tradition of pointing out how quickly time is passing, and how slow we often are to realize it. In this case, those of us in Randall's general age range are used to thinking of \"Jason\" and \"Chad\" as names for young, trendy, party animals.  The fact that only a small fraction of people with these names are under the age of 30, and a growing number of them are now grandparents (and that trend is likely to increase rapidly in the next few years), forces us to acknowledge that quite a bit of time has passed since we first formed our world views, and that means we've aged, even if we haven't noticed it.\nThe title text adds a caveat to the assertion, mentioning the lack of any real evidence for the distribution of ages of Grandparents, but tacitly admits that the matter is not sufficiently important to seek any further precision.\nOther possible caveats of the data:\nThe title text ends with the text \"No further research is really *needed,*\" referencing 2268: Further Research is Needed . This is also a joke in itself. The emphasis on *needed* is an admission that although more research is *possible*, it's simply not warranted, given the fairly trivial nature of the topic.\n[A progression chart covering the period of years between 1950 to 1995. One line, representing the birth years of people becoming grandparents, is dotted and begins low at the start, climbs, then steeply declines. Two solid lines, representing the birth years of people named \"Chad\" or \"Jason\", begin in the early 1960s, rise almost concurrently, however one declines steadily while the other has a curve almost before the end of the chart. The overlapping area between the dotted and solid lines is shaded. The lines show the following data:]\nBirth years of people becoming grandparents this year (United States, very rough estimate) [A dotted line which begins at 1950, rises to its peak at 1970, then steeply declines to zero by the late '70s.]\nBirth years of people named \"Jason\" and \"Chad\" (Social Security data) [Chad: A solid line beginning at 1962, rises to its peak by 1975, then drops through the '80s and '90s. Jason crosses underneath it in 1985, but then re-crosses it in 1993.] [Jason: A solid line beginning at 1963, rises to its peak between 1977-80, then declines, dropping beneath Chad around 1985 but climbing above it again in 1993.]\n[Caption below the comic:] Fun fact: We have now entered the era of \"Grandpa Jason\" and \"Grandpa Chad.\"\n"}
{"id":2272,"title":"Ringtone Timeline","image_title":"Ringtone Timeline","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2272","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ringtone_timeline.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2272:_Ringtone_Timeline","transcript":"[A horizontal timeline spanning between the years 1875 and 2022. Every year is indicated by a tick below the line, and labeled every 5 years. There is a gap between 1883 and 1989 with jagged lines to indicate a jump in time. 7 sections are labeled on the chart, each with a border except for the first and last:]\n[1875, with no border:] Telephone ringer invented\n[1878-1883:] Normal ringing sounds\n[Gap and jagged lines to indicate jump in time from 1883 to 1989]\n[1989-1996:] Normal ringing sounds\n[1996-2003:] Cool space beeps\n[2003-2009:] Song and novelty ringtones\n[2009-2013:] Cool space beeps\n[2013-2019:] Normal ringing sounds\n[2020, with no border:] Everyone sets their phones to vibrate\n[Caption below the panel:] After 140 years, humanity is finally on the verge of winning the war against ringtones.\n","explanation":"After the telephone was invented, a way of indicating when a call was coming through was needed.  Special voltages sent through the line were used to activate a physical bell on the other end, leading to what we recognize as a phone ringing sound , and that method of generating sound persisted for quite some time, even when new methods of detecting and generating ringing sounds were developed.\nEventually, however, people realized they were no longer confined to the traditional bell ringing sound, as computers became more and more involved with the telephone process, and variations of bell-type sounds were introduced, often sounding like spaceship sounds from sci-fi movies. Probably the most iconic \"cool space beeps\" are the chirps from the communicators from Star Trek (which themselves resemble flip-phones in style). Another common ringtone was the Nokia tune .\nIn the late 1990s and early 2000s, actual songs, or song snippets were able to be used as a ringing sound. It became common to record song snippets from the radio, or to use song MP3 files as ringtones. Many of these songs are grating to hear, and also a social faux pas if they sound in theatres or other listening venues.  As an example, this Geico ad featuring bad ringtones, including \"the worst ringtone [the Geico gecko has] ever heard\", aired in 2010, around the end of the \"song and novelty ringtone\" period (according to Randall's periodization).\nAs people got sick of that, they reverted to use the default ring tone, a spaceship \/ computer sound, although this time often of higher quality and more melodious in nature. Nowadays, there are more people electing to use a more traditional ringing sound, both as the novelty has worn off, and possibly also as an ironic statement about ringtones. Randall (in the person of Cueball) made a statement like this in 479: Tones in 2008, which according to his reckoning was in the waning years of the novelty ringtone epoch.\nThe final stage the comic is pointing to is do away with traditional sound entirely, and going with the vibrate mode most portable phones have; what little sound there is is more of a low rumbling sound. Using this setting is common for schools, workplaces, or churches, as it can be disruptive to have a phone ring in a public place . Some users have chosen to always set their phones to the vibrate setting, to avoid having to change their ringing settings back and forth. Randall claims that vibrate mode is the \"final victory\" over ringtones, which he apparently dislikes.\nIn the title text, Randall ironically uses a \"novelty ringtone\" which is an audio recording of a phone vibrating. This would sound like a phone on vibrate mode, but his actual phone is not vibrating, and is actually producing a \"ringing\" sound. However, if the original phone was vibrating on a hard surface (as opposed to in a pocket, muffled by fabric), the sound would be much louder and more grating.  A recording of that sound, played as an audio ringtone, would go back to being annoying again. But maybe less imaginatively so than might be a version of the staccato \"drum-da-da-drum-da-da-drum\" of a phone's periodic handshaking with a mast, such as you sometimes hear over unassociated audio equipment, at pretty much any time it pleases.\n[A horizontal timeline spanning between the years 1875 and 2022. Every year is indicated by a tick below the line, and labeled every 5 years. There is a gap between 1883 and 1989 with jagged lines to indicate a jump in time. 7 sections are labeled on the chart, each with a border except for the first and last:]\n[1875, with no border:] Telephone ringer invented\n[1878-1883:] Normal ringing sounds\n[Gap and jagged lines to indicate jump in time from 1883 to 1989]\n[1989-1996:] Normal ringing sounds\n[1996-2003:] Cool space beeps\n[2003-2009:] Song and novelty ringtones\n[2009-2013:] Cool space beeps\n[2013-2019:] Normal ringing sounds\n[2020, with no border:] Everyone sets their phones to vibrate\n[Caption below the panel:] After 140 years, humanity is finally on the verge of winning the war against ringtones.\n"}
{"id":2273,"title":"Truck Proximity","image_title":"Truck Proximity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2273","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/truck_proximity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2273:_Truck_Proximity","transcript":"[A chart is shown with two axes. Each axis has a label with an arrow pointing from the label towards higher values. No values are shown.] X-axis: Knowledge of different types of trucks Y-axis: Proximity to trucks in daily life\n[Three sections are marked on the chart with dotted lines, drawn in imperfect ellipses. The first two circumscribe areas along the diagonal X=Y. A large one takes up about two thirds of the length starting from the origin, and a smaller one is separated a bit from the first one, but continuing the trend of X=Y. This takes up less than a third at the top right. Below this, close to the X-axis is a third even smaller section, its outer edge is as far to the right at the one at the top. Each of these three sections has a label written inside. From largest to smallest these are:] Normal people People with truck related jobs or hobbies Parents of children age 2-5\n","explanation":"This comic is a graph showing the relationship between time spent in proximity to trucks and level of knowledge about different types of trucks. For the general populace the two tend to go together: people who do not spend much time around trucks are less likely to have knowledge about trucks, and people who spend more time around trucks are more likely to have knowledge about trucks. People with jobs or hobbies involving trucks spend a lot of time with them and must know how they work, so they fit this trend but at a higher level on both axes.\nThe outlier group presented here are parents of small children.  Small children think trucks are cool and learn a lot about them, and then share this knowledge with their parents. The children themselves might be counted into the \"people with truck-related hobbies\" but parents won't and are unlikely to go near any truck. They might also try to keep their children away from them, which is why they have less proximity to trucks than most normal people.\nThe title text presumes that this graph could also be made about dinosaurs and farm animals. Randall confidently states that children like dinosaurs and farms and trucks, and so there must be multimedia featuring all three at once. In fact, books about dinosaurs driving tractors on farms do exist ( Dinosaur Farm! and Dinosaur Farm are two examples), as are books about them driving trucks ( Dinosaur Rescue! ) as well as TV shows about dinosaurs that ARE trucks ( Dinotrux ). Not all three together so far , apparently trucks and farms do not mix very well.\n[A chart is shown with two axes. Each axis has a label with an arrow pointing from the label towards higher values. No values are shown.] X-axis: Knowledge of different types of trucks Y-axis: Proximity to trucks in daily life\n[Three sections are marked on the chart with dotted lines, drawn in imperfect ellipses. The first two circumscribe areas along the diagonal X=Y. A large one takes up about two thirds of the length starting from the origin, and a smaller one is separated a bit from the first one, but continuing the trend of X=Y. This takes up less than a third at the top right. Below this, close to the X-axis is a third even smaller section, its outer edge is as far to the right at the one at the top. Each of these three sections has a label written inside. From largest to smallest these are:] Normal people People with truck related jobs or hobbies Parents of children age 2-5\n"}
{"id":2274,"title":"Stargazing 3","image_title":"Stargazing 3","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2274","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stargazing_3.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2274:_Stargazing_3","transcript":"[In a dark panel, Megan as a TV host stands in front of a group of people: Science Girl, Ponytail and Cueball. The panel is inverse-colored, i.e. white text and drawings on black] Host: Welcome back to Stargazing. Host: There are no new stars since last time, but you came back for some reason.\n[Zoomed out on the same scene, the host is now with Science Girl, Ponytail, Cueball, a Megan-like woman, and White Hat. The host is pointing upwards with her left hand.] Host: That star is Vega. At magnitude 0.03, it's the brightest star I'm currently talking about. Host: That one is Polaris. It's over the North Pole, which is all it has going for it.\n[A frame-less white panel, zoomed in on the host, who is now pointing upwards with her right hand.] Host: That's a comet. Some of them come back every few decades, no matter how much I yell at them. Host: But stargazing isn't all fun yelling. We face a problem even worse than comets: light pollution.\n[Back to a dark panel, the host now has a big bag of crossbows. The bag has a logo of a crossbow with stars around it. She has taken out one of them and is holding it in her right hand.] Host: The sky is going away because people keep shining lights at it. The new LEDs are even worse - they're too blue, and you can't turn them off by throwing rocks at them like with the old ones. Host: Luckily, I brought these astronomy crossbows. Host: Take one, then let's fan out and look for lamps.\n","explanation":"This is the third and final comic in the Stargazing series. The first 1644: Stargazing appeared four years earlier and the second 2017: Stargazing 2 one and a half years earlier.\nAs in the first two comics, Megan is hosting a stargazing event, in which she mixes accurate astronomical information with trivialities, as well as utterly bizarre statements. (See this section from the original Stargazing comic about the host and also the trivia , from the original comic, regarding the gender of the host).\nVega is a star in the constellation of Lyra . It does indeed have magnitude 0.03 and is the brightest star mentioned in this comic. Vega is only the 5th brightest star (outside of the Sun), as Sirius is the brightest visible star.  The phrase It's the brightest star I'm currently talking about is an example of the technically correct but not at all useful information that is typical of the Stargazing series. The phrase is true no matter what, because any star one talks about is the brightest star one is talking about, as any brighter star becomes the one talked about when mentioned. [ citation needed ]\nPolaris is indeed the star over the North Pole, and is commonly called the North Star or the Pole Star. It is the brightest star in the constellation Ursa Minor, but there are about fifty other stars that are as bright as it is (magnitude 2), so it's not really remarkable apart from being the pole star, as Megan says. Despite the fact that being the pole star is \"all it has going for it,\" it is nevertheless very important because it is used for navigation, as it appears fixed in the night sky. It hasn't always been and won't always be the pole star, however, as Earth's axis precesses in a 26,000 year cycle.\nComets are comparatively small clumps of rock and ice, seen mostly by the long, lit 'trail' of particles the heat of the sun causes to be ejected, and the solar wind then spreads outward in thin glowing lines that can be larger and more visible even than the constellations they are seen in front of - at least during the brief phase of their closest approach to the sun.  Comets generally have highly elliptical orbits around the Sun and so they are only seen for a brief period of time \"every few decades\" during their closest aproach. Yelling at comets is believed to be an ineffective way to make them go away [ citation needed ] . Megan may dislike comets because of their history in superstition of being seen as a sign of doom. This provides humor because typically this superstitious fear was caused by a lack of understanding, and it would be expected that a stargazing host would be informed on and therefore unafraid of comets.  No actual astronomers are bothered by comets [ citation needed ] , but some are upset about satellite megaconstellations such as SpaceX's Starlink .  In that case, astronomers are not yelling at the satellites, but at the companies that launch them.\nLight pollution is indeed a problem with stargazing. Light pollution is the presence of artificial light in the night sky, which makes it very difficult to see stars. Stargazing in remote locations is remarkably different than in populated cities. Light pollution was previously discussed in 2121: Light Pollution .  Light pollution does not actually make the \"sky go away\", but it does affect how humans can see stars or other astronomical features in the sky.\nMegan advocates an active approach to resolving light pollution\u2014rather than lobbying for reductions in artificial lighting, as the dark-sky movement does, she intends to lead her audience in destroying artificial lights.  Older lightbulbs are usually glass bulbs filled with inert gas (for incandescent bulbs) or high-pressure gases (for e.g. sodium-vapor lamps ) and so are easy to destroy with any blunt impact, thus accounting for Megan's mention of \"throwing rocks at them\". Modern LED lights, however, are much more robust, which is why she is handing out crossbows to achieve greater projectile energy.  An \" astronomy crossbow \" is a tool used to measure the angular distance between stars. They cannot shoot real crossbow bolts , but any type of crossbow or other weapon could be used to destroy lights and \"preserve\" the sky.  (Speaking of astronomy tools that have weapon-related names, there is a type of telescope called a \" Sun Gun \", but it is only meant to be used during the day to enable groups of people to view the Sun safely.  It is probably best that Megan's show is taking place at night, or else she might cause even more trouble.)\nIn the title text Megan mentions that by destroying enough of the lights in the region will make it possible to see more comets. By reducing the light pollution it will in general be possible to see more of any kind of astronomical objects, not just comets. But as Megan has made clear she dislikes comets, and is thus not interested in seeing any of them. But to see more of any of the other astronomical objects out there, she is willing to take the risk of seeing more comets, by lowering the light pollution.\nThis comic became the last comic not to be related to COVID-19 for more than a month!\n[In a dark panel, Megan as a TV host stands in front of a group of people: Science Girl, Ponytail and Cueball. The panel is inverse-colored, i.e. white text and drawings on black] Host: Welcome back to Stargazing. Host: There are no new stars since last time, but you came back for some reason.\n[Zoomed out on the same scene, the host is now with Science Girl, Ponytail, Cueball, a Megan-like woman, and White Hat. The host is pointing upwards with her left hand.] Host: That star is Vega. At magnitude 0.03, it's the brightest star I'm currently talking about. Host: That one is Polaris. It's over the North Pole, which is all it has going for it.\n[A frame-less white panel, zoomed in on the host, who is now pointing upwards with her right hand.] Host: That's a comet. Some of them come back every few decades, no matter how much I yell at them. Host: But stargazing isn't all fun yelling. We face a problem even worse than comets: light pollution.\n[Back to a dark panel, the host now has a big bag of crossbows. The bag has a logo of a crossbow with stars around it. She has taken out one of them and is holding it in her right hand.] Host: The sky is going away because people keep shining lights at it. The new LEDs are even worse - they're too blue, and you can't turn them off by throwing rocks at them like with the old ones. Host: Luckily, I brought these astronomy crossbows. Host: Take one, then let's fan out and look for lamps.\n"}
{"id":2275,"title":"Coronavirus Name","image_title":"Coronavirus Name","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2275","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coronavirus_name.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2275:_Coronavirus_Name","transcript":"[Megan is carrying a box with biohazard symbols on it towards a desk where Ponytail (wearing safety glasses) is working on a laptop, across from Cueball (also wearing safety glasses) who is putting a test tube into a PCR machine. There's also a flask on the desk.] Ponytail: Feels like we missed the window for the \"COVID-19\" renaming. \"Coronavirus\" is just too catchy. Cueball: But it's not specific! There are a lot of coronaviruses.\n[In a frameless panel, Ponytail (still wearing safety glasses) is pointing at a screen or picture showing a modern city skyline with a large spider crawling across three of the high-rise buildings.] Ponytail: I think it's fine. It's like, you know the giant spider downtown that sits on the buildings and sometimes eats cars? I think technically it's a mutant T. annexa wolf spider, but everyone is just calling it \"the spider\" and we all know what they mean.\n[Back to the setting from the first panel. Megan is standing and Ponytail had turned towards her and Cueball has stepped back from the machine.] Megan: I've been meaning to ask, what's with that spider? Should we...do something? Ponytail: Honestly I've been too busy with the virus stuff to look into it-I just changed my commute to avoid Main St. Cueball: Yeah, that's fair. One thing at a time.\n","explanation":"This comic is the first comic in a long series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic . For several weeks in a row, all comics were related to this pandemic.\nThis is thus Randall's first take on the COVID-19 pandemic. As of the publication date (March 2, 2020), the pandemic had infected more than 90,000 people, and had caused more than 3,000 deaths.\nCoronavirus is a category of viruses named for their appearance, which is similar to a halo or crown, and includes four different viruses which can cause the common cold in humans. However, the virus itself is not called COVID-19, but is called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). So calling the virus or disease \"coronavirus\" is like calling a specific strain of flu The Influenza virus . However, since the new coronavirus is so hyped in the media it has attracted so much attention, so the name \"coronavirus\" has become associated with COVID-19, making it difficult to discuss other types of coronaviruses later on.\nAs of March 2, 2020, COVID-19 in China has a 20% hospitalization rate and a 2% death rate by current estimates, compared to a typical rate of around 0.1% for the flu in the US .\nIn this comic, researchers Ponytail , Megan and Cueball are discussing that it is by now too late to try calling the disease its official name COVID-19, as the name coronavirus has stuck. Cueball reacts with dismay, since there are many other types of coronaviruses.\nTo illustrate that Cueball's complaint is excessively pedantic and inconsequential, Ponytail \u2014 rather than using a more real-world analogy \u2014 compares the coronavirus naming to a giant car-eating spider living on top of the skyscrapers of the town, which people similarly refer to generically as simply \"The Spider,\" even though that is not the most technically-accurate name (it is technically a mutated Tigrosa annexa wolf spider ). Everyone knows what you mean when you say \"Coronavirus\", as they do when you mention \"The Spider\".\nThe comic then goes on to poke fun at itself by treating Ponytail's example as a real concern, as Megan then asks if they should not also do something about the spider. But Ponytail and Cueball agree that they can only tackle one problem at a time, and coronavirus takes up all their time. Ponytail further notes that she simply began altering her route to circumvent the location where The Spider has taken up residence, as evidence that the Spider issue can be easily avoided, and is therefore not an immediate concern.\nThe title text references the health advice that people avoid touching their face with unwashed hands, in order to prevent infections that they picked up by touching things from entering their mucous membranes. (It's a lot easier for an infection to enter the body through the inside of your nose than your hands.) It is likewise quite important to keep the giant spider from touching your face, but for the dissimilar reason that it might bite and eat you.\nNotably, the rename to COVID-19 did eventually catch on as the default description of the disease caused by \"The Coronavirus\" SARS-CoV2.\n[Megan is carrying a box with biohazard symbols on it towards a desk where Ponytail (wearing safety glasses) is working on a laptop, across from Cueball (also wearing safety glasses) who is putting a test tube into a PCR machine. There's also a flask on the desk.] Ponytail: Feels like we missed the window for the \"COVID-19\" renaming. \"Coronavirus\" is just too catchy. Cueball: But it's not specific! There are a lot of coronaviruses.\n[In a frameless panel, Ponytail (still wearing safety glasses) is pointing at a screen or picture showing a modern city skyline with a large spider crawling across three of the high-rise buildings.] Ponytail: I think it's fine. It's like, you know the giant spider downtown that sits on the buildings and sometimes eats cars? I think technically it's a mutant T. annexa wolf spider, but everyone is just calling it \"the spider\" and we all know what they mean.\n[Back to the setting from the first panel. Megan is standing and Ponytail had turned towards her and Cueball has stepped back from the machine.] Megan: I've been meaning to ask, what's with that spider? Should we...do something? Ponytail: Honestly I've been too busy with the virus stuff to look into it-I just changed my commute to avoid Main St. Cueball: Yeah, that's fair. One thing at a time.\n"}
{"id":2276,"title":"Self-Isolate","image_title":"Self-Isolate","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2276","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/self_isolate.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2276:_Self-Isolate","transcript":"[Cueball sits in an armchair watching television. A zigzag line from the TV indicates that the text is a voice from the TV.] Voice from television: Experts are saying people may need to \"self-isolate\" to combat the virus.\n[A slim beat panel with Cueball sitting silent in the armchair.]\n[Zoomed in on Cueball in the armchair. A starburst on the right border indicates the voice from an off-panel person.] Cueball: ... I've been practicing for this moment my whole life. Off-panel voice: I don't think that's\u2014 Cueball: Quick, make plans and watch how fast I cancel!\n","explanation":"This comic is the second comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic .\nIn this comic, Cueball is watching television and hears a suggestion that people may need to \"self-isolate.\" This refers to the practice of isolating infected individuals, to keep the disease from spreading. If the pandemic grows more severe, going out in large crowds could also be discouraged, to avoid being infected by those around you.\nAccording to the HHS , both quarantine and isolation help prevent the spread of infectious diseases, but they are different. Quarantine is for well people who might have been exposed to see if they become sick. Isolation is for sick people to keep them from infecting healthy people. So the suggestion for self-isolation means that sick people should stay away from healthy people.\nCueball's response to this advice is that he's \"been practicing for this moment [his] whole life\". xkcd frequently refers to social awkwardness, introversion, and difficulty with interpersonal interactions. Cueball (likely representing Randall himself) appears to find spending time in public and with large groups trying. It's implied that he prefers to spend time alone (or possibly with small groups of family and close friends) rather than going out. The joke is that this tendency is often seen as unhealthy and alienating, but in the case of a pandemic, actually becomes quite valuable. Cueball seems to take an odd sort of pride in the fact that he's skilled at remaining alone and uninfected, while more social people would be in danger.\nThe comic image is a link to one tweet in a thread of tweets about COVID-19 by @kakape , a science journalist according to their Twitter bio, which says \"Social distancing may mean staying further apart from each other physically in coming weeks. We should compensate by caring even more about each other than usually, because we are, of course, all in this together.\" ( beginning of thread ).\nIn the title text, Cueball continues to be proud of his introversion, claiming that he has been \"practicing social distancing\" for much of his life.\n[Cueball sits in an armchair watching television. A zigzag line from the TV indicates that the text is a voice from the TV.] Voice from television: Experts are saying people may need to \"self-isolate\" to combat the virus.\n[A slim beat panel with Cueball sitting silent in the armchair.]\n[Zoomed in on Cueball in the armchair. A starburst on the right border indicates the voice from an off-panel person.] Cueball: ... I've been practicing for this moment my whole life. Off-panel voice: I don't think that's\u2014 Cueball: Quick, make plans and watch how fast I cancel!\n"}
{"id":2277,"title":"Business Greetings","image_title":"Business Greetings","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2277","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/business_greetings.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2277:_Business_Greetings","transcript":"[Beret Guy is standing to the left addressing Ponytail, Hairy and Hairbun sitting in office chairs at a table. Hairbun is at the end of the table. All three have one arm on the table.] Beret Guy: I don't think we should overreact to the coronavirus, Beret Guy: But it might be time to put an end to the custom of starting business meetings by everyone licking each others' eyeballs. Hairy: I'll miss the human contact, but that's fair. Hairbun: Gotta change with the times.\n","explanation":"This comic is the third comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic . With this comic also on that topic, all comics of that week were about the pandemic. This continued for many more weeks.\nAs a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, people are refraining from personal contact. This leads to changes with customs in the workplace, such as shaking hands at the beginning of a meeting.\nThe comic shows Beret Guy addressing his employees at his eccentric company ( Ponytail , Hairy and Hairbun , see also 1997: Business Update ). He states that although they should not overreact to the coronavirus, they should at least stop their custom of beginning meetings by \"licking each others' eyeballs\". Virus or not, it is not common for people to lick anyone's eyeballs at meetings, [ citation needed ] but it could be an extreme stretch of intimate behavior to make an analogy to some cultures' norm of kissing acquaintances in greeting.\nHumorously, his employees state that they will miss this human contact, but that they at least understand.\nContact between saliva and eyes are a very common way to spread the disease. However, this usually occurs from one infected person sneezing and airborne particles randomly coming in contact with an uninfected bystander's eye, or people touching their own faces and eyes after having touched an infected surface, not by applying the saliva directly to a person's eyeball by means of another person's tongue. Also, most people's eyelids instinctually close when they see an object, including someone else's tongue, about to hit them in order to protect the eyeballs, so actually licking each others' eyeballs, as opposed to merely each others' eye lids , would be very difficult for most people, but Beret Guy being able to do this would not be very surprising considering his other abilities, such as being immune to his head being impaled.\nThe title text refers to an actual business custom (exchanging business cards ), but one which is absurdly altered to promote the spread of disease by touching cards and hands to faces. It is not clear whether this is safer or more dangerous than Beret Guy's previous practice of eating business cards, see 1032: Networking .\n[Beret Guy is standing to the left addressing Ponytail, Hairy and Hairbun sitting in office chairs at a table. Hairbun is at the end of the table. All three have one arm on the table.] Beret Guy: I don't think we should overreact to the coronavirus, Beret Guy: But it might be time to put an end to the custom of starting business meetings by everyone licking each others' eyeballs. Hairy: I'll miss the human contact, but that's fair. Hairbun: Gotta change with the times.\n"}
{"id":2278,"title":"Scientific Briefing","image_title":"Scientific Briefing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2278","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scientific_briefing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2278:_Scientific_Briefing","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are showing a graph on a projected screen.  The graph is labeled \"Things\", with \"Time\" advancing to the right on the x -axis.  The level of \"Things\" has been rising over time to a point labeled \"Now\".  The current level of \"Things\" is above a level labeled \"Good\", and about as far below a level labeled \"Bad\".  Megan is pointing to the line of \"Things\" with a pointer stick, while Cueball is pointing up to the \"Bad\" level with a pointer stick.]\nMegan: Here's the situation: Megan: This line is here. Cueball: But it's going up toward here .\n[White Hat enters the scene.  His hand is on his chin.  Cueball is no longer holding a pointer stick.]\nWhite Hat: So things will be bad? Megan: Unless someone does something to stop it. White Hat: Will anyone do that? Megan: ...We don't know. Megan: That's why we're showing you this.\n[A narrow panel focusing only on Megan and Cueball.]\nWhite Hat (off-panel, left): So you don't know, White Hat: And the graph says things are not bad. Cueball: But if no one acts, they'll become bad.\n[White Hat is back inside the frame.  He is gesturing to Megan and Cueball with his palm up.]\nWhite Hat: Well, please let me know if that happens! Megan: Based on this conversation, it already has.\n","explanation":"Things are not good, and are going to be bad soon.  The only way for things to not be bad is for someone to do something about it. Megan and Cueball are presenting these things to White Hat , evidently hoping to encourage him to do something about things, but he instead chooses to wait for things to become bad, to which Megan replies that the conversation itself indicates they have become bad.\nMegan's final remark \u2014 \"Based on this conversation, it already has [become bad]\" \u2014 is an instance of recursion , and suggests that the unnamed subject of the graph may be something whose worsening is demonstrated by the way the discussion of the graph has gone.  The subject of the graph could, therefore, be the phenomenon of people not acting on things that are worsening until they actually become bad, as White Hat proposes to do.  At the time this comic came out, the outbreak of COVID-19 was on the rise and about to be declared a pandemic, with widespread perception the US federal government had failed to act before the outbreak became a crisis.  The first of the COVID-19 comics, 2275: Coronavirus Name , explicitly showed people not dealing with one problem while they concentrate on another (though in that case they were dealing with COVID-19 while neglecting an invading giant spider).\nThe recursive subject of the graph could also be the deterioration of data analysis into such abstract terms that it no longer depends on the content of the topic supposedly being analyzed.  Or, Megan's final remark could be an ironic commentary on the situation without actually referring to the topic of the graph.  The ambiguity of Megan's remark may be the point of the humor, as it compounds the absurd ambiguity of the entire discussion.\nIf the graph isn't about the recursive topic of the discussion, what might it be about?  At the moment of release, an obvious possible thing on its way to becoming bad was the number of cases of infection in the COVID-19 pandemic.  There were a series of comics about COVID-19, including the three comics immediately before and the four immediately after this one.  The graph shows a steadily rising line, but with a slight zigzag in it, which could be an intentional similarity to the Keeling Curve .\nThe graph could also be about most anything else, because, as the title text remarks, it applies to \"like half of\" any things considered.  While it's hard to say whether precisely 50% of all things are getting bad (or good), in a more general sense all line graphs would trend at least slightly either up or down.  This binary 'either good or bad' finding may lead one to conclude that \"like half\" of all graphs show something getting bad (or else good).  If not everyone agrees on what is \"good\" or \"bad\" on some issue, that same issue might even be viewed as going either from good to bad or from bad to good, providing two different graphs for each such issue with 50% of them broadly matching the comic.\nTo whatever extent this comic is related to COVID-19 \u2014 which it does not after all explicitly mention, but, at least, COVID-19 exemplifies the problem of waiting to act until things reach a crisis \u2014 it would be the fourth comic in a row in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\n[Megan and Cueball are showing a graph on a projected screen.  The graph is labeled \"Things\", with \"Time\" advancing to the right on the x -axis.  The level of \"Things\" has been rising over time to a point labeled \"Now\".  The current level of \"Things\" is above a level labeled \"Good\", and about as far below a level labeled \"Bad\".  Megan is pointing to the line of \"Things\" with a pointer stick, while Cueball is pointing up to the \"Bad\" level with a pointer stick.]\nMegan: Here's the situation: Megan: This line is here. Cueball: But it's going up toward here .\n[White Hat enters the scene.  His hand is on his chin.  Cueball is no longer holding a pointer stick.]\nWhite Hat: So things will be bad? Megan: Unless someone does something to stop it. White Hat: Will anyone do that? Megan: ...We don't know. Megan: That's why we're showing you this.\n[A narrow panel focusing only on Megan and Cueball.]\nWhite Hat (off-panel, left): So you don't know, White Hat: And the graph says things are not bad. Cueball: But if no one acts, they'll become bad.\n[White Hat is back inside the frame.  He is gesturing to Megan and Cueball with his palm up.]\nWhite Hat: Well, please let me know if that happens! Megan: Based on this conversation, it already has.\n"}
{"id":2279,"title":"Symptoms","image_title":"Symptoms","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2279","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/symptoms.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2279:_Symptoms","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan stand facing each other, with Cueball looking down at his smartphone held up in one hand.] Cueball: It says here common symptoms include shortness of breath, fever, fatigue, and a dry cough. Megan: That's reassuring to me, a person with powerful lungs, icy skin, frenzied energy, and an incredibly wet cough.\n","explanation":"This comic is the fifth comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThe comic states that the symptoms of a disease are shortness of breath , fever , fatigue and dry cough . These are the top 3 and 5th most common symptoms reported for COVID-19. This is thus the fifth comic in a row about this disease, released on the day that the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic .\nLooking these symptoms up on his phone, Cueball reads them to Megan who expresses relief.  The experiences of hers she claims as normal are so extremely opposite to the symptoms of the disease, that getting it might even be a boon rather than a harm. If a person has powerful lungs, shortness of breath wouldn't be very noticeable. She references icy skin, normally not a fever symptom, although heavy sweating caused by fever can lower temperature. She describes having frenzied energy, the opposite of fatigue.\nThe last symptom is an \"incredibly wet cough\", and although that is the opposite of a dry cough, it still sounds quite bad. The description she gives opposes COVID-19, but may be indicative of something else.\nThe focus on how symptoms play out differently for people with different normal experiences distantly touches on, but deftly evades, the harsh reality that people who, unlike the comic's characters, already have severe respiratory issues, may die in large quantities unless our response to the virus improves.  This is because the impact of a disease relates to how bad its symptoms are for the carriers.\nMegan's optimistic reaction is ironic, considering these could be symptoms of a whole host of medical situations, including any kind of flu.\nThe title text expands on this joke. Cueball reads up on the side effects from some medicine. Here again they don't have the common side effects of the medicine but the exact opposite, so they think they must be fine, even though those \"anti-symptoms\" are themselves cause for concern.\nIt also reflects on the whole concept of symptom\/side effect warnings themselves as often people have no good frame of reference for when a particular symptom is actually abnormal.  It is often easy for one to believe they match some or all of a list of symptoms because for someone to be absolutely sure they do not have a specific symptom, they would need an almost comic level of \"normality\".\nThe medicine is supposed to make the user:\nHaving a heavy head is not a good sign, even though the opposite is also not good. Dry mouth can be annoying but her condition sounds dangerous. And although blurred vision is a bad thing, it is impossible for a human eye to follow the 12-80 beats a second of a hummingbird; this suggests that Megan might be hallucinating, which is arguably even worse.\nMuch later in 2580: Rest and Fluids , the joke is again on symptoms or rather getting them again. The pandemic was still going almost two years later.\n[Cueball and Megan stand facing each other, with Cueball looking down at his smartphone held up in one hand.] Cueball: It says here common symptoms include shortness of breath, fever, fatigue, and a dry cough. Megan: That's reassuring to me, a person with powerful lungs, icy skin, frenzied energy, and an incredibly wet cough.\n"}
{"id":2280,"title":"2010 and 2020","image_title":"2010 and 2020","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2280","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2010_and_2020.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2280:_2010_and_2020","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are walking to the right of the panel. There is a gray outline around Cueball, indicating he is from the future] White Hat: What are things like ten years from now in 2020? White Hat: We have this new \"bitcoin\" thing \u2014 does it ever catch on and become normal?\n[A frameless panel, with White Hat and Cueball still walking to the right.] Cueball: It's still around. I just bought a bottle of hand sanitizer for one bitcoin.\n[A regular panel, with them continuing to walk] White Hat: Cool, that sounds pretty normal. Cueball: Well, here's the thing...\n","explanation":"This comic is the sixth comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic .\nWhite Hat , who lives in 2010, and Cueball , who lives in 2020, are in contact with each other via some kind of time travel. White Hat wants to learn about life in 2020 and is particularly interested in bitcoin , a decentralized cryptocurrency which was released in 2009, and whether it had become an acceptable currency. Cueball answers that bitcoin still exists, and that he just bought a bottle of hand sanitizer for the price of one bitcoin. White Hat probably assumes that bitcoin is a widely accepted currency worth a few dollars, and thinks that the situation is \"normal\". (In April 2010, one bitcoin was worth about 14 cents.)\nAt the time of this comic, the COVID-19 is spreading around the world, causing thousands of people to die (although relatively few compared to the number of people that have gotten better) and billions to panic. This increased the demand for hygiene products, including hand sanitizers, and therefore their price has increased. It also triggered a panic on financial markets, including severe devaluation of the infamously volatile bitcoin. Despite the crash, one bitcoin was still worth about $5,400 on the day this strip was published, not a few dollars. Therefore, buying a hand sanitizer for one bitcoin is not as normal as White Hat assumes.\nThe price of hand sanitizer has not reached the price of a bitcoin (yet), although some people on sites such as Amazon.com are attempting to sell it for ludicrous amounts and there are attempts by Amazon, eBay, and other selling platforms, as well as potential legislation, aimed at curtailing such price gouging .\nThe title text claims that, in 2030, bitcoin will again be worth about one dollar, but many houses will also be worth only one dollar due to the difficulty inherent in containing \"holo-banshees\" in the attic.  What a holo-banshee is is not explained, but one can guess as to what it might mean.  \"Holo\" is generally short for hologram and typically denotes some kind of 3D looking digital visual form, and a \" banshee \" is a mythological wailing creature or spirit.  So even if not a physical object, constant shrieking would be undesirable. [ citation needed ]\nThe \"nominal fee\" mentioned by the 2030 time traveler is known in legal parlance as a \"peppercorn\". In reality, such a practice has been quite common for several decades (though not for something on the scale of a house); legal processes state that both sides must give something in order for a contract to exist, and a minimal peppercorn payment to secure a contract is preferable to the legal hoops that must be jumped through in order to lawfully give something away for nothing.\n[White Hat and Cueball are walking to the right of the panel. There is a gray outline around Cueball, indicating he is from the future] White Hat: What are things like ten years from now in 2020? White Hat: We have this new \"bitcoin\" thing \u2014 does it ever catch on and become normal?\n[A frameless panel, with White Hat and Cueball still walking to the right.] Cueball: It's still around. I just bought a bottle of hand sanitizer for one bitcoin.\n[A regular panel, with them continuing to walk] White Hat: Cool, that sounds pretty normal. Cueball: Well, here's the thing...\n"}
{"id":2281,"title":"Coronavirus Research","image_title":"Coronavirus Research","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2281","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coronavirus_research.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2281:_Coronavirus_Research","transcript":"[A very disheveled Megan, hair in disorder, walks up to Cueball.] Megan: Hi. Cueball: Hello. You look...fine.\n[In a frame-less panel Megan has stopped next to Cueball.] Megan: I have now read virtually every available scientific paper on COVID-19. Cueball: Cool, what'd you learn?\n[Megan has raised her palms towards Cueball.] Megan: Well it seems this virus wants to get inside your cells. Cueball: Mhmm...\n[Megan raises her left arm, with her index finger in the air in front of Cueball's face.] Megan: But it's a trap! You shouldn't let it. Cueball: I think we knew that. Megan: But now I know it with error bars!\n","explanation":"This comic is the seventh comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic .\nMegan , disheveled and exhausted, has been researching COVID-19 nonstop and is now reporting her findings to Cueball . She claims to have read all available literature on the subject, but the best she can come up with is an extremely basic fact about viruses \u2014namely that they infect cells and this is bad and should be prevented, which Cueball and just about everybody else already knew. She enthusiastically replies that she now knows this with error bars , which are graphical representations of the variability of data and are used on graphs to indicate the error or uncertainty in a reported measurement. Perhaps because of her sleep deprivation, she is unable to process the information that she has read, or is unable to properly phrase it in words. This is not the first time that Megan has exhaustively researched a topic to the detriment of her own health, see 1708: Dehydration .\nIn the title text, she has a hunch that staying awake long enough to read 500 scientific papers is probably not a good idea, but she hasn't found a study that specifically confirms that. She intends to further compound her exhaustion by continuing to do research rather than just getting some much-needed sleep. Assuming that Megan averages half an hour to find and read each paper, she has been continuously reading for 10.4 days, which is approaching the world record for not sleeping. In 1964, Randy Gardner , a student in San Diego, California set the then-world record of 11 days and 25 minutes (264.4 hours) without sleeping.\n[A very disheveled Megan, hair in disorder, walks up to Cueball.] Megan: Hi. Cueball: Hello. You look...fine.\n[In a frame-less panel Megan has stopped next to Cueball.] Megan: I have now read virtually every available scientific paper on COVID-19. Cueball: Cool, what'd you learn?\n[Megan has raised her palms towards Cueball.] Megan: Well it seems this virus wants to get inside your cells. Cueball: Mhmm...\n[Megan raises her left arm, with her index finger in the air in front of Cueball's face.] Megan: But it's a trap! You shouldn't let it. Cueball: I think we knew that. Megan: But now I know it with error bars!\n"}
{"id":2282,"title":"Coronavirus Worries","image_title":"Coronavirus Worries","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2282","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coronavirus_worries.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2282:_Coronavirus_Worries","transcript":"[A scatter-plot, with 8 labeled dots. Both axis are labeled with text beneath the X-axis and to the left of the Y-axis. Arrows are pointing to the right from the X- axis and up from the Y-xis. The dots are scattered from left to right and top to bottom, but there are some grouping of the labels with two to the left, four in the middle and two to the right. But the dots they belong to are more scattered than this. Here below all labels are given, first for the axis, and then for each dot in approximately normal reading order from the left column to the right column:] Y-axis: More healthy X-axis: More common\n[Top left]: Whether you're remembering to drink water and rest [Very bottom, near left]: Whether forgetting to drink water or rest will make you get the coronavirus [Very top, near right]: Whether you're able to stay home [Top leaning, right]: Whether your friends and family are able to stay home [Middle, leaning right]: Whether your government is reacting wrong [Very bottom center]: Whether random people in a news story are reacting wrong [Toward bottom right]: Whether you're getting enough work done [Very bottom right]: Whether you have the virus because you just coughed and last week you touched a doorknob\n","explanation":"This comic is the eighth comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic .\nRandall has created a scatter plot graph showing \"more common\" worries versus the \"more healthy\" worries. Presumably, \"more healthy\" refers to more important things to worry about concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. From this graph, Randall notes that the \"more healthy\" concerns are not necessarily the ones that are the most common.\nOn the left side of the graph, signifying \"less common\" worries\/concerns are concerns relating to the drinking of water, and resting. Drinking water (staying hydrated) and getting enough sleep each night are important ways to fight off disease, and they're things that almost everyone can take direct action on, so this is marked as one of the most healthy things to worry about.  In 2281: Coronavirus Research , Megan shows signs that she (like many) has not been taking care to get enough sleep.  However, not drinking enough water and not sleeping enough are not likely to cause coronavirus specifically, so that particular worry is marked as one of the least healthy.\nIn the middle of the graph are \"medium common\" worries\/concerns. The \"most healthy\" or vital concerns are being able to stay home and the ability for friends and family to stay home. Across much of the world, public gatherings have been discouraged, including requiring many workers to telecommute . This is following the principle of social distancing , to slow the spread of COVID-19. These are considered very healthy concerns to be having.\nBelow these two concerns is concerns about the government response, specifically if the government is \"reacting wrong\". Many world governments have been criticized for inadequate responses to the pandemic. However, even if the government's response (or lack of response) is incorrect, it is not something that most people can control directly, nor should it prevent people from taking care of the more healthy concerns about staying home and staying well-hydrated and well-rested, which is why this worry is marked as being only moderately healthy.  Even less important than the government response is worrying about the reactions of random people featured in news stories (who are most likely featured specifically because their behavior is extreme or aberrant) or Internet trolls or people who have different opinions to you in the story's comments section.\nA more common concern listed is \"whether you are getting enough work done\". Telecommuting (working from home) may be less productive than working at the normal office, so Randall or others may be concerned about their work productivity.  For people working in industries that directly affect the health and well-being of others, such as medicine, this is a fair concern (and many of the event cancellations and other responses are intended to make their jobs easier), but in general, this is a much less healthy concern than staying home and well-rested.\nThe most common and least important concern according to Randall is \"whether you have the virus just because you just coughed and last week you touched a doorknob\". Though it is an important to be concerned about catching the coronavirus, simply coughing a few times or \"touching a doorknob\" are unlikely reasons to suspect having COVID-19. Most cases of COVID-19 do include a cough, and the disease can be latent for over a week before showing symptoms, but also include other symptoms, including fever and difficulty breathing.\nThe title text lists an uncommon, unimportant concern: the copyright status of a \"coronavirus emoji\" on Slack (a business instant messaging software). The Creative Commons license is a license allowing for fair use of published work (and presumably emojis)  that are otherwise copyrighted. Something that is in public domain has no copyright protection on it, and can be used freely. Presumably, this is a concern that only Randall has, making it uncommon. It is also relatively unimportant in the greater scheme of the COVID-19 pandemic.\n[A scatter-plot, with 8 labeled dots. Both axis are labeled with text beneath the X-axis and to the left of the Y-axis. Arrows are pointing to the right from the X- axis and up from the Y-xis. The dots are scattered from left to right and top to bottom, but there are some grouping of the labels with two to the left, four in the middle and two to the right. But the dots they belong to are more scattered than this. Here below all labels are given, first for the axis, and then for each dot in approximately normal reading order from the left column to the right column:] Y-axis: More healthy X-axis: More common\n[Top left]: Whether you're remembering to drink water and rest [Very bottom, near left]: Whether forgetting to drink water or rest will make you get the coronavirus [Very top, near right]: Whether you're able to stay home [Top leaning, right]: Whether your friends and family are able to stay home [Middle, leaning right]: Whether your government is reacting wrong [Very bottom center]: Whether random people in a news story are reacting wrong [Toward bottom right]: Whether you're getting enough work done [Very bottom right]: Whether you have the virus because you just coughed and last week you touched a doorknob\n"}
{"id":2283,"title":"Exa-Exabyte","image_title":"Exa-Exabyte","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2283","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exa_exabyte.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2283:_Exa-Exabyte","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart is holding a pointer, and is pointing it towards a blackboard behind her, while she addresses her student Cueball who is sitting on a chair at a desk to the left of her, holding his hands on his knees.] Miss Lenhart: Biology is hard because there's so much of it. Earth hosts about 10 exa-exabytes worth of DNA.\n[In a frame-less panel, the panel has panned to the left and is now showing Miss Lenhart holding the pointer to her side, but without the blackboard. In front of her is now both Cueball and Megan sitting at their desks. Cueball has taken one hand on to the table. Megan has both hands folded on the table in front of her.] Cueball: What's an exa-exabyte? Miss Lenhart: It's 10 36 bytes. Cueball: How do I picture that? Miss Lenhart: Imagine you had an exabyte of data, but each byte contained an exabyte of data.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head. A starburst to the right indicates Miss Lenhart's voice from off-panel.] Cueball: I can't even picture what an exabyte is. Miss Lenhart (off-panel): It's 10 18 bytes. Cueball: But how do I picture 10 18 ?\n[Zoomed out to showing Megan, Cueball, and Miss Lenhart along with the blackboard. Megan has raised a hand palm up. Cueball is looking back at her over his shoulders.  Miss Lenhart is forming a closed first with her empty hand, the one without the pointer.] Megan: Imagine you had 10 apples. Megan: Now imagine 18 smaller apples, floating next to them and a little above. Cueball: Cool, got it. Miss Lenhart: No!\nIn 1519: Venus , release date May 1, 2015, Miss Lenhart indicated that she was retiring as a primary or secondary school teacher in a month. Here we see Megan and Cueball, both adults, sitting in a classroom setting with Miss Lenhart providing instruction.  A reasonable assumption is that Miss Lenhart has taken some form of adult education job during her retirement.  For example, in the United States it is common for community colleges to use low paid adjunct professors who either have a day job or another source of income such as a teacher's pension.\nThere is also a hint of irony in her having to now put up with the same type of blatantly incorrect explanations that she herself was freely giving out just prior to her retirement.","explanation":"This comic is arguably the ninth comic in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic . This comic does not mention the disease but it does mention biology.\nThis is a comic about the difficulty of picturing or understanding large numbers. As mentioned in the comic, an exabyte is 10 18 bytes, while an \"exa-exabyte\"\u2014not a common word, but one that abuses the principles of metric prefixes \u2014would be 10 36 bytes. 10 36 is properly given the name undecillion (in short scale, and sextillion in long scale). \nAccording to a 2015 article by The New York Times , researchers estimate that there are about 5 * 10 37 DNA base pairs on Earth (50 trillion trillion trillion). So Miss Lenhart 's claim of 10 exa-exabytes\u20141 * 10 37 bytes is a reasonable approximation ( Fermi estimation ).  (The estimate was 5 plus or minus 4 * 10 37 .  There are 4 possible base pairs, or 2 bits per pair, a byte is 8 bits.)\nThese numbers are larger than most people can imagine. Even much smaller numbers such as a billion (10 9 ) or a trillion (10 12 ) are hard to imagine. For instance:\nWikipedia has an article on the exabyte and one on large numbers which describes various things close to 10 18 .\nCueball expresses his difficulty in visualizing a number even as large as one exabyte (10 18 bytes).\nMegan trivializes the problem away by describing an exabyte as 10 apples, with \"18 smaller apples, floating next to them and a little above\", representing the notation 10 18 using apples for digits. This is entirely unhelpful, as using apples in a base-1 enumeration offers no obvious advantages over base-10 in understanding exponents; Megan's bad advice & Cueball's seemingly ready acceptance of it causes Miss Lenhart to yell out \"No!\" in frustration.\nThe title text further trivializes the problem of visualizing large numbers by suggesting that you can visualize 10 18 as a number by simply visualizing the similar-looking number of 10 13 with some extra lines drawn to turn the 3 into an 8. Changes in exponents can cause huge changes in the value shown, and this is no exception: Changing that 3 into an 8 changes the value by a factor of 100,000.\nRandall has previously discussed the difficulty of large numbers in 2091: Million, Billion, Trillion , 1894: Real Estate , and 558: 1000 Times .\n1605: DNA also discusses how \"hard\" biology is.\n[Miss Lenhart is holding a pointer, and is pointing it towards a blackboard behind her, while she addresses her student Cueball who is sitting on a chair at a desk to the left of her, holding his hands on his knees.] Miss Lenhart: Biology is hard because there's so much of it. Earth hosts about 10 exa-exabytes worth of DNA.\n[In a frame-less panel, the panel has panned to the left and is now showing Miss Lenhart holding the pointer to her side, but without the blackboard. In front of her is now both Cueball and Megan sitting at their desks. Cueball has taken one hand on to the table. Megan has both hands folded on the table in front of her.] Cueball: What's an exa-exabyte? Miss Lenhart: It's 10 36 bytes. Cueball: How do I picture that? Miss Lenhart: Imagine you had an exabyte of data, but each byte contained an exabyte of data.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's head. A starburst to the right indicates Miss Lenhart's voice from off-panel.] Cueball: I can't even picture what an exabyte is. Miss Lenhart (off-panel): It's 10 18 bytes. Cueball: But how do I picture 10 18 ?\n[Zoomed out to showing Megan, Cueball, and Miss Lenhart along with the blackboard. Megan has raised a hand palm up. Cueball is looking back at her over his shoulders.  Miss Lenhart is forming a closed first with her empty hand, the one without the pointer.] Megan: Imagine you had 10 apples. Megan: Now imagine 18 smaller apples, floating next to them and a little above. Cueball: Cool, got it. Miss Lenhart: No!\nIn 1519: Venus , release date May 1, 2015, Miss Lenhart indicated that she was retiring as a primary or secondary school teacher in a month. Here we see Megan and Cueball, both adults, sitting in a classroom setting with Miss Lenhart providing instruction.  A reasonable assumption is that Miss Lenhart has taken some form of adult education job during her retirement.  For example, in the United States it is common for community colleges to use low paid adjunct professors who either have a day job or another source of income such as a teacher's pension.\nThere is also a hint of irony in her having to now put up with the same type of blatantly incorrect explanations that she herself was freely giving out just prior to her retirement."}
{"id":2284,"title":"Sabotage","image_title":"Sabotage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2284","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sabotage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2284:_Sabotage","transcript":"[Cueball is seated at a desk, typing on a laptop. The top half of the image is the text he is typing in a reply message:] \"I see you're still getting together today! I'll be there, doing my spoken-word Baby Shark karaoke all evening. We'll also be setting up a petting zoo for the kids. We've spent all week trapping wild skunks!\" [Below the text is a white-on-green \"reply\" button.]\n[Caption below the panel:] In the coronavirus era, desperate times call for desperate measures.\n","explanation":"This comic is the tenth comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic .\nIn the wake of the COVID-19, the advice from many professionals in the United States is to avoid public gatherings to slow the spread of the disease and \"flatten the curve\".\nIn this comic, some group of people (we're not told who) are planning a public event, which is very much contrary to the widespread professional advice, and is said to put everyone at risk by accelerating the spread of the disease in the general population.  In an effort to sabotage this event by deterring people from attending, Cueball applies reverse psychology, pretending to be enthusiastically planning various activities at the gathering that most people would go out of their way to avoid:  a wild skunk petting zoo, which would most likely result in everyone getting heavily sprayed with violently foul-smelling skunk scent that wild skunks use to drive away predators; and karaoke featuring the song \" Baby Shark \", which is a song for small children that is generally considered annoying to adults, made even more direly annoying in this case by being spoken rather than sung.\nIn the title text, Cueball has stepped up his game from merely threatening to spoil everyone's fun to making them fear that they might get infected.  He claims to have attended the \"World Handshake Championships\", which presumably would involve shaking hands with as many people as possible; this would facilitate the spread of diseases such as COVID-19.  He furthermore claims to have traveled home from the championship via a cruise ship, which may also cause concern because cruise ships are known for their densely populated environments and lack of extensive medical facilities making prevention and treatment of infections very difficult or impossible. Cruise ships have been a recent topic of interest in relation to SARS CoV-2 due to many people being stranded at sea with infected patients because of COVID-19 pandemic on board.\n[Cueball is seated at a desk, typing on a laptop. The top half of the image is the text he is typing in a reply message:] \"I see you're still getting together today! I'll be there, doing my spoken-word Baby Shark karaoke all evening. We'll also be setting up a petting zoo for the kids. We've spent all week trapping wild skunks!\" [Below the text is a white-on-green \"reply\" button.]\n[Caption below the panel:] In the coronavirus era, desperate times call for desperate measures.\n"}
{"id":2285,"title":"Recurring Nightmare","image_title":"Recurring Nightmare","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2285","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/recurring_nightmare.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2285:_Recurring_Nightmare","transcript":"[Megan, standing next to Cueball, is gesturing with her arms wide.] Megan: I keep having nightmares that I show up at school, and then suddenly panic as I realize\u2013 Cueball: \u2013that you're naked? Megan: That I'm in a crowded room!\n","explanation":"This comic is the eleventh comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic .\nMegan states to Cueball that she keeps having the same nightmare. As she begins to explain that in her dream she shows up at school and panics as she realizes something, Cueball interrupts her to suggest she has turned up at school naked. But instead, Megan says that she finds herself in a crowded room at school.\nIt is an allegedly frequent dream-trope to be in a situation of otherwise polite company and discover oneself naked in the midst of the crowd. This can be added to something such as a general \" forgotten to prepare for the exam you're sitting \" to build upon various levels of worst-case scenario anxieties amongst your peers, parents or other persons who will judge you badly for your faux pas .\nIn light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, Megan is obviously dreaming up her problem of being in a crowd (at school), as most schools have stopped holding in-person classes (at the time of this comic, most schools in many countries had switched to online instruction or have completely closed due to the pandemic).\nSocial distancing has been widely practiced around the world as a way to slow the spread of the disease. In the title text, Megan finds relief in dreaming that she's naked, as her nudity, perhaps similar to the actual real-life 'health tip' of eating excessive garlic, has the unintentional but beneficial effect of having crowd members back away from her personal space out of shock and\/or mutual embarrassment.  This may somewhat mitigate the viral transmission by droplets from coughs, although to be more protected, Megan should dream that she is at least wearing a face mask, or that she is going to thoroughly wash her hands as soon as possible, in case she has touched any contaminated surfaces.\nNightmares about school were also the topic of 557: Students , specifically stating that people have dreams about school, even when already having graduated.\n[Megan, standing next to Cueball, is gesturing with her arms wide.] Megan: I keep having nightmares that I show up at school, and then suddenly panic as I realize\u2013 Cueball: \u2013that you're naked? Megan: That I'm in a crowded room!\n"}
{"id":2286,"title":"6-Foot Zone","image_title":"6-Foot Zone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2286","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/6_foot_zone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2286:_6-Foot_Zone","transcript":"[Caption:] Guide to the 6' Social Distancing Zone\n[Profile image of Megan with 6 foot distance measurements on both sides. Also indicated is the width of the full \"6' zone\", which consists of 6' to her right, her width, and 6' to her left. Her width is not explicitly indicated.]\n[Overhead image of a person within a slightly elliptical outline at a distance of 6 feet in all directions. The \"width\" of the person pushes the ellipse longer in one dimension. The ellipse is again labeled \"6' zone\".]\n[Statistics:] Approx. area: 145 ft 2 Border length: 43 ft Population density: 190,000 people\/mile 2 Value at NYC real estate price\/ft 2 : $195,000 Maximum number of horses that could fit inside it with you, estimated using the dimensions in the US Forest Service Equestrian Design Handbook : 8\n[This last statistic is illustrated with a second overhead image, showing 8 horses, mosaicked together a little like an M.C. Escher tesselation, filling the entire 6' zone along with the person.]\n","explanation":"This comic is the 12th comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis comic is about social distancing , a common practice to prevent the spread of the COVID-19. It has been suggested to maintain 6\u00a0feet (i.e. 1.8288\u00a0m - in e.g. France and Britain the suggested distance is 2\u00a0m) of distance between yourself and other people, to prevent the transmission of respiratory droplets from you to others (or vice versa).\nRandall takes this 6 feet of distance, and does calculations of the \"area\" of distancing, \"border\", population density, and \"real estate value\". He finally culminates in determining the number of horses that could also fit in the space.\nRandall's border length and approximate area calculations are based on a zone with an outside radius of approximately 6.8 feet or 82 inches (2.07 m), meaning that the person has a radius of approximately 0.8 feet (9.6 in, 0.24 m). That is, 2\u03c0(6.8ft) = 42.7 ft and \u03c0(6.8ft) 2 = 145.3 ft 2 .\nThere are two different population densities that can be calculated. The one used by Randall in the comic is the population density of the exclusion zone itself, i.e. just the reciprocal of its area. This is \u03c0 -1 (6.8\u00a0ft) -2 = 190,000 mi -2 . A different density is the density of a crowd in which everyone obeys the distancing rules. That would result in 0.9069(\u03c0 -1 )(3.8ft) -2 = 560,000 mi -2 population density. When people stand 6ft apart from each other, their exclusion zones are overlapping; instead we can use smaller circles  with 3.8 ft radius that are not overlapping. 0.9069 is the packing density of circles in the plane.\nFor comparison, only 21 countries have a population density >1000\u00a0mi -2 , but there are a few cities with a population density on the same order of magnitude (~100,000\u00a0mi -2 ).\nThe USFS Equestrian Design Guidebook is (of course) a real thing, and it discusses the dimensions of the design horse\nThe title text is a pun using the alternate definition of foot by switching the naming from 6-foot zone, where foot is used as a unit of distance, to 34-foot zone, where the number represents the total number of feet inside the circle, including the horses\u2019 feet, assuming the human is endowed with the standard two feet and each horse has the standard four feet apiece.\n[Caption:] Guide to the 6' Social Distancing Zone\n[Profile image of Megan with 6 foot distance measurements on both sides. Also indicated is the width of the full \"6' zone\", which consists of 6' to her right, her width, and 6' to her left. Her width is not explicitly indicated.]\n[Overhead image of a person within a slightly elliptical outline at a distance of 6 feet in all directions. The \"width\" of the person pushes the ellipse longer in one dimension. The ellipse is again labeled \"6' zone\".]\n[Statistics:] Approx. area: 145 ft 2 Border length: 43 ft Population density: 190,000 people\/mile 2 Value at NYC real estate price\/ft 2 : $195,000 Maximum number of horses that could fit inside it with you, estimated using the dimensions in the US Forest Service Equestrian Design Handbook : 8\n[This last statistic is illustrated with a second overhead image, showing 8 horses, mosaicked together a little like an M.C. Escher tesselation, filling the entire 6' zone along with the person.]\n"}
{"id":2287,"title":"Pathogen Resistance","image_title":"Pathogen Resistance","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2287","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pathogen_resistance.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2287:_Pathogen_Resistance","transcript":"[A small colony of coccus bacteria, a bacteriophage, and a protozoon, with an eye, are floating together.] Bacteriophage: I'm worried about humans developing resistance to us. Bacteriophage: Using pasta.\n[In a half height panel we see two macrophages, each with an eye, and lots of Y-shaped antibodies chasing three protozoa, also with one eye each. One protozoon is already covered in antibodies and seems to have fallen over. Above the panel is the text that the bacteriophage is narrating.] Bacteriophage (narrating): The human immune system is a nightmare. Bacteriophage (narrating): It's the worst. Bacteriophage (narrating): It's the scariest thing in the universe. Macrophage: Who wants a Huuggg Antibody-covered protozoon: Nooo!\n[Close-up on bacteriophage] Bacteriophage: We can only survive by staying ahead of it.  Keep jumping from person to person, keep mutating and evolving. Bacteriophage: But now humans are adapting too fast.\n[Water pipes. A mosquito net with a bed under it. An unopened condom package.] Bacteriophage (narrating): We spread through their water. They built pipes. Bacteriophage (narrating): We used mosquitoes. They put out nets and poison everywhere. Bacteriophage (narrating): We spread through sex, and suddenly they all had these plastic things.\n[Depictions of seven coronavirus with spikes, one very large, one large, two small and three tiny. They are above a picture of Hairbun and Cueball shaking hands, while exhaling a cloud and tiny droplets spraying all over from both their clouds from exhaling.] Bacteriophage (narrating): This time, we really thought we had them. Bacteriophage (narrating): One of us got good at transmission through everyday contact.\n[A row of four sets of human lungs and their trachea is shown. The first set of lungs has just one black dot in the left and a few black dots in the right lung. The second has the bottom right lung covered in black, and the left lung has a bit black on either side and still some black dots in the middle. The third has most of each lung covered in black, except maybe a quarter of each lungs top. The fourth set of lungs are completely filled with black. Below them is a graph showing exponential growth with an X-axis with 17 equidistant ticks and to the right a Y-axis with eight equidistant ticks. This time the narrating is indicated to come from off-panel left with a speech line, and so are the two answers, coming from the off-panel right. It is like if the speakers are looking at this chart from off-panel.] Bacteriophage (off-panel left): It was great. We were tearing through lungs, spreading like wildfire. Voice (off-panel right): Hooray! Voice 2 (off-panel right): I hate lungs.\n[Close-up of bacteriophage \"head\".] Bacteriophage: Then, all of a sudden, humans everywhere just... stopped . They stopped working, stopped seeing friends.\n[Megan is sitting on a couch with a remote control in her hand, watching a flat screen TV. Cueball is at a sink with a mirror, washing his hands under hot water indicated by heat lines coming up from his hands. They are facing away from each other. Again speech is come from off-panel left and right with speech lines] Voice (off-panel left): What are they doing ? Bacteriophage (off-panel right): Nothing! Bacteriophage (off-panel right): They're just sitting there in their houses washing their hands.\n[Cueball stands in an otherwise empty room He is surrounded by falling droplets, many of which are now lying on the floor around his feet. Among the droplets is a coronavirus that shouts out.] Bacteriophage (narrating): Suddenly humans became dead ends. We tried to jump from one to the next, but there's no one to jump to. Coronavirus: Help! Bacteriophage (narrating): We can't escape.\n[Three large Coronaviruses and several smaller ones are encroached on by at least four macrophages, one showing a large eye, surrounding them as well as streams of Y-shaped antibodies mowing in towards the viruses. A rectangular panel at the top, is placed over the top edge of the panel. The narrating text is inside this panel:] Bacteriophage (narrating): We're trapped in there with those ghastly immune systems. Antibodies: It's huug tiiiiime Macrophage top left: Come here for a huuug Macrophage bottom left: Huuuuugs\n[A slim panel, with text above and below the panel with narration. In the panel there are two larger coronaviruses covered in antibodies and attacked directly by macrophages. Smaller coronavirus are shown covered in antibodies as well. Some of the macrophages are actively devouring viruses. While others already contain broken-down remnants of a coronavirus. Most of the macrophages has an eye.] Bacteriophage (narrating): Even if we win a fight, there's nowhere to go. Macrophage a the top: Huuuuuuuggss Macrophage at the bottom: Huuugs Bacteriophage (narrating): By staying inside, humans have become resistant.\n[Back to the discussion between the coccus, the bacteriophage and the protozoon with eye.] Coccus bacteria: How could they evolve that fast? Humans take decades to reproduce! Bacteriophage: It's not evolution. It's something with their brains. Protozoon: I wondered what those were for!\n[Bacteriophage pointing with a leg to Cueball and Megan who are looking at their phones; Megan and Cueball are then walking to the right; Megan and Cueball are shown at separate sinks with mirrors washing their hands.] Bacteriophage: Humans started looking at their phones, talking, writing words, and making signs. A human named \"Gloria Gaynor\" filmed herself singing at her bathroom sink. Bacteriophage: And then they bought lots of pasta. Bacteriophage: Then, around the world, they all went home and started washing their hands.\n[Bacteriophage and protozoon with eye.] Bacteriophage: They saw what we were doing and changed their behavior to stop us. Protozoon: Brains are the worst .\n[Coccus, bacteriophage and protozoon with eye.] Coccus bacteria: It's not over, right? They can't sustain this. They must be bored and tired. Coccus bacteria: Will they give up? Bacteriophage: I don't know. They seem determined to protect each other.\n[Coccus, bacteriophage and protozoon with eye.] Bacteriophage: And Bacteriophage: They have a lot of pasta.\n","explanation":"This comic is the 13th comic in a row in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nRather than expressing humanity's fears and pessimism about the pandemic, this strip anthropomorphizes some of the pathogens which afflict humanity and presents their fears and pessimism about possibly going extinct.  This serves as a roundabout way of expressing hope and wonder at the ingenuity and tenacity of humans in the face of diseases past (with water sanitation, mosquito netting, and condoms) and present (with the power of social distancing and Gloria Gaynor 's hit song I Will Survive ). Gaynor recorded a video of herself washing her hands for 20 seconds (the recommended length of time to wash hands for optimal cleanliness) to the background of her hit song.\nThe three pathogens presented are a virus (a bacteriophage ), a small colony of a coccus -shaped bacterium (such as Streptococcus ), and a protozoon (a caricature of a ciliate ).  Bacteriophages do not infect human cells (as the name suggests, they only infect bacteria), and have been studied for use as \" phage therapy \" for humans, especially in dealing with antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections (which is usually what people mean when they talk about \"resistance\" in the context of pathogens); however, they are iconic, instantly-recognizable viruses, and some have been found to collude with bacteria in forming certain antibiotic-resistant biofilms . Only one kind of ciliate is known to cause human disease; however, ciliates are iconic for protozoa just as bacteriophages are for viruses (see, for example, Gary Larson's now-venerable The Far Side cartoons). The ciliate may be a 'stand-in' for protozoa that cause widespread and dangerous human diseases, such as malaria . The drawing is wildly out of scale; a protozoon is larger than a bacterium, which in turn is much larger than a virus.\n\"The scariest thing in the universe\" to these microbes is the human immune system, represented in the second panel and later by antibodies (Y-shaped drawings) and anthropomorphized macrophages (actual macrophages do not have glaring angry eyes [ citation needed ] ). When a T cell encounters an unfamiliar molecule in the body, such as the surface proteins of SARS-CoV-2, it will search for a B cell that produces a matching antibody.  If and when it finds such a B cell, it will command the B cell to rapidly multiply and mass-produce antibodies.  Those antibodies will then bind to any antigens they contact, which may impede the antigen (as shown by the tagged protozoon in panel 2 lagging behind its siblings) and will definitely mark them for destruction by macrophages, which engulf (\"HUUGGG\") and digest antibody-tagged objects they encounter.  T cells can also be described as hugging cells , but a hug from a T cell is used to activate other processes, while a hug from a macrophage is a precursor to digestion.  White blood cells are quite persistent once they have detected an antigen, even chasing them over many cell lengths in what must be a terrifying experience for the antigen being chased.\nThe comic humorously considers pasta as an essential part of humans' fight against coronavirus. Pasta is an example of a dried food that can last a long time, if the orders to stay indoors continue, and was one of many products bought in mass quantities by shoppers \"panic-buying\" at the onset of lockdowns. Pasta is a popular dish in Italy, which is experiencing particular difficulties with COVID-19, but not every culture consumes or likes pasta. In addition, the Gaynor vid was initially shared via soundpasta.com among other services, and \"pasta\" is sometimes used to refer to sharing over the internet via cut-and-paste.\nThe colony of cocci protests that it shouldn't be possible for humans to evolve \"pathogen resistance\" in the short period of months since the breakout of COVID-19, when humans require over a decade to reach sexual maturity, and in modern times often wait at least two decades before having children.  Humans develop immunity to some diseases after being infected, as some B cells become memory cells and are stored for quick re-activation in the case of a later infection, but this is not very effective against viruses which mutate rapidly, such as influenza and the common cold (which is sometimes caused by coronaviruses, although not SARS-CoV-2).  Bacteria and viruses, on the other hand, reproduce in a matter of minutes, so that there may be hundreds of generations per day (comparable to the number of generations that have passed for humanity since the beginnings of agriculture), each of which presents opportunities to evolve new antigens that are not recognized by any antibodies present in the body or to evolve resistance to whatever antibiotic drugs the host might be using.  However, as the bacteriophage explains, humans generally do not become resistant against pathogens by genetic drift (although there are researchers who are seeking to identify genes that encode resistances to various diseases and then propagate them to other humans through gene editing, as in the He Jiankui affair ).  Instead, humans \"evolve\" pathogen resistance through behavioral changes.  The behaviors presented in this comic strip include:\nThese behaviors do not come from our genomes, passed along through reproduction, but from our brains, passed along by communication.  Some of the language of epidemiology is also used in discussion of communication, most notably \"going viral\" -- in this case, information is going viral to prevent viruses from going viral.\nThe title text reverts to the point of view of humans and references a famous line from the graphic novel Watchmen , where the vigilante Rorschach , whilst in prison and surrounded by enemies who want to kill him, proclaims: \"I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.\"  This presents an alternate perspective on quarantine and isolation that some may find more bearable: rather than passively hiding indoors in fear of the virus, we are taking action to fragment the virus population so that our immune systems (and medical intervention, in more serious cases) can defeat it in detail .\n[A small colony of coccus bacteria, a bacteriophage, and a protozoon, with an eye, are floating together.] Bacteriophage: I'm worried about humans developing resistance to us. Bacteriophage: Using pasta.\n[In a half height panel we see two macrophages, each with an eye, and lots of Y-shaped antibodies chasing three protozoa, also with one eye each. One protozoon is already covered in antibodies and seems to have fallen over. Above the panel is the text that the bacteriophage is narrating.] Bacteriophage (narrating): The human immune system is a nightmare. Bacteriophage (narrating): It's the worst. Bacteriophage (narrating): It's the scariest thing in the universe. Macrophage: Who wants a Huuggg Antibody-covered protozoon: Nooo!\n[Close-up on bacteriophage] Bacteriophage: We can only survive by staying ahead of it.  Keep jumping from person to person, keep mutating and evolving. Bacteriophage: But now humans are adapting too fast.\n[Water pipes. A mosquito net with a bed under it. An unopened condom package.] Bacteriophage (narrating): We spread through their water. They built pipes. Bacteriophage (narrating): We used mosquitoes. They put out nets and poison everywhere. Bacteriophage (narrating): We spread through sex, and suddenly they all had these plastic things.\n[Depictions of seven coronavirus with spikes, one very large, one large, two small and three tiny. They are above a picture of Hairbun and Cueball shaking hands, while exhaling a cloud and tiny droplets spraying all over from both their clouds from exhaling.] Bacteriophage (narrating): This time, we really thought we had them. Bacteriophage (narrating): One of us got good at transmission through everyday contact.\n[A row of four sets of human lungs and their trachea is shown. The first set of lungs has just one black dot in the left and a few black dots in the right lung. The second has the bottom right lung covered in black, and the left lung has a bit black on either side and still some black dots in the middle. The third has most of each lung covered in black, except maybe a quarter of each lungs top. The fourth set of lungs are completely filled with black. Below them is a graph showing exponential growth with an X-axis with 17 equidistant ticks and to the right a Y-axis with eight equidistant ticks. This time the narrating is indicated to come from off-panel left with a speech line, and so are the two answers, coming from the off-panel right. It is like if the speakers are looking at this chart from off-panel.] Bacteriophage (off-panel left): It was great. We were tearing through lungs, spreading like wildfire. Voice (off-panel right): Hooray! Voice 2 (off-panel right): I hate lungs.\n[Close-up of bacteriophage \"head\".] Bacteriophage: Then, all of a sudden, humans everywhere just... stopped . They stopped working, stopped seeing friends.\n[Megan is sitting on a couch with a remote control in her hand, watching a flat screen TV. Cueball is at a sink with a mirror, washing his hands under hot water indicated by heat lines coming up from his hands. They are facing away from each other. Again speech is come from off-panel left and right with speech lines] Voice (off-panel left): What are they doing ? Bacteriophage (off-panel right): Nothing! Bacteriophage (off-panel right): They're just sitting there in their houses washing their hands.\n[Cueball stands in an otherwise empty room He is surrounded by falling droplets, many of which are now lying on the floor around his feet. Among the droplets is a coronavirus that shouts out.] Bacteriophage (narrating): Suddenly humans became dead ends. We tried to jump from one to the next, but there's no one to jump to. Coronavirus: Help! Bacteriophage (narrating): We can't escape.\n[Three large Coronaviruses and several smaller ones are encroached on by at least four macrophages, one showing a large eye, surrounding them as well as streams of Y-shaped antibodies mowing in towards the viruses. A rectangular panel at the top, is placed over the top edge of the panel. The narrating text is inside this panel:] Bacteriophage (narrating): We're trapped in there with those ghastly immune systems. Antibodies: It's huug tiiiiime Macrophage top left: Come here for a huuug Macrophage bottom left: Huuuuugs\n[A slim panel, with text above and below the panel with narration. In the panel there are two larger coronaviruses covered in antibodies and attacked directly by macrophages. Smaller coronavirus are shown covered in antibodies as well. Some of the macrophages are actively devouring viruses. While others already contain broken-down remnants of a coronavirus. Most of the macrophages has an eye.] Bacteriophage (narrating): Even if we win a fight, there's nowhere to go. Macrophage a the top: Huuuuuuuggss Macrophage at the bottom: Huuugs Bacteriophage (narrating): By staying inside, humans have become resistant.\n[Back to the discussion between the coccus, the bacteriophage and the protozoon with eye.] Coccus bacteria: How could they evolve that fast? Humans take decades to reproduce! Bacteriophage: It's not evolution. It's something with their brains. Protozoon: I wondered what those were for!\n[Bacteriophage pointing with a leg to Cueball and Megan who are looking at their phones; Megan and Cueball are then walking to the right; Megan and Cueball are shown at separate sinks with mirrors washing their hands.] Bacteriophage: Humans started looking at their phones, talking, writing words, and making signs. A human named \"Gloria Gaynor\" filmed herself singing at her bathroom sink. Bacteriophage: And then they bought lots of pasta. Bacteriophage: Then, around the world, they all went home and started washing their hands.\n[Bacteriophage and protozoon with eye.] Bacteriophage: They saw what we were doing and changed their behavior to stop us. Protozoon: Brains are the worst .\n[Coccus, bacteriophage and protozoon with eye.] Coccus bacteria: It's not over, right? They can't sustain this. They must be bored and tired. Coccus bacteria: Will they give up? Bacteriophage: I don't know. They seem determined to protect each other.\n[Coccus, bacteriophage and protozoon with eye.] Bacteriophage: And Bacteriophage: They have a lot of pasta.\n"}
{"id":2288,"title":"Collector's Edition","image_title":"Collector's Edition","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2288","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/collectors_edition.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2288:_Collector%27s_Edition","transcript":"[Cueball stands to the left of a vibrating box.] [The words \"Collector's Edition\" are written above him and boxed.]\n","explanation":"This was the tenth April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous fools comic was 2131: Emojidome from Monday April 1, 2019. The next became 2445: Checkbox released on Thursday April 1, 2021.\nIt is a large image, of which only part is visible, but can be dragged around. This space acts as a shared virtual sandbox where viewers can interact.  \"Items\" (small, often humorous images) could be collected from other comics and then placed in this image by viewers. The collection then updated for all viewers in real-time. Multiples of the same item are often seen.\nThere is a \"backpack\" at the bottom, similar to backpacks in video games containing items collected by the player. As hinted by the title text, items could be found by visiting different XKCD comics\/pages. Randomly, some pages would have a treasure chest which contained the sticker related to the page. The hint would refer to the page which currently had a chest.\nThe sticker images can be seen at https:\/\/xkcd.com\/2288\/collectors\/static\/loot\/loot_ XXX .png, where XXX is a number from 001-253. Additionally, some images can be found at custom URLs, for example the periodic elements can be found at https:\/\/xkcd.com\/2288\/collectors\/static\/loot\/element- XX .png, where XX is the element, and text loot at https:\/\/xkcd.com\/2288\/collectors\/static\/loot\/loot-words- X .png, where X is the sentence.\nAs of April 5 2020, chests are no longer dropped.\nClick \u201cExpand\u201d to see the full image.\n[Cueball stands to the left of a vibrating box.] [The words \"Collector's Edition\" are written above him and boxed.]\n"}
{"id":2289,"title":"Scenario 4","image_title":"Scenario 4","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2289","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scenario_4.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2289:_Scenario_Four","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are standing in front of a large graph, with \"Time\" along the horizontal axis and \"Bad Stuff\" along the vertical axis. The curve on the graph shows a generally shallow upward slope.] Megan: Our new models outline a few possible scenarios. Cueball: #1 is the best scenario.\n[The graph now shows a much steeper curve, before flattening out far in the future, similar to a logistic curve.] Megan: Scenario 2 is not so great.\n[The graph now climbs quite quickly, approximating an exponential curve.] Cueball: Scenario 3 would be pretty bad.\n[The graph starts curling up, like the exponential curve, but continues curving back, so that it no longer qualifies as a function, and may indicate time-travel to the past.] Megan: Then there is scenario 4. Megan: We think it's a graphing error. Cueball: If not, we definitely want to avoid it.\n","explanation":"Although not directly mentioned, this comic is probably the 14th comic in a row (not counting the April Fools' comic ) in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nIn 2278: Scientific Briefing , Megan and Cueball were briefing White Hat on things that were getting bad, hoping to convince him to do something about them.  He chose to wait until things actually got bad.  Evidently, that has happened, and now Megan and Cueball are delivering another briefing on just how much \"Bad Stuff\" there might be, according to their models.\nIn the context of the information (and misinformation) explosion associated with the COVID-19 pandemic (ongoing at the time that this comic was published), many graphs have been shown highlighting the prevalence of the disease - the number of cases at any one time and place, and the change in the number of cases over time. That being said, the graphs shown could easily apply to any number of scenarios where an upward trend is bad.\nSeveral of these graphs have attempted to predict the future, using statistical tools (\"models\") to process existing data and generate a forecast. Inputs to the model(s) may include different assessments of, for example, the number of COVID-19 cases that have been recorded. Four scenarios are presented here, presumably showing what a particular model (probably only one despite the reference to \"new modelS\" in the comic) forecasts given different, unspecified, inputs.\nMegan and Cueball present four scenarios, only three of which are possible.\n[Megan and Cueball are standing in front of a large graph, with \"Time\" along the horizontal axis and \"Bad Stuff\" along the vertical axis. The curve on the graph shows a generally shallow upward slope.] Megan: Our new models outline a few possible scenarios. Cueball: #1 is the best scenario.\n[The graph now shows a much steeper curve, before flattening out far in the future, similar to a logistic curve.] Megan: Scenario 2 is not so great.\n[The graph now climbs quite quickly, approximating an exponential curve.] Cueball: Scenario 3 would be pretty bad.\n[The graph starts curling up, like the exponential curve, but continues curving back, so that it no longer qualifies as a function, and may indicate time-travel to the past.] Megan: Then there is scenario 4. Megan: We think it's a graphing error. Cueball: If not, we definitely want to avoid it.\n"}
{"id":2290,"title":"Homemade Masks","image_title":"Homemade Masks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2290","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/homemade_masks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2290:_Homemade_Masks","transcript":"[Cueball stands at a distance from Megan, who is wearing a face mask] Cueball: Homemade mask, huh? You think they help? Cueball: I've read so many conflicting things.\n[Flashback to when Megan was not wearing a mask but carrying a large sign, with Cueball and Ponytail approaching her from both sides. It is not possible to read what is on the sign. Masked Megan is pictured in an inset panel.] Megan (narrating): Well, what I was doing before was carrying around a big sign that said \"There's a pandemic so please give me space because I don't want to get sick or make anyone else sick!\"\n[Same as first panel] Megan: The problem was, I had to write small to fit, so people kept walking closer to read it. Cueball: Oops. Megan: Yeah, the mask gets it across better.\n","explanation":"This comic is the 15th comic in a row (not counting the April Fools' comic ) in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nIn this comic, Cueball wonders if Megan's homemade mask will be of any use, because he has seen many different points of view and is unsure which one is correct.  It is generally agreed that homemade masks will not block particles (including droplets which carry viruses) as effectively as officially-tested N95-class masks or surgical masks , and possibly confer no benefit at all; however, wearing a homemade mask may reduce contagiousness if the wearer is infected, by blocking droplets from being expelled.  It may also make the wearer less likely to touch their face (which may be a vector for catching COVID-19 from contaminated surfaces).  On the other hand, there are concerns that it may confer a false sense of security, leading to unsafe behaviors, and that the warm, moist environment produced by the wearer's breath may also harbor incoming viruses, which may later infect the wearer if the mask is not washed frequently.\nMegan replies that she originally carried a sign warning people to keep their distance, but people needed to get close to her to read it, making it counterproductive.  The implication is that Megan's primary purpose in wearing the mask is to signal to other people that's she's concerned about spreading COVID-19, and remind them to keep their distance. Whether or not the mask has any direct benefits in blocking virus transmission, Megan apparently feels that the social impact of seeing someone in a face mask is likely to change behaviors, making transmission less likely.\nThe title text indicates an alternate method, where Megan could change the sign into a device for pushing people back in order to maintain distance.  Holding the sign out in front of her (instead of over her head) would also let people get close to the sign to read it, without getting in her face.\n[Cueball stands at a distance from Megan, who is wearing a face mask] Cueball: Homemade mask, huh? You think they help? Cueball: I've read so many conflicting things.\n[Flashback to when Megan was not wearing a mask but carrying a large sign, with Cueball and Ponytail approaching her from both sides. It is not possible to read what is on the sign. Masked Megan is pictured in an inset panel.] Megan (narrating): Well, what I was doing before was carrying around a big sign that said \"There's a pandemic so please give me space because I don't want to get sick or make anyone else sick!\"\n[Same as first panel] Megan: The problem was, I had to write small to fit, so people kept walking closer to read it. Cueball: Oops. Megan: Yeah, the mask gets it across better.\n"}
{"id":2291,"title":"New Sports System","image_title":"New Sports System","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2291","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_sports_system.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2291:_New_Sports_System","transcript":"[Single wide frame representing a basketball court with a basketball hoop at each end.  There are seven players running around the court, with a virtual ball in the bottom right corner (indicated as a dashed circle).  Nine off-screen voices of \"online viewers\" are yelling instructions to the players.  A caption is below the frame running nearly the full width of the frame.]\nViewer One: No! Viewer Two: It's on the\u2013 Viewer Three: Look out! [A player with thick hair and a goatee is \"air-shooting\" into the left-hand basket.] Viewer Four: No! [A player with thick hair is running to the right.] Viewer Five: He's right there Viewer Five: Don\u2019t run into\u2013 [A player with no hair is air-dribbling to the right.] Viewer Six: Go left! Viewer Seven: Left! Viewer Eight: Riiight! [A player with thick hair and a full beard is facing left and jumping, hands raised to intercept a ball.] [A player with no hair is facing left and crouching, reaching for a ball.] [A player with no hair is making an alley-oop motion towards the right-hand basket.] Viewer Nine: Stop dunking and find the ball! [The virtual ball is slowly moving right, unseen by the players.] [A player is hanging on the rim of the basket, making a dunking motion.]\nCaption below the panel: No one liked my new sports system, in which each player is in a separate arena sharing a single virtual ball that they can't see while online viewers yell instructions, but it was fun to watch while it lasted.\n","explanation":"This comic is the 16th comic in a row (not counting the April Fools' comic ) in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nAs communities have been ordered to stay indoors to avoid spreading the virus, this has also affected sports leagues around the world, with many of them suspending their seasons, or cancelling them outright. (see this Wikipedia article for a full list of sports or sporting events impacted) Some leagues have instead promoted e-sports, such as the NBA holding an NBA 2K20 tournament between active NBA players .\nRandall , in this comic, proposes an obviously bad \"new sports system\" of \"virtual sports\", in which players play with a virtual ball in separate arenas, and are guided by online viewers. This obviously proves to be challenging, as the ball is virtual but the players are not wearing any virtual reality or augmented reality headsets, and thus they do not know how to interact with it properly. Playing in separate arenas would solve the problem of spreading the virus, as the players do not have any direct interactions with each other.\nThis would be a similar system to Twitch Plays Pok\u00e9mon , in which Twitch viewers \"play\" Pok\u00e9mon video games in a crowdsourced manner.  There are also many games that are intentionally constructed so that some players must accomplish a goal they cannot see or with incomplete information, while they are guided by other players.  These include common team-building exercises (often involving blindfolds), and the bomb-disposal themed puzzle game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes .\nThe NBA also is holding a similar idea, holding a Horse tournament among NBA and WNBA players , which works better than the version of basketball shown in this comic because players don't need to interact with the same ball.\nIn the title text, Randall claims that boxing and football (he does not specify gridiron football or association football) proved to be difficult, with pairs figure skating still possible as long as figures like elevations are removed, and professional wrestling being unaffected. Boxing and gridiron football would be impossible to play in these situations; on top of the difficulty of trying to play without knowing where the other players are located, these sports are predicated on contact. A boxer cannot get a knockout without being able to touch the other players, and football players cannot block or tackle even if they mime catching the ball. Association football, with less emphasis on contact, might still be playable, but would suffer at least from the same complications as basketball shown here. Pairs figure skating would be possible, excepting \"throwing\" moves or \"lifts\", as typically pairs figure skaters skate in unison, replicating the same moves.\nHumorously, Randall claims that professional wrestling will be unaffected by his new system. This is in reference to the \"open secret\" that the matches have predetermined outcomes and are more \"entertainment\" than actual competition, with much of the 'forced' movement of one competitor being aided or even guided by the 'victim' rather than the 'aggressor' in semi-improvised feats of coordinated athleticism.\n[Single wide frame representing a basketball court with a basketball hoop at each end.  There are seven players running around the court, with a virtual ball in the bottom right corner (indicated as a dashed circle).  Nine off-screen voices of \"online viewers\" are yelling instructions to the players.  A caption is below the frame running nearly the full width of the frame.]\nViewer One: No! Viewer Two: It's on the\u2013 Viewer Three: Look out! [A player with thick hair and a goatee is \"air-shooting\" into the left-hand basket.] Viewer Four: No! [A player with thick hair is running to the right.] Viewer Five: He's right there Viewer Five: Don\u2019t run into\u2013 [A player with no hair is air-dribbling to the right.] Viewer Six: Go left! Viewer Seven: Left! Viewer Eight: Riiight! [A player with thick hair and a full beard is facing left and jumping, hands raised to intercept a ball.] [A player with no hair is facing left and crouching, reaching for a ball.] [A player with no hair is making an alley-oop motion towards the right-hand basket.] Viewer Nine: Stop dunking and find the ball! [The virtual ball is slowly moving right, unseen by the players.] [A player is hanging on the rim of the basket, making a dunking motion.]\nCaption below the panel: No one liked my new sports system, in which each player is in a separate arena sharing a single virtual ball that they can't see while online viewers yell instructions, but it was fun to watch while it lasted.\n"}
{"id":2292,"title":"Thermometer","image_title":"Thermometer","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2292","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/thermometer.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2292:_Thermometer","transcript":"[Cueball stands in the center of the panel holding a thermometer.] Cueball: This thermometer is in Celsius. How do you change it? Off-panel voice: Long press the button.\n[Cueball presses the button, and the thermometer beeps] Press Beep Thermometer: Units: Kelvin Cueball: No...\n[Cueball presses the button, and the thermometer beeps] Press Beep Thermometer: Units: Degrees Rankine Cueball: What.\n[Cueball presses the button, and the thermometer beeps] Press Beep Thermometer: Units: Average Translational Kinetic Energy Cueball: This is the worst thermometer. Off-panel voice: Boltzmann's constant is on the side if you need it.\nIn 1643: Degrees , Cueball struggles with which temperature unit to use, and ultimately tells his friend the temperature in radians , which is not a valid temperature scale.\nIn 1923: Felsius , Randall proposes a combined Fahrenheit\/Celsius temperature scale called Felsius.\n","explanation":"This comic is arguably the 17th comic in a row (not counting the April Fools' comic ) in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis comic expresses frustration at the multitude of temperature scales. Randall , as a former engineer, has strong opinions about units, as unit conversion is often a gripe for many engineers. (In a special preface in the UK edition of Randall's book What If , he mentions that one does not appreciate the metric system unless they have had to go through a bunch of scientific papers using really unusual units like \"kilocubic feet per second\" or \"acre-feet\".) As elevated body temperature is a symptom of COVID-19, the comic is thus also concerning the virus.\nCueball is holding what appears to be a medical thermometer, implying that he's trying to check his body temperature . He mentions that the thermometer is in Celsius, and asks how to change it.  Many thermometers sold in the United States have settings for both Fahrenheit and Celsius, with an option to change between the two. Americans are almost always more familiar with body temperatures in Fahrenheit, so Cueball presumably expects to change to that scale. However, he finds that the thermometer provides measurements in a series of scales that are increasingly unhelpful. Human body temperature in Celsius is 37 \u00b0C.\nwhere k B is the Boltzmann constant , 1.380649\u00d710 \u221223 J\u22c5K -1 . So if this thermometer told you a translational kinetic energy measurement in joules, you could get the measured temperature in the Kelvin scale by dividing by the Boltzmann constant and multiplying by 2\/3. Somebody who actually wanted to use this measure of temperature might then find it useful to have Boltzmann's constant printed on the thermometer.\nUsing these last three units for home temperature gauging would be ridiculous, as Kelvin and Rankine measurements of body temperature are unfamiliar to the average user and even those familiar with them would need to do calculations to translate normal body temperature.  Kinetic energy is obscure enough that only physicists, engineers and thermodynamicists, a relative handful of the potential buyers, would likely know what it refers to. Those that do could make use of the value printed on the thermometer, but such would add a great deal of unnecessary complexity to what should be a simple and intuitive task.\nIn the last frame Cueball calls the thermometer the worst. It seems to lack Fahrenheit entirely, frustrating its American consumer base, including Cueball. From a nerd's perspective this would be an extraordinary device, offering even exotic temperature scales. However, a \"normal person\" would find this thermometer terribly difficult to use for everyday purposes when set on any of the non-Celsius scales, like checking their body temperature or the temperature of food. As an item of consumer electronics, especially one sold in the United States, it would be almost completely useless.\nDeliberately lacking Fahrenheit is a jab against the Imperial system of units , and against the similar but distinct system of United States customary units . Although Imperial units and local traditional units are still used for various limited purposes (and\/or by older generations) in different countries, most of the world has switched to using the metric system for most purposes going forward, with the US being relatively unusual in the extent to which it still routinely defaults to the US customary units in daily life.  Many proponents of the metric system have long pushed for the US to change over, arguing that Imperial and US customary units (and degrees Fahrenheit, specifically) are archaic and obsolete. Randall has dealt with this conflict in other strips ; as a physics major, he's partial to the metric system, and finds it frustrating to maintain multiple different scales (which is the basis of the conflict in this strip). On the other hand, he recognizes certain intuitive advantages to Imperial and US customary measurements, and recognizes that the forces of social inertia in US society make change difficult.\nThe title text references an archaic temperature unit, R\u00f8mer , first proposed in 1701, and is the common ancestor of both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales. Unlike the other measurements mentioned in this strip, the R\u00f8mer scale is no longer used in any context, and only people interested in the history of temperature scales have any idea that it even exists. This is the ultimate form of obscure and outdated temperature measurements.\n[Cueball stands in the center of the panel holding a thermometer.] Cueball: This thermometer is in Celsius. How do you change it? Off-panel voice: Long press the button.\n[Cueball presses the button, and the thermometer beeps] Press Beep Thermometer: Units: Kelvin Cueball: No...\n[Cueball presses the button, and the thermometer beeps] Press Beep Thermometer: Units: Degrees Rankine Cueball: What.\n[Cueball presses the button, and the thermometer beeps] Press Beep Thermometer: Units: Average Translational Kinetic Energy Cueball: This is the worst thermometer. Off-panel voice: Boltzmann's constant is on the side if you need it.\nIn 1643: Degrees , Cueball struggles with which temperature unit to use, and ultimately tells his friend the temperature in radians , which is not a valid temperature scale.\nIn 1923: Felsius , Randall proposes a combined Fahrenheit\/Celsius temperature scale called Felsius.\n"}
{"id":2293,"title":"RIP John Conway","image_title":"RIP John Conway","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2293","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rip_john_conway.gif","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2293:_RIP_John_Conway","transcript":"[A pixelated image of a stick figure using 21 pixels, could be a pixel Cueball, which waves with one hand up while holding the other hand down. The head consist of 7 pixels, the top row of three having two pixels beneath the two outer pixels, thus having two empty pixels beneath the central pixel. The neck and torso is a typical cross made from six pixels. The two legs are two pixels each shifted left and right of the cross. The arm to the left that waves is two pixels one down and the next back up to the level of the cross central beam. The arm to the right has the first pixel similarly but the second pixel continues one further step down. After less than one second it turns out that the image is animated, with the pixels changing according to the rules of Conway's Game of Life. The figure splits into three groups, two of which dissipates in a similar way at the bottom of the panel. The other becomes a 'glider' and moves off to the top-right corner of the image and out of the frame. The animation then repeats.]\nSome clients of the site crashed on this xkcd, most notably the Samsung Smart TV client.\n","explanation":"John Conway , an English mathematician, passed away of COVID-19 on April 11, 2020. Two days later, Randall created this memorial comic . It is the 6th memorial comic, but it is the first released in almost 5 years, since 1560: Bubblegum .\nOne of Conway's most famous creations was the cellular automaton known as Conway's Game of Life . A cellular automaton is a machine composed of cells, each of which can be in a different state. Every generation, each cell in the automaton may transition to a new state depending on a set of rules. (Conway's work in mathematics was vast and various, but he is perhaps best known in the field for discovering the surreal numbers , which inspired Donald Knuth to write a novel which may have been referenced back in 505: A Bunch of Rocks .)\nConway's Game of Life was first popularized to the general public in the form of a game, Life Genesis, bundled into some distributions of Windows 3.1, an operating system from the early-90s that Randall most likely used in his preteen years.\nConway's Game of Life is a 2-state automaton (i.e., every cell can be \"alive\" or \"dead\") that is implemented on a two-dimensional grid of cells using the Moore neighborhood - this means that each cell can only be influenced by the eight cells directly surrounding it, both orthogonally and diagonally. The transition rules that Conway used are as follows:\nDespite the simplicity of these three rules, Conway showed that patterns of amazing complexity can nonetheless develop out of simple cell arrangements. Some patterns do not evolve at all (\"still lifes\"), some enter a cyclic, repeating state (\"oscillators\"), and some reproduce their own pattern displaced by an offset, resulting in patterns that can move across the grid under their own power (\"gliders\" and \"spaceships\"). This last category is of particular interest, as it allows the Game of Life to transmit information from one location to another, allowing for rich, dynamic behavior and even for the creation of computational machines within the automaton itself.\nThis comic begins with the shape of a stick figure as the starting cell configuration of the Game of Life. The black cells are \"alive\" and the white cells are \"dead\". This configuration then evolves via Conway's rules, disintegrating into nothingness except for a five-cell pattern known as a \"glider\", which ascends up, signifying that Conway went to heaven, and to the right. This visually suggests a \"soul\" breaking away as the corporeal body disintegrates. The glider is perhaps the most iconic pattern of the Game of Life, and is often used symbolically to represent the phenomenon of emergence.\nHere the topology of the grid on which the cells evolve is not known, the cellular automaton can be run on many topologies, for example you can choose to make cells reappear from the opposite side once they reach an edge (similarly to the behaviour of the well known Pacman). Here once the glider reaches the top right, we know for sure that the actual grid is bigger (since the glider leaves the frame while continuing its pattern), and we are only seeing part of the full grid.\nThe initial state presented in the comic does actually evolve in that manner, as can be verified by entering the pattern into a cellular automaton simulator such as Golly or web services such as this one . It seems that no one else have created this pattern before. At least, despite discussion in the comments, no one has found anything to show that this is not Randall's own discovery of this pattern.\nThe title text simply states Conway's birth and death year: 1937-2020.\nConway's Game of Life was previously mentioned in 696: Strip Games . Cellular automata was also referenced in 505: A Bunch of Rocks .\nThis comic is the 18th comic in a row (not counting the April Fools' comic ) in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic . Although this comic is, of course, mainly a tribute to John Conway, the fact that he died of COVID-19 in the middle of this long series of coronavirus-related comics by Randall is relevant.\n[A pixelated image of a stick figure using 21 pixels, could be a pixel Cueball, which waves with one hand up while holding the other hand down. The head consist of 7 pixels, the top row of three having two pixels beneath the two outer pixels, thus having two empty pixels beneath the central pixel. The neck and torso is a typical cross made from six pixels. The two legs are two pixels each shifted left and right of the cross. The arm to the left that waves is two pixels one down and the next back up to the level of the cross central beam. The arm to the right has the first pixel similarly but the second pixel continues one further step down. After less than one second it turns out that the image is animated, with the pixels changing according to the rules of Conway's Game of Life. The figure splits into three groups, two of which dissipates in a similar way at the bottom of the panel. The other becomes a 'glider' and moves off to the top-right corner of the image and out of the frame. The animation then repeats.]\nSome clients of the site crashed on this xkcd, most notably the Samsung Smart TV client.\n"}
{"id":2294,"title":"Coronavirus Charts","image_title":"Coronavirus Charts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2294","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coronavirus_charts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2294:_Coronavirus_Charts","transcript":"[A graph is drawn.]\n[A curve labeled \"United States\" starts about halfway up the vertical axis, rises almost to the top, and then levels off about a third of the way along the horizontal axis.] [4 other curves are also shown, labeled \"New York City area\", \"Italy\", \"Norway + Sweden\" and \"Ratio between France and Spain\".] Y-axis label: Coronavirus deaths today plus total cases one week ago per capita X-axis label: Negative test results per Google search for \"COVID\" (log scale) Caption: I'm a huge fan of weird graphs, but even I admit some of these coronavirus charts are less than helpful.\n","explanation":"This comic is the 19th comic in a row (not counting the April Fools' comic ) in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nDuring the current outbreak of COVID-19, there have been many graphs used by health officials and others to show trends in infection and death rates. Their x-axis is usually time. The curves might represent different countries or different mitigation strategies. But \nhealth officials and media have struggled to decide what to put on the y-axis. Because testing strategies and reporting are so variable across even small regions, their data does not reflect comparable guesses at the true number of cases. So they produce graphs of confirmed cases, confirmed plus suspected cases, deaths, hospitalizations, any of the above per capita, day-to-day changes in any of the above, and share of test results that are positive for different areas of New York .\nThis graph, however, while sharing similarities with actual data and graphs is completely useless. This is due to the bizarre data-points being used, as well as the unhelpful graph axes. The caption of the comic notes as much, perhaps indicating that this comic is intended to satirize the useful, but exceptionally detailed graphs that are currently in use. Some of these graphs have a semilog scale, like this graph - but generally the y-axis is the log scale and the x-axis is not. Sometimes the other graphs compare things of vastly different sizes - as demonstrated by showing both the USA and New York. Sometimes they scale the data to population, as referenced by the title text.\nIn addition, the selection of geographic areas used here is incomprehensible. Two of the lines represent countries (USA and Italy), and another represents part of one of those countries (New York City area). The New York City area may have been chosen because it has a very large number of cases, more than some countries. However, a fourth line combines Norway and Sweden -- two countries which are culturally, economically, and geographically similar but have imposed very different strategies regarding closing businesses and schools. Combining Norway and Sweden obscures any differences attributable to their different policies regarding the virus. A fifth line represents not a geographical area but the ratio between France and Spain, making an already meaningless graph even less comprehensible.\nThe title text adds a further ambiguity: Usually, there are only two items being compared in a \"vice versa\" (e.g. \"Would you rather have live in a city with the land size of San Francisco and the population density of Tokyo, or vice versa?\" when comparing two other cities with those measurements); here there are three , leading to either ambiguity ( possibly two South Korea lines, each based on one of two complementary sets of cross-demographic refactoring), or six lines being embodied in that \"vice versa\".\nOther metrics used\nX-axis:\nY-axis:\nTitle text: While adding data for South Korea might be helpful (as it shows an Asian country, compared to just Europe and the US), it is only logical to scale the data to the population of another country (e.g. Japan) if you're actually comparing the two countries (i.e. does Japan have more or fewer cases per capita than South Korea).  Scaling cases based on land area is much less useful; it's true that countries with lots of land area , like Australia, do have lower population densities, which affects the spread of disease, but most of the people in Australia live in higher-density cities on the coast, so the actual change is not that great.\n[A graph is drawn.]\n[A curve labeled \"United States\" starts about halfway up the vertical axis, rises almost to the top, and then levels off about a third of the way along the horizontal axis.] [4 other curves are also shown, labeled \"New York City area\", \"Italy\", \"Norway + Sweden\" and \"Ratio between France and Spain\".] Y-axis label: Coronavirus deaths today plus total cases one week ago per capita X-axis label: Negative test results per Google search for \"COVID\" (log scale) Caption: I'm a huge fan of weird graphs, but even I admit some of these coronavirus charts are less than helpful.\n"}
{"id":2295,"title":"Garbage Math","image_title":"Garbage Math","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2295","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/garbage_math.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2295:_Garbage_Math","transcript":"[A series of mathematical equations are written from top to bottom]\nPrecise number + Precise number = Slightly less precise number\nPrecise number \u00d7 Precise number = Slightly less precise number\nPrecise number + Garbage = Garbage\nPrecise number \u00d7 Garbage = Garbage\n\u221a Garbage = Less bad garbage\nGarbage\u00b2 = Worse garbage\n1\/N \u03a3 (N pieces of statistically independent garbage) = Better garbage\n(Precise number) Garbage = Much worse garbage\nGarbage \u2013 Garbage = Much worse garbage\nPrecise number \/ ( Garbage \u2013 Garbage ) = Much worse garbage, possible division by zero\nGarbage \u00d7 0 = Precise number\n","explanation":"This comic illustrates the \" garbage in, garbage out \" concept using mathematical expressions. It shows how, if you have garbage as inputs to your calculations, then you will likely get garbage as a result, except when you multiply by zero, which eliminates all uncertainty of the result.\nThe propagation of errors in arithmetic , other mathematical operations , and statistics is described in colloquial terms. Numbers with low precision are termed garbage, while numbers with high precision are called precise. The table below quantifies the change in precision from the operands to their result in terms of their variance , represented by \u03c3, the Greek lowercase letter sigma, equal to the standard deviation , or the square root of the variance. Variance or standard deviation are common specifications of uncertainty (as an alternative to, for example, a tolerance interval .)\nThe accuracy and precision of mathematical operations correspond to the rules of propagation of uncertainty , where a \"garbage\" number would correspond to an estimate with a high degree of uncertainty, and a precise number has low uncertainty. The uncertainty of the result of such operations will usually correspond to the term with the highest uncertainty. The rule about N pieces of independent garbage used to calculate an arithmetic mean reflects how the central limit theorem predicts that the uncertainty (or standard error ) of an estimate will be reduced when independent estimates are averaged.\nThe title text refers to the computer science maxim of \"garbage in, garbage out,\" which states that when it comes to computer code, supplying incorrect initial data will produce incorrect results, even if the code itself accurately does what it is supposed to do. As we can see above, however, when plugging data into mathematical formulas, this can possibly magnify the error of our input data, though there are ways to reduce this error (such as aggregating data). Therefore, the quantity of garbage is not necessarily conserved , in contrast to other scientific quantities like energy and momentum that are always conserved. Alternatively, this could be take as a pun on environmental conservation efforts, which can often involve recycling one's trash. However, the computer science maxim of \"garbage in, garbage out,\" has nothing to do with actual garbage.\n[A series of mathematical equations are written from top to bottom]\nPrecise number + Precise number = Slightly less precise number\nPrecise number \u00d7 Precise number = Slightly less precise number\nPrecise number + Garbage = Garbage\nPrecise number \u00d7 Garbage = Garbage\n\u221a Garbage = Less bad garbage\nGarbage\u00b2 = Worse garbage\n1\/N \u03a3 (N pieces of statistically independent garbage) = Better garbage\n(Precise number) Garbage = Much worse garbage\nGarbage \u2013 Garbage = Much worse garbage\nPrecise number \/ ( Garbage \u2013 Garbage ) = Much worse garbage, possible division by zero\nGarbage \u00d7 0 = Precise number\n"}
{"id":2296,"title":"Sourdough Starter","image_title":"Sourdough Starter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2296","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sourdough_starter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2296:_Sourdough_Starter","transcript":"[Cueball stands in front of a kitchen counter looking down at a glass jar he is holding in both hands. The jar's flat lid is lying on the table. There is another large jar farther back on the counter with a lid, with a small handle, on. In both jars there is a substance, which do stay in the same position in the jar even though Cueball tilts the jar he is holding.] Cueball: My sourdough starter is coming along nicely!\n[Caption below the panel] Theory: The coronavirus is a yeast symbiont with an extremely convoluted parasitic life cycle.\n","explanation":"This comic is another comic in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nRecently, because of the coronavirus, many people are forced to stay home in quarantine or under Stay-at-home orders . These conditions often lead to spare time that needs to be filled, and many people have turned to baking, which can usually be done entirely at home, is relatively time-consuming, and has the advantage of producing finished food, lessening the need to go out to buy food. This trend is common enough that baking supplies, including yeast, have seen a spike in demand, to the point where many people have trouble finding it.\nAs an alternative to yeast, consumers can grow their own sourdough starter, which is a symbiotic culture of yeast and bacteria naturally found in flour. Once the starter has matured, part of it can be used to make bread or other baked good rise, while the remainder can be mixed with more water and nutrients to allow the remaining yeast and bacteria to multiply once again. Because these populations need to be maintained, it's often been a practice to trade starters from house to house, with each home using starter when they need it, then setting up the remaining starter to breed more. This has historically been a social activity, allowing people who share an interest in baking to meet, share recipes, and spend time together.\nThe upshot of all of this is that the coronavirus pandemic has created conditions in which yeast (and symbiotic bacteria) are being bred in larger numbers, both by companies trying to fill demand, and by individuals trying to make their own. The joke is that this outcome is, in fact, the entire purpose of the coronavirus, which is in a symbiotic relationship with yeast. The entire global pandemic, by this logic, is directed to keep humans indoors and baking so that more yeast (and bacteria) is bred. The practice of swapping sourdough starters means that they're propagated more widely, increasing and distributing the yeast population (while potentially giving the virus more opportunity to spread, as people socialize).\nAs Randall points out, this cycle is extremely convoluted.  However, it is not unknown for parasites to drive the responses of other creatures in order to propagate themselves. For example, Toxoplasma gondii infects mice, but can only reproduce when it infects cats.  The organism has therefore adapted to infect the nervous systems of mice, making them extremely reckless, increasing their odds of being caught and eaten by cats, allowing the the parasite to move to a new host.  Some flatworm parasites have very complex life cycles that involve four different host animals .\nRandall has previously speculated about unusual parasitic organisms in 2246: Christmas Presents , in which he \"concluded\" that Christmas presents are parasites of Christmas trees, possibly mediated by a fungus. And in 1664: Mycology a fungus infects human brains making them wish to study (and thus grow more of) this fungus.\nViruses are not organisms (lacking some of the defining features of life), and it is debatable whether they would be considered parasites. Moreover, this theory is obviously implausible for a number of reasons.  The most obvious being that natural responses, particularly of viruses and simple organisms, evolve over a long time scale.  SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the current pandemic, has very likely been infecting humans for less than one year, certainly not long enough to evolve such a complex set of behaviors. At the same time, a symbiotic relationship would require yeast to somehow contribute to the life cycle of the coronavirus in a meaningful way, which is unlikely when the yeast is being artificially bred in isolated containers.  If however, as suggested by the title text, people getting together to swap yeast starters after the lockdown ends does cause the virus to begin spreading in humans again as a result of the social contact, then the yeast would be contributing to the life cycle of the coronavirus, in an equally convoluted way.  The humor, therefore, is derived from the fact that this is a comical exaggeration, but based on cycles that actually do happen in nature.\n[Cueball stands in front of a kitchen counter looking down at a glass jar he is holding in both hands. The jar's flat lid is lying on the table. There is another large jar farther back on the counter with a lid, with a small handle, on. In both jars there is a substance, which do stay in the same position in the jar even though Cueball tilts the jar he is holding.] Cueball: My sourdough starter is coming along nicely!\n[Caption below the panel] Theory: The coronavirus is a yeast symbiont with an extremely convoluted parasitic life cycle.\n"}
{"id":2297,"title":"Use or Discard By","image_title":"Use or Discard By","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2297","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/use_or_discard_by.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2297:_Use_or_Discard_By","transcript":"[Megan stands in the middle of the panel, holding two flare guns, one in each hand.] Megan: These emergency flare guns are about to expire. Cueball [off-panel]: I forgot we had those.\n[Cueball sitting at a desk, working on a computer.] Megan [off-panel]: This one says \"Use or discard by Apr 25 2020.\" Cueball: Okay...\n[Megan holds up one of the flare guns looking at it. She holds the other flare gun by her side.] Megan: But this one just says \"Use by\" ... Cueball [off-panel]: No.\n","explanation":"Many products carry a \"Use By\", \" Expiration date \", \"Discard by\" or similar date.  The date shows the latest date by which the product has been verified to provide its expected use. For example, a foodstuff will have a \"consume by\" date, showing the date after which the food may be unsuitable for eating.  For most products, this is a conservative estimate, especially if a product is kept sealed and stored in a cool, dark place. A few products become dangerous to use after that point, some simply become stale and less palatable (as in the case of foods) or lose potency. For most consumer items, there's no immediate imperative to discard a product as soon as it expires; you simply take the risk of a decline in quality or reliability.\nOne of the issues around expiration dates is that the language used tends to be arbitrary and ambiguous. Some have explicit instructions to the consumer, such as \"use by:\", others have instructions to the seller, such as \"sell by:\", still others say things such as \"best by:\" or \"freshest before:\". This can make it confusing how important it is to get rid of a given product on that date.\nIn this comic, two similar emergency flare guns , an item typically used to send out distress flares , have slightly different expiry instructions. One has an instruction to \"use by or discard by\" a specific date (in this case, three days after the date of publishing).  The other has an instruction to \"use by\" this date. These two phrases almost certainly have the same intent. There would be no reason to actually fire the flare.  Even the instructions to discard the flare gun really just mean that the manufacturer cannot guarantee that it will work past the printed date, and so do not advise counting on it in an emergency situation.\nDespite this implication, Megan seems to take the latter instruction literally, as an order to actually fire the flare gun prior to the expiration date, whether or not it's necessary. It may be taken that she wants the experience of firing a flare, and takes that instruction as an excuse to do so. Cueball immediately objects to this line of reasoning. Firing a flare unnecessarily is generally a bad idea. It could summon emergency responders to a non-emergency situation, diverting emergency resources that may be needed elsewhere.  Even worse, if a flare is fired improperly, or in an unsafe direction, it could cause a fire and\/or injuries, ironically creating an emergency situation, rather than signalling one. This was the cause of a serious fire at a Frank Zappa concert in Montreaux in December 1971, which inspired the well known song (and infamous guitar riff) \" Smoke on the Water \" by Deep Purple .\nThe title text similarly indicates that Megan intends to follow the same instructions with a can of bear spray .  Since there are no bears present, she will go camping and leave her food out to attract their attention, so that she may use the bear spray to repel bears before it \"goes bad\".  This would involve approaching bears (close enough to spray them) and irritating them, potentially causing them to attack if the spray is ineffective or misapplied (perhaps it only works if they smell it, but Megan might spray another part of the bear), when it would be much safer to simply discard the bear spray and not get close to bears.\nExpiration dates (for food) have also been mentioned in 737: Yogurt , 1109: Refrigerator , and 2178: Expiration Date High Score .\n[Megan stands in the middle of the panel, holding two flare guns, one in each hand.] Megan: These emergency flare guns are about to expire. Cueball [off-panel]: I forgot we had those.\n[Cueball sitting at a desk, working on a computer.] Megan [off-panel]: This one says \"Use or discard by Apr 25 2020.\" Cueball: Okay...\n[Megan holds up one of the flare guns looking at it. She holds the other flare gun by her side.] Megan: But this one just says \"Use by\" ... Cueball [off-panel]: No.\n"}
{"id":2298,"title":"Coronavirus Genome","image_title":"Coronavirus Genome","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2298","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coronavirus_genome.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2298:_Coronavirus_Genome","transcript":"[Megan sits at a desk, working on a laptop. A genome sequence is displayed on her laptop screen, shown with a jagged line in a text bubble.] Cueball (off-screen): So that's the coronavirus genome, huh? Megan: It is! Laptop: <A long string of unintelligible letters, presumably the genome>\n[Cueball walks up and stands behind Megan, still working on the laptop.] Cueball: It's weird that you can just look at it in a text editor. Megan: It's essential! Megan: We geneticists do most of our work in Notepad.\n[A frameless panel, Cueball still standing behind Megan. Megan rests her arm on the chair. ] Cueball: Notepad? Megan: Yup! Nicer labs use Word, which lets you change the genome font size and make nucleotides bold or italic. Cueball: Ah, okay. Megan: That extra formatting is called \"epigenetics\".\n[A regular panel. Cueball still stands behind Megan, this time with his hand on his chin.] Cueball: Hey, why does that one have a red underline? Megan: When we identify a virus, we add its genome to spellcheck. That's how we spot mutations. Cueball: Clever!\n","explanation":"This comic is another comic in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nIt was also the first in a new series , followed in the next comic by 2299: Coronavirus Genome 2 .\nMegan is a geneticist doing research on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. She is analyzing the virus's genome , its genetic material composed of RNA . The genomic sequence can be represented as a list of nucleotide bases ( guanine , adenine , cytosine , thymine and uracil - often abbreviated as G, A, C, T, and U).\nThe nucleotide sequence displayed is a 100% match to six SARS-CoV-2 sequences in public databases, all of them originating from the East Coast of the United States. The sequence is from nucleotides 26202-26280 of the virus genome and overlaps an unknown open reading frame\/gene named ORF3a. One of the matching sequences is [1] . However, SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, and so its genetic material (not containing any DNA) would not include thymine (T) but would use uracil (U) instead. The sequence uses the codes of DNA as RNA sequencing involves copying the genome into a DNA, and the DNA code is more familiar anyways.\nCueball is surprised that Megan and her colleagues actually use Microsoft Notepad , a simple text editor , to look at the genome, instead of more modern technology. She explains that better research institutions use Microsoft Word , a more advanced editor, to allow additional formatting (such as bolding and italics ), and humorously calls this \" epigenetics \". In the real world, epigenetics is the study of changes that are not caused by changes in nucleotides, but by chemical modifications of DNA or chromosomes that cause changes in patterns of gene expression and activation, sometimes several generations down.  This might be considered analogous to altering the meaning of a text by changing its formatting rather than the content; for example, content can be moved into parentheses or footnotes to be de-emphasized, or rendered in boldface or enlarged to attract attention and emphasize key points. Much as text can be wrapped in HTML tags or similar markup to change its formatting, nucleotides can be methylated to prevent transcription, and the histones around which DNA is wound can also be modified to promote or repress gene expression. During DNA replication, these modifications are often also reproduced.\nThe real punchline comes when Megan uses spellcheck to detect mutations in the genome by adding the previous genome to spellcheck and comparing them. Overall, Megan uses ridiculously and humorously crude methods to analyze a major genetic item. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 is almost 30,000 base-pairs long, which exceeds the longest words of any natural language by two orders of magnitude (the longest words ever used in literature -- i.e. not constructed in isolation simply for the purpose of being a long word, or chemical formulas -- approach 200 letters), and may exceed the capabilities of any available spell-checking program. Furthermore, a spellcheck program underlines the whole word if a single letter is wrong and not just the letter itself. Thus, it would not be able to highlight individual mutated base pairs.  Megan might be better served by using a diff tool, but most scientists generally use commercial software that is designed to view, annotate, and edit DNA sequences (eg: Snapgene, Geneious, DNAstrider, ApE).\nThe title text mentions grammar checking and claims that whoever discovers how to use that to compare genomic material should be awarded a Nobel Prize . Spell-checking is analogous to comparing sequences against ones previously known, an activity that is the bread and butter of bioinformatics nowadays. Grammar checking would be analogous to having some sort of sense as to how well all the sequences generally cooperate and interact to create possibly viable functionality in an organism, something we are unable to do at the moment except in very limited ways and only in a few simple cases. It may also be a snarky commentary on the untrustworthy nature of grammar-check programs in general, which often follow grammatical rules far more strictly than is practical; it's not uncommon for an author to follow a grammar-check recommended correction only to find the corrected portion is now part of a longer portion that the checker deems \"incorrect\".\nAmusingly, this and the title text foreshadowed the usage of an MIT language learning algorithm to predict mutations in SARS-CoV-2.\n[Megan sits at a desk, working on a laptop. A genome sequence is displayed on her laptop screen, shown with a jagged line in a text bubble.] Cueball (off-screen): So that's the coronavirus genome, huh? Megan: It is! Laptop: <A long string of unintelligible letters, presumably the genome>\n[Cueball walks up and stands behind Megan, still working on the laptop.] Cueball: It's weird that you can just look at it in a text editor. Megan: It's essential! Megan: We geneticists do most of our work in Notepad.\n[A frameless panel, Cueball still standing behind Megan. Megan rests her arm on the chair. ] Cueball: Notepad? Megan: Yup! Nicer labs use Word, which lets you change the genome font size and make nucleotides bold or italic. Cueball: Ah, okay. Megan: That extra formatting is called \"epigenetics\".\n[A regular panel. Cueball still stands behind Megan, this time with his hand on his chin.] Cueball: Hey, why does that one have a red underline? Megan: When we identify a virus, we add its genome to spellcheck. That's how we spot mutations. Cueball: Clever!\n"}
{"id":2299,"title":"Coronavirus Genome 2","image_title":"Coronavirus Genome 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2299","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coronavirus_genome_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2299:_Coronavirus_Genome_2","transcript":"[Megan sits in an office chair at her desk with a laptop. She is leaning on the back of the chair with one arm while turning away from her desk to talk to Cueball standing behind her.] Cueball: Hey, if you have the coronavirus genome as a text file, can you email it to me? Megan: Sure. Megan: ...Why?\n[Megan has turned to her her laptop typing on it, Cueball is off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): Nothing. Megan: I ... see. Megan: Well, here you go. Laptop: Click\n[In \"two\" frame-less panels in a row Cueball is shown twice while typing on his phone with both hands. The second time the text on his phone screen is shown above it in a square \"speech bubble\" with a \"speech line\" going down to the phone. It displays a Twitter interface, highlighting that he is trying to tweet too many characters. The last line of text in the tweet is marked with red. A number below is in red font and the + in a circle after that is in cyan font. The last word is in white font inside a cyan strip.] Phone: GAAAGGTAAGATGGAGAGGCCTTGTC CCTGGTTCAACGAGAA -29,602 (+) Tweet\n[Back to the original setting but with Megan still typing on her laptop while Cueball looks at his phone that he holds up in one hand.] Cueball: Okay, it's too long for Twitter, but it can fit in a Facebook post. Megan: Unsettling that your first instinct is \"share it online.\" Cueball: It's cool, I sanitized my phone before posting.\n","explanation":"This comic is another comic in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nIt is also a direct continuation of the previous comic, 2298: Coronavirus Genome , making this a new series .\nMegan sent her copy of the coronavirus genome to Cueball , who then proceeded to share it with his friends on social media. In effect, he is spreading the virus over the Internet, though not in a form that can actually make people sick with COVID-19 (which may seem obvious, but then some people believe 5G causes coronavirus .)  If his post catches on and is widely shared, it might be described as \"going viral\".(This \"virtually\" spreading the coronavirus , would be a prank).\nAdditionally while exchanging research data generally is as good an idea as using readymade tools for science publishing the genome of a dangerous virus actually might cause the virus to spread further: There are specialized manufacturers that can mail you arbitrary DNA snippets if you send them their sequence as an ASCII file. That actually can work in the other direction, too: Some of the machines used by such firms in order to save space stored a base pair in 4 bits of memory and could (using a buffer overrun) be convinced to actually try to execute instead of manufacturing the DNA code.\nIn continuation of the previous strip, Cueball appears to be fascinated by the fact that the entire genome of this very consequential virus can be fully detailed in a text file, using only 30,000 characters. He realizes that he can't fit this much information in a single tweet (Twitter has a 280 character limit), but is able to fit the entire genome in a Facebook post (Facebook allows up to 63,206 characters in a post ).\nThis strip draws humor from the contrast between the costly physical precautions that are being taken to prevent the spread of coronavirus between people and the blitheness with which Cueball attempts to share (the genome of) the coronavirus electronically.  Cueball's response (that it's okay, because he sanitized his phone before posting) could be taken as a sarcastic rebuttal, given that Megan sent the genome to him without knowing why he wanted it, or a commentary on the useless or counterproductive behaviors of clueless people (e.g. people who wear gloves before touching potentially-contaminated surfaces, but then scratch their noses while still wearing the possibly-contaminated gloves).  It could also be a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, in which humanity is revealed to possibly be the descendants of the \"useless\" occupants of the planet Golgafrincham, including telephone sanitizers; unfortunately, after sending their useless members to the planet later called Earth, the remaining Golgafrinchans were subsequently wiped out by a plague caught from an unsanitized telephone. This may also be a reference to the concept of digital data sanitization (the screening of user inputs to prevent exploitation of security flaws) as in 327: Exploits of a Mom .\nThe title text deals with the almost inevitable outcome of the resulting message being 'liked' by some other party. In this case Megan, although she just told Cueball it was weird that he shared it. This may be a commentary on the common reflex to \"like\" your friend's posts, even if you think they're strange. Alternately, the \"like\" button on Facebook was historically the only way to signal a reaction to a post (other than actually commenting).  When someone posted about a bad event, such as an injustice, a tragedy, or a difficult personal event, people might \"like\" the post to indicate their support of the person posting it, but it could read as having positive feelings toward the incident itself.  (Facebook has since added multiple reaction buttons to express such emotions as surprise, sadness or anger).  In this case, Megan \"like\"ing the coronavirus genome could be taken to mean that she likes the virus itself, which would be quite odd.\n[Megan sits in an office chair at her desk with a laptop. She is leaning on the back of the chair with one arm while turning away from her desk to talk to Cueball standing behind her.] Cueball: Hey, if you have the coronavirus genome as a text file, can you email it to me? Megan: Sure. Megan: ...Why?\n[Megan has turned to her her laptop typing on it, Cueball is off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): Nothing. Megan: I ... see. Megan: Well, here you go. Laptop: Click\n[In \"two\" frame-less panels in a row Cueball is shown twice while typing on his phone with both hands. The second time the text on his phone screen is shown above it in a square \"speech bubble\" with a \"speech line\" going down to the phone. It displays a Twitter interface, highlighting that he is trying to tweet too many characters. The last line of text in the tweet is marked with red. A number below is in red font and the + in a circle after that is in cyan font. The last word is in white font inside a cyan strip.] Phone: GAAAGGTAAGATGGAGAGGCCTTGTC CCTGGTTCAACGAGAA -29,602 (+) Tweet\n[Back to the original setting but with Megan still typing on her laptop while Cueball looks at his phone that he holds up in one hand.] Cueball: Okay, it's too long for Twitter, but it can fit in a Facebook post. Megan: Unsettling that your first instinct is \"share it online.\" Cueball: It's cool, I sanitized my phone before posting.\n"}
{"id":2300,"title":"Everyone's an Epidemiologist","image_title":"Everyone's an Epidemiologist","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2300","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/everyones_an_epidemiologist.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2300:_Everyone%27s_an_Epidemiologist","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are walking with makeshift medical masks covering their lower faces. Megan has thrown her arms in the air, and a star burst at her forehead where her speech line emanates, indicate she is agitated.] Megan: Ugh, everyone's an epidemiologist. Megan: It's like when there's a mountaineering disaster in the news, and suddenly everyone is an expert on mountain climbing safety.\n[In a frame-less panel they walk on together.] Cueball: I mean, it's not exactly like that. Cueball: If the entire world's population were suddenly stranded on mountaintops together, a lot of people would understandably be trying to become mountaineering experts really fast. Megan: Okay, that's fair.\n[Megan stops and lift both hands palm up while Cueball walks past her.] Megan: But I do wish they wouldn't keep going on TV and saying \"According to my research on gravity, if everyone curls into a ball and rolls, we'll get to the bottom quickly!\" Cueball: Yes, that's definitely not helping.\n","explanation":"This comic is another comic in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nMegan complains that the sudden rise in awareness of COVID-19 has led to many people that act as if they are epidemiologists ; i.e. experts on the issue of global policy and the virus's traits, while in fact most are just repeating what they have heard from various news outlets, which do not always get everything right . She compares the situation to people who are suddenly expert on mountain climbing safety every time a mountaineering disaster hits the news - and uses an analogy of Joseph Beuys' \"Everyone is an artist\" for saying that.\nCueball notes that her analogy fails to account that everyone is directly affected by the virus, meaning that everyone should be educating themselves on the topic as much as possible, similar to how if everyone was stranded in mountains all at once, lots of people would try to become experts as fast as possible.\nMegan acknowledges this fact, but continues the mountaineer analogy to the virus saying that she wishes those that now think they are experts would at least not go out on TV saying they found out that everyone would come down fast if they just curl up in to balls and roll down because their \"research on gravity\" says they will get to the bottom quickly, which Cueball agrees.\nIn corona pandemic terms, this is probably a reference to those that claim we need to get out of lockdown as fast as possible, to save the economy (the closure of which has its own costs, potentially including losses of life through e.g. depression, homelessness, displacement, and so on), and maybe to induce herd immunity (SARS-CoV-2 does not mutate as rapidly as e.g. the influenza family of viruses, so it is hoped that individuals who are infected and survive will develop long-term immunity, and that a single vaccine will be very broadly effective, but this is still not known for certain as of this writing). But those are not considering all the lives at stake, which is what frustrates Megan. Who should decide that those with weak immune systems should be placed in such grave risk, for the better of the economy? Maybe not the every-man who has read something on the internet... which could be wrong, see 386: Duty Calls .\nThe title text explains how the decision may not even be yours; if those who were in more precarious positions above you now start to hit you on the way down and cause you to tumble as well, you will also end up as one of those rolling downhill. And in pandemic terms - if enough people ignore the precautions, then it will be much harder for the rest to avoid getting the disease, which will cause more deaths.\nThe rolling-down-hill strategy is reminiscent of 1217: Cells in that it solves the immediate problem (whether being stuck on a mountain, or having some disease) while also likely killing the patient. It may therefore be in reference to Trump's widely reported comments that an injection of a disinfectant could cure coronavirus; such an injection would \"kill\" (inactivate) any virus particles it contacted, but it would also kill so many of the patient's cells as to risk the patient's life.\nThe Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake is an annual event in which people intentionally roll down a steep hill (chasing after a wheel of cheese, or a foam replica since 2013), and they do indeed reach the bottom very quickly (the cheese was known to reach speeds in excess of 70 mph) and are often injured enough to require hospitalization, although because all participants are volunteers in good health, there have been no fatalities.  The May 2020 event has been canceled due to COVID-19.\nAlternately, it may be a reference to the \"just succumb to the problem\" solution of ignoring the dangers involved in letting what happens happen. Just quickly get everyone into the valley bottom and they all (who survive) subsequently have a herd immunity where none of them now needs to be scared of falling any more, and can jostle against anyone else without any such issues.\n[Megan and Cueball are walking with makeshift medical masks covering their lower faces. Megan has thrown her arms in the air, and a star burst at her forehead where her speech line emanates, indicate she is agitated.] Megan: Ugh, everyone's an epidemiologist. Megan: It's like when there's a mountaineering disaster in the news, and suddenly everyone is an expert on mountain climbing safety.\n[In a frame-less panel they walk on together.] Cueball: I mean, it's not exactly like that. Cueball: If the entire world's population were suddenly stranded on mountaintops together, a lot of people would understandably be trying to become mountaineering experts really fast. Megan: Okay, that's fair.\n[Megan stops and lift both hands palm up while Cueball walks past her.] Megan: But I do wish they wouldn't keep going on TV and saying \"According to my research on gravity, if everyone curls into a ball and rolls, we'll get to the bottom quickly!\" Cueball: Yes, that's definitely not helping.\n"}
{"id":2301,"title":"Turtle Sandwich Standard Model","image_title":"Turtle Sandwich Standard Model","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2301","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turtle_sandwich_standard_model.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2301:_Turtle_Sandwich_Standard_Model","transcript":"[A two-by-two grid, with a piece of bread next to the top left cell; a turtle shell next to the bottom left cell; lettuce, cheese, and tomato above the top left cell; and an turtle head enclosed in a circle above the top right cell.]\n[Top left cell: an image of a sandwich.]\n\u2714 CONFIRMED\n[Top right cell: an image of a shell-less turtle sandwiched between two slices of bread.]\n(?)\n[Bottom left cell: an image of a turtle shell housing lettuce, cheese, and tomato - the contents of a sandwich.]\n(?)\n[Bottom right cell: an image of a turtle.]\n\u2714 CONFIRMED\n[Caption below the panel]\nOur lab is working to detect the two missing pieces of the turtle-sandwich standard model.\n","explanation":"This comic references particle physics. The Standard Model of physics explains the base particles and fields that make up the universe.  The elementary fermions of the standard model can be laid out in a 3\u00d74 grid, with three \" generations \" of matter, each containing a quark with charge +\u2154, a quark with charge -\u2153, a lepton with charge -1, and a neutrino with charge 0.  The first generation contains the familiar up and down quarks, which make protons and neutrons, the electron, and the electron neutrino.  Each succeeding generation of matter is more massive than the one before, and only the first generation of particles occurs naturally on Earth; the others have only been created and identified in particle accelerator experiments (although they also arguably exist in various extreme places around the universe; for example, the strange quark is suspected to be a component of the denser parts of neutron stars).\nQuarks were initially proposed by Murray Gell-Mann to simplify the \" particle zoo \" that physicists were discovering.  He found that the twenty-five or so mesons and hadrons that were known at that time could be organized into what he called the \" eightfold way \" by just three properties: spin , charge, and what he called \" strangeness \".  He proposed that three quarks (and their corresponding antiquarks) governed these properties.  His chart had an empty space for what he called the omega baryon , and when a particle of the properties he predicted (including its mass) was discovered, his model received a lot of support.  The quark model was eventually extended to include six quarks, and as with the eightfold way, one of the lines of evidence in favor of what became known as the Standard Model is that it predicted the existence and masses of several particles, which have since been confirmed; the top quark 's mass was predicted in 1973, and experimentally verified in 1995, for example, and on the gauge boson side of the chart, the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012.\nIn this comic strip, sandwiches (lettuce, cheese, tomato, and possibly other fillings, surrounded by bread) and turtles (an aquatic reptile which wears an armored shell) are likewise proposed to not be \"elementary\" entities, but in fact combinations of 4 elementary parts, namely bread, fillings, reptile, and shell.  The narrator's lab is looking for the hypothesized \"bread-shelled turtle\" and \"shell-coated sandwich\".  In fiction, turtles' shells are often depicted as articles of clothing which they can remove at will, but in the real world, the shell is a part of the turtle's skeleton, so unless the narrator's lab is willing to commit extremely invasive surgery, they will never find a bread-shelled turtle, although they could much more easily take the shell of a dead turtle and put some sandwich fillings inside.\nThe failure to detect the bread-shelled turtle could be taken as evidence that the turtle-sandwich standard model is flawed -- perhaps turtles and sandwiches are elementary entities, or perhaps the elementary entities that make them are much smaller than is proposed here.  There is also the small matter that there are things besides sandwiches and turtles in the universe [ citation needed ] .  Alternatively, it could be taken as evidence that the bread-shelled turtle has an extremely high energy, and so does not exist under typical conditions of our universe.  This might be analogous to magnetic monopoles ; we would know one if and when we saw one (and many experiments have sought them out), and we believe we know how they would behave, but no such particle has ever been verifiably detected or created.\nIn the same vein, the lack of observation could be due to the instability of the arrangements. Turtleshell-turtle assemblies can last for more than 100 years, while bread-filling assemblies are indefinitely stable under sufficiently low energies . The two other arrangements may simply be formed rarely, and have a relatively short half-life.\nThe title text introduces more particle physics jargon, proposing that the \"top and bottom\" parts of the bread and\/or shell have distinct \" flavors \", and that there may be \"strange\" and \"charm\" variants as well (a reference to the higher-generation quarks -- strange and charm in the second generation, and top and bottom in the third).\nUnlike the turtle-sandwich standard model, there are no particles predicted by our Standard Model that have not yet been detected; however, there are several gaps between the pure Standard Model and what we observe in reality, most notably the existence of gravity and the apparent asymmetry between the amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe.  For this reason, the Standard Model is generally considered to be somehow incomplete.\n[A two-by-two grid, with a piece of bread next to the top left cell; a turtle shell next to the bottom left cell; lettuce, cheese, and tomato above the top left cell; and an turtle head enclosed in a circle above the top right cell.]\n[Top left cell: an image of a sandwich.]\n\u2714 CONFIRMED\n[Top right cell: an image of a shell-less turtle sandwiched between two slices of bread.]\n(?)\n[Bottom left cell: an image of a turtle shell housing lettuce, cheese, and tomato - the contents of a sandwich.]\n(?)\n[Bottom right cell: an image of a turtle.]\n\u2714 CONFIRMED\n[Caption below the panel]\nOur lab is working to detect the two missing pieces of the turtle-sandwich standard model.\n"}
{"id":2302,"title":"2020 Google Trends","image_title":"2020 Google Trends","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2302","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2020_google_trends.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2302:_2020_Google_Trends","transcript":"[A line chart plotting the popularity of various search terms from May 2019 through April 2020: sewing machine (blue line), webcam (red), Andrew Cuomo (yellow), flour (green), and pangolin (purple). The yellow line starts at the bottom of the chart and rises about halfway up at the end of March 2020 before decaying to about 20% by the end of April. The purple line starts at the bottom of the chart and has a small lump in February 2020 and a slightly bigger lump in March 2020 before trending back down. The blue line starts at about 10% up the chart and then spikes up to 50% at the beginning of April before decaying to 40% at the end of April. The red line starts at about 20% up the chart, has a small lump in September 2019, and then jumps up to 40% in March 2020 before trending back down. The green line starts at about 30% up the chart, has a small lump in December 2019, and then spikes up to the top of the chart at the end of March 2020.]\n[Caption below comic:] I want to show someone from 2019 this Google Trends graph and watch them try to guess what happened in 2020.\n","explanation":"This comic is another comic in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nRandall wants to go back in time to show a 2019 person a Google Trends graph , showing massive spikes in a group of search terms, all around the same time. Some of the terms (flour, webcam, sewing machine) had fairly steady popularity, then rapidly jumped higher.  Others (pangolin, Andrew Cuomo) were barely searched for at all until they suddenly became items of intense interest.  The joke is that, without context, it would be impossible to guess what caused these simultaneous spikes, and the pattern would seem completely random. A person might guess that there was a single event that drove all of these searches, but it would be difficult to speculate what that might be.\nAll of these trends are presumably due to the COVID-19 pandemic.\nThe title text is a possible \"guess\" by the 2019 person for these search terms having an increase together: a YouTube craze of exotic animals (which includes pangolins) in homemade aprons (possibly made with the help of sewing machines) hosting baking shows which leads to a response by New York governor Andrew Cuomo. This is not correct. [ citation needed ]\nA recent prior comic that touches on the past's possible views on the present situation from limited information was 2280: 2010 and 2020 .  In that case, the relative costs of cryptocurrency and hygiene supplies was considered unremarkable by a 2010 person because (unbeknownst to him) the price of both had skyrocketed.\n[A line chart plotting the popularity of various search terms from May 2019 through April 2020: sewing machine (blue line), webcam (red), Andrew Cuomo (yellow), flour (green), and pangolin (purple). The yellow line starts at the bottom of the chart and rises about halfway up at the end of March 2020 before decaying to about 20% by the end of April. The purple line starts at the bottom of the chart and has a small lump in February 2020 and a slightly bigger lump in March 2020 before trending back down. The blue line starts at about 10% up the chart and then spikes up to 50% at the beginning of April before decaying to 40% at the end of April. The red line starts at about 20% up the chart, has a small lump in September 2019, and then jumps up to 40% in March 2020 before trending back down. The green line starts at about 30% up the chart, has a small lump in December 2019, and then spikes up to the top of the chart at the end of March 2020.]\n[Caption below comic:] I want to show someone from 2019 this Google Trends graph and watch them try to guess what happened in 2020.\n"}
{"id":2303,"title":"Error Types","image_title":"Error Types","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2303","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/error_types.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2303:_Error_Types","transcript":"[A list with nine entries. The left side has 9 types of errors numbered with Roman numerals. The right side has a description of each type of error:] Type I Error: False positive Type II Error: False negative Type III Error: True positive for incorrect reasons Type IV Error: True negative for incorrect reasons Type V Error: Incorrect result which leads you to a correct conclusion due to unrelated errors Type VI Error: Correct result which you interpret wrong Type VII Error: Incorrect result which produces a cool graph Type VIII Error: Incorrect result which sparks further research and the development of new tools which reveal the flaw in the original results while producing novel correct results Type IX Error: The Rise of Skywalker\n","explanation":"This comic is another comic in a series of comics related to the 2020 pandemic of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 , which causes COVID-19 .\nThe comic is inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, as there is a lot of medical testing for the disease being done, including detection of the virus itself, usually by qPCR, or of antibodies present in people who have had the disease (sometimes unknowingly). The quality of these tests is often mediocre and never perfect, leading to discussion of different types of errors that can occur, including \"false positives\" (calling presence of the virus\/antibodies when they are not really there) or false negatives (failing to see the virus\/antibodies which are present).  \nThe comic is riffing on Type I and type II errors , also known as \"false positive\" and \"false negative\", respectively. The first two rows of the comic's table are correct definitions for established terms in statistics. Further rows contain suggestions for new terminology.\n\n[A list with nine entries. The left side has 9 types of errors numbered with Roman numerals. The right side has a description of each type of error:] Type I Error: False positive Type II Error: False negative Type III Error: True positive for incorrect reasons Type IV Error: True negative for incorrect reasons Type V Error: Incorrect result which leads you to a correct conclusion due to unrelated errors Type VI Error: Correct result which you interpret wrong Type VII Error: Incorrect result which produces a cool graph Type VIII Error: Incorrect result which sparks further research and the development of new tools which reveal the flaw in the original results while producing novel correct results Type IX Error: The Rise of Skywalker\n"}
{"id":2304,"title":"Preprint","image_title":"Preprint","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2304","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/preprint.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2304:_Preprint","transcript":"[Blondie as a newscaster is sitting at a desk.  To the right is a screen with text, the bottom word is a thin line making the letters white. Just above her head is what she says as her opening line for her news story. But above this text, is more text which have been grayed out and scribbled over. This are three other alternative opening lines which she did not use, indicating revisions to her script.] Blondie [gray and scribbled out]: According to a new preprint\u2026 Blondie [gray and scribbled out]: \u2026An unpublished study\u2026 Blondie [gray and scribbled out]: According to a new paper uploaded to a preprint server but which has not undergone peer review\u2026 Blondie: According to a new PDF\u2026\nInset graphic: Breaking news\n[Beneath the panel is a long caption consisting of an underlined headline with three bulleted points beneath it:] Benefits of just saying \"a PDF\": Avoids implications about publication status Immediately raises questions about author(s) Still implies \"this document was probably prepared by a professional, because no normal human trying to communicate in 2020 would choose this ridiculous format.\"\n","explanation":"This comic is about how media reports non- peer-reviewed research papers. The newscaster depicted is attempting to report breaking news based on information in a study; however, the study in question has not been formally published. This leads to uncertainty on the part of either the newscaster, Blondie , or her scriptwriters as they try to determine how to refer to this study, represented here by alternative introduction lines being scribbled out.\nRandall suggests that, instead of explaining that the paper was in preprint , or unpublished or submitted to a preprint server and not peer-reviewed, the newscaster could simply say it was a PDF . PDF (Portable Document Format) is a file format for documents developed by Adobe to be used independent of application software, hardware and operating systems.\nRandall proceeds to lists several benefits of using \"PDF\":\nThe title text makes fun of what is incorrectly believed to be the official name of PDF; it is now an open international standard (ISO 32000-1), and the only PDF files that are \"Adobe Acrobat files\" or \"Adobe PDF\" files are those created using Adobe Systems' software. Further, Adobe does not use the \u00ae designation in conjunction with PDF. (See Adobe Trademark Guidelines, 1 Nov. 2014 ) Adobe trademark guidelines were also made fun of here .\nSince so many applications can create and even edit PDF files, implying a connection with Adobe every time someone talks about one is preposterous, and one could sarcastically pronounce the registered trademark symbol to show contempt for the fact that it is a registered trademark.\nThis comic was possibly produced in response to the preprint study \"COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California\" , Bendavid et al, which was posted online in mid-April 2020 before peer review. The authors of the paper went on a media blitz immediately after posting it, appearing on major cable news networks and writing editorials in major publications, claiming that their results show that COVID-19 is not nearly as bad as thought and that most people are already immune to it. Other scientists have pointed out that, if the very high false-positive rate of the test used and the sample bias of their methodology (testing only people who self-report as sick) are properly considered in the analysis, the data collected is such poor quality as to be meaningless, with properly applied error bars on the number of actual cases in the general population extending below 0. Nonetheless, many less-scientifically-literate politicians, media figures, and protest groups continue to use the much-criticized study as proof that COVID-19 should not be considered an emergency, and that quarantine measures should be cancelled. As of May 11 2020, the study has still not passed peer review, nor undergone any revisions since the first posting.\n[Blondie as a newscaster is sitting at a desk.  To the right is a screen with text, the bottom word is a thin line making the letters white. Just above her head is what she says as her opening line for her news story. But above this text, is more text which have been grayed out and scribbled over. This are three other alternative opening lines which she did not use, indicating revisions to her script.] Blondie [gray and scribbled out]: According to a new preprint\u2026 Blondie [gray and scribbled out]: \u2026An unpublished study\u2026 Blondie [gray and scribbled out]: According to a new paper uploaded to a preprint server but which has not undergone peer review\u2026 Blondie: According to a new PDF\u2026\nInset graphic: Breaking news\n[Beneath the panel is a long caption consisting of an underlined headline with three bulleted points beneath it:] Benefits of just saying \"a PDF\": Avoids implications about publication status Immediately raises questions about author(s) Still implies \"this document was probably prepared by a professional, because no normal human trying to communicate in 2020 would choose this ridiculous format.\"\n"}
{"id":2305,"title":"Coronavirus Polling","image_title":"Coronavirus Polling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2305","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/coronavirus_polling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2305:_Coronavirus_Polling","transcript":"[A panel only with text. At the top there is three paragraphs of explanatory text. Below that is a paragraph in smaller gray font with link to sources. Below that there are two columns of poll results, each with a heading. There are six polls in the left and seven polls in the right column. Instead of a bulleted list, each poll has its percent that agrees given to the left of the statement, which is thus aligned to the right of this percentage. At the end of each statement there is a reference in brackets in gray font.] It's hard to get people to agree on anything in polls. But we agree about the coronavirus. Here's how Americans feel about COVID-19, along with other topics that get similar levels of agreement for comparison. Compiled with help from HuffPost polling editor Ariel Edwards-Levy. Sources: xkcd.com\/2305\/sources\n[Left column:] Recent coronavirus polls 86% say \"stay-at-home orders are responsible government policies that are saving lives\" rather than \"an over-reaction\" (ABC\/Ipsos) 85% oppose reopening schools (NPR\/Marist) 91% oppose resuming big sporting events (NPR\/M.) 85% trust local health officials and health care workers (Axios\/Ipsos) 93% are trying to maintain 6-foot distances while in public (Axios\/Ipsos) 81% say Americans should continue to social distance for as long as is needed to stop the Coronavirus even if it means continued damage to the economy (Politico\/Morning Consult)\n[Right column:] Other polls 81% enjoy apple pie (HuffPost\/YouGov) 76% feel positively about kittens (HuffPost\/YouGov) 84% have a favorable impression of Tom Hanks (Ipsos 2018) 89% say fair elections are important to democracy (Pew) 86% feel positively toward Betty White (Ipsos 2011) 86% do not trust Kim Jong-Un to do the right thing (Pew 2019) 64% are concerned about the emergence of \"murder hornets\" (YouGov)\n","explanation":"This comic is another comic in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThe comic compares opinion polling of COVID-19 related topics to polling of other, mostly unrelated topics. The American public often tends to be sharply divided about major political and social issues, but polling shows that the country is remarkably united about the dangers posed by the COVID-19 and the measures necessary to prevent its spread.  This is notable, because responses to this pandemic have significant political and economic implications, which usually results in major division and distrust. The poll results also contradict the extensive news coverage of notable anti-lockdown protests prominent in many major cities; by implication, this comic is arguing that such protests are unrepresentative and disproportionately covered. Or else that this vocal and demonstrative minority is almost the only group making their opinion public in such a newsworthy manner.\nTo put these majority opinions in perspective, polls on other topics are shown with similar but slightly smaller high percentages of likemindedness but on extremely uncontroversial questions [ citation needed ] such as liking apple pie or Tom Hanks, or the importance of elections to democracy.\nThe title text refers to the chapter \"How To Win an Election\" in Munroe's book How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems , in which a similar set of near-unanimous survey questions are shown for prospecting candidates to support, or, alternately, oppose, thus guaranteeing their popularity or lack thereof.  To see what this politician's speeches might have looked like, we can look at FiveThirtyEight's \"perfect stump speeches\" that espouse only opinions held by a majority of Republicans or Democrats .\nThe polls cited in this comic are all linked at http:\/\/xkcd.com\/2305\/sources .\n\n[A panel only with text. At the top there is three paragraphs of explanatory text. Below that is a paragraph in smaller gray font with link to sources. Below that there are two columns of poll results, each with a heading. There are six polls in the left and seven polls in the right column. Instead of a bulleted list, each poll has its percent that agrees given to the left of the statement, which is thus aligned to the right of this percentage. At the end of each statement there is a reference in brackets in gray font.] It's hard to get people to agree on anything in polls. But we agree about the coronavirus. Here's how Americans feel about COVID-19, along with other topics that get similar levels of agreement for comparison. Compiled with help from HuffPost polling editor Ariel Edwards-Levy. Sources: xkcd.com\/2305\/sources\n[Left column:] Recent coronavirus polls 86% say \"stay-at-home orders are responsible government policies that are saving lives\" rather than \"an over-reaction\" (ABC\/Ipsos) 85% oppose reopening schools (NPR\/Marist) 91% oppose resuming big sporting events (NPR\/M.) 85% trust local health officials and health care workers (Axios\/Ipsos) 93% are trying to maintain 6-foot distances while in public (Axios\/Ipsos) 81% say Americans should continue to social distance for as long as is needed to stop the Coronavirus even if it means continued damage to the economy (Politico\/Morning Consult)\n[Right column:] Other polls 81% enjoy apple pie (HuffPost\/YouGov) 76% feel positively about kittens (HuffPost\/YouGov) 84% have a favorable impression of Tom Hanks (Ipsos 2018) 89% say fair elections are important to democracy (Pew) 86% feel positively toward Betty White (Ipsos 2011) 86% do not trust Kim Jong-Un to do the right thing (Pew 2019) 64% are concerned about the emergence of \"murder hornets\" (YouGov)\n"}
{"id":2306,"title":"Common Cold","image_title":"Common Cold","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2306","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/common_cold.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2306:_Common_Cold","transcript":"[Three large viruses hang in the air in front of Cueball. The one closest to Cueball looks a bit like the virus causing the corona pandemic, although it is made clear it is not this type of virus. The other two are put together in small circles. The one behind the corona-like virus has 7 small circles, four in a group, one above and two below. The other has three circles. They are not so closely knit together, and may instead represent three smaller viruses rather than one large. The corona type virus addresses Cueball with a starburst above it indicating it speaks the lines above.] Corona-like virus: Hi there! We're the viruses that cause the common cold. Corona-like virus: This handwashing... Corona-like virus: It stops when this is all over, right?\n[Same setting in a slimmer panel.] Corona-like virus: It's just, it's making things really hard for us, too. Corona-like virus: Maybe we could make a deal?\n[Same setting in a frame-less panel. The large virus also speaks as indicated with a starburst above it.] Large virus: We won't kill you! Large virus: We just want to get back in your throat and make you feel gross now and then. Corona-like virus: Show us some mercy?\n[Zoom in on Cueball, beat panel.]\n[In the close-up of Cueball, he lifts his hand up, which has been balled into a fist. He is emphatic in his reply.] Cueball: No.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis comic with talking viruses was followed by a comic debating if viruses are Alive Or Not ?\nMany of the measures humans have undertaken to fight SARS-CoV-2, such as careful hand-washing and sanitizing of frequently-touched surfaces, are effective against most pathogens. Hence, one of the ironic silver linings of the coronavirus pandemic is that the aggressive implementation of these measures is likely to slow the spread, not only of SARS-CoV-2 but of many common illnesses. If these measures become long-term social expectations, they may improve public health long after the current pandemic has passed.\nHand-washing with soap is a particularly effective way to disable coronaviruses and influenza viruses, which have a viral envelope .\nMost common colds are caused by a rhinovirus , a non-encapsulated virus that is not as sensitive to soap. Nonetheless, proper and frequent hand-washing appears to reduce the spread of most viruses, by removing biological residue which harbors the virus. Hence, more aggressive hygiene is likely to have at least some impact on most easily transmissible diseases.\nIn this strip, Randall addresses the matter from the point of view of viruses. Specifically, those that cause the common cold , imagining them as sentient entities, with spreading infection as their conscious goal. Much like in 2287: Pathogen Resistance , the humor comes from the perspective flip, where health measures intend to protect us are seen by the pathogens as terrifying attacks. In this strip, the cold viruses become aware that more aggressive hygiene measures are putting them at risk, and hope to negotiate with humanity, on the grounds that, unlike SARS-CoV-2, they are rarely fatal. Their hope seems to be that, once the current pandemic is brought under control, humanity will abandon these measures, and allow them to freely spread, once again.\nCueball's adamant refusal likely reflects Randall's hope that this pandemic will result in lasting changes, slowing the spread of all diseases, including those which are merely very unpleasant, as opposed to actually fatal. By treating this as a conscious battle, people may be more inclined to be vigilant, and not allow the enemy any opportunity to recover.\nWhile colds are unlikely to kill otherwise healthy humans, they still cause symptoms that can be painful, even debilitating, in the short term. Previous strips made reference to the miserable nature of the disease.  In December 2015, Randall released both 1612: Colds and 1618: Cold Medicine .\nThe what if? book previously dealt with the plausibility of eliminating the common cold through aggressive physical distancing alone. The section in that book concluded that total elimination would be impractical. However, the current situation suggests that minimizing the spread of disease by careful hygiene measures is realistic.\nIn the title text, Randall mentions a virus with the name metapneumovirus . He states that this is easily the common cold virus with the coolest name. But that does not mean it warrants our sympathy (as it is present in up to 40% of colds, and can be deadly in vulnerable populations). And he finishes by stating that \"Colds suck. No mercy.\" So Randall would not be sorry to see the common cold eliminated, or at least substantially contained, by our coronavirus precautions.\n[Three large viruses hang in the air in front of Cueball. The one closest to Cueball looks a bit like the virus causing the corona pandemic, although it is made clear it is not this type of virus. The other two are put together in small circles. The one behind the corona-like virus has 7 small circles, four in a group, one above and two below. The other has three circles. They are not so closely knit together, and may instead represent three smaller viruses rather than one large. The corona type virus addresses Cueball with a starburst above it indicating it speaks the lines above.] Corona-like virus: Hi there! We're the viruses that cause the common cold. Corona-like virus: This handwashing... Corona-like virus: It stops when this is all over, right?\n[Same setting in a slimmer panel.] Corona-like virus: It's just, it's making things really hard for us, too. Corona-like virus: Maybe we could make a deal?\n[Same setting in a frame-less panel. The large virus also speaks as indicated with a starburst above it.] Large virus: We won't kill you! Large virus: We just want to get back in your throat and make you feel gross now and then. Corona-like virus: Show us some mercy?\n[Zoom in on Cueball, beat panel.]\n[In the close-up of Cueball, he lifts his hand up, which has been balled into a fist. He is emphatic in his reply.] Cueball: No.\n"}
{"id":2307,"title":"Alive Or Not","image_title":"Alive or Not","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2307","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alive_or_not.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2307:_Alive_Or_Not","transcript":"[A chart consisting of vertical line, with 14 dots and a horizontal dashed dividing line drawn across the list a bit below the middle. Each dot has a label to the right of the line with a line pointing to the dot they belong to. Above and below the dividing line is a label with a broad arrow pointing up above and down below.] Up arrow: Alive Down arrow: Not alive\n[Dot labels from top to bottom above the dashed line:] Animals (Normal) Animals (Weird ones like jellyfish and coral) Fungi Plants Slime molds Bacteria Archea Viruses\n[Dot labels from top to bottom below the dashed line:] Prions Fire Clouds Fossils Rocks shaped like faces Regular rocks\n","explanation":"There is no universally-accepted definition of \" life \"; all definitions thus far proposed have either excluded some things commonly understood to be alive or included some things commonly understood to not be alive. Take reproduction, a trait commonly assumed to be essential and unique to life; by this definition, anything which cannot reproduce (including mules , worker bees , and postmenopausal women) would be considered nonliving, while anything which can duplicate itself (including computer viruses , advanced 3D printers , and fire \u2014see below) would be considered alive.\nMany more elaborate definitions of life have been attempted over the decades.  Some common additional factors include:\nDespite all of this, the only definite definition of \"life\" is \"something everyone agrees is alive\". This comic attempts to rank several types of things by how likely people are to perceive them as \"alive\". As there is a debate as to whether viruses are alive or not, Randall has taken a side, and may spark debate, by putting viruses above the alive line.\nGiven that this comic was released during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, viruses are for sure on Randall's mind, given that most comics more than a month before this one was about COVID-19. And this comic is most likely inspired by this, and the previous comic 2306: Common Cold , where the cold viruses are definitely alive, and afraid.\nInterestingly, the vertical line linking the categories extends beyond both the most-alive and least-alive things, making one wonder what Randall might think is more alive than \"normal animals\" or less alive than \"regular rocks\". In the latter direction an explanation might be that shortly before this comic the scientific press wrote about heat-resistant bacteria that live in the desert and slowly eat regular rocks generating their own water in this process making even the sand in the desert partially alive.\n[A chart consisting of vertical line, with 14 dots and a horizontal dashed dividing line drawn across the list a bit below the middle. Each dot has a label to the right of the line with a line pointing to the dot they belong to. Above and below the dividing line is a label with a broad arrow pointing up above and down below.] Up arrow: Alive Down arrow: Not alive\n[Dot labels from top to bottom above the dashed line:] Animals (Normal) Animals (Weird ones like jellyfish and coral) Fungi Plants Slime molds Bacteria Archea Viruses\n[Dot labels from top to bottom below the dashed line:] Prions Fire Clouds Fossils Rocks shaped like faces Regular rocks\n"}
{"id":2308,"title":"Mount St. Helens","image_title":"Mount St. Helens","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2308","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mount_st_helens.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2308:_Mount_St._Helens","transcript":"[Caption above graph:] Heights of mountains in Washington State Over time\n[A graph is shown with close to 30 horizontal gray lines which seem not to change much, if any, as they go from left to right. Only the top 6 gray lines are distinctly separated from others. The top line is way above the second line which again is far above the next two that are close together. Two more close together is somewhat further down, and just below them the rest of the lines follow in close proximity down to the bottom of the graph. A single black line is also shown. It begins as the fifth highest line, just above the two last mentioned above. It, like all other lines, goes horizontally, but only three fifths of the way across the graph \u2013 then it immediately drops down well below most of the other lines (at 1980) and levels off, continuing on its horizontal path. There is a caption above the graph, and both Y-axis and X-axis has labels. For the Y-axis there is a tick for every label, for the X-axis only every 2nd tick has a label. A unit is given on the top label on the Y-axis.]\n[X-axis:] 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020\n[Y-axis:] 15,000 feet 14,000 13,000 12,000 11,000 10,000 9,000 8,000\n","explanation":"This comic marks the 40 year anniversary of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens that killed 57 people. It was a Monday so a normal release day could be used to mark this event.\nIt shows a graph of the height of the mountains in the state of Washington as a function of time over the last 100 years. The only mountain to change its height significantly over this time period is Mount St. Helens , which the comic is named after. It is also the only black line as all other (30?) lines are gray.\nMount St. Helens is a volcano that famously and explosively erupted in 1980. Millions of tons of earth were blasted from one face of the mountain all over the surrounding countryside.  After it was over, the peak of Mount St. Helens was no longer the 5th highest in the state of Washington , having lost approximately 1,300 feet (400 m) in height (from 9,677 ft (2,950 m) pre-explosion to 8,363 ft (2,549 m) post-explosion).\nThe comic shows a rare event that had major effect and was predictable in hindsight, but would have surprised an observer that is just tracking the height of Mt. St. Helens in a non-representative timeframe. Such an event is called a Gray Rhino event.\nCurrently, the 5 highest mountain peaks in Washington State are Mount Rainier (at 14,411 ft or 4,392 m), Mount Adams , Mount Baker , Glacier Peak , and Bonanza Peak . As shown in the comic, Mount St. Helens was the 5th highest, but now has fallen to #35 (using a topographic prominence cut-off of 500 m (1640 feet)). Only mountains above 8,000 feet (2,438 m) are included, with the graph topping at 15,000 feet (4,572 m), 600 feet (182 m) above the highest mountain. There are 92 peaks above 8000 feet in the state, so not all are included and the lines are not really distinct below 9000 feet. Seems like there are less than 30 lines drawn. Of course it says Mountains not Mountain peaks, but there are only four mountain ranges in Washington with peaks above 8000, so he must mean peaks!\nTechnically, the other mountains may be fluctuating in height as well, due to erosion or the movement of Earth's tectonic plates, but this phenomenon should not be visible on the time-scale and vertical resolution that Randall has plotted.  Precision GPS measurements of various peaks in Washington have only been available since 2010, and it's likely that the primarily volcanic mountains of Washington experience significant but comparatively slight variations throughout the year due to snowfall, melt, or the pressure of swelling magma inside volcanic cores.  These changes go largely unmeasured, while the mountains continue to appear equally physically unchanging and imposing both in person and from a distance.\nSource: Seattle Times . So while the comic does appear to show some slight fluctuations in height for mountains, that is more likely a side-effect of the comic's free-hand drawing style than an accurate reflection of any real fluctuations.\nThe title text is a play on the term \"peak\" meaning both the highest point of a mountain and also the optimal, most famous or most impressive stage of a trend; for instance: \"The band Rolling Stones really peaked in the 80s.\"\n[Caption above graph:] Heights of mountains in Washington State Over time\n[A graph is shown with close to 30 horizontal gray lines which seem not to change much, if any, as they go from left to right. Only the top 6 gray lines are distinctly separated from others. The top line is way above the second line which again is far above the next two that are close together. Two more close together is somewhat further down, and just below them the rest of the lines follow in close proximity down to the bottom of the graph. A single black line is also shown. It begins as the fifth highest line, just above the two last mentioned above. It, like all other lines, goes horizontally, but only three fifths of the way across the graph \u2013 then it immediately drops down well below most of the other lines (at 1980) and levels off, continuing on its horizontal path. There is a caption above the graph, and both Y-axis and X-axis has labels. For the Y-axis there is a tick for every label, for the X-axis only every 2nd tick has a label. A unit is given on the top label on the Y-axis.]\n[X-axis:] 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020\n[Y-axis:] 15,000 feet 14,000 13,000 12,000 11,000 10,000 9,000 8,000\n"}
{"id":2309,"title":"X","image_title":"X","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2309","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/x.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2309:_X","transcript":"[Cueball holds a laptop with code visible on the screen.] Cueball: I've developed a new programming language! Offpanel voice: Didn't a judge order you to stop doing that?\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball holds the laptop with one hand and types on the keyboard.] Cueball: Higher court threw out the ruling! Cueball: I'm back, suckers! Offpanel voice: Dammit.\n[Cueball holds the folded down laptop at his side.] Cueball: But I promise it's good this time! Cueball: Just normal code. Good clean syntax. Nothing weird. Offpanel voice: Okay...\n[Cueball holds the laptop at his side, and raises a finger on his other hand.] Cueball: Except the only variable name is \"X\". To refer to different variables you have to write \"X\" in different fonts. Offpanel voice: I'm calling the court. Another offpanel voice: Maybe we can appeal.\n","explanation":"Cueball has developed a new programming language with novel syntax. Such languages are usually classified as esoteric languages \u2014 programming languages developed for no practical use other than novelty, challenge, or academic interest, and which are difficult to understand or work with (although that doesn't stop people from trying to use them). Some classic examples of these are INTERCAL and brainfuck .\nNormally, there is no law against developing bad programming languages or bad code (although some would argue there should be). The law often has to play catch-up with technology. However, as when the EPA took an interest in Cueball's Laptop Issues , and Cueball's other tech support problems , it seems that a judge has previously ordered Cueball to stop developing new programming languages, possibly because the result was so egregious as to cause real harm.  However, the ruling was overturned on appeal, and Cueball is free to inflict his work on the world once again, unless and until there is another appeal.  Cueball's use of the phrase \" higher court\" suggests that he has not gotten a ruling from the Supreme Court of the United States or whatever state has jurisdiction over him, or else he would have said so, and evidently the offscreen voices hope to appeal to them and get Cueball's injunction reinstated.\nA variable is a piece of data (such as an integer or a string of text) whose value can change over the run of a program. Variables are identified by name and can usually be named any string of alphanumeric characters. To make code easier for a human to follow, variables are usually given a name that indicates what the variable is for; for example, a variable counting how many seconds have passed since the program was launched might be called elapsedTime .\nThe overall concept of a variable is usually first taught in Algebra , where the most basic nondescript name for a variable is x . When first learning or teaching programming, it's not unheard of for sample variables in practice problems to be named \"x\". However, outside of a controlled learning environment calling any variable \"x\" is considered bad coding practice, because anyone reading the code will not immediately understand what the variable does unless they are familiar with it. Even the original programmer may come back to it and find that they have forgotten what the variable was for.\nHere, Cueball is developing a language where all variables are named X - and the only way to differentiate different Xs is to write it in different typefaces. Needless to say, this is a terrible idea. The language would be a nightmare to program in, as all of the variables would look very similar unless careful attention is being paid, and there would be little to no way to determine what each one does, since font names are typically not very descriptive. Additionally, the fact that some fonts look similar (such as Arial and Helvetica) would require the programmer to have an intricate knowledge of different fonts and how to distinguish them from only one letter.\nSuch a language would also require the source code files to be in some rich text format such as a Word document, in order to store the font information. Additionally, it would also require the use of a word processor or similar in order to edit the code. Programs would also run into difficulties if the system does not have the required fonts installed, or if the font is not licensed for them to use.\nBy contrast, normal code is always written in plain text (usually with ASCII or UTF-8 encoding), which does not specify a typeface and can be edited by even the most basic of text editors.\nThis comic may also be a jab at mathematicians, who by convention use variable names which are short and nondescript (e.g. \"x\"), and which can also be \"typeface sensitive\" - for example, \u2115 denotes the set of natural numbers, and it is not uncommon to see the definition of a limit as \"For every \u2107>0 there exists N in \u2115 such that for every n in \u2115, if n>N, |f(n)-l|<\u2107\". Or for example, \u211c may denote the real part of a complex number, whereas \u211d denotes the set of real numbers, and R might denote the radius of some circle in the complex plane.\nThe title text references the fact that most code editors use a monospaced font (i.e., one where every character is the same width), as opposed to variable-width fonts, in which some characters like 'I' are narrower than others. This is partly because fixed horizontal alignment is sometimes useful when dealing with certain text strings.\n'Variable-width variables', a pun on two meanings of the word 'variable', refers to the fact that the letter X, like all letters, has different widths in different fonts. This would make this fixed alignment almost impossible, thus creating yet another reason why Cueball's language would be highly unpleasant to use. It likely also directly (mis)refers to systems such as variable-width encoding in which the data linked to in a variable storage is packed into an unfixed number of bits and\/or bytes. Such systems often use Huffman-type encoding to progressively differentiate, from the initial elements, how many more elements are needed to fully define the value, but a reserved deliminating value marking the end of a cumulative arbitrary-length array might be considered another form.\n[Cueball holds a laptop with code visible on the screen.] Cueball: I've developed a new programming language! Offpanel voice: Didn't a judge order you to stop doing that?\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball holds the laptop with one hand and types on the keyboard.] Cueball: Higher court threw out the ruling! Cueball: I'm back, suckers! Offpanel voice: Dammit.\n[Cueball holds the folded down laptop at his side.] Cueball: But I promise it's good this time! Cueball: Just normal code. Good clean syntax. Nothing weird. Offpanel voice: Okay...\n[Cueball holds the laptop at his side, and raises a finger on his other hand.] Cueball: Except the only variable name is \"X\". To refer to different variables you have to write \"X\" in different fonts. Offpanel voice: I'm calling the court. Another offpanel voice: Maybe we can appeal.\n"}
{"id":2310,"title":"Great Attractor","image_title":"Great Attractor","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2310","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/great_attractor.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2310:_Great_Attractor","transcript":"[Cueball and Beret Guy stand next to each other, talking. Beret Guy leans towards Cueball by bending down one knee.] Cueball: I can't believe it's still light out. It's 8:00 PM! Beret Guy: Seriously! This morning I fell off the wall.\n[In a frame-less panel with the same setting Beret Guy is looking and pointing to the right.] Cueball: Wait, why were you sleeping on the wall? Beret Guy: The Great Attractor is near the horizon at night right now.\n[Zoom in on Beret Guy, who hold one hand palm up towards Cueball who is speaking to him off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): The Great Attractor? Beret Guy: Yeah! The space one. Beret Guy: It pulls on me extra hard. Doctors said it's something to do with galactic motion and how many dimensions my bones have.\n[Cueball is still standing as Beret Guy slides away to the right, while looking and leaning back towards Cueball. He holds his arms slightly out, to keep his balance. Lines behind him and at his feet indicates his motion, even if he is clearly not walking. In his last word the letters becomes italic after Good and the last three Ts becomes smaller and smaller than the previous letters.] Beret Guy: This time of year, it's below us all day, so I stand vertically. But day-sliding season is near! Beret Guy: Let me know if you have any errands to run to the south! Beret Guy: Good niiight t t\n","explanation":"Cueball comments on the fact that as summer approaches, the sun rises earlier and sets later, a common topic of conversation, especially to complain that it is still light at times of day where you are used to it being dark out. Beret Guy comments that he fell off of the wall this morning, a seemingly unconnected topic.\nPeople will often complain about falling out of bed as an indicator of having slept badly. The later sunset is often linked to worsened sleep . However, Beret Guy didn't fall from the bed, he fell from the wall. While being able to figure out he's talking about his worsened sleep, Cueball is understandably confused, so Beret Guy clarifies.\nBeret Guy is strongly affected by the Great Attractor , a large gravitational anomaly that influences the galaxies near it, but is difficult to observe directly. Beret Guy claims that the Great Attractor pulls on him unusually hard, which could be another one of his strange powers . This attraction, while not overpowering the gravity of the Earth, (he states in the title text that he can \"Jump extra high\" when it is above him) affects his life greatly.\nFor Beret Guy his attraction to the Great Attractor means that, at various times, like now, he can lie on the vertical surface of any wall (external or internal) that is currently oriented in a fortuitous direction (i.e. facing north). He fell off the wall this morning due the Great Attractor being below him during daylight hours and on the horizon during night hours. Thus, Beret Guy's complaint in the first panel comes across as an attempted solidarity with Cueball's complaint; he was still asleep when the Great Attractor moved to below him, causing him to fall off the wall and presumably awaken him. The Great Attractor reaches the same apparent location once in a stellar day which is about four minutes shorter than the solar day. This means Beret Guy would only be able to sleep on walls for certain part of the year, as the time of day when the Great Attractor is near the horizon would occur 4 minutes earlier each day.\nHe gives a short explanation of which Attractor he refers to (the space one) and why the Great Attractor affects him. According to his doctors it is apparently caused by the motion of galaxies and how many dimensions his bones have. Since having fewer than 3 spatial dimensions may lead to trouble, his bones may be existing in more dimensions than our normal 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time. Galactic motions normally have no significant effect on a person with 3-D bones. [ citation needed ]\nBeret Guy then says that day-sliding season is near, due to the Great Attractor being at the horizon in the day, and offers to run errands for Cueball in the South, implying that he will be pulled towards the south during day-sliding season, and can run much faster in that direction.\nBeret Guy is not standing straight up during this comic, he has one knee slightly bent towards Cueball in the first two panels. This is because it is evening (8:00 PM as Cueball states) and the Great Attractor is now coming near the horizon, where it will be during the night. So Beret Guy will be pulled towards the south, behind him in the comic, and thus leans away from the pull. In the final panel, when he leaves Cueball, moving right towards south and into the pull, he can be seen sliding along the ground without walking. He leans a bit back to not stumble forward. His last sentence also indicates that he either speeds up or that he is a little uncertain on his feet altering his voice.\nHe mentions that at the moment during day-time the Great Attractor is beneath him so he can stand straight. He then just feels a little heavier (he will thus weigh more than another person with the same mass).\nIn the title text he says he liked living in the south because the Great Attractor was often above him, meaning he could jump higher with the help of its pull (and would weigh less than a normal person with same mass). Since he could jump, the force is clearly weaker than Earth's gravity, but still enough for him to easily slide over the ground when it is near the horizon. So he could likely win some high-jump or long-jump competitions if he chose the right time and place.\nBeing Beret Guy, he is never really unhappy, so he states that he also likes it here (in the north). But then he continues to comment on how easy it will be for him to get to the south. Because if he entirely stopped bracing himself against the pull by crouching into a more spherical shape, and just waited for the Great Attractor to get near the horizon again, then the pull would cause him to start rolling over the ground to some place with lower net gravitational potential, i.e. further south, where the Great Attractor will be more directly over his head. In practice travelling any extended distance, let alone thousands of kilometers, by rolling would likely result in unpleasant bruising and be generally a bad idea. [ citation needed ]\nA prior example of an xkcd character with alternate gravitational susceptibility is 417: The Man Who Fell Sideways , where a consistent off-vertical pull somehow applies (rather than one linked to a spot on the stellar sphere). In 1376: Jump Cueball floats sideways across the ground a bit above Earth, in a similar idea to being pulled sideways.\nSee also these other fictional examples of 'personalized' gravitational susceptibilities .\nBeret Guy has previously been interested in strange attracting forces in the universe, in 502: Dark Flow , where he hoped it was his mom and wished she would pull on him. It was though not about the Great Attractor, and the force did not clearly affect him, although his love for his mom did affect two space probes, as mentioned in the title text.\nThis comic came out just a bit more than a month before the next comic with one of Beret Guy's strange powers, 2325: Endorheic Basin . Which is interesting since the previous comic with such a power came back in November 2017, 1922: Interferometry , more than 2.5 years before this one. Also in the Endorheic Basin comic strange forces exerted a pull on Beret Guy, although in that it was he who attracted water, where here it was himself that was most affected.\nSome of the humor of the comic has to do with the immense differences in scale between Beret Guy and the Great Attractor.\nIn very round numbers our own Milky Way galaxy is 150,000 - 200,000 light years across.  It is just one of several galaxies in something called the Local Group , which is around 10,000,000 light years across.  And the Local Group is itself in something called the Local Supercluster (also called the Virgo Supercluster), around 110,000,000 light years across.  Each galaxy, each group, and each supercluster is not just a chance alignment, but is a gravitational coherent structure. And all this is just yet a part of the even larger Laniakea Supercluster in which also the Great Attractor is located, along with more than 100,000 other galaxies, in a region of space spanning more than 500 million light years.\nSomething unpredictable (hence \"anomalous\") is going on with the galaxies in the Local Supercluster (including our own).  These galaxies are indeed accelerating away from one another as seen by their red shift. Hubble's Law predicts the expansion should be uniformly proportional to their distance from Earth and from one another.  But for the Local Supercluster something is restricting the expansion.  That something is, as \"viewed\" from Earth, somewhere in the direction of the Southern Triangle constellation but 250,000,000 light years distant, and has (but only since 1988) been termed the Great Attractor.  The Great Attractor can't conveniently be seen at visible wavelengths, because that direction is the so-called Zone of Avoidance : the area of the night sky obscured by our own Milky Way.\nBoiling this all down: something a quarter of a billion light years away that makes an anomalous blip in the local rate of expansion of the universe, and whose existence astronomers deduce only by X-ray observations of stellar red-shift, has large-scale effects on everyday gravitational forces uniquely experienced by Beret Guy.  OK, now you can smile.\n[Cueball and Beret Guy stand next to each other, talking. Beret Guy leans towards Cueball by bending down one knee.] Cueball: I can't believe it's still light out. It's 8:00 PM! Beret Guy: Seriously! This morning I fell off the wall.\n[In a frame-less panel with the same setting Beret Guy is looking and pointing to the right.] Cueball: Wait, why were you sleeping on the wall? Beret Guy: The Great Attractor is near the horizon at night right now.\n[Zoom in on Beret Guy, who hold one hand palm up towards Cueball who is speaking to him off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): The Great Attractor? Beret Guy: Yeah! The space one. Beret Guy: It pulls on me extra hard. Doctors said it's something to do with galactic motion and how many dimensions my bones have.\n[Cueball is still standing as Beret Guy slides away to the right, while looking and leaning back towards Cueball. He holds his arms slightly out, to keep his balance. Lines behind him and at his feet indicates his motion, even if he is clearly not walking. In his last word the letters becomes italic after Good and the last three Ts becomes smaller and smaller than the previous letters.] Beret Guy: This time of year, it's below us all day, so I stand vertically. But day-sliding season is near! Beret Guy: Let me know if you have any errands to run to the south! Beret Guy: Good niiight t t\n"}
{"id":2311,"title":"Confidence Interval","image_title":"Confidence Interval","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2311","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/confidence_interval.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2311:_Confidence_Interval","transcript":"[A graph is shown in the middle of the panel. There is a square frame around it. The graph has two unlabeled axes with ticks along both axes.  The axes end in arrows. A solid line graph is shown. It begins around the middle of the Y axis, goes up and flattens twice before falling down towards the right. Far above and just below the frame around the graph are two gray dotted lines. They do not follow the same path as the solid line inside the frame, but do follow the same general trend. Below the graph, but inside the frame, is a caption:] Fig. 2: Predicted Curve\n[Caption below the panel:] Science tip: If your model is bad enough, the confidence intervals will fall outside the printable area.\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Science Tip .  This is the second time that a category of tips (with the first being \" Protip \") has been re-used.\nGraphs of continuous functions' predicted values often show confidence intervals , a region (either shaded or marked with dotted lines, the latter used here) that indicates the margin of error for the prediction at any point. The joke in this comic is that the estimate has so much uncertainty that the confidence interval extends off the top and bottom of the chart, which in a real report would usually prevent it from being printed and require a re-scaled chart to show it (if not declined altogether, as data with such wide variance might be deemed useless).  This may be a tip as if it's outside the printable area, it won't be seen by anyone who reads it, and thus they won't realize how bad your model is, though this is more of a tip in how to trick people into falsely thinking you've shown a good result with your work than it is a tip in presenting an actual legitimate useful scientific result.\nIn the title text, a millisigma would be an error of +\/- 1\/1000th of a standard deviation .  Statistical error and uncertainty is typically measured by standard deviation , which is written in formulas with the Greek letter sigma , and is also frequently referred to by the word \"sigma.\"  Measurements of sample means, one of the most common experimentally determined variables, will tend to follow a normal distribution , such that 68 percent of members of the population will fall within one sigma (plus or minus) of the mean value, 95 percent within two sigma, and 99.7 percent within three sigma.  Any of these intervals may be usefully reported as the confidence interval, so long as it's made clear to the reader, but two- or three-sigma are sufficient for most applications.  However, this graph shows data of such poor quality (or such poorly-chosen y -axis bounds) that even the millisigma confidence interval (0.08% of the population -- not often used in science, but occasionally found in e.g. molecular analysis tools ) does not fit on the graph.  Variations in the curve that are small compared to the error bar typically can't be distinguished from errors. Therefore, the shape of the curve - and the entire graph in this example - is meaningless.\n[A graph is shown in the middle of the panel. There is a square frame around it. The graph has two unlabeled axes with ticks along both axes.  The axes end in arrows. A solid line graph is shown. It begins around the middle of the Y axis, goes up and flattens twice before falling down towards the right. Far above and just below the frame around the graph are two gray dotted lines. They do not follow the same path as the solid line inside the frame, but do follow the same general trend. Below the graph, but inside the frame, is a caption:] Fig. 2: Predicted Curve\n[Caption below the panel:] Science tip: If your model is bad enough, the confidence intervals will fall outside the printable area.\n"}
{"id":2312,"title":"mbmbam","image_title":"MBMBaM","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2312","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mbmbam.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2312:_mbmbam","transcript":"[Cueball, Megan, and White Hat are standing next to each other, talking. Megan has her hands raised to the side, in a shrugging gesture.]\nMegan: Odd how in physics \" mb \" is both millibars (pressure) and millibar n s (area). Megan: mbmb could mean millibar-millibarn, which is a unit of force, strangely. White Hat: Units are weird.\n[Same scene - Megan is now checking her phone. White Hat is raising his right index finger.]\nCueball: So what's mbmbam , the My-Brother-My-Brother-And Me unit? Megan: Millibar-milliibarn-attometer, I guess? That'd be a unit of energy. 10 -47 Joules. White Hat: \"One podcast\"\n[Same scene in a frameless panel. Megan holds her phone to her side. White Hat has his arms raised to the side, excited.]\nCueball: 10 -47 sounds small. Megan: Yeah, it's roughly the energy you'd need to lift one yeast cell by one Planck length in Earth's gravity. White Hat: Planck yeast!\n[Same scene in a regular panel. Megan has put away her phone, and has her right index finger raised. White Hat has his hands balled into fists, frustrated.]\nCueball: Doesn't Planck yeast rise on its own? Megan: Yeah, that's what makes quantum foam. But data suggests our universe is flat. Megan: String theory says it's because spacetime has unleavened dimensions. White Hat: ...I hate you.\n","explanation":"In part, this comic is an homage to the referenced podcast, My Brother, My Brother, and Me , which often features rapid garden-path conversations and puns and double entendres that are at once groan-worthy and\u00a0delightfully witty. \"MBMBAM\" is an acryonym of \" M y B rother, M y B rother, A nd M e\".\nThe millibar is a metric unit of pressure (force per unit area), equal to a thousandth of a bar , or 100 Pa .  It is slightly less than one-thousandth of sea-level atmospheric pressure on Earth (a standard atmosphere is 1013.25 millibar).\nThe millibarn is a metric unit of area, equal to a thousandth of a barn (a humorously-named unit approximately equal to the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus), or 10^-31 m^2 or 10^-27 cm^2. Both units would theoretically have the symbol mb . Hence mbmb (the pressure unit multiplied by the area unit) would be a unit of force. This can be seen by applying dimensional analysis; pressure x area = (force\/area) x area = force.  Nobody in the comic strip discusses the magnitude of this force, but it would be 100 Pa x 10^-31 m^2 = 10^-29 newtons = 10^-24 dynes, or about the weight of an electron under Earth's gravity.\nam would be the symbol of an attometer , or 10^-18 meters. Multiply that to create the unit mbmbam , which would be a unit of energy. Specifically, it would be a unit of work: the energy expended to move an object. More dimensional analysis: force x distance = (work\/distance) x distance = work. The actual value of 1 mbmbam is correctly calculated in the comic: 100 Pa x 10^-31 m^2 x 10^-18 m = 10^-47 joules = 10^-40 erg. White Hat dubs this unit \"one podcast\".\nThe final panel is an extended series of puns: 'rise' referring to physically moving upward as well as biologically growing (expanding and becoming lighter and softer) as yeasts do; 'foam' referring to both quantum foam (the fluctuation of spacetime on very small scales due to quantum mechanics) as well as the foam generated by yeast fermenting; 'unleavened dimensions' punning on the eleven dimensions of spacetime in string theory (actually, ten\u2014 M theory says eleven), while continuing to play on the theme of yeast--in this case, the universe is presumably flat because some of its dimensions lack the Planck yeast that would make them rise.\nThe example used in the comic of lifting a yeast cell 1 Planck length is one of many possible examples of 1 mbmbam of work. (The Planck length , approximately 1.6\u00d710^\u221235 m or 1.6\u00d710^\u221233 cm, is how far light travels in one unit of Planck time .) Another interpretation of 1 mbmbam would be the work necessary to pull two socially distancing (6 ft) SARS-CoV-2 virions apart by the thickness of a single strand of hair against the gravity they exert on each other.\nThe Planck Era (or Planck Epoch ) referenced in the title text is the near infinitesimally short period covering the first 10^-43 s after the Big Bang, when energies were so high that the four fundamental forces were combined into one and ordinary subatomic particles didn't yet exist. It is unlikely there were advice shows during this era [ citation needed ] , so this would likely be a modern nostalgia show for physicists. The title text is also a play on My Brother, My Brother and Me's tagline: An advice show for the modren [sic] era.\n[Cueball, Megan, and White Hat are standing next to each other, talking. Megan has her hands raised to the side, in a shrugging gesture.]\nMegan: Odd how in physics \" mb \" is both millibars (pressure) and millibar n s (area). Megan: mbmb could mean millibar-millibarn, which is a unit of force, strangely. White Hat: Units are weird.\n[Same scene - Megan is now checking her phone. White Hat is raising his right index finger.]\nCueball: So what's mbmbam , the My-Brother-My-Brother-And Me unit? Megan: Millibar-milliibarn-attometer, I guess? That'd be a unit of energy. 10 -47 Joules. White Hat: \"One podcast\"\n[Same scene in a frameless panel. Megan holds her phone to her side. White Hat has his arms raised to the side, excited.]\nCueball: 10 -47 sounds small. Megan: Yeah, it's roughly the energy you'd need to lift one yeast cell by one Planck length in Earth's gravity. White Hat: Planck yeast!\n[Same scene in a regular panel. Megan has put away her phone, and has her right index finger raised. White Hat has his hands balled into fists, frustrated.]\nCueball: Doesn't Planck yeast rise on its own? Megan: Yeah, that's what makes quantum foam. But data suggests our universe is flat. Megan: String theory says it's because spacetime has unleavened dimensions. White Hat: ...I hate you.\n"}
{"id":2313,"title":"Wrong Times Table","image_title":"Wrong Times Table","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2313","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wrong_times_table.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2313:_Wrong_Times_Table","transcript":"[Caption above table:] Wrong Times Table The incorrect answers that feel most right to me\n\n","explanation":"A \"times table\" (or multiplication table ) is a table used to show the products of numbers. Typically, elementary school children are taught to memorize the table of whole numbers up to 10 as part of learning arithmetic.\nIn this comic Randall supplies his own alternative version of the multiplication table, with entirely incorrect values that nonetheless \"feel\" reasonably correct to him. It is unclear how his values are derived, as they don't follow a consistent pattern, but it could be that when calculating products, he sometimes has to correct his mental arithmetic, perhaps thinking along such lines as \"8*4 is 36... Or, wait, is it 32?\". Most of the values are transposed from their correct position (e.g., adding or subtracting one -- or two, or three -- from one or both multiplicands), some are \"off by one\" (or two, or by a factor of two), and some (mostly in the 1 row and column) could be created by adding, subtracting, or dividing the two factors instead of multiplying them. It is notable that some properties of mathematics are not followed, as sometimes smaller multiplicands multiply to a larger product than larger multiplicands, and sometimes two even multiplicands produce an odd product.\nThe table is symmetric, indicating that Randall's form of multiplication is commutative .\nThe title text (referencing Randall's suspicion that 6x7=42 may be wrong) is an allusion to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , in which the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is said to be forty-two . However, in the book this answer is meaningless without knowing the ultimate question , and so to calculate the ultimate question, a planet-sized computer is constructed. This later becomes Earth, but Earth is destroyed shortly before its calculation is complete. Arthur Dent, one of the last surviving humans, has some white mice (pan-dimensional beings looking like white mice to us) try to get him to give them his brain, so they could attempt to recreate the ultimate question, hoping it may be stored within his brain since he was part of the computer matrix up to just before Earth was destroyed a few days before completing a 10 million year calculation. Arthur refuses, and the mice try to think of some question that makes the answer 42 make sense, like \" how many roads must a man walk down \". They also suggest 6x7. Arthur later tries to recreate the question himself by picking letter tiles from a bag, and produces the sentence \"What do you get if you multiply six by nine\".  This leads him to remark \"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe.\" Note, however, that operation of said planet-sized computer was disrupted, both by its near-total destruction and by the much earlier crash-landing onto it of the 'B' Ark and its somewhat useless passengers, so it's also possible the universe is okay and only the question was computed incorrectly.  As it happens, 6x9 = 42 in base 13, but Douglas Adams has disclaimed this as being a mere coincidence.  In Randall's table, neither 6x7 nor 6x9 are said to result in 42, but 7x7 is.\nIf we consider the smaller multiplicand to be a and the larger to be b , then (one of infinitely many possibilities of) the formulas used by Randall are as follows:\nThe correct multiplication table for the numbers 1-10 is below:\n[Caption above table:] Wrong Times Table The incorrect answers that feel most right to me\n\n"}
{"id":2314,"title":"Carcinization","image_title":"Carcinization","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2314","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/carcinization.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2314:_Carcinization","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are walking next to each other towards the left with Megan looking back at Cueball.] Megan: Have you heard of \"carcinization\"? Megan: The tendency of nature to evolve things into crabs. Cueball: Oh?\n[They continue to walk, both of them looking forward.] Megan: Yeah, the basic \"crab\" design has evolved separately a number of times. Cueball: Evolution just loves making crabs, I guess!\n[Narrower panel with only Megan seen walking on while lifting both her arms slightly to each side.] Megan: Apparently!\n[Two smaller beat panels are drawn between the previous and next normal sized panels. The first is a bit lower than the top of the normal panels, and is partly lying in over the other small panel, which is below and to the right of the first. The top panel shows Megan continuing to walk along.  The second shows Megan stopping and turning to look back.]\n[Megan has turned completely and is looking down at a small crab scuttling along on the ground where Cueball was before.] Megan: Oh no\nIn January 2020, less than half a year before this comic was released, the Dinosaur Comic also released a comic about Carcinization . This web comic is on Randall's list of Comics I enjoy and was also used in 145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics . Another popular webcomic, Questionable Content, had a crab-themed comic the day before this comic was released.\nJust a month after the release of this comic, \"carcinization\" was the Word of the Day in Wiktionary.\nThis comic was also the inspiration for SCP-6010 , a story about all animal life turning into crabs, set in the SCP Foundation setting. SCP 6010 mentions life turning into crabs o June 1st 2019, the release date for this comic.\n","explanation":"As Megan is telling Cueball , separate species of animals have evolved into \"crab-like\" forms at different times. Naturalists who noticed the tendency gave it the name carcinization .\nIt is a specific form of convergent evolution , where differing families of animals (in this case, nominally across the crustacea ) develop a tendency towards developing a 'crab' bodyplan to a greater degree than their origins would suggest. A similar process has created several varieties of river dolphin with similar adaptations to their environments, despite being 'stranded' offshoots of different forerunner pelagic species.\n\"True crabs\" ( Brachyura ) form just a small subset of the Crustacea subphylum, and the Cancer genus is a subset of that, yet there appears to be something about the bodyplan and even resulting behaviour that has meant a number of species have arisen from alternate areas of the family tree that are now trivially indistinguishable without extensive study.\nCarl Linnaeus even initially included all Crustacea under the 'Cancer' genus (using the Latin name for crabs), and his taxonomic classification has been heavily refined as further knowledge has come to light, in order to reveal this phenomenon.\nApparently this principle is much stronger in the webcomic than in real life, as shortly after being told this, Megan notices that Cueball (not a crustacean!) has himself turned into a crab. This isn't really evolution as we know it (outside Pok\u00e9mon evolution at least), which refers to changes (usually gradual changes, but not always) in a species across generations caused by random mutations. The organisms individually never change [ citation needed ] , they are merely different from their ancestors, and the organisms with changes that make them more fit for their environment are the ones who are more likely to survive long enough to pass down those changes. What happens to Cueball is more like a transformation, but it could still be called 'carcinization', since he becomes crab-like.  The comic strip might be an allusion to Franz Kafka's short story The Metamorphosis (another word used to describe life-forms that dramatically transform themselves, like caterpillars turning into butterflies), which starts with the main character suddenly waking up and finding that he has transformed into a giant bug.\nCueball's sudden transformation is perhaps explained by the title text, that \"Nature abhors a vacuum and anything that's not a crab\". The text is a reference to Aristotle's Horror vacui , a statement about how empty space tends to be immediately refilled by surrounding things, so vacuums seem to be impossible to maintain. As does \"not being a crab\", it seems.\nStrictly speaking, we don't know for certain that Cueball actually transformed; it could be that he has ducked out of sight and left a crab in his place (or noticed a crab conveniently nearby) to play a prank on Megan.\n[Cueball and Megan are walking next to each other towards the left with Megan looking back at Cueball.] Megan: Have you heard of \"carcinization\"? Megan: The tendency of nature to evolve things into crabs. Cueball: Oh?\n[They continue to walk, both of them looking forward.] Megan: Yeah, the basic \"crab\" design has evolved separately a number of times. Cueball: Evolution just loves making crabs, I guess!\n[Narrower panel with only Megan seen walking on while lifting both her arms slightly to each side.] Megan: Apparently!\n[Two smaller beat panels are drawn between the previous and next normal sized panels. The first is a bit lower than the top of the normal panels, and is partly lying in over the other small panel, which is below and to the right of the first. The top panel shows Megan continuing to walk along.  The second shows Megan stopping and turning to look back.]\n[Megan has turned completely and is looking down at a small crab scuttling along on the ground where Cueball was before.] Megan: Oh no\nIn January 2020, less than half a year before this comic was released, the Dinosaur Comic also released a comic about Carcinization . This web comic is on Randall's list of Comics I enjoy and was also used in 145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics . Another popular webcomic, Questionable Content, had a crab-themed comic the day before this comic was released.\nJust a month after the release of this comic, \"carcinization\" was the Word of the Day in Wiktionary.\nThis comic was also the inspiration for SCP-6010 , a story about all animal life turning into crabs, set in the SCP Foundation setting. SCP 6010 mentions life turning into crabs o June 1st 2019, the release date for this comic.\n"}
{"id":2315,"title":"Eventual Consistency","image_title":"Eventual Consistency","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2315","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eventual_consistency.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2315:_Eventual_Consistency","transcript":"[Cueball sits at a home desk.] Laptop: I know it's hard to focus right now, but we should try to finish testing the DB. Cueball: Ughhhh. Cueball: Okay.\n[A frameless panel. Cueball still sitting at his desk. He has his hand on his chin.] Laptop: The system needs to guarantee eventual consistency. Cueball: I mean, it does.\n[Closeup of Cueball.] Cueball: Eventual consistency is guaranteed by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Cueball: Sooner or later this will all be a uniform heat bath. Cueball: Maximum entropy.\n[Back to Cueball and desk.  Cueball is leaning back in his chair.] Laptop: Maximum entropy means no useful work can be done! Cueball: I'm getting a head start by doing no useful work now .\n","explanation":"Cueball 's employer wants him to continue his work, possibly as a home-based remote worker as encouraged by the common current advice during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic .\nThe stated task is to \"test the database\" and \"guarantee eventual consistency\". Trying to avoid work, Cueball points out that the second law of thermodynamics itself \"guarantees eventual consistency\", as the universe is guaranteed to eventually die a heat death , at maximum entropy and perfect consistency . His boss responds that in a system that has reached maximum entropy, no work can be performed (as this requires a difference in energy states between two sources).  Cueball claims that he's simply getting a head start on this.\nEventual consistency has a double meaning here.  In computing, many systems are distributed (spread out) across multiple servers, sometimes in very different parts of the world.  When data changes -- like the number of views on a video or the likes on a social media post -- updating it across every server can be a challenge, and it's often not necessary to keep the data perfectly in sync everywhere.  So the system will use eventual consistency instead.  Each individual server will record changes, and after a certain amount of time or a certain amount of change, the results will be synced across the whole network.  At any given moment, an individual server's data will be a little off -- but eventually everything will get recorded correctly.\nThe title text constitutes another play on the words \"heat bath\", which can refer to the thermally uniform state of the universe at heat death . However, in this context, we can assume Cueball instead plans to prepare a literal warm bath for his own relaxation and enjoyment after or during (or instead of) his work.\n[Cueball sits at a home desk.] Laptop: I know it's hard to focus right now, but we should try to finish testing the DB. Cueball: Ughhhh. Cueball: Okay.\n[A frameless panel. Cueball still sitting at his desk. He has his hand on his chin.] Laptop: The system needs to guarantee eventual consistency. Cueball: I mean, it does.\n[Closeup of Cueball.] Cueball: Eventual consistency is guaranteed by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Cueball: Sooner or later this will all be a uniform heat bath. Cueball: Maximum entropy.\n[Back to Cueball and desk.  Cueball is leaning back in his chair.] Laptop: Maximum entropy means no useful work can be done! Cueball: I'm getting a head start by doing no useful work now .\n"}
{"id":2316,"title":"Hair Growth Rate","image_title":"Hair Growth Rate","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2316","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hair_growth_rate.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2316:_Hair_Growth_Rate","transcript":"[White Hat and Ponytail are walking to the right.] White Hat: The average head has about 100,000 hairs. White Hat: And hair grows at about \u00bd\" per month. White Hat: Plus or minus. Ponytail: Okay...\n[They continue to walk while White Hat lift a hand up palm up.] White Hat: So our heads are producing an inch of hair every minute. Ponytail: I see.\n[They continue to walk.] Ponytail: I'm just glad it's evenly distributed. It would suck if we grew a single new five-foot-long hair every hour.\n[White Hat and Ponytail are seen in silhouette from a distance. White Hat has lifted a finger up and while Ponytail has thrown both her arms out to the sides.] White Hat: Hmm, would the hair grow steadily, or would it suddenly shoot out 5 feet on the hour? Ponytail: If the latter, what noise would it make? Ponytail: Ziiip? Pwiff? White Hat: Fwip? Ponytail: Blip. White Hat: Zhooop. Ponytail: Pew!\n","explanation":"This strip is one of the simpler jokes that xkcd has done, being an observation on mathematics, biology, and human expectation. White Hat starts by sharing various facts about hair with Ponytail; hair count, individual hair growth rate, and finally total hair growth rate. Ponytail proceeds to snark about how unpleasant it would be if, rather than 100,000 hairs growing at a gross total of five feet (1.524m) per hour, humans grew a single hair at five feet per hour. The comic then delves into the absurdity of gradual versus spontaneous growth, and then the sound effects involved therein.\nThe comic touches on what information can be obscured by just looking at aggregate values.  A person whose 100,000 hairs grow a half-inch (1.27cm) per month experiences the same total new hair growth as a person with one hair growing five feet in an hour, but their grooming experiences would be very different.  Likewise, a person with one hair growing steadily for an hour has the same average rate of hair growth as a person experiencing sudden hair growth on the hour, but the profile of instantaneous energy conversion and protein production would be very different.  One of Ponytail's suggestions for what five feet of instantaneous hair growth might sound like is a sound effect generally used for directed-energy weapons ( Pew! ).\nWe never see what sort of hairstyle White Hat has under his hat, but Ponytail's hair is fairly long.  If she had to grow it out by one hair per hour, as in the title text, then it would take over eleven years before all 100,000 hairs had grown out.\n[White Hat and Ponytail are walking to the right.] White Hat: The average head has about 100,000 hairs. White Hat: And hair grows at about \u00bd\" per month. White Hat: Plus or minus. Ponytail: Okay...\n[They continue to walk while White Hat lift a hand up palm up.] White Hat: So our heads are producing an inch of hair every minute. Ponytail: I see.\n[They continue to walk.] Ponytail: I'm just glad it's evenly distributed. It would suck if we grew a single new five-foot-long hair every hour.\n[White Hat and Ponytail are seen in silhouette from a distance. White Hat has lifted a finger up and while Ponytail has thrown both her arms out to the sides.] White Hat: Hmm, would the hair grow steadily, or would it suddenly shoot out 5 feet on the hour? Ponytail: If the latter, what noise would it make? Ponytail: Ziiip? Pwiff? White Hat: Fwip? Ponytail: Blip. White Hat: Zhooop. Ponytail: Pew!\n"}
{"id":2317,"title":"Pinouts","image_title":"Pinouts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2317","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pinouts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2317:_Pinouts","transcript":"[Caption at top] Pinouts Quick Reference Guide\n[Four common connectors are depicted - vertically, rather than the usual horizontal orientation.]\n[The first connector is a 19-pin HDMI connector.] [The nine pins on the left are labeled:] Data +5V +6VI +7VII Antidata Water Vacuum Amazon Copyright Pin Decorative [The ten pins on the right are labeled:] +3.3V DC -3.3V DC Tx Wx Rx Only Unknown +240V DC 5V AC GND Ground\n[The second connector is a 5-pin Micro USB connector.] [The five pins are labeled:] GND GND GND USB GND\n[The third connector is a 24-pin USB-C connector, with only the right side labeled.] [The twelve pins on the right are labeled:] +5V DC +3.3V DC +120V AC Boobytrap Pin (Pure Solder) Mechanical +3.3eV\/C Candlepin Facebook Use +5V (Positrons) Pin Roulette GND SKY\n[The fourth and final connector is a 1-pin COAX connector.] [The one pin in the center is labeled:] Pin\n","explanation":"Electronics connectors are designed to transport both information and power. A pinout diagram describes the function of each pin such as to communicate data, transport power, physical function (keying), etc. In this comic there is an absurd alternative to the actual pins used in connectors. The pin labels are references to many tech issues and attributes, and not all may be documented correctly here.\nHardware hobbyists might feel excitement at seeing a unified specification for these common connectors, but the comic is of course humorous. The real life diagrams are as follows: HDMI , Micro USB , USB-C .\nThe HDMI interface uses four pairs of shielded twisted-pair connectors, along with seven other connectors. ( Twisted pair means a wire is wrapped with the other wire that returns the current to the original device, thus minimizing electromagnetic noise. Shielding refers to wrapping a cable with a conductor to absorb the energy of noise.) Three of these pairs are for data (TMDS Data0, Data1, and Data2) and the other is a clock. These pairs take up three pins as one of them is a ground pin for the shielding wrapped around each pair. TMDS stands for \" Transition-minimized differential signaling \" and is also used in the DVI standard.\nDDC stands for \"Display Data Channel\" and is based on the I\u00b2C serial standard. It is used to allow the transmitting device to learn what formats of data the receiving device can accept.\nCEC stands for \"Consumer Electronics Control\" and is supposed to allow a single remote control to control multiple devices.\n\"Hot Plug Detect\" refers to hot-plugging, where a cable is connected to a device already turned on. The device should then ideally detect that the cable has been plugged in and respond appropriately.\nA ground pin is commonly found on USB and other pin connectors. At least one ground is necessary to complete the circuit, and some cables use multiple ground lines to distribute current or to support twisted pairs . However, there is no purpose served by having many more ground pins than data pins. Therefore, it seems rather silly for the micro USB to have 4 ground pins and only 1 functional \"USB\" pin. It also does not give much information about what the \"USB\" pin would do, as opposed to a standard pinout diagram. This diagram also leaves out the +5V power pin that is present in the real micro USB connector, which would render most USB peripherals unable to function.\nThe ordering and count of the pins may be an allusion to Monty Python 's \"Spam\" sketch, in which one of the many Spam-related menu items is \"Spam, Spam, Spam, egg, and Spam\".\n\nThe two sides of a USB C connector are labeled \"A\" and \"B\". These are rotationally symmetric, mostly. For example, B10 and B11 are Rx1, a separate twisted-pair for receiving information in Superspeed mode compared to A10 and A11's Rx2. This gives two Rx\/Tx pairs for Superspeed use. CC1 and SBU1 are mirrored to CC2 and SBU2. However, the D, VBUS, and GND pins are perfectly mirrored.\nThe fact that only half of the USB-C pins are documented might hint to an alternative way to manufacture connectors that can be inserted rotated by 180\u00b0: Make the receiver use only the right side of the pins and make the sender connect both the left and the right side so all Pins that might match a function are connected correctly no matter if the cable is rotated by 180\u00b0. However, doing this would result in only having one Rx\/Tx pair for Superspeed use.\nA coaxial RF connector has two contacts - one pin, and the shield; typically the whole connector is labeled with whatever function\/signal is carried by the pair.  The joke here is that the label is technically correct (the best kind of correct), but not very useful to the end user, as it does not specify the voltage rating, impedance, connector size, or other useful information about the cable.  Some serial data transmission systems, such as Ethernet , used coaxial cable early on as a low cost, widely available solution, however most of these have largely become obsolete.  A common coaxial cable still widely in use is RG-6 , which is typically used to deliver satellite television, cable television, and cable Internet services in the United States and Canada.\n[Caption at top] Pinouts Quick Reference Guide\n[Four common connectors are depicted - vertically, rather than the usual horizontal orientation.]\n[The first connector is a 19-pin HDMI connector.] [The nine pins on the left are labeled:] Data +5V +6VI +7VII Antidata Water Vacuum Amazon Copyright Pin Decorative [The ten pins on the right are labeled:] +3.3V DC -3.3V DC Tx Wx Rx Only Unknown +240V DC 5V AC GND Ground\n[The second connector is a 5-pin Micro USB connector.] [The five pins are labeled:] GND GND GND USB GND\n[The third connector is a 24-pin USB-C connector, with only the right side labeled.] [The twelve pins on the right are labeled:] +5V DC +3.3V DC +120V AC Boobytrap Pin (Pure Solder) Mechanical +3.3eV\/C Candlepin Facebook Use +5V (Positrons) Pin Roulette GND SKY\n[The fourth and final connector is a 1-pin COAX connector.] [The one pin in the center is labeled:] Pin\n"}
{"id":2318,"title":"Dynamic Entropy","image_title":"Dynamic Entropy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2318","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dynamic_entropy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2318:_Dynamic_Entropy","transcript":"[One panel only with text and a few lines and arrows. There are two columns each with a heading. Beneath each heading is a quote written on four lines. Below the quote, in grey font, and indented, starting with a hyphen, with the text aligned to the right of this are five lines of text. This explains who the quote belongs too and where it was stated (in brackets at the end). From the bottom of each of these two gray text paragraphs gray curved arrows goes down to two gray lines. Below each of these two lines are one large word per line. They are again in black text.] Dynamic \"It's impossible to use the word 'dynamic' in the pejorative sense... Thus, I thought 'Dynamic Programming' was a good name.\" - Richard Bellman, explaining how he picked a name for his math research to try to protect it from criticism ( Eye of the Hurricane , 1984)\nEntropy \"You should call it 'Entropy'... No one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.\" - John von Neumann, to Claude Shannon, on why he should borrow the physics term in information theory (as told to Myron Tribus)\nDynamic Entropy\n[Caption below the panel:] Science Tip: If you have a cool concept you need a name for, try \"Dynamic Entropy.\"\nMany of Buckminster Fuller 's designs and works were associated with the word \" dymaxion \", a combination of the words \"dynamic\", \"maximum\", and \"tension\", all words that Fuller himself used a lot in talking about his work, and which are words that simultaneously have use in science and positive connotations in lay English.\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Science Tip . This time it is a bit special since it came less than three weeks after another Science Tip: 2311: Confidence Interval (which was itself the first time that a non-Protip Tip type has been re-used). This is the first time a type of tip (that was not a Protip ) has been used for two \"tips comics\" in a row.\nThis Science Tip suggests that if you have a cool new concept, you should call it dynamic entropy , hence the title.\nDynamic programming is a mathematical optimization method and computer programming method developed by Richard Bellman in the 1950s. The History section of the Wikipedia article contains the full paragraph from Bellman's autobiography that contains the quote that is in the comic strip. Bellman describes how he was doing mathematical research funded by the military at a time when the Secretary of Defense had a literal pathological fear of the word \"research\", and by extension, \"mathematical\". Bellman borrowed the word \"dynamic\" from physics as being both accurate for his work and as a word that in plain English has positive connotations and is never used in a pejorative sense (expressing contempt or disapproval).  The word \"dynamic\" itself comes from the Greek dynamikos , \"powerful\", which is a positive meaning in itself, and has been applied to topics in physics that are related to motion and forces and used in ordinary English to refer to things that exert power, force, growth, and change (dynamo, dynamite, and as an adjective).  Even though those things aren't always good, when they're bad, we use other words instead (e.g. cancer undergoes metastasis , not \"dynamism\").\nEntropy is a term from physics, specifically statistical mechanics, describing a property of a thermodynamic system. When Claude Shannon developed a mathematical framework for studying signal processing and communications systems, which became known as Information theory , he struggled to come up with a proper name for one mathematical concept in his theory that quantified amount of noise or uncertainty in a signal. Computer scientist John von Neumann noticed the similarity of the equations with some in thermodynamics and suggested, \"You should call it entropy , for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.\" (see History of information theory ).\nThe naming of dynamic programming and of entropy in information theory are both examples of scientists choosing a name for what were at least partially very non-scientific seeming reasons. In one case because it has only positive and no negative connotations in plain English. In the other case because there is much confusion over the meaning of the word so Shannon would be free to adopt it in a new context. Randall is claiming that would make them great to put together to name some new concept; the combination will mean whatever the creator wants it to mean (even able to change mid-debate), and never sound bad the way that e.g. cold fusion has come to be.\nEven though the caption implies that \"dynamic entropy\" would be available as a new name, it has actually been used in physics [1] , probability [2] , computer science [3] , and even the term \"dynamical entropy\" in physics [4] [5] and bioscience [6] .\nIn the title text Randall mentions that, even though his physics professors have continued to use the word \"dynamical\", \"trying to normalize it\" by repetitive usage, he remains convinced that it is not really a word.  Presumably he doesn't like that it has two suffixes used to make words into adjectives, -ic and -al, as if \"dynamic\" wasn't already positive enough. The Free Dictionary discusses how -ic and -ical suffixes are confused in many common words and explains their different uses.\nThe term \"dynamical\" in physics generally is used in \" Dynamical system \" or as an adjective to name a concept as applied to dynamical systems such as \"dynamical entropy\" [7] .\n\n[One panel only with text and a few lines and arrows. There are two columns each with a heading. Beneath each heading is a quote written on four lines. Below the quote, in grey font, and indented, starting with a hyphen, with the text aligned to the right of this are five lines of text. This explains who the quote belongs too and where it was stated (in brackets at the end). From the bottom of each of these two gray text paragraphs gray curved arrows goes down to two gray lines. Below each of these two lines are one large word per line. They are again in black text.] Dynamic \"It's impossible to use the word 'dynamic' in the pejorative sense... Thus, I thought 'Dynamic Programming' was a good name.\" - Richard Bellman, explaining how he picked a name for his math research to try to protect it from criticism ( Eye of the Hurricane , 1984)\nEntropy \"You should call it 'Entropy'... No one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.\" - John von Neumann, to Claude Shannon, on why he should borrow the physics term in information theory (as told to Myron Tribus)\nDynamic Entropy\n[Caption below the panel:] Science Tip: If you have a cool concept you need a name for, try \"Dynamic Entropy.\"\nMany of Buckminster Fuller 's designs and works were associated with the word \" dymaxion \", a combination of the words \"dynamic\", \"maximum\", and \"tension\", all words that Fuller himself used a lot in talking about his work, and which are words that simultaneously have use in science and positive connotations in lay English.\n"}
{"id":2319,"title":"Large Number Formats","image_title":"Large Number Formats","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2319","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/large_number_formats.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2319:_Large_Number_Formats","transcript":"[A panel only with text. At the top there is four lines of explanatory text. Below that are 2 columns with 5 rows of number formats. Each numerical format is in red, with black text explaining the format below it.]\nWhat the way you write large numbers says about you (Using the approximate current distance to Jupiter in inches as an example)\n25,259,974,097,204 Normal person\n25 trillion Normal person\n25 billion Old British person\n2.526x10 13 Scientist\n2.525997x10 13 Scientist trying to avoid rounding up\n2.526e13 or 2.526*10^13 Software developer\n25,259,973,541,888 Software developer who forgot about floats\n10 13 Astronomer\n{\u2205,{\u2205},{\u2205,{\u2205}},{\u2205,{\u2205},{... Set theorist\n1,262,998,704,860 score and four Abraham Lincoln\n","explanation":"This comic shows what the way you write large numbers says about you. Different people use different methods to express large numbers. And this comic claims it can tell something about you based on the way you format large numbers. In this way, the comic is similar in idea to 977: Map Projections , where it was your choice of map projections that could tell something about you.\nSee the table below for each of the 10 different ways to express large numbers, plus the 11th mentioned in the title text.\nThe number used as an example is the approximate distance from the planet Earth to the planet Jupiter as of the release day of the comic on June 12th 2020, in inches (1 inch = 2.54 cm).\nTwo days after the release of the comic the following text could be found on Jupiter info on The Sky Live .\nThe distance of Jupiter from Earth is currently 640,084,108 kilometers, equivalent to 4.278698 Astronomical Units. Light takes 35 minutes and 35.0908 seconds to travel from Jupiter and arrive on Earth.\n64,008,410,800,000 cm \/ 2.54 cm\/inches = 25,200,161,732,283 inches - much less than the number used in the comic. But Jupiter's distance to Earth changes quite quickly, and was decreasing at the time of the release of the comic.\nAccording to a graph of the distance as a function of time on The Sky Live, the distance on the release day was 643.1 million km. This will give 25.3*10 13 which the used number will round to.\nThe used number 25,259,974,097,204 is equivalent to 641.6 million km. On June 13th the distance is given as 641.7 million km in the graph on The Sky Live, very close to the number used. As this was the day after the release of this comic, it seems like Randall used a different distance than the exact one for the release day. He may have also used an average for June which would be 642 million km based on the average of the distance on June and July 1st.\n[A panel only with text. At the top there is four lines of explanatory text. Below that are 2 columns with 5 rows of number formats. Each numerical format is in red, with black text explaining the format below it.]\nWhat the way you write large numbers says about you (Using the approximate current distance to Jupiter in inches as an example)\n25,259,974,097,204 Normal person\n25 trillion Normal person\n25 billion Old British person\n2.526x10 13 Scientist\n2.525997x10 13 Scientist trying to avoid rounding up\n2.526e13 or 2.526*10^13 Software developer\n25,259,973,541,888 Software developer who forgot about floats\n10 13 Astronomer\n{\u2205,{\u2205},{\u2205,{\u2205}},{\u2205,{\u2205},{... Set theorist\n1,262,998,704,860 score and four Abraham Lincoln\n"}
{"id":2320,"title":"Millennium Problems","image_title":"Millennium Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2320","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/millennium_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2320:_Millennium_Problems","transcript":"[Randall, drawn as Cueball, is holding a hand palm up towards a screen where a projector on the floor in front of him is projecting a diagram. The projector is propped up on some kind of legs to project up on to the screen. Behind the projector Ponytail is watching him, while Cueball is looking away from Randall, while yelling after someone off-panel.] Randall: ...Proving that one of these four is unsolvable, but not which.  If it's one of these , it would open a hole in Perlman's Poincar\u00e9 conjecture proof. Randall: But it would also mean that solving either of the other two would re -prove Poincar\u00e9, and imply Hodge is isomorphic to... Cueball: Security?!\n[The slide on the projector screen shows a four-by-four matrix with 16 illegible entries, and also illegible text left and right of the matrix. The matrix is connected by four lines to four text segments written around the matrix. Two above (left and right), one to the right (at the bottom) and one below to the left. Arrows go between the right and left text at the top and both from the top left and the right text to the text at the bottom. The two to the right are connected by a line with an illegible equation written over this line, intersecting it. From the bottom text below the matrix an arrow goes down to another text beneath it. And from there an arrow goes up to the right text.] Hodge Riemann Navier-Stokes Birch\/SD Poincar\u00e9 wrong??\n[Caption below panel:] I'm trying to make it so the Clay Mathematics Institute has to offer an eighth prize to whoever figures out who their other prizes should go to.\n","explanation":"Randall , drawn as Cueball , is presenting a slide on the Millennium Prize Problems , seven problems designated by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the year 2000 as some of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics, a sort of successor to David Hilbert's list of 23 problems announced in 1900.  The seven problems are:\nThere are $1,000,000 prizes attached to each problem, although Grigori Perelman , the mathematician who proved the Poincar\u00e9 conjecture , turned down his prize.\nRandall is attempting to demonstrate relationships between the various problems. According to the presentation, proving one might either disprove or prove others, and the proposed interactions between problems are so complex that the Institute might decide to award an additional prize to whoever can figure out which problem or problems have actually been solved by any given proof.  This eighth prize could perhaps be funded by the award Perelman rejected.\nRandall has previously been banned from conferences for various provocative acts; presumably he's on his way to getting thrown out of the Clay Mathematics Institute as well, as the \"other\" Cueball is already calling security. However, this seems to be only these three people, thus not a conference to be banned from this time.\nThe title text mentions that, if someone were to find a hole (a common expression for a deficiency or error) in Perelman's proof of the Poincar\u00e9 conjecture, the famously reclusive author might show up again and fix the problem by applying the theoretical mathematics of differential geometry, where \"hole\" has a different meaning, to the figurative \"hole\" in the sequence of logical conclusions. The suggested method of enclosing the hole in a loop and then shrinking it away is reminiscent of the specific technique (Ricci flow with surgery) by which Perelman solved the Poincar\u00e9 conjecture.\n[Randall, drawn as Cueball, is holding a hand palm up towards a screen where a projector on the floor in front of him is projecting a diagram. The projector is propped up on some kind of legs to project up on to the screen. Behind the projector Ponytail is watching him, while Cueball is looking away from Randall, while yelling after someone off-panel.] Randall: ...Proving that one of these four is unsolvable, but not which.  If it's one of these , it would open a hole in Perlman's Poincar\u00e9 conjecture proof. Randall: But it would also mean that solving either of the other two would re -prove Poincar\u00e9, and imply Hodge is isomorphic to... Cueball: Security?!\n[The slide on the projector screen shows a four-by-four matrix with 16 illegible entries, and also illegible text left and right of the matrix. The matrix is connected by four lines to four text segments written around the matrix. Two above (left and right), one to the right (at the bottom) and one below to the left. Arrows go between the right and left text at the top and both from the top left and the right text to the text at the bottom. The two to the right are connected by a line with an illegible equation written over this line, intersecting it. From the bottom text below the matrix an arrow goes down to another text beneath it. And from there an arrow goes up to the right text.] Hodge Riemann Navier-Stokes Birch\/SD Poincar\u00e9 wrong??\n[Caption below panel:] I'm trying to make it so the Clay Mathematics Institute has to offer an eighth prize to whoever figures out who their other prizes should go to.\n"}
{"id":2321,"title":"Low-Background Metal","image_title":"Low-Background Metal","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2321","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/low_background_metal.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2321:_Low-Background_Metal","transcript":"[Black Hat stands behind Megan who addresses Cueball who stands on the other side of a table with a machine. The machine is a rectangular box with a small dome with one large and two small antennas on top. It seems to point in Cueball's direction as it has a broad protrusion at the back and protrusion at the front that gets smaller towards the tip.  The word \"Time\" is written on the side, and below that is possibly more illegible text.] Megan: Our time machine works. Megan: But we're almost out of low-background metal. Cueball: What's that?\n[Close-up on Megan who lifts her hand palm up.] Megan: Modern metal is contaminated by fallout from nuclear testing, and lead also has natural radioactivity that fades over time. Megan: To shield sensitive equipment, physicists use lead from sunken Roman ships. Megan: But shipwreck lead is hard to find.\n[Back to the original setting, Megan has turned to Black Hat, who has his hand on his chin.] Black Hat: How much do we have? Megan: Enough for one trip through time. Black Hat: Hmmm...\n[The three are now in a helicopter, with Megan piloting, Cueball as a passenger in the back, and Black Hat firing a flamethrower at a Roman ship beneath them through the window behind the cockpit. Two sailors with Roman type helmets are looking on as the stern of their ship catches fire. One of them throwing his arms out to the side. The intact sail is still up behind them and behind that another sailor jumps into the water, down to a fourth sailor already in the water. Two already-burning ships can also be seen to the left of the ship under attack. One is burning all over, with the mast still up but the sail long gone, and the third ship is almost completely sunk, but the part above the water is aflame. Seven small clouds are around the helicopter in the sky.] Flamethrower: Fwooosh\n","explanation":"In this comic, a team including Megan and Black Hat who have invented a time travel machine presents it and their problems to Cueball . Time travel is a common trope in science fiction, and specifically here on xkcd , and such a discovery would be likely to change the world as we know it. However, Megan and Black Hat's machine requires the use of \"low-background\" metal, which is in short supply.\nMegan explains that, while delicate equipment is often shielded from radiation by lead, metal produced in modern times is contaminated by nuclear fallout in the atmosphere, which means that the shielding itself has enough radioactivity to interfere with highly delicate equipment.  In order to shield this equipment, \"low-background metal\" is salvaged from sunken ships.  Lead ingots from Roman cargo have been used in experiments.  The Roman lead was produced before atmospheric nuclear tests occurred [ citation needed ] and therefore did not have resulting radionuclides in the air used in its manufacture. When it is extracted, lead is naturally contaminated with the radioactive isotope Pb-210, with a 22 year half-life. Because it has spent many centuries continually underwater, it is both shielded from radioactive particles, and has had time for natural radioactivity to fade.\nThe number of shipwrecks of that age that can be found and successfully salvaged for metal is quite small, which puts this material in short supply. Megan mentions that they have only enough for a single trip.  The team realizes (apparently at Black Hat 's suggestion), that a solution is to use their single trip to take modern military hardware back to the era of the Roman Empire and use it to sink multiple ships.  This would both provide for many more shipwrecks to salvage, and give the team a good idea of where those wrecks were, when they returned to modern times. They could also specifically target ships that were in waters that are well-suited for salvage operations.\nHowever, while this might be a pragmatic solution, going back in time to sink ships and murder the occupants doesn't seem like a particularly morally acceptable solution, [ citation needed ] not to mention opening up potential time travel paradoxes such as what if one of the ship occupants killed was an ancestor to one of the protagonists? If this were a real scenario, there would probably be less drastic solutions available, such as purchasing quantities of lead from the time (would need to convincingly impersonate a local and have something that could be used as currency) and dropping them in the ocean from a (rented) non-destroyed ship, which as a bonus eliminates the need to extract it from the charred remains of a ship later.\nUsing time travel to retrieve items from the past that are not available in the present is a frequent trope in time travel-related media. Frequently, it is done with the goal of making money , but other purposes are used as well. In the Star Trek movie The Voyage Home , time travel is used to retrieve whales and transport them to the present. In the book Timeline , time travel is used to record historical events for entertainment purposes. In the movie Avengers: Endgame , time travel is used to retrieve minerals important to a future plan. In the movie Back to the Future , when Marty tells Doc that the time machine runs on plutonium, Doc exclaims, \"I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drug store, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by\" (from this transcript ).\nLow-background steel is the most famous kind of low-background metal, used in real life for highly sensitive particle detectors in physics and medicine, and is salvaged from ships sunk before 1945 (the Trinity nuclear test ). Since this is steel, the ships used typically date back to World War I or World War II.  (It should be noted that the vast majority of applications that previously required special low-background steel can now once again use ordinary newly-produced steel, as the concentration of radionuclides in the atmosphere has declined almost to pre-1945 levels in the decades since the cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing, due partly to the shorter-lived of these radionuclides having decayed away and partly to processes such as the carbon cycle having removed most of the still-extant radionuclides from the atmosphere.)\nThe title text refers to Greek fire , which was an incendiary weapon invented and employed by the Byzantine empire. It was a flammable liquid, famously said to burn on water, that was used in naval combat to set fire to enemy ships. As it was a closely-guarded military secret, many of the details have been lost to time, and modern chemists have only been able to develop educated guesses of what it probably was. Randall proposes a rather outlandish alternative hypothesis: that all records of Greek fire were actually in reference to the modern weapons used by the time travelers. It is also notable that, if the time machine was taken to the time of the classical Roman empire, Greek fire would not yet have been a known term. Perhaps the weapon wielded by the time travelers was later conflated with the Byzantines' weapon, or perhaps the time machine was taken to a period a few centuries later than classical Rome.\nIn 1063: Kill Hitler a single-use time machine is available. It is also used by Black Hat. However, due to the way the time machine in this comic is used, it must be assumed that they can use it again after the salvage of lead from the sunken ships.\n[Black Hat stands behind Megan who addresses Cueball who stands on the other side of a table with a machine. The machine is a rectangular box with a small dome with one large and two small antennas on top. It seems to point in Cueball's direction as it has a broad protrusion at the back and protrusion at the front that gets smaller towards the tip.  The word \"Time\" is written on the side, and below that is possibly more illegible text.] Megan: Our time machine works. Megan: But we're almost out of low-background metal. Cueball: What's that?\n[Close-up on Megan who lifts her hand palm up.] Megan: Modern metal is contaminated by fallout from nuclear testing, and lead also has natural radioactivity that fades over time. Megan: To shield sensitive equipment, physicists use lead from sunken Roman ships. Megan: But shipwreck lead is hard to find.\n[Back to the original setting, Megan has turned to Black Hat, who has his hand on his chin.] Black Hat: How much do we have? Megan: Enough for one trip through time. Black Hat: Hmmm...\n[The three are now in a helicopter, with Megan piloting, Cueball as a passenger in the back, and Black Hat firing a flamethrower at a Roman ship beneath them through the window behind the cockpit. Two sailors with Roman type helmets are looking on as the stern of their ship catches fire. One of them throwing his arms out to the side. The intact sail is still up behind them and behind that another sailor jumps into the water, down to a fourth sailor already in the water. Two already-burning ships can also be seen to the left of the ship under attack. One is burning all over, with the mast still up but the sail long gone, and the third ship is almost completely sunk, but the part above the water is aflame. Seven small clouds are around the helicopter in the sky.] Flamethrower: Fwooosh\n"}
{"id":2322,"title":"ISO Paper Size Golden Spiral","image_title":"ISO Paper Size Golden Spiral","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2322","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/iso_paper_size_golden_spiral.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2322:_ISO_Paper_Size_Golden_Spiral","transcript":"[Caption inside panel:] The golden ratio is everywhere!\n[Picture of the ISO standard paper sizes (i.e. A1, A2, etc.) placed so that they fit together perfectly, overlaid with a spiral resembling that of the golden ratio] [A rectangle in landscape orientation with width= height*sqrt(2) is divided into two halves by a vertical line. The left half, a rectangle in portrait orientation, with height=width*sqrt(2), is labeled \"A1\". The right half (also portrait) is divided into two halves by a horizontal line; the rectangle above this horizontal line (landscape) is labeled \"A2\". Below this horizontal line there is a landscape rectangle which is divided into two portrait rectangles by a vertical line. The right half is labeled \"A3\", the left half is divided into two halves by a horizontal line. The lower half is labeled \"A4\", the upper half is divided again, with its left half labeled \"A5\". The series continues like this until \"A10\". ] [Symbolically:  A1 -right,up- A2 -down,right- A3 -left,down- A4 -up,left- A5 -right,up- A6 -down,right- A7 -left,down- A8 -up,left- A9 -right,up- A10.] [A red spiral starts at the lower left corner of A1, passes through the upper right corner of A1 which is also the upper left corner of A2, continues through the upper right corner of A3, lower right of A4, lower left of A5, etc, and after passing through the lower right corner of A10 continues to what would be the lower left corner of A11 and the upper right corner of A12.]\n[Caption below panel:] How to annoy both graphic designers and mathematicians\n","explanation":"This comic strip is about how to annoy graphic designers and mathematicians, much like 590: Papyrus and 1015: Kerning .\nAn easy way to annoy many mathematicians is to make fanciful claims about the Golden Ratio . It's been claimed, with varying levels of credibility, to be detectable in many natural and human-made situations, often with the dubious subjective claim that using the ratio in some particular way makes an image more \"beautiful\". The Golden Spiral is a spiral whose growth factor is this ratio; a common (though slightly geometrically inaccurate) way to illustrate the spiral is to draw curves through a set of squares whose side lengths shrink according to the Golden Ratio. The result looks rather like Randall's drawing here.\nHowever, Randall hasn't used the Golden Ratio at all; he's just drawn a spiral ( not the Golden Spiral) through a common diagram showing the A Series of standard paper sizes, but in landscape instead of portrait (this diagram is commonly drawn in portrait). These papers aren't squares at all, but rectangles whose side lengths shrink by a factor of the square root of 2. Additionally, the paper sizes shrink by a factor of one half, so the area is filled in a geometric series.  This is sometimes called a silver rectangle, although the Silver ratio is actually 1+\u221a2. By mistaking the A Series for something connected with the Golden Ratio, and perpetuating the tradition of making dubious claims about the Golden Ratio, Randall has successfully annoyed both graphic designers and mathematicians.\nThe title text is a similarly themed joke, based partly on the fact that the US uses customary units while the vast majority of the rest of the world uses SI units .  The 11\/8.5 ratio is the length\/width ratio of US Letter paper, which is 11 inches by 8.5 inches (another common size in the United States is US Legal, which is 14\" by 8.5\").  The value of \u03c0\/4 radians is indeed equal to 45 degrees, although Randall takes the cosine in one case and uses the raw angle in the other case in order to get a close coincidence of values.  The width and length of A Series paper ( ISO 216 ) is always given in whole millimeters, and the width\/length ratio is very close to cos(45\u00b0) (which is 1\/\u221a2=0.707\u2026)  As for US Letter paper: to 4 decimal places, 8.5\/11 = 0.7727 and \u03c0\/4 = 0.7854.\nIn reality, the usage of radians vs. degrees is not a geographic or political decision, but generally is delineated by profession.  Most engineering and science fields measure angles in degrees or fractions of degrees (arcseconds, or even milliarcseconds in fields like astronomy), while mathematicians and physicists generally use radians.  Civil engineers may refer to the slope of a road by its grade , which is commonly expressed in terms of the tangent of the angle to the horizontal (either as a percentage or a ratio); for angles up to ~10\u00b0, this is close to the value of the angle in radians.\nThe difference between the \"real\" Golden Spiral squares and Randall's version is approximately either .2038 (for \u221a2-1.6180\u2026) or .08907 ((1\/\u221a2)-1.6180\u2026), depending on which way you're counting. Either way, the difference would be very noticeable.)\nThe spiral shown is approximately a logarithmic spiral with a growth factor of \u221a2, although it has been edited slightly to make it fit neatly inside the rectangles.\nIf the center of the spiral is at the origin, it may be graphed with r = C*2^(\u03b8\/\u03c0), for any positive constant C.\nIn 1488: Flowcharts a golden spiral has been laid in over the chart. That comic is a link that goes to the spiral page on xkcd.\n[Caption inside panel:] The golden ratio is everywhere!\n[Picture of the ISO standard paper sizes (i.e. A1, A2, etc.) placed so that they fit together perfectly, overlaid with a spiral resembling that of the golden ratio] [A rectangle in landscape orientation with width= height*sqrt(2) is divided into two halves by a vertical line. The left half, a rectangle in portrait orientation, with height=width*sqrt(2), is labeled \"A1\". The right half (also portrait) is divided into two halves by a horizontal line; the rectangle above this horizontal line (landscape) is labeled \"A2\". Below this horizontal line there is a landscape rectangle which is divided into two portrait rectangles by a vertical line. The right half is labeled \"A3\", the left half is divided into two halves by a horizontal line. The lower half is labeled \"A4\", the upper half is divided again, with its left half labeled \"A5\". The series continues like this until \"A10\". ] [Symbolically:  A1 -right,up- A2 -down,right- A3 -left,down- A4 -up,left- A5 -right,up- A6 -down,right- A7 -left,down- A8 -up,left- A9 -right,up- A10.] [A red spiral starts at the lower left corner of A1, passes through the upper right corner of A1 which is also the upper left corner of A2, continues through the upper right corner of A3, lower right of A4, lower left of A5, etc, and after passing through the lower right corner of A10 continues to what would be the lower left corner of A11 and the upper right corner of A12.]\n[Caption below panel:] How to annoy both graphic designers and mathematicians\n"}
{"id":2323,"title":"Modeling Study","image_title":"Modeling Study","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2323","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/modeling_study.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2323:_Modeling_Study","transcript":"[There are two columns.]\n[The column on the left is a piece of paper labeled \"Empirical Study\". The paper consists of the sections \"Abstract\", \"Introduction\", \"Methods\", \"Results\", and \"Discussion\". Each section consists of several horizontal lines meant to represent blocks of text. All sections except \"Abstract\" have gray, dulled text, while \"Abstract\" has fully black text to separate it from the other sections. In the middle of the \"Abstract\" section, there is a large red rectangle. Inside this rectangle is the word \"Problem\" in large red letters.]\n[The column on the right is a piece of paper labeled \"Modeling Study\". It consists of the same sections with the same highlighting, but the large red rectangle with the word \"Problem\" is in the \"Methods\" section instead of the \"Abstract\" section. Because of this, it is dulled to match the rest of the \"Methods\" section.]\n[There is a curvy black arrow pointing from the red box in the paper on the left to the red box in the paper on the right.]\n[Caption below the panel:] A mathematical model is a powerful tool for taking hard problems and moving them to the methods section.\n","explanation":"In this comic, a humorous comparison is drawn between two common types of scientific studies: empirical research , where an experiment is designed to test a scientific theory, and mathematical modeling , where mathematical formulations are produced to predict how physical systems behave under given circumstances. In empirical studies, hard questions about the limitations of existing theory tend to be addressed in the abstract, which is the brief summary of the paper that is presented at the beginning of most scientific articles. In modeling studies, assumptions based on existing theory are built into the model, and any problems associated with these assumptions tend to be discussed in the methods section, which outlines the design of an experiment in the case of an empirical study, or how the model was designed and the reasoning behind the choices made in the case of a modeling study.  In the empirical study, the proverbial \"big red problem box\" is stated up-front where everyone who finds the paper will read it, while in the modeling study, it's buried in the middle of the paper, where it's less likely to be read.\nThe caption opens like a typical statement in favor of modeling studies, \"A mathematical model is a powerful tool for taking hard problems,\" but while a researcher who works with models might go on to say \"...and breaking them down,\" or \"...and studying them in ways that would be impractical for empirical studies,\" Randall concludes that they can't actually make hard problems any easier.  His title text, \"You've got questions, we've got assumptions,\" plays on the slogan of the now-defunct electronics chain Radio Shack of \"You've got questions, we've got answers\" by pointing out that any answers provided are built on assumptions by the modelers.  In other words, garbage in, garbage out .\nRandall doesn't call this a \"tip\" , but it does fit in with his science tip in 2311: Confidence Interval , namely, that \"If your model is bad enough, the confidence intervals will fall outside the printable area.\"  Much as that tip suggests that a model's results can be made to look more impressive by hiding the error bounds outside the printed area of a graph, this comic strip suggests that acknowledgments of problems can be moved to less-trafficked parts of the paper by switching from empirical to modeling studies.\n[There are two columns.]\n[The column on the left is a piece of paper labeled \"Empirical Study\". The paper consists of the sections \"Abstract\", \"Introduction\", \"Methods\", \"Results\", and \"Discussion\". Each section consists of several horizontal lines meant to represent blocks of text. All sections except \"Abstract\" have gray, dulled text, while \"Abstract\" has fully black text to separate it from the other sections. In the middle of the \"Abstract\" section, there is a large red rectangle. Inside this rectangle is the word \"Problem\" in large red letters.]\n[The column on the right is a piece of paper labeled \"Modeling Study\". It consists of the same sections with the same highlighting, but the large red rectangle with the word \"Problem\" is in the \"Methods\" section instead of the \"Abstract\" section. Because of this, it is dulled to match the rest of the \"Methods\" section.]\n[There is a curvy black arrow pointing from the red box in the paper on the left to the red box in the paper on the right.]\n[Caption below the panel:] A mathematical model is a powerful tool for taking hard problems and moving them to the methods section.\n"}
{"id":2324,"title":"Old Days 2","image_title":"Old Days 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2324","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/old_days_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2324:_Old_Days_2","transcript":"[In a slim panel, Cueball and Hairbun are walking together to the right. Hairbun has her palm raised.] Cueball: What was the Internet like in the olden days, for a developer? Hairbun: Oh, things were very different.\n[Cueball and Hairbun have stopped walking. Zoomed in on Hairbun.] Hairbun: The cloud was a lot smaller. It was called a \"mainframe\" and it was near Sacramento. Hairbun: It was on the state landline, so the whole industry paused when the governor had to make a phone call.\n[Zoomed back out. Hairbun has her palm raised.] Hairbun: There was no memory protection. If you wanted to write to an address, you would call around to ask whether anyone else was using it. Hairbun: Often Bill Gates would say he was, even when he wasn't. That's how Microsoft got its early foothold. Cueball: Wow.\n[Zoomed back in Hairbun. Cueball responds off-screen.] Hairbun: \"Git\" was originally a van that circled around gathering data tapes to copy and distribute. We all took turns driving it. Hairbun: When you saw it coming you'd blow an air horn to request that it pull over. Hairbun: That's where \"pull request\" came from. Cueball (off-screen): Oh, neat!\n[Cueball and Hairbun continue walking to the right. Hairbun has her palm raised.] Hairbun: Before terminals, we all used punch cards, which were originally developed to control looms. Hairbun: Early mainframes would produce a sweater each time you ran your code. Hairbun: Eventually we got them to stop. We had enough sweaters.\n","explanation":"In this sequel to 1755: Old Days , which was released more than 3.5 years ago, the conversation continues, as if no time has passed, between (young) Cueball and (old) Hairbun about computer programming in the past. As in the first comic in this series , Cueball, having only a faint idea of just how difficult and byzantine programming was \"in the old days\", asks Hairbun to enlighten him on the specifics. Hairbun promptly seizes the opportunity to screw with his head.\nThe new claims:\n[In a slim panel, Cueball and Hairbun are walking together to the right. Hairbun has her palm raised.] Cueball: What was the Internet like in the olden days, for a developer? Hairbun: Oh, things were very different.\n[Cueball and Hairbun have stopped walking. Zoomed in on Hairbun.] Hairbun: The cloud was a lot smaller. It was called a \"mainframe\" and it was near Sacramento. Hairbun: It was on the state landline, so the whole industry paused when the governor had to make a phone call.\n[Zoomed back out. Hairbun has her palm raised.] Hairbun: There was no memory protection. If you wanted to write to an address, you would call around to ask whether anyone else was using it. Hairbun: Often Bill Gates would say he was, even when he wasn't. That's how Microsoft got its early foothold. Cueball: Wow.\n[Zoomed back in Hairbun. Cueball responds off-screen.] Hairbun: \"Git\" was originally a van that circled around gathering data tapes to copy and distribute. We all took turns driving it. Hairbun: When you saw it coming you'd blow an air horn to request that it pull over. Hairbun: That's where \"pull request\" came from. Cueball (off-screen): Oh, neat!\n[Cueball and Hairbun continue walking to the right. Hairbun has her palm raised.] Hairbun: Before terminals, we all used punch cards, which were originally developed to control looms. Hairbun: Early mainframes would produce a sweater each time you ran your code. Hairbun: Eventually we got them to stop. We had enough sweaters.\n"}
{"id":2325,"title":"Endorheic Basin","image_title":"Endorheic Basin","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2325","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/endorheic_basin.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2325:_Endorheic_Basin","transcript":"[Megan, holding a glass of water up in one hand, is talking to Beret Guy, who has water surrounding his feet, with small droplets falling off the two small water triangles that cover his feet.  The water in her glass is leaning towards Beret Guy.] Megan: Why are your feet wet? Beret Guy: I'm an endorheic basin!\n[Megan looks down at her glass as the water in it is flying out towards Beret Guy's arm, which he has stretched out towards the glass.] Megan: Huh? Beret Guy: Nearby water flows toward me, not the ocean. Beret Guy: See? Megan: Oh, cool.\n[At the top of this panel is a box with text being said by Beret Guy to Megan. Beneath it is a depiction of what he is explaining to Megan. Beret Guy is shown standing in a bathroom, with a towel around his waist. Almost his entire body is covered completely in water, except most of his head above mouth level, and both his feet are beneath the water bubble. He yells to someone outside the bathroom. A shower-tray or partially sunken bathtub can be seen to the left with a closed shower curtain across it. To the right of him is the sink with mirror above it. Further right is the door. The floor is tiled.] Beret Guy - narrating: The most annoying part is drying off after a shower. Beret Guy: Can someone bring me the siphon?\n[Back to the situation from the first panel, although Megan has lowered her glass a bit. The glass seems to be as full as in the first panel though, even though Beret Guy now also has water on his arm where it was pulled out off Megan's glass in panel 2.] Beret Guy: But I have to get rid of it or I'll develop salt flats. Beret Guy: Anyway, let me know if you need any minerals!\n","explanation":"Yet another comic with one of Beret Guy's strange powers . This time he attracts water so it flows to him rather than running out towards the nearby oceans. He thus claims he is an endorheic basin , hence the title.\nAn endorheic basin is a limited drainage basin that normally retains water and allows no outflow to other external bodies of water, such as rivers or oceans, but converges instead into lakes or swamps, permanent or seasonal, that equilibrate through evaporation. The Caspian Sea in Asia is the largest such basin. It is debated if it is a lake or a sea (it is salty, but not connected to the oceans). If it is a lake then it is the world's largest lake.\nReal-life endorheic basins do not attract water in any unusual ways. Rather, they form when low-lying, inland areas receive water from rivers and streams, but not enough to flood them completely and allow the water to overflow into an ocean. As the surface of the lake grows, so do the rate of evaporation and seepage into the ground, until they're equivalent to the inflow of water (at least, on a yearly average). Obviously, Beret Guy's inexplicable effect on water is distinct from the way actual endorheic basins function.\nThe panel showing Beret Guy after a shower looks similar to what could happen in a space station if you have liquid water in zero gravity. The water in this environment sticks to any surface it encounters. [ citation needed ] See for instance the start of this video Water in zero gravity and this one Wringing out Water on the ISS - for Science! to see how water reacts to human skin in zero gravity. It is thus almost impossible for him to dry off after a shower.  It seems like the water that is attracted to him is still somewhat subject to gravity, as it pools downwards upon him; presumably he knows to finish showering before it floods over his face.\nIn fact he needs someone to come with a siphon to get rid of the water. A siphon is a hose or u-shaped pipe, where the downward pipe is longer than the upward section. Thus the water falling in the downward section creates a pull lifting the water in the upward section up to the highest point, from which it will flow down pulling more water up. As the endorheic basin caused by Beret Guy seems to have a limited reach, placing one end of the pipe sufficiently far outside creates a similar effect: The water outside Beret Guy's area of effect flows down under the influence of gravity, creating a pull lifting the water near him \"up\" out of the endorheic basin. Randall made a what if? about siphons in #143: Europa Water Siphon .\nAs with real endorheic basins, if the water is allowed to sit, it will eventually evaporate, but he notes that he'll \"develop salt flats\". Water from rivers carry salts, typically in low concentrations, and if a lake lacks outflows, the salts build up over time, as the water evaporates.  If a salt lake evaporates completely, it can create salt flats (or salt pans), like those near Salt Lake City in Utah , e.g. the Bonneville Salt Flats . These salts come in a variety of forms, including minerals. Sometimes, endorheic basins have high enough concentrations of dissolved minerals to be worth extracting, which is presumably what he means by \"let me know if you need any minerals\".\nThere may also be a contrived pun here, in that \"flats\" is a description of various types of footwear (among them: women's shoes that are not high-heeled and ballet shoes not specifically reinforced for advanced 'pointe' dancing), and the water would clearly leave the 'flats' on his feet.\nIn the title text, Beret Guy mentions his \"biggest fear\" due to his water attracting abilities is being flooded to by \"colonial engineers\" in order for them to use him and the water to generate electricity.  This may be a reference to the Qattara Depression Project . The Qattara depression is a low-lying region near the Egyptian coast. For nearly a century, there have been proposals to dig a canal from the sea to flood this depression, deliberately creating a huge endorheic basin. By placing hydroelectric dams along the canal, the proposals hoped to generation huge amounts of electricity. At least one proposal included the use of nuclear explosions to create the canal, which may help to explain why he considers this his biggest fear.\nHe then mentions that his \"biggest hope\", due to his ability, is that he will generate sailing stones . Sailing stones (also known as sliding rocks, walking rocks, rolling stones, and moving rocks), are a geological phenomenon where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention. The movement of the rocks occurs when large ice sheets a few millimeters thick and floating in an ephemeral winter pond start to break up during sunny days. Frozen during cold winter nights, these thin floating ice panels are driven by wind and shove rocks at speeds up to 5 meters per minute. The Racetrack Playa , an endorheic basin in Death Valley, is one of the most famous locations for sailing stones.\nThis comic came out just a bit more than a month after the previous comic with one of Beret Guy's strange powers, 2310: Great Attractor , in which strange forces exerted a pull on Beret Guy. It does not appear that he himself is drawn to water, and we cannot determine if the Great Attractor is drawn to him, so Newton's Third Law may be constantly being broken, along with the more obvious scientific impossibilities that surround Beret Guy.\n[Megan, holding a glass of water up in one hand, is talking to Beret Guy, who has water surrounding his feet, with small droplets falling off the two small water triangles that cover his feet.  The water in her glass is leaning towards Beret Guy.] Megan: Why are your feet wet? Beret Guy: I'm an endorheic basin!\n[Megan looks down at her glass as the water in it is flying out towards Beret Guy's arm, which he has stretched out towards the glass.] Megan: Huh? Beret Guy: Nearby water flows toward me, not the ocean. Beret Guy: See? Megan: Oh, cool.\n[At the top of this panel is a box with text being said by Beret Guy to Megan. Beneath it is a depiction of what he is explaining to Megan. Beret Guy is shown standing in a bathroom, with a towel around his waist. Almost his entire body is covered completely in water, except most of his head above mouth level, and both his feet are beneath the water bubble. He yells to someone outside the bathroom. A shower-tray or partially sunken bathtub can be seen to the left with a closed shower curtain across it. To the right of him is the sink with mirror above it. Further right is the door. The floor is tiled.] Beret Guy - narrating: The most annoying part is drying off after a shower. Beret Guy: Can someone bring me the siphon?\n[Back to the situation from the first panel, although Megan has lowered her glass a bit. The glass seems to be as full as in the first panel though, even though Beret Guy now also has water on his arm where it was pulled out off Megan's glass in panel 2.] Beret Guy: But I have to get rid of it or I'll develop salt flats. Beret Guy: Anyway, let me know if you need any minerals!\n"}
{"id":2326,"title":"Five Word Jargon","image_title":"Five Word Jargon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2326","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/five_word_jargon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2326:_Five_Word_Jargon","transcript":"[White Hat, holding his palm up, is speaking to Cueball, who is typing with both hands on his smartphone. What he types is indicated with a jagged line going up from his phone.] White Hat: Yeah, I learned about it when I was researching anomalous electroweak sphaleron transition baryogenesis. Cueball: Cooool. Text on phone: A-n-o-m-\n[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Collecting really satisfying-sounding five-word technical phrases.\nCurrent favorites Transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt placement Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model Unicellular diazotrophic cyanobacteria group A Anomalous electroweak sphaleron transition baryogenesis\n","explanation":"This is another comic in Randall 's My Hobby series , the first of two hobby comics released in the same week, the second being 2328: Space Basketball .\nThis hobby involves \"collecting\" and presumably using five-words-long technical jargon. In the comic, White Hat uses a phrases with five such words while talking to Randall (as Cueball ), causing Randall to exclaim \"cool\" (as in what a cool sentence), and then proceed to type the phrase into his phone to add to his list of favorite Five Word Jargon.\nRandall then proceeds to list his current favorites among really satisfying five word technical phrases (or jargon) as a caption below the panel, with White Hat's phrase as the last, possibly the newest. Maybe it was the one that caused Randall to consider other phrases and make this comic.\nIn the title text, Randall says that he has another much harder hobby, which is to engineer situations where he can use more than one of his favorite phrases. It would seem difficult to combine any of the four listed phrases in a given conversation, as they are from four separate fields (medicine, economics\/statistics, biology, and physics\/cosmology). However, he said \"situations\", which is broader term than \"conversations\".  For example, someone could arrange for experts on these fields to deliver TED talks on these topics, so that he could introduce them by saying \"today, we will learn about...\" and list the phrases, but Randall cannot, because he has been banned from TED .  At least he has succeeded in using them together in this comic.\nThis technique has also been used by the [ [1] ], who uses three-word phrases to create excuses for why he won't fix someone's computer when they ask.\nA transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) is \"an artificial channel within the liver that connects the inflow portal vein and the outflow hepatic vein\".  It is used to treat various intestinal bleeding. This term can be found in this publication: https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/16850140\/ transjugular the shunt is inserted via the jugular vein intrahepatic within the liver portosystemic blood is shunted from the portal vein (draining blood from the intestines to the liver) to the systemic circulation (returning blood from the liver to the heart) shunt a tube within the body that bypasses the normal flow of something (whether a natural defect, or an artificial device) placement the operation to insert it\nA generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model is a statistical model for economic research. An autoregressive model of a time series is one that uses previous values of the time series to predict the next value. A conditional probability model is one that divides data into inputs and outputs and models the relation between them using a conditional probability distribution of the outputs given the inputs. A heteroskedastic distribution is one in which the variance (or standard deviation) of a random variable is not the same across all values of the variable. This phrase can be found in this publication: https:\/\/www.scirp.org\/html\/11-1241334_99870.htm\nGeneralized making more general, as opposed to a specific model autoregressive using previous values to predict future values. conditional outputs depending on specific inputs (in the sense of, \"funding is conditional on meeting targets\") heteroskedasticity the property where the variance (that is, the random difference between an expected value and its observed value) itself varies in response to some variable. From Greek, meaning \"different dispersion\". For example, a graph of expenditure on food against income shows higher randomness at higher income levels, because poor people always eat cheaply, while rich people sometimes do and sometimes don't. model a set of equations that attempt to describe some property of the world for the purpose of analysis\nA unicellular diazotrophic cyanobacterium is a single-celled type of bacteria that is able to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a more usable form, and also generates oxygen through photosynthesis. The term can also be found in this publication: https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC4303622\/ unicellular Consisting of only one cell ( Unicellular organism ), such as all bacteria. The opposite is multicellular , which includes almost all other lifeforms like animals, plants, algae, etc. diazatrophic Having the property of fixing nitrogen from the air into other chemicals. cyanobacterium A fairly broad category of bacteria which often play an important role in various habitats, using photosynthesis to convert light energy to oxygen. \"Cyano\" refers to their general blue colour, not cyanide. group A the \"first\" group of several groups in a controlled experiment, or a scientific study; in this case, it is the first of several (B, C) groups of phylogenetically-related organisms, for which there is as yet no published scientific name, see here: https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/308030272_The_small_unicellular_diazotrophic_symbiont_UCYN-A_is_a_key_player_in_the_marine_nitrogen_cycle .\nThis is a term from Particle physics \/ cosmology . Baryons are subatomic particles containing an odd number of quarks; protons and neutrons are the most familiar examples. Baryogenesis is the hypothetical physical process that took place during the early universe that produced more matter than antimatter in the observable universe (or it could be any process that produces baryons). Sphaleron is a static (time-independent) solution to the electroweak field equations of the Standard Model of particle physics, and is involved in certain hypothetical processes that change the number of baryons or leptons (e.g. forming baryons and removing leptons).  It is believed that the electroweak interaction is responsible for baryogenesis, but that at the temperatures involved (~10 15 K), sphaleron interactions would wipe out any excess of baryons; therefore, for baryogenesis to \"stick\", it must have occurred at the transition out of the electroweak era...unless there were some kind of anomaly in the formation or interaction of sphalerons. Google reports no matches (other than this page) for the entire phrase in quotes, but shows about 70 results unquoted, indicating it finds only partial matches.\nAnomalous Deviating from normal or expected electroweak A theory combining electromagnetism and the weak interaction , two of the four fundamental forces (alongside the strong interaction and gravity) in the Standard Model of particle physics. sphaleron a single, time-independent, solution to electroweak field equations, represented as a saddle point between two different low energy equilibria transition change baryogenesis creating baryons, which are a category subatomic particles containing an odd number of quarks, including protons and neutrons. (-genesis is a general suffix for a process which creates something; eg carcinogenesis means, creating cancer)\n[White Hat, holding his palm up, is speaking to Cueball, who is typing with both hands on his smartphone. What he types is indicated with a jagged line going up from his phone.] White Hat: Yeah, I learned about it when I was researching anomalous electroweak sphaleron transition baryogenesis. Cueball: Cooool. Text on phone: A-n-o-m-\n[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Collecting really satisfying-sounding five-word technical phrases.\nCurrent favorites Transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt placement Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model Unicellular diazotrophic cyanobacteria group A Anomalous electroweak sphaleron transition baryogenesis\n"}
{"id":2327,"title":"Oily House Index","image_title":"Oily House Index","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2327","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/oily_house_index.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2327:_Oily_House_Index","transcript":"[A line graph is shown. Above it is a rectangular frame with formulas inside. Most of the top part of the frame is removed and instead a heading is written over the missing section of the frame. The formula is written in three parts, with the first two parts having a division line with text written above and below.] Dimensional economic analysis New home price ($\/sqft) \/ Oil price ($\/BBL) = $\/area \/ $\/volume = Length\n[The graph has a labeled Y-axis with four ticks, which have values, and also the origin has a value. The X.axis is a time-line without label. There are five labeled ticks.] X-axis: 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 Y-axis label:  OHI (feet) Y-axis: 40 30 20 10 0\n[Above the line graph there is a caption:] Oily House Index: How deep you could fill the average new home if you converted its mortgage to crude oil\n[The graph begins around 15 before 1980, then dips below 10, rises slowly until about 1988 when it rises sharply. It stays high but has several peaks, and one deep valley until 1999 when there is a very high peak, which then drops fast. A few more peaks, and then a decline to the lowest point in 2008, which is followed by a small peak, and then another drop. From there it stays low until 2015 when it rises quite fast and has one very high peak. It then drops of, until 2020 when there is a really sharp peak. Above the top of the peak is a dotted line extending to the top of the graph (i.e. the top of the Y-axis, not the top of the panel). Then it drops down but not very low as it reaches the present.]\n[There are six labels with arrows pointing from them to notable peaks and valleys along the graph. They are written both above and below the line. From left to right they are:] 1979 energy crisis Gulf War 1999 oil glut Oil and housing crashes partly cancel out 2010s oil glut OHI briefly became infinite as oil prices reached zero in 2020\n[From 2005-2010 there is a dotted horizontal line that hits the valley at 2008. This is labeled with an arrow pointing to it:] Ceiling height\n[Below the line is a drawing of Cueball and Megan standing on the X-axis near 1990. Next to them is a label with an arrow pointing to them:] People (for scale)\n","explanation":"In economics, an index is a statistical measure of change in a representative group of individual data points. Common indices include NASDAQ (a measure of a range of stock prices) and a consumer price index (a measure of retail prices)\nThis chart demonstrates an invented index, the \"Oily House Index\", which measures a ratio of oil price to average house prices, over time.\nThe numerator is the average price of a new home (presumably in the US), in USD per square foot ($\/sqft). It does not specify what kind of home, or where. One available metric is the average price per square foot of floor space in new single-family houses in the United States which was $118.91 in 2019. The caption refers to converting the mortgage of the new house (that is, how much the purchaser borrowed, which could be zero), while the definition simply refers to the new home price (the total value). It is not clear which of these two is used in the chart.\nThe denominator is the price of oil in USD per barrel ($\/BBL). This is also not well defined, although the chart's caption suggests that it is based on crude oil. There are many different indices for different blends of oil in different locations, such as West Texas Intermediate , which is a crude oil commonly used as a global oil benchmark. (Others include Brent and Dubai Crude). The WTI price fluctuated around $55-60 throughout 2019. A barrel is a standard unit of oil volume, defined as 42 U.S. gallons (roughly 5.615 cubic feet or 0.16 cubic metres).\nThe comic then applies dimensional analysis to this index: dividing $\/sqft by $\/bbl yields a result whose dimension is a linear measurement, which can be called length. 1 barrel is 42 gallons, a gallon is 231 cubic inches, and a cubic foot is 12 3 =728 cubic inches, so a barrel is approximately 5.6146 cubic feet and a cubic foot is approximately 0.1781 barrel. The average price per square foot of a new single-family dwelling in the USA in 2019 was about $119\/square foot, while the price of oil in mid 2019 was about $60\/BBL or $10.7\/cubic foot. Dividing $119\/square foot by $10.7\/cubic foot gives approximately 11.1 foot. This is slightly lower than the value shown on the chart of around 15.\nThe chart's caption then interprets that length as the depth that a new home could be filled with the crude oil that could be purchased with its price. For scale Cueball and Megan has been drawn, and the ceiling height of a typical house has been indicated, showing that only in time with deep crisis will the oil not fill the house.  It's also not exactly clear where the extra oil should go after a multi-storey house has been filled; on the top floor, you could just take off the roof and let the oil pile up (perhaps after building some retaining walls), but on the lower floors, there's already oil above the ceiling.\nThe index is high when house prices are high and oil prices are low (such as during the 1999 oil glut), and low when house prices are low and oil prices are high (such as during the 1979 energy crisis). See details about the chart below.\nThe title text, \"We're underwater on our mortgage thanks to the low price of water\", is a pun. A mortgage on a property is considered to be \"underwater\" when the value of the mortgage exceeds the value of the property. This is bad for both the owner (who owes more money than the property is worth) and the bank (who now have a loan which is not fully secured against a default: if the property owner defaults, the bank will lose money in selling the property)- though obviously far worse for the owner.\nThe title text is hinting at an alternative index based on the ratio of house price to the price of water instead of oil. At the 2019 rate of $118.91\/ft\u00b2 and a rough average water price of $0.0015\/gallon , a house would have to be filled with water to a depth of 1060 ft for the house cost to match the water cost. If the price of water fell or the house cost per square foot rose, then the index would rise, causing the house to be even deeper in water (following the metaphor of the index as filling the house with physical water). This situation could arise even if the property value remained high, although Randall may be humorously suggesting that the increase in the index would literally flood the property with water, which would then damage it, obviously decreasing its value. (If the index continues to be computed on average house prices, then this single event would not materially impact the index as a whole.)\nIn What If #11 \"Droppings\" , Randall commented that \"unit cancellation is weird\" after making a similar calculation about fuel efficiency -- the European convention of presenting fuel mileage as \"liters per 100 kilometers\" represents an area (volume\/distance), which can be physically interpreted as the cross-sectional area of a tube of gasoline with the total volume of fuel burned stretched out over the length of the journey.\n1979 energy crisis In the wake of the Iranian Revolution , global oil supply reduced by only 4%, but caused widespread panic and a huge increase in oil price. Gulf War The Gulf War (August 1990 - Feb 1991) was the invasion of Iraq by the US, which decreased oil supplies and caused a spike in prices. 1999 oil glut In early 1999, Iraq increased its oil production, while the Asian Financial Crisis reduced demand. Prices briefly fell to as low as $16. [1] Ceiling height Reinforcing the connection with the metaphorical house filled with oil, \"ceiling height\" here is shown at somewhere just below 10 feet. The standard ceiling height in US homes is 9 feet for ground floor, and 8 feet on higher floors. [2] Only twice has the height been below ceiling height, during the 1979 energy crisis, and in the beginning of the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Oil and housing crashes partly cancel out As a result of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 , oil prices crashed from $147\/BBL in July 2008 to $30 in December 2008. Meanwhile, falling house prices , which had partially triggered the financial crisis, continued to slump across the US, with the Case-Shiller home price index reporting its largest ever price drop in December 2008. Since both oil price and house prices were falling, the effect of dividing one by the other means that the index didn't change significantly, remaining around 8-15 feet. 2010s oil glut In 2014-16 there was a serious surplus of crude oil , partially caused by increasing shale oil from the US and Canada, a slowdown in demand from China, and increasing fuel efficiency and use of renewable energy. Prices dropped from $125\/BBL from 2012 to below $30 in January 2016. By October 2018, prices had recovered to $85\/BBL. ] OHI briefly became infinite as oil prices reached zero in 2020 In April 2020, the coronavirus pandemic dramatically reduced vehicle and air transport, crashing oil demand. Oil futures actually went to zero , and even below, several times: oil producers paying consumers to take their oil, to avoid the costs of storing it. Dividing anything by zero officially has no defined result, but in many thought experiments yields infinity, hence the \"infinite oily house index\". The graph should actually wrap around to the negative axis at this point.\n[A line graph is shown. Above it is a rectangular frame with formulas inside. Most of the top part of the frame is removed and instead a heading is written over the missing section of the frame. The formula is written in three parts, with the first two parts having a division line with text written above and below.] Dimensional economic analysis New home price ($\/sqft) \/ Oil price ($\/BBL) = $\/area \/ $\/volume = Length\n[The graph has a labeled Y-axis with four ticks, which have values, and also the origin has a value. The X.axis is a time-line without label. There are five labeled ticks.] X-axis: 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 Y-axis label:  OHI (feet) Y-axis: 40 30 20 10 0\n[Above the line graph there is a caption:] Oily House Index: How deep you could fill the average new home if you converted its mortgage to crude oil\n[The graph begins around 15 before 1980, then dips below 10, rises slowly until about 1988 when it rises sharply. It stays high but has several peaks, and one deep valley until 1999 when there is a very high peak, which then drops fast. A few more peaks, and then a decline to the lowest point in 2008, which is followed by a small peak, and then another drop. From there it stays low until 2015 when it rises quite fast and has one very high peak. It then drops of, until 2020 when there is a really sharp peak. Above the top of the peak is a dotted line extending to the top of the graph (i.e. the top of the Y-axis, not the top of the panel). Then it drops down but not very low as it reaches the present.]\n[There are six labels with arrows pointing from them to notable peaks and valleys along the graph. They are written both above and below the line. From left to right they are:] 1979 energy crisis Gulf War 1999 oil glut Oil and housing crashes partly cancel out 2010s oil glut OHI briefly became infinite as oil prices reached zero in 2020\n[From 2005-2010 there is a dotted horizontal line that hits the valley at 2008. This is labeled with an arrow pointing to it:] Ceiling height\n[Below the line is a drawing of Cueball and Megan standing on the X-axis near 1990. Next to them is a label with an arrow pointing to them:] People (for scale)\n"}
{"id":2328,"title":"Space Basketball","image_title":"Space Basketball","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2328","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/space_basketball.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2328:_Space_Basketball","transcript":"[Cueball, holding a basketball in front of him in both hands, is looking up at the basketball hoop in front of him. The hoop is on a standard board, but at the foot of the rod holding the hoop, there seems to be growing grass up, indicating it is outside.] Cueball: Okay, here are the rules: Cueball: I have to make 30 shots in a row before a meteor falls through the hoop. Cueball: I'm a 30% free throw shooter so the odds are actually pretty even. Cueball: Ready...Go!\n[Caption below panel:] My hobby: playing basketball against space\n","explanation":"This is another comic in Randall 's My Hobby series , released during the same week as his last hobby comic, 2326: Five Word Jargon .\nRandall wishes to play basketball against outer space , hence the title Space Basketball . (His previous attempt at creating a \" New Sports System \" for multiplayer socially-distant basketball was not very successful.)  His goal is to make thirty baskets in a row before the universe puts a meteor through his hoop.\nIt should be noted that while may be technically correct to call the falling space object in this case a \"meteor\", when it hits the ground moments later it would be known as a meteorite .  See also Terminology section below. See also 1405: Meteor , for what Randall's thoughts are on this.\nRandall estimates that his success rate at free-throw shooting is approximately 30%.  Therefore, the chances of Cueball making 30 shots in a row is 0.3 30 , or about 1 in five quadrillion (2\u00d710 \u221216 ); for comparison, there are approximately 150 quadrillion seconds remaining before the Sun engulfs the earth (5 billion years), so if Randall has a chute set up under the basket and enough basketballs to sustain a constant high rate of shooting, he has \"decent\" odds of achieving his goal before the Sun burns out.  But really, Randall has comparably rapid learning at this task, whereas asteroids have extreme persistence far beyond Randall's life, so when he says the odds are comparable he is abstractly weighing his unique skillset against that of small stellar bodies.\nStill, the lifetime odds of being killed by a meteorite have been estimated at 1 in 75,000 or 600,000 or 700,000 [1] . These calculations are usually based on the probability of being alive at a time when a huge impact kills billions of people. Randall just uses the chance of one meteorite shot on Earth hitting this hoop (hoop-area divided by Earth-area = 3.2\u00d710 \u221216 ) which is in the same range as 0.3 30 . Actual meteorite fall statistics report an average of 1.2 meteorites per year hitting the European continent which suggests that the average probability of Cueball winning after each shot attempt is about equivalent to a meteorite passing through the hoop over the period of 10 hours. Therefore Cueball has a better chance of winning than the universe \"on the short term\" if he makes more than 840 free-shot attempts per year for the rest of his life. The expected time for the universe to actually \"complete\" the challenge would be in the range of 8 billion years, the same magnitude to the current age of the universe and longer than the estimated remaining lifetime of the solar system .\nIn the title text, Randall assumes that he would get better at free throwing shooting with practice in his lifetime (\"the short term\"). Some of the world's best basketball players have free-throw percentages over 90%, and even professional players with reputations of being \"poor\" free-throw shooters (e.g. Shaquille O'Neal) are above 50%.  If Randall can improve his percentage to 50%, his odds of sinking thirty baskets in a row improve to \"nearly\" one-in-a-billion, while a member of the elite 50\u201340\u201390 club would have a probability better than four percent of making thirty free-throws in a row. Some specialists have achieved much higher success rates, with the record for most consecutive baskets being held by Tom Amberry with 2,750. The NBA regular season record is 97 free throws in a row, set by Micheal Williams in 1993 (during the 1992\u201393 and 1993\u00a094 seasons).\nHowever, he acknowledges that in \"the long term\" (the life of the universe, or at least the Earth), the Earth will be hit by very many meteorites; even though it is more likely that Randall will make his thirty free-throws before a meteor passes through his basket, he does not possess the cosmic lifespan [ citation needed ] required to surmount the odds against him and actually have a good probability to witness either event.\nA piece of space debris falling through the atmosphere is a meteor .\nA piece of space debris that makes it all the way to the surface of the Earth (or any planet) is a meteorite .\nMost meteors burn up completely and do not become meteorites.\nThe concept of a meteor passing through a basketball hoop, ten feet or less from hitting the ground, is so uncommonly discussed that the terminology could be a matter of some debate.  Unless it is very large, a meteor this close to the ground will have slowed to terminal velocity and will no longer be burning up [ citation needed ] ; it will therefore not be incandescing like a conventional meteor, and it is certain that it will become an actual meteorite within just a moment.\n(Any meteor still incandescing within 10 feet of the ground, on the other hand, would presumably destroy both the basketball hoop and any nearby observer, meaning that poor Cueball, if still shooting, would lose the game in a much bigger way.)\nMany scientifically-aware people have the habit of correcting \"meteor\" to \"meteorite,\" so it may be safest to use the latter term among nerds other than Randall, or you could out-nerd them by pedantically pointing out a reason to still call it a meteor.\n[Cueball, holding a basketball in front of him in both hands, is looking up at the basketball hoop in front of him. The hoop is on a standard board, but at the foot of the rod holding the hoop, there seems to be growing grass up, indicating it is outside.] Cueball: Okay, here are the rules: Cueball: I have to make 30 shots in a row before a meteor falls through the hoop. Cueball: I'm a 30% free throw shooter so the odds are actually pretty even. Cueball: Ready...Go!\n[Caption below panel:] My hobby: playing basketball against space\n"}
{"id":2329,"title":"Universal Rating Scale","image_title":"Universal Rating Scale","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2329","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/universal_rating_scale.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2329:_Universal_Rating_Scale","transcript":"[Caption above the frame:] Universal Rating Scale\n[A vertical scale, with 45 gradations, labelled. These are the grades:] 0 1 Strongly Disagree F [star] \u2606 Extinct Tall 2 G Critical [frowny face] \u2639 3 endangered [two stars] \u2606\u2606 PG Disagree VG 4 Grande 5 PG-13 [neutral face] \ud83d\ude10 6 T for Teen 7 [three stars] \u2606\u2606\u2606 Agree Venti 8 Least Concern [smiley face] \u263a A Strongly Agree Category 5 EF-5 NC-17 UNC AA [four stars] \u2606\u2606\u2606\u2606 A+ S AAA 10 10.0 11\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall has blended many traditional rating scales to create a \"universal rating scale\". Unfortunately, the mixing of these scales creates a scale that is impossible to use. Only a subset of the values of each rating scale is included, further weakening its claim as a \"universal\" scale. The result is much like the attempt to create a \"universal standard\" in 927: Standards .\nAlternatively, it can be perceived as a way of comparing the different scales, for instance to answer a question like \"Is it worse to get a 2 or an F?\"\nScale of zero to ten (but with an 11, because people often add that to exaggerate - see up to eleven about the meme) 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11. The number 9 is omitted, possibly because seven ate nine (789) or because nine is the neglected number . Competitive scores , such as for artistic gymnastics' Code of Points , (ordinarily from 0.0 to a perfect 10.0 ) 10.0 Likert scale strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree (often there is a \"neither agree nor disagree\" value in the middle, but it is not strictly required) School grades (there are also B, C, D, and others with + or -) F, A+ S - Schools in Japan may use the S grading , which is said to stand for \"superior\" , implying \u201ceven better than A.\u201d The expression S is also used in daily life, generally perceived as an S in s pecial or s uper, here unrelated to the academic grading system. For example, the most expensive seat in a theater (e.g. a balcony seat) may be called S-seki (lit. \u201cS seat\u201d) in Japanese, while the second most expensive seat may be called A-seki . Many video games also use S grading, and some (such as Beat Saber and Dance Dance Revolution) use SS, SSS, and even more S's as ranks above that (though these are not shown in the webcomic). A possibly related expression is \u201cSuper S\u201d as in Sailor Moon SuperS . Star rating 1 star, 2 stars, 3 stars, 4 stars, frequently used to rate restaurants, films etc. 5 star is omitted, probably due to Randall's opinion that items with 5 stars tend to only have had one rater and aren't trustworthy . Conservation status (this is only a subset of the nine groups in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species) extinct, critical (probably critical ly endangered ), endangered, least concern According to the title text, \"extinct in the wild\" is a half-step below \"critical\", presumably above \"G\". Starbucks brand beverage sizes (there is also short and trenta) tall, grande, venti MPAA age-appropriate film ratings took effect November 1, 1968 with G, M (now PG), R (not shown in comic) and X (now NC-17) G, PG (as of February 11, 1972, replaced GP ), PG-13 ( introduced July 1, 1984), NC-17 (introduced September 1990, replaced X ) ESRB age-appropriate ratings for video games (there is also EC for early childhood, E for everyone, E10+ for Everyone 10+, M for Mature, and AO for Adults Only) T for teen Happiness emojis (alternately, the Wong\u2013Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale ) Frowny face (\u2639, U+2639), neutral face (\ud83d\ude10, U+1F610), smiley face (\u263a, U+263A). It is not totally clear which emoji each symbol is meant to refer to. The unhappy face could be Worried Face \ud83d\ude1f, Anguished Face \ud83d\ude27, Frowning Face \u2639\ufe0f (note the lack of eyebrows), Slightly Frowning Face \ud83d\ude41 etc. Coin grades G, VG, UNC meaning good, very good, and uncirculated respectively Hurricane\/cyclone strengths , Saffir\u2013Simpson scale (ordinarily categorized from category 1 to category 5) Category 5 Tornado intensities , enhanced Fujita scale (ordinarily categorized from EF0 to EF5) EF-5 Credit (and other) ratings A, AA, AAA Credit rating agencies will rank businesses and governments based on their likely ability to pay back their creditors' interest ratings. The very highest are rated AAA, and then (in Standard & Poor's scheme) AA+, AA, AA-, A+, and so on. (Note that Randall's scale rates A+ as better than AA, indicating that it's the \"A+\" from school grades rather than the one from Standard & Poor's list.) This could also be a reference to battery sizes. This would imply that AAA is better than AA, which is not necessarily true, but funny to think about. Alternatively, this could be a reference to sports tier divisions; where AA and AAA basketball for example promote age and skill appropriate competition.\nThe title text suggests that the scale as shown here is incomplete, by referencing further gradings that are not shown in the table. Critically endangered and Extinct in the wild are real conservation status categories recognised by the IUCN, although it's not clear what \"Critically endangered\/extinct in the wild\" would mean - perhaps the \"possibly extinct in the wild\" designation, abbreviated CR(PEW). It would presumably fit on the table somewhere between \"Extinct\" and \"Critical\", although its ordering relative to \"tall\", \"2\" and \"G\" is unclear.\nThe title text suggests that a score at this level had been graded on a curve , which bumped its rating up to \"Venti\", which is on the table, two steps below \"Least concern\". This would be an extraordinary example of such a curve, pushing the score from approximately 2\/10 to almost 8\/10. This could only happen if the exam was extremely difficult, meaning most results were significantly below 2\/10.\n[Caption above the frame:] Universal Rating Scale\n[A vertical scale, with 45 gradations, labelled. These are the grades:] 0 1 Strongly Disagree F [star] \u2606 Extinct Tall 2 G Critical [frowny face] \u2639 3 endangered [two stars] \u2606\u2606 PG Disagree VG 4 Grande 5 PG-13 [neutral face] \ud83d\ude10 6 T for Teen 7 [three stars] \u2606\u2606\u2606 Agree Venti 8 Least Concern [smiley face] \u263a A Strongly Agree Category 5 EF-5 NC-17 UNC AA [four stars] \u2606\u2606\u2606\u2606 A+ S AAA 10 10.0 11\n"}
{"id":2330,"title":"Acceptable Risk","image_title":"Acceptable Risk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2330","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/acceptable_risk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2330:_Acceptable_Risk","transcript":"[All of the panels depict the same two characters seen from a long distance, making them difficult to recognize. However, they appear to be Cueball (on the left) and Ponytail (on the right). They are each wearing a mask.]\n[Cueball and Ponytail talk to each other, standing at a distance:] Cueball: Okay. Based on the local virus prevalence, our careful quarantines, and the steps we've taken to reduce transmission risk, Cueball: I think it's okay for us to hang out. Ponytail: I agree.\n[Three small panels, vertically on top of each other] [Cueball and Ponytail get closer to each other.] [Cueball and Ponytail get still closer.] [Cueball and Ponytail standing near each other:] Cueball: Hi. Ponytail: Hi.\n[A normal sized panel, with Cueball and Ponytail standing near each other. They are yelling, with their arms raised:] Cueball: Is this social interaction good enough that it's worth risking our lives and the lives of others?! Ponytail: I don't know! Cueball: AAAAA! Ponytail: AAAAAA!\n[Cueball and Ponytail stand much farther apart.] Cueball: Healthy socializing was hard enough before the pandemic. Ponytail: Let's just try again in 2021.\n","explanation":"This comic is another comic in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis comic shows Cueball and Ponytail , who are nervous to spend time in close proximity while the coronavirus is still widespread, and while lockdown procedures are still in effect across the world. Despite taking many precautions, such as wearing masks and maintaining physical separation, they still fear the effects of the virus, and attempt to weigh the value of actually seeing each other in-person versus potentially catching the virus. This is a dilemma faced by many, as the United States enters the fourth month since stay at home orders began. Cueball and Ponytail are particularly affected because they are known to overthink everyday decisions and interactions (in spite of their protestation to the contrary in the title text), as seen in e.g. 1445: Efficiency . Moreover, Cueball is bad at social interactions , virus or no virus, as pointed in the last panel.\nThe comic title \"Acceptable Risk\" is formally used in risk assessments as a risk level that so low that it is comparable with other daily life risks. Typically, Acceptable Risk is defined as the probability of death being about one in a million. Cueball implicitly makes a risk assessment where he takes into account local virus prevalence and steps to reduce transmission risk coming to the conclusion that the risk to \"hang out\" is an acceptable risk. During the meeting however he becomes aware that for a good risk control strategy he also has to consider the trade-off between the benefits of taking the risk of \"social interaction\" over the benefits of completely avoiding the risk. Additionally, the numerous precautions that Cueball and Ponytail have taken to reduce risk (wearing masks, meeting in a featureless empty field with no other people, maintaining a safe distance) likely make the social interaction much less enjoyable, and thus perhaps not worth it at all. Cueball and Ponytail figure that it is extremely hard to measure the benefits of social interaction for them, and thus decide that for now complete avoidance is the better risk control strategy.\nTheir screaming actually increases the risk of the interaction; this is why Japan recently banned screaming on amusement park rides (you read that right) , and why many jurisdictions are levying particular restrictions on singing even when gatherings are permitted.\n[All of the panels depict the same two characters seen from a long distance, making them difficult to recognize. However, they appear to be Cueball (on the left) and Ponytail (on the right). They are each wearing a mask.]\n[Cueball and Ponytail talk to each other, standing at a distance:] Cueball: Okay. Based on the local virus prevalence, our careful quarantines, and the steps we've taken to reduce transmission risk, Cueball: I think it's okay for us to hang out. Ponytail: I agree.\n[Three small panels, vertically on top of each other] [Cueball and Ponytail get closer to each other.] [Cueball and Ponytail get still closer.] [Cueball and Ponytail standing near each other:] Cueball: Hi. Ponytail: Hi.\n[A normal sized panel, with Cueball and Ponytail standing near each other. They are yelling, with their arms raised:] Cueball: Is this social interaction good enough that it's worth risking our lives and the lives of others?! Ponytail: I don't know! Cueball: AAAAA! Ponytail: AAAAAA!\n[Cueball and Ponytail stand much farther apart.] Cueball: Healthy socializing was hard enough before the pandemic. Ponytail: Let's just try again in 2021.\n"}
{"id":2331,"title":"Hamster Ball 2","image_title":"Hamster Ball 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2331","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hamster_ball_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2331:_Hamster_Ball_2","transcript":"[Cueball is inside a transparent human-sized sphere, evidently \"rolling\" forward. Ahead of him is White Hat, wearing a mask.] Cueball: They laughed at me, all those years ago, when I got this human-sized hamster ball.\n[Frameless panel with just Cueball rolling forward, with his hand in a fist.] Cueball: But who's laughing now?!?\n[Cueball and White Hat have stopped. White Hat is pointing into the distance.] White Hat: Sounds like the same people. White Hat: See? There's some of them over there.\n[Cueball turns around to roll backwards while White Hat stands next to him still.] Cueball: Yeah, neighborhood kids. Cueball: At least they've stopped trying to roll me into soccer goals. Cueball: No, here they come. Cueball: Run!\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nA hamster ball is a small, transparent sphere in which a hamster or other pet rodent can run around (reasonably) safely, without being in its cage.  Cueball had previously obtained a \" human-sized hamster ball \" for himself.\nCueball relates that, once upon a time, he was teased for this seemingly-frivolous pursuit, but he feels that now, in the midst of a worldwide coronavirus pandemic , having his own bubble to be inside is a smart move.  He is contrasted to White Hat, who is wearing a facemask for protection.\n\"Who's laughing now\" is a common phrase that you know better than others who originally laughed at you, or that the \"tides have turned\" and you have a control over the situation. However, as White Hat notes, the same people who laughed at Cueball before are still laughing at him, for the same reasons as before: even though his hamster ball has some practical utility now (enforcing social distancing), it still looks ridiculous and is lots of fun to roll around.\nIn the title text, Cueball says that he feels worst about being teased by \"responsible, mask-wearing\" teens, who treat the outside of his hamster ball as a potentially-contaminated surface (which it is, if it has previously been rolled around by ir responsible teens who might have contracted and spread the coronavirus) and disinfect it, taking care to avoid spraying the vents and thus not exposing Cueball's lungs to a hazardous chemical, before rolling him around.  It's not clear why he doesn't like being rolled around by responsible teens; it could be that he vindictively wishes that they would catch the coronavirus from the outside of his hamster ball, thus proving that he was correct to use it, or it could be that his ego is injured by the fact that even responsible and otherwise well-mannered and socially-conscious teenagers (who are not likely to be particularly harmed themselves by COVID-19, but conscientiously follow guidance to reduce transmission and protect those who are at-risk) find his hamster ball so ridiculous that they have to have fun at his expense.\nAs the title indicates, this is the second comic specifically devoted to hamster balls; the first was 152: Hamster Ball , in which Cueball wished for a genie to give him a human-sized hamster ball (and then had no other wishes he wished to wish). A human hamster ball also features prominently in 211: Hamster Ball Heist .\n[Cueball is inside a transparent human-sized sphere, evidently \"rolling\" forward. Ahead of him is White Hat, wearing a mask.] Cueball: They laughed at me, all those years ago, when I got this human-sized hamster ball.\n[Frameless panel with just Cueball rolling forward, with his hand in a fist.] Cueball: But who's laughing now?!?\n[Cueball and White Hat have stopped. White Hat is pointing into the distance.] White Hat: Sounds like the same people. White Hat: See? There's some of them over there.\n[Cueball turns around to roll backwards while White Hat stands next to him still.] Cueball: Yeah, neighborhood kids. Cueball: At least they've stopped trying to roll me into soccer goals. Cueball: No, here they come. Cueball: Run!\n"}
{"id":2332,"title":"Cursed Chair","image_title":"Cursed Chair","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2332","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cursed_chair.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2332:_Cursed_Chair","transcript":"[Beret Guy and Cueball are talking.] Beret Guy: Remember how I bought my desk chair from that mysterious shop? Cueball: I think so? Beret Guy: Turns out the chair was cursed.\n[Beret Guy and Cueball are still talking. Beret Guy has his palms out.] Beret Guy: So I went back to return it, but the shop was gone! The door was boarded up! Cueball: I think most of the shops are closed because of coronavirus.\n[Beret Guy has his hands over his mouth in shock.] Beret Guy: Oh no! Beret Guy: The curse must have caused the pandemic! Cueball (off-panel): What.\n[Beret Guy starts running with a raised sword in a frameless panel. Cueball is next to him.] Beret Guy: If I destroy the chair, we can stop the virus! Cueball: What.\n[Beret Guy is chasing a floating desk chair. Cueball is watching.] Beret Guy: Die, plague-bringer! Desk chair: Hee hee I can not die Cueball: Maybe you should just shop at IKEA.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nBeret Guy informs Cueball that he purchased a cursed office chair from a mysterious shop. Cueball isn't sure if he remembers this happening, which is possibly because Beret Guy has previously stated that he makes a habit of purchasing daily necessities from such stores. Beret Guy then exclaims that the store he bought the chair from was gone when he went to return it, though given his buying preferences, he should perhaps not be so surprised. Cueball suggests that maybe the shop was simply closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic , as is the case for wide variety of non-cursed businesses. Beret Guy takes this as proof that the chair somehow caused the pandemic, a claim Cueball meets incredulously. In the final panel, Beret Guy is doing battle with the chair, which taunts him and claims to be immortal (\u201c I can not die \u201d). In fact, most chairs cannot die, because they are not alive. [ citation needed ] Cueball remarks that it would be simpler to shop at IKEA , a store famous for its minimalist flat-pack furniture, and which does not sell cursed items [ citation needed ] (although they do sell \u201c miniature Dyson spheres \u201d).\nThe cursed chair and the boarded-up store are references to the stores that sell cursed items mentioned in 1772: Startup Opportunity . In that comic, the stores vanished without a trace. But the fact the door was boarded is much more likely due to the pandemic or other causes than the store mysteriously disappearing.\nBuying an item from a shop you never noticed before, bringing it home, discovering it is cursed, and trying to return it only to discover the shop isn\u2019t there anymore is a popular trope. See The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday .\nIn the title text, the Siege Perilous is the empty seat at the Round Table in Arthurian legend, reserved by Merlin for the knight who would find the Holy Grail (who turns out to be Sir Galahad ) and fatal to anyone else who sits in it. Herman Miller is an American office furniture company that produced the Aeron chair , which is the basis for an artwork by Glenn Kaino called The Siege Perilous . Wirecutter is a website that evaluates and recommends consumer products.  From the title text, it sounds like (in the xkcd universe) Wirecutter is used to encountering cursed products, [ citation needed ] so they didn\u2019t even bother trying to sit in it to test the Siege Perilous\u2019s perilousness (er, peril ) before they started fighting it\u2014and emerged victorious, if it\u2019s only nearly as immortal as it boasts.\n[Beret Guy and Cueball are talking.] Beret Guy: Remember how I bought my desk chair from that mysterious shop? Cueball: I think so? Beret Guy: Turns out the chair was cursed.\n[Beret Guy and Cueball are still talking. Beret Guy has his palms out.] Beret Guy: So I went back to return it, but the shop was gone! The door was boarded up! Cueball: I think most of the shops are closed because of coronavirus.\n[Beret Guy has his hands over his mouth in shock.] Beret Guy: Oh no! Beret Guy: The curse must have caused the pandemic! Cueball (off-panel): What.\n[Beret Guy starts running with a raised sword in a frameless panel. Cueball is next to him.] Beret Guy: If I destroy the chair, we can stop the virus! Cueball: What.\n[Beret Guy is chasing a floating desk chair. Cueball is watching.] Beret Guy: Die, plague-bringer! Desk chair: Hee hee I can not die Cueball: Maybe you should just shop at IKEA.\n"}
{"id":2333,"title":"COVID Risk Chart","image_title":"COVID Risk Chart","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2333","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/covid_risk_chart.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2333:_COVID_Risk_Chart","transcript":"[This comic is a graph plotting the safety risk of activities on the vertical axis and the risk of infection from COVID-19 on the horizontal axis. Lowest risks are in the upper left corner, and highest in the lower right. All activities are color coded green, yellow, orange, or red. A two way arrow labeled \u201cnon-COVID risk\u201d points up and down to \"high\" and \"low\" labels on the left side of the graph. Another two way arrow labeled \u201cCOVID risk\u201d points left and right to \"high\" and \"low\" labels on the top of the graph.\nFrom left to right and top to bottom:]\nStaying home & Video chats , Hanging out with friends in the park , Grocery shopping , Attending in-person classes , Singing in church Going for walks , Hanging out with friends on the beach , Grocery shopping while hungry , Attending online classes while sitting in class at a different school , Going to a restaurant Riding an electric scooter , Renting an electric scooter , Grocery shoplifting & Riding a single rental scooter with a stranger , Getting a dental cleaning & Going on a Tinder date , Going to a bar & Going to a party & Hosting a party & Going on a cruise Going down a waterslide , Going down a waterslide with a stranger , Getting in a stranger\u2019s car , Getting a dental cleaning from a Tinder date , Opening a kissing booth at a COVID testing site Playing lawn darts , Climbing up a waterslide with a stranger , Getting in a stranger\u2019s car uninvited , Doing skateboard tricks in a hospital , Doing skateboard tricks in a bar Doing skateboard tricks , Riding the conveyor belt through the TSA x-ray machine , Axe throwing contest , Racing a scooter through a hospital with a mask on & Racing a scooter through a hospital without a mask , Skateboarding into a mosh pit on a cruise ship Setting off fireworks in your car , Running and sliding headfirst into the pins at a bowling alley , Stealing a stranger\u2019s car , Racing a scooter through a hospital with a mask on & Racing a scooter through a hospital without a mask [extends from previous row], Skateboarding into a mosh pit on a cruise ship & Getting a COVID test from a stranger at a crowded bar Bungee jumping while doing sword tricks , Going down a waterslide on an electric scooter , Setting off fireworks in a stranger\u2019s car & Axe catching contest , Racing a scooter through a hospital with a mask over your eyes , Winning a test-tube-eating contest at a COVID testing lab\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis comic is a graph showing the risk of COVID-19 infection of numerous activities on the horizontal axis, while showing the other (i.e. safety) risks of the activity on the vertical axis. The activities are also color coded green, yellow, orange, or red, presumably indicating whether engaging in them is a good idea. All the activities are green in the upper left corner (no COVID-19 danger and no other dangers), but change to yellow, orange, and red as you go right or down. This presentation and color progression is similar to a common presentation of a risk matrix .\nOne-dimensional charts showing the COVID-19 risk of common activities were popular at the time of this comic, when businesses and schools were re-opening after the first wave of COVID-19.\nThe top of the graph contains activities that people are likely to engage in during the pandemic, beginning (from left to right) with staying at home, hanging out with friends at the park, grocery shopping, attending in-person classes, and singing in church. The first few activities are common and not very dangerous (colored green and yellow), but the last two come with significant risks of infection due to COVID-19 (they are colored orange and red). Lower on the graph the activities become more and more dangerous (though these dangers are not related to COVID-19, i.e.: they are non-covid risks) and then non-sensical, a trend often seen in xkcd comics. Some activities are grouped together, being variations of the same thing (such as going down a waterslide, going down a waterslide with a stranger, and going down a waterside on an electric scooter). The last row contains extremely dangerous activities such as (from left to right, or from low COVID-19 danger to high) bungee jumping while doing sword tricks, going down a waterslide on an electric scooter, (participating in an) axe catching contest, racing a scooter through a hospital with a mask over your eyes, and winning a test tube -eating contest at a COVID testing lab. All these activities are likely to result in undesirable outcomes. [ citation needed ]\nPart of the humor comes from the increasing ridiculousness of the \"red\" activities, some of which are unlikely combinations or escalations of other less-risky activities (e.g. renting an electric scooter is a \"green\" activity, but riding that scooter with a stranger carries more risk, and then still more from racing that scooter through a hospital, with or without a mask).\nThis comic strip is similar in presentation to 2282: Coronavirus Worries .\nThe title text suggests a ticket to \"the\" kissing booth as a prize. Presumably, the prize is for the test-tube eating contest, and the booth is the kissing booth mentioned in the comic, \"a kissing booth at a COVID testing site\". A kissing booth is a kind of sideshow sometimes seen at carnivals, where members of the public can pay a small fee to kiss someone, usually an attractive woman. Winning a ticket would normally be positively received. However, since kissing is a very high risk activity for COVID-19 transmission, it would now be perceived as a kind of punishment. Moreover, if the ticket was the prize for the test-tube eating contest then not only would the winner already likely have infected themselves with COVID-19, but they are likely to have mouth injuries from eating glass, making the kiss even riskier.\nThe lowest-risk category of activities has very low COVID risk and also very low non-COVID risk.\nStaying home The lowest-risk activity of all, as long as the home itself is safe, and your family members do not have COVID-19. Video chats Video chatting carries a slightly higher non-COVID risk than simply staying at home, because you might get into an upsetting argument or accidentally expose something embarrassing. As long as the person you're chatting with is not within your personal space, the risk of catching COVID from them is still zero. Hanging out with friends in the park Physically interacting with others creates an increased risk COVID transmission, but the major risk of transmission seems to come from sharing enclosed spaces, not the outdoors, and as long as everyone keeps to themselves, they can still safely enjoy the social interaction (as long as they aren't prone to overthinking everyday decisions ). Going for walks Going for walks carries very little COVID risk as long as you stay by yourself. It is slightly more dangerous than staying home though, as you might fall or hurt yourself in some way. Hanging out with friends on the beach This has a similar COVID risk as hanging out with friends in the park, but has slightly more safety concerns due to possible unpleasant encounters with crabs, jellyfish, and other ocean-going animals as well as the risks posed by extended UV exposure. There are also negligible risks of tsunamis, shark attacks, and encounters with other rare and deadly animals. Riding an electric scooter Electric scooters are scooters powered by electricity. They have increased in popularity recently, representing a form of lightweight transportation. If done by oneself, riding one has essentially no risk of coronavirus, but it is relatively easy to injure oneself when riding an electric scooter. Electric scooters have previously been mentioned in E Scooters . Renting an electric scooter This has a slightly higher COVID risk than riding your own scooter, as a previous renter could have left traces of the virus on the handle bars. In terms of general safety, it is the equivalent of riding your own scooter. Going down a waterslide Waterslides are common attractions at water parks and even some community pools. They are simply slides made faster by running water down them. They are not extremely dangerous, so long as the rider can swim or stand in the pool of water at the end of the slide, though it is definitely possible to injure oneself on one, both reasons perhaps contributing to it being the most dangerous of the \"green\" activities. As long as the water is properly filtered, any handrails are sanitized between riders, and riders waiting in line and in the pool are appropriately separated, there is little risk of catching COVID.\nThe medium-risk category of activities has medium COVID risk and also medium non-COVID risk.\nGrocery shopping Going shopping for groceries involves entering a building in which others are present, including many workers who are present for hours-long shifts. The risk of catching COVID can be reduced by wearing face masks, barriers between staff areas and customer areas, and limiting customer densities. Grocery shopping while hungry Shopping for groceries while hungry does not carry any greater risk of catching COVID, but this shows a slightly increased non-COVID risk because people who go shopping while hungry tend to buy foods that are more expensive and less healthy. (Be advised that a study that popularized this \"common sense\" result has been retracted due to academic misconduct by its author, Brian Wansink .) Grocery shoplifting Shoplifting is taking goods without paying, so this activity is stealing groceries. It would expose you to the same amount of COVID risk as regular grocery shopping, but would additionally subject you to the risk of arrest and\/or physical retaliation. And even if not detected, self-inflicted risks may result from your possibly apocryphal chosen method of subterfuge. While this activity is not very risky and is colored yellow, it is probably not a good idea. Riding a single rental scooter with a stranger This is a bad idea, as most rental scooters are designed for only one person. It would also expose you to a stranger, who might have COVID. The safety concern of riding with two people on a one-person scooter is not reflected in the comic. Going down a waterslide with a stranger This carries the same risks as going down a waterslide by yourself (as long as the waterslide is designed for two people), but exposes you to a stranger who could have COVID. Getting in a stranger\u2019s car This can potentially be risky because driving is dangerous, and because murders have occurred in the past when people hitchhike. Getting into a stranger\u2019s car would also expose you COVID, if they are carrying the virus. A car is a confined space, which is generally considered particularly bad from a COVID perspective. Playing lawn darts This activity poses little risk of COVID-19 transmission, as this game is usually played outdoors and players generally do not have to be close to play, so standard outdoor precautions can be taken. Lawn darts can pose a moderate risk of personal injury if played unwisely, which is why they have been banned in their original metal-tipped form in the United States and Canada. Climbing up a waterslide with a stranger This activity poses similar risk of COVID-19 transmission as the \"going down a waterslide with a stranger\" activity, but there is higher non-COVID risk because waterslides are meant to \"go down\", and going against the normal flow of water (or without ensuring that nobody else is sliding down) may result in injury. Getting in a stranger\u2019s car uninvited This has similar risk as the normal \"getting in a stranger's car\", but there is higher risk of getting in a car uninvited , as you may be considered a hijacker or trying to steal the car, and thus the stranger may physically attack you. Doing skateboard tricks Performing tricks on a skateboard, especially if well away from other people, carries little risk of COVID-19 transmission, but carries a moderate risk of personal injury, especially when a manoeuvre does not go as intended and\/or the rider unintentionally comes off the board to collide with the ground and\/or obstacles. Riding a conveyor belt through the TSA x-ray machine This has relatively low risk of COVID infection, assuming the conveyor X-ray machine belt is sanitized; however, this is generally not legal or lawful and may get you in trouble with the TSA and other authorities, and you might get cancer because of the exposure to X-rays. Axe throwing contest Under normal circumstances, attending an axe throwing contest is a fairly risky endeavor, as an improperly thrown axe has a tendency to rebound off the target and could hit you (whether you are throwing or merely spectating). The global pandemic adds an additional layer of risk, as if you are engaged in an axe throwing contest you most are most likely in close contact with other people increasing your risk of catching COVID-19.\nThis is where things start getting serious. This category of activities has a higher COVID risk and same for the non-COVID risk.\nAttending in-person classes While there is low risk to injure oneself in class, most schools have closed at the beginning of the COVID pandemic to prevent the virus from spreading through close proximity attendees. Some schools have switched to online classes, while others have reopened and reduced the number of students per classroom. The risk of transmission would then be greater when attending in-person than online class. Attending online classes while in class at a different school Continuing on the previous activity, participating to classes in both modes at the same time wouldn't augment risks associated with COVID, but could cause mental exhaustion or similar stress-related symptoms. If you are not properly paying attention to a class you should be attending, or have inexplicably gone to a classroom that you have no reason to be in, there are further risks that you will fall foul of a teacher's or school's authority. Getting a dental cleaning Superficial dental work by a trained practitioner is not particularly risky under normal circumstances, but COVID precautions in most sitations (keeping at a distance, using face coverings) aren't compatible with the requirements of one person leaning in close to another person's open mouth and prodding into it with various tools. Going on a Tinder date Meeting a stranger is very much the point of a Tinder date. Even if the intimacy only extends to drinks and\/or a meal it is difficult to 'socially distance' while still being sociable. The meet-up intention, by one or both parties, might be expected to be even less distancing. As well as COVID risks from well-intentioned encounters, there are very basic risks (on the night or consequentially) to health and happiness that cannot be entirely ruled out. Getting a dental cleaning from a Tinder date It seems that the COVID risk from combining the above two activities do not significantly compound, but: the low likelyhood that an almost-random stranger is trained in dental hygiene adds to the non-COVID risks to impromptu dentistry; if they are qualified, they are unlikely to have turned up properly equipped; if they arrive equipped, without pre-arrangement, that may also be worrying. Doing skateboard tricks in a hospital Skateboarding in a confined indoor setting, or in rooms furnished with beds and equipment should be significantly more risky than in a skatepark or other typical venue. Possibly the immediacy of healthcare professionals and supplies makes the outcomes of any injuries less problematic. However, your exertions in the proximity of likely sources for the COVID pathogen is a significant issue in itself. Racing a scooter through a hospital with a mask on Your skateboard tricks may have been not particularly mobile, like Feet Stomps and other in-situ board-flips. If you're on a scooter ( foot- , electric- or combustion-powered ) that is deliberately traveling fast then you're living more dangerously. But at least you're wearing a mask, to slightly reduce the accompanying contagion risks... Racing a scooter through a hospital without a mask ...unless you aren't? Setting off fireworks in your car A car is an extremely confined space, and most fireworks need a lot of space once lit. It's not obvious if you are supposed to be in the car yourself, but there is at least risk of damaging the vehicle. Running and sliding headfirst into the pins at a bowling alley Intending to impact a bunch of 1.5kg pins, with your head doing the job normally done with a ~7kg ball, is not considered particularly risk-free. Being in a (normally) communal recreational facility, there may also be chances of contact with surfaces previously shed-upon by the exertions of a COVID-infected person. Stealing a stranger\u2019s car This is illegal, may involve risk of physical confrontation and do you really want to get into that driver's seat without thoroughly disinfecting it first?\nThis is where things start getting really serious and even somewhat absurd. This category of activities has the highest COVID risk and the highest non-COVID risk.\nSinging in church Being in a public gathering place such as a church is a significant exposure risk for COVID. While singing is normally harmless, in a church singing is often done without masks and in a group, further increasing exposure in this case. There have been cases of outbreaks traced to choir practices\/performances , which motivated bans on singing in churches. However, the same article mentions that a fluid mechanics expert studied the airflows from singing and various instruments and came to the conclusion that \"singing is quite safe\". (Certain instruments were another matter.) N.b., the outbreaks traced to the four choirs mentioned in the article were all prior to widespread practice of prevention measures. Going to a restaurant Restaurants are another place where traffic and exposure to COVID is high, as well as being a confined space. Other accidents, such as fires, falls, or choking add to the non-COVID risk. Going to a bar Similarly to restaurants, bars are also a place where COVID-19 spreads often. Bars can be more crowded than restaurants, with people sitting or eating in closer proximity. However, since the customers are more likely to be drunk and to get into a fight, the non-COVID risk is increased. Even if not engaging in violence, people who are even slightly inebriated are more likely to ignore standard precautions like social distancing. Going to a party \/ Hosting a party Parties are a highly social activity which increases exposure to COVID. Hosting or attending a party carries similar COVID-related risk as both involve interactions with others, while accidents can occur at a party, contributing to the non-COVID risk. However, hosts may still have a slightly larger COVID-related risk as they are more likely to be touching objects or surfaces on which the virus is present as they tidy up during or after the party, and are likely in proximity of all the guests during the party. Going on a cruise Cruises have been a site where many people have contracted COVID , leading to the high COVID-related risk. However, there are other risks associated with cruises that are non-COVID related, such as the risk of the ship sinking, or other sicknesses, etc. Opening a kissing booth at a COVID testing site Opening a kissing booth at a COVID testing site is likely to attract others who may be sick with COVID (since they are likely at the testing site to be tested, or to have been in proximity to someone who is), and kissing them greatly increases the risk of transmission. Opening a booth close to a testing site may also lead to controversy, adding to the non-COVID related risk. (A kissing booth is a place where one can kiss the person at the stand as a prize or in exchange for money). Doing skateboard tricks in a bar As mentioned before, bars are places where it is very likely to contract COVID. Doing skateboard tricks in such a confined space also leads to a very large risk of injury. Skateboarding in a mosh pit on a cruise ship Mosh pits are often very densely crowded with people, so the risk of transmission is huge. Also, doing skateboard tricks in such a crowded area means one could get trampled, knocked over, run into other people and\/or things, etc. Additionally, doing these on a cruise ship heightens the risk, as mentioned above. Getting a COVID test from a stranger at a crowded bar As mentioned before, bars greatly increase the risk of contracting COVID, and getting a test from a stranger means the test itself carries many non-COVID related risks coming from a malicious or incompetent stranger. Testing for COVID-19 involves taking a sample of mucus, saliva, or blood; any of these sampling apparatus may potentially be contaminated with COVID or other diseases if they are being improperly re-used. Bungee jumping while doing sword tricks While bungee jumping is an activity that is often not performed in a crowded area, meaning that it is difficult to contract COVID while doing so, the act of bungee jumping while doing sword tricks could lead to a host of injuries. Going down a waterslide on an electric scooter As mentioned before, if the waterslide is not used by many people, riding it is not likely to cause COVID. However, since waterslides contain water and electric scooters contain batteries (they don't mix well, safety-wise), many injuries may result. Also, some areas of the waterslide {i.e. tunnels) could result in you flying out of the electric scooter and injuring yourself further. Setting off fireworks in a stranger's car A car is a confined space, and so the risk of contracting COVID is higher. Setting off fireworks in cars also will cause many injuries to everyone in the car, and more injuries in reactions from the driver and\/or other angry passengers. Axe catching contest The proximity to others during a contest means a higher risk of contracting COVID. As for the axe catching part, injuries are likely to occur from attempting to catch flying axes, especially if the catcher is inexperienced. Racing a scooter through a hospital with a mask over your eyes A hospital is a place where COVID patients often stay, leading to a higher risk of contracting the disease. Having a mask over one's eyes would do nothing to help reduce the risk. Riding a scooter while effectively blindfolded in an area that has many obstructions like a hospital can lead to many injuries. Winning a test-tube-eating contest at a COVID testing lab Eating many test tubes which potentially contain samples containing COVID will almost definitely lead to one contracting the disease, and eating glass will lead to numerous internal injuries which will then easily lead to death. The title text proclaims that \"First prize is a free ticket to the kissing booth!\" further increasing the risk.\n[This comic is a graph plotting the safety risk of activities on the vertical axis and the risk of infection from COVID-19 on the horizontal axis. Lowest risks are in the upper left corner, and highest in the lower right. All activities are color coded green, yellow, orange, or red. A two way arrow labeled \u201cnon-COVID risk\u201d points up and down to \"high\" and \"low\" labels on the left side of the graph. Another two way arrow labeled \u201cCOVID risk\u201d points left and right to \"high\" and \"low\" labels on the top of the graph.\nFrom left to right and top to bottom:]\nStaying home & Video chats , Hanging out with friends in the park , Grocery shopping , Attending in-person classes , Singing in church Going for walks , Hanging out with friends on the beach , Grocery shopping while hungry , Attending online classes while sitting in class at a different school , Going to a restaurant Riding an electric scooter , Renting an electric scooter , Grocery shoplifting & Riding a single rental scooter with a stranger , Getting a dental cleaning & Going on a Tinder date , Going to a bar & Going to a party & Hosting a party & Going on a cruise Going down a waterslide , Going down a waterslide with a stranger , Getting in a stranger\u2019s car , Getting a dental cleaning from a Tinder date , Opening a kissing booth at a COVID testing site Playing lawn darts , Climbing up a waterslide with a stranger , Getting in a stranger\u2019s car uninvited , Doing skateboard tricks in a hospital , Doing skateboard tricks in a bar Doing skateboard tricks , Riding the conveyor belt through the TSA x-ray machine , Axe throwing contest , Racing a scooter through a hospital with a mask on & Racing a scooter through a hospital without a mask , Skateboarding into a mosh pit on a cruise ship Setting off fireworks in your car , Running and sliding headfirst into the pins at a bowling alley , Stealing a stranger\u2019s car , Racing a scooter through a hospital with a mask on & Racing a scooter through a hospital without a mask [extends from previous row], Skateboarding into a mosh pit on a cruise ship & Getting a COVID test from a stranger at a crowded bar Bungee jumping while doing sword tricks , Going down a waterslide on an electric scooter , Setting off fireworks in a stranger\u2019s car & Axe catching contest , Racing a scooter through a hospital with a mask over your eyes , Winning a test-tube-eating contest at a COVID testing lab\n"}
{"id":2334,"title":"Slide Trombone","image_title":"Slide Trombone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2334","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/slide_trombone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2334:_Slide_Trombone","transcript":"[Megan walking along carrying a trombone.] Offpanel voice #1: Hey, her old trombone. Offpanel voice #2: Cool, I haven't seen that thing since the 90s.\n[Four quick shots of Megan moving the trombone's slide back and forth. It makes sound, but not like an ordinary trombone.] FX: Slide FX: Hisss FX: Slide FX: Hisss\n[Megan does something else with the trombone, and it shoots water at the offpanel observers.] FX: Pshhhhh Offpanel voice #1: AUGH! Offpanel voice #2: So that's where my Super Soaker went.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Megan carries her \"old\" trombone , a brass musical instrument with a movable sliding piece used to change a musical note's pitch, which those offscreen apparently haven't caught sight of since the 90s (presumably the 1990s). These offscreen people don't suspect anything unusual of Megan's trombone until it turns out that it contains a water gun, which she uses to soak the other characters. It is unclear whether she has somehow hidden the water gun inside the trombone, has disassembled it to produce a hybrid trombone\/Super Soaker device, or otherwise modified the trombone such that it can shoot water as a water gun would.\nIn the second panel, she is priming the water gun by pumping air into it, following the sequence of pump actions used for the Super Soaker. During the first \"slide\" action, the user pulls the grip towards themselves, increasing pressure within the water reservoir of the gun. During the second \"hiss\" action, this grip is pushed away; a valve prevents air leaving the chamber, though a small amount usually leaks out. Part of the joke here is that a slide trombone also has a slide mechanism, held in a similar way as that of the Super Soaker, but which serves a completely different purpose. In the case of the trombone, when the slide is extended, the total length of tubing between the mouthpiece and the bell is extended, thereby lowering the pitch of the sound that is produced (there is, however, no comparable air chamber). This similarity between the two devices enables Megan to use the trombone's slide as if it were a Super Soaker's.\nIn the third panel, she presses the trigger, causing the compressed air within the water reservoir to push water from it at high speed, hitting the off-screen targets. One cries out in surprise, while the other expresses the realization of what had happened to their lost Super Soaker (that Megan had taken it as an alteration to her trombone).\nIn the title text, Megan asks those offscreen about the CPS 2000 , a water gun which, as is mentioned, was powerful but too powerful, causing injuries to those shot by it and allegedly leading to its discontinuation. Megan then, in connection with her previous question about the Super Soaker, asks to borrow a tuba, most probably to hide the CPS 2000 water gun inside. Her reasoning behind needing this tuba seems to be that the CPS 2000 is seemingly larger than the Super Soaker originally stored in Megan's trombone and thus would require a larger vessel (this use of the tuba may be cause for loss of friendship with an experienced player).\nThe CPS 2000 referenced by Megan was developed primarily by Lonnie Johnson (inventor) and Bruce D'Andrade for Larami 's Super Soaker product line. The \"CPS\" within its name refers to the \" Constant Pressure System \" used in certain water guns (its technology can be seen in this patent by Bruce D'Andrade). In this system, a rubber bladder within the water gun is pressurized by the user's pumping action, which draws water from a reservoir and pushes it into the pressure chamber, filling the bladder like a balloon. Once the desired volume of water is stored within the toy, the water can be released by means of a spring-loaded trigger and valve system. Upon release, the rubber bladder pushes the water out of the pressure chamber and out of the front nozzle, hitting whatever targets the user desires it to. The \"constant pressure\" of the CPS's name refers to the fact that the bladder will exert the same pressure on the water throughout the shot, ensuring consistent power and range, as opposed to air pressure Super Soakers, whose power will die off during the shot as the pressurized air within the pressure chamber expands, expelling the water but reducing the pressure in the toy.\nThe Super Soaker that Megan uses in this comic is also referenced in 220: Philosophy and 517: Marshmallow Gun . If the water gun featured in this comic is the same as that depicted in previous comics, it would likely be a Super Soaker 50 , the first widely available pressurized water gun. It could also be the less common but earlier model the Power Drencher or the later SS 50 Classic Series , Super Soaker S.E. , or the 20th anniversary SS 50 rerelease .\n[Megan walking along carrying a trombone.] Offpanel voice #1: Hey, her old trombone. Offpanel voice #2: Cool, I haven't seen that thing since the 90s.\n[Four quick shots of Megan moving the trombone's slide back and forth. It makes sound, but not like an ordinary trombone.] FX: Slide FX: Hisss FX: Slide FX: Hisss\n[Megan does something else with the trombone, and it shoots water at the offpanel observers.] FX: Pshhhhh Offpanel voice #1: AUGH! Offpanel voice #2: So that's where my Super Soaker went.\n"}
{"id":2335,"title":"Photo Deposit","image_title":"Photo Deposit","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2335","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/photo_deposit.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2335:_Photo_Deposit","transcript":"[Megan is holding a banknote up in one hand, while she is taking a picture of it with her smartphone held in the other hand. A starburst near the phone indicates the sound this makes. She is standing with her back to Cueball, who faces away from her. He is holding a banknote down by his side in one hand, while he is looking at his smartphone which he holds up in the other hand. From Cueball's phone there is a starburst from which a line goes up above him to indicate what is on the screen.] Megan's phone: Click Cueball's phone: Deposit accepted!\n[Caption below panel:] After a lucrative six hours for us, our bank removed the new feature in their app that let you deposit cash by taking a picture of it.\n","explanation":"Some mobile banking apps allow users to deposit checks through the app, by photographing the check and entering the relevant information. The comic parodies this imagining a bank that allowed you to \"deposit\" banknotes via a mobile app, by taking photos of them. The caption implies that this attempt is predictably disastrous, as it's shut down within six hours.\nChecks are essentially documents instructing a bank to disburse funds from a given account to a specified recipient, hence electronic transfers make sense: the recipient's bank can transfer the image to the depositor's bank and the funds can be transferred between the two. The check could only be deposited by the recipient, and any attempt to deposit the check repeatedly would be refused (and potentially subject the recipient to legal action).  By contrast, cash functions as a bearer instrument , where physical possession of the banknotes effectively constitutes possession of the funds. Hence, depositing cash electronically would make little sense, as the depositor would still have the notes (and therefore the money), and the bank would not. Such a transaction would enrich the depositor at the expense of the bank.\nThe title text states that the app recognizes the serial numbers on the bills and prevents users from depositing them multiple times. However, this would not solve the fundamental problem. Clients could still deposit all of their cash and retain ownership of it.  And they could then exchange those bills for different ones and deposit the new bills, repeating the process indefinitely (which explains Cueball's comment about \"a lucrative six hours\"). It is possible that Megan and Cueball are deliberately depositing the same bills to each of their accounts, given their close proximity.\nThe only way such a system could work is if every entity that accepted cash payments or deposits operated from a common database, functioning in real-time, which kept track of each transaction, and disallowed any further use of that specific bill. This would have the ultimate impact of making cash virtually useless, as once every bill had been spent once, all future transactions would need to be electronic (unless there were a system in place to physically distribute the appropriate bills to the appropriate people, which would defeat the entire point). Such a system is essentially the basis for cryptocurrency , which uses a crowd-sourced system to track the movement of money. But such a system would require virtually universal acceptance in a given country, and could not be implemented by a single bank.\nIn addition, the system would be highly vulnerable to counterfeiting . Common anti-counterfeiting measures include using distinctive materials and fine details, both of which are difficult to duplicate well enough to fool a human. Smartphone cameras, on the other hand, can't distinguish texture and may not have sufficient resolution to make out that level of detail. Counterfeiters could produce and deposit an almost unlimited number of bills, then destroy them, leaving little evidence of their crime.\nAs a result, this system would be inherently unworkable, and the party that would suffer from it would be the bank that implemented it in the first place. Which makes it realistic that, if a bank were to implement such a scheme, they'd very quickly realize their error and put an end to it. This is why the bank took down this system.\n[Megan is holding a banknote up in one hand, while she is taking a picture of it with her smartphone held in the other hand. A starburst near the phone indicates the sound this makes. She is standing with her back to Cueball, who faces away from her. He is holding a banknote down by his side in one hand, while he is looking at his smartphone which he holds up in the other hand. From Cueball's phone there is a starburst from which a line goes up above him to indicate what is on the screen.] Megan's phone: Click Cueball's phone: Deposit accepted!\n[Caption below panel:] After a lucrative six hours for us, our bank removed the new feature in their app that let you deposit cash by taking a picture of it.\n"}
{"id":2336,"title":"Campfire Habitable Zone","image_title":"Campfire Habitable Zone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2336","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/campfire_habitable_zone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2336:_Campfire_Habitable_Zone","transcript":"[A campfire is in the middle of the panel in a white area with two areas shaded green to the left and right of the fire. There are also two white areas outside of these green areas. Ponytail is sitting normally on the ground to the left of the fire, with her body fully inside the left green area. She is facing the fire and is holding a stick in both hands. The stick has a marshmallow on the tip and she is holding it over the top of the flames of the fire. Cueball is sitting to the right near the fire, only half inside the green are. He is sitting sideways leaning away from the fire, holding one hand to his head, while his other hand seems to be ready to support him as he is leaning further away from the fire. The arm closest to the fire and his head seems to be very hot as three small smoke-like lines rises from Cueball. Megan is crouching to the right of Cueball, far from the fire outside the right green area. She is supporting herself on one knee and one foot. She is also holding a stick in both hands with a marshmallow on it. She is holding the stick inside the green area to the right of Cueball far from the fire. Four small lines above and below indicates that she is waving the stick up and down. The camp fire is built up of several logs on top of each other, with big flames above it, with smaller flames hanging loose in the air above the main flames. A small dead tree is to the far left and small rocks\/stones lie along the ground all the way from left to right interspersed with grass tufts. Below the scene there is a label from which two curved arrows point to the two green areas.] Label: Habitable zone\n[Caption below panel:] Astronomers define the Campfire Habitable Zone as the region where you're far enough not to be burned but close enough to roast marshmallows.\n","explanation":"This comic plays on the concept of the astronomic \"habitable zone\" applied at the scale of people sitting around a campfire.\nThe habitable zone of a star is the range of distances in which a planet might support liquid water, and hence life in the only form that we currently know of (as an allusion to the \"not too hot, not too cold, but just right \" of the related children's story , the habitable zone is also commonly known as the \"Goldilocks zone\"). If the planet is too close to the star, then the amount of stellar radiation would be too great, causing the water to boil; too far from the star, and the planet doesn't have enough radiation, causing the water to freeze (although for life to actually exist, the planet itself must also have the right mass in order to maintain a life-compatible atmosphere and meet other such requirements). For our Sun, the habitable zone is estimated to range from about 0.38 to 10 astronomical units, where 1 astronomical unit is the distance from the Sun to the Earth.\nMarshmallow toasting is a popular camping activity in which people place a marshmallow (a soft, sugary blob made of gelatin and covered in corn starch) on a stick and over\/near a fire. As the marshmallow cooks, the inside becomes gooey while the outside becomes crispy (perhaps slightly charred and maybe even burned, depending on the toaster's preference), making it tastier via caramelization and the Maillard reaction .\nIn the context of the campfire, a similar \"habitable zone\" is posited by Randall to exist: a zone which is close enough to the fire such that the person can comfortably toast marshmallows, presumably on a stick of reasonable length (the ones in the comic seem to be about 1.5 times an arm's normal reach), yet far enough such that the person is not uncomfortably hot or even burned by either direct contact with the flames or by exposure to the radiant heat of the fire.\nTo demonstrate this hypothesis (with the habitable zones marked in green), Cueball is shown sitting outside the right habitable zone on the side of the fire. Even though he is able to toast his marshmallows on the fire due to his being close to it, he will have and is having part of his body scorched, as he is too close (fires can get really hot ). Megan, also on the right, is well outside the habitable zone on the side away from the fire. Although not burned, the marshmallow on the stick she is waving will presumably not toast due to its being too far from the campfire. Ponytail, on the other hand, has found and is enjoying the medium between the plights of both Cueball and Megan by sitting entirely within her (the left) habitable zone, thereby both being close enough to the fire to be able to toast her marshmallows while also staying far enough away such that she will not be burned.\nThe title text introduces the concept of tidal locking , in which one astronomical body synchronizes its rotation with its orbit around another such that one side always faces the other body (e.g. the case of Earth's moon, which always presents the same face to the Earth). The joke here is that if a marshmallow became tidally locked to the fire, then one side would become more and more cooked, perhaps burnt, while the other side never became toasted at all. This also may allude to the instance in which a marshmallow has begun melting more than you realized and dripped down so far that it no longer responds to your rotation of the roasting stick (the solution to which is to cut your losses and pull the marshmallow out immediately, before it drops into the fire pit).\n[A campfire is in the middle of the panel in a white area with two areas shaded green to the left and right of the fire. There are also two white areas outside of these green areas. Ponytail is sitting normally on the ground to the left of the fire, with her body fully inside the left green area. She is facing the fire and is holding a stick in both hands. The stick has a marshmallow on the tip and she is holding it over the top of the flames of the fire. Cueball is sitting to the right near the fire, only half inside the green are. He is sitting sideways leaning away from the fire, holding one hand to his head, while his other hand seems to be ready to support him as he is leaning further away from the fire. The arm closest to the fire and his head seems to be very hot as three small smoke-like lines rises from Cueball. Megan is crouching to the right of Cueball, far from the fire outside the right green area. She is supporting herself on one knee and one foot. She is also holding a stick in both hands with a marshmallow on it. She is holding the stick inside the green area to the right of Cueball far from the fire. Four small lines above and below indicates that she is waving the stick up and down. The camp fire is built up of several logs on top of each other, with big flames above it, with smaller flames hanging loose in the air above the main flames. A small dead tree is to the far left and small rocks\/stones lie along the ground all the way from left to right interspersed with grass tufts. Below the scene there is a label from which two curved arrows point to the two green areas.] Label: Habitable zone\n[Caption below panel:] Astronomers define the Campfire Habitable Zone as the region where you're far enough not to be burned but close enough to roast marshmallows.\n"}
{"id":2337,"title":"Asterisk Corrections","image_title":"Asterisk Corrections","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2337","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/asterisk_corrections.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2337:_Asterisk_Corrections","transcript":"[A screenshot of a text messaging app.] Other user: Do you have any weekend plans? User of this device: I'm gonna ride a horse on the beach at dawn *Eat *3AM *Couch *Pizza\n[Caption below the panel:] I like how we can do corrections in text chat by appending words with asterisks and our brains just figure out where they go.\n","explanation":"In text messages, asterisks are commonly used to denote a correction of some error in an earlier text. Asterisk corrections typically specify the corrected words, but do not explicitly mark the words that should be replaced. The words that should be replaced are simply the words in the message that make sense to be replaced by the correction, often the ones that are the closest by spelling or meaning to the correction.\nIn this comic, the messenger ( Randall ) corrects four such inaccuracies. The message, if the corrections were to be taken in order, might read \"I'm gonna eat 3 AM on the couch at pizza.\" The typical reader should be sharp enough to know that it should read \"I'm gonna eat a pizza on the couch at 3 AM.\", replacing the ones that are closest by function in the sentence. Randall finds this remarkable.\nTaken one at a time, it appears the reader would have the following sentences in their head:\nI'm gonna ride a horse on the beach at dawn (original sentence - sounds adventurous and sporty) I'm gonna eat a horse on the beach at dawn (replacing the action - a figure of speech?) I'm gonna eat a horse on the beach at 3AM (replacing the time - occultish?) I'm gonna eat a horse on the couch at 3AM (replacing the location - lazily occultish, or worse?) I'm gonna eat a pizza on the couch at 3AM (replacing the food - not too odd, but very slobbish)\nHuman brains can process these corrections automatically because the syntax of most English sentences are as follows:\nSubject \u2014 Verb \u2014 Object \u2014 Manner \u2014 Place \u2014 Time\nOther languages have different word orders but generally have the same six categories.\nThe messenger's original sentence can be parsed as follows:\nI (subject) \u2014 am gonna ride (verb) \u2014 a horse (object) \u2014 (no manner) \u2014 on the beach (place) \u2014 at dawn (time) .\nNotice that the four corrections fall into four different categories in this structure, so there is only one sensible replacement:\n\"Couch\" and \"pizza\" are both nouns so they could theoretically be subjects, but asterisk corrections must replace an existing part of the sentence satisfactorily, so the \"'m\" part of the verb prevents these third-person nouns from being parsed as the subject. Theoretically one could also swap \"couch\" and \"pizza\" around, giving \"eat a couch on the pizza\", but this makes much less practical sense than \"eat a pizza on the couch\". That said, in xkcd's fictional universe there is nothing to stop the character from eating a couch on a pizza.\nIn the title text, Randall says that he likes to make it as difficult as possible for his text recipient to guess where his correction should be, and uses the following sentence and correction:\n\"I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty.\" *witchcraft\nThe trick here is trying to figure out which word(s) should be replaced by \"witchcraft\". Broadly speaking, \"witchcraft\" could serve as an activity, but no words for activities exist in the original sentence, leaving the reader to guess at the intent. Possible solutions suggested in the comments are:\n\"I'd love to witchcraft , maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty.\" \"I'd love to meet up, witchcraft in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty.\" \"I'd love to meet up, maybe witchcraft a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty.\" (These three examples verbed \"witchcraft\" to mean \"perform witchcraft\".) \"I'd love to meet up, maybe in witchcraft days? Next week is looking pretty empty.\" \"I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Witchcraft week is looking pretty empty.\" ( Witchcraft week is an event in Bargota, Spain.  It usually occurs in July, the month in which this comic strip was released, although this year's event in particular was canceled due to COVID-19 -- which would indeed make it pretty empty.) \"I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next witchcraft is looking pretty empty.\"\nOf course, none of these solutions would be evident as correct to the recipient of the message, until Randall sends further corrections.\nOne absurdity in the main comic panel is that, after all four corrections has been parsed, the meaning of the resulting sentence has no connection with the original sentence whatsoever. However, asterisk corrections are generally used to correct typing mistakes, not to completely change the meaning of the original message. This raises suspicion as to why the messenger wrote the original sentence in the first place. Perhaps Randall does want to make the comic as difficult for his readers to parse as possible while making the point that asterisk corrections are usually quite intuitive to understand.\n[A screenshot of a text messaging app.] Other user: Do you have any weekend plans? User of this device: I'm gonna ride a horse on the beach at dawn *Eat *3AM *Couch *Pizza\n[Caption below the panel:] I like how we can do corrections in text chat by appending words with asterisks and our brains just figure out where they go.\n"}
{"id":2338,"title":"Faraday Tour","image_title":"Faraday Tour","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2338","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/faraday_tour.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2338:_Faraday_Tour","transcript":"[Close-up on Hairy] Hairy: Hey there superfans, welcome to the livecast!\n[Hairy walks toward an opening in a large building] Hairy: Got a real treat for you today: a tour of the world's largest Faraday cage! Hairy: C'mon, let's check it-\n[Two panels of a \"loading\" spinner on a black background]\n[Hairy exits the building] Hairy: -was so cool! Wow!! Hairy: Thanks for coming along, and don't forget to smash that like button!\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nHairy , addressing an unseen camera (possibly the reader's POV) welcomes viewers to a livestream broadcast - that he calls\/brands as a 'Livecast' - walking through \"the world's largest Faraday cage .\" A Faraday cage blocks electromagnetic transmission into and out of the cage area. Attempting to broadcast a walk through such a cage with any medium that uses radio waves would (theoretically, at least) cause the transmitter's signal to drop out completely, resulting in the loading wheel shown in panels three and four. Faraday cages do not necessarily have to be dark inside, as this one appears to be (they typically block longer wavelengths than those of visible light, which consists of electromagnetic waves). However, the darkness visually aligns with the concept of communications blackout , which is what Hairy's viewers experience while Hairy is in the cage.  The darkness could be taken as a metaphor for depending so heavily on electronic connectivity for one's view of the world that anything not directly connected is conceived as unobservable. (Alternatively, the light switch could be inside the cage.)\nThe Faraday cage that Hairy is visiting may also be an anechoic chamber for testing radio equipment, which would be completely lined with radiation-absorbent material , not just an open-air cage, to ensure that the measurements inside are of the highest quality.  There's no particular reason that it would have to have the lights off for his tour (in fact, it would be better to have the lights on so that he could see the features inside), [ citation needed ] but some anechoic chambers have been used for sensory deprivation experiments , in which participants are shut inside in total darkness and quiet.\n\"Smash that like (or subscribe, etc.) button\" is a typical command given by YouTubers to watchers, asking to publicly \"like\" the video or subscribe to their channel if they enjoyed it, ultimately to boost the creator's popularity. Developers want lots of views, likes, and subscribes because YouTube pays artists (e.g. $1 per 1000 views).\nThe title text refers to COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The joke is that, as they don't get cell service in the cage, the owners would be unaware of global events. This implies for comedic effect that the owners and workers solely live inside the Faraday cage, continuing the theme of treating connectivity as the only way to acquire information.  They would still be able to receive news if they ever step outside to welcome visitors, or have print media delivered, but their choice to unconventionally isolate themselves might reflect their general attitudes to the world outside and it is also implied that Hairy is one of the rare few outsiders they have pre-agreed to allow to visit, or one of the few people who would think to ask for and plan a tour during a pandemic.\nRandall has referenced Faraday cages for comedic effect in the past. See 1142: Coverage .\n[Close-up on Hairy] Hairy: Hey there superfans, welcome to the livecast!\n[Hairy walks toward an opening in a large building] Hairy: Got a real treat for you today: a tour of the world's largest Faraday cage! Hairy: C'mon, let's check it-\n[Two panels of a \"loading\" spinner on a black background]\n[Hairy exits the building] Hairy: -was so cool! Wow!! Hairy: Thanks for coming along, and don't forget to smash that like button!\n"}
{"id":2339,"title":"Pods vs Bubbles","image_title":"Pods vs Bubbles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2339","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pods_vs_bubbles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2339:_Pods_vs_Bubbles","transcript":"[Cueball is walking to the right with Megan.  He has his index finger raised dramatically.] Cueball: I refuse to bubble with anyone who calls it a \"pod\" and not a \"bubble\".\n[Caption below the panel]: This is probably my opinion that would have sounded the most incoherent to me a year ago.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nDuring the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic , various degrees of household self-isolation were often asked of people, depending on location, once it became understood that there was a virus spreading through contact\/proximity vectors.\nAs the initial surge of cases appeared to decline, in places where such drastic restrictions had been implemented and seemingly had prevented ever higher infection rates, many regions decreased the strictness of these measures. For instance, permitting any two households (neither having signs of symptoms) to meet with each other and only each other , or allowing one person in a multi-occupancy residence to invite just one other person to reassociate with. Further relaxation of rules may have occurred since, with the caveat that even one case of COVID-19 discovered in such a co-isolating group of people should be considered a risk factor to every other member (however the local jurisdiction deals with that).\nA common term for the larger social unit, not to overlap with any other expanded social unit, is a 'bubble', perhaps to imply that you can only have membership of one bounded bubble at a time (unlike an Euler diagram ). The term \u2018build your bubble\u2019 was coined by Dr Ingham (University of Otago, New Zealand) as a way of encouraging people with disabilities to create safe \u2018bubbles\u2019 with care givers during lockdown.\u00a0 Another common term is 'pod', representing the closed nature of a pod. There is probably as much variation across the world about what podding or bubbling practically means as there is between any two instances of those podded vs. those bubbled. Some sports leagues have resumed play in these structures, with the media using the bubble terminology , both in the United States and across the wider world , as players and commentators alike resume some degree even of international competition (so long as they follow the 'bubble' rules ).\nDespite the semantic inconsequentialities of the difference, here Cueball clearly expresses a personal preference that he would probably not like being kept in an enforced social situation with someone who uses the other term.\nRandall realizes that, despite his tendencies towards strong opinions on semantics, this particular point is one he would have been highly unlikely to say a year ago, and probably would not even have understood what it meant, because he could not have foreseen the COVID-19 pandemic and its widespread impact.\nCueball was shown using a literal bubble (a hamster ball ) in 2331: Hamster Ball 2 , but evidently got tired of being rolled around by the neighborhood kids.\nThe title text refers to travel restrictions. Many countries have placed limitations on its citizens' travel, particularly in and out of that country. Canada has mandated 14-day self-isolation on anyone who has returned from out-of-country, and has strictly limited any attempts to leave the country, with the United States being specifically noted as a high-risk tourism destination. Randall jokes that such measures are only 99% meant as COVID-19 precautions, with the remaining 1% being due to the authorities sharing Randall's semantic opinions.\n\n[Cueball is walking to the right with Megan.  He has his index finger raised dramatically.] Cueball: I refuse to bubble with anyone who calls it a \"pod\" and not a \"bubble\".\n[Caption below the panel]: This is probably my opinion that would have sounded the most incoherent to me a year ago.\n"}
{"id":2340,"title":"Cosmologist Genres","image_title":"Cosmologist Genres","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2340","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cosmologist_genres.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2340:_Cosmologist_Genres","transcript":"","explanation":"A cosmologist is someone who studies the universe; cosmology is a branch of astronomy. When describing the composition of stars in astronomical terms, metals are all the elements heavier than helium . This definition of metal is significantly broader than the one used outside astronomy . Likewise, this chart of musical genres describes everything \"heavier\" than pop as metal. The standard conception of elemental metals is a subset of the astronomical conception of metals; likewise, here the musical genre metal is presented as a subset of the genres cosmologists consider metal.\nRandall may have decided to portray pop music in a similar way to the elements helium and hydrogen as a reference to the \" pop test \", the test for hydrogen as a product of a chemical reaction.\nCosmologists also study the history and future of the universe, and the title text refers to the Big Bang . At roughly 10 -32 seconds after the Big Bang, the inflationary epoch ended, causing a large number of quarks, anti-quarks , and gluons to come into existence. In inflationary cosmology , this point is considered to be the end of the Big Bang. Randall jokingly refers to it as \"post-\" because nearly the entire history of the universe is after this instant. This is a reference to types of music with \"post-\" in their names, e.g. post-rock , post-punk , post-metal .\n"}
{"id":2341,"title":"Scientist Tech Help","image_title":"Scientist Tech Help","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2341","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/scientist_tech_help.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2341:_Scientist_Tech_Help","transcript":"What tech people think scientists need help with: [Cueball, Ponytail, and Megan are facing a second Cueball and Hairbun. Ponytail is gesturing with her hand out. The second Cueball has his finger raised.] Ponytail: Please\u2013our data, it's too complex! Can your magical machine minds unearth the patterns that lie within? Cueball 2: We shall marshal our finest algorithms!\nWhat scientists actually need: [The two Cueballs, Ponytail, Megan, and Hairbun are in the same position as before. The second Cueball no longer has his finger raised.] Ponytail: For a few weeks in June, the lab was infested by wasps, so we had to take pictures of the equipment through the window. Ponytail: How do you get graphs from a Polaroid photo into Excel?\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall pokes fun at stereotypes of scientists that \"tech people\" hold.\nIn the first panel Randall, presents an idealized view of the tasks of tech people. A group of scientists have run their experiments and compiled their data, but find that the data is simply too complicated for humans, even advanced scientists such as themselves; the tech people resolve in heroic statements to decipher the data with their most advanced algorithms. Large portions of machine learning and data science hinge around finding a pattern (either regression or classification) in a given data set, but the more common, real-world problem is in data cleaning and preparation. For the most part, the rest can be done with preexisting implementations. These types of tasks are those that tech people both expect to perform, and hope to expand upon.\nThe second panel presents a different reality. The scientists are fully confident they can interpret the data on their own, provided they can access it, because the methods of recording their data are incredibly sub-par. Apparently wasps had infested the lab, and the scientists had to take photos of their equipment through the window. This created a much more fundamental problem of data format than normal (image vs spreadsheet, as opposed to something more normal like pixel-wise vs vertex-based segmentation).  The joke is that the scientists' questions for their tech specialists are very mundane in nature; it presents not a chance to test and prove their machine learning systems, but a simple and tedious process of untangling digital paperwork. This is true in real life \u2014 experts' expertise is usually deep, but not broad, and helping them with issues outside their comfort zone is rarely glamorous.\nPolaroid is a brand of instant camera , though \"Polaroid\" is often used to refer to instant cameras in general. Excel is referring to Microsoft Excel , a spreadsheet management program.\nThe title text refers to WebPlotDigitizer , a tool which may be used on visual displays of data such as graphs and charts in order to extract the underlying data. This tool would have the potential to solve the problem which the scientists have by extracting data from the images taken of the equipment. Randall acknowledges the usefulness of the tool, but also expresses some dislike that the tool was invented at all \u2014 someone must have had the original data to draw the graph, thus if they had made the data available then he wouldn't have to reverse engineer the plot. Other possibilities are that he simply feels that the tool is too powerful and leaving him less work to do, or that tools so trite and seemingly unnecessary prove so useful in the end.\n2116: .NORM Normal File Format deals with nested file formats.\nWhat tech people think scientists need help with: [Cueball, Ponytail, and Megan are facing a second Cueball and Hairbun. Ponytail is gesturing with her hand out. The second Cueball has his finger raised.] Ponytail: Please\u2013our data, it's too complex! Can your magical machine minds unearth the patterns that lie within? Cueball 2: We shall marshal our finest algorithms!\nWhat scientists actually need: [The two Cueballs, Ponytail, Megan, and Hairbun are in the same position as before. The second Cueball no longer has his finger raised.] Ponytail: For a few weeks in June, the lab was infested by wasps, so we had to take pictures of the equipment through the window. Ponytail: How do you get graphs from a Polaroid photo into Excel?\n"}
{"id":2342,"title":"Exposure Notification","image_title":"Exposure Notification","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2342","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exposure_notification.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2342:_Exposure_Notification","transcript":"[Cueball standing, holding out his chiming smartphone to review alerts it has received.] Alert 1:43 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:38 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:36 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:31 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID.\n[Caption below the panel:] No one likes my new COVID exposure notification app.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nDuring the coronavirus pandemic, many apps were developed to implement digital contact tracing , using proximity detection or location tracking to notify people who had been potentially exposed to COVID-19. People who know they are infected are encouraged to isolate, and it takes time to test and find out if somebody is infected; so most notifications are retrospective, telling the user about past potential exposures.\nIn this comic, a different type of app has been developed. Instead of notifying someone if they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19, the app produces notifications if they have been exposed to someone who has not tested positive. (Perhaps it also notifies the user if they have been exposed to a person who has tested positive, but if this is the case, it hasn't happened to the user in question yet.) This is much less useful because most people one would typically encounter would either not be infected, or not be aware of their infection, so almost every interaction will generate a notification, annoying the user.  Also, being exposed to someone who has not tested positive is not good news, because it is still possible that the person might have COVID-19; it is simply less bad than being exposed to someone who has tested positive, but still worse than not being exposed to anyone.\nSocially and psychologically, modest amounts of people being close to each other normally is a positive behavior.  For a typical person, it could be considered a sad sign of our times if you needed an app to tell you whether you did right in social interactions and compliment you. (For socially awkward people , on the other hand, this could be a welcome development.)\nIn the title text, Randall decides to give in to users requests, and add a mode giving the bad news that you have been exposed to COVID-19.  Calling this dark mode is a play on dark referring to less desirable, as well as dark mode, a common user interface option. Dark mode is a common feature in apps which allows users the options to have a user interface that gives off less light. Alternatively, it may just be that the developer is completely misunderstanding the user's actual needs. This would be consistent with creating an app that alerts the way this one did in the first place.\nRandall has published similar \"useless useful apps\" in 937: TornadoGuard (a tornado-alert app that has lots of great features, except it doesn't actually alert the user about tornadoes) and 2236: Is it Christmas? (a web page that correctly identifies most days as \"not Christmas\", but then fails to identify Christmas Day as Christmas, for a >99% \"accuracy\").\nA week after this comic was posted, a user of the Canadian COVID tracing app posted an article about a similar issue: notifications from non exposure .\n[Cueball standing, holding out his chiming smartphone to review alerts it has received.] Alert 1:43 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:38 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:36 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:31 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID.\n[Caption below the panel:] No one likes my new COVID exposure notification app.\n"}
{"id":2343,"title":"Mathematical Symbol Fight","image_title":"Mathematical Symbol Fight","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2343","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mathematical_symbol_fight.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2343:_Mathematical_Symbol_Fight","transcript":"[A chart is shown with 30 different symbols arranged above a line with arrows in both ends and with 17 ticks between the arrow heads. The symbols are mostly in two rows, but the first two symbols from the left do not have another symbol above them, and towards the right there are a segment with three rows of symbols. Above the symbols there is a heading and a subheading. And beneath those there is a long arrow pointing right with a label above it.] Mathematical Symbols By how useful they would be in a fight More useful \u211d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2205 > \u221d \u03c0 + \u03a8 ~ \u21d2 \u22c5 \u0393 \u221a \u222e \u222b \u21c0 \u03b8 \u221e \u222a \u2208 \u2200 \u2202 \u2260 # \u0394 \u03b6 \u2135 \u03c1 \u2192 \u22a5 \u2013\u2013\n[Below the double arrow line are eight characters that fight each other in groups of two by  using some of the symbols shown above them as weapons. They have chosen symbols that are almost above them in the chart.] [Megan is awkwardly handling a giant \"\u211d\" holding it up against White Hat who is holding a \"\u03b8\" (or \"\u2205\"?) with both hands, as a shield.] [Cueball is holding an \"\u2208\" in both hands, with its \"tines\" pointed towards Blondie, who is swatting at him with a \"#\".] [Ponytail is leaping at Danish, swinging a \" \u03c1 \" like an axe, while Danish is leaning back and thrusting a \"\u2192\" back at her.] [Black Hat is swinging a long \"\u221a\" like a polearm at Hairy, who is holding a long \"\u23af\" defensively.]\n","explanation":"This comic imagines which mathematical symbols would be good in a fight if they were made corporeal in two (or three) dimensions.\nGenerally, objects with longer reach and pointier ends wound up on the right (\"more useful\") side of the scale, and symbols with less reach and more curves wound towards the left (\"less useful\") side. A straight line is farthest to the \"more dangerous\" side; however, the straight line does not appear to be any thicker or thinner, or pointier, than any of the other lines that would make it more \"useful\" (It should be noted that this chart seems to fall afoul of what Eliezer Yudkowsky (who also wrote HPMoR) calls the intent to kill : that humans tend to define \"winning a fight\" and \"useful\" as causing some form of bodily harm on their opponent despite survival and purely defensive strategies being an equally valid goals.).\nBelow the chart, with the symbols listed in order of usefulness, eight characters wield eight of the symbols. See the table below for the meaning of each symbol.\nThe comic invokes surreal humour by suggesting that mathematical symbols could be handled as physical objects in the real world. Another component of the humor is the implication that it is useful to prepare to use mathematical symbols in a fight, even though mathematicians, who use mathematical symbols, usually do not conduct their debates violently (though some stories suggest that Hippasus was killed by his fellow Pythagoreans for his proof that irrational numbers exist), and even if they did, they wouldn't use large reproductions of their symbols as weapons.\nThe title text refers to a Treble clef , which is not a mathematical symbol but rather a musical symbol . The note of concern in the text suggests musical symbols may be viewed in such fights as exotic or especially dangerous. See also the last entry in the table below.\n[A chart is shown with 30 different symbols arranged above a line with arrows in both ends and with 17 ticks between the arrow heads. The symbols are mostly in two rows, but the first two symbols from the left do not have another symbol above them, and towards the right there are a segment with three rows of symbols. Above the symbols there is a heading and a subheading. And beneath those there is a long arrow pointing right with a label above it.] Mathematical Symbols By how useful they would be in a fight More useful \u211d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2205 > \u221d \u03c0 + \u03a8 ~ \u21d2 \u22c5 \u0393 \u221a \u222e \u222b \u21c0 \u03b8 \u221e \u222a \u2208 \u2200 \u2202 \u2260 # \u0394 \u03b6 \u2135 \u03c1 \u2192 \u22a5 \u2013\u2013\n[Below the double arrow line are eight characters that fight each other in groups of two by  using some of the symbols shown above them as weapons. They have chosen symbols that are almost above them in the chart.] [Megan is awkwardly handling a giant \"\u211d\" holding it up against White Hat who is holding a \"\u03b8\" (or \"\u2205\"?) with both hands, as a shield.] [Cueball is holding an \"\u2208\" in both hands, with its \"tines\" pointed towards Blondie, who is swatting at him with a \"#\".] [Ponytail is leaping at Danish, swinging a \" \u03c1 \" like an axe, while Danish is leaning back and thrusting a \"\u2192\" back at her.] [Black Hat is swinging a long \"\u221a\" like a polearm at Hairy, who is holding a long \"\u23af\" defensively.]\n"}
{"id":2344,"title":"26-Second Pulse","image_title":"26-Second Pulse","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2344","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/26_second_pulse.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2344:_26-Second_Pulse","transcript":"[Science Girl is standing in the front of a whiteboard holding a pointer up towards the board. Ponytail, Hairy, and Megan are sitting at desks facing Science Girl.] Science Girl: When everything is still, seismometers pick up faint tremors we call seismic noise. Science Girl: Most of it is from ocean waves, cars, etc.  But there's also a mysterious 26-second pulse.\n[Close up on Science Girl. She is holding a hand palm up towards the board behind her, showing a map with Africa in the center and some other continents at the edges of the view. A star is drawn within the country of Ghana, near the coastline.] Science Girl: We've triangulated the source to somewhere in the Gulf of Guinea. Science Girl: It comes and goes with the seasons, but it's been there since at least the 1980s.  It's so regular we use it to sync up seismometers.\n[In a frame-less panel only Science Girl is shown, once again in profile. She has the board behind her and points the pointer towards the board.] Off-panel voice: What causes it? Science Girl: Not sure.  The most popular theory is that storm-driven waves set up some kind of resonance with the coast.\n[Science Girl has leaned her stick on the board's tray.  She has raised her clenched fists.] Science Girl: Another theory is that long ago, seismologists murdered a giant and buried the body at sea. Science Girl: Now we are haunted by the beating of its telltale heart! Science Girl: Could be either. Science Girl: Further research is needed.\n","explanation":"In this comic strip, Science Girl is presenting her project on geology to her class mates, and is explaining some of the non-earthquake signals that seismometers detect.  She describes a mysterious signal that repeats with a 26-second period .\nScientists have exploited this signal to correct for clock drift in historic seismic records.\nScience Girl initially provides a plausible explanation (some kind of natural wave pattern on the coastline of the Gulf of Guinea , which is in fact the most common theory about this signal).\nHowever, she quickly takes a turn for the dramatic when she claims that it might be a giant, murdered by seismologists, whose heart still beats.  This is a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart , in which the main character murders a man and hides his corpse beneath the floorboards, and then hears (or believes he hears) his victim's heart continuing to beat; the noise eventually drives him to confess his guilt to visiting police officers.  (The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart never uses that phrase in the story; he calls it a hideous heart.) \"The Tell-Tale Heart\" was previously referenced in 740: The Tell-Tale Beat .\nNormal human hearts beat much more rapidly than once every 26 seconds, but large animals and hibernating animals may have much slower heart rates (which would include a giant at the bottom of the ocean [ citation needed ] ).\nThe title text gives an alternate explanation for the seismic activity: volcanic activity , but Science Girl continues to believe in the giant story. In the last panel she references the common science meme that further research is needed, which has been mentioned several times in previous strips, including 2268: Further Research is Needed .\nA seismometer is a device for measuring vibrations in the earth's crust, and one is likely in the collection of Cueball from 2060: Hygrometer .\n[Science Girl is standing in the front of a whiteboard holding a pointer up towards the board. Ponytail, Hairy, and Megan are sitting at desks facing Science Girl.] Science Girl: When everything is still, seismometers pick up faint tremors we call seismic noise. Science Girl: Most of it is from ocean waves, cars, etc.  But there's also a mysterious 26-second pulse.\n[Close up on Science Girl. She is holding a hand palm up towards the board behind her, showing a map with Africa in the center and some other continents at the edges of the view. A star is drawn within the country of Ghana, near the coastline.] Science Girl: We've triangulated the source to somewhere in the Gulf of Guinea. Science Girl: It comes and goes with the seasons, but it's been there since at least the 1980s.  It's so regular we use it to sync up seismometers.\n[In a frame-less panel only Science Girl is shown, once again in profile. She has the board behind her and points the pointer towards the board.] Off-panel voice: What causes it? Science Girl: Not sure.  The most popular theory is that storm-driven waves set up some kind of resonance with the coast.\n[Science Girl has leaned her stick on the board's tray.  She has raised her clenched fists.] Science Girl: Another theory is that long ago, seismologists murdered a giant and buried the body at sea. Science Girl: Now we are haunted by the beating of its telltale heart! Science Girl: Could be either. Science Girl: Further research is needed.\n"}
{"id":2345,"title":"Wish on a Shooting Star","image_title":"Wish on a Shooting Star","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2345","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wish_on_a_shooting_star.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2345:_Wish_on_a_Shooting_Star","transcript":"[A Venn diagram is shown:]\n[The left circle is labeled \"Things people wish for\" and contains:] Love Money Fame Health Power Luck Success\n[The right circle is labeled \"Things shooting stars can cause\" and contains:] Radio noise Dust and ionized gas in the upper atmosphere Infrasound Cool lights in the sky\n[The only item in the overlapping section is:] Revenge\n","explanation":"This comic was published at the annual peak of the Perseids meteor shower . It is a common practice to make a wish when one sees a shooting star, in hopes that the wish comes true. This comic consists of a Venn diagram showing what things are commonly wished for upon seeing a shooting star, and what things the shooting star may cause. Shooting stars, as they are actually meteors, can only cause changes to physical phenomena, such as radio noise or the appearance of the sky as they burn up in the upper atmosphere. The only thing that is shared between the potential wish side of the diagram and the shooting star caused side is revenge. This would occur when a shooting star actually hits the planet, becoming a meteorite. This is frequently highly destructive, given the high speed of falling meteors. As such, it would be possible for the meteorite to hit something that someone for some reason or another wished revenge upon. However, given the massive surface area of the planet, the likelihood that someone's revenge would be \"granted\" by a meteorite would be very low (although not quite as low as dunking a meteorite through a basket ). The title text makes fun of this by detailing several incidents where a meteorite landed and caused damage.\nList of things that were damaged by meteorites (from title text):\nIf there is a \"message\" to this comic strip, it could be similar to those of 1024: Error Code and 2247: Weird Hill : that we shouldn't bother wishing for things that shooting stars can't give us, but should instead take time away from our temporal concerns and just relax and appreciate their beauty.  Or maybe the message is that, if you must wish on a shooting star, you should wish for revenge, because that's something that might come true.  Of course, as the title text makes clear, meteorites don't really land according to our designs and schedules, and if you're close enough to a shooting star to see it, and you wish for it to avenge you, and it is big enough to hurt someone, you're probably at risk yourself.\nMeteorites were most recently mentioned in 2328: Space Basketball .  Randall has discussed strange and \"impossible\" wishes in 1086: Eyelash Wish Log .\n[A Venn diagram is shown:]\n[The left circle is labeled \"Things people wish for\" and contains:] Love Money Fame Health Power Luck Success\n[The right circle is labeled \"Things shooting stars can cause\" and contains:] Radio noise Dust and ionized gas in the upper atmosphere Infrasound Cool lights in the sky\n[The only item in the overlapping section is:] Revenge\n"}
{"id":2346,"title":"COVID Risk Comfort Zone","image_title":"COVID Risk Comfort Zone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2346","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/covid_risk_comfort_zone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2346:_COVID_Risk_Comfort_Zone","transcript":"Ways to say no when someone tells you to do something outside your COVID risk comfort zone:\n[A comic with three panels is shown.]\n[The first panel is large. There are 2 Cueballs each wearing masks. Inside Cueball appears to be in a doorway that leads into a building. Outside Cueball is showing Inside Cueball a phone.] Label: Too Indirect Inside Cueball: You have to come inside. Outside Cueball: Ok, but... I've been trying to follow the science, and they're really emphasizing the transmission risk in enclosed spaces. I know you're wearing a mask, and I feel so awkward making a scene over a tiny risk. But I'm trying to keep my overall risk acceptably low, which means having simple rules so I don't overthink every minor decision. See, if you look at this spreadsheet-\n[Second panel, smaller. Only the Cueball outside is shown now.] Label: Direct Outside Cueball: I'm so sorry, but I'm avoiding shared indoor spaces unless it's an emergency.\n[Third panel, even smaller. Only the Cueball outside is shown.] Label: Too Direct Outside Cueball: I'm not setting foot in your haunted plague box.\n","explanation":"This comic is another comic in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nOne of the major vectors for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is in sharing an enclosed space with someone who is infected, especially someone who is asymptomatic and not aware of being infected.  Wearing a face mask, as both \"Inside Cueball\" and \"Outside Cueball\" are, will dramatically reduce the rate of transmission, perhaps by a factor of 30 compared to the \"baseline\" of neither wearing a mask, but given the limited volume of air available, it is likely that sooner or later one of them will inhale enough air with enough virus-bearing droplets to risk catching the disease.  This knowledge leads Outside Cueball to refuse Inside Cueball's invitation to visit indoors, but (in a recurring theme of xkcd ) leaves him feeling uncertain as to how he should refuse the invitation.  The comic proceeds to depict a spectrum of options.\nThe first option is overly technical to the extreme, to the point where Outside Cueball is effectively giving Inside Cueball an in-depth lesson on common health advice during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Being overly technical is a common trope among xkcd comics -- in particular, Outside Cueball's fervent insistence that he made a spreadsheet so he doesn't \"overthink every minor decision\" is disproved by (a) the fact that he made a spreadsheet (cf. 1445: Efficiency ) and (b) the events of 2330: Acceptable Risk . The second option that is presented is the most reasonable of the three, being an expression of reasonable concern, and a polite refusal to enter. The last option is simplified to the extreme, and successfully insults the owner of the building while still expressing a desire to avoid coming inside. The title text appears to be a continuation of the last panel. In it, someone, presumably Cueball, compares themselves to a vampire, because folklore has it that vampires cannot enter a building without permission. However, the speaker has no interest in coming inside, despite any invitations that they may have, whereas vampires usually want to come inside to drain the occupants' blood.  Some vampires will even take measures to trick an invitation out of a hesitant \"host\", which is something that would be unthinkable to Outside Cueball under the COVID circumstances.\nAs a fourth option compromise between the second and third choices, Cueball could just flatly refuse: \"No,\" or \"No, thank you.\"  We don't know the circumstances here (is Inside Cueball a friend of Outside Cueball, a shopkeeper, or just a passing acquaintance?), but clearly there's no urgent reason that Outside Cueball has to go inside, and so he doesn't owe Inside Cueball any explanation (nor any insults).\nOther comics mentioning \"COVID-19 risk\" include 2330: Acceptable Risk and 2333: COVID Risk Chart (which might itself be the spreadsheet made or used by Outside Cueball).\nWays to say no when someone tells you to do something outside your COVID risk comfort zone:\n[A comic with three panels is shown.]\n[The first panel is large. There are 2 Cueballs each wearing masks. Inside Cueball appears to be in a doorway that leads into a building. Outside Cueball is showing Inside Cueball a phone.] Label: Too Indirect Inside Cueball: You have to come inside. Outside Cueball: Ok, but... I've been trying to follow the science, and they're really emphasizing the transmission risk in enclosed spaces. I know you're wearing a mask, and I feel so awkward making a scene over a tiny risk. But I'm trying to keep my overall risk acceptably low, which means having simple rules so I don't overthink every minor decision. See, if you look at this spreadsheet-\n[Second panel, smaller. Only the Cueball outside is shown now.] Label: Direct Outside Cueball: I'm so sorry, but I'm avoiding shared indoor spaces unless it's an emergency.\n[Third panel, even smaller. Only the Cueball outside is shown.] Label: Too Direct Outside Cueball: I'm not setting foot in your haunted plague box.\n"}
{"id":2347,"title":"Dependency","image_title":"Dependency","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2347","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dependency.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2347:_Dependency","transcript":"[A tower of blocks is shown. The upper half consists of many tiny blocks balanced on top of one another to form smaller towers, labeled:] All modern digital infrastructure\n[The blocks rest on larger blocks lower down in the image, finally on a single large block. This is balanced on top of a set of blocks on the left, and on the right, a single tiny block placed on its side. This one is labeled:] A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003\n","explanation":"Technology architecture is often illustrated by a stack diagram , in which higher levels of rectangles indicate components that are dependent on components in lower levels. This is analogous to a physical tower of blocks, in which higher blocks rest on lower blocks. The stack in this cartoon bears a striking resemblance to a physical block tower, suggesting the danger that the tower will lose its balance when a critical piece is removed, in this case a piece near the bottom, labeled as being maintained by a single semi-anonymous person located somewhere relatively unimportant doing it for their own unknown reasons without fame or acknowledgement. The concept of balance is not intended to be communicated by a stack diagram, making this a humorously absurd extension of a well-known diagram style.\nImageMagick , mentioned in the title text, is a popular, standalone utility released in 1990 that is used for performing transformations between various graphics file formats, and various other transformations.  While there are also numerous libraries and APIs for performing these tasks within larger programs, ImageMagick is so popular and easy to use that many programs use its API or just find it easier to shell out to ImageMagick to perform a necessary transformation. They therefore depend on ImageMagick, and would break if ImageMagick were to disappear.\nTaking code re-usability and modularization to its logical extreme has been a long-time tenet for programmers; programming began as a slow task on very memory-constrained systems, utilizing punch cards and days of delay waiting to discover a bug, so that reuse made things possible that otherwise wouldn't be.  Once systems became small, fast, and able to hold a lot of data, the ability to provide higher and higher degrees of automation made reusable libraries a huge engine behind the development of technology.  By outsourcing what would seem like basic functions, such as string manipulation, to other libraries, developers waste less time reinventing the wheel, so the philosophy goes (or as Beret Guy's business practices literally: 2140: Reinvent the Wheel ), and thus many tiny packages, many of which contained only one function, became popular dependencies. This was especially true in Unix and Linux, where an entire program is commonly used for one small task, and programs exist to tie others together into powerful shell scripts.\nNode.js (a platform for JavaScript) and Python are two modern ecosystems providing huge stashes of centralized libraries where developers of the world can come together to stand on the shoulders of all the small useful libraries they make for each other, to make new ones that are more and more powerful, and also more and more prone to sudden new unexpected bugs somewhere in the dependency chain.  JavaScript was designed to be an easy to use front end scripting language, not a basic and core backend language as users of node.js's NPM package manager have made it be.  While in theory, such a system may sound good for developers who would need to write and maintain fewer lines of code, systems which are highly optimized are also highly susceptible to rapid changes. For example, the famous left-pad incident in the NPM package manager left many major and minor web services which depended on it unable to build. A disgruntled developer unpublishing 11 lines of code was able to break everybody's build, because everyone was using it.\nIn 2014, the Heartbleed bug revealed a significant portion of the internet was vulnerable to attack due to a bug in OpenSSL, a free and open-source library facilitating secure communication. One headline at the time demonstrated this comic in real life: \"The Internet is Being Protected by Two Guys Named Steve\" . The aforementioned Steves were overworked, underfunded, and largely unknown volunteers whose efforts nevertheless underpinned the security of major websites throughout the world. Randall provided a concise, helpful explanation of the bug in 1354: Heartbleed Explanation .\nThe current model of libraries and open-source development (topics which Randall has addressed extensively in the past) relies heavily on the free and continued dedication of unpaid hobbyists. Though some major projects such as Linux may be able to garner enough attention to build an organization, many smaller projects, which are in turn reused by larger projects, may only be maintained by one person, either the founder or another who has taken the torch. Maintaining libraries requires both extensive knowledge of the library itself as well as any use cases and the broader community around it, which usually is suited for maintainers who have spent years at the task, and thus cannot be easily replaced. Thus, there are many abandoned projects on the internet as people move on to greener pastures. Far from the days of backwards compatibility, that's usually not a problem, unless a project happens to be far up the dependency chain, as illustrated, in which case there may be a crisis down the road for both the developers and the users down the chain.\n[A tower of blocks is shown. The upper half consists of many tiny blocks balanced on top of one another to form smaller towers, labeled:] All modern digital infrastructure\n[The blocks rest on larger blocks lower down in the image, finally on a single large block. This is balanced on top of a set of blocks on the left, and on the right, a single tiny block placed on its side. This one is labeled:] A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003\n"}
{"id":2348,"title":"Boat Puzzle","image_title":"Boat Puzzle","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2348","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/boat_puzzle.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2348:_Boat_Puzzle","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are standing on the bank of a river. There is a boat in the river. A goat and wolf are also on the riverbank, and Ponytail is holding a cabbage.] Ponytail: I need to cross the river. I have a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. Cueball: Hmm.\n[White Hat appears, accompanied by two wolves and pulling a wagon full of cabbages.] Cueball: OK, here's what- White Hat: Hi, I also need to cross. I have two wolves and 100 cabbages.\n[Black Hat arrives, surrounded by a cloud of flying creatures and carrying a jar of bugs under his arm. Beret Guy follows with another wolf and goat on leashes.] Black Hat: I have 50 cabbage moths and 2,000 boat-destroying termites. Beret Guy: I have a wolf that can operate a boat, and a goat that eats wolves.\n[The fourth panel is a zoomed-out shot, where everything but the sky appears black.]\n[A trolley speeds in, leaving a trail of dust in its wake. A person is standing on the front, and many ears are barely visible above the seats.]\nCueball: Hang on, I need to make a spreadsheet. Trolley operator: Look out! Trolley operator: My wolf-filled trolley is out of control and can only be stopped by a cushion of cabbages!\n","explanation":"This comic is a twist on an old riddle . In the original riddle, a person has to cross a river in a boat that can only hold them and one other object. They have a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage that they need to bring across with them, similar to the first panel. If the wolf is left alone with the goat, however, the wolf will eat the goat; and if the goat and cabbage are alone, the goat will eat the cabbage. (The problem can be solved in seven trips.)\nHowever, the comic quickly devolves into surrealism in the later panels as new characters show up, bringing deviations of the original \"cabbage\", \"goat\", and \"wolf\" that add extra layers of complexity to the riddle. White Hat brings extra wolves and cabbages. Black Hat , in his traditional classhole style, brings cabbage moths which will infest unsupervised cabbages with destructive larvae, and boat-destroying termites . How he intends to bring them across the river (or even if he wants to) is unknown, but it brings to mind the parable of The Scorpion and the Frog . Beret Guy arrives with a wolf who can operate a boat, who could perhaps serve as a second pilot to expedite the crossing, so long as he is not asked to ferry a goat, and also a goat who eats wolves, possibly in addition to the cabbages. This is unusual, as one would expect from Beret Guy's associates.\nThe last panel is a reference to the Trolley Problem , a moral test that asks the participant whether they would passively let people in the way of an uncontrollable trolley die or actively divert the trolley to kill a single person standing on a branch of the tracks. The comic gives a twist here too: according to the title text, the characters must choose between stopping the trolley full of wolves with a cushion of cabbages (in which Black Hat's cabbage moths have laid eggs, which he implicitly argues are morally equivalent to \"innocent children\") or letting it crash into the river (at which point the wolf who can operate a boat will steal the boat to rescue the wolves from the trolley, which will delay the other characters from crossing the river).\nThe River Crossing puzzle was also mentioned in 1134: Logic Boat and referenced in 589: Designated Drivers .\nThe Trolley Problem was also mentioned in 1455: Trolley Problem and referenced in 1938: Meltdown and Spectre .\nUnlike typical Logic Boat problems the presence of multiple humans makes finding a solution almost trivial, however trying to determine the solution with the least number of trips could still make the somewhat challenging.  Because the set of constraints are both ambiguous and incomplete, it requires the reader to make assumptions that, in turn, will lead to different solutions.\nThe following assumptions can be made based on the setup of the problem or are necessary to avoid an unsolvable puzzle.\nThe trolley problem creates two versions of the puzzle, one where the cabbages are destroyed, the other where they are not and a wolf rescue takes place.  The ethical issues associated with the trolley problem are independent from the logic of how to cross the river.\nWith four humans involved, the first trip across can bring an extra human who then can guard the cargo as it is brought across in arbitrary order with care being taken not to have predator and prey alone together at the end.  The termites must be last cargo ferried across as they will destroy the boat.\nThe cabbages are destroyed. The second to last trip brings across the last human and the last trip brings across the termites.\nA pack of wolves is now on the near bank.  The last human is brought across in the third to last trip, followed by the last wolf and lastly the termites.\nNo information is provided about whether or not the humans all get along with each other and this is left as a possible exercise for the reader given all of the characters' varying personality traits.  However the sailing wolf would likely come in handy if certain humans (ex Black Hat, Beret Guy) cannot be left alone.  It is also probable that certain characters might not serve in the capacity as a cargo guard.\nIt is also unclear if humans can leave with their cargo once all the cargo has been brought across.  This could complicate matters if a far side \"guard\" leaves early.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are standing on the bank of a river. There is a boat in the river. A goat and wolf are also on the riverbank, and Ponytail is holding a cabbage.] Ponytail: I need to cross the river. I have a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. Cueball: Hmm.\n[White Hat appears, accompanied by two wolves and pulling a wagon full of cabbages.] Cueball: OK, here's what- White Hat: Hi, I also need to cross. I have two wolves and 100 cabbages.\n[Black Hat arrives, surrounded by a cloud of flying creatures and carrying a jar of bugs under his arm. Beret Guy follows with another wolf and goat on leashes.] Black Hat: I have 50 cabbage moths and 2,000 boat-destroying termites. Beret Guy: I have a wolf that can operate a boat, and a goat that eats wolves.\n[The fourth panel is a zoomed-out shot, where everything but the sky appears black.]\n[A trolley speeds in, leaving a trail of dust in its wake. A person is standing on the front, and many ears are barely visible above the seats.]\nCueball: Hang on, I need to make a spreadsheet. Trolley operator: Look out! Trolley operator: My wolf-filled trolley is out of control and can only be stopped by a cushion of cabbages!\n"}
{"id":2349,"title":"Rabbit Introduction","image_title":"Rabbit Introduction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2349","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rabbit_introduction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2349:_Rabbit_Introduction","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of a screen and pointing at it with a stick. On the screen is a rabbit shown next to a smartphone, some keys on a key-chain, and two coins. The phone is larger than the rabbit.] Cueball: The US's smallest rabbit species is the pygmy rabbit from the Great Basin area. Cueball: We're seeking a grant to introduce them into the east.\n[Blondie, White Hat, Megan and Hairy sit behind a long table. Blondie leans both her arms on the table. Hairy has one arm on the table. The other two have their arms down. Cueball replies to Blondie's question from off-panel.] Blondie: Are they native here? Cueball (off-panel): No. Blondie: Will they control some invasive pest? Cueball (off-panel): Dunno! Blondie: Then...Why would you do this?\n[In a frameless panel Cueball is seen in front of the screen, which is seen from the side. He points to something on the screen with the pointer, while looking over his shoulder.] Cueball: I don't understand. Cueball: Did you see how small they are? Cueball: They're so round! Cueball: Those tiny ears!\n[Back to the four people behind the desk. Blondie and White Hat are in the same positions but Megan has both her hands up into her hair, and Hairy has one arm on the table, and the other is held up high with a finger pointing up.] Blondie: I see. I'm afraid we'll be denying your grant. White Hat: Hang on. He is right about their ears... Megan: The little feet! Hairy: I vote we fund them!\n","explanation":"Cueball is giving a presentation on the pygmy rabbit to a group of panelists, requesting a grant to introduce the species to the eastern United States. The head of the panel, Blondie , asks about typical reasons for introducing a species. If they were native to an area, but had been locally depopulated, re-introduction can help to restore the local ecosystem, but Cueball admits this is not the case.  Another reason animal populations may be introduced is to control a local pest. Cueball seems to have no idea what the impact on the local ecosystem would be. In fact, he makes quite clear that his reasoning is simply that the creatures are tiny and cute, and he wants to spread them. He also appears to be entirely perplexed that the panel doesn't feel the same way.\nBlondie, very reasonably, immediately moves to deny the request. Not only would such a grant expend funds for no legitimate scientific or ecological purpose, but it would risk serious and unstudied impacts on the local ecosystem ( especially considering that this very thing has happened with rabbits before ). However, at this point, the other three panelists - White Hat , Megan and Hairy - have been swayed by Cueball's unconventional argument. All three of them are visibly entranced by the cuteness of the rabbits, and appear willing to fund the request purely based on affection for the animals.  This is sort of the opposite of the \" charismatic megafauna \" method of conservation - charismatic minifauna : the more mini, the more charismatic.\nThe title text mentions the effort to reintroduce the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit into their native area of the Columbia River drainage basin . It refers to an \"Interstate Bun Gap\", suggesting a competition between states over which has the most and\/or cutest rabbits.  That phrase is a reductio ad absurdum of other gaps in capabilities between states and nations, such as the bomber gap and missile gap (widely-publicized shortages - later revealed to be fictional - of the respective nuclear arsenals of the United States compared to the Soviet Union), perhaps similar to the satirical \"mine shaft gap\" from the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove .\nThis comic continues an xkcd tradition of dealing with the subjective cuteness of rabbits as a scientific discipline ( 1682: Bun ). Randall seems fascinated with the cuteness of lagomorphs, as it is a recurring subject .\n[Cueball is standing in front of a screen and pointing at it with a stick. On the screen is a rabbit shown next to a smartphone, some keys on a key-chain, and two coins. The phone is larger than the rabbit.] Cueball: The US's smallest rabbit species is the pygmy rabbit from the Great Basin area. Cueball: We're seeking a grant to introduce them into the east.\n[Blondie, White Hat, Megan and Hairy sit behind a long table. Blondie leans both her arms on the table. Hairy has one arm on the table. The other two have their arms down. Cueball replies to Blondie's question from off-panel.] Blondie: Are they native here? Cueball (off-panel): No. Blondie: Will they control some invasive pest? Cueball (off-panel): Dunno! Blondie: Then...Why would you do this?\n[In a frameless panel Cueball is seen in front of the screen, which is seen from the side. He points to something on the screen with the pointer, while looking over his shoulder.] Cueball: I don't understand. Cueball: Did you see how small they are? Cueball: They're so round! Cueball: Those tiny ears!\n[Back to the four people behind the desk. Blondie and White Hat are in the same positions but Megan has both her hands up into her hair, and Hairy has one arm on the table, and the other is held up high with a finger pointing up.] Blondie: I see. I'm afraid we'll be denying your grant. White Hat: Hang on. He is right about their ears... Megan: The little feet! Hairy: I vote we fund them!\n"}
{"id":2350,"title":"Deer Turrets","image_title":"Deer Turrets","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2350","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/deer_turrets.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2350:_Deer_Turrets","transcript":"[Black Hat is at a podium, addressing a crowd] Black Hat: Was it a mistake to build turrets that can track nearby wireless devices and fire powerful lasers in their general direction? Black Hat: Sure. I realize that now.\n[Face-front view of Black Hat] Black Hat: Was it a mistake to mount those turrets on neighborhood deer, release them, then lose interest in the project and move on? Black Hat: Yes. Hindsight is 20\/20.\n[Close-up, Black Hat holds up his index finger] Black Hat: But science is about learning from mistakes Black Hat: And not being afraid to make new ones.\n[Side view again] Black Hat: Like inviting you here, but not warning you to put your phones in airplane mode. Black Hat: Another mistake. Black Hat: But that's okay. Off-Panel: Gallop gallop Audience member: Is it really?! Black Hat: I think it's fine. Deer: Pew! Pew!\n","explanation":"Black Hat has built laser turrets that automatically shoot at nearby wireless devices. This could potentially be useful in a military context, but for reasons unforeseeable , he's gone and strapped them to local deer. Deer are well-defined by their tendency to move around (which Cueball attempted to exploit for ergonomic reasons in 1329: Standing ), typically in areas close to civilization, so attaching wireless-seeking laser robots to them effectively makes them organic killbots. As the last panel reveals, this can be circumvented by disabling wireless access on your devices (airplane mode), though Black Hat doesn't seem particularly concerned with letting people know this, and seems to brush these inventions off as simple mistakes.  At least one member of the press isn't convinced, sarcastically asking \" is it really ?!\"  It's not clear if the reporter is asking if it's really \"another mistake\" (i.e. expressing that this was Black Hat's plan all along), or if it's really \"okay\", but Black Hat chooses to interpret the question as meaning the latter, and declares that he thinks everything's fine -- after all, he's not the one getting shot by deer-mounted lasers.\nThe title, \"Deer Turrets,\" may be a pun on \"deterrents,\" as laser turrets would certainly deter people with wireless devices from approaching deer.\nIn the second panel Black Hat uses the common idiom \"hindsight is 20\/20 \". This may be a pun, as \"hind\" is a term for an adult female (doe) deer - as a counterpoint to the adult male (buck) deer being known as a \"stag\" - and a \"sight\" is a visual aligning device , often for weaponry. Whether or not the potential pun has any further caliber to its references, this might be the ultimate aim of this wording.\nThe auto-targeting laser turrets may be a reference to attempts by researchers at the University of Washington to create a laser-based battery charging device [1] . The device in question is mounted on a turret that locates and aims the beam at a photovoltaic cell attached to the battery. The same technology could theoretically be used with a higher-powered laser, but for the application described in the comic, the targeting mechanism would need to be altered to sense any electronic rather than the accompanying photovoltaic cell.\nIn the title text, Black Hat claims that his great grandfather designed the RMS Titanic , the then-largest ocean-liner in the world which sank after striking an iceberg in 1912, and the LZ 129 Hindenburg , the then-largest airship in the world which caught fire and crashed in 1937. He claims that his ancestor did not retire from the design business after the loss of the Titanic , but instead learned from it and made the Hindenburg \"iceberg-proof\". This is an obvious and humorous lie for several reasons. First, the lead designers of the Olympic -class Titanic and the Hindenburg -class airship were two different people, Lord Pirrie and Dr. Ludwig D\u00fcrr respectively, and Black Hat is probably not one of D\u00fcrr's great-grandsons (Lord Pirrie had no children). Secondly, while no airship has been recorded to be destroyed by striking an iceberg, it's not because of any \"iceberg-proofing\" efforts by Black Hat's great-grandfather, or anyone else -- it's just due to the basic fact that airships fly in the air, where there are no icebergs. [ citation needed ] Were an airship to strike an iceberg, it would almost certainly be destroyed; in fact, the even deadlier accident on the airship USS Akron resulted from the airship simply striking the (unfrozen) ocean.\nThe possibility of mounting devices on wild deer was previously referenced in the title text of 1924: Solar Panels .\nBlack Hat has built a similar device to target users of Google Glass in 1251: Anti-Glass .\n[Black Hat is at a podium, addressing a crowd] Black Hat: Was it a mistake to build turrets that can track nearby wireless devices and fire powerful lasers in their general direction? Black Hat: Sure. I realize that now.\n[Face-front view of Black Hat] Black Hat: Was it a mistake to mount those turrets on neighborhood deer, release them, then lose interest in the project and move on? Black Hat: Yes. Hindsight is 20\/20.\n[Close-up, Black Hat holds up his index finger] Black Hat: But science is about learning from mistakes Black Hat: And not being afraid to make new ones.\n[Side view again] Black Hat: Like inviting you here, but not warning you to put your phones in airplane mode. Black Hat: Another mistake. Black Hat: But that's okay. Off-Panel: Gallop gallop Audience member: Is it really?! Black Hat: I think it's fine. Deer: Pew! Pew!\n"}
{"id":2351,"title":"Standard Model Changes","image_title":"Standard Model Changes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2351","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/standard_model_changes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2351:_Standard_Model_Changes","transcript":"[A chart of the Standard Model of particle physics with red marks all over the chart.] Changes I would make to the Standard Model\n[In reading order:] u up, connected to the down quark below. c charm, connected to the strange quark below, in faded gray with a red l left written over it. Above is a red note with an arrow pointing to the\u00a0:charm quark. The note reads, Consistent quark names (use \"strange\" and \"charm\" for bosons) t top, connected to the bottom quark below. g gluon H Higgs, in faded gray with a red V Vin Diesel writted over it. To the right is a red note with an arrow pointing to the Higgs boson, which reads, With all respect to Peter H, the Higgs boson needs a flashier name\nd down, connected to the up quark above. s strange, connected to the charm quark above, in faded gray with a red r right written over it. b bottom, connected to the top quark above. \u03b3 photon G graviton, in red with a red border. To the right is a red note with an arrow pointing to the graviton, which reads, Let's just include it, it's probably fine\ne electron, connected to the electron neutrino below. \u00b5 muon, connected in faded gray to the muon neutrino below, with red rounded corners cutting it off. \u03c4 tau, connected to the tau neutrino below, in faded gray with a red scribble over it. On the tau lepton is a red note which reads, No one needs tau leptons Z Z boson, with the Z symbol and the Z in the name in faded gray. The symbol has a red s written over it and the Z in the name is scribbled out in\u00a0:red. The word strange is written in red between the symbol and the name. M magic, in red with a red border. To the right is a red note with an arrow pointing to the magic particle, which reads, Decoy particle for people making nonsense claims about \"quantum\" philosophy stuff\nv e electron neutrino, with the e as a subscript of the v, connected to the electron above. The v is in faded gray and a red N with a circle around it is written on it. Below is a red note with an arrow pointing to the electron neutrino, which reads, Fix neutrino symbol so I stop mixing up \u03bd and v v \u03bc muon neutrino, with the \u00b5 as a subscript of the v, connected to the muon above, in faded gray with a red scribble over it. On the muon neutrino is a red note which reads, Too many neutrinos v \u03c4 tau neutrino, with the \u03c4 as a subscript of the v, connected to the tau lepton above, in faded gray. Written over it is a D dark matter in red with a red border. Below the tau neutrino is a red note with an arrow pointing to it, which reads, We found it! W W boson, with the W symbol and the W in the name in faded gray. The symbol has a red c written over it and the W in the name is scribbled out in red. The word charm is written in red between the symbol and the name. \ud83d\udc1e cool bugs, in red with a red border. To the right is a red note with an arrow pointing to cool bugs, which reads, Very small bugs are fundamental particles now\n","explanation":"In this comic strip, Randall is proposing some changes to the Standard Model of particle physics. The currently accepted particle table has 17 slots: 12 fermions (first 3 columns of the table - six quarks [top two rows] and six leptons [bottom two rows]) and five bosons (last two columns of the table - four gauge bosons [left hand column] and one scalar boson [right hand column]).\n\nThis comic consists of a normal version of the particle table to which Randall has made substantial alternations and additions, which are drawn in red over the black and white table.\nWhile the Standard Model's predictions are very well supported by experiments, the physics community has identified several flaws in it (e.g. it lacks any particles to convey gravity), and so lots of research is committed to searching for \" Physics beyond the Standard Model \".  Some of Randall's changes are sort of intended to fill some of those gaps, but for the most part they are nonsensical (although not quite as much as the Turtle Sandwich Standard Model or Fixion ).\nRandall's proposed changes to the quarks are relatively restrained -- he proposes only that the \"strange\" and \"charm\" names should be moved to bosons, while the strange quark should be renamed the \"right quark\" and the charm quark should be renamed the \"left quark\", so that all quarks will have \"ordinary\" directional names.\nIn reality, the original quark model proposed by Murray Gell-Mann included only three quarks, with the \"strange\" quark so named because the particles that contained them were strangely long-lived relative to their masses.  The \"charm\" quark was so named when it was proposed because it brought a \"charming\" symmetry to the weak interaction, which we now understand is because it completes the second generation of quarks, along with the strange quark.  When a third generation of quarks was proposed, they were called top and bottom by analogy to the up and down quarks (which are so named because of the isospin they carry), though the names 'truth' and 'beauty' were briefly in competition, and colliders working with B quarks are sometimes even now called \" Beauty Factories \".\nRandall likely applied \"left\" to \"strange\" and \"right\" to \"charm\" simply due to the placement of the particles in the table: In the American English vernacular, the phrase \"left and right\" is more common than \"right and left\", in the same way that \"top and bottom\" is more common than \"bottom and top\", and \"up and down\" is more common than \"down and up\". So he placed \"left\" above \"right\" to match the ordering of the other quark generations.\nWhile Randall leaves two leptons, the electron and the muon, untouched, he has opted to discard the tau lepton entirely. Each of these three leptons has an associated neutrino; Randall has decided to discard all but the electron neutrino, as he has decided that three are too many neutrino types. He has also replaced the standard symbol for the neutrino, the Greek letter \u03bd (nu), with a capital N, in order to avoid confusion between \u03bd and v, the two letters appearing similar, though this might further be confused with nucleon (particle physicists commonly use N to denote \"proton or neutron\", and excited states of nucleons are given the symbol N, followed by the mass in parenthesis [1] ) or possibly even with the symbol for Nitrogen (the atomic nucleus with 7 protons and a similar number of neutrons, encountered more in radiology\/chemistry as an N, 7 N, 14 N, N + , N 2 and other variations).\nIn place of one of the neutrinos, Randall has introduced a new elementary particle that supposedly explains the existence of dark matter. The nature of dark matter is one of the most famous mysteries in physics: galaxies seem to have much higher gravity than their detectable matter would account for, yet this mysterious form of matter does not seem to interact with other matter in any other detectable way. Neutrinos are known for rarely interacting with other matter, due to their lack of charge, which could justify Randall's decision, but even the little interaction that neutrinos have with the weak force rules them out as candidates for dark matter.  Hypothetical sterile neutrinos could be the source of dark matter, and also for the small but nonzero masses of the familiar neutrinos, but no such particles have yet been identified. Together with the arrow, the only one in the comic that points at the particle's box rather than the symbol, the triumphant exclamation \"We found it!\" probably means that the new \"dark matter\" entry in the table is the dark matter particle.\nRandall proposes several new names for existing particles.  First, that the W and Z bosons should be renamed to the charm and strange bosons, respectively (taking the names from the quarks), and second, that the Higgs boson should be named the Vin Diesel boson, as he considers Peter Higgs 's name to be too boring to be given to a particle.  The Higgs boson is known in the popular press (to the chagrin of many physicists, including Higgs) as \" The God Particle \", which is certainly a flashy name, but which itself was changed by the editors of the book of the same name from its authors' originally-intended title: The Goddamn Particle.\nRandall inserts the graviton, a purely theoretical particle, noting that its inclusion is \"probably fine\". While the graviton has never been observed, it is occasionally included in diagrams of the standard model to show its hypothetical place, which likely convinced Randall to do the same. Here it is shown below the Higgs boson, implying to be a scalar boson, though it is theoretically a 2nd-order tensor boson (with a spin of 2) and is usually given its own column.\nRandall also proposes that a false decoy \"Magic\" particle should be added to the Standard Model, to trip up promoters of quantum mysticism .  Presumably, anyone who invokes this particle to support their claims will expose themselves as a fraud, much as cartographers will print trap streets on their maps to catch plagiarism.\nFinally, Randall adds \"Cool bugs\" as a fundamental particle, with an explanation of \"Very small bugs are fundamental particles now\".\nThe title text builds on the \"Cool bugs\" entry, joking about what spin bugs would have if they were a fundamental particle.\nThe title text references quantum spin number , a property of particles in physics that bears similarities to actual spinning. Although the cool bugs particle is put in the scalar boson group with spin 0, Randall states that it instead has spin 1\/2, like a fermion. It is thus not clear whether cool bugs obey the Pauli exclusion principle or not. Unique among elemental particles, cool bugs are affected by wind, which can change their spin.\nChanges highlighted in red .\n[A chart of the Standard Model of particle physics with red marks all over the chart.] Changes I would make to the Standard Model\n[In reading order:] u up, connected to the down quark below. c charm, connected to the strange quark below, in faded gray with a red l left written over it. Above is a red note with an arrow pointing to the\u00a0:charm quark. The note reads, Consistent quark names (use \"strange\" and \"charm\" for bosons) t top, connected to the bottom quark below. g gluon H Higgs, in faded gray with a red V Vin Diesel writted over it. To the right is a red note with an arrow pointing to the Higgs boson, which reads, With all respect to Peter H, the Higgs boson needs a flashier name\nd down, connected to the up quark above. s strange, connected to the charm quark above, in faded gray with a red r right written over it. b bottom, connected to the top quark above. \u03b3 photon G graviton, in red with a red border. To the right is a red note with an arrow pointing to the graviton, which reads, Let's just include it, it's probably fine\ne electron, connected to the electron neutrino below. \u00b5 muon, connected in faded gray to the muon neutrino below, with red rounded corners cutting it off. \u03c4 tau, connected to the tau neutrino below, in faded gray with a red scribble over it. On the tau lepton is a red note which reads, No one needs tau leptons Z Z boson, with the Z symbol and the Z in the name in faded gray. The symbol has a red s written over it and the Z in the name is scribbled out in\u00a0:red. The word strange is written in red between the symbol and the name. M magic, in red with a red border. To the right is a red note with an arrow pointing to the magic particle, which reads, Decoy particle for people making nonsense claims about \"quantum\" philosophy stuff\nv e electron neutrino, with the e as a subscript of the v, connected to the electron above. The v is in faded gray and a red N with a circle around it is written on it. Below is a red note with an arrow pointing to the electron neutrino, which reads, Fix neutrino symbol so I stop mixing up \u03bd and v v \u03bc muon neutrino, with the \u00b5 as a subscript of the v, connected to the muon above, in faded gray with a red scribble over it. On the muon neutrino is a red note which reads, Too many neutrinos v \u03c4 tau neutrino, with the \u03c4 as a subscript of the v, connected to the tau lepton above, in faded gray. Written over it is a D dark matter in red with a red border. Below the tau neutrino is a red note with an arrow pointing to it, which reads, We found it! W W boson, with the W symbol and the W in the name in faded gray. The symbol has a red c written over it and the W in the name is scribbled out in red. The word charm is written in red between the symbol and the name. \ud83d\udc1e cool bugs, in red with a red border. To the right is a red note with an arrow pointing to cool bugs, which reads, Very small bugs are fundamental particles now\n"}
{"id":2352,"title":"Synonym Date","image_title":"Synonym Date","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2352","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/synonym_date.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2352:_Synonym_Date","transcript":"[Ponytail and Hairy talking.] Ponytail: So, how is she? Hairy: Well...she's a talented writer. Seems very cool. Ponytail: ...but? Hairy: She's really into...synonyms.\nPonytail: I don't understand. Hairy: Her hobby is finding the most unsettling possible words for any sentence. Ponytail: Word games? That doesn't sound too bad. Hairy: Well...\n[Caption above reads \"Earlier...\"] [Megan is wearing a dress and talking to Hairy, who is dripping wet.] Megan: Ugh, it's so watery out. Megan: You must be clammy! Want to guzzle some tea?\n[Hairy is now less wet and holding a cup of warm tea.] Megan: Let me slough off this dress, Megan: and slither into something more comfortable.","explanation":"Ponytail asks Hairy about Megan , his date. Hairy mentions that she's a talented writer and seems cool, but when prompted by Ponytail, says Megan is into synonyms. Megan apparently enjoys unsettling Hairy with words. Ponytail thinks word games aren't too bad, and she would be right if it weren't for Megan's unsettling use of them.\nIn the next panel (labeled \"Earlier...\"), it's raining (or humid), and Hairy comes back in. Megan comments, \"Ugh, it's so watery out. You must be clammy! Want to guzzle some tea?\" replacing wet (or humid ), cold (or sweaty ), and drink with more suggestive, possibly-repulsive-sounding words. \"Clammy\" does technically refer to having damp skin, but it is usually used in the context of nervousness or illness, and \"guzzle\" suggests very rapid consumption, which is not a safe way of drinking hot tea, and is also considered rude when enjoying a meal with others, especially romantic interests. Continuing, she says, \"Let me slough off this dress, and slither into something more comfortable,\" replacing take (or remove , or disrobe ) and slip . This last sentence of course strongly suggests snakes shedding their skin.  Serpentine movements are sometimes regarded as alluring and attractive , but people usually don't favorably compare their clothing to snakes' skin care. [ citation needed ]\nShe further elaborates on this in the title text, saying \"We need some grub to munch -- I'll go slouch over to the kitchen.\" By using the word \"grub,\" she presumably means the slang term for basic food like the type served in pubs (which is often greasy fast-food, served in a dirty -- one might even say grubby -- environment), though it may also invoke the image of white insect larvae, like pale lumps of flesh squirming in a dark hole, while \"slouching\" has connotations of laziness or suspicious activity, rather than romance.\nExcessive use of uncommon words is a common trope in fiction, and also seen in real life. Usually, the speaker is trying to demonstrate their superior intelligence or knowledge. Megan, on the other hand, seeks to use a similar tactic to make listeners uncomfortable. The words she's using aren't especially complex or uncommon, and they're technically correct, but they've been selected to evoke disgust in the listener.\nStrange synonyms were also the focus in 1322: Winter , and a similar concept was the joke in 919: Tween Bromance (although in that strip, Cueball was making Megan uncomfortable).  Megan has previously shown off her love of uncomfortable puns (\"Vore of the Roses\") in 2245: Edible Arrangements .\nRandall has written many comic strips before about his (comical, fictional) hobbies , but this is the first time he's written about someone else's hobby.\n[Ponytail and Hairy talking.] Ponytail: So, how is she? Hairy: Well...she's a talented writer. Seems very cool. Ponytail: ...but? Hairy: She's really into...synonyms.\nPonytail: I don't understand. Hairy: Her hobby is finding the most unsettling possible words for any sentence. Ponytail: Word games? That doesn't sound too bad. Hairy: Well...\n[Caption above reads \"Earlier...\"] [Megan is wearing a dress and talking to Hairy, who is dripping wet.] Megan: Ugh, it's so watery out. Megan: You must be clammy! Want to guzzle some tea?\n[Hairy is now less wet and holding a cup of warm tea.] Megan: Let me slough off this dress, Megan: and slither into something more comfortable."}
{"id":2353,"title":"Hurricane Hunters","image_title":"Hurricane Hunters","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2353","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hurricane_hunters.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2353:_Hurricane_Hunters","transcript":"[Black hat facing left] Black Hat: Yes, flying into the eye of a hurricane is dangerous.\n[Cueball on left at a desk being addressed by Black Hat on the right] Black Hat: But it provides us with crucial data that helps us understand and predict these storms.\n[Same as previous cell, with Black Hat raising his hand] Cueball: But your passengers had bought tickets to St. Louis. Black Hat: They should be proud of our contributions to meteorology!\nEverything on Cueball's desk has gone missing in panel 3.\n","explanation":"The comic strip opens with Black Hat explaining to Cueball (who is presumed to be some government official) that flying into hurricanes, while risky, provides valuable scientific data. Although the eye itself is relatively calm, it is surrounded by the eyewall , a region of extremely intense thunderstorms.  Thus, the danger of flying through such storms must be carefully weighed against the scientific knowledge being gained.  In the real world, such missions are conducted by highly-trained pilots with specialized aircraft, such as the NOAA Hurricane Hunters and the US Air Force's 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (also nicknamed \"Hurricane Hunters\").\nHowever, Cueball's comment in the third panel shows that Black Hat is not discussing the activity of hurricane hunting in general, but rather is attempting to justify his decision to fly a passenger jet through the eye of a hurricane.  Passenger airliners are not meant to fly into hurricanes, [ citation needed ] and can easily crash there.  It's not clear if Black Hat is (somehow) a jet pilot himself, has come into ownership of an airline and was merely directing a flight, or, probably most likely , simply hijacked the flight he happened to be on, but the commercial jet passengers were not expecting to \"participate\" in a hurricane hunting mission.  Black Hat replies that, instead of being upset, the passengers should be proud of their contributions to meteorology, but their contribution is probably negligible, as they were not actively collecting useful scientific data.\nThis comic is likely referencing both Hurricane Laura , which was active during the week prior to this comic strip's publication, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 , which players have been utilising the software's ability to simulate real-time weather to fly into and  explore the (virtual) aforementioned hurricane. The simulator currently only has passenger aircraft available to pilot, echoing Black Hat's flying of a commercial jet into a hurricane. A similar situation where historical\/well-documented experimental techniques are used in inappropriate situations occurs in 1594: Human Subjects , albeit by test subjects rather than \u201cresearchers\u201d, if Black Hat can be called that.\nIn the title text, Black Hat says that their flight gathered data on the possibility of making loops in the eye of the hurricane by passenger airliners, but if it had actually done a loop, he probably would have said so.\nThe Boeing 707 was made to successfully execute a barrel roll and fly inverted during a 1955 test flight . If no flight envelope protections are active, barrel rolls are possible with any aircraft and any helicopter, because the aircraft and its fuel systems only experience mild and positive g loads, never negative ones. Likewise, the air flow stays the same as in level flight. Problematic is ending the barrel roll, as there is a possibility of exceeding the safe speed limits.\nAnother passenger jet that was barrel-rolled is the Concorde . Pilots Brian Walpole and Jean Franchi did on a test flight - not once, but several times.\nLoops are a lot more problematic because of the speeds reached when ending the maneuver, and the speed needed to begin it. But like the barrel roll, a loop can be flown while only experiencing mild and positive g loads. In fact, Harold E. Thompson flew several loopings in a Sikorsky S-52 , a helicopter first flown in 1947. Prolonged inverted flights, though, cause negative g forces, an altered air flow, and cause havoc with the fuel systems, parts of which are gravity-driven. Aircraft that can fly inverted for longer than a few seconds are specifically designed, for example aerobatic aircraft and fighter jets.\nIt is possible that this is his justification of why the flight contributed to meteorology. However, passenger airliners' abilities to do loops has nothing to do with that field of science. Moreover, the same data could be gathered by flying the same airliner without passengers, or with willing ones.\n[Black hat facing left] Black Hat: Yes, flying into the eye of a hurricane is dangerous.\n[Cueball on left at a desk being addressed by Black Hat on the right] Black Hat: But it provides us with crucial data that helps us understand and predict these storms.\n[Same as previous cell, with Black Hat raising his hand] Cueball: But your passengers had bought tickets to St. Louis. Black Hat: They should be proud of our contributions to meteorology!\nEverything on Cueball's desk has gone missing in panel 3.\n"}
{"id":2354,"title":"Stellar Evolution","image_title":"Stellar Evolution","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2354","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/stellar_evolution.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2354:_Stellar_Evolution","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart stands in front of a chalkboard. On the board are squiggly lines of text and a series of growing circles] Miss Lenhart: After a star begins fusing hydrogen, it may reach a stable equilibrium in which it separates from Massachusetts and develops a thriving lobster industry. Miss Lenhart: This is known as the Maine Sequence.\n","explanation":"This is a pun on the main sequence , the continuous and distinctive band of stars that appear on Hertzsprung\u2013Russell diagrams . Stars on this band are known as main-sequence stars. These are the most numerous stars in the universe, and include the Earth's Sun. The main sequence forms a major part of a star's life cycle, with smaller stars spending more time on it, where they transform hydrogen to helium via nuclear fusion to generate energy and sustain themselves.\nMiss Lenhart starts off apparently describing the main sequence. However, she veers off into the history of Maine , the most northeastern of the 48 contiguous US states. She mentions the separation of Maine from Massachusetts and its lobster fishing industry, similar to how, soon after the beginning of their lifespans, stars evolve from early stages (like T-Tauri stars) and go onto the main sequence, where they become stable and stay for a long time. She makes a play between \"main\" and the U.S. state of \" Maine \", which are homophones . The allusion to stars might also be a reference to the representation of individual states as stars on the canton of the US flag.\nThe title text puns on either the state or the star slowly growing for a long time, before suddenly becoming \"redder\". In the case of the state, the population of Maine has been slowly but steadily growing over the last century, increasing from about 700,000 in 1900 to about 1,350,000 in 2020. [1] Similarly, stars with a mass of 0.6\u201310 M\u2609 slowly grow while they are on the main sequence, then increase in size and leave the main sequence in the subgiant phase, before suddenly becoming red giants.\nIn American politics, \"red\" most recently refers to the Republican party (NBC showed Republicans in blue and Democrats in red until 1996, and CNN until 1992). While in the past Maine has frequently voted for Democratic party candidates, Republican party candidates have increasingly won more campaigns or lose campaigns with larger minorities of the vote. For instance, Maine, which has used a district-based voting system, voted in its entirety for the Democratic party presidential candidates in the 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections, but one of its districts voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Meanwhile, a main sequence star transitions eventually into a red giant , also becoming \"redder\". Alternatively, the color change could refer to lobsters; when one is cooked, it turns from a bluish-green to a bright red-orange. \"Red\" is unfortunately also used in the derogatory terms \"rednecks\" for rural lower income folks (Maine is a predominantly rural, lower income state), and \"redskins\" for indigenous Native Americans (discussion of indigenous empowerment has been rising in Maine).\n[Miss Lenhart stands in front of a chalkboard. On the board are squiggly lines of text and a series of growing circles] Miss Lenhart: After a star begins fusing hydrogen, it may reach a stable equilibrium in which it separates from Massachusetts and develops a thriving lobster industry. Miss Lenhart: This is known as the Maine Sequence.\n"}
{"id":2355,"title":"University COVID Model","image_title":"University COVID Model","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2355","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/university_covid_model.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2355:_University_COVID_Model","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking to each other.] Cueball: Apparently some university reopened based on a COVID model developed by two physicists. Megan: Uh oh.\n[Cueball raises an arm slightly.] Cueball: But even their worst-case model underestimated the number of student parties and they had to shut down.\n[Cueball holds up a finger.] Megan: Can't understand why someone with a physics degree would be bad at judging how often college students get invited to parties. Cueball: Excuse me, I was invited to multiple parties. Cueball: And attended both of them!\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nCueball begins telling Megan an anecdote about how a college decided to reopen \"based on a COVID model developed by two physicists.\" (The incident in question is likely a reference to this article and tweet about the University of Illinois, that went viral with similar wording the day before the comic was published). Presumably, the model predicted that the university could allow students to return to campus while still keeping cases of COVID-19 under control, perhaps using some combination of reduced classroom and residence hall density, and by implementing policies against large social gatherings.\nBefore he can get further, Megan interrupts him with \"Uh oh,\" perhaps worried that an epidemiological model created by people who aren't epidemiologists could be ineffective. Alternately, she may be expressing concern specifically about physicists' epidemiological modelling. Cueball then confirms her fears by saying that the model underestimated how many parties the students would hold, and so the actual number of cases on campus has turned out to be greater than even their worst-case prediction. Megan facetiously wonders how a physicist could have failed to know how much college kids party, implying that physicists do not attend many parties. Cueball, representing Randall , a physics major, then retorts that he \"was invited to multiple parties! And attended both of them!\" implying first that he was invited to many parties over an undefined period of time at college, but then admitting it was only two.\nIn the title text, Randall, no longer in-character, admits to attending at least a third party, and possibly a few more that have been forgotten, and confirms this was over the entire course of his degree studies, likely 4-8 years or more. This demonstrates, as an introverted physics major who struggles with social interactions ,\nhe (and by implied extension most Physics majors) has little interest in attending parties.  As many other people go to college for the parties rather than the education [ citation needed ] , we can only imagine how severely his campus epidemiology model would underestimate the number of opportunities for the coronavirus to spread.\nA nontrivial number of colleges followed this trajectory in 2020, such as the aforementioned University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign .\nA different comic with physicists modeling another field is 793: Physicists .\n[Cueball and Megan are talking to each other.] Cueball: Apparently some university reopened based on a COVID model developed by two physicists. Megan: Uh oh.\n[Cueball raises an arm slightly.] Cueball: But even their worst-case model underestimated the number of student parties and they had to shut down.\n[Cueball holds up a finger.] Megan: Can't understand why someone with a physics degree would be bad at judging how often college students get invited to parties. Cueball: Excuse me, I was invited to multiple parties. Cueball: And attended both of them!\n"}
{"id":2356,"title":"Constellation Monstrosity","image_title":"Constellation Monstrosity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2356","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/constellation_monstrosity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2356:_Constellation_Monstrosity","transcript":"[Within a frame, a long title is written in a short arc above the drawn elements] Virgibrascorpleo\n[Upon a background of astrological imagery merged in accord, basic point-and-line astronomical\/astrological representations of Scorpio, Libra, Virgo and Leo are illustrated.] [(Scorpio may be slightly rotated\/translated for aesthetic reasons.)]\n[Red lines have been added to link stars in adjacent constellations.] [ Beta Scorpii may be connected to Sigma Librae (once known as Gamma Scorpii)] [ ...also Pi Scorpii may be connected to Tau Librae ] [ Beta Librae may be connected to Mu Virginis ] [ Nu Virginis may be connected to Beta Leonis (better known as Denebola )]\n[Caption below the frame] I got kicked out of the International Astronomical Union for adding extra lines between the constellations to create a monstrosity.\n","explanation":"Constellations in the night sky are formed by pattern-forming various asterisms and other stellar relationships in the night sky.\nBeing rather subjective, different cultures have inculcated differences in their interpretations, some subtle and others less so, for the exact same objective views of the night sky. Even where the same groupings are recognised, different cultures can 'see' different forms behind that group of stars. However, observers in the southern hemisphere will see entirely new constellations not visible to those in the northern one, and vice-versa, whilst observing those patterns fully visible to both (on the ecliptic ) as inverted and therefore may inspire vastly different conceptualised images or even connectivities.  The International Astronomical Union has demarcated the sky into 88 constellations , mostly those known to ancient Greece (catalogued by Ptolemy) plus southern constellations designated by astronomers during the European Renaissance.\nRandall has taken one particular zodiac (or at least part of the hellenic one, closely tied to western astrology and still inspiring astronomical naming) and imagined further lines connecting stars to link up four separate constellations, to create a portmanteau constellation with a portmanteau name. As a matter of fact, this connection is half true, since Libra used to be the two claws of a much larger Scorpio, the larger constellation having been split in two when the twelve zodiac signs were set as they are now.\nThe four constellations used here are Scorpio (the scorpion), Libra (the scales), Virgo (the virgin\/maiden) and Leo (the lion), sequentially spread across the sky in positions relating to a span of astrological dates running 'backwards' from late November through to late July. The name Randall gave this meta-constellation, however, uses a different order to combine as \"Virg(o, l)ibra(, )scorp(io & )leo\". Possibly \"Scorlibirgoleo\", or a similar mash-up with the same source order, did not roll together nicely enough for his liking.\nIn reality, any apparent proximity of stars on the celestial sphere does not guarantee an actual proximity in the depths of space, either within or between constellations. Knock-on effects from this renaming would not change actual scientific understanding, but it could have a knock-on effect upon star catalogues and databases if this object regrouping forces so many incidental name changes to the current referencing system, which is why the astronomers are upset (as indicated in the title text). Similarly, astrology's conceit based upon four separate 'characters' and life-paths, arising from birth-signs and planetary transits across four distinct areas of the sky, would lose 'precision' if forced to accept a single symbolic area in their stead. Astrologers would be very upset because their work (interpreted charitably) is related to understanding the influences of the stars on life on Earth; they might be concerned that \" crossing the stars \" could lead to \" disaster \". It's not clear how Randall hoped to alter the practices of either group with his changes, but he was banned from the IAU for his efforts ( not the first time this has happened ).  Randall previously mentioned being banned from the IAU in 541: TED Talk , but the reason stated in that comic was \"redefinition of the 'planet' to include the IAU presidents' mom\", so presumably he was reinstated and then banned again.\nThis monstrosity is reminiscent of the infamous 2009 Dutch horror film known as The Human Centipede , in which three humans are bound together such that their digestive systems are connected in sequence.  In this image, the head of Virgo appears to be connected to the hindquarters of Leo, and likewise the mouthparts of Scorpio are fixed to the bottom of the \"stand\" of Libra.  Libra's stand appears to go under Virgo's dress; to form a complete \"celestial centipede\", it should attach to Virgo's hindquarters, but judging by the connection between stars, it probably (mercifully) connects to her foot.\n[Within a frame, a long title is written in a short arc above the drawn elements] Virgibrascorpleo\n[Upon a background of astrological imagery merged in accord, basic point-and-line astronomical\/astrological representations of Scorpio, Libra, Virgo and Leo are illustrated.] [(Scorpio may be slightly rotated\/translated for aesthetic reasons.)]\n[Red lines have been added to link stars in adjacent constellations.] [ Beta Scorpii may be connected to Sigma Librae (once known as Gamma Scorpii)] [ ...also Pi Scorpii may be connected to Tau Librae ] [ Beta Librae may be connected to Mu Virginis ] [ Nu Virginis may be connected to Beta Leonis (better known as Denebola )]\n[Caption below the frame] I got kicked out of the International Astronomical Union for adding extra lines between the constellations to create a monstrosity.\n"}
{"id":2357,"title":"Polls vs the Street","image_title":"Polls vs the Street","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2357","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/polls_vs_the_street.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2357:_Polls_vs_the_Street","transcript":"White Hat: Polls are just numbers. White Hat: You have to talk to people on the street .\nWhite Hat: Polls say most people support <Candidate X>. White Hat: But the people I talk to on the street support <Candidate Y>.\nWhite Hat: Polls claim most people don't live in my town and have never been here. White Hat: But the people I meet on the street tell a very different story.\nWhite Hat: According to polls , most people don't like playing in traffic. White Hat: So why do I never seem to meet these people on the street ?\n","explanation":"This comic discusses getting data or opinions through a study (polls) or by getting them anecdotally (on the street). The phrase \"voice on the street\" is commonly used by news reporters who get opinions on issues by literally asking people walking by what they think, and has been previously mentioned (and derided) in 756: Public Opinion .\nMany news organizations, and other data-driven institutions, conduct or commission polls to assess the opinions of the general public.  These polls generally rely on asking a randomly selected and anonymous set of people a set of consistent, prepared and deliberately crafted questions about their opinions, experiences, and intents. The results of these polls are traditionally held to reflect the views of the public as a whole, within certain margins for error. Many news shows also conduct \"man-on-the-street\" interviews (more formally known as vox populi , \"voice of the people\"), to provide a human face of \"the public\" and engage viewers more.  Many pollsters, pundits, and politicians worry that polling data may not accurately reflect the true trends in public opinion, as in the infamous \" Dewey Defeats Truman \" newspaper headline, and so White Hat is here extolling the virtues of interviewing \"real people\" to get at that ground truth.\nWhite Hat suggests that, while polls suggest \"candidate X\" is more favored, the people on the street that White Hat interviews are more supportive of \"candidate Y\". He implies that his experiences reflect reality better than the polls. There are a number of reasons why polls may not be entirely representative.  The sampling method might not be genuinely random, some groups might be less likely than others to respond to a poll, and it's argued that some people express views that they consider to be more socially acceptable, even in anonymous polls, but vote differently in actual elections (examples include the \" Bradley effect \" and the \" shy Tory factor \"). Despite these concerns, there is little evidence that individual conversations do a better job at determining public opinion than polling. However, attempting to get a person from off the street to report for a news anchor instead would obviously exacerbate all of these problems immensely, rather than fixing anything.\nThis comic is very likely a reference to the 2020 United States presidential election , which occurred on November 3, 2020 (about 2 months from the time of the comic's publication), which Democrat Joe Biden won. Most polls showed Biden polling ahead of incumbent Donald Trump, but Trump and his supporters frequently argued that the polls are inaccurate, often arguing that they personally knew or talked to many Trump supporters, and few Biden supporters. At the same time, the fact that Trump won the 2016 election astonished many (including Randall) who had seldom met Trump supporters in their own lives and within their own social circles. This kind of anecdotal evidence is generally a poor basis for gauging public support, for multiple reasons. Politics in the US are frequently regional, so sampling in a single area is unlikely to be representative of the whole country, or even a whole state. It's not uncommon for gathering places (both physical and virtual) to attract people from one political group more than another, producing a skewed sample. If someone uses their own perception, rather than rigorous analysis, confirmation bias is likely to have a major impact (a person might pay more attention to supporters of their preferred candidate, and ignore political opponents).\nThis strip lampoons such thinking, as it quickly becomes clear that White Hat's methodology is heavily driven by selection bias. He's apparently talking only to the residents of his town, and extrapolating those results to the whole country. By that logic, he would conclude that everyone has visited his town, and most people live there.  It is true that he's getting \"ground truth\", but it's also true that he's only sampling a very small (and highly idiosyncratic) part of the whole population.\nThe punchline in the final panel is a joke about the phrase \"on the street\". Usually this phrase means \"anywhere out in public where the interviewer can openly approach people\" (often a sidewalk near the studio), but White Hat is presumably taking the phrase literally and interviewing people he meets on the roadway. In the US, roads are generally reserved for vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles and in most areas bicycles), and walking or standing in the roadway for long periods is dangerous and usually illegal. White Hat's sample population thus consists only of the people who can be found on the roadway outside of designated pedestrian zones, who are generally from the small fraction of the population who have no qualms about the risks of being struck by moving vehicles or causing accidents when drivers swerve to avoid them.\nThe title text is a joke about selection bias and tautology . People who don't feel like taking surveys wouldn't get as far as answering a survey question about survey questions.  However, it does touch on an issue raised by FiveThirtyEight after the election: that polls only measure people who are interested in answering polls, and that population may not be politically representative of the entire country .\nWhite Hat: Polls are just numbers. White Hat: You have to talk to people on the street .\nWhite Hat: Polls say most people support <Candidate X>. White Hat: But the people I talk to on the street support <Candidate Y>.\nWhite Hat: Polls claim most people don't live in my town and have never been here. White Hat: But the people I meet on the street tell a very different story.\nWhite Hat: According to polls , most people don't like playing in traffic. White Hat: So why do I never seem to meet these people on the street ?\n"}
{"id":2358,"title":"Gravitational Wave Pulsars","image_title":"Gravitational Wave Pulsars","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2358","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gravitational_wave_pulsars.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2358:_Gravitational_Wave_Pulsars","transcript":"[Single panel with Ponytail and Cueball standing facing each other] Ponytail: Ask me what the secret to detecting gravitational waves using pulsars is.\nCueball: What's the secret to detecting grav\u2014\nPonytail: Timing!\n","explanation":"Pulsars are rotating neutron stars, which have a very precise period of rotation. Pulsars are highly magnetized, causing a them to emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation that rotates across their sky. Radio astronomers can detect these beams if and when they point towards Earth, where they appear as pulses of radiation with highly stable periods. They use the pulsars' periodic beams to try to detect gravitational waves by tracking the rotation period of an ensemble of pulsars extremely precisely over long periods of time. Disturbances in the pulsars' rotation period will be measurable at Earth. A disturbance from a passing gravitational wave will have a particular signature across the ensemble of pulsars, and will be thus detected. The process is called \"pulsar timing\" , or just \"timing\" for short.\nPonytail presents this to Cueball as a joke - specifically, a joke about comedy. One of the most important aspects of comedy is revealing the punchline with correct timing. Ponytail sets Cueball up for a joke like, \"Ask me what the secret of comedy is.\" \/ \"What's the secret of--\" \/ \"Timing!\" In this format, the punchline (\"Timing!\") deliberately comes too soon, which makes it funny because the timing is bad. Ponytail also replaces the secret to comedy with the secret to detecting gravitational waves with pulsars, to set up the joke about the word \"timing\".\nThe title text is a play on a well-known real estate saying that the three most important parts of a real estate deal are \"location, location, location.\" In 3D Euclidean space , the three Cartesian coordinates {X, Y, Z} all refer to locations along the three axes.\n[Single panel with Ponytail and Cueball standing facing each other] Ponytail: Ask me what the secret to detecting gravitational waves using pulsars is.\nCueball: What's the secret to detecting grav\u2014\nPonytail: Timing!\n"}
{"id":2359,"title":"Evidence of Alien Life","image_title":"Evidence of Alien Life","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2359","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/evidence_of_alien_life.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2359:_Evidence_of_Alien_Life","transcript":"[The comic is laid out like a 3 by 3 grid, with the amount of evidence down the left-hand side (Weak Evidence of Alien Life\/Promising Evidence\/Definite Evidence) and the type of reaction across the top (Not Cautious Enough\/Appropriately Cautious\/Too Cautious). Each box is a combination of the row label and column label.]\n[Row 1: Weak Evidence of Alien Life] [Column 1: Not Cautious Enough] [Cueball is looking through a telescope. There is a long, thin asteroid seen through the telescope, shown on the upper-left hand corner in the panel.] Cueball: This asteroid is probably an alien probe! [Column 2: Appropriately Cautious] [Same scene as before, except the asteroid is omitted.] Cueball: This asteroid is weird and we should take a closer look. Cueball: It's not aliens. [Column 3: Too Cautious] Cueball: This asteroid appears to be far away, but it could also be nearby and just very small.\n[Row 2: Promising Evidence] [Column 1: Not Cautious Enough] [Ponytail runs excitedly to Cueball. She carries a notepad with a V on it.] Ponytail: They found life on Venus! [Column 2: Appropriately Cautious] [Same scene, except Ponytail is simply looking at her notepad.] Ponytail: These molecules might be produced by life, or by weird high-heat chemistry. [Column 3: Too Cautious] [Same scene, except Ponytail's arm is slack by her side.] Ponytail: There is growing evidence that the atmosphere on Venus contains molecules.\n[Row 3: Definite Evidence] [Column 1: Not Cautious Enough] [There is a UFO with two aliens coming out of it. Cueball excitedly runs to the aliens, while Megan waits. There are three UFOs flying in the background.] Cueball: I'm going to go give those aliens a hug! [Column 2: Appropriately Cautious] [Two aliens are on the ground, and the foreground UFO is no longer in the frame. Cueball is talking to Megan. There are three UFOs in the background.] Cueball: Oh wow, aliens! Cueball: Should we try to communicate? [Column 3: Too Cautious] [Three UFOs are shooting beams into the United Nations building, vaporizing it. Cueball and Megan are watching.] Megan: The energy beams vaporizing the United Nations could be a possible biosignature.\n","explanation":"This comic depicts a table of possible responses to new information on the possibility of alien life. It is presented in table form, with the columns representing three categories of reaction to new evidence, and the rows representing the strength of new evidence, increasing down the table. Each intersection then shows a small scenario of what the response would be. The left and right-hand column scenarios are hyperbolic in either their acceptance or denial. The center column represents a reasonable course of action.\nThis comic was a reaction to the discovery of phosphine gas on Venus , which is where Ponytail's \"V\" figure in the second row comes from (a representation of the phosphine absorption feature). Phosphine is a molecule whose presence in the Venusian atmosphere came as a surprise. Light breaks phosphine down, meaning something must be producing it. However, there is no known abiotic mechanism on Venus that would produce the gas in the quantities observed. The phosphine could therefore be a sign of life on Venus, but more evidence is needed. Venus was also an unexpected place to find a possible sign of life \u2014 although it was a common pulp fiction setting in the early 20th-century , the arrival of the space probe era dashed hopes that the hidden surface might be, say, an exotic jungle (one of the more common pulp-fiction concepts). More recent efforts at finding life in the Solar System have mostly focused on Mars and various ice moons with suspected subsurface oceans , but life more-or-less as we know it could exist within the upper atmosphere of Venus, which has more Earth-like conditions than the surface.  However, while the discovery of phosphine is interesting, it is not nearly enough evidence to claim that \"life has been found\" on Venus, and likewise, it is comically understated to refer to the paper as \"evidence of molecules\" in Venus's atmosphere.\nThe title text refers to an action which is simultaneously too cautious and not cautious enough: the speaker is skeptical that aliens exist, which is usually an appropriate belief, except that presumably Megan and Cueball are in the situation presented in the bottom row, where aliens have landed right in front of them.  Rather than modifying his belief (presumably it's Cueball, who was the one to approach the aliens in the other panels), he expresses an intention to approach the alleged aliens and attempt to remove their masks.  He believes that he will expose a human wearing a costume, perpetrating a \"Scooby-Doo\"-style hoax , but no matter what the outcome is, he's acting rashly.  If the beings before him are aliens, he will be initiating a very aggressive first contact and will likely receive a violent response, and even if the alien is not violent, Cueball might end up removing an environmental apparatus that is protecting it from Earth's environment (or vice versa).  On the other hand, even if the \"aliens\" really are fakes, Cueball might end up injuring someone who is just playing a harmless joke (and who'd want to keep some kind of mask on to reduce the spread of COVID-19 ).\nIn the first row, an asteroid looks like an \"alien probe\". The \"least cautious\" response immediately jumps to the conclusion that the asteroid is an alien probe. The \"too cautious\" response simply ignores the asteroid, while the \"appropriately cautious\"  response seeks to discover more information about the asteroid.\nThe \"alien probe\" asteroid refers to 'Oumuamua , which passed through the Solar System in 2017.  'Oumuamua's hyperbolic trajectory indicated interstellar origin.  Because of the unusual elongated shape suggested by its albedo (the object was never visualized as more than a point source of light) and indications of a slight non-gravity related acceleration, there were many wild speculations about 'Oumuamua's origin, including it being an alien probe similar to the one presented in the science fiction classic Rendezvous with Rama .  The image of an astronomer looking through a telescope and being alarmed by seeing \"something huge\" which is actually very small and very close is an old comic gag , but the difference in parallax would immediately distinguish a close asteroid from a far one.\nThe second row refers to the discovery of phosphine gas on Venus, with the \"least cautious\" response to simply conclude that there is life on Venus. The \"appropriately cautious\" and \"too cautious\" responses provide more general conclusions about \"molecules\" on Venus.\nIn the final row, aliens have arrived on Earth.  The insufficiently cautious approach is to immediately hug them.  Cueball might make a new friend, but he might also be mistaken as an attacker, or perhaps the aliens are intending to make a meal of whoever approaches them.  The more responsible approach is to (consider attempting to) communicate at a distance.  In the final panel, the United Nations building is being vaporized by energy beams.  This is technically \"just\" a \"possible biosignature\", as there are abiotic stellar events that produce energetic beams (although those are usually the size of planets or stars rather than buildings) and the beams could also be of human origin , but debating such semantics in the face of such destructive power seems excessively pedantic.  For that matter, even though that panel is presented as \"too cautious\", it's only \"too cautious\" in the sense of \"discussing the possibility of alien life\"; Megan and Cueball are showing extreme lack of caution by remaining in the vicinity of an alien attack.\nThe destruction of human governmental buildings is a common trope in science fiction films, as a way of aliens removing the ability of humanity to co-ordinate a response to an attack.  The United Nations building is allegedly the co-ordination centre for a worldwide response to an extraterrestrial incursion.  However, since popular culture in the USA currently doesn't pay much attention to the United Nations, in American movies it is more commonly the White House or larger cities like New York or Los Angeles that get blown up by aliens.\n[The comic is laid out like a 3 by 3 grid, with the amount of evidence down the left-hand side (Weak Evidence of Alien Life\/Promising Evidence\/Definite Evidence) and the type of reaction across the top (Not Cautious Enough\/Appropriately Cautious\/Too Cautious). Each box is a combination of the row label and column label.]\n[Row 1: Weak Evidence of Alien Life] [Column 1: Not Cautious Enough] [Cueball is looking through a telescope. There is a long, thin asteroid seen through the telescope, shown on the upper-left hand corner in the panel.] Cueball: This asteroid is probably an alien probe! [Column 2: Appropriately Cautious] [Same scene as before, except the asteroid is omitted.] Cueball: This asteroid is weird and we should take a closer look. Cueball: It's not aliens. [Column 3: Too Cautious] Cueball: This asteroid appears to be far away, but it could also be nearby and just very small.\n[Row 2: Promising Evidence] [Column 1: Not Cautious Enough] [Ponytail runs excitedly to Cueball. She carries a notepad with a V on it.] Ponytail: They found life on Venus! [Column 2: Appropriately Cautious] [Same scene, except Ponytail is simply looking at her notepad.] Ponytail: These molecules might be produced by life, or by weird high-heat chemistry. [Column 3: Too Cautious] [Same scene, except Ponytail's arm is slack by her side.] Ponytail: There is growing evidence that the atmosphere on Venus contains molecules.\n[Row 3: Definite Evidence] [Column 1: Not Cautious Enough] [There is a UFO with two aliens coming out of it. Cueball excitedly runs to the aliens, while Megan waits. There are three UFOs flying in the background.] Cueball: I'm going to go give those aliens a hug! [Column 2: Appropriately Cautious] [Two aliens are on the ground, and the foreground UFO is no longer in the frame. Cueball is talking to Megan. There are three UFOs in the background.] Cueball: Oh wow, aliens! Cueball: Should we try to communicate? [Column 3: Too Cautious] [Three UFOs are shooting beams into the United Nations building, vaporizing it. Cueball and Megan are watching.] Megan: The energy beams vaporizing the United Nations could be a possible biosignature.\n"}
{"id":2360,"title":"Common Star Types","image_title":"Common Star Types","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2360","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/common_star_types.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2360:_Common_Star_Types","transcript":"[A chart, with ten colored circles representing stars of different colors and sizes. Each circle has a label, with a line going from the label to the circle. Below each label is a small description in smaller font. The text is listed from the top left. Above all the circles is the following heading:] Common star types\n[A small yellow star.] Yellow dwarf Warm, stable, slowly-growing\n[An even smaller white star.] White dwarf Small, hot, dim\n[A very large red-orange star squishing the previous two stars into the corners of the chart.] Red giant Huge, cool, luminous\n[A small red star.] Red dwarf Small, cool, ancient, dim\n[An olive green, medium-sized star.] Green elf Old, diminishes into the west\n[A fairly large pale blue star.] Blue giant Large, hot, short-lived\n[A blue-green, medium-sized star.] Teal sphynx Cryptic, eternal\n[A small silver-colored star.] Gray wizard Wise, powerful, mercurial\n[A tiny blue star.] Indigo banshee Bright, portentous, extremely loud\n[A beige, medium-sized star.] Beige gorgon Dangerous to observe at optical wavelengths.\n","explanation":"This 'infographic' chart purports to be a comparative guide to various star types, often described by a basic color, which is something that even naked-eye astronomy has determined, and may be qualified as 'dwarf' or 'giant' to describe relative sizes. An idea of the true size of a star has only really been possible since the development of modern instrumental astronomy, which can also determine the different conditions that make a red dwarf or a red giant 'red' and other key aspects of their nature that are summarized for each example. See table below .\nIn true xkcd tradition, this is taken beyond reality. The pantheon of stars illustrated extend the use of 'dwarf' and 'giant' as if describing mythical or fictional beings, drawing upon others from the fantasy ilk with hues and shades that may not be typically described, or even encountered, by astronomers. The aspect information provided for these 'star' types is based upon the respective mythologies.\nThe title text is in the style of a Wikipedia page's hatnote \/ reference note. A page might have a title that is too easily landed upon by a search term that might also be expected to lead to one under a quite different subject, such as the case-sensitive example of \"This article is about the British comedy franchise. For the type of star, see Red dwarf .\" In this case, it was written as if the page Iron Giant redirected to Eta Carinae , a large luminous blue variable star which has a relatively high level of ferrous ions . Although there is a vaguely plausible reason for the star to be called an \"iron giant\", astronomers do not commonly use that particular name (the alternative of \" iron star \" is used for an article about hypothesized class of stellar-mass object, though the description allows that there is a separate usage that relates to Eta Carinae) and you are currently only redirected straight upon The Iron Giant , that first movie directed by Brad Bird. This note was added to Wikipedia, but quickly removed.\n[A chart, with ten colored circles representing stars of different colors and sizes. Each circle has a label, with a line going from the label to the circle. Below each label is a small description in smaller font. The text is listed from the top left. Above all the circles is the following heading:] Common star types\n[A small yellow star.] Yellow dwarf Warm, stable, slowly-growing\n[An even smaller white star.] White dwarf Small, hot, dim\n[A very large red-orange star squishing the previous two stars into the corners of the chart.] Red giant Huge, cool, luminous\n[A small red star.] Red dwarf Small, cool, ancient, dim\n[An olive green, medium-sized star.] Green elf Old, diminishes into the west\n[A fairly large pale blue star.] Blue giant Large, hot, short-lived\n[A blue-green, medium-sized star.] Teal sphynx Cryptic, eternal\n[A small silver-colored star.] Gray wizard Wise, powerful, mercurial\n[A tiny blue star.] Indigo banshee Bright, portentous, extremely loud\n[A beige, medium-sized star.] Beige gorgon Dangerous to observe at optical wavelengths.\n"}
{"id":2361,"title":"Voting","image_title":"Voting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2361","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2361:_Voting","transcript":"[Cueball walks in from right, staring at his phone and talking to Megan.] Cueball: I will crawl across broken glass to vote this year if I have to. Megan: ...Why would there be broken glass? Megan: There aren't even any big windows at our polling place.\n[Cueball raising a finger triumphantly.] Cueball: I will wait in line till the sun burns out. Megan: Ok, some places have lines, which is awful, but it's usually pretty quick here? Megan: Definitely not 5 billion years.\n[Cueball raising a fist.] Cueball: I will walk barefoot across hot coals to cast my ballot! Megan: Where would you even find coals? Megan: You can wear shoes to vote. This scenario makes no sense.\n[Cueball raising a finger, and walking back off-panel to the left] Cueball: I will swim across a shark-filled channel! Megan: That'll take you way outside our precinct. Cueball: Then I'll swim back! Megan: Can you do all this stuff after voting?\n","explanation":"The run-up to the 2020 United States elections , occurring on November 3, 2020 (less than 2 months from the time of the comic's publication), has been fraught with various overlapping worries about the legitimacy of the forthcoming result. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new interest in voting by mail , at a historically large scale. See Postal voting in the United States for more detail. Cueball, however, is in a very patriotic mood and makes a series of hyperbolic statements to Megan about the trials he would be willing to endure in order to vote in the upcoming elections, none of which would (hopefully), in reality, apply to his or anyone else's circumstance.\nCrawling across broken glass might have actually been necessary at some polling sites of the 2001 New York City mayoral election primary, which had begun on September 11, 2001, and would have continued had it not been postponed two weeks due to the terrorist attacks of that day. However, as Megan states, their polling sites, unlike those of the 2001 election, don't even feature any especially large windows or other such structures from which broken glass could be derived. The idea of being so intent on doing something (in this case, voting) that a person claims to be willing to crawl across broken glass to do so is a common expression.\nThe Sun, currently a yellow dwarf star on the main sequence, will eventually expand into a red giant, then collapse down to a white dwarf when its fuel is exhausted; this will not happen for billions of years, as Megan points out. Because of this, waiting until the sun burns out would result in Cueball's vote not being counted at all, both because it would be after the official deadline for ballots to be cast and because there would no longer be anyone alive on Earth.\nAs Megan observes, hot coals would most likely not even be present at their polling stations, and although some states have been accused of trying to make voting inconvenient or unsafe, this comic has not yet led any states to prohibit wearing shoes at polling places.\nAccording to Megan, her and Cueball's municipality does not even include a single shark-infested body of water that Cueball would be able to swim through in order to cast his vote. Cueball's solution to this problem is to simply swim back to their location after swimming in his shark-filled channel.\nMegan tries in vain to convince Cueball that his proposed actions are unnecessary or even impossible in their area, but, unable to bring him back to reality, she closes the final panel by asking if he'd be willing to put off all of this dangerous stuff until after voting, perhaps so that he will be alive long enough to vote in the first place.\nBroken glass, the extinction of humanity, hot coals, and sharks aside, though, Cueball faces the risk of contracting COVID-19 from being in such close proximity to so many other voters, as he seems to plan on voting in person (his words show his desire for activities only possible by way of physical action; in the title text, he also ignores Megan when she says that mail-in voting is available).\nIn the title text, Megan tells Cueball that he does not need to go to such lengths to vote, as their state has mail-in voting and already sent forms either to cast a ballot or to apply for mail-in ballots. Cueball ignores her and continues looking online for shark-filled channels to swim through.  In doing so, he completely negates his professed desire to vote, as he is ignoring the easy path and going after paths that would end up making it impossible to cast his vote. Alternatively, he may just be caught in the normal rabbit hole of doing Internet research, where you start researching one thing (voting locations) and end up reading about another (locations of shark-infested channels).\nRandall is making the point that, despite apparent obstruction tactics and threats and attempts to de-legitimize the process, voting is very important (Cueball is using hyperbole to illustrate the importance), and relatively easy (as Megan keeps reminding him).  He is also expressing an opinion that the increased danger of system compromise harming the legitimacy of the voting process due to massive mail-in voting is less worrisome than the corona-virus pandemic keeping people from voting at all, if in-person voting were the only viable option.\nRandall lives in Massachusetts, a state with majority Democrat media, voters, and government.  Sharks are sighted off Cape Cod on occasion, so if he really wanted to, he could swim with them, but unless he lives on Cape Cod itself, it would take him very far outside his voting district.\n[Cueball walks in from right, staring at his phone and talking to Megan.] Cueball: I will crawl across broken glass to vote this year if I have to. Megan: ...Why would there be broken glass? Megan: There aren't even any big windows at our polling place.\n[Cueball raising a finger triumphantly.] Cueball: I will wait in line till the sun burns out. Megan: Ok, some places have lines, which is awful, but it's usually pretty quick here? Megan: Definitely not 5 billion years.\n[Cueball raising a fist.] Cueball: I will walk barefoot across hot coals to cast my ballot! Megan: Where would you even find coals? Megan: You can wear shoes to vote. This scenario makes no sense.\n[Cueball raising a finger, and walking back off-panel to the left] Cueball: I will swim across a shark-filled channel! Megan: That'll take you way outside our precinct. Cueball: Then I'll swim back! Megan: Can you do all this stuff after voting?\n"}
{"id":2362,"title":"Volcano Dinosaur","image_title":"Volcano Dinosaur","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2362","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/volcano_dinosaur.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2362:_Volcano_Dinosaur","transcript":"[Megan is standing facing right, talking to Cueball who is sitting at a computer desk and also facing right, looking at a computer screen.] Cueball: Oh cool, they just found a dinosaur that was buried by a volcanic eruption 125 million years ago. Megan: Wow.\n[Pause. Megan is still facing right. Panel closes in on Megan and Cueball is not shown. This panel has no dialogue.]\n[Megan has stepped closer to Cueball, who leans in and is still looking at the screen.] Megan: Was it okay? Cueball: Hmm, it doesn't say.\n","explanation":"This comic is a reference to this discovery of fossils of dinosaurs that were buried and killed by a volcanic eruption .\nMegan asks if the dinosaur was okay. As living things typically don't survive being fossilized in volcano debris [ citation needed ] , the answer to the question would obviously be \"no\", but Cueball replies that he is unsure. Even if the dinosaur somehow survived the initial burial, it would be very difficult for it to survive being buried for 125 million years. 2020 probably wouldn't be the best year to dig it up and potentially let it free.\nIt is not an uncommon shortcut to refer to finds of relatively intact fossilized pieces of an animal using wording that sounds like they found an entire animal intact, as in the headline \"New dinosaur discovered\" rather than a wordier but more accurate \"the fossil of a new dinosaur\" or \"the fossilized bones of a new dinosaur\".  Most parts of an animal dead for millions of years don't survive that length of time, and those that do are usually transformed into something else, such as bones becoming fossilized into rock and minerals.\nMegan's response is natural and expected in many situations when hearing of a person or creature experiencing misfortune. The humour here comes from the inaptness of asking the question millions of years after the event. Rather than responding to the ridiculousness of Megan's question, Cueball takes it seriously, and deadpans that he can't tell.\nThe title text suggests contacting its \" next of kin \", which usually means a nearest living relative, e.g. a brother or a sister. The process of identifying and contacting next of kin is a standard step performed by authorities in the event of a death being discovered. The reason for this step is to allow the next of kin to exercise their rights to the property of the deceased under inheritance law. In this case, non-avian dinosaurs are extinct [ citation needed ] , so it is the job of phylogeneticists (those who study evolutionary relationships) to determine which living animal (presumably a bird of some kind) is the \"nearest relative\" to the deceased dinosaurs. However, even if the correct species could be identified, the specific animal would be all but impossible to find.  Statistically speaking, that dinosaur is almost certainly either a direct ancestor of all living birds , or else an ancestor of no living birds.\n[Megan is standing facing right, talking to Cueball who is sitting at a computer desk and also facing right, looking at a computer screen.] Cueball: Oh cool, they just found a dinosaur that was buried by a volcanic eruption 125 million years ago. Megan: Wow.\n[Pause. Megan is still facing right. Panel closes in on Megan and Cueball is not shown. This panel has no dialogue.]\n[Megan has stepped closer to Cueball, who leans in and is still looking at the screen.] Megan: Was it okay? Cueball: Hmm, it doesn't say.\n"}
{"id":2363,"title":"Message Boards","image_title":"Message Boards","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2363","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/message_boards.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2363:_Message_Boards","transcript":"[Single panel showing a view of the \"MopedPro\" forum on a message board, with a caption below the panel.] Forum Tab: MopedPro Forum (Top Left) | (4 tabs with illegible writing on them. None of them appear to be selected) (Top Right)\nNIN85 (posted December 5, 2000 - 13:01): So mad that my mom won't let me get a Vespa. I'm old enough for a moped license and they're really not that dangerous.\nJULZ [new user] (posted September 23, 2020 - 17:05): At least she's not stopping you from getting an electric scooter you don't even need a license for\nNIN85 (posted September 23, 2020 - 18:36): Okay, Julian, (a) you know we talked about this, and (b) how the heck did you find this thread\n[Caption below the comic]: I love that message boards are now old enough for this to happen.\n","explanation":"The joke of this comic lies in the dates of the forum posts and the (presumed) relation between the posters.\nThe initial post was made in 2000 by NIN85 who was, at the time, a teenaged girl (likely 14 or 15 years old given that her username ends in \"85,\" implying she was born in 1985), complaining that her mother did not allow her to get a Vespa . Vespa is a brand of scooters and mopeds produced by the Italian manufacturer Piaggio. Most U.S. states require motorcycle licenses for any vehicle with an engine size over 50 cubic centimeters. Most Vespas are larger than this, although 49 CC models (classified as mopeds) do exist. Depending on the state, the minimum age to get a moped in the United States is 14, 15, or 16.\nThe reply was written in 2020 (twenty years later) by JULZ (or Julian), the presumed son of the now-adult NIN85, likely in his teenage years.  The \"Z\" may refer to \"Generation Z\", paralleling the \"85.\" \"JULZ\" complains about his mother refusing to allow him to get an electric scooter, which doesn't require a license. He is implicitly pointing out the hypocrisy of his mother, as a fifteen-year-old, thinking that teenagers with scooters are perfectly reasonable, while as a thirtyfive-year-old, being against the idea.\nThe primary source of humor in this strip (made explicit in the caption) derives from the fact that the Internet has been in common use for so long that teenagers can now look up old posts that their parents made when they, themselves, were teenagers. The late 1990s to early 2000s was right around the time the average person would be expected to have access to the internet and use it regularly, which means that, as of 2020, that's been the case for around one human generation. This can be jarring for people who are still used to thinking of the Internet as a new technology. Noting how much time has passed since events that feel recent is a recurring theme in xkcd.\nOf course, the basic premise of this exchange is nothing new. Teenagers have encountered (and been surprised by) the notion that their parents were once young for as long as there have been people. In the past, it's happened through finding old photographs, old videos, old diaries, or simply by hearing stories from their family and old friends. Young people are often shocked by what they learn, and accuse their parents of hypocrisy when they punish behavior that they once engaged in. Of course, this isn't true hypocrisy: we expect teenagers to grow and evolve, and develop mature, adult viewpoints. Parents naturally have both more understanding of dangers and lower tolerance for risk when dealing with their children. This strip points out that the internet has now existed for long enough (and preserves archives for long enough) that it's now become a potential medium for this whole dynamic. Part of the humor results from the unexpected situation that the child went to the trouble of tracking down his mother's old forum post, and that his mother is still active in the same niche forum 20 years later (as evidenced by her rapid response).\nIn the title text, the parent is apparently a moderator on that board now, or at least can quickly twist the ear of an actual mod. She has the thread locked (preventing further replies) and threatens banning the kid if he does not learn to post new threads, instead of dredging up dead threads from two decades ago. The act of reviving long-dead threads is often called \"thread necromancy\" or \"necroing,\" and many forums (and users) frown upon it. It is seen as similar to bringing up a conversation from ages ago in real life. It often adds nothing new, and the original participants in the discussion may no longer be active or no longer interested in the topic. Some forums may actually encourage tagging onto existing but idle discussions (to add new or updated information) rather than repeatedly creating new threads, but that does not seem to be the case here.\nInvoking the power of moderation could suggest that, in typical parental fashion, she's using her greater influence and social position to end the discussion, making clear that she's the one in charge.  \"You'll be banned from this forum thread\" could be seen as the Internet version of \"as long as you live under my roof, you'll live by my rules\".\n[Single panel showing a view of the \"MopedPro\" forum on a message board, with a caption below the panel.] Forum Tab: MopedPro Forum (Top Left) | (4 tabs with illegible writing on them. None of them appear to be selected) (Top Right)\nNIN85 (posted December 5, 2000 - 13:01): So mad that my mom won't let me get a Vespa. I'm old enough for a moped license and they're really not that dangerous.\nJULZ [new user] (posted September 23, 2020 - 17:05): At least she's not stopping you from getting an electric scooter you don't even need a license for\nNIN85 (posted September 23, 2020 - 18:36): Okay, Julian, (a) you know we talked about this, and (b) how the heck did you find this thread\n[Caption below the comic]: I love that message boards are now old enough for this to happen.\n"}
{"id":2364,"title":"Parity Conservation","image_title":"Parity Conservation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2364","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/parity_conservation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2364:_Parity_Conservation","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of an oval wall mirror hanging over a small table.  He's holding a tube connected to an electronic device.  A face is dimly reflected in the mirror.]\nCueball: Listen, I know I said your name three times.\nCueball: But before you come out of the mirror and murder me, can you hold this cobalt-60 and take some measurements?\nCueball: See, I'm researching parity conservation...\n[Caption below the comic]: It took some negotiating, but I've finally become the first person to coauthor a paper with Bloody Mary.\n","explanation":"Bloody Mary is a legend of a ghost, phantom, or spirit conjured to reveal the future. She is said to appear in a mirror when her name is chanted repeatedly. This is why Cueball says he said her name three times. This is her second apperance in xkcd, the first being 555: Two Mirrors .\nThe remark on parity conservation and cobalt-60 is likely a reference to the Wu experiment . In 1956, physicist Chien-Shiung Wu and her team at the National Bureau of Standards used cobalt-60 to show that the weak interaction breaks parity: beta particles leave the decaying nucleus in the direction opposite to nuclear spin.\nOne of the results of this is that it becomes possible to differentiate between the concepts of left and right on a purely technical level, even if the person (or distant alien) you're talking to can't see you. When we say that \"parity is not conserved,\" we mean that the concepts of left and right are not purely symmetrical across all areas of physics. As Richard Feynman put it, this means that \"nature's laws are different for the right hand and the left hand, that there's a way to define the right hand by physical phenomena.\"\nIt seems as if Cueball is trying to \"hand\" Bloody Mary his experimental apparatus either physically (as he is asking her to take the cobalt-60 \"before [she] come[s] out of the mirror\"), or perhaps by reflecting it onto her side. Because Bloody Mary exists in mirrors, her world is implicitly a mirror of ours. This would allow her to conduct mirror physics experiments, such as whether or not the beta particles leave the cobalt-60 in the same direction as they do in our universe.\nThe title text references antimatter . In physics, antimatter is like a mirrored version of matter \u2014 mirrored in charge, parity, and time \u2014 composed of antiparticles rather than particles. Antimatter and matter spontaneously annihilate each other when they meet, releasing extremely high-energy radiation. Therefore, Bloody Mary being made of antimatter explains why she kills people when she comes out of the mirror. (Bloody Mary would also be annihilated in such an interaction, so the fact that she keeps coming back may be attributable to her being a ghost.)\nThere have been a lot of science fiction-y stories featuring antimatter people; often, these are duplicates of \"regular\"-matter people.  The stories often show unrealistic ideas of what would happen if matter and antimatter versions of people met.  Sometimes, the duplicates simply disappear; sometimes, if the plot requires it only one may disappear.  Or sometimes the entire universe is destroyed.  In reality, what would happen is that the matter and antimatter would mutually annihilate, as pairs of subatomic particles, creating enormous radiation and heat.  It's likely that only a small fraction of the matter and antimatter would actually come into contact, rather than being propelled apart by the explosion.  Indeed, if the duplicates are in their versions of air, the air and anti-air particles would interact first! Even in interstellar space, an antimatter alien would give off significant radiation from collisions with matter particles. In these stories, it's often presumed that the corresponding duplicates of people can annihilate only each other, but can safely touch anything else.  In reality, the matching is at the subatomic level: any proton with any antiproton, any electron with any antielectron (or \"positron\"), etc.\n[Cueball is standing in front of an oval wall mirror hanging over a small table.  He's holding a tube connected to an electronic device.  A face is dimly reflected in the mirror.]\nCueball: Listen, I know I said your name three times.\nCueball: But before you come out of the mirror and murder me, can you hold this cobalt-60 and take some measurements?\nCueball: See, I'm researching parity conservation...\n[Caption below the comic]: It took some negotiating, but I've finally become the first person to coauthor a paper with Bloody Mary.\n"}
{"id":2365,"title":"Messaging Systems","image_title":"Messaging Systems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2365","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/messaging_systems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2365:_Messaging_Systems","transcript":"A Venn Diagram is shown, framed in a box. It has three components:\nVaguely Modern, E2E Encrypted, Supported By Everyone\nItems Solely in the Vaguely Modern category are:\nFacebook Messenger, Hangouts, Discord, Various DMs\nItems In both 'Vaguely Modern' and 'E2E Encrypted' categories are:\nSignal, iMessage, Whatsapp\nItems Solely in the E2E Encrypted category are:\nPGP Email, Various Obscure Projects, Skype I think, XMPP and XMPP + XEP-0384: OMEMO\nItems Solely in the 'Supported By Everyone' category is:\nSMS\nAll other categories are empty.\n[Caption below the comic]: Why SMS refuses to die\n","explanation":"Messaging systems suffer from the network effect , as in order to communicate, both parties need to be using the same system.\nThough relatively ancient by modern standards, SMS is supported by almost every mobile device (unless you're using a kosher phone or still on a DynaTAC ) that has a phone number attached, which means if you want to send a message to someone, but aren't sure if you have a messaging protocol in common, you can be sure at least they have SMS.\nThe comic mentions many other communication systems, which offer various advantages in either security ( end to end encryption ) and or a bunch of general improvements filed under the label \"vaguely modern\", such as longer character limits and the ability to share media such as images in-service.\nThe messaging systems are shown in a Venn Diagram , with the categories corresponding to these three advantages. The intersections between the categories are very minimal: there are a few systems that have both E2E encryption and are modern, but no intersections with \"supported by everyone\", and SMS is the only system in that category. So when choosing a method of communication, you're usually faced with a compromise.\nThe title text proposes an alternative, absurd mingling of technologies in the vein of 1636: XKCD Stack . IRC is Internet Relay Chat, a similarly antiquated messaging service that may also never die, as suggested in 1782: Team Chat . Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a layer of networking software that provides encrypted communication. DOSBox is an emulator that recreates the operating environment of MS-DOS ; part of the absurdity is that DOSBox is intended almost solely for video games. Additionally, this hodgepodge of technologies is running in a mobile browser, instead of a dedicated server or machine.\nVarious other comics have referenced the issue of chat services, including 1810: Chat Systems , 1254: Preferred Chat System , and 1782: Team Chat .\nSlack\nFacebook Messenger\nHangouts\nDiscord\nVarious DMs\nEnd-to-end encryption refers to messaging systems where only the communicating users can read the messages posted. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers \u2013 including telecom providers , internet providers , and even the provider of the communication service \u2013 from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation.\nPGP Email\nVarious Obscure Projects\nSkype I Think\nXMPP ( Jabber + TLS )\nSignal\niMessage\nWhatsApp\nSMS\nRCS (Rich Communication Services) is a more modern protocol, aimed at replacing SMS and MMS protocols. RCS support has been slow to rollout among cellular carriers, due to their preference for proprietary implementations and monetizable usage tracking and\/or gatekeeping. Like SMS and MMS, RCS is a federated network, wherein failure of one provider's systems is unlikely to result in a total system outage. The single-provider messaging networks of other widely used systems (such as those mentioned on this page) can experience system-wide outages that prevent all users from communicating via them at all; this has happened multiple times for both Signal and Discord, among others. For this reason, single-provider networks are intrinsically more prone to total system outages than federated networks.\nThe long-standing interoperability of SMS+MMS networks is difficult (if not impossible) to match in terms of communicating with a maximum number of people, and maintaining functionality for other users when one provider experiences an outage.\nA Venn Diagram is shown, framed in a box. It has three components:\nVaguely Modern, E2E Encrypted, Supported By Everyone\nItems Solely in the Vaguely Modern category are:\nFacebook Messenger, Hangouts, Discord, Various DMs\nItems In both 'Vaguely Modern' and 'E2E Encrypted' categories are:\nSignal, iMessage, Whatsapp\nItems Solely in the E2E Encrypted category are:\nPGP Email, Various Obscure Projects, Skype I think, XMPP and XMPP + XEP-0384: OMEMO\nItems Solely in the 'Supported By Everyone' category is:\nSMS\nAll other categories are empty.\n[Caption below the comic]: Why SMS refuses to die\n"}
{"id":2366,"title":"Amelia's Farm Fresh Cookies","image_title":"Amelia's Farm Fresh Cookies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2366","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/amelias_farm_fresh_cookies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2366:_Amelia%27s_Farm_Fresh_Cookies","transcript":"[What looks like the back of a package of cookies is shown.]\n[Top left: Product logo.] Amelia's Farm-Fresh Cookies [Parts of an oval surround the logo]\n[Middle left: What appears to be a standard Nutrition Facts panel, though the details are illegible squiggles]\n[Bottom left: What appears to be an ingredients list, though the details are illegible squiggles, and a few other squiggles]\n[Right side:] Our Story Growing up on my grandma's farm, I spent so many cozy mornings in the kitchen, watching her take trays of fresh-baked cookies from the oven. Her cookies were just awful . She used the finest ingredients. Eggs straight from the coop, stone-ground flour, hand-churned butter. But she squandered them. It's so sad. She told me I was too picky, but I know what cookies are supposed to taste like. When I started a bakery, I vowed not to repeat her mistakes. These cookies won't fall apart in your hands. They have gooey centers, and slightly crisp exteriors, not the other way around, Grandma . There's no mysterious gritty texture. Why would there be? If you enjoy these cookies, please write to my grandma to let her know. Thanks! Amelia\n[A partially legible squiggled address appears at the bottom left of the Our Story part of the box. The bracketed dashes represent portions that are illegible.] Ms W[\u2014\u2014] M[\u2014\u2014] 1[\u2014] A[\u2014\u2014] Ln O[\u2014\u2014], FL 328[\u2013]1\n","explanation":"The comic portrays the back side of a box of cookies (evidenced by the nutrition facts -style table on the left side). Many brands have a romanticized origin story on their packaging explaining the name or how they have a secret ingredient. Instead, this brand's origin story is a tale of petty one-upmanship as the brand's founder sets out to prove that her cookies are better than her grandmother's.\nGrandma's cookies were apparently very fragile and crumbly. They also had \"gooey exteriors and slightly crisp interiors.\" Normally items bake from the exterior in, so how the interior had gotten crisp and the exterior hadn't is not explained (maybe Grandma \"bakes\" them in a microwave oven ?). Grandma's cookies also had a \"mysterious gritty texture\", perhaps from sand getting into the flour from the stone grinders, that was unpleasant to Amelia.\nTo complete her revenge, the \"story\" contains the grandmother's address. Creating false addresses for their mascots is often used as a publicity stunt for children to write testimonials to the brand's PR or marketing department. However, here it appears to be Amelia's actual Grandma's actual address, the goal being for her to receive thousands of letters on a regular basis about how her granddaughter's cookies are so great, while jabbing \"unlike yours!\"\nIn retaliation, Amelia's grandmother has started submitting (presumably bogus) food safety complaints about Amelia's bakery to the health department in a ploy to overburden the bakery with unnecessarily frequent inspections. At one point Amelia eventually decided to offer a truce, which her grandmother emphatically rejected, underscoring it by sending Amelia an extra-large batch of the cookies she knows Amelia hates.\nWhile the name of the city past the first letter and at least one of the zip code digits is too illegible to read, by process of elimination it is plausible that the city is Orlando and the zip code is 32891 (or less likely, 32861). No other location in Florida consists of one word starting with O and a zip code legibly close to the one in the comic.\n[What looks like the back of a package of cookies is shown.]\n[Top left: Product logo.] Amelia's Farm-Fresh Cookies [Parts of an oval surround the logo]\n[Middle left: What appears to be a standard Nutrition Facts panel, though the details are illegible squiggles]\n[Bottom left: What appears to be an ingredients list, though the details are illegible squiggles, and a few other squiggles]\n[Right side:] Our Story Growing up on my grandma's farm, I spent so many cozy mornings in the kitchen, watching her take trays of fresh-baked cookies from the oven. Her cookies were just awful . She used the finest ingredients. Eggs straight from the coop, stone-ground flour, hand-churned butter. But she squandered them. It's so sad. She told me I was too picky, but I know what cookies are supposed to taste like. When I started a bakery, I vowed not to repeat her mistakes. These cookies won't fall apart in your hands. They have gooey centers, and slightly crisp exteriors, not the other way around, Grandma . There's no mysterious gritty texture. Why would there be? If you enjoy these cookies, please write to my grandma to let her know. Thanks! Amelia\n[A partially legible squiggled address appears at the bottom left of the Our Story part of the box. The bracketed dashes represent portions that are illegible.] Ms W[\u2014\u2014] M[\u2014\u2014] 1[\u2014] A[\u2014\u2014] Ln O[\u2014\u2014], FL 328[\u2013]1\n"}
{"id":2367,"title":"Masks","image_title":"Masks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2367","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/masks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2367:_Masks","transcript":"[A chart is shown with a title and explanation at the top:] Masks By effectiveness at preventing respiratory virus transmission\n[The chart consist of a vertical line going top to bottom with arrows at both ends. There are labels at the top, aorund the middle and at the bottom:] Not effective. Effective Extremely Effective\n[Along the line there are 12 bullets. From each bullet there goes a line (often with one or two turns) to a depiction of a type of mask. Each mask type is labeled. The first six masks are all close to the top, the last only halfway down to the middle of the line. The next two are right around the middle, then two are halfway towards the bottom from there and the final two are close to the bottom, with the last very close to the botom. From top to bottom:] Zorro\/Lone Ranger Batman Theater Skincare Scarecrow Guy Fawkes Cloth SpiderMan N95 Scuba Vader Mysterio\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis comic is a line from top to bottom explaining how good different types of masks are at preventing respiratory virus transmission. As with many comics in 2020, it is a reference to the 2020 pandemic of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, a virus that primarily transmits through air droplets expelled from the human nose and mouth. This comic may have been inspired from a Polygon article published on May 15th .\n[02%] Zorro\/Lone Ranger [03%] Batman [07%] Theater [10%] Skincare [15%] Scarecrow [18%] Guy Fawkes [48%] Cloth [52%] Spider-Man [68%] N95 [71%] Scuba [80%] Vader [90%] Mysterio\n[A chart is shown with a title and explanation at the top:] Masks By effectiveness at preventing respiratory virus transmission\n[The chart consist of a vertical line going top to bottom with arrows at both ends. There are labels at the top, aorund the middle and at the bottom:] Not effective. Effective Extremely Effective\n[Along the line there are 12 bullets. From each bullet there goes a line (often with one or two turns) to a depiction of a type of mask. Each mask type is labeled. The first six masks are all close to the top, the last only halfway down to the middle of the line. The next two are right around the middle, then two are halfway towards the bottom from there and the final two are close to the bottom, with the last very close to the botom. From top to bottom:] Zorro\/Lone Ranger Batman Theater Skincare Scarecrow Guy Fawkes Cloth SpiderMan N95 Scuba Vader Mysterio\n"}
{"id":2368,"title":"Bigger Problem","image_title":"Bigger Problem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2368","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bigger_problem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2368:_Bigger_Problem","transcript":"[Cueball, holding a clipboard next to his body in his left hand, holds his right hand palm up towards White Hat.] Cueball: I'm trying to fix <problem with the world>. Can you help?\n[Cueball stands with both arms down while white Hat lift one hand up toward Cueball.] White Hat: It's obvious you don't actually care. If you did, you'd be trying to fix <bigger problem> instead.\n[Same setting as the first picture, wit Cueball's hand a bit further out towards White Hat.] Cueball: Okay, want to help fix <bigger problem>? White Hat: No, for another reason I'll think of later.\n","explanation":"Cueball is asking White Hat to help fix an unspecified problem with the world. Presumably, he is working for some form of charity and perhaps asking for donations or signatures. White Hat responds by saying that Cueball doesn't care (about, presumably, the world) and that he would be working to fix an unspecified larger issue if he really cared. Cueball then asks if White Hat would rather be working to solve that problem. However, White Hat says that he doesn't want to, but that he also hasn't come up with an excuse not to yet. White Hat seems as if he couldn't be bothered, and wants to go on with his life.\nThe claim that someone is not working towards an important issue, while not always completely invalid , is commonly used as a cheap tactic to ignore a solution to a problem, even when the person using it does want to help out with either cause and is also a logical fallacy known as the \" Not as bad as \" fallacy, Fallacy of Relative Privation , or Appeal to Worse Problems . In the last panel of this comic, White Hat reveals that he isn't sufficiently devoted to either cause to act on them, so that his bringing up the larger issue appears less like interest in the larger issue than an excuse to not support Cueball's cause.\nThe title text furthers this point. While the argument used by White Hat is supposed to imply that the person giving the argument cares about an issue that matters more (to the exclusion of the other issue), it's often used, as seen in this comic, as an excuse to not work to fix any problem, making it \"a real slam-dunk argument against fixing any of them.\"\nBoth causes in the comic are referred to ambiguously and surrounded with angle brackets to imply that they can be filled it with any two problems, as the comic is supposed to depict a common situation that happens during discussions of many different causes.\nThis comic is quite similar to 871: Charity because both have a character that responds to people trying to help \"by figuring out a reason that they're not really as good as they seem\". Additionally, it seems to relate to 1447: Meta-Analysis on being very meta. 1232: Realistic Criteria has an extremely similar conversation between Cueball and White Hat.\nPeople sometimes use similar fallacious reasoning against themselves, thinking that they shouldn't tackle \"simple\" \"unimportant\" problems when there are \"important\" problems outstanding, even if the former are within their ability to handle but the latter aren't.  This can be a form of self-sabotaging behavior.\nIn essence, this may be an example of the principle \"The perfect is the enemy of the good.\" That is, it is better to make a small advance which does some good. If you insist on doing nothing until you cure everything to perfection, nothing will be done.\n[Cueball, holding a clipboard next to his body in his left hand, holds his right hand palm up towards White Hat.] Cueball: I'm trying to fix <problem with the world>. Can you help?\n[Cueball stands with both arms down while white Hat lift one hand up toward Cueball.] White Hat: It's obvious you don't actually care. If you did, you'd be trying to fix <bigger problem> instead.\n[Same setting as the first picture, wit Cueball's hand a bit further out towards White Hat.] Cueball: Okay, want to help fix <bigger problem>? White Hat: No, for another reason I'll think of later.\n"}
{"id":2369,"title":"All-in-One","image_title":"All-in-One","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2369","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/all_in_one.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2369:_All-in-One","transcript":"[A large printer-like machine, with the label All-in-One Paper Processor on the top left of it. There are three columns of functions, with a few of them having a green light. At the top of the machine is a \"paper feed\" tray. At the bottom of the machine, is a large hole, for outputting the paper.]\nColumn 1 Print (lit green) Copy Fax (lit green) Shred Scan Translate Summarize Plagiarize Collate (lit green)\nColumn 2 Staple (lit green) Remove staples Add those perforated edge strips that are so fun to tear Roll Burn Eat\nColumn 3 Fold airplane Origami flower Corrugate Paper-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 D\u00e9coupage Notarize (lit green) Biodegrade Crumple and throw at trash like a basketball (lit green)\n","explanation":"This is an xkcd-style parody of an all-in-one printer , a printer which typically can perform several functions, usually printing, scanning, copying, and faxing. This machine starts off with fairly standard printer functions but quickly becomes absurd. The machine is accordingly oversized, making room for all the status indicators and (presumably) the extra internal parts required to accomplish the uncommon functions.\nThe title text says that if both the \"scan\" and \"shred\" options are selected, it now scans documents before trying to destroy them. Previously the machine destroyed documents and then scanned the pieces and tried to reconstruct them, identifying the original location of each shredded piece on the original sheet(s) of paper, which takes a large amount of processing power.\nCertain functions are lit green, indicating they are in use. To show which ones are in use, they are highlighted green (selected) .\n[A large printer-like machine, with the label All-in-One Paper Processor on the top left of it. There are three columns of functions, with a few of them having a green light. At the top of the machine is a \"paper feed\" tray. At the bottom of the machine, is a large hole, for outputting the paper.]\nColumn 1 Print (lit green) Copy Fax (lit green) Shred Scan Translate Summarize Plagiarize Collate (lit green)\nColumn 2 Staple (lit green) Remove staples Add those perforated edge strips that are so fun to tear Roll Burn Eat\nColumn 3 Fold airplane Origami flower Corrugate Paper-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 D\u00e9coupage Notarize (lit green) Biodegrade Crumple and throw at trash like a basketball (lit green)\n"}
{"id":2370,"title":"Prediction","image_title":"Prediction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2370","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/prediction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2370:_Prediction","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball standing next to each other. Cueball has his palm out.] Cueball: Event A is more likely than Event B.\n[White Hat touches chin thoughtfully] White Hat: So you're saying that Event A will happen. Cueball: No, Event B could also happen.\n[A frameless panel] White Hat: So you're saying it's 50\/50. Cueball: No, it's definitely not 50\/50.\n[Cueball produces a phone] White Hat: Sounds like you have no idea what will happen. Cueball: And yet I knew exactly how this conversation would go. Here, listen: [Cueball clicks a button on his phone] *Click* Phone: Then you'll say, \"So it's 50\/50\"\n","explanation":"This comic is about misunderstanding probability . Sometimes people will incorrectly assume that if two events are possible, and one of them is more likely than the other to occur, then the first event WILL occur; or, that if one names two or more outcomes they are equally likely to occur when in fact they might have different probabilities.\nSaying that one event is more likely to happen than another is not the same as saying that the first event is definitely going to happen. A statement like \"event A has a 70% probability of happening\" often misleads people into believing that event A is inevitable, while in fact 3 times out of 10 event B will happen instead of A.\nSome don't like probability statements because they are not definite and therefore cannot be proven wrong. For example, if a probability statement says \"event A has a 1% probability of happening\" and event A actually happens, that does not prove the statement wrong, because the statement admits of the possibility of event A happening.\nFor example, FiveThirtyEight famously gave Trump a higher odds, 28.6% of winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election than most other models did just before the election, but still not more likely than his opponent. However, many readers at the time interpreted that as \"Trump is definitely going to lose\", and after he won that election, blasted FiveThirtyEight for getting its prediction \"wrong\". However, that interpretation is mistaken. 28.6% means Trump had a real chance at winning: if you could put election results in a hat and draw them at random, he would win two out of every seven tries. For another example, in tabletop gaming terms, Trump's likelihood of winning was slightly lower than that of passing a flat check with a DC of 15 (6\/20 or 30%).\nThe correct interpretation of a probability statement like \"event A has a 70% probability to happen\" is that in the long run, about 70% of events with this probability end up happening. If, for example, 99% of those events ended up happening, the 70% probabilities you gave those events may likely be wrong (you should've given probabilities closer to 99%), even though you \"called\" almost all events correctly (in the sense that 70% means the events are more likely to happen than not to happen, and almost all of them happened). Looking back at your predictions and seeing if the results are what you should expect is called calibration ( example ).\nIn the last panel, it is shown that Cueball anticipated this lack of understanding, so he plays pre-recorded audio of his prediction for the conversation.\nThe title text says that these people are gullible enough to the point that they would accept a disadvantageous bet. However, it also says that the probability that they might not actually go through with paying the bet if they lose brings into question whether to propose the bet is actually worth it. Randall has previously made allusions to betting on fallaciously claimed probabilities in comics such as 1132: Frequentists vs. Bayesians and 955: Neutrinos .\nThe comic doesn't rule out the possibility that event A and event B aren't directly related. For example, it is more likely to flip a coin and get a head than to roll a 6-sided die and get a 6. This is a fairly pointless observation in most cases, except perhaps if one is trying to explain the probability of an unfamiliar event by comparison with something very familiar.\nAt the time of writing, the 2020 United States presidential and congressional elections are less than a month away. This is a time when polls showing one or the other candidate leading are common, and may be misinterpreted to mean that the candidate is certain to win. Additionally, after the 2016 election saw Donald Trump, the trailing candidate in the polls, winning, many also interpreted this to mean that the polls were useless and\/or wrong, or even go beyond this and take an adverse poll prediction as a perversely authoritative indication that the exact opposite result (which they would favour) is now a certainty. Cueball has previously shown an interest in U.S. election polling, for example in 500: Election .\nIn early October, famous statistician Nate Silver explained on his podcast \"Model Talk\" that, according to his model, Donald Trump had a 17% chance of winning reelection in 2020. That seems low, but it's a one in six chance, the odds of Russian roulette, the practice of shooting oneself in the head with a six-bullet barreled pistol with only one chamber loaded: it only has one chance in six to kill the person doing it. Would anyone in their right mind play Russian roulette? The answer he was implying was no. This illustrates how one chance in six is very real. While 17% seems low, it can absolutely happen.\n[White Hat and Cueball standing next to each other. Cueball has his palm out.] Cueball: Event A is more likely than Event B.\n[White Hat touches chin thoughtfully] White Hat: So you're saying that Event A will happen. Cueball: No, Event B could also happen.\n[A frameless panel] White Hat: So you're saying it's 50\/50. Cueball: No, it's definitely not 50\/50.\n[Cueball produces a phone] White Hat: Sounds like you have no idea what will happen. Cueball: And yet I knew exactly how this conversation would go. Here, listen: [Cueball clicks a button on his phone] *Click* Phone: Then you'll say, \"So it's 50\/50\"\n"}
{"id":2371,"title":"Election Screen Time","image_title":"Election Screen Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2371","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/election_screen_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2371:_Election_Screen_Time","transcript":"[Cueball is looking at his phone screen time report. The screen appears above his head]\nScreen Time Report\nStaying informed about politics like a good civic-minded person [tiny blue bar] 26m\nReading election updates that won't affect your actions in any way but slightly improve your knowledge about what's going to happen in a few weeks [really extremely long blue bar-chart bar] 9h14m\n","explanation":"Cueball has an app on his phone which informs him of the time spent using it for various purposes. These are typically used to monitor one's own, or maybe one's teenage child's, (over)use of games, social media apps, general browsers, etc., and highlight any surprising issues.  It is unclear whether this is: a specific analyser, that somehow identifies just this narrow subset of uses; a more general app, currently filtered to give information on just these two politics-related interactions via some complex heuristic method; or he actually does nothing but these two classifiable things, on this particular device.\nWhichever is the case, it is currently displaying and comparing just two curiously detailed statistics - the time used staying informed about politics, and the time he has spent reading election updates - and nothing else. The total time recorded would be a large slice of someone's typical day, if the report is for the last 24 hours, but is overwhelmingly dominated by the latter activity whatever the duration covered.\nThe comic reflects that most people spend a lot of time consuming news speculating about who will win the upcoming election, even though reading these \"updates\" will have no impact on the election because people are unlikely to change their minds because of them. People spend very little time researching information that will allow them to make informed decisions about voting, which is an important civic duty.  In addition, a recent article in The Atlantic said that \" Reading Too Much Political News Is Bad for Your Well-Being \".\nThe title text suggests regret about the time spent consuming political news, possibly reflecting the sentiment that the 2020 United States presidential election has been especially divisive with little productive dialogue. The title text might also be a reference to the movie Airplane! (directly referencing the 1957 movie Zero Hour! ) where one of the most popular gags is when Steve McCroskey first says \"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking\", then \"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines\", \"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue\" and so on.\nRandall has also mentioned \"screen time apps\" in 2223: Screen Time . Randall has previously remarked on poor time allocation in 1445: Efficiency , in which he admits that he reduces his overall efficiency by spending too much time figuring out which approach to a problem was more efficient.\nIn 2282: Coronavirus Worries , he indicated that worrying about other people's actions is much less healthy (although unfortunately more common) than looking after your own health.\n[Cueball is looking at his phone screen time report. The screen appears above his head]\nScreen Time Report\nStaying informed about politics like a good civic-minded person [tiny blue bar] 26m\nReading election updates that won't affect your actions in any way but slightly improve your knowledge about what's going to happen in a few weeks [really extremely long blue bar-chart bar] 9h14m\n"}
{"id":2372,"title":"Dialect Quiz","image_title":"Dialect Quiz","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2372","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dialect_quiz.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2372:_Dialect_Quiz","transcript":"[Box with title at the top]\nDialect Quiz\n[Smaller subtitle underneath]\nCompare answers with your friends!\n[Quiz is divided into two columns. Answers to questions are indicated by a letter followed by a closed parentheses, such as A). These letters are greyed out]\n[Column 1:] How do you address a group of two or more people?\nA) You B) Y'all C) I have not been around two or more people for so long that I can't remember\nHow do you pronounce \"Penelope\"?\nA) Rhymes with \"Antelope\" B) Rhymes with \"Develop\"\nWhat do you call the scientific field that studies the stars?\nA) Astrology B) Agronomy C) Cosmetology\nHow do you pronounce \"genre\"?\nA) Gone-ra B) Juh-neer C) Jen-er-uh\nYou pronounce \"Google\" with a high-pitched yelp on the...\nA) First syllable B) Second syllable\nWhat do you call the thing on the wall at school that you drink water from?\nA) Gutter pipe B) Drainpipe\nHow do you pronounce the name for a short silent video file?\nA) Animated give B) Animated gift\nWhat do you call the baseball-sized garden bugs that, when poked, glow brightly and emit a warbling scream?\nA) What? B) Lawn buddies\n[Column 2:] What do you call the misleading lines painted by disgruntled highway workers to trick cars into driving off the road?\nA) Prank lines B) Devil's Marks C) Fool-me lines D) Fauxguides E) Delaware lines\nWhat do you call the blue-green planet in the outer Solar System?\nA) Uranus B) Neptune\nWhat do you call this tool? [Image of a claw hammer]\nA) Banger B) Nail axe C) Wood mage wand D) I'm familiar with this tool but have no specific word for it E) I have never seen it before\nWhat do you call a long sandwich with meats and lettuce and stuff?\nA) A long sandwich with meats and lettuce and stuff B) A longwich C) A salad hot dog\nWhat do you call the scaly many-legged animal often found in attics?\nA) Lightbulb eater B) I have no special name for them C) I've never looked in my attic\nWhat do you say when someone around you sneezes?\nA) \"What was that?\" B) \"Oh, wow.\" C) [Quietly] \"Yikes.\"\n","explanation":"This comic is a parody of online quizzes that offer to compare the user's dialect of American English with others around the country. These quizzes generally contain questions about word usage, names for certain objects, and pronunciations that vary between different regions of the US. There are also quizzes about broader English dialects, but this comic focuses on commonly cited differences between American dialects.\nThe earliest quiz of this type to be widely disseminated online was the Harvard Dialect Survey , conducted in the early 2000s by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The survey created maps of the distribution of various word usage (such as pop\/soda\/coke for a fizzy softdrink) and was a relatively early example of widely shared Internet \"viral\" content. In 2013, Josh Katz of the New York Times created a new version based on the Harvard survey, which became the Times' most popular content of 2013 and spread the idea to many more people. Many of the questions in this comic directly derive from entries in those surveys.\nRandall's previous two comics have been about election predictions, leading up to the 2020 US General Presidential Election. A prominent predictor of the election results is Nate Silver, who runs the FiveThirtyEight website. @NateSilver538 posted his results of taking the New York Times version of the survey on October 11, 2020... just three days before this comic was posted. 2371: Election Screen Time specifically suggests that Randall may be spending too much time obsessing over new posts and content from the election predictors. It's coincidental, but likely, that Nate Silver's tweet inspired Randall's post: he was reminded of the 2013 feature from the Times.\n[Box with title at the top]\nDialect Quiz\n[Smaller subtitle underneath]\nCompare answers with your friends!\n[Quiz is divided into two columns. Answers to questions are indicated by a letter followed by a closed parentheses, such as A). These letters are greyed out]\n[Column 1:] How do you address a group of two or more people?\nA) You B) Y'all C) I have not been around two or more people for so long that I can't remember\nHow do you pronounce \"Penelope\"?\nA) Rhymes with \"Antelope\" B) Rhymes with \"Develop\"\nWhat do you call the scientific field that studies the stars?\nA) Astrology B) Agronomy C) Cosmetology\nHow do you pronounce \"genre\"?\nA) Gone-ra B) Juh-neer C) Jen-er-uh\nYou pronounce \"Google\" with a high-pitched yelp on the...\nA) First syllable B) Second syllable\nWhat do you call the thing on the wall at school that you drink water from?\nA) Gutter pipe B) Drainpipe\nHow do you pronounce the name for a short silent video file?\nA) Animated give B) Animated gift\nWhat do you call the baseball-sized garden bugs that, when poked, glow brightly and emit a warbling scream?\nA) What? B) Lawn buddies\n[Column 2:] What do you call the misleading lines painted by disgruntled highway workers to trick cars into driving off the road?\nA) Prank lines B) Devil's Marks C) Fool-me lines D) Fauxguides E) Delaware lines\nWhat do you call the blue-green planet in the outer Solar System?\nA) Uranus B) Neptune\nWhat do you call this tool? [Image of a claw hammer]\nA) Banger B) Nail axe C) Wood mage wand D) I'm familiar with this tool but have no specific word for it E) I have never seen it before\nWhat do you call a long sandwich with meats and lettuce and stuff?\nA) A long sandwich with meats and lettuce and stuff B) A longwich C) A salad hot dog\nWhat do you call the scaly many-legged animal often found in attics?\nA) Lightbulb eater B) I have no special name for them C) I've never looked in my attic\nWhat do you say when someone around you sneezes?\nA) \"What was that?\" B) \"Oh, wow.\" C) [Quietly] \"Yikes.\"\n"}
{"id":2373,"title":"Chemist Eggs","image_title":"Chemist Eggs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2373","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chemist_eggs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2373:_Chemist_Eggs","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail face a table with something like a lab stirrer or heater on it, supporting a flat-bottomed and -topped container from which bubbles are rising.] Cueball: How will I know if the reaction fails? Ponytail: You'll smell the sulfides. Cueball: What do those smell like? Ponytail: Sulfurous. Rotten eggs.\n[A new panel, the table is gone. Cueball is now facing Ponytail.] Cueball: Chemists always compare sulfur to rotten eggs. Cueball: But why would I know that smell? Ponytail: I dunno, It's a common thing!\n[Ponytail puts her hand out.] Cueball: Is it? My kitchen is messy, but there aren't eggs lying around rotting. Ponytail: You must have smelled one at some point.\n[Ponytail is now walking right off-panel, away from Cueball. She is clenching her hands and is evidently annoyed] Cueball: Are all chemists' houses full of random raw eggs? Do you toss them over your shoulder for good luck? Ponytail: My house is not full of eggs! Cueball: What do you consider a normal amount of eggs in a house? Cueball: If kids egg your house this Halloween, how will you know??\nThe quantity of eggs eaten per person in the U.S was estimated at 289.5 in 2019. [1]\n","explanation":"In this comic, Ponytail explains to Cueball that if he smells sulfides then the chemistry experiment on which they're working has failed. Ponytail then clarifies that sulfides smell like rotten eggs. The main and most distinct chemical rotten eggs emit is hydrogen sulfide , hence most people who smell them will link the chemical with \"rotten egg smell\".\nCueball replies, however, that he doesn't actually know what rotten eggs smell like, and it's odd that everyone uses that as a comparison. This is a result of changing times \u2014 decades ago, when the 'rotten eggs' descriptor became commonplace in chemistry education at high schools and universities, rotten eggs were indeed common enough that cooks avoided adding eggs directly to other ingredients, lest the rotten egg, not detected until after it was too late, force the cook to discard everything and start over. Vastly improved farming, shipping, and marketing practices have made the rotten egg vanishingly rare, at least at supermarkets in the USA. Moreover, much greater recognition of the health hazards of hydrogen sulfide means that, due to various occupational safety precautions, opportunities for sniffing the gas have become scarce, and usually engender swift reactions such as building evacuation.\nThus, the comparison has outlived the circumstances that spawned it, and chemistry teachers parrot a line they learned as students, which is no longer relevant to the students' experience. Cueball then takes the disconnect between the trope and his experience and pushes it for all it's worth. This could be taken as symbolic of people who spot such discordances and blow them out of proportion to troll others, in which case, Cueball has most definitely succeeded, based on how Ponytail reacts \u2014 she is clenching her fists in anger as she leaves the conversation, presumably to avoid further irritation. (Perhaps she smells eggs often from the people in 382: Trebuchet !)\nSome of Cueball 's questions suggest that chemists use eggs in place of other items. For example, the superstitious may react to a spilling of salt by picking it up and throwing it over their left shoulder, ostensibly as an attempt to blind the Devil.  Another relates to the upcoming night before Halloween event called \" Mischief Night \", where kids are known to throw eggs at houses. Cueball asks Ponytail how she will know if this has happened, as he thinks she keeps an unusually large number of eggs in her house.\nEven though rotten eggs (and hydrogen sulfide in general) are much less common nowadays, many fuel gases are mixed with odorant compounds to signal that a leak is happening; even if the user might be unfamiliar with \"rotten eggs\" specifically, a large amount of unpleasant odor still works as an alarm that something bad is happening.  People who use natural gas or propane stoves should be familiar with the similarly rotten smell of methanethiol , ethanethiol , and\/or tert-butylthiol (the \"-SH\" thiol group is a common feature of many pungent odors, including garlic and skunk spray).  Some mineral springs and other natural water sources also contain sulfides and have a strong sulfide odor and flavor; they are sometimes referred to as \"sulfur springs\".\nThe title text makes a joke about how often chemists use the comparison, saying that they use a rotten egg smell as the baseline and that a lack of the smell is a distinct one. Given the health hazards of hydrogen sulfide and the regulations now enforced in recognition of those hazards, the chemistry teacher probably doesn't often experience the smell either. Since hydrogen sulfide deadens the sense of smell, taking this smell as a 'baseline' is improbable and potentially dangerous, and it's unfortunate that the title text makes this suggestion.\n[Cueball and Ponytail face a table with something like a lab stirrer or heater on it, supporting a flat-bottomed and -topped container from which bubbles are rising.] Cueball: How will I know if the reaction fails? Ponytail: You'll smell the sulfides. Cueball: What do those smell like? Ponytail: Sulfurous. Rotten eggs.\n[A new panel, the table is gone. Cueball is now facing Ponytail.] Cueball: Chemists always compare sulfur to rotten eggs. Cueball: But why would I know that smell? Ponytail: I dunno, It's a common thing!\n[Ponytail puts her hand out.] Cueball: Is it? My kitchen is messy, but there aren't eggs lying around rotting. Ponytail: You must have smelled one at some point.\n[Ponytail is now walking right off-panel, away from Cueball. She is clenching her hands and is evidently annoyed] Cueball: Are all chemists' houses full of random raw eggs? Do you toss them over your shoulder for good luck? Ponytail: My house is not full of eggs! Cueball: What do you consider a normal amount of eggs in a house? Cueball: If kids egg your house this Halloween, how will you know??\nThe quantity of eggs eaten per person in the U.S was estimated at 289.5 in 2019. [1]\n"}
{"id":2374,"title":"10,000 Hours","image_title":"10,000 Hours","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2374","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/10000_hours.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2374:_10,000_Hours","transcript":"[Cueball is staring at his phone. A report from the phone is shown above his head] If you buy into the \"10,000 hours\" thing, you are now a world-class expert!\n[Caption below comic] My screen time reports have started trying to put a positive spin on things.\n","explanation":"This comic references a common refrain that one must do something for 10,000 hours to become an expert on it.\nThe linked article states:\nPopular smartphone operating systems automatically record the amount of time the user spends using their phone, broken down by time spent in each app. This feature is supposed to allow users to analyze their own habits. On iOS, this feature is called Screen Time . On Android, it is called Digital Wellbeing .\nIn this comic, Cueball 's phone tells him that, assuming that the 10,000-hour idea is correct, he is now a master of a task, because of the amount of time he has spent on his phone. The 10,000-hour refrain usually pertains to the arts or sports, because they require a certain level of skill; learning to spend time on one's phone does not require this level of training [ citation needed ] , so this stretch of time does not bring Cueball closer to achieving any goal. Furthermore, it is not clear exactly what task (or possibly tasks) Cueball is supposed to have mastered.\nRandall often pokes fun at his extensive screen time, such as in 2223: Screen Time . Cueball's phone wants to delicately approach the topic so as not to make Cueball feel bad, so the euphemism about expertise is meant to distract him from realizing how much time he actually spends on his phone. Also, the phone tells Cueball that he was become a \"world-class expert\", when really he is just someone who checks his phone way too much. It is interesting that his phone decides to be kind to him, even when he has neglected it before ( 1668: Singularity ).\nThe title text refers to the fact that people eat a lot, 1-2 hours a day , though not all of this time is spent chewing. At the time of this comic's publication, Randall was just over 36 years old (13,151 days), so he has spent a large amount of time eating, well over 10,000 hours. It could also be a reference to the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, in which Calvin refers to routines he has created to improve at chewing.\n[Cueball is staring at his phone. A report from the phone is shown above his head] If you buy into the \"10,000 hours\" thing, you are now a world-class expert!\n[Caption below comic] My screen time reports have started trying to put a positive spin on things.\n"}
{"id":2375,"title":"Worst Ladder","image_title":"Worst Ladder","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2375","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/worst_ladder.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2375:_Worst_Ladder","transcript":"[Ponytail, Cueball, Hairy and Hairbun are sitting around a boardroom table. Megan is giving a presentation and pointing to a chart behind her.] Megan: Our entertainment division is failing. We can't compete with free content.\n[A frameless panel. Only Megan is shown, with her pointer to her side.] Off-panel voice: Where are they going? YouTube? TikTok? Megan: No.\n[Zoomed in on Megan.] Megan: The Google Images search results for worst ladder . Off-panel voice: Huh? Off-panel voice: Let me see ...\n[Ponytail and Cueball are looking at one laptop, and Hairy and Hairbun are looking at a second. Megan has her arms out in front of her, frustrated.] Ponytail: Yikes, look at this one! The stepladder is balanced on -- Hairy: Wow, they tied a ladder to -- Hairbun: Ooh, check out the -- Megan: No!\nSearching Google for \"worst ladder\" at the time the comic was posted allows observing ladders that are comically unsafe or poorly designed (see sample results from shortly after the comic was posted ). It is worth noting that, while normally it does not undergo much change, the \"worst ladder\" page will likely now contain a barrage of results related to this xkcd comic, as happened with 369: Dangers . This influence is similar to the Slashdot effect . For reference, at the time of posting (0:00 UTC), the comic was the 30th Google image result. From about 0:20 to 1:15 UTC, it was the 18th result; by 1:30 UTC, it had become the third result. Searching Google for \"worst ladder -xkcd\" yields better results, but some xkcd is still there.\n","explanation":"An always present concern of media industries is consumers shifting tastes or indeed abandoning a medium altogether (such as print newspapers or in-person theaters). This strip depicts one such scenario prompting a meeting to discuss the problem. The other attendees suspect the consumers are simply shifting to an online platform, but Megan reveals they are instead shifting towards image search results.\nOf course, during the age of the internet, there are many sources of free entertainment. YouTube and TikTok provide examples of these services, as practically anyone can choose from a tremendous variety of content. Therefore, this abundance of free content hurts services that require money to see their content, particularly when this content does not have any factors that make it inherently more appealing than the free services. The Quibi paid service shut down, just 6 months after it opened, on the same day that this comic appeared.\nThe joke here is that instead of YouTube or TikTok, possible customers are going to the Google Image search page for \"worst ladder\" . Even the meeting participants are entranced by it, so the meeting devolves into everyone showing their favorites to each other.\nSearching for images is an unorthodox source of entertainment, frequently only seen when searching for memes (this, in fact, is how Know Your Meme gauges interest in a meme). Depending on your relationship with Google's personalization algorithms, image results may change up between different people or different views, or remain roughly stagnant from day to day (contrasted with other services that contain new posts nearly every second), and the quality of any Google Images page will decline with scrolling. Therefore, an image search results page is not a sustainable source of entertainment [ citation needed ] , and may be unlikely to compete with the service in this comic.\nSearch results currently tend to vary widely from person to person, as Google uses the user's search history, IP address, and location to try to find the most relevant result for each person, even if they are not logged in. This provides social opportunities around searching, sometimes exploited by social media posts (which may be how Megan originally found out).\nThe title text explains that the company actually decided to use the idea, and created a subscription service for these images. The idea was a success and was indeed very lucrative. They then tried selling actual \"worst ladders\", or \"worst ladders\"-themed merchandise at a hardware store, thinking that people who enjoy looking at others' mistakes would also enjoy making that mistake themselves, but this tie-in ended up costing them as much money as they made from the subscriptions (if the word \"disastrous\" is meant literally, there may have been injuries and liability lawsuits involved).\n[Ponytail, Cueball, Hairy and Hairbun are sitting around a boardroom table. Megan is giving a presentation and pointing to a chart behind her.] Megan: Our entertainment division is failing. We can't compete with free content.\n[A frameless panel. Only Megan is shown, with her pointer to her side.] Off-panel voice: Where are they going? YouTube? TikTok? Megan: No.\n[Zoomed in on Megan.] Megan: The Google Images search results for worst ladder . Off-panel voice: Huh? Off-panel voice: Let me see ...\n[Ponytail and Cueball are looking at one laptop, and Hairy and Hairbun are looking at a second. Megan has her arms out in front of her, frustrated.] Ponytail: Yikes, look at this one! The stepladder is balanced on -- Hairy: Wow, they tied a ladder to -- Hairbun: Ooh, check out the -- Megan: No!\nSearching Google for \"worst ladder\" at the time the comic was posted allows observing ladders that are comically unsafe or poorly designed (see sample results from shortly after the comic was posted ). It is worth noting that, while normally it does not undergo much change, the \"worst ladder\" page will likely now contain a barrage of results related to this xkcd comic, as happened with 369: Dangers . This influence is similar to the Slashdot effect . For reference, at the time of posting (0:00 UTC), the comic was the 30th Google image result. From about 0:20 to 1:15 UTC, it was the 18th result; by 1:30 UTC, it had become the third result. Searching Google for \"worst ladder -xkcd\" yields better results, but some xkcd is still there.\n"}
{"id":2376,"title":"Curbside","image_title":"Curbside","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2376","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/curbside.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2376:_Curbside","transcript":"[Beret Guy talking on a cell phone. The response from the person on the phone is in a jagged bubble.] Beret Guy: Hi, is this the shop that sells cursed items but when you try to return them the shop is gone? Phone: Yes, how can I help you?\n[A frameless panel. Beret Guy still talking on the phone] Beret Guy: Do you do curbside pickup? I wanted to buy a cursed amulet that angers ghosts, and some groceries. Phone: No, but it's okay, we wear masks.\n[Zoomed in on other side of Beret Guy's face] Beret Guy: So you can't bring stuff out? Phone: I'm afraid not. Beret Guy: But it's so stuffy in there!\n[The callee's response is on the top of the panel. Beret Guy is now holding his phone in front of him, ready to end the call.] Phone: Why not think of the virus as part of the amulet's curse? Beret Guy: Excuse me!? I'm trying to buy some bread and do battle with ghosts, not endanger my family and friends in a pandemic! Beret Guy: I will take my business elsewhere.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nBeret Guy is making contact with a shop that sells cursed items, only to vanish when the customer tries to return the product . He has previously mentioned doing most of his shopping (including groceries) at such locations in 1772: Startup Opportunity , and visited one (possibly the same one) several months earlier in 2332: Cursed Chair . That visit ended with him trying to stop the COVID-19 pandemic by destroying the cursed chair, but evidently he either failed to destroy the chair (which claimed to be immortal) or found that doing so didn't halt the pandemic. (Apparently Beret Guy has visited this same store before, since he says that \"it's so stuffy in there\", but has not attempted to return any of his purchases, since the store has not disappeared yet. Or perhaps it is simply nonexistent when someone is trying to return something.)\nAfter confirming that he has the right number, Beret Guy asks if the cursed store does curbside pickup, as he intends to place an order for bread and a cursed amulet, but does not wish to go inside during the pandemic. Many grocery stores have started offering such services, allowing a customer to place an order over the phone or online, then receive it outside the store, thus minimizing the interaction with store staff or other customers. Closed spaces are understood to pose a greater risk of contagion than the outdoors, where wind and sun can mitigate airborne viral particles.\nThe store's contact replies that no, they do not offer curbside pickup, but tries to assure Beret Guy that all employees at the location wear masks. (They might be wearing haunted Halloween masks .) When Beret Guy expresses disappointment at the revelation, complaining about the stuffy air of the shop, the contact advises him to consider the virus as part of the curses that come with their products. Beret Guy gets angry at this -- apparently, he's okay with buying cursed items, but not exposing himself to unacceptable risks of catching COVID-19.  Beret Guy promptly proclaims that he will not be doing business with the location if they are going to showcase such an attitude towards the pandemic. It's unclear how he will find another store with similar unusual characteristics, although it has been mentioned that there is an entire industry of these stores.\nBeret Guy mentions that he wants to buy an amulet in order to 'do battle with ghosts', which is not an ordinary thing to do given that most people cannot interact directly with ghosts. [ citation needed ] Perhaps he has a ghost-fighting weapon that he has also bought from the shop, although a more likely explanation (given Beret Guy's peculiarity) seems that he is somehow able to engage in martial combat with them. A common argument for how ghosts can exist is that they are in another dimension; given that Beret Guy has extra dimensions in his bones ( 2310: Great Attractor ), he might appear as a skeleton warrior in the ghosts' dimension. Thus, being able to battle ghosts would be one of the many strange powers of Beret Guy . It is also unclear why Beret Guy specifically wants to anger the ghosts.\nHe also mentions that he is there to buy groceries, which is rather ordinary in contrast to the previous request. This is another example of Beret Guy's seemingly oblivious view of the world, putting the purchase of a ghostly amulet on par with buying bread.\nThe title text explains that contact tracers have been attempting to visit the store to figure out who else has been working or shopping there, which suggests that people may have been exposed to COVID there.  However, presumably because of the peculiar nature of the store, a notable number of the contact tracers have not returned from visiting it, leading the state to create a tracing program to find the missing contact tracers. The joke here is that the contact tracers must now be traced by another tracing program. This same kind of recursivity of tracking tracers has been previously explored for finding finders and incinerating incinerators .\n[Beret Guy talking on a cell phone. The response from the person on the phone is in a jagged bubble.] Beret Guy: Hi, is this the shop that sells cursed items but when you try to return them the shop is gone? Phone: Yes, how can I help you?\n[A frameless panel. Beret Guy still talking on the phone] Beret Guy: Do you do curbside pickup? I wanted to buy a cursed amulet that angers ghosts, and some groceries. Phone: No, but it's okay, we wear masks.\n[Zoomed in on other side of Beret Guy's face] Beret Guy: So you can't bring stuff out? Phone: I'm afraid not. Beret Guy: But it's so stuffy in there!\n[The callee's response is on the top of the panel. Beret Guy is now holding his phone in front of him, ready to end the call.] Phone: Why not think of the virus as part of the amulet's curse? Beret Guy: Excuse me!? I'm trying to buy some bread and do battle with ghosts, not endanger my family and friends in a pandemic! Beret Guy: I will take my business elsewhere.\n"}
{"id":2377,"title":"xkcd Phone 12","image_title":"xkcd Phone 12","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2377","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/xkcd_phone_12.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2377:_xkcd_Phone_12","transcript":"[The comic shows two smartphones: one taller and wider than the other. ]\n[Labels to the left of the larger smartphone:]\n[Labels to the right of the larger smartphone:]\n[Labels to the right of the smaller smartphone:]\n[Text below the phone:] The xkcd Phone 12* and 12 Max**\n*Standard **For people named Max\n\"The only phone you'll ever own\"\u00ae\u2122\n","explanation":"This is the \"12th\" (actually the 8th) in the ongoing xkcd Phone series in which Randall explains his new joke phone designs with many strange and useless features. It is also a reference to the recently released iPhone 12 . However, there have only been 8 comics released, with the previous two being 2000: xkcd Phone 2000 and 1889: xkcd Phone 6 .\nThe note about the xkcd Phone 12 and the xkcd Phone 12 Max (only for people named Max) is a joke about the different models of iPhone 12: iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max. The xkcd Phone 12 Max would be expected to have a larger screen, but it seems that this phone is also only for people with the name Max. If the phones are respectively placed, Max's (Maxes'?) phone is the smaller of the two models.\nThe slogan '\"The only phone you'll ever own\"' could be interpreted as something of a threat, which is believable given some of the purported features. The slogan has the \"registered trademark\" symbol, with that symbol supposedly itself trademarked, which is highly unlikely. It is similar to the phrase \"The last suit you'll ever wear\" , describing the black suits worn by the Men In Black in the movie of the same name.\nMultiple features are labelled on the phone that are common when advertising other products, but highly unusual in mobile phones, for comedic effect:\nThe title text mentions xkcd phone OS updates, including:\n[The comic shows two smartphones: one taller and wider than the other. ]\n[Labels to the left of the larger smartphone:]\n[Labels to the right of the larger smartphone:]\n[Labels to the right of the smaller smartphone:]\n[Text below the phone:] The xkcd Phone 12* and 12 Max**\n*Standard **For people named Max\n\"The only phone you'll ever own\"\u00ae\u2122\n"}
{"id":2378,"title":"Fall Back","image_title":"Fall Back","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2378","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fall_back.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2378:_Fall_Back","transcript":"[Cueball is looking at his phone.] Cueball: It's 8 PM. Exactly six days until the polls close here.\n[Megan walks in from Cueball's left, holding up a finger. Cueball has lowered his phone.] Megan: Six days and one hour. Cueball: Oh right, fall back. Cueball: Ugh.\n[Megan holds out her arms.] Megan: Personally, I think it's great. Megan: Don't you want this moment to last as long as possible?\n[Close up on Megan.] Megan: My pandemic anxiety and election anxiety have finally fused. Megan: I have ascended. Megan: I get breaking news alerts in my dreams.\n[Back to Cueball and Megan.] Cueball: I don't think the endless 24 hour news cycle has been good for either of us. Megan: Well, then I have good news about Sunday! Cueball: Ughhh.\n","explanation":"Daylight saving time ends in the United States at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday in November, when 2 a.m. becomes 1 a.m. Election Day in the United States is on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.\nIn 2020, Nov. 1 is Sunday, so the shift from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time will happen two days before the 2020 election . This has the effect of making Sunday, Nov. 1 a 25-hour day. The switchover is sometimes referred to mnemonically as \"fall back,\" with its springtime counterpart (a day of 23 hours) being \"spring forward\" as mentioned in 1655: Doomsday Clock .\nAt the beginning of the comic, Cueball incorrectly calculates the time until the election day polls close (this varies from state to state); in the second panel, Megan reminds him about falling back. She goes on to possibly sarcastically treasure this extended moment, one more hour to experience the bitter election cycle and the COVID-19 pandemic .  Megan describes herself as dissociating here, and it is possible she is actually treating these emergencies as good now, instead of bad.  The behavior could be seen as an indirect demand for the situation to change, a demonstration that she may lose her sanity further if it does not.  Cueball hears how intense she is saying her experience is, and says he thinks they've both spent too much time engaging with the news (a sentiment echoed from other recent xkcd comics, like 2371: Election Screen Time and possibly 2374: 10,000 Hours ). When he mentions the 24-hour news cycle , Megan corrects him again, as Sunday will be a 25 -hour news cycle.\nThe title text refers to a popular sentiment that the issues and emotions raised in the 2016 United States presidential election were not settled when the election was over and have continued unabated since then.  Even though the election itself was held in November 2016, the primary candidates officially announced their campaigns in early 2015; thus, 2020 is the sixth year since that campaign season opened.  The implication could be that the whole nation, or at least Randall's community of political followers, has had to be in an altered state of consciousness to handle the past six years.  It could also be a reference to ongoing strong campaigning, in excess of what people have seen in the past.\n[Cueball is looking at his phone.] Cueball: It's 8 PM. Exactly six days until the polls close here.\n[Megan walks in from Cueball's left, holding up a finger. Cueball has lowered his phone.] Megan: Six days and one hour. Cueball: Oh right, fall back. Cueball: Ugh.\n[Megan holds out her arms.] Megan: Personally, I think it's great. Megan: Don't you want this moment to last as long as possible?\n[Close up on Megan.] Megan: My pandemic anxiety and election anxiety have finally fused. Megan: I have ascended. Megan: I get breaking news alerts in my dreams.\n[Back to Cueball and Megan.] Cueball: I don't think the endless 24 hour news cycle has been good for either of us. Megan: Well, then I have good news about Sunday! Cueball: Ughhh.\n"}
{"id":2379,"title":"Probability Comparisons","image_title":"Probability Comparisons","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2379","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/probability_comparisons.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2379:_Probability_Comparisons","transcript":"[Large heading, centered.]\nProbability Comparisons\n[Left column.]\n0.01% You guess the last four digits of someone's social security number on the first try\n0.1% Three randomly chosen people are all left-handed\n0.2% You draw 2 random Scrabble tiles and get M and M\nYou draw 3 random M&Ms and they're all red\n0.3% You guess someone's birthday in one try.\n0.5% An NBA team down by 30 at halftime wins\nYou get 4 M&Ms and they're all brown or yellow\n1% Steph Curry gets two free throws and misses both\nLeBron James guesses your birthday, if each guess costs one free throw and he loses if he misses\n1.5% You get two M&Ms and they're both red\nYou share a birthday with a Backstreet Boy\n2% You guess someone's card on the first try\n3% You guess 5 coin tosses and get them all right\nSteph Curry wins that birthday free throw game\n4% You sweep a 3-game rock paper scissors series\nPortland, Oregon has a white Christmas\nYou share a birthday with two US Senators\n5% An NBA team down 20 at halftime wins\nYou roll a natural 20\n6% You correctly guess someone's card given 3 tries\n7% LeBron James gets two free throws and misses both\n8% You correctly guess someone's card given 4 tries\n9% Steph Curry misses a free throw\n10% You draw 5 cards and get the Ace of Spades\nThere's a magnitude 8+ earthquake in the next month\n11% You sweep a 2-game rock paper scissors series\n12% A randomly-chosen American lives in California\nYou correctly guess someone's card given 6 tries\nYou share a birthday with a US President\n13% A d6 beats a d20\nAn NBA team down 10 going into the 4th quarter wins\nYou pull one M&M from a bag and it's red\n14% A randomly drawn scrabble tile beats a d6 die roll\n15% You roll a d20 and get at least 18\n16% Steph Curry gets two free throws but makes only one\n17% You roll a d6 die and get a 6\n18% A d6 beats or ties a d20\n19% At least one person in a random pair is left-handed\n20% You get a dozen M&Ms and none of them are brown\n21% St. Louis has a white Christmas\n22% An NBA team wins when they're down 10 at halftime\n23% You get an M&M and it's blue\nYou share a birthday with a US senator\n24% You correctly guess that someone was born in the winter\n25% You correctly guess that someone was born in the fall\nYou roll two plain M&Ms and get M and M.\n26% You correctly guess someone was born in the summer\n27% LeBron James misses a free throw\n32% Pittsburgh has a white Christmas\n33% A randomly chosen Star Wars movie (Episodes I-IX) has \"of the\" in the title\nYou win the Monty Hall sports car by picking a door and refusing to switch\nYou win rock paper scissors by picking randomly\n34% You draw five cards and get an ace\n35% A random Scrabble tile is one of the letters in \"random\"\n[Right column.]\n39% LeBron James gets two free throws but misses one\n40% A random Scrabble tile is a letter in \"Steph Curry\"\n46% There's a magnitude 7 quake in LA within 30 years\n48% Milwaukee has a white Christmas\nA random Scrabble tile is a letter in Carly Rae Jepsen\n50% You get heads in a coin toss\n53% Salt Lake City has a white Christmas\n54% LeBron James gets two free throws and makes both\n58% A random Scrabble tile is a letter in \"Nate Silver\"\n60% You get two M&Ms and neither is blue\n65% Burlington, Vermont has a white Christmas\n66% A randomly chosen movie from the main Lord of the Rings trilogy has \u201cof the\u201d in the title twice\n67% You roll at least a 3 with a d6\n71% A random Scrabble tile beats a random dice roll\n73% LeBron James makes a free throw\n75% You drop two M&Ms and one of them ends with the \"M\" up so it's clear they're not Skittles\n76% You get two M&Ms and neither is red\n77% You get an an M&M and it's not blue\n78% An NBA team wins when they're up 10 at halftime\n79% St. Louis doesn't have a white Christmas\n81% Two random people are both right-handed\n83% Steph Curry gets two free throws and makes both\n85% You roll a d20 and get at least a 4\n87% An NBA team up by 10 going into the 4 th quarter wins\nSomeone fails to guess your card given 7 tries\n88% A randomly chosen American lives outside California\n89% You roll a 3 or higher given two tries\n90% Someone fails to guess your card given 5 tries\n91% You incorrectly guess that someone was born in August\nSteph Curry makes a free throw\n92% You guess someone's birth month at random and are wrong\n93% Lebron James makes a free throw given two tries\n94% Someone fails to guess your card given 3 tries\n95% An NBA team wins when they're up 20 at halftime\n96% Someone fails to guess your card given 2 tries\n97% You try to guess 5 coin tosses and fail\n98% You incorrectly guess someone's birthday is this week\n98.5% An NBA team up 15 points with 8 minutes left wins\n99% Steph Curry makes a free throw given two tries\n99.5% An NBA team that's up by 30 points at halftime wins\n99.7% You guess someone's birthday at random and are wrong\n99.8% There's not a magnitude 8 quake in California next year\n99.9% A random group of three people contains a right-hander\n99.99% You incorrectly guess the last four digits of someone's social security number\n99.9999999999999995% You pick up a phone, dial a random 10-digit number, and say 'Hello Barack Obama, there's just been a magnitude 8 earthquake in California!\" and are wrong\n0.00000001% You add \"Hang on, this is big \u2014 I'm going to loop in Carly Rae Jepsen\", dial another random 10-digit number, and she picks up\n[In light grey colour and in the lower left corner there is text.]\nSources: https:\/\/xkcd.com\/2379\/sources\/\n","explanation":"This is a list of probabilities for different events. There are numerous recurring themes, of which the most common are free throws (13 entries), birthdays (12), dice (12, split about evenly between 6-sided (d6) and 20-sided (d20) types), M&M candies (11), playing cards (9), NBA basketball mid-game victory predictions (9), Scrabble tiles (7), coins (7), white Christmases (7), and the NBA players Stephen Curry and LeBron James (7 each).\nThemes are variously repeated and combined, for humorous effect. For instance, there are entries for both the probability that St. Louis will have a white Christmas (21%) and that it will not (79%). Also given is the 40% probability that a random Scrabble tile will contain a letter from the name \"Steph Curry\".\nThere are 80 items in the list, the last two of which devolve into absurdity - perhaps from the stress of preparing the other 78 entries.\nThe list may be an attempt to better understand probabilistic election forecasts for the 2020 United States presidential election , which was four days away at the time this comic was published and had also been alluded to in 2370: Prediction and 2371: Election Screen Time . Statistician and psephologist Nate Silver is referenced in one of the list items. On the date this cartoon was published, Nate Silver's website FiveThirtyEight.com was publishing forecast probabilities of Donald Trump and Joe Biden winning the US Presidential election. On 31 October 2020, the forecast described the chances of Donald Trump winning as \"roughly the same as the chance that it\u2019s raining in downtown Los Angeles. It does rain there. (Downtown L.A. has about 36 rainy days per year, or about a 1-in-10 shot of a rainy day.)\" A day previously, when the chances were 12%, the website had also described Trump's chances of winning as \"slightly less than a six sided die rolling a 1\".\nThe probabilities are calculated from these sources , as mentioned in the bottom left corner.\nThe title text refers to the song \" Call Me Maybe \" by Carly Rae Jepsen (cited twice in the list). \"MAYBE\" is emphasized, perhaps because the probability of getting her phone number correct, as in the last item in the list, is very low. The capitalization could also be a reference to Scrabble tiles, as was previously mentioned in association with Carly Rae Jepsen.\nIn the original comic, \"outside\" in the 88% probability section is spelled incorrectly as \"outide\". In addition, the 39% section had \"two free throw\" instead of \"throws\".\nThe (seemingly unimportant) odds of LeBron James' versus Stephen Curry's free throws and names in Scrabble refer to 2002: LeBron James and Stephen Curry .\n[Large heading, centered.]\nProbability Comparisons\n[Left column.]\n0.01% You guess the last four digits of someone's social security number on the first try\n0.1% Three randomly chosen people are all left-handed\n0.2% You draw 2 random Scrabble tiles and get M and M\nYou draw 3 random M&Ms and they're all red\n0.3% You guess someone's birthday in one try.\n0.5% An NBA team down by 30 at halftime wins\nYou get 4 M&Ms and they're all brown or yellow\n1% Steph Curry gets two free throws and misses both\nLeBron James guesses your birthday, if each guess costs one free throw and he loses if he misses\n1.5% You get two M&Ms and they're both red\nYou share a birthday with a Backstreet Boy\n2% You guess someone's card on the first try\n3% You guess 5 coin tosses and get them all right\nSteph Curry wins that birthday free throw game\n4% You sweep a 3-game rock paper scissors series\nPortland, Oregon has a white Christmas\nYou share a birthday with two US Senators\n5% An NBA team down 20 at halftime wins\nYou roll a natural 20\n6% You correctly guess someone's card given 3 tries\n7% LeBron James gets two free throws and misses both\n8% You correctly guess someone's card given 4 tries\n9% Steph Curry misses a free throw\n10% You draw 5 cards and get the Ace of Spades\nThere's a magnitude 8+ earthquake in the next month\n11% You sweep a 2-game rock paper scissors series\n12% A randomly-chosen American lives in California\nYou correctly guess someone's card given 6 tries\nYou share a birthday with a US President\n13% A d6 beats a d20\nAn NBA team down 10 going into the 4th quarter wins\nYou pull one M&M from a bag and it's red\n14% A randomly drawn scrabble tile beats a d6 die roll\n15% You roll a d20 and get at least 18\n16% Steph Curry gets two free throws but makes only one\n17% You roll a d6 die and get a 6\n18% A d6 beats or ties a d20\n19% At least one person in a random pair is left-handed\n20% You get a dozen M&Ms and none of them are brown\n21% St. Louis has a white Christmas\n22% An NBA team wins when they're down 10 at halftime\n23% You get an M&M and it's blue\nYou share a birthday with a US senator\n24% You correctly guess that someone was born in the winter\n25% You correctly guess that someone was born in the fall\nYou roll two plain M&Ms and get M and M.\n26% You correctly guess someone was born in the summer\n27% LeBron James misses a free throw\n32% Pittsburgh has a white Christmas\n33% A randomly chosen Star Wars movie (Episodes I-IX) has \"of the\" in the title\nYou win the Monty Hall sports car by picking a door and refusing to switch\nYou win rock paper scissors by picking randomly\n34% You draw five cards and get an ace\n35% A random Scrabble tile is one of the letters in \"random\"\n[Right column.]\n39% LeBron James gets two free throws but misses one\n40% A random Scrabble tile is a letter in \"Steph Curry\"\n46% There's a magnitude 7 quake in LA within 30 years\n48% Milwaukee has a white Christmas\nA random Scrabble tile is a letter in Carly Rae Jepsen\n50% You get heads in a coin toss\n53% Salt Lake City has a white Christmas\n54% LeBron James gets two free throws and makes both\n58% A random Scrabble tile is a letter in \"Nate Silver\"\n60% You get two M&Ms and neither is blue\n65% Burlington, Vermont has a white Christmas\n66% A randomly chosen movie from the main Lord of the Rings trilogy has \u201cof the\u201d in the title twice\n67% You roll at least a 3 with a d6\n71% A random Scrabble tile beats a random dice roll\n73% LeBron James makes a free throw\n75% You drop two M&Ms and one of them ends with the \"M\" up so it's clear they're not Skittles\n76% You get two M&Ms and neither is red\n77% You get an an M&M and it's not blue\n78% An NBA team wins when they're up 10 at halftime\n79% St. Louis doesn't have a white Christmas\n81% Two random people are both right-handed\n83% Steph Curry gets two free throws and makes both\n85% You roll a d20 and get at least a 4\n87% An NBA team up by 10 going into the 4 th quarter wins\nSomeone fails to guess your card given 7 tries\n88% A randomly chosen American lives outside California\n89% You roll a 3 or higher given two tries\n90% Someone fails to guess your card given 5 tries\n91% You incorrectly guess that someone was born in August\nSteph Curry makes a free throw\n92% You guess someone's birth month at random and are wrong\n93% Lebron James makes a free throw given two tries\n94% Someone fails to guess your card given 3 tries\n95% An NBA team wins when they're up 20 at halftime\n96% Someone fails to guess your card given 2 tries\n97% You try to guess 5 coin tosses and fail\n98% You incorrectly guess someone's birthday is this week\n98.5% An NBA team up 15 points with 8 minutes left wins\n99% Steph Curry makes a free throw given two tries\n99.5% An NBA team that's up by 30 points at halftime wins\n99.7% You guess someone's birthday at random and are wrong\n99.8% There's not a magnitude 8 quake in California next year\n99.9% A random group of three people contains a right-hander\n99.99% You incorrectly guess the last four digits of someone's social security number\n99.9999999999999995% You pick up a phone, dial a random 10-digit number, and say 'Hello Barack Obama, there's just been a magnitude 8 earthquake in California!\" and are wrong\n0.00000001% You add \"Hang on, this is big \u2014 I'm going to loop in Carly Rae Jepsen\", dial another random 10-digit number, and she picks up\n[In light grey colour and in the lower left corner there is text.]\nSources: https:\/\/xkcd.com\/2379\/sources\/\n"}
{"id":2380,"title":"Election Impact Score Sheet","image_title":"Election Impact Score Sheet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2380","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/election_impact_score_sheet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2380:_Election_Impact_Score_Sheet","transcript":"Do you know anyone in Arizona?\nResearch shows that reminders from friends and family to vote have a bigger effect on turnout than anything campaigns do.\nOne of the best ways you can help is to scroll through your contacts (or use apps like VoteWithMe) to find people you can check in with to see if they plan to vote or need help doing it.\nThis chart lets you tally the effect of your reminders on the outcome based on who you've contacted and where they live.\nElection impact score sheet\n*Multiplier based on 538 presidential vote impact, plus points for senate and local elections\nIn smaller text, to the right of the main score sheet, a duplicate of the score sheet with red tally marks and points is shown\nFollowed by an arrow, pointing to the \"Your election impact\" total box in the main table, is this text\nBased on turnout experiments, 10 points on this scale has roughly as much effect on the  outcome as one average vote. For every 10 points you tally, it's as if you voted again!\nBelow the main score sheet table\n[Click for printable version]\nShare a pic of your score sheet with #Hashtag , and be sure to send a copy to Nate Silver to let him know to include those extra votes in his model!\n","explanation":"This comic was published the day before Election day in the United States (November 3, 2020), which features a contentious presidential election between the incumbent, President Donald Trump , and the challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden . The United States does not elect presidents by popular vote, but instead uses an electoral college system, with each state getting a predetermined number of electoral votes, and a majority of electoral votes needed to win an election. The previous presidential election in 2016, which involved Trump and Hillary Clinton , was won by Trump, who lost the popular vote by 2 percentage points, but won the electoral vote 304-227 (270 was needed to win the election).\nElectoral college votes are distributed based on the number of congressional representatives of each state, with the most populous state, California, receiving 55 votes, and the least populous states which are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming receiving 3 votes each, along with the District of Columbia, which as of the writing of this comic was not a state. Because the United States Congress has two legislative houses, with only one (the House of Representatives) apportioning representatives to the states based on their percentage of the US population and the other (the Senate) allocating two senators to every state regardless of population, smaller states have a higher ratio of electoral college votes to population than larger states do.\nAdditionally, most states (all but Nebraska and Maine) give all of their electoral college votes to whoever earns the most votes in their state. This means that a small change in the percentage of voters who favor one party's candidate over another within a state doesn't make a difference on the final outcome unless that change tips the scales between the two candidates. Therefore, it's easy to predict the final electoral college votes of many states where one party has a clear lead. Other states, including some of the ones listed by Randall, are considered \" swing states \", as they are competitive to both of the two major parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party .\nTogether, these factors make voting in some states - \"swing states\" with smaller populations - much more likely to influence the outcome of the election than others. Randall in this comic is encouraging his readers to \" get out the vote \" and encourage voting among their friends and family who live in these nineteen states which are most likely to affect the outcome of the election. The rest of the 31 states (and, presumably, the District of Columbia) are grouped under the \"all other states\" bucket, presumably as their election outcome is \"safely\" for Biden or Trump.\nPer many analysts, the state of Pennsylvania is considered an absolute necessity for Trump, and considered very important for Biden. This is why Pennsylvania is weighted the most heavily in Randall's comic.\nOf course, just because a state may be a clear win for one party does not mean the votes of anyone who votes for the other party are wasted. A higher percentage of voters voting for the losing candidate sends a signal that the state is more competitive than assumed, which forces representatives to compromise and could make future voters more likely to show up because they believe their vote is more likely to matter. Additionally, many \"down-ballot\" races, like races for governorships, US Congress, state legislatures, and county governments, may be more competitive than the presidential race, and may have just as much or more impact on most people's lives. Randall accounts for some of these local races in deciding how to rank the states on the scoresheet.\nThe text at the bottom says to post your scoresheet with #Hashtag . The \"#\" symbol (pronounced \"hash\") denotes a hashtag on platforms like Twitter, used to tag one's post as relating to the topic named following the symbol. However, this hashtag (said out-loud as \"Hashtag Hashtag\") would relate a post to the topic of hashtags rather than elections or votes, and so for the scoresheet is nonsensical and doesn't describe anything useful. It also refers to Nate Silver's famous election forecast model at FiveThirtyEight . Randall closes by urging people to contact Nate Silver to tell him to adjust his model to account for the added votes they have caused, but as the form doesn't indicate which candidate the filler has voted for or plans to vote for, never mind the people contacted, there's no way for him to know what sort of update to make.  Perhaps the flurry of posts bearing the hashtag \"#Hashtag\" and indicating an effort to increase civic engagement will be a heartwarming surprise on a day that will probably be very busy and stressful for him.\nThe title text explains that even if one thinks that their family and friends always vote, or that their reminder to vote won't work, they should do so anyway because of the chance they may be wrong.\nAs shown in previous comics ( 1756: I'm With Her and others), Randall was a supporter of 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton (who ran against Trump), but this announcement should be equally applicable to supporters of either of the two main candidates in the current presidential race.\nThe comic includes a link for a printable version: https:\/\/xkcd.com\/2380\/election_impact_score_sheet.pdf\nAs for all other states: President Trump won Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming; while former Vice President won California, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, and Washington.\nDo you know anyone in Arizona?\nResearch shows that reminders from friends and family to vote have a bigger effect on turnout than anything campaigns do.\nOne of the best ways you can help is to scroll through your contacts (or use apps like VoteWithMe) to find people you can check in with to see if they plan to vote or need help doing it.\nThis chart lets you tally the effect of your reminders on the outcome based on who you've contacted and where they live.\nElection impact score sheet\n*Multiplier based on 538 presidential vote impact, plus points for senate and local elections\nIn smaller text, to the right of the main score sheet, a duplicate of the score sheet with red tally marks and points is shown\nFollowed by an arrow, pointing to the \"Your election impact\" total box in the main table, is this text\nBased on turnout experiments, 10 points on this scale has roughly as much effect on the  outcome as one average vote. For every 10 points you tally, it's as if you voted again!\nBelow the main score sheet table\n[Click for printable version]\nShare a pic of your score sheet with #Hashtag , and be sure to send a copy to Nate Silver to let him know to include those extra votes in his model!\n"}
{"id":2381,"title":"The True Name of the Bear","image_title":"The True Name of the Bear","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2381","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_true_name_of_the_bear.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2381:_The_True_Name_of_the_Bear","transcript":"[Megan walks in front the left, looking down at her phone. Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other.] Megan: Wow - according to the internet, we don't know the true name of the bear. Cueball: What?\n[Gretchen McCulloch, drawn with short, curly hair, comes on-panel from the right.] Megan: Apparently there was a superstition that saying its name would summon it. \"Bear\" and \"bruin\" mean \"the brown one.\" Its actual name has been lost. Cueball: Wow. Ponytail: Gretchen, is this for real?\n[Zoom-in on Gretchen.] Gretchen: Well, sort of Gretchen: The Proto-Indo-European root was *rkto- Gretchen: It was lost in the Germanic languages like English, but survived elsewhere, e.g. Greek \"arktos\" and Latin \"ursus\"\n[Back to the second panel, with Megan holding her phone down, Ponytail with her hands in the air, and Gretchen with her hand on her chin.] Megan: So could we figure out what the word would have been in English? Gretchen: Hmm. I mean, we'll never know, but given Germanic sound shifts, a reasonable guess might be \"arth\"? Ponytail: No!!\n[The panel zooms in again to Gretchen.] Ponytail (off-panel): Stop! AAAAA! Gretchen: What?? Ponytail (off-panel): Don't say it!\n[Ponytail is holding her palms out. Megan is no longer in the panel.] Ponytail: What have you done ? Off-panel noise: ROAR Gretchen: Oh Gretchen: Oh no\nThe last comic strip that ended with the words \"Oh no\" was 2314: Carcinization , which also featured an unfortunate occurrence involving an animal as its punchline when Cueball spontaneously transformed into a crab.\n","explanation":"The Canadian Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch tweeted about the theory that the word for bear became taboo in some branches of Indo-European languages - notably the Germanic one - and it was replaced by euphemisms. In the Germanic branch, the euphemism may have been \"the brown one,\" and thus the modern word \"bear\" (derived from Germanic \"beran\") would more literally translate into the color \"brown\" rather than the animal.\nThe Indoeuropean root for bear is *rkto-, which has been inferred from modern languages that still use a word derived from it. In the comic, McCulloch applies sound shifting laws to it to guess how it would have evolved in English had it not been superseded, but saying it seems to actually summon a bear.\nInterestingly enough, the hypothesized word \u201carth\u201d is the same as the Welsh and Cornish for the word \u201cbear.\u201d Welsh belongs to the Celtic language family, which is one of the Indo-European branches that still uses a word derived from *rkto-, as do the Italic (Romance), Greek and Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) branches, while Germanic, Slavic and Baltic branches abandoned it for different euphemisms. Another Indo-European language where the word for bear is very close to this extrapolation is Armenian, where it's written \u0561\u0580\u057b and pronounced \u201cartch\u201d. The comic does not explain why speakers of Welsh, Cornish, Italic, Greek, Indo-Aryan, and Armenian languages do not summon a bear every time they refer to one. [ citation needed ]\nUse of true names appears to be highly effective in the xkcd universe, rather like a fairy tale , and it is also a common trope elsewhere. Some say a true name contains clear meaning of who someone or something really is.\nIn 2421: Tower of Babel a linguist that resembles Gretchen from this comic appears. Since that story takes place in biblical time, it is not Gretchen, but obviously this is how linguists look in xkcd from now on.\n[Megan walks in front the left, looking down at her phone. Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other.] Megan: Wow - according to the internet, we don't know the true name of the bear. Cueball: What?\n[Gretchen McCulloch, drawn with short, curly hair, comes on-panel from the right.] Megan: Apparently there was a superstition that saying its name would summon it. \"Bear\" and \"bruin\" mean \"the brown one.\" Its actual name has been lost. Cueball: Wow. Ponytail: Gretchen, is this for real?\n[Zoom-in on Gretchen.] Gretchen: Well, sort of Gretchen: The Proto-Indo-European root was *rkto- Gretchen: It was lost in the Germanic languages like English, but survived elsewhere, e.g. Greek \"arktos\" and Latin \"ursus\"\n[Back to the second panel, with Megan holding her phone down, Ponytail with her hands in the air, and Gretchen with her hand on her chin.] Megan: So could we figure out what the word would have been in English? Gretchen: Hmm. I mean, we'll never know, but given Germanic sound shifts, a reasonable guess might be \"arth\"? Ponytail: No!!\n[The panel zooms in again to Gretchen.] Ponytail (off-panel): Stop! AAAAA! Gretchen: What?? Ponytail (off-panel): Don't say it!\n[Ponytail is holding her palms out. Megan is no longer in the panel.] Ponytail: What have you done ? Off-panel noise: ROAR Gretchen: Oh Gretchen: Oh no\nThe last comic strip that ended with the words \"Oh no\" was 2314: Carcinization , which also featured an unfortunate occurrence involving an animal as its punchline when Cueball spontaneously transformed into a crab.\n"}
{"id":2382,"title":"Ballot Tracker Tracker","image_title":"Ballot Tracker Tracker","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2382","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ballot_tracker_tracker.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2382:_Ballot_Tracker_Tracker","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting behind a desk, pointing at a laptop. White Hat is standing behind him. Crumpled-up papers are strewn across the ground. ] Cueball: And this tab is my ballot tracker tracker, which tracks how quickly other ballot trackers update. White Hat: You should add a tracker for how often you breathe so you don't forget. Cueball: I will breathe when they call it.\n","explanation":"This comic was posted 3 days after the 2020 election day in the United States (November 3, 2020). As of the date of posting, the 2020 United States presidential election , between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden , still had not been \"called\" for either candidate by most news outlets (\"called\" refers to projecting the results of the election). This was atypical for most US presidential elections, which were \"called\" either on election day or on the morning following.\nA major reason for the delay in determining the results of the election was the greatly increased use of mail-in ballots , caused by social distancing concerns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mail-in ballots in some states were counted after the in-person voting, which caused delays in the vote-counting, and thus the projection of the winner.\nAs of the date of posting, the electoral vote counts - as called by most major news organizations - were 253-214 in favor of Biden, with 270 electoral votes needed to win the election. Six states were considered \"too close to call\", with no determined winner until more ballots were counted.  Biden was winning the popular vote by about 4 million.\nCueball in this comic has created an app, doc, or website that tracks in real time how quickly \"ballot trackers\" update. A ballot tracker is a web page provided by a news organization that reports updated vote counts as they are published by the states. The news organizations use these counts as the major input to the \"decision desks\", which are their staff who analyze the ongoing vote results to decide when to declare a projected winner for a state. (See \"Tracking Which News Outlets Have Called the Presidential Race in Each State\" ) Cueball (representing Randall) is anxiously awaiting resolution to the long election season. Not only is he anxiously checking to see if the race has been decided, but he is also predicting how close the race is to being decided by constantly checking the ballot trackers to see how they change, as well as keeping track of which sources of tracking information most quickly show updated information on which to base those predictions.\nThe last line of dialogue in the comic, where Cueball says, \"I will breathe when they call it\", may refer to the idea that many people \" hold their breath \" when waiting for an important result, so people may hold their breath until the Presidential race is called. However, since this time around the announcement could have taken days if not weeks longer, literally holding one's breath until the winner was announced would not be possible. [ citation needed ] As it happens, the election was called for Biden the morning after this comic was published, about 3\u00bd days after the election, although Trump was still attempting to challenge the results in court, which would make holding one's breath until all appeals and recounts are complete an even worse idea than if he had conceded.\nIn the title text, Randall wishes good luck to the Democrats in the state of Georgia who are running in later run-off elections. Two Senate seats were being voted on in the state of Georgia in 2020, but no candidate achieved over 50% of the vote in either race. It was highly likely that the runoffs would determine control of the Senate. By law in the state of Georgia, these two races were decided in \"runoff\" elections, where the top two candidates from each of the races ran against only each other, on January 5, 2021. In the end, both Democrats were elected to the Senate. Randall also wishes good luck to the SREs ( Site Reliability Engineers ) of Google Sheets, an online spreadsheet program, who are in charge of maintaining the Google infrastructure while people like him are constantly refreshing their sheets and pulling data. Randall is comparing Georgia's upcoming \"runoff\" election to the current election, calling it a \"run-on\" for how long it is taking.\nThe theme of recursive naming is a recurring one in xkcd, most recently with the \"contact tracer tracing program\" in 2376: Curbside .\n[Cueball is sitting behind a desk, pointing at a laptop. White Hat is standing behind him. Crumpled-up papers are strewn across the ground. ] Cueball: And this tab is my ballot tracker tracker, which tracks how quickly other ballot trackers update. White Hat: You should add a tracker for how often you breathe so you don't forget. Cueball: I will breathe when they call it.\n"}
{"id":2383,"title":"Electoral Precedent 2020","image_title":"Electoral Precedent 2020","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2383","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/electoral_precedent_2020.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2383:_Electoral_Precedent_2020","transcript":"The problem with statements like \"No <party> candidate has won the election without <state>\" Or \"No president has been reelected under <circumstances>\"\n\u2605 Updated for 2020 \u2605\n[Each statement below has its own panel. The year is in a caption, the precedent is stated by a standing Cueball in the main panel, and the president who broke it is below the panel.] 1788... No one has been elected president before. ...But Washington was. 1792... No incumbent has ever been reelected. ...Until Washington. 1796... No one without false teeth has become president. ...But Adams did. 1800... No challenger has beaten an incumbent. ...But Jefferson did. 1804... No incumbent has beaten a challenger. ...Until Jefferson. 1808... No congressman has ever become president. ...Until Madison. 1812... No one can win without New York. ...But Madison did. 1816... No candidate who doesn't wear a wig can get elected. ...Until Monroe was. 1820... No one who wears pants instead of breeches can be reelected. ...But Monroe was. 1824... No one has ever won without a popular majority. ...J.Q. Adams did. 1828... Only people from Massachusetts and Virginia can win. ...Until Jackson did. 1832... The only presidents who get reelected are Virginians. ...Until Jackson. 1836... New Yorkers always lose. ...Until Van Buren. 1840... No one over 65 has won the presidency. ...Until Harrison did. 1844... No one who's lost his home state has won. ...But Polk did. 1848... As goes Mississippi, so goes the nation. ...Until 1848. 1852... New England Democrats can't win. ...Until Pierce did. 1856... No one can become president without getting married. ...Until Buchanan did. 1860... No one over 6'3\" can get elected. ...Until Lincoln. 1864... No one with a beard has been reelected. ...But Lincoln was. 1868... No one can be president if their parents are alive. ...Until Grant. 1872... No one with a beard has been reelected in peacetime. ...Until Grant was. 1876... No one can win a majority of the popular vote and still lose. ...Tilden did. 1880... As goes California, so goes the nation. ...Until it went Hancock. 1884... Candidates named \"James\" can't lose. ...Until James Blaine. 1888... No sitting president has been beaten since the Civil War. ...Cleveland was. 1892... No former president has been elected. ...Until Cleveland. 1896... Tall Midwesterners are unbeatable. ...Bryan wasn't. 1900... No Republican shorter than 5'8\" has been reelected. ...Until McKinley was. 1904... No one under 45 has been elected. ...Roosevelt did. 1908... No Republican who hasn't served in the military has won. ...Until Taft. [The precedent takes up the entire panel this year. Consequently, there is no Cueball.] 1912... After Lincoln beat the Democrats while sporting a beard with no mustache, the only Democrats who can win have a mustache with no beard. ...Wilson had neither. 1916... No Democrat has won while losing West Virginia. ...Wilson did. 1920... No incumbent senator has won. ...Until Harding. 1924... No one with two Cs in their name has become president. ...Until Calvin Coolidge. 1928... No one who got ten million votes has lost. ...Until Al Smith. 1932... No Democrat has won since women secured the right to vote. ...Until FDR did. 1936... No president's been reelected with double-digit unemployment. ...Until FDR was. 1940... No one has won a third term. ...Until FDR did. 1944... No Democrat has won during wartime. ...Until FDR did. 1948... Democrats can't win without Alabama. ...Truman did. 1952... No Republican has won without winning the House or Senate. ...Eisenhower did. 1956... No one can beat the same nominee a second time in a leap year rematch. ...Until Eisenhower. 1960... Catholics can't win. ...Until Kennedy. 1964... Every Republican who's taken Louisiana has won. ...Until Goldwater. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1968... No Republican vice president has risen to the Presidency through an election. ...Until Nixon. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1972... Quakers can't win twice. ...Until Nixon did. 1976... No one who lost New Mexico has won. ...But Carter did. 1980... No one has been elected president after a divorce. ...Until Reagan was. 1984... No left-handed president has been reelected. ...Until Reagan was. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1988... No one with two middle names has become president. ...Until \"Herbert Walker\". [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1992... No Democrat has won without a majority of the Catholic vote. ...Until Clinton did. [The precedent takes up the entire panel this year. Consequently, there is no Cueball.] 1996... No Dem. incumbent without combat experience has beaten someone whose first name is worth more in Scrabble. ...Until Bill beat Bob. 2000... No Republican has won without Vermont. ...Until Bush did. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 2004... No Republican without combat experience has beaten someone two inches taller ...Until Bush did. 2008... No Democrat can win without Missouri. ...Until Obama did. 2012... Democratic incumbents never beat taller challengers. ... Until Obama did. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 2016... No one has become president without government or military experience. ... Until Trump did. 2020? No one has won after being impeached. \u2713 2020? No challenger with a website has won. X\n[Caption below the comic] Congratulations to President-Elect Joe Biden for breaking the website curse!\n","explanation":"This comic is an update to 1122: Electoral Precedent , adding \"broken precedents\" for the US presidential elections in 2016 and 2020. It was published six days after the 2020 election took place, and two days after most news networks \"called\" the election , projecting Biden as the winner. The majority of the comic's panels are duplicates from 1122, with the exception of the 2012 panel (modified to show that Obama did in fact break the streak), the 2016 panel (added to reflect the election of Donald Trump), and the two 2020 panels. It continues the theme of pointing out that an arbitrary 'precedent' can always be invoked to predict the outcome of an election. Presidential elections happen rarely enough that each is a unique event, and something is always happening for the first time. Like with the other examples, the precedents mentioned here mix factors that could plausibly impact the election (such as one candidate having been impeached), with precedents that are just a product of time and chance (like a successful challenger having a website).\nThe final two panels again show how, no matter which candidate won in 2020, it would be a 'first' in some way.\nThe 2020 election was also precedent-breaking in a few ways that Randall didn't mention:\nAlso, Biden is the first president from the state of Delaware, thus he broke the \"precedent\" that Delawareans can't win. Randall then proceeds to combine these 2 facts to create a new precedent: Only Delawareans can defeat incumbents with a website.\nAll original options can be found at 1122: Electoral Precedent .\nThe problem with statements like \"No <party> candidate has won the election without <state>\" Or \"No president has been reelected under <circumstances>\"\n\u2605 Updated for 2020 \u2605\n[Each statement below has its own panel. The year is in a caption, the precedent is stated by a standing Cueball in the main panel, and the president who broke it is below the panel.] 1788... No one has been elected president before. ...But Washington was. 1792... No incumbent has ever been reelected. ...Until Washington. 1796... No one without false teeth has become president. ...But Adams did. 1800... No challenger has beaten an incumbent. ...But Jefferson did. 1804... No incumbent has beaten a challenger. ...Until Jefferson. 1808... No congressman has ever become president. ...Until Madison. 1812... No one can win without New York. ...But Madison did. 1816... No candidate who doesn't wear a wig can get elected. ...Until Monroe was. 1820... No one who wears pants instead of breeches can be reelected. ...But Monroe was. 1824... No one has ever won without a popular majority. ...J.Q. Adams did. 1828... Only people from Massachusetts and Virginia can win. ...Until Jackson did. 1832... The only presidents who get reelected are Virginians. ...Until Jackson. 1836... New Yorkers always lose. ...Until Van Buren. 1840... No one over 65 has won the presidency. ...Until Harrison did. 1844... No one who's lost his home state has won. ...But Polk did. 1848... As goes Mississippi, so goes the nation. ...Until 1848. 1852... New England Democrats can't win. ...Until Pierce did. 1856... No one can become president without getting married. ...Until Buchanan did. 1860... No one over 6'3\" can get elected. ...Until Lincoln. 1864... No one with a beard has been reelected. ...But Lincoln was. 1868... No one can be president if their parents are alive. ...Until Grant. 1872... No one with a beard has been reelected in peacetime. ...Until Grant was. 1876... No one can win a majority of the popular vote and still lose. ...Tilden did. 1880... As goes California, so goes the nation. ...Until it went Hancock. 1884... Candidates named \"James\" can't lose. ...Until James Blaine. 1888... No sitting president has been beaten since the Civil War. ...Cleveland was. 1892... No former president has been elected. ...Until Cleveland. 1896... Tall Midwesterners are unbeatable. ...Bryan wasn't. 1900... No Republican shorter than 5'8\" has been reelected. ...Until McKinley was. 1904... No one under 45 has been elected. ...Roosevelt did. 1908... No Republican who hasn't served in the military has won. ...Until Taft. [The precedent takes up the entire panel this year. Consequently, there is no Cueball.] 1912... After Lincoln beat the Democrats while sporting a beard with no mustache, the only Democrats who can win have a mustache with no beard. ...Wilson had neither. 1916... No Democrat has won while losing West Virginia. ...Wilson did. 1920... No incumbent senator has won. ...Until Harding. 1924... No one with two Cs in their name has become president. ...Until Calvin Coolidge. 1928... No one who got ten million votes has lost. ...Until Al Smith. 1932... No Democrat has won since women secured the right to vote. ...Until FDR did. 1936... No president's been reelected with double-digit unemployment. ...Until FDR was. 1940... No one has won a third term. ...Until FDR did. 1944... No Democrat has won during wartime. ...Until FDR did. 1948... Democrats can't win without Alabama. ...Truman did. 1952... No Republican has won without winning the House or Senate. ...Eisenhower did. 1956... No one can beat the same nominee a second time in a leap year rematch. ...Until Eisenhower. 1960... Catholics can't win. ...Until Kennedy. 1964... Every Republican who's taken Louisiana has won. ...Until Goldwater. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1968... No Republican vice president has risen to the Presidency through an election. ...Until Nixon. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1972... Quakers can't win twice. ...Until Nixon did. 1976... No one who lost New Mexico has won. ...But Carter did. 1980... No one has been elected president after a divorce. ...Until Reagan was. 1984... No left-handed president has been reelected. ...Until Reagan was. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1988... No one with two middle names has become president. ...Until \"Herbert Walker\". [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1992... No Democrat has won without a majority of the Catholic vote. ...Until Clinton did. [The precedent takes up the entire panel this year. Consequently, there is no Cueball.] 1996... No Dem. incumbent without combat experience has beaten someone whose first name is worth more in Scrabble. ...Until Bill beat Bob. 2000... No Republican has won without Vermont. ...Until Bush did. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 2004... No Republican without combat experience has beaten someone two inches taller ...Until Bush did. 2008... No Democrat can win without Missouri. ...Until Obama did. 2012... Democratic incumbents never beat taller challengers. ... Until Obama did. [The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 2016... No one has become president without government or military experience. ... Until Trump did. 2020? No one has won after being impeached. \u2713 2020? No challenger with a website has won. X\n[Caption below the comic] Congratulations to President-Elect Joe Biden for breaking the website curse!\n"}
{"id":2384,"title":"Set in the Present","image_title":"Set in the Present","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2384","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/set_in_the_present.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2384:_Set_in_the_Present","transcript":"[Cueball is standing and watching a presumed typical wall mounted flat-screen television. There is no background, nor other physical features, just Cueball and the obliquely aligned screen positioned to also let us view its foreshortened image. In this, Megan and Ponytail are seen talking face to face with hands almost or actually in contact. Their faces are sociably close together and they are not shown as wearing masks. In the background of the scene are several other Cueball-like figures, not notably masked up or distanced from each other, and two may be holding hands. Cueball himself is given a large thought bubble above him, within which is written his current, distracted train of thoughts:]\nCueball: Okay, they're hugging, and no one has masks, but she has a modern phone. Is this story set in 2019? Cueball: Or is this a post-vaccine future? Or an alternate no-COVID timeline? Cueball: Or are we supposed to think these characters are irresponsible?\n[Caption below the panel:] Movies and shows that are vaguely set in \"the present\" will be awkward for a while.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nCueball is watching a wall-mounted television set that's showing either a movie or a TV program, and notices that none of the characters are taking the recommended precautions concerning the COVID-19 pandemic . This leads him to speculate on the timeline and internal logic of the show.\nOn-screen, people are talking face-to-face without face masks, and other maskless people mingle in the background. Cueball notes that, if the story takes place in the same reality and time as us, the absence of precautions should mark the characters as reckless or irresponsible (which impacts the story).  Alternative explanations he comes up with are that the show might be set either prior to the pandemic or far enough in the future that the impacts are no longer visible. However, these possibilities are be difficult to square with era-specific cues like technology and popular culture references.\nBillie Eilish is an American singer and songwriter who first became active in 2015, and rose to stardom in 2019, so a reference to her implies a show set within the last few years, and likely only one year in the past. The presence of \"modern\" phones (presumably a late model smartphone) has a similar implication. But in a TV show or film series where time passes in-universe, this also creates problems. If it's set in the recent past, and the series continues for a few more years, then the characters should encounter the pandemic in later seasons. If it's set in the future, then the entire series must be set in the future (because none of it included the pandemic).  If the series has gone on for several years, the current episode must be at least several years in the future, which raises the question of why all the technology and pop culture shown is familiar to us.\nThe simplest explanation is that COVID-19 doesn't exist within the program's universe (an idea Cueball briefly considers as an \" alternate timeline ,\" but doesn't dwell on). Perfect consistency with the real world in fiction is hard to achieve, and how accurately stories track to current events varies widely. Movies and television productions are enormously complex, and months, if not years, can pass between when a screenplay is written and the finished product is released. This means that rapid changes in the real world are rarely reflected promptly in fiction. Alternately, the production might have taken place in the COVID era but the creators consciously chose not to include the pandemic in the story. Some viewers can ignore these inconsistencies, but for others, they make suspension of disbelief impossible.\nCueball has previously been distracted by minor details in film or television in 1451: Background Screens . The idea of using thumbtacks and strings (usually accompanied by newspaper clippings and photographs) to study a problem is pop-culture shorthand for a conspiracy theory . Randall has previously mentioned this in 2244: Thumbtacks And String .\n[Cueball is standing and watching a presumed typical wall mounted flat-screen television. There is no background, nor other physical features, just Cueball and the obliquely aligned screen positioned to also let us view its foreshortened image. In this, Megan and Ponytail are seen talking face to face with hands almost or actually in contact. Their faces are sociably close together and they are not shown as wearing masks. In the background of the scene are several other Cueball-like figures, not notably masked up or distanced from each other, and two may be holding hands. Cueball himself is given a large thought bubble above him, within which is written his current, distracted train of thoughts:]\nCueball: Okay, they're hugging, and no one has masks, but she has a modern phone. Is this story set in 2019? Cueball: Or is this a post-vaccine future? Or an alternate no-COVID timeline? Cueball: Or are we supposed to think these characters are irresponsible?\n[Caption below the panel:] Movies and shows that are vaguely set in \"the present\" will be awkward for a while.\n"}
{"id":2385,"title":"Final Exam","image_title":"Final Exam","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2385","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/final_exam.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2385:_Final_Exam","transcript":"[Ponytail is standing in front of a whiteboard addressing someone off-panel to the left.] Ponytail: Welcome to your final exam. Ponytail: The exam is now over. Ponytail: I'm afraid all of you failed. Ponytail: Your grades have been stored on our department server and will be submitted tomorrow. Ponytail: Class dismissed.\n[Caption below the panel:] Cybersecurity final exams\n","explanation":"In this comic, Ponytail appears to be administering a group sitting for cybersecurity exam. However, at the beginning of the exam, she informs her students that they have all failed, despite not having taken a test yet. She then informs them that their grades are stored on the department server and will be submitted the next day. The implication here is that the true test, rather than being a traditional exam, is actually whether the students can hack into the server and change their grades. This may be a jab at education security which is known to be vulnerable to assault ( not the first time XKCD has made such a joke). In real life, students have attempted to change their grades in this manner, with occasional success.\nThe title text adds a twist to this. In order for a student to get a good grade in the game theory class, they need to get a below-average grade on this final exam. This incentivizes the students to also change the grades of other students when they change their grade. However, this is more complicated than it seems, and depends on various factors, such as the fraction of students who take game theory in addition to cybersecurity. If, for example, half of the students also take game theory, then for all of them to get 80% of the average score, even assuming that all their non-game-theory classmates get maximum possible score, they would have to target for 2\/3 (or about 67%) of the maximum possible score, to get 80% of the final average. While that would make their game theory grade perfect, it might noticeably worsen their cybersecurity grade. This gets progressively worse with the increasing fraction of students who take game theory along with cybersecurity.\nIn the extreme case of all cybersecurity students also taking game theory class, this degenerates into another common game theory problem: Guess 2\/3 of the average of everybody's guesses. The only winning strategy is, of course, for everyone to guess 0, which means that 2\/3 of the average will be 0. This assumes perfect rationality of all players with respect to the game theory problem. The catch is that here we have the same number as a grade for the cybersecurity exam and for the game theory guess. We'd like one to be as high as possible, and the other to be zero or close to zero, which are obviously conflicting goals.\nTo improve their overall results, students could resort to various compromises and strategies, such as increasing other students' scores against their will, or making alliances with students who might not mind taking a hit to their game theory grade (perhaps in exchange for other incentives) - these are all topics that the game theory class would have been dealing with. Specifically, this test seems to refer to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons ; if one student changes their grade to 80% of the average, they will receive high marks, but if more and more students attempt this, the gain for each one drops and tends towards zero.\nThe combination with cybersecurity adds another layer of complexity, in that students could, for example, also attempt to lock each other out of the server to achieve maximum control over the results to their benefit.\nIn the strip, there is no actual test to take. But if there was one, there would still be strategies to optimize performance without hacking the grades. One option would be to take the test normally, and then change every fifth answer to the bubble below it; using this strategy your overall grade will drop to 80% if you were at 100%, and may even raise your score if a student performed particularly poorly. The trick, though, is that other students (assuming rationality) would try this strategy as well; thus, a student may need to overcorrect more, weigh the possibilities of whether any of their classmates had followed this as well, and perform this recursively until it is most likely that the score is 80 percent of the average.\nNote: All of the above is based on the assumption that the game theory mark will be directly (and not inversely) proportional to how close the cybersecurity grade is to 80% of the average. This is left ambiguous in the formulation.\nNote: The above also assumes the system accepts a maximum of 100%.  If (as is likely) the system allows for extra credit you could reach a Nash equilibrium by setting the non-game theory students to an arbitrary, but very high, number (say 2000%) C and then the game theory students to (C*g)\/(.25+g) where g is the percentage of students not in game theory.\nNote: The solution becomes trivial if the game-theory grade is stored on the same server but submitted after the cybersecurity grade. Students would simply give themselves full marks on cybersecurity, then edit the game-theory grade after cybersecurity has been submitted.\n[Ponytail is standing in front of a whiteboard addressing someone off-panel to the left.] Ponytail: Welcome to your final exam. Ponytail: The exam is now over. Ponytail: I'm afraid all of you failed. Ponytail: Your grades have been stored on our department server and will be submitted tomorrow. Ponytail: Class dismissed.\n[Caption below the panel:] Cybersecurity final exams\n"}
{"id":2386,"title":"Ten Years","image_title":"Ten Years","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2386","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ten_years.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2386:_Ten_Years","transcript":"From 1141: Two Years [Randall (drawn as Cueball) and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (drawn as Megan) sit on a bed, Randall's fianc\u00e9e is talking on the phone. The person she is talking to, a doctor holding a clipboard, is shown inset.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: Oh god.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit together while Randall's fianc\u00e9e, now bald, is receiving chemotherapy. They are both on their laptops.] IV pump: ... Beeep ... Beeep ... Beeep ...\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (who is wearing a knit cap) are paddling a kayak against a scenic mountain backdrop.]\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit at a table, staring at a cell phone. There is a clock on the wall. Her head is stubbly.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: How long can it take to read a scan!?\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are back at the hospital again, Randall's fianc\u00e9e receiving chemo. They are playing Scrabble.] Randall: \"Zarg\" isn't a word. Randall's fianc\u00e9e: But caaaancer. Randall: ...Ok, fine.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (wearing a knit cap) are listening to a Cueball-like friend. A large thought bubble is above their heads and it obscures the friends talk. The text below, split in three is the only part there can be no doubt about:] Friend: So next year you should come visit us up in the mounta a and Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (thinking): \"Next year\"\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are getting married, with a heart above their heads. Randall's wife's hair is growing back.]\n[Randall and Randall's wife (wearing a knit cap) stand on a beach, watching a whale jump out of water.] Fwoosh\n\nFrom 1928: Seven Years\n[Randall and Randall's wife (with her hair noticeably longer) are walking through a forest.]\n[Randall's wife is sitting down, not in the forest anymore.] Randall's wife: My toe hurts and I found a report of a case in which toe pain was an early sign of cancer spreading. Randall: Wait\u2014didn\u2019t you stub your toe yesterday? Randall's wife: Yes, but what if this is unrelated?\n[Randall and his wife are going spelunking. The guide is gesturing deeper into the cave while Randall and his wife are climbing down.]\n[Randall's wife stands on a rock above an alligator in a swamp, photographing the alligator.  Randall is on a balcony behind safety railings.] Randall: When they estimated your survival odds, I think they made some optimistic assumptions about your hobbies.\n[Randall's wife sits on an examination bed, listening to a doctor holding a clipboard.] Doctor: This is probably nothing. Doctor: But given your history, we should do a full scan. Doctor: We'll call with the results in a few days.  Try not to worry about it until then!\n[Randall and his wife stand above a deep pond full of fish and other objects.  Randall's wife is piloting a wired underwater camera with lights.]\n[Randall and his wife are standing next to each other.  Randall's wife has shoulder-length hair covering most of her face.] Randall's wife: Hard to believe\u2014six years ago, I was bald.  But today, after a long struggle, I finally look like the little girl from The Ring . Randall: That's, uhh... good? Randall's wife: Hissssss\n[A line of six people, including Randall and his wife, stand and watch the solar eclipse.]\nNew to 2386: Ten Years :\n[Randall and his wife are sitting in a room with five bunnies sitting around and on them. The Poster on the wall reads: Rabbit rescue.] Randall: Do you think they're socialized enough? Randall's wife: This one might need one more head pat.\n[Randall is running and pushing his wife on a hand cart.] Someone off-panel: Has anyone seen the hand cart? Randall's wife: Wheee!\n[Randall and his wife walks up hill with snowy mountains near by and in the background. his wife is gesturing to something ahead of them.]\n[A large dark panel, to the right of the previous three, to the left in two rows. Randall and his wife sits, leaning back on their hands looking up, at the end of a pier going into a lake. The end is broader and they sit to each side of the middle of he pier. It is night and behind the lake there is a forest of pine trees. Above the three is a clear starlit night sky with hundreds of stars and the band of the Milky Way clearly visible. The trees and some of the stars are reflected in the water of the lake, distorted by the movements of the water.]\n[Randall is sitting on a grassy field, a bit higher than his wife who lies on her back looking up.] Randall: You did it. Randall: Ten years. Randall's wife: It doesn't seem real.\n[Zoom in on Randall's wife, who is not longer lying down.] Randall's wife: When they showed me my 10-year survival chart, I really didn't believe I would make it here. Randall's wife: I don't understand why you married me when it looked so bad. Randall's wife: But it was very sweet.\n[In a frame-less panel Randall is standing in front of his wife, who is sitting on the ground, arm leaning on her bent knees.] Randall: You make it sound like an act of grace, and not something I desperately wanted to do and was worried I wouldn't get to. Randall: You're the coolest person I've ever met. I just wanted whatever time we could have.\n[Same setting but seen from a distance and in silhouette. Randall's wife has lifted her fist towards the sky, and it seems like Randall has turned away from her looking up.] Randall's wife: Well, good news, my hideous and inexplicable existence continues unabated! Take that, Biology! Randall's wife: You failed to kill me and now I can never die! Randall: Is... that how it works? Randall's wife: It was in the fine print on the chart.\n","explanation":"Randall 's then-fianc\u00e9e, now wife was diagnosed with cancer in late 2010. This is a matter he has discussed in the comic multiple times before , with Randall being depicted as Cueball and his wife as Megan. It has been 10 years since her diagnosis and treatments.\nThis comic is a continuation of 1141: Two Years and 1928: Seven Years , which are shown in the first 16 panels, slightly grayed out.\nThe first of the new panels shows Randall and his wife at a \"Rabbit Rescue\", interacting with buns ( a recurring theme of xkcd).  The purpose of such events is to get rescued (often surrendered or seized) rabbits or other animals used to interacting with each other and with unfamiliar humans under controlled circumstances, to help them be more suitable as pets and hopefully entice visitors to adopt them.  Randall facetiously asks his wife if she thinks the rabbits have socialized enough, even though he and his wife are there for the sake of their own enjoyment (and she indicates that she would like to spend more time patting a bunny on its head).\nIn the next panel, Randall is pushing his wife in a handcart, which is presumably stolen. (As evidenced by the off-panel person asking if anybody has seen the handcart.)\nThe third new panel shows Randall and his wife exploring a mountain. They appear to have found something interesting, due to Megan pointing her finger towards something off-panel. It appears to be a reference to a similar climbing scene from 1190: Time .\nThe fourth panel shows Randall and his wife sitting on the edge of a pier, looking at the night sky. This is a typical romantic nighttime activity. The panel is distinguished because there was considerably more effort put into the drawing of this panel than of the other panels, by virtue of it being nighttime. Thus, the reflection of the starlight on their faces is the center of attention in the drawing.\nThe final new panels show Randall and his wife sitting on a hill, talking about how they couldn't believe that Megan would make it to 10 years cancer-free, which according to 881: Probability wasn't all that certain (77% probability -- the probability of picking an M&M out of a bag at random and getting one that isn't blue ). Randall's wife voices a concern that she had seemingly been carrying for a while, that she was a burden to Randall, and explains that she couldn't understand why he would marry her, except as a show of grace. Randall firmly rejects this notion, stating that it was no mere gesture, but that it was important to him that they enjoy \"whatever time we could have\".\nFinally, and as with the first comic in the series, the comic takes a light-hearted turn: because the table does not include values for probability of survival more than ten years after treatment, Randall's wife jokingly concludes that she is now immortal, perhaps thanks to a cursed artifact.  Many anniversaries are traditionally marked by giving gifts, such as the silver jubilee after twenty-five years of marriage (or of a monarch's reign, or an employee's seniority within a company, or anything else).  The tenth anniversary is traditionally associated with a tin gift (tin being a much more precious metal in 1922 than it is today), but maybe Randall bought it at a cursed shop .\nThe title-text expands on this final joke, as it suggests that there is an official name for this giving of cursed artifacts once the ten-year mark has passed. Also, it seems as though Randall has finally found a less-gross name for this anniversary than \"biopsy-versary\".\nCursed artifacts that cannot die were recently mentioned in 2332: Cursed Chair .\nFrom 1141: Two Years [Randall (drawn as Cueball) and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (drawn as Megan) sit on a bed, Randall's fianc\u00e9e is talking on the phone. The person she is talking to, a doctor holding a clipboard, is shown inset.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: Oh god.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit together while Randall's fianc\u00e9e, now bald, is receiving chemotherapy. They are both on their laptops.] IV pump: ... Beeep ... Beeep ... Beeep ...\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (who is wearing a knit cap) are paddling a kayak against a scenic mountain backdrop.]\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e sit at a table, staring at a cell phone. There is a clock on the wall. Her head is stubbly.] Randall's fianc\u00e9e: How long can it take to read a scan!?\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are back at the hospital again, Randall's fianc\u00e9e receiving chemo. They are playing Scrabble.] Randall: \"Zarg\" isn't a word. Randall's fianc\u00e9e: But caaaancer. Randall: ...Ok, fine.\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (wearing a knit cap) are listening to a Cueball-like friend. A large thought bubble is above their heads and it obscures the friends talk. The text below, split in three is the only part there can be no doubt about:] Friend: So next year you should come visit us up in the mounta a and Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e (thinking): \"Next year\"\n[Randall and Randall's fianc\u00e9e are getting married, with a heart above their heads. Randall's wife's hair is growing back.]\n[Randall and Randall's wife (wearing a knit cap) stand on a beach, watching a whale jump out of water.] Fwoosh\n\nFrom 1928: Seven Years\n[Randall and Randall's wife (with her hair noticeably longer) are walking through a forest.]\n[Randall's wife is sitting down, not in the forest anymore.] Randall's wife: My toe hurts and I found a report of a case in which toe pain was an early sign of cancer spreading. Randall: Wait\u2014didn\u2019t you stub your toe yesterday? Randall's wife: Yes, but what if this is unrelated?\n[Randall and his wife are going spelunking. The guide is gesturing deeper into the cave while Randall and his wife are climbing down.]\n[Randall's wife stands on a rock above an alligator in a swamp, photographing the alligator.  Randall is on a balcony behind safety railings.] Randall: When they estimated your survival odds, I think they made some optimistic assumptions about your hobbies.\n[Randall's wife sits on an examination bed, listening to a doctor holding a clipboard.] Doctor: This is probably nothing. Doctor: But given your history, we should do a full scan. Doctor: We'll call with the results in a few days.  Try not to worry about it until then!\n[Randall and his wife stand above a deep pond full of fish and other objects.  Randall's wife is piloting a wired underwater camera with lights.]\n[Randall and his wife are standing next to each other.  Randall's wife has shoulder-length hair covering most of her face.] Randall's wife: Hard to believe\u2014six years ago, I was bald.  But today, after a long struggle, I finally look like the little girl from The Ring . Randall: That's, uhh... good? Randall's wife: Hissssss\n[A line of six people, including Randall and his wife, stand and watch the solar eclipse.]\nNew to 2386: Ten Years :\n[Randall and his wife are sitting in a room with five bunnies sitting around and on them. The Poster on the wall reads: Rabbit rescue.] Randall: Do you think they're socialized enough? Randall's wife: This one might need one more head pat.\n[Randall is running and pushing his wife on a hand cart.] Someone off-panel: Has anyone seen the hand cart? Randall's wife: Wheee!\n[Randall and his wife walks up hill with snowy mountains near by and in the background. his wife is gesturing to something ahead of them.]\n[A large dark panel, to the right of the previous three, to the left in two rows. Randall and his wife sits, leaning back on their hands looking up, at the end of a pier going into a lake. The end is broader and they sit to each side of the middle of he pier. It is night and behind the lake there is a forest of pine trees. Above the three is a clear starlit night sky with hundreds of stars and the band of the Milky Way clearly visible. The trees and some of the stars are reflected in the water of the lake, distorted by the movements of the water.]\n[Randall is sitting on a grassy field, a bit higher than his wife who lies on her back looking up.] Randall: You did it. Randall: Ten years. Randall's wife: It doesn't seem real.\n[Zoom in on Randall's wife, who is not longer lying down.] Randall's wife: When they showed me my 10-year survival chart, I really didn't believe I would make it here. Randall's wife: I don't understand why you married me when it looked so bad. Randall's wife: But it was very sweet.\n[In a frame-less panel Randall is standing in front of his wife, who is sitting on the ground, arm leaning on her bent knees.] Randall: You make it sound like an act of grace, and not something I desperately wanted to do and was worried I wouldn't get to. Randall: You're the coolest person I've ever met. I just wanted whatever time we could have.\n[Same setting but seen from a distance and in silhouette. Randall's wife has lifted her fist towards the sky, and it seems like Randall has turned away from her looking up.] Randall's wife: Well, good news, my hideous and inexplicable existence continues unabated! Take that, Biology! Randall's wife: You failed to kill me and now I can never die! Randall: Is... that how it works? Randall's wife: It was in the fine print on the chart.\n"}
{"id":2387,"title":"Blair Witch","image_title":"Blair Witch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2387","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/blair_witch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2387:_Blair_Witch","transcript":"[Megan is standing in front of a screen looking away from it at an audience off-panel. She is holding a stick, pointed at the chart behind her. The chart shows the stick figure from The Blair Witch Project . Above is an unreadable line of text, and below are two smaller rectangles a smaller one above the other, the small seems to be empty, but there seems to be some kind of graph in the bottom one.] Megan: Other than the fake 1999 video, there have been no Blair Witch sightings in 30+ years. Megan: The IUCN redlist says the witch is \"possibly extinct in the wild.\"\n[A close-up of Megan's face. The screen now shows a habitat map, with four separate shaded areas enclosed in a dotted line. The dotted line and one of the areas goes to the upper edge of the screen indicating they continue beyond the shown area. Beneath the dotted line and to the right there are three small squares, one of them clearly shaded the same way as the areas above. Next to each there is an unreadable label.] Megan: Development in the Maryland suburbs has fragmented the spooky forest habitat. Megan: Climate change will push any remnant populations north.\n[Back to the original setting, Megan is standing with the stick pointing downwards, and the chart is out of frame.] Megan: That's why we plan to capture any surviving witches and establish a breeding population. Megan: Then, in time, the Blair Witch Reintroduction Project can begin.\n","explanation":"The Blair Witch Project is a found footage horror film released in 1999. For the marketing campaign of the film, the producers created the legend of the Blair Witch, a supernatural being whose legend originates in Burkittsville , MD. As it sometimes happened in Protestant societies in the colonial era , a woman was ostracized from the community after having been accused of witchcraft . This woman, who tends to conflict in name with various versions of the lore, would supposedly attempt to inflict revenge upon the community that exiled her, and these fearful people fled from the town.\nThe comic takes a humorous turn on the legend, suggesting a conservation program to save the Blair Witch. While the film was described by reliable sources as faked and misrepresented footage, the Blair Witch is postulated as separate species that is being tracked by the IUCN Red List . With the rise of camera-phones in the modern age, sightings of beings that are most likely fictitious , such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, are becoming rarer over time, due to lack of credibility of a reported sighting without visual evidence (although with the rise of deepfakes, even visual evidence might lose credibility in the future). A species which has not been notably documented for a long time would indeed be moved to the \"possibly extinct in the wild \" category, as Megan notes.\nRather than taking this to mean the Blair Witch does not exist however, Megan instead suggests habitat loss as the reason why encountering a Blair Witch might be more difficult. Habitat loss is in fact one of the most prominent and concerning reasons for extinction in recent years. Megan claims that suburban projects have fragmented the witch's \"spooky forest\" ecosystem, a reference to the many species that are dying off due to encroachment, logging, and similar human activities. Migration due to climate change is also an observable phenomenon in animal populations (and some plant populations, depending on their mode of travel while in seeds; those that rely on animals to germinate will migrate as well).\nMegan then proposes a plan to catch and breed Blair Witches in an attempt to resurrect the species. This final panel is more obviously humorous, as even if the Blair Witch did exist separate from humans, there is only one, [ citation needed ] and thus any attempt to breed and repopulate would be futile. It may be possible that this is not a problem , but if it is, it could also raise the objection that any pair of Blair Witch may both be female, and thus unable to reproduce. This could be resolved by (a) assuming that Witches can ( sometimes? ) be male as well, or (b) assuming that, much like Tremblay's salamander, females can reproduce with a male of a related species (most likely human, in which case the project might have difficulty obtaining approval from an ethics review board .) The phrase \"Blair Witch Reintroduction Project\" is a reference to The Blair Witch Project .\nThe title-text suggests that the comic is a lecture, as Megan's whiteboard and pointer would suggest. A (presumed) student asks whether Megan is concerned that witches won't breed in captivity (a serious real-world concern to the IUCN). If this is a press conference, the question would be asked by a reporter instead.  Megan replies that they are worried that there will be breeding, but biologists are unsure how the breeding occurs, calling it \"harrowing\" (presumably because they have captured the Blair Witch and it has set a curse on their laboratory as she supposedly did in Burkittsville).  Historically, communities practicing witchcraft may have fled to the woods to engage in sometimes very sexual behaviors that others at the time were very frightened by.\nRandall previously wrote about an ill-advised fauna introduction project in 2349: Rabbit Introduction , but at least rabbits are cuter and less harrowing than witches. [ citation needed ]\n[Megan is standing in front of a screen looking away from it at an audience off-panel. She is holding a stick, pointed at the chart behind her. The chart shows the stick figure from The Blair Witch Project . Above is an unreadable line of text, and below are two smaller rectangles a smaller one above the other, the small seems to be empty, but there seems to be some kind of graph in the bottom one.] Megan: Other than the fake 1999 video, there have been no Blair Witch sightings in 30+ years. Megan: The IUCN redlist says the witch is \"possibly extinct in the wild.\"\n[A close-up of Megan's face. The screen now shows a habitat map, with four separate shaded areas enclosed in a dotted line. The dotted line and one of the areas goes to the upper edge of the screen indicating they continue beyond the shown area. Beneath the dotted line and to the right there are three small squares, one of them clearly shaded the same way as the areas above. Next to each there is an unreadable label.] Megan: Development in the Maryland suburbs has fragmented the spooky forest habitat. Megan: Climate change will push any remnant populations north.\n[Back to the original setting, Megan is standing with the stick pointing downwards, and the chart is out of frame.] Megan: That's why we plan to capture any surviving witches and establish a breeding population. Megan: Then, in time, the Blair Witch Reintroduction Project can begin.\n"}
{"id":2388,"title":"Viral Quiz Identity Theft","image_title":"Viral Quiz Identity Theft","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2388","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/viral_quiz_identity_theft.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2388:_Viral_Quiz_Identity_Theft","transcript":"[Hairy and White Hat are standing across from each other at a table.  Each has a laptop open in front of him.]\nHairy: Here's my plan: we start a viral quiz to trick people into posting the name of the street they lived on as a kid. Hairy: Then we use it to steal their identity! White Hat: Okay. White Hat: Just checking, you know voter files and mortgages and stuff are mostly public records, right? Hairy: Huh? What are you talking about? White Hat: ...Nothing.  We can do your thing.\n","explanation":"Hairy is trying to compile a list of names and addresses, for identity theft purposes. He intends to do so by posting an online quiz to entice people into posting their personal information; for example, asking people to post their 'porn star name' by combining their pet's name (or their middle name, or their mother's maiden name) and the street they grew up on. However, as White Hat points out, a lot of this information is already in the public record making his \"viral quiz\" unnecessary. This comic is one of very few where White Hat's argument is not used as a straw man ; rather, Hairy is the unenlightened one and White Hat has the idea that will require much less work for the same result.  However, when Hairy proves to have no idea about public records, White Hat decides that it will be easier (or at least more fun) to just play along with Hairy's plan rather than try to educate him.\nEven though White Hat is correct that there are public databases with lists of legal names and addresses, lots of online interactions take place in forums where people adopt pseudonyms.  A viral quiz like this one could be useful for de-anonymizing users, a process known colloquially as \" doxing \". There is also a suspicion that these kind of viral quizzes are used to create databases to answer password recovery questions correctly. Together with a man-in-the-middle attack on the email system used, this can lead to hackers taking over user accounts.\nIn the title text, it turns out that lots of users did not provide their personal information. Instead they provided fake information, which Hairy naively takes as truth.  The number '420' is associated with the use of marijuana and the number '69' is used to refer to a sex position .  These two numbers have found their way into society from memes to car prices . White Hat could also be taking the data at its word when he replies that there must be a high-rise building at that address to hold so many respondents, but it is more likely that he is making a sarcastic double-entendre pun.  420 69th St. is a real address in several US cities, but it looks like they're all single-family dwellings or small offices, not high-rises.\nIf Hairy had talked to Black Hat , he might have been told about the time Black Hat made a bunch of free web services to harvest usernames and passwords.  Black Hat's project stalled when he realized that he didn't know what he wanted to do with the information he harvested, and Hairy's plan doesn't seem very well-thought-out past the \"get personal details\" step either.\n[Hairy and White Hat are standing across from each other at a table.  Each has a laptop open in front of him.]\nHairy: Here's my plan: we start a viral quiz to trick people into posting the name of the street they lived on as a kid. Hairy: Then we use it to steal their identity! White Hat: Okay. White Hat: Just checking, you know voter files and mortgages and stuff are mostly public records, right? Hairy: Huh? What are you talking about? White Hat: ...Nothing.  We can do your thing.\n"}
{"id":2389,"title":"Unread","image_title":"Unread","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2389","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unread.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2389:_Unread","transcript":"[A graph with the x-axis and y-axis labeled]\n[The graph has a line that starts near the bottom of the x-axis, fluctuates a little, then steadily increases until it is approaching the maximum of the y-axis, whereby it begins to level out] Percentage of received messages in the service that are marked unread Time --->\n[Three Cueballs standing at different points on the graph. The first two are shown directly above the line at the beginning and middle areas, and the third is shown below it near the end of the graph. All three are holding phones.]\n[The first Cueball looks at his phone, which displays two notifications on an app] Oh hey, two new messages!\n[The next Cueball again looks at his phone, this time with 45 notifications on the app] Ugh, gotta take some time to go through these.\n[The last Cueball's phone app shows 10129 notifications] Wow, it hit five digits.\n[Caption below the panel] Another way every system eventually becomes email\n","explanation":"Cueball has an unspecified communication application on his phone. As the chart displays, the longer he has the app, the more unread messages he has on it (likely due to a combination of more people trying to contact him over it and him checking it less diligently). Eventually, he gives up reading every message, and he notices apathetically when it reaches 10,000 notifications. The joke comes in the caption, which states that all communication services have this problem and implies that this problem is the key problem with email .\nThe caption, \" Another way every system eventually becomes email\" (emphasis added) is a reference to Zawinski's law of software envelopment : \"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.\"  In this case, it's not that every program will eventually become capable of sending and receiving emails, but rather that Cueball\/Randall will treat every program that provides notifications the same way he treats his email inbox.\nIn the title text, Randall uses this reasoning to explain why he'll never install a smart smoke detector . A smart detector would send a notification to his phone when the smoke level is high enough to trigger it, or perhaps when it is running low on battery; following the same trend, Randall believes he will eventually stop reading the alerts from the smoke detector. Ignoring a smoke detector is dangerous. [ citation needed ] Traditional (non-smart) smoke detectors typically use sound to denote status, with very loud piercing sounds used to indicate events requiring immediate notice (i.e. an active fire producing large amounts of smoke) and quieter chirps to indicate other conditions, such as low battery levels.  While some people can and do tune out the low battery warnings, it tends to be difficult to ignore the active fire types of alerts.  However, a person would need to be within hearing range for those alerts, versus allowing people to ignore alerts from around the world with a smart smoke detector.\nRandall has previously covered his trouble keeping up with email, for example in 1783: Emails .\n[A graph with the x-axis and y-axis labeled]\n[The graph has a line that starts near the bottom of the x-axis, fluctuates a little, then steadily increases until it is approaching the maximum of the y-axis, whereby it begins to level out] Percentage of received messages in the service that are marked unread Time --->\n[Three Cueballs standing at different points on the graph. The first two are shown directly above the line at the beginning and middle areas, and the third is shown below it near the end of the graph. All three are holding phones.]\n[The first Cueball looks at his phone, which displays two notifications on an app] Oh hey, two new messages!\n[The next Cueball again looks at his phone, this time with 45 notifications on the app] Ugh, gotta take some time to go through these.\n[The last Cueball's phone app shows 10129 notifications] Wow, it hit five digits.\n[Caption below the panel] Another way every system eventually becomes email\n"}
{"id":2390,"title":"Linguists","image_title":"Linguists","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2390","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/linguists.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2390:_Linguists","transcript":"[Ponytail is walking to the left. A voice calls out from behind her (at the right of the panel):] Off-panel voice: Help! Off-panel voice: I fell down a hole!\n[Ponytail runs to the right, toward the hole.]\n[Ponytail, kneeling down next to the hole, calls out:] Ponytail: Hey! Ponytail: Is \"fell down a hole\" exactly equivalent to \"fell in a hole,\" in your usage? Or do they have slightly different implications?\n[Caption below the panel] There's a myth that linguists are pedants who love correcting people, but they're actually just enthusiastic about understanding language in all its infinite varieties, which is much worse.\n","explanation":"Ponytail hears the cries of an unidentified person who has become trapped in a hole. She rushes over, but rather than helping the person out, she instead asks whether the trapped person's chosen phrasing for their predicament \u2013 \"fell down a hole\" \u2013 is equivalent to \"fell in a hole.\"\nTo most people, the phrases \"fell down a hole\" and \"fell in a hole\" are paraphrases. To other people, however, the two sentences have a subtle difference that implies slightly different things; for example, whether one has fully or only partially fallen down\/in the hole, how big the hole is, or whether the person has exited out of the hole yet at the time of speaking (see the paragraph on the title text below). Ponytail is thus asking whether the person chose to use 'down' over 'in' for those reasons. In either case, the joke here is that this is probably not the best time for Ponytail to ask.\nIn the caption, Randall comments on the stereotype that linguists are obnoxious elitists who only love telling people how wrong they are (\" Grammar Nazis \"). A linguist might make a statement like this that ends with something like \"linguists actually are only trying to describe existing grammar rules, not prescribe them.\" Instead, Randall takes the comment in an unexpected direction by saying not that linguists are better than expected but actually worse. He claims that seeking to extract exact information is worse than if they were pedants browbeating their audience, possibly because a pedant could prioritize the elements of a situation better than Ponytail is doing here.\nThis is similar to the viewpoint dedicated to scientists in comic 877: Beauty , as in studying that field seems to be a cold and sad way to analyze the thing, but instead is an extreme form of child-like awe and inspiration.\nThe title text sees Ponytail asking the person whether their answer is dependent on the current situation, or in technical terms, tense-aspect-mood . As noted above some people see the difference between 'fell down' and 'fell in' as to whether the sentence still holds true at the time of speaking; this is called the perfective aspect . There are other variations, such as recent vs. remote past: \"I just fell down a hole\"; the perfect (not to be confused with the first one - note the lack of -ive ): \"I fell down a hole, and it has consequences relevant to our conversation\"; habitual : \"I had previously fallen down a(nother?) hole, and I have fallen down this hole now\", all of which can influence one to choose 'down' over 'in' or vice versa.\nThe last sentence \u201cassuming you get out\u201d drives home the point that Ponytail is concerning herself with linguistic matters over practical ones. Ponytail\u2019s use of \u201cassuming\u201d rather than \u201cwhen\u201d suggests that Ponytail doesn\u2019t have a plan to get the person out, or that she has a plan but isn\u2019t confident in its success. The former interpretation, that Ponytail is thinking of the person getting out as abstract and unconnected with her, is funnier and more consistent with Ponytail\u2019s actions so far.\n[Ponytail is walking to the left. A voice calls out from behind her (at the right of the panel):] Off-panel voice: Help! Off-panel voice: I fell down a hole!\n[Ponytail runs to the right, toward the hole.]\n[Ponytail, kneeling down next to the hole, calls out:] Ponytail: Hey! Ponytail: Is \"fell down a hole\" exactly equivalent to \"fell in a hole,\" in your usage? Or do they have slightly different implications?\n[Caption below the panel] There's a myth that linguists are pedants who love correcting people, but they're actually just enthusiastic about understanding language in all its infinite varieties, which is much worse.\n"}
{"id":2391,"title":"Life Before the Pandemic","image_title":"Life Before the Pandemic","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2391","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/life_before_the_pandemic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2391:_Life_Before_the_Pandemic","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are having a conversation.] Megan: What do you miss most about life before the pandemic? Cueball: I can barely remember it.\nMegan: I miss going scuba diving without having to wear a mask. Cueball: I miss free refills at gas stations. Megan: I miss grilling in the library.\n[Close-up on Megan, Cueball's voice comes from off-panel, to the right.] Megan: I miss when tennis players didn't have to have that safety net between them. Cueball: I miss indoor fireworks.\n[The frame returns to seeing them both, they are now walking to the right while talking.] Megan: I miss when arcades let you take toys from the bin with your hand instead of using that stupid claw. Cueball: Ugh, I hate that thing. Megan: I can't wait for a vaccine.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nMegan and Cueball are having a conversation about life before the pandemic, which was declared as such on the 11th of March, 2020 by the World Health Organization. They talk about what they miss about life before the pandemic, but Cueball says that he can barely remember it. This is borne out by the rest of their discussion: None of the activities they list were ever common and most are strange, some are even forbidden and various items are misconstrued as existing for pandemic mitigation purposes.\nAfter they finish reminiscing, Megan says that she can't wait for a vaccine, further implying that she can't wait to have all of these things \"back.\" Both Pfizer\/BioNTech and Moderna are making vaccines, with Pfizer\/BioNTech making their application for emergency use on November 20th, 2020, 7 days before this comic's release. It is expected to be approved for use by the end of the year.\nScuba stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. It consists of a tank of compressed air, which is conducted through a tube to a mouthpiece which allows the diver to breathe underwater. A mask is a fundamental part of scuba diving to allow the diver to see underwater better. Cloth masks, to help lower the spread of the virus between people, are a recommended precaution when in public, but wearers are advised not to wear them when swimming. Megan is conflating these two different types of masks, misremembering a world where scuba diving did not have masks involved. You do not need to wear a cloth mask if you are scuba diving, but you do need to wear a scuba mask\u2013irrespective of whether there is a pandemic.\nScuba masks previously rated quite well on the mask effectiveness scale in 2367: Masks .  However because the regulator is technically not a face covering, Megan's Scuba club may be requiring full face or \"hardhat\" style diving equipment, which would justify her complaint.\nGas stations are locations where you can buy gasoline, which powers internal combustion engines, especially those in cars. Many of these locations have a small convenience store attached, where customers can purchase snacks or drinks while having their car filled up. It's unknown whether Randall\/Ponytail meant \"free refill\" of gasoline or of drinks from the convenience store, but either way it was not a business practice that was common. [ citation needed ] Free refills of drinks are more associated with restaurants and diners, who allow free top-ups of relatively cheaper soft drinks, tea, or coffee, in the hopes that it will attract people to come in and buy more expensive meals to cover the cost.\nGrilling food generally poses a significant fire hazard (and can produce toxic carbon monoxide) and is thus typically not allowed indoors, especially in libraries, whose shelves full of flammable paper books present both an increased fire hazard (as the fire could spread more quickly with plenty of fuel, and the shelves could potentially hamper efforts to evacuate the library if the fire made that necessary) and a liability (because if the books burned, they would be destroyed\/unusable, and it would likely cost a lot of money to replace them). In the pandemic, many libraries discourage people from spending time there, preferring that visitors only check out or drop off books. Some libraries have even removed chairs to achieve this.\nEven if grilling were allowed in Cueball's and Megan's library beforehand, it would not be allowed during the pandemic, as it would involve eating in an enclosed area, an activity specifically warned to increase the contagiousness of the virus. Backyard (or library) cookouts have been discouraged by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention , or CDC, because of this.\nTennis is a sport where two players use racquets to hit a ball at each other. The game is played on a court divided in half by a low net. The net is not used for anyone's safety; it's to ensure that the ball must be volleyed to the other player with some minimum height. Megan seems to believe that the net is there to ensure that the players stay on opposite sides of the net, in order to lower the spread of the virus.\nMany indoor activities were moved outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic, as poorly-ventilated indoor spaces vastly increase the chance of the virus spreading. Fireworks are explosives shot into the air for entertainment. Due to inherently being explosive, fireworks can be dangerous, i.e. cause injuries or even death. Some countries (for instance, The Netherlands) have temporarily banned fireworks because of COVID-19, reasoning the fireworks-induced injuries would put additional stress on hospitals that are already nearing maximum (intensive care) capacity due to COVID cases. Most fireworks are not suitable for use indoors; setting them off indoors is even more dangerous than they already are, even before the pandemic. [ citation needed ] However, there are specially designed indoor fireworks, most often used by specially trained and licensed pyrotechnicians. These are usually seen in large indoor venues for concerts and sporting events, both of which have been curtailed due to the pandemic.  In this case Cueball would be accurately lamenting his inability to enjoy indoor fireworks.\nArcade claw machines have a bin of prizes (often stuffed animals) with a claw mechanism hanging overhead. The player pays a few coins into the machine and maneuvers the claw over a desired prize. The claw will descend and \"attempt\" to grab the prize for retrieval. There is often a hidden percentage chance that the claw will not fully close.\nThis is a frustrating experience for the player (e.g. Cueball), but he misunderstands the purpose of the claws. While manipulator arms are also used for handling dangerous items, the claws in these machines are not to reduce coronavirus spread. Instead, they make toy-grabbing deliberately inefficient so that people may play again and pay more money. If people could take toys freely from the bin with their hands, operators would lose money, as people could take multiple toys or avoid paying entirely. It is unlikely that they would allow this even after the pandemic.\nOut of frustration, some players attempt to reach through the deposit hole in order to try to take one of the stuffed animals or other prizes without the use of the claw. Since multiple people would presumably have already touched the metal interior, this is an effective way to spread the contagion quickly, which makes it even more imperative to discontinue this practice. There are other dangers to doing this as well; one can get their arm stuck in the machine , and can even cause themselves serious damage.\nAgain it is possible that the arcade used a ticket or token system where one could cash out their winnings for self-selected items such as plush toys.  As a COVID mitigation, the arcade may have found it necessary to make the plush toys only available via an enclosed claw style \"skill\" game.\nA mall, in a historical context, refers to a large open walkway, such as the National Mall , where one could conceivably enter with a horse, although it was considered inappropriate to do so. However, it appears Cueball and Megan are referring to a shopping mall , where a shopper entering with a horse was never a regular occurrence [ citation needed ] , at least in universes where there isn\u2019t a horse in aisle five .\n[Megan and Cueball are having a conversation.] Megan: What do you miss most about life before the pandemic? Cueball: I can barely remember it.\nMegan: I miss going scuba diving without having to wear a mask. Cueball: I miss free refills at gas stations. Megan: I miss grilling in the library.\n[Close-up on Megan, Cueball's voice comes from off-panel, to the right.] Megan: I miss when tennis players didn't have to have that safety net between them. Cueball: I miss indoor fireworks.\n[The frame returns to seeing them both, they are now walking to the right while talking.] Megan: I miss when arcades let you take toys from the bin with your hand instead of using that stupid claw. Cueball: Ugh, I hate that thing. Megan: I can't wait for a vaccine.\n"}
{"id":2392,"title":"Cyber Cafe","image_title":"Cyber Cafe","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2392","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cyber_cafe.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2392:_Cyber_Cafe","transcript":"Which word in the name \"cyber cafe\" sounds more dated?\n2015 - Cyber 2016 - Cyber 2017 - Cyber 2018 - Cyber 2019 - Cyber 2020 - Cafe\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nA cybercafe, or Internet cafe , is a cafe or other restaurant that provides Internet access.  Prior to widespread ownership of personal computers and cell phones, such cafes would host computers that clients could use, and nowadays, many fast-food restaurants and cafes provide free Wi-Fi to their customers, so that people can use their computers while at the cafe. \"Cyber\" is a prefix meaning something relating to computers (as in Cyber Monday, the day the comic was posted), but this comic suggests that it sounds dated, previously discussed in 1573: Cyberintelligence . However, in 2020, he jokes that \"cafe\" actually sounds more dated. This is a result of lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic preventing people from going to cafes, and like the preceding comic is a play on the sense that the lockdowns could shift economies and cultures to remove parts of the physical world permanently, depending on how long they last.\nIn the title text, Randall indulges his munchies of ambiguity by proposing that the term \"cyber cafe\" be re-used to refer to online hangout spaces that try to feel like cafes.  This would change the meaning from \"a cafe where computers are available for use by patrons\" to \"a setting or activity in cyberspace that feels like a cafe\" (which would at least be inline with similar terms, like cyberbullying , cybersex , etc.).\nWhich word in the name \"cyber cafe\" sounds more dated?\n2015 - Cyber 2016 - Cyber 2017 - Cyber 2018 - Cyber 2019 - Cyber 2020 - Cafe\n"}
{"id":2393,"title":"Presidential Middle Names","image_title":"Presidential Middle Names","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2393","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/presidential_middle_names.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2393:_Presidential_Middle_Names","transcript":"Prettiest Presidential Middle Names Official Rankings (Updated for 2021)\n","explanation":"A list of what Randall perceives will be the prettiest presidential middle names after the inauguration on January 20, 2021. Joe Robinette Biden (46th president-elect) will take the second slot bumping previous second-place holder Franklin Delano Roosevelt , the 32nd president, back to third. Warren Gamaliel Harding , the 29th president, remains in first. Robinette is Biden's grandmother's maiden name .\nThe title text announces that Rutherford Birchard Hayes , the 19th president, remains at or near the bottom.\nOverall, the ranking would not include every president, as many early presidents, such as George Washington and John Adams , lacked middle names. Some presidents were also more commonly known by their middle names as opposed to their first names, particularly John Calvin Coolidge , Stephen Grover Cleveland , Hiram Ulysses Grant , and Thomas Woodrow Wilson . In the case of Grant, the Senator who enrolled him at West Point messed up his full name as Ulysses Simpson Grant, hence he is widely known as Ulysses S. Grant with the spurious middle \"S\". Also, Harry S Truman 's middle name was just the letter S and was not an initial of a name; Truman's parents could not agree on which of his grandfathers' names to give him, but luckily they both started with the letter. One president has even changed their entire name: Gerald Ford was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr., officially changing his name in 1935. \nThere is no evidence in the comic for how Randall\u2019s list would deal with these cases.\nThe humor is based on the sheer oddity of ranking people by the perceived prettiness of their obscure middle names.\nRaphael Gamaliel Warnock became a U.S. senator in January 2021, a hundred years and a week after former president Warren Gamaliel Harding left the Senate. Randall\u2019s favourite presidential middle name is thus once again represented in government.\n(updated for 2021, as the comic)\nThe Presidents without middle names \u2014 almost all of those before Grant, and a few a bit later \u2014 were George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson , James Madison , James Monroe , Andrew Jackson , Martin Van Buren , John Tyler , Zachary Taylor , Millard Fillmore , Franklin Pierce , James Buchanan , Abraham Lincoln , Andrew Johnson , Benjamin Harrison , William McKinley , and Theodore Roosevelt .\nPrettiest Presidential Middle Names Official Rankings (Updated for 2021)\n"}
{"id":2394,"title":"Contiguous 41 States","image_title":"Contiguous 41 States","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2394","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/contiguous_41_states.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2394:_Contiguous_41_States","transcript":"[Heading above the panel:] The Contiguous 41 States\n[A map of the United States, missing Delaware, Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota, along with Alaska and Hawaii.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Tired of being left off maps of the US, Alaska and Hawaii begin producing maps with other states missing, too.\n","explanation":"The United States of America is composed of 50 states, 48 of which are contiguous \u2013 meaning they share common borders. Two states are separated from the other 48 states, Alaska and Hawaii . Alaska, purchased from Russia in 1867, is separated from the rest of the United States by the country of Canada, or at least appears to be as a result of the Mercator Projection . Hawaii, annexed in 1898, is a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean. As these states are not contiguous to the rest of the 48 states, they may be omitted from maps of the United States. Typically, these 2 states are included in inset maps, separate sections usually placed at the bottom of the main map.\nThe United States also includes 5 permanently inhabited territories (Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa), which are not contiguous with states.  Puerto Rico may become a state . The District of Columbia is not ( yet ) a state, but is contiguous with the states.\nThe map in this comic is \"Alaska and Hawaii's revenge\", with seven additional states removed: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.  Most of these are accomplished by eliminating a column of states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. Oklahoma and Texas, which are directly south of these, are slid over to the west into the space freed up by deleting New Mexico.  The other two deleted states are Pennsylvania and Delaware, with the states to their south and north slid\/extended to fill the gap.\nThe map is also missing Isle Royale , Michigan, the third-largest island in the contiguous U.S. This seems to be a legitimate oversight, as the map includes numerous smaller islands in detail, including Michigan's Beaver Island and North Manitou Island. Even the non-contiguous Northwest Angle of Minnesota is depicted. (The Eastern Shore of Virginia , which is not connected to the rest of Virginia and only borders Maryland, is also not shown\u2014presumably to make way for New Jersey replacing much of the Delmarva Peninsula ).\nSome states, while not removed, are significantly distorted. Iowa and Missouri lose their contours with the Missouri River, while Wyoming's eastern border is crooked. The eastern border of Maryland follows the Delaware river with New Jersey. The border between Oklahoma and Arkansas is moved west.\nThe United States did have exactly 41 states for a few days in 1889, from the admission of Montana, the 41st state, on November 8, to the admission of Washington (the state, not DC), the 42nd state, on November 11.  However, it was not the same 41 as shown here; for example, Pennsylvania and Delaware were two of the original 13 states (Delaware calls itself the first state, based on date of ratification of the Constitution) and Arizona and Oklahoma did not become states until the early 1900s.\nThe title text riffs on synonyms for \"shared borders\", which, according to Randall, linguists are inventing more of (while claiming they already existed) to make life more complicated for modern English users, for obscure reasons.\nIn fact, 'contiguous', 'coterminous', and 'conterminous' all date from early modern English, early-to-mid 17th century (just after the time of Shakespeare). 'Coterminous' and 'conterminous' are alternate spellings from the same Latin root ('cum' + 'terminus'), whereas 'contiguous' is from a different root (Latin 'contiguus'). Randall, facetiously, accuses linguists of having fabricated this history.\n'Conterguous' is a neologism by Randall, though he blames it on linguists, consistent with his claim that they made up all the others. It is a portmanteau of 'CONTERminous' and 'contiGUOUS'. It is etymologically absurd (the prefix 'conter-' is meaningless). Its 'top-down' introduction into the language would simply be for the purpose of messing with people's minds, as Randall suggests. However, should the word catch on with English speakers, perhaps precisely because it is a joke, its 'bottom-up' entry into the language is certainly possible. One could then argue just how much Randall would have to answer for.\n[Heading above the panel:] The Contiguous 41 States\n[A map of the United States, missing Delaware, Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota, along with Alaska and Hawaii.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Tired of being left off maps of the US, Alaska and Hawaii begin producing maps with other states missing, too.\n"}
{"id":2395,"title":"Covid Precaution Level","image_title":"Covid Precaution Level","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2395","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/covid_precaution_level.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2395:_Covid_Precaution_Level","transcript":"COVID Precaution Level [Shown is a control knob for adjusting the stringency of precautions taken against COVID-19 (the knob has a black line indicating exactly where it is pointing), with fewer precautions to the left, more to the right. Most of the lower two thirds of the range is labelled \"precautions that feel insufficient\"; most of the upper two thirds is labelled \"precautions that feel excessive\".  There is an overlap between the two, covering about 1\/4 of the range.  The control is set to somewhat above the top of the \"insufficient\" subrange.]\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis comic seems to represent the problem that precautions that are insufficient feel excessive to many people and vice versa, thus there is such a large overlap between the 2 sections. Even a moderately sensible individual will likely consider some blanket precautions restrictive because they don't allow a nuance of behaviour they think they should be able to embrace safely; meanwhile they'll find some of the actual official exceptions, that probably do not apply to them, to be taken reckless advantage of by others.  Additionally, neither range mentions whether the precautions are actually effective, which also can have a level of subjectivity.\nRandall points out that part of the challenge with finding the 'right setting' is that you can only know for sure that your precautions were insufficient if and when you catch COVID and either get tested or develop symptoms, by which point it is too late to change your precautions (although your case could at least inform others). However, some people do not take precautions seriously even though they believe in COVID because they view it as a mild disease, like the common cold or influenza, that won't kill them, and there have been people who contracted COVID-19 multiple times, so perhaps Randall was referring to dying from COVID-19 instead.\nCOVID Precaution Level [Shown is a control knob for adjusting the stringency of precautions taken against COVID-19 (the knob has a black line indicating exactly where it is pointing), with fewer precautions to the left, more to the right. Most of the lower two thirds of the range is labelled \"precautions that feel insufficient\"; most of the upper two thirds is labelled \"precautions that feel excessive\".  There is an overlap between the two, covering about 1\/4 of the range.  The control is set to somewhat above the top of the \"insufficient\" subrange.]\n"}
{"id":2396,"title":"Wonder Woman 1984","image_title":"Wonder Woman 1984","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2396","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wonder_woman_1984.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2396:_Wonder_Woman_1984","transcript":"[Ponytail sitting at a desk, chatting with Cueball (off-screen) on a laptop.] Ponytail: Just two weeks until I see Wonder Woman 1984 , learn who the Democratic nominee was, and find out how the election went. Cueball: Huh?\n[Close-up on Ponytail.] Ponytail: To avoid spoilers, I blocked all news sites ahead of the November 2019 release. Ponytail: But then they bumped the date on my ticket to June 2020, and now December 25th. Ponytail: It also moved to a drive-in theater? Some retro promotion, maybe.\n[Cueball on his laptop, chatting with Ponytail (off-screen) on a laptop.] Cueball: Wait, you haven't seen any news? Ponytail: Nope! Cueball: So you don't know about - Ponytail: No spoilers!\n[Back to Ponytail sitting at a desk, chatting with Cueball (off-screen) on a laptop.] Cueball: Okay. Just... Cueball: Bring a mask, in case you need to get out of the car. Ponytail: Oh, I'll have a full costume! But it's a tiara, not a mask.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nPonytail, who was eager to see Wonder Woman 1984 , the 2019 sequel to the acclaimed 2017 Wonder Woman film, decided to block all news media leading up to the film, to avoid spoilers . Avoiding spoilers is a common practice for people who do not wish to be \"spoiled\" by reading or hearing any plot points of the film, because they want to be immersed in the movie when watching it for the first time, by not being able to predict any plot twists before they occur. Many early reviewers may inadvertently give away key parts of the film, which may ruin the experience for some watchers, and story elements may be leaked by inside sources, either accidentally or deliberately.\nHowever, there have been many delays for release of the film, in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. The film was originally delayed from November 1, 2019 to June 5, 2020 to allow more time for production, and then, after the pandemic struck, was pushed to August 14, 2020, then October 2, 2020, before it was finally moved to December 25, 2020. The film studio announced a simultaneous release of the film in theaters and also on streaming platform HBO Max .\nAbsurdly, Ponytail apparently continued to block news sites after the delays, and so has not read any news in over a year, even news unrelated to movies. Because of this, she is apparently totally unaware of the entire pandemic, as well as more predictable major news items like the 2020 United States presidential election. This is particularly absurd, because these events were influential enough that it would be difficult or impossible to avoid awareness, even with no media exposure. They have been common topics of conversation, not to mention face-masks and other public health-control measures have now become ubiquitous, and election campaign signs and bumper stickers were common sights in the lead-up to November.\nHow the release date being postponed (twice) did not convince Ponytail to find out why, therefore becoming aware of the pandemic with its associated lockdown and public health-control, is a question that is left unanswered. It is also unclear how she became aware that the movie had, in fact, been postponed. Her confusion as to why her movie is now being shown at a drive-in theater is a sign that she's unaware of COVID-19. Drive-in theaters have been seen as a safer option than indoor movie theaters during the pandemic.\nCueball tries to warn her about the ongoing pandemic, but in an effort to avoid spoilers, she silences him. This may imply that in her wildly excessive effort to avoid spoilers, she's avoided leaving her home and talking to people, which could explain her exceptional level of disconnection from current events. Cueball then tells her to wear a mask, but she is still confused. Ponytail says that she will dress up in costume as Wonder Woman, who is traditionally shown wearing a tiara but not a mask (unlike Batman or many other comic characters, although efficiency of their masks still varies wildly in regards to COVID-19 protection).\nThe title text expands on Ponytail's speculation that the use of the drive-in theaters is a \"retro promotion,\" presumably because drive-ins and the '80s setting of the movie are now both considered to be retro in 2020. However, they are not associated with the same period; drive-in theaters in America had their heyday in the 1950s and '60s, and were in rapid decline by the '80s. Ponytail further demonstrates her misunderstanding of history by mentioning several other things which she wrongly believes are from the '80s. Britney Spears is a singer who was popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Hustle was a disco dance popular in the mid-1970s. Pogs under that name peaked in the mid-1990s. Elvis 's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show - a pivotal moment in American pop culture - occurred on September 9, 1956. ( The Ed Sullivan Show went off the air in 1971, Ed Sullivan died in 1974, and Elvis Presley died in 1977.) This joke concerns the phenomenon of people lumping together all time periods before their birth, which results in \"retro\" or \"period\" representations combining elements from widely different time periods. (A similar behavior is seen in 771: Period Speech .) Cueball points this out by asking Ponytail when she was born, implying that, if she'd actually lived through any of those time periods, she'd realize that they were distinct. If Ponytail could not remember any of these events in her childhood, an age of about 20 years can be set as an approximate upper bound for this particular character's age.\nThis comic is similar to 2280: 2010 and 2020 and 2338: Faraday Tour , which also involve characters who are unaware of the COVID-19 pandemic.\n[Ponytail sitting at a desk, chatting with Cueball (off-screen) on a laptop.] Ponytail: Just two weeks until I see Wonder Woman 1984 , learn who the Democratic nominee was, and find out how the election went. Cueball: Huh?\n[Close-up on Ponytail.] Ponytail: To avoid spoilers, I blocked all news sites ahead of the November 2019 release. Ponytail: But then they bumped the date on my ticket to June 2020, and now December 25th. Ponytail: It also moved to a drive-in theater? Some retro promotion, maybe.\n[Cueball on his laptop, chatting with Ponytail (off-screen) on a laptop.] Cueball: Wait, you haven't seen any news? Ponytail: Nope! Cueball: So you don't know about - Ponytail: No spoilers!\n[Back to Ponytail sitting at a desk, chatting with Cueball (off-screen) on a laptop.] Cueball: Okay. Just... Cueball: Bring a mask, in case you need to get out of the car. Ponytail: Oh, I'll have a full costume! But it's a tiara, not a mask.\n"}
{"id":2397,"title":"I Just Don't Trust Them","image_title":"I Just Don't Trust Them","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2397","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_just_dont_trust_them.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2397:_I_Just_Don%27t_Trust_Them","transcript":"[Cueball stands with his arms to his sides, facing Megan.] Cueball: I just don't trust them, and I don't want to put something they developed into my body.\n[Caption below the panel:] How I feel about bats\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nCueball partially echoes a statement made by anti-vaccination activists about \" Big Pharma \" (the powerful and profit-driven companies which develop pharmaceutical drugs such as vaccines ). Anti-vaccine protesters falsely believe that vaccines contain harmful toxins (such as HIV proteins, aluminum salts , formaldehyde, mercury , and nanoparticles) that cause ill effects on the human body, that just because there has never been a licensed mRNA vaccine before that these new vaccines are not safe in the long term, and that the corporations that make them are not to be trusted because they are exploiting a captive public for profit while disregarding public health. The joke is that Cueball is revealed to be not talking about Big Pharma but, instead, bats.\nAccording to the WHO, COVID-19 has an ecological origin in bat populations. Hence, Cueball sees the virus as something developed by bats, and the ambiguity by which he expresses his desire to not be infected adds to the joke.\nThe comic could simply be seen to serve as a compelling argument against the anti-vaccine movement, which is often criticized for spreading misinformation and increasing rates of disease, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This comic comes shortly after the news of the development of several COVID-19 vaccines with high rates of success; there are concerns that herd immunity may be delayed if people refuse to take the vaccine.\nThe title text refers to getting immunity the old-fashioned way, i.e. catching the disease and waiting for your immune system to build up a response. This is usually considered healthy when immunity to minor diseases is common, and can avoid the sudden forced evolution of new diseases among extensively hypercareful communities, but developing natural immunity is certainly incredibly dangerous during a pandemic of a serious illness. One joke here is that many anti-vaxxers claim that it is more natural to not take a vaccine. Because many people conflate \"natural\" with \"healthy\", the assumption underlying the claim \"it is more natural to not take a vaccine\" is that it is therefore more healthy. Such arguments are an example of the logical fallacy known as Appeal to nature . Thus, the title text is apparently written from a pro-vaxxer's take on the stance of an anti-vaxxer.\nThe title text also playfully suggests that the immune system would attempt to use an Internet search engine to learn how to manufacture spike protein antibodies . While this may be an effective technique for a human being to acquire knowledge, it would not likely be as efficient for a nonsentient biological system. [ citation needed ]\n[Cueball stands with his arms to his sides, facing Megan.] Cueball: I just don't trust them, and I don't want to put something they developed into my body.\n[Caption below the panel:] How I feel about bats\n"}
{"id":2398,"title":"Vaccine Tracker","image_title":"Vaccine Tracker","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2398","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vaccine_tracker.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2398:_Vaccine_Tracker","transcript":"[Megan walks towards Cueball. Cueball sits in front of his laptop.] Megan: What are you up to? Cueball: You know how when I have a package coming, I sit here refreshing the package tracker? Megan: Is that the state vaccine website? [Cueball refreshes the page] *REFRESH*\nMegan: You know it will be a while before you can- [Cueball refreshes the page, cutting her off.] *REFRESH* Megan: They haven't even announced when- [Cueball refreshes the page again, cutting her off.] *REFRESH*\nMegan: Are you going to sit there clicking refresh for several months? Cueball: I am ready for the pandemic to be done.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nSimilar to 281: Online Package Tracking , Cueball is trying to \"track\" the status of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine , which was approved in the USA the week prior to the publishing of this comic, and began to be administered the day of publication. Cueball is impatient for the vaccine to be released to the public, wanting the pandemic to end as soon as possible. Because of that, he is treating the state vaccine website like a package tracker, even though it will probably be several months before he is vaccinated.\nOf course, the state vaccine website does not act like a package tracker, and updates will be few and far between. The comedy in this comes from Cueball expecting it to update regularly, even though the vaccine is not going to come anytime soon for most people, especially for those in Cueball's presumed priority level. Checking once a day for general 'movement' probably would more than suffice to get a head's up on when a possible invitation or opportunity to book would present itself.\nThe title text refers to Pfizer's vaccine plant in the city of Kalamazoo, Michigan , and is also a reference to 281: Online Package Tracking .\n[Megan walks towards Cueball. Cueball sits in front of his laptop.] Megan: What are you up to? Cueball: You know how when I have a package coming, I sit here refreshing the package tracker? Megan: Is that the state vaccine website? [Cueball refreshes the page] *REFRESH*\nMegan: You know it will be a while before you can- [Cueball refreshes the page, cutting her off.] *REFRESH* Megan: They haven't even announced when- [Cueball refreshes the page again, cutting her off.] *REFRESH*\nMegan: Are you going to sit there clicking refresh for several months? Cueball: I am ready for the pandemic to be done.\n"}
{"id":2399,"title":"2020 Election Map","image_title":"2020 Election Map","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2399","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2020_election_map.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2399:_2020_Election_Map","transcript":"2020 Election Map [One stick figure in a black circle] = 250,000 votes [Stick figure in a blue circle] Biden [Stick figure in a red circle] Trump [Stick figure in a green circle] Other Votes are distributed by state as accurately as possible while keeping national totals correct. Location within each state is approximate. [Blue, red, and green circles are distributed across a map of the United States.]\n","explanation":"This is a sequel to an earlier comic, 1939: 2016 Election Map . The United States elects its president not directly by popular vote but by an Electoral College composed of a number of electors, partially proportional to population, from each state. Presently, a \"winner-take-all\" system is used in most states: the winner of the popular vote in each state receives all of the electoral votes for that state. Though, strictly speaking, the electors are not required to cast their ballots according to this system, many states impose penalties on them if they don't. Technically, the popular vote in each state is to elect a slate of electors who in turn elect the President.\nDuring the election season, news outlets and other political trackers tend to color-code each state with the party which won the state (or which is projected or speculated to win).  Since the 2000 election it's become common practice to code Republican victories as red and Democratic victories as blue. Other parties have less consistent colors, but are commonly green. These colors have become embedded in popular vernacular, as states that are heavily Republican are known as \"red states\" and those that are heavily Democratic are known as \"blue states\".\nThese graphics can be misleading as to the realities on the ground, though.  Because each state is colored solidly red or blue, it gives the impression that each state belongs entirely to one party or the other, when the color could represent a very slender minority, or an overwhelming advantage. In addition, such a graphical view means that larger states translate to more area of a given color, giving the impression of party strength, even though that may not represent many voters. In the US, large cities trend largely Democratic, while rural areas trend largely Republican. This means that many Democratic voters are concentrated in relatively small urban areas, so a large \"red\" state may represent fewer voters than a small \"blue\" state.\nRandall's solution to this is to represent the Republican and Democratic voters in each state with Cueball icons, each icon representing 250,000 voters.  He has made some attempt to distribute the Cueball icons within a state in a manner similar to how the actual votes were distributed.  This has the advantage of giving a decent impression of how popular each candidate was, how their popularity varied across the country, and how the votes were distributed by both state and region.  It also gives at least a basic indication of population patterns in the US, with large regions that are sparsely inhabited, and populations clustered in urban centers.\nThe title text compares different voter pools in terms of absolute size. These facts are frequently counter-intuitive. California is generally thought of as a \"blue state\", and Texas as a \"red state\" (Although that may be changing), so it's surprising to realize that, in 2020, Donald Trump received more votes in California than he did in Texas. The reason for this is not complex, California has a huge population, nearly 40 million people, of whom 17.5 million voted in 2020.  Even though Joe Biden won the state easily, Trump received 6 million of those votes.  Texas, by contrast, has 27.7 million residents and 11.3 million voters in the 2020 election. Trump received 5.9 million of those votes, which was enough to win the state. Because of the huge variation in population among US states, and the political divisions within each state, there are multiple \"blue\" states which have more Republican voters that at least some \"red\" states, and vice versa. This underscores the importance of not viewing any state as politically uniform. Even if a state trends heavily toward one party, there is always a substantial population of the other party, and in large states, that means enough people that they'd be a formidable political force anywhere else.\nSource\nThe following table lists the number of 250,000-vote markers in the map by candidate and state, and compares this with the actual number of votes. Source\n2020 Election Map [One stick figure in a black circle] = 250,000 votes [Stick figure in a blue circle] Biden [Stick figure in a red circle] Trump [Stick figure in a green circle] Other Votes are distributed by state as accurately as possible while keeping national totals correct. Location within each state is approximate. [Blue, red, and green circles are distributed across a map of the United States.]\n"}
{"id":2400,"title":"Statistics","image_title":"Statistics","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2400","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/statistics.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2400:_Statistics","transcript":"[Shown is a graph with the x-axis labeled \"time\" and the y-axis labeled \"COVID cases.\" There is a black line on the graph labeled \"placebo group\", which has a roughly linear slope moving toward the top right corner. There is a red line labeled \"vaccine group\", which follows the black line for about an eighth of the width of the graph before leveling off at a much slower increase.]\nCaption beneath the graph: Statistics tip: Always try to get data that's good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine . It is also another one of Randall's Tips , this time a statistics tip.\nThe main focus of the comic is a graph showing cases of COVID-19 versus time for two groups: one group was vaccinated and the other group was not. Graphs are ways to visualize data, and for real data indicate specific values. This graph seems to be based on the Moderna vaccine's results but is somewhat fictionalized. The higher line (\"placebo group\") rises in a steep curve. The lower line (\"vaccine group\") follows the first for a bit but then levels out to a much slower rate of climb. Officially, a scientific assessment of the effectiveness of anything requires rigorous statistical analysis. This is particularly true in medical studies, where impacts of biology can be highly complex and subject to many factors, meaning that careful review of the data is necessary to confirm that an intervention was effective. The joke of this comic is that the intervention presented here is so obviously effective that it's obvious even to a layman with little understanding of the math. A few days after the vaccine was administered, cases in the vaccinated group essentially flatline, while cases in the placebo group continue to rise as a significant rate. The data is so \"good\", meaning that numbers for the treatment and control groups diverge so dramatically, that actual analysis becomes almost a formality: a glance at the chart would convince most people that the treatment is effective.\nThis comic was released one day after the FDA's Dec 17th briefing document for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was released. The document includes the following chart .  The charts draw the integral of the incidence data rather than the data itself (\"cumulative\" rather than \"rate\"): this results in changes in disease rate towards the left side of the chart, being added into the data on the right side, amplifying their difference.  This technique for emphasizing the data is valid: the spread between the lines only continues to increase if the effect continues happening, such that the total spread at the right is proportional to the total effect the vaccine had.  The charts do not show any information on other possible variables.  Randall has described previously in his webcomics how very clear charts can be made to hide misleading data.  The linked graph does not leave the numbers out, and the numbers indicate the vaccine is 91% effective at preventing the disease (and a 95% chance of being between 85 and 95% efficient).\nThe advice here could be seen as the inverse of the \"science tip\" in 2311: Confidence Interval , in which the data was so bad that its error bars fell outside of the graph and were not shown. Also there's some association with 1725: Linear Regression where the data is not so good that you don't need to perform linear analysis.\nThe null hypothesis, mentioned in the title text, is the hypothesis in a statistical analysis that indicates that the effect investigated by the analysis does not occur, i.e. 'null' as in zero effect. For example, the null hypothesis for this study might be \"The vaccine has no effect on whether subjects catch COVID.\" The null hypothesis was previously the subject of 892: Null Hypothesis . The null hypothesis is rejected when the probability of something like the observed data would be very low were the null hypothesis true.\nFor a simplified example, imagine there are 10\u202f000 people in the vaccinated group, and each has a 5% chance of catching COVID under the null hypothesis; we expect 500 people to catch COVID. If only 490 catch COVID, the null hypothesis remains plausible, but if just 10 do, the odds are (in Python; see binomial distribution ) sum([math.comb(10000, i) * 0.05**i * 0.95**(10000-i) for i in range(0,10)]) = 1.5\u00a0\u00d7\u00a010 -204 . In other words, it is wildly improbably that an ineffective vaccine would have produced such excellent results. We therefore conclude that the vaccine is not ineffective, and have rejected the null hypothesis.\nMost people however, on seeing the raw results, would have concluded that the vaccine worked and statistics were just a formality. As the title text says, they would have \"reject[ed] the null hypothesis based on the 'hot damn, check out this chart' test.\"\n[Shown is a graph with the x-axis labeled \"time\" and the y-axis labeled \"COVID cases.\" There is a black line on the graph labeled \"placebo group\", which has a roughly linear slope moving toward the top right corner. There is a red line labeled \"vaccine group\", which follows the black line for about an eighth of the width of the graph before leveling off at a much slower increase.]\nCaption beneath the graph: Statistics tip: Always try to get data that's good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it\n"}
{"id":2401,"title":"Conjunction","image_title":"Conjunction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2401","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/conjunction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2401:_Conjunction","transcript":"[Caption above the first panel:] What people imagine astronomers observing a conjunction are like\n[Cueball and Ponytail are both looking through telescopes at the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.] Cueball: 6.15 arcminutes! Ponytail: Stupendous! This confirms Einstein!\n[Caption above the second panel:] What they're actually like\n[The same picture with different spoken sentences.] Cueball: Wow! Look how close they are! Ponytail: It's so cool!! Cueball: Now kiiiisssss!! Ponytail: Dooo iiit!\n","explanation":"Cueball and Ponytail are observing the 2020 Jupiter-Saturn conjunction . This comic is similar to other comparisons between expectation and reality, such as 2176: How Hacking Works , 683: Science Montage , 2341: Scientist Tech Help , and 538: Security . The expectation is that the scientists will remain professional and serious throughout the event, testing Einstein's theory of General Relativity and using technical terms such as arcminute , a unit of measurement often used in astronomy. In reality, however, they are actually treating the event quite whimsically and are having fun with it, even jokingly commenting about the event. Other astronomical phenomena, such as solar eclipses, actually have been used to test Einstein's theories, but in this case the interest is purely aesthetic.\nThe title text references the misconception that the planets physically get very close at conjunction, rather than merely appearing to do so. The wording suggests a quick and uneventful merger, possibly alluding to the way drops of water merge when the surface tension between them is broken.\nIf Jupiter and Saturn really did come into contact and \"blooped together\", most of the mass would stay collected as an extremely hot [ citation needed ] and turbulent blob that would eventually settle down as a new planet (which Randall suggests might be called \"Jaturn\" ), but more than a bit would be spewed outwards.  The possible outcomes vary enormously, depending on factors such as how direct the impact was, and its alignment relative to the planets' spins. However, while such a collision would be preceded by a conjunction, a conjunction does not necessarily indicate an imminent collision, as Jupiter and Saturn, although on the same sightline from Earth, are still separated by 734 million km (456 million mi) at the time of the conjunction - almost five times the distance from Earth to the Sun.\n[Caption above the first panel:] What people imagine astronomers observing a conjunction are like\n[Cueball and Ponytail are both looking through telescopes at the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.] Cueball: 6.15 arcminutes! Ponytail: Stupendous! This confirms Einstein!\n[Caption above the second panel:] What they're actually like\n[The same picture with different spoken sentences.] Cueball: Wow! Look how close they are! Ponytail: It's so cool!! Cueball: Now kiiiisssss!! Ponytail: Dooo iiit!\n"}
{"id":2402,"title":"Into My Veins","image_title":"Into My Veins","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2402","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/into_my_veins.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2402:_Into_My_Veins","transcript":"[Close up of Cueball.] Cueball: Yesssss Cueball: Inject this directly into my veins\n[Beat panel. Ponytail looks down at a clipboard while Cueball is looking at her.]\n[Zoom out to reveal that Cueball is standing by a stool, with Ponytail in front of him with a clipboard and syringe and Hairy behind him with a box of bandages and a first-aid kit.] Ponytail: Ok, but the vaccine is intramuscular... Hairy: Why do people keep saying that? Cueball: Sorry, sorry. Cueball: Just excited.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic . It also references a common meme .\nTwo of the next four comics also contain references to the vaccine, 2404: First Thing and 2406: Viral Vector Immunity , and the first of these, like this one, additionally references a common Internet trend.\nThe COVID-19 Pandemic has been one of the most consequential and broadly unpleasant events in living memory. [ citation needed ] As of the publication of this strip, it is estimated to have caused over 1.5 million deaths worldwide, with over 300,000 deaths in the United States, and many more serious cases, often with lasting impacts.  Even for those who have been spared infection, measures to slow the spread of the virus have been highly impactful, and have been ongoing for nearly a year.\nAs a consequence of all of this, many people (including, presumably, Randall ) are excited for the vaccine, which will hopefully end the pandemic. This comic shows Cueball clearly thrilled to receive the vaccine. \"Inject this directly into my veins\" is a meme based on a line (from The Simpsons ): in the episode \" A Star Is Burns \", an alcoholic character wins a lifetime supply of beer, and replies \"just hook it to my veins\". The meme is typically applied to things that are not injected at all (such as a form of media or entertainment) to express exaggerated enthusiasm.  When Cueball applies the meme to the COVID-19 vaccine, it causes some confusion, because the vaccine is delivered by injection, but not directly into a vein . The medical staff delivering the vaccine have apparently heard this or similar lines frequently, and appear to take it literally, repeatedly explaining that it's not actually possible.\nThe title text references another such meme, \"Shut up and take my money,\" which derives from the 2010 \" Attack of the Killer App \" episode of Futurama . This meme, like the first, expresses extreme and immediate desire for something, with the implication that the speaker is not only willing but eager to pay whatever it costs, and is too excited to wait for a sales pitch or for any warnings or disclaimers. The COVID-19 vaccine is being provided free of charge to Cueball, so taking his money is entirely unnecessary (and possibly illegal). Once again, this is a source of potential confusion because, under the American healthcare system, many people likely will have to pay at least part of the cost of vaccination. The workers administering it could easily confuse the meme for a genuine request.\nThis was the last comic before this years Christmas comic . It was about the Covid-19 vaccine. The last comic before the 2021 Christmas comic, 2558: Rapid Test Results , was about Covid-19 tests.\n[Close up of Cueball.] Cueball: Yesssss Cueball: Inject this directly into my veins\n[Beat panel. Ponytail looks down at a clipboard while Cueball is looking at her.]\n[Zoom out to reveal that Cueball is standing by a stool, with Ponytail in front of him with a clipboard and syringe and Hairy behind him with a box of bandages and a first-aid kit.] Ponytail: Ok, but the vaccine is intramuscular... Hairy: Why do people keep saying that? Cueball: Sorry, sorry. Cueball: Just excited.\n"}
{"id":2403,"title":"Wrapping Paper","image_title":"Wrapping Paper","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2403","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wrapping_paper.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2403:_Wrapping_Paper","transcript":"[Cueball is standing at the left of a decorated Christmas tree, with present boxes underneath it. The presents are wrapped with the undecorated side of the wrapping paper facing out. Megan is kneeling at the right side, unwrapping a gift, revealing stripes on the inside.]\nMegan: Cool! I got the entire universe and every object within it except for a pair of headphones!\n[Caption below the panel]: Presents get a lot more impressive if you turn the wrapping paper inside out\n","explanation":"This comic was published on Christmas Day, 2020, a day where people who celebrate Christmas traditionally open presents.\nIn this comic, Megan is unwrapping a present while Cueball looks on (perhaps it's the present he gave her). The premise is that the definition of a present is not what's inside the box, but what's inside the region of space that the blank side of the wrapping paper faces. So if you wrap the box with the printed side towards the box, everything in the universe outside the box is the gift. Apparently, the box contains a pair of headphones, which would be a nice present, but not nearly as impressive as almost everything in the universe. [ citation needed ] And since the rest of the universe contains millions of headphones, many of which are probably nicer than the ones in this box, she still gets headphones as well.\nThe title text extends this to regifting , which is the practice of using a received present (usually unwanted and hopefully unused) as a present for someone else. This practice is often considered to be impolite because it's assumed to simultaneously show a lack of appreciation of a gift you've received (because you want to get rid of it), and an unwillingness to spend much time, effort, or money on a gift for someone else. But if you wrap an ordinary present inside out, all the gifts you've ever received in the past are part of the entire universe except for that present, so you're actually doing an enormous amount of regifting including stuff belonging to other people , which is as rude as regifting can get.\nDouglas Adams 's novel So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish , the fourth in the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, contains a similar joke. A man living in an inside-out room in a desert treats the rest of Earth as an insane asylum, with himself living outside of it as the only sane man.\nThis may also refer to a math joke about how to create the smallest fence around a group of animals. Rather than finding the obvious fence, a mathematician would build a small, circular fence around themselves and declare the region on the other side of the fence \"inside\", thus enclosing all the animals!\nThe mention of headphones might be a reference to the AirPods Max , which were released by Apple on December 9, just 16 days before this comic, and stirred much debate for their USD$549 price tag.\n[Cueball is standing at the left of a decorated Christmas tree, with present boxes underneath it. The presents are wrapped with the undecorated side of the wrapping paper facing out. Megan is kneeling at the right side, unwrapping a gift, revealing stripes on the inside.]\nMegan: Cool! I got the entire universe and every object within it except for a pair of headphones!\n[Caption below the panel]: Presents get a lot more impressive if you turn the wrapping paper inside out\n"}
{"id":2404,"title":"First Thing","image_title":"First Thing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2404","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/first_thing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2404:_First_Thing","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are walking toward the right side of a single panel. Ponytail is gesturing with one arm.]\nPonytail: The first thing I'm going to do after I get the vaccine? Ponytail: Definitely make a bunch of spike proteins and engulf them with dendritic cells. Ponytail: Then I'll probably display the antigens to my T-cells...\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nThis comic, somewhat like 2402: Into My Veins , references both the COVID-19 vaccine and a common Internet trend. Two comics later in 2406: Viral Vector Immunity , the vaccine is again referenced.\nThe COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most consequential and broadly unpleasant events in living memory [ citation needed ] .  As of the publication of this strip, it is estimated to have caused over 1.5 million deaths worldwide and over 300,000 deaths in the United States. Many more cases that have not resulted in fatality often need serious medical support and\/or have lasting implications.  Even for those who have been spared infection, measures to slow the spread of the virus have been highly impactful and have been ongoing for nearly a year.\nIn consequence of all of this, many people are excited for the vaccine (which will hopefully end the pandemic). Many people online have been sharing plans for what they'll do after getting the vaccine, like \"see my friends\" or \"travel the world.\" In this comic, Ponytail takes the phrase literally, listing not what she will voluntarily choose to do but what low-level involuntary systems in her body will do immediately after getting the vaccine:\nThe next step is mentioned in the title text:\nThe last point, which are the only things that Ponytail will choose to do is important, for a number of reasons.  The vaccines currently available offer a great deal of protection to an individual patient, but that protection takes several days to even begin in a significant way. Full immunity will likely require several weeks and an additional dose.  In addition, while highly effective, the current crop of vaccines are not 100% effective. And even those who develop immunity can become contaminated with the virus on their person and then transmit it to others.\nFor all of these reasons, there is a very real fear of people who receive vaccinations immediately abandoning all other precautions and continuing to spread the virus.  Genuinely ending the pandemic will require precautions to remain in place until enough of the population is vaccinated that a combination of high levels of population immunity and other distancing precautions lower the infection rate to a controllable level. Abandoning safety precautions before this occurs could extend the pandemic and cost lives.  Accordingly, Ponytail's intent is to be responsible and maintain all appropriate precautions until such time as it's safe to change them.\n[Ponytail and Cueball are walking toward the right side of a single panel. Ponytail is gesturing with one arm.]\nPonytail: The first thing I'm going to do after I get the vaccine? Ponytail: Definitely make a bunch of spike proteins and engulf them with dendritic cells. Ponytail: Then I'll probably display the antigens to my T-cells...\n"}
{"id":2405,"title":"Flash Gatsby","image_title":"Flash Gatsby","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2405","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flash_gatsby.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2405:_Flash_Gatsby","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk using his laptop.] Off-panel voice: 3... 2... 1... Happy New Year! Cueball: Okay, it\u2019s up! Cueball: Annnnnd ... support was pulled, it\u2019s down again.\n[Caption below the panel:] There's only a very short window of time in which I can post my unauthorized Flash\u00ae adaptation of The Great Gatsby .\n","explanation":"This comic unfolds over the last few seconds of 2020 and the first few seconds of 2021. Cueball is attempting to do something requiring the overlap of two eras that only abut: creating an \"unauthorized\" adaptation of The Great Gatsby , using the Adobe Flash plugin platform.\nThe Great Gatsby is a classic novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925. Copyright law in the United States of America, where The Great Gatsby was first published, was retroactively extended several times in the 1990s and early 2000s, causing the copyright on The Great Gatsby to extend until the end of 2020 . In 2021, it finally entered the public domain so that it became legal to make a copy without violating copyright law.\nAdobe Flash , formerly known as Shockwave Flash, is a web plugin that was commonly used by many websites in the late 1990s and 2000s. It allowed website creators to add animations, sound, and complex logic to build games, videos, and other interactive experiences. Presumably, the Flash version of the novel is some kind of interactive reader, animated cartoon, or perhaps even a game.\nOver the years, Adobe Flash was repeatedly exploited by hackers, incurring heavy costs on Adobe as they tried to update Flash against these attacks after rushing features out before stabilizing them. Newer technologies are now able to provide comparable features with more compatibility, more community involvement, and less risk, so support for Flash is being phased out by most web browsers. Adobe officially ended support for Flash after December 31, 2020.\nIn line with Adobe's decision, Chrome is blocking Flash in January . This will make entire internet culture histories spanning many years of making and engaging Flash experiences unusable for most people. Therefore, Cueball's Flash version of The Great Gatsby will become legal at the very moment that everyone should stop using it.\nIn this comic, Cueball suggests that the withdrawal of Flash support occurs after the copyright expiration rather than simultaneously with it. This is most likely because the applicable copyright law in the United States states that the creative work becomes public domain at the end of the year 2020 and Flash gets disabled at the beginning of the year 2021. So it is conceivable (but not practical) that there is one second when the novel is public domain and Flash is still enabled.\nBy late 2020, Flash Player was already blocked by most browsers, but could still be whitelisted on individual sites. Using old versions of browsers, or workarounds to run blocked extensions, Cueball's Great Gatsby may still be readable after the official Flash End of Life date of January 1, 2021. Even with these workarounds, Flash Player itself will block Flash content from playing on January 12, 2021, making that the final death date for official modern versions of Flash.\nAfter January 12, Flash content may still be accessible through older builds of Flash Player, and through various archival and emulation projects, such as the Internet Archive , Ruffle , BlueMaxima's Flashpoint , and SuperNova .\nThe title wording has a number of possible meanings to it. It's the 'Gatsby' book via the medium of the electronic Flash format. Because of the briefest of availability (at best, a single moment), it appears and disappears again 'in a flash'. Being 'flash' is a very apt description of the millionaire Gatsby character himself ('Flash the cash' is being ostentatious). And, if the endeavor is not actually as legitimate as hoped, the word has also referred to felonious behaviors and forged copies.\nThe title text references using excuses for not having read a book considered a classic.  Before the end of 2020, a possible excuse for not trying to read it was it may not have been available in the format a person wanted it (such as via a flash program in this case) and it might have been illegal (copyright violation) to get it in that format.  After 2020, the new excuse to not read it could be a technical one (flash doesn't work\/nothing capable of running flash).  Both excuses are quite flimsy; it's apparent the person really just doesn't care to read The Great Gatsby.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk using his laptop.] Off-panel voice: 3... 2... 1... Happy New Year! Cueball: Okay, it\u2019s up! Cueball: Annnnnd ... support was pulled, it\u2019s down again.\n[Caption below the panel:] There's only a very short window of time in which I can post my unauthorized Flash\u00ae adaptation of The Great Gatsby .\n"}
{"id":2406,"title":"Viral Vector Immunity","image_title":"Viral Vector Immunity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2406","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/viral_vector_immunity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2406:_Viral_Vector_Immunity","transcript":"[A large wooden horse statue on wheels stands before a city wall, upon which are standing several warriors who are shouting and brandishing spears.] Warrior 1: Look! It's a statue of that horrible animal that trampled Steve! Warrior 2: Burn it! Warrior 3: Smash it! Warrior 4: Push it into the gorge!\n[Caption below the panel:] How vaccine failure due to viral vector immunity works","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic . This comic is the third of five releases, following 2402: Into My Veins and 2404: First Thing , which reference the new COVID-19 vaccine . It was released on New Years day, without being a New Year comic . This had not happened since 2010.\nThe comic attempts to explain a virus vector vaccine and one way it can fail, using the story of the Trojan Horse as an analogy. Note that neither the Pfizer\/BioNTech nor Moderna vaccines are virus vector vaccines, using lipid nanoparticles for delivery rather than viruses.\nA vaccine is a way to familiarize a host's immune system with a pathogen without actually causing the host to fall ill.  There are many types of vaccines that have been developed, all of which are ways to present a significant segment of a pathogen's molecular structure to the host body, so that the immune system recognizes the pathogen and mounts an immune response faster when a real infection happens.\nA viral vector is a tool used by molecular biologists to deliver genetic materials into cells.\nA viral vector vaccine, also known as a live vector vaccine, uses a modified virus, different from the pathogen being immunized against, as a carrier to deliver a molecular payload into the host body. This modified virus is called the vector because it is the method of delivery of a piece of the pathogen's genetic code.  If the recipient has a strong immune response to the vector itself (i.e., the proteins making up the surface of the vector virus), the immunization may be less effective because the vector virus, and hence its payload of viral genetic material, will be destroyed before they can enter the host's cells.  It is to some degree a dice roll, with regard to whether some recipients will already be immune to a vector.\nFor example, a modified (to be harmless) cold virus can be used to deliver genetic material (RNA or DNA) of another virus into the patient's cells. The cells are induced to manufacture protein found in the pathogenic protein, which the patient's immune system detects and reacts to. That way the immune system recognizes the pathogenic virus without actually being infected with it, which decreases the time needed to react to a real infection.  Any patients whose immune systems recognize the modified cold virus (the vector), and destroy it rapidly, won't get the full intended benefit of creating a strong immune response to the second virus (the payload inside).\nThe comic represents this idea with the Trojan horse being the vector, carrying a payload of Greek soldiers into the cell, as represented by the City of Troy. In the original Trojan Horse story, Greek soldiers hid inside a statue of a horse which the Trojans were told was a gift to Athena; the Trojans brought it within their walls (which the Greek army had failed to penetrate in an extended siege), allowing the soldiers in the horse to undermine the city's defenses and let in the rest of their army to take the city. Note: In a viral vector vaccine, the payload inside the vector works to the benefit of the person receiving the vaccine - opposite to the soldiers inside the Trojan horse, who had only malice in mind for the city receiving the \"gift\" horse.\nIn the comic the warriors, rather than finding the wooden horse a benign object, recognize the shape of the delivery vehicle (the Trojan horse) as being similar to an animal that trampled one of their own earlier and therefore refuse it entry. An amusing point here is that they are not as such surprised at the arrival of a wooden vehicle at their doorstep, rather that its shape resembling an animal they have found threatening before, which is similar to how simple in its judgements the immune system can be. (In addition, although the warriors suggest pushing the wooden horse into a gorge, there are no gorges very close to Troy, which is situated close to the sea on the Plain of Troy .)\nThe title text is a further riff on this theme, playing on an advertising campaign for freeze dried coffee.  In the advertisements a narrator would claim to have secretly replaced fresh brewed coffee with that made from freeze dried to see if subjects could tell the difference, the contents of the coffee cup being the payload and the narrator the virus vector.  The test subject's use of a sword relates the situation back to the Trojan scenario of the panel.\n[A large wooden horse statue on wheels stands before a city wall, upon which are standing several warriors who are shouting and brandishing spears.] Warrior 1: Look! It's a statue of that horrible animal that trampled Steve! Warrior 2: Burn it! Warrior 3: Smash it! Warrior 4: Push it into the gorge!\n[Caption below the panel:] How vaccine failure due to viral vector immunity works"}
{"id":2407,"title":"Depth and Breadth","image_title":"Depth and Breadth","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2407","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/depth_and_breadth.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2407:_Depth_and_Breadth","transcript":"[Five panels, each containing identical copies of a rooted tree graph, grayed out in the background. The tree has a height of 3 and 15 nodes.] [In all five panels, a black twisty arrow in the foreground indicates the order in which nodes are traversed. The arrow does not complete the entire traversal but cuts off at some point. Backtracking is indicated with a dotted line.] [In the descriptions below, node 1 is the root, nodes 2 and 3 are its child nodes, nodes 4 and 5 are 2's child nodes, nodes 6 and 7 are 3's child nodes, nodes 8 and 9 are 4's child nodes, and so on up to node 15.] [Backtracking is omitted from the descriptions below, as they increased confusion when read.]\nDepth-first search [The arrow visits nodes 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 5, 10, 11.]\nBreadth-first search [The arrow visits nodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 [ sic ] , 6, 8.]\nBrepth-first search [The arrow visits nodes 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 3, 6, 10, 11.]\nDeadth-first search [The arrow visits nodes 1, 2, 4, 4, 2, 4, 3, 6, 12, 13, 12.]\nBread-first search [The arrow starts at node 1, then immediately leaves the tree off to the right to point to a small loaf labeled \"Bread\".]\n","explanation":"Tree structures are one of the most common data structures used in computer science.  The common ways of enumerating items arranged in a tree is either depth-first , or breadth-first , which are depicted accurately in the comic.  Randall humorously combines the words, to produce \"brepth-first\", \"deadth-first\", \"bread-first\", and \"death-first\" search algorithms.\nDepth-first search explores down a full branch of the tree before working back to a higher level. This type of tree structure was already discussed as inefficient for human needs in 761: DFS . The \"opposite\" of this is breadth-first search, which explores each level of the tree at a time.\nIn the \"brepth-first\" algorithm, a depth-first and a breadth-first search are hybridized where the left-most node is visited more frequently than the right node, but the right node is still visited.  This might be good for exploring data that is loosely but not strictly weighted to the left, or where data in deeper nodes needs some time to be loaded before it can be used. As implied by 761: DFS , this might be the best algorithm for a human to employ, where one can explore several topics briefly before deciding which one to explore more deeply, rather than blindly following the first rabbit hole to an absurd conclusion. Informed search algorithms like A* search , Beam search , and other Best-first search algorithms show this type of behavior by expanding the most promising node in the current set (under some appropriate metrics).\nThe nature of the \"deadth-first\" algorithm is unclear and inefficient, since it searches the same nodes multiple times before moving to an entirely different region of the tree.  It might be useful in a context where examining nodes has some probability of returning a noisy or incorrect result, such as searching for small objects that may be overlooked.\nThe bread-first search is taken literally.  Bread is searched for first.  Since the computer user now has already met their want to find bread, the computer has no reason to explore the tree at all. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text introduces a \"death-first\" search, in which the user explores what it is like to be dead, before considering anything else. Specifically, the title text refers to hell, which calls to mind the adventures of Dante Alighieri in his Inferno , and is a less likely place for keys to be left than one's coat pockets [ citation needed ] . In 2021 (the year this comic was published) there are commemorations for the 700th anniversary of Dante's Death. These are expected to take place among the living only, and not in Hell. [ citation needed ] A much more pleasant death-first algorithm might be to skip hell and purgatory and search heaven first, perhaps multiple times (which in itself would be a use of the deadth-first approach).\n[Five panels, each containing identical copies of a rooted tree graph, grayed out in the background. The tree has a height of 3 and 15 nodes.] [In all five panels, a black twisty arrow in the foreground indicates the order in which nodes are traversed. The arrow does not complete the entire traversal but cuts off at some point. Backtracking is indicated with a dotted line.] [In the descriptions below, node 1 is the root, nodes 2 and 3 are its child nodes, nodes 4 and 5 are 2's child nodes, nodes 6 and 7 are 3's child nodes, nodes 8 and 9 are 4's child nodes, and so on up to node 15.] [Backtracking is omitted from the descriptions below, as they increased confusion when read.]\nDepth-first search [The arrow visits nodes 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 5, 10, 11.]\nBreadth-first search [The arrow visits nodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 [ sic ] , 6, 8.]\nBrepth-first search [The arrow visits nodes 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 3, 6, 10, 11.]\nDeadth-first search [The arrow visits nodes 1, 2, 4, 4, 2, 4, 3, 6, 12, 13, 12.]\nBread-first search [The arrow starts at node 1, then immediately leaves the tree off to the right to point to a small loaf labeled \"Bread\".]\n"}
{"id":2408,"title":"Egg Strategies","image_title":"Egg Strategies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2408","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/egg_strategies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2408:_Egg_Strategies","transcript":"[3x3 grid of egg cartons, each containing between 5-8 eggs in an arrangement matching a description of lawful\/neutral\/chaotic paired with good\/neutral\/evil. Each egg carton is depicted from a top-down view, with the lid open and the eggs and their places visible.]\nTop Left - Lawful Good\n[6 eggs centered\n3 in the top row, shifted to the right\n3 in the bottom row, shifted to the left]\nTop Center - Neutral Good\n[7 eggs\n4 in the left side\n3 in the right side, with one in the top row and two in the bottom row]\nTop Right - Chaotic Good\n[6 eggs spread randomly while preserving reflective symmetry between eggs and non-eggs]\nMiddle Left - Lawful Neutral\n[5 eggs all on the bottom row, starting on the left side]\nMiddle Center - True Neutral\n[7 eggs all to the left side\n4 in the top row\n3 in the bottom row]\nMiddle Right - Chaotic Neutral\n[6 eggs staggered in every other space so that each egg is diagonal from the two nearest\nno two eggs are directly next to each other side-to-side or up-and-down\n3 in the top row, starting in the left-most position\n3 in the bottom row; starting position second from the left side]\nBottom Left - Lawful Evil\n[8 eggs\n6 in the egg carton, centered but offset one place to the left; 3 eggs each on the top and bottom\n2 eggs are on top of the 6 that are placed in the carton]\nBottom Center - Neutral Evil\n[8 eggs\n3 on the bottom edge of the lid\n2 in the top center positions in the egg carton\n3 centered on the edge and on top of\/between the eggs on the lid and the eggs in the proper positions]\nBottom Right - Chaotic Evil\n[broken eggs in the center of the carton and spilling\/splattering over the rest of the carton and onto the lid\n6 or 7 yellow-orange yolks are visible\nthe spilled egg whites are colored light yellow-greenish\nseveral pieces of eggshells, varying in size from approximately one-half to very small chips are mixed in with the yolks and whites]\n","explanation":null}
{"id":2409,"title":"Steepen the Curve","image_title":"Steepen the Curve","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2409","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/steepen_the_curve.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2409:_Steepen_the_Curve","transcript":"[Line graph shown with a rising curve drawn in black. There is an underlined label above and another label below the graph. The Y-axis line is ending in an arrowhead and also has a label. All this is in black. But the last number in the upper label as well as one word in each of the other two labels, have been scribbled out in red and then another number or word has been written behind or beneath in red.] [Caption above the graph:] 202 0 1\n[Y-Axis:] COVID Deaths Vaccinations\n[Caption below the graph:] Flatten Steepen The Curve\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nIn early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly became the main public concern. The virus spread at an exponential rate before initial lockdowns started to reduce the trajectory for a time. The graphic drawn in black depicts exponential growth in the measure of deaths \u2014 though it is not clear (without proper units or values on either axis) if this is because it is a cumulative count of deaths or the rate of deaths per day.  Such graphs were common in the spring of 2020, enough that Randall has previously parodied them in 2294: Coronavirus Charts . These graphs often showed future projections that compared continued exponential growth vs. curves that did not grow as fast, or even flattened out. Governments around the world realized that if the trend was to continue healthcare services would become overwhelmed, thus all kinds of political, civic and personal efforts were put towards doing things that would cause the 'curve' to flatten and not rise as rapidly as it would do unchecked. \"Flatten the curve\" thus became the rallying cry for all measures taken to reduce the spread of the virus.\nIn 2021, the pandemic is ongoing (with second or even third 'waves' of resurgence affecting some populations that had temporarily flattened the curve) but now we have a handful of vaccines available. In 2278: Scientific Briefing , White Hat remarked that many scientific briefings use similar or identical charts, but in this briefing, a chart from the beginning of the pandemic is reprinted verbatim and then crudely updated with red ink.  The red overlay intends to update the 'original' graphic to portray the number of vaccines provided (again, it could easily be either cumulative or rate-wise). With the change to what is represented, the line remains the same but the hoped-for outcome is changed accordingly. Making the curve steeper represents getting more people vaccinated faster.\nIn both cases, there would be an upper limit on the cumulative value, but the ceiling must be well beyond the upper limits (x and y axes) of this graph. If this is a rate-graph, it would show a peak and subsequent decline at the same point in time where a cumulative graph would show an inflection in its gradient, but neither are visible here.\nAdditionally, the analogy between the number of deaths and the number of vaccinated people could be considered as questionable, as the number of deaths in the initial stages of a pandemic is expected to follow an exponential law, whereas the same cannot be said for the number of vaccinated people.\nThe title text gives a summary of the overall goal.  Flatten the curve (of infections\/deaths), Steepen the curve (of vaccinations\/immunizations), Hang out.  We've done the first, we're starting the second... and the third is where we can (hopefully) all hang out together again, in person, without masks or social distancing.  But we have to finish the first two steps successfully to get to the third one.\n[Line graph shown with a rising curve drawn in black. There is an underlined label above and another label below the graph. The Y-axis line is ending in an arrowhead and also has a label. All this is in black. But the last number in the upper label as well as one word in each of the other two labels, have been scribbled out in red and then another number or word has been written behind or beneath in red.] [Caption above the graph:] 202 0 1\n[Y-Axis:] COVID Deaths Vaccinations\n[Caption below the graph:] Flatten Steepen The Curve\n"}
{"id":2410,"title":"Apple Growers","image_title":"Apple Growers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2410","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/apple_growers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2410:_Apple_Growers","transcript":"[Beret Guy and Cueball stand on either side of Megan with her hair unkempt. They stand behind a lectern with an image of an apple on the front of it. Unreadable text is written on both side of the apple in two rows.] Megan: *Ahem* Megan: The state apple-growers' association has decided to formally call on President Donald Trump to resign.\n[A wider shot shows Beret Guy, Megan, and Cueball on a podium behind the lectern. The visible audience consist of a Cueball-like guy, Hairy, and Ponytail, who is holding a microphone to her mouth as she addresses those on the podium.] Ponytail: Weren't you meeting to update the standards for new apple varieties? Megan: Yes, but we talked it over and this is what we decided. Megan: We feel strongly that this is important.\n[There is a narrow shot with a zoom in on Megan.] Ponytail (off-panel): Did you discuss anything on your actual agenda? Megan: Thanks for the question! Megan: We did not.\n[Beret Guy, Cueball and Megan is again seen from the front behind the lectern, Megan's hair even more unkempt.] Ponytail (off-panel): Do you have any apple-related announcements at all? Megan: Uh, apples are great. Best fruit. Everyone should buy 1,000 of them. Megan: We're a little distracted right now, okay??\n","explanation":"On January 6, 2021, a group of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the United States Capitol while Congress was in session to certify the results of the 2020 election , in which President Trump lost a bid for re-election. The attack resulted in an evacuation of Congress, a disruption of the operations of the legislature, and the deaths of several people. While Trump was not directly involved with the riot, he has been accused of contributing to it by consistently refusing to accept the election results, claiming that his opponent's victory was fraudulent, and using inflammatory rhetoric when speaking to his supporters. As a result, officials from both major political parties have called upon Trump to resign, and other avenues to remove him from office have been proposed. At the time of publication, Trump's second impeachment had been mooted but it, and all other events that followed, had not yet happened.\nNormal American life, already strained under the COVID-19 pandemic , was dealt another blow by the conflict. Normally planned events continue to be held, but the shadow of current events impacts everything. This comic depicts one such event, a news conference hosted by the State Apple Growers (of an unspecified state). This group apparently had a scheduled meeting to discuss apple variety standards, but their meeting was instead dominated by discussions of events in government, resulting in them issuing a formal statement calling upon President Trump to resign. This statement obviously has nothing to do with apples, [ citation needed ] and when pressed, the spokesperson makes generic statements in favor of apples, but points out that they're too distracted by more urgent matters to focus on their normal jobs.\nThis strip appears to be based on a number of private companies and other organizations without specific political missions, which nonetheless felt the need to respond to the event. Famously, both Twitter and Facebook banned the president from their platforms in the aftermath. The events of the strip are reminiscent of Signature Bank and the National Association of Manufacturers calling on Trump to resign. Many national brands released statements of condemnation and announced plans to cut political contributions for legislators who voted against certification of the election results. The joke appears to be that even small and local organizations feel compelled to weigh in on an issue of this significance, even though their influence in the matter is likely minimal.\nCosmic Crisp , mentioned in title text, is a variety of apples developed in the Washington State University that has been on sale since 2019, amid a large marketing campaign. The implication of the title text is that the people involved are in fact, very interested in and concerned with details of apple cultivation and marketing, and hope to return to a state in which they they can focus on those. But the more immediate draw of events makes it difficult to focus on what they usually like to talk about.\nBeret Guy is shown to be a member of the State Apple Growers' Association; in 2209: Fresh Pears , he sells \"fresh pears\" (so fresh, he doesn't even plant seeds until a customer pays for one) and expresses an interest in growing apples, and evidently has either figured out robotic grafting or chosen another approach (or maybe, given his usual eccentricity, he is only a member of the Association as an aspiring apple grower).  This is one of very few comics with Beret Guy where he is not really doing anything, although this is also a weird turn of events that the Apple Growers discuss Trump. However, usually Beret Guy is not interested in real-life problems.\n[Beret Guy and Cueball stand on either side of Megan with her hair unkempt. They stand behind a lectern with an image of an apple on the front of it. Unreadable text is written on both side of the apple in two rows.] Megan: *Ahem* Megan: The state apple-growers' association has decided to formally call on President Donald Trump to resign.\n[A wider shot shows Beret Guy, Megan, and Cueball on a podium behind the lectern. The visible audience consist of a Cueball-like guy, Hairy, and Ponytail, who is holding a microphone to her mouth as she addresses those on the podium.] Ponytail: Weren't you meeting to update the standards for new apple varieties? Megan: Yes, but we talked it over and this is what we decided. Megan: We feel strongly that this is important.\n[There is a narrow shot with a zoom in on Megan.] Ponytail (off-panel): Did you discuss anything on your actual agenda? Megan: Thanks for the question! Megan: We did not.\n[Beret Guy, Cueball and Megan is again seen from the front behind the lectern, Megan's hair even more unkempt.] Ponytail (off-panel): Do you have any apple-related announcements at all? Megan: Uh, apples are great. Best fruit. Everyone should buy 1,000 of them. Megan: We're a little distracted right now, okay??\n"}
{"id":2411,"title":"1\/10,000th Scale World","image_title":"1\/10,000th Scale World","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2411","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1_10000th_scale_world.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2411:_1\/10,000th_Scale_World","transcript":"[At the top of the image, inside the panel, a large title is floating in the air.] RULES\nFor visitors to my 1\/10,000th scale world\n1 meter = 10 km   1 ft = 10,000 ft ~ 2 miles\n[Each of the following rules is written near a character or point of interest on the map.]\n[Two small dots with thin lines coming out of them horizontally are in the air near Cueball, who is brushing them off.] Watch out for airliners cruising near shoulder level\n[Small mountains are seen near the left edge of the screen, by Cueball's feet.] Trip hazard: Appalachian Mountains\n[A young Hairy is climbing on mountains reaching approximately Cueball's waist.] Do not stand or climb on Mt. Everest\n[Under the water, a small bump in the ground expells bubbles.] Caution: Hydro-thermal vents underfoot\n[Science Girl stands shoulder-deep in the ocean, peering down into the trench below.] Children must be supervised while in the ocean, especially near trenches\n[Megan's hand is extended, and lightning from the cloud is jumping to her hand.] Danger: positive lightning! Do not touch cloud tops\n[Ponytail sits near some mountains, with a dotted line in the air stretching across her forehead.] Avoid hypoxia by regularly sitting to bring your lungs below the death zone\n[A blob-shaped thing with wiggly grey texture lines drawn all over is underground.] Do not dig near Yellowstone\n[A second Cueball is jumping in the air, a hand reached back, in position to smack a weather balloon.] Please do not smack weather balloons\n[Some very tiny vertical lines extend from the ground.] Be careful not to step on cities with especially pointy towers, like Toronto, Seattle, and Dubai\nMegan, who is touching the top of a cloud, appears to be standing on top of the ocean, but as other characters are visibly either in front of hills and mountains or standing upon their slopes, it is likely that she is stood upon the ground (at an imperceptible height above 'local' sea-level) on or just beyond a shoreline located in the almost mythical third dimension.\n","explanation":"This comic is the first in the Scale World series.\nLarge objects (cars, airplanes, etc.) are often reproduced as scale models , which are proportionally smaller physical models of the original objects.  The scale of such a model is typically expressed as the ratio of the size of the model (the first number) to the size of the original object (the second number). For example, a 1\/10,000th scale model means that 1 meter in the model represents 10,000 meters in the original object. The same applies to maps and globes . What Randall has here, though, is neither a map nor a model but a seemingly complete copy of Earth , at a 1:10,000 scale. Various features and warnings are labeled.\nMiniature parks , also known as model villages, are tourist attractions around the world of a scale between 1:9 and 1:72.  For example, the finale of the movie Hot Fuzz features a battle amongst a miniature of the streets and buildings seen so far in the film.  Normally a miniature park would feature a representation of one geographical location rather than a geologically\/technologically accurate depiction of our current planet. Whether or not Randall is aware of it, the reputed largest outdoor relief map in the world is set out at a horizontal scale of 1:10,000.\nReal-world phenomena are reproduced at scale, for humorous effect. A real 1\/10,000th scale \"Earth\" would have a diameter of less than a mile, and a surface area of around 2 square miles, the approximate dimensions of a medium-sized asteroid. On such an object, constrained by known physics, there would be no air, standing water, weather, or large magma bodies, and any sort of rough-housing would irrecoverably catapult the visitor into space.\nNormally in a miniature model, most warnings try to prevent the visitors from accidentally doing something cataclysmic to the model. Likewise, the \"ocean play area rules\" in the title text tell visitors not to create any megatsunamis , which could conceivably be induced by a cannonball dive. But as digging seems to be discouraged mainly where it causes volcanoes to break out, the visitors seem to be given far greater freedom than usual.\nVisitors are also instructed not to try to pry the model of the wreck of the Titanic off the ocean floor.  In our world, the wreck is at a depth of 12,500 feet, which would be 1 foot and 3 inches in Randall's model world.  The Titanic was over 882 feet long, but the ship split in half as she sank, and now lies in two pieces about a third of a mile apart.  Randall's model would have two pieces about a half-inch in size separated by about two inches.  If the models are rusted and sunk in mud just like the real wreck is, trying to pry them loose would certainly damage them, but all of Randall's other rules seem to be about preventing harm to guests, not preventing damage to the model, so maybe he just doesn't want guests bending over and exerting themselves in the water where they could slip, submerge their faces, and be at risk of drowning.\nScale models, and the problems with them, were the subject of 878: Model Rail . In general, illustrating relative scale is a recurring subject on xkcd. This comic is also somewhat reminiscent of 941: Depth Perception .\n[At the top of the image, inside the panel, a large title is floating in the air.] RULES\nFor visitors to my 1\/10,000th scale world\n1 meter = 10 km   1 ft = 10,000 ft ~ 2 miles\n[Each of the following rules is written near a character or point of interest on the map.]\n[Two small dots with thin lines coming out of them horizontally are in the air near Cueball, who is brushing them off.] Watch out for airliners cruising near shoulder level\n[Small mountains are seen near the left edge of the screen, by Cueball's feet.] Trip hazard: Appalachian Mountains\n[A young Hairy is climbing on mountains reaching approximately Cueball's waist.] Do not stand or climb on Mt. Everest\n[Under the water, a small bump in the ground expells bubbles.] Caution: Hydro-thermal vents underfoot\n[Science Girl stands shoulder-deep in the ocean, peering down into the trench below.] Children must be supervised while in the ocean, especially near trenches\n[Megan's hand is extended, and lightning from the cloud is jumping to her hand.] Danger: positive lightning! Do not touch cloud tops\n[Ponytail sits near some mountains, with a dotted line in the air stretching across her forehead.] Avoid hypoxia by regularly sitting to bring your lungs below the death zone\n[A blob-shaped thing with wiggly grey texture lines drawn all over is underground.] Do not dig near Yellowstone\n[A second Cueball is jumping in the air, a hand reached back, in position to smack a weather balloon.] Please do not smack weather balloons\n[Some very tiny vertical lines extend from the ground.] Be careful not to step on cities with especially pointy towers, like Toronto, Seattle, and Dubai\nMegan, who is touching the top of a cloud, appears to be standing on top of the ocean, but as other characters are visibly either in front of hills and mountains or standing upon their slopes, it is likely that she is stood upon the ground (at an imperceptible height above 'local' sea-level) on or just beyond a shoreline located in the almost mythical third dimension.\n"}
{"id":2412,"title":"1\/100,000th Scale World","image_title":"1\/100,000th Scale World","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2412","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1_100000th_scale_world.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2412:_1\/100,000th_Scale_World","transcript":"[At the top of the image, inside the panel, a large title is floating in the air.] RULES For visitors to my 1\/100,000th scale world 1 meter = 100 km, 1 ft=100,000ft\u224820 miles\n[Each of the following rules is written near a character or point of interest on the map.]\n[Dark-colored aurorae are floating in the air.] Our aurora are probably non-toxic but please stop trying to taste them\n[Ponytail is kneeling and breaking off part of an ice cap. In her other hand, she holds a wine glass.] No breaking off pieces of the ice caps to put in your drink\n[At around ankle height, a mountain is shown.] Do not step on Mount Everest\n[A relatively small ocean is shown on the right of Mount Everest.] Caution! [A pictogram of a person slipping.] Ocean floor slippery when wet\n[A cell coverage icon with one cell bar.] Warning: Limited cell network coverage above the ionosphere. Crouch down to get more bars\n[Megan is facing the aurorae. Thin horizontal lines are at her knees.] Wear sunscreen; the ozone layer only protects you below the knees.\n[Cueball is standing with three meteors whizzing both at and away from him.] Beware of chest-level meteors\n[A dotted line is at the Cueball from the last rule's chest.] -100\u00b0C mesopause vest recommended\n[A wine glass is resting on the ground near a shallow depression.] If Lake Tahoe or the Dead Sea dries up, refill them with this 5oz wine glass\n[\u200bAnother Cueball is standing, holding both hands up to his face.] Safety glasses required for protection from reentering spacecraft Cueball: OW! (off-panel voice): What? Cueball: I got a Soyuz in my eye\n[A tornado-shaped lightning sprite is hovering over a cloud.] Do not anger the sprites\n[A dotted line weaves belowground.] Please stop digging through the Moho. Staff are tired of cleaning up large igneous provinces.\n[An arrow pointing above the panel top.] ISS (14 feet up) Returns every 90 minutes Hit it with a Nerf dart, win a prize!\n","explanation":"This comic is the second in the Scale World series.\nRandall has another seemingly complete scale model of Earth , this time at a smaller scale of 1:100,000 \u2013 that is, 1 meter in this scale world represents 100,000 meters in the real world. (This is one tenth the size of his previous scale world .) Again, real-world features and phenomena are depicted at scale and labeled with warnings. Details on the various remarks are in the table below.\nThe title text states that the floor should be slightly curved. In fact, given that the model in the comic is about 10 meters long, it represents about 1000 km of Earth, which spans about 9 degrees of a great circle. Therefore, if the model wasn't larger than the part shown in the panel, its edges would have a very noticeable slope of 4.5 degrees. What's more, the note that they haven't invented artificial gravity reveals that the scale worlds are nothing more than a mundane model, rather than some supernatural phenomenon that allows giants to roam about the surface of the Earth.\n[At the top of the image, inside the panel, a large title is floating in the air.] RULES For visitors to my 1\/100,000th scale world 1 meter = 100 km, 1 ft=100,000ft\u224820 miles\n[Each of the following rules is written near a character or point of interest on the map.]\n[Dark-colored aurorae are floating in the air.] Our aurora are probably non-toxic but please stop trying to taste them\n[Ponytail is kneeling and breaking off part of an ice cap. In her other hand, she holds a wine glass.] No breaking off pieces of the ice caps to put in your drink\n[At around ankle height, a mountain is shown.] Do not step on Mount Everest\n[A relatively small ocean is shown on the right of Mount Everest.] Caution! [A pictogram of a person slipping.] Ocean floor slippery when wet\n[A cell coverage icon with one cell bar.] Warning: Limited cell network coverage above the ionosphere. Crouch down to get more bars\n[Megan is facing the aurorae. Thin horizontal lines are at her knees.] Wear sunscreen; the ozone layer only protects you below the knees.\n[Cueball is standing with three meteors whizzing both at and away from him.] Beware of chest-level meteors\n[A dotted line is at the Cueball from the last rule's chest.] -100\u00b0C mesopause vest recommended\n[A wine glass is resting on the ground near a shallow depression.] If Lake Tahoe or the Dead Sea dries up, refill them with this 5oz wine glass\n[\u200bAnother Cueball is standing, holding both hands up to his face.] Safety glasses required for protection from reentering spacecraft Cueball: OW! (off-panel voice): What? Cueball: I got a Soyuz in my eye\n[A tornado-shaped lightning sprite is hovering over a cloud.] Do not anger the sprites\n[A dotted line weaves belowground.] Please stop digging through the Moho. Staff are tired of cleaning up large igneous provinces.\n[An arrow pointing above the panel top.] ISS (14 feet up) Returns every 90 minutes Hit it with a Nerf dart, win a prize!\n"}
{"id":2413,"title":"Pulsar Analogy","image_title":"Pulsar Analogy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2413","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pulsar_analogy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2413:_Pulsar_Analogy","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other.] Cueball: Why do pulsars spin so fast? Ponytail: Hmm, let me think of an analogy...\n[A tape measure is retracting above Ponytail's head. To the right of her head, a tape measure is spinning rapidly.] Retracting tape measure: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Spinning tape measure: SNAP Ponytail: You know how when you retract a tape measure and let go, it leaves it spinning? Ponytail: It's like that. Cueball (off-panel): Oh, I see.\n[A tape measure with a laser instead of a measuring tape is spinning slowly.] Cueball (off-panel): And if the tape measure is the kind with a laser level, that's the beam of radiation? Ponytail (off-panel): Exactly!\n[Cueball and Ponytail are walking next to each other in silhouette.] Ponytail: And when the tape whips around and smacks your hand, that's the neutron degeneracy shockwave. Cueball: Sounds painful! Ponytail: Top cause of astronomer hand injuries.\n","explanation":"Pulsars are a kind of old, shrunken, fast-spinning star.  They are usually neutron stars .  They no longer shine in all directions, but instead produce beams of radiation out of their magnetic poles, which blip by us in rapid pulses as they spin.\nPonytail, an astronomer in this comic, explains a pulsar's fast rotation with an analogy about a tape measure retracting.  The analogies that Ponytail picks are incredibly poor ones.\nSince the analogy does result in something that spins, the reader might think that, while they don't immediately see how it helps in understanding pulsars, they're willing to reserve judgment to see what is then done with the analogy; Cueball's response may suggest this sort of wait-and-see attitude.  However, the analogy is likely to be useless or misleading, as the tape measure starts to rotate because the retracting tape is not moving only in a radial (in\/out) direction. As a star collapses into a pulsar, its natural rotation rate is greatly amplified by its shrinking moment of inertia.\nFurther elaborations of the analogy, rather than clarifying matters, are successively more surreal.  More misleading than the tape-measure is the idea of a laser measure being \"exactly\" like the emissions of a pulsar, which, although both pulse, are produced in entirely different ways and are at best simply helping the mind hold the concept.\nWhen a tape measure retracts, the part of the tape outside the tape measure is not going directly towards the tape measure's center but rather towards a hole in the side. This means the tape possesses some angular momentum relative to the tape measure. In addition, when the tape measure retracts, the part of the tape inside the tape measure rotates around a spool (which pulls the part of the tape outside the tape measure inside), so it also has angular momentum relative to the tape measure. When the tape is completely retracted, the tape can no longer rotate relative to the tape measure. Because of the conservation of rotational momentum, the tape measure will start spinning at this point.\nWhile pulsars also rotate quickly due to the conservation of angular momentum, the exact mechanism is completely different. Pulsars are formed when stars collapse due to no longer performing enough fusion to produce enough heat and energy to cancel out gravity. This causes the star to contract, which causes its mass, on average, to be closer to its axis of rotation, which causes the rotational inertia (also called the moment of inertia) to decrease. If the star's angular velocity stayed constant, this would cause the angular momentum to decrease, so the star's angular velocity must increase in order to offset the decrease in rotational inertia, i.e. the star (which is now a pulsar) spins faster. This is demonstrated here . This method requires an initial rotation, which comes from the star. (The star's rotation comes from the dynamics of the gas cloud which forms the solar system in the first place.)\nSome tape measures have a built-in laser line level and others have a built-in laser rangefinder . Pulsars emit electromagnetic radiation out of their magnetic poles, which is similar to a laser, but unlike the laser of a tape measure, the pulsar beam is emitted through the axis of the magnetic field.  The pulsing nature of a pulsar comes from when the axis of rotation is not precisely aligned with the axis of the magnetic field, and the location of the viewer as the beam sweeps by.  In the tape measure analogy the beam is at a right angle to the axis of rotation, so as long as the viewing angle isn't parallel with the rotation axis, the viewer would see the laser increase and decrease periodically as it the rotating tape measure points towards or away from the viewer.\nWhile pulsars do demonstrate incredible starquakes and rotational glitches , neutron degeneracy is part of the mechanisms in which they are originally formed. During the formation of a neutron star, usually in the form of an initial inward implosion, the neutron degeneracy (basically the impossibility of neutron of occupying the same space because of fundamental constraints in physics that are studied by quantum mechanics) stops the implosion and redirects the shockwave outwards, thus producing a Supernova explosion. The analogy is with a tape measurer that hits a hand (the constraint) during its rapid rotation due to its retracting tape (the implosion) thus redirecting part of the energy towards the hand (s the supernova energy is redirected outside).\nHowever, astronomers do not usually let go of laser tape measures frequently, so they are probably not the top cause of any type of hand injuries, as Ponytail said.\nThe title text mentions the right-hand rule in three-dimensional space. In a typical 3D coordinate system the Y-axis will point counterclockwise to the X-axis when looking down from the positive Z-axis.  In academia, students are often taught to remember a number of mathematical conventions by using their actual physical right and left hands to align the axes.  When the axes are in a different order, the left hand can be used instead of the right, but there are a number of common operations in engineering and physics that use the cross product in systems where the first axis might point in absolutely any direction relative to the viewer.  Using the hand rules, the thumb is aimed along the first axis, the forefinger along the second, and the middle finger along the third \u2014 all at ninety degrees.  So, when the first axis points off to the right, the right wrist is torqued to its full extension to make the thumb point that way while the other two fingers don't.  During exams, students can be seen performing this feat.  People who learn cross products early in their life may develop other approaches for remembering these things, that don't stretch the hands as much, but then adopt the common approach once taught it.\n[Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other.] Cueball: Why do pulsars spin so fast? Ponytail: Hmm, let me think of an analogy...\n[A tape measure is retracting above Ponytail's head. To the right of her head, a tape measure is spinning rapidly.] Retracting tape measure: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Spinning tape measure: SNAP Ponytail: You know how when you retract a tape measure and let go, it leaves it spinning? Ponytail: It's like that. Cueball (off-panel): Oh, I see.\n[A tape measure with a laser instead of a measuring tape is spinning slowly.] Cueball (off-panel): And if the tape measure is the kind with a laser level, that's the beam of radiation? Ponytail (off-panel): Exactly!\n[Cueball and Ponytail are walking next to each other in silhouette.] Ponytail: And when the tape whips around and smacks your hand, that's the neutron degeneracy shockwave. Cueball: Sounds painful! Ponytail: Top cause of astronomer hand injuries.\n"}
{"id":2414,"title":"Solar System Compression Artifacts","image_title":"Solar System Compression Artifacts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2414","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/solar_system_compression_artifacts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2414:_Solar_System_Compression_Artifacts","transcript":"[Irregular bands of gray are shown, shading from a white circular segment on the lower left side of the panel to completely black on the right. The bands have pixelated edges. A small white space probe is shown just outside the last dark gray band, in the completely black area. A dotted line starting from inside the dark gray area and ending at the space probe indicates that it is moving to the right, out of the gray area. Close to the white area, there are many bands packed closely together and with hard to define edges. But there are five gray areas clearly separated from the white, with a tendency to be elongated in the space probe's direction.]\n[Caption below the panel]: Milestone: Voyager has passed through the streaming video compression artifacts that mark the edge of the solar system\n","explanation":"Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by the United States in 1977. Originally designed to study the outer planets of the Solar System , it is now several decades into an extended mission beyond Neptune (see #Trivia ). The Voyager probe has made history for passing many milestones of our solar system.\nWhen images are compressed by a lossy compression format (e.g. JPEG ), visual artifacts are created. Randall here is suggesting that the probe has passed the artifacts as if the artifacts were an actual feature of the solar system rather than a consequence of our technology.  The banding lines he has drawn are commonly seen in old images with low bit depth.\nThe 'solar system' in the snapshot appears to be a 4-bit greyscale-plane at a more pixelated level than the image given. It contains 16 'banded' levels from the brightest (closest zones, within this image, to the Sun) to darkest (the furthest illustrated expanses, including interstellar space), with irregular or non-trivial transitional edges but no obvious or dominant dithering\/speckling or 'noise'. The Voyager image (and track) is overlaid in a white 'line drawing' format.\nEach apparent pixel in this low-res rendering is approximately 1 AU\u00b2, where 1 AU ( astronomical unit ) is the distance from the Sun to the earth. The Sun is off the left side of the image by about 30 pixels, meaning that of all the planets in the solar system, only Neptune would have an orbit that is within the image at all (at the left edge). The heliosphere is 120 AU from the sun, in the direction that Voyager 1 is travelling: Voyager crossed that milestone in August 2012. At time of publication Voyager was just over 150 AU from the Sun, as shown in the image.\nContinuing on its course at 38,000 mph, or 3.6 AU\/year, Voyager will reach the outer edge of the Oort cloud , the edge of our solar system, in about 300 years.\nThe title text refers to 'our spacetime codec ', suggesting a representation of reality itself as a series of ones and zeros. If empty space is the darkest possible thing that can be represented--which may be the case when only 16 levels are available (see above)--then it is possible that dark matter is so dark that it cannot be represented: it would require a negative number, which is not available. This is the dynamic range issue mentioned.\nArtefacts are evident in 1683: Digital Data , and mentioned in the title text of 331: Photoshops .\n[Irregular bands of gray are shown, shading from a white circular segment on the lower left side of the panel to completely black on the right. The bands have pixelated edges. A small white space probe is shown just outside the last dark gray band, in the completely black area. A dotted line starting from inside the dark gray area and ending at the space probe indicates that it is moving to the right, out of the gray area. Close to the white area, there are many bands packed closely together and with hard to define edges. But there are five gray areas clearly separated from the white, with a tendency to be elongated in the space probe's direction.]\n[Caption below the panel]: Milestone: Voyager has passed through the streaming video compression artifacts that mark the edge of the solar system\n"}
{"id":2415,"title":"Allow Captcha","image_title":"Allow Captcha","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2415","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/allow_captcha.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2415:_Allow_Captcha","transcript":"[Header at the top of the image with white text inside a light blue rectangle]: To prove you're human, please click every box containing a verb that starts with \"A\"\n[Below the header, a series of panels in a 4x4 grid. Each panel has a word in capitals. Most of the words appear to be in buttons, and several have illegible text above or below. Some are tilted or off-center]\nAlike\nElope\nAloe\nAle\nAvow\nDanny\nAllele\nAllot\nAskew\n[Two buttons, both saying]: Deny\n[The next two panels are joined together, with two buttons next to each other. One says \"Deny\" and the other \"Allow\". The text above reads]: [illegible].com wants to install a helper tool\n[With the word \"Allow\" printed clearly above and illegible text below]: Alto\nAllow\nDeal\nDelay\n","explanation":"Captcha is designed to prevent spambots from being able to post on websites by posing challenges that humans can easily solve but that spambots and other automated programs cannot solve. The original version (used in 632: Suspicion ) asked users to identify text that was rotated, warped, or otherwise modified in order to make it more difficult for automated programs to solve. Once automated programs got good at that, new captchas were put out that exploited the fact that computers tend to be bad at image recognition, e.g. asking the user to select only images that contain cats from a grid of images of cats, dogs, and other objects (used in 1897: Self Driving ). This captcha appears to combine the two methods\u2014with the additional hurdle that in order to pass the captcha, users must be able to not only read but also understand (i.e. know the definitions of words). However, if the goal is to allow humans but not computers to pass (although, as the next paragraph will describe, it is not the goal), this is not a good method of differentiating between the two. Any computer program that can accurately read text (and there are now many programs that can do so) would know which words start with 'A' and would be able to look up the definitions (including parts of speech) online, so this would not be effective as a captcha. Humans on the other hand, would often get confused between \"ale\" and \"ail\" or between \"allot\" and \"a lot\". The English language has no distinction between nouns and verbs by spelling, only grammatical usage, and many words in English are both nouns and verbs, depending on context and placement.\nIn reality, however, the window is merely disguised as a captcha in order to trick human visitors into allowing the website to install \"a helper tool\", which may be malware, on their computer. The top of the window uses a similar shade of blue to the current version of reCAPTCHA (currently the most common brand of captcha), the prompt includes the phrase \"to prove you're human\", and the grid is similar to the grid used by reCAPTCHA. However, positioned to appear to humans as two reCAPTCHA boxes is a window asking viewers whether they want to allow or deny the website's request to install the supposed \"helper tool\". The idea is that because \"allow\" is a verb beginning with the letter A, human visitors would click on what they think is the box with the word allow in it but actually allow the website to install potential malware on their computer. The window attempts to disguise this by formatting many of the words in boxes as buttons and including other text in smaller font on other boxes. In addition, the captcha may be intentionally difficult so that users will be too distracted by wondering whether ale is a verb to process the meaning of the request.\nIt should be noted that simply tricking humans would not necessarily be enough to install malware on their computer. First of all, while a person can select any part of a grid box in order to select that box, only clicking on the actual button that says allow will allow malware unto the computer. If a person clicks on another part of the supposed box, nothing will happen, so the person will likely take a closer look in order to see why the window is not being selected and then possibly realize that this is a trick as a result. Further, the website would likely not be able to specify where the permission window appears, so would not be able to fit it into the fake reCAPTCHA. In addition, the user's computer may have an anti-virus software that will prevent the computer from executing malicious code downloaded by the website. Or in order for the user to install software, a second window may pop up requiring the user to type in an administrator password, which will likely startle the user.\nShady websites often use similar tactics to trick you into allowing notifications, including saying \" Please allow notifications to confirm you are not a robot \". This comic combines that with a traditional reCAPTCHA to try and trick savvier users too.\nThe title text is a another trick reCAPTCHA which is trying to make you give out your social security number by clicking the pairs of numbers that appear in your Social Security number. A social security number is a form of identification used in the United States, originally used for the Social Security Administration. Over time, this number has become a type of national identification number, so stealing these numbers would allow a scammer to commit identity fraud. Of course, it would use a different grid, as the grid pictured in the comic has words, not pairs of digits. If you can find all of the pairs then they would be able to guess your real number and thus this would be a weird kind of phishing attempt. If the grid is 4\u00d74 (and some reCAPTCHA grids are only 3\u00d73), then it can only show 16 of the possible 100 pairs of two digits, so any people who are successfully tricked likely would not reveal their entire Social Security numbers because some digit pairs in their Social Security numbers would not appear. However, it should be noted that this trick likely will not be as successful as the captcha-based trick because the phrase \"Social Security number\" will likely raise alarm bells concerning identity theft, and people who are not citizens or permanent or temporary residents of the United States will not have Social Security numbers, so they will not be able to be tricked into revealing personal information this way even if they are especially gullible.\nIt should also be noted that the phrase \"to prove you're human\", while also attempting to disguise the trick, has a somewhat different implication. In the first example, the idea of the supposed captcha is that it asks the user to complete a task that human brains but not computer programs can perform accurately easily, such as image recognition. In the example in the title text, the idea of the fake captcha appears to be that humans are issued Social Security numbers (at least if they live or have lived in the United States), but computers are not. As the website does not already know the users' Social Security numbers, it would not actually be able to tell whether the user's response was correct. There is nothing to prevent programming an automated spambot program to randomly select zero to four of the boxes. Likewise, users could lie and not reveal their actual Social Security numbers, although those who realize that the supposed captcha is an attempt at identity theft will likely not complete it at all and could report it to law enforcement instead.\n[Header at the top of the image with white text inside a light blue rectangle]: To prove you're human, please click every box containing a verb that starts with \"A\"\n[Below the header, a series of panels in a 4x4 grid. Each panel has a word in capitals. Most of the words appear to be in buttons, and several have illegible text above or below. Some are tilted or off-center]\nAlike\nElope\nAloe\nAle\nAvow\nDanny\nAllele\nAllot\nAskew\n[Two buttons, both saying]: Deny\n[The next two panels are joined together, with two buttons next to each other. One says \"Deny\" and the other \"Allow\". The text above reads]: [illegible].com wants to install a helper tool\n[With the word \"Allow\" printed clearly above and illegible text below]: Alto\nAllow\nDeal\nDelay\n"}
{"id":2416,"title":"Trash Compactor Party","image_title":"Trash Compactor Party","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2416","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/trash_compactor_party.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2416:_Trash_Compactor_Party","transcript":"[An ongoing party of five people is placed between two walls on wheels. There are two machines on either side of the walls,  moving the walls on the left and right ever-closer in. The machines have pistons that push the walls together. Their rods are not long enough for the walls to meet in the middle, only to push the people close together. Near the left wall, Megan is sitting on a chair pushing on the approaching wall with hands and feet. Next to her is (and adult) Science Girl looking toward the other wall with her hands held up to her neck. Then follows White Hat, also with his arms raised towards his neck, he is looking at Megan's wall. Next to him is a small table with a glass and a plate with something on it, probably snacks. On the other side of the table stands Ponytail with a wine glass in her hand. She is looking to the right at Cueball, who is standing on the other side of a chair standing between them. Seems like he just got up after having been sitting there looking at the advancing wall. Now he is standing pressed up against it pushing on it with both hands.]\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm planning a trash-compactor-themed party for when this is all over so we can get used to standing near each other again.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nRandall is planning a party for when the pandemic is under control and it will again be acceptable to meet with people in close proximity and without a face mask or other kinds of protection.\nBut he has realized that after more than a year, where social distancing has been a thing, it will be difficult to get people to voluntarily move closer than 1-2 m from each other.\nThus to break the ice, and the social distancing, his party will have a theme - it will be a Trash Compactor Party. So he plans to install two moving walls on either side of the party room, which will slowly move together pressing people closer together. It is supposed to be a theme party, so the walls are not supposed to crush people in the end, but force them to get much closer than one meter apart.\nIn the comic Randall shows how people might react to this after more than a year without being close to anyone not from their own family\/corona bubble.\nCueball and Megan are trying to push each of the walls of the trash compactor back in order to prevent it from pushing them closer to the three other people. Two of the other attendees, Science Girl and White Hat appear to be anxiously shying away from the inexorably increasing proximity of both of their neighboring guests, as they hold their arms nervously and protectively around their chests and necks. Thus reflecting the common current trend for many normal people to maintain increased personal space when meeting or passing other people out and about, compared with the pre-COVID era. Randall's claim is that this will not just go away because the restrictions are completely lifted if the pandemic comes under control. Ponytail is the one that seems least concerned; she even stands with a wine glass in her hands. She is looking at Cueball, maybe amused at the other people's reactions to a now safe situation.\nThe title text references a high-profile instance of the trope from the original Star Wars film (later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV \u2014 A New Hope ). Han Solo utters this quip shortly after he and several other main characters bail out of a firefight and land in a trash compactor. The walls then start closing in and, as in the comic, the characters are not enthused about being pushed ever closer together, and seek to push back on the walls before being crushed. Here, the quote also expresses a sense of (a new) hope: since a common symptom of COVID-19 is a loss of smell, the fact that the characters are all able to smell their surroundings suggests that the pandemic is gone.\n[An ongoing party of five people is placed between two walls on wheels. There are two machines on either side of the walls,  moving the walls on the left and right ever-closer in. The machines have pistons that push the walls together. Their rods are not long enough for the walls to meet in the middle, only to push the people close together. Near the left wall, Megan is sitting on a chair pushing on the approaching wall with hands and feet. Next to her is (and adult) Science Girl looking toward the other wall with her hands held up to her neck. Then follows White Hat, also with his arms raised towards his neck, he is looking at Megan's wall. Next to him is a small table with a glass and a plate with something on it, probably snacks. On the other side of the table stands Ponytail with a wine glass in her hand. She is looking to the right at Cueball, who is standing on the other side of a chair standing between them. Seems like he just got up after having been sitting there looking at the advancing wall. Now he is standing pressed up against it pushing on it with both hands.]\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm planning a trash-compactor-themed party for when this is all over so we can get used to standing near each other again.\n"}
{"id":2417,"title":"1\/1,000th Scale World","image_title":"1\/1,000th Scale World","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2417","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1_1000th_scale_world.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2417:_1\/1,000th_Scale_World","transcript":"[At the top of the image, inside the panel, a large title is floating in the air.] RULES\nFor visitors to my 1\/1,000th scale world\n1 meter = 1 km   1 ft = 1,000 ft\n[Each of the following rules is written near a character or point of interest on the map.]\n[Keep hot objects off the ice sheet over the south pole neutrino observatory]\n[Do not bother the meteor crater ducks]\n[No connecting the dead sea to the ocean]\n[Be patient: Niagara falls will take a few minutes to fill your water glass]\n[Trip hazard: the Gateway arch]\n[Do not let ants into the Sudbury neutrino observatory]\n[Megan balances on the Golden Gate bridge,her legs wobbling.]\n[Only one person on the Golden Gate tightrope at a time]\n[Watch for small planes]\n[Drone altitude limit]\n[Do not remove statue of liberty LEGO minifig]\n[Do not remove safety caps]\n[Caution: sharp]\n[Do not mix up the USS enterprises:]\n[Two zeppelins float in the sky.]\n[No open flames in zeppelin area]\n[A fish at a size relevant to the characters in the strip faces towards two small two small horizontal lines, presumably whales.]\n[Please stop releasing goldfish in the ocean. They keep eating all the blue whales.]\n[An arrow points to a small line in the sky resembling an airplane.]\n[Warning! Choking hazard! Keep small children away from ascending\/ descending airliners]\n","explanation":"This comic is the third in the Scale World series.\nYet again, Randall has a seemingly complete scale model of Earth , this time at a larger scale of 1:1000 \u2013 that is, 1 meter in this scale world represents 1000 meters in the real world. (This is ten times the size of Randall's original scale world .) Again, real-world features and phenomena (such as several underground neutrino detectors ) are depicted at scale and labeled with warnings. Several of the warnings point out humorous consequences of the scale, such as non-scaled goldfish eating scaled-down blue whales.  Other than the usual homo sapiens, the introduction of non-scaled animals into the scaled world (with consistently humorous consequences) is an addition to the earlier comics of the series.\n[At the top of the image, inside the panel, a large title is floating in the air.] RULES\nFor visitors to my 1\/1,000th scale world\n1 meter = 1 km   1 ft = 1,000 ft\n[Each of the following rules is written near a character or point of interest on the map.]\n[Keep hot objects off the ice sheet over the south pole neutrino observatory]\n[Do not bother the meteor crater ducks]\n[No connecting the dead sea to the ocean]\n[Be patient: Niagara falls will take a few minutes to fill your water glass]\n[Trip hazard: the Gateway arch]\n[Do not let ants into the Sudbury neutrino observatory]\n[Megan balances on the Golden Gate bridge,her legs wobbling.]\n[Only one person on the Golden Gate tightrope at a time]\n[Watch for small planes]\n[Drone altitude limit]\n[Do not remove statue of liberty LEGO minifig]\n[Do not remove safety caps]\n[Caution: sharp]\n[Do not mix up the USS enterprises:]\n[Two zeppelins float in the sky.]\n[No open flames in zeppelin area]\n[A fish at a size relevant to the characters in the strip faces towards two small two small horizontal lines, presumably whales.]\n[Please stop releasing goldfish in the ocean. They keep eating all the blue whales.]\n[An arrow points to a small line in the sky resembling an airplane.]\n[Warning! Choking hazard! Keep small children away from ascending\/ descending airliners]\n"}
{"id":2418,"title":"Metacarcinization","image_title":"Metacarcinization","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2418","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/metacarcinization.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2418:_Metacarcinization","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are walking together.  White Hat has his smartphone out in his hand. White Hat: Have you seen this video of a crow sledding on a roof? Cueball: Yeah! It's always cool to see animals using tools. Cueball: Like how sea otters use rocks to open crab shells. Cueball: Hey, did you know the \"crab\" body plan has evolved multiple times?\n[Caption below the panel:] Regardless of the starting topic, any conversation with me eventually converges to carcinization.","explanation":"The comic strip opens with a conversation between White Hat and Cueball as they are walking together.  White Hat asks Cueball if he has seen a video of a crow sledding on a roof \u2014 presumably this one , or one of its later viral reposts. ( Animals sledding seems to be a thing lately). In this case, the crow is a Hooded Crow . Cueball remarks that it's a cool example of tool use by animals , a sign of intelligence (which corvids [Corvidae; the crow family], including crows, ravens, and jackdaws , are famous for).  He then points out that sea otters use tools too, namely using stones to crack open crab shells.\nThis in turn leads him to bring up the fact that the 'crab' body plan has evolved multiple times, a phenomenon known as carcinization , previously discussed in 2314: Carcinization .  In that strip, Cueball turned into a crab shortly after hearing about carcinization, so perhaps White Hat will likewise be transformed momentarily.\nThe conversation serves as an example of a wiki walk , where a conversation naturally diverts from the original topic into a seemingly unrelated topic through a series of logical associations. Although a sledding crow has little to do with carcinization in and of itself, the conversation has managed to bridge the two topics through intermediary steps (crow using a sled, animals using tools in general, otters using stones to open crabs, crab evolutionary process).\nThe title and caption is a joke that, much like natural life-forms have evolved into crab-like forms multiple independent times, so too do all of Cueball's (or Randall's) conversations wiki-walk into a discussion of that evolutionary process.\nIn the title text, Randall jokes that marine biologists have a similar tendency to bring up whalefall (or \"whale fall\") ecosystems, which arise whenever a whale's carcass falls onto the deep ocean floor and are thought to provide \"stepping stones\" for species migration across the generally barren seafloor.  Such occurrences are relatively rare, perhaps occurring once every few miles on whale migration routes, but they happen anyway, much like conversations about them. Another example of scientists tending to bring up facts from their field of study can be found at 1610: Fire Ants , and Randall often brings up the fact that birds evolved from dinosaurs.\n[White Hat and Cueball are walking together.  White Hat has his smartphone out in his hand. White Hat: Have you seen this video of a crow sledding on a roof? Cueball: Yeah! It's always cool to see animals using tools. Cueball: Like how sea otters use rocks to open crab shells. Cueball: Hey, did you know the \"crab\" body plan has evolved multiple times?\n[Caption below the panel:] Regardless of the starting topic, any conversation with me eventually converges to carcinization."}
{"id":2419,"title":"Hug Count","image_title":"Hug Count","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2419","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hug_count.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2419:_Hug_Count","transcript":"[A bar graph is shown with 25 black bars and one gray at the far right. Most of the bars have a height around the center of the graph, but the one in the middle is clearly higher than all others, and the two before and after are lower than average. There are also a couple of high bars in pairs on either side of the central spike. The far-right, however, are two very low bars, with the last in gray less than half the height of the previous, which was already only a third of the next lowest bar. There are numbers on both axes. The X-axis has the year for every fifth year below the relevant bar, and the number of hugs is given in intervals of 10 on the Y-axis. The Y-axis has ticks for every number, but those with labels are longer.  The chart has a title written above:] Estimated Number of Distinct People Hugged per Year\n[Y-axis:] 30 20 10 0\n[X-axis:] 2000\u00a0\u00a02005\u00a0\u00a02010\u00a0\u00a02015\u00a0\u00a02020\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThe comic displays a bar chart showing the number of Individuals Randall has hugged per year, spanning from 1996 to 2021, and goes up to 35 individuals hugged in 2007. The apparent spike in the estimate for 2007 may have been chance or may have been a known social event that Randall remembers, such as a family reunion or anticipated parting from a social group (such as a school or job from which he left), where he hugged many people he otherwise would not have hugged. While it varies a decent amount for the first 24 years, it drops sharply in 2020 and goes even lower in 2021. However, it should be noted that 2021 (at the time of the comic) had just begun, which is why the final bar is grey. It seems he is down to only two people hugged in 2021, one of which is most likely his wife. In 2020 he managed 5 different hugs, but the extra three may have been before the onset of COVID-19 precautions in the US.\nThis is because in 2020 when the pandemic happened, everyone had to social distance and avoid contact with strangers. This was a widely used method of slowing the spread of COVID-19. People are asked to not closely associate with those outside a very limited 'bubble' or even isolate themselves in their own household. As such, people have had less physical contact with each other since the beginning of this pandemic, including hugs.\nNo explanation is given for the variations year-to-year preceding 2020, and much of it may be random walks . However, one can see a major spike in hug levels in 2010 and 2011; Randall's wife was diagnosed with cancer in late 2010 (see Category:Cancer ). Loved ones of those with cancer tend to receive much compassion from others, and compassion tends to beget hugs.\nThe title text states that, while Randall isn't very big on hugs, he too desires hugs. It plays on the common phrase \"I'm not too big of an (x) person\", which is used to indicate that someone isn't extremely fond of said activity. One could then infer the person is not fond of the activity at all, though in this case, he indicates his desire for hugs is non-zero, as presumably demonstrated by the frequency being now less than even he would prefer.\n[A bar graph is shown with 25 black bars and one gray at the far right. Most of the bars have a height around the center of the graph, but the one in the middle is clearly higher than all others, and the two before and after are lower than average. There are also a couple of high bars in pairs on either side of the central spike. The far-right, however, are two very low bars, with the last in gray less than half the height of the previous, which was already only a third of the next lowest bar. There are numbers on both axes. The X-axis has the year for every fifth year below the relevant bar, and the number of hugs is given in intervals of 10 on the Y-axis. The Y-axis has ticks for every number, but those with labels are longer.  The chart has a title written above:] Estimated Number of Distinct People Hugged per Year\n[Y-axis:] 30 20 10 0\n[X-axis:] 2000\u00a0\u00a02005\u00a0\u00a02010\u00a0\u00a02015\u00a0\u00a02020\n"}
{"id":2420,"title":"Appliances","image_title":"Appliances","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2420","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/appliances.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2420:_Appliances","transcript":"[The comic is laid out like a grid, with usages for common household appliances the left-hand side (Make toast \/ Wash dishes \/ Cook a frozen dinner \/ Wash clothes \/ Cook eggs \/ Dry clothes) and appliances for these activities across the top (Toaster \/ Dishwasher \/ Microwave \/ Washing machine \/ Stove\/oven \/ Dryer). The grid illustrates the \"match-ups\", with a green square denoting a \"correct\" match-up, a yellow square denoting something that may work somewhat, and a red square denoting something that most certainly won't work.]\n[From the top left corner, going from left to right, top to bottom, with each first item being on its own line in the grid, the images in the squares are as follows:]\n","explanation":"This comic shows a confusion matrix of the applicability of various household appliances to different tasks. Green indicates an excellent performance, yellow not ideal, but usable, and red dismal or destroyed. The diagonal is green as it shows the tasks done by the machines they are supposed to be performed by. See table below. The comic is similar to 1890: What to Bring , but that comic does not use yellow or another intermediate color.\nSalmon can be easily cooked in a dishwasher , so it's marked \"cooked\", and thus \"cook a frozen dinner\" is only yellow on the dishwasher entry.\nThe stove\/oven has three green as it can also cook a microwave frozen dinner, although slower, and can toast bread, again slower than the toaster. It is by far the machine that has the fewest red entries, only one, as it cannot wash clothes. It can also not clean dishes, but it might sterilize them, thus that entry is yellow. It may actually dry the clothes, but is liable to burn them and is therefore yellow.\nThe microwave oven can also cook eggs, thus it has two green, the only other than the stove\/oven with more than one green.\nThe toaster and the washing machines are the only ones without any yellow, and with only one green, for making toast\/washing clothes - they are thus the appliances with the fewest other potential uses (zero). The washing machine will at least not destroy the clothes if you try to dry them, but it has the opposite effect, thus still red. The toaster will not destroy the dishes, but will potentially just make the dirt burn harder.\nThe title text mentions that it would be theoretically possible to cook eggs in a dryer, but it is not a common use for a dryer. [ citation needed ] The joke is that it is not called scrambled eggs but tumbled eggs. It also mentions that the dryer has to become hotter than usual for a dryer (maybe dangerously hot for the clothes for it to work). And then the eggs should be cracked and put in an oven bag, that really needs to be tight and well zipped.\n[The comic is laid out like a grid, with usages for common household appliances the left-hand side (Make toast \/ Wash dishes \/ Cook a frozen dinner \/ Wash clothes \/ Cook eggs \/ Dry clothes) and appliances for these activities across the top (Toaster \/ Dishwasher \/ Microwave \/ Washing machine \/ Stove\/oven \/ Dryer). The grid illustrates the \"match-ups\", with a green square denoting a \"correct\" match-up, a yellow square denoting something that may work somewhat, and a red square denoting something that most certainly won't work.]\n[From the top left corner, going from left to right, top to bottom, with each first item being on its own line in the grid, the images in the squares are as follows:]\n"}
{"id":2421,"title":"Tower of Babel","image_title":"Tower of Babel","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2421","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tower_of_babel.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2421:_Tower_of_Babel","transcript":"[The Tower of Babel is shown. It has a broad two sectioned base and above that extends straight up out of the top of the frame, with 10 identical segments. This is seen from afar, so the three people standing at the base of the tower is very small. But Cueball and Megan can be easily identified. They are standing on either side of a woman with big curly hair (which is first clear in the next panel). The text spoken is written over the tower in white sections that hides the tower. But the tower can be seen above, between and below these two text segments:] Cueball: The Tower of Babel is complete! Megan: Let's go meet God!\n[Cueball, the curly haired woman and Megan are now standing at the top of the Tower of Babel. The top is made of bricks, but the part of the last segment before the top looks like those shown in the first panel. God is represented by an off-panel voice coming from a star burst at the top of the panel. The three people look up in that direction.] Cueball: Hi God! God (off-panel): Wow, nice tower! God (off-panel): You did a great job! I'm so proud! Megan: Thanks!\n[Same settings but Megan has turned towards the curly haired woman holding an arm out towards her. The woman has taken one hand to her chin.] God (off-panel): I'm going to give you a reward. God (off-panel): What do you like about the world? Curly haired woman: Hmm. Words are really cool. Megan:  No, wait-\n[Same settings, in a broader panel. The curly haired woman lifts her hands up curled into fists. Her yell comes from a starburst over her head, to indicate the difference to normal speech. Megan has taken her arm down.] God (off-panel): Great! I'm going to give you lots of languages to study, each with its own phonology, word ordering, morphosyntactic alignment... Curly haired woman: YESSSSSS! Megan:  We should not have brought a linguist.\nIn 2381: The True Name of the Bear , sentences spoken by the curly haired-woman, the suspected Gretchen McCulloch do not have periods at their ends, a fact which she mentioned on Twitter. However, in this comic, she uses periods, so her previous periodlessness might be a coincidence and not a trait of her character on xkcd.\n","explanation":"The story of the Tower of Babel is the Biblical explanation for the existence of different languages in the world. In the story, humans endeavor to build a tower reaching heaven. Their arrogance angers God and prompts him to sabotage the project. He does this by \"confounding their speech\" (commonly interpreted as giving everyone their own language), inhibiting their ability to work together.\nIn this retelling, however, the events are the same, but the motives changed. God is pleased with the tower, and promises to create a diversity of languages, not as a punishment, but as a reward for the member of the party who finds words interesting. Megan seems to recognize the potential issues this would cause, but the word-loving woman is enthusiastic. This plays on Randall 's various geeky interests, recognizing that complexities of the world, which frustrate many people, are a source of great joy and interest to others. A world with only one language would make travel and global communication much easier, but for those with an interest in linguistics, it would be deeply limiting, as there would be only one language to study.\nThe party that ascends to the top of the tower consists of Cueball , Megan and a curly-haired woman, who may be the linguist Gretchen McCulloch as she was depicted in 2381: The True Name of the Bear .\nPhonology is the study of the sounds used in a language or dialect, or of the systems that languages use to organize sounds. For example, English has the words \"light\" and \"right\", indicating a distinction between \/l\/ and \/r\/, but other languages, such as Japanese, do not, resulting in the (in)famous stereotype. On the other hand, English does not make a distinction between \/u\/ and \/y\/, while French does, having words such as \"le but\" (the goal) and \"le bout\" (the tip).\nWord order is the study of order of the parts of a language, e.g. the subject, object, verb, and other modifiers. English uses the subject\u2013verb\u2013object order (\"She loves him\"), but other languages use subject-object-verb (\"She him loves\") and other permutations of these orders.\nMorphosyntactic alignment is the relationship between the \"roles\" in a sentence, and how they relate to transitivity. The vast majority of world languages, including English, use nominative-accusative alignment. In nominative-accusative languages, the subjects of transitive verbs (verbs with objects) and the subjects of intransitive verbs (verbs without objects) are treated the same, and differently from the objects of transitive verbs. For example, \"She sees him\" and \"She runs\" use the same word \"she\". However, other forms exist like ergative-absolutive alignment, where the subject of an intransitive verb matches the object of a transitive verb (\"She sees him\" and \"Her runs\"), transitive alignment, where the subject and object of a transitive verb are the same and different from the subject of an intransitive verb (\"Her sees him\" and \"She runs\"), or split-S and split ergativity, where it follows nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive based on context. For example, if it depends on animacy, you could have \"She (the person) runs\", but \"Them (the trees) fall\".\nThe title text expands the joke by suggesting that the miscommunication caused by the Tower of Babel is not due to language barriers, but instead because linguists have created intentionally meaningless sentences to illustrate points about grammar, and identifies two famous examples of such. \" Colorless green ideas sleep furiously \", coined by linguist Noam Chomsky in 1957, is an example of a sentence that is structurally correct but contains paradoxes and meaningless comparisons: Something cannot be both colorless AND green (see Invisible Pink Unicorn ), ideas do not sleep, and sleeping generally is not done furiously. [ citation needed ] That said, the sentence \"colorless green ideas sleep furiously\" is so well known in linguistics that a competition to make the sentence meaningful was held in 1985 and attracted a number of entrants .\n\"More people have been to Russia than I have\" is an example of comparative illusion . This sentence seems to make sense at first, but upon deeper analysis does not. Many people misinterpret its meaning as \"I do not own\/have in my household as many people as those who have been to Russia.\"\n[The Tower of Babel is shown. It has a broad two sectioned base and above that extends straight up out of the top of the frame, with 10 identical segments. This is seen from afar, so the three people standing at the base of the tower is very small. But Cueball and Megan can be easily identified. They are standing on either side of a woman with big curly hair (which is first clear in the next panel). The text spoken is written over the tower in white sections that hides the tower. But the tower can be seen above, between and below these two text segments:] Cueball: The Tower of Babel is complete! Megan: Let's go meet God!\n[Cueball, the curly haired woman and Megan are now standing at the top of the Tower of Babel. The top is made of bricks, but the part of the last segment before the top looks like those shown in the first panel. God is represented by an off-panel voice coming from a star burst at the top of the panel. The three people look up in that direction.] Cueball: Hi God! God (off-panel): Wow, nice tower! God (off-panel): You did a great job! I'm so proud! Megan: Thanks!\n[Same settings but Megan has turned towards the curly haired woman holding an arm out towards her. The woman has taken one hand to her chin.] God (off-panel): I'm going to give you a reward. God (off-panel): What do you like about the world? Curly haired woman: Hmm. Words are really cool. Megan:  No, wait-\n[Same settings, in a broader panel. The curly haired woman lifts her hands up curled into fists. Her yell comes from a starburst over her head, to indicate the difference to normal speech. Megan has taken her arm down.] God (off-panel): Great! I'm going to give you lots of languages to study, each with its own phonology, word ordering, morphosyntactic alignment... Curly haired woman: YESSSSSS! Megan:  We should not have brought a linguist.\nIn 2381: The True Name of the Bear , sentences spoken by the curly haired-woman, the suspected Gretchen McCulloch do not have periods at their ends, a fact which she mentioned on Twitter. However, in this comic, she uses periods, so her previous periodlessness might be a coincidence and not a trait of her character on xkcd.\n"}
{"id":2422,"title":"Vaccine Ordering","image_title":"Vaccine Ordering","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2422","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vaccine_ordering.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2422:_Vaccine_Ordering","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are talking. Megan is looking down and reading a news story on her phone.] Megan: The CDC says it's okay to mix and match the mRNA vaccines for doses 1 and 2, but only in \"exceptional situations\". Cueball: I wonder which order works better, if either.\n[A slimmer panel. Megan has her finger raised and her phone to her side] Megan: Well you know what they say. Megan: Moderna before Pfizer, you'll be none the wiser.\n[A regular panel, Megan and Cueball still standing next to each other.] Megan: Pfizer before Moderna then you'll... rule ancient Smyrna. Cueball: Weird side effect. Megan: A lot of hard-to-rhyme drugs have those.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nTwo COVID-19 vaccines have been approved in the United States (one from Moderna , the other from a joint venture between Pfizer and BioNTech ). Each of these vaccines require 2 doses, taken 3-4 weeks apart.\nMegan is reading an article on her phone to Cueball. A report from the CDC says that it's possible to get effective immunity against COVID-19 when mixing mRNA vaccine doses from Pfizer and Moderna, but that this practice should not be the norm. The report in question can be viewed here ; it stresses that mixing the vaccines is acceptable only in exceptional circumstances, such as \"when the first-dose vaccine product cannot be determined.\"\nCueball wonders whether the order in which you receive the vaccines matters. Megan then attempts to create mnemonic devices to help them remember which mix-and-match strategy is best for the mRNA vaccines (e.g., \"Beer before wine and you'll feel fine; wine before beer and you'll feel queer\"). She \"concludes\" that receiving the Pfizer vaccine after the Moderna one will be just as effective as having two doses of either, but that having the Moderna vaccine after Pfizer's will lead to the patient becoming the ruler of an ancient city. Megan might mean that the patient will be literally transported back in time, as she and Cueball (and Black Hat ) were in 2321: Low-Background Metal .  The apparent truthiness of these mnemonics might be attributed to the rhyme-as-reason effect , a cognitive bias that is often misleading - very much so in this case. Megan succeeds by rhyming \"Pfizer\" and \"wiser,\" but struggles with finding a rhyme for \"Moderna,\" settling for Smyrna , an ancient city located in what is now Izmir , Turkey.\nA side effect of a drug is an effect incidental to the intended purpose of the drug. Side effects can be positive or negative, though in vaccine trials the greater concern is usually about negative side effects. Becoming ruler of an ancient city that is now only a historical ruin would certainly be an unexpected side effect. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text continues the theme of difficult rhymes, using the full names of both the Moderna vaccine drug ( mRNA-1273 , rhymed with banshee ) and the Pfizer one ( tozinameran , rhymed with catamaran ).\n[Megan and Cueball are talking. Megan is looking down and reading a news story on her phone.] Megan: The CDC says it's okay to mix and match the mRNA vaccines for doses 1 and 2, but only in \"exceptional situations\". Cueball: I wonder which order works better, if either.\n[A slimmer panel. Megan has her finger raised and her phone to her side] Megan: Well you know what they say. Megan: Moderna before Pfizer, you'll be none the wiser.\n[A regular panel, Megan and Cueball still standing next to each other.] Megan: Pfizer before Moderna then you'll... rule ancient Smyrna. Cueball: Weird side effect. Megan: A lot of hard-to-rhyme drugs have those.\n"}
{"id":2423,"title":"Project Orion","image_title":"Project Orion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2423","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/project_orion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2423:_Project_Orion","transcript":"[Cueball is raising his arm, holding the hand tilted down with palm up towards White Hat. Above them is the words Cueball says (without a speech line showing this). The first three lines are in normal font, but then successive lines fade to lighter and lighter gray and finally in the fourth line, just above their heads, the text is almost white. The overall effect is that Cueball's words gradually become background noise to White Hat.] Cueball: Our garden grew really well last year, so we think we might put a second raised bed along the garage, if we can find a...\n[Only White Hat is shown, without text, as he stares away from where Cueball must be off the edge of the panel.]\n[Only White Hat again, who now seems to look straight out of the panel.]\n[Back to the original setting. Cueball has lifted both hands up in front of him. He once again has the attention of White Hat. The text above begins with a line half hidden under the top of the panel, almost white font, and then the text fades back to black font over the next three lines, with the next, and last, line in his first paragraph all in black. And then a small gap and connecting line between this and the last two lines of text in his second paragraph. This time there is also with a speech line down to Cueball. The text from \"...\" to the first comma is difficult to read as only bottom half is shown, and in very faded font.] Cueball: ...thanks to X ray ablation, the pusher plate would absorb the nuclear blast, recoil, and then return to position for the next bomb. Cueball: Such a wild idea! Probably good that it was abandoned.\n[Caption below the panel:] If you temporarily tune out while a physicist is talking, when you tune back in they'll be talking about Project Orion.\n","explanation":"White Hat and Cueball are having a conversation. In the first panel, Cueball is telling White Hat about his gardening experiences. White Hat tunes out for the middle two panels, and when he starts paying attention again, Cueball is discussing Project Orion .\nProject Orion was an ambitious idea, funded briefly by the US government in the 1960s, to launch enormous spaceships into orbit by detonating a series of nuclear bombs below them. The force from the explosions would be absorbed by a pusher plate on the bottom of the rocket, which is the detail Cueball is sharing when White Hat tunes back in. In Ad Astra , Roy McBride uses a similar mechanism to get from Neptune back to Earth. It was considered feasible for construction, but abandoned because of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty as well as out of concerns for both cost and the idea of spaceships literally armed with atomic bombs. People probably daydream about this project because it seems like it could provide for rapid and massive entry into space, but it was halted due to the intense danger. We may have sufficient technology to somehow make this safe with extensive additional engineering, but the risk is still so large it has not been pursued.\nThe fact that physicists' conversations tend to converge towards Project Orion is similar to how Randall's conversations tend to converge towards carcinization in 2418: Metacarcinization . Cueball turned into a crab (i.e., he carcinized) when Megan first told him about carcinization in 2314: Carcinization ; hopefully physicists don't do something analogous when discussing Project Orion.\nThe title text transitions to another cool nuclear rocket technology, dusty plasma fission fragment rockets , which also uses nuclear energy, and would fit well in the 2326: Five Word Jargon collection.\nProject Orion has been mentioned before, in 786: Exoplanets , where Beret Guy sums it up as \"nuke-riding city ships\", and on what if? .\n[Cueball is raising his arm, holding the hand tilted down with palm up towards White Hat. Above them is the words Cueball says (without a speech line showing this). The first three lines are in normal font, but then successive lines fade to lighter and lighter gray and finally in the fourth line, just above their heads, the text is almost white. The overall effect is that Cueball's words gradually become background noise to White Hat.] Cueball: Our garden grew really well last year, so we think we might put a second raised bed along the garage, if we can find a...\n[Only White Hat is shown, without text, as he stares away from where Cueball must be off the edge of the panel.]\n[Only White Hat again, who now seems to look straight out of the panel.]\n[Back to the original setting. Cueball has lifted both hands up in front of him. He once again has the attention of White Hat. The text above begins with a line half hidden under the top of the panel, almost white font, and then the text fades back to black font over the next three lines, with the next, and last, line in his first paragraph all in black. And then a small gap and connecting line between this and the last two lines of text in his second paragraph. This time there is also with a speech line down to Cueball. The text from \"...\" to the first comma is difficult to read as only bottom half is shown, and in very faded font.] Cueball: ...thanks to X ray ablation, the pusher plate would absorb the nuclear blast, recoil, and then return to position for the next bomb. Cueball: Such a wild idea! Probably good that it was abandoned.\n[Caption below the panel:] If you temporarily tune out while a physicist is talking, when you tune back in they'll be talking about Project Orion.\n"}
{"id":2424,"title":"Normal Conversation","image_title":"Normal Conversation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2424","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/normal_conversation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2424:_Normal_Conversation","transcript":"[Randall, drawn as Cueball wearing a white face masks, is talking to Cueball wearing a face mask with striped pattern.] Randall: So how's...everything. Randall: I mean, I know everything is, um...but are you, uh... Randall: Sorry, I feel like the pandemic has destroyed my ability to have a conversation like a normal human. Cueball: Haha, I know, right?\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm at least glad I have this excuse now.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nRandall \/ Cueball has shown in many comics the difficulty of making small talk, or having a \"normal\" conversation, when you spent your developing years developing work skills ( comics of this are here ), a trait of nerds such as engineers that is frequently used as material in comics .  With the COVID-19 pandemic, he feels that others may have difficulty having normal conversations as well, and so this seems to be a \"silver lining\" for the pandemic. He can now use this excuse instead of having to admit that he has difficulty in social situations (and always has, even before the pandemic). Randall also uses a false but plausible excuse to cover unusual nerd behavior in 1900: Jet Lag . He also uses another excuse which can get him out of life in general in 880: Headache .\nIn the title text, he shows his dislike, which existed prior to the pandemic, of going to crowded bars. In the future, even after the pandemic passes, Cueball will still have the excuse that the pandemic made him feel uncomfortable in crowded bars due to possible virus spread and that the feeling has persisted past the pandemic.  Cueball remarked on his good fortune in 2276: Self-Isolate , as it turns out he has been \"practicing social distancing\" all his life, but that it has now finally become common practice.\n[Randall, drawn as Cueball wearing a white face masks, is talking to Cueball wearing a face mask with striped pattern.] Randall: So how's...everything. Randall: I mean, I know everything is, um...but are you, uh... Randall: Sorry, I feel like the pandemic has destroyed my ability to have a conversation like a normal human. Cueball: Haha, I know, right?\n[Caption below the panel:] I'm at least glad I have this excuse now.\n"}
{"id":2425,"title":"mRNA Vaccine","image_title":"mRNA Vaccine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2425","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mrna_vaccine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2425:_mRNA_Vaccine","transcript":"[Cueball seated in a doctor's office getting a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Both he and the doctor are wearing masks; the doctor is also wearing a scrub cap.] Doctor: The vaccine contains mRNA instructions for making the virus spike protein. Cueball: Weird, so the vaccine is just blueprints? Doctor: Yup! Your body reads the mRNA, makes the proteins, and then has an immune reaction to them. Cueball: Why would my body attack something it made itself? Doctor: Well...\n[Princess Leia and General Dodonna in frame.] Leia: Here are the Death Star plans. Dodonna: Thank you, Princess.\n[Dodonna, Ponytail, and White Hat in frame.] Dodonna: These blueprints are from Princess Leia. Ponytail: Ugh, she's always giving us projects.\n[Ponytail and Cueball in frame.] Ponytail: Here, take these blueprints to your construction crew. Cueball: Affirmative. What is it? Ponytail: No idea. Something the Princess wants. Cueball: Copy that.\nPanel heading: Soon... [A view from outside of the Death Star.] Voice from Death Star: Hi, Commander? Construction crew B here.\n[A view from inside the Death Star, with a planet visible through two adjacent windows. Cueball is standing at some kind of control\/communications panel.] Cueball: We finished building the Princess's big metal orb thing.\n[A view from outside the Death Star again, with the curve of the planet in the foreground.] Voice from Death Star: Do you know if she wants us to park it somewhere, or\u2014 Voices from the planet: AAAAAA!!!\n[A view from the planet's surface with the Death Star in the sky. 3 Cueballs, a Megan-like character, and Ponytail are on the planet's surface.] Voice from Death Star: ...Is everything ok? Cueball 1: AAAAAAA! Cueball 2: Imperial battle station!!! Ponytail & Cueball 3: AAAAAAAAAA Offscreen voice: Red Alert Red Alert\n[Another view from the planet's surface. There is some type of military encampment surrounded by an open field, with trees and mountains in the background. People are running around on the field, which also contains several currently grounded craft and several flying craft streaming toward the Death Star.] Death Star voice: Hello? Generic field voices: Get the fighters in the air! Red Alert Blow it up! Blow it up! AAAAA Generic tree voices: AAAAAaa Generic spacecraft voices: Kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it\n[A zoomed-in view of the outside of the Death Star, which is accumulating light damage. Numerous spacecraft are shooting at it; various explosions occur on the Death Star's surface and in space nearby.] Death Star voice: Hello? Generic spacecraft voices: Shoot it! Shoot it! Shoot it! That armor's too strong! We're not getting through! Keep firing!\n[A view from inside the Death Star again with Cueball at the control panel and the planet in the background windows; various projectiles and explosions can be seen through the window.] Cueball: Can everybody please just chill? We don't even have the laser thing wired up. We\u2014 BOOM Hey!! I said , we...\n[Ponytail enters from the left, and points to her left. Princess Leia points at her.] Ponytail: We can't get through! We're running out of proton torpedoes! Leia: Send every crew to build more torpedoes! Ponytail: There aren't enough ships to\u2014 Leia: Build more ships!!\n[Ponytail is standing still and Princess Leia is walking to the right with her fists raised.] Ponytail: That thing is just sitting there. Are you sure we\u2014 Leia: Keep building ships! Build ships forever! Destroy the orb!\n[A view of the Death Star in space and the curvature of the planet off to the side. An enormous torrent of (barely visible) ships is seen streaming from the planet's surface to the Death Star. The damage to the Death Star is slightly worse.] Generic ship voices: aaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaa Death Star voice: What is wrong with you people?\n[Back in the real world, Cueball is standing with arms hunched and a cartoon helix above his head. Megan stands next to him.] Cueball: Definitely feeling a little sore. Megan: Yeah, they said you might have some side effects. Megan: You lie down\u2014I'll get you some hot tea and a blanket.\n[An outside view of the damaged Death Star with ships swarming it.] Generic voices: Die die die die! Die!\n[An inside view; Cueball appears injured, and the control panel is damaged with a fire on the ground nearby.] Cueball: I hate you all so much.\n[The outside of the Death Star again.] Ship 1: What's that?! Ship 2: Looks like a thermal exhaust port. Ship 3: I'm going in!\n[The outside of the Death Star.] pew pew pew pew pew pew\n[Beat panel.]\n[The Death Star explodes.]\n[A disheveled Dodonna, Princess Leia, and Ponytail in frame.]\n[The same frame.] Leia: Good work.\n[In the real world, Cueball sits on top of a bed with a blanket draped over his lap. Megan stands next to the bed.] Cueball: I'm feeling better today. Megan: That's great!\nPanel heading: A few months later... [Cueball and White Hat walking past each other. Cueball is wearing a face mask; White Hat isn't but coughs into his elbow.] White Hat: Cough cough\n[The real Death Star drifts toward the planet.] Death Star voice: We have reached the rebel system, Lord Vader.\n[View from inside the real Death Star.] Vader: Now they shall witness the firepower of this fully armed and oper\u2014\n[Leia, Ponytail, and Cueball in frame.] Leia: Thermal exhaust port!! Ponytail: Aaa Cueball: Aaa\n[An equally large torrent of ships stream from the planet to the real Death Star.] Death Star voice: What. Various ships: aA AAAAAAA aaa aAAAAAAA aaa AAAAAA aaa aAAAAA\n[The Death Star explodes, leaving debris trailing away.]\n[In the real world, White Hat and Cueball continue to walk past each other.] Cueball: \u266b \u266b\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nThis one is another analogy to how mRNA vaccines work, by creating inactive fragments of the virus to prime the immune system to be prepared to stave off the real thing. This is done in response to Cueball's question to the person vaccinating him, \"Why would my body attack something it made itself?\", using elements of the film Star Wars: Episode IV as an analogy.\nThe analogy starts in the second panel, where the Rebel Alliance has retrieved the Death Star plans, conveyed by Princess Leia to General Jan Dodonna (in Star Wars , via R2-D2 and some adventures, but shown as a simple handoff here). The Death Star is a space station the size of a small moon that has the power to destroy planets. In the film, the plans are analyzed to find a weakness in the enemy Death Star and destroy it; however, in this panel, the \"Death Star plans\" are passed down a line of people until they are interpreted as a construction assignment and are used to build a Death Star. In the analogy, the mRNA in the vaccine corresponds to the plans for the Death Star, the spike proteins (inactive COVID-19 virus fragments) correspond to the benign Death Star itself, and the cellular processes that build spike proteins correspond to the builders of the benign Death Star.  Just as merely having the plans on hand led to the Death Star being built, the mere presence of the mRNA in the cellular environment leads to it being translated, producing the viral protein.  Amusingly, as the plans are handed off to the construction crew leader, he replies \"Copy that,\" which both acknowledges the handoff in conversation and presages his actions.\nAfter Leia's Death Star has been built, it is positioned near a planet\/moon. This Death Star is benign : it only looks dangerous and isn't about to actually hurt anyone; the Death Star crew are Rebels, after all, and state that they don't have the laser wired up. The Rebels mobilize to destroy this benign Death Star because it looks like an enemy battle station, evidently not listening to the construction crew's transmissions. Analogously, immune cells cannot think [ citation needed ] or directly communicate, basing their determination of friend from foe entirely on external chemical signatures. However, the Death Star operators are confused, because they believe Leia (a member of the Rebels) had ordered its construction. The Rebels initially attack the surface of the benign Death Star, without much effect; Leia orders the factories to continue developing torpedoes and ships as they run out, presumably putting an extra workload on the factory workers and tiring them out, or at least diverting resources away from other projects. In the analogy, the Rebels correspond to the immune system's B cells and T cells , which mobilize to attack the spike proteins (the benign Death Star) made as a result of the vaccine, but are often ineffective at first. The body keeps producing these immune cells, trying many variants (many ways of attacking the benign Death Star) in an attempt to find one that works well against the spike proteins. This results in Cueball experiencing side effects from the vaccine, including soreness and tiredness, and he lies down and rests.\nAfter much effort on the Rebels' part, they find a weakness in the benign Death Star, a \"thermal exhaust port\" vulnerable to \"proton torpedoes\" that can destroy the Death Star. Firing a proton torpedo down the exhaust port destroys a Death Star very rapidly, compared to the initial, ineffective frontal assault on the surface. After this benign Death Star is destroyed, Princess Leia allows the fleet to stand down.\nUp to this point, the entire thing seems like a comedy of errors, with huge expenditures being made for no apparent reason, due to a simple lack of communication.  But during this process, the Rebel Alliance has both built a huge fleet and figured out how to target the Death Star's weakness and destroy it. Later on, when a real, dangerous Death Star approaches the planet (with the apparent intent of destroying it), the Rebels immediately deploy their fleet, target the weakness, and destroy it almost immediately, much to the shock of the Imperial troops, who had believed they were on an invulnerable ship and are surprised by the Rebels' immediate response and overwhelmed by it.\nThe analogy is that the immune system (the Rebel Alliance) figures out a way to attach to the spike proteins (attack the benign Death Star) made by the mRNA vaccine; the immune system's antibodies (Rebel planners) now \"know\" how to recognize and destroy things that have these spike proteins \u2014 including SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (real, dangerous Death Stars). Hence, when the vaccinated Cueball approaches White Hat, who is maskless, coughing, and presumably sick with COVID-19, Cueball's immune system is able to destroy dangerous SARS-CoV-2 virus particles because it knows about the virus's spike proteins. This is represented by Cueball not experiencing any suffering from COVID-19, and he goes on his way whistling merrily, perhaps to the tune of The Throne Room\/End Title (from the ceremony celebrating the destruction of the Death Star).\nIt's notable that Cueball continues to wear a mask after being vaccinated. This is in accordance with CDC guidelines, which recommend continuing to wear a mask, practicing social distancing, etc. after getting the vaccine; doctors at CDC \"don\u2019t yet know whether getting a COVID-19 vaccine will prevent you from spreading the virus that causes COVID-19 to other people, even if you don\u2019t get sick yourself.\" [1] None of the vaccines available as of when the comic was posted are 100% effective at preventing infection, with the best ones about 94% effective at preventing symptomatic cases, but all vaccines that are approved or submitted for approval are completely (100.00%) effective at preventing death from COVID-19.\nThe title text references the fact that the two COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use in the United States as of the date of publication (the Pfizer-BioNTech one and the Moderna one ) require two doses of vaccine to be fully effective, as do many others in use worldwide (AstraZeneca, Gameleya Institute, Sinovac, etc.). The second dose strengthens the body's immune response to the spike proteins and causes it to \"remember\", via antibodies, how to attack those proteins for a long time \u2014 hopefully years or even decades. Likewise, the Rebels in the movies destroy two Death Stars, the second one in Return of the Jedi . Incidentally, that second Death Star was destroyed while it was apparently incomplete, much like the Death Star here was destroyed before it could destroy Cueball; however, in the film, the Emperor had deliberately left it with an incomplete outer structure to lure the Rebellion into attacking it, only for the Rebels to find that its superlaser was fully operational.\nVaccination was also explained, xkcd-style, in 2406: Viral Vector Immunity .\nReferences to the Star Wars franchise are a recurring theme on xkcd.\n[Cueball seated in a doctor's office getting a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Both he and the doctor are wearing masks; the doctor is also wearing a scrub cap.] Doctor: The vaccine contains mRNA instructions for making the virus spike protein. Cueball: Weird, so the vaccine is just blueprints? Doctor: Yup! Your body reads the mRNA, makes the proteins, and then has an immune reaction to them. Cueball: Why would my body attack something it made itself? Doctor: Well...\n[Princess Leia and General Dodonna in frame.] Leia: Here are the Death Star plans. Dodonna: Thank you, Princess.\n[Dodonna, Ponytail, and White Hat in frame.] Dodonna: These blueprints are from Princess Leia. Ponytail: Ugh, she's always giving us projects.\n[Ponytail and Cueball in frame.] Ponytail: Here, take these blueprints to your construction crew. Cueball: Affirmative. What is it? Ponytail: No idea. Something the Princess wants. Cueball: Copy that.\nPanel heading: Soon... [A view from outside of the Death Star.] Voice from Death Star: Hi, Commander? Construction crew B here.\n[A view from inside the Death Star, with a planet visible through two adjacent windows. Cueball is standing at some kind of control\/communications panel.] Cueball: We finished building the Princess's big metal orb thing.\n[A view from outside the Death Star again, with the curve of the planet in the foreground.] Voice from Death Star: Do you know if she wants us to park it somewhere, or\u2014 Voices from the planet: AAAAAA!!!\n[A view from the planet's surface with the Death Star in the sky. 3 Cueballs, a Megan-like character, and Ponytail are on the planet's surface.] Voice from Death Star: ...Is everything ok? Cueball 1: AAAAAAA! Cueball 2: Imperial battle station!!! Ponytail & Cueball 3: AAAAAAAAAA Offscreen voice: Red Alert Red Alert\n[Another view from the planet's surface. There is some type of military encampment surrounded by an open field, with trees and mountains in the background. People are running around on the field, which also contains several currently grounded craft and several flying craft streaming toward the Death Star.] Death Star voice: Hello? Generic field voices: Get the fighters in the air! Red Alert Blow it up! Blow it up! AAAAA Generic tree voices: AAAAAaa Generic spacecraft voices: Kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it\n[A zoomed-in view of the outside of the Death Star, which is accumulating light damage. Numerous spacecraft are shooting at it; various explosions occur on the Death Star's surface and in space nearby.] Death Star voice: Hello? Generic spacecraft voices: Shoot it! Shoot it! Shoot it! That armor's too strong! We're not getting through! Keep firing!\n[A view from inside the Death Star again with Cueball at the control panel and the planet in the background windows; various projectiles and explosions can be seen through the window.] Cueball: Can everybody please just chill? We don't even have the laser thing wired up. We\u2014 BOOM Hey!! I said , we...\n[Ponytail enters from the left, and points to her left. Princess Leia points at her.] Ponytail: We can't get through! We're running out of proton torpedoes! Leia: Send every crew to build more torpedoes! Ponytail: There aren't enough ships to\u2014 Leia: Build more ships!!\n[Ponytail is standing still and Princess Leia is walking to the right with her fists raised.] Ponytail: That thing is just sitting there. Are you sure we\u2014 Leia: Keep building ships! Build ships forever! Destroy the orb!\n[A view of the Death Star in space and the curvature of the planet off to the side. An enormous torrent of (barely visible) ships is seen streaming from the planet's surface to the Death Star. The damage to the Death Star is slightly worse.] Generic ship voices: aaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaa Death Star voice: What is wrong with you people?\n[Back in the real world, Cueball is standing with arms hunched and a cartoon helix above his head. Megan stands next to him.] Cueball: Definitely feeling a little sore. Megan: Yeah, they said you might have some side effects. Megan: You lie down\u2014I'll get you some hot tea and a blanket.\n[An outside view of the damaged Death Star with ships swarming it.] Generic voices: Die die die die! Die!\n[An inside view; Cueball appears injured, and the control panel is damaged with a fire on the ground nearby.] Cueball: I hate you all so much.\n[The outside of the Death Star again.] Ship 1: What's that?! Ship 2: Looks like a thermal exhaust port. Ship 3: I'm going in!\n[The outside of the Death Star.] pew pew pew pew pew pew\n[Beat panel.]\n[The Death Star explodes.]\n[A disheveled Dodonna, Princess Leia, and Ponytail in frame.]\n[The same frame.] Leia: Good work.\n[In the real world, Cueball sits on top of a bed with a blanket draped over his lap. Megan stands next to the bed.] Cueball: I'm feeling better today. Megan: That's great!\nPanel heading: A few months later... [Cueball and White Hat walking past each other. Cueball is wearing a face mask; White Hat isn't but coughs into his elbow.] White Hat: Cough cough\n[The real Death Star drifts toward the planet.] Death Star voice: We have reached the rebel system, Lord Vader.\n[View from inside the real Death Star.] Vader: Now they shall witness the firepower of this fully armed and oper\u2014\n[Leia, Ponytail, and Cueball in frame.] Leia: Thermal exhaust port!! Ponytail: Aaa Cueball: Aaa\n[An equally large torrent of ships stream from the planet to the real Death Star.] Death Star voice: What. Various ships: aA AAAAAAA aaa aAAAAAAA aaa AAAAAA aaa aAAAAA\n[The Death Star explodes, leaving debris trailing away.]\n[In the real world, White Hat and Cueball continue to walk past each other.] Cueball: \u266b \u266b\n"}
{"id":2426,"title":"Animal Songs","image_title":"Animal Songs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2426","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/animal_songs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2426:_Animal_Songs","transcript":"[A man with a bit of hair, later shown to represent Dr. Fauci, is putting on a white lab coat as he walks past his fish tank. The tank, on a small table, has one small fish in it, looking at him. Inside the tank there is also a seaweed-like plant and a small castle and an even smaller pyramid. Seven music notes, 4 double and 3 single notes, are scattered about Fauci's speech which is written with lower case letters (normal capitalization) as opposed to normal xkcd text with all small caps.] Dr. Fauci: \u266b Putting on my doctor coat \u266b\n[Dr. Fauci is buttoning the coat. He is now standing to the right of the fish tank. The fish has turned towards him and has moved to the end of the tank near him. He still sings with the same letter type and six music notes, 3 double and 3 single notes, are scattered around the text.] Dr. Fauci: \u266b It's the coat I wear \u266b\n[Dr. Fauci is back to the left of the fish tank, looking at himself in a mirror, and touching his face. There is a small shelf with three items on the wall beneath the mirror. The fish has swam back to its original position turned towards him. He is still singing, with one double and one triple note on either side of his lyrics. An off-panel voice addresses him from the right, and he replies. These exchanges are written in normal xkcd small caps style.] Dr. Fauci: \u266b so they know how good a doctor I am \u266b Off-panel voice: Dr. Fauci?  The press conference is in five. Dr. Fauci: Be right there!\n[Caption below the panel:] It's nice to think about how serious and important people probably also absentmindedly sing made-up songs to pets.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nJokes about professionals not being so professional in private have been presented before, for example in 2401: Conjunction and 1463: Altitude .\nDr. Anthony Fauci is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was largely responsible for informing the public in the United States on how to avoid spreading SARS-CoV-2 in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic . He was recently awarded a one million dollar prize for his recent work. This may be the press conference he is going to. The comic shows him singing a silly made-up song to his pet fish as he goes about his daily routine - a counterintuitively childlike (albeit delightful and relatable) habit for an authority figure who normally presents himself to the public in a professional and prosaic \"grown-up\" manner. Incidentally, this characterization of Dr. Fauci doesn't seem to be far from the truth: Fauci's daughter Jenny is quoted in the Washington Post as saying of her father: \"He's a goofball[...] He works hard and he does his thing, but he comes home and he's singing opera in the kitchen and dancing around.\"\nIn 231: Cat Proximity , it's presented as 'normal' for people to make inane statements and use baby talk near cats , but here, Dr. Fauci is singing to his fish. The title text explains that, as he is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he is forbidden from owning a pet cat, because petting the cat would be \"giving aid and comfort\" to an allergen, which is (a reference to) one definition of treason under the United States Constitution . The \u201callergen\u201d refers to the hypothetical cat\u2014some people are allergic to cats .\n[A man with a bit of hair, later shown to represent Dr. Fauci, is putting on a white lab coat as he walks past his fish tank. The tank, on a small table, has one small fish in it, looking at him. Inside the tank there is also a seaweed-like plant and a small castle and an even smaller pyramid. Seven music notes, 4 double and 3 single notes, are scattered about Fauci's speech which is written with lower case letters (normal capitalization) as opposed to normal xkcd text with all small caps.] Dr. Fauci: \u266b Putting on my doctor coat \u266b\n[Dr. Fauci is buttoning the coat. He is now standing to the right of the fish tank. The fish has turned towards him and has moved to the end of the tank near him. He still sings with the same letter type and six music notes, 3 double and 3 single notes, are scattered around the text.] Dr. Fauci: \u266b It's the coat I wear \u266b\n[Dr. Fauci is back to the left of the fish tank, looking at himself in a mirror, and touching his face. There is a small shelf with three items on the wall beneath the mirror. The fish has swam back to its original position turned towards him. He is still singing, with one double and one triple note on either side of his lyrics. An off-panel voice addresses him from the right, and he replies. These exchanges are written in normal xkcd small caps style.] Dr. Fauci: \u266b so they know how good a doctor I am \u266b Off-panel voice: Dr. Fauci?  The press conference is in five. Dr. Fauci: Be right there!\n[Caption below the panel:] It's nice to think about how serious and important people probably also absentmindedly sing made-up songs to pets.\n"}
{"id":2427,"title":"Perseverance Microphones","image_title":"Perseverance Microphones","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2427","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/perseverance_microphones.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2427:_Perseverance_Microphones","transcript":"[Megan is sitting in an office chair at a desk, typing on her laptop. The laptop is connected to an audio mixer box on the floor. The box has several buttons and indicators etc. Cueball is standing on the other side of the box, holding an electric guitar ready to play. The guitar is plugged into the box. From the box there is also a wire going to a small pedal on the floor. Cueball has one foot on top of this pedal.] Megan: Perseverance's microphones are active! Downlinking audio! Cueball: I'm ready with the looper pedal.\n[Caption below the panel:] The first Mars sample return\n","explanation":"This comic is a play on dual meanings of the word \"sample\". The day before this comic was published, NASA successfully landed a new rover, Perseverance , on Mars; part of its mission is to drill and scoop Martian rock and dust from the surface, store it in tubes, and leave them on the surface for collection by a future mission which will return them to Earth. If successful, this would be the \"first Mars sample return\" in history.\n\u201c Samples \u201d can also refer to short snippets of recorded sound used in music. Perseverance is the first Mars mission to land on Mars with microphones too, so it would be possible to use audio samples from those microphones musically, e.g. using a looper pedal , which lets a musician play short samples of music and then repeats them back live as if it were another musician. Using a loop pedal would make sense if the sample includes a tune that repeats throughout the song\u2014or that could repeat throughout the song. This is similar to 411: Techno .\nThe joke is that these audio samples, as opposed to rock samples, would be \"the first Mars sample return.\" Additionally, the comic might be a reference to Samples from Mars , a company that sells sampled audio from older instruments for digital music production.\nThe title text anthropomorphises the rover, suggesting that the drop to the surface was so frightening for it that it was screaming as it descends.\nThe period between entry into the Martian atmosphere and touchdown on its surface has been dubbed the \"Seven Minutes Of Terror\", mainly for the terror felt by the mission controllers on Earth, rather than the lander, as they are unable to make any useful corrections to a craft that is hundreds of millions of miles\/kilometres away. The round-trip communication delay significantly exceeds the whole of the passage through the thin atmosphere, so they have to rely on whatever pre-arranged autonomy they engineered and programmed into their craft beforehand, and hope they anticipated all eventualities .\nYou can view the landing here .\nThe landing was the topic of the next comic 2428: Mars Landing Video .\n[Megan is sitting in an office chair at a desk, typing on her laptop. The laptop is connected to an audio mixer box on the floor. The box has several buttons and indicators etc. Cueball is standing on the other side of the box, holding an electric guitar ready to play. The guitar is plugged into the box. From the box there is also a wire going to a small pedal on the floor. Cueball has one foot on top of this pedal.] Megan: Perseverance's microphones are active! Downlinking audio! Cueball: I'm ready with the looper pedal.\n[Caption below the panel:] The first Mars sample return\n"}
{"id":2428,"title":"Mars Landing Video","image_title":"Mars Landing Video","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2428","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mars_landing_video.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2428:_Mars_Landing_Video","transcript":"[Hairbun is standing, arms spread out,  on a podium in front of a lectern. There is a \"Crash\" on the top right of the panel with several lines around to indicate the position, and an off panel voice coming from there. As indicated in the caption below the voice is from Randall.] Hairbun: We're excited to share the first ever full-speed video of a Mars landing. Sound: Crash Randall (off-panel): Doesn't that mean it's also the worst ever full-speed video of a mars landing? Randall (off-panel):Do you expect that record to stand forever, or is NASA working on a worse one?\n[Caption below the comic]: NASA tried to ban me from their press briefings, but ironically their security was totally unprepared to deal with a skycrane.\n","explanation":"Three days before this comic was published, NASA successfully landed a new rover, Perseverance , on Mars. This was also the subject of the previous comic 2427: Perseverance Microphones .\nThis comic was published shortly before a NASA press briefing that showed, as mentioned in the comic, the first ever full-speed video of a Mars landing. This comic is set at that press briefing and was published shortly before NASA, either unaware of Randall's threat or recognizing that it was not serious, went ahead and hold the briefing in real life. \"Full-speed\" here means that the video was captured at a frame rate high enough that it looks continuous when played back, as opposed to low-frame-rate imagery that looks jerky when played back.\nThe comic plays on the fact that if there is only one of something in a set, that one thing is the most\/least in that set by lack of comparison. As there is only one full speed video of a Mars landing, that makes the video the best one as well as the worst one. Randall , who has often been banned from conferences , has apparently also been banned from NASA's press briefings. So he decided to crash the conference (literally, see below) solely to ask the question, \"Is this then not also the worst video ever\", flouting his ban and embarrassing NASA (a prior case of the latter is possibly why the former is currently active).\nHe follows up with the question of whether NASA is planning to make a worse Mars landing video, which is silly because people generally don't intend to make something worse. [ citation needed ] However, because this video is the worst full-speed video of a Martian landing by virtue of being the only full-speed video of a Martian landing, it is likely that if enough full-speed videos of Martian landings are made in the future, this video will not be the worst forever. Although this is merely a consequence of the fact that it is the only full-speed video of a Martian landing so far, the fact that it is technically true, as well as the way that Randall phrases it, makes it look embarrassing for NASA. The tendency of Randall (the character, not the real-life person) to make rude, embarrassing, and otherwise unwelcome comments is probably why he has been banned from NASA's press briefings, as well as all those conferences.\nJudging by the sound effects, Randall has chosen to literally crash his way through the roof, using a \"skycrane\" \u2014 a general term for aerial vehicles that can lower or raise objects similarly to standard cranes. Specifically, one of these was used to land the Perseverance rover three days before. On Earth one might use the Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane helicopter, while NASA used a custom-built skycrane delivery system for the Perseverance rover. Randall deems using a skycrane to crash a conference about a skycrane ironic, especially since NASA's security was totally unprepared to stop him from using this method - a method NASA developed - to crash the press-briefing.\nThe title text refers to the 11-minute communications delay (one-way; 23-minute delay round-trip) between Mars and Earth, due to the speed of light and the distance between the planets at the time of the rover's landing. The Perseverance mission control must wait this long before they can even begin to respond to anything that happens to the rover, which Randall here twists into an 11-minute period in which he can ask whatever questions he likes before NASA can respond. This would only make sense if the conference he was crashing was on Mars and they were waiting for his questions here on Earth, or vice versa and plays on the ambiguity of the expression \"Mars briefing\", which can mean both a briefing about Mars and a briefing taking place on Mars.\n[Hairbun is standing, arms spread out,  on a podium in front of a lectern. There is a \"Crash\" on the top right of the panel with several lines around to indicate the position, and an off panel voice coming from there. As indicated in the caption below the voice is from Randall.] Hairbun: We're excited to share the first ever full-speed video of a Mars landing. Sound: Crash Randall (off-panel): Doesn't that mean it's also the worst ever full-speed video of a mars landing? Randall (off-panel):Do you expect that record to stand forever, or is NASA working on a worse one?\n[Caption below the comic]: NASA tried to ban me from their press briefings, but ironically their security was totally unprepared to deal with a skycrane.\n"}
{"id":2429,"title":"Exposure Models","image_title":"Exposure Models","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2429","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/exposure_models.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2429:_Exposure_Models","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on his laptop as Megan walks in.] Cueball: I built another COVID exposure model to help me limit my risk.\n[Megan stands behind Cueball, who has turned in his chair to face her. He is leaning his arm on the back of the chair.] Megan: Any new insights? Cueball: Yeah: \"If you spend all day debugging models, you don't have close contact with a lot of people.\"\n[Cueball turns away from Megan to type on his laptop again. The back of his chair has disappeared.] Megan: Well, I guess it worked. Cueball: According to my meta-model, the end of the pandemic is only four more models away. Megan: So close!\n","explanation":"This is another comic in a series related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nCueball (or Randall ) created another COVID exposure model to help lower his risk of catching COVID-19 in the pandemic. Megan inquires about the model's result, to which Cueball admits that he's been sitting at his computer continuously debugging models, and draws the conclusion that debugging COVID-19 models lessens close contact with other people. This is similar to the premise of 1445: Efficiency and 1708: Dehydration , except with the situation reversed \u2014 where before, researching a situation made the situation worse, here Cueball's time \"wasted\" has actually benefited him.\nBy \"model,\" Randall likely means a manually crafted model, since he describes debugging it, but he may also mean the form of automatically generated software that is used in modern machine learning.\nCueball is too busy making models to figure out how to actually lower his risk other than sitting around repeating the work of others and improving his model-building skill. He has also created a meta-model, reporting the number of models Cueball has to create to wait the pandemic out. The fact that Megan refers to having to wait for the time that it would take Cueball to create four more models as \"so close\" implies that Cueball goes through models quickly, which makes sense because he spends all of his time working on new ones.\nIn the title text Randall mentions that he is dangerously close to making a spreadsheet about how many spreadsheets about coronavirus he has made cumulative over time. This would be a recursive graph, a recurring theme on xkcd.\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on his laptop as Megan walks in.] Cueball: I built another COVID exposure model to help me limit my risk.\n[Megan stands behind Cueball, who has turned in his chair to face her. He is leaning his arm on the back of the chair.] Megan: Any new insights? Cueball: Yeah: \"If you spend all day debugging models, you don't have close contact with a lot of people.\"\n[Cueball turns away from Megan to type on his laptop again. The back of his chair has disappeared.] Megan: Well, I guess it worked. Cueball: According to my meta-model, the end of the pandemic is only four more models away. Megan: So close!\n"}
{"id":2430,"title":"Post-Pandemic Hat","image_title":"Post-Pandemic Hat","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2430","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/post_pandemic_hat.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2430:_Post-Pandemic_Hat","transcript":"[A ballcap with an image of a webcam lens and a message reading \"Excuse me, my eyes are actually down here\" above a downward-facing arrow] [Caption below the panel]: Hat for post-pandemic socializing\n","explanation":"This is another comic in a series related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a significant shift from in-person to computer-mediated interactions for both recreational and professional activities. For many, the computer setup used for these interactions is a laptop with a webcam above the screen. As people have become accustomed to looking directly into the camera, i.e. above where the other people's faces are, to simulate eye contact for meetings, Randall implies that there will be issues returning to pre-COVID life. In response, he has designed a baseball cap with an image that resembles a laptop webcam that sits above the wearer's eyes and a message that humorously acknowledges that the reader is likely reverting to virtual meeting habits for in-person interactions and that reminds people that for in-person interactions, one must look the other person's face, not above it like there's a webcam there.\nThe cap in this strip likely references a tradition of novelty tee-shirts, intended to be worn by women, feature \"my eyes are up here!\" or similar words written across the chest, and an arrow pointing upwards. These shirts are designed to both tease and parody the tendency of heterosexual men to look at a woman's breasts, usually automatically and without conscious thought. The cap, as a result, compares the conditioned response of looking at a webcam with the instinctive response of looking at a woman's chest, both of which would result in failure to make eye contact during a conversation.\nActual shirt-based text (as in the Title Text) would represent where a video-conferencer is not staring at the screen-top camera to 'fake' eye contact on the other screen(s) but truly aimed at the image of the eyes. The view of such an 'honest' stare could look like a 'chest gaze'.\n1889: xkcd Phone 6 'solved' all these problems by putting a camera in the middle of the screen.\n[A ballcap with an image of a webcam lens and a message reading \"Excuse me, my eyes are actually down here\" above a downward-facing arrow] [Caption below the panel]: Hat for post-pandemic socializing\n"}
{"id":2431,"title":"Leap Year 2021","image_title":"Leap Year 2021","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2431","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/leap_year_2021.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2431:_Leap_Year_2021","transcript":"[Cueball checking his phone in a narrow panel.] Cueball: Can't believe it's already March. Black Hat (off-screen): Nah, it's February 29th.\n[Cueball has put his phone away and is standing next to Black Hat.] Cueball: It's not a leap year. Black Hat: I decided to make it one. Every year deserves to leap. Cueball: Can you do that? Black Hat: Can anyone stop me?\n[Zoom in on Cueball.] Cueball: I guess if you just encourage people to call March 1st \"February 29th\", they can go along with it if they want. Just a one-day renaming. Black Hat (off-screen): No, tomorrow will be March 1st.\n[Cueball standing to Black Hat, who is walking off screen to the right, with his finger raised.] Cueball: So you're causing calendar drift for future generations. Black Hat: If they didn't want to experience consequences, they shouldn't have decided to live in the future.\n","explanation":"Cueball , checking his phone, comments on how fast time goes, saying it is already March. (This comic was posted on March 1, 2021.) Black Hat overhears him and says that it's actually February 29.\nFebruary 29 exists in the Gregorian calendar and its predecessor, the Julian calendar , as a correction mechanism for the fact that one tropical year on Earth is not exactly 365 days long. It's closer to 365.2422, and to prevent the dates from precessing relative to the seasons, an extra day is added once every fourth year, also called a leap year. This is still not enough to completely match Earth's orbital period, and for that reason the Gregorian calendar changed the leap year rules to be as follows: Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. This makes the average year 365.2425 days long, which approximates the 365.2422 days in the tropical year.\nBlack Hat wants every year to have a February 29, for no clear reason. Cueball acknowledges that he could accomplish this, if he could convince enough people to go along with it. Calendar systems are all invented, and whatever date systems are commonly acknowledged become the \"correct\" date. Cueball initially considers the change minor, assuming that they would simply change March 1st to February 29th on non-leap years, which would merely rename a single day and skip \"March 1st\" by going directly from February 29th to March 2nd. Black Hat clarifies that he actually wants to add another day, and the day AFTER that will be March 1. This could still be a minor change, if March were changed to a 30 day month on non-leap years, but Black Hat apparently wants the changes to propagate throughout the year. This would result in a 366-day year, causing the months to drift out of alignment with the seasons over the course of years, needlessly complicating time-keeping. Black Hat is unconcerned with the effect this will have on the \"people of the future\", and, as in the past , people around him are much more concerned about the time problems he's creating than he is. This once happened in ancient Egypt, where the priests had leap years every three years instead of every four years, so ancient Egypt had to have no leap years for several decades afterwards in order to fix the calendar.\nIn the last frame, Black Hat states that if the those people cared about the problems he's causing, \"they shouldn't have decided to live in the future.\" Of course, it is at present impossible to choose the time period in which you live, [ citation needed ] yet Black Hat intends on penalizing them for it. Any number of positions could be proposed as a motive for his actions (for example, he may envy them for having the technology or benefits of the future, and wants to counteract that), but it is most likely that he is simply honing his sociopathic tendencies on a defenseless target.\nIn the title text, Cueball responds that this change would also cause issues for him, who is \"living in the present\", and he should not be forced to \"move into the future\". Alternatively, viewing the quote as a continuation of Black Hat's text at the end of the comic, he could mean that the effect of his new calendar is placed mostly on future people, and since he literally lives in the present and doesn't intend on travelling to the future, he can do what he wants without many repercussions. In this second interpretation, the phrase \"move now\" can be taken to have a double meaning: not only does Black Hat not intend to move presently, he also does not intend to move where the present currently is (i.e., move the \"now\" into the future).\n[Cueball checking his phone in a narrow panel.] Cueball: Can't believe it's already March. Black Hat (off-screen): Nah, it's February 29th.\n[Cueball has put his phone away and is standing next to Black Hat.] Cueball: It's not a leap year. Black Hat: I decided to make it one. Every year deserves to leap. Cueball: Can you do that? Black Hat: Can anyone stop me?\n[Zoom in on Cueball.] Cueball: I guess if you just encourage people to call March 1st \"February 29th\", they can go along with it if they want. Just a one-day renaming. Black Hat (off-screen): No, tomorrow will be March 1st.\n[Cueball standing to Black Hat, who is walking off screen to the right, with his finger raised.] Cueball: So you're causing calendar drift for future generations. Black Hat: If they didn't want to experience consequences, they shouldn't have decided to live in the future.\n"}
{"id":2432,"title":"Manage Your Preferences","image_title":"Manage Your Preferences","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2432","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/manage_your_preferences.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2432:_Manage_Your_Preferences","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk in front of his laptop computer. A black zigzag line points to the screen, and above this is shown what is displayed on Cueball's screen. This is shown as a black rectangle, with a white box, with black frame, overlaid over the top of the black section, extending half way above it. The text in this white box is in gray font. Inside the black rectangle are two gray rectangles, with white borders and black text. A small rectangle at the top has \"Manage your Preferences\" inside it, and a large rectangle below has 6 lines of text.] Agree to whatever Transport me to an immersive Myst-like game where I click confusingly-labeled toggle switches, only some of which work, perhaps never to find my way back to the page I wanted.\nThe title-text originally said \"Atrius\" instead of \"Atrus\". A few hours after the comic's release, this was changed.","explanation":"This comic illustrates the complex dialogues often employed by webpage or software designers to hide settings from the user. Many pages provide controls to set privacy-related preferences but make those settings opaque in an attempt to dissuade users from using them. The idea is that a user will become impatient by the confusing options and select the defaults, which provide the site or software with more access or information. This situation is compared to Myst , a 1990s puzzle video game.\nCompanies which collect or process personal information are required by privacy legislation to give their users the option to withhold personal information, although regulations vary depending on the region-specific laws. The operators of such services usually want to collect as much personal data as they can in order to target advertisements or sell their information to someone else, and wish to incentivize their users not to activate those features. One tactic that is frequently used to accomplish this goal is to provide the user an option which enables all the data collection, but to make the process of disabling the collection time-consuming or difficult. This type of action is generally illegal under the same privacy legislation, but regulation of it has been lax so many companies still try it.\n\"Atrus\" in the title text is the main non-player character in the Myst series. In the first game these people were imprisoned within books. Pages needed to be collected to complete the books, and it was incredibly hard to find a single page, involving extensive laborious navigation and exploration, and the finding and solving of hidden puzzles. In the Myst mythos, the books open portals to other worlds, a little like web hyperlinks. Some sites' privacy settings are similarly labyrinthine. For example, some sites will run scripts from a variety of providers but will only allow users to disable them one site at a time without an explanation of what each one does.\nThe black background possibly shows how many sites are providing tools to switch between light and dark backgrounds now. For a long time white backgrounds were the usual default style, and only people who understood esoteric browser configurations could redisplay many things with a black background - possibly to help with perceived eyestrain or power usage in certain displays. More recently, it is a fashionable setting for content providers to compose as a selectable option. It is out-of-place for Randall to show a black background, as many of his comics take place in technical computer systems that often have a black background anyway, as most computer terminals still do.\nSome browsers and websites do have actual games embedded within their various configuration interfaces. Chrome , for example, has the famous dinosaur game .\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk in front of his laptop computer. A black zigzag line points to the screen, and above this is shown what is displayed on Cueball's screen. This is shown as a black rectangle, with a white box, with black frame, overlaid over the top of the black section, extending half way above it. The text in this white box is in gray font. Inside the black rectangle are two gray rectangles, with white borders and black text. A small rectangle at the top has \"Manage your Preferences\" inside it, and a large rectangle below has 6 lines of text.] Agree to whatever Transport me to an immersive Myst-like game where I click confusingly-labeled toggle switches, only some of which work, perhaps never to find my way back to the page I wanted.\nThe title-text originally said \"Atrius\" instead of \"Atrus\". A few hours after the comic's release, this was changed."}
{"id":2433,"title":"Mars Rovers","image_title":"Mars Rovers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2433","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mars_rovers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2433:_Mars_Rovers","transcript":"[A scatter plot is shown with two labeled axis, each with 5 ticks and ending in an arrow. Two types of Mars rovers are drawn in the top left part, at the top tick and the next highest tick. Each rover type has a label with two names. A third smaller drone is drawn in the lower right part close to the third tick on the Y-axis, with a single name label. It has two arrows pointing up and down to question marks, and two small lines of either side of the rotor blades, indicate movement. Far to the right, about twice the length of the drawn X-axis from the origin of the chart, and at the height of the lowest tick on the Y-axis, is a third type of rover, also with a single name label. The entire chart also has a label:] Mars Rovers Y-Axis: Capabilities X-Axis: Cuteness Curiosity & Perseverance Spirit & Opportunity Ingenuity Sojourner\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall has made a scatter plot displaying 6 different Mars rovers on a cuteness versus capabilities chart. Only three rover pictures are shown in the main plot, as two of the four rovers are near identical to other rovers sent to Mars, and the last rover is displayed off the cuteness chart.\nHe finds the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to be very capable \/ useful, but not very cute. Spirit and Opportunity are cuter than the first two, but less capable.\nThe recently launched Perseverance rover contains a drone helicopter, Ingenuity , which Randall finds pretty cute, but is unsure how exactly to grade for capability. The error bars make Ingenuity look like it's bobbing up and down, as helicopters sometimes do. It's debatable if a flying drone can be considered a Mars Rover, since a rover is usually something that drives over a surface, but the anticipated flight plan for Ingenuity is to cover some distance (by air) and then land on the ground again.\nFinally, on the very right far off the cuteness chart is the Sojourner rover, launched in 1997. He considers this rover extremely cute, but ultimately not that capable. To indicate the extreme cuteness of Sojourner (previously mentioned in 1585: Similarities ), he has drawn it far outside the axis of the plot to indicate it falls off the chart.\nIn the title text, Randall is disappointed that there aren't many people who have modified their Roomba vacuums to look like (or act like?) the Sojourner rover. Roombas are a recurring theme on xkcd. Search results at the time of posting are mainly reports mentioning the iRobot company, makers of the Roomba line, since one of its founders worked on the Sojourner rover.\nThe end of the title text, \"be the change,\" is a truncated form of the expression \"be the change you want to see in the world\"; basically, if there's something you want to see happen, be the one who makes it happen. This implies that Randall will be modifying his Roomba to look\/act like Sojourner .\n[A scatter plot is shown with two labeled axis, each with 5 ticks and ending in an arrow. Two types of Mars rovers are drawn in the top left part, at the top tick and the next highest tick. Each rover type has a label with two names. A third smaller drone is drawn in the lower right part close to the third tick on the Y-axis, with a single name label. It has two arrows pointing up and down to question marks, and two small lines of either side of the rotor blades, indicate movement. Far to the right, about twice the length of the drawn X-axis from the origin of the chart, and at the height of the lowest tick on the Y-axis, is a third type of rover, also with a single name label. The entire chart also has a label:] Mars Rovers Y-Axis: Capabilities X-Axis: Cuteness Curiosity & Perseverance Spirit & Opportunity Ingenuity Sojourner\n"}
{"id":2434,"title":"Vaccine Guidance","image_title":"Vaccine Guidance","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2434","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vaccine_guidance.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2434:_Vaccine_Guidance","transcript":"[Megan's face is seen at the bottom of the panel with the CDC-logo slightly above her and to the left; it is a black rectangle with the letters in white, and with a white jiggly line to the left of the first C.] Megan: Our new guidance: Fully vaccinated people can gather privately with no masks or distancing, and can visit with unvaccinated low-risk people in one household. Megan: Any questions? Logo: CDC\n[Blondie, Hairy and Megan are seen at the bottom of the panel in three separate rectangular panels with Blondie and Hairy's panels at the left above one another. Those panels are almost square and also smaller than Megan's, more rectangular panel to the right of theirs. This panel is centered at the middle of those two panels to the left, and the logo is still visible. It is also shown that Megan is standing behind a lectern. Blondie, above Hairy, is the one asking questions to Megan.] Blondie: If my neighbors and I are all vaccinated, can I visit them unmasked and drink milk straight from the jug in their fridge? Megan: I...You can visit, yes. Blondie: And the jug thing? Megan: ...Next question? Logo: CDC\n[In a frame-less panel there are two panels at the bottom, with Science Girl in the largest to the left and Megan in the smaller to the right, with the logo still visible, but unreadable still the lectern is shown.] Science Girl: I'm fully vaccinated. Can I ride my bike in my sister-in-law's house? Megan: In her house? Science Girl: Like, down the stairs. Megan: I guess? You should at least wear a helmet. Science Girl: Even if she's not high-risk? Megan: Any other questions?\n[White Hat is in a rectangular box at the bottom of the panel. Megan is replying from off-panel to the right from a star burst at the edge of the panel. At the bottom there is a message in a black rectangle with white text.] White Hat: I'm two weeks past my second dose. White Hat: Can I get a horse? Megan: Thank you all for coming. White Hat: What if I wear a mask? White Hat: What if the horse does? Message: Meeting ended by host.\n","explanation":"This is another comic in a series related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nOn the day this comic was published, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new guidelines relating to COVID-19, lifting many of the existing restrictions for people who have been fully vaccinated for two weeks. Megan , speaking as a CDC spokesperson, is introducing these new guidelines in a video press conference. However, the other participants in the press conference quickly start asking about actions that have little or nothing to do with the vaccine, some of which would be dangerous whether COVID-19 was a risk or not, similarly to 2238: Flu Shot . It's possible that they do not remember life before the pandemic very well, as in 2391: Life Before the Pandemic .\nBlondie asks whether it would be okay to visit neighbors and drink milk directly from the carton. In most Western cultures, drinking directly from a container that could be shared with others (such as a milk carton) is considered unsafe, due to the risk of diseases being transmitted, and generally gross, as saliva and other biological material is passed that way. While these risks are arguably worse during the pandemic, it was unacceptable before the pandemic and will presumably be so afterward.\nScience Girl asks whether it would be okay to ride a bike down the stairs of a family member's house, which has a severe risk of injury.\nWhite Hat follows up asking whether he can get a horse, and whether it would help for him and\/or the horse to wear masks. This has basically no relation to anything else that was said. In response, Megan gives up trying to answer the increasingly irrelevant questions and ends the call.\nIn the title text, Randall mentions that when he is fully vaccinated, he will be able to write messages in ALL CAPS . This is generally used to indicate shouting, an activity which could spread COVID-19 and cause infection if done in person.\n[Megan's face is seen at the bottom of the panel with the CDC-logo slightly above her and to the left; it is a black rectangle with the letters in white, and with a white jiggly line to the left of the first C.] Megan: Our new guidance: Fully vaccinated people can gather privately with no masks or distancing, and can visit with unvaccinated low-risk people in one household. Megan: Any questions? Logo: CDC\n[Blondie, Hairy and Megan are seen at the bottom of the panel in three separate rectangular panels with Blondie and Hairy's panels at the left above one another. Those panels are almost square and also smaller than Megan's, more rectangular panel to the right of theirs. This panel is centered at the middle of those two panels to the left, and the logo is still visible. It is also shown that Megan is standing behind a lectern. Blondie, above Hairy, is the one asking questions to Megan.] Blondie: If my neighbors and I are all vaccinated, can I visit them unmasked and drink milk straight from the jug in their fridge? Megan: I...You can visit, yes. Blondie: And the jug thing? Megan: ...Next question? Logo: CDC\n[In a frame-less panel there are two panels at the bottom, with Science Girl in the largest to the left and Megan in the smaller to the right, with the logo still visible, but unreadable still the lectern is shown.] Science Girl: I'm fully vaccinated. Can I ride my bike in my sister-in-law's house? Megan: In her house? Science Girl: Like, down the stairs. Megan: I guess? You should at least wear a helmet. Science Girl: Even if she's not high-risk? Megan: Any other questions?\n[White Hat is in a rectangular box at the bottom of the panel. Megan is replying from off-panel to the right from a star burst at the edge of the panel. At the bottom there is a message in a black rectangle with white text.] White Hat: I'm two weeks past my second dose. White Hat: Can I get a horse? Megan: Thank you all for coming. White Hat: What if I wear a mask? White Hat: What if the horse does? Message: Meeting ended by host.\n"}
{"id":2435,"title":"Geothmetic Meandian","image_title":"Geothmetic Meandian","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2435","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geothmetic_meandian.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2435:_Geothmetic_Meandian","transcript":"F(x1,x2,...xn)=({x1+x2+...+xn\/n [bracket: arithmetic mean]},{nx,x2...xn, [bracket: geometric mean]} {x n+1\/2 [bracket: median]})\nGmdn(x1,x2,...xn)={F(F(F(...F(x1,x2,...xn)...)))[bracket: geothmetic meandian]}\nGmdn(1,1,2,3,5) [equals about sign] 2.089\nCaption: Stats tip: If you aren't sure whether to use the mean, median, or geometric mean, just calculate all three, then repeat until it converges\nGeothm means \"counting earths\" (From Ancient Greek \u03b3\u03b5\u03c9- (ge\u014d-), combining form of \u03b3\u1fc6 (g\u00ea, \u201cearth\u201d) and \u1f00\u03c1\u03b9\u03b8\u03bc\u03cc\u03c2 arithmos, 'counting').  Geothmetic means \"art of Geothming\" based on the etymology of Arithmetic (from Ancient Greek \u1f00\u03c1\u03b9\u03b8\u03bc\u03b7\u03c4\u03b9\u03ba\u03ae (\u03c4\u03ad\u03c7\u03bd\u03b7) (arithm\u0113tik\u1e17 (t\u00e9khn\u0113), \u201c(art of) counting\u201d).  This is an exciting new terminology that is eminently suitable for modern cosmology & high energy physics - particularly when doing math on the multiverse.  However, it is unlikely this etymology is related to the term \"geothmetic meandian\" as coined by Randall, as it can be more simply explained as a portmanteau of the three averages in its construction: geo metric mean, ari thmetic mean , and me dian .\nThe following Python code (inefficiently) implements the above algorithm:\nHere is a slightly more efficient version of the Python code:\nAnd here is an implementation of the Gmdn function in R:\n","explanation":"There are a number of different ways to identify the \" average \" value of a series of values, the most common unweighted methods being the median (take the central value from the ordered list of values if there are an odd number - or the value half-way between the two that straddle the divide between two halves if there are an even number) and the arithmetic mean (add all the numbers up, divide by the number of numbers). The geometric mean is less well-known but works similarly to the arithmetic mean. The geometric mean of n positive numbers is the n th root of the product of those numbers. If all of the numbers in a sequence are identical, then its arithmetic mean, geometric mean and median will be identical, since they would all be equal to the common value of the terms of the sequence. However, if the sequence is not constant, then the arithmetic mean will be greater than the geometric mean , and the median may be different than either of those means.\nThe geometric mean, arithmetic mean and harmonic mean (not shown) are collectively known as the Pythagorean means , as specific modes of a greater and more generalized mean formula that extends arbitrarily to various other possible nuances of mean-value rationisations (cubic, etc.).\nOutliers and internal biases within the original sample can make boiling down a set of values into a single 'average' sometimes overly biased by flaws in the data, with your choice of which method to use perhaps resulting in a value that is misleading, exaggerating or suppressing the significance of any blips.\nIn this depiction, the three named methods of averaging are embedded within a single function that produces a sequence of three values - one output for each of the methods. Being a series of values, Randall suggests that this is ideally suited to being itself subjected to the comparative 'averaging' method. Not just once, but as many times as it takes to narrow down to a sequence of three values that are very close to one another.\nIt can be shown that the xkcd value of 2.089 for GMDN(1,1,2,3,5) is validated:\nThe function GMDN in the comic is properly defined in the second row since F acts on a vector to produce another three vector, however GMDN in the last line is shown to produce a single real number rather than a vector and is thus missing a final operation of returning a single component. Each row in this table shows the set Fn(..) composed of the average, geomean and median computed on the previous row, with the sequence {1,1,2,3,5} as the initial F0. While GMDN is not differentiable, due to the median, this can be interpreted as somewhat similar to a heat equation which approaches equilibrium through averaging. Interestingly, the maximum value alternates between the average and the median (highlighted in bold in the table), while the minimum value alternates between the geomean and the median. This holds for many inputs thus providing the basis for a possible proof-by-induction of convergence on the range (see discussions).\nThe comment in the title text about suggests that this will save you the trouble of committing to the 'wrong' analysis as it gradually shaves down any 'outlier average' that is unduly affected by anomalies in the original inputs. It is a method without any danger of divergence of values, since all three averaging methods stay within the interval covering the input values (and two of them will stay strictly within that interval).\nThe title text may also be a sly reference to an actual mathematical theorem, namely that if one performs this procedure only using the arithmetic mean and the harmonic mean, the result will converge to the geometric mean. Randall suggests that the (non-Pythagorean) median, which does not have such good mathematical properties with relation to convergence, is, in fact, the secret sauce in his definition.\nThe question of being unsure of which mean to use is especially relevant for the arithmetic and harmonic means in following example.\nCueball and Megan decide to complete the exchange between themselves in order to save the Bid-ask spread of the Exchange rate which is the cost the bank imposes on Cueball and Megan for its service as a Market maker .\nIn one direction (\u20ac\/$), Cueball is using the arithmetic mean but Megan is using the harmonic mean while in the other direction ($\/\u20ac), Megan is using the arithmetic mean but Cueball is using the harmonic mean. This creates two new exchange rates which are closer than the orginal rates, but the new rates are still different for each other. Megan and Cueball can then iterate this process and the rates will converge to the geometric mean of the original rates, namely:\nThere does exist an arithmetic-geometric mean , which is defined identically to this except with the arithmetic and geometric means, and sees some use in calculus.  In some ways it's also philosophically similar to the truncated mean (extremities of the value range, e.g. the highest and lowest 10%s, are ignored as not acceptable and not counted) or Winsorized mean (instead of ignored, the values are readjusted to be the chosen floor\/ceiling values that they lie beyond, to still effectively be counted as \"edge\" conditions), only with a strange dilution-and-compromise method rather than one where quantities can be culled or neutered just for being unexpectedly different from most of the other data.\nThe input sequence of numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5) chosen by Randall is also the opening of the Fibonacci sequence .  This may have been selected because the Fibonacci sequence also has a convergent property: the ratio of two adjacent numbers in the sequence approaches the golden ratio as the length of the sequence approaches infinity.\nHere is a table of averages classified by the various methods referenced:\nF(x1,x2,...xn)=({x1+x2+...+xn\/n [bracket: arithmetic mean]},{nx,x2...xn, [bracket: geometric mean]} {x n+1\/2 [bracket: median]})\nGmdn(x1,x2,...xn)={F(F(F(...F(x1,x2,...xn)...)))[bracket: geothmetic meandian]}\nGmdn(1,1,2,3,5) [equals about sign] 2.089\nCaption: Stats tip: If you aren't sure whether to use the mean, median, or geometric mean, just calculate all three, then repeat until it converges\nGeothm means \"counting earths\" (From Ancient Greek \u03b3\u03b5\u03c9- (ge\u014d-), combining form of \u03b3\u1fc6 (g\u00ea, \u201cearth\u201d) and \u1f00\u03c1\u03b9\u03b8\u03bc\u03cc\u03c2 arithmos, 'counting').  Geothmetic means \"art of Geothming\" based on the etymology of Arithmetic (from Ancient Greek \u1f00\u03c1\u03b9\u03b8\u03bc\u03b7\u03c4\u03b9\u03ba\u03ae (\u03c4\u03ad\u03c7\u03bd\u03b7) (arithm\u0113tik\u1e17 (t\u00e9khn\u0113), \u201c(art of) counting\u201d).  This is an exciting new terminology that is eminently suitable for modern cosmology & high energy physics - particularly when doing math on the multiverse.  However, it is unlikely this etymology is related to the term \"geothmetic meandian\" as coined by Randall, as it can be more simply explained as a portmanteau of the three averages in its construction: geo metric mean, ari thmetic mean , and me dian .\nThe following Python code (inefficiently) implements the above algorithm:\nHere is a slightly more efficient version of the Python code:\nAnd here is an implementation of the Gmdn function in R:\n"}
{"id":2436,"title":"Circles","image_title":"Circles","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2436","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/circles.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2436:_Circles","transcript":"[Five small circles, looped together in the style of the Olympics logo is drawn in the center. On the left, a larger circle surrounds two of the prior ones, incidentally overlapping a third circle. A larger circle surrounds four of the small circles, thus also the previous mentioned circle, cutting over the last of the five circles. Finally a very large circle fully contains all the other circles. The three larger circles have labels, with the small ones label above, and with a small clarifying line from the label towards the top of this circle. The middle sized circle has the label standing on a break in the circle at it's bottom, and the largest circle has the label just beneath it. From smallest to largest of the circles the labels are:] Mastercard Audi Olympics\n","explanation":"The comic depicts five overlapping circles, themselves encircled by circles of various sizes which enclose two, four, or all five of the smaller overlapping circles, as in an Euler diagram . Several well-known logos consist of overlapping circles, and the larger circles reference these logos. These are: Mastercard , which consists of two side-by-side overlapping circles (technically, disks, since they're filled in); Audi , which is four side-by-side overlapping circles, and the Olympic rings , which are five topologically linked rings in a \"W\" shaped pattern.\nTo indicate that the Mastercard logo comprises two overlapping circles, the diagram draws a larger circle around the first two circles, inscribed with a label. Other than its size and the label, this new circle is identical to the five smaller circles.\nSimilarly, to indicate that the Audi logo comprises four overlapping circles, the diagram again provides a larger circle, this time encompassing the first four smaller circles, inscribed with a label. The \"Audi\" circle completely encloses the \"Mastercard\" circle, indicating that the four circles of the \"Audi\" logo include the two circles of the \"Mastercard\" logo.\nFinally, an even larger circle, enclosing all of the other circles, indicates that the Olympic Rings use all five original circles.\nThe comic was released only about four months before the postponed 2020 Summer Olympics was scheduled to start on 23 July 2021. It was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic , which has spawned a series of comics on xkcd.\nThe title text is a textual representation of the Mastercard name as a Venn diagram containing the letters in the words \"master\" and \"card\" \u2014 A and R are shared by both, while MSTE and CD are unique to their respective elements.\n[Five small circles, looped together in the style of the Olympics logo is drawn in the center. On the left, a larger circle surrounds two of the prior ones, incidentally overlapping a third circle. A larger circle surrounds four of the small circles, thus also the previous mentioned circle, cutting over the last of the five circles. Finally a very large circle fully contains all the other circles. The three larger circles have labels, with the small ones label above, and with a small clarifying line from the label towards the top of this circle. The middle sized circle has the label standing on a break in the circle at it's bottom, and the largest circle has the label just beneath it. From smallest to largest of the circles the labels are:] Mastercard Audi Olympics\n"}
{"id":2437,"title":"Post-Vaccine Party","image_title":"Post-Vaccine Party","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2437","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/post_vaccine_party.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2437:_Post-Vaccine_Party","transcript":"[The comic consists of four underlined headings, two by two grid, with three or four lines of text beneath each. Almost all of the original lines of text have been fully or partially crossed out (marked with <del> below), and five new items have been added (marked with <ins> below), plus some brackets and one arrow. Even one of the added items has been modified.] Drinks Soda Wine Beer Cocktails Small cups of ice water\nFood Pizza Nachos Various snacks Three M&Ms and a saltine per person\nEntertainment Music (ambient) Karaoke Big screen TV showing sports Bob Ross\nActivities Board games 52-card pickup [The \"52\" is then stricken out and replaced with \"3\"] Video Games Ping ( Pong ) [A red arrow points from \"Video Games\" to \"(Pong)\"] Good conversation\n[Caption below the panel:] We're planning our first post-vaccine party, but we want to start slow.\n","explanation":"This is another comic in a series related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nAs more and more people are getting vaccinated against COVID-19, and as the CDC has released guidelines suggesting vaccinated people can start gathering in larger groups, there is increasing excitement about the possibility to resume get-togethers, and have a party. However, being very cautious, Randall is cutting down the scope for his first \"post-pandemic\" party from that of a normal party. Not all of the scope reductions make sense. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text mentions that in the end, despite Randall's efforts, even the incredibly mild disruption of an M&M's falling into a cup of water caused the party-goers to panic and flee, much as Cueball and Ponytail did in a similar situation .\n[The comic consists of four underlined headings, two by two grid, with three or four lines of text beneath each. Almost all of the original lines of text have been fully or partially crossed out (marked with <del> below), and five new items have been added (marked with <ins> below), plus some brackets and one arrow. Even one of the added items has been modified.] Drinks Soda Wine Beer Cocktails Small cups of ice water\nFood Pizza Nachos Various snacks Three M&Ms and a saltine per person\nEntertainment Music (ambient) Karaoke Big screen TV showing sports Bob Ross\nActivities Board games 52-card pickup [The \"52\" is then stricken out and replaced with \"3\"] Video Games Ping ( Pong ) [A red arrow points from \"Video Games\" to \"(Pong)\"] Good conversation\n[Caption below the panel:] We're planning our first post-vaccine party, but we want to start slow.\n"}
{"id":2438,"title":"Siri","image_title":"Siri","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2438","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/siri.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2438:_Siri","transcript":"[Science Girl is holding her phone up in one hand looking at the screen. A starburst from the phone indicates the voice coming from the phone] Phone: Your timer is set. Science Girl: Thanks\n[The picture broadens and shows that Science Girl, with the phone now held down, is standing in front of a desk, where Cueball, facing her, is sitting in an office chair using a laptop.] Science Girl: Is Siri alive? Cueball: No.\n[Back to only showing Science Girl, her phone and arm still held down at her side.] Science Girl: Oh, ok.\n[Same setting but Science Girl has raised her arm with the phone, looking at it again.] Science Girl: How did she die?\n","explanation":"Science Girl thanks Siri on her smartphone for setting an alarm. In the next panel, she asks Cueball , \"Is Siri alive?\", since AI assistants can seem to be almost human on a very superficial level. Cueball answers \"No,\" since Siri is entirely software, and we don't generally attribute life to computer programs (the closest might be computer viruses , since they replicate).\nScience Girl then asks \"How did she die?\" She may have already been treating Siri as alive because she could talk to 'her,' and treats this lack-of-life as a new state of being. So rather than interpreting the answer in a philosophical sense of whether Siri is something that ever can be alive, which might normally have been presupposed, she treats it as meaning that Siri had (just) expired. This may require a credulous certainty of 'facts' taken literally - it is not clear what could then be understood if Siri were 'proven' to be alive and talking again, afterwards.\nOr perhaps she thinks that the software Siri is a software embodiment of an actual person (or possibly ghost of actual person), and Cueball was talking about the original person. We don't currently have the technology to upload a person's personality into a computer , [ citation needed ] but it's a popular science fiction trope and many scientists think we will eventually be able to do this .\nAnother explanation could be that she associates everything into two categories, 'alive' and 'dead', without considering any intermediate or altogether separate categories, such as 'was never alive' or 'was programmed by people who are\/were alive, but is not itself alive'. This false dichotomy causes Science Girl to misinterpret Cueball's answer of Siri not being alive as \"Siri is dead.\"\nFinally, she could have actually been asking about Susan Bennett , the voice actress that recorded the base sounds for the synthesizer, perhaps thinking she recorded the full line rather than just base sounds for the software to synthesize. Assuming Science Girl meant the default voice, Bennett is very much alive, and Science Girl simply asked her question wrongly.\nThe title text explains that, contrary to the above explanations, Siri actually died in a battle with Alexa , another personal assistant, hinging on their abilities to set multiple timers. Siri can set multiple timers, but this feature must be enabled via shortcuts. Alexa's ability to do so is much simpler and more user friendly. Of the many actions that these programs are able to perform, this is probably one of the more trivial, so it's not very comprehensible, at least to those not themselves living as digital assistants, that it would be the chosen method for a duel to the death. One possible explanation is that Alexa itself led the battle to that arena, where she knew she could win thanks to her superiority.\n[Science Girl is holding her phone up in one hand looking at the screen. A starburst from the phone indicates the voice coming from the phone] Phone: Your timer is set. Science Girl: Thanks\n[The picture broadens and shows that Science Girl, with the phone now held down, is standing in front of a desk, where Cueball, facing her, is sitting in an office chair using a laptop.] Science Girl: Is Siri alive? Cueball: No.\n[Back to only showing Science Girl, her phone and arm still held down at her side.] Science Girl: Oh, ok.\n[Same setting but Science Girl has raised her arm with the phone, looking at it again.] Science Girl: How did she die?\n"}
{"id":2439,"title":"Solar System Cartogram","image_title":"Solar System Cartogram","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2439","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/solar_system_cartogram.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2439:_Solar_System_Cartogram","transcript":"[Above a chart are two paragraphs with explanation:] Most solar system diagrams are misleading. This chart offers a more accurate view by showing the planets sized by population.\n[Below the explanation is a list of the eight planets in the solar system. They are shown in order with labels. All but Earth show up only as dots. Earth is large and clearly drawn, with a view approximately centered on Indonesia. The spacing between the dots is equal, and the same distance as from those closest dots to Earth to Earths surface. Earth's label floats below it, while the other planets' labels connect to their respective dots with lines, with text either above or below the line of planets:] Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall has made a cartogram showing the planets in the solar system . Cartograms are a type of map in which geographic area is displayed proportionately to some secondary characteristic - in this case, population. From the title text it is clear that the population in question is human (persons) (but even if all life forms where counted it it wouldn't matter, since the only confirmed life in the Solar System is on Earth). Thus the other planets have a population of 0 and are shown as nothing more than dots.\nThis comic is a joke about cartograms, which are used, for instance, to show electoral representation. A standard American electoral map is very misleading. Though the split between the two major parties, Democrats and Republicans, is about 50-50, most of the area of the U.S. map is shown in the color associated with the Republican Party, red. That's because many Democrats live in densely packed districts occupying little land area, while many Republicans live in rural districts with large land area but few people. This has led to the rise of electoral cartograms in which district areas are shown in proportion to population, correcting the misimpression that most of America is conservative.\nSolar system diagrams are likely also to be misleading. Illustrators are overwhelmingly forced to use a far more scaled-down spacing between planets, compared to their scaled sizes, even if they can (or care to) maintain consistency in the relative distances and\/or radii on linear scales. (The huge factors of difference involved instead may lend themselves to being physically modeled to better give some sense of the spacing and sizing differences.) Here, Randall has intentionally applied the wrong solution to the problem.\nInterestingly, the side of the Earth shown includes China and India, two countries that alone account for over a quarter of all humans on Earth.\nThe title text states that even though Randall counts every active Mars rover as a person (for sentimental reasons), they are almost nothing compared to Earth's roughly 7,900,000,000 persons. Mars therefore is still nothing more than a dot compared to the Earth. There are a total of five rovers at the time of the comic's publication; in chronological order, they are Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. Only the latter two were functional at the time of the comic's publication, giving Mars a rover population of two. A third rover, China's Tianwen-1 , landed on Mars on 2021 May 14, making for an all-time high of three active rovers.\nMars rovers are a recurring theme on xkcd and only a few weeks earlier, a comic named 2433: Mars Rovers was released. This is the fourth comic this year to reference Mars Rovers.\n[Above a chart are two paragraphs with explanation:] Most solar system diagrams are misleading. This chart offers a more accurate view by showing the planets sized by population.\n[Below the explanation is a list of the eight planets in the solar system. They are shown in order with labels. All but Earth show up only as dots. Earth is large and clearly drawn, with a view approximately centered on Indonesia. The spacing between the dots is equal, and the same distance as from those closest dots to Earth to Earths surface. Earth's label floats below it, while the other planets' labels connect to their respective dots with lines, with text either above or below the line of planets:] Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune\n"}
{"id":2440,"title":"Epistemic Uncertainty","image_title":"Epistemic Uncertainty","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2440","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/epistemic_uncertainty.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2440:_Epistemic_Uncertainty","transcript":"[Two panels are shown with labels above them.] Regular Uncertainty Epistemic Uncertainty\n[In both panels Megan stands in front of a data presentation on a slide behind her. She is pointing at the slide with a stick.]\n[In the left panel titled 'Regular Uncertainty'. Megan standing in front of a presentation of a graph showing, from top to bottom, the number 74%, a horizontal line with a small black diamond near the middle representing an average with error bars, and a line of dots representing data in a horizontal scatter plot.] Megan: Our study found the drug was 74% effective, with a confidence interval from 63% to 81%. 74%\n[In the right panel titled 'Epistemic Uncertainty'. Megan stands in front of a presentation of data with a silhouette of a man with a hat labelled with a white question mark. Above this are three guesses of the \"real\" result and its relation to the study result.] Megan: Our study found the drug to be 74% effective. Megan: However, there is a 1 in 4 chance that our study was modified by George the Data Tamperer, whose whims are unpredictable. 73 -> 74?? 47 -> 74?? 0 -> 74?? ?\n","explanation":"This comic is a comparison of two different research studies. One of these studies shows \"regular uncertainty\". One of these studies shows \"epistemic uncertainty.\" In both panels, the core data is the same. The drug in question is 74% effective. However, the uncertainty qualities are different. The first is straightforward. The confidence interval (the error bars on the chart) is from 63 to 81%. The second panel includes the additional wrinkle of \"George the Data Tamperer, whose whims are unpredictable.\"\nIn statistics, a confidence interval is an estimate which provides a range of values. These values are based on the statistical probability that the data collected represents a certain result. The confidence interval is a reflection on the uncertainty imposed by the limits of study sample sizes. No study will ever have an infinite data set. [ citation needed ] As a result, it is possible for different studies to give slightly different results.  Averaging the results of multiple studies can give a result that is probably more accurate. The result given may still be skewed. A small skew is more probable than a large one, though. For example, if a drug was 80% effective it would be possible for several small studies to show a spread of different results with an average of 74% effectiveness. If the drug was 99% effective it would still be possible to randomly end up with the same data. However, this would be highly unlikely. This gives us a spread of \"likely\" predictions. Predictions outside a certain interval are considered too unlikely to be realistic.\nGeorge the Tamperer and Evangeline the Adulterator (from the title text) are analogous to the characters from Alice and Bob cryptography thought experiments. In the most basic examples, Alice and Bob are communicating. A third party, Eve the Eavesdropper, is spying on them. Both George and Evangeline have the ability to alter the study's results. George and Evangeline add uncertainty to the final data product. Specifically, they add epistemic uncertainty.\nEpistemology \u2013 unlike epidemiology \u2013 is the branch of philosophy related to knowledge. Thus epistemic uncertainty is the ultimate impossibility to be sure that what we know is accurate. We are not unsure what is accurate beause of failures in measurement. We are unsure what is accurate because of the intrinsic limits of knowledge. It seems that the \"epistemic uncertainty\" data has a 25% chance of data tampering by George. In  the previous study, the data is known but its reflection of the general case is uncertain to an extent. In contrast, in this study even the knowledge of whether any single data point is correct is uncertain. Thus, their data has a 25% chance of being incorrect. There is no possible statement about how incorrect it may be.\nThe title text mentions an individual called \"Evangeline the Adulterator.\" She adulterates their drug doses. If this happened, the researchers would not even be sure the patients received the dosages (or exacting medicines\/placebos) as prescribed. The study methodology itself would be in doubt.\n[Two panels are shown with labels above them.] Regular Uncertainty Epistemic Uncertainty\n[In both panels Megan stands in front of a data presentation on a slide behind her. She is pointing at the slide with a stick.]\n[In the left panel titled 'Regular Uncertainty'. Megan standing in front of a presentation of a graph showing, from top to bottom, the number 74%, a horizontal line with a small black diamond near the middle representing an average with error bars, and a line of dots representing data in a horizontal scatter plot.] Megan: Our study found the drug was 74% effective, with a confidence interval from 63% to 81%. 74%\n[In the right panel titled 'Epistemic Uncertainty'. Megan stands in front of a presentation of data with a silhouette of a man with a hat labelled with a white question mark. Above this are three guesses of the \"real\" result and its relation to the study result.] Megan: Our study found the drug to be 74% effective. Megan: However, there is a 1 in 4 chance that our study was modified by George the Data Tamperer, whose whims are unpredictable. 73 -> 74?? 47 -> 74?? 0 -> 74?? ?\n"}
{"id":2441,"title":"IMDb Vaccines","image_title":"IMDb Vaccines","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2441","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/imdb_vaccines.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2441:_IMDb_Vaccines","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on a laptop. There is a large thought bubble of his thoughts above his head, and his typing on the laptop makes sounds.] Cueball's thoughts: For the throne room scene, I think it's all three until the Emperor dies, then Vader only. It can't be Luke only, since he's visiting Vader, who is clearly at elevated respiratory risk. Plus, he removes Vader's mask! Keyboard: Type type.\n[Caption below the panel]: My Hobby: Editing IMDb to note the minimum set of people who need to be vaccinated in each scene for it to pass muster under current CDC guidance.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis is another entry in the My Hobby series. Cueball is evaluating movies on IMDb (the Internet Movie Database ), based on how many people would need to be vaccinated for COVID-19 , in order for them to follow the CDC's most recent guidelines. The guidelines tell how fully vaccinated people should act ( at time of posting ). The evaluation assumes that the COVID-19 pandemic spread to the universes where the movies take place by the time at which they take place. This is part of a continuing pattern of comics . In these comics Randall applies COVID-19 safety standards to pre- or post-COVID situations.\nAt the moment, Cueball is viewing the final confrontation between Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader (formerly Anakin Skywalker), and Emperor Sheev Palpatine. This confrontation takes place on the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi . Darth Vader wears a breathing apparatus in a mask that fully covers his face. Vader wears this because he sustained massive respiratory damage several movies earlier. During the confrontation, the Emperor is killed. Then Luke removes Vader's mask to see his face. (It is revealed in a previous film that Vader is Luke's father.) COVID-19 would be impossible for the Star Wars movies. It would be impossible because the Star Wars movies take place \"a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away\". This time was well before COVID-19 existed. [ citation needed ]\nCueball notes that if only Luke had been vaccinated, he would still be a possible risk to Vader. The various vaccines seem to do well to protect recipients from the harsher outcomes of the virus. The vaccines may not completely prevent them from mild infection and potentially then passing it onwards. Luke is young and healthy. Luke is probably less susceptible, if Luke were to be exposed to the virus at any point. Vader's health issues mean that Vader would be in much greater danger from such a respiratory disease without Vader's own personal inoculation. The Emperor is elderly, but probably not at as great of a risk as Vader is. However, the Emperor, too is susceptible if the Emperor were infected.\nCueball judges that Darth Vader's mask and breathing apparatus would protect Vader from the virus, a topic that was previously considered in 2367: Masks . The protection is at least to a limited extent. This is not an unreasonable assumption. Vader's suit has allowed Vader to survive the vacuum of space for short periods of time . Cueball concludes that all the characters in this fight need to be vaccinated in order to prevent the spread of the virus. This will be true until the Emperor dies. After the Emperor dies, only Vader needs to be vaccinated.\nThe title text refers to two separate CDC recommendations. If you are visiting with people from a single household when vaccinated, all at low risk of serious complications from COVID-19, you do not have to take precautions. The precaution that you do not have to take include physical distancing or masks. If you are visiting with people from multiple households, then it is recommended that you take precautions against the spread of the disease regardless. Cueball is unsure whether or not Darth Vader and the Emperor live in close enough proximity to count as a single household. Whether Vader and the Emperor live in a single household would change how Cueball decides who should and should not be vaccinated. It is unknown, based on the Original Trilogy of Star Wars movies alone, how much time Vader and the Emperor spend in proximity. The \"weird black egg thing\" refers to Darth Vader's meditation chamber . The meditation chamber first seen in The Empire Strikes Back , which allows Vader to spend some time outside of his suit.\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on a laptop. There is a large thought bubble of his thoughts above his head, and his typing on the laptop makes sounds.] Cueball's thoughts: For the throne room scene, I think it's all three until the Emperor dies, then Vader only. It can't be Luke only, since he's visiting Vader, who is clearly at elevated respiratory risk. Plus, he removes Vader's mask! Keyboard: Type type.\n[Caption below the panel]: My Hobby: Editing IMDb to note the minimum set of people who need to be vaccinated in each scene for it to pass muster under current CDC guidance.\n"}
{"id":2442,"title":"Mask Opinions","image_title":"Mask Opinions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2442","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mask_opinions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2442:_Mask_Opinions","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat are standing and talking. Both are wearing masks.] Cueball: I am so excited not to have so many opinions about different kinds of masks at the forefront of my brain at all times. White Hat: Seriously.\n[The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's upper body. His hands are raised.] Cueball: \"Do you know any tricks for getting a good seal around the bridge of your nose?\" Cueball: I do, and I want to stop knowing them.\n[Cueball is walking away from White Hat with his hands raised above his head.] White Hat: You could always try talking about something else. Cueball: Honestly not sure I can! White Hat: Well. White Hat: Soon.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nCueball and White Hat are having a conversation about face masks, which have become everyday essentials during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cueball has become exasperated with the weight of mask-related knowledge on his mind at all times, citing examples of instances of conversation in which he irritably divulges his knowledge of face masks. White Hat tries to placate him with the idea that this won't go on forever. He suggests thinking and talking about other things, but given Cueball's obsessive tendencies in the past, this is unlikely to occur. The final words of the comic, \"Well. Soon.\" may be a pun on the phrase \"Get Well Soon\", commonly said as an expression of sympathy for someone who is sick or injured. In this case, White Hat hopes that Cueball will be able to stop talking about masks soon, which in turn means that he hopes for an end to the coronavirus pandemic.  (It is not stated whether he hopes for an end to the coronavirus pandemic simply so that he can stop hearing Cueball talk about masks or because of the lives that would be lost if the pandemic continued.)\nIn the title text, Randall implicitly endorses White Hat's hope, while suggesting that the new norm of wearing a mask when you feel sick will still be useful after the pandemic ends. Given that masks lower the transmission rates of many viral infections, including the common cold, this could be a wise strategy for avoiding illnesses in the future. Such a practice has been present for some time before the pandemic in other countries, Japan among them, where the habit of masks is the result of the last big pandemic (Spanish Flu, 1919\/1920), but in North America the practice began (and may end) with COVID-19. Eliminating the common cold through masks, in this case via hazmat suits, has been examined in the What If? chapter 'Common Cold'.\n[Cueball and White Hat are standing and talking. Both are wearing masks.] Cueball: I am so excited not to have so many opinions about different kinds of masks at the forefront of my brain at all times. White Hat: Seriously.\n[The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's upper body. His hands are raised.] Cueball: \"Do you know any tricks for getting a good seal around the bridge of your nose?\" Cueball: I do, and I want to stop knowing them.\n[Cueball is walking away from White Hat with his hands raised above his head.] White Hat: You could always try talking about something else. Cueball: Honestly not sure I can! White Hat: Well. White Hat: Soon.\n"}
{"id":2443,"title":"Immune Response","image_title":"Immune Response","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2443","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/immune_response.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2443:_Immune_Response","transcript":"[Megan is walking toward Cueball, who is holding his arm.] Megan: How you feeling? Cueball: Not bad. Tired. A little sore.\n[Zoom in on Cueball. He looks down at his arms, which are held out.] Cueball: I feel bad for my immune system. It doesn't know this isn't a real virus. It must be freaking out. Cueball: Hey buddy, don't worry! We're going to be fine. This is just practice!\n[Zoom out. Megan gestures at Cueball, as he holds his arm.] Megan: No, don't tell it that . You want it to panic and build defenses that will be able to handle the real thing. Cueball: I guess. Cueball: Okay, let me try that again. Cueball: *ahem*\n[Cueball dramatically clutches at his chest.] Cueball: Woe! My arm is stricken by a dreadful plague! Cueball: I feel death draw near! My only hope is those heroic immune cells! Megan: Perfect. Cueball: Psst - you're doing great! I'm so proud of you.\n","explanation":"This is another comic in a series related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nAs with a number of previous strips , Randall has a tendency to anthropomorphize both pathogens and the immune system, envisioning the process of infection and immune response as an epic battle . In this case, he treats his immune system as he would a child trying to accomplish something difficult, and worries about its emotional reaction.\nThe COVID-19 vaccines (like all viral inoculations) work by introducing viral proteins into the body, causing the immune system to react as if the actual virus were present, creating the antibodies to fight it. As a result, if the actual virus is introduced, the immune system will have the capacity to quickly eliminate it.\nIn this comic, Cueball has just received the COVID-19 vaccine and anthropomorphizes this process. He worries that his immune system is \"freaking out\", as the vaccine causes the body to 'think' it's under attack and respond as it would to a deadly threat. Cueball accordingly tries to reassure his immune system that the threat isn't real. However, Megan reminds him that the \"panic\" is the entire point, as that's what causes the body to build defenses, which will allow it to handle the real virus. Cueball then switches tactics, melodramatically announcing that the virus is about to kill him, and encouraging his \"heroic immune cells\" to save the day. The joke is that the basic elements of their response is accurate: the vaccine is essentially a ruse intended to \"trick\" the immune system into developing antibodies. However, the immune system obviously lacks a separate consciousness, and can neither hear nor understand their comments, [ citation needed ] making both reassurance and encouragement entirely moot.\nIn the title text, Cueball continues to treat his immune system like a conscious entity. Specifically, all of his communications sound like a parent, or other adult, trying to encourage a child who was trying to win a game: giving it a pep talk about how he doesn't care if it wins or loses as long as it has fun. This is a common refrain when parents or other adults try to reassure children in contexts where victory isn't especially important, and where enjoyment is the real goal. Cueball then remembers that this particular event is much more consequential. If his immune system were to 'lose' to the vaccine, that would presumably mean it was incapable of responding properly to the viral threat, meaning he'd be in serious risk of death if he contracted the actual virus. As a result, he corrects himself and states that winning, in this case, is \"very important\".\n[Megan is walking toward Cueball, who is holding his arm.] Megan: How you feeling? Cueball: Not bad. Tired. A little sore.\n[Zoom in on Cueball. He looks down at his arms, which are held out.] Cueball: I feel bad for my immune system. It doesn't know this isn't a real virus. It must be freaking out. Cueball: Hey buddy, don't worry! We're going to be fine. This is just practice!\n[Zoom out. Megan gestures at Cueball, as he holds his arm.] Megan: No, don't tell it that . You want it to panic and build defenses that will be able to handle the real thing. Cueball: I guess. Cueball: Okay, let me try that again. Cueball: *ahem*\n[Cueball dramatically clutches at his chest.] Cueball: Woe! My arm is stricken by a dreadful plague! Cueball: I feel death draw near! My only hope is those heroic immune cells! Megan: Perfect. Cueball: Psst - you're doing great! I'm so proud of you.\n"}
{"id":2444,"title":"Ingenuity","image_title":"Ingenuity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2444","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ingenuity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2444:_Ingenuity","transcript":"[Ingenuity\/Perseverance is on the surface of Mars.] Perseverance: Ingenuity helicopter has been lowered. Perseverance: Preparing to release it onto the surface.\n[A cut to mission control on Earth. Cueball trips and clicks on a key on his workstation, while Ponytail stands nearby.] Cueball: Oops Control panel: Click Trip\n[Back on Mars, Ingenuity's rotor blades start spinning.] Ingenuity: Bzzzzzz\n[Perseverance is being lifted into the air atop Ingenuity.] Perseverance: Wheeee! Ingenuity: Bzzzzzz\n","explanation":"Ingenuity is a drone-like helicopter deployed to the surface of Mars. It rode on the underside of the Perseverance rover and at the time of publication its protective housing had been released from the rover and it was being prepared for a flight in early April. The helicopter is supposed to take off after the rover fully releases it and clears its takeoff trajectory.\nThe comic projects what might happen if the mission controllers activated the helicopter early. In this case, the process is approaching the point of detaching the part-deployed Ingenuity. Ponytail and Cueball are present in mission control when Cueball trips and hits a button that clearly triggers the Ingenuity drone to take off. Perserverance, still firmly above\/attached is seen to easily ride atop it. The rover exclaims \"Wheee!\", presumably from excitement or happiness.\nIn the title text, some character discovers powered flight is easier on Mars, which contradicts our current understanding that powered flight is very difficult on Mars . Mars may have less gravity, but Mars's atmosphere is 1% the density of Earth's. It's so thin that you couldn't move a feather with a fan. This is why the character mumbles his explanation of the science, because they know any explanation doesn't actually make sense.\nThe total mass of the two vehicles is about 556 times that of the helicopter alone, meaning the unexpected lift effect 'described' would have to be several hundred times more effective than that anticipated, depending upon the factor of overdesign already built in to avoid an expensive marginal failure. It also seems to be trivially easy to balance the extremely top-heavy loading upon the small solar-panel that tops out the counter-rotating coaxial blades, which adds yet more questions of both the dynamic and structural performance, never mind questions about the available power to accomplish this and the later possibilities to recharge.\nIt is not the first time that we have seen a Mars vehicle vastly exceed expectations in these pages.\nIt is also not the first time a character has caused an incident by tripping and hitting a control panel .\n[Ingenuity\/Perseverance is on the surface of Mars.] Perseverance: Ingenuity helicopter has been lowered. Perseverance: Preparing to release it onto the surface.\n[A cut to mission control on Earth. Cueball trips and clicks on a key on his workstation, while Ponytail stands nearby.] Cueball: Oops Control panel: Click Trip\n[Back on Mars, Ingenuity's rotor blades start spinning.] Ingenuity: Bzzzzzz\n[Perseverance is being lifted into the air atop Ingenuity.] Perseverance: Wheeee! Ingenuity: Bzzzzzz\n"}
{"id":2445,"title":"Checkbox","image_title":"Checkbox","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2445","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/checkbox.gif","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2445:_Checkbox","transcript":"[A small box is in the middle of a large white frame. The box can have a check-mark, but it is alternating between being checked or unchecked. At the bottom right there is a muted speaker (which can be unmuted). If the user press the checkbox gray dots or lines will appear below depending on the length of the press. These will move from right to left and then disappear.]\n","explanation":"This was the 11th April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous fools comic was 2288: Collector's Edition , which was delayed two days and released on Friday April 3, 2020. The next became 2601: Instructions released on Friday April 1, 2022 (a regular release day).\nThe comic looks similar to a loading screen. The actual comic (this \u201cloading screen\u201d) consists of an animated gif of a checkbox (hence the name).\nThe frame is replaced with an interactive panel. In the center is a check box, which clears itself immediately when checked. In the bottom right is a mute button, which begins muted. By unmuting, and changing it to a loudspeaker, sounds are played when the check box is checked. This was the first comic with audio on xkcd. But the very similar Fool's comic from the next year, 2601: Instructions , used audio as the main part of the joke. This comic and also has a mute button (but here the sound was on when the mute button is shown, seems like an error). This comic is also very similar to this one, as it only has one thing in the center, but not a check box, but a radio button .\nUnder the checkbox is a scrolling visual representation of the timing and duration of clicks in the check box, which also produce matching beeping sounds when unmuted. The representation consists of a dot for a short press, or a bar for a longer press. All long presses are represented by a bar of a pre-determined length; in other words, a longer press does not result in a longer bar.\nBy varying between brief and long presses, and brief and long intervals between presses, it is possible to enter characters in Morse Code.\nThe check box then begins operating by itself, producing sounds which can be decoded as Morse Code. These responses are also printed in the browser's JavaScript console in both plain text and a textual representation of Morse code. If left without any initial input for 30 seconds it would send the message CQ (meaning \"Seek You\").\nThe title text hints at the use of Morse Code in the comic; interpreting the \"check\" as a Morse Code dot and the \"chhecck\" (a long check) as a Morse Code dash gives ...---..., which is the Morse Code for \"SOS\", the international distress signal. Incidentally, inputting the SOS signal gives \"YOU TOO?\".\nFor the majority of inputs, the check box responds with a random selection from the following list:\nSome keywords, however, have special responses .\nThis comic has a unique header text , see the details here . The header is:\n\"This comic was put together by Max Goodhart, Patrick, Amber, Benjamin Staffin, Kevin Cotrone, and Michael Leuchtenburg.\"\nRead Max's blog post on development of the comic.\n[. represents a short signal, - represents a long signal, and \/ represents pauses between words. Sojourner is a Mars rover which has been referenced by Randall in the past and is the entity operating the morse code device.]\nSee also QRS and QRQ.\nAn explanation of Q codes can be found here .\nSteps to complete (directions can be abbreviated as their first letter):\nAfter successfully repairing and rebooting Sojourner, a comic is opened which depicts it seeking out and finding its friends, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Perseverance, and Ingenuity. Curiosity and Perseverance are locked in a swordfight, and either Spirit or Opportunity is carried off by Ingenuity while the other speeds off a small mound of dirt. Ingenuity carrying a rover is a reference to the previous comic.\nThe page's JavaScript creates a global object morse with encode and decode methods.  From the developer console, it is possible to write morse.encode(\"A PHRASE\") , which will print the Morse code corresponding to the text provided, or morse.decode(\"... --- ...\") which will translate the Morse code to text.\nBeepComic.hurryUp() to get the reply immediately in the console. BeepComic.send(...) to send directly to SOJOURNER.\n[A small box is in the middle of a large white frame. The box can have a check-mark, but it is alternating between being checked or unchecked. At the bottom right there is a muted speaker (which can be unmuted). If the user press the checkbox gray dots or lines will appear below depending on the length of the press. These will move from right to left and then disappear.]\n"}
{"id":2446,"title":"Spike Proteins","image_title":"Spike Proteins","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2446","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spike_proteins.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2446:_Spike_Proteins","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk with an open laptop in front of him. Megan stands behind him looking over his shoulder. Beret Guy is in front of the desk, walking away and looking back at the two while holding a hand to his shoulder, where he got the vaccine shot.] Beret Guy: Got the vaccine! Megan: Congrats! Beret Guy: Time to go make spike proteins.\n[Cueball continues to work on his laptop while Megan is looking on.]\n[In a frameless, narrow panel, Beret Guy walks back carrying a large object in his arms that looks like a spike protein. But it is about half as long as he is tall, fluffy and dripping wet, flexing slightly along its length, with the Y-shaped head pointed forwards, away from Beret Guy] Beret Guy: OK! Beret Guy: Here's my first try.\n[Beret Guy drops the spike protein onto Cueball's desk with the Y-shaped end on the desk up against the back of Cueball's laptop. The movement is shown with several lines and a sound follows when it hits the desk. The head of it takes up the entire desk area not covered by the laptop, while the tail  overhangs the desk. Cueball is grabbing the lid and base of his laptop with both hands, pulling it partially closed and away from the spike protein, and Megan reflexively leans away.] Spike Protein: Plop\n[Beret Guy turns to leave, with an outstretched finger pointing skyward. The overhanging part of the spike protein has sagged, and it is dripping some wet material over both the floor and desk. Cueball is sitting with his hands on the partially closed laptop, Megan stands normally again.] Beret Guy: More! Cueball: Ewww. Megan: Why is it so wet??\n","explanation":"This is another comic in the COVID-19 series related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis is also another comic about the current vaccine against COVID-19 . A vaccine is designed to provoke an immune response from the body of the recipient, which \"trains\" the immune system to attack actual viruses (or bacteria). For COVID-19, the spike protein , necessary for the virus to bind a receptor on human cells and invade them, is the key protein for an immune response. Almost all vaccines approved for human use pre-COVID actually contain either inactivated pathogen (e.g., flu vaccine), live but safe pathogen variants (e.g., measles), or some protein from the pathogen that the immune system can respond to (e.g., pertussis).  The four COVID-19 vaccines approved in the United States or the European Union as of the date of this comic, however, are all a relatively new type of vaccine that instead cause human cells to temporarily produce spike proteins, which the immune system then \"learns\" to attack. The Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson \u2019s Janssen vaccine use a technique first approved for the July 2020 Ebola vaccine, in which a genetically modified adenovirus is used to deliver DNA to the nuclei of the vaccine recipients' cells, which convert the DNA to Messenger RNA (mRNA). The recipients' cells then use the mRNA as instructions to produce spike proteins. The Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are of an even newer type: m RNA vaccines , which directly inject the mRNA into the body for the cells to use, and never have to enter the cell nuclei.\nBeret Guy , in his usual fashion , misunderstands how reality works, then reality alters to fit his view of it.\nAfter receiving the vaccine, as he informs Cueball and Megan , he claims he will now go away to make spike proteins. For him, this literally means that he (not his cells) will build them, by unexplained means. When he returns he is carrying his constructed protein, which is roughly 8 orders of magnitude larger than the normal version, and also appears to be dripping. He then drops it on the desk, where a laptop is being used. Cueball part-closes his screen to try to prevent the mass from landing on it - though he's only partially successful.\nWhen a normal living body is coerced into making a spike protein, they are microscopic particles that distribute internally around the body to provoke an immune response. Beret Guy's macroscopic version provokes an understandable response of both disgust and confusion from both Cueball and Megan, who choose to ask why it is so wet. Proteins are highly hydrated molecules where water \u2014 through the moderation of its presence and absence in specific locations \u2014 plays a central role in shaping the structure and function of the protein (although it is not clear how Beret Guy knows that the spike protein should be hydrated since this is his first try). Though, of the many questions that might have been asked, it is not an entirely unreasonable snap reaction.\nBeret Guy remains typically oblivious to the fuss he causes. His enthusiastic intention, apparently, is to leave his first proud creation there as he departs to construct further examples. They will likely be no less unwelcome.\nAnything damp and squidgy (as this creation seems to be) would not be welcome around a laptop, for a number of reasons, and Beret Guy seems to have made a particularly messy contact with the part of the case where most such devices are likely to have clusters of heat vents or unruggedised ports\/connections that may not react well to the ingress of liquids.\nThe title text is a pun on Acer, ACER2, and ACE2. Acer is a brand of computers including laptops. The ACE2 receptor , is an entry point on a cell to which the SARS-COV-2 virus attaches during the process of entering the cell. ACER2 is a real enzyme in humans which, although unrelated to ACE2 or SARS-COV-2, may also help bind the pun together.\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk with an open laptop in front of him. Megan stands behind him looking over his shoulder. Beret Guy is in front of the desk, walking away and looking back at the two while holding a hand to his shoulder, where he got the vaccine shot.] Beret Guy: Got the vaccine! Megan: Congrats! Beret Guy: Time to go make spike proteins.\n[Cueball continues to work on his laptop while Megan is looking on.]\n[In a frameless, narrow panel, Beret Guy walks back carrying a large object in his arms that looks like a spike protein. But it is about half as long as he is tall, fluffy and dripping wet, flexing slightly along its length, with the Y-shaped head pointed forwards, away from Beret Guy] Beret Guy: OK! Beret Guy: Here's my first try.\n[Beret Guy drops the spike protein onto Cueball's desk with the Y-shaped end on the desk up against the back of Cueball's laptop. The movement is shown with several lines and a sound follows when it hits the desk. The head of it takes up the entire desk area not covered by the laptop, while the tail  overhangs the desk. Cueball is grabbing the lid and base of his laptop with both hands, pulling it partially closed and away from the spike protein, and Megan reflexively leans away.] Spike Protein: Plop\n[Beret Guy turns to leave, with an outstretched finger pointing skyward. The overhanging part of the spike protein has sagged, and it is dripping some wet material over both the floor and desk. Cueball is sitting with his hands on the partially closed laptop, Megan stands normally again.] Beret Guy: More! Cueball: Ewww. Megan: Why is it so wet??\n"}
{"id":2447,"title":"Hammer Incident","image_title":"Hammer Incident","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2447","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hammer_incident.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2447:_Hammer_Incident","transcript":"[Cueball, holding a palm up in front of him, stands before a long desk, behind which is a seated panel of four people, consisting of Ponytail, Hairy, a Cueball-like guy and Hairbun. Hairy is the only one to have one arm on the desk, all other arms are held down with hands below the desk.] Cueball: Yes, I know you're mad that I dropped that hammer. Cueball: But think about me\u2014 Cueball: Seven years of bad luck!\n[Caption below the panel]: Man, NASA is really on my case about the James Webb Space Telescope.\n","explanation":"The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope created to be the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope under construction at time of publishing and launched December 25, 2021, though in 2014: JWST Delays , xkcd predicted its launch would actually occur during late 2026.\nIt's implied that Cueball dropped a hammer on the mirror of the JWST and broke it. In superstition, breaking a mirror causes seven years of bad luck. The cost estimate for the JWST is currently US$10 billion, and Cueball is at a NASA official hearing for breaking this very expensive piece of equipment, no doubt costing NASA (and thus the nation) hundreds of millions of dollars more for repair work. However, Cueball is more concerned about personally experiencing seven years of bad luck.\nIn actuality the mirror panel is not made of glass, so it's likely that a dropped hammer would dent and distort the panel rather than shattering it. Presumably Cueball's hammer drop would damage or destroy only one mirror panel out of the JWST's eighteen panels. (If he had destroyed the entire telescope, he would have been facing 7\u00d718=126 years of bad luck, and the damage costs would be much higher. Then again, this depends on the altitude that the destruction happened. ) Even breaking a single panel would likely be very expensive because it would require extremely accurate machinery and extensive calibration tests to make and install a replacement panel, especially because the back of JWST's mirrors are made of beryllium. Beryllium is expensive to purchase, since it is relatively scarce, and is very hard and abrasive, so making things out of it is difficult (and expensive due to the specialized machinery required and the precautions necessary to prevent inhalation). Breaking a beryllium mirror would lead to dust formation; single exposures to beryllium dust can cause acute beryllium poisoning and massively increase the risk of lung cancer, which is very bad luck on behalf of Cueball. In addition to the property damage, Cueball is probably liable for injuring his coworkers, which is probably the main reason why the NASA workers are so angry at him because human lives are more valuable than mere money. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text refers to the Cold Stone Creamery , a chain that mixes ice cream with various other ingredients, such as fruit or candy, in front of the customer before serving it. The usual surface for mixing is a piece of granite which is kept cold (about -10\u00b0C). It's implied that Cueball had tried mixing his ice cream and flavorings in the style of Cold Stone Creamery on the JWST mirror, which is also kept cold -- in fact much colder, as it's cooled to as low as 7 K (-266\u00b0C, or -447\u00b0F). If Cueball had mixed ice cream this way on the JWST, he would likely have scratched and\/or stained the surfaces on the telescope and perhaps have gotten gunk into the instrumentation, and possibly, due to the localized temperature differential from ice cream hundreds of degrees warmer than the material, promoted damaging distortions or fractures -- hardly the 'good idea' mentioned in the title text.  (It also would not have worked: at sufficiently low temperatures, ice cream hardens and cannot be mixed.)\nThe bad luck from breaking a mirror is also referenced in 1136: Broken Mirror .\n[Cueball, holding a palm up in front of him, stands before a long desk, behind which is a seated panel of four people, consisting of Ponytail, Hairy, a Cueball-like guy and Hairbun. Hairy is the only one to have one arm on the desk, all other arms are held down with hands below the desk.] Cueball: Yes, I know you're mad that I dropped that hammer. Cueball: But think about me\u2014 Cueball: Seven years of bad luck!\n[Caption below the panel]: Man, NASA is really on my case about the James Webb Space Telescope.\n"}
{"id":2448,"title":"Eradication","image_title":"Eradication","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2448","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/eradication.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2448:_Eradication","transcript":"[Megan holding a hand up, palm held out, is walking with Cueball.] Megan: Even if the threat eventually fades, thanks to vaccines and stuff,\n[They walk on, both with their arms down.] Megan: And it becomes just another circulating common cold virus,\n[Megan holds her hand up in a fist, while Cueball hold his hand to his chin as they walk on.] Megan: I think we should pursue global eradication of SARS-CoV-2 out of spite . Cueball: Revenge-based public health policy. I like it.\n","explanation":"This is another comic in the COVID-19 series related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nMegan and Cueball are discussing the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 eventually becoming \"another circulating common cold virus\".  This is considered to be a serious possibility , as a combination and vaccines and acquired immunity cause most people to have some degree of immunity as they age. This is particularly likely because SARS-CoV-2 poses little risk to small children, and if most people are infected with it in childhood, they'll likely be immune as adults. Multiple other coronaviruses are common in the human population, and fall under the category of \"the common cold\", causing only minor and temporary symptoms, with little serious risk for most people.\nIf SARS-CoV-2 does transition to being a minor disease, there will be little reason to continue focused eradication efforts, because the ongoing harm will be too little to justify such efforts.  It's extremely difficult to wipe out a virus altogether, as it requires every human population to be either isolated from the disease, or vaccinated until herd immunity is achieved.  There are only two viruses which have been totally eliminated in the wild: Smallpox and rinderpest , and rinderpest infects only cattle and other ruminants, not humans. The elimination of smallpox was one of the greatest public health accomplishments of the 20th century, and resulted from an aggressive and ambitious global vaccination effort. Smallpox is now considered to be extinct in the wild, with only a small number of samples still preserved in government labs.\nWhere diseases continue to be dangerous, ongoing global efforts are made to eliminate them entirely (polio, measles and rubella are currently targets of such programs).  If a disease ultimately becomes more or less harmless, its elimination is less of a priority.\nThe joke of this strip is that, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Megan feels so much rage and ill-will toward the disease that vaccination efforts are no longer only a matter of protecting health, but an expression of hostility toward the virus. Her argument is that, even if global elimination efforts are no longer justified by the danger of the virus, they should be pursued \"out of spite\". Like many other strips in this series, the characters tend to anthropomorphize the virus, treating it as an intelligent and sentient enemy, rather than mere force of nature. Given that mindset, the idea that the virus could cause so many deaths and so much disruption, and then continue to exist without consequence, would upset many people. Cueball agrees with her perspective, approvingly referring to it as \"revenge\". Cueball has also previously shown a merciless attitude towards endemic infections , even those that aren't particularly deadly, and so the idea of eliminating one entirely would probably appeal to him on its own merits.\nThe title text refers to the aforementioned extinction (in the wild) of smallpox. This is the type of line one might see in fiction , delivered to someone who is about to be killed, taunting them about the death of one of their friends or associates. The line treats the virus like a villain in an action movie, and revelling in the fact that we're finally going to kill it.\n[Megan holding a hand up, palm held out, is walking with Cueball.] Megan: Even if the threat eventually fades, thanks to vaccines and stuff,\n[They walk on, both with their arms down.] Megan: And it becomes just another circulating common cold virus,\n[Megan holds her hand up in a fist, while Cueball hold his hand to his chin as they walk on.] Megan: I think we should pursue global eradication of SARS-CoV-2 out of spite . Cueball: Revenge-based public health policy. I like it.\n"}
{"id":2449,"title":"ISS Vaccine","image_title":"ISS Vaccine","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2449","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/iss_vaccine.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2449:_ISS_Vaccine","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are standing talking to each other.] Megan: I just realized\u2014 Megan: The astronauts on the ISS probably can't get the vaccine until they land. Cueball: Sure they can. Cueball: NASA's good at orbital injections.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nMegan has just realized that the astronauts on the ISS (the International Space Station ) probably can't get a vaccine against COVID-19 before they land. That is, it will not get shipped up to them.\nThis can be a concern because their immune system is impacted by extended stays in space. So when they come down again they may need to stay in quarantine longer, as the vaccine is not fully effective the first few weeks after administration. There could of course also be concern about getting COVID-19 while in space, but this is very unlikely due to the quarantine measures and other security measures taken by NASA and their Russian counterpart, Roscosmos . See this article with more details on these facts: What NASA is doing to keep COVID-19 off the space station .\nCueball 's reply, \"NASA's good at orbital injections\", is a pun on \"orbital injection\", also called orbital insertion , which is the adjustment of a spacecraft\u2019s momentum that puts it into a stable orbit around a planet, moon, or other celestial body. Space agencies like NASA do this routinely on spaceflight missions. Getting an injection of a COVID-19 vaccine while in orbit aboard the ISS could also be called orbital injection, hence the pun.\nThe title text refers to the fact that, because the ISS orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, the people aboard it experience a day in that time, seeing a sunrise and sunset and crossing the International Date Line on the ground. One interpretation of this might be that 90 minutes on the ISS are equivalent to a day on the ground, making the people on board due for the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine (normally 21 days) or the Moderna vaccine (normally 28 days) after 31.5 or 42 hours, respectively, which Randall rounds to 30 or 40 hours. In reality, rather than tracking the local time of the territories it passes above, the ISS follows Coordinated Universal Time .\n[Megan and Cueball are standing talking to each other.] Megan: I just realized\u2014 Megan: The astronauts on the ISS probably can't get the vaccine until they land. Cueball: Sure they can. Cueball: NASA's good at orbital injections.\n"}
{"id":2450,"title":"Post Vaccine Social Scheduling","image_title":"Post Vaccine Social Scheduling","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2450","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/post_vaccine_social_scheduling.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2450:_Post_Vaccine_Social_Scheduling","transcript":"[From top to bottom, eleven people are standing on the left side of the image: Danish, Cueball #1, Hairbun, Black Hat, Ponytail, Science Girl, White Hat, Hairy, Blondie, Cueball #2, and Megan, with even-numbered characters standing slightly further to the left. Each character\u2019s first and second doses of the vaccine are labeled \u2460 and \u2461, respectively. The time before each character\u2019s first dose is drawn with a grey solid line; the time between their first dose and after they are fully vaccinated (two weeks after their second dose) is drawn with a grey dashed line; the time after they are fully vaccinated is drawn with a black solid line. Black Hat, Science Girl, Blondie, Cueball #2, and Megan have all received their first doses before the comic\u2019s time frame. Social activities are drawn with an ellipse around the top and bottom members, and each participating character is identified with a large filled-in circle on their timeline. The ellipses are labeled\u00a0:] DINNER   GAMES   MOVIE   BIRTHDAY   DINNER   CABIN\n[The events that happen, in chronological order (from left to right), are:\n[Caption below the panel:] Post-Vaccine Social Scheduling\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nThe comic shows a timeline of a multitude of (presumably) friends and acquaintances getting two doses of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.  Due to the recommended delay between shots, as well as the few weeks needed to build antibodies after the second shot, planning get-togethers becomes complicated by who is free to meet, or not yet.\nThe diagram is some form of Scheduling Diagram, maybe akin to a Gantt chart , which helps to coordinate the status of several individual 'processes' (personal vaccination schedules) and demonstrate where dependent activities (meet-ups) are mutually possible.\nEventually, everyone can start getting together, but during the time where some people have only received one, neither, or only got the second recently, the scheduling is complicated.  The complication is increased by the fact that people who have received one or two doses of vaccine, but haven't gone through the whole waiting period, can be expected to have some protection, but possibly not full protection (as represented by the dashed line).  In that case, there's the added question of how important it is that the person is at an event, and how much risk the people involved are willing to tolerate. This may be the reason for the \"movie\" set, in which all participants will have received both doses, but one will not have completed the final waiting period.\nThe title text references NP-hardness, a theme that has come up in past comics. NP-hardness describes a particular level of computational difficulty. Scheduling problems are normally NP-hard. But when extra challenges such as having to deal with whether or not people are vaccinated they become even more difficult.\nIn this case though, Critical Path dependencies seem trivial enough. Events (vertical lozenges across the dot-marked timelines of those included) are as trivial to validate as possible for those selected to attend. Fixed events in time can be scanned to show all those allowed to participate at that moment. Movable events can be rescheduled until (enough of) those hoped to be included are 'valid'. Complications may arise for those whose presence relies upon the status of others potentially attending, or the need to maintain time between two events (in either order) with part-shared attendees as a precautionary 'cool-down' isolation. It is not obvious that either of these issues factor in, any more than basic scheduling conflicts would.\nThe third person is scheduled for a movie before being fully vaccinated may be a direct reference to 2441: IMDb Vaccines , discussing the number of people that needs to be vaccinated to record a particular scene. Other than each line's identifying portrait (which are not of the Throne Room characters) no explicit age\/vulnerability information is given to justify this, presumably the chart's users are aware of the specifics.\nThe third person in the table is included in a movie viewing (for which masks could be worn) shortly after their second immunization, but not included in the dinner group until the full benefit of the vaccine takes hold.  CDC guidelines permit vaccinated individuals to visit inside a home or private setting without a mask with one household of unvaccinated people who are not at risk for severe illness. Therefore the movie gathering conforms to CDC recommendations provided that the single unvaccinated person is not at increased risk of severe illness and the movie is in a home or private setting.\nThe third person in the table appears to have received the second shot twice.  This is possibly a reference to 2422: Vaccine Ordering . Another interpretation is that she lied about her first dose being her second dose to be invited to the movie.\n[From top to bottom, eleven people are standing on the left side of the image: Danish, Cueball #1, Hairbun, Black Hat, Ponytail, Science Girl, White Hat, Hairy, Blondie, Cueball #2, and Megan, with even-numbered characters standing slightly further to the left. Each character\u2019s first and second doses of the vaccine are labeled \u2460 and \u2461, respectively. The time before each character\u2019s first dose is drawn with a grey solid line; the time between their first dose and after they are fully vaccinated (two weeks after their second dose) is drawn with a grey dashed line; the time after they are fully vaccinated is drawn with a black solid line. Black Hat, Science Girl, Blondie, Cueball #2, and Megan have all received their first doses before the comic\u2019s time frame. Social activities are drawn with an ellipse around the top and bottom members, and each participating character is identified with a large filled-in circle on their timeline. The ellipses are labeled\u00a0:] DINNER   GAMES   MOVIE   BIRTHDAY   DINNER   CABIN\n[The events that happen, in chronological order (from left to right), are:\n[Caption below the panel:] Post-Vaccine Social Scheduling\n"}
{"id":2451,"title":"AI Methodology","image_title":"AI Methodology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2451","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ai_methodology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2451:_AI_Methodology","transcript":"[Cueball is standing on a podium in front of a projection on a screen and points with a stick to a bar chart histogram with a bell curve to the left and a single bar to the far right marked with an arrow.] Cueball: Despite our great research results, some have questioned our AI-based methodology. Cueball: But we trained a classifier on a collection of good and bad methodology sections, and it says ours is fine.\n","explanation":"The joke in this comic is that the people are using artificial intelligence (AI) without understanding how to, and that by doing this the research concerned is at best unreliable and possibly deliberately compromised. The researchers acknowledge that their approach is risky and requires extra verification, but repeatedly use equally or more unreliable AI-based solutions to these problems. Therefore, their problems are likely as bad as they ever were and any other team using one of their verification tools is likely to experience similar unreliability. For an introduction to machine learning, you can visit https:\/\/fast.ai\/ .\nThe first comment, that \"some have questioned our AI-based methodology\", refers to difficulty verifying the correctness of AI-based processing. A model (a program which solves a problem with AI-based statistical analysis) may appear reliable when it is instead insufficiently tested. Models are liable to experience issues due to lingering influences from its training data or a bad algorithm reducing the quality of the investigation. It is therefore necessary for research using such models to demonstrate that those models have been tested well enough that their results are likely to be useful. Frequently, additional tests are performed after training to confirm that the model can handle data collected in a different way to the data used to train it.\nCueball seeks to reassure his audience by quantifying the quality of his methodology. He does this by creating yet another AI to rank methodologies. This approach is unlikely to instill confidence for a variety of reasons:\nWhile there are many red flags in the original AI and quality AI, it is theoretically possible that they operate as Cueball claims. The title text's comments about spacing and diacritics prove that this is not the case and that the quality AI, at least, is completely broken. AI models are given input in various complex ways and determine based on statistical analysis which details are important. Such models can easily find details in the training data which correlate with correct answers but make the resulting model useless.\nFor example, a research team once created a model which was given medical information to determine how likely a patient was to have cancer. The model was trained on existing patient records and the team planned to use it on new patients. However, the original model did not use the medical information but instead simply checked the name of the hospital--a patient at a hospital with \"cancer center\" in the name was likely to have cancer. The model had identified a data point which correlated with the desired answer, but this correlation was not useful for the intended purpose. The model concerned was discarded and a new one created without the hospital name.\nIn this case, the methodology sections are text written by humans, which can contain various artifacts of the writing process. These can include details like how the user chose to insert spaces, word usage, spelling, or diacritic marks which are optional in English (e.g. naive versus na\u00efve). It appears that the training information identifies certain patterns which correlate with \"good\" methodologies. This indicates a few more problems for this research team:\n[Cueball is standing on a podium in front of a projection on a screen and points with a stick to a bar chart histogram with a bell curve to the left and a single bar to the far right marked with an arrow.] Cueball: Despite our great research results, some have questioned our AI-based methodology. Cueball: But we trained a classifier on a collection of good and bad methodology sections, and it says ours is fine.\n"}
{"id":2452,"title":"Aviation Firsts","image_title":"Aviation Firsts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2452","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/aviation_firsts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2452:_Aviation_Firsts","transcript":"[A chart is shown with nine items. To the right of each item there are two check boxes. Above the top row of check boxes are two underlined labels for the two columns. The first four rows have both boxes checked, and the last five have only the first box checked. The last two items are so long that they take up three and four rows of text. The first seven items are written on one line each.]\n","explanation":"This comic reflects the Ingenuity probe's first flight on Mars . Now that Ingenuity has completed its first flight, Mars can be counted among planets with controlled powered flight. The preceding milestones in this list were completed by the first space probes to reach and then land on Mars. Flight, landing and controlled landing were variously achieved by some or all of the prior landers, depending upon your definition of flight, but certainly by the Skycrane element used in landing both Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. These may not have qualified as controlled powered flight as they only used their power to control the landing, before flying off again under power without any more precise control than that needed to intentionally crash elsewhere.\nThe remaining milestones have only been completed on Earth, if at all, and also grow more bizarre and more specific further down the comic and extending into the title text.\n[A chart is shown with nine items. To the right of each item there are two check boxes. Above the top row of check boxes are two underlined labels for the two columns. The first four rows have both boxes checked, and the last five have only the first box checked. The last two items are so long that they take up three and four rows of text. The first seven items are written on one line each.]\n"}
{"id":2453,"title":"Excel Lambda","image_title":"Excel Lambda","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2453","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/excel_lambda.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2453:_Excel_Lambda","transcript":"[In a narrow panel, Ponytail is walking in from the left, looking down at her phone] Ponytail: Oh cool, Excel is adding a lambda function, so you can recursively define functions.\n[Ponytail, holding her phone to her side stands behind Cueball, who is sitting in an office chair with a hand on a laptop standing on his desk. He has turned around to face her, leaning with the other arm on the back of the chair.] Cueball: Seems unnecessary. Cueball: When I need to do arbitrary computation, I just add a giant block of columns to the side of my sheet and have a Turing machine traverse down it.\n[In a frame-less panel Ponytail is standing in he same position behind Cueball, who has resumed working on his laptop with both hands on the keyboard.] Ponytail: I think you're doing computing wrong. Cueball: The Church-Turing thesis says that all ways of computing are equally wrong.\n[Ponytail is still behind Cueball, who has a finger raised in the air, and the other hand is on the desk. Cueball's head has a visible sketch layer which has not been erased.] Ponytail: I think if Turing saw your spreadsheets, he'd change his mind. Cueball: He can ask me to stop making them, but not prove whether I will!\n","explanation":"Cueball is computing and Ponytail criticizes him in a way that is reminiscent of the Code Quality series , although not as harsh. Cueball has lots of strange computer problems , and this will most likely result in another one.\nThe comic begins with Ponytail finding out that Microsoft Excel is adding a lambda function to their function library. This was announced by Microsoft for Beta users in December of 2020. A lambda function is a fundamental mathematical structure that can be used to define all possible computations, in what is known as lambda calculus . They are commonly found in programming languages such as Lisp , Python , and many others. A lambda function is also called an anonymous function because in most languages it can be passed to other functions (including another lambda function) without needing to be given any formal name.\nFinding that Excel is adding a lambda function pleases Ponytail. Cueball claims that the lambda function is unnecessary, as when he needs arbitrary computation he just adds a block of columns to the side of his sheet and has a Turing machine process it. This would technically work as lambda calculus is formally equivalent to Turing machines. People have created Turing machines in Excel , although not for practical purposes.\nPonytail finds his solution absurd and is convinced Cueball is \"doing computing wrong\". But he claims that all computing is equally wrong, citing the Church-Turing thesis , a hypothesis which says that a function can be computed by executing a series of instructions if and only if that function is computable by a Turing machine. A classical Turing machine uses an infinitely long strip of tape as its memory; for Cueball, the large Excel column acts as the \"tape\". All ways of computing are \"equally wrong\" since, according to this thesis, they can all be translated to or from a Turing machine.\nPonytail and Cueball appear to have different ideas of 'computing'. Ponytail, like most programmers, probably includes efficiency and readability as important characteristics of 'doing computing right'. Cueball appears interested only in computability , a more theoretical point of view than Ponytail's.\nPonytail then says that Turing would change his mind if he saw Cueball's spreadsheet, presumably because of the extreme complexity of Cueball's code in the spreadsheet. Cueball's final statement is that Turing could ask him to stop, but would not be able to prove if he actually will stop.\nCueball's final statement is a reference to the halting problem mentioned in the title text. It is the problem of determining whether a given Turing machine will halt. The problem has been shown to be undecidable, i.e., it is impossible to build an algorithm that computes whether any arbitrary Turing machine will halt or not. Because of the way Cueball has behaved, he has been specifically mentioned in Turing's later formulations of the halting problem. Cueball finds this very rude. This is of course a joke, since Turing has been dead since 1954, presumably long before Cueball was born. But it would be crazy indeed if a scientist became so mad at a person that they would mention this person by name in their formulation of a serious problem.\nOver-complicated spreadsheets were also mentioned in 2180: Spreadsheets .\n[In a narrow panel, Ponytail is walking in from the left, looking down at her phone] Ponytail: Oh cool, Excel is adding a lambda function, so you can recursively define functions.\n[Ponytail, holding her phone to her side stands behind Cueball, who is sitting in an office chair with a hand on a laptop standing on his desk. He has turned around to face her, leaning with the other arm on the back of the chair.] Cueball: Seems unnecessary. Cueball: When I need to do arbitrary computation, I just add a giant block of columns to the side of my sheet and have a Turing machine traverse down it.\n[In a frame-less panel Ponytail is standing in he same position behind Cueball, who has resumed working on his laptop with both hands on the keyboard.] Ponytail: I think you're doing computing wrong. Cueball: The Church-Turing thesis says that all ways of computing are equally wrong.\n[Ponytail is still behind Cueball, who has a finger raised in the air, and the other hand is on the desk. Cueball's head has a visible sketch layer which has not been erased.] Ponytail: I think if Turing saw your spreadsheets, he'd change his mind. Cueball: He can ask me to stop making them, but not prove whether I will!\n"}
{"id":2454,"title":"Fully Vaccinated","image_title":"Fully Vaccinated","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2454","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fully_vaccinated.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2454:_Fully_Vaccinated","transcript":"[Megan is standing in front of a three-step stair leading up to an open door. She has one hand in the air while talking to someone inside the house, who replies. The ground outside has small tufts of grass.] Megan: Hi, I'm here to visit! Voice, from inside the house: Do I know you? Megan: No, it's cool, I'm two weeks past my second dose.\n[Caption below the panel:] Remember, once you're fully vaccinated, the CDC says you're free to visit other people's houses.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stated that once people are fully vaccinated, they are able to visit other people's houses (and not risk spreading\/catching coronavirus). The implication, of course, is that you can visit people that you would also have visited before the outbreak. The humor in this comic comes from Megan who is just going to visit a random stranger's house. She explains this is okay because she is fully vaccinated, telling the person in the house that she is two weeks past her second dose. This was part of the topic of the last vaccine comic 2450: Post Vaccine Social Scheduling .\nRestrictions to socializing, brought in as various governments reacted to the emergent COVID-19 pandemic, often disallowed or discouraged visiting family, friends, etc, beyond a mutually isolating 'support bubble', which meant that many house visits that might have occurred beforehand were no longer advisable. With the development and distribution of vaccines, and the eventual receiving of a second dose as applicable, the rules have been modified to allow those vaccinated to once again resume some degree of their prior outgoing behavior where the risks have been mitigated.\nIn this instance, though, Megan has taken the advice even further. Rather than opening back up to a situation closer to the 'old normal', she has taken it as an official sanction to exceed the old social limits and pester complete strangers. Alternately, this is what she always used to do, and only stopped 'for the duration', this unlucky householder being (one of) the first to be subjected to this 'guerilla visiting' now that there seems to be no reason not to continue.\nIn the title text, the owner of the house explains to Megan that just because she has been vaccinated she just can't enter into someone's house without being invited \u2014 a commonly understood form of property law.\nBut due to the vaccine type Megan thinks the owner has mixed this up with a commonly understood element of vampire lore, that vampires must be invited into a home before they can pass through the doorway. \nIn vampire lore, vampires are often able to transform into bats, and these two are thematically associated with each other. Since the coronavirus is likely a bat virome that has entered into humans, Megan misunderstands the owner's objection to her entry, believing that the homeowner thinks that she has become a vampire. (The virus, and thus elements of the vaccine, having ultimately originated in bats and therefore 'possibly' actual vampire stock.)\nMegan thus begins to explain that the vaccine works on a bat virus and has nothing to do with bats. And since she is thus not a vampire she has no problems entering a doorway uninvited, and further explains that she is also not repelled by garlic or other classic weakness of vampires. Vampire lore states that they are repelled by garlic , crosses, holy water, sunlight, and wooden stakes through the heart (the last being a problem for humans in general, vampiric or otherwise).\nThe owner is attempting to explain that Megan does not have the legal or moral right to enter simply because she is vaccinated, but this seems to not register with Megan .\nDoing ridiculous things that were never allowed, even normally, after being vaccinated or low-risk, was also the theme of 2434: Vaccine Guidance . 2391: Life Before the Pandemic also dealt with a similar theme, with Cueball and Megan reminiscing about activities they missed doing but which had not been allowed or possible before the pandemic.\n[Megan is standing in front of a three-step stair leading up to an open door. She has one hand in the air while talking to someone inside the house, who replies. The ground outside has small tufts of grass.] Megan: Hi, I'm here to visit! Voice, from inside the house: Do I know you? Megan: No, it's cool, I'm two weeks past my second dose.\n[Caption below the panel:] Remember, once you're fully vaccinated, the CDC says you're free to visit other people's houses.\n"}
{"id":2455,"title":"Virus Consulting","image_title":"Virus Consulting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2455","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/virus_consulting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2455:_Virus_Consulting","transcript":"[Ponytail stands in front a chart, with a labeled graph with an upward-curving line at the top, and several box-and-whisker plots below, with unreadable text and labels. She is holding a pointer towards the plot while addressing a panel in front of her to the left. The panel is seated behind a desk and is composed of Hairbun, Cueball and Megan. Cueball has one arm on the desk.] Ponytail: Now, I know you're worried about the variants, but this graph should be encouraging. Ponytail: Your rollout is going well. The vaccines are good. They work. Label on graph: Vaccinations\n[Same setting in a narrower panel without the chart. Ponytail has the pointer to her side. Cueball has his arms under the desk as the other two.] Hairbun: You're just telling us what we want to hear. Ponytail: If you think that, you should see the reports from my colleagues who work for COVID.\n[Close-up of Ponytail in a very narrow panel.] Off-screen voice: They work for who?? Ponytail: Our firm has lots of clients.\n[Black Hat stands in front of an identical chart as in panel one, and points to it with a pointer in the same way as Ponytail did. Only he is looking to the right at his clients. He is speaking to a panel of three large coronaviruses, two of which floats above the desk, the middle one is partly below the desk. Across the top frame of the panel there is a box with a caption:] Meanwhile... Black Hat: Now, I know you're excited about the variants, but this graph should be terrifying. Black Hat: We're in real trouble here. Label on graph: Vaccinations\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nThis comic imagines a scenario where Ponytail works for a consulting firm , which offers advice about viruses, specifically COVID-19. Ponytail tells a panel of people (the government?), consisting of Hairbun , Cueball and Megan , that though they are worried about COVID-19 variants , the fact that the number of people vaccinated is increasing considerably is a good sign. Hairbun then accuses Ponytail's firm of simply \"telling them what they want to hear\", accusing her firm of giving them false hope to make them keep retaining her firm.\nThe punchline comes in the final panel where it turns out that Ponytail's colleague, Black Hat , is consulting a different set of clients, which are the viruses themselves. He presents the exact same graph to the viruses and gives them the opposite message: though COVID-19 variants seem to be exciting to them, vaccination numbers are terrible news to their propagation and survival. This repeats the idea of 2287: Pathogen Resistance where the pandemic is seen from the virus' perspective. As in that previous comic, it is the virus that is in a lot of trouble, which is another way of saying that humanity stands a good chance of surviving this situation. (That humanity will survive is also good for the virus, which needs living humans so that it can spread.) This is not the first time that Black Hat has given advice to natural disasters that can kill humans, see 1754: Tornado Safety Tips .\nThe fact that another member of Ponytail's firm is telling clients that they should be worried is what Ponytail refers to when claiming that her firm does not simply tell clients what they want to hear.\nSecondarily, the comic is making fun of the perception that consulting firms will offer their services to whoever can pay, even if they are harmful to society, a perception with some basis in fact .\nAround the time of the comic, several SARS-CoV-2 variants , commonly called \"COVID variants\", had been in the news. The SARS-CoV-2 virus had already been seen to have mutated into many different strains, some of which spread more easily among humans. It was still unknown whether the different variants have a greater individual fatality rate. The contemporary SARS-CoV-2 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna as well as the Regeneron therapeutic monoclonal antibodies all effectively protect against at least the New York ( Lineage B.1.526 ), South African ( Lineage B.1.351 ), and U.K. ( Lineage B.1.1.7 ) variants according to two recent study preprints released April 22, 2021. Further research and peer review was ongoing.\nSince the original date of this comic, the common practice changed from describing variants by geographic origins. Variants Of Concern and Variants Of Interest might indeed have arisen spontaneously in the place where their changes had first been detected in (or most directly traced back to), but there was no good reason to perpetuate a stigma upon any particular region. Instead, greek letter-names were applied to the major variations. (For the above noted versions \"New York\" became Iota, that South African version was identified as Beta, and U.K. (or \"Kent\") had been assigned as Alpha.) Not all lettered VOCs\/VOIs became major players on the global stage, but by by November 2021, the ' alphabet ' had reached Omicron (the fifteenth letter but the thirteenth actually used, having just skipped the letters \"nu\" and \"xi\" to avoid undesirable sound-alike associations) and, while there is still much to study, this seems to have the capability of greater transmissability and retransmissability (even in the vaccinated) but, initially at least, also lower illness\/hospitality\/mortality rate. All these factors have reinforced the potential for the Omicron variety to spread more easily in the human population, as more of an endemic than a pandemic, and thus also to dominate the field against its fellow viral variations.\n(The \"BA.2\" sub-varient of Omicron has been seen to be again more dangerous and resistant to preventative\/theraputic treatment than the prior Omicron but, as of April 2022, calls by some to give it a Virus Of Concern letter (probably \"Pi\") have not yet been acted upon.)\nPossibly, with hindsight, this actually suggests that Black Hat's caution (and perhaps subsequent advice) has been taken on board by the respective clients. On the other hand, it could be equally true that humanity is just becoming more blas\u00e9, or just overly weary of repeating lockdowns\/masks\/etc, and is no longer fulfilling the original good practice. But all this is in the future, for the comic, and even this explanation doesn't yet know how how it will turn out.\nBack in the original comic's time, the title text notes that the firm's \"virus division\" (the group advising the viruses themselves) has started to get worried that their jobs are becoming obsolete, due to vaccine efficacy. Thus, they are demanding to be paid \"up front\", before consulting\/advising services have been rendered to their clients. Dependent upon the expectations of each party, payment can be asked for \"up front\", deferred for invoicing once services have been rendered, or a combination of the two. The weaker party to a contract may need to submit their transaction, or a guarantor, before the other spends too much effort in fulfilling their side of the contract.\n[Ponytail stands in front a chart, with a labeled graph with an upward-curving line at the top, and several box-and-whisker plots below, with unreadable text and labels. She is holding a pointer towards the plot while addressing a panel in front of her to the left. The panel is seated behind a desk and is composed of Hairbun, Cueball and Megan. Cueball has one arm on the desk.] Ponytail: Now, I know you're worried about the variants, but this graph should be encouraging. Ponytail: Your rollout is going well. The vaccines are good. They work. Label on graph: Vaccinations\n[Same setting in a narrower panel without the chart. Ponytail has the pointer to her side. Cueball has his arms under the desk as the other two.] Hairbun: You're just telling us what we want to hear. Ponytail: If you think that, you should see the reports from my colleagues who work for COVID.\n[Close-up of Ponytail in a very narrow panel.] Off-screen voice: They work for who?? Ponytail: Our firm has lots of clients.\n[Black Hat stands in front of an identical chart as in panel one, and points to it with a pointer in the same way as Ponytail did. Only he is looking to the right at his clients. He is speaking to a panel of three large coronaviruses, two of which floats above the desk, the middle one is partly below the desk. Across the top frame of the panel there is a box with a caption:] Meanwhile... Black Hat: Now, I know you're excited about the variants, but this graph should be terrifying. Black Hat: We're in real trouble here. Label on graph: Vaccinations\n"}
{"id":2456,"title":"Types of Scientific Paper","image_title":"Types of Scientific Paper","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2456","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/types_of_scientific_paper.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2456:_Types_of_Scientific_Paper","transcript":"[Heading:] Types of Scientific Paper\n[An array of 4 rows with 3 scientific papers each, is shown. We see the first page of each paper, but only its title is legible. Headings are shown as black lines, paragraphs of text are shown as several squiggly lines and figures are shown as empty white rectangles. Titles are as follows:] We put a camera somewhere new Hey, I found a trove of old records! They don't turn out to be particularly useful, but still, cool! My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it The immune system is at it again We figured out how to make this exotic material, so email us if you need some What are fish even doing down there This task I had to do anyway turned out to be hard enough for its own paper Hey, at least we showed that this method can produce results! That's not nothing, right? Check out this weird thing one of us saw while out for a walk We are 500 scientists and here's what we've been up to for the last 10 years Some thoughts on how everyone else is bad at research We scanned some undergraduates\nThe comic inspired many derivatives, changing the paper titles to be more relevant to specific fields.\nThe hashtag #TypesOfScientificPapers on Twitter includes many of these.\nThere is a generator .\nThere is a moodboard compiling hundreds of them .\nSome examples include:\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall describes categories of scientific papers with somewhat humorous generalized titles.\n[Heading:] Types of Scientific Paper\n[An array of 4 rows with 3 scientific papers each, is shown. We see the first page of each paper, but only its title is legible. Headings are shown as black lines, paragraphs of text are shown as several squiggly lines and figures are shown as empty white rectangles. Titles are as follows:] We put a camera somewhere new Hey, I found a trove of old records! They don't turn out to be particularly useful, but still, cool! My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it The immune system is at it again We figured out how to make this exotic material, so email us if you need some What are fish even doing down there This task I had to do anyway turned out to be hard enough for its own paper Hey, at least we showed that this method can produce results! That's not nothing, right? Check out this weird thing one of us saw while out for a walk We are 500 scientists and here's what we've been up to for the last 10 years Some thoughts on how everyone else is bad at research We scanned some undergraduates\nThe comic inspired many derivatives, changing the paper titles to be more relevant to specific fields.\nThe hashtag #TypesOfScientificPapers on Twitter includes many of these.\nThere is a generator .\nThere is a moodboard compiling hundreds of them .\nSome examples include:\n"}
{"id":2457,"title":"After the Pandemic","image_title":"After the Pandemic","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2457","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/after_the_pandemic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2457:_After_the_Pandemic","transcript":"\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThere is no hidden humor in this comic, it simply states an opinion. Randall is saying that he is looking forward to not having to wear a mask everywhere after the pandemic is over.  Mask mandates were a common way various organizations reduced the spread of Covid-19.  Now that the vaccines exist, people are assuming that these mask mandates will soon end, and in many jurisdictions they have already.\nHowever, Randall hopes that people will continue to wear a mask when they are sick, as is common in many East Asian countries.  This lets other people know the person may be sick, or trying to avoid becoming sick, so they can give the person extra distance.  Wearing a mask reduces the spread of infectious droplets when one exhales or coughs, and reduces exposure to droplets from others.  Both features help reduce the spread of communicable diseases.  Also, Randall thinks other people coughing on him is gross, as do most people.\nMasking when ill would help reduce influenza, tuberculosis and colds.  The flu is a deadly disease that usually kills tens of thousands of people each year.\nPeople with less common diseases, like tuberculosis, may be more likely to wear a mask if mask wearing becomes more common, so they don't feel as conspicuous. For less severe illnesses and less vulnerable populations xkcd's wish may not be such a good idea, as every cold - albeit unpleasant - constantly trains the immune system and keeps it alert. [1]\nThe title text continues this line of reasoning by saying Randall wants to worry less about COVID-19, but hopes people would worry more about colds. Colds are generally mild and might cause someone to spend a few days home sick from work or school. However, colds cost tens of billions of dollars annually in the US.  Costs include the value of lost productivity at work or school, time spent caring for the sick, cost of doctor visits and medications.  Inappropriate treatment of colds with antibiotics is common, and contributes to the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria , and clostridium difficile infections . [2] .\nRandall has made a specific corona comic targeted at colds before: 2306: Common Cold . And in 2015 he probably had a severe cold (or more than one) as he published these two comics 1612: Colds and 1618: Cold Medicine in December 2015.\n\n"}
{"id":2458,"title":"Bubble Wrap","image_title":"Bubble Wrap","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2458","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bubble_wrap.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2458:_Bubble_Wrap","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a large piece of bubble wrap in both hands, clearly pressing one of the bubbles with his fingers so it pops, indicated with several small lines going away from that spot, and a sound.] Cueball: Hmm... Cueball: WD-40, diesel fumes... Cueball: And is that sea air? I guess they're near the ocean. Bubble wrap: Pop\n[Caption below the panel:] If your sense of smell is good enough, popping bubble wrap gives you a tour of a bubble wrap factory.\n","explanation":"Bubble wrap is packing material made by melting two sheets of plastic together with little pockets of air (the \"bubbles\") spread throughout the surface. It is wrapped around fragile items for moving or shipping because the air pockets act as a cushion if the item(s) within are struck or shaken. Many people enjoy popping bubble wrap as a mindless hobby, perhaps due to the tactility and other sensations of each bubble makes as it bursts.\nThe premise behind this comic is that the air inside each bubble comes from the factory where it was made, and thus as each bubble is popped that air \u2014 along with anything in it \u2014 is released. If one had a very sensitive sense of smell, one could detect unique odors present in the factory at the time not present where you are popping the bubble wrap. The comic has Cueball smelling WD-40 (a penetrating oil likely to be found where machines are running), diesel fumes (likely found where trucks drop off supplies or pick up product) and what he thinks is sea air, causing him to muse that the factory is by the ocean.\nIn reality, the air inside most factories is much like the air anywhere else. [ citation needed ] This is particularly true for modern factories which are much cleaner than the popular conception of a dirty, smelly factory from early in the days of industrialization. One would be unlikely to distinctly smell WD-40 or diesel fumes standing in such a factory unless it was right after or right near they were used. It would be even less likely to them smell them when the minuscule amounts of air in the bubbles was then diluted in the larger amount of air surrounding you when they are popped. Furthermore, although the comic suggests popping the bubbles gives one a \"tour\" of the factory, in fact all of the air added to the bubbles would only come from air near the machine where the wrap is made. It would be even less likely to pick up smells from other parts of the factory such as diesel fumes from the loading docks, since air is not added to bubble wrap there.\nAlthough this scenario is unlikely given human olfactory ability, scientists with very sensitive equipment have done essentially this with ice cores. As ice is laid down in places such as the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets, it traps small bubbles from the atmosphere at the time within it. As long as the ice remains frozen, those bubbles remain trapped and do not interact with the current atmosphere, preserving a record of the chemical composition of the air in the past. There have been many scientific expeditions to drill ice cores and then melt pieces of them in a laboratory where special equipment can analyze the ancient air as it is released to study the quantity of oxygen and CO2 within in. The deeper the core is drilled, the farther in the past the sample.\nThe title text references David Attenborough , who is famous for having narrated many influential documentaries for the BBC about life on earth. He is renowned for having brought science into the homes of tens of millions. The title text humorously suggests that Cueball thinks his \"narration\" about what he smells in the bubble wrap is as important and distinguished as Attenborough's award winning work.\n[Cueball is holding a large piece of bubble wrap in both hands, clearly pressing one of the bubbles with his fingers so it pops, indicated with several small lines going away from that spot, and a sound.] Cueball: Hmm... Cueball: WD-40, diesel fumes... Cueball: And is that sea air? I guess they're near the ocean. Bubble wrap: Pop\n[Caption below the panel:] If your sense of smell is good enough, popping bubble wrap gives you a tour of a bubble wrap factory.\n"}
{"id":2459,"title":"March 2020","image_title":"March 2020","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2459","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/march_2020.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2459:_March_2020","transcript":"[In a 3 column by 5 row grid of panels, 15 monthly wall calendars are shown. All calendars have a large header with month and year given on two lines. Below this is a black border with 7 white lines, for each day of the week, and below that 5 rows with 7 columns, making all calendars the same, with 35 spaces. Nothing is shown in these grids. Next to each of these calendars Cueball is shown. In the first 12 panels, Cueball is standing next to the calendar, in only slightly different poses. The text on the calendars only change in the top row, then it stays the same for the next nine panels:] Calendar: January 2020 Calendar: February 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020\n[In the bottom row's first panel the calendar is, as always, to the left, but now Cueball is wearing a mask and sitting on a chair leaning a bit to the left while he is being vaccinated by a masked Ponytail to his right. She is inserting the needle into his left arm. To the right is a tall but small table with the vial from which she has drawn the vaccine standing next to the lid of the vial.] Calendar: March 2020\n[The bottom row's second panel is similar to the previous with Cueball wearing a mask and sitting on a chair leaning a bit to the left while he is being vaccinated - although this time by a masked Hairy, standing to his right. Hairy is also inserting the needle into his left arm. To the right is a different small table, with only one leg. On it is a vial from which Hairy has drawn the vaccine. Also some other black things are lying on the table, maybe other syringes for administrating the vaccine.] Calendar: March 2020\n[In the final panel Cueball again stands next to the calendar, but finally the text has changed.] Calendar: May 2021\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nThis comic shows 15 calendars and Cueball next to them. The first three months on the calendar are January, February and March 2020. It would be expected that the months would increase in order, but the calendar month stays at March 2020 until the final panel of the comic, where it switches to May 2021, the month this comic was released, indicating that Cueball is \"stuck\" in March 2020 for more than a year. The COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States in March 2020 and Cueball (probably representing Randall ) may feel that he has been unable to move on with life, or that time was at a standstill until he was fully vaccinated. It is plausible that Randall was past the two weeks after his final vaccination when this comic came out. He has made several comics centered around that of being fully vaccinated in the weeks up to this comic. Specifically 2450: Post Vaccine Social Scheduling and 2454: Fully Vaccinated in April.\nIn the penultimate 2 panels, Cueball is shown getting his two doses of the vaccine, with Ponytail and Hairy administering the vaccine. Also these two panels are in March 2020, but in reality they are most likely in March 2021 and April 2021, as there are typically 3-6 weeks between first and second dose depending on the type of vaccine. In the final panel, the calendar has switched to the current month, May 2021, showing that Cueball can now resume life after getting vaccinated, and most likely having passed the two weeks after final shot mark.\nThe title text references 630: Time Travel , another time-related comic. While it\u2019s technically true that the vaccines were brought from the year 2020, it was through the ordinary \u201cone day per day\u201d form of time travel illustrated in this earlier comic.\nInterestingly, there are only 15 panels, so if the 'normal' months increased in sync, it would \"only\" be March 2021, not May 2021. This may refer to the strange distortion of time during the COVID-19 pandemic . Clearly 17 panels would have made more sense when counting months, but the point here is that time has been at a standstill the last 14 months from March 2020 to April 2021; how many panels represents those 14 month (14, 12 or 10) is not important. Using 15 panels, makes the first 3 and the last 3 stand out from the 9 in the middle, which makes sense from the flow of the comic.\n[In a 3 column by 5 row grid of panels, 15 monthly wall calendars are shown. All calendars have a large header with month and year given on two lines. Below this is a black border with 7 white lines, for each day of the week, and below that 5 rows with 7 columns, making all calendars the same, with 35 spaces. Nothing is shown in these grids. Next to each of these calendars Cueball is shown. In the first 12 panels, Cueball is standing next to the calendar, in only slightly different poses. The text on the calendars only change in the top row, then it stays the same for the next nine panels:] Calendar: January 2020 Calendar: February 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020 Calendar: March 2020\n[In the bottom row's first panel the calendar is, as always, to the left, but now Cueball is wearing a mask and sitting on a chair leaning a bit to the left while he is being vaccinated by a masked Ponytail to his right. She is inserting the needle into his left arm. To the right is a tall but small table with the vial from which she has drawn the vaccine standing next to the lid of the vial.] Calendar: March 2020\n[The bottom row's second panel is similar to the previous with Cueball wearing a mask and sitting on a chair leaning a bit to the left while he is being vaccinated - although this time by a masked Hairy, standing to his right. Hairy is also inserting the needle into his left arm. To the right is a different small table, with only one leg. On it is a vial from which Hairy has drawn the vaccine. Also some other black things are lying on the table, maybe other syringes for administrating the vaccine.] Calendar: March 2020\n[In the final panel Cueball again stands next to the calendar, but finally the text has changed.] Calendar: May 2021\n"}
{"id":2460,"title":"Vaccinated","image_title":"Vaccinated","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2460","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vaccinated.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2460:_Vaccinated","transcript":"[Cueball is holding his phone up, looking at the bright screen (indicated with lines emanating from the screen). Megan stands next to him looking down at his phone.] Cueball: It's official: We're fully vaccinated. Megan: It doesn't feel real.\n[Cueball has put his phone away, and they are looking at each other.] Cueball: I can't wait to hang out with friends again. Megan: Seriously.\n[In a frame-less panel they are just standing next to each other, but looking away from each other.]\n[They look back at each other and continue the conversation.] Cueball: So, uh...how do we... Megan: I was hoping you knew. Cueball: I'm realizing now, I was hazy on this before the pandemic.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nHooray, Cueball and Megan are finally fully vaccinated! This means that they are now able to socialize within society, as they are unafraid of being infected by COVID or spreading COVID to others.\nHowever, the punchline lies in the fact that Cueball and Megan have never been good with social interactions , and are still unsure of how to do this.\nThe title text continues with this theme, as Cueball (or Megan?) is good at building mathematical models to know when it is safe to attend parties (and other large gatherings), but the issue remains that they are not commonly invited to these events, or are socially awkward when attending them.\n[Cueball is holding his phone up, looking at the bright screen (indicated with lines emanating from the screen). Megan stands next to him looking down at his phone.] Cueball: It's official: We're fully vaccinated. Megan: It doesn't feel real.\n[Cueball has put his phone away, and they are looking at each other.] Cueball: I can't wait to hang out with friends again. Megan: Seriously.\n[In a frame-less panel they are just standing next to each other, but looking away from each other.]\n[They look back at each other and continue the conversation.] Cueball: So, uh...how do we... Megan: I was hoping you knew. Cueball: I'm realizing now, I was hazy on this before the pandemic.\n"}
{"id":2461,"title":"90's Kid Space Program","image_title":"90's Kid Space Program","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2461","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/90s_kid_space_program.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2461:_90%27s_Kid_Space_Program","transcript":"[A command and service module representing the tip of a spacecraft, is attached by four long trusses to four equidistant points on the edge of a giant light green pepper (a green \"hill\" with a round raised edge around it).  The popper is in its inverted configuration, ready to pop. There is a caption beneath the panel:] The 90's Kid Space Program prepares for their first orbital launch\n","explanation":"The \"launch system\" is just one of the rubber popper toys popular in the 1990s. These toys are little rubber hemispheres, about 1\" (25 mm) in diameter and 1\/8\" (3 mm) thick. When turned inside-out and placed on a hard surface, they will, after a short wait, snap back to their original shape, popping up into the air. The joke is that kids who grew up with these toys will think they're a great idea to propel a space ship to orbit, when in fact the toys launch at mere tens of kilometers per hour, far short of the thousands needed to reach orbital speed [ citation needed ] . But now kids playing with these are those that make rockets, hence the title 90's Kid Space Program (KSP).\nEven if the popper-based propulsion system could generate enough acceleration to reach orbit, the abrupt impulse would likely cause serious harm to any astronauts.\nThe title text implies that many working now at NASA were 90s kids. Both categories would include Randall , as he was born in 1984 and previously worked at NASA.\nThe title is a reference to the Kerbal Space Program (KSP) which has been a recurring theme on xkcd, and it has previously been hinted at that NASA's employees uses this program in 1244: Six Words and 2204: Ksp 2 . And also that you learn more about orbital Mechanics by using KSP than from being hired by NASA in 1356: Orbital Mechanics .\n[A command and service module representing the tip of a spacecraft, is attached by four long trusses to four equidistant points on the edge of a giant light green pepper (a green \"hill\" with a round raised edge around it).  The popper is in its inverted configuration, ready to pop. There is a caption beneath the panel:] The 90's Kid Space Program prepares for their first orbital launch\n"}
{"id":2462,"title":"NASA Award","image_title":"NASA Award","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2462","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nasa_award.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2462:_NASA_Award","transcript":"[Cueball, Ponytail, Hairy, and Megan stand on a two tiered platform. Ponytail and Hairy are are on the top step, with Cueball and Megan standing on the lower step looking up at the other two. Ponytail holds a necklace with a rock attached to the end up in both hands offering it to Hairy.] Ponytail: We're honored to present you with this Nobel Prize! Hairy: That's just a rock. Ponytail: Yeah, but from a certain angle...\n[Caption beneath the panel]: NASA has a new award for people on the internet who claim to find life in their Mars photos.\n","explanation":"In this comic Hairy is awarded a \" Nobel Prize \" by NASA , represented by Ponytail handing him the award, as well as Cueball and Megan . He receives this award because he has found \"life on Mars\" by looking at NASA's images from their Mars missions. Hairy looks at his prize, and remarks that it is just a rock on a ribbon. To this Ponytail replies that from a certain angle... implying that if he looks hard enough the rock might look like a Nobel Prize. Just like Hairy, by looking at the pictures in the right way, found something that looked like life on Mars.\nThis comic jabs at poorly-supported claims of discovering alien life, particularly when instances of pareidolia are used as \"evidence\" of such life. Pareidolia is the tendency for perception to spuriously impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous visual stimulus, for example a rock that is interpreted as a face. A famous example is the Face on Mars , a 2km long hill that can be said to resemble the face of a human when viewed on low resolution images, at a specific angle and lighting conditions. At the time some people claimed this was proof of an ancient Martian civilization. Later higher resolution images showed that the face was an optical illusion. \nRocks make for poor prizes as they make for poor evidence [ citation needed ] , and looking from different angles is of no use for either.\nIf you're actively looking for patterns in large amounts of data (especially if it's any pattern, largely undefined until it is 'found') then you are likely to dismiss all the data that does not support your preconceived ideas and seize upon the small randomnesses that you have managed to trawl though and classify as 'interesting'.  This is an example of Confirmation Bias . It's possible that the featured NASA personnel specifically sifted rocks looking for one that looked like an award.\nThe title text explains how you find life on Mars. Just access other people's images that have been taken on Mars, and look for plants and animals. This is lampooning the simplistic notion that life on Mars would be detected by looking at photos at all.  In reality, all extraterrestrial life (in this solar system at least) is almost certainly microscopic.  The notion of detecting it by studying photos of the Martian surface is just as absurd as the idea of looking at the photos and expecting to see dogs and trees and other familiar macroscopic lifeforms.\nBuilding a camera and landing it on Mars is what NASA does with their Mars rovers and other Mars missions. The camera is a small part of the entire mission, though an important part. But this is why the title text talks about landing the camera on Mars. The space probes are the cameras.\n[Cueball, Ponytail, Hairy, and Megan stand on a two tiered platform. Ponytail and Hairy are are on the top step, with Cueball and Megan standing on the lower step looking up at the other two. Ponytail holds a necklace with a rock attached to the end up in both hands offering it to Hairy.] Ponytail: We're honored to present you with this Nobel Prize! Hairy: That's just a rock. Ponytail: Yeah, but from a certain angle...\n[Caption beneath the panel]: NASA has a new award for people on the internet who claim to find life in their Mars photos.\n"}
{"id":2463,"title":"Astrophotography","image_title":"Astrophotography","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2463","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/astrophotography.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2463:_Astrophotography","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan stand on a hill with the dark yellow sun setting behind them. Outside the Sun's disc everything is black. All that can be seen is silhouettes against the sun. Cueball is at the top-left of the hill, holding a bow in his left arm, which has been recently shot, as indicated with lines along the string. The the arrow is to right, where it has speared a ball. Megan is at the bottom-right of the hill, juggling four other balls, one near her hand, two above her and one higher up than the path of the arrow. There are two planes going in opposite directions with banners on them with words readable against the Sun. Above the planes is the shadow of the International Space Station. Finally Sun is partially eclipsed by the moon in the upper right corner.] [Banner 1]: Nice [Banner 2]: Shot\n[Caption beneath the panel]: Our astrophotography community's one-upsmanship[sic] is getting out of hand.\n","explanation":"Astrophotography is the practice of taking pictures of astronomical objects.  Sometimes it is specified as a hobby, as opposed to the work of professional astronomers.  Astrophotographers like to take pretty pictures of all sorts of objects in the sky, but photographing the Sun is a popular subgenre within the field, especially if something is transiting in front of it.  Typical things include planes, the International Space Station (ISS), and the Moon ( Solar eclipses ).\nDuring the Total Solar Eclipse 2017 visible across US it was possible to see the ISS pass in front of the Sun during a partial part of the Eclipse (from a site that was later in the total Eclipse zone.) This was photographed and filmed by Destin from Smarter Every Day and can be seen in his video Space Station Transiting 2017 ECLIPSE . (Go to the time of the flyby of the ISS in the video here ).\nTwo years later he did another episode South American Eclipse - Argentina . In this video there was only the moon eclipsing the sun, at first, but then towards the end the sun begins to set behind the distant mountains creating a shadow scenario between Moon and mountain shadows as displayed in this comic.\nThis comic thus combines those two videos, which Randall must have seen, and then adds several more layers caused by the Astrophotography community's One-Upmanship. The practice of \"one-upmanship\" refers to the practice of achieving something superior to what another has achieved, or \"getting one up on\" them. The term originated in the 1950s or earlier.\nThe caption claims that the photo shown in the comic is the result of a continuous string of one-upmanship among astrophotographers in a community, each striving to one-up the other.\nIn this comic there seems to be an abundance of things:\nTaking the picture required precisely scheduling and arranging the relative positions of several of the various subjects (and photographer) to coincide with the predictable but rare conjunctions of the rest of the scene, as well as special equipment:\nThe title text describes a similarly outlandish photo attempting to one-up Cueball and Megan, done simultaneously on the next hill over, thus a place where the same ISS transit can be seen:\n[Cueball and Megan stand on a hill with the dark yellow sun setting behind them. Outside the Sun's disc everything is black. All that can be seen is silhouettes against the sun. Cueball is at the top-left of the hill, holding a bow in his left arm, which has been recently shot, as indicated with lines along the string. The the arrow is to right, where it has speared a ball. Megan is at the bottom-right of the hill, juggling four other balls, one near her hand, two above her and one higher up than the path of the arrow. There are two planes going in opposite directions with banners on them with words readable against the Sun. Above the planes is the shadow of the International Space Station. Finally Sun is partially eclipsed by the moon in the upper right corner.] [Banner 1]: Nice [Banner 2]: Shot\n[Caption beneath the panel]: Our astrophotography community's one-upsmanship[sic] is getting out of hand.\n"}
{"id":2464,"title":"Muller's Ratchet","image_title":"Muller's Ratchet","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2464","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mullers_ratchet.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2464:_Muller%27s_Ratchet","transcript":"[A caption sits above a slightly greyed-out photo of Hairbun holding out a cat to Cueball, who has his hand over his face and is leaning away. Below are arrows leading to much smaller variations of the photo, all altered in some way.] [From left to right: Image with the sides cropped and black text bordered by white in the bottom center; image with black text in white box with black border above cat, on Hairbun, and on Cueball; image identical to the original but with softer edges; image cropped around all sides to exclude all negative space around frame, with white text bordered by black near the top and bottom center; image cropped to cut out half of Hairbun and Cueball's legs and featuring the cat holding a sword out at Cueball; image same as the original except with black text bordered by white on top of the cat, Hairbun, and Cueball; and image blurred out and at low resolution with black text in white oval on top of Hairbun and Cueball.] Caption above: When a photo goes around on social media, people create lots of new versions of it.\n[A larger depiction of an image altered to cut out some of Hairbun and Cueball's legs and the cat holding a sword to the left of a caption, with a faint, shadowed wordmark saying \"Made with SwordApp ] Caption: Sometimes, one of the edited versions becomes more popular and supplants the original. But often, the new version isn't made from the best copy of the image. It may be pixelated, cropped, or watermarked. [The same image appears with a more transparent box around it showing the cropped-out areas and an arrow pointing into it saying \"lost\". To the left is a caption.] Caption: As long as those flaws are minor enough that they don't cancel out the big change, the new version can still win out. Each good change brings with it random background damage. The degradation only goes one way. Once an image is cropped, its descendents will be, too. This steady loss of information is called Muller's Ratchet . [The original photo and the edited replacement are side-by-side, with the original on the right and the replacement on the left. The area above the cat where the sword is shown in the replacement is circled with a dotted line in both images. In the original, the area inside is greyed out, and in the replacement, the entire image is greyed out except for that area.] [Arrows point from the emphasized parts of both images to a new photo below that combines the original image with the sword from the replacement. The dotted line is still present. A caption sits to the left.] Caption: But there's a solution. The old versions are still around, so if you have an image editor that lets you splice together parts of two images, you can make a new version with the best parts of both. This process is called recombination... ] [All previous panels are grouped in one large panel, with a caption below the entire frame] Caption: People use evolutionary metaphors to explain the spread of internet content, but at this point we have so much more experience with the internet that I feel like it often makes more sense the other way around.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall reviews a passage explaining the internet with terms associated with evolution, comparing the constant resharing and changing of popular photos to evolutionary processes, namely Muller's ratchet and recombination .\nAn image of Hairbun showing a cat to Cueball , who is apparently shocked, is used as an example of the subject phenomenon. This image is altered in various ways:\nRecombination is the combination of genetic material from chromosomes, shuffling genes during meiosis. In this case, it is being compared to shuffling and recombining aspects of an edited digital image.\nSometimes, genetic mutation can create better genes - like the sword being given to the cat in the image. Other changes remove or degrade from the genetic history, without apparent detriment, just because the circumstances do not currently confer any significant advantage to it. If the 'lost' ability is perhaps useful in dealing with an infrequent environmental stress then the loss of its utility might be felt a generation or two later.\nWith recombination, useful novel changes can be shuffled into the population without necessarily bringing in a less useful mutation, creating descendents with both the obvious advantages (a sword) and the previously more established resilience (the fuller frame).\nThe degradation of digital images has previously been explored in 1683: Digital Data .\nThe title text has a double meaning, referring both to the ways these particular images on the Internet illustrate these evolutionary processes (which are driven by the mechanisms of biological reproduction, including sexual reproduction) and to the amount of erotic imagery illustrating the mechanics of sexual activity one might find on the Internet .\n[A caption sits above a slightly greyed-out photo of Hairbun holding out a cat to Cueball, who has his hand over his face and is leaning away. Below are arrows leading to much smaller variations of the photo, all altered in some way.] [From left to right: Image with the sides cropped and black text bordered by white in the bottom center; image with black text in white box with black border above cat, on Hairbun, and on Cueball; image identical to the original but with softer edges; image cropped around all sides to exclude all negative space around frame, with white text bordered by black near the top and bottom center; image cropped to cut out half of Hairbun and Cueball's legs and featuring the cat holding a sword out at Cueball; image same as the original except with black text bordered by white on top of the cat, Hairbun, and Cueball; and image blurred out and at low resolution with black text in white oval on top of Hairbun and Cueball.] Caption above: When a photo goes around on social media, people create lots of new versions of it.\n[A larger depiction of an image altered to cut out some of Hairbun and Cueball's legs and the cat holding a sword to the left of a caption, with a faint, shadowed wordmark saying \"Made with SwordApp ] Caption: Sometimes, one of the edited versions becomes more popular and supplants the original. But often, the new version isn't made from the best copy of the image. It may be pixelated, cropped, or watermarked. [The same image appears with a more transparent box around it showing the cropped-out areas and an arrow pointing into it saying \"lost\". To the left is a caption.] Caption: As long as those flaws are minor enough that they don't cancel out the big change, the new version can still win out. Each good change brings with it random background damage. The degradation only goes one way. Once an image is cropped, its descendents will be, too. This steady loss of information is called Muller's Ratchet . [The original photo and the edited replacement are side-by-side, with the original on the right and the replacement on the left. The area above the cat where the sword is shown in the replacement is circled with a dotted line in both images. In the original, the area inside is greyed out, and in the replacement, the entire image is greyed out except for that area.] [Arrows point from the emphasized parts of both images to a new photo below that combines the original image with the sword from the replacement. The dotted line is still present. A caption sits to the left.] Caption: But there's a solution. The old versions are still around, so if you have an image editor that lets you splice together parts of two images, you can make a new version with the best parts of both. This process is called recombination... ] [All previous panels are grouped in one large panel, with a caption below the entire frame] Caption: People use evolutionary metaphors to explain the spread of internet content, but at this point we have so much more experience with the internet that I feel like it often makes more sense the other way around.\n"}
{"id":2465,"title":"Dimensional Chess","image_title":"Dimensional Chess","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2465","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dimensional_chess.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2465:_Dimensional_Chess","transcript":"[A chessboard is depicted in the middle of a stack of boards. All pieces visible on the middle board are in their starting positions, except the white knight from a2 at d1 and the black pawn from g2 at e2. There are three boards each above and below the original, missing columns a and h. On columns c & f on each board, there are clear cubes with a small pedestal on each square. Columns d & e are similar, except with multiple cubes on each square. No chess pieces are visible, except for a white piece -- not clearly visible, but implicitly the white king's knight -- on the second board above the middle on b2 and a black pawn on the top board on f3. Below the chessboards is a caption] [Caption below the panel]: The problem with N- dimensional chess is that N is a constant across the board. In my new variant, every row has one more dimension than the one behind it.\n","explanation":"Being good at chess is often regarded as a sign of high intelligence. A skilled player must be able to consider possibilities several moves in advance, which can be represented as an exponentially growing tree of possibilities.  The branching factor of chess, the approximate number of legal moves available at any given time, is about thirty-five, although most players (human and computer) will use heuristics to prune the trees to regard only likely or promising moves.  Expanding the playing field by generalizing to three-dimensional chess (or beyond) will increase the branching factor even further, and so someone who is able to competently play three-dimensional chess could be regarded as even more intelligent than someone who can only play two-dimensional chess. Making chess into an N -dimensional game thus makes it arbitrarily more difficult, even before Randall's addition of non-uniform dimensionality of the board.\nRegarding Randall's rule that \"every row has one more dimension than the one behind it,\" it is easiest to see how this is applied with the first two rows on each end. The first row on each end is a like a row on a traditional two-dimensional chess board (albeit played with three-dimensional pieces): you can go from left to right, or forward into the next row. The second row then becomes a two-dimensional row of a three-dimensional space: you can go left to right, forward to back, and now top to bottom. Note that there are seven spaces (represented by \"shelves\") from top to bottom, as opposed to the typical eight rows from left to right\/front to back. This is likely to make sure there is symmetry between how many additional spaces are on top versus on the bottom (three, in this case). Moving another row would presumably add movement in some other direction to make it more complicated\/interesting. This escalates until somehow the middle two rows require moving pieces in five dimensions (the middle two rows are four-dimensional rows + moving to other rows as fifth dimension), despite humans only being able to experience three spatial dimensions. [ citation needed ] This could potentially be accomplished via playing on a computer.\nThere are eight squares on the first row, 56 on the second row and presumably 504 on the third and 1512 on the fourth, thus making the total number of squares 4160 rather than the 64 of a traditional chess board. The drawing shows apparently five squares (or boxes) stacked on the third row and if this is also formed symmetrically, there are four hidden out of sight. The middle rows are already quite convoluted but it seems as if Randall drew three boxes along this dimension. Due to this dimensionality increase, there is plenty of free space in the middle board, drastically changing the game dynamics such that shadowing plays very little role and that movement is very unrestricted.\nThe title text refers to the practice of writing down what happens throughout the game, so that it is possible to review how the game progressed later. Recording moves in this fashion is required in most tournament situations. There are several common forms of Chess notation used for this purpose, and as well as indicating the moves, players may add annotations indicating their opinions about whether a particular move was good, bad, or peculiar. According to the title text, every annotation is followed by \"?!\"\u2014which indicates a questionable move, of dubious value but not obviously a blunder either. The joke is that the variable-dimensional game is so complicated that any move will answer this description.\nThere appears to be the normal chess pieces (so no Fairy chess pieces ), but the game has already started (there are white and black pawns in one of the middle squares, and both white and black knights have moved.\nNote that \"in dimensional chess\" may be a pun on \" N -dimensional chess.\"\n[A chessboard is depicted in the middle of a stack of boards. All pieces visible on the middle board are in their starting positions, except the white knight from a2 at d1 and the black pawn from g2 at e2. There are three boards each above and below the original, missing columns a and h. On columns c & f on each board, there are clear cubes with a small pedestal on each square. Columns d & e are similar, except with multiple cubes on each square. No chess pieces are visible, except for a white piece -- not clearly visible, but implicitly the white king's knight -- on the second board above the middle on b2 and a black pawn on the top board on f3. Below the chessboards is a caption] [Caption below the panel]: The problem with N- dimensional chess is that N is a constant across the board. In my new variant, every row has one more dimension than the one behind it.\n"}
{"id":2466,"title":"In Your Classroom","image_title":"In Your Classroom","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2466","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/in_your_classroom.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2466:_In_Your_Classroom","transcript":"[Caption above scatter plot with labeled axes] Caption: The thing you study just showed up in your classroom! That's... Upper y-axis label: Good Lower y-axis label: Bad Upper x-axis label: Normal Lower x-axis label: Weird\n[First quadrant (left to right, top to bottom):] 20th century authors Exobiology 21st century authors 19th century authors Robotics Paleontology Martian soil chemistry Child psychology Tourism [Second quadrant] Atmospheric physics Ethics Education Bibliography Human physiology Public speaking Architecture Library science Furniture design Culinary arts Ergonomics Botany [Third quadrant] Entomology Occupational therapy Hydraulic engineering Pest control Foodborne illness Criminal law Physiology of stress Oncology [Fourth quadrant] Ornithology Animation Petroleum geology Highway engineering Toxicology Hematology Hostage negotiation History of siege warfare Trauma surgery Volcanology Quasar astronomy\n","explanation":"Randall has created a thought experiment and corresponding chart about school courses. The idea is, \"the subject of the class appears in the classroom\" and the chart compares how dangerous and how unusual that would be.\nIn the title text two points that are off the chart to the left and right are also mentioned. See details about all the subjects in the table below.\nNote that Randall uses similar diagrams in each of 388: Fuck Grapefruit , 1242: Scary Names and 1501: Mysteries , which also contain different items. They  also have extra points mentioned in the title text. In the first two comics the points are also off the chart, whereas for the last the description of the point is too long to fit on the chart. Extra info outside the chart is also used in the title text of 1785: Wifi , but this is a line graph.\n[Caption above scatter plot with labeled axes] Caption: The thing you study just showed up in your classroom! That's... Upper y-axis label: Good Lower y-axis label: Bad Upper x-axis label: Normal Lower x-axis label: Weird\n[First quadrant (left to right, top to bottom):] 20th century authors Exobiology 21st century authors 19th century authors Robotics Paleontology Martian soil chemistry Child psychology Tourism [Second quadrant] Atmospheric physics Ethics Education Bibliography Human physiology Public speaking Architecture Library science Furniture design Culinary arts Ergonomics Botany [Third quadrant] Entomology Occupational therapy Hydraulic engineering Pest control Foodborne illness Criminal law Physiology of stress Oncology [Fourth quadrant] Ornithology Animation Petroleum geology Highway engineering Toxicology Hematology Hostage negotiation History of siege warfare Trauma surgery Volcanology Quasar astronomy\n"}
{"id":2467,"title":"Wikipedia Caltrops","image_title":"Wikipedia Caltrops","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2467","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wikipedia_caltrops.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2467:_Wikipedia_Caltrops","transcript":"[Cueball drives a car, followed by another car driven by Hairy. Cueball is leaning on the open window looking back as 24 large paper slips with Wikipedia links are flying out of the open trunk of the car. They extend to the front of Hairy's car, obscuring that all the way up to Hairy's position in the car. None of the links can be read in full, and only on a few can parts of the actual link be seen. Many has only part of the pages title visible, some parts are obstructed partly by other slips in front of them or they have not entirely left the trunk. In once case the link is so long that it has been split on two lines on a thicker slip. There is a large part of the link that cannot be seen after the first line, but the end of the second line can be seen as well. Here the (fairly) readable parts are give, roughly in normal reading order.] a.org\/wiki\/Elsagate wiki\/Bubbly_Creek wiki\/Pheasant_Island a.org\/wiki\/American_death_triangle List_of_fictional_colors \/wiki\/Future_of_Earth#Introversion pedia.org\/wiki\/Fastest_animals#Invertebrates ki\/Defence_Scheme_No._1 i\/Boeing_YAL-1 ki\/Bald-hairy \/Walkalong_glider Burned_house_horizon \/wiki\/AVE Mizar Flying_ice_cube Time in Australia#Anomalies: Unexplained_sounds Talk:List_of_U.S._states_and_ Ebright_Azimuth Mosquito_laser January_0 \/1808_mystery_eruption \/Hairy_Hands Cumberland_vs._Georgia_Tech_football_game Timeline_of_the_far_future \/wiki\/1994_Caribbean_Cup#Anomaly\n[Caption below the panel:] I have a collection of Wikipedia links to throw behind my car if I'm ever being chased by someone as easily distracted as me.\n","explanation":"Cueball's car has a collection of Wikipedia links spilling out of the trunk, meant to stop Hairy who's in the following car. The idea is that by dropping a series of interesting links, one could stop someone else's movement as they take the time to go through them all, provided that they are also easily distracted. This is analogous to the caltrops mentioned in the title; caltrops are small, spiked implements that are scattered on a road to slow down someone pursuing you. Hence the title of Wikipedia Caltrops .\nWikipedia is also a website that is notorious for having many links to other pages, which may result in a \"wiki walk\", a dilemma for Randall that has been discussed previously in 214: The Problem with Wikipedia (and separately with TV Tropes in 609: Tab Explosion ).\nThis strategy is similar to a weaponized version of 356: Nerd Sniping , using the high levels of focus that tend to come along with nerdy interests against someone. Munroe apparently reasons that, because these links would stop him in his tracks, they might do the same for a given target.\nThe Wikipedia links include:\nMentioned in the title text, a \" Czech hedgehog \" is an anti-tank obstacle made of metal, essentially a large caltrop. It would be an effective roadblock, however a sign describing it would not impede most traffic, [ citation needed ] only for those distracted as easily as Randall.\n[Cueball drives a car, followed by another car driven by Hairy. Cueball is leaning on the open window looking back as 24 large paper slips with Wikipedia links are flying out of the open trunk of the car. They extend to the front of Hairy's car, obscuring that all the way up to Hairy's position in the car. None of the links can be read in full, and only on a few can parts of the actual link be seen. Many has only part of the pages title visible, some parts are obstructed partly by other slips in front of them or they have not entirely left the trunk. In once case the link is so long that it has been split on two lines on a thicker slip. There is a large part of the link that cannot be seen after the first line, but the end of the second line can be seen as well. Here the (fairly) readable parts are give, roughly in normal reading order.] a.org\/wiki\/Elsagate wiki\/Bubbly_Creek wiki\/Pheasant_Island a.org\/wiki\/American_death_triangle List_of_fictional_colors \/wiki\/Future_of_Earth#Introversion pedia.org\/wiki\/Fastest_animals#Invertebrates ki\/Defence_Scheme_No._1 i\/Boeing_YAL-1 ki\/Bald-hairy \/Walkalong_glider Burned_house_horizon \/wiki\/AVE Mizar Flying_ice_cube Time in Australia#Anomalies: Unexplained_sounds Talk:List_of_U.S._states_and_ Ebright_Azimuth Mosquito_laser January_0 \/1808_mystery_eruption \/Hairy_Hands Cumberland_vs._Georgia_Tech_football_game Timeline_of_the_far_future \/wiki\/1994_Caribbean_Cup#Anomaly\n[Caption below the panel:] I have a collection of Wikipedia links to throw behind my car if I'm ever being chased by someone as easily distracted as me.\n"}
{"id":2468,"title":"Inheritance","image_title":"Inheritance","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2468","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/inheritance.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2468:_Inheritance","transcript":"[Ponytail, White Hat, Megan, and Cueball are playing a board game. There are drinks on the table. Ponytail is writing something]\nPonytail: Let's see...I got 31, you have 28, 35 for you, and- Cueball: -I've got 10,019. Ponytail: *Sigh* Cueball: Hey, add another 20 to everyone, on me! White Hat: I hate this .\n[Caption beneath the panel:] No one wants to play board games with me ever since I inherited 4,000,000 victory points from my grandfather.\n","explanation":"This comic is in reference to strategy board games , which often score players on some type of point system based on a variety of possible achievements. The joke in this comic is that Cueball has a massive sum of points that were not scored in the current game but rather handed down from his grandfather. Board games do not normally include an inheritance from previous sessions [ citation needed ] , in contrast to real life where some people become wealthy by inheriting vast sums of money from ancestors. Such inheritances tend to lead to 'successes' in life for those who have done little to earn their wealth.\nCueball offers to distribute a trifling fraction of his points to the other players, teasing them, but he will still have an insurmountable advantage. Despite his 'generosity', no one wants to play a game that they have no chance of winning.  The value of his score, 10,019, seems to indicate that he \"earned\" 19 points during the course of the game (less than his competitors) and then added 10,000 from his 'inheritance'.\nThe comic may be a reference to economic simulation board games like Monopoly , which was created as a critique to capitalism; in this case, no one can win the game against people who start out with a large amount of accumulated wealth. See also the ' Small Loan of a Million Dollars ' trope of a profile in which the author or subject discusses the simple tricks they used to retire early or buy a house, often involving a hurried admission of financial assistance from a family member.\nThe title text asks Cueball if he has any moral qualms over the source of these points, then indicates his grandfather's fortune was made through factory farming in the farm-themed board game Agricola . Factory farming is a broad term for applying mass-production techniques to agriculture, treating both plants and animals as commodities to be processed as efficiently as possible. These techniques are condemned, at least in some circles, as being cruel to livestock, in addition to having serious environmental and land-use implications, among other criticisms. The implication is that Cueball's grandfather somehow managed to introduce an immoral and\/or socially harmful mechanic into a board game, greatly enriching himself and his heirs. This echoes another concern about inherited wealth: that the source of the money may have been unethical, but the heirs still get to enjoy the advantages, without considering themselves accountable for the harm. Cueball brushes off this criticism with the claim that the change was inevitable, which is a common response to analogous real-life concerns. The game Agricola was previously mentioned in 696: Strip Games and 778: Scheduling .\n[Ponytail, White Hat, Megan, and Cueball are playing a board game. There are drinks on the table. Ponytail is writing something]\nPonytail: Let's see...I got 31, you have 28, 35 for you, and- Cueball: -I've got 10,019. Ponytail: *Sigh* Cueball: Hey, add another 20 to everyone, on me! White Hat: I hate this .\n[Caption beneath the panel:] No one wants to play board games with me ever since I inherited 4,000,000 victory points from my grandfather.\n"}
{"id":2469,"title":"Astronomy Status Board","image_title":"Astronomy Status Board","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2469","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/astronomy_status_board.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2469:_Astronomy_Status_Board","transcript":"[Ponytail is looking through a telescope, while Cueball is pressing buttons, which makes noises, on a remote control connected with a wire to a large board to their right. He controls the messages shown on this board.] Remote: Beep beep\n[The board has a black screen, with a label in a white section above the screen:] Astronomy Status Board:\n[The black screen has five rows with text in three columns. The first column is with white text. The second is in glowing green text and the last are in faded grey red text.]\nAstronomers do regularly observe occultations of stars by other celestial bodies, and sometimes also search through archived images for missed occultations.  This can provide information on the size and orbit of an asteroid too small to observe directly, or other useful scientific knowledge, but occulted stars are not \"gone\", merely hidden.  There are also a few astronomers who are searching image archives for stars that really have completely vanished without a trace (or suddenly appeared), as this would be a sign of truly novel physics -- perhaps even a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence -- but no such vanishings have yet been identified. This comic appeared at the time the VASCO project is receiving media attention, claiming that 800 stars visible in 70 years old photos are not seen anymore .\nSmall stars which have exhausted their hydrogen fuel without building enough heat to fuse carbon or oxygen, are theorized to eventually collapse into faint \" white dwarf stars\" which are of such low luminosity that they are unlikely to remain visible to the naked eye from the Earth's surface except at very close proximities. The Earth's sun, Sol, is generally expected to follow this progression as a low-mass main sequence star, during the latter period of its stellar evolution . Although some stellar models predict that relatively rapid collapses are possible, the long time scale over which stellar evolutions are believed to occur decreases the odds of observing any one specific star both before and after this transition. In this comic, individual stars are not listed; therefore \"gone\" is unlikely to be useful for the stars, because a great number of stars would be \"still there\" until well after the expected collapse of our own sun.\nOne of the proposed outcomes of the ultimate fate of the universe is the Big Rip . If it's correct, all the items on the status board will eventually move from Still There to Gone, beginning with the most distant galaxies and proceeding to the the objects in our own solar system (although there will be hardly any time for the board to show Gone for the closest, especially the Moon). This scenario is dramatized in the short story \" Last Contact \" by Stephen Baxter.\nCollisions between celestial bodies are commonly postulated as a fundamental part of the formation of planetary nebula . Since most mass in the known universe is observed to have a relatively low albedo , the presence of numerous unlit, massy bodies of planetary scale and smaller is strongly indicated. This is corroborated by measurements of orbital deflection detected in many visible stars, hinting at the possibility of large planets orbiting around them, unseen due to distance & low luminosity. The possibility of one or more local planets being \"gone\" could be attributed to unpredicted collision with another object of similar mass or equivalent velocity. Such a collision is one possible explanation for the sudden & catastrophic disintegration of Earth's moon, Luna, in the novel Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. This hypothetical event forms the premise of this book, during which Earth's whole sky becomes occluded by dust raised by millions of impacts across its surface & eventually by the constant incandescent descent of lunar debris itself. Again however, a single collision with any planet besides the Earth would not remove all the \"Planets\" from the Earth's visible night sky, so \"gone\" remains unlikely to be used for that category of celestial objects.\nOcclusion of Earth's entire sky, due to airborne dust, volcanic ash, increased cloud cover, light pollution , or sufficiently dense layers of high-albedo material in orbit, may be the least unlikely potential reason for all of these celestial phenomena to be flagged as \"gone\". Notably, the phenomena in question would remain; only our view of them would be gone.\n","explanation":"Ponytail is staring at the sky through a telescope while Cueball is operating a checklist, visible on a large screen on what looks like a large billboard.\nSince they are junior astronomers, they appear to have been tasked with simply verifying whether normal celestial objects are still present in the sky, such as the Sun and the Moon. Only large objects that are clear in the sky (at least at night for those not the Sun). Although all of these objects will eventually disappear it is not expected to happen within the life of the status board. [ citation needed ]\nThis is likely a reference to the many \"status boards\" for online services ( example , another example , a different example , a funnier example ). The joke is that it would be funny if there was a status board to check that all the celestial bodies are still there, and that with our modern culture few people are looking directly at the real sky, even though anyone with a telescope and an unobstructed view could just look at the sky to verify for themselves without referencing such a status board. This is compounded by the fact that the listed celestial bodies have existed for billions of years, and are expected to last for billions more, leading one to wonder why astronomers would bother checking and rechecking just to see if they're \"still there\" with any sort of regularity.\nThis comic may also be an oblique reference to the study of the projected future of celestial objects given our current understanding of physics.  At various points in the future the objects on the billboard may become unobservable from Earth.  The Moon is gradually receding from Earth, and when the Sun enters its red giant phase the Moon might be broken up. [1] Eventually the Sun itself will run out of usable fuel and will go dark as will other stars.  Moreover, if current theories of dark energy and universal expansion hold, the acceleration of the universe could push galaxies beyond the \"Hubble Horizon\" , meaning they would no longer be observable.  Matter itself could even cease to exist under some hypothetical scenarios, such as proton decay or the Big Rip .  The joke of the comic here would be that all these scenarios are only possible in the unimaginably far future (exception: False Vacuum Decay ) and do not need constant monitoring by astronomers.\n[Ponytail is looking through a telescope, while Cueball is pressing buttons, which makes noises, on a remote control connected with a wire to a large board to their right. He controls the messages shown on this board.] Remote: Beep beep\n[The board has a black screen, with a label in a white section above the screen:] Astronomy Status Board:\n[The black screen has five rows with text in three columns. The first column is with white text. The second is in glowing green text and the last are in faded grey red text.]\nAstronomers do regularly observe occultations of stars by other celestial bodies, and sometimes also search through archived images for missed occultations.  This can provide information on the size and orbit of an asteroid too small to observe directly, or other useful scientific knowledge, but occulted stars are not \"gone\", merely hidden.  There are also a few astronomers who are searching image archives for stars that really have completely vanished without a trace (or suddenly appeared), as this would be a sign of truly novel physics -- perhaps even a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence -- but no such vanishings have yet been identified. This comic appeared at the time the VASCO project is receiving media attention, claiming that 800 stars visible in 70 years old photos are not seen anymore .\nSmall stars which have exhausted their hydrogen fuel without building enough heat to fuse carbon or oxygen, are theorized to eventually collapse into faint \" white dwarf stars\" which are of such low luminosity that they are unlikely to remain visible to the naked eye from the Earth's surface except at very close proximities. The Earth's sun, Sol, is generally expected to follow this progression as a low-mass main sequence star, during the latter period of its stellar evolution . Although some stellar models predict that relatively rapid collapses are possible, the long time scale over which stellar evolutions are believed to occur decreases the odds of observing any one specific star both before and after this transition. In this comic, individual stars are not listed; therefore \"gone\" is unlikely to be useful for the stars, because a great number of stars would be \"still there\" until well after the expected collapse of our own sun.\nOne of the proposed outcomes of the ultimate fate of the universe is the Big Rip . If it's correct, all the items on the status board will eventually move from Still There to Gone, beginning with the most distant galaxies and proceeding to the the objects in our own solar system (although there will be hardly any time for the board to show Gone for the closest, especially the Moon). This scenario is dramatized in the short story \" Last Contact \" by Stephen Baxter.\nCollisions between celestial bodies are commonly postulated as a fundamental part of the formation of planetary nebula . Since most mass in the known universe is observed to have a relatively low albedo , the presence of numerous unlit, massy bodies of planetary scale and smaller is strongly indicated. This is corroborated by measurements of orbital deflection detected in many visible stars, hinting at the possibility of large planets orbiting around them, unseen due to distance & low luminosity. The possibility of one or more local planets being \"gone\" could be attributed to unpredicted collision with another object of similar mass or equivalent velocity. Such a collision is one possible explanation for the sudden & catastrophic disintegration of Earth's moon, Luna, in the novel Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. This hypothetical event forms the premise of this book, during which Earth's whole sky becomes occluded by dust raised by millions of impacts across its surface & eventually by the constant incandescent descent of lunar debris itself. Again however, a single collision with any planet besides the Earth would not remove all the \"Planets\" from the Earth's visible night sky, so \"gone\" remains unlikely to be used for that category of celestial objects.\nOcclusion of Earth's entire sky, due to airborne dust, volcanic ash, increased cloud cover, light pollution , or sufficiently dense layers of high-albedo material in orbit, may be the least unlikely potential reason for all of these celestial phenomena to be flagged as \"gone\". Notably, the phenomena in question would remain; only our view of them would be gone.\n"}
{"id":2470,"title":"Next Slide Please","image_title":"Next Slide Please","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2470","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/next_slide_please.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2470:_Next_Slide_Please","transcript":"[A list of 12 quotes is given. Above is a large header with a question, and then a description, before the quotes follows. The text above the quotes is centered:] Did you know? Transcripts of famous quotes often leave out the slideshow instructions. Here\u2019s how these lines actually sounded:\n[The first six quotations, are written so they fit around an image of Ronald Reagan standing next to his slide showing six segments of the Berlin Wall. A large arrow points down on to the middle segment of the wall. There is something on the ground in front of the wall, could be puddles or debris. The image is to the right, and the two first and last quote goes above and below the image, while the other three stops to the left of the image:] \"Give me liberty or give me\u2014Next slide, please\u2014death!\" \"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down\u2014Next slide, please\u2014this wall.\" \"It was the best of times\u2014Next slide, please\u2014It was the worst of times.\" \"We have nothing to fear but\u2014Next slide, please\u2014fear itself.\" \"To be or\u2014Next slide, please\u2014not to be, that is the question.\" \"Shall I compare thee to a summer\u2019s day? Thou art\u2014Next slide, please\u2014more lovely and\u2014Next slide, please\u2014more temperate.\"\n[Below those five quotations is three more quotes to the right of an image showing Winston Churchill standing next to his slide showing a beach. The sun and three small clouds are over the ocean which has white waves on the black water. Ponytail is sitting under a parasol to the left, Cueball is sitting on the sand to the right with a drink in his hands, and behind him is a kid running after a large beach-ball.] \"We shall fight\u2014Next slide, please\u2014on the beaches, we shall fight on\u2014Next slide, please\u2014the landing grounds...\" \"Read my lips\u2014Next slide, please\u2014no new taxes.\" \"That's one small step for man\u2014Next slide, please\u2014one giant leap for mankind.\"\n[Below this picture is the last three quotations, without any pictures:] \"Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears! Next slide, please. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.\" \"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of\u2014Next slide, please\u2014a good fortune, must be in want of\u2014Next slide, please\u2014a wife.\" \"Veni, vidi\u2014Velim, pictura proxima\u2014vici.\"\n","explanation":"This comic presumes that many famous quotes are actually excerpts from slideshow presentations , and the text they were reading was split across multiple slides. Splitting sentences across multiple slides can often be a useful tool if there are images accompanying it, which could explain the specific placement of many of \"next slide, please\" comments. For example, in the quote \"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,\" one can imagine the speaker starting with a slide that showed the prosperity of some people then, in the middle of the sentence, switching to a slide of many people's destitution. When using images this way, it is often better for timing purposes to have control of your own slides. However, Randall claims that, in these speeches, the person making the speech wasn't controlling their slide presentation, so they had to ask the operator to go to the next slide. A common way to ask this is to say \"next slide, please\", but these requests would have been edited out of the historical transcripts. The comic imagines the places where the slide breaks might have been, and inserts that request.\nMost of these quotes are drawn from speeches, which could conceivably have been accompanied by slides or other stage directions (\"pause for laughter\"), but the list is quite ridiculous as it includes works of literature, where the reader is the one who turns pages as necessary, and speeches from periods of history, such as the American Revolution and Caesar's Veni, vidi, vici speech, which predated slide projectors [ citation needed ] . Even in the quotations that take place in an era with slide projectors, every single one is an instance where the speaker was, quite famously, recorded live \u2014 said recordings would show there were in fact no edits, and certainly not any instructions for a slide projector operator. See details in the table below, including the quote in the title text.\nThe phrase \"Next slide, please\" is perhaps in a sweet-spot of utility and performance. A rehearsed presentation, with speaker and 'slide handler' working with a tight script, could probably do without off-stage prompting at all, or the better lecturers with an oft-repeated talk could set it all on timings knowing they can keep the changes synchronised with their speech, or vice-versa. But when a cue is necessary, an unambiguous signal should be used, and an audible 'clicker' (or a small and briefly flashed light) has been used historically, especially with pre-electronic slide-shows where the slide-operator at the back of an auditorium needed to clearly discern the intent of the person at the lectern.\nIn the United Kingdom, England's Chief Medical Officer caused some amusement on social media with the constant use of the phrase in coronavirus presentations, culminating in the availability of many mugs and cards with his image and this slogan on, and a campaign [1] to purchase an automatic clicker for him instead.\n[A list of 12 quotes is given. Above is a large header with a question, and then a description, before the quotes follows. The text above the quotes is centered:] Did you know? Transcripts of famous quotes often leave out the slideshow instructions. Here\u2019s how these lines actually sounded:\n[The first six quotations, are written so they fit around an image of Ronald Reagan standing next to his slide showing six segments of the Berlin Wall. A large arrow points down on to the middle segment of the wall. There is something on the ground in front of the wall, could be puddles or debris. The image is to the right, and the two first and last quote goes above and below the image, while the other three stops to the left of the image:] \"Give me liberty or give me\u2014Next slide, please\u2014death!\" \"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down\u2014Next slide, please\u2014this wall.\" \"It was the best of times\u2014Next slide, please\u2014It was the worst of times.\" \"We have nothing to fear but\u2014Next slide, please\u2014fear itself.\" \"To be or\u2014Next slide, please\u2014not to be, that is the question.\" \"Shall I compare thee to a summer\u2019s day? Thou art\u2014Next slide, please\u2014more lovely and\u2014Next slide, please\u2014more temperate.\"\n[Below those five quotations is three more quotes to the right of an image showing Winston Churchill standing next to his slide showing a beach. The sun and three small clouds are over the ocean which has white waves on the black water. Ponytail is sitting under a parasol to the left, Cueball is sitting on the sand to the right with a drink in his hands, and behind him is a kid running after a large beach-ball.] \"We shall fight\u2014Next slide, please\u2014on the beaches, we shall fight on\u2014Next slide, please\u2014the landing grounds...\" \"Read my lips\u2014Next slide, please\u2014no new taxes.\" \"That's one small step for man\u2014Next slide, please\u2014one giant leap for mankind.\"\n[Below this picture is the last three quotations, without any pictures:] \"Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears! Next slide, please. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.\" \"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of\u2014Next slide, please\u2014a good fortune, must be in want of\u2014Next slide, please\u2014a wife.\" \"Veni, vidi\u2014Velim, pictura proxima\u2014vici.\"\n"}
{"id":2471,"title":"Hippo Attacks","image_title":"Hippo Attacks","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2471","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hippo_attacks.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2471:_Hippo_Attacks","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk. He has lifted both arms with palm up towards the screen of his laptop in front of him. Megan stands behind him to the right, looking over his shoulder at the screen.] Cueball: I hate unsourced statistics. Cueball: This viral post says hippos kill 2,900 people a year, but this random listicle says 500. Megan: Makes sense. Megan: Publishing the real number would be a HIPPO violation.\n","explanation":"The first part of this comic deals with unreliable sources on the internet. Neither \"viral posts\" nor \"random listicles \" are usually very reliable sources of information. They rarely cite their sources, [ citation needed ] and they are often published without much fact-checking, as published volume and impressive-sounding numbers are far more important for ad-revenue than actual facts.\nThe viral post appears to be this Facebook post. The relevant source is unknown (and may very well be made up, since the source is ClickHole, a satirical website formerly owned by The Onion ). There are a number of listicles Cueball may be referring to, but they all appear to be citing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , however, even they do not seem to provide source for the number of fatalities caused by hippopotamus.\nThe Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ( HIPAA , pronounced HIP-uh ) is an American healthcare law enacted in 1996. One of the most commonly cited provisions from HIPAA is the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which regulates the use and disclosure of protected health information.\nIn this comic, Cueball and Megan are discussing the number of hippopotamus attacks, which is unverified. Megan proposes an alternative explanation as to why this particular number is hard to come by: it would be violating the patients' privacy to create statistics of a very specific and unusual cause of death. The punchline comes with the pun on \"hippo violation\" (\"HIPAA violation\").\nThe title text amplifies the criticism of listicles. They sometimes provide factoids with regards to ill-defined, hard-to-measure numbers, and these factoids might end up in common circulation between such articles. One extreme example would be the number of waves in the ocean. Some problems with this definition would be:\nWith different replies to these questions, wildly different answers could be reached. But, counting every body of water on the planet, 850 trillion waves works out as around 2.354 (unique) waves per square meter.\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk. He has lifted both arms with palm up towards the screen of his laptop in front of him. Megan stands behind him to the right, looking over his shoulder at the screen.] Cueball: I hate unsourced statistics. Cueball: This viral post says hippos kill 2,900 people a year, but this random listicle says 500. Megan: Makes sense. Megan: Publishing the real number would be a HIPPO violation.\n"}
{"id":2472,"title":"Fuzzy Blob","image_title":"Fuzzy Blob","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2472","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fuzzy_blob.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2472:_Fuzzy_Blob","transcript":"[Cueball takes picture of his house from a distance great enough to get the whole house in the picture. He holds the camera (or smartphone) in both hands. The shutter makes a sound:] Click\n[The picture he has taken is shown below. The picture is lying tilted compared to the panel, and shows the house but with a fuzzy light brown blob covering the left part of the picture, just touching the left side of the house. Above and partly over the picture is a small frame with Cueball's response when he sees the picture:] What the...\n[White Hat gestures towards Cueball with one hand, while Cueball holds his camera in one hand towards White Hat, with the picture shown on the screen, too small to see though.] White Hat: What's that fuzzy blob next to your house? It's huge! Cueball: I don't know! I looked up and it was gone! White Hat: How can a giant structure vanish? Cueball and White Hat: ...Cloaking device?!!\n[Blondie is standing at the front of the panel with a microphone in her hand speaking towards the viewer. Behind her is a close up of the Blob (in black and white) on a screen. To the left of the screen is an almost bald man with hair behind his ears, holding a hand to his chin. To the right is Megan, who is holding one hand out palm up, towards the picture, which they are both looking at.] Blondie: The fuzzy blob, dubbed \"flob\" by internet sleuths, has city planners stumped. Man: No, that's not any type of building I'm familiar with. Megan: Could be an experimental military dome.\n[Hairbun is standing on a podium behind a lectern with a microphone on it. She addresses three people in front of the stage, Cueball, Megan and White Hat. Behind them Blondie is turned the other way speaking to a camera, on a tripod. She has a microphone in her hand.] Hairbun: The zoning board investigation has found no evidence of a cloaked dome structure. Hairbun: The historical commission will be joining the research into these domes and other unusual buildings, such as the historic 4th Ave Church... Blondie: This only raises more questions.\n","explanation":"Cueball is taking a picture of his house, but sees a large fuzzy blob on the side of the picture. This blob seems to come from Cueball making the mistake of putting one of his fingers partially in front of the lens. This is a common enough occurrence with smartphones or compact cameras that an ordinary user should immediately be able to identify the problem; however, the comic derives humor from having no one in the comic come to this conclusion, and accordingly taking it very seriously as a perplexing mystery.\nLikely, this comic stems from the resurgent talk of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) now dubbed \" Unidentified Aerial Phenomena \" (UAP) The topic regained popularity after the Department of Defense (DoD), recently confirmed the authenticity of 3 videos taken by US Naval personnel. It has been much discussed in mainstream news, not just among extraterrestrial enthusiasts or conspiracy theorists , some of whom have created QAnon spin-off theories.\nRandall has previously expressed skepticism about claims of witnesses who claim to have seen unproven phenomena (including 'flying saucers', as well as supernatural events and cryptozoological specimens) based on the simple reality enough people carry cameras that they would be constantly captured in photos and videos. (See 1235: Settled ).\nIn this strip Randall appears cases where phenomena have been caught on film, but are generally unclear and ambiguous.  He appears to be suggesting that there are generally simpler explanations for what we see in the videos than objects of alien origin.  Examples in the past have turned out to be things such as birds, dirt on camera lenses and lights being reflected off glass windows or bodies of water. The fact that many people seem uninterested in the more mundane and likely explanations and assume these videos are proof of alien crafts is mocked here.\nIt's worth noting that Randall is a strong enthusiast for space exploration, and has expressed certainty that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the galaxy.  This strip is likely not intended to mock belief that other intelligences exist (notably, the conspiracy theorists in the strip assume the \"flob\" is manmade, not alien) but instead to make fun of excessive credulity, and point out that any definitive conclusion of aliens is overhyped .\nThe tendency to make unwarranted connections to unrelated but synchronous 'evidence' is shown in the title text. Investigation of this phenomena has brought to light 'irregularities' in the local zoning permits .  Such irregularities are extremely common in most bureaucracies, and may be the result of mundane corruption, incompetence, honest mistakes in a complex system, or the result of complexities that make consistent documents difficult or impossible. To connect such irregularities to an identified image does not follow logically, as both are pretty normal occurrences.  However, conspiracy theories make similar leaps all the time, insisting that some case of corruption, bad decision by a government official, or developing social problem is proof of a conspiracy, rather than a very normal government problem.\nAn alternate intention of the word 'irregularities' might be due to the necessarily zig-zaggy nature of defining a 'circular' zone footprint by drawing best-fit boundary lines only along streets, within any established grid-based system of city 'blocks'. The interpretation of why any zone is a complex and crinkly shape, rather than a strictly utilitarian rectangle, may not be so obvious from an overview that does not take into account geological or political restrictions such as the curve of a watercourse in a valley or a mandate against hi-rise buildings within a certain radius of a monument.\n[Cueball takes picture of his house from a distance great enough to get the whole house in the picture. He holds the camera (or smartphone) in both hands. The shutter makes a sound:] Click\n[The picture he has taken is shown below. The picture is lying tilted compared to the panel, and shows the house but with a fuzzy light brown blob covering the left part of the picture, just touching the left side of the house. Above and partly over the picture is a small frame with Cueball's response when he sees the picture:] What the...\n[White Hat gestures towards Cueball with one hand, while Cueball holds his camera in one hand towards White Hat, with the picture shown on the screen, too small to see though.] White Hat: What's that fuzzy blob next to your house? It's huge! Cueball: I don't know! I looked up and it was gone! White Hat: How can a giant structure vanish? Cueball and White Hat: ...Cloaking device?!!\n[Blondie is standing at the front of the panel with a microphone in her hand speaking towards the viewer. Behind her is a close up of the Blob (in black and white) on a screen. To the left of the screen is an almost bald man with hair behind his ears, holding a hand to his chin. To the right is Megan, who is holding one hand out palm up, towards the picture, which they are both looking at.] Blondie: The fuzzy blob, dubbed \"flob\" by internet sleuths, has city planners stumped. Man: No, that's not any type of building I'm familiar with. Megan: Could be an experimental military dome.\n[Hairbun is standing on a podium behind a lectern with a microphone on it. She addresses three people in front of the stage, Cueball, Megan and White Hat. Behind them Blondie is turned the other way speaking to a camera, on a tripod. She has a microphone in her hand.] Hairbun: The zoning board investigation has found no evidence of a cloaked dome structure. Hairbun: The historical commission will be joining the research into these domes and other unusual buildings, such as the historic 4th Ave Church... Blondie: This only raises more questions.\n"}
{"id":2473,"title":"Product Launch","image_title":"Product Launch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2473","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/product_launch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2473:_Product_Launch","transcript":"[Hairy and Ponytail are standing to the left of a wrapped object. Cueball is standing on the right.] Hairy: The press is here for the product launch! Hairy: Remember, people are wary of smart devices, so we want to strike a non-threatening tone.\n[Pan over to just Cueball; Hairy and Ponytail are off of the left side of the panel.] Cueball: Hang on, did you say non -threatening? Hairy: Yes. Why- Cueball: Nothing. It's probably fine.\n[Caption: Soon...] [Cueball is standing on a platform next to the previously seen wrapped object.] Cueball: They say technology can change the world, for good or for evil. Our new product will show how true that is. Cueball: We hear the plaintive cries of our customers. We want to give them what they deserve.\n[Zoom in on Cueball, who has his hand up in a gesture.] Cueball: Now, let us expose our product to the atmosphere for the first time, surprising and delighting customers within a five-block radius. (Voice off-panel): I'm leaving. Cueball: No, don't worry! A staggering number of people will survive!\n","explanation":"Three people are discussing the upcoming public announcement of their company's new product, apparently an electronic device shown on the pedestal between them. Hairy mentions that smart devices can make people uncomfortable. Common reasons include:\nTo allay these concerns, the device should be presented as non-threatening. Cueball asks to confirm the non , implying that this was not clear to him before. In fact, it even appears he thought he was being asked to put together a threatening presentation, but does not explain.\nLater, Cueball presents the device on-stage, with statements that have been styled to sound positive but carry double meanings.  The subtlety of the changes in tone could make them harder to discuss for many.\nIn the title text, someone is saying that the actual reveal was uneventful. Cueball interrupts, implying that there is one last feature to demonstrate, at which point the first speaker assumes the worst (that the product's most threatening aspect was saved for last).\nBesides the main joke of a product that is likely so unsafe as to be illegal, the comic could also be poking fun at the desire of tech companies to make their products sound important, which can undermine the message of benign safety.\nThis comic was released on the day of Apple's 2021 WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) keynote, at which the company traditionally announces new features and products.  \"One more thing\" is a tagline famously associated with Steve Jobs' product announcements and something of an Apple tradition.\n[Hairy and Ponytail are standing to the left of a wrapped object. Cueball is standing on the right.] Hairy: The press is here for the product launch! Hairy: Remember, people are wary of smart devices, so we want to strike a non-threatening tone.\n[Pan over to just Cueball; Hairy and Ponytail are off of the left side of the panel.] Cueball: Hang on, did you say non -threatening? Hairy: Yes. Why- Cueball: Nothing. It's probably fine.\n[Caption: Soon...] [Cueball is standing on a platform next to the previously seen wrapped object.] Cueball: They say technology can change the world, for good or for evil. Our new product will show how true that is. Cueball: We hear the plaintive cries of our customers. We want to give them what they deserve.\n[Zoom in on Cueball, who has his hand up in a gesture.] Cueball: Now, let us expose our product to the atmosphere for the first time, surprising and delighting customers within a five-block radius. (Voice off-panel): I'm leaving. Cueball: No, don't worry! A staggering number of people will survive!\n"}
{"id":2474,"title":"First Time Since Early 2020","image_title":"First Time Since Early 2020","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2474","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/first_time_since_early_2020.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2474:_First_Time_Since_Early_2020","transcript":"[Heading:] \"This is actually the first time I've _____ since early 2020.\" [Below is a long vertical arrow with the words \"normal\" and \"alarming\" at the top and the bottom of the arrow respectively. To the right side of the arrow is a list of text, with each item starting with a triangle.] \u25c0 been to a birthday party \u25c0 eaten at a restaurant \u25c0 seen my family \u25c0 been on a plane \u25c0 gone to a movie \u25c0 gone to a store \u25c0 installed software updates \u25c0 eaten a vegetable \u25c0 opened the fridge \u25c0 paid taxes \u25c0 washed my hands \u25c0 seen another person \u25c0 seen a ghost \u25c0 served as a decoy \u25c0 sighted land \u25c0 checked the news \u25c0 checked on the customers in the escape room \u25c0 contracted a novel bat virus\nOn July 6, 2021, four weeks after the release of this comic, an emergency patch update was released for Windows 7. Since support for Windows 7 had otherwise ended in mid-January 2020, this means that people whose computers ran Windows 7 could have installed software updates for the first time since early 2020.\n","explanation":"This is yet another comic part of the series of comics on the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis comic is a chart that orders things based on the level of alarm that would occur if it were revealed that someone had not done a given thing since early 2020. Many of the items, but not all, are linked to new constraints due to the pandemic.\nThe title text serves as another chart point, though it isn't given where it is on the chart.\nBeen to a birthday party\nGoing to a birthday party was a normal task before the pandemic, and it's normal to say you haven't gone to one since early 2020.\nEaten at a restaurant\nEating at a restaurant was also common before governments instated lockdowns, but during the lockdowns many restaurants had to limit their service to delivery and take-out.\nSeen my family\nSeeing your family was fairly common before the governments instated lockdowns. However, there were emergency visits during the lockdown period.\nBeen on a plane\nGovernments around the world cancelled commercial flights during the pandemic. However, businessmen like Bill Gates used private jets during the pandemic.\nGone to a movie\nMany cinema halls around the world closed due to the pandemic. Several movies were instead released directly to TV via OTT platforms.\nGone to a store\nAlthough some stores were closed during the lockdown period, others were open for essential commodities. Therefore, going to a store for the first time since early 2020 is little strange.\nInstalled software updates\nRegularly installing software updates is recommended, mainly for security reasons. However, many people don't follow these recommendations (mostly by fear of software inconsistency or instability), although a delay of more than one year is quite long. Mentioning software updates is weird, because it is not directly related to the COVID pandemic. On the contrary, since many people spent much more time at home and worked at home, it was all the more important to keep software up to date, especially due to zero-day exploits.\nEaten a vegetable\nSince vegetables are essential to a healthy diet, not eating a single vegetable in a whole year is not recommended. [ citation needed ] Anxiety due to the pandemic and disruption of social relations may have caused people to consume more junk food than usual.\nOpened the fridge\nThis is quite weird, since most people use their refrigerators to store fresh food. Maybe some people became anorexic because of anxiety due to the pandemic or stopped consuming fresh food and relied more on junk food. Moreover, most food products will alter or rot if stored in a fridge for more than one year, and become dangerous to eat. [ citation needed ]\nPaid taxes\nAlthough some people, depending on where they live and their income, may not pay taxes in an immediately obvious way, there are some taxes, such as VAT in many countries and sales tax in the United States or Canada, which almost everyone would pay in the natural course of everyday life, though may not be 'obvious' in the paying, or even be extracted at source (withheld from payroll) in the simpler cases. (Randall lives in Massachusetts , which does not have a VAT, but does have a 6.25% sales tax.) It is therefore strange that someone could have gone a year without paying any taxes, implying they made almost no monetary transactions in the period, nor are made (directly) responsible for any residential or property-owning taxations that might otherwise be payable to one or other layer of government.\nIf the statement refers specifically to filing income taxes (which is often the case when people refer to \"taxes\", because the paperwork and large sums of money transferred at once makes the income tax highly noticeable and memorable), it might describe someone who filed a tax return for 2019 early in 2020 and then waited until later in 2021 to file a return for 2020.\nWashed my hands\nOne of the main pieces of advice during the pandemic was to wash one's hands, frequently. Even in normal circumstances, washing hands is a good idea to remain hygienic, [ citation needed ] and not do so for a year would be disgusting to most people, and a good way of catching diseases.\nLike paying taxes, it is very common to wash one's hands inadvertently as part of another activity, so someone who actually has not washed their hands since early 2020 likely also never bathed or showered.\nSeen another person\nDespite the restrictions, most people will have seen another person during the pandemic, virtually or otherwise.\nSeen a ghost\nThe fact that the speaker apparently has seen a ghost, both now and presumably before early 2020 (else they would simply say it was the 'first time' they saw a ghost) is unusual. [ citation needed ]\nServed as a decoy\nSimilar to the previous point, this is not a normal activity, so the specificity is unusual.\nSighted land\nMost people live on land, [ citation needed ] so sighting land should not be unusual, even during a pandemic. The fact that someone has gone over a year without sighting land suggests they have been lost at sea for the duration. There are several reported cases of ships' crews refused permission to disembark, due to local restrictions and\/or because their scheduled relief were unable to embark, but the unluckily held-on persons forced to remain beyond their originally planned obligations should never have been left permanently beyond any tantalizingly unreachable view of the shore.\nTaken more literally, it could simply mean that the person remained indoors and did not look outside, or that the person was temporarily blind.\nChecked the news\nIf someone has not checked the news since early 2020, they will likely be in for a shock upon checking. Noting that this could possibly (if increasingly absurdly) still apply to someone like Ponytail (as portrayed in strip 2396: Wonder Woman 1984 ).\nChecked on the customers in the escape room\nThe implication is that the customers in question have been trapped in the escape room since early 2020. Most escape rooms are not equipped to support a person for that length of time, so unless the customers actually escaped, they would likely not have survived. [ citation needed ]\nContracted a novel bat virus\nAs a 'novel bat virus' is what kicked off the whole pandemic, contracting another one may send the whole world into a new pandemic.\nGotten the Ferris wheel operator's attention (title text)\nIt seems that the speaker has been stuck in a Ferris wheel for a year. It is unclear how they may have survived.\nAlternately, it would be perfectly normal that the speaker has not been at an amusement park with a working Ferris wheel since early 2020 - but it would be unusual to focus on interacting with the operator versus enjoying the attraction.\nSeveral science fiction stories include wheel-like prisons where people stay for years, but generally they are underground and horizontal rather than in the air and vertical like Ferris wheels are.\n[Heading:] \"This is actually the first time I've _____ since early 2020.\" [Below is a long vertical arrow with the words \"normal\" and \"alarming\" at the top and the bottom of the arrow respectively. To the right side of the arrow is a list of text, with each item starting with a triangle.] \u25c0 been to a birthday party \u25c0 eaten at a restaurant \u25c0 seen my family \u25c0 been on a plane \u25c0 gone to a movie \u25c0 gone to a store \u25c0 installed software updates \u25c0 eaten a vegetable \u25c0 opened the fridge \u25c0 paid taxes \u25c0 washed my hands \u25c0 seen another person \u25c0 seen a ghost \u25c0 served as a decoy \u25c0 sighted land \u25c0 checked the news \u25c0 checked on the customers in the escape room \u25c0 contracted a novel bat virus\nOn July 6, 2021, four weeks after the release of this comic, an emergency patch update was released for Windows 7. Since support for Windows 7 had otherwise ended in mid-January 2020, this means that people whose computers ran Windows 7 could have installed software updates for the first time since early 2020.\n"}
{"id":2475,"title":"Health Drink","image_title":"Health Drink","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2475","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/health_drink.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2475:_Health_Drink","transcript":"[White Hat holding a bottle and standing next to Cueball] White Hat: My new health drink is packed with amino acid nanoenzymes that I designed to train your immune system to fight infections! Cueball: Can you give it to some people and see if they get sick less often? White Hat: Whoa, that sounds way too complicated.\n","explanation":"This comic pokes fun at health fads, alternative medicine and the like. It points out that many such products will go out of their way to market themselves as legitimate and cutting-edge by using impressive-sounding scientific terms, yet fail to perform even the most basic part of actual science: running a randomized controlled trial to find out if the drink actually helps fight infections. When Cueball points this out, White Hat reacts as though this process is highly advanced and unreasonable, which clearly demonstrates that his product is either nonsensical or an active scam (or both).\nEnzymes are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. For example, certain proteins aid digestion by breaking down large molecules. Every cell of the human body produces lots of enzymes; the suggestion that people may be lacking them is frequently used as a basis to peddle pseudoscientific products. Nanoenzymes are synthetic materials that perform similar functions to ordinary enzymes; although they may be useful for treating specific diseases and conditions, the average person will probably not find them beneficial. Amino acids are the chemicals that make up proteins, and therefore all natural enzymes are made from amino acids anyway. White Hat's claim use of the term is not particularly explanatory and is likely used to impress and bewilder his audience, so that they are more likely to buy the product.\nThe comic may reference the FDA's decision three days earlier to approve a drug for Alzheimer treatment, without direct evidence of efficacy.\nThe title text further showcases White Hat's incompetence. First, he suggests keeping track of large numbers of people in a clinical trial by storing their data in Microsoft Excel , a popular spreadsheet application. Despite the insistence of many companies and government agencies throughout the years, Excel is not a database , and it should not be used to store other people's personal and medical information. He then complains that Excel is too \"fancy\", and then calls himself a \"simple country nanoenzyme developer\" \u2014 this is a parody of the idiom \"simple country lawyer,\" a trained professional who pretends to be an average joe to garner sympathy. Nanomaterials are developed using specialized equipment in laboratories by people who are extremely well-versed in science; the notion of comparing one of these scientists to a 'simple country' anything is ludicrous, and the idea that they would find Excel daunting and overcomplicated is equally so. It's ironic that the person with the seemingly very complicated work and production would be unable to perform the simple procedures which Cueball has suggested in order to make his claims rigorous and supported with evidence. In this, White Hat is demonstrating his complete incompetence and lack of knowledge into what his product actually does.\n[White Hat holding a bottle and standing next to Cueball] White Hat: My new health drink is packed with amino acid nanoenzymes that I designed to train your immune system to fight infections! Cueball: Can you give it to some people and see if they get sick less often? White Hat: Whoa, that sounds way too complicated.\n"}
{"id":2476,"title":"Base Rate","image_title":"Base Rate","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2476","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/base_rate.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2476:_Base_Rate","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in front of a screen that shows a bar graph with 2 bars with labels beneath. The right bar is significantly higher than the left. Cueball is holding a pointer which he points at the label of the highest bar, which has been encircled.] Cueball: Remember, right-handed people commit 90% of all base rate errors. Label: L R\n","explanation":"The \" base rate \" is a type of base probability, which a statistical probability can be based on. The base rate fallacy is a type of error in which people are presented with the rate at which something occurs throughout an entire population along with more specific information about a subset of that population, and tend to ignore the whole-population information in favor of the specific information.\nIn this case, the joke is that 90% of people are right-handed, so if there is no connection between handedness and making base rate errors, then 90% of these errors would be made by right handers.  Thus while Cueball's claim that right-handers commit 90% of base-rate errors is technically true, taking that as reason to believe that \"making base-rate errors\" is somehow specially associated with right-handed-ness -- as would be implied by an intervention effort specific to right-handed-people -- is itself a base-rate error.\nCueball may be holding the pointer in his right hand, suggesting he might be right-handed (as 90% of stick figures are [ citation needed ] ).  Since Cueball has no facial features it is impossible to tell if he faces the audience, or looking at his graph. However, it seems most likely that he is looking at his audience while delivering the take home message and thus points at the graph behind him. Thus he likely belongs to the 90% that makes 90% of the base-rate errors, one of those he is just committing.\nIn the title text, Cueball dismisses the idea of adjusting his graph to account for the difference in numbers of left-handed versus right-handed members of the population.  He suggests focusing efforts on the right-handed majority to resolve that 90% of base rate errors.  This is a somewhat common counterargument to statistical arguments of this stripe (often as justification for racial profiling, for example); it fails because if the target group is not in fact somehow special with regard to the issue at hand, there is generally \"nothing to fix\" and no special approach to discover that cannot be just as easily applied to the population of the whole.\nSomething similar occurs in 1138: Heatmap , where Cueball makes inferences simply based on a population map of the US, instead of statistical evidence.\n[Cueball is standing in front of a screen that shows a bar graph with 2 bars with labels beneath. The right bar is significantly higher than the left. Cueball is holding a pointer which he points at the label of the highest bar, which has been encircled.] Cueball: Remember, right-handed people commit 90% of all base rate errors. Label: L R\n"}
{"id":2477,"title":"Alien Visitors","image_title":"Alien Visitors","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2477","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alien_visitors.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2477:_Alien_Visitors","transcript":"[A flying saucer is hovering high above Cueball and Megan, drawn very small standing on the ground beneath it. The aliens inside speak to them from inside their saucer, indicated with zigzag lines between it and the text.] Aliens: Greetings, humans! Megan: Whoa, aliens! Aliens: We bring you technological wonders!\n[Zoom in on the flying saucer which has two beams below it, the left showing an outline of a pyramid and the right is shown lifting a large stone. Cueball replies off-panel.] Aliens: We will help you lift great stones and build towering monuments. Cueball (off-panel): Oh, pyramids?\n[Zoom in on Cueball and Megan looking up, the Aliens reply from above the panel.] Aliens (off-panel): ...Yes. Cueball: Yeah, we have those. In Egypt. Megan: And Mexico. Cueball: I think they used ramps?\n[Zoom back out, as in first panel] Aliens: Then we shall build a ring of stones aligned with the stars, so at the solstice- Megan: Oh, like Stonehenge? Aliens: Dammit, humans.\n","explanation":"This is the first comic in a new series , followed in the next comic by 2478: Alien Visitors 2 .\nThis strip satirizes the ancient astronauts hypothesis: that aliens were involved in building the pyramids and Stonehenge . This concept, popular in some circles, is based on the assumption that earlier civilizations lacked the technology to build such large structures.  There are also geometric or other scientific properties to these structures, which some people assume that humans of that era would have been incapable of creating. Erich von D\u00e4niken , a Swiss author, is one of the foremost proponents of \"ancient astronauts.\" Some say that such pseudoscience is inherently racist, as it assumes, without any proof, that other civilizations were unable to build their monuments without foreign help.  Although others disagree since most races and nationalities have one or another of these monuments with similar claims.\nIn the comic, aliens arrive with the intention of building such monuments with their highly advanced technology, including some sort of tractor beam to lift the heavy stones and another beam that can depict a pyramid. They are shocked to hear from Cueball that humans accomplished the same thing thousands of years earlier with such simple tools as ramps, and even in more than one location on Earth (Pyramids in Egypt and Mexico ). Thus they proceed to suggest a stone circle to predict the solstice, but before they can finish this sentence Megan says this is like Stonehenge.\nThe joke of the strip is that, if aliens were interested in building such structures on earth, they'd be just as likely to show up today as thousands of years ago.  And if they offered to build pyramids today, humans would be very unimpressed, as we've had the technology to do so for quite some time. The notion that an advanced, spacefaring species would come all the way to Earth (or whatever other planets they visit) to build relatively simple stone structures seems dubious, when put that way.\nAlternately, the aliens may have visited Earth before in the past and impressed the humans of the time with their advanced technology of pyramids and stone circles, leading them to expect the same technology to impress the humans again in the present day.  This is somewhat plausible: Stonehenge is estimated to have been built around 3100BC, while the pyramids were built 500-1000 years later.  Assuming both structures were indeed built by aliens in the past, the visitors would have returned to the Earth to find agricultural civilizations almost identical to the ones they encountered centuries prior.  The aliens could have then been led to believe that human technology, if almost entirely unchanged in the 500 years since they last visited, would not have advanced significantly in a few thousand years.  Indeed, the aliens were mostly correct in this assessment: technological advancement progressed at a crawl until the scientific revolution marked the emergence of modern science only a relatively short 600 years ago.  From this perspective, the aliens would seem to be correct in their assumption that human technology would not significantly improve such that they could not impress humanity with their technological wonders.  Unfortunately, the aliens have been caught off-guard by the exponential nature of technological advancement, in that advanced civilizations have the resources to advance even more rapidly.\nThe aliens' reaction is frustration as they cannot teach us anything new; evidently, it does not occur to them to share their technologies for antigravity and interstellar travel (which, having come to Earth in floating spaceships, they clearly possess).\nIn the title text they have regrouped and would now present another wonder - gears . This is very likely a reference to the Antikythera mechanism , an artifact dating from the 2nd century BC which used a complex, geared calculating system to predict the movement of stars and planets. As with the aforementioned structures, some fringe groups theorize that such mechanisms were beyond human technology at the time, and therefore must have been given by aliens. Once again, such technology is not impressive to humans at this point, as complex, geared mechanisms are now commonplace in most human societies. Indeed, quite a bit of intricate mechanical gearing and timing has been obsoleted by electronics.\n[A flying saucer is hovering high above Cueball and Megan, drawn very small standing on the ground beneath it. The aliens inside speak to them from inside their saucer, indicated with zigzag lines between it and the text.] Aliens: Greetings, humans! Megan: Whoa, aliens! Aliens: We bring you technological wonders!\n[Zoom in on the flying saucer which has two beams below it, the left showing an outline of a pyramid and the right is shown lifting a large stone. Cueball replies off-panel.] Aliens: We will help you lift great stones and build towering monuments. Cueball (off-panel): Oh, pyramids?\n[Zoom in on Cueball and Megan looking up, the Aliens reply from above the panel.] Aliens (off-panel): ...Yes. Cueball: Yeah, we have those. In Egypt. Megan: And Mexico. Cueball: I think they used ramps?\n[Zoom back out, as in first panel] Aliens: Then we shall build a ring of stones aligned with the stars, so at the solstice- Megan: Oh, like Stonehenge? Aliens: Dammit, humans.\n"}
{"id":2478,"title":"Alien Visitors 2","image_title":"Alien Visitors 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2478","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alien_visitors_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2478:_Alien_Visitors_2","transcript":"[A flying saucer is flying high above Ponytail who is walking towards White Hat, Cueball and Megan. Those three are looking up at the spacecraft. The humans are drawn very small standing on the ground beneath it. The aliens inside speak to them from inside their saucer, indicated with zigzag lines between it and the text.] Aliens: Greetings, humans. We have returned. Aliens: Since you already have pyramids, we've brought you more advanced wonders.\n[Pan up to only showing the flying saucer which has two beams below it, the left showing an outline of a biplane and the right is showing an outline of a blimp. The humans reply off-panel. Given their positions before, the first is probably Ponytail, but it cannot be determined.] Aliens: These machines will let you conquer the sky! Voice 1 (off-panel): A biplane? Voice 1 (off-panel): Aren't monoplanes more efficient? Voice 2 (off-panel): Does that blimp use hydrogen?\n[Zoom in on the four humans looking up, the Aliens reply from above the panel. There is a chemical formula in an outline from the alien flying saucer, shown in a similar manner to the other items.] Chemical formula: (CH 3 CH 2 ) 4 Pb Aliens (off-panel): Add this elixir of lead to your gasoline and your engines will run smooth. White Hat: Lead? Isn't that stuff toxic? Aliens: Is it? Aliens: Oh no.\n[Zoom back out, as in first panel but the flying saucer and the humans are shown in silhouette. A beam from the saucer is showing an outline of a juice machine.] Aliens: Okay, uh. Aliens: This device's electric press can squeeze fresh fruit juice from bags of pulp! Ponytail: ...Just curious, did you build that saucer? Cueball: Maybe we shouldn't stand right under it.\n","explanation":"This is the second comic in a series , following the previous comic 2477: Alien Visitors .\nThe aliens now return to show us even more \"advanced\" inventions. As with the previous strip, the only innovations they offer are not only things that humans know how to build, but things we figured out some time ago, and are now obsolete.  As with the pyramids and Stonehenge, these inventions might have been impressive in their time, but now offer nothing to humanity.\nBiplanes are planes with two sets of wings, which provide more of the necessary lift at slow speed than a contemporaneous monoplane , but develop increased drag and aerodynamic and air-frame issues as higher air-speeds became possible\/necessary. Biplanes have been obsolete for most purposes since the 1930s, though they remain in use for agriculture and aerial sports.\nA blimp is a lighter than air aircraft with no internal structure. These aircraft were traditionally filled with hydrogen gas to provide the needed buoyancy, due to the lower density of hydrogen and a US monopoly on helium limiting availability for the German blimp manufacturer. Hydrogen is highly flammable and thus presents a safety issue. The famous Hindenburg disaster is widely seen as a reason hydrogen airships are unlikely to be widely accepted. However, it is still disputed whether the hydrogen or the coating of the airframe caused the fire. Blimps are still used today, but only rarely, in niche applications, such as for advertising or for aerial photography\/videography. Modern airships generally use helium as a lifting gas, which is more expensive, but non-flammable.\nTetraethyllead ((CH 3 CH 2 ) 4 Pb) is a chemical added to gasoline (mostly from the 1920s to the 1990s \u2014 although some countries still use it to this day ) to prevent engine knocking . Lead is toxic and bio-accumulative, and there's substantial evidence that its use in gasoline caused widespread lead exposure, impacting public health on a huge scale. The aliens seem surprised to learn of these toxic effects, and their concern implies that they may be using leaded gasoline themselves, but it's unclear whether they might think that their biology may by vulnerable to lead as well or whether they never considered that biologies alien to theirs would be.\nThe final invention appears to be a reference to Juicero , a defunct and short-lived brand of juicer, which has become iconic of the absurdity of modern technology investment. The company produced a high-tech, internet-connected juicer which sold for $700, and only worked on the company's proprietary branded single-serving bags of pulped fruit, which were available by subscription for $5-$7 per serving. The company raised over $100 million in startup capital, but quickly went out of business because most consumers considered the expensive product to be nearly useless, coupled with a rather damning video by Bloomberg demonstrating said packets could easily be squeezed by hand. The title text singles this invention out, calling it one of the \"mistakes of the past\".\nAfter the latest showing of unimpressive \"inventions\", the humans start questioning how \"advanced\" the aliens really are. It's traditionally assumed that a species capable of interstellar travel would have a host of other advanced technologies, which is inconsistent with the unimpressive and not only obsolete, but also fatally-flawed inventions they're offering to humanity.  The humans on the ground ask whether they actually built their own flying saucer. They also consider the wisdom of standing directly under the saucer, implying that, if the aliens did build it, it's likely to be unreliable, and may be at risk of crashing (though perhaps a bit ironically, the humans say this in response to the juicer, and while the actual device it is spoofing was a failure in many ways, one thing it was not was shoddily built (aside from the fact that you could squeeze more juice by hand than by using the machine...) - one critique of the Juicero was that it was needlessly over-engineered).\n[A flying saucer is flying high above Ponytail who is walking towards White Hat, Cueball and Megan. Those three are looking up at the spacecraft. The humans are drawn very small standing on the ground beneath it. The aliens inside speak to them from inside their saucer, indicated with zigzag lines between it and the text.] Aliens: Greetings, humans. We have returned. Aliens: Since you already have pyramids, we've brought you more advanced wonders.\n[Pan up to only showing the flying saucer which has two beams below it, the left showing an outline of a biplane and the right is showing an outline of a blimp. The humans reply off-panel. Given their positions before, the first is probably Ponytail, but it cannot be determined.] Aliens: These machines will let you conquer the sky! Voice 1 (off-panel): A biplane? Voice 1 (off-panel): Aren't monoplanes more efficient? Voice 2 (off-panel): Does that blimp use hydrogen?\n[Zoom in on the four humans looking up, the Aliens reply from above the panel. There is a chemical formula in an outline from the alien flying saucer, shown in a similar manner to the other items.] Chemical formula: (CH 3 CH 2 ) 4 Pb Aliens (off-panel): Add this elixir of lead to your gasoline and your engines will run smooth. White Hat: Lead? Isn't that stuff toxic? Aliens: Is it? Aliens: Oh no.\n[Zoom back out, as in first panel but the flying saucer and the humans are shown in silhouette. A beam from the saucer is showing an outline of a juice machine.] Aliens: Okay, uh. Aliens: This device's electric press can squeeze fresh fruit juice from bags of pulp! Ponytail: ...Just curious, did you build that saucer? Cueball: Maybe we shouldn't stand right under it.\n"}
{"id":2479,"title":"Houseguests","image_title":"Houseguests","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2479","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/houseguests.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2479:_Houseguests","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Now that we're fully vaccinated, we can invite people over. Megan: Exciting!\n[Same setting, without talk. Beat panel.]\n[Cueball and Megan are standing in a wider panel. Megan is looking down at her torso while holding her arms out from her body.] Cueball: Which means we have to clean. Megan: ...You know, I suddenly feel only about 98% vaccinated. Cueball: Yeah, let's give it a few more days.\n","explanation":"This comic is another entry in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nWith COVID-19 vaccines under distribution, more and more people are becoming fully vaccinated. Cueball and Megan have apparently become part of that group, and Cueball notes that with the vaccine in their systems, they can once again start hosting people at their house \u2014 the various local and national rules maintained to mitigate infections now allowing indoors association in such circumstances for many individuals. Megan concurs, indicating they have been looking forward to having their friends over.\nAfter a beat panel, Cueball notes that if they intend to host people, they need to clean the house. Megan promptly backtracks on her eagerness to have people over, implying that her reluctance to complete this task (possibly a rather onerous one, if they have been neglecting housework during the pandemic) may outweigh her desire to socialize. Megan claims she only feels 98% vaccinated, and thus is not completely ready for houseguests; Cueball agrees that they need to wait a few more days before they are 100% vaccinated\/ready for guests.\nThe earlier vaccination-related comic 2460: Vaccinated depicted Cueball and Megan as not very skilled at social interactions , so it's possible they may not have many \"people\" to invite over anyway, or may be awkward with those they do invite over.\nThe title text continues the theme of \"vaccination status = houseguest readiness\" and assumes that this is an association of one state with the other that is commutative - that is, reversible, with either one implying the other.\nIn the title text, it appears Cueball and Megan have cleaned most of their house in preparation for having guests, with the evident exception of the spare room next to the living room, which is perhaps being used to store junk from the other rooms. Thus they pretend that in that room they are not fully vaccinated, as if their vaccination status is dynamically influenced by their location in their home rather than, for instance, by the memory of their adaptive immune system .\n[Cueball and Megan are talking.] Cueball: Now that we're fully vaccinated, we can invite people over. Megan: Exciting!\n[Same setting, without talk. Beat panel.]\n[Cueball and Megan are standing in a wider panel. Megan is looking down at her torso while holding her arms out from her body.] Cueball: Which means we have to clean. Megan: ...You know, I suddenly feel only about 98% vaccinated. Cueball: Yeah, let's give it a few more days.\n"}
{"id":2480,"title":"No, The Other One","image_title":"No, The Other One","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2480","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/no_the_other_one.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2480:_No,_The_Other_One","transcript":"[A typical line-drawn map projection of the United States, with discontiguous Alaska and Hawaii moved into a convenient corner.] [Coastlines and national borders are in a firm half-tone.] [Non-coastal state boundaries are shown in a lighter tone and feature the standard two-letter abbreviations.] [Location dots and labels of the settlements they represent are overlaid in solid black.]\n[Within each of the states, expanded here for readability, are the following placenames...] AK [Alaska] Houston AL [Alabama] Detroit Houston Jackson AR [Arkansas] Nashville AZ [Arizona] Miami Peoria CA [California] Beaumont Jamestown Lincoln Mesa Plymouth CO [Colorado] [An unlabelled dot, between text for Louisville, CO and Atlanta, NE; probably the actual Mesa, CO.] Louisville Mesa [Appears to be the incorrectly-labeled town of Orchard Mesa, CO.] CT [Connecticut] Salem DE [Delaware] Atlanta Newark FL [Florida] Bowling Green Houston GA [Georgia] Albany Columbus Dallas Roswell HI [Hawaii] Mountain View IA [Iowa] Indianapolis Knoxville ID [Idaho] Atlanta Princeton IL [Illinois] Beverly Hills Lincoln Plano IN [Indiana] Houston Plymouth KS [Kansas] Detroit Manhattan Ottawa KY [Kentucky] Anchorage New Haven LA [Louisiana] Alexandria MA [Massachusetts] Princeton MD [Maryland] Pasadena Phoenix ME [Maine] Lisbon Portland Vienna MI [Michigan] Atlanta Saint Louis MN [Minnesota] Albany Austin Bloomington Grand Rapids MO [Missouri] Boston Houston Savannah MS [Mississippi] Philadelphia MT [Montana] Lincoln Manhattan NC [North Carolina] Dallas Washington ND [North Dakota] Jamestown New England NE [Nebraska] Atlanta Cedar Rapids Memphis NH [New Hampshire] Lisbon NJ [New Jersey] Long Beach NM [New Mexico] Des Moines Las Vegas NV [Nevada] Dayton NY [New York] North Pole Philadelphia Texas [Further subtitled as...] (Texas, Mexico) OH [Ohio] Bowling Green Cambridge Gettysburg Houston OK [Oklahoma] Disney Orlando Saint Louis OR [Oregon] Dallas Oakland Phoenix PA [Pennsylvania] Jersey Shore RI [Rhode Island] Lincoln SC [South Carolina] Baton Rouge SD [South Dakota] Dallas Gettysburg TN [Tennessee] Fayetteville White House TX [Texas] Atlanta Beverly Hills Buffalo Los Angeles Miami New York Pasadena San Diego Santa Fe South Bend UT [Utah] Cleveland VA [Virginia] Key West VT [Vermont] Richmond WA [Washington] Des Moines WI [Wisconsin] Atlanta WV [West Virginia] Bridgeport WY [Wyoming] Albany Atlantic City Buffalo\n","explanation":"This is a map of the United States, showing cities or towns with the same name as other more famous places. For example, the map has a dot for a relatively unknown place called Los Angeles, located in Texas, not to be confused with the very well known Los Angeles that is in California.\nFew place names are unique, and there may be many places with the same name . Multiple American towns have been named after the same British town, famous person, or geographic feature.\nHowever, names can become associated with specific places on a national level, where the best-known example is usually the biggest or otherwise the most significant. The name of this comic indicates the contextualization required to specify one of the less-famous exemplars of a given name. Someone might say they are from \"Los Angeles\" and would have to say \"no, the other one\" since the listener would assume they are from Los Angeles, California.\nThe title text references Key, West Virginia and Key West, Virginia , two places that, when spoken aloud, are only distinguishable by the pause (comma) location. Neither are to be confused with Key West, Florida , which is a location well-known nationally.\n[A typical line-drawn map projection of the United States, with discontiguous Alaska and Hawaii moved into a convenient corner.] [Coastlines and national borders are in a firm half-tone.] [Non-coastal state boundaries are shown in a lighter tone and feature the standard two-letter abbreviations.] [Location dots and labels of the settlements they represent are overlaid in solid black.]\n[Within each of the states, expanded here for readability, are the following placenames...] AK [Alaska] Houston AL [Alabama] Detroit Houston Jackson AR [Arkansas] Nashville AZ [Arizona] Miami Peoria CA [California] Beaumont Jamestown Lincoln Mesa Plymouth CO [Colorado] [An unlabelled dot, between text for Louisville, CO and Atlanta, NE; probably the actual Mesa, CO.] Louisville Mesa [Appears to be the incorrectly-labeled town of Orchard Mesa, CO.] CT [Connecticut] Salem DE [Delaware] Atlanta Newark FL [Florida] Bowling Green Houston GA [Georgia] Albany Columbus Dallas Roswell HI [Hawaii] Mountain View IA [Iowa] Indianapolis Knoxville ID [Idaho] Atlanta Princeton IL [Illinois] Beverly Hills Lincoln Plano IN [Indiana] Houston Plymouth KS [Kansas] Detroit Manhattan Ottawa KY [Kentucky] Anchorage New Haven LA [Louisiana] Alexandria MA [Massachusetts] Princeton MD [Maryland] Pasadena Phoenix ME [Maine] Lisbon Portland Vienna MI [Michigan] Atlanta Saint Louis MN [Minnesota] Albany Austin Bloomington Grand Rapids MO [Missouri] Boston Houston Savannah MS [Mississippi] Philadelphia MT [Montana] Lincoln Manhattan NC [North Carolina] Dallas Washington ND [North Dakota] Jamestown New England NE [Nebraska] Atlanta Cedar Rapids Memphis NH [New Hampshire] Lisbon NJ [New Jersey] Long Beach NM [New Mexico] Des Moines Las Vegas NV [Nevada] Dayton NY [New York] North Pole Philadelphia Texas [Further subtitled as...] (Texas, Mexico) OH [Ohio] Bowling Green Cambridge Gettysburg Houston OK [Oklahoma] Disney Orlando Saint Louis OR [Oregon] Dallas Oakland Phoenix PA [Pennsylvania] Jersey Shore RI [Rhode Island] Lincoln SC [South Carolina] Baton Rouge SD [South Dakota] Dallas Gettysburg TN [Tennessee] Fayetteville White House TX [Texas] Atlanta Beverly Hills Buffalo Los Angeles Miami New York Pasadena San Diego Santa Fe South Bend UT [Utah] Cleveland VA [Virginia] Key West VT [Vermont] Richmond WA [Washington] Des Moines WI [Wisconsin] Atlanta WV [West Virginia] Bridgeport WY [Wyoming] Albany Atlantic City Buffalo\n"}
{"id":2481,"title":"1991 and 2021","image_title":"1991 and 2021","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2481","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/1991_and_2021.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2481:_1991_and_2021","transcript":"[Cueball (with an aura) is talking to White Hat.] White Hat: Welcome to 1991! White Hat: So you're from 2021?  What happens with technology over the next 30 years?\n[Same scene, except Cueball has his palm out.] Cueball: We passed a federal law to combat laser attacks on airliners, and there are TV shows where robots battle. Cueball: Also, cordless phones are longer range now, and it's really easy to send news stories to your friends. White Hat: Wow, okay.\n[Same scene.] Cueball: Now, try to guess which of those things turn out to be important. White Hat: ...is it not the lasers? Cueball: It is not the lasers.\nOn release, the title text was not actually included as such. It was instead included as the text of a \"see also\" link, which is often invisible to readers and is activated by clicking the comic. Such links have been used in the past for larger versions of the comic or for related information on other sites. Here, it linked back to the comic itself, and was evidently a mistake.\n","explanation":"This comic shows a Cueball from 2021 who is once again discussing the future's technology with White Hat, this time in 1991 instead of 2010. White Hat is awed by the advances in technology, but is not expecting that the law combating laser attacks on passenger aircraft is not the most important thing mentioned.\n\"Laser attacks on airliners\" sounds dramatic and important, and White Hat probably thinks that laser weapons have been developed and used to attack aircraft. Given that \"a [US] federal law\" has been passed to combat such attacks, White Hat may be envisioning a future where US citizens have access to laser guns, and some reckless individuals have been firing them at airplanes. (If it were some other group like terrorists or foreign militaries, a federal law would be unlikely to dissuade them.)\nIn reality, the \"lasers\" in question are low-powered laser pointers, which some people aim at passenger airliners as a (dangerous) prank. When the beam hits the airplane, it cannot damage the plane itself, much less shoot it from the sky; [ citation needed ] it can, however, blind the pilot, which poses a threat to them and their passengers. A law ( 18 USC \u00a739A ) was thus passed in 2012 to criminalize this.\nThe robot fighting TV shows mentioned include BattleBots , Robot Wars , and MegaBots , the earliest of which started in 1998. In them, machines armed with a variety of weapons fight in an arena. These are not technically robots or drones in the traditional sense of operating autonomously; for the most part, they are either remote controlled or piloted by humans, and have only rudimentary on board computer systems.  They are certainly not controlled by AI.  Also, while these shows have been popular enough to return to the air after periods of hiatus, they are not nearly as popular as sports involving humans.\nIn this comic, \"cordless phone\" may be meant literally, meaning any wireless phone without a cord. That's distinct from common parlance where \"cordless phone\" is distinct from a cellular phone, and is a wireless extension of a landline, typically of limited range, i.e. within a home. It seems likely that Cueball was using a term he believed a 1991 citizen would more easily relate to. Although cell phones had been in use for over a decade by 1991, they were most commonly depicted as a foible of a stereotypical \"businessman\", typically accompanied by displays of distraction, classism, & self-importance. The term \"cell phone\" was at that time frequently used to refer to older analog cellular networks, with many mobile users proud of their new CDMA or GSM \" digital \" phones, as distinct from true \"cellular\" systems which have been deprecated since that time (this distinction has since disappeared from common usage). A more general term used in modern parlance, such as \"mobile phone\" or \"wireless phone\" may have been less recognizable to the average person in 1991. Describing a cell phone as \"a cordless phone [where you can] send news stories to your friends\" would be a reasonable way of describing a cell phone to a person of that era.\nAdditionally, cellular phones today do not have much longer range than cellular phones of 1991 (in fact most have less range, due to their lower transmission power & use of higher frequencies, as well as indirectly due to increasing crowding on most wireless frequencies). Cordless phones reliant on a land-line, may exhibit somewhat longer range than they did in 1991, due to improvements in digital error correction & audio compression, although the effective range of a single transmission at a given power & frequency would otherwise be reduced by interference from the proliferation of other wireless devices outside functional range &\\or operating independently. Satellite phones also offer more terrestrial range than cellular or cordless landline phones, however their functional range has not greatly increased since 1991 either (being already sufficient to reach a satellite within line-of-sight above). A possible explanation for a perceived \"longer range\" is that cellular phone towers are much more omnipresent than in 1991, granting cellular devices much greater functional area even though their functional range from one tower is typically less than in 1991.\nSharing on social media has distorted what news stories people encounter. Instead of a curated selection of important [ citation needed ] news fact-checked by a newspaper or tv\/ radio broadcast from a large corporate media conglomerate , we see only what people similar to us found interesting.\nBy most reasonable measures, the most important technologies on the list could be seen as the rise of mobile phones, and the ability to easily share news stories (aside of course, from any perceived advent of high-powered laser weapons or televised robotic warfare). The first of these, mobile phone usage (& smartphones in particular) has led to a dramatic change in how people communicate, with a large amount of communication now remote, which was not as convenient in the 90s (requiring, for example, setting up roaming at the carrier's office before taking the phone to another city) and impossible for most people a few decades prior: Low frequency wireless for personal communication was relatively uncommon in the early '90s & remains so today. Sharing of news stories person-to-person is partly blamed for the spread of fake news ; misinformation has become more and more politically, legally, & socially significant in the past few years. While wireless communication has certainly had enormous & wide-ranging effects, the factuality of the data communicated is arguably of greater importance than the means of its communication. The joke is that the impact of a technology on society isn't really about how exciting or dangerous it might look at first glance.\nThe title text horrifies 90s White Hat , as it not only refers to a pandemic serious enough to induce lockdowns, but mentions it casually, in reference to the existence of computer webcams. COVID-19 is already a hugely impactful deadly disease, but by mentioning it without details, it leaves White Hat to guess as to the details. Cueball doesn't specify whether there have been one or more pandemics (the plural use of 'lockdowns' could be taken to imply that there were more than one), or how serious they were, how long-lasting, or how many lives were lost to them.  In consequence, White Hat could easily be assuming a dystopian future even worse than what really happened.\n[Cueball (with an aura) is talking to White Hat.] White Hat: Welcome to 1991! White Hat: So you're from 2021?  What happens with technology over the next 30 years?\n[Same scene, except Cueball has his palm out.] Cueball: We passed a federal law to combat laser attacks on airliners, and there are TV shows where robots battle. Cueball: Also, cordless phones are longer range now, and it's really easy to send news stories to your friends. White Hat: Wow, okay.\n[Same scene.] Cueball: Now, try to guess which of those things turn out to be important. White Hat: ...is it not the lasers? Cueball: It is not the lasers.\nOn release, the title text was not actually included as such. It was instead included as the text of a \"see also\" link, which is often invisible to readers and is activated by clicking the comic. Such links have been used in the past for larger versions of the comic or for related information on other sites. Here, it linked back to the comic itself, and was evidently a mistake.\n"}
{"id":2482,"title":"Indoor Socializing","image_title":"Indoor Socializing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2482","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/indoor_socializing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2482:_Indoor_Socializing","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are having a conversation.] White Hat: How are you? Cueball: Excruciatingly aware of how much of each other's gross lung air we're breathing. Cueball: I mean, fine!  How are you?\n","explanation":"Cueball is meeting White Hat , who is probably not in the same household. White Hat asks how Cueball is, which is normal small talk, but Cueball responds by expressing his anxiety that they're inhaling one another's \"gross lung air\". Cueball then repeats a common joke regarding how impossible it is to connect with people when our conversation norms discourage honest communication, switching to a more socially acceptable \"fine\".\n\"Gross\" here may be a pun on the term gross anatomy (i.e. anatomy at the macroscopic level) and \"gross\" as a synonym for \"disgusting.\"\nA recurring theme in xkcd is characters expressing an uncomfortable awareness of realities that most people tend to ignore, particularly for experts in a particular field (examples include 2057: Internal Monologues , 913: Core , 203: Hallucinations , and 1839: Doctor Visit ).  In this strip, likely as a result of being primed by awareness of the COVID-19 pandemic , Cueball finds it difficult to be in the same building with other people without being aware of the fact that they're breathing the same air, meaning that particles of biological material are being freely exchanged. In an earlier era, such concerns might have been dismissed as being extreme, but the pandemic has demonstrated that there's very real reason to be concerned.  Even if everyone involved is vaccinated, that doesn't entirely remove the risk, nor does it protect against other diseases, which can spread in similar ways.\nThe title text reinforces the idea that knowing more about any subject increases the likelihood that you'll become disturbed by some constant and basic reality of life. In this case, studying biology tends to be disturbing, since the field involves in depth knowledge of our own bodies, as well as all other organisms we encounter, and which makes one uncomfortably aware of all the risks and flaws basic to being alive.\nNormally, inhaling unfamiliar biological organisms from the bodies of others is one way the immune system learns its environment, to prepare for possible diseases like seasonal colds.  With the advent of common distant travel, culture has adapted to the onslaught of new organisms people are exposed to, giving us strong senses of hygiene to protect our health beyond the adaption of our immune systems.  Diverse cultures of hygiene have evolved deadly superbacteria, produced sets of people with very good hygiene and very weak immune systems, as well as saving millions of lives, providing for treatments like safe open surgery and normalising novel piercings.  Often learning of the realities of the pervasiveness of micro-organisms and the details of biology can clash with one's culture of hygiene.\n[White Hat and Cueball are having a conversation.] White Hat: How are you? Cueball: Excruciatingly aware of how much of each other's gross lung air we're breathing. Cueball: I mean, fine!  How are you?\n"}
{"id":2483,"title":"Linked List Interview Problem","image_title":"Linked List Interview Problem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2483","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/linked_list_interview_problem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2483:_Linked_List_Interview_Problem","transcript":"[Cueball is writing on a whiteboard with a blue pen with Ponytail looking over his shoulder. The text on the board is unreadable, but it is is written in blue above them. It is a piece of code and it reads:]\nPonytail: Hey.\n[Caption beneath the panel:] Coding interview tip: Interviewers get really mad when you try to donate their linked lists to a technology museum.\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Coding interview Tip.\nIn computer programming, a linked list is a type of data structure that stores data throughout memory accompanied with memory addresses of the next, and potentially previous data point, establishing a relative ordering for a collection of data. Several common software engineering interview questions involve manipulating or otherwise interacting with linked lists. Possibly because programmers in the current day rarely work with linked lists directly, Randall suggests that such structures belong in a \"technology museum,\" and thinks it would be more beneficial to mankind to email the list to such a museum rather than perform any useful work with it.\nA linked list is a way to store sequential data in computer memory. Each piece of data is stored with a pointer to the next piece. This makes it very easy to add new data in the middle, since only one existing pointer must change to point to the new data. The drawback of a naive implementation can be that finding data may require following the entire chain. Technical programming interviewers like to see if applicants are familiar with the structure and the computational complexity concept itself.\nLinked lists are, historically, one of the two main data structures that represent sequential data, along with arrays. Unlike arrays, they have the theoretical advantage of O(1) insertions and deletions thanks to not needing to reallocate the entire structure, but have O(n) random access (see comparisons ). However, modern processors' cache structure favors data that are located next to each other, pre-fetching the adjacent items, and modern processors can perform bulk memory moves, making resize operations faster. Finally, using linked lists usually implies dynamic allocation of each list member as opposed to reserving memory for a bunch of items in a bulk and then using that memory once an item has to be added. Memory allocation tends to be slow on modern systems and adds overhead for managing the information, which byte is allocated for what item, which can be significant, particularly for smaller data items; many small allocations also tend to fragment memory, which can lead to it being wasted and unavailable to the app later, particularly in long-running processes such as web servers. These properties tend to make linked lists poorly suited for most system programming applications in which a programmer might write algorithms to manipulate data structures, instead of using existing libraries.\nModern programming languages usually provide abstractions (often named \"array,\" \"vector\" or \"list\") which interact with the sequential data at the memory level, providing access to this data while using arrays, linked lists, hybrids of the aforementioned technologies, or other approaches, and the programmer doesn't necessarily need to care one way or another. Knowing the underlying concepts is still useful, however, when creating fast running code which scales well to large data, avoiding (e.g.) traversing the list over and over again, or performing particularly inefficient operations.\nCueball's code implements a routine whose name implies that it does a mundane task, specifically traversing a linked list, but in fact emails the contents of the list to a technology museum. This could reveal private data that might be stored in a linked list, such as bank account numbers, medical information, passwords, etc., and would thus be a terrible idea. This is why interviewers - presumably job interviewers - would \"get really mad\".\nIn the title text, a singly linked list contains pointers to traverse the list in only one direction; namely, from the head to the end. By contrast, each element in a doubly linked list contains pointers to both the \"next\" and \"previous\" elements, enabling traversal in either direction. Randall continues the implication that such lists are obsolete by implying that traversing such a list would be akin to time travel. Without the \"previous element\" pointers, Randall is concerned he would not be able to reverse the time travel, as he could not traverse the list in the reverse direction.\n[Cueball is writing on a whiteboard with a blue pen with Ponytail looking over his shoulder. The text on the board is unreadable, but it is is written in blue above them. It is a piece of code and it reads:]\nPonytail: Hey.\n[Caption beneath the panel:] Coding interview tip: Interviewers get really mad when you try to donate their linked lists to a technology museum.\n"}
{"id":2484,"title":"H-alpha","image_title":"H-alpha","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2484","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/h_alpha.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2484:_H-alpha","transcript":"[In a slim panel Black Hat is seen holding a small black device up in his left hand.] Black Hat: I got an H-Alpha filter for looking at the sun.\n[In a broad frame-less panel Black Hat, holding the device down in his left hand while standing behind Cueball who is sitting in an armchair reading on his tablet.] Black Hat: It also works for nebulae. But that's about it. There just aren't that many hot blobs of hydrogen to look at, I guess.\n[Back to a slim panel, Black Hat is seen holding his left hand to his chin, while he holds the device down in his right hand.] Black Hat: ...Unless...\n[Another two slim panels follows. In the first Black Hat turns around and leaves, his head already partly outside the panel already, and he no longer holds the device in his hands. And then follows an empty beat panel.]\n[In a broad panel Black Hat re-enters with the device held down in his hand. He is walking towards Cueball in his armchair. His black hat is somewhat out of shape. Cueball is still reading but is now hunched further forward and he has lifted his tablet so it is very close to his face.] Black Hat: Huh, did you know blimps all use helium now? You learn something new every day! By the way, we're out of fireworks. Black Hat: And some advertising company is real mad.\n","explanation":"Black Hat has acquired an H-alpha filter. This is a special kind of optical filter used for scientific observations of the Sun's chromosphere . It is different from an ordinary solar filter, which is used to protect one's eyes or camera, as looking at the Sun bare-eyed will do damage to one's eyes. A camera using an ordinary (not H-alpha) solar filter was seen in 1828: ISS Solar Transit , and the consequences of not using such a filter were explored in 2227: Transit of Mercury .\nBlack Hat points out that the filter can also be used to look at nebulae , but doesn't see much further use for it; since the filter only transmits a very narrow bandwidth of light, one generated by hot hydrogen, it is not useful for looking at much else. This gives him an idea, and he leaves.\nWARNING!!! A deep sky nebula H-alpha filter has a wider bandwidth than a solar H-alpha filter and WILL hurt the eyes if used to observe the sun!\nUpon returning, his hat looks damaged. He casually shares with Cueball three seemingly unrelated observations which suggest what he was up to in the meantime: that most modern blimps use helium to keep them aloft, that their household is out of fireworks, and that an advertising company (or several, going by the title text) is upset. Early in the 20th century, most airships such as blimps and zeppelins used hydrogen as the lifting gas.  There were several incidents in which this gas ignited while the ships were in flight, resulting in spectacular and catastrophic fireballs, most famously the Hindenburg disaster . Taken together, the implication is that Black Hat tried to set someone's advertising blimp alight using fireworks; so he could use his H-alpha filter to look at the burning hydrogen.\nIn modern times, one of the most well-known uses of airships is blimps for advertising, as they are an unusual and hence attention-getting sight in the sky, offer a large surface area that can be used to show a slogan or logo, and can stay aloft for a long time at comparatively little cost. Modern blimps almost exclusively use helium as a lifting gas. While helium is significantly more expensive than hydrogen (and a non-renewable resource), it has similar weight and therefore similar lifting power to hydrogen, but is not flammable. (In fact, as a noble gas, helium is totally non-reactive under normal conditions).  Any attempt to cause a hydrogen fireball would, therefore, be doomed to failure.  Nonetheless, if Black Hat managed to set off sufficiently powerful fireworks near the blimp, it could potentially damage the skin, risking a loss of helium and possibly putting people in danger, which is likely why the advertising company is \"real mad\".  The joke is that Black Hat would do something as destructive as attempting to destroy a blimp in flight, potentially killing people aboard or on the ground, merely to have the opportunity to use his H-alpha filter.\nCueball \"responds\" by holding whatever he's reading closer to his face, apparently hoping to avoid further conversation (or consequences).\nThe title text references the insurance company MetLife, which until 2016 used the cartoon character Snoopy as an advertising mascot. In the Peanuts comics, Snoopy would frequently imagine himself as a fighter pilot in World War I in an aerial battle with the Red Baron , a battle he would frequently lose. The detail that Black Hat \"dressed up as the Red Baron\" might help explain another point: advertising blimps typically fly higher than the effective range of most fireworks. It would be entirely consistent with Black Hat's history to modify the stolen triplane mentioned in 496: Secretary: Part 3 to allow him to launch fireworks from the air, in mockery of an old-fashioned dogfight.\nThis comic was published shortly before Independence Day 2021, a US holiday that is often commemorated with fireworks. This may explain why Black Hat and Cueball originally had some fireworks around.\n[In a slim panel Black Hat is seen holding a small black device up in his left hand.] Black Hat: I got an H-Alpha filter for looking at the sun.\n[In a broad frame-less panel Black Hat, holding the device down in his left hand while standing behind Cueball who is sitting in an armchair reading on his tablet.] Black Hat: It also works for nebulae. But that's about it. There just aren't that many hot blobs of hydrogen to look at, I guess.\n[Back to a slim panel, Black Hat is seen holding his left hand to his chin, while he holds the device down in his right hand.] Black Hat: ...Unless...\n[Another two slim panels follows. In the first Black Hat turns around and leaves, his head already partly outside the panel already, and he no longer holds the device in his hands. And then follows an empty beat panel.]\n[In a broad panel Black Hat re-enters with the device held down in his hand. He is walking towards Cueball in his armchair. His black hat is somewhat out of shape. Cueball is still reading but is now hunched further forward and he has lifted his tablet so it is very close to his face.] Black Hat: Huh, did you know blimps all use helium now? You learn something new every day! By the way, we're out of fireworks. Black Hat: And some advertising company is real mad.\n"}
{"id":2485,"title":"Nightmare Code","image_title":"Nightmare Code","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2485","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/nightmare_code.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2485:_Nightmare_Code","transcript":"[A Cueball-like person is giving a presentation while wearing futuristic gear, including a visor with an antenna rising from it, a backpack-like appliance of some kind, and a futuristic pointer.  The audience is not pictured.  The presenter is floating rather than standing.  The presentation is projected from a small device near the bottom of the frame, and the appearance of the presentation suggests it is a hologram. The content of the slide shows the names of the first four letters of the Greek alphabet:] Alpha Beta Gamma Delta\nPresenter: We all know the Nightmare Code , used to assign neutral names to scary ongoing lists, such as hurricanes, virus variants, and nanobot swarms. Presenter: But did you know it actually originated as the letters of an ancient Earth language?\n","explanation":"Although the pandemic is not directly mentioned, this comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nA person using futuristic technology is giving a presentation or lecture. The content of his projected screen includes the names of the first four letters of the Greek alphabet , which he refers to as the Nightmare Code. The presenter expects that the list is familiar to his audience, but that it is novel information to them that it used to have a purpose other than providing arbitrary names to hurricanes, virus variants, and nanobot swarms.\nThe presenter refers to Greek as a language from Earth: this implies that the audience is mostly extraterrestrial - on Earth, everything is Earth implicitly. This may be the reason that they're unaware of the Greek language: the nightmare code may have spread beyond Earth, but a rather small Earth language may not be common knowledge.\nAtlantic hurricanes and tropical storms are named once they have sustained wind speeds of 33 knots (61 km\/h; 38 mph) or more. The names for these storms go from A-W each year (each letter has a name randomly chosen from a predefined list), with 21 names allocated each yearly period . When the 21 names are exhausted, Greek letters were once used to continue naming storms as needed, although the World Meteorological Organization decided not to use Greek letters when naming storms from 2021 onward. Perhaps in this vision of the future, the naming lists have given way to using the Greek alphabet exclusively.\nVirus variants may also be given names once they are deemed sufficiently nightmarish. At the time of this writing, eleven variants of SARS-CoV-2 have been labeled with Greek letters.  Previously, variants were named informally for the region in which they were identified (as were many viruses themselves), but this practice has ceased due to risks of discrimination and the perverse incentive of countries to suppress health information for the sake of saving face. A place may become (in)famously known as the origin of a disease by such a name, even if it originated elsewhere; an example is Spanish flu , which was actually first observed in the US state of Kansas. Nowadays vague names such as 'bird flu' or partly-informed geographic names tend to be better referenced by their hemagglutinin and neuraminidase subtypes, such as \"H1N1\" and \"H9N2\". The more technical coronavirus identification system uses a term such as \"lineage B.1.617.2\", whose awkwardness makes it unlikely to replace better-known names such as the \"Kent variant\" or \"Indian variant\".\nAnother set of historic nightmares the audience clearly knows about, which are still in our own future, are nanobot swarms, presumably nanoengineering failures and\/or deliberate misuses of nanotechnology of the Gray goo type. Significant recurring or sequential events have seemingly earned the need to differentiate their outbreaks, and Greek letters have been used to do this. One may even be tempted to speculate that the futuristic figure and his presentation equipment float in space because the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable as a result of one or more of said nanotechnology disasters.\nThe cultural forgetfulness about the neutral basis of the old letters, after perhaps who-knows-what nanobot disasters that may have scoured the Earth clean of all things Greek, has led to no other common use for them except for their use in identifying far too many crises. The words themselves thus are instantly associated to bad times for almost everyone.\nThe title text indicates that future people stopped using the term \"alphabet\" (which derives from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta ) due to the negative associations of the words caused by them being used to describe nightmarish occurrences. The \"alphabet\" is now called \"charset\", for \"character sets\".\n[A Cueball-like person is giving a presentation while wearing futuristic gear, including a visor with an antenna rising from it, a backpack-like appliance of some kind, and a futuristic pointer.  The audience is not pictured.  The presenter is floating rather than standing.  The presentation is projected from a small device near the bottom of the frame, and the appearance of the presentation suggests it is a hologram. The content of the slide shows the names of the first four letters of the Greek alphabet:] Alpha Beta Gamma Delta\nPresenter: We all know the Nightmare Code , used to assign neutral names to scary ongoing lists, such as hurricanes, virus variants, and nanobot swarms. Presenter: But did you know it actually originated as the letters of an ancient Earth language?\n"}
{"id":2486,"title":"Board Game Party Schedule","image_title":"Board Game Party Schedule","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2486","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/board_game_party_schedule.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2486:_Board_Game_Party_Schedule","transcript":"[Caption above:] Board Game Party Schedule\n[A timeline is shown, from about 6PM at the top to about 11PM at the bottom. Events are displayed as white rectangles, labeled as follows:]\nbefore 6PM: people filter in 6:00\u20136:25: small talk 6:25\u20136:55: debate which game to play 6:55: remember that you need to order food 6:55\u20137:15: debate where to order from 7:15: pick a place, order 7:15\u20137:40: pick a game and start setting up 7:40\u20138:20: explain rules to new people 8:20: food arrives 8:20\u20139:00: eat food 9:00\u20139:27: resume setting up 9:27\u20139:52: more explanation 9:52\u201310:13: restless faction tries to start simpler game 10:13\u201310:38: general debate 10:38\u201310:57: \u201cIt will make sense once you play\u201d 10:57\u201311:10: finish setting up after 11:10 PM: people head home\n","explanation":"This comic shows a timeline of a gathering to play some sort of fairly complex board game.  These games often have many pages of rules, and a long setup time.  Often the very complex rules must be explained in detail, which can be extremely dull in a group environment.\nConversely, just beginning like at the time entry point \"it will make sense once you play\" without explanation often leads to new player frustration that, had they had a complete understanding, they would have made different choices and had a more reasonable chance at victory, or even worse, avoided constantly being informed of \"illegal moves\".\nIn addition, since it's a party, there are other activities that take place in addition to playing the game, notably ordering and eating food.\nBy the time you eat, prepare the game, and teach the new players, little time is left to actually play the game. This comic exaggerates this dynamic, for in the timeline, no one gets to play the game at all. Often during these gatherings the frustration with the factors above cause people to suggest settling on a simpler or more well known game.\nThe title text observes some of the guests supposedly playing a fictional [ citation needed ] board game, Meta Board Game Party \u2013 a game about board game parties. Because the quoted rule states that arguing in the \"breakaway faction\" is worth more victory points, it would be optimal strategy for them to do just that, for as long as possible. This seems to be a sarcastic explanation as to why they tried to get the whole group to play some other game and turned the ensuing debate into 45 minutes of bickering.\n[Caption above:] Board Game Party Schedule\n[A timeline is shown, from about 6PM at the top to about 11PM at the bottom. Events are displayed as white rectangles, labeled as follows:]\nbefore 6PM: people filter in 6:00\u20136:25: small talk 6:25\u20136:55: debate which game to play 6:55: remember that you need to order food 6:55\u20137:15: debate where to order from 7:15: pick a place, order 7:15\u20137:40: pick a game and start setting up 7:40\u20138:20: explain rules to new people 8:20: food arrives 8:20\u20139:00: eat food 9:00\u20139:27: resume setting up 9:27\u20139:52: more explanation 9:52\u201310:13: restless faction tries to start simpler game 10:13\u201310:38: general debate 10:38\u201310:57: \u201cIt will make sense once you play\u201d 10:57\u201311:10: finish setting up after 11:10 PM: people head home\n"}
{"id":2487,"title":"Danger Mnemonic","image_title":"Danger Mnemonic","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2487","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/danger_mnemonic.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2487:_Danger_Mnemonic","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart is holding a finger up in front of two children: a boy with spiky hair and Science Girl.]\nMiss Lenhart: Now, remember: Miss Lenhart: If red touches yellow amid leaves of three under a red sky at morning, Miss Lenhart: You should probably just get out of there.\n","explanation":"The teacher Miss Lenhart warns two small kids using a danger mnemonic .\nHowever, this is actually a mash-up of three different common danger mnemonics, each of which warn about different hazards.\nThis mnemonic is intended to help recognize a venomous coral snake , which has red, black, and yellow stripes, with the red and yellow stripes adjacent. Nonvenomous king snake species also have red, black, and yellow stripes, but the black stripes separate the red and yellow ones. Note that this identification is accurate only in eastern North America; coral snakes in other parts of the world sometimes have black stripes touching red stripes. The safest course of action is to avoid any snake with the warning colors of red, yellow\/white, and black stripes. Another corruption of same warning features in 1604: Snakes .\nThis mnemonic is used to identify poison ivy and poison oak throughout much of North America. These plants both produce an oily surface resin called urushiol, which causes an allergic reaction in the majority of people. Touching either plant can result in contact dermatitis, which can be severely itchy or painful. If burned, the urushiol can be inhaled, causing lung irritation.  While rarely serious, these reactions are often severely unpleasant and can last for weeks, so avoiding the plants is well advised.  Both plants generally grow three leaves at the end of each branch, and grow berries that turn white when ripe.  The mnemonic helps in remembering this characteristic to distinguish them from similar-looking but harmless vines. See 443: Know Your Vines .\nThis mnemonic predicts bad\/good weather conditions based on a particularly red sunrise\/sunset. It is predictive at middle latitudes where the prevailing winds go from west to east.  Regions of higher air pressure will cause a particularly red sky at sunrise\/sunset, so a red sky in the evening indicates a high pressure system is coming in from the west with its calmer weather, while a red sky in the morning indicates a low pressure front coming in (usually with rain and rougher weather). In some countries (such as the United Kingdom), the saying mentions shepherds rather than sailors. Randall actually wrote a newspaper article explaining this phenomenon.\nCombining all three sayings sounds particularly ominous. It implies that a person is involved with a situation simultaneously involving coral snakes, poison ivy, and potentially nasty weather.  In such a case, Miss Lenhart advises the children to \"just get out of there\", implying that the situation is too dangerous to try to deal with.\nThe title text refers to another mnemonic: 'Beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, you're in the clear.' Unlike the first three mnemonics, which are genuinely useful for avoiding danger, this one is largely a myth , as the order in which you drink alcohol is unlikely to impact how sick you become. However, whether the mnemonic is true or not, testing it would involve multiple drinks of alcohol, which would be ill-advised when facing a dangerous situation, particularly one as bizarre and complex as implied in this strip.\nSee also 2422: Vaccine Ordering for the previous time xkcd referenced the latter mnemonic.\nSee also 2038: Hazard Symbol for another combination of danger warnings.\n[Miss Lenhart is holding a finger up in front of two children: a boy with spiky hair and Science Girl.]\nMiss Lenhart: Now, remember: Miss Lenhart: If red touches yellow amid leaves of three under a red sky at morning, Miss Lenhart: You should probably just get out of there.\n"}
{"id":2488,"title":"Board Game Argument Legacy","image_title":"Board Game Argument: Legacy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2488","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/board_game_argument_legacy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2488:_Board_Game_Argument:_Legacy","transcript":"[White Hat, Megan, Ponytail, and Cueball are sitting around a table that is covered with board game boxes. White Hat is pointing at Ponytail. Both Ponytail and Cueball are holding boxes.] Ponytail: You may reallocate up to five tokens to your top choice from last week. Remember, the game with the least support tonight will go to the thrift store. Ponytail: Next, we'll resume the debate over ordering expansion packs.\n[Caption beneath the panel:] We got tired of having the same repetitive arguments every week over which game to play, so we developed Board Game Argument: Legacy .\n","explanation":"This comic continues the joke from comic 2486: Board Game Party Schedule , released the previous week, about the difficulty some gaming groups have actually playing any game at all once they get together.  In this scenario the group have leveraged the difficulty of choosing a game into a game itself.  It seems to be that each player has a certain number of votes, or tokens, that they can use to decide which game to play, with the added element that they permanently dispose of the losing game. This can lead to strategic play where a player might vote for a game, even if they don't want to play it that night, so that they could still play it at some future resolution of the choosing.\nOnce the voting is finished, the next phase of the game is to debate which expansion packs they should collectively buy for which game.\nA legacy board game is one where players change the game itself in the course of play, such as by writing on certain cards and ripping up others, causing future sessions to be modified. A legacy game thus avoids the tendency of some games to become repetitive if they are played every week, which is a common tradition among friends or families. The meta-game this comic describes fits this definition, because the available pool of games (and expansion packs) changes based on the players' decisions. Randall refers to the \u201cgame\u201d of choosing what to play having become repetitive. Although official legacy games are sold by the manufacturers of the original game, some players may create their own legacy versions of a game.\nThe title text refers to how many board and card game owners are bothered by legacy games because they destroy game pieces. A legacy game, of course, is meant to be permanently altered, but many players find it hard to perform destructive actions like cutting or tearing up cards. At an extreme, some owners wish to keep their games in as-new condition, going as far as refusing to shuffle cards in ways that bend them, or not punching tokens out of their cardboard frames. Even some games not classed as \"legacy\" games may have elements such as blank cards to be filled in by the players. For those who are reluctant to make changes, these items may remain blank forever. An additional layer of humour comes from the fact that it sounds like the speaker is chastising a game owner who does not want to engage with ordinary elements of the game, but instead urges them to pour soda on the game (something that would usually be an unfortunate accident). \"2d6\" is standard notation for games that involve rolling several different types of dice, where the first number refers to the number of dice to be rolled (in this case 2), and the second number referring to the style of dice (in this case 6-sided). That means that the player could end up pouring between 2 and 12 ounces of soda (inclusive) into their game box, depending on the total value rolled on the two 6-sided dice and assuming the dice roll directly translates to ounces.\nThe board game boxes visible in this comic are real board games (from left to right):\n[White Hat, Megan, Ponytail, and Cueball are sitting around a table that is covered with board game boxes. White Hat is pointing at Ponytail. Both Ponytail and Cueball are holding boxes.] Ponytail: You may reallocate up to five tokens to your top choice from last week. Remember, the game with the least support tonight will go to the thrift store. Ponytail: Next, we'll resume the debate over ordering expansion packs.\n[Caption beneath the panel:] We got tired of having the same repetitive arguments every week over which game to play, so we developed Board Game Argument: Legacy .\n"}
{"id":2489,"title":"Bad Map Projection The Greenland Special","image_title":"Bad Map Projection: The Greenland Special","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2489","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bad_map_projection_the_greenland_special.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2489:_Bad_Map_Projection:_The_Greenland_Special","transcript":"Bad Map Projection #299: The Greenland Special Equal-area map preserves size everywhere except Greenland, which uses the Mercator projection. [A drawn world map, perhaps the Tobler hyperelliptical projection, except for Greenland which is of a typical Mercator appearance and sized at almost the size of Africa, to almost entirely fill the space between Canada and Iceland. It extends up well beyond the nominal location of the North Pole, while its southern tip has an apparent latitude comparable to that of Spain or the vicinity of Virginia.]","explanation":"This is the fourth comic in the series of Bad Map Projections displaying Bad Map Projection #299: The Greenland Special. It came one and a half year after the third 2256: Bad Map Projection: South America (#358), and was followed about 10 months later by 2613: Bad Map Projection: Madagascator (#248).\nMap projections are different methods of representing the curved surface of the Earth on a two-dimensional map. There's no perfect way to do so. Because the Earth is not flat, any 2D map projection of it will always distort in a way the spherical reality, and a map projection that is useful for one aspect (like navigation, geographical shapes and masses visualization, etc.) will not be so for all the others. Typically a projection can represent only distances, areas or angles correctly, or at best imperfectly compromise two of these. The map choice should reflect the purpose you need to put it to, as it will necessarily distort (perhaps by twisting, skewing and\/or resizing) those aspects it was not designed to show intact.\nOne such projection is the Mercator projection , which is designed so that all north-south lines of longitude are parallel to each other and all rhumb lines are consistent, which is most important in the time of map-based navigation. In reality, apart from the direct east-west directions, all the imaginary straight lines eventually meet at the poles - even if they look parallel. The apparent distance between lines of latitude at the more extreme latitudes expands and the vicinity around each pole can never be drawn, as Mercator maps show geographic features plotted over ever larger map areas and distances than they should, for those nearer the poles, compared to those more equatorial. It is not possible to accurately compare the sizes of features across the globe using this projection, although the distortions can be effectively ignored for more local maps that do not plot a significant area of the globe (other than very close to the poles, historically not an issue) and along or between any given narrow strips of latitude away from the equator the comparison is between near equal scalings.\nGreenland is a large [ citation needed ] island in the Arctic ocean and one of the nearest pieces of land to the north pole. The Mercator projection shows it to be significantly larger than it really is, compared to equator-straddling features such as Africa. It is therefore one of the most obvious inaccuracies of Mercator's map, if used (e.g.) in the classroom to teach physical geography (which perhaps would best use a representation that was consistent to area) rather than navigation.\nThe equal-area projections such as Mollweide or Tobler Hyperelliptical , the latter of which seems to extremely closely match the majority of the features evident upon the hand-drawn map, ensure that shapes contain the same relative  proportion of area as they would upon the original spherical (or slightly spheroidal ) surface, across all latitudes, but only by bending the directions and rescaling the distances ever more drastically the closer to the map edge (the anti-meridian to that the map is centred upon) you go. Unlike the Mercator projection, you can show the poles (as the extreme upper and lower limits of the rim) from an equatorially-centred view, and every point of the Earth is given one definite position (or two, where they lie exactly upon the crossing point between the left\/right extremes of the map).\nThis comic's projection has retained this singular inaccuracy as a deliberate feature, though avoiding all other such inaccuracies of the Mercator projection by using a different projection elsewhere that is designed explicitly to avoid them. For example, a traditional Mercator map would show other polar areas such as Antarctica, southern South America, or even New Zealand as larger, but this map does not.\nAlthough it may not be obvious, due to no land-masses being normally shown at\/close-enough to the North Pole, the Mercatorish Greenland actually extends beyond the Elliptic map's northern limits into positions that do not even exist in reality - it does not even 'wrap around and over' the pole (like a bad toup\u00e9e) but passes through it and the arbitrary back-edge meridian line and into purely imaginary space that does not exist upon the surface of the Earthly sphere. (For a flipped comparison, the lower 'curve' of Antarctica is not its coast, but merely the map's 'wrap-around' edge where a further step would have you stepping back onto the continent at a second point of this nominal edge. The true coast of Antarctica is only the rough upper edge, passing between the two points which each represent the one arbitrary 'wrap-around' coordinate that is opposite-but-adjacent on the map's oval edging, i.e. at \u00b1180\u00b0E\/W, but which otherwise has no particularly special quality 'on the ground'.)\nThe title text suggests that this map was created for people who believe Greenland should be larger. Whether these people believe it should be physically increased in size in some manner or should simply receive a greater share of the attention is unclear. One method for increasing its size would be to increase the coverage of its ice cap, which is currently decreasing in size due to increases in temperature. However, increasing Greenland's ice coverage to the size it appears on a Mercator map would involve covering the entire island and surrounding ocean with ice, which would be very problematic for Greenland's population [ citation needed ] .\nBad Map Projection #299: The Greenland Special Equal-area map preserves size everywhere except Greenland, which uses the Mercator projection. [A drawn world map, perhaps the Tobler hyperelliptical projection, except for Greenland which is of a typical Mercator appearance and sized at almost the size of Africa, to almost entirely fill the space between Canada and Iceland. It extends up well beyond the nominal location of the North Pole, while its southern tip has an apparent latitude comparable to that of Spain or the vicinity of Virginia.]"}
{"id":2490,"title":"Pre-Pandemic Ketchup","image_title":"Pre-Pandemic Ketchup","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2490","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/pre_pandemic_ketchup.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2490:_Pre-Pandemic_Ketchup","transcript":"[Cueball is standing in a kitchen, looking at bottle with label which he is holding in his hand. He is talking to a person off-panel behind him, who replies. There is a cupboard above him, with stuff protruding from the shelves. Below that is a counter, with a drawer and a cupboard. There is an  bottle with fluid, a can and a jar on top. Only the latter two has labels.] Cueball: Oh wow, pre-pandemic ketchup! Cueball: We haven't bought this kind since before. Cueball: I'm gonna toss it. (off-screen): Eww, yes.\n[Caption below the panel:] Spring 2020 forms a weird dividing line in my kitchen.\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nJust like 2474: First Time Since Early 2020 , Randall compares the pre-pandemic life and the post-pandemic life in this comic. Life has changed dramatically due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns and restrictions by governments around the world.\nIn this comic, Cueball bought a bottle of ketchup before the pandemic and they have not bought that kind of ketchup since, possibly due to supply chain disruptions or that brand not being available to order online. It may be a reference to the shortage of ketchup packets caused by an increase in takeout orders and restaurants replacing the ketchup bottle on the table with single serving units [ dubious ] . Cueball is now cleaning out his cupboard, perhaps as a form of \"pandemic spring cleaning\" to make way for the future, and considers throwing it away. An offscreen character encourages him to toss it.\nIn the title text, Cueball (or possibly Randall ) is wondering in which year he would discard the last weird food item that he bought online in early 2020.  If he's going for the Expiration Date High Score to beat 24.3, he should probably wait until 2045 or so.\n[Cueball is standing in a kitchen, looking at bottle with label which he is holding in his hand. He is talking to a person off-panel behind him, who replies. There is a cupboard above him, with stuff protruding from the shelves. Below that is a counter, with a drawer and a cupboard. There is an  bottle with fluid, a can and a jar on top. Only the latter two has labels.] Cueball: Oh wow, pre-pandemic ketchup! Cueball: We haven't bought this kind since before. Cueball: I'm gonna toss it. (off-screen): Eww, yes.\n[Caption below the panel:] Spring 2020 forms a weird dividing line in my kitchen.\n"}
{"id":2491,"title":"Immune Factory","image_title":"Immune Factory","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2491","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/immune_factory.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2491:_Immune_Factory","transcript":"[Cueball walks in from the left, hand held up in front of him, to where Hairy is sitting in an armchair facing away, sick from a second vaccination. Hairy is wrapped in a blanket and holding a steaming mug, and his hair is messy.] Cueball: I guess the first shot made your body build defenses, and now it's ramping up production. Hairy: So I've become an antibody factory.\n[Cueball has walked around the chair and is now facing Hairy, whose mug continues to steam just as much.] Hairy: I don't feel great. I think my factory has some OSHA violations. Hairy: My lymphatic system is protesting brutal working conditions.\n[In a frame-less panel, Cueball continues to stand in front of Hairy, whose mug is steaming less.] Hairy: Update: my immune cells have unionized. Cueball: Common side effect. Helps maintain a healthy balance.\n[Cueball has raised a finger into the air, while Hairy is pointing in Cueball's direction. Hairy's mug is no longer steaming.] Cueball: Immune system unions are actually why we stopped doing variolation. Hairy: Oh? Why? Cueball: They don't like scabs. Hairy: Ugh. Leave.\n","explanation":"This comic is another entry in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nWhen Hairy received his first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, his body began building a defense in the form of antibodies. He has now received his second shot, and is feeling even more unwell than the first time, since his body has ramped up the production of antibodies, as Cueball states. Hairy and Cueball then begins to make comments that metaphorically compare Hairy's immune system to a factory, hence the title Immune Factory.\nVaccines in general work by giving the body's immune system a chance to respond to a pathogen without actually being infected. The immune system responds by producing antibodies, proteins customised to attach to the pathogen, either disabling it directly or marking it for attack by immune cells. After the vaccine (or after an actual illness), the immune system remembers how to make the antibodies and can more quickly respond to future infections. This is why Hairy describes his body as an \"antibody factory\".\nHowever, many common symptoms of illness (such as fever, soreness, diarrhea and nausea) are actually caused by the body's immune response rather than the infection itself. As a result, vaccines can result in similar symptoms to an illness, albeit milder and of shorter duration.\nHairy extends the \"body as factory\" metaphor by complaining that, since he feels unwell, the factory must be violating OSHA regulations\u2014that is, rules that protect workers from unsafe work conditions. Hairy says his lymphatic system (a major component of the immune system) is protesting the \"brutal\" work of responding to the vaccine, as human workers might protest a dangerous workplace.\nIn real workplaces, one possible response to worker dissatisfaction is for them to unionize , forming an organization that can use their solidarity to bargain for improvements to working conditions. Hairy says that this is what his immune cells have done. It is not clear whether this corresponds to any actual part of the immune response, or whether it is simply a humorous expansion on the \"factory\" metaphor.\nCueball uses the \"union\" statement to set up a pun on two meanings of the word \"scab\". If unions make demands that an employer refuses, their workers may strike , or refuse to work. Employers may keep the workplace running by hiring strikebreakers , non-union workers (or union workers who break ranks with their colleagues). Union members may refer to strikebreakers by the pejorative term \"scabs\".\nAnother meaning of \"scab\" is the hard coating the body produces to cover a bleeding or seeping wound while it heals. Smallpox is a dangerous illness that causes ulcers upon the skin, leading to many small scabs forming as those ulcers heal. Prior to modern vaccination techniques, people were sometimes deliberately infected with smallpox\u2014typically from a person with a mild case\u2014while they were healthy. This process, now called variolation (after Variola , the virus that causes smallpox), could be done in various ways. Some methods used pus or fluid from smallpox ulcers, but others used scabs from the ulcers, dried and powdered. This powder might be rubbed into a cut in the skin, or insufflated (blown up the person's nose).\nThe pun therefore is that members of the immune system union would not like either kind of scab. Hairy finds the pun appalling, and tells Cueball to leave .\nThe title-text parodies the trend for recent incarnations of unions to rebrand or form anew with a descriptively apt name (possibly with a forced acronym, or styled as one for branding purposes), rather than the (Extended\/ Very Extended \/etc) Three Letter Acronyms of times past. In this case making a portmanteau of \"immune union\" - Immunion. The cleverness of this name apparently convinced some of Hairy's immune cells that were previously opposed to the union to change their minds.\n[Cueball walks in from the left, hand held up in front of him, to where Hairy is sitting in an armchair facing away, sick from a second vaccination. Hairy is wrapped in a blanket and holding a steaming mug, and his hair is messy.] Cueball: I guess the first shot made your body build defenses, and now it's ramping up production. Hairy: So I've become an antibody factory.\n[Cueball has walked around the chair and is now facing Hairy, whose mug continues to steam just as much.] Hairy: I don't feel great. I think my factory has some OSHA violations. Hairy: My lymphatic system is protesting brutal working conditions.\n[In a frame-less panel, Cueball continues to stand in front of Hairy, whose mug is steaming less.] Hairy: Update: my immune cells have unionized. Cueball: Common side effect. Helps maintain a healthy balance.\n[Cueball has raised a finger into the air, while Hairy is pointing in Cueball's direction. Hairy's mug is no longer steaming.] Cueball: Immune system unions are actually why we stopped doing variolation. Hairy: Oh? Why? Cueball: They don't like scabs. Hairy: Ugh. Leave.\n"}
{"id":2492,"title":"Commonly Mispronounced Equations","image_title":"Commonly Mispronounced Equations","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2492","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/commonly_mispronounced_equations.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2492:_Commonly_Mispronounced_Equations","transcript":"[Each equation is bordered, with a pronunciation guide beneath.]\nCommonly Mispronounced Equations\nRow 1\nF = G m\u2081m\u2082\/r\u00b2 FUH- JAM -ER\nE = mc\u00b2 EM -CAH-TOO\na\u00b2 + b\u00b2 = c\u00b2 AT- BOOT -COOT\nRow 2\nA = \u03c0r\u00b2 APP -ER-TOO\nH = \u2212\u03a3p\u1d62log p\u1d62 HA- SPLOG -PEE\nPV = nrt PAV -NURT\nRow 3\ne i\u03c0 = \u22121 EYE -PIN\nF = ma FEE -MAH\n\u2202\u00b2u\/(\u2202t\u00b2) = c \u2202\u00b2u\/(\u2202x\u00b2) DOOT CAH- DOOX\nRow 4\nf'(x) = lim h\u21920 f(x+h) \u2212 f(x) \/ h FAX -LIM-OH FAX -UH-FOX\nx = \u2212b \u00b1 \u221a(b\u00b2 \u2212 4ac) \/ (2a) ZA- BO -BA FAK- TOH -AH\n","explanation":"This comic is a collection of very commonly used physics and mathematical equations, along with their \"correct\" pronunciations. Equations are normally voiced out loud either by their names (\"mass-energy equivalence\") or by saying the parts out loud using normal linguistic rules (\"E equals m c squared\"). This comic instead asserts that equations are meant to be said out loud like words, using their own set of phonic rules.\nThough the premise may initially seem absurd, some nerds have both the trait of using equations as commonly as others might chat and that of finding it entertaining to coin amusing new words (\"input\", \"pwn\"). Saying the equations more rapidly can speed up work or make work seem more enjoyable.  This phenomenon is called clipping .\nUsing clipped or verbalized forms of equations is sometimes standard practice within a given field. The equation for continuously compounding interest A=Pe rt is commonly taught and discussed as the \"pert\" equation, while the definitions of the main trigonometric functions is similarly taught and discussed as SOH-CAH-TOA: sine\u00a0= opposite\/hypotenuse, cosine\u00a0= adjacent\/hypotenuse, and tangent\u00a0= opposite\/adjacent. These particular \"corrections\" are all nonstandard, however, occasionally conflicting with more normal readings like \"pivnert\" for the ideal gas law. The \"corrections\" are also internally inconsistent, with equal signs and exponents sometimes omitted and sometimes included and intermediate vowels.\n[Each equation is bordered, with a pronunciation guide beneath.]\nCommonly Mispronounced Equations\nRow 1\nF = G m\u2081m\u2082\/r\u00b2 FUH- JAM -ER\nE = mc\u00b2 EM -CAH-TOO\na\u00b2 + b\u00b2 = c\u00b2 AT- BOOT -COOT\nRow 2\nA = \u03c0r\u00b2 APP -ER-TOO\nH = \u2212\u03a3p\u1d62log p\u1d62 HA- SPLOG -PEE\nPV = nrt PAV -NURT\nRow 3\ne i\u03c0 = \u22121 EYE -PIN\nF = ma FEE -MAH\n\u2202\u00b2u\/(\u2202t\u00b2) = c \u2202\u00b2u\/(\u2202x\u00b2) DOOT CAH- DOOX\nRow 4\nf'(x) = lim h\u21920 f(x+h) \u2212 f(x) \/ h FAX -LIM-OH FAX -UH-FOX\nx = \u2212b \u00b1 \u221a(b\u00b2 \u2212 4ac) \/ (2a) ZA- BO -BA FAK- TOH -AH\n"}
{"id":2493,"title":"Dual USB-C","image_title":"Dual USB-C","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2493","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dual_usb_c.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2493:_Dual_USB-C","transcript":"[A power cord like plug with two prongs is shown, but each prong is in the shape of USB-C connectors. Above is a title and below is a label.] Cursed Connectors #187 Dual USB-C\n","explanation":"This comic was the first in what became a new series of Cursed Connectors and presents Cursed Connector #187: Dual USB-C. The series continued two comics later with 2495: Universal Seat Belt (#65) and was followed three weeks after that by 2503: Memo Spike Connector (#102).\nStarting roughly around 2016, the word \"cursed\" has become slang for something that makes the user feel uncomfortable (unlike the classic definition, nothing supernatural needs to cause the discomfort).\nUSB-C connectors are the newest version of the USB standard , and Randall showcases a new type of connector which would see two USB-C plugs side-by-side able to be inserted simultaneously by housing them inside a NEMA 1-15P plug, more commonly known as a Type A plug, that is usually used in some countries to connect electrical devices to AC current. This does not seem to offer any advantages over the current implementation.\nFurther, the plug introduces several disadvantages, including, but not limited to\nThe connector therefore is considered cursed.\nNotably, there's an existing dual USB-C plug in use for Macbook-compatible high-performance dongles, among other things, which is remarkably similar but avoids all the above disadvantages. It instead invites confusion with the NEMA 6-15 connectors.\nThe title text indicates that an equivalent for the 3-pronged NEMA 5-15P plug (a.k.a the Type B plug) for AC current could be created easily by incorporating a USB-B plug, which are small and square-shaped and could therefore function as the ground prong. There appears to be no reason to do this other than because both names contain the letter 'B'.\nUnconventional uses for electric plugs are a recurring topic in xkcd (see 1293: Job Interview and 1395: Power Cord ). Combining them with USB was previously explored in 1406: Universal Converter Box among other combinations.\n[A power cord like plug with two prongs is shown, but each prong is in the shape of USB-C connectors. Above is a title and below is a label.] Cursed Connectors #187 Dual USB-C\n"}
{"id":2494,"title":"Flawed Data","image_title":"Flawed Data","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2494","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flawed_data.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2494:_Flawed_Data","transcript":"[Cueball is pointing a stick at a poster hanging behind him while addressing an unseen audience. There are two graphs on the poster with data points and fitting curves.] Cueball: We realized all our data is flawed.\n[The three next panels all have a label in a frame going over the top of each panels frame. The poster can no longer be seen in the rest of the panels. Cueball has taken the stick down.] Label: Good Cueball: ...So we're not sure about our conclusions.\n[Cueball holds the pointer almost as in the first panel.] Label: Bad Cueball: ...So we did lots of math and then decided our data is actually fine.\n[Cueball holds the pointer so it point upwards. Also he lifts his other hand a bit up.] Label: Very bad Cueball: ...So we trained an AI to generate better data.\n","explanation":"This is another comic about what is the right or wrong way to perform research when data is not adequate.\nIn the first frame, Cueball presents a report on a poster (two graphs with data points and possible fitted curves), admitting that all of the data is actually flawed. He doesn't explain if it's contrary to some outcome or revelation, or perhaps a systematic error in the data-gathering process.\nFrom there, three different reactions to this is displayed in order of how good a decision they make based on this realization.\nGood\nIn the first scenario Cueball states they are no longer sure about the conclusions they had drawn from the flawed data. This is, of course, the scientifically appropriate decision. The less reliable data is, the less reliable the conclusions that can be drawn. Ideally, flawed data would be discarded altogether, but there are situations in which better data is not available, so a compromise may be to draw tentative conclusions, but make clear that those are uncertain, due to issues with the data.\nBad\nIn the second scenario Cueball then explains that after heavy manipulation (\"doing a lot of math\") of their flawed data, they decided they were actually fine. There are a number of methods that can be used to manipulate or \"clean\" data, with varying levels of complexity and reliability. Some of these methods may be valid in certain situations, but applying them after the initial analysis failed is highly suspect.  The likelihood, in such a case, is that the researchers tried different methods of data manipulation, one after another, until they found one that gave the results they wanted. This is clearly highly subject to the biases of the researchers (both conscious and unconscious) and is much less likely to result in accurate conclusions. Hence, this approach occurs in research more often than it should, and Randall is making clear that it's \"bad\".\nVery bad\nIn the third and final scenario, Cueball explains that they scrapped all the flawed data. However, instead of trying to make some new data by correctly redoing research\/measurements\/tests, they instead trained an Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate better data from nothing but a desire to match a target outcome. This is of course not real data, but just a simulation of data, selectively sieving statistical noise for desirable qualities. And since they are probably looking for a specific result, they are training the AI to generate data that supports this. This approach is \"very bad\", as it not only produces no useful science, but means that future researchers will be working from entirely artificial data. Doing so would be destructive to science and would be considered incredibly unethical in any research body or association. The only purpose of such a method would be to convince others that you'd proven something interesting, rather than determining what's true (and possibly gain some experience in AI programming). AI is a recurring theme on xkcd.\nIn the title text, the results from the very bad approach are mentioned and the fact that they got the data they were looking for is made clear when they state that We trained it to produce data that looked convincing, and we have to admit, the results look convincing! The AI was of course trained to provide data that looks convincing, which is why they are so convinced of the results.\n[Cueball is pointing a stick at a poster hanging behind him while addressing an unseen audience. There are two graphs on the poster with data points and fitting curves.] Cueball: We realized all our data is flawed.\n[The three next panels all have a label in a frame going over the top of each panels frame. The poster can no longer be seen in the rest of the panels. Cueball has taken the stick down.] Label: Good Cueball: ...So we're not sure about our conclusions.\n[Cueball holds the pointer almost as in the first panel.] Label: Bad Cueball: ...So we did lots of math and then decided our data is actually fine.\n[Cueball holds the pointer so it point upwards. Also he lifts his other hand a bit up.] Label: Very bad Cueball: ...So we trained an AI to generate better data.\n"}
{"id":2495,"title":"Universal Seat Belt","image_title":"Universal Seat Belt","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2495","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/universal_seat_belt.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2495:_Universal_Seat_Belt","transcript":"[The two ends of a seatbelt are shown next to each other, but the seatbelt connectors are replaced with a USB-A plug and port. Above is a title and below is a label.] Cursed Connectors #65 the Universal Seat Belt\n","explanation":"This became the second installment in the series of Cursed Connectors and presents Cursed Connectors #65: The Universal Seat Belt. The series began two comics earlier with 2493: Dual USB-C (#187) and was followed three weeks later by 2503: Memo Spike Connector (#102).\nThe comic shows another of Randall's \"Cursed Connectors\", the \"Universal Seat Belt \" \u2014 a pun on the Universal Serial Bus ( USB ) connector \u2014 which would have the same abbreviation of USB.\nUSB connectors are mostly designed for free and unrestricted insertion and removal. There may be a slight use of the internal and external bumps and dimples to provide a tactile indication of being engaged or disengaged, but there are usually no facilities to prevent a connector being easily pulled out of even a port being actively used - the OS can do no more than complain that a device has been removed without first ensuring proper logical unmapping of the resource (which in turn may have to await a current session of data transfer being completed or aborted) or warn that a \"delayed write\" has failed.\t Anyone who has used USB in a frequently-jostled environment knows the connectors can't withstand much jerking around without their connection to their mainboard permanently failing.\nCar seat-buckles, on the other hand, have very definite requirements to not come loose unless intentionally and mechanically released, in order to keep the passenger safely anchored to the seat.\nThe title text claims that the seat belt is secure in the case of a crash. This is another pun, as seat belts protect passengers in a car crash while USB standard is designed to protect the computer in the event of a device hardware malfunction.\nAnother similarity between seat-belts (especially on back seats) and USB-plugs is that they can be a bit fiddly to insert. A seat-belt lock with the asymmetric design of a USB-A plug would be even more fiddly and thus \"cursed\".\nOne possible use for the USB data connector might be to give a certain degree of 'proof' that the belt is plugged in, although that functionality is fairly well covered by current anchor-point sensors that (combined with seat-occupancy sensors that may respond to the weight of a seated person) can trigger dashboard lights and possibly warning sounds in vehicles as necessary to prompt correct usage of restraining belts. That system does not usually need an electronic data connection between anchor and belt, an anchor-side switch should suffice, and it would still require a mechanical gripping\/hooking method to make it of any use to be engaged in the first place.\nThe USB specification is designed such that USB connectors fit snugly from pressure.  This means they usually need no button, like seatbelts have, to lock them in place.  If one hacks a USB connection to increase the tightness, so that it can withstand more force applied to it and still hold its function, it becomes much harder, or even impossible, to insert and remove.  Randall has removed the button, such that the connectors are a \"cursed\" misleading and dangerous use of similar form.\n[The two ends of a seatbelt are shown next to each other, but the seatbelt connectors are replaced with a USB-A plug and port. Above is a title and below is a label.] Cursed Connectors #65 the Universal Seat Belt\n"}
{"id":2496,"title":"Mine Captcha","image_title":"Mine Captcha","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2496","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mine_captcha.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2496:_Mine_Captcha","transcript":"[A Minesweeper game in a 4x4 grid is shown beneath a blue rectangle. There is an explanation in white text in the blue field:] To proceed, click all the pictures of Mines\n[The Minesweeper field has six cells with revealed numbers on a light gray background. The other 10 fields are empty and dark gray. The three ones are blue, the single two are green and the two threes are red. On top of this each number is drawn in a different font\/style. The ones changes how bold they are. The two is drawn in a 3D format, the one three is very thin and the other is drawn with two lines and no filling in between (hollow). The grid looks like this:]\n\n\n\n","explanation":"This comic, like 1897: Self Driving , references the approach of using human-entered CAPTCHA inputs to solve machine learning problems, particularly those involving image classification.\nIn order to prevent automated programs from using web services, Google offers a protection called reCAPTCHA , which performs various tests to see if a user is human or machine. (One of these tests is a \"I'm not a robot\" checkbox which must be checked in order to proceed, although ticking the box is merely a formality, and later versions of reCAPTCHA can simply perform the tests quietly in the background without needing user consent).\nIf the reCAPTCHA system suspects that the user may be an automated bot, it presents an image recognition challenge that only humans should be able to pass. This has the desired effect of denying access to robots, but it also has a side benefit that the human input can be used to train Google's image recognition software. The challenge usually features a square grid of images, typically things one might see while driving - eg. \"check all squares containing a STOP SIGN\". If the user clicks the correct squares, they are permitted to continue.\nMinesweeper , on the other hand, is a logic puzzle game in which the player is presented with a grid of unrevealed squares, and must deduce the location of mines that have been secretly hidden on random squares. The game provides clues by marking some squares with the number of mines (up to a maximum of 8) that are adjacent to that square; by carefully considering the possibilities, a player can deduce which squares must contain mines, and mark them with flags to avoid clicking on them. Revealing a mine loses the game.\nIn this comic, Randall combines the two concepts to create a \"Mine Captcha\", which is presented in the form of a reCAPTCHA challenge but actually appears to be a mini game of Minesweeper. (To be more precise, it is actually the opposite of regular Minesweeper, since the challenge invites the user to click on the mines - in Minesweeper, you are supposed to not click the mines. Furthermore, on its own terms it is unsolveable as a reCAPTCHA, since the user is asked to click on all pictures of mines. However, as in the real Minesweeper, there are no pictures of mines displayed (in Minesweeper, these only appear when the game is over). Taking the game as playable, however, in both cases you still need to know where the mines are, so it is still solved the same way).\nA real-world Mine Captcha would be somewhat ineffective for a variety of reasons. Firstly, not every human would recognize a game of Minesweeper and therefore wouldn't understand what they are being asked to do. Even if they do recognize the game, they may not know the logical method for deducing the locations of mines. Additionally, even for skilled players, there is a trap in that the Captcha's objective is the reverse of regular Minesweeper; they might therefore get tripped up by muscle memory and click on something that is not a mine, which would fail the challenge.\nAnother issue is that games of Minesweeper can sometimes involve a degree of luck, as it is possible to generate a puzzle which does not give sufficient information to unambiguously deduce the location of every mine (Though this may not be a problem since Randall's Minesweeper is only a 4x4 grid). In these situations, the most a player can do is click the uncertain square and hope for the best. If the Mine Captcha is poorly implemented in this way, this would increase false negatives in human detection due to some humans failing the captcha purely due to bad luck. (Some variants attempt to eliminate this problem: Mine Detector , for example, is a variant game which provides better information, such that it's almost always solvable without guessing except at the highest difficulty level).\nFinally, a Mine Captcha would actually be fairly easy for an artificial intelligence (AI) to solve, since it is a logic puzzle - as long as the AI can read the numbers, it can simply use an algorithm to eliminate all impossibilities until it has the correct answer. (Indeed, for a 4x4 grid, it's even easier than that; a computer could quickly brute-force the problem by trying every possible arrangement of mines until it has the correct one).\nIt seems that Randall predicted that an AI might try to solve the captcha itself, as he rendered each numeral in a different style; this is similar to obfuscation methods used in text-based captchas to prevent automatic text recognition software from reading the captcha. However, it would not be very effective in this case as the same numbers have the same color; an AI could simply recognize the color instead, which is even easier for an AI than trying to read a number.\nThe title text is similar to 1897: Self Driving where the CAPTCHA solver is asked to answer quickly, implying that the training data is actually a real-world situation being experienced by a self-driving vehicle at that very moment. The joke here is that real-life minefields do not have large numbers indicating which of the surrounding land contains mines [ citation needed ] .\nAssuming that columns are denoted by letters A, B, C, D, left to right, and rows are denoted by 1, 2, 3, 4, top to bottom, one way to solve the captcha is as follows:\nThe leftmost red 3 at A3 is surrounded by four squares (A2, B2, B3, A4), of which we know three are mines. Therefore, one of these squares is not a mine. However, because of the blue 1 at B4, we know that only one of B3 and A4 can be a mine, otherwise, there would be more than one mine adjacent to B4; therefore, A2 and B2 must be mines. Otherwise, there could only be two total mines adjacent to A3.\nSince A1 is a green 2 and is adjacent to two squares that we now know are mines (A2 and B2), this means that B1 is not a mine. If it was, there would be 3 adjacent mines to A1. Furthermore, since there is a blue 1 at C1, and we know that the adjacent B2 is a mine, this means that D1 and D2 are also not mines, since if any of them were, there would be more than one mine adjacent to C1.\nWe also know that C3 and C4 are not mines, since we already know that the blue 1 at B4 is next to exactly one mine (on either B3 or A4). Since this eliminates two of the three possible neighbors of the blue 1 at D4, this means that D3 must be a mine.\nFinally, since we now know the locations of two of the mines around the red 3 at C2, and we have eliminated all other possibilities, B3 must be a mine. Therefore, the mines are at A2 , B2 , B3 , and D3 . This solves the puzzle.\n[A Minesweeper game in a 4x4 grid is shown beneath a blue rectangle. There is an explanation in white text in the blue field:] To proceed, click all the pictures of Mines\n[The Minesweeper field has six cells with revealed numbers on a light gray background. The other 10 fields are empty and dark gray. The three ones are blue, the single two are green and the two threes are red. On top of this each number is drawn in a different font\/style. The ones changes how bold they are. The two is drawn in a 3D format, the one three is very thin and the other is drawn with two lines and no filling in between (hollow). The grid looks like this:]\n\n\n\n"}
{"id":2497,"title":"Logic Gates","image_title":"Logic Gates","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2497","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/logic_gates.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2497:_Logic_Gates","transcript":"[The comic shows a chart with twelve electronic logic gates arranged in three rows of four. Each gate is depicted as a schematic symbol, with a label underneath. Above them is a header:] Common logic gate symbols\n[Here below follows a description of the 12 gates in the three rows, with their label given beneath each description:]\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. Two inputs on the left lead to the vertical left edge of a solid D-shaped symbol. From the right side of the D there is one output.] AND gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. Two inputs on the left lead to a convex-crescent left edge of a crescent-shaped symbol. The right side of the crescent symbol's shape forms a point at its output. From the right side of the crescent there is one output.] OR gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. One input leads to a triangular symbol pointing to the right. There is a small bubble symbol connected to the triangle on the output, which leads right.] NOT gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. This is identical to the OR GATE, except the output has a bubble attached, like the NOT GATE's output.) NOR gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. This is identical to the OR GATE, except the left-hand arc at the input has a double-stroked line.] XOR gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. This is identical to the AND GATE, except the output has a bubble attached, like the NOT GATE's output.] NAND gate\n[An unusual symbol. This symbol has one input on the left leading to a convex-crescent left edge, like the OR GATE. The output side as a smooth crescent like the AND GATE but has two outputs.] NORX gate\n[An unusual symbol. This symbol has two inputs on the left leading to a vertical left edge input, like the AND GATE. The output side has a convex-crescent double-stroked output like the mirror image of the XOR GATE's input. There are two outputs.] GAND ate\n[An unusual symbol. This resembles the NOT GATE except there are two inputs instead of one leading into the left side.] XAND gort\n[An unusual symbol. This has a double-stroked convex-crescent input like the XOR GATE, but the two inputs have bubbles attached. The single output has a smooth crescent shape with a bubble, like a NAND GATE.] NORG xort\n[An unusual symbol. Two inputs lead to a convex-crescent edge, and the two lines of this symbol now enter a double-stroked convex-crescent input like the XOR GATE. The two lines of -this- symbol have bubbles placed half way across their horizontal length, and are presumably the outputs.] ANDORX gant\n[An unusual symbol. The symbol is identical to the NOR GATE, except the upper and lower horizontal parts of the symbols hull have a NOT GATE placed on them - one pointing to the left on the upper line, and to the right on the lower line. There is one output to the symbol, with a bubble attached.] NORXONDOR gorgonax\n","explanation":"The comic lists logic gates . The first six are real but the last six are made up and get increasingly absurd. The names for these last six use the same letters and syllables as the first six so as to appear at a glance to be consistent with their naming conventions.\nSome of the ways the gate parts are combined seemingly-impossibly can raise ideas in the mind of the reader of how quantum computing involves processing multiple possibilities at once, or how machine learning involves solving systems backward from their outputs to their inputs.  The names ring of calling more and more profoundly to some mythological catastrophe.\nThe only real-life logic gate that was omitted is the XNOR gate (short for \"eXclusive Not OR\"; it compares the inputs, and if and only if they are equal, it outputs true). Note that the \"NORG XORT\" gate would be logically equivalent to it, if it were tipped to match its uniquely XOR-style tail, since it would then be an XNOR gate with NOT on both inputs, a modification that has no ultimate effect on the logic as it merely switches the case of which exclusivity it needs to be, and does not care which version of same-input it might be responding to.\nA double-NOT on an input would produce the identical output again (...if the input is not not true). Two NOTs preapplied to a (N)AND or (N)OR would produce the same output as a (further-)NOTed version of the (N)OR or (N)AND, conversely (...if not -1 and not -2 then this also means that neither 1 nor 2). Normally this would be shown, if necessary, as full NOT gates on the lead-in inputs but (see Transcript, below, and the NORG XORT description above) the shortcut element is occasionally used in further mix'n'match symbology (together with reinterpreting connectivity lines as partial shape-edges and vice-versa) in 'understandable' but definitely non-standard ways.\nAlong with the deliberate confusion of connector and shape-edge lines, directionality is also played with in several cases, with input 'ends' perhaps also at the (implied) output end and reversed sub-symbols implying a composite gate with substructural feedback or perhaps diode-rectification upon a bidirectional logic path.\nMuch like 2360: Common Star Types , as the list progresses, the names start to sound more like mythical creatures, closing with the \"Norxondor gorgonax\". As with the symbology, the names appear to be nonsensical recombinations of the standard ones (perhaps with off-subject inspirations, in some cases) but often do not match up with the symbolic (mis)use, such as an X in the name not implying\/being implied by an XOR's unique drawn feature.\nIn the title text Randall claims that in the programming language C the multiocular O (\ua66e) character, an exotic glyph variant of the Cyrillic letter O, is used to represent the bitwise version of the last operator Norxondor gorgonax (presumably \ua66e\ua66e represents the non-bitwise version), fitting as the multiocular O is used to refer to \"many-eyed seraphim \" (angels) in some religious literature. Gorgons ( beige or otherwise) have heads covered with snakes instead of hair, and so possess multiple eyes, the most famous was known as Medusa (she was depicted in 1608: Hoverboard ).  The \ua66e character abstractly inspires ideas of great otherworldly demons like those of the Cthulhu mythos.\nC is a low-level programming language, and as such, it has many operations that correspond to logical (i.e. bitwise) operations.  These contrast with operations that work in a non-bitwise way.  For example, \"&&\" is the non-bitwise \"AND\" operator that takes the operands as a whole, while \"&\" is the bitwise \"AND\" that combines the respective bits of its two inputs independently before spitting out the new single composite value the output bits represent. In non-bitwise operations, 0 always represents \"FALSE\", while any non-zero value means \"TRUE\" for inputs, and 1 is used to represent TRUE for outputs.  Thus, \"14 && 3\" gives the result 1: TRUE AND TRUE -> TRUE.  In the bitwise operation, using the same values, the decimal value 14 has the binary value 1110 and the decimal value 3 has the binary value 0011, and for this example we get:\n[The comic shows a chart with twelve electronic logic gates arranged in three rows of four. Each gate is depicted as a schematic symbol, with a label underneath. Above them is a header:] Common logic gate symbols\n[Here below follows a description of the 12 gates in the three rows, with their label given beneath each description:]\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. Two inputs on the left lead to the vertical left edge of a solid D-shaped symbol. From the right side of the D there is one output.] AND gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. Two inputs on the left lead to a convex-crescent left edge of a crescent-shaped symbol. The right side of the crescent symbol's shape forms a point at its output. From the right side of the crescent there is one output.] OR gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. One input leads to a triangular symbol pointing to the right. There is a small bubble symbol connected to the triangle on the output, which leads right.] NOT gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. This is identical to the OR GATE, except the output has a bubble attached, like the NOT GATE's output.) NOR gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. This is identical to the OR GATE, except the left-hand arc at the input has a double-stroked line.] XOR gate\n[A standard gate symbol used in real life. This is identical to the AND GATE, except the output has a bubble attached, like the NOT GATE's output.] NAND gate\n[An unusual symbol. This symbol has one input on the left leading to a convex-crescent left edge, like the OR GATE. The output side as a smooth crescent like the AND GATE but has two outputs.] NORX gate\n[An unusual symbol. This symbol has two inputs on the left leading to a vertical left edge input, like the AND GATE. The output side has a convex-crescent double-stroked output like the mirror image of the XOR GATE's input. There are two outputs.] GAND ate\n[An unusual symbol. This resembles the NOT GATE except there are two inputs instead of one leading into the left side.] XAND gort\n[An unusual symbol. This has a double-stroked convex-crescent input like the XOR GATE, but the two inputs have bubbles attached. The single output has a smooth crescent shape with a bubble, like a NAND GATE.] NORG xort\n[An unusual symbol. Two inputs lead to a convex-crescent edge, and the two lines of this symbol now enter a double-stroked convex-crescent input like the XOR GATE. The two lines of -this- symbol have bubbles placed half way across their horizontal length, and are presumably the outputs.] ANDORX gant\n[An unusual symbol. The symbol is identical to the NOR GATE, except the upper and lower horizontal parts of the symbols hull have a NOT GATE placed on them - one pointing to the left on the upper line, and to the right on the lower line. There is one output to the symbol, with a bubble attached.] NORXONDOR gorgonax\n"}
{"id":2498,"title":"Forest Walk","image_title":"Forest Walk","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2498","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/forest_walk.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2498:_Forest_Walk","transcript":"[Megan and Beret Guy are walking through a landscape with spread-out trees and grass and puddles on the ground.] Megan: Wow, this is all yours? Beret Guy: Yeah! All the way back to the river! Beret Guy: I walk here every day.\n[Megan still walks towards Beret Guy who has now stopped and is looking up while speaking to a man hanging in a tree in front of them. The man has long wild hair and a large beard. He hangs from his parachute which has been folded around a large branch sticking out from beneath the top of the tree. He is holding a long stick of some sort, seemingly attempting to threaten Beret Guy, as the stick and his legs are vibrating as indicated with small lines.] Beret Guy: Morning, Mister Cooper! Cooper: You help me down this instant!\n[Pan down to show only Beret Guy and nothing else. Cooper replies from off-panel from the top corner.] Beret Guy: Do you promise to give back all the money you took? Cooper [off-panel]: Never! Beret Guy: Okay! See you tomorrow!\n[Megan and Beret Guy continue walking through the landscape with three small trees behind them, as well as grass, rocks, and a small puddle. Megan looks back over her shoulder towards where Cooper is hanging.] Megan: Was that D.B. Cooper? Beret Guy: Yeah, and up ahead there's an owl nest! Beret Guy: There's so much neat stuff here.\n","explanation":"Megan is walking through a wide landscape with Beret Guy who owns a big part of it. Megan is surprised that he owns such a big property, however, Beret Guy is known for his inexplicable businesses such as in 1493: Meeting and from 1032: Networking ; we know he probably has enough resources to be able to buy it. Alternatively, he might have simply inherited it from his mom (see 502: Dark Flow ), or may not understand the concept of owning it. Nevertheless, he walks here every day, and from the context of the comic, it seems pretty much no one else comes here.\nThey meet a rather disheveled-looking bearded man hanging from a parachute caught in a tree. The man shakes a stick at them and demands to be helped down to the ground. Beret Guy simply addresses him as \"Mister Cooper\" and asks if he promises to return the money he took. The man angrily refuses, and Beret Guy casually says he'll see him again tomorrow, suggesting that this conversation has become a daily routine.\nMegan asks if the man was D. B. Cooper, which Beret Guy immediately confirms. He then comments on an owl nest as another bit of \"neat stuff\" found on his land, suggesting that he finds Cooper's presence to be just another mildly interesting part of this land.\nD. B. Cooper is the identity given to a man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in 1971. He collected a $200,000 ransom (equivalent to $1,250,000 in 2020) and famously donned a parachute and jumped from the plane over the state of Washington. He was never seen or heard from again. Despite lengthy FBI investigations and nationwide publicity, the hijacker was never identified. A few thousand dollars of the ransom money was found in a river, nearly 10 years after the hijacking, but the remainder has never been recovered. The only things known about him are a police composite drawing and the name \"Dan Cooper\", under which he had purchased his airline ticket (he was called \"D.B.\" as a result of a miscommunication with the media, and the name stuck).\nThe high-profile case followed by the never-solved mystery has led to a massive amount of speculation as to his identity, background, and what became of him. Many consider the most likely scenario to be that he didn't survive the parachute jump, and simply crashed somewhere that his body was never found. Others imagine that he escaped with the money and simply managed to evade capture.\nThe comic is insinuating that, after leaping from the plane, he got entangled in a tree in Beret Guy's land, and has been there ever since.\nUncanny situations are nothing new to Beret Guy since he possesses many strange powers . Hence, the concept of a famous criminal hanging from a tree for nearly 50 years doesn't seem any more interesting to him than an owl's nest. In keeping with the typical bizarre-ness of Beret Guy's life, it isn't explained how a man could survive for half a century hanging from a tree, why he'd choose to remain trapped there for his entire life rather than return money that he's in no position to spend, or why Beret Guy wouldn't simply report his whereabouts to the police.  All of these are simply accepted as unremarkable realities of life, for him.\nD. B. Cooper was already referenced by Randall in 1400: D.B. Cooper , 1501: Mysteries and 2452: Aviation Firsts .\nThe title text may refer to the linguist from 2390: Linguists who is more interested in the linguistic nuances that people use than in actually responding to their call for assistance. It is not known how many others have walked through Beret Guy's land, in the interim, or whether it is their nature or the general aura from Beret Guy, but the linguist did not much more than ponder the phrase \"help me down\". Megan also seems in no particular hurry to intervene.\n[Megan and Beret Guy are walking through a landscape with spread-out trees and grass and puddles on the ground.] Megan: Wow, this is all yours? Beret Guy: Yeah! All the way back to the river! Beret Guy: I walk here every day.\n[Megan still walks towards Beret Guy who has now stopped and is looking up while speaking to a man hanging in a tree in front of them. The man has long wild hair and a large beard. He hangs from his parachute which has been folded around a large branch sticking out from beneath the top of the tree. He is holding a long stick of some sort, seemingly attempting to threaten Beret Guy, as the stick and his legs are vibrating as indicated with small lines.] Beret Guy: Morning, Mister Cooper! Cooper: You help me down this instant!\n[Pan down to show only Beret Guy and nothing else. Cooper replies from off-panel from the top corner.] Beret Guy: Do you promise to give back all the money you took? Cooper [off-panel]: Never! Beret Guy: Okay! See you tomorrow!\n[Megan and Beret Guy continue walking through the landscape with three small trees behind them, as well as grass, rocks, and a small puddle. Megan looks back over her shoulder towards where Cooper is hanging.] Megan: Was that D.B. Cooper? Beret Guy: Yeah, and up ahead there's an owl nest! Beret Guy: There's so much neat stuff here.\n"}
{"id":2499,"title":"Abandonment Function","image_title":"Abandonment Function","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2499","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/abandonment_function.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2499:_Abandonment_Function","transcript":"[A multi-Rotor drone is seen flying though the air from left to right. Tied below the drones main body is the drone's own remote controller. Movement lines behind drone indicate a wavery flight path. A voice emanates from the drone:] Drone: Hi, I'm yours now! Please charge me! Drone: Hi, I'm yours now! Please charge me!\n[Caption below the panel:] Tech Tip: If you ever get tired of a toy drone, tie the controller to it and set it outside. Its abandonment function will activate and it will find a new home.\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Tech Tip.\nPet abandonment is a situation of concern among biological pets, and is part of the reason there are animal rescue organizations providing for adoption in most regions.  Since drones are automated, they can be programmed to have an automatic abandonment function.\nIn reality, this \"abandonment function\" is the norm that things left outside homes are often considered gifts for any passersby who would like them.  Hence, following the instructions in the webcomic may result in one's drone disappearing for a new owner, but not for the reason depicted.\nWith the drone responsible for flying to find its own new owner, one can possibly imagine it becoming more and more \"fervent\" as its charge runs down, to prevent the accumulation of derelict drones in the streets.\nTriggering abandonment based on extended close proximity to the device's own controller could produce issues such as accidental activation, or malicious activation by a party who could send the proximity signal from a great distance, possibly to many drones at once, via software defined radio . It is, however, more likely that being left consciously uncontrolled for an extended period is the actual trigger, with the attachment of the controller being more a direct courtesy to the next adoptive-owner, and\/or preventing the loss of carrier signal that would instead activate whatever auto-homing (i.e. return-to-launch-point) behavior the more sophisticated drones may use if ever beyond their pre-programmed flight parameters.\nThe concept of there being \"wild\" vs \"domesticated\" drones rings again both of wildlife and pets, and of new intelligent software providing for drones acting on their own.  In the latter case, protection for \"wild\" drones could imply many things about the role of artificial intelligence in society.  Did we organize the wild drones to obey our laws, or are we protecting them in fear of being punished by their superior power? A foreign military drone could also be considered a wild drone.\nBut more likely Randall is imagining flocks of abandoned drones, fending for themselves, traveling distances as they survive off of seasonally-dependent charging resources.  This is similar to the behavior of birds, which are protected (in the U.S.) by the real-world Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 . Aggressive flocks of drones was used in 1630: Quadcopter and drones has become a recurring theme on xkcd, where also training of drones as a pet has been the subject in 1881: Drone Training .\nThis idea of protecting drones is analogous to the anomaly that misbehaving drones have not been well tracked by law enforcement: https:\/\/observer.com\/2020\/01\/drone-flock-mystery-baffling-authorities\/ .  If computer viruses continue to evolve, wild drones could indeed evolve too, as they are directed by software, but usually a human being or organization is considered to be somewhere at the helm (separately) of both computer viruses and drones.\nThe idea that a drone may choose of its own volition whether to find a new owner or join a wild flock is a little similar to the situation for abandoned pets.\n[A multi-Rotor drone is seen flying though the air from left to right. Tied below the drones main body is the drone's own remote controller. Movement lines behind drone indicate a wavery flight path. A voice emanates from the drone:] Drone: Hi, I'm yours now! Please charge me! Drone: Hi, I'm yours now! Please charge me!\n[Caption below the panel:] Tech Tip: If you ever get tired of a toy drone, tie the controller to it and set it outside. Its abandonment function will activate and it will find a new home.\n"}
{"id":2500,"title":"Global Temperature Over My Lifetime","image_title":"Global Temperature Over My Lifetime","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2500","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/global_temperature_over_my_lifetime.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2500:_Global_Temperature_Over_My_Lifetime","transcript":"Graph of temperature over time, titled:\n\"Global average temperature\nOver my lifetime\n(60-month running june average, NOAA NCEI time series)\"\nThe X axis is in years, going from 1980 to a little after 2020. Each decade is marked.\nThe Y axis in in \u00b0C, with the \"20th century average\" at the bottom, up to +1\u00b0C (from the average), labelled every 0.2\u00b0C.\nCertain points and periods on the graph are marked and contain descriptions of events and actions that occurred in Randall's life.\n\nNovember 1982 Exxon International report predicts that fossil fuel use will raise global temperatures to about 1\u00b0C above their normal levels within 40 years October 1984 I\u2019m born in Easton, PA Summer 1991 I learn to ride a bike Spring 1992 My elementary school celebrates Earth Day and I learn about the greenhouse effect 1993-1996 I get very into Star Wars and Animorphs Fall 1996 I stand around awkwardly at my first middle school dance Spring 2002 I get accepted into college Spring 2006 I somehow graduate despite spending most of my time playing Mario Kart Summer 2006 I see An Inconvenient Truth in the theater and feel anxious Fall 2011 I get married Summer 2012 I read headlines about a global warning \u201cpause\u201d and hope that maybe things aren\u2019t so bad 2013-2021 I read more about climate science and get steadily more alarmed Spring 2016 I read the 1982 Exxon report June 2020 Global 60-month average reaches +0.94\u00b0C, Easton, PA is 2\u00b0C hotter than normal for the fifth year in a row Today (no description) 2022 (near future) [Large X within a circle] 1982 Exxon Prediction\n","explanation":"This is Randall Munroe in his role as a meticulous, conscientious presenter of scientific data.  The activities shown in Randall's lifeline, whether learning to ride a bike or even getting married, pale into insignificance when the consequences of unprecedented global average temperature rise are understood and accepted.  In particular, he shows that back in 1982, two years before Randall was born, Exxon wrote an internal report predicting the rise of global temperatures due to fossil fuel use, and 40 years later their prediction (shown as the X in a circle at the top-right) is being shown to be right on track. Unfortunately, that report was hidden and not seen until much later, and the world has been slow to respond with the urgency needed to reverse the damage being done to the planet.\nThe Wikipedia article global temperature record has some telling graphs to supplement Randall's.  This one: Global Average Temperature is the global average temperature change for the modern era, since data started being collected regularly in 1850.  This one: 2000 Year Temperature Comparison reconstructs 2000 years of temperatures.\nAnd this comic is a small segment of another comic 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline .\nThe comic itself links to the referenced Exxon document about CO2 emissions .\nThe comic was published on the same day that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 2021 Assessment Report\nOne of the entries is I somehow graduate despite spending most of my time playing Mario Kart. Mario Kart is a popular video game series developed by Nintendo , and has been a recurring theme on xkcd. Hewing close to the comic's timeline, 127: The Fast and the Furious , which contains an early Mario Kart joke, was released in July 2006.\nThe title text refers to the fact that Exxon, being a fossil fuel company, is likely to make better predictions on fossil fuel use as they are involved in fossil fuel production themselves.\nGraph of temperature over time, titled:\n\"Global average temperature\nOver my lifetime\n(60-month running june average, NOAA NCEI time series)\"\nThe X axis is in years, going from 1980 to a little after 2020. Each decade is marked.\nThe Y axis in in \u00b0C, with the \"20th century average\" at the bottom, up to +1\u00b0C (from the average), labelled every 0.2\u00b0C.\nCertain points and periods on the graph are marked and contain descriptions of events and actions that occurred in Randall's life.\n\nNovember 1982 Exxon International report predicts that fossil fuel use will raise global temperatures to about 1\u00b0C above their normal levels within 40 years October 1984 I\u2019m born in Easton, PA Summer 1991 I learn to ride a bike Spring 1992 My elementary school celebrates Earth Day and I learn about the greenhouse effect 1993-1996 I get very into Star Wars and Animorphs Fall 1996 I stand around awkwardly at my first middle school dance Spring 2002 I get accepted into college Spring 2006 I somehow graduate despite spending most of my time playing Mario Kart Summer 2006 I see An Inconvenient Truth in the theater and feel anxious Fall 2011 I get married Summer 2012 I read headlines about a global warning \u201cpause\u201d and hope that maybe things aren\u2019t so bad 2013-2021 I read more about climate science and get steadily more alarmed Spring 2016 I read the 1982 Exxon report June 2020 Global 60-month average reaches +0.94\u00b0C, Easton, PA is 2\u00b0C hotter than normal for the fifth year in a row Today (no description) 2022 (near future) [Large X within a circle] 1982 Exxon Prediction\n"}
{"id":2501,"title":"Average Familiarity","image_title":"Average Familiarity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2501","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/average_familiarity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2501:_Average_Familiarity","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.] Ponytail: Silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochemists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars. Cueball: And quartz, of course. Ponytail: Of course.\n[Caption below the panel] Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.\n","explanation":"This comic claims that experts vastly overestimate how familiar other people are with their own field of study. As an example, Randall shows a conversation between Ponytail and Cueball as two geochemists specializing in silicate chemistry. Although the two scientists understand that the layman does not know all that they know about silicates, they are still under the impression that other people at least know the chemical makeup of olivine and some feldspars . Cueball also mentions quartz , an even simpler mineral taken for granted by Ponytail.\nIn truth, the average person can't be expected to know the chemical makeup of any arbitrarily-chosen substance reliably (or any material at all), if that average person's job and hobby do not involve chemistry \u2014 aside from the few that made their way into common knowledge , like NaCl for salt [1] (sodium chloride or halite in mineral form), H 2 O for water (facetiously known as dihydrogen monoxide, ice in mineral form), or CO 2 for carbon dioxide (while most people are more familiar with its gaseous form, it is also used in mineral form as dry ice ), and may not even know the definition of \"feldspar\" beyond \"a mineral\", if at all.\nIt even goes so far as to initially gloss over the 'everyday' knowledge of quartz... until prompted by the slightly-less-overestimating partner in the conversation. Perhaps like a gardener forgetting to mention the lawn he maintains (along with the 'actual' plants in the borders or vegetable patches), there seemed no need to include such a common mineral as a subject of silicate chemistry. Quartz is a basic silicon oxide (SiO 2 ) that many non-chemists have heard of because it is common and has a variety of uses, though they would not know its chemical structure. Quartz can be found as distinct large-scale crystals (probably obvious to the layman, as an ice-cube is in a drink) but also features as a hard-wearing micro-constituent of many rocks. Quartz is a major component of most sand (except for coral sands, which are calcium carbonates).  Quartz crystals are sometimes made into jewelry and other decorative objects. Most modern clocks use the resonance frequency of quartz to keep time.\nMinerals like feldspars and olivine generally exist as a continuum of varying chemical formulas, represented as a mixture of \"endmembers\" that have some pure composition. Feldspars are a category of aluminum-containing silicate minerals that account for the most of the rock in the earth's crust by mass. They are composed of a silicon-aluminum-oxygen lattice filled with sodium, potassium, or calcium ions. The major varieties are CaAl 2 Si 2 O 8 (anorthite), NaAlSi 3 O 8 (albite), and KAlSi 3 O 8 (potassium feldspar). Olivine is most notable as being the primary constituent of the upper mantle and commonly found in stony meteorites, and has the formula X 2+ 2 SiO 4 , where X is any iron or magnesium ion. The ends of the spectrum are Mg 2 SiO 4 ( forsterite ) and Fe 2 SiO 4 ( fayalite ).\nIn the title text the two geologists express belief that the average person should be more familiar with silicates because of how ubiquitous they are. Their somewhat-exasperated statement plays on the phrase \"you can't throw a rock without hitting one,\" a standard hyperbole about how common something is. Indeed, silicate rocks are extremely common on Earth \u2014 not only would a rock thrown in a random direction stand a decent chance of striking a silicate mineral rock, but the rock being thrown also has a very high chance of being a silicate mineral rock. With the exception of a few carbonate deposits, rocks found in large deposits on Earth's surface nearly all have silica in them, even extraterrestrial rocks. The Earth's crust is about 60% silica by weight. [2]\n[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.] Ponytail: Silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochemists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars. Cueball: And quartz, of course. Ponytail: Of course.\n[Caption below the panel] Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.\n"}
{"id":2502,"title":"Every Data Table","image_title":"Every Data Table","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2502","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/every_data_table.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2502:_Every_Data_Table","transcript":"[A data table is shown with eight years given. After each year is seven dots. At the end of these dots are unreadable text\/scribbles. The table is slanted compared to the panel, so the top year is in the top left corner, partly obscured by the panel, and the dots end at the edge of the panel, so only very small part of the scribles are seen (resembling an eight dot). And at the bottom the year is close to the middle of the panel, but most of the year is below the panel, and only the last three dots are visible. Two years have symbols indicating an unseen footnote.] 2017....... 2018....... 2019....... 2020*...... 2021 \u2020 ....... 2022....... 2023....... 2024.......\n[Caption below the panel:] Every data table from now on\n","explanation":"This comic is another entry in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nIt shows a future data table with one entry for each year from 2017 to 2024, so this table is made at least three years after publication of the comic (presuming it does not depict some form of advanced estimation of trends). The only discernable differences across the eight years are that two years have footnotes as in 2020* and 2021 \u2020 , whereas the other six years have not.\nSometimes a symbol such as an asterisk (*) or a dagger (\u2020, also called an obelus or obelisk) is used to denote an unusual entry in a table to be explained in a footnote with a matching symbol.\nThe COVID pandemic has had a large impact on the entire world and one way this can be seen is through strange stats resulting from the effects of the pandemic, at least in 2020 and 2021, the years marked with footnote in the data table. Various statistics such as employment statistics, spending power, holiday miles, pet ownership, births (or at least conceptions), and \u2014 naturally \u2014 deaths may have been either grossly suppressed\/increased for the majority of 2020, and for 2021 may have hardly recovered, partially recovered, renormalized, bounced back with a vengeance or be over-compensated for in the effort to catch up.\nThus Randall concludes that every data table will look like this one from now on, hence the title of the comic.\nIn the title text Randall states that he hopes 2022 is relatively normal. Comically, he doesn't mainly hope for this because he wants the Covid-19 pandemic to end, but rather because he doesn't know what symbol is used after the asterisk and the cross.\nIt is hard to know what 2022 might be like. Nothing (at the time of this comic being published in August 2021) is exactly back to normal and proper recovery or the resulting compensatory readjustment may not have concluded in time for 2022 to reflect the trends expected based upon pre-2020 figures, and the additional further years that future statistics will record.\nCommon symbols that are used if the first two are taken include multiple symbols (such as \u2020\u2020 or ***), or a series of further single-symbols such as the convention to use a double dagger (\u2021), the section symbol\/silcrow (\u00a7), the parallel\/double-pipe (\u2016) and the paragraph symbol\/pilcrow (\u00b6). Alternately you could just start and continue the series with superscript numbers (\u00b9, \u00b2, \u00b3 ...), especially when you discover a need to frequently clarify multiple and\/or nested footnotes on each page, or save up a whole chapter of many such references to present them as 'endnotes', upon entirely different pages from the text being referenced.\nUnrelated to the usage as English footnote characters, the asterisk and dagger symbol are used in German mainly as the shorthand genealogic signs to express \"born\" and \"died\" respectively (e.g. in encyclopaedias, as the German terms are three-syllable words for both and need to be shortened), so a person that is 2020(*) and 2021(\u2020) would have been alive for only about a year, depending on the months. This symbology is also used on some tomb stones. An optimistic view is the \"birth\" and \"death\" of the Coronavirus itself, which would also understandably result in uncertainty on the next symbol in this order, for 2022. Pessimists in this context might suggest to use \u221e, which is the symbol for infinity.\nSimilarly, in biology, species (or genus, etc...) that are possibly extinct are indicated with an asterisk and dagger is used to note the possible extinction (double asterisks indicate taxa believed to be extinct in the wild but known to be extant in cultivation). This of course do not fit well with the Covid-19, which is not close to extinction, and it is also not about to cause the extinction of humans.\nRandall, however, seems to have forgotten the potential monkey's paw nature of his wish. 'Relative' requires a comparison between things. It could well be that the whole fall-out of the pandemic becomes the new normal, and future years have no necessity to use symbols to explain how those years come to be like everyone knows they are, while dates before 2020 will be entirely understood as the old-normal. Only 2020 and 2021 may need contextual clarifying, due to the necessary transition\/limbo between the earlier unaffected and later fully-adapted scenarios.\n[A data table is shown with eight years given. After each year is seven dots. At the end of these dots are unreadable text\/scribbles. The table is slanted compared to the panel, so the top year is in the top left corner, partly obscured by the panel, and the dots end at the edge of the panel, so only very small part of the scribles are seen (resembling an eight dot). And at the bottom the year is close to the middle of the panel, but most of the year is below the panel, and only the last three dots are visible. Two years have symbols indicating an unseen footnote.] 2017....... 2018....... 2019....... 2020*...... 2021 \u2020 ....... 2022....... 2023....... 2024.......\n[Caption below the panel:] Every data table from now on\n"}
{"id":2503,"title":"Memo Spike Connector","image_title":"Memo Spike Connector","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2503","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/memo_spike_connector.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2503:_Memo_Spike_Connector","transcript":"[A memo spike is shown (a device also called a Spindle). It is a long spike standing up from a round base plate. A wire is coming in from the left and appears to be hardwired into the spike's base element. Two other wires comes in from the right. Both are firmly impaled down upon the spike, penetrated completely through shortly before their apparently unterminated ends. The end of the impaled wire closest to the base faces out and the details appear to show it to be of some variety of multicore (rather than co-axial) manufacture. The other cable's end is a bit higher and points into the image. Above is a title and below is a label.] Cursed Connectors #102 The Memo Spike\n","explanation":"This is the third installment in the series of Cursed Connectors and presents Cursed Connectors #102: The Memo Spike. It follows 2495: Universal Seat Belt (#65) and was followed 9 days later by 2507: USV-C (#280).\nThe comic depicts a large metal spike with a wire coming from the base. The spike stabs through two other wires, thus creating an electrical connection between the three. As the name suggests, the spike resembles a stationery spindle , colloquially known as a spike, called a Memo Spike here by Randall. However, unlike normal spindles, this one has a cable of some kind coming out of it, suggesting this is a hub of some sort.\nSpindles are used to temporarily hold paper by \"spindling\" or impaling the paper onto the spike (as depicted in the comic). They're most known for their use in restaurants as a way to hold bills that have been paid, or traditionally in offices that work with many bits of paper, e.g. with invoices in a finance department or hardcopy in newspaper editing, to prevent accidental disturbance\/shuffling, at the expense of a small puncture mark in each sheet so impaled. (This could cause errors in papers with punch-holes that are meant to be read by machines, hence the admonition against \" folding, spindling, and mutilating \".) In the latter context, the editor might put all the rejected stories onto a spike (rather than into a wastebasket) to prevent them going astray, and this might be the source of the term ' spiked '.\nThe joke of the comic is while any number of non-destructive connection standards exist, a large spike can provide much of the same results: a conductive object that retains a connection of multiple wires in a way that allows electricity to pass through. Indeed, in the early days of Ethernet, vampire taps were used, essentially spikes that bit into a cable to establish a new branch in the network.  Another type of connection which involves piercing the wire is a punch-down block , a type of insulation-displacement connector , where one or more wires are pushed into a cutting channel instead of onto a spike.\nDepending on the type of cable it is also likely to create a short circuit, e.g. by connecting both strands of a twisted pair of strands in a typical Ethernet cable, or the central wire and the sheath of a coaxial cable. In an enterprise environment, this could even happen on a PoE-Connection , which actually carry more noticeable amounts of power (up to 25.5W). Even if this is avoided, the single spike may be large enough to mechanically sever a random subset of the finer strands that exist within a multicore cable such as is commonly in use today.\nThe title text takes this a bit further. It says that it is backwards compatible with many existing cables. This means any cable large enough to be impaled by the spike could be used. Needless to say it will likely not work anyway. It also continues by saying that phones and tablets can also be connected using this method if you press them down hard enough over the spike. Thus if you actually manage to make the spike penetrate the device's coverings to reach the electrical parts, then there is a connection. The implication is that any device or cable can be connected to any other device or cable as a form of universal adapter\/splitter\/combiner across arbitrary hardware and communications\/power standards. In reality, this could be even more dangerous and will surely destroy the phone\/tablet either directly or by overloading their cable connection. [ citation needed ] Also be careful not to impale your hand while trying to push the spike through your tablet's screen.\n[A memo spike is shown (a device also called a Spindle). It is a long spike standing up from a round base plate. A wire is coming in from the left and appears to be hardwired into the spike's base element. Two other wires comes in from the right. Both are firmly impaled down upon the spike, penetrated completely through shortly before their apparently unterminated ends. The end of the impaled wire closest to the base faces out and the details appear to show it to be of some variety of multicore (rather than co-axial) manufacture. The other cable's end is a bit higher and points into the image. Above is a title and below is a label.] Cursed Connectors #102 The Memo Spike\n"}
{"id":2504,"title":"Fissile Raspberry Isotopes","image_title":"Fissile Raspberry Isotopes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2504","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fissile_raspberry_isotopes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2504:_Fissile_Raspberry_Isotopes","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are standing in a field, looking at rows of crops disappearing in the distance over rolling hills.] Ponytail: I reckon it'll be a good harvest. Ponytail: So long as we don't get too many fissile raspberry isotopes. Cueball: Too many whats ?\n[In a half height panel is shown a picture of a raspberry with an arrow to a situation where it is splitting in to two equal parts. From the split there also comes two small drupelets flying out as shown with arrows. Below these two situations is a smaller sketch of how one of these two drupelets will eventually hit another raspberry, which will send out three drupelets when splitting, two of those hitting other berries, that each send out two drupelets. The lower of these are not depicted hitting any, but the upper split hits two again, which each send out two, in an ongoing chain reaction. The depiction stops there. Above this panel is what Ponytail tells Cueball:] Ponytail (narrating): If a raspberry breaks in half, it releases fragments which can cause more splits. Within seconds you've lost the whole crop.\n[Ponytail and Cueball are standing in an empty panel talking.] Ponytail: Luckily the berries are bound by fresh raspberry pie mesons. Cueball: I hope they hold. Ponytail: It's my grandma's recipe. They'll hold.\n","explanation":"Ponytail is admiring her raspberry fields telling Cueball she expects a good harvest... That is if they do not get too many fissile raspberry isotopes! To which Cueball has to ask Too many whats?\nThe comic is thus a joking analogy to nuclear chain reactions , in which the fission (splitting in two) of one atomic nucleus releases neutrons , which then strike other nuclei and cause them in turn to fission, releasing more neutrons. This chain reaction releases a great deal of energy and is what makes possible both nuclear power and nuclear bombs .\nA fissile isotope , such as uranium-235 , is one that is sufficiently large and unstable to undergo such a chain reaction, as opposed to the more common and less unstable uranium-238 . Ponytail fear that her raspberries have too many unstable isotopes so that her fields risk undergoing a similar fission-driven chain reaction. This chain reaction is depicted in the second panel, and she explains that if this happens the entire crop may be gone in seconds. It sounds like this is only dangerous for her economy, i.e. all the berries destroyed, but not a runaway explosion that destroys her field and any living thing nearby.\nIn real life, raspberries don't undergo such chain reactions. [ citation needed ] As an aggregate fruit , raspberries (as well as blackberries mentioned in the title text) resemble common depictions of atomic nuclei , with each drupelet corresponding to a nucleon (proton or neutron), which is probably why they are the subject of the comic.  (The actual \"appearance\" of atomic nuclei, in contrast to the common depictions, is complicated by Heisenbergian uncertainty, quantum effects, and strong nuclear force interactions.)  Perhaps these raspberries are byproducts of the experiments depicted in 1949: Fruit Collider .\nThis comic is also a pun on \"pi mesons\" or pions , subatomic particles that transmit the strong nuclear force , and the similarity in name to a pie , the food type, as in a raspberry pie . The transmission of the strong nuclear force happens most importantly in the atomic nucleus and is responsible for keeping the nucleus intact, i.e. , preventing it from undergoing fission despite the strong repulsive electromagnetic force present from all the positively-charged protons .\nRaspberry pies (and pie mesons of such) are not to be confused with Raspberry Pi , a very popular microcontroller widely used for hobbyist or educational projects.\nPonytail claims that her berries are protected (bound) by fresh raspberry pie mesons. Cueball states he hopes they hold, but Ponytail is confident as these pies are made from her grandma's recipe, i.e. , it is actually a fresh pie made from the berries. The faith in the pie recipe being able to impede the danger references the convention of \"Just like Grandma used to make\", nostalgia for an infallible cookery ancestor, in this case a hallowed family recipe that acts to mitigate any budding 'berry' chain-reaction. Grandma's baking is not always so fondly remembered and, in this case, it could be some (in)famous inertness and solidity to the product that is reassuring, not any form of culinary excellence.\nThe title text mentions that the grandma's \"blackberry pie meson\" recipe was a huge seller, but that then the farm was shut down by a joint FDA\/NRC investigation. This refers to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The FDA is responsible for the regulation and inspection of food in the U.S., and the NRC for the regulation and inspection of nuclear facilities and materials. A hypothetical \"blackberry pie meson\" might well run afoul of both, being both nuclear and therefore subject to NRC regulations and permitting requirements, and unhealthy to eat and thus violating FDA rules. This could in addition also violate the FDA's rules on radiation emitting products. One might be able to imagine the FDA discovering that the blackberry pies are functioning to contain a nuclear chain reaction, and calling in the NRC to consult. The FDA took a similarly incongruous interest in physics in the title text of 2216: Percent Milkfat .\nIt is mentioned that the pies were shelf stable , which means it can last a long time without being in a refrigerator. This may be because of its innate radioactivity keeping it free from germs. This may also explain why they were shut down by both the above-mentioned agencies.  The word \"stable\" also describes atoms , and therefore substances, that do not spontaneously undergo nuclear decay, though a stable isotope may (eventually) result directly from the decay of an unstable one.\n[Ponytail and Cueball are standing in a field, looking at rows of crops disappearing in the distance over rolling hills.] Ponytail: I reckon it'll be a good harvest. Ponytail: So long as we don't get too many fissile raspberry isotopes. Cueball: Too many whats ?\n[In a half height panel is shown a picture of a raspberry with an arrow to a situation where it is splitting in to two equal parts. From the split there also comes two small drupelets flying out as shown with arrows. Below these two situations is a smaller sketch of how one of these two drupelets will eventually hit another raspberry, which will send out three drupelets when splitting, two of those hitting other berries, that each send out two drupelets. The lower of these are not depicted hitting any, but the upper split hits two again, which each send out two, in an ongoing chain reaction. The depiction stops there. Above this panel is what Ponytail tells Cueball:] Ponytail (narrating): If a raspberry breaks in half, it releases fragments which can cause more splits. Within seconds you've lost the whole crop.\n[Ponytail and Cueball are standing in an empty panel talking.] Ponytail: Luckily the berries are bound by fresh raspberry pie mesons. Cueball: I hope they hold. Ponytail: It's my grandma's recipe. They'll hold.\n"}
{"id":2505,"title":"News Story Reaction","image_title":"News Story Reaction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2505","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/news_story_reaction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2505:_News_Story_Reaction","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting at a desk, typing on his laptop. What he types is shown above Cueball, as indicated by the line going from his hands to the text.] Cueball: Devastated to hear that a pack of wild dogs got into the Louvre and shredded the Mona Lisa. Cueball: What a loss for humanity. Cueball: My first kiss was in the aisle of a J.C. Penny [ sic ] that had a poster of the Mona Lisa on the wall, so this is hitting me especially hard.\n[Caption below the panel] Sometimes I have to remind myself not to make every news story about me.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball is at his computer, likely typing a comment after reading a shocking news story where the Mona Lisa has been attacked and shredded by a pack of wild dogs. The Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings in human history. At the time of this comic, the Mona Lisa has not been attacked and is unlikely to be shredded in this circumstance at least by dogs as it is painted on wood, rather than canvas. [1]\nAt the beginning of his comment, Cueball describes his reaction and disappointment about the event, describing the event as \"a loss for humanity.\" Cueball is then reminded of his first kiss, which occurred inside of a JCPenney , where a picture of the Mona Lisa hung on one of its walls. He adds this to his comment, explaining that this is why the news hits him hard. However, his story has almost no relation to the Mona Lisa , other than that the picture was at the scene as well as being unnecessary.\nAfter posting the comment, Cueball reflects on this and mentions that not every news story is, or needs to be, about himself.\nThe title text describes an exception to this, where his experience IS directly related to the affected painting, as his ex seemingly planned to get revenge on the painting itself. The title text suggests that the dogs destroyed the painting before Cueball's ex could do so. (But perhaps it could be that she let the dogs in, and so this extra information could lead to the police finding the person who was responsible.)\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, typing on his laptop. What he types is shown above Cueball, as indicated by the line going from his hands to the text.] Cueball: Devastated to hear that a pack of wild dogs got into the Louvre and shredded the Mona Lisa. Cueball: What a loss for humanity. Cueball: My first kiss was in the aisle of a J.C. Penny [ sic ] that had a poster of the Mona Lisa on the wall, so this is hitting me especially hard.\n[Caption below the panel] Sometimes I have to remind myself not to make every news story about me.\n"}
{"id":2506,"title":"Projecting","image_title":"Projecting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2506","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/projecting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2506:_Projecting","transcript":"[Ponytail, Cueball, Megan, and White Hat are standing. Cueball is talking, with arms outstretched, palms up, while the other three are looking at him.] Cueball: Like a lot of you, I have a real problem with projection.\n","explanation":"In this comic, Cueball expresses his difficulty with psychological projection . Projection is taking qualities of the self and attributing these qualities to others.\nCueball actually admits he has a real problem with projecting, but while doing so, he is seemingly oblivious to the fact, that he is stating this in a way that projects his self-identified difficulty upon his friends: Ponytail , Megan and White Hat . Of course, this could also just be a joke made by Cueball, as it is the joke in the comic. On the other hand, Cueball and Randall have serious issues with social interactions , and this could just be another example of such a problem.\nIn the title text, Cueball continues his projections, stating that this is something we all need to work on . So he continues to believe that all the others have the same problem, not just a lot of them as in his original statement, which left the possibility that not all of them had this issue. In the end, he also tops it by saying but especially you all indicating that he imagines his own case is a less serious issue of projection than that he actually projects the others as having.\nAlternately, the phrase having a real problem with projection usually means the person speaks quietly, their voice doesn't carry very far, particularly in acting and public speaking environments. Someone with difficulty projecting wouldn't be heard by people in the back row, or perhaps even halfway into the audience (depending how much difficulty they have). This comic is notably smaller than the average xkcd comic, making it the visual \/ comic equivalent to not projecting. Just as a non-projecting voice cannot be heard very far away, this comic cannot be seen very far away (in either case, not as far as usual). Under this interpretation, the title text is referencing that his audience is also not projecting, they're just as small as he is.\nAlternatively, Cueball expresses his difficulty with complex numbers .  There exists a common projection between the complex and reals, but it may not be clear to him about which method to use or how to do it.  If he is projecting onto the real part of the complex line, then his issue is a many-to-one problem, which explains why it is everyone else's problem as well.\nAn alternative perspective might be that the characters, as stick figures, are represented as two dimensional projections of three dimensional objects, and this projection has an issue that depth information is not preserved, so for example, it isn't clear whether cueball is facing towards us or away from us. As his arms are not foreshortened by the projection, this indicates that he is standing in an unnatural pose, so the fact that he says that especially the other characters have a problem with projection would be a good example of psychological projection.\nA further alternative read could be that Cueball is acting as the Randall surrogate, noting that the other characters are projections of Randall's conscious and subconscious self.  The title text could then be read as either directed to those aspects as expressed as characters within the comic, or directed to the reader, who also has things to work on.\nA different meaning of the term \"Projecting\" is seen in the fields of public speaking and drama, being the way that a person clearly uses their voice to address an audience.  If Cueball is not projecting well, then the characters listening to him may ignore him.\nProjection is an ongoing issue.  People from disparate communities can experience this all the time, where one person assumes out of habit that the other person has the traits of their community.  On the end of the spectrum, projection can be completely delusional, as the comic hints at.  It would make sense for that be more common for people who attend less to where others are at, such as introverted or powerful people, two groups that experienced engineers can land in.\nIt is also possible that Cueball is addressing the portion of readers who feel the need to project onto Randall their own desire (and meticulousness in analytical searching) for layers upon layers of hidden meaning in xkcd comics. The assumption that he has stuffed several different obscure punchlines into the one sentence of a single-panel comic is, despite the layered punchlines in some other comics, quite a stretch. Randall may be suggesting that such projections from readers onto him are problematic because they cause comic explanation pages to be filled with rambling speculation that can make the explanation of the actual joke harder to understand.\n[Ponytail, Cueball, Megan, and White Hat are standing. Cueball is talking, with arms outstretched, palms up, while the other three are looking at him.] Cueball: Like a lot of you, I have a real problem with projection.\n"}
{"id":2507,"title":"USV-C","image_title":"USV-C","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2507","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/usv_c.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2507:_USV-C","transcript":"[A cable with a curled wire displays the end of both of its connectors. The top end has a USB-C connector and the bottom end has a UV-C LED. The UV light is shown coming out of this end with a hazy blue circle around a white middle. The lamp is also bluish. Above is a title and below is a label.] Cursed Connectors #280 USB-C to UV-C\n","explanation":"This is the fourth installment in the series of Cursed Connectors and presents Cursed Connectors #280: USB-C to UV-C. It follows 2503: Memo Spike Connector (#102) and was first followed just a bit more than half a year later by 2589: Outlet Denier (#78).\nThis comic depicts a cable that converts from USB-C (at the top of the picture) to UV-C (at the bottom).\nUSB-C is a rotationally symmetrical Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. UV-C is a range of ultraviolet light with wavelengths between 100 and 280 nm.  This is often used as a germicide, so this comic may also be related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has an infosheet with information about these devices and COVID-19. And the connector number (280) is likely chosen because it is the boundary between UV-C and UV-B in nanometres.\nSimilar cables actually exist, with a USB port at one end to power a small (usually visible light) lamp at the other. A cable with a UV-C lamp could, as noted above, be useful for disinfecting surfaces; however, the depicted design would be problematic because it would expose the user's skin and eyes to harmful ultraviolet radiation.\nUnless there is more to the UV-C end than indicated, the cable seems not to have use in bidirectional communication (even to confirm that it is plugged in or shone upon some suitable optical transceiver) so in any data transfer situation it could be a limited-range broadcast-only system at best - which has its uses in certain niche cases.\nThe title text mentions that the UV-C is unpolarized . This is a pun with two uses of the term polarized. When referring to a connector 'polarization', or absence of it, it means that USB-C does not force you to use a single correct orientation when using it, i.e. you don't have to turn it \"right-side-up\" like USB-A or USB-micro.\nIt also refers to the use of a polarizing filter which takes unpolarized light waves and blocks out the waves that are not oriented in the same direction. These are used in sunglasses and photography to eliminate glare and enhance the image. These filters do need to be oriented in a specific direction in order to have the desired effect of passing\/blocking a given polarization, perhaps to separate two perpendicularly orientated 'channels' that need to be unmixed exactly knowing the respective orientation of the two signals ( or exactly 180\u00b0 out, which is what USB-C effectively allows for at present).\nThe light could also have been circularly polarized , which allows 'left' and 'right' rotating polarizations to simultaneously carry separate signals, but not require the same strict orientation to operate properly, at all, so long as arbitrary mirrors are not involved at any stage of the optical path. Regardless, the implication here is that there is no deliberate rationalization of the light to contend with, anyway, which seems to be just making a positive point out of a potentially lost opportunity to double any intended signal bandwidth. The name \"Ultra-Serial Violet...\" could be read as consciously eschewing all attempts at parallelism, including talkback.\n[A cable with a curled wire displays the end of both of its connectors. The top end has a USB-C connector and the bottom end has a UV-C LED. The UV light is shown coming out of this end with a hazy blue circle around a white middle. The lamp is also bluish. Above is a title and below is a label.] Cursed Connectors #280 USB-C to UV-C\n"}
{"id":2508,"title":"Circumappendiceal Somectomy","image_title":"Circumappendiceal Somectomy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2508","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/circumappendiceal_somectomy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2508:_Circumappendiceal_Somectomy","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting with legs out over the edge of an examination table, hugging his stomach, likely because of stomach pains. A doctor in lab coat and a surgical head cap is standing next to the table speaking to Cueball, one arm stretched out towards him.] Doctor: Normally we would remove your appendix from your body. Doctor: But thanks to new surgical techniques, we're now able to remove your entire body from around your appendix!\n","explanation":"In normal medicine, appendectomy is the surgical removal of an appendix . The purpose of the appendix is not fully understood, believed to be a reservoir for a human's gut microbiome. However if an appendix is swelling, it comes with risk of bursting and causing massive damage through internal bleeding and septic bacterial infection. In such cases the appendix may be partially removed through surgery.\nBreaking down the comic's title: circum- means \"around,\" -appendiceal means \"the appendix,\" som(a)- means \"the body,\" and -ectomy means \"removal.\" Therefore, a circumappendiceal somectomy would be \"a removal of the body from around the appendix.\" This appears to be the procedure that the doctor in the comic is describing.\nThe joke is that such a procedure is functionally identical to a typical appendectomy, the removal of the appendix from the body - just viewed from a different perspective. It humorously implies that the entire body of the patient is the problematic part to be removed, leaving the appendix behind.  It should be noted, though, that the procedure is identical only if it's done without disrupting the integrity of the body. There are situations in which an essential part is removed from a damaged or unimportant system by dismantling the system, piece by piece, leaving the part behind.  Obviously, this would not be an advisable method for treating appendicitis . [ citation needed ]\nThe title text provides personal insight into the comic. It appears Randall has gotten appendicitis before, which may have been the inspiration of 2147: Appendicitis and was treated using antibiotics instead of surgery. However, his appendix became inflamed again, and this time it was removed. Randall's experience is not uncommon, as a 2020 study found that nearly 40% of patients treated with antibiotics for appendicitis required an appendectomy for recurrent appendicitis within 7 years. However, this should be the final time, as it is unlikely to get appendicitis without an appendix. [ citation needed ] However, he does not rule out the possibility that something \"extremely unexpected\" happened during the surgery which could cause him to suffer from appendicitis again. Possible candidates for such an extremely unexpected event could include the surgeon faking the removal of Randall's appendix and leaving it intact, or removing only part of it, removing Randall's appendix but transplanting someone else's appendix into him instead, or even the appendix's spontaneous regeneration .  While most of these possibilities are absurd, stump appendicitis, in which appendicitis occurs in remnant of the appendix that remains after surgery really does occur in 1 in 50,000 cases according to the article Appendicitis after appendicectomy - NCBI .\n[Cueball is sitting with legs out over the edge of an examination table, hugging his stomach, likely because of stomach pains. A doctor in lab coat and a surgical head cap is standing next to the table speaking to Cueball, one arm stretched out towards him.] Doctor: Normally we would remove your appendix from your body. Doctor: But thanks to new surgical techniques, we're now able to remove your entire body from around your appendix!\n"}
{"id":2509,"title":"Useful Geometry Formulas","image_title":"Useful Geometry Formulas","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2509","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/useful_geometry_formulas.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2509:_Useful_Geometry_Formulas","transcript":"[Four figures in two rows of two, each being a common two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object, with solid lines in front and dotted lines behind. Each figure has some labeled dimensions represented with arrows and a formula underneath indicating its area. Above the four figures is a header:] Useful geometry formulas\n[Top left; A circle with an inscribed concentric ellipse sharing its horizontal diameter. The edge of the ellipse above the major axis is drawn with a dotted line, while the lower edge is drawn with a solid line, similar to textbook depictions of a 3D sphere. The shared radius\/semi-major axis to the right of the center is drawn as an arrow and labeled 'r'.  ] A = \u03c0r\u00b2\n[Top right; An ellipse with horizontal major axis, plus two straight lines: one from each end of the major axis, up to a point vertical to the center of the ellipse, so that the major axis of the ellipse (not drawn) and the two lines would form an isosceles triangle with a vertical axis of symmetry. The upper edge of the ellipse above the major axis is drawn with a dotted line, while the lower edge is drawn with a solid line, similar to textbook depictions of a right elliptical cone, or more commonly a right circular cone. The semi-minor axis of the ellipse is drawn with an arrow down from the center and labeled 'a' and the semi-major axis is similarly drawn to the right of the center and labeled 'b'.  To the right of the shape, the height of the isosceles triangle is drawn using arrows, and labeled 'h'.] A = 1\/2 \u03c0ab + bh\n[Bottom left; Two ellipses of the same dimensions, with major axes horizontal, drawn vertically one above the other, with vertical lines connecting each end of the major axis of the top ellipse to the corresponding points on the bottom ellipse.  The upper edge of the bottom ellipse above the major axis is drawn with a dotted line, while the lower edge is drawn with a solid line, similar to textbook depictions of a right elliptical prism or, more commonly, a right cylinder (circular prism). Inside the shape, the major axis of the upper ellipse is drawn as a double-ended arrow and labeled 'd'.  The semi-minor axis of the lower ellipse is drawn as an arrow down from the center and labeled 'r'. To the right of the shape, the length of the vertical lines is replicated using arrows and labeled 'h'. ] A = d(\u03c0r\/2 + h)\n[Bottom right; Two rectangles of the same vertical and horizontal dimensions, drawn with one offset diagonally to the upper right of the other, with diagonal lines connecting the corresponding vertices, forming a hexagon with opposite sides parallel.  The upper right rectangle has its left and bottom sides drawn with dotted lines, and a similar dotted line is used connecting the bottom left corner of the two rectangles, similar to textbook depictions of rhomboid-based right prisms, or more commonly rectangular prisms.  Outside the shape, the bottom edge of the lower rectangle is redrawn below the shape with arrows and labeled 'b'. The length of the left edge is similarly redrawn to the left and labeled 'h'. The length of the diagonal line connecting the upper left corners of the two rectangles is similarly redrawn on the top left using arrows and labeled 'd'. The acute angle between the bottom edge of the lower rectangle, and the dotted diagonal connecting the two lower left corners, is labeled '\u03b8'] A = bh + d(b sin\u03b8 + h cos\u03b8)\n","explanation":"This comic showcases area formulas for the areas of four two-dimensional geometric shapes which each have extra dotted and\/or solid lines making them look like illustrations for 3-dimensional objects. The first, a simple equation for the area of a circle, the second an equation for the area of a triangle with a semi-elliptic base, the third an equation for the area of a rectangle with an elliptical base and top, and the fourth an equation for the area of a hexagon consisting of two opposing right-angled corners and two parallel diagonal lines connecting their sides. In each case, only the area formed by the outline of each shape is calculated.\nSimilar illustrations are commonly found in geometry textbooks, which are used to depict three-dimensional figures on a two-dimensional page. They commonly make use of slanted lines to indicate edges receding into the distance and dashed lines to indicate an edge occluded by nearer parts of the solid. The joke is that the formulae given here are for the area of each two-dimensional shape within its outer solid lines, not for the surface area or volume of the illustrated 3D object (as would be shown in the geometry textbook). The title text continues the joke by claiming that the dotted lines are simply decorative.\nThe illustrations depict the following plane or solid figures, depending on the interpretation.\nTop Left - Circle with an inscribed ellipse, or Sphere\nThis illustration is commonly used to depict a three-dimensional sphere, with the ellipse representing a \"horizontal\" or axial cross-section through the center; the solid lower half of the ellipse represents the \"front\" of the circumference of this cross-section, while the dotted upper half represents the \"back\" of the same section, which would be occluded from view if this were a solid shape.\nThe radius of the circle, from the center to the right edge where it meets the ellipse, is labeled 'r'. In a textbook diagram of a sphere, the radius might be instead labeled with a diagonal line from the center to a different point on the ellipse, implying the generality that all points on that cross-section, and indeed on the whole spherical surface, are at the same radius from the center. However, this line would be shorter on the page than the actual radius, making it useless for the formula of the area of the 2D outer shape.\nThe area of the 2D shape on the page is the area of the circle, which is A = \u03c0r 2 .  This is captioned below the figure.\nCoincidentally the area of the horizontal cross-section of the 3D sphere, as depicted by the ellipse, is also \u03c0r 2 , and a reader familiar with such diagrams might initially assume that this is what was meant.  However, this does not extend to the other figures.\nThe 3D sphere commonly depicted by this drawing would have a volume of 4 \/ 3 \u03c0r 3 and a surface area of 4\u03c0r 2 .\nTop Right - Ellipse with symmetrical diagonal lines, or Cone\nThis illustration is commonly used to depict a three-dimensional right circular cone, with the lower half of the ellipse representing the \"front edge\" of the bottom surface, and the upper half representing the occluded \"back edge\".  However such drawings would usually not use both 'a' and 'b' to describe the radius of the base of the cone, which is drawn as an ellipse due to foreshortening.  Alternatively, the drawing could depict a right elliptical cone.\nRandall approximates the area of the 2D shape on the page as the sum of the area of the triangle formed by the major axis of the ellipse and the two lines, and half of the area of the ellipse ( \u03c0 \/ 2 ab) since most of the upper half of the ellipse overlaps the triangle.  The equation for this area is A = 1\/2 \u03c0ab + bh.  This is captioned below the figure.\nThe actual area of a picture of a cone is not Randall's approximation, because the sides connect at the points on the ellipse where they can spread widest and form tangents to the ellipse, and such points are a little higher than those which define the major axis. This is most obvious in cases when h is only a little larger than a. The area can be computed to be exactly A = b (a arccos(-a\/h)) + \u221a(h 2 -a 2 )).\nThe 3D right circular cone commonly depicted by this drawing would have a volume of \u03c0r 2 h\/3 where r=a=b.  The area of the \"lower\" surface would be \u03c0r 2 , while the surface area of the upper conical surface would be \u03c0r\u221a(h 2 + r 2 ).  Neither of these areas can correspond with the caption in the comic, nor does the total surface area (the sum of these two).\nIf we do not assume that a = b, this drawing could also depict a right elliptic cone.  The volume of the elliptic cone would be \u03c0 \/ 3 abh.  The area of the lower surface would be \u03c0ab and the area of the curved upper surface would be 2a\u221a(b 2 +\u00a0h 2 ) 0 \u222b 1 \u221a( a\u00b2h\u00b2(t\u00b2-1)\u00a0-\u00a0b\u00b2(a\u00b2+h\u00b2t\u00b2) \/ a\u00b2(t\u00b2-1)(b\u00b2+h\u00b2) )\u00a0dt.\nBottom Left - Two ellipses joined vertically, or Cylinder\nThis illustration is commonly used to depict a 3D cylinder or right circular prism.  In this case, the upper ellipse represents the \"visible\" part of the top circular surface, with its \"depth\" shorter than its \"width\" due to foreshortening, and the lower part of the lower ellipse represents the \"front\" edge of the lower surface; the dotted half of the lower ellipse represents the occluded \"back\" edge of the lower surface.\nTo add to the confusion, the upper ellipse has its major axis labeled 'd' which usually denotes the diameter of a circular surface, while the lower ellipse has its semimajor axis labeled 'r' which similarly denotes a radius, even though the ellipses drawn have neither diameter nor radius.  The 'h' denoting height is also used for both rectangles and solid objects.  While 'd' in this case is required for the area calculation of the 2D shape, in textbooks only 'r' may be marked and the arrow may be offset at a diagonal rather than in line with any figurative axis, to imply its applicability to any angle of radius.\nThe non-overlapping parts of the 2D shape are composed of the rectangle formed by the major axes of the two ellipses and the vertical lines, plus half of the top ellipse and half of the bottom ellipse.  The area of the rectangle is dh, and the area of an ellipse with semimajor axis d\/2 and semiminor axis r is \u03c0rd\/2.  The total area is A = d(\u03c0r\/2 + h), which is captioned below the figure.\nA 3D right circular prism (cylinder) would have a volume of \u03c0r 2 h and a surface area of 2\u03c0r 2 + \u03c0dh, or 2\u03c0r(r + h) since in this case d = 2r.  The area of each flat surface would be \u03c0r 2 .  If we do not assume d = 2r, then the lateral surface area of the right elliptic cylinder is 4h 0 \u222b 1 \u221a( 1\u00a0-\u00a0t\u00b2(1-4r\u00b2\/d\u00b2) \/ 1\u00a0-\u00a0t\u00b2 )\u00a0dt. The volume is \u03c0 \/ 2 rdh.\nBottom Right - Parallel Hexagon, or Prism\nThis illustration is commonly used to depict a rectangular prism, with 'b' denoting the 'breadth', 'd' the 'depth' and 'h' the 'height'.  However, the labeled angle \u03b8, which is necessary for the area calculation of the 2D shape, would not normally be used in a diagram of a rectangular prism, as all angles are assumed to be right angles.  A rhomboidal prism could be accurately described by this diagram with the assumption that the 'base' parallelogram is perpendicular to the 'front' and that the only non-right angle is \u03b8.  In that case 'd' would not accurately describe the depth of the solid, which would be d sin \u03b8.\nThe area of the 2D shape is comprised of the rectangle at the lower left, the parallelogram above it, and the parallelogram on the right.  The area of the rectangle representing the front face of the prism is bh. The area of the upper parallelogram is db\u00a0sin\u00a0\u03b8. The area of the right parallelogram is dh\u00a0cos\u00a0\u03b8.  The equation for this area is  A = bh + d(b sin\u03b8 + h cos\u03b8) as is given below the figure.\nThe surface area of the prism would be 2bh\u00a0+\u00a02db sin \u03b8\u00a0+\u00a02dh. The volume is bdh sin \u03b8. Assuming a 3D shape, \u03b8 can be artificially altered by the projection; the assumption could be made that \u03b8 is 90 degrees, and sin \u03b8 is 1 (and therefore can be eliminated from the formulas), but since \u03b8 is marked, such an assumption might not be valid.\nIn the history of the development of computer-generated 3D graphics, calculations of the apparent visual area taken up by the projection of a volume may have been useful in occlusion-like optimizations, where each drawn pixel may be passed through many fragment shaders.\n[Four figures in two rows of two, each being a common two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object, with solid lines in front and dotted lines behind. Each figure has some labeled dimensions represented with arrows and a formula underneath indicating its area. Above the four figures is a header:] Useful geometry formulas\n[Top left; A circle with an inscribed concentric ellipse sharing its horizontal diameter. The edge of the ellipse above the major axis is drawn with a dotted line, while the lower edge is drawn with a solid line, similar to textbook depictions of a 3D sphere. The shared radius\/semi-major axis to the right of the center is drawn as an arrow and labeled 'r'.  ] A = \u03c0r\u00b2\n[Top right; An ellipse with horizontal major axis, plus two straight lines: one from each end of the major axis, up to a point vertical to the center of the ellipse, so that the major axis of the ellipse (not drawn) and the two lines would form an isosceles triangle with a vertical axis of symmetry. The upper edge of the ellipse above the major axis is drawn with a dotted line, while the lower edge is drawn with a solid line, similar to textbook depictions of a right elliptical cone, or more commonly a right circular cone. The semi-minor axis of the ellipse is drawn with an arrow down from the center and labeled 'a' and the semi-major axis is similarly drawn to the right of the center and labeled 'b'.  To the right of the shape, the height of the isosceles triangle is drawn using arrows, and labeled 'h'.] A = 1\/2 \u03c0ab + bh\n[Bottom left; Two ellipses of the same dimensions, with major axes horizontal, drawn vertically one above the other, with vertical lines connecting each end of the major axis of the top ellipse to the corresponding points on the bottom ellipse.  The upper edge of the bottom ellipse above the major axis is drawn with a dotted line, while the lower edge is drawn with a solid line, similar to textbook depictions of a right elliptical prism or, more commonly, a right cylinder (circular prism). Inside the shape, the major axis of the upper ellipse is drawn as a double-ended arrow and labeled 'd'.  The semi-minor axis of the lower ellipse is drawn as an arrow down from the center and labeled 'r'. To the right of the shape, the length of the vertical lines is replicated using arrows and labeled 'h'. ] A = d(\u03c0r\/2 + h)\n[Bottom right; Two rectangles of the same vertical and horizontal dimensions, drawn with one offset diagonally to the upper right of the other, with diagonal lines connecting the corresponding vertices, forming a hexagon with opposite sides parallel.  The upper right rectangle has its left and bottom sides drawn with dotted lines, and a similar dotted line is used connecting the bottom left corner of the two rectangles, similar to textbook depictions of rhomboid-based right prisms, or more commonly rectangular prisms.  Outside the shape, the bottom edge of the lower rectangle is redrawn below the shape with arrows and labeled 'b'. The length of the left edge is similarly redrawn to the left and labeled 'h'. The length of the diagonal line connecting the upper left corners of the two rectangles is similarly redrawn on the top left using arrows and labeled 'd'. The acute angle between the bottom edge of the lower rectangle, and the dotted diagonal connecting the two lower left corners, is labeled '\u03b8'] A = bh + d(b sin\u03b8 + h cos\u03b8)\n"}
{"id":2510,"title":"Modern Tools","image_title":"Modern Tools","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2510","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/modern_tools.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2510:_Modern_Tools","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting on an office chair at his desk typing on his laptop. White Hat is standing behind the desk looking at Cueball.] Cueball: Okay, I've got this neural net generating mostly valid makefiles. Cueball: Next I'm going to train it to distinguish between Bash and Zsh...\n[Caption below the panel:] People often use ancient tools and UIs to develop modern cutting-edge technology, but I do it the other way around.\n","explanation":"Cueball tells White Hat how he has trained a neural net to generate mostly valid Makefiles .\nThis is the file type that Make searches for. In software development, Make is a build automation tool that automatically builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading files called Makefiles which specify how to derive the target program. (See 2173: Trained a Neural Net ). Make is a very old tool, having first appeared in 1976.\nThen Cueball continues to tell that he next will train it to distinguish between Bash and Zsh.\nBash and Zsh are two command line interfaces for Unix-like OSes. The way to execute commands is almost identical, making detecting a script that contains a mixed syntax nearly impossible. This was previously referenced in 1678: Recent Searches . Bash and Zsh are also old tools, having come out in 1989 and 1990 respectively.\nA human-designed 'random Makefile'-maker might have been written with this explicit choice amongst the earlier decisions in the generation process, but an AI might be assumed to have started (many, many generations ago) with something close to utter nonsense and painstakingly reached the stage of (mostly!) valid files along the way. Some might say that the differentiation training would have been better added at another point in the lengthy process.\nOn top of that, the current (mostly valid) results may even be polyglot and\/or shell-agnostic . Dependant upon the fitness tests in use, many other $SHELL -choices and Makefile styles may have been coevolved as valid (if rarer) subgenus of outputs, such as a command.com -based makefile.\nIn the caption it states that Cueball is using modern tools to make ancient technology, as opposed to other people who use ancient tools and UIs ( User interface ) to develop Modern Tools.\nIn the title text Randall states that he tried to train an AI ( Artificial intelligence ) to repair his horribly broken Python environment . But the AI kept giving up and deleting itself. The joke partly relates to when it or is not appropriate to personify goal-driven processes.  In the study of alignment of artificial intelligence, it is common to consider AIs finding ways to meet the tasks they are given that are highly unexpected, and then developing into an apocalypse .  A common unexpected solution encountered in research is that the agent finds a way to disable itself as more efficient to meet its reward parameters than anything else it discovers, and then learns to repeatedly do so. The AI might be so intelligent that it had developed critical 'personal' opinions that led it to be so intellectually appalled by the task, or else just found it impossible to fix the python environment and therefore justify its own existence, that it had no other recourse but to commit a form of suicide because Cueball's code was that bad ( which is a recurring theme for Cueball ). Python has been a recurring subject as has Programming and Artificial Intelligence .\nThe main joke is that Cueball is using cutting-edge tools to develop very old technologies, which is perhaps only useful if one is pursuing hobbies in conflict with a differing AI addiction. As the caption implies, it is much more common for people to use fundamental and well-established tools as the toolchain or building blocks of modern technology. A concrete example of this is writing scripts using decades-old Bash to automatically set up a significantly newer (2014) technology called Kubernetes .\n[Cueball is sitting on an office chair at his desk typing on his laptop. White Hat is standing behind the desk looking at Cueball.] Cueball: Okay, I've got this neural net generating mostly valid makefiles. Cueball: Next I'm going to train it to distinguish between Bash and Zsh...\n[Caption below the panel:] People often use ancient tools and UIs to develop modern cutting-edge technology, but I do it the other way around.\n"}
{"id":2511,"title":"Recreate the Conditions","image_title":"Recreate the Conditions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2511","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/recreate_the_conditions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2511:_Recreate_the_Conditions","transcript":"[Megan is standing, pointing a stick at a poster of a particle collision, (as it looks when measured in a particle collider), where many other particles emerge from the central collision, a black spot, with many thin curved lines going away from it, and two larger beams going straight in. Above the upper part of these lines there are three lines of unreadable text, three unreadable labels are written over three of the lines, and there are two unreadable lines of text at the bottom one at each side of the poster.] Megan: Our lab was trying to recreate the conditions that occurred seconds after the Big Bang.\n[Megan is standing with arms lifted to each side, stick in hand, looking straight out, in an otherwise empty panel.] Megan: But it turns out they were extremely hot and unpleasant.\n[Megan points at another poster with the stick. The poster shows a picture of a beach, with the sun over the ocean, a palm tree bending in over a parasol stuck in the sand. At the front there is a small table with two drinks on it.] Megan: So now we're trying to recreate the conditions that occurred on this tropical beach in early 2014. Megan: Honestly don't know why we were doing that other thing.\n","explanation":"Scientists recreate conditions of things to gain scientific knowledge on a topic to better be able to observe why or how things happen. This could be done by making miniature versions of events and simulating events using safe methods.\nIn this comic, Megan 's lab discovered that the conditions during the seconds after the Big Bang were extremely hot and unpleasant.  They have thus decided to attempt to recreate the conditions of a tropical beach in 2014 instead (7 years prior to when this comic was released). Here, the joke is that instead of recreating a condition  for scientific study purposes, Megan and her crew were simply trying to create a pleasant environment for recreation, in the sense of personal enjoyment.\nThe title text is a reference to 1949: Fruit Collider a pun of pi\u00f1a colada (Spanish for \"strained Pineapple\") and a particle collider : the Spanish word \"colada\" is pronounced similarly to the English word \"collider\". Taken literally, \"pi\u00f1a collider\" would be a pineapple collider, which may be interpreted as a fruit juicing machine for making pi\u00f1a coladas.\n[Megan is standing, pointing a stick at a poster of a particle collision, (as it looks when measured in a particle collider), where many other particles emerge from the central collision, a black spot, with many thin curved lines going away from it, and two larger beams going straight in. Above the upper part of these lines there are three lines of unreadable text, three unreadable labels are written over three of the lines, and there are two unreadable lines of text at the bottom one at each side of the poster.] Megan: Our lab was trying to recreate the conditions that occurred seconds after the Big Bang.\n[Megan is standing with arms lifted to each side, stick in hand, looking straight out, in an otherwise empty panel.] Megan: But it turns out they were extremely hot and unpleasant.\n[Megan points at another poster with the stick. The poster shows a picture of a beach, with the sun over the ocean, a palm tree bending in over a parasol stuck in the sand. At the front there is a small table with two drinks on it.] Megan: So now we're trying to recreate the conditions that occurred on this tropical beach in early 2014. Megan: Honestly don't know why we were doing that other thing.\n"}
{"id":2512,"title":"Revelation","image_title":"Revelation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2512","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/revelation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2512:_Revelation","transcript":"[A Twitter-like page is displayed with a post and a comment nested beneath it. The top poster's profile image is of a man with wild hair, standing on hill near a coast looking out over the ocean. The beach is visible below him. His name is revealed in the comment as John. The poster of the comment's profile image is of a man with flat hair. There is a logo \"9 News\" at the bottom right. Beneath both pictures are unreadable text. There are also four icons with unreadable text beneath both posts. A line divides the original post and the comment.] John: And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.\nChannel 9 News: Hi John, incredible story, hope you and your family are safe. Can Channel 9 News share your account in broadcast and print?\n","explanation":"A user with a profile picture of a stick figure with hair, who could be on an island and is called John, posts the Bible text from Revelation 6:12 on a social media website. The author(s) of the book of Revelation refer to themselves as John; some religious scholars identify the author as John of Patmos or as John the Apostle . Thus it is likely that the user has the identity of the said John, either as this biblical-era person themselves (online communities existing in their time, or vice-versa) or adopting the historic character name for interpretive or parodic reasons. The comic places a Biblical event in the modern day to portray what it would be like for apocalyptic miracles to happen nowadays. It also depicts how even the epically largest of our most meaningful and moving moments can end up being treated online.\nA news channel's official social-media monitor understands this to be an actual (natural) disaster in progress and asks for permission to use the posted information in a broadcast. This could be what would have happened if John had been using Twitter in his own time, in which case his Revelation might have received this response from that time's similarly-connected reporters, perhaps not comprehending the observations to be 'prophetic visions of the future', with potentially a different level of significance altogether, rather than reports of events just happened.\nIf the monitor has just found some form of dislocated account (a very old message, a modern echo for proselytizing purposes or a jape of some kind) then they appear to have been drawn in, having not recognized it as historic text from the Bible.\nWhichever way, the response is typical of a 'foot in the door' approach probably used for any and all candidate 'breaking news' citizen-reports, identified by trawling and searching the media-feeds for newsworthy content by either reporters or an 'algorithm'. As well as trying to ask for republishing permission, as per the duty of care reporters should grant to their sources, it is couched behind a typically bland statement of concern.\nThe reply may seem underwhelming, given the Revelation-level nature of the scenario, but this early in the reporting cycle the researcher may not have enough facts from which to respond more empathetically. Without any 'empathy' the channel and its staff may look entirely uncaring, but anything too effusive would also look unprofessional. Whether the news-organization and\/or its staff could be truly concerned, or simply going through the motions, would highly depend upon their established reputation in the eyes of one viewing this exchange. Cynicism might be involved, all round.\nThe title text modifies verse 14 from \"And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places\" to instead reference the infinite scrolling of a news ticker . Thus this news story would just be one on an infinite scroll page of ever-new stories.\nAlternatively, a Biblical-level disaster actually IS occurring, in which case the newscaster's response is underwhelming, to say the least.\nEach of the described events happens at times. The sun is black during an eclipse, the moon is red when it sits at the horizon and\/or in eclipse, and earthquakes happen on a frequent basis across the planet. When events happen together, it can have great import, and people may become more disconnected from what is real or common nature as lives become digitized. Many people are so used to sunrises and sunsets while seeing the moon high in the sky that they do not realise that the moon also turns red when it rises and sets.\nIn 2014, a series of four total lunar eclipses were identified by some Christian preachers as being the \" blood moon \" mentioned in Revelation 6:12, but the world did not proceed to end. [ citation needed ]\n[A Twitter-like page is displayed with a post and a comment nested beneath it. The top poster's profile image is of a man with wild hair, standing on hill near a coast looking out over the ocean. The beach is visible below him. His name is revealed in the comment as John. The poster of the comment's profile image is of a man with flat hair. There is a logo \"9 News\" at the bottom right. Beneath both pictures are unreadable text. There are also four icons with unreadable text beneath both posts. A line divides the original post and the comment.] John: And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.\nChannel 9 News: Hi John, incredible story, hope you and your family are safe. Can Channel 9 News share your account in broadcast and print?\n"}
{"id":2513,"title":"Saturn Hexagon","image_title":"Saturn Hexagon","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2513","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/saturn_hexagon.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2513:_Saturn_Hexagon","transcript":"[Cueball is presenting in front of a poster, which he is pointing at with a stick.]\nCueball: We're proud to announce that our team has finally determined the origin and nature of Saturn's polar hexagon.\n[The poster represents Saturn and its ring-system. There is a massive football\/soccer ball drawn as if inside the semi-transparent planet, taking up slightly less than half of it by volume. \nOne of the ball's hexagons coincides with Saturn's polar hexagon, and is labelled \"Hexagon\". Other labels are illegible. The poster's title is \"There's a Big Soccer Ball In There\". The rest of the poster is illegible, except for a section heading that reads \"BSBIT Model\".]\n","explanation":"Saturn's Hexagon is a cloud formation on Saturn centered on its north pole. Similar to Jupiter's Great Red Spot , Saturn's Hexagon has proven a persistent feature observed by multiple space probes. The cause was not known until recently, when data from the 2006-2009 Cassini\u2013Huygens probe could be analyzed in depth. This finding was widely publicized in popular science media (see for example [1] ) and is related to how currents flow deep within Saturn's atmosphere.\nRandall proposes an alternate explanation: it is the top of a soccer ball . Soccer balls are made in the shape of a truncated icosahedron , where faces alternate between regular hexagons and regular pentagons to achieve a more uniform roll. This design was introduced in 1968 as the Adidas Telstar , and is now considered the \"traditional\" soccer ball. The article is shown to refer to this as the \"BSBIT model\", a technical-sounding acronym from \"Big Soccer Ball In There\".\n\"Soccer\" is the name used in the United States for association football , a game called simply \"football\" in much of the world. Similarly, the US makes wide use of customary units of measurement (inches, feet, miles, pounds, etc.) where much of the world uses the SI or metric system (centimetres, metres, kilometres, kilograms, etc.), so \"football\" is jokingly referred to in the title text as the SI name for \"soccer\". As much of the Web panders to a significantly US-based audience [ citation needed ] , many sites use only American customary measurements and omit metric equivalents, which might annoy non-US users; Randall parodies this by sarcastically and non-seriously apologizing. [ citation needed ] . Just as the American customary units derive from British Imperial units , the term \"soccer\" originated in the UK, originally to distinguish it from rugby football (sometimes \"rugger\"), before soccer became the most common form of football there.\nThis comic may also reference something often quoted to students decades ago that Saturn would float if there were a large enough pool of water to hold it, often having been stated as \"Saturn is a giant beach ball\".  This refers to the property that Saturn is the planet with the lowest average density .  This, of course, is a lot more complicated in reality.\nIncidentally, the presentation of the truncated-icosahedral 'football', pressing one clear polygonal face up along the upper limit of the planetary sphere, has much in common with the (non-truncated) icosahedron that floats within a Magic 8-Ball , arranged to display just one random triangular face whenever its viewing window is upwards. This may be coincidence, without any obvious attempt to directly reference any of the popular memes relating to this. Randall has previously parodied the magic 8-ball in 1525: Emojic 8 Ball .\n[Cueball is presenting in front of a poster, which he is pointing at with a stick.]\nCueball: We're proud to announce that our team has finally determined the origin and nature of Saturn's polar hexagon.\n[The poster represents Saturn and its ring-system. There is a massive football\/soccer ball drawn as if inside the semi-transparent planet, taking up slightly less than half of it by volume. \nOne of the ball's hexagons coincides with Saturn's polar hexagon, and is labelled \"Hexagon\". Other labels are illegible. The poster's title is \"There's a Big Soccer Ball In There\". The rest of the poster is illegible, except for a section heading that reads \"BSBIT Model\".]\n"}
{"id":2514,"title":"Lab Equipment","image_title":"Lab Equipment","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2514","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lab_equipment.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2514:_Lab_Equipment","transcript":"[Ponytail and Cueball are talking to each other. They are standing between two tables with equipment scattered on them, including lens-stands and eye-protection. Ponytail is pointing away from Cueball towards an unidentified off-panel location.]\nPonytail: The spectrometer is over here, the Nd:YAG lasers are over here, Ponytail: and in the corner is a laser that turned out not to be useful for us, but we keep it because it's fun to toast marshmallows with it.\n[Caption below the panel] Every lab in every field has some piece of equipment like this.\n","explanation":"This comic claims that in every science lab, there exists some piece of equipment that sticks around less for being useful, and more because the scientists and technicians just think the device is really cool.\nThe comic presents a laboratory containing equipment for analysis of substances. While giving Cueball a tour of the lab equipment, Ponytail shows a spectrometer \u2014 a device that examines light emitted from or passed through samples to fingerprint emission or absorption lines in the mix of light. Next she shows the \"Nd:YAG\" lasers. It is unknown if the multiple lasers are for redundancy or if they have different specifications and are for different tests. \"Nd:YAG\" stands for neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet ; it is a lasing medium commonly used in lasers. Lastly she shows off a decommissioned laser not used in experiments, but rather for toasting marshmallows.\nThe claim that such things are almost universal is, in fact, very realistic. When doing any research, especially cutting-edge research, it's often difficult to predict what equipment will be useful or not, so it's inevitable those some things will be purchased, and not turn out to be very effective in their experiments.  Some of these things will end up being sold, put into storage, repurposed, or even thrown away, but some equipment is enjoyed by the researchers, despite a lack of official uses, and so will end up being kept around.  Researchers, being human [ citation needed ] , are going to do some things in the lab for their own amusement, rather than because it's part of a formal experiment, and if equipment has already been purchased, keeping it because it's enjoyable is usually overlooked.  Additionally, just playing around with high-end equipment can occasionally lead to useful discoveries. Basic research is difficult to plan out, and sometimes just letting scientists play around with powerful equipment can produce unexpected results, which can lead to new scientific understanding.\nThe title-text mentions that she's using \"annealing techniques\" to make the perfect s'more.  A s'more is a popular treat in the United States and Canada, consisting of one or more toasted marshmallows and a layer of chocolate sandwiched between two pieces of graham cracker. Annealing is more commonly a heat-treatment technique used to influence the nature of the crystals in metals for structural reasons.  This is done when jewelry is molded from molten metal, but more likely Randall means a use of annealing in scientific research. Annealing is also used in glass production .  This suggests that Ponytail is trying to use lasers and\/or other specialized heating equipment to control the melting process of the chocolate, in conjuction with precision toasted marshmallows, to perfect this treat.  She points out that this shouldn't be mentioned on the grant application. When labs apply for grants to purchase or upgrade equipment, or to fund research projects, they emphasize the scientific principles that could be advanced (and potential useful products that might be produced) as a result of their research.  The idea that researchers might be using the equipment to amuse themselves and work on whimsical side projects would be unlikely to impress the groups offering the grant, [ citation needed ] even though, as Randall points out, such things are pretty much ubiquitous.\n[Ponytail and Cueball are talking to each other. They are standing between two tables with equipment scattered on them, including lens-stands and eye-protection. Ponytail is pointing away from Cueball towards an unidentified off-panel location.]\nPonytail: The spectrometer is over here, the Nd:YAG lasers are over here, Ponytail: and in the corner is a laser that turned out not to be useful for us, but we keep it because it's fun to toast marshmallows with it.\n[Caption below the panel] Every lab in every field has some piece of equipment like this.\n"}
{"id":2515,"title":"Vaccine Research","image_title":"Vaccine Research","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2515","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/vaccine_research.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2515:_Vaccine_Research","transcript":"[White Hat is talking to Cueball.] White Hat: I've been hearing about vaccines. White Hat: But I decided to do my own research.\n[In a frame-less panel White Hat continues to talk to Cueball.] White Hat: So I spent months on the Internet reading hundreds of studies.\n[Close up of White Hat as he speaks to Cueball, who replies from off-panel.] White Hat: And wow, I gotta say, White Hat: these vaccines are pretty good. Cueball (off-panel): Oh, really.\n[Zoomed back out, to White Hat and Cueball talking.] White Hat: Yeah, seems like it'd be great if lots of people got them. White Hat: Is anyone working on that? Cueball: There's been some effort. White Hat: Okay, cool.\n","explanation":"This comic is another entry in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nThe comic starts with White Hat using a common conversational tactic used by vaccine skeptics, and conspiracy theorists, in order to try to persuade others, typically claiming that they did their own research. The phrase \"done my own research\" is often taken to mean that the speaker is skeptical of the topic, and has done only cursory fact-checking, typically consulting only nonscientific sources that confirm and validate their prior beliefs. However, subverting expectations, it seems that White Hat genuinely had researched the subject deeply, consulting a large number of primary sources, and coming to a conclusion matching the overwhelming scientific consensus that vaccination against COVID-19 is safe and effective. The conclusion he expresses is humorously simple, but entirely in keeping with every expert analysis: \"These vaccines are pretty good... Seems like it would be great if lots of people got them.\"\nIn the last panel, White Hat asks if there are any efforts to distribute the vaccine, to which Cueball responds with understated irony. Anyone genuinely informed about the vaccines would have to be aware of the huge scale of vaccine rollout efforts, or of the resistance to them. It strains credulity that someone could read \"hundreds of studies\" on the topic and not be aware of how many people had been vaccinated. Cueball, however, doesn't mock White Hat's incongruous ignorance, but simply responds that there's been \"some effort\", which satisfies White Hat.\nAt the time this strip was posted, only about 42.3% of the world population had been vaccinated against COVID-19. In low income countries, however, distribution has been negligible, and the rate is below 1.9% .\nIn the title text, Randall comments that he feels a little sheepish that he has spent way too much time and effort confirming the statement \"yes, the vaccine helps protect people from getting sick and dying\". This has been known for a long time despite the anti-vaxxers' efforts. But, as he states, this could be seen as a hobby . Anti-vaxxers often refer to people who get vaccinated as \"sheep\".\nThis comic may be a sort of spiritual successor to 2281: Coronavirus Research .\n[White Hat is talking to Cueball.] White Hat: I've been hearing about vaccines. White Hat: But I decided to do my own research.\n[In a frame-less panel White Hat continues to talk to Cueball.] White Hat: So I spent months on the Internet reading hundreds of studies.\n[Close up of White Hat as he speaks to Cueball, who replies from off-panel.] White Hat: And wow, I gotta say, White Hat: these vaccines are pretty good. Cueball (off-panel): Oh, really.\n[Zoomed back out, to White Hat and Cueball talking.] White Hat: Yeah, seems like it'd be great if lots of people got them. White Hat: Is anyone working on that? Cueball: There's been some effort. White Hat: Okay, cool.\n"}
{"id":2516,"title":"Hubble Tension","image_title":"Hubble Tension","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2516","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hubble_tension.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2516:_Hubble_Tension","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are walking to the right. Ponytail has her palm raised.] Ponytail: There are three main estimates of the universe's expansion rate and they all disagree.\n[They keeping walking to the right.] Ponytail: Measurements of star distances suggest the universe is expanding at 73 km\/s\/megaparsec.\n[They are still walking to the right.] Ponytail: Measurements of the cosmic microwave background suggest it's expanding at 68 km\/s\/megaparsec.\n[They continue walking to the right. Ponytail points towards Dave who replies from off-panel to the right.] Ponytail: And Dave, who has a radar gun, says it's expanding at 85 mph in all directions. Dave (off-panel): Those galaxies are really booking it! Ponytail: Thanks, Dave.\n","explanation":"Ponytail is telling Cueball about the expansion of the universe telling him that there are three main estimates of the rate of expansion, and that they all disagree. She then tells him of the two well known (and very complicated) methods, and finally the joke is that the third method is performed by a guy named Dave (who replies from off-panel), and he claims to measure the speeds with a radar gun, as if the galaxies were speeding here on Earth.\nThe fact that most galaxies are receding from us, and that the distance to the galaxy is directly proportional to the speed (as measured by red-shift ) was discovered in the 1920s by Edwin Hubble and others. This constant of proportionality is known as the Hubble Constant .\nOne way of measuring the Hubble Constant is to measure the distance to (relatively) nearby galaxies. Once distance is obtained, speed can be easily obtained by measuring the red-shift and thus the Hubble Constant calculated. Measuring the distance turns out to be fiendishly difficult because a distant bright star looks the same as a dim star that is closer, and localized movements can influence the speed of recession \u2014 though less significantly, for multiple reasons, the further away are the objects that you study.\nIn practice, astronomers have a number of ways of measuring distance that work at different scales, and they can be built upon to measure distance to far away galaxies. This is known as the Cosmic distance ladder .\nThe first rung is parallax . As the Earth orbits around the Sun, nearby stars appear to move slightly relative to distant stars; a star that moves by one second of arc is said to have a distance of 1 Parsec \u2014 about 3\u00bc light years or 30 trillion (3x10 13 ) kilometers.\nThe next rung is Cepheid variables , which periodically brighten and dim. The frequency of variation is related to the absolute brightness of the star, and thus by comparing the absolute to the relative brightness (subject to the Inverse-square law where not otherwise obscured) the distance can be measured.\nThe final rung is Type Ia supernova , which occur when an accreting white dwarf exceeds 1.4 solar masses. Because the initial mass is always identical, the absolute brightness of the explosion is as well, so the distance can be similarly calculated.\nPutting these together, the best measurement of the Hubble Constant is 73 km\/s\/Mparsec.\nThis is in conflict with the other main way of measuring the Hubble Constant, analyzing makeup of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, which yields a value of 68 km\/s\/Mparsec. The difference is statistically significant, and well outside the error bounds of each measurement.\nSince the CMB technique relies on our understanding and assumptions about the early universe, as well as on the cosmological effects of General Relativity on large scales, if this discrepancy proved real it could be the gateway to new discoveries in cosmology and gravity, as well as possibly shed light on the origin of the universe and a ' Theory Of Everything '. Cosmologists got quite excited about this. It might also be that there was a previously unaccounted-for error in any of the rungs of the cosmological distance ladder and, once that is fixed, the two results will be consistent.\nThe third method introduced in this comic is a guy named Dave who is trying to use a radar speed gun (as used by the police for detecting speeding cars) to try to measure the movement of astronomical bodies.  A radar system works by sending electromagnetic radiation from the gun and then measuring the returned radiation to determine how far away or how fast a moderately distant object is moving.  Because of the transmission and return times required (and the inverse-square law), a radar device will only be able to get information about the very closest objects, such as the Moon (a type of Moon bounce ) and other objects orbiting the Earth (or perhaps the Sun), where the influence of being in orbit utterly dominates over any possible Hubble-shift. Doing that still needs very powerful radar systems like the former Arecibo Telescope to be able to get any useful information from that far away; a hand-held radar gun would not be able to 'lock on' across those distances, let alone distant galaxies.\nGoing by back-calculating grossly 'idealized' universe models, as suggested by the other two estimates, a receding velocity of 85 miles per hour ('mph'; about 137 kilometers per hour, 'kph' or 'km\/h') should be seen at a distance of roughly 1700-1850 light-years, on the order of the thickness of our galactic disc. Much too far to use a radar gun on, also much too close to exclude any significant galactic stellar motions. Much the same is true if the figure is actually 85 kph (1050-1130 ly), as suggested it might be in the title text.\nAside from being practically incorrect, that value of 85 kph relates to around 53 mph, which might be the normally observed traffic speed on certain roads (especially if someone is conspicuously using a radar gun!) if by 'all directions' you effectively mean 'both directions' of traffic flow that Dave could possibly be measuring. Dave may have been referring to the kind of Galaxy that he can more easily find out the velocity of.\nThe comic is likely making fun of the common internet phenomenon of amateur (wannabe?) scientists seeking to discredit established scientific facts by reporting the results of experiments made using everyday tools.  Dave has probably heard of the fact that there is no agreement in the scientific measurements of the Hubble constant and decided to try to settle the controversy using the tools at his disposal, without remotely realizing that the margin of error required in the measurements is well outside the range of what can be used with conventional objects.\nDave might also lack an understanding of units of measure and dimensions. Ponytail describes the measurements of the rate of universal expansion, a speed that varies with distance, in km\/s\/Mparsec, having dimension 1\/T or 1\/time. Dave made his measurements in miles\/hour or km\/h, which have dimension L\/T or length\/time. These are not comparable with the official units. Dave does not appear to be aware of this (and Ponytail does not draw Cueball or Dave's attention to it).\n[Cueball and Ponytail are walking to the right. Ponytail has her palm raised.] Ponytail: There are three main estimates of the universe's expansion rate and they all disagree.\n[They keeping walking to the right.] Ponytail: Measurements of star distances suggest the universe is expanding at 73 km\/s\/megaparsec.\n[They are still walking to the right.] Ponytail: Measurements of the cosmic microwave background suggest it's expanding at 68 km\/s\/megaparsec.\n[They continue walking to the right. Ponytail points towards Dave who replies from off-panel to the right.] Ponytail: And Dave, who has a radar gun, says it's expanding at 85 mph in all directions. Dave (off-panel): Those galaxies are really booking it! Ponytail: Thanks, Dave.\n"}
{"id":2517,"title":"Rover Replies","image_title":"Rover Replies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2517","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rover_replies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2517:_Rover_Replies","transcript":"[A post of a rocky landscape and a close-up of a rock is next to a profile picture of the camera of a Mars rover.] Just collected a sample!\n[Comments below. Each comment has an icon of a person or other image next to it and an illegible name above the comment.] [face of Cueball-like character]: These pictures are great! [curved lines]: I'm so proud of you [Cueball-like stick figure]: Wow you know a lot about rocks [Megan]: Go go go go go! [spiral galaxy-like image]: More propaganda from NASA's 5G vaccine microchip factory [Ponytail]: Quiet, we're not doing that here [unidentified stick figure]: Hello from Missouri (Earth)! [Hairy]: Did you find any skeletons yet [Blondie]: I hope your helicopter comes back!\n[Caption below frame:] The most unexpectedly wholesome place on the internet is the replies to NASA's rovers on social media.","explanation":"There is a Twitter account for NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover , which recently collected samples. The Twitter account tweets in the first person like in the comic. Likely a human on earth is playing the role of the rover [ citation needed ] . While the exact post shown does not exist, it has posted a similar tweet.\nThe first four replies (in order of top-to-bottom) are likely just general compliments to the rover, demonstrating that the replies are indeed wholesome. Reply three in particular references rocks, as the main purpose of most Mars rovers is to perform Martian geology.\nReply five is a mashup of conspiracy theories, including about 5G communications, vaccines , and others. Ponytail then replies \"Quiet, we're not doing that here\", implying either that she doesn't want it in the replies to this, that she thinks that the rude reply should be posted somewhere else, that she's a NASA employee stating that NASA does not have a 5G vaccine-microchip factory, or that she also is a conspiracy theorist trying to redirect the fellow commenter to other forums with more susceptible audiences.\nThe next reply references people saying where they're from, then clarifying where that is in brackets, e.g. Wingerworth (England). This commenter expands that to clarify that they are from Earth, joking that the planet may be ambiguous as the Mars rover is not on Earth. In reality, this ambiguity does not exist as humans only live on Earth, [ citation needed ] thus contributing to the humor.\nThe second-to-last reply is likely a misunderstanding, with the commenter believing that the rover is digging to perform anthropology or paleontology, not geology. The commenter could, however, believe that there is\/was complex life on Mars, thus allowing the possibility that there are Martian skeletons for the rover to find.\nThe final reply is a reference to Ingenuity , a small helicopter which Perseverance took to Mars as a technology demonstrator . It has been very successful and completed many flights, often taking it quite far from Perseverance.\nThe title text is in the form of another reply. The character posting that reply believes that the rover has taken its phone to Mars, and has used that to take the pictures. This is likely because most photos on social media are taken on phones, and social media sites are often designed for phones. In addition, Perseverance and Curiosity differ from previous rovers in that they have cameras mounted on flexible arms, allowing them to take photographs of themselves - somewhat akin to a smartphone on a selfie-stick. In reality, Mars rovers don't have smartphones, and Perseverance is taking photos with an equipped camera.\nWhile this comic is most likely referencing Perseverance, there is another small possibility that Curiosity is shown here, as Curiosity also has collected samples . This is unlikely though due to the timing of this comic.\n[A post of a rocky landscape and a close-up of a rock is next to a profile picture of the camera of a Mars rover.] Just collected a sample!\n[Comments below. Each comment has an icon of a person or other image next to it and an illegible name above the comment.] [face of Cueball-like character]: These pictures are great! [curved lines]: I'm so proud of you [Cueball-like stick figure]: Wow you know a lot about rocks [Megan]: Go go go go go! [spiral galaxy-like image]: More propaganda from NASA's 5G vaccine microchip factory [Ponytail]: Quiet, we're not doing that here [unidentified stick figure]: Hello from Missouri (Earth)! [Hairy]: Did you find any skeletons yet [Blondie]: I hope your helicopter comes back!\n[Caption below frame:] The most unexpectedly wholesome place on the internet is the replies to NASA's rovers on social media."}
{"id":2518,"title":"Lumpers and Splitters","image_title":"Lumpers and Splitters","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2518","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lumpers_and_splitters.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2518:_Lumpers_and_Splitters","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are standing looking at each other. There are boxes beneath each of them with a label.] Megan: Really, we're both just categorization pedants. Label: Lumper\nCueball: Ahh, so you're a meta -lumper. Label: Splitter\n","explanation":"It is common to separate groups of things \u2014 species, people, languages, software models, etc. \u2014 into categories , but different people may do this in different ways. \"Lumpers\" work from the ground up by focusing on similarities among individual things to create larger categories, while \"splitters\" do the opposite, taking larger categories and trying to find characteristics that are not shared by all members of the group to further divide them into smaller subsets.\nThe comic points out the meta -ness of categorizing people based on how they categorize. It labels Megan and Cueball as those two types of categorizers. Megan, the lumper, describes herself and Cueball as both being \"categorization pedants\", lumping the two distinct categories \"lumpers\" and \"splitters\" into one. Cueball, the splitter, subcategorizes Megan into a more specific type of lumper: a \"meta-lumper\"\u2014since the things Megan was lumping includes lumpers themselves\u2014thereby splitting off lumpers from meta-lumpers. If Cueball further categorized himself he would be a meta-splitter.\nThe title text references the opening line of the novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, which reads (as translated into English), \"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.\" Randall is drawing a parallel between this line and the lumper\/splitter distinction because the line lumps one group of things (happy families) while splitting another group (unhappy families).\nAdditionally, this may be a reference to the podcast episode \"Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That's the kind of episode it's - clitics\" [1] , published a few days before the comic, wherein the hosts separate people into lumpers and splitters of clitics.\n[Megan and Cueball are standing looking at each other. There are boxes beneath each of them with a label.] Megan: Really, we're both just categorization pedants. Label: Lumper\nCueball: Ahh, so you're a meta -lumper. Label: Splitter\n"}
{"id":2519,"title":"Sloped Border","image_title":"Sloped Border","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2519","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sloped_border.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2519:_Sloped_Border","transcript":"[Cueball and Blondie are standing on a podium. They are holding a document together between them, filled with unreadable text. On either side of the podium are two informational graphics each on a stand. They are placed a bit behind the back side of the podium. The graphic to the left shows a cross-sectional view of a non-vertical border, shown as a dotted line going up between Cueball and Blondie, who both are standing on the ground. The angle is indicated and noted, and the line tilts towards Blondie's side. The graphic on the right shows a skewed perspective of a similar setup of the non vertical border, shaded so what is behind it becomes gray. There are also some lines on this plane to indicate where it is. It almost looks like a window, but people can move through it. There are also two more persons than on the left, Megan, who is on the same side of the border as Cueball, and another Cueball-like guy standing next to Blondie. Megan is entirely on Cueball's side of the plane, but the other three are positioned so they are intersected by the 'shaded plane' of the border, with the effect that some or most of their bodies are beyond the sloped boundary, in the gray area, but not all. Cueball and Blondie are postureed in a mutual greeting across this border, as the others look on.] Cueball: With this treaty, we are proud to announce the creation of the world's first sloped international border! Angle: 74\u00b0\n[Caption below frame:] If I'm ever put in charge of a country, I'm going to spend all my time trying to think of new ways to make life a nightmare for GIS people.\n","explanation":"Every country has land and sea international borders that demarcate the extent of their territory and their legal jurisdiction. These borders are established through law, treaty, or consensus. Establishing an international border is maintained by present-day customs, immigration, and security checks. Some countries (like Cyprus ) have established a buffer zone outside of their international border in order to gain additional protection during a conflict, and most countries have an offshore Exclusive Economic Zone in order to preserve exclusive proprietorship of marine resources such as oilfields and fishing grounds.\nIn this comic, Cueball and Blondie have established a \"sloped\" international border through a treaty. Usually borders are perpendicular to the ground [ citation needed ] so that all the air(space) above the ground belongs to the same country. This is called Air sovereignty . Thus it suffices to define the border on the earth surface, as 1D lines across the curved 2D surface. The precise definition is that a line from the center of the Earth through the point of the border is drawn. Sloped terrain is immaterial to the border of the air sovereignty which is still vertical, even if not perpendicular to the terrain.\nIf the borders were sloped (with respect to the horizontal ground level) an airplane would need to know its precise height to decide if another country's jurisdiction currently applies. With the help of the Global Positioning System this would be in principle possible, although the height information of GPS is less reliable.  (It might be possible to program a computer to use altitude data from the airplane's altimeter along with latitude and longitude data from the GPS and a relevant ground relief database to make an accurate determination.)\nMost countries would not agree to a border that cuts into their airspace and shrinks their territory as the altitude increases; most cases of countries losing area have come about as a result of trying to avert, or losing, an armed conflict. It is entirely possible that Cueball's country has compelled Blondie's country to accept its demands, of which the redrawn border is one. Alternatively, Cueball's country may be deliberately reducing its own airspace purely because it will cause problems.\nThere is at least one famous case of a border being affected by elevation: the Franco-Swiss border bisects the staircase of the Hotel Arbez . Hence, although part of the upper floor is geographically in France, the entire floor is Swiss territory, because it is only accessible through Switzerland.\nThe mathematical computation for an angled air sovereignty seems relatively straight-forward at low level and could be expressed with a single line of code or a single equation, although the people acting on the information are likely unfamiliar with code and equations and likely use tools with completely no support for sloped borders.  The mention of curvatures in the title text may reveal some emergent problems that need accounting for.\nA totally straight line drawn far enough upwards at an angle will find the surface of the Earth curving away beneath it (not even considering terrain undulations) and the angle to the local vertical will reduce as it continues, tending towards vertical as you head towards infinite altitude.\nAlternately (although it seems this is not the case) the profile of the sloped border may be assumed to remain at a constant angle to the shifting vertical, in which case it describes a certain form of spiral (which will eventually loop around the earth).\nA third option is that it gains altitude at a constant rate, with respect to the passage of land measured on its surface track, to form a different spiral , in which case it will still loop around the Earth but at an angle that increasingly tends towards horizontal.\nWhile the comic doesn't mention this, such a boundary should probably also extend underground, in the opposite direction. (The straight-line version, if implemented, will eventually reach a depth at which it is tangential to the radius and then rise back through the surface an equal distance further around the planet.)  This would then impact, at practical depths for such things, planning rights for property foundations and, at deeper levels, mining rights for minerals.\nPractically an upper-limit to a nation's claim (somewhat below satellites, e.g. the Karman Line) and a lower limit (well before reaching the Earth's mantle) will prevent many of these complications, together with intersections with other (probably vertical) 'territorial volume' borders that will supercede in any compound claims to ownership. - However, it is still very important to specify exactly which curve (i.e. with respect to what) the boundary is designed to respecting.\n\"GIS\" refers to geographic information system , a set of tools and methods for capturing, analyzing and presenting spatial and geographic data. While altitude is already an (optional) element in the blocks of information, people developing these systems would be inconvenienced by the additional requirements demanded by the border described in the comic.\nIt is possible this comic is inspired by such boundary disputes as the Beaufort Sea 'wedge' which, while in this case perpendicular to the surface, suffers from alternative interpretations of how to extend it from the shoreline out towards international waters.\n[Cueball and Blondie are standing on a podium. They are holding a document together between them, filled with unreadable text. On either side of the podium are two informational graphics each on a stand. They are placed a bit behind the back side of the podium. The graphic to the left shows a cross-sectional view of a non-vertical border, shown as a dotted line going up between Cueball and Blondie, who both are standing on the ground. The angle is indicated and noted, and the line tilts towards Blondie's side. The graphic on the right shows a skewed perspective of a similar setup of the non vertical border, shaded so what is behind it becomes gray. There are also some lines on this plane to indicate where it is. It almost looks like a window, but people can move through it. There are also two more persons than on the left, Megan, who is on the same side of the border as Cueball, and another Cueball-like guy standing next to Blondie. Megan is entirely on Cueball's side of the plane, but the other three are positioned so they are intersected by the 'shaded plane' of the border, with the effect that some or most of their bodies are beyond the sloped boundary, in the gray area, but not all. Cueball and Blondie are postureed in a mutual greeting across this border, as the others look on.] Cueball: With this treaty, we are proud to announce the creation of the world's first sloped international border! Angle: 74\u00b0\n[Caption below frame:] If I'm ever put in charge of a country, I'm going to spend all my time trying to think of new ways to make life a nightmare for GIS people.\n"}
{"id":2520,"title":"Symbols","image_title":"Symbols","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2520","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/symbols.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2520:_Symbols","transcript":"[A list with 14 different scientific constants\/symbols are shown. Next to each symbol is a description. Above the list is a heading and beneath that a subheading.] Symbols And what they mean\nd \u2044 dx An undergrad is working very hard \u2202 \u2044 \u2202x A grad student is working very hard \u0127\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Oh wow, this is apparently a quantum thing R\u2091\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Someone needs to do a lot of tedious numerical work; hopefully it's not you (T a \u2074 - T b \u2074)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You are at risk of skin burns N A You are probably about to make an incredibly dangerous arithmetic error \u00b5m\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Careful, that equipment is expensive mK\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Careful, that equipment is very expensive nm\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Don't shine that in your eye eV Definitely don't shine that in your eye mSv\u00a0 You're about to get into an internet argument mg\/kg\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Go wash your hands \u00b5g\/kg\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Go get in the chemical shower \u03c0 or \u03c4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Whatever answer you get will be wrong by a factor of exactly two\n","explanation":"This comic refers to elements of (mostly mathematical or engineering) notation commonly used in various fields of math and science. Each piece of notation is presented as \"symbolizing\" not what it specifically means, but a typical context in which it might be encountered, see below .\nMany of the individual descriptions look like verbiage that might be found on informational or warnings signs or placards, although typically with a silly edge.\nThe title text refers to two non-SI units of radiation measurement, r\u00f6ntgen and rem . In the mid-20th century when they were in use, the dangers of radiation weren't as well understood as today, so an area with radiation that was noteworthy back then is probably dangerous , hence the no trespassing part.\nLater Randall made a similar comic, 2586: Greek Letters , regarding the use of Greek letters in math.\nd \u2044 dx : An undergrad is working very hard d\/dx is the symbol for a single-variable derivative . This is one of the basic operations in calculus and consequently is ubiquitous in the work of undergraduates in the sciences. A hard-working undergraduate in the relevant fields would churn through exercises using this symbol.\n\u2202 \u2044 \u2202x : A grad student is working very hard The replacement of the standard \"d\" letters with the curly letters \"\u2202\" denotes the partial derivative, which generalizes the ordinary derivative to multi-variable calculus.  Problems with partial derivatives, especially partial differential equations, can be extremely challenging. Although PDEs would typically be first taught at an undergraduate level, difficult partial derivatives would be encountered in graduate-level work.\n\u0127: Oh wow, this is apparently a quantum thing \u0127 (pronounced \"h-bar\") is a symbol used for (the reduced) Planck's constant , a universal, fundamental constant in quantum physics. \u0127 is equal to the energy of a photon divided by its frequency, and angular momentum in quantum mechanical systems is measured in quantized integer or half-integer units of \u0127.\nClassical physics appears as a limit of quantum physics if all \"actions\" (quantities of dimension energy * time, momentum * length, or angular momentum) are much larger than \u0127. Conversely, you can also formally set \u0127=0 to get classical results from quantum formulae. This means that effects that are proportional to some power of \u0127 cannot be explained classically, and instead are \"a quantum thing\".\nR\u2091: Someone needs to do a lot of tedious numerical work; hopefully it's not you The Reynolds number (which is usually denoted by \"Re,\" not \"R e \" as it appears in the comic) is the most important dimensionless group in fluid mechanics. Named for Osborne Reynolds, Re characterizes the relative sizes of inertial and viscous effects in a moving fluid. Large values of Re are indicative of turbulent flow, which cannot usually be retrieved analytically, and so numerical modeling is necessary. Accurate numerical studies of high-Reynolds-number flows are notoriously difficult to create and program.\nAlternatively, R\u2091 could stand for electronic transition dipole moment in a molecule. This appears in quantum-mechanical calculations of transition probabilities and also includes a lot of unpleasant numerical work. R\u2091 is also a term used for the radius of the Earth at mean sea level, though this is not necessarily a complex term in and of itself.\nAnother alternative is that R\u2091 could refer to Relative Error, a measurement of precision or accuracy.  Used often in the analysis of scientific data and numerical analysis.\n(T a \u2074 - T b \u2074): You are at risk of skin burns The Stefan-Boltzmann law says that a perfectly absorbing (\"black body\") source emits electromagnetic radiation with a power per unit area of \u03c3T 4 , where \u03c3 is a known constant and T is the absolute temperature. The quantity (T a 4 \u2013 T b 4 ) thus appears in any calculation of purely radiative energy transfer between two bodies, one at temperature T a and the other at T b . When the radiative transfer is large enough to be the most important form of heat interchange, it is normally also large enough to sear the skin with thermal or ultraviolet burns.\nN A : You are probably about to make an incredibly dangerous arithmetic error N A , or Avogadro's number , is the number of molecules in a mole of a substance, approximately the number of carbon atoms in exactly 12 grams of carbon-12. This is an enormous number, exactly 6.022 140 76 \u00d7 10\u00b2\u00b3, or 602 214 076 000 000 000 000 000. Working with N A , it is easy to accidentally divide by it instead of multiplying or vice versa, leading to erroneous and nonsensical answers such as ~10 -23 molecules (even though you can't have less than 1 whole molecule) or ~10 46 moles (>10 43 to to 10 45 kilograms, depending on the chemical) of a substance.\n\u00b5m: Careful, that equipment is expensive Micrometers are a very small unit of distance. Micrometers are commonly used to measure wavelengths in the infrared, and infrared detectors are very expensive, compared with visible wavelength counterparts. Of course, micrometers are used as a measurement of distance in other contexts, but any distance-measuring device capable of accurately measuring micrometer distances would also be expensive. Similarly, tools used to create or calibrate items within micrometer tolerances can also be expensive.\nmK: Careful, that equipment is very expensive Kelvin is a temperature scale roughly speaking similar to Celsius, but taking absolute zero as its zero point instead of the freezing point of water (rigorously speaking, its definition is now based on the Boltzmann constant ). Millikelvins (1\/1000 of a Kelvin) are used for high precision temperature work.  Frequently this is used in processes of cooling temperatures to nearly absolute zero - such as superconductors or other quantum effects that occur when atoms are almost still.  This is suggesting that the symbol appears on a sensitive experimental system probing quantum mechanical behavior that would likely only exist in an advanced laboratory. Any equipment that works down at mK temperatures, or at least to mK precision and accuracy, is likely to be very expensive.\nnm: Don't shine that in your eye Nanometers are frequently seen in the listed wavelengths for lasers. Pointing a visible or infrared laser at someone's eye is notoriously dangerous; the tightly-focused coherent light can cause permanent damage very quickly.\neV: Definitely don't shine that in your eye Electron volt energies are typical of moderate-energy particle beams, produced by accelerating electrons (or protons) over macroscopic voltages. These particle beams can be even more damaging (and are probably a direct reference to Anatoli Bugorski) to soft tissues than optical-wavelength lasers.\nmSv: You're about to get into an Internet argument The millisievert is a unit of radiation dose absorbed. It is a very small dosage, but the joke refers to Internet trolls debating the effects of low-dose radiation sources, such as 5G wireless networks. Randall's comment may also be referring to this chart .\nmg\/kg: Go wash your hands This unit measures the dose of a drug or other chemical in milligrams per kilogram of body mass. If the appropriate dose - or worse, the lethal dose - is measured in mg\/kg (parts per million), then the substance may be quite toxic.\n\u00b5g\/kg: Go get in the chemical shower A unit 1\/1000 times the size of mg\/kg. If a dosage is measured in micrograms per kilogram (parts per billion), any accident probably requires whole-body decontamination procedures.\n\u03c0 or \u03c4: Whatever answer you get will be wrong by a factor of exactly two \u03c0 is defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, while \u03c4 is defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its radius (and is therefore equal to 2\u03c0). \u03c0 has been used as the primary constant for describing the circumference and area of circles millennia ago, but proponents of \u03c4 claim that \u03c4 is more natural in most contexts since it makes working in radians more straightforward. The joke here is that whichever constant you use, it will probably be the wrong one (off by a factor of two, one way or the other) for the formula you are trying to use. The debate over Tau vs Pi was solved by Randall in this compromise: 1292: Pi vs. Tau .\n[A list with 14 different scientific constants\/symbols are shown. Next to each symbol is a description. Above the list is a heading and beneath that a subheading.] Symbols And what they mean\nd \u2044 dx An undergrad is working very hard \u2202 \u2044 \u2202x A grad student is working very hard \u0127\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Oh wow, this is apparently a quantum thing R\u2091\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Someone needs to do a lot of tedious numerical work; hopefully it's not you (T a \u2074 - T b \u2074)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You are at risk of skin burns N A You are probably about to make an incredibly dangerous arithmetic error \u00b5m\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Careful, that equipment is expensive mK\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Careful, that equipment is very expensive nm\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Don't shine that in your eye eV Definitely don't shine that in your eye mSv\u00a0 You're about to get into an internet argument mg\/kg\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Go wash your hands \u00b5g\/kg\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Go get in the chemical shower \u03c0 or \u03c4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Whatever answer you get will be wrong by a factor of exactly two\n"}
{"id":2521,"title":"Toothpaste","image_title":"Toothpaste","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2521","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/toothpaste.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2521:_Toothpaste","transcript":"[Cueball, holding his arms out, is talking to Megan.] Cueball: I can't believe she said that. Cueball: She apologized, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.\n[Megan holds a hand, palm up, out towards Cueball as she replies.] Megan: Sure you can; it's easy. You just put your mouth over the opening.\n[Finally they stand straight talking.] Cueball: Well, that's the worst thing you've ever said. Megan: Sorry, I can take it back. It's just like- Cueball: No!\n","explanation":"Cueball is telling Megan about his friend. He indicates that she said something shocking and probably hurtful. He then states that even though she tried to apologize it was too late, the words had been said and it cannot be taken back.\nHe uses a phrase to underline this: You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.\nPutting toothpaste back in its tube is often used as an analogy for something irreversible, such as how you can't undo speaking. Megan, however, rejects this assertion and says that you actually can put toothpaste back in its tube, which is certainly possible in some cases. There are many ways to do this, and none of them are recommendable if the toothpaste has come into contact with something non-sterile.  But she chooses a particular nasty one where she would blow the paste in her mouth back into the tube. This is obviously much more unsanitary than simply returning unused toothpaste to the tube, which someone might reasonably want to do after squeezing out more than they wanted.\nCueball is so disgusted by this suggestion that he states that Megan's suggestion is the worst thing she has ever said.\nThe joke then comes when Megan assumes that Cueball's original analogy still holds, that taking words back is like putting toothpaste back in to the tube. So therefore she can actually unsay something. She starts to say exactly what Cueball's other friend did \"Sorry, I can take it back\". But then she says, \"It's just like--\", and was presumably about to continue,  \"--putting toothpaste back in the tube\" (or perhaps, since it's Megan, was going to give a new analogy that was even worse). However, Cueball forcefully interrupts her, because the idea of putting toothpaste back in the tube now evokes the distasteful mental image of Megan blowing used toothpaste back into the tube.\nToothpaste is normally loaded into the tube from the back, before it is crimped shut. However, it should technically be possible to push an extruded amount of paste back in from the front by wrapping one's lips around the whole front of the tube and blowing the paste you have in your mouth back in. This positive pressure can re-inflate the tube the same way one blows up a balloon. However, blowing the toothpaste back into the tube would be highly unsanitary, and as the main purpose of toothpaste is to clean teeth, the end result is both counterproductive and disgusting. [ citation needed ] In some cases paste coming out of a tube will be sucked back in if the pressure is released. Such containers would probably be able to suck toothpaste back in, if it was still lying on the toothbrush in one blob (or on the table\/in the sink if dropped). As above mentioned this would be unsanitary as germs etc. could get back inside the tube, where the paste is supposed to be clean.\nThe title text spoofs a common line found in toothpaste commercials: \"9 out of 10 dentists recommend using our brand.\" This statement is very easily manipulated through any number of basic marketing tactics (such as only asking 9 dentists, whom are all paid handsomely), and its ubiquity lends it to spoofing. In this case, it's spoofed by saying that nine out of ten dentists are dis satisfied with Megan's approach (or with Randall and his ideas, as it is usually he who speaks in the title text; if it refers to Randall himself it is reminiscent of all the conferences he has been banned from ) and have banned the toothpaste spitter from their offices.\nIt may actually say more about any dental establishment that does not disapprove of what Megan apparently is not just theorizing about doing - but maybe they are disapproving too, just not considering it bad enough to ban her from office.\n[Cueball, holding his arms out, is talking to Megan.] Cueball: I can't believe she said that. Cueball: She apologized, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.\n[Megan holds a hand, palm up, out towards Cueball as she replies.] Megan: Sure you can; it's easy. You just put your mouth over the opening.\n[Finally they stand straight talking.] Cueball: Well, that's the worst thing you've ever said. Megan: Sorry, I can take it back. It's just like- Cueball: No!\n"}
{"id":2522,"title":"Two-Factor Security Key","image_title":"Two-Factor Security Key","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2522","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/two_factor_security_key.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2522:_Two-Factor_Security_Key","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail stand facing each other.] Cueball: I got one of those two-factor security keys you've been bugging me about. Ponytail: Great!\n[Cueball and Ponytail continue facing each other.] Cueball: It took a lot of work, fiddling with configurations, annoying setbacks, and general pain,\n[Closeup on Cueball holding a keychain.] Cueball: ... but I finally got it onto the metal ring of my keychain. Ponytail [off-panel]: At least now it's secure. Cueball: Yeah, this thing is not coming off.\nAn authenticaion 'factor' is a distinct method of proving your legitimate use of a service or product. They can be broadly be grouped into three main groups.\nOne-Factor Authentication now may trying to avoid the shortcomings of the Password system (including the intervention of a 'remembered' password) by developing passwordless authentication techniques based upon \"have\/are\" factors only.\nTwo-Factor Authentication was usually the addition of a physical\/biometric authentication method to augment each use of a known password\/PIN (e.g. the 'rolling token' number).\nConversely, the physical authentication of a bank-card has required backing up by its remembered PIN when used in cash-machines\/ATMs. (In shops, checking against the signature written on the same card was for a long time the verification of valid ownership, this recently progressed to Chip-And-Pin, but then in many cases has been superceded by Contactless (NFC) versions, making it a Single-Factor solution in sufficiently low-value transactions.)\nMany people may be more familiar with an occasional Second-Factor Re Authentication, when (for one reason or another) they are no longer able to provide a valid password for some login or other, and activate the \"Forgot my password\" request which sends a link to their backup email account. Where one is set up, is still active and and you have not also lost the ability to access that. (This is not the situation that Cueball is in, or may be in.) This has largely replaced the infamous \"Challenge Question\" (though may still be combined with it)  probably to defeat replay-attacks or the more clever phishing attacks.\nThree-Factor Authentication should really be a \"know\" and \"have\" and \"are\" combination. Imagine the cinematic scene of the 'President' granting authority for a nuclear attack by inserting a physical key into the required device, typing in their code and then presenting their eye to a retinal scanner.\nAnything that is (seriously) quoted as Four-Factor, or above, is going to either duplicate the number of required verifications of a similar scope (towards diminishing returns) or is describing a setup of a number of optional methods from which a lesser number would be considered sufficiently valid to provide. e.g. registering all ten finger\/thumb-prints in case of some random future digital injury.\n\n","explanation":"Two factor security authentication (also see #Trivia ) is something that Ponytail has clearly been talking to Cueball about. In this strip, Cueball is telling her that he has finally buckled down and gotten the two factor security key that she has pestered him to get.\nHe recites the trials that he endured in \"installing\" the key, all of which seem plausible configuration issues for setting up a proper two-factor authentication from scratch.  However it is then revealed that all this work was just the task of attaching the 'key' (which looks like it could be a common brand of physical two-factor key fob or dongle) onto his metal keyring.\nMetal keyrings are reliably secure as far as keeping a key attached, but this is in part because of how notoriously difficult it is to add a key to or remove a key from them. The rings must be forced apart and held apart while the key traverses however many layers the ring has (usually two or three, though keyrings with more layers are not unheard of). Cueball confidently asserts (to off-screen Ponytail, who probably was expecting something more practical) that his key is not coming off, indicating both a (well-founded) faith in the keyring's ability to keep his key, and a desire to not go through the same process in reverse.  Presumably all his effort was in \"installing\" the key onto the keychain, and he probably hasn't actually set it up for any of his accounts, leaving them just as insecure as they were.\nThe title text has a similar double meaning.  Cueball would of course use it to the \"proof\" of his efforts installing the key--though difficult, metal keyrings can be forced apart physically by human hands, at least if the human in question has fingernails sturdy enough to slip between the rings, at which point the insertion of a finger would be enough to keep it apart until the key is inserted. However, keeping the rings apart can be strenuous on the fingers, and can result in bruising, which Cueball is all too familiar with. Proof of work alludes to the cryptographic concept, which ties (sideways, as proof of work is a security term for a concept intended to deter denial of service and similar volume-based attacks but not directly related) back into the two-factor authentication.\nAdditionally a third meaning could be that while he spent a lot of time setting up 2FA he totally overlooked the possibility of him losing his whole keychain thus locking him out of all the services that requires 2FA if he didn't set up yet another layer of backup.\n[Cueball and Ponytail stand facing each other.] Cueball: I got one of those two-factor security keys you've been bugging me about. Ponytail: Great!\n[Cueball and Ponytail continue facing each other.] Cueball: It took a lot of work, fiddling with configurations, annoying setbacks, and general pain,\n[Closeup on Cueball holding a keychain.] Cueball: ... but I finally got it onto the metal ring of my keychain. Ponytail [off-panel]: At least now it's secure. Cueball: Yeah, this thing is not coming off.\nAn authenticaion 'factor' is a distinct method of proving your legitimate use of a service or product. They can be broadly be grouped into three main groups.\nOne-Factor Authentication now may trying to avoid the shortcomings of the Password system (including the intervention of a 'remembered' password) by developing passwordless authentication techniques based upon \"have\/are\" factors only.\nTwo-Factor Authentication was usually the addition of a physical\/biometric authentication method to augment each use of a known password\/PIN (e.g. the 'rolling token' number).\nConversely, the physical authentication of a bank-card has required backing up by its remembered PIN when used in cash-machines\/ATMs. (In shops, checking against the signature written on the same card was for a long time the verification of valid ownership, this recently progressed to Chip-And-Pin, but then in many cases has been superceded by Contactless (NFC) versions, making it a Single-Factor solution in sufficiently low-value transactions.)\nMany people may be more familiar with an occasional Second-Factor Re Authentication, when (for one reason or another) they are no longer able to provide a valid password for some login or other, and activate the \"Forgot my password\" request which sends a link to their backup email account. Where one is set up, is still active and and you have not also lost the ability to access that. (This is not the situation that Cueball is in, or may be in.) This has largely replaced the infamous \"Challenge Question\" (though may still be combined with it)  probably to defeat replay-attacks or the more clever phishing attacks.\nThree-Factor Authentication should really be a \"know\" and \"have\" and \"are\" combination. Imagine the cinematic scene of the 'President' granting authority for a nuclear attack by inserting a physical key into the required device, typing in their code and then presenting their eye to a retinal scanner.\nAnything that is (seriously) quoted as Four-Factor, or above, is going to either duplicate the number of required verifications of a similar scope (towards diminishing returns) or is describing a setup of a number of optional methods from which a lesser number would be considered sufficiently valid to provide. e.g. registering all ten finger\/thumb-prints in case of some random future digital injury.\n\n"}
{"id":2523,"title":"Endangered","image_title":"Endangered","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2523","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/endangered.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2523:_Endangered","transcript":"[Ponytail stands facing Cueball and Megan in front of a poster board.] [Ponytail is pointing a stick to the board reading \"Current List\" with bullet points beneath.] [The first bullet reads Influenza B\/Yamagata.] [Four further bullet points follow, which are left indistinct.]\nPonytail: Influenza's genetic diversity has declined during the pandemic, and the B\/Yamagata lineage is at risk of extinction. Ponytail: Which would be such a shame. Megan: Yeah, I'm sooooooo worried about it. Cueball: We'd be just heartbroken!\n[Caption below the panel]: When a pathogen that scientists really don't like is close to disappearing, it gets added to the sarcastic endangered species list.\n","explanation":"The endangered species list (also known as the IUCN Red List ) is a system for categorizing species based on \"level of extinction\". This list is primarily focused on macroscopic organisms such as animals and plants, as it is these organisms whose extinction is easiest to quantify, and on which most conservation efforts focus. Generally, it is a serious concern when a species is listed on the endangered species list, as this indicates its extinction could be at hand. Ponytail , Cueball , and Megan in this comic are scientists who maintain an endangered species list of microscopic pathogens. People generally want harmful pathogens and parasites to go extinct, [ citation needed ] unlike harmless plants and animals, so each species added to the pathogen endangered species list is a cause for celebration rather than concern, and the characters in the comic indulge in this celebration by sarcastically pretending to be upset about the potential for pathogen extinction, while in reality being excited about the possibility.\nThe title text mentions some of the species on the list, including polio and Guinea worm disease - diseases that have historically sickened and killed many people but are currently being eradicated due to worldwide efforts - the former, famously, through vaccination, and the latter through education and prevention techniques. As their eradication proceeds, they become more and more endangered of extinction, and thus earn their place on the list. The title also mentions a much less important pathogen, namely a certain strain of an enterovirus , also known as a stomach flu, which unlike polio and guinea worm is likely only to cause temporary discomfort, not death or long-term disability, in infected people. However, the strain in question infected every member of the lab maintaining the list, and as a result of their personal negative experience with it, and the spiteful feelings that resulted from that experience, the characters will celebrate its extinction as much as that of polio, and have accordingly added it to the list.\nRandall was most likely inspired by this article about different influenza strains. Influenza causes the yearly flu, which infects 5\u201315% of the global population annually and causes 3-5 million severe cases worldwide.\nThe bitter irony here is that much recent scholarship has described links between parasite biodiversity and ecosystem-wide, indeed planet-wide, biodiversity . In a few cases, if preserving and expanding biodiversity are seen as good things, then preserving and expanding biodiversity of parasites is a good thing, the one not being possible without the other. Parasites and disease agents, arguably, are classes of predators, and their removal can help establish a superpredator, the actions of which can catastrophically drive down biodiversity. Humans, released from predation by a large percentage of formerly-effective microbial predators, through the introduction of penicillin and other antibiotics plus other elements of 'heroic medicine', sanitation, etc., have arguably become such a superpredator , and one that is mediating a loss of global biodiversity that may become the largest single species-extinction event in the history of planet Earth.\nThere also seems to be some evidence that infections with influenza viruses increase the chance of a heart attack. For instance regular flu shots reduce the risk of heart attacks . Thus the fact that we are \"heartbroken\" when B\/Yamagata goes extinct could be sarcastic since we might suffer less from broken hearts.\n[Ponytail stands facing Cueball and Megan in front of a poster board.] [Ponytail is pointing a stick to the board reading \"Current List\" with bullet points beneath.] [The first bullet reads Influenza B\/Yamagata.] [Four further bullet points follow, which are left indistinct.]\nPonytail: Influenza's genetic diversity has declined during the pandemic, and the B\/Yamagata lineage is at risk of extinction. Ponytail: Which would be such a shame. Megan: Yeah, I'm sooooooo worried about it. Cueball: We'd be just heartbroken!\n[Caption below the panel]: When a pathogen that scientists really don't like is close to disappearing, it gets added to the sarcastic endangered species list.\n"}
{"id":2524,"title":"Comet Visitor","image_title":"Comet Visitor","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2524","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/comet_visitor.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2524:_Comet_Visitor","transcript":"[Megan sits at a desk in front of a computer, looking to the left off-panel and pointing at the screen] Megan: Have you seen this big comet, C\/2014 UN271? Megan: It'll pass near Saturn's orbit in 10 years.\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball stands behind Megan, who is now looking at the computer and typing] Cueball: Wow, look at the orbital period. Megan: Yeah, it hasn't been to this part of the solar system since humans evolved. Megan: At least.\n[Cueball starts running off-panel, holding his finger in the air. Megan looks towards him with both arms resting on the back of her chair] Cueball: Well, we definitely need to tidy up. I'll start on the Pacific Garbage Patch, you tackle orbital debris. Megan: What about the moon footprints? Cueball: Sweep them up. Collect the Mars rovers, too! Cueball: We can put them back once it's gone.\n","explanation":"Comet C\/2014 UN 271 is a large comet that was discovered in 2014 almost as far from the Sun as the orbit of Neptune, and it will reach its closest approach in 2031, near Saturn's orbit. It's an Oort Cloud comet, with a period of more than 4 million years. Since modern humans ( homo sapiens ) evolved about 300,000 years ago (although tool-making ancestors were around about 2.5 million years ago), the last time it was among the planets was indeed long before humans evolved.\nWhen a long-period comet comes into the inner Solar System, it's often figuratively called a \"visit\". But Megan and Cueball treat this more literally (or perhaps more sarcastically). Just as one usually neatens up their home when they're expecting guests, to make a good impression, they realize they need to clean up the Earth and its vicinity in preparation for this \"visitor\". Cueball starts handing out assignments -- he'll clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch , and suggests that Megan take care of all the debris in orbit .\nCueball and Megan also make notes to sweep up the lunar footprints that NASA astronauts left on the Moon during the Apollo missions and put away the Mars rovers . It's also common for people expecting visitors to put various objects out of view with the intention of returning them to their normal place after the visit, usually because the objects are considered unsightly that under normal circumstances is outweighed by the convenience of being out in the open.\nHowever, since the comet will not come anywhere close to Earth and Mars, all this hardly seems necessary; it would be like cleaning up your home because the President or some other dignitary will be visiting your town. In addition, while a dignitary would theoretically be able to see one's house, although comets have tails , they do not have eyes, [ citation needed ] so they would not be able to perceive any difference between Earth before and after tidying up (even if the nucleus had an eye, it would not be able to see because it is in a coma ). Furthermore, sweeping footprints in the Moon, that Cueball sees as a way of tidying up, would be seen as destroying an invaluable archaeological sites by NASA and other people .\nAlternatively, Megan and Cueball aren't \"cleaning up\" for a visitor as one might do if the visitor was a friend of theirs.  They're hiding themselves and contraband as one might do if they were worried the police were visiting. Or more likely in this context that it could be an alien visit, and they would like to make it difficult to spot the human civilization from space. In that case they might need to shut down all light in every big city on Earth as well.\nThe title text debunks the claim that the Great Wall of China is the only human-made structure visible from outer space ; in fact the Great Wall cannot easily be distinguished from space (as it is very long but not wide), but some other human constructions such as the Pyramids can (and cities are easily visible at night because they emit light).\n[Megan sits at a desk in front of a computer, looking to the left off-panel and pointing at the screen] Megan: Have you seen this big comet, C\/2014 UN271? Megan: It'll pass near Saturn's orbit in 10 years.\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball stands behind Megan, who is now looking at the computer and typing] Cueball: Wow, look at the orbital period. Megan: Yeah, it hasn't been to this part of the solar system since humans evolved. Megan: At least.\n[Cueball starts running off-panel, holding his finger in the air. Megan looks towards him with both arms resting on the back of her chair] Cueball: Well, we definitely need to tidy up. I'll start on the Pacific Garbage Patch, you tackle orbital debris. Megan: What about the moon footprints? Cueball: Sweep them up. Collect the Mars rovers, too! Cueball: We can put them back once it's gone.\n"}
{"id":2525,"title":"Air Travel Packing List","image_title":"Air Travel Packing List","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2525","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/air_travel_packing_list.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2525:_Air_Travel_Packing_List","transcript":"[A lists of 20 items is given in two columns with 10 items in each. Each item is preceded by a checkbox. Most items only take up one line, but in the left column two items take up two and in the right one item take up three, so they take up the same space. Above is a large heading, with an explanation beneath it.] Air Travel Packing List If you haven't flown in a while, you might not remember what you need to bring. Use this handy checklist to pack!\n[Left column:] \u2610 Seat cushion \u2610 Parachute \u2610 Wing glue \u2610 Air horn \u2610 Sextant \u2610 Nose plugs and goggles for pressure \u2610 Airplane shoes \u2610 Navigation crystal \u2610 Spare batteries in case the plane runs out \u2610 Birdseed\n[Right column:] \u2610 Homing beacon \u2610 Meteorite antidote \u2610 USB wing connector \u2610 Emergency siren \u2610 Spare flaps \u2610 Mouthpiece (Pandemic restriction; airlines still provide the trumpet) \u2610 Luggage ballast \u2610 Flag (International flights) \u2610 Decoy tickets \u2610 Keys to the plane\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThe comic is about a proposed air-travel packing list, and the humor stems from the fact that many people have not been flying during the pandemic, and thus they might have forgotten what to pack. So Randall is so kind as to provide a packing list with 20 items. However, apart from the first item, the rest is not something you would or even should normally bring on an airplane.\nMany of the items are already found on passenger airplanes, some items would seem like they could be useful on a plane, while others could actually be useful in case of a plane crash (but only if you survive), while many others would be counter-productive to safe air travel, even in the event of a crash. Below in the table is a quick summary of each item.\nThe title text references the idea that there is a trumpet for each passenger provided by the airline, which is item number 16 on the list. This items also states that you, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, should remember to bring your own mouthpiece for the trumpet as a safety measure.\nThe trumpet idea is then combined with the common debate regarding reclining your seat in airplanes. About half of the people think that reclining is rude as it takes up the space of the person behind you. The other half think that seats recline for a reason and the person in a seat has the rights to the space behind them. See for instance this video about such a debate. Reclining a seat has resulted in actual physical fights on board airplanes.\nHere it seems that Randall sides with the anti-recliners, although maybe only in the context of the comic, because he states that reclining would prevent him from playing his trumpet, as the seat hits the bell of the trumpet. The person in front could certainly argue that playing the trumpet behind them would be very annoying, to which Randall could reply that because the trumpet is provided by the airline, he has the right to play it. This would add a new layer to the debate. This could also be Randall's way of arguing against the right to recline a seat, just because it is possible.\n[A lists of 20 items is given in two columns with 10 items in each. Each item is preceded by a checkbox. Most items only take up one line, but in the left column two items take up two and in the right one item take up three, so they take up the same space. Above is a large heading, with an explanation beneath it.] Air Travel Packing List If you haven't flown in a while, you might not remember what you need to bring. Use this handy checklist to pack!\n[Left column:] \u2610 Seat cushion \u2610 Parachute \u2610 Wing glue \u2610 Air horn \u2610 Sextant \u2610 Nose plugs and goggles for pressure \u2610 Airplane shoes \u2610 Navigation crystal \u2610 Spare batteries in case the plane runs out \u2610 Birdseed\n[Right column:] \u2610 Homing beacon \u2610 Meteorite antidote \u2610 USB wing connector \u2610 Emergency siren \u2610 Spare flaps \u2610 Mouthpiece (Pandemic restriction; airlines still provide the trumpet) \u2610 Luggage ballast \u2610 Flag (International flights) \u2610 Decoy tickets \u2610 Keys to the plane\n"}
{"id":2526,"title":"TSP vs TBSP","image_title":"TSP vs TBSP","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2526","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tsp_vs_tbsp.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2526:_TSP_vs_TBSP","transcript":"Cooking tips: tsp vs tbsp [left column:] Tsp Teraspoon 1,000,000,000,000 (10 12 ) spoons\n[right column:] Tbsp Binary tsp 1,099,511,627,776 (1024 4 ) spoons\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Cooking Tip.\nThis comic plays a joke on the common liquid measurements of teaspoons (tsp) and tablespoons (tbsp), which are commonly confused. In the US, a teaspoon is defined as 4.9 ml (0.18 imp fl oz; 0.17 US fl oz) while a tablespoon is defined as 14.8 ml (0.50 US fl oz; 3 tsp).\nIt also plays a joke on metric prefixes (based on powers of 10) versus binary prefixes (based on powers of 2), which are also a common source of confusion (see also 394: Kilobyte ). In the International System of Units (SI), T (for tera- ) signifies a multiplier of 10 12 (that is, 1\u00a0000\u00a0000\u00a0000\u00a0000), while Ti ( tebi- , for terabinary ), and not Tb, is an ISO standard binary prefix meaning 2 40 (that is, 1024 4 = 1\u00a0099\u00a0511\u00a0627\u00a0776).\nIf \"spoon\" is understood as US teaspoon, then one teraspoon will be 4\u00a0928\u00a0922 cubic meters (1.302 billion US gallons or 3996 acre-feet) and a binary teraspoon will be 5\u00a0419\u00a0407 cubic meters (1.432 B gal or 4394 acre-ft). If the US tablespoon is taken as base unit, a teraspoon will be 14\u00a0786\u00a0765 cubic meters and a binary teraspoon 16\u00a0258\u00a0220 cubic meters \u2013 roughly equivalent to six thousand Olympic-size swimming pools or slightly more than six times the volume of the Pyramid of Giza. All these units have fairly limited uses in cooking. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text is a play on a lyric from the Alanis Morissette song \" Ironic \": \"It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.\" Randall changes the line to \"teraspoon\" and \"kilonife\". The \"kilonife\" comes from knife being interpreted as \"nife\" with a k prefix \u2013 k being the SI symbol for kilo- \u2013, in a similar vein as taking tsp for \"teraspoon\". \"Nife\" is a geophysical name for Earth's core, thought to be composed of nickel and iron, and hence the word comes from the chemical symbols Ni (nickel) and Fe (iron).\nCooking tips: tsp vs tbsp [left column:] Tsp Teraspoon 1,000,000,000,000 (10 12 ) spoons\n[right column:] Tbsp Binary tsp 1,099,511,627,776 (1024 4 ) spoons\n"}
{"id":2527,"title":"New Nobel Prizes","image_title":"New Nobel Prizes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2527","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/new_nobel_prizes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2527:_New_Nobel_Prizes","transcript":"[Megan stands at a podium on a stage, facing right. Behind her is a screen showing eight Nobel Prizes. Ponytail is approaching the front of the stage while waving.] Megan: And all eight Nobel Prizes for the Discovery of New Nobel Prizes have been awarded to... Megan: *sigh* Megan: ...Doctor Adams, again , for the discovery of two new Prizes. Dr. Adams: Thank you, thank you!\n[Caption below frame:] We don't know how she started this and now we can't figure out how to stop her.\n","explanation":"The Nobel Prize is a set of prizes awarded in memory of Alfred Nobel to, \"those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.\"\nIn this comic a Nobel prize is being awarded for the discovery of two new Nobel prizes. This parallels Nobel Prizes awarded for the discovery of new elements . However, unlike elements, Nobel Prizes cannot be discovered. [ citation needed ]\nThe comic suggests that the doctor, presumably a social psychologist and the world's top expert on Impostor Syndrome , being awarded the prize came up with the idea of \"discovering\" Nobel Prizes, and no one can figure out how to stop awarding them to her.\nIn reality, the categories were established by Alfred Nobel's will for contributions or discoveries in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. In 1968, Sweden's central bank funded an award for economics in honor of its 300th anniversary that is also colloquially called the Nobel Prize in Economics . While there is currently a petition to add a Nobel prize for contributions to environmental conservation, it would presumably also need external funding, although the decision process is unclear.\nThe title text is a play on the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine , insinuating that the Nobel Assembly (the group in charge of awarding Nobel Prizes) has become so desperate to stop Doctor Adams that they have decided to award a Nobel Prize to anyone who can make her stop 'discovering' new prizes. The joke also plays on the name of the said prize, because as of the writing of this comic the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is the only Nobel Prize with two subjects (i.e. with \"or\" in the title). This may also be a jab by Randall at the fields of Physiology and Medicine, as poking fun at other disciplines is a recurring theme on xkcd. [ citation needed ]\nThis comic was published on the Monday the week following the announcements of the 2021 Nobel Prize recipients.\n[Megan stands at a podium on a stage, facing right. Behind her is a screen showing eight Nobel Prizes. Ponytail is approaching the front of the stage while waving.] Megan: And all eight Nobel Prizes for the Discovery of New Nobel Prizes have been awarded to... Megan: *sigh* Megan: ...Doctor Adams, again , for the discovery of two new Prizes. Dr. Adams: Thank you, thank you!\n[Caption below frame:] We don't know how she started this and now we can't figure out how to stop her.\n"}
{"id":2528,"title":"Flag Map Sabotage","image_title":"Flag Map Sabotage","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2528","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flag_map_sabotage.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2528:_Flag_Map_Sabotage","transcript":"[A flag displays a white country-shaped area surrounded by a red field. Inside the shape sits a map legend.]\n[Label of map legend] Map Legend [Bright blue rectangle] Disputed territory [Green rectangle] Newly independent [Blue rectangle] Demilitarized zone [Yellow rectangle] Tornado warning [Dark blue rectangle] Held by rebel forces [Red rectangle] Greater Delaware [Black rectangle] Unexplored\n[Caption below panel] Our new country's flag sabotages those maps where geographic areas are colored in with flag patterns.\n\n","explanation":"The comic refers to a type of map that colors countries using the national flag designs; see here for such a map of Europe. Randall proposes a new flag specifically designed to troll such maps.  Most obviously, the flag includes a legend with multiple common flag colors to indicate random regional attributes.  Hence, the mere act of placing this flag on a map would cause people to misinterpret this legend as applying to the entire map, giving wildly false information about regions of other countries. This trick is reminiscent of 327: Exploits of a Mom , with Mrs. Robert's son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- .\nIn addition to the legend, the flag consists of two red fields, one of which has an irregular-shaped border, the other of which is a straight line. The irregular shape is similar to a geographical border based on natural features (such as rivers and coastlines), while borders not based on such features tend to be straight lines.  Red is the most common color on national flags, so if any bordering country had red on their flag, it would risk bordering these red fields, confusing where the border lay (as well as designating the entire red region as \"greater Delaware\").  If this flag is intended for the USA (although the text mentions \"our new country\"), the red regions would be continuous with the red strips on both sides of Canada's flag and the red field on the right of Mexico's flag, disguising the border still further.\nThe title text refers to the flag of Belgium, which consists of three vertical stripes in the order (left to right) black, yellow, and red. The western part of Belgium would, according to the legend, be unexplored, while the eastern part would be Greater Delaware. The middle would therefore be a tornado zone separating the unexplored area from Greater Delaware. Depending on how the flags are aligned it might be possible to explore from the south, where the blue-white-red stripes of the French flag contain another piece of Greater Delaware that may be conveniently located to help said exploration. Exploring from the Netherlands (red, white, and blue horizontal stripes) is not viable as rebel forces are positioned between Greater Delaware and the unexplored region.\nThis is not the first time Randall has made a flag for a new country! See 1815: Flag\n[A flag displays a white country-shaped area surrounded by a red field. Inside the shape sits a map legend.]\n[Label of map legend] Map Legend [Bright blue rectangle] Disputed territory [Green rectangle] Newly independent [Blue rectangle] Demilitarized zone [Yellow rectangle] Tornado warning [Dark blue rectangle] Held by rebel forces [Red rectangle] Greater Delaware [Black rectangle] Unexplored\n[Caption below panel] Our new country's flag sabotages those maps where geographic areas are colored in with flag patterns.\n\n"}
{"id":2529,"title":"Unsolved Math Problems","image_title":"Unsolved Math Problems","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2529","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/unsolved_math_problems.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2529:_Unsolved_Math_Problems","transcript":"The Three Types Of Unsolved Math Problem\n[First box:] Weirdly Abstract [Ponytail stands in front of an equation.] Is the Euler Field Manifold Hypergroup Isomorphic to a G\u00f6del-Klein Meta-Algebreic \u03b5<0 Quasimonoid Conjection under Sondheim Calculus? Or is the question ill-formed? \u2b19\u211d\u0307\u2124\/E\u2135\u2085 [The Z is raised and underneath it is a double-ended arrow bent at a right angle. One points toward the R the other toward the Z. The \u2085 is double-struck (\ud835\udfdd) like the R and Z.]\nSecond: Weirdly Concrete [Cueball stands in front of a grid with 6 columns and 7 rows] If I walk randomly on a grid, never visiting any square twice, placing a marble every N steps, on average how many marbles will be in the longest line after N*K steps? Somehow the answer is important in like three unrelated fields. [The path starts in the 3rd row and 3rd column, a small circle indicates the start. It takes the path: North, East, North, East (a black dot representing the 1st marble is placed here, so N=4), South, East, South, South (2nd marble), West, South, West, North (3rd marble), West, South, South, South (4th Marble), West, North, West, West (this goes offgrid to the West. There is no visible line or marble outside the grid). The 1st, 3rd, and 4th marbles are colinear and there is a dotted line connecting them. The line's slope is 3.]\nThird: Cursed [A Megan with unkempt hair stands next to a curve] What in God's name is going on with this curve? Is it even math? [The curve starts at the bottom of the screen, rises straight upward, begins to wobble left and right a little. It lists to the left and the left-right motion increases, then decreases. It begins a large counter-clockwise arc, spiraling inwards twice, then ends]\n","explanation":"Math has many problems that remain \"unsolved.\" This is not simply a matter of finding the correct numbers on both sides of an equal sign, but usually require proving or finding a counterexample to some conjecture, or explaining some property of some mathematical object. Sometimes this might involve extending an existing proof to a wider range of numbers like reals, complex numbers, or matrices.\nA concrete problem is one that is very obviously connected to a real world process, while an abstract problem is one which seems unconnected to actual problems. In modern math, many problems tend to be very abstract, requiring complicated notation to adequately state the problem in the first place, like many of the millennium problems . On the other hand, many unsolved problems are very concrete; for example, there are very many problems related to packing objects into spaces that are very difficult to solve although quite easy to state, such as the Collatz conjecture . Finally, Randall describes a third category of \"cursed problems,\" that have strange, seemingly random behavior, such as the behavior of turbulence or the distribution of prime numbers.\nIn the first panel, Ponytail describes a weird abstract problem. Her description seems to be a meaningless jumble of terms that are either mathematical or just sound mathematical. And the mathematical terms are from disparate branches of mathematics: group theory, topology, and calculus.\nFinally she asks whether the problem statement is ill-formed; considering that it's mostly gibberish, this may be true.\nMany real unsolved math problems appear similarly abstract. One example is the Hodge conjecture , a Millennium Prize problem. It states \"Let X be a non-singular complex projective manifold. Then every Hodge class on X is a linear combination with rational coefficients of the cohomology classes of complex subvarieties of X.\" These words may appear nonsensical to a layperson. And even to an expert, the question is `abstract'. (Given a specific manifold, even an abelian fourfold, how on earth do you determine if a given 2,2 class is a cycle?)\nIn the second panel, Cueball describes a concrete random walk problem, and then mentions that this somehow has applications in three unrelated fields. This is actually not uncommon. The Wikipedia article says that \"random walks have applications to engineering and many scientific fields including ecology, psychology, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, and sociology. Walking randomly on a grid never visiting any square twice is known as a self-avoiding walk .\" This panel may have been inspired by some of the tricky unsolved problems about self-avoiding walks. Many of these problems have to do with rigorously proving properties of random walks that have been guessed by physics intuition, so these problems are connected to physics. The part about the maximum number of points in a line is reminiscent of problems in combinatorial geometry, which often involve counting points lying on different lines. Python code simulating this situation can be found here: [1] . C++ code simulating this situation can be found here: [2] .\nIn the final panel, Megan is looking at a strange curve that seems to have no consistent pattern. At the bottom it's mostly straight, with a few little wobbles. In the middle it looks like a wild, high-frequency wave that suddenly bursts and then dies down. And the top is a spiral that looks like a question mark or a Western-style Crosier . She wonders if this could even be mathematical. \nOn one hand, considering the weird shapes that come from plotting some mathematical processes (e.g. the Mandelbrot set ), it could well be. For example the unsolved Riemann hypothesis , another Millennium Prize problem, concerns the properties of a weird and at-first-glance random curve .  In number theory, the term \"cursed curve\" has been used to describe the \"split Cartan\" modular curve of level 13, which resisted attempts for many years to compute its set of rational points .\nOn the other hand, the question if could even be mathematical suggests that this may indeed not be a mathematical symbol. The curve looks like the unalome symbol, which is a Buddhist symbol which represents the path taken in life, or the journey to enlightenment. It could be argued that this indeed represents an unsolved problem, although not a mathematical one - which might then be part of the humoristic meaning.\nIn the title text, the curve in the final panel is further explained based on the consensus of supposedly a group who has studied it and the procedure that generates it, commenting that \"it's just like that\" as their conclusion, which is really not an explanation at all.\nThe Three Types Of Unsolved Math Problem\n[First box:] Weirdly Abstract [Ponytail stands in front of an equation.] Is the Euler Field Manifold Hypergroup Isomorphic to a G\u00f6del-Klein Meta-Algebreic \u03b5<0 Quasimonoid Conjection under Sondheim Calculus? Or is the question ill-formed? \u2b19\u211d\u0307\u2124\/E\u2135\u2085 [The Z is raised and underneath it is a double-ended arrow bent at a right angle. One points toward the R the other toward the Z. The \u2085 is double-struck (\ud835\udfdd) like the R and Z.]\nSecond: Weirdly Concrete [Cueball stands in front of a grid with 6 columns and 7 rows] If I walk randomly on a grid, never visiting any square twice, placing a marble every N steps, on average how many marbles will be in the longest line after N*K steps? Somehow the answer is important in like three unrelated fields. [The path starts in the 3rd row and 3rd column, a small circle indicates the start. It takes the path: North, East, North, East (a black dot representing the 1st marble is placed here, so N=4), South, East, South, South (2nd marble), West, South, West, North (3rd marble), West, South, South, South (4th Marble), West, North, West, West (this goes offgrid to the West. There is no visible line or marble outside the grid). The 1st, 3rd, and 4th marbles are colinear and there is a dotted line connecting them. The line's slope is 3.]\nThird: Cursed [A Megan with unkempt hair stands next to a curve] What in God's name is going on with this curve? Is it even math? [The curve starts at the bottom of the screen, rises straight upward, begins to wobble left and right a little. It lists to the left and the left-right motion increases, then decreases. It begins a large counter-clockwise arc, spiraling inwards twice, then ends]\n"}
{"id":2530,"title":"Clinical Trials","image_title":"Clinical Trials","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2530","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/clinical_trials.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2530:_Clinical_Trials","transcript":"1. Come up with new idea 2. Convince people it's good\n[Scrawled in red as an afterthought, an arrow inserting it between item 2 and the original item 3] 3. Check whether it works\n3. [Now scribbled over and amended to \"4.\"] New idea is adopted\n[Caption below the panel] The invention of clinical trials","explanation":"The comic begins with a simple process for adopting a new idea just by convincing people that it is a good idea. The joke is that this skips the important step of checking whether it actually is a good idea. That correction presumably comes about after ideas are adopted which sounded good but turn out to be harmful. The comic captions the addition of this checking step as \"the invention of clinical trials\".\nThe purpose of clinical trials in medicine is to make sure that a new medicine works and doesn't have serious side-effects. One example of the dangers of failing to make sure that it doesn't have serious side effects is thalidomide , which caused a lot of birth defects. In a clinical trial, the effect of a treatment is compared to the effect of a placebo, or an existing treatment, to make sure it actually has a beneficial effect. (Earlier trials establish that it is even a viable candidate for testing and establishing possible dosages\/regimens that can then be carried forward to a treatment (Phase III) trial.)\nBefore the invention of clinical trials, people generally didn't know, or at least had no way of confirming, whether medicines actually worked. Although many herbs and medicines were effective, others were no better than a placebo, and some medical treatments such as trepanation and bloodletting not only had no benefit (except for a very few rare conditions) but were very likely to be harmful. Those treatments that did work at all were mostly those that had been tried (for whatever reason ) and just happened to be useful, but others had neutral or even adverse effects, but still managed to not be so dangerous that subsequent recoveries from the original ailment\u2014regardless of (or despite!) dangers inherent in such treatments\u2014were taken as proof of their efficacy.\nSimilar to more recent examples, some earlier treatments may have been gradually discovered to help a particular condition only by noticing beneficial side-effects when consumed for sustenance or for unrelated medical 'guesses'. However, they also remained without the full scientific rigour so long as it remained a 'traditional remedy' with at best an oral tradition across many disparate practitioners, and no consistent effort to formalise or test the falsifiability of any findings.\nAt the time that this comic was published, the world was in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic , which made the existence of clinical trials more relevant to the public, who waited eagerly for what sounded like good ideas to get through clinical trials and available to the general public\u2026 or fail clinical trials and not do that. During this frustrating wait, many unscientific claims have been made that various drugs or non-drug treatments are cures for COVID-19, making it difficult to convince believers to get real treatments. On the other hand, many people were skeptical about COVID-19 vaccines which were made available to the public for emergency use before the clinical trials were finished, or had concerns about whether the clinical trials were rushed or otherwise flawed due how quickly they were conducted compared to the traditional speed for vaccine development and approval.\nIn the title text, \"Standard of care\" refers to the previously accepted practice which a new medicine needs to be compared against. Because the original 3-step \"standard of care\" in this comic didn't include clinical trials before their adoption, we didn't need to do any testing in order to decide to start using them. If we had had them as the standard of care, then we would have had to perform tests before we added a step and it would have taken longer. This assumes that the process itself is subject to the same scientific rigor as medical treatment; in practice that would be more of a political change that is still not tested.\nThis comic can be viewed to criticize several extreme political proposals that are obviously bad ideas to most people, such as abolishing the nuclear family, making gay marriage illegal, blocking the development of renewable energy sources and defunding the police. People tested the latter in Seattle, and the test didn't go well .\n1. Come up with new idea 2. Convince people it's good\n[Scrawled in red as an afterthought, an arrow inserting it between item 2 and the original item 3] 3. Check whether it works\n3. [Now scribbled over and amended to \"4.\"] New idea is adopted\n[Caption below the panel] The invention of clinical trials"}
{"id":2531,"title":"Dark Arts","image_title":"Dark Arts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2531","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/dark_arts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2531:_Dark_Arts","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat stand in a slightly darkened room, with a jagged circle of light centered on Cueball and light-reflecting onto White Hat's face. Cueball holds his arm out with his palm facing towards White Hat.] Cueball: Long ago, in another age, I mastered these dark arts. Cueball: But I now endeavor to live my life such that I never need them. Cueball: Their power leads only to ruin. [Caption below panel] My response whenever anyone asks me to mess around with filesystems\n","explanation":"White Hat has presumably just asked Cueball to perform some task involving filesystems . Cueball responds with an exceptionally melodramatic monologue, referring to the subject as \"dark arts\" and stating he'd rather not have anything to do with them. This is reminiscent of a fairly typical scene in fantasy novels, superhero movies, etc: a person with supernatural powers explains they prefer not to use them, as their use is likely to have negative effects that outweigh the positive ones. Often this is tied to a tragic backstory of the character, where the use of their powers previously caused them or someone close to them much suffering.\nThe humor of the comic comes from the parallel drawn; it seems unlikely that knowledge of filesystems could have negative consequences on the scale of, say, leveling a city, so the comparison is hyperbolic. However, much of today's infrastructure does depend on legacy systems that can be very overly complex to work with, having weathered aggressive political conflicts and short corporate deadlines for decades now. An example is the recent shutdown of the pgp keyserver network, or how the developer of the fastest linux filesystem built (reiserfs) was imprisoned for murdering his wife right before it could be merged into linux. Still, this joke is in a similar vein to comics like 349: Success , in which Cueball's relationship with technology is shown to have a potential for disaster far exceeding that of a normal person's.\nA filesystem is the part of a computer's operating system that handles the organization of data in persistent storage, usually splitting it into files and directories. It can be a very complicated piece of software. Because of this, it is easy to make mistakes in advanced usage, and because it controls practically all data on a given machine, mistakes made can have serious consequences (e.g., loss of data). These properties of filesystems are likely why Cueball is reluctant to mess with them.\next4 is a popular filesystem used with the Linux operating system kernel.\nHardlinks allow two filenames to refer to the same underlying file or directory. These can be particularly tricky to use, as in nearly all respects they look like regular files, but modifying them can have effects that are not immediately obvious (e.g., changing what one filename refers to, the other will not remain consistent). Hardlinks and their misuse have been referenced in xkcd before, as in 981: Porn Folder .\nThe title text hints at an experience Cueball or Randall had (his own \"tragic backstory\", if you will), involving hardlinks on ext4. He thought he had found an ideal use case for them, one which presumably avoided most of their pitfalls, but still, six months later, ended up having to troubleshoot some inscrutable bug arising from his decision.\nJavascript is a programming language most often associated with web pages. As such it is not usually interacting directly with a computer's filesystem, since allowing arbitrary websites to access the filesystem is widely considered an extremely bad idea [ citation needed ] . It is possible to run Javascript directly outside of a browser \u2013 in which case it does have access to common filesystem operations, and even theoretically to the internals of the filesystem \u2013 but since it is a high-level language with poor support for working with the data structures a filesystem uses, this would be a painful, \"cursed\" way to go about things.\nA senior IT professional (nowadays fewer people need to know about such features) will be reminded of their own experiences and mishaps with non-trivial file system configurations.  Beyond hardlinks, filesystems may have a number of features a normal user or even an admin are not aware of. Such features are prone to bugs, poor documentation, or poor integration with other system tools.\nFor example:\n\"In another age\" might refer to the fact that detailed file system manipulations were common in the days when developers were installing, configuring and managing operating systems and software on physical servers. When disk space was limited and network speeds were low, such manipulations saved space and time. Virtualization, containerization and deployment frameworks isolate developers and administrators from such low level details.\n[Cueball and White Hat stand in a slightly darkened room, with a jagged circle of light centered on Cueball and light-reflecting onto White Hat's face. Cueball holds his arm out with his palm facing towards White Hat.] Cueball: Long ago, in another age, I mastered these dark arts. Cueball: But I now endeavor to live my life such that I never need them. Cueball: Their power leads only to ruin. [Caption below panel] My response whenever anyone asks me to mess around with filesystems\n"}
{"id":2532,"title":"Censored Vaccine Card","image_title":"Censored Vaccine Card","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2532","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/censored_vaccine_card.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2532:_Censored_Vaccine_Card","transcript":"[Profile picture of a Cueball's head and shoulders, with unreadable lines of text to the right.] Check it out, I just got my booster!\n[Picture of the U.S. COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card attached on a media post. The card includes pre-printed information in black and handwritten information in blue, the latter indicated here by bold text. Some of the text has been blacked out, indicated here by \"[censored]\".]\nCOVID-[censored] Vaccination record card [At the upper right of the card appears the logo of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a stylized eagle surrounded by the words \"Department of Health & Human Services USA\", although those words are not legible in this drawing. Next to that appears the logo of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a shaded box with the letters \"CDC\" and the words \"Centers for Disease Control and [censored]\" below it.]\nPlease keep this record card, which includes [censored] about [censored]. Por favor, guarde esta tarjeta de registro, que incluye [censored] [censored] sobre [censored].\nMunroe Randall\nLast Name                     First Name\n10-17-[censored]84 41592653\nDate of birth                 Patient number\n[A table fills the remainder of the card. It has four columns and five rows. The first row gives the column names:] Vaccine. Manufacturer lot number. Date. Provider or clinic site. [The rest of the rows have been filled out. Each \"date\" cell also includes pre-printed \"MM DD YY\" below the line where the date is written.] 1st dose COVID-[censored]. Pfizer ER1138 . 04 \/ 01 \/ 21 . CVS Pharmacy Clinician #5309 . 2nd dose COVID-[censored]. Pfizer ES2187 . 04 \/ 22 \/ 21 . CVS [censored] [censored]. Other. 3rd dose [censored] FH1729 . 10 \/ 21 \/ 21 . [censored] [censored] [censored] CIA [censored]. Other. [censored]. [censored]\/[censored]\/[censored]. [censored].\n[Caption below panel:] Security tip: To seem more mysterious, try censoring only non -identifying information.\n","explanation":"This comic is another entry in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .\nThe comic hinges on the sharing of vaccination card photos on social media as proof that the user has been vaccinated against COVID-19 (in this case, gotten a booster shot , a third dose of the vaccine). When people in the United States first started receiving their vaccine shots, a large number of them shared photos of the CDC vaccination proof cards that they received alongside the vaccines; it was enough of a trend that the FTC released an official statement warning vaccine recipients not to share photos , due to the cards containing personal identification that probably should not be made public.\nThe irony here is that Randall has \" censored \" (redacted) some impersonal lines, such as the instructions that are identical on all vaccination cards, and many easy-to-guess lines, while not censoring any of said personal information.\nConsidering the date of the 3rd dose (one day prior to the comic's uploading), it is likely that the blackouts in the last line are only covering whitespace.\nAnother possible reference here is to the practice of filing for FOIA requests that has been getting more popular in recent years, with sites like muckrock.com developing to support it.  These requests provide for citizens to view the contents of government files, but the files first go through a process of redaction via solid black rectangles.  The information that is redacted can seem random, ridiculous, and frustrating, and be a source of legal action.\nThe caption indicates that his intention is to \"seem more mysterious\". This is best exemplified by the blanking of most of the word \"clinician\" to leave the acronym \" CIA \", referring to the US government agency known for its frequently \"mysterious\" (classified) activity, as well as its liberal use of redaction like that in the comic.\nThe \"19\" in COVID-19 is systematically censored in the comic. This is humorous because currently COVID-19 is the only thing that could be meant by \"COVID-[anything]\", and so the redaction is pointless. This may also be intended, in the interest of mystery, to imply some future outbreak of a similar disease (given an identifier based on the year of its inception).\nThe sentence at the top of the card, which appears once in English and once in Spanish, has equivalent portions redacted in both languages:\nThis is the first comic including a sentence (or, given the censorship, at least a good portion of one) in Spanish.\nCVS Pharmacy is a pharmacy chain in the US which provides COVID-19 vaccinations.  CVS #05309 is in Pineville, LA, while Randall lives in Massachusetts; it is not clear why he would have received his first vaccine dose in Louisiana.\nThe title text comments on the \"Provider or clinic site\" of the second dose on the card. Where the word \"pharmacy\" appears in the previous row (and would be on a real card), it is censored in the comic. The most reasonable assumption is that the word is still \"pharmacy\" and that Randall has simply chosen to redact that instance for some reason, but the title text humorously implies that it was in fact some other CVS-related venture where he got his second dose, for instance a \"CVS parking lot\" or perhaps an anti-submarine warfare carrier .\nCVS's parent company, CVS Health , does have other enterprises with compatible names: CVS Caremark and CVS Specialty . However, neither of these provide COVID-19 vaccinations.\nRandall's patient number is the 2nd to 9th digits of the fractional part of the decimal expansion of pi inclusively: 41592653.\nThe lot numbers of the first and second doses allude to two numbers that appear frequently in Star Wars and other works related to George Lucas: 1138 , and 2187 . The lot number of the third dose is the Ramanujan-Hardy number .\nThe Clinician number for the first shot is the last 4 digits of the phone number for \"Jenny\" 867-5309 , which has been entered into communication technology by a massive number of people.\nGiven the reasonable assumption [ citation needed ] that the partially censored year relates to the twentieth century, the date of birth on the card corresponds to that given in the acknowledged timeline for Randall. The censorship of that specific part of his date of birth might be related to the fact that the number \"19\" has been systematically redacted on the card. Another interpretation is that Randall is implying he is either over one hundred years old or a time traveler, although neither is likely to be true. [ citation needed ]\n[Profile picture of a Cueball's head and shoulders, with unreadable lines of text to the right.] Check it out, I just got my booster!\n[Picture of the U.S. COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card attached on a media post. The card includes pre-printed information in black and handwritten information in blue, the latter indicated here by bold text. Some of the text has been blacked out, indicated here by \"[censored]\".]\nCOVID-[censored] Vaccination record card [At the upper right of the card appears the logo of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a stylized eagle surrounded by the words \"Department of Health & Human Services USA\", although those words are not legible in this drawing. Next to that appears the logo of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a shaded box with the letters \"CDC\" and the words \"Centers for Disease Control and [censored]\" below it.]\nPlease keep this record card, which includes [censored] about [censored]. Por favor, guarde esta tarjeta de registro, que incluye [censored] [censored] sobre [censored].\nMunroe Randall\nLast Name                     First Name\n10-17-[censored]84 41592653\nDate of birth                 Patient number\n[A table fills the remainder of the card. It has four columns and five rows. The first row gives the column names:] Vaccine. Manufacturer lot number. Date. Provider or clinic site. [The rest of the rows have been filled out. Each \"date\" cell also includes pre-printed \"MM DD YY\" below the line where the date is written.] 1st dose COVID-[censored]. Pfizer ER1138 . 04 \/ 01 \/ 21 . CVS Pharmacy Clinician #5309 . 2nd dose COVID-[censored]. Pfizer ES2187 . 04 \/ 22 \/ 21 . CVS [censored] [censored]. Other. 3rd dose [censored] FH1729 . 10 \/ 21 \/ 21 . [censored] [censored] [censored] CIA [censored]. Other. [censored]. [censored]\/[censored]\/[censored]. [censored].\n[Caption below panel:] Security tip: To seem more mysterious, try censoring only non -identifying information.\n"}
{"id":2533,"title":"Slope Hypothesis Testing","image_title":"Slope Hypothesis Testing","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2533","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/slope_hypothesis_testing.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2533:_Slope_Hypothesis_Testing","transcript":"[Three points are labeled \"Student A\", \"Student B\" and \"Student C\" from left to right in a scatter plot with axes labeled \"Stats exam grade\" (60-100) and \"Scream loudness (decibels)\" (86-94) with a trend line. Student B has the highest exam grade, followed by Student C and then Student A.] [A line goes from the trend line to a box containing the following:] \u03b2=1.94 p=0.586\n[In a frameless panel, Megan reads a piece of paper while facing Cueball while three students look at them from the background.] Megan: Darn, not significant. Cueball: We need more data. Have them each try yelling into the mic a few more times.\n[The same scatter plot as in the first panel except with more points for each of the students with slightly different decibel values, and the text in the text box changed to:] \u03b2=1.94 p=0.037* *Significant!\n[Similar panel to the second one] Megan: Perfect! Cueball: Are you sure we're doing slope hypothesis testing right?\n","explanation":"\"Slope hypothesis testing\" is a method of testing the significance of a hypothesis involving a scatter plot.\nIn this comic, Cueball and Megan are performing a study comparing student exam grades to the volume of their screams. Student A has the worst grade and softest scream, but Student B has the best grades and Student C the loudest scream. A trendline has been plotted, indicating a positive correlation between grades and volume...but the p-value is extremely high, indicating little statistical significance to the trend. P-value is based on both how well the data fits the trendline and how many data points have been taken; the more data points and the better they fit, the lower the p-value and more significant the data.\nMegan complains about the insignificance of their results, so Cueball suggests having each student scream into the microphone a few more times. (The three students are still there as they can be seen behind them. The three students look like schoolkids; one of them is Science Girl .)\nHaving the students scream again will not help though, because it only provides more data on the screaming without providing more data on its relation to exam scores, and is a joke around poor statistical calculations likely made in the field today. The p-value is incorrectly recalculated based on the increased number of measurements without accounting for the fact that observations are nested within students. Each student has exactly the same test scores (probably referencing the same datum as before) and have vocal volume ranges that don't drift far either (each seems to have a range of scream that is fairly consistent and far from overlapping). Megan is pleased by these results, but Cueball belatedly realizes this technique may not be scientifically valid. Cueball is correct (presuming that they are using simple linear regression). A more appropriate technique would account for the non-independence of the data (that multiple data points come from each person). Examples of such techniques are multilevel modeling and Huber-White robust standard errors.\nMeasuring data multiple times can be a way to increase its accuracy, but does not increase the number of data points with regard to another metric, and the horizontally clustered points on the chart make this visually clear. A more effective and scientifically correct way of gathering data test would be to test other students and add their figures to the existing data, rather than repeatedly testing the same three students.\nCommon statistical formulae assume the data points are statistically independent, that is, that the test score and volume measurement from one point don't reveal anything about those of the other points. By measuring each individual's scream multiple times, Cueball and Megan violate the independence assumption (a person's scream volume is unlikely to be independent from one scream to the next) and invalidate their significance calculation. This is an example of pseudoreplication. Furthermore, Megan and Cueball fail to obtain new test scores for each student, which would further limit their statistical options.\nAnother strange aspect of their experiment is that the p-values obtained during a typical linear regression assume there is uncertainty in the y-values but the x-values are fully known, whereas in this experiment, they are reducing uncertainty in the x-values of their data, while doing nothing to improve knowledge of the y-values.\nMoreover, even if the new data were statistically independent, this still appears to be a classic example of \"p-hacking\", where new data is added until a statistically significant p-value is obtained.\nIn current AI, there's a push toward \"few-shot learning\", where only a few data items are used to form conclusions, rather than the usual millions of them.  This comic displays danger associated with using such approaches without understanding them in depth.\nAdditionally, a common theme in some research is the discovery of correlations that do not survive independent reproduction.  This is because randomness with too few samples produces apparent correlations, and Randall has repeatedly made comics about this hopeful error (see 111 , 925 and 882 among others).\nIn the title text, Megan and Cueball are trying to yell over each other, asking each other to speak up so they can be heard, presumably because they are having trouble hearing from the yelling experiment.  Or possibly they have trouble speaking audibly because they score poorly on statistics exams.\n[Three points are labeled \"Student A\", \"Student B\" and \"Student C\" from left to right in a scatter plot with axes labeled \"Stats exam grade\" (60-100) and \"Scream loudness (decibels)\" (86-94) with a trend line. Student B has the highest exam grade, followed by Student C and then Student A.] [A line goes from the trend line to a box containing the following:] \u03b2=1.94 p=0.586\n[In a frameless panel, Megan reads a piece of paper while facing Cueball while three students look at them from the background.] Megan: Darn, not significant. Cueball: We need more data. Have them each try yelling into the mic a few more times.\n[The same scatter plot as in the first panel except with more points for each of the students with slightly different decibel values, and the text in the text box changed to:] \u03b2=1.94 p=0.037* *Significant!\n[Similar panel to the second one] Megan: Perfect! Cueball: Are you sure we're doing slope hypothesis testing right?\n"}
{"id":2534,"title":"Retractable Rocket","image_title":"Retractable Rocket","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2534","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/retractable_rocket.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2534:_Retractable_Rocket","transcript":"[Beret Guy and Megan is talking. Behind them near the horizon is a tall rocket on a launchpad.] Beret Guy: We're testing our new retractable rocket. Megan: You mean reusable? Beret Guy: No.\n[A zoom in on the launchpad and rocket. It has the appearance of having a long first stage, a second stage with slightly wider fairing and an Apollo-style capsule with escape-tower atop it all. There is a directionless speech-bubble at the top depicting a count down voice.] Count down: Three...Two...One...Liftoff!\n[Same view as before, but while the base of the rocket-stack remains stationary, the first stage is apparently elongated, with a hint of a bend to the right, to raise the total height to which the upper-stage and capsule assembly reaches almost to the top of the panel.]\n[In a wider panel, with the base to the left, the first stage is now elongated far enough to disappear off the top of the center of the frame, thus clearly bending to the right. Two peoples voices are indicated as coming from the space capsule far above, as it reaches it destination.] Voice 1: Hi, welcome to the ISS! Voice 2: Hello!\n[The final panel shows the same view as in the third panel. The first stage is now retracting, and has similar length as in the third panel, but the capsule is no longer atop the 'second stage' fairing. Four movement lines above the top of the retracting rocket indicates that it is returning back to the original position.]\n","explanation":"This comic documents another of Beret Guy 's absurdist ventures . He explains to Megan that \"we\" (possibly his company ) are testing their new \"retractable\" rocket.\nReusable rockets are a growing industry, as they are more economically viable in the long run \u2013 though technically much more difficult to operate \u2013 than rocket boosters that are just discarded after use (which have been standard throughout the majority of space-faring history). Thus, Megan is understandably confused about Beret Guy's assertion that theirs is \"retractable\", asking if he misspoke. In typical fashion, he assures her that he did not misspeak, with a single \"No\" without further explanation.\nThey proceed to watch the rocket \"launch\", proving that it is indeed retractable . In fact the rocket does not launch, but merely extends \u2013 apparently all the way to the International Space Station (ISS), a height of over 400 km (over 250 miles) \u2013 before retracting, as promised, to its original position. The top part, with the astronauts in it, has been left in space. Presumably, it is docked to the ISS, as the crew onboard the ISS say hello to them in panel 4.\nOf course, it would not be possible to extend anything this far. [ citation needed ] The top would need to be moving very fast compared to the bottom part, or it would bend westwards and break, and even with the strongest material a fully extended, very thin, presumably, hollow structure with a payload on top would buckle very soon after extension began. Also, the ISS moves at 27,600 km\/h (17,100 mph) compared to the ground under it, making an orbit in about one and a half hours. So making the tip follow this long enough to dock would be even more impossible.\nBeret Guy's retractable rocket has more than a few similarities to a space elevator which has been discussed in real life. The chief difference is, a space elevator is only extended once (and most likely this would be down from space, not extended upwards), and never retracted unless it needs to be dismantled. Randall has referenced space elevators in 697: Tensile vs. Shear Strength . A more similar theoretical means to attain orbit is that of the space fountain . He has also examined the problems of a solid metal object extending through the atmosphere in a what-if .\nThe current method of sending rockets into space requires huge amounts of fuel, and the more fuel you attempt to carry, the heavier the rocket, leading to more fuel being required, etc. ( Tsiolkovsky rocket equation ), which makes the current method inefficient.  Alternate methods are being explored, such as using a slingshot ( SpinLaunch had a successful test flight of a smaller scale launcher just days before this comic was published, probably the influence for this comic), theoretical space elevators , or this comic's impossible retractable rocket idea, all of which would leave the majority of the \"fuel\" requirements on Earth or elsewhere rather than having to carry heavy fuel with the rocket.  The only fuel carried might be minimal amounts for course adjustments once in space rather than large amounts used to get there.  However, many of these methods are less flexible than rockets; the space elevator, for instance, operates on the basis of constant angular velocity relative to the Earth's axis of rotation, meaning that it cannot launch payloads directly into low-earth orbit, polar orbits, or many other orbits frequently used by satellites for their desirable characteristics, and satellites intended for these orbits might still need to carry considerable amounts of fuel, even if less than that required to launch directly from the ground.\nThe title text parodies the 'old' single-use boosters. It appears that the predecessors to the 'retractable rockets' were capable of controlled extension only. Once they had lofted the payload to orbit, they were then allowed to fall over, destroying them in the process so they could not be used again just like booster rockets. However, if a 250 mile\/400 km high construction just fell over, it would be much more difficult to avoid other damage, than to the rocket (booster), than for just a few small booster rockets falling out of the sky. [ citation needed ]\nThis comic was released four days before (and possibly refers to) SpaceX's Crew-3 mission to send astronauts to ISS with a reusable rocket on 31 October 2021.\n[Beret Guy and Megan is talking. Behind them near the horizon is a tall rocket on a launchpad.] Beret Guy: We're testing our new retractable rocket. Megan: You mean reusable? Beret Guy: No.\n[A zoom in on the launchpad and rocket. It has the appearance of having a long first stage, a second stage with slightly wider fairing and an Apollo-style capsule with escape-tower atop it all. There is a directionless speech-bubble at the top depicting a count down voice.] Count down: Three...Two...One...Liftoff!\n[Same view as before, but while the base of the rocket-stack remains stationary, the first stage is apparently elongated, with a hint of a bend to the right, to raise the total height to which the upper-stage and capsule assembly reaches almost to the top of the panel.]\n[In a wider panel, with the base to the left, the first stage is now elongated far enough to disappear off the top of the center of the frame, thus clearly bending to the right. Two peoples voices are indicated as coming from the space capsule far above, as it reaches it destination.] Voice 1: Hi, welcome to the ISS! Voice 2: Hello!\n[The final panel shows the same view as in the third panel. The first stage is now retracting, and has similar length as in the third panel, but the capsule is no longer atop the 'second stage' fairing. Four movement lines above the top of the retracting rocket indicates that it is returning back to the original position.]\n"}
{"id":2535,"title":"Common Cold Viruses","image_title":"Common Cold Viruses","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2535","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/common_cold_viruses.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2535:_Common_Cold_Viruses","transcript":"[Megan, Cueball, and White Hat are standing in a group.] Cueball: COVID has made me so curious about colds. The next time I get one, I want to know which virus it is specifically. Cueball: A rhinovirus? RSV? Mild influenza? Or something weird like metapneumovirus?\n[They begin to talk together.] Megan: How distinct are they? Could you learn to tell them apart? Cueball: See, I wonder! White Hat: I could get a sequencer from work...\n[Caption above the panel:] Several years later... [In this panel, Cueball is sitting on the left, Megan is sitting on the right, and White Hat is standing at the far right. Megan is coughing, her hair frazzled. There is a tissue box in the middle, and discarded tissues lie on the ground.] Cueball: Ah yes, this one has the rich, full-bodied bouquet of RSV, but the heady congestion lends it a lingering rhinovirus nosefeel. Megan: *Cough* Megan: Quite right!\n","explanation":"This comic is another entry in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nIn this strip, Megan and White Hat are listening to Cueball explain his newfound interest in the various different viruses that cause the common cold , which is an umbrella term used to describe the mild-to-moderate symptoms these viruses all cause.\nMegan expresses curiosity as well, and White Hat suggests he could get a DNA sequencer to help. By the third and final panel, several years have passed. All three characters appear to be ill, perhaps even as a result of now purposefully infecting themselves with chosen diseases. Whether deliberately or 'naturally', they do seem to have by now encountered a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and various types of rhinoviruses , and are now describing their experienced symptoms with terms similar to ones used in wine tasting (e.g. \"bouquet\" is a term used in wine tasting; \"nosefeel\" is a parody of the wine-tasting term \"mouthfeel\", etc.).\nThis strip follows the theme of 915: Connoisseur , making fun of the fact that people can form strong opinions and preferences on pretty much anything if they spend enough time and attention on it.  In this case, despite the fact that the symptoms of these viruses are almost universally considered to be unpleasant, the characters appear to have developed an appreciation for the subtle variations.  A similar phenomenon is referenced in 1095: Crazy Straws .\nThe idea of intentionally infecting a person with a disease is a trope in multiple Speculative Fiction stories. For instance, Iain M. Banks' Culture series , set in a world where all diseases are eradicated or treatable, includes story lines where persons deliberately infect themselves with viruses to experience the symptoms.\nThe title text references the H1N1 swine flu virus, which was the disease at the heart of the 2009 swine flu pandemic . It also further expands on the wine tasting comparison \u2013 connoisseurs often consider the environmental conditions of the growing season the grapes came from as an important factor in the quality of a given wine, so certain years may be considered better than others.  Since 2009, less severe forms of H1N1 influenza have become one of the standard variants in annual flu seasons and a perennial in the influenza vaccination mix.  From the influenza strain's perspective, 2009 was the year of breakthrough success for H1N1.\nAs access to community makerspaces, labs, and knowledge has spread, people have begun doing more things at home that were previously confined to industrial and academic research environments.  This was stimulated further during the onset of the pandemic, when communities became focused on helping offset overtaxed national resources.\n[Megan, Cueball, and White Hat are standing in a group.] Cueball: COVID has made me so curious about colds. The next time I get one, I want to know which virus it is specifically. Cueball: A rhinovirus? RSV? Mild influenza? Or something weird like metapneumovirus?\n[They begin to talk together.] Megan: How distinct are they? Could you learn to tell them apart? Cueball: See, I wonder! White Hat: I could get a sequencer from work...\n[Caption above the panel:] Several years later... [In this panel, Cueball is sitting on the left, Megan is sitting on the right, and White Hat is standing at the far right. Megan is coughing, her hair frazzled. There is a tissue box in the middle, and discarded tissues lie on the ground.] Cueball: Ah yes, this one has the rich, full-bodied bouquet of RSV, but the heady congestion lends it a lingering rhinovirus nosefeel. Megan: *Cough* Megan: Quite right!\n"}
{"id":2536,"title":"Wirecutter","image_title":"Wirecutter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2536","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/wirecutter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2536:_Wirecutter","transcript":"[A New York Times Wirecutter article. There is the NYT logo and Wirecutter logo in the top left. Also in the top of the page is a search bar, a user account icon, and 7 \"header\" level hyperlinks with illegible text. The article title is as follows:] The Best Religion By Wirecutter Staff\n[The words \"Wirecutter Staff\" are followed by illegible text presumably representing the date of the article. Below are icons for Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, and save.]\n[The article's image depicts Cueball shrugging in the center of the picture with many question marks floating above him. The content of the article is as follows:]\nWhat does it all mean? Our reviewers tried out over 70 of the most popular belief systems. Here's what they found\u2026\n","explanation":"Wirecutter is a product review website owned by The New York Times . Randall is parodying the website by having them \"review\" the 70 most popular religions . Product review websites typically make posts with the \"best\" X, e.g. \"Best smartphones,\" or \"Best laptops.\" These reviews are useful for consumers trying to choose among the wide variety of products available.\nThere are a wide variety of religions . However, unlike electronic devices, a person does not usually choose their religion; they are taught one during childhood and most remain in that religion their entire life. Changing religions is ( usually ) a significant life event. [ citation needed ] Many religions, including many variants of the three major Abrahamic religions promote exclusivity , and do not recognize other religions as valid. They emphasize the importance of specific practices or belief in specific creeds. Members of those religions might not recognize a reviewer as having truly \"tried\" their religion if their intent was always to move on to another.\nA post \"reviewing\" religions is sure to stir up controversy, as many religious followers are passionate about their religious beliefs and believe their religion is best. Literal wars have been fought over the idea one religion could be superior to another, and it is not a wound most practitioners are willing to reopen any time soon. Moreover, religions are typically chosen for more fundamental reasons -- such as by comparing the likelihood that each religion makes accurate claims, or the efficacy of each religion in promoting an ethical life, or the connection a practitioner feels to the religion's rituals, metaphors, and images, or by privileging a preexisting cultural or family connection to a particular tradition -- not by comparing gimmicky features or price.\nThe title text mentions \"budget\" and \"upgrade\" picks, which are subcategories for reviewers - cheaper options and options that are good for upgrading your current product. Neither of these categories are typical categories for religions [ citation needed ] and could further anger their adherents. The association of religion and money could allude to various controversial topics such as tithing , indulgences , televangelism , or Prosperity theology .  Budget need not be just about money, it could also refer to the amount of time or effort involved.  (e.g., how much time is spent in religious activities, needing to learn a new language, etc.)  Some religious followers might be offended [ citation needed ] if their religion was picked in a \"budget\" category. The idea of a religion \"upgrade\" evokes the highly divisive concept of supersessionism among the major Abrahamic religions, which would be guaranteed to cause further outcry no matter which one of those the article would pick for the category.\n[A New York Times Wirecutter article. There is the NYT logo and Wirecutter logo in the top left. Also in the top of the page is a search bar, a user account icon, and 7 \"header\" level hyperlinks with illegible text. The article title is as follows:] The Best Religion By Wirecutter Staff\n[The words \"Wirecutter Staff\" are followed by illegible text presumably representing the date of the article. Below are icons for Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, and save.]\n[The article's image depicts Cueball shrugging in the center of the picture with many question marks floating above him. The content of the article is as follows:]\nWhat does it all mean? Our reviewers tried out over 70 of the most popular belief systems. Here's what they found\u2026\n"}
{"id":2537,"title":"Painbow Award","image_title":"Painbow Award","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2537","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/painbow_award.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2537:_Painbow_Award","transcript":"[A figure of a graph is shown, the figure has a number as if used in a paper. The graph has two labeled axis but without any units given. The Y-Axis has 15 ticks of equal length, the X-axis has 21 ticks, with every fifth double the height of the other. The graph displays a messy shape with color gradients, with a bright spot to the right of the shape around the middle right part of the graph. This bright spot is surrounded by mainly green and red, with darker colors at the edge, and the rest of the graph white. On the right side of the graph there is a labeled bar with the color scale. To the right of this are numbers indicating what the color represents. The color scale begins at the bottom with white, then goes to gray\/blue, to black, back to blue, to gray, to green, to dark red, to red which fades via brown in to green, from where it fades slowly from darker green to lighter green ending up as yellow before going back to white again at the top.] Label: Figure 2 Y-Axis: \u03bb X-Axis: \u03b8 (phase) Scale label: Peak Energy 120 100 80 60 40 20 0\n[Caption under the panel:] Every year, disgruntled scientists compete for the Painbow Award for worst color scale.\n","explanation":"This comic makes fun of the badly selected color scales used in the figures for scientific papers by suggesting that the scientists picking them are in competition to use the most problematic scale. The title of the comic is a portmanteau of \"pain\" and \"rainbow\" suggesting a humorous name for terrible color scales.\nThe color scale here showcases a collection of unintuitive and unhelpful decisions. Starting from the top, white fades down into green, which then fades into red (passing through brown in the middle instead of yellow, indicating subtractive color mixing instead of additive color mixing, for no obvious reason). The red then turns back into green as the intensity decreases further. Red and green in close proximity make the energy levels hard or impossible to distinguish for those with protanopic color vision deficiency . This confusion is repeated at lower energy levels, where blue transitions to black and then back into white via a gray with a tiny tinge of blue. The highest and lowest recorded energy levels have the same color value, which is less than ideal. That Randall is aware of color blindness and the problems this causes has been revealed in other comics like this one 1213: Combination Vision Test .\nAlthough it's possible (for someone with full color vision) to interpret data from this graph from context clues - the white that fades to green is high-energy white, while the white that fades to blue is low-energy white - there's no benefit to doing things this way, and a lot of downsides. Additionally, there are regions in the color scale where the color changes very rapidly, which creates the false appearance of an edge in what is likely a smooth function.\nBecause the color scale includes black, representing just over 20 unlabeled units, it is possible that the graph axes, labels, and perhaps even the comic's caption represent measured values. Because they don't blend continuously with the negative space around them, this appears unlikely.\nReal-world analogues to the Painbow Award include radar meteorology charts, where different types of precipitation have different color schemes that can overlap and blend in confusing transition zones. In the field of data visualization, the CIELAB color space , perceptually uniform color spaces , or even more specialised scales have been developed to replace simple algebraic interpolation of red, green, and blue values.\nThe title text takes the concept of bad color combinations further, suggesting the use of navy blue , dark blue , and midnight blue for first, second, and third respectively. These are the names of three similar XKCD colors , and, as sighted readers will be able to see, there is very little difference between them [ citation needed ] . However, the choice of blue(s) may be a direct play upon the association of the Blue Riband (a.k.a. \"Blue Ribbon\") and\/or Cordon Bleu (likewise, but this time direct from the French) awards, extended in common use for excellence across a much wider range of competitive fields.\nFor rosette-rewarded competitions (e.g. livestock parades, dog-shows, etc) the first prize ones are commonly blue (red for 2 nd and either yellow or white for 3 rd ), though it may not be logically obvious to someone unfamiliar with this, perhaps more used to yellow depicting the 'gold standard, first place' indicator or red as the most alerting hue in some other ranking situations. Where a depicted award schema is directly gold\/silver\/bronze-influenced, however, the gold and bronze 'metallic off-yellows' can sometimes be more confused with each other than with the mid-level desaturated 'silver'\n[A figure of a graph is shown, the figure has a number as if used in a paper. The graph has two labeled axis but without any units given. The Y-Axis has 15 ticks of equal length, the X-axis has 21 ticks, with every fifth double the height of the other. The graph displays a messy shape with color gradients, with a bright spot to the right of the shape around the middle right part of the graph. This bright spot is surrounded by mainly green and red, with darker colors at the edge, and the rest of the graph white. On the right side of the graph there is a labeled bar with the color scale. To the right of this are numbers indicating what the color represents. The color scale begins at the bottom with white, then goes to gray\/blue, to black, back to blue, to gray, to green, to dark red, to red which fades via brown in to green, from where it fades slowly from darker green to lighter green ending up as yellow before going back to white again at the top.] Label: Figure 2 Y-Axis: \u03bb X-Axis: \u03b8 (phase) Scale label: Peak Energy 120 100 80 60 40 20 0\n[Caption under the panel:] Every year, disgruntled scientists compete for the Painbow Award for worst color scale.\n"}
{"id":2538,"title":"Snack","image_title":"Snack","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2538","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/snack.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2538:_Snack","transcript":"[Ponytail, holding a cookie up in one hand and an apple up in the other, addresses an alarmed Cueball. His alarm is shown by seven lines radiating away from his head, and he also holds his arms stretched out.] Ponytail: Hey, do you want a cookie? Or an apple? Cueball: Who are you!? Did the IRB approve this!? Is everyone here an actor!?\n[Caption beneath the panel:] The best prank you can play on psych majors is just to offer them a snack.\n","explanation":"Many psychological studies involve participants being asked to make decisions under varying conditions, to determine how those conditions influence decision making. A common example is to give subjects a choice between eating a healthy snack (such as an apple) or a tasty snack (such as a cookie), which may be used as a simple proxy for whether they're prioritizing long-term health or short-term gratification. In most cases they are not made aware of the nature of the experiment, as knowing the premise of the study is liable to influence their behavior and alter the results. Instead subjects may deliberately be given a false impression of the purpose of the study, or they may be offered a choice under conditions where they're not aware that they're part of an experiment at all.\nExamples of experiments like this are the Stanford marshmallow experiment and this study .\nThis sort of psychological study is most commonly done by universities, which means that using university students as subjects is generally the most convenient option. This means both that psychological studies tend to be heavily skewed towards the demographics of college students, and that university students have a pretty good chance of being invited to participate in a study at some point.\nThe joke in this strip is based on the premise that psychology majors are sufficiently aware of such studies that it would make them suspicious of any circumstances which could be part of a study.  If they've studied (or even conducted) such experiments, anything that reminded them of such a study could cause them to become suspicious. In Cueball 's case this is exaggerated into outright paranoia, and Ponytail is apparently playing on that to prank him, offering options that could easily be part of such an experiment just to spook him into suspicion.\nStudies done on humans are subject to important ethical controls, particularly if the subjects are not fully informed of the study's purpose. \"IRB\" stands for Institutional Review Board , which is a committee (for example, at a university) which must approve such research to ensure that there's no significant risk of doing harm to the subjects of the study.\nThe title text jokes that graduate students have so much work to do that they are liable to forget to eat entirely and stereotypically too impoverished to afford adequate amounts of food; when presented with an offer of a snack, they don't ponder the implications or potential ulterior motives; they just eat it quickly and get back to work.\n[Ponytail, holding a cookie up in one hand and an apple up in the other, addresses an alarmed Cueball. His alarm is shown by seven lines radiating away from his head, and he also holds his arms stretched out.] Ponytail: Hey, do you want a cookie? Or an apple? Cueball: Who are you!? Did the IRB approve this!? Is everyone here an actor!?\n[Caption beneath the panel:] The best prank you can play on psych majors is just to offer them a snack.\n"}
{"id":2539,"title":"Flinch","image_title":"Flinch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2539","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/flinch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2539:_Flinch","transcript":"[Cueball holds a bowling ball in both hands. It is attached to a string that goes behind him and up disappearing off panel around double his height. He is talking to Megan, Hairy, and Ponytail who is looking at him. Between Cueball and the other three is a cross in a dotted circle on the floor.] Cueball: If you stand with the bowling ball in front of your face and let go, will you flinch when it swings back?\n[Zoom in on Megan in a slim panel. There is a caption in a frame above her.] Caption: Physicist Megan: I won't flinch. Megan: I trust conservation of energy.\n[Zoom in on Hairy, in a wide panel. He has lifted arm holding his hand palm up toward Cueball (who is off-panel). There is a caption in a frame above him.] Caption: Biologist Hairy: I trust my flinch reflex, which was honed by millions of years of evolution to protect my delicate face. I'm not messing with it.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail in a slim panel. There is a caption in a frame above her.] Caption: Engineer Ponytail: I don't trust that you hung that thing up correctly.\n","explanation":"Cueball is performing a common physics demonstration in which a heavy ball is hung from a rope or cable. The demonstrator, or a volunteer, pulls the ball back until it's close to their face (possibly even touching it), then releases it, allowing it to swing, and then return. Due to conservation of energy, the ball cannot return any further than its original release point, making it impossible for the person to be struck by it. Because a heavy pendulum will tend to lose little energy on each swing (relative to its overall energy), it will come back very close to its original point, so the experiment creates a conflict between the instinctive desire to escape a heavy object flying at your face, and the theoretical knowledge that it won't harm you.\nMegan is a physicist, who understands the principles of the experiment and claims she won't flinch, confident that it can't harm her.\nHairy is a biologist, and implies that he has no intention of avoiding the flinch reflex, as he trusts the automatic reflexes that the human body has evolved more than he trusts the premise of the experiment. In  both 755: Interdisciplinary and 1670: Laws of Physics , the same experiment is referenced. In the title text of the latter Randall makes a very similar argument as the biologist does here.\nPonytail , an engineer, replies that she doesn't trust Cueball to have hung the pendulum correctly.  Engineers are trained in science, but work with practical applications, and tend to be very aware that practice is rarely as simple as scientific theories might imply. Even if the physical laws are constant, the experiment might not go according to plan. For example, if the cable were to snap or come loose while swinging toward the subject, the ball could strike them in the body, or land on their feet.  If the cable is more elastic than anticipated, it could stretch unpredictably, once again striking someone.  If the anchor point is not stable, it could shift during the experiment, once again causing harm. Also if the ball is not released but pushed, or if the one releasing it leans forward after release they might get hit in the face.\nThe punch line basically makes the point that failure to trust the safety of an experiment doesn't necessarily imply a lack of scientific knowledge.  If you lack confidence in the design of an experiment, then it's not safe to assume that the laws of physics will protect you.\nThe title text shows a pre-med student's response. Pre-medical university courses have a reputation for being more intense and demanding than other undergraduate degrees, so the student is portrayed as being very stressed and time-conscious; showing little interest in the experiment itself, only in how it impacts their degree. In addition, medical students are commonly the subject of \"interesting\" medical experiments which may lead to long-term psychological and physical side-effects.\nThe student first asks if participating in the demonstration will count for a physics credit, implying that they're not willing to spend time on it unless it contributes to their academic requirements. They then ask if they can shorten the string to make the demonstration go faster. Shortening a pendulum does, indeed, cause it to swing faster, but the time saved would be less than the time necessary to make the modification, so the demonstration would not end sooner. Finally, they ask to do a variant where they deliberately get struck in the face, because they have a \"thing for first aid training\" immediately after. This would likely injure them, but the student is apparently willing to sacrifice their own safety and well-being in service to their academic career. It's not clear how this would help, although it could potentially help others learn first aid by having them practice on the new injury.\nVarious alternate takes on this experiment have been previously featured in 755: Interdisciplinary and 1670: Laws of Physics , but this is the first time experiment is performed in a proper manner.\n[Cueball holds a bowling ball in both hands. It is attached to a string that goes behind him and up disappearing off panel around double his height. He is talking to Megan, Hairy, and Ponytail who is looking at him. Between Cueball and the other three is a cross in a dotted circle on the floor.] Cueball: If you stand with the bowling ball in front of your face and let go, will you flinch when it swings back?\n[Zoom in on Megan in a slim panel. There is a caption in a frame above her.] Caption: Physicist Megan: I won't flinch. Megan: I trust conservation of energy.\n[Zoom in on Hairy, in a wide panel. He has lifted arm holding his hand palm up toward Cueball (who is off-panel). There is a caption in a frame above him.] Caption: Biologist Hairy: I trust my flinch reflex, which was honed by millions of years of evolution to protect my delicate face. I'm not messing with it.\n[Zoom in on Ponytail in a slim panel. There is a caption in a frame above her.] Caption: Engineer Ponytail: I don't trust that you hung that thing up correctly.\n"}
{"id":2540,"title":"TTSLTSWBD","image_title":"TTSLTSWBD","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2540","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/ttsltswbd.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2540:_TTSLTSWBD","transcript":"[Cueball stands behind a lectern on a podium, gesturing with one hand held out, speaking to an audience. A banner hangs on the wall over the crowd with large letters on it. Illegible smaller text is written under these letters.] Cueball: Next we have a session on organ transplants and another on airships. Cueball: Then lunch, then we'll have one on gyroscopes and one on butterflies. Banner: TTSLTSWBD\n[Caption below panel:] The first annual conference on Things That Seem Like They Shouldn't Work But Do\n","explanation":"Cueball is standing at a lectern on a podium , addressing a large crowd. He is describing the program of some event, listing the different topics that will be covered. These appear to be random, but the caption gives the punchline: it is a conference on things that seem like they shouldn't work but do.\nBy \"things that seem like they shouldn't work\", it means things that the average person would have some intuitive sense that the function of thing was impossible, and yet ample real-world experience shows that they do, and may become a routine function that people depend upon.  TTSLTSWBD in the title and the banner is the abbreviation for \"Things That Seem Like They Shouldn't Work, But Do\".\nOrgan transplantation , where a functioning organ is cut out of one person (possibly a dead one) and put into another person where it will now operate for their benefit.  Given the very complex and delicate nature of living tissue, it's rather surprising that this could work at all.  In reality, it's not a simple process, and a lot of things could go wrong, but modern medicine is advanced enough that organ transplantation is widely accepted and regularly practiced, usually functioning well enough to extend life.\nAirships , or dirigibles, are huge , rigid structures which are filled with bags of lighter-than-air gas, which causes the entire structure to float, and could carry both passengers and significant loads. The idea of such a huge vessel traveling, able to both move rapidly and float in place, would be hard to imagine if it didn't exist, yet zeppelins functioned and were a practical mode of transportation for a time. Unlike the other things mentioned, airships are largely obsolete (having lost favor due to safety concerns and surpassed by other technologies). Airships are a recurring theme on xkcd.\nLunch is listed as if it was another topic of the TTSLTSWBD, but it actually just means that after discussing airships, the conference will take a break to eat lunch, as many humans usually do. [ citation needed ] Because lunch is a relatively modern construction, filling a niche that grew after dinner shifted later into the day, it may defy one's intuition. In this sense, a three-meal day may seem like it shouldn't work, but most who observe all three meals on schedule would likely argue that it does.\nMechanical gyroscopes are simple devices consisting of a spinning disc mounted inside three concentric gimbals as a fixture, or more often observed at work as a single spindle in a free-standing external frame that can be held or moved around by hand. The rotational inertia of the spinning disc resists change in orientation, and tends to remain in a single orientation (if free to do so) or else exert counter-intuitive forces (where directly encouraged to change its central axis). The notion that a disc can remain so steady can be counterintuitive even to those who understand the physical principles. This weirdness has been previously referenced in 332: Gyroscopes . An optical gyroscope does not mechanically resist any motion but (relying upon an effect originally exploited in a failed attempt to disprove Special Relativity ) ultimately provides similar feedback about the rotation of the unit into which it is mounted.\nButterflies fly with an unusual fluttering pattern, which works in part due to the notoriously complex principles of fluid dynamics that may look like uncontrolled fluttering but yet somehow allows the creature to land directly on specific flowerheads to feed. This is not as intuitively understandable as the flight of larger creatures such as birds.\nThe title text refers to rotary hooks on sewing machines, which are a complicated (and complicated looking) mechanism whose purpose is to feed one thread in a loop around a whole spool of another thread, and are apparently counterintuitive enough that the conference feels they need a whole day to cover them.\nThis concept is referenced in 2115: Plutonium .\nThe conference that the comic pictures is another example of a thing that seems like it shouldn't work but does. At first glance, Cueball seems to be listing a random, disconnected list of topics that will be covered, which runs counter to the format of most conferences. It initially seems inconceivable that enough people would be interested in all of those separate topics for the conference to make a profit (from attendance fees). However, the audience is packed, demonstrating that this is not the case. This may be because many people enjoy the mind-expanding feeling of having their intuitions shattered.\n[Cueball stands behind a lectern on a podium, gesturing with one hand held out, speaking to an audience. A banner hangs on the wall over the crowd with large letters on it. Illegible smaller text is written under these letters.] Cueball: Next we have a session on organ transplants and another on airships. Cueball: Then lunch, then we'll have one on gyroscopes and one on butterflies. Banner: TTSLTSWBD\n[Caption below panel:] The first annual conference on Things That Seem Like They Shouldn't Work But Do\n"}
{"id":2541,"title":"Occam","image_title":"Occam","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2541","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/occam.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2541:_Occam","transcript":"[Megan is holding a hand palm up towards Cueball as they are walking together.] Megan: The simplest explanation is that Occam shaves the barber.\n","explanation":"This comic invokes three philosophical topics: Occam's Razor , the Barber Paradox and Murphy's Law .\nOccam's Razor is the principle that explanations should not postulate more entities than necessary. It is often phrased as \"the simplest explanation is best\". The word ' razor ' is intended to evoke the image of shaving off superfluous elements.\nThe Barber Paradox postulates a town barber who shaves all those, and those only, in the town who don\u2019t shave themselves, and asks whether the barber shaves himself. The paradox is that if he does, then he shouldn\u2019t, and if he doesn\u2019t, then he should. It is an attempt at a concrete, real-world analogue of Russell's Paradox in set theory.\nMegan tries to invoke Occam's Razor to create a simpler solution to the paradox. Occam's Razor is named in honor of  philosopher William of Ockham (Ockham being a town in England) and she declares that William shaves the barber. Her proposal is humorous and does not of course resolve the paradox, as the barber is still not shaving himself (so he should shave himself, so he shouldn't shave himself...)\nThe title text invokes Murphy's Law: the expectation that \"anything that can go wrong will go wrong.\" When you shave with a cut-throat razor , there's multiple things that could go wrong , many of which would cause harm to the person being shaved. Alternatively, invoking Murphy's law makes the principle of Occam's Razor itself, or its use in the comic, \"go wrong\", possibly rendering the solution invalid.\n[Megan is holding a hand palm up towards Cueball as they are walking together.] Megan: The simplest explanation is that Occam shaves the barber.\n"}
{"id":2542,"title":"Daylight Calendar","image_title":"Daylight Calendar","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2542","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/daylight_calendar.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2542:_Daylight_Calendar","transcript":"[Danish is looking down at her phone which she holds up in her hand, while Cueball stands next to her]: Danish: Ugh, I hate November. It's 26:15 and the sun is setting again! Danish: 3-day days are the worst. Cueball: I like it. I know it's dark, but it's nice to have the extra time on deadlines.\n[Caption below the panel]: In our new calendar system, the date changes after every 12 hours of daylight, regardless of how long that takes.\n","explanation":"At the time of this posting, the United States had ended daylight saving time (DST) recently, on November 7, and returned to standard time. Daylight saving time is a practice of setting clocks ahead by 1 hour during warmer months to effectively 'borrow' some of the typically unused early morning light and pass it down to the late evening where more people can make use of it. In the United States, daylight saving time starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.\nA result of ending of daylight saving time is the sun setting earlier than people are used to, as people have become acclimatised to the shifted clocks \u2014 though it does mean an 'extra' hour of light has returned to the seasonally redarkening mornings. The start of the comic may be the start of a typical comment about how the sun seems to set earlier than usual in November; which it does anyway (north of the equator) but the clock-shift makes it even more obvious.\nIn this comic, however, Randall turns the normal talk about DST on its head by devising a calendar system where the dates \"change\" based on 12 hours of daylight. This causes shorter \"days\" in the summer months, which may get more than 12 hours of daylight in a \"solar day\" and longer \"days\" in the winter months which would have fewer hours of daylight in a \"solar day\". As mentioned in the title text, this change would be very pronounced near the poles, which may only get a few hours of daylight per 24 hours in the winter, but conversely may get 20 or more hours of daylight per 24 hours in the summer. Cueball says that he likes the new calendar system, as it gives him more \"time\" in the winter to complete work - if Cueball is given \"3 days\" to complete a task, each of those days could be longer than a typical 24 hours. However, this would be reversed in the summer, as each day would be shorter. Also, if this calendar system was in place, his boss could resolve this problem by just giving him 72 hours to complete his task instead of \"3 days\".\nAt temperate latitudes and above, as the calendar goes towards winter (for your hemisphere) the length of daylight per daily cycle shortens. Instead of having \"long summer days\" (i.e. periods of daylight) and shorter ones in the winter, but still the artificial pressures of a regulated 24-hour cycle to adhere to, the proposal seems to be that the date gets incremented whenever (and only when) twelve hours of daylight have passed.\nIn the summer, a day-count starting at sunrise could require a late-afternoon switch to 'tomorrow', which would in turn be switched earlier still the next day as it was already partly used up, with possibly two date-changes per astronomical day (early morning and mid-evening, for example). As winter draws on, not enough daylight will pass to guarantee a date-change in any single period. On the day of this comic's release - November 15, 2021 - Massachusetts, where Randall lives, gets ten hours and forty five minutes between civil twilights . It is possible that the last day-mark was late during the previous daylight cycle and the next one won't be until early in the following one.\nDepending on how exactly daylight is measured, we may have more \"days\" in a year than the usual 365, since refraction of light near the horizon means that the sun is visible slightly more than 50% of the year on average. This effect is strongest near the poles, since the sun spends more time near the horizon. In addition, due the Earth's elliptical orbit, more northerly parts of the Earth receive more sunlight than southerly parts. Combined, these effects mean that a year at the north pole is 381 \"days\", compared to 369 at the Equator.\nExactly how the time is marked is not fully explained. Starting each day-period at 00:00 would be easiest, but could be a psychological step too far. One possibility is to set a nominal 00:00 six hours before a day-change, in line with an 'idealised' twelve-hours-of-daylight day, but disregard hours 'belonging' to a prior daylight period. Then keep the clock running (throughout any intervening nights and into the next daylight as necessary) until the date clicks over and realigns as necessary. Clock times would not reach 23:59 for most of the summer, and could far exceed that in the winter. Megan's clock has reached 26:15, by this sunset, and may well be due to be far into the 30-hours range before more daylight and the moving on to the new date and reset time, if not beyond.\nBeyond the arctic (and antarctic) circle, twelve hours of daylight would be accumulated up twice per traditional day, at times, while being effectively on hold for much of the other six months, depending upon actual latitude.\n[Danish is looking down at her phone which she holds up in her hand, while Cueball stands next to her]: Danish: Ugh, I hate November. It's 26:15 and the sun is setting again! Danish: 3-day days are the worst. Cueball: I like it. I know it's dark, but it's nice to have the extra time on deadlines.\n[Caption below the panel]: In our new calendar system, the date changes after every 12 hours of daylight, regardless of how long that takes.\n"}
{"id":2543,"title":"Never Told Anyone","image_title":"Never Told Anyone","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2543","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/never_told_anyone.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2543:_Never_Told_Anyone","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are holding hands, she has turned her head towards him, while he is still looking at the scenery. They are standing on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a vast stretch of land with water to the right and mountains far off. There are many details with lakes and smaller bodies of water on the land, three larger and three smaller clouds near the horizon and the sun is shining from the top right corner.] Megan: I've never told anyone this before.\n[Cueball has turned towards Megan, as they are still holding hands, in an otherwise empty panel.] Megan: I know I shouldn't. Megan: But I feel like I can trust you.\n[Megan and Cueball are no longer holding hands as he has taken both his hands up in front of his mouth and a sound escapes him, as shown with small lines coming off his head with the speech line going up from above them.] Megan: My one-time code is 263827. Cueball: *Gasp*\n","explanation":"This comic combines stereotypes about two secrets that one would normally be reluctant to share: dark, personal secrets , and passwords . In the comic, Megan appears to be about to tell Cueball a secret of the former variety, but twists it by instead revealing a one-time code (presumably for the use of two-factor authentication for an online account). This is poking fun at the serious-looking warnings that typically accompany the generation of one-time codes. For example: \"DO NOT share this code with anyone. We will NEVER call you to ask for it.\" While this is still something Megan should normally be reluctant to share, it has much less value to Cueball than a personal secret [ citation needed ] unless his intent was to steal Megan's account - and even then it's probably useless, as these codes become invalid after they're used (hence the term \"one-time\") or a few minutes after generation. Cueball compounds the humor by reacting with a shocked gasp, as one would be more expected to react to a dark secret.\nUsers are generally warned never to tell their password to anyone, not even a support representative of the site; real technical support reps shouldn't ever need your password, and anyone with a true configured-in authority should never even find it necessary to know\/use it. However, one tactic that hackers use to break into accounts is to claim to be calling from the site and say that they need your password to fix some vague and\/or mythical problem with the account. The title text says that Megan trusts Cueball so much that, despite knowing this, she would divulge her password to him even if he tried this approach on her. There is a further irony here, as Megan is focusing on the exception to the rule (\"Don't even tell an employee\" implies \"You shouldn't tell anyone \") as if it was the most important factor.\n[Megan and Cueball are holding hands, she has turned her head towards him, while he is still looking at the scenery. They are standing on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a vast stretch of land with water to the right and mountains far off. There are many details with lakes and smaller bodies of water on the land, three larger and three smaller clouds near the horizon and the sun is shining from the top right corner.] Megan: I've never told anyone this before.\n[Cueball has turned towards Megan, as they are still holding hands, in an otherwise empty panel.] Megan: I know I shouldn't. Megan: But I feel like I can trust you.\n[Megan and Cueball are no longer holding hands as he has taken both his hands up in front of his mouth and a sound escapes him, as shown with small lines coming off his head with the speech line going up from above them.] Megan: My one-time code is 263827. Cueball: *Gasp*\n"}
{"id":2544,"title":"Heart-Stopping Texts","image_title":"Heart-Stopping Texts","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2544","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/heart_stopping_texts.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2544:_Heart-Stopping_Texts","transcript":"[Comic heading:] Most heart-stopping texts to receive out of the blue\n[A collection of light gray text bubbles in two columns:]\nDid you forget what day it is?\nI bet you're probably getting bombarded with texts right now, huh?\nDid you mean to post that to everyone?\nIs this your house? cnn.com\/2021\/11\/19\/S...\nYou didn't click on any weird emails recently, did you?\nCan I call?\nWait, do you know Joe Rogan? How does he know your name?\nWhy are you trending on Twitter?\n","explanation":"Text messages have become a ubiquitous form of communication in most countries, and have become a basic part of many people's everyday lives.  Conversations over text frequently jump straight to the purpose of the communication, without salutation or prelude.  Some texts, particularly when delivered without context, can carry implications that cause immediate anxiety.\n\"Out of the blue\" is an English expression meaning \"to appear in a sudden and unexpected fashion\". It's a shortened version of  \"sudden as a bolt out of the Blue\", referring to a bolt of lightning out of the clear, blue sky.  The implication is that something dramatic (and possibly dangerous) is has occurred without any warning signs, under circumstances where it wouldn't normally be expected.\nThis comic lists texts that would be worrying to receive with no context, for a variety of reasons. It seems to suggest that sending these is a good way to prank someone; particularly the title text, where deliberately sending an animated loading icon seems like it couldn't be intended for any other purpose. The different messages are explained below.\n[Comic heading:] Most heart-stopping texts to receive out of the blue\n[A collection of light gray text bubbles in two columns:]\nDid you forget what day it is?\nI bet you're probably getting bombarded with texts right now, huh?\nDid you mean to post that to everyone?\nIs this your house? cnn.com\/2021\/11\/19\/S...\nYou didn't click on any weird emails recently, did you?\nCan I call?\nWait, do you know Joe Rogan? How does he know your name?\nWhy are you trending on Twitter?\n"}
{"id":2545,"title":"Bayes' Theorem","image_title":"Bayes' Theorem","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2545","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bayes_theorem.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2545:_Bayes%27_Theorem","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart is pointing with a pointer, held in her right hand, to a white-board with tables, what looks like formulae and lots of other unreadable text. She looks toward her off-panel class, from where a voice replies to her question.] Miss Lenhart: Given these prevalences, is it likely that the test result is a false positive? Off-panel voice: Well, this chapter is on Bayes' Theorem, so yes.\n[Caption below the panel]: Sometimes, if you understand Bayes' Theorem well enough, you don't need it.\n","explanation":"For example, if a test has a 100% sensitivity (first line, all those affected receive a positive result) and a 99% specificity (second line, 1% of the unaffected also receive a positive result), the interpretation of a positive test depends on the prevalence of the disease in the population. In the example case, the prevalence is 0.1% (third column), so that when the test result is positive (1% of the tests, left column) the subject is actually unaffected nine time out of ten. Although this would be a very performant test, given the relative prevalences involved it will produce overwhelmingly false positives among all positive results. (But, in this example, all those told they are not in danger \u2014 almost a hundred times more individuals than test positive \u2014 are correctly notified.)\nFor this same example, the Bayesian formula gives\u00a0:\nP( Affected | Positive ) = P( Positive | Affected ) * P( Affected ) \/ P( Positive ) = 100% * 0.1% \/ 1% = 10% and P( Unaffected | Positive ) = P( Positive | Unaffected ) * P( Unaffected ) \/ P( Positive ) = 0.9009% * 99.9% \/ 1% = 90%\nIn this comic, a teacher is presenting a problem which the students are supposed to use Bayes' theorem to solve. However, the off-panel student knows that they are studying Bayes' theorem, so they use that prior knowledge to guess the usual answer to such problems. The punch line is the caption - The student doesn't need to do the calculation because they're familiar with questions involving Bayes' theorem and how they often present the counterintuitive result to illustrate the importance of prevalence to the calculation.\nThere is perhaps also a self-referential situation here where the student has updated their prior probabilities a number of times for whether the answer was \"Yes\" to a question involving Bayes' Theorem. If their method of answering \"Yes\" to every such question has succeeded every time before then by Bayes' theorem they will have a lot of justification to continue to do until they start getting it wrong. The prevalence of Bayes Theorem questions that require the answer \"No\" might be small enough that this doesn't happen in any small number of times and so they learn nothing of the false-positive rate until that point in time. This could be interpreted as a criticism of Bayesian Statistics which may treat a judgement as well justified (e.g. getting the question right) despite lacking a clear understanding of mechanism (e.g. basing your answer to the question on the numbers provided).\nThe title text refers to the mathematical definition of Bayes' theorem: P(A | B) = P(B|A) * P(A) \/ P(B). Here, P(A|B) represents the probability of some event A occurring, given that B has occurred. This is often referred to as \"the probability of A given B\". It can be hard to remember if P(A|B) means probability of A given B, or if it's B given A, especially when talking about the probability of an earlier cause given a later effect. Randall's joke is based on this difficulty. Here P((B|A)|(A|B)) is meant to be read as the probability that you write (B|A) given that the correct expression is (A|B), which makes it the probability that you got the order of the notation mixed up.\n[Miss Lenhart is pointing with a pointer, held in her right hand, to a white-board with tables, what looks like formulae and lots of other unreadable text. She looks toward her off-panel class, from where a voice replies to her question.] Miss Lenhart: Given these prevalences, is it likely that the test result is a false positive? Off-panel voice: Well, this chapter is on Bayes' Theorem, so yes.\n[Caption below the panel]: Sometimes, if you understand Bayes' Theorem well enough, you don't need it.\n"}
{"id":2546,"title":"Fiction vs Nonfiction","image_title":"Fiction vs Nonfiction","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2546","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/fiction_vs_nonfiction.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2546:_Fiction_vs_Nonfiction","transcript":"[Cueball is talking to Ponytail and White Hat.] Cueball: Star Wars ? Ponytail: Fiction.\n[Same setting.] Cueball: The Making of Star Wars ? White Hat: Nonfiction.\n[Closeup of Cueball.] Cueball: Star Wars: The Adventures of Boba Fett ? Off-panel voice: Fiction.\n[Closeup of Ponytail.] Cueball (off-panel): Star Wars: The Official Guide to Boba Fett's Armor and Weapons ? Ponytail: Nonfiction, technically.\n[Cueball has lifted a hand palm up as he talks to Ponytail and White Hat.] Cueball: Boba Fett's Gadgets and How He Got Them ? Ponytail: ...Fiction? Ponytail: It depends.\n[Cueball is talking to Ponytail and White Hat. Ponytail has turned towards White Hat and has taken a hand to her chin.] Cueball: Boba Fett: A Life , by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin? Ponytail: Hm. White Hat: Maybe we should just have a Boba Fett section.\n","explanation":"Cueball is asking Ponytail and White Hat to classify different Star Wars books and movies as fiction or nonfiction.  (Perhaps he is working at a library or bookstore, or sorting a personal collection.) Star Wars as a whole is a multimedia franchise, which includes films, TV series, novels, etc, but often singularly refers to the original 1977 film later more lengthily titled Star Wars: Episode IV \u2013 A New Hope (or, given the fact that the rest of the titles are books, one of several novelizations based on the script). The classifications get more complicated to determine as the conversation progresses while revealing a quite specific obsession with the character of Boba Fett . The complexity may even end up converting lumpers into splitters , a philosophical distinction that another recent comic touched upon.\nNonfiction (also spelled non-fiction) is any document or media content that intends, in good faith, to present only truth and accuracy regarding information, events, or people. In contrast, fiction offers information, events, or characters expected to be partly or largely imaginary, or else leaves open if and how the work refers to reality.\nIn the end, White Hat suggests that, since Cueball has so many works featuring Boba Fett, it would be more useful to group them together in a new category rather than sorting them into the fiction and nonfiction sections.\n[Cueball is talking to Ponytail and White Hat.] Cueball: Star Wars ? Ponytail: Fiction.\n[Same setting.] Cueball: The Making of Star Wars ? White Hat: Nonfiction.\n[Closeup of Cueball.] Cueball: Star Wars: The Adventures of Boba Fett ? Off-panel voice: Fiction.\n[Closeup of Ponytail.] Cueball (off-panel): Star Wars: The Official Guide to Boba Fett's Armor and Weapons ? Ponytail: Nonfiction, technically.\n[Cueball has lifted a hand palm up as he talks to Ponytail and White Hat.] Cueball: Boba Fett's Gadgets and How He Got Them ? Ponytail: ...Fiction? Ponytail: It depends.\n[Cueball is talking to Ponytail and White Hat. Ponytail has turned towards White Hat and has taken a hand to her chin.] Cueball: Boba Fett: A Life , by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin? Ponytail: Hm. White Hat: Maybe we should just have a Boba Fett section.\n"}
{"id":2547,"title":"Siren","image_title":"Siren","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2547","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/siren.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2547:_Siren","transcript":"[Circe is speaking to Odysseus.] Circe: Remember, Odysseus: Circe: As you pass the rocks you will hear a woman calling out to you, urging you to stray from your path, but plug your ears and hold your course, for her beguiling lies will draw you to a watery grave. Circe: I don't know why they can't just fix it. I keep filing error reports.\n[Caption below the panel:] Circe was actually just telling Odysseus to ignore his GPS.\n","explanation":"Odysseus is the hero of the Greek epic Odyssey by Homer . This is a poem that relates the journey of Odysseus back home to his homeland from the newly defeated Troy, and how he inadvertently angered Poseidon thus causing the journey to take 10 years.\nIn the story, now widely translated and adapted for modern audiences, Circe warns Odysseus of the Sirens , who sing beautiful songs that lure sailors towards their shores, just to doom the boats to sink upon the jagged rocks surrounding their islands. In Odysseus's own case, the Sirens even claim to be able to \" tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world \"; at this point, Odysseus has been away from home for many years and has no idea if his wife and son remember him, so the temptation to stay and listen (and thus find out if he will be able to return alive) is especially powerful.\nThis comic reframes the advice as if Odysseus was being told to ignore the incorrect instructions of a GPS-linked routefinder , rather than the Sirens. Errors, omissions or out-of-date information in the databases used by such devices famously have sent drivers down roads they might never have even tried to use (guided by printed maps, road-signs or even past experience) without the alluring voice of the 'infallible' dashboard device leading them through too-narrow lanes, into rivers or even hundreds of miles completely out of their way - perhaps to a destination similarly-named to their intended one. GPSs did not exist during the time the poem was written, [ citation needed ] so this could not be the case here.\nA navigation system giving wrong directions can happen, for example, due to outdated or incomplete map data. Sometimes users can file an error report with the provider of the navigation system and hope that they fix the problem in a software update. This is what Circe already did multiple times. However, the error was not fixed, so she has to resort to telling Odysseus to ignore the route.\nThe title text shows what the route description could have looked like, had Odysseus indeed used a modern navigation system. It includes the start and destination of the route, the estimated duration and warnings about special circumstances of the journey.\nNormally, the sea voyage from the City of Troy to Ithaca should take much less than ten years. For Odysseus it took so long because of the many obstacles he had to face, so the navigation system would have some sort of clairvoyance function built in.\n\"Route crosses an international border\" and \"Route includes a ferry\" are standard warnings included in a route description. The former alludes to the facts that Odysseus's voyage took him to many lands and kingdoms while the latter may allude to the fact that in Book XI of the Odyssey, Odysseus visits Hades, which is traditionally reached by a ferry across the river Styx, piloted by Charon the ferryman.  \"Route includes capture by the goddess Calypso \" is not normally something that a navigation system would warn about or could know about, [ citation needed ] but this indeed happened to Odysseus in Homer's tale; he was kept on her island Ogygia for seven years.\nThe weird directions in the title text may be a reference to 461: Google Maps .\n[Circe is speaking to Odysseus.] Circe: Remember, Odysseus: Circe: As you pass the rocks you will hear a woman calling out to you, urging you to stray from your path, but plug your ears and hold your course, for her beguiling lies will draw you to a watery grave. Circe: I don't know why they can't just fix it. I keep filing error reports.\n[Caption below the panel:] Circe was actually just telling Odysseus to ignore his GPS.\n"}
{"id":2548,"title":"Awful People","image_title":"Awful People","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2548","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/awful_people.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2548:_Awful_People","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are having a conversation while walking.] Cueball: The Internet makes it easy to be a jerk and forget the person we're talking to is a human. Megan: Yeah... Megan: But it also makes us see messages from awful people and assume they come from normal peers.\n[Closeup on Megan. Above Megan is a picture of a \"reply\" post from a man with sunglasses. The post has a title above it.] Megan: Recently I got a mean reply from a stranger. It was minor but it really got to me. Post title: Replies to \"Favorite Movie\" Post: Every group has one person who likes that movie, and it's the friend they all secretly hate.\n[Blondie as a news anchor behind a desk. A \"News4\" logo is displayed on the desk. There is a picture of the man with sunglasses with \"Arrested\" under his name. His picture is next to a picture of a house with \"Breaking\" above it. Megan's dialogue appears above the picture, but she herself is not shown in this panel.] Megan: Then the next week I saw that guy on the news. He was an actual murderer!\n[Megan and Cueball standing next to each other.] Megan: I can't believe I spent a week stressed out that my taste in movies wasn't shared by the East Valley Strangler. Cueball: Yeah, at least wait for a second opinion from the Lake Slayer.\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are having a conversation about social media. Cueball mentions that when responding to textual comments on a screen, it can be easy to forget these comments are made by thinking, feeling humans (a sentiment expressed before on XKCD ). Megan agrees, but also relates a negative comment she got from a stranger about her taste in movies. The twist is that it turns out the person criticizing her was a murderer. Although this does not inherently negate his taste in movies, it does free Megan from the burden of weighing his opinions equally to her own.\nThe title-text mentions the \u201cLakeSlayer7\u201d which is clearly a reference to the \"Lake Slayer\" in the comic. They mention, contrary to several other reviewers, that a burger joint in town is unsatisfactory, and that the reader should come to a place \u201cby the lake\u201d instead, which might be (and probably is) a plot to lure people to the lake and to be slain. [ citation needed ]\nIn many social and news sites there is a tendency to surface negative content . This can be editorial intent , naive algorithms , or both , attempting to induce rage to drive engagement. Review sites can exhibit a bias in either direction, with minutiae burying valid feedback.\n[Cueball and Megan are having a conversation while walking.] Cueball: The Internet makes it easy to be a jerk and forget the person we're talking to is a human. Megan: Yeah... Megan: But it also makes us see messages from awful people and assume they come from normal peers.\n[Closeup on Megan. Above Megan is a picture of a \"reply\" post from a man with sunglasses. The post has a title above it.] Megan: Recently I got a mean reply from a stranger. It was minor but it really got to me. Post title: Replies to \"Favorite Movie\" Post: Every group has one person who likes that movie, and it's the friend they all secretly hate.\n[Blondie as a news anchor behind a desk. A \"News4\" logo is displayed on the desk. There is a picture of the man with sunglasses with \"Arrested\" under his name. His picture is next to a picture of a house with \"Breaking\" above it. Megan's dialogue appears above the picture, but she herself is not shown in this panel.] Megan: Then the next week I saw that guy on the news. He was an actual murderer!\n[Megan and Cueball standing next to each other.] Megan: I can't believe I spent a week stressed out that my taste in movies wasn't shared by the East Valley Strangler. Cueball: Yeah, at least wait for a second opinion from the Lake Slayer.\n"}
{"id":2549,"title":"Edge Cake","image_title":"Edge Cake","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2549","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/edge_cake.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2549:_Edge_Cake","transcript":"[Megan is walking towards Cueball and Emily (who resembles Hairbun), holding a cake.] Megan: Happy birthday, Emily! Cueball: Wait, wasn't that last month? When's your birthday, anyway? Emily: It's complicated.\n[A diagram of a flight path over the North Pole, with meridian lines radiating out from the center. Emily's dialogue appears above the diagram, but she herself does not appear in this panel.] Emily: My mom went into labor on an arctic international flight that diverted directly over the North Pole. Emily: I was born in every time zone at once.\n[With Megan standing behind her, Emily holds out a plate of cake to Cueball.] Emily: It was also February 29th, and the airline was just changing ownership between countries. Emily: The International Bureau of Weights and Measures finally issued a declaration that it's my birthday whenever I want. Emily: Cake? Cueball: Nice, it's all edge pieces.\n","explanation":"Megan \u2014possibly an IERS (International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems) agent\u2014wishes Emily, represented as Hairbun , Happy Birthday. This prompts a confused Cueball to ask if her birthday was sometime last month. Emily explains that she was born over the North Pole in a plane, meaning that she was born in every timezone at once. Technically though this is false, as there are some timezones (such as UTC+5:45 ) that are not represented at the north pole. Except for the one hour before it's midnight at the International Date Line, the date in eastern time zones is one day ahead of western time zones, so Emily would have been born on two days at once.\nShe also says that it was February 29th (presumably it was also February 28 or March 1 in some time zones). February 29th only happens at most once every four years in the Gregorian calendar, adding to the confusion - people born on February 29th often celebrate their non-leap-year birthdays on arbitrary days (or not at all ). Normally one could simply use the time zone of the city the airplane took off from , but the airline company was changing ownership from one country to another at the time, so this option has apparently been ruled out. This is not terribly logical, however, since contracts transferring ownership usually specify an exact time (commonly one minute before or after midnight in a specific time zone to avoid confusion on which day midnight is in) to come into effect.  Regardless of which time zone(s) she was in when she was born this is an absolute time and if she was born before it she would have been born in an aircraft of the first country and if after it in an aircraft of the second country. Alternately, the time zone of the city the aircraft took off from doesn't change even if the nationality of the plane changes in midair, so that should have still been an option.\nThe punchline is that rather than try to identify the correct birthday for Emily, the BIPM has decided to let her have birthdays whenever she wants.  This doesn't make much sense, however. As noted above even if she was born in every time zone at once it could only have been on one of two days (February 29th, plus either February 28th or March 1st). Since it is common for people born on February 29th to celebrate on February 28th in non-leap years, it would have been trivial to pick the non-leap day present in some of the time zones (either February 28th or March 1st) and declare it Emily's birthday. It's possible that Emily was told \"You can choose when you want your birthday to be\", and Emily decided to exploit the lack of specificity to the degree presented in the comic.\nIn real life researchers in the Arctic at or near the North Pole use Coordinated Universal Time as the local time standard by convention, to avoid this exact problem. Thus it could have been said that Emily was born on the date that it was at that time in UTC. Furthermore, it is extremely unlikely that she would have been born at the exact instant the plane was over the north pole, indeed, it is unlikely that the plane even traveled over the exact pole, as opposed to a few miles or even feet to either side of it. With modern positioning equipment such as GPS, it should have been possible to determine which time zone the plane was in when she was born. Even in the impossibly unlikely event that she was directly above the pole at the instant of her birth, at jetliner speeds the plane was traveling about ten miles per minute, so a reasonable delay of even seconds in declaring \"time of birth\" would have placed the plane and her clearly in one time zone.\nBoth the comic title and Cueball's final line are puns on \" edge case \", an engineering term referring to situations or conditions that are unusual in a way likely to cause problems unless specifically accounted for. Edge pieces are generally only important with sheet goods (brownies, sheet cakes, etc), which are typically cut into pieces creating a difference between pieces originating on the edge and pieces originating from the center. Since the top and sides of a cake are often frosted, an edge piece has two faces covered in frosting and a corner piece has three, while a center piece only has one. Depending upon your relative preferences between the surface (often icing over marzipan) and core body of the cake (which can be fruitcake, or some variety of spongecake, etc, but not actually obvious which until the cake is cut), it being an edge-faced slice can be considered a bonus. Cueball certainly seems to appreciate this.\nThe title text states that the IERS sends Emily a cake every time they add or remove a leap second, out of superstition (perhaps Megan is delivering that cake). The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service is in charge of global time standards. It occasionally adds one leap-second to Coordinated Universal Time to adjust for changes in the rotation speed of the Earth.\nThe comic might also be a modern version of the SS Warrimoo , a passenger liner that reportedly crossed the international date line at the equator on midnight Dec. 31, 1899. This would have placed her bow in the Southern Hemisphere on 1 January 1900, her stern in the Northern Hemisphere on 31 December 1899. She would therefore have been simultaneously in two different hemispheres, on two different days, in two different months, in two different years, in two different decades, and according to some definitions in two different seasons (northern winter and southern summer) and possibly in two different centuries.\n[Megan is walking towards Cueball and Emily (who resembles Hairbun), holding a cake.] Megan: Happy birthday, Emily! Cueball: Wait, wasn't that last month? When's your birthday, anyway? Emily: It's complicated.\n[A diagram of a flight path over the North Pole, with meridian lines radiating out from the center. Emily's dialogue appears above the diagram, but she herself does not appear in this panel.] Emily: My mom went into labor on an arctic international flight that diverted directly over the North Pole. Emily: I was born in every time zone at once.\n[With Megan standing behind her, Emily holds out a plate of cake to Cueball.] Emily: It was also February 29th, and the airline was just changing ownership between countries. Emily: The International Bureau of Weights and Measures finally issued a declaration that it's my birthday whenever I want. Emily: Cake? Cueball: Nice, it's all edge pieces.\n"}
{"id":2550,"title":"Webb","image_title":"Webb","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2550","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/webb.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2550:_Webb","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are looking at an advent calendar hanging on a wall in front of them. The advent calendar is loosely tiled with 18 smaller hexagons, numbered from 5 to 22 in no clear order or pattern. They are regularly arranged into a larger hexagonal shape and of the five rows, there are three in the top and bottom ones, as also with each diagonal edge. There are four in each of the other rows, offset symmetrically, with a gap where a fifth could have been in the centre of the middle row.] Cueball: The hexagons are nice. Cueball: But why does it end at 22? Numbers:\n[Caption below the panel:] Astronomer Advent Calendar\n","explanation":"This comic depicts an advent calendar geared toward astronomers anticipating the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope .\nAt the time this comic was published, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was scheduled to be launched on the 22nd of December, 2021 (after many prior delays ). Christmas would indeed have come early for astronomers if the launch had been successful and on time. By December 14, the launch date had been pushed back again to \"no earlier than December 24\", as NASA was working on resolving a communications issue between the observatory and its launch vehicle system. This was followed by another delay announced on December 21, when the launch date was pushed back to December 25, due to weather concerns. It was successfully launched from Kourou in French Guiana on December 25 at 09:20 FGT (12:20 UTC, 07:20 EST ), as hoped for in this comic: 2559: December 25th Launch .\nA normal advent calendar marks the days until Christmas by allowing miniature doors to be opened, or other means of revealing some treat\/picture. This is often from the 1st of the month until the 'big reveal' on the 24th or 25th, though other schemes may exist in other cultures. This particular calendar features 18 hexagonal features, intended to be sequentially accessed over several days, in the same layout as the 18 gold-beryllium mirror segments designed to fold out to form the JWST's primary mirror. The first door is on the 5th, two days after this comic's publication date, making the last on the 22nd, the 'Big Day'.\nCueball's question could be interpreted two ways: Cueball doesn't know about JWST, so he is asking why this advent calendar ends before Christmas (and possibly fearing this calendar is similar to the one in 1245: 10-Day Forecast ); or Cueball does know about JWST and its history of delays, so he is asking why the calendar ends on 22 when there is no certainty in that launch date (and also implying that he expects it to be delayed). [Note: two weeks after the comic was posted, the JWST was again delayed, this time to no earlier than Christmas Eve (and later finally to Christmas Day itself), making the expectation accurate. This would also make a traditional advent calendar serve equally well, were it not for the hexagon design.]\nDecember 22 is also the day after the northern hemisphere winter solstice. The end of the world was famously predicted for the winter solstice in 2012 .\nThe title text references the fact that chocolates in advent calendars are often molded into different shapes, and the fact that the later numbers have a \"pamphlet on managing anxiety\" is probably supposed to quell the impeding fear that the launch could be delayed further or go wrong. The telescope's launch was initially planned for 2007, but due to various redesigns, financial issues, accidents, flaws, and the COVID-19 pandemic , the launch date was pushed back to 2011, then 2013, 2018, 2020, May 2021, October 2021, and finally to the current launch date in December 2021. It may also allude to post-launch concerns; even if the launch goes well, there will still be nervousness about the complex 160-day process in which the JWST reaches its intended observation point 930,000 miles from Earth, many subsystems are unfolded\/deployed, and the instrument passes its final calibrations. There is effectively no way to rescue\/repair this expensive piece of equipment should anything be amiss, unlike the Hubble Space Telescope , which was visited five times by Space Shuttles to remedy and enhance various features. (There exist issues with even Hubble that cannot currently be considered repairable without the Shuttles or any proven replacement, and the JWST will be located far beyond Hubble's operational orbit in a place much more difficult to get to.)\nThe JWST has been referenced previously in 1730: Starshade , 2014: JWST Delays and 2447: Hammer Incident , mentioned in 1461: Payloads as well as indirectly in 975: Occulting Telescope . After this comic it was referenced in 2559: December 25th Launch and 2564: Sunshield .\n[Cueball and Ponytail are looking at an advent calendar hanging on a wall in front of them. The advent calendar is loosely tiled with 18 smaller hexagons, numbered from 5 to 22 in no clear order or pattern. They are regularly arranged into a larger hexagonal shape and of the five rows, there are three in the top and bottom ones, as also with each diagonal edge. There are four in each of the other rows, offset symmetrically, with a gap where a fifth could have been in the centre of the middle row.] Cueball: The hexagons are nice. Cueball: But why does it end at 22? Numbers:\n[Caption below the panel:] Astronomer Advent Calendar\n"}
{"id":2551,"title":"Debunking","image_title":"Debunking","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2551","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/debunking.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2551:_Debunking","transcript":"[Several news headlines are shown in boxes.] [Box 1] AP photos show Dr. Fauci's office contains a normal number of microwaves [Box 2] Fact check: singer Billie Eilish was born years after the TWA Flight 800 explosion [Box 3] Vaccinated people can remove their hats without trouble by tugging upward, say doctors [Box 4] Physicists say Dorito powder is affected by gravity [Box 5] Steering wheels will work normally on Dec 12th; make left and right turns as usual [Box 6] CNN investigation: Santa's skin is dry and healthy this year, with the same amount of oil as before [Caption below the panel:] I don't know whether the \"Don't repeat the claim in the headline debunking it\" thing works or not, but it definitely makes reading the news weird.\n","explanation":"When writing a news article that \"debunks\" a claim (shows why it is false), writing its headline in the form \"X is false\" is discouraged . The reason is that just repeatedly seeing \"X\", even if negated or followed by \"is false\", can make readers subconsciously believe it.\nTo avoid this, Randall as a journalist has worded his debunking articles in a positive sense. This makes for a confusing read if the reader has not heard of the original claim. The \"original claims\" allegedly being debunked here don't actually appear to have been made anywhere, and can only be inferred from the debunking.\nMuch of the debunking relies on setting simple facts straight, making for bizarrely banal headlines.\n[Several news headlines are shown in boxes.] [Box 1] AP photos show Dr. Fauci's office contains a normal number of microwaves [Box 2] Fact check: singer Billie Eilish was born years after the TWA Flight 800 explosion [Box 3] Vaccinated people can remove their hats without trouble by tugging upward, say doctors [Box 4] Physicists say Dorito powder is affected by gravity [Box 5] Steering wheels will work normally on Dec 12th; make left and right turns as usual [Box 6] CNN investigation: Santa's skin is dry and healthy this year, with the same amount of oil as before [Caption below the panel:] I don't know whether the \"Don't repeat the claim in the headline debunking it\" thing works or not, but it definitely makes reading the news weird.\n"}
{"id":2552,"title":"The Last Molecule","image_title":"The Last Molecule","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2552","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/the_last_molecule.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2552:_The_Last_Molecule","transcript":"[Ponytail is presenting on a stage. To the top-center of the slide which Ponytail is pointing to, there is a circled \"100% complete\" under \"Chemistry\", then to the left is \"Biology\" which is at \"93% complete\" and to the right is \"Physics\" which is at \"98% complete\". The bottom of the slide shows the structural formula of a molecule which is captioned \"The Last One\", along with a few smaller captions around it drawn as squiggles.]\nPonytail: With the discovery of the last molecule, I'm pleased to announce that chemistry is finally complete. Ponytail: Best of luck to our competitors in their race for second place.\n","explanation":"This comic jokingly proposes a situation in which chemists have discovered and catalogued every single possible molecule. Thus they declare they have \"completed chemistry.\"  As deep learning algorithms can now predict chemical properties of proteins in advance of measurement, this situation may be looming closer.\nLike comic 2268 , this may be a reference to a quote from around 1900, often attributed to Lord Kelvin or Albert Michelson: \"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.\" More likely, this is a reference to attempts by Frege and by Russell and Whitehead a century ago to prove using symbolic logic the completeness of arithmetic. This turned out to be impossible since Kurt Goedel's famous Incompleteness Theorem proved that at least one proposition could neither be proved true or false. Against this background, the idea that natural sciences could be 90+% complete is humorously exaggerated.\nIn real life the number of ways to arrange atoms into molecules grows combinatorically with the number of atoms in a molecule. Since molecules can be extremely large (up until the point where gravity takes over and initiates nuclear fusion), the number of possible combinations is much much larger than the number of particles in the observable universe, making the full cataloging of all molecules impossible. Thus, a \"final molecule\" cannot be reached. In addition, chemistry is the study of the interaction and changing states of atoms and molecules, not simply the cataloging of all specimens of molecule. Even if we did have a list of every molecule, there are a far greater number of ways to continue studying them, so the field would still be nowhere near completed.\nThis is reminiscent of biology's focus in previous centuries on simply cataloging the species on Earth, or Mathematics' classification of finite simple groups (only the latter was, surprisingly, actually completed successfully).\nFurther, the goal of science is not to \"complete\" a field, but to understand it better and better (finite order group theory did not shutter its doors after all finite simple groups were classified).  No scientific field is considered fully understood (or rather, it is then considered a specialisation of a wider field). As readers are aware of this, part of the humor comes from the very high percentages given to the different fields. Putting Biology at 93% and Physics at 98% is patently absurd. Another part of the humor is the precision. As mentioned in the title text, we can't even give a definitive answer to changing-target yet deceptively simple questions like \"How many kinds of ants are there?\"\nIf biology were simply a matter of cataloging species, we are currently at around 10-20%. And yes many of them are ants; when J.B.S Haldane, founder of the field of population genetics, was asked what he learned about God from studying creation, he reportedly said \"God is incredibly fond of beetles\" . Counting species aside, fundamental and important problems such as what genes promote which traits, the nature of cognition, and the mechanism behind several diseases remain complete mysteries. We know less about our own ocean floor than we do about the surface of Mars.\nAs for Physics, all the elementary particles of the Standard Model of particle physics have been experimentally detected, culminating in the 2012 detection of the Higgs Boson . But questions such as \"what is dark matter?\", \"how do we unify the four fundamental forces?\", \"how do we make nuclear fusion possible on earth?\", \"is the speed of light symmetrical?\", and \"how many dimensions does the universe have?\" make it clear that the field still has a long, long way to go.\nThe title text in particular makes fun of Biology lagging behind due to the inherent difficulty of cataloging all species. Species are being constantly created and recategorized, so even if it were possible to know exactly what animals were alive on Earth at any one time, and which could interbreed, there would still be no agreement on the number of species they constituted, and that's without even getting into historic species, such as the contentious question of whether Neanderthals are considered a subspecies of homo sapiens, or a whole separate species.\n[Ponytail is presenting on a stage. To the top-center of the slide which Ponytail is pointing to, there is a circled \"100% complete\" under \"Chemistry\", then to the left is \"Biology\" which is at \"93% complete\" and to the right is \"Physics\" which is at \"98% complete\". The bottom of the slide shows the structural formula of a molecule which is captioned \"The Last One\", along with a few smaller captions around it drawn as squiggles.]\nPonytail: With the discovery of the last molecule, I'm pleased to announce that chemistry is finally complete. Ponytail: Best of luck to our competitors in their race for second place.\n"}
{"id":2553,"title":"Incident Report","image_title":"Incident Report","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2553","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/incident_report.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2553:_Incident_Report","transcript":"Facility: East Valley Nuclear Plant Date: 12\/10\/2021 Report ID: 9603120071 Event description: Roughly 18 hours prior to the incident, an Amazon package containing fireworks was mistakenly delivered to the reactor control room and left under the console. The next day, at approximately 14:00 , Technician A arrived at the facility with a bag containing four juggling pins. At 14:20 , Technician A entered the control room, and joined Technician B at the console. At 14:28 , Technician C exited the elevator and approached the control room holding a birthday cake intended for Technician B. At 14:29:22 , Technician A said \"Hey [Technician B], check out this cool trick I learned\" while taking out the juggling pins. Technician B turned to look just as, at 14:29:26 , Technician C entered holding the cake.\n[Caption below the panel]: You know things are about to get bad when the incident report starts including seconds in the timestamps.\n","explanation":"An incident report describes the sequence of events when something goes wrong, including the lead-up as well as the aftermath. This usually involves describing at what time related events happen. In this comic, a report at a nuclear power plant on the day of the comic's publishing starts with particularly vague timestamps (that a package of fireworks arrived \"roughly 18 hours prior\" to it), then uses approximate minute-level precision (\"14:00\" and \"14:20\", which could reasonably be five minutes off in either direction), then minute-level precision (\"14:28\"), then second-level precision (\"14:29:22\" and \"14:29:26\").\nThis suggests that the clock time is really a proxy for the amount of time before one specific moment where everything falls apart, and when seconds start appearing, it implies that the recollection is within a few minutes of the disaster. Normally the increased level of precision reflects close monitoring capabilities of the affected systems, reviewing monitoring equipment, such as surveillance camera and microphone recordings, and\/or detailed analysis by incident investigators. It may have been sufficient for the resulting inquiry to merely note the prior arrival of the original package, and possibly then read off (whatever remains of) the signing-in logs for the approximate times each member of staff arrives on the scene. At some point, though, the investigation will refer to fully timestamped security recordings, perhaps even eventually frame-by-frame with particular interest in exactly which things touched exactly what other things, in sequence, in order to hopefully learn all the necessary lessons about the incident.\nSynchronization of events is important in incident investigations , so often systems are required to take input from common, relatively precise time references, such as GPS , WWV broadcast , or cellular telephone systems. For example, an aircraft crash needs radar positioning data synced with voice communications and flight recorder data .  Lack of correlation between these is a potential source of conspiracy theories, for example one of the hijacked planes on 9\/11 crashed into Pennsylvania either at 10:03 or 10:06 depending on two different information sources.\nIn many situations, incident reports are anonymized as shown to protect the identities of those people involved in the incidents. This is often done to prevent unnecessary blaming of certain individuals, particularly when it hasn't yet been determined whether the incident was negligence or just an accident.\nExamples of real-life incident reports with second-level precision timestamps showing the increasing precision around critical moments include:\nThe report shown cuts off before reaching the actual incident, leaving it to the reader to imagine what happened next. If the birthday cake has lit candles, one possible sequence of events is that a dropped or badly thrown juggling pin could have hit one of them and then rolled over to the fireworks package, thus igniting the package. This would have caused the fireworks to go off underneath the reactor control's console.\nAlthough the comic refers to juggling \"pins\" , jugglers commonly call those props \"clubs.\" It is possible Randall is confusing the similarly shaped objects in 10-pin bowling to juggling clubs. \"Pins\" are another name for a component of Uranium Carbide type nuclear fuel rods , which are involved in the safe control of the nuclear reaction within a nuclear power plant. No sane reactor staff would juggle these complex, heavy and expensive pieces of equipment. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text refers to the theme music from the 1975 film Jaws , which has come to represent impending danger. Movies use music to create the correct emotional tone; suspenseful music indicates that something bad is about to happen. The Jaws theme is an iconic example, famously used to create a sense of foreboding, then uses increasingly rapid tempo to build a sense of imminent danger, culminating in a dramatic moment of disaster (a shark attack, in the film). As with the increasing tempo of this theme, the increasing precision with which events are recorded in an incident report build the increasing sense that something terrible is imminent.\n9603120071 is an actual accession number for an incident at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in 1996. Four slightly contaminated stray kittens were found, cleaned, and adopted. No clock times were mentioned in the report.\nReal-world nuclear power stations have strictly regulated control rooms which would prevent the simultaneous presence of fireworks, juggling and birthday celebrations. [1] [2] There is no East Valley nuclear power plant, but there are two reactor units at the nuclear power plant in Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania.\nFacility: East Valley Nuclear Plant Date: 12\/10\/2021 Report ID: 9603120071 Event description: Roughly 18 hours prior to the incident, an Amazon package containing fireworks was mistakenly delivered to the reactor control room and left under the console. The next day, at approximately 14:00 , Technician A arrived at the facility with a bag containing four juggling pins. At 14:20 , Technician A entered the control room, and joined Technician B at the console. At 14:28 , Technician C exited the elevator and approached the control room holding a birthday cake intended for Technician B. At 14:29:22 , Technician A said \"Hey [Technician B], check out this cool trick I learned\" while taking out the juggling pins. Technician B turned to look just as, at 14:29:26 , Technician C entered holding the cake.\n[Caption below the panel]: You know things are about to get bad when the incident report starts including seconds in the timestamps.\n"}
{"id":2554,"title":"Gift Exchange","image_title":"Gift Exchange","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2554","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/gift_exchange.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2554:_Gift_Exchange","transcript":"[Ponytail is talking to Cueball.] Ponytail: Ugh, I have to organize a fair gift exchange for my survey-loving family. Ponytail: Do you want to help? Ponytail: They said it's \"okay if it's complicated.\"\n[Caption below the panel:] The perfect gift for a political scientist","explanation":"In December, white elephant gift exchange parties are popular, in which party-goers bring and exchange presents, via a variety of procedures which often involve individuals taking turns to pick a present. Usually they can either pick a wrapped present and open it, or take a present that someone else has opened already.\nMany political scientists think that creating a fair gift exchange is a really tricky problem, since it involves different valuation of various goods (one person might like socks while another person would not), a possible incentive to misrepresent how much you value things (\"You're going to have to offer me a LOT to give up these socks, because I really like them\"), arbitrary order effects (who goes first matters), and more. These problems have a lot of political analogues in the political science topics of social choice theory and mechanism design , and many political scientists dedicate years of their life to figuring out the best solutions. Therefore, a political scientist would enjoy the challenge of creating a fair gift exchange; it is the best gift that Ponytail could have given them.\nThe scenario Ponytail presents is formally known as a fair item allocation problem, for which there are various approaches to how to define fair , and various proposed allocation algorithms, some of which are computationally intractable even for small numbers of participants.\nThe fact that the family loves surveys implies that a favourite method of political scientists, surveying the electorate, would be greatly appreciated. The \"It's okay if it's complicated\" line is funny because many of the theoretically best solutions a political scientist might come up with would be very complicated--far more so than the typical person would want to think about.\nIn the title text, having well-formatted budgets makes a scientist's job much easier since it is better for data manipulation. In the same way, expressing preferences on a well-calibrated numerical scale makes data manipulation simple and straightforward. Therefore, Ponytail's scenario is an excellent gift for the political scientist. It also extends the humorous scenario of the nerdy family who enjoy filling in complex surveys - the same family would be likely to enjoy a well-formatted budget spreadsheet.\n[Ponytail is talking to Cueball.] Ponytail: Ugh, I have to organize a fair gift exchange for my survey-loving family. Ponytail: Do you want to help? Ponytail: They said it's \"okay if it's complicated.\"\n[Caption below the panel:] The perfect gift for a political scientist"}
{"id":2555,"title":"Notifications","image_title":"Notifications","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2555","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/notifications.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2555:_Notifications","transcript":"[White Hat, Megan and Cueball are standing next to each other. White Hat is separated from the other two figures by a small margin.] White Hat: And another thing that annoys me about people is... Cueball: This user has notifications turned off.\n[The camera zooms in on Megan and Cueball. Megan turns to look at Cueball.] Cueball: They will see your messages when they're back. Cueball: Notify anyway?\n[The camera zooms outward to show White Hat. Megan turns back to look at White Hat. All three figures are standing silently.]\n[Megan turns to look at Cueball again.] Megan: What are you-- Cueball: Shhh- It's working.\n","explanation":"Many devices will notify the user when something of possible interest occurs (e.g., a new phone call is received, a load of laundry is done).  Some, such as the instant messaging software Slack , allows you to turn notifications off while you're offline or away (or just don't want to be disturbed). Such a function would be desirable in real life, as illustrated here.  The sender can sometimes override this and notify the user anyway.\nWhite Hat is telling Cueball and Megan about \"another thing that annoys [him] about people,\" which means that either the strip begins after he has already vented a long series of gripes, or he is prone to spontaneously airing one of his many grievances non sequitur .  (Both of those traits could be something that annoys Cueball about people.) Cueball responds by \"turning off his notifications\" from White Hat. White Hat immediately falls silent, sparing Megan and Cueball from further boring \"conversation\". Maybe Cueball has picked up the \"Commented\" trick , White Hat is thrown off by the unusual statement, or it could be that he just naively takes Cueball at his word.  Either way, now that he \"knows\" that he will not receive any further immediate engagement from Cueball, he thus gives up, for the time being, talking at Megan and Cueball about his annoyance(s). If he believes the premise, he might recite the rest of his conversation as soon as Cueball supposedly turns notifications back on. His behavior is reminiscent of a user who is logged into a chat server but is \"away from keyboard\" and totally disengaged.\nMegan starts to ask Cueball what he's doing, but Cueball shushes her to let it 'keep working' -- presumably, if Megan speaks up, she might alert White Hat that Cueball is still listening and draw him back into conversation.\nIn the title text, this is taken even further by combining this with a standard real-life reason (or excuse) to leave a social situation: that the person has to leave because it is getting late. It is often used when someone really has a thing early the next day and wants to get home early to get enough sleep to be prepared for the \"thing\", but the vagueness of the thing suggests that they just want to get out of uncomfortable company or situations.\nThe specific time, 10:34 pm, informs the messenger (who could be anywhere) of the user's time zone, and tells the one that wishes to notify that it is past the normal bedtime in the user's time zone. And this is why the program would normally ask if they still really wish to notify them, since they would risk waking the recipient up. This could cause annoyance if the message is not urgent and important. In this case, however, it is clear he is awake and wants to leave the social situation, supposedly because of a thing he has the next day. In this situation, it is funny because apparently it's Cueball talking about himself in the third person to another person who knows they are in the same time zone, and unless all of the characters are out really late it's unlikely that it's actually that late at night in \"Cueball's time zone\" at the moment.\nAn alternate explanation is that the comic highlights how strange it is that the \"This user has notifications off, Notify anyway?\" pop-up can sometimes leave one paralyzed with indecision, despite the fact that it does literally nothing to stop you from sending the text as normal. If it pops up when you send a text, now you have to decide whether your text is important enough to notify the person you have texted, even though they have notifications off. It's the same situation as if you're told that your boss is doing something important. You could be paralyzed, trying to figure out whether \"the machine ran out of batteries\" is more important than whatever generic \"important thing\" the other person is doing. Plus, now you have to factor in things like whether your interruption will cause more harm than help, how long it'll take, etc.\nIf Cueball just \"Blocked\" notifications from white hat, White Hat would simply be annoyed and just keep talking (because blocking implies that you just don't want to talk anymore.) However, by giving White Hat the option to \"Notify anyway\", Cueball paralyzes White Hat with indecision, as shown by him not doing anything for multiple panels.\nThis is ironic, as when users are given the option to \"Notify anyway\", it basically renders the action of turning off notifications useless because anyone can bypass the system. However, it still works to stop most message notifications, because no one wants to bypass the filter and risk annoying the person who turned off notifications. This may be why Cueball shushes Megan to let it 'keep working'; If Megan speaks up, White Hat might realize that Cueball's 'filter' does literally nothing to stop his messages, and White Hat would resume his rant.\n[White Hat, Megan and Cueball are standing next to each other. White Hat is separated from the other two figures by a small margin.] White Hat: And another thing that annoys me about people is... Cueball: This user has notifications turned off.\n[The camera zooms in on Megan and Cueball. Megan turns to look at Cueball.] Cueball: They will see your messages when they're back. Cueball: Notify anyway?\n[The camera zooms outward to show White Hat. Megan turns back to look at White Hat. All three figures are standing silently.]\n[Megan turns to look at Cueball again.] Megan: What are you-- Cueball: Shhh- It's working.\n"}
{"id":2556,"title":"Turing Complete","image_title":"Turing Complete","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2556","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/turing_complete.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2556:_Turing_Complete","transcript":"[Ponytail has raised her hand, palm up, as she addresses Cueball.] Ponytail: ...Now, it turns out this is actually Turing-Complete...\n[Caption below the panel:] This phrase either means someone spent six months getting their dishwasher to play Mario or you're under attack by a nation-state.\n","explanation":"A Turing machine is a theoretical computer that has an infinite tape of symbols.   It can read and change the symbols on the tape as it moves up and down this tape according to a set of instructions (program).\nThis very simple machine can be shown to do every computational task that what we think of as a \"computer\" can do, given the right program and enough time. Something that is Turing complete is able to act as a Turing machine, though generally physical examples are limited to having a finite tape, [ citation needed ] and this means it is also able to do basically every computational task.\nMany pieces of hardware and software are supposed to be Turing complete (even Excel, as previously pointed out in 2453: Excel Lambda ).  Some other things turn out to be Turing complete, even if they weren't designed for it (for instance, the tabletop game Magic: The Gathering or, at least within xkcd meta-reality, rocks in a desert ). Whatever Ponytail has been referring to is not shown, but it seems to be an anecdote about how something seemingly too simple and\/or specialised to exhibit such a computational equivalence has been discovered to actually be that capable. Ponytail may refer to the recent articles about the background of the NSO zero click exploit for iPhones, e.g. this .\nMario is the lead character in a long running series of video games including Donkey Kong , Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart .  Running video games, such as Doom , is one common way of demonstrating the ability to run arbitrary programs on devices that were not intended as general purpose computers.  With complex processors being installed in more and more devices, it's plausible that someone could get a dishwasher to play Mario.\nHowever, another reason to make a device run arbitrary code is to breach security. If the owner of a system assumes that it can only do one specific thing, like operate a dishwasher, they may not take precautions against hacking.  But if the system is actually Turing-complete, a hacker could potentially make it do something else, like become part of a botnet .  Therefore, \"this is actually Turing-complete\" could be the prelude to a complicated hacking attempt.  Sophisticated hacking attacks are often the work of hackers that have the support of a government, or nation-state .\nThe ForcedEntry exploit is a way that was developed to allow PDF files to force malware onto various devices. PDF files are normally used to present documents.  The exploit uses a  PDF's ability to do logic operations on pixels to implement a simple virtual CPU within one of the PDF renderer's decompression functions. Constructing a CPU in this way is similar to how a hardware CPU is made of individual logic gates.  ForcedEntry was publicized a few days before this comic came out.\nIn the title-text it is suggested that this mechanism can be used for what might be more legal and practical purposes, although this might be up to some interpretation depending upon who has the right (and permission) to do what.\nA tech stack is one shorthand way of describing the way an integrated grouping of communicating software packages provides everything from the deepest data handling (even as low-level as an operating system itself) to the user interface. All of these will normally be on a computer (or possibly many of them, whether locally or distributed worldwide) and if a sufficiently functional surrogate system is capable of emulating this (computing what the original computer(s) would do) then it can be considered to effectively be the same stack of technology and duplicate or replace the originals.\n[Ponytail has raised her hand, palm up, as she addresses Cueball.] Ponytail: ...Now, it turns out this is actually Turing-Complete...\n[Caption below the panel:] This phrase either means someone spent six months getting their dishwasher to play Mario or you're under attack by a nation-state.\n"}
{"id":2557,"title":"Immunity","image_title":"Immunity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2557","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/immunity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2557:_Immunity","transcript":"[White Hat has raised his hand, palm up, as he addresses Cueball.] White Hat: See, it's good to get infected, because it gives you immunity.\n[White Hat has lowered his arm.] Cueball: Why would I want immunity?\n[Same setting.] White Hat: To protect you from getting inf... White Hat: ...wait.\n","explanation":"This comic is, although not specifically referenced, another entry in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nA common issue posited by people opposed to vaccination , especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, is that there are other ways to become immune to diseases caused by viruses or bacteria \u2014 most notably, contracting the disease \"naturally\".\nCueball , by way of questioning, points out to White Hat that this makes no sense. Contracting the natural disease is the thing people are trying to prevent . Diseases are bad. [ citation needed ]\nAlthough there are plenty of instances where someone has already recovered, and therefore is in possession of natural immunity , it would be better to have that immunity without getting sick at all. Especially with a disease like COVID that can cause permanent damage even to those who eventually clear the virus. Vaccination provides similar immunity without the negative effects of infection. While explaining that getting infected is the best way to avoid getting infected, White Hat thus realizes the circular logic presented by anti-vaxxers , and thus stops mid sentence.\nThe title text elaborates on this by pointing out that people with no understanding of the immune system will understand that contracting a disease to avoid contracting a disease is a bad idea, and that people with a strong understanding of the immune system will understand the specific ways it can fail (and that vaccines provide a greater benefit for less risk). It is thus only people with a limited understanding of the immune system, who know that infection can provide immunity but haven't thought out the disadvantages of catching the disease, who would make a claim such as White Hat does.\nThe comic does not specifically reference vaccines and anti-vaxxers. It could also be about people who refuse to wear masks and social distance during the pandemic, who do not understand how much they are putting other people at risk. White Hat may even be fumbling an explanation of his previous 2515: Vaccine Research into why vaccines are good.\nOlder folks may be familiar with the \"infection gives you immunity\" trope due to their experience with so-called \"childhood diseases\". Before there were vaccines for e.g. measles , mumps , and chickenpox , it was seen as preferable for young children to contract these diseases, because the risk of serious illness is greater for those who get \"first infections\" later in life. Children run a comparatively smaller risk of serious illness in return for (usually) life-long immunity. Note that this only ever made sense for children whose immune system is still flexible enough to adapt, and not for 30 something fitness bros. Furthermore, the trope has outlived its context. Small as the risk to children of serious illness from measles, mumps, and chickenpox might be, vaccines all but eliminate the risk of contracting serious symptoms at all, so there is no sensible reason to subject oneself to infection.\nThe trope, moreover, is misapplied to COVID-19, because, on present evidence, immunity from infection is short-lived (which, at least at the time of this comic, was exacerbated by the fact that variants with sufficiently different spike proteins to at least partially evade natural immunity (such as beta, delta, and omicron) were arising at a rate of multiple per year), so there is no benefit to be gained by running the risk of winding up in the hospital - or the morgue. The better comparison is to influenza , which people get vaccinated against every year. Instead of childhood diseases, think of diseases that had a high probability of serious illness at any age, such as poliomyelitis and smallpox , for which few accepted the \"infection gives you immunity\" trope (even though, for those diseases, infection typically yielded life-long immunity), and there was far less resistance to effective vaccines once these became available.\n[White Hat has raised his hand, palm up, as he addresses Cueball.] White Hat: See, it's good to get infected, because it gives you immunity.\n[White Hat has lowered his arm.] Cueball: Why would I want immunity?\n[Same setting.] White Hat: To protect you from getting inf... White Hat: ...wait.\n"}
{"id":2558,"title":"Rapid Test Results","image_title":"Rapid Test Results","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2558","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rapid_test_results.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2558:_Rapid_Test_Results","transcript":"[Header above the comic:] Interpreting Rapid Test Results\n[What follows is a set of 8 possible rapid test results for COVID-19.]\n[One line on the \"C\".] Negative\n[Two lines, one on the \"C\" and one on the \"T\".] Positive\n[Two curvy lines on the \"C\" and the \"T\", resembling the \"approximately equal\" sign.] Approximately positive\n[Two lines, not on the \"C\" or the \"T\", but they are instead closer together.] Positive (college ruled)\n[Five lines resembling a cell signal symbol.] Good cell signal\n[Two straight lines, on the \"C\" and \"T\", with lines going outward from the centre, giving an illusion of the lines being curved.] Did you know these lines are actually parallel?\n[One line on the \"C\", and two lines in a cross with one line sticking upward of the center of the cross.] The Blair Witch is near\n[Three lines, with one on the \"C\", one on the \"T\", and one in the middle of the \"C\" and \"T\".] Click to expand Covid menu\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .\nThis comic is a joke about COVID-19 rapid lateral flow test results. These devices are used in many countries for individuals to test their own nasal and oropharynx fluid for evidence of COVID-19 virus to detect asymptomatic infection.  These tests have two indicator strips - a test line for covid-19 and a control line to check the device is working correctly.  Where a control line is not present, the test should be ignored and repeated. Until comparatively recently pregnancy was the occasion most familiar for requiring this form of test)\nThe first 2 answers are the standard indicators for a negative and positive result, but Randall takes this to absurdity, see below in the table .\nThe title text interprets the hyphen in \"Covid-19\" as a negative sign to make a mathematical joke (or possibly a reference to antimatter , which in reality mutually annihilates when coming into contact with regular matter). Here Randall postulates a counterpart virus to Covid-19, resulting in a test with inverted colors, which he names Covid+19. When combined this anti-coronavirus exactly matches the original one and results in zero Covid, curing those who had previously been infected.\nThis was the last comic before this year's Christmas comic . It was about Covid-19 testing. The last comic before the 2020 Christmas comic, 2402: Into My Veins , was about the Covid-19 vaccine.\n[Header above the comic:] Interpreting Rapid Test Results\n[What follows is a set of 8 possible rapid test results for COVID-19.]\n[One line on the \"C\".] Negative\n[Two lines, one on the \"C\" and one on the \"T\".] Positive\n[Two curvy lines on the \"C\" and the \"T\", resembling the \"approximately equal\" sign.] Approximately positive\n[Two lines, not on the \"C\" or the \"T\", but they are instead closer together.] Positive (college ruled)\n[Five lines resembling a cell signal symbol.] Good cell signal\n[Two straight lines, on the \"C\" and \"T\", with lines going outward from the centre, giving an illusion of the lines being curved.] Did you know these lines are actually parallel?\n[One line on the \"C\", and two lines in a cross with one line sticking upward of the center of the cross.] The Blair Witch is near\n[Three lines, with one on the \"C\", one on the \"T\", and one in the middle of the \"C\" and \"T\".] Click to expand Covid menu\n"}
{"id":2559,"title":"December 25th Launch","image_title":"December 25th Launch","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2559","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/december_25th_launch.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2559:_December_25th_Launch","transcript":"[Close-up of the top of the James Webb Space Telescope launch rocket. A \"Webb\" logo can be seen alongside other indistinct logos. Some clouds and birds are visible in the background.] Caption: T-minus 10...9...8...\n[Zoom-out to show the complete rocket and the ground below. The rocket takes up the bottom-left corner. At the top-right, Santa Claus and a line of reindeer are flying in towards the left.] Santa: Ho ho ho! Santa: Merry Christmas!\n[Ponytail and Cueball sitting at mission control consoles.] Cueball: Oh no.\n","explanation":"The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. It has suffered many, many delays over its development period (as previously referenced in 2014: JWST Delays ), but it finally launched on Christmas day, December 25, 2021.\nThis was about 7 hours after this comic appeared. The release day of this comic was Christmas Eve the 24th of December. As can be seen from when this page was created 05:02:00, 25 December 2021 (UTC), the comic came out at least 7 hours before launch which was 12:20:00, 25 December 2021 (UTC). Since Boston ( Randall's home town) is 5 hours after UTC then the comic must have released close to midnight on the 24th for Randall, and clearly before midnight for the rest of the time zones in the US.\nWeb comics are usually drawn some time in advance. When this comic was drawn and scheduled for publication, it is possible NASA had not yet announced that the launch of JWST was slipping from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day.\nThe launch was probably three days after Randall opened the last number in his Webb advent calendar. (Thus this is the second Christmas comic this year referring to the telescope).\nIn this comic, the James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready to take off. However, an unfortunate circumstance occurs: Santa Claus himself, presumably on his way to or from delivering presents to children, crosses into the path of the launch rocket. The joke is the implication that, right on the brink of success, this extraordinarily unlucky incident will either destroy the telescope, harm Santa, or cause yet another delay, much to Cueball 's horror.\nReal launch aborts have occurred with fewer than 2 seconds left in the countdown, causing delays of over a month.\nAccording to the title text, the range safety officer has made the decision to shoot down Santa Claus's sleigh, in order to clear the sky above, protecting the launch window. This seems to demonstrate that they are determined not to let anything delay the launch any further (or that given a choice between destroying the telescope or destroying Santa, the range safety officer chooses the latter). \"Range Safety Officer\" is the job title of a person in charge of the safety of a launch.\nAirspace is normally closed to air traffic to avoid collisions between aircraft and rocket launches.  While Santa might not know about such restrictions, he already knows about this particular launch because thousands of astronomy geeks have asked for a new space telescope as a Christmas present in their letters to Santa, and the easiest way for Santa to deliver such a present is just keeping a safe distance from the launch pad. Moreover NORAD tracks Santa 's flying around the world and would be able to give sufficient warning to both Santa and Ground Control to prevent such a close encounter of a festive kind; as well as to prevent accidental global thermonuclear war by confusing a pack of flying reindeer with a first-strike attack by a foreign power. Finally, Santa Claus performs deliveries overnight, while the launch is scheduled for morning local time , so the timing of such a collision would not occur.\nThe JWST has been referenced previously in 1730: Starshade , 2014: JWST Delays , 2447: Hammer Incident and 2550: Webb , is on the list of payloads in 1461: Payloads and its planned use was indirectly referenced in 975: Occulting Telescope .  Santa is known to maintain a list of humans responsible for technological incidents and to have suitable punishment for offenders. 12 days after launch it was referenced again in 2564: Sunshield .\n[Close-up of the top of the James Webb Space Telescope launch rocket. A \"Webb\" logo can be seen alongside other indistinct logos. Some clouds and birds are visible in the background.] Caption: T-minus 10...9...8...\n[Zoom-out to show the complete rocket and the ground below. The rocket takes up the bottom-left corner. At the top-right, Santa Claus and a line of reindeer are flying in towards the left.] Santa: Ho ho ho! Santa: Merry Christmas!\n[Ponytail and Cueball sitting at mission control consoles.] Cueball: Oh no.\n"}
{"id":2560,"title":"Confounding Variables","image_title":"Confounding Variables","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2560","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/confounding_variables.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2560:_Confounding_Variables","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart is holding a pointer and pointing at a board with the a large heading with some unreadable text beneath it. Below this there are two graphs with scattered points. In the top graph the points are almost on a straight increasing line. In the bottom the data points seem to be more random. Mrs Lenhart covers most of the right side of the board, but there is more unreadable text to the right of her.] Miss Lenhart: If you don't control for confounding variables, they'll mask the real effect and mislead you. Heading: Statistics\n[Miss Lenhart is holding the pointer down in one hand while she holds a finger in the air with the other hand. The board is no longer shown.] Miss Lenhart: But if you control for too many variables, your choices will shape the data and you'll mislead yourself.\n[Miss Lenhart is holding both arms down, still with the pointer in her hand.] Miss Lenhart: Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot where you do both, making you doubly wrong. Miss Lenhart: Stats are a farce and truth is unknowable. See you next week!\n","explanation":"In statistics, a confounding variable is a third variable that's related to the independent variable, and also causally related to the dependent variable. An example is that you see a correlation between sunburn rates and ice cream consumption; the confounding variable is temperature: high temperatures cause people go out in the sun and get burned more, and also eat more ice cream.\nOne way to control for a confounding variable by restricting your data-set to samples with the same value of the confounding variable. But if you do this too much, your choice of that \"same value\" can produce results that don't generalize. Common examples of this in medical testing are using subjects of the same sex or race -- the results may only be valid for that sex\/race, not for all subjects.\nThere can also often be multiple confounding variables. It may be difficult to control for all of them without narrowing down your data-set so much that it's not useful. So you have to choose which variables to control for, and this choice biases your results.\nIn the final panel, Miss Lenhart suggests a sweet spot in the middle, where both confounding variables and your control impact the end result, thus making you \"doubly wrong\". \"Doubly wrong\" result would simultaneously display wrong correlations (not enough of controlled variables) and be too narrow to be useful (too many controlled variables), thus the 'worst of both worlds'.\nFinally she admits that no matter what you do the results will be misleading, so statistics are useless. This would seem to be an unexpected declaration from someone supposedly trying to actually teach statistics [ citation needed ] , and expecting her students to continue the course. Though there is a possibility that she is not there to purely educate this subject, but is instead running a course with a different purpose and it just happens that this week concluded with this particular targeted critique.\nIn the title text, the residual refers to the difference between any particular data point and the graph that's supposed to describe the overall relationship. The collection of all residuals is used to determine how well the line fits the data. If you control for this by including a variable that perfectly matches the discrepancies between the predicted and actual outcomes, you would have a perfectly-fitting model:  however, it is nigh impossible (especially in the social and behavioral sciences) to find a \"final variable\" that perfectly provides all the \"missing pieces\" of the prediction model.\n[Miss Lenhart is holding a pointer and pointing at a board with the a large heading with some unreadable text beneath it. Below this there are two graphs with scattered points. In the top graph the points are almost on a straight increasing line. In the bottom the data points seem to be more random. Mrs Lenhart covers most of the right side of the board, but there is more unreadable text to the right of her.] Miss Lenhart: If you don't control for confounding variables, they'll mask the real effect and mislead you. Heading: Statistics\n[Miss Lenhart is holding the pointer down in one hand while she holds a finger in the air with the other hand. The board is no longer shown.] Miss Lenhart: But if you control for too many variables, your choices will shape the data and you'll mislead yourself.\n[Miss Lenhart is holding both arms down, still with the pointer in her hand.] Miss Lenhart: Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot where you do both, making you doubly wrong. Miss Lenhart: Stats are a farce and truth is unknowable. See you next week!\n"}
{"id":2561,"title":"Moonfall","image_title":"Moonfall","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2561","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/moonfall.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2561:_Moonfall","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan walking to the right] Megan: Are you excited for Moonfall ? Megan: Or cringing? Cueball: Well...\n[Closeup on Cueball] Cueball: I like when stories are grounded in good science because it's exciting to expand our ideas of what's possible.\n[Zoomed back out to Cueball and Megan walking to the right. Cueball has his palms raised] Cueball: But I also support giving Roland Emmerich as much money as he wants to make cool spaceship noises and smash moons into things. Megan: Excited to expand our ideas of how much stuff can explode at once.\n","explanation":"Megan asks Cueball if he is excited for the release of the movie Moonfall .\nMoonfall was released in February 2022, a couple of months after this comic. Its director, Roland Emmerich , is known for blowing up things in his movies (see for instance the Roland Emmerich Supercut ), as well as for factual inaccuracies in his work (mainly the scientific implausibility of his many disaster movies like Independence Day , The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 ).\nThe plot of Moonfall is scientifically preposterous, making it potentially \"cringe-worthy\" for someone who enjoys \"hard\" science fiction, like Cueball.\nFor the moon to fall from the sky, it would have to stop orbiting. Most forces applied it to will simply change the way in which it is orbiting, making the orbit more elliptical, larger or smaller. To stop it from orbiting entirely, a 'braking' force would need to be applied in the opposite direction of its travel, to halt it.\nThe moon's mass is about 7.34767\u00d710 22 kg and its speed about 1.022 km\/s, so the energy needed to stop it is \u00bd mv 2 or about 3.8364\u00d710 28 joules. That's about the energy of 1 trillion large nuclear explosions, centered on the leading-most point of the moon's surface. A precisely-oriented stellar body could strike the moon to do this, like a billiard ball colliding with tons of interstellar moon shrapnel instead of dust.\nLess counteractive energy could make the Moon change orbit to one with a perigee below the surface of the Earth, close enough to (partially) enter the atmosphere or merely bring it down beneath the applicable Roche limit . These scenarios would be only technically less catastrophic, and whether the Moon fragments from the initially applied force, the stresses of its nearest (non-contact) distance to Earth or actually survives largely intact until there is a more direct physical interaction, the precise degree of the effect might be practically academic.\nCueball explains to Megan that he usually likes it when stories are based on good science. Maybe only bending it a bit to create the story, to expand our ideas of what is possible. But then he goes on to state that he supports giving Roland Emmerich as much money as he wants, to make cool spaceship noises and smash moons into things. In the movie it is only a moon (the Moon , presumably, see the plot below). But in general Roland often uses huge explosions in his movies, something also previously said about other similarly-styled directors like Michael Bay .\nMegan sums the situation for Cueball up, stating that he is excited to expand our ideas of how much stuff can explode at once.\nIn the title text Cueball continues by explaining that while novel ideas and explosions are good, what he really want from a movie is novel ideas about cool explosions. So new ways to explode things, or ideas about exploding more things at once. Or both.\nIn 1536: The Martian a similar discussion of an upcoming movie is made for The Martian . But in that case it is the scientific accuracy that is the subject, and the lack of huge explosion that makes it hard to believe it could become a big budget movie! It is very rare that Randall makes a movie review like in those two comics.\nSpoiler Alert\nIn Moonfall, a mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit around Earth and sends it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it. With mere weeks before impact and the world on the brink of annihilation, NASA executive and former astronaut Jo Fowler is convinced she has the key to saving us all - but only one astronaut from her past, Brian Harper[,] and a conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman believe her. These unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love, only to find out that our Moon is not what we think it is. \u2014Centropolis Entertainment, quoted at IMDB\n[Cueball and Megan walking to the right] Megan: Are you excited for Moonfall ? Megan: Or cringing? Cueball: Well...\n[Closeup on Cueball] Cueball: I like when stories are grounded in good science because it's exciting to expand our ideas of what's possible.\n[Zoomed back out to Cueball and Megan walking to the right. Cueball has his palms raised] Cueball: But I also support giving Roland Emmerich as much money as he wants to make cool spaceship noises and smash moons into things. Megan: Excited to expand our ideas of how much stuff can explode at once.\n"}
{"id":2562,"title":"Formatting Meeting","image_title":"Formatting Meeting","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2562","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/formatting_meeting.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2562:_Formatting_Meeting","transcript":"[A screen is shown which displays five rows of text, the top three above a dividing line. To the right of the screen the upper part of Cueball is visible as he delivers a message concerning the text on the screen:] Localization working group Upcoming meetings ----------------- US Team: 2\/3\/22 EU Team: 2\/3\/22\nCueball: And the European formatting and localization team will meet a month later...\n","explanation":"In the United States , it's common to write dates numerically in the format month \/ day \/ year -- 2\/3\/22 means February 3, 2022 (the century is often omitted when it's obvious that the date is around the current time). In Europe, the usual order is day\/month\/year - so 2\/3\/22 is 2nd March, 2022.\n\" Localization \" is the technique used in software to make it accept input and display output in the formats most natural to users in their locations. For example, in the United States numbers use commas \",\" to separate thousands and a decimal point \".\" to separate the decimal values, while in large areas of the EU it is the reverse .  And the textual output will be translated to the local language. Naturally, this also includes displaying dates in the local format, as described above. Localization may also include the adoption of the tax law to the location, for instance when adopting tax software made for the US to the UK.\nThe joke in this comic is that two dates are shown, on the same display , relating to meetings regarding localization. The date of the meeting of the US team is localized in the US format while the EU team's meeting is localized in the European format, and these two dates (about a month apart) happen to be formatted the same (there are 64 such pairings of dates, as long as the day of the month of one is between 1 and 12 and not equal to the presumed month of the other). Cueball needs to explain that the European meeting will be a month later than the US meeting to avoid any confusion due to the ambiguity. Which is ironic , since the aim of localization is to reduce such confusion .\nA further interpretation, which extends also into the title text, is that these groups may have been supposed to meet on the same day. But even the committee that was supposed to fix these problems messed this up. Cueball may be 'explaining' the staggered approach to cover up that the two groups are already reading the date(s) for the meeting quite differently.\nISO-8601 (that is, standard number 8601 as promulgated by the International Organization for Standardization since 1988) specifies a date format of YYYY-MM-DD (e.g., 2021-12-31), which results in dates being listed in chronological order when sorted stringwise. The ISO format is called \" big-endian \", which refers to the fact that the most significant unit in the date (the year) comes first. The European format is instead \" little-endian \", as the front-end value represents the finest possible distinction the date can convey - the particular day. The American format is \" middle-endian \", or occasionally \"mixed-endian\", since the value given first is the one which is neither the one with greatest significance nor the most precise.\nIn the above, the 'value groups' are not usually internally checked for ' endianness ', but regular numerals are also usually written with the largest place values on the left \u2013 for example, the first 2 in 2021 is the thousands place \u2013 though whether this convention is big-endian or little-endian depends on whether the writing system of such numbers is in the context of left-to-right or right-to-left text. The concept of endianness is most often used in reference to the storage order, whether of indivisible binary bits or of values built up of successive value groups. Pairs of hexadecimal values are individually usually represented in big-endian 'numeric' order, where bitwise distinctions are not necessary, but it is useful to know if a system stores a multibyte value in big-endan or little-endian packing, i.e., whether the value 0x01 0x02 (values 1 and 2, on their own) is treated as a value of 258 (0x01*256 + 0x02*1) or 513 (0x01*1 + 0x02*256). (The term was taken in inspiration from a Jonathan Swift story about a war over which end of a boiled egg one should cut into, a useful metaphor for many other situations where diametrically opposed self-justifications for one or another practice may lead to standing by vague principles rather than agreeing upon a unifying resolution.) This standard was also mentioned in 1179: ISO 8601 and used in 1340: Unique Date .\nThe joke in the title text is that it appears some people attempted to interpret the improperly formatted date as if it were expressed in the more ISO-8601 style of format of \"Y\/M\/D\". They read the date as 20 02, March 22, so they already went to their meeting almost 20 years ago. Unless the announcement of the meetings was made 2 decades in advance, there's a paradox that these participants would have taken the date from an announcement in the far future. However, a strict interpretation of the date would make this incorrect: ISO-8601 format specifies four-digit years (which also avoids having to assume the century), two-digit months, and two-digit days. Therefore \"2\/3\/22\u201d can by specification not be an ISO-8601 date, as \"2\" can only be rendered as \"0002\", and \"3\" must be \"03\". Even if the leading zeroes were omitted in violation of ISO-8601, the year would become Year 2 , not Year 2002. Since the standard always uses a 4 digit 'YYYY' format in the first field, and no common formatting uses YYYY-DD-MM, any date written in ISO-8601 is easily recognized and (comparatively) unambiguously interpretable as YYYY-MM-DD. Dates written as if Y-M-DD or other distortions should be considered formatted improperly, and unwisely.\n[A screen is shown which displays five rows of text, the top three above a dividing line. To the right of the screen the upper part of Cueball is visible as he delivers a message concerning the text on the screen:] Localization working group Upcoming meetings ----------------- US Team: 2\/3\/22 EU Team: 2\/3\/22\nCueball: And the European formatting and localization team will meet a month later...\n"}
{"id":2563,"title":"Throat and Nasal Passages","image_title":"Throat and Nasal Passages","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2563","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/throat_and_nasal_passages.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2563:_Throat_and_Nasal_Passages","transcript":"[A graph with two curves are shown. The Y-axis ends in an arrow, but has no units or ticks. The X-axis has no arrow but has 23 ticks with every fifth longer and every tenth labeled. The first tick extends the Y-axis below the X-axis. Both curves start over the second tick and end over the last tick. One curve is a dotted straight line running along the bottom of the graph just above the X-axis. The other start a bit higher and oscillate a bit up and down with 19 sharp peaks and 19 troughs, where some of the troughs have extra features, and not all are equidistant. After this a 20th small peak just starts to drop down again, before the curve goes in to a very steep rise almost all the way to the top of the graph. There is a small dip on the way before it reaches a maximum. Then a deep drop followed by a smaller rise before an even deeper drop. But then at the end, the graph rises almost vertically to the highest point where the graph stops over the last tick. At the top left of the graph the two lines are explained showing a solid and a dotted line with text to their right. Below this, above the solid curve midway between the first two labels on the X-axis, is a label from which 5 arrows points to 5 consecutive peaks.] - How much Time I have spent thinking about my throat and nasal passages, over time \u2505 How much I want to think about them Label:Cold\/Flu Season X-axis: 2000 2010 2020\n","explanation":"This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .  This comic became the last to reference the pandemic for a long time. The next reference to COVID-19 came four months later and in 2615: Welcome Back it was just briefly mentioned in the title text.\nIn the graph a black solid line displays how much he has been thinking about his throat and nose since 2000 and up until 2022. The first 20 years the graph oscillate up and down once every year, and every spike represents the common cold and flu season. Autumn and winter causes the spike, while spring and summer clearly drops. Perhaps this is indicating no tendency to suffer from hayfever , which might at least produce mini-spikes at the times of of maximum grass-pollen, tree-pollen and\/or other similar atmospheric flotsam. There is basically a spike for every year, although some years it looks a bit different which could be variations induced by complex sociological or meteorological drivers - meeting more or fewer people inside stuffy buildings rather than in the open air. But all in all the peaks seem low, especially when compared to how much time he has thought about it since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out around March 2020. Each summer since there has been a dip, but not anywhere close to the tops of the previous years, and around New Year 2022 the graph peaks (likely due to the Omicron variant ).\nThe peaks in 2020 and 2021 (2022) are about 6 times higher than those the year before 2020. So if the Y-axis begins at zero, this is how much more he thinks of his throat now than during the times when he actually had a cold.\nThere seems to be no way of knowing if Randall has had COVID-19, but from his comics it seems safe to assume he is fully vaccinated. At the time of release the Omicron variant of COVID-19 seems to by-pass the protections given by vaccines for about 50% of those vaccinated, although vaccinated people generally do not experience severe symptoms.\nThe joke is in the dotted line at the very bottom of the graph which either is just above zero, or is actually supposed to be the zero line (which would not change the above assumption about 6 times more thinking). This line reflects how much time he actually wishes to think about them, which is probably not at all. But even before corona Randall seems to have spent way too much time pondering his sore throat.\nIn the title text Randall references the trick known as \"You are now aware of your tongue\", which is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it will make anyone hearing it involuntarily think and be aware of their tongue. In a much earlier comic, 972: November , this trick was the topic, see more about it there.\nRandall sarcastically remarks that the tongue trick needed an element of mortal peril to be truly enjoyable, as with the corona pandemic making him aware of his throat and nasal passages. His actual opinion is probably the opposite, that it was annoying before and that it only became worse now that it contains the danger of death. Being aware of your tongue is annoying, but not dangerous. Being aware of your throat during the COVID-19 pandemic may leave you fearing for your life, even if there is nothing wrong with your throat.\nRandall has before the corona pandemic complained about a sore throat caused by the common cold, see 1612: Colds , more than once just a few weeks apart, see 1618: Cold Medicine . See also 1896: Active Ingredients Only .\n[A graph with two curves are shown. The Y-axis ends in an arrow, but has no units or ticks. The X-axis has no arrow but has 23 ticks with every fifth longer and every tenth labeled. The first tick extends the Y-axis below the X-axis. Both curves start over the second tick and end over the last tick. One curve is a dotted straight line running along the bottom of the graph just above the X-axis. The other start a bit higher and oscillate a bit up and down with 19 sharp peaks and 19 troughs, where some of the troughs have extra features, and not all are equidistant. After this a 20th small peak just starts to drop down again, before the curve goes in to a very steep rise almost all the way to the top of the graph. There is a small dip on the way before it reaches a maximum. Then a deep drop followed by a smaller rise before an even deeper drop. But then at the end, the graph rises almost vertically to the highest point where the graph stops over the last tick. At the top left of the graph the two lines are explained showing a solid and a dotted line with text to their right. Below this, above the solid curve midway between the first two labels on the X-axis, is a label from which 5 arrows points to 5 consecutive peaks.] - How much Time I have spent thinking about my throat and nasal passages, over time \u2505 How much I want to think about them Label:Cold\/Flu Season X-axis: 2000 2010 2020\n"}
{"id":2564,"title":"Sunshield","image_title":"Sunshield","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2564","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sunshield.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2564:_Sunshield","transcript":"[The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is floating through space, shown in white on a pitch black background. The two mirrors are seen in front of the sunshield, which is kite shaped. A white line goes from the telescope up to two lines of white text, connected with a small white line.] JWST: Okay, universe- JWST: Smile!\n[Same setting, but now only a small thin white line goes up to a line of white text representing a sound made by the telescope.] JWST: Click\n[Same setting, but now it turns out that a small bulb on the front of the telescope is a flash light. A bright flash glows from the bulb, turning most of the panel white. A cone on the left side is blocked and kept pitch black by the telescope's sunshield. The light fades a bit towards the edges of the picture, giving the light cone a rounded appearance. Thus the image actually looks a lot like Pac-Man in the process of eating the telescope.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Astronomy fact: The purpose of the JWST sunshield is to protect the Sun and the Earth from the telescope's powerful flash.\n","explanation":"This is another comic with a Fact , though not a Fun fact - this time an Astronomy fact. The next comic with a fact, namely 2596: Galaxies , was also with an Astronomy fact. This is the first time that the field that a fact pertains to has been immediately repeated.\nJWST stands for James Webb Space Telescope , a space telescope that was launched 12 days prior to publication of this comic, see more details here 2559: December 25th Launch .\nIt has a sunshield to protect its instruments from the heat of the sun and to keep them below 40 K (-233 \u00b0C\/-388 \u00b0F). Deployment of the sunshield was completed the day before the comic was published. The JWST has to undergo a complex sequence of deployment steps to unfold parts that had to be packed tightly for launch. This sequence has 344 possible points of failure that would render the very expensive space telescope useless; 75% of them led up to the successful full deployment of the sunshield. Thus successful steps are widely celebrated, with this comic an example of such a celebration.\nOrdinary cameras use a flash to take pictures in low-light situations. Outer space is very dark [ citation needed ] (one of the JWST's mission objectives will help astronomers calculate exactly how dark ), so this comic posits that the JWST has a very powerful flash to compensate for this. Most astronomical cameras don't use flash photography [ citation needed ] -- they depend on the light either emitted by objects themselves (e.g., stars) or from nearby very bright objects (e.g., Solar System planets will reflect the Sun's light, while distant clouds of gas and dust may be largely illuminated by the light of supernovae or recently formed stars within or near them). A flash generally doesn't work for many reasons:\nThere are some examples of astronomical research done using things similar to a flash. Radar astronomy involves emitting radio waves (microwaves) that bounce off distant planets, asteroids, comets, etc., and analyzing the returned waves. The Lunar Laser Ranging experiment uses lasers, which are loosely related to flashes for photography, to measure the distance between Earth and Moon. The outward light is concentrated upon the approximate area of the lunar target, which employs an optical trick to send most of that which actually struck it back to the approximate area of the source equipment.\nThe comic assigns the sunshield a new, comical purpose of shielding the Sun (and Earth ,which is roughly in the same direction as the Sun, due to the deployment at the L2 Lagrange point ) from this flash, rather than the other way around. When the camera is taking a picture, the comic shows space in front of the shield lit up while there is a totally dark shadow behind the shield (in the direction of Earth and Sun).\nThe comic also has the camera making a \"click\" sound. In traditional mechanical cameras without a mirror, this sound comes from the shutter opening and closing, and mirror-less digital cameras mimic this sound so the user (and subject, when human) knows when the picture is being taken. JWST won't actually click -- it doesn't have a shutter, as it takes long-exposure digital images, and in space no one can hear you click .\nThe telescope also tells the universe to smile for the picture. The universe doesn't have a mouth to smile with [ citation needed ] , although there are a number of features both on Solar System objects and in deep space that look like faces; this is a phenomenon called pareidolia . The most well known is the Man in the Moon , but there are numerous others both in the Solar system , most famous is probably the Face on Mars and out among the galaxies, like the Cheshire Cat galaxy group named after the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland .\nThe title text suggests that, due to the sunshield not being angled to shield Mars, Mars's surface has been badly scarred by the flash. This implies incredible strength of the flash, perhaps to ensure the light can return from its destinations, comparable to death-ray satellites in fiction.\n[The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is floating through space, shown in white on a pitch black background. The two mirrors are seen in front of the sunshield, which is kite shaped. A white line goes from the telescope up to two lines of white text, connected with a small white line.] JWST: Okay, universe- JWST: Smile!\n[Same setting, but now only a small thin white line goes up to a line of white text representing a sound made by the telescope.] JWST: Click\n[Same setting, but now it turns out that a small bulb on the front of the telescope is a flash light. A bright flash glows from the bulb, turning most of the panel white. A cone on the left side is blocked and kept pitch black by the telescope's sunshield. The light fades a bit towards the edges of the picture, giving the light cone a rounded appearance. Thus the image actually looks a lot like Pac-Man in the process of eating the telescope.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Astronomy fact: The purpose of the JWST sunshield is to protect the Sun and the Earth from the telescope's powerful flash.\n"}
{"id":2565,"title":"Latency","image_title":"Latency","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2565","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/latency.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2565:_Latency","transcript":"[Caption above a graph showing a bar with 6 lines between the two ends:] Typical process latency:\n[The bar is split in two small regions at either end with two times two lines close to each other at the left and only one of those pairs of lines near the right. In between is a very long white area with no features. Above the two small segments at either end, there are small brackets of this type \"{\" lying down so the tip points up towards a curved line that then goes up to two labels.] Left: Automated steps: 800 ms Right: Automated steps: 200 ms\n[A similar, but very long, bracket is below the bar indicating the long white area in the middle. The tip points down to a label:] Someone copies and pastes data from a thing into another thing: 2-15 minutes (More if the person on call is busy)\n","explanation":"This comic is about the time it takes for a request to be processed; a total of 1 second is devoted to automated processes, but 2-15 minutes or longer are devoted to a not-yet-automated process that is performed by a human.\nPart of the humor comes from the fact that most, if not all, instances of a person copying and pasting data from one place to another could be trivially automated and included as part of the automated steps, if only a programmer could take the time to program the process. Having a human take several minutes to move data that a computer could move in fractions of a second is incredibly inefficient, and reflects the humorously poor optimization present in many routine processes.\nThe title text refers to SCAPDFATIAT, which is defined in the comic as Someone Copies and Pastes Data From a Thing Into Another Thing.\nBecause it requires a human worker to fully accomplish, in-between various other work commitments as well as possibly personal\/non-work activities, it is plausible that (even if the copying was started promptly enough) the person involved will not have pasted onwards by the time their effective working day ends. It might be reasonable to assume that a job that ought to take no more than a few actual minutes thus is only 'guaranteed' to be concluded at some point the following working day (which may be a whole long weekend away, possibly including public holidays). The business will therefore state (e.g. in contractual service agreements) that the guaranteed response times are of the order of \"within one working day\". Even if they hope and expect that any request passed to their staff is handled within a much shorter timescale. If reliably capable of being fully automated (e.g. with a resilient and continually maintained server infrastructure), could be fulfilled almost instantly at any time of day or night. But it may be the need to keep an 'intelligent' human in the loop (as well as to \"under-promise and over-deliver\", rather than the reverse) that makes the concept of \"next-working-day\" a more attractive commitment to make.\n[Caption above a graph showing a bar with 6 lines between the two ends:] Typical process latency:\n[The bar is split in two small regions at either end with two times two lines close to each other at the left and only one of those pairs of lines near the right. In between is a very long white area with no features. Above the two small segments at either end, there are small brackets of this type \"{\" lying down so the tip points up towards a curved line that then goes up to two labels.] Left: Automated steps: 800 ms Right: Automated steps: 200 ms\n[A similar, but very long, bracket is below the bar indicating the long white area in the middle. The tip points down to a label:] Someone copies and pastes data from a thing into another thing: 2-15 minutes (More if the person on call is busy)\n"}
{"id":2566,"title":"Decorative Constants","image_title":"Decorative Constants","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2566","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/decorative_constants.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2566:_Decorative_Constants","transcript":"[A small panel only with text. Written as an excerpt from a mathematical text book. Begins with a number for an equation, then follows the equation written in larger letters and symbols. And below are explanations of each term in the equation. The \u03bc has a bar over the top and the D has a double vertical line.] Eq. 4-15 T = \ud835\udd3bm 0 (r out - r in ) \u03bc\u0305 T: Net rate m 0 : Unit mass (r out -r in ): Flow balance \ud835\udd3b, \u03bc\u0305: Decorative\n[Caption below the panel:] Math tip: If one of your equations ever looks too simple, try adding some purely decorative constants.\n","explanation":"This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Math Tip.\nRandall gives an example of a complex looking equation labeled 4-15:\nT = \ud835\udd3bm 0 (r out \u2212 r in ) \u03bc\u0305\nBut since \ud835\udd3b and \u03bc\u0305 are \"decorative\", the equation can be reduced to\nT = m 0 (r out \u2212 r in )\nHere T is the net rate, m 0 the unit mass and (r out \u2212 r in ) the flow balance.\nThe decorative symbols can be interpreted as constants \ud835\udd3b = \u03bc\u0305 = 1, in which case the implied operations of multiplication and exponentiation make sense. The \ud835\udd3b is double-struck (\"blackboard bold\", thus in the comic only the vertical line is double). Mathematicians, who are always searching for more symbols [ citation needed ] , have taken to distinguishing things represented by the same letter by using different fonts, such as \ud835\udc51, \ud835\udc1d, \ud835\udc85, \ud835\udc37, \ud835\udc03, \ud835\udc6b, \ud835\udcb9, \ud835\udc9f, \ud835\udd89, \ud835\udd6f, \u2202, \ud835\udd55, and \ud835\udd3b. The double-struck font is easier to write on a blackboard than a proper bold letter and often represents a set, such as \u211d for the set of real numbers or \u2102 for the set of complex numbers. \ud835\udd3b can represent the unit disk in the complex plane, the set of decimal fractions, or the set of split-complex numbers.\n\u03bc is the Greek lowercase mu and has many uses in mathematics and science. Here it has a bar, \u03bc\u0305, which could indicate a number of things, including the complex conjugate. Intriguingly, \u03bc is the symbol in statistics for the population mean, and the overbar represents the sample mean, so this could represent a random variable which is the average of a sample of means \u03bc i of different populations in some larger ensemble of populations.\nUsing a special version both of D and \u03bc to even further spice up the formula all leads up to the math tip:\nIf one of your equations ever looks too simple, try adding some purely decorative constants.\nOther examples of well known equations that are profound but look simple include\nE = mc 2 ( Special Relativity ), PV = nRT (the Ideal Gas Law ), F = ma ( Newton's Second Law ), V = IR ( Ohm's Law ), and G \u03bc\u03bd + \u039b g \u03bc\u03bd = \u03baT \u03bc\u03bd ( Einstein field equations ), and e \u03c0i +1 = 0 ( Euler's Identity ).\nOf these, only the Einstein field equations have been spiced up with decorative indices (which actually hide a system of ten nonlinear partial differential equations).\nIn the title text Randall mentions the Drag equation , which is attributed to Lord Rayleigh . In fluid dynamics , the drag equation is a formula used to calculate the force of drag experienced by an object due to movement through a fully enclosing fluid. The equation is F d =\u00a0\u00bd \u03c1u 2 c d A . Here F d is the drag force, \u03c1 the mass density of the fluid, u the relative flow velocity, c d the drag coefficient and A is the area.\nRandall jokes that the factor of \u00bd in the equation is meaningless and purely decorative, since the drag coefficients, c d , are already unitless and could just as easily be half as big thus leaving out the \u00bd in front of the equation. The \u00bd is thus just an example of a \"decorative constant.\" The usual reason for including the factor of \u00bd is that it is part of the formula for kinetic energy that appears in the derivation of the drag equation, i.e. \u00bd \u03c1u 2 . However, modern treatments are so condensed that this factor of \u00bd is often smuggled in with no explanation.\nSince we can choose the constants to be whatever we want, it could be possible to absorb the \u00bd into the drag coefficient c d , but that does not mean it is unmotivated, since it comes from the kinetic energy. Still, Randall quotes Frank White's Fluid Mechanics textbook, which two times calls it \"a traditional tribute to Euler and Bernoulli.\" According to White, the factor of \u00bd rather comes from the calculation of the projected area of the object being dragged. Randall has brought up this point before, in his book, \" How To \"\nThe line from White probably refers to renowned mathematicians Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli . Euler who is held to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history worked directly with Daniel and was a friend of the Bernoulli family , that produced eight mathematically gifted academics.\nDaniel Bernoulli is known for modifying the definition of vis viva (what we now call kinetic energy) from mv 2 to \u00bd mv 2 , as motivated by the derivation from the impulse equation. In 1741, he wrote\n[Define vis viva ] esse \u00bd mvv = \u222b pdx .\nThat is, \"define vis viva to be \u00bd mv 2 = \u222b p d x ,\" where p is the force (from pressione ) and d x is the differential of position (infinitesimal displacement). Today, this equation says that the kinetic energy imparted to an object at rest equals the work done on it.\nIn the drag equation \u00bd \u03c1u 2 represents the dynamic pressure due to the kinetic energy of the fluid, and hence the 1\/2 makes sense to keep in the equation, and could thus easily be argued not to represent a decorative constant.\nThe title text is pretty much word-for-word a repeat from Randall's book How To . In Chapter 11: How to Play Football , he misuses the drag equation, and mentions this fact in more depth, in a footnote.\n[A small panel only with text. Written as an excerpt from a mathematical text book. Begins with a number for an equation, then follows the equation written in larger letters and symbols. And below are explanations of each term in the equation. The \u03bc has a bar over the top and the D has a double vertical line.] Eq. 4-15 T = \ud835\udd3bm 0 (r out - r in ) \u03bc\u0305 T: Net rate m 0 : Unit mass (r out -r in ): Flow balance \ud835\udd3b, \u03bc\u0305: Decorative\n[Caption below the panel:] Math tip: If one of your equations ever looks too simple, try adding some purely decorative constants.\n"}
{"id":2567,"title":"Language Development","image_title":"Language Development","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2567","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/language_development.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2567:_Language_Development","transcript":"[Megan and Cueball are looking to the left at a baby with dark hair. The baby sits on the left side of a table in an elevated baby chair.] Megan: He's only 1, so he still mostly speaks proto-Indo-European. Megan: But we've heard a few Germanic words already, so Old English can't be far off. Baby: *Melg- Baby: *Pl(e)hk- Cueball: They progress so fast!\n","explanation":"Megan and Cueball are having what could appear to be a typical conversation about her child's ability to learn languages really fast. But the comic mixes up the concept of learning a language and the development of languages over time. The joke comes from the a conflation of two different things.\nThe conventional meaning of language development is the process by which infants begin to talk, that is to understand and produce intelligible speech. The field of language acquisition (sometimes called... language development) seeks to understand how baby humans are able to rapidly comprehend, internalize, and begin producing a new language so rapidly.\nInstead of starting with babbling , the first stage of normal language development, this baby's form of \"language development\" seems to be the linguistic form: going through all of the theoretical stages of the evolution of the English language, from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic to Old English.\nIn comparative linguistics and historical linguistics , Proto-Indo-European is a theorized common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Proto-Germanic is a reconstructed language formerly spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia. It developed out of Proto-Indo-European and is the proposed common ancestor for all Germanic languages . Old English would have developed out of Proto-Germanic. Modern English developed out of Old English with many additions from French (which comes from a different branch of the Indo-European language family). This parody of language development parallels the discredited theory of recapitulation in embryo development, sometimes expressed as \"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny\", in which a developing animal embryo (ontogeny) was once thought to go through stages resembling successive adult stages in the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors (phylogeny).\nIn linguistics, reconstructed words from proto-languages are commonly marked with an asterisk (*) to show that the word forms are not attested by any historical sources but created as a proposed ancestor word. The baby says the Proto-Indo-European roots that the words \"milk\" and \"please\" are derived from. Obviously, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European did not speak in roots, but used words made from the roots, so the way the baby talks does not reflect any stage of development of the proto-language.\nSome sounds babies make are hard to interpret. [ citation needed ] However, humans have a tendency to recognize known things and patterns. They see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. Thus, a parent familiar with Proto-Indo-European may falsely hear their baby speak Proto-Indo-European by misinterpreting unintelligible sounds.\nPerhaps this is an alternate universe where every baby has to gradually develop their language skills along a historical path rather than a child-developmental one, until they reach the ultimately developed modern language of their parents (in this case Modern English).\nThere have been alleged language deprivation experiments where newborn infants were not exposed to any spoken language in order to find the \"natural human language\", in the days before ethics review boards would have forbidden such cruel treatments. Such experiments are known today to be a source for psychological problems at least. Alleged outcomes in the apocryphal sources range from the deprived children imitating other sounds in their environment, to them dying.\nIn the title text, Randall describes a 2-year-old child as speaking in iambic pentameter and in Elizabethan English, a meter and dialect of modern English used by Shakespeare more than 400 years ago. The Terrible Twos are a colloquialism referring to the developmental tendency of two-year-olds to have more temperamental behavior, as the child's developing assertion of autonomy and self-identity clash with other expectations of behaviour, before hopefully acceptably balancing their assertiveness with social normatism. The toddler's quote of \"forsooth, to bed thou shalt not take me, cur!\" would roughly be equivalent to \"Indeed, you shall not take me to bed, you dog!\" in less archaic English.\n[Megan and Cueball are looking to the left at a baby with dark hair. The baby sits on the left side of a table in an elevated baby chair.] Megan: He's only 1, so he still mostly speaks proto-Indo-European. Megan: But we've heard a few Germanic words already, so Old English can't be far off. Baby: *Melg- Baby: *Pl(e)hk- Cueball: They progress so fast!\n"}
{"id":2568,"title":"Spinthariscope","image_title":"Spinthariscope","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2568","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spinthariscope.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2568:_Spinthariscope","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a small item up in on hand in front of his three friends. Megan has her arms lifted and bent in front of her, White Hat has his arms raised over his head and Ponytail is pointing at Cueball while her other hand, held down behind her, is balled into a fist.] Cueball: It's a spinthariscope, a 1940s toy with a radioactive isotope inside. If you let your eyes adjust to total darkness and look into the lens, you can see the flashes of individual atoms decaying. Megan: What?? White Hat: Aaaaa! Ponytail: Get it away!\n[Caption below the panel:] Fun fact: Spinthariscopes have the highest ratio of \"that can't possibly be safe and legal\" to actual safety and legality of any known toy.\n","explanation":"This is another comic with one of Randall's fun facts .\nAs stated in the comic, a spinthariscope is a device with a small amount of radioactive material ( americium or thorium ) and a screen. When one of the radioactive atoms decays, it emits an alpha particle , which strikes the screen, which emits a small flash of light. You can see these flashes by looking through a lens.\nIt was invented in 1903 initially as a scientific instrument, but was soon replaced by more accurate and quantitative devices. But the original device was still popular for some time as an educational toy for children, and you can still get them today.\nThe joke in the comic is that most people have little understanding of radiation, and overreact to any mention that something is radioactive. So when Cueball tells Megan, White Hat, and Ponytail that the toy contains radioactive material, they're shocked and scared. But the amount of radioactive material in the toy is very tiny and the radiation is itself so trivially contained that there's practically no risk from it. The short-ranged alpha particles are likely stopped by the lens through which the harmless flashes of light (from particles that instead hit and neutralise in the internal screen element) are seen. Alpha decay always leads to an unstable decay product, which results in further decay (always gamma decay, and sometimes beta decay as well) which are less easily blocked, but the amount of such radiation from these decay products is negligible.\nThe fun fact in the caption says that Spinthariscopes have the highest ratio of \"that can't possibly be safe and legal\" to actual safety and legality of any known toy. When people hear about Spinthariscopes for the first time, they often assume, due to the radioactive material inside, that they must be very dangerous. They thus also question if such a toy is at all legal to make or own in the first place. But the fact is that Spinthariscopes are both safe and legal to make, sell and own.  So, the perceived danger and presumption that it must be illegal is at a very high number, and the actual danger and the actual illegality results in a very low number on the same scale. It is this ratio between perceived and actual danger and illegality that are the highest for Spinthariscopes, higher than for any other known toy.\nThe formulation, however, causes some confusion, because the caption uses actual safety and legality (high) instead of actual danger and illegality (low). Instead of a high ratio between perceived danger and actual danger, the result is an even ratio between perceived danger and actual safety, which are both high. The ratios for the other mentioned toys would also be even, as they have low perceived danger and low actual safety. This is obviously not the intended meaning, as the other toys are said to be toward the other end of the scale.\nThe title text mentions some other materials\/toys that sound dangerous but aren't. Gallium is a metallic element with a low melting point of 29.76\u00b0C (85.568\u00b0F) so it will melt in your hand. Additionally, gallium has strange properties when it interacts with aluminum, causing aluminum to \"melt\" or become brittle. Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, but can be used to create glowsticks and other lighted objects. Though these two toys might seem dangerous, they are actually typically used perfectly safely.\nAt the opposite end of the spectrum is lawn darts , a toy containing large darts that are thrown into the air to fall back down onto a target that's placed or marked upon the ground quite near the players' positions. Unlike the spinthariscope, which sounds dangerous but is actually harmless, lawn darts sound relatively innocent but can cause severe injury if you accidentally hit a person (and a few children were even killed ), so they were banned in the US and Canada in the 1980s. When sharpened, these toys even compare quite favorably to weapons of war .\nToday many houses have smoke detectors using ionization caused by radioactive decay of Americium-241 to detect the smoke. So having something with radioactive material in your house is quite common, and in this case increases the safety level for those houses.\n[Cueball is holding a small item up in on hand in front of his three friends. Megan has her arms lifted and bent in front of her, White Hat has his arms raised over his head and Ponytail is pointing at Cueball while her other hand, held down behind her, is balled into a fist.] Cueball: It's a spinthariscope, a 1940s toy with a radioactive isotope inside. If you let your eyes adjust to total darkness and look into the lens, you can see the flashes of individual atoms decaying. Megan: What?? White Hat: Aaaaa! Ponytail: Get it away!\n[Caption below the panel:] Fun fact: Spinthariscopes have the highest ratio of \"that can't possibly be safe and legal\" to actual safety and legality of any known toy.\n"}
{"id":2569,"title":"Hypothesis Generation","image_title":"Hypothesis Generation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2569","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hypothesis_generation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2569:_Hypothesis_Generation","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart stands in front of a blackboard with various unreadable scribbles, gesturing towards it with a pointer.] Miss Lenhart: To do science, you generate a hypothesis, then test it.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, raising his hand.] Cueball: But how do you generate a hypothesis?\n[Miss Lenhart now stands in front of Cueball's desk, she is holding down the pointer and Cueball has his hands on his legs.] Miss Lenhart: Great question. How do you think you do it? Cueball: Well, maybe you - Miss Lenhart: And there you have it!\n","explanation":"Miss Lenhart is teaching a science class and starts by formulating the fact that to perform any science you need to generate a hypothesis in order to test it.\nThe front row student, Cueball (presumably the rest of the students in the class are off panel), is thus prompted to ask the salient question of how one finds an original hypothesis. By using a clever prompting question in reply, Miss Lenhart allows the student to discover the answer himself. In typical Miss Lenhart fashion she is a bit rude, interrupting him before he can even formulate his thoughts. But the idea that he even has gotten an idea to share is proof that he has made a hypothesis about how to generate a hypothesis. This does not, however, answer how he did it, but now he knows he can do it.\nThis approach may not have worked with less eager\/capable students, so it highlights the strengths of both the student and the teacher - and that she had a good understanding of the student's ability to reason this out with just the barest of guidance. Or perhaps it is just another prank by Miss Lenhart .\nThe key aspect being conveyed in this simple exchange is that one of the many good practices in science (no matter the aspect, though the specifics may change according to the precise field of study) is that one should first have an idea of what you can test and then perform the test to confirm (or rule out) your idea.\nIn the title text the joke is that it is thus very easy to make hypotheses and thus everyone makes them all the time, so there are numerous ones to test. And the now frazzled scientists that are trying to work their way through them request that everyone stop making new hypotheses until they have worked their way through the huge backlog of untested hypotheses already made.\n[Miss Lenhart stands in front of a blackboard with various unreadable scribbles, gesturing towards it with a pointer.] Miss Lenhart: To do science, you generate a hypothesis, then test it.\n[Cueball is sitting at a desk, raising his hand.] Cueball: But how do you generate a hypothesis?\n[Miss Lenhart now stands in front of Cueball's desk, she is holding down the pointer and Cueball has his hands on his legs.] Miss Lenhart: Great question. How do you think you do it? Cueball: Well, maybe you - Miss Lenhart: And there you have it!\n"}
{"id":2570,"title":"Captain Picard Tea Order","image_title":"Captain Picard Tea Order","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2570","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/captain_picard_tea_order.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2570:_Captain_Picard_Tea_Order","transcript":"[At the top of the panel, there is a large caption covering two lines with a sub-caption below in a normal-sized font:] Other words Captain Picard tried at the end of his tea order before settling on \"hot\" From most normal to least\n[Bellow this we see Picard, drawn bald except for a bit of hair near his ears and behind his head. He stands next to a machine, which is a standing rectangle of the same dimensions as Picard. In the front, there is an opening around the middle, a dispenser from where the ordered items can be retrieved. There is a label at the top of the machine. Picard is giving a command to the machine. His first three words are clearly spoken out as they stand, but then at the end of the sentence, instead of just adding one more word, there is a list of five words in a column between two gray lines. Five words are visible, but the top and bottom words are fading out, presumably other words are above and below, but no longer visible. All except the middle are gray. The middle word is placed as the direct follow up to the first three words in the sentence Picard speaks out, and this word is black like the previous three words. So this middle word is clearly the one he actually speaks out. The others were options, presumably on his mind.] Label: Replicator Picard:\n[To the left of the machine, a long arrow begins snaking its way towards the bottom, where it ends in an arrow pointing down towards the bottom of the panel. At the top, there is a broad and thick bar from which it starts. Beneath this there are several ticks, the first three are close together and on a part of the arrow that goes almost straight down. But then the arrow curves in under the drawing of Picard, and goes over another drawing of him, placed in a captioned frame. The arrow goes around this and up on the other side, where it goes around another drawing of Picard in a similarly captioned frame. After having gone around this frame it goes a bit up before turning almost straight down before the final arrowhead that points down. In total there are 36 labeled ticks on the arrow, see labels below. The ticks have very varying distances between them. There are especially long between them around the first panels with Picard, but closer together at the start and towards the very end. Above the top bar from where the arrow starts there is also a label and just below this and to the left of the long arrow is a smaller arrow pointing down in the direction of the long arrow. This small arrow has a label at its starting point.] Bar label: Normal Small arrow label: Less normal\n[The second drawing of Picard, shows him standing next to the labeled machine. Picard is this time holding a cup, with sticky lines connecting his hands and the machine to the cup. He clearly looks down at the cup rather than on the machine, as the hair behind his ear is turned differently than the first drawing, where he looks straight towards the machine. Above is a label inside a frame overlaid on the top line of the panel, with what Picard ordered:] \"Tea. Earl Grey. Sticky.\" Label: Replicator\n[The third drawing of Picard, only displays him and not the machine. He is holding a vibrating cup in both hands and has now turned the other way, away from where the machine was in the previous drawings (again clearly seen by his hair). Very large letters are displayed in three lines behind him to the exclusion of all else. Four of the 15 letters are partly hidden behind the panel's frame, and seven of them are partly covered by Picard. Above is a label inside a frame overlaid on the top line of the panel, with what Picard ordered:] \"Tea. Earl Grey. Loud.\" Teacup: Teeeeeeeeeeeeee\n[Words on the arrow from start to finish:] Hot Iced Decaf Good Lukewarm Tasty Boiled Watery Sour Meaty Solid Dry Raw Deep-fried Sticky Grilled Fossilized Magnetic Ballistic Unstable Blessed Blurry Loud Virtual Intravenous Expanding Ironic Segmented Verbose Cursed Unexpected Bipedal Afraid Infinite Tea for him, too\n","explanation":"Captain Jean-Luc Picard is a primary character in the science fiction TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation , which is focused on the crew of a starship.  The ship is equipped with replicators , which can create virtually any object or material requested, including food and drink, and which respond to verbal commands.\nIn the show, Picard's beverage of choice is Earl Grey tea .  His habitual method for ordering is to first specify what he wants (tea, in this case), then specify a particular type (Earl Grey), and then give specific instructions for how it is to be served (hot, as opposed to iced tea ).  Because this is his favored drink, he repeatedly places the exact order \" Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. \" The first picture in the strip implies that the display shows each part of the order, and provides a list of options for the next step.\nRandall parodies this repeated order by suggesting other words that could follow \"Tea. Earl Grey.\", starting from ones he considers more \"normal\" moving to those he presumes increasingly \"less normal\" down a long and winding arrow.\nThe results of two examples from the normal\/less-normal scale are also illustrated: Sticky tea and loud tea. Sticky is kind of obvious, though perhaps not immediately understandable, the loud version is a tea that screams \"Teeee...\"  The vibrating and screeching teacup may be a reference to the various Star Trek episodes about tribbles , which behave in a similar way in the presence of Klingons.\nThe very last qualifying addition, the least normal is not a single word but \"Tea for him, too.\" This reinterprets the meaning of the standard introductory words, suggesting that \"tea\", and \"Earl Grey\" are separate orders, which implies that he wants the replicator to produce tea, then replicate a human being named Earl Grey (either one of the Earls Grey or a person surnamed Grey with the given name of Earl), then a second tea to serve to this newly created person. Earl Grey tea is named after the Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey , a 19th century British Prime Minister, and Captain Picard possibly wishes to have said Earl be generated to provide him with company.\nIn contrast to the often trivial use of a replicator as merely a potentially infinitely versatile vending machine, the comic sets up a number of quite esoteric options, culminating in Earl Grey himself potentially drinking (generic) tea, after both the tea and he have been replicated into existence by Picard.\nIn the title text, someone tells Picard that they should wait until the Earl has been fully extruded from the dispenser, and then ascertain what he would actually wish to drink. The presumption is that it could take some time to get a full living person out of the replicator.  This sort of operation would be better suited for the holodeck, which has been used to create simulacra of other historical figures, including Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Sir Isaac Newton, with the limitations that they are mere simulations without their own autonomy and cannot exist beyond the limits of the fixed holotransmitters; though at least two others seem to have gained full sentience, and granted (or be convinced they were granted) physical freedom.\nIn the various versions of Star Trek , it's established that replicators aren't capable of producing living things , so canonically this version of the order could not be filled.\n[At the top of the panel, there is a large caption covering two lines with a sub-caption below in a normal-sized font:] Other words Captain Picard tried at the end of his tea order before settling on \"hot\" From most normal to least\n[Bellow this we see Picard, drawn bald except for a bit of hair near his ears and behind his head. He stands next to a machine, which is a standing rectangle of the same dimensions as Picard. In the front, there is an opening around the middle, a dispenser from where the ordered items can be retrieved. There is a label at the top of the machine. Picard is giving a command to the machine. His first three words are clearly spoken out as they stand, but then at the end of the sentence, instead of just adding one more word, there is a list of five words in a column between two gray lines. Five words are visible, but the top and bottom words are fading out, presumably other words are above and below, but no longer visible. All except the middle are gray. The middle word is placed as the direct follow up to the first three words in the sentence Picard speaks out, and this word is black like the previous three words. So this middle word is clearly the one he actually speaks out. The others were options, presumably on his mind.] Label: Replicator Picard:\n[To the left of the machine, a long arrow begins snaking its way towards the bottom, where it ends in an arrow pointing down towards the bottom of the panel. At the top, there is a broad and thick bar from which it starts. Beneath this there are several ticks, the first three are close together and on a part of the arrow that goes almost straight down. But then the arrow curves in under the drawing of Picard, and goes over another drawing of him, placed in a captioned frame. The arrow goes around this and up on the other side, where it goes around another drawing of Picard in a similarly captioned frame. After having gone around this frame it goes a bit up before turning almost straight down before the final arrowhead that points down. In total there are 36 labeled ticks on the arrow, see labels below. The ticks have very varying distances between them. There are especially long between them around the first panels with Picard, but closer together at the start and towards the very end. Above the top bar from where the arrow starts there is also a label and just below this and to the left of the long arrow is a smaller arrow pointing down in the direction of the long arrow. This small arrow has a label at its starting point.] Bar label: Normal Small arrow label: Less normal\n[The second drawing of Picard, shows him standing next to the labeled machine. Picard is this time holding a cup, with sticky lines connecting his hands and the machine to the cup. He clearly looks down at the cup rather than on the machine, as the hair behind his ear is turned differently than the first drawing, where he looks straight towards the machine. Above is a label inside a frame overlaid on the top line of the panel, with what Picard ordered:] \"Tea. Earl Grey. Sticky.\" Label: Replicator\n[The third drawing of Picard, only displays him and not the machine. He is holding a vibrating cup in both hands and has now turned the other way, away from where the machine was in the previous drawings (again clearly seen by his hair). Very large letters are displayed in three lines behind him to the exclusion of all else. Four of the 15 letters are partly hidden behind the panel's frame, and seven of them are partly covered by Picard. Above is a label inside a frame overlaid on the top line of the panel, with what Picard ordered:] \"Tea. Earl Grey. Loud.\" Teacup: Teeeeeeeeeeeeee\n[Words on the arrow from start to finish:] Hot Iced Decaf Good Lukewarm Tasty Boiled Watery Sour Meaty Solid Dry Raw Deep-fried Sticky Grilled Fossilized Magnetic Ballistic Unstable Blessed Blurry Loud Virtual Intravenous Expanding Ironic Segmented Verbose Cursed Unexpected Bipedal Afraid Infinite Tea for him, too\n"}
{"id":2571,"title":"Hydraulic Analogy","image_title":"Hydraulic Analogy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2571","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/hydraulic_analogy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2571:_Hydraulic_Analogy","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart stands next to a white board with two diagrams while pointing to the first. While she is explaining Cueball interrupts her from off-panel as seen by his voice coming from the right side out of a starburst on the panels edge. The diagrams are a schematic circuit diagram and a water flow diagram. There is a battery (with labels on top and bottom) on the left and a resistor on the right of the circuit as well as labels on each of these and one at the top part of the wire. There is a pump to the left and a tighter section of the pipe to the right, as well as labels on these and on the top part of the pipe. At the bottom there is two arrow pointing in towards the pipe, this also has a label.] Miss Lenhart: Electric current is like water flowing in a pipe. The pressure represents- Cueball [off-panel]: Wait, hold on. Labels on circuit: + - V I R Labels on flow diagram: Pump F R D\n[The view changes so Miss Lenhart and the white board are seen from the side. She still stands next to the white board, arms now down, as Cueball approaches the board with a marker held in one hand. The diagrams can still be seen, but distorted from being viewed from the side, and no labels are readable.] Cueball: Do you mind if I just...\n[Zoom in on Cueball, who is drawing on the white board, which is the left edge of the panel, i.e. not visible in the panel. Noises from the marker drawing on the board comes up from the tip of the marker pen. The movement of the pen is indicated with small lines on either side.] Scribble Scribble Scribble\n[Miss Lenhart and Cueball, holding the marker pen down, stand on either side of the white board looking at Cueball's version with the merged diagram. He has connected the two, so instead of the wire going down after the resistor in the circuit diagram, it now is connected with water flowing to the right just below the resistor, and then up into the pump to the right of the resistor. At the bottom where the water pipe before bent up into the pump, the water now continues running to the left (the pipe was not drawn around it by Cueball), and it now flows where the bottom part of the wire, from the circuit, was before, turning up below the battery and connecting with it there. All the labels from before have been retained as follows.] Labels on diagram: + - V I R Pump F R D\n[Miss Lenhart and Cueball stand on a podium with a Cueball-like presenter. The presenter is holding two Nobel Prize medals up in his hands. He is holding them from the strings they are attached to, so the medals hang below his hands.] Presenter: And for the design and construction of the liquitricity device, the Nobel Prize goes to...\n","explanation":"Electric flow is commonly represented by a \" hydraulic analogy \". In this analogy, the water pressure represents voltage and the flow of the water is the current . Electric resistance is represented by a constricted section of a pipe.\nMiss Lenhart is teaching a class and starts to explain this analogy when Cueball suddenly has an idea and changes her diagrams - connecting the electrical diagram and the hydraulic diagram. In doing this, he has envisioned what comes to be called a \"liquitricity device\", combining liquid water and electric current flows together and given a suitably portmanteau title.\nThe last panel shows that Miss Lenhart and Cueball eventually receive the Nobel Prize , presumably the Nobel Prize in Physics , for the design and construction of the device - indicating that rather than being purely theoretical it has actually been practical to make this device.\nThe title text 'explains' how this device works and references Ohm's Law , one of the fundamental laws of electricity, but strangely seems as much an incomprehensible mix of the two as the diagram in explaining whatever form of possible duality it actually employs.\nOne of the featured Footer comics , 730: Circuit Diagram , displays a very complex circuit diagram. Although no pump or direct water flow can be found here, it all ends up in a beaker with holy water. And there is a symbol labeled 3 liters, at the bottom close to the beaker. This is the symbol for an orifice or flow restriction used on plumbing or hydraulic diagrams. So Randall already mixed water flow and circuit diagrams over 10 years ago.\n[Miss Lenhart stands next to a white board with two diagrams while pointing to the first. While she is explaining Cueball interrupts her from off-panel as seen by his voice coming from the right side out of a starburst on the panels edge. The diagrams are a schematic circuit diagram and a water flow diagram. There is a battery (with labels on top and bottom) on the left and a resistor on the right of the circuit as well as labels on each of these and one at the top part of the wire. There is a pump to the left and a tighter section of the pipe to the right, as well as labels on these and on the top part of the pipe. At the bottom there is two arrow pointing in towards the pipe, this also has a label.] Miss Lenhart: Electric current is like water flowing in a pipe. The pressure represents- Cueball [off-panel]: Wait, hold on. Labels on circuit: + - V I R Labels on flow diagram: Pump F R D\n[The view changes so Miss Lenhart and the white board are seen from the side. She still stands next to the white board, arms now down, as Cueball approaches the board with a marker held in one hand. The diagrams can still be seen, but distorted from being viewed from the side, and no labels are readable.] Cueball: Do you mind if I just...\n[Zoom in on Cueball, who is drawing on the white board, which is the left edge of the panel, i.e. not visible in the panel. Noises from the marker drawing on the board comes up from the tip of the marker pen. The movement of the pen is indicated with small lines on either side.] Scribble Scribble Scribble\n[Miss Lenhart and Cueball, holding the marker pen down, stand on either side of the white board looking at Cueball's version with the merged diagram. He has connected the two, so instead of the wire going down after the resistor in the circuit diagram, it now is connected with water flowing to the right just below the resistor, and then up into the pump to the right of the resistor. At the bottom where the water pipe before bent up into the pump, the water now continues running to the left (the pipe was not drawn around it by Cueball), and it now flows where the bottom part of the wire, from the circuit, was before, turning up below the battery and connecting with it there. All the labels from before have been retained as follows.] Labels on diagram: + - V I R Pump F R D\n[Miss Lenhart and Cueball stand on a podium with a Cueball-like presenter. The presenter is holding two Nobel Prize medals up in his hands. He is holding them from the strings they are attached to, so the medals hang below his hands.] Presenter: And for the design and construction of the liquitricity device, the Nobel Prize goes to...\n"}
{"id":2572,"title":"Alien Observers","image_title":"Alien Observers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2572","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alien_observers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2572:_Alien_Observers","transcript":"[Three aliens are looking at a screen. They each have six tentacles, of which four are used as legs, and the other two can be used as arms. They also have a small mouth and two eye stalks with a large eye at the end of each. The eyes has large eyelashes all the way around. One of the aliens is standing to the left of the screen, pointing to it by raising one of its tentacles. The other two aliens stand to the right of the screen looking at the picture. The screen's image depicts a cross-sectional diagram showing two humans in a rough landscape. There is a shaded area above each of the humans and the terrain. The shaded area's boundary consists of arcs of differing sizes centered upon each human. To the left of the first human there is also a small straight area over the ground. To the left of this towards the edge of the screen, what appears to be an arc with a very large radius that begins and rises high up compared to the other two arcs, around a point beyond the on-screen image's edge. The rightmost human's zone has a dashed region between concentric radii of different sizes indicating that this zone has been revised further out than before. Four flying-saucer like spaceships are shown in the air close to, but above, the shaded areas. One high near the left curve, one over the flat area, one near the intersection between the two small arcs and one over the middle of the right arc.] Left Alien: Human 38XT11-B-C54  just bought a new phone with a 10x zoom, so we have to expand our restricted flight zone by 1,800 meters to keep our ship blurry. Right Alien 2: Seriously? Didn't they just upgrade? Left Alien: I know, I know...\n[Caption below the panel:] The hardest part of being an alien observing Earth is keeping track of what cameras everyone has.\n","explanation":"This strip depicts a group of aliens observing earth, and discussing their \"restricted flight zone\", which they appear to change each time a human acquires a more powerful camera.\nThis comic was followed directly by 2573: Alien Mission , where aliens use similar looking flying-saucer type spacecrafts to observe Earth. It is not specifically stated that these two form a series, but the next comic could be seen as a direct follow up to the this one, indicating that the aliens are the same in the two comics. Just 7 comics later 2579: Tractor Beam also used similar spacecraft.\nBoth strips are based on UFO conspiracy theories , which are common in the US and a number of other countries.  It is often claimed that Unidentified Flying Objects seen in the sky are, in fact, extraterrestrial space craft, visiting earth for various reasons. Reports of such sightings have existed for a long time, and ever since cameras became widely available, photographs (and later videos) have been produced which are claimed to show such flying vessels. Almost invariably, these images are sufficiently distant, blurry, or otherwise obscured as to make any kind of detailed identification impossible - they could not be Unidentified Flying Objects if it were possible to identify them!\nThis strip lampoons such ideas by positing that aliens are real, but deliberately maintain a distance such that no clear photographs can be taken. While this concept might seem initially plausible, it doesn't stand up to examination.  Over the past several decades, cameras have become far more common, with most of the population of many countries carrying cameras every waking moment (and even sleeping with those same cameras within reach). At the same time, cameras available to the average consumer have dramatically increased in resolution and zooming capabilities.  The same shot that resulted in blurry and vague photographs in early digital photography could result in much more detailed images today, and also overcome many of the pitfalls associated with 'analogue' photography without sufficient skill and\/or bulky equipment.  What's more, the cameras owned by individual consumers have a wide range of resolutions and other capabilities, meaning that an image that would show little detail from one person's camera could result in highly detailed photograph if someone else took a picture.  The fact that improving camera technology has not resulted in improved images of these supposed vessels is an impossibly weak point in these conspiracy theories.\nThe humorous premise of the strip is that these aliens are real, and are monitoring earth, but are taking deliberate actions to keep evidence of their presence ambiguous.  To do this, they would need to not only monitor what camera technology exists on earth, but the exact type of camera each individual owns, and maintain their flights right at the outer visual limit of those cameras.  Such information would need to be implausibly detailed, and constantly updated, because technology is constantly improving and people are constantly getting new phones with new cameras.  Part of the joke is that the aliens would have to know the visual range of our cameras, but instead of remaining safely outside of it (so that no pictures of their vessels could be taken at all), they stay close enough to be seen, but never close enough for detailed images.\nIn a broader sense, this strip addresses the same issue as previous strips, such as 718: The Flake Equation and 1235: Settled , in which the phenomenon of UFO sightings\/reports is still left not resolved (either way) despite what modern technology should suggest is possible. The suggestion is that this trend either means that sufficiently advanced aliens are deliberately leaving ambiguous evidence of their presence, or that no such alien visitors are here, and the purported evidence is either faked, or misinterpretations of other phenomena. It's pretty clear which explanation Randall favors.\nIn the title text, the aliens note that one particular human now has a YouTube account, meaning they are likely to record video instead of attempting to capture still images. This means that the alien craft used to create the sighting must behave as erratically as possible, in order to avoid being identified. This relates to the often wildly oscillating (as well as blurry) films and videos of 'UFOs' that have been taken by the impromptu human observer beyond the limit of their ability to hold their fully-zoomed camera steady. Here it is explained as the flying saucers actually moving in an improbably jerky manner to prevent detailed recording of their craft. Further briefings of the sort depicted would doubtless accompany upgrades in optical\/digital-stability features or the purchase of a camera tripod.\nThe identifier for the one buying the phone begins with \"Human 38XT11\". This seems likely to be a reference to THX 1138 as this was the title of George Lucas 's first film, which is also referenced in the original Star Wars film. The name contains the number in reverse, as well as the letters, if \"human\" could be written as H.\n[Three aliens are looking at a screen. They each have six tentacles, of which four are used as legs, and the other two can be used as arms. They also have a small mouth and two eye stalks with a large eye at the end of each. The eyes has large eyelashes all the way around. One of the aliens is standing to the left of the screen, pointing to it by raising one of its tentacles. The other two aliens stand to the right of the screen looking at the picture. The screen's image depicts a cross-sectional diagram showing two humans in a rough landscape. There is a shaded area above each of the humans and the terrain. The shaded area's boundary consists of arcs of differing sizes centered upon each human. To the left of the first human there is also a small straight area over the ground. To the left of this towards the edge of the screen, what appears to be an arc with a very large radius that begins and rises high up compared to the other two arcs, around a point beyond the on-screen image's edge. The rightmost human's zone has a dashed region between concentric radii of different sizes indicating that this zone has been revised further out than before. Four flying-saucer like spaceships are shown in the air close to, but above, the shaded areas. One high near the left curve, one over the flat area, one near the intersection between the two small arcs and one over the middle of the right arc.] Left Alien: Human 38XT11-B-C54  just bought a new phone with a 10x zoom, so we have to expand our restricted flight zone by 1,800 meters to keep our ship blurry. Right Alien 2: Seriously? Didn't they just upgrade? Left Alien: I know, I know...\n[Caption below the panel:] The hardest part of being an alien observing Earth is keeping track of what cameras everyone has.\n"}
{"id":2573,"title":"Alien Mission","image_title":"Alien Mission","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2573","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/alien_mission.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2573:_Alien_Mission","transcript":"[Two 'classic' Flying Saucer spacecraft are hovering in the sky with speech-lines indicating communication from someone within each saucer. The rightmost is tilted a bit, like it is being attentive to the left.] Left Saucer: Sir, can we talk? Left Saucer: We've been observing earth for almost a century.\n[Same setting but both saucers are level.] Left Saucer: Hovering and zooming from place to place, trying to avoid being spotted by humans. Right Saucer: Yeah.\n[In a Frameless panel only the left saucer is shown. The right saucer's voice emerges from an edge-of-panel starburst.] Left Saucer: By now we've flown over every inch of the surface many times. Right Saucer (off-panel): Yes? And?\n[Same setting as in the first panel, with the right one tilted towards the left saucer.] Left Saucer: Face it: If Bigfoot is real, he's not anywhere on this planet. Right Saucer: But humans have captured some intriguing videos! Left Saucer: *sigh* Right Saucer: How else do you explain the...\n","explanation":"This comic followed directly after 2572: Alien Observers , both comics featuring alien flying saucers observe Earth. It is not specifically stated that these two form a series, but this comic could be seen as a direct follow up to the previous one, indicating that the aliens are the same in the two comics. Just 6 comics later 2579: Tractor Beam also used similar spacecraft.\nThe comic portrays a conversation between aliens inside two flying saucers (or alternately, two aliens whose form is that of flying saucers) in which they discuss their long-secret observation of Earth. It seems that the leader of the mission is in the right saucer, as the alien in left saucer begins by saying \"Sir, can we talk\". The left alien then continues to state that they have been secretly observing Earth for almost a century (perhaps from the early 1930's or late 1920's, and the title text suggests they already were there in 1937). During these almost 100 years, they have repeatedly flown over every (square) inch of Earth's surface, while trying to avoid being spotted by humans. (This is related to the previous comic, which is about improving cell-phone cameras making it increasingly difficult for flying saucer occupants to avoid being photographed.)\nThis leads up to the punchline, which reveals that the leader in the right saucer has been hunting for Bigfoot . The left alien tells him that if a Bigfoot exist anywhere in the universe, it is not on planet Earth. Apparently even advanced aliens have been unable to spot Bigfoot.  The alien leader continues his delusion by citing intriguing human videos of something that looks like Bigfoot. When the other alien sighs, implying that this conversation has occurred many times before, the leader continues his arguments with the typical conspiracy line, \"How else do you explain the...\"\nThe first panel alludes to the fact that UFO sightings became commonplace only in the 1940s .\nThe humor derives from the fact that UFO enthusiasts and cryptozoology enthusiasts have a similar mindset: They both believe in phenomena that the scientific establishment believes baseless. Both systems are fully lacking in clear evidence but have an abundance of eyewitness accounts and vague\/blurry photographic evidence. And both belief systems have existed for many years, but rapidly advancing technology, accumulating data, and ubiquity of high quality cameras have still failed to capture any clear and detailed evidence. ( Randall seems to find this point particularly significant, and although his previous comic explained the bad flying saucer photos, he already made the comic 1235: Settled long ago, where he calls it settled that Bigfoot, UFOs, and similar phenomena don't exist since everyone has a camera handy at all times.) While these concepts are parallel, they're logically independent, as one deals with species that are presumably native to Earth and the other deals with advanced alien species visiting the Earth. The notion of alien visitors being interested in cryptozoology is incongruous: to them, all Earth animals would presumably seem equally alien.\nIn previous strips, Randall has suggested playing conspiracy theories off against one another (see 966: Jet Fuel ). This comic has a similar theme: suggesting that UFOs are here to search for Bigfoot (and the Yeti) sounds ridiculous on its face. But any explanation of why it's ridiculous would apply equally well to the notion of Bigfoot and UFO's individually.\nSome of the aliens clearly have a similar belief, at least in Bigfoot, which is why they came to Earth. This implies that they had some prior knowledge or suspicion of its existence, and only then possibly narrowed it down to this one planet because of the videos humans have made.\nWhatever the arguments about Bigfoot, the title text reveals a separate discussion regarding the Yeti , a similar large hominid purported to reside in the Himalayas , and the tentative permission to conduct one last search for it. As the Yeti and Bigfoot are very similarly described, they could also be seen as the same, so the only difference is that finding a Bigfoot in the Himalayas would make it a Yeti. In the discussion about this last search, they caution about staying high above the Pacific and watch where they are going. This is because, as it turns out, they were the cause of the Amelia Earhart incident. Amelia Earhart disappeared  while flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 and neither her nor her plane have ever been found. The title text implies that she disappeared because of an encounter with a flying saucer. She has previously been the main character in 950: Mystery Solved and has since been a recurring theme on xkcd.\nThat their clearly superior observation technology and methods have been apparently unable to resolve these issues at first seems like it shouldn't bode well for our own cryptozoologists. But since lack of results does nothing to deter them, and since it is always impossible to prove a negative, they would likely not change their beliefs even if they heard of the alien results: \"Bigfoot of course hides when the aliens look! And how else do you explain the...\"\n[Two 'classic' Flying Saucer spacecraft are hovering in the sky with speech-lines indicating communication from someone within each saucer. The rightmost is tilted a bit, like it is being attentive to the left.] Left Saucer: Sir, can we talk? Left Saucer: We've been observing earth for almost a century.\n[Same setting but both saucers are level.] Left Saucer: Hovering and zooming from place to place, trying to avoid being spotted by humans. Right Saucer: Yeah.\n[In a Frameless panel only the left saucer is shown. The right saucer's voice emerges from an edge-of-panel starburst.] Left Saucer: By now we've flown over every inch of the surface many times. Right Saucer (off-panel): Yes? And?\n[Same setting as in the first panel, with the right one tilted towards the left saucer.] Left Saucer: Face it: If Bigfoot is real, he's not anywhere on this planet. Right Saucer: But humans have captured some intriguing videos! Left Saucer: *sigh* Right Saucer: How else do you explain the...\n"}
{"id":2574,"title":"Autoresponder","image_title":"Autoresponder","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2574","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/autoresponder.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2574:_Autoresponder","transcript":"[Cueball and White Hat are talking to each other while Cueball is typing on his smartphone. A dark-haired figure stands behind White Hat, drawn with thicker\/rougher lines as if clad in bulky clothing; wearing spiky knee and elbow guards, a spike-embossed and notably scarred crash-helmet upon its head; and is holding a glinting sharp sword in its hand.] Cueball: Ready to go? White Hat: Yup! Can you email me the tickets before we leave? Cueball: Sure, one sec.\n[The next panel is nested inside the first, although at first it just looks like two individual panels. This could indicate the second panel is an immediate response to the first. The armored figure aggressively moves forward towards Cueball, who drops his phone in surprise. The armored figure has its sword-arm raised, the other hand pushing White Hat behind it, by pushing him in the face which causes him to stumble backwards so his hat starts to fall off.] Cueball: Okay, I sent it to- Armored figure: It is outside work hours! Armored figure: Prepare to die! Cueball: Augh!\n[Caption below the panel:] I always feel bad when I trigger my friends' work autoresponders.\n","explanation":"Cueball and White Hat are going to some kind of show (a movie or concert, perhaps), and Cueball asks White Hat if he is ready to go, who affirms this but asks for Cueball to email him the tickets before they go.\nWhen Cueball does this he apparently opts to send them to White Hat's work email address. When White Hat is not at work, he has an autoresponder activated that tells people to not disturb him as he is not at work. Usually this means that his email server sends an automatic response telling the sender of the mail that he is not at work, and not to expect an immediate reply.\nBut in this comic, White Hat has a physical autoresponder standing behind him, drawn as a human with thicker\/rougher lines as if clad in bulky clothing, wearing spiky knee and elbow guards and a spike-embossed and notably scarred crash-helmet upon its head. It holds a glinting, sharp sword in its hand. When Cueball inadvertently activates it, it plunges forward to 'defend' White Hat from being disturbed by work related things during his spare time. It is so aggressive that it even violently pushes White Hat out of the way, with a blow to the face so that he falls back and dislodges his hat, as it prepares to confront the perpetrator, Cueball.\nIn the caption below, Randall states that he feels bad when he activates his friends' autoresponders. It is unclear if this is because he thinks he disturbs them with what they might think is work, because he then knows he will not get a reply or if he feels attacked (like Cueball in the comic) by their \"aggressively worded\" auto-replies.\nIn the title text Cueball shouts out (in all caps) to the autoresponder \"I admire how you set boundaries and I hope your colleagues respect them! Please spare my life!\"  He therefore thinks it is a good idea to have time away from work where you cannot be contacted by your colleagues.\nIt is unclear if the autoresponder is a human or a robot, but the open-faced helmet reveals the fringe and neck-length hair generally seen on female characters, although for instance Megan 's hair is usually longer and not so messy as this creature. This would be reminiscent of the Android series , especially 600: Android Boyfriend , where one of the androids moves past its owner.\n[Cueball and White Hat are talking to each other while Cueball is typing on his smartphone. A dark-haired figure stands behind White Hat, drawn with thicker\/rougher lines as if clad in bulky clothing; wearing spiky knee and elbow guards, a spike-embossed and notably scarred crash-helmet upon its head; and is holding a glinting sharp sword in its hand.] Cueball: Ready to go? White Hat: Yup! Can you email me the tickets before we leave? Cueball: Sure, one sec.\n[The next panel is nested inside the first, although at first it just looks like two individual panels. This could indicate the second panel is an immediate response to the first. The armored figure aggressively moves forward towards Cueball, who drops his phone in surprise. The armored figure has its sword-arm raised, the other hand pushing White Hat behind it, by pushing him in the face which causes him to stumble backwards so his hat starts to fall off.] Cueball: Okay, I sent it to- Armored figure: It is outside work hours! Armored figure: Prepare to die! Cueball: Augh!\n[Caption below the panel:] I always feel bad when I trigger my friends' work autoresponders.\n"}
{"id":2575,"title":"What If? 2","image_title":"What If? 2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2575","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/what_if_2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2575:_What_If%3F_2","transcript":"[Randall, drawn as Cueball, is throwing his arms out as he stands next to a big red book with white drawings on the cover. The cover shows a large passenger plane that has just taken off, as can be seen since the landing gear still has the wheels extended (only one wheel is visible at the middle part and then the one in the front). A Tyrannosaurus Rex has jumped on to the plane and it is biting down on the ceiling of the plane a bit in front of the wings, as if on the back of a prey. The dinosaur has already broken through the ceiling. Below is a jagged landscape with small mountain like peaks in the background. Megan and Cueball are standing on the top of the second of two raised plateaus, looking up at the plane and dinosaur. There is unreadable white text above the plane, then a title beneath the plane, and the authors name below the landscape, and more unreadable text beneath that, all in white. Below the book, there is a small arrow pointing to the right bottom of the book, with a label beneath.] Randall: Announcement: I\u2019m publishing a what if? sequel! Book cover: what if? 2 Book cover: Randall Munroe In stores 9\/13, available for preorder now: xkcd.com\/whatif2\n[Randall is shown holding up his smart phone in one hand. The screen lights up as indicated with small lines at the top. These point up to at least six SMS texts, each with two lines of text. They are shown in speech bobbles with a small arrow in the bobbles lower left corner. All six are covered partly by either the other five, or by Randall\u2019s head, and none of them can be read in any meaningful way; only parts of sentences or words are clearly visible. The bobbles and the text in them are all drawn in gray. Randall is narrating (not speaking) in this panel, both above the SMS texts, and below.] Randall narrating: Ever since I wrote what if? , I\u2019ve been flooded with questions. Randall narrating: And not just from readers- My friends and family stated texting them to me, too. Text 1: Hey, could s.. ele Text 2: Hypothe\u2026 Text 3: If you s\u2026 Jupiter\u2026 Text 4: Could my c\u2026 or\u2026 Text 5: Do you\u2026 my car\u2026 Text 6: If I trie\u2026 the sun, would I\u2026 Randall narrating: Honestly, I love it.\n[Randall is again standing next to his red book talking. There is also a second version of the book lying to the right of the closed book, and this has been opened up to reveal two pages. The text is unreadable and the images are very hard to see, but it seems that two people are standing next to each other on the right page. The image at the top of the left page has been enlarged and shown to the right of the open book. It is an image of the Earth that is being peeled by a potato peeler, which takes off a large peel from the north part of Scandinavia and then goes via Russia into Asia. The title and author name can still just be read on the book,but maybe only because they are already known...] Randall: The questions are so good. People have asked about touching exotic  materials, traveling across space and time, eating things they shouldn\u2019t, and smashing large objects into the Earth. There are questions about lasers, explosions, swingsets, candy, and soup. Several planets are destroyed-one of them by the soup. Book cover: what if? 2 Book cover: Randall Munroe\n[Zoom in on the top part of Randall speaking on.] Randall: Like the first book, what if? 2 also features collections of short answers, new lists of weird and worrying questions, and some of my favorite answers from the What if site.\n[Only the closed red book are shown in this panel, in an even larger version than in any of the previous panels. But it is still only the title and the author name that can be read, but in this version these can also be read on the spine of the book. Randall is narrating again, and there are text both above and below the book.] Randall narrating: If you want to get it when it\u2019s released, you can preorder a copy at xkcd.com\/whatif2 Book spine: what if? 2 Randall Munroe Book cover: what if? 2 Book cover: Randall Munroe Randall narrating: Available Sep 13, 2022\n","explanation":"This comic is Randall 's way of announcing and promoting his new book, what If? 2 , based on his what if? blog and following his first what if book.\nThe entire comic (including the xkcd Header text ) is a link to a what if? 2: the book page on xkcd .\nApart from promoting the book, the comic also explains why he ended up writing a sequel. After the first book came out Randall was flooded with what if? questions. Presumable mainly from his readers via e-mail, but his friends and families also started texting him with these questions. Some of these texts are displayed in the comic, but only partially, so none of the six question texts can be read. But where one might think that this would become tiresome, Randall instead tells the readers the opposite: \"Honestly, I love it.\"\nHe then continues to praise the quality of the questions, mentioning no less than nine examples of what the questions were about. And in the process ensures the reader that planets, including the Earth, will be destroyed multiple times in his new book. At the end he lets the readers know that some of the features of the first book, with short answer sections and disturbing questions (likely not answered), are also included in this book.\nHe also states that a few of his favorites from the What If? site site have been included, so it is not all new material. From the book stores, it seems like he includes his very last online What If? ( Earth-Moon Fire Pole ) for instance, which was released on 2018-05-21, almost four years before this comic was released. Also, by the time the book is released, it will be almost four years and four months since the last article on What If?\nThe final part of the comic is a picture of the book that both makes it clear when the book is released and how to preorder it.\nRandall ensured the maximum possible attention to his announcement by placing a countdown in the header about three weeks prior to the announcement. This has caused a lot of speculation as to what would be revealed on the day of this comic's release 2022-01-31. The timer was inside a panel at the top right of the xkcd header text next to the standard header text: xkcd updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday . Inside the panel a picture began emerging after the first day, but the picture only changed approximately once every four hours. After a few weeks was it certain that it was a plane that was being revealed. And on the second to last day, around day twenty, it was clear that it featured a T. rex -like dinosaur en silhouette standing on top of the aircraft, apparently trying to eat its way into the fuselage, and it might have been possible to guess the relation to the What If? sequel. On the day before the announcement on xkcd, however, Amazon made visible a preorder page for the book , so the answer was made clear about a day before Randall had intended. This clearly annoyed users of this page as can be seen in the talk page for the countdown .\nUntil then, however, there were numerous theories about the countdown and what the image would reveal as the image gradually changed throughout the eventual 136 frames .\nIn the title text, Randall feels that he must clarify the release day (as in 2562: Formatting Meeting ), since he has often joked about the way different countries (and people) write dates. He did not use the one version he himself had promoted in earlier comics. He does however give two different versions of the release date: the first is \"9\/13\" in the first panel, which is at least (usually \u2014 see below) only readable one way; harder to misinterpret is the more expansive \"Sep 13, 2022\" in the final panel. A format that he could have used to avoid any confusion is: \"the book is released on 2022-09-13,\" using the international standard as defined in the ISO 8601 standard and shown in 1179: ISO 8601 .\nThe clarification reads: By 9\/13, I mean September 13th, not the 9th day of Jancember, the cursed 13th month that exists between December and January in the transdimensional temporal plane.\nSince there are only 12 months in the year, [ citation needed ] 9\/13 actually cannot be mistaken, while 9\/12 might be. So there was really no need for this clarification, especially with the last text in the last panel. So this is of course just a title text joke, where he can manage to make a portmanteau of January and December (\"Jancember\") and then then call this a cursed month as it would be the 13th month if it came before New Year. This comic came out at the end of January, so it could have been at the end of Jancember instead. The number thirteen is seen by many as an unlucky number, so a thirteenth month would be considered cursed by some, or at least unlucky.  \nIn reality, a 13th month can exist in some alternate calendars and is then called \" Undecimber \".\nAt the release of this comic, the header changed to promote the website, the xkcd links in the top left section of xkcd was changed to promote the book and he made his first Blag post in more than two years with the What If 2 post.\nThe what if? header was also changed to accommodate promotion of the new book; not so strange, seeming as it was based on that blog. A picture is displayed at the top with the book at both ends and this text in between, with the first line taking up the top and the two other lines below, the first in a frame:\nWhat If? 2 Preorder now On sale 9\/13\nThe entire picture links to the what if? 2 page.\nExactly two months after the release of this promotion comic Randall made another comic about his new what if? 2 book: 2600: Rejected Question Categories . In this he also gives the release day as 9\/13, in the title text, although without any mention of the ambiguity of this date format.\n[Randall, drawn as Cueball, is throwing his arms out as he stands next to a big red book with white drawings on the cover. The cover shows a large passenger plane that has just taken off, as can be seen since the landing gear still has the wheels extended (only one wheel is visible at the middle part and then the one in the front). A Tyrannosaurus Rex has jumped on to the plane and it is biting down on the ceiling of the plane a bit in front of the wings, as if on the back of a prey. The dinosaur has already broken through the ceiling. Below is a jagged landscape with small mountain like peaks in the background. Megan and Cueball are standing on the top of the second of two raised plateaus, looking up at the plane and dinosaur. There is unreadable white text above the plane, then a title beneath the plane, and the authors name below the landscape, and more unreadable text beneath that, all in white. Below the book, there is a small arrow pointing to the right bottom of the book, with a label beneath.] Randall: Announcement: I\u2019m publishing a what if? sequel! Book cover: what if? 2 Book cover: Randall Munroe In stores 9\/13, available for preorder now: xkcd.com\/whatif2\n[Randall is shown holding up his smart phone in one hand. The screen lights up as indicated with small lines at the top. These point up to at least six SMS texts, each with two lines of text. They are shown in speech bobbles with a small arrow in the bobbles lower left corner. All six are covered partly by either the other five, or by Randall\u2019s head, and none of them can be read in any meaningful way; only parts of sentences or words are clearly visible. The bobbles and the text in them are all drawn in gray. Randall is narrating (not speaking) in this panel, both above the SMS texts, and below.] Randall narrating: Ever since I wrote what if? , I\u2019ve been flooded with questions. Randall narrating: And not just from readers- My friends and family stated texting them to me, too. Text 1: Hey, could s.. ele Text 2: Hypothe\u2026 Text 3: If you s\u2026 Jupiter\u2026 Text 4: Could my c\u2026 or\u2026 Text 5: Do you\u2026 my car\u2026 Text 6: If I trie\u2026 the sun, would I\u2026 Randall narrating: Honestly, I love it.\n[Randall is again standing next to his red book talking. There is also a second version of the book lying to the right of the closed book, and this has been opened up to reveal two pages. The text is unreadable and the images are very hard to see, but it seems that two people are standing next to each other on the right page. The image at the top of the left page has been enlarged and shown to the right of the open book. It is an image of the Earth that is being peeled by a potato peeler, which takes off a large peel from the north part of Scandinavia and then goes via Russia into Asia. The title and author name can still just be read on the book,but maybe only because they are already known...] Randall: The questions are so good. People have asked about touching exotic  materials, traveling across space and time, eating things they shouldn\u2019t, and smashing large objects into the Earth. There are questions about lasers, explosions, swingsets, candy, and soup. Several planets are destroyed-one of them by the soup. Book cover: what if? 2 Book cover: Randall Munroe\n[Zoom in on the top part of Randall speaking on.] Randall: Like the first book, what if? 2 also features collections of short answers, new lists of weird and worrying questions, and some of my favorite answers from the What if site.\n[Only the closed red book are shown in this panel, in an even larger version than in any of the previous panels. But it is still only the title and the author name that can be read, but in this version these can also be read on the spine of the book. Randall is narrating again, and there are text both above and below the book.] Randall narrating: If you want to get it when it\u2019s released, you can preorder a copy at xkcd.com\/whatif2 Book spine: what if? 2 Randall Munroe Book cover: what if? 2 Book cover: Randall Munroe Randall narrating: Available Sep 13, 2022\n"}
{"id":2576,"title":"Control Group","image_title":"Control Group","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2576","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/control_group.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2576:_Control_Group","transcript":"[Ponytail is looking at her smartphone which she is holding in her hand, while she is talking to Cueball.] Ponytail: Are you playing Wordle? Cueball: No, I'm in the control group.\n[Caption below the panel:] My new all-purpose excuse for when I'm not doing something\n","explanation":"Wordle ( [1] ) is a web-based word puzzle game that was popular when this comic was released. In the comic, Ponytail asks Cueball whether he's playing the game; Cueball replies that he isn't, because he's \"in the control group\".\nIn scientific studies, the control group stands in opposition to the treatment group; whereas the treatment group receives the experimental \"treatment\", the control group does not, instead receiving a placebo or nothing at all. This is done to establish a baseline\u2014what would happen without intervention\u2014against which the result of the experimental treatment is compared later.\nWhen Cueball replies that he's \"in the control group\", this implies that Ponytail and other Wordle players are part of a \"treatment\" group. This implies that playing Wordle may have some long-term effects worth studying.\nJokingly, this may also imply that Wordle is some sort of social experiment , perhaps a sociological study conducted by Harvard . As noted in the caption to the comic, Randall has been using this line as his new all-purpose excuse when he is not doing something. It's a clever way of saying that you're determined not to take part, as a control group requires him to avoid it. Mind control studies can also be nonconsensual experiments that massively impact public behavior.\nMore realistically, Cueball may be part of a real market research control group, which was not exposed to advertisements and memes supporting the game or anything associated with the game. Market research studies have been common since the advent of advertising.\nThe title text is a parody of Wordle's sharing feature, which users have been posting on Twitter or other social media platforms to show their success or failure at the game. The title text shows a 5x6 grid, but calls it \"Placeble\" (a portmanteau of Placebo and Wordle) and has a number after it, suggesting that not only is the game a social experiment, but that a \"placebo version\" is being given to the control group. In the real Wordle sharing feature, the number represents the current day's game. On the date this comic was released, the Wordle website itself was on game 228, matching the number in the title text. Randall's placebo version of Wordle has blank\/incorrect squares and has a score of \"x\/6\" which is a loss in Wordle \u2014 unsuccessful after the maximum 6 tries.\n[Ponytail is looking at her smartphone which she is holding in her hand, while she is talking to Cueball.] Ponytail: Are you playing Wordle? Cueball: No, I'm in the control group.\n[Caption below the panel:] My new all-purpose excuse for when I'm not doing something\n"}
{"id":2577,"title":"Sea Chase","image_title":"Sea Chase","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2577","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sea_chase.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2577:_Sea_Chase","transcript":"[A pirate ship flying the Skull and Crossbones is sailing after a merchant ship. Two sailors' voices come from the merchant ship.] Merchant ship sailor #1: They're closing in! Merchant ship sailor #2: Hang on, we're almost at the meridian!\n[A map of the Earth in the Robinson projection, with two red dots in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A voice comes from the red dot further to the east.] Merchant ship sailor #2: Now! Throw the switch!\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball, representing merchant ship sailor #1, pulls down a giant lever switch labeled \"Projection\", from \"Robinson\" to \"Goode Homolosine\".]\n[A map of the Earth in the Goode Homolosine projection, with one red dot on the American side of the split and one red dot on the European side of the split.]\n","explanation":"In this comic, Randall returns to one of his pet subjects: map projections . Unusually, [ citation needed ] this time it is from the perspective of people living \u2014 or, in this case, sailing \u2014 upon the world that is quite literally being mapped.\nTwo sailing ships, of circa 18th-century design, are engaged in a close chase across the Atlantic , the aggressor flying the Skull and Crossbones of a stereotypical pirate vessel. It can be seen from the flags of both ships that they are tacking into the wind, the trailing ship seeming to be lighter and yet deploying more effective canvas with two active sails than the forward one can with three.  The ship being chased has a plan to escape and the means to do so. At a crucial moment, Cueball is told to flip a large incongruous switch that (like several other artifacts in the xkcd universe) alters the nature of their reality.\nWhereas beforehand the world is directly represented upon a simply contiguous map, the Robinson projection , it is now changed to one (which is actually the new reality) known as Goode Homolosine in which the flattening of the world mitigates localized warping of angle, distance, and area by introducing discontinuities in relatively \"unused\" parts of the mapped world, such as the center of the Atlantic.\nBy precisely timing the change (as they cross a particular meridian , possibly the 40\u00b0W one), they leave the pursuer now on the wrong side of the very real gap, allowing the pursued ship to escape whatever fate they were trying to avoid. Though there is still an oceanic connection, it requires sailing down the edge towards the tropics, rounding this particular rent in the planet's surface, and heading back up the other side. This is vastly further than Cueball's ship needs to travel to reach (presumably) any European port in which they can safely moor.\nThe title text elaborates on the policies of the ship: crewmates are never to look into the \"projection abyss\" and to never hit the red button labeled \" DYMAXION .\"\nThe first rule suggests that changing the projection of physical reality produces a gap in reality \u2014 a void. This may be dangerous to gaze into or simply unnerving to crewmates, hence the rule. This may also be a reference to a well-known quote by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche : \u201cHe who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.\u201d  See Beyond Good and Evil at Project Gutenberg\nThe second rule references a button that seems to do the same thing as the lever but changes the world into a Dymaxion projection . The Dymaxion map projects the Earth onto 20 triangles, which are typically chosen such that landmasses are contiguous while adding many discontinuities in the oceans. This would make navigating by ship in such a 2D world even more difficult than in the Goode homolosine projection. In particular, crossing the Atlantic ocean becomes impossible because of the introduction of a projection abyss from Norway to the Caribbean.\nThe Robinson, Goode Homolosine, and Dymaxion projections have been referenced in 977: Map Projections .\n[A pirate ship flying the Skull and Crossbones is sailing after a merchant ship. Two sailors' voices come from the merchant ship.] Merchant ship sailor #1: They're closing in! Merchant ship sailor #2: Hang on, we're almost at the meridian!\n[A map of the Earth in the Robinson projection, with two red dots in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A voice comes from the red dot further to the east.] Merchant ship sailor #2: Now! Throw the switch!\n[In a frameless panel, Cueball, representing merchant ship sailor #1, pulls down a giant lever switch labeled \"Projection\", from \"Robinson\" to \"Goode Homolosine\".]\n[A map of the Earth in the Goode Homolosine projection, with one red dot on the American side of the split and one red dot on the European side of the split.]\n"}
{"id":2578,"title":"Sword Pull","image_title":"Sword Pull","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2578","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/sword_pull.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2578:_Sword_Pull","transcript":"[Cueball walks towards a large stone on the ground from which the hilt of a sword is protruding. The ground he walks on is uneven, with small plants growing and small stones lying on the ground.] Cueball:\u00a0??\n[Cueball stands on the stone and attempts to pull the sword out of the stone using both hands and leaning a bit back away from the sword.]\n[Cueball manages to pull the sword partially out of the stone, still using both hands, and now he is almost standing in full height, but still leaning a bit back. Both he and the sword is vibrating from the effort, as indicated by several sets of two lines around the sword and Cueball's arms. The pull gives off a loud sound, and also a buzzing sound comes because of the pull.  And three small lines above the right part of the stone indicated that other sounds are coming from the stone] Pull: Yank! Sword: Zzz z z Stone: Put put put Stone: Brrr rr rr\n[Cueball is still holding on to the sword, with the tip still inside the stone. But he is not pulling anymore and is now looking down on the stone beneath him. There are now several lines from both sides of the stone indicating noises coming from the stone, which now is written on both sides of Cueball on the stone.] Cueball:\u00a0??\u00a0?? Stone: Rr r r rrrrrrrr r r\n[Cueball has released the sword which has then returned to the original position deep in the stone. The stone is now clearly moving to the right of the panel, with Cueball on top of it. He is looking behind him and holding his arms out to the side to keep his balance. The patch where the stone lay to start is dark. Four large lines behind the stone indicates how it is moving. The stone is already partially outside the right edge of the panel. The sound from the stone is floating behind the stone as it moves to the right] Stone: R r r r rrrrrr r rr\n","explanation":"A surprised Cueball walks up to a stone where apparently a sword is stuck in almost to the hilt, embedded in a stone much like a particularly well-known fable in the legends of King Arthur . This may mean this sword is called Excalibur . Usually, the narrative is that the one who can free the significant sword becomes king of England (or, technically, Britain), see for instance Disney's The Sword in the Stone \u2014 or the scene as featured in 1521: Sword in the Stone , where Megan decides to return the sword back into the stone after reading about England on Wikipedia. (It has been commented that the one who managed to embed the sword in the stone in the first place may have had the greater skill and\/or strength.)\nCueball rises to the challenge and stands atop the stone, for leverage, and pulls hard to yank it almost out of the stone. With a surprise even greater than before, he finds that the pulling of the sword merely starts a motor within the stone and, almost immediately,  the whole assemblage starts moving to the right with Cueball still standing upon it. Having failed to fully remove the sword from the stone, after he releases it the sword is retracted back to its original position inside the now moving stone.\nThe title text implies that the sword is actually the rope starter for Merlin's dirt bike . Merlin , a wizard, is typically known as King Arthur's mystical advisor. The title text mentions that Merlin really should not just let his dirt bike lie around, indicating that this is a common occurrence and has caused problems before. Since rocks are usually not dirt bikes in disguise, [ citation needed ] Randall may be describing this literally, as in a stone-bike that travels through the dirt, as it appears to represent in the last panel.\nSome similarly-sized stones, namely sailing stones , do move spontaneously with up to 0.3 km\/h in precise conditions. However, the stone in the comic appears to be moving at a higher speed, and sailing stones require no rope starting. [ citation needed ]\n[Cueball walks towards a large stone on the ground from which the hilt of a sword is protruding. The ground he walks on is uneven, with small plants growing and small stones lying on the ground.] Cueball:\u00a0??\n[Cueball stands on the stone and attempts to pull the sword out of the stone using both hands and leaning a bit back away from the sword.]\n[Cueball manages to pull the sword partially out of the stone, still using both hands, and now he is almost standing in full height, but still leaning a bit back. Both he and the sword is vibrating from the effort, as indicated by several sets of two lines around the sword and Cueball's arms. The pull gives off a loud sound, and also a buzzing sound comes because of the pull.  And three small lines above the right part of the stone indicated that other sounds are coming from the stone] Pull: Yank! Sword: Zzz z z Stone: Put put put Stone: Brrr rr rr\n[Cueball is still holding on to the sword, with the tip still inside the stone. But he is not pulling anymore and is now looking down on the stone beneath him. There are now several lines from both sides of the stone indicating noises coming from the stone, which now is written on both sides of Cueball on the stone.] Cueball:\u00a0??\u00a0?? Stone: Rr r r rrrrrrrr r r\n[Cueball has released the sword which has then returned to the original position deep in the stone. The stone is now clearly moving to the right of the panel, with Cueball on top of it. He is looking behind him and holding his arms out to the side to keep his balance. The patch where the stone lay to start is dark. Four large lines behind the stone indicates how it is moving. The stone is already partially outside the right edge of the panel. The sound from the stone is floating behind the stone as it moves to the right] Stone: R r r r rrrrrr r rr\n"}
{"id":2579,"title":"Tractor Beam","image_title":"Tractor Beam","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2579","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/tractor_beam.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2579:_Tractor_Beam","transcript":"[A flying saucer type spacecraft hangs in the air above a flat area with scattered rocks and two hills in the background. A beam of 'light' emerges, a conical region textured with wavy lines radiating along its length, from a small square opening beneath the bottom of the craft going down to the ground a bit right of the saucer where its conceivably circular cross-section is rendered elliptic by both its angle of projection and our own viewing perspective. Cueball hangs suspended within the middle of the beam, above the ground but still some way from the saucer. His arms are held out to either side and his legs are bent up behind him. He is looking up at the saucer while talking.] Cueball: Does this beam only lift me? How do you avoid pulling up dirt and leaves and stuff? If I kick off my shoes, will they fall? Cueball: Is my weight pulling your ship downward? What will happen if a bat flies through the beam? Cueball: Hey, why does your ship have those blinky lights? Are they...\n[Caption below the panel:] Moments later, the aliens set me back down and left.\n","explanation":"Cueball is being pulled into a spaceship by a beam of light, called a tractor beam in the title. This is a common trope in science fiction, and usually pretty scary for the person involved. However, while Cueball is being pulled up, he asks a series of questions about the beam, about the force on the ship, and about the ship itself. The punch line is the caption - the aliens, frustrated by Cueball's questioning, release him and move on, to presumably find a different human to abduct and study. Many people have reported being abducted by aliens in real life, though none of these have been confirmed. [ citation needed ]\nThe first three questions deal with the properties of the beam \u2013 how it can be controlled to pull only him (and his clothes), not anything else. He also wonders whether the beam would still continue to lift his shoes if he took them off midway. Perhaps his apparel is only rising with him because it normally stays attached to him, perhaps it is similarly levitated with equal force or impulse. Theoretically, it could only lift his clothing, with enough force to hoist him along with it, though if this was done with insufficient finesse, it could cause damage to the clothing or the person. (One might be tempted to call this a Space Wedgie .) It is highly unlikely that this type of tractor beam could be used on Cueball without him realizing it, which would likely lead to him asking how the tractor beam lifted the clothes and not him.\nNext, Cueball asks if his weight is pulling the ship downward. This would be the case, for example, if he were hoisted upwards by a rope instead of the beam, as equal but opposite forces act against each other, but not if the beam alters the nature of his surroundings such as with Cavorite or another means of gravitational shielding or alteration.\nThen he asks what will happen if a bat flies through the beam. Things that could happen include the beam breaking (and him falling downward) due to the projected effect being interrupted, the bat being pulled up ahead of him as it enters the effective volume of the levitating beam or else nothing at all as it is outside the actual volumetric segment of the beam that is more than ambient light-effects. It may presumably have a relationship with the same focal effect as that which avoids the ground upon which he previously stood being drawn upwards. Also, the shadow of the bat on the ground might make the light beam look like an inverted Bat-Signal .\nAs the ship leaves, Cueball continues asking questions, as shown in the title text. Those questions address the shape of the ship. He asks whether the aliens based the saucer shape on depictions of extraterrestrials in earth popular culture, or if classic flying saucers were inspired by them. \nHis next question was cut off, but what we heard is \"does the rotational symmetry help with\".\nWhether Cueball actually arrived onboard the ship is uncertain. If he started badgering the aliens with questions during the lift and then (as stated) was immediately set down again then he did not. Either way, they got fed up and decided to return him to the ground instead of sharing their knowledge, or just because they preferred someone less talkative. They may prefer or expect more scared, overawed, or surprised abductees but, by whatever alien criteria they judge their catches, it seems he isn't what they want.\nThis was the third comic in less than three weeks featuring aliens using this type of flying saucer type spaceship. The other two comics were in a row just 6 and 7 comics before this one, 2572: Alien Observers and 2573: Alien Mission\n[A flying saucer type spacecraft hangs in the air above a flat area with scattered rocks and two hills in the background. A beam of 'light' emerges, a conical region textured with wavy lines radiating along its length, from a small square opening beneath the bottom of the craft going down to the ground a bit right of the saucer where its conceivably circular cross-section is rendered elliptic by both its angle of projection and our own viewing perspective. Cueball hangs suspended within the middle of the beam, above the ground but still some way from the saucer. His arms are held out to either side and his legs are bent up behind him. He is looking up at the saucer while talking.] Cueball: Does this beam only lift me? How do you avoid pulling up dirt and leaves and stuff? If I kick off my shoes, will they fall? Cueball: Is my weight pulling your ship downward? What will happen if a bat flies through the beam? Cueball: Hey, why does your ship have those blinky lights? Are they...\n[Caption below the panel:] Moments later, the aliens set me back down and left.\n"}
{"id":2580,"title":"Rest and Fluids","image_title":"Rest and Fluids","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2580","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rest_and_fluids.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2580:_Rest_and_Fluids","transcript":"[Cueball and Black Hat are talking to each other. Black Hat has his arms outstretched.] Black Hat: So glad you're feeling better! Black Hat: Be sure to get dehydrated and run on a treadmill until you black out!\n[Caption below the panel:] Once people aren't sick anymore, it's important to remind them to stop resting and drinking fluids.\n","explanation":"Black Hat congratulates Cueball on his recovery from some type of illness or injury. Common advice when someone is sick is to get plenty of rest and drink lots of water, to aid recovery and to ensure they don't ignore various common causes of fluid loss.\nHowever, being Black Hat, he targets Cueball (who has been restored to full health) to tell him that he now should do the opposite of this. While a healthy person should get a reasonable amount of exercise, and should not spend excessive time in bed, Black Hat goes to an absurd extreme.  He tells Cueball to stop drinking water entirely and engage in an excessive amount of activity \u2014 in this case, by running on a treadmill to the point of physical collapse. The caption explains this, saying that it is \"important\" to tell people who have recently recovered from sickness to stop resting and drinking fluids, suggesting that these behaviors are for the exclusive purpose of healing and that they are useless (or even counter-productive) for someone who is now healthy.\nPart of the joke may be that the most basic common and basic advice to people who are sick is good, general advice in any case. While a person who's sick should be particularly attentive to these needs, and will generally require more rest than a person who's healthy, getting adequate rest and hydration are important for maintaining health, not just recovering from illness, and pursuing the opposite would be dangerous.\nThe title-text expands on this backward line of thinking by suggesting to do the opposite of common remedies for various usual remedies: a hot cloth, standing, breathing parched air, taking histamines (this is as opposed to reducing fever with a cool compress, resting in bed, inhaling hot water vapors and using antihistamines ). These are increasingly bizarre.  A hot cloth on the forehead would range from useless to dangerous (if too hot, it could cause burns or overheating).  Remaining standing isn't harmful for most people, but would soon become exhausting.  Breathing dry air isn't harmful for most people, but without adequate water would dehydrate you even faster.  Histamines are compounds created in the body that regulate the immune system. They're generally not available as a supplement so it would be difficult to \"take\" histamines. If you could somehow raise your histamine levels artificially, it could interfere with any number of bodily functions.\nThis comic has some resemblance to 2279: Symptoms since it also makes a joke out of symptoms or the opposite of symptoms. Although not mentioned here, this comic is probably, like Symptoms, related to the COVID-19 pandemic , as many people were still sick with it at the time of publishing this comic.\n[Cueball and Black Hat are talking to each other. Black Hat has his arms outstretched.] Black Hat: So glad you're feeling better! Black Hat: Be sure to get dehydrated and run on a treadmill until you black out!\n[Caption below the panel:] Once people aren't sick anymore, it's important to remind them to stop resting and drinking fluids.\n"}
{"id":2581,"title":"Health Stats","image_title":"Health Stats","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2581","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/health_stats.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2581:_Health_Stats","transcript":"[Cueball is looking down and to the right at his bent arm, where a small device is radiating as shown with several small lines. Above him the message from the device is shown in a frame, that is divided in two by a line. The top part has one line of text, with a x at the end for closing the message. And below in the second half are two lines of text. Cueball is speaking to someone off-panel, who replies from a starburst at the panel's edge.] Box title bar: New health stat! Box: Left hand blood volume: 21.83 mL Cueball: Oh. Cool. Not sure how to interpret that, but good to know, I guess. Off-panel voice: I guess!\n[Same setting but Cueball has turned to the left, still looking at his device on his bend arm. The message on the device is now only showing the message part, so it is no longer divided into two parts.] Box: Left hand blood volume: 21.81 mL Cueball: Huh, it's going down. I guess that happens. Off-panel voice: Mhm.\n[In a frame-less panel, Cueball now has both arms bent with his hands close together in front of him. He has once again turned toward the right, and is still looking at the device.] Box: Left hand blood volume: 21.86 mL Cueball: Oh weird, now it's going up higher than before. Off-panel voice: Maybe you shouldn't look at-\n[Cueball now holds his arm with the device outstretched towards the right, with his other arm bent in front of him a finger raised.] Box: Left hand blood volume: 22.09 mL Cueball: It's going way up! Is my hand exploding?! Cueball: And now my pulse is rising! Aaaaa!!!! Off-panel voice: So sorry. We will treasure your memory.\n","explanation":"Cueball's has a smartwatch that tells him a new health statistic. It is clearly either a new watch or a newly discovered feature added to his existing one.\nIt seems to monitor the volume of blood currently in his left hand (specifically the one the watch is being worn on the wrist of, implying it tracks the inflow and outflow and maintains a running tally) and conveys this quantity in milliliters (ml). It also tracks other stats like his pulse, as seen later, but this is not what currently interests Cueball. Instead he studies the blood volume information and finds it changing from moment to moment. This may be from a combination of his pulse (misaligned to the frequency of the updates) or the vertical position and attitude of his hand (he subtly changes the hand's position from panel to panel). It could just be inaccuracies in the data, an issue with all scientific instruments but more so for consumer devices used without practiced expertise - it is unlikely he has strapped the measuring device tight enough onto his wrist to give scientifically consistent results, even with such slight arm movements as he makes.\nHe reports his thoughts on this to someone off-panel, who is heard replying to all his comments. At first, Cueball just voices the assumption that the small change is normal, and accepts the movement away from a number he had no reason to disbelieve as realistic. But then two measurements in a row both increase. Although all the changes are slight, compared to the magnitude of the numbers themselves, this freaks him out. He may be extrapolating these two data points into the future - if this rather selective trend continues, his hand may explode from its ever-increasing volume of blood. Either this, or Cueball noticed that the variation in the first three data points was \u00b10.025, but the final variation suddenly surpasses this level by ten times this range, massively redefining his evolving expectations.\nFor whatever reason he becomes anxious, a consequence of this is that his pulse also begins to rise, as also documented by the watch. This could simultaneously increase his blood pressure (not noted as being another monitored statistic) and in turn causing another rise in the volume of blood in his hand. Knowledge of the pulse increase makes him even more alarmed, which will cause a positive feedback loop at least in the short term.\nThe total difference between the maximum (22.09 ml) and minimum volume (21.81 ml) of blood in his hand is only 0.28 ml compared to an average of 21.9 ml, so less than 1.5% difference. This can realistically be assumed to be a normal fluctuation from heartbeat to heartbeat and\/or with change of posture. For that matter, neither Cueball nor ourselves may have any idea what a normal volume of blood in his left hand would be. His comment in the first panel is that he's \"not sure how to interpret\" the initial measurement, and it might need rather uncommon medical knowledge to do so - even those who have learnt how much blood a typical human body should contain might be stumped by how much of that is just within a typical (or specific) human hand. However, he seems to have assumed that 21.83 ml was a normal measurement simply since it was the first one he saw (a stereotypical preference for early information ).\nJust before his anxiety reaches breaking point, his off-panel friend begins to tell him to stop looking at the watch all the time, but is interrupted mid-sentence by Cueball actually freaking out. This final outbreak causes his off-screen companion to tease him by saying that \"We will treasure your memory\", thus joking that Cueball will soon die from the blood loss when his hand explodes.\nThe title text continues with this teasing where the friend jokes that after his demise he will live on forever in his friends' hearts. From there he will thus also be responsible for pushing a bit more blood into his friends' left hands, now and again, so they can feel this as a squeeze to remind them of how they lost their friend to a left-handed blood explosion.\nThis is likely meant to parody the tendency of people to monitor minute details of their own health, pandered to by possibly misguided developments in personal meditech, without having a clear idea of what any of the data means. This is arguably much more common today with health devices readily available, which can give the average person data about their own body but often don't offer useful context. Cueball is apparently sufficiently fixated on data that apparent changes to any metric causes him to panic. He doesn't know what the blood volume of his hand means for his health, or even whether it's a useful metric, yet he obsesses over perceived trends in the data.  The irony is that his very focus causes a more important metric (his pulse rate) to elevate. This may be intended to suggest that excessive fixation on one's own health can cause elevated anxiety. Ironically, this stress can potentially be more harmful than the things that the person has become upset about.\n[Cueball is looking down and to the right at his bent arm, where a small device is radiating as shown with several small lines. Above him the message from the device is shown in a frame, that is divided in two by a line. The top part has one line of text, with a x at the end for closing the message. And below in the second half are two lines of text. Cueball is speaking to someone off-panel, who replies from a starburst at the panel's edge.] Box title bar: New health stat! Box: Left hand blood volume: 21.83 mL Cueball: Oh. Cool. Not sure how to interpret that, but good to know, I guess. Off-panel voice: I guess!\n[Same setting but Cueball has turned to the left, still looking at his device on his bend arm. The message on the device is now only showing the message part, so it is no longer divided into two parts.] Box: Left hand blood volume: 21.81 mL Cueball: Huh, it's going down. I guess that happens. Off-panel voice: Mhm.\n[In a frame-less panel, Cueball now has both arms bent with his hands close together in front of him. He has once again turned toward the right, and is still looking at the device.] Box: Left hand blood volume: 21.86 mL Cueball: Oh weird, now it's going up higher than before. Off-panel voice: Maybe you shouldn't look at-\n[Cueball now holds his arm with the device outstretched towards the right, with his other arm bent in front of him a finger raised.] Box: Left hand blood volume: 22.09 mL Cueball: It's going way up! Is my hand exploding?! Cueball: And now my pulse is rising! Aaaaa!!!! Off-panel voice: So sorry. We will treasure your memory.\n"}
{"id":2582,"title":"Data Trap","image_title":"Data Trap","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2582","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/data_trap.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2582:_Data_Trap","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk, hands on his knees, looking at his laptop. Megan stands behind him, with her arms raised to the sides and above her head.] Cueball: Hey, look, we have a bunch of data! I'm gonna analyze it. Megan: No, you fool! That will only create more data!\n","explanation":"Cueball wants to analyze a \"bunch\" of data that he has, likely from a survey or study. Megan warns him against doing analysis because analysis produces more data \u2014 specifically, data about the data . This is implied to be a bad thing, as in, having \"too much\" data is undesirable \u2014 perhaps he will be expected to analyze the metadata, then analyze the metadata created by the metadata, and so on. However, data generated from analysis may provide useful insights about the original data set, e.g. finding trends or correlations between data points. Avoiding the analysis or deleting its data could deprive the analyzer of useful information. And, in the case that the analysis is flawed or impossible, there is little danger in disposing of any resulting reports. [ citation needed ]\nThe title text proposes an alternate solution: destructive analysis. It is important that the method chosen to analyze the data destroys as much information as it created, thus keeping the total amount of data constant. This expands on the concept of not having a surplus of data, suggesting that any analysis should destroy as much data as it produces. This would make data constant in quantity or in an equilibrium; of course, data doesn't actually have this limitation, [ citation needed ] and the user can create as much data as is needed or desired.\nIn the quantum world information can neither be destroyed or created; see the no-hiding theorem , for instance. Destructive analysis is a term used in archeology; as the name implies the thing that you study is destroyed by the analysis. However, destructive analysis is rarely or never used to study data. [ citation needed ]\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk, hands on his knees, looking at his laptop. Megan stands behind him, with her arms raised to the sides and above her head.] Cueball: Hey, look, we have a bunch of data! I'm gonna analyze it. Megan: No, you fool! That will only create more data!\n"}
{"id":2583,"title":"Chorded Keyboard","image_title":"Chorded Keyboard","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2583","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/chorded_keyboard.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2583:_Chorded_Keyboard","transcript":"[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk, typing on his keyboard as shown by small lines over one hand, while looking at the screen of his stationary computer. The screen is on a raised platform on his desk. Lyrical text is written upon each scene, presumably what Cueball is typing.] I heard there was a secret chord That David pressed and it typed a word\n[A closeup on Cueball in a slim panel. We see him from the waist up, with his hands on the keyboard just beneath the panels frame.] But you don't use a chorded keyboard, do you\n[Same setting as in the first panel, except Cueball's arms have moved and there are movement lines above and below his arms.] It goes like this, <control> and <shift> The other hand hits H and <left>\n[Slimmer panel but same setting as in the first panel, again the arms have moved a bit, with movement lines above them. The final written word of text is marked as arising directly from the computer.] And all at once it types out Computer: Hallelujah\n","explanation":"This strip is a parody of the first verse (and in the title text, the end of the last verse) of Leonard Cohen 's \" Hallelujah \", which has become a distinctive and popular song of which covers and versions exist. Written as a ballad , it is partly based upon the allegory of a mystical musical chord of several musical notes, that the words and tune both describe and illustrate by example.\nHere is the verse from the song (see the lyrics here ):\nNow I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do ya? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing \"Hallelujah\"\nCueball is filking upon this theme, but in his case he has somehow set up his computer so that, upon pressing a certain combination of multiple keys on his keyboard, the system will automatically type out the word \"hallelujah\" (xkcd's all-caps lettering makes it unclear how the word is capitalized). In his description of the process, in both the comic proper and the title text, he uses adapted lyrics that again both describe and illustrate by example. Most of the initial lyrics are floating 'thoughts'. The punchline \"hallelujah\", however, is 'spoken' out of his computer monitor - typical of how on-screen text is indirectly shown in this comic series. It partially continues as a song parody through the title text but then trails off into a typical computer-complaint that he perhaps may often have cause to make .\nThe original lyrics rely upon typically nuanced rhymes, such as \"do you\" (or \"do ya'\") with \"Hallelujah\", and \"fifth\" with \"lift\", but fairly reliably rhymes \"chord\" with \"Lord\". In Randall 's version, it starts with \"chord\" and \"word\" which look like they should rhyme, but would be \/k\u0254\u0279d\/ vs. \/w\u025dd\/ in an typical US accent. Similarly \"shift\" and \"left\" might be considered not a perfect rhyme when read as prose, but should still be possible to meaningfully sing.\nTechnically, a chorded keyboard is one in which (nearly) all inputs are made by simultaneous pressing of a given combination of a limited number of keys, such as a literal handful of non-alphabetic keys, that the user learns to combine to represent the key-presses of more standard keyboards or (in some cases) signify entire phonemes or words. The workings of such a keyboard tends to be handled internally, sending to the computer the signal(s) that would have been sent from its larger cousin.\nA big thing among Xennial hackers like Randall and his original audience was customising keyboard uses. The linux operating system was originally designed and used for personal customisation, and people move their configurations from system to system, often customising how things respond to such a degree that other users struggle to make use of their system at all. The first major two text editors, vim and emacs, were composed of different camps of how to efficiently type. The emacs camp believed it was more effective to hit many keys at once to accomplish a large task, but both editors were designed to be highly customisable. It's erroneously believed that the traditional qwerty keyboard was specifically designed to make typing inefficient so as to reduce engineering burden in making old typewriters responsive and reliable. Given the prevalence of them, it has been common among hackers to remap a keyboard to something they may personally consider more efficient, such as to use a dvorak layout layout rather than a qwerty layout. Chorded configurations are an order of magnitude more efficient than the dvorak layout, but are more complex to configure because the result is not at all a one-to-one mapping. The traditional court reporting device is a chorded keyboard, to keep up with human speech.\nUsing a combination of normally single-use keys (the 'H' and a cursor) with others, including modifiers ('shift' and 'control'), i.e. 'chording' with his keyboard, is a kind of key combination found traditionally in emacs and operating system commands (such as pressing ctrl+alt+c, to copy a selection to clipboard). The ballad then comes across as an ode to system customisation and the practice of user-interface hacking, wherein a computer user knows how to rebuild their interface in almost any way they desire.\nThe chording example goes beyond mainstream use (shift and an alphabetic character changes the character case, whilst ctrl and a character may initiate an editing command) or mainstream multi-modifier combinations (ctrl, alt and the 'e' may result in the '\u00e9', where the keyboard does not otherwise support it) and even goes beyond emacs-like command sequences which are generally software-specific. It seems likely that a setup such as that depicted in this comic is handled within the computer, either defined within the OS (all mainstream desktop operating systems support alternative keyboard mapping and customisable key-combinations, often for accessibility and international keyboard support), or (as is often the case with specialist configurable gaming keyboards) via the driver installed to mediate such esoteric keyboard combinations as the user has predefined for themselves.\nCueball's combination-keypress may in fact be better termed a 'macro', in some contexts. The single event, somehow triggered by this particular simultaneous multi-key input, invokes the injection of a pre-specified sequence of standard characters into the appropriate text-buffer\/-stream, in lieu of manual per-character input.\nThe title text spoofs the last verse of the (original) song, with \"Hallelujah\" being replaced by Cueball trailing off musing about having apparently lost the backup of his keyboard configuration, implying that he ended up in a position where he would want to restore said backup (for instance, having tampered with it to the point he is no longer capable of operating the keyboard efficiently, if at all).\nHere is the original verse, where the title text spoofs the last three lines:\nI did my best, it wasn't much I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya And even though it all went wrong I'll stand before the lord of song With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah\nAs added irony, while in the original that verse is hopeful, with the singer being thankful for experiencing joy even from a relationship that ultimately failed, contrarily in the alt text Cueball is apparently expressing regret. Or, if taken literally, it could instead imply that God himself is questioning Cueball about his tampering with software, which could fit with the running gag of Cueball's (often self-inflicted) computer problems being hyperbolically atrocious .\nWhen one modifies one's keyboard config, it can make the system seem unusable (or at least highly unexpected) to things like a boss, a spouse, or an automated maintenance system. When an error is made somewhere in the process, it can make the system seem unusable to the very person who made the changes, making it hard to change them back.\n[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk, typing on his keyboard as shown by small lines over one hand, while looking at the screen of his stationary computer. The screen is on a raised platform on his desk. Lyrical text is written upon each scene, presumably what Cueball is typing.] I heard there was a secret chord That David pressed and it typed a word\n[A closeup on Cueball in a slim panel. We see him from the waist up, with his hands on the keyboard just beneath the panels frame.] But you don't use a chorded keyboard, do you\n[Same setting as in the first panel, except Cueball's arms have moved and there are movement lines above and below his arms.] It goes like this, <control> and <shift> The other hand hits H and <left>\n[Slimmer panel but same setting as in the first panel, again the arms have moved a bit, with movement lines above them. The final written word of text is marked as arising directly from the computer.] And all at once it types out Computer: Hallelujah\n"}
{"id":2584,"title":"Headline Words","image_title":"Headline Words","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2584","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/headline_words.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2584:_Headline_Words","transcript":"[White Hat, Megan, Cueball, and Ponytail stand in a row, with White Hat and Megan facing toward the right and Cueball and Ponytail facing toward the left.] Megan: Maybe Rob shouldn't host the party. He has cats and some of us are allergic. Cueball: Wow, major snub for widely-touted top spot as lavish gala bid nixed. Megan: Why are you talking so weird? Please stop. Cueball: Ill-advised scheme mulled as tension mounts amid growing backlash.\n[Caption below the panel:] My project to speak only in weird headline words didn't last long.\n","explanation":"White Hat , Megan , Cueball and Ponytail are planning a party. Megan mentions that the party was planned to be at Rob's place, but that this might not be a good idea, since he has cats, and some of the participants in the party are allergic to cats. This is a valid reason [1] . Seems likely that Megan is one of those that are allergic. Usually Rob is drawn as Cueball, but it is not necessarily Rob that is present, it could just be a discussion among some of the friends that are supposed to come to the party.\nCueball then replies to this in news-commentary fashion, using words and phraseologies that are common in headlines but rare in day-to-day use. This is strange enough to prompt Megan to ask him to stop. He continues though, although the gist of his second line is that he will stop speaking that way.\nThat this is indeed the case and what he is actually trying to do is explained in the comics caption. It states that Cueball's project was to speak in weird headline words. And that the project did not last for long.\nNews headlines are often very dramatic explanations of minor events; so are the things Cueball says here. Furthermore, some newspapers write their headlines in a stylized way which relies heavily on shorter words (such as \"nixed\" for \"rejected\"), often uses cliches (such as \"tension mounts\") and omits 'unnecessary' grammatical padding, a style colloquially known as Headlinese .\nSee below for explanation of his headlines.\nThe title text continues with a final headline statement from Cueball, telling everyone that the project was halted. Probably permanently.\nHere each of the three headlines will be explained. Several of the words used are listed in the wiki article on Headlinese.\nWow, major snub for widely-touted top spot as lavish gala bid nixed.\nAccording to the list of words: \"snub\" means to reject; \"tout\" can mean to suggest something, for approval; here, a \"bid\" means an attempt; and \"nix\" also means to put to an end\/not allow to happen. The \"top spot\" is a venue which has status and popularity, while a \"lavish gala\" is an expensive\/impressive festive celebration, in this case being a party.\nTranslating it step by step to more normal English:\nAlmost literal word replacement:\n\"Wow, a significant rejection for a widely suggested venue, which was looking like it was going to be used. Their attempt to host the party will probably fail now\"\nTrim excess words:\n\"This is a big surprise. We have had a significant rejection for the most widely suggested and popular venue. This means they probably won't host the party.\"\nWhat he probably meant:\n\"Gosh, having heard that, it looks like Rob probably won't host the party after all.\"\n\nIll-advised scheme mulled as tension mounts amid growing backlash.\nWe can use a similar process, along with the list of words, to translate it step by step to more normal English:\nAlmost literal word replacement:\n\"This idea wasn't well thought-out and I'm now reconsidering it as I feel pressured to stop by your increasingly negative reactions\"\nApply more context and rearrange:\n\"This idea wasn't well thought-out, and your reactions are making me uneasy, so I should probably stop\"\nWhat he probably meant:\n\"This was a bad idea and I can tell that you won't tolerate this much longer, so I should probably stop.\"\n\nRoundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely. (title text)\nThis time the sentence yields to relatively trivial word replacement:\n\"Nobody liked me trying to speak like this, so I'm going to stop forever.\"\nWhat he probably meant:\n\"You all clearly hate me doing this, so I'll stop.\"\n[White Hat, Megan, Cueball, and Ponytail stand in a row, with White Hat and Megan facing toward the right and Cueball and Ponytail facing toward the left.] Megan: Maybe Rob shouldn't host the party. He has cats and some of us are allergic. Cueball: Wow, major snub for widely-touted top spot as lavish gala bid nixed. Megan: Why are you talking so weird? Please stop. Cueball: Ill-advised scheme mulled as tension mounts amid growing backlash.\n[Caption below the panel:] My project to speak only in weird headline words didn't last long.\n"}
{"id":2585,"title":"Rounding","image_title":"Rounding","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2585","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rounding.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2585:_Rounding","transcript":"[In the top left part of the panel is a small drawing where Cueball, wearing a bike helmet and holding a bike, is speaking to Megan.] Cueball: I can ride my bike at 45 MPH. Cueball: If you round.\n[To their right is a large number with unit, with an arrow going straight down to a normal sized similar number. From there and proceeding all the way down to the bottom, in alternating leftward and rightward rows, the rest of the comic shows arrows connecting conversions from one measured unit into another unit. Straight arrows show the direction of the sequence on each line, the end of each line curveing down to start the next line in the opposite direction. The last of these lines ends close to the middle of the panel, with a straight arrow down to another large number with unit, like the first.] 17 MPH 8 meters\/sec 16 knots 5 fathoms\/sec 3 furlongs\/min 6 fathoms\/sec 40 KPH 22 knots 41 KPH 204 furlongs\/hr 26 MPH 12 M\/S 4 furlongs\/min 15 yards\/sec 8 fathoms\/sec 15 M\/S 34 MPH 5 furlongs\/min 33 knots 19 yards\/sec 10 fathoms\/sec 36 knots 6 furlongs\/min 45 MPH\n","explanation":"This comic is about the follies of unit conversion. Normally, when you say you can ride a bike at 45 mph if you round, you mean that you can ride at a speed between 44.5 and 45.5, something most people are incapable of doing. [ citation needed ] The joke is that Cueball actually means if you go through a extremely long chain of rounding imprecisely (see below ), starting at 17 mph (which is equivalent to 27.4 km\/h and not an improbable speed for an ordinary road-bike and a reasonably fit rider), you can get to the value of 45 (72.4 km\/h).\nRandall also esoterically uses some more historic units here: fathoms\/sec, furlongs\/min, and furlongs\/hr. A fathom is a unit of length, in the modern era being equivalent to six feet, usually used to measure the depth of water. Fathoms\/sec could potentially be used to measure the ascent\/descent speed of a submersible, but it would normally be a strange choice to enumerate the speed of a bike. A furlong is also a unit of length, equivalent to one eighth of a mile (or 660 feet or 110 fathoms) but is mostly unused except in horse racing. It is possible that furlongs\/min or furlongs\/hour could be used to measure the speed of a horse. Knots (nautical miles per hour) are a standard unit of measuring speed, but are typically used for measuring speed for airplanes or ships, not speed on land. However, km\/h (kilometers per hour, spelled kph in the comic) is commonly used internationally to state the speed of land vehicles, while m\/s (meters per second) is a measurement encountered in scientific usage.\nThe title text furthers the joke by taking the imprecise rounding literally, implying that this increase could actually be used\/abused as a novel form of propulsion, but it isn't clarified for what type of vehicle. It could be an engine for ground or air travel, but contains the implication that it is trying to 'trick physics' similar to the theoretical 'warp drive' conceived to propel interstellar spacecraft at otherwise impossible speeds. One interpretation of the supposed chain of conversions is that it has somehow created a great deal of energy from nothing. Suppose there existed a device or system that could magically accelerate an object from 17 mph to 45 mph without any energy input. The sped-up object could be harnessed to a generator or engine in such a way that the object was slowed back down to 17 mph, with the difference in energy being output in a useful way, and the object fed back into the device. The result would be an engine that could create both free energy and non-conserved changes in momentum.\nAt the demonstrated rate of about 4% medium rounding gain, it would just take 73 more steps of rounding-acceleration to reach supersonic speed from the starting speed of 45 mph. If the speed of light could be approached without relativistic effects, another 349 steps would go from supersonic speed to the speed of light. (More efficient approaches may exist.)\n[In the top left part of the panel is a small drawing where Cueball, wearing a bike helmet and holding a bike, is speaking to Megan.] Cueball: I can ride my bike at 45 MPH. Cueball: If you round.\n[To their right is a large number with unit, with an arrow going straight down to a normal sized similar number. From there and proceeding all the way down to the bottom, in alternating leftward and rightward rows, the rest of the comic shows arrows connecting conversions from one measured unit into another unit. Straight arrows show the direction of the sequence on each line, the end of each line curveing down to start the next line in the opposite direction. The last of these lines ends close to the middle of the panel, with a straight arrow down to another large number with unit, like the first.] 17 MPH 8 meters\/sec 16 knots 5 fathoms\/sec 3 furlongs\/min 6 fathoms\/sec 40 KPH 22 knots 41 KPH 204 furlongs\/hr 26 MPH 12 M\/S 4 furlongs\/min 15 yards\/sec 8 fathoms\/sec 15 M\/S 34 MPH 5 furlongs\/min 33 knots 19 yards\/sec 10 fathoms\/sec 36 knots 6 furlongs\/min 45 MPH\n"}
{"id":2586,"title":"Greek Letters","image_title":"Greek Letters","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2586","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/greek_letters.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2586:_Greek_Letters","transcript":"[A list with 21 explanations of different Greek letters. To the left, the letter (in one case two letters) are shown, and then the explanation is written to the right in one or two lines (and in one case on three lines). Above these explanations, there is a header in a slightly larger font:] What Greek letters mean in equations \u03c0 This math is either very simple or impossible. \u0394 Something has changed. \u03b4 Something has changed and it's a mathematician's fault. \u03b8 Circles! \u03a6 O R B S \u03f5 Not important, don't worry about it. \u03c5,\u03bd Is that a v or a u? Or...oh no, it's one of those . \u03bc This math is cool but it's not about anything that you will ever see or touch, so whatever. \u03a3 Thank you for purchasing Addition Pro \u00ae! \u03a0 ...and the Multiplication \u00ae expansion pack! \u03b6 This math will only lead to more math. \u03b2 There are just too many coefficients. \u03b1 Oh boy, now this is math about something real. This is math that could kill someone. \u03a9 Oooh, some mathematician thinks their function is cool and important. \u03c9 A lot of work went into these equations and you are going to die here among them. \u03c3 Some poor soul is trying to apply this math to real life and it's not working. \u03be Either this is terrifying mathematics or there was a hair on the scanned page. \u03b3 Zoom pew pew pew [space noises] zoooom! \u03c1 Unfortunately, the test vehicle suffered an unexpected wing separation event. \u039e Greetings! We hope to learn a great deal by exchanging knowledge with your Earth mathematicians. \u03c8 You have entered the domain of King Triton, ruler of the waves.\n","explanation":"Mathematics uses lots of Greek letters, typically using the same letter consistently to represent a particular constant or type of variable. This comic gives a (non-)explanation of what they typically mean, see below .\nIn the title text the joke about capital Xi from the main comic is continued. In the main comic those using \u039e (capital xi) greets us as Earth mathematicians, indicating they are not from Earth, but have come here to learn what we know of math. In the title text the idea that any one using \u039e must be aliens is made clear. So if you ever meet someone using this letter while doing math, then learn as much as you can by quietly observing them, before they return to their home planet. Either learn from their possible advanced math (that allowed them to construct a way to get from one star system to another), or learn about them as the aliens species they represent.\nPreviously Randall made a similar comic, 2520: Symbols , about math symbols.\n[A list with 21 explanations of different Greek letters. To the left, the letter (in one case two letters) are shown, and then the explanation is written to the right in one or two lines (and in one case on three lines). Above these explanations, there is a header in a slightly larger font:] What Greek letters mean in equations \u03c0 This math is either very simple or impossible. \u0394 Something has changed. \u03b4 Something has changed and it's a mathematician's fault. \u03b8 Circles! \u03a6 O R B S \u03f5 Not important, don't worry about it. \u03c5,\u03bd Is that a v or a u? Or...oh no, it's one of those . \u03bc This math is cool but it's not about anything that you will ever see or touch, so whatever. \u03a3 Thank you for purchasing Addition Pro \u00ae! \u03a0 ...and the Multiplication \u00ae expansion pack! \u03b6 This math will only lead to more math. \u03b2 There are just too many coefficients. \u03b1 Oh boy, now this is math about something real. This is math that could kill someone. \u03a9 Oooh, some mathematician thinks their function is cool and important. \u03c9 A lot of work went into these equations and you are going to die here among them. \u03c3 Some poor soul is trying to apply this math to real life and it's not working. \u03be Either this is terrifying mathematics or there was a hair on the scanned page. \u03b3 Zoom pew pew pew [space noises] zoooom! \u03c1 Unfortunately, the test vehicle suffered an unexpected wing separation event. \u039e Greetings! We hope to learn a great deal by exchanging knowledge with your Earth mathematicians. \u03c8 You have entered the domain of King Triton, ruler of the waves.\n"}
{"id":2587,"title":"For the Sake of Simplicity","image_title":"For the Sake of Simplicity","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2587","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/for_the_sake_of_simplicity.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2587:_For_the_Sake_of_Simplicity","transcript":"[Cueball is standing beside a table holding his arms out to each side. He has a small object in his right hand. Ponytail and White Hat are sitting on either side of the table. They have a board game between them with several small objects, like the one in Cueball's hand, but with different heights standing on the table. There is also a stack of cards near Ponytail to the left. Both players have their hands on some of the small objects on the table.] Cueball: You may assign each gardener's token to a secondary garden plot within a 30-minute walk from their home plot. Cueball: For the sake of simplicity, each gardener is assumed to have a constant walking speed proportional to their height and cardio score. Cueball: For the sake of simplicity, cardio scores are inherited matrilineally...\n[Caption below the panel:] If you're worried that you're making something too complicated, just add \"for the sake of simplicity\" now and then as a reminder that it could always be worse.\n","explanation":"Cueball appears to be explaining a gardening-related board game to Ponytail and White Hat . The game mechanics being employed are ridiculously overcomplicated for a game that seems to be about gardening \u2014 the cardiovascular health of the gardeners is tracked, for example. However, Cueball uses the refrain \"for the sake of simplicity\" to imply that the rules could be even more complicated . For example, the walking speed \u2014 already a surprisingly complex element \u2014 is constant instead of varying based on conditions, and the cardio scores \u2014 inherited matrilineally, requiring players to keep track of their gardeners' lineage \u2014 at least does not require players to calculate a random combination of many ancestors.\nIt's shown pretty quickly that Cueball's mechanics are needlessly intricate, and his definition of \"simplicity\" is not nearly simple enough: the lore of the game says gardeners may tend to secondary plots no more than \"a 30-minute walk from their home plot\", but where most games would simply state an arbitrary number of tiles a gardener token may walk, Cueball expects his players to calculate how far an adult human actually walks in 1800 seconds. This immediately spirals into the game tracking far more variables than necessary such as height and \"cardio score\", or even things like the curvature of spacetime in the area, and the direct inheritance of a single \"cardio score\" which requires tracking the gardener's matrilineal line \u2014 instead of factors more typical to games such as weather or terrain.\nFeatures of Cueball's game include:\nAs gardening is itself an oddly mundane premise for a board game, [ citation needed ] it is entirely possible that gardening is just a minor element of a much broader game.\nThe title text mentions that the space is assumed to be Euclidean , which is what most people would assume since it corresponds to our normal experience, so this is not something that normally needs to be explained. But then it says that this isn't true in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild Orchid. An orchid is a type of flowering plant, which is relevant to a gardening game, but Schwarzschild refers to Karl Schwarzschild , a physicist who solved equations related to general relativity ; the Schwarzschild radius is the boundary of a black hole , and spacetime is severely warped in this vicinity, so Euclidean geometry and Newton's Laws don't describe motion here well. Most boardgames that even care about Euclidean principles only apply them to the 2D planar playing-surface, it seems possible that Cueball has already accounted for the slight (but non-zero) effects of the curvature of the Earth and\/or changes in elevation across the apparently detailed simulation within the game environment, through 3D Euclidean space. And, further, the title text implies he actually sat down to calculate the distortion of general relativity upon the walking speed of an adult human, then later used these equations for an entire game mechanic \u2014 albeit one that players can mercifully skip when there are no gardeners in proximity of Schwarzschild Orchids.\nThe next comic 2588: Party Quadrants , also mentions complicated rules for scoring a contest. This seems somewhat related to the complicated rules of this game.\n[Cueball is standing beside a table holding his arms out to each side. He has a small object in his right hand. Ponytail and White Hat are sitting on either side of the table. They have a board game between them with several small objects, like the one in Cueball's hand, but with different heights standing on the table. There is also a stack of cards near Ponytail to the left. Both players have their hands on some of the small objects on the table.] Cueball: You may assign each gardener's token to a secondary garden plot within a 30-minute walk from their home plot. Cueball: For the sake of simplicity, each gardener is assumed to have a constant walking speed proportional to their height and cardio score. Cueball: For the sake of simplicity, cardio scores are inherited matrilineally...\n[Caption below the panel:] If you're worried that you're making something too complicated, just add \"for the sake of simplicity\" now and then as a reminder that it could always be worse.\n"}
{"id":2588,"title":"Party Quadrants","image_title":"Party Quadrants","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2588","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/party_quadrants.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2588:_Party_Quadrants","transcript":"[A solid black lined square chart is divided into four quadrants with two light gray lines. Above the chart the left and right column are labeled, and above the labels there is a bracket with a label written on the bracket. Similarly there is labels to the left, of the top and bottom rows, with a bracket indicating those also with a label written on the bracket:] Top: Fun for me Top: No Yes Left: Fun for guests Left: No Yes\n[The top left quadrant is empty. The same goes for the bottom left quadrant, except labels for items in the bottom right quadrant is written in the bottom left quadrant. In the top right quadrant, there is a single black point which is almost touching the right edge of the chart, and lies about a quarter of the way down from the top towards the gray line. The point is labeled:] Label: Sporcle geography tournament Label: with snacks! Label: Live-updating scoreboard, no distracting music\n[In the bottom right quadrant there is a Venn diagram. It consist of two skewed ellipsoids, one with a solid line overlapping the other with a dotted line. The solid lined region goes further to the left, and the dotted line region goes further to the top, but both are mainly in the bottom right region, and the bottom right section is completely overlapping. Both regions are indicated with an arrow that goes to them from a label. The solid lined regions label is written to the left and it is entirely inside the bottom left quadrant. The dotted lined regions label is written in both of the lower quadrants, thoug mainly above the Venn diagram in the bottom right quadrant.] Solid lined label: Appropriate zone for a party Dotted lined label: Appropriate for my birthday party\n","explanation":"In this comic there is a graph divided into quadrants to visualize the range of possibilities of fun for Randall and for guests at parties hosted by Randall.  The top and bottom halves are labeled as \"fun for guests\" with \"no\" in the top quadrant and \"yes\" in the bottom quadrant. The left and right halves labeled as \"fun for me\", i.e. fun for the host Randall, with \"no\" in the left quadrant and \"yes\" in the right quadrant.\nIn the bottom right quadrant (which indicates fun for everyone), are two separately outlined but largely overlapping regions, like a Venn diagram . One is the appropriate zone for a party (in general) and the other other applies to Randall's own birthday party. They are both vaguely ellipsoid and both enclose a reasonable to nearly maximal amount of fun in both dimensions. The key difference is that the range of the birthday party is skewed towards being marginally more for Randall's enjoyment, but is still firmly in the bottom right quadrant. By contrast, the range for a party is weighted more towards \"Fun for Guests\" and less towards \"Fun for Me\", as befits an event hopefully hosted to entertain its guests and make them feel special.\nOmitting the extreme edges may indicate that there are no points there because it's impossible to completely please everybody, or it may be a warning that a party should not be such extreme fun that it gets out of hand nor let the balance of fun stray too far from equal. There are no specific points labeled in this quadrant.\nThe joke is that the only data point, presumably Randall's latest idea for a party, is in the upper right quadrant, signifying that it is only fun for Randall! It is very far right and fairly close to the top, indicating extreme fun for Randall and not fun at all for anyone else. The point is labeled \"Sporcle geography tournament with snacks! Live-updating scoreboard, no distracting music\". The elements of Randall's \"fun\" party include:\nIn the caption it is mentioned that for some reason, Randall keeps \"accidentally\" planning parties in the top right quadrant (fun for him, not for guests). Presumably he is so caught up in what he considers entertaining that he doesn't take into account the interest level of the guests. This is regardless of which party-context, and well outside either of the appropriate zones. This diagram though indicates that he know this is the case, but maybe he is first able to place the point on the diagram after the party, when he realizes that his guest leaves early (again) out of boredom.\nThe title text elaborates on the Sporcle trivia game night that Randall has planned in the upper right quadrant. It makes mention of a comprehensive, and perhaps overly complicated, scoring system to determine who is the party's winner. That he's talking about \"winning the party\" suggests he is fundamentally misunderstanding the point of parties -- they're supposed to be fun for everyone attending, not (exclusively) a competition.\nSee the previous comic 2587: For the Sake of Simplicity , which seems to be a bit related to what Randall thinks is fun, whereas other might not.\n[A solid black lined square chart is divided into four quadrants with two light gray lines. Above the chart the left and right column are labeled, and above the labels there is a bracket with a label written on the bracket. Similarly there is labels to the left, of the top and bottom rows, with a bracket indicating those also with a label written on the bracket:] Top: Fun for me Top: No Yes Left: Fun for guests Left: No Yes\n[The top left quadrant is empty. The same goes for the bottom left quadrant, except labels for items in the bottom right quadrant is written in the bottom left quadrant. In the top right quadrant, there is a single black point which is almost touching the right edge of the chart, and lies about a quarter of the way down from the top towards the gray line. The point is labeled:] Label: Sporcle geography tournament Label: with snacks! Label: Live-updating scoreboard, no distracting music\n[In the bottom right quadrant there is a Venn diagram. It consist of two skewed ellipsoids, one with a solid line overlapping the other with a dotted line. The solid lined region goes further to the left, and the dotted line region goes further to the top, but both are mainly in the bottom right region, and the bottom right section is completely overlapping. Both regions are indicated with an arrow that goes to them from a label. The solid lined regions label is written to the left and it is entirely inside the bottom left quadrant. The dotted lined regions label is written in both of the lower quadrants, thoug mainly above the Venn diagram in the bottom right quadrant.] Solid lined label: Appropriate zone for a party Dotted lined label: Appropriate for my birthday party\n"}
{"id":2589,"title":"Outlet Denier","image_title":"Outlet Denier","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2589","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/outlet_denier.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2589:_Outlet_Denier","transcript":"[To the left is a power strip with a rocker switch at the top and five outlets, and a connected wire goes from the top off to the left. To the right is the plug that should go into one of the outlets. A curved wire comes from the right and connects to the end of the connector, which is longer than a normal plug. The prongs are visible underneath where the box ends. But instead of ending there, there is a bar horizontal to the first part, which is longer than the power strip itself. There is a D shaped bar attached to this long bar, centred on the middle of the bar. If it was plugged in, the long bar would cover all the other outlets of the power strip.]\n[Text above the image:] Cursed Connectors #78 [Text below the image:] The outlet denier\n","explanation":"This is the fifth installment in the series of Cursed Connectors and presents Cursed Connectors #78: The Outlet Denier.\nThe outlet denier connector in this comic is the large connector to the right. It has a plug on the downward side that is supposed to go into a power strip or other type of outlet. It has two long bars extending up and down off the plug, as well as a D shape on one side with another, slightly less long bar on the other side of the D, that has the cord connected to it. The purpose of the outlet denier is to block access to as many other ports on a power strip as possible, hence the name. It is designed to work with many different types of power strips, such as the standard one displayed in the comic, as well as ones with the sockets rotated 90 degrees (the long bar extending to the cord) and other types of outlets like the triple outlet on the end of many extension cords and two dimensional power strips that extend a couple of outlets left and right as well as up and down (the D shape on the side). The extreme bars to each side may also prevent plugging the Denier into an outlet close to the floor, forcing the user to use a power strip or similar item for it.\nThere is an example power strip displayed to the left of the outlet denier, used to help explain that the outlet denier is designed to block as many other sockets on a power strip as possible. The power strip is presumably of the type with a rocker switch that can turn the entire power bar off. This power bar has five outlets.\nMany appliances require transformers or other large components on their power cord. Sometimes these \"power bricks\" are built around the plug. The comic is making fun of these types of power bricks, as they often block access to other sockets on a power strip or wall outlet. This can be really annoying when you want to plug in many different appliances into a power strip.\nOther plugs are deliberately designed to block the other half of a duplex outlet, preventing users from plugging anything else in that could overload the circuit. The comic could be depicting an extreme case of a cumbersome connector shape designed to block an entire power strip, as the appliance connected to it uses so much power that a single extra item plugged into the power strip would cause problems.\nThe title text says that the outlet denier has bumps on the underside of the long bar that would match up with the location of the rocker switch no matter which outlet of the strip it is plugged into. It's not clear whether this will turn the power switch off or force it always on. But either way, it gets in the way of the user being able to control the power themselves.\nIf it forces it off, then the Outlet Denier cannot even be used. So to at least assume someone might actually use it, it must force it on. Since there are nothing else that can go into the power strip, it is not that important it it is possible to switch it off though.\n[To the left is a power strip with a rocker switch at the top and five outlets, and a connected wire goes from the top off to the left. To the right is the plug that should go into one of the outlets. A curved wire comes from the right and connects to the end of the connector, which is longer than a normal plug. The prongs are visible underneath where the box ends. But instead of ending there, there is a bar horizontal to the first part, which is longer than the power strip itself. There is a D shaped bar attached to this long bar, centred on the middle of the bar. If it was plugged in, the long bar would cover all the other outlets of the power strip.]\n[Text above the image:] Cursed Connectors #78 [Text below the image:] The outlet denier\n"}
{"id":2590,"title":"I Shouldn't Complain","image_title":"I Shouldn't Complain","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2590","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/i_shouldnt_complain.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2590:_I_Shouldn%27t_Complain","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are standing together. Cueball has his hands on his chin, shocked.] Cueball: I can't believe you fell headfirst into a garbage can and were stuck there for two hours while wasps stung your exposed legs! Megan: I shouldn't complain! Lots of people have been stuck for longer in worse places. Megan: Really, I'm lucky.\n[Caption below the panel:] The more unpleasant someone's experience is, the more they apologize for complaining because it could be worse.\n","explanation":"Humans have a tendency to re-calibrate their mental scales to place their actual experience in the center. Cueball, who has never experienced being trapped for hours with stinging insects, rates this in comparison to not being trapped at all. Megan, however, rates it in comparison to other uncomfortable places a person could be stuck.\nThe title text explains how Megan came into such a mess. A tennis ball used in a clothes dryer got stuck in the exhaust vent, and was shot out of the house through the exhaust vents hole in the wall. Then it hit the wasp nest and ricocheted over on Megan knocking her off the ladder she was standing on. Since she was close to the nest, she may actually have been up on the ladder in order to see if she could remove the nest. The fall from the ladder made her end up in the trash can where she could not get out. The angry wasps began stinging her legs. This continued for two hours.\nIn the title text, Megan continues to downplay her experience even though it was very painful. She says that the wasp nest was of the type bald-faced hornets .\nThe Schmidt sting pain index is a scale developed by entomologist Justin O. Schmidt to rank the relative pain caused by different stinging insects. This scale ranges from 0 (for stings that are completely ineffective) to 4, which denotes torturous and nearly incapacitating pain (originally, Schmidt only classed one species as a 4, but two additional species have since been added at this level).  Megan says her stings were a 2 on the scale , which denotes \"familiar\" pain, comparable to that of the common Western Honey Bee . Most people would find that experience incredibly painful, particularly since she endured multiple stings over a long period of time, but Megan points out that there exist insects with more painful stings.\nMegan concludes that she'd been lucky, based on the argument that she theoretically could have endured something worse than she did. The joke, of course, is that by almost any subjective standard, her experience was deeply unluckly.\nShe also further downplays the situation by focusing attention on the sting pain index instead of the sting lethal capacity, described by the author of the pain index . The two are not necessarily equivalent. Let's assume that all insects in the colony affected stung Megan at least once over her two hour ordeal. A colony capable of sustaining an attack over two hours would probably be at least as large as the typical maximum size for a bald-faced hornet nest . Such an attack might (depending on number of attackers and the species of wasp) deliver enough venom to kill 84 kg (185 pounds) worth of mice (or human?). Given such an attack, Megan would probably not be standing around in routine conversation, casually discussing the incident. She would far more likely be in a hospital bed, and in a gruesome fight for her life .\n[Cueball and Megan are standing together. Cueball has his hands on his chin, shocked.] Cueball: I can't believe you fell headfirst into a garbage can and were stuck there for two hours while wasps stung your exposed legs! Megan: I shouldn't complain! Lots of people have been stuck for longer in worse places. Megan: Really, I'm lucky.\n[Caption below the panel:] The more unpleasant someone's experience is, the more they apologize for complaining because it could be worse.\n"}
{"id":2591,"title":"Qua","image_title":"Qua","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2591","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/qua.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2591:_Qua","transcript":"[Cueball and Megan are speaking to each other.] Cueball: People mostly use \"qua\" to sound pretentious. You rarely hear qua qua qua. Megan: Nice use of qua qua qua qua qua qua qua.\n","explanation":"Saying something is \"X qua X\" (e.g. \"entertainment qua entertainment\") means when X is being viewed in its most typical capacity (eg, entertainment as something that entertains, rather than as a business, a form of propaganda, or whatever).\nFor example, \"A copy, qua copy, can never be the equal of the exemplar, and it may be much its inferior.\" [1]\nCueball claims that people only use qua to \"sound pretentious\" without properly understanding its meaning. Thus, people do not use \"qua qua qua\", or \"qua for the sake of qua\". However, Megan one-ups this with a series of seven qua s: she compliments Cueball's successful use of \"qua qua qua qua qua qua qua\", or \"the phrase 'qua qua qua' for its correct meaning\".\nThe joke is that, for the reader, the conversation has likely dissolved into gibberish because of unfamiliar terminology and semantic satiation . This is similar to other complex sentences such as \"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo\" , \"That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is\" , and \"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher\" . Following this trend, you can create a grammatically correct sentence that includes 'qua' a consecutive number of times equal to (2 n -1), where n is a natural number.\nThe title text goes further with this, using a Latin phrase sine qua non (meaning literally \"without which not\"), commonly rendered as \"that which is absolutely necessary\" or \"essential\". Thus, the title text says that \"the word 'qua' in its real meaning is essential to the phrase 'sine qua non' used correctly\".\nHowever, the **qua** in title text phrase is a demonstrative pronoun (\"which\"), unlike the other **qua** which is an adverb, so the similarity is only coincidental.\n[Cueball and Megan are speaking to each other.] Cueball: People mostly use \"qua\" to sound pretentious. You rarely hear qua qua qua. Megan: Nice use of qua qua qua qua qua qua qua.\n"}
{"id":2592,"title":"False Dichotomy","image_title":"False Dichotomy","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2592","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/false_dichotomy.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2592:_False_Dichotomy","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are talking to each other. White Hat has his arms spread outwards in exasperation, while Cueball gestures assertively with his pointer finger.] White Hat: That's a false dichotomy! Cueball: Yes, but we have to embrace false dichotomies, because the only alternative is cannibalism.\n","explanation":"A dichotomy is two alternatives which are normally mutually exclusive (such as the dichotomy between a flat Earth and non-flat Earth). A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy based on an incorrect perception of limited options (for example: if the page background isn't white, it is black).\nCueball has apparently made one such error and is being called out by White Hat for it. Upon having this pointed out to him, Cueball says that we must embrace false dichotomies, because the only other option is cannibalism . This statement is another false dichotomy, as presenting false dichotomies is not the only alternative to cannibalism [ citation needed ] . The reverse (that cannibalism is incompatible with expressing false dichotomies) is also not potentially true, as eating people may eventually result in having nobody you need to present false dichotomies to.\nCueball has thus created another false dichotomy to excuse his first.\nThe false dichotomy Cueball appears to be referring to is the notion that those identified as human must not be eaten, but even closely related animals are not human and can be eaten, i.e. species can be divided clearly between \"human\" and \"food\".  If this dichotomy is not accepted, then consuming any species that shares, for instance, any significant percentage of DNA with humans could be considered a measure of cannibalism.\nThe title text states that there are two kinds of dichotomies, making a dichotomy in itself. Due to three types of dichotomy being mentioned, and only two being foreshadowed, this statement is itself a surprise trichotomy, or three-parted choice. The title text is a variation of the \"Two kinds of People\" joke.  The classic math nerd variant is \"There are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count, and those who can't.\"  Alternatively, it may refer to a variation about binary . The original joke usually goes something like this: \"There are 10 types of people: those who know binary, and those who don't.\" The variation is usually something like the following: \"There are 10 types of people: those who know binary, and those who don't, and those who weren't expecting a ternary joke.\" Another version of this kind of joke is \"there are two kinds of people: those who can extrapolate from an incomplete data set,\"\nThe word trichotomy is a relative neologism, to be understood as to mean \"divided into (or amongst) three parts\", having replaced the original prefix \"di-\" (a factor of two, either doubled or, by context, halved) with that of \"tri-\" (similarly tripled\/thirded). Strictly, though, dichotomy more directly stems from Greek elements that say \"apart, I cut\", with \"apart\" being represented by the \"dicho-\" (itself being roughly \"into two\", or to separate) which does not have a direct \"tricho-\" equivalent, although it does ultimately derive from \"duo\", Greek for \"two\". This is the kind of linguistic nuance that Randall clearly enjoys, yet may also happily or carelessly (mis)use without compunction.\n[White Hat and Cueball are talking to each other. White Hat has his arms spread outwards in exasperation, while Cueball gestures assertively with his pointer finger.] White Hat: That's a false dichotomy! Cueball: Yes, but we have to embrace false dichotomies, because the only alternative is cannibalism.\n"}
{"id":2593,"title":"Deviled Eggs","image_title":"Deviled Eggs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2593","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/deviled_eggs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2593:_Deviled_Eggs","transcript":"[The comic consists of four variations of deviled eggs.]\n[A typical deviled egg, with half of the white part of a hard-boiled egg and a paste of yolk in a rough cone. The paste is speckled with red dots.] Chef Deviled egg\n[A deviled egg, except the paste has been flattened to be level with the white.] Landscaper Leveled egg\n[A deviled egg, except the edge of the white has bevels.] Designer Beveled egg\n[A deviled egg, except the paste is now two hemispheres, one set in (and level with) the white and the other on top with a toothpick wedged between the two hemispheres at the left egg keeping them separated. The toothpick has a small piece of blue foil wrapped around the edge of the toothpick.] Physicist Demon egg\n","explanation":"A deviled egg is a dish created by cutting a hard-boiled egg into halves and replacing the yolk with a paste frequently made using the yolk itself, additional ingredients such as mustard and mayonaise , and topped with a red spice (usually paprika ). Importantly, the paste has a larger volume than the original yolk because of the added ingredients (and probably some air) into the originally homogeneous yolk substances. Randall Munroe parodies the dish by creating several alternative versions of the dish for other professions using word plays on the name of the dish.\nChef - Deviled egg\nThe original dish with the excess paste piled above the egg white.\nLandscaper - Leveled egg\nMany landscaping projects involve leveling irregular ground surfaces. [ citation needed ] A landscaper may prefer to serve their deviled egg with a leveled flat surface. (This happens to resemble a normal hard-boiled egg cut in half.)\nDesigner - Beveled egg\nBevels are a design pattern of creating non-perpendicular surfaces between adjacent edges. A designer may prefer to serve their egg with the edge of the white beveled to give their eggs a more modern, aesthetically pleasing look.\nPhysicist - Demon egg\nThis deviled egg is designed to look like the Demon Core which was a sub-critical plutonium sphere manufactured during the Manhattan Project to investigate the properties of criticality . The Demon Core consisted of three parts: two plutonium-gallium hemispheres and a ring designed to keep neutron flux from \"jetting\" out of the joined surface between the hemispheres during implosion. The set of plutonium pieces got their name from the 2 criticality incidents that occurred when scientists were investigating this property. The first accident resulted in the death of Harry Daghlian . In the second incident, experimenters covered the core with two neutron reflecting shells separated only by a handheld screwdriver. (No, really.) The screwdriver slipped, causing the core to become completely covered by the neutron reflecting shell, bringing the core past its criticality limit. A large amount of radiation caused the subsequent death of physicist Louis Slotin . The dome of the boiled egg and the toothpick resemble the configuration of the experiment.\nThe demon core was also referred to in 1242: Scary Names .\nThe title texts refers to ionized-air glow , a blue light emitted by air submitted to an energy flux from radiation and seen during the incidents involving the demon core .\nFor a detailed explanation of the Demon Core, Kyle Hill produced an Youtube Documentary regarding the Demon Core.\n[The comic consists of four variations of deviled eggs.]\n[A typical deviled egg, with half of the white part of a hard-boiled egg and a paste of yolk in a rough cone. The paste is speckled with red dots.] Chef Deviled egg\n[A deviled egg, except the paste has been flattened to be level with the white.] Landscaper Leveled egg\n[A deviled egg, except the edge of the white has bevels.] Designer Beveled egg\n[A deviled egg, except the paste is now two hemispheres, one set in (and level with) the white and the other on top with a toothpick wedged between the two hemispheres at the left egg keeping them separated. The toothpick has a small piece of blue foil wrapped around the edge of the toothpick.] Physicist Demon egg\n"}
{"id":2594,"title":"Consensus Time","image_title":"Consensus Time","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2594","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/consensus_time.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2594:_Consensus_Time","transcript":"Proposal: Consensus Time\nEvery day, anyone in the time zone can press a button when they feel like it's 9 AM. The next day, clocks slow down or speed up to match the median choice from the previous day.\n[A diagram representing the hours of two days with tick marks, with some of the tick marks longer than others and\/or in boldface, and some of them labeled as follows:]\nMidnight 6AM 9AM today Median Noon 6PM Midnight 6AM 9AM tomorrow Noon 6PM Midnight\n[A brace connects the period from the second \"Midnight\" to \"9AM tomorrow\". It is labeled:] Longer hours\n[A scatterplot of 57 dots appears below the hashmarks, indicating the distribution of when participants pushed the \"9 AM\" button. The most extreme outliers are at roughly 3AM and 9PM, but they most densely cluster around a vertical dotted line labelled \"Median\" at approximately 11:15AM, interrupted as it passes through the main mass of dots at roughly the position of the 29th plotted dot from either end.]\n[Megan, facing to the left, and Cueball, facing to the right, each hold a handheld device. The devices are too small to see clearly but are making sounds, implying that each of them has just pressed the \"9 AM\" button.] Beep Beep\nA working version has been created.\n","explanation":"Randall , jumping on this topic, proposes a system that allows everybody to say when it \"feels\" like 9 am, and then the median 9 am will become the real 9 am. This happens every day. As the title text points out, this would be chaotic and, to put it bluntly, awful. [ citation needed ]\nPresumably the times indicated on this diagram are as the clocks in this time zone would indicate, as opposed to an \"ordinary\" reference time.\nThe graph of points seems to follow a normal distribution, with a large number of votes being clustered around a given time, and giving a median of soon after 11AM. There are some extreme outliers, some before 6AM and some after 6PM, indicating some users being outside the normal range but no information on whether it's a malicious attempt.\nAlthough the hours between midnight and 9 am are labelled as \"longer\" (which we can assume means each would take longer than an hour of ordinary time to pass) the effect on the remaining hours is left unstated. If we assume that the remaining hours pass at the usual rate then this would suggest that midnight would come sooner or later than normal and hence the next vote would occur sooner or later respectively. This implies the time in this time zone could drift further than a day (or even multiple days) from existing time-zones which could be what is meant by \"feedback\", \"chaos\" and the effect on weekdays mentioned in the title text.\nProposal: Consensus Time\nEvery day, anyone in the time zone can press a button when they feel like it's 9 AM. The next day, clocks slow down or speed up to match the median choice from the previous day.\n[A diagram representing the hours of two days with tick marks, with some of the tick marks longer than others and\/or in boldface, and some of them labeled as follows:]\nMidnight 6AM 9AM today Median Noon 6PM Midnight 6AM 9AM tomorrow Noon 6PM Midnight\n[A brace connects the period from the second \"Midnight\" to \"9AM tomorrow\". It is labeled:] Longer hours\n[A scatterplot of 57 dots appears below the hashmarks, indicating the distribution of when participants pushed the \"9 AM\" button. The most extreme outliers are at roughly 3AM and 9PM, but they most densely cluster around a vertical dotted line labelled \"Median\" at approximately 11:15AM, interrupted as it passes through the main mass of dots at roughly the position of the 29th plotted dot from either end.]\n[Megan, facing to the left, and Cueball, facing to the right, each hold a handheld device. The devices are too small to see clearly but are making sounds, implying that each of them has just pressed the \"9 AM\" button.] Beep Beep\nA working version has been created.\n"}
{"id":2595,"title":"Advanced Techniques","image_title":"Advanced Techniques","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2595","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/advanced_techniques.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2595:_Advanced_Techniques","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart is using a stick to point at a whiteboard behind her while facing, presumably, a crowd of off-panel students. The white board has a drawing of a snake-shaped dragon with wings, flying with it's body in an S-shape. An archer is pointing an arrow up at the dragon above him. Above the drawings there are three and below two rows of unreadable text and equations.] Miss Lenhart: To solve this equation, we invoke Gauss's operator to transform it into a dragon. Miss Lenhart: Then we slay the dragon with Hilbert's Arrow, and transform its corpse back into the solution. Off-panel voice: Just to be clear, this is a metaphor, right? Miss Lenhart: Does this look like English class?!\n[Caption below the panel:] All advanced math techniques\n","explanation":"In typical Miss Lenhart fashion, she is teaching a mathematics class where she outlines a process by which a mathematical result is achieved through steps which sound suspiciously like magical RPG logic. She includes both a dragon and arrows to slay it.\nOne of her students asks if this is a metaphor for the technique, but her rather tetchy reply \"Does this look like English class?!\" seems to imply that she literally means that dragons and arrows will be employed in the resolution of the problem. It is also clear from the slide she is pointing at that she has drawn a dragon and a man with a bow that is aiming an arrow at the dragon. Whilst metaphor is an important part of many languages, and so is definitely taught in language classes, it is not usually used in math classes.\nThe caption beneath the comic states that this approach describes \"All advanced math techniques.\" This could be a reference to the now-common approach in higher mathematics in which a problem is transformed into another domain where it is easier to solve, then transformed back. For instance, in Fourier analysis , commonly used for analyzing the behavior of signals or dynamical systems, a problem can be transformed from the time domain to the frequency domain, solved, and then transformed back again. A (much) more complex example is Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem , which uses modularity lifting to transform the problem. Here Miss Lenhart says she will transform a math problem into an actual dragon, slay it, and transform the corpse back into mathematics.\nAn alternative view is that Randall is referring to Arthur C. Clarke 's third law that Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic , as re-framed for mathematics. What Randall would be implying is that all advanced math techniques look like magic to non-mathematicians. (Another advanced and somewhat magical math technique is deployed by Miss Lenhart in 1724: Proofs .)\nInvocations are a common classification for spoken or vocalized types of spell. In the logic Miss Lenhart used, 'invoking' Gauss's operator may refer to casting a magical spell with verbal components (such as True Polymorph ). The operator is presumably named after the famous German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss . There is nothing on Wikipedia called Gauss's operator, but there is both Gauss's law and the Gauss\u2013Kuzmin\u2013Wirsing operator . As neither can transform an equation into a dragon, [ citation needed ] it's clear Randall is making a joke.\nSlaying the dragon with Hilbert's arrow indicates that the arrow has some magical properties. The arrow is presumably named after David Hilbert , known for many mathematical developments including Hilbert's problems and Hilbert spaces . A Hilbert space converts subsets of an infinite vector space into a complete metric space, allowing the use of linear algebra and calculus methods which might otherwise be applicable only to finite Euclidean spaces. Vectors could be compared with an arrow. Magical arrows are frequently used to slay dragons in myth and role-playing games. Magical items in RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons are often named after a creator or famous user; hence, a magical \"Arrow of Hilbert\" might traverse infinite spaces or affect targets for which one or more stats are effectively infinite.\nThere is in fact a class of Dragon curves , which do have the sort of S-shape shown on the whiteboard, but they have no connection to Gauss's operator, and are not actual dragons that need slaying.\nThe title text contains two puns and a reference. The phrase \" Cutlass of Variations\" is a pun on the mathematical technique called \" Calculus of variations \". The word \"Noetherworld\" is a pun on \" netherworld \". The reference is to the mathematician Emmy Noether , a giant in the field of abstract algebra which, through more of Ms. Lenhart\u2019s questionable transformations, may become an actual giant in a field of abstract algae bras. Furthermore, Noether's Theorem is used in the Calculus of Variations. She was previously referenced as one of many important women in science back in 896: Marie Curie .\n[Miss Lenhart is using a stick to point at a whiteboard behind her while facing, presumably, a crowd of off-panel students. The white board has a drawing of a snake-shaped dragon with wings, flying with it's body in an S-shape. An archer is pointing an arrow up at the dragon above him. Above the drawings there are three and below two rows of unreadable text and equations.] Miss Lenhart: To solve this equation, we invoke Gauss's operator to transform it into a dragon. Miss Lenhart: Then we slay the dragon with Hilbert's Arrow, and transform its corpse back into the solution. Off-panel voice: Just to be clear, this is a metaphor, right? Miss Lenhart: Does this look like English class?!\n[Caption below the panel:] All advanced math techniques\n"}
{"id":2596,"title":"Galaxies","image_title":"Galaxies","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2596","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/galaxies.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2596:_Galaxies","transcript":"[An almost white panel with a caption at the top. Then a small circle, much smaller than for instance the letter O in the text is in the center of the panel. A bending arrow points to the circle and beneath the arrow is a caption.] Open this picture fullscreen on your phone and hold it at arm's length. There are 50,000 galaxies in this circle.\n[Caption below the panel:] Astronomy Fact: There are too many galaxies.\n","explanation":"This is another comic with a Fact , the second in a row of these fact comics to use an Astronomy fact.\nOur best approximation of the number of galaxies in the observable universe is about 200 billion (2 \u00d7 10 11 ). That's a lot of galaxies, [ citation needed ] and here Randall exemplifies this by showing a small circle and estimating that when the comic's picture is viewed at a typical arm's length, expanded to full screen on your typical smartphone, the circle contains roughly 50,000 galaxies (that means of course not the small circle itself, but the volume defined by the viewer's eye, that circle, and an onward conical extension into deep space \u2014 and simultaneously back in time \u2014 to the respective limits of the observable universe). Most of those far-away galaxies are undetectable by even our most powerful astronomical instruments today, and comparatively few could be seen (let alone positively identified as such) by the naked eye. For example, in the Hubble Deep Field , an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, about 3,000 visible galaxies can be identified.\nMeasuring in the mid-point of the lines, the circle is about one fortieth of the width of the frame of the comic. The absolute circle size depends on the display resolution, size and mode, but it can reasonably be taken to be 1mm diameter, or 0.5mm radius, giving a total area \u03c0 r 2 or about \u03c0\/4 square millimeters. You're probably holding the phone about a half a meter away from your eye. The surface area of a sphere is 4 \u03c0 r 2 . With a radius of one-half meter, that comes out to be \u03c0 square meters. Thus, the area of the circle is about 1\/4000000 of the area of the sphere, 200 billion galaxies divided by 4 million is the 50,000 average mentioned in the cartoon. A similar mathematics was used for the comic 1276: Angular Size , in which the projective sphere was at the Earth's own radius and cross-sectional areas of objects were compared, rather than an approximate count of objects within a given angular spread.\nWhile galaxies usually are between 3,000 to 300,000 light-years across and contain between 10^8 (100 million) and 10^14 (100 trillion) stars, most are so far away from the Earth (upwards of billions of light-years) that they are invisible to the naked eye, or even through most telescopes. When magnified across such vast distances, even something as small as a pinhole expands to huge sizes, easily able to fit tens of thousands of galaxies.\nThe premise of this comic is that although galaxies are giant, space is unimaginably big and contains a vast number of things. Randall is apparently overwhelmed by this, as shown in the caption: Astronomy Fact: There are too many galaxies .\nThe title text is Randall reassuring his readers why not to worry of this overwhelming fact. He states that most galaxies only have few stars and probably no planets. However, as mentioned above each galaxy contains a huge amount of stars, and as evident from all his own comics about exoplanets , it is now clear that many of the stars in a galaxy also have planets orbiting them. Thus the number of stars and planets in that small circle is much more mind-bogglingly large, than the number of galaxies, and thus the reassurance is sarcasm.\nIn 975: Occulting Telescope Cueball expresses a similar sentiment about the number of stars.\n[An almost white panel with a caption at the top. Then a small circle, much smaller than for instance the letter O in the text is in the center of the panel. A bending arrow points to the circle and beneath the arrow is a caption.] Open this picture fullscreen on your phone and hold it at arm's length. There are 50,000 galaxies in this circle.\n[Caption below the panel:] Astronomy Fact: There are too many galaxies.\n"}
{"id":2597,"title":"Salary Negotiation","image_title":"Salary Negotiation","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2597","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/salary_negotiation.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2597:_Salary_Negotiation","transcript":"[Ponytail sits in an office chair at her desk, with Cueball sitting in a similar chair on the other side with his hands on his knees. Ponytails has her hands on the desk and in front of her, there is a slim thing standing up. It could be a very small screen, but there seems to be no keyboard in front of her. Maybe it is a small tablet with a support for letting is stand up. Behind that there are what appears to be two piles of papers of different sizes.] Ponytail: We'd like to extend an offer! The starting salary is $55,000. Cueball: Wow. I guess I'm inside a negotiation! Ponytail: I... Weird to phrase it like that, but- Cueball: I can do this.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's upper half.] Cueball: I won't accept a penny over $50,000. Sorry, I mean under. Under $60. I mean, $600. Thousand. $600,000. I want a 15% cut of the salary. Raise. Double down. Fold. Pass. Fill it up with regular.\n[The same shot, except Cueball is now holding three pieces of paper, and he is looking down on them. Ponytail is talking to him from off-panel.] Ponytail (off-panel): Are you- Cueball: Sorry, sorry. Let me start over. Cueball: OK, my chart says... Cueball: ...Can I borrow a calculator? What's 20% of $55,000?\n[Back to the scene from the first panel. Ponytail has taken one hand down to her knee, with the other still on the desk. Cueball has put the papers on his lap and has raised his hand in the air holding one finger up. In his other hand he holds either a borrowed calculator or his own smartphone.] Ponytail: Listen, if you need to- Cueball: I won't take this job for less than $61,333 point 3 repeating! Ponytail: Sure, $61,333 is fine. That's actually- Cueball: Point 3 repeating or I walk!\n","explanation":"Ponytail 's company would like to hire Cueball for a job, and she is telling him that their offer for his starting salary is $55,000.\nWhen offered a new job, it is common to negotiate on aspects of the offer such as salary, and employers may offer below the market rate initially in the expectation that the final negotiated amount will be higher. Given that the bedrock of one's future income depends on the outcome of a one-time process requiring skills unrelated to the job one is hired for, it is advisable to take one's time and do as much research as possible.\nCueball has clearly done some research, but perhaps too much as he is flummoxed by this high-stakes situation and starts to ramble with decreasing coherence. First he gets completely confused about the numbers. He says he won't have a penny over $50,000, thus cutting $5000 of the initial offer, and saying he will not have more than that. He realizes this was completely wrong, and corrects to \"under\", but is still 5000 lower. He then fumbles his words, asking for $60, then $600, then adding \"thousand\" for $600,000.\nRealizing that he is completely off, he asks for a \"15% cut of the salary\". Here, Cueball seems to confuse salary and commission. \"X% cut of the salary\" seems like what a recruiter\/headhunter may get from their employer as a commission if they successfully make their person hired.\nThe next word he says is \"Raise\". This could make sense if he already had a job, and wished to negotiate for a pay raise. After this, he begins to think of raise as in a card game and starts rambling off mainly poker related terms, like \"raise\", \"fold\" and \"pass\". He throws in \"double down\" in between. This can also be a card game term, as in blackjack where double down means to double a bet after seeing one's initial cards, with the requirement that one additional card be drawn. Lastly, he randomly mentions \"fill it up with regular\", which could be a request to a gas station attendant to fill a vehicle with \"regular\" (compared to higher octane) gasoline.\nPonytail tries to ask him something, but Cueball interrupts her, saying he is sorry and that he would like to start over. At this time he takes out several sheets of paper and looks at some charts. He asks if he can borrow a calculator and then asks what's 20% of $55,000. (This would be $11,000.) He eventually settles on a number, $61,333. 3 He even states that the decimals of 3 should be repeating, as in forever. This is exactly $61,333\u2153. He clearly states he will not take the job for less than that. A 2016 Harvard Business School study found that avoiding round numbers is a remarkably effective negotiation tactic.\nSince this is not that much more than the starting offer Ponytail is ready to accept this and says \"Sure, $61,333 is fine.\" But Cueball interrupts her because what she just offered him was 33\u2153 cents less than he asked for.\nIn the title text it shows that this is not good enough. Cueball has now confused himself to the point he will only accept exactly what he asked for, the bizarre amount $61,333\u2153. Ponytail tries to explain to him that the point 3 repeating cannot be paid in whole cents, and tries to let him know that their payroll software only can handle whole cents, and he thus can get either 0.33 or 0.34 (the latter actually being more than he asks for). Alas, Cueball, either out of panic or a love of mathematics, shouts \"No deal!\" and lets the job slip out of his hands, because he has completely misunderstood the concept of negotiation.\nFor more interview-related xkcd comics, see for instance Category:Job interviews .\nThis could also be taken in series with Cueball (possibly as a stand in for Randall) misunderstanding classically \"adult\" ideas, see for instance 616: Lease , 905: Homeownership , 1674: Adult and 1894: Real Estate .\n[Ponytail sits in an office chair at her desk, with Cueball sitting in a similar chair on the other side with his hands on his knees. Ponytails has her hands on the desk and in front of her, there is a slim thing standing up. It could be a very small screen, but there seems to be no keyboard in front of her. Maybe it is a small tablet with a support for letting is stand up. Behind that there are what appears to be two piles of papers of different sizes.] Ponytail: We'd like to extend an offer! The starting salary is $55,000. Cueball: Wow. I guess I'm inside a negotiation! Ponytail: I... Weird to phrase it like that, but- Cueball: I can do this.\n[Zoom in on Cueball's upper half.] Cueball: I won't accept a penny over $50,000. Sorry, I mean under. Under $60. I mean, $600. Thousand. $600,000. I want a 15% cut of the salary. Raise. Double down. Fold. Pass. Fill it up with regular.\n[The same shot, except Cueball is now holding three pieces of paper, and he is looking down on them. Ponytail is talking to him from off-panel.] Ponytail (off-panel): Are you- Cueball: Sorry, sorry. Let me start over. Cueball: OK, my chart says... Cueball: ...Can I borrow a calculator? What's 20% of $55,000?\n[Back to the scene from the first panel. Ponytail has taken one hand down to her knee, with the other still on the desk. Cueball has put the papers on his lap and has raised his hand in the air holding one finger up. In his other hand he holds either a borrowed calculator or his own smartphone.] Ponytail: Listen, if you need to- Cueball: I won't take this job for less than $61,333 point 3 repeating! Ponytail: Sure, $61,333 is fine. That's actually- Cueball: Point 3 repeating or I walk!\n"}
{"id":2598,"title":"Graphic Designers","image_title":"Graphic Designers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2598","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/graphic_designers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2598:_Graphic_Designers","transcript":"[Cueball stands in a lightly adorned room of a house, facing an open doorway. Each surface is painted an almost imperceptibly different shade of off-white, except the floor which is white. There is a rug, a couch with a pillow (white) and a book. There are two windows, in the right there is a potted plant. Knit Cap stands in the open doorway, as if about to enter the house, one foot at the threshold, but not on the floor inside. Cueball is reaching towards the doorway, inviting Knit Cap to enter.] Cueball: Come on in! We just repainted. Knit Cap: I... can't.\n[Caption below the panel:] If you want to set up a vampire-style barrier to keep graphic designers from entering your house, just paint every surface a slightly different shade of off-white.\n","explanation":"Being presented with visual information that is just not quite right is known to cause feelings of unease and revulsion, particularly when presented with CGI human faces, a concept known as the uncanny valley .\nIn the title text, it mentions a contingency against the designer managing to actually overcome this disgust. In this case, Cueball sets up a second way to troll his graphic designer friend using some picture frames, a level , and a protractor that can measure increments of less than a degree. Cueball can then skew his picture frames by an extremely small amount, noticeable only to the designer friend, to disgust him even further \u2014 similar to the effect of bad kerning . This could thus be applied like the use of crosses or garlic , which vampires are famously repulsed by.\nAlthough the window ledges are slightly inclined, falling subtly from left to right, it is unlikely this is a deliberate aspect of the room so much as a side-effect of Randall's imprecise stick-figure drawing style.\nTrue to the comic's joke, Randall has actually colored each segment of the comic differently to each other, even though normal persons would just perceive all walls as slightly gray (off-white). \nThe hexadecimal color codes are:\nWhilst this subtle difference may be undetectable to humans without a graphic design qualification, it can be made clearer by increasing the saturation value of the image, as shown in this rendering with an exaggerated color saturation .\n[Cueball stands in a lightly adorned room of a house, facing an open doorway. Each surface is painted an almost imperceptibly different shade of off-white, except the floor which is white. There is a rug, a couch with a pillow (white) and a book. There are two windows, in the right there is a potted plant. Knit Cap stands in the open doorway, as if about to enter the house, one foot at the threshold, but not on the floor inside. Cueball is reaching towards the doorway, inviting Knit Cap to enter.] Cueball: Come on in! We just repainted. Knit Cap: I... can't.\n[Caption below the panel:] If you want to set up a vampire-style barrier to keep graphic designers from entering your house, just paint every surface a slightly different shade of off-white.\n"}
{"id":2599,"title":"Spacecraft Debris Odds Ratio","image_title":"Spacecraft Debris Odds Ratio","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2599","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/spacecraft_debris_odds_ratio.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2599:_Spacecraft_Debris_Odds_Ratio","transcript":"[A chart is shown. Above the chart there is a heading, with a subheading below it:] Odds ratio for head injuries from falling spacecraft debris (Monte Carlo Simulation)\n[The chart is rectangular with the X-axis labels above the chart with numbers from 1 to 5. These are places over vertical lines. The first at 1 is black, the other four are light gray. There are three smaller light gray ticks between each set of lines, and one on either side of the first and last. The distance between lines gets smaller and smaller towards the right, probably logarithmic.] X-axis: 1 2 3 4 5\n[The Y-axis is not scaled; there are no ticks or lines. Instead it just gives five labels from top to bottom. Above those labels there is an arrow pointing to the top one with a label above explaning the axis.] Hours spent outdoors per day Y-axis: 0 (ref) 1 2-4 5-10 11+\n[Aligned with each of these five divisions of the Y-axis there is a dot. The top one is placed on the solid line under 1 as a reference point. The other four dots all have long error bars, with the dots at the center of these. The second dot is a bit to the left of the solid line, with the error bar going almost to the left edge of the graph and halfway to the first light gray line to the right. The third dot is located halfway between the solid and the first light gray line with the error bar just crossing the solid line, and almost reaching the gray line. The fourth dot is about a third way between the first and second of the gray lines, with the error bar crossing both these lines. The fifth and last dot is just past the second gray line, with the error bar crossing both that, going more than half toward the first gray line, and also just past the third gray line. On the same height as the two bottom dots, there are asterisks just right of the edge of the graph.] * *\n[Below the panel there is a caption:] Our new study suggests that spending more than 5 hours outside significantly increases your risk of head injury from spacecraft debris, so try to limit outdoor activities to 4 hours or less.\n","explanation":"This comic is a misunderstanding of statistics very similar to that of 1252: Increased Risk . It explains that going outside for more than 5 hours per day significantly increases your risk of head injury from falling spacecraft, and advises to limit outside activity to avoid this risk.\nHowever, since the odds of being hit in the head by (any part of) a falling spacecraft are astronomically low to begin with , quadrupling it or more still results in a negligible probability. The horizontal error bars for times greater than 4 hours are marked with asterisks to indicate they are significantly different from the reference value at 0 hours, as indeed those error bars don't overlap the vertical line for the 0-hours reference value.\nError bars are graphical representations of the variability of data and used on graphs to indicate the error or uncertainty in a reported measurement.\nPresenting the data by hour brackets hides the data distribution inside each bracket. If the data were presented hour by hour, and not by groups of hours, they may show a different threshold of increased risk or no threshold (odds ratio could be linear).\nThe graph and error bars are based on a Monte Carlo simulation , a type of computational algorithm that uses repeated random sampling to obtain the likelihood of a range of results of occurring; see, for instance, this article about Monte Carlo simulations . Additionally, this may indicate that the entire study was conducted via a Monte Carlo simulation and that no real data was collected adding to the absurdity of the claim that more time spent outside could lead to an increased risk of head injuries due to falling space craft.  Indeed, it is so rare for humans to be struck by spacecraft debris that a simulation is probably the only way to study the risk; an absurdly large sample size, involving tens of millions of participants over several decades, would be necessary to obtain significant experimental data.\nThe specific reference to falling spacecraft is likely inspired by events happening around the time of this comics release (March 2022).  Around a month before this was posted, the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos , warned that sanctions against Russia (mostly those over the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine ) could result in the International Space Station crashing.  Since the Russian section of the space station is the one that provides propulsion (although it is built to rely on the power generated by the other sections), this was taken seriously and as of when this was posted, NASA was trying to come up with alternative stabilization strategies in case the situation worsened. There was also a recent report of some 600 kg space rocket debris found in Brazil.\nThe title text makes a similar joke. While the increase in chances of death by a bear attack are greater when going outside than the decrease in chances of death by cardiovascular disease, by getting out to exercise, it is incorrect to combine them in this way, since cardiovascular disease has a much higher starting chance of death, and reducing it by 30% has a much more significant effect on overall life expectancy than quadrupling the very very small chance of death by bear attack.  At least for the majority of us who don't live in or near wild bears' natural habitats.\nThe \"280% increase\" of the title text is also an error, though perhaps not for reasons that are obvious at first (for instance, the correct calculation is not \"300% \u2212 30% = 270%\"). To \"increase by 300%\" means multiplying the probability by (1 + 3.0) = 4.0, while to \"decrease by 30%\" means multiplying by (1 \u2212 0.3) = 0.7. Combining these means multiplying by both, for an overall change of 4.0 \u00d7 0.7 = 2.8, or 280%. However, this result means the risk has increased to 280% of its old value, not by 280%. And in any case, it is still not valid to simply combine two changes in wildly different risks like this.\nThe odds of an event is the probability that it happens divided by the probability that it doesn't happen. People often express odds as a ratio (e.g. the odds of rolling a 6 on a 6-sided dice might be expressed as 0.16777...\u00a0: 0.83333..., or equivalently as 1:5), but it is important to note that such ratios are not odds ratios (it would be fitting to call this a \"probability ratio\", but this terminology is not standard).\nAn odds ratio is the odds of event O happening, given that some other event E has occurred, divided by the odds of O given that E has not occurred. O is sometimes called an \"outcome\" and E is sometimes called an \"exposure\", because people are often interested in comparing things like the odds of getting lung cancer (O) given that you smoke (E) to the odds of getting lung cancer given that you don't smoke, as a way of measuring the extent to which exposure to E influences outcome O. In the case of the comic, the outcome variable O is the event of getting a head injury from falling spacecraft debris, and the exposure variable E is the event of spending H hours per day outside, for various values of H. The comic appears to be saying that for each value of H, there are two options for E: either you spend H hours per day outside or you never go outside.\nSo for small values of H (e.g. 1 hour per day), the comic is saying that the event of being hit by spacecraft debris is more or less independent of the event of spending H hours per day outside, which is to say that the odds of being hit is more or less the same regardless of the choice you make between spending H hours per day outside and never going outside. Hence the dot on the 1-hour bar is close to 1, because the two odds are more or less equal (the dot appears to represent an average estimate of the odds ratio).\nNote that when calculating the odds ratios for this comic, the odds in the denominators are always the same, as they are the odds of being hit given that you never go outside, which does not depend on H. So when the comic says that the odds ratio is above 3 for H={11+ hours per day}, it is effectively saying that the odds of being hit when you spend this much time outside is a bit more than 3 times the odds of being hit when you spend 1 hour per day outside.\nSuppose the probability of being hit is: P when you spend 1 hour per day outside, and Q when you spend 11+ hours per day outside. The odds of being hit under these two exposures are P\/(1-P) and Q\/(1-Q) respectively, and because the odds ratios have equal denominators, the comic is saying that Q\/(1-Q) = kP\/(1-P), where k is a bit more than 3. If we rearrange this to get an expression for Q, we get:\nAs P is negligibly small, 1-P is very close to 1, and P+(1-P)\/k is very close to 1\/k. Thus Q is very close to kP (i.e. a bit more than 3 times P), meaning that the probability of being hit when you spend 11+ hours per day outside is still negligibly small. Thus, the comic's suggestion that we spend 4 hours or less outside based on the estimated odds ratios is extremely misguided.\n[A chart is shown. Above the chart there is a heading, with a subheading below it:] Odds ratio for head injuries from falling spacecraft debris (Monte Carlo Simulation)\n[The chart is rectangular with the X-axis labels above the chart with numbers from 1 to 5. These are places over vertical lines. The first at 1 is black, the other four are light gray. There are three smaller light gray ticks between each set of lines, and one on either side of the first and last. The distance between lines gets smaller and smaller towards the right, probably logarithmic.] X-axis: 1 2 3 4 5\n[The Y-axis is not scaled; there are no ticks or lines. Instead it just gives five labels from top to bottom. Above those labels there is an arrow pointing to the top one with a label above explaning the axis.] Hours spent outdoors per day Y-axis: 0 (ref) 1 2-4 5-10 11+\n[Aligned with each of these five divisions of the Y-axis there is a dot. The top one is placed on the solid line under 1 as a reference point. The other four dots all have long error bars, with the dots at the center of these. The second dot is a bit to the left of the solid line, with the error bar going almost to the left edge of the graph and halfway to the first light gray line to the right. The third dot is located halfway between the solid and the first light gray line with the error bar just crossing the solid line, and almost reaching the gray line. The fourth dot is about a third way between the first and second of the gray lines, with the error bar crossing both these lines. The fifth and last dot is just past the second gray line, with the error bar crossing both that, going more than half toward the first gray line, and also just past the third gray line. On the same height as the two bottom dots, there are asterisks just right of the edge of the graph.] * *\n[Below the panel there is a caption:] Our new study suggests that spending more than 5 hours outside significantly increases your risk of head injury from spacecraft debris, so try to limit outdoor activities to 4 hours or less.\n"}
{"id":2600,"title":"Rejected Question Categories","image_title":"Rejected Question Categories","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2600","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/rejected_question_categories.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2600:_Rejected_Question_Categories","transcript":"In What If? 2 (xkcd.com\/whatif2), I answer ridiculous questions sent in by readers about everything from volcanoes to spaceships to soup.\nHere are a few of the common types of question that I did not answer:\n[In separate boxes for each category]\n[In row 1:]\nPeople cheating on homework: What if I made a pendulum by hanging a rock on a 2.75 meter string? What would its period be in seconds? (Show your work!)\nMedical advice: What if you got a scratch and the next day your hand looks like this [ \ud83d\udcce attachment ]? Should you see a doctor or what?\nPersonal: Why don't the squirrels in my yard like me???\n[In row 2:]\nSpam: Do you want to meet lonely singles in your area tonight?\nPhishing: Have you recently been the victim of phishing? To check, log in to your account by clicking here .\nRequests for help with a crime: Using modern science, what would be the fastest way to get through this bank vault door? [ \ud83d\udcce blueprints]\n[In row 3:]\nUnanswerable: Why am I me and not someone else\nVague: What is going to happen? (Be specific)\nVague+Ominous: Will I have to start worrying about spiders after Tuesday?\n?????: Hi, we're lonely singles in your area, and we're wondering what would happen if we shot a nuclear bomb into a volcano! [partially cut off horizontally:] Click here to log in and tell us\n","explanation":"This comic shows the categories of questions he claims to have received, but rejected to use in his book, giving an example question for each category. In typical xkcd fashion, these begin out by being plausible, although often unlikely to have been submitted as a what if? question, moving in to more and more absurd types of questions, especially with the last question, that appears to be a combination of all previous categories and is therefore marked \"?????\"\nThe title text refers to the launch date of the book September 13, rendered in the American style 9\/13. This format can be confusing to non-Americans, although usually not when the date is larger than 12, since it would then appear to reference the 9th day of the 13th month. This \"13th month\" was, however, referenced in the first comic about the book: 2575: What If? 2 . See also Randall's take on the date format, ISO 8601 , in 1179: ISO 8601 .\nRandall then continues the title text by referencing the second to last category with vague ominous questions. The example question here asks if there is need to worry about spiders after Tuesday. So Randall notes that the release date, 5.5 months after the release of this comic, is of course assuming anyone will survive past next Tuesday (2022-04-05).\nTuesday has been notably referenced in 277: Long Light , 564: Crossbows , 1099: Tuesdays and most notably in 1245: 10-Day Forecast , where it seems that the last day ever will be a Tuesday. Tuesday is the second day of the week, and notably, the Tuesday of the week following the publication of this cartoon (April 5th, 2022) was the Day of the Spiders.\nIn What If? 2 (xkcd.com\/whatif2), I answer ridiculous questions sent in by readers about everything from volcanoes to spaceships to soup.\nHere are a few of the common types of question that I did not answer:\n[In separate boxes for each category]\n[In row 1:]\nPeople cheating on homework: What if I made a pendulum by hanging a rock on a 2.75 meter string? What would its period be in seconds? (Show your work!)\nMedical advice: What if you got a scratch and the next day your hand looks like this [ \ud83d\udcce attachment ]? Should you see a doctor or what?\nPersonal: Why don't the squirrels in my yard like me???\n[In row 2:]\nSpam: Do you want to meet lonely singles in your area tonight?\nPhishing: Have you recently been the victim of phishing? To check, log in to your account by clicking here .\nRequests for help with a crime: Using modern science, what would be the fastest way to get through this bank vault door? [ \ud83d\udcce blueprints]\n[In row 3:]\nUnanswerable: Why am I me and not someone else\nVague: What is going to happen? (Be specific)\nVague+Ominous: Will I have to start worrying about spiders after Tuesday?\n?????: Hi, we're lonely singles in your area, and we're wondering what would happen if we shot a nuclear bomb into a volcano! [partially cut off horizontally:] Click here to log in and tell us\n"}
{"id":2601,"title":"Instructions","image_title":"Instructions","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2601","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/instructions.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2601:_Instructions","transcript":"[The comic consists of one radio button, a small circle in the center of a large white panel. It is interactive. When pressing the radio button (selecting it), it turns blue. The second the radio button is pressed a more than 9-hour long audio file of coding instructions begins to play, and a mute button appears in the bottom right corner. It fades slowly into full opacity. Pressing this button will change it to a loudspeaker. It toggles whether there is sound playing or not. It is not possible to shut down the audio by pressing the radio button. Once selected it cannot be deselected as there is only this one option.]\n[Covered by the radio button is an image of a turtle crawling from left to right, with a dotted line trailing behind it, indicating its movement. This image can only be seen by looking in the place where images for xkcd are usually placed on xkcd.]\n[To read a transcript of the audio file go here: 2601: Instructions\/Audio Transcript .]\n\nThe image drawn by the Logo program is a depiction of Bob Ross standing in front of a canvas, on which he has painted \"a happy little tree, holding up a happy little world\".  However, unlike his usual \"happy little trees\", the tree depicted is not a small pine, but rather a gargantuan World Tree growing from the back of a giant World Turtle , on which a Flat Earth rests.  (The \"happy little world\" does bear several small pines more typical of his style.)\nNear the middle of the world, a Cueball sits while listening to the radio, perhaps tuning in to the same transmission that generated the image.  Closer to the reader, a turtle is shown walking around, leaving dotted-line tracks behind it, suggestive of the Logo turtle. The dotted-line tracks spell out \"TY\", shorthand for \"thank you\".\nAt the far left of the image, a robot and human are drawn next to a turtle which has flipped onto its back.  The robot declares, \"Poor thing!\" while the human says \"I'll help\".  This is a reference to the \"empathy tests\" employed to distinguish humans from androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film adaptation Blade Runner .  As part of the test, the listener is asked to imagine being in the desert, flipping a tortoise onto its back, and refusing to turn it back over, while their eyes are monitored for signs of emotional response (or lack thereof).  In this case, the robot expresses sympathy for the turtle and the human declares that he will turn it back over.  (Although the robot is very clearly distinguishable from a human being.)\n[A man with large hair and a beard is holding an artist's palette with five patches of paint in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. He looks upon his canvas, where he has painted a large painting.] Painter: A Happy little tree Painter: Holding up a happy little world.\n[The painting contains lots of stuff. Among others, is a robot that sees Cueball bending down to lift a turtle that is on its back. They talk:] Robot: Poor thing\" Cueball: I'll help\n[In the top right corner, there is a dotted line forming a semi-circle around the corner. Inside this are the words:] Vacuum decay\n[There are no other words in the image. The image includes:]\nIn the sky:\nOn top of the tree:\nUnder the tree:\n[The rest just needs to be written out in detail...]\n","explanation":"This is the 12th April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous April fools' comic was 2445: Checkbox , which was released on Thursday, April 1st, 2021.\nWhen loading the comic just a small dot is shown, a radio button (or option button). Usually, there would be more than one to give the user options. Once it has been selected it cannot be deselected. Once pressed the button turns blue and this starts the real part of this April fool's comic.\nThe comic consists of an audio file . The speech is a mix of facts about turtles and coding instructions in LOGO .  When executed, the instructions draw an xkcd comic. The audio file is 9 hours and 7 minutes long.\nOnce the voice begins to describe the instructions (hence the title) it is possible to mute the audio by pressing a muted button at the bottom right of the screen. This fades into view when the radio button is pushed. Pressing it will change the button to a non muted loudspeaker . These were the same buttons that were in the previous April fool's comic 2445: Checkbox . That was the first xkcd comic with audio , and thus these were two April fools' comics with audio in a row, and these are the only comics with audio. In the Checkbox comic, the mute buttons meaning are reversed, so the sound is on when the loudspeaker is shown and muted when the mute button is shown. It could be another layer to the April fool's joke or just an error by Randall.\nThe image originally displayed on this page was of a small turtle crawling in the center where the radio button is in the real comic. That was the image that would be downloaded by web crawlers like explain xkcd's bot, as it is what was placed here on xkcd: https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/instructions_2x.png . This is of course not the real comic, which cannot be downloaded in that manner.\nThe \"turtle\" is a key concept in Logo, a programming language especially designed to teach programming to children in an easy way. The turtle in the logo is the cursor. Programming commands move the turtle, drawing a line as it goes. Of course, listening to hours of instructions, including the speech-synthesized reading of source code, is not an easy way to code or draw a picture. [ citation needed ]\nIn addition, at the end of the audio the voice says:\nThe title text alludes to Bob Ross 's catchphrase \"happy little trees\" in The Joy of Painting , a PBS TV show in which Ross leads the viewer through the painting of a nature scene.  The audio file itself is also presented in the style of The Joy of Painting ; it begins with greeting the viewer and introducing the color palette to be used (just one color, in this case, as Logo and all computer monitors of the time were monochrome).  The speaker then reads out some helper functions to be used in programming the scene, which is more analogous to Ross's palette of paints (titanium white, carmine red, etc.) along with words of encouragement as each is completed.  The functions are DIST, to calculate the Euclidean distance between two points, LERP, to perform linear interpolation , MIX to average two numbers (with LERP), and CUBIC to draw cubic Hermite splines .  From there, the speaker alternates between sketching parts of the scene and offering more words of encouragement, mixed in with turtle facts.\nTranscribing the audio into text was organized as a project on github .\nThis is not the first time that Randall made an interactive comic where turtles played a big part, see 1416: Pixels . In this, he jokes with the idea of turtles all the way down, which is also mentioned in the audio file. He also made a comic simply called 889: Turtles .\nThis comic has a unique header text , see the details here . The header is:\n\"Today's comic was created with Patrick , Amber , @chromakode , Michael , Kat , Conor , @zigdon ,  and Benjamin Staffin .\"\nThe header had not changed since the promotion of the new what if? 2 book.\n[The comic consists of one radio button, a small circle in the center of a large white panel. It is interactive. When pressing the radio button (selecting it), it turns blue. The second the radio button is pressed a more than 9-hour long audio file of coding instructions begins to play, and a mute button appears in the bottom right corner. It fades slowly into full opacity. Pressing this button will change it to a loudspeaker. It toggles whether there is sound playing or not. It is not possible to shut down the audio by pressing the radio button. Once selected it cannot be deselected as there is only this one option.]\n[Covered by the radio button is an image of a turtle crawling from left to right, with a dotted line trailing behind it, indicating its movement. This image can only be seen by looking in the place where images for xkcd are usually placed on xkcd.]\n[To read a transcript of the audio file go here: 2601: Instructions\/Audio Transcript .]\n\nThe image drawn by the Logo program is a depiction of Bob Ross standing in front of a canvas, on which he has painted \"a happy little tree, holding up a happy little world\".  However, unlike his usual \"happy little trees\", the tree depicted is not a small pine, but rather a gargantuan World Tree growing from the back of a giant World Turtle , on which a Flat Earth rests.  (The \"happy little world\" does bear several small pines more typical of his style.)\nNear the middle of the world, a Cueball sits while listening to the radio, perhaps tuning in to the same transmission that generated the image.  Closer to the reader, a turtle is shown walking around, leaving dotted-line tracks behind it, suggestive of the Logo turtle. The dotted-line tracks spell out \"TY\", shorthand for \"thank you\".\nAt the far left of the image, a robot and human are drawn next to a turtle which has flipped onto its back.  The robot declares, \"Poor thing!\" while the human says \"I'll help\".  This is a reference to the \"empathy tests\" employed to distinguish humans from androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film adaptation Blade Runner .  As part of the test, the listener is asked to imagine being in the desert, flipping a tortoise onto its back, and refusing to turn it back over, while their eyes are monitored for signs of emotional response (or lack thereof).  In this case, the robot expresses sympathy for the turtle and the human declares that he will turn it back over.  (Although the robot is very clearly distinguishable from a human being.)\n[A man with large hair and a beard is holding an artist's palette with five patches of paint in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. He looks upon his canvas, where he has painted a large painting.] Painter: A Happy little tree Painter: Holding up a happy little world.\n[The painting contains lots of stuff. Among others, is a robot that sees Cueball bending down to lift a turtle that is on its back. They talk:] Robot: Poor thing\" Cueball: I'll help\n[In the top right corner, there is a dotted line forming a semi-circle around the corner. Inside this are the words:] Vacuum decay\n[There are no other words in the image. The image includes:]\nIn the sky:\nOn top of the tree:\nUnder the tree:\n[The rest just needs to be written out in detail...]\n"}
{"id":2602,"title":"Linguistics Degree","image_title":"Linguistics Degree","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2602","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/linguistics_degree.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2602:_Linguistics_Degree","transcript":"[Megan, who is wearing a graduation cap, receives a degree which is handed to her by Hairbun. They are standing on a podium with Ponytail and Cueball standing below as onlookers.] Hairbun: Congratulations on the degree! Your word is \"Bassoon.\" Ponytail: Oh nice! Not as cool as my \"Jackalope,\" but still not bad. Cueball: You all are lucky. I'm stuck with \"Slurp.\"\n[Caption below panel:] Every linguistics degree comes with one word that you're put in charge of.\n","explanation":"Hairbun hands Megan a linguistics degree, and informs her she is now \"in charge of\" the word ' bassoon .' Watching this, Ponytail and Cueball compare the words they were assigned when they got their linguistics degrees, ' jackalope ' and ' slurp ' respectively. Ponytail thinks bassoon is a cool word but thinks her own is better, whereas Cueball is not satisfied with his word. A bassoon is a woodwind musical instrument with a double reed, while a jackalope is a mythical creature, a jackrabbit crossed with an antelope .\nIt is never clarified what being \"in charge of\" a word entails. It could mean being in charge of keeping track of the word, or having actual authority over the use of the word, which is unlikely as normally language use cannot be dictated by a single person . Also, no specific university has control over all of linguistics as far as we know, so it would require every university capable of giving people linguistics degrees to co-operate, so nobody is assigned the same word.  Any well-educated member of the linguistic community will know what is being suggested is impossible hence why they are the only ones aware of how important it is.\nThe title text merely furthers how seemingly random the entire situation is. The word \"linguistics\" was assigned to a \"random student in Ohio who barely graduated and then went into automotive marketing\", who we can assume isn't very important to the field of linguistics. [ citation needed ] But this means that no one is actually taking care of this important word, since it must be assumed that the student is no longer interested in linguistics.\nThe idea of individuals having a guardianship of an idea or concept has appeared in science fiction.  For example, in Fahrenheit 451 characters have memorised books to save them from book-burning and... spoiler-stuff.\nIt also exists in reality. Members of the Royal Spanish Academy , the institution that defines the official dictionary of the Spanish language, are symbolically put in charge of one letter of the dictionary each to take care of it.\n[Megan, who is wearing a graduation cap, receives a degree which is handed to her by Hairbun. They are standing on a podium with Ponytail and Cueball standing below as onlookers.] Hairbun: Congratulations on the degree! Your word is \"Bassoon.\" Ponytail: Oh nice! Not as cool as my \"Jackalope,\" but still not bad. Cueball: You all are lucky. I'm stuck with \"Slurp.\"\n[Caption below panel:] Every linguistics degree comes with one word that you're put in charge of.\n"}
{"id":2603,"title":"Childhood Toys","image_title":"Childhood Toys","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2603","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/childhood_toys.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2603:_Childhood_Toys","transcript":"[Title:] Childhood Toys [Subtitle:] By Practicality for Commuting\n[Caption of the first box:] Practical\n[Cueball, wearing a helmet, drives by on an electric scooter, passing another Cueball and Hairbun, who is holding a briefcase.] Scooter Cueball: Hi, boss!\n[Caption of the second box:] Less Practical\n[Ponytail rides by White Hat on a unicycle.] Ponytail: Good Morning!\n[Caption of the third box:] Impractical\n[Cueball bounces past Megan on a pogo stick.] Pogo Stick: Boing boing Cueball: How's it going?\n[Caption of the fourth box:] Very Impractical\n[Cueball slides past Hairy(?) on a Slip 'N Slide.] Cueball: Wheeeee Cueball: Hi Boss!\n","explanation":"This comic shows various objects, ranked by how practical they would be for long-distance transportation. The objects are described as childhood toys.\nThe \"Practical\" panel shows objects designed for convenient transportation, namely bicycles and electric scooters . Most people know how to ride a bicycle, and can easily go several miles on it. Scooters (shown in the comic panel) are also relatively easy to use, and may have a motor allowing them to be used for significant distances \u2014 the one shown has the appearance of one with a battery unit rather than being 'leg-propelled', and is named as such in the list for which it has been depicted. These are not considered \"toys\" at adult size as they are widely used for transport, but children's bikes and scooters (particularly unpowered scooters) not used for transport would generally be considered toys. The practicality of bicycles and e-scooters tends to depend more on local infrastructure and amenities (i.e., the presence of a safe cycle route and the destination being within a sensible distance) than on the equipment itself. Bicycles can carry substantial loads . In some countries e-scooters are legally restricted or prohibited on public roads which may make commuting on them unviable.\nThe \"Less Practical\" panel has objects designed for transportation, but which may be harder to use than the first panel. Skateboards and roller skates , while designed for transportation, don't work great over long distances or when carrying objects, and Big Wheels and unicycles (shown in the panel) are simply less practical bikes.\nIn the \"Impractical\" panel are objects that are designed for transportation, but are very much not designed for convenience, especially over long distances. Stilts are long poles that one stands on to extend their legs; while they increase the user's stride length, it takes quite a bit of practice to use them, especially if they're very long. A jump rope is a rope that the user swings around their body while they jump over it whenever the rope passes below their feet; it doesn't actually provide any transportation by itself, the user is simply hopping to their destination, which is a very tiring way to travel (but very good exercise if you can do it). A wagon has no propulsion of its own, it has to be pulled by the user; parents sometimes use it to transport their children short distances (such as to a playground). Larger wagons are used commercially. A Pogo stick is a pole with a spring at the bottom and a platform for standing on, which can be used to bounce; while fun for bouncing a few yards (as shown in the panel), like the jump rope it would be tiring for long distances.\nThe \"Very Impractical\" panel has objects that may be used for transportation, but to an incredibly limited degree. Slip 'N Slides (shown in the panel) only work (effectively) downhill, and only where they are placed down. Trampolines and Tire swings could let you go somewhere, but you'd need to set up multiple in a row leading to your destination beforehand. Hot Wheels cars could be put onto the bottom of shoes to create extremely ill-advised [ citation needed ] improvised rollerskates, but the car on its own has effectively no merit for transportation.\nThe title text refers to tetherball , a game found in many playgrounds where a ball is attached to a pole by a long rope. This is also very impractical, as the rope just winds around a stationary pole. It's possible that he is swinging from the rope and letting go (which would explain the bruises and scrapes, as well as the torn rope), but there is no remotely practical way to use this to commute. [ citation needed ] Nevertheless, if you were able to swing quickly enough and cut the rope at exactly the right moment, you might be able to achieve a short commute to a nearby target. This method may have been inspired by NASA purchasing a launch via the SpinLaunch rocket system the same week as the comic appeared.\n[Title:] Childhood Toys [Subtitle:] By Practicality for Commuting\n[Caption of the first box:] Practical\n[Cueball, wearing a helmet, drives by on an electric scooter, passing another Cueball and Hairbun, who is holding a briefcase.] Scooter Cueball: Hi, boss!\n[Caption of the second box:] Less Practical\n[Ponytail rides by White Hat on a unicycle.] Ponytail: Good Morning!\n[Caption of the third box:] Impractical\n[Cueball bounces past Megan on a pogo stick.] Pogo Stick: Boing boing Cueball: How's it going?\n[Caption of the fourth box:] Very Impractical\n[Cueball slides past Hairy(?) on a Slip 'N Slide.] Cueball: Wheeeee Cueball: Hi Boss!\n"}
{"id":2604,"title":"Frankenstein Captcha","image_title":"Frankenstein Captcha","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2604","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/frankenstein_captcha.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2604:_Frankenstein_Captcha","transcript":"[A captcha design, with a header and four rows of four pictures each below it. The header, in white lettering on a blue background, reads:] To continue, please click All squares containing Frankenstein\n[The pictures, all with gray backgrounds, are as follows, from left to right in each row:]\nRow 1\nMonster: GRRR\nRow 2\nRow 3\nFrankenstein: It's alive!\nGirl: Monster!\nRow 4\n[Caption below the panel]: Oh no.\n","explanation":"This comic strip is a play on the meanings (and misunderstanding) of the name \"Frankenstein\". Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel by Mary Shelley about a medical student named Victor Frankenstein who creates an artificial life-form. The man he creates once describes himself as \"the Adam of [Frankenstein's] labour\" in the book, and strictly speaking is properly known as \"Frankenstein's monster \" (or perhaps \"creation\" or \"son\"), but is often erroneously called \"Frankenstein\" himself. This has been fertile ground for many, many debates about whether the monster could also properly be called \"Frankenstein,\" either as a family name, an honorific, or simply because it's more recognizable and convenient. Randall has weighed in on the debate himself in a previous comic, 1589: Frankenstein .\nThe CAPTCHA shown in the comic instructs the user to select all tiles containing Frankenstein. The tiles include both a reanimated corpse resembling Frankenstein's monster and a scientist yelling, \"It's alive!\u201d who is clearly intended to be Victor Frankenstein. The problem arises from the contrast between various definitions of the term Frankenstein. Going just off the book's text, the monster has no name, so the correct answer to the CAPTCHA is just the left square of the third row.  However, the character depicted there is clearly Henry Frankenstein from the famous 1931 film adaptation (Victor Frankenstein never said the words \"it's alive!\" in the book), and likewise the creature depicted is clearly inspired by Boris Karloff 's iconic portrayal in that film and its sequels.  If the images are captured from that film, then all four of them could be said to be \"containing (a subset of) Frankenstein (the 1931 film)\".\nSome CAPTCHAs - especially Google's widely spread reCAPTCHA - nowadays serve a dual purpose: (1) to separate human users from bots by way of intelligent interaction, and (2) to train a neural network, hence the \"correct answer\" to image recognition CAPTCHAs is not known ahead of time and is merely based on the most commonly-chosen tiles. Thus, a user who knows that \"Frankenstein\" refers only to the scientist would face this CAPTCHA with dread, uttering \"Oh No\" as they realize that they must select the tiles containing the monster, and possibly not even be allowed to select the tile containing the actual scientist Victor Frankenstein if they want to pass the CAPTCHA.\nAlternatively, this comic strip with its \"Oh No\" caption could be referencing 1897 , which would imply that someone had actually created a Frankenstein's monster which needs to be located as soon as possible.\nMany of the other tiles appear to be pictures of entities that inspire similar pedantry. For example, there is a picture of a turtle (or possibly a tortoise, or a reference to the Voight-Kampff test used in a manner analogous to CAPTCHA), a ship (or possibly a boat), Link (the name given to each of several protagonists that appear across generations and timelines, throughout the Legend of Zelda video games, who many erroneously refer to as Zelda), a pond (or possibly a lake, a puddle, or a mirage ), a squash or pumpkin (often subject to the fruit or vegetable debate), an erupting volcano (with lava, or is it magma?), and the planet Pluto (or is it a dwarf planet?). Other tiles seem to be inspired by images that commonly occur in actual captchas, like the STOP sign or the traffic light. However, at least some of these may also be meant to fall into the category of entities that inspire pedantry, for example: because traffic lights can also be called traffic signals or stoplights; many people thinking that the shape of a stop sign is a hexagon, not an octagon; and the definition of a sandwich (previously discussed as a \u201crandom semi-ironic obsession\u201d in 1835 ).\nThe title text refers to one of the methods used to distinguish a ship from a boat. When making a turn, if the vessel leans towards the inside of the turn circle then it is considered a boat, whereas if the vessel leans away from the turn circle it is considered a ship [1] . Since the vessel generates a wake as it moves, checking whether it is a boat or a ship can be done while it is literally drawing a line on the water (the wake). The phrase \"a line drawn in water\" is also an idiom for something ephemeral. Ironically, it has persisted for a long time and dates back at least to the early Buddhists. (e.g. AN 3.132 & AN 7.74 ). The distinction between a ship and a boat is also unclear, having changed over time, with no universally accepted rule to distinguish between the two . The title text is also a pun on the common idiom \"drawing a line in the sand.\" The title text could also be referencing the image of a boat or ship that appears as one of the CAPTCHA tiles in the comic, where Randall has drawn a squiggly line often used in crude drawings to represent a waterline.\n[A captcha design, with a header and four rows of four pictures each below it. The header, in white lettering on a blue background, reads:] To continue, please click All squares containing Frankenstein\n[The pictures, all with gray backgrounds, are as follows, from left to right in each row:]\nRow 1\nMonster: GRRR\nRow 2\nRow 3\nFrankenstein: It's alive!\nGirl: Monster!\nRow 4\n[Caption below the panel]: Oh no.\n"}
{"id":2605,"title":"Taylor Series","image_title":"Taylor Series","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2605","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/taylor_series.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2605:_Taylor_Series","transcript":"[Miss Lenhart pointing a stick at a whiteboard, which has some scribbled text written on it and one line is circled.] Miss Lenhart: At this point, you're probably thinking, \"I love this equation and wish it would never end!\" Miss Lenhart: Well, good news!\n[Caption below the panel:] Taylor series expansion is the worst.\n","explanation":"In mathematics, a Taylor series expansion is a polynomial power series approximation of a function [1] around a given point, composed of an infinite sum of the function's derivatives , each both divided by successive factorials and multiplied by the incrementally increasing power of the distance from the given point. Such expansions usually continue without end. Beyond approximation of functions, Taylor series are also useful for deriving numerical approximations of irrational values, such as \u03c0 , as well as symbolic forms to make functions easier to integrate or otherwise manipulate with calculus. [2] However, because they involve difficult calculus operations, and can be annoyingly tedious to calculate by hand , they are often not loved by math students. [3]\nMiss Lenhart appears to be teaching a class about how to use a Taylor series. She presumes her students want to keep learning about the series, in that they, \"wish it would never end.\" She then says \"Good news!\" because the series does not end. The cartoon's humor is based on the contrast between wishing the series won't end, ordinarily desired of sequences of enjoyable events, and the infinite nature of the Taylor series, which is less likely appreciated by her students struggling to understand why the sums converge to their resulting value.\nThe title text is a reference to the common practice among physicists and engineers of abbreviating the Taylor series to only the first few terms, typically one or two, in order to simplify the mathematics of their models. The title text is also a pun on the use of the word \"series\" to refer to a television program. It symbolizes the terms of the mathematical series as a metaphor with a television season, suggesting that only the first term is useful. It makes fun of the common sentiment against bad screenwriting of a series by saying that, \"The series should have been cancelled after the first season,\" replacing \"season\" with \"term.\" (Notably, both \"term\" and \"season\" are used to refer to a stretch of time during which a program is airing\u2014generally, a television or scholastic program, respectively.) Also note that US President Zachary Taylor died during his first term. In a way, his presidency was cancelled during his first term.\n[Miss Lenhart pointing a stick at a whiteboard, which has some scribbled text written on it and one line is circled.] Miss Lenhart: At this point, you're probably thinking, \"I love this equation and wish it would never end!\" Miss Lenhart: Well, good news!\n[Caption below the panel:] Taylor series expansion is the worst.\n"}
{"id":2606,"title":"Weird Unicode Math Symbols","image_title":"Weird Unicode Math Symbols","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2606","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/weird_unicode_math_symbols.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2606:_Weird_Unicode_Math_Symbols","transcript":"Weird Unicode Math Symbols\nAnd their meanings\n","explanation":"This comic proposes joke explanations for various unicode symbols with obscure or no known uses.\nThis comic may have been inspired by this blog post , which went viral (in a limited sense) the same day the comic was published.\nWeird Unicode Math Symbols\nAnd their meanings\n"}
{"id":2607,"title":"Geiger Counter","image_title":"Geiger Counter","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2607","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/geiger_counter.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2607:_Geiger_Counter","transcript":"[Cueball and Ponytail are wearing hard hats and standing in what looks to be some sort of desert or rocky area. Cueball is holding a Geiger counter in his hands. Ponytail is holding a clipboard.] Cueball: At first I was confused about why they wanted me to carry a Geiger counter here, but then it clicked.\n","explanation":"This comic is a simple pun . Cueball and Ponytail are standing in what looks to be a desert, and Cueball is holding a Geiger counter in his hand. Cueball remarks that he did not understand why he was asked to carry a Geiger counter, but that it then \"clicked\" with him.\nGeiger counters are devices used to measure the amount of radiation in an area. When a particle of ionizing radiation hits the sensor of a Geiger counter, it will give off a distinct \"clicking\" noise. \"Click\" can also be a slang term for the Eureka effect , a sudden moment of understanding. The pun in this comic insinuates that Cueball realized why he was asked to bring the Geiger counter when it clicked, indicating radiation nearby. In radioactive areas, it is usually a good idea to carry around some sort of radiation detector for safety reasons . [ citation needed ]\nThis is likely a parody of a fairly well-known pun that takes advantage of a similar double meaning: \"I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.\" Just as that pun uses \"hit me\" to mean both the action of the ball and to understand, this comic uses the \"clicking\" to mean both the action of the Geiger counter and to understand. A related variety of pun, told in the third person , is the Tom Swifty .\nThe title text is also a pun, with the implication being the narrator \"understood\" once they \"stood under\" the birds that were perched on the wire (who may have then pooped on the narrator to bring them to their understanding [in the \"realization\" sense]).\n[Cueball and Ponytail are wearing hard hats and standing in what looks to be some sort of desert or rocky area. Cueball is holding a Geiger counter in his hands. Ponytail is holding a clipboard.] Cueball: At first I was confused about why they wanted me to carry a Geiger counter here, but then it clicked.\n"}
{"id":2608,"title":"Family Reunion","image_title":"Family Reunion","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2608","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/family_reunion.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2608:_Family_Reunion","transcript":"[Megan, White Hat, Cueball, Hairy, Danish, a white cat with black patches on its back, Hairbun, a chair with a half-full wine-glass on the seat, and a potted plant on a cabinet are \"standing\" in a line. White Hat is holding a glass and Hairy has his hands to the side in a \"shrug\" position. Megan and Cueball are facing right and everything\/one else is facing left (except for the potted plant, which is not facing any direction). There are arrows pointing to each of the living creatures.]\n14th cousin [Megan] 2nd cousin [White Hat] Me [Cueball] 12th cousin [Hairy] 35th cousin [Danish] 17,000,000th cousin [cat] 9th cousin [Hairbun] 50,000,000,000th cousin [potted plant]\n[Caption below the panel:] Really, every gathering is a family reunion.\n","explanation":"Because all humans are descended from a common ancestor , every human is, at some point, related to every other human, albeit distantly. Similarly, all life forms on Earth are presumed (with good reasons) to be descended from a single even more distant relative whose ultimate lineage became more relevant than any from its own 'cousins' at the time, and thus all life forms are distantly related. This makes every interaction with another life-form, technically, a family reunion, if not in the traditional sense.\nThe general English definition of a cousin , which is a person sharing an ancestor who is not a direct parent of either party, can be qualified by two numbers. There is the n th-ness of the relationship (the fewest generations you need to go beyond one's parentage, \"a first cousin\" implies that a grandparent is the key link) - for example, this Cueball's relation to White Hat is via a great-grandparent, whilst that with Hairbun is through a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent. A \"removed\" number is any difference in this number between the two individuals, such that a child of a direct cousin invokes a \"once removed\" relationship between the two (without individually qualifying who is the 'senior' generation, from whom the 'nth' count is determined). You would normally only qualify \"first cousin\" if this fact is considered important, and \"zero times removed\" would also be considered implicit.\nAs pointed out in the title text, cat lifespans (or, more importantly, inter-generational breeding cycles) are somewhat different from those of humans. Although they would have still been very similar immediately after the divergence from the appropriate most recent common ancestor (MRCA), the differences will have built up to a generational-count displacement of a similarly extreme nature. i.e. that while the shared ancestor is Cueball's 17-million-or-so-Great Grandparent, the cat is in turn the 31-million-or-so-Great Grandchild. Exactly how accurate, or even precise, Randall considers these numbers is unknown, but it is the kind of fact that we know he likes to research and use expert opinion for.\nAccording to this Quora page , there have been about 13,000 generations of modern humans, so the people at this party would be quite closely related, all things considered.\nThe Evogeneao Tree of Life diagram indicates that humans and cats diverged around 90 million years ago and humans and plants diverged around 1.8 billion years ago.\nIf we presume that generations of humans (including proto-humans, pre-humans, etc) since the divergence from cathood (including proto-cats, pre-cats, and the rest, back to the common ancestral form) have averaged around 5 years, then a 17 millionth cousin may be about right. Many of our (and cats') early ancestors will have necessarily been small burrowing mammals \u2014 to have been amongst the ones who survived the asteroid around 66 million years ago that killed off most of the dinosaurs \u2014 with contemporary equivalents having breeding cycles in terms of a year at the most. But we currently have a large feasible range of generational cycle (15-50 years, very roughly, with or without technical\/social help or hinderances), that may have started to drag our long-term average upwards since at least the age of the early hominids, if not the age of our primate forebears or earlier.\nTo get a 50 billionth cousin from the potted plant, then the generations of (eventually) humans since we were of the same form as that time's ancestral plants (or vice-versa) would need to average two weeks. This is possible, but difficult to be precise about due to the lack of much of the required evidence in the known fossilized remains.  Any reasonable estimate, however, should be heavily weighted towards generation spans common for unicellular eukaryotes, rather than the longer generations common for multicellular eukaryotes: the general consensus on the most recent common ancestor for of animals and plants identifies it as a unicellular eukaryote.\nGiven the above analysis of eukaryotes as cousins one wonders why Randal Monroe didn't include that every lack of gathering is also a family reunion.\n[Megan, White Hat, Cueball, Hairy, Danish, a white cat with black patches on its back, Hairbun, a chair with a half-full wine-glass on the seat, and a potted plant on a cabinet are \"standing\" in a line. White Hat is holding a glass and Hairy has his hands to the side in a \"shrug\" position. Megan and Cueball are facing right and everything\/one else is facing left (except for the potted plant, which is not facing any direction). There are arrows pointing to each of the living creatures.]\n14th cousin [Megan] 2nd cousin [White Hat] Me [Cueball] 12th cousin [Hairy] 35th cousin [Danish] 17,000,000th cousin [cat] 9th cousin [Hairbun] 50,000,000,000th cousin [potted plant]\n[Caption below the panel:] Really, every gathering is a family reunion.\n"}
{"id":2609,"title":"Entwives","image_title":"Entwives","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2609","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/entwives.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2609:_Entwives","transcript":"[A large treelike person (an Ent, maybe Treebeard) is holding one of his arms out towards six characters that are all looking at him. A man (Aragorn) with beard stubble and long hair, a dwarf (Gimli) with a helmet and a very large beard, an elf (Legolas) with long blonde hair (holding a bow down), and three short persons, hobbits, two with dark hair, and the middle one with blonde hair.] Ent: Alas, there are no Ent women. The Entwives all vanished in the second age, during Sauron's war. Aragorn: I'm so sorry. Ent: And what about you all? Same story, I assume? Aragorn: Huh? No, what do you mean?\n","explanation":"In The Lord of the Rings , the Ents are a species of tree-like humanoids, such as the one depicted in this comic. The comic shows an Ent, presumably Treebeard , meeting with some of the nine from the Fellowship of the Ring . The image is inaccurate inasmuch as it shows three hobbits : during the Ents' interactions with the Fellowship, two of the four hobbits ( Frodo and Sam ) were elsewhere in Middle Earth , so it was only Merry and Pippin who met the ents. The other three in the image are the human Aragorn , the Dwarf Gimli and the Elf Legolas . The last two of the nine, not depicted, were the wizard Gandalf and the human Boromir .\nPart of the backstory of the Ents is that all the females of their species (the Entwives that this comic is named for) had disappeared thousands of years before during Sauron 's war of the second age . The Ents and the Entwives lived in separate locations, and eventually, when the Ents went to visit the Entwives, the latter were seemingly nowhere to be found. The Ents have been searching for their lost mates ever since. The loneliness of the Ents' all-male society is considered a great tragedy in their culture. It is several thousands years ago in the time of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Ents have all but forgotten how the Entwives even looked. They live for many thousands of years.\nThis comic uses that backstory to satirically comment on the extreme gender imbalance of the protagonists of Lord of the Rings; when presented with the all-male Fellowship, the Ent assumes that they must come from a race afflicted by a similar tragedy. In a broader sense, this can be read as a commentary on how few female characters there are in the trilogy overall. In reality, the general lore presents, or at least mentions, the existence of at least multiple (if not numerous) female characters of almost all races that make up the fellowship (dwarf, man, elf, hobbit), and does not suggest that what happened with the Ents and their Entwives happened to any other race.\nThe clickable link on the image leads to the satirical video Lord of the Rings Trilogy but it's EVERY scene where two female characters interact . The creator claims that this shows all the scenes from the trilogy where two female characters interact (but later admits in the Youtube comments that there are indeed a few more). There is only one 3 second long scene, which only emphasizes how few female characters there are in the trilogy. The inclusion of this clip may be a reference to the Bechdel test , a baseline indicator of the representation of women in a piece of media that requires two women to have a conversation about something other than a man. Whether this three-and-a-half-word exchange is sufficient to pass the test is debatable. Later versions of the test suggest that the two women should be named (i.e. not just two incidental characters that have very few lines), whereas this scene is between \u00c9owyn and an unnamed girl. There is debate as to if there are other scenes with women speaking with women, and if we are only talking about human women, or if other races females would also count. There are at least three important female characters, but they do not meet\/speak much if at all. But they have several scenes where they talk, even a long monologue... But if they speak to someone it is male characters.\nThe title text most likely refers to the character of Arwen , an elf woman and, later, wife of Aragorn; while somewhat important to the story, she is nowhere near as significant as the males of the Fellowship, despite being used more prominently in the movies than in the books. Even if she were part of the Fellowship, a single important woman wouldn't counterbalance the heavily male-centric storytelling.\nThe way that the title text is phrased is a reference to the proverbial (and implicitly imaginary) \" Girlfriend in Canada ,\" a trope in which a single American character claims to have a girlfriend that their friends wouldn't know \"because she lives in Canada\" (or some other sufficient separation such as \"goes to another school\"), when in reality the reason that nobody else has met her is because she doesn't exist (with an implication that the character is either a closeted gay or an incel ). Canada is one of only two countries with which the United States has land borders, making it a potentially plausible place for some American's long-distance girlfriend to live, and presumably the Fellowship consider the Elf kingdom of Rivendell to be sufficiently distant to allow the Ent to accept the plausibility of the statement without any further delving into potentially awkward details.\n[A large treelike person (an Ent, maybe Treebeard) is holding one of his arms out towards six characters that are all looking at him. A man (Aragorn) with beard stubble and long hair, a dwarf (Gimli) with a helmet and a very large beard, an elf (Legolas) with long blonde hair (holding a bow down), and three short persons, hobbits, two with dark hair, and the middle one with blonde hair.] Ent: Alas, there are no Ent women. The Entwives all vanished in the second age, during Sauron's war. Aragorn: I'm so sorry. Ent: And what about you all? Same story, I assume? Aragorn: Huh? No, what do you mean?\n"}
{"id":2610,"title":"Assigning Numbers","image_title":"Assigning Numbers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2610","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/assigning_numbers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2610:_Assigning_Numbers","transcript":"[Cueball holds a hand up to his chin while he ponders the contents of what may be a whiteboard. There are five general lines of unreadable scribbling on the board, and between the two bottom lines, there is a square frame to the right with another scribble to the left. Cueball's thoughts are shown above him in a large thought bubble.] Cueball's thinking: If I assign numbers to each of these things, then it becomes data , and I can do math on it!\n[Caption  beneath the panel:] The same basic idea underlies G\u00f6del's Incompleteness Theorem and all bad data science.\n","explanation":"This explanation is by mathematical necessity either incomplete or incorrect.\nCueball is falling into a common trap, because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Faced with some sort of information, of an unknown kind but seemingly not intrinsically mathematical in nature, he has decided that one possible way to proceed is to somehow translate everything into values which can be combined and compared numerically.\nThis is a very common thing to do, in fields as diverse as computational linguistics or sports analytics , and can be a powerful tool for understanding and learning new things about a subject as Data science tries to extract knowledge and insights from potentially noisy and disordered facts. But it is also used to implement bad science by using incorrect or misguided ideas about how to represent the source material. While it's possible to casually assign numeric values to random pieces of data, these numbers are generally not meaningful enough to compute with and draw any useful inferences from. It is generally possible to perform statistical analysis only on actual measurements, not on what may effectively be arbitrarily-assigned values.\nMachine learning algorithms, which are commonly used by data scientists, typically require all their inputs to be numerical. However, most datasets contains categorical features (e.g. the description of a piece of furniture: chair, table, ...). Data scientists therefore use encoding techniques to convert these categorical features to a numerical form so they can be used as inputs to a machine learning model. For instance, label encoding consists of arbitrarily assigning an integer to a category (chair=0, table=1, ...) which may appear meaningless to most observers. In various cases, they may be right.\nSo, as well as being the mechanism that underlies one of the most profound theorems of 20th century mathematics, it can be mis-used for all kinds of bad or misguided science. From Cueball's attitude, it is far from clear that his attempt will reliably translate his project into a numerical system, nor that his attempt to \"do math on it!\" will be any more competent.\nOne of the major characters who looked at the concept is Kurt G\u00f6del. He introduced the idea of G\u00f6del numbering with his landmark incompleteness theorems . In it a unique natural number is assigned to each axiom, statement, and proof, which might otherwise be difficult to accurately process in any other kind of approach. Instead, it is now possible to create metamathematical statements in the language of mathematics.\nThis allowed G\u00f6del to make the statement \"This statement cannot be proven based on the axioms provided\" in a mathematically rigorous way. A simple proof by contradiction shows that the statement cannot be false, and therefore (in most logical systems) must be true. The proof goes as follows: 1. Assume that \"This statement cannot be proven from the axioms\" (Call this statement G) is false. [1] 2. Therefore G can be proven from the axioms. [2] 3. The axioms exist. [3] 4. Therefore, G is true. [4] 5. Therefore, G and also not G. [5] 6.  This is a contradiction, and therefore A (that is, 'not G') or B (ZFC) must be wrong. We are not willing to sacrifice assumption B, so we must conclude that A is false, given B. [6] 7.  Therefore, G.\nNotice that the truth of G\u00f6del's statement does not depend on any particular set of axioms, and adding axioms (such as \"G\u00f6del's particular statement is true\") only opens up new iterations of the statement which cannot be proven based on the expanded set of axioms (A statement such as \"All statements of a similar nature to G\u00f6del's particular statement\" is not precise enough to serve as an axiom.).  As such, with a little more legwork, it can be proven that any logical system robust enough to accommodate arithmetic must necessarily contain facts that are true within the system but cannot be proven or disproven within the system.  The importance of this result cannot be understated, as it upended the entire philosophy of mathematics. David Hilbert 's famous proclamation \"We must know, we will know\" is simply incorrect. ... Either that, or (ironically) G\u00f6del used an \"inconsistent\" or \"incomplete\" system to produce his result.\nThe title text suggests that G\u00f6del should perform such an analysis on different branches of mathematics, by calculating the average of all the fields' theorems' G\u00f6del numbers. This is nonsensical for a number of reasons:\n1) G\u00f6del is long dead, and dead people can't write articles; [ dubious ] - see 599: Apocalypse 2) G\u00f6del numbers grow very large very quickly, and depend heavily on the specific values assigned to each logical operator. Therefore the results could be manipulated simply by changing the numbering order of each operator; 3) It may be very hard to gather all theorems in a field, or even a representative sample; 4) Different fields of science, like biology or human behaviour, may not be able to write their theorems in the mathematical language of G\u00f6del's incompleteness theorem\nIf anyone were to attempt this form of analysis, it would be an example of the bad data science described in the caption.\n[Cueball holds a hand up to his chin while he ponders the contents of what may be a whiteboard. There are five general lines of unreadable scribbling on the board, and between the two bottom lines, there is a square frame to the right with another scribble to the left. Cueball's thoughts are shown above him in a large thought bubble.] Cueball's thinking: If I assign numbers to each of these things, then it becomes data , and I can do math on it!\n[Caption  beneath the panel:] The same basic idea underlies G\u00f6del's Incompleteness Theorem and all bad data science.\n"}
{"id":2611,"title":"Cutest-Sounding Scientific Effects","image_title":"Cutest-Sounding Scientific Effects","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2611","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/cutest_sounding_scientific_effects.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2611:_Cutest-Sounding_Scientific_Effects","transcript":"[A tournament bracket tree is shown with 16 scientific effect names, with 8 on the left and 8 on the right side. From both sides toward the middle the brackets reduce from eight to four, to two, then to one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle for the winners name of the final match. Above the bracket there is a title:] Cutest-Sounding Scientific Effects\n[Left side:] YORP effect Nocebo effect\nWoozle effect Stroop effect\nPockels effect Cheerios effect\nHot chocolate effect Perky effect\n[Right side:] Bouba\/kiki effect Cutaneous rabbit effect\nSmall firm effect Little Parks effect\nDr. Fox effect Oddity effect\nButterfly effect Popcorn effect\nThe first wave ran from April 25, 2022 at 5:19pm ET to the next day at 5:42pm ET.\nThe second wave started on April 26, 2022 at 5:56pm ET and ended around 11:56am ET.\nThe third wave started on April 27, 2022 at 6:54pm ET and ended around 12:54pm ET.\nThe fourth wave started on April 28, 2022 at 4:30pm ET and ended around 10:30pm ET.\n","explanation":"Randall has compiled yet another single-elimination tournament bracket for a knock-out competition, by public vote, between 16 different scientific effect names that he seems to consider worthy of being cute-sounding.\nAs of the release day, he is determining the result in a series of Twitter polls . These results are shown here .\nSee below for explanations for what each of the 16 effects are.\nSeveral unrelated scientific effects were previously combined in 1531: The BDLPSWDKS Effect , which also included the Stroop effect (the last S).\nIn the title text, Randall coins the term \"Stroop-YORP number\" as a count of how many 'casual' references a future publication can sneak into it from the 16 finalist names for cutest effect. It specifies that it should be without the word effect after the words (sans 'effect').\nTongue-in-cheek 'counting scores' are familiar in the likes of the Erd\u0151s and Bacon numbers, both of which are referenced by 599: Apocalypse (the latter only in the title text). In these cases the ideal is to get the lowest number, whereas here higher is better. The cross-field hybrid Erd\u0151s\u2013Bacon number is one in which the desired score is the lowest sum of both values (neither being undefinable) by dint of having participated in both arenas of respective achievement, but not necessarily (or practically) in a single combined presentation.\nFor instance the Stroop-YORP number could be high for a wildlife paper. That could possibly use \"butterfly\" and \"rabbit\" (possibly needing the latter to be specifically 'cutaneous', to count), which may both be found in \"little parks\" with some \"popcorn\" seen littered around without too much \"oddity\"; and of course a (Dr.?) \"fox\" could be in the area, getting a score of 6. But other words may be a stretch, with an imaginative reference to a \"woozle\" possibly easier to employ than to evoke anything of the \"nocebo\".\nOn the other hand, for a space-science paper there may be more obvious (mis)uses for physics-related terms, and mentioning YORP might well be expected. But it may need creative thinking to introduce the rabbit or the more psychological idea of Stroopicity, etc, without reason to discuss the responses of animal or human payloads being sent there.\nIt is not actually obvious whether Randall intends the score to only be valid if the insertions are off-field and\/or undetected, such as when someone is wagered that they can slip unrelated song lyrics or a 'hello' to Jason Isaacs into a public speech without the rest of the audience twigging.\nA search of google scholar indicates many articles with a score of 2 (e.g. this paper , which refers to butterfly shaped popcorn), but 3 or more seems to not be attested.\nYORP effect The YORP effect is the effect of sunlight on an asteroid with variations of shape and\/or albedo, which can increase its rotation rate and\/or modify its axis of rotation. It can cause objects to eventually spin apart or drastically change their orbit. It is an acronym of the names Yarkovsky, O\u2019Keefe, Radzievskii and Paddack, who were instrumental in its discovery. More than a century ago, Yarkovsky determined that heat applied to a symmetrical rotating body would be asymmetrically re-emitted and apply a small but continuous thrust, and this was added to by considering the forces to non-symmetrical bodies. Nocebo effect An effect in which a recipient of medication who believes that it will have negative side-effects is more likely to experience those negative side-effects, whether they can be really caused by the medication or not. Opposite of the placebo effect , which focuses on positive side-effects that arise beyond the true efficacy of a given treatment. Noc\u0113b\u014d is Latin for \u201cI shall harm\u201d, coined to oppose plac\u0113b\u014d , \u201cI shall please\u201d. Woozle effect If a study gets repeatedly cited and otherwise disseminated, then people will start to believe it regardless of whether it has any evidence behind it. And if there is not  any evidence, it becomes an urban myth. Named after a Winnie-the-Pooh story in which Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet try to catch an imaginary animal called a woozle, and accidentally follow their own tracks in circles. A similar effect was discussed in 978: Citogenesis , wherein a sourceless statement on Wikipedia can become apparently credible via simple repetition. Stroop effect The Stroop effect (referenced in 1531: The BDLPSWDKS Effect ) is a psychological phenomenon in which it is easier to name the visual color of a word when the word refers to its own color, than when the word refers to a different color; i.e. the fact that saying that Red is red is easier than to say that Blue is green. Named after John Ridley Stroop . Pockels effect A phenomenon where an electric field passed through a medium can cause the medium's refractive index to depend upon the polarization and propagation direction of the refracted light, a property known as birefringence . Named after Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels . Cheerios effect A phenomenon where objects floating in a liquid appear to attract or repel each other. Named after the cereal Cheerios, which are an everyday demonstration of this phenomenon because many eat Cheerios in a bowl of milk. Hot chocolate effect A phenomenon where the sound created by tapping a cup of hot liquid rises in pitch as a soluble powder is added. Perky effect An experiment in which participants were asked to visualize an object while staring at a screen on which the outline of that object was subtly projected. Participants believed the projected shape to be only a product of their imaginations. Named after Cheves Perky . Bouba\/kiki effect An observation that people, despite different native languages, will relatively consistently assign names with certain sounds to blobby or spiky shapes, suggesting the association of sound and shape is non-arbitrary. Bouba and kiki were two of the words used in the experiment. Cutaneous rabbit effect A phenomenon where, when tapped on one part of the body in rapid succession and then switching to another, the subject feels the tapping at locations in between the two. For example, if rapidly tapping the wrist then switching to the elbow, the subject will subjectively feel as if they are being tapped at progressive intervals between the wrist and elbow, when they are not. Small firm effect An economic theory that small firms usually perform better than larger ones Little\u2013Parks effect A phenomenon where a fluctuating magnetic field passed through a superconductor can slightly suppress its superconductivity, inducing small fluctuations in its electrical resistance. When juxtaposed against the \"small firm effect\", as in the bracket, one might get the impression that it is somehow related to urban architecture or civil engineering. Dr. Fox effect A disputed theory that student evaluations of their teachers are likely unreliable, because they are largely based on the teacher's charisma instead of the quality of their content. Oddity effect A theory that when fish assemble in shoals (large social groups), any that stand out appearance-wise will be attacked by a predator, explaining why shoals tend to have similar-looking members. Butterfly effect The butterfly effect is the sensitivity of chaotic systems to small changes in initial conditions. The weather system of Earth is chaotic, and so an arbitrarily small change in air patterns (such as could be caused by the flapping of a butterfly's wing) could ultimately change the weather for the whole world. Popcorn effect A phenomenon exhibited by crushed ore placed on a vibrating screen for separation in mineral processing, in which larger particles tend to bounce higher than smaller particles.\n[A tournament bracket tree is shown with 16 scientific effect names, with 8 on the left and 8 on the right side. From both sides toward the middle the brackets reduce from eight to four, to two, then to one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle for the winners name of the final match. Above the bracket there is a title:] Cutest-Sounding Scientific Effects\n[Left side:] YORP effect Nocebo effect\nWoozle effect Stroop effect\nPockels effect Cheerios effect\nHot chocolate effect Perky effect\n[Right side:] Bouba\/kiki effect Cutaneous rabbit effect\nSmall firm effect Little Parks effect\nDr. Fox effect Oddity effect\nButterfly effect Popcorn effect\nThe first wave ran from April 25, 2022 at 5:19pm ET to the next day at 5:42pm ET.\nThe second wave started on April 26, 2022 at 5:56pm ET and ended around 11:56am ET.\nThe third wave started on April 27, 2022 at 6:54pm ET and ended around 12:54pm ET.\nThe fourth wave started on April 28, 2022 at 4:30pm ET and ended around 10:30pm ET.\n"}
{"id":2612,"title":"Lightsabers","image_title":"Lightsabers","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2612","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/lightsabers.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2612:_Lightsabers","transcript":"[Two Cueball like Jedi are engaging each other in a duel using lightsabers over 12 panels of equal size, with sound effects as the only sound. In the first panel the left Jedi has his lightsaber extended holding it in both hand pointing towards the other, who at this time is just turning his lightsaber on.] Tssssss Click\n[Almost same position of the Jedi, but the right Jedi's lightsaber has now extended, making a sound. He is holding it up near his head in both hands] Tsss\n[Then they run towards each other and swing their lightsabers towards each other, two small arcs indicating the swing of the lightsabers.]\n[The two beams hit each other and connects at the middle in a big bloop of light, with drops of \"light\" jumping off both above and below the connected lightsabers. Both Jedi still holds on to their handles with both hands. A loud sound comes out of the connection:] Bloop\n[The Jedi stands still holding their handles. The beam is now forming a bow between the two handles.]\n[The left Jedi violently shakes his handle causing a wave to travel down the beam towards the right Jedi.] Shake shake\n[The right Jedi shakes his handle and well and another wave travels the opposite direction towards the left Jedi.] Shake shake\n[Back to the bow of light between them, but the beam is visibly still shaking, but no wave is traveling any longer.]\n[Same setting but the shaking has stopped. The right Jedi turns his lightsaber off on his handle with a sound:] Click\n[The beam of light is retracted quickly into the handle of the Jedi turning his lightsaber off. So quickly that the two Jedi, still holding on to their handles are pulled up in the air and towards each other as the sound of the beam turning off is heard. Lines indicate their movement and shadows on the ground beneath them indicate they are in the air.] Zhhhiiiip\n[When the beam is completely retracted the two handles collide and so do the heads of the two Jedi with a loud sound. They still hold on to their handles with both hands. They still hang in the air with shadows on the ground beneath them.] Bonk\n[In the final panel the two Jedi lie unconscious on the ground with their heads towards each other and with their arms stretched out towards each other. The connected handles lie between them.]\n","explanation":null}
{"id":2613,"title":"Bad Map Projection Madagascator","image_title":"Bad Map Projection: Madagascator","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2613","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/bad_map_projection_madagascator.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2613:_Bad_Map_Projection:_Madagascator","transcript":"Bad map projection #248: Madagascator\nMercator projection but with the North Pole in the Indian Ocean so it exaggerates the size of Madagascar instead of Greenland. Various countries and oceans are labeled, and country borders are shown.","explanation":"This is the fifth comic in the series of Bad Map Projections displaying Bad Map Projection #248: Madagascator. It came about 10 months after the fourth 2489: Bad Map Projection: The Greenland Special (#299).\nThis time, Randall used the classic Mercator projection but instead of placing the North Pole on top and the South Pole on the bottom it is oriented so that the top is the island of Mah\u00e9 .  The map projection is technically a Oblique Mercator projection , with an unusual choice of the cylinder's axis.  Since the Mercator projection tends to visually distort areas near the top and bottom of the resulting map, this gives some areas, notably Madagascar, very unusual shapes, hence the name the Madagascator \u2014 a portmanteau of \"Madagascar\" and \"Mercator\"!\nThe Mercator projection became the standard projection for world maps during the 1800s, because a straight line (or rhumb line ) in a Mercator map represents a constant bearing relative to true north. Historically, when navigation was performed by compass, this was a very valuable feature, since one (adjusting for the differences between true and magnetic north) could plot a constant-bearing course between two locations by simply looking at their relative direction on the map.\nHowever, in the mid-20th century, the Mercator was criticized because it causes distortion near the north and south poles of the map, giving an inaccurate impression of relative sizes. The most commonly given example of this is the size of Greenland \u2014 although on the Mercator it appears to be larger than Africa in area, Africa in reality covers an area 14 times that of Greenland.\nRandall turns this example on its head by making Madagascar, rather than Greenland, appear larger in the Madagascator than in reality. By contrast with Greenland, the world's largest non-continent island, Madagascar is only the fourth-largest island in the world, behind Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo.\nTo accomplish this, instead of placing the north pole of the map at the geographic North Pole, Randall places the north pole of the map on the island of Mah\u00e9 in Seychelles. As Madagascar is relatively close to Mah\u00e9 (around 650 mi (1050 km) distant), placing the north pole of the Mercator projection at Mah\u00e9 significantly distorts the size of Madagascar, making it appear comparable in size to Europe on the map.\nBut this distortion is even more pronounced when it comes to the island of Mah\u00e9 itself, as Randall notes in the title text.\nAlthough Mah\u00e9, the largest island in Seychelles with an area of 60.7 square mi (157.2 square km), is minuscule even compared to Madagascar, the claim in the title text that it appears \"larger than the rest of the Earth's land area combined\" is an understatement.\nNo part of Mah\u00e9 is visible in the comic, but clicking on the actual comic will open a website that displays Mercator projections with a pole in any chosen location, with the location of the one opened set to Mah\u00e9. The chosen pole is (infinitely far to) the right of the screen, while its antipode is on the left. With this, it is possible to see that the island is indeed larger than the rest of the map's land area combined. A single national park within the island rivals Africa in size, and the narrow dirt road closest to the pole appears thicker than Panama. This also reveals that the location of the map's north pole (the \"small lake\" mentioned by Randall) is the lake impounded by the Rochon Dam, a popular tourist location in Mah\u00e9.\nUnlike previous Bad Map Projections, Morocco and Western Sahara are drawn as one unlabelled country.\nBad map projection #248: Madagascator\nMercator projection but with the North Pole in the Indian Ocean so it exaggerates the size of Madagascar instead of Greenland. Various countries and oceans are labeled, and country borders are shown."}
{"id":2614,"title":"2","image_title":"2","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2614","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/2.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2614:_2","transcript":"[An apparent generalisation of a scientific expression consisting of a dotted rectangular 'box' outline, left empty, and various commonly-themed symbology around it:]\n[as normal text, to the left of all the rest:] 2 [superscript to the immediate left of the box:] 2 [subscript also to the immediate left of the box:] 2 [superscript to the immediate right of the box:] 2 [subscript also to the immediate right of the box:] 2;2 [i.e. separated by a semicolon] [as normal text, to the right of almost all the rest:] (2) [i.e. enclosed in standard parentheses] [smaller subscript, centered immediately beneath the 2 within the parentheses:] 2\n[Further details are drawn in grey tone, around or near various of the elements of the expression:] [Captions above the numbers] [with an arrow pointing to the leftmost 2:] Regular Math [with an arrow pointing to the leftwards superscript 2:] Physics [with an arrow pointing to the rightwards superscript 2:] Regular math or footnotes [with an arrow pointing to the parenthetical 2 at the right:] Either high school math functions or incomprehensible group theory\n[Captions below the numbers] [with an arrow pointing to the leftwards subscript 2:] Chemical Physics [with an arrow pointing to just the rightwards subscript 2:] Chemistry [with an arrow pointing to a distorted grey ring snaking around only the comma of the semicolon and the following 2 of the rightmost subscript:] Matrices! [with an arrow pointing to a larger grey ring that passes fully around the whole semicolon and final 2 of the rightmost subscript:] The physicists are at it again [with an arrow pointing to the small 2 placed below the parenthetical 2:] Oh no. Whatever this is, it's cursed.\n","explanation":"This demonstrates the different ways in which the number 2 can be typeset in various scientific fields.  While these ways of typesetting are used with any number, using the number 2 in this instance provides a clear illustration how adding numbers can significantly alter a feature of a concept (such as the number of electrons in an atom) or perform a mathematical operation on it (such as raising a value to its second power).\nThe dotted box represents any character (a number, letter, or bigram of letters, as appropriate to the various signifiers). All the other notation consists only of the digit 2, with occasional additional punctuation, in various locations in relation to this character. Each of these is labelled as to what its 'purpose' might normally be with respect to the general term:\nRegular Math Precedes the term. \"2x\" indicates two times the value of x in normal algebraic use that should be familiar for many people. Physics A preceding superscript. \" 2 H\" would indicate the particular isotope of hydrogen with the atomic weight of two, namely deuterium, which is most often encountered when working with the atomic level of matter where the total number of neutrons and protons in the atom is important. It can also represent tetration , which is iterated exponentiation. Chemical Physics A preceding subscript, as in \" 2 He\", indicates the atomic number of an atom, which is the number of protons it contains. It is thus a guide to the number of electrons its unionised form usually has and hence is meaningful for its potential chemical interactions with other atoms. This number of protons should be invariant for any particular named element, but is usually given simultaneously with the presuperscripted mass number for which it can indicate the applicable nuclear physics. Chemical physics is a subdiscipline of physics and chemistry. It can also represent pentation , which is iterated tetration. Regular Math or Footnotes A trailing superscript is typical of a power value ; in this case \"x\u00b2\" would be x multiplied by itself - a common mathematical standard. Additionally, superscripted numbers are one common way to mark words in a line of text in a way to refer to a footnote , typically placed at the bottom of the page and containing additional information that would distract from the main text itself. The ambiguity between footnotes and exponents was used in 1184: Circumference Formula . Chemistry A trailing subscript is used in chemistry to indicate a multiple of the element (or group of elements, in brackets) in a chemical formula . \"H 2 O\" indicates two hydrogen atoms bond with a single oxygen atom in a molecule of water. Matrices! (\"2,2\") Extending the trailing subscript with a comma-separated value usually indicates a multidimensional array (e.g., establishing a 2-by-2 square of numbers, or this particular position in such an array), which is in the realm of matrix mathematics . This is a little bit beyond 'everyday algebra' for many people, as seemingly indicated by the exclamation of the mere mention of matrices. The Physicists Are At It Again (\"2;2\") This label encompasses a mark that turns the prior comma into a semicolon, as part of the trailing subscript. This is a common notation for the Covariant derivative of a tensor field, which is commonly used in the mathematics of general relativity. Either High School Math Function or Incomprehensible Group Theory The number 2 in parentheses that follow a term would normally be the argument to a function . For example, \"f(2)\" means that you should take the value 2, and find the result if manipulated by the predefined function f . It is generally taught as part of algebraic mathematics in high school . In group theory , however, the number 2 in parentheses could indicate a special kind of group, such as an an element of a symmetry group that keeps 2 fixed, or some kind of group of 2x2 matrices. For instance, SU(2) is a 3-dimensional Lie group of unitary matrices . These concepts are taught in graduate or advanced undergraduate mathematics courses. Oh no. Whatever this is, it's cursed. A symbol centered underneath another larger symbol is normally reserved for doing summations or products, where the big symbol is \u03a3 or \u03a0, or some other operation applied to a sequence of numbers. It does not make sense to have a single number on top of a smaller one. As with other things where something appears to have gone wrong in Randall's comic universe, the explanation for this particular anomaly is that it is 'Cursed'. Two numbers may be stacked directly on top of one another in parentheses as binomial coefficients : ( 2 2 ), but those are always the same size, denoting a combination . In this case, 2 choose 2 is equal to one combination. The usage mentioned in the alt text is an operation (e.g. \u03a3 for summation) over a variable, usually indicated by a letter such as i, where the operation is performed over all values of the variable (i.e., you \u03a3 (sum) the argument over all values of i). In the \"2\" case, the alt text says \"you 2 the argument over all values of 2\" (i.e., the \u03a3 operation has been replaced by the \"2\" operation and the i variable has been replaced by the \"2\" variable). 2 is usually not an operation, though the definition of 2 under Church encoding is a function that takes in and produces functions. 2 applied to 2 in the church encoding is 4. However, the title text implies that 2 is treated like a variable,which it is not (and it's definitely not a operator and variable at the same time). Things being cursed is a common trope within recent xkcd comics, which have mentioned items including Cursed chairs and cursed connectors . This notation is one of the few occasions where the supernatural has demonstrable implications for science and mathematics for those foolhardy enough to use it.\n[An apparent generalisation of a scientific expression consisting of a dotted rectangular 'box' outline, left empty, and various commonly-themed symbology around it:]\n[as normal text, to the left of all the rest:] 2 [superscript to the immediate left of the box:] 2 [subscript also to the immediate left of the box:] 2 [superscript to the immediate right of the box:] 2 [subscript also to the immediate right of the box:] 2;2 [i.e. separated by a semicolon] [as normal text, to the right of almost all the rest:] (2) [i.e. enclosed in standard parentheses] [smaller subscript, centered immediately beneath the 2 within the parentheses:] 2\n[Further details are drawn in grey tone, around or near various of the elements of the expression:] [Captions above the numbers] [with an arrow pointing to the leftmost 2:] Regular Math [with an arrow pointing to the leftwards superscript 2:] Physics [with an arrow pointing to the rightwards superscript 2:] Regular math or footnotes [with an arrow pointing to the parenthetical 2 at the right:] Either high school math functions or incomprehensible group theory\n[Captions below the numbers] [with an arrow pointing to the leftwards subscript 2:] Chemical Physics [with an arrow pointing to just the rightwards subscript 2:] Chemistry [with an arrow pointing to a distorted grey ring snaking around only the comma of the semicolon and the following 2 of the rightmost subscript:] Matrices! [with an arrow pointing to a larger grey ring that passes fully around the whole semicolon and final 2 of the rightmost subscript:] The physicists are at it again [with an arrow pointing to the small 2 placed below the parenthetical 2:] Oh no. Whatever this is, it's cursed.\n"}
{"id":2615,"title":"Welcome Back","image_title":"Welcome Back","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2615","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/welcome_back.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2615:_Welcome_Back","transcript":"[A large cloud fills the upper 3\/4 of the panel. That it is a cloud is indicated by curved lines at the bottom of the cloud. Below the cloud lines is a tornado in the right part of the background. It is throwing up dust on or near the mid-distance horizon and creating an active debris cloud. In the foreground Cueball is standing holding his phone up in one hand, looking at the screen, which is on as indicated by five \"light lines\" coming of his display. Three paragraphs of text fills most of the white cloud space above Cueball, they are connected by lines, with the last leading down to the top of Cueball's phone. There are two rounded boxes to the right and below the first two paragraphs with text. They represents buttons Cueball presses on the screen to get to the next text message.] Hi! The TornadoGuard\u2122 team is proud to announce a big update! We've added- Okay\nNote to users of sentinel mode: We've heard your feedback, and the controls are now- Got it\nThe TornadoGuard\u2122 team saw this cool leaf shaped like a spider; do you want to see...\n[Caption below the panel:] When you open an app for the first time in a while, you have to wait around while it tells you about all the cool adventures it's had.\n","explanation":"Cueball is opening an app called TornadoGuard, a reference to comic 937: TornadoGuard . In that comic the app is described to have a function so it \"plays a loud alert sound when there is a tornado warning for your area\". Tornadoes are a recurring theme on xkcd.\nIn the background, a tornado is approaching, so presumably a loud alert sound has just played and Cueball has opened the app. It is also possible that the app didn't play any alert (see reviews of the app in 937 ), but Cueball saw the Tornado and thus opened the app to check whether it had any news.\nHowever, before he can interact with the app and learn more about the tornado, he has to click through various old messages from the app, since he hasn't opened the app in a while. This is feasible because May, which is the month in which this comic was published and typically the most active month for tornadoes, had seen fewer-than-average tornadoes in the previous two years but not during this year \u2013 see this Tornado Central story . So Cueball would have been more likely to have to worry about tornadoes this year than in the previous two years.\nThe comic is poking fun at the obtrusiveness of these kind of messages by presenting a scenario where they cause a significant delay before Cueball would be able to read the very urgent information about current tornadoes.\nThe messages include a description of a big update, a response to user feedback about one specific feature, and a social post seemingly unrelated to the app.\nThis continues in the title text where there are two more messages that refer to specific world events and can therefore be dated: The fire that damaged the church of Notre Dame in Paris April 15th 2019; and the early attempts to limit the spread of Covid-19 disease, which was declared a pandemic on March 11th 2020. It has been a while since the last reference to the pandemic , actually the previous comic about this, 2563: Throat and Nasal Passages , was released almost exactly 4 months prior to this one.\nThe two mentioned news stories were relevant about three and two years before this comic was published, respectively. Neither of these are important to know right now, whereas an announcement about an update that changes its functionality could be important to know about .\nAlthough it is possible that there are no more messages to click through if nothing of significance has happened subsequent to the title text ones , the reader can easily imagine that the development team has posted further 'real time' messages that Cueball will still have to scroll through and\/or dismiss, with very little immediate importance compared with the imminent proximity of an actual funnel-cloud.\n[A large cloud fills the upper 3\/4 of the panel. That it is a cloud is indicated by curved lines at the bottom of the cloud. Below the cloud lines is a tornado in the right part of the background. It is throwing up dust on or near the mid-distance horizon and creating an active debris cloud. In the foreground Cueball is standing holding his phone up in one hand, looking at the screen, which is on as indicated by five \"light lines\" coming of his display. Three paragraphs of text fills most of the white cloud space above Cueball, they are connected by lines, with the last leading down to the top of Cueball's phone. There are two rounded boxes to the right and below the first two paragraphs with text. They represents buttons Cueball presses on the screen to get to the next text message.] Hi! The TornadoGuard\u2122 team is proud to announce a big update! We've added- Okay\nNote to users of sentinel mode: We've heard your feedback, and the controls are now- Got it\nThe TornadoGuard\u2122 team saw this cool leaf shaped like a spider; do you want to see...\n[Caption below the panel:] When you open an app for the first time in a while, you have to wait around while it tells you about all the cool adventures it's had.\n"}
{"id":2616,"title":"Deep End","image_title":"Deep End","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2616","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/deep_end.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2616:_Deep_End","transcript":"[Caption above the scene] How deep ends form in pools\n[On the left of the image is the shallowest water in the pool, about the height of Megan. All the water in the image is grey. She is swimming in the water, and a duck floatie and a beach ball are floating to the left of her. It is labeled] Shallow End\n[Underneath, a thick layer is labeled] Pool Floor\n[Going to the right from there, the pool floor begins to curve downwards. As the floor goes down, the water gets deeper. In the deepest area, it is labeled] Deep End\n[At the bottom of the deep end, there is a curve and a deposit on the pool floor. Within the sediment and pool floor, there are some small pools of trapped water, labeled with three arrows] Trapped Water\n[On the pool floor an arrow indicates that the oceanic plate is moving left-to-right across the image, which is labeled] Subduction\n[Some of the water pools are dragged along by the pool floor, while others float up through the ground. The latter are accompanied by several arrows pointing up to indicate upwards movement. These are labeled:] Upward Migration\n[At the surface there is an area, which is labeled] Splash zone\n[The water erupts in two geysers, the left slightly larger than the other. Several children (small versions of Ponytail, Hairy, and Science Girl as herself) are playing there. Science Girl is sitting with her arms in the air facing the geysers, and Ponytail and Hairy are running towards the right geyser, Hairy with his arms in the air. The area is labeled] Splash Zone\n[To the left of the splash zone is the edge of the pool, where a Cueball figure is in mid-air after jumping off the diving board, with his arms outstretched. This is labeled] Pool Deck\n","explanation":"Pools, like oceans, contain water. This comic produces a schematic for the former, derived from science about the latter. On Earth, the surface consists of tectonic plates which move around. In this comic, Randall equates swimming pools with plate tectonics , to explain how deep ends form in said pools. In actuality, swimming pools aren't formed by plate tectonics (at least, not the ones made by people; we can't be sure about the others).\nA swimming pool is a pool of water, typically used for swimming. Most of these have a deep end and a shallow end. This is intentional, usually to allow less confident swimmers to have somewhere to stand up when needed, while also accommodating activities (such as diving, underwater swimming, rescue practice, etc.) which would not be possible in shallower water.\nSubduction , a geological process in which one plate slips beneath another and is forced down into the mantle, is shown here as the reason swimming pools have deep ends. This usually takes place between continental plates and oceanic plates, although it could happen with two oceanic plates. The comic depicts the former, an oceanic plate subducting under a continental one. With tectonic plates, this often results in a deep oceanic trench where one plate slides beneath the other, as well as a chain of volcanoes above areas farther along the subducting plate, where rock that has liquefied from the subduction comes toward the surface as magma and erupts in volcanoes. An example is the Cascadia Subduction Zone in which the Juan de Fuca Plate is subducting beneath the North American Plate , creating the volcanic Cascade Range .\nA splash zone is an area of a waterpark with water being sprayed around, allowing people to get wet without the need to get into the pool. It is not a geological term, but splash zone can mean the area next to a coastline that gets splashed by waves. In this comic, the splash zone consists of natural geysers, fed by the bubbles of water that return upwards from the subducted plate.\nThe title text refers to back-arc basins , zones of depression that sometimes occur slightly beyond volcanic arcs due to a rift in the tectonic plate. The ban on running in this area likely has more to do with its proximity to the pool area than any danger intrinsic to back-arc basins.  A typical safety rule around swimming pools is to avoid running on the pool deck to prevent injuries due to slipping and falling on the hard deck.\nOther comics that mention unusual tectonic plate motion include 1388: Subduction License and 1874: Geologic Faults .\n[Caption above the scene] How deep ends form in pools\n[On the left of the image is the shallowest water in the pool, about the height of Megan. All the water in the image is grey. She is swimming in the water, and a duck floatie and a beach ball are floating to the left of her. It is labeled] Shallow End\n[Underneath, a thick layer is labeled] Pool Floor\n[Going to the right from there, the pool floor begins to curve downwards. As the floor goes down, the water gets deeper. In the deepest area, it is labeled] Deep End\n[At the bottom of the deep end, there is a curve and a deposit on the pool floor. Within the sediment and pool floor, there are some small pools of trapped water, labeled with three arrows] Trapped Water\n[On the pool floor an arrow indicates that the oceanic plate is moving left-to-right across the image, which is labeled] Subduction\n[Some of the water pools are dragged along by the pool floor, while others float up through the ground. The latter are accompanied by several arrows pointing up to indicate upwards movement. These are labeled:] Upward Migration\n[At the surface there is an area, which is labeled] Splash zone\n[The water erupts in two geysers, the left slightly larger than the other. Several children (small versions of Ponytail, Hairy, and Science Girl as herself) are playing there. Science Girl is sitting with her arms in the air facing the geysers, and Ponytail and Hairy are running towards the right geyser, Hairy with his arms in the air. The area is labeled] Splash Zone\n[To the left of the splash zone is the edge of the pool, where a Cueball figure is in mid-air after jumping off the diving board, with his arms outstretched. This is labeled] Pool Deck\n"}
{"id":2617,"title":"Maps","image_title":"Maps","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2617","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/maps.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2617:_Maps","transcript":"[Cueball is holding his hands up and is staring down at his open palms. Megan and White hat is looking at him.] Cueball: You look around one day and realize the things you assumed were immutable constants of the universe have changed. Cueball: The foundations of our reality are shifting beneath our feet. Cueball: We live in a house built on sand.\n[Caption below panel] The day I discovered that Apple Maps is kind of good now\n","explanation":"The term \"map\" carries a double meaning within this comic. While it refers to an actual map, it also refers to the concept of \"map and territory,\" where your map is your model of the universe, and the territory is the universe itself. Cueball has a map of the universe where Apple Maps is bad, and is surprised to discover that the map no longer fits the territory, and thus has to update his map.\nThe title text mentions OpenStreetMap , an open-data crowd sourced geodatabase, which has also improved since Randall has last checked, potentially moving it from a \"pretty good\" score to a \"really good\" score. He also adds two examples on how the Apple Maps service has improved: zooming in on cities, like London or New York you can see features like trees and road markings, the latter usually not visible on other mapping services at all. He marvels at the number of \"good\" mapping options now!\nGoogle Maps itself, and especially its satellite coverage outside the US, was considered quite bad when it launched in 2005. The maps displayed back then led to mockery among \"real\" cartographers that the service couldn't really be considered a map, either: It was called \"map-like\", with casual digital maps being so new at the time. However, Google's popular mapping approach revolutionized how maps were perceived all over the world. The approaches Google uses are explained in How Google Maps is Made . This approach blurs the lines between traditional paper maps, GIS (geo-informational systems) and digitally rendered maps on screen. The process of \"mapping\" - as it is referenced here - has since moved significantly into the digital realm.\n[Cueball is holding his hands up and is staring down at his open palms. Megan and White hat is looking at him.] Cueball: You look around one day and realize the things you assumed were immutable constants of the universe have changed. Cueball: The foundations of our reality are shifting beneath our feet. Cueball: We live in a house built on sand.\n[Caption below panel] The day I discovered that Apple Maps is kind of good now\n"}
{"id":2618,"title":"Selection Bias","image_title":"Selection Bias","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2618","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/selection_bias.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2618:_Selection_Bias","transcript":"[Blondie is standing on a podium behind a lectern with a microphone. She is standing under a hanging sign with large text. In front of the podium is an audience of five seated persons all with their hands raised above their heads. The audience includes two guys that look like Cueball, Hairbun, and two other persons with dark and blonde hair.] Sign: Statistics conference 2022 Blondie: Raise your hand if you\u2019re familiar with selection bias. Blondie: As you can see, it\u2019s a term most people know...\n","explanation":"Selection bias is when a survey or poll of some sort comes up with incorrect results due to those who were asked. For example, if you asked a group of people how many acres of land they own, your average number will be higher if you ask a group of farmers rather than a group of city residents.\nThe joke is that she is thus falling for the very thing she's trying to explain. A statistics conference is likely to have an audience consisting of professional statisticians, or at least people interested in the subject, and it is expected that most of them would thus be familiar with any mainstream statistical term, like selection bias. Had she asked a random sample of people in the street, many of them would likely not be sure what selection bias is. This effect is also the subject of 2357: Polls vs the Street .\nThis joke also ties into how statistics as a whole can be highly counter-intuitive and sometimes almost paradoxical, where things like the Monty Hall problem and survivorship bias lead people into thinking the answer to a problem is definitely in a place it's not. That Blondie, presumably a statistician herself, made this kind of (potentially deliberate) error is professionally embarrassing but not unprecedented.\nThe title text refers to Acquiescence bias , which is the tendency of people to respond positively to positive questions, for example, \"Are you familiar with the famous webcomic xkcd ?\" is more likely to generate the answer yes than \"Are you familiar with that webcomic for engineers that nobody else understands until they go to Explain xkcd ?\" Acquiescence bias is not a widely known concept, [ citation needed ] making the results of this poll suspect; similar to the selection bias example above, the reason that the general public seems familiar with acquiescence bias may be because the surveyor themself fell victim to promoting acquiescence bias.\n[Blondie is standing on a podium behind a lectern with a microphone. She is standing under a hanging sign with large text. In front of the podium is an audience of five seated persons all with their hands raised above their heads. The audience includes two guys that look like Cueball, Hairbun, and two other persons with dark and blonde hair.] Sign: Statistics conference 2022 Blondie: Raise your hand if you\u2019re familiar with selection bias. Blondie: As you can see, it\u2019s a term most people know...\n"}
{"id":2619,"title":"Cr\u00eape","image_title":"Cr\u00eape","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2619","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/crepe.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2619:_Cr%C3%AApe","transcript":"[Cueball is holding a plate up in both hand, showing Megan the crepe lying on the plate. His word for cr\u00eape has a different diacritic over the \"e\" than the normal circumflex (^). Instead it looks more like an open arrow head.] Cueball: Check out this cr\u00eape I made! Megan: Weird circumflex, but okay.\n","explanation":"Cueball has made a cr\u00eape , a thin pancake known for its legendary status in French cuisine, which he proudly announces. However, the circumflex (the accent above the e) is written strangely. Instead of the usual simple angle (^), it looks more like the outline of a flattened arrowhead ( \u2b9d ). Megan , who can apparently hear the orthography of spoken text, comments on the odd shape with an appropriate pun.\nMegan's response, \"Weird circumflex but okay\" is a play on the recent expression Weird flex, but ok . A \"flex\" is bragging about something. A \"weird flex\" is used when the speaker acknowledges (perhaps ironically) that the first person is attempting to brag about something, but doesn't recognise the thing as brag-worthy.\nHer answer could also be applied to the shape of the cr\u00eape, as circumflex means \"bent around\".\nIn some dialects of English (e.g. British English), and in the original French pronunciation, \"cr\u00eape\" is said so that the \u00ea is pronounced as in \"get\" (i.e. \"cr-eh-p\"), but American English speakers pronounce it like an \"A\" (i.e. \"cr-ay-p\").\nThe title text continues the wordplay by saying that \"A medicine that makes you put two dots over your letters more often is a di\u00e4retic\".\nThe word di\u00e4retic is a pun on diuretic (a substance promoting increased urine production), diaeresis (a symbol in the form of two dots placed above a vowel, as the \u00e4 in the made up word di\u00e4retic; the adjective form of diaeresis can be spelled \" dieretic \") and diacritic (a glyph added to a letter to distinguish its sound from the normal version, what both the circumflex and the diaeresis are). See also the comic 1647: Diacritics about the use of these. Taking a di\u00e4retic medicine would supposedly cause you to use diaeresis (also known as umlaut) \u00f6ver m\u00f6re l\u00ebtters th\u00e4n w\u00f6uld \u00fcsuall\u00ff b\u00eb th\u00eb c\u00e4se.\nDiacritics are rarely used in English, potentially because of the diverse set of origin languages it developed from, or the wide variation of pronunciations within a same nation, but are a common feature of other languages.  In English, they are normally only seen in specific loanwords (such as cr\u00eape) or used for emphasis or decoration (for example the metal umlaut seen in rock bands like Mot\u00f6rhead , M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce , Queensr\u00ffche , or Sp\u0131n\u0308al Tap ).  The exception to this is the diaresis, which when it is used at all, is placed over the second vowel in a double-vowel word to indicate a morphological break between them as opposed to a diphthong (e.g. na\u00efve or co\u00f6peration).  The diaresis is optional, and, especially with words beginning with the co- prefix (e.g. cooperation, coevolution, or coincidence), rarely used.  The New Yorker magazine is a famous outlier, advising consistent use of the diaresis in its style guide .\n[Cueball is holding a plate up in both hand, showing Megan the crepe lying on the plate. His word for cr\u00eape has a different diacritic over the \"e\" than the normal circumflex (^). Instead it looks more like an open arrow head.] Cueball: Check out this cr\u00eape I made! Megan: Weird circumflex, but okay.\n"}
{"id":2620,"title":"Health Data","image_title":"Health Data","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2620","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/health_data.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2620:_Health_Data","transcript":"[Cueball and Doctor Ponytail are talking to each other. Cueball is sitting on an examination table and Doctor Ponytail, in a doctor's coat, is looking down and reading from a clipboard with some illegible writing on it.] Doctor Ponytail: I'm taking a look at your numbers, and it doesn't look good. Doctor Ponytail: You have a lot of measurements. Quite a few variables.\n[Same setting but Doctor Ponytail looks up at Cueball.] Cueball: Is that... bad? Doctor Ponytail: Variables are the #1 risk factor for outcomes. Doctor Ponytail: The past is a big contributor to the future.\n[Same setting but Doctor Ponytail puts her arm with the clipboard down.] Cueball: Isn't that just causality? Doctor Ponytail: Causality is the leading cause of death in this country.\n[Same setting.] Cueball: So what are my odds? Doctor Ponytail: Do you have a family history? Cueball: Of what? Doctor Ponytail: Just, in general. Cueball: ...Yes? Doctor Ponytail: Oh no.\n","explanation":"Cueball tries to cut to the root of the issue by asking his chances of survival. Ponytail asks whether Cueball has a family history, but rather than asking for a history of specific illnesses, she is merely asking whether he has any family history at all. Her apparent concern on discovering that he does is presumably due to the fact that everyone who has a family history dies, and therefore she sees this as negative. However, this is not medically informative, since everyone has some kind of family history (whether they personally know anything of it or not) and everyone eventually dies. [ citation needed ]\nThe comic is likely a comment on the impenetrability of some medical diagnoses, where high levels of jargon and non-contextualized statistics, combined with a lot of hedging language, can leave patients none the wiser about their prospects or the relative merits of various courses of treatment. Similarly, it could be reflecting on the effects of availability bias and the base rate fallacy when medical practitioners are deriving diagnoses, treatment options, and similar conclusions from medical records designed to highlight the information necessary to diagnose specific well-understood illnesses. It may also be making fun of poorly defined health statistics: statistics for the leading causes of accidental death in the United States , for example, typically cite 'poisoning' as the number one cause, even though poisoning other than drug overdoses is actually quite rare. The comic takes vague statistics to the extreme, citing 'causality' as the leading cause of death.\nThe title text continues the joke, suggesting that researchers are searching for a cure for causality, which is absurd and inconceivable.\nThe comic as a whole is reminiscent of 830: Genetic Analysis and 1840: Genetic Testing Results (particularly the title text of the latter), as the information given by the doctor in all three is self-evident and useless as a result.\n[Cueball and Doctor Ponytail are talking to each other. Cueball is sitting on an examination table and Doctor Ponytail, in a doctor's coat, is looking down and reading from a clipboard with some illegible writing on it.] Doctor Ponytail: I'm taking a look at your numbers, and it doesn't look good. Doctor Ponytail: You have a lot of measurements. Quite a few variables.\n[Same setting but Doctor Ponytail looks up at Cueball.] Cueball: Is that... bad? Doctor Ponytail: Variables are the #1 risk factor for outcomes. Doctor Ponytail: The past is a big contributor to the future.\n[Same setting but Doctor Ponytail puts her arm with the clipboard down.] Cueball: Isn't that just causality? Doctor Ponytail: Causality is the leading cause of death in this country.\n[Same setting.] Cueball: So what are my odds? Doctor Ponytail: Do you have a family history? Cueball: Of what? Doctor Ponytail: Just, in general. Cueball: ...Yes? Doctor Ponytail: Oh no.\n"}
{"id":2621,"title":"Mainly Known For","image_title":"Mainly Known For","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2621","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/mainly_known_for.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2621:_Mainly_Known_For","transcript":"[Megan holds her hand palm up towards Cueball.] Megan: ...And her dad looks exactly like the Pixar guy. Steve what's-his-name? Jobs? Cueball: \"Pixar guy\"? Cueball: You always know famous people for such weird reasons.\n[Megan puts her hand down.] Megan: What do you mean? Cueball: Who is John Lennon? Megan: Wasn't he in a band? With Ringo from Shining Time Station . Cueball: How is that your main association?\n[In a frameless panel Megan holds a finger up in front of Cueball.] Megan: I also know he once did a song with the guy from Labyrinth! Cueball: You mean David Bowie? I think he's famous for some other stuff, too.\n[Megan puts her hand down while Cueball facepalms. The line connecting his is curved.] Megan: Oh yeah, he was also in Zoolander! Megan: I forgot that movie, it came out back when Jenna Bush's dad was president. Cueball: *Sigh*\n","explanation":"Frequently, when people can't remember a celebrity's name, they will point out other works they are known for in hopes someone else will recognize them from that and remind them of the name.  The comic, for its demographic of nerds, is joking on how it can come across to have lived a life separate from popular culture, where one learns things for different reasons than most people do.\nCueball points out that Megan's tendency to avoid the \"main\" association and instead go with a much more secondary one is weird, which confuses her. To demonstrate how weird her associations are, Cueball asks her, \"Who is John Lennon ?\" Lennon was a founding member of The Beatles , which is one of the most famous bands of all time. Megan recognizes Lennon as a musical artist, but is unable to remember the name of The Beatles. Bizarrely she does remember the name of Lennon's bandmate Ringo Starr . Even stranger, Megan still fails to associate Ringo with The Beatles, but rather remembers him as Mr. Conductor from the first season of the 1989 children's television show Shining Time Station . Starr was never particularly well-known for his acting career, and even among his acting roles Shining Time Station was a minor and obscure example.\nHoping to show that she really does know Lennon and that her associations aren't weird, she points out that she remembers John doing a song with David Bowie . But she cannot remember the name of the song (\" Fame \") or even Bowie's name, recognizing him instead for his acting role in Labyrinth . When Cueball states Bowie's name and adds, presumably sarcastically, that he think he is famous for \"other stuff\", she also remembers Zoolander which is a less prominent film in which Bowie had a cameo. Bowie is primarily famous for his famous musical career (such as his smash hits \" Space Oddity \" or \" Let's Dance \").\nSensing Cueball's annoyance, but failing to understand it, she attempts to excuse herself for not remembering Zoolander to begin with, because it came out a long time ago, during the Presidency of George W. Bush . Zoolander was indeed released in 2001. Apparently unable, again, to remember the president's name, she identifies him as \" Jenna Bush 's dad\". Jenna Bush is a minor TV personality and is far less well known than her father..\nWhile the kind of associations people make, like Megan in this comic, are often prone to the Mandela effect , Megan's information about all the celebrities is, in fact, correct, but apparently they are never what those people are best known for. The oddness of having such obscure knowledge about celebrities and popular culture, but apparently missing far more common knowledge, is frustrating to Cueball, but there's nothing he can point to that she's wrong about.\nThere may also be some overlap with the Streisand effect , named after a woman widely known for owning an overly lavish mansion on the coast of a state north of Mexico.\nIn the title text, Megan stacks her unusual references and takes them to extremes.  She refers to \" Keira Knightly \" [ sic -- her surname is spelled Knightley], who is probably best known for her roles in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and the 2005 Pride and Prejudice film , by referencing her small role in Star Wars: Episode I \u2013 The Phantom Menace (as Sab\u00e9, who funnily enough is a handmaiden and decoy for Queen Padm\u00e9 Amidala, a main character played by Natalie Portman). \"Star Wars\" is one of the most famous film franchises in history, but Megan seems not to know the name of the series, or the film, referring to it as the \"first movie\" (it was the first in the plotline, but the fourth one made) in \"that series by The Land Before Time producer\".  ( George Lucas is famous as the creator of Star Wars but was also one of the executive producers of the 1988 animated film The Land Before Time .)\nIn addition to George Lucas, she identifies another actor in the Star Wars series, Samuel L. Jackson , by his roles in Jurassic Park (an extremely successful film, but one in which Jackson had a relatively small role) and the PBS children's series Ghostwriter (in which Jackson appeared in only a few episodes). In addition, Megan mentions that the Star Wars series had \"script work by Billie Lourd 's mom\", referring to Carrie Fisher .  Fisher came to fame playing the major role of Princess Leia Organa in the original \"Star Wars\" film, and reprising her role in multiple sequels, but she also contributed uncredited script-doctoring work to the franchise.\nGhostwriter was previously featured in 130: Julia Stiles , which described a scene from the show as \"the best thing ever to appear on TV\".\n[Megan holds her hand palm up towards Cueball.] Megan: ...And her dad looks exactly like the Pixar guy. Steve what's-his-name? Jobs? Cueball: \"Pixar guy\"? Cueball: You always know famous people for such weird reasons.\n[Megan puts her hand down.] Megan: What do you mean? Cueball: Who is John Lennon? Megan: Wasn't he in a band? With Ringo from Shining Time Station . Cueball: How is that your main association?\n[In a frameless panel Megan holds a finger up in front of Cueball.] Megan: I also know he once did a song with the guy from Labyrinth! Cueball: You mean David Bowie? I think he's famous for some other stuff, too.\n[Megan puts her hand down while Cueball facepalms. The line connecting his is curved.] Megan: Oh yeah, he was also in Zoolander! Megan: I forgot that movie, it came out back when Jenna Bush's dad was president. Cueball: *Sigh*\n"}
{"id":2622,"title":"Angular Diameter Turnaround","image_title":"Angular Diameter Turnaround","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2622","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/angular_diameter_turnaround.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2622:_Angular_Diameter_Turnaround","transcript":"[Cueball and a row of 7 spiral galaxies, the first 5 growing sequentially smaller and the last 2 growing larger] Angular Diameter Turnaround [A spiral galaxy emitting light and Cueball in a small circle with closely spaced grid lines, captioned \"T=1b yr.\"] [A stretched truncated circle with widely spaced gridlines, with the galaxy at one side and Cueball on the other, and light following a curved path through the stretched space to Cueball, captioned \"Now (T=13.8b yr.)\". Cueball is thinking \"Big!\"] Illustrated using phones instead of galaxies (Brightness and redshift adjusted to keep phones visible) Things that are far away look smaller, but things that are really far away look bigger , because when their light was emitted, the universe was small and they were close to us. [numerous iPhones scattered in space, with numbers visible on their lockscreen. The closest is brightly lit and says \"13 billion years after the Big Bang\" on the screen. Subsequent phones behind this one are smaller, fainter and more red, until they reach \"3\" (the rest of the text is too small to read). From this point, the phones grow larger, although they continue to get fainter and redder. Subsequent phones show \"2\", \"1\", \"500 million\", \"200 million\", \"50 million\", \"20 million\" (which is larger than the original \"13 billion years after the Big Bang\" phone) and a very large, faint phone so big that only the word \"thousand\" is visible, with the rest of the screen obscured behind other phones or so large it extends off the panel]\n","explanation":"This comic references multiple physics and maths concepts, including Angular diameter , Angular diameter distance , Redshift , and mobile phones , although mobile phones are not a core science at this time. [ citation needed ]\nThe comic shows the galaxies of the universe as Samsung Galaxy mobile phones, pairing the age we see them at from earth, the degree they are redshifted, and how much of the sky they take up, known as their angular diameter. The mobile phones that are closer and older have depleted batteries, whereas the batteries are full for those phones from which the light is still only beginning to reach us. This is how galaxies appear in the sky if they were phones that had batteries lasting billions of years, the light reaching us from deeper into the past as it comes from objects that are farther away. Phones at a low battery may be a reference to 1373: Screenshot , where Randall commented that it is hard to pay attention to any phone with a low battery as the need to charge it is so urgent.\nAn important takeaway from this comic is that the events that occurred at the very start of our universe are etched in our sky as if they are still happening now , in a detailed faint timeline, that we are still learning more and more from.  Using the mobile phone metaphor helps as, when the technology space was young and smaller there were mobile phones , such as the original iPhone ,  which one might still remember despite there being many more recent and better ones in a more crowded market space.\nRandall's intent appears to be to highlight how just a few very distant galaxies occupy incredibly large proportions of the sky and are seen as they were at a very young age. Mobile phones have this similarity, of massive presence, relatively early stages of new technology, and bringing information from far away.\nThe large galaxies can be seen in dark red in the background as if the unimaginably ancient child galactic bodies are looming forebodingly behind everything else. The title text refers to galaxies falling into a pool of dilute blood as if the void beyond were hell.  This completely misses the point as to what redshift is, being an effect on the wavelength of light, rather than light being filtered through regions of infernal suffering or far galaxies being stained by the blood of the enemies of Android phones.\nThis physical concept has a lot of juxtaposition of things that usually contradict, and Randall has put energy into attempting to highlight that.\nKatie Mack tweet: https:\/\/twitter.com\/AstroKatie\/status\/1516548836709343238\nSpacetime diagram possibly has reasonable visualizations of the kinds of relations bodies have when they are moving this far apart, including angular diameter distance. Simultaneity no longer exists at such distances. Distance is debated too, although that would be a different article.\n[Cueball and a row of 7 spiral galaxies, the first 5 growing sequentially smaller and the last 2 growing larger] Angular Diameter Turnaround [A spiral galaxy emitting light and Cueball in a small circle with closely spaced grid lines, captioned \"T=1b yr.\"] [A stretched truncated circle with widely spaced gridlines, with the galaxy at one side and Cueball on the other, and light following a curved path through the stretched space to Cueball, captioned \"Now (T=13.8b yr.)\". Cueball is thinking \"Big!\"] Illustrated using phones instead of galaxies (Brightness and redshift adjusted to keep phones visible) Things that are far away look smaller, but things that are really far away look bigger , because when their light was emitted, the universe was small and they were close to us. [numerous iPhones scattered in space, with numbers visible on their lockscreen. The closest is brightly lit and says \"13 billion years after the Big Bang\" on the screen. Subsequent phones behind this one are smaller, fainter and more red, until they reach \"3\" (the rest of the text is too small to read). From this point, the phones grow larger, although they continue to get fainter and redder. Subsequent phones show \"2\", \"1\", \"500 million\", \"200 million\", \"50 million\", \"20 million\" (which is larger than the original \"13 billion years after the Big Bang\" phone) and a very large, faint phone so big that only the word \"thousand\" is visible, with the rest of the screen obscured behind other phones or so large it extends off the panel]\n"}
{"id":2623,"title":"Goofs","image_title":"Goofs","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2623","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/goofs.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2623:_Goofs","transcript":"[An excerpt from an Internet Movie Database web page showing a list of goofs from a film. Each item has some small illegible text below it, which on the real IMDb would say something like \"7 of 72 found this interesting | Share this\". The first and third items have a faint yellow-tinted background. The third item is only partially visible at the bottom of the \"screen\".] [Heading:] Goofs (78) [List:] The space detective's office is on Chestnut Ave, but Lower Manhattan has no street by that name. Agent Glennifer pursues the cybernetic dog onto what is clearly Ludlow Street. The agents destroy the blimp drones in Union Square with harpoons from a store display rack. The nearest harpoon store is several blocks away and has no outdoor displays. The apartment in the background of the hologram kissing scene actually exists in downtown Vancouver. We called the owners, who confirmed they had no residents named [...]\n[Caption below the panel:] Sometimes the IMDB \"Goofs\" section really seems to struggle with the whole premise of fiction.\n","explanation":"IMDb is the Internet Movie Database , a website that contains detailed, user-contributed information about movies and TV shows. One of the sections in many entries is \" Goofs \". This may list bloopers, inconsistencies, implausible actions, anachronisms, etc. in the movie. While some people find enjoyment in searching for these errors, to others, the entries listed can often be overly pedantic and missing the point [ citation needed ] (a problem that can often afflict sites that rely on users to provide their content [Hey! Who you calling a pedant?]). The comic makes fun of this with several goofs that simply point out differences between something in the movie and reality; but since the movie is fiction (in this case, a science fiction film that includes a space detective, a cybernetic dog, blimp drones, and a hologram kissing scene), one can say that these \"goofs\" might simply be more differences between the movie world and our own.\nIn the first goof, a named street doesn't actually exist in the city in which the movie is set. Unless the address is important to the plot (Manhattan has a number of streets with well-known characters - for example, the main theatre district is on Broadway, Fifth Avenue is a major shopping district, and Wall Street is known for large financial institutions), screenwriters can and do make up street names. It might actually be expedient to 'rename' a setting in many cases, to avoid issues such as fans showing up at said street and harassing the residents.\nIn the second example, they point out that there's no harpoon store at the location where the characters obtain a harpoon in the movie, and the nearest actual harpoon store doesn't have a display window. Movies take liberties with details like this for plot expediency, and is not considered a goof. Manhattan does not appear to have any notable harpoon stores, [ citation needed ] with or without the kind of frontage described.\nIn the third example, the background of a scene is of an apartment in Downtown Vancouver (a cheap and popular filming location that frequently stands in for other cities). The goof points out that the real-life apartment does not belong to the character who supposedly lives in it. Fictional movie characters do not exist in reality, [ citation needed ] and many scenes are set in fictional locations that are completely separate from their real-life filming locations. As such, this is only a \"goof\" if the scene is taken entirely literally.\nThe title text describes an actual anachronism. The film is set in 2018, but there's a billboard for the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron , which came out in 2015, while the next Avengers film, Avengers: Infinity War , came out in 2018. Assuming the movie was filmed before 2018, the filmmakers wouldn't have known what films would be current at the time it would be released, and certainly not the artwork they'd be using to promote them. They could have chosen to set it during the time of initial filming, but again, unless the specific date is significant to the plot, it's common to set (or rather, assume) a film takes place about the same time it's released. Generic advertisements for fictional (or parody ) films might be put over egregiously obvious existing material, physically or in post-production editing, as might references to major brands \u2013 perhaps replaced by those agreed with from product placement partners.\nThe title text also mentions the possibility of a self-reference \u2013 the billboard could be for this film itself since it's being released at the same time it's set.  This assertion that in-universe self-reference is plausible for a movie production is likely another example of the goof's writer failing to understand the basic \"premise of fiction\". Most movies do not exist within the fictional world they portray, [ citation needed ] and many audiences would find self-reference to be a far greater obstacle to suspending disbelief than an ad for the wrong Avengers movie.\n[An excerpt from an Internet Movie Database web page showing a list of goofs from a film. Each item has some small illegible text below it, which on the real IMDb would say something like \"7 of 72 found this interesting | Share this\". The first and third items have a faint yellow-tinted background. The third item is only partially visible at the bottom of the \"screen\".] [Heading:] Goofs (78) [List:] The space detective's office is on Chestnut Ave, but Lower Manhattan has no street by that name. Agent Glennifer pursues the cybernetic dog onto what is clearly Ludlow Street. The agents destroy the blimp drones in Union Square with harpoons from a store display rack. The nearest harpoon store is several blocks away and has no outdoor displays. The apartment in the background of the hologram kissing scene actually exists in downtown Vancouver. We called the owners, who confirmed they had no residents named [...]\n[Caption below the panel:] Sometimes the IMDB \"Goofs\" section really seems to struggle with the whole premise of fiction.\n"}
{"id":2624,"title":"Voyager Wires","image_title":"Voyager Wires","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2624","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/voyager_wires.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2624:_Voyager_Wires","transcript":"[In the bottom right corner is a space probe, with large satellite dish and long antenna. Behind it runs a long wire, that makes three loops before it is connected to North America  on the Earth in the top left corner. To the left of the Earth there is a second wire, which goes off-panel to the left.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Sad news: Due to high copper prices and budget constraints, NASA may finally have to cut the wires that they've been spooling out to communicate with Voyager 1 and 2.\n","explanation":"This comic claims that the Voyager probes communicate with NASA though ridiculously long copper wires. These wires would have to be continuously lengthened as the probes travel away from Earth. Supposedly, because of \"high copper prices and budget constraints,\" they may not be able to afford to lengthen the wires much longer. If this occurred, they would have to either cut the wires or let them break, which would prevent any further communication with the probes. In reality they use radio waves , not long copper wires, so this will not actually happen.\nIf copper wires were dragged by the Voyager probes, assuming a 1mm\u00b2 thick cable, 550 tons of copper would be needed per hour and it would add 1 million Ohm per hour to the cable resistance. At $8,560\/ton , this would cost $41 billion dollars\/year, which would be nearly twice NASA's entire annual budget .\nThe resulting wire would slow down the probes by drag unless the wire itself was actively suspended (i.e. accelerated) continuously as it was fed. The wire could not be used for any other mechanical purpose such as a space elevator for this reason.\nSince the Earth spins, the wires would also spool around the Earth, slowing the probes down even further. Clearly, this is not a good idea. This problem might be avoided if the wires reached earth at one of the poles. Or perhaps they could go to an airplane that flies around earth at exactly 15 degrees of longitude per hour, with periodic air-to-air refueling, so that it is always on the side of the earth facing the probe.\nBecause the Voyager probes aren't in the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun, the Earth would not, in its rotation around the sun, drag these copper wires through the sun. If it did, the wires would melt.\nThe title text references the phenomenon seen with self-retracting cables, such as are commonly found on vacuum cleaners, where the free end of the cable, where the plug is, oscillates more and more wildly as the cable approaches full retraction, leading to the danger of a painful rap on the hand if it is not withdrawn in time. A planet-sized impact of this kind could cause severe damage.\nA few days before this comic was released, NASA had reported receiving corrupted data from the Voyager 1 probe.  The fact that they are receiving any data at all means that the attitude control system must be working (or else the antenna would not point at Earth), but they continue to investigate how that data could be corrupted after that point.\nSpoiler alert\nThe consequence of a cable between a craft in space and a planetary location being suddenly retracted was recently imagined in the first episode of the Apple TV+ series Foundation , wherein a space elevator tether was severed. It didn't end well for anyone other than the terrorists who won the freedom of thousands of inhabited worlds which had formerly suffered under the jackbooted oppression of Trantor 's fascist galactic Empire regime.\nAnother illustration in fiction of a severed space elevator is in Red Mars, part of the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.\n[In the bottom right corner is a space probe, with large satellite dish and long antenna. Behind it runs a long wire, that makes three loops before it is connected to North America  on the Earth in the top left corner. To the left of the Earth there is a second wire, which goes off-panel to the left.]\n[Caption below the panel:] Sad news: Due to high copper prices and budget constraints, NASA may finally have to cut the wires that they've been spooling out to communicate with Voyager 1 and 2.\n"}
{"id":2625,"title":"Field Topology","image_title":"Field Topology","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2625","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/field_topology.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2625:_Field_Topology","transcript":"[A row of four signs, each held up by two posts, followed by a row of four rounded lozenge shapes, one for each sign. The signs and lozenge shapes are shaded as if three-dimensional objects, all being flattish with a small third dimension; the four lozenge shapes each have one pair of sides horizontal and the other pair at a slight angle from vertical, denoting a horizontal plane perpendicular to the signs extending \"out\" towards the viewer, which places each shape \"in front\" of its sign. All but the first lozenge shape have various numbers of ellipses within the shape - ovoids shaded to denote holes piercing through the objects.]\n[Leftmost sign:] Baseball Soccer Tetherball [The shape below this sign contains no ellipses.]\n[Second sign from left:] Volleyball Badminton High jump [This shape has one large ellipse in the center.]\n[Third sign:] Basketball Football Parallel bars [This shape has two large ellipses - one in the top half and one in the bottom half.]\n[Fourth and rightmost sign:] Olympic swimming Croquet [This shape has nine small ellipses - eight arranged symmetrically towards the edges of the shape and one in the center.]\n[Caption underneath the signs and shapes:] No one ever wants to use the topology department's athletic fields.\n","explanation":"Field Topology is a subject in mathematics , but in this comic, Randall is instead examining the topology of playing fields used for various sports. The comic strip depicts a situation in which the common practice of multi-use athletic facilities has been organized by the \"topology department\" and constructed to be shared by all sports whose normal playing fields are topologically equivalent . One key assumption in topology is that you can ignore the specificities of shape, size and material of the objects concerned. This presents an amusing contrast as the \"equivalent\" topology department playing fields are actually not very appropriate for the activities listed in the comic, as the standard positioning, size and shape of hoops, nets and bars and the material of the field itself are not equivalent to the real playing fields used for those activities.\n(Not to be confused with mathematical fields , or the Fields Medal prize -- although the concept is likely a further pun in the comic, as math (including topology), and most things once can imagine really, are mostly performed (\"played\") within mathematical fields.)\nIn topology, shapes which can be smoothly deformed into one another without adding or removing holes are considered equivalent. A topological hole is an area of the nominal space (or area, or other manifold) through which nothing restricted to this topology can pass. A loop is a path across the allowable territory of a topology (or a viable circuit to make through the world it describes) that end up where it started. For example, when describing the space taken up by a solid object such as a coffee mug, the handle forms a loop with a hole through it. If a loop cannot be tightened (ultimately adjusted to take a shorter path) down to a single point, then it must be wrapped around at least one \"topological hole\", and you have separately unique paths (or points, i.e., on different disconnected topologies) where you cannot adjust one loop to take the route of another without severing a looped path and reconnecting it.\nWhen describing a negative space, such as the space around an archway, the 'hole' would be the material of the arch itself. This is because a loop formed by a ring around any part of the arch material can only be shortened to a finite length, not to a point; the 'hole' is the arch-shaped obstruction which forces the existence of these loops. A basketball hoop connected to the ground forms a similar obstruction with a loop through it, so the space around the hoop contains an equivalent hole. In this comic the topology department has analysed the spaces where various sports are played by the number of such obstructions in the playing area. Each space depicted in the comic is then signposted with the sports which are played on a field with that number of holes.\nBaseball , tetherball and soccer are played on fields which are continuous in three-dimensional space. This means it is possible to traverse any path around or over any of the structures defining the field, while there are no obstructions which can be traversed through in a loop around them. The goals on a soccer field presumably do not create holes because the goalposts and crossbar are connected to the field by the net; Randall apparently considers these to form continuous surfaces which do not allow loops through them.\nVolleyball and badminton are played using a net suspended from poles, and the high jump has a bar that contestants jump over. The structure formed by the net or bar and the supporting poles can be considered to be a \"hole\" through the playing field, as a path over and under the net\/bar forming a loop cannot be contracted to a single point, so their playing fields in the comic all have one \"hole\".\nA basketball court has two hoops. Parallel bars can be thought of as two archways. Both have opportunities to pass through either (or both) structures, and so the material of the structures define a hole in the topological abstract of the playing 'space'.  Since we are told that these sports fields belong to the Topology Department - and are not necessarily generalized to all sports fields - we might assume that their \"football\" field is either for rugby or for American football using H-shaped uprights .\nAn Olympic-sized swimming pool has ten lanes, and thus nine lane dividers which are fastened to the walls of the pool at each end, creating topological holes through the play area. Each hoop in croquet is similarly a hole through the space; while most versions of croquet use six hoops, nine hoops are used for \"backyard croquet\" which is played recreationally in the United States and Canada. The fact that the space in a swimming pool is typically filled with water [ citation needed ] has been overlooked by the topology department.\nAs mentioned in the title text, this last configuration is also homeomorphic to a foosball table (with each rod sustaining the player figures above the table defining a hole) or a Skee-Ball lane (which is even more straightforward, as it is just a plane with several holes in which to throw balls). These \"fields\" don't actually have the same number of holes, but are apparently lumped together by the Topology Department as having \"many\" holes.\nUnfortunately, the Topology Department does not seem to have a field for hurdling events.\n[A row of four signs, each held up by two posts, followed by a row of four rounded lozenge shapes, one for each sign. The signs and lozenge shapes are shaded as if three-dimensional objects, all being flattish with a small third dimension; the four lozenge shapes each have one pair of sides horizontal and the other pair at a slight angle from vertical, denoting a horizontal plane perpendicular to the signs extending \"out\" towards the viewer, which places each shape \"in front\" of its sign. All but the first lozenge shape have various numbers of ellipses within the shape - ovoids shaded to denote holes piercing through the objects.]\n[Leftmost sign:] Baseball Soccer Tetherball [The shape below this sign contains no ellipses.]\n[Second sign from left:] Volleyball Badminton High jump [This shape has one large ellipse in the center.]\n[Third sign:] Basketball Football Parallel bars [This shape has two large ellipses - one in the top half and one in the bottom half.]\n[Fourth and rightmost sign:] Olympic swimming Croquet [This shape has nine small ellipses - eight arranged symmetrically towards the edges of the shape and one in the center.]\n[Caption underneath the signs and shapes:] No one ever wants to use the topology department's athletic fields.\n"}
{"id":2626,"title":"d65536","image_title":"d65536","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2626","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/d65536.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2626:_d65536","transcript":"[A large sphere with a several lines, and in some places grids, are shown. Cueball, standing next to it, is dwarfed by its size, as it is at least seven times as tall as he is. The sphere has many lines following various great circles or parallel lesser circles around the curve of the sphere, and some patches of cross hatching to suggest further texturing along these lines hovering just below the degree of most of the illustrative detailing. The lines and grids cover the sphere in three layers of parallel axes, angled sixty degrees from each other, implying a huge mesh of equilateral triangles or hexagons. In the top right part of the ball is a black circle. An arrow points to this circle, and the end of the arrow goes to a larger circle that partly obscures the rightmost part of the sphere. The circle shows a zoom in on the surface in the black circle on the sphere. The zoom shows a small portion of the sphere's surface, showing that the grid comes along because the sphere is divided into elongated hexagonal faces with numbers up to at least five-digits. Seven numbers can be fully seen, but there are nine other faces partly shown, five of these with part of their numbers visible, one of these clearly only have four digits. One of the empty faces must also have a number with only 1-3 digits, as no numbers are visible although a significant part of the face is visible.]\n[Here follows the numbers in the zoomed in part of the sphere, with  \"...\" represents numbers being cut off. The numbers are read in lines left to right, even though the numbers are tilted from down towards the right, which could have suggested a different reading order.] 30827 16[bottom part of a cut-off line][small cut-off circle] ...38 11875 25444 ...[top part of a cut-off line]5 12082 28525 3 [left part of a cut-off line]... 13359 13874 [Two cut-off lines, likely the start of the number 2]...\n[Caption below the image:] The hardest part of securely generating random 16-bit numbers is rolling the d65536.\n","explanation":"In binary computing, 16 bit unsigned numbers range from 0 to 65535, for a total of 65536 unique numbers, a number which is hence well-known to software engineers. Generating large numbers in a manner that is truly random is a recurring problem in cryptography, required to send private messages to another party. People today still use dierolls to generate private random numbers.\nIn role-playing games (and occasionally in other tabletop games), multiple shapes of dice are often used to generate random numbers in specific ranges.  By convention, these are referred to as d n according to their number of faces. A traditional six-faced die would be a d6, and many popular pen-and-paper role-playing games use dice ranging between d4 and d20. While there are larger dice used in tabletop games (most commonly d100), these are usually split into multiple smaller ones. For example, a d100 is often two d10s rolled together, with one die providing the first digit and the other die giving the second digit \u2014 the total number of possible combinations (100) is the product of the number of faces of the two dice (10 * 10). While \"real\" d100s and other large-numbered dice do exist, most people consider them to be impractical: they need to be either impractically large or have very small faces (resulting in small print for the numbers), they're close enough to being spheres that it's difficult to get them into a stable resting position, and even if they are stationary, determining which face is \"on top\" is difficult to do by eye. The Zocchihedron (d100) die is also difficult to ensure as unbiased because of geometry requiring dissimilar faces and therefore a different mixture of 'stopping factors' for each face it could land upon. The largest unbiased die is a d120 (excluding the bipyramids, which can theoretically be made with arbitrarily many sides), so it is very likely that Cueball's d65536 die is also biased.\nHere, Cueball has constructed a d65536 for generating random 16 bit numbers. It may have solved the problem of generating large random numbers with fewer die rolls, but it magnifies all of the problems with large-numbered dice to ludicrous extremes. In order for the faces to be readable, the die is ridiculously huge, dwarfing the human standing next to it. Rolling such a die is not only physically challenging, but it would also need a huge space in which to roll if the result is to be random, and that space would need to have an extremely flat and rigid surface in order for the die to come to rest. And even if those problems were solved, simply getting to a vantage point to see the top of the die would be a major challenge, and determining which number was truly on top would be near impossible to do by eye. If one really wished to use dice, it would be much easier to simply use multiple dice rolls. For instance, one could roll eight d4 dice (or use 16 coin flips), and convert the result into binary. This has the same randomness as a single die roll [ citation needed ] ?, but can take much longer, so people do purchase d16s to simplify it and speed it up.\nThe closest regular shape similar to the depicted in the comic could be a Goldberg polyhedron . However, no such polyhedron exists with exactly 65536 hexagonal faces. The closest Goldberg Polyhedron has a mixture of 65520 hexagons and 12 pentagons, totaling 65532 faces. It is possible to construct a fair die without a matching regular shape by limiting the sides which it could land on and designing those sides to be fair (for instance, a prism with rectangular facets that extend its entire length, and rounded ends to ensure it doesn't balance on end).\nThe title text references how cryptographic systems (especially RSA and other factoring-is-hard based systems) are vulnerable to quantum attacks as quantum computing technology develops. The title text is essentially punning on the idea of a \"large\" quantum system. \"Large\" in the quantum computing sense would be on the order of 64 qubits each of which would be an atom or two at most. This would still be microscopic and will never be as large as the giant die the comic is centered on; but for a well-observed environment and human rolling without sufficient entropy (consider somebody obsessed with a certain number dropping the die on something soft), a conventional computer could predict some rolls. See also 538 for non-mathematical paths of cryptography.\n[A large sphere with a several lines, and in some places grids, are shown. Cueball, standing next to it, is dwarfed by its size, as it is at least seven times as tall as he is. The sphere has many lines following various great circles or parallel lesser circles around the curve of the sphere, and some patches of cross hatching to suggest further texturing along these lines hovering just below the degree of most of the illustrative detailing. The lines and grids cover the sphere in three layers of parallel axes, angled sixty degrees from each other, implying a huge mesh of equilateral triangles or hexagons. In the top right part of the ball is a black circle. An arrow points to this circle, and the end of the arrow goes to a larger circle that partly obscures the rightmost part of the sphere. The circle shows a zoom in on the surface in the black circle on the sphere. The zoom shows a small portion of the sphere's surface, showing that the grid comes along because the sphere is divided into elongated hexagonal faces with numbers up to at least five-digits. Seven numbers can be fully seen, but there are nine other faces partly shown, five of these with part of their numbers visible, one of these clearly only have four digits. One of the empty faces must also have a number with only 1-3 digits, as no numbers are visible although a significant part of the face is visible.]\n[Here follows the numbers in the zoomed in part of the sphere, with  \"...\" represents numbers being cut off. The numbers are read in lines left to right, even though the numbers are tilted from down towards the right, which could have suggested a different reading order.] 30827 16[bottom part of a cut-off line][small cut-off circle] ...38 11875 25444 ...[top part of a cut-off line]5 12082 28525 3 [left part of a cut-off line]... 13359 13874 [Two cut-off lines, likely the start of the number 2]...\n[Caption below the image:] The hardest part of securely generating random 16-bit numbers is rolling the d65536.\n"}
{"id":2627,"title":"Types of Scopes","image_title":"Types of Scopes","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2627","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/types_of_scopes.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2627:_Types_of_Scopes","transcript":"Content is a table, with column headings \"Regular Blank Scope\", \"Electron Blank Scope\", and \"Radio Blank Scope\".  Row headings are \"Micro\", \"Tele\", \"Peri\", \"Stetho\", \"Kaleido\", \"Gyro\", and \"Horo\".\nRegular Microscope Look at small stuff Electron Microscope Look at really small stuff Radio Microscope Figure out why your radio broke Regular Telescope Look at stuff that's far away Electron Telescope Detect cosmic rays Radio Telescope Look at distant high-energy stuff Regular Periscope Look for enemy ships Electron Periscope Examine the hull of an enemy ship for structural flaws Radio Periscope Let the crew of your submarine listen to NPR Regular Stethoscope Listen to a patient's chest Electron Stethoscope Burn a patient's skin Radio Stethoscope Play the noises from a patient's chest on NPR Regular Kaleidoscope See cool shapes and colors Electron Kaleidoscope See cool Bremsstrahlung Radio Kaleidoscope Another word for the \"Scan\" button Regular Gyroscope Balance by spinning Electron Gyroscope Another word for electromagnet Radio Gyroscope Another word for turntable Regular Horoscope Get random life advice Electron Horoscope Predict a particle's quantum state Radio Horoscope Get random life advice from exploding galaxies\n","explanation":"Electron microscopes , electron telescopes and radio telescopes are special forms of microscopes and telescopes , respectively. This comic explores what you could do with a hypothetical \"electron ___-scope\" and \"radio ___-scope\" for other \"regular\" items whose name also ends in -scope (namely: periscope , stethoscope , kaleidoscope , gyroscope and horoscope ).\nThe third column with \"radio\" often plays on different meanings of the word radio: 1) related to radiation and 2) a device for receiving radio communication or broadcasts.\nThe title text makes a pun on \"gyroscope\" and a middle-eastern pita wrap called a \" gyros \".\nContent is a table, with column headings \"Regular Blank Scope\", \"Electron Blank Scope\", and \"Radio Blank Scope\".  Row headings are \"Micro\", \"Tele\", \"Peri\", \"Stetho\", \"Kaleido\", \"Gyro\", and \"Horo\".\nRegular Microscope Look at small stuff Electron Microscope Look at really small stuff Radio Microscope Figure out why your radio broke Regular Telescope Look at stuff that's far away Electron Telescope Detect cosmic rays Radio Telescope Look at distant high-energy stuff Regular Periscope Look for enemy ships Electron Periscope Examine the hull of an enemy ship for structural flaws Radio Periscope Let the crew of your submarine listen to NPR Regular Stethoscope Listen to a patient's chest Electron Stethoscope Burn a patient's skin Radio Stethoscope Play the noises from a patient's chest on NPR Regular Kaleidoscope See cool shapes and colors Electron Kaleidoscope See cool Bremsstrahlung Radio Kaleidoscope Another word for the \"Scan\" button Regular Gyroscope Balance by spinning Electron Gyroscope Another word for electromagnet Radio Gyroscope Another word for turntable Regular Horoscope Get random life advice Electron Horoscope Predict a particle's quantum state Radio Horoscope Get random life advice from exploding galaxies\n"}
{"id":2628,"title":"Motion Blur","image_title":"Motion Blur","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2628","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/motion_blur.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2628:_Motion_Blur","transcript":"[White Hat is holding a camera up to his face looking to the left away from Cueball and Ponytail standing to his right. Cueball is holding one hand, with a balled up fist, up towards White Hat] White Hat: Okay, I'm going to pan around. Cueball: No, wait, your shutter speed is too fast, it will look choppy if\u2014\n[White Hat turns clockwise towards Cueball and Ponytail, with the camera held up partly behind his head, so it points in the panel. Cueball clenches both his fists, held down now, and hunches his shoulders. Ponytail stands as before next to him.] Cueball: Hnnnnngh\n[White Hat has turned around and is now pointing the camera towards Cueball and Ponytail. Cueball now appears blurry while Ponytail looks normal.]\n[Caption below panel:] Expert photographers can learn to generate their own motion blur to compensate for other people's bad camera settings.\nThis comic remained on xkcd's front page even after the midnight between Monday and Tuesday (in Eastern Time), which is a rare instance that Randall has missed a midnight deadline.","explanation":"This is analogous to something much more common that people do, by practicing moving their bodies relative to the motion of the camera: reducing blur when the shutter speed is too low.\nThe title text refers to the fact that only one object - in this case, Cueball - appearing blurry while everything else in the frame is sharp is even more exotic. It can also be seen as a celebration and sarcasm regarding the rare experience of valuing having exotic knowledge and skills. It seems likely Randall has practiced reducing blur, but not succeeded at increasing it, and was possibly exposed to somebody saying \"high\" shutter speed when they meant \"low\" shutter speed, but this is presently unverified.\nThis is somewhat similar to a trick 'used' by some fictional characters who have the power to make themselves unclear to observers or cameras alike. In real-life it is the difference between \"stop motion\" and \"go motion\" tricks.\nWhen light hits a human's retina, it is perceived for a short while even after the light has ceased. This means that objects moving across a human's field of vision at a sufficient speed will naturally appear blurry \u2013 in our perception, the light arriving right now from the trailing part of the object will mix with the light that arrived a moment earlier, from the leading part of the object.\nA camera's shutter speed is the amount of time that the shutter is open for each frame, allowing the image sensor to capture light. If the shutter speed is too high (relative to the frame-rate), this blurring will not occur, and the motion will look unnaturally crisp \u2013 if something is too small and\/or too quick, the illusion of motion may disappear altogether; the object instead will appear as a brief flash of multiple objects standing still, like in the case of a fast-moving mouse cursor on a screen. See for instance this Videography - Slow Shutter Speed vs. Fast Shutter Speed Comparison .\nIn cinema, the shutter speed is generally set to double the frame-rate, e.g. 1\/48 s for footage shot at 24 fps (one of the lowest standard frame-rates, a remnant from the age of mechanical motion picture cameras and film projectors).\nAn opposing problem is that of a camera not sufficiently matching the relative motion of a moving object, with a shutter speed that is too slow (and may need to be, given the choice of aperture and lighting conditions). Sports photographers must learn how to scan-and-pan their subjects (runners, horses, vehicles, etc) with enough synchronicity to capture them sharply, and possibly seemingly hanging frozen in mid-air against an artistically-blurred background.\nIt is unclear how Cueball makes the motion blur include both his feet, as the friction with the ground should hinder them from vibrating horizontally in the manner that may cause for motion blur. Additionally, creating the kind of motion blur he does (with evenly distributed horizontal blur) requires extreme acceleration at both ends of the movement.\n[White Hat is holding a camera up to his face looking to the left away from Cueball and Ponytail standing to his right. Cueball is holding one hand, with a balled up fist, up towards White Hat] White Hat: Okay, I'm going to pan around. Cueball: No, wait, your shutter speed is too fast, it will look choppy if\u2014\n[White Hat turns clockwise towards Cueball and Ponytail, with the camera held up partly behind his head, so it points in the panel. Cueball clenches both his fists, held down now, and hunches his shoulders. Ponytail stands as before next to him.] Cueball: Hnnnnngh\n[White Hat has turned around and is now pointing the camera towards Cueball and Ponytail. Cueball now appears blurry while Ponytail looks normal.]\n[Caption below panel:] Expert photographers can learn to generate their own motion blur to compensate for other people's bad camera settings.\nThis comic remained on xkcd's front page even after the midnight between Monday and Tuesday (in Eastern Time), which is a rare instance that Randall has missed a midnight deadline."}
{"id":2629,"title":"Or Whatever","image_title":"Or Whatever","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2629","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/or_whatever.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2629:_Or_Whatever","transcript":"[White Hat and Cueball are looking out on a skyline with six smaller skyscrapers and one much taller. The tall building has three plateaus, where it gets thinner before the top. On the top there are also two tall antennas, one twice as high as the other. Around the buldings therare 7 small clouds and two distant birds flying next tot he top of the tallest building. The two are standing on a ground behind a fence, maybe a viewing point, for looking in over the city skyline. They are looking toward the tallest bulding.] White Hat: You know, back in the 90s, the Sears Tower was the world's tallest tower. Cueball: Yeah! Or \"building.\" The CN Tower and the KVLY-TV Antenna were taller, but the CN Tower isn't always considered a building and the antenna is supported by guy wires or whatever.\n[Caption below the panel]: Whenever I get self-conscious about how obsessive I sound about some random topic, I panic and tack on \"or whatever.\"\n","explanation":"The Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) is a 108-story, 442.1 meter skyscraper in Chicago. It is currently the third tallest building in North America, and was indeed the tallest building in the world for 25 years, surpassing the World Trade Center upon opening in 1973, and being surpassed by the Petronas Towers upon their opening in 1998.\nWhite Hat conveys some interesting historical trivia to Cueball , regarding the Sears Tower . Cueball then sets the record straight by correcting White Hat's use of the word tower: In the category of 'tower', the Willis Tower was never the tallest. Cueball then realizes he just one-upped White Hat with what he knows about tall structures in general, which might make him sound obsessive, so he tags on the meaningless caveat of \"or whatever\".\nThis is meant to diffuse the tension he may have added by his well-meaning contradiction, but could also be taken as a passive-aggressive behaviour by interlocutors who may already be touchy about the original 'correction'.\nIn the title-text, being already self-conscious that he has overstepped the mark for polite smalltalk, he then hypercorrects the self-perceived tone of his response by explicitly denying that he knows far more about the tower, but only by providing the very facts that he is trying to claim not to know. Alternately, this could be White Hat responding to something else Cueball said, as an annoyed way to either get Cueball to stop, or to make a point that Cueball knows more than is \"normal\" about skyscrapers.\nThis comic hinges on the debate about the tallest structure vs tallest building . A building is generally defined as a human-built structure fit for human habitation when it is fit for human habitation, while a structure is generally defined as anything humans make. (Or in some cases, anything an animal makes, like crab shells. )\nIt is far from unusual for the tallest building (habitable) to be shorter than the tallest structure (uninhabitable), such as in 1974 when the tallest structure was the Warsaw radio mast at 646.38 meters. The radio mast was uninhabitable, [ citation needed ] so the tallest building was (sort-of coincidentally) the Sears Tower at 442.1 meters. The Warsaw tower collapsed in 1991, so it was not the tallest structure for the majority of the '90s.\nAfter the Warsaw Tower's demise, the KVLY-TV mast , which stood at 629 meters, held the record of tallest structure until either 2000 or 2010, with the opening of the Petronius platform and Burj Khalifa respectively. (The date depends on whether you count underwater towers, as the Petronius platform is an oil rig and only 75 meters of the platform are above water). It was also the tallest Guyed mast up until 2019, when it was reduced to 605.6 meters, giving  the KRDK-TV mast the record.\nThe CN tower stands at 553.3 meters (Measured from top of spire), which is higher than the Sears\/Willis tower but shorter than the KVLT-TV mast. It is mentioned as is has some habitable space but not much, causing debate about whether it is a building (Referenced below). It was never the tallest structure, but if it's a building it would have been the tallest in the world from it's opening in 1976 until the Canton Tower 's in 2009. It is currently the 9th tallest building.\nThe debate surrounding the tallest building does not stop at building vs structure. Architects have long argued about what the height definition of a building should be.  Should it include antennas sitting at the top of the building?  How about spires that form part of the architectural design of the building but are not part of the habitable space?  Should we focus instead on the highest habitable floor?  The debate has historically had relevance every time a new record is claimed by developers eager to reach new heights using any means possible ( Size Does Matter, At Least In The Tallest Building Debate ).\nThere is yet more debate about what counts as a building vs a structure. While some people would say that any structure with any habitable space is a building, most people in the field agree that there is a certain threshold  of habitable space, below which there is not enough habitable space to count as a \"building\", even if there is some.\nA main point in this debate are TV towers , which are often tall towers with little habitable space in them, but with an observation deck at the top. Examples include the Tokyo Skytree , Fernsehturm Stuttgart , and CN tower. A similar structure is the Dubai Creek Tower , a tower under construction in Dubai, set to become the world's tallest structure. (The Dubai Creek Tower will not, however, broadcast tv signals).\nTV towers are sometimes counted as buildings as they do have some habitable space. However, they are often not as they are commonly considered to not have enough habitable space to be buildings, hence Cueball's line \"The CN tower isn't always considered a building\"\nWikipedia lists the tallest structures, and this YouTube video explains a bit more about tall buildings\/structures.  Since 2010 the Burj Khalifa has been both the tallest structure and the tallest building in the world.\n[White Hat and Cueball are looking out on a skyline with six smaller skyscrapers and one much taller. The tall building has three plateaus, where it gets thinner before the top. On the top there are also two tall antennas, one twice as high as the other. Around the buldings therare 7 small clouds and two distant birds flying next tot he top of the tallest building. The two are standing on a ground behind a fence, maybe a viewing point, for looking in over the city skyline. They are looking toward the tallest bulding.] White Hat: You know, back in the 90s, the Sears Tower was the world's tallest tower. Cueball: Yeah! Or \"building.\" The CN Tower and the KVLY-TV Antenna were taller, but the CN Tower isn't always considered a building and the antenna is supported by guy wires or whatever.\n[Caption below the panel]: Whenever I get self-conscious about how obsessive I sound about some random topic, I panic and tack on \"or whatever.\"\n"}
{"id":2630,"title":"Shuttle Skeleton","image_title":"Shuttle Skeleton","url":"https:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/2630","image_url":"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/shuttle_skeleton.png","explained_url":"https:\/\/www.explainxkcd.com\/wiki\/index.php\/2630:_Shuttle_Skeleton","transcript":"[In the upper right part of the panel there is a small drawing of the Space Shuttle as seen from above. Beneath it, and to its left, is a much larger drawing with the same outline as the Shuttle. But this time the outer layers have been removed to reveal the inside. This has revealed a skeleton taking up the entire space inside. The head is in the front, and legs and tail at the rear, with arms and fingers in the wings, looking somewhat like a bat's \"hand\/wings\". The bones are white with the frame of the shuttle gray or black. Some of the lines outlining the design of the shuttle are both on the small and the large drawing, along the wings and rear engines. Both feet and arms have five fingers\/toes. There seem to be 24 ribs in the very long rib-cage.]\n[Caption beneath the panel:] The Space Shuttle was long assumed to be a type of fish or shark, but after it was decommissioned in 2011, analysis of its skeleton determined that it was actually a mammal.\n","explanation":"The Space Shuttle was a reusable spacecraft system used by NASA from 1981 to 2011, after which it was decommissioned. In this comic, Randall suggests that the nature of the shuttle was in doubt or misunderstood until either an intact 'specimen' (of which there are four) had been dissected, or possibly the remains were reassembled from the two that were lost in accidents .\nWith its shape, shown in the small image, and the tail fin, it looks a bit like a bony fish or ray . The joke is that after the shuttle was taken out of use, its skeleton was analyzed, and as shown in the comic, was found to have a skeleton typical of a mammal, with details such as the pentadactyl quadripedal bodyform hidden beneath its aerodynamic sweep, as well as having bones (i.e., not primarily cartilage). This morphology is similar to that possessed by a whale. Of course, the skeleton of a spacecraft is not made of bones, but rather of metal and other manufactured materials. [ citation needed ]\nAs the understanding of the natural world developed, many taxonomic misconceptions were overturned, or at least the scientific terminology was tightened. For instance, it was found that dolphins and whales were mammals, not fish. [ cetacean needed ] Because of convergent evolution \u2013 the tendency for distantly-related species to adapt similarly to a given environment \u2013 it is often not easy to properly classify organisms merely by observing their exterior. For example, whales and fish have very similar body shapes, as did the extinct plesiosaurs, because life as a swimming vertebrate favors the same adaptations. In lieu of genetic analysis, or even of sufficient observation of them in the wild, the main progress in understanding differences among marine animals was often in dissecting the corpses of creatures found stranded or caught in nets, or reconstructing them from skeletal remains. Together with fossil evidence, insights were developed about their origins and differences from others' origins.\nThe title text conflates the now-extinct Steller's sea cow , an aquatic mammal related to manatees and named after explorer\/zoologist Georg Steller (also extinct), with the adjective \"stellar\", which means being of a star or stars, such as inter-stellar space or stellar masses.\nOne might expect that the idea for this comic may have come from the recent California Supreme Court ruling that bumblebees are considered fish under a law which categorized several other invertebrates as part of a broad colloquial category of fish (as in \"Fish and Game Department\" designations.) However, given the short time between the ruling and the comic's release, it is likely that this was a coincidence.\n[In the upper right part of the panel there is a small drawing of the Space Shuttle as seen from above. Beneath it, and to its left, is a much larger drawing with the same outline as the Shuttle. But this time the outer layers have been removed to reveal the inside. This has revealed a skeleton taking up the entire space inside. The head is in the front, and legs and tail at the rear, with arms and fingers in the wings, looking somewhat like a bat's \"hand\/wings\". The bones are white with the frame of the shuttle gray or black. Some of the lines outlining the design of the shuttle are both on the small and the large drawing, along the wings and rear engines. Both feet and arms have five fingers\/toes. There seem to be 24 ribs in the very long rib-cage.]\n[Caption beneath the panel:] The Space Shuttle was long assumed to be a type of fish or shark, but after it was decommissioned in 2011, analysis of its skeleton determined that it was actually a mammal.\n"}